Boot up is rather fast but application performance goes from slow (low peak times) to get some coffee, take a walk, get in a qucik nap before your StarOffice document loads Slloooowwwwww (peak usage times).
Isn't that average for a StarOffice startup time?
All kidding aside, to me it sounds like disk bottleneck which is common at "peak time" or it could be CPU, I'm not sure but network IO and memory IO are pretty much constants on shared systems like these. THis is why I'm not a big fan of global shared network drives. Sure they are very convenient, but its best to keep larger permanent storage on a shared disk, and your regular day to day stuff on a local disk.
That is what regular "PC" users do, and there is actually a reason for it. *NIX guys get seduced into NFS mounted home drives and doing 100% of their work out of them when 99% of the time its unnecessary.
Which is why my god is the Scientific Method, and my religion the study of our suroundings.
My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.
Rumsfeld should be fired, but I love this quote:
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
Yeah, that reminds me of the police profile of a drug trafficker.
A lone driver who is an average looking white male in his mid-20s to mid-30s, driving an average car, will all appropriate tags and documentation, and doing the speed limit.
Actually, this leads to the average white guy with a young female and a baby to throw the cops off, but they are kinda hard to buy these days... Wal-mart hasn't carried them in years.
they put security above happy travellers, but the rest of the world has different priorities.
Wow. Here's a business idea. Like http://www.smintair.com/ is an airline for smokers, how about an airline for travelers?
No muss no fuss. You sign a waiver, and you can just travel freely like we used to do in recent past?
It kills me that people were willing to die to do trans-atlantic travel not too long ago under horrible conditions and ships, but its an unacceptable risk to board a plane even though the risk is less than driving to and from the place in a car.
That is funny, but it also says volumes (in triplicate!)
Google, like other companies, has issued press releases in the attempt to preserve their brand name. But with the Xerox example, that is a little different.
Xerox started out as a photocopying company, and Xerox used to be synonymous as a verb to do photocopies. But now, that term (at least in the US) has lost its uniqueness with just "copy" or "photocopy" and I guess the reason is that the technology is not new anymore, and Xerox does not hold anywhere near a monopoly on the market anymore.
Now with Google, I would bet the same thing would have to apply. Google may lose the monopoly on searches, but I surely don't see the company going away in at least 20 or so years. My hunch is that they are going to be around for a loonng time, and that is a good thing(tm).
The RIAA is lawyers. Representing the recording industry is their full time job.
And, as any conspiracy theorist would ask one to do in a situation like this. Follow the money.
The RIAA is paid by the recording companies, and the recording companies are paid for by people like you and me who buy their products.
Seriously, at this point in the game, there is no need for them. People are more than willing and have the capabilities to distribute recorded music via bittorent, IRC, FTP, HTTP, USENET, and purchasing used music. There are excellent artists who have consciously made the decision to not go with the RIAA sanctioned labels for this reason.
At this point in time, it seems clear that the proper decision is to boycott these people. I really didn't think I was doing anything that wrong but I bought my first RIAA album in years because I wanted it, but I'm done now. The only legal means of buying music today that I will do is from the used CD store, but otherwise, I'm going to "pirate" and do whatever it takes to not directly support these people anymore.
WIth the new highdef DVDs not playing legal content and it is getting to the point that its practically a crime to pay for music and movies, I believe it is simply time to stop doing so.
But you'd have a hard time convincing me that THC should still be illegal.
One of many problems with our current view on drug use is that, today, in 2006, THC is legal in all 50 states of the US.
Another problem, is that if one were to take a drug screen, they would fail the test, and then, _iff they were given the opportunity_, they would have to give the person that gave them the test one of the few things that is still protected, even in a court of law -- one's private medical information.
Yes, marinol (and another drug which I believe was just approved by the FDA) whose active ingredient is synthetic THC, and is legal, yet controlled, in the US. There are two kickers here.
1) Even though its legal, you are still subject to the discrimination of acquiring THC in your system illegally.
2) The drug is VERY strong -- too strong, even by stoner standards.
I'm not convinced that every single drug should be legal, but I am convinced that marijuana and THC should be. The crimes against it simply do not outweigh the cost of enforcing those crimes and the negative effects that come from its being illegal.
Take cocaine for instance - it has a 1700% profit ratio [source VH1's "Drug Years" and the History Channel's "Histroy of Cocaine"] compared to what it costs to manufacture.
And bottled water and air almost has infinite percent profit ratio [ source common sense:) ]
I really believe that there is a thing called market value. In the past ~20 years, the price of cocaine has not really increased. Marijuana has increased, but this is due to the quality increasing. Cocaine is the same as it was ever because it is manufactured, now how its stepped on and with what is a different story.
I believe that the cost of marijuana if legal would not significantly change. The same for cocaine as well. Compared to other vices, they are about the same as legal and quasi legal ones.
The thing that sucks is if you really like the stuff, no matter how cheap it is, you still can't afford it.
the netherlands with its much more permissive legal behaviour regarding drugs does NOT see appreciably higher use of hard drugs than we do
Actually, per capita, they use less drugs than the US does.
I find it interesting, especially with african-americans, that many of them do and sell drugs entirely because it is illegal. For them, its part of their culture more than a desire to get high.
Caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco are all "psychotropic" substances.
So, Salvia Divinorum is completely legal, available in the mail, and AFAIK, the most potent naturally occurring psychedelic substance known to man.
Caffeine is basically 100% legal. Who cares. Sure, I've done plenty of it, but its not that fun in excess, nor is it going to fuck you up that much.
Tobacco is becoming less legal as we speak. Again, its not going to fuck you up too much (high wise).
Alcohol law are becoming more strict, especially drinking and driving laws and for drinking under the age of 21 to 18 depending on your jurisdiction.
"Crack cocaine" is more illegal than powder cocaine, even if you are busted with powder cocaine with the intent to make crack cocaine. Pot is basically only illegal in large quantities. Really, all drugs are pretty much legal in small, personal quantities.
In other words, laws are not absolute, they are kinda like perceived danger guidelines. Are you careful when you walk down the sidewalk? No. Raise the sidewalk a couple of miles off the ground, and you will be much more careful.
Don't legalise drugs on the basis of taxing them. Sure, tax them like you'd tax any other good, but I hate using revenue to the state as a justification. The reason drugs should be legal is because people should have dominion over their own bodies.
Well, their current illegality is just a welfare program for the legal, judicial, and criminal system.
Ask any judge if they would have a job if drugs were legal. Odds are, they will say no.
The thing is that the "war on drugs" has become such a profit driven thing by our government that they cannot legalize it anymore because it would kill their bottom line. Any rational being would say that the war on drugs has been lost and that it is a stupid waste of time, but telling the DEA, most all of the lawyers, judges, and policemen that they have to find a new job is not going to be easy.
The spirit of the law and the letter of the law regarding drugs is completely different. The law is written so that possession or sale of X mass of Y substance will get you Z sentence. The spirit of the law is that, yeah, you can do these things, but its going to get more expensive and dangerous as you get older. So, if your a white kid of college age or in your 20s, party up, but outside of that, we will "throw the book at you".
Eureka! That's how to stop spam. Educate people with a campaign reminiscent of the Speed Kills campaign, so that people understand they could permanently damage their penis by taking unregulated pharmaceuticals from shady online stores hosted on 0wn3d pcs.
yes, after billions of dollars and many decades this has completely eradicated the desire for illicit drugs.
In statistical filtering, it is certainly NOT true that more data == better results. You want a sample of data that most accurately represents the sort of content you are receiving RIGHT NOW. I completely purge my Firefox Bayesian database every couple of months and retrain on recent emails only.
SpamAssassin's bayes filter auto-learns, auto-purges, and all of that.
Monthly maintenance is not significantly different than hitting that delete key.
The part about willpower is completely wrong: If you exercise willpower and self control, then you can keep the addiction under control.
For many people being addicted to something means this:
- When I wanted to do addictive behavior X, I did it. - When I didn't want to do addictive behavior X, I still did it. - My best ideas and willpower almost killed myself and others.
There are many graves that are filled with people who were completely under control of their addictions.
What about the one we really need to know?? User 17556639!!!
Hello, I'm user 17556639, and I'm a crime novelist.
Actually, I'm not but it is simply not up to AOL or the government or anybody to snoop into my business without probable cause. And probable cause is limited to the government, the rest stay the fuck out of my business.
Anything taken out of context can look completely different, and it simply is NOT the duty of a citizen to chronically prove their innocence.
A) Its sometimes impossible to prove that I was home alone asleep.
B) I'm innocent until proven guilty. Even after being charged and possibly jailed until my court time.
So, yes, I'm one of those "Fuck the children" people. I'm one of those people that respects my privacy. I'm one of those people that believes in free speech. Yes, I vote libertarian too.
Yeah, and Richard Branson dropped out of high school because it was getting in the way of his business (he later founded and runs Virgin).
Fred Smith only got a C on his paper for starting a company like FedEx.
The list goes on and on. But most successful people took more conventional routes by going to excellent schools, picked excellent parents and grandparents, knew tons of other successful people, and all of that jazz.
Americans love the rags to riches on in a [mb]illion story, but those are still one in [mb]illion, and they still only happen once out of every million or billion times. People do the one in a couple of millions thing every year by doing another "American dream" thing of winning the lottery. Almost 100% of the time, these people are less happy, and simply have worse lives after winning the lottery than before, and often lose all of the money in a few years.
Sure, its hard for me and many other people to accept that they really get what they deserve in life and just be happy with that. Sure we dream that if only X would happen then we would be happier. But the evidence is not supporting of such events, and the likelihood of them happening is pretty low.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Like it or not, Flash is here to stay.
Here to stay for what?
Getting middle management PHB's hair more pointy?
From what I know, flash really does not exist, nor is it here to stay.
Is it an open standard, that works on all platforms, is part of the W3Cs recommendations, and has unilateral support?
Nope.
Can it be searched, indexed, and googled?
Nope.
Can it really do anything besides look good?
No.
I will say, that sure, flash, as its name suggests, is flashy and sexy, but it has so many downsides to it, that I do not consider it part of the web. By default, I browse with plugins off. It reduces the number of obnoxious, ADD inspired ads down by 30-40%. It saves my CPU cycles and heat from my laptop while increasing battery life. Sure, I miss those groovy intro pages, but even if I have flash active, me, like most people skip them anyway just like splash screens for games and everything else. It may be mildly entertaining the first time, after that, give me what I'm here for!
I've never seen an ecommerce site that used a flash mechanism for purchasing goods and/or sevices. I've never seen much real content in flash, and when there is, I am annoyed with the inability to go back and forward in my browser like every other site. I have to relearn a new widget set and way of doing things for every site. I can't download and save images and text, I can't print the site. My freedoms and happiness are both limited when flash comes into the picture.
I will say that I have caught myself being drawn into the eye candy and scaled vector graphics and whatnot by flash for almost 10 years now, but the lack of real benefits plus the laundry list of negatives makes flash a loss, and not worth the effort in my eye.
Sure, there has been versioning and virtual desktops for a very long time, but neither seem to be as polished and usable by "normal" people like what the videos for Leopard demonstrate.
I've used virtual desktops from a number of different implementations, including on a Mac, and I gave up on them because of one big annoyance -- the inability to move an app to another desktop so that I can interact, copy and paste from it. I've found that hiding apps and hiding "others" to be about the same as virtual desktops. A simple click on the docked app or a command-tab and the app is back. Command-H, and its gone again.
Now, with Leopard's implementation of virtual desktops. Yeah, they got it right.
Right now, with Expose, I can hit a button to view all windows in a smaller format, click on one, and have that window come to the forefront while maintaining the previous stacking order. Very slick. I can also, with a single key stroke, do this with the current application.
Now, what has Apple done with virtual desktops? Well, they just upped the bar one notch from the Expose features I just mentioned.
Again, this is only from a video, but this is how it looks to me, and makes sense. Now, with a single keystroke, I can now view _all desktops_ just like viewing all windows, but here is the catch. I can DND a window to another virtual desktop, and then warp to that desktop. Sure, other virtual desktops almost had that functionality via a small pager that you could DND things, but it was either real estate intensive to have a pager big enough you could actually make sense of, or it was just difficult in that you had to DND a window to another desktop, switch to that desktop, and then move the same window again. Now, its a matter of move and follow, and get back to work. No disruption of thought, basically one continuous flow. Very, very slick and elegant, and definitely worth the wait.
Now with the time machine thing. Again, sure, we've had CVS, VMS's versioning, subversion, and our own -1 -2 -3 versioning schemes that are difficult to use and are very prone to human error. Now, doing a spotlight search with no hits, and then intuitively go back in time until you get hits. Very slick.
Now, I'm under the assumption that someone like me will not be able to use time machine because I simply go through so much data with gigs and gigs of scratch and temporary stuff that I don't see this as something that could work with my niche, but then again, my apps and my work flow accommodate this pretty well already. But for those 99.99% of "normal" people out there. I can already see their eyes light up, and wonder how they had gotten along without such a feature in their life.
Are there really people whose heartbeat rises when some new tech is introduced ?
Yes. Although, the drama is slowing down.
People's heartbeat rises when some new cars are introduced. Cars are pretty common and standard now, but there are still times when new models and/or features are introduced and people go nuts.
I used to go nuts when every beta release of Netscape came out. I would wake up early in the morning and download it from a california server from the east coast so I could get into the FTP server and to get a good transfer rate. Now, I just use the default browser that comes with my OS, and when an update or feature is added, and thats few and far between, I say, wow, thats nice, why did it take them so long?
Now, this slashdot drama about Steve Jobs is probably sensationalized a bit, but as far as desktop computing goes, Apple has it down. I've used kazillions of desktop GUI environments, and I will say that the OS X environment at least wins because it annoys me the least. I've used KDE, Gnome, OL(V)WM, CDE, Windows 3.1->XP, FVWM, TWM, Afterstep, Window Maker, Apple//s, Macs from 84-present, and I'm sure a few others. But as any industry matures, the number of choices diminishes, and the real differences between them are not that big of a difference.
Personally, I'm glad that reboots and crashes are not an integral part of computer usage. I see that the computer market may stagnate for a while, and then, like cars today, there may be a new uprising where there are other options available to fit ones personality and fashion interests, but for the most part, computers, like cars, are just tools. Pretty much a dime a dozen, but if you want to impress your friends and enemies, you can get a more fancy, newer, niche computer, and like a car, your friends will say, "Ooh, thats cool", and your enemies will say "He just got that to compensate for _____", and yeah, both will be right:)
Slashdot Mirror
Boot up is rather fast but application performance goes from slow (low peak times) to get some coffee, take a walk, get in a qucik nap before your StarOffice document loads Slloooowwwwww (peak usage times).
Isn't that average for a StarOffice startup time?
All kidding aside, to me it sounds like disk bottleneck which is common at "peak time" or it could be CPU, I'm not sure but network IO and memory IO are pretty much constants on shared systems like these. THis is why I'm not a big fan of global shared network drives. Sure they are very convenient, but its best to keep larger permanent storage on a shared disk, and your regular day to day stuff on a local disk.
That is what regular "PC" users do, and there is actually a reason for it. *NIX guys get seduced into NFS mounted home drives and doing 100% of their work out of them when 99% of the time its unnecessary.
Which is why my god is the Scientific Method, and my religion the study of our suroundings.
My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.
Rumsfeld should be fired, but I love this quote:
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Yeah, that reminds me of the police profile of a drug trafficker.
A lone driver who is an average looking white male in his mid-20s to mid-30s, driving an average car, will all appropriate tags and documentation, and doing the speed limit.
Actually, this leads to the average white guy with a young female and a baby to throw the cops off, but they are kinda hard to buy these days... Wal-mart hasn't carried them in years.
they put security above happy travellers, but the rest of the world has different priorities.
Wow. Here's a business idea. Like http://www.smintair.com/ is an airline for smokers, how about an airline for travelers?
No muss no fuss. You sign a waiver, and you can just travel freely like we used to do in recent past?
It kills me that people were willing to die to do trans-atlantic travel not too long ago under horrible conditions and ships, but its an unacceptable risk to board a plane even though the risk is less than driving to and from the place in a car.
The difference with Google is that it is also the name of the company, which cannot be revoked.
The only popular revocation that I know of is the thermos, but that was a brand name by a company, not the company's name itself.
I wish I had problems with being too successful and popular.
Could someone Xerox it for me?
That is funny, but it also says volumes (in triplicate!)
Google, like other companies, has issued press releases in the attempt to preserve their brand name. But with the Xerox example, that is a little different.
Xerox started out as a photocopying company, and Xerox used to be synonymous as a verb to do photocopies. But now, that term (at least in the US) has lost its uniqueness with just "copy" or "photocopy" and I guess the reason is that the technology is not new anymore, and Xerox does not hold anywhere near a monopoly on the market anymore.
Now with Google, I would bet the same thing would have to apply. Google may lose the monopoly on searches, but I surely don't see the company going away in at least 20 or so years. My hunch is that they are going to be around for a loonng time, and that is a good thing(tm).
The RIAA is lawyers. Representing the recording industry is their full time job.
And, as any conspiracy theorist would ask one to do in a situation like this. Follow the money.
The RIAA is paid by the recording companies, and the recording companies are paid for by people like you and me who buy their products.
Seriously, at this point in the game, there is no need for them. People are more than willing and have the capabilities to distribute recorded music via bittorent, IRC, FTP, HTTP, USENET, and purchasing used music. There are excellent artists who have consciously made the decision to not go with the RIAA sanctioned labels for this reason.
At this point in time, it seems clear that the proper decision is to boycott these people. I really didn't think I was doing anything that wrong but I bought my first RIAA album in years because I wanted it, but I'm done now. The only legal means of buying music today that I will do is from the used CD store, but otherwise, I'm going to "pirate" and do whatever it takes to not directly support these people anymore.
WIth the new highdef DVDs not playing legal content and it is getting to the point that its practically a crime to pay for music and movies, I believe it is simply time to stop doing so.
Just wait until terrorists start swallowing bombs...
Never happen.
People willing to die for their beliefs would never do such a thing.
But you'd have a hard time convincing me that THC should still be illegal.
One of many problems with our current view on drug use is that, today, in 2006, THC is legal in all 50 states of the US.
Another problem, is that if one were to take a drug screen, they would fail the test, and then, _iff they were given the opportunity_, they would have to give the person that gave them the test one of the few things that is still protected, even in a court of law -- one's private medical information.
Yes, marinol (and another drug which I believe was just approved by the FDA) whose active ingredient is synthetic THC, and is legal, yet controlled, in the US. There are two kickers here.
1) Even though its legal, you are still subject to the discrimination of acquiring THC in your system illegally.
2) The drug is VERY strong -- too strong, even by stoner standards.
I'm not convinced that every single drug should be legal, but I am convinced that marijuana and THC should be. The crimes against it simply do not outweigh the cost of enforcing those crimes and the negative effects that come from its being illegal.
DMT is typically synthesized.
Now, if you want to compare DMT and salvia extract...
Take cocaine for instance - it has a 1700% profit ratio [source VH1's "Drug Years" and the History Channel's "Histroy of Cocaine"] compared to what it costs to manufacture.
:) ]
And bottled water and air almost has infinite percent profit ratio [ source common sense
I really believe that there is a thing called market value. In the past ~20 years, the price of cocaine has not really increased. Marijuana has increased, but this is due to the quality increasing. Cocaine is the same as it was ever because it is manufactured, now how its stepped on and with what is a different story.
I believe that the cost of marijuana if legal would not significantly change. The same for cocaine as well. Compared to other vices, they are about the same as legal and quasi legal ones.
The thing that sucks is if you really like the stuff, no matter how cheap it is, you still can't afford it.
the netherlands with its much more permissive legal behaviour regarding drugs does NOT see appreciably higher use of hard drugs than we do
Actually, per capita, they use less drugs than the US does.
I find it interesting, especially with african-americans, that many of them do and sell drugs entirely because it is illegal. For them, its part of their culture more than a desire to get high.
Caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco are all "psychotropic" substances.
So, Salvia Divinorum is completely legal, available in the mail, and AFAIK, the most potent naturally occurring psychedelic substance known to man.
Caffeine is basically 100% legal. Who cares. Sure, I've done plenty of it, but its not that fun in excess, nor is it going to fuck you up that much.
Tobacco is becoming less legal as we speak. Again, its not going to fuck you up too much (high wise).
Alcohol law are becoming more strict, especially drinking and driving laws and for drinking under the age of 21 to 18 depending on your jurisdiction.
"Crack cocaine" is more illegal than powder cocaine, even if you are busted with powder cocaine with the intent to make crack cocaine. Pot is basically only illegal in large quantities. Really, all drugs are pretty much legal in small, personal quantities.
In other words, laws are not absolute, they are kinda like perceived danger guidelines. Are you careful when you walk down the sidewalk? No. Raise the sidewalk a couple of miles off the ground, and you will be much more careful.
Don't legalise drugs on the basis of taxing them. Sure, tax them like you'd tax any other good, but I hate using revenue to the state as a justification. The reason drugs should be legal is because people should have dominion over their own bodies.
Well, their current illegality is just a welfare program for the legal, judicial, and criminal system.
Ask any judge if they would have a job if drugs were legal. Odds are, they will say no.
The thing is that the "war on drugs" has become such a profit driven thing by our government that they cannot legalize it anymore because it would kill their bottom line. Any rational being would say that the war on drugs has been lost and that it is a stupid waste of time, but telling the DEA, most all of the lawyers, judges, and policemen that they have to find a new job is not going to be easy.
The spirit of the law and the letter of the law regarding drugs is completely different. The law is written so that possession or sale of X mass of Y substance will get you Z sentence. The spirit of the law is that, yeah, you can do these things, but its going to get more expensive and dangerous as you get older. So, if your a white kid of college age or in your 20s, party up, but outside of that, we will "throw the book at you".
So, does this mean that the creators of malware/viruses/spyware are going to be classified as terrorists?
d =39237
Why, yes! http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parenti
Thats amateur.
Real spammers put those tags between every letter of displayed text. Render white text. There is a laundry list of crap that they pull.
Fortunately, SpamAssassin just filters them as spam...
Eureka! That's how to stop spam. Educate people with a campaign reminiscent of the Speed Kills campaign, so that people understand they could permanently damage their penis by taking unregulated pharmaceuticals from shady online stores hosted on 0wn3d pcs.
yes, after billions of dollars and many decades this has completely eradicated the desire for illicit drugs.
In statistical filtering, it is certainly NOT true that more data == better results. You want a sample of data that most accurately represents the sort of content you are receiving RIGHT NOW. I completely purge my Firefox Bayesian database every couple of months and retrain on recent emails only.
SpamAssassin's bayes filter auto-learns, auto-purges, and all of that.
Monthly maintenance is not significantly different than hitting that delete key.
The part about willpower is completely wrong: If you exercise willpower and self control, then you can keep the addiction under control.
For many people being addicted to something means this:
- When I wanted to do addictive behavior X, I did it.
- When I didn't want to do addictive behavior X, I still did it.
- My best ideas and willpower almost killed myself and others.
There are many graves that are filled with people who were completely under control of their addictions.
Also, reliability would be increased.
Typically power does this in a typical datacenter:
AC (from the outside world) -> DC (at the UPS) -> AC -> DC (in the computer)
At least here in the US, AC is used at high voltage/low current for large transmission from power stations to homes and businesses.
I believe that having a UPS/PDU at least in each rack would be killer.
What about the one we really need to know?? User 17556639!!!
Hello, I'm user 17556639, and I'm a crime novelist.
Actually, I'm not but it is simply not up to AOL or the government or anybody to snoop into my business without probable cause. And probable cause is limited to the government, the rest stay the fuck out of my business.
Anything taken out of context can look completely different, and it simply is NOT the duty of a citizen to chronically prove their innocence.
A) Its sometimes impossible to prove that I was home alone asleep.
B) I'm innocent until proven guilty. Even after being charged and possibly jailed until my court time.
So, yes, I'm one of those "Fuck the children" people. I'm one of those people that respects my privacy. I'm one of those people that believes in free speech. Yes, I vote libertarian too.
Yeah, and Richard Branson dropped out of high school because it was getting in the way of his business (he later founded and runs Virgin).
Fred Smith only got a C on his paper for starting a company like FedEx.
The list goes on and on. But most successful people took more conventional routes by going to excellent schools, picked excellent parents and grandparents, knew tons of other successful people, and all of that jazz.
Americans love the rags to riches on in a [mb]illion story, but those are still one in [mb]illion, and they still only happen once out of every million or billion times. People do the one in a couple of millions thing every year by doing another "American dream" thing of winning the lottery. Almost 100% of the time, these people are less happy, and simply have worse lives after winning the lottery than before, and often lose all of the money in a few years.
Sure, its hard for me and many other people to accept that they really get what they deserve in life and just be happy with that. Sure we dream that if only X would happen then we would be happier. But the evidence is not supporting of such events, and the likelihood of them happening is pretty low.
Like it or not, Flash is here to stay.
Here to stay for what?
Getting middle management PHB's hair more pointy?
From what I know, flash really does not exist, nor is it here to stay.
Is it an open standard, that works on all platforms, is part of the W3Cs recommendations, and has unilateral support?
Nope.
Can it be searched, indexed, and googled?
Nope.
Can it really do anything besides look good?
No.
I will say, that sure, flash, as its name suggests, is flashy and sexy, but it has so many downsides to it, that I do not consider it part of the web. By default, I browse with plugins off. It reduces the number of obnoxious, ADD inspired ads down by 30-40%. It saves my CPU cycles and heat from my laptop while increasing battery life. Sure, I miss those groovy intro pages, but even if I have flash active, me, like most people skip them anyway just like splash screens for games and everything else. It may be mildly entertaining the first time, after that, give me what I'm here for!
I've never seen an ecommerce site that used a flash mechanism for purchasing goods and/or sevices. I've never seen much real content in flash, and when there is, I am annoyed with the inability to go back and forward in my browser like every other site. I have to relearn a new widget set and way of doing things for every site. I can't download and save images and text, I can't print the site. My freedoms and happiness are both limited when flash comes into the picture.
I will say that I have caught myself being drawn into the eye candy and scaled vector graphics and whatnot by flash for almost 10 years now, but the lack of real benefits plus the laundry list of negatives makes flash a loss, and not worth the effort in my eye.
Sure, there has been versioning and virtual desktops for a very long time, but neither seem to be as polished and usable by "normal" people like what the videos for Leopard demonstrate.
I've used virtual desktops from a number of different implementations, including on a Mac, and I gave up on them because of one big annoyance -- the inability to move an app to another desktop so that I can interact, copy and paste from it. I've found that hiding apps and hiding "others" to be about the same as virtual desktops. A simple click on the docked app or a command-tab and the app is back. Command-H, and its gone again.
Now, with Leopard's implementation of virtual desktops. Yeah, they got it right.
Right now, with Expose, I can hit a button to view all windows in a smaller format, click on one, and have that window come to the forefront while maintaining the previous stacking order. Very slick. I can also, with a single key stroke, do this with the current application.
Now, what has Apple done with virtual desktops? Well, they just upped the bar one notch from the Expose features I just mentioned.
Again, this is only from a video, but this is how it looks to me, and makes sense. Now, with a single keystroke, I can now view _all desktops_ just like viewing all windows, but here is the catch. I can DND a window to another virtual desktop, and then warp to that desktop. Sure, other virtual desktops almost had that functionality via a small pager that you could DND things, but it was either real estate intensive to have a pager big enough you could actually make sense of, or it was just difficult in that you had to DND a window to another desktop, switch to that desktop, and then move the same window again. Now, its a matter of move and follow, and get back to work. No disruption of thought, basically one continuous flow. Very, very slick and elegant, and definitely worth the wait.
Now with the time machine thing. Again, sure, we've had CVS, VMS's versioning, subversion, and our own -1 -2 -3 versioning schemes that are difficult to use and are very prone to human error. Now, doing a spotlight search with no hits, and then intuitively go back in time until you get hits. Very slick.
Now, I'm under the assumption that someone like me will not be able to use time machine because I simply go through so much data with gigs and gigs of scratch and temporary stuff that I don't see this as something that could work with my niche, but then again, my apps and my work flow accommodate this pretty well already. But for those 99.99% of "normal" people out there. I can already see their eyes light up, and wonder how they had gotten along without such a feature in their life.
Are there really people whose heartbeat rises when some new tech is introduced ?
//s, Macs from 84-present, and I'm sure a few others. But as any industry matures, the number of choices diminishes, and the real differences between them are not that big of a difference.
:)
Yes. Although, the drama is slowing down.
People's heartbeat rises when some new cars are introduced. Cars are pretty common and standard now, but there are still times when new models and/or features are introduced and people go nuts.
I used to go nuts when every beta release of Netscape came out. I would wake up early in the morning and download it from a california server from the east coast so I could get into the FTP server and to get a good transfer rate. Now, I just use the default browser that comes with my OS, and when an update or feature is added, and thats few and far between, I say, wow, thats nice, why did it take them so long?
Now, this slashdot drama about Steve Jobs is probably sensationalized a bit, but as far as desktop computing goes, Apple has it down. I've used kazillions of desktop GUI environments, and I will say that the OS X environment at least wins because it annoys me the least. I've used KDE, Gnome, OL(V)WM, CDE, Windows 3.1->XP, FVWM, TWM, Afterstep, Window Maker, Apple
Personally, I'm glad that reboots and crashes are not an integral part of computer usage. I see that the computer market may stagnate for a while, and then, like cars today, there may be a new uprising where there are other options available to fit ones personality and fashion interests, but for the most part, computers, like cars, are just tools. Pretty much a dime a dozen, but if you want to impress your friends and enemies, you can get a more fancy, newer, niche computer, and like a car, your friends will say, "Ooh, thats cool", and your enemies will say "He just got that to compensate for _____", and yeah, both will be right