FredFredrickson

If this were attempted, I think we'd have a LOT of talk about what truly is an ad and what isn't.

I mean, the web banners and billboards we see every day don't do a lot to actually sell products. But your friend telling you they really love a particular product helps a lot.

But in a society where a movement such as you've described was in motion, would both be equally as bad? Are both not manipulative in their own way?

This is both ingenious and hilarious. The best kind of solution, in my opinion.

How many companies has that been true for, though? Apple is the only PC company who made it big as a phone manufacturer. It's a single point on the graph.

As an artist, this is exactly the point that I make when I argue with people who say patents should be abolished.

Without any kind of protection, anyone who has a greater means of production/marketing than you will always steal your ideas and profit more from them than you can.

Obviously we need to fix the process so that as few bad patents are awarded as possible. Someone's just got to figure out how!

You stated this as if it would be a controversial opinion, but I'm not sure I understand why that it would be.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to YouTube if the comments were removed from video / channel pages for a week or a month.

I don't see how that would keep people from visiting the site or watching videos (and of course, ads).

Whenever I'm writing CSS and I start getting to the point where I question whether or not I might as well be using inline styles, I know I'm doing something wrong and take a step back to evaluate where I went wrong.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I fully agree - I hate having all kinds of junky game clients running on my computer when I ought to just be able to have one, Steam, which is obviously doing a decent job.

On the other hand, I think that competition will drive Steam to be better (or maybe, just maybe, result in something better than Steam), and so I don't necessarily want the other companies to stop trying to compete entirely, either.

I keep arguing with people about this. I just don't understand the hang-up.

I was one of those people who, many years ago and despite my own machine always having an online connection, would complain about these sorts of things. I would imagine all sorts of scenarios where my machine would lose a connection and I'd be unable to play for an hour or two, and I'd be upset.

Then WoW came along. And Guild Wars. And Diablo 3. And games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 which didn't necessarily require a persistent online connection to play, but in the absence of a massive LAN, were virtually useless without it. I still enjoy single player games, but increasingly (and almost without my even noticing it), lots of the games I play depend on there being an online connection, and a pool of other people to play with.

So while I understand that SimCity is traditionally thought of as an offline game (and always really has been, with few exceptions), I don't understand the problem here. You're probably always online. It's awesome to have your city saves in a place where they won't be wiped out if you re-format or your hard drive gets corrupted. And if you lose your connection for a while, then do something else.

I think as long as customers are aware of this requirement at the outset, there's no harm in it. It's like any MMO, and when you think of it in that context, it's not weird or awful at all.

It implies that they can't have courage without being drunk, and certainly that's not a very nice thing to say about someone, let alone a huge group of people who obviously don't all fit that stereotype.

Interesting little story. Did your grandfather say anything about how the people out in the wilderness reacted?

Absolutely. It can go a long way to not be petty about it.

In these situations, I usually offer a normal bit of criticism, both positive and negative, and then let that be the end of it. Sometimes the client will come back, sometimes not.

Either way, you've preserved your relationship and they might well come back to you when they want to see some revisions down the road.

In my experience, as a graphic designer, who has seen my type of work be outsourced (right in front of me) to some cheapo place overseas, I think it's best to just shut up and let the client do it.

Most of the time, they will get something back that is awful, and if they actually have an eye for quality, it'll make them better appreciate the work you do. You might even get some more work from them after they've satisfied their fantasies of cheap labor.

If they don't have an eye for quality, and they go with the garbage the outsource comes up with, then you probably didn't want them as a client in the first place.

Or just hold the gun an inch or two away from the screen.

That's a pretty loose definition of the term 'success'.

Everyone knowing about it is a big hurdle to get over towards real success, but it's not really success in itself.

Interesting, thanks! I use Windows mostly, but I dabble in Ubuntu every now and then as well, and I might have a spare computer soon, so I though I'd give it a try. Didn't want to bother with it if it wasn't ready for prime time though.

The only reason why anyone would defend these practices is that presumably, if the company did not monetize their software in this way, the software couldn't continue to be developed.

In Oracle's case, this seems absurd. The money they make from toolbar installations couldn't possibly be very high, could it?

It's an accessibility feature. If you don't have the dexterity to hold keys down yourself, you can enable sticky keys and (if I remember correctly) it will make certain keys act as toggles so you don't have to do finger-yoga to hit certain key combinations.

Have you spent much time with Linux TF2? Any idea if it's more or less stable than the Windows / OS X builds?

You know, there's something comforting about going just about anywhere and having, at least, a vague idea of how the layout might be, what things look like, and where to find things.

On the other hand though, I agree with you. That same comfort makes it dissatisfying to travel at times. I live in an area of California surrounded by lots of historical smaller cities, but it's nearly pointless to travel to any of them because, aside from a few key features, they all look like the same place overall.

Don't even get me started about housing developments. Once you're lost in one of those, your best hope is to start leaving breadcrumbs.

Your opening sentence makes me wonder: why does it have to be an all-out switch?

When you need a car for getting places and a truck for moving things, and you can afford both, you don't need to choose between one or the other. You can have both, and use each for what you need it for. Operating systems are not a life-choice; they do not demand exclusive relationships.

There's never going to be an end to the "normal" PC market until people find a way to get work done on all the devices that will purportedly take the PC's place.

I've always assumed the benefit is that you don't have to maintain a separate set of files for each window size... but it seems like, for all intents and purposes, you might as well be if you have to set up special cases for all sorts of window sizes, just in one document.

Might I ask what browser you're using?

Older browsers used to just resize the font inline, and leave other elements alone, but most modern browsers resize everything these days when you use those commands, so sites shouldn't look any different when scaled up or down. It's been this way for a long time, it seems.

A little late with the reply here, but I think that his thesis is bogus. So-called "retina" displays are not the reason for flat / modern UI designs moving away from skeuomorphism. I would argue it's just a new trend that naturally developed both from a wont to get away from the old, and from the relatively new sophistication of on-screen design tools (like CSS3, HTML5, etc).

Am I the only one who just yawned when Megaupload was taken down?

I have no ill-will towards the people who run or use that (or those types of) site, and I don't really like how the government handled the Megaupload thing, but with the proliferation of cloud storage sites hosted by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, etc., it just seems stupid to subject yourself to all the security issues, fake download buttons, ads, etc. that you find on sites like this.

This is quite awesome. It's the next logical step from all the custom phone case services out there (mostly for iDevices, it seems).

This is starting to look like some horrible regex nightmare!

>I WISH there was a Windows 8 live CD. MS does not want you to "try windows" they want you committed.

I kind of have to take issue with this one... They handed out the pre-release version of Win 8 for a half a year. It had no upgrade-to-full option, but for anyone who wanted to try it, they put it out there.

I'll admit that they don't give you a lot of [read: any] try-before-you-buy options for Win 8 currently, but this is the first version in a while that they've done like that, so it might get better again.

The top animation doesn't seem to be working in Firefox 18 on OS X 10.8.2. The glowing box works, however.