It is only their scooter fleet being replaced, not their cars or motorcycles. Also, motorcycles are used throughout the US almost exclusively for traffic control - not emergency responders. In NY, scooters are likely used just by the meter maids - not the SWAT team.
Why not make their scooters green? They will likely save on maintenance costs as well considering that they are modular and *far* simpler than a real motorcycle (or gas powered scooter for that matter). Not to mention advancing the market and the state of the art for electric vehicles.
MST3k was officially dead/zombie-fied to me when they starting suing small live acts based on 'format similarity'. The folks in charge obviously have no sense of humor.
We've put ourselves into this situation. The secrets are there because the "public" cannot be told. What percentage of the "public" today is Muslim and would always come down on the side of Muslims vs. the US? No, we let people into the US that place the interests of foreign organizations ahead of those of the US. We have one now as a congressman who is going to try to take the oath of office on a Quran. Alarmist. Who gives two sh**s about what book they are using when they swear an oath of office? It is a formality. And frankly if he is a good muslim - I'd prefer he swear on something he holds dear. Considering the graft and corruption in the federal government I'd say swearing on the bible doesn't seem to amount to much.
I know lots of good muslims who are not fundamentalists. Don't let that word get politically charged like "terrorist" already has - don't give it the power to make you stop thinking critically.
I never understood why google bought picasa. I had to use their software at a company about a year and a half ago and thought it was total crap. It was used to put up those lame 'corporate party' pictures on the company intranet. It produced lousy html code with unimpressive navigation features. It was tough to integrate into existing pages and such. The interface was klunky and "mom-ish".
So seriously, I am left wondering what is so great about it? Google obviously thought it was good enough to buy, my wife was all gangbusters a few weeks ago about wanting it (installed via wine but wouldn't run) and slashdot seems to think having it for linux is great... what gives?
digiKam seems to do laps around it and is native in linux. What am I missing here?
Sounds like a familiar upgrade path. I was constantly getting my dad's hand-me-down machines. The first was a TRS80 Model I - *loaded* with 32K ram, dual external floppies and acoustic coupler modem and a generic epson printer. I wrote basic programs, did word processing, and wrote and played a scant few games, basically just cut my teeth on it.
When XT's came out my Dad picked up two in rapid succession and I got a hercules monochrome 8mhz 128K machine with a single floppy. Eventually, dual floppies, more ram, CGA, and a mammoth 10mb HD. MFM, RLL, SCSI, IDE, CGA, EGA, VGA(!), each upgrade seemed like a quantum leap.
That hand-me-down cycle continued through a couple 286's, a few 386's and several 486's until one day, as a junior in college, I bought a 486DX4100 and finally had a faster machine than my dad;)
These days, now that I can easily buy new hardware, I could care less about upgrades. I have since totally burnt out on games so there is no benefit in uprooting my whole machine to gain a little speed here or there. And there don't seem to be any quantum leaps anymore, improvements seem mundane and incremental and I don't get anything out of an upgrade other than a charge on the credit card and a ton of work to fit the new hardware into an existing machine.
I think the above is AGS, aging geek syndrome - where you look critically at 'upgrades' and see only the work involved in implementing them.
Smaller and smaller devices are where the innovation seems to happen these days, but the incompatibility between all those devices kills any 'upgrade fever' one might experience. That being said, when I can get my cellphone to have Ghz-like processing power and a variable sized holographic display, I'll be the first in line.
I have tried mambo 4.5.x - same thing, everything is stored in a database. I recall seeing a somewhat kludgy inline frame module for static content is that what you are referring to?
What bugs me is that any sufficiently powerful/featureful CMS system that I have tried requires the content to be stuffed into a database somewhere. I am fine with having certain types of content like blog entries and such in a database, but there are lots of times where I just want to incorporate pre-existing static content or stuff that just doesn't play well in a database - like a cgi app for example. Templating, news/blog features, html editors, etc. are all nice to have, but without the ability to manage pre-existing content I have to rewrite all of my resources to fit into their box. That sucks.
An engine that could manage dynamic content and incorporate static content (parsing it, embedding it, styling it, whatever) would be perfect. But I haven't found such a package. Anybody who has waded through the hundreds of free CMSs and found this featureset, do tell.
It also lacked sulfur which acted as a lubricant in diesel fuel promoting less engine wear as the fuel is a lubricant as well
FYI, SME biodiesel (soy-methyl-esters) have never had this problem. SME is the dominant Biodiesel that can be purchased in the US. Homebrew WVO (waste veg oil) might have this problem, but pretty much any biodiesel you could buy has *far* superior lubricating qualities by design. In fact SME is added to low-sulfur dino diesel to improve its lubricating qualities.
... From a political standpoint, biodiesel subsidies also pay for numerous megacorp farming cronies.
Wow, who do you work for, Shell, Total, or Exxon? This Argumentum Ad Hominem is by far the worst spin I have ever seen on the most promising alternatives to dino-fuels. What is the half trillion dollars we are "investing" in Iraq if not oil industry subsidies?
Not to mention that bio-fuels are cumulatively far less CO2 producing because the plants that comprise it grew by photosynthesis which removes carbon dioxide from the air.
Bio-fuels are the *perfect* transitional solution for weaning the United States off of its petroleum addiction. We can stop paying farm subsidies to keep farming viable - demand would rise and we wouldn't have to pay to keep farmers from farming. We can reuse all of our current fuel infrastructure (refineries, fuel tankers, gas pumps, etc) with next to no investment.
Bio-fuels would release us from foreign oil dependence, substantially drop our CO2 emissions, costs us nearly nothing, and save us money on farm subsidies. A nice crutch until we can arrive at an end-to-end solution for "zero-emission" fuel.
Lastly, bio-fuels have other positive aspects, for example biodiesel: 0 sulfur emissions, 2/3 less exhaust smoke (over dino-diesel), *far* superior lubricating qualities (than dino-diesel), etc.
So you are saying that myriad folks I see driving their H2s on their daily commute to work are doing so because they need to haul groceries and kids and video games over a mountain? The argument you espouse justifies a minivan. The reason SUVs are so popular is because they work like a minivan but look "tough" and have that "get out of my way" factor that a minivan doesn't.
That being said, I drive an econo beater most of the time but also have a truck. I use the truck for towing and hauling, but that doesn't justify my 4x4 with a 4 inch lift kit and oversize tires. My truck is also my toy so I understand the need for these features, and I *do* drive it over mountains and not on my commute. The problem I have is with Suzy homemaker that is driving her military grade vehicle with 18" ground clearance and offroad tires back and forth to the grocery store.
Tangentially, I am waiting for SOMEBODY TO PRODUCE A MIDSIZE TRUCK THAT RUNS ON DIESEL so I can get have the utility of a truck, the efficiency of a diesel and the green-ness of biodiesel. Like my wife's VW TDI. Damn I'm jealous of that car.
As a biodiesel user and vegetarian I am frikin TORN!;) Does the reduction in greenhouse gases outweigh the negative of grinding up animals for fuel?
Hmmm... well those animals would have been producing methane and carbon dioxide - and using them for fuel reduces greenhouse gasses even further... twice the reduction in CO2 emissions, hmmm tempting. Uhhh... well... whatever the carnies can use it and I'll stick to SME (soy methyl esters);)
1.) That everybody is a goddamned operating systems kernel engineer instead of a user who wants to get some fucking computer work done. 95% of you people have never even modified a single line of your local Linux kernel source tree.
Swearing in the first paragraph, eh? Doesn't bode well for your argument. And, to your point, it isn't that they want/need to modify the kernel - just that they or someone else capable can, so that this cheap soon-to-be unsupported device can continue to live once the proprietary software vendor realizes there is no revenue stream in cheap give-away machines. Kernel-wise this is a moot point since Darwin is open source, but the rest of the OS is not.
2.) That there will always be a majority of kids who aren't interested in staring at lines of source code to feel good about their "software freedom." Give me a break.
Yeah, and there will always be a majority of kids who don't want to brush their teeth, go to bed, go to school, or be politically active. Your point is?
3.) That the tiny minority of kids who would actually be interested in Linux and 100% open source would just wipe OS X off the laptop and install Linux for free anyway.
True enough. I doubt the OS choice is driven by pandering to tinkerers though.
4.) You guys obsess over making every little kid a coder, when XCode/GCC ships free with OS X, and these kids could have been designing the next great Cocoa apps. Cocoa simply whips the butt of everything else out there.
Man Motif is so cool. No way, GTK is so cool. You guys are sooo dumb, QT is teh r0x0rs. Yeah whatever Cocoa is the coolest. Nuhh UHHHuh, Avalon rulez! Ad nauseum.
5.) There are TONS more creative kids than coder kids, and think of all the incredible creative stuff that would have been nurtured here. iLife ships for free with OS X. Now these kids won't get to have Garageband for free, or iPhoto for free, or iMovie and iDVD for free. But hey, now they get to experience the joy of having to install two entire desktop environments and libraries just to run each other's apps! Have fun with a "package management system" and a fragmented filesystem hierarchy that dumps files all over the place instead of in well-designed bundles!
Ah, you are using that word "creative" to mean "artistic" - how annoying. My writer wife does that as does her painter mother. But I digress... You are defeating your argument here. The point is to have a cheap, supported, useful device for kids to learn on and here you are already talking about what they will have to buy in order to do cool stuff with the device. This is exactly why a proprietary software vendor will donate their OS (besides the familiarity lock-in with kids)
6.) Which leads to my final point. These kids will be taught the wrong ways to do things instead of the right ways. App bundles, real application APIs, real drag-and-drop, etc....
Are you serious? Do you really think these kids are going to be writing programs outside of hello world? What do you expect them to write, p2p videophone applications? Come on be serious. These are going to be word processors, presentation designers, photo editors... productivity tools.
I guarantee a kid given a choice and presented both systems would have gone with Apple...
You are probably right here, OSX is well designed and has lots of nifty eye candy. And 9 out of 10 kids will tell you that "shiny" is cooler than "sustainable" any day of the week and twice on Tuesdays.
So, to review, Google has not (largely) done anything to provides its kick-ass tools on Linux. I guess it is prudent business but I had thought that Google as a company would have the conscience to do something to for the linux user also. I personally do not think it has.
Because largely linux users don't need it. I'm glad you think google desktop is a kickass app, but to me it is just so much fluff. The only useful bit is the ability to search outlook email and I don't run outlook on linux. find . |xargs grep "whatever" works fine for me.
Google video? you mean video.google.com? how does that need a port?
Google Earth, Google talk eh, maybe. But really I could care less
Picasa? I used that software before it was acquired and it sucked.. I don't want a port of that turd
What about all of the great platform-neutral apps they have given you for FREE? Search, Gmail, Maps, Video, Images, blah blah blah... From my perspective they have given me a crapload of apps, just none that sit on my local machine. That being said, I am sure reasons will develop to not like google related to this.
Consider this syllogism: If knowledge is power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then it follows that absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely. Assuming an iff relationship between knowledge and power. Pass me the spliff man.;)
That said, as nice a gesture as this is, the iPod is a lot more than just its firmware. That clickwheel interface is pretty amazing--I haven't used such an intuitive device interface in a long time
I suppose I am the only person in the whole world who finds the ipod physical interface totally "the suck" and the software unintuitive. I thought the original jog wheels were cool just because they were retro, smooth and elegant - but the whole rub your finger around a touchpad? weak! Is it a button? is it a touchpad? does a double touch do something different? What the hell? It probably makes sense for those that owned and understood the jog wheel version but as a johnny-come-lately, it is confusing at best. Couple that with the totally unintuitive 3rd party fm broadcasting thingies that require you to play and pause a song to broadcast FM and you have me sitting in the passenger seat on a roadtrip fiddling with the damn thing for hours just trying to get it to play a damn song.
If that is the best interface out there... egads what must the worst one be like?
For once the tinfoil hats have it. This is a total and complete bullshit made-up problem that serves only to create work. *IF* you believe the estimates that the equvalent of 10000 barrels of oil a day will be saved, that is ~30 days * 10000 * ~$60 =$180 million a year saved. Whoopdee-f**king-doo! It is going to cost far, FAR more than that to retool every daylight savings time algorithm, device, clock, calendar, etc. American Airlines alone will have to foot a bill of that magnitude to update, test and deploy their software. And now we all have a y2k style annoyance with our machines.
DST is NOT as simple as changing your clock; for example: Go outside. Look at the power meter on the side of your dwelling/office building. There is a recorder there. It may or may not adjust for the existing DST. It may or may not be read by a human. It may or may not dial in and send your data directly. You may or may not be able to choose your own retail electric provider to service your meter. Your meter reading entity may or may not be the same as your transmission and distribution service provider. Your power generation company might be any of a number.
My point is ALL of these folks now have to change their code, their processes, their accounting, everything. And it all needs to happen by the same day in 2007. This is the insight I have because of my day gig, I am sure there are thousands of other problems as bad or worse that are created by this idiotic timeshifting crap.
Timezones, daylight savings, local time - all bullshit that is supposed to simplify our lives that *really* only complicates it. Designed in a day that had no ramifications other than "oops, time to reset my watch".
WAKE UP EARLIER, GO TO BED EARLIER. I have read all the hoopla about how DST saves energy. It doesn't. What does save energy is people doing things earlier and quitting things earlier./rant
I'd like to ride with the highway drivers that you do. I regularly have near misses on the highway on my motorcycle.
Cars traveling 25mph are making more stupid traffic decisions because the speed limit is low in locations where they might make stupid decisions.
Highways, however, don't require as many decisions and you might think that makes for a safer ride but alas no. Highways (around here anyway) always lead to 'zoned out' drivers. Zoned out drivers are the ones who regularly change lanes into mine. Super-ultra-zoned out drivers are the ones who don't even recognize their error and continue to merge into me while I am honking the horn and taking evasive action (usually followed by a high speed pass and the one finger salute).
To a good (surviving) motorcyclist, everyone everywhere is always a threat. The best place to drive is where nobody but you gets to make stupid traffic decisions.
Interesting... where'd you get that info? Been looking for my sub-100k id for a while and can't remember the login. Had read/. for a long time before ever getting a login and longer still before ever bothering to post. (still don't post much!)
Yeah... but if you named your baby Longhorn then it would likely be born a year late, missing many features (toes, fingers, face, etc.) and the constant stream of mucous and pus issuing forth from its orifices (from battling all those diseases, er, bugs)... ick.
Hello? Kevorkian? Do you make house calls?
Core Data = good idea, weak storage
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Core Data sounds like so many other great 3rd party tools out there, except now part of the OS (so to speak). A standardized object-relational persistence mechanism and design studio - Awesome. But why only:
A text-based XML file format
A better performing binary file format
A high-performance, SQLite-based database file format
Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism? Using LDAP or any sql-92 compliant existing database would be useful. Hey apple, you listening?
First off, this is not a huge deal. Anybody with even a moderately complex ASP.net site has probably written custom authentication anyway. As is typical, the/. anti-MS crowd (into which I am normally grouped) have already blown this way out of proportion.
What would be interesting would be if mono and their re-implementation of ASP.Net got a boost out of this from the migration of some of the more run-of-the-mill ASP.Net websites. I see very few mono ASP.Net sites, and even less buzz about it.
The one thing I was interested the article is missing. If I have to install all those frigging modules and services and tweak on the OSC stuff to get it working I want to know there is a payoff somewhere and not just some oddly tempo'd mario bros music.
The Bookshelf paradigm has real potential. It is a better metaphor for how I am sure many people use their computer - *especially* if it were coupled with a computer that did away with the primary and secondary storage dichotomy.
To be successful, the bookshelf paradigm would require a machine that has secondary storage that was so fast as to negate the need for RAM, or a machine with so much primary storage as to negate the need for a hard drive. Programs wouldn't have to be loaded, they would always be there instantly - like a book. You wouldn't have to sit and wait for load times, the program's state would be the 'bookmark' where you left off, restarting the application would be like rereading, etc etc. As far as metaphors go, it would be far more intuitive for someone who had never used computers before and far less frustrating. In fact, most of my annoyances with working on computers all day long can be tracked back to the primary/secondary storage differentiation - I lump BSODs and crashes together in this category because the "reboot to fix" mentality is a direct descendent of this storage differentiation.
The bookshelf/nonvolatile machine combo is how I want my machine and my applications to behave. I went to linux in '97 because it was the closest approximation to that behavior with uptimes of several months (years for the hardcore/security unconscious). This would be the largest paradigm shift in computing since microcomputers.
Slashdot Mirror
It is only their scooter fleet being replaced, not their cars or motorcycles. Also, motorcycles are used throughout the US almost exclusively for traffic control - not emergency responders. In NY, scooters are likely used just by the meter maids - not the SWAT team.
Why not make their scooters green? They will likely save on maintenance costs as well considering that they are modular and *far* simpler than a real motorcycle (or gas powered scooter for that matter). Not to mention advancing the market and the state of the art for electric vehicles.
Their "intellectual property" is riffing on bad movies? Give me a break - I personally have prior art on that!
MST3k was officially dead/zombie-fied to me when they starting suing small live acts based on 'format similarity'. The folks in charge obviously have no sense of humor.
I know lots of good muslims who are not fundamentalists. Don't let that word get politically charged like "terrorist" already has - don't give it the power to make you stop thinking critically.
I never understood why google bought picasa. I had to use their software at a company about a year and a half ago and thought it was total crap. It was used to put up those lame 'corporate party' pictures on the company intranet. It produced lousy html code with unimpressive navigation features. It was tough to integrate into existing pages and such. The interface was klunky and "mom-ish".
So seriously, I am left wondering what is so great about it? Google obviously thought it was good enough to buy, my wife was all gangbusters a few weeks ago about wanting it (installed via wine but wouldn't run) and slashdot seems to think having it for linux is great... what gives?
digiKam seems to do laps around it and is native in linux. What am I missing here?
Sounds like a familiar upgrade path. I was constantly getting my dad's hand-me-down machines. The first was a TRS80 Model I - *loaded* with 32K ram, dual external floppies and acoustic coupler modem and a generic epson printer. I wrote basic programs, did word processing, and wrote and played a scant few games, basically just cut my teeth on it.
;)
When XT's came out my Dad picked up two in rapid succession and I got a hercules monochrome 8mhz 128K machine with a single floppy. Eventually, dual floppies, more ram, CGA, and a mammoth 10mb HD. MFM, RLL, SCSI, IDE, CGA, EGA, VGA(!), each upgrade seemed like a quantum leap.
That hand-me-down cycle continued through a couple 286's, a few 386's and several 486's until one day, as a junior in college, I bought a 486DX4100 and finally had a faster machine than my dad
These days, now that I can easily buy new hardware, I could care less about upgrades. I have since totally burnt out on games so there is no benefit in uprooting my whole machine to gain a little speed here or there. And there don't seem to be any quantum leaps anymore, improvements seem mundane and incremental and I don't get anything out of an upgrade other than a charge on the credit card and a ton of work to fit the new hardware into an existing machine.
I think the above is AGS, aging geek syndrome - where you look critically at 'upgrades' and see only the work involved in implementing them.
Smaller and smaller devices are where the innovation seems to happen these days, but the incompatibility between all those devices kills any 'upgrade fever' one might experience. That being said, when I can get my cellphone to have Ghz-like processing power and a variable sized holographic display, I'll be the first in line.
I have tried mambo 4.5.x - same thing, everything is stored in a database. I recall seeing a somewhat kludgy inline frame module for static content is that what you are referring to?
What bugs me is that any sufficiently powerful/featureful CMS system that I have tried requires the content to be stuffed into a database somewhere. I am fine with having certain types of content like blog entries and such in a database, but there are lots of times where I just want to incorporate pre-existing static content or stuff that just doesn't play well in a database - like a cgi app for example. Templating, news/blog features, html editors, etc. are all nice to have, but without the ability to manage pre-existing content I have to rewrite all of my resources to fit into their box. That sucks.
An engine that could manage dynamic content and incorporate static content (parsing it, embedding it, styling it, whatever) would be perfect. But I haven't found such a package. Anybody who has waded through the hundreds of free CMSs and found this featureset, do tell.
It also lacked sulfur which acted as a lubricant in diesel fuel promoting less engine wear as the fuel is a lubricant as well
FYI, SME biodiesel (soy-methyl-esters) have never had this problem. SME is the dominant Biodiesel that can be purchased in the US. Homebrew WVO (waste veg oil) might have this problem, but pretty much any biodiesel you could buy has *far* superior lubricating qualities by design. In fact SME is added to low-sulfur dino diesel to improve its lubricating qualities.
From a political standpoint, biodiesel subsidies also pay for numerous megacorp farming cronies.
Wow, who do you work for, Shell, Total, or Exxon? This Argumentum Ad Hominem is by far the worst spin I have ever seen on the most promising alternatives to dino-fuels. What is the half trillion dollars we are "investing" in Iraq if not oil industry subsidies?
Not to mention that bio-fuels are cumulatively far less CO2 producing because the plants that comprise it grew by photosynthesis which removes carbon dioxide from the air.
Bio-fuels are the *perfect* transitional solution for weaning the United States off of its petroleum addiction. We can stop paying farm subsidies to keep farming viable - demand would rise and we wouldn't have to pay to keep farmers from farming. We can reuse all of our current fuel infrastructure (refineries, fuel tankers, gas pumps, etc) with next to no investment.
Bio-fuels would release us from foreign oil dependence, substantially drop our CO2 emissions, costs us nearly nothing, and save us money on farm subsidies. A nice crutch until we can arrive at an end-to-end solution for "zero-emission" fuel.
Lastly, bio-fuels have other positive aspects, for example biodiesel: 0 sulfur emissions, 2/3 less exhaust smoke (over dino-diesel), *far* superior lubricating qualities (than dino-diesel), etc.
heh, wonder how many americans would get a red dwarf joke
Got it. Always wondered what their fascination with Wilma was though... Betty was most certainly the real hottie.
So you are saying that myriad folks I see driving their H2s on their daily commute to work are doing so because they need to haul groceries and kids and video games over a mountain? The argument you espouse justifies a minivan. The reason SUVs are so popular is because they work like a minivan but look "tough" and have that "get out of my way" factor that a minivan doesn't.
That being said, I drive an econo beater most of the time but also have a truck. I use the truck for towing and hauling, but that doesn't justify my 4x4 with a 4 inch lift kit and oversize tires. My truck is also my toy so I understand the need for these features, and I *do* drive it over mountains and not on my commute. The problem I have is with Suzy homemaker that is driving her military grade vehicle with 18" ground clearance and offroad tires back and forth to the grocery store.
Tangentially, I am waiting for SOMEBODY TO PRODUCE A MIDSIZE TRUCK THAT RUNS ON DIESEL so I can get have the utility of a truck, the efficiency of a diesel and the green-ness of biodiesel. Like my wife's VW TDI. Damn I'm jealous of that car.
As a biodiesel user and vegetarian I am frikin TORN! ;) Does the reduction in greenhouse gases outweigh the negative of grinding up animals for fuel?
;)
Hmmm... well those animals would have been producing methane and carbon dioxide - and using them for fuel reduces greenhouse gasses even further... twice the reduction in CO2 emissions, hmmm tempting. Uhhh... well... whatever the carnies can use it and I'll stick to SME (soy methyl esters)
1.) That everybody is a goddamned operating systems kernel engineer instead of a user who wants to get some fucking computer work done. 95% of you people have never even modified a single line of your local Linux kernel source tree.
Swearing in the first paragraph, eh? Doesn't bode well for your argument. And, to your point, it isn't that they want/need to modify the kernel - just that they or someone else capable can, so that this cheap soon-to-be unsupported device can continue to live once the proprietary software vendor realizes there is no revenue stream in cheap give-away machines. Kernel-wise this is a moot point since Darwin is open source, but the rest of the OS is not.
2.) That there will always be a majority of kids who aren't interested in staring at lines of source code to feel good about their "software freedom." Give me a break.
Yeah, and there will always be a majority of kids who don't want to brush their teeth, go to bed, go to school, or be politically active. Your point is?
3.) That the tiny minority of kids who would actually be interested in Linux and 100% open source would just wipe OS X off the laptop and install Linux for free anyway.
True enough. I doubt the OS choice is driven by pandering to tinkerers though.
4.) You guys obsess over making every little kid a coder, when XCode/GCC ships free with OS X, and these kids could have been designing the next great Cocoa apps. Cocoa simply whips the butt of everything else out there.
Man Motif is so cool. No way, GTK is so cool. You guys are sooo dumb, QT is teh r0x0rs. Yeah whatever Cocoa is the coolest. Nuhh UHHHuh, Avalon rulez! Ad nauseum.
5.) There are TONS more creative kids than coder kids, and think of all the incredible creative stuff that would have been nurtured here. iLife ships for free with OS X. Now these kids won't get to have Garageband for free, or iPhoto for free, or iMovie and iDVD for free. But hey, now they get to experience the joy of having to install two entire desktop environments and libraries just to run each other's apps! Have fun with a "package management system" and a fragmented filesystem hierarchy that dumps files all over the place instead of in well-designed bundles!
Ah, you are using that word "creative" to mean "artistic" - how annoying. My writer wife does that as does her painter mother. But I digress... You are defeating your argument here. The point is to have a cheap, supported, useful device for kids to learn on and here you are already talking about what they will have to buy in order to do cool stuff with the device. This is exactly why a proprietary software vendor will donate their OS (besides the familiarity lock-in with kids)
6.) Which leads to my final point. These kids will be taught the wrong ways to do things instead of the right ways. App bundles, real application APIs, real drag-and-drop, etc....
Are you serious? Do you really think these kids are going to be writing programs outside of hello world? What do you expect them to write, p2p videophone applications? Come on be serious. These are going to be word processors, presentation designers, photo editors... productivity tools.
I guarantee a kid given a choice and presented both systems would have gone with Apple...
You are probably right here, OSX is well designed and has lots of nifty eye candy. And 9 out of 10 kids will tell you that "shiny" is cooler than "sustainable" any day of the week and twice on Tuesdays.
So, to review, Google has not (largely) done anything to provides its kick-ass tools on Linux. I guess it is prudent business but I had thought that Google as a company would have the conscience to do something to for the linux user also. I personally do not think it has.
;)
Because largely linux users don't need it. I'm glad you think google desktop is a kickass app, but to me it is just so much fluff. The only useful bit is the ability to search outlook email and I don't run outlook on linux. find . |xargs grep "whatever" works fine for me.
Google video? you mean video.google.com? how does that need a port?
Google Earth, Google talk eh, maybe. But really I could care less
Picasa? I used that software before it was acquired and it sucked.. I don't want a port of that turd
What about all of the great platform-neutral apps they have given you for FREE? Search, Gmail, Maps, Video, Images, blah blah blah... From my perspective they have given me a crapload of apps, just none that sit on my local machine. That being said, I am sure reasons will develop to not like google related to this.
Consider this syllogism: If knowledge is power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then it follows that absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely. Assuming an iff relationship between knowledge and power. Pass me the spliff man.
That said, as nice a gesture as this is, the iPod is a lot more than just its firmware. That clickwheel interface is pretty amazing--I haven't used such an intuitive device interface in a long time
I suppose I am the only person in the whole world who finds the ipod physical interface totally "the suck" and the software unintuitive. I thought the original jog wheels were cool just because they were retro, smooth and elegant - but the whole rub your finger around a touchpad? weak! Is it a button? is it a touchpad? does a double touch do something different? What the hell? It probably makes sense for those that owned and understood the jog wheel version but as a johnny-come-lately, it is confusing at best. Couple that with the totally unintuitive 3rd party fm broadcasting thingies that require you to play and pause a song to broadcast FM and you have me sitting in the passenger seat on a roadtrip fiddling with the damn thing for hours just trying to get it to play a damn song.
If that is the best interface out there... egads what must the worst one be like?
For once the tinfoil hats have it. This is a total and complete bullshit made-up problem that serves only to create work. *IF* you believe the estimates that the equvalent of 10000 barrels of oil a day will be saved, that is ~30 days * 10000 * ~$60 =$180 million a year saved. Whoopdee-f**king-doo! It is going to cost far, FAR more than that to retool every daylight savings time algorithm, device, clock, calendar, etc. American Airlines alone will have to foot a bill of that magnitude to update, test and deploy their software. And now we all have a y2k style annoyance with our machines.
/rant
DST is NOT as simple as changing your clock; for example: Go outside. Look at the power meter on the side of your dwelling/office building. There is a recorder there. It may or may not adjust for the existing DST. It may or may not be read by a human. It may or may not dial in and send your data directly. You may or may not be able to choose your own retail electric provider to service your meter. Your meter reading entity may or may not be the same as your transmission and distribution service provider. Your power generation company might be any of a number.
My point is ALL of these folks now have to change their code, their processes, their accounting, everything. And it all needs to happen by the same day in 2007. This is the insight I have because of my day gig, I am sure there are thousands of other problems as bad or worse that are created by this idiotic timeshifting crap.
Timezones, daylight savings, local time - all bullshit that is supposed to simplify our lives that *really* only complicates it. Designed in a day that had no ramifications other than "oops, time to reset my watch".
WAKE UP EARLIER, GO TO BED EARLIER. I have read all the hoopla about how DST saves energy. It doesn't. What does save energy is people doing things earlier and quitting things earlier.
In theory nothing ;) My fiancee's 01 Beetle TDI has been running on 100% soy biodiesel for 20k miles now. Can't recommened it enough.
I'd like to ride with the highway drivers that you do. I regularly have near misses on the highway on my motorcycle.
Cars traveling 25mph are making more stupid traffic decisions because the speed limit is low in locations where they might make stupid decisions.
Highways, however, don't require as many decisions and you might think that makes for a safer ride but alas no. Highways (around here anyway) always lead to 'zoned out' drivers. Zoned out drivers are the ones who regularly change lanes into mine. Super-ultra-zoned out drivers are the ones who don't even recognize their error and continue to merge into me while I am honking the horn and taking evasive action (usually followed by a high speed pass and the one finger salute).
To a good (surviving) motorcyclist, everyone everywhere is always a threat. The best place to drive is where nobody but you gets to make stupid traffic decisions.
Interesting... where'd you get that info? Been looking for my sub-100k id for a while and can't remember the login. Had read /. for a long time before ever getting a login and longer still before ever bothering to post. (still don't post much!)
-G
Yeah... but if you named your baby Longhorn then it would likely be born a year late, missing many features (toes, fingers, face, etc.) and the constant stream of mucous and pus issuing forth from its orifices (from battling all those diseases, er, bugs)... ick.
Hello? Kevorkian? Do you make house calls?
Core Data sounds like so many other great 3rd party tools out there, except now part of the OS (so to speak). A standardized object-relational persistence mechanism and design studio - Awesome. But why only:
Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism? Using LDAP or any sql-92 compliant existing database would be useful. Hey apple, you listening?
First off, this is not a huge deal. Anybody with even a moderately complex ASP.net site has probably written custom authentication anyway. As is typical, the /. anti-MS crowd (into which I am normally grouped) have already blown this way out of proportion.
What would be interesting would be if mono and their re-implementation of ASP.Net got a boost out of this from the migration of some of the more run-of-the-mill ASP.Net websites. I see very few mono ASP.Net sites, and even less buzz about it.
The one thing I was interested the article is missing. If I have to install all those frigging modules and services and tweak on the OSC stuff to get it working I want to know there is a payoff somewhere and not just some oddly tempo'd mario bros music.
Anybody want to share mp3 samples?
The Bookshelf paradigm has real potential. It is a better metaphor for how I am sure many people use their computer - *especially* if it were coupled with a computer that did away with the primary and secondary storage dichotomy.
To be successful, the bookshelf paradigm would require a machine that has secondary storage that was so fast as to negate the need for RAM, or a machine with so much primary storage as to negate the need for a hard drive. Programs wouldn't have to be loaded, they would always be there instantly - like a book. You wouldn't have to sit and wait for load times, the program's state would be the 'bookmark' where you left off, restarting the application would be like rereading, etc etc. As far as metaphors go, it would be far more intuitive for someone who had never used computers before and far less frustrating. In fact, most of my annoyances with working on computers all day long can be tracked back to the primary/secondary storage differentiation - I lump BSODs and crashes together in this category because the "reboot to fix" mentality is a direct descendent of this storage differentiation.
The bookshelf/nonvolatile machine combo is how I want my machine and my applications to behave. I went to linux in '97 because it was the closest approximation to that behavior with uptimes of several months (years for the hardcore/security unconscious). This would be the largest paradigm shift in computing since microcomputers.