Precisely my friend. Hence we have grandmothers getting frisked at airports for darning needles, because they don't want to appear to be discriminating. Instead of focussing on young Middle Eastern men who are the obvious and most likely suspects, they do this idiotic random frisking. We all understand the evils of profiling but do we want to live with the alternatives?
Re:Stop nit-picking and just enjoy the damn film
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I loved the movie and I still like to watch the DVD occasionally. Some great special effects, e.g. the lightning bolts and some of the other "mutant powers".
However, the fight scenes were to laugh. Aside from Wolverine's fight sequences, which seemed well thought out and genuine, the X-men come across as a bunch of amateurs who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. In the Storm vs. Toad scene, she just stands there and gets her clock cleaned. The mighty Storm, huh? I guess the Professor should teach less physics and more martial arts at his academy.
On the other hand, come to think of it, one of the biggest goofs in the movie was Magneto's assertion that a lightning bolt to the copper structure in the Statue would be dangerous, when in fact it would have safely been conducted away. Maybe Magneto needs to take some of X's physics classes.
Er... try hitting ctrl-G switches to user style sheet This is possibly the best feature in Opera. Renders nearly unreadable pages readable, e.g. gray text on black, microscopic type size, lack of word wrapping. ctrl-G fixes it all.
Moz and IE don't have this feature as far as I can tell.
It's free if you don't mind the built-in banner ad. I paid for the Linux version because I mind the banner ad and, at the time, it was the best browser I could find for linux.
Mozilla is catching up, but I still find it big and sluggish by comparison. I love the convenience of Opera's keyboard shortcuts, and its tabbed browser windows are much more elegant and natural to use than Mozilla's.
Why try to land on the moon? All that trouble and money to get three guys up there, only two of whom could actually walk around on the surface. And then abandon all the equipment. All they accomplished was to litter the moon.
Why try to build smaller and faster chips? Computers seem plenty fast enough. My word processor never lags behind my typing. It used to, with my old Commodore, though even then it wasn't a big deal.
Why do basic research? It doesn't seem useful. They should focus on curing diseases instead. All that wasted tax money you know.
Why meet new people? I already know all the people I need to. What can knowing more people possibly accomplish?
Why do libraries need funding? I don't use libraries and I don't see the point of them either. That money should be used for something more directly useful such as filling potholes on the streets I drive on.
Well, you're proposing to do something really hard, i.e. to somehow recognize trolls among legitimate messages, which sounds nearly impossible, and yet you balk at doing something extremely easy, i.e. cutting and pasting messages into an editor for a few days or weeks. You'd be doing the world a huge service if you could solve the troll/spam problem; go for it. Don't let lack of direct access to a database slow you down.
Microsoft's professionals with their fat wallets haven't been able to stave off linux yet. They now (publicly) call it their number one threat, in fact.
I don't think sales figures are a useful metric in this situation; MS, for all their hubris, is a very forward thinking company and they are looking ahead 7-10 years and seeing a world of linux servers.
It's a simple problem. They are a sales driven concern and Linux is free. Whether or not some of the distro companies will be around in a few years, Linux will surely continue to develop, and it will keep eating into MS's soft underbelly like the cancer that they say it is!
The poster to whom you are replying was joking, methinks. It's sometimes cathartic to fantasize doing bad things to evil people, even if in real life of course you need to adhere to ethical and legal norms. Spam is very, very frustrating and the selfish, short-sighted acts of a few unethical people have almost ruined the internet.
So, my friend, maybe you need to lighten up, develop a sense of humor, and stop calling others ignorami just because you don't understand them.
What a great business model! Just put the no-spam rules in fine print (arial 3 point) at the end of the user Agreement, institute a nice, fat $1000 fine and forfeit all prepaid fees, and let'er rip. Five times a day? I'd retire on that, no problem.
Re:about time..The Day Z-D Journalism Died
on
Ziff Davis Teeters
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, and their treatment of WinCE/PocketPC versus Palm has been similar. Back when WinCE handhelds were new, PC Mag touted their "familiar" Windows-like interface as this great advantage, despite being double the price and half the productivity power of a Palm. They simply bet with the projected winner instead of publishing an objective and truthful comparison. Feh!
I wish there were a driver for my SIIG flashcard reader. SIIG told me they had no plans to support Linux. USB 2.0 is all very well but manufacturers still need to have a little openmindedness.
You make a few good points but some of this sounds a bit paranoid.
> So of course Microsoft would like things to quiet down right > now. It's because they've already set the traps that they hope will > capture Linux and the Internet.
So far, so good.
> These traps include: > > -.Net
.NET is good technology. Look, if someone else had invented it, let's say Sun or IBM, would people be so upset about it? It's going to make web services easier to implement. Let J2EE have a little competition and we'll all benefit.
> - Palladium
The only credible benefit of Palladium to the consumer is spam blocking. Digital rights management is usually consumer-hostile and tends to be defeated. This one has little chance of success; too big brother-ish. Keep your congress-peops informed of your opinions. Meanwhile, there's a couple of products out that already do spam blocking in a similar way (ChoiceMail, Mail Washer), and more are coming.
> - Windows Media protocols over the Internet
WMP is a pretty good format. Let them pour money into improving this important technology, and we'll all benefit. Anyway, with crossover I can now run Windows Media in Linux, which is one less reason to run Windows--how does that help Microsoft? Remember, the media player is a free download.
> - Palladium support for Apache
As above.
> - MS Office lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
As above--it's a lock-in, yes, but it's an unlocking of the operating system. You don't need Windows to do "real" Office. However, this is almost a red herring because Star/Open Office, Abi Word, etc. have gotten so good. Anyway, the research to improve Crossover/Wine has a great side effect; it makes more Win32 binaries run properly in Linux.
> - ActiveX lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
Hmm. For online banking it's handy but best is to scream at the bank, as a customer, and demand platform independent banking or you'll move your accounts elsewhere. Money talks. However, as above, it's a liberation of the OS.
> -.Net support (lock-in) in Qt > - ActiveX support (lock-in) in Konqueror > - Windows Media lock-in on Linux (mplayer)
Understand your point but this stuff is redundant.
> - Hardware partnership with AMD (kept API details secret, making Linux unstable) > - Hardware partnership with NVidia (closed source driver tied into Linux kernel) > - Hardware lock-in through NVidia (their new graphics language compiler)
Don't know anything about these. Tying a BIOS chipset to a particular OS sounds dangerous and probably unworkable anyway. If it's that specific and that secret, it'll certainly break something out there. Dongles failed a long time ago and any attempt to revive them is a waste of time.
I'm more optimistic than you, though I agree with your concerns. Anyway my strategy is to keep pushing for Linux wherever I work and certainly in my home office. But, if someone builds a better widget well, you know it's still a market system; let the best product win.
even easier; just create a procmail filter to catch multiple garbage characters, e.g.
# look for 6 upper ascii [probably Asian] characters # this searches for characters excluding space through tilde and tab) :0 B: * [^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ] ${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
This has cut my Asian language spam down to zero. It also caught email from a mailing list where one of the posters was a Russian guy with some foreign text in his sig, so I had to add it to my "Live" list.
The question is, why on earth would Microsoft be opposed to this? It expands their empire by letting non-Windows users take advantage of the WMP standard, and on top of that someone else did all the hard work for them.
If MS were serious about promoting their technologies as standards, they would be glad to see them ported to other platforms. If anything, setting WMP loose on unix platforms may help bury Real Media.
I just don't get it, but then lawyers work in mysterious ways.
Perhaps a rep as a game device would hurt Palm, but there are certainly good uses for that 4-way rocker switch beyond games. For example:
Spreadsheets--at last, we have a way to navigate intuitively, up-down as well as left-right.
Image display--obvious use is navigating and selecting thumbnails
Options and Preferences--navigating tabs and operating various kinds of controls.
Gosh I'm too tired to think this morning but probably there are hundreds of other potential applications. Overall this seems like a positive development that adheres more or less to the K.I.S.S. philosophy.
Don't forget the Handera, a Palm compatible that has the virtual graffiti area since at least a year ago, as well as a few other tasty features. I can't understand why Palm doesn't copy this feature; it's so convenient, and it works as well as the silk screen approach.
There are still a lot of organizations using old Netscape 4.x browsers. For example my wife's employer, a non-profit refugee agency, runs Netscape 4.7x browsers on Windows 95 machines (plus a few Win98 boxes). They neither know nor care about the standards wars; they simply use what they're used to and they don't want to spend a lot of time retraining their staff, converting bookmarks, etc. Not that these are hard things to do necessarily, but it's simply not on their agenda; they're too busy doing their jobs and staying afloat. I suspect a lot of non-technical organizations think pretty much the same way.
Most sites behave correctly with NS 4.7x browsers, though a few will indeed specify IE 5.x. As for those sites which simply won't work with anything but IE, we either complain vociferously or boycott, or both.
For what it's worth, I have found NS 4.7x on Linux to be the reference browser when all others fail to render a site correctly. If Microsoft came out with IE for Linux, I'd gladly download it and use it for a reference browser, but my main tool remains Opera, the queen of browsers.;-) -Terry
Wow. Lighten up a little, why don't you? Is this jealousy, or what?
So, Rowling's books are not literature, eh? What is your definition of "real literature"? (Please include lots of expletives, to prove your own intellectual superiority here. Oh yes, and be sure to use the word "philisophical" again--it will certainly bolster your arguments!)
- video telephony -- you will be able to call people on your PC phone and talk with real time motion video. Fax/voicemail/email will all be in one inbox. No need for a conventional POTS landline anymore.
- movies and "internet TV" -- we already have internet radio, this is the next logical step. Goodbye Blockbusters. You can watch movies on demand; what a great business model that would be--no tapes/discs to return, no deposits; just pay $2 for 48 hour access to your favorite movies.
- faster downloads. This would encourage, for better or worse, more resource-heavy web sites. Probably we'd end up with a dichotomy where almost every major location would have a high and low bandwidth version. High bandwidth would have video, high resolution graphics, interactive audio, perhaps speech recognition for navigation, etc. (well speech recog could be a local thing but if you just build it in to your site via a java applet or something people won't need to install viavoice or whatever)
- synergy -- you can work from home, have real time high quality video conferencing to multiple locations.
- virtual applications -- you won't need heavy duty office software installed at home; you can do practically everything over the network, and your home terminal can be a slimmed down, thin client. How this pans out economically is another question; software rental is an icky concept, but the capability will be there.
this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I agree with you however that fixed IP will be useful in the future; maybe with Internet2? Cheers, Terry
OK. Suppose you walk into a teleportation chamber, it scans you completely and creates the identical copy at the destination. Then, it destroys the original you, to achieve the effect of "teleporting". That's what I don't want.
Philosophically it doesn't matter to the rest of the universe what entity emerges from the destination chamber as long as it's a perfect copy of the original. However, it's still murder.
You can go; I'll take the bus.
I'm not getting in one of those things
on
Laser Beam Teleported
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Suppose they get this working with matter. Then it's just a matter of time before humans would walk into a chamber and be rematerialized somewhere else. The question is, who walks out of the destination chamber? Is it me or is it a reconstructed "me" with a different awareness, while the original "me" was destroyed? Even if it's a perfect copy, it's not worth the risk.
- Instant replay: probably a no-brainer (so to speak); add some memory and TIVO-type controls to the belt pack.
- Human camera: throw away your still and video cameras. You will never need them again. Your vacations will be completely documented, as will everything else you do. Hmm; some things you might want to be able to delete, though.
- zoom (optical and digital): as you described.
- wireless capability: you could be a real time eyewitness reporter, or a human webcam.
- filters: cut the brightness factor on a sunny day
- night vision: add infrared capability. You'll see better than "sighted" people 24 hours a day. If you live alone, you'll never need lights in your home and can save on the electricity..
- Direct PC interface: throw away your CRT/LCD screens; you can just jack straight into your computer's video output. I wonder if 3D capability is possible.
- Remote sight: using a wireless connection, you could instantly cut over to cameras installed in your house to check on your kids, etc. You could have a remote control system to turn the camera's focus in any direction as you move your head or with a joystick. This would be handy for remote conferencing too.
I see lots of growth in Web services and entertainment.
Thanks for your thoughtful posting. I'm curious whether you mean you are seeing lots of growth now, or you simply mean you are predicting growth. I have not seen much growth yet. Of course, it depends how you define web services, but I'm talking about opening up a company's data to its customers via services written using serverside J2EE or.NET.
There's certainly a lot of interest in web services, and some very large companies are promoting it as the next big thing, but I wonder how much of that interest has been realized in terms of broad based investments by customers. According to the Gartner Group, by the year 2004 Web services will be the primary method of delivering corporate software solutions. That's a pretty bold statement.
Regarding your job interview advice, your advice is pretty sound, except: #5 -...Don't show up in a suit unless it's an executive position
That's possibly true in certain places but it's a very bad rule of thumb. Better to always wear your best suit. Do you really want to work at a place where people look down on you for being well dressed? How silly.
#6 - Base the business on the numbers and the market, not the Herman Miller chairs
You don't always know where the furniture came from; my brother's medical clinic has these $5000 leather sofas that he got for like $300 each--slight damage in delivery or some such, and he's got an eye for bargains. Personally I'd be put off if they didn't have decent ergonomic chairs and keyboard holders; it's such a good investment. I might still take the job and then lobby for (or just bring in my own) better equipment, but nonetheless it's not a good sign.
#7 - Avoid the startup
Well if we all did this, what a boring world it would be. Startups are a great opportunity to learn all about business, which the typical tech person doesn't necessarily get working at a larger company. Plus, you get to do more stuff, e.g. if you're a database programmer you might also be involved in installing and admin'ing the databases until the company got big enough to hire a dba. It's all in what the individual is seeking, and the original question was about trends to jump on, not how to find a stable boring position.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely my friend. Hence we have grandmothers getting frisked at airports for
darning needles, because they don't want to appear to be discriminating. Instead of focussing on
young Middle Eastern men who are the obvious and most likely suspects,
they do this idiotic random frisking.
We all understand the evils of profiling but do we want to
live with the alternatives?
I loved the movie and I still like to watch the DVD occasionally. Some great special effects, e.g. the lightning bolts and some of the other "mutant powers".
However, the fight scenes were to laugh. Aside from Wolverine's fight sequences, which seemed well thought out and genuine, the X-men come across as a bunch of amateurs who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. In the Storm vs. Toad scene, she just stands there and gets her clock cleaned. The mighty Storm, huh? I guess the Professor should teach less physics and more martial arts at his academy.
On the other hand, come to think of it, one of the biggest goofs in the movie was Magneto's assertion that a lightning bolt to the copper structure in the Statue would be dangerous, when in fact it would have safely been conducted away. Maybe Magneto needs to take some of X's physics classes.
Er... try hitting ctrl-G
switches to user style sheet
This is possibly the best feature in Opera.
Renders nearly unreadable pages readable, e.g. gray text on black, microscopic type size, lack of word wrapping. ctrl-G fixes it all.
Moz and IE don't have this feature as far as I can tell.
It's free if you don't mind the built-in banner ad.
I paid for the Linux version because I mind the banner ad and, at the time, it was the best browser I could find for linux.
Mozilla is catching up, but I still find it big and sluggish by comparison. I love the convenience of Opera's keyboard shortcuts, and its tabbed browser windows are much more elegant and natural to use than Mozilla's.
even simpler than that!
F12 r --> disables popups
F12 w --> enables popups
It's an instinctive subsecond keystroke for me now.
Why try to land on the moon? All that trouble and money to get three guys up there, only two of whom could actually walk around on the surface. And then abandon all the equipment. All they accomplished was to litter the moon.
Why try to build smaller and faster chips? Computers seem plenty fast enough. My word processor never lags behind my typing. It used to, with my old Commodore, though even then it wasn't a big deal.
Why do basic research? It doesn't seem useful. They should focus on curing diseases instead. All that wasted tax money you know.
Why meet new people? I already know all the people I need to. What can knowing more people possibly accomplish?
Why do libraries need funding? I don't use libraries and I don't see the point of them either. That money should be used for something more directly useful such as filling potholes on the streets I drive on.
Etc. You get the idea.
Well, you're proposing to do something really hard, i.e. to somehow
recognize trolls among legitimate messages, which sounds nearly
impossible, and yet you balk at doing something extremely easy,
i.e. cutting and pasting messages into an editor for a few days or
weeks. You'd be doing the world a huge service if you could solve the
troll/spam problem; go for it. Don't let lack of direct access to a
database slow you down.
Gee, you're welcome!
Microsoft's professionals with their fat wallets haven't been able to stave off linux yet. They now (publicly) call it their number one threat, in fact.
I don't think sales figures are a useful metric in this situation; MS, for all their hubris, is a very forward thinking company and they are looking ahead 7-10 years and seeing a world of linux servers.
It's a simple problem. They are a sales driven concern and Linux is free. Whether or not some of the distro companies will be around in a few years, Linux will surely continue to develop, and it will keep eating into MS's soft underbelly like the cancer that they say it is!
-Yog
The poster to whom you are replying was joking, methinks. It's sometimes cathartic to fantasize doing bad things to evil people, even if in real life of course you need to adhere to ethical and legal norms. Spam is very, very frustrating and the selfish, short-sighted acts of a few unethical people have almost ruined the internet.
So, my friend, maybe you need to lighten up, develop a sense of humor, and stop calling others ignorami just because you don't understand them.
>...we have 9 legally retarded persons on death row!
Uh, is it possible to be illegally retarded?
What a great business model! Just put the no-spam rules in fine print (arial 3 point) at the end of the user Agreement, institute a nice, fat $1000 fine and forfeit all prepaid fees, and let'er rip. Five times a day? I'd retire on that, no problem.
Yes, and their treatment of WinCE/PocketPC versus Palm has been similar. Back when WinCE handhelds were new, PC Mag touted their "familiar" Windows-like interface as this great advantage, despite being double the price and half the productivity power of a Palm. They simply bet with the projected winner instead of publishing an objective and truthful comparison. Feh!
I wish there were a driver for my SIIG flashcard reader. SIIG told me they had no plans to support Linux. USB 2.0 is all very well but manufacturers still need to have a little openmindedness.
You make a few good points but some of this sounds a bit paranoid.
.Net
.NET is good technology. Look, if someone else had invented it, let's say Sun
.Net support (lock-in) in Qt
> So of course Microsoft would like things to quiet down right
> now. It's because they've already set the traps that they hope will
> capture Linux and the Internet.
So far, so good.
> These traps include:
>
> -
or IBM, would people be so upset about it? It's going to make web services
easier to implement. Let J2EE have a little competition and we'll all benefit.
> - Palladium
The only credible benefit of Palladium to the consumer is spam blocking.
Digital rights management is usually consumer-hostile and tends to be defeated.
This one has little chance of success; too big brother-ish. Keep your
congress-peops informed of your opinions. Meanwhile, there's a couple of
products out that already do spam blocking in a similar way
(ChoiceMail, Mail Washer), and more are coming.
> - Windows Media protocols over the Internet
WMP is a pretty good format. Let them pour money into improving this important
technology, and we'll all benefit. Anyway, with crossover I can now run
Windows Media in Linux, which is one less reason to run Windows--how does that
help Microsoft? Remember, the media player is a free download.
> - Palladium support for Apache
As above.
> - MS Office lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
As above--it's a lock-in, yes, but it's an unlocking of the operating system.
You don't need Windows to do "real" Office. However, this is almost a red
herring because Star/Open Office, Abi Word, etc. have gotten so good. Anyway,
the research to improve Crossover/Wine has a great side effect; it makes more
Win32 binaries run properly in Linux.
> - ActiveX lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
Hmm. For online banking it's handy but best is to scream at the bank, as a
customer, and demand platform independent banking or you'll move your accounts
elsewhere. Money talks. However, as above, it's a liberation of the OS.
> -
> - ActiveX support (lock-in) in Konqueror
> - Windows Media lock-in on Linux (mplayer)
Understand your point but this stuff is redundant.
> - Hardware partnership with AMD (kept API details secret, making Linux unstable)
> - Hardware partnership with NVidia (closed source driver tied into Linux kernel)
> - Hardware lock-in through NVidia (their new graphics language compiler)
Don't know anything about these. Tying a BIOS chipset to a particular OS
sounds dangerous and probably unworkable anyway. If it's that specific and
that secret, it'll certainly break something out there. Dongles failed a long
time ago and any attempt to revive them is a waste of time.
> - Attempted government-mandated IP-security-hardware lock-in
Palladium, in other words.
I'm more optimistic than you, though I agree with your concerns. Anyway my
strategy is to keep pushing for Linux wherever I work and certainly in my home
office. But, if someone builds a better widget well, you know it's still a market system; let the best product win.
Terry
even easier; just create a procmail filter to catch multiple garbage characters, e.g.
:0 B:
# look for 6 upper ascii [probably Asian] characters
# this searches for characters excluding space through tilde and tab)
* [^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ]
${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
This has cut my Asian language spam down to zero. It also caught email from a mailing list where one of the posters was a Russian guy with some foreign text in his sig, so I had to add it to my "Live" list.
The question is, why on earth would Microsoft be opposed to this? It expands their empire by letting non-Windows users take advantage of the WMP standard, and on top of that someone else did all the hard work for them.
If MS were serious about promoting their technologies as standards, they would be glad to see them ported to other platforms. If anything, setting WMP loose on unix platforms may help bury Real Media.
I just don't get it, but then lawyers work in mysterious ways.
Perhaps a rep as a game device would hurt Palm, but there are certainly good uses for that 4-way rocker switch beyond games. For example:
Spreadsheets--at last, we have a way to navigate intuitively, up-down as well as left-right.
Image display--obvious use is navigating and selecting thumbnails
Options and Preferences--navigating tabs and operating various kinds of controls.
Gosh I'm too tired to think this morning but probably there are hundreds of other potential applications. Overall this seems like a positive development that adheres more or less to the K.I.S.S. philosophy.
Don't forget the Handera, a Palm compatible that has the virtual graffiti area since at least a year ago, as well as a few other tasty features. I can't understand why Palm doesn't copy this feature; it's so convenient, and it works as well as the silk screen approach.
;-)
Still, the NR70/V looks pretty cool.
There are still a lot of organizations using old Netscape 4.x browsers. For example my wife's employer, a non-profit refugee agency, runs Netscape 4.7x browsers on Windows 95 machines (plus a few Win98 boxes). They neither know nor care about the standards wars; they simply use what they're used to and they don't want to spend a lot of time retraining their staff, converting bookmarks, etc. Not that these are hard things to do necessarily, but it's simply not on their agenda; they're too busy doing their jobs and staying afloat. I suspect a lot of non-technical organizations think pretty much the same way.
;-)
Most sites behave correctly with NS 4.7x browsers, though a few will indeed specify IE 5.x. As for those sites which simply won't work with anything but IE, we either complain vociferously or boycott, or both.
For what it's worth, I have found NS 4.7x on Linux to be the reference browser when all others fail to render a site correctly. If Microsoft came out with IE for Linux, I'd gladly download it and use it for a reference browser, but my main tool remains Opera, the queen of browsers.
-Terry
Wow. Lighten up a little, why don't you? Is this jealousy, or what?
So, Rowling's books are not literature, eh? What is your definition of "real literature"? (Please include lots of expletives, to prove your own intellectual superiority here. Oh yes, and be sure to use the word "philisophical" again--it will certainly bolster your arguments!)
I can think of a few things:
- video telephony -- you will be able to call people on your PC phone and talk with real time motion video. Fax/voicemail/email will all be in one inbox. No need for a conventional POTS landline anymore.
- movies and "internet TV" -- we already have internet radio, this is the next logical step. Goodbye Blockbusters. You can watch movies on demand; what a great business model that would be--no tapes/discs to return, no deposits; just pay $2 for 48 hour access to your favorite movies.
- faster downloads. This would encourage, for better or worse, more resource-heavy web sites. Probably we'd end up with a dichotomy where almost every major location would have a high and low bandwidth version. High bandwidth would have video, high resolution graphics, interactive audio, perhaps speech recognition for navigation, etc. (well speech recog could be a local thing but if you just build it in to your site via a java applet or something people won't need to install viavoice or whatever)
- synergy -- you can work from home, have real time high quality video conferencing to multiple locations.
- virtual applications -- you won't need heavy duty office software installed at home; you can do practically everything over the network, and your home terminal can be a slimmed down, thin client. How this pans out economically is another question; software rental is an icky concept, but the capability will be there.
this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. I agree with you however that fixed IP will be useful in the future; maybe with Internet2?
Cheers,
Terry
OK. Suppose you walk into a teleportation chamber, it scans you completely and creates the identical copy at the destination. Then, it destroys the original you, to achieve the effect of "teleporting". That's what I don't want.
Philosophically it doesn't matter to the rest of the universe what entity emerges from the destination chamber as long as it's a perfect copy of the original. However, it's still murder.
You can go; I'll take the bus.
Suppose they get this working with matter. Then it's just a matter of time before humans would walk into a chamber and be rematerialized somewhere else. The question is, who walks out of the destination chamber? Is it me or is it a reconstructed "me" with a different awareness, while the original "me" was destroyed? Even if it's a perfect copy, it's not worth the risk.
The sky's the limit on capabilities.
- Instant replay: probably a no-brainer (so to speak); add some memory and TIVO-type controls to the belt pack.
- Human camera: throw away your still and video cameras. You will never need them again. Your vacations will be completely documented, as will everything else you do. Hmm; some things you might want to be able to delete, though.
- zoom (optical and digital): as you described.
- wireless capability: you could be a real time eyewitness reporter, or a human webcam.
- filters: cut the brightness factor on a sunny day
- night vision: add infrared capability. You'll see better than "sighted" people 24 hours a day. If you live alone, you'll never need lights in your home and can save on the electricity..
- Direct PC interface: throw away your CRT/LCD screens; you can just jack straight into your computer's video output. I wonder if 3D capability is possible.
- Remote sight: using a wireless connection, you could instantly cut over to cameras installed in your house to check on your kids, etc. You could have a remote control system to turn the camera's focus in any direction as you move your head or with a joystick. This would be handy for remote conferencing too.
I see lots of growth in Web services and entertainment.
.NET.
...Don't show up in a suit unless it's an executive position
Thanks for your thoughtful posting. I'm curious whether you mean you are seeing lots of growth now, or you simply mean you are predicting growth. I have not seen much growth yet. Of course, it depends how you define web services, but I'm talking about opening up a company's data to its customers via services written using serverside J2EE or
There's certainly a lot of interest in web services, and some very large companies are promoting it as the next big thing, but I wonder how much of that interest has been realized in terms of broad based investments by customers. According to the Gartner Group, by the year 2004 Web services will be the primary method of delivering corporate software solutions. That's a pretty bold statement.
Regarding your job interview advice, your advice is pretty sound, except:
#5 -
That's possibly true in certain places but it's a very bad rule of thumb. Better to always wear your best suit. Do you really want to work at a place where people look down on you for being well dressed? How silly.
#6 - Base the business on the numbers and the market, not the Herman Miller chairs
You don't always know where the furniture came from; my brother's medical clinic has these $5000 leather sofas that he got for like $300 each--slight damage in delivery or some such, and he's got an eye for bargains. Personally I'd be put off if they didn't have decent ergonomic chairs and keyboard holders; it's such a good investment. I might still take the job and then lobby for (or just bring in my own) better equipment, but nonetheless it's not a good sign.
#7 - Avoid the startup
Well if we all did this, what a boring world it would be. Startups are a great opportunity to learn all about business, which the typical tech person doesn't necessarily get working at a larger company. Plus, you get to do more stuff, e.g. if you're a database programmer you might also be involved in installing and admin'ing the databases until the company got big enough to hire a dba. It's all in what the individual is seeking, and the original question was about trends to jump on, not how to find a stable boring position.
-Terry