I've used GMail for a while now...
on
Gmail Adds Features
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· Score: 5, Insightful
While its features are more iterative than revolutionary, I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail.
We are all inundated with e-mail nowadays. Semantic parsing and bayesian filtering are commonplace, but no conventional e-mail client allows automatic grouping by subject in quite the manner of GMail. I enjoy the ability to search messages rather than arbitrarily tossing them into folders to be forgotten. Indeed, e-mail has called out for intelligent grouping for some time now.
It opens up some fantastic marketing opportunities as well. Already they exploit this with the excellent GoogleAds along the side of the screen that have relevance to the e-mail one is perusing; however, with the gradual acceptance of commercial e-mail by people and by legislation I believe there is a great deal of future potential in selling/buying general profiles of e-mail accounts using this same data. As search engines and e-mail combine, the quality of the search interface becomes a mute point; the most interesting information is pushed to the user based on relevance to their online lives.
The only real concern is privacy, but I'll bet it's possible to sell really general-type information without violating any policies -- thus using advertising to continue to deliver the kinds of features users expect without costing them a dime. If only they could do something like this with online backup/recovery as well.
Unfortunate...
on
How to Podcast
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· Score: 1, Insightful
My first reaction is to wonder how much of this is illegal. It's almost certainly possible to record off of somebody else's podcast, and I doubt that person is tracking the dues they owe the RIAA and others for broadcasting.
If people keep doing undesireable things, it's only going to lead to undesirable features being built into the iPos and iTunes. It's really only.001% that want to do something like this; why ruin it for everybody else?
Actually, most addicted gamers I know seem to suffer from some form of ADD. I suspect this is more cause than effect, as they can focus on a game for hours but nothing else the rest of the day.
Then when you throw violence or antisocial behavior into the games... well, it's not good for anybody, but for kids it's the mental equivalent of a sugar-only diet. Any wonder why each generation is more troubled than the last?
The most stable people I know had some degree of balance -- some exercise, some religion, some (usually wholesome) entertainment.
Our society is all about throwing temperance out the window because virtually all our media is an advertisement of some sort and marketing itself is about promoting hedonistic extremes.
People are behind the wheel, and people drive like idiots.
In the ideal traffic network, everybody would drive at approximately the same speed with a fair cushion of space between each car and faster traffic in the left lane. That careful balance is destroyed with the first SUV driver that's constantly swerving from lane to lane trying to get an extra five or six seconds cut off the trip (not to mention that these large vehicles generally clog the road even when driven normally.)
To improve traffic, we need to continue putting the emphasis on low-fuel consumption and on quality mass-transit. At least until we get robotic cars that operate according to some sort of centralized traffic planner.
Given that there is already a rudimentary text-to-speech package available for Linux, and now a speech-to-text package, perhaps the secret is to pipe one to the other in a closed loop until one learns how to enunciate and the other how to listen?
I wonder how many "unfinished" features there are in released code. I've played more than a few games that had items or characters that could be unlocked with a Gameshark or similar that were leftovers, but besides the multiplayer code in GTA3 for the PC hadn't heard of anything this involved that was left in the code without being tapped.
The second thought, of course, is about how ludicrous the concept is that hunting for or unlocking this sort of functionality would be considered illegal anywhere -- and wondering if the time is near when cheating devices like the Gameshark will be treated like flash carts are today.
This is one of the best free e-mail services out there. Does POP3 as well.
Or request GMail invites -- there's tons of them floating around.
It's pretty amazing when you think about it.
on
Making Tracks on Mars
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Mars always seemed just out of reach when I first took interest in astrology. The planet most like our own in the solar system, it's the logical next step for our move off this planet as we begin to explore and colonize space and it's quite encouraging to see that this is a possibility -- although hopefully more success will be had with landing manned spacecraft on its surface.
I suppose another thing I've always hoped to see was signs of life in the universe. Although we've discovered a number of potentially lifebearing worlds, I find it quite interesting that none actually seem to bear life. One starts to wonder if alternative scientifically accepted theories, such as intelligent design, might be at play in the larger picture when we fail to discover one other world with the same characteristics as our own bearing life.
Indeed, it seems almost as if the universe might be made for us alone (a sobering thought if ever there was one.) Things like irreducible complexity in bacterial flagelli or the inability to intentionally design life from scratch while claiming that a roll of the dice made all this seems absurd. Perhaps it's time to present alternative theories to our budding scientists to permit the forward-thinking ones to discard the baggage of examining the past so that progress on space travel can be most efficiently made.
What have your experiences been with trying to get media recognition of your candidacy and your goals without having the kind of budget the two major parties have?
People do not want to be informed -- they want to feel informed. I agree with everything you say, but it is this which has doomed true journalism. People want so much more to be "right" than to understand, to think, or to suffer challenge to their long-held beliefs.
What we get in America today is not true journalism. Partisan bias, which is largely demonstrated in the choice of what is and isn't "newsworthy", has been pushed to the fore of our media. Talking heads on a us-and-them political debate program on the news network of your choice where you are guaranteed moments to feel alternately indignant and superior and ultimately well-informed that you are right and they are wrong. The format is popular to the extent that almost all news has one pro- and one con- to give you a well-balanced viewpoint.
And at the end of it all you've seen a lot of sizzle with absolutely no steak. How many hours have been spent on Hurricane Ivan? Or decades-old military documents? The corporate media has no place for politics save those which fill an entertainment quotient -- anything meaningful is not newsworthy.
It's when you go out on the web to find news that you see just how joined journalism and politics can be. In fact, to the point you can't trust anything you read. This journey is much like the one through corporate media, except all the stories seem to end in police state or end-of-world scenarios.
Good stuff -- they interview record execs and former/current/hopeful musicians and explain the sorts of problems the industry is facing. While people stealing music online is a factor, lesser-known factors are also discussed including the fact that sales figures may be sinking because people are finished replacing their record collections with CDs.
The energy cost in manufacturing the turbines is greater than the energy gain you get back from them.
So all you're doing is shifting the cost to another part of the chain, in accordance with the third law of thermodynamics.
It's probably better to focus on using stored energy more efficiently. There's a lot of waste in coal or oil that could be cut back.
Most people consider spam as unsolicited commercial e-mail and have it in a separate class entirely from junkmail or telemarketing because it puts a heavier burden on the receiver than on the sender.
There are signs that this is changing however, with fewer mailservers handling e-mail, better bandwidth, and larger hard disk sizes it is quite likely that we are approaching a point at which spam begins to achieve parity with junkmail in terms of that sender/receiver cost relationship. At which point it may be wise to at least consider including spam as a marketing resource alongside more conventional services.
Junkmail keeps the cost of stamps low and helps subsidize other uses of the postal system. Perhaps if the same occurs with spam it won't be such an ugly concept?
It looks like if one were to use this with Windows XP there's still the software consideration -- fortunately, there's a wealth of Free or Open software that could be run on here without having to worry about doubling license costs. Most offices could get by with Mozilla and StarOffice.
Maybe even go so far as putting Linux on the thing?
As long as you're working on a budget system anyway.
I see a few comments in here questioning the logic or similarity of this project to the already failed thin-client model that was once promised to revolutionize business computing. It seems to me the point is not to put all the eggs in one handbag -- but quite the opposite; to increase the capability and flexibility of an already capable and flexible system. This isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to discover or fully realize other possibilities with Linux that hinge upon greater portability.
It is exactly this lack of perception that demonstrates the extent to which the impact of history's lessons on the business world are trivialized by our public school systems. For example, if you asked me a week ago the origin of
chopsticks I (like most people) would have responded China, or parts
nearby. Now this totally neglects the less-than-common knowledge that
they were actually created in America in the 1800s by immigrants to
mining communities as a means of differentiating their restaurants from
more common fare, and have caught on in Asia to the point of accounting
for over 2.5% of our lumber exports!
The ramifications are intriguing, not the least of which are our
dwindling natural resources and the need to choose the path of innovation
rather than exploitation with regards to manufacturing; in this case, the
substitution of "spokes" -- recyclable plastic chopsticks -- for
conventional oak or cherry chopsticks where disposability is a factor.
Do we continue to promote a business model whose short-term gains outstrip the long-term ones? Or do we invest in discovering new trends, occasionally losing our bets and occasionally hitting it big? I submit to you that only the latter has driven mankind's growth -- despite the apparent short-term risks -- and that to content yourself to following the leader is a sure road to stagnation and ultimately failure.
None. The movie is being offered with a particular set of terms and the consumer is free to choose.
For a time people were permitted to retain content simply because creators and distributors didn't have the technical ability to limit use. But as far as I can tell just because we can record content off of TV to watch it later doesn't mean it is mandatory for the content to be produced in such a way as to make recording and retention feasible.
People get used to having things a particular way and begin to think it's a right.
I was unaware they had a high-resolution spacelab. Although I suppose it makes sense to put prototypes through a number of unusual conditions to harden them for satellite use.
I wonder how much of the equipment in space runs Linux?
Remember when politics was about trying to figure out the best guy for the job?
We've sure gotten away from that. The whole Swift Boat thing has made a great distraction from any meaningful issues that could be raised. And now a 'political stock market simulation'?
What's wrong with politics that we do everything we can to stop from looking at it objectively? Why make it a game?
Piracy undoubtedly diminishes sales, but the extent to which this is the case is debatable.
While I don't agree with stealing music, I would argue with the term "undoubtedly" at least until some decent market studies are done proving that P2P isn't actually generating more music purchases in general.
Because I've heard more then enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's a possibility. It might not be sustainable if the RIAA opened the floodgates and said "download what you want, pay for what you like", thereby removing any stigma involved in music theft, but under current circumstances I'd bet plenty of new music purchases have been made.
Slashdot Mirror
The future is now.
We are all inundated with e-mail nowadays. Semantic parsing and bayesian filtering are commonplace, but no conventional e-mail client allows automatic grouping by subject in quite the manner of GMail. I enjoy the ability to search messages rather than arbitrarily tossing them into folders to be forgotten. Indeed, e-mail has called out for intelligent grouping for some time now.
It opens up some fantastic marketing opportunities as well. Already they exploit this with the excellent GoogleAds along the side of the screen that have relevance to the e-mail one is perusing; however, with the gradual acceptance of commercial e-mail by people and by legislation I believe there is a great deal of future potential in selling/buying general profiles of e-mail accounts using this same data. As search engines and e-mail combine, the quality of the search interface becomes a mute point; the most interesting information is pushed to the user based on relevance to their online lives.
The only real concern is privacy, but I'll bet it's possible to sell really general-type information without violating any policies -- thus using advertising to continue to deliver the kinds of features users expect without costing them a dime. If only they could do something like this with online backup/recovery as well.
If people keep doing undesireable things, it's only going to lead to undesirable features being built into the iPos and iTunes. It's really only .001% that want to do something like this; why ruin it for everybody else?
Then when you throw violence or antisocial behavior into the games... well, it's not good for anybody, but for kids it's the mental equivalent of a sugar-only diet. Any wonder why each generation is more troubled than the last? The most stable people I know had some degree of balance -- some exercise, some religion, some (usually wholesome) entertainment.
Our society is all about throwing temperance out the window because virtually all our media is an advertisement of some sort and marketing itself is about promoting hedonistic extremes.
In the ideal traffic network, everybody would drive at approximately the same speed with a fair cushion of space between each car and faster traffic in the left lane. That careful balance is destroyed with the first SUV driver that's constantly swerving from lane to lane trying to get an extra five or six seconds cut off the trip (not to mention that these large vehicles generally clog the road even when driven normally.)
To improve traffic, we need to continue putting the emphasis on low-fuel consumption and on quality mass-transit. At least until we get robotic cars that operate according to some sort of centralized traffic planner.
Given that there is already a rudimentary text-to-speech package available for Linux, and now a speech-to-text package, perhaps the secret is to pipe one to the other in a closed loop until one learns how to enunciate and the other how to listen?
The second thought, of course, is about how ludicrous the concept is that hunting for or unlocking this sort of functionality would be considered illegal anywhere -- and wondering if the time is near when cheating devices like the Gameshark will be treated like flash carts are today.
My question is: is there anything Microsoft can do that we won't question?
Applaud them for their newfound approach to open source. More alternatives are always better. I'll bet this software does something Kwiki can't do.
Or request GMail invites -- there's tons of them floating around.
I suppose another thing I've always hoped to see was signs of life in the universe. Although we've discovered a number of potentially lifebearing worlds, I find it quite interesting that none actually seem to bear life. One starts to wonder if alternative scientifically accepted theories, such as intelligent design, might be at play in the larger picture when we fail to discover one other world with the same characteristics as our own bearing life.
Indeed, it seems almost as if the universe might be made for us alone (a sobering thought if ever there was one.) Things like irreducible complexity in bacterial flagelli or the inability to intentionally design life from scratch while claiming that a roll of the dice made all this seems absurd. Perhaps it's time to present alternative theories to our budding scientists to permit the forward-thinking ones to discard the baggage of examining the past so that progress on space travel can be most efficiently made.
What have your experiences been with trying to get media recognition of your candidacy and your goals without having the kind of budget the two major parties have?
What we get in America today is not true journalism. Partisan bias, which is largely demonstrated in the choice of what is and isn't "newsworthy", has been pushed to the fore of our media. Talking heads on a us-and-them political debate program on the news network of your choice where you are guaranteed moments to feel alternately indignant and superior and ultimately well-informed that you are right and they are wrong. The format is popular to the extent that almost all news has one pro- and one con- to give you a well-balanced viewpoint.
And at the end of it all you've seen a lot of sizzle with absolutely no steak. How many hours have been spent on Hurricane Ivan? Or decades-old military documents? The corporate media has no place for politics save those which fill an entertainment quotient -- anything meaningful is not newsworthy.
It's when you go out on the web to find news that you see just how joined journalism and politics can be. In fact, to the point you can't trust anything you read. This journey is much like the one through corporate media, except all the stories seem to end in police state or end-of-world scenarios.
Consequently, the news fails it.
Good stuff -- they interview record execs and former/current/hopeful musicians and explain the sorts of problems the industry is facing. While people stealing music online is a factor, lesser-known factors are also discussed including the fact that sales figures may be sinking because people are finished replacing their record collections with CDs.
Where does that leave us?
It's probably better to focus on using stored energy more efficiently. There's a lot of waste in coal or oil that could be cut back.
There are signs that this is changing however, with fewer mailservers handling e-mail, better bandwidth, and larger hard disk sizes it is quite likely that we are approaching a point at which spam begins to achieve parity with junkmail in terms of that sender/receiver cost relationship. At which point it may be wise to at least consider including spam as a marketing resource alongside more conventional services.
Junkmail keeps the cost of stamps low and helps subsidize other uses of the postal system. Perhaps if the same occurs with spam it won't be such an ugly concept?
Maybe even go so far as putting Linux on the thing? As long as you're working on a budget system anyway.
It is exactly this lack of perception that demonstrates the extent to which the impact of history's lessons on the business world are trivialized by our public school systems. For example, if you asked me a week ago the origin of chopsticks I (like most people) would have responded China, or parts nearby. Now this totally neglects the less-than-common knowledge that they were actually created in America in the 1800s by immigrants to mining communities as a means of differentiating their restaurants from more common fare, and have caught on in Asia to the point of accounting for over 2.5% of our lumber exports!
The ramifications are intriguing, not the least of which are our dwindling natural resources and the need to choose the path of innovation rather than exploitation with regards to manufacturing; in this case, the substitution of "spokes" -- recyclable plastic chopsticks -- for conventional oak or cherry chopsticks where disposability is a factor.
Do we continue to promote a business model whose short-term gains outstrip the long-term ones? Or do we invest in discovering new trends, occasionally losing our bets and occasionally hitting it big? I submit to you that only the latter has driven mankind's growth -- despite the apparent short-term risks -- and that to content yourself to following the leader is a sure road to stagnation and ultimately failure.
For a time people were permitted to retain content simply because creators and distributors didn't have the technical ability to limit use. But as far as I can tell just because we can record content off of TV to watch it later doesn't mean it is mandatory for the content to be produced in such a way as to make recording and retention feasible.
People get used to having things a particular way and begin to think it's a right.
I wonder how much of the equipment in space runs Linux?
We've sure gotten away from that. The whole Swift Boat thing has made a great distraction from any meaningful issues that could be raised. And now a 'political stock market simulation'?
What's wrong with politics that we do everything we can to stop from looking at it objectively? Why make it a game?
- Windows remote terminal, with foldout keyboard/touchpad (or integrate in screen)
- Xvid movie playback -- this phone could fit a drive that could carry a movie in this format
- Pleasant aroma, such as pine needles, that gradually turns into burning tire or pig farm as hard drive fills
- FLAC playback (MP3/Ogg are nice but the difference is noticable)
- USB connectivity -- like thumbdrives
Just to name a few things.Storage is great but it's about time they add features to the phone that can take full advantage of it.
While I don't agree with stealing music, I would argue with the term "undoubtedly" at least until some decent market studies are done proving that P2P isn't actually generating more music purchases in general.
Because I've heard more then enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's a possibility. It might not be sustainable if the RIAA opened the floodgates and said "download what you want, pay for what you like", thereby removing any stigma involved in music theft, but under current circumstances I'd bet plenty of new music purchases have been made.
Because I wasn't expecting that it would, but apparently somebody is. Unrealistic expectations also lead to insecure implementation.
Saves us the bother of having to clean up after these countries that buy dual-use equipment from us for "development" then turn on us.