I'm sure it doesn't take a roomful of analysts at Google to realize that their greatest vulnerability is in web access. If MS were to embed their "next-generation" search so deeply into the UI experience of a future (Longhorn?) OS that the average consumer would become accustomed to simply using the, say, always visible MS search bar in the Sidebar for all web and desktop searches, Google would be toast. And you can bet Microsoft's roomful of analysts have come to exactly the same conclusion: the way to defeat Google is to make it hard to access Google.
So, if you're Google, are you going to sit around with your hands in your ridiculously deep pockets and let Microsoft dictate the future growth of your business? Hell no. In fact, recent comments from MS make it clear that war has been declared.
Defensive strategies are already in the works (e.g. using AdSense to "spread" their ad revenue generation so that it doesn't depend on hits to Google proper) so, how to counterattack?
Well, Google hires smart engineers and likely equally smart business strategists who know that Firefox's success is a free trial balloon -- and it hasn't popped. Google's best move is to build a browser and challenge MS on its own turf. There's a reason Google is always in need of Windows developers and its not just to work on the Google Toolbar.
Is Google building an OS? Who knows. But is Google building a browser? They better be.
Why isn't the MPAA cracking down on them instead of college kids that have nothing better to do with their bandwidth than download DiVX ripped movies?
Because:
1) The number of people who buy videos from street vendors is likely miniscule compared to the number of people who are already downloading ripped movies; and
2) The quality of videos from street vendors is notoriously unwatchable; and
3) The "college kids" that are downloading ripped movies are precisely the demographic that the movie industry depends on for generating theater revenue. If it becomes as popular as MP3 sharing, they're going to lose $, hence sue now before it becomes a major problem.
People who use Apple are different, they are willing to make sacrifices on functionality for aesthetics and lower hassle.
I guess this is where I disagree. I think most PC consumers are willing to make those exact sacrifices, but to date, the small form factor offerings like this one are just not attractive in the least bit. If Dell or another deep pocket PC maker can create an attractive PC at this size, I think it may indeed sell.
The hurdle is this: I think Apple has figured out how to create nice looking things relatively cheaply -- and that's their competitive advantage at this price point. It may not be possible for Dell to make a computer at the Apple Mac Mini's size that's attractive. IMHO, Dell DJ falls short aesthetically when compared to an iPod, and perhaps that is proof that good, inexpensive design is hard to do.
The one button makes perfect sense if you are adhere strictly to direct manipulation, and thus, think of the mouse as simply an extension of your hand: "picking" items with the mouse and "picking" actions with the mouse.
The right mouse button bringing up a menu is a complete abstraction, one that -- at the time when a mouse was a foreign input device for consumers -- Apple chose to avoid. IMHO it's more accurate to say the one button mouse made sense at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, but not anymore.
I'd rather go buy a cheapo tower that can take an ATX motherboard of my choosing...it's cheaper to deal with.
What Apple does is probably good for the people who use Apples and want a smaller, cuter LOOKING computer, but the market of people that use Apple is different than the market of people who use PCs.
Apples are the closest thing you can get to a car with the hood welded shut.
I believe your mistaken. Just because you'd rather buy a cheap tower and build your own PC doesn't mean "the market of people who use PCs" are anything like you. In fact, given that computer systems are just about commodity items, "the market of people who use PCs" are most likley people who will never, ever even open up their computer. And that's exactly why Dell is #1 and not the maker of some "cheapo tower."
Thus, a "car with the hood welded shut" (e.g. the Mac Mini) is not only attractive for Apple users, but also for most PC users.
For you and other "tinkerers" there will always be the option to build your own, but you're a rare breed. Dell isn't interested in your business, and neither is Apple.
You're missing the intangibles. According to your pricing, a prospective customer would have to ask "is a much lighter, smaller, cooler looking Mac without the headaches of Windows that includes iLife worth an extra $89?"
Apple is betting yes. And next quarter we'll see what the market said.
The problem with these compound (e.g. RSS + social networking) technologies is that it's quite a task to develop one great technology, let alone two great technologies that work seamlessly together. IMHO, Rojo is in a tough spot because their differentiator, namely RSS aggregation, is a walk in the park compared to developing a robust social network.
As the article notes at the end, Rojo's best gamble is to provide RSS services for already established social networking companies before Friendster et. al. figure out that adding friend-weighted RSS feeds really isn't that hard.
The finding shows that 44% of web searchers (ahem) use only one search engine. That's amazing in and of itself and probably brings tears of joy to the current market leaders (read: Google). It looks like it's going to take some more intense search engine advertising (a la Yahoo!'s old TV campaign) to get people to consider trying something new.
My personal interest has been in using Google to return pages related to some search query and then data mining the text on the referenced pages (my company develops a product called theConcept for OS X). For example, doing keyphrase analysis on the first 100 pages returned in the results from the Google search "linus torvalds" returns key pairs such as:
operating system linux kernel free software
And citations linked to those pairs such as:
Linus torvalds as the moving force behind the operating system that is reshaping the computing industry.
Andrew tanenbaum has been derided for his heavy hand and misjudgements of the linux kernel such a reaction to tanenbaum is unfair.
Respect for richard stallman's contributions to the free software movement and consider him the real pioneer in the field but I believe...linus who has turned that dream into the beginning of a reality by bringing...next level.
IMHO, as client-end data analysis gets more sophisticated (and increased broadband used allows for quicker web data mining), linguistical tools on the desktop can leverage the raw data on the web to do some pretty interesting things.
Really, the web is the largest corpus out there. Using Google is just a great way to get it down to a manageable size.
Ciarelli had sought legal help from groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based organization that Gross has represented in the past.
I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over.
This is really a criticism of application design and not the model per se. If the KDE applet doesn't allow you to "see each item once" then that is probably a good feature suggestion.
As the developer of an RSS ticker (Tickershock, for Mac OS X) I find that the happiest users are those who aren't interested in peering at news headlines all day, but rather enjoy the randomness of "catching a good story" every now and then.
Tickers aren't for eveyone (but neither are email-style aggregators) so if the tickers on CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/etc. drive you crazy, you're probably right to steer clear of them on your desktop.
You're right: evolution is a theory, but creationism is not because it is not derived from the scientific method. And thus, as you say, evolution and any other scientific theory explaining the origin of life should be taught. Creationism (which is an explanation that cannot be disproved by scientific method, but is only accepted on faith) cannot be taught.
I'm no lawyer : can a court order someone to reveal its sources?
Yes. That is why Judith Miller (New York Times) was fined and ordered to jail: for contempt in refusing to name sources to the federal grand jury investigating the Valeire Plame leak in October (the contempt charge is currently suspended while on appeal).
There is no true or guaranteed protection of sources where the law is concerned.
The oldest Homo Erectus fossils are estimated to be 1.5 million years old...Are human beings so close to perfect that evolution didn't have to do much in the past 1.5 million years?
If this is what you look like, then yes, you pose quite a riddle. Otherwise, I'd say evolution helped you out quite a bit. FYI, Homo Sapiens has only been wandering about for about 150,000 years.
As Jobs noted, the iPod Mini took a nice chunk out of the Flash MP3 player market and thus the Shuffle is meant to take the remainder (low end). However, if the Shuffle were to have a screen (and thus be fully functional) it would almost certainly eat into Mini sales. Thus, the lack of screen is not only a design (elegant) and engineering (fewer parts) triumph, but also a marketing coup (increase marketshare without cannabalizing sales). Impressive.
A CNN article on this subject included what I thought was a fascinating quote:
In human time, earthquakes that powerful are rare, but in the vastness of geologic time, they are commonplace. "An earthquake of this magnitude, in this part of the world, has probably occurred about a million times since the breakup of Pangea," said Chris Scotese, a geophysicist at the University of Texas-Arlington. "No exaggeration."
Too often we're bounded by thinking of events in human time scales (if not generational time scales) but a 9.0 quake is just a regular occurance in the life of the Earth. It's suppose it's events like these that reveals how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.
Sep 23, 1983 4:11 pm: me as a 14 year old getting the guts to post to Usenet -- adding to a thread on post-(nuclear)holocaust films. I remember being thrilled that someone actually responded to my post. Ah the days of being an awkward computer teen:-)
I haven't looked at the source, but given the broad description of the protocol I'm assuming each "chunk" has a GUID along with the payload. Obviously, this allows for swarming and reduced download/upload bottlenecks, but doesn't it also allow for easy corruption of the data stream?
For example, when the RIAA tried to defeat Napster by brute force, namely setting up drone/honeypot PCs with libraries of corrupted files, the method failed miserably. I would guess that by its nature, knowing what IP you were downloading an entire file from, it wouldn't be too hard to filter out known RIAA servers.
But, with BitTorrent handling the gathering of chunks from the swarm from multiple IPs, doesn't that greatly increase the likelihood of success for a similar attack?
For example, shouldn't the MPAA be able to download the source code and modify encoding so that if (Random() % 1000) a chunk flips some of the bits in the payload? Wouldn't installing this code on a farm of drones eventually "corrupt" the datastreams on BitTorrent?
Or are their safeguards in place for this kind of attack?
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. I wonder how many people will get that reference.
"But it's a peaceful basketball!"
I'm sure it doesn't take a roomful of analysts at Google to realize that their greatest vulnerability is in web access. If MS were to embed their "next-generation" search so deeply into the UI experience of a future (Longhorn?) OS that the average consumer would become accustomed to simply using the, say, always visible MS search bar in the Sidebar for all web and desktop searches, Google would be toast. And you can bet Microsoft's roomful of analysts have come to exactly the same conclusion: the way to defeat Google is to make it hard to access Google.
So, if you're Google, are you going to sit around with your hands in your ridiculously deep pockets and let Microsoft dictate the future growth of your business? Hell no. In fact, recent comments from MS make it clear that war has been declared.
Defensive strategies are already in the works (e.g. using AdSense to "spread" their ad revenue generation so that it doesn't depend on hits to Google proper) so, how to counterattack?
Well, Google hires smart engineers and likely equally smart business strategists who know that Firefox's success is a free trial balloon -- and it hasn't popped. Google's best move is to build a browser and challenge MS on its own turf. There's a reason Google is always in need of Windows developers and its not just to work on the Google Toolbar.
Is Google building an OS? Who knows. But is Google building a browser? They better be.
Why isn't the MPAA cracking down on them instead of college kids that have nothing better to do with their bandwidth than download DiVX ripped movies?
Because:
1) The number of people who buy videos from street vendors is likely miniscule compared to the number of people who are already downloading ripped movies; and
2) The quality of videos from street vendors is notoriously unwatchable; and
3) The "college kids" that are downloading ripped movies are precisely the demographic that the movie industry depends on for generating theater revenue. If it becomes as popular as MP3 sharing, they're going to lose $, hence sue now before it becomes a major problem.
People who use Apple are different, they are willing to make sacrifices on functionality for aesthetics and lower hassle.
I guess this is where I disagree. I think most PC consumers are willing to make those exact sacrifices, but to date, the small form factor offerings like this one are just not attractive in the least bit. If Dell or another deep pocket PC maker can create an attractive PC at this size, I think it may indeed sell.
The hurdle is this: I think Apple has figured out how to create nice looking things relatively cheaply -- and that's their competitive advantage at this price point. It may not be possible for Dell to make a computer at the Apple Mac Mini's size that's attractive. IMHO, Dell DJ falls short aesthetically when compared to an iPod, and perhaps that is proof that good, inexpensive design is hard to do.
The one button makes perfect sense if you are adhere strictly to direct manipulation, and thus, think of the mouse as simply an extension of your hand: "picking" items with the mouse and "picking" actions with the mouse.
The right mouse button bringing up a menu is a complete abstraction, one that -- at the time when a mouse was a foreign input device for consumers -- Apple chose to avoid. IMHO it's more accurate to say the one button mouse made sense at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, but not anymore.
I'd rather go buy a cheapo tower that can take an ATX motherboard of my choosing...it's cheaper to deal with.
What Apple does is probably good for the people who use Apples and want a smaller, cuter LOOKING computer, but the market of people that use Apple is different than the market of people who use PCs.
Apples are the closest thing you can get to a car with the hood welded shut.
I believe your mistaken. Just because you'd rather buy a cheap tower and build your own PC doesn't mean "the market of people who use PCs" are anything like you. In fact, given that computer systems are just about commodity items, "the market of people who use PCs" are most likley people who will never, ever even open up their computer. And that's exactly why Dell is #1 and not the maker of some "cheapo tower."
Thus, a "car with the hood welded shut" (e.g. the Mac Mini) is not only attractive for Apple users, but also for most PC users.
For you and other "tinkerers" there will always be the option to build your own, but you're a rare breed. Dell isn't interested in your business, and neither is Apple.
Zvpebfbsg vf pbzzvggrq gb ranoyvat rirel phfgbzre gb jbex, pbzzhavpngr, naq genafnpg ohfvarff zber frpheryl. Oruvaq gur tybony frphevgl zbovyvmngvba naabhaprq va Bpgbore 2003, jr jvyy pbagvahr gbjneq gung tbny ol jbexvat pybfryl jvgu phfgbzref, cnegaref, naq gur vaqhfgel. Jr zrnfher bhe rssbegf hfvat gur FQ?+P senzrjbex.
Given her penchant for exposure, she'll need one sewed into her underwear as well.
You're missing the intangibles. According to your pricing, a prospective customer would have to ask "is a much lighter, smaller, cooler looking Mac without the headaches of Windows that includes iLife worth an extra $89?"
Apple is betting yes. And next quarter we'll see what the market said.
The problem with these compound (e.g. RSS + social networking) technologies is that it's quite a task to develop one great technology, let alone two great technologies that work seamlessly together. IMHO, Rojo is in a tough spot because their differentiator, namely RSS aggregation, is a walk in the park compared to developing a robust social network.
As the article notes at the end, Rojo's best gamble is to provide RSS services for already established social networking companies before Friendster et. al. figure out that adding friend-weighted RSS feeds really isn't that hard.
The finding shows that 44% of web searchers (ahem) use only one search engine. That's amazing in and of itself and probably brings tears of joy to the current market leaders (read: Google). It looks like it's going to take some more intense search engine advertising (a la Yahoo!'s old TV campaign) to get people to consider trying something new.
operating system
linux kernel
free software
And citations linked to those pairs such as:
Linus torvalds as the moving force behind the operating system that is reshaping the computing industry.
Andrew tanenbaum has been derided for his heavy hand and misjudgements of the linux kernel such a reaction to tanenbaum is unfair.
Respect for richard stallman's contributions to the free software movement and consider him the real pioneer in the field but I believe...linus who has turned that dream into the beginning of a reality by bringing...next level.
IMHO, as client-end data analysis gets more sophisticated (and increased broadband used allows for quicker web data mining), linguistical tools on the desktop can leverage the raw data on the web to do some pretty interesting things.
Really, the web is the largest corpus out there. Using Google is just a great way to get it down to a manageable size.
From the Seattle Times:
Ciarelli had sought legal help from groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based organization that Gross has represented in the past.
The EFF declined to take Ciarelli's case.
Given that the EFF is defending AppleInder and PowerPage in a similar case, the question comes to mind: why not defend ThinkSecret?
Does anyone know?
- <function name="printf"><argument value="I don't think this is such a good idea.\n"/></function><semicolon/>
</function>I was constantly staring at the news feeds as they scrolled by and re-reading the same headlines over and over.
This is really a criticism of application design and not the model per se. If the KDE applet doesn't allow you to "see each item once" then that is probably a good feature suggestion.
As the developer of an RSS ticker (Tickershock, for Mac OS X) I find that the happiest users are those who aren't interested in peering at news headlines all day, but rather enjoy the randomness of "catching a good story" every now and then.
Tickers aren't for eveyone (but neither are email-style aggregators) so if the tickers on CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/etc. drive you crazy, you're probably right to steer clear of them on your desktop.
You're right: evolution is a theory, but creationism is not because it is not derived from the scientific method. And thus, as you say, evolution and any other scientific theory explaining the origin of life should be taught. Creationism (which is an explanation that cannot be disproved by scientific method, but is only accepted on faith) cannot be taught.
I'm no lawyer : can a court order someone to reveal its sources?
Yes. That is why Judith Miller (New York Times) was fined and ordered to jail: for contempt in refusing to name sources to the federal grand jury investigating the Valeire Plame leak in October (the contempt charge is currently suspended while on appeal).
There is no true or guaranteed protection of sources where the law is concerned.
...can they design an authentic robotic soccer hooligan? (powered by alcohol of course)
The oldest Homo Erectus fossils are estimated to be 1.5 million years old...Are human beings so close to perfect that evolution didn't have to do much in the past 1.5 million years?
If this is what you look like, then yes, you pose quite a riddle. Otherwise, I'd say evolution helped you out quite a bit. FYI, Homo Sapiens has only been wandering about for about 150,000 years.
As Jobs noted, the iPod Mini took a nice chunk out of the Flash MP3 player market and thus the Shuffle is meant to take the remainder (low end). However, if the Shuffle were to have a screen (and thus be fully functional) it would almost certainly eat into Mini sales. Thus, the lack of screen is not only a design (elegant) and engineering (fewer parts) triumph, but also a marketing coup (increase marketshare without cannabalizing sales). Impressive.
Here. Very nice. I wonder who'll be the first to sacrifice their own and post a full autopsy?
Appledotted.
A CNN article on this subject included what I thought was a fascinating quote:
In human time, earthquakes that powerful are rare, but in the vastness of geologic time, they are commonplace. "An earthquake of this magnitude, in this part of the world, has probably occurred about a million times since the breakup of Pangea," said Chris Scotese, a geophysicist at the University of Texas-Arlington. "No exaggeration."
Too often we're bounded by thinking of events in human time scales (if not generational time scales) but a 9.0 quake is just a regular occurance in the life of the Earth. It's suppose it's events like these that reveals how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.
Sep 23, 1983 4:11 pm: me as a 14 year old getting the guts to post to Usenet -- adding to a thread on post-(nuclear)holocaust films. I remember being thrilled that someone actually responded to my post. Ah the days of being an awkward computer teen :-)
Here's something that I've been wondering:
I haven't looked at the source, but given the broad description of the protocol I'm assuming each "chunk" has a GUID along with the payload. Obviously, this allows for swarming and reduced download/upload bottlenecks, but doesn't it also allow for easy corruption of the data stream?
For example, when the RIAA tried to defeat Napster by brute force, namely setting up drone/honeypot PCs with libraries of corrupted files, the method failed miserably. I would guess that by its nature, knowing what IP you were downloading an entire file from, it wouldn't be too hard to filter out known RIAA servers.
But, with BitTorrent handling the gathering of chunks from the swarm from multiple IPs, doesn't that greatly increase the likelihood of success for a similar attack?
For example, shouldn't the MPAA be able to download the source code and modify encoding so that if (Random() % 1000) a chunk flips some of the bits in the payload? Wouldn't installing this code on a farm of drones eventually "corrupt" the datastreams on BitTorrent?
Or are their safeguards in place for this kind of attack?