Don't forget - having faster chips released will bring down the prices of the 'low' end processors and enable Joe public to afford what was very recently a high end machine.
Most people won't afford a 2GHz machine, but the pricing implications mean that a previously out of reach 933 / 1 GHz migh be that bit more affordable.
I heard about a guy who owns an Island off the coast of Britain somewhere. Because it wasn't in British waters he had it effectively setup as his own country. He had his own laws, his own money and you needed a passport to get in.
There was talk about him hosting servers there to allow people to be free from the usual laws of the UK. Of course this then threw up the argument that only porn hosters and drug barons would be interested or have reason to use this kind of protection - typical;-)
"...looks like search engines will become illegal then..."
Along with newspapers, radio, tv.....anything that serves information to the public.
The problem here is that the record industry is getting frustrated with not being able to stop the root cause of the 'problem' - ie the actual sites. They can't stop them so they are going after the next best thing in their eyes - the directions to help other people find these sites.
Does anyone else find it amusing that stories of con artists that would ordinarily not be newsworthy, are treated differently because they are 'on the web'? As far as I can tell, this guy is just another conman who managed to sucker people into buying into his scheme and then running off with the money.
Any time there are gullible people looking to make fast money there will be people like this - the Internet hasn't changed that - it's just another area to exploit.
Agreed - you also run the risk of giving the power to change laws to the 'technologically enabled' rather than the masses. Sure, lots of people have computers these days, but not everyone is able to use them to the same level. Ideas like this would be great if well regulated, but shouldn't at this stage be a replacement for more traditional methods - more a complimentary solution.
Don't know about all of their bills but I think Virgin use a Google search engine on their home page. They paid for this but it's not branded as Google - just the technology underneath.
I doubt that the PSX or similar will ever replace the computer for business or home office use. I don't have a lot of understanding about the architecture of the PSX but I think it's unlikely that it's well suited to applications that would suit your average business user.
Where I can see this might be good is in the set top box arena. YOu can already send email with the Dreamcast, it seems a natural step to build web browsing functionality into a PSX style console. Throw in the better styling of the console / set top box idea, and the PC could well be replaced as a home device for entertainment.
Sure - there's the issue of people keeping copies, but you'd give your credit card number to an e-tailer wouldn't you? What's to stop them from keeping a copy and using it elsewhere?
It is actually true - Dvorak keyboards are more efficient but Qwerty keyboards slowed down typists in the days when mechanical devices couldn't keep up.
I also read another article that said using a Qwerty layout is actually bad for your hans because with most English words, the layout of keys means that you spend a lot more time on the left hand side of the keyboard, and not enough time on the 'home' row (the middle one).
They also suggested that having another layout - for example an alphabetic layout - would not be efficient either, since when people type on an alphabetic layout, they think in their head where the letter fits in the alphabet and then look for it on the keyboard. Using Qwerty is different because people don't think about where a letter occurs in relation to other letters - just it's position on the keyboard.
Just had a thought reading this part of your comment...
Online, hostile environments are driving almost every social group other than techno-savvy young white men away from coherent public discussion of technology...
A majority of posts seem to be either praising / complaining about the option to remain anonymous and how it can cause problems. In that case - how the hell are people supposed to draw the conclusion that the majority of online groups are 'Techno-savvy young white men...'? How do you know what gender or race I am? Sure my nick might give away some of it, but how do you know the nick is accurate? I might actually be a female from Timbuktu for all anyone knows!
As I understand it there must be a distinct difference between the benefits given to permanent and temporary employees. As well as keeping the permies happy (contractors already earn more money - why should they get the other perks too?) it's also a legal requirement.BR> The company I work for gives it's perm employees free membership to a health club but temps have to pay. There was some bad feeling about this but it's all been done to satisfy the law.
I wonder if this was done for a similar reason to Intel putting Linux on their new web appliance - cost control? Laptops are getting more and more competitive with price becoming ever more important to people - maybe this is a way for IBM to bring the price down. Fair enough if it is, but I bet IBMs support falters.
It was a commercial for glasses, spectacles, contact lenses that kind of thing. If I remember rightly it all revolved around something like 'I never expected to see all this in my lifetime...' where 'all this' was things like space travel etc etc. Pretty tenuous link from Hawking to glasses though! I'd never have thought he'd agree to it.
Couldn't agree more! Mind you, he did do a pretty sad advertising campaign for an opticians in the UK (apologies if you're in the UK and alreay knew that!) I couldn't believe that a guy of such incredible intelligence and vision would be reduced to making crappy tv commercials - maybe Brief History of Time isn't bringing in the royalites anymore?
What probably happened was that someone heard that they were trying to encourage the use of 'home cooked' software, and someone in the news agencies misinterpretted this as a ban. Maybe it was language related - perhaps something got lost in the translation? Maybe the Chinese government 'suggested' that Linux should be used, and the communist definition of a suggestion is 'you will do this'!
Yeah - plus a lot of the other posts suck too! I spent a while going through the comments on the Humpday quickies and about half of them were complaints that the WuName Perl script didn't work. If you're going to post make sure you read the previous ones first otherwise you just annoy people. There - that's my $0.02 worth, or in UK money, about £0.01......
Forgive me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here - I'm sure there's a difference between US and UK law. Is it illegal in the US to have an item (like a clock for example) that can double up as something else (like a surveillance camera)?
We have a store in the UK called Spymaster that sells nothing but that kind of equipment - the US authorities would have a field day if they visited! I also found a similar place in the US. Does this law mean that the pen shown would be illegal as well?
Agreed - I can't see the fact that Linux is installed on these boxes being the deciding factor for people to buy them. Look at TVs, Videos and other home appliances - nobody cares how the functionality of the device is implemented - who cares what kind of transistors are used inside your TV? As long as the device does what people want it to do at a reasonable price, then they will buy it. Linux - UNIX - Windows - whatever. If the price is right then people won't care.
"...sites that let you choose any country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and then require a State and 5 digit zip code..."
I hate when sites do this! I'm in the UK and my address hardly ever fits into the required format for a site that's so obviously been created in the US. I guess the problem here is that in order to get good delivery times, companies like to have Zip / Postal codes and complete addresses, but to find out the format for every country from A-Z would just be too much effort.
I had a similar experience to your Fax episode. I placed an order at a site which I then had problems with. After checking it out, I found that the form simply sent an email to a person who filled in a paper order form using the details I supplied, and then posted it to another company for processing!!!
I think the big problem here is that with the exception of people who grew up using the web, this Christmas is the first time a lot of people will have used online shopping. I imagine that they have a pre-conceived idea of what the service will be like: Point - Click - Package arrives next day. We all know that this isn't really feasible.
These are probably people who don't buy using mail order either, and forget that just because it's online shopping doesn't mean that there's no courier or postal service involved. I bet that a lot of the problems caused with delayed deliveries this time of year are down to overloaded postal systems.
Personally, I ordered a product from a UK site on Saturday evening at 6pm. I never really expected it to arrive before Xmas but it was with me on Tuesday morning. Online shopping can work - people just need to be educated in what to expect from it.
I was beginning to think this as well - Yahoo, Infoseek, Hotbot and the like just don't seem to find the good stuff anymore. If there's content held in a database and a page is generated on demand by an active server page or CGI script for example then the page doesn't come into existence until the user requests the information.
Perhaps it's time for search engines to search by topic and direct to a site related to the enquiry. The individual sites could then have their own search utilities to trawl through their databases? Not sure if this is feasible or not though.
In terms of good search engines though - Google and AllTheWeb.com seem to find good content whenever I use them. The problem I guess is that you don't know what you're missing until you find it by some other means, and neither do the search engines.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget - having faster chips released will bring down the prices of the 'low' end processors and enable Joe public to afford what was very recently a high end machine.
Most people won't afford a 2GHz machine, but the pricing implications mean that a previously out of reach 933 / 1 GHz migh be that bit more affordable.
I heard about a guy who owns an Island off the coast of Britain somewhere. Because it wasn't in British waters he had it effectively setup as his own country. He had his own laws, his own money and you needed a passport to get in.
;-)
There was talk about him hosting servers there to allow people to be free from the usual laws of the UK. Of course this then threw up the argument that only porn hosters and drug barons would be interested or have reason to use this kind of protection - typical
"...looks like search engines will become illegal then..."
Along with newspapers, radio, tv.....anything that serves information to the public.
The problem here is that the record industry is getting frustrated with not being able to stop the root cause of the 'problem' - ie the actual sites. They can't stop them so they are going after the next best thing in their eyes - the directions to help other people find these sites.
Does anyone else find it amusing that stories of con artists that would ordinarily not be newsworthy, are treated differently because they are 'on the web'? As far as I can tell, this guy is just another conman who managed to sucker people into buying into his scheme and then running off with the money.
Any time there are gullible people looking to make fast money there will be people like this - the Internet hasn't changed that - it's just another area to exploit.
Agreed - you also run the risk of giving the power to change laws to the 'technologically enabled' rather than the masses. Sure, lots of people have computers these days, but not everyone is able to use them to the same level. Ideas like this would be great if well regulated, but shouldn't at this stage be a replacement for more traditional methods - more a complimentary solution.
Let me guess - 2 months down the line after MS have been running this thing, they'll turn round and claim copyright or trademark rights on '.Net'?
Just imagine... http://andover.net(TM)(C)Microsoft2000..... shudder
....By the way when you purchase your intel dot station, I hope you enjoy the IRQ conflicts and bluescreens....?
Errr - the DotStation runs on Linux? You know - Linux? Last time I checked bluescreens were a Windows feature.
There's this as well....
Affiliate Programs that people can pay for to put a Google search utility on their site.
Don't know about all of their bills but I think Virgin use a Google search engine on their home page. They paid for this but it's not branded as Google - just the technology underneath.
I doubt that the PSX or similar will ever replace the computer for business or home office use. I don't have a lot of understanding about the architecture of the PSX but I think it's unlikely that it's well suited to applications that would suit your average business user.
Where I can see this might be good is in the set top box arena. YOu can already send email with the Dreamcast, it seems a natural step to build web browsing functionality into a PSX style console. Throw in the better styling of the console / set top box idea, and the PC could well be replaced as a home device for entertainment.
Sure - there's the issue of people keeping copies, but you'd give your credit card number to an e-tailer wouldn't you? What's to stop them from keeping a copy and using it elsewhere?
It is actually true - Dvorak keyboards are more efficient but Qwerty keyboards slowed down typists in the days when mechanical devices couldn't keep up.
I also read another article that said using a Qwerty layout is actually bad for your hans because with most English words, the layout of keys means that you spend a lot more time on the left hand side of the keyboard, and not enough time on the 'home' row (the middle one).
They also suggested that having another layout - for example an alphabetic layout - would not be efficient either, since when people type on an alphabetic layout, they think in their head where the letter fits in the alphabet and then look for it on the keyboard. Using Qwerty is different because people don't think about where a letter occurs in relation to other letters - just it's position on the keyboard.
Just had a thought reading this part of your comment...
Online, hostile environments are driving almost every social group other than techno-savvy young white men away from coherent public discussion of technology...
A majority of posts seem to be either praising / complaining about the option to remain anonymous and how it can cause problems. In that case - how the hell are people supposed to draw the conclusion that the majority of online groups are 'Techno-savvy young white men...'? How do you know what gender or race I am? Sure my nick might give away some of it, but how do you know the nick is accurate? I might actually be a female from Timbuktu for all anyone knows!
As I understand it there must be a distinct difference between the benefits given to permanent and temporary employees. As well as keeping the permies happy (contractors already earn more money - why should they get the other perks too?) it's also a legal requirement.BR>
The company I work for gives it's perm employees free membership to a health club but temps have to pay. There was some bad feeling about this but it's all been done to satisfy the law.
I wonder if this was done for a similar reason to Intel putting Linux on their new web appliance - cost control? Laptops are getting more and more competitive with price becoming ever more important to people - maybe this is a way for IBM to bring the price down. Fair enough if it is, but I bet IBMs support falters.
It was a commercial for glasses, spectacles, contact lenses that kind of thing. If I remember rightly it all revolved around something like 'I never expected to see all this in my lifetime...' where 'all this' was things like space travel etc etc. Pretty tenuous link from Hawking to glasses though! I'd never have thought he'd agree to it.
Couldn't agree more! Mind you, he did do a pretty sad advertising campaign for an opticians in the UK (apologies if you're in the UK and alreay knew that!) I couldn't believe that a guy of such incredible intelligence and vision would be reduced to making crappy tv commercials - maybe Brief History of Time isn't bringing in the royalites anymore?
What probably happened was that someone heard that they were trying to encourage the use of 'home cooked' software, and someone in the news agencies misinterpretted this as a ban. Maybe it was language related - perhaps something got lost in the translation? Maybe the Chinese government 'suggested' that Linux should be used, and the communist definition of a suggestion is 'you will do this'!
Yeah - plus a lot of the other posts suck too! I spent a while going through the comments on the Humpday quickies and about half of them were complaints that the WuName Perl script didn't work. If you're going to post make sure you read the previous ones first otherwise you just annoy people. There - that's my $0.02 worth, or in UK money, about £0.01......
Forgive me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here - I'm sure there's a difference between US and UK law. Is it illegal in the US to have an item (like a clock for example) that can double up as something else (like a surveillance camera)?
We have a store in the UK called Spymaster that sells nothing but that kind of equipment - the US authorities would have a field day if they visited! I also found a similar place in the US. Does this law mean that the pen shown would be illegal as well?
How about a Furby? Technically that's a recording system masquerading as a cute cuddly toy animal!
Agreed - I can't see the fact that Linux is installed on these boxes being the deciding factor for people to buy them. Look at TVs, Videos and other home appliances - nobody cares how the functionality of the device is implemented - who cares what kind of transistors are used inside your TV? As long as the device does what people want it to do at a reasonable price, then they will buy it. Linux - UNIX - Windows - whatever. If the price is right then people won't care.
"...sites that let you choose any country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and then require a State and 5 digit zip code ..."
I hate when sites do this! I'm in the UK and my address hardly ever fits into the required format for a site that's so obviously been created in the US. I guess the problem here is that in order to get good delivery times, companies like to have Zip / Postal codes and complete addresses, but to find out the format for every country from A-Z would just be too much effort.
I had a similar experience to your Fax episode. I placed an order at a site which I then had problems with. After checking it out, I found that the form simply sent an email to a person who filled in a paper order form using the details I supplied, and then posted it to another company for processing!!!
I think the big problem here is that with the exception of people who grew up using the web, this Christmas is the first time a lot of people will have used online shopping. I imagine that they have a pre-conceived idea of what the service will be like: Point - Click - Package arrives next day. We all know that this isn't really feasible.
These are probably people who don't buy using mail order either, and forget that just because it's online shopping doesn't mean that there's no courier or postal service involved. I bet that a lot of the problems caused with delayed deliveries this time of year are down to overloaded postal systems.
Personally, I ordered a product from a UK site on Saturday evening at 6pm. I never really expected it to arrive before Xmas but it was with me on Tuesday morning. Online shopping can work - people just need to be educated in what to expect from it.
I was beginning to think this as well - Yahoo, Infoseek, Hotbot and the like just don't seem to find the good stuff anymore. If there's content held in a database and a page is generated on demand by an active server page or CGI script for example then the page doesn't come into existence until the user requests the information.
Perhaps it's time for search engines to search by topic and direct to a site related to the enquiry. The individual sites could then have their own search utilities to trawl through their databases? Not sure if this is feasible or not though.
In terms of good search engines though - Google and AllTheWeb.com seem to find good content whenever I use them. The problem I guess is that you don't know what you're missing until you find it by some other means, and neither do the search engines.