"better hardware" is so vague it's useless: it could mean more powerful, cuter, more robust... or whatever, depending on what one's hardware tastes are.
hardware is cheaper then software. adding a bit of ram to support a mildly wasteful OS (and doing their best to prune the linux features which are useless in this scenario) is a lot cheaper than developing, debugging, supporting, documenting, training... from scratch a new OS.
Good point about Linus not being a UI god. I tend to agree less with some other stuff though: - There are not that many computer newbies anymore. My take is that unless your approach is clearly superior, you should go with familiar, which Unity is not, and Gnome, a bit. - Unity has a large amount of issues, both for noobs and advanced users: my parents need shortcuts to several folders, which seems impossible; and i have a dual screen setup with my main screen on the right, ie I need the menu bar on the right too. Apparently, Shuttleworth don't want that. - Which does lead us to confidence and governance issues. I'm frankly getting the vibe that decision regarding linux features, especially UI, are made by a gang of developpers who want to impress they peers and do fancy stuff, with little-to-no input from actual users. With the compounding difficulty that unfinished stuff gets relased (and NOT as beta).
Experimenting with stuff is fine... up to the point where the experiment takes over the business, resulting in stuff being released that should never have left the lab, because it's both pointless and unfinished. Meanwhile, grub2 still craps half of my installs, dual-screen is flaky...
I disagree. User Interfaces are very important, and even a Linux luminary like Linus speaking up that Gnome, KDE and Unity are past unusable is both sad and a good thing, and in any case it's major. Hopefully someone will rein in the developpers and make them produce stuff that people actually can/want/re happy to use, not wank-off material for nerds.
it depends on whether you're talking features or ergonomics. And of whether your app is *supposed* to be usable by all, or only by a select few. I can understand your point, but, also, there's a perverse developer pride in making something so complicated that barely anyone can use it. Complexity != power, nor versatility.
It's OK to have features that very few users ever use. It's no longer OK though, if those "rare" features obscure the "frequent" ones. And, in my experience, oftentimes even barebones apps have big ergonomics issues.
a while back I was working sales in a dev shop. My mantra was: our apps should be so easy to use that your mom should be able to use them. Not you, not me, not your GF... your mom. And I'm not talking about that ubercool geeky mom, I'm talking about the one who gets lost because an icon moved 2 inches to the left...
I regularly got shot down for dumbing things down too much... I still sure I was right, though.
the patent system is good for lawyers, who are disproportionately represented in the pools of elected officials, lobbyists, and political contributors. The current system is extremely good for them, and mildly good for politicians in generals as it helps finance the whole lobbying/contributions rigmarole.
since both parties benefit, and have no balls anyway... things will stay that way.
Speaking of low-budget crap, this week's episode of Switched at Birth makes references to Deafenstein, a fictitious Frankenstein by and for deaf people. There's a few shots of it towards the end... It's hilarious.
My sister teaches 6 yo, a friend 12-15. Both have received (understated) guidelines that they "shouldn't" use Facebook for anything work-related.
I can understand how having an open means of communication with students, and publishing content with shaky confidentiality, can be a sensitive subject. But the rule does seem a little ass-backwards: other social services are not discouraged, and more specific guidelines (make your groups invite-only, all your content confidential, make clear that "classroom behavior rules" apply...) are not even mentioned.
In the end, sis and mate end up doing all the wrong things (publishing photos of kids to a much wider audience than they realize, getting trolled...) for marginal results, as a lot of kids and even parents only know Facebook and won't register with / visit regularly another site.
I don't know how flexible Facebook can be, but I'm sure an outfit as big as an education ministry could wrangle special conditions and a simplified, secure interface, for a few hundreds of thousands of users.
If the incredible cascade of not only screw-ups but willful negligence that lead to that specific catastrophe has so little consequences, the message is clear: do it again. Ditto for the financial upheaval, whose net result is that Goldman Sachs has even less competition now, lots of bankers walked away with millions in bonuses, and taxpayers paid billions in ransom. Oh, and no new regulation, and no new taxes. Did anyone go to jail ?
This is not high school anymore: reputation is less important than money. Do you think all those big banks, and their bankers, give a damn about what we think of them, as long as they can take home huge bonuses ? same everywhere: the companies mostly don't care, the employees don't give a f**k.
who is "everyone" ? everyone is only interested in how much money they're making for themselves, and their bonuses are pretty much instantaneous, whereas the risk can manifest years later.
the individuals who brokered those deals made millions, even though they cost billions to taxpayers in the end. their bosses didn't come off too badly either. their companies/shareholders, a bit worse sometimes, especially for those who were not propped up.
and Sammy will find buyers, but I'm much more interested in the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet, which does everything quite differently: - active digitizer pen, allows taking freehand+OCR notes on it. If I can discipline myself into using that correctly, should shave 1hr off my workday. - a smorgasbord of standard ports: USB host (USB drives FTW !), Mini-USB, mini-HDMI, full SD, allows connecting the tablet to stuff w/o special "forgettable" cables, and saves on cables - plenty of pro software pre-installed (QuickOffice, security, OCR, some kind of notetaking software...), shaves $50+ from the actual "usable configuration" price, on top of cable savings. - optional Thinkpad keyboard with a variation of the trackpoint, lets my hands stay on home row - serious-looking black slate
Since I have 4 browsers on my PC - If I want to appear very smart, I should use Opera - Smart, but not frightening (when looking for a date ?) = Chrome - Bland = IE
X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649 -=[ Fun_People ]=-
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
Forwarded-by: Nev Dull
Forwarded-by: "John P. Kole"
Forwarded-by: Vince Cavasin Monkey Trumps Wall Street With 200 Percent Gain
Dart-Throwing Monkey Returns to Wall Street With New Picks For Year 2000
Business Wire
01/12/00, 9:41p
(Copyright ' 2000, Business Wire)
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 12, 2000--Raven, the dart-throwing monkey with her own Web site, showed up many of Wall Street's finest with her 213 percent gain for the year.
"It's all in the wrist action," stated Raven, age six. A Web site and index have been created to monitor her performance. The Web site and the index can both be found at www.monkeydex.com.
MonkeyDex is the Internet's first index of Internet stocks picked by an actual monkey. MonkeyDex was created in January of 1999 when Raven, a six-year-old female monkey, tossed darts at a dartboard of 133 Internet-related stocks. Raven returned to Wall Street this year with a dart toss at a dartboard of 281 Internet-related stocks.
"She quadrupled the performance of the Dow and doubled the performance of the Nasdaq composite," stated Roland Perry, editor of the Internet Stock Review and creator of the MonkeyDex. "Not bad considering she wasn't able to participate in any of the hot new issue offerings," he added.
"And yes, she beat the Internet Stock Review's top 20 picks for 1999, which gained 79 percent last year. We did manage to outperform her with our Original Watch List, which gained 490 percent in 1998 and went on to finish 1999 with a two-year gain of 1,566 percent."
Had Raven been employed at a Wall Street Mutual Fund, her performance would rank her as the 22nd best money manager in the country outperforming over 6,000 Wall Street pros.
Raven's picks for 1999 were AudioHighway (Nasdaq:AHWY), down 21%; CMGI Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), up 935%; iMall (Nasdaq:IMAL), bought out; Inktomi (Nasdaq:INKT), up 177%; ISS Group (Nasdaq:ISSX), up 158%; Kushner-Locke (Nasdaq:KLOC), down 36%; Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), up 194%; Netspeak (Nasdaq:NSPK), up 88%; Onsale (Nasdaq:ONSL), bought out; and Ozemail, which merged with MCI WorldComm (WCOM).
Raven's picks for year 2000 are Audible.com (Nasdaq:ADBL), Broadcom (Nasdaq:BRCM), eToys (Nasdaq:ETYS), Litronic (Nasdaq:LNTX), Medium4.com (OTCBB:METV), Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), N2H2 (Nasdaq:NTWO), Prodigy (Nasdaq:PRGY), Software.com (Nasdaq:SWCM) and StarMedia (Nasdaq:STRM).
This year's dart-tossing ceremonies were recorded by a film crew from the National Enquirer and will air on National Enquirer TV (http://www.nationalenquirertv.com/):
The Internet Stock Review Online is an Online newsletter designed to give broad coverage to Internet-related publicly traded companies. Each issue of the Online newsletter aggregates and reports on New Buys & Sales on Wall Street, coverage initiated or dropped on Wall Street, Big Movers, Earnings (or lack of) reports, news and/or news releases from Business Wire or PR Newswire, news from industry media or trade journals, news from traditional media outlets.
Each issue includes hyperlinks to the news origination source for full coverage. The newsletter additionally reports on the availability of streaming audio/video profiles, news releases, shareholder conferences and interviews with senior management of the companies covered.
it does feel kinda gratuitous to go for ever faster churning. is it really productive, useful, to invest ever greater efforts and money into accelerating arbitrages from say, once per hour, to once per millisecond ? picoseconds next ?
there's a strong moral risk: if you can both buy a company's debt, and insurance in case they don't repay it, why not keep doing that endlessly ? you make money both ways, nobody is really interested in the underlying debt quality, and bankers make fat commissions on both sides of every deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time you run into Big William, please ask him what he meant by "to be or not to be" for me !
"better hardware" is so vague it's useless: it could mean more powerful, cuter, more robust... or whatever, depending on what one's hardware tastes are.
right. software catalog, os features,, advertising, distribution, buzz, design... don't count at all !
the ipad is not a tablet, it's a rectangular slab of magic !
hardware is cheaper then software. adding a bit of ram to support a mildly wasteful OS (and doing their best to prune the linux features which are useless in this scenario) is a lot cheaper than developing, debugging, supporting, documenting, training... from scratch a new OS.
maybe because at the time, these thousands were a very large slice of a much smaller pie ?
Good point about Linus not being a UI god. I tend to agree less with some other stuff though:
- There are not that many computer newbies anymore. My take is that unless your approach is clearly superior, you should go with familiar, which Unity is not, and Gnome, a bit.
- Unity has a large amount of issues, both for noobs and advanced users: my parents need shortcuts to several folders, which seems impossible; and i have a dual screen setup with my main screen on the right, ie I need the menu bar on the right too. Apparently, Shuttleworth don't want that.
- Which does lead us to confidence and governance issues. I'm frankly getting the vibe that decision regarding linux features, especially UI, are made by a gang of developpers who want to impress they peers and do fancy stuff, with little-to-no input from actual users. With the compounding difficulty that unfinished stuff gets relased (and NOT as beta).
Experimenting with stuff is fine... up to the point where the experiment takes over the business, resulting in stuff being released that should never have left the lab, because it's both pointless and unfinished. Meanwhile, grub2 still craps half of my installs, dual-screen is flaky...
I disagree. User Interfaces are very important, and even a Linux luminary like Linus speaking up that Gnome, KDE and Unity are past unusable is both sad and a good thing, and in any case it's major. Hopefully someone will rein in the developpers and make them produce stuff that people actually can/want/re happy to use, not wank-off material for nerds.
it depends on whether you're talking features or ergonomics. And of whether your app is *supposed* to be usable by all, or only by a select few. I can understand your point, but, also, there's a perverse developer pride in making something so complicated that barely anyone can use it. Complexity != power, nor versatility.
It's OK to have features that very few users ever use. It's no longer OK though, if those "rare" features obscure the "frequent" ones. And, in my experience, oftentimes even barebones apps have big ergonomics issues.
a while back I was working sales in a dev shop. My mantra was: our apps should be so easy to use that your mom should be able to use them. Not you, not me, not your GF... your mom. And I'm not talking about that ubercool geeky mom, I'm talking about the one who gets lost because an icon moved 2 inches to the left...
I regularly got shot down for dumbing things down too much... I still sure I was right, though.
the patent system is good for lawyers, who are disproportionately represented in the pools of elected officials, lobbyists, and political contributors. The current system is extremely good for them, and mildly good for politicians in generals as it helps finance the whole lobbying/contributions rigmarole.
since both parties benefit, and have no balls anyway... things will stay that way.
Speaking of low-budget crap, this week's episode of Switched at Birth makes references to Deafenstein, a fictitious Frankenstein by and for deaf people. There's a few shots of it towards the end... It's hilarious.
My sister teaches 6 yo, a friend 12-15. Both have received (understated) guidelines that they "shouldn't" use Facebook for anything work-related.
I can understand how having an open means of communication with students, and publishing content with shaky confidentiality, can be a sensitive subject. But the rule does seem a little ass-backwards: other social services are not discouraged, and more specific guidelines (make your groups invite-only, all your content confidential, make clear that "classroom behavior rules" apply...) are not even mentioned.
In the end, sis and mate end up doing all the wrong things (publishing photos of kids to a much wider audience than they realize, getting trolled...) for marginal results, as a lot of kids and even parents only know Facebook and won't register with / visit regularly another site.
I don't know how flexible Facebook can be, but I'm sure an outfit as big as an education ministry could wrangle special conditions and a simplified, secure interface, for a few hundreds of thousands of users.
If the incredible cascade of not only screw-ups but willful negligence that lead to that specific catastrophe has so little consequences, the message is clear: do it again. Ditto for the financial upheaval, whose net result is that Goldman Sachs has even less competition now, lots of bankers walked away with millions in bonuses, and taxpayers paid billions in ransom. Oh, and no new regulation, and no new taxes. Did anyone go to jail ?
This is not high school anymore: reputation is less important than money. Do you think all those big banks, and their bankers, give a damn about what we think of them, as long as they can take home huge bonuses ? same everywhere: the companies mostly don't care, the employees don't give a f**k.
who is "everyone" ? everyone is only interested in how much money they're making for themselves, and their bonuses are pretty much instantaneous, whereas the risk can manifest years later.
the individuals who brokered those deals made millions, even though they cost billions to taxpayers in the end. their bosses didn't come off too badly either. their companies/shareholders, a bit worse sometimes, especially for those who were not propped up.
and Sammy will find buyers, but I'm much more interested in the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet, which does everything quite differently:
- active digitizer pen, allows taking freehand+OCR notes on it. If I can discipline myself into using that correctly, should shave 1hr off my workday.
- a smorgasbord of standard ports: USB host (USB drives FTW !), Mini-USB, mini-HDMI, full SD, allows connecting the tablet to stuff w/o special "forgettable" cables, and saves on cables
- plenty of pro software pre-installed (QuickOffice, security, OCR, some kind of notetaking software...), shaves $50+ from the actual "usable configuration" price, on top of cable savings.
- optional Thinkpad keyboard with a variation of the trackpoint, lets my hands stay on home row
- serious-looking black slate
Since I have 4 browsers on my PC
- If I want to appear very smart, I should use Opera
- Smart, but not frightening (when looking for a date ?) = Chrome
- Bland = IE
and if I want to crash, I'll fire up firefox !
X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649 -=[ Fun_People ]=-
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
Forwarded-by: Nev Dull
Forwarded-by: "John P. Kole"
Forwarded-by: Vince Cavasin
Monkey Trumps Wall Street With 200 Percent Gain
Dart-Throwing Monkey Returns to Wall Street With New Picks For Year 2000
Business Wire
01/12/00, 9:41p
(Copyright ' 2000, Business Wire)
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 12, 2000--Raven, the dart-throwing monkey with her own Web site, showed up many of Wall Street's finest with her 213 percent gain for the year.
"It's all in the wrist action," stated Raven, age six. A Web site and index have been created to monitor her performance. The Web site and the index can both be found at www.monkeydex.com.
MonkeyDex is the Internet's first index of Internet stocks picked by an actual monkey. MonkeyDex was created in January of 1999 when Raven, a six-year-old female monkey, tossed darts at a dartboard of 133 Internet-related stocks. Raven returned to Wall Street this year with a dart toss at a dartboard of 281 Internet-related stocks.
"She quadrupled the performance of the Dow and doubled the performance of the Nasdaq composite," stated Roland Perry, editor of the Internet Stock Review and creator of the MonkeyDex. "Not bad considering she wasn't able to participate in any of the hot new issue offerings," he added.
"And yes, she beat the Internet Stock Review's top 20 picks for 1999, which gained 79 percent last year. We did manage to outperform her with our Original Watch List, which gained 490 percent in 1998 and went on to finish 1999 with a two-year gain of 1,566 percent."
Had Raven been employed at a Wall Street Mutual Fund, her performance would rank her as the 22nd best money manager in the country outperforming over 6,000 Wall Street pros.
Raven's picks for 1999 were AudioHighway (Nasdaq:AHWY), down 21%; CMGI Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), up 935%; iMall (Nasdaq:IMAL), bought out; Inktomi (Nasdaq:INKT), up 177%; ISS Group (Nasdaq:ISSX), up 158%; Kushner-Locke (Nasdaq:KLOC), down 36%; Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), up 194%; Netspeak (Nasdaq:NSPK), up 88%; Onsale (Nasdaq:ONSL), bought out; and Ozemail, which merged with MCI WorldComm (WCOM).
Raven's picks for year 2000 are Audible.com (Nasdaq:ADBL), Broadcom (Nasdaq:BRCM), eToys (Nasdaq:ETYS), Litronic (Nasdaq:LNTX), Medium4.com (OTCBB:METV), Lycos (Nasdaq:LCOS), N2H2 (Nasdaq:NTWO), Prodigy (Nasdaq:PRGY), Software.com (Nasdaq:SWCM) and StarMedia (Nasdaq:STRM).
This year's dart-tossing ceremonies were recorded by a film crew from the National Enquirer and will air on National Enquirer TV (http://www.nationalenquirertv.com/):
Boston, WFXT -- 12:30 p.m., Midnight
Chicago, WFLD -- 12:30 p.m., Midnight
Los Angeles, KCAL -- 3 p.m., 12:30 a.m.
Miami, WBZL -- 1 p.m., 2 a.m.
New York, WNYW -- 11 a.m.
Philadelphia, WTXF -- Noon
San Francisco, KBWB -- 11 p.m., 12:30 p.m.
Washington, D.C., WTTG -- 12:30 p.m., 5 a.m.
About the Internet Stock Review Online
The Internet Stock Review Online is an Online newsletter designed to give broad coverage to Internet-related publicly traded companies. Each issue of the Online newsletter aggregates and reports on New Buys & Sales on Wall Street, coverage initiated or dropped on Wall Street, Big Movers, Earnings (or lack of) reports, news and/or news releases from Business Wire or PR Newswire, news from industry media or trade journals, news from traditional media outlets.
Each issue includes hyperlinks to the news origination source for full coverage. The newsletter additionally reports on the availability of streaming audio/video profiles, news releases, shareholder conferences and interviews with senior management of the companies covered.
MonkeyDex
www.monkeydex.com
it does feel kinda gratuitous to go for ever faster churning. is it really productive, useful, to invest ever greater efforts and money into accelerating arbitrages from say, once per hour, to once per millisecond ? picoseconds next ?
meanwhile, others are building factories...
there's a strong moral risk: if you can both buy a company's debt, and insurance in case they don't repay it, why not keep doing that endlessly ? you make money both ways, nobody is really interested in the underlying debt quality, and bankers make fat commissions on both sides of every deal.
oh, wait...
... or not doing.
still, nobody's forced to work for them, nor to buy their wares.
with the government, you just HAVE to pay. and comply.
private industry play with their own money, the government, with ours.
not so much about removing politics, more about removing kickbacks in all their forms, including plush jobs...