That way all the important stuff (data and software) would be on my PDA, so I wouldn't need to "buy the white album again" if I replaced my cellphone.
By "buy the White Album again" I assume you mean, "Transfer the MP3's you had on your old phone onto your new phone". Which is really awful, I agree. It took like 30 minutes last time. I was traumatized. Good thing I could still listen to them on my computer while they were transferring to my new phone or I might not have made it.
I'm being obnoxious I know, and you were probably talking about have to require software when you change platforms (which actually can be a PITA if you have something you liked that doesn't run on the new platform), but really how is this any different than having to go through the same stuff every time you replace your PDA? I don't see how you would replace your phone platform (with PDA built in)any more or less often than you would replace your PDA platform (with external phone).
When they talk about this kind of tech I'm pretty sure they're including CC branded debit cards in the mix. I try to avoid using credit cards too, but I use a card to pay quite a bit. I just use the debit card 99% of the time.
GP has a certain "you kids get off my lawn" charm, but also a valid point. Until it gets to the point where my cell phone can act as my ID, medical insurance card, library card, Barnes and Noble Club membership card, video rental place card, AND my credit card I'm not likely to get rid of my wallet. How is this really saving me much time or energy? I can't really carry less stuff (in the short term, I'll probably still need to carry the actual cards, since not everyone is instantly going to get readers for these phones), it's not really much more difficult to pull out my wallet than my phone, what's the real advantage here? I dunno, people seem to like it where it's been tried, maybe I'm just missing something.
I'm not questioning where you can actually do this in Kenya, I'm sure you can, since you live there. I do question how useful it is there. I was just listening to the radio this morning talking about how since the election problems last year, people are literally living in tents. Businesses are failing left and right. I find it hard to believe that very many businesses are investing in M-PESA accounts outside of the high-end shops. How often can you actually USE this system?
I'm willing to admit I could easily be wrong, having never been to Kenya. I also admit that the idea of a shop stall at a public market allowing you to pay by cell phone appeals to the geek in me. I just can't see how the infrastructure could work. I'm sure Kenya HAS large stores where investments like this make sense, but my outsider's impression was that most of the time, for most of the people, businesses were small affairs. Market stalls and modest shops are not the kinds of places this makes sense.
Oh, and thanks so very much for the cheep American comment. It is to laugh. Ha Ha. Gosh it's like I didn't even know there were countries in Africa.
Yeah, I have to admit I was a bit miffed when I read the headline, thinking "Dammit, I just installed the thing. I haven't have time to really test much of anything yet." This makes much more sense.
There's a fine line here between forcing your views on someone and helping them see a benefit that they've previously missed. The fact is that many, many people who don't "want" broadband (read as they don't want the expense or they don't want to change away form a familiar interface) find, once they get it, that it is helpful to them. Like everyone else, I have the anecdotes about people I've know who resisted broadband only to finally give in to some sort of pressure to family and friends to get. Most found it very useful once they actually had it, a few did not and eventually wound up canceling it or considering it an expense of their [husband,wife,kids]. Given the relative numbers though, I feel comfortable telling people that they should try broadband. Many more people seem to like ti once they get it than don't.
When my wife and I moved for my new job we decided to get an apartment instead of buying a house right away. Our house had a built-in microwave and our apartment does not. Being the foodies that we are, we decided, "Bah, we hardly ever use the microwave, we just won't buy one".
Yeah... no. You'd be amazed at how often you use the thing. Melting butter, warming the maple syrup for pancakes, warming leftovers, plus the occasional "yes, I'm a foodie but dammit I just want a quick frozen pizza or bag of popcorn" situation. We lasted a month, then decided it was to useful not to have.
I fail to see how this article is pro-MS. It seems to be a more less balanced comparison between differing UI models. Ars Technica has, if anything, a bit of a Pro-Apple bent as far as I've seen lately. The article never makes any value judgments about which philosophy is better, nor does it seem to be selling anything. Just dispelling what the author sees as a misunderstanding regarding how the taskbar developed. Personally I felt like he vaguely preferred the Apple model, though as I said, he never actually makes a point of it.
About the only thing he didn't point out that I thought might be mildly relevant was that most X11 desktop managers follow the MS model rather than the Apple model, so it's probably more familiar to Unix users as well as Windows users.
Worse, it's a selective myth. The "groupthink" is whatever the current poster wants it to be. We all love Apple, or Linux, or hate Mircrosoft, or even love Microsoft depending on the point being made.
Yeah, I still haven't entirely mastered Expose. Well, more to point, I know exactly how to use it (it's not all the complicated after all) I just don't tend to think of it immediately. When I think to use it it's a big help, but I don't always think of it. Also (at least from my experience) it only shows documents open on the current virtual desktop, which isn't always what I want. You're right in general though, it the tool to use for finding Documents vs. Applications.
As a long time Windows/Linux user who's started using Macs in the last couple of years I found that the document centric idea took a fairly short time to get used to. As the article states however, there are some scalability issues when you get to the point where you have lots of documents open on several different desktops. Finding the Window you want, as opposed to the app you want, can be a PITA when you a large number of windows open in one app. It's not impossible, or even all that difficult, but it seems a bit more clunky then the Windows model for this one particular situation.
And in 2005, while I was working for them, SGI declared bankruptcy. They made some phenomenally poor decisions both from a technology and a business point of view and they paid for it. Having been great once is not the same as being great. That said, they appear to be executing a very impressive turn-around, and part of me wishes I'd never left. Hopefully the economic down turn doesn't kill them just as they are digging out of their hole.
Correct, at worse it's a felony defined simply as "refusal of lawful orders". It could get you jail time, but certainly not death. Even then if an officer tender his or her resignation rather than follow an order they believe to be wrong (even if it is legal), they can usually get away with nothing worse than losing their job. Enlisted men don't have the option of resignation (they're under contract), but I can imagine only a VERY limited set of circumstances in which the President could give anyone below the rank of general an order more significant than "get me a cup of coffee".
I read a very interesting opinion in a blog recently. It stated that the Blogsphere, and indeed the concept of "new media" is eventually going to destroy itself, unless it can find a way to not destroy "old media". His argument was essentially that bloggers and other "new media" types don't produce news, they cannibalize it. Bloggers take large amounts of primary source material (news clips, newspaper articles, online articles by conventional newspaper and TV station web sites, occasionally transcripts recorded from speeches or political events (though usual that record is made by a conventional news source)) and distill it into secondary material that they then publish. This is a useful and valuable service (though the people themselves often write from very biased perspectives and skew the information they distill), but it doesn't create the news that they mine. Someone still has to produce that primary material which entities as varied as "The Drudge Report" and the "Daily KOS" (and probably many in between) then digest into the "new media".
The producers of that primary material are slowly being squeezed out by the people that most depend on the material. It requires a much larger budget to produce the primary source material (people have to travel to where the news is, record it reliably and hopeful in a very high res format, transmit it to where the distribution source is, expenses in paying interviewers, transcribers, etc) than to produce the secondary information. The "new media" likely cannot afford to produce it's own primary material. Unless a way can be found to make a decent profit off the Internet, or to prevent traditional media from failing because of the Internet, the source material is going to dry up. Or at least become less common and harder to mine.
I find it ironic that The US was one of the earliest innovators of simple easy to use base ten money, and we've been unable to convince anyone to use base ten for anything else since.
Actually you do have to Pay the $99 to run it on your own pre-identified phone. You can't register a phone as a "developer" phone until you pay the "developer" fee. I paid the fee, so obviously I consider it worthwhile, but on the flip side i can see where people don't care for the arrangement. I can totally see the $99 to distribute on the app store, but it does seem like you should be able to register your phone without a fee. As you point out, it's certainly no worse than the cost of entry for WinMo development, and obviously I didn't consider it THAT big of a deal or I'd not have paid, but I can see where people don't like it.
To be fair "you had to buy a Mac". You could have bought a $500 Mac Mini, you chose to buy a MacBook Pro. Not that I disagree with your choice, I'd have gone with the more useful and powerful machine too, but you didn't HAVE to buy the expensive one.
Did you sign up when the Dev kit first became available? As I understand it Apple only let in a small percentage of the people who initially signed up to download a dev kit until the App Store went live. Basically you had to either be a big name developer (Sega), prove that you had a working app ready for launch day, or be one of the first like 1000 people to sign up. Everyone else was put off until a day or two after the store launched. I got the dev kit maybe a day or two after it was released and I wasn't give my certification until a few days after App Store launched. Since then they've supposedly been very quick on the turn around. Since I've been lazy and STILL haven't finished an app, it wasn't really that big a deal. As I understand it, had you contacted them and told them you had an app ready, they'd have made sure you were online for launch day.
Back in the day, and I mean way back when, work in the US government was considered a service to the country and not a means to make oneself rich.
Uh, when was that? So far as I can tell politics has been a road to wealth and power for at least the majority of politicians since there have been politics. There are exceptions of course, many different time periods have had men that seemed to legitimately be in it to serve their fellow man, but most politicians have been in it for themselves first and their fellow men in some distance of second.
You're trolling, but this is a fantastically unfair statement. F/OSS has a number of perfectly usable systems that can do most of, if not everything, that AD can do... Except work with Windows. Works with practically every other operating system, open or closed source, on the face of the earth; but Microsoft made a choice to not work with what everyone else does. If anything you could argue that AD is a "clone" of LDAP/Kerberos.
There was a Slashdot story not too long ago about this. Essentially Microsoft is opening up in response to the recent EU court cases. They've been fairly good about it so far. There is some evidence they may have already been think about opening this stuff up, and the court case only sped matters up a bit. And the Samba team is hurting for developers.
Lots more on the other side of the link with specifics about what MS is doing and why, and how much a good portion of Slashdot distrusts this.
To be fair, the number of changes that Windows requires manual editing of the registry for are vanishingly few compared to the number of changes that any *nix except OS X require you to open a text file for. It's getting better. You can do far more from a GUI in Linux than you used to be able to, but in fact you may very well need to open a text editor just to get GUI working if you get unlucky with a Linux Install.
But gaming is a weird animal. Many gamers (not all, maybe not even most, but many) are influential in other people's tech decisions. Whether it be the kids who his parent's assume "knows about computers" because he spends lots of time on one and can spout jargon he read on game sites, the programmer or sys admin who games as a hobby, or the "Tech Site" writers who's primary measure of performance is game FPS; lots of gamers have some level of influence on various numbers of people's technical decisions.
On top of that, even many people who don't game take an attitude of "Well, if it'll play that game, it will certainly be able to handle my $trivaltask". Gamers may be a small part of the market, but they are a much bigger part of marketing.
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That way all the important stuff (data and software) would be on my PDA, so I wouldn't need to "buy the white album again" if I replaced my cellphone.
By "buy the White Album again" I assume you mean, "Transfer the MP3's you had on your old phone onto your new phone". Which is really awful, I agree. It took like 30 minutes last time. I was traumatized. Good thing I could still listen to them on my computer while they were transferring to my new phone or I might not have made it.
I'm being obnoxious I know, and you were probably talking about have to require software when you change platforms (which actually can be a PITA if you have something you liked that doesn't run on the new platform), but really how is this any different than having to go through the same stuff every time you replace your PDA? I don't see how you would replace your phone platform (with PDA built in)any more or less often than you would replace your PDA platform (with external phone).
When they talk about this kind of tech I'm pretty sure they're including CC branded debit cards in the mix. I try to avoid using credit cards too, but I use a card to pay quite a bit. I just use the debit card 99% of the time.
GP has a certain "you kids get off my lawn" charm, but also a valid point. Until it gets to the point where my cell phone can act as my ID, medical insurance card, library card, Barnes and Noble Club membership card, video rental place card, AND my credit card I'm not likely to get rid of my wallet. How is this really saving me much time or energy? I can't really carry less stuff (in the short term, I'll probably still need to carry the actual cards, since not everyone is instantly going to get readers for these phones), it's not really much more difficult to pull out my wallet than my phone, what's the real advantage here? I dunno, people seem to like it where it's been tried, maybe I'm just missing something.
I'm not questioning where you can actually do this in Kenya, I'm sure you can, since you live there. I do question how useful it is there. I was just listening to the radio this morning talking about how since the election problems last year, people are literally living in tents. Businesses are failing left and right. I find it hard to believe that very many businesses are investing in M-PESA accounts outside of the high-end shops. How often can you actually USE this system?
I'm willing to admit I could easily be wrong, having never been to Kenya. I also admit that the idea of a shop stall at a public market allowing you to pay by cell phone appeals to the geek in me. I just can't see how the infrastructure could work. I'm sure Kenya HAS large stores where investments like this make sense, but my outsider's impression was that most of the time, for most of the people, businesses were small affairs. Market stalls and modest shops are not the kinds of places this makes sense.
Oh, and thanks so very much for the cheep American comment. It is to laugh. Ha Ha. Gosh it's like I didn't even know there were countries in Africa.
Yeah, I have to admit I was a bit miffed when I read the headline, thinking "Dammit, I just installed the thing. I haven't have time to really test much of anything yet." This makes much more sense.
There's a fine line here between forcing your views on someone and helping them see a benefit that they've previously missed. The fact is that many, many people who don't "want" broadband (read as they don't want the expense or they don't want to change away form a familiar interface) find, once they get it, that it is helpful to them. Like everyone else, I have the anecdotes about people I've know who resisted broadband only to finally give in to some sort of pressure to family and friends to get. Most found it very useful once they actually had it, a few did not and eventually wound up canceling it or considering it an expense of their [husband,wife,kids]. Given the relative numbers though, I feel comfortable telling people that they should try broadband. Many more people seem to like ti once they get it than don't.
When my wife and I moved for my new job we decided to get an apartment instead of buying a house right away. Our house had a built-in microwave and our apartment does not. Being the foodies that we are, we decided, "Bah, we hardly ever use the microwave, we just won't buy one".
Yeah... no. You'd be amazed at how often you use the thing. Melting butter, warming the maple syrup for pancakes, warming leftovers, plus the occasional "yes, I'm a foodie but dammit I just want a quick frozen pizza or bag of popcorn" situation. We lasted a month, then decided it was to useful not to have.
Yeah, the corners drove me freaking nuts for a week or two, and now I wonder how I ever disliked them.
I fail to see how this article is pro-MS. It seems to be a more less balanced comparison between differing UI models. Ars Technica has, if anything, a bit of a Pro-Apple bent as far as I've seen lately. The article never makes any value judgments about which philosophy is better, nor does it seem to be selling anything. Just dispelling what the author sees as a misunderstanding regarding how the taskbar developed. Personally I felt like he vaguely preferred the Apple model, though as I said, he never actually makes a point of it.
About the only thing he didn't point out that I thought might be mildly relevant was that most X11 desktop managers follow the MS model rather than the Apple model, so it's probably more familiar to Unix users as well as Windows users.
Worse, it's a selective myth. The "groupthink" is whatever the current poster wants it to be. We all love Apple, or Linux, or hate Mircrosoft, or even love Microsoft depending on the point being made.
Yeah, I still haven't entirely mastered Expose. Well, more to point, I know exactly how to use it (it's not all the complicated after all) I just don't tend to think of it immediately. When I think to use it it's a big help, but I don't always think of it. Also (at least from my experience) it only shows documents open on the current virtual desktop, which isn't always what I want. You're right in general though, it the tool to use for finding Documents vs. Applications.
As a long time Windows/Linux user who's started using Macs in the last couple of years I found that the document centric idea took a fairly short time to get used to. As the article states however, there are some scalability issues when you get to the point where you have lots of documents open on several different desktops. Finding the Window you want, as opposed to the app you want, can be a PITA when you a large number of windows open in one app. It's not impossible, or even all that difficult, but it seems a bit more clunky then the Windows model for this one particular situation.
And in 2005, while I was working for them, SGI declared bankruptcy. They made some phenomenally poor decisions both from a technology and a business point of view and they paid for it. Having been great once is not the same as being great. That said, they appear to be executing a very impressive turn-around, and part of me wishes I'd never left. Hopefully the economic down turn doesn't kill them just as they are digging out of their hole.
Correct, at worse it's a felony defined simply as "refusal of lawful orders". It could get you jail time, but certainly not death. Even then if an officer tender his or her resignation rather than follow an order they believe to be wrong (even if it is legal), they can usually get away with nothing worse than losing their job. Enlisted men don't have the option of resignation (they're under contract), but I can imagine only a VERY limited set of circumstances in which the President could give anyone below the rank of general an order more significant than "get me a cup of coffee".
I read a very interesting opinion in a blog recently. It stated that the Blogsphere, and indeed the concept of "new media" is eventually going to destroy itself, unless it can find a way to not destroy "old media". His argument was essentially that bloggers and other "new media" types don't produce news, they cannibalize it. Bloggers take large amounts of primary source material (news clips, newspaper articles, online articles by conventional newspaper and TV station web sites, occasionally transcripts recorded from speeches or political events (though usual that record is made by a conventional news source)) and distill it into secondary material that they then publish. This is a useful and valuable service (though the people themselves often write from very biased perspectives and skew the information they distill), but it doesn't create the news that they mine. Someone still has to produce that primary material which entities as varied as "The Drudge Report" and the "Daily KOS" (and probably many in between) then digest into the "new media".
The producers of that primary material are slowly being squeezed out by the people that most depend on the material. It requires a much larger budget to produce the primary source material (people have to travel to where the news is, record it reliably and hopeful in a very high res format, transmit it to where the distribution source is, expenses in paying interviewers, transcribers, etc) than to produce the secondary information. The "new media" likely cannot afford to produce it's own primary material. Unless a way can be found to make a decent profit off the Internet, or to prevent traditional media from failing because of the Internet, the source material is going to dry up. Or at least become less common and harder to mine.
I find it ironic that The US was one of the earliest innovators of simple easy to use base ten money, and we've been unable to convince anyone to use base ten for anything else since.
I actually noticed improved performance when I upgraded my first gen MBP to 10.5 from 10.4. T'was a nice change.
Actually you do have to Pay the $99 to run it on your own pre-identified phone. You can't register a phone as a "developer" phone until you pay the "developer" fee. I paid the fee, so obviously I consider it worthwhile, but on the flip side i can see where people don't care for the arrangement. I can totally see the $99 to distribute on the app store, but it does seem like you should be able to register your phone without a fee. As you point out, it's certainly no worse than the cost of entry for WinMo development, and obviously I didn't consider it THAT big of a deal or I'd not have paid, but I can see where people don't like it.
To be fair "you had to buy a Mac". You could have bought a $500 Mac Mini, you chose to buy a MacBook Pro. Not that I disagree with your choice, I'd have gone with the more useful and powerful machine too, but you didn't HAVE to buy the expensive one.
Did you sign up when the Dev kit first became available? As I understand it Apple only let in a small percentage of the people who initially signed up to download a dev kit until the App Store went live. Basically you had to either be a big name developer (Sega), prove that you had a working app ready for launch day, or be one of the first like 1000 people to sign up. Everyone else was put off until a day or two after the store launched. I got the dev kit maybe a day or two after it was released and I wasn't give my certification until a few days after App Store launched. Since then they've supposedly been very quick on the turn around. Since I've been lazy and STILL haven't finished an app, it wasn't really that big a deal. As I understand it, had you contacted them and told them you had an app ready, they'd have made sure you were online for launch day.
Back in the day, and I mean way back when, work in the US government was considered a service to the country and not a means to make oneself rich.
Uh, when was that? So far as I can tell politics has been a road to wealth and power for at least the majority of politicians since there have been politics. There are exceptions of course, many different time periods have had men that seemed to legitimately be in it to serve their fellow man, but most politicians have been in it for themselves first and their fellow men in some distance of second.
You're trolling, but this is a fantastically unfair statement. F/OSS has a number of perfectly usable systems that can do most of, if not everything, that AD can do... Except work with Windows. Works with practically every other operating system, open or closed source, on the face of the earth; but Microsoft made a choice to not work with what everyone else does. If anything you could argue that AD is a "clone" of LDAP/Kerberos.
There was a Slashdot story not too long ago about this. Essentially Microsoft is opening up in response to the recent EU court cases. They've been fairly good about it so far. There is some evidence they may have already been think about opening this stuff up, and the court case only sped matters up a bit. And the Samba team is hurting for developers.
Lots more on the other side of the link with specifics about what MS is doing and why, and how much a good portion of Slashdot distrusts this.
To be fair, the number of changes that Windows requires manual editing of the registry for are vanishingly few compared to the number of changes that any *nix except OS X require you to open a text file for. It's getting better. You can do far more from a GUI in Linux than you used to be able to, but in fact you may very well need to open a text editor just to get GUI working if you get unlucky with a Linux Install.
But gaming is a weird animal. Many gamers (not all, maybe not even most, but many) are influential in other people's tech decisions. Whether it be the kids who his parent's assume "knows about computers" because he spends lots of time on one and can spout jargon he read on game sites, the programmer or sys admin who games as a hobby, or the "Tech Site" writers who's primary measure of performance is game FPS; lots of gamers have some level of influence on various numbers of people's technical decisions.
On top of that, even many people who don't game take an attitude of "Well, if it'll play that game, it will certainly be able to handle my $trivaltask". Gamers may be a small part of the market, but they are a much bigger part of marketing.