Actually, it's not the movement of air as much as you think. With all the "noisy air mover" examples you listed, the majority of the noise comes from the bearings in the electric motors and whatever they drive. Disconnect the belt in your vacuum and see if it gets much quieter--it most likely won't. Check out noisy power tools such as table saws and routers, it's almost always the bearings making all the racket. With PCs you can really notice that when the bearings in a fan go bad--the low noise that was always there at a muffled level suddenly gets loud and shrieking. =
A third used to be correct into the 80s or so. Today it's closer to 23% and shrinking. I was really interested in the exact figures a few weeks ago but it turned out to be more frustrating to find current number than I thought. Most published figures went to 2000 or so, but the trend is definitely towards 20% rural population within the next few years.
> It's called (s)elective amnesia. Windows what? XP?! Never heard of it. You must mean Vista. Reminds me a bit of the.NET craze, where a few months after.NET 1.0 went Gold all of a sudden everybody wanted developers with 3 years of C# experience.
It's interesting to observe the "brand-name" computer sellers: all the majors suddenly only provide Vista drivers and support for their new machines. Not even a mention of XP (or God forbid, 2000) on Gateway's or HP's websites. Haven't checked Dell, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same there.
This has been done before invarious ways. In the 80s VW experimented with a roadside beacon approach that communicated with an in-car display system: when the car entered a road segment leading to a serviced light, one of three LEDs on the dash simulating a traffic light lit, indicating the color of the upcoming light at the current speed. The idea was to choose a speed that kept the on-dash traffic light green, presumably within the legal speed limit. They actually had a pilot installation in a couple of cities in Germany, and some VW (and maybe Audi) models in the 80s were equipped with the system, but it obviously never made it beyond that.
Another system that was used in Germany was a mechanism called "Green Wave", where a roadside speed indicator displayed the speed that would guarantee reaching the next light on green. These indicators typically were placed just after a traffic light for the next light. When no legal speed could get you to the next light on green anymore, the indicator would turn off. I'm not sure how widespread this system is anymore today.
Looks alright and the Linux support is nice, but it's yet another proprietary product that promises that the basic version will be forever free, or until they sell out to Microsoft. IIRC Groove made similar promises in the early days about their personal edition.
Re:I'm groovy and haven't found an alternative yet
on
Alternative to Groove?
·
· Score: 1
I've followed Groove since day one, when you could download their beta/trial version to play around, and thought it was a very innovative product. Ray Ozzie used to proselytize the concept at every opportunity--I think I still have a copy of DDJ somewhere with a many-page article about the XML architecture of Groove. They wanted it to be an open platform for the development of P2P collaboration tools. That's why a lot of people were quite taken aback when they sold themselves to Microsoft and Ray Ozzie became their chief evangelist. A product like Groove simply doesn't fit Microsoft's strategy of all enterprise tools requiring their infrastructure. Sooner or later Groove simply won't work (or, more insidiously, won't work well) without Microsoft components such as AD, MSSQL, SharePoint, and who knows what else. I think Groove has reached a point where it will start becoming less interesting to their original core audience--small business and individuals. Just my $0.02 anyway.
I don't know what you guys are bitching about. Slashdot is the National Enquirer of the geek world, it offers up EXACTLY the kind of sh!t we come here for.
Agree. The only problem I have with XDrive is their totally retarded sign-up mechanism: they require you to register an AOL "screen name", and that system seems to be at least intermittently broken. I've tried to sign up a friend several times using both FF and IE and never received an actual screen name, but it did register his email address each time and did not let me use it again the next time, so I always had to use a different email address, and still no screen name to this day.
> he fact you can't start up XCode and build yourself a hack for whatever matters to casual > OS X programmers and possibly to some businesses, but to most users this won't matter.
You should go and check out sites like www.handango.com sometime to see the flood of software an open platform leads to. Much of it may be crap to you and many others, but one man's turd may be another's diamond in the rough, and who is Apple to decide for me what is and isn't a turd? Most of the Pocket PC or Palm software wouldn't exist if it had required any sort of signing or other blessing from Microsoft, especially if such signing cost any sort of money. I sincerely doubt Apple will certify third party iPhone software for free. I'm sure they're viewing the iPhone as one of their entry ways into the software-as-a-service arena. If current polls regarding people's willingness to shell out the full price for the iPhone is any indication, Apple will have to compete much more on a level playing field than with the iPod, where there was a much less established and vibrant market. So if they have to sell the phone closer to cost like most other manufacturers, they will need other ways of making money with it. Rented software would be one way.
Seriously, you all need to work on your English comprehension, since several responded making the exact same (incorrect) point. I even quoted the part I responded to, go back and parse it all again.
Umm, this entire SITE is for "gadget-tinkering nerds"; if you don't identify as such, what are you doing on/. ?!
> The name of the OS has nothing to do with that.
Sigh, I guess I will try one more time. Here's a portion of the post I originally replied to:
> It's expensive, it's going to be shiny, and the most interesting aspects we won't know > about at least until it ships. Namely, how will OS X for mobile effect the landscape.
I replied with a SINGLE line saying that unless users can develop and/or install their own apps on it, the OS doesn't matter. Nothing more, nothing less, and I think the modders understood that quite well.
> Come on, it just isn't important for the iPhone to be "open".
Mate, I really hate spelling this out for you and all the other brethren on your compound, but as long the OS is not open for public development, the OS itself matters diddly-squat. So please anybody who feels the urge to do so, don't always keep bringing up how OS X on the iPhone will change the landscape. As long as you need Apple's and the carrier's blessing to release software for the phone, pickings will be slim. For the end user the platform would matter about as much as what OS that fancy LG washer runs--all (s)he ever sees is a (smallish) list of pricey apps they can install on their iPhone from Cingular's website.
Most Pocket PC/Smartphone phones are NOT closed platforms: they run an OS with a well published API, readily available development tools, and the ability to install third party software without carrier approval. Just in case there was any confusion on the matter, that's what is commonly meant by an "open platform" in these kinds of threads.
Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and parenthesis hell isn't particularly beautiful to me. For a human readable format, I find it a lot harder to match small closing parentheses than explicit--albeit more verbose--closing tags, especially since you very rarely find multiple consecutive identical closing tags in real data.
> That said, I use XML when I have to
Excellent, that's where the value of XML comes in. It's neither the most efficient, nor necessarily the most beautiful data description standard out there, but as it goes with standards, the fewer there are the more useful they become. XML is the most successful generic data description standard yet, and there are parsers and manipulation tools on just about any platform and in any language imaginable.
Basically you're talking about running tsclient on some Linux distro. Since you don't care about local capabilities, pick the lightest and fastest booting distro using the lightest window manager, or no window manager at all. Tsclient will run in full screen mode, so on a LAN it will feel pretty much like Windows.
Awkwardness will set in at the intersection of the remote world and local resources: while local storage (e.g. USB flash drives to take out/bring in data) may not be a big issue, printers sooner or later end up being a real PITA. Networked printers can work well enough (even though you tend to see all the company printers available, which in a larger installation can be A LOT), but local printers can be a pain and get you back into the customized client situation. It gets even worse with other peripherals like scanners, which can lead to a lot of compatibility issues with remote software trying to access a local scanner.
> Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created. > Heck, they weren't even forced into it. Microsoft simply made the tools available.
Well, the WHY is a different can of worms entirely and has much more to do with the choices available to an enterprise developer than with any best-of-breed issues. Most enterprises adopt a single software development platform, and that often is Microsoft. Given only Microsoft choices, would you rather develop in VB6, MFC or.NET? Case closed. Tools with the same (or higher) productivity as.NET have been around for a while (see Borland Delphi), but were gradually edged out of the enterprise by convenient comprehensive software contracts with Microsoft--the old "why pay for another tool if we already get one for free"?
He's talking 20 years ago, that would be 87, so those were the A500/2000 days and several things fall off your list: no scalable fonts at the OS level yet (I don't think we had a DTP program with outline fonts yet at the time), no 68020, no web browser. Shadow Of The Beast was awesome, though. Aaah, those Amiga memories...
Wow, insightful indeed. To add some metrics to the rebuttals in this thread: create two files with some bogus XML, one with very short tag names, the other with long ones. Then compare their uncompressed versus zipped sizes:
Wow, insightful indeed. To add some metrics to the rebuttals in this thread: create two files with some bogus XML, one with very short tag names, the other with long ones. Then compare their uncompressed versus zipped sizes:
File 1:
Value
Value...
(1000 total copies of the element)
Uncompressed: 16,009 bytes Compressed: 190 bytes
File 2:
Value
Value...
(1000 total copies of the element)
Uncompressed: 92,079 bytes Compressed: 525 bytes
So yeah, let's create really obscure and non-intuitive file formats to save ourselves the wasteful redundancy of XML.
Slashdot Mirror
> the dream [...] is wholly subject to the interpretation of the dreamer
Or as Ricky Gervais in the original The Office would call it, "The American Pipe Dream".
Actually, it's not the movement of air as much as you think. With all the "noisy air mover" examples you listed, the majority of the noise comes from the bearings in the electric motors and whatever they drive. Disconnect the belt in your vacuum and see if it gets much quieter--it most likely won't. Check out noisy power tools such as table saws and routers, it's almost always the bearings making all the racket. With PCs you can really notice that when the bearings in a fan go bad--the low noise that was always there at a muffled level suddenly gets loud and shrieking. =
A third used to be correct into the 80s or so. Today it's closer to 23% and shrinking. I was really interested in the exact figures a few weeks ago but it turned out to be more frustrating to find current number than I thought. Most published figures went to 2000 or so, but the trend is definitely towards 20% rural population within the next few years.
> It's called (s)elective amnesia. Windows what? XP?! Never heard of it. You must mean Vista. Reminds me a bit of the .NET craze, where a few months after .NET 1.0 went Gold all of a sudden everybody wanted developers with 3 years of C# experience.
It's interesting to observe the "brand-name" computer sellers: all the majors suddenly only provide Vista drivers and support for their new machines. Not even a mention of XP (or God forbid, 2000) on Gateway's or HP's websites. Haven't checked Dell, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same there.
This has been done before invarious ways. In the 80s VW experimented with a roadside beacon approach that communicated with an in-car display system: when the car entered a road segment leading to a serviced light, one of three LEDs on the dash simulating a traffic light lit, indicating the color of the upcoming light at the current speed. The idea was to choose a speed that kept the on-dash traffic light green, presumably within the legal speed limit. They actually had a pilot installation in a couple of cities in Germany, and some VW (and maybe Audi) models in the 80s were equipped with the system, but it obviously never made it beyond that.
Another system that was used in Germany was a mechanism called "Green Wave", where a roadside speed indicator displayed the speed that would guarantee reaching the next light on green. These indicators typically were placed just after a traffic light for the next light. When no legal speed could get you to the next light on green anymore, the indicator would turn off. I'm not sure how widespread this system is anymore today.
Looks alright and the Linux support is nice, but it's yet another proprietary product that promises that the basic version will be forever free, or until they sell out to Microsoft. IIRC Groove made similar promises in the early days about their personal edition.
I've followed Groove since day one, when you could download their beta/trial version to play around, and thought it was a very innovative product. Ray Ozzie used to proselytize the concept at every opportunity--I think I still have a copy of DDJ somewhere with a many-page article about the XML architecture of Groove. They wanted it to be an open platform for the development of P2P collaboration tools. That's why a lot of people were quite taken aback when they sold themselves to Microsoft and Ray Ozzie became their chief evangelist. A product like Groove simply doesn't fit Microsoft's strategy of all enterprise tools requiring their infrastructure. Sooner or later Groove simply won't work (or, more insidiously, won't work well) without Microsoft components such as AD, MSSQL, SharePoint, and who knows what else. I think Groove has reached a point where it will start becoming less interesting to their original core audience--small business and individuals. Just my $0.02 anyway.
I don't know what you guys are bitching about. Slashdot is the National Enquirer of the geek world, it offers up EXACTLY the kind of sh!t we come here for.
Agree. The only problem I have with XDrive is their totally retarded sign-up mechanism: they require you to register an AOL "screen name", and that system seems to be at least intermittently broken. I've tried to sign up a friend several times using both FF and IE and never received an actual screen name, but it did register his email address each time and did not let me use it again the next time, so I always had to use a different email address, and still no screen name to this day.
Also, don't forget to ask Steve to change your diapers at night.
> he fact you can't start up XCode and build yourself a hack for whatever matters to casual
> OS X programmers and possibly to some businesses, but to most users this won't matter.
You should go and check out sites like www.handango.com sometime to see the flood of software an open platform leads to. Much of it may be crap to you and many others, but one man's turd may be another's diamond in the rough, and who is Apple to decide for me what is and isn't a turd? Most of the Pocket PC or Palm software wouldn't exist if it had required any sort of signing or other blessing from Microsoft, especially if such signing cost any sort of money. I sincerely doubt Apple will certify third party iPhone software for free. I'm sure they're viewing the iPhone as one of their entry ways into the software-as-a-service arena. If current polls regarding people's willingness to shell out the full price for the iPhone is any indication, Apple will have to compete much more on a level playing field than with the iPod, where there was a much less established and vibrant market. So if they have to sell the phone closer to cost like most other manufacturers, they will need other ways of making money with it. Rented software would be one way.
Seriously, you all need to work on your English comprehension, since several responded making the exact same (incorrect) point. I even quoted the part I responded to, go back and parse it all again.
> the majority of people in the real world don't use an open OS.
Wow people, just because both use the word open does not mean that "open platform" = "open OS". Apples and oranges in this discussion.
> you got modded up by gadget-tinkering nerds
/. ?!
Umm, this entire SITE is for "gadget-tinkering nerds"; if you don't identify as such, what are you doing on
> The name of the OS has nothing to do with that.
Sigh, I guess I will try one more time. Here's a portion of the post I originally replied to:
> It's expensive, it's going to be shiny, and the most interesting aspects we won't know
> about at least until it ships. Namely, how will OS X for mobile effect the landscape.
I replied with a SINGLE line saying that unless users can develop and/or install their own apps on it, the OS doesn't matter. Nothing more, nothing less, and I think the modders understood that quite well.
> Come on, it just isn't important for the iPhone to be "open".
Mate, I really hate spelling this out for you and all the other brethren on your compound, but as long the OS is not open for public development, the OS itself matters diddly-squat. So please anybody who feels the urge to do so, don't always keep bringing up how OS X on the iPhone will change the landscape. As long as you need Apple's and the carrier's blessing to release software for the phone, pickings will be slim. For the end user the platform would matter about as much as what OS that fancy LG washer runs--all (s)he ever sees is a (smallish) list of pricey apps they can install on their iPhone from Cingular's website.
Most Pocket PC/Smartphone phones are NOT closed platforms: they run an OS with a well published API, readily available development tools, and the ability to install third party software without carrier approval. Just in case there was any confusion on the matter, that's what is commonly meant by an "open platform" in these kinds of threads.
> though you probably knew that, and just wanted to spread misinformation
Thank you, though the parent post wasn't really worth replying to.
> Namely, how will OS X for mobile effect the landscape.
If they keep it closed, it won't make any difference whatsoever.
> Beautiful code.
Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and parenthesis hell isn't particularly beautiful to me. For a human readable format, I find it a lot harder to match small closing parentheses than explicit--albeit more verbose--closing tags, especially since you very rarely find multiple consecutive identical closing tags in real data.
> That said, I use XML when I have to
Excellent, that's where the value of XML comes in. It's neither the most efficient, nor necessarily the most beautiful data description standard out there, but as it goes with standards, the fewer there are the more useful they become. XML is the most successful generic data description standard yet, and there are parsers and manipulation tools on just about any platform and in any language imaginable.
Basically you're talking about running tsclient on some Linux distro. Since you don't care about local capabilities, pick the lightest and fastest booting distro using the lightest window manager, or no window manager at all. Tsclient will run in full screen mode, so on a LAN it will feel pretty much like Windows.
Awkwardness will set in at the intersection of the remote world and local resources: while local storage (e.g. USB flash drives to take out/bring in data) may not be a big issue, printers sooner or later end up being a real PITA. Networked printers can work well enough (even though you tend to see all the company printers available, which in a larger installation can be A LOT), but local printers can be a pain and get you back into the customized client situation. It gets even worse with other peripherals like scanners, which can lead to a lot of compatibility issues with remote software trying to access a local scanner.
In my experience those who hate it the most are those who understand it the least.
> Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created.
.NET? Case closed. Tools with the same (or higher) productivity as .NET have been around for a while (see Borland Delphi), but were gradually edged out of the enterprise by convenient comprehensive software contracts with Microsoft--the old "why pay for another tool if we already get one for free"?
> Heck, they weren't even forced into it. Microsoft simply made the tools available.
Well, the WHY is a different can of worms entirely and has much more to do with the choices available to an enterprise developer than with any best-of-breed issues. Most enterprises adopt a single software development platform, and that often is Microsoft. Given only Microsoft choices, would you rather develop in VB6, MFC or
He's talking 20 years ago, that would be 87, so those were the A500/2000 days and several things fall off your list: no scalable fonts at the OS level yet (I don't think we had a DTP program with outline fonts yet at the time), no 68020, no web browser. Shadow Of The Beast was awesome, though. Aaah, those Amiga memories...
(uh, let's do that again, this time with Extrans)
...
n dThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>n dThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName> ...
Wow, insightful indeed. To add some metrics to the rebuttals in this thread: create two files with some bogus XML, one with very short tag names, the other with long ones. Then compare their uncompressed versus zipped sizes:
File 1:
<r>
<c>Value</c>
<c>Value</c>
</r>
(1000 total copies of the <c> element)
Uncompressed: 16,009 bytes
Compressed: 190 bytes
File 2:
<thisIsTheVeryLongRootElementTagName>
<andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>Value</a
<andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName>Value</a
</thisIsTheVeryLongRootElementTagName>
(1000 total copies of the <andThisIsTheVeryLongChildElementTagName> element)
Uncompressed: 92,079 bytes
Compressed: 525 bytes
So yeah, let's create really obscure and non-intuitive file formats to save ourselves the wasteful redundancy of XML.
Wow, insightful indeed. To add some metrics to the rebuttals in this thread: create two files with some bogus XML, one with very short tag names, the other with long ones. Then compare their uncompressed versus zipped sizes:
...
...
File 1:
Value
Value
(1000 total copies of the element)
Uncompressed: 16,009 bytes
Compressed: 190 bytes
File 2:
Value
Value
(1000 total copies of the element)
Uncompressed: 92,079 bytes
Compressed: 525 bytes
So yeah, let's create really obscure and non-intuitive file formats to save ourselves the wasteful redundancy of XML.