I was recently lucky enough to have two tours of the CMS experiment, once on the open day and a second private tour a couple of weeks later. I can honestly say that I felt humbled standing next to it.
I am no stranger to technology, I work as a sysadmin in a large, world class data center. But this thing is something else. To think that a team made up of people from all over the world can accomplish something like this when they put their minds to it.
And the purpose of it? Not to make weapons or money, but purely and simply, to increase our knowledge.
I own an iPod Touch and it is HANDS DOWN the greatest tech device I've ever bought.
I wholeheartedly agree. I have owned my fair share of tech, but the iPod Touch is the best designed, most pleasurable piece of equipment I've used to date. I still have a smile on my face each time I use it, and I've had it for a couple of months now.
The difference Apple brings to the market is that extra yard. Yes their stuff is expensive compared to the competition, yes there are problems with it, yes they are no better than others in terms of things like the non-disclosure agreement. But still the extra polish, the attention to detail makes it worth it for me.
Actually, it was the script writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples who first came up with the idea of Deckard being a replicant. Scott keeps it nicely ambiguous during the film, but himself finally admitted in an interview more recently that in his view Deckard is a replicant.
Personally, I think the matter is left ambiguous enough in the film (even the directors cut) for the viewer to make up their own mind.
The Gmail interface sucks. When I first started using it I didn't mind as I assumed it would be cleaned up, but it's hardly changed. It still looks like someone dropped a purely functional UI on a back end with a view to replacing it later when they had time. Props to Google for the service, good spam filtering, pushing the boundaries on quotas etc, but please now spend a bit of time redoing the UI!
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. The search utilities we are being offered, Google toolbar, Spotlight are most useful bringing order to an already chaotic environment. But also they then promote the idea that you don't even need maintain any order any more so you stop doing it, making the tools even more useful.
In the long term I wonder if this is a dangerous thing, people will worry less about order and rely more on tools to bring order to their environments. But order covers other areas too, in your approach to work, coding, writing etc. I wonder if this will start breaking down eventually?
Am I the only one baffled by this obsession with local search? I send most of 5 days a week using desktop computers and a lot of the weekends, and I have to say that I very rarely need to search for anything locally. I put stuff where I can find it later using simple directory structures. Is that so difficult?
If my car comes flying through your bedroom window at 30 miles an hour because I parked it at the top of a hill in neutral, should General Motors be responsible?
I don't agree that this is a fair analogy. A more appropriate analogy would be that General Motors sells you a car that you believe to be the most up to date, leading model, only for it to be stolen the next day by some 14 year old oik who knows that he can open the rear passenger door just by tapping on the lock with a screw driver.
I am fed up with this attitide that it's the fault of the user who should know better. Utter rubbish. The product is faulty, pure and simple, and the fault is with the manufacturer, Microsoft in this case for making insecure software. They've known about the problems for years, and have done little or nothing to fix them.
I bought a Mac for my parents a couple of years ago. It runs OSX. Apart from a bit of help with the network settings I didn't have to do anything else to get them online SECURELY. Why is that? Because the machine comes with a firewall, built in, and turned on by default, and the OS is written with security as one of the primary goals. I have full confidence that they are now as secure as they need to be, and that if I'd bought them a PC instead the machine would be riddled with viruses and spyware by now.
I bought an iTrip a couple of years back but was very dissapointed with it. Not only was the sound quality terrible at it's best, it was impossible to find an unused frequency when in a built up area. Plus, on long journeys you are forever retuning the thing as you move from one area to the next, chasing unused frequencies.
I then looked into an expensive iPod compatible stereo, but finally went for a 16 euro faux cassett type adapter. Works perfectly. I've only had to replace it once when the wire broke. One thing you have to do though is to oil the mechanism a little to stop it squeaking.
Let's not get started on relying on a third party (Google) whom you have no contract with for a large percentage of your business. That's got to rank up there with Stupid Business Models 101 in my view.
I couldn't agree more. It's an unfortunate fact that one single entity has such a monopoly on search at the moment, but that doesn't mean you have to base your entire business model on your rank at their site. You might as well base it on the weather, you have little if any control over it, your business is at the whim of their decisions, and you have no recourse if it doesn't go your way.
According to this article - The governments that have committed to buy laptops for their schoolchildren include Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay.
So it sounds like governments are starting to put their money on the table.
The majority of these same people either don't know there are alternatives, or aren't in a position to change. They don't 'like' it, they just put up with it.
Even if the source code is completely open, maybe 1% of the population has the skill to audit the code. The other 99% have to take it on trust, which is counter to the entire idea of open democracy.
I disagree. 1% is still almost 300,000 people by todays figures. Add to that the various academic institutions and liberty groups that would be keen on auditing the code, plus the opposition party(s) who also have more than a passing interest in keeping things fair, AND probably a large number of foreign people who would also have access, I think you have enough eyeballs to ensure the system is sufficiently audited.
Our government needs an elected body of IT experts
If, as you say (and I entirely agree) that "A democratic system cannot work unless there is absolute transparency in the voting process." then simply making the code availble for public perusal (open source) would be sufficient, as with the Australian system. Indeed, if you can't trust an elected government to manage it's evoting systems properly, then electing a second body to police the system doesn't ensure that the system will be any fairer.
This stance only makes sense if you then make a visible public statement about why you didn't vote, or aproach the relevant authorities about the problem. I hope you did.
They can then retrieve available items from inside the store, or have the clothes shipped from a central warehouse... skipping the line at the register completely.
Wow, imagine this extended to the home, allowing shoppers to buy without even leaving the house! Oh, wait...
Isn't it about time Microsoft was held accountable for it's part in this mess? And I don't mean getting all it's XP users to upgrade to Vista, I mean doing something to solve the problem now. Surely a massive publicity campaign together with some patches would do a huge amount of good here?
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I was recently lucky enough to have two tours of the CMS experiment, once on the open day and a second private tour a couple of weeks later. I can honestly say that I felt humbled standing next to it.
I am no stranger to technology, I work as a sysadmin in a large, world class data center. But this thing is something else. To think that a team made up of people from all over the world can accomplish something like this when they put their minds to it.
And the purpose of it? Not to make weapons or money, but purely and simply, to increase our knowledge.
Hats off to all those involved.
I own an iPod Touch and it is HANDS DOWN the greatest tech device I've ever bought.
I wholeheartedly agree. I have owned my fair share of tech, but the iPod Touch is the best designed, most pleasurable piece of equipment I've used to date. I still have a smile on my face each time I use it, and I've had it for a couple of months now.
The difference Apple brings to the market is that extra yard. Yes their stuff is expensive compared to the competition, yes there are problems with it, yes they are no better than others in terms of things like the non-disclosure agreement. But still the extra polish, the attention to detail makes it worth it for me.
So if this escaped into the wild, and you accidentally consumed a small amount, would it turn you into crude oil?
Not likely. But it'd probably give you flatulence of unprecedented proportions.
I think we've stumbled across a secondary method for creating fuel!
although I personally wouldn't know a Trent Reznor song from a Barry Manilow song
:)
I guarentee that if I played you one of each you would know the difference
Actually, it was the script writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples who first came up with the idea of Deckard being a replicant. Scott keeps it nicely ambiguous during the film, but himself finally admitted in an interview more recently that in his view Deckard is a replicant.
Personally, I think the matter is left ambiguous enough in the film (even the directors cut) for the viewer to make up their own mind.
The Gmail interface sucks. When I first started using it I didn't mind as I assumed it would be cleaned up, but it's hardly changed. It still looks like someone dropped a purely functional UI on a back end with a view to replacing it later when they had time. Props to Google for the service, good spam filtering, pushing the boundaries on quotas etc, but please now spend a bit of time redoing the UI!
a novel car designed to run entirely on compressed air claiming to have a range of 2000km with zero pollution
Erm, no. Where did the energy come from to compress the air in the first place? The pollution is just happening somewhere else.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. The search utilities we are being offered, Google toolbar, Spotlight are most useful bringing order to an already chaotic environment. But also they then promote the idea that you don't even need maintain any order any more so you stop doing it, making the tools even more useful.
In the long term I wonder if this is a dangerous thing, people will worry less about order and rely more on tools to bring order to their environments. But order covers other areas too, in your approach to work, coding, writing etc. I wonder if this will start breaking down eventually?
Am I the only one baffled by this obsession with local search? I send most of 5 days a week using desktop computers and a lot of the weekends, and I have to say that I very rarely need to search for anything locally. I put stuff where I can find it later using simple directory structures. Is that so difficult?
If my car comes flying through your bedroom window at 30 miles an hour because I parked it at the top of a hill in neutral, should General Motors be responsible?
I don't agree that this is a fair analogy. A more appropriate analogy would be that General Motors sells you a car that you believe to be the most up to date, leading model, only for it to be stolen the next day by some 14 year old oik who knows that he can open the rear passenger door just by tapping on the lock with a screw driver.
I am fed up with this attitide that it's the fault of the user who should know better. Utter rubbish. The product is faulty, pure and simple, and the fault is with the manufacturer, Microsoft in this case for making insecure software. They've known about the problems for years, and have done little or nothing to fix them.
I bought a Mac for my parents a couple of years ago. It runs OSX. Apart from a bit of help with the network settings I didn't have to do anything else to get them online SECURELY. Why is that? Because the machine comes with a firewall, built in, and turned on by default, and the OS is written with security as one of the primary goals. I have full confidence that they are now as secure as they need to be, and that if I'd bought them a PC instead the machine would be riddled with viruses and spyware by now.
I bought an iTrip a couple of years back but was very dissapointed with it. Not only was the sound quality terrible at it's best, it was impossible to find an unused frequency when in a built up area. Plus, on long journeys you are forever retuning the thing as you move from one area to the next, chasing unused frequencies.
I then looked into an expensive iPod compatible stereo, but finally went for a 16 euro faux cassett type adapter. Works perfectly. I've only had to replace it once when the wire broke. One thing you have to do though is to oil the mechanism a little to stop it squeaking.
Let's not get started on relying on a third party (Google) whom you have no contract with for a large percentage of your business. That's got to rank up there with Stupid Business Models 101 in my view.
I couldn't agree more. It's an unfortunate fact that one single entity has such a monopoly on search at the moment, but that doesn't mean you have to base your entire business model on your rank at their site. You might as well base it on the weather, you have little if any control over it, your business is at the whim of their decisions, and you have no recourse if it doesn't go your way.
According to this article - The governments that have committed to buy laptops for their schoolchildren include Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay.
So it sounds like governments are starting to put their money on the table.
As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to.
Do we have any actual data on how popular the service was? I think this was a neat idea, but if it wasn't being used it won't be missed...
The majority of these same people either don't know there are alternatives, or aren't in a position to change. They don't 'like' it, they just put up with it.
I would like to agree with you, but you haven't given any reasons why you prefered one over the other. Can you expand a little?
Even if the source code is completely open, maybe 1% of the population has the skill to audit the code. The other 99% have to take it on trust, which is counter to the entire idea of open democracy.
I disagree. 1% is still almost 300,000 people by todays figures. Add to that the various academic institutions and liberty groups that would be keen on auditing the code, plus the opposition party(s) who also have more than a passing interest in keeping things fair, AND probably a large number of foreign people who would also have access, I think you have enough eyeballs to ensure the system is sufficiently audited.
Our government needs an elected body of IT experts
If, as you say (and I entirely agree) that "A democratic system cannot work unless there is absolute transparency in the voting process." then simply making the code availble for public perusal (open source) would be sufficient, as with the Australian system. Indeed, if you can't trust an elected government to manage it's evoting systems properly, then electing a second body to police the system doesn't ensure that the system will be any fairer.
This stance only makes sense if you then make a visible public statement about why you didn't vote, or aproach the relevant authorities about the problem. I hope you did.
They can then retrieve available items from inside the store, or have the clothes shipped from a central warehouse ... skipping the line at the register completely.
Wow, imagine this extended to the home, allowing shoppers to buy without even leaving the house! Oh, wait...
Isn't it about time Microsoft was held accountable for it's part in this mess? And I don't mean getting all it's XP users to upgrade to Vista, I mean doing something to solve the problem now. Surely a massive publicity campaign together with some patches would do a huge amount of good here?
So it's detectable.
...in fact some are not even detectable in any way.
What rubbish, if it's on the machine it's detectable. May not be easy, but you'll find it eventually if you look hard enough.
Apparently the new ones can be designed to have flaws.
I hear they spoke extensively to Microsoft to find the best way to consistently achieve flaws.
Last time I tried Smoothwall (18 months ago) the UI was so bad I gave up on it and chose pfsense instead. I hope it has improved since.