Whatthey needed to do was involve the opensource and game modding communities in the design and encourage them to work together to crank out lots of free or low cost high-quality games. THAT is what is going to make or break this kind of platform. If they do that then they'll get plenty of feedback from the community as to the design. The QD was actually pretty nice and I may still try to pick one up if I can after Christmas.
Such a toy has to have the mainstays of fancy phones these days though. A good built-in camera, GPS, MP3 playing abilities, downloadable third party software and files, and of course bluetooth. The NGage was almost there so it seems a shame they were giving up.
A camera that can be swivled to face front or back would be really cool as would GPS. If they could tie those in to the gaming enviroment it'd be really interesting. Let the games respond to your locations and physical movements or even facial expressions.
Oh well. A mismanaged product altogether. Released without all the right features and killed when it could easily have been made one of the best products on the market.
Intellectual Ability should replace the concept of Intellectual Property. IP law blindly assumes that creativity is limited and there is nothing that count be wanted from the creator after the product of their creativity is available. Today that isn't true at all. Often IP isn't as valuable as the minds that created it. The change from putting value on creations to putting value on creators is a major economic change and such changes are always a little painful but for the good of all. The industrial revolution was a painful economic change but I doubt many would say it hurt the world economy in the long term. Doubtless people who produced their products and couldn't adapt to the changes went out of business during the industrial revolution. So it will be with the intelligence revolution.
As a tax payer I don't want my government paying for any IP to be produced that isn't available free of cost to the tax payer. That means research, software, and all other IP not of a sensitive (for national security) nature. If we're spending millions of dollars on software then we should be spending it on something that everyone can use freely.
I'd be glad for schools to stop pushing students into IT/CS. I hate that lots of posers got pushed through with degrees and no idea what they're doing, any talent in what they're doing, or any real interest in what they're doing. That just watered down the worth of everybody elses degrees and job experience because there is no way to tell somebody with a clue from someone without.
It's largely these crappy schools fault that the IT market went from paying well to paying poorly. To many of these crappy IT/CS graduates hit the market creating more a supply of them than was demanded. The people hiring them usually can't tell the difference if they've hired someone good or bad so it does us real geeks little good to be actually good at our jobs.
Worse, enough of these posers have been in the work force long enough that now they're in charge of IT departments and purposely avoid hiring people smarter than themselves or trying anything outside their experience because they're afraid of lossing control. These are usually the wankers who keep running Windows 98, keep writing spaghetti code, and who think firewalls aren't really important on the network.
So PLEASE. Don't push anymore of these losers into a field they're not interested in. Let them all become P.E. teachers where they can't do any harm.
Does anyone actually shop at Radio Shack? I always found it to be sort of the slums of electronic stores and it's usually empty when you go there. I have no idea how they stay in business. I have a Radio Shack about a block from here and it's been more than two years since I bothered going there because they never have what I need or anything very interesting to look at.
I haven't watched tv for years. I watch movies on my tv but I don't watch television shows. I don't have cable, sat, or even rabbit ears. The content doesn't make it worth the price of the equipment, services, or time let alone make it worth watching shitty ads.
For me the same would be true of Windows. I already have a REALLY free better-than-Windows OS, Linux, so why would I use Windows with ads? The only purpose of Windows is to play Windows-only games (Which I rarely do anyway) and I can't imagine being thrilled with a popup in the middle of a life or death (virtual anyway) battle. I'll stick to Linux for work and my PlayStation for games.
As for movies I rip the DVD, removing annoying things like menus, ads, region controls, and encryption and burn it to a much cleaner new DVD. A very good way to avoid being forced to watch half an hour of ads at the beginning of each disc. I've noticed certain brands, especially Disney, have gotten very bad about these ads and bogus anti-piracy lectures at the start of a DVD so I simply remove that crap.
I'd have liked it to use a normal PCMCIA card to offer GPRS/3G connectivity. After a recent trip where I frequently tried to use my laptop to look up directions using Google Maps and the frustration of dealing with the bulk of the laptop and lack of decent Wifi access (my first hotel, a Best Western, was suppoed to have access but that access seemed to only work in one parking spot in the parking lot.. I moved to a different hotel after that).
It uses bluetooth and your phone to access the Internet? Any special phone? I'm going to have to upgrade my phone shortly anyway so I'd like to make the best choice for this usage. I've previously used my phones built-in browser but have been unhappy with it's quality and expense. Sadly the browser and related charges of my ancient phone from about five years ago were better.
I was planning on getting a PCMCIA card for the laptop to offer getting online anywhere in the city but these look like a promising alternative. Our business is actually thinking of getting handhelds with net access for all sales and service staff. I wonder if these would work better?
At worst the government can destroy the Internet for those within their legal reach.
If the Internet is damaged to much by these idiots it'll just create an economic chance for an alternative network to be set up and capitalized on. A lot of publishers and users would choose this less restricted Internet even if it was smaller. Most likely this new network would be even less centralized as it'd probably start as a grass roots project by people who are pissed at the control. Rather than being built on a backbone owned by big businesses it'd probably be built on wireless with encrypted backbone traffic.
If they disallow that then it'll simply do two things. One, let the country slip behind the rest of the world in science and technology while more intelligent countries pass us by. No doubt it'd eventually cause either a reversal of those laws or create an exodus of the more intelligent people from this country. Two, create a black market for an alternative Internet. Most likely this would find ways to piggy back across the existing Internet but would hide the traffic with encryption and other techniques. End points would probably be a wireless mesh network.
It's fine to make Linux easier to use. Just actually make it easier to use and don't just make it more like Windows in the blind assumption that Windows is easier to use.
It's obvious that you don't know how easy Linux can be to use if you think you need to do something special to get X working with your video card. If you are having trouble with a video card it's probably because you are using a commercial driver that isn't under the care of the opensource community. THIS is usually what makes software hard. Ever configured Windows? It's an unholy nightmare as compared to Linux. Driver conflicts, drivers just plain not available because you're using the wrong version of Windows, etc. There isn't even a standard way to install drivers on Windows. Sometimes you pop in the disc and they auto-install. Sometimes you have to manually search the disc. Sometimes Windows has a copy already if you happen to be using the right version of Windows. Sometimes you have to download the driver off a very unhelpful vendors website. Sometimes you have to intall 20 other bits of software just to get to the driver. Yes.. very easy.. and don't forget that a good majority of the time Windows wants you to reboot before it can use these new drivers. Hahaha. These are what Linux is trying to avoid.
Windows and OS X are designed to make the easy stuff easier. Linux is designed to make the hard stuff easier. Newbies may not like that but in the end Linux is easier to use. Let newbies do what they always do and pay an expert to do the things they don't understand how to do.
I've actually been involved in usability studies between different OSs and my experience is that users don't even usually notice they are in a different OS let alone have any problem using Linux. Users rarely install hardware and stuff such as that anyway and when they do they tend to have problems on any OS. When's the last time you saw Grandma install a new video card and actually get it configured properly in any OS?
Nobody that actually uses Linux cares if it stays at 5% as it already works fine for us and is improving. Better that than gain 95% market share only to have it made as crappy as Windows. Alternatives are only useful to consumers if they actually offer a product with alternative features.
What is needed isn't a binary kernel API. What is needed is for hardware developers to begin to make their devices work with a fixed standard interface. We wouldn't use their products if they didn't all plug into our AGP, PCI Express, or whatever port so why do we use them when they can't conform to a standard driver? I don't have to load new drivers when I plug in different speakers or a keyboard (usually) so why do I need to for my video card or printer? That is where the problem is. They are purposely avoiding compatibility standards. There is no technical reason why they can't standardize.
Why do I care if the stupid and lazy people out there can get a better computing experience? They can already if only they will put forth a very small amount of effort. If they won't make the effort then what is in it for me to make the effort for them?
I've been using a Linux desktop for about seven years with far more success than any of my Windows or OS X customers are having with their 'easier' platform. You can keep all your clever ideas for converting the masses and leave me with a tool that actually works. Don't turn Linux into Windows just for the sake of having a free version of Windows.
Besides, the desktop is dead. It's a lame metaphor anyway that lends to low productivity and a lot of user confussion. It just wasn't a concept made to handle today's complex world. Better ideas are out there and they are beginning to work their way into the mass market.
Anyone that really wants a binary driver API could always write one and require that users use a kernel that has the BD API in order to use their drivers. An installer could even install such a kernel module for the user. Then it'd just be a legal issue to work out and not a technical issue. There is really no reason for closed source drivers though. It's one of the stupidest ideas in the PC industry. There is nothing in there that gains the companies any real advantage and by being closed they are actually producing crappier products.
Making a good template for a site is not easy and not especially fun. Making one that uses CSS for more than changing your fonts and make it work in all major browsers and you've just been through hell. IE is seriously a nightmare to do thanks largely to it's lack of proper transparency support and lack of positioning support.
Most site's need only the graphics and colors of their template changed from one of maybe three basic designs so it makes sense to reuse most of that code and to just change what needs to be changed. If you go with a design other than those basic three then I hope you know what you're doing because user's do best with a user-interface that behaves in a way they expect. Trying to do something new and different in UI design is rarely a good idea.
I'll agree that most stock templates I've seen have been crude and poorly designed. They're usually designed by people with experience in graphic arts or HTML but no experience in UI design. Flash templates especially annoy me as they waste a lot of energy on looking fancy without actually making the site even as easy to use as a normal HTML page. It's more of a problem of the designers lack of experience than a problem with the concept of templates though.
How many MAJOR websites have you used that use Javascript links. That annoys the crap out of me because it is so needless and is a usability nightmare. It's easy enough to use normal links and then add Javascript behaviors to them if you want them to do something different for browsers that have Javascript support. The Javascript code is usually cleaner if you assign it as a behavior anyway. There is absolutely no reason to ever use a Javascript link. It's no wonder designers create such crap with major sites doing that sort of lazy work.
Stock photos are fine for templates and mockups. It's the responsibility of whomever turns them into a finished site to exchange stock photos for custom photos.
People might take their free console but will they play it? If not then it won't help them much. They might inflate their licensing fees but only so long as game sales are proving that the market penetration is as good as the console sales indicate. Throwing money at people can work but only if they make people want what they're offering. I have a dozen consoles in my living room already but the only ones I ever play are the PS2 and DC and even those I rarely bother with anymore. For the most part games have gotten boring and THAT is Microsoft's biggest problem to tackle. Nintendo's Revolution seems to be an attempt to attack that issue at least while the 360 and PS3 just throw on more power.
They know that time is running out for their OS and Office Suite empire so they're willing to lose money in the short-term to move into consumer devices such as XBOX and Media Center. It's a life or death issue for Microsoft to take the place of Sony as the #1 console maker. They need something that can't easily be opensourced out from under them in the next decade and customers who don't already have a death grudge against them. Games are much harder to create than applications so gaming is a safer place to be in and consoles themselves take billions of dollars to launch so it's unlikely that a homebrew console will be a danger anytime soon.
If you build it they will come. Make a game prototype that runs on a PC and then pitch it to them for porting to the console. Usually all you have to do is buy a console development kit and work out distribution rights with an existing distributor that does have a deal with the console maker.
Make your game run in Linux and you can sell copies to Linux users too including several Linux-based console start-ups. The Windows and console game markets are fierce while Linux users are starved for any games to throw money at. Just don't mismanage your money like Loki Games did and you could do very well. Just do me a favor and make all platform-specific code use an opensource library so that the games can be ran on different hardware and OS's. I'm pissed at Loki for making it so hard to keep their games running on 2.6 kernels (they were developed for 2.4). If they'd thought about it that small percentage of code could have been in a library that could have been updated without recompiling the whole game.
I think Revolution is going to reclaim Nintendo it's 2nd place position. It's been a long time since I was excited to see something from Nintendo but Revolution has done just that. Their new ideas with controllers and game design are very compelling. I think Sony will keep PlayStation as the number one console because of the huge library of games available and the fact that the PS3 is slotted to be more powerful than the XBOX360, thanks no doubt to shipping a little later, but it's following pretty close on the heels of the 360's release. I also think M$'s plans to create artificial shortages of the 360 will come back to bite them. Fans get pissed if they can't buy the new toy they want and even more if they hear it's being done to them on purpose. This will push XBOX back to third position and as Sega has shown there isn't a huge market for third place consoles unless they can find a special niche and hang on (Gameboy).
In other news.. Gizmondo.. will it last? If they'd open up third party game development to everyone I think it could unseat the Gameboy and PSP. A plethora of games and apps is what that system needs to be huge. It seems nice from messing with it in store and they seem to get the active gaming concept by having games that react to your position (GPS). Active gaming is huge and is going to get much bigger especially when combined with multi-player gaming. If only it worked as a phone like the NGage I wouldn't need to carry so many items. Realisticly if they don't push for third-party developers to have easy access to making Gizmondo programs and extensions then they have no hope of competiting with the huge amount of money behind Gameboy and PSP. Call it the BeOS problem.
Exactly. Companies should be legally responsible for protecting customer, employee, and any other sensitive information. They should also be fined if their networks are penetrated and used to attack outside systems IF the problem in question has been known and had a solution available for at least X amount of time.. 72 hours maybe? In turn, commercial software producers and distributors should be held responsible for making those fixes available and easy to install. Blocking off WiFi is a stupid solution that just won't make any notable difference and will create a lot of redtape.
I purposely leave my AP open. It's no risk to the rest of my network as I firewall every machine on my network away from every other machine such that nobody can access anything I don't want them to. It'd be retarded to start dictating firewall configurations. Oops you leave a ssh port open? That's inviting worms that infect ssh flaws.. a $200 fine. Nevermind if you patched your version of ssh already.
Hell the FCC should have something to say about this. WiFi is in open public spectrum that is supposed to be usable by the consumer. Blocking off parts of this public spectrum with closed services is keeping other people from having equal access to this public resource. THAT should be what is illegal if anything. It's the same thing as fencing off part of a national park and saying it belongs to you. Requiring that sort of abuse by law shouldn't be allowed.
As someone that's taken quite a few classes, online and in flesh, from quite a few different schools as well as having taught a bit I'll say that I don't think it makes much difference. A good teacher can make a class great and a so/so or bad teacher can make it worthless to take. If you have a good teacher and make an effort then you'll learn something and do well. Otherwise you probably won't get much from the experience.
Most of my experience is in computer science and electrical engineering. My experience is that those who have a natural talent for the material will get it and those that don't will never be able to learn it well enough to do anything very useful with it. Simply knowing programming syntax or how to do the math and logic needed won't do you much good if you can't grok the work on an intuitive level. I'd assume the same is true of any form of science or engineering. You might be able to blunder your way through History 101, online or off, but complex material can't be really learned by memorization and example problems.
I don't think a class being online or off really makes a difference so long as you have access to the information and tools you need to learn. I do think most online classroom tools, such as WebCT, are very poorly designed and are often not well understood or utilized by students or teachers. They lack polish, often fail to work correctly or at all, and are just badly thought out and implemented. If anything is wrong with online courses it is in the implementation and not in the concept. Participating in these courses shouldn't feel like a lesson in patience and muddling through. No software other than your web browser should be required. Browsers other than IE should work fine. If anything none IE browsers should enable more functionality since they better support advanced features. I get tired of having to use IE, which usually still doesn't work right, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, a PDF viewer. etc just to look at me course materials. It should all work directly in the damn browser window. If that is done then online courses should be at least as good as physical classes. Afterall, I learned most my Unix and programming skills from reading man pages and online docs.;)
My experience is that most innovations aren't new - it's just that when enough people become aware of the idea that they realize it exists that whomever has the best known implementation of that idea is called innovative. Which is why most inventions happen in more than one place, by more than one person, at the same time. Lightbulbs were around for a long time before Edison's lightbulb took off but he still gets the credit for inventing the lightbulb. Ideas very much like the web were around for a long time before the web but that's just the first version to have the needed features and be in the right place at the right time in order to take off.
True innovation doesn't really exist. We're all taking ideas from each other and adding our own observations and ideas with those all the time. Invention isn't sitting down and farting out something totally new. It's making tiny incremental changes that suddenly add up to something significantly different to be classified as something new.
Microsoft's problem is that they have R&D that might be innovative but they rarely, if ever, use those innovations in real products in a timely manner. Also MS seems blind to the rest of the world so they innovate things that others have already done - sometimes decades after others have done it. Sort of a problem. If they innovate ideas when others are innovating the same things at the same time then they can still get by with claiming to be innovative but if they are a year or a decade behind others then it doesn't really count anymore.
It really depends on what the problem is and where you throw the money and how much money you throw. Try solving problems without throwing money, or some sort of economic resource, at it. Not many that can be done for free. Even your investment in time translates to throwing money at the problem.
Intelligence is how you fix problems. Money is the tool that lets you leverage that intelligence to fix problems. Just thinking wisely at the problem rarely works.
It's not M$'s mistakes people mind so much as their trying to make up for their mistakes by using anti-competitive behavior. Y'know.. all those anti-trust lawsuits that keep popping up. Darn us for not giving the boot that smashes a fair chance to start coming for our heads before we run for cover.
Of course just stealing a peek in someone's wallet or digging the info from their trash is pretty damn easy and wouldn't be likely to be detected if you were careful. Why steal someones cash or credit card, which they'll likely detect, when you can pick their pocket/purse or grab their wallet from their desk, pilfer it for information (digital cam would make it quick), and drop it back undetected.
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Whatthey needed to do was involve the opensource and game modding communities in the design and encourage them to work together to crank out lots of free or low cost high-quality games. THAT is what is going to make or break this kind of platform. If they do that then they'll get plenty of feedback from the community as to the design. The QD was actually pretty nice and I may still try to pick one up if I can after Christmas.
Such a toy has to have the mainstays of fancy phones these days though. A good built-in camera, GPS, MP3 playing abilities, downloadable third party software and files, and of course bluetooth. The NGage was almost there so it seems a shame they were giving up.
A camera that can be swivled to face front or back would be really cool as would GPS. If they could tie those in to the gaming enviroment it'd be really interesting. Let the games respond to your locations and physical movements or even facial expressions.
Oh well. A mismanaged product altogether. Released without all the right features and killed when it could easily have been made one of the best products on the market.
Intellectual Ability should replace the concept of Intellectual Property. IP law blindly assumes that creativity is limited and there is nothing that count be wanted from the creator after the product of their creativity is available. Today that isn't true at all. Often IP isn't as valuable as the minds that created it. The change from putting value on creations to putting value on creators is a major economic change and such changes are always a little painful but for the good of all. The industrial revolution was a painful economic change but I doubt many would say it hurt the world economy in the long term. Doubtless people who produced their products and couldn't adapt to the changes went out of business during the industrial revolution. So it will be with the intelligence revolution.
As a tax payer I don't want my government paying for any IP to be produced that isn't available free of cost to the tax payer. That means research, software, and all other IP not of a sensitive (for national security) nature. If we're spending millions of dollars on software then we should be spending it on something that everyone can use freely.
I'd be glad for schools to stop pushing students into IT/CS. I hate that lots of posers got pushed through with degrees and no idea what they're doing, any talent in what they're doing, or any real interest in what they're doing. That just watered down the worth of everybody elses degrees and job experience because there is no way to tell somebody with a clue from someone without.
It's largely these crappy schools fault that the IT market went from paying well to paying poorly. To many of these crappy IT/CS graduates hit the market creating more a supply of them than was demanded. The people hiring them usually can't tell the difference if they've hired someone good or bad so it does us real geeks little good to be actually good at our jobs.
Worse, enough of these posers have been in the work force long enough that now they're in charge of IT departments and purposely avoid hiring people smarter than themselves or trying anything outside their experience because they're afraid of lossing control. These are usually the wankers who keep running Windows 98, keep writing spaghetti code, and who think firewalls aren't really important on the network.
So PLEASE. Don't push anymore of these losers into a field they're not interested in. Let them all become P.E. teachers where they can't do any harm.
Definately a top geek book and series.. Hyperion is a good series too.
One that is one of my favorite geek novels that wasn't mentioned was bruce Sterling's Distraction.
Does anyone actually shop at Radio Shack? I always found it to be sort of the slums of electronic stores and it's usually empty when you go there. I have no idea how they stay in business. I have a Radio Shack about a block from here and it's been more than two years since I bothered going there because they never have what I need or anything very interesting to look at.
48 hours?! Jeez you have a suck ass connection or something. ;) Of course BT is always slower than just FTP'ing the damn file.
Funny, I've been seeing these kits for at least a month at Fry's though. What makes Radio Shack special?
I haven't watched tv for years. I watch movies on my tv but I don't watch television shows. I don't have cable, sat, or even rabbit ears. The content doesn't make it worth the price of the equipment, services, or time let alone make it worth watching shitty ads.
For me the same would be true of Windows. I already have a REALLY free better-than-Windows OS, Linux, so why would I use Windows with ads? The only purpose of Windows is to play Windows-only games (Which I rarely do anyway) and I can't imagine being thrilled with a popup in the middle of a life or death (virtual anyway) battle. I'll stick to Linux for work and my PlayStation for games.
As for movies I rip the DVD, removing annoying things like menus, ads, region controls, and encryption and burn it to a much cleaner new DVD. A very good way to avoid being forced to watch half an hour of ads at the beginning of each disc. I've noticed certain brands, especially Disney, have gotten very bad about these ads and bogus anti-piracy lectures at the start of a DVD so I simply remove that crap.
I'd have liked it to use a normal PCMCIA card to offer GPRS/3G connectivity. After a recent trip where I frequently tried to use my laptop to look up directions using Google Maps and the frustration of dealing with the bulk of the laptop and lack of decent Wifi access (my first hotel, a Best Western, was suppoed to have access but that access seemed to only work in one parking spot in the parking lot.. I moved to a different hotel after that).
It uses bluetooth and your phone to access the Internet? Any special phone? I'm going to have to upgrade my phone shortly anyway so I'd like to make the best choice for this usage. I've previously used my phones built-in browser but have been unhappy with it's quality and expense. Sadly the browser and related charges of my ancient phone from about five years ago were better.
I was planning on getting a PCMCIA card for the laptop to offer getting online anywhere in the city but these look like a promising alternative. Our business is actually thinking of getting handhelds with net access for all sales and service staff. I wonder if these would work better?
At worst the government can destroy the Internet for those within their legal reach.
If the Internet is damaged to much by these idiots it'll just create an economic chance for an alternative network to be set up and capitalized on. A lot of publishers and users would choose this less restricted Internet even if it was smaller. Most likely this new network would be even less centralized as it'd probably start as a grass roots project by people who are pissed at the control. Rather than being built on a backbone owned by big businesses it'd probably be built on wireless with encrypted backbone traffic.
If they disallow that then it'll simply do two things. One, let the country slip behind the rest of the world in science and technology while more intelligent countries pass us by. No doubt it'd eventually cause either a reversal of those laws or create an exodus of the more intelligent people from this country. Two, create a black market for an alternative Internet. Most likely this would find ways to piggy back across the existing Internet but would hide the traffic with encryption and other techniques. End points would probably be a wireless mesh network.
It's fine to make Linux easier to use. Just actually make it easier to use and don't just make it more like Windows in the blind assumption that Windows is easier to use.
It's obvious that you don't know how easy Linux can be to use if you think you need to do something special to get X working with your video card. If you are having trouble with a video card it's probably because you are using a commercial driver that isn't under the care of the opensource community. THIS is usually what makes software hard. Ever configured Windows? It's an unholy nightmare as compared to Linux. Driver conflicts, drivers just plain not available because you're using the wrong version of Windows, etc. There isn't even a standard way to install drivers on Windows. Sometimes you pop in the disc and they auto-install. Sometimes you have to manually search the disc. Sometimes Windows has a copy already if you happen to be using the right version of Windows. Sometimes you have to download the driver off a very unhelpful vendors website. Sometimes you have to intall 20 other bits of software just to get to the driver. Yes.. very easy.. and don't forget that a good majority of the time Windows wants you to reboot before it can use these new drivers. Hahaha. These are what Linux is trying to avoid.
Windows and OS X are designed to make the easy stuff easier. Linux is designed to make the hard stuff easier. Newbies may not like that but in the end Linux is easier to use. Let newbies do what they always do and pay an expert to do the things they don't understand how to do.
I've actually been involved in usability studies between different OSs and my experience is that users don't even usually notice they are in a different OS let alone have any problem using Linux. Users rarely install hardware and stuff such as that anyway and when they do they tend to have problems on any OS. When's the last time you saw Grandma install a new video card and actually get it configured properly in any OS?
Nobody that actually uses Linux cares if it stays at 5% as it already works fine for us and is improving. Better that than gain 95% market share only to have it made as crappy as Windows. Alternatives are only useful to consumers if they actually offer a product with alternative features.
What is needed isn't a binary kernel API. What is needed is for hardware developers to begin to make their devices work with a fixed standard interface. We wouldn't use their products if they didn't all plug into our AGP, PCI Express, or whatever port so why do we use them when they can't conform to a standard driver? I don't have to load new drivers when I plug in different speakers or a keyboard (usually) so why do I need to for my video card or printer? That is where the problem is. They are purposely avoiding compatibility standards. There is no technical reason why they can't standardize.
Why do I care if the stupid and lazy people out there can get a better computing experience? They can already if only they will put forth a very small amount of effort. If they won't make the effort then what is in it for me to make the effort for them?
I've been using a Linux desktop for about seven years with far more success than any of my Windows or OS X customers are having with their 'easier' platform. You can keep all your clever ideas for converting the masses and leave me with a tool that actually works. Don't turn Linux into Windows just for the sake of having a free version of Windows.
Besides, the desktop is dead. It's a lame metaphor anyway that lends to low productivity and a lot of user confussion. It just wasn't a concept made to handle today's complex world. Better ideas are out there and they are beginning to work their way into the mass market.
Anyone that really wants a binary driver API could always write one and require that users use a kernel that has the BD API in order to use their drivers. An installer could even install such a kernel module for the user. Then it'd just be a legal issue to work out and not a technical issue. There is really no reason for closed source drivers though. It's one of the stupidest ideas in the PC industry. There is nothing in there that gains the companies any real advantage and by being closed they are actually producing crappier products.
Making a good template for a site is not easy and not especially fun. Making one that uses CSS for more than changing your fonts and make it work in all major browsers and you've just been through hell. IE is seriously a nightmare to do thanks largely to it's lack of proper transparency support and lack of positioning support.
Most site's need only the graphics and colors of their template changed from one of maybe three basic designs so it makes sense to reuse most of that code and to just change what needs to be changed. If you go with a design other than those basic three then I hope you know what you're doing because user's do best with a user-interface that behaves in a way they expect. Trying to do something new and different in UI design is rarely a good idea.
I'll agree that most stock templates I've seen have been crude and poorly designed. They're usually designed by people with experience in graphic arts or HTML but no experience in UI design. Flash templates especially annoy me as they waste a lot of energy on looking fancy without actually making the site even as easy to use as a normal HTML page. It's more of a problem of the designers lack of experience than a problem with the concept of templates though.
How many MAJOR websites have you used that use Javascript links. That annoys the crap out of me because it is so needless and is a usability nightmare. It's easy enough to use normal links and then add Javascript behaviors to them if you want them to do something different for browsers that have Javascript support. The Javascript code is usually cleaner if you assign it as a behavior anyway. There is absolutely no reason to ever use a Javascript link. It's no wonder designers create such crap with major sites doing that sort of lazy work.
Stock photos are fine for templates and mockups. It's the responsibility of whomever turns them into a finished site to exchange stock photos for custom photos.
People might take their free console but will they play it? If not then it won't help them much. They might inflate their licensing fees but only so long as game sales are proving that the market penetration is as good as the console sales indicate. Throwing money at people can work but only if they make people want what they're offering. I have a dozen consoles in my living room already but the only ones I ever play are the PS2 and DC and even those I rarely bother with anymore. For the most part games have gotten boring and THAT is Microsoft's biggest problem to tackle. Nintendo's Revolution seems to be an attempt to attack that issue at least while the 360 and PS3 just throw on more power.
They know that time is running out for their OS and Office Suite empire so they're willing to lose money in the short-term to move into consumer devices such as XBOX and Media Center. It's a life or death issue for Microsoft to take the place of Sony as the #1 console maker. They need something that can't easily be opensourced out from under them in the next decade and customers who don't already have a death grudge against them. Games are much harder to create than applications so gaming is a safer place to be in and consoles themselves take billions of dollars to launch so it's unlikely that a homebrew console will be a danger anytime soon.
If you build it they will come. Make a game prototype that runs on a PC and then pitch it to them for porting to the console. Usually all you have to do is buy a console development kit and work out distribution rights with an existing distributor that does have a deal with the console maker.
Make your game run in Linux and you can sell copies to Linux users too including several Linux-based console start-ups. The Windows and console game markets are fierce while Linux users are starved for any games to throw money at. Just don't mismanage your money like Loki Games did and you could do very well. Just do me a favor and make all platform-specific code use an opensource library so that the games can be ran on different hardware and OS's. I'm pissed at Loki for making it so hard to keep their games running on 2.6 kernels (they were developed for 2.4). If they'd thought about it that small percentage of code could have been in a library that could have been updated without recompiling the whole game.
I think Revolution is going to reclaim Nintendo it's 2nd place position. It's been a long time since I was excited to see something from Nintendo but Revolution has done just that. Their new ideas with controllers and game design are very compelling. I think Sony will keep PlayStation as the number one console because of the huge library of games available and the fact that the PS3 is slotted to be more powerful than the XBOX360, thanks no doubt to shipping a little later, but it's following pretty close on the heels of the 360's release. I also think M$'s plans to create artificial shortages of the 360 will come back to bite them. Fans get pissed if they can't buy the new toy they want and even more if they hear it's being done to them on purpose. This will push XBOX back to third position and as Sega has shown there isn't a huge market for third place consoles unless they can find a special niche and hang on (Gameboy).
In other news.. Gizmondo.. will it last? If they'd open up third party game development to everyone I think it could unseat the Gameboy and PSP. A plethora of games and apps is what that system needs to be huge. It seems nice from messing with it in store and they seem to get the active gaming concept by having games that react to your position (GPS). Active gaming is huge and is going to get much bigger especially when combined with multi-player gaming. If only it worked as a phone like the NGage I wouldn't need to carry so many items. Realisticly if they don't push for third-party developers to have easy access to making Gizmondo programs and extensions then they have no hope of competiting with the huge amount of money behind Gameboy and PSP. Call it the BeOS problem.
Exactly. Companies should be legally responsible for protecting customer, employee, and any other sensitive information. They should also be fined if their networks are penetrated and used to attack outside systems IF the problem in question has been known and had a solution available for at least X amount of time.. 72 hours maybe? In turn, commercial software producers and distributors should be held responsible for making those fixes available and easy to install. Blocking off WiFi is a stupid solution that just won't make any notable difference and will create a lot of redtape.
I purposely leave my AP open. It's no risk to the rest of my network as I firewall every machine on my network away from every other machine such that nobody can access anything I don't want them to. It'd be retarded to start dictating firewall configurations. Oops you leave a ssh port open? That's inviting worms that infect ssh flaws.. a $200 fine. Nevermind if you patched your version of ssh already.
Hell the FCC should have something to say about this. WiFi is in open public spectrum that is supposed to be usable by the consumer. Blocking off parts of this public spectrum with closed services is keeping other people from having equal access to this public resource. THAT should be what is illegal if anything. It's the same thing as fencing off part of a national park and saying it belongs to you. Requiring that sort of abuse by law shouldn't be allowed.
As someone that's taken quite a few classes, online and in flesh, from quite a few different schools as well as having taught a bit I'll say that I don't think it makes much difference. A good teacher can make a class great and a so/so or bad teacher can make it worthless to take. If you have a good teacher and make an effort then you'll learn something and do well. Otherwise you probably won't get much from the experience.
;)
Most of my experience is in computer science and electrical engineering. My experience is that those who have a natural talent for the material will get it and those that don't will never be able to learn it well enough to do anything very useful with it. Simply knowing programming syntax or how to do the math and logic needed won't do you much good if you can't grok the work on an intuitive level. I'd assume the same is true of any form of science or engineering. You might be able to blunder your way through History 101, online or off, but complex material can't be really learned by memorization and example problems.
I don't think a class being online or off really makes a difference so long as you have access to the information and tools you need to learn. I do think most online classroom tools, such as WebCT, are very poorly designed and are often not well understood or utilized by students or teachers. They lack polish, often fail to work correctly or at all, and are just badly thought out and implemented. If anything is wrong with online courses it is in the implementation and not in the concept. Participating in these courses shouldn't feel like a lesson in patience and muddling through. No software other than your web browser should be required. Browsers other than IE should work fine. If anything none IE browsers should enable more functionality since they better support advanced features. I get tired of having to use IE, which usually still doesn't work right, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, a PDF viewer. etc just to look at me course materials. It should all work directly in the damn browser window. If that is done then online courses should be at least as good as physical classes. Afterall, I learned most my Unix and programming skills from reading man pages and online docs.
My experience is that most innovations aren't new - it's just that when enough people become aware of the idea that they realize it exists that whomever has the best known implementation of that idea is called innovative. Which is why most inventions happen in more than one place, by more than one person, at the same time. Lightbulbs were around for a long time before Edison's lightbulb took off but he still gets the credit for inventing the lightbulb. Ideas very much like the web were around for a long time before the web but that's just the first version to have the needed features and be in the right place at the right time in order to take off.
True innovation doesn't really exist. We're all taking ideas from each other and adding our own observations and ideas with those all the time. Invention isn't sitting down and farting out something totally new. It's making tiny incremental changes that suddenly add up to something significantly different to be classified as something new.
Microsoft's problem is that they have R&D that might be innovative but they rarely, if ever, use those innovations in real products in a timely manner. Also MS seems blind to the rest of the world so they innovate things that others have already done - sometimes decades after others have done it. Sort of a problem. If they innovate ideas when others are innovating the same things at the same time then they can still get by with claiming to be innovative but if they are a year or a decade behind others then it doesn't really count anymore.
It really depends on what the problem is and where you throw the money and how much money you throw. Try solving problems without throwing money, or some sort of economic resource, at it. Not many that can be done for free. Even your investment in time translates to throwing money at the problem.
Intelligence is how you fix problems. Money is the tool that lets you leverage that intelligence to fix problems. Just thinking wisely at the problem rarely works.
Where can I get some of that kool-aid?
It's not M$'s mistakes people mind so much as their trying to make up for their mistakes by using anti-competitive behavior. Y'know.. all those anti-trust lawsuits that keep popping up. Darn us for not giving the boot that smashes a fair chance to start coming for our heads before we run for cover.
Of course just stealing a peek in someone's wallet or digging the info from their trash is pretty damn easy and wouldn't be likely to be detected if you were careful. Why steal someones cash or credit card, which they'll likely detect, when you can pick their pocket/purse or grab their wallet from their desk, pilfer it for information (digital cam would make it quick), and drop it back undetected.
What is jdob? They offer a range of RAID options so you have your choice of fault tolerance levels.