The "micro" part nominally means that entries are typically capped to whatever will fit in an SMS (although it's unclear whether SMS usage is still common).
The more interesting property relates to subscription. Like RSS, you start receiving updates from contacts you've explicitly selected. Spam-proof, and highly conducive to emergent conversations. (If you're a Facebook user, this is kind of like the News Feed.)
Here's another way to look at it: logging into your microblog is like joining an enormous IRC channel spanning the entire world, only almost everyone is set to/IGNORE so you don't really see them. Over time you unignore friends and build a little chatworld of your ownâ"no two views of the global conversation are identical.
thats why we see more and more im systems develop a system of offline messages. [...] only thing missing really is a way to save and sort individual messages like one can mail, and upload files in a similar way to how one can do attachments to a mail.
Um.
At this point, haven't you essentially reinvented the email wheel?
I don't see how this hypothetical system is substantially different from email. Well, to be fair, "email plus presence" (see: tightly integrated email/IM systems like Gmail/Gtalk or Mail.app/iChat).
Note also that whatever it is about email that "the kids" don't like anymore, they'll also grow to dislike about "IM plus offline messages plus mailboxes plus attachments".
I'm pretty sure if it contained a 10 milliwatt laser, had Bluetooth, and was featured on ThinkGeek, then, yes, it would be OK to post about it. Because geeks would care.
Geeks of both sexes, that is. "Finally: tampons you won't be embarrassed to run into the drugstore for!"
Tracie Broom, a San Francisco writer, and her friends cannibalize Scrabble to play a quicker word game - called alternately Anagram or Grab Scrabble. They put the Scrabble tiles face down, and flip them over one-by-one, calling out new words as they are formed, or stealing words from other players.
Sounds a lot like Quiddler, a card-based game that's like Scrabble for the impatient. My friends and family are hooked on it. (The other Set games, including the eponymous "Set", are also fun, quick, and brain-intensive.)
PalmOS developers tend to be amongst the most loyal out there -- not quite fanatical about the platform, but very pragmatically into it. I guess something has to come out of the fact that applications written for Palm IIIx devices are still running, even on the latest devices, without any rework.
It has a lot to do with the fact that "the latest devices" are almost identical to the originals. The programming model hasn't changed appreciably in 10 years (excepting Cobalt, which nobody bought).
If Dell were still selling boxes loaded with Windows 95, you'd be pretty happy about programming the Win32 API too.
As a Houston-area Wii hunter, I get pretty firmly stonewalled by every clerk and store manager I talk to, from the nice ones (GameStop) to the really surly ones (Target: "We won't get any more Wiis for the rest of the year."). I guess you just have to know someone who knows someone.
Many communities seem to get a lot of mileage out of publishing their chat history (e.g. public IRC logs).
This doesn't really solve the problem of equal participation for peers separated by timezone (or, more to the point, separated by waking hours), but it does address the following killer feature of message boards: searching past discussions for help. Public message boards often serve as organically-growing FAQs; for every question asked and answered, hundreds may get answers without ever having to ask. The same is true of published chat transcripts.
(It works in the corporate setting too: I've personally had good success, in terms of capturing ephemeral knowledge that would otherwise be lost, with behind-the-firewall publication of internal IRC logs.)
MPU. I was about to post an Oryx and Crake plug in response to this very quote, but, well, waxigloo beat me to it.
I was surprised, though, that the Wikipedia entry for O&C says nothing about ChickieNobs (and barely anything about wolvogs or the other genetically engineered organisms in the text). Time for an update, methinks.
See, a scroll-wheel doesn't have to be a flat, round rubber disc, it can be a cylinder!
Holy crap, you're right. But---get this----what if we mounted it upright on (i.e., normal to) the music player's surface? Then you could reach out, maybe with your thumb and forefinger, and... I don't know, rotate the thing? Twist it? "Turn" it?
I could totally imagine this on the front of music players everywhere for volume control and maybe to select between different wireless "channels" (TODO: figure out how to modulate multiple streams of music in a band of EM radiation).
Actually, this could be even bigger! We could use these kinds of controls in any situation where fine-tuning and coarse-grained adjustment are necessary (say, on microscopes), or really on any kind of mechanism where the act of turning the control can be made to do useful mechanical work (TODO: maybe this can be used on water faucets? doors? something like that).
I'm stuck on a name for this physical, continuously-variable, cylindrical widget. Any ideas?
An important part of real-world programming is teamwork; in 314 we embrace this and randomly sort students into groups of two for pair programming. The groups change for each project, and each project group gets a spot in a svn repository set up for the course. ACLs keep groups from peeking at one another's changes (for example, see this team list, which is actually just a slice of our Subversion access control file). Students were required to tag their submissions for each of the project milestones: specification, prototype, final; this was how students submitted code for these deadlines. From timestamps we could easily see which groups incurred "slip hours" for late turnins.
There were a number of reported incidences of lost work or conflicting changes which would have been disasters if not for svn, which saved their bacon. Groups that learned to check in early and often knew that accidental deletions or disk failures posed no threat to a successful project submission. A few enterprising teams even used tags and branches to help organize complex development efforts. In all, it was quite a successful adventure and we'll probably do something similar in the future.
When did I saw that the person would be just as productive as in Word?
Sorry, I over-generalized "WYSIWYG tool [for LaTeX]" to WYSIWYG document processor. You're probably right that graphical LaTeX editors aren't substantially more accessible than the bare LaTeX markup.
[Aside: Where are these men-on-the-street who need all this professional typesetting? I want to live on that street! My car probably wouldn't get broken into as much.]
LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor.
I love LaTeX (I have TeXShop open in the background right now!), but I have to argue with the assertion that the uninitiated "man [or woman! -ed] on the street" can be just as productive as s/he was in Word. Compare Word's graphical table builder and tab ruler, the result of about 20 years of noodling around with the best user experience for creating such things, with \begin{tabular}{|r|r@{.}l|}. OW MY WORD PROCESSOR.
Even if you give everyone a pocket syntax reference, unless you have a TeX ninja working overtime on your templates, you'll still end up with a lot of documents that look like academic research papers. This is fine if what you're writing are academic research papers [hi!], but for most corporate communication people are accustomed to more effortless (read: WYSIWYG) control over the output. (This is, of course, usually a terrible idea, resulting in official RIF memos from HR written in Comic Sans; I think there's a happy medium somewhere in between.)
It's pretty shocking to change everything (document format, writing environment, collaboration tools) all at once. Start with reasonable source control, the best bacon-saving device you can get. Have everyone check existing docs (Word, HTML, whatever) into source control; Even though diffs are meaningless for the binary formats, the other benefits (versioning, collaboration, remote storage, tags, platform independence) are huge. It's the quickest way to put an end to the madness of emailed.doc files and accidental deletions.
If you've got a lot of Windows users, go with Subversion and get everyone to install the TortoiseSVN shell extension, which offers the most natural GUI for new (and experienced!) users of version control.
Once everyone's comfortable with SVN, you can then start migrating to text-based document formats in which the source control diffs mean something (LaTeX, XML, reStructured, etc.)
My particular configuration of browser, font, window size, etc. conspired to place this story's headline at the bottom of the window; the only text visible "above the fold" was:
As others have pointed out, IP Multicast is tough to deploy, fragile, and not particularly scalable. What you really want is so-called Application-Level Multicast: distributed construction of p2p multicast trees (or other similar structures) among end hosts, without help from routers. See: Scribe/SplitStream, End System Multicast (ESM), Overcast, etc.
This [link to reciprocating saw] can fix anything.
Unfortunately, it can't fix the damage you did to your office equipment (from the perspective of your employer). Companies are often irrationally resistant to non-destructive, 100% reversible alterations to office equipment, but they are 100% rationally resistant to destructive, irreversible alterations to office equipment.
The trick is to work within the system you're given, adding things you can remove, and removing things you can put back later. Other commenters have suggested basic upgrades along these lines, like keyboard trays, shelving, etc., and these are great ideas. A few more simple thoughts from my personal experience:
Ergonomic keyboard. Cheaper than an ergonomic chair, but almost as useful. Forcing your hands into a more reasonable position for typing marathons can have (positive) ripple effects throughout your posture and musculature. Some swear by the Kinesis keyboards (my advisor has the "keys-in-a-bowl" version), but these will set you back almost as much as a chair, so I settle for the venerable MS Natural Keyboard (mine is an OEM version of the Pro, resold at Fry's for about $15).
Move your desk. If you can't change anything else about your desk, hopefully you can position it so that it's not backed up to a wall. This gives your eyes a different distance at which to focus when you glance away from your monitor (assuming your boss allows you to do this).
Hack your furniture. Not applicable if you really just have a big lab-bench-style desk, but for those who are living in Hermann Miller Hell® (a.k.a. a cubicle farm), there are lots of ways you can reconfigure your space, given the right hex driver. Half-walls, shelving, whiteboards--there are cube modules for all of these. Even if your employer didn't spring for all these fancy parts (the office furniture equivalent of purchasing exclusively the "boring" LEGO sets containing only 2x4 bricks (tall)), there are still hacks to be had. At a previous job we connected desks to wall sections out-of-phase, so we could have half-width wall sections cut open between cubicles (for a little bit of collaboration without reverting to an open bullpen layout, or to suspend other improvised half-height divider panels).
Use spare moving boxes to create dynamic and interesting office furnishings. OK, this one's a joke (mostly).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but look where this kind of argument got Mondale in '84: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mondale#cite_ref-2
The more interesting property relates to subscription. Like RSS, you start receiving updates from contacts you've explicitly selected. Spam-proof, and highly conducive to emergent conversations. (If you're a Facebook user, this is kind of like the News Feed.) Here's another way to look at it: logging into your microblog is like joining an enormous IRC channel spanning the entire world, only almost everyone is set to /IGNORE so you don't really see them. Over time you unignore friends and build a little chatworld of your ownâ"no two views of the global conversation are identical.
Um.
At this point, haven't you essentially reinvented the email wheel?
I don't see how this hypothetical system is substantially different from email. Well, to be fair, "email plus presence" (see: tightly integrated email/IM systems like Gmail/Gtalk or Mail.app/iChat).
Note also that whatever it is about email that "the kids" don't like anymore, they'll also grow to dislike about "IM plus offline messages plus mailboxes plus attachments".
I'm pretty sure if it contained a 10 milliwatt laser, had Bluetooth, and was featured on ThinkGeek, then, yes, it would be OK to post about it. Because geeks would care.
Geeks of both sexes, that is. "Finally: tampons you won't be embarrassed to run into the drugstore for!"
Sounds a lot like Quiddler, a card-based game that's like Scrabble for the impatient. My friends and family are hooked on it. (The other Set games, including the eponymous "Set", are also fun, quick, and brain-intensive.)
It has a lot to do with the fact that "the latest devices" are almost identical to the originals. The programming model hasn't changed appreciably in 10 years (excepting Cobalt, which nobody bought).
If Dell were still selling boxes loaded with Windows 95, you'd be pretty happy about programming the Win32 API too.
As a Houston-area Wii hunter, I get pretty firmly stonewalled by every clerk and store manager I talk to, from the nice ones (GameStop) to the really surly ones (Target: "We won't get any more Wiis for the rest of the year."). I guess you just have to know someone who knows someone.
Doesn't matter. In the case of a recount, the paper ballots---the ones the voter verified---are used.
Many communities seem to get a lot of mileage out of publishing their chat history (e.g. public IRC logs).
This doesn't really solve the problem of equal participation for peers separated by timezone (or, more to the point, separated by waking hours), but it does address the following killer feature of message boards: searching past discussions for help. Public message boards often serve as organically-growing FAQs; for every question asked and answered, hundreds may get answers without ever having to ask. The same is true of published chat transcripts.
(It works in the corporate setting too: I've personally had good success, in terms of capturing ephemeral knowledge that would otherwise be lost, with behind-the-firewall publication of internal IRC logs.)
MPU. I was about to post an Oryx and Crake plug in response to this very quote, but, well, waxigloo beat me to it. I was surprised, though, that the Wikipedia entry for O&C says nothing about ChickieNobs (and barely anything about wolvogs or the other genetically engineered organisms in the text). Time for an update, methinks.
Well played, well played.
Holy crap, you're right. But---get this----what if we mounted it upright on (i.e., normal to) the music player's surface? Then you could reach out, maybe with your thumb and forefinger, and ... I don't know, rotate the thing? Twist it? "Turn" it?
I could totally imagine this on the front of music players everywhere for volume control and maybe to select between different wireless "channels" (TODO: figure out how to modulate multiple streams of music in a band of EM radiation).
Actually, this could be even bigger! We could use these kinds of controls in any situation where fine-tuning and coarse-grained adjustment are necessary (say, on microscopes), or really on any kind of mechanism where the act of turning the control can be made to do useful mechanical work (TODO: maybe this can be used on water faucets? doors? something like that).
I'm stuck on a name for this physical, continuously-variable, cylindrical widget. Any ideas?
In COMP 314 (Rice University's sophomore-level programming & algorithms class, taught this past spring by Prof. Dan Wallach) we TAs solved this problem with Subversion.
An important part of real-world programming is teamwork; in 314 we embrace this and randomly sort students into groups of two for pair programming. The groups change for each project, and each project group gets a spot in a svn repository set up for the course. ACLs keep groups from peeking at one another's changes (for example, see this team list, which is actually just a slice of our Subversion access control file). Students were required to tag their submissions for each of the project milestones: specification, prototype, final; this was how students submitted code for these deadlines. From timestamps we could easily see which groups incurred "slip hours" for late turnins.
There were a number of reported incidences of lost work or conflicting changes which would have been disasters if not for svn, which saved their bacon. Groups that learned to check in early and often knew that accidental deletions or disk failures posed no threat to a successful project submission. A few enterprising teams even used tags and branches to help organize complex development efforts. In all, it was quite a successful adventure and we'll probably do something similar in the future.
Oops.
Forcing users away from a low-bandwidth version to the original, image-heavy article => brutal Slashdotting.
Sorry, The Escapist.
Sorry, I over-generalized "WYSIWYG tool [for LaTeX]" to WYSIWYG document processor. You're probably right that graphical LaTeX editors aren't substantially more accessible than the bare LaTeX markup.
[Aside: Where are these men-on-the-street who need all this professional typesetting? I want to live on that street! My car probably wouldn't get broken into as much.]
I love LaTeX (I have TeXShop open in the background right now!), but I have to argue with the assertion that the uninitiated "man [or woman! -ed] on the street" can be just as productive as s/he was in Word. Compare Word's graphical table builder and tab ruler, the result of about 20 years of noodling around with the best user experience for creating such things, with \begin{tabular}{|r|r@{.}l|}. OW MY WORD PROCESSOR.
Even if you give everyone a pocket syntax reference, unless you have a TeX ninja working overtime on your templates, you'll still end up with a lot of documents that look like academic research papers. This is fine if what you're writing are academic research papers [hi!], but for most corporate communication people are accustomed to more effortless (read: WYSIWYG) control over the output. (This is, of course, usually a terrible idea, resulting in official RIF memos from HR written in Comic Sans; I think there's a happy medium somewhere in between.)
It's pretty shocking to change everything (document format, writing environment, collaboration tools) all at once. Start with reasonable source control, the best bacon-saving device you can get. Have everyone check existing docs (Word, HTML, whatever) into source control; Even though diffs are meaningless for the binary formats, the other benefits (versioning, collaboration, remote storage, tags, platform independence) are huge. It's the quickest way to put an end to the madness of emailed .doc files and accidental deletions.
If you've got a lot of Windows users, go with Subversion and get everyone to install the TortoiseSVN shell extension, which offers the most natural GUI for new (and experienced!) users of version control.
Once everyone's comfortable with SVN, you can then start migrating to text-based document formats in which the source control diffs mean something (LaTeX, XML, reStructured, etc.)
As others have pointed out, IP Multicast is tough to deploy, fragile, and not particularly scalable. What you really want is so-called Application-Level Multicast: distributed construction of p2p multicast trees (or other similar structures) among end hosts, without help from routers. See: Scribe/SplitStream, End System Multicast (ESM), Overcast, etc.
Unfortunately, it can't fix the damage you did to your office equipment (from the perspective of your employer). Companies are often irrationally resistant to non-destructive, 100% reversible alterations to office equipment, but they are 100% rationally resistant to destructive, irreversible alterations to office equipment.
The trick is to work within the system you're given, adding things you can remove, and removing things you can put back later. Other commenters have suggested basic upgrades along these lines, like keyboard trays, shelving, etc., and these are great ideas. A few more simple thoughts from my personal experience:
Um, so, what's up with that MacNN URL? Is someone getting AdWords revenue for every Slashdot-reading Apple fanboy who clicks the link?