That Personal Rapid Transit system looks fantastic, but it's going to be a long long time before it reaches the point where it can thoroughly replace the automobile. A person won't be able to get in a PRT pod on my block in New Jersey and take it all the way to my grandpa's farmland in rural Illinois anytime in my grandchildren's lifetimes, much less mine or Grandpa's.
Which is not to say that adoption couldn't take place in small steps, over time. Within 100 years, for example, I could see the NYC subway system retrofitted to make use of PRT vehicles -- at first only along the same service lines that selected trains currently run on, and then eventually expanded to include seamless automated transfer points between lines, reconstruction of long-abandoned elevated tracks, expansion into outlying neighborhoods, and so on.
The same kind of slow evolution applies to computing technology. Yes, new improved ideas in operating systems, programming languages, whatever will appear in the future, but the world won't be migrating to them overnight -- there are going to be long, slow, transitory periods, and in retrospect nothing will look revolutionary, only continuous evolution.
For the most part, the math part of CS is completely useless unless you're doing something in a field which specifically requires it, i.e. fluid dynamics.
This, I believe, is ultimately why I abandoned the CS degree path as an undergrad and focused on a major in the arts instead.
I came into college with a year of high school AB Calculus under my belt, but in order to graduate with a BA in CS I would have had to slog my way through at least two more semesters' worth of tedious problem sets, and unless I got into 3D modeling it wasn't even going to be applicable to the code I'd be developing anyway. I decided I would rather spend my evenings drinking or talking to girls.
I mean, I'd rather trust someone who I didn't know, but I considered a *regular guy* instead of a paid researcher who told what to find.
I dunno, I'd rather trust someone who is a credentialed expert in their field, than some schlub just like me who doesn't know any more than I do. That just seems like common sense.
Does this mean I'm crazy? (Better Google "mental illness" and find out.)
I assume, of course, there will be a thumbs-down button so I can indicate I have no intention of ever purchasing the product featured in a particular ad, and will be never shown it again.
I may be overgeneralizing, but I think advertisers would rather have you press the Thumbs-Down button on their ad than have you press no button at all.
Even if you hate the ad and the product, when you take action it proves that you gave them both your attention. That represents a return on investment to the advertiser. You may hate them or you may love them, but at least you know who they are.
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be.
I'm sure it could be argued OGG Vorbis completely demolishes everything that MP3 is/was/used to be also, but does it matter? Like MP3, RSS has already won the mindshare war. Those three letters are already stuck in the minds of bloggers as the very definition of How To Syndicate Content.
You even rip off the MS menu keys on your work PC?
Damn right I do!
That gap between Alt and Ctrl was left there for a reason. I HATE it when my pinky is a little to the left or right of where it should be, and the result is that Windows steals away focus from whatever window I'm using and gives it to the Start menu.
Berners-Lee gave us a system for sharing dry academic documents, one that wasn't substantially better or worse than Gopher and Archie and WAIS and all the other networked hypertext systems of the time.
I mean, a bunch of 200 year old Supreme court judges making laws about P2P when they dont even use email????
Judges don't make laws, they interpret them. And since laws should ideally be technology-agnostic, and equally applicable to cases that arise yesterday, today, or tomorrow, it shouldn't really matter if the Supreme Court uses email or not. It's the facts of law that they are hearing, not facts of technology.
the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.)
X windowing has been around for fully half of Unix's history. Can one still legitimately claim that the Unix mindset MUST involve "a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces"?
The wayback machine could be called a directory of old web pages, cached as they existed at the time. Facts. Thus protected from copyright claims.
Does that mean I can republish a collection of copyrighted short stories from, say, 10 years ago, and sell them for profit, and when the authors send their lawyers after me, I can get off the hook by defining their stories as "facts" and my anthology just a directory of facts? Unlikely.
A webpage is not a fact. It is a creative or commercial work.
No, this is like publishing a book and having a copy of it end up in a library's collection, and then suing the library for letting someone check your book out.
(We can keep refining the analogy until it's perfect!)
I still take the side of Microsoft on this one, though. They created the browser with their own in-house programmers and therefore should be able to distribute it any way they like.
Too bad that IE was largely based on code purchased from Mosaic, and not the work of in-house programmers, because otherwise your variable-substitution would have been quite appropriate.
(Well, okay, MS programmers contributed ActiveX and the MARQUEE tag...)
Fire up the management app from your desk, swap him to blade 8. Without getting up, Joe now has a new system
Unfortunately, all his data was on the disk in the blade that failed, so either Joe has to re-do a lot of work from scratch, or Joe has to come to you and bug you to get his old blade back online so he can get to his data.
Sure, you could take it a step further and put a shared storage solution behind the blades, but if you're going that far, why not go all the way and use true thin clients, with virtual user machines running inside one huge backend server? Giving each desktop their own physical CPU and memory doesn't seem very practical when each one is going to be 95% idle under typical circumstances...
The NES had a 6-bit (64 color) YUV palette, which could have a 3-bit RGB de-emphasis effect applied to it, resulting in a theoretical color depth of 9 bits (at least using console marketers' math).
It was due to limitations of the video memory unit that only a small subset of the possible colorspace could be displayed on screen at once, although some demos exist that circumvent those limitations by using carefully timed code and mid-scanline palette switches, etc.
Somehow I get the feeling that Nintendo is going to try to avoid making it a prerequisite that you own and use a product sold by one of their competitors in the console market.
Yes, despite an operating budget of millions and multiple engineers on the job, I'm sure they've overlooked what a random anonymous slashdotter came up with 9 minutes after the post.
I didn't see any quotes from a staff optometrist, opthalmologist, or even optician in that press-release-masquerading-as-news. If I had to guess, I would hazard a guess that their operating budget of millions (madeupnumber) does not include such an expert on payroll.
The other other thing it's missing is cellular phones that have the processing power to do more than about 10 frames per second of QVGA video at 8-bit color depth. Sure, your Treo may be capable of semi-decent A/V playback, but your kid brother's Ultra-micro-mini-moto isn't and won't be for at least five years.
And the other other other thing it's missing is compelling cellular-phone video content.
Slashdot Mirror
It's another thing entirely to simply copy everything Boing Boing does.
To be fair, Slashdot posts a lot of stories that HAVEN'T been posted already on BoingBoing.
To be petty, most of those are articles that have already been posted on SLASHDOT.
That Personal Rapid Transit system looks fantastic, but it's going to be a long long time before it reaches the point where it can thoroughly replace the automobile. A person won't be able to get in a PRT pod on my block in New Jersey and take it all the way to my grandpa's farmland in rural Illinois anytime in my grandchildren's lifetimes, much less mine or Grandpa's.
Which is not to say that adoption couldn't take place in small steps, over time. Within 100 years, for example, I could see the NYC subway system retrofitted to make use of PRT vehicles -- at first only along the same service lines that selected trains currently run on, and then eventually expanded to include seamless automated transfer points between lines, reconstruction of long-abandoned elevated tracks, expansion into outlying neighborhoods, and so on.
The same kind of slow evolution applies to computing technology. Yes, new improved ideas in operating systems, programming languages, whatever will appear in the future, but the world won't be migrating to them overnight -- there are going to be long, slow, transitory periods, and in retrospect nothing will look revolutionary, only continuous evolution.
For the most part, the math part of CS is completely useless unless you're doing something in a field which specifically requires it, i.e. fluid dynamics.
This, I believe, is ultimately why I abandoned the CS degree path as an undergrad and focused on a major in the arts instead.
I came into college with a year of high school AB Calculus under my belt, but in order to graduate with a BA in CS I would have had to slog my way through at least two more semesters' worth of tedious problem sets, and unless I got into 3D modeling it wasn't even going to be applicable to the code I'd be developing anyway. I decided I would rather spend my evenings drinking or talking to girls.
I mean, I'd rather trust someone who I didn't know, but I considered a *regular guy* instead of a paid researcher who told what to find.
I dunno, I'd rather trust someone who is a credentialed expert in their field, than some schlub just like me who doesn't know any more than I do. That just seems like common sense.
Does this mean I'm crazy? (Better Google "mental illness" and find out.)
I assume, of course, there will be a thumbs-down button so I can indicate I have no intention of ever purchasing the product featured in a particular ad, and will be never shown it again.
I may be overgeneralizing, but I think advertisers would rather have you press the Thumbs-Down button on their ad than have you press no button at all.
Even if you hate the ad and the product, when you take action it proves that you gave them both your attention. That represents a return on investment to the advertiser. You may hate them or you may love them, but at least you know who they are.
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be.
I'm sure it could be argued OGG Vorbis completely demolishes everything that MP3 is/was/used to be also, but does it matter? Like MP3, RSS has already won the mindshare war. Those three letters are already stuck in the minds of bloggers as the very definition of How To Syndicate Content.
Or are you just somehow magically able to know just what each and every key combination does in a program you've never used before?
Not on my own, but if I employ the assistance of a magical tool like a "book" or a "help file"...
(Yes, the poor quality and completeness of software documentation IS a problem, and is the petard by which I am myself hoist'd)
3 years ago when Dreamwave did a Transformers comic that comic became the number one selling comic for the next year.
Yes, and where is Dreamwave now? Broke and out of business.
You even rip off the MS menu keys on your work PC?
Damn right I do!
That gap between Alt and Ctrl was left there for a reason. I HATE it when my pinky is a little to the left or right of where it should be, and the result is that Windows steals away focus from whatever window I'm using and gives it to the Start menu.
The term "Dinbot" was trademarked by Hasbro as far back as, I believe, 1986.
It was the homebrew robot that polluted the net and diluted the term, not the Transformers fans.
Berners-Lee gave us a system for sharing dry academic documents, one that wasn't substantially better or worse than Gopher and Archie and WAIS and all the other networked hypertext systems of the time.
Andreesen gave us pretty pictures to look at.
And that is why he is the one who is celebrated.
I mean, a bunch of 200 year old Supreme court judges making laws about P2P when they dont even use email????
Judges don't make laws, they interpret them. And since laws should ideally be technology-agnostic, and equally applicable to cases that arise yesterday, today, or tomorrow, it shouldn't really matter if the Supreme Court uses email or not. It's the facts of law that they are hearing, not facts of technology.
the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.)
X windowing has been around for fully half of Unix's history. Can one still legitimately claim that the Unix mindset MUST involve "a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces"?
Now I'll always be able to find out where the nearest Danny Elfman band is!
he says you can [tab through elements] at the top of the page, and Firefox Just Works.
I'd ask you what browser you're using
IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT BROWSER HE'S USING!
If there's ANY standards-compliant browser in which tabbing through elements doesn't Just Work, the solution is incomplete.
I do not expect, nor do I desire for someone to use my company's web apps from a cellphone or PDA.
I, as a user, expect the web apps I use to be usable from any web browser available to me, including cellphones and PDAs.
If your company will not provide this ability to me, I will visit your competitors and see if they will.
The wayback machine could be called a directory of old web pages, cached as they existed at the time. Facts.
Thus protected from copyright claims.
Does that mean I can republish a collection of copyrighted short stories from, say, 10 years ago, and sell them for profit, and when the authors send their lawyers after me, I can get off the hook by defining their stories as "facts" and my anthology just a directory of facts? Unlikely.
A webpage is not a fact. It is a creative or commercial work.
No, this is like publishing a book and having a copy of it end up in a library's collection, and then suing the library for letting someone check your book out.
(We can keep refining the analogy until it's perfect!)
I still take the side of Microsoft on this one, though. They created the browser with their own in-house programmers and therefore should be able to distribute it any way they like.
Too bad that IE was largely based on code purchased from Mosaic, and not the work of in-house programmers, because otherwise your variable-substitution would have been quite appropriate.
(Well, okay, MS programmers contributed ActiveX and the MARQUEE tag...)
Fire up the management app from your desk, swap him to blade 8. Without getting up, Joe now has a new system
Unfortunately, all his data was on the disk in the blade that failed, so either Joe has to re-do a lot of work from scratch, or Joe has to come to you and bug you to get his old blade back online so he can get to his data.
Sure, you could take it a step further and put a shared storage solution behind the blades, but if you're going that far, why not go all the way and use true thin clients, with virtual user machines running inside one huge backend server? Giving each desktop their own physical CPU and memory doesn't seem very practical when each one is going to be 95% idle under typical circumstances...
The NES had a 6-bit (64 color) YUV palette, which could have a 3-bit RGB de-emphasis effect applied to it, resulting in a theoretical color depth of 9 bits (at least using console marketers' math).
It was due to limitations of the video memory unit that only a small subset of the possible colorspace could be displayed on screen at once, although some demos exist that circumvent those limitations by using carefully timed code and mid-scanline palette switches, etc.
USB eh? Will it only work on windows?
Somehow I get the feeling that Nintendo is going to try to avoid making it a prerequisite that you own and use a product sold by one of their competitors in the console market.
My point is that if your [sic] buying a 64bit system that is fast in order to run your old 32bit programs slowly [sic]. Wrong tool for the job.
You've just answered the question put forth.
Why doesn't the Itanium get respect? Because if you want to run your existing 32bit programs, it is the wrong tool for the job.
Yes, despite an operating budget of millions and multiple engineers on the job, I'm sure they've overlooked what a random anonymous slashdotter came up with 9 minutes after the post.
I didn't see any quotes from a staff optometrist, opthalmologist, or even optician in that press-release-masquerading-as-news. If I had to guess, I would hazard a guess that their operating budget of millions (madeupnumber) does not include such an expert on payroll.
The other thing it's missing is resolution.
The other other thing it's missing is cellular phones that have the processing power to do more than about 10 frames per second of QVGA video at 8-bit color depth. Sure, your Treo may be capable of semi-decent A/V playback, but your kid brother's Ultra-micro-mini-moto isn't and won't be for at least five years.
And the other other other thing it's missing is compelling cellular-phone video content.