For me, Virtual Desktops in OSX would be a killer feature. They're one thing that, for me, would make OSX far more usable (as in, I might be able to use it for more than 30 seconds without wanting to break something). Hell, they may even make the OSX interface nice to use!
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 1
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
Exactly. And in my mind, this is the ONLY acceptable use for Flash. Google uses Flash in a couple of places (Video and Analytics, possibly others?). They've used it quite effectively, and only for things where it really is the best tool for the job. I see other sites every day that use Flash for their fucking navigation bars and splash screens. I don't even bother loading them, usually (I use the flashblock extension), I just leave the site. Flash is ugly and bloated and it fucks up navigation, so I just don't bother. Someone else can have my pageviews.
On top of all that, I use 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Firefox, so there's no Flash for me. I have to either launch my 32-bit copy of Firefox (which I keep around precisely for YouTube, Google Video and Analytics) or just wait until the next day and look at whatever I was going to look at from work.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as it says ThinkPad on it, it'll be the same quality we expect from a ThinkPad. The ThinkPad name and look are so associated with IBM that IBM will make sure Lenovo keeps quality up.
or maybe the truly amazing stuff MS/Google have is hidden from prying eyes till the market is ready for them:)
This is my guess. I mean, we all know that Google has _huge_ distributed computing resources, and it's pretty well known that they do a lot of work on distributed operating and file systems. They just haven't released any of that back-end stuff (yet).
Second, it was the prettiest, most easy-to-use OS, even with cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.
Exactly. Graphical file managers _never_ got better than the one in Mac OS 9. In fact, they've gone downhill from there (OSX's is a piece of shit). I use the command-line instead of a graphical file manager now (and have since I quit using Mac OS 9 in 1999ish), just because it's easier, faster and better than any graphical file manager.
Secondly, this will most likely be a peer-to-peer application because it would be bandwidth expensive and problematic to centrally host these shows. A thing that concerns me with this is something I saw happen with Kazaa and the Windows media formats. Virus writers were figuring out ways to embed viruses into the files so that when your machine read them, the codec would unintentionally execute or behave like a virus or malware. Several of my friends suffered computer troubles due to downloading WMA files and trying to listen to them only to have their machine lock up with a worm. Later on, Kazaa included a BullGuard P2P Virus Protection Option in their product but in my opinion, it was too late. Everyone should be familiar with the potential JPEG exploit in Microsoft Windows, if it can be done for one two dimensional image, surely it can be embedded in a single frame of a video file.
I fail to see how badly-written codecs and viewer software that allow arbitrary code from a non-executable file to be run is the problem of the distribution network. If an idiot user runs an executable that's named "hot pr0n!.mpeg.exe", that's the user's problem. If MS's JPEG implementation allows arbitrary code to be run on someone's machine that's MS's problem.
Let's not shift the blame from the stupid users and bad coders to the people who allow the content to be distributed. That's like blaming the truck driver who delivered your car to the dealership when you drive the car off a cliff at 200 mph.
Private schooled kids are better educated. Charter schooled kids are better educated. Home schooled kids are better educated. finally I will bet that computer schooled kids are better educated. when compared to public schools.... Unfortunately, most of the poor can not afford the $200-$300 a month for their kids private school tuition.
So, maybe we should be rallying behind _improving_ public schools, rather than developing alternatives. Every child should have the opportunity to get a proper education. The fact that rich kids can afford to go and get good educations at private/charter schools while poor kids are limited by the public schools they must attend is sad and disgusting.
I'm very glad that I live in a place where private/charter schools are extremely rare and the public system provides a fairly good education. If only everywhere was like here.
Closed protocols are not a substitute for security. Any traffic that goes over the internet can be intercepted. Once you have the packets, it's just a matter of figuring out what they mean. This certainly does raise concerns that tapping into Skype conversations may become easy, but this was bound to happen eventually and should be no surprise to anyone.
Besides, who really cares? Phone conversations can be tapped into. Cell phones, too. Everyone knows not to transmit confidential information over the phone.
I sit on the computing science curriculum committee (as the student representative) here, so I've been actively involved with lots of ideas and planning regarding how to increase enrollment and continuance in our CS program. I think introducing robots into the first-year courses is the worst idea yet.
Why?
1) Not everyone who's into CS is interested in robots. I'm as hardcore as CS students come, and I'm not into robots in the slightest.
2) Robots are fiddly and frustrating. They teach robotics courses here with AIBO dogs and RoboCup soccer robots, and everyone I know who's taken the courses says they're annoying as fuck to work with. They break a lot, the sensors are garbage and you spend as much time compensating for the deficiencies of the robot as you do actually making it work properly. Which is fine in a fourth-year course about robotics, of course, that's what it's supposed to teach: here's a field where things don't work right and you have to compensate. But in a first-year course, this is a terrible idea.
3) It's not a good introduction to computing science. It gives the mathy people the incorrect impression that CS isn't mathy at all (which they won't like and will make them switch into math), and it gives the non-mathy people the incorrect impression that CS isn't mathy at all (which they will like, and will cause them to continue and then fail out in second year).
They're experimenting with the introductory courses here this year. The idea behind the experiments is to introduce students to the _real_ guts of computing science to start off with - finite state machines, data structures, algorithms - without going too in depth and scaring people off and while at the same time showing real applications for CS and teaching a language (Perl or C++, depending on the course). I think this is the right approach: it will attract the people who are truly interested in computing science, whether they knew they were before or not. I _wish_ that my first-year courses had included this kind of thing. If I had been one of those students teetering between CS and another field, my first-year Java house-drawing course certainly would have convinced me CS was the wrong way to go. So would robots.
Common trademarks used as generic words: Aspirin...
If I'm not mistaken, Aspirin is no longer a trademark in the US. Bayer failed to protect it properly and it fell into the public domain. Hence all the new Bayer ads that don't use the word Aspirin, referring to the product as "Bayer" in hopes that it will become the new name for Aspirin.
Here in Canada, however, it's still a trademark and the ads still say Aspirin.
"my teacher sent me to the principles office for texting during class."
Man, you got off light! She could have sent you to the principal's office and he wouldn't have been very happy with you at all. Proving some things from first principles at the principles office was probably kinda fun.
So what happens when your reservoir runs out of nanotubes and can no longer replenish the lube in the drive? You have to buy a new one? I mean, I'm guessing they can put enough nanotubes in there to last longer than the other drive components in the common case, but this could still be a problem.
Sounds like it would be great for Seagate, since their drives could actually expire at a set time, but maybe not so great for consumers.
I'd also like to see them do it with young drivers and some old people. Prove once and for all that young people who drive a bit fast but are alert and have quick reflexes are, in fact, safer on the road than old people who go along at 20km/h everywhere and pay ridiculously low insurance rates.
That works at many stores in the US, but it does not at the Apple Store. They charge a 10% restocking fee. December 2004 when I bought a new 17" PowerBook, it had a broken keyboard out of the box. Apple wanted a 10% restocking fee to replace it. That would have cost me almost $300. My other option was to send it in for repair, but Apple was out of the backlit keyboards so it would have taken over six weeks to get it repaired. After fighting with the manager for almost four hours the manager that showed-up for the next shift offered the solution of letting me return the laptop with the large restocking fee and then letting me buy a demo unit for $300 off. Since I was tired and was facing a three hour drive home, I gave-in. Paying that much for a used laptop sucked, but it was the best I could do.
My dad (who sold expensive software for many years) taught me that the customer is _always_ right. Best advice I've ever received.
When a company decides they would like to fuck me over, I do the following: 1) Kindly explain that I'm a good customer who buys lots of stuff from them. Ask if they can waive whatever the fuck-over is. 2) Inform them that I'm not pleased with their service and ask to speak to a higher-up. Yes, there are people higher up than the manager. 3) Inform them that I will not be purchasing anything from them in the future, and will encourage my friends, family, colleagues, etc to do the same.
It worked with Best Buy when fighting to get a new laptop on warranty. And Best Buy are the biggest fuckers-over of the bunch.
Remember: You're the only reason these stores stay in business. Threaten to take away your business (and to discourage other people from doing business there). There is no more serious threat for a store. Ultimately, in non-essential industries like computers, consumers are in control. We can always take our business elsewhere and should be happy to do so.
Google's filter (like any good spam filter) is adaptive. Spammers/phishers figure out a way to get their stuff through, a bunch of people mark it as spam/phishing and the filter learns that those messages are spam/phishing. You'll probably see the exact same messages hitting your spam box in a couple weeks.
I would never, ever, ever even _think_ of trying to write an Ajax application. I hate javascript way too much for that, and the whole asynchronous web-page dynamicness scares the shit out of me. However, I can stand writing GUI code in Java, and I already have some knowledge of how it works. GWT enables me to write super-cool Ajax websites without worrying a bit about javascript. I think this is the true power of GWT: it enables _application_ developers (rather than web developers) to write nice web applications without learning a whole new skillset. This is a win for developers because we can do cool things without learning a whole new trade, and it's a win for consumers because web apps can be written by skilled application developers instead of photoshop gurus.
Also, just because GWT provides some server-side machinery doesn't mean you have to use it. GWT will happily make asynchronous calls to any old URL, so you can write your backend in PHP or Perl or C or whatever you like. Personally, I've been playing with GWT using PHP/SQLite as my backend (following Juan Hurtado's great tutorial). It works great, and since I'm already comfortable with Java, PHP and SQL, it doesn't require a steep learning curve to create very nice web apps.
That said, I will certainly be taking a deeper look at TFA later and perhaps following its example to learn how to use the Java server-side machinery. Could be interesting.
In 2006, this network of roads includes 46,000 miles of highway; 55,000 bridges...
Wait a minute, that would be more than one bridge per mile, on average. Is that actually correct? I don't remember there being that many bridges on any of the interstates I've driven on.
However, CSS2 fixed positioning allows you to place content relative to the viewport (which is CSS-speak for window) instead of the document. For example, by setting position: fixed; bottom: 0 on an element, it will stick to the bottom. This works in Opera, Safari and Mozilla-based browsers. IE6 doesn't support it, however. It remains to be seen if IE7 will support it.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this comment, but I think this fails to solve the common case. Most often, we would like to have a footer that is at the bottom of the viewport when the content is smaller than the viewport, but always moves with the bottom of the content. The way I understand it, this sticks your footer permanently to the bottom of the viewport, which is not as useful IMO.
That said, I seem to recall finding a hack to make CSS do exactly what I have described (footer at the bottom of the viewport or content, whichever is lower). Unfortunately, I don't remember what the hack was.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
For me, Virtual Desktops in OSX would be a killer feature. They're one thing that, for me, would make OSX far more usable (as in, I might be able to use it for more than 30 seconds without wanting to break something). Hell, they may even make the OSX interface nice to use!
Exactly. And in my mind, this is the ONLY acceptable use for Flash. Google uses Flash in a couple of places (Video and Analytics, possibly others?). They've used it quite effectively, and only for things where it really is the best tool for the job. I see other sites every day that use Flash for their fucking navigation bars and splash screens. I don't even bother loading them, usually (I use the flashblock extension), I just leave the site. Flash is ugly and bloated and it fucks up navigation, so I just don't bother. Someone else can have my pageviews.
On top of all that, I use 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Firefox, so there's no Flash for me. I have to either launch my 32-bit copy of Firefox (which I keep around precisely for YouTube, Google Video and Analytics) or just wait until the next day and look at whatever I was going to look at from work.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as it says ThinkPad on it, it'll be the same quality we expect from a ThinkPad. The ThinkPad name and look are so associated with IBM that IBM will make sure Lenovo keeps quality up.
Just my two cents.
Never. Those of us who use C are smart enough to know that QT is fucking ugly and that GTK is far superior.
Exactly. 80 megabits is still 10 fucking times what's available around here.
This is my guess. I mean, we all know that Google has _huge_ distributed computing resources, and it's pretty well known that they do a lot of work on distributed operating and file systems. They just haven't released any of that back-end stuff (yet).
Exactly. Graphical file managers _never_ got better than the one in Mac OS 9. In fact, they've gone downhill from there (OSX's is a piece of shit). I use the command-line instead of a graphical file manager now (and have since I quit using Mac OS 9 in 1999ish), just because it's easier, faster and better than any graphical file manager.
I fail to see how badly-written codecs and viewer software that allow arbitrary code from a non-executable file to be run is the problem of the distribution network. If an idiot user runs an executable that's named "hot pr0n!.mpeg
Let's not shift the blame from the stupid users and bad coders to the people who allow the content to be distributed. That's like blaming the truck driver who delivered your car to the dealership when you drive the car off a cliff at 200 mph.
So, maybe we should be rallying behind _improving_ public schools, rather than developing alternatives. Every child should have the opportunity to get a proper education. The fact that rich kids can afford to go and get good educations at private/charter schools while poor kids are limited by the public schools they must attend is sad and disgusting.
I'm very glad that I live in a place where private/charter schools are extremely rare and the public system provides a fairly good education. If only everywhere was like here.
Closed protocols are not a substitute for security. Any traffic that goes over the internet can be intercepted. Once you have the packets, it's just a matter of figuring out what they mean. This certainly does raise concerns that tapping into Skype conversations may become easy, but this was bound to happen eventually and should be no surprise to anyone.
Besides, who really cares? Phone conversations can be tapped into. Cell phones, too. Everyone knows not to transmit confidential information over the phone.
I sit on the computing science curriculum committee (as the student representative) here, so I've been actively involved with lots of ideas and planning regarding how to increase enrollment and continuance in our CS program. I think introducing robots into the first-year courses is the worst idea yet.
Why?
1) Not everyone who's into CS is interested in robots. I'm as hardcore as CS students come, and I'm not into robots in the slightest.
2) Robots are fiddly and frustrating. They teach robotics courses here with AIBO dogs and RoboCup soccer robots, and everyone I know who's taken the courses says they're annoying as fuck to work with. They break a lot, the sensors are garbage and you spend as much time compensating for the deficiencies of the robot as you do actually making it work properly. Which is fine in a fourth-year course about robotics, of course, that's what it's supposed to teach: here's a field where things don't work right and you have to compensate. But in a first-year course, this is a terrible idea.
3) It's not a good introduction to computing science. It gives the mathy people the incorrect impression that CS isn't mathy at all (which they won't like and will make them switch into math), and it gives the non-mathy people the incorrect impression that CS isn't mathy at all (which they will like, and will cause them to continue and then fail out in second year).
They're experimenting with the introductory courses here this year. The idea behind the experiments is to introduce students to the _real_ guts of computing science to start off with - finite state machines, data structures, algorithms - without going too in depth and scaring people off and while at the same time showing real applications for CS and teaching a language (Perl or C++, depending on the course). I think this is the right approach: it will attract the people who are truly interested in computing science, whether they knew they were before or not. I _wish_ that my first-year courses had included this kind of thing. If I had been one of those students teetering between CS and another field, my first-year Java house-drawing course certainly would have convinced me CS was the wrong way to go. So would robots.
If I'm not mistaken, Aspirin is no longer a trademark in the US. Bayer failed to protect it properly and it fell into the public domain. Hence all the new Bayer ads that don't use the word Aspirin, referring to the product as "Bayer" in hopes that it will become the new name for Aspirin.
Here in Canada, however, it's still a trademark and the ads still say Aspirin.
Man, you got off light! She could have sent you to the principal's office and he wouldn't have been very happy with you at all. Proving some things from first principles at the principles office was probably kinda fun.
So what happens when your reservoir runs out of nanotubes and can no longer replenish the lube in the drive? You have to buy a new one? I mean, I'm guessing they can put enough nanotubes in there to last longer than the other drive components in the common case, but this could still be a problem.
Sounds like it would be great for Seagate, since their drives could actually expire at a set time, but maybe not so great for consumers.
Whacking it like they're 12 again?
I'd also like to see them do it with young drivers and some old people. Prove once and for all that young people who drive a bit fast but are alert and have quick reflexes are, in fact, safer on the road than old people who go along at 20km/h everywhere and pay ridiculously low insurance rates.
My dad (who sold expensive software for many years) taught me that the customer is _always_ right. Best advice I've ever received.
When a company decides they would like to fuck me over, I do the following:
1) Kindly explain that I'm a good customer who buys lots of stuff from them. Ask if they can waive whatever the fuck-over is.
2) Inform them that I'm not pleased with their service and ask to speak to a higher-up. Yes, there are people higher up than the manager.
3) Inform them that I will not be purchasing anything from them in the future, and will encourage my friends, family, colleagues, etc to do the same.
It worked with Best Buy when fighting to get a new laptop on warranty. And Best Buy are the biggest fuckers-over of the bunch.
Remember: You're the only reason these stores stay in business. Threaten to take away your business (and to discourage other people from doing business there). There is no more serious threat for a store. Ultimately, in non-essential industries like computers, consumers are in control. We can always take our business elsewhere and should be happy to do so.
Agreed.
I predict that if this happens, my group's annual Fall Installfest will be busier than ever. Hurray!
Google's filter (like any good spam filter) is adaptive. Spammers/phishers figure out a way to get their stuff through, a bunch of people mark it as spam/phishing and the filter learns that those messages are spam/phishing. You'll probably see the exact same messages hitting your spam box in a couple weeks.
I would never, ever, ever even _think_ of trying to write an Ajax application. I hate javascript way too much for that, and the whole asynchronous web-page dynamicness scares the shit out of me. However, I can stand writing GUI code in Java, and I already have some knowledge of how it works. GWT enables me to write super-cool Ajax websites without worrying a bit about javascript. I think this is the true power of GWT: it enables _application_ developers (rather than web developers) to write nice web applications without learning a whole new skillset. This is a win for developers because we can do cool things without learning a whole new trade, and it's a win for consumers because web apps can be written by skilled application developers instead of photoshop gurus.
Also, just because GWT provides some server-side machinery doesn't mean you have to use it. GWT will happily make asynchronous calls to any old URL, so you can write your backend in PHP or Perl or C or whatever you like. Personally, I've been playing with GWT using PHP/SQLite as my backend (following Juan Hurtado's great tutorial). It works great, and since I'm already comfortable with Java, PHP and SQL, it doesn't require a steep learning curve to create very nice web apps.
That said, I will certainly be taking a deeper look at TFA later and perhaps following its example to learn how to use the Java server-side machinery. Could be interesting.
Clearly, you've never met a DBA.
Cute chica at bar: "So, what do you do for a living?"
DBA: "I think I need to get home and iron my socks now."
eBay owns PayPal. So, no.
But Google Auctions will. Remember, you heard it here first.
Wait a minute, that would be more than one bridge per mile, on average. Is that actually correct? I don't remember there being that many bridges on any of the interstates I've driven on.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding this comment, but I think this fails to solve the common case. Most often, we would like to have a footer that is at the bottom of the viewport when the content is smaller than the viewport, but always moves with the bottom of the content. The way I understand it, this sticks your footer permanently to the bottom of the viewport, which is not as useful IMO.
That said, I seem to recall finding a hack to make CSS do exactly what I have described (footer at the bottom of the viewport or content, whichever is lower). Unfortunately, I don't remember what the hack was.