Sorry, but after this "Google Voice is simply duplicate functionality", Apple has lost pretty much all legitimacy in anything they say. Everything they say lately, one has to think "why are they really doing this," and there is always an obvious alternative answer.
Great, the laser pulses will probably be DRM encoded so that only authorized chips are used and vendors that insert the appropriate smart card can perform service on them...
The advent of CPU-enhanced cars is a great one, but this is one place where the govt really needs to step in an open things up. For standard engine codes, things aren't too bad; but Lord help you if you want to read an ABS or airbag code from a GM vehicle (for example). They're locked down. I have some decent PC-based code reader hardware and software, but in order to read the ABS error that my two vehicles are both showing (GM, learn to design ABS, will ya!), I need to spend hundreds or thousands on their own software/hardware to simply find out which of my four ABS sensors is faulty.
The more they get into specialized things like this, including laser ignition, the more I worry that I won't be able to be a backyard mechanic any more.
I have bought copies of both books in my (distant) past.
Recently, I "found" electronic copies of them, and re-read them, enjoying them very much, more so than when I first purchased them. I read them on a free reader on two different handheld devices (one Windows CE; ugh, but it's my phone, too, so meh), and one Linux based (cooler, but blah, it's not my phone).
Nobody revoked anything on me. Nobody took away my right to read. Nobody took away my license to read these books that I purchased awhile back. Nobody could, because it was through "unauthorized" channels. But I bought the damn book. And here in Canada, even borrowing the book/record/game gives you permission to copy it for yourself for personal use.
Most consumers wouldn't know how to do what I did, and that's sad.
I'll never buy into DRM.
Also, I've gotten HDTV through less than legit means, while simultaneously paying for full subscription. (If I used that subscription purely, I'd be forced to do the D-to-A-to-D route, blah). But I get my HDTV, for personal use, recordable, copyable, save-able, pure. Through unauthorized means. I'm supposedly legally allowed to, but not permitted to actually do so, as a non-informed consumer.
In general, the producers need to know that their content isn't *that* valuable or *that* essential to people's lives. It's not freakin' oxygen. But if the masses want to toss you a few bucks each for unrestricted access to it (which I would), you should accept it, and you'll be rich. Richer than astronauts (as Homer would say).
But you keep trying to deny me something I bought, and you wont't survive. I can guarantee that...
The biggest problem I see with Facebook is the stupid, silly apps that get *full* access to your data. I create a dancing Christmas tree that everybody sends to their friends, or similar banality, and I can scam tons of personal data, that I really don't need to show that dancing Christmas tree.
The Canadian report recommends that these third party apps only request the data they need to perform their function, that the app let's the user know what data is using, and gets the user's approval. If that Dancing Christmas tree is asking for my phone number, I don't think that's appropriate, and I should be able to reject it, and the app wouldn't be popular.
I believe Facebook used to have a better granularity in asking what perms an app could have (although most apps asked for everything anyway). If app creators would only ask for what is relevant to their app, and users were aware of it (and refused to give away details unnecessarily), things would be much cleaner.
I do fault facebook for removing (or hiding?) this granularity, and simply making a "grant permission" button instead of showing all that a given vendor was getting access to.
Creating a mindless but popular app really the easiest way to get a ton of demographic data for nothing. It's shameful that Facebook allowed this, perhaps even encouraged it; now they're being called on it.
I wonder if this is related to an odd cat vocalization I've seen. At least three (non-overlapping) cats I've had over the years, make a vocalization (kind of a murrmurrmurr half-meow with their mouths closed) when they're in a happy or friendly mood.
I've never heard other cats make this sound, so I was wondering if there was something I was doing in their upbringing to bring it out (some sound I was making they were trying to imitate, or picking up on the fact that the sound gets them attention?
That kind of hardware hardly ever gets used in production without a service contract to cover repairs. After it is 3-4 years old, the service contract becomes silly expensive and the hardware gets retired. Something from the dot-com meltdown is way out of warranty.
Excellent point. And more than the "warrantee" is the "license agreement." Some smart purchasers, I've been told, wouldn't buy the units until they were guaranteed, in writing, that the software licenses were transferable. We didn't, and ours weren't.
So any purchaser of the system who was looking to use the unit as anything other than spare parts, would have to pay a major licensing fee to Netapp, pretty much zeroing any resale value. Very shitty indeed on Netapp's part. I do like the tech they put into the units, but the software licensing policies almost make me think their obsolescence by cheaper/easier/faster solutions is a bit deserved...
From the.COM bust, I have two leftover Netapp filers, with a dozen or so shelves, about 2T of storage. Each unit was about $250,000 new. A half million dollars worth of gear. Sitting in my shed. It's not worth the cost of shipping to even give the unit away any more. I guess it'll probably just go to the recycling depot. It seems a bit sad for such a cool piece of hardware.
On the cheerier side, it is nice to enjoy the benefits of the new densities; I have two 1T external drives, I bought for $100 each, mirrored for redundancy, that sit in the corner of my desk, silently, drawing next to no power. (Of course the NetApp would have better throughput in a major server environment, but for most practical purposes, a small RAID of modern 1T drives is just fine.)
As others have pointed out, textbooks are quite the scam, with minor editions being updated to require purchase of new books each year.
No one wants to take the chance that they're answering the wrong question on an assignment, or missing a factoid that is asked on a test, that happened not to be in their edition.
For some subjects, evolving of the texts makes sense; for some established fundamentals, it's senseless.
What would be interesting would be for some website to track differences between editions, to let students know where they stand; it would really call out the perpetrators of this "edition scam" and reduce their power greatly.
Alternatively, I wouldn't be surprised to see a trend towards copying/pdf'ing (i.e. piracy) of texts to save money for students. Piracy often crops up in cases where there is inappropriately high pricing (most computer games, IMHO); I can't see an area more ripe for piracy than the textbook industry. (Not that I'd condone it, just that I think the prices are inflated, and the requirements for new texts are artificially and inappropriately imposed.)
One thing that always seemed odd to me was that each year, in each course, the professors seemed surprised (or feigned surprise) at how expensive the book actually was, and indicated they wouldn't have chosen it had they known how expensive it was. Are their kickbacks or something?!?!? (I taught one year, and was given a big armload of texts to examine and choose between; I wasn't told prices, and simply picked the best one based upon its merit. So if there was a kickback scam, no one approached me; thankfully, for their sake:)
However, there's a surprising amount of content on TPB that is definitely legal, Linux ISOs of various vintages, books and video in the public domain, as well as content uploaded by it's author.
I'm not sure if this has any legal bearing, but I think one thing that differentiates the legal content, is that it is *easily* and *reliably* found elsewhere. I want to bittorrent an Ubuntu distro, I can find a tracker on ubuntu.com, guaranteed, 100%. I think the same would apply for most other categories of free content. If an author John Doe makes his books available for free, then johndoe.com is probably a better place to download them, or find a tracker.
For illegal movies/software, there is no obvious official source; in some ways, the Pirate Bay has become the defacto source for a lot of this stuff.
Personally, I find rapidshare (esp. with a premium account) lets me download stuff much faster, more reliably, and without freaking out my routers with so many connections. (For legal content, of course.:)
(On that note, and a bit off-topic, why is it that torrents seem to kill my internet connecdtion (ADSL) for pretty much any other internet browsing, even when I throttle to a handful of connections, and a reasonable kbps rate?)
This will (well, could) be great for geek hikers like myself; I find the topographical maps available okay, but don't really give one an accurate feel for the lay of the land. Incorporating this map into GPS (or, in the shorter term, some open source mapping software on a PDA-sized device) will be very cool...
Sigh, one of these days I hope to look at the beautiful surroundings nature provides, more than I look at my gadgets I bring with me:) Oh well, navigating/mapping is half the fun of exploring, to me (whether in a car, boat, or on foot).
I'm sure it varies state by state (and province by province), but last time I checked, the power companies don't pay you penny-for-penny for the kwh you sell back to them. If memory serves, they pay you something like 10% of the going rates, which doesn't really amount to much. However, every bit of power you *reduce* your power company usage by, is pure gain. Counting on selling excess just doesn't factor in practically at this time.
A bit OT, but I'm curious as to why the best deal for half decent motherboards around here seem to be NVidia chipsets and onboard graphics, and AMD processors... Should AMD/ATI be cranking out chipsets that allow board makers to do better/faster/cheaper boards with combos from the same manufacturer?? Just seems odd. All the PC's in my house (one Linux, one Hackintosh, a couple of Windows ones for the kids, are all NVidia/AMD setups, bought over the past few years.)
Is there any chance that this is done to thwart 'IP-over-DNS' attempts?
Many ISP's will forward port 53 traffic happily, even before a cable modem is provisioned. If you attempt to go to any site (port 80, etc.) it will redirect you to their provisioning page. But DNS requests work.
So there are tools to funnel *all* of your traffic through a tunnel on port 53, as fake DNS requests.
You need a DNS server on the other end as an exit for the gateway, and control over your domain to redirect the requests appropriately, but I've used it on unprovisioned modems in a pinch, and it does work. I wouldn't want to download Redhat ISO's over it, but for casual browsing when nothing else is available, it does work. (Not recommending the practice of course.)
I could see grabbing control of port 53 to avoid this tunneling (although it's doubtful it's widespread enough to warrant such work).
In general, I'm a bit mixed on the topic; I'm all for net neutrality, but to provide a good, consistent user experience, an ISP taking control of DNS requests (and cacheing) isn't too far out there. If they are redirecting things inappropriately, however, then that's an absolute no-no, and should be slapped down immediately...
You are absolutely right man. Could you imagine if the Internet has been provided to them ? Every other dude would be on ICQ or similar client and we all would have lots of traces to follow.
1996 called, and they want their instant messaging client back...
Here's why I'm excited about/anxious for Chrome on OS/X:
I used Firefox for awhile, a couple of years back. It bogged down the CPU, especially after running for awhile.
So I switched to Opera (and shortly thereafter went from Windows to OS X). It was a peppier experience. But with newer releases, and the increasing use of Flash (I think) on the Net, it started getting slower and slower. I don't like having my fan run while I'm simply sitting and reading a static page. Turning off all plugins seems to avoid that, so I point the finger at Flash. But not having Flash, or only having it on demand, is fairly annoying. Also, there's some sites Opera just won't render properly. Not many, but some.
So I switched back to Firefox, with the advent of 3.0. Even doing nothing, sitting with a few static pages open (and Adblock, Flashblock) it seems to still hover at 10% CPU usage. Bleh. Enough to keep my fan humming all the time.
When I tried Chrome on Windows, I was quite excited, with the process-per-page approach. I can see *what* page is slowing things down, and kill it if I chose. That's my biggest beef with Opera/Firefox (I won't even let IE into the discussion:P): you can't tell *what* page is slowing down your browser. I've tried JavaScript debuggers, other dev tools to try and found out, but have had no success.
I'm praying that Chrome on OS/X will be my salvation (although I've become dependent upon some Firefox extensions, particularly vimperator:P). Upon first glance, it looks pretty good (and I'm using it to post this article). It seems to suck up 30% CPU for 20 seconds or so *after* finishing loading a page, but then does settle down.
Right now I have about 5 tabs open, and each is using 2-3%, which is slightly concerning. That could add up to be just as bad as Firefox/Opera. But for now, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of being an early release, and keep my fingers crossed that the "Browser That Finally Doesn't Suck [CPU]" is on the horizon...
For retro shits-n-giggles, I have two rotary phones (one wall mount, one desk) that ring with bells, etc.. I have an Asterisk system in the house, separate extensions in each room. But for my office, I like the funky old classic. It works fine with a Linksys ATA (pulse dialing, ringing). On some devices (iAXY), pulse dialing and sufficient ring current isn't provided, so they don't work; but on devices that still support pulse dialing, they do work nicely.
I also have a hand-crank phone (turn the crank to ring the operator, to connect you, kinda thing). Obviously the cranking wouldn't do much (but maybe fry some equipment), but answering and holding a conversation works just fine. The electrical standards for telephony haven't changed since pretty much their inception (or at least they've kept an amazing amount of backwards compatibility).
Given that it's hooked to a modern Asterisk system (which in turn is hooked to the internet), this is older than that 1962 modem (circa 1940, I believe). Having a 1940's phone connected to VOIP is quite a kick...
Wasn't there a story recently about how mission control managed to upload the whole freakin' Spiderman movie lately for the astronauts? How would uploading a codec or VLC be harder than that?
I'm also surprised they would bring DVD's. Why bring several clunky physical media, when the movies could have been pre-copied to the hard drives (ripped, that is). I rip movies from legal DVD's to the hard drive when I go on a mere business trip; one would think when you're going on the damn shuttle you pack even lighter...
Most people's light switches are further than the TV, and they'd be outraged to have to turn the tv on/off without a remote... I think remote control of lights and other home functions is a natural evolution that we will see become more and more commonplace. Possibly managed by a computer, but more likely interfaced through a dedicated remote-control device. (These already exist of course, just will probably become more of a standard thing.)
Isn't this type of study best suited for a properly designed and executed "focus group." It's surely the more appropriate way to do user testing.
Experimenting with web site delays on live users is akin to inappropriately releasing an operating system before it's ready for prime time, and letting the users suffer by finding and reporting the bugs. Oh, wait...
(Also, I'm sure MS has enough sections to their web properties, and enough traffic, and enough existing delays, that they could analyze their existing data to determine where delays are distracting or frustrating users.)
I tend to browse, finding interesting links, always opening them in the background, and getting to them when I finish the current article.
I'm known as a bit of a tab hog, in general.
Now and then, I'll split things into two windows, to organize my browsing. This is effectively trying to put a bit of "hierarchy" the browsing experience.
I believe a "power browser user" basically does do a bit of a hierarchical thing when browsing, expanding topics of interest as they see fit. To have a single tab bar be able to handle a bit more structure to my browsing experience would really be killer, to me.
Opera (I think) does have the option of opening new tabs *next* to the current tab, rather than at the end, which kind of groups things together a bit better, but not well enough for my tastes.
To have the browser be able to open new tabs, but optionally in "sub-trees" where I choose, and maybe expand/collapse those subtrees might be pretty compelling (although possibly too confusing for the casual user?)
In any case, I think we need *some* tree-like tab behaviour.
When I first checked out Xen, I was kind of hopeful that it could achieve that sort of thing already. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have a "fast direct console" for letting a windows Virtual Machine perform at full speed for interactive purposes. Accessing a Windows VM via VNC or RDC doesn't exactly allow one to play the latest games (or even do more mundant work interactively for regular use).
Is anybody working on this? It seems like it would be a great addition. I'd love to have my required Windows machine (for kids games, PVR, etc.) actually virtualized with a Linux wrapper outside of it.
As it stands, I run my Asterisk system under CoLinux on Windows; I'd love to turn that inside out, having Linux be in control, with windows Virtualized; but the fast access to the video is required by my Windows needs, and not my Linux needs, so Windows as the supervising OS is my only option, ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but after this "Google Voice is simply duplicate functionality", Apple has lost pretty much all legitimacy in anything they say. Everything they say lately, one has to think "why are they really doing this," and there is always an obvious alternative answer.
Sigh, I really want to like them, I really do.
But my hopes are fading.
Great, the laser pulses will probably be DRM encoded so that only authorized chips are used and vendors that insert the appropriate smart card can perform service on them...
The advent of CPU-enhanced cars is a great one, but this is one place where the govt really needs to step in an open things up. For standard engine codes, things aren't too bad; but Lord help you if you want to read an ABS or airbag code from a GM vehicle (for example). They're locked down. I have some decent PC-based code reader hardware and software, but in order to read the ABS error that my two vehicles are both showing (GM, learn to design ABS, will ya!), I need to spend hundreds or thousands on their own software/hardware to simply find out which of my four ABS sensors is faulty.
The more they get into specialized things like this, including laser ignition, the more I worry that I won't be able to be a backyard mechanic any more.
I have bought copies of both books in my (distant) past.
Recently, I "found" electronic copies of them, and re-read them, enjoying them very much, more so than when I first purchased them. I read them on a free reader on two different handheld devices (one Windows CE; ugh, but it's my phone, too, so meh), and one Linux based (cooler, but blah, it's not my phone).
Nobody revoked anything on me. Nobody took away my right to read. Nobody took away my license to read these books that I purchased awhile back. Nobody could, because it was through "unauthorized" channels. But I bought the damn book. And here in Canada, even borrowing the book/record/game gives you permission to copy it for yourself for personal use.
Most consumers wouldn't know how to do what I did, and that's sad.
I'll never buy into DRM.
Also, I've gotten HDTV through less than legit means, while simultaneously paying for full subscription. (If I used that subscription purely, I'd be forced to do the D-to-A-to-D route, blah). But I get my HDTV, for personal use, recordable, copyable, save-able, pure. Through unauthorized means. I'm supposedly legally allowed to, but not permitted to actually do so, as a non-informed consumer.
In general, the producers need to know that their content isn't *that* valuable or *that* essential to people's lives. It's not freakin' oxygen. But if the masses want to toss you a few bucks each for unrestricted access to it (which I would), you should accept it, and you'll be rich. Richer than astronauts (as Homer would say).
But you keep trying to deny me something I bought, and you wont't survive. I can guarantee that...
The biggest problem I see with Facebook is the stupid, silly apps that get *full* access to your data. I create a dancing Christmas tree that everybody sends to their friends, or similar banality, and I can scam tons of personal data, that I really don't need to show that dancing Christmas tree.
The Canadian report recommends that these third party apps only request the data they need to perform their function, that the app let's the user know what data is using, and gets the user's approval. If that Dancing Christmas tree is asking for my phone number, I don't think that's appropriate, and I should be able to reject it, and the app wouldn't be popular.
I believe Facebook used to have a better granularity in asking what perms an app could have (although most apps asked for everything anyway). If app creators would only ask for what is relevant to their app, and users were aware of it (and refused to give away details unnecessarily), things would be much cleaner.
I do fault facebook for removing (or hiding?) this granularity, and simply making a "grant permission" button instead of showing all that a given vendor was getting access to.
Creating a mindless but popular app really the easiest way to get a ton of demographic data for nothing. It's shameful that Facebook allowed this, perhaps even encouraged it; now they're being called on it.
Proud to be Canadian. :)
I wonder if this is related to an odd cat vocalization I've seen. At least three (non-overlapping) cats I've had over the years, make a vocalization (kind of a murrmurrmurr half-meow with their mouths closed) when they're in a happy or friendly mood.
I've never heard other cats make this sound, so I was wondering if there was something I was doing in their upbringing to bring it out (some sound I was making they were trying to imitate, or picking up on the fact that the sound gets them attention?
Excellent point. And more than the "warrantee" is the "license agreement." Some smart purchasers, I've been told, wouldn't buy the units until they were guaranteed, in writing, that the software licenses were transferable. We didn't, and ours weren't.
So any purchaser of the system who was looking to use the unit as anything other than spare parts, would have to pay a major licensing fee to Netapp, pretty much zeroing any resale value. Very shitty indeed on Netapp's part. I do like the tech they put into the units, but the software licensing policies almost make me think their obsolescence by cheaper/easier/faster solutions is a bit deserved...
From the .COM bust, I have two leftover Netapp filers, with a dozen or so shelves, about 2T of storage. Each unit was about $250,000 new. A half million dollars worth of gear. Sitting in my shed. It's not worth the cost of shipping to even give the unit away any more. I guess it'll probably just go to the recycling depot. It seems a bit sad for such a cool piece of hardware.
On the cheerier side, it is nice to enjoy the benefits of the new densities; I have two 1T external drives, I bought for $100 each, mirrored for redundancy, that sit in the corner of my desk, silently, drawing next to no power. (Of course the NetApp would have better throughput in a major server environment, but for most practical purposes, a small RAID of modern 1T drives is just fine.)
Polish.
As others have pointed out, textbooks are quite the scam, with minor editions being updated to require purchase of new books each year.
No one wants to take the chance that they're answering the wrong question on an assignment, or missing a factoid that is asked on a test, that happened not to be in their edition.
For some subjects, evolving of the texts makes sense; for some established fundamentals, it's senseless.
What would be interesting would be for some website to track differences between editions, to let students know where they stand; it would really call out the perpetrators of this "edition scam" and reduce their power greatly.
Alternatively, I wouldn't be surprised to see a trend towards copying/pdf'ing (i.e. piracy) of texts to save money for students. Piracy often crops up in cases where there is inappropriately high pricing (most computer games, IMHO); I can't see an area more ripe for piracy than the textbook industry. (Not that I'd condone it, just that I think the prices are inflated, and the requirements for new texts are artificially and inappropriately imposed.)
One thing that always seemed odd to me was that each year, in each course, the professors seemed surprised (or feigned surprise) at how expensive the book actually was, and indicated they wouldn't have chosen it had they known how expensive it was. Are their kickbacks or something?!?!? (I taught one year, and was given a big armload of texts to examine and choose between; I wasn't told prices, and simply picked the best one based upon its merit. So if there was a kickback scam, no one approached me; thankfully, for their sake :)
I'm not sure if this has any legal bearing, but I think one thing that differentiates the legal content, is that it is *easily* and *reliably* found elsewhere. I want to bittorrent an Ubuntu distro, I can find a tracker on ubuntu.com, guaranteed, 100%. I think the same would apply for most other categories of free content. If an author John Doe makes his books available for free, then johndoe.com is probably a better place to download them, or find a tracker.
For illegal movies/software, there is no obvious official source; in some ways, the Pirate Bay has become the defacto source for a lot of this stuff.
Personally, I find rapidshare (esp. with a premium account) lets me download stuff much faster, more reliably, and without freaking out my routers with so many connections. (For legal content, of course. :)
(On that note, and a bit off-topic, why is it that torrents seem to kill my internet connecdtion (ADSL) for pretty much any other internet browsing, even when I throttle to a handful of connections, and a reasonable kbps rate?)
This will (well, could) be great for geek hikers like myself; I find the topographical maps available okay, but don't really give one an accurate feel for the lay of the land. Incorporating this map into GPS (or, in the shorter term, some open source mapping software on a PDA-sized device) will be very cool...
Sigh, one of these days I hope to look at the beautiful surroundings nature provides, more than I look at my gadgets I bring with me :) Oh well, navigating/mapping is half the fun of exploring, to me (whether in a car, boat, or on foot).
And even more unbelievable, is the fact that they the whole thing.
I'm sure it varies state by state (and province by province), but last time I checked, the power companies don't pay you penny-for-penny for the kwh you sell back to them. If memory serves, they pay you something like 10% of the going rates, which doesn't really amount to much. However, every bit of power you *reduce* your power company usage by, is pure gain. Counting on selling excess just doesn't factor in practically at this time.
A bit OT, but I'm curious as to why the best deal for half decent motherboards around here seem to be NVidia chipsets and onboard graphics, and AMD processors... Should AMD/ATI be cranking out chipsets that allow board makers to do better/faster/cheaper boards with combos from the same manufacturer?? Just seems odd. All the PC's in my house (one Linux, one Hackintosh, a couple of Windows ones for the kids, are all NVidia/AMD setups, bought over the past few years.)
Is there any chance that this is done to thwart 'IP-over-DNS' attempts?
Many ISP's will forward port 53 traffic happily, even before a cable modem is provisioned. If you attempt to go to any site (port 80, etc.) it will redirect you to their provisioning page. But DNS requests work.
So there are tools to funnel *all* of your traffic through a tunnel on port 53, as fake DNS requests.
You need a DNS server on the other end as an exit for the gateway, and control over your domain to redirect the requests appropriately, but I've used it on unprovisioned modems in a pinch, and it does work. I wouldn't want to download Redhat ISO's over it, but for casual browsing when nothing else is available, it does work. (Not recommending the practice of course.)
I could see grabbing control of port 53 to avoid this tunneling (although it's doubtful it's widespread enough to warrant such work).
In general, I'm a bit mixed on the topic; I'm all for net neutrality, but to provide a good, consistent user experience, an ISP taking control of DNS requests (and cacheing) isn't too far out there. If they are redirecting things inappropriately, however, then that's an absolute no-no, and should be slapped down immediately...
1996 called, and they want their instant messaging client back...
Here's why I'm excited about/anxious for Chrome on OS/X:
I used Firefox for awhile, a couple of years back. It bogged down the CPU, especially after running for awhile.
So I switched to Opera (and shortly thereafter went from Windows to OS X). It was a peppier experience. But with newer releases, and the increasing use of Flash (I think) on the Net, it started getting slower and slower. I don't like having my fan run while I'm simply sitting and reading a static page. Turning off all plugins seems to avoid that, so I point the finger at Flash. But not having Flash, or only having it on demand, is fairly annoying. Also, there's some sites Opera just won't render properly. Not many, but some.
So I switched back to Firefox, with the advent of 3.0. Even doing nothing, sitting with a few static pages open (and Adblock, Flashblock) it seems to still hover at 10% CPU usage. Bleh. Enough to keep my fan humming all the time.
When I tried Chrome on Windows, I was quite excited, with the process-per-page approach. I can see *what* page is slowing things down, and kill it if I chose. That's my biggest beef with Opera/Firefox (I won't even let IE into the discussion :P): you can't tell *what* page is slowing down your browser. I've tried JavaScript debuggers, other dev tools to try and found out, but have had no success.
I'm praying that Chrome on OS/X will be my salvation (although I've become dependent upon some Firefox extensions, particularly vimperator :P). Upon first glance, it looks pretty good (and I'm using it to post this article). It seems to suck up 30% CPU for 20 seconds or so *after* finishing loading a page, but then does settle down.
Right now I have about 5 tabs open, and each is using 2-3%, which is slightly concerning. That could add up to be just as bad as Firefox/Opera. But for now, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of being an early release, and keep my fingers crossed that the "Browser That Finally Doesn't Suck [CPU]" is on the horizon...
For retro shits-n-giggles, I have two rotary phones (one wall mount, one desk) that ring with bells, etc.. I have an Asterisk system in the house, separate extensions in each room. But for my office, I like the funky old classic. It works fine with a Linksys ATA (pulse dialing, ringing). On some devices (iAXY), pulse dialing and sufficient ring current isn't provided, so they don't work; but on devices that still support pulse dialing, they do work nicely.
I also have a hand-crank phone (turn the crank to ring the operator, to connect you, kinda thing). Obviously the cranking wouldn't do much (but maybe fry some equipment), but answering and holding a conversation works just fine. The electrical standards for telephony haven't changed since pretty much their inception (or at least they've kept an amazing amount of backwards compatibility).
Given that it's hooked to a modern Asterisk system (which in turn is hooked to the internet), this is older than that 1962 modem (circa 1940, I believe). Having a 1940's phone connected to VOIP is quite a kick...
What do I win?
Can they do that? Add to my list of mental illnesses after the fact???
Wasn't there a story recently about how mission control managed to upload the whole freakin' Spiderman movie lately for the astronauts? How would uploading a codec or VLC be harder than that?
I'm also surprised they would bring DVD's. Why bring several clunky physical media, when the movies could have been pre-copied to the hard drives (ripped, that is). I rip movies from legal DVD's to the hard drive when I go on a mere business trip; one would think when you're going on the damn shuttle you pack even lighter...
Just seems very strange.
Most people's light switches are further than the TV, and they'd be outraged to have to turn the tv on/off without a remote... I think remote control of lights and other home functions is a natural evolution that we will see become more and more commonplace. Possibly managed by a computer, but more likely interfaced through a dedicated remote-control device. (These already exist of course, just will probably become more of a standard thing.)
Isn't this type of study best suited for a properly designed and executed "focus group." It's surely the more appropriate way to do user testing.
Experimenting with web site delays on live users is akin to inappropriately releasing an operating system before it's ready for prime time, and letting the users suffer by finding and reporting the bugs. Oh, wait...
(Also, I'm sure MS has enough sections to their web properties, and enough traffic, and enough existing delays, that they could analyze their existing data to determine where delays are distracting or frustrating users.)
Hmmm, as another posted pointed out, there is an add-on for that...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
Must try it out.
I tend to browse, finding interesting links, always opening them in the background, and getting to them when I finish the current article.
I'm known as a bit of a tab hog, in general.
Now and then, I'll split things into two windows, to organize my browsing. This is effectively trying to put a bit of "hierarchy" the browsing experience.
I believe a "power browser user" basically does do a bit of a hierarchical thing when browsing, expanding topics of interest as they see fit. To have a single tab bar be able to handle a bit more structure to my browsing experience would really be killer, to me.
Opera (I think) does have the option of opening new tabs *next* to the current tab, rather than at the end, which kind of groups things together a bit better, but not well enough for my tastes.
To have the browser be able to open new tabs, but optionally in "sub-trees" where I choose, and maybe expand/collapse those subtrees might be pretty compelling (although possibly too confusing for the casual user?)
In any case, I think we need *some* tree-like tab behaviour.
When I first checked out Xen, I was kind of hopeful that it could achieve that sort of thing already. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have a "fast direct console" for letting a windows Virtual Machine perform at full speed for interactive purposes. Accessing a Windows VM via VNC or RDC doesn't exactly allow one to play the latest games (or even do more mundant work interactively for regular use).
Is anybody working on this? It seems like it would be a great addition. I'd love to have my required Windows machine (for kids games, PVR, etc.) actually virtualized with a Linux wrapper outside of it.
As it stands, I run my Asterisk system under CoLinux on Windows; I'd love to turn that inside out, having Linux be in control, with windows Virtualized; but the fast access to the video is required by my Windows needs, and not my Linux needs, so Windows as the supervising OS is my only option, ugh.