I hate to say it, but get some perspective. Star Wars is just a story. Just like so many other stories behind it. The metaphorical journey of coming of age by correcting your parents mistakes, then gaining the wisdom that realizes the mistakes were not really malevolent, and forgiving, is as old as humanity. The story of being overtaken by something bigger than you is equally old. The only thing new was the setting and special effects, which really came about by the creative application of available technology. Which is why Lucas redid the movies. They are really a tour de force of technology.
If there is a problem, it is not Lucas, but the fans who do not have the maturity, wisdom, or coping strategies to move beyond the create. And I am saying this out of deep knowledge. I came of age with Star Wars. It is part of me. I could quote and reenact the movie. i buy stuff, but I do not go out and buy everything star wars. I have moved on to other equally interesting stories, and more importantly, created my own original stories by living real life. I do not indulge in fantasy by continuously reenacting someone else's creation, even though i could.
Lucas is doing what he can. Sure I was upset when he redid Star Wars. Sure I was upset when he fucked up the sequels. But because I have more in my life than star wars, and as a creative person I understand the need to create and recreate, I am not going to waste my time bashing someone else when I could be creating myself.
If Star Wars has turned into a plastic characterture, it is the fault of the fans. It is really like any religion. One can live the values, or one can build meaning idols and monuments. Is he taking advantage of stupid people. Maybe, but so what. We can't protect everyone from everything, and we can't live our lives constantly making sure we have do nothing that might be a bad influence. We all have to make a choice of how to apply our life. For example, one can fund the creating of plastic dolls, or UNICEF.
Well, I just got my razr which is the size of an iPod mini, and it will play music, but is not expandable.
If the phone is the size of iPod, that is too big. If the phone is the size of a mini, has bluetooth, has a a gig of storage, and the battery life of Razr, then that is good. It should be possible in the near future to combine a razr and a shuffle, with two gig. Except for the screen, it could even play movies.
I think the only time MS truly innovated, and the only time it truly got it's self together, and what made it the dominate OS, was in the mid 80's when it reliazed it would lose everything if it did not 1)come out with a GUI based OS, and 2) had to have a flagship non-OS product to encourage people to use it's OS. It managed to get it's act together and pretry quickly did both. Fortunately, MS created MS Office first for mac, which meant Apple was able to somewhat flourish and continue to innovate.
OTOH, IE, Access, MS Sever, MS SQL, are hacks in comparison. There was little new technology developed, and little new added to the realm of human knowledge
The inital appeal of nearly any video game is due to it's novelty. The fact is that in many cases the game pushes the technology to the limits and allows novel things to be done. Games in particular can push technology as they do not have to be so worried about reliability.
Yes these games were mostly about about static or nearly static dots moving about a fixed or nearly fixed background. But that was an achievement. And in the case of the man, the fact that a few more cycles were squeezed out to animate the hero, made it even more interesting. It is just like the old cars. The issue is not that they were not as fast as modern cars, but they were able to built at all given the level of technology.
As the ed note said, the appeal was that the game was challenging. It was hard to win the game. And that was the object. One was not just able to go around and blow things up for 10 minutes. It was an intense competative experience.
So in 10 years when we have computers that can do real time high quality rendering, and for $50 you can scan yourself into any game, as well as your favorite girl who is not and could never be aware of your existance, and the object is to kill all the more popular kids who beat you up every day so you can make it to her house and have sex, everyone will be complaining about those old lame games.
And if I were trapped on a desert island, and i had to choose a video game, and if there were available power to let me play those games, and if I were to live long enough on the island playing games and not foraging, I would so with Tetris.
It is the average person segment. The person, or, more precisely, teenager that now spends his or her entire time at school schemeing on how to get the computer to log onto Yahoo music videos. The teen that needs the music to be part of the peer group, but does not have money to buy a CD. And remember singles are a rarity.
There is no judgement on the quality of th music. There is no imagining that the song is going to be entertaining any longer than it takes to show the other students that you have the hot new song. Who cares if the lease will expire, there will be a new song next week.
So, as long as a kid can get a player for $99, he or she will find the time to plug it into the front USB port at school, and get the requisite dose of music. And for $5 a month, you buy acceptance.
Apple has some experience in this. The newton was the tablet PC that technology would allow. It was a full powered computer, with expandability and full network connections. I remember transfering files over my ethernet. I did not have to connect my Newton to my computer, only my network.
What killed the Newton was syncronization. All the stuff I wrote on the newton was difficult to transfer to the Mac. All my contacts on the Mac was difficult to reliably syncronize to the newton. Don't tell me how to do it. I have used a newton from the day it came out until they day they kiled it. I have all the tools, cards, utilities, whatever. I still ahve 2000 sitting in it's leather case in my house.
So, as soon as palm V came out, small, sync, everything, I was all over it. It was could not be a writing machine, but I could live with that. My Newton became more trouble than it was worth.
But Apple now has sync, at least for what can fit on the.Mac drive. It does not sync macs, and I have found nothing that will do so quickly over 802.11b, but you can do calendars, contacts, mail, and good number of documents, which is has made my life so much easier.
So, this tablet PC, which will have bluetooth and airport, can do what the newton never could. Be an effective remote terminal. You can carry it around for an hour or a day, and, within a few minutes, all relevent changes can be transfered. You can take it to the coffee house, sync to.Mac, and by the time you get back home, your big machine can be updated.
Am I sorely afraid I will buy this thing. Yes. I don't really know what I would use it for, which is the rub. If it is like an iTablet, consumer priced, it would be fun to have. If it was PowerTablet, the investment would be difficult.
I did not read the article, but having lived throught it, and watch the technology develop, let me say that it is difficult to say what happened and who did what
What is true is that MS helpd mov the market from IBM and mainframes and minis to micro computers. The computers were not advanced. The CLI sucked, when compared to what one could do on a mainframe. Command completion, complex pipes, etc. MS Dos and Apple DOS and ProDOS, even CP/M, were terrible inadequate. For anything but spreadsheets and writing, my micro was a dumb terminal.
And MS was gaining market share and Apple had failed to reach the public with the Apple///. They had to do something. That something was to find the next big thing and bring it to market. Yes, Xerox did a lot of the initial work. We owe Xerox for much in technology, even beyond computers, and I think everyone knows that.
But Apple bought some of the technologies, designed a machnine, and brought it to market. And let me tell you, compared to the shit CLI before it, it was wonderful. There were still things you could not do, which previously could be done with a simple.bat or basic program, but what could be done overshadowed all of it. I was still running some stuff on remote minis using CLI.
Once Apple proved the technology, MS developed a competing technolgy over the next 5-10 years, and took over the market on commodity computers. In that time, we enjoyed a GUI honeymoon. We were in a world with computers limited by the GUI interface and binary files, and layers of technology to compensate for those limitations. MS is thriving in that enviroment, minimizing the command line, and creating random file formats. Just like they were doing in the early 80's.
And now, just like back then, Apple is in trouble. So one again it looked outside itself to find the solution, in the form of BSD. In creates a hybrid of the GUI and CLI interface so the user can choose. The big guys have always done this, just look at the old Sparc stations. They were doing 10 years ago what the Mac does now. But, once again, Apple has put it into a box that is accesible to much of the population. It is not groundbreaking, it is just that the technology has become affodable, just like 20 years ago. And in 5-10 years MS will create a similiar system that 'costs' half as much.
What world do you live in? When did we last have nature? I remember a film producer talking about how hard it was to find a setting for his movie. He needed a wide expanse of untouched plain. It was very difficult to find.
I have seen farms in South America. Long lines of power lines and road destroying the pristinene pastures. Not to mention the coal mining and brick making operations covering everything in soot.
We had a farm about an hour out of town in Texas. Again, power lines, telephone lines, roads, railroads, even large a power distribtution network about a mile away, and a good 20 miles from any large town. It was a rural area, but already stripped of it's purity. And this was long before everyone had to have a cell phone. And of course windmills everywhere because if you don't have running water windmills, if you are in the right area, is the best, most natural way, to pump water.
I would think that people who lived in rural areas would like cell towers and localized windmills so they would not have to destroy thier wonderful area with all those poles, not to mention all the trees that have to be cut down for the right of way.
Fans at tired of tried and busted plot devices. The plot device of Star Trek is the Huckleeberry-Finn-Going-down-the-river-with-a-slav e. Not the rocky-and-bullwinkly-waybac-machine, which is funny for about 4 minutes.
Also fans want the Star Trek is technology that serves and invisibly and magically work, and can be fixed in 1/10th of the time by the in house engineer, not the technology that doesn't work, but can be made magically work when the plot requires it. The later is just cheating.
It is also important to have movement and challanges. Just look at the ST movies that have worked, and those that have not. I think we were all eagerly anticipating enterprise. We just didn't know it was going to use every contraindicated plot line. Does experience teach these people anything? And even the stuff that works, use in moderation. I mean 7 of 9 did save Voyager, but that does not mean that we all women have to know be dressed in skin tight outfits. The go go dance stuff of ST:TOS was at least, somewhat, in context.
I suppose them ending with an alternate reality and bringing back actors that have no shame says it all.
I have worked for small and medium sized companies, both private and public. Private firms, to be honest, are not necessarily more short term than public. Both must make money, and with a private firm the money must be made by selling services and products now. Even if a private firm has a long term outlook, the money for developing new products must either come from the preexisting wealth of the owners or current sales. In all cases the persons who control the firm decide if the company is short or long term, either the owners or the board.
I think what is different is that public firms see the primary product as stock, which is an artifice with no intrinsic value, where private firms are more likely to see the products as a the more or less tangible goods and services provided to the customer. Therefore most effort will be put into providing and developing those goods and services, rather than just manipulating the stock price.
What we were seeing in public companies was extreme short term behavior. Firms were able to create extreme growth in stock price, without a congruent growth in sales or availability or even the tangible portfolio of goods and services. Therefore investors who were short term could profit but long term investors, like the employees who had pensions in the firm, were sure to lose everything.
The reforms, far from being a cash transfer from productive activities to accountants, were necessary to insure that long terms investors would be protected. The average investor themselves have demanded the regulations to make sure that they can be sure the companies books are honest. It is a critical development if the 401K and 403B is to continue to pump money back into R&D. It is a critical development if the Bush private accounts, no matter how inane, are to be possible.
Prior Apple products have had internal code names that were used in a semi-public way. (The Sagan/BHA saga comes to mind.)
Prior Mac OS have had these "internal" codenames printed on big letters on the box with coordinating color shemes. Jaguar, Panther. No reasonable person could imagine they would not do the same with Tiger.
Ever had a Windows Window no respond to you because a modal dialgue has popped up somewhere and that window is now obscuring it? Well, I have and Macs do not have that problem due to a much more intelligent way of handlind modal popups (it's embedded in the window that spawned it).
I stil have occasional issues with modal popups. Mostly to do with full screen video and something in the background wanting attention. It is not a major annoyance, but I do watch movies while crunching something in the background.
I do aggree that one biggie over MS Windows is text edit. It is small and full featured. No need to load MS Word or OO.org. I think the problem with MS Windows is that MS want everyone to buy MS Word, so the OS level editors are crap.
What I have seen happen over the past 10 years is this/
First, a master in computer science of some such field has been pretty easy to get, so most firms want this level of credential. This is reasonable. However, it does leave out a lot of people who have read all the right books, can code in many languages, can crank out code a very reasonable rate, and have good people skills.
Second, as has been document, age discrimination starts in the mid 30's. Anyone who is suspected of being over 30, and has not built up enough experience to be in a senior position, is not going to be hired.
Third, women are often overlooked and underpaid, at least with my anectodotal experience. There really is not reason for this as women are very analytical and tend to be as good at languages and math as anyone else.
Fourth, realted to the last two issues, most compaies want juniors to work incredible hours for somewhat low pay, as is shown in the video game industry. Since skill is not often valued, the ability to crank out the code is seen as the premium.
Really the H1B visas are bieng overused. They bring in kids from Europe to work at ski resorts. They bring in kids from Asia to work our computers. It is any wonder that the work ethic of American kids is so bad. They have no place to go. It is like, if all dictators goes to France when they are overthrown, where to French dictators go. A kid studies all his or her life, and gets a job, only to lose it as soon as the firm finds a cheaper way to do things. I see companies struggling to find non-US employees, who don't even show up for work, when qualified Americans are waiting for jobs.
I don't want to be anti anyone, but it is true. It seems that firms are purposely setting standards to exclude local labour. And it is not so bad, but who is fucking going to buy the products. Only the people who the firm imports? And how much money is leaving the country, on top of the current trade deficiet, to feed the foriegn families. I understand that firms must compete, and that they do not like to train, the hiring an indentured servent is preferable to a free agent, but a balance much be found. We can't all just stand around selling things to each other and creating pyramid schemes while the rest of the world creates all the cool stuff. I know that all firms say we try to get good people, but we can't. Yeah, just like it used to be impossible to get a good female executive or a good black accountant.
This is called "basic research." It probably won't work, and if it does, will be far beyond even a VC event horizon.
Any money for this would come from the government through the grant writing process. The number of labs who have a C-60 reactor, and have good control over it, are still reletively small. Not to mention the ability to characterize and sort.
This is not like, say, the space plane, in which most technology is 5-10 years old and all that was required was a bit of money for engineering. These are molecules that really do not yet exist in huge quanities, and putting them together is not well understood. Hell, even the theory of how they conduct electricity is younger that superconductors, and just see how many of those we have around.
Rice and NASA have a very good working relationship. Rice has some of the best people to deal this type of Nanotechnology, plus enough other funding to leverage this small amount of money into a working product.
Daleks were trotted out when ratings needed a boost. By putting on a dalek episode this early, the BBC has a made a vote of no confidence wrt the show. I would have really hoped that we would have one season of dalek free original scripts.
There were a lot dalek episodes in the first 10 or so seasons, which was fine because it was new and they allowed much development. Then they reduced the frequency in the height of the Tom Baker years, and then were made occasionally to support the weaker seasons, especially after Davidson.
Well, I never used IE as my primary browser, and my first browser was Moasiac.
However, I always have IE loaded because many organizations have chosen to be IE only, whcih means that some pages will not work at all without IE. At the very least I have to use IE to navigate to a page, then copy that URL into a better browser for future use.
SO, why are we worried about IE. Because so many organziations have a huge investment in IE as an application frontend, and even though the vast majority of the incompatibilites are in fact bugs that should be fixed, the organizations are unlikely to expend the resources to do so. Therefore we will be stuck with IE for a very long time, and, since most people will now use two browsers, it si up to MS to fix the pile fo shit they foisted upon the unsuspecting world.
You miss one point of the affinity card. To get you to go to a particular store. Instead of competing on price and service, affinity cards attempt to make a consumer visit a particular store even if the price, service, or whatever, is inferior. For many consumers it works. They will always shop at a single grocery store. Me, I always shop at one grocery store, but it is the only one without markups for non-members.
So making it easy for a consumer to be part of serveral programs is not a good thing. True they still make money off selling customer data, but the store will lose sales. Also, there is a possibility that a competitor might get free access to the customer spending patterns.
I think this was one problem MS passport. It is already too easy for consumers to compare prodcuts and switch vendors on the web. The MS solution would aggravate this, and there was really no reason for any vendor to pay for the privilage.
As you mentioned, it costs money to get a new customer. A vendor does not want to things that will allow the customer to easily move to a competitor.
You tip a average servant because that is the way the servant makes his or her money. It is codified, for example, in the US minimum wage law.
For someone like a police officer or teacher or other public servant, the tips are more complicated. I believe in the US the law is you are not supposed to tip. The base and overtime pay is all the compensation. Some may think it is not enough, but the contract and licensing forces you to formally agree.
OTOH, every coffeehouse, every corner market gives away free coffee and food. This is good because if gives the police a place to hang out, and makes the surrounding 100 feet safer, but what about the little shop down the street that does not have anything cheap to offer?
The parent post is correct. Tipping your waitstaff, especially if you are planning to return, a la Hemmingway, is good. But Police are supposed to protect equally, and it is human nature to favor those that give you free things.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done. There were major confluence of factors that made the attack succesful, one of which was it's originality. I am not talking about the theorectical existance, but the the practical implementation.
It is like taking down a plan with a protable cassete player full of explosives. Done once. Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
To be less simplistic. It seems the SOP for hijacking is to get the plane down with minimal risks to passengers. To be sure, there are things that the pilots can do to disable hijackers. These moves may have been used in the past to save planes. However, these actions also pose a significant risk to passengers. Injuring or killing a passengers might be justifiable when death is imminent, but not otherwise. Until a hijacker actually killed plane loads of passengers, the risk probably did not seem justified.
There were other factors as well. For example, the hijackers were not the typical young kids looking for a socially acceptable way to end thier lives. There were no significant defections in the ranks.
To be sure some of it was a faulty intellignece agency. This is the same intellegence that hugely overestimated the ability of USSR and encouraged a hugely wasteful buildup of WMD in the US. It seems that 20 years would show some progress, but it appears that along with the extremely useful jobs of US intellegence agencies, they are also sometimes reqToo true.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done. There were major confluence of factors that made the attack successful, one of which was it's originality. I am not talking about the theoretical existence, but the the practical implementation.
It is like taking down a plan with a portable cassette player full of explosives. Done once. Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
To be less simplistic. It seems the SOP for hijacking is to get the plane down with minimal risks to passengers. There are things that the pilots can do to disable hijackers. These moves may have been used in the past to save planes. However, these actions also pose a significant risk to passengers. Injuring or killing a passengers might be justifiable when death is imminent, but not otherwise. Until a hijacker actually killed plane loads of passengers, the risk probably did not seem justified.
There were other factors as well. For example, the hijackers were not the typical young kids looking for a socially acceptable way to end their lives. There were no significant defections in the ranks.
To be sure some of it was a faulty intelligence agency. This is the same intelligence that hugely overestimated the ability of USSR and encouraged a hugely wasteful buildup of WMD in the US. It seems that 20 years would show some progress, but it appears that along with the extremely useful jobs of US intelligence agencies, they are also sometimes required to makeup data that supports the current administrations desires.uired to makeup data that supports the current adminstrations desires.
I think what most people miss is that the devices in space craft, hell even most cars, and not general purpose computers(GPC), have no need to be GPCs, and should not be GPCs. A GPC, quite frankly, is jack of all trades. Designed to do everything adequately, nothing well, and is a single point of failure. It might be over-designed to do a few things well, but then it costs more.
An embedded machine, OTOH, is designed to do one, or a very small range of things, very well, very reliably, and very efficiently. I have had the fortune of working on two space based projects. In the first we used a single board Z80 based space hardened 'computer' to control a simple set of devices. It stored the ASM code in an EEPROM. It was more complex than we needed, as it was a standard issue unit, but much simpler than the Apple ][ we used as the GPC.
On the second project, 10 years later, we were not using incredible different machines on the satellite, though the GPC was now a Wintel machines with 100X the memory and speed. But when your main concern is that things just have to work, processor speed and OS wars have little meaning.
So these stories about how underpowered and behind the times embedded systems are just annoys me. It is just like continuous burns on SciFi shows(kudos to Babylon 5). Perhaps meaningless power is important to the ignorant masses, but we on/. are supposed to know better. I was using a tape drive until at least '87, just because It Worked.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with the interesting language contructs of today's youth. I find it interesting because english is a very versatile language, and has only been somewhat static since the printing press. See the differences between for intance, Beowolf, The canterbury tales, and Harry Potter.
In any case, one of my favorite is the new use of 'barely'. For instance, 'I barely got to work' which means not that one had a hard time getting to work, but that one in fact just arrived.
So, in this context the above is perfect. MS just now got windows to Work. If Longhorn in fact works, I will certainly agree.
The statements above are simple, neat, and so misleading as to be wrong. I do agree with your conclusions, but the argument is really weak.
OPEC wants to make a profit, but has been trying not to make the same mistakes it did in the 70's that resulted in average US fuel economy increase from around 15 to around 25 miles per gallon. Thier main purpose seems to be to ration the supplies so that current prices are not too high, and supplies last as long as possible. There is some price fixing going on, but on balance, I think they serve a useful function, and probably do much to try to keep prices stable. The US mucking around in Iraq probably has more to do with it.
Available supplies are falling, but overall output is remaining rather steady. In fact, the 2004 numbers I have seen shows an increase in output. So supplies are falling, but has anyone really counted that. True, accounting fibs showed us that there was less oil that we thought, but what commodity is truly priced on output 10 years down the road?
Demand is climbing, and china plays a big part. So do bigger houses in the US, and a fall in US fuel effeciency. The demand is not responding to increased price, this is wierd, and it is much bigger than china.
As far as building new refineries, I am sure it is more a matter of need and money than anything else. After the 70's, i believe the US was overcapcity. No refinaries were needed for many years. It appears from what I have read that maybe 10 years ago old refinaries were brought back online and upgraded. We now seem to be in a situation in which we need more capacity, and there is money availble to create it. However, due to the rules the oil industry created, rules that pretty much assumed that new capacity would not soon be needed, it is very difficult to build a new refinery.
The reality is that we are in a bizzare situation in which the normal rules of supply and demand seem to be suspended. People in the west are buying huge cars and huge houses, even if they will require huge amount of hugely expecsive fuel to run. China is lending money to the west to buy chinese products that are produced in factories that will require huge amounts of fuel to create, and, in the end, will unlikely turn a profit. It is a wacko world. It may end soon, and badly, as we are unlikely going to build more capacity, fuel costs will continue to rise, and only a major crash will bring us to out senses.
In Houston we have an ad campaign. It is called something like Houston, it's worth it. The context is Houston is a horrible place, but there are some interesting benifits.
To me one cool thing is being the first words from the moon. Houston, tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.
It is not much, but when all we have is huge mosquitoes, intolerable heat, unbreathable air, and politicians' embarrassing their adopted state with grammatically offensive utterances, one takes what one can get.
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If there is a problem, it is not Lucas, but the fans who do not have the maturity, wisdom, or coping strategies to move beyond the create. And I am saying this out of deep knowledge. I came of age with Star Wars. It is part of me. I could quote and reenact the movie. i buy stuff, but I do not go out and buy everything star wars. I have moved on to other equally interesting stories, and more importantly, created my own original stories by living real life. I do not indulge in fantasy by continuously reenacting someone else's creation, even though i could.
Lucas is doing what he can. Sure I was upset when he redid Star Wars. Sure I was upset when he fucked up the sequels. But because I have more in my life than star wars, and as a creative person I understand the need to create and recreate, I am not going to waste my time bashing someone else when I could be creating myself.
If Star Wars has turned into a plastic characterture, it is the fault of the fans. It is really like any religion. One can live the values, or one can build meaning idols and monuments. Is he taking advantage of stupid people. Maybe, but so what. We can't protect everyone from everything, and we can't live our lives constantly making sure we have do nothing that might be a bad influence. We all have to make a choice of how to apply our life. For example, one can fund the creating of plastic dolls, or UNICEF.
If the phone is the size of iPod, that is too big. If the phone is the size of a mini, has bluetooth, has a a gig of storage, and the battery life of Razr, then that is good. It should be possible in the near future to combine a razr and a shuffle, with two gig. Except for the screen, it could even play movies.
I still miss the simplicity of the startac.
OTOH, IE, Access, MS Sever, MS SQL, are hacks in comparison. There was little new technology developed, and little new added to the realm of human knowledge
Yes these games were mostly about about static or nearly static dots moving about a fixed or nearly fixed background. But that was an achievement. And in the case of the man, the fact that a few more cycles were squeezed out to animate the hero, made it even more interesting. It is just like the old cars. The issue is not that they were not as fast as modern cars, but they were able to built at all given the level of technology.
As the ed note said, the appeal was that the game was challenging. It was hard to win the game. And that was the object. One was not just able to go around and blow things up for 10 minutes. It was an intense competative experience.
So in 10 years when we have computers that can do real time high quality rendering, and for $50 you can scan yourself into any game, as well as your favorite girl who is not and could never be aware of your existance, and the object is to kill all the more popular kids who beat you up every day so you can make it to her house and have sex, everyone will be complaining about those old lame games.
And if I were trapped on a desert island, and i had to choose a video game, and if there were available power to let me play those games, and if I were to live long enough on the island playing games and not foraging, I would so with Tetris.
There is no judgement on the quality of th music. There is no imagining that the song is going to be entertaining any longer than it takes to show the other students that you have the hot new song. Who cares if the lease will expire, there will be a new song next week.
So, as long as a kid can get a player for $99, he or she will find the time to plug it into the front USB port at school, and get the requisite dose of music. And for $5 a month, you buy acceptance.
What killed the Newton was syncronization. All the stuff I wrote on the newton was difficult to transfer to the Mac. All my contacts on the Mac was difficult to reliably syncronize to the newton. Don't tell me how to do it. I have used a newton from the day it came out until they day they kiled it. I have all the tools, cards, utilities, whatever. I still ahve 2000 sitting in it's leather case in my house.
So, as soon as palm V came out, small, sync, everything, I was all over it. It was could not be a writing machine, but I could live with that. My Newton became more trouble than it was worth.
But Apple now has sync, at least for what can fit on the .Mac drive. It does not sync macs, and I have found nothing that will do so quickly over 802.11b, but you can do calendars, contacts, mail, and good number of documents, which is has made my life so much easier.
So, this tablet PC, which will have bluetooth and airport, can do what the newton never could. Be an effective remote terminal. You can carry it around for an hour or a day, and, within a few minutes, all relevent changes can be transfered. You can take it to the coffee house, sync to .Mac, and by the time you get back home, your big machine can be updated.
Am I sorely afraid I will buy this thing. Yes. I don't really know what I would use it for, which is the rub. If it is like an iTablet, consumer priced, it would be fun to have. If it was PowerTablet, the investment would be difficult.
Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.
Next thing you know they will have a mauve screen of death.
What is true is that MS helpd mov the market from IBM and mainframes and minis to micro computers. The computers were not advanced. The CLI sucked, when compared to what one could do on a mainframe. Command completion, complex pipes, etc. MS Dos and Apple DOS and ProDOS, even CP/M, were terrible inadequate. For anything but spreadsheets and writing, my micro was a dumb terminal.
And MS was gaining market share and Apple had failed to reach the public with the Apple ///. They had to do something. That something was to find the next big thing and bring it to market. Yes, Xerox did a lot of the initial work. We owe Xerox for much in technology, even beyond computers, and I think everyone knows that.
But Apple bought some of the technologies, designed a machnine, and brought it to market. And let me tell you, compared to the shit CLI before it, it was wonderful. There were still things you could not do, which previously could be done with a simple .bat or basic program, but what could be done overshadowed all of it. I was still running some stuff on remote minis using CLI.
Once Apple proved the technology, MS developed a competing technolgy over the next 5-10 years, and took over the market on commodity computers. In that time, we enjoyed a GUI honeymoon. We were in a world with computers limited by the GUI interface and binary files, and layers of technology to compensate for those limitations. MS is thriving in that enviroment, minimizing the command line, and creating random file formats. Just like they were doing in the early 80's.
And now, just like back then, Apple is in trouble. So one again it looked outside itself to find the solution, in the form of BSD. In creates a hybrid of the GUI and CLI interface so the user can choose. The big guys have always done this, just look at the old Sparc stations. They were doing 10 years ago what the Mac does now. But, once again, Apple has put it into a box that is accesible to much of the population. It is not groundbreaking, it is just that the technology has become affodable, just like 20 years ago. And in 5-10 years MS will create a similiar system that 'costs' half as much.
I have seen farms in South America. Long lines of power lines and road destroying the pristinene pastures. Not to mention the coal mining and brick making operations covering everything in soot.
We had a farm about an hour out of town in Texas. Again, power lines, telephone lines, roads, railroads, even large a power distribtution network about a mile away, and a good 20 miles from any large town. It was a rural area, but already stripped of it's purity. And this was long before everyone had to have a cell phone. And of course windmills everywhere because if you don't have running water windmills, if you are in the right area, is the best, most natural way, to pump water.
I would think that people who lived in rural areas would like cell towers and localized windmills so they would not have to destroy thier wonderful area with all those poles, not to mention all the trees that have to be cut down for the right of way.
Also fans want the Star Trek is technology that serves and invisibly and magically work, and can be fixed in 1/10th of the time by the in house engineer, not the technology that doesn't work, but can be made magically work when the plot requires it. The later is just cheating.
It is also important to have movement and challanges. Just look at the ST movies that have worked, and those that have not. I think we were all eagerly anticipating enterprise. We just didn't know it was going to use every contraindicated plot line. Does experience teach these people anything? And even the stuff that works, use in moderation. I mean 7 of 9 did save Voyager, but that does not mean that we all women have to know be dressed in skin tight outfits. The go go dance stuff of ST:TOS was at least, somewhat, in context.
I suppose them ending with an alternate reality and bringing back actors that have no shame says it all.
I think what is different is that public firms see the primary product as stock, which is an artifice with no intrinsic value, where private firms are more likely to see the products as a the more or less tangible goods and services provided to the customer. Therefore most effort will be put into providing and developing those goods and services, rather than just manipulating the stock price.
What we were seeing in public companies was extreme short term behavior. Firms were able to create extreme growth in stock price, without a congruent growth in sales or availability or even the tangible portfolio of goods and services. Therefore investors who were short term could profit but long term investors, like the employees who had pensions in the firm, were sure to lose everything.
The reforms, far from being a cash transfer from productive activities to accountants, were necessary to insure that long terms investors would be protected. The average investor themselves have demanded the regulations to make sure that they can be sure the companies books are honest. It is a critical development if the 401K and 403B is to continue to pump money back into R&D. It is a critical development if the Bush private accounts, no matter how inane, are to be possible.
Prior Mac OS have had these "internal" codenames printed on big letters on the box with coordinating color shemes. Jaguar, Panther. No reasonable person could imagine they would not do the same with Tiger.
I stil have occasional issues with modal popups. Mostly to do with full screen video and something in the background wanting attention. It is not a major annoyance, but I do watch movies while crunching something in the background.
I do aggree that one biggie over MS Windows is text edit. It is small and full featured. No need to load MS Word or OO.org. I think the problem with MS Windows is that MS want everyone to buy MS Word, so the OS level editors are crap.
First, a master in computer science of some such field has been pretty easy to get, so most firms want this level of credential. This is reasonable. However, it does leave out a lot of people who have read all the right books, can code in many languages, can crank out code a very reasonable rate, and have good people skills.
Second, as has been document, age discrimination starts in the mid 30's. Anyone who is suspected of being over 30, and has not built up enough experience to be in a senior position, is not going to be hired.
Third, women are often overlooked and underpaid, at least with my anectodotal experience. There really is not reason for this as women are very analytical and tend to be as good at languages and math as anyone else.
Fourth, realted to the last two issues, most compaies want juniors to work incredible hours for somewhat low pay, as is shown in the video game industry. Since skill is not often valued, the ability to crank out the code is seen as the premium.
Really the H1B visas are bieng overused. They bring in kids from Europe to work at ski resorts. They bring in kids from Asia to work our computers. It is any wonder that the work ethic of American kids is so bad. They have no place to go. It is like, if all dictators goes to France when they are overthrown, where to French dictators go. A kid studies all his or her life, and gets a job, only to lose it as soon as the firm finds a cheaper way to do things. I see companies struggling to find non-US employees, who don't even show up for work, when qualified Americans are waiting for jobs.
I don't want to be anti anyone, but it is true. It seems that firms are purposely setting standards to exclude local labour. And it is not so bad, but who is fucking going to buy the products. Only the people who the firm imports? And how much money is leaving the country, on top of the current trade deficiet, to feed the foriegn families. I understand that firms must compete, and that they do not like to train, the hiring an indentured servent is preferable to a free agent, but a balance much be found. We can't all just stand around selling things to each other and creating pyramid schemes while the rest of the world creates all the cool stuff. I know that all firms say we try to get good people, but we can't. Yeah, just like it used to be impossible to get a good female executive or a good black accountant.
Any money for this would come from the government through the grant writing process. The number of labs who have a C-60 reactor, and have good control over it, are still reletively small. Not to mention the ability to characterize and sort.
This is not like, say, the space plane, in which most technology is 5-10 years old and all that was required was a bit of money for engineering. These are molecules that really do not yet exist in huge quanities, and putting them together is not well understood. Hell, even the theory of how they conduct electricity is younger that superconductors, and just see how many of those we have around.
Rice and NASA have a very good working relationship. Rice has some of the best people to deal this type of Nanotechnology, plus enough other funding to leverage this small amount of money into a working product.
There were a lot dalek episodes in the first 10 or so seasons, which was fine because it was new and they allowed much development. Then they reduced the frequency in the height of the Tom Baker years, and then were made occasionally to support the weaker seasons, especially after Davidson.
However, I always have IE loaded because many organizations have chosen to be IE only, whcih means that some pages will not work at all without IE. At the very least I have to use IE to navigate to a page, then copy that URL into a better browser for future use.
SO, why are we worried about IE. Because so many organziations have a huge investment in IE as an application frontend, and even though the vast majority of the incompatibilites are in fact bugs that should be fixed, the organizations are unlikely to expend the resources to do so. Therefore we will be stuck with IE for a very long time, and, since most people will now use two browsers, it si up to MS to fix the pile fo shit they foisted upon the unsuspecting world.
So making it easy for a consumer to be part of serveral programs is not a good thing. True they still make money off selling customer data, but the store will lose sales. Also, there is a possibility that a competitor might get free access to the customer spending patterns.
I think this was one problem MS passport. It is already too easy for consumers to compare prodcuts and switch vendors on the web. The MS solution would aggravate this, and there was really no reason for any vendor to pay for the privilage.
As you mentioned, it costs money to get a new customer. A vendor does not want to things that will allow the customer to easily move to a competitor.
For someone like a police officer or teacher or other public servant, the tips are more complicated. I believe in the US the law is you are not supposed to tip. The base and overtime pay is all the compensation. Some may think it is not enough, but the contract and licensing forces you to formally agree.
OTOH, every coffeehouse, every corner market gives away free coffee and food. This is good because if gives the police a place to hang out, and makes the surrounding 100 feet safer, but what about the little shop down the street that does not have anything cheap to offer?
The parent post is correct. Tipping your waitstaff, especially if you are planning to return, a la Hemmingway, is good. But Police are supposed to protect equally, and it is human nature to favor those that give you free things.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done. There were major confluence of factors that made the attack succesful, one of which was it's originality. I am not talking about the theorectical existance, but the the practical implementation.
It is like taking down a plan with a protable cassete player full of explosives. Done once. Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
To be less simplistic. It seems the SOP for hijacking is to get the plane down with minimal risks to passengers. To be sure, there are things that the pilots can do to disable hijackers. These moves may have been used in the past to save planes. However, these actions also pose a significant risk to passengers. Injuring or killing a passengers might be justifiable when death is imminent, but not otherwise. Until a hijacker actually killed plane loads of passengers, the risk probably did not seem justified.
There were other factors as well. For example, the hijackers were not the typical young kids looking for a socially acceptable way to end thier lives. There were no significant defections in the ranks.
To be sure some of it was a faulty intellignece agency. This is the same intellegence that hugely overestimated the ability of USSR and encouraged a hugely wasteful buildup of WMD in the US. It seems that 20 years would show some progress, but it appears that along with the extremely useful jobs of US intellegence agencies, they are also sometimes reqToo true.
The reason it worked is because no one imagined it could or would be done. There were major confluence of factors that made the attack successful, one of which was it's originality. I am not talking about the theoretical existence, but the the practical implementation.
It is like taking down a plan with a portable cassette player full of explosives. Done once. Likewise, now that we have a practical example of an airplane as a instrument of death, it is not going to be so easy to subdue passengers who know death is imminent in either case.
To be less simplistic. It seems the SOP for hijacking is to get the plane down with minimal risks to passengers. There are things that the pilots can do to disable hijackers. These moves may have been used in the past to save planes. However, these actions also pose a significant risk to passengers. Injuring or killing a passengers might be justifiable when death is imminent, but not otherwise. Until a hijacker actually killed plane loads of passengers, the risk probably did not seem justified.
There were other factors as well. For example, the hijackers were not the typical young kids looking for a socially acceptable way to end their lives. There were no significant defections in the ranks.
To be sure some of it was a faulty intelligence agency. This is the same intelligence that hugely overestimated the ability of USSR and encouraged a hugely wasteful buildup of WMD in the US. It seems that 20 years would show some progress, but it appears that along with the extremely useful jobs of US intelligence agencies, they are also sometimes required to makeup data that supports the current administrations desires.uired to makeup data that supports the current adminstrations desires.
An embedded machine, OTOH, is designed to do one, or a very small range of things, very well, very reliably, and very efficiently. I have had the fortune of working on two space based projects. In the first we used a single board Z80 based space hardened 'computer' to control a simple set of devices. It stored the ASM code in an EEPROM. It was more complex than we needed, as it was a standard issue unit, but much simpler than the Apple ][ we used as the GPC.
On the second project, 10 years later, we were not using incredible different machines on the satellite, though the GPC was now a Wintel machines with 100X the memory and speed. But when your main concern is that things just have to work, processor speed and OS wars have little meaning.
So these stories about how underpowered and behind the times embedded systems are just annoys me. It is just like continuous burns on SciFi shows(kudos to Babylon 5). Perhaps meaningless power is important to the ignorant masses, but we on /. are supposed to know better. I was using a tape drive until at least '87, just because It Worked.
One wonders if this article might not be better published in the JIR, a journal dedicated to those finding that cannot, or should not, be reproduced.
In any case, one of my favorite is the new use of 'barely'. For instance, 'I barely got to work' which means not that one had a hard time getting to work, but that one in fact just arrived.
So, in this context the above is perfect. MS just now got windows to Work. If Longhorn in fact works, I will certainly agree.
The statements above are simple, neat, and so misleading as to be wrong. I do agree with your conclusions, but the argument is really weak.
OPEC wants to make a profit, but has been trying not to make the same mistakes it did in the 70's that resulted in average US fuel economy increase from around 15 to around 25 miles per gallon. Thier main purpose seems to be to ration the supplies so that current prices are not too high, and supplies last as long as possible. There is some price fixing going on, but on balance, I think they serve a useful function, and probably do much to try to keep prices stable. The US mucking around in Iraq probably has more to do with it.
Available supplies are falling, but overall output is remaining rather steady. In fact, the 2004 numbers I have seen shows an increase in output. So supplies are falling, but has anyone really counted that. True, accounting fibs showed us that there was less oil that we thought, but what commodity is truly priced on output 10 years down the road?
Demand is climbing, and china plays a big part. So do bigger houses in the US, and a fall in US fuel effeciency. The demand is not responding to increased price, this is wierd, and it is much bigger than china.
As far as building new refineries, I am sure it is more a matter of need and money than anything else. After the 70's, i believe the US was overcapcity. No refinaries were needed for many years. It appears from what I have read that maybe 10 years ago old refinaries were brought back online and upgraded. We now seem to be in a situation in which we need more capacity, and there is money availble to create it. However, due to the rules the oil industry created, rules that pretty much assumed that new capacity would not soon be needed, it is very difficult to build a new refinery.
The reality is that we are in a bizzare situation in which the normal rules of supply and demand seem to be suspended. People in the west are buying huge cars and huge houses, even if they will require huge amount of hugely expecsive fuel to run. China is lending money to the west to buy chinese products that are produced in factories that will require huge amounts of fuel to create, and, in the end, will unlikely turn a profit. It is a wacko world. It may end soon, and badly, as we are unlikely going to build more capacity, fuel costs will continue to rise, and only a major crash will bring us to out senses.
To me one cool thing is being the first words from the moon. Houston, tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.
It is not much, but when all we have is huge mosquitoes, intolerable heat, unbreathable air, and politicians' embarrassing their adopted state with grammatically offensive utterances, one takes what one can get.