Although I am quite skilled myself in repairing/restoring older cars, I am more than happy to pay the higher costs after taking a look under the hood of a modern car. My Studebaker is fast and fun, but it has none of the electronics of the new cars and one can almost tear the entire thing down and rebuild it without having to consult a technical manual.
The downside of course is that it is an older car and has none of the safety gear that modern cars have. I once lost a wheel racing (and winning) a 930 turbo (when I was younger and more impetuous) as there were no safety devices that would retain it when the axle broke. You can imagine the fear that sets in at 110MPH or so when you suddenly find yourself running along with a presumably four wheel car that now happens to have only three.
As an aside, you might be surprised at how much an "automotive technician" who knows their stuff can make. The folks down at the Mercedes Benz dealer can truly clean up with six figure salaries. And judging from the last routine service bill on my mom's S-class, there may be more than one tech making that kind of salary there.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead? I would love a 700mhz Powerbook for $600 or so (no thanks, refurbed units).
The answer is simple really. Apple would like to maintain their products as objects of desire. Sexy bits of computer art that both inspire lust and allow us to accomplish our work easier and/or faster than ever before, making a difference. To lower the prices would reduce Apple computers to commodity items much like the rest of the Wintel world.
How many Dell, HP, Compaq, graybox etc.... hardware rollouts are greeted with the same kind of fervor that Apple computer hardware announcements inspire?
From the article: Pelling agrees, and says that he and Gimzewski are doing tests to rule out the possibility that other molecules in the fluid bathing the cells, or even the tip of the microscope itself, are generating vibrations that their probe picks up.
Even if this is the case, because of a cells small molecular fingerprint or components tend to dictate what role a cell plays or what the status of a cell is on a more discrete time basis that say gene expression, one would wonder if this is not also an identifier of status or identity as well. For more detail on cytosomics or metabolomics, see this site.
The software then looks for useful features, such as the corners of windows and doors, and extracts the colours and intensities of the pixels around them. Next, it searches the image database for matching data, using the base station the cellphone's signal came from as a guide. Finally, it uses the differences between the two images to calculate the photographer's position.
To me, it would appear that an easier solution might be to use GIS data in combination with the cell phone signal and comparisons of rough morphological features of buildings. The instructions should simply be: Point your camera at a building near you so that you can approximate its outline and then send that image. This would scale much larger than the methods referenced in the article as you would not have to store every detail of the buildings surrounding you including pixel maps of textures and color. This approach could be handled for a large city by a few commodity servers whereas the other approach would require significantly more computational resources.
Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC? I don't really need directions to find my way around Cambridge city center as you could almost throw a rock from the center and hit just about every building around, but London, Washington, Houston etc... are another story and the data required from their approach would require massive computational infrastructure.
Hmmmm. This sounds like the fluorocarbons that we used to bathe the insides of Cray supercomputers with. They were pretty cool with little windows that one could look in and see "waterfalls" of fluorocarbon flowing over the circuitboards and components to keep them cool.
Of course we had to have an entire floor below us dedicated to refrigeration, but hey. Governments can afford this kind of stuff.
So, lemme ask: Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time? No. You pay for a specific service with your phone line and you don't want to have to be interrupted with ads when you are talking with family, friends or business partners. If this lawsuit is accepted, then one would not have any protection to prevent ads from appearing during your phone calls. As a resident of Utah, I am not usually happy with all of the legislation that occurs up on capitol hill here, but this is one bit of legislation that I fully support.
From the suit: "private enforcers, motivated by the act's draconian penalties and the promise of attorneys' fees, may still seek to sue WhenU for allegedly violating the act."
Well, yeah. That is just the point folks. I don't want spyware on my system. (one of the many reasons I use a Macintosh)
Thus, the act presents WhenU with the impossible choice of either foregoing constitutionally protected advertising and spending significant sums to comply with the act (thereby reducing the effectiveness of its business), without any guaranty that it will avoid liability in doing so, or else being subjected to millions of dollars of claims by private litigants."
No, actually. It is quite simple: Go out of business. Your business model is corrupt and unwanted by both consumers and legitimate businesses. We don't want you here and you can't force yourself on consumers that do not want you. That is the point of the law, the people have spoken and the legislators have listened and responded. And NO.....you don't have a constitutionally mandated right to invade my privacy. That is what it really comes down to.
I should amend this to say what I intended to say: Specifically that political perspectives are not going to be difficult to get and they will try and cloud the issues with agenda, but contact someone (like Robert Reich) who can put you in touch with folks inside and outside of politics.
A documentary is important and I would fully support one being created (Disclaimer: my first major in college was documentary film), but perhaps more importantly, that documentary would be made much stronger if it would include some hard numbers and studies including rigorous statistics on just how offshoring is helping (or hurting) the 1) corporation, 2) worker, 3) consumer. Perhaps not just the viewpoint in the US as an interesting perspective could be made from the person getting the job.
So, here is the deal: Documentaries are often about perspective but ideally, they are about finding the truth and revealing that truth to your viewer. Political perspectives are going to be difficult to get, but contact someone like Robert Reich who could place you in touch with a variety of folks in and out of the political scene.
bob@RobertReich.org Robert Reich
P.O. Box 381483 Cambridge, MA 02238 (617) 547-2206 Fax: (617) 498-0048
I might remind everybody that this is exactly how Compaq made a name for themselves by reverse engineering the IBM PC, thus creating the Wintel based PC industry.
"Hey Bubba, I know what let's do! Lets go throw sh*t at the moon and see if we can make craters. Yeah, that's cool Zeek. heh, heh, heh."
Seriously though, where is the science in this? They claim to want to take pictures, but they are pictures of the near side of the moon, of which we have plenty. And, unless you wanted to bury your cremains on the surface of the moon, this is the same kind of thing you find when you go hiking in the desert or mountains and find cans and things that people have shot at and left to rust or names carved into trees or rocks saying "Steve was here".
I am usually a strong supporter of science related work and space exploration, but this seems.....well?......What's the point?
Condition of the cargo cannot be guaranteed after the 4,000 mph impact, Orbital Development explains, although the cargo is contained within a special burst-resistant canister.
P.S., what is the point of using a "burst resistant container" if you are going to be aiming your "object" for a 4000 MPH impact with the moon? I am currently unaware of any container system weighing more than.00001 grams or so that is capable of withstanding an impact of that speed. Marketing gone awry.
Jeez have you moderators and commenters all lost your minds or do you simply not know what the parent poster is talking about? How do you think full resolution DV is rendered down for editing and distribution? The question in the story post was Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime,, and that is exactly what Pixlet was designed to address. In fact, the referenced article is talking exactly about compression to deliver 3D and video on devices other than computers like cell phones and other devices needing small footprints.
Think before you mod or reply and read the articles.
Yes lets take unemployed people and put them to work manually getting to know the interworkings of the IRS and its databases. They sure wouldn't be tempted to abuse their position would they?
You might be shocked to find out how many low wage earners have access to medical (HMO's and insurance companies), credit (mortage and credit lending agencies) and yes, tax information (federal and private contractors) on you already. There are systems in place to protect privacy at many companies and organizations that deal with this sort of data, but there are always folks that will abuse the system. The solution is to make punishments for identity theft crimes very severe.
CIO Magazine is running a story on the IRS's nearly failed $8 billion modernization attempt that includes missed deadlines, cost overruns of over $200 million and four CIO's in seven years."
Ummmm......If this project was my responsibility, as CTO I believe I would have canned the whole project and started anew as from the sounds of it, there is too much baggage with which to continue. So, here we go: Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project so that nobody gets paid unless key points in the strategy are reached.
A simple strategy might be to run and fund the project entirely within the IRS structure and take the following strategy:
While the linked article is short on what exactly is going wrong with the transfer, I was talking with a guy working on the project in an airport last year. According to him, one of the big problems the IRS is facing is that everybody is talking about incompatible data formats and getting data to migrate from one database to another while maintaining taxpayer information. This may be a little glib, but perhaps we could take a more direct approach to updating the data file structures like deciding upon a data format a priori and simply, through brute force, repopulating the new database with the old data? We could create a few thousand temporary (2-3 year) jobs for those folks on welfare or currently out of work and using redundant strategies for error correction, manually enter the data into the new formats.
PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003.
Well, there is a reason you still see COBOL jobs being posted from time to time. The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented and to quote an oft used phrase: "if it aint broke, don't fix it".
Of course they have made some improvements over the years, but these things are going to have a mighty impressive return on investment over the course of their lifetimes. Much more so than your average desktop PC which (if your running Windows) needs (is required) to be replaced every couple of years or so.
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real. Therefore, I would not say this is a gimmick, but that it would enforce the idea to those who may not think as much in their daily lives the issues of privacy and information customization and product dissemination to consumers.
Hmmmm. This sounds much like an extension of MATRIX, only we are not examining only criminals per se, but we are now examining everyone with the assumption that they are cheating on their taxes. Of course if you are cheating you are a criminal, but this again establishes a loss of privacy and presumes that your information is available to search without a court order. I wonder if the same company behind MATRIX, Seisint is the company behind or involved with this new initiative?
Actually, what I have been looking for is a PDA that would be a hybrid of small laptop and PDA kind of like the old Newtons that would allow me to have a built in wireless communication that would work with all phone/Internet networks across the world (likely with a hybrid of TCP/IP, VOIP and GSM) and a Bluetooth headset, leveraging something simple like iChat for calls with a built in calendar and address book. I am sick of having to purchase multiple phones for travel to different countries or swapping out SIM cards and then having yet still to type in all the access codes for various networks to make a simple phone call to someone. This hypothetical PDA should also be able to plug into projectors so I can give Keynote (or Powerpoint) presentations at meetings and invited talks, function as a basic word processor, note taker and sketch pad, have good battery life (8 real hours) and have a hard drive to be able to play DVDs and music on the airplane without the CD or DVD media.
I suppose the ruggedized PDA referenced in the article is expandable for wireless networks, but it really should have built in 802.11x and Bluetooth and appears to be a sort of ruggedized iPaq. I expect it will not be a big seller and the big purchasers of this device in the article will be those folks in the GPS and GIS fields who need this sort of device, but for approx $1600 US, I would expect built in GPS as well.
Re:The REAL security problem in '04
on
Gates on Winsecurity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Apple computers are created for, and solely used by people who know, and want to know nothing about computers, the "proudly ignorants".
Ah, but they are also used by the most advanced computer users out there. Those that use them for a variety of fields in science from quantum chemistry to astrophysics, medicine and computer science. Pretty impressive that.
This is a dangerous mindset to encourage. Their computers are set up to do everything for you, to treat the user with a kind of benevolent contempt.
What is a dangerous mindset? Allowing people to be connected? Allowing them access to information? What are you going to say next......That people should not be able to vote for whom they want?
As to doing things for you, yeah, when I want to plug in a hard drive, it is automatically mounted and I don't have to type in the CLI two or three lines of commands to get it mounted and shared. There are many other examples of this and why you perceive this as benevolent contempt completely escapes me.
Some recent pricing of upgrades illustrates the kind of attitude Apple has to its customers.
This leap of logic is confusing. And what recent pricing are you referring to? Can they not expect to make a profit on their investment? Be thankful Microsoft has some minor competition, or else you might be paying more than you might think.
The email mentions that fast-spreading and destructive viruses and worms are 'threatening the potential of technology to advance business productivity, commerce and communication',
I don't know about that.......seeing as how I use OS X, I have yet to experience downtime or hassles due to viruses or worms. Of course there are problems with an increased number of emails from Windows machines containing worms and such, but they are simply filtered out via the spam filter. So this statement from Gates only really applies unless you are using something other than OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, BSD, etc....:-)
Earlier this week Gates said Longhorn is 'not a date-driven release.' and said the speculation that the operating system will come out in 2006 is 'probably valid.'"
Windows is Microsoft's cash cow and from an investor perspective, there may be push from the shareholders.I have sold off most of my Microsoft stock on principle after watching their abuse of the PC market for the last few years, but I still own some and this is not encouraging.
"According to The Register Sun Microsystems & Microsoft have reached a settlement in their 10 year old lawsuit. Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property."
Whoa......Apple got ripped off with the $150 Million settlement with their suit against Microsoft. But of course, Microsoft agreed to continue Office development for the Mac which would be hard to quantify in terms of investment potential. Additionally, there was the matter of Microsoft attempting to get Apple to kill Quicktime development......
One point that particularly struck me: according to Gruber, 'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!"
This has certainly been my experience. My latest journal entry covers it quite nicely I think, but many of the geek folks I know including hard core UNIX users and scientists who have long been Windows users are shifting to OS X. After all, yes, UNIX is powerful and while performing certain tasks can be faster with the command line (indeed almost impossible without), for the most part, a good GUI can make things much more efficient. The nice thing about OS X is that your CLI is still there just waiting for you to invoke it allowing access to all that UNIXy goodness.
(Disclaimer): There are days when I consume a pot or so of coffee for myself, so I am not saying this out of any prejudice. However, the thing to remember is that there *are* pharmacologically active compounds in coffee, in particular caffeine. The effects of caffeine really depend upon the person and how well their liver enzymes are induced to take care of compounds like this, but 100 cups could be enough to give you anxiety, sweats, tremors dizzyness, GI cramping, dehydration (caffeine is a diuretic), and at higher (toxic) doses even heart arrhythmias, nausea and vomiting, symptoms of CNS toxicity involving ringing ears or damped sounds and flashing light and possibly convulsions. So, can it kill you? Possibly. So, my question to you is.......why would you want to drink 100 cups of coffee in a day? This isn't some dare or weird coffee enema garbage that someone is trying to foist on you is it?
TV isn't going anywhere though, as soon as the TV companies get off their collective butts and get more and more on-demand TV then viewers will return to that medium (even if it is through their computer/digital entertainment unit).
Indeed. What has amazed me however is that the TV and cable companies have not yet moved to a pure subscription model allowing you to pay for the TV that you watch or letting you even pay for the individual channels you want to watch. For instance, there are probably half a dozen TV channels I would watch including some news, the History Channel, Food TV, Turner Classic movies, and Speedvision. Let me pay for what I want and when I want it and perhaps we might watch more television. As it is now......that big assed set in the TV room gets turned on maybe a couple times a week.
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Although I am quite skilled myself in repairing/restoring older cars, I am more than happy to pay the higher costs after taking a look under the hood of a modern car. My Studebaker is fast and fun, but it has none of the electronics of the new cars and one can almost tear the entire thing down and rebuild it without having to consult a technical manual.
The downside of course is that it is an older car and has none of the safety gear that modern cars have. I once lost a wheel racing (and winning) a 930 turbo (when I was younger and more impetuous) as there were no safety devices that would retain it when the axle broke. You can imagine the fear that sets in at 110MPH or so when you suddenly find yourself running along with a presumably four wheel car that now happens to have only three.
As an aside, you might be surprised at how much an "automotive technician" who knows their stuff can make. The folks down at the Mercedes Benz dealer can truly clean up with six figure salaries. And judging from the last routine service bill on my mom's S-class, there may be more than one tech making that kind of salary there.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead? I would love a 700mhz Powerbook for $600 or so (no thanks, refurbed units).
The answer is simple really. Apple would like to maintain their products as objects of desire. Sexy bits of computer art that both inspire lust and allow us to accomplish our work easier and/or faster than ever before, making a difference. To lower the prices would reduce Apple computers to commodity items much like the rest of the Wintel world.
How many Dell, HP, Compaq, graybox etc.... hardware rollouts are greeted with the same kind of fervor that Apple computer hardware announcements inspire?
From the article: Pelling agrees, and says that he and Gimzewski are doing tests to rule out the possibility that other molecules in the fluid bathing the cells, or even the tip of the microscope itself, are generating vibrations that their probe picks up.
Even if this is the case, because of a cells small molecular fingerprint or components tend to dictate what role a cell plays or what the status of a cell is on a more discrete time basis that say gene expression, one would wonder if this is not also an identifier of status or identity as well. For more detail on cytosomics or metabolomics, see this site.
The software then looks for useful features, such as the corners of windows and doors, and extracts the colours and intensities of the pixels around them. Next, it searches the image database for matching data, using the base station the cellphone's signal came from as a guide. Finally, it uses the differences between the two images to calculate the photographer's position.
To me, it would appear that an easier solution might be to use GIS data in combination with the cell phone signal and comparisons of rough morphological features of buildings. The instructions should simply be: Point your camera at a building near you so that you can approximate its outline and then send that image. This would scale much larger than the methods referenced in the article as you would not have to store every detail of the buildings surrounding you including pixel maps of textures and color. This approach could be handled for a large city by a few commodity servers whereas the other approach would require significantly more computational resources.
Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC? I don't really need directions to find my way around Cambridge city center as you could almost throw a rock from the center and hit just about every building around, but London, Washington, Houston etc... are another story and the data required from their approach would require massive computational infrastructure.
Hmmmm. This sounds like the fluorocarbons that we used to bathe the insides of Cray supercomputers with. They were pretty cool with little windows that one could look in and see "waterfalls" of fluorocarbon flowing over the circuitboards and components to keep them cool.
Of course we had to have an entire floor below us dedicated to refrigeration, but hey. Governments can afford this kind of stuff.
So, lemme ask: Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time? No. You pay for a specific service with your phone line and you don't want to have to be interrupted with ads when you are talking with family, friends or business partners. If this lawsuit is accepted, then one would not have any protection to prevent ads from appearing during your phone calls. As a resident of Utah, I am not usually happy with all of the legislation that occurs up on capitol hill here, but this is one bit of legislation that I fully support.
From the suit: "private enforcers, motivated by the act's draconian penalties and the promise of attorneys' fees, may still seek to sue WhenU for allegedly violating the act."
Well, yeah. That is just the point folks. I don't want spyware on my system. (one of the many reasons I use a Macintosh)
Thus, the act presents WhenU with the impossible choice of either foregoing constitutionally protected advertising and spending significant sums to comply with the act (thereby reducing the effectiveness of its business), without any guaranty that it will avoid liability in doing so, or else being subjected to millions of dollars of claims by private litigants."
No, actually. It is quite simple: Go out of business. Your business model is corrupt and unwanted by both consumers and legitimate businesses. We don't want you here and you can't force yourself on consumers that do not want you. That is the point of the law, the people have spoken and the legislators have listened and responded. And NO.....you don't have a constitutionally mandated right to invade my privacy. That is what it really comes down to.
I should amend this to say what I intended to say: Specifically that political perspectives are not going to be difficult to get and they will try and cloud the issues with agenda, but contact someone (like Robert Reich) who can put you in touch with folks inside and outside of politics.
A documentary is important and I would fully support one being created (Disclaimer: my first major in college was documentary film), but perhaps more importantly, that documentary would be made much stronger if it would include some hard numbers and studies including rigorous statistics on just how offshoring is helping (or hurting) the 1) corporation, 2) worker, 3) consumer. Perhaps not just the viewpoint in the US as an interesting perspective could be made from the person getting the job.
So, here is the deal: Documentaries are often about perspective but ideally, they are about finding the truth and revealing that truth to your viewer. Political perspectives are going to be difficult to get, but contact someone like Robert Reich who could place you in touch with a variety of folks in and out of the political scene.
bob@RobertReich.org
Robert Reich
P.O. Box 381483
Cambridge, MA 02238
(617) 547-2206
Fax: (617) 498-0048
I might remind everybody that this is exactly how Compaq made a name for themselves by reverse engineering the IBM PC, thus creating the Wintel based PC industry.
Boy, how redneck can you get?
.00001 grams or so that is capable of withstanding an impact of that speed. Marketing gone awry.
"Hey Bubba, I know what let's do! Lets go throw sh*t at the moon and see if we can make craters. Yeah, that's cool Zeek. heh, heh, heh."
Seriously though, where is the science in this? They claim to want to take pictures, but they are pictures of the near side of the moon, of which we have plenty. And, unless you wanted to bury your cremains on the surface of the moon, this is the same kind of thing you find when you go hiking in the desert or mountains and find cans and things that people have shot at and left to rust or names carved into trees or rocks saying "Steve was here".
I am usually a strong supporter of science related work and space exploration, but this seems.....well?......What's the point?
Condition of the cargo cannot be guaranteed after the 4,000 mph impact, Orbital Development explains, although the cargo is contained within a special burst-resistant canister.
P.S., what is the point of using a "burst resistant container" if you are going to be aiming your "object" for a 4000 MPH impact with the moon? I am currently unaware of any container system weighing more than
Jeez have you moderators and commenters all lost your minds or do you simply not know what the parent poster is talking about? How do you think full resolution DV is rendered down for editing and distribution? The question in the story post was Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime,, and that is exactly what Pixlet was designed to address. In fact, the referenced article is talking exactly about compression to deliver 3D and video on devices other than computers like cell phones and other devices needing small footprints.
Think before you mod or reply and read the articles.
Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime,
Ummmm......Pixlet.
Yes lets take unemployed people and put them to work manually getting to know the interworkings of the IRS and its databases. They sure wouldn't be tempted to abuse their position would they?
You might be shocked to find out how many low wage earners have access to medical (HMO's and insurance companies), credit (mortage and credit lending agencies) and yes, tax information (federal and private contractors) on you already. There are systems in place to protect privacy at many companies and organizations that deal with this sort of data, but there are always folks that will abuse the system. The solution is to make punishments for identity theft crimes very severe.
CIO Magazine is running a story on the IRS's nearly failed $8 billion modernization attempt that includes missed deadlines, cost overruns of over $200 million and four CIO's in seven years."
Ummmm......If this project was my responsibility, as CTO I believe I would have canned the whole project and started anew as from the sounds of it, there is too much baggage with which to continue. So, here we go: Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project so that nobody gets paid unless key points in the strategy are reached.
A simple strategy might be to run and fund the project entirely within the IRS structure and take the following strategy:
While the linked article is short on what exactly is going wrong with the transfer, I was talking with a guy working on the project in an airport last year. According to him, one of the big problems the IRS is facing is that everybody is talking about incompatible data formats and getting data to migrate from one database to another while maintaining taxpayer information. This may be a little glib, but perhaps we could take a more direct approach to updating the data file structures like deciding upon a data format a priori and simply, through brute force, repopulating the new database with the old data? We could create a few thousand temporary (2-3 year) jobs for those folks on welfare or currently out of work and using redundant strategies for error correction, manually enter the data into the new formats.
Done.
PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003.
Well, there is a reason you still see COBOL jobs being posted from time to time. The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented and to quote an oft used phrase: "if it aint broke, don't fix it".
Of course they have made some improvements over the years, but these things are going to have a mighty impressive return on investment over the course of their lifetimes. Much more so than your average desktop PC which (if your running Windows) needs (is required) to be replaced every couple of years or so.
Of course the data itself is not new and there is nothing controversial about this per se. The real issue is in the visual representation of your geographic data which demonstrates to you specifically that your home location is *known*. Of course the magazine has always *known* where you live because they mail the periodical to your house. But for some reason, showing folks information in a graphical or visual format makes it more real. Therefore, I would not say this is a gimmick, but that it would enforce the idea to those who may not think as much in their daily lives the issues of privacy and information customization and product dissemination to consumers.
I wonder if this technology could be used to create inexpensive scanning electron beam microscopes? (As seen in Blade Runner).
Hmmmm. This sounds much like an extension of MATRIX, only we are not examining only criminals per se, but we are now examining everyone with the assumption that they are cheating on their taxes. Of course if you are cheating you are a criminal, but this again establishes a loss of privacy and presumes that your information is available to search without a court order. I wonder if the same company behind MATRIX, Seisint is the company behind or involved with this new initiative?
Actually, what I have been looking for is a PDA that would be a hybrid of small laptop and PDA kind of like the old Newtons that would allow me to have a built in wireless communication that would work with all phone/Internet networks across the world (likely with a hybrid of TCP/IP, VOIP and GSM) and a Bluetooth headset, leveraging something simple like iChat for calls with a built in calendar and address book. I am sick of having to purchase multiple phones for travel to different countries or swapping out SIM cards and then having yet still to type in all the access codes for various networks to make a simple phone call to someone. This hypothetical PDA should also be able to plug into projectors so I can give Keynote (or Powerpoint) presentations at meetings and invited talks, function as a basic word processor, note taker and sketch pad, have good battery life (8 real hours) and have a hard drive to be able to play DVDs and music on the airplane without the CD or DVD media.
I suppose the ruggedized PDA referenced in the article is expandable for wireless networks, but it really should have built in 802.11x and Bluetooth and appears to be a sort of ruggedized iPaq. I expect it will not be a big seller and the big purchasers of this device in the article will be those folks in the GPS and GIS fields who need this sort of device, but for approx $1600 US, I would expect built in GPS as well.
Apple computers are created for, and solely used by people who know, and want to know nothing about computers, the "proudly ignorants".
Ah, but they are also used by the most advanced computer users out there. Those that use them for a variety of fields in science from quantum chemistry to astrophysics, medicine and computer science. Pretty impressive that.
This is a dangerous mindset to encourage. Their computers are set up to do everything for you, to treat the user with a kind of benevolent contempt.
What is a dangerous mindset? Allowing people to be connected? Allowing them access to information? What are you going to say next......That people should not be able to vote for whom they want?
As to doing things for you, yeah, when I want to plug in a hard drive, it is automatically mounted and I don't have to type in the CLI two or three lines of commands to get it mounted and shared. There are many other examples of this and why you perceive this as benevolent contempt completely escapes me.
Some recent pricing of upgrades illustrates the kind of attitude Apple has to its customers.
This leap of logic is confusing. And what recent pricing are you referring to? Can they not expect to make a profit on their investment? Be thankful Microsoft has some minor competition, or else you might be paying more than you might think.
The email mentions that fast-spreading and destructive viruses and worms are 'threatening the potential of technology to advance business productivity, commerce and communication',
:-)
I don't know about that.......seeing as how I use OS X, I have yet to experience downtime or hassles due to viruses or worms. Of course there are problems with an increased number of emails from Windows machines containing worms and such, but they are simply filtered out via the spam filter. So this statement from Gates only really applies unless you are using something other than OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, BSD, etc....
Earlier this week Gates said Longhorn is 'not a date-driven release.' and said the speculation that the operating system will come out in 2006 is 'probably valid.'"
Windows is Microsoft's cash cow and from an investor perspective, there may be push from the shareholders.I have sold off most of my Microsoft stock on principle after watching their abuse of the PC market for the last few years, but I still own some and this is not encouraging.
"According to The Register Sun Microsystems & Microsoft have reached a settlement in their 10 year old lawsuit. Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property."
Whoa......Apple got ripped off with the $150 Million settlement with their suit against Microsoft. But of course, Microsoft agreed to continue Office development for the Mac which would be hard to quantify in terms of investment potential. Additionally, there was the matter of Microsoft attempting to get Apple to kill Quicktime development......
One point that particularly struck me: according to Gruber, 'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!"
This has certainly been my experience. My latest journal entry covers it quite nicely I think, but many of the geek folks I know including hard core UNIX users and scientists who have long been Windows users are shifting to OS X. After all, yes, UNIX is powerful and while performing certain tasks can be faster with the command line (indeed almost impossible without), for the most part, a good GUI can make things much more efficient. The nice thing about OS X is that your CLI is still there just waiting for you to invoke it allowing access to all that UNIXy goodness.
(Disclaimer): There are days when I consume a pot or so of coffee for myself, so I am not saying this out of any prejudice. However, the thing to remember is that there *are* pharmacologically active compounds in coffee, in particular caffeine. The effects of caffeine really depend upon the person and how well their liver enzymes are induced to take care of compounds like this, but 100 cups could be enough to give you anxiety, sweats, tremors dizzyness, GI cramping, dehydration (caffeine is a diuretic), and at higher (toxic) doses even heart arrhythmias, nausea and vomiting, symptoms of CNS toxicity involving ringing ears or damped sounds and flashing light and possibly convulsions. So, can it kill you? Possibly. So, my question to you is.......why would you want to drink 100 cups of coffee in a day? This isn't some dare or weird coffee enema garbage that someone is trying to foist on you is it?
Oh, yea. IAAS. (I am a scientist).
TV isn't going anywhere though, as soon as the TV companies get off their collective butts and get more and more on-demand TV then viewers will return to that medium (even if it is through their computer/digital entertainment unit).
Indeed. What has amazed me however is that the TV and cable companies have not yet moved to a pure subscription model allowing you to pay for the TV that you watch or letting you even pay for the individual channels you want to watch. For instance, there are probably half a dozen TV channels I would watch including some news, the History Channel, Food TV, Turner Classic movies, and Speedvision. Let me pay for what I want and when I want it and perhaps we might watch more television. As it is now......that big assed set in the TV room gets turned on maybe a couple times a week.