Um, yeah - like 'accidentally' getting 12,000+ copies of an appointment from repetitive hand motions...
I think Fossil DID their homework...
on
Palm OS Wristwatch
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...and they're funded by a VC firm made up entirely of optometrists. The flash demo on the Amazon site is at least 1.5x actual size - so we'll all be going blind in record time. Trifocals not included.
Well, Herr Speedy-Hosen, for 1000 feet, I could just hire Michael Johnson to run across campus in - erm - 30 seconds with - let's see - 700 MB per cd... 150 mbit per sec... um..... (click click click) 1,400 cds on his back and get the same throughput! SO TH... What? Ah. OK - maybe this IS a breakthrough after all. Never mind.
OG owns the name but not the stuff... SCO owns the stuff but not the name... Apple can't call it by its name but can use the stuff... AH! Yes! Mr. Carroll, care to comment?:
Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding. `You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing you a song to comfort you.' `Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. `It's long,' said the Knight, `but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it -- either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else --' `Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. `Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "Haddocks' Eyes".' `Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested. `No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man".' `Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called"?' Alice corrected herself. `No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called "Ways and Means": but that's only what it's called, you know!' `Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. `I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really is "A-sitting On a Gate": and the tune's my own invention.'
They should promote this *and* shut down pirates. They'll be promoting their future and protecting their rights. Go ask Dr. Seuss' widow about the Cat In The Hat. Came very close to losing the character because she/they didn't enforce copyright against the many pirates. Then you saw an explosion of the character in products, theme parks, etc... Dump the pirates and go with the smartest legit method. They may be better at this than many of us think.
"Countries with the lowest piracy rates enjoy larger IT sectors accompanied by greater tax bases, more jobs and other economic benefits. The lower the piracy rate, the larger the IT sector grows and the greater the benefits it delivers."
WHAT!? Correlation does not demand causality. Ever think that maybe the piracy rates are lower in better-off countries because they have the disposable income to buy the freaking stuff?
3M make a tape called 'Greptile" that Pearl Izumi made into a set of matching handlebar tape and cycling glove. Each has lots of microscopic protrusions that make the things stick like crazy to each other - not sure how microscopic, but the ads always had EM photos of the surface. 3M also sells the raw tape. Reviews are great, but it never really caught on. For most cyclists, increased padding is prolly preferred over increased grip - you can always squeeze harder.
Charlie Wilson's War, Bringing Down The House.
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
OK - CW'sW is marginally techie in the application of 20th c weapons to 16th c fighters, but your jaw will be on the floor. Cyberstuff will seem very very tame. Charlie Wilson's social engineering skills (what'n they used to call "politics") will make Kevin Mitnik look like a 4th rate lock picker.
Bringing Down The House - well what can a bunch of MITers and others do when they really set their minds to it. You'll recognize personalities here. You'll wish it was you until it hits the fan.
And as the man said, these stories "have the added benefit of being true."
in "A Taste of Armageddon". Sorry, Professor Chaos. So here a bunch of real guys kill a mess of virtual people and they'll be sent to a real prison for their virtual deed. I knew this week was making too much sense.
i'm not talking about adminning the machines - i need to get a common desktop for the windows machines that were donated, a licensed version of current (i'll go 98se or xp - you'll see why) for every machine. and the no cost option wins. i can't go $200 per machine for most likely non-upgrade-capable current OSs, as i'm likely looking at ram and disk upgrades to get to xp... ditto a decent productivity suite for wintel, etc...
i need to keep 2 dozen PCs at school up to date - they're all donations, they have whatever OS the giver had, I need them all to be on a par so kids can go from one to another without a brain freeze, and though a part of me wishes they'd play fair on a lot of other things, this seems like it's more needed than evil.
apple has been known to give the OS at a significant discount to teachers, i'm surprised they made a stink.
plus how long would i be working there if i told the boss 'we can get this for free, but on principle i'll just run down to staples and pick up 24 of them at the sell thru price...'
The vintners know in excruciating detail the exact temperatures and numbers of days in a certain weather that led to one vintage or another - and you'll hear wine buffs recite these and swoon over the details of a specific year and things like which hill certain grapes came from... and they can opt to time things the best - right down to things like opting for night harvest, etc... this gives them a finer mesh on their data, both in space and time. I can just about listen to all the details without just leaping up and well open the bloody bottle and just drink it already! *ahem* but when it works, it's wonderful. this should help - i presume they won't be going for an average here, but going for optimum. i'm trying hard not to imagine days on a hillside in the finger lakes with my iBook checking on the grapes under a big tree, sampling the last batch, and fragging other thinktanks... starbucks eat your heart out.
Calm down and stop putting words in my mouth. I didn't claim any of the things you manufactured - but I have a fair amount of data under varied conditions and the life of the OS - and he has one buggy machine. Do the math. I believe he's telling the truth - but I also believe he needs to get the thing looked at. What's your solution? The overwhelming user experience with OS X is that it is sterling compared to most other OSs. If it's unstable for you, dump it or fix it. But it is clearly possible to treat OS X pretty poorly and do a lot better than you are or the above poster is doing with OSX. Your 12" G4 has only two video outs - VGA adapter and S/Comp out - if disconnecting either of those is causing a kernel panic - get it looked at. It's obviously under warranty and you can make it better. Or continue to act like you are and post things like that.
You may have the single most unreliable Mac OS X box I can imagine hearing of. Seriously, I've got an iBook with 2 kernel panics over 26 months, a dozen cubes and Bondi iMacs with month-long uptimes. And that's with a hundred kids roaming all over them on a daily basis in some sort of quest to break anything they can imagine. Apps (and 99% just the beta ones) may quit unexpectedly, the non-beta ones are typically 3rd party conflicts - but no system crashes.
Something needs attention, but it's prolly not Apple's QC in your particular case. Now, if your "OS X box" is an unsupported, g3 conversion with all sorts of third party stuff crammed into it, then you're on your own - Apple prides itself on end-to-end integration and this goes a long way to create OSX's new reputation for robustness.
In fact, OSX shipped on an Apple system is the first mainstream setup I would label "robust" (in the engineering sense as inspired by Rev. Woody Flowers' diatribes from my FIRST days)
I got news for you... not only does the scientific community have those ideas about how unique and exceptional humans are ("how" unique?), so does the literary community, the artistic community, the philosophical community, the musical community, the educational community, the list goes on... You shall know them by their works.
One story earlier this year was that they had sold something like 5 million copies of their software but something like 8 million people used it to file online - that kinda sorta warrants better DRM on the 1:1 license side, but sounds like they're stepping on their disks when it comes to managing that part of it...
... oh, sorry, right. don't need to imagine - they already have this - the towers full of red caged humans lulled into behavior by their own personal fantasy - in the Matrix.
... and you're all set. Is this straight out of Dilbert or what? How more anti-social can you get? Yout Personal Space is now guarded by 120VAC and large poles of steel. Great. This is a one-stop divorce mill.
"On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia. deeply dark and silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship?s semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn?t remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn?t it? It didn?t know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn?t like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn?t remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn?t find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem.
The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn?t find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn?t find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software? agents? surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the ship?s memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship?s logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
-- DNA, MH (hhgg5)
"Ready, set, spam Armed with swaths of information, Shiels purchased four computers and two cable-modem connections, which soon were running above full capacity with only about six hours of rest each day. But that was just the beginning of the investments. "
This makes sense. In the past month or so, the amount traceable to DSL or cable clients has now pushed over 50% of my spam. I'm slowly automating turfing them to the abuse depts - but some don't even let you send directly - you have to go fill out a form. And they demand the full message- difficult when the email grabs an image as you open it - those don't stay. Seems the cable/dsl companies have this very low on their priority list.
The RIAA should stick to legit services like Apple has started and stop the electronic goosing - it's hardly the high road.
The P2Ps should 'fess up, at least to themselves, lose the weak arguments (95 percent of what they claim as justification) and realize they are in fact trading in illegal-by-contract goods and should be grateful they're around this long.
Theyre really just treading water in "it's-only-illegal-if-you-get-caught land. Silly basis for an industry.
And remember, for the most part, you get what you pay for. It doesn't matter how scammed the traders get, and it doesn't matter what the RIAA does, it won't stop them.
A fair and well-managed system will. When it's reasonable, people will pay and use just like books. The VCR didn't kill the video rental or sales industry, and the copier doesn't stop a single sale at Borders or B&N. Granted digital copying makes things easier, and the ecoonomics helps, but that's what needs to be in the new model. Most people with most traditional media would rather have a legit copy than a pirated one.
Snide remarks about mice and gui and color monitors - at Doug Englebart's Mother Of All Demos? which is pretty much when this stuff hit the fan? About the Macintosh? Nope. Know why? Their jaws were too far dropped to make such remarks. People recognized the value. The sensation of of-course-this-is-what-i-wanted-all-along. And it has less to do with "like" than the fact that those things increased effectiveness, intuitiveness and productivity.
I think it's cool idea too. But if it's not practical or effective, it won't stick.
They abovementioned inventions saved steps. Particularly steps like trying to visualize our work in color, then revamping it when it didn't match, etc... Like trying to remember the explicit, error-intolerant text strings you need to type to get the computer to do something you could simply verbalize and recognize... the list goes on.
But attaching a scanner to my computer so that when I pull out my wedding invitation it'll come up on my computer? Given that the whole wedding is now in iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie, it seems like a big kludge.
To illustrate, several years ago I was invited to work on Portfolio Assessment software for education at a Very Big Educational Publisher. We had about a dozen people brainstorming a system to journal everything a kid did on the computer, scan everything a kid did on paper, photo everything 3-d, and put it all in a time x topic x evaluation matrix that could be analyzed, summarized, etc. We got all fevered about how simple this woulf be, and that the machine would have all this data, then we realized of course that kids and parents wanted a handle on it, so everyone said yes, just print out the scan and the kid can even take a copy of their artwork home to put on the fridge! Hello? Just give the kid his damn artwork after you scan it. This is another example of thinking too hard, and you'll be filing it next to Microsoft Barney. I'm betting you'll see good voice recognition before you see this thing go pervasive.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we rig it so that giving someone the finger deploys the airbag?
Please?
Anyone kow? Was it finished then? Is it an old rc3? SHould I wait a few hours?
Since about a year ago, they tore all the USB cables off the shelves, repackaged them as "USB 2.0!" and doubled the price of the same bloody wires.
Um, yeah - like 'accidentally' getting 12,000+ copies of an appointment from repetitive hand motions...
...and they're funded by a VC firm made up entirely of optometrists. The flash demo on the Amazon site is at least 1.5x actual size - so we'll all be going blind in record time. Trifocals not included.
Well, Herr Speedy-Hosen, for 1000 feet, I could just hire Michael Johnson to run across campus in - erm - 30 seconds with - let's see - 700 MB per cd... 150 mbit per sec... um..... (click click click) 1,400 cds on his back and get the same throughput! SO TH... What? Ah. OK - maybe this IS a breakthrough after all. Never mind.
OG owns the name but not the stuff... SCO owns the stuff but not the name... Apple can't call it by its name but can use the stuff... AH! Yes! Mr. Carroll, care to comment?:
Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.
`You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing you a song to comfort you.'
`Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
`It's long,' said the Knight, `but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it -- either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else --'
`Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
`Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "Haddocks' Eyes".'
`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.
`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man".'
`Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called"?' Alice corrected herself.
`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called "Ways and Means": but that's only what it's called, you know!'
`Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
`I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really is "A-sitting On a Gate": and the tune's my own invention.'
They should promote this *and* shut down pirates. They'll be promoting their future and protecting their rights. Go ask Dr. Seuss' widow about the Cat In The Hat. Came very close to losing the character because she/they didn't enforce copyright against the many pirates. Then you saw an explosion of the character in products, theme parks, etc... Dump the pirates and go with the smartest legit method. They may be better at this than many of us think.
WHAT!? Correlation does not demand causality. Ever think that maybe the piracy rates are lower in better-off countries because they have the disposable income to buy the freaking stuff?
3M make a tape called 'Greptile" that Pearl Izumi made into a set of matching handlebar tape and cycling glove. Each has lots of microscopic protrusions that make the things stick like crazy to each other - not sure how microscopic, but the ads always had EM photos of the surface. 3M also sells the raw tape. Reviews are great, but it never really caught on. For most cyclists, increased padding is prolly preferred over increased grip - you can always squeeze harder.
OK - CW'sW is marginally techie in the application of 20th c weapons to 16th c fighters, but your jaw will be on the floor. Cyberstuff will seem very very tame. Charlie Wilson's social engineering skills (what'n they used to call "politics") will make Kevin Mitnik look like a 4th rate lock picker.
Bringing Down The House - well what can a bunch of MITers and others do when they really set their minds to it. You'll recognize personalities here. You'll wish it was you until it hits the fan.
And as the man said, these stories "have the added benefit of being true."
in "A Taste of Armageddon".
Sorry, Professor Chaos.
So here a bunch of real guys kill a mess of virtual people and they'll be sent to a real prison for their virtual deed.
I knew this week was making too much sense.
i'm not talking about adminning the machines - i need to get a common desktop for the windows machines that were donated, a licensed version of current (i'll go 98se or xp - you'll see why) for every machine. and the no cost option wins. i can't go $200 per machine for most likely non-upgrade-capable current OSs, as i'm likely looking at ram and disk upgrades to get to xp... ditto a decent productivity suite for wintel, etc...
i need to keep 2 dozen PCs at school up to date - they're all donations, they have whatever OS the giver had, I need them all to be on a par so kids can go from one to another without a brain freeze, and though a part of me wishes they'd play fair on a lot of other things, this seems like it's more needed than evil.
apple has been known to give the OS at a significant discount to teachers, i'm surprised they made a stink.
plus how long would i be working there if i told the boss 'we can get this for free, but on principle i'll just run down to staples and pick up 24 of them at the sell thru price...'
The vintners know in excruciating detail the exact temperatures and numbers of days in a certain weather that led to one vintage or another - and you'll hear wine buffs recite these and swoon over the details of a specific year and things like which hill certain grapes came from... and they can opt to time things the best - right down to things like opting for night harvest, etc... this gives them a finer mesh on their data, both in space and time. I can just about listen to all the details without just leaping up and well open the bloody bottle and just drink it already! *ahem* but when it works, it's wonderful. this should help - i presume they won't be going for an average here, but going for optimum. i'm trying hard not to imagine days on a hillside in the finger lakes with my iBook checking on the grapes under a big tree, sampling the last batch, and fragging other thinktanks... starbucks eat your heart out.
Calm down and stop putting words in my mouth. I didn't claim any of the things you manufactured - but I have a fair amount of data under varied conditions and the life of the OS - and he has one buggy machine. Do the math. I believe he's telling the truth - but I also believe he needs to get the thing looked at. What's your solution? The overwhelming user experience with OS X is that it is sterling compared to most other OSs. If it's unstable for you, dump it or fix it. But it is clearly possible to treat OS X pretty poorly and do a lot better than you are or the above poster is doing with OSX. Your 12" G4 has only two video outs - VGA adapter and S/Comp out - if disconnecting either of those is causing a kernel panic - get it looked at. It's obviously under warranty and you can make it better. Or continue to act like you are and post things like that.
You may have the single most unreliable Mac OS X box I can imagine hearing of. Seriously, I've got an iBook with 2 kernel panics over 26 months, a dozen cubes and Bondi iMacs with month-long uptimes. And that's with a hundred kids roaming all over them on a daily basis in some sort of quest to break anything they can imagine. Apps (and 99% just the beta ones) may quit unexpectedly, the non-beta ones are typically 3rd party conflicts - but no system crashes.
Something needs attention, but it's prolly not Apple's QC in your particular case. Now, if your "OS X box" is an unsupported, g3 conversion with all sorts of third party stuff crammed into it, then you're on your own - Apple prides itself on end-to-end integration and this goes a long way to create OSX's new reputation for robustness.
In fact, OSX shipped on an Apple system is the first mainstream setup I would label "robust" (in the engineering sense as inspired by Rev. Woody Flowers' diatribes from my FIRST days)
I got news for you... not only does the scientific community have those ideas about how unique and exceptional humans are ("how" unique?), so does
the literary community,
the artistic community,
the philosophical community,
the musical community,
the educational community,
the list goes on...
You shall know them by their works.
One story earlier this year was that they had sold something like 5 million copies of their software but something like 8 million people used it to file online - that kinda sorta warrants better DRM on the 1:1 license side, but sounds like they're stepping on their disks when it comes to managing that part of it...
... oh, sorry, right. don't need to imagine - they already have this - the towers full of red caged humans lulled into behavior by their own personal fantasy - in the Matrix.
... and you're all set. Is this straight out of Dilbert or what? How more anti-social can you get? Yout Personal Space is now guarded by 120VAC and large poles of steel. Great. This is a one-stop divorce mill.
"On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia. deeply dark and silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship?s semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn?t remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn?t it? It didn?t know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn?t like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn?t remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn?t find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem.
The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn?t find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn?t find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software? agents? surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the ship?s memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship?s logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
-- DNA, MH (hhgg5)
This makes sense. In the past month or so, the amount traceable to DSL or cable clients has now pushed over 50% of my spam. I'm slowly automating turfing them to the abuse depts - but some don't even let you send directly - you have to go fill out a form. And they demand the full message- difficult when the email grabs an image as you open it - those don't stay. Seems the cable/dsl companies have this very low on their priority list.
The RIAA should stick to legit services like Apple has started and stop the electronic goosing - it's hardly the high road.
The P2Ps should 'fess up, at least to themselves, lose the weak arguments (95 percent of what they claim as justification) and realize they are in fact trading in illegal-by-contract goods and should be grateful they're around this long.
Theyre really just treading water in "it's-only-illegal-if-you-get-caught land. Silly basis for an industry.
And remember, for the most part, you get what you pay for. It doesn't matter how scammed the traders get, and it doesn't matter what the RIAA does, it won't stop them.
A fair and well-managed system will. When it's reasonable, people will pay and use just like books. The VCR didn't kill the video rental or sales industry, and the copier doesn't stop a single sale at Borders or B&N. Granted digital copying makes things easier, and the ecoonomics helps, but that's what needs to be in the new model. Most people with most traditional media would rather have a legit copy than a pirated one.
John Dvorak aside, really - back it up.
Snide remarks about mice and gui and color monitors - at Doug Englebart's Mother Of All Demos? which is pretty much when this stuff hit the fan? About the Macintosh? Nope. Know why? Their jaws were too far dropped to make such remarks. People recognized the value. The sensation of of-course-this-is-what-i-wanted-all-along. And it has less to do with "like" than the fact that those things increased effectiveness, intuitiveness and productivity.
I think it's cool idea too. But if it's not practical or effective, it won't stick.
They abovementioned inventions saved steps. Particularly steps like trying to visualize our work in color, then revamping it when it didn't match, etc... Like trying to remember the explicit, error-intolerant text strings you need to type to get the computer to do something you could simply verbalize and recognize... the list goes on.
But attaching a scanner to my computer so that when I pull out my wedding invitation it'll come up on my computer? Given that the whole wedding is now in iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie, it seems like a big kludge.
To illustrate, several years ago I was invited to work on Portfolio Assessment software for education at a Very Big Educational Publisher. We had about a dozen people brainstorming a system to journal everything a kid did on the computer, scan everything a kid did on paper, photo everything 3-d, and put it all in a time x topic x evaluation matrix that could be analyzed, summarized, etc. We got all fevered about how simple this woulf be, and that the machine would have all this data, then we realized of course that kids and parents wanted a handle on it, so everyone said yes, just print out the scan and the kid can even take a copy of their artwork home to put on the fridge!
Hello?
Just give the kid his damn artwork after you scan it.
This is another example of thinking too hard, and you'll be filing it next to Microsoft Barney.
I'm betting you'll see good voice recognition before you see this thing go pervasive.