I was amazed at just how much lightning was in that video. It never occurred to me until now that there would be so many thunderstorms going on all over the world all of the time. This is a rare video where the superlatives in the headline (amazing, fantastic etc.) are well and truly justified.
For Aperture, iMovie, iPhoto and Garage band, full screen mode is actually pretty good (except it doesn't work with a second monitor, which is a shame -- it should at least let you keep the dashboard on there). I wouldn't say it's totally useless. I agree that for safari, mail and iWork it's not so good.
A version of twitter that worked in full screen (like the iPad version, with sliding panels) would be very interesting. It might not work, but I'd like to see it.
I live in the UK, and over here there are about 25 million households. Let's say that each has an average of 4 bulbs burning for 5 hours a night during a single month. Let's say November. If those bulbs burn 100W of electricity each, that's 400 million W hours, or 4 MWh per night. That's 120 MWh for one month. However you argue it, that's a lot of energy, that can be reduced by a factor of TEN, by simply switching people to newer technology. THAT is what science and progress is all about.
I might be out on my math, I'm not an electrical engineer, but I think my point stands. If EVERYBODY used 10W eco-bulbs rather than 100W incandescent, it would make a noticeable difference.
OK, so is that reduction going to be wiped out by China and India? Maybe, but that's no excuse. Currently the USA is the #1 consumer of energy in the world. Regardless of what anyone else is doing, it is our duty to do better, and we can. We should lead by doing the right thing. It's like you're saying that you want to be the worst in the world, because if you aren't then somebody else might stoop lower.
I hope India and China find a way of meeting their energy needs without destroying the earth. I'm sure they will, because as we burn through our oil and coal it gets more and more expensive. Soon we'll reach the point that it is not just a good idea, but an economic necessity that they (and we) become significantly more efficient with our energy use. If they want to be globally dominant, they'll need to become more efficient before Europe or the US get there.
BTW, lighter cars aren't less safe per se -- they can be just as safe for the occupants if designed properly and are ALWAYS safer for pedestrians. Look at the cars that 5 stars in the Euro NCAP tests. Most of them are small family cars.
With hyperbole like that, I take it you're somewhat against the idea of reversing man-made global warming and trying to save our planet. Look, I'm sure you're an intelligent person. If you can't see that it is totally insane to continue using 100W light bulbs, there is no hope for any of us. You can light an entire house using less energy than that single 100W bulb would use, and the little photons of light would be perfectly adequate.
Look around you. See what is happening and get a god damn clue. Once you've done that, stop using the idiotic language you used above and become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
My apologies if you were trying to play devil's advocate (though if that's the case it was a bit pointless -- I don't think the scientists are asking why the climate scientists get so much stick -- I think they know already), but it didn't come across that way. If you were just trolling, grow up and do something useful.
I think it's an incredible project, and I'll certainly buy one for my son when they come out. I'm just wondering though if not having VGA is a bit of an oversight and I'd be interested to know why you made that tradeoff. I agree composite is great for places where old TVs are common, and HDMI is great for those of us who just want it as a novelty, it's just I can't help but feel that the people who could benefit most from this would most likely get one of these along with a free or very low cost second-hand monitor, which would almost certainly be VGA only.
That could happen, but you're right -- getting buy-in from the OEMs would be hard (probably impossible to start), so the path of least resistance would be to continue as is. Also, adding a central authority (all of the infrastructure for securely connecting clients) really complicates things and will also be a negative vs. fax.
Here's an alternative take, going a bit beyond the tech. If you look at what fax is used for today, I'd say it mostly comes down to this: documents that either a) need to be, or b) have been signed. I bet that accounts for 80% of current fax use (that people care about). Certainly the only times I've used a fax are to receive and return a contract. Therefore, the only thing I can see that can replace fax is a simple, de-centralized way of digitally verifying and signing read-only documents (and those signatures being legally binding). If you can do that, it will save the lawyers time and money and will give them an easily archived document that doesn't require 7 years of storage in a basement (hard drive space is cheaper than physical storage). They'd probably switch to email as the transport, especially if we also gave them a super-easy way to encrypt the message using public/private keys that were shared in an open directory. The only thing they'd be missing is guaranteed delivery, but I think they'd live without that for a lot of things (I think things that currently need guaranteed delivery go by special-delivery anyway).
For my scenario to become reality, just as big a change needs to happen as for yours, but you aren't fighting the old-guard OEMS, you're simply trying to sell a better service that has no dependency on other people playing nicely. If you can get all legal firms in one area to use the solution (so they can use it to send documents between each other), it'll have a knock-on affect as legal firms who come in to contact with them see how it could also help them. Once you reach a critical mass (probably 30% of law firms), there'd be no stopping you.
People have been working on this (digital signatures) for years, and clearly something isn't good enough about it (else it would have taken off). One of the problems is that it's expensive -- either expensive hardware (like RSA tags) or certificates (this annoys me) -- something isn't right. It'd have to be based entirely off open standards, and it'd have to be free or extremely cheap. For me to sign a contract, I'll buy a $10 key (as a one off), but I won't buy a $150 certificate that lasts one year. If you could give out free digital certificates/keys, and they be legally binding, that'd be massive.
I didn't realize how quickly I'd fill up all of my disks with videos of my kids when I upgraded to a full HD camcorder. I've now filled up every disk I own, and it's making it tricky to actually do stuff on my computers.
Fax was stupid tech 15 - 20 years ago. Transmitting bits instead of data? Are you nuts?
I'm intrigued... What is the difference between bits and data? You do realize it's all the same, right? Fax machines are just as digital as a workstation, they just interface over an analogue telephone network.
I'd love to have the chance to show a doctor or lawyer what I could do for them with smart tech
Trouble is, even though those doctors and lawyers are the people who would need to purchase your new improved system, they don't actually care. Look at how they work -- they employ staff (temps in the legal profession, regular admin staff in medical) to do all of that for them. Those temps tend to come and go, so whatever solution you give them needs to involve minimal training -- fax machines are great, because everyone knows how they work. Whatever solution you come up with also has to work with zero training/cost for the recipient. Fax machines are great because it ticks this box too. It also needs to be relatively secure and reliable. Fax is reliable because if you get a send confirmation you can be pretty sure that they got it.
The simplest workable solution is usually the best, and fax machines currently fall in to that category. Email almost meets the criteria, but the extra steps and uncertainties make it less suited, so far as these people are concerned.
I know you're busy and it looks expensive, but you need to try harder for me to prove to you that it's not.
So speak to people in those professions and prepare a pitch. If you really can do stuff to improve their lives, they'll listen.
FWIW, I'm a software developer, and I've created software to do exactly what you are talking about -- I've built document management software and pitched it to legal people. I'm not a great sales person/networker (I'm working on it), so my evidence doesn't count for much, but I've found that people do not want to change a system that mostly works for them, despite the advantages. You need to show that you can save them serious time and money (but let's be honest, sending fax isn't time consuming), or bring them a whole new world of business that was previously unavailable (like e-commerce), but that doesn't apply here.
The one that changed everything for me was the smaller of two books that came with Blitz Basic 2 (for my Amiga). It was a cross between a reference manual and a guide to programming, and from it I learned to write code. 20 years later, I'm still coding, full-time now, and I still love it.
The problem back then (for me at least) was that compilers, SDKs and reference manuals cost a fortune. I earned £4 a week delivering newspapers, so I couldn't afford £300 for a C compiler and £200 for the Commodore SDK. Once you outgrew the included basic, it was quite hard to know where to go next.
But I'm not suggesting that's a classic by any stretch, it's just a book that had a profound impact on me. As for classics that might have been overlooked so far in this discussion, how about Game Programming Gems? Over the years I'm quite sure that they've made a pretty sound impact on the world of games programming. My favourite books (which are mentioned above, but aren't technical guides per se) are Mythical Man Month and Peopleware. Peopleware in particular taught me that good programming is as much about people as it is about syntax. I also liked Extreme Programming by Beck.
Looks like a DNS hack, which'd explain why some people are seeing it come back to life and others aren't -- all depends on ISP DNS servers (cacheing and whatnot).
Anyway, can't say I'm particularly bothered. Once upon a time, about 7 years ago, the Register went downhill so badly that I stopped visiting it all together. They had a bone-headed editorial style that made them seem arrogant, dim-witted and sometimes just unpleasant. These days, whenever I accidentally follow a YC HackerNews link there (from Twitter), it looks like they're basically the same now as then.
The tipping point for me came when some idiot on their staff wrote an article complaining that Google had drawn a special logo for a world water day, but not for St. George's day (an silly English thing that we have every year). It looks like a joke in bad taste, but I don't think it was - not least because the guy that wrote tended to have a 'toxic' element in most of his writing. I've seen a few articles since showing their scepticism of climate change, wheeling out the usual 'aren't we so clever for being able to think for ourselves' bullshit despite clearly not having 'a fucking clue'.
I guess their tech coverage was OK, but their opinions got right up my nose.
Scratch is very good, but I'd probably recommend Hackety Hack instead. A third alternative is Alice. Somebody who wants to introduce children to programming should definitely look at all three.
It's Ruby, so it's nice and compact and quite readable, and it includes Shoes, so you can create windows and forms and respond to events in single lines of code (that do what they say).
Scratch is very good, I agree, but for a presentation (if it's hands-off for the kids), the risk is that the kids will concentrate on the pretty 3D graphics and miss the point of those funny little grey oblongs (and they probably won't be able to read the instructions if it's projected on a big screen).
How about Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/)? It's a really simple IDE designed to let kids explore Ruby. It lets you create Windows and buttons and event handlers and stuff really easily, so you can create a 'real' app in a few lines of really quite readable code. You can probably make the font big so the kids can see what you're typing.
That's the truth. I don't even know why we're bothering to discuss this stuff, since it's the same every time - grand promises and pie-in-the-sky stuff that will never materialise. They've been this way for as long as I can remember (though, to be fair, they pretty much owned 8-bit BASIC, so maybe they started off OK). I bet they keep the ribbons though, since it seems they've already coded those:(
Why can't you access The Economist through a specially formatted web page?
Because off-line web-apps full of content are only just really becoming possible (and I'm not sure it's possible at all right now for magazines - HTML5 does support a basic level of 'off-line' use, but I don't think it'd work for a big package of content). FWIW, I'm a web developer, but I don't develop media-rich web apps, so I'm not totally up on this.
Whoops:) Didn't mean to leave that mostly in there, or at least make it sound a/bit/ sarcastic. Ah well. I/have/ enjoyed/. very much, you created something very good and made a difference.
Of course! I came straight to the comments to post the exact same thing. It is my favourite xkcd, I think:)
FWIW, I'll believe that Microsoft have actually changed something for the better once it's shipping and it is proven that they actually did it. Too often they've been quick to talk and slow to deliver.
Wouldn't a better analogy be the phone system itself? The connector, the line voltages, the time between signals, etc. Surely they would be the API? The phone number is just a value you pass in to the API. The phone book is just a dictionary of those numbers.
Actually, it is. At least here in the UK - I haven't looked in to it in the US yet. We have something over here called 'database' rights, which protect your collection of otherwise public data. It's meant to protect the effort that goes in to collecting and collating data for a directory. It's a bit of a pain when you want to start building your own directory of E.g., business listings (which is why I looked in to it).
This always confused me, because companies buy and sell rights to names every day, for millions of dollars, without invalidating the importance of that name. I suspect how well this argument stacks up depends, as always, on which side has more money to spend on lawyers.
Are you using a stream-lined version of XP? That's one of the things you could disable in, e.g. XP lite. By default, XP has zip support. It calls them 'Compressed Folders'. I used to disable it and install WinZip/WinRar/7-zip, because the MS zip support was (and still is) very slow and a bit buggy.
Windows 7 does quite a bit of stuff that XP doesn't, but the fundamentals are basically the same from an end-user perspective. Things like GPU acceleration for the desktop is good, because it frees up some CPU/memory bandwidth and moves it to the GPU. The networking is much improved, and so is the shell. There's plenty of stuff going on, you just don't see much of it, aside from the glass effect Windows and new task bar.
IBM are now all about consultancy and services, which suits them rather well. They're also the number 2 tech company (by the crude measure of market cap), behind Apple but ahead of Microsoft. No, they're not #1, but they're hardly 'a shadow'.
I recall Microsoft being called up on antitrust charges because they tried to give preferential treatment to IE on THEIR product
I know you know this bit, but just for clarity's sake (because a lot of people here don't seem to know why Microsoft are so hated): Microsoft's product was effectively the only product in that market, giving them an actual monopoly. Monopolies aren't bad per se, unless the company that has the monopoly starts to use their position to destroy competition. Microsoft were definitely abusing their position, and that is why they were slapped. The IE bundling wasn't their first serious abuse of power either (if you're interested, also see: DR-DOS problems running Windows 3, the Disk Stacker compression tool, their secret use of APIs for their own software (like scatter-read in NT for SQL Server), something about Word Perfect (I forgot what that was though), bullying OEMs in to not shipping non-MS operating systems on PCs).
The reason it doesn't apply to Apple now is because Apple do not have a monopoly on anything, smart phones included. What share of the smart phone market do Apple have? It's certainly less than the 90% or so that they'd need to be considered a monopoly. If Apple make a serious error of judgement (like you could argue they have with this no-links rule), the theory is that there are enough options on the market that if people really care they can buy an alternative. And there are alternatives and people who don't like Apple are buying them, so it seems the free market is working.
Poor GoDaddy built their entire cloud hosting solution based on the Xserve (I wonder if that investment was among the soured investments that ended up convincing GD's principals and investors to sell the company).
Don't be silly, investors don't care one jot about the specific details of the IT infrastructure, they just care that it works and that it 'sounds' credible/cool/high-tech when people talk about it. In their heads, they imagine that it's a trivial task to exchange a rack of ageing server made by company A with a single blade server from company B. They know it just requires a few hundred thousand dollars and a little bit of time. And they're right, because people like us do worry about the specifics and we take great pride in making sure that the IT stuff we work on does work.
They [Apple], completely dropped the ball and forgot about the back room IT folks again
Here's my take on this sentiment: Apple have limited resources (albeit for a given definition of 'limited') and they need to slice their time in the way that they feel gives them the best shot at achieving what they want to do. If you look back at Apple's (and Steve Jobs' in particular) vision, it's never been about enterprise. Even Next wasn't really about enterprise, despite everything. In my mind, Apple are about making computers work for everyone. iCloud is far more important to Apple than enterprise -- we (the enterprise) can look after ourselves -- we don't need Apple's vision to keep our workhorse servers running mission critical apps. Consumers, however, are going to love the way that iCloud lets them save a document on one computer/device, and instantly have it available on all of their computers/devices. That's a big change, and IMHO, Apple are right to shift their focus away from the enterprise/niche pro markets and in to this area.
Of course, I might feel differently if I worked for cable TV using FCP day in day out, or if I had a room full of Xserve's. I'd probably be a bit annoyed too, but I'd like to think not -- that I can adapt without too much whining or hand wringing, just like Apple can.
I'm on FF and I see the same thing too. I wonder, could ad-block plus cause this? Interesting -- I'll try turning it off and seeing if that fixes the random page jumps...
Slashdot Mirror
I was amazed at just how much lightning was in that video. It never occurred to me until now that there would be so many thunderstorms going on all over the world all of the time. This is a rare video where the superlatives in the headline (amazing, fantastic etc.) are well and truly justified.
For Aperture, iMovie, iPhoto and Garage band, full screen mode is actually pretty good (except it doesn't work with a second monitor, which is a shame -- it should at least let you keep the dashboard on there). I wouldn't say it's totally useless. I agree that for safari, mail and iWork it's not so good.
A version of twitter that worked in full screen (like the iPad version, with sliding panels) would be very interesting. It might not work, but I'd like to see it.
I live in the UK, and over here there are about 25 million households. Let's say that each has an average of 4 bulbs burning for 5 hours a night during a single month. Let's say November. If those bulbs burn 100W of electricity each, that's 400 million W hours, or 4 MWh per night. That's 120 MWh for one month. However you argue it, that's a lot of energy, that can be reduced by a factor of TEN, by simply switching people to newer technology. THAT is what science and progress is all about.
I might be out on my math, I'm not an electrical engineer, but I think my point stands. If EVERYBODY used 10W eco-bulbs rather than 100W incandescent, it would make a noticeable difference.
OK, so is that reduction going to be wiped out by China and India? Maybe, but that's no excuse. Currently the USA is the #1 consumer of energy in the world. Regardless of what anyone else is doing, it is our duty to do better, and we can. We should lead by doing the right thing. It's like you're saying that you want to be the worst in the world, because if you aren't then somebody else might stoop lower.
I hope India and China find a way of meeting their energy needs without destroying the earth. I'm sure they will, because as we burn through our oil and coal it gets more and more expensive. Soon we'll reach the point that it is not just a good idea, but an economic necessity that they (and we) become significantly more efficient with our energy use. If they want to be globally dominant, they'll need to become more efficient before Europe or the US get there.
BTW, lighter cars aren't less safe per se -- they can be just as safe for the occupants if designed properly and are ALWAYS safer for pedestrians. Look at the cars that 5 stars in the Euro NCAP tests. Most of them are small family cars.
Hmmmm.
demanding trillions of dollars
Ah
coercive force of law
Yep
to dictate what mileage automobiles get
I see
outlawing 100W incandescent light bulbs
With hyperbole like that, I take it you're somewhat against the idea of reversing man-made global warming and trying to save our planet. Look, I'm sure you're an intelligent person. If you can't see that it is totally insane to continue using 100W light bulbs, there is no hope for any of us. You can light an entire house using less energy than that single 100W bulb would use, and the little photons of light would be perfectly adequate.
Look around you. See what is happening and get a god damn clue. Once you've done that, stop using the idiotic language you used above and become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
My apologies if you were trying to play devil's advocate (though if that's the case it was a bit pointless -- I don't think the scientists are asking why the climate scientists get so much stick -- I think they know already), but it didn't come across that way. If you were just trolling, grow up and do something useful.
I think it's an incredible project, and I'll certainly buy one for my son when they come out. I'm just wondering though if not having VGA is a bit of an oversight and I'd be interested to know why you made that tradeoff. I agree composite is great for places where old TVs are common, and HDMI is great for those of us who just want it as a novelty, it's just I can't help but feel that the people who could benefit most from this would most likely get one of these along with a free or very low cost second-hand monitor, which would almost certainly be VGA only.
That could happen, but you're right -- getting buy-in from the OEMs would be hard (probably impossible to start), so the path of least resistance would be to continue as is. Also, adding a central authority (all of the infrastructure for securely connecting clients) really complicates things and will also be a negative vs. fax.
Here's an alternative take, going a bit beyond the tech. If you look at what fax is used for today, I'd say it mostly comes down to this: documents that either a) need to be, or b) have been signed. I bet that accounts for 80% of current fax use (that people care about). Certainly the only times I've used a fax are to receive and return a contract. Therefore, the only thing I can see that can replace fax is a simple, de-centralized way of digitally verifying and signing read-only documents (and those signatures being legally binding). If you can do that, it will save the lawyers time and money and will give them an easily archived document that doesn't require 7 years of storage in a basement (hard drive space is cheaper than physical storage). They'd probably switch to email as the transport, especially if we also gave them a super-easy way to encrypt the message using public/private keys that were shared in an open directory. The only thing they'd be missing is guaranteed delivery, but I think they'd live without that for a lot of things (I think things that currently need guaranteed delivery go by special-delivery anyway).
For my scenario to become reality, just as big a change needs to happen as for yours, but you aren't fighting the old-guard OEMS, you're simply trying to sell a better service that has no dependency on other people playing nicely. If you can get all legal firms in one area to use the solution (so they can use it to send documents between each other), it'll have a knock-on affect as legal firms who come in to contact with them see how it could also help them. Once you reach a critical mass (probably 30% of law firms), there'd be no stopping you.
People have been working on this (digital signatures) for years, and clearly something isn't good enough about it (else it would have taken off). One of the problems is that it's expensive -- either expensive hardware (like RSA tags) or certificates (this annoys me) -- something isn't right. It'd have to be based entirely off open standards, and it'd have to be free or extremely cheap. For me to sign a contract, I'll buy a $10 key (as a one off), but I won't buy a $150 certificate that lasts one year. If you could give out free digital certificates/keys, and they be legally binding, that'd be massive.
Anyway, I'm rambling now, sorry :)
Also if you're into shooting HD video.
Amen to that :(
I didn't realize how quickly I'd fill up all of my disks with videos of my kids when I upgraded to a full HD camcorder. I've now filled up every disk I own, and it's making it tricky to actually do stuff on my computers.
Fax was stupid tech 15 - 20 years ago. Transmitting bits instead of data? Are you nuts?
I'm intrigued... What is the difference between bits and data? You do realize it's all the same, right? Fax machines are just as digital as a workstation, they just interface over an analogue telephone network.
I'd love to have the chance to show a doctor or lawyer what I could do for them with smart tech
Trouble is, even though those doctors and lawyers are the people who would need to purchase your new improved system, they don't actually care. Look at how they work -- they employ staff (temps in the legal profession, regular admin staff in medical) to do all of that for them. Those temps tend to come and go, so whatever solution you give them needs to involve minimal training -- fax machines are great, because everyone knows how they work. Whatever solution you come up with also has to work with zero training/cost for the recipient. Fax machines are great because it ticks this box too. It also needs to be relatively secure and reliable. Fax is reliable because if you get a send confirmation you can be pretty sure that they got it.
The simplest workable solution is usually the best, and fax machines currently fall in to that category. Email almost meets the criteria, but the extra steps and uncertainties make it less suited, so far as these people are concerned.
I know you're busy and it looks expensive, but you need to try harder for me to prove to you that it's not.
So speak to people in those professions and prepare a pitch. If you really can do stuff to improve their lives, they'll listen.
FWIW, I'm a software developer, and I've created software to do exactly what you are talking about -- I've built document management software and pitched it to legal people. I'm not a great sales person/networker (I'm working on it), so my evidence doesn't count for much, but I've found that people do not want to change a system that mostly works for them, despite the advantages. You need to show that you can save them serious time and money (but let's be honest, sending fax isn't time consuming), or bring them a whole new world of business that was previously unavailable (like e-commerce), but that doesn't apply here.
The one that changed everything for me was the smaller of two books that came with Blitz Basic 2 (for my Amiga). It was a cross between a reference manual and a guide to programming, and from it I learned to write code. 20 years later, I'm still coding, full-time now, and I still love it.
The problem back then (for me at least) was that compilers, SDKs and reference manuals cost a fortune. I earned £4 a week delivering newspapers, so I couldn't afford £300 for a C compiler and £200 for the Commodore SDK. Once you outgrew the included basic, it was quite hard to know where to go next.
But I'm not suggesting that's a classic by any stretch, it's just a book that had a profound impact on me. As for classics that might have been overlooked so far in this discussion, how about Game Programming Gems? Over the years I'm quite sure that they've made a pretty sound impact on the world of games programming. My favourite books (which are mentioned above, but aren't technical guides per se) are Mythical Man Month and Peopleware. Peopleware in particular taught me that good programming is as much about people as it is about syntax. I also liked Extreme Programming by Beck.
Looks like a DNS hack, which'd explain why some people are seeing it come back to life and others aren't -- all depends on ISP DNS servers (cacheing and whatnot).
Anyway, can't say I'm particularly bothered. Once upon a time, about 7 years ago, the Register went downhill so badly that I stopped visiting it all together. They had a bone-headed editorial style that made them seem arrogant, dim-witted and sometimes just unpleasant. These days, whenever I accidentally follow a YC HackerNews link there (from Twitter), it looks like they're basically the same now as then.
The tipping point for me came when some idiot on their staff wrote an article complaining that Google had drawn a special logo for a world water day, but not for St. George's day (an silly English thing that we have every year). It looks like a joke in bad taste, but I don't think it was - not least because the guy that wrote tended to have a 'toxic' element in most of his writing. I've seen a few articles since showing their scepticism of climate change, wheeling out the usual 'aren't we so clever for being able to think for ourselves' bullshit despite clearly not having 'a fucking clue'.
I guess their tech coverage was OK, but their opinions got right up my nose.
Scratch is very good, but I'd probably recommend Hackety Hack instead. A third alternative is Alice. Somebody who wants to introduce children to programming should definitely look at all three.
Hackety Hack: http://hackety-hack.com/
It's Ruby, so it's nice and compact and quite readable, and it includes Shoes, so you can create windows and forms and respond to events in single lines of code (that do what they say).
Scratch is very good, I agree, but for a presentation (if it's hands-off for the kids), the risk is that the kids will concentrate on the pretty 3D graphics and miss the point of those funny little grey oblongs (and they probably won't be able to read the instructions if it's projected on a big screen).
How about Shoes (http://shoesrb.com/)? It's a really simple IDE designed to let kids explore Ruby. It lets you create Windows and buttons and event handlers and stuff really easily, so you can create a 'real' app in a few lines of really quite readable code. You can probably make the font big so the kids can see what you're typing.
That's the truth. I don't even know why we're bothering to discuss this stuff, since it's the same every time - grand promises and pie-in-the-sky stuff that will never materialise. They've been this way for as long as I can remember (though, to be fair, they pretty much owned 8-bit BASIC, so maybe they started off OK). I bet they keep the ribbons though, since it seems they've already coded those :(
Why can't you access The Economist through a specially formatted web page?
Because off-line web-apps full of content are only just really becoming possible (and I'm not sure it's possible at all right now for magazines - HTML5 does support a basic level of 'off-line' use, but I don't think it'd work for a big package of content). FWIW, I'm a web developer, but I don't develop media-rich web apps, so I'm not totally up on this.
Whoops :) Didn't mean to leave that mostly in there, or at least make it sound a /bit/ sarcastic. Ah well. I /have/ enjoyed /. very much, you created something very good and made a difference.
Best of luck. I've been a mostly silent reader of Slashdot since about 1999, but I've enjoyed it very much. Mostly.
I guess it's true. Slashdot is dead. Fox News confirms it (seriously: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/24/gawker-7-other-formerly-popular-sites-dead-or-dying/)
Of course! I came straight to the comments to post the exact same thing. It is my favourite xkcd, I think :)
FWIW, I'll believe that Microsoft have actually changed something for the better once it's shipping and it is proven that they actually did it. Too often they've been quick to talk and slow to deliver.
A better analogy would be a phone book
Wouldn't a better analogy be the phone system itself? The connector, the line voltages, the time between signals, etc. Surely they would be the API? The phone number is just a value you pass in to the API. The phone book is just a dictionary of those numbers.
Actually, it is. At least here in the UK - I haven't looked in to it in the US yet. We have something over here called 'database' rights, which protect your collection of otherwise public data. It's meant to protect the effort that goes in to collecting and collating data for a directory. It's a bit of a pain when you want to start building your own directory of E.g., business listings (which is why I looked in to it).
This always confused me, because companies buy and sell rights to names every day, for millions of dollars, without invalidating the importance of that name. I suspect how well this argument stacks up depends, as always, on which side has more money to spend on lawyers.
Are you using a stream-lined version of XP? That's one of the things you could disable in, e.g. XP lite. By default, XP has zip support. It calls them 'Compressed Folders'. I used to disable it and install WinZip/WinRar/7-zip, because the MS zip support was (and still is) very slow and a bit buggy.
Windows 7 does quite a bit of stuff that XP doesn't, but the fundamentals are basically the same from an end-user perspective. Things like GPU acceleration for the desktop is good, because it frees up some CPU/memory bandwidth and moves it to the GPU. The networking is much improved, and so is the shell. There's plenty of stuff going on, you just don't see much of it, aside from the glass effect Windows and new task bar.
IBM are now all about consultancy and services, which suits them rather well. They're also the number 2 tech company (by the crude measure of market cap), behind Apple but ahead of Microsoft. No, they're not #1, but they're hardly 'a shadow'.
I recall Microsoft being called up on antitrust charges because they tried to give preferential treatment to IE on THEIR product
I know you know this bit, but just for clarity's sake (because a lot of people here don't seem to know why Microsoft are so hated): Microsoft's product was effectively the only product in that market, giving them an actual monopoly. Monopolies aren't bad per se, unless the company that has the monopoly starts to use their position to destroy competition. Microsoft were definitely abusing their position, and that is why they were slapped. The IE bundling wasn't their first serious abuse of power either (if you're interested, also see: DR-DOS problems running Windows 3, the Disk Stacker compression tool, their secret use of APIs for their own software (like scatter-read in NT for SQL Server), something about Word Perfect (I forgot what that was though), bullying OEMs in to not shipping non-MS operating systems on PCs).
The reason it doesn't apply to Apple now is because Apple do not have a monopoly on anything, smart phones included. What share of the smart phone market do Apple have? It's certainly less than the 90% or so that they'd need to be considered a monopoly. If Apple make a serious error of judgement (like you could argue they have with this no-links rule), the theory is that there are enough options on the market that if people really care they can buy an alternative. And there are alternatives and people who don't like Apple are buying them, so it seems the free market is working.
Poor GoDaddy built their entire cloud hosting solution based on the Xserve (I wonder if that investment was among the soured investments that ended up convincing GD's principals and investors to sell the company).
Don't be silly, investors don't care one jot about the specific details of the IT infrastructure, they just care that it works and that it 'sounds' credible/cool/high-tech when people talk about it. In their heads, they imagine that it's a trivial task to exchange a rack of ageing server made by company A with a single blade server from company B. They know it just requires a few hundred thousand dollars and a little bit of time. And they're right, because people like us do worry about the specifics and we take great pride in making sure that the IT stuff we work on does work.
They [Apple], completely dropped the ball and forgot about the back room IT folks again
Here's my take on this sentiment: Apple have limited resources (albeit for a given definition of 'limited') and they need to slice their time in the way that they feel gives them the best shot at achieving what they want to do. If you look back at Apple's (and Steve Jobs' in particular) vision, it's never been about enterprise. Even Next wasn't really about enterprise, despite everything. In my mind, Apple are about making computers work for everyone. iCloud is far more important to Apple than enterprise -- we (the enterprise) can look after ourselves -- we don't need Apple's vision to keep our workhorse servers running mission critical apps. Consumers, however, are going to love the way that iCloud lets them save a document on one computer/device, and instantly have it available on all of their computers/devices. That's a big change, and IMHO, Apple are right to shift their focus away from the enterprise/niche pro markets and in to this area.
Of course, I might feel differently if I worked for cable TV using FCP day in day out, or if I had a room full of Xserve's. I'd probably be a bit annoyed too, but I'd like to think not -- that I can adapt without too much whining or hand wringing, just like Apple can.
I'm on FF and I see the same thing too. I wonder, could ad-block plus cause this? Interesting -- I'll try turning it off and seeing if that fixes the random page jumps...