I would DEFINATELY download TV episodes and movies for $1.99 ANYDAY over music tracks for $.99
And that's why?
I have a huge music collection, but it's a few beloved tracks - some from CDs, some from the net - that I keep playing over and over. WinAmp Statistics say that some of these tracks were played 40 - 50 times. So I get a lot of bang for my buck.
(And that's only on my desktop PC. Add a similar number for my MP3 player.)
The great thing about music is you can listen to it while doing something else. Try the same thing with video.
Honestly - how often would you watch an episode of "Friends" or another video? Two times? Maybe four? I don't think so.
(Admittedly, there are movies that I could watch over and over, like Blade Runner or Fight Club. But in that case, I'll gladly fork over the money for a real DVD.)
Man, whatever it is you do for a living: Try to become a freelancer.
Get up. Enjoy a big, healthy breakfast. Take a walk, go shopping, enjoy the sun, meet friends.
Six or seven hours later, go to work (you still need a "buffer" in case something goes wrong with your job.)
Work until you are too tired to go on. When you cant understand what you just wrote/read, it is definitely time to go to bed.
This may feel weird at the start (our culture seems to be hardwired to the "work first/play afterwards" model), but it works for me.
I have been living like this for almost twenty years, and it works. I go to bed when I am tired. I get circa eight hours of fun, eight hours of work and eight hours of sleep out of the day, like almost everybody else. I just accept the offset (and I have clients who are willing to do the same, among them a tiny little software company from Redmond).
Try it. You might like it.
PS: Never, ever use your bed for something else than sleep or sex. Condition your brain to accept this as the place where it is supposed to shut down. This is important. Trust me.
Not meaning to be disrespectful, but I always love it when Big Government tells us what toys we will be playing with in ten years.
And while I love the Holodeck as the lazy scriptwriter's friend in every other TNG episode, this is one of those technologies that has to be perfect (or at least 99.9%) to work. Total immersion in a Doom-like Game - Hell, yes. Smelling a TV set designer's idea of a football stadium while sitting on my couch - thanks, but no thanks.
It is depressing that about every response modded 4+ in this thread pisses on Kelly because he dares to think outside of the box, i.e., the Internet as it is today. People who are supposed to be imaginative, unconventional thinkers indulge in variations of "Ain't never gonna work, just like flying cars."
How disappointing.
Kelly himself admits that he was wrong about the Internet's potential ten years ago, like so many others, that no-one foresaw eBay and Weblogs. He also says we aren't even near what a worldwide network could be, that it is self-organizing, unplanned, fueled by imagination and goodwill (Hey, OSS crowd - anyone home?).
But the collected wisdom of/. decides that this is just "another page filler".
The major part of Kelly's article celebrates the power of a self-organizing, link-everything-to-everything world, but as he doesn't put it in technical terms, it has to be BS. Such narrow-mindedness must be really comfortable.
Admittedly, the last few paragraphs (indicating the Web might become self-aware one day) sound a bit like standard Science-Fiction fare.
But then, the same was true fifteen years ago for the medium and the technologies we are using *right now.*
If you look at Kelly's books and articles, you'll see he has groked the potential of nonlinear, self-organizing systems. Unfortunately, people around here seem to be more obsessed with the technical details than any kind of "why" and "where" beyond their 3 GHz boxes.
I would kill for reliable and affordable GPS in a notebook.
A clock? Hmm. As another poster said, I own enough widgets telling the time.
The touchpad-on-the-side idea is wickedly cool. I would love this, as the ocassional grabbing for the mouse is even worse when you are sitting in a real tight place. However, I am afraid developing this would be tough - how should that sensor know that the guys jacket a few inch away should be ignored, yet every move of your thumb be tracked immediately?
I'm an end user. I have always been. I am one of the many who are supposed to buy hardware and software and services (and I did: If I had spent my money on cars, not on hardware and software, there would be a Porsche or two in my garage. This is just to say: I *do* put my money where my mouth is.).
I started with a Commodore C64 many, many years ago - I was into gaming and music, like most kids.
The C64 had great games. It was cheap. For a kid, it worked like a TV set: You switched it on, started the game, off you went into unknown territory.
Later, I switched to the Atari ST, because it was the only machine with a built-in MIDI interface. I was into music. The ST had sequencers, sound design software, a wickedly fast and customizable text editor and a pretty reliable layout software. With two friends, I was able to produce a CD, the CD booklet, cover and more on a machine with 2 MB RAM. Those were good times.
The ST worked like a TV set on steroids: You switched it on, and two minutes later, your application was there: a great sequencer, an innovative layout software. Off we went.
A few years later, I became a Mac addict. The Mac had music, graphics and productivity applications, and it was cooler than Windows. It was fun to work with. The consistency of applications was amazing: Every key combo worked in every application. Everywhere you wanted color, you had the same color selector. You didn't have to think; you just did what you wanted to do.
The Mac worked like a super-luxury TV set: You had a set of great applications, a beautiful package and beautiful software, all working smoothly together. Heaven. We produced another CD.
In 1996, I switched to Windows and never looked back, and I will definitely not sidestep to Linux.
Why?
Because I love Windows per se so much?
No. I don't.
But by that time, I had discovered so many things I wanted to do: Editing digital audio. More games (I'm still a game addict). The Internet: HTML editors, browsers, FTP clients. Text analysis. Databases.
Today, if I have a particular problem, it takes me circa 10 minutes to find five great applications that will do what I want. In most areas, I can choose between freeware, shareware, exotic stuff from innovative little companies and expensive packages from the big guys.
I chose whatever I like best and what I can afford.
I still want my applications like TV sets: Of course I need to learn what all the funny buttons on the remote do, but in the end, I just want to WATCH MY FAVORITE SHOW.
Developers, please take note:
We - the end users - admire you. We love you work, your efforts, the blood, sweat and tears you put into your work.
Frankly, most of us think that most of you are magicians.
Shall I let you into a little secret?
We do not give a flying fuck about operating systems. We may buy Windows today or download Linux tomorrow. We don't care.
We have stuff to do.
We want great applications.
We want consistency (the same friggin' key shortcut for "bold" or "start sequencer" in every app).
We want stability (the TV set thing).
We do not care about what's going on underneath the surface. We know you do, and we admire you.
We want a reliable, consistent platform. Like electric power, or water, or the telephone system. Later, at the bar, we'll listen to all your stories about how you did it, and smile and buy you another beer.
But all we want to start with is something like a car that you can start like any other car. Keys, gas, road.
And a trillion of great applications running on top of that.
As others have pointed out, the return on investment may not be what you expect when switching to another keyboard layout - you are still stuck with rows of keys that force your hands into an unnatural position. So why not do something more radical and take a look at the Ergodex DX1? Although Toms Hardware Guide and others refer to it as the ultimate gaming controller, it should be possible to build your own ergonomical keyboard layout for coding. The tray can hold up to 50 keys, and with a clever setup this should beat both QWERTY and Dvorak. It seems they are using high quality keys and have good software. I will buy one next month, although this is not exactly a cheap toy.
The American obsession with sexuality and the fear that *gasp* a minor might be confronted with it never ceases to amaze us simple folk over here in Old Europe. But then, a nipple here and a little flesh there are bigger threats to the Free World than machine guns and grenades.
So soon we will hear a public outcry about - what? (The simulation) of something wonderful, hidden in a game glorifying violence and crime.
Admittedly, the iPod is a sweet little audio player with a clever store concept behind it.
But putting this kind of story on/. is just free advertising for Steve & Co. We are not talking about new products or services here, folks. We are talking about shopping at SteveWorld to earn a few bonus points should we be so lucky to be counted as customer # 490000.
There are dozens of great (DRM-free) audio players out there. I cannot see why we should high-five every little stunt from Apple's marketing department on a site devoted to innovation and cool stuff.
I admire Gibson, and I love most of his work. But this sounds as if he had been caught in a reality distortion field.
Remixing happens, in many art forms (especially music/digital audio, where powerful tools have arrived - this is the area I'm working in).
But I think the overwhelming majority of people today - and for the coming decades, unless we see a singularity - are and will be perfectly happy to be part of a passive audience.
Occasionally, I talk to friends and people I meet at parties about this concept of the permanent remix - actually a collage (sic) of my own ideas and things that artists (Todd Rundgren) and companies (Sseyo) have done and preached. Audio loops and snippets, sound libraries and algorithmic composition tools that can be used to re-assemble and fine-tune existing music without ever hearing the same song twice, because the classic 3.5 minute "song" is only a snapshot - where you could have a (3D, i.e. surround) movie.
Most of them get it.
But they are simply not interested.
"Why should I want to remix someone's music?" is the usual response. And these are intelligent, curious people.
Many people have access to more music than they will be able to listen to during the next ten years. They are not interested in, well, adding to the mix.
I think this is a pity, but probably 95% of the audience wants to sit back and enjoy. Remixing LOTR or Neuromancer is not trivial. Most people just want to enjoy it.
Refrigerators and TV sets once were considered a luxury, now you will hardly find a household without them. The features, though, are basically the same as 50 years ago.
The same is not true for the PC and probably never will be, as it is a potentially a universal machine, which is a mixed blessing.
While prices may continue to go down, complexity doesn't. Au contraire: Here in Germany, discount retailer sells thousands and thousands of 3 GHz "Mulimedia" PCs which in their current incarnation are advertised as the one-size-fits all equivalent of a Home Office, a video console, a VCR, a DVD Player/Recorder, a Digital TV receiver, a Digital Radio...
Moms and Pops read this list and expect the reliability and simplicity of all these appliances. What they actually get is a very fragile pile of interrelated software and hardware components.
I love expandable, hackable, flexible machines like any other./ reader. But I am afraid that a PC as ubiquitous as the TV set would have to be very similar to just that - a kind of black box that neither Grandpa nor a piece of malware can break.
I have a small script that exports all my mail from Outlook (minus attachments) to a FileMaker database. This DB holds nearly all my written communication (outgoing E-mail, faxes, letters, incoming E-Mail) plus notes about important meetings and phone calls (I could scan imcoming letters and faxes, too, but I am too lazy to bother with OCR) from the last eight years and weighs around 100 MB. I can live with that.
This way, my Outlook PST file stays small (just a week's worth of mail plus contact and calendar data), so I can easily sync it with my phone.
When I open the FileMaker DB (trusty old 3.0, BTW), it prompts me to enter a name and then displays all communication with a person/organization, chronologically sorted. As a bonus, this is linked to my address DB, so I can easily call up additional data. This has saved me several times when an almost-forgotten ex-client called.
I guess there are more professional CRM products for this kind of stuff, but I feel better with a homebrew solution. And should I ever want to move to a different format, FileMaker can export CSV and TAB. Good enough for me.
Imagine the hell that a real life "furry" would go through
While this is (and hopefully will stay) on the Fantasy side of things, there is a cycle of Science Fiction stories by Cordwainer Smith dealing with such "underpeople". Amazing stuff, exotic even by SF standards and written in a beautiful style. Though those stories are set in a far and sometimes bizarre future, I am afraid Smith got pretty close to how man would treat chimeras (or in this case: animals with improved intelligence).
Building a PC for people who are afraid of them and/or have limited physical capabilities is not (only) about reducing the feature set, but about adding usability features.
Voice recognition and output, scaling/zooming textg and graphics (which should be supported everywhere), consistent user interface design etc. are features that would make life easier so much easier not only for elder people, but also for small children and disabled people.
Not exactly small markets.
Suggested Reading: Quarantine by Greg Egan
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Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There is an excellent novel by Australian Science Fiction author Greg Egan called Quarantine (Wikipedia entry/Amazon) on this subject. I cannot claim to understand even half the theories in there, but it is a fascinating read and a mindbender similar to what Stephenson's "Snow Crash" had to offer twelve years ago.
It's a pity that obviously Spielberg didn't have the guts to leave the story where it belongs: At the beginning of the 20th century.
I don't want to sound luddite, but come on. We had our fair share of "Here and now" Monster Invasian stories. "War of the Worlds" started it all. It would have been a sign both of respect and attitude to acknowlegde this by leaving the story in context, i.e. the year 1900.
If you look at the visual treat that was "Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow" (a movie done with relatively modest ressources), think of the wonders a Steven Spielberg could have done in recreating the age of industrialization. Think of a "Last Samurai"-style Cruise struggling with space-faring aliens in a world that hadn't even learned about heavier-than-air flight. As a "It could happen tomorrow" story set in 200X, this might as well be a lame "Independence Day - the Sequel".
The worst part of this is we'll have to swallow that Mars as we know it today - visited by dozens of probes and probably shorter on intelligent life than our own world - will start an invasion on Earth. Now that's a bit much.
This guy is an attorney who - judging from the equipment and setup described in this article - has money coming out of his ears. What is he doing with that? Collecting music, so when the Jihad/Armageddon/whatever comes, it'll all be safe in his pretty suburban home, because the first thing them nasty Muslims will do when they take over the US of A. is burn Britney and her work. Could happen any day now, so keep those Torrents coming!
Yeah, rrright.
If he really is that concerned about preserving culture, why doesn't he devote some money and time to the Internet archive, maybe lobbying the record companies to set up a safe archive of their back catalogues? One should suppose that in a connected world a distributed, redundant archive is better than a pile of drives in a person's basement.
Nah - he has to do it by himself.
One of the key sentences is at the end of the article: "Put a kid in a candy store and let them eat all they want and at some point they will stop."
Which amazingly is true, at least from my experience (I'm swapping music with friends, which is (still) legal in Germany when you own the original, unless you circumvent copy protection). Not for him, though. He has to have it all.
Maybe I'm being cynic, but it's hard to believe this is more than an anal-retentive attempt to be King of the MP3 hill.
What really pisses me off, though, is a statement like this: "Youre not denying anyone else the product; you arent taking money away from the artist because the artist was never going to get your money." - which is the same lame excuse that every would-be "pirate" in the world uses. Only he has an important moral justification (Save Western Culture!), so it's A-OK.
Come on, people - this isn't the world of Fahrenheit 451. If you want to preserve important cultural works in the digital domain, vote for those that support end-user rights, generous public domain regulations etc., buy from companies that do not torture you with copy-protection schemes, spread the word. Sitting in a basement full of FireWire drives with music you will never listen to is just a poor man's version of the Evil Genius scheme.
People who look at these browser screenshots and decide that the semantic web is/will be a mess stop thinking too early.
This graph-like presentation is just one way to show semantics, and it only works for certain things, like topic maps.
I'm sometimes using tools like outliners and the Brain (insert pun here) to present ideas and their relationships. This is not the way you would want to e.g. read/present a complex manual.
Other, more complex forms of presentation are required - and possible. Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas regarding hypertext and presentation of relationships that have never turned into products. I'm working on my own little, Xanadu-ish project that aims to make navigation in structured text easier. The benefit is not presentation "A" or "B" - but the fact that you will be able to tweak the presentation according to what you need to know. This requires semantics, which in turn requires new tools both for the author, not (only) for the reader.
One day, we will look back and wonder how we could live with an Internet where a search engine had to guess if we are looking for Lotus The Car or Lotus The Flower or Lotus The Software Company, or where separating articles by an author from those about him was nearly impossible. No-one in their right mind can claim this is good enough for the future.
VST plug-ins are a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the rich history of software synthesis.
While you have every right in the world to see things that way (though this is a very fuzzy statement), lets put this in the context of todays professional music production environments. I have a lot of respect for Csound & Co., but I have yet to see these and related technologies in professional studios. There is some interesting avantgarde work based on Max & Co., there are people like Monolake who have turned their homegrown software into a solid business (Ableton Live), but when you are simply looking for reliable, usable sound generators and effects, VST owns.
BTW, I am doing a lot of work for a digital audio hardware and software company (not Steinberg), and they are moving more and more of their products from hardware to software. VST is the way to go if want/need compatibility to professional audio software. So much about the "drop in the bucket".
Synthesizers dont die, they just move to software...
There is no need to "revitalize" the music synthesizer scene, as you suggest - it is alive and kicking. As we speak, literally hundreds of synths with all kinds of engines (additive, substractive, sampling, FM, granular etc.) are being developed, sold and given away for free. Go to KVR to learn more.
Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field. But if you simply want tools for music production, you can be up and running with a cheap off-the-shelf PC and some free software (sequencer, synths, effects) in an hour.
I wish I would have had this twenty years ago, when MIDI came up.
It does work with Opera (7.54), although it will give you a warning on top of the page.
And you can tweak Opera's search.ini file, so e.g. typing "d foo" in your adress bar or open dialog will search all things foo on your harddisk.
So this is not "Google Desktop for IE", but for HTML files - and everything else you may want to search for.
Not meaning to spoil the party, but ...
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Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has come a long way, but IMHO Opera got there faster.
Not meaning to rant, but the permanent high-fiving of the Firefox crowd is getting on my nerves a bit. Every two months or so for the last years, I took Mozilla/Firefox version for a test drive, while at the same time using Opera as my main browser. Now - after ten years of development and admittedly some enormous achievements - I find that Firefox is a decent, though underpowered tool compared to the Opera browser. It has a great renderer, but there's more to a browser than that.
I know Opera isn't that popular with the/. crowd as it is closed-source, commercial software, but it had so many features before Mozilla & IE that make my life easier that the price seems ridiculous compared to the time it saved me: Mouse gestures, SDI/MDI browsing, customizable searches, customizable UI (menus, key combinations, mouse gestures - you name it), a very efficient cookie/password manager, the ability to re-open a session (set of pages) at any time, tools to filter links on a page, "predictive" browsing (Fast Forward), spational navigation (use Shift + Cursor Keys to reach links accorcing to their position), the ability to combine several user stylesheets on the fly, a 20% to 800% zoom feature including images and other objects on a page... I could go on.
To me, the Mozilla/Firefox seems like a grass-roots effort to build a car - a Beetle, for example. After putting an emormous amount of manpower in it, the team got it right: a working, reliable product for the masses, and it's *free*. Opera in comparison is a very slick machine built by a small, dedicated company - more like a Ferrari. And in comparison to what my hardware and other software packages I'm using cost me, the price of $39 seems even more ridiculous.
I do not want to spoil the party. It is a good thing that Mozilla/Firefox exists. But as a tool for daily work, I prefer something with a little more power under the hood.
We've been down that path and the result is a browser that is bug ridden and hasn't been updated in years
Sorry to break this to you, but you don't know what you are talking about. I suggest you take IE, Mozilla und Opera through the usual HTML/CSS test suites. I also suggest to open 30-40 pages in all three browsers on a standard machine and see what happens.
Also, the point of "no updates in years" is grotesque. Opera A/S is developing this browser for various platforms, with a 7.5 preview for Windows and Linux that is running circles around every browser in the market.
That "small company in Norway" is supported by a great community, they listen to their customers, and they have neither a political/religious "agenda" (the browser as the "spearhead" in a "war" - please...) nor do they use it as a tool to sell an OS/service/whatever. They just want to provide a great browser and earn some money with it. I can totally relate to that.
BTW, all this "payware = evil" talk is becoming so incredibly boring. Opera is circa 40 Euros/dollars. This investment - and it was voluntary, as there is an ad-supported version - has saved me hundreds of hours due to Opera's stability, the fast renderer and the superior controls (mouse gestures, spatial navigations etc.).
Frankly Opera just don't have much of a future for general Internet browsing
Yeah, right. Let's talk about this in a few years when a lot of "general Internet browsing" happens on portable devices.
The only way to start a successful business... is having a client.
Neither the Macintosh nor Google would be here today if this were true.
You have to find/define a niche, and develop a product that fits in that particular niche.
Somebody once said to me: "When you're on the road at night and get into a critical situation - never steer your car towards the lights! Because light means someone else is there already."
He was an old man, referring to cars. But I have applied this both to (IT) business and creative work, and never had a reason to regret it.
Does anyone realize how often foreign governments and entities are spying on US corporations? There's a lot of industrial espionage out there.
Ironically, Open Source lobbyists outside of the US say that governments and large corporations should move away from Microsoft as they suspect NSA/CIA/FBI/Corporate America-sponsored backdoors in Windows & Co to spy on them...
Slashdot Mirror
And that's why?
I have a huge music collection, but it's a few beloved tracks - some from CDs, some from the net - that I keep playing over and over. WinAmp Statistics say that some of these tracks were played 40 - 50 times. So I get a lot of bang for my buck.
(And that's only on my desktop PC. Add a similar number for my MP3 player.)
The great thing about music is you can listen to it while doing something else. Try the same thing with video.
Honestly - how often would you watch an episode of "Friends" or another video? Two times? Maybe four? I don't think so.
(Admittedly, there are movies that I could watch over and over, like Blade Runner or Fight Club. But in that case, I'll gladly fork over the money for a real DVD.)
Man, whatever it is you do for a living:
Try to become a freelancer.
Get up. Enjoy a big, healthy breakfast. Take a walk, go shopping, enjoy the sun, meet friends.
Six or seven hours later, go to work (you still need a "buffer" in case something goes wrong with your job.)
Work until you are too tired to go on. When you cant understand what you just wrote/read, it is definitely time to go to bed.
This may feel weird at the start (our culture seems to be hardwired to the "work first/play afterwards" model), but it works for me.
I have been living like this for almost twenty years, and it works. I go to bed when I am tired. I get circa eight hours of fun, eight hours of work and eight hours of sleep out of the day, like almost everybody else. I just accept the offset (and I have clients who are willing to do the same, among them a tiny little software company from Redmond).
Try it. You might like it.
PS: Never, ever use your bed for something else than sleep or sex. Condition your brain to accept this as the place where it is supposed to shut down. This is important. Trust me.
... will this be the same blazing success as Fifth Generation Computing?
Not meaning to be disrespectful, but I always love it when Big Government tells us what toys we will be playing with in ten years.
And while I love the Holodeck as the lazy scriptwriter's friend in every other TNG episode, this is one of those technologies that has to be perfect (or at least 99.9%) to work. Total immersion in a Doom-like Game - Hell, yes. Smelling a TV set designer's idea of a football stadium while sitting on my couch - thanks, but no thanks.
It is depressing that about every response modded 4+ in this thread pisses on Kelly because he dares to think outside of the box, i.e., the Internet as it is today. People who are supposed to be imaginative, unconventional thinkers indulge in variations of "Ain't never gonna work, just like flying cars."
/. decides that this is just "another page filler".
How disappointing.
Kelly himself admits that he was wrong about the Internet's potential ten years ago, like so many others, that no-one foresaw eBay and Weblogs. He also says we aren't even near what a worldwide network could be, that it is self-organizing, unplanned, fueled by imagination and goodwill (Hey, OSS crowd - anyone home?).
But the collected wisdom of
The major part of Kelly's article celebrates the power of a self-organizing, link-everything-to-everything world, but as he doesn't put it in technical terms, it has to be BS.
Such narrow-mindedness must be really comfortable.
Admittedly, the last few paragraphs (indicating the Web might become self-aware one day) sound a bit like standard Science-Fiction fare.
But then, the same was true fifteen years ago for the medium and the technologies we are using *right now.*
If you look at Kelly's books and articles, you'll see he has groked the potential of nonlinear, self-organizing systems. Unfortunately, people around here seem to be more obsessed with the technical details than any kind of "why" and "where" beyond their 3 GHz boxes.
I would kill for reliable and affordable GPS in a notebook.
A clock? Hmm. As another poster said, I own enough widgets telling the time.
The touchpad-on-the-side idea is wickedly cool. I would love this, as the ocassional grabbing for the mouse is even worse when you are sitting in a real tight place. However, I am afraid developing this would be tough - how should that sensor know that the guys jacket a few inch away should be ignored, yet every move of your thumb be tracked immediately?
I'm an end user. I have always been. I am one of the many who are supposed to buy hardware and software and services (and I did: If I had spent my money on cars, not on hardware and software, there would be a Porsche or two in my garage. This is just to say: I *do* put my money where my mouth is.).
I started with a Commodore C64 many, many years ago - I was into gaming and music, like most kids.
The C64 had great games. It was cheap. For a kid, it worked like a TV set: You switched it on, started the game, off you went into unknown territory.
Later, I switched to the Atari ST, because it was the only machine with a built-in MIDI interface. I was into music. The ST had sequencers, sound design software, a wickedly fast and customizable text editor and a pretty reliable layout software. With two friends, I was able to produce a CD, the CD booklet, cover and more on a machine with 2 MB RAM. Those were good times.
The ST worked like a TV set on steroids: You switched it on, and two minutes later, your application was there: a great sequencer, an innovative layout software. Off we went.
A few years later, I became a Mac addict. The Mac had music, graphics and productivity applications, and it was cooler than Windows. It was fun to work with. The consistency of applications was amazing: Every key combo worked in every application. Everywhere you wanted color, you had the same color selector. You didn't have to think; you just did what you wanted to do.
The Mac worked like a super-luxury TV set: You had a set of great applications, a beautiful package and beautiful software, all working smoothly together. Heaven. We produced another CD.
In 1996, I switched to Windows and never looked back, and I will definitely not sidestep to Linux.
Why?
Because I love Windows per se so much?
No. I don't.
But by that time, I had discovered so many things I wanted to do: Editing digital audio. More games (I'm still a game addict). The Internet: HTML editors, browsers, FTP clients. Text analysis. Databases.
Today, if I have a particular problem, it takes me circa 10 minutes to find five great applications that will do what I want. In most areas, I can choose between freeware, shareware, exotic stuff from innovative little companies and expensive packages from the big guys.
I chose whatever I like best and what I can afford.
I still want my applications like TV sets: Of course I need to learn what all the funny buttons on the remote do, but in the end, I just want to WATCH MY FAVORITE SHOW.
Developers, please take note:
We - the end users - admire you. We love you work, your efforts, the blood, sweat and tears you put into your work.
Frankly, most of us think that most of you are magicians.
Shall I let you into a little secret?
We do not give a flying fuck about operating systems. We may buy Windows today or download Linux tomorrow. We don't care.
We have stuff to do.
We want great applications.
We want consistency (the same friggin' key shortcut for "bold" or "start sequencer" in every app).
We want stability (the TV set thing).
We do not care about what's going on underneath the surface. We know you do, and we admire you.
We want a reliable, consistent platform. Like electric power, or water, or the telephone system. Later, at the bar, we'll listen to all your stories about how you did it, and smile and buy you another beer.
But all we want to start with is something like a car that you can start like any other car.
Keys, gas, road.
And a trillion of great applications running on top of that.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
As others have pointed out, the return on investment may not be what you expect when switching to another keyboard layout - you are still stuck with rows of keys that force your hands into an unnatural position. So why not do something more radical and take a look at the Ergodex DX1? Although Toms Hardware Guide and others refer to it as the ultimate gaming controller, it should be possible to build your own ergonomical keyboard layout for coding. The tray can hold up to 50 keys, and with a clever setup this should beat both QWERTY and Dvorak. It seems they are using high quality keys and have good software. I will buy one next month, although this is not exactly a cheap toy.
The American obsession with sexuality and the fear that *gasp* a minor might be confronted with it never ceases to amaze us simple folk over here in Old Europe. But then, a nipple here and a little flesh there are bigger threats to the Free World than machine guns and grenades.
So soon we will hear a public outcry about - what? (The simulation) of something wonderful, hidden in a game glorifying violence and crime.
Ah, the irony.
Admittedly, the iPod is a sweet little audio player with a clever store concept behind it.
/. is just free advertising for Steve & Co. We are not talking about new products or services here, folks. We are talking about shopping at SteveWorld to earn a few bonus points should we be so lucky to be counted as customer # 490000.
But putting this kind of story on
There are dozens of great (DRM-free) audio players out there. I cannot see why we should high-five every little stunt from Apple's marketing department on a site devoted to innovation and cool stuff.
I admire Gibson, and I love most of his work. But this sounds as if he had been caught in a reality distortion field.
Remixing happens, in many art forms (especially music/digital audio, where powerful tools have arrived - this is the area I'm working in).
But I think the overwhelming majority of people today - and for the coming decades, unless we see a singularity - are and will be perfectly happy to be part of a passive audience.
Occasionally, I talk to friends and people I meet at parties about this concept of the permanent remix - actually a collage (sic) of my own ideas and things that artists (Todd Rundgren) and companies (Sseyo) have done and preached. Audio loops and snippets, sound libraries and algorithmic composition tools that can be used to re-assemble and fine-tune existing music without ever hearing the same song twice, because the classic 3.5 minute "song" is only a snapshot - where you could have a (3D, i.e. surround) movie.
Most of them get it.
But they are simply not interested.
"Why should I want to remix someone's music?" is the usual response. And these are intelligent, curious people.
Many people have access to more music than they will be able to listen to during the next ten years. They are not interested in, well, adding to the mix.
I think this is a pity, but probably 95% of the audience wants to sit back and enjoy. Remixing LOTR or Neuromancer is not trivial. Most people just want to enjoy it.
Refrigerators and TV sets once were considered a luxury, now you will hardly find a household without them. The features, though, are basically the same as 50 years ago.
The same is not true for the PC and probably never will be, as it is a potentially a universal machine, which is a mixed blessing.
While prices may continue to go down, complexity doesn't. Au contraire: Here in Germany, discount retailer sells thousands and thousands of 3 GHz "Mulimedia" PCs which in their current incarnation are advertised as the one-size-fits all equivalent of a Home Office, a video console, a VCR, a DVD Player/Recorder, a Digital TV receiver, a Digital Radio ...
Moms and Pops read this list and expect the reliability and simplicity of all these appliances. What they actually get is a very fragile pile of interrelated software and hardware components.
I love expandable, hackable, flexible machines like any other ./ reader. But I am afraid that a PC as ubiquitous as the TV set would have to be very similar to just that - a kind of black box that neither Grandpa nor a piece of malware can break.
I have a small script that exports all my mail from Outlook (minus attachments) to a FileMaker database. This DB holds nearly all my written communication (outgoing E-mail, faxes, letters, incoming E-Mail) plus notes about important meetings and phone calls (I could scan imcoming letters and faxes, too, but I am too lazy to bother with OCR) from the last eight years and weighs around 100 MB. I can live with that.
This way, my Outlook PST file stays small (just a week's worth of mail plus contact and calendar data), so I can easily sync it with my phone.
When I open the FileMaker DB (trusty old 3.0, BTW), it prompts me to enter a name and then displays all communication with a person/organization, chronologically sorted. As a bonus, this is linked to my address DB, so I can easily call up additional data. This has saved me several times when an almost-forgotten ex-client called.
I guess there are more professional CRM products for this kind of stuff, but I feel better with a homebrew solution. And should I ever want to move to a different format, FileMaker can export CSV and TAB. Good enough for me.
While this is (and hopefully will stay) on the Fantasy side of things, there is a cycle of Science Fiction stories by Cordwainer Smith dealing with such "underpeople". Amazing stuff, exotic even by SF standards and written in a beautiful style. Though those stories are set in a far and sometimes bizarre future, I am afraid Smith got pretty close to how man would treat chimeras (or in this case: animals with improved intelligence).
Excellent points.
Building a PC for people who are afraid of them and/or have limited physical capabilities is not (only) about reducing the feature set, but about adding usability features.
Voice recognition and output, scaling/zooming textg and graphics (which should be supported everywhere), consistent user interface design etc. are features that would make life easier so much easier not only for elder people, but also for small children and disabled people.
Not exactly small markets.
There is an excellent novel by Australian Science Fiction author Greg Egan called Quarantine (Wikipedia entry/Amazon) on this subject. I cannot claim to understand even half the theories in there, but it is a fascinating read and a mindbender similar to what Stephenson's "Snow Crash" had to offer twelve years ago.
It's a pity that obviously Spielberg didn't have the guts to leave the story where it belongs: At the beginning of the 20th century.
I don't want to sound luddite, but come on. We had our fair share of "Here and now" Monster Invasian stories. "War of the Worlds" started it all. It would have been a sign both of respect and attitude to acknowlegde this by leaving the story in context, i.e. the year 1900.
If you look at the visual treat that was "Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow" (a movie done with relatively modest ressources), think of the wonders a Steven Spielberg could have done in recreating the age of industrialization. Think of a "Last Samurai"-style Cruise struggling with space-faring aliens in a world that hadn't even learned about heavier-than-air flight. As a "It could happen tomorrow" story set in 200X, this might as well be a lame "Independence Day - the Sequel".
The worst part of this is we'll have to swallow that Mars as we know it today - visited by dozens of probes and probably shorter on intelligent life than our own world - will start an invasion on Earth. Now that's a bit much.
This guy is an attorney who - judging from the equipment and setup described in this article - has money coming out of his ears. What is he doing with that? Collecting music, so when the Jihad/Armageddon/whatever comes, it'll all be safe in his pretty suburban home, because the first thing them nasty Muslims will do when they take over the US of A. is burn Britney and her work. Could happen any day now, so keep those Torrents coming!
Yeah, rrright.
If he really is that concerned about preserving culture, why doesn't he devote some money and time to the Internet archive, maybe lobbying the record companies to set up a safe archive of their back catalogues? One should suppose that in a connected world a distributed, redundant archive is better than a pile of drives in a person's basement.
Nah - he has to do it by himself.
One of the key sentences is at the end of the article:
"Put a kid in a candy store and let them eat all they want and at some point they will stop."
Which amazingly is true, at least from my experience (I'm swapping music with friends, which is (still) legal in Germany when you own the original, unless you circumvent copy protection).
Not for him, though. He has to have it all.
Maybe I'm being cynic, but it's hard to believe this is more than an anal-retentive attempt to be King of the MP3 hill.
What really pisses me off, though, is a statement like this: "Youre not denying anyone else the product; you arent taking money away from the artist because the artist was never going to get your money." - which is the same lame excuse that every would-be "pirate" in the world uses. Only he has an important moral justification (Save Western Culture!), so it's A-OK.
Come on, people - this isn't the world of Fahrenheit 451. If you want to preserve important cultural works in the digital domain, vote for those that support end-user rights, generous public domain regulations etc., buy from companies that do not torture you with copy-protection schemes, spread the word. Sitting in a basement full of FireWire drives with music you will never listen to is just a poor man's version of the Evil Genius scheme.
People who look at these browser screenshots and decide that the semantic web is/will be a mess stop thinking too early.
This graph-like presentation is just one way to show semantics, and it only works for certain things, like topic maps.
I'm sometimes using tools like outliners and the Brain (insert pun here) to present ideas and their relationships. This is not the way you would want to e.g. read/present a complex manual.
Other, more complex forms of presentation are required - and possible. Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas regarding hypertext and presentation of relationships that have never turned into products. I'm working on my own little, Xanadu-ish project that aims to make navigation in structured text easier. The benefit is not presentation "A" or "B" - but the fact that you will be able to tweak the presentation according to what you need to know. This requires semantics, which in turn requires new tools both for the author, not (only) for the reader.
One day, we will look back and wonder how we could live with an Internet where a search engine had to guess if we are looking for Lotus The Car or Lotus The Flower or Lotus The Software Company, or where separating articles by an author from those about him was nearly impossible. No-one in their right mind can claim this is good enough for the future.
While you have every right in the world to see things that way (though this is a very fuzzy statement), lets put this in the context of todays professional music production environments. I have a lot of respect for Csound & Co., but I have yet to see these and related technologies in professional studios. There is some interesting avantgarde work based on Max & Co., there are people like Monolake who have turned their homegrown software into a solid business (Ableton Live), but when you are simply looking for reliable, usable sound generators and effects, VST owns.
BTW, I am doing a lot of work for a digital audio hardware and software company (not Steinberg), and they are moving more and more of their products from hardware to software. VST is the way to go if want/need compatibility to professional audio software. So much about the "drop in the bucket".
Synthesizers dont die, they just move to software ...
There is no need to "revitalize" the music synthesizer scene, as you suggest - it is alive and kicking. As we speak, literally hundreds of synths with all kinds of engines (additive, substractive, sampling, FM, granular etc.) are being developed, sold and given away for free. Go to KVR to learn more.
Admittedly, not too much open-source in that field. But if you simply want tools for music production, you can be up and running with a cheap off-the-shelf PC and some free software (sequencer, synths, effects) in an hour.
I wish I would have had this twenty years ago, when MIDI came up.
It does work with Opera (7.54), although it will give you a warning on top of the page.
And you can tweak Opera's search.ini file, so e.g. typing "d foo" in your adress bar or open dialog will search all things foo on your harddisk.
So this is not "Google Desktop for IE", but for HTML files - and everything else you may want to search for.
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has come a long way, but IMHO Opera got there faster.
/. crowd as it is closed-source, commercial software, but it had so many features before Mozilla & IE that make my life easier that the price seems ridiculous compared to the time it saved me: Mouse gestures, SDI/MDI browsing, customizable searches, customizable UI (menus, key combinations, mouse gestures - you name it), a very efficient cookie/password manager, the ability to re-open a session (set of pages) at any time, tools to filter links on a page, "predictive" browsing (Fast Forward), spational navigation (use Shift + Cursor Keys to reach links accorcing to their position), the ability to combine several user stylesheets on the fly, a 20% to 800% zoom feature including images and other objects on a page ... I could go on.
Not meaning to rant, but the permanent high-fiving of the Firefox crowd is getting on my nerves a bit. Every two months or so for the last years, I took Mozilla/Firefox version for a test drive, while at the same time using Opera as my main browser. Now - after ten years of development and admittedly some enormous achievements - I find that Firefox is a decent, though underpowered tool compared to the Opera browser. It has a great renderer, but there's more to a browser than that.
I know Opera isn't that popular with the
To me, the Mozilla/Firefox seems like a grass-roots effort to build a car - a Beetle, for example. After putting an emormous amount of manpower in it, the team got it right: a working, reliable product for the masses, and it's *free*. Opera in comparison is a very slick machine built by a small, dedicated company - more like a Ferrari. And in comparison to what my hardware and other software packages I'm using cost me, the price of $39 seems even more ridiculous.
I do not want to spoil the party. It is a good thing that Mozilla/Firefox exists. But as a tool for daily work, I prefer something with a little more power under the hood.
Sorry to break this to you, but you don't know what you are talking about. I suggest you take IE, Mozilla und Opera through the usual HTML/CSS test suites. I also suggest to open 30-40 pages in all three browsers on a standard machine and see what happens.
Also, the point of "no updates in years" is grotesque. Opera A/S is developing this browser for various platforms, with a 7.5 preview for Windows and Linux that is running circles around every browser in the market.
That "small company in Norway" is supported by a great community, they listen to their customers, and they have neither a political/religious "agenda" (the browser as the "spearhead" in a "war" - please ...) nor do they use it as a tool to sell an OS/service/whatever. They just want to provide a great browser and earn some money with it. I can totally relate to that.
BTW, all this "payware = evil" talk is becoming so incredibly boring. Opera is circa 40 Euros/dollars. This investment - and it was voluntary, as there is an ad-supported version - has saved me hundreds of hours due to Opera's stability, the fast renderer and the superior controls (mouse gestures, spatial navigations etc.).
Yeah, right. Let's talk about this in a few years when a lot of "general Internet browsing" happens on portable devices.Neither the Macintosh nor Google would be here today if this were true.
You have to find/define a niche, and develop a product that fits in that particular niche.
Somebody once said to me: "When you're on the road at night and get into a critical situation - never steer your car towards the lights! Because light means someone else is there already."
He was an old man, referring to cars. But I have applied this both to (IT) business and creative work, and never had a reason to regret it.
But then, your mileage may vary.
Ironically, Open Source lobbyists outside of the US say that governments and large corporations should move away from Microsoft as they suspect NSA/CIA/FBI/Corporate America-sponsored backdoors in Windows & Co to spy on them