It's a pity that more sites don't take the hint and remove the pop-up/pop-under/flash-within hell that drives people away from their pages.
Personally I'm pretty happy about that --- it generally indicates the content is useless. With a decent browser, I can eliminate irrelevant popups and even with a lame browser (ie ie) I know that it can safely be ignored.
What is sad is when useless or biased info gets embedded in text, making it difficult or impossible to distill the stuff I'm interested in. Google does a great job separating its ads from its content.
How do we know aliens don't communicate by propogating buffer overruns throughout the planet? Has anyone analysed this code, if it is indeed out in the wild?
There's gotta be more to extraterrestial life than mutilating cows and doing donuts in crop fields.
Sure, you can eliminate some problems that way - but what if someone has a legitimate business and someone else (their competitor, their eternal nemesis, their ex) decorates the streets of Beijing with their phone number?
For me, there is only one feature on a phone that really counts: the keys.
Use a separate keychain instead:->
Sorry. But seriously, your point is valid - especially so with some Japanese products aimed at the teen market. However, the P800 phone has a STYLUS! So in this case keys play a much less important role.
In fact, since the whole concept of twelve keys on a tiny device just sucks, a stylus phone is a pretty good thing, don't you think?
Regardless of whether video blogging technology is possible, how useful will it be? To answer that, I thnik the whole idea of blogs needs to be questioned.
It might be fun to write blogs, but how many people are actually interested in them. Most blogs I see are just narcisistic capsules describing the innermost thoughts and feelings of some guy I don't know.
The problem with blogs is they are unstructured --- if you want to make a website about goldfish, make one about goldfish with nice links and structure. Don't just keep appending news --- no-one will be interested in scanning through it all to derive some information about a particular topic.
Video blogs make the situation worse --- searching is impossible and you'll end up with scores of media documents, once again about some average bloke's activities of the day.
This is like those guys who strapped cameras (before they were "webcams") to their head in the mid-90s and transmitted every unexciting moment of their unexciting day as a mathematics graduate student, before people Jennycam et al realised there is only one type of "video blog" that will successfully captivate web users.
Another reason for braille on all ATMs: interface consistency. Even 20/20 users will become accustomed to using the braille for additional feedback. It's not difficult for them to type in on a numeric keypad, but every bit of feedback helps (and every lack hinders), especially when they can't see the PIN they enter.
You probably don't notice how much you use bubbles on the keyboad. Even though they were initially intended for blind users, you'd certainly notice if they were taken away.
You're assuming google is buying blogger to improve google's services.
But it's likely google wants to improve blogger's services, and that may be the main game: if google's own resources can dramatically improve blogger, then a strong synergy exists after all.
What do people blog about? Recent events.
What is the world's best source of info on recent events? Google.
Google can integrate its data into the blogger UI to structure blogs, possibly link between them, etc. This in turn will improve google's own services. As you say, that part could be done by spiders. BUT by no means as effectively as a situation where the blog data itself is directly linked to google's records before it is is even published to the web.
Pacman - First mainstream video game character. Very worthy.
Dragon's Lair - first laserdisc game. Important but not top three material.
How about...
Donkey Kong - the game that started the biggest dynasty of game characters
Street Fighter - spawned by far the biggest gaming genre of the past decade
Tetris - the "Hello World" of video gaming... the most widely ported arcade game ever. And also its graphics were mundane, even for the late 80s, demonstrating games don't have to be sexy to be addictive.
And from the perspective of technology, how about some of the early 3D classics (Star Wars, Tron) or some of the Japanese "VR" dancing, musical instrument etc, games. And for cultural impact.
Dragon's Lair was great technology for its time. But top 3? Not even a contender!!!
Now, on the down side, this is an internal memo, so it wasn't really supposed to be public knowledge, right?
It's an internal memo, but I doubt Sun are naieve enough to expect it remain internal. This is evident in the guarded language used, e.g. the opening paragraph includes "While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++" and "these issues are not inherent to Java".
They do go on to mention "the Java problem" a few times, but on the whole, the memo reads as one intended to be constructive.
Gosling has at times been criticised for being too much of a fanatic, but really I think Sun has generally been quite open in their assessment of Java.
A great example of Sun's open attitude is Josh Bloch's "Effective Java" book. This is a Sun guy responsible for the collections framework, among other things. In the book, he is quite objective about where the Java API implementation sits according to his Java tips. For instance, he points to classes that should have been declared final (in his opinion), some classes could have been made immutable, etc. OO design concepts have matured since Java was developed, so there's no shame in admitting these things.It is only a shame when such problems are not admitted, and just swept under the carpet (as the poster above mentioned).
The nice thing about Sun's business model for Java, in contrast to a more private model, is that they are forced to be responsive because they have many partners, and benefit greatly from open source. If Sun were ever to begin treating their comments on Java as nothing more than a public relations exercise, they may as well start making all their boxes run C#.
I test the test until the test tests ok. Then I write a test for another test, and so on.
Test the test? Sure it's possible...
Tools like Jester let you evaluate the quality of your JUnit test cases. So yes you can evise your test cases in between refactoring your code.
Hopefully the developers of Jester didn't evaluate their test code with Jester (XXP with Jester-for-Jester), the mere thought has me spiralling into a daze of infinite recursion.
Typical ambiguous slashdot headline had me concerned for a second... I'm really looking forward to this phone.
I noted a few pros and cons a few days ago wrt PDA/Phone combos.
Upsides of P800: - size of a normal phone - pen-based input. Using Jot, which might have been a problem for grafitti fans until palm announced its shifting to Jot - all the usual stuff - MP3s, camera, bluetooth - java - Unbelievably, a mame [demon.co.uk] port.
More downsides: - Cost - currently selling at about US$900. - Proprietary Sony memory stick rather than SD/MMC card.
I can't wait for the P800, although i agree americans may have difficulty as it's GSM. AFAIC its the first fully-fledged PDA-phone combo thats actually the size of a phone.
Upsides of P800: - size of a normal phone - pen-based input. Using Jot, which might have been a problem for grafitti fans until palm announced its shifting to Jot - all the usual stuff - MP3s, camera, bluetooth - java - Unbelievably, a mame port.
More downsides: - Cost - currently selling at about US$900. - Proprietary Sony memory stick rather than SD/MMC card.
Is Bill G. giving guarantees as to how long MS is committed to broadcasting the time, weather, sports, and email??
Uh that's one think you *don't* need to worry about. If Bill G decides MS is doing watches, then MS is committed to the watch business for the next decade. You're talking about a company with a cash base of many billions --- that's hard cash sitting in a bank. It's also a company that likes to spend on areas slightly outside its usual focus, to prevent monopoly accusations.
MS's bottomless pocckets will be used relentlessly for several generations until MS either dominates the industry (Pocket PC), needs to pull out for strategic purposes (MSN dialup), or decides it has tried long enough and cannot effectively compete (???).
You're right ---- sendmail can be very powerful and is not for newbies.
The reason people complain about sendmail so vehemently is that standard distros seem to think it's funny to provide sendmail as the default. I know this is true for redhat and I suspect it follows for others(?). I doubt there would be as much frustration if a more admin-friendly package was offered as the default.
For newbies, sendmail is an beast far too complex to bother with configuring. There are no decent GUI front-ends and the config files require compilation and are basically a complete mess.
Changing the setup is hard enough - I dread to consider the possibility that someone might have to tune it. The topic certainly warrants a thick textbook.
Personally, I agree with others here when it comes to your typical desktop linux setup: destroy sendmail and install Postfix or QMail.
As well as the extra storage, you'd also be able to view all the pics you've taken, and keep some pics permanently on the device.
Microdrives aren't too bad, but like the guy above said, they're much more expensive than HDs. Also they drain power badly - not good if you've got a digicam on the road.
One major problem though with this idea is what storage format would they use? Digicams use a large variety of cards: CF, SD/MMC, smartcard. Not to mention proprietry formats like Sony memory stick and the Handspring devices. Whatever Apple came up with would be bound to disappoint a lare proportion of the masses. Apple itself does not have any commitment to any storage format, although their friendliness to open standards like firewire would suggest they'd go for CF or SD (or maybe both like the Handera PDA).
Emulator sound isn't exactly the same but there are so many advantages of emulators...
It works
It's spec'd as fast and big as you always wanted it (or as lame if that's your preference)
Saves space - less atoms on your desk
You can save the entire memory image
Connects to your standard hardware (printer, modem, etc, if you can set it up)
Yeah these things are great for a hobby hardware geek. Practical value, assuming emulator exists, is very limited though - maybe to extract data from some legacy storage media. But even people who want to just play around with an old computer are usually better off sticking with an emulator.
It's slashdotworthy because it shows MP3 has hit the mainstream --- artists don't get much bigger than Madonna, and she's agreed to put her signature on a concept that the music publishers are calling "theft/piracy/etc".
Similar thing happened a couple of years ago with artists like Courtney Love, Offspring (sort of), Limp Bizkit (for $10M) supported Napster. But here it's become more mainstream --- big-name artists signing a big-name company providing MP3 technology.
I don't know if those so-called Apple Employees are legitimate, but it seems likely there's more to this partnership than a few engraved autographs.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's every bit as evil as you guys thing Mic rosoft is. I don't know why they're not on Slashdot's radar.
Yes they're both the wickedest of evil empires, but Sony produces awesome cameras, games, movies, laptops, pdas, phones, mp3 players....
MS make windows and office which some people have to use for reasons of compatibility
Spot the difference?
Gotta say this ... you can do that on opera by default.
..." for groups search and lots more engines covered.
Also "r
std_disclaimer - dont own opera shares etc
It's a pity that more sites don't take the hint and remove the pop-up/pop-under/flash-within hell that drives people away from their pages.
Personally I'm pretty happy about that --- it generally indicates the content is useless. With a decent browser, I can eliminate irrelevant popups and even with a lame browser (ie ie) I know that it can safely be ignored.
What is sad is when useless or biased info gets embedded in text, making it difficult or impossible to distill the stuff I'm interested in. Google does a great job separating its ads from its content.
How do we know aliens don't communicate by propogating buffer overruns throughout the planet? Has anyone analysed this code, if it is indeed out in the wild?
There's gotta be more to extraterrestial life than mutilating cows and doing donuts in crop fields.
Sure, you can eliminate some problems that way - but what if someone has a legitimate business and someone else (their competitor, their eternal nemesis, their ex) decorates the streets of Beijing with their phone number?
The numbers are also checked manually and require the approval of a senior official before the bombardment can begin, he told the People's Daily.
This is the bit I'd be worry about. You'd hate someone to target you and have you taken "for punishment" by pasting a few stickers in your name.
So how effective is the manual check?
For me, there is only one feature on a phone that really counts: the keys.
:->
Use a separate keychain instead
Sorry. But seriously, your point is valid - especially so with some Japanese products aimed at the teen market. However, the P800 phone has a STYLUS! So in this case keys play a much less important role.
In fact, since the whole concept of twelve keys on a tiny device just sucks, a stylus phone is a pretty good thing, don't you think?
Technology likes this really shows off how useful an open, ASCII-based, protocol can be.
Regardless of whether video blogging technology is possible, how useful will it be? To answer that, I thnik the whole idea of blogs needs to be questioned.
It might be fun to write blogs, but how many people are actually interested in them. Most blogs I see are just narcisistic capsules describing the innermost thoughts and feelings of some guy I don't know.
The problem with blogs is they are unstructured --- if you want to make a website about goldfish, make one about goldfish with nice links and structure. Don't just keep appending news --- no-one will be interested in scanning through it all to derive some information about a particular topic.
Video blogs make the situation worse --- searching is impossible and you'll end up with scores of media documents, once again about some average bloke's activities of the day.
This is like those guys who strapped cameras (before they were "webcams") to their head in the mid-90s and transmitted every unexciting moment of their unexciting day as a mathematics graduate student, before people Jennycam et al realised there is only one type of "video blog" that will successfully captivate web users.
What Is the Animatrix?
Some kind of Matrix animation I can only speculate.
And the damn thing STILL runs Linux. Wow!
... but why don't they mention anything about ogg vorbis. I would have bought one right away if only they supported ogg.
Great - it runs linux
I can't help it, it's a reflex action.
Another reason for braille on all ATMs: interface consistency. Even 20/20 users will become accustomed to using the braille for additional feedback. It's not difficult for them to type in on a numeric keypad, but every bit of feedback helps (and every lack hinders), especially when they can't see the PIN they enter.
You probably don't notice how much you use bubbles on the keyboad. Even though they were initially intended for blind users, you'd certainly notice if they were taken away.
You're assuming google is buying blogger to improve google's services.
But it's likely google wants to improve blogger's services, and that may be the main game: if google's own resources can dramatically improve blogger, then a strong synergy exists after all.
What do people blog about? Recent events.
What is the world's best source of info on recent events? Google.
Google can integrate its data into the blogger UI to structure blogs, possibly link between them, etc. This in turn will improve google's own services. As you say, that part could be done by spiders. BUT by no means as effectively as a situation where the blog data itself is directly linked to google's records before it is is even published to the web.
Pong - Icon of early video gaming. Very worthy.
...
... the most widely ported arcade game ever. And also its graphics were mundane, even for the late 80s, demonstrating games don't have to be sexy to be addictive.
Pacman - First mainstream video game character. Very worthy.
Dragon's Lair - first laserdisc game. Important but not top three material.
How about
Donkey Kong - the game that started the biggest dynasty of game characters
Street Fighter - spawned by far the biggest gaming genre of the past decade
Tetris - the "Hello World" of video gaming
And from the perspective of technology, how about some of the early 3D classics (Star Wars, Tron) or some of the Japanese "VR" dancing, musical instrument etc, games. And for cultural impact.
Dragon's Lair was great technology for its time. But top 3? Not even a contender!!!
Say, you don't happen to work in a comic shop?
Now, on the down side, this is an internal memo, so it wasn't really supposed to be public knowledge, right?
It's an internal memo, but I doubt Sun are naieve enough to expect it remain internal. This is evident in the guarded language used, e.g. the opening paragraph includes "While the Java language provides many advantages over C and C++" and "these issues are not inherent to Java".
They do go on to mention "the Java problem" a few times, but on the whole, the memo reads as one intended to be constructive.
Gosling has at times been criticised for being too much of a fanatic, but really I think Sun has generally been quite open in their assessment of Java.
A great example of Sun's open attitude is Josh Bloch's "Effective Java" book. This is a Sun guy responsible for the collections framework, among other things. In the book, he is quite objective about where the Java API implementation sits according to his Java tips. For instance, he points to classes that should have been declared final (in his opinion), some classes could have been made immutable, etc. OO design concepts have matured since Java was developed, so there's no shame in admitting these things.It is only a shame when such problems are not admitted, and just swept under the carpet (as the poster above mentioned).
The nice thing about Sun's business model for Java, in contrast to a more private model, is that they are forced to be responsive because they have many partners, and benefit greatly from open source. If Sun were ever to begin treating their comments on Java as nothing more than a public relations exercise, they may as well start making all their boxes run C#.
I test the test until the test tests ok. Then I write a test for another test, and so on.
...
Test the test? Sure it's possible
Tools like Jester let you evaluate the quality of your JUnit test cases. So yes you can evise your test cases in between refactoring your code.
Hopefully the developers of Jester didn't evaluate their test code with Jester (XXP with Jester-for-Jester), the mere thought has me spiralling into a daze of infinite recursion.
Typical ambiguous slashdot headline had me concerned for a second ... I'm really looking forward to this phone.
I noted a few pros and cons a few days ago wrt PDA/Phone combos.
Upsides of P800:
- size of a normal phone
- pen-based input. Using Jot, which might have been a problem for grafitti fans until palm announced its shifting to Jot
- all the usual stuff - MP3s, camera, bluetooth
- java
- Unbelievably, a mame [demon.co.uk] port.
More downsides:
- Cost - currently selling at about US$900.
- Proprietary Sony memory stick rather than SD/MMC card.
I can't wait for the P800, although i agree americans may have difficulty as it's GSM. AFAIC its the first fully-fledged PDA-phone combo thats actually the size of a phone.
Upsides of P800:
- size of a normal phone
- pen-based input. Using Jot, which might have been a problem for grafitti fans until palm announced its shifting to Jot
- all the usual stuff - MP3s, camera, bluetooth
- java
- Unbelievably, a mame port.
More downsides:
- Cost - currently selling at about US$900.
- Proprietary Sony memory stick rather than SD/MMC card.
Is Bill G. giving guarantees as to how long MS is committed to broadcasting the time, weather, sports, and email??
Uh that's one think you *don't* need to worry about. If Bill G decides MS is doing watches, then MS is committed to the watch business for the next decade. You're talking about a company with a cash base of many billions --- that's hard cash sitting in a bank. It's also a company that likes to spend on areas slightly outside its usual focus, to prevent monopoly accusations.
MS's bottomless pocckets will be used relentlessly for several generations until MS either dominates the industry (Pocket PC), needs to pull out for strategic purposes (MSN dialup), or decides it has tried long enough and cannot effectively compete (???).
You're right ---- sendmail can be very powerful and is not for newbies.
The reason people complain about sendmail so vehemently is that standard distros seem to think it's funny to provide sendmail as the default. I know this is true for redhat and I suspect it follows for others(?). I doubt there would be as much frustration if a more admin-friendly package was offered as the default.
For newbies, sendmail is an beast far too complex to bother with configuring. There are no decent GUI front-ends and the config files require compilation and are basically a complete mess.
Changing the setup is hard enough - I dread to consider the possibility that someone might have to tune it. The topic certainly warrants a thick textbook.
Personally, I agree with others here when it comes to your typical desktop linux setup:
destroy sendmail and install Postfix or QMail.
As well as the extra storage, you'd also be able to view all the pics you've taken, and keep some pics permanently on the device.
Microdrives aren't too bad, but like the guy above said, they're much more expensive than HDs. Also they drain power badly - not good if you've got a digicam on the road.
One major problem though with this idea is what storage format would they use? Digicams use a large variety of cards: CF, SD/MMC, smartcard. Not to mention proprietry formats like Sony memory stick and the Handspring devices. Whatever Apple came up with would be bound to disappoint a lare proportion of the masses. Apple itself does not have any commitment to any storage format, although their friendliness to open standards like firewire would suggest they'd go for CF or SD (or maybe both like the Handera PDA).
Yeah these things are great for a hobby hardware geek. Practical value, assuming emulator exists, is very limited though - maybe to extract data from some legacy storage media. But even people who want to just play around with an old computer are usually better off sticking with an emulator.
Something else JW has is explanatory graphics. This should be done here too - it wouldn't be hard to anticipate what the teams will be up to.
It's slashdotworthy because it shows MP3 has hit the mainstream --- artists don't get much bigger than Madonna, and she's agreed to put her signature on a concept that the music publishers are calling "theft/piracy/etc".
Similar thing happened a couple of years ago with artists like Courtney Love, Offspring (sort of), Limp Bizkit (for $10M) supported Napster.
But here it's become more mainstream --- big-name artists signing a big-name company providing MP3 technology.
I don't know if those so-called Apple Employees are legitimate, but it seems likely there's more to this partnership than a few engraved autographs.