Funny, I get my downloads at full resolution. Maybe you make the mistake of paying some crappy services for crappy low quality downloads. I just BT mine. Eventually though, I think that high res, DRM free, video downloads is a business model that has to happen. If not then people will just share the content amongst themselves.
Streaming is a stupid idea. Nobody wants to buy a stream. People want their own copy just as if they were buying a disc. It's not difficult to download 40GB and I do it frequently. As broadband gets better it'll only get easier. Hard drive space is certainly making it easier to store large chunks of data as the drives constantly improve. Storing files that big is not an issue these days (unless maybe you're using a crap OS like Windows). I don't really think the average consumer gives a rat's ass if it's HD or not though. Most of us are plenty happy with DVD-quality or even VHS-quality for most content. My wife doesn't sit around worrying because Ugly Betty or desperate Housewife's isn't in HD. So long as she can watch the shows she wants, when she wants, rather than tuning in at a given time, everything is peachy.
What good would it do? They're all a bunch of scum but in the end it's not our leaders fault that our country is so screwed up. It's the citizens fault. For not voting. For voting without thinking. For being stupid, uneducated and emotional. For being lazy. For being morally bankrupt. For being a bunch of pansies. For not caring about the future of our country or our descendants.
Yes, it's our fault. People get the government they deserve.
IMHO there shouldn't really need to be an interface. I've been using file system versioning in Linux for a long time (thanks to FUSE) and it works just fine using normal file dialogs and explorers. I don't see an argument for a pretty interface. A minor upgrade of file dialogs and explorers would be plenty to make the extended functionality seamless but it's not a big deal since it's easy to work with old versions as they are just part of the normal filesystem.
Research for the sake of research is fine and I do think the government needs to do a better job at funding basic research. I do think that biomedical companies are not doing everything they could though. Either they are purposely dragging their feet or they're just to big to be really innovative.
Before we can seriously think about socialized medicine that will work there are a few problems we'll have to attack in order to make the concept really work. One of those is the need to push the biomedical industry towards much more innovation. Medicine needs to move forward much more quickly and prices need to constantly be dropping.
Of course I'd say that targeting the problems with crazy lawsuits against doctors and the related insurance needs would probably be the next single biggest issue we need to fix before socialized medicine is practical. Then we need to lower the price of going into the medical profession (educational expenses being a major factor) and we need to bring some sense to health insurance.
I might not agree with every aspect of Grove's attack on the biomedical industry but at least it's someone taking potshots that need to be taken before things will get better. Much better than the bullshit the politicians are pretending at.
Damn, some old coot probably bought one for his grandkids thinking it was the real thing. I feel a class action suit coming on. America - the country where stupid people must be protected from themselves at any cost.
There have been lame knockoffs that look like Playstation controllers, Nintendo controllers, etc for years and it's never seemed to be an issue. Maybe people who play the Wii are stupider overall since they are evidently getting this confussed. I've seen these at Walmart and they are obviously just a cheap knockoff and they're sold in the toy department. Only a complete moron would be confussed. I've never even seen a Wii controller first hand and I can tell them apart. Doh.
I like the ones that are in old mines too. Quite a good reuse of a mine. I used to see lots of data-center-in-mines when I lived in the Kansas City area. It just seems so obvious that data centers need to be heavily protected so I don't see how somebody could get robbed four times in two years - that's just stupid.
I think Javascript is fine for any application reasonable to do in a web browser. Rather than worry to much about features I'd rather they work on performance. Javascript performance just isn't good enough for major UI or multimedia work. In some cases threading might help with this but I don't know that it's a major factor.
The only feature I think absolutely needs to be added to Javascript is built-in behaviors. Otherwise, If they're going to add features they should add some functionality for working with multimedia, SVG, and possibly 3D more easily - to fill the hole between current Javascript and Flash.
Anyway, you really shouldn't be using Javascript for mouse rollovers and eye candy unless you have very specific needs that can't be done by CSS.
As a developer that works on many websites I'll side with the creator of Javascript and stick to whatever standard he sets forth. If I have to let Microsoft do without features because they refuse to keep up then I don't mind doing so. I always try to design stuff so that if scripting doesn't work everything will still be usable anyway so it won't really harm my users to much. I already have to provide work arounds to keep IE6 and IE7 working reasonable.
If we're going to replace Javascript then I vote for some variant of Python with built-in DOM support and strong networking features.
Not quite part of the Javascript spec but I'd also like to see a tweak to (X)HTML so that authors can declare that script written outside the HEAD section to be ignored. This would make avoiding XSS issues so much easier and wouldn't be any issue to any developer using behaviors or similar methods to attach their JS as needed. I'd also like to see browsers allow users to select an option to disallow JS outside of the HEAD element.
I don't really plan to buy either a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player. Either would obviously be a product without any real use. Digital downloads are a more practical way to get media and are obviously the way of the future. Apple TV and similar products are the way content purchase and playback will be in the near future.
They were all over a year ago so giving specific examples is probably difficult. It was all sorts of topics though. At the time I was living in San Diego so I'd find articles related to some specific thing in San Diego and go through and make corrections like adding references and information and it'd just disappear. I'm a geek so I spend a lot of time looking at all kinds of technical articles and sometimes I'd make corrections to them. I'm into history and literature so sometimes I'd do some of those. I'd experience the issue across the board. It didn't look like vandalism - it looked like an admin removing my fixes because it didn't suit them for some reason. It all got anal retentive to the point of being ridiculous.
I still use Wikipedia to look stuff up but I never try to improve it anymore.
After quite some time of making many minor contributions - manly fixing typos, fixing references, etc - I stopped contributing about a year ago because I kept seeing my fixes being removed and stub articles I filled in being reverted back to blank. It was never anything that could be controversial either - no politics or religion or such. Someone along the way made a really bad decision about not allowing content to be added. Just kind of threw a wet blanket on what made Wikipedia great.
I run OS X in VMWare on Linux and Windows so that I can test software on all three platforms regardless to what I'm actually running as my host platform at a given time. Before Safari was released for Windows it was the only real way to test websites on Safari if you didn't have a Mac handy.
I haven't actually run OS X in VM on top of OS X. The only reason I can see to do so would be to test software against different versions of OS X.
I've had OS X running in VMWare for about a year. It requires a couple tweaks, mostly to turn off Trusted Computing, to make it fast enough to use properly but thats about it. Now that VMWare can legally support OS X I expect it'll become a lot easier to setup OS X really soon.
I can't see OS X being very good for a server. It's considerably more expensive than Linux and prone to wasting resources on UI. I use a tiny copy of FreeBSD for my file servers and it works very well.
Versioning filesystems aren't that new or impressive in the server world and aren't that complex to use anyway. The one I use on Linux simply has a.fs_history subdirectory in every directory that offers a read-only versioning view of the directory's contents. Each file is presented as a directory of the same name, with different versions of that file inside named by their creation/modification time. Any program read old versions and it'd be quite easy to make a modified file dialog for the system.
Now for the desktop I think most users have not yet experienced versioning so it'll probably be a nice feature. I don't know why no Linux distro, to my knowledge, has a versioning file system as the default file system for/home as it's such an obvious useful feature. More proof that distro maintainers are more interested in creating new wallpapers than in adding useful features. Since FUSE became commonplace it's been extremely easy to create useful file systems like this.
I personally have no fear of empowering my customers/users to do more for themselves, automation, etc - I will still be a person that is needed to create new things. All these do is give me a wider range of reach. It's like having employees. Just because I have employees doesn't mean I'm no longer needed. I simply break up my workflow by handing some of it off to my employees. Likewise I can hand it off to machines in some cases or to users themselves in some cases.
That is not the same as offshoring of jobs though. While offshoring is unlikely to hurt me directly it does hurt me because it is bad for the economy as a whole. I certainly don't mind it when those we're hiring have to stick to the same level of standards we do - using lead free paint, not using slave labor, etc - but when we're not doing business with true peers it undermines the ability of US companies and our peers to compete fairly. There are reasons we have laws that guarentee the quality of products and the quality of life of workers and we should not buy from countries that do not have a similar set of laws.
I think if companies really expect for technology such as a wiki to really cut the number of employees they need then either they're kidding themselves or they have a lot of employees that don't have any real function. No real IT people are much at risk and will just be reassigned to areas they can be more useful in. The only people that may have trouble is those that work in data entry and even among those any smart company should know that those that do a good job are valuable. For the most part, community technologies just enable companies to do more with the resources they already have.
I'd turn around, obviously grab another drive just like it, and walk out of the store with my receipt in hand. Let the bastards call the cops and look like assholes when I calmly hand over my receipt to prove my purchase. Or if they hadn't given me my receipt yet I'd start yelling about how they stole my money. Let lots of other customers hear all about it.
I'm so pissed off at being pushed around by big companies. I've had a couple different companies this past year that I canceled my service from and they kept charging me and claimed I hadn't canceled. I've had several more that have screwed up billing and keep submitting charges I've never authorized for stuff I didn't buy and my bank refuses to help in any way - including not removing overdraft charges. The worst are businesses, in my case a merchant services company that was serving my business, that require a bank account number for auto-pay - you just can't get rid of the bastards. 1&1 Internet is pretty bad too - they accidently charged me for a hosted server whose contract I'd canceled and my wife for a bunch of domains she canceled. Their billing department is horrible. Of course the worst one I'm dealing with right now is the IRS. I'm fighting a case of identity theft to get last year's tax refund still. They acknowledge it's obviously a case of identity theft and they say they know who is responsible but they can't release my money to me until they've figured out how to collect back what they sent the thief. It's their screw-up so how the heck is it my problem? Of course fighting with the government is hellish and it's not enough money to make it worth paying for a lawyer probably.
The funny thing is that Wal-Marts will take anything back if you're willing to argue. It can be old and broken. It can even be a product they've never sold. They'll take it back if you just keep standing there. Of course the department manager that gets stuck trying to deal with your return will curse you but by then you'll have your cash.
I've learned not to ask for help. More often than not you spend more time trying to explain what you want than it'd take to just hunt around and find your item. Even after explaining fully I don't think I've ever had a useful answer. Not that any other store is better. Small shops, usually, just don't have what you want and big places like Fry's and Best Buy hire idiots. Sadly, if you aren't a computer whiz and don't know someone that is a computer whiz you're just kind of screwed. Can't really be helped though as most people don't want to pay for the expertise.
Life becomes difficult when you move from one Fry's location to another because they don't have the same layout. Suddenly you no longer know where everything is. You're forced (or so I tell my wife) to spend hours and hours browsing until the new store is memorized.
I won't quite agree with you. While I do agree that every atempt I've seen so far for artificial intelligence to classify random data has been sort of lame I don't think it's an impossible task. It's merely a task that requires more memory and processor power than we've yet got available. I've seen some pretty decent AI stuff for classifying smaller groups of data so I think it's only a matter of time before a computer can classify most data that a human could classify. I think that's a point too - often we expect computers to do a better job than we ourselves could do. If it's ambiguous to us then it probably will be to a computer also. As long as we make mistakes computers probably will too. My choice method is to have a computer auto-sort data, have humans double-check the sorting and correct it if needed, and have any changes passed back to the computer to improve it's training. Over time such systems do usually get better although sometimes developers have to take a look at the corrections also and figure out if there is some factors they're not letting their program properly recognize and respond to.
Of course instead of going with fancy AI stuff it's always easier to just markup our own data in a way that is meaningful. Maybe create a wrapper that can be embedded directly into the system we already use. Instead of linking directly to a document or file why not link to a meta-data file that then provides the URL for the actual file desired? You could then make available all kinds of meta-data for any file without having to create a bunch of new file formats.
No, before the bubble burst they were willing to pay more. That's a much different thing than them paying that much now. Back then I didn't have a family to take care of but now I do so I have different priorities when selecting a job.
Of course the other side of things - if I'd been one of those who'd taken one of the high paying job offers he got during the bubble days then most likely I would have some major financial problems when the bubble burst. Avoiding jobs that sounded like they didn't have a business plan kept me from making as much but it kept me from being left without a seat when the music stopped too.
Maybe in Australia techs are well paid. I don't think they are here in the US.
I make less than I did 10 years ago and my cost of living is at least twice as much and the skill and experience required is far far more than what was required 10 years ago. My experience is that most companies these days are rather cheap when it comes to paying their geeks. I didn't even go for the high paying job offers I had back then - if I had, then I would have been making 6 or 7 times what I'm making now. To many wannabes came into the market and watered down the pay rate and made it harder to prove your skill as compared to the average jerk who got a degree but has little personal interest in geekdom. They can do what they were trained for but they don't have large amounts of extra knowledge that makes them exceptional.
I think geeks need to be more organized. Not as a union but as a trade organization of some kind. Not everyone can become a doctor or a lawyer - they have to pass certain exams and have a certain amount of real world experience. Certifications help but they are often more a test of test taking experience than at real world skills. We need something more organized and rigid. Also I think taking the exams should be affordable enough to be accessible to anyone while passing the exam should be hard enough to weed out the posers. Exams should focus on more than one area. It's not enough to be a network admin or a programmer - real geeks are network admins and programmers and system admins and much more. It should be a test to prove who is really up to the title of being a geek. It should cover history, theory, and practical skills on all levels.
This comment has as much to do with this article as the parent. Lets take every chance we have to start a pointless political flamewar between the child killers and the wussies. I of course don't care to take a side in the issue because I'm to busy looking at pr0n. Due to my sticky hands, my ballot will probably have hanging chads too. It's all a conspiracy man!
Won't be useful until they offer unlimited space. 4GB is just not enough space to be really useful to me. Sounds like it'll make it easier to do things like GMailFS though for people that just want to store a couple gigs at a time or want to mess with multiple accounts.
I remember doing that way back in the mid 90's though when programming web based interfaces to my MUDs. If you used a reference to a known object you'd get that object. If not then it'd try to search around and guess what you were looking for. It's not an innovation - it's the obvious thing to do. Doh - patents are so retarded.
The lack of a high capacity optical drive is on feature that's kept me from buying a 360. Even if they add one though I'm not very likely to buy a 360 just because it's stamped with Microsoft's brand and I've had to many bad consumer experiences with them. Money really isn't much of a factor though as I only expect to buy the console once and a couple hundred dollars as a one time cost isn't very important.
Of course the real deciding factor in consoles is the games. I've yet to see any game in this generation, for any console, that is really exciting enough to buy a new console for. GTA4 might get me to buy a PS3. I've been highly disppointed that the PS3 has yet to have any games really making it worth buying. Wii looks interesting but not enough to really buy one yet - maybe when they get cheap they'll be worth the few hours I'd actually spend playing it. That's what I did with the GameCube - bought it when they got cheap, played through a couple games, and then gave it to my little sisters. The HD-DVD does apply to this metric though as I like deeply involved games so the extra storage space could make games more appealing to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I get my downloads at full resolution. Maybe you make the mistake of paying some crappy services for crappy low quality downloads. I just BT mine. Eventually though, I think that high res, DRM free, video downloads is a business model that has to happen. If not then people will just share the content amongst themselves.
Streaming is a stupid idea. Nobody wants to buy a stream. People want their own copy just as if they were buying a disc. It's not difficult to download 40GB and I do it frequently. As broadband gets better it'll only get easier. Hard drive space is certainly making it easier to store large chunks of data as the drives constantly improve. Storing files that big is not an issue these days (unless maybe you're using a crap OS like Windows). I don't really think the average consumer gives a rat's ass if it's HD or not though. Most of us are plenty happy with DVD-quality or even VHS-quality for most content. My wife doesn't sit around worrying because Ugly Betty or desperate Housewife's isn't in HD. So long as she can watch the shows she wants, when she wants, rather than tuning in at a given time, everything is peachy.
What good would it do? They're all a bunch of scum but in the end it's not our leaders fault that our country is so screwed up. It's the citizens fault. For not voting. For voting without thinking. For being stupid, uneducated and emotional. For being lazy. For being morally bankrupt. For being a bunch of pansies. For not caring about the future of our country or our descendants.
Yes, it's our fault. People get the government they deserve.
IMHO there shouldn't really need to be an interface. I've been using file system versioning in Linux for a long time (thanks to FUSE) and it works just fine using normal file dialogs and explorers. I don't see an argument for a pretty interface. A minor upgrade of file dialogs and explorers would be plenty to make the extended functionality seamless but it's not a big deal since it's easy to work with old versions as they are just part of the normal filesystem.
Research for the sake of research is fine and I do think the government needs to do a better job at funding basic research. I do think that biomedical companies are not doing everything they could though. Either they are purposely dragging their feet or they're just to big to be really innovative.
Before we can seriously think about socialized medicine that will work there are a few problems we'll have to attack in order to make the concept really work. One of those is the need to push the biomedical industry towards much more innovation. Medicine needs to move forward much more quickly and prices need to constantly be dropping.
Of course I'd say that targeting the problems with crazy lawsuits against doctors and the related insurance needs would probably be the next single biggest issue we need to fix before socialized medicine is practical. Then we need to lower the price of going into the medical profession (educational expenses being a major factor) and we need to bring some sense to health insurance.
I might not agree with every aspect of Grove's attack on the biomedical industry but at least it's someone taking potshots that need to be taken before things will get better. Much better than the bullshit the politicians are pretending at.
Damn, some old coot probably bought one for his grandkids thinking it was the real thing. I feel a class action suit coming on. America - the country where stupid people must be protected from themselves at any cost.
There have been lame knockoffs that look like Playstation controllers, Nintendo controllers, etc for years and it's never seemed to be an issue. Maybe people who play the Wii are stupider overall since they are evidently getting this confussed. I've seen these at Walmart and they are obviously just a cheap knockoff and they're sold in the toy department. Only a complete moron would be confussed. I've never even seen a Wii controller first hand and I can tell them apart. Doh.
I like the ones that are in old mines too. Quite a good reuse of a mine. I used to see lots of data-center-in-mines when I lived in the Kansas City area. It just seems so obvious that data centers need to be heavily protected so I don't see how somebody could get robbed four times in two years - that's just stupid.
I think Javascript is fine for any application reasonable to do in a web browser. Rather than worry to much about features I'd rather they work on performance. Javascript performance just isn't good enough for major UI or multimedia work. In some cases threading might help with this but I don't know that it's a major factor.
The only feature I think absolutely needs to be added to Javascript is built-in behaviors. Otherwise, If they're going to add features they should add some functionality for working with multimedia, SVG, and possibly 3D more easily - to fill the hole between current Javascript and Flash.
Anyway, you really shouldn't be using Javascript for mouse rollovers and eye candy unless you have very specific needs that can't be done by CSS.
As a developer that works on many websites I'll side with the creator of Javascript and stick to whatever standard he sets forth. If I have to let Microsoft do without features because they refuse to keep up then I don't mind doing so. I always try to design stuff so that if scripting doesn't work everything will still be usable anyway so it won't really harm my users to much. I already have to provide work arounds to keep IE6 and IE7 working reasonable.
If we're going to replace Javascript then I vote for some variant of Python with built-in DOM support and strong networking features.
Not quite part of the Javascript spec but I'd also like to see a tweak to (X)HTML so that authors can declare that script written outside the HEAD section to be ignored. This would make avoiding XSS issues so much easier and wouldn't be any issue to any developer using behaviors or similar methods to attach their JS as needed. I'd also like to see browsers allow users to select an option to disallow JS outside of the HEAD element.
I don't really plan to buy either a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player. Either would obviously be a product without any real use. Digital downloads are a more practical way to get media and are obviously the way of the future. Apple TV and similar products are the way content purchase and playback will be in the near future.
They were all over a year ago so giving specific examples is probably difficult. It was all sorts of topics though. At the time I was living in San Diego so I'd find articles related to some specific thing in San Diego and go through and make corrections like adding references and information and it'd just disappear. I'm a geek so I spend a lot of time looking at all kinds of technical articles and sometimes I'd make corrections to them. I'm into history and literature so sometimes I'd do some of those. I'd experience the issue across the board. It didn't look like vandalism - it looked like an admin removing my fixes because it didn't suit them for some reason. It all got anal retentive to the point of being ridiculous.
I still use Wikipedia to look stuff up but I never try to improve it anymore.
After quite some time of making many minor contributions - manly fixing typos, fixing references, etc - I stopped contributing about a year ago because I kept seeing my fixes being removed and stub articles I filled in being reverted back to blank. It was never anything that could be controversial either - no politics or religion or such. Someone along the way made a really bad decision about not allowing content to be added. Just kind of threw a wet blanket on what made Wikipedia great.
I run OS X in VMWare on Linux and Windows so that I can test software on all three platforms regardless to what I'm actually running as my host platform at a given time. Before Safari was released for Windows it was the only real way to test websites on Safari if you didn't have a Mac handy.
I haven't actually run OS X in VM on top of OS X. The only reason I can see to do so would be to test software against different versions of OS X.
I've had OS X running in VMWare for about a year. It requires a couple tweaks, mostly to turn off Trusted Computing, to make it fast enough to use properly but thats about it. Now that VMWare can legally support OS X I expect it'll become a lot easier to setup OS X really soon.
I can't see OS X being very good for a server. It's considerably more expensive than Linux and prone to wasting resources on UI. I use a tiny copy of FreeBSD for my file servers and it works very well.
.fs_history subdirectory in every directory that offers a read-only versioning view of the directory's contents. Each file is presented as a directory of the same name, with different versions of that file inside named by their creation/modification time. Any program read old versions and it'd be quite easy to make a modified file dialog for the system.
/home as it's such an obvious useful feature. More proof that distro maintainers are more interested in creating new wallpapers than in adding useful features. Since FUSE became commonplace it's been extremely easy to create useful file systems like this.
Versioning filesystems aren't that new or impressive in the server world and aren't that complex to use anyway. The one I use on Linux simply has a
Now for the desktop I think most users have not yet experienced versioning so it'll probably be a nice feature. I don't know why no Linux distro, to my knowledge, has a versioning file system as the default file system for
I personally have no fear of empowering my customers/users to do more for themselves, automation, etc - I will still be a person that is needed to create new things. All these do is give me a wider range of reach. It's like having employees. Just because I have employees doesn't mean I'm no longer needed. I simply break up my workflow by handing some of it off to my employees. Likewise I can hand it off to machines in some cases or to users themselves in some cases.
That is not the same as offshoring of jobs though. While offshoring is unlikely to hurt me directly it does hurt me because it is bad for the economy as a whole. I certainly don't mind it when those we're hiring have to stick to the same level of standards we do - using lead free paint, not using slave labor, etc - but when we're not doing business with true peers it undermines the ability of US companies and our peers to compete fairly. There are reasons we have laws that guarentee the quality of products and the quality of life of workers and we should not buy from countries that do not have a similar set of laws.
I think if companies really expect for technology such as a wiki to really cut the number of employees they need then either they're kidding themselves or they have a lot of employees that don't have any real function. No real IT people are much at risk and will just be reassigned to areas they can be more useful in. The only people that may have trouble is those that work in data entry and even among those any smart company should know that those that do a good job are valuable. For the most part, community technologies just enable companies to do more with the resources they already have.
I'd turn around, obviously grab another drive just like it, and walk out of the store with my receipt in hand. Let the bastards call the cops and look like assholes when I calmly hand over my receipt to prove my purchase. Or if they hadn't given me my receipt yet I'd start yelling about how they stole my money. Let lots of other customers hear all about it.
I'm so pissed off at being pushed around by big companies. I've had a couple different companies this past year that I canceled my service from and they kept charging me and claimed I hadn't canceled. I've had several more that have screwed up billing and keep submitting charges I've never authorized for stuff I didn't buy and my bank refuses to help in any way - including not removing overdraft charges. The worst are businesses, in my case a merchant services company that was serving my business, that require a bank account number for auto-pay - you just can't get rid of the bastards. 1&1 Internet is pretty bad too - they accidently charged me for a hosted server whose contract I'd canceled and my wife for a bunch of domains she canceled. Their billing department is horrible. Of course the worst one I'm dealing with right now is the IRS. I'm fighting a case of identity theft to get last year's tax refund still. They acknowledge it's obviously a case of identity theft and they say they know who is responsible but they can't release my money to me until they've figured out how to collect back what they sent the thief. It's their screw-up so how the heck is it my problem? Of course fighting with the government is hellish and it's not enough money to make it worth paying for a lawyer probably.
The funny thing is that Wal-Marts will take anything back if you're willing to argue. It can be old and broken. It can even be a product they've never sold. They'll take it back if you just keep standing there. Of course the department manager that gets stuck trying to deal with your return will curse you but by then you'll have your cash.
I've learned not to ask for help. More often than not you spend more time trying to explain what you want than it'd take to just hunt around and find your item. Even after explaining fully I don't think I've ever had a useful answer. Not that any other store is better. Small shops, usually, just don't have what you want and big places like Fry's and Best Buy hire idiots. Sadly, if you aren't a computer whiz and don't know someone that is a computer whiz you're just kind of screwed. Can't really be helped though as most people don't want to pay for the expertise.
Life becomes difficult when you move from one Fry's location to another because they don't have the same layout. Suddenly you no longer know where everything is. You're forced (or so I tell my wife) to spend hours and hours browsing until the new store is memorized.
I won't quite agree with you. While I do agree that every atempt I've seen so far for artificial intelligence to classify random data has been sort of lame I don't think it's an impossible task. It's merely a task that requires more memory and processor power than we've yet got available. I've seen some pretty decent AI stuff for classifying smaller groups of data so I think it's only a matter of time before a computer can classify most data that a human could classify. I think that's a point too - often we expect computers to do a better job than we ourselves could do. If it's ambiguous to us then it probably will be to a computer also. As long as we make mistakes computers probably will too. My choice method is to have a computer auto-sort data, have humans double-check the sorting and correct it if needed, and have any changes passed back to the computer to improve it's training. Over time such systems do usually get better although sometimes developers have to take a look at the corrections also and figure out if there is some factors they're not letting their program properly recognize and respond to.
Of course instead of going with fancy AI stuff it's always easier to just markup our own data in a way that is meaningful. Maybe create a wrapper that can be embedded directly into the system we already use. Instead of linking directly to a document or file why not link to a meta-data file that then provides the URL for the actual file desired? You could then make available all kinds of meta-data for any file without having to create a bunch of new file formats.
No, before the bubble burst they were willing to pay more. That's a much different thing than them paying that much now. Back then I didn't have a family to take care of but now I do so I have different priorities when selecting a job.
Of course the other side of things - if I'd been one of those who'd taken one of the high paying job offers he got during the bubble days then most likely I would have some major financial problems when the bubble burst. Avoiding jobs that sounded like they didn't have a business plan kept me from making as much but it kept me from being left without a seat when the music stopped too.
Maybe in Australia techs are well paid. I don't think they are here in the US.
I make less than I did 10 years ago and my cost of living is at least twice as much and the skill and experience required is far far more than what was required 10 years ago. My experience is that most companies these days are rather cheap when it comes to paying their geeks. I didn't even go for the high paying job offers I had back then - if I had, then I would have been making 6 or 7 times what I'm making now. To many wannabes came into the market and watered down the pay rate and made it harder to prove your skill as compared to the average jerk who got a degree but has little personal interest in geekdom. They can do what they were trained for but they don't have large amounts of extra knowledge that makes them exceptional.
I think geeks need to be more organized. Not as a union but as a trade organization of some kind. Not everyone can become a doctor or a lawyer - they have to pass certain exams and have a certain amount of real world experience. Certifications help but they are often more a test of test taking experience than at real world skills. We need something more organized and rigid. Also I think taking the exams should be affordable enough to be accessible to anyone while passing the exam should be hard enough to weed out the posers. Exams should focus on more than one area. It's not enough to be a network admin or a programmer - real geeks are network admins and programmers and system admins and much more. It should be a test to prove who is really up to the title of being a geek. It should cover history, theory, and practical skills on all levels.
This comment has as much to do with this article as the parent. Lets take every chance we have to start a pointless political flamewar between the child killers and the wussies. I of course don't care to take a side in the issue because I'm to busy looking at pr0n. Due to my sticky hands, my ballot will probably have hanging chads too. It's all a conspiracy man!
Won't be useful until they offer unlimited space. 4GB is just not enough space to be really useful to me. Sounds like it'll make it easier to do things like GMailFS though for people that just want to store a couple gigs at a time or want to mess with multiple accounts.
I remember doing that way back in the mid 90's though when programming web based interfaces to my MUDs. If you used a reference to a known object you'd get that object. If not then it'd try to search around and guess what you were looking for. It's not an innovation - it's the obvious thing to do. Doh - patents are so retarded.
The lack of a high capacity optical drive is on feature that's kept me from buying a 360. Even if they add one though I'm not very likely to buy a 360 just because it's stamped with Microsoft's brand and I've had to many bad consumer experiences with them. Money really isn't much of a factor though as I only expect to buy the console once and a couple hundred dollars as a one time cost isn't very important.
Of course the real deciding factor in consoles is the games. I've yet to see any game in this generation, for any console, that is really exciting enough to buy a new console for. GTA4 might get me to buy a PS3. I've been highly disppointed that the PS3 has yet to have any games really making it worth buying. Wii looks interesting but not enough to really buy one yet - maybe when they get cheap they'll be worth the few hours I'd actually spend playing it. That's what I did with the GameCube - bought it when they got cheap, played through a couple games, and then gave it to my little sisters. The HD-DVD does apply to this metric though as I like deeply involved games so the extra storage space could make games more appealing to me.