Now that I think of it, you're correct. Still, I can't believe they'd start supporting Outlook on Hotmail unless they've finally managed Exchange support. If not Exchange itself, then Exchange features kludged into BSD.
But I could be wrong. And if I'm wrong about that, then I'm also wrong about all the other stuff in my previous post. In which case it's just somebody in Redmond adding features to justify a bigger budget.
I don't recall anybody mentioning the radiation issue. This is about ergonomics, and the literature there is pretty solid.
Next time you have a "bullshit!" response to something somebody says, stop to consider whether you're responding to what they actually said, or whether you're just lumping them in with somebody else who said something vaguely similar.
If you're having glare/headache issues with any monitor, the first thing you need to do, before spending thousands on hardware, is to talk to an optometrist. I did, and got lots of useful advice from him. The one that most suprised me was his suggestion that I lower my monitor to the lower edge of my field of vision. Suprising, because most computer accessories and furniture are designed to raise monitors. But he was right.
(You might think that a opthamologist, who has medical training, would be a better source than an optometrist. But it's my perception that optometrists actually do better with the little practical issues.)
Also note that a lot of people who don't need glasses for normal activities need them while they're sitting in from of a computer.
One mistake my optometrist did make was to recommend "task glasses" in place of my normal progressive lenses. These are glasses where the focus is optimized for your specific monitor setup. Possibly the right choice if you're a key-entry person or other person that never looks away from the screen. But if you stop to refer to books or write on paper, I think standard glasses arebetter.
There have been paid email providers for years.
Just because something is free, doesn't mean its a bargain. Having to change your email address every time you change ISPs, overloaded servers, tiny mailbox limits, no spam filtering, bad or nonexistant web access to your email -- these are all reasons not to use a mail server, even if you don't have to pay for it. I don't think I've ever used the free mailbox that came with my ISP account. (Well, there was my first ISP, Netcom, but I actually had that mailbox before Netcom started offering Internet access.) Right now, I use a mailbox provided by my Web hosting provider. But before I had a web site I used a mailbox provider, mainly because they supported IMAP, something most ISPs don't do.
This is not so much about Outlook as about Exchange. There are lots of Outlook features that don't work unless your email server is Exchange. There are a few Exchange service providers, but mostly you don't have access to Exchange unless you work for a company that uses it.
This service doesn't just give Microsoft a new revenue stream (which they're not exactly desperate for in any case) it gives people a chance to try out Exchange features without the investment of an Exchange infrastructure. Which would, theoretically, encourage more people to adopt Exchange in place of other email server software.
None of what I've just said should be taken as advocacy for the software just described. Some of Exchange's workflow features are intriguing, but I have too many concerns over MS's quality and security problem. Plus I'm a standards zealot -- I'm not going to encourage any more MS technology lockin. Plus the weird, messy, I-know-what-you-really-want design of Outlook makes me want to scream.
Obviously there are many ways you can do this. The simplest I can think of is a Firefox extension similar to "Open in IE" that works automaticaly when it sees you navigating to a page on a list. Which saves you a little hassle, but is still pretty messy. Probably what you'd want is some kind of framework application that embeds Gecko, MSHTML, and maybe a couple of others, and switches between them as preprogrammed.
Thing is, these applications all require work. The plugin is maybe a week of somebody's time, and the framework is a major project. Who's going to invest their time in such a thing? Not Firefox enthusiasts, who donate their labor because they love the software, not because they want to make life easier for people who can't ditch Internet Explorer.
Probably you could get somebody to do it if you paid them. But if you have that kind of money lying around, you should spend it on making your company's servers less dependent on proprietary tech.
Just because something doable and useful, doesn't mean it's worth the trouble.
The server network was going to be owned by a single company.
Which is centralized control of content, even if the servers are geographically dispersed. Which be a civil liberties disaster -- if it weren't impractical. Not because you can't build the infrastructure (obviously you can) but because nobody would be stupid enough to hand over their content to such a centralized entity.
The company itself didn't have censorship or filtering functions, it was more of a common carrier than most ISPs are now.
And ISPs are constantly under pressure to censor the content they carry. As are the companies that host the content. Some censorship actually takes place, but it's limited by way content is dispersed among many different providers in different countries.
Apple has always taken the attitude that its case designs are intellectual property. Which really discourages people from imitating their better designs. (I often wish somebody would imitate the Stalk iMac, but now even Apple seems to have abandoned that design.)
I suppose it would be hard for Apple's lawyers to argue that a simple white box is a Design Trademark. But I suspect nobody but Apple will seee any marketability is a simple and tiny plug-and-play desktop system.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Xanadu
Agreed. But I also think he was a little out of touch with some real-world social and legal issues. He envisioned a very centralized approach to electronic publishing. That might have helped with the cross referencing, and fair rewards for content creators. But it would have been a totaly disaster for civil liberties.
The real killer was that such a central content repository was just plain impractical. Thank God for that!
I'd previously heard the "Do you want to live forever?" line attributed to a sergeant at Omaha Beach. Not suprising that it was previously heard a generation earlier. And I'd guess that it's much older than that. It's probably as old as warfare.
Coincidentally, I had just decided that my next PDA had to be Linux-based. I've been using Palms for years, and always liked them. But I'm not impressed with the latest PalmOne offerings, and they no longer have any real competition for dedicated Palm-based PDAs. (I don't want a smart phone or a game gadget.) Plus my current m515 is showing signs that PalmOne and PalmSource no longer know what they're doing.
First I got bit by the m5xx USB bug and had to buy a torx tool just to perform the necessary power cycle. (A hard reset doesn't erase the USB misconfiguration.) Then I discovered that the latest Palm Desktop upgrade had screwed up my Install conduit. After a frustrating hassle with PalmOne tech support (who used to be very good), I discovered that the only fix was to totally remove Palm Desktop (including registry entries!) and re-install. I still haven't got all my conduits back.
Time to look for alternatives. Alas, none of the English-language Linux PDA sites have been updated in a while. Nobody seems to be working on that stuff in this country. It appeared that my only option was to buy a Windows-based PDA and either live with a crappy OS or hack in Linux myself. Neither prospect appealled.
So this latest Dynamism offer caught my attention. But it has two things I absolutely don't want in a pocket device: a keyboard (I can't do thumb-and-peck, I need a stylus) and a hard drive (too big a point of failure; the 16-meg of solid-state storage in my m515 is already more data than I need to carry in my pocket).
But what's really discouraging is that this is only available from Dynamism. Nothing against them, but their speciality is selling Japanese stuff that nobody else thinks is worth selling in North America. Which means that all the talk we had a couple years ago about Linux-based PDAs was just talk. Too bad.
Bluetooth would be more to the point. WiFi only works if you're near a hotspot. With Bluetooth, you can network through your cell phone and control your oven from anwhere you can see a cell phone tower.
WiFi is fine for laptops. To use a laptop, you at least need a chair, and preferrably a table. Whoever provides you with these conveniences is probably going to go the extra 500 meters and give you a hotspot as well. But for a device you use while standing on a street corner, you want Bluetooth.
Not fair. They haven't just switched the keycaps, they westernized the OS. Plus they provide the English-speaking tech support you're not going to get from Taurus.
And you're really overestimating the markup. If you think you can manufacture a hard-drive based pocket computer for $200, why are you wasting your time on Slashdot?
Every time I remind people of TiVo's quality problems, I get a bunch of responses from people who haven't had any trouble -- and of course that "proves" that I'm on LSD. That's like insisting that Russian Roulette is a safe pastime, since most people survive the experience.
I mean, they're all about searching, locating relevant things, organisation of data etc, right?
Searching, yes, locating, yes, organizing, big fat no. Their core business is helping you find information on the most disorganized collection of data in human history: the Web.
I'm not sure I'm a Picasa fan. Like you, I want to categorize and organize, and Picasa isn't particularly good at that. But it is good at simply finding things. During its automatic search, it turned up directories of old photos I was sure I'd lost. And I found them because Picasa's good at presenting large gobs of graphical information. Which, for the purposes of finding pictures, is a lot more useful than pattern matching.
Now the question is, how hard is it to decrypt those streams? Is there a decent chance of cracking the keys in software, or is a cable card the only hope?
Unless somebody uncovers a flaw in the underlying algorithm, you are not going to do any key cracking.
CSS (the encryption used on DVDs) did get cracked, of course. That was the result of a poorly-chosen algorithm and sloppiness on the part of a CSS licensee. These are mistake the entertainment industry is not likely to repeat.
No no. Make him grovel, make him beg. Make him admit how he chased away all the more talented writers and actors, and generally ruined the franchise. Then slam the door in his face.
A lot of posts on this story. A lot of them are actually written by intelligent people. To whom I address this question: Why do you care? The only real purpose of the net TLD is to provide a separate address space for network services provides. That purpose has been pretty much ignored for years now. I think 80% of the domains are in.net just because the name was already taken in.com and.org, or because somebody wanted to lock up all variations of a name. Is anybody going to go through all those millions of domains and figure out which ones really belong there?
I find it pretty hard to take the whole TLD thing seriously anway. Even when the rules are applied consistently, all you get is a lot of obscure suffixes that are of no real use to anybody. And when the rules have never really been applied, as with.net,.org, and most of the national domains, it's hard to understand why anybody cares who administers the domains.
Slashdot Mirror
But I could be wrong. And if I'm wrong about that, then I'm also wrong about all the other stuff in my previous post. In which case it's just somebody in Redmond adding features to justify a bigger budget.
Next time you have a "bullshit!" response to something somebody says, stop to consider whether you're responding to what they actually said, or whether you're just lumping them in with somebody else who said something vaguely similar.
(You might think that a opthamologist, who has medical training, would be a better source than an optometrist. But it's my perception that optometrists actually do better with the little practical issues.)
Also note that a lot of people who don't need glasses for normal activities need them while they're sitting in from of a computer.
One mistake my optometrist did make was to recommend "task glasses" in place of my normal progressive lenses. These are glasses where the focus is optimized for your specific monitor setup. Possibly the right choice if you're a key-entry person or other person that never looks away from the screen. But if you stop to refer to books or write on paper, I think standard glasses arebetter.
There have been paid email providers for years. Just because something is free, doesn't mean its a bargain. Having to change your email address every time you change ISPs, overloaded servers, tiny mailbox limits, no spam filtering, bad or nonexistant web access to your email -- these are all reasons not to use a mail server, even if you don't have to pay for it. I don't think I've ever used the free mailbox that came with my ISP account. (Well, there was my first ISP, Netcom, but I actually had that mailbox before Netcom started offering Internet access.) Right now, I use a mailbox provided by my Web hosting provider. But before I had a web site I used a mailbox provider, mainly because they supported IMAP, something most ISPs don't do.
This service doesn't just give Microsoft a new revenue stream (which they're not exactly desperate for in any case) it gives people a chance to try out Exchange features without the investment of an Exchange infrastructure. Which would, theoretically, encourage more people to adopt Exchange in place of other email server software.
None of what I've just said should be taken as advocacy for the software just described. Some of Exchange's workflow features are intriguing, but I have too many concerns over MS's quality and security problem. Plus I'm a standards zealot -- I'm not going to encourage any more MS technology lockin. Plus the weird, messy, I-know-what-you-really-want design of Outlook makes me want to scream.
Thing is, these applications all require work. The plugin is maybe a week of somebody's time, and the framework is a major project. Who's going to invest their time in such a thing? Not Firefox enthusiasts, who donate their labor because they love the software, not because they want to make life easier for people who can't ditch Internet Explorer.
Probably you could get somebody to do it if you paid them. But if you have that kind of money lying around, you should spend it on making your company's servers less dependent on proprietary tech.
Just because something doable and useful, doesn't mean it's worth the trouble.
I suppose it would be hard for Apple's lawyers to argue that a simple white box is a Design Trademark. But I suspect nobody but Apple will seee any marketability is a simple and tiny plug-and-play desktop system.
You're confusing Slashdotters with people who read 18th-century romantic poetry. Talk about opposites!
The real killer was that such a central content repository was just plain impractical. Thank God for that!
Possibly. But they'll be engineered, manufactured, and supported by the same people who have screwed up the current generation of Palms.
I'd previously heard the "Do you want to live forever?" line attributed to a sergeant at Omaha Beach. Not suprising that it was previously heard a generation earlier. And I'd guess that it's much older than that. It's probably as old as warfare.
First I got bit by the m5xx USB bug and had to buy a torx tool just to perform the necessary power cycle. (A hard reset doesn't erase the USB misconfiguration.) Then I discovered that the latest Palm Desktop upgrade had screwed up my Install conduit. After a frustrating hassle with PalmOne tech support (who used to be very good), I discovered that the only fix was to totally remove Palm Desktop (including registry entries!) and re-install. I still haven't got all my conduits back.
Time to look for alternatives. Alas, none of the English-language Linux PDA sites have been updated in a while. Nobody seems to be working on that stuff in this country. It appeared that my only option was to buy a Windows-based PDA and either live with a crappy OS or hack in Linux myself. Neither prospect appealled.
So this latest Dynamism offer caught my attention. But it has two things I absolutely don't want in a pocket device: a keyboard (I can't do thumb-and-peck, I need a stylus) and a hard drive (too big a point of failure; the 16-meg of solid-state storage in my m515 is already more data than I need to carry in my pocket).
But what's really discouraging is that this is only available from Dynamism. Nothing against them, but their speciality is selling Japanese stuff that nobody else thinks is worth selling in North America. Which means that all the talk we had a couple years ago about Linux-based PDAs was just talk. Too bad.
WiFi is fine for laptops. To use a laptop, you at least need a chair, and preferrably a table. Whoever provides you with these conveniences is probably going to go the extra 500 meters and give you a hotspot as well. But for a device you use while standing on a street corner, you want Bluetooth.
And you're really overestimating the markup. If you think you can manufacture a hard-drive based pocket computer for $200, why are you wasting your time on Slashdot?
Every time I remind people of TiVo's quality problems, I get a bunch of responses from people who haven't had any trouble -- and of course that "proves" that I'm on LSD. That's like insisting that Russian Roulette is a safe pastime, since most people survive the experience.
I'm not sure I'm a Picasa fan. Like you, I want to categorize and organize, and Picasa isn't particularly good at that. But it is good at simply finding things. During its automatic search, it turned up directories of old photos I was sure I'd lost. And I found them because Picasa's good at presenting large gobs of graphical information. Which, for the purposes of finding pictures, is a lot more useful than pattern matching.
So it's basically a welfare program for unemployed techies?
CSS (the encryption used on DVDs) did get cracked, of course. That was the result of a poorly-chosen algorithm and sloppiness on the part of a CSS licensee. These are mistake the entertainment industry is not likely to repeat.
No no. Make him grovel, make him beg. Make him admit how he chased away all the more talented writers and actors, and generally ruined the franchise. Then slam the door in his face.
I find it pretty hard to take the whole TLD thing seriously anway. Even when the rules are applied consistently, all you get is a lot of obscure suffixes that are of no real use to anybody. And when the rules have never really been applied, as with .net, .org, and most of the national domains, it's hard to understand why anybody cares who administers the domains.
Fine, but we're not talking about what you want. We're talking about what people in general might want.