Right here on/. I predicted (and was shot down) that this alert system was going to be used badly. The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.
What they need to do is to make an opt in system with levels that you can opt into. Level 1 would be for situations where nearly everyone's life is peril. Say a poison gas leak where going outside will kill you. The Boston bombers manhunt would not count as level 1. Level 2 would be a warning about something that could kill you such as to stay away from an area as there is a poison gas leak there. Level 3 would be Lost children who have been taken by bad people (not a custody case) Level 4 would be things like weather alerts.
But my guess is that the government is going to be captain obvious with most of their alerts and tell people that a storm is coming (that has been in the news for 3 straight days), then it will be political messages of grief and loss (i.e. "My heart goes out to those who...") , and eventually things like reminders to vote and recycle.
But being the government they believe that their mission is so very important that people should not be able to opt out of this crap. The key is that people need to not be treated like children and the government should not have any special rights. If people want to opt out then they are clearly stating "I don't want your crap".
I would love it if this comes to fruition; but I am sick of the breathless articles showing us the future without actually showing us anything. CANCER CURED! headlines that later are shown to only be in one mouse which later exploded. ITER would be a great example. The other day I read a headline about a Fusion Breakthrough; basically they had laid a brick or two at the ITER project (literally this was the headline and real story). I am still interested in the above story but I wish they would moderate the story a bit. Minimally I want to see the thing hooked up to a car exhaust generating a useful amount of power (say running an air conditioner).
A few months back I read a great article about a battery breakthrough. Then they had this postage stamp sized thing powering a LED. I can power a LED with a slice of lemon. Power up an iPhone and you've got my attention. Power a car and you've got the world's attention.
Up to about the years 1200-1400 the Arab world was pretty cool. While we Europeans were living in an age appropriately designated the Dark Ages much of the Arab world was doing cool math, Cool science, Exploration, trade, arts, and medicine. They were fairly tolerant of other religions and were one of the few bright spots on this planet. Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again. Maybe lots of female internet entrepreneurs is a step in that direction. I wonder if there were more female entrepreneurs in the middle east 1000 years ago?
How hard is it to wipe a machine? I've never been a fan of the wasteful practice of physically shredding hard drives. But a simple policy is that you physically take every drive out of the machine, hook it up to a master machine, and run a reliable drive wiping program. As for the reliability of these drive wiping programs, I have not only not heard of something slipping by them, there is one company that sells hard drives that have been wiped with only zeros and has a cash prize if you can restore the data. So if you are doing a two pass random data wipe you are way ahead of the state of the art.
I am fairly certain I could set up a drive wiping station (with a multi drive connector) for about $200. Then if you occasionally did get a drive with a weird issue where you couldn't wipe it then you use the hammer next to the station and bonk the drive a few times and throw it in a special box for physical destruction.
Years ago MS made some seriously compelling software. I happily jumped onto DOS, Window 3.0 3.1 3.11, Then the amazing 98, 98se. Around the 98 time I made the leap from Borland C++ to Visual C++ 1.0 which was amazing. Then ME came out which was a monstrosity. NT was awesome which any developer worth anything was on instead of the many initial versions of XP. Eventually XP stabilized and many applications stopped working on NT so I reluctantly made that switch.
On the server side NT was amazing, IIS was pretty good as compared to the netscape web server. The early.net products let me get away from Java. But then the products just died. IIS started getting really complicated,.net became a windows product marketing machine. Windows server got really expensive. SQL got even more expensive. All this at the same time that Linux got really good, Apache got really good, mysql got really good.
So basically since around 2001 MS has not made a product that I have found terribly compelling. Visual Studio is fairly impressive but since it primarily develops windows applications it is useless to me.
Even on the office front I could probably use a copy of Office 97 or 2000 perfectly well. So the key problem to me for MS is what have they done for me in a decade to make my life as a developer (thus deploy-er of their technology) better? White papers from their marketing department don't count.
I have what I need and it is quite old. I wouldn't mind an upgrade but I don't have to get one. Plus if I do want an upgrade I will buy a used machine where someone put the best of everything into it 3 years ago.
Most desktops can be repaired for around $70 so they can last until they are so old it becomes silly. Laptops are way less repairable and more breakable so they vanish from the pool of used machines faster.
But one factor keeping laptops running is that when the batteries die people just turn them into desktops and are happy with the mobility of their phones and tablets.
The biggest factor keeping people away from new machines is the relentless bloatware infesting most new machines. We./'rs can remove that crap in a second but for most users they are stuck with the stuff and the various ads annoy and scare them.
I have a fairly javascript intense website but it is primarily used for layout etc. There is no way I am using more than a few dozen K of RAM with my variables including temp ones created in loops. Thus garbage collection and whatnot should not apply to my site. Yet my site is dog SLOW on the iOS platforms as compared to even old desktops.
Years ago I was dealing with a particularly nasty problem with some new Oracle software. We called for support and went up layer after layer until we were talking with a guy involved in development. He basically said that the software in question was crap and that we would never get our thing to work.
About the only company that vaguely impressed me with their support was Sun in that if one of their machines died they bent over backward to get it working again. In one case they sent a guy in to swap out a dead motherboard early on a Sunday morning.
But the sad reality with Sun was that it was just cheaper and faster to buy 10 white box Linux machines for the same price and have massive redundancy.
So don't give me Enterprise crap with things like Node.js. If you are small node.js is a proven solution. If you are big node.js is still a proven solution. If you are huge then node.js might start showing weaknesses along with basically everything else but being massive you should have people who can deal with it in no time at all.
About the only thing that "Enterprise" solutions offer are slick salesmen and slick looking certifications.
I believe the US military had the same problem making the switch from Horses to mechanical vehicles. Being a Cavalry officer was very prestigious. Driving a truck was not. I heard a story where some guy had to go out and shoot a bunch of horses to make his point. I suspect that if you check the records that the motor vehicles were not a command opportunity in the beginning either.
One thing about switching to all drones is that they might regret not having some human pilots around when some enemy either jams the existing drones rendering them useless or worse just takes them over right after launch.
If air superiority suddenly vanishes you can't retreat fast enough.
I have a livescribe pen and love many of its features. But their software is a bag of cloud crap. Basically in order to use the pen I have to sign in to their cloud stuff. Then they really try to get me to use EverNote (of hacked account fame). Then there is the fact that I need to buy their notebooks. And then on top of all that the tiny screen on the pen basically vanished on a recent firmware upgrade.
All I want to do it make notes and turn them into PDFs. If I want to "cloud" them then I will do that myself.
If this Lernstift pen gets good reviews and they keep it simple then there is a 100% chance that I will be upgrading to their product. Seeing that I love my Livescribe despite its serious flaws I would fall deeply in love with a pen that didn't require special paper, looked nice, and didn't stray from the core functionality of recording my scribbles. Most importantly if it didn't make me log in to some stupid cloud stuff.
Years ago I worked at a waterslide. A number of people figured out how to position their bodies so they skipped across the water at the bottom. This resulted in a number of broken bits as they could actually reach the end of the pool and slam into the concrete. The pool at the end was a good 30 feet long. I would guess that some of them were skipping well enough to go at least another 10 feet. I doubt that many waterslide designers take the body engineers into account.
A New constitutional amendment is needed in nearly every western country. It needs to strictly limit the information that a government can conceal from the public and limit what corporations and governments may collect.
Right now people blah blah about big data but the reality is that most data collected is not well analyzed and is poorly collected. A simple example is that I was doing some billing system work for a telephone company and based on the records they kept many phone calls never started, and many phone calls never ended. Just glitches in the recorded data. This is just one problem among many in really analyzing data. But people are only going to get better at this and with image recognition I can see both the police and retailers going mad once they can get it working. Through the pile of cameras you should be able to make a fairly good map of where everyone is all the time. Retailers on the otherhand would love to know your tastes and spending habits. That way they can pounce on their likely customers and say, "These green pants will go well with your new red sweater that you bought across town a week ago."
If corporations can start combining their data they can quickly build an incredible profile of every person. Get records from your power company about power usage, scan what car you are driving, what you are wearing, who you are with. I can see them identifying that you might have a new girlfriend and try to guilt you into buying her something "Special". This might all sound like innocent marketing but it becomes nastier when your employer can now buy a retail record that you met with some union organizers. (Which I did yesterday even though I run my own company because they happen to be friends).
Once the information that is gathered has some real value you will see companies energetically collecting it (paying everyone with a security camera to feed their machine) and then finding the gaps and putting up bill boards that watch cars go by and check their occupants.
But the elephant in the room is that governments really really should not know that much about people. If a government (democratically elected included) can watch its opponents then it will. Many people elected to government get very righteous about their mission and think that their opposition (taking cheap shots) only exists to steal their jobs and stop them from doing the right thing. So using government gathered data to stop them is actually the righteous thing to do. Or they are just dirtbags who don't want to let go.
Another one was a telephone tech division that used company's call records to see if they were talking to the competition. They also had the sales division's phones set up for two neat tricks. One was that if a phone call was forwarded they would see what number the call had been forwarded to. And they would see private numbers. These guys saw nothing wrong with this.
In my neck of the woods a government lost an election and one of the nails in their coffin was when it was revealed that they were using private tax records to target their fundraising.
So as this big data becomes easier and easier I can see where anyone with access to this data will misuse it. Not everyone just that there are some people who will abuse any data they can get.
So quite simply there need to be constitutional amendments (that lobbyists can't keep working against) that limit what data anyone can store and what data can be hidden. A simple example of this is that I don't want my power records accessible to anyone without a warrant. I want the mall security video to only be used in relation to a crime not sold to a marketing a company.
Did the reset, reinstalled my favorite plugins, and FF now runs as one would expect it to. I didn't lose any data including the insidiously necessary url completion.
I regularly see my Firefox cracking a gig of memory. Then after a few days use it often starts getting weird. Then when I try to quit it the damn thing won't go away so I have to do a "Force Quit". I primarily keep using it because firebug is so good.
My biggest problem with all the Windows 8 blathering is that there are two forces making Windows anything more irrelevant. One is that your average computer user is moving to a smartphone for all personal use. The average Joe out there just has little need for a PC. If they do need a PC a little bit then they can use their 6 year old Laptop they bought from a guy named Doug. So beyond work Windows 8 is not relevant to most people's lives.
The other force is as we all love here on/. Linux. I am not going into the which one is better it is the which one is good enough. For many people both personal and business the only difference between a PC with Windows and a PC with Linux is $100. Does it run a browser and print? Check.
Does this mean that Linux is going to win overnight? No. Apathy will keep the PC world installing Windows 8 by default. The key here is that if people buy a machine tomorrow they don't really care if it has Vista, 7, or 8.1. The only real screw-up for MS was the start button in that it left normally apathetic people scratching their heads thinking, "I don't like this." Did they download and install Linux? No but it did make them say, "I'll take the old Windows please."
So what this says to me is that there is no compelling case for most people to use Windows; but that there is also not a terribly compelling case for them not to; in that it is too much trouble to switch.
Now compare this to the days when 3.11, 95, and then 98 came out. Each of those were huge improvements that made many people's computer lives much better. I'm not saying 8.1 is worse than 7 it is just that most people would find an SSD more of a computer quality of life improvement. Or even replacing Norton or whatever bloatware AV came with their machine.
Actually this could get weird. Here is a story of a guy who donated sperm to a lesbian couple with contracts protecting him. Then the couple went on welfare so the state is now going after him for child support.
As for the Hitler kid. It is not so much that the kid would be a genocidal monster but would have the crushing weight of history on him. I suspect that regardless of his predisposition that there would be groups calling for his blood (bad pun).
The key here is that cloning is going to result in some screwed up situations.
Let's say a serial killer has 5 clones made before he is caught. Then the first 4 (all raised differently) go on a killing spree themselves. What do you do with the 5th?
Then what about the billionaire who has 300,000 clones made of himself by paying 300,000 women $10,000 each to be impregnated with his clone. (For the low price of $3 billion.)
Anecdotally a friend of mine turned down a pretty damn good offer from a nice company in the area due to the place being "a giant sterile Starbucks wasteland".
Rich people cloning pets will be a mild controversy but mostly due to the money wasted. Some ego maniac cloning themselves will make the news. Then some people will clone lost loved ones causing a certain creepy factor news bite. But the cloning that will really make the news is when some company will claim (initially fraudulently) that they have the DNA of a variety of stars so you too can not only have Brad Pitt's baby but that the baby will be Brad Pitt. That is when the creepy factor will completely cross into the public discussion with all the legal, ethical, moral water cooler philosophizing that the news-people and their pundits can then do.
Basically this will bring a 1,000 sci-fi books to life (but in a sad and pathetic kind of way).
I'll start by asking: what do you with the kid if Hitler is cloned? Does Mr. Pitt owe child support to any of his clones? Or does Brad Pitt's father owe child support to the clones?
I have a simple idea for a pretty solid system to deal with all unwanted calls. The idea is that you opt into this system. Then when you receive a call that you don't want you would dial *55 or something. You would never receive a call from that number again but more importantly once some small number of people had *55'd a number nobody who had opted in would receive a call from that number.
This way anybody who makes annoying phone calls would be blacklisted. This would include politicians, survey companies, charities, sales people, even annoying girlfriends. I would trust that anyone who annoys even a small handful of people is someone I don't want phoning me. Charities, politicians, and whatnot would be all indignant about this but if they regularly got *55'd then maybe they should rethink their position in this world.
The key here is no exceptions. I don't want some group self righteously explaining why they should be able to annoy me. Basically I don't want to ever receive a phone call from someone who I don't personally know.
In order to have DRM you will have to force the browsers to obey DRM. A great example is how various parties are now trying to strong arm Firefox into obeying their rules about cookies.
Also DRM often requires that they firmly establish who you are. This would require that your identity be substantially tied to your browser. Then any website that is part of their scheme can then query this as a prerequisite to your using their site. This is the sort of MBA thinking that is just stupid.
Once it seems acceptable to force browsers to do something then all kinds of parties will try to force browsers to obey their rules. So I am not just worried about DRM. DRM is easy for anyone who wants to wall off their part of the web. They can just create a plug-in and do all the DRM they ever wanted to. What the various movie industry types have discovered is that nobody wants their crap plugins.
These industry types have blah blahed that piracy killed the DVD. I personally use Netflix and am happy with the click and watch interface. But the other day I put in a DVD for the first time in 5 years and it just made me angry. I had to sit through FBI warnings, I couldn't fast forward through their company logos and the menu didn't default on the movie (the reason I would put it in) but on the trailers (which their marketing department would want most). It is through DRM that they were able to force the manufacturers of DVDs to disable skipping the warnings and fast-forward when I wanted to.
Seeing that it was the World Wide Web Consortium that tried to choke us with XHTML as a method to "force" us to follow their rules I am asking the various browser development companies to band together and cut their ties with the World Wide Web Consortium. It is time for a new standards body; one that doesn't listen to any party outside of those who use browsers, develop browsers, and develop servers.
A very simple litmus test for the public's desire for DRM is that they will flock to a DRM plug-in in droves to the point where it is just stupid not to include it with the browsers. If few want it then by what right do they think they can force us to take it?
I used Mac OS X as my personal example. My key message is that most non technical people don't actually give a crap about what OS they are on. My mother uses Linux with an icon for email(through chrome), an icon for chrome, and an icon for open office (I installed it a long time ago when arguably it was the best) and most of my siblings have no idea that there is anything different on her computer when they are visiting and use it.
About the only people who really get hot under the collar about Microsoft as the only viable operating system are Microsoft Development shops.
Where people are going to get angry is when they have been using this dual boot device for a year or two and find out that the MS part cost them an extra $100 when they haven't used it in two years. Then they will actively make sure their next device doesn't have MS anything on it.
When I first started to switch to mac I thought the dual boot would be a great introduction. Within a week I cleared out my windows partition and moved it to a VM. Months later I found I was only going to windows for to see that all was still working in IE and to run the occasional windows only application.
So having an Android/Windows combo may very well have the same results for many. They will think that they can have the best of both worlds and find that Android serves many of their needs quite nicely and instead of "rejecting" windows discover they just aren't using it. So instead of it being a religious conversion it will be more of a migration.
This has got to be a nightmare scenario for MS in that they know that for most people almost any OS will do. Does it have a browser, check (that will be the limit of most people's lists) does it have an easy way to watch Youtube, does it have any good games, does it boot really fast, does it have a good battery life.
You will notice I didn't put office applications in that list as most people only use those at work.
Plus the needs of us techie types are way way off most people's lists.
Can't do Cake as it is too slow. Google beats your search results if your site isn't uber fast. Thus a site using raw PHP will be on page one while an identical site with Cake will be on page 8. This is one of the reasons I am tempted to make the mega leap to C++ for web apps.
Yes I did perl from around 1996 to 2000, then Java around 2000 (It really wasn't meant for web at the time), then.net around 2002 (It wasn't meant for the web at the time either), then PHP around 2004. Since then I have taken cracks at just about everything but lisp and Scala. Still keep going back to PHP.
Oh and str_replace has fooled me many times so I now use preg_replace. Little harder but much cooler.
If I had a Tesla there are two features that I would want. PV solar on all the horizontal surfaces. I use my car a few times a week and for short distances. So even crappy PV would generally keep the car topped up. Plus PV isn't that crappy thus a day at the beach should buy you 5% more charge.
But what I really want is a tiny turbine generator. As in 5-10 HP. This would be enough that if I screw up and am 10 miles from home when the car basically dies I can just pull over and read for 20 minutes to build up enough charge to get home.
People will blah blah about the volt having an onboard generator but that is basically a full sized gas engine. I am talking about something that would fit in shoebox or two with a pint or two of fuel. The range of the Tesla is great and would meet 99.9% of my needs nicely. But I can see the day when the kids didn't plug it in leaving it at 40% when I need to pick up my wife at the airport. I would look at the range and with gritted teeth see that I have almost exactly the range to get there and back. So I would kick in the turbine and buy a few extra miles. I am enough of an optimist to make stupid trips like this. Also it would allow me to do the walk of shame to a nearby gas station if I even ran down the fuel. Plus this whole battery switching thing and regular charging stations will come to my part of the world shortly after they install them in Antarctica so more ability for self-reliance would be required in these parts.
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Right here on /. I predicted (and was shot down) that this alert system was going to be used badly. The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.
What they need to do is to make an opt in system with levels that you can opt into. Level 1 would be for situations where nearly everyone's life is peril. Say a poison gas leak where going outside will kill you. The Boston bombers manhunt would not count as level 1. Level 2 would be a warning about something that could kill you such as to stay away from an area as there is a poison gas leak there. Level 3 would be Lost children who have been taken by bad people (not a custody case) Level 4 would be things like weather alerts.
But my guess is that the government is going to be captain obvious with most of their alerts and tell people that a storm is coming (that has been in the news for 3 straight days), then it will be political messages of grief and loss (i.e. "My heart goes out to those who...") , and eventually things like reminders to vote and recycle.
But being the government they believe that their mission is so very important that people should not be able to opt out of this crap. The key is that people need to not be treated like children and the government should not have any special rights. If people want to opt out then they are clearly stating "I don't want your crap".
I would love it if this comes to fruition; but I am sick of the breathless articles showing us the future without actually showing us anything. CANCER CURED! headlines that later are shown to only be in one mouse which later exploded. ITER would be a great example. The other day I read a headline about a Fusion Breakthrough; basically they had laid a brick or two at the ITER project (literally this was the headline and real story). I am still interested in the above story but I wish they would moderate the story a bit. Minimally I want to see the thing hooked up to a car exhaust generating a useful amount of power (say running an air conditioner).
A few months back I read a great article about a battery breakthrough. Then they had this postage stamp sized thing powering a LED. I can power a LED with a slice of lemon. Power up an iPhone and you've got my attention. Power a car and you've got the world's attention.
Up to about the years 1200-1400 the Arab world was pretty cool. While we Europeans were living in an age appropriately designated the Dark Ages much of the Arab world was doing cool math, Cool science, Exploration, trade, arts, and medicine. They were fairly tolerant of other religions and were one of the few bright spots on this planet. Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again. Maybe lots of female internet entrepreneurs is a step in that direction. I wonder if there were more female entrepreneurs in the middle east 1000 years ago?
So all I can say is good luck!
How hard is it to wipe a machine? I've never been a fan of the wasteful practice of physically shredding hard drives. But a simple policy is that you physically take every drive out of the machine, hook it up to a master machine, and run a reliable drive wiping program. As for the reliability of these drive wiping programs, I have not only not heard of something slipping by them, there is one company that sells hard drives that have been wiped with only zeros and has a cash prize if you can restore the data. So if you are doing a two pass random data wipe you are way ahead of the state of the art.
I am fairly certain I could set up a drive wiping station (with a multi drive connector) for about $200. Then if you occasionally did get a drive with a weird issue where you couldn't wipe it then you use the hammer next to the station and bonk the drive a few times and throw it in a special box for physical destruction.
This is not rocket surgery.
Years ago MS made some seriously compelling software. I happily jumped onto DOS, Window 3.0 3.1 3.11, Then the amazing 98, 98se. Around the 98 time I made the leap from Borland C++ to Visual C++ 1.0 which was amazing. Then ME came out which was a monstrosity. NT was awesome which any developer worth anything was on instead of the many initial versions of XP. Eventually XP stabilized and many applications stopped working on NT so I reluctantly made that switch.
.net products let me get away from Java. But then the products just died. IIS started getting really complicated, .net became a windows product marketing machine. Windows server got really expensive. SQL got even more expensive. All this at the same time that Linux got really good, Apache got really good, mysql got really good.
On the server side NT was amazing, IIS was pretty good as compared to the netscape web server. The early
So basically since around 2001 MS has not made a product that I have found terribly compelling. Visual Studio is fairly impressive but since it primarily develops windows applications it is useless to me.
Even on the office front I could probably use a copy of Office 97 or 2000 perfectly well. So the key problem to me for MS is what have they done for me in a decade to make my life as a developer (thus deploy-er of their technology) better? White papers from their marketing department don't count.
I have what I need and it is quite old. I wouldn't mind an upgrade but I don't have to get one. Plus if I do want an upgrade I will buy a used machine where someone put the best of everything into it 3 years ago.
./'rs can remove that crap in a second but for most users they are stuck with the stuff and the various ads annoy and scare them.
Most desktops can be repaired for around $70 so they can last until they are so old it becomes silly. Laptops are way less repairable and more breakable so they vanish from the pool of used machines faster.
But one factor keeping laptops running is that when the batteries die people just turn them into desktops and are happy with the mobility of their phones and tablets.
The biggest factor keeping people away from new machines is the relentless bloatware infesting most new machines. We
I have a fairly javascript intense website but it is primarily used for layout etc. There is no way I am using more than a few dozen K of RAM with my variables including temp ones created in loops. Thus garbage collection and whatnot should not apply to my site. Yet my site is dog SLOW on the iOS platforms as compared to even old desktops.
Years ago I was dealing with a particularly nasty problem with some new Oracle software. We called for support and went up layer after layer until we were talking with a guy involved in development. He basically said that the software in question was crap and that we would never get our thing to work.
About the only company that vaguely impressed me with their support was Sun in that if one of their machines died they bent over backward to get it working again. In one case they sent a guy in to swap out a dead motherboard early on a Sunday morning.
But the sad reality with Sun was that it was just cheaper and faster to buy 10 white box Linux machines for the same price and have massive redundancy.
So don't give me Enterprise crap with things like Node.js. If you are small node.js is a proven solution. If you are big node.js is still a proven solution. If you are huge then node.js might start showing weaknesses along with basically everything else but being massive you should have people who can deal with it in no time at all.
About the only thing that "Enterprise" solutions offer are slick salesmen and slick looking certifications.
I believe the US military had the same problem making the switch from Horses to mechanical vehicles. Being a Cavalry officer was very prestigious. Driving a truck was not. I heard a story where some guy had to go out and shoot a bunch of horses to make his point. I suspect that if you check the records that the motor vehicles were not a command opportunity in the beginning either.
One thing about switching to all drones is that they might regret not having some human pilots around when some enemy either jams the existing drones rendering them useless or worse just takes them over right after launch.
If air superiority suddenly vanishes you can't retreat fast enough.
I have a livescribe pen and love many of its features. But their software is a bag of cloud crap. Basically in order to use the pen I have to sign in to their cloud stuff. Then they really try to get me to use EverNote (of hacked account fame). Then there is the fact that I need to buy their notebooks. And then on top of all that the tiny screen on the pen basically vanished on a recent firmware upgrade.
All I want to do it make notes and turn them into PDFs. If I want to "cloud" them then I will do that myself.
If this Lernstift pen gets good reviews and they keep it simple then there is a 100% chance that I will be upgrading to their product. Seeing that I love my Livescribe despite its serious flaws I would fall deeply in love with a pen that didn't require special paper, looked nice, and didn't stray from the core functionality of recording my scribbles. Most importantly if it didn't make me log in to some stupid cloud stuff.
Years ago I worked at a waterslide. A number of people figured out how to position their bodies so they skipped across the water at the bottom. This resulted in a number of broken bits as they could actually reach the end of the pool and slam into the concrete. The pool at the end was a good 30 feet long. I would guess that some of them were skipping well enough to go at least another 10 feet. I doubt that many waterslide designers take the body engineers into account.
A New constitutional amendment is needed in nearly every western country. It needs to strictly limit the information that a government can conceal from the public and limit what corporations and governments may collect.
Right now people blah blah about big data but the reality is that most data collected is not well analyzed and is poorly collected. A simple example is that I was doing some billing system work for a telephone company and based on the records they kept many phone calls never started, and many phone calls never ended. Just glitches in the recorded data. This is just one problem among many in really analyzing data. But people are only going to get better at this and with image recognition I can see both the police and retailers going mad once they can get it working. Through the pile of cameras you should be able to make a fairly good map of where everyone is all the time. Retailers on the otherhand would love to know your tastes and spending habits. That way they can pounce on their likely customers and say, "These green pants will go well with your new red sweater that you bought across town a week ago."
If corporations can start combining their data they can quickly build an incredible profile of every person. Get records from your power company about power usage, scan what car you are driving, what you are wearing, who you are with. I can see them identifying that you might have a new girlfriend and try to guilt you into buying her something "Special". This might all sound like innocent marketing but it becomes nastier when your employer can now buy a retail record that you met with some union organizers. (Which I did yesterday even though I run my own company because they happen to be friends).
Once the information that is gathered has some real value you will see companies energetically collecting it (paying everyone with a security camera to feed their machine) and then finding the gaps and putting up bill boards that watch cars go by and check their occupants.
But the elephant in the room is that governments really really should not know that much about people. If a government (democratically elected included) can watch its opponents then it will. Many people elected to government get very righteous about their mission and think that their opposition (taking cheap shots) only exists to steal their jobs and stop them from doing the right thing. So using government gathered data to stop them is actually the righteous thing to do. Or they are just dirtbags who don't want to let go.
Another one was a telephone tech division that used company's call records to see if they were talking to the competition. They also had the sales division's phones set up for two neat tricks. One was that if a phone call was forwarded they would see what number the call had been forwarded to. And they would see private numbers. These guys saw nothing wrong with this.
In my neck of the woods a government lost an election and one of the nails in their coffin was when it was revealed that they were using private tax records to target their fundraising.
So as this big data becomes easier and easier I can see where anyone with access to this data will misuse it. Not everyone just that there are some people who will abuse any data they can get.
So quite simply there need to be constitutional amendments (that lobbyists can't keep working against) that limit what data anyone can store and what data can be hidden. A simple example of this is that I don't want my power records accessible to anyone without a warrant. I want the mall security video to only be used in relation to a crime not sold to a marketing a company.
You Sir, are a god.
Did the reset, reinstalled my favorite plugins, and FF now runs as one would expect it to. I didn't lose any data including the insidiously necessary url completion.
Thank you!
I regularly see my Firefox cracking a gig of memory. Then after a few days use it often starts getting weird. Then when I try to quit it the damn thing won't go away so I have to do a "Force Quit". I primarily keep using it because firebug is so good.
My biggest problem with all the Windows 8 blathering is that there are two forces making Windows anything more irrelevant. One is that your average computer user is moving to a smartphone for all personal use. The average Joe out there just has little need for a PC. If they do need a PC a little bit then they can use their 6 year old Laptop they bought from a guy named Doug. So beyond work Windows 8 is not relevant to most people's lives.
/. Linux. I am not going into the which one is better it is the which one is good enough. For many people both personal and business the only difference between a PC with Windows and a PC with Linux is $100. Does it run a browser and print? Check.
The other force is as we all love here on
Does this mean that Linux is going to win overnight? No. Apathy will keep the PC world installing Windows 8 by default. The key here is that if people buy a machine tomorrow they don't really care if it has Vista, 7, or 8.1. The only real screw-up for MS was the start button in that it left normally apathetic people scratching their heads thinking, "I don't like this." Did they download and install Linux? No but it did make them say, "I'll take the old Windows please."
So what this says to me is that there is no compelling case for most people to use Windows; but that there is also not a terribly compelling case for them not to; in that it is too much trouble to switch.
Now compare this to the days when 3.11, 95, and then 98 came out. Each of those were huge improvements that made many people's computer lives much better. I'm not saying 8.1 is worse than 7 it is just that most people would find an SSD more of a computer quality of life improvement. Or even replacing Norton or whatever bloatware AV came with their machine.
Actually this could get weird. Here is a story of a guy who donated sperm to a lesbian couple with contracts protecting him. Then the couple went on welfare so the state is now going after him for child support.
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/sperm-donor-sued-child-support-article-1.1232394
As for the Hitler kid. It is not so much that the kid would be a genocidal monster but would have the crushing weight of history on him. I suspect that regardless of his predisposition that there would be groups calling for his blood (bad pun).
The key here is that cloning is going to result in some screwed up situations.
Let's say a serial killer has 5 clones made before he is caught. Then the first 4 (all raised differently) go on a killing spree themselves. What do you do with the 5th?
Then what about the billionaire who has 300,000 clones made of himself by paying 300,000 women $10,000 each to be impregnated with his clone. (For the low price of $3 billion.)
Anecdotally a friend of mine turned down a pretty damn good offer from a nice company in the area due to the place being "a giant sterile Starbucks wasteland".
He loved San Fran though.
Rich people cloning pets will be a mild controversy but mostly due to the money wasted. Some ego maniac cloning themselves will make the news. Then some people will clone lost loved ones causing a certain creepy factor news bite. But the cloning that will really make the news is when some company will claim (initially fraudulently) that they have the DNA of a variety of stars so you too can not only have Brad Pitt's baby but that the baby will be Brad Pitt. That is when the creepy factor will completely cross into the public discussion with all the legal, ethical, moral water cooler philosophizing that the news-people and their pundits can then do.
Basically this will bring a 1,000 sci-fi books to life (but in a sad and pathetic kind of way).
I'll start by asking: what do you with the kid if Hitler is cloned? Does Mr. Pitt owe child support to any of his clones? Or does Brad Pitt's father owe child support to the clones?
I have a simple idea for a pretty solid system to deal with all unwanted calls. The idea is that you opt into this system. Then when you receive a call that you don't want you would dial *55 or something. You would never receive a call from that number again but more importantly once some small number of people had *55'd a number nobody who had opted in would receive a call from that number.
This way anybody who makes annoying phone calls would be blacklisted. This would include politicians, survey companies, charities, sales people, even annoying girlfriends. I would trust that anyone who annoys even a small handful of people is someone I don't want phoning me. Charities, politicians, and whatnot would be all indignant about this but if they regularly got *55'd then maybe they should rethink their position in this world.
The key here is no exceptions. I don't want some group self righteously explaining why they should be able to annoy me. Basically I don't want to ever receive a phone call from someone who I don't personally know.
In order to have DRM you will have to force the browsers to obey DRM. A great example is how various parties are now trying to strong arm Firefox into obeying their rules about cookies.
Also DRM often requires that they firmly establish who you are. This would require that your identity be substantially tied to your browser. Then any website that is part of their scheme can then query this as a prerequisite to your using their site. This is the sort of MBA thinking that is just stupid.
Once it seems acceptable to force browsers to do something then all kinds of parties will try to force browsers to obey their rules. So I am not just worried about DRM. DRM is easy for anyone who wants to wall off their part of the web. They can just create a plug-in and do all the DRM they ever wanted to. What the various movie industry types have discovered is that nobody wants their crap plugins.
These industry types have blah blahed that piracy killed the DVD. I personally use Netflix and am happy with the click and watch interface. But the other day I put in a DVD for the first time in 5 years and it just made me angry. I had to sit through FBI warnings, I couldn't fast forward through their company logos and the menu didn't default on the movie (the reason I would put it in) but on the trailers (which their marketing department would want most). It is through DRM that they were able to force the manufacturers of DVDs to disable skipping the warnings and fast-forward when I wanted to.
Seeing that it was the World Wide Web Consortium that tried to choke us with XHTML as a method to "force" us to follow their rules I am asking the various browser development companies to band together and cut their ties with the World Wide Web Consortium. It is time for a new standards body; one that doesn't listen to any party outside of those who use browsers, develop browsers, and develop servers.
A very simple litmus test for the public's desire for DRM is that they will flock to a DRM plug-in in droves to the point where it is just stupid not to include it with the browsers. If few want it then by what right do they think they can force us to take it?
I used Mac OS X as my personal example. My key message is that most non technical people don't actually give a crap about what OS they are on. My mother uses Linux with an icon for email(through chrome), an icon for chrome, and an icon for open office (I installed it a long time ago when arguably it was the best) and most of my siblings have no idea that there is anything different on her computer when they are visiting and use it.
About the only people who really get hot under the collar about Microsoft as the only viable operating system are Microsoft Development shops.
Where people are going to get angry is when they have been using this dual boot device for a year or two and find out that the MS part cost them an extra $100 when they haven't used it in two years. Then they will actively make sure their next device doesn't have MS anything on it.
When I first started to switch to mac I thought the dual boot would be a great introduction. Within a week I cleared out my windows partition and moved it to a VM. Months later I found I was only going to windows for to see that all was still working in IE and to run the occasional windows only application.
So having an Android/Windows combo may very well have the same results for many. They will think that they can have the best of both worlds and find that Android serves many of their needs quite nicely and instead of "rejecting" windows discover they just aren't using it. So instead of it being a religious conversion it will be more of a migration.
This has got to be a nightmare scenario for MS in that they know that for most people almost any OS will do. Does it have a browser, check (that will be the limit of most people's lists) does it have an easy way to watch Youtube, does it have any good games, does it boot really fast, does it have a good battery life.
You will notice I didn't put office applications in that list as most people only use those at work.
Plus the needs of us techie types are way way off most people's lists.
Can't do Cake as it is too slow. Google beats your search results if your site isn't uber fast. Thus a site using raw PHP will be on page one while an identical site with Cake will be on page 8. This is one of the reasons I am tempted to make the mega leap to C++ for web apps.
Yes I did perl from around 1996 to 2000, then Java around 2000 (It really wasn't meant for web at the time), then .net around 2002 (It wasn't meant for the web at the time either), then PHP around 2004. Since then I have taken cracks at just about everything but lisp and Scala. Still keep going back to PHP.
Oh and str_replace has fooled me many times so I now use preg_replace. Little harder but much cooler.
If I had a Tesla there are two features that I would want. PV solar on all the horizontal surfaces. I use my car a few times a week and for short distances. So even crappy PV would generally keep the car topped up. Plus PV isn't that crappy thus a day at the beach should buy you 5% more charge.
But what I really want is a tiny turbine generator. As in 5-10 HP. This would be enough that if I screw up and am 10 miles from home when the car basically dies I can just pull over and read for 20 minutes to build up enough charge to get home.
People will blah blah about the volt having an onboard generator but that is basically a full sized gas engine. I am talking about something that would fit in shoebox or two with a pint or two of fuel. The range of the Tesla is great and would meet 99.9% of my needs nicely. But I can see the day when the kids didn't plug it in leaving it at 40% when I need to pick up my wife at the airport. I would look at the range and with gritted teeth see that I have almost exactly the range to get there and back. So I would kick in the turbine and buy a few extra miles. I am enough of an optimist to make stupid trips like this. Also it would allow me to do the walk of shame to a nearby gas station if I even ran down the fuel. Plus this whole battery switching thing and regular charging stations will come to my part of the world shortly after they install them in Antarctica so more ability for self-reliance would be required in these parts.