Frankly i was not a big gamer, but my games were nintendo. I don't play many games as an adult becuase I choose to spend my money elsewhere. However, if I had kids, I would only buy nintendo. They are rock solid consoles that can handle the abuse of children, and have appropriate games.
I think one reason Nintendo does so poorly is because parents give in to thier children's desire for inappropriate content or buy the console for themselve's instead of thier children.
If the GPL is proven to violate some law, then the GPL would be invalid in those places where that laws exist. This is why some want to create such laws in the US and elsewhere. It is that simple.
And the enforcement of contracts are wierd, and jurisdication is even wierder. Everyone plays fast and loose with both, trying to get some advantage by manipulating the rules. It is why tort law reform tries to push cases to the Federal level, where the courts have more to do.
And you know there are some things that contrats can't be used for. I can't contract to kill someone, and as part of the contract hold the person who pays me money harmless. Even promising not to work for a year for $1000 is questionable. Would that hold up in court? Who knows. Even if was a million dollars, the court would want to know why, and if it was a neccesary condition, or merely a desired conditioned. It is like we can't give up rights without due cause. Otherwise we would have employer violating minimum wage and other worker protections much more than they do now.
But as The Register pointed out, this has nothing to do with an executive. This has to do with the greatest challenge to the MS monopoly since Netscape. Google is building platform indepedent tools performing tasks that MS would have us believe are impossible outside of IE. They are providing free consumer services that MS depended upon to further the desktop monopoly. Google is1 proving to the server market that MS is not neccesary, and too expensive. Few customers are paying for the latest prodcts. The only reason they sell all the OS they do is that one can't transfer an OS from an old machine.
So really this is nothing more than an attempt to sue a competitor to death. If MS can weaken google enough over the next couple years, then Vista can be used to apply the final death blow. If iTunes maintains even 70% of the online music market, and Google maintinas 70% of the search market, and Sony/Nintendo maintains 70% of the games market, and all MS can say is look at out pretty pictures, where are they in 10 years? Do they have the research and infrastructure to become a services company like IBM? Do they actully provide any service?
I think this is what doomed one of my prior relationships. I was and relatively old Emailer. She was a relatively young IMer. Incompatibility ensued.
(interesting side note is that emailer is old enough to be in the dictionary, but IMer is not. One is truly old when one's verbifications are standard.)
...and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it.
HTML and CSS already allow us to do this to some extent. Not sure if the user has graphics? Use image tags. Not sure what size of the user's screen ? Use %width insead of fixed. Not sure if the user has good eyesight? Don't use anything that specifies and exact font or size.
The problem is that too few designers use these tools. Everyone got caught up in wanting HTML to be page markup instead of text markup. CSS kind of lets you do page markup, but should be used only for general directions, not exact placement. Given that designers often refuse to use these tools, and many refuse to design for the general user, instead opting for exact specification on IE, i fail to see how anything can be different in 10 years.
In fact, the only thing that might be different is that the standard might specificy some automation for choosing text or graphics for different devices. If your device is too far off from the standard, the same thing will happen as does in the Outlook web client. Text flows off the screen and one has a terrible time doing anything.
Most of the design standards we are supposed to apply today will be effective in 5 years, as many of the coding best practices from 20 years ago are still valid today. The problem is that we didn't follow the best practices 10 years ago(can we say MS buffer overflows), and we don't follow those practices today, what makes anyone think we will follow them in future. Just like now we will have different standards for different machines, if for no other reason that MS needs to keep it's monopoly.
Almost everything is about gaining publicity. Corporations establish a protocol of reporting problems so that bad publicity can be avoided. The press loves whistle blowers as it sells papers. The corporations sue whistle-blowers to prevent them from informing the public of problems. So in terms of publicity, it is a wash. Corporations don't withhold information for safety. They do so to avoid publicity. Whistle-blowers don't care about the publics right to know, they only want their 15 minutes of fame.
What the parent is talking about in the rest of the post is ethics. Is it ethical to report a problem of this magnitude. Who knows. I am not a philosopher. What I do know is in the free world there is freedom of the press, and if one discovers something independently, then there is a often a right to publish such finding. One can make national security arguments, but as far as i know, Rove did not leak this.
So, a company may have a process of reporting the bugs so they don't get bad publicity. Is everyone required to use this? of course not. We are a free people. Do we sometimes have to face consequences or our actions? Sure. Does the good of our actions sometimes justify the consequences? Sure.
There is probably no hero here. Society has not agreed to the rules that Cisco wants to follow. Cisco, like any fool, can sue anyone they want. I can sue someone for saying i borrow my clothes. But to establish a precedence that says a defect in product can only be released to the public through a process set up by the said company is dangerous. Remember we recently had a drug scandal in which the company use vagaries in the FDA reporting rules to hide that the drug was potentially fatal. If we take you seriously, and allow companies to control the information flow, such data would never be released, and those that were harmed by it would never get justice.
In this case, the disclosure might very well prode them a solve a problem that they were sitting on because it was not worth the money to fix. Remember the formula for corporate Amerca. The cost to fix the problems has to be less than the cost to the pay off the families harmed by the product.
I think there is a lot of oversimplification on all sides. The reality is more complex. For example, the fact that the average person both downloads and purchases music does not mean that the labels make as much as they would if downloading were not available. Of course, the labels do not have a right to profit, but they do have a right to the pursuit of happiness which is often interpreted as the same thing. OTOH, firms do need to a make a suitable profit to operate, and, as much as we whine, most of us have at least one favorite RIAA artist.
To me the real argument is the nature of entertainment. Can entertainment be packaged like a bottle of soda so that the owners are compensated everytime a person drinks that kind of soda. The production and development costs are not really an issue either. If you take a bottle of soda from the market and pay only the actual cost of the product, minus shop profit, that is still stealing. It would be my argument that entertainment cannot be packaged. I can lend my DVD of a movie. I can make a copy of music to tape. I can drive my car down the road and entertain the world with my favorite CD. So where is the happy medium?
And I think this is where the parent was going. The new reality may in fact reduce the profits of the labels, and, if not, require a reworking of the model. It is the nature of humans to want to get stuff with minimal work. It is why we have all this cool technology. So, there is no reason to say the labels are evil for wanting profits and not wanting to work. We all do that. And anything that requires them to make less money or do more work is unacceptable because that is not the desired path. Likewise, the average consumer needs to take responsibility for their desires. Yes, advertising makes us want this stuff, and it is really unfair to make us want stuff we cannot have. But if we do not attribute a fundamental right of the firms to profit, we cannot attribute a fundamental right of the consumer to have lots of stuff.
The online perspective is interesting. Combined with the reduction in fundemental differences between CPU models, it really leads to a world it which it matters less what you computer is running, and more how the computer communicates.
So, the Intel switch may not create a big advantage for Apple, and i don't think it will. But what is happening is MS is still promoting IE as the browser for the internet, but increasingly integrating it with the OS to the point that the latest browser is only going to exist on the latest OS. Therefore if developers continue to design for IE, which is easier to design for becuase IE is actually a rather specilized application front end, and only incidently a web browser, then we are all going to be forced to use windows.
And this may be where the wisdom of Apple's switch emerges. We must migrate web designers from the IE state of mind to the more open standards state of mind. This is going to require some education and experience as IE design is trivial compared to what google and the others do. One safe way to do this may be for Apple to supply machines in which designers can run Windows and Mac OS and Linux and whatever. A kind of crutch.
There a still a number of IE sites out there, and they may continue to use latest features. All these people who want to stick with 2000 or XP are going to be disappointed when the content won't run becuase everyone is designing for vista.
I am not sure how popular this is going to be. The popularity in the 80's, at least on the PC side, was due to complexity of achieving large memory size, beyond 640K, as well as the fact that everything had to fit in 64K chunks. Since one had to buy additional cards to expand past 640K, it sometimes made sense to buy a RAM disk. This was somewhat differnt on the Mac side, especially when they started coming with >1MB, where we would just partition off a bit of memory for ram disks. Even on the 512K I would sometimes take 100K for files.
But today the situation is much different. Even home machines can be upgraded to 2 GB. Most OS will try to cache recently used items in memory for as long as possible. The *nix will speed up with more memory because of fewer page swaps. I don't see how the ram disk will help that much as if you have enough RAM, everything is there anyway, and with fast HD is doesn't take that much time to get there.
It is true that for large files that one works on regularly, having them always in RAM will be good, espcialy with an automatic write through to HD. But even that is less neccesary. Computers are seldom powered completed down, and whatever you were working on yesterday, will be there today when you wake the computer up, expecially with a backup battery.
I can ru most applications quite well on 450 MHZ G4(circa 2000). In the early 90's I worked on an SGI that ran the complex GUI and various number crunching applications faster than anything I have now. Just like office application, vingtage 1995 is often more than good enough.
There is no reason why they can't deploy this technology as soon as they start manufacturing them in quantity. For most work done in offices and schools this is more than good enough. Localized versions of *nix and OO.org, or whatever, should work well given enough memory. Since much of this is or will be developed locally, and will be available to many school children, the number of people available to support these machines in the next several years should be phenomenal.
The concern that the bigwigs in the US should have is major bussiness partner is going to be running different technology, and 20% of the worlds population is going to be brought up using OSS. And this in a world where the dominant US software is opposed to compatibility, and denies the value of, OSS. If we just look at it in the microcosm, for instance the Wal*Mart supply chain interfacing with China, one wonders if any proprietary data interface can be sustained.
and certainly this will be possible on even the production hardware, but most users would likely prefer a Virtual PC-like environment for running x86 OSes/applications without rebooting.
Pretty much that is what I expect to do. I would not feel comfortable running the MS mess outside of a good sandbox that can be cheaply and easily destroyed and rebuilt. My hope is that someone will come up with such a sandbox, replacing VPC, which I did not upgrade after MS acquired it. I did enjoy the ability to run NT and Mandrake in thier own little window, and will look forward to doing so again. I specifically would hope someone other that MS would do this.
Petty much it seems the interesting thing they did was figure out a way to get information about the behavior of some folks and effeciently crunch all the data. It really isn't different than any other survallience, but it is automated.
The question I would ask is if 85% is such a good rate. I mean they key thing here is that you have a bunch of data, and you are trying to use it to reliable predict patterns. At 85% one is going to be wrong almost 2 time out of 10. combine this with the fact that nearly 6 times out of 10 one is going to be at home or work, and the average persons weekend is generally structured, is the marginal increase to 85% even significant?
It is like i always thought. MS products are for entertainment purposes only, and nothing is warranted to be of any use, or usefulness, whatsoever. Nothing is guaranteed to be defect free or suitable to the purpose for which it is advertised. Do not use the information provided for any purpose other than play time. No effort has been made to insure anything is valid.
I mean really, with all that money MS could not afford current photographs? Do we need anymore evidence that MS cannot innovate at all. They probably heard about google maps, said we got to get us one of those thingy's, and cobbled it together overnight using images locked in someone basement on cassette tape. Kudos for being able to hack together some almost working code quickly(though MS maps took about 10X as much time to load as google maps), but lose a million points for being so cheap as to buy outdated maps. Of course, MS will still figure out some way to make getting to google from vista so hard that we will have the whole netscape thing over again. Even with vastly inferior products. And don't tell me MS didn't. I was around. I coded. I saw.
They did shrink it about 20%. It is impressive that they fit a display and radio in that space. Everyone is harping on the file system, but that is code, not space. The iPod Shuffle, as well as most USB memory sticks, actually has a file system, just not used for music.
There are many annoying things about it. The dongle has been mentioned. It is USB 1.1, which makes little sense, with maximum speed of 6 Mb/s. By far the most annoying thing is that it is only rated for 8 hours playing MP3 content. I assume that it will work on non-windows devices, but it is not specified as such.
The nice thing is that it seems one can use the device to transfer and play music, none of that annoying iPod type hiding and mangling of the files. I wonder if they are going to tie this to the walmart music service and market it like the ipod. Doing so would make a lot of sense.
In the end, a 1 gb memory stick it cheaper than this toy, and the form factor of the iPod. Even the sony, though twice as big and more expensive, seem to have some advantages. And I am hesitant to buy a product from a company that cannot produce a corporate web site that does not look a it is promoted a cheap toy or art exhibit.
Anyway, dongles are so 20th century. if they were going with slow transfer, they should have gone bluetooth.
I expect the change will endanger children, particularly those in primary school. Many of these children walk to school, alone or with parents. By pushing the time up in march, one makes the walking to school time, 7-7:30, dark, particularly in the north. Instead of sunrise before 6:30, one would expect sunrise after 7:00 for the first half of the month. The same is true for the last half of october.
In the south, the situation is actually worse. Perhas the sun won't rise until after 7:30 for much of each month. Of course, the early sunset affects nothing as mosts kids are home soon after 3:00, or 4 at the latest.
It is clearly not a good thing to have children walking to school in the dark. But perhaps a few months of additional dange is worth a single hour of additional fun.
Re:apple need to bump up the entry level spec
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 1
I like the fact that apple does not play to the lowest common denominator. I appreciate that they include commodity equipment as it becomes effective, but I don't like the fact they know sacrafice reliability to meet a price point. I appriate getting a reasonable mac for 1000-1500.
So the last thing I would want them to so is put together some POS machine to satisfy the lowest common denominator whose primary purpose is to be cheap. Quality costs money. 400 thread count sheets cost more than 300 thread count.
But the thing that really frustrates me is that everyone complains that the Mac costs too much because it has too much stuff on it, and then when stuff is taken off, the complaint is that it doesn't have enough.
In the end the Mac has a market. It is not going to be the low end buy whatever piece of junk is at walmart. It is not be the corporate types who don't have competent web designers so everything is IE only. But if a family can scrap together $1000 so the kid learn office applications, programming with c, c++, objective c, Java, and web design, all within a nity IDE, all for no additional costs, then they should really think about it. If you want the kids to learn to make movies, that is a slightly more expensive machine. You know, my family came up with money for an apple many years ago, and did it when we had almost no money. It allowed me to do much more stuff, like EPROMS, than I could do on the 1980ish PC. I think it is just a matter of priorties.
Ah, this is interesting. I have been using browsers, media players, and operating systems for many years. I have never directly paid to use the former two. It was either a free download(perhaps FTP) or came with the machine. The later I have directly paid to add to a machine once in my life. It was CP/M. Otherwise it came with the machine or was an inexpensive upgrade.
What we learn from this is that utility, or operating, components are not so valuable in themselves. We buy a complete car, not a chasis, engine, and then oh, we need some way to control it.
But in the end the value of a product is not measured in resources consumed, but in what people, either the end user or advertiser or whoever, will pay to use it. Of course, if the value is not greater than the billable resources consumed, then the company will suffer, and if the value is not greater than all resources consumed, then society suffers.
MS continues to use IE as the carrot to keep people on widows. It value is soley to MS as a monopolistic tool. This is why it has been and will continue to be free, and why they are increasingly limiting the upgrade path.
This is often brought up, but it is really not a valid point. If an ISP is legit, this will not happen very often because they are not going to form the deals with spammers to provide bandwidth. Likewise, the probability is that this action will take down a server, but not the entire pipe. So, whoever is on the shared server might be affected, but if it is a commerical system, that will be taken care of with the minimum uptime.
In Houston there are a set of apartments that used to be often featured on Cops and such voyeristic shows. Whoever lived there were often inconvinced with the comming of going of drug people, anti drug people, and cops. Since the drug dealers and hookers were not the majority, it might seem reasonable for the cops to let the low income residents have some peace and not keep arresting the dealers. However, the cops were the only ones that kept the dealers in the minority, and the disturbance was the price paid for cheap rent.
Amen to that. I just completed a program meant to help me encourage kids to get into engineering. How to do that when the only thing we are building is roads, I don't know.
The good news is the Chinese still have a good deal of control over their currency. They will let it float, but not much. As long as they continue to lend us money to buy their stuff, we will be ok. Of course, the US populous is now getting pissed of they the Chinese want to buy major infrastructure in the US, but what do people expect when we refuse to pay the prices necessary to have stuff controlled here?
The main problem with this plan is that mars is not something that is going to happen in to years. It is a 10 year project, but, unfortunately, we are lead by people who are more concerned about the profits next Thursday than the accomplishments next year.
What concerns me about this is fantasy and how it relates to entertainment. I think we have violent entertainment becuase it not only satisfies a natural urge in some of us to be violent, but also societal tendencies to solve problems with violence. Likewise, the sexual is minimized because of our societal tendency not to, as a whole, be loving and caring people. Therefore, and this is really scary, the sexual is often presented in a negative or violent way, which may in fact be my only concern with this game.
What also worrying is that most teens will not have experience with real violence that can put what they see on the screen in a proper context. OTOH, most teens will have some, if limited, sexual experience that can be used to put what on the screen in context. Anyone who has had sex knows most of the sex on the screen is contrived, while most of us, even adults, can't say that about the shooting.
Certainly many kids have seen a date sort of topless, and nude pictures, but I hope most kids have not seen someone shot or shot someone.
This really sounds like the congress is trying to pretend that it has an energy conservation policy, but really does not. It is like mandating fuel effeciency for cars, but subsidizing the purchase of Hummers for personal at 40% or more.
So, lets look at reality. They say it will save 100,000 barrels of oil, and we use like 20 million. Now is that 100,000 for only those sixty days, i.e. 6 millon? This would mean that the savings for the year would be around 0.08%. Or are those sixty days going to save 600,000 barrels, or 3% each for each new day. If there is a fairy that would magically decrease oil usage by 3%, why haven't we brought it out before.
The other issue is that the longest day is in the summer, and the shortest day in the winter, while the equinoxes are in late march and september. This means the day and night are the same leangth in late March, but the day shorter in early March. DST should take advantage of the longer days. That is we can set out clock forward because it will still be light later. However, until near the end of march the day is still recovering from the winter short days. So for instance in chicago, the day is only 11 hours long. In november the issue is even worse, some places getting less than 10 hours of sun. Whatever you gain in the evening, you lose in the morning. Everyone, especially in the fall, will get to work in the dark, and work for an hour, and then can use sunlit. I will put a snide remark here about the peopell in washington not knowing this because they work 10 to 3.
This is like the oil reserves in Alaska. If they get built, in many years, they may provide a tenth of a percent more output to the world oil supply, providing almost no releif for prices, but it is still a more reasonable thing to do than tell people to turn off the damn TV when they go to sleep.
It seems that articles like this confuse the operation of MS Windows, the hardware it runs on, and the applications that run using both.
For instance, most hardware vendors will include a two button mouse. This has nothing to do with MS Windows. One can buy many types of mice and use it on many different windowing systems. However, by making the two button mouse standard, the applications, and indeed the windowing system, can utilize this standard. Whether the result is effective is debatable. What is true is a single button mouse is more effective for the new user, and those with hand problems. When Apple enforces the single button mouse, the computer is generally available to more people. One can buy a two button mouse, or a track pad, or sketch pad, or a pointer, or whatever one wishes. But Apple sells one thing.
The second isue is what is standard. IS the control key standard. Probably. I use it in X Windows. But complaining about a shortcuts keys miss the basic issue. In a GUI the first consideration should be does the GUI work. In this respect, one can argue whether menus should take advantage of habit and stay in the same place, or realize the the screen is huge and move. But if one is going to talk about shortcuts, one should remeber that it was Apple that enforced the consisant shortcuts, i.e, meta-c is always cut, and the likes of MS who pushed against that consistancy to maintain competative advantage. But really the whole thing boils down to basic confusion. The layout of the keyboard is not the OS. One can buy a Mac keyboard to use on the PC. Of course, due to silly bios issues, one still needs a XT keyboard.
So, lets stick knife in this puppy. A valid issue, that involves a discussion of complexity, number of ways to reach one command, and even the sensibility of the toolbar itself. It seems to me that one graduates from the heirchical menu system to the keyboard shortcut, and usefulness of the toolbar is in that it allows you to get to things you need, but no so often that you remember the shortcut.
The most interesting suggestions are limiting files and sorting. I like working with OO.org in x-windows because I can select by type. OTOH, most files in Mac OS I open from the desktop. If I need 10 files, I open them. It used to be you print fro the desktop to. I miss that. It could be with many thing MS Windows, the feature is a hack for some other deficiency in the system, perhaps now fixed, or a relic from the CLI days. I would say the folder was the same thing. I have never missed it.
I really do not mean to be a fanboy here. There are significant issues with Mac OS X. It still hangs. I wish it included more wireless drivers. But this article is lame because, like so many others, it does not try to understand the philosophy of different OS, and why some things needs to be different. I know that most users cannot differentiate between the layers of a computer, just like they think that IE is the internet, but if you are going to write about something, try to think a little harder before you start.
You know, in my day the university wasted money on cool things. Like roofs for buildings. Or Computers. Or, honestly, kickbacks so the athlete could get drugs and hookers. While we poor science students had to pay for our own.
But seriously, what is the point of an official music source. Did they ever have an official radio station? Or an official music store? Or an official candy bar?
Kids are going to listen to podcasts, and want the song. If they have a dollar, they might buy it off iTunes. Otherwise they will do what has always been done, which is record it off the radio or get a copy from someone else. Nobody has money, and this stuff is expensive.
And the music industry should play a soft touch with the kids. As far back as the 70's and 80's, I can assure you that Deborah Harry and madonna would not the rich chicks they are now if stupid middle school kids were yelled at for copying music. And do you think that the silly college kids bought anything from REM? Not often.
I don't know what the solution is. Everyone deserves to rich and unhappy. Everyone deserves thier cut. But a school contracting with a single service does not seem to lead to everyone getting thier cut. The selected songs will be counted, but everything else will be missed. I only use iTunes, and I only get a 25% hit rate. If the hit rate for a kid is 25% i am sure they will never check the site again. The register claims that zero songs have been bought through the napster deals.
In any case, I am glad the U went with an indie source. It will be good for the kids. I hope that they still have access to iTunes if everyone has an iPod. Although I bet that Apple would have cut a really good deal for each student to have $50 gift card.
I have done a bit of programming on mainframe, minis, and microcomputers. The big difference seems that we have gone from utilities to applications. When computer were big, one would load in the text file of data, crunch it on whatever piece of hardware was available, using calls to whatever standard routines would work, and then manipulate, reduce, and graph. Pretty much a script or Fortran code would glue a bunch of stuff together. If one was really motivated, one would package the utilities under a screen menu.
When the micro became big in the mid 80's, I began to use applications instead. Load the data into a database. Write it to a binary, that some other application could use. Let the other application crunch it. If I was luck I would have some scripting within the applications to work with, but often not between. In the end the data was in some weird binary file that I could do nothing with, other than in the application. If another application could read it, that would be great. Otherwise it was a dead end. Now some of this was caused by the GUI, but it actually started before.
It has taken me some time to get back to the utility mindset. The fact that applications will write data as XML and parser utility are widely avaiable helps.
So I would think that windows programmer would write applications directly, whereas other coders would write or otherwise cobble together utilities, which would then be gathered under a suitable GUI to complete a specific task. It is something I have seen in the MS Visual studio world. There are dependencies between objects that make no sense and are not neccesary. The widegets, and data, and controllers, and everything just get mashed together. It can lead to really weird bugs.
The last thing i wrote, I tried to start from the GUI, and couldn't make it work. So then I wrote some utilities, packaged them as objects, and pretty soon has some really neat general utilities. Now I could repackage them and write a gui to make an application, but I don't really have the time right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one reason Nintendo does so poorly is because parents give in to thier children's desire for inappropriate content or buy the console for themselve's instead of thier children.
And the enforcement of contracts are wierd, and jurisdication is even wierder. Everyone plays fast and loose with both, trying to get some advantage by manipulating the rules. It is why tort law reform tries to push cases to the Federal level, where the courts have more to do.
And you know there are some things that contrats can't be used for. I can't contract to kill someone, and as part of the contract hold the person who pays me money harmless. Even promising not to work for a year for $1000 is questionable. Would that hold up in court? Who knows. Even if was a million dollars, the court would want to know why, and if it was a neccesary condition, or merely a desired conditioned. It is like we can't give up rights without due cause. Otherwise we would have employer violating minimum wage and other worker protections much more than they do now.
But as The Register pointed out, this has nothing to do with an executive. This has to do with the greatest challenge to the MS monopoly since Netscape. Google is building platform indepedent tools performing tasks that MS would have us believe are impossible outside of IE. They are providing free consumer services that MS depended upon to further the desktop monopoly. Google is1 proving to the server market that MS is not neccesary, and too expensive. Few customers are paying for the latest prodcts. The only reason they sell all the OS they do is that one can't transfer an OS from an old machine.
So really this is nothing more than an attempt to sue a competitor to death. If MS can weaken google enough over the next couple years, then Vista can be used to apply the final death blow. If iTunes maintains even 70% of the online music market, and Google maintinas 70% of the search market, and Sony/Nintendo maintains 70% of the games market, and all MS can say is look at out pretty pictures, where are they in 10 years? Do they have the research and infrastructure to become a services company like IBM? Do they actully provide any service?
(interesting side note is that emailer is old enough to be in the dictionary, but IMer is not. One is truly old when one's verbifications are standard.)
HTML and CSS already allow us to do this to some extent. Not sure if the user has graphics? Use image tags. Not sure what size of the user's screen ? Use %width insead of fixed. Not sure if the user has good eyesight? Don't use anything that specifies and exact font or size.
The problem is that too few designers use these tools. Everyone got caught up in wanting HTML to be page markup instead of text markup. CSS kind of lets you do page markup, but should be used only for general directions, not exact placement. Given that designers often refuse to use these tools, and many refuse to design for the general user, instead opting for exact specification on IE, i fail to see how anything can be different in 10 years.
In fact, the only thing that might be different is that the standard might specificy some automation for choosing text or graphics for different devices. If your device is too far off from the standard, the same thing will happen as does in the Outlook web client. Text flows off the screen and one has a terrible time doing anything.
Most of the design standards we are supposed to apply today will be effective in 5 years, as many of the coding best practices from 20 years ago are still valid today. The problem is that we didn't follow the best practices 10 years ago(can we say MS buffer overflows), and we don't follow those practices today, what makes anyone think we will follow them in future. Just like now we will have different standards for different machines, if for no other reason that MS needs to keep it's monopoly.
What the parent is talking about in the rest of the post is ethics. Is it ethical to report a problem of this magnitude. Who knows. I am not a philosopher. What I do know is in the free world there is freedom of the press, and if one discovers something independently, then there is a often a right to publish such finding. One can make national security arguments, but as far as i know, Rove did not leak this.
So, a company may have a process of reporting the bugs so they don't get bad publicity. Is everyone required to use this? of course not. We are a free people. Do we sometimes have to face consequences or our actions? Sure. Does the good of our actions sometimes justify the consequences? Sure.
There is probably no hero here. Society has not agreed to the rules that Cisco wants to follow. Cisco, like any fool, can sue anyone they want. I can sue someone for saying i borrow my clothes. But to establish a precedence that says a defect in product can only be released to the public through a process set up by the said company is dangerous. Remember we recently had a drug scandal in which the company use vagaries in the FDA reporting rules to hide that the drug was potentially fatal. If we take you seriously, and allow companies to control the information flow, such data would never be released, and those that were harmed by it would never get justice.
In this case, the disclosure might very well prode them a solve a problem that they were sitting on because it was not worth the money to fix. Remember the formula for corporate Amerca. The cost to fix the problems has to be less than the cost to the pay off the families harmed by the product.
To me the real argument is the nature of entertainment. Can entertainment be packaged like a bottle of soda so that the owners are compensated everytime a person drinks that kind of soda. The production and development costs are not really an issue either. If you take a bottle of soda from the market and pay only the actual cost of the product, minus shop profit, that is still stealing. It would be my argument that entertainment cannot be packaged. I can lend my DVD of a movie. I can make a copy of music to tape. I can drive my car down the road and entertain the world with my favorite CD. So where is the happy medium?
And I think this is where the parent was going. The new reality may in fact reduce the profits of the labels, and, if not, require a reworking of the model. It is the nature of humans to want to get stuff with minimal work. It is why we have all this cool technology. So, there is no reason to say the labels are evil for wanting profits and not wanting to work. We all do that. And anything that requires them to make less money or do more work is unacceptable because that is not the desired path. Likewise, the average consumer needs to take responsibility for their desires. Yes, advertising makes us want this stuff, and it is really unfair to make us want stuff we cannot have. But if we do not attribute a fundamental right of the firms to profit, we cannot attribute a fundamental right of the consumer to have lots of stuff.
So, the Intel switch may not create a big advantage for Apple, and i don't think it will. But what is happening is MS is still promoting IE as the browser for the internet, but increasingly integrating it with the OS to the point that the latest browser is only going to exist on the latest OS. Therefore if developers continue to design for IE, which is easier to design for becuase IE is actually a rather specilized application front end, and only incidently a web browser, then we are all going to be forced to use windows.
And this may be where the wisdom of Apple's switch emerges. We must migrate web designers from the IE state of mind to the more open standards state of mind. This is going to require some education and experience as IE design is trivial compared to what google and the others do. One safe way to do this may be for Apple to supply machines in which designers can run Windows and Mac OS and Linux and whatever. A kind of crutch.
There a still a number of IE sites out there, and they may continue to use latest features. All these people who want to stick with 2000 or XP are going to be disappointed when the content won't run becuase everyone is designing for vista.
But today the situation is much different. Even home machines can be upgraded to 2 GB. Most OS will try to cache recently used items in memory for as long as possible. The *nix will speed up with more memory because of fewer page swaps. I don't see how the ram disk will help that much as if you have enough RAM, everything is there anyway, and with fast HD is doesn't take that much time to get there.
It is true that for large files that one works on regularly, having them always in RAM will be good, espcialy with an automatic write through to HD. But even that is less neccesary. Computers are seldom powered completed down, and whatever you were working on yesterday, will be there today when you wake the computer up, expecially with a backup battery.
There is no reason why they can't deploy this technology as soon as they start manufacturing them in quantity. For most work done in offices and schools this is more than good enough. Localized versions of *nix and OO.org, or whatever, should work well given enough memory. Since much of this is or will be developed locally, and will be available to many school children, the number of people available to support these machines in the next several years should be phenomenal.
The concern that the bigwigs in the US should have is major bussiness partner is going to be running different technology, and 20% of the worlds population is going to be brought up using OSS. And this in a world where the dominant US software is opposed to compatibility, and denies the value of, OSS. If we just look at it in the microcosm, for instance the Wal*Mart supply chain interfacing with China, one wonders if any proprietary data interface can be sustained.
Pretty much that is what I expect to do. I would not feel comfortable running the MS mess outside of a good sandbox that can be cheaply and easily destroyed and rebuilt. My hope is that someone will come up with such a sandbox, replacing VPC, which I did not upgrade after MS acquired it. I did enjoy the ability to run NT and Mandrake in thier own little window, and will look forward to doing so again. I specifically would hope someone other that MS would do this.
The question I would ask is if 85% is such a good rate. I mean they key thing here is that you have a bunch of data, and you are trying to use it to reliable predict patterns. At 85% one is going to be wrong almost 2 time out of 10. combine this with the fact that nearly 6 times out of 10 one is going to be at home or work, and the average persons weekend is generally structured, is the marginal increase to 85% even significant?
I mean really, with all that money MS could not afford current photographs? Do we need anymore evidence that MS cannot innovate at all. They probably heard about google maps, said we got to get us one of those thingy's, and cobbled it together overnight using images locked in someone basement on cassette tape. Kudos for being able to hack together some almost working code quickly(though MS maps took about 10X as much time to load as google maps), but lose a million points for being so cheap as to buy outdated maps. Of course, MS will still figure out some way to make getting to google from vista so hard that we will have the whole netscape thing over again. Even with vastly inferior products. And don't tell me MS didn't. I was around. I coded. I saw.
There are many annoying things about it. The dongle has been mentioned. It is USB 1.1, which makes little sense, with maximum speed of 6 Mb/s. By far the most annoying thing is that it is only rated for 8 hours playing MP3 content. I assume that it will work on non-windows devices, but it is not specified as such.
The nice thing is that it seems one can use the device to transfer and play music, none of that annoying iPod type hiding and mangling of the files. I wonder if they are going to tie this to the walmart music service and market it like the ipod. Doing so would make a lot of sense.
In the end, a 1 gb memory stick it cheaper than this toy, and the form factor of the iPod. Even the sony, though twice as big and more expensive, seem to have some advantages. And I am hesitant to buy a product from a company that cannot produce a corporate web site that does not look a it is promoted a cheap toy or art exhibit.
Anyway, dongles are so 20th century. if they were going with slow transfer, they should have gone bluetooth.
In the south, the situation is actually worse. Perhas the sun won't rise until after 7:30 for much of each month. Of course, the early sunset affects nothing as mosts kids are home soon after 3:00, or 4 at the latest.
It is clearly not a good thing to have children walking to school in the dark. But perhaps a few months of additional dange is worth a single hour of additional fun.
So the last thing I would want them to so is put together some POS machine to satisfy the lowest common denominator whose primary purpose is to be cheap. Quality costs money. 400 thread count sheets cost more than 300 thread count.
But the thing that really frustrates me is that everyone complains that the Mac costs too much because it has too much stuff on it, and then when stuff is taken off, the complaint is that it doesn't have enough.
In the end the Mac has a market. It is not going to be the low end buy whatever piece of junk is at walmart. It is not be the corporate types who don't have competent web designers so everything is IE only. But if a family can scrap together $1000 so the kid learn office applications, programming with c, c++, objective c, Java, and web design, all within a nity IDE, all for no additional costs, then they should really think about it. If you want the kids to learn to make movies, that is a slightly more expensive machine. You know, my family came up with money for an apple many years ago, and did it when we had almost no money. It allowed me to do much more stuff, like EPROMS, than I could do on the 1980ish PC. I think it is just a matter of priorties.
What we learn from this is that utility, or operating, components are not so valuable in themselves. We buy a complete car, not a chasis, engine, and then oh, we need some way to control it.
But in the end the value of a product is not measured in resources consumed, but in what people, either the end user or advertiser or whoever, will pay to use it. Of course, if the value is not greater than the billable resources consumed, then the company will suffer, and if the value is not greater than all resources consumed, then society suffers.
MS continues to use IE as the carrot to keep people on widows. It value is soley to MS as a monopolistic tool. This is why it has been and will continue to be free, and why they are increasingly limiting the upgrade path.
In Houston there are a set of apartments that used to be often featured on Cops and such voyeristic shows. Whoever lived there were often inconvinced with the comming of going of drug people, anti drug people, and cops. Since the drug dealers and hookers were not the majority, it might seem reasonable for the cops to let the low income residents have some peace and not keep arresting the dealers. However, the cops were the only ones that kept the dealers in the minority, and the disturbance was the price paid for cheap rent.
The good news is the Chinese still have a good deal of control over their currency. They will let it float, but not much. As long as they continue to lend us money to buy their stuff, we will be ok. Of course, the US populous is now getting pissed of they the Chinese want to buy major infrastructure in the US, but what do people expect when we refuse to pay the prices necessary to have stuff controlled here?
The main problem with this plan is that mars is not something that is going to happen in to years. It is a 10 year project, but, unfortunately, we are lead by people who are more concerned about the profits next Thursday than the accomplishments next year.
What also worrying is that most teens will not have experience with real violence that can put what they see on the screen in a proper context. OTOH, most teens will have some, if limited, sexual experience that can be used to put what on the screen in context. Anyone who has had sex knows most of the sex on the screen is contrived, while most of us, even adults, can't say that about the shooting.
Certainly many kids have seen a date sort of topless, and nude pictures, but I hope most kids have not seen someone shot or shot someone.
So, lets look at reality. They say it will save 100,000 barrels of oil, and we use like 20 million. Now is that 100,000 for only those sixty days, i.e. 6 millon? This would mean that the savings for the year would be around 0.08%. Or are those sixty days going to save 600,000 barrels, or 3% each for each new day. If there is a fairy that would magically decrease oil usage by 3%, why haven't we brought it out before.
The other issue is that the longest day is in the summer, and the shortest day in the winter, while the equinoxes are in late march and september. This means the day and night are the same leangth in late March, but the day shorter in early March. DST should take advantage of the longer days. That is we can set out clock forward because it will still be light later. However, until near the end of march the day is still recovering from the winter short days. So for instance in chicago, the day is only 11 hours long. In november the issue is even worse, some places getting less than 10 hours of sun. Whatever you gain in the evening, you lose in the morning. Everyone, especially in the fall, will get to work in the dark, and work for an hour, and then can use sunlit. I will put a snide remark here about the peopell in washington not knowing this because they work 10 to 3.
This is like the oil reserves in Alaska. If they get built, in many years, they may provide a tenth of a percent more output to the world oil supply, providing almost no releif for prices, but it is still a more reasonable thing to do than tell people to turn off the damn TV when they go to sleep.
For instance, most hardware vendors will include a two button mouse. This has nothing to do with MS Windows. One can buy many types of mice and use it on many different windowing systems. However, by making the two button mouse standard, the applications, and indeed the windowing system, can utilize this standard. Whether the result is effective is debatable. What is true is a single button mouse is more effective for the new user, and those with hand problems. When Apple enforces the single button mouse, the computer is generally available to more people. One can buy a two button mouse, or a track pad, or sketch pad, or a pointer, or whatever one wishes. But Apple sells one thing.
The second isue is what is standard. IS the control key standard. Probably. I use it in X Windows. But complaining about a shortcuts keys miss the basic issue. In a GUI the first consideration should be does the GUI work. In this respect, one can argue whether menus should take advantage of habit and stay in the same place, or realize the the screen is huge and move. But if one is going to talk about shortcuts, one should remeber that it was Apple that enforced the consisant shortcuts, i.e, meta-c is always cut, and the likes of MS who pushed against that consistancy to maintain competative advantage. But really the whole thing boils down to basic confusion. The layout of the keyboard is not the OS. One can buy a Mac keyboard to use on the PC. Of course, due to silly bios issues, one still needs a XT keyboard.
So, lets stick knife in this puppy. A valid issue, that involves a discussion of complexity, number of ways to reach one command, and even the sensibility of the toolbar itself. It seems to me that one graduates from the heirchical menu system to the keyboard shortcut, and usefulness of the toolbar is in that it allows you to get to things you need, but no so often that you remember the shortcut.
The most interesting suggestions are limiting files and sorting. I like working with OO.org in x-windows because I can select by type. OTOH, most files in Mac OS I open from the desktop. If I need 10 files, I open them. It used to be you print fro the desktop to. I miss that. It could be with many thing MS Windows, the feature is a hack for some other deficiency in the system, perhaps now fixed, or a relic from the CLI days. I would say the folder was the same thing. I have never missed it.
I really do not mean to be a fanboy here. There are significant issues with Mac OS X. It still hangs. I wish it included more wireless drivers. But this article is lame because, like so many others, it does not try to understand the philosophy of different OS, and why some things needs to be different. I know that most users cannot differentiate between the layers of a computer, just like they think that IE is the internet, but if you are going to write about something, try to think a little harder before you start.
Well, given that most of you were in diapers in 1997, i guess you probably have never seen a music video on MTV.
But seriously, what is the point of an official music source. Did they ever have an official radio station? Or an official music store? Or an official candy bar?
Kids are going to listen to podcasts, and want the song. If they have a dollar, they might buy it off iTunes. Otherwise they will do what has always been done, which is record it off the radio or get a copy from someone else. Nobody has money, and this stuff is expensive.
And the music industry should play a soft touch with the kids. As far back as the 70's and 80's, I can assure you that Deborah Harry and madonna would not the rich chicks they are now if stupid middle school kids were yelled at for copying music. And do you think that the silly college kids bought anything from REM? Not often.
I don't know what the solution is. Everyone deserves to rich and unhappy. Everyone deserves thier cut. But a school contracting with a single service does not seem to lead to everyone getting thier cut. The selected songs will be counted, but everything else will be missed. I only use iTunes, and I only get a 25% hit rate. If the hit rate for a kid is 25% i am sure they will never check the site again. The register claims that zero songs have been bought through the napster deals.
In any case, I am glad the U went with an indie source. It will be good for the kids. I hope that they still have access to iTunes if everyone has an iPod. Although I bet that Apple would have cut a really good deal for each student to have $50 gift card.
When the micro became big in the mid 80's, I began to use applications instead. Load the data into a database. Write it to a binary, that some other application could use. Let the other application crunch it. If I was luck I would have some scripting within the applications to work with, but often not between. In the end the data was in some weird binary file that I could do nothing with, other than in the application. If another application could read it, that would be great. Otherwise it was a dead end. Now some of this was caused by the GUI, but it actually started before.
It has taken me some time to get back to the utility mindset. The fact that applications will write data as XML and parser utility are widely avaiable helps.
So I would think that windows programmer would write applications directly, whereas other coders would write or otherwise cobble together utilities, which would then be gathered under a suitable GUI to complete a specific task. It is something I have seen in the MS Visual studio world. There are dependencies between objects that make no sense and are not neccesary. The widegets, and data, and controllers, and everything just get mashed together. It can lead to really weird bugs.
The last thing i wrote, I tried to start from the GUI, and couldn't make it work. So then I wrote some utilities, packaged them as objects, and pretty soon has some really neat general utilities. Now I could repackage them and write a gui to make an application, but I don't really have the time right now.
Even in the early 80's tape was what I used on my portable computer.
Of course CD and DVD is still useful for storage, but the do not seem to be as reliable as floppy, especially not as reliable as 3.5" floppy.