While we're at this, what does "less capable" mean in this context? Less capable of being shot-put across the room? Less capable of having an "Intel Inside" label on it?
Look, I know it's cool to bash Microsoft and call them "M$" and whatnot
It'd be much easier to give Microsoft credit for things if they hadn't pulled so many questionable and boneheaded PR moves in the past, like that fake "switch" ad from a couple years back that turned out to be written by a PR person and used a stock photo. They then went back and forth for 3 days on whether the story was real or not. And the pre-written anti-anti-trust letters to the editor they circulated. And so on....
I realize that some of these things are the decisions of PR firms and not Microsoft's management. Regardless, I find myself wondering what is real and what is PR. Including Slashdot posts - I'm not accusing you in particular, but given past behavior it would be no surprise if they hired some PR firm that thought posting pro-MS items on Slashdot might be a good way to spend their billions.
Maybe it's time to get fitted for a tinfoil hat....
I think the problem here is that no Linux Desktop project is going back and optimizing the bloated stuff they're creating. They just release and move on to tacking on the next set of features. It's an interesting contrast with what MS and Apple are doing.
MS is taking so long to make Longhorn that they have both time to optimize what they're working on (whether they'll do so is a different question) and the hardware has time to grow into it.
Apple grossly overshot the existing hardware with 10.0, but have since been going back and optimizing the hell out of everything. Every release is faster on all generations of hardware in ways that indicate they're paying attention to the user experience, rather than necessarily focusing on new features.
Either of these approaches is difficult, if not impossible, for an open source project. MS's long range approach runs into trouble because every.001 version change gets used and suggestions are made based on that. Long term planning is difficult when every transition gets nitpicked. Apple's approach would require that the coders for desktop environment, its key applications, and the XFree folks all get together and coordinate their efforts.
Can't offer a suggestion, but i figured i could throw out my interpretation of the problem....
Other people have addressed point 1, but you're really suffering from fuzzy thinking on points 2 and 3.
For point 2, the whole "dinosaurs in a tropical paradise thing", you have to remember that dinosaurs had very little infrastructure. If the coastal plain they were living in flooded, they just wandered somewhere else. We don't have that luxury - lots of our population lives in coastal plains, and we have essentially irreplaceable investments in infrastructure in some of them (he looks out his window at Manhattan...). Paying to handle greenhouse gasses now may be economically painful, but not stopping the rising seawaters may be excruciating.
As for point 3, if you don't think we're changing the environment, look at the satellite photos of NE North America before and during the blackout. Look at the satellite photos of Amazon deforestation or the Indonesian fire season from a few years back. Yes, any single year we may do less than Pinatubo, but collectively, human activity is having a staggering affect on the environment.
None of this necessarily means that the scenarios presented in this report will play out. It just means we'd be fools not to do something to try to prevent them from happening.
Webkit is the same data loading/display engine that powers safari. It's provided by Apple, works as far back as 10.2.6, and is part of the default 10.3 install. The XCode developer tools let you drag and drop webkits onto window prototypes - there's an article on doing so here: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/ 01/23/w ebkit.html
I wasn't aware that 3.1 ran nicely under any circumstances. I was using nothing but Macs when i came in contact with it and couldn't believe anyone could find that interface tolerable.
JT
Re:I still don't get the streaming revenue model
on
The Nine Lives of Napster
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't get the streaming revenue model from the seller's expense perspective, either.
Think about it - as a streaming service increases its number of users, the server and bandwidth requirements (and thus cost) are going to increase in a very linear fashion. In contrast, for Apple, the increase may be linear, but the slope's going to be MUCH more shallow.
To detail my reasoning: Apple's just got to have the capacity to stream a few previews and support a few downloads for a given user. If the person likes the song, they buy it and play the local copy, rather than streaming it again. If an average user sets a reasonable monthly allowance, Apple only has to send them less than 50 songs a month, and maybe 100 30 second previews.
Now think about the capacity required for a service that has to be sending out data whenever a user wants to listen to a song. The average user will probably need several hundred songs sent to them a month. Much higher bandwidth and server requirements.
Meanwhile, the person streaming the music has sent his service less than what Apple's gotten out of many of its purchasers. So, basically, i think the streaming services are starting out with two strikes against them.
Well, i'd give you a RTFA, but it seems that the webserver wouldn't let you anyway. Their screenshot collection did show KDE, but with the comment that it ran very slowly. No huge surprise - KDE is very full featured for a PDA.
Would someone with experience in this area make a suggestion about how long it would take for Microsoft to spend a half billion on lawyers?
I've got some friends who are corporate lawyers in New York City, and it wouldn't shock me if they could spend that much money by dragging things out long enough and hiring enough legal help...
"The icons are no worse than MS' icons, and many concepts are difficult to get across in a 24x24 bitmap."
That is more or less the point i was trying to make. Yes, MS's icons are nearly equally useless, and yes it's an inherent limitation of small images. They just can't convey much information.
That's why Microsoft shouldn't be emulated - there shouldn't be 40 small, similar looking images across the toolbar. Pick the 10 most important functions, make readily distinguishable images for them, and put them there. People will be able to use and remember them instead of staring mutely at all the indistinguishable choices.
I'm sorry if i sound unduly harsh - the K folks have put a lot of hard work into this - but i've spent the last few days writing and editing a paper in Word v.X, and i'm about ready to take an Uzi up to Redmond.
Go back and look at the screen shot here. What exactly do you see?
I see an interface design that isn't happy with including everything but the kitchen sink, so it grabbed that, the bathroom sink, tub, and anything else in the apartment that could actually hold water, and threw that in too. Too many menus with uniformative titles, too many buttons with uninformative icons, too many content panes to possible figure out which one you're actually working in. Plus the cheap knockoff of the hierachial view of Windows, which i've always thought was poorly designed from a UI standpoint (and ugly, too!).
This illustrates the worst tendencies of open source software. The first instinct is to do whatever Microsoft does, and it's a bad one. Microsoft's got more employees than it really knows what to do with, so when it comes down to deciding which features to implement, they implement them all. Everything winds up bloated and confusing.
It'll be nice that Linux users have the option of using this, but by shamelessly trying to mimic Exchange/Outlook, these guys have taken away any chance they had of being better than Microsoft.
Is it just me, or when something about a Vice President at Apple, did you expect to see Al Gore quoted?
Re:First war post!
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, i don't have to pretend. I live in New York City, which is a very likely target of any reprisals. At the moment, i can hear helicopters passing near our apartment; this morning, one from the coast guard went by my balcony at eye level, while one of their patrol boats went tearing up the East River towards Long Island Sound. Police were searching cars at a checkpoint near my subway stop as i commuted home this evening.
For the most part, the post-9/11 nervousness had passed. Since the orange alert in the fall and the ramping up for war had begun, it all came back. It doesn't have the inevitability that's present in Baghdad, but it sure feels like life under threat.
The 802.11g base station was mentioned as a bit of an afterthought, but there's two really cool features in it:
It's a print server for a USB printer. It's got a USB port - plug something in, and it shows up on your network.
It's a PPP server. You can apparently set your modem to answer calls. This will give you access not only to your local network (printing, file sharing), but if the airport is routing a DSL/Cable connection, you get full dial up internet access.
Kinda kills the answering machine, but what the hell !
A while back, an article in the journal Nature indicated that labs in Germany and the US isolated small fragments of DNA from Neanderthal bones. These indicated that the differences between Neanderthal sequences and the equivalent sequence in modern humans is greater than the difference among various populations of modern humans. They interpreted this to indicate that Neanderthals had branched off the the population of homo-like species well in advance of the development of modern humans, and thus that they compromised a separate species, with no indication of interbreeding with modern humans.
I'm sure those who disagree could give a cogent counter argument, but i don't work on evolution, so i can't.
They were a bit vague on what goes on in the fly, so here's a short synopsis:
The entire back of the fly has the potential to become either a sensory organ or cuticle (the fly's skin). Things get narrowed down by the expression of some sensory-promoting proteins in clusters of cells at specific locations. The process they're intrigued by is how a single cell within this cluster becomes sensory.
All of these cells begin expressing a signal and a receptor for that signal. When the signal is received, a cell will turn down the expression of both the signal and the sensory promoting genes. Cells that aren't receiving the signal will turn down the expression of the receptor and turn up the expression of the signal. Thus, when a cell isn't seeing a lot of signal, it both reduces its ability to see any more, and increases its signaling to surrounding cells.
In the end, it all becomes a balancing act between signaling and seeing signaling from neighboring cells. The thought is that the initiation of the process is somewhat stochastic - some cells may turn on the signal earlier than others or start of expressing it at a higher level. The result of the signaling reinforcing itself is that this initial small advantage is greatly amplified, and becomes an all-or-nothing decision.
I hope that is more coherent than i think it is...
Actually, no. About the only way to create something like that is to give two SCSI devices the same ID number. You more or less have to be actively stupid to create these sorts of problems on a Mac.
Although i won't conclude he's a moron, i can only conclude Katz is a bit lazy. I've seen a fair number of posts at/. by people who obviously have a background in biology, some of whom claim to work on the Human Genome Project. The writings contained here indicate that Katz never bothered to track them down and ask them to clarify and/or correct anything in this article.
A small sampling of the misconceptions and errors here:
The increasing speed of the project has been made possible by advances in the automated machinery that performs the sequencing, not by computing advances. Getting the sequence is the hard part; analyzing it's (relatively) easy.
Mapping of disease locuses has not been limited by computing power either. Most of these efforts are done by smaller labs not associated with the HGP. Nobody's looking at anything like artistic ability, as far as i know.
Supporters of this project hail it for a variety of reasons. Only the most foolishly optimistic view it as a way of eliminating disease. We've been cloning disease genes for a while now, and that information has not lead to a whole lot in the way of disease elimination.
The agencies funding the HGP in this country are the NIH and DOE - both have budgets subjected to congressional approval and the heads of each are appointed by the president. To say that we started this project without governmental oversight is a gross distortion.
Some of the ethical issues burried in the text are certainly worthy of public debate (they're definitely being debated in private), and i'd love to see them debated. Unfortunately, the text as a whole is so loaded with hyperbole and misinformation, that it doesn't seem capable of stimulating rational debate. If anybody reading this wants to be the person triggering that debate, please, make the time and effort necessary to get the facts straight first.
I think the folks producing the KDE should be congratulated for making a product that's friendly enough that beginners can use Linux for basic network and productivity tasks. What's now lacking is a Linux environment for those in between the novices who don't want to reconfigure anything once it works and the pros who don't need a desktop environment.
Intermediate users are still stuck with issues like critical configuration files having obscure names and locations, a bewildering directory structure, an inability to reorganize applications and support files according to their needs, etc. Although many of these are more structural issues with Linux as a whole and many *nix programs in specific, has the KDE team ever thought about turning their attention to making Linux as a whole a bit more user friendly, or at least providing a shell that makes it appear that way?
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at this, what does "less capable" mean in this context? Less capable of being shot-put across the room? Less capable of having an "Intel Inside" label on it?
Look, I know it's cool to bash Microsoft and call them "M$" and whatnot
It'd be much easier to give Microsoft credit for things if they hadn't pulled so many questionable and boneheaded PR moves in the past, like that fake "switch" ad from a couple years back that turned out to be written by a PR person and used a stock photo. They then went back and forth for 3 days on whether the story was real or not. And the pre-written anti-anti-trust letters to the editor they circulated. And so on....
I realize that some of these things are the decisions of PR firms and not Microsoft's management. Regardless, I find myself wondering what is real and what is PR. Including Slashdot posts - I'm not accusing you in particular, but given past behavior it would be no surprise if they hired some PR firm that thought posting pro-MS items on Slashdot might be a good way to spend their billions.
Maybe it's time to get fitted for a tinfoil hat....
JT
I think the problem here is that no Linux Desktop project is going back and optimizing the bloated stuff they're creating. They just release and move on to tacking on the next set of features. It's an interesting contrast with what MS and Apple are doing.
.001 version change gets used and suggestions are made based on that. Long term planning is difficult when every transition gets nitpicked. Apple's approach would require that the coders for desktop environment, its key applications, and the XFree folks all get together and coordinate their efforts.
MS is taking so long to make Longhorn that they have both time to optimize what they're working on (whether they'll do so is a different question) and the hardware has time to grow into it.
Apple grossly overshot the existing hardware with 10.0, but have since been going back and optimizing the hell out of everything. Every release is faster on all generations of hardware in ways that indicate they're paying attention to the user experience, rather than necessarily focusing on new features.
Either of these approaches is difficult, if not impossible, for an open source project. MS's long range approach runs into trouble because every
Can't offer a suggestion, but i figured i could throw out my interpretation of the problem....
JT
Other people have addressed point 1, but you're really suffering from fuzzy thinking on points 2 and 3.
For point 2, the whole "dinosaurs in a tropical paradise thing", you have to remember that dinosaurs had very little infrastructure. If the coastal plain they were living in flooded, they just wandered somewhere else. We don't have that luxury - lots of our population lives in coastal plains, and we have essentially irreplaceable investments in infrastructure in some of them (he looks out his window at Manhattan...). Paying to handle greenhouse gasses now may be economically painful, but not stopping the rising seawaters may be excruciating.
As for point 3, if you don't think we're changing the environment, look at the satellite photos of NE North America before and during the blackout. Look at the satellite photos of Amazon deforestation or the Indonesian fire season from a few years back. Yes, any single year we may do less than Pinatubo, but collectively, human activity is having a staggering affect on the environment.
None of this necessarily means that the scenarios presented in this report will play out. It just means we'd be fools not to do something to try to prevent them from happening.
JT
Webkit is the same data loading/display engine that powers safari. It's provided by Apple, works as far back as 10.2.6, and is part of the default 10.3 install. The XCode developer tools let you drag and drop webkits onto window prototypes - there's an article on doing so here:/ 01/23/w ebkit.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004
So no, no Gecko.
JT
Never mind the hammer security patches - it probably won't interact with industry standard nails.
I wasn't aware that 3.1 ran nicely under any circumstances. I was using nothing but Macs when i came in contact with it and couldn't believe anyone could find that interface tolerable.
JT
I don't get the streaming revenue model from the seller's expense perspective, either.
Think about it - as a streaming service increases its number of users, the server and bandwidth requirements (and thus cost) are going to increase in a very linear fashion. In contrast, for Apple, the increase may be linear, but the slope's going to be MUCH more shallow.
To detail my reasoning:
Apple's just got to have the capacity to stream a few previews and support a few downloads for a given user. If the person likes the song, they buy it and play the local copy, rather than streaming it again. If an average user sets a reasonable monthly allowance, Apple only has to send them less than 50 songs a month, and maybe 100 30 second previews.
Now think about the capacity required for a service that has to be sending out data whenever a user wants to listen to a song. The average user will probably need several hundred songs sent to them a month. Much higher bandwidth and server requirements.
Meanwhile, the person streaming the music has sent his service less than what Apple's gotten out of many of its purchasers. So, basically, i think the streaming services are starting out with two strikes against them.
JT
Well, i'd give you a RTFA, but it seems that the webserver wouldn't let you anyway. Their screenshot collection did show KDE, but with the comment that it ran very slowly. No huge surprise - KDE is very full featured for a PDA.
JT
Would someone with experience in this area make a suggestion about how long it would take for Microsoft to spend a half billion on lawyers?
I've got some friends who are corporate lawyers in New York City, and it wouldn't shock me if they could spend that much money by dragging things out long enough and hiring enough legal help...
JT
"The icons are no worse than MS' icons, and many concepts are difficult to get across in a 24x24 bitmap."
That is more or less the point i was trying to make. Yes, MS's icons are nearly equally useless, and yes it's an inherent limitation of small images. They just can't convey much information.
That's why Microsoft shouldn't be emulated - there shouldn't be 40 small, similar looking images across the toolbar. Pick the 10 most important functions, make readily distinguishable images for them, and put them there. People will be able to use and remember them instead of staring mutely at all the indistinguishable choices.
I'm sorry if i sound unduly harsh - the K folks have put a lot of hard work into this - but i've spent the last few days writing and editing a paper in Word v.X, and i'm about ready to take an Uzi up to Redmond.
Go back and look at the screen shot here. What exactly do you see?
I see an interface design that isn't happy with including everything but the kitchen sink, so it grabbed that, the bathroom sink, tub, and anything else in the apartment that could actually hold water, and threw that in too. Too many menus with uniformative titles, too many buttons with uninformative icons, too many content panes to possible figure out which one you're actually working in. Plus the cheap knockoff of the hierachial view of Windows, which i've always thought was poorly designed from a UI standpoint (and ugly, too!).
This illustrates the worst tendencies of open source software. The first instinct is to do whatever Microsoft does, and it's a bad one. Microsoft's got more employees than it really knows what to do with, so when it comes down to deciding which features to implement, they implement them all. Everything winds up bloated and confusing.
It'll be nice that Linux users have the option of using this, but by shamelessly trying to mimic Exchange/Outlook, these guys have taken away any chance they had of being better than Microsoft.
ugh, that should be
"Is it just me, or when something about a Vice President at Apple was mentioned, did you expect to see Al Gore quoted?"
score the original -1, posting after Vodka Tonic.
Is it just me, or when something about a Vice President at Apple, did you expect to see Al Gore quoted?
Actually, i don't have to pretend. I live in New York City, which is a very likely target of any reprisals. At the moment, i can hear helicopters passing near our apartment; this morning, one from the coast guard went by my balcony at eye level, while one of their patrol boats went tearing up the East River towards Long Island Sound. Police were searching cars at a checkpoint near my subway stop as i commuted home this evening.
For the most part, the post-9/11 nervousness had passed. Since the orange alert in the fall and the ramping up for war had begun, it all came back. It doesn't have the inevitability that's present in Baghdad, but it sure feels like life under threat.
JT
The 802.11g base station was mentioned as a bit of an afterthought, but there's two really cool features in it:
It's a print server for a USB printer. It's got a USB port - plug something in, and it shows up on your network.
It's a PPP server. You can apparently set your modem to answer calls. This will give you access not only to your local network (printing, file sharing), but if the airport is routing a DSL/Cable connection, you get full dial up internet access.
Kinda kills the answering machine, but what the hell !
JT
A while back, an article in the journal Nature indicated that labs in Germany and the US isolated small fragments of DNA from Neanderthal bones. These indicated that the differences between Neanderthal sequences and the equivalent sequence in modern humans is greater than the difference among various populations of modern humans. They interpreted this to indicate that Neanderthals had branched off the the population of homo-like species well in advance of the development of modern humans, and thus that they compromised a separate species, with no indication of interbreeding with modern humans.
I'm sure those who disagree could give a cogent counter argument, but i don't work on evolution, so i can't.
Cheers,
Jay
They were a bit vague on what goes on in the fly, so here's a short synopsis:
The entire back of the fly has the potential to become either a sensory organ or cuticle (the fly's skin). Things get narrowed down by the expression of some sensory-promoting proteins in clusters of cells at specific locations. The process they're intrigued by is how a single cell within this cluster becomes sensory.
All of these cells begin expressing a signal and a receptor for that signal. When the signal is received, a cell will turn down the expression of both the signal and the sensory promoting genes. Cells that aren't receiving the signal will turn down the expression of the receptor and turn up the expression of the signal. Thus, when a cell isn't seeing a lot of signal, it both reduces its ability to see any more, and increases its signaling to surrounding cells.
In the end, it all becomes a balancing act between signaling and seeing signaling from neighboring cells. The thought is that the initiation of the process is somewhat stochastic - some cells may turn on the signal earlier than others or start of expressing it at a higher level. The result of the signaling reinforcing itself is that this initial small advantage is greatly amplified, and becomes an all-or-nothing decision.
I hope that is more coherent than i think it is...
JT
Actually, no. About the only way to create something like that is to give two SCSI devices the same ID number. You more or less have to be actively stupid to create these sorts of problems on a Mac.
Dr. Jay
Although i won't conclude he's a moron, i can only conclude Katz is a bit lazy. I've seen a fair number of posts at /. by people who obviously have a background in biology, some of whom claim to work on the Human Genome Project. The writings contained here indicate that Katz never bothered to track them down and ask them to clarify and/or correct anything in this article.
A small sampling of the misconceptions and errors here:
The increasing speed of the project has been made possible by advances in the automated machinery that performs the sequencing, not by computing advances. Getting the sequence is the hard part; analyzing it's (relatively) easy.
Mapping of disease locuses has not been limited by computing power either. Most of these efforts are done by smaller labs not associated with the HGP. Nobody's looking at anything like artistic ability, as far as i know.
Supporters of this project hail it for a variety of reasons. Only the most foolishly optimistic view it as a way of eliminating disease. We've been cloning disease genes for a while now, and that information has not lead to a whole lot in the way of disease elimination.
The agencies funding the HGP in this country are the NIH and DOE - both have budgets subjected to congressional approval and the heads of each are appointed by the president. To say that we started this project without governmental oversight is a gross distortion.
Some of the ethical issues burried in the text are certainly worthy of public debate (they're definitely being debated in private), and i'd love to see them debated. Unfortunately, the text as a whole is so loaded with hyperbole and misinformation, that it doesn't seem capable of stimulating rational debate. If anybody reading this wants to be the person triggering that debate, please, make the time and effort necessary to get the facts straight first.
JTI think the folks producing the KDE should be congratulated for making a product that's friendly enough that beginners can use Linux for basic network and productivity tasks. What's now lacking is a Linux environment for those in between the novices who don't want to reconfigure anything once it works and the pros who don't need a desktop environment.
Intermediate users are still stuck with issues like critical configuration files having obscure names and locations, a bewildering directory structure, an inability to reorganize applications and support files according to their needs, etc. Although many of these are more structural issues with Linux as a whole and many *nix programs in specific, has the KDE team ever thought about turning their attention to making Linux as a whole a bit more user friendly, or at least providing a shell that makes it appear that way?
Jay T