I did. I'm now contemplating a wireless eee cluster. Imagine, a beowulf cluster of tiny computers interconnected via bluetooth or 802.11. I'll get an eeePC, an eeeKeyboard, an eeeMouse, an eeeMonitor, maybe even an eeePrinter, and for the hour of battery life that I get out of them, I'll have a mobile cloud with the processing power of a 4-core workstation powered by Atom! Well, the Intel Atom, not U-238. But still, that's pretty cool!
Jobs is undoubtedly a huge part of Apple's success. Apple would not be where it is today if not for Steve Jobs vision and leadership. He is a god among CEOs and computer geeks.
Apple is a good company and should be able to find their way after Jobs leaves, if they've done what they need to do. If they haven't, then Jobs himself has failed to do what he needs to do to ensure the health of his company.
If the Macworld keynote 09 was lackluster, it could just be because they don't have anything huge that they've been working on. Apple doesn't have to revolutionize the entire world every single year in order to stay in business or to grow. They have a great foundation, and a very mature, established product in OS X. Their iTunes Music Store is doing well. iPhone has been very successful, despite the problems and criticism.
Some keynotes, they've done little more than announce incremental hardware revisions for their products. This could just be one of those times.
Apple does have holes in their product line that they could fill if they wanted -- a Macbook tablet, a modular, expandable Mac midtower that isn't as expensive as a Pro, but more powerful than iMac. A fuller product line for the Enterprise.
They haven't needed to fill those holes thus far to remain profitable, and some have argued that by not filling those holes, it's enabled them to remain profitable. They've picked their battles and done very well within the niches they seek to own.
Just because they don't generate iPhone-level buzz every single year doesn't mean that Apple's suddenly in crisis, has lost its way, or is entering a "post-Jobs era" of mediocrity.
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Well, when I'm talking about "programming" using a natural language text interface, I don't mean what we currently think of as programming, I just mean programming in the sense of "giving a computer instructions to execute" -- basically, how they portray in Star Trek, where Kirk says "Computer: Do..." and the computer figures out what Kirk means by that, how to do it, and does it.
It's very unrealistic based on how we understand computers today, of course, but perhaps a super-advanced computer could be developed that could behave this way.
I suppose the argument could be made that Kirk interacting with the computer in this way is merely using the computer, not programming it. But I consider it to be programming at least in the sense that usually the computer is doing something it was not designed for to address some ad hoc situation that came up in the course of the episode.
Of course, in Star Trek they also do a fair amount of fiddling with buttons and dials and such, so to me the voice interface that Kirk uses on the bridge is more a dramatic device than a well thought out concept for a futuristic interface. But it's still a dream for many to one day be able to say things to their computer in a natural language and have it be able to interpret and execute successfully some appropriate actions.
Right. Kurzweil thinks they're awesome, in part I believe because he sees it as an incremental stepping stone to developing machines that think. In real life, users get tired after talking for a long time. Imagine how hoarse you'd be if you had to talk to a computer all day long in order to dictate a Word document, launch apps, navigate the interface, etc.
Pointers and keyboards are far more efficient for such tasks. Are there tasks for which a voice interface would be better suited? Perhaps, but I don't think we've seen the applications developed yet that work better with voice than by manual input. Maybe voice-dialing for your cell phone? Nothing else springs to mind.
Would having a conversation with a computer that was capable of understanding conversational english be awesome? I imagine it would be. But what would we talk about? What would I do with such a computer that I couldn't do with my current PC?
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. but that's nowhere near being on the horizon yet, and I don't know that we'll ever get there, because where's the demand for the intermediary steps that would lead us there, and what would those intermediary steps even be??
Kurzweil has a really good handle on where hardware will be, but not software. What I believe this means is that drives the creation of software is not how quickly it can be developed, but whether there's demand for it.
Demand and innovation are a lot trickier to predict than advances in speed and minitiaturization of electronics hardware, so what we envisioned we thought our future selves might want in 2009 isn't actually quite what it turns out we actually wanted.
Kurzweil thinks speech interface is where it's at, but the world gives us Twitter and Facebook.
Kurzweil wants to use technology to make us immortal or give rise to machines that supercede humankind and take the next evolutionary step as a technological rather than biological one. Meanwhile, people want to make money, get laid, watch stupid video clips, listen to music, and act like their opinion is the best thing there's ever been.
So... Where'll we be in the future? Watch Idiocracy.
If Apple's doomed the minute Jobs is no longer running the helm, you might as well start running like hell as far away as you can from Apple right now. Jobs is a mortal, and will not be around forever. Find a company or product that will not immediately collapse when its founder dies or retires.
Do you *really* want to be running on something with a future that uncertain? I for one don't believe that Apple's on that shakey ground, but for those who do believe that, if they're still running on Apple, they're crazy.
Innovation does not only service existing markets, it creates new ones, too. Think about Nintendo (Wii) and Apple (iPhone) for instance, who consistently create new markets that weren't there before. In a stagnating market, innovation is more important than ever.
Agreed. To put it another way, problems require solutions. Solutions sometimes require innovation.
We're facing problems now where the solutions we've been using aren't cutting it, and are perhaps even the cause of the problems. Therefore, I expect to see a LOT of innovation in the next few years.
How in the hell does Popeye still pull in $2.9 BILLION dollars a year? That's amazing. I never would have thought they'd rake in that much still. Can you imagine how much they must have been losing to piracy?
Who is still such a big popeye fan after all these years? What are Popeye's key demographics?
Training is usually neglected or assumed to happen on the user's initiative.
I followed the career path that I did (from desktop publishing to IT user support to IT server admin to application developer) because I did take initiative.
Back when I was doing user support, I found that my workload lessened considerably when I took the time to explain to the user what caused the problem that they called me about, and how to fix that problem in the future if it happened again.
I learned to make sure that I wasn't conveying to the user that I was bossing them around or telling them to do my job for me, but that I was empowering them to work around simple problems more expediently and be more effective at doing their job. I'd even create documentation for processes to follow and hand them to the user, to save me the repetitive explanations so that I could devote my time to learning new things and keeping ahead of the curve.
Probably 90% of the users appreciated this a great deal, and loved that I took the time to explain things to them in a way they could understand and that they found useful. A good 80% of the time, back in the early days when I wasn't much more knowledgeable than the average person, just simply more comfortable navigating a GUI and right-clicking on everything to figure out what you could do, when someone would call me looking for help with something, I had no idea how to fix their problem, and often had never even used the program they were struggling with, but was able to figure things out in about 5 minutes by actually reading the interface and applying a little common sense, logic, and trial-error until I got it to work. Occasionally the Help menu or the manual even helped.
At some point, though, with users, I also learned that it was prudent at times to identify the issue as not a technical problem, but a training problem. I could have gone into training users to do basic, simple things in common applications that everyone uses, and made pretty decent money that way... but I would have been bored out of my mind and frustrated that regular people like me couldn't figure out the same stuff that I'd been able to figure out on my own.
I remember one lady I tried to help, an author who was trying to write a book in MS Word '97, and had no idea about formatting tools. Everything was spaces instead of tabs, with a hard return at the end of every line, looked fine to her on screen, but was completely FUBAR when printed. She had a 200+ page manuscript written out this way, and wanted me to go in and fix everything.
This was when I was working computer services for Kinko's, and she was using one of the rental DIY PC's for $0.20/min but wanted me to do all the work for her when it wouldn't print out like she thought it would on our printer, which is something we would normally have charged $75/hr for as "custom computer work".
Allegedly, it printed fine on her home printer, so the problem HAD to be with our systems. I wasn't about to rework her entire manuscript unless she was willing to pay for the labor, but as a courtesy customer service favor, I offered to show her how to set up tabs and so forth, and tried to sell her on the free lesson I was offering by explaining that if she learned how to get the most out of her tools, she could be much more productive in writing.
She had zero interest in learning. To her, Word was a typewriter and should work exactly like the typewriters she was used to from 30 years ago. She actually told me she "didn't have time" to learn how to be more productive. Never mind that doing it the right way would have freed up her time by at least a factor of two, if not ten.
That's when I learned that some people just don't want to learn. It's not that she couldn't, it's not that she didn't have the time, she just wasn't willing to do it. She might have had a lot of knowledge about whatever she was writing about, but because she wasn't willing to invest in some other knowledge that she regarded as beneath her for som
Also, keep in mind that many people's ISPs are also content middle men: the cable company, the digital satellite tv company, even the phone company is packaging television packages these days. They all have a stake in preserving restricted pay-for-access to the content they're selling access to.
All the RIAA needs to do is send cox, comcast, and time-warner a graph showing the increase in bittorrent traffic and a corresponding decrease in pay-per-view and premium channel subscription, and they'll get the picture pretty quickly.
Good call, but in my region the economy sucks, and with real estate being in a huge depression I have no hope of relocating without taking a giant loss on my house.:/
It might still be worth it though, if I can find a really good job.
Yeah, well I don't even make $65k/year, and the building I work in now is a grey cinder block rectangle with peeling paint and a parking lot that resembles the surface of the moon. And for the last three years my company has given us a $25 gift card for our holiday bonus, I don't get any stock options, and our cafeteria is halfway decent at best.
With the above made up numbers, I can still hear our CFO saying "see, we should focus on Internet Explorer... everyone else doesn't even have 20% share! And, that 'Firefox' thing is going DOWN! "
I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.
It's too bad you can't fire that CFO if he can't see IE drop from 70% to 60% marketshare and think IE is dominant, *particularly* if developing to open standards enables you to hit 100% of the market. Barring browser-specific workarounds to address showstopper bugs where some browser doesn't follow w3c fully/correctly, no web development should be targeting any browser.
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
Indeed. I was raised with dogma-indoctrinating songs about that language. I can still remember one of them, "C is for Cookie. That's good enough for me."
To be fair, Steve Jobs is the guy who made all that possible.
We've seen what Apple is without him... bankrupt.
I keep hearing this, and it's total BS. Or if it's not total BS, then Apple is not much of a company at all.
If your enterprise's very life in the market is that dependent on one person being alive, your long term prospects are very poor. Jobs is mortal. If Apple the company can't continue to operate in the post-Jobs world, then they're screwed, and all of their customers should be looking for a company that can continue to operate effectively and bring new products to market and support existing products without having to depend on a biological single point of failure. If Jobs hasn't gotten Apple into shape to the point where they are capable of doing this, then Jobs hasn't done his job.
Actually, I wonder if this is exactly why the behavior of being a smart-ass has evolved in children. We need some way for young people to be able to know if an elder is mentally competent enough. If someone with dementia can't detect sarcasm, it stands to reason that by being a smart-ass, you can tell if they're still capable of making leadership decisions. If they are, then they'll smack you, if not, you put them out on an ice floe.
Agreed. I like to use a Mount Everest metaphor. Can no one go to Mount Everest until we build a wheelchair ramp up it? Or should we let those who are able to as far as they can?
We can make things accessible as much as possible, but with finite resources, sometimes you can only fund a trip to Everest for an able-bodied person, or you can make a few local buildings wheelchair accessible for the same money.
Where's the money better spent? Both are worthy causes.
How hard would it be for an enterprise to set up Wakeup on LAN on all PCs in the organization and a script set to trigger the startup of the machine 10 minutes before the employee is scheduled to show up?
Slashdot Mirror
I did. I'm now contemplating a wireless eee cluster. Imagine, a beowulf cluster of tiny computers interconnected via bluetooth or 802.11. I'll get an eeePC, an eeeKeyboard, an eeeMouse, an eeeMonitor, maybe even an eeePrinter, and for the hour of battery life that I get out of them, I'll have a mobile cloud with the processing power of a 4-core workstation powered by Atom! Well, the Intel Atom, not U-238. But still, that's pretty cool!
Jobs is undoubtedly a huge part of Apple's success. Apple would not be where it is today if not for Steve Jobs vision and leadership. He is a god among CEOs and computer geeks.
Apple is a good company and should be able to find their way after Jobs leaves, if they've done what they need to do. If they haven't, then Jobs himself has failed to do what he needs to do to ensure the health of his company.
If the Macworld keynote 09 was lackluster, it could just be because they don't have anything huge that they've been working on. Apple doesn't have to revolutionize the entire world every single year in order to stay in business or to grow. They have a great foundation, and a very mature, established product in OS X. Their iTunes Music Store is doing well. iPhone has been very successful, despite the problems and criticism.
Some keynotes, they've done little more than announce incremental hardware revisions for their products. This could just be one of those times.
Apple does have holes in their product line that they could fill if they wanted -- a Macbook tablet, a modular, expandable Mac midtower that isn't as expensive as a Pro, but more powerful than iMac. A fuller product line for the Enterprise.
They haven't needed to fill those holes thus far to remain profitable, and some have argued that by not filling those holes, it's enabled them to remain profitable. They've picked their battles and done very well within the niches they seek to own.
Just because they don't generate iPhone-level buzz every single year doesn't mean that Apple's suddenly in crisis, has lost its way, or is entering a "post-Jobs era" of mediocrity.
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.
Well, when I'm talking about "programming" using a natural language text interface, I don't mean what we currently think of as programming, I just mean programming in the sense of "giving a computer instructions to execute" -- basically, how they portray in Star Trek, where Kirk says "Computer: Do..." and the computer figures out what Kirk means by that, how to do it, and does it.
It's very unrealistic based on how we understand computers today, of course, but perhaps a super-advanced computer could be developed that could behave this way.
I suppose the argument could be made that Kirk interacting with the computer in this way is merely using the computer, not programming it. But I consider it to be programming at least in the sense that usually the computer is doing something it was not designed for to address some ad hoc situation that came up in the course of the episode.
Of course, in Star Trek they also do a fair amount of fiddling with buttons and dials and such, so to me the voice interface that Kirk uses on the bridge is more a dramatic device than a well thought out concept for a futuristic interface. But it's still a dream for many to one day be able to say things to their computer in a natural language and have it be able to interpret and execute successfully some appropriate actions.
Right. Kurzweil thinks they're awesome, in part I believe because he sees it as an incremental stepping stone to developing machines that think. In real life, users get tired after talking for a long time. Imagine how hoarse you'd be if you had to talk to a computer all day long in order to dictate a Word document, launch apps, navigate the interface, etc.
Pointers and keyboards are far more efficient for such tasks. Are there tasks for which a voice interface would be better suited? Perhaps, but I don't think we've seen the applications developed yet that work better with voice than by manual input. Maybe voice-dialing for your cell phone? Nothing else springs to mind.
Would having a conversation with a computer that was capable of understanding conversational english be awesome? I imagine it would be. But what would we talk about? What would I do with such a computer that I couldn't do with my current PC?
Probably a few things would be a lot easier (programming by telling the computer what to do in a natural language rather than having to write objects and procedures in a high-level computer language... Or perhaps gaming applications.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. but that's nowhere near being on the horizon yet, and I don't know that we'll ever get there, because where's the demand for the intermediary steps that would lead us there, and what would those intermediary steps even be??
Kurzweil has a really good handle on where hardware will be, but not software. What I believe this means is that drives the creation of software is not how quickly it can be developed, but whether there's demand for it.
Demand and innovation are a lot trickier to predict than advances in speed and minitiaturization of electronics hardware, so what we envisioned we thought our future selves might want in 2009 isn't actually quite what it turns out we actually wanted.
Kurzweil thinks speech interface is where it's at, but the world gives us Twitter and Facebook.
Kurzweil wants to use technology to make us immortal or give rise to machines that supercede humankind and take the next evolutionary step as a technological rather than biological one. Meanwhile, people want to make money, get laid, watch stupid video clips, listen to music, and act like their opinion is the best thing there's ever been.
So... Where'll we be in the future? Watch Idiocracy.
If Apple's doomed the minute Jobs is no longer running the helm, you might as well start running like hell as far away as you can from Apple right now. Jobs is a mortal, and will not be around forever. Find a company or product that will not immediately collapse when its founder dies or retires.
Do you *really* want to be running on something with a future that uncertain? I for one don't believe that Apple's on that shakey ground, but for those who do believe that, if they're still running on Apple, they're crazy.
I hope not, I've heard that the iRack is unstable.
'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate"
Innovation does not only service existing markets, it creates new ones, too. Think about Nintendo (Wii) and Apple (iPhone) for instance, who consistently create new markets that weren't there before. In a stagnating market, innovation is more important than ever.
Agreed. To put it another way, problems require solutions. Solutions sometimes require innovation.
We're facing problems now where the solutions we've been using aren't cutting it, and are perhaps even the cause of the problems. Therefore, I expect to see a LOT of innovation in the next few years.
How in the hell does Popeye still pull in $2.9 BILLION dollars a year? That's amazing. I never would have thought they'd rake in that much still. Can you imagine how much they must have been losing to piracy?
Who is still such a big popeye fan after all these years? What are Popeye's key demographics?
Who cares where Clippy is from. I just want it to die.
No, you have to learn about where it came from, so you can nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This is CmdrTaco -- he's saving electricity by turning off the spellchecker to conserve power, while running off of battery backup. Obviously.
Training is usually neglected or assumed to happen on the user's initiative.
I followed the career path that I did (from desktop publishing to IT user support to IT server admin to application developer) because I did take initiative.
Back when I was doing user support, I found that my workload lessened considerably when I took the time to explain to the user what caused the problem that they called me about, and how to fix that problem in the future if it happened again.
I learned to make sure that I wasn't conveying to the user that I was bossing them around or telling them to do my job for me, but that I was empowering them to work around simple problems more expediently and be more effective at doing their job. I'd even create documentation for processes to follow and hand them to the user, to save me the repetitive explanations so that I could devote my time to learning new things and keeping ahead of the curve.
Probably 90% of the users appreciated this a great deal, and loved that I took the time to explain things to them in a way they could understand and that they found useful. A good 80% of the time, back in the early days when I wasn't much more knowledgeable than the average person, just simply more comfortable navigating a GUI and right-clicking on everything to figure out what you could do, when someone would call me looking for help with something, I had no idea how to fix their problem, and often had never even used the program they were struggling with, but was able to figure things out in about 5 minutes by actually reading the interface and applying a little common sense, logic, and trial-error until I got it to work. Occasionally the Help menu or the manual even helped.
At some point, though, with users, I also learned that it was prudent at times to identify the issue as not a technical problem, but a training problem. I could have gone into training users to do basic, simple things in common applications that everyone uses, and made pretty decent money that way... but I would have been bored out of my mind and frustrated that regular people like me couldn't figure out the same stuff that I'd been able to figure out on my own.
I remember one lady I tried to help, an author who was trying to write a book in MS Word '97, and had no idea about formatting tools. Everything was spaces instead of tabs, with a hard return at the end of every line, looked fine to her on screen, but was completely FUBAR when printed. She had a 200+ page manuscript written out this way, and wanted me to go in and fix everything.
This was when I was working computer services for Kinko's, and she was using one of the rental DIY PC's for $0.20/min but wanted me to do all the work for her when it wouldn't print out like she thought it would on our printer, which is something we would normally have charged $75/hr for as "custom computer work".
Allegedly, it printed fine on her home printer, so the problem HAD to be with our systems. I wasn't about to rework her entire manuscript unless she was willing to pay for the labor, but as a courtesy customer service favor, I offered to show her how to set up tabs and so forth, and tried to sell her on the free lesson I was offering by explaining that if she learned how to get the most out of her tools, she could be much more productive in writing.
She had zero interest in learning. To her, Word was a typewriter and should work exactly like the typewriters she was used to from 30 years ago. She actually told me she "didn't have time" to learn how to be more productive. Never mind that doing it the right way would have freed up her time by at least a factor of two, if not ten.
That's when I learned that some people just don't want to learn. It's not that she couldn't, it's not that she didn't have the time, she just wasn't willing to do it. She might have had a lot of knowledge about whatever she was writing about, but because she wasn't willing to invest in some other knowledge that she regarded as beneath her for som
Hitl-- oh wait, Godwin.
Also, keep in mind that many people's ISPs are also content middle men: the cable company, the digital satellite tv company, even the phone company is packaging television packages these days. They all have a stake in preserving restricted pay-for-access to the content they're selling access to.
All the RIAA needs to do is send cox, comcast, and time-warner a graph showing the increase in bittorrent traffic and a corresponding decrease in pay-per-view and premium channel subscription, and they'll get the picture pretty quickly.
Good call, but in my region the economy sucks, and with real estate being in a huge depression I have no hope of relocating without taking a giant loss on my house. :/
It might still be worth it though, if I can find a really good job.
Yeah, well I don't even make $65k/year, and the building I work in now is a grey cinder block rectangle with peeling paint and a parking lot that resembles the surface of the moon. And for the last three years my company has given us a $25 gift card for our holiday bonus, I don't get any stock options, and our cafeteria is halfway decent at best.
Hey, if google wanted to hire me, I'd totally take it.
With the above made up numbers, I can still hear our CFO saying "see, we should focus on Internet Explorer... everyone else doesn't even have 20% share! And, that 'Firefox' thing is going DOWN! "
I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.
It's too bad you can't fire that CFO if he can't see IE drop from 70% to 60% marketshare and think IE is dominant, *particularly* if developing to open standards enables you to hit 100% of the market. Barring browser-specific workarounds to address showstopper bugs where some browser doesn't follow w3c fully/correctly, no web development should be targeting any browser.
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
Indeed. I was raised with dogma-indoctrinating songs about that language. I can still remember one of them, "C is for Cookie. That's good enough for me."
To be fair, Steve Jobs is the guy who made all that possible.
We've seen what Apple is without him... bankrupt.
I keep hearing this, and it's total BS. Or if it's not total BS, then Apple is not much of a company at all.
If your enterprise's very life in the market is that dependent on one person being alive, your long term prospects are very poor. Jobs is mortal. If Apple the company can't continue to operate in the post-Jobs world, then they're screwed, and all of their customers should be looking for a company that can continue to operate effectively and bring new products to market and support existing products without having to depend on a biological single point of failure. If Jobs hasn't gotten Apple into shape to the point where they are capable of doing this, then Jobs hasn't done his job.
Ted Stevens was right, just 100 years late!
Ted Stevens is just repeating what he learned in school. It's not his fault it was 75 years ago.
Actually, I wonder if this is exactly why the behavior of being a smart-ass has evolved in children. We need some way for young people to be able to know if an elder is mentally competent enough. If someone with dementia can't detect sarcasm, it stands to reason that by being a smart-ass, you can tell if they're still capable of making leadership decisions. If they are, then they'll smack you, if not, you put them out on an ice floe.
Agreed. I like to use a Mount Everest metaphor. Can no one go to Mount Everest until we build a wheelchair ramp up it? Or should we let those who are able to as far as they can?
We can make things accessible as much as possible, but with finite resources, sometimes you can only fund a trip to Everest for an able-bodied person, or you can make a few local buildings wheelchair accessible for the same money.
Where's the money better spent? Both are worthy causes.
How hard would it be for an enterprise to set up Wakeup on LAN on all PCs in the organization and a script set to trigger the startup of the machine 10 minutes before the employee is scheduled to show up?
Great Scott! Wait til the PC hits 88mph, then you're going to see some serious shit!