As much as I admire Google, I think they really need to grow up a little. Yeah, all the cool applications and features they keep releasing are impressive as hell. But they're starting to neglect the basics. Like getting a product out of Beta mode in a reasonable time. (It's true that Google's Beta releases are often less buggy than most companys' final releases, but that doesn't change the fact that many of their products never seem to mature.) Like putting basic functionality ahead of the gee whiz stuff: Google Maps now has three different kinds of fancy displays, but still can't disambiguate addresses properly.
Google has a reputation for having a totally unstructured working environment. That's good for creativity and morale, but there has to be some coordination and policy making, or else you're just creating stuff at random and shoving it out the door.
I hear somebody saying, "But they're making money!" Sure, they do have some good basic products that generating tons of cash flow. The fact remains, their other projects are a mess, and a lot of promising products will probably never mature. All that cash flow is both very good and very evil. Very good because Google will not be in real trouble for the foreseeable future. Very evil because they have no incentive to correct their worst mistakes.
This was never meant to be an article, text-based or otherwise. It's a presentation -- the stuff that appears on a big screen behind somebody's head while they're talking. People put these on the web because they're all that's left of the talk. Unless somebody thought to record the talk and put that on that web. Speaking of really big files...
How do you get 7.5 grand a year? I feed 2048 Megabtyes into their online calculator and get $13.31 a month.
Hand-carrying to offline storage sounds like a lot of work. Plus, how often do you make the trip? 'Cause if you do have a disaster, you'll lose everything since your last trip. (Murphy's Law says you can't ever postpone a trip, because your house will certainly burn down the same day.) This company claims their software backs up files as they're created.
Another brainless slashdotter who can't be bothered actually reading what he replies to. The dude doesn't need help finding a provider. He needs something to distinguish one provider from another.
I guess I sort of stand corrected. I've never seen that picture, but I've often heard it described. What comes across to me is that the woman is holding a device that will replace all her other means of accessing, recording, and storing information. So it may resemble a laptop, but it goes way beyond that. To say, "Kay anticipated the laptop" kind of trivializes his vision. It doesn't take a lot of imagination or insight to know that computers would be portable someday.
Not the first time Star Trek showed its cultural ignorance. My favorite was when they decided that Star Fleet had to have a ship with a Russian name. So you heard references to the "Potemkin". Jeez! The last ship with that name is famous mainly for a mutiny that occurred on it. And it was named after a Tsarist aristrocrat who is mainly remembered for his invention of the "Potemkin Village" -- in other words, he's a byword for dishonesty and mistreatment of his peasants.
Obviously whoever came up "Starship Potemkin" (St. Gene himself?) didn't know any of the above. Probably just heard that there had been a movie called "Battleship Potemkin" but obviously had never seen it.
He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out...
Kay's Dynabook concept was more like a PDA or tablet than a laptop. Though more powerful than any of these. What he was really doing was trying to imagine what computing would be like when it was totally pervasive, and had completely replaced low-tech means of accessing and using information.
On that basis, the rest of us still haven't caught up with him! Things like GUIs, portable computers, wireless networking, and the web are all steps towards the future he envisioned. But that future is still a long ways away.
COM is designed for scripting, nothing baroque about using it there.
Sure, COM is great for accessing libraries from scripts. But I stand behind my "baroque" comment. Too many COM libaries, including the ones bundled with Windows, are unnecessarily complex.
For once, "Have you even heard of Google?" is not the correct response. The dude didn't ask "Can I script under windows", he asked "What's the best way to do scripting under windows." And that's a tricky question -- Windows is hardly the most scripting-friendly OS.
Microsoft naturally comes out on top when you google for Windows scripting. But that doesn't mean that MS scripting technology is the best choice. On the contrary, Microsoft scripting relies heavily on their usual kludgey, baroque libraries and runtimes. I'm no expert, but if I were looking to do this sort of thing, I'd at least look at other scripting solutions for Windows. ActiveState is the obvious first place to look. There are many others.
And then there's Kahn Souphanousinphone (Laotian) on King of the Hill. Which all goes with what I was saying: the Star Trek Kahn wasn't necessarily Mongolian. Of course, the only Kahn most (non-Trekkie) westerners have heard of is Ghengis.
I just noticed that the Star Trek Kahn's full name is Khan Noonien Singh. That's definitely a South Asian name. "Singh" is Punjabi for "Lion" and is a conventional surname for Sikhs. Kahn is presumably not a Sikh (hard to imagine him adhering to a religion of any sort), but there are a lot of Singhs in the Indian military, due to the Sikh tradition of military service. So "Kahn" and "Singh" both have connotations of war and conflict. Which probably has more to do with the character getting that name than any ethnic thing.
(And you can't count Richardo 'KHAAAAAAANNNN!' Montalban, because he was a) from the 20th century, and b) Mongolian)
Well, of course you can't count Latino actors playing non-Latinos. If you could, people would wonder which side won the 1848 war! Half my favorite TV actors are Latino, but those unwilling to do the more degrading stereotypes have to play Anglos to make a living. It's all part of Hollywood insisting that people only watch shows they can "identify with".
But as long as we're not being racist, let's not jump to conclusions about where Kahn came from. Just as all Gomezes are not Mexican, all Kahns are not from Mongolia. I dimly recall a reference to India or Pakistan, which would kind of fit.
I suppose it's possible "Kirk" is supposed to sound vaguely like "Cook". But I've never heard this mentioned by any insider. Most likely they just picked a simple, macho name out of a hat.
"Hook" from "Cook" is just plain silly. Aside from that half-syllable and the fact that they're both sailors, the two characters have nothing in common. And the stereotype of the pirate with a hook for a hand is pretty standard.
My favorite accent story: Julia Roberts grew up speaking with a Georgia drawl, which she went to a lot of trouble to lose when she went Hollywood. Then when she was cast in Steel Magnolias she went to a Hollywood "accent coach" to get it back again. The consensus is that the accent he taught her is a standard Hollywood "southerner" that bears no resemblance to a real-life Georgia accent.
Second favorite: Anthony LaPaglia's native accent is Austrialian, but he's careful to use his self-taught Bronx accent in public, even when he's not working. He claims that casting directors used to turn him down because they claimed he always spoke with a trace of Aussie in his voice. So he stopped using his native voice at all in auditions, and let them think he really was from the Bronx.
The first version of that line was "I canna change the laws of physics!" Cool when I first heard it. Sad how quickly it became a cliche.
Something has to be said about the famous accent. I don't know that many Scots, but I'm told that nobody from Scotland actually talks that way. It's a sort of Hollywood convention.
Speaking of Scots, has anybody else noticed that Kirk and McCoy are both Scottish names? So two of the three main characters were Scottish, plus the most prominent supporting character. Makes you wonder...
That's a dumb comparison. Betamax would still be around if users and distributors weren't forced by economics to choose a single format. You couldn't buy a VCR that did both formats and the cost of supporting an extra format was too much for distributors. By contrast, most aggregators support both RSS and Atom, and its pretty easy to distribute in both formats if you have a mind to. The only issue is whether the extra features of Atom are worth bothering with.
And so what? I've yet to have a media file successfully download from archive.org. The servers are too overloaded to allow a connection to stay open long enough. With a little patience you can access their Wayback Machine and other repositories of small files, but their collection of media files is effectively inacessible.
...a city-run cable system might... block religious channels.
That's an ironic claim. There used to be a lot more religious channels on commercial cable than there are now. What happened to them? Providers needed their bandwidth for all those useless "bundles" that they're forced to buy. Viewers complained, but business is business.
Some of us are more comfortable with keyboards that with p&p. We type faster than we write, we make fewer mistakes, it's easier to read our notes, and electronic notes are easier to search and organize.
So you're more comfortable with p&p. Nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with other people using the technology they are comfortable with.
What is wrong is people getting all righteous about other people who want to do things differently.
Yeah, my first thought was "Reality game? You need a special term for games that aren't electronic?" But I guess there are people who have never played a game without peering at a video screen. Pretty sad, really.
Do you really want to host a web/email service and provide technical support to your family?
Well, assuming the guy is your standard "I need to get my hands dirty" geek, the hosting part is a given. And whether he wants to or not, he's going to have to do tech support -- Yahoo Groups is well-designed, but it's still complicated enough to intimidate the non-techie.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has a reputation for having a totally unstructured working environment. That's good for creativity and morale, but there has to be some coordination and policy making, or else you're just creating stuff at random and shoving it out the door.
I hear somebody saying, "But they're making money!" Sure, they do have some good basic products that generating tons of cash flow. The fact remains, their other projects are a mess, and a lot of promising products will probably never mature. All that cash flow is both very good and very evil. Very good because Google will not be in real trouble for the foreseeable future. Very evil because they have no incentive to correct their worst mistakes.
This was never meant to be an article, text-based or otherwise. It's a presentation -- the stuff that appears on a big screen behind somebody's head while they're talking. People put these on the web because they're all that's left of the talk. Unless somebody thought to record the talk and put that on that web. Speaking of really big files...
Hand-carrying to offline storage sounds like a lot of work. Plus, how often do you make the trip? 'Cause if you do have a disaster, you'll lose everything since your last trip. (Murphy's Law says you can't ever postpone a trip, because your house will certainly burn down the same day.) This company claims their software backs up files as they're created.
Another brainless slashdotter who can't be bothered actually reading what he replies to. The dude doesn't need help finding a provider. He needs something to distinguish one provider from another.
Of course, that leaves us with the obvious question: is a 53K connection worth sharing?
I guess I sort of stand corrected. I've never seen that picture, but I've often heard it described. What comes across to me is that the woman is holding a device that will replace all her other means of accessing, recording, and storing information. So it may resemble a laptop, but it goes way beyond that. To say, "Kay anticipated the laptop" kind of trivializes his vision. It doesn't take a lot of imagination or insight to know that computers would be portable someday.
Not the first time Star Trek showed its cultural ignorance. My favorite was when they decided that Star Fleet had to have a ship with a Russian name. So you heard references to the "Potemkin". Jeez! The last ship with that name is famous mainly for a mutiny that occurred on it. And it was named after a Tsarist aristrocrat who is mainly remembered for his invention of the "Potemkin Village" -- in other words, he's a byword for dishonesty and mistreatment of his peasants.
Obviously whoever came up "Starship Potemkin" (St. Gene himself?) didn't know any of the above. Probably just heard that there had been a movie called "Battleship Potemkin" but obviously had never seen it.
On that basis, the rest of us still haven't caught up with him! Things like GUIs, portable computers, wireless networking, and the web are all steps towards the future he envisioned. But that future is still a long ways away.
Microsoft naturally comes out on top when you google for Windows scripting. But that doesn't mean that MS scripting technology is the best choice. On the contrary, Microsoft scripting relies heavily on their usual kludgey, baroque libraries and runtimes. I'm no expert, but if I were looking to do this sort of thing, I'd at least look at other scripting solutions for Windows. ActiveState is the obvious first place to look. There are many others.
I just noticed that the Star Trek Kahn's full name is Khan Noonien Singh. That's definitely a South Asian name. "Singh" is Punjabi for "Lion" and is a conventional surname for Sikhs. Kahn is presumably not a Sikh (hard to imagine him adhering to a religion of any sort), but there are a lot of Singhs in the Indian military, due to the Sikh tradition of military service. So "Kahn" and "Singh" both have connotations of war and conflict. Which probably has more to do with the character getting that name than any ethnic thing.
But as long as we're not being racist, let's not jump to conclusions about where Kahn came from. Just as all Gomezes are not Mexican, all Kahns are not from Mongolia. I dimly recall a reference to India or Pakistan, which would kind of fit.
"Hook" from "Cook" is just plain silly. Aside from that half-syllable and the fact that they're both sailors, the two characters have nothing in common. And the stereotype of the pirate with a hook for a hand is pretty standard.
My favorite accent story: Julia Roberts grew up speaking with a Georgia drawl, which she went to a lot of trouble to lose when she went Hollywood. Then when she was cast in Steel Magnolias she went to a Hollywood "accent coach" to get it back again. The consensus is that the accent he taught her is a standard Hollywood "southerner" that bears no resemblance to a real-life Georgia accent.
Second favorite: Anthony LaPaglia's native accent is Austrialian, but he's careful to use his self-taught Bronx accent in public, even when he's not working. He claims that casting directors used to turn him down because they claimed he always spoke with a trace of Aussie in his voice. So he stopped using his native voice at all in auditions, and let them think he really was from the Bronx.
Hollywood is so much about what people expect.
Any word you say in your throat is Klingon? I guess that makes sense.
So Scottish English will continue to evolve, but North American English will never change? Try again.
The what?
Something has to be said about the famous accent. I don't know that many Scots, but I'm told that nobody from Scotland actually talks that way. It's a sort of Hollywood convention.
Speaking of Scots, has anybody else noticed that Kirk and McCoy are both Scottish names? So two of the three main characters were Scottish, plus the most prominent supporting character. Makes you wonder...
Bit of a spam problem, alas. But not nearly as bad as Monster or ComputerCareers.
That's a dumb comparison. Betamax would still be around if users and distributors weren't forced by economics to choose a single format. You couldn't buy a VCR that did both formats and the cost of supporting an extra format was too much for distributors. By contrast, most aggregators support both RSS and Atom, and its pretty easy to distribute in both formats if you have a mind to. The only issue is whether the extra features of Atom are worth bothering with.
And so what? I've yet to have a media file successfully download from archive.org. The servers are too overloaded to allow a connection to stay open long enough. With a little patience you can access their Wayback Machine and other repositories of small files, but their collection of media files is effectively inacessible.
So you're more comfortable with p&p. Nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with other people using the technology they are comfortable with.
What is wrong is people getting all righteous about other people who want to do things differently.
Yeah, my first thought was "Reality game? You need a special term for games that aren't electronic?" But I guess there are people who have never played a game without peering at a video screen. Pretty sad, really.