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(No I'm not affiliated in any way with this guy)

Remote control applications could be good, but again, depending on environmental radio noise, etc., I'd probably prefer for my TV to stick with IR.

I am using my T68i BT-enabled phone as a remote control for my Mac, thanks to the wonderful Salling Clicker application. I don't have a dedicated DVD player, but using the phone as a remote control it's very convenient to sit back and watch DVD's on my computer. It's also nice that you don't have the point the phone at anything when using it as a remote control. Oh, and of course I also synchronize my address book with BT. In my household at least, Bluetooth is far from dead.

JP

I'll second that; I've got a T68i, a PowerBook 12", and Palm's Tungsten T, and they all work beautifully together; you can do all Philly says and more.

Tap the HotSync icon on the Palm, and the other two devices light up and start syncing information with it. Add to that the ability to do light web browsing on the Palm from anywhere, not just within hotspots, with the phone in your pocket doing the heavy lifting, and you've got got all the info you really need, with you at all times.

Additionally, shareware programs like Salling Clicker let you control PowerPoint, DVD Player, and iTunes right from the phone; you can even trigger events using a proximity sensor, so that (for example) your email client quits when you walk out of the room.

It all works, and it works well. Maybe Apple's integration allowed stuff like this to be developed more quickly, but there's no reason one couldn't make this all happen on Windows or Linux as well. Don't confuse poor implementation or application of a protocol on a given platform with its overall failure.

Works great on my iBook with a Bluetooth dongle and my T68i. I've been using it to keep contacts in sync for the past 3 months with narry an issue. On top of that, it works great as a wireless remote using Salling Clicker. You can control anything that works with AppleScript. I've used it for presentations, controlling itunes, and playing DVDs. Sounds like the grass is greener here, than on the other side of the fence.

I'm sick of people claiming this or that thing is dead, or is going to be dead. As long as it works well for someone, and fits a niche better than any other product its alive! As long as its supported by OS X, I'll be using it. And from the looks of Apple's front page, as well as their inclusion of bluetooth adapters in their recent machines it looks like it'll be around for quite some time.

I'd disagree, the solution's already there with very popular off-the-shelf hardware. All you need is:

• One of these phones
  
• Something running This OS
  
• A Bluetooth Adapter
  
• Some software like this and this

...and reliable.

In any scenario, I think the internet and new imaging tech, etc, plus the general lack of lives, need for nostalgia, and the stupidity of the tv/moviemaker corporations has led more and more fans to start making their own remakes. Take Star Trek Exeter, for example...

I urge for the day i can use my iPod as a clicker device to go to the next slide in a presentation, or when i can set my iPod next to my laptop and automatically sync it.

I bet you're not urging for the kind of battery drain that would go hand in hand with your iPod's wireless sync capability. Or the length of time the sync would take if you were moving a reasonable number of songs onto it.

And if you want a presentation clicker and a proximity sensor today, get a Mac and one of the phones supported by Salling Clicker. I haven't integrated it into my home automation setup yet, but the possibilities are practically endless.

~Philly

At risk of being modded down...

I made this for those less-than-mature moments on Fark.com, but I think it applies in this thread...

This guy.

No, no, awfully sorry that's not quite what were looking for, NEXT!

Speaking of bugs in laptops, I noticed that my iBook had been at one time inhabited by something...creepy, and took a picture. I have no idea what that is, or why it was in there, or how it got in there...

interaccess in Toronto is an amazing gallery.
The Seemen and SRL in San Francisco will blow your ass up.
xraylab in Seattle/Chicago/New York does some great interactive work.
Norm White has been kicking art/tech ass for since before you were born.
David Rokeby's work is totally amazing too.

Beige Programming Ensemble in Chicago/St. Louis/New York can make your Atari/C64 do backflips.

and for some amazing reading... Stephen Wilsons information arts book has no comparison.
rhizome.org is a pretty good site for all things art/tech (esp. web art)

And for validation by the mainstream art world check out the whitney's artport.

• David Rokeby
• Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
• Simon Penny

interaccess in Toronto is an amazing gallery.

The Seemen and SRL in San Francisco will blow your ass up.

xraylab in Seattle/Chicago/New York does some great interactive work.

Norm White has been kicking art/tech ass for since before you were born.

David Rokeby's work is totally amazing too.

Beige Programming Ensemble in Chicago/St. Louis/New York can make your Atari/C64 do backflips.

And for some amazing reading... Stephen Wilsons information arts book has no comparison.

rhizome.org is a pretty good site for all things art/tech (esp. web art)

And for validation by the mainstream art world check out the whitney's artport.

I was going to submit this an hour ago, but figured nah, not worth the trouble. Now Sophrosyne has stolen my rightful limelight!

"...and some towns even have trolley tracks buried underneath 2 feet of concrete..."

Um...more like 2 INCHES. It's not a good idea to keep paving over top of old surfaces. Also, if a road is paved in concrete, they usually dig down and redo the subsurface. On most roads with streetcar tracks, they just pave over it with asphalt. Whenever the road needs to be resurfaced, they grind it down to the old track level and start over. If they don't the curbs on the side of the road will be too low, and they'll have to raise all the drains and access covers.

Have a look here to see what's left in Cincinnati, and how the tracks still show up in places. http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/

You probably don't want to remove the US keyboard, as not all applications support Unicode. See this site for a keyboard layout that supports all the Latin blocks (Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional)

Not all fonts support these, although Gentium supports every possible Latinate Unicode 3.0 glyph, and up to three levels of diacretics.

The article refers to a UI feature called "stacks". From the article:

"But there's more new to My Contacts than just the Carousel view. In My Contacts, you can arrange contacts by Name, Email, Work Email, Personal Email, Home Phone, Work Phone, or Online Status, but you can also utilizing a new feature called Stacks. Because you can't actually work with stacks in 4015, it's unclear what the feature does, but you can stack contacts by the same list of criteria by which you can arrange them, and you can also unstack them. Stacking and unstacking might be related to the Carousel view but, again, that's unclear right now."

Here is a screenshot of the view.

Recently, there was a Slashdot article here about a "piles" feature that Apple had patented in June 2001 that sounds very familiar. Screenshot of piles here looks different, but the concepts appear similar:

"In addition, sources said Panther will finally mark the debut of the much-discussed "piles" GUI design concept, which Apple patented in June 2001. According to the patent, piles comprise collections of documents represented graphically in stacks. Users can browse the "piled" documents dynamically by pointing at them with the cursor; the filing system can then divide a pile into subpiles based on each document's content. At the user's request, the filing system can automatically file away documents into existing piles with similar content."

Adi Gadwale.

I've heard of people doing this with macs (via some program called clicker and I'd love to do the same for my machine at work.

Congratulations, b.foster. You have advanced to Level 5 in the Six Degrees of CmdrTaco.

I'm really excited about this service. Hopefully it will be able to provide me with some music for my Internet radio station. Still trying to figure out whether these music files can be re-encoded properly, though, to be webcast on Live365(my webcast host). Harold VoyagerRadio.com

Here, blow your load.

I hope they have a good selection of electronica. Let's see some Amon Tobin, Royksopp, Underworld and Thievery Corp! At the least, let's do better than BMG Music Service. I want some music for my Internet radio station.

The most important question is, does Apple have the music? I'm looking for downtempo electronica to add to my Internet radio station, VoyagerRadio. I hope Apple has a better selection of electronica than services like BMG.

"never been easy to get users around even an OS 9 desktop"?

I think you have some issues here. OS 9 compared to Windows and certainly Linux has always been viewed as the ease of use winner. What operating system are you comparing MacOS 9 to in order to arrive at this dubious conclusion?

As for OSX printer sharing, are you trying to get a mac's printer to be seen by others or are you trying to get a mac to see windows printers?

If the former, you open the system preferences application, click on sharing, then click on printer sharing (ooh, unbelievably hard isn't it). The latter can be done but requires a little more effort and instructions can be found here.

CUPS was a 3rd party hack in 10.1 and standard in 10.2. I expect that by 10.3 they'll make a nice UI for it. But look at where we're starting from. The conversation's about an easy to use Unix. At worst, Mac OS X is as powerful as Linux and as hard to use for uses that the Apple team hasn't created a GUI for. These cases are getting fewer and further apart with every iteration. Admittedly, printing was one of the weakest parts of 10.0 but the only case where you even have to do a hack these days is for printers that are smb shared and do not have appletalk options, IP printing, rendezvous, Lexmark inkjet networking, jetdirect, LPD/LPR, or are not registered with directory services.

For large installations, it would probably be best if you tied in directory services to your active directory tree and all printers available with active directory would also become available to your mac (and if there are no Mac drivers, standard CUPS drivers are available and easily installed).

smart folders sounds like an awesome idea to me. Piles, althugh the name will be the butt of many jokes, seems like an excellent UI enhancement, but what I really want is not fancy, not modern; just gimme text handling that works and works fast. I mean iPhoto can seamlessly resize thousands of my photos in thumbnail view in realtime but it takes 30 seconds to change the title of a single image! wtf is going on there. See my extensive bitch on this topic. It's just text like derrida said.

At first glance, the 'Piles' metaphor (as exampled here) appears to be close to what 'Clutter' attempts to do with your CD's on a OS X desktop. Perhaps it may come in for some legal attention once 10.3 is released ?

Does anyone else thing that piles could be used to implement BeOS-style live searches?

Doug

And, for those of you who want a visual interpretation of how this could work, I got this off of google. It's an interactive flash animation which shows one possible design of how it could work; and, if it works close to this, it's gonna be really cool.

here is a possible example of how they will work, flash required.

the idea is that you could stack documents in a group on top of each other, so to speak. say you are working on a web page, you could select say the index.html and the images (or whatever, im assuming) and group them together in one pile.

after this, you would convieably be able to click and hold or right click, and the pile would expand to show you the documents contained in said pile. while expanded you could select which file you actually want to open.

could be nifty

I see a market for a premium file mirroring monopoly here, jump onboard before AOL takes over!

Gee, if only Apple had thought about doing that...

Well, well. Is this just a coincidence, or what? I just received the following regarding the $26 part of my "double rebate", although they don't mention the 2nd one for $20, that had the copy of the UPC code. Remember, this was purchased around Dec. 15th. At least I saved the flyer from Micro Center and all paperwork if I want to pursue this.

From: "customerservice@teg-online.com"
To: [ortholattice]
Subject: Offer Status Update
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 23:06:03 -0400

[note backdating in body of email, mismatching header]

4/14/03 &nbs p; &n bsp; &nbs p; &n bsp; &nbs p; &n bsp; [sic]

[ortholattice]
[address deleted]
Xxxxxxxx, MA yyyyy-zzzz

Dear [ortholattice],
Thank you for participating in the following promotional offer:

Monitors 719BF & 719BF-BK $26 @Micro Center

Your Personal Reference Number is: Cxxxxxxx [deleted]

We are pleased to advise that your entry is being processed and has been
qualified. Please allow for 10-12 weeks for the delivery of your
check/product.

If you have further questions after that time frame on your submission,
please visit us on the web at www.expressgroup.com. There, you will be
able to view the status of your submission by using your personal
reference number listed above.

Sincerely,


The Express Group

Printing, Distribution, Fulfillment

(OK, now this is really off-topic but here's the MYSTERY OF THE DAY: What the heck is Six_Degrees_CmdrTaco? Why is my handle in this list along with 7300 others? Does anyone else here recognize their handle on this list?)

This phone doesn't support SyncML, so the chances of you syncing with your Mac anytime soon are slim. Nokia does provide PC software to allow syncing with your Windows PC, though.

And as for Bluetooth, once again Nokia has failed to implement the headset profile, although it does support the newer handsfree profile. I can't seem to find any details on the differences between the two but what it does mean for sure is that of the current Bluetooth headsets available, only the SonyEricson HBH-60 and the soon-to-arrive Nokia HDW-2 support that profile. Nokia is known for their poor and buggy Bluetooth support (they must hate that their rival Ericsson invented it) and they do seem to try the "embrace and extend" scheme once in a while - they want you to buy their Bluetooth device and not someone else's. They've used the headset profile in the 6310i, but that's it for the US market.

It's hard not to support SonyEricsson (especially the Ericsson part) when they've made Bluetooth a licensed standard, and when they put things like SyncML, an open syncing standard, on their phones. And don't forget the SonyEricsson Clicker which is just plain cool.

A good review of the 3650 is here.

I think that, in order to have fun at actually role playing, the ratio of NPCs to PCs has to be about 100:1, where NPCs are people living "by the rules", and the PCs are people doing whatever the hell they please. It does not matter whether the NPCs are virtual or if they are played by actors. Both are expensive propositions.

I agree with the other poster who called for small bands of players, but I think, in a big enough world, you could probably support hundreds of these bands, if they were dispersed well enough. Problem is, the worlds are also too small. When you think about a world being 20km by 20km or so, at first it sounds impressive (see Xenus or Morrowind). But how many lost dungeons can you reach on a day's hike? This is "mitigated" by speeding up time by six or so, but that's a bit of a cheat if all the player is doing is walking outdoors.

Let's just change the name to MMOG and forget the role playing until the environments are suited to and inspire it.

--

Feeling Bored?

--

Feeling Bored?

Let's remember that, once you compile a program, you are left with the same thing no matter what language you used: instructions and data. Because all you really have to work with is memory and processors (and I/O, but you can treat that like the other two).

I am far more interested in the progress of automating the development of programs than in the formalization of How Not to Do Stupid Things (TM). I choose languages and tools which save me time and repetition, because tedious (and mindless) repetition is a sure way to increase the probability of human error. Silly ideas of aesthetics and tradition are of no use to me.

Perhaps the new frontier of programming is not the language, but the development environment. Then again, that's really what a language is: an environment for managing the production of machine code. But environments are more than languages now, so why not exert some serious effort, and do some serious studies, of the impact of the whole environment?

--

My blog: The Bored Astronaut

1. Bubb Rubb: WooWoo!
2. Bubb Rubb Info Center
3. Yahoo Discussion Group

"I dont think this fits into the 'Digital Hub' or the 'Year of the Notebook' shtick they have been preaching."

Well, for a start, when it was announced music was one of the integral parts of the 'Digital Hub', and it only makes sense to make money off the content as well as the hardware its played on (whilst complicated, it is working for Sony).

Secondly, I didn't think at keynotes you have to announce every stratergy you are working on, especially the secret ones which might not pan out. Cut them a bit of slack :)

"Hey lets waste a ton of money while were barely profitable to buy into an industry that everyone _knows_ is dying..."

From the LA Times article - "People close to Jobs say he is convinced that the music industry is about to turn a corner in the copyright war." That "vision thing" is why Steve has tonnes of money, contacts and a private jet, whilst working for two kickass companies, again, cut him a bit of slack...

The maintainer for the awesome Meterologist weather program for OS X has decided to stop maintaining the program for at least the next few months... There doesn't appear to be a "second in command", so it looks like this program is going to languish. The source is open. Any takers (I would, but I'm about to enter grad school)?

The energy comes from the batteries they had attached to the spheres. Read the paper; the spheres had a voltage applied to them.

I agree with you that chemists can't do physics, but take a look at the APL article article. All they did was confirm that a Coulomb motor could be built....nothing really new.

Here's the journal article from Applied Physics Letters

As machines become more intelligent - more intelligent? That hasn't happened in 50 years, why would it happen now?

Does this mean that we can expect machines to experience the equivalent of nervous breakdowns and other mental aberrations? - if by 'nervous breakdowns and other mental aberrations' he means BSOD, then yeah, sure :)

Well, so far, yes, but autonomous, goal-seeking machines that can reprogram their own goals and subgoals could, in effect, develop "minds of their own" and set off in unpredictable directions. If they create goals that make no sense whatsoever to us, then we may see those choices as "crazy." - I don't believe any computer could come up with problems that 'make no sense whatsoever', that's my management's job. BTW., if a computer decided to fill up portions of memory with number (and that is basically all they can do, really) the reasons for these things can be traced back to the program and the hardware. On the other hand human 'users' can come up with things that make no sence whatsoever

that probably cannot be traced back with logic.

just imagine the potential for chaos when a supercomputer in charge of some critical aspect of our lives gets confused about its goals and purpose in life. - we had a purpose in life? !!!! ?!!???!!! (I mean except for 'boinking' of-course)

So what would be the machine equivalent of a neurosis? Imagine that you are driving down a highway in your car and, slowly at first, you begin to apply more and more pressure to both the gas and brake pedals simultaneously. You notice the car's reaction, as it "tries to cope with" the conflicting forces that are simultaneously trying to speed it up and slow it down. - so you see, it is the 'user' of the system who is to blame, not the system itself, or in this case a car, since it has no internal 'desires' to speed up and slow down simultaneously.

An intelligent machine is most likely to respond neurotically when internal directives, such as self-preservation, conflict with external instructions. - please. He should reread Asimov, the kinds of conflicts found in robots are all well documented there :)

What kind of "therapy" would work for the car's or a PC's "neurosis"? - for a MS PC, a reboot or a reinstall. Or better yet, installing a OS GNU/Linux. If that does not help - reinstall the user.

We can now see that intelligent machines are susceptible to different kinds of program malfunctions that are analogous to human neuroses and that would require special preventive and corrective procedures. - that's why complex systems need good QA'ing.

The enormous attraction of nanotechnology is that it could render traditional manufacturing obsolete. Armies of nanobots would merely synthesize the desired substances out of their atomic and molecular constituents - now he has to reread Stanislav Lem's The Invincible.

What if nanotechnology were to fall into the hands of terrorist and hate groups or nations bent on blackmailing civilization? - Oh my! Good thing GWB is in power in the US of A. He'll just bomb da bastards! (-Nukular, Lisa, it's pronounced nukular!)

In short - this guy................. If you know your SciFi well you don't need to read him.

Furthermore, as astute readers have already figured out, the shelf eliminates any need for the perversion of interface metaphors that is the use of copy and paste for files. The "Edit -> Copy File" command now becomes "File -> Place on Shelf", and the "Edit -> Paste File" command now splits into two commands, "File -> Copy from Shelf" and "File -> Move from Shelf", making it more powerful that copy/paste (since "cut" is not an option) in addition to being more sane and consistent with the rest of the UI.

Why the hostility? The "Cut" feature is practically the only thing from Windows that I miss in OS X. It's annoying to not be able to move files in OS X without dragging. Often you know you want to move some files, but say you get to the destination and want to make a new folder for them. This is incredibly annoying to do with OS X, but would be way easier with keyboard Cut as well as Copy/Paste.

What is the down side to having a "Cut"? I assume there's some usability study that shows users messing up more with Cut around. But I find this hard to believe. Cut and Paste to a hidden clipboard is so ingrained in computer users that introducing an explicit "shelf" makes things more, not less complicated. In fact, OS X is going in the opposite direction... nowadays you can cut and paste almost everything to a hidden clipboard and it tries to sort out what you meant (e.g. copy a file and paste it into a text editor, or drag a file onto a terminal window).

You can get an OS X version of the shelf mentioned (a kind of visible clipboard) at XShelf today. I have it around as a kludge for moving files more easily. But it would all be solved by having a "Cut" option as well as Copy and Paste.

- Eric

I know I can't tell em apart most of the time. And who knew they had so maaany?
Field Guide to Fox Blondes

here and here

I assume that means you're familiar with Spell My Name With an S (as in Zebatinsky).