Actually, I killed my girlfriend while copying a DVD. I mean, her irritating nagging about copying a "stupid" movie like Office Space and the gun might've had something to do with it, but I WAS copying a DVD.
And won't the last mile be taken care of with Wi-max or whatever service opens up on the soon-to-be-auctioned spectrum? This article doesn't seem to be projecting some current developments into the next two years very well.
I actually think Jeff Hawkins was on to a great definition of intelligence with his book that came out a few years ago, On Intelligence. Intelligence is just the ability to predict things. Every time you make a move or say something, it is in anticipation of the predicted results. Computers that spit out answers a la the Turing Test or Big Blue but can't assess the affect of what they do aren't intelligent. And that ability to predict can be answered by the simple question why--why did you do that? ("Why, Mr. Anderson!? Why!?) A computer that could answer that question, or be analyzed in such a way to find that answer should be considered intelligent.
"I think just a few weeks ago Slashdot had an article that a computer program has been designed that is now at the point where it cannot lose at checkers - ever."
I think computers will definitely always lose playing this kind of checkers. Lushes.
You're absolutely right, they are aggressive with the wrong priorities, and it's because of who now backs them. The news is now just like an other kind of entertainment on broadcast mediums, it has to make money. The only news organizations you won't see reporting stories on Paris and Lindsay and public broadcast. I think the only hope is that the web makes such an end run around these news-for-profit organizations by simply taking all the profit out of the equation. When information is tied to money, money inevitably has a warping effect on the information. News is something that should be altruistic and not-for-profit. I don't think the government should necessarily legislate that, mind you, I just think that it may be an ineviable fact of interactive media versus broadcast media.
And the unfortunate part is that dumb people will use this as the final confirmation of the fact that God exists, because Look! There's a planet like Earth that could support life but there's no intelligent life on it and that must be because we're special and God made us.
However, if we started planning now we could tell them all that we've figured out that the new planet we found is where the Garden of Eden was before God banished us here, and then we could ship all the buggers off.
>I think you script junkies should show us how you plan > to utilize multitouch in your websites. Oh wait, you can't.
At the moment, you're right to an extent. I haven't thought of any uses for multitouch on such a small screen other than the drag and pinch techniques. But those work in Safari, no problem. In fact someone in this thread pointed out that Google maps is running as an app and not as a Safari sandboxed application. But that's not to say that Google Maps (or any web 2.0 app like it) won't run in Safari, and in that case, pinching, dragging and zooming in/out with double-taps all work fine.
I wouldn't doubt though that in the near future, either through a javascript interface to the iphone or some modification of the DOM for Safari, that multitouch events will be able to be captured. Apple's already got an API(?) for javascript for the iphone--maybe there are already multitouch events available.
I DO wish that Flash was available on the iPhone though, because that would present some great opportunities to make real use of multitouch. But Flash is a processor HOG. It would kill the iphone. I hate Adobe for not open sourcing the damn Flash plugins. If they'd let some decent programmers at it, I *know* that the Flash plugin could be made a hell of a lot more efficient. I have such a love/hate with Flash because of that. I've done some great things with flash on web sites (both full flash sites and flash elements combined with HTML) but the plugin sucks and the development environment is one of the most fickle pieces of software on OS X. It craps out on me all the time--even the CS3 intel native version.
These critiques are all fine but they miss the point. If you don't have wifi access or cell phone coverage, what the hell good is ANY smart phone really? The iphone is not a computer. It's an ipod that's a phone. If you want to write a high-performance game, write it for laptops or the Sony PSP. The iphone won't have the processor capacity to run a high performance video game anyway, for the same reason that it won't run Flash. But it doesn't matter because that's just not the market the iphone is meant to serve. As for how complex even AJAX driven web apps can be on the iphone, see my other posts on this thread--there is some very real potential.
There are some possibilities here, but not for everything you mentioned. As I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, having Flash on the iphone would really solve all the problems you mentioned, but I can see why Apple doesn't want to include the Flash player just yet. Nonetheless, just playing sounds with javascript is feasible. Here are some sound scripts written in javascript. Admittedly, it's midi, but there are lots of other resources and ways to do this. And don't forget, one technology that Apple is happy to push is quicktime. The quicktime app can capture and record video and audio although I'm not sure about the quicktime plugin. I've seen quicktime work in concert with AJAX and you can certainly build some interesting AV apps with it. I have also seen some AJAX video games (though they are admittedly clunky). But if this announcement about utilizing AJAX to build apps on the iphone is anything other than misdirection (which I think it is) Apple might very well start to build some things into Quicktime and Safari that will make more of these things possible. At the end of the day, this is iPhone 1.0. There's a lot of room for improvements. And given Apple's track record, I think we can all expect them to improve reasonably quickly.
> I don't get it when people start saying 'it is underpowered to run any real apps.'
Agreed. That's just silly. There's plenty of firepower there. However, Apple definitely wants that 8gig of hard drive space filled up with music and movies from iTunes and NOT the latest bloatware from Adobe or Microsoft. I think that's one of the major reasons for this move. However, I also think that this could also be akin to getting rid of the disk drive in the iMac. Yes, other smart phones have SDKs for developing software, but then, none of those other phones have a decent enough UI or a browser totally capable of running web 2.0 apps. And Look! It's only been 2 days since the announcement and already there are 2 web apps out for the iPhone:
> The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
The platform is Safari. The development community can make web 2.0 apps. Google Maps, Flickr, Digg, Yahoo Pipes, Delicious... these ARE the killer apps of the last 5 years and iPhone will run them all and allow them to interface with the phone and the user's data. Nothing more to see here.
Smartphones generally account for 3% of the mobile phone market. However, 25% of current American mobile phone owners would like to have a smartphone, but apparently are waiting for something. Hmmm... considering that the iPhone will work perfectly fine as a phone, and considering that it does a bunch of other *consumer* oriented stuff, like photos and movies, this is probably the market that Apple is attempting to capture, not the Blackberry suits.
>the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons.
I come from the opposite end of the spectrum though, and I wonder how many people are out there like me. I use my cell phone less than my ipod. I make maybe two calls a day, and maybe a text every once in a while (mostly to twitter). If anything I want an iphone because its a damn fine ipod, not because it's a phone. So the lack of buttons and greater screen real estate in a small package is actually a big bonus.
I've talked about this elsewhere but a lot of the criticisms of the iphone's closed nature with regard to onboard applications misses the point. It's a mobile platform that's meant to have online access all the time. Building in a full featured browser that can utilize web 2.0 applications makes a lot more sense than turning over a massive amount of local memory on the machine to Microsoft and Adobe who are in the habit of generating bloatware. Apple wants the memory to be stuffed with music and movies, not applications that could be better (and more sleekly) run through a fully capable Safari. That's why Google and Yahoo were partners at the iphone announcement and not Adobe and Microsoft (who are almost always there at new mac announcements).
If he is talking about '97 then another major contributing factor to the failure of "AJAX" was that it was called ActiveX (and was for IE only). THAT failed because it wasn't particuarly open and didn't work with Netscape (which at the time was still the dominant browser). The idea of cross-browser DHTML (it did too have a fancy name!) was in its infancy and there was absolutely no cross-browser compatibility as I recall. AJAX is working because people are cooperating around a standard, just like most other successes on the net (i.e. tcp, http, html, etc.)
Is it just me or are more software businesses starting to realize that the real mantra of the net is "Play nice or get stomped."
IT people with your attitude drive me insane and give us all bad names. I can't imagine what kind of hoops your people have to jump through to get a stupid digital document. "Sorry, Ron, the asshole in IT won't let us use PDFs, can you send me a Word doc?" A University I was affiliated with did the same thing with regard to zip files. Zip files!!! So hundreds of scientists can't get work done because ONE jackass can't figure out how to better protect them than just outright banning a file type from email.
First generation iPod, true. But in reality, with the capabilities this will have down the road running OS X, it's really just a pocket mac. And about damn time too!
I was working on a product design team once upon a time and the head of the team was absolutely insistent that everything be "idiot proof" and "super simple". Every design idea we had for the interface was met with the test of whether a complete moron would know what it did and understand how to use it. Finally, after one particularly grueling debate on the matter, one of the engineers had enough and said, "You know, some people get lost in buildings. And we can't help them. Could we please just worry about everybody else?" I died laughing because it was so true. We often discuss the computer interface as something on par with a toaster or an ipod and a lot of people seem to forget that the first level of interface--the physical interface--is a keyboard and a mouse. Some peope can't use a keyboard and a mouse. And you can't help them.
I second the parent on this one! Putting cameras in every classroom and leaving them running is really the only way to solve this problem. The students are only going to record a teacher losing his or her temper, not what they did to provoke the reaction. A teacher's best defense would be to NOT lose their cool, and point to the act in the video. Most parents are under the total delusion that their child is an angel and would never do the things reported by the school. They are always convinced it's a misunderstanding. Video to illustrate their cretin's behavior might help with the discipline problem in schools. Video in schools might also help teachers to not lose their cool (which the good ones never do). What's the problem here?
So, his theory doesn't entirely make sense (how do you calculate BATNA again?). His article is riddled with grammatical errors (I caught three). And the article is the only one posted on the blog. Wherein lies this gentleman's credibility and why are we all discussing his article? Perhaps it's in the money he must have paid CowboyNeal to post the article to Slashdot.
Especially since with decent speech recognition software (like dragon speak naturally--apparently the latest verison is really good) and a decent chatbot software and a speech synthesizer it wouldn't be that hard to really create a robot that could hold coversation. It would have obvious flaws and be hard, etc. but isn't that what research money is *really* for? Hard stuff? This is a just a fancy puppet.
Wasn't part of the opening premise of Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash" that everyone's wages in the world economy had been equalized and everyone made the same amount of money--that of a Pakistani brickmaker? That was fiction of course, but the reality of the situation is that we have given corporations free reign to do as they please without consequence. Coporations as entities have only one allegiance, the dollar (and not the US dollar at that). It doesn't matter how patriotic their captains are, the dollar comes first, and if the US does nothing to enforce allegiance the boards of those companies will continue to line their wallets and screw the workers and the public.
More than anything it is sickening to see these companies (who all made their money off of the labor of the average american who fought for labor rights) completely ignore workers' rights elsewhere--as if the workers' movement in the US was a mistake and not a correct moral stance. It would cost them next to nothing to ensure that their workers in foreign markets were treated reasonably well, but once again, the dollar trumps all.
None of this is going to change until the United States sees real coporate reform. These juggernauts are the hallmark and backbone of our economy and they will abandon us in pursuit of profit if we don't change the system that binds them.
Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right. The stock market makes poor decisions and often purchasing decisions are based on just how "off" experts say that the market is (Google is undervalued/overvalued, etc). I mean, it's fine if companies want to cull their employees for ideas but I hope they don't come under the delusion that just because everybody thinks its a good idea that means it will succeed. Doesn't anybody listen to their mothers anymore? --Just because everybody else is jumping off a bridge, would you do it to?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I killed my girlfriend while copying a DVD. I mean, her irritating nagging about copying a "stupid" movie like Office Space and the gun might've had something to do with it, but I WAS copying a DVD.
And won't the last mile be taken care of with Wi-max or whatever service opens up on the soon-to-be-auctioned spectrum? This article doesn't seem to be projecting some current developments into the next two years very well.
I actually think Jeff Hawkins was on to a great definition of intelligence with his book that came out a few years ago, On Intelligence. Intelligence is just the ability to predict things. Every time you make a move or say something, it is in anticipation of the predicted results. Computers that spit out answers a la the Turing Test or Big Blue but can't assess the affect of what they do aren't intelligent. And that ability to predict can be answered by the simple question why--why did you do that? ("Why, Mr. Anderson!? Why!?) A computer that could answer that question, or be analyzed in such a way to find that answer should be considered intelligent.
I think computers will definitely always lose playing this kind of checkers. Lushes.
You're absolutely right, they are aggressive with the wrong priorities, and it's because of who now backs them. The news is now just like an other kind of entertainment on broadcast mediums, it has to make money. The only news organizations you won't see reporting stories on Paris and Lindsay and public broadcast. I think the only hope is that the web makes such an end run around these news-for-profit organizations by simply taking all the profit out of the equation. When information is tied to money, money inevitably has a warping effect on the information. News is something that should be altruistic and not-for-profit. I don't think the government should necessarily legislate that, mind you, I just think that it may be an ineviable fact of interactive media versus broadcast media.
And the unfortunate part is that dumb people will use this as the final confirmation of the fact that God exists, because Look! There's a planet like Earth that could support life but there's no intelligent life on it and that must be because we're special and God made us.
However, if we started planning now we could tell them all that we've figured out that the new planet we found is where the Garden of Eden was before God banished us here, and then we could ship all the buggers off.
>I think you script junkies should show us how you plan
> to utilize multitouch in your websites. Oh wait, you can't.
At the moment, you're right to an extent. I haven't thought of any uses for multitouch on such a small screen other than the drag and pinch techniques. But those work in Safari, no problem. In fact someone in this thread pointed out that Google maps is running as an app and not as a Safari sandboxed application. But that's not to say that Google Maps (or any web 2.0 app like it) won't run in Safari, and in that case, pinching, dragging and zooming in/out with double-taps all work fine.
I wouldn't doubt though that in the near future, either through a javascript interface to the iphone or some modification of the DOM for Safari, that multitouch events will be able to be captured. Apple's already got an API(?) for javascript for the iphone--maybe there are already multitouch events available.
I DO wish that Flash was available on the iPhone though, because that would present some great opportunities to make real use of multitouch. But Flash is a processor HOG. It would kill the iphone. I hate Adobe for not open sourcing the damn Flash plugins. If they'd let some decent programmers at it, I *know* that the Flash plugin could be made a hell of a lot more efficient. I have such a love/hate with Flash because of that. I've done some great things with flash on web sites (both full flash sites and flash elements combined with HTML) but the plugin sucks and the development environment is one of the most fickle pieces of software on OS X. It craps out on me all the time--even the CS3 intel native version.
These critiques are all fine but they miss the point. If you don't have wifi access or cell phone coverage, what the hell good is ANY smart phone really? The iphone is not a computer. It's an ipod that's a phone. If you want to write a high-performance game, write it for laptops or the Sony PSP. The iphone won't have the processor capacity to run a high performance video game anyway, for the same reason that it won't run Flash. But it doesn't matter because that's just not the market the iphone is meant to serve. As for how complex even AJAX driven web apps can be on the iphone, see my other posts on this thread--there is some very real potential.
There are some possibilities here, but not for everything you mentioned. As I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, having Flash on the iphone would really solve all the problems you mentioned, but I can see why Apple doesn't want to include the Flash player just yet. Nonetheless, just playing sounds with javascript is feasible. Here are some sound scripts written in javascript. Admittedly, it's midi, but there are lots of other resources and ways to do this. And don't forget, one technology that Apple is happy to push is quicktime. The quicktime app can capture and record video and audio although I'm not sure about the quicktime plugin. I've seen quicktime work in concert with AJAX and you can certainly build some interesting AV apps with it. I have also seen some AJAX video games (though they are admittedly clunky). But if this announcement about utilizing AJAX to build apps on the iphone is anything other than misdirection (which I think it is) Apple might very well start to build some things into Quicktime and Safari that will make more of these things possible. At the end of the day, this is iPhone 1.0. There's a lot of room for improvements. And given Apple's track record, I think we can all expect them to improve reasonably quickly.
> I don't get it when people start saying 'it is underpowered to run any real apps.'
s e
;)
Agreed. That's just silly. There's plenty of firepower there. However, Apple definitely wants that 8gig of hard drive space filled up with music and movies from iTunes and NOT the latest bloatware from Adobe or Microsoft. I think that's one of the major reasons for this move. However, I also think that this could also be akin to getting rid of the disk drive in the iMac. Yes, other smart phones have SDKs for developing software, but then, none of those other phones have a decent enough UI or a browser totally capable of running web 2.0 apps. And Look! It's only been 2 days since the announcement and already there are 2 web apps out for the iPhone:
Onetrip (Only viewable with Safari):
http://www.mrgan.com/onetrip/help.php?browser=fal
Digg:
http://davidcann.com/iphone/
That was quick. Maybe all you compile code junkies need to start brushing up on your XML, SOAP, and AJAX.
> The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
The platform is Safari. The development community can make web 2.0 apps. Google Maps, Flickr, Digg, Yahoo Pipes, Delicious... these ARE the killer apps of the last 5 years and iPhone will run them all and allow them to interface with the phone and the user's data. Nothing more to see here.
In the mobile phone market, yes, Blackberry has a VERY small market share.
Mobile Phone Market Share:
Nokia: 35%
Motorola: 16%
Samsung: 12%
LG: 7.2%
Smartphones generally account for 3% of the mobile phone market. However, 25% of current American mobile phone owners would like to have a smartphone, but apparently are waiting for something. Hmmm... considering that the iPhone will work perfectly fine as a phone, and considering that it does a bunch of other *consumer* oriented stuff, like photos and movies, this is probably the market that Apple is attempting to capture, not the Blackberry suits.
Stats from:
http://www.itfacts.biz/
>the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons.
I come from the opposite end of the spectrum though, and I wonder how many people are out there like me. I use my cell phone less than my ipod. I make maybe two calls a day, and maybe a text every once in a while (mostly to twitter). If anything I want an iphone because its a damn fine ipod, not because it's a phone. So the lack of buttons and greater screen real estate in a small package is actually a big bonus.
I've talked about this elsewhere but a lot of the criticisms of the iphone's closed nature with regard to onboard applications misses the point. It's a mobile platform that's meant to have online access all the time. Building in a full featured browser that can utilize web 2.0 applications makes a lot more sense than turning over a massive amount of local memory on the machine to Microsoft and Adobe who are in the habit of generating bloatware. Apple wants the memory to be stuffed with music and movies, not applications that could be better (and more sleekly) run through a fully capable Safari. That's why Google and Yahoo were partners at the iphone announcement and not Adobe and Microsoft (who are almost always there at new mac announcements).
If he is talking about '97 then another major contributing factor to the failure of "AJAX" was that it was called ActiveX (and was for IE only). THAT failed because it wasn't particuarly open and didn't work with Netscape (which at the time was still the dominant browser). The idea of cross-browser DHTML (it did too have a fancy name!) was in its infancy and there was absolutely no cross-browser compatibility as I recall. AJAX is working because people are cooperating around a standard, just like most other successes on the net (i.e. tcp, http, html, etc.)
Is it just me or are more software businesses starting to realize that the real mantra of the net is "Play nice or get stomped."
IT people with your attitude drive me insane and give us all bad names. I can't imagine what kind of hoops your people have to jump through to get a stupid digital document. "Sorry, Ron, the asshole in IT won't let us use PDFs, can you send me a Word doc?" A University I was affiliated with did the same thing with regard to zip files. Zip files!!! So hundreds of scientists can't get work done because ONE jackass can't figure out how to better protect them than just outright banning a file type from email.
Find a solution to the problem. That's your job.
I think that the next round of Apple laptops may just forgo the keyboard, ala iMacs having no disk drives back in the day.
First generation iPod, true. But in reality, with the capabilities this will have down the road running OS X, it's really just a pocket mac. And about damn time too!
I was working on a product design team once upon a time and the head of the team was absolutely insistent that everything be "idiot proof" and "super simple". Every design idea we had for the interface was met with the test of whether a complete moron would know what it did and understand how to use it. Finally, after one particularly grueling debate on the matter, one of the engineers had enough and said, "You know, some people get lost in buildings. And we can't help them. Could we please just worry about everybody else?" I died laughing because it was so true. We often discuss the computer interface as something on par with a toaster or an ipod and a lot of people seem to forget that the first level of interface--the physical interface--is a keyboard and a mouse. Some peope can't use a keyboard and a mouse. And you can't help them.
I second the parent on this one! Putting cameras in every classroom and leaving them running is really the only way to solve this problem. The students are only going to record a teacher losing his or her temper, not what they did to provoke the reaction. A teacher's best defense would be to NOT lose their cool, and point to the act in the video. Most parents are under the total delusion that their child is an angel and would never do the things reported by the school. They are always convinced it's a misunderstanding. Video to illustrate their cretin's behavior might help with the discipline problem in schools. Video in schools might also help teachers to not lose their cool (which the good ones never do). What's the problem here?
So, his theory doesn't entirely make sense (how do you calculate BATNA again?). His article is riddled with grammatical errors (I caught three). And the article is the only one posted on the blog. Wherein lies this gentleman's credibility and why are we all discussing his article? Perhaps it's in the money he must have paid CowboyNeal to post the article to Slashdot.
Especially since with decent speech recognition software (like dragon speak naturally--apparently the latest verison is really good) and a decent chatbot software and a speech synthesizer it wouldn't be that hard to really create a robot that could hold coversation. It would have obvious flaws and be hard, etc. but isn't that what research money is *really* for? Hard stuff? This is a just a fancy puppet.
Wasn't part of the opening premise of Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash" that everyone's wages in the world economy had been equalized and everyone made the same amount of money--that of a Pakistani brickmaker? That was fiction of course, but the reality of the situation is that we have given corporations free reign to do as they please without consequence. Coporations as entities have only one allegiance, the dollar (and not the US dollar at that). It doesn't matter how patriotic their captains are, the dollar comes first, and if the US does nothing to enforce allegiance the boards of those companies will continue to line their wallets and screw the workers and the public.
More than anything it is sickening to see these companies (who all made their money off of the labor of the average american who fought for labor rights) completely ignore workers' rights elsewhere--as if the workers' movement in the US was a mistake and not a correct moral stance. It would cost them next to nothing to ensure that their workers in foreign markets were treated reasonably well, but once again, the dollar trumps all.
None of this is going to change until the United States sees real coporate reform. These juggernauts are the hallmark and backbone of our economy and they will abandon us in pursuit of profit if we don't change the system that binds them.
If birds descended from dinosaurs then won't T-rex taste like chicken?
Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right. The stock market makes poor decisions and often purchasing decisions are based on just how "off" experts say that the market is (Google is undervalued/overvalued, etc). I mean, it's fine if companies want to cull their employees for ideas but I hope they don't come under the delusion that just because everybody thinks its a good idea that means it will succeed. Doesn't anybody listen to their mothers anymore? --Just because everybody else is jumping off a bridge, would you do it to?