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Comment Facebook is killing them. (Score 2) 174

Twitter is dying because of its open structure and limited message size. Facebook is eating their lunch. The basic difference? Message size. So, Twitter thinks they can out FB Facebook. I dunno. I don't bother with twitter because of the 140 char limit. Hmmmmm... This might lure me into bothering with it. But can I control who follows me? No. Nemmind.

Comment Re:Shoot the messenger (Score 0) 402

"Why should it ever "meet the designs that the public wants?" Seriously, why would anyone consider that as a goal?"

Are you making software for the public to use or not? If no, then fine - go back to text based interfaces. If you're making software for others to use, and these others may not be as smart and savvy as you, then fuck off - grow up and design what the public wants and needs.

Comment Let an old geezer splain some stuff (Score 1) 125

I used to work for Macromedia - from 1995 - 1998. I was there when they bought Flash (It was called "FutureSplash") and yes, it was originally supposed to simply do vector based animation, because bandwidth back in the mid 90s sucked balls. Fairly quickly it became painfully obvious that Macromedia's flagship product, Director was doomed. Director did pixel based animations and a lot of other things thanks to its programming language, Lingo. A HUGE portion of the development cost for Director went into Lingo. Now with Director made (mostly) redundant by Flash they had to figure out what to do with the people. So, what better way to fuck it up than to shoehorn some crazy language into it and give it superpowers like Director? Enter ActionScript.

There was no reason to think about security - it was a tool to make stupid games and animations on the interweb thingie. And, like Director it became increasingly bloated and complex and pointless. Flash was dead long before the security gremlins appeared. Then Adobe bought the whole mess, hook, line, and sinker. Suckers. Between the headache that was Flash and the eye watering bilge that was ColdFusion, Macromedia got even with Adobe by serving them a hot buttered plate full of digital poo. The only thing, IMHO, that was worth a right flying fuck from Macromedia that Adobe got was FreeHand, and, Adobe, in it's infinite wisdom, killed FreeHand, even though it was a demonstrably better product.

Macromedia was poorly run by a bunch of wolverines. They got bought by the Borg. And now there's basically nothing left of value except Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and inDesign. And I'm not that certain about Premiere....

RS

Comment OR: (Score 1) 365

" Nonetheless, the results indicate that either humanity really is the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, or advanced civilizations are far more efficient in their use of energy than is reasonable to assume."

Or:

Advanced species abandon or never develop the human invention of "civilisation". These other species may be the dominant species on their planet, they just know how to live in harmony with its biospere and have no need to invade other planets, much less each other's social groups.

Comment Didn't the Apple Menu precede this? (Score 1) 270

I coulda sworn that prior to OSx there was this Apple Menu Item thingie and you could pretty much modify it to your heart's content. But hey - that was 1990s before CSS turned everything into rounded edges and HTML5 turned everything into swingie woo woo stuff and httprequest made bilge like Facebook possible....

Comment In my world (Score 1) 620

I am sometime called on to do Calligraphy. Yes, with ink and edged pens and fancy expensive as fuck paper. I have a Pelikan pen from 1983. It is in a steel box that used to be my mom's sewing kit. She bought that in 1966. I also have a metric triangle that helps me line out a page very quickly and it's from 1979.

Given this is slashdot, you're probably thinking "fuck Heineken man - we're talking' computer shit around here dude!"

So my oldest piece of digital gear is a box of floppy disks from the mid 1980s - "original copies" of files I made and some software that will never see the light of day, and sound disk for my 1986 DSS1 Sampling Synth that is mouldering in the basement.

HW

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