The thing about Palm Foleo, above all else, is that Palm is dying. They've been dying by inches since 2002 or so... When they still had over 3/4 of the handheld market share (and when people still cared about PDAs) they were on top of the world. After that they did pretty good with the Treo - which, IMO, could have given them a solid future - except they were too slow about following up on that success. It turned out that other hardware manufacturers were also capable of producing hardware with similar capabilities in the same form-factor... And Palm's OS, which was wonderful back in 1998, wonderful because Palm bucked the trend of trying to put as much CPU power into a palmtop as possible and instead put in just as much as they could reasonably do and still have a device that was nice to carry around - was seriously showing its age at a time when people's desire for the portable device to also be able to do things like play media and manage photos was now quite reasonable from a hardware standpoint...
Now, I don't think Foleo was based on Palm OS - but the thing is Palm's just not on very solid footing right now. They aren't Apple, they can't do something crazy like that and expect people to lap it up. I think that anybody trying to sell low-capability sub-notebooks is going for a bit of a hard sell - but the idea behind the product is sound... Sometimes you just need to do your work on something a little bit smaller - something just a bit easier to lug around - and even if you can fit all the technology of a full laptop into that form factor, you can't squeeze the screen, for instance - you need a certain physical size for usability - and if the screen's too small then the software has to be designed to account for that. But still they're trying to sell something people don't think they need - so it helps a lot if it's being sold by a company that's not already in its death throes...
Wow. Did you bother asking them what they would support before writing the application? Well, from what he said it sounds like:
- Initially, no - they wrote the thing in PHP just 'cause (maybe it was a prototype or maybe the devs were just experimenting and found they'd come up with something people wanted) - In subsequent rewrites, yes - they agreed on C#, for instance, and then IT changed their mind after the thing was rewritten again in C#...
I feel this bit bears repeating. In both the "Mooninite scare" and the Star thing, one very disturbing aspect of all the local reporting was that it was very heavily spun in favor of the city, the TSA, etc. Referring to a pack of D cells and some LEDs as a "Hoax Device" - even when it was already damned obvious that the Mooninites were neither bombs nor hoax bombs - is just a cheap tactic to make people side with the authorities, despite little matters like common sense getting in the way.
In an appropriately curved universe pi could be 3. Yeah, but the problem there is that you wind up with mail being delivered 6 months before it's given to the post office, and chunks of dead postmaster strewn about the room...
It won't matter. If Obama wins the democratic nomination, then both presidential candidates will be pro-net-neutrality. There just isn't a popular platform for "yes, let's cripple the Internet so that corporations can profit more," and for once politicians have realized it. Well, over the years presidential candidates have learned a few interesting tricks. For instance, a candidate could potentially say they're going to do something, and then, once elected, do something else. Or, they could actually say what they're going to do, but say it in such a way that people don't catch on that it's not what they want. For instance, consider the following possible statement. The figures in it are fictitious, of course...
"Presently there's a conflict going on with regard to how the internet is managed. Service providers are overwhelmed with the level of traffic they receive, and over 80% of that traffic is being generated by less than 20% of their clients. This results in slower connections for the rest of their clients. I support legislation that would allow these providers to manage their services in such a way as to ensure a good experience for all their clients."
That's the trick - not everybody is a filesharer, and not everybody has actually started using the internet in a way that demands the full speed of their connection. Appeal to the clueless majority - tell them that filesharing results in them getting lower speeds (never mind the fact that it's their service provider's responsibility to provide the speed they've promised, or the fact that many of these users aren't likely to notice the difference anyway) and... voila. Public support for throwing a bone to ISPs.
Aussie Cops were disappointed when the response to their request was that searching computers was "not my bag, baby!" - so unfortunately for them the whole plan is scrapped.
How do we know that it hasn't already gone off, and the burst is due to hit us in say, 10 minutes? Well, it's 20 minutes later, so I guess that theory is shot to hell.:D
But no, media companies are obsessed with reselling the same content as many times as possible to the same people. How many special basement-THX-director's-cut-lost-hidden-import-bootleg versions of Blade Runner do I need? If you're gonna use something like Blade Runner as an example, then you need to consider that they're happy to sell you as many copies as you're willing to buy. If people weren't buying the redundant editions they wouldn't sell 'em...
Far more insidious IMO is when one is sold a defective product, like the badly-translated Zeta Gundam or a DVD with marginally defective encoding - and thus they make another sale by fixing the problem and releasing a new edition...
don't move when you depress the key. Personally, I like to depress keys by telling them that they're worthless and no-one likes them. Ah, if only keyboards had Genuine People Personalities then you needn't bother... The keys would depress themselves.
Joe user just bought a laptop and doesn't know the difference between a window and the screen. That's the audience we're talking about here. They just want their computer to work. I'd wager he also doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Is this really the crowd we want to cater to when we make design decisions for an OS?
I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac (full disclosure: I did, and I can't believe I'm saying that).
I'm thinking of moving back away from Mac, personally. Turns out I don't really like their window manager very much, or the poor integration with (or segregation of?) X11 and limited availability of free software on the platform. (For instance KDE apps aren't readily available in Mac-native form, nor are my usual collection of game console emulators...)
I find myself wishing that my Mac laptop were Intel-based so that I could maybe try Haiku on it. In the end I may just go with Linux or dual-boot...
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Linux and it's not as though I think it should be willfully obtuse or anything - but I think it's worth re-examining, why do we (supposedly?) want Linux to be a huge popular success? Why should we feel bad if it isn't? Is that really the best priority to be pursuing?
What I enjoy about the system is that it's good for me. I can operate it well with the keyboard, it's great for all kinds of tinkering, and it's generally a system that stays out of my way and lets me do my thing.
Of course that's not for everybody. What I've just described is a fine system for a computer hobbyist. People are always quite aware that "average users" have different needs than the people who are into computers for their own sake - but have we programmers rejected the idea that the converse is true? That computer hobbyists are better served by a system that gives them the elbow room they desire for free-range tinkering?
Naturally there are people who would benefit from having very user-friendly software packages on Linux - mainly people who want to sell computers with that software on it. I don't have a problem with them - but serving that group isn't my main interest, either....
What I want is a good system for me. I think that even in that, Linux could do with some major improvement - for starters, "computer hobbyists" may have different needs than "average users" but all the same poor documentation and obtuse or inconsistent interfaces (or blatantly faulty code) can be just as much trouble for hobbyists - we just have a greater tendency to rationalize the problem, or ignore it.
nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life unless it was truly highly valuable to society
Yea but how do you judge that. A lot of people seem to be forgetting that if after 50 years nobody cares anymore about some music, it makes no money for its creator copyrighted or not. And if lots of people still want to listen to it after 50 years, maybe it is actually highly valuable to society. Maybe we want more music like that.
But that's not something you can make happen by providing higher incentives... It's partly a matter of luck, partly a matter of talent, and partly a matter of getting a record company's PR machine behind a particular album, artist, or track...
I would rather foster an environment in which it's not all about the two or three big hits per year... If the value of those incredibly long-lasting, very rare megahits were lower, then there would be less focus on trying to generate those megahits (a process that involves signing lots of artists, trying to coax them into writing music that the producer feels has a good shot at becoming a big hit, and casting most of them aside when it doesn't work out and signing another big crop...) and more focus on just making good music - stuff that's good enough to make steady income but not necessarily a chart-buster. The music industry would thus (if I am correct) support a larger number of artists and a wider variety of music - because there would be a larger niche for the artists who are good but not necessarily the ultra-rare megahit performers... It just wouldn't support them forever. There'd be a shift from the constant attempt to find the big hit that will bring in money for the next 20 years to aiming for something steadier... Lower stakes but better chances of winning.
Meanwhile, artists (that is, working artists, not those living off a big hit from decades ago) would have more resources - free access to reasonably recent music to incorporate (via sampling, etc.), transform, or just play...
I feel like the long copyrights are contributing to the homogenization of our culture... as long as so much emphasis is placed on such a relatively small collection of current work (farming for mega-hits), the available variety is bound to suffer, and the easiest way to maximize profit will continue to be to try to sell us all the same thing, and find that one thing most of us can agree on and will be willing to latch on to...
Isn't this a form of unauthorized wiretapping? No, you're confused...
"Wiretapping" is when you use access to the physical layer to eavesdrop on telephone service, which is of course private.
When you're providing a data network, the data you'd be "tapping into" is actually sent to your computers. It's given to you. So of course it's a whole different deal. If it was something private, they shouldn't have sent it to your internet gateway! You don't use a dirty word like "wiretapping" to describe that...
2. Compression is HIGHLY effective on XML documents (all that <element> and </element> stuff tokenizes very well). A well-compressed XML doc should not be much larger or harder to work with than the raw data contained within it. That always seemed ass-backwards to me.
"Sure, the data format I use for this application contains large amounts of unnecessary, redundant, excessively verbose tagging, and sure the data itself is needlessly encoded into a representation that only uses about 6 bits out of any 8, tops, but on the bright side, it compresses real well"
Well, of course it compresses real well... You've just encoded everything with a lot of redundancy and used a fraction of your "bandwidth"... But if you had encoded your data efficiently in the first place, you wouldn't have to compress it...
And all this for, what, so your document is easy to read in Notepad? All these parsing libraries have been written for XML (and that's a great asset!), but if the same had been done for an efficient meta-format, then the addition of one application - a data editor - would make a binary format just as easy to work with...
Every cool technology has an X in the name (UNIX, ActiveX, DirectX), and the existence of the X allows people to overlook the fact that they are just plain bad ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, OK, they've got Sketchup - I think we all knew about that one...
What more fitting tribute to Clarke than to associate his name with the greatest bang since the big one?
But Zaphod Beeblebrox already has a name. :)
That's OK, from now on he'll just be known as "Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is associated with the name Clarke"Well, it's not really that it fills one specific hole... If anything it's kind of a double-penetration thing...
The thing about Palm Foleo, above all else, is that Palm is dying. They've been dying by inches since 2002 or so... When they still had over 3/4 of the handheld market share (and when people still cared about PDAs) they were on top of the world. After that they did pretty good with the Treo - which, IMO, could have given them a solid future - except they were too slow about following up on that success. It turned out that other hardware manufacturers were also capable of producing hardware with similar capabilities in the same form-factor... And Palm's OS, which was wonderful back in 1998, wonderful because Palm bucked the trend of trying to put as much CPU power into a palmtop as possible and instead put in just as much as they could reasonably do and still have a device that was nice to carry around - was seriously showing its age at a time when people's desire for the portable device to also be able to do things like play media and manage photos was now quite reasonable from a hardware standpoint...
Now, I don't think Foleo was based on Palm OS - but the thing is Palm's just not on very solid footing right now. They aren't Apple, they can't do something crazy like that and expect people to lap it up. I think that anybody trying to sell low-capability sub-notebooks is going for a bit of a hard sell - but the idea behind the product is sound... Sometimes you just need to do your work on something a little bit smaller - something just a bit easier to lug around - and even if you can fit all the technology of a full laptop into that form factor, you can't squeeze the screen, for instance - you need a certain physical size for usability - and if the screen's too small then the software has to be designed to account for that. But still they're trying to sell something people don't think they need - so it helps a lot if it's being sold by a company that's not already in its death throes...
- Initially, no - they wrote the thing in PHP just 'cause (maybe it was a prototype or maybe the devs were just experimenting and found they'd come up with something people wanted)
- In subsequent rewrites, yes - they agreed on C#, for instance, and then IT changed their mind after the thing was rewritten again in C#...
My favorite monster...
The Destroid Monster...
I feel this bit bears repeating. In both the "Mooninite scare" and the Star thing, one very disturbing aspect of all the local reporting was that it was very heavily spun in favor of the city, the TSA, etc. Referring to a pack of D cells and some LEDs as a "Hoax Device" - even when it was already damned obvious that the Mooninites were neither bombs nor hoax bombs - is just a cheap tactic to make people side with the authorities, despite little matters like common sense getting in the way.
"Presently there's a conflict going on with regard to how the internet is managed. Service providers are overwhelmed with the level of traffic they receive, and over 80% of that traffic is being generated by less than 20% of their clients. This results in slower connections for the rest of their clients. I support legislation that would allow these providers to manage their services in such a way as to ensure a good experience for all their clients."
That's the trick - not everybody is a filesharer, and not everybody has actually started using the internet in a way that demands the full speed of their connection. Appeal to the clueless majority - tell them that filesharing results in them getting lower speeds (never mind the fact that it's their service provider's responsibility to provide the speed they've promised, or the fact that many of these users aren't likely to notice the difference anyway) and... voila. Public support for throwing a bone to ISPs.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who made this association. :D
But you're wrong, you just quoted the second rule.
Aussie Cops were disappointed when the response to their request was that searching computers was "not my bag, baby!" - so unfortunately for them the whole plan is scrapped.
Far more insidious IMO is when one is sold a defective product, like the badly-translated Zeta Gundam or a DVD with marginally defective encoding - and thus they make another sale by fixing the problem and releasing a new edition...
as in "neighbor" or "weigh"...
It's been said that every one's a super hero - every one's a Captain Kirk!
I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac (full disclosure: I did, and I can't believe I'm saying that).
I'm thinking of moving back away from Mac, personally. Turns out I don't really like their window manager very much, or the poor integration with (or segregation of?) X11 and limited availability of free software on the platform. (For instance KDE apps aren't readily available in Mac-native form, nor are my usual collection of game console emulators...)I find myself wishing that my Mac laptop were Intel-based so that I could maybe try Haiku on it. In the end I may just go with Linux or dual-boot...
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Linux and it's not as though I think it should be willfully obtuse or anything - but I think it's worth re-examining, why do we (supposedly?) want Linux to be a huge popular success? Why should we feel bad if it isn't? Is that really the best priority to be pursuing?
What I enjoy about the system is that it's good for me. I can operate it well with the keyboard, it's great for all kinds of tinkering, and it's generally a system that stays out of my way and lets me do my thing.
Of course that's not for everybody. What I've just described is a fine system for a computer hobbyist. People are always quite aware that "average users" have different needs than the people who are into computers for their own sake - but have we programmers rejected the idea that the converse is true? That computer hobbyists are better served by a system that gives them the elbow room they desire for free-range tinkering?
Naturally there are people who would benefit from having very user-friendly software packages on Linux - mainly people who want to sell computers with that software on it. I don't have a problem with them - but serving that group isn't my main interest, either....
What I want is a good system for me. I think that even in that, Linux could do with some major improvement - for starters, "computer hobbyists" may have different needs than "average users" but all the same poor documentation and obtuse or inconsistent interfaces (or blatantly faulty code) can be just as much trouble for hobbyists - we just have a greater tendency to rationalize the problem, or ignore it.
Yea but how do you judge that. A lot of people seem to be forgetting that if after 50 years nobody cares anymore about some music, it makes no money for its creator copyrighted or not. And if lots of people still want to listen to it after 50 years, maybe it is actually highly valuable to society. Maybe we want more music like that.
But that's not something you can make happen by providing higher incentives... It's partly a matter of luck, partly a matter of talent, and partly a matter of getting a record company's PR machine behind a particular album, artist, or track...I would rather foster an environment in which it's not all about the two or three big hits per year... If the value of those incredibly long-lasting, very rare megahits were lower, then there would be less focus on trying to generate those megahits (a process that involves signing lots of artists, trying to coax them into writing music that the producer feels has a good shot at becoming a big hit, and casting most of them aside when it doesn't work out and signing another big crop...) and more focus on just making good music - stuff that's good enough to make steady income but not necessarily a chart-buster. The music industry would thus (if I am correct) support a larger number of artists and a wider variety of music - because there would be a larger niche for the artists who are good but not necessarily the ultra-rare megahit performers... It just wouldn't support them forever. There'd be a shift from the constant attempt to find the big hit that will bring in money for the next 20 years to aiming for something steadier... Lower stakes but better chances of winning.
Meanwhile, artists (that is, working artists, not those living off a big hit from decades ago) would have more resources - free access to reasonably recent music to incorporate (via sampling, etc.), transform, or just play...
I feel like the long copyrights are contributing to the homogenization of our culture... as long as so much emphasis is placed on such a relatively small collection of current work (farming for mega-hits), the available variety is bound to suffer, and the easiest way to maximize profit will continue to be to try to sell us all the same thing, and find that one thing most of us can agree on and will be willing to latch on to...
"Wiretapping" is when you use access to the physical layer to eavesdrop on telephone service, which is of course private.
When you're providing a data network, the data you'd be "tapping into" is actually sent to your computers. It's given to you. So of course it's a whole different deal. If it was something private, they shouldn't have sent it to your internet gateway! You don't use a dirty word like "wiretapping" to describe that...
"Joke" is to "Anonymous Coward" as "Anvil" is to...
A) Hammer
B) Forged Steel
C) Wile E. Coyote...
"Sure, the data format I use for this application contains large amounts of unnecessary, redundant, excessively verbose tagging, and sure the data itself is needlessly encoded into a representation that only uses about 6 bits out of any 8, tops, but on the bright side, it compresses real well"
Well, of course it compresses real well... You've just encoded everything with a lot of redundancy and used a fraction of your "bandwidth"... But if you had encoded your data efficiently in the first place, you wouldn't have to compress it...
And all this for, what, so your document is easy to read in Notepad? All these parsing libraries have been written for XML (and that's a great asset!), but if the same had been done for an efficient meta-format, then the addition of one application - a data editor - would make a binary format just as easy to work with...
5. It has an X in the name.
Don't forget "XBox"!Every cool technology has an X in the name (UNIX, ActiveX, DirectX), and the existence of the X allows people to overlook the fact that they are just plain bad ideas.