Several recent announcements / new items about Microsoft products and development seem to tie into this.
At both the Internet and the network/local filesystem/OS level, Microsoft has announced intentions to dramatically enhance information cataloging and search capabilities. By extension, newer versions of Office will facilitate hooking into these capabilities and tying the results to individual work. In the opposite direction, they can aid in exposing that work for reference and use by coworkers.
Locally run products like OneNote are beginning to offer these capabilities at this point in time. OneNote takes a user's local Office and Internet information (documents, emails, browsing history) and provides a central point of reference, search, and annotation. It's interesting to note (if my recollection of the wee bit of news I absorbed on the topic is correct) that OneNote was initially offered as part of the latest Macintosh Office release.
The web services aspect allows for a "standardized", authenticated means of exchanging information between one entity and another. It does not, of itself, dictate where that information is hosted. The scary part about this for me is the potential implication that we might all be running web services servers on our local PCs. With MS's abysmal history of server security, I have concerns regarding the security of my local information being compromised by default features to support this that come with the new versions of Office, the OS, etc. that will support these collaboration features.
Behind a corp firewall, this may end up being relatively ok. For the lone user on the wild frontier... Well, I hope we're not looking at IIS revisited.
Particularly enlightening, the insight into work that's desirable versus work that is agony. The chance to learn and grow, and an environment that lets you do this, make all the difference. And, I agree that the type he describes often are very self managed, given this. "an environment that lets you do this" -- not asking for management's hand-holding; rather, that they do their thing and stay our of your way, letting you do yours. Including not telling you that you have to work in the midst of a melee and spawn a dozen processes and a thousand threads, putting all your resources into overhead instead of effective work.
I believe it is quite possible to make yourself stupid. I've experienced this myself, working in corp environments that constrained my ability to act, made me clean up after incompetents who had come before (I mean, really incompetent), and which value imposing every conversation and twitching pencil tapper on me, over the effective, for them revolutionary work I pulled off on the off-hours.
I'm on my way out of another such situation. Thanks to Graham for helping to restore a bit of my self esteem.
(I'm not saying I'm great shakes. However, the article gives me some encouragement and ideas for making the best of what I've got.)
Powermarks (www.kaylon.com) is a well-regarded bookmarking utility that uses a keyword index rather than a tree. It will automatically pull keywords from a page's title, and one can type others in quite easily. They need not be in any particular order.
Searching is quite rapid, and one can quickly winnow several thousand bookmarks down to what one wants.
Since it's based on keywords, things can be as cross indexed as you like. No "where do I put this", eanie meanie meinie mo. Want it there? Type the keyword. There too? Type that keyword.
I would find something similar wrapped into an email utility very useful.
Unfortunately, Powermarks hasn't yet made it out of Windows space. So, those interested in having a look (shareware) will have to play with the beast.
Cringely has good info -- deserves the referrals
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
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· Score: 1
I don't care if Bob does get mentioned here frequently. The guy can think, isn't afraid to speculate, and hacks any system, technical, political, business, PBS, to the best of his ability.
He's a hacker in the true spirit. Cringely is dead. Long live Cringely.
I don't know, but surmise that the seekable data may be held in RAM. Given Google's likely loads, they're looking at a lot of load distribution. With search data in RAM, each machine can handle more load. Therefore less machines needed. The additional RAM costs less than the additional machines (and MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE of those machines) otherwise needed.
Every time I get a bloated piece of HTML solicitation, I develop a special degree of disgust and hatred for the offending sender.
Even some stuff I've signed up for is going HTML, often without warning.
Time to shoot some "graphic designers", we've got too many again. Or would those be graphics engineers?
And, is there some reason most of those HTML solicitations have to be so horribly laid out?
Good stuff, successful or not
on
Woz's New Startup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Good luck to you, Woz!
The man is a brilliant engineer. And at making new technology cost-effective and so commercially realizable.
Whether that translates into a business windfall? Well, I just hope he's having fun and feeling creative. Technically, good things are bound to come of it.
I hope the interface (from physical to graphic) is really useful.
And, if you expect me to read anything significant off of it, I hope the display is decent.
When are we ever going to fix displays? We've got horsepower enough -- how about something easy on the eyes and with more than a piddly few lines?
I became increasingly fond of TNG as it found its legs and focused upon ongoing, cross-episode character development. Combined with this deeper philosophical questions. To me, and to many others, I believe, "classic" science fiction has always been primarily about character, psychology, sentience. Knowing only ourselves, it comes down to questions and speculation about humanity, being human. The setting can serve very well to emphasize these issues, and can provide some great entertainment (and eye candy, nowadays -- and yes, you can take that more than one way), but the best of it lies with the characters (where, so far, the eye candy is holding her own very well, I might add).
I've made the point to others that I felt a subset of the TNG characters formed the core of the show and helped it to endure to success and its long run. Picard, of course. Data. (Some of Trek's most interesting characters have been on the edge of the human condition: An android seeking humanity; Q, a God (for all intents and purposes) confronting the same; the Doc on Voyager; Seven of Nine), La Forge (an engineer with enough quiet personality to round him out). These characters grew with the show and became much more complete. By contrast, several of the others, even when written focus shows, just didn't come much beyond the two dimensional caricatures with which they started.
By the way, I include Wesley in the group that grew and really helped to give the show some continuity and enduring basis. He was a bit geeky, but in a passionate manner and without too much attitude. And he was given some wonderful opportunities for growth by the writers. Wesley became a character that felt "real" and in whom I remained interested, even when his appearances became sporadic. I felt there was much more depth to his participation, and the questions he faced were not shallow or overly formulaic.
In my long-winded manner, my question is: Do you have any sense of what I'm describing (without picking favorites or "rilin' the troops")? If so, can you provide any insight, based on your experience, as to how such characters are created and evolve? What tends to foster them, and what tends to prevent the same? From an actor's perspective, what are the influences that favor or hinder such character development? What helped you to make the most of Wesley? What do you see as risks or hinderments to the actor? In all of this, I'll take whatever opinions you have to offer, whether specific to TNG or more general.
An often repeated frustration of mine is to see a new show (of whatever genre) start off terrifically, only to have its depth curtailed and its characters practically parodied by themselves sometime into the first or second season. A contrast would be the improvement of TNG itself over time, or the pickup with Deep Space after TNG ended. At the character level, at the show level, I'm wondering what you noted about such developments.
Looking forward, I wonder how such things will play out with Enterprise
A *well designed*, one page marketing sheet could help. I repeat, *well designed*. And well distibuted.
It would show high-level results of independent testing of appropriately chosed AMD and Intel based systems (and not a whole raft full -- just one or two popular sets). With a couple of graphs and summary numbers, the consumer would see that an Athlon 1.4GHz performs comparably to or better than an Intel 1.8GHz, or whatever.
Don't overwhelm them. 1 page of reasonably large text and pictures should suffice.
The harder part (once control has been wrested from the brainless marketers) would be to get the sheet into salespersons, saleswebs, etc. hands for presentation.
Customers, even non-technical ones, are very adroit to smelling BS, and very adverse to it. I think an honest approach might work better than the proposed obfuscation.
In its current form, this looks to be potential weapons technology. Relatively speaking, a very efficient interceptor, if electronics and guidance control can survive launch.
Here's the most succinct way I've yet found of describing the hypocrisy of the DMCA within our society.
Under DMCA, one can be legally attacked for creating a device that might be used to break the law (outside of DMCA itself) by violating copyrights. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Individuals and small companies.
At the same time, gun owners are working at, and succeeding in, making themselves exempt from liability for creating devices that may and are used to break the law. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Small guys.
Copyright violation via "circumvention devices" may cost a content owner some revenue. (And to that, it's been argued that some violations may indirectly INCREASE revenue, e.g. Napster's influence on CD sales.)
Illegal use of firearms results in severe physical and emotional trauma, and often in death.
The big corporations have a monopoly on both IP and on immunity.
Well, it was more succinct in my head this morning when I was still bright-eyed, but you get the drift.
I keep landing with employers having "open space" offices. Granted, it's my fault for not finding better.
The interruptions of yammering coworkers are the hardest part of the job. The work itself, by comparison, is easy. It's finding the concentration, maintaining focus, that turn it into such a challenge.
Any employer who thinks they are saving money by doling out less square footage per "unit" is sadly deluded.
Of course, some people seem to thrive in such environments. However, when I challenge them and get them into a quieter environment, they almost always perform better. As for those who need the oversight of short walls to keep them on track, the company would be better off without them.
For portable data entry, I would like to see a true one-handed, chording keyboard. Preferably engineered to a standard definition.
The device could remain compact, and although I have not used one, I understand that a practiced chording keyboard user can enter text faster than an accomplished touch-typist.
The stylus interface is just too low bandwidth for serious note-taking and the like.
Note that this would not be new technology. It would just involve moving an established, if niche, technology to this platform and giving it an appropriate form factor.
Yes. Remember, a general library will be catering to non-professionals, as much or moreso than to professional. How many times I've wished someone I'm helping would devote a few hours to books such as this. With such background, their tasks would be much clearer to them and my job much easier.
Your points could segway into an argument against closed, proprietary storage and presentation formats.
If one server, or one set of wholly controlled servers, is the sole repository of such historical information, what checks and balances are there against its being edited and altered?
That fake newspaper you buy as a gag gift is obviously a forgery. What happens when there is no other copy to compare the forgery to?
If the bits can only be archived in one place, their authenticity may be the more suspect.
Re:V2 of Learning Perl in Bookshelf...V3 now here
on
Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Any chance O'Reilly will do an "enhanced" CD with DBI and Friedl's book (and, why not, Learning 3, of course:-)? I'd pay more, and maybe even pay again (unless I can 'upgrade'), to have everything I need in portable format. Lugging all those books around gets to be a pain.
I know, you're not O'Reilly, but you're a lot closer to them than me.:-)
The search engine does appear to be different from the first version. Self-contained, not requiring an initial install.
Wherever you hang their directory subtree, the search works. With v1, I had to dig into config files and edit some path references after installing into a non-default directory, before I could get the searching to work. I view this v2 change as a major improvement.
On the downside, the v1 results gave some context. When one jumped to a result, all occurences of the matching term were flagged by being rendered in a larger, red font.
With v2, one gets an anemic list of one-line, couple-of-words references. Well, at least it runs without tweaking -- on Windoze.
Does anyone else see the possibility of a perception, correct or not, of O'Reilly creeping a bit toward the MS camp?
Slashdot Mirror
Gives a whole new meaning (or several) to this peripheral.
I think some of you are missing the point.
Several recent announcements / new items about Microsoft products and development seem to tie into this.
At both the Internet and the network/local filesystem/OS level, Microsoft has announced intentions to dramatically enhance information cataloging and search capabilities. By extension, newer versions of Office will facilitate hooking into these capabilities and tying the results to individual work. In the opposite direction, they can aid in exposing that work for reference and use by coworkers.
Locally run products like OneNote are beginning to offer these capabilities at this point in time. OneNote takes a user's local Office and Internet information (documents, emails, browsing history) and provides a central point of reference, search, and annotation. It's interesting to note (if my recollection of the wee bit of news I absorbed on the topic is correct) that OneNote was initially offered as part of the latest Macintosh Office release.
The web services aspect allows for a "standardized", authenticated means of exchanging information between one entity and another. It does not, of itself, dictate where that information is hosted. The scary part about this for me is the potential implication that we might all be running web services servers on our local PCs. With MS's abysmal history of server security, I have concerns regarding the security of my local information being compromised by default features to support this that come with the new versions of Office, the OS, etc. that will support these collaboration features.
Behind a corp firewall, this may end up being relatively ok. For the lone user on the wild frontier... Well, I hope we're not looking at IIS revisited.
For me, this article hits the topic head on.
Particularly enlightening, the insight into work that's desirable versus work that is agony. The chance to learn and grow, and an environment that lets you do this, make all the difference. And, I agree that the type he describes often are very self managed, given this. "an environment that lets you do this" -- not asking for management's hand-holding; rather, that they do their thing and stay our of your way, letting you do yours. Including not telling you that you have to work in the midst of a melee and spawn a dozen processes and a thousand threads, putting all your resources into overhead instead of effective work.
I believe it is quite possible to make yourself stupid. I've experienced this myself, working in corp environments that constrained my ability to act, made me clean up after incompetents who had come before (I mean, really incompetent), and which value imposing every conversation and twitching pencil tapper on me, over the effective, for them revolutionary work I pulled off on the off-hours.
I'm on my way out of another such situation. Thanks to Graham for helping to restore a bit of my self esteem.
(I'm not saying I'm great shakes. However, the article gives me some encouragement and ideas for making the best of what I've got.)
I found your comment interesting and informative. Thanks.
'nuff said.
Powermarks (www.kaylon.com) is a well-regarded bookmarking utility that uses a keyword index rather than a tree. It will automatically pull keywords from a page's title, and one can type others in quite easily. They need not be in any particular order.
Searching is quite rapid, and one can quickly winnow several thousand bookmarks down to what one wants.
Since it's based on keywords, things can be as cross indexed as you like. No "where do I put this", eanie meanie meinie mo. Want it there? Type the keyword. There too? Type that keyword.
I would find something similar wrapped into an email utility very useful.
Unfortunately, Powermarks hasn't yet made it out of Windows space. So, those interested in having a look (shareware) will have to play with the beast.
I don't care if Bob does get mentioned here frequently. The guy can think, isn't afraid to speculate, and hacks any system, technical, political, business, PBS, to the best of his ability.
He's a hacker in the true spirit. Cringely is dead. Long live Cringely.
I don't know, but surmise that the seekable data may be held in RAM. Given Google's likely loads, they're looking at a lot of load distribution. With search data in RAM, each machine can handle more load. Therefore less machines needed. The additional RAM costs less than the additional machines (and MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE of those machines) otherwise needed.
Every time I get a bloated piece of HTML solicitation, I develop a special degree of disgust and hatred for the offending sender.
Even some stuff I've signed up for is going HTML, often without warning.
Time to shoot some "graphic designers", we've got too many again. Or would those be graphics engineers?
And, is there some reason most of those HTML solicitations have to be so horribly laid out?
Good luck to you, Woz!
The man is a brilliant engineer. And at making new technology cost-effective and so commercially realizable.
Whether that translates into a business windfall? Well, I just hope he's having fun and feeling creative. Technically, good things are bound to come of it.
I hope the interface (from physical to graphic) is really useful.
And, if you expect me to read anything significant off of it, I hope the display is decent.
When are we ever going to fix displays? We've got horsepower enough -- how about something easy on the eyes and with more than a piddly few lines?
I became increasingly fond of TNG as it found its legs and focused upon ongoing, cross-episode character development. Combined with this deeper philosophical questions. To me, and to many others, I believe, "classic" science fiction has always been primarily about character, psychology, sentience. Knowing only ourselves, it comes down to questions and speculation about humanity, being human. The setting can serve very well to emphasize these issues, and can provide some great entertainment (and eye candy, nowadays -- and yes, you can take that more than one way), but the best of it lies with the characters (where, so far, the eye candy is holding her own very well, I might add).
I've made the point to others that I felt a subset of the TNG characters formed the core of the show and helped it to endure to success and its long run. Picard, of course. Data. (Some of Trek's most interesting characters have been on the edge of the human condition: An android seeking humanity; Q, a God (for all intents and purposes) confronting the same; the Doc on Voyager; Seven of Nine), La Forge (an engineer with enough quiet personality to round him out). These characters grew with the show and became much more complete. By contrast, several of the others, even when written focus shows, just didn't come much beyond the two dimensional caricatures with which they started.
By the way, I include Wesley in the group that grew and really helped to give the show some continuity and enduring basis. He was a bit geeky, but in a passionate manner and without too much attitude. And he was given some wonderful opportunities for growth by the writers. Wesley became a character that felt "real" and in whom I remained interested, even when his appearances became sporadic. I felt there was much more depth to his participation, and the questions he faced were not shallow or overly formulaic.
In my long-winded manner, my question is: Do you have any sense of what I'm describing (without picking favorites or "rilin' the troops")? If so, can you provide any insight, based on your experience, as to how such characters are created and evolve? What tends to foster them, and what tends to prevent the same? From an actor's perspective, what are the influences that favor or hinder such character development? What helped you to make the most of Wesley? What do you see as risks or hinderments to the actor? In all of this, I'll take whatever opinions you have to offer, whether specific to TNG or more general.
An often repeated frustration of mine is to see a new show (of whatever genre) start off terrifically, only to have its depth curtailed and its characters practically parodied by themselves sometime into the first or second season. A contrast would be the improvement of TNG itself over time, or the pickup with Deep Space after TNG ended. At the character level, at the show level, I'm wondering what you noted about such developments.
Looking forward, I wonder how such things will play out with Enterprise
.Keeping a suit tied up tweeking his (gender intended) presentation prevents him from sticking his nose into real decisions and mucking them up.
It would show high-level results of independent testing of appropriately chosed AMD and Intel based systems (and not a whole raft full -- just one or two popular sets). With a couple of graphs and summary numbers, the consumer would see that an Athlon 1.4GHz performs comparably to or better than an Intel 1.8GHz, or whatever.
Don't overwhelm them. 1 page of reasonably large text and pictures should suffice.
The harder part (once control has been wrested from the brainless marketers) would be to get the sheet into salespersons, saleswebs, etc. hands for presentation.
Customers, even non-technical ones, are very adroit to smelling BS, and very adverse to it. I think an honest approach might work better than the proposed obfuscation.
In its current form, this looks to be potential weapons technology. Relatively speaking, a very efficient interceptor, if electronics and guidance control can survive launch.
Under DMCA, one can be legally attacked for creating a device that might be used to break the law (outside of DMCA itself) by violating copyrights. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Individuals and small companies.
At the same time, gun owners are working at, and succeeding in, making themselves exempt from liability for creating devices that may and are used to break the law. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Small guys.
Copyright violation via "circumvention devices" may cost a content owner some revenue. (And to that, it's been argued that some violations may indirectly INCREASE revenue, e.g. Napster's influence on CD sales.)
Illegal use of firearms results in severe physical and emotional trauma, and often in death.
The big corporations have a monopoly on both IP and on immunity.
Well, it was more succinct in my head this morning when I was still bright-eyed, but you get the drift.
I thought the DMCA was already a pretty big virus payload.
The interruptions of yammering coworkers are the hardest part of the job. The work itself, by comparison, is easy. It's finding the concentration, maintaining focus, that turn it into such a challenge.
Any employer who thinks they are saving money by doling out less square footage per "unit" is sadly deluded.
Of course, some people seem to thrive in such environments. However, when I challenge them and get them into a quieter environment, they almost always perform better. As for those who need the oversight of short walls to keep them on track, the company would be better off without them.
How often has a chance encounter or off-topic exploration resulted in a true find. That dohickey may lead you to something great.
The device could remain compact, and although I have not used one, I understand that a practiced chording keyboard user can enter text faster than an accomplished touch-typist.
The stylus interface is just too low bandwidth for serious note-taking and the like.
Note that this would not be new technology. It would just involve moving an established, if niche, technology to this platform and giving it an appropriate form factor.
Yes. Remember, a general library will be catering to non-professionals, as much or moreso than to professional. How many times I've wished someone I'm helping would devote a few hours to books such as this. With such background, their tasks would be much clearer to them and my job much easier.
If one server, or one set of wholly controlled servers, is the sole repository of such historical information, what checks and balances are there against its being edited and altered?
That fake newspaper you buy as a gag gift is obviously a forgery. What happens when there is no other copy to compare the forgery to?
If the bits can only be archived in one place, their authenticity may be the more suspect.
Was a joke. As in, what kind of pricing will a "JRE-enabling" vendor get from MS. Wouldn't be the first time...
Best use I've seen for Java on the client: Conway's Game of Life.
I know, you're not O'Reilly, but you're a lot closer to them than me. :-)
Insert 2 cents here...
The search engine does appear to be different from the first version. Self-contained, not requiring an initial install.
Wherever you hang their directory subtree, the search works. With v1, I had to dig into config files and edit some path references after installing into a non-default directory, before I could get the searching to work. I view this v2 change as a major improvement.
On the downside, the v1 results gave some context. When one jumped to a result, all occurences of the matching term were flagged by being rendered in a larger, red font.
With v2, one gets an anemic list of one-line, couple-of-words references. Well, at least it runs without tweaking -- on Windoze.
Does anyone else see the possibility of a perception, correct or not, of O'Reilly creeping a bit toward the MS camp?