Really? Seriously? I agree that their recommendation engine is extremely valuable. But the rest of it? Oh so hard to rip content, shove it into S3, and use EC2 instances to serve the content back out to registered users.
Oh please, anyone willing to risk using your fly-by-night service is just going to torrent the shit for free. And they'll probably get more content that way. Hell, I pay for Netflix and still have to go to torrent sites to get my 30 Rock fix (no cable TV). You'd be a bottom feeder, at best.
You have it so backwards. People accepting the least amount of profit is what caused the big internet boom and bust 10 years ago. LIke you, they thought that anyone could make a profit by putting up a website.. any website. Didn't really matter what the website did because the barrier to entry was so small.How wrong they were.
As far as I can see, the phenomenon is only going to become more ubiquitous as time passes.
It will, but it won't be limited to the web. One could say that droid and iPhone are essentially using the cloud for apps. They're just utilizing native apps AND web browser to do it. That's what Google doesn't seem to get. They think that the only way to use the "cloud" is through a web browser. When, in fact, any app can hit a web based API and exchange data. So basically you can get the best of both worlds, the power and functionality of native apps and cloud based storage for essential data.
The machine is a lot more secure than regular laptops
Of course it is secure. You can hardly do anything with it. Yay, security through severely limited functionality. Genius!
But if you can't live without installable software, you can always hit the developer switch, and install/use Ubuntu in dev mode.
Or you could just get a netbook and install whatever you want on it.
As it turns out, internet access isn't ubiquitous, at least not yet.
And even if it were, you'd be stupid to shackle yourself with a web browser as your ONLY way of using that internet access. To me it is a "cake or death" type decision. Given the same hardware, I can either run Linux (or WIndows XP if you're into that) and have access to apps AND a web browser. Or I can run a system that can ONLY run a web browser. Hmmm. Not really much of a choice there.
Chrome OS is an idea way too far ahead of its time.
Is it? Or is it just the wrong approach to an idea that vendors like Apple have already gotten to work? Turns out you can build a network dependent system out of native software and keep it relatively simple, reliable, and secure. And all without the harsh limitations of a web browser. Ok, so the walled garden of iPhone/iPad does present some limitations, but nothing like trying to get everything to run inside a web browser.
Right now there's no reason to ditch native software that works perfectly well.
What makes you think that will change? There are no browser technologies even on the radar that can even begin to compete with native apps in terms of functional potential. HTML5 isn't even close. HTML5 will kill Flash, if it is lucky.
If you're a business that makes money where the majority of the work is done by your computing equipment (Netflix, etc), the business is mostly that equipment.
You couldn't be more wrong. The value of the physical hardware, were you to liquidate it, is generally a relatively small part of most businesses unless you are Amazon or Terramark and renting out hardware IS you business. ANd if you are one of those companies for whom the hardware is that much a part of your total value, you probably wouldn't profit from renting it from someone else, so you won't be using Amazon anyway. Cloud services like Amazon AWS are especially for companies for whom the hardware is a small part of the business.
Sure, you've got licensing. Sure, you've got distribution centers for the physical discs. But if your business is mostly that software, and the hardware side is elastic and fungible, while also being cheap and easily obtainable by anyone, your business is some sprinkles on top of a cake anyone can buy a piece of.
So so wrong. If you think anyone can develop the next Netflix killer by sprinkling some sugar on Amazon AWS, have fun trying.
The capital outlay is time to build software systems like Netflix that run on Amazon. You may argue "Who is going to waste their time with that?" Easy. The 4-6 billion people not in the first world (Brazil, Russia, India, China, as well as a lot of eastern Europe) whose time is relatively cheap. You just need a credit card and an AWS account. Low barrier to entry = low business value.
But that low barrier to entry doesn't seem to be helping any of those countries compete directly with first world corporations.
Don't be shocked as not only the cost of online services that anyone can develop drops, but also the available profit margin of said services.
The cost of simply getting a site out there has been negligible (not counting developer time) for YEARS now. The better part of a decade, even. It is thinking like yours that caused the internet bubble of the early 2000's. People saw how easy it was to put up a site and didn't realize that monetizing it is damned hard. I might go so far as to suggest that profiting from a website is getting more difficult. Used to be you could make OK money with a small site and a few ads. Now advertising margins are tiny. You need to be pretty big to make a reasonable amount of money from advertising now. Ok, maybe those profits are going to be sufficient for people in third world countries, but the vast majority of them will remain bottom feeders, not the next Netflix.
When I play those old games, I realize how shallow and repetitive most of them were. I guess you could say that about games today, but at least they've got shiny graphics now. For me, the nostalgia is in talking about those old things because it involves romanticizing the past. In reality, MSDOS was a pieces of shit operating system, even for its day, but I'll be damned if I didn't spend hours upon hours trying to squeeze that last 4k out of "conventional memory" anyway. Put me in front of DOS now and I'll laugh at you. I never want to see that POS again.
What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it?
I'm not sure you really "get" how services like Amazon AWS/S3 work. All they do is manage the physical infrastructure at the lowest level. You still have to write your software to use all of it and tie it together. That's where the real value lies (in terms infrastructure). Making good use of Amazon is no trivial matter.
You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Absolutely. And that's what makes services like Amazon and Terramark so compelling. The thing is, not everyone can't be successful at it. Anyone could go out and start a website for almost nothing. Getting people to visit it is another story....
TL;DR Massive, cheap infrastructure-on-demand drags down valuation of businesses that run on it. Win for consumers (hopefully), lose for businesses (not so bad).
WTF are you talking about? How could cheap, available infrastructure possibly drag down valuation of a business? If you have X $$$ to invest in your tech business, you can either dump it into buying and maintaining your own hardware or you can put it into software to tie mature cloud services together.Either way, the value is there (assuming you invested wisely).
As anyone who has ever had to deal with outside vendors knows, they have no real commitment to your business. You are a single account.
Except when they do. Through an SLA. Also, they have a reputation to maintain. It just isn't good business to go letting your clients flap in the wind.
Now, personally, I absolutely hate relying on outside vendors for support when I know that I have the expertise to handle most problems myself given the right access. But, to someone who doesn't have that expertise, it doesn't really matter a whole lot if the support is outside or inside the company. I don't think it is as bleak as you paint it. You can get good service providers and you can get bad ones. Just as you can hire good local admins or you can hire bad ones. You just have to weigh the costs and risks.
If that only happens 2 days a year, you just factor that as a cost unless there is some critical reason you must remain up (hospital).
Not sure I see something like a hospital move to the "cloud," but stranger things can happen. I mean, I'm pretty sure they're smart enough to realize that they can't bet everything on their internet connection. For most everyone else.. meh. It isn't like in-house systems never go down. You might have an awesome team who keeps things running like a well oiled machine, but I hardly think that's much of a candidate for moving to cloud anyway.
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
If you're relying on tools/software to "differentiate" yourself from other businesses, you're doing it wrong. The kinds of things you're going to be moving offsite into hosted services in the cloud are usually very generic things anyway. Stuff that most businesses just need to get done as cheaply and as efficiently as possible, and it really doesn't have a whole lot of direct impact on customers.
As jobs get completely slaughtered something has to give. Shorter work weeks or civil unrest.
Meh, Somebody has to run those data centers and cloud services you know. Computers and automation have always threatened to put people out of work but it never seems to actually work out that way. You just have to know how to follow the jobs. I mean, you can sit around bitching and complaining that your job running your company's mail server is gone because they moved everything to Gmail or you could apply at Google. Or start your own cloud service. Or maybe you were just another clueless small potatoes sysadmin who shouldn't have been working with computers in the first place...
I don't get my nostalgia fix. I used it do it all: BBSes, tinker with assembly, love flipping through the computer shopper, play silly text/ascii based games... all of it. I've tried going back and doing some of those old things but it all just seems so boring now. Those 8-bit games, the MSDOS commandline, fiddling with the registers on my VGA card.... all boring. I feel like I have no use for a computer now that doesn't have a 24/7 link to the internet. BBSes (those that are left) feel so lonely and isolated. I still do geeky things. Don't get me wrong, but I do things on a whole different scale now. There's a dozen layers of abstraction between me and the hardware now and I like it that way. I use websites like Slashdot with thousands of simutaneous users and I like it that way.. No more single line BBSes.
Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.
Using a calendar protocol instead of SMTP allows me to do neato nifty things like check people's availability before sending an invite. If you rely on email to exchange calendar events, then you miss out on a whole lot of calendar functionality.
Or... You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.
I can do both. Apple Mail understands calendar invites and adds them to my iCal. But normally I prefer to use the CalDAV connection to the companies Goggle domain for day to day stuff.
Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.
Ideally your calendar server would handle all that for you.
. but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway,
Should it use the gecko engine at all?
might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.
I tend to give a heavy preferrence to native software. I prefer software that can integrate well with the desktop over software that looks the same on all platforms. I don't really care what Mail/Calendar look like to WIndows users. I'm using a Mac.
How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?
The point is that I don't think SMTP is an appropriate for sharing calendars. So... just once. My calendar server should take care of talking to other people for me.
The email calender connection is simple -- email is used for invitations. invitations to events are sent via email, and the invited parties can accept, decline and such, also through emails.
But why? Wouldn't a dedicated protocol be better? LIke CalDAV? You need something like this to be able to do things like view people's availability BEFORE sending the invite. How do you do this if you're using the MTA only to pass around invites? The nice thing about a seperate calendar protocol is that it allows you to use whatever email client you want and wahtever calendar you want. You don't have to try to find one program that does everything perfectly they way you like. That always annoyed me in corporate environments because you're forced to use crap like Outlook or Lotus Notes. And it is doubly worse if you're nto using Windows.
it's much more convenient to be able to just be able to see the invite in the email app, see if it conflicts with an existing event, and click "accept" ro decline or whatever, all in the email app, in the message view pane.
No easier than your calendar program notifying you that you have a new invite and asking you if you want to accept. I don't really see the difference or the advantage of having it in a message pane in you email program.
Because people use email to arrange and invite many people to meetings. I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.
Oh, Apple Mail already imports meetings into iCal for me. Not really necessary to have them in one program. Actually, I recently added CalDAV connection directly to Google calendar. Now I don't even depend on email to get invites. Email is completely detached from calendar for my uses.
Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?
Well, I have my programming IDE open most of the time and Email too. Why not combine those? Just because you have two programs running doesn't mean it makes sense to combine them.
So... anyway, I can see why you might not like it, but "never understood?"
I still really don't get it. There's no real problem combining them. It just always seemed odd that so many people take it for granted that they would be combined.
So if I invent something really cool and innovative, but it uses some materials that are too expensive for me to actually purchase myself, I can't safely sell it to a company that CAN make it?
You could contract with them to make it on your behalf. Otherwise, no, I don't think you should be able to sell a monopoly like it was property because it isn't property.
If I try to sell the idea without having a patent, they can just rip off my idea after I demo it, t
I don't believe in "selling" ideas. I think it is wrong. You sell products. You dont' sell ideas. A government granted monopoly is NOT a product.
they can just rip off my idea after I demo it, tell me to bug off, and I have no legal recourse.
No, you would get a patent on it. You just wouldn't be selling the idea to them. You'd be offering to partner with them to make your idea happen. See the difference? If you're not willing to at least contract with someone to make your idea happen, sorry, you lose the rights to the monopoly and the idea goes back into the public domain.
But if I DO have a patent for it, the company is less likely to want to make it if they don't own the patent on that item, so it never gets made , and my bright idea is gone forever
Maybe, maybe not. Lots of patents never get implemented now. In fact, that's one of the big problems. We have these companies with patent "portfolios" filled with ideas they have no intention of using themselves. Instead, they use these patents to squash others who happen to come up with the same ideas on their own. Most patents are not especially innovative or revolutionary. There're just things that somebody thought of which could just as easily have been thought of by someone else. If you're not going to use an idea, step out of the way and let someone else do it.
The "other guys" i was referring to were the Europeans and other first world countries. Third world countries don't need to subsidize. They already work for peanuts.
But you can have both. You can sync your gmail via IMAP when at your own computer and use the web when not. A dedicated email client is just so much faster and easier to use, IMO. Plus you can easily consolidate many different email accounts. I have 4, currently. For me webmail has always been a last resort. Like nice to have, but would never want to rely on it. Even gmail is kind of clunky compared to, say, Apple Mail.
I never understood the email-calendar connection. I don't see any advantage to having it in the same program. Switching to iCal is no more difficult than going to a different section of my email program. Generally I value keeping my email program fast and simple (thank you Mail.app). I cringe whenever I look at people's horrible email clients with a zillion different folders and functions.
I was under the impression that farm subsidies allow us to export crops. Without them we wouldn't be able to compete. Basically it comes down to "all the other guys subsidize, so we do too." Is this not the case?
What, that they can be traded? Is that the problem with houses, cars and antique porn mags too?
A patent is a temporary monopoly granted by the government. It is not property to be traded. If you invent something but decide not to use it, you should lose the patent.
Then doesn't it depend on where the dam is more than anything? I mean, what if you don't have to flood a significant area? Look at dams on the Columbia river. As far as I know, they take advantage of the gorge.
I'll grant you that it's safer than liquid hydrogen. It's also safer than compressed fluorine, nitroglycerin, or potassium cyanide. But I kind of don't want large containers of any of those things sitting around in my house, you know?
Well obviously your home is not an industrial facility, so yeah, it would be quite unsightly, if nothing else, but I've got containers of gas sitting around my garage and I don't think anything of it. Maybe I'll mix some with oil and put it in the weed whacker. Might spill some on myself. And I wash it off. It stinks but there's litle harm. Hell, I could probably even do it while smoking if I wanted. Mythbusters showed that cigarettes are not hot enough to ignite gas like in the movies and it takes just the right enviornment for the vapors to explode. I probably wouldn't take that chance, personally, but plenty of people smoke around gas. Besides being flammable, gas is very safe. We keep all sorts of flammable liquids around the house and we dont' even think twice about it: aerosols, paint thinner, alcohol, etc. All safe aside from being flammable.
But the dams aren't producing the biomass, they're just collecting it. Presumably that biomass would decay whether it was at the bottom of the reserve or at the river delta. So what's your point?
Why are they comparing the production of ethanol (48% of "renewables") with nuclear? That doesn't make any sense. Nuclear is for electricity. Ethanol fuels cars. And what happens when they factor in all the petroleum used to produce all that ethanol. Last I checked, ethanol barely breaks even. Woops! And what would it even say if the comparison was meaningful? That people are scared of nuclear? No surprise there.
And then they go to compare "renewables" with domestic crude oil. First, why just domestic crude? Why not talk about ALL the crude consumed in the US? Why include anything but ethanol in that comparison? What sense does it make to compare hydropower with domestic crude oil? They're totally different markets.
Generally if layout is that important, that means you're printing it. In which case, you probably want to download and print the document from a real PDF viewer. PDF isn't suitable for mobile devices anyway. But then, being on a Mac and using an iPhone, maybe I just take good PDF support for granted? PDF.js sounds like a neat exercise, but I'll keep using Preview. I don't really want your half-assed, slow PDF viewer embedded in my browser, thanks.
Sure, once there is real scarcity in common metals, people will find ways to make money mining our trash. Look at what some people are willing to do for copper now. You can make money just turning in copper wire to metal scrappers.
Are you kidding me? People have been using RG6/RG59 coax and RCA style cables since before I was born (1970's). And people are STILL using them to hook up their Wii's to their TV.
I'm pretty sure HDMI will be standard for quite a bit longer than 5-10 years. HD TV is only just now becoming ubiquitous with still plenty of SD sets out there. TV technology is going to stick to 1080p for quite some time. No reason to replace HDMI.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Seriously? I agree that their recommendation engine is extremely valuable. But the rest of it? Oh so hard to rip content, shove it into S3, and use EC2 instances to serve the content back out to registered users.
Oh please, anyone willing to risk using your fly-by-night service is just going to torrent the shit for free. And they'll probably get more content that way. Hell, I pay for Netflix and still have to go to torrent sites to get my 30 Rock fix (no cable TV). You'd be a bottom feeder, at best.
You have it so backwards. People accepting the least amount of profit is what caused the big internet boom and bust 10 years ago. LIke you, they thought that anyone could make a profit by putting up a website.. any website. Didn't really matter what the website did because the barrier to entry was so small.How wrong they were.
As far as I can see, the phenomenon is only going to become more ubiquitous as time passes.
It will, but it won't be limited to the web. One could say that droid and iPhone are essentially using the cloud for apps. They're just utilizing native apps AND web browser to do it. That's what Google doesn't seem to get. They think that the only way to use the "cloud" is through a web browser. When, in fact, any app can hit a web based API and exchange data. So basically you can get the best of both worlds, the power and functionality of native apps and cloud based storage for essential data.
The machine is a lot more secure than regular laptops
Of course it is secure. You can hardly do anything with it. Yay, security through severely limited functionality. Genius!
But if you can't live without installable software, you can always hit the developer switch, and install/use Ubuntu in dev mode.
Or you could just get a netbook and install whatever you want on it.
As it turns out, internet access isn't ubiquitous, at least not yet.
And even if it were, you'd be stupid to shackle yourself with a web browser as your ONLY way of using that internet access. To me it is a "cake or death" type decision. Given the same hardware, I can either run Linux (or WIndows XP if you're into that) and have access to apps AND a web browser. Or I can run a system that can ONLY run a web browser. Hmmm. Not really much of a choice there.
Chrome OS is an idea way too far ahead of its time.
Is it? Or is it just the wrong approach to an idea that vendors like Apple have already gotten to work? Turns out you can build a network dependent system out of native software and keep it relatively simple, reliable, and secure. And all without the harsh limitations of a web browser. Ok, so the walled garden of iPhone/iPad does present some limitations, but nothing like trying to get everything to run inside a web browser.
Right now there's no reason to ditch native software that works perfectly well.
What makes you think that will change? There are no browser technologies even on the radar that can even begin to compete with native apps in terms of functional potential. HTML5 isn't even close. HTML5 will kill Flash, if it is lucky.
If you're a business that makes money where the majority of the work is done by your computing equipment (Netflix, etc), the business is mostly that equipment.
You couldn't be more wrong. The value of the physical hardware, were you to liquidate it, is generally a relatively small part of most businesses unless you are Amazon or Terramark and renting out hardware IS you business. ANd if you are one of those companies for whom the hardware is that much a part of your total value, you probably wouldn't profit from renting it from someone else, so you won't be using Amazon anyway. Cloud services like Amazon AWS are especially for companies for whom the hardware is a small part of the business.
Sure, you've got licensing. Sure, you've got distribution centers for the physical discs. But if your business is mostly that software, and the hardware side is elastic and fungible, while also being cheap and easily obtainable by anyone, your business is some sprinkles on top of a cake anyone can buy a piece of.
So so wrong. If you think anyone can develop the next Netflix killer by sprinkling some sugar on Amazon AWS, have fun trying.
The capital outlay is time to build software systems like Netflix that run on Amazon. You may argue "Who is going to waste their time with that?" Easy. The 4-6 billion people not in the first world (Brazil, Russia, India, China, as well as a lot of eastern Europe) whose time is relatively cheap. You just need a credit card and an AWS account. Low barrier to entry = low business value.
But that low barrier to entry doesn't seem to be helping any of those countries compete directly with first world corporations.
Don't be shocked as not only the cost of online services that anyone can develop drops, but also the available profit margin of said services.
The cost of simply getting a site out there has been negligible (not counting developer time) for YEARS now. The better part of a decade, even. It is thinking like yours that caused the internet bubble of the early 2000's. People saw how easy it was to put up a site and didn't realize that monetizing it is damned hard. I might go so far as to suggest that profiting from a website is getting more difficult. Used to be you could make OK money with a small site and a few ads. Now advertising margins are tiny. You need to be pretty big to make a reasonable amount of money from advertising now. Ok, maybe those profits are going to be sufficient for people in third world countries, but the vast majority of them will remain bottom feeders, not the next Netflix.
When I play those old games, I realize how shallow and repetitive most of them were. I guess you could say that about games today, but at least they've got shiny graphics now. For me, the nostalgia is in talking about those old things because it involves romanticizing the past. In reality, MSDOS was a pieces of shit operating system, even for its day, but I'll be damned if I didn't spend hours upon hours trying to squeeze that last 4k out of "conventional memory" anyway. Put me in front of DOS now and I'll laugh at you. I never want to see that POS again.
What sort of value does your business have if someone else is running all the infrastructure behind it?
I'm not sure you really "get" how services like Amazon AWS/S3 work. All they do is manage the physical infrastructure at the lowest level. You still have to write your software to use all of it and tie it together. That's where the real value lies (in terms infrastructure). Making good use of Amazon is no trivial matter.
You could build a Netflix, a Dropbox, a DNSMadeEasy/DynDNS/UltraDNS, etc., as long as you have a team with the time to build it.
Absolutely. And that's what makes services like Amazon and Terramark so compelling. The thing is, not everyone can't be successful at it. Anyone could go out and start a website for almost nothing. Getting people to visit it is another story....
TL;DR Massive, cheap infrastructure-on-demand drags down valuation of businesses that run on it. Win for consumers (hopefully), lose for businesses (not so bad).
WTF are you talking about? How could cheap, available infrastructure possibly drag down valuation of a business? If you have X $$$ to invest in your tech business, you can either dump it into buying and maintaining your own hardware or you can put it into software to tie mature cloud services together.Either way, the value is there (assuming you invested wisely).
As anyone who has ever had to deal with outside vendors knows, they have no real commitment to your business. You are a single account.
Except when they do. Through an SLA. Also, they have a reputation to maintain. It just isn't good business to go letting your clients flap in the wind.
Now, personally, I absolutely hate relying on outside vendors for support when I know that I have the expertise to handle most problems myself given the right access. But, to someone who doesn't have that expertise, it doesn't really matter a whole lot if the support is outside or inside the company. I don't think it is as bleak as you paint it. You can get good service providers and you can get bad ones. Just as you can hire good local admins or you can hire bad ones. You just have to weigh the costs and risks.
If that only happens 2 days a year, you just factor that as a cost unless there is some critical reason you must remain up (hospital).
Not sure I see something like a hospital move to the "cloud," but stranger things can happen. I mean, I'm pretty sure they're smart enough to realize that they can't bet everything on their internet connection. For most everyone else.. meh. It isn't like in-house systems never go down. You might have an awesome team who keeps things running like a well oiled machine, but I hardly think that's much of a candidate for moving to cloud anyway.
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
If you're relying on tools/software to "differentiate" yourself from other businesses, you're doing it wrong. The kinds of things you're going to be moving offsite into hosted services in the cloud are usually very generic things anyway. Stuff that most businesses just need to get done as cheaply and as efficiently as possible, and it really doesn't have a whole lot of direct impact on customers.
As jobs get completely slaughtered something has to give. Shorter work weeks or civil unrest.
Meh, Somebody has to run those data centers and cloud services you know. Computers and automation have always threatened to put people out of work but it never seems to actually work out that way. You just have to know how to follow the jobs. I mean, you can sit around bitching and complaining that your job running your company's mail server is gone because they moved everything to Gmail or you could apply at Google. Or start your own cloud service. Or maybe you were just another clueless small potatoes sysadmin who shouldn't have been working with computers in the first place...
I don't get my nostalgia fix. I used it do it all: BBSes, tinker with assembly, love flipping through the computer shopper, play silly text/ascii based games... all of it. I've tried going back and doing some of those old things but it all just seems so boring now. Those 8-bit games, the MSDOS commandline, fiddling with the registers on my VGA card.... all boring. I feel like I have no use for a computer now that doesn't have a 24/7 link to the internet. BBSes (those that are left) feel so lonely and isolated. I still do geeky things. Don't get me wrong, but I do things on a whole different scale now. There's a dozen layers of abstraction between me and the hardware now and I like it that way. I use websites like Slashdot with thousands of simutaneous users and I like it that way.. No more single line BBSes.
Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.
Using a calendar protocol instead of SMTP allows me to do neato nifty things like check people's availability before sending an invite. If you rely on email to exchange calendar events, then you miss out on a whole lot of calendar functionality.
Or ... You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.
I can do both. Apple Mail understands calendar invites and adds them to my iCal. But normally I prefer to use the CalDAV connection to the companies Goggle domain for day to day stuff.
Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.
Ideally your calendar server would handle all that for you.
. but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway,
Should it use the gecko engine at all?
might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages ... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.
I tend to give a heavy preferrence to native software. I prefer software that can integrate well with the desktop over software that looks the same on all platforms. I don't really care what Mail/Calendar look like to WIndows users. I'm using a Mac.
How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?
The point is that I don't think SMTP is an appropriate for sharing calendars. So... just once. My calendar server should take care of talking to other people for me.
The email calender connection is simple -- email is used for invitations. invitations to events are sent via email, and the invited parties can accept, decline and such, also through emails.
But why? Wouldn't a dedicated protocol be better? LIke CalDAV? You need something like this to be able to do things like view people's availability BEFORE sending the invite. How do you do this if you're using the MTA only to pass around invites? The nice thing about a seperate calendar protocol is that it allows you to use whatever email client you want and wahtever calendar you want. You don't have to try to find one program that does everything perfectly they way you like. That always annoyed me in corporate environments because you're forced to use crap like Outlook or Lotus Notes. And it is doubly worse if you're nto using Windows.
it's much more convenient to be able to just be able to see the invite in the email app, see if it conflicts with an existing event, and click "accept" ro decline or whatever, all in the email app, in the message view pane.
No easier than your calendar program notifying you that you have a new invite and asking you if you want to accept. I don't really see the difference or the advantage of having it in a message pane in you email program.
Because people use email to arrange and invite many people to meetings. I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.
Oh, Apple Mail already imports meetings into iCal for me. Not really necessary to have them in one program. Actually, I recently added CalDAV connection directly to Google calendar. Now I don't even depend on email to get invites. Email is completely detached from calendar for my uses.
Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?
Well, I have my programming IDE open most of the time and Email too. Why not combine those? Just because you have two programs running doesn't mean it makes sense to combine them.
So... anyway, I can see why you might not like it, but "never understood?"
I still really don't get it. There's no real problem combining them. It just always seemed odd that so many people take it for granted that they would be combined.
So if I invent something really cool and innovative, but it uses some materials that are too expensive for me to actually purchase myself, I can't safely sell it to a company that CAN make it?
You could contract with them to make it on your behalf. Otherwise, no, I don't think you should be able to sell a monopoly like it was property because it isn't property.
If I try to sell the idea without having a patent, they can just rip off my idea after I demo it, t
I don't believe in "selling" ideas. I think it is wrong. You sell products. You dont' sell ideas. A government granted monopoly is NOT a product.
they can just rip off my idea after I demo it, tell me to bug off, and I have no legal recourse.
No, you would get a patent on it. You just wouldn't be selling the idea to them. You'd be offering to partner with them to make your idea happen. See the difference? If you're not willing to at least contract with someone to make your idea happen, sorry, you lose the rights to the monopoly and the idea goes back into the public domain.
But if I DO have a patent for it, the company is less likely to want to make it if they don't own the patent on that item, so it never gets made , and my bright idea is gone forever
Maybe, maybe not. Lots of patents never get implemented now. In fact, that's one of the big problems. We have these companies with patent "portfolios" filled with ideas they have no intention of using themselves. Instead, they use these patents to squash others who happen to come up with the same ideas on their own. Most patents are not especially innovative or revolutionary. There're just things that somebody thought of which could just as easily have been thought of by someone else. If you're not going to use an idea, step out of the way and let someone else do it.
The "other guys" i was referring to were the Europeans and other first world countries. Third world countries don't need to subsidize. They already work for peanuts.
But you can have both. You can sync your gmail via IMAP when at your own computer and use the web when not. A dedicated email client is just so much faster and easier to use, IMO. Plus you can easily consolidate many different email accounts. I have 4, currently. For me webmail has always been a last resort. Like nice to have, but would never want to rely on it. Even gmail is kind of clunky compared to, say, Apple Mail.
I never understood the email-calendar connection. I don't see any advantage to having it in the same program. Switching to iCal is no more difficult than going to a different section of my email program. Generally I value keeping my email program fast and simple (thank you Mail.app). I cringe whenever I look at people's horrible email clients with a zillion different folders and functions.
I was under the impression that farm subsidies allow us to export crops. Without them we wouldn't be able to compete. Basically it comes down to "all the other guys subsidize, so we do too." Is this not the case?
What, that they can be traded? Is that the problem with houses, cars and antique porn mags too?
A patent is a temporary monopoly granted by the government. It is not property to be traded. If you invent something but decide not to use it, you should lose the patent.
Then doesn't it depend on where the dam is more than anything? I mean, what if you don't have to flood a significant area? Look at dams on the Columbia river. As far as I know, they take advantage of the gorge.
I'll grant you that it's safer than liquid hydrogen. It's also safer than compressed fluorine, nitroglycerin, or potassium cyanide. But I kind of don't want large containers of any of those things sitting around in my house, you know?
Well obviously your home is not an industrial facility, so yeah, it would be quite unsightly, if nothing else, but I've got containers of gas sitting around my garage and I don't think anything of it. Maybe I'll mix some with oil and put it in the weed whacker. Might spill some on myself. And I wash it off. It stinks but there's litle harm. Hell, I could probably even do it while smoking if I wanted. Mythbusters showed that cigarettes are not hot enough to ignite gas like in the movies and it takes just the right enviornment for the vapors to explode. I probably wouldn't take that chance, personally, but plenty of people smoke around gas. Besides being flammable, gas is very safe. We keep all sorts of flammable liquids around the house and we dont' even think twice about it: aerosols, paint thinner, alcohol, etc. All safe aside from being flammable.
But the dams aren't producing the biomass, they're just collecting it. Presumably that biomass would decay whether it was at the bottom of the reserve or at the river delta. So what's your point?
Why are they comparing the production of ethanol (48% of "renewables") with nuclear? That doesn't make any sense. Nuclear is for electricity. Ethanol fuels cars. And what happens when they factor in all the petroleum used to produce all that ethanol. Last I checked, ethanol barely breaks even. Woops! And what would it even say if the comparison was meaningful? That people are scared of nuclear? No surprise there.
And then they go to compare "renewables" with domestic crude oil. First, why just domestic crude? Why not talk about ALL the crude consumed in the US? Why include anything but ethanol in that comparison? What sense does it make to compare hydropower with domestic crude oil? They're totally different markets.
Generally if layout is that important, that means you're printing it. In which case, you probably want to download and print the document from a real PDF viewer. PDF isn't suitable for mobile devices anyway. But then, being on a Mac and using an iPhone, maybe I just take good PDF support for granted? PDF.js sounds like a neat exercise, but I'll keep using Preview. I don't really want your half-assed, slow PDF viewer embedded in my browser, thanks.
Sure, once there is real scarcity in common metals, people will find ways to make money mining our trash. Look at what some people are willing to do for copper now. You can make money just turning in copper wire to metal scrappers.
Are you kidding me? People have been using RG6/RG59 coax and RCA style cables since before I was born (1970's). And people are STILL using them to hook up their Wii's to their TV.
I'm pretty sure HDMI will be standard for quite a bit longer than 5-10 years. HD TV is only just now becoming ubiquitous with still plenty of SD sets out there. TV technology is going to stick to 1080p for quite some time. No reason to replace HDMI.