if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control.
It isn't just that. If your control looks superficially like a common control, the user will also have to remember that your control behaves differently and how to react accordingly every time they use your application.
For most people, this is a major source of ineffciency. Even hard core geeks stumble over this sort of thing, whether they are willing or able to admit it to themselves.
It seems to me that geeks wouldn't be too happy with API calls that do something similar and yet have totally different semantics, why are such inconsitancies acceptable, or even desirable, when we are talking about a User Interface as opposed to an Application Programmer Interface?
Given that the record industry is facing decling sales, I am not convinced that they do have a handle on what "most people" want, at least not right now.
The dirty secret about the record industry, indeed, the whole damn entertainment industry, is that their ability to give the people what they want is really pretty weak.
Sure, they try all sorts of things, they poor huge amounts of money into marketing, etc, but when it comes down to it, all they do is milk the bands and movies that happen to take off for all they are worth, without regard to the future, and cut their losses on bands or movies that don't make it. From this, they try to make a small profit margin. If the margin threatens to get too large, they spend it on parties & other perks for the execs and marketing departments and call it a promotional expense.
Apple is going to have to balance the savings of using a standard PC platform with the expense of supporting multiple vendors, or loosing hardware revenue because someone releases a patch that lets MacOS x86 run on their hardware.
You have to consider that Apple's current machines are very PC like in many respects (AGP, PCI, USB, IDE, industry standard memory, etc.) In other words, they are already leveraging major peices of the PC architecture.
I would guess that an Apple PC would look very much like the latest PC hardware spec pushed by Microsoft with, perhaps, a hardware key to tie in with the OS, and perhaps a BIOS that doesn't support so much legacy crap.
Progress is often made when multiple parties pursue their mutual interests in an enlightened fashion. This can make for some strange bedfellows, but then, this is a complicated world we live in.
That said, there is a good business case for not experimenting with your development environment. It is one that puzzles most techies, so it is worth explaining.
I have my own illustration. I live in a 70 year old house. The main bathroom was fixed up by the previous owners about $10 years ago, but it had problems. Among them, the old wall mounted toilet used a lot of water. It had a short bowl (I like elongated bowls) It was cracked at the base. It oozed unknown stuff around the base and it had started leaking where the pipe from the tank joined the base and the wall wasn't holding the weight from the tank very well.
We could have fixed the wall and installed a new wax seal and we might have fixed the oozing problem (assuming the cracked base wasn't involved), but we thought this was a good time to upgrade to a new water efficient modern toilet with a nice roomy elongated bowl. Sounds simple, right?
Well, first thing, the distance between the center of the drain and the wall was about 15.25" rather than the now standard 12" So, we had to custom order a new toilet. The custom order, even though it was discounted from retail, was still 3x as much as the same toilet at Home Depot for a 12" offset.
For another thing, no one, as far as we could tell makes toilets for a 15" offset, so we had to order a 14" and figure out what to do about the extra large gap between the tank and the wall, because, once we got the new toilet in there, it was obvious that it was too damn big.
We are still going to have to patch the wall, since the new toilet is smaller (but we knew that).
We had to get new studs to hold the toilet to the wall and I had to look around a little more to find ones long enough for our situation.
The old stud hole was too rotted out, so I ended up having to epoxy the stud in, but not until I made another trip to look for more options. Plus, this still may not hold and I might have to try something else.
The toilet sticks out into the room further than I would like. Their solution for 14" offsets is to sell the same base as for other applications and make a tank that is built up at the back so that it comes closer to the wall.
Now, the addage of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" doesn't quite apply to my situation, but the reasoning is still the same. Seemingly minor changes can be much more involved than they look at first glance.
Some of the problems we ran into could have been mitigated, but they would have required significantly more planning, and some of them would have required exploration which itself would have been disruptive and might have created other problems that needed to be solved.
Changes to ones systems platform can be similarly disruptive.
It is often taken as an article of faith in slashdot circles that companies want a software vendor they can sue if something goes wrong. You might apply a similar principal here.
But it isn't that they want someone to sue, it is that they want someone substantial enough that they might be around in a year or two if something goes wrong or even if something goes right and they want to add a new feature to the product.
This makes perfect sense to me. If you are an IT manager who is outsourcing some work, how happy are you going to be a year later if that person/company isn't around anymore because they closed down or moved on to other work. In such a situation, you are faced with finding someone else who can get up to speed on the code and then do whatever additional work is necessry. There goes all the advantage of finding the right supplier in the first place, and you must again take on the trouble and expense of finding a new vendor.
So, why would the vendor asking $15,000 be more likely to be arround in 12 months than the vendor asking $5,000? Well, if most of the bids came in closer to $15,000 than $5,000, then it one might assume that $15,000 is closer to what the project might actually cost. Someone who looses money on something isn't likely to be in business very long.
Now, maybe the $5,000 is close to the actual cost, but the firm charging $15,000 has a fatter margin, which it might be able to use to keep staff on durring lean times, rather than letting them scatter, and to involve a second person in the project so that there is someone else familiar with the code & architecture in case the person doing the bulk of the work moves on.
The firm with the fatter margins also has more room to work if something goes awry on the project without having to come back and ask for more money. This means the IT manager is less likely to have to go to his superiors and say "the project went over budget" even if the "over budget" is still less.
One advantage of pay TV is that that only thing TV producers and executives have to worry about is whether they attract a large enough audience of paid subscribers.
In an advertising supported model, it isn't enough for the TV-types to come up with something that finds an audience, they have to find an audience that the advertizers want to pay for. As a result, there are a lot of shows that get cancelled after the second season even though they may draw more viewers than another show that goes on for 4-5 seasons.
I think Pressplay's latest pricing is getting close to reasonable. "Portable downloads" which you can transfer to another medium, like CD, and which you can use after your subscription expires, run ~$1/each.
This is a pretty good deal if, for example, you typicially buy CDs to get one or two songs (and so end up paying $7-14/song). It isn't all that bad if you actually want the entire CD. (Say $14 for 14 tracks).
Of course, there is overhead. $10/month for access to the service. That gets you unlimited streaming and unlimited downloads, but the downloads are restricted. You can't use them once your subscription expirers, and you can only use them on two machines.
Still, $10/month doesn't seem all that bad. A big appeal is that you basically have full access, via streaming, to your collection from any computer, saving you the trouble, for example, of on-demand streaming your own.
The biggest downsides I see, at this point:
that portable audio devices aren't fully enfranchised. To take audio with you, you have to purchase a "portable download." To really address this within the typical subscription model requires a further proliferation of DRM that I am not sure I am comfortable with.
selection seems limited. Pressplay seems to have a lot of artists (and I am assuming that most of their recent releases are available for download and purchase), but part of what I love about Kazaa is that I can find all sorts of obscure stuff, like old songs from the 80's, rare live recordings, ect that an "official" service might never manage to offer.
Re:Boon for the third world... sorta
on
Solar Surgery
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· Score: 2
Gates has said he will give away an actual percentage of his assets.
His goal, I think, is to have given most everything away before he dies (though that will likely include endowing institutions which will outlive him)
We will see what comes to pass, but I think he will go a long way to dispersing his wealth. He got a lot of bad press about his record with giving. Some people tried to shame him by comparing him to his late mother , but I am not sure it was fair. Gates strikes me as a very focused and involved person. I can't imagine him disposing of large portions of his capital without being very involved in the process. But at the time he was very involved with Microsoft.
I agree with the idea that non-scientists, non-geeks & non-techies need to have a better grounding in the sciences.
I went to a school know for its strong emphasis on the humanities, and the excellence of its science education. Yet, humanities majors can slip out with only 1 year of science or math!!
As a bio major, I had to do a year of general humanities, a year of history or social science, a year of art, a year of literature, in addition to the bio, the chem, the physics & the math.
It occurs to me though, that we have the tools. We have scientists & techies who are reasonably well versed in the humanities. Surely that background should help us bring a better understanding of the generalities and specifics of the sciences to the humanities majors. (We will worry about the business and marketing majors later, we have to pick our battles).
It would probably help if we held sciences great communicators in similar esteem to its great discoverers. I'm not sure we do. I have seen plenty of people slagging on Carl Sagan, less because of the level of science he practiced, but because he did so much to bring science to the rabble.
I agree with the general point that a lot of people will just end up doing similar jobs in a computing setting, but I see a few nuances.
1st. If you have spent much time on a movie set you know that there is a lot of time in which any given creative or technical person does absolutely nothing except wait for the time when their particular skill or perspective is needed.
It is easy for me to imagine that those people might spend more time working in a CGI production. Taken in agregate, this would probably mean fewer people would be required over all to create the same number of hours of entertainment.
2nd. Some technical professions would probably be entirely eliminated. For example, who needs electricians on a virtual set? Similarly, some creative jobs might be eliminated as software empowers top creative people to accomplish more without relying on an army of assistants.
Yes, the distruction of some positions will result in the creation of new ones, but I don't think it will be 1:1.
Sorry I didn't make it. I was feeling rather ambivalent. Probably just as well, I don't deal with noisy places very well.
Northgate is very easy for me to get too, but it seems to be dominated by horrid chains.
One idea would be Zeitgeist Espresso down near Pioneer square. I say this because it is a pretty big space and they have free 802.11b connectivity, which hopefully no-one will use, except maybe to stream, but knowing it is there should give people a warm fuzzy feeling.
Thuey usually close at 7:00pm, I think, but they might stay open later if arrangements were made. 20 people should be enough incentive to stay open late and it would guarantee we have the place to ourselves.
On the other hand, they aren't a bar.
They also have a smaller place on capitol hill that is open late.
battery life and heat are interrelated, and have significant influence on the portability and speed of a laptop.
heat is what battery charge ends up as, so these are obviously directly related.
The portability of a laptop is largely influenced by its weight, and to a lesser degree, size. The battery is one of the heaviest and largest single components in a laptop (after the screen). So, a processor that draws significantly less power for a given level of performance allows the use of a significantly smaller and lighter battery pack, resulting in a more portable computer.
The performance of a laptop is, of course, by the performance of its processor. In a laptop heat dissipation and battery life conspire often force a practical limit on the processor. A more efficient processor, that demands less power, and therefore dissipates less heat, will allow a faster processor to be used in a given machine.
they mention owning the patent for all fields of use except satellite broadcast
What I think the clause about satelite broadcast means:
1. The Satelite Broadcast industry (ie DirectTV) is MPEG based. 2. MPEG makes use of JPEG like techniques. 3. The Satelite Broadcast industry has obtained licensing for the relevant JPEG patents for use in MPEG compress video streams for satelite delivery.
Therefore, that licensing has already been negotiated. This would help explain why they didn't try to press this patent on JPEG until now. They had money coming in and were complacent.
Why it took them so damn long to wake up to the fact that there was money in JPEG is still a mystery. The Web went commercial more than 5 years ago. Consumer grade digital cameras, which make entensive use of JPEG compression, have been around for about as long.
What will likely happen is that Microsoft will look around and come up with a patent that they own that Forent or Compression labs is violating and they will come up with a cross-license agreement.
This is the big reason the patent system is screwed. The little guy, and that may well include Forent in this case, has no leverage against the big guys.
Slashdot Mirror
if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control.
It isn't just that. If your control looks superficially like a common control, the user will also have to remember that your control behaves differently and how to react accordingly every time they use your application.
For most people, this is a major source of ineffciency. Even hard core geeks stumble over this sort of thing, whether they are willing or able to admit it to themselves.
It seems to me that geeks wouldn't be too happy with API calls that do something similar and yet have totally different semantics, why are such inconsitancies acceptable, or even desirable, when we are talking about a User Interface as opposed to an Application Programmer Interface?
Most record buyers don't file share. Most filesharers buy lots of CDs.
Dumbass.
Given that the record industry is facing decling sales, I am not convinced that they do have a handle on what "most people" want, at least not right now.
The dirty secret about the record industry, indeed, the whole damn entertainment industry, is that their ability to give the people what they want is really pretty weak.
Sure, they try all sorts of things, they poor huge amounts of money into marketing, etc, but when it comes down to it, all they do is milk the bands and movies that happen to take off for all they are worth, without regard to the future, and cut their losses on bands or movies that don't make it. From this, they try to make a small profit margin. If the margin threatens to get too large, they spend it on parties & other perks for the execs and marketing departments and call it a promotional expense.
It is about as sophisticated as panning for gold.
I was half serious in both of my statements (wrapped, as they were, in a single sentence).
I'll leave it to you to figure out which halves.
For inspiring open source development by giving people things to imitate and something to hate.
Apple is going to have to balance the savings of using a standard PC platform with the expense of supporting multiple vendors, or loosing hardware revenue because someone releases a patch that lets MacOS x86 run on their hardware.
You have to consider that Apple's current machines are very PC like in many respects (AGP, PCI, USB, IDE, industry standard memory, etc.) In other words, they are already leveraging major peices of the PC architecture.
I would guess that an Apple PC would look very much like the latest PC hardware spec pushed by Microsoft with, perhaps, a hardware key to tie in with the OS, and perhaps a BIOS that doesn't support so much legacy crap.
Umm, hasn't apple already adopted the PC architecture? PCI, USB, AGP, etc?
Progress is often made when multiple parties pursue their mutual interests in an enlightened fashion. This can make for some strange bedfellows, but then, this is a complicated world we live in.
That said, there is a good business case for not experimenting with your development environment. It is one that puzzles most techies, so it is worth explaining.
I have my own illustration. I live in a 70 year old house. The main bathroom was fixed up by the previous owners about $10 years ago, but it had problems. Among them, the old wall mounted toilet used a lot of water. It had a short bowl (I like elongated bowls) It was cracked at the base. It oozed unknown stuff around the base and it had started leaking where the pipe from the tank joined the base and the wall wasn't holding the weight from the tank very well.
We could have fixed the wall and installed a new wax seal and we might have fixed the oozing problem (assuming the cracked base wasn't involved), but we thought this was a good time to upgrade to a new water efficient modern toilet with a nice roomy elongated bowl. Sounds simple, right?
Well, first thing, the distance between the center of the drain and the wall was about 15.25" rather than the now standard 12" So, we had to custom order a new toilet. The custom order, even though it was discounted from retail, was still 3x as much as the same toilet at Home Depot for a 12" offset.
For another thing, no one, as far as we could tell makes toilets for a 15" offset, so we had to order a 14" and figure out what to do about the extra large gap between the tank and the wall, because, once we got the new toilet in there, it was obvious that it was too damn big.
We are still going to have to patch the wall, since the new toilet is smaller (but we knew that).
We had to get new studs to hold the toilet to the wall and I had to look around a little more to find ones long enough for our situation.
The old stud hole was too rotted out, so I ended up having to epoxy the stud in, but not until I made another trip to look for more options. Plus, this still may not hold and I might have to try something else.
The toilet sticks out into the room further than I would like. Their solution for 14" offsets is to sell the same base as for other applications and make a tank that is built up at the back so that it comes closer to the wall.
Now, the addage of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" doesn't quite apply to my situation, but the reasoning is still the same. Seemingly minor changes can be much more involved than they look at first glance.
Some of the problems we ran into could have been mitigated, but they would have required significantly more planning, and some of them would have required exploration which itself would have been disruptive and might have created other problems that needed to be solved.
Changes to ones systems platform can be similarly disruptive.
It is often taken as an article of faith in slashdot circles that companies want a software vendor they can sue if something goes wrong. You might apply a similar principal here.
But it isn't that they want someone to sue, it is that they want someone substantial enough that they might be around in a year or two if something goes wrong or even if something goes right and they want to add a new feature to the product.
This makes perfect sense to me. If you are an IT manager who is outsourcing some work, how happy are you going to be a year later if that person/company isn't around anymore because they closed down or moved on to other work. In such a situation, you are faced with finding someone else who can get up to speed on the code and then do whatever additional work is necessry. There goes all the advantage of finding the right supplier in the first place, and you must again take on the trouble and expense of finding a new vendor.
So, why would the vendor asking $15,000 be more likely to be arround in 12 months than the vendor asking $5,000? Well, if most of the bids came in closer to $15,000 than $5,000, then it one might assume that $15,000 is closer to what the project might actually cost. Someone who looses money on something isn't likely to be in business very long.
Now, maybe the $5,000 is close to the actual cost, but the firm charging $15,000 has a fatter margin, which it might be able to use to keep staff on durring lean times, rather than letting them scatter, and to involve a second person in the project so that there is someone else familiar with the code & architecture in case the person doing the bulk of the work moves on.
The firm with the fatter margins also has more room to work if something goes awry on the project without having to come back and ask for more money. This means the IT manager is less likely to have to go to his superiors and say "the project went over budget" even if the "over budget" is still less.
One advantage of pay TV is that that only thing TV producers and executives have to worry about is whether they attract a large enough audience of paid subscribers.
In an advertising supported model, it isn't enough for the TV-types to come up with something that finds an audience, they have to find an audience that the advertizers want to pay for. As a result, there are a lot of shows that get cancelled after the second season even though they may draw more viewers than another show that goes on for 4-5 seasons.
I think Pressplay's latest pricing is getting close to reasonable. "Portable downloads" which you can transfer to another medium, like CD, and which you can use after your subscription expires, run ~$1/each.
This is a pretty good deal if, for example, you typicially buy CDs to get one or two songs (and so end up paying $7-14/song). It isn't all that bad if you actually want the entire CD. (Say $14 for 14 tracks).
Of course, there is overhead. $10/month for access to the service. That gets you unlimited streaming and unlimited downloads, but the downloads are restricted. You can't use them once your subscription expirers, and you can only use them on two machines.
Still, $10/month doesn't seem all that bad. A big appeal is that you basically have full access, via streaming, to your collection from any computer, saving you the trouble, for example, of on-demand streaming your own.
The biggest downsides I see, at this point:
that portable audio devices aren't fully enfranchised. To take audio with you, you have to purchase a "portable download." To really address this within the typical subscription model requires a further proliferation of DRM that I am not sure I am comfortable with.
selection seems limited. Pressplay seems to have a lot of artists (and I am assuming that most of their recent releases are available for download and purchase), but part of what I love about Kazaa is that I can find all sorts of obscure stuff, like old songs from the 80's, rare live recordings, ect that an "official" service might never manage to offer.
Gates has said he will give away an actual percentage of his assets.
His goal, I think, is to have given most everything away before he dies (though that will likely include endowing institutions which will outlive him)
We will see what comes to pass, but I think he will go a long way to dispersing his wealth. He got a lot of bad press about his record with giving. Some people tried to shame him by comparing him to his late mother , but I am not sure it was fair. Gates strikes me as a very focused and involved person. I can't imagine him disposing of large portions of his capital without being very involved in the process. But at the time he was very involved with Microsoft.
How do you turn creamated remains into diamonds? All the carbon has been driven off as CO2. Or are the collecting the remains before that point?
I agree with the idea that non-scientists, non-geeks & non-techies need to have a better grounding in the sciences.
I went to a school know for its strong emphasis on the humanities, and the excellence of its science education. Yet, humanities majors can slip out with only 1 year of science or math!!
As a bio major, I had to do a year of general humanities, a year of history or social science, a year of art, a year of literature, in addition to the bio, the chem, the physics & the math.
It occurs to me though, that we have the tools. We have scientists & techies who are reasonably well versed in the humanities. Surely that background should help us bring a better understanding of the generalities and specifics of the sciences to the humanities majors. (We will worry about the business and marketing majors later, we have to pick our battles).
It would probably help if we held sciences great communicators in similar esteem to its great discoverers. I'm not sure we do. I have seen plenty of people slagging on Carl Sagan, less because of the level of science he practiced, but because he did so much to bring science to the rabble.
I agree with the general point that a lot of people will just end up doing similar jobs in a computing setting, but I see a few nuances.
1st. If you have spent much time on a movie set you know that there is a lot of time in which any given creative or technical person does absolutely nothing except wait for the time when their particular skill or perspective is needed.
It is easy for me to imagine that those people might spend more time working in a CGI production. Taken in agregate, this would probably mean fewer people would be required over all to create the same number of hours of entertainment.
2nd. Some technical professions would probably be entirely eliminated. For example, who needs electricians on a virtual set? Similarly, some creative jobs might be eliminated as software empowers top creative people to accomplish more without relying on an army of assistants.
Yes, the distruction of some positions will result in the creation of new ones, but I don't think it will be 1:1.
Is it slower on x86 code, or slower when both platforms are running optimized native code?
Slower on x86 code, or slower when both platforms are running optimized native code?
Sorry I didn't make it. I was feeling rather ambivalent. Probably just as well, I don't deal with noisy places very well.
Northgate is very easy for me to get too, but it seems to be dominated by horrid chains.
One idea would be Zeitgeist Espresso down near Pioneer square. I say this because it is a pretty big space and they have free 802.11b connectivity, which hopefully no-one will use, except maybe to stream, but knowing it is there should give people a warm fuzzy feeling.
Thuey usually close at 7:00pm, I think, but they might stay open later if arrangements were made. 20 people should be enough incentive to stay open late and it would guarantee we have the place to ourselves.
On the other hand, they aren't a bar.
They also have a smaller place on capitol hill that is open late.
Of course, Itanium is backwords compatible with x86 code. It just isn't particularly fast when doing so.
Don't 56k modems, or at least one of the most common implementations look for PPP packet boundries and send the buffer immediately?
battery life and heat are interrelated, and have significant influence on the portability and speed of a laptop.
heat is what battery charge ends up as, so these are obviously directly related.
The portability of a laptop is largely influenced by its weight, and to a lesser degree, size. The battery is one of the heaviest and largest single components in a laptop (after the screen). So, a processor that draws significantly less power for a given level of performance allows the use of a significantly smaller and lighter battery pack, resulting in a more portable computer.
The performance of a laptop is, of course, by the performance of its processor. In a laptop heat dissipation and battery life conspire often force a practical limit on the processor. A more efficient processor, that demands less power, and therefore dissipates less heat, will allow a faster processor to be used in a given machine.
Oh, wait. This is a troll, isn't it. Oh well.
they mention owning the patent for all fields of use except satellite broadcast
What I think the clause about satelite broadcast means:
1. The Satelite Broadcast industry (ie DirectTV) is MPEG based.
2. MPEG makes use of JPEG like techniques.
3. The Satelite Broadcast industry has obtained licensing for the relevant JPEG patents for use in MPEG compress video streams for satelite delivery.
Therefore, that licensing has already been negotiated. This would help explain why they didn't try to press this patent on JPEG until now. They had money coming in and were complacent.
Why it took them so damn long to wake up to the fact that there was money in JPEG is still a mystery. The Web went commercial more than 5 years ago. Consumer grade digital cameras, which make entensive use of JPEG compression, have been around for about as long.
What will likely happen is that Microsoft will look around and come up with a patent that they own that Forent or Compression labs is violating and they will come up with a cross-license agreement.
This is the big reason the patent system is screwed. The little guy, and that may well include Forent in this case, has no leverage against the big guys.
20 years from filing date. That gives them 2.5 years of royalties.
They can, however, sue for back royalties, but there may be some limit on how far back they can go.