IF it is transparent, and (s)he has to spend no extra money on new equipment. But judging by the fragility of many of the new DRM schemes being tried out, I doubt DRM will end up being so smooth and transparent as to not upset the Wal-Mart crowds. After sufficient returns of Scream 10 because Bubba "The Tooth" McFartsy couldn't play it on his 19" Orion TV because its DRM was incompatible with his Memorex Blu-Ray player, which was three firmware versions behind and required a broadband connection to update itself (which Bubba of course doesn't have), Wal-Mart may just have to back off supporting such Bubba-defying DRM schemes.
Of course, one would need to know the term "picocell" in connection with GSM to search efficiently, otherwise you could be spending some time searching.
The average child simply doesn't have sufficiently well developed abstract thinking for most programming languages. You're talking about an age at which most children are still struggling to understand monetary equivalences, forget about fractions. They MAY be able to understand something like Logo up to a point, but even that has a pretty substantial disconnect between cause and action.
I'm 6'2" and also find the xB ideal in the headroom department--heck, the Cat in the Hat would find it comfortable, hat and all. Actually, you will find that most European compacts will fit you just fine as well, since the're taylored towards larger average heights. Older Japanese ones OTOH could be awful in that respect. I simply did not have enough leg room in the earlier Miatas, even with the seat all the way back. My knees were scraping the steering wheel, and didn't have much room to go sideways either because of the door and the gear shift.
That's crap, and if you don't know it, you should. Consequences from Google?! Google is a search engine, and as such you expect it to be impartial and exhaustive. If you can't be sure that you're getting all possible results obtainable to your queries, because some of them violate the search engine's ideology, you go elsewhere. Google is simply undermining its own integrity and the basis of its popularity by playing censor. This may be small fish for now, but if it's any indication of the direction Google is heading, they're going to censor themselves into irrelevance sooner or later. I've loved Google as much as anybody else for a long time, but they can certainly do things to change that.
That's a really good point. And while there may be no NEED to right-click in MacOS right now, given the growing popularity of multi-button mice on the Mac, eventually some apps will require it for certain functions. Try explaining clicking the right button to grandma then--what right button?! There's a button on this thing?
Anyway, for such as design-driven company as Apple, I find that a lot of their more recent products stray far away from the established Bauhaus form-follows-function principles that have given us some great and timeless designs in the past. A lot of this new stuff has been shoehorned into some injection-molded amorphous glob without obvious functionality, just because they can, not because it makes sense.
Not really in any useful way, since the tags are passive and radiate very little energy when energized. Even with very sensitive equipment I doubt you could coax people-tracking distances out of there tags, a la James Bond.
> It would help you keep track of your kids, and you could Lojack > them if they were ever kidnapped.
Actually, it would endanger them more than anything. The kidnappers, unless they're from another planet or are clueless dweebs and don't know about the standard tags that everyone carries, will immediately proceed to remove the tags from the victim, in the process potentially harming the person directly or through infections.
> If you win at a game of football, do you keep running around the pitch playing no-one?
Sports gamse are just an ANALOGY for business, and as with any analogy, you have to know where to stop. The duration of games is very short compared to the lifetime of a business, so that's where the analogy breaks down. OTOH, you could say that the end of a game is not really the end, but rather the beginning of learning lessons for the next game, where you hope to be better than last time. There will always be other games, and if you don't learn anything from your past games and practice hard to be better, you will lose them. That's where Microsoft fell down, on the preparing-for-future-games bit. They're the kind of athlete that only practices by competing, and while they're remarkably good at it, that's a risky approach.
"I'm a complex guy, and thus possess a substantial amount of personal information. The real question is whether you want to browse through it all."
He's also got a version control system named SVS, for Shane Versioning System. I'm surprised he left the name OpenGEM alone, without morphing it into ShaneGEM or something.
>at least for *me*, it would be easier to explain Illustrator in terms of Inkscape.
Sure, but then not everyone does that thing you do when you think no-one's looking either. Sometimes you just have to go with what the majority is familiar with.
This is version number inflation. Soon we will reach pinball score version numbers. I'm curious what the exact formula is they're using: how many added features increment the minor version number by one, and what's the equivalent number of bug fixes? Does a new feature beat a bug fix?
> There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted > greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant.
Well, he hasn't contributed much to IT other than rants in a long time. I guess once you get your name out there you create a platform for yourself to rant about other things you may know less about.
Regarding new OSs, I think the time for new successful ones has passed. PCs have surpassed a critical mass worldwide where you can't just yank out its underpinnings every decade or so and start from scratch. It's been tried several times in the last decade and a half, with maybe the most promising having been BeOS, and look just how popular it has been. The only other "new" platform with any sort of chance is OS X, and even that isn't all that new or all that revolutionary. Just check out what happens any time KDE drops binary backward compatibility, and compared to Windows its user base is quite miniscule.
Make it better for whom? Because reading any of their schemes and goals, it can't be us, the customers, for we are mere shaftees. Perhaps by "customers" they mean those who buy their DRM crapola technology and incorporate it into hardware.
This is not going to happen on your computer, it's Tivo functionality. And they would logically only share out movies you already have on your box. The more popular the movie, the less drain on Netflix. Regarding upstream traffic, that's something Netflix/Tivo will have to negotiate with the handful of large broadbrand providers.
Not necessarily. Netflix and Tivo were planning on using a bittorrent-like p2p approach to downloading, which would actually make the most popular movies also the fastest to download.
> In the long term CDMA offers more room for improvement > and it uses the bandwidth more efficiently than GSM.
That is assuming that GSM would be standing still all this time. Which is, of course, wrong. Of the two, I would say that GSM has shown more growth and adaptability over the last almost two decades. For a technology designed back in the 80's, it's still kicking pretty well today. And as the other poster said, UMTS is based on a CDMA air interface, so there is definitely an upgrade path there. Of course, the politics of HOW this is being done by most carriers is another thing.
> Why would you not go with the service that, by your own admission is the best at that?
Because low-level technical superiority does not always equate an overall better product and end-user experience. As an end-user, the close-to-godliness goodness of CDMA results in almost squat advantage. Sure you'll have über-geeks (particularly on/.) waxing on how the voice quality and QOS is so much better. But given an average CDMA phone and an average GSM phone in your average urban setting, most non-ideological people would be hard-pressed to detect a difference. What comes into play then are usability and convenience. In that respect, the US CDMA carriers haven't got a chance against GSM. The convenience of carrier-independent phones and the SIM cards far outweighs any shiny objects Sprint and Verizon might use to blind you to the shackles. You can order any old phone from Europe or Asia that tickles your fancy and that will never be offered in the US (as long as it's tri-band or supports the US frequencies). And you won't have to worry about having to hack the phone. And if you travel abroad, you simply buy a local prepaid SIM and have a local number for the duration of your visit, on your own phone, complete with your very own facial grease on the display and your own spittle on the mouthpiece.
It's definitely hit-and-miss. But I can say that on a trip from Pensacola FL back home to Chattanooga TN through the hinterlands of AL, we've been online with our laptop via our bluetooth phone almost the entire 8 hours, with very decent GPRS throughput. Once in a while a timeout a refresh, but not all that often. Sadly, about a third of that time was on/.
1. A structure for supporting or enclosing something else, especially a skeletal support used as the basis for something being constructed.
2. An external work platform; a scaffold.
3. A fundamental structure, as for a written work.
4. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality.
AJAX relies on the foundations of JavaScript, XML and the HTTP transport. You tie these three together through a little bit of JavaScript code, not very much at all. Definitions 1 and 4 very neatly describe AJAX as we already have it. Any kind of higher-level framework encapsulating this would be so thin and lightweight as to hardly be worth the effort of developing or learning. And where exactly are you getting the idea of abstracting GUI elements in AJAX? It's a communications paradigm.
Those were my thoughts exactly. If someone felt AJAX needed a "framework", perhaps they didn't quite get what AJAX was--it pretty much IS a framework already.
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IF it is transparent, and (s)he has to spend no extra money on new equipment. But judging by the fragility of many of the new DRM schemes being tried out, I doubt DRM will end up being so smooth and transparent as to not upset the Wal-Mart crowds. After sufficient returns of Scream 10 because Bubba "The Tooth" McFartsy couldn't play it on his 19" Orion TV because its DRM was incompatible with his Memorex Blu-Ray player, which was three firmware versions behind and required a broadband connection to update itself (which Bubba of course doesn't have), Wal-Mart may just have to back off supporting such Bubba-defying DRM schemes.
Of course, one would need to know the term "picocell" in connection with GSM to search efficiently, otherwise you could be spending some time searching.
The average child simply doesn't have sufficiently well developed abstract thinking for most programming languages. You're talking about an age at which most children are still struggling to understand monetary equivalences, forget about fractions. They MAY be able to understand something like Logo up to a point, but even that has a pretty substantial disconnect between cause and action.
I'm 6'2" and also find the xB ideal in the headroom department--heck, the Cat in the Hat would find it comfortable, hat and all. Actually, you will find that most European compacts will fit you just fine as well, since the're taylored towards larger average heights. Older Japanese ones OTOH could be awful in that respect. I simply did not have enough leg room in the earlier Miatas, even with the seat all the way back. My knees were scraping the steering wheel, and didn't have much room to go sideways either because of the door and the gear shift.
Yeah, great comeback, especially posted as AC. Be a real jerk and put your karma where your (filthy) mouth is.
That's crap, and if you don't know it, you should. Consequences from Google?! Google is a search engine, and as such you expect it to be impartial and exhaustive. If you can't be sure that you're getting all possible results obtainable to your queries, because some of them violate the search engine's ideology, you go elsewhere. Google is simply undermining its own integrity and the basis of its popularity by playing censor. This may be small fish for now, but if it's any indication of the direction Google is heading, they're going to censor themselves into irrelevance sooner or later. I've loved Google as much as anybody else for a long time, but they can certainly do things to change that.
That's a really good point. And while there may be no NEED to right-click in MacOS right now, given the growing popularity of multi-button mice on the Mac, eventually some apps will require it for certain functions. Try explaining clicking the right button to grandma then--what right button?! There's a button on this thing?
Anyway, for such as design-driven company as Apple, I find that a lot of their more recent products stray far away from the established Bauhaus form-follows-function principles that have given us some great and timeless designs in the past. A lot of this new stuff has been shoehorned into some injection-molded amorphous glob without obvious functionality, just because they can, not because it makes sense.
> all they have to do is follow the RFID tag
Not really in any useful way, since the tags are passive and radiate very little energy when energized. Even with very sensitive equipment I doubt you could coax people-tracking distances out of there tags, a la James Bond.
> It would help you keep track of your kids, and you could Lojack
> them if they were ever kidnapped.
Actually, it would endanger them more than anything. The kidnappers, unless they're from another planet or are clueless dweebs and don't know about the standard tags that everyone carries, will immediately proceed to remove the tags from the victim, in the process potentially harming the person directly or through infections.
> If you win at a game of football, do you keep running around the pitch playing no-one?
Sports gamse are just an ANALOGY for business, and as with any analogy, you have to know where to stop. The duration of games is very short compared to the lifetime of a business, so that's where the analogy breaks down. OTOH, you could say that the end of a game is not really the end, but rather the beginning of learning lessons for the next game, where you hope to be better than last time. There will always be other games, and if you don't learn anything from your past games and practice hard to be better, you will lose them. That's where Microsoft fell down, on the preparing-for-future-games bit. They're the kind of athlete that only practices by competing, and while they're remarkably good at it, that's a risky approach.
> Are you saying he's a pompous ass because he's got a lot of photos and other personal files?
Yes, and because of everything else I said. That's exactly what I'm saying, indeed.
From his "Personal stuff" page:
"I'm a complex guy, and thus possess a substantial amount of personal information. The real question is whether you want to browse through it all."
He's also got a version control system named SVS, for Shane Versioning System. I'm surprised he left the name OpenGEM alone, without morphing it into ShaneGEM or something.
>at least for *me*, it would be easier to explain Illustrator in terms of Inkscape.
Sure, but then not everyone does that thing you do when you think no-one's looking either. Sometimes you just have to go with what the majority is familiar with.
This is version number inflation. Soon we will reach pinball score version numbers. I'm curious what the exact formula is they're using: how many added features increment the minor version number by one, and what's the equivalent number of bug fixes? Does a new feature beat a bug fix?
> There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted
> greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant.
Well, he hasn't contributed much to IT other than rants in a long time. I guess once you get your name out there you create a platform for yourself to rant about other things you may know less about.
Regarding new OSs, I think the time for new successful ones has passed. PCs have surpassed a critical mass worldwide where you can't just yank out its underpinnings every decade or so and start from scratch. It's been tried several times in the last decade and a half, with maybe the most promising having been BeOS, and look just how popular it has been. The only other "new" platform with any sort of chance is OS X, and even that isn't all that new or all that revolutionary. Just check out what happens any time KDE drops binary backward compatibility, and compared to Windows its user base is quite miniscule.
> and make it better
Make it better for whom? Because reading any of their schemes and goals, it can't be us, the customers, for we are mere shaftees. Perhaps by "customers" they mean those who buy their DRM crapola technology and incorporate it into hardware.
This is not going to happen on your computer, it's Tivo functionality. And they would logically only share out movies you already have on your box. The more popular the movie, the less drain on Netflix. Regarding upstream traffic, that's something Netflix/Tivo will have to negotiate with the handful of large broadbrand providers.
Not necessarily. Netflix and Tivo were planning on using a bittorrent-like p2p approach to downloading, which would actually make the most popular movies also the fastest to download.
> In the long term CDMA offers more room for improvement
> and it uses the bandwidth more efficiently than GSM.
That is assuming that GSM would be standing still all this time. Which is, of course, wrong. Of the two, I would say that GSM has shown more growth and adaptability over the last almost two decades. For a technology designed back in the 80's, it's still kicking pretty well today. And as the other poster said, UMTS is based on a CDMA air interface, so there is definitely an upgrade path there. Of course, the politics of HOW this is being done by most carriers is another thing.
> Why would you not go with the service that, by your own admission is the best at that?
/.) waxing on how the voice quality and QOS is so much better. But given an average CDMA phone and an average GSM phone in your average urban setting, most non-ideological people would be hard-pressed to detect a difference. What comes into play then are usability and convenience. In that respect, the US CDMA carriers haven't got a chance against GSM. The convenience of carrier-independent phones and the SIM cards far outweighs any shiny objects Sprint and Verizon might use to blind you to the shackles. You can order any old phone from Europe or Asia that tickles your fancy and that will never be offered in the US (as long as it's tri-band or supports the US frequencies). And you won't have to worry about having to hack the phone. And if you travel abroad, you simply buy a local prepaid SIM and have a local number for the duration of your visit, on your own phone, complete with your very own facial grease on the display and your own spittle on the mouthpiece.
Because low-level technical superiority does not always equate an overall better product and end-user experience. As an end-user, the close-to-godliness goodness of CDMA results in almost squat advantage. Sure you'll have über-geeks (particularly on
It's definitely hit-and-miss. But I can say that on a trip from Pensacola FL back home to Chattanooga TN through the hinterlands of AL, we've been online with our laptop via our bluetooth phone almost the entire 8 hours, with very decent GPRS throughput. Once in a while a timeout a refresh, but not all that often. Sadly, about a third of that time was on /.
Look up the definition of "framework":
framework Pronunciation Key (frmwûrk)
n.
1. A structure for supporting or enclosing something else, especially a skeletal support used as the basis for something being constructed.
2. An external work platform; a scaffold.
3. A fundamental structure, as for a written work.
4. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality.
AJAX relies on the foundations of JavaScript, XML and the HTTP transport. You tie these three together through a little bit of JavaScript code, not very much at all. Definitions 1 and 4 very neatly describe AJAX as we already have it. Any kind of higher-level framework encapsulating this would be so thin and lightweight as to hardly be worth the effort of developing or learning. And where exactly are you getting the idea of abstracting GUI elements in AJAX? It's a communications paradigm.
Those were my thoughts exactly. If someone felt AJAX needed a "framework", perhaps they didn't quite get what AJAX was--it pretty much IS a framework already.
> and I'll get to talk to my wife for 3 hours each day in the car.
Jes-us, bring on the Metra!
Well, I thought we already established that left-leaning channels aren't news. I was talking about the remaining one.