when is the last time you had to roll back a driver on your mobile phone?
how long does it take to boot your tv?
google seems to understand that the fun we've had with the PC hobby has run its course...
the world is ready for the long-promised, yet to be delivered computing appliance...
finally, with mobile broadband and web applications, it's all possible...
for most users and most tasks, the browser can be the interface...
the operating system can just quietly disappear...
geeks are hostile because their skills are all about mastering the PC...
everyone else just wants to email, browse, tweet and connect...
Google have the market power and resources to provide the needed ecosystem to make this a reality...
If they can really execute this strategy (and there are holes in their current services you can drive a truck through!) the world will be theirs...
...because I once stood behind him in line to get into a guitar concert at Stanford, yeah!
He stood there quietly and waited to get into the hall with everyone else, see!
Now pipe down you sonofabitch!
He's a brilliant guy, too bad that his own reality distortion field delayed his surgery. His letter seems a little disingenuous and unfortunately his health is material re Apple shares. There's probably no succession plan that will change that when the CEO is so closely identified with the brand.
The Hyperion technology is a lot safer than the low-level research and medical reactors that still quietly exist all over the planet - there is no liquid cooling system that can catastrophically fail and burial will secure the installations. Nimby alarmists ignore that nuclear power is the safest source of energy by any measure, once all the real risks are compared. Disposal is safe, but has been made too costly due to post TMI/Chernobyl hysteria.
Sadly, the worlds uranium supply is limited. And, even at current consumption levels, is likely to become very scarce within the next 50 years, or so. Another problem is scalability - how many of these plants will have to roll off the production line to provide even 10% of the world's base load? My quick calculation says about 50,000 will be needed to reach this target. That's a lot of systems and a lot of uranium.
If you want to be safe, stay out of the street, stay off the road, stay out of the sun, avoid food and drink.
Ah gee, how we love to dance on poor willie...once upon a time there was a company that had contempt for its customers...and, that contempt trickled into everything the company did...soon, it couldn't distinguish between the quality of its products and services and its marketing...this company was always on message, but the hidden message was (pssst, those suckers won't know the difference)...one day the customers looked up to heaven, searching for an answer...a cloud began to form in the empty sky...it got bigger, and bigger...
and so on, and so on,...we keep going around-and-around with all these commercial vs o/s arguements. If you're a professional, you need the best-in-class tool in most cases, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time and $. That's why enlightened companies pay license fees - they don't want their employees hamstrung and un-productive. So far, it's clear that the commercial products have the edge in most (not all) instances.
Even if/when o/s products become demonstrably better than the established industry standard products, they still have to displace the encumbent, just like any market entrant.
The weakness of creative anarchy is it's inability to deliver focused products. The value of o/s is that it provides a 2nd tier competitor and options for users. And, this puts positive pressure on the market leader to improve. But, the price of the tool is always going to be miniscule compared to the value of labor - duh!
Perhaps contracted artists, management companies, labels and clearing houses are obsolete? The real economy around music is becoming centered around instant availability and infinite choice. In the short term, this looks like piracy.
Disintermediation (artist-to-consumer) is one obvious response. Copyright holders should be racing to digitise and commoditise their entire back libraries - more than 90% is either unavailable or low-quality rip. Look at the 'box set' tv pheonomena. People will happily pay for old TV shows but you have to provide value - and it's almost all profit for the owners.
If the labels and studios had any imagination - they'd be trying to flood the market before the opportunity gets swallowed by the coming bandwidth.
Exactly right, I'd mod you up but I'd rather chime-in. Microsoft is going after the enterprise search and more importantly, knowledge management space. Autonomy is the current leader here and this is a big potential cornerstone of the enterprise. It's nothing to do with web search - rather it's about managing internal information distributed across the network(s).
Infoglut starts and home and this technology is about 'knowing what you know' to support customer service, R&D, litigation, SOX compliance, etc.
...the documented "tests" of site legitimacy at your site are so lame and obvious they hardly bear discussion.
Example - you don't recognize our site as having a valid business address because it's embedded in a table - not best practice HTML, granted, but hardly obscure AND you only recognise certification from the BBB - which is hardly a sterling endoresement of business legitimacy.
Sorry to go on the attack, but I don't think you can fairly claim to have solved this problem at any level that this crowd would accept as meaningful. The web is not headquartered in Podunk and it doesn't meet for lunch at the Rotary Club.
I have to use the OO spreadsheet to support some gawdawful SQL queries that are linked to some legacy CRM stuff...but it's like walking barefoot on gravel compared to Excel.
I think OO would do fine for anyone who hasn't spent years living in MSOffice - otherwise it's torture - I had to buy Office for an Admin who threatened to walk over OO formatting frustrations.
Interesting to compare the sample EOL page for Rice and the existing entry for Rice in Wikipedia. Not only does the existing Wikipedia entry already have the same public domain image attached but it is (to this layman) more authoritative, more detailed and even better written when compared to the wooden 'encarta-style' prose in EOL.
Wikipedia foundation is a sponsor, of sorts, so hopefully EOL will benefit from the association, but I see this as a kind of showdown between the power of benign anarachy vs traditional academic processes. I this EOL will struggle to do a well as Wikipedia, but I'm pretty biased.
In any case, it's a noble (if not Nobel) ambition.
...take a straight edge and lay it across a line of type, covering the midline of each lowercase letter and the descenders (tails on 'y's and 'ps' , etc).
If the font has serifs, you'll be able to read it just about as well as if the entire line is exposed. This is important (he said, puffing himself up) because when we read, we generally scan letter shapes and word shapes that are familiar - it's unconscious - but has been demonstrated in the lab umpteen years ago by so-and-so as well as whosit (you in the back, pay attention!).
Try it without serifs - you can still read, but you're working a bit harder, eh?
This has been implicitly understood since the time of Caxton and is the reason why these font standards have evolved ever since.
Woah, I clearly remember receiving my first Nigerian $20M fax (yes, fax not email) waaaaay back 'round '92. You'd think they'd catch this guy!
How does he manage to send so many personalised emails? He must stay-up late at night!
...to back-up your assertion that the rate of evolution can be manipulated environmentally. However, this could be accelleration rather than retardation. In The Ancestors Tale, Richard Dawkins cites the case of Russian researchers' attempts to domesticate the Silver Fox. By selecting for tameness against aggression the foxes we're both behaviorally and physically transformed within 20 generations. They became short, floppy eared and developed spotted, mongrel like coats which (ironically) made them useless for the fur trade.
Dawkins suggests this is powerful evidence that humans have been dramatically changed by their own environmental manipulations - perhaps accounting for the rapidity of our divergence away from our cousins - not easily accounted for by the relatively recent forking of the family tree.
Just another case where the surprising complexity of natural selection can 'play into' the wilful distortions of the creationists.
Well...apart from the destruction and carbon emissions caused by the actual mining and moving of the coal, 'clean coal' may not be any kind of carbon neutral panacea - at least not any time soon. Australia just announced it's first 'next gen', 'clean coal' power plant.
How clean?
About a 30% reduction in greenhouse gasses. And the Australian taxpayer is going to have to subsidise the project to the tune of AUD$100M (US$79M) to achieve this result. Hardly gonna get us home, is it?
While we're all so focused on our little LCD screens, we might want to occasionally look out the window and wave goodbye...
Both of these systems are rooted in the 18th Century. They never anticipated:
a) a global economy
b) lightspeed evolution of technology, instant communication, blah, blah.
Patents are hopeless - they really operate as a kind of lifetime income protection scheme for lawyers - how can anyone really protect anything if there are separate systems for each country? Patents are a kind of new-age trading card. Fun to collect and swap with your strategic partners. Otherwise,they just inhibit innovation.
Copyrights are fine in principle, but suffer from the same problem - either there's one global system or forget it. And, oh yes, they're virtually zero protection for the creator (distinct from their aggregate value to mega publishers).
I'm imagining a kind of IP anarchy, where you just get to market earlier and better than the next guy. Ooooops! Isn't that really the way it works?
Slashdot Mirror
when is the last time you had to roll back a driver on your mobile phone? how long does it take to boot your tv? google seems to understand that the fun we've had with the PC hobby has run its course... the world is ready for the long-promised, yet to be delivered computing appliance... finally, with mobile broadband and web applications, it's all possible... for most users and most tasks, the browser can be the interface... the operating system can just quietly disappear... geeks are hostile because their skills are all about mastering the PC... everyone else just wants to email, browse, tweet and connect... Google have the market power and resources to provide the needed ecosystem to make this a reality... If they can really execute this strategy (and there are holes in their current services you can drive a truck through!) the world will be theirs...
...and you'll need a paid upgrade to get it back out!
...because I once stood behind him in line to get into a guitar concert at Stanford, yeah!
He stood there quietly and waited to get into the hall with everyone else, see!
Now pipe down you sonofabitch!
He's a brilliant guy, too bad that his own reality distortion field delayed his surgery. His letter seems a little disingenuous and unfortunately his health is material re Apple shares. There's probably no succession plan that will change that when the CEO is so closely identified with the brand.
The Hyperion technology is a lot safer than the low-level research and medical reactors that still quietly exist all over the planet - there is no liquid cooling system that can catastrophically fail and burial will secure the installations. Nimby alarmists ignore that nuclear power is the safest source of energy by any measure, once all the real risks are compared. Disposal is safe, but has been made too costly due to post TMI/Chernobyl hysteria.
Sadly, the worlds uranium supply is limited. And, even at current consumption levels, is likely to become very scarce within the next 50 years, or so. Another problem is scalability - how many of these plants will have to roll off the production line to provide even 10% of the world's base load? My quick calculation says about 50,000 will be needed to reach this target. That's a lot of systems and a lot of uranium.
If you want to be safe, stay out of the street, stay off the road, stay out of the sun, avoid food and drink.
Ah gee, how we love to dance on poor willie...once upon a time there was a company that had contempt for its customers...and, that contempt trickled into everything the company did...soon, it couldn't distinguish between the quality of its products and services and its marketing...this company was always on message, but the hidden message was (pssst, those suckers won't know the difference)...one day the customers looked up to heaven, searching for an answer...a cloud began to form in the empty sky...it got bigger, and bigger...
without shoving all the useless stuff down my throat;
that actually boots and runs faster than XP on my current, reasonably up-to-date hdw?
I'll be your fanmonkey for ever /or until the next "upgrade" / and we'll go around the dance floor once again.
...if you responded with only a hint of seriousness, your /. account was terminated, yes? That firehose is really doing its job, eh?
and so on, and so on,...we keep going around-and-around with all these commercial vs o/s arguements. If you're a professional, you need the best-in-class tool in most cases, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time and $. That's why enlightened companies pay license fees - they don't want their employees hamstrung and un-productive. So far, it's clear that the commercial products have the edge in most (not all) instances.
Even if/when o/s products become demonstrably better than the established industry standard products, they still have to displace the encumbent, just like any market entrant.
The weakness of creative anarchy is it's inability to deliver focused products. The value of o/s is that it provides a 2nd tier competitor and options for users. And, this puts positive pressure on the market leader to improve. But, the price of the tool is always going to be miniscule compared to the value of labor - duh!
Disintermediation (artist-to-consumer) is one obvious response. Copyright holders should be racing to digitise and commoditise their entire back libraries - more than 90% is either unavailable or low-quality rip. Look at the 'box set' tv pheonomena. People will happily pay for old TV shows but you have to provide value - and it's almost all profit for the owners.
If the labels and studios had any imagination - they'd be trying to flood the market before the opportunity gets swallowed by the coming bandwidth.
Infoglut starts and home and this technology is about 'knowing what you know' to support customer service, R&D, litigation, SOX compliance, etc.
Example - you don't recognize our site as having a valid business address because it's embedded in a table - not best practice HTML, granted, but hardly obscure AND you only recognise certification from the BBB - which is hardly a sterling endoresement of business legitimacy.
Sorry to go on the attack, but I don't think you can fairly claim to have solved this problem at any level that this crowd would accept as meaningful. The web is not headquartered in Podunk and it doesn't meet for lunch at the Rotary Club.
Indeed, this is one of the landmark fraud-leads-to-business-failure cases from the 80s. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/08/29/BU12623.DTL
I think OO would do fine for anyone who hasn't spent years living in MSOffice - otherwise it's torture - I had to buy Office for an Admin who threatened to walk over OO formatting frustrations.
Wahhhh! Where's the frickin format painter???
--
we interrupt this sig to bring you the following important sig:
The editorializing, while expected, just flags the bias of the contributor and weakens the otherwise-positive spirit (possibly vodka?) of /.
blaming users for their inability to secure the hideously insecure architecture of networked computing is silly
In a better world things would arrive in the market secure-by-default
damn you, you laws of physics you!
Wikipedia foundation is a sponsor, of sorts, so hopefully EOL will benefit from the association, but I see this as a kind of showdown between the power of benign anarachy vs traditional academic processes. I this EOL will struggle to do a well as Wikipedia, but I'm pretty biased.
In any case, it's a noble (if not Nobel) ambition.
Isn't that what beer is???
If the font has serifs, you'll be able to read it just about as well as if the entire line is exposed. This is important (he said, puffing himself up) because when we read, we generally scan letter shapes and word shapes that are familiar - it's unconscious - but has been demonstrated in the lab umpteen years ago by so-and-so as well as whosit (you in the back, pay attention!).
Try it without serifs - you can still read, but you're working a bit harder, eh?
This has been implicitly understood since the time of Caxton and is the reason why these font standards have evolved ever since.
There's a term for this, uh legibility.
Woah, I clearly remember receiving my first Nigerian $20M fax (yes, fax not email) waaaaay back 'round '92. You'd think they'd catch this guy! How does he manage to send so many personalised emails? He must stay-up late at night!
Dawkins suggests this is powerful evidence that humans have been dramatically changed by their own environmental manipulations - perhaps accounting for the rapidity of our divergence away from our cousins - not easily accounted for by the relatively recent forking of the family tree.
Just another case where the surprising complexity of natural selection can 'play into' the wilful distortions of the creationists.
How clean?
About a 30% reduction in greenhouse gasses. And the Australian taxpayer is going to have to subsidise the project to the tune of AUD$100M (US$79M) to achieve this result. Hardly gonna get us home, is it?
While we're all so focused on our little LCD screens, we might want to occasionally look out the window and wave goodbye...
Both of these systems are rooted in the 18th Century. They never anticipated:
a) a global economy
b) lightspeed evolution of technology, instant communication, blah, blah.
Patents are hopeless - they really operate as a kind of lifetime income protection scheme for lawyers - how can anyone really protect anything if there are separate systems for each country? Patents are a kind of new-age trading card. Fun to collect and swap with your strategic partners. Otherwise,they just inhibit innovation.
Copyrights are fine in principle, but suffer from the same problem - either there's one global system or forget it. And, oh yes, they're virtually zero protection for the creator (distinct from their aggregate value to mega publishers).
I'm imagining a kind of IP anarchy, where you just get to market earlier and better than the next guy. Ooooops! Isn't that really the way it works?
...943,606 dusty broken laptops
Thanks for posting the link to this excellent resource.