I've got a few comments on a well-rounded education.
First of all, a good education isn't obtained entirely in the classroom. Most of the practical, job-oriented stuff that I learned came out of part-time jobs and internships (which my academic background helped me get). I learned the basic theory for designing software in class, but I learned the practical skills to code parts of a complicated project by going out and doing it. It's hard to teach those things in a classroom, and I'd rather see schools help their students get real work experience (through internships and co-op programs in particular) than do a poor job of teaching this stuff in the classroom.
Besides, there's no way that a four-year education can prepare you for the first ten years of your working life unless you're planning a very dull career. In the three years I've been out of school, I've had to learn about a whole bunch of different technologies (like J2EE and wireless computing) that didn't really exist when I was in school. I can't even begin to guess what I'll be working with by the time I've been out of school for ten years. New stuff comes along pretty fast, so the best thing you can learn in school is how to learn quickly.
Why? It's actually a great model for consumers. If companies priced the hardware so that they could turn a profit on it, it would rival the price of a personal computer and lots of people wouldn't bother. This model lets them get the hardware out to a much wider user base and then make plenty of money on software if they come up with good games and market them well (bad marketing killed the Dreamcast, not weak hardware or software).
Looking at the pictures, my guess is that these wouldn't be good for a 3-year-old because they're small enough to swallow. Wait until she's older. I think LEGO still makes a set of bricks for young children that are slightly larger than the standard ones, those might be safer.
I learned Pascal in my first semester as a CS undergrad and assembler in my second semester. I taught myself C over the summer and used it for all the programs in my second-year classes. Java came out late in my third year and I used it as a TA for the intro class in my fourth year. I've got a few observations.
One semester is enough time to really get a good grasp on procedural programming (manipulating variables, flow control, recursion, basic performance analysis, etc.) but not enough time to do that and really learn OO.
Learning assembler first is overkill. Learning assembler second is a good idea, because you get a better sense of what it's being used for.
A good first language is one that doesn't give you a lot of rope with which to hang yourself. Pascal and Java are both better than C in this regard.
One should learn OO right around when one starts working with data structures
Computer science and programming are not the same thing. Most computer science courses can and should be largely language-independent.
Overall, I think that there are some good reasons to use Java in an intro class: it keeps the student out of trouble, it's got a C-like syntax, and you can easily use it to demonstrate the basic stuff. The biggest drawback to using Java is that you don't get students thinking carefully about memory allocation, but most of them need a little time to master for loops before they can really handle memory manipulation anyway.
As much as I dislike this whole Smart Tags idea, I don't think it's a copyright issue. When I request a web page, the server delivers the data to my browser. I have the right to instruct the browser to modify it for my own personal use. For example, I can make the font larger or I can override the designer's choice of text and background colors with my own. Similarly, if I'm enough of a crackhead, I can run Microsoft LinkMuncher on my own personal copy of the page in order to ensure that it is not "underlinked" or "overusable." As long as I don't redistribute it, it's probably no more of a copyright violation than changing the background color.
Still, even if it's not a copyright violation, the only good thing about this feature is that it'll default to off.
Actually, they are putting this feature into Word and Excel. As I understand it, when you type certain things in Word or Excel (names, stock symbols, etc.), you'll get a little symbol next to them that will launch a web browser and take you to some MS info service (phone book, stock quotes, etc.).
Personally, I've been reasonably happy with Win95, Win98, WinME and Win2K but the more I hear about Windows XP the happier I am that I installed Linux last week.
You're wrong about IBM. You can often make more money with a small slice of a big pie than with an entire small pie.
Apple has 5% of the personal computer market. PC companies share the other 95%. Even if IBM only grabs 10% of the market for PCs, they can still sell twice as many computers as Apple can.
As far as I can tell, all different sorts of people are involved in open software. Some aren't going to be interested in closed-source projects, but others will (especially if they can still do open-source work in their free time). There are a lot of factors that go into choosing the right job, and open source is only one of them for most people.
I think that targeting some of your recruiting at the open source community is a great idea. And the best part is that before you hire an open source developer, you can easily get a look at how he writes code.
That's a lot of nonsense. If I tell a programmer to drop everything and do a new task, and that new task takes 12 hours, it's completely unreasonable for me to come back 12 hours later and ask why something else isn't done.
It's pretty unambiguous that "drop everything" means put this new thing first on your to-do list. The issue is really not whether or not one has other priorities, but whether or not one can do two jobs at once. Most people can't, and it's unreasonable to expect that introducing new work into a full schedule won't push everything else back.
I'd be very surprised to see this decision hold up on appeal. If the arbitrator laid out the 3 criteria correctly (confusing similarity, no legitimate interest in the name, and bad faith registration or use), then there's no way that RightSports should lose the name because confusing similarity (whether or not it exists) is insufficient on its own.
Whether or not the names are similar is debatable, but it looks like a pretty blatant land-grab by Referee magazine. Given that both companies serve the same small market, I'm not surprised that their mutual customers are outraged by this and threatening a boycott. RightSports is providing much more value at a lower price, so Referee magazine is far more likely to alienate its own customers than to turn them against RightSports. Hopefully, this will eventually turn into a case study in why not to pull this kind of crap.
This is actually a much better approach to layoffs than what many dot-coms have been doing. Check out this article from Salon for some stories on how not to do layoffs. I'm sad to see GameCenter go, and I hope that GameSpot changes a little to compensate, but I'm glad that they're at least making their job cuts in a responsible way and helping people find new jobs.
A small ISP that just offers a dial-up connection doesn't have the resources to compete with AOL and MSN and others. To succeed, an ISP needs to offer more than that - good deals on DSL/broadband, shell accounts, specialized content, whatever and they need to target a niche market and develop loyal customers who will not leave them for AOL. A Mom-and-Pop ISP isn't ripe for a takeover by a big ISP until a good number of their customers have actually left for other ISPs.
The ISP I use for shell access and e-mail (but not for actual connectivity right now) is New York City's Panix The rates are excellent and they're the best ISP I've ever used, so I recommend them if you're in the NYC area and need an ISP (or if you're elsewhere and need a reliable e-mail account and support staff that actually know what Unix is).
The value of the Apple brand is impacted by things that look like they're from Apple even if they're not. If I make a crappy ripoff of Aqua and it gets passed around, people may think that the real Aqua is just as crappy, and that's going to reduce the chances that they'll ever consider buying a Mac.
What I would do, if I were Apple, is create my own Aqua-like UIs for other operating systems - a Windows desktop, Unix GUI themes, etc. and either sell them cheap or distribute them freely. If they have to crack down on this stuff, then there's obviously some demand. There are plenty of people who wish they were using a Mac but are stuck with Windows and they'd go for it. Also, people who've never used a Mac would be able to get a feel for it on their Windows PCs, so it might help them recruit new users. And by doing it themselves, they'd insure high quality and reduce the need for other people to make Aqua-like skins for Windows apps.
As others have said, Juno's not forcing anyone to use their service. Still, I think it's a bad business move. Given that one of the largest states in the US is in the middle of an energy crisis, it just doesn't look good to launch a program in which you require your customers to keep their computers running continuously.
Other distributed computing companies (Popular Power, for instance) don't require continuous operation (as far as I know). They pay you for what you do, but you're allowed to turn the machine off or take it off the network. Using subscribers' machines for distributed computing is a reasonable price for free service, and would have been a neat enhancement to their business model. Requiring continuous operation just makes them look greedy. And if you consider the state of affairs in California, their timing is awful.
It sounds as though Raskin and Burg are basically advocating an invisible OS. The Palm, which Burg cites as a device that exemplifies his ideal, definitely has an OS (PalmOS). The user can use all of the main applications and have minimal interaction with the OS itself. However, if the user wants to customize things or install additional software on the Palm, there is still OS interaction of a sort. I don't buy the idea that installing new software on a Palm is much harder than walking through a basic InstallShield wizard.
Truthfully, the idea of a keyboard that figures out what I want to do as soon as I start typing doesn't appeal to me. How does it decide what kind of text I'm typing and open the appropriate application? At some point, the user needs to tell the computer what task he wants to perform. I'm not convinced that putting that process into hardware is preferable to doing it on the screen. Burg doesn't offer any real support for that argument.
A lot of newer PCs are shipping with keyboards that contain Palm-like buttons which automatically launch e-mail, web browsers, and other programs. While I like application-launching buttons on the Palm, I'm too well-trained as a computer user to bother with them on a keyboard. And you still have to customize those buttons using software at some point. The big difference is that in hardware you get a fixed number of buttons, while you can always draw an extra button on the screen.
The most intuitive interface for selecting an application is probably voice commands. If you could just say "Word" or "Emacs", you wouldn't have to worry about where it was stashed in some menu hierarchy.
...is another man's research. I did read the article. Here's what it says:
"Sexually explicit is defined as any depiction or description of 'sexual excitement,' `sexual conduct,' or `a lewd exhibition of nudity.'"
I can see how that would pose problems for all sorts of people attempting to access material for legitimate academic work. Literature and art, for example, often have enough sexual content to qualify under those rules.
And then what about researching sexuality and pornography? What if one wanted to write a paper about sexuality and the Internet?
Sexuality is as legitimate a subject for academia as anything else. It's absolutely ridiculous that college professors should have to ask their department heads to sign permission slips before they read anything explicit. It's just as ridiculous that they should have to get permission before giving academic assignments which deal with sexual matters to adult students.
As a former computer lab monitor, I'm all for nobody looking at porn in the lab, but this decision goes beyond that.
First, a point of clarification. It doesn't look as though e-mail that one actually sends qualifies as "deleted." It sounds like this proposal covers the draft that you wrote before you sent it (the one in which you referred to your boss as "that pompous windbag") which currently might be used against you if it was found on your computer (even though you removed the phrase in question from the version you sent).
On a related note, it would be great if deletion were just as simple as emptying the trash bin in Windows every now and again. However, a lot of incriminating data can be found in the nooks and crannies of file formats like MS Word (yes, I know this wouldn't be a problem if we all used Linux or BSD but we don't). Your non-incriminating copy of a file might still contain a buffer full of incriminating text that you had carefully erased.
My personal opinion on this sort of thing is that it really depends on the nature of the crime. If one actually hurts someone, deleted information relating to that should be fair game. However, if the act of deletion makes the data harmless then it should be ignored. For example, if I write an e-mail message to a co-worker that could be construed as sexual harassment, but I cancel before sending it, it would be unfair to use the leftover draft of the unsent message to demonstrate a pattern of harassment. Similarly, if I write a letter in MS Word and delete a paragraph about how the recipient and I should kill my husband, but I delete the paragraph before I print and mail the letter, the file recovered from my hard drive should not be used as evidence of conspiracy to commit murder. The key question seems to be does deleting the data effectively reverse the intent behind creating the data? If it does then one shouldn't be held accountable for it, but if not then it should be fair game.
Breaking SDMI after products are on the shelves would definitely be much more interesting than breaking it now. Still, SDMI seems doomed whether it's hacked or not because it offers nothing for the consumer.
Like the article says, it's going to be pretty hard to sell SDMI-compliant CD players. A consumer who knows what SDMI is has no incentive to buy one, unless manufacturers slash prices on them but that's unlikely given the cost of developing the new devices. I wonder if we'll start seeing CDs with SDMI-only tracks (i.e. you get the whole album normally, but there are two extra bonus tracks that only play on an SDMI device). Either that or SDMI support won't be mentioned on packaging, so that someone who goes to buy a new Discman will discover that it supports SDMI when it refuses to play the CD he burned on his computer. That would be a customer relations nightmare.
Anyway, given that SDMI will pretty much repulse most of the early-adopter types who are key to the success of new hardware (like portable MP3 players), the odds of it getting off the ground are low.
I'd expect a moderated search engine to run into the same problem that web filtering encounters - one person's trash is another person's useful information. You could easily have half a dozen users who search on the same keyword to find different information.
For example, if I search on the keyword "hair" to find information about hairstyling and I moderate down the links relating to the musical "Hair," that's going to make it harder for the person who wants to know about the original cast album.
Also, a moderating system could be intentionally or unintentionally tilted by users with agendas. For example, someone could register a large number of users and moderate down sites which contained opinions or information which they opposed.
I think the biggest problem with search engines is actually in the user interfaces. The web is so huge that it's often hard to find anything by just entering a word or two. Search interfaces should make it easy for users to provide effective search criteria. Also, users need to learn how to construct effective searches. Coming up with the keywords that produce the documents you want without also producing 10 pages of crap is not intuitive for most people.
With two headline-making price glitches, Amazon is looking a bit inept at this point. What's amazing is that they've managed to develop one of the best, most comprehensive, and most innovative online shopping experiences and they can't figure out how to keep their prices straight. It's too bad they're not doing their new car store in-house. ("Check it out, this new Mercedes lists at $50,000 but I got it from Amazon for $8995!")
But what's even more amazing is their lack of business savvy on this particular issue. Amazon thrives on repeat customers and that requires good customer service. Whatever loss they would have taken by shipping discounted merchandise, the cost of all this bad press will be worse. If you're looking for signs that Amazon's on its way out, incidents like this are even more of a warning than their earnings reports.
Personally, I'm inclined to think that the most useful tools are the highly customizable ones - while I don't go near the Microsoft paperclip, tools like Outlook or procmail give me fine-tuned control over how I receive and organize my mail and that's good. So a big thing that I look for in new software is how easily I can customize it to work with me. Microsoft Word nearly always seems to work against me.
I can't imagine trying to set up rules for something that was responding to my hand and/or eye movements. They're often way too subconscious and I don't understand them well enough to formulate rules that are as useful as "Beep when I get mail from my boss." Also, what if I want to wear mirrored sunglasses while I code? (I just got a new desk at which I face big windows with no blinds - around 3 or 4 pm, I'm very tempted to put on dark glasses). Is that going to break the UI? There are also a lot of variables in a person's behavior - sitting in a different chair, not getting enough sleep, and drinking too much coffee can all change one's movements. Although I've got to say that a UI which could detect when I hadn't had enough coffee and brew me a fresh cup would be a huge improvement.
So, I think this idea is barking up the wrong tree. The things I'd rather see in a new UI paradigm are some integration of voice commands, easier methods for customization (so that it's not just for geeks anymore. Outlook's Rules Wizard is actually moderately good at this.), and an interface with some sort of ability to learn from interactions with a user (while maintaining enough consistency so the guy doesn't feel like his computer is schizophrenic).
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I've got a few comments on a well-rounded education.
First of all, a good education isn't obtained entirely in the classroom. Most of the practical, job-oriented stuff that I learned came out of part-time jobs and internships (which my academic background helped me get). I learned the basic theory for designing software in class, but I learned the practical skills to code parts of a complicated project by going out and doing it. It's hard to teach those things in a classroom, and I'd rather see schools help their students get real work experience (through internships and co-op programs in particular) than do a poor job of teaching this stuff in the classroom.
Besides, there's no way that a four-year education can prepare you for the first ten years of your working life unless you're planning a very dull career. In the three years I've been out of school, I've had to learn about a whole bunch of different technologies (like J2EE and wireless computing) that didn't really exist when I was in school. I can't even begin to guess what I'll be working with by the time I've been out of school for ten years. New stuff comes along pretty fast, so the best thing you can learn in school is how to learn quickly.
Why? It's actually a great model for consumers. If companies priced the hardware so that they could turn a profit on it, it would rival the price of a personal computer and lots of people wouldn't bother. This model lets them get the hardware out to a much wider user base and then make plenty of money on software if they come up with good games and market them well (bad marketing killed the Dreamcast, not weak hardware or software).
Looking at the pictures, my guess is that these wouldn't be good for a 3-year-old because they're small enough to swallow. Wait until she's older. I think LEGO still makes a set of bricks for young children that are slightly larger than the standard ones, those might be safer.
- One semester is enough time to really get a good grasp on procedural programming (manipulating variables, flow control, recursion, basic performance analysis, etc.) but not enough time to do that and really learn OO.
- Learning assembler first is overkill. Learning assembler second is a good idea, because you get a better sense of what it's being used for.
- A good first language is one that doesn't give you a lot of rope with which to hang yourself. Pascal and Java are both better than C in this regard.
- One should learn OO right around when one starts working with data structures
- Computer science and programming are not the same thing. Most computer science courses can and should be largely language-independent.
Overall, I think that there are some good reasons to use Java in an intro class: it keeps the student out of trouble, it's got a C-like syntax, and you can easily use it to demonstrate the basic stuff. The biggest drawback to using Java is that you don't get students thinking carefully about memory allocation, but most of them need a little time to master for loops before they can really handle memory manipulation anyway.As much as I dislike this whole Smart Tags idea, I don't think it's a copyright issue. When I request a web page, the server delivers the data to my browser. I have the right to instruct the browser to modify it for my own personal use. For example, I can make the font larger or I can override the designer's choice of text and background colors with my own. Similarly, if I'm enough of a crackhead, I can run Microsoft LinkMuncher on my own personal copy of the page in order to ensure that it is not "underlinked" or "overusable." As long as I don't redistribute it, it's probably no more of a copyright violation than changing the background color.
Still, even if it's not a copyright violation, the only good thing about this feature is that it'll default to off.
Actually, they are putting this feature into Word and Excel. As I understand it, when you type certain things in Word or Excel (names, stock symbols, etc.), you'll get a little symbol next to them that will launch a web browser and take you to some MS info service (phone book, stock quotes, etc.).
Personally, I've been reasonably happy with Win95, Win98, WinME and Win2K but the more I hear about Windows XP the happier I am that I installed Linux last week.
You're wrong about IBM. You can often make more money with a small slice of a big pie than with an entire small pie.
Apple has 5% of the personal computer market. PC companies share the other 95%. Even if IBM only grabs 10% of the market for PCs, they can still sell twice as many computers as Apple can.
As far as I can tell, all different sorts of people are involved in open software. Some aren't going to be interested in closed-source projects, but others will (especially if they can still do open-source work in their free time). There are a lot of factors that go into choosing the right job, and open source is only one of them for most people.
I think that targeting some of your recruiting at the open source community is a great idea. And the best part is that before you hire an open source developer, you can easily get a look at how he writes code.
Do they really think people will shell out $200 to play Snake on their TV screens?
That's a lot of nonsense. If I tell a programmer to drop everything and do a new task, and that new task takes 12 hours, it's completely unreasonable for me to come back 12 hours later and ask why something else isn't done.
It's pretty unambiguous that "drop everything" means put this new thing first on your to-do list. The issue is really not whether or not one has other priorities, but whether or not one can do two jobs at once. Most people can't, and it's unreasonable to expect that introducing new work into a full schedule won't push everything else back.
If 8088 assembler was so great, how come nobody writes in it anymore?
I'd be very surprised to see this decision hold up on appeal. If the arbitrator laid out the 3 criteria correctly (confusing similarity, no legitimate interest in the name, and bad faith registration or use), then there's no way that RightSports should lose the name because confusing similarity (whether or not it exists) is insufficient on its own.
Whether or not the names are similar is debatable, but it looks like a pretty blatant land-grab by Referee magazine. Given that both companies serve the same small market, I'm not surprised that their mutual customers are outraged by this and threatening a boycott. RightSports is providing much more value at a lower price, so Referee magazine is far more likely to alienate its own customers than to turn them against RightSports. Hopefully, this will eventually turn into a case study in why not to pull this kind of crap.
This is actually a much better approach to layoffs than what many dot-coms have been doing. Check out this article from Salon for some stories on how not to do layoffs. I'm sad to see GameCenter go, and I hope that GameSpot changes a little to compensate, but I'm glad that they're at least making their job cuts in a responsible way and helping people find new jobs.
A small ISP that just offers a dial-up connection doesn't have the resources to compete with AOL and MSN and others. To succeed, an ISP needs to offer more than that - good deals on DSL/broadband, shell accounts, specialized content, whatever and they need to target a niche market and develop loyal customers who will not leave them for AOL. A Mom-and-Pop ISP isn't ripe for a takeover by a big ISP until a good number of their customers have actually left for other ISPs.
The ISP I use for shell access and e-mail (but not for actual connectivity right now) is New York City's Panix The rates are excellent and they're the best ISP I've ever used, so I recommend them if you're in the NYC area and need an ISP (or if you're elsewhere and need a reliable e-mail account and support staff that actually know what Unix is).The value of the Apple brand is impacted by things that look like they're from Apple even if they're not. If I make a crappy ripoff of Aqua and it gets passed around, people may think that the real Aqua is just as crappy, and that's going to reduce the chances that they'll ever consider buying a Mac.
What I would do, if I were Apple, is create my own Aqua-like UIs for other operating systems - a Windows desktop, Unix GUI themes, etc. and either sell them cheap or distribute them freely. If they have to crack down on this stuff, then there's obviously some demand. There are plenty of people who wish they were using a Mac but are stuck with Windows and they'd go for it. Also, people who've never used a Mac would be able to get a feel for it on their Windows PCs, so it might help them recruit new users. And by doing it themselves, they'd insure high quality and reduce the need for other people to make Aqua-like skins for Windows apps.
As others have said, Juno's not forcing anyone to use their service. Still, I think it's a bad business move. Given that one of the largest states in the US is in the middle of an energy crisis, it just doesn't look good to launch a program in which you require your customers to keep their computers running continuously.
Other distributed computing companies (Popular Power, for instance) don't require continuous operation (as far as I know). They pay you for what you do, but you're allowed to turn the machine off or take it off the network. Using subscribers' machines for distributed computing is a reasonable price for free service, and would have been a neat enhancement to their business model. Requiring continuous operation just makes them look greedy. And if you consider the state of affairs in California, their timing is awful.
It sounds as though Raskin and Burg are basically advocating an invisible OS. The Palm, which Burg cites as a device that exemplifies his ideal, definitely has an OS (PalmOS). The user can use all of the main applications and have minimal interaction with the OS itself. However, if the user wants to customize things or install additional software on the Palm, there is still OS interaction of a sort. I don't buy the idea that installing new software on a Palm is much harder than walking through a basic InstallShield wizard.
Truthfully, the idea of a keyboard that figures out what I want to do as soon as I start typing doesn't appeal to me. How does it decide what kind of text I'm typing and open the appropriate application? At some point, the user needs to tell the computer what task he wants to perform. I'm not convinced that putting that process into hardware is preferable to doing it on the screen. Burg doesn't offer any real support for that argument.
A lot of newer PCs are shipping with keyboards that contain Palm-like buttons which automatically launch e-mail, web browsers, and other programs. While I like application-launching buttons on the Palm, I'm too well-trained as a computer user to bother with them on a keyboard. And you still have to customize those buttons using software at some point. The big difference is that in hardware you get a fixed number of buttons, while you can always draw an extra button on the screen.
The most intuitive interface for selecting an application is probably voice commands. If you could just say "Word" or "Emacs", you wouldn't have to worry about where it was stashed in some menu hierarchy.
...is another man's research. I did read the article. Here's what it says:
"Sexually explicit is defined as any depiction or description of 'sexual excitement,' `sexual conduct,' or `a lewd exhibition of nudity.'"
I can see how that would pose problems for all sorts of people attempting to access material for legitimate academic work. Literature and art, for example, often have enough sexual content to qualify under those rules.
And then what about researching sexuality and pornography? What if one wanted to write a paper about sexuality and the Internet?
Sexuality is as legitimate a subject for academia as anything else. It's absolutely ridiculous that college professors should have to ask their department heads to sign permission slips before they read anything explicit. It's just as ridiculous that they should have to get permission before giving academic assignments which deal with sexual matters to adult students.
As a former computer lab monitor, I'm all for nobody looking at porn in the lab, but this decision goes beyond that.
First, a point of clarification. It doesn't look as though e-mail that one actually sends qualifies as "deleted." It sounds like this proposal covers the draft that you wrote before you sent it (the one in which you referred to your boss as "that pompous windbag") which currently might be used against you if it was found on your computer (even though you removed the phrase in question from the version you sent).
On a related note, it would be great if deletion were just as simple as emptying the trash bin in Windows every now and again. However, a lot of incriminating data can be found in the nooks and crannies of file formats like MS Word (yes, I know this wouldn't be a problem if we all used Linux or BSD but we don't). Your non-incriminating copy of a file might still contain a buffer full of incriminating text that you had carefully erased.
My personal opinion on this sort of thing is that it really depends on the nature of the crime. If one actually hurts someone, deleted information relating to that should be fair game. However, if the act of deletion makes the data harmless then it should be ignored. For example, if I write an e-mail message to a co-worker that could be construed as sexual harassment, but I cancel before sending it, it would be unfair to use the leftover draft of the unsent message to demonstrate a pattern of harassment. Similarly, if I write a letter in MS Word and delete a paragraph about how the recipient and I should kill my husband, but I delete the paragraph before I print and mail the letter, the file recovered from my hard drive should not be used as evidence of conspiracy to commit murder. The key question seems to be does deleting the data effectively reverse the intent behind creating the data? If it does then one shouldn't be held accountable for it, but if not then it should be fair game.
Breaking SDMI after products are on the shelves would definitely be much more interesting than breaking it now. Still, SDMI seems doomed whether it's hacked or not because it offers nothing for the consumer.
Like the article says, it's going to be pretty hard to sell SDMI-compliant CD players. A consumer who knows what SDMI is has no incentive to buy one, unless manufacturers slash prices on them but that's unlikely given the cost of developing the new devices. I wonder if we'll start seeing CDs with SDMI-only tracks (i.e. you get the whole album normally, but there are two extra bonus tracks that only play on an SDMI device). Either that or SDMI support won't be mentioned on packaging, so that someone who goes to buy a new Discman will discover that it supports SDMI when it refuses to play the CD he burned on his computer. That would be a customer relations nightmare.
Anyway, given that SDMI will pretty much repulse most of the early-adopter types who are key to the success of new hardware (like portable MP3 players), the odds of it getting off the ground are low.
I'd expect a moderated search engine to run into the same problem that web filtering encounters - one person's trash is another person's useful information. You could easily have half a dozen users who search on the same keyword to find different information.
For example, if I search on the keyword "hair" to find information about hairstyling and I moderate down the links relating to the musical "Hair," that's going to make it harder for the person who wants to know about the original cast album.
Also, a moderating system could be intentionally or unintentionally tilted by users with agendas. For example, someone could register a large number of users and moderate down sites which contained opinions or information which they opposed.
I think the biggest problem with search engines is actually in the user interfaces. The web is so huge that it's often hard to find anything by just entering a word or two. Search interfaces should make it easy for users to provide effective search criteria. Also, users need to learn how to construct effective searches. Coming up with the keywords that produce the documents you want without also producing 10 pages of crap is not intuitive for most people.
With two headline-making price glitches, Amazon is looking a bit inept at this point. What's amazing is that they've managed to develop one of the best, most comprehensive, and most innovative online shopping experiences and they can't figure out how to keep their prices straight. It's too bad they're not doing their new car store in-house. ("Check it out, this new Mercedes lists at $50,000 but I got it from Amazon for $8995!")
But what's even more amazing is their lack of business savvy on this particular issue. Amazon thrives on repeat customers and that requires good customer service. Whatever loss they would have taken by shipping discounted merchandise, the cost of all this bad press will be worse. If you're looking for signs that Amazon's on its way out, incidents like this are even more of a warning than their earnings reports.
Personally, I'm inclined to think that the most useful tools are the highly customizable ones - while I don't go near the Microsoft paperclip, tools like Outlook or procmail give me fine-tuned control over how I receive and organize my mail and that's good. So a big thing that I look for in new software is how easily I can customize it to work with me. Microsoft Word nearly always seems to work against me.
I can't imagine trying to set up rules for something that was responding to my hand and/or eye movements. They're often way too subconscious and I don't understand them well enough to formulate rules that are as useful as "Beep when I get mail from my boss." Also, what if I want to wear mirrored sunglasses while I code? (I just got a new desk at which I face big windows with no blinds - around 3 or 4 pm, I'm very tempted to put on dark glasses). Is that going to break the UI? There are also a lot of variables in a person's behavior - sitting in a different chair, not getting enough sleep, and drinking too much coffee can all change one's movements. Although I've got to say that a UI which could detect when I hadn't had enough coffee and brew me a fresh cup would be a huge improvement.
So, I think this idea is barking up the wrong tree. The things I'd rather see in a new UI paradigm are some integration of voice commands, easier methods for customization (so that it's not just for geeks anymore. Outlook's Rules Wizard is actually moderately good at this.), and an interface with some sort of ability to learn from interactions with a user (while maintaining enough consistency so the guy doesn't feel like his computer is schizophrenic).