Most people criticize MS for having crappy security and being virus prone, but when they try and do something about it, people get pissed and call it anti-trust. Where's the happy medium? Is there one if the average user refuses to buy anti-virus yet not having it literally endangers everyone else on the internet?

There weren't a lot of touch screen phone options either before the iPhone. Sometimes you have to lead.

This article reads less like a news story than an emotional, personal rant by someone who's puckering with contempt because he got his feelings hurt.

Tech companies make crappy decisions all the time. Ubuntu probably thought it would have more time to become the king of the desktop before realizing that soon the desktop would be irrelevant and that *nix alternatives had already beaten it to the punch for being the kings of mobile.

At this point, he should probably start thinking further down the road to gesture and voice computing. My kinect tells me that it's almost time to stop touching devices at all, and I believe it.

I will be flayed alive, but Silverlight 4 is a "Rich Internet Application" framework and with the most recent version, they built in some very tight and effective printing functionality. That, in combination with the ability to pretty much lay things out exactly as you want, export to an image or text format, export the app to an out of browser desktop app, and print in whatever format you see fit, makes it ideal for the kind of ticketing system you're talking about.

Here's a blog on how to implement it: http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/27/Silverlight_4_s_Printing_Support
And another: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/A-look-at-the-Printing-API-in-Silverlight-4.aspx

and here's Microsoft's page hyping it: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

Here's a blog on linking Ruby on Rails with Silverlight as well: http://techblogging.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/using-silverlight-with-rubyonrails/

Hope this helps.

I think their logo may win this year's Unintentionally Sexual Logo category.

I think the fear is that once there is a .xxx domain, you'll get a "save the children" law in most countries that forces all new porn sites into the .xxx TLD. Once that happens, ISP's, cable companies, and countries can block access to all of them at once. China and Australia come to mind. When that happens,

At that point, it becomes a freedom of expression/free market question when potential customers are barred from a seeing/buying a product by some kind of intermediary censorship. Since the US is all about freedom of expression and free market/pro business, it becomes an endless DOJ issue dealing with lawsuits both for and against regulating access to the adult portion of the net. It seems far fetched, but would anyone really be surprised if Comcast or AOL started blocking .xxx domains by default claiming it was standing up for the children (and not at all saving bandwidth from porn video and torrents)? Now you're talking about Net Neutrality too...enter the FCC. How many billions would the US spend deciding whether or not to defend the porn industry?

Embrace our new Alien Overlords.

Next time, Hurricane survivors won't be accused of looting, they'll simply be edited out of the shot and the news will say that everyone escaped unharmed. :-o

I think people are intentionally missing the point.

Someone makes a website.
The time it took to make the site costs them money either directly or indirectly (they made it, or they paid someone to make it).
Someone is paying to keep the web server online in bandwidth, hardware, content upkeep or software costs.

The only way most people can make money from a website is to show ads. Ad companies can tell if their ads are displaying and pay less if their ads are blocked. The only way for people using this model to pay for content managers, bandwidth costs, faster servers, etc is through ad revenue. If site owners don't get paid, they can't pay for these things, so one or many of the things running the site don't work as well.

If you can't afford reliable content managers (or you yourself have to work a real job because you don't get paid enough), the content suffers. If you can't afford a lot of bandwidth, the site gets slow from throttling it. If you can't afford up to date anti-virus (or a good ops guy to manage your firewall), your site is easier to hack and take down. If you can't afford a new nic card (or F5 for large sites with server farms), your site goes offline with hardware issues.

If a large business owns a site and it doesn't make money, it simply takes it offline or invests less in the above mentioned maintenance costs until the value of the site is diminished to the point that it's better to read another site - or a magazine for that matter.

The thing the guy is trying to say is that if you like the current state of the site, it takes money to maintain. If it doesn't make enough money, he doesn't have to work for free. If you don't care if the site goes down or degrades in some way, go ahead and block the ads. If you take a "I wasn't going to pay for it anyway, but will if it's free and those ads are like a tax on my sanity so I block them" stance, what he's saying is that you're reducing his ability to make money from his site and by extension, lowering the overall experience for everyone.

I worked for a news site that made money with a per-view ad model and can tell you that it takes several million dollars a month to maintain a world class news site. The AP must be paid for content. Editors to moderate the AP must be paid. Production Operations guys, Test Operations guys, Developers, Release Engineers, Project Managers, Ad Operations, Managers for PM/Dev/Editorial/Test, Marketing, Sales...all have to be paid.

It's always a delicate balancing act with your corporate overlords who want to make a lot of money (to pay the bills, and appease THEIR corporate overlords) - while trying not to alienate your user. Big invasive ads make more money per impression than little ones that few people see. That you don't see giant ads on a given site all the time is a testament to their restraint or ability to ward off the bottom-lining execs.

I love free sites like Slashdot, but they're probably has high quality as they are because the majority of people let ads display. Sure, Slashdot would probably still be on the web if nobody viewed the ads, but it's unlikely to have a lot of the features that ad revenue paid to have developed.

I'd be interested to hear what Slashdot would be like if they made no ad revenue from CmdrTaco. Would they have been bought up by their corporate overlords? What would that have meant if they hadn't?

Ridley Scott hated the theatrical release of Blade Runner, but I loved it. What the filmmaker thinks of his films has little to do with how much I like them. I thought the Dune movie was pretty awesome when I saw it first, but it didn't age well. But, like other readers, that's the Dune universe I knew. I didn't mind the Weirding modules. They reminded me in some ways of Spider-Man's web shooters. Not needed, but a cool part of the mythos that says something interesting about their inventors.

Still haven't read the book though, but I didn't have to read Phillip K Dick to appreciate Blade Runer either.

Well this definitely begs the question: Where's my ************ flying car?!

What comes next is the equivalent of when police drive down the street and scan license plates. You can be walking down the street and your finger gets scanned and a cop just grabs you off the street and arrests you for unpaid parking tickets.

I'm SO glad this vital security measure will be in place.

My bet is that by 2012, Apple will have released something better than the iPhone, completely changing the game again to the massive disappointment of all cell phones that are just catching up to the iPhone in overall usability.

I mean, every comment on here is talking about non-iPhones will catch up to iPhone and overtake them, but who really thinks Apple is just going to stop innovating? When I had my 60 gb iPod Video, I couldn't think of something cooler than that. Since I got my iPhone 3g, I haven't even taken the iPod out of the drawer except to back up files to it.

This kind of sentiment is exactly why Linux has to battle uphill all the time. If you want Linux to succeed, you drop the holier than thou attitude and do whatever it takes to get as close to the Mac users, or ANY users as possible.

Unbelievably, Microsoft is beating Mac on a "We're Less Expensive" platform on all those free laptop commercials. Microsoft's commercials are eating Linux's lunch and nobody is paying attention because people somehow see going after Mac users as either a losing proposition, or see the Mac user as witless and snooty. At this stage in the game, Linux needs any user it can get, but some people seem to prefer to put down Mac or Windows users as clueless. This does nothing but guarantee Linux loses another user to companies who don't care if they're clueless, only if they have money.

If a Mac user reads the above post and takes it as representative of the community's general level of interest in helping the consumer, you've just helped Linux lose market share. Worse, you helped create another "Don't mention Linux" user, which is ironic considering this article was meant to warn against that.

Don't make things harder.

Aside from the mac thing, he makes a good point. Part of the reason why there's been such a push for an easy install and good user experience is that every time you alienate a user with an OS that doesn't "just work", it creates an OPPONENT of the OS. At that point, they really have to love learning something new, or love a challenge to go back.

Case in point, the first time I tried to install Linux, the mouse driver stopped working every single time I booted the system and I literally had to chmod one of the config files in order to prevent it from being overwritten by some wacky boot-time application. The average user, when confronted with that kind of problem, will get frustrated and not spend 2 hours looking for some fringe case mouse driver or chmod hack in order to get things working (That's assuming they have more than one computer to look up the information with, which most people don't). They'll just quit and think Linux isn't as good as Windows or Mac. Unfortunately, as far as user experience goes, you not only have to combat ignorance, you also have to combat the bad experiences of those who the experience failed in the past.

Now here's the part that REALLY sucks. A few Linux users out there at this point will say "Well if you're too stupid to figure out how to get a mouse to work, you don't deserve to run the best OS in the world." That's where a major company with people who are paid to support new/ignorant users (not stupid, ignorant) for free (for the first 30 days of ownership) beats free-if-you-can-find-it support.

So when marginally tech saavy users hear the words "powered by Linux" and they tried installing it prior to 2007 or so, the first thing they feel is FEAR, and DOUBT that they will be able to get support if it fails. These aren't people who went to a LUG event and met the cool people, they tried it out, blew away their windows install and lost data.

The number ONE thing the big Linux installs like Red Hat and Ubuntu SHOULD be focused on is a campaign that says something like "GET YOUR Linux, AND FREE PHONE SUPPORT...FOREVER - GET THE PENGUIN!" and then create a consortium that funds that support. Then when people hear the word Linux, they think "hey - Linux is THE shit" instead of leaving out the "THE".

-- The Penguin loves you. Love the Penguin.