Even American citizens are frustrated by this. I cruise a couple of times a year and the port officials always seem to glare at you when you present your US passport. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-citizens coming in at the airports.
Bin Laden scored a great victory just by locking down freedom of movement in the US. I love traveling to other countries and almost always feel welcome. I wish the same were true here in the US.
Bin Laden was the prompt, the the guy who declared war against freedom in the US was George W Bush. Sadly, while Obama railed against that as a candidate, he's not doing a lot to distinguish himself from Bush on that front now.
Things like Three Strikes laws have dramatically increased California's prison population in recent years. This has resulted in an increase in funds that must go to prisons. This, combined with a refusal to increase taxes means that much more of the limited government revenue is going into the black hole that is the prison system.
So the solution is to have prisoners work on building the railroad, then?
Last I heard, California was flirting with bankruptcy, so I doubt they have the money...
Oddly enough, many of the world's people and organizations most able to generate huge sums of cash are constantly on the edge of debt disaster. Massive revenues are often more important than debt levels when determining how much capital a government, corporation, or dude can raise.
Simply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
In this case, I'd say the reviewer has failed everyone.
So to summarize your post: the reviewer doesn't make any solid arguments to support his position that Google Wave is not very exciting, and you heartily assert that it's the best thing ever.
the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing
Millions? Lets see here, the update was only recommended for a few hours and was quickly pulled. How many people do you think update constantly? If Windows updates are any indication (and most just install in the background with almost no user interaction) chances are very few. We aren't talking about "millions" but a few thousand in the worst case.
Well iTunes has been installing the Apple Updater Thingy by default for a long time, so the question is how often that checks for updates. And according to Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/apple-pushes-unwanted-enterprise-tool-to-windows-users.ars) the update was actually pushed "earlier this month" and only came to the attention of the online media today. It sounds like it was pulled a few hours after it hit half the computer-related news sites, not a few hours after it was pushed out to users.
Of course it works fine with zero difference between using Office XP on Vista or on Windows XP. The page you link to doesn't say you need to do anything to make it work - it just slimily says that they recommend you buy a new version of Office.
The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
Pagerank created a new problem, though. Before it, doing a search on a random search engine generally produced useful results. After it, doing a search on a random search engine largely produced link aggregate sites with no content dedicated to boosting the relevance of each other and affiliated sites.
If Google joins the already crowded field of metacommenting services but puts their Pageranky twist on it, I imagine that commenters will follow the example of the link aggregators and spam the service with useless algorithm gaming posts. On the plus side, this will be invisible to people who don't choose to use this service, so there won't be the collateral damage caused by Pagerank.
Noble intentions indeed. Call me a skeptic, but when you can get a basic refractive telescope plus tripod (which will easily cost more than the scope itself) for under $40 I'm not exactly enthusiastic about this. And when kids find out that all they can do is look at the moon and get headaches, they'll learn one thing: Astronomy without super-expensive equipment is boring.
Even with only your eyes and the night sky, astronomy isn't boring. It requires effort, however. Sure, most kids may not care about the sky. But like most interests, it becomes more engrossing as more effort is put into it. Go outside at midnight every night, sit on a roof, and sketch the sky. Learn the names of the things you can see, figure out when they'll be where, watch the planets move, look up notable events like meteor showers.
Now go buy a good pair of 10x50 binoculars. Look at the Orion Nebula. It's easy to find and it's cool. Now go looking for Messier objects. Andromeda's a good choice - it's quite visible in binos even in a city like San Jose on the right night, but it takes a little effort to find at first. Work your way to more difficult objects. Learn what they are. Learn what they do.
There's as much to keep you, or a kid, entertained in astronomy as there is in anything else. It just takes some effort, and after the night sky sketching it will likely be fun all the way. Or it may not be for you, but it doesn't hurt to try.
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
I don't think the ribbon is meant for eye candy. I think it's meant to improve usability, but in my experience it seems to do so mostly for very inexperienced users, and costs usability for more experienced users (and I think I've seen this decoupled from the need to relearn the same tasks). In FF they better make the ribbon hideable - who even ever uses menus in a browser? If they go from a tiny line of text to a large and always present wall of icons I'll revolt.
"Unless you browse the internet non-stop, all day, this won't be a problem."
IE apologists:
"Unless you browse dangerous sites, this won't be a problem."
The irony is hilarious.
Opera is faster than FF, which is faster than Chrome, for loading Slashdot, news sites, blah blah etc. I guess I don't do much with Javascript, but when I tried to switch to webkit I couldn't get past the sluggish html rendering.
Chrome sure has things FF doesn't (Even though protected tabs and multi-threading JS are coming in new releases), but FF has things chrome doesn't as well (The add-on store).
Nobody gives a flying fuck if Chrome loads pages a minuscule amount faster than FF.
Well, if the page isn't mostly Javascript, that's not true. In my recent personal testing, prompted by a desire to leave FF behind, I found that only Opera (seriously) loaded html faster than FF. IE was tied with FF. Chrome and Safari made Javascript sing, but were much slower at loading and scrolling (my pet peeve) html.
Yep... the Turbo Boost is a great idea for desktops, it always gives you the maximum performance within a given thermal envelope. But to laptops, it's pretty much the anti-steedstep, making it spend as much power as possible when it's almost idle. However, it seems they didn't test the real minimum by disabling turbo. I'm assuming the laptops can control this from software, anything else would be silly. Sure, it'll also drop your performance from 3.06 to 1.73GHz but since power is roughly proportional with frequency squared it should also lower the CPU to about (1.73 / 3.06)^2 = 32% power consumption.
It's a good point that this seems to counter speedstep, but to some extent they work together. A 3.06 GHz frequency allows a particular computing task to be finished faster so the chip can fall back to the idle speedstep frequency (on my ~3 GHz desktop i-7 the idle speed is 1.2 GHz). Also, come to think of it, you mixed up the exponent in the CPU power equation. The power draw is proportional to frequency and to the square of voltage, not the other way around. So assuming CPU task completion time scales to the -1 power with frequency, which seems reasonable, the increased power draw for the higher frequency exactly cancels with the fact that processes will finish faster.
On desktop i7's, Turbo Boost still only gives an extra ~200MHz (albeit to all cores). I'm not sure if they actually mean the Turbo Boost on the mobile i7 chips will upclock by up to 1.33GHz, or if they just mean that the chip will be available with base clock speeds in that range.
--- Mr. DOS
The new Lynnfield i-7s see a much bigger boost. My i7-860 goes from 2.8 to 3.46 gHz, which is fairly significant.
Still, there's a less obvious cost associated with using web apps for your office documents. Do you really want Microsoft to have all your personal data? Does a company want MS to have its trade secrets? Does the government want to be dependent on MS to function? The same goes for Google.
If the shower is run once a day the residual chlorine would sterilize any colony before it could establish. If the shower isn't run once a day and properly drains the environment won't remain wet enough long enough for the colony to establish. The only time a colony could establish such that the residual wouldn't kill it is if the shower isn't used daily and doesn't drain properly. Even then I doubt it could effectively establish because the amount of food in the water for the bacteria is going to be near zero, at least for properly treated water. The BOD (Biologic Oxygen Demand) requirements for potable water are very very low in the US. Only the water systems that are the worst of the worst (no residual chlorine, high BOD) in the US would even have the possibility and then you need a bad shower head and infrequent showering to make this happen. The probability is very low IMO.
As a post that's currently modded to +5 up above states, this bacteria doesn't really mind chlorine in its environment. As the other response to your post states, 30% of shower heads in the US have this bacteria.
Palms $70/month plan includes unlimited data/texting/mobile-mobile(Any network) calls and 450minutes for landlines/business lines.
To get an equivalent plan on the iphone would cost near $120/month, the difference being $50/month or $600/year.
The employee referral plan, which the VP of Sprint has suggested anyone interested use (he even gave his email publicly for the referral form) is $60/month and includes a few features the $70/mo plan doesn't, I believe. Somehow the taxes are a lot lower than on my previous plans, too. I pay $63/month after taxes and fees.
I completely agree with "combofix rocks." My job at the college I attend is pretty much removing that virus 24/7 from student laptops, and I've learned a few things:
1) McAfee sucks. We supply a copy of the Enterprise version to students, and a patched installation is required for internet access. Somehow, we're still inundated every semester with the latest flavor of AntiVirus ModelYear.
2) ComboFix is amazing. It's simple, but it automates a lot of tools that are a bit of a pain to use on their own. Ten minutes, and most malware is somewhat neutered.
3) MalwareBytes is amazing. ComboFix always misses stuff, but it lets us install MalwareBytes (also free) which finishes the job. I haven't seen any virus MB couldn't remove.
It's usually faster to run ComboFix + MalwareBytes (half hour between the tools in most cases) than it is to nuke it from orbit and reinstall Windows. Unless you're paranoid, two programs will take care of your end of your extended family's implied social support contract.
I removed infections from professors' computers every once in awhile in school. They always had problems that weren't even recognized by the big commercial virus scanner program given to everyone at the university. Combofix cleared the computers more than half the time, and I used MalwareBytes in the cases where it didn't. Why is it that infections known for years are still unrecognizable by Symantec and yet trivially cleanable by even old versions of free malware tools?
Adblock and FF are pretty solid infection preventions for even users who like to click on popup ads, since they block the display of those ads. Freeware tools fix infections. I haven't seen the major AV companies' software do either.
I definitely want the creators to get paid, and I don't want people to pirate copies of their games.
That aside, I don't buy this argument. If piracy leads to "Honest people need[ing] to pay extra to subsidize thieves" and strong DRM helps to counter this, why is it that PC games are always much cheaper than console games despite their relative ease of piracy?
If M$ were offered the same deal, they would snap it up immediately & not have such objections to it. I would prefer to see Google running this than M$.
Despite your persuasive dollar signs, I'm not convinced that MS is capable of evil on this scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Even American citizens are frustrated by this. I cruise a couple of times a year and the port officials always seem to glare at you when you present your US passport. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-citizens coming in at the airports.
Bin Laden scored a great victory just by locking down freedom of movement in the US. I love traveling to other countries and almost always feel welcome. I wish the same were true here in the US.
Bin Laden was the prompt, the the guy who declared war against freedom in the US was George W Bush. Sadly, while Obama railed against that as a candidate, he's not doing a lot to distinguish himself from Bush on that front now.
Always the hell holes of the world attract the sleeze of the world, like me to Slashdot.
fixed.
Things like Three Strikes laws have dramatically increased California's prison population in recent years. This has resulted in an increase in funds that must go to prisons. This, combined with a refusal to increase taxes means that much more of the limited government revenue is going into the black hole that is the prison system.
So the solution is to have prisoners work on building the railroad, then?
lulz. The Democrats have the majority, but its the Republicans fault!
Typical Californian.
So you're arguing that the Democrats are the ones who don't want to increase taxes?
Last I heard, California was flirting with bankruptcy, so I doubt they have the money...
Oddly enough, many of the world's people and organizations most able to generate huge sums of cash are constantly on the edge of debt disaster. Massive revenues are often more important than debt levels when determining how much capital a government, corporation, or dude can raise.
Simply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
In this case, I'd say the reviewer has failed everyone.
So to summarize your post: the reviewer doesn't make any solid arguments to support his position that Google Wave is not very exciting, and you heartily assert that it's the best thing ever.
Someone took the video and censored it. Just watch it and skip TFA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyas7BrbUFY
the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing
Millions? Lets see here, the update was only recommended for a few hours and was quickly pulled. How many people do you think update constantly? If Windows updates are any indication (and most just install in the background with almost no user interaction) chances are very few. We aren't talking about "millions" but a few thousand in the worst case.
Well iTunes has been installing the Apple Updater Thingy by default for a long time, so the question is how often that checks for updates. And according to Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/apple-pushes-unwanted-enterprise-tool-to-windows-users.ars) the update was actually pushed "earlier this month" and only came to the attention of the online media today. It sounds like it was pulled a few hours after it hit half the computer-related news sites, not a few hours after it was pushed out to users.
WTF are you talking about? That's absolutely NOT true. All versions of MS OfficeXP and 2003 are listed on the Vista compatibility pages :
https://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/Browse.aspx?type=Software&category=Business%20%26%20Home%20Office&subcategory=Office%20Suites&page=2
Perhaps you should either do some research or work for Dell.
Unless it's a 64 bit machine
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/Browse.aspx?type=Software&category=Business%20%26%20Home%20Office&subcategory=Office%20Suites&os=64-bit&page=4
Of course it works fine with zero difference between using Office XP on Vista or on Windows XP. The page you link to doesn't say you need to do anything to make it work - it just slimily says that they recommend you buy a new version of Office.
What happens if Cyanogen, or some other person, decided to modify the Talk so that all numbers dialed were reported to third party advertisers?
Wouldn't Google appreciate reports of every number dialed via Talk? Or do they not count as third party?
The web had the same problem, which PageRank solved (in part). We may need something analogous to tame the new "meta web".
Pagerank created a new problem, though. Before it, doing a search on a random search engine generally produced useful results. After it, doing a search on a random search engine largely produced link aggregate sites with no content dedicated to boosting the relevance of each other and affiliated sites.
If Google joins the already crowded field of metacommenting services but puts their Pageranky twist on it, I imagine that commenters will follow the example of the link aggregators and spam the service with useless algorithm gaming posts. On the plus side, this will be invisible to people who don't choose to use this service, so there won't be the collateral damage caused by Pagerank.
Noble intentions indeed.
Call me a skeptic, but when you can get a basic refractive telescope plus tripod (which will easily cost more than the scope itself) for under $40 I'm not exactly enthusiastic about this. And when kids find out that all they can do is look at the moon and get headaches, they'll learn one thing: Astronomy without super-expensive equipment is boring.
Even with only your eyes and the night sky, astronomy isn't boring. It requires effort, however. Sure, most kids may not care about the sky. But like most interests, it becomes more engrossing as more effort is put into it. Go outside at midnight every night, sit on a roof, and sketch the sky. Learn the names of the things you can see, figure out when they'll be where, watch the planets move, look up notable events like meteor showers.
Now go buy a good pair of 10x50 binoculars. Look at the Orion Nebula. It's easy to find and it's cool. Now go looking for Messier objects. Andromeda's a good choice - it's quite visible in binos even in a city like San Jose on the right night, but it takes a little effort to find at first. Work your way to more difficult objects. Learn what they are. Learn what they do.
There's as much to keep you, or a kid, entertained in astronomy as there is in anything else. It just takes some effort, and after the night sky sketching it will likely be fun all the way. Or it may not be for you, but it doesn't hurt to try.
In my opinion this is a really, really dumb move. While its all eye-candy and nice, it brings down the usability a lot. If you want to get to the menu, you have to find some button from somewhere obscure location and then the menu will be vertical to begin with, like right-clicking. On top of that its one extra mouse click. I hate the same thing with Office. Another good example is MSN Messenger. I can never find the menu button, and when I do the menu looks just retarted.
The ironic thing is that a menubar is the least intrusive UI object on the screen. It's small, it doesn't get in the way and it goes nicely along with title bar. And you still find everything easily and fast from it.
This doesn't "tidy up" 'dated' browser. There a lot more issues to look at, like UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling, in which Firefox is actually lacking behind (still wins IE tho, but thats not much)
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
Gladly I'm not Firefox user, and even less so with this. It seems Firefox is going more and more to the way of grandma-understands-too. While I myself more and more like the approach Opera takes; feels like a complete suite for browsing. Maybe it'll gain more marketshare for Opera in power users, who still value usability and the simple efficient things like menu bars.
I don't think the ribbon is meant for eye candy. I think it's meant to improve usability, but in my experience it seems to do so mostly for very inexperienced users, and costs usability for more experienced users (and I think I've seen this decoupled from the need to relearn the same tasks). In FF they better make the ribbon hideable - who even ever uses menus in a browser? If they go from a tiny line of text to a large and always present wall of icons I'll revolt.
Firefox apologists:
"Unless you browse the internet non-stop, all day, this won't be a problem."
IE apologists:
"Unless you browse dangerous sites, this won't be a problem."
The irony is hilarious.
Opera is faster than FF, which is faster than Chrome, for loading Slashdot, news sites, blah blah etc. I guess I don't do much with Javascript, but when I tried to switch to webkit I couldn't get past the sluggish html rendering.
LOL! Your a retard, nice Troll.
Chrome sure has things FF doesn't (Even though protected tabs and multi-threading JS are coming in new releases), but FF has things chrome doesn't as well (The add-on store).
Nobody gives a flying fuck if Chrome loads pages a minuscule amount faster than FF.
Well, if the page isn't mostly Javascript, that's not true. In my recent personal testing, prompted by a desire to leave FF behind, I found that only Opera (seriously) loaded html faster than FF. IE was tied with FF. Chrome and Safari made Javascript sing, but were much slower at loading and scrolling (my pet peeve) html.
Yep... the Turbo Boost is a great idea for desktops, it always gives you the maximum performance within a given thermal envelope. But to laptops, it's pretty much the anti-steedstep, making it spend as much power as possible when it's almost idle. However, it seems they didn't test the real minimum by disabling turbo. I'm assuming the laptops can control this from software, anything else would be silly. Sure, it'll also drop your performance from 3.06 to 1.73GHz but since power is roughly proportional with frequency squared it should also lower the CPU to about (1.73 / 3.06)^2 = 32% power consumption.
It's a good point that this seems to counter speedstep, but to some extent they work together. A 3.06 GHz frequency allows a particular computing task to be finished faster so the chip can fall back to the idle speedstep frequency (on my ~3 GHz desktop i-7 the idle speed is 1.2 GHz). Also, come to think of it, you mixed up the exponent in the CPU power equation. The power draw is proportional to frequency and to the square of voltage, not the other way around. So assuming CPU task completion time scales to the -1 power with frequency, which seems reasonable, the increased power draw for the higher frequency exactly cancels with the fact that processes will finish faster.
On desktop i7's, Turbo Boost still only gives an extra ~200MHz (albeit to all cores). I'm not sure if they actually mean the Turbo Boost on the mobile i7 chips will upclock by up to 1.33GHz, or if they just mean that the chip will be available with base clock speeds in that range.
--- Mr. DOS
The new Lynnfield i-7s see a much bigger boost. My i7-860 goes from 2.8 to 3.46 gHz, which is fairly significant.
One can always transfer them to the device for free via a cable. The limitation seems to be on what shows up in the Kindle store.
I'm sure the annual rental fee will be so much cheaper (cough) than the $150 I spent to buy Office 97 (~$11.50 per year).
You were sure and you're correct! The annual fee is $0. The one time cost of purchase is $0. The biweekly upside down processing fee is $0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Web_Apps#Office_Web_Applications
Still, there's a less obvious cost associated with using web apps for your office documents. Do you really want Microsoft to have all your personal data? Does a company want MS to have its trade secrets? Does the government want to be dependent on MS to function? The same goes for Google.
Or suffer from the chronic purchasing of bogus, yet name-brand, gimmicks?
Stop making fun of Macs. That's mean!
If the shower is run once a day the residual chlorine would sterilize any colony before it could establish. If the shower isn't run once a day and properly drains the environment won't remain wet enough long enough for the colony to establish. The only time a colony could establish such that the residual wouldn't kill it is if the shower isn't used daily and doesn't drain properly. Even then I doubt it could effectively establish because the amount of food in the water for the bacteria is going to be near zero, at least for properly treated water. The BOD (Biologic Oxygen Demand) requirements for potable water are very very low in the US. Only the water systems that are the worst of the worst (no residual chlorine, high BOD) in the US would even have the possibility and then you need a bad shower head and infrequent showering to make this happen. The probability is very low IMO.
As a post that's currently modded to +5 up above states, this bacteria doesn't really mind chlorine in its environment. As the other response to your post states, 30% of shower heads in the US have this bacteria.
Palms $70/month plan includes unlimited data/texting/mobile-mobile(Any network) calls and 450minutes for landlines/business lines.
To get an equivalent plan on the iphone would cost near $120/month, the difference being $50/month or $600/year.
The employee referral plan, which the VP of Sprint has suggested anyone interested use (he even gave his email publicly for the referral form) is $60/month and includes a few features the $70/mo plan doesn't, I believe. Somehow the taxes are a lot lower than on my previous plans, too. I pay $63/month after taxes and fees.
I completely agree with "combofix rocks." My job at the college I attend is pretty much removing that virus 24/7 from student laptops, and I've learned a few things:
1) McAfee sucks. We supply a copy of the Enterprise version to students, and a patched installation is required for internet access. Somehow, we're still inundated every semester with the latest flavor of AntiVirus ModelYear.
2) ComboFix is amazing. It's simple, but it automates a lot of tools that are a bit of a pain to use on their own. Ten minutes, and most malware is somewhat neutered.
3) MalwareBytes is amazing. ComboFix always misses stuff, but it lets us install MalwareBytes (also free) which finishes the job. I haven't seen any virus MB couldn't remove.
It's usually faster to run ComboFix + MalwareBytes (half hour between the tools in most cases) than it is to nuke it from orbit and reinstall Windows. Unless you're paranoid, two programs will take care of your end of your extended family's implied social support contract.
I removed infections from professors' computers every once in awhile in school. They always had problems that weren't even recognized by the big commercial virus scanner program given to everyone at the university. Combofix cleared the computers more than half the time, and I used MalwareBytes in the cases where it didn't. Why is it that infections known for years are still unrecognizable by Symantec and yet trivially cleanable by even old versions of free malware tools?
Adblock and FF are pretty solid infection preventions for even users who like to click on popup ads, since they block the display of those ads. Freeware tools fix infections. I haven't seen the major AV companies' software do either.
I definitely want the creators to get paid, and I don't want people to pirate copies of their games.
That aside, I don't buy this argument. If piracy leads to "Honest people need[ing] to pay extra to subsidize thieves" and strong DRM helps to counter this, why is it that PC games are always much cheaper than console games despite their relative ease of piracy?
If M$ were offered the same deal, they would snap it up immediately & not have such objections to it. I would prefer to see Google running this than M$.
Despite your persuasive dollar signs, I'm not convinced that MS is capable of evil on this scale.