> Does anyone buy Sony Cybershot cameras for anything other than the "cyber" name and the "kewl" streamilined shape? I guess the Sony brand is important there too.
I have one, I wanted an Ixus and got a cybershot as a gift instead probably because of the higher resolution (7Mi pixel instead of 5Mi) and probably because of the brand. I don't have a problem with the usability but I find it not very good in low light condition (fuzzy images):-( now I'm perhaps not fair because I was used to 35mm cameras before.. But my stepsister has an Ixus 50, I've used it only a little but it seems to work better in low light condition, not as good as 35mm of course, but better than the cybershot..
While you're right in your description of newcomers to digital photography, I think that it won't stay that way, even with many millions of pixel, I'm not really satisfied with my digital camera: too many fuzzy photo, bad light sensitivity, bad latency, too long between two shots, 3* zoom etc..
I expect than in a few years, when people want to buy their second digital camera, they'll get much more sensitive to these issue than resolution which after a point doesn't really matter, now some issue may not be solvable such as having a bigger zoom in a small form factor but I hope that others will be..
Most brilliant *theoretical* physicists, sorry but that's a different class.
You know people tend to be interested in theories only when they apply in the real world. Einstein theories did apply in the real world, string theories have not been able to do interesting testable predictions yet, unfortunately..
>Its very easy to say today that Einstein's works are simple and obvious.
I trust that you haven't read about 'general relativity' then, which I wouldn't quite call 'simple and obvious'.
People always forget about general relativity, but it's really its biggest achivement, most of the other contributions of Einstein were more or less 'in the air', hadn't he find them others would probably have made the same contribution just a bit later, general relativity on the other hand was very far from being 'in the air'..
In the article they talk about pain relief by a placebo, so pain is not a totally real bullet either: pain is quite influenced by the mind even without placebo. Once I shielded me for the pain of a dying nerve in a tooth by reading a book, and a dying nerve in a tooth is *quite* painful, granted this is quite different from a placebo more similar with the use of hynosis to shield a patient from pain during a surgery.
Agreed, quite often those type of stories appear at the same time as the release of major movies without any significant news in the science themselves, disgusting really.
In France we had a president (Mitterrand) who spied on a woman (Carole Bouquet) probably because he liked her. Granted she is beautiful, but this shouldn't have happened!
And for the French, the rainbow warrior show how wrong it can go. A men got killed in this other stupid affair..
That's the danger putting too much power in the hand of individuals, who check that they aren't abusing them? Or doing really stupid thing with their power?
MacCarthysm show that even with more people taking decision, things can still go out of hand, but at least we can hope that this happen less often.
> Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips.
And? I fail to see your point, there is not much difference with IBM which sells servers chips too and embedded chips which cover a wide range of usage.
For the off-topic part about Apple: 1) I don't understand why Apple made the switch too. 2) you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligence sign. 3) Free software such as Linux is a competitor so why wouldn't they bash it if they get a chance? It's not like their principal target is geeks. 4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it. 5) About Linux comparison: when I see reviews about MacOS X, I'm always surprised how stringent the reviewers are: they expect high quality from Apple and they're quite disappointed when they don't have it, unfortunately reviewers about Linux are far more tolerant because they don't expect (and don't get) such quality: the cracks between the many layers of a Linux's desktop are always showing. Somehow I doubt that this can be fixed in one or two years, especially since HW makers don't help by hiding their spec (Nvidia, ATI, other..).
Sure but without spending on the latest tech, you'll get behind Intel and that's something IBM cannot afford.. The R&D for fabs must still be done for IBM's own POWER and joint venture with AMD but there is a client less to recoup the cost. I always find it funny that IBM's say that they don't care about Apple because it was a low volume client, I bet that they don't sell that many high-end POWER CPU too, compared to the number of PPC micro-controllers sold, yet investements for the high-end tech is important: that's the next generation low end.. Plus as the grand-parend said, volume != margin.
Last Christmas, I was shopping for a cordless phone suited to my (old) parents, one was dedicated to older people, but it cost twice as much as other phones with less functionnality. The only real improvement for older people was that it had less functionnality and had bigger buttons.
Somehow I wasn't ready to pay twice as much for bigger buttons.
My feeling is that the company doing it was way too greedy and treats older people as 'cash cow', barf.
I wonder who is stupid enough to have moderated the parent as insightful?
What if the email contains an attachment which is in a format that you can't read? Sure it is encoded as ASCII but it doesn't help..
Re:Firefox has very serious problems.
on
Firefox Secrets
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· Score: 1
I wonder why web browser allow plugins to kill the browser? It is well known that complex plugins (such as flash) are often buggy and that they will often crash and kill the browser, why not run the plugin in a different process? This way if the plugin fails, the browser can detect it and restart the plugin or the user could ask the browser to restart the plugin. The only shared memory between the browser and the plugin would correspond to the part of the window rendered by the plugin (you could have several parts handled by the same plugins process to reduce load), this way the plugin process could not corrupt the browser. Granted it wouldn't help website fully rendered in Flash, but they usually suck, so this isn't a problem:-)
There are quite a few language for the JVM which are 'better Java' (I looked at Scala and liked it myself) but the number may be their downfall..
I suspect that the reason why functionnal programming has not been successfull is that there are too many languages to choose from, so the minimum number of users needed to grow have not been reached, this could happen too to these 'better Java' languages..
-highly complete API? Sorry but the GUI part sucked very much and is still sucking by many measures (also Java can't print was true at some time), so while the standard library was more complete than what was available on other language, in some important areas (GUI, printing,..) it was very bad..
-it was the first language with reflection designed into its core Ok, you've just shown that you're ignorant: Smalltalk, LISP..
Java's designers weren't even able to provide generics into the language at first, which means than when they realised that it really suck to have all these cast everywhere they had to bolt it on the language, bleh.
As for your last part, Python predates Java.. What is true is that Java has succeeded much more than many other language: the Internet bubble and Sun's marketing have really helped Java. That said, Java is really 'plain' and too verbose for my taste, maybe the addition of local type inferencing (that C# v3 will have) would help here.
When one doesn't really know, one should better avoid making such empty assertions especially this strongly, that's how you get all sorts of disastrous strong belief..
Ahem, while it is well established than men have (in average) higher physical strength than women (anyway the sex type average doesn't matter, only individual capabilities matter), where are your proofs that women makes better nurse than men? They 'multitask' better? So what?
It is well established than on average men are better at using maps (something with the way to do rotations in the head), but it doesn't makes men better drivers or better explorers: there is much more to the task than simply reading a map!
Nope, it is "when do you admit that you don't know?".
Why does the universe exist? Agnostic answer: I don't know.
Why does the universe exist? Religious answer: God created it. Which trigger: Why does God exist? Religious answer: equivalent to 'I don't know'.
Atheist are just Agnostic which recognize the stupidity of the Religious point (adding an entity which doesn't solve the problem), so they acknowledge that they don't know why the universe exist but they consider that God is a stupid idea.
I still don't beleive that VR-google will be in a 10 year timeframe: for this type of interaction to be accepted, the google must be light, with good resolution, do not look ugly and the price of system google+tracking must not be too expensive. Your setup of cameras is also not transportable, which is a problem which will be even more acute in the future as laptops are more and more used.
Currently VR-googles are still seldom used for *gaming* purpose!! So the odds of having them used for work purpose in 10 years is quite low.
For the responsiveness, I think than HDD speed is only a small part of the issue: tests done with RAID0 setup on Internet have only shown negligible improvement whereas (by first hand usage) BeOS applications felt much more responsive than normal Windows or Linux applications on much slower computer. Of course ultimately the response time are limitated by peripherals, but we are *far* from here. A small exemple: it took 14s to boot BeOS to a usable desktop (not counting BIOS of course) whereas in Linux it can easily take one minute to boot the OS and the desktop (KDE or Gnome).
In a linear read of the disk during one minute you can read a *lot* of data! You can say that this is not a 'linear read', but then it becomes a software problem to use efficiently the disk: BeOS have shown what is possible to do for a generic OS equivalent to what we use now (no special HW like Amiga in the beginning, it had memory protection..) , but unfortunately neither Windows nor Linux have followed..
> Most women look at sexy women because they want to evoke the same reaction and are looking for the guidelines.
I'm not so sure: a (feminine) magazine asked both men and women with which celebrity they would like to 'sleep with'. All the men picked women celebrities, and all the women picked men celebrities, until now nothing surprising.
And then the magazine asked them to choose a second celebrities: all the men picked a second woman celebrity and suprisingly the women picked women celebrities!
So are woman looking at hot women only for guidelines or is-there attraction too? Now the women didn't say in the article that they wanted to bang the woman celebrity, maybe they just wanted to "share" the man, but it's still surprising..
> It is still doing kernel and architectual concepts today that you cannot find any other consumer level OS. PERIOD.
And from my user point of view, Linux/Unix are doing exactly the same thing as Windows, so these 'architectural concepts' that NT has bring absolutly *nothing*: no better feature, no increased stability.
OTOH, Plan9's concepts facilitates remote use, BeOS usage of threads improved responsiveness: those are features that are interesting, not vagues 'architectural concepts' bringing nothing to the user.
About your point 3, I'm not so sure that 3D would be that helpful, afterall even if you've had a 3D display, it is still projected as 2D on your retina, so you'll still see crossing lines. Our brain is quite good at reconstructing 3D-ness for the simple objects that surround us, but I'm not so sure that it'd be able to do a good job for complex 3D diagrams. So 3D would help, but how much? That is the question.
For the tab, you can already do some kind of organisation in 2D, for example you can open different windows for different website and then use only tabs to navigate in a website. Still it is true that tab do not show the dependency but OTOH showing depencencies would take up valuable screen space, so it is a tradeoff..
> My prescription, switch to glasses with very high resolution
Currently, I've heard that virtual reality goggles provides motion sickness: you're head is moving but what you're seeing is not moving --> motion sickness. I don't know about you, but I'd hate getting seasick with using a computer.
So to work, as you said the computer must monitor the head and do it nearly flawlessly before the setup is usable, somehow I don't expect this kind of setup being used.. especially not in 10 years!
IMHO before switching to a different GUI, we should try to perfect what we have: 1) everything should occur in less than 1/10s so that we can keep focusing on the task. 2) The screen resolution should be enhanced so that computers can stop using dirty hack such as anti-aliasing, kerning etc. The better font readability would improve users experience. 3) Increasing the screen size (especially width) would be good too. 4) Current optical mouse provides much better feedback than traditionnal 'ball mouse', users should use that too.
For the point 1, our current OS do not provide such thing, BeOS's applications were much more responsive than current application so it is possible to improve responsiveness, but as it means recoding the OS and the applications, this won't happen soon. Too bad: BeOS was very enjoyable to use thanks to its great responsiveness.
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> Does anyone buy Sony Cybershot cameras for anything other than the "cyber" name and the "kewl" streamilined shape? I guess the Sony brand is important there too.
:-( now I'm perhaps not fair because I was used to 35mm cameras before..
I have one, I wanted an Ixus and got a cybershot as a gift instead probably because of the higher resolution (7Mi pixel instead of 5Mi) and probably because of the brand.
I don't have a problem with the usability but I find it not very good in low light condition (fuzzy images)
But my stepsister has an Ixus 50, I've used it only a little but it seems to work better in low light condition, not as good as 35mm of course, but better than the cybershot..
While you're right in your description of newcomers to digital photography, I think that it won't stay that way, even with many millions of pixel, I'm not really satisfied with my digital camera: too many fuzzy photo, bad light sensitivity, bad latency, too long between two shots, 3* zoom etc..
I expect than in a few years, when people want to buy their second digital camera, they'll get much more sensitive to these issue than resolution which after a point doesn't really matter, now some issue may not be solvable such as having a bigger zoom in a small form factor but I hope that others will be..
> most brilliant physicist of all time.
Most brilliant *theoretical* physicists, sorry but that's a different class.
You know people tend to be interested in theories only when they apply in the real world. Einstein theories did apply in the real world, string theories have not been able to do interesting testable predictions yet, unfortunately..
>Its very easy to say today that Einstein's works are simple and obvious.
I trust that you haven't read about 'general relativity' then, which I wouldn't quite call 'simple and obvious'.
People always forget about general relativity, but it's really its biggest achivement, most of the other contributions of Einstein were more or less 'in the air', hadn't he find them others would probably have made the same contribution just a bit later, general relativity on the other hand was very far from being 'in the air'..
In the article they talk about pain relief by a placebo, so pain is not a totally real bullet either: pain is quite influenced by the mind even without placebo.
Once I shielded me for the pain of a dying nerve in a tooth by reading a book, and a dying nerve in a tooth is *quite* painful, granted this is quite different from a placebo more similar with the use of hynosis to shield a patient from pain during a surgery.
Agreed, quite often those type of stories appear at the same time as the release of major movies without any significant news in the science themselves, disgusting really.
In France we had a president (Mitterrand) who spied on a woman (Carole Bouquet) probably because he liked her.
Granted she is beautiful, but this shouldn't have happened!
And for the French, the rainbow warrior show how wrong it can go. A men got killed in this other stupid affair..
That's the danger putting too much power in the hand of individuals, who check that they aren't abusing them? Or doing really stupid thing with their power?
MacCarthysm show that even with more people taking decision, things can still go out of hand, but at least we can hope that this happen less often.
> Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips.
And? I fail to see your point, there is not much difference with IBM which sells servers chips too and embedded chips which cover a wide range of usage.
For the off-topic part about Apple:
1) I don't understand why Apple made the switch too.
2) you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligence sign.
3) Free software such as Linux is a competitor so why wouldn't they bash it if they get a chance? It's not like their principal target is geeks.
4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it.
5) About Linux comparison: when I see reviews about MacOS X, I'm always surprised how stringent the reviewers are: they expect high quality from Apple and they're quite disappointed when they don't have it, unfortunately reviewers about Linux are far more tolerant because they don't expect (and don't get) such quality: the cracks between the many layers of a Linux's desktop are always showing.
Somehow I doubt that this can be fixed in one or two years, especially since HW makers don't help by hiding their spec (Nvidia, ATI, other..).
Sure but without spending on the latest tech, you'll get behind Intel and that's something IBM cannot afford..
The R&D for fabs must still be done for IBM's own POWER and joint venture with AMD but there is a client less to recoup the cost.
I always find it funny that IBM's say that they don't care about Apple because it was a low volume client, I bet that they don't sell that many high-end POWER CPU too, compared to the number of PPC micro-controllers sold, yet investements for the high-end tech is important: that's the next generation low end..
Plus as the grand-parend said, volume != margin.
Last Christmas, I was shopping for a cordless phone suited to my (old) parents, one was dedicated to older people, but it cost twice as much as other phones with less functionnality.
The only real improvement for older people was that it had less functionnality and had bigger buttons.
Somehow I wasn't ready to pay twice as much for bigger buttons.
My feeling is that the company doing it was way too greedy and treats older people as 'cash cow', barf.
I wonder who is stupid enough to have moderated the parent as insightful?
What if the email contains an attachment which is in a format that you can't read?
Sure it is encoded as ASCII but it doesn't help..
I wonder why web browser allow plugins to kill the browser? :-)
It is well known that complex plugins (such as flash) are often buggy and that they will often crash and kill the browser, why not run the plugin in a different process?
This way if the plugin fails, the browser can detect it and restart the plugin or the user could ask the browser to restart the plugin.
The only shared memory between the browser and the plugin would correspond to the part of the window rendered by the plugin (you could have several parts handled by the same plugins process to reduce load), this way the plugin process could not corrupt the browser.
Granted it wouldn't help website fully rendered in Flash, but they usually suck, so this isn't a problem
Groovy, Scala, Nice..
There are quite a few language for the JVM which are 'better Java' (I looked at Scala and liked it myself) but the number may be their downfall..
I suspect that the reason why functionnal programming has not been successfull is that there are too many languages to choose from, so the minimum number of users needed to grow have not been reached, this could happen too to these 'better Java' languages..
-highly complete API? ..) it was very bad..
Sorry but the GUI part sucked very much and is still sucking by many measures (also Java can't print was true at some time), so while the standard library was more complete than what was available on other language, in some important areas (GUI, printing,
-it was the first language with reflection designed into its core
Ok, you've just shown that you're ignorant: Smalltalk, LISP..
Java's designers weren't even able to provide generics into the language at first, which means than when they realised that it really suck to have all these cast everywhere they had to bolt it on the language, bleh.
As for your last part, Python predates Java.. What is true is that Java has succeeded much more than many other language: the Internet bubble and Sun's marketing have really helped Java.
That said, Java is really 'plain' and too verbose for my taste, maybe the addition of local type inferencing (that C# v3 will have) would help here.
> French is even easier
Not so, a few years ago there was a tentative to simplify the language.
Unfortunately, too many 'traditionalists' were against it so it didn't work, too bad.
Well empty affirmations do not worth much in my book.
God exist. Women/Men are better at XXX because it is their nature. etc..
That's with this kind of mindset that women were forbid to vote, racism and religions works, they rely on 'obvious' strong affirmations. Bleh.
Blah, blah.. No proof, only wild assumptions.
When one doesn't really know, one should better avoid making such empty assertions especially this strongly, that's how you get all sorts of disastrous strong belief..
Ahem, while it is well established than men have (in average) higher physical strength than women (anyway the sex type average doesn't matter, only individual capabilities matter), where are your proofs that women makes better nurse than men? They 'multitask' better? So what?
It is well established than on average men are better at using maps (something with the way to do rotations in the head), but it doesn't makes men better drivers or better explorers: there is much more to the task than simply reading a map!
Nope, it is "when do you admit that you don't know?".
Why does the universe exist? Agnostic answer: I don't know.
Why does the universe exist? Religious answer: God created it.
Which trigger: Why does God exist? Religious answer: equivalent to 'I don't know'.
Atheist are just Agnostic which recognize the stupidity of the Religious point (adding an entity which doesn't solve the problem), so they acknowledge that they don't know why the universe exist but they consider that God is a stupid idea.
Could you elaborate? What do you mean by running multiple OS subsystem?
What does NT provides and what is-it used for?
If you're thinking about multiple display, multiple keyboards, yes it is possible in Linux.
I still don't beleive that VR-google will be in a 10 year timeframe: for this type of interaction to be accepted, the google must be light, with good resolution, do not look ugly and the price of system google+tracking must not be too expensive.
Your setup of cameras is also not transportable, which is a problem which will be even more acute in the future as laptops are more and more used.
Currently VR-googles are still seldom used for *gaming* purpose!! So the odds of having them used for work purpose in 10 years is quite low.
For the responsiveness, I think than HDD speed is only a small part of the issue: tests done with RAID0 setup on Internet have only shown negligible improvement whereas (by first hand usage) BeOS applications felt much more responsive than normal Windows or Linux applications on much slower computer.
Of course ultimately the response time are limitated by peripherals, but we are *far* from here. A small exemple: it took 14s to boot BeOS to a usable desktop (not counting BIOS of course) whereas in Linux it can easily take one minute to boot the OS and the desktop (KDE or Gnome).
In a linear read of the disk during one minute you can read a *lot* of data! You can say that this is not a 'linear read', but then it becomes a software problem to use efficiently the disk: BeOS have shown what is possible to do for a generic OS equivalent to what we use now (no special HW like Amiga in the beginning, it had memory protection..) , but unfortunately neither Windows nor Linux have followed..
> Most women look at sexy women because they want to evoke the same reaction and are looking for the guidelines.
I'm not so sure: a (feminine) magazine asked both men and women with which celebrity they would like to 'sleep with'. All the men picked women celebrities, and all the women picked men celebrities, until now nothing surprising.
And then the magazine asked them to choose a second celebrities: all the men picked a second woman celebrity and suprisingly the women picked women celebrities!
So are woman looking at hot women only for guidelines or is-there attraction too?
Now the women didn't say in the article that they wanted to bang the woman celebrity, maybe they just wanted to "share" the man, but it's still surprising..
> It is still doing kernel and architectual concepts today that you cannot find any other consumer level OS. PERIOD.
And from my user point of view, Linux/Unix are doing exactly the same thing as Windows, so these 'architectural concepts' that NT has bring absolutly *nothing*: no better feature, no increased stability.
OTOH, Plan9's concepts facilitates remote use, BeOS usage of threads improved responsiveness: those are features that are interesting, not vagues 'architectural concepts' bringing nothing to the user.
About your point 3, I'm not so sure that 3D would be that helpful, afterall even if you've had a 3D display, it is still projected as 2D on your retina, so you'll still see crossing lines.
Our brain is quite good at reconstructing 3D-ness for the simple objects that surround us, but I'm not so sure that it'd be able to do a good job for complex 3D diagrams.
So 3D would help, but how much? That is the question.
For the tab, you can already do some kind of organisation in 2D, for example you can open different windows for different website and then use only tabs to navigate in a website.
Still it is true that tab do not show the dependency but OTOH showing depencencies would take up valuable screen space, so it is a tradeoff..
> My prescription, switch to glasses with very high resolution
Currently, I've heard that virtual reality goggles provides motion sickness: you're head is moving but what you're seeing is not moving --> motion sickness.
I don't know about you, but I'd hate getting seasick with using a computer.
So to work, as you said the computer must monitor the head and do it nearly flawlessly before the setup is usable, somehow I don't expect this kind of setup being used.. especially not in 10 years!
IMHO before switching to a different GUI, we should try to perfect what we have:
1) everything should occur in less than 1/10s so that we can keep focusing on the task.
2) The screen resolution should be enhanced so that computers can stop using dirty hack such as anti-aliasing, kerning etc. The better font readability would improve users experience.
3) Increasing the screen size (especially width) would be good too.
4) Current optical mouse provides much better feedback than traditionnal 'ball mouse', users should use that too.
For the point 1, our current OS do not provide such thing, BeOS's applications were much more responsive than current application so it is possible to improve responsiveness, but as it means recoding the OS and the applications, this won't happen soon.
Too bad: BeOS was very enjoyable to use thanks to its great responsiveness.