Interesting Links for 8-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Tolerance game in memory of murdered Goth Sophie Lancaster
  (tags: murder game tolerance)
• How to improve your efficiency
  (tags: efficiency geek)
• Sony scraps the MiniDisc WalkMan. I had no idea it was still going...
  (tags: sony music walkman minidisc obsolescence)
• Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
  (tags: ettiquette mozilla internet)
• Polar bears come from Ireland
  (tags: ireland bears genetics)

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I'm with mozilla on this one. I can quite see they want to discourage people being rude/abusive in their development community. An aggressive atmosphere doesn't encourage other people to contribute, and the bugtracker just isn't the place to let off steam.

[matgb]

Pretty much. It says "warned repeatedly" and the way the report was worded was obnoxious.

And FFS without improvements and UI tweaks and other new 'features' products just die, haven't used TB for years (they fixed the bug that lost me two years of email in a later release but I prefer Gmail).

Having said that, the annoying 'do you want to compact' question always did bug me, and if it was on this machine with a massive hard drive I'd fail to see the point as well.

But there're ways to propose features that don't piss off the devs.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> And stop "upgrading" things. Just fix BUGS, for God's sake!

They should say that to Open Office too.

[andrewducker]

Of course, no application is ever without bugs, so that leaves you with an application that never improves.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Sure but you have to prioritize sensibly.

[andrewducker]

I bet the Open Office people think they do :->

(It's also a classic problem with Open Source development - nobody wants to pick up the boring bugs, and nobody can force them to. I wonder if Brazil's involvement will change this.)

[fearmeforiampink]

MiniDisc is/was fairly heavily used in the music industry. You can put a demo track on it, share it with someone/give it to a radio station. It's easy for them to play but harder than an MP3 for those you give it to to send absolutely everywhere. You can make a disc of the songs you'll be playing in your set, or two for crossing between 'em, they have the inbuilt ability to name tracks, and it's easy to wipe and re-use.

They suffered versus MP3 players as their capacity stayed static whilst MP3 players capacity shot through the roof. But that didn't particularly hurt their usefulness in the music industry.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Why would you capitalise "goth"? Unless you're meaning the Germanic tribe, surely it would be lower-case unless you also capitalise "punk" and "rudeboy"?