Having personally lost an Epson printer by letting a cartridge run until it was dry... and wasting time and money replacing the cartridge, running cleaning cycles, replacing the cartridge again (yes, I'm an idiot... but I've gotten bad cartridges from time to time), running more cleaning cycles, going online and trying various suggestions for homebrew ways to clean Epson nozzles......I have to admit I'm pretty leery about actually running the cartridge dry.
I have another Epson now (I told you I was an idiot, didn't I?) which takes individual cartridges for each color. I'm not so sure I like that, either. In theory it ought to save money, but in practice, after a year or so, the cartridge cycles become unsynchronized, so I am always getting interrupted because some cartridge has gotten low... and then when I tool out to the office supply store, they try to stock cartridges for umpteen different models in six different ink colors but I always seem to hit them on the day when they're out of light cyan...
I had not discussed Vista with either of them. Short story: Both of them bought new PCs this year, both of them after Vista's release. My wife wanted a Dell but ended up picking up an HP at Staples because Dell told her she couldn't get a Dell PC with anything but Vista. My son wanted a Dell and, as it happened, it turned out he _was_ able to get a Dell preloaded with XP, and that's what he got.
Both my wife and my son are what you might call computer-literate, but neither of them has any love for computers. They browse the Web, they do a little word processing, a little spreadsheet, they download and print pictures from their digital cameras, and don't buy new computers until they're forced to.
In my wife's case, she'd been using Win98 SE on a 2000-vintage Gateway. (She picked Gateway because she liked their cow-themed boxes and because in 2000 they had retail "stores" that catered to non-techies). What forced her to buy a new PC was the lack of updates for her Win98SE version of Norton Antivirus, and for IE--and the increasing number of websites she visits that cause her version of IE to hang or crash.
Her approach to me came about a day or two after Vista release and what she said was, "You know, I think I'd better buy a new computer now before I'm stuck with one that has Vista." What put her off of Vista was the impression she'd gotten from the mainstream news that it was a) brand new, and b) rough around the edges. Incidentally, she wanted a Dell, but ended up buying an HP because at the time she called Dell they claimed, truthfully or untruthfully, that they would not sell her the low-end machine she wanted preloaded with Vista. (The reason I even suggest untruthfulness was that the person she talked to said that Dell would not sell any PCs preloaded with XP to anyone nohow no way, that they had switched 100% to Vista, and claimed that every other computer maker had, too). So we drove to the nearest Staples and she bought a sweet little compact HP, new in its box, that had XP SP2 preloaded.
A couple of weeks ago, my son called asking whether I had any idea why performing a virus scan on his machine would make the screen go to black and make the machine reboot. Long story short: Bad fan on the power supply. After reviewing options, he decided that the option he liked was to buy a new machine.
Again, I had not discussed Vista with him. Again, _he_ called _me_ and asked whether I thought he should get Vista. He said he was leaning against it, "because Moose" (a friend of his) "says I'd be crazy to get Vista at this stage," but he was on the Dell website and couldn't find a home machine without one. He asked if I thought it would be all that crazy to get Vista. I gave him the most honest answer I could, which was that if you just want a plain-Jane reliable box, well, XP is mellow and mature and not too bad, while Vista is new and does have significant teething pains. I added that if he was going to go with Vista he should get Home Premium, not Home, because it would be silly to have the headaches and not at least get all the fancy new usability and UI good stuff, and that he should have at least double the minimum "recommended" RAM and disk space and should ask hard questions about the video card.
He called me back an hour later to say that he'd found that if he ordered the machine as a "home" system, he could only get Vista, but he'd found that the exact same CPU... which incidentally happened to be one Consumer Reports liked... was also sold under "small business," and ordered that way XP was an option. And the machine ordered as a "small business" system with XP actually cost a little less than the same machine ordered as a "home" system with Vista Home Basic.
He went with XP.
So, yeah, I'd say Microsoft has a problem. But I think it's a problem with Vista, not a problem with perception, and they'd be better off improving Vista than conducting ad campaigns. No ad campaign is as powerful as word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth on Vista is bad.
And, just maybe, when Microsoft thinks about "customers," they should be thinking of my wife and my son and attending to their needs... not the needs of PC manufacturers and the RIAA.
Oh, I can only imagine the mischief this will potentially cause... as people discover, not just ancestors they didn't know they had, but ancestors they thought they had, but don't.
"So the years went by and he wished he was dead. He had seventeen girls and still wasn't wed. When he'd ask his papa, papa would always say, 'No! That girl is your sister but your mama don't know!'
"So he went to his mama and he bowed his head. Told his mama what his papa had said. His mama said, 'Son, go, man, go! Your papa ain't your papa but your papa don't know!'"
--"Ah Woe, Ah Me," Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, John Stewart, popularized by the Kingston Trio
"She's the illegitimate daughter, of the illegitimate son, of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon."
The current crowd in power really does seem to believe they can create their own reality. As Ron Suskind reported,
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''
But, as Ronald Reagan said—quoting John Adams, consciously or unconsciously, without attribution—"facts are stubborn things."
Boston has a on-demand real-time traffic report service called SmarTraveler. Six other cities have it as well, and doubtless there are similar services by other names. In Massachusetts it's subsidized by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and, as they say "Dial Star-One on your cellular phone, it's a free call."
Obviously the authorities think it's a good idea and want you to access it on your cellular phone. You can also access it via the web and of course via landline phones, so if the authorities don't want you to use it while driving, why did they make it a free star-one cellular call?
Don't forget the immigrants. It wasn't just money that got us where we are today.
The United States benefitted enormously from an influx of European physicists in the 1930s and 1940s, some of them escaping Hitler's Germany... Not to slight Harold Urey or E. O. Lawrence or Richard Feynman... but, call the roll of the people who gave us the scientific lead that led to our superpower status: Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Isador Rabi, Stanislaw Ulam, E. P. Wigner, Hans Bethe... and don't forget the German scientists recruited just after the war, Werner von Braun. Immigrants, every one of them.
In today's anti-immigrant and xenophobic climate, we've actually been kicking out graduate students and postdocs with Middle Eastern origins and generally making their lives miserable with red tape and problems with student visas. With that sort of treatment, they'll probably end up pursuing careers somewhere other than the U. S.
...so 80 MB for under $12K indeed sounds good. Actually, 10 MB for $12,500 sounded pretty good because it was the brand-new just-out replacement for the previous model, which was 10 MB for $22,000 or thereabouts.
The 10 MB consisted of a removable top-loading disk pack and an internal fixed disk, each capable of storing 5 MB. Those 5 MB disk packs cost something like $100 or $150 each. This would have been in the early 1970s...
...that OS/2 would be the dominant operating system by, IIRC, 1993 or thereabouts.
I just did some Googling on things like "bad Gartner predictions" and "missed Gartner predictions" or '"Gartner predictions" scorecard' hoping that someone had tried to keep tabs on them, but found to my disappointment virtually no relevant hits. Everyone discusses them in the months after they're released, nobody seems to check back even as recently as a year.
Of course, with predictions like these for 2002... "During 2002, leading-edge businesses will exploit application integration to generate business innovation...." how the heck would anyone ever figure out whether or not it was fulfilled?
I can't believe people pay Gartner for this stuff.
Steve Jobs just hates people spoiling his surprises.
My first thought when Jonathan Schwartz announced that ZFS would be the file system in Leopard was that now there was a really danger that Jobs might cancel it, just out of spite... and the prove the leaker wrong.
"A tip-off on fake CDs is that they will have 20 to 24 tracks each, instead of 12 or 14," says Marcus Cohen anti-piracy counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Yes, sir, and beware of one-pound cans of coffee that contain sixteen ounces instead of thirteen, sleazy operators that will sell you a four by four by eight foot "cord" of wood, and call the cops if your bag of a dozen bagels turns out to contain thirteen.
Short measure, your infallible sign of genuine U. S. music industry product.
SIgh... must press preview... What I meant of course is that I used to have marvellous fun wasting time prowling around for things in the university library that weren't very relevant to whatever I was supposed to be doing.
Regardless of the maybe-not-so-unimportant details, let me just say that Google Books, with "Full View" turned on, is a treasure. I haven't had so much fun since I graduated and moved and lost access to my university library.
There's just amazing stuff in there. Look at this peek at what Princeton University was like in 1818. Before peeking, guess how many professors you think Princeton had in 1818.
How about Horseless Age, full of spiffy ads on all the hot automotive items of 1903?
How about The Boston Road Book, which lists, describes, and rates all the best roads and routes for cyclists as of 1899?
Yes, I wish Google gave access to the OCR text (they must have OCRed it in order to index it) and I wish they were a little more forthcoming with respect to your rights to use this material (can Google really stop me from reusing material that's in the public domain? Does scanning a book constitute a transformative use or whatever?)
But don't let arguing over it stop you from enjoying this fabulous resource.
Welcome to the brave new world, where everyone has a pre-existing condition.
The good news is, you'll have knowledge that could extend your life or even save it, if you could get treatment.
The bad news is, in countries with profit-based free-market medical insurance, you won't be to afford that get that treatment, because insurance companies will jack up their premiums when they find out about you.
Everyone has seen this coming for decades. Now it's here. I don't think the United States is ready for it.
Yes I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run but I'm not looking forward to yet another hiatus in which: no industrial-strength disk-recovery tools are available, in which accidentally running the wrong disk-repair tool on the wrong partition hoses it instead of fixing it, and in which yet more legacy software suffers breakage due to subtle incompatibilities in implementation.
(Yesyesyes, I know, ZFS is reliable that disk-recovery tools are not needed. And if you believe that, then you probably believed Microsoft when they said NTFS volumes never needed defragmentation).
Dear Apple:
Please let HFS+ still be an option.
Please let Classic still run on Power Mac processors.
Please let reasonably well-behaved software that uses resource forks still work.
Please let it be case-insensitive and case-preserving.
And if software engineers were true professionals with a professional code of ethics, they probably would. At the very least, it is their ethical responsibility to attempt to the very best of their ability to make management understand the futility of DRM.
"2.5: Integrity: One will not knowingly lay claims to competence one does not demonstrably possess."
It seems to me that an engineer who, knowing that it is impossible to create a DRM system that does what it is supposed to do, nevertheless accepts an assignment to create one, is implicitly claiming competence he or she does not possess and is in violation of this point.
"2.7: Accountability:...The personal accountability of consultants and technical experts is especially important because of the positions of unique trust inherent in their advisory roles. Consequently, they are accountable for seeing to it that known limitations of their work are fully disclosed, documented and explained."
"3.4: Statements: One shall not make false or exaggerated statements as to the state of affairs existing or expected regarding any aspect of information technology or the use of computers."
And how, exactly, is this different from the situation in the PC world?
"Many ill-fated customers who upgraded have yet to get their PCs back to perfect working order" it says here and in many other places. Vista broke quite a few hardware drivers. And if your device is more than a few years old, the MBAs who decide these things are likely to decide against spending development money just to please loyal customers, so in most cases the simplest option is... to buy your way out of it.
Conversely, there are many things Mac OS X can do that Windows can't do unless you locate commercial products or shareware. I just found out yesterday, for example, that, unlike Mac OS X, Windows XP has no built-in way to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard drive. And, of course, as far as I know there's no way to create a PDF file on a Windows machine without installing extra software.
From the article: "Basically, it's going to be awkward making phone calls with the Wing."
Might as well end the review right there.
I don't know whether the iPhone will be any better, but Steve Jobs was dead on when he said "The killer app is... making calls."
I have a Swiss Army knife, and while I find the magnifying glass, scissors, and Phillips screwdrivers to be very useful, I use it mostly as a knife. If the knife blades weren't sturdy, sharp, and easy to open, I wouldn't carry one... not even if it included a microscope, pinking shears, and a full set of Torx bits.
In his book, High-Tech Ventures, Digital Equipment Corporation pioneer Gordon Bell analyzed various factors in the potential success of startups.
As I recall, one of his great big red flags was any product whose development entailed more than two technology breakthrough.
Yeah, here it is (PDF). He says, flatly, "A successful startup cannot be based on more than two breakthroughs in the state of the art. And for each area requiring a breakthrough, an alternative technology should be available as a backup."
So, by this measure, the Wright Brothers needed breakthroughs in engines and airframe design... so success was possible.
As for LiftPort, I think I've lost count of the number of breakthroughs they need.
And I'm not sure what their backup technology would have been if, by any chance, the carbon nanotube strategy turned out to be unfeasible.
Not that I don't use them a lot myself, but I thought that in C++ you were supposed to try to avoid the use of macros altogether, and in particular were supposed to use consts for, well, defining constants.
Many things look quite impressive in the context of a demo. The MIT Media Lab has been pulling off absolutely stunning demos for... is it a decade now? Very few of them have led directly to anything real. There's no way to tell whether this is the sort of thing like Clippy that is an impressive demo but not a useful product. But the comment that "the company's unofficial Surface showman, Jeff Gattis is a clean-cut fellow who is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars" is not confidence-inspiring. It would be much more impressive if they had demonstrated the product by letting half-a-dozen people, with no training, who had never seen the product before, try to use it.
There are some very obvious practical issues. With a vertically-oriented touchscreen, the issue was what sort of gadget you could use to prop your hands so that your arms wouldn't be trembling an aching in half an hour.
WIth a horizontally-oriented table-sized touch screen, the obvious issue is that if you put it under a thick sheet of Lexan it won't be touch-sensitive any more... and if you don't put it under a thick sheet of Lexan it won't be touch-sensitive for long.
It would be an interesting contest to see whether one of these $10,000 gadgets lasts longer in a typical American home or in a "Starwood hotel, Harrah's casino or T-Mobile shops." I figure a week, tops, before someone spills a cocktail on it or tries to see whether they can operate it with their butt.
Why is it news that Google now has it, too? Has Google become like Microsoft--so automatically newsworthy that it is automatically news whenever Google copies its competitors?
I played with it A9's version a while, but have never been able to find any practical use for it. At one point I thought I had a use for it--trying to settle a question of how many stories tall a particular building was--but the views didn't show enough in the vertical direction.
And then another time I thought I a use for it--verifying the exact name of a building. Specifically, I was trying to find out whether the signage on the old old John Hancock building, the one on 197 Clarendon Street, actually said "Stephen L. Brown" building or not. The sign or plaque or whatever was obscured by parked trucks.
Meanwhile, it appears that Google Maps does not currently have any street level views of Boston at all.
I occasionally find it amusing to tune my car radio to FM 87.9, which (in the U. S.) is the default setting for most of these FM transmitter gadgets. I commute on Route 128 in Massachusetts so there is plenty of company, and more often than not there is an audible signal on 87.9.
Mostly it seems to be people listening to Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio, but you also get a sampling of other satellite stations and (most likely) iPods.
The signal will usually be audible for the better part of a minute. Oddly enough, I've never managed to identify the car doing the transmission. You'd think you could tell from the positions of the cars around you and the strength of the signal, but I can't.
I discovered this because I have an iPod FM transmitter, set for 87.9 myself (after much experimentation I was never able to find any less-used channel).
What seems perverse that the signals from other cars' transmitters are not only strong enough to hear when my transmitter is off, they are strong enough to produce annoying an audible interference when my own transmitter, inside the car, is on. You'd think a transmitter two feet from the radio would totally overpower that must be at least forty feet away with two car body's worth of shielding in between, but no.
I can deal with a hundred or so email messages. I can scroll through and skim the subject lines in a few seconds.
But I just hate it when I see that my phone's "voice mail" indicator is flashing. There aren't any subject lines. Even though most of it isn't important, there's no way to be sure.
So, there's no rational strategy once you see the light is flashing except to sit there for five minutes, listening to the damn messages in real time.
I can hope that at least some of them will give you an idea of what they're about in the first few seconds, but for every person who thinks that "Hi" is a good subject line, there is someone who thinks "Please call me" is a good voice mail message. So if that isn't someone you can ignore, I need to call them and leave them frickin' voice mail message (because in the twenty-first century, the idea of actually being able to reach anyone on the phone is absurd).
And I get to do all of this one a great big 20-column-by-4-line alphanumeric screen. With a legible, ergonomic snot-on-phlegm color scheme. And a badly designed user interface that maps every function into a number... except for a rew random keys with arrows and blobs and non-message-related legends on them. So if Idon't have the plastic card handy, Ineed to wait while an obnoxious synthesized voice says "To listen, press 5; to erase, press 8;...." And hope I don't get confused with the other voice mail systems I use on which I press 8 to listen and 5 to erase, or whatever.
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Having personally lost an Epson printer by letting a cartridge run until it was dry... and wasting time and money replacing the cartridge, running cleaning cycles, replacing the cartridge again (yes, I'm an idiot... but I've gotten bad cartridges from time to time), running more cleaning cycles, going online and trying various suggestions for homebrew ways to clean Epson nozzles... ...I have to admit I'm pretty leery about actually running the cartridge dry.
I have another Epson now (I told you I was an idiot, didn't I?) which takes individual cartridges for each color. I'm not so sure I like that, either. In theory it ought to save money, but in practice, after a year or so, the cartridge cycles become unsynchronized, so I am always getting interrupted because some cartridge has gotten low... and then when I tool out to the office supply store, they try to stock cartridges for umpteen different models in six different ink colors but I always seem to hit them on the day when they're out of light cyan...
Two data points. My wife and my son.
I had not discussed Vista with either of them. Short story: Both of them bought new PCs this year, both of them after Vista's release. My wife wanted a Dell but ended up picking up an HP at Staples because Dell told her she couldn't get a Dell PC with anything but Vista. My son wanted a Dell and, as it happened, it turned out he _was_ able to get a Dell preloaded with XP, and that's what he got.
Both my wife and my son are what you might call computer-literate, but neither of them has any love for computers. They browse the Web, they do a little word processing, a little spreadsheet, they download and print pictures from their digital cameras, and don't buy new computers until they're forced to.
In my wife's case, she'd been using Win98 SE on a 2000-vintage Gateway. (She picked Gateway because she liked their cow-themed boxes and because in 2000 they had retail "stores" that catered to non-techies). What forced her to buy a new PC was the lack of updates for her Win98SE version of Norton Antivirus, and for IE--and the increasing number of websites she visits that cause her version of IE to hang or crash.
Her approach to me came about a day or two after Vista release and what she said was, "You know, I think I'd better buy a new computer now before I'm stuck with one that has Vista." What put her off of Vista was the impression she'd gotten from the mainstream news that it was a) brand new, and b) rough around the edges. Incidentally, she wanted a Dell, but ended up buying an HP because at the time she called Dell they claimed, truthfully or untruthfully, that they would not sell her the low-end machine she wanted preloaded with Vista. (The reason I even suggest untruthfulness was that the person she talked to said that Dell would not sell any PCs preloaded with XP to anyone nohow no way, that they had switched 100% to Vista, and claimed that every other computer maker had, too). So we drove to the nearest Staples and she bought a sweet little compact HP, new in its box, that had XP SP2 preloaded.
A couple of weeks ago, my son called asking whether I had any idea why performing a virus scan on his machine would make the screen go to black and make the machine reboot. Long story short: Bad fan on the power supply. After reviewing options, he decided that the option he liked was to buy a new machine.
Again, I had not discussed Vista with him. Again, _he_ called _me_ and asked whether I thought he should get Vista. He said he was leaning against it, "because Moose" (a friend of his) "says I'd be crazy to get Vista at this stage," but he was on the Dell website and couldn't find a home machine without one. He asked if I thought it would be all that crazy to get Vista. I gave him the most honest answer I could, which was that if you just want a plain-Jane reliable box, well, XP is mellow and mature and not too bad, while Vista is new and does have significant teething pains. I added that if he was going to go with Vista he should get Home Premium, not Home, because it would be silly to have the headaches and not at least get all the fancy new usability and UI good stuff, and that he should have at least double the minimum "recommended" RAM and disk space and should ask hard questions about the video card.
He called me back an hour later to say that he'd found that if he ordered the machine as a "home" system, he could only get Vista, but he'd found that the exact same CPU... which incidentally happened to be one Consumer Reports liked... was also sold under "small business," and ordered that way XP was an option. And the machine ordered as a "small business" system with XP actually cost a little less than the same machine ordered as a "home" system with Vista Home Basic.
He went with XP.
So, yeah, I'd say Microsoft has a problem. But I think it's a problem with Vista, not a problem with perception, and they'd be better off improving Vista than conducting ad campaigns. No ad campaign is as powerful as word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth on Vista is bad.
And, just maybe, when Microsoft thinks about "customers," they should be thinking of my wife and my son and attending to their needs... not the needs of PC manufacturers and the RIAA.
...not even if you think you're mixing the best features from each.
...it wouldn't be perfection.
If only you could combine a Big Mac and a Hershey bar...
If only you could combine Fred Astaire and Rudolf Nuruyev...
If only Gary Trudeau could draw like Albert Dürer...
Oh, I can only imagine the mischief this will potentially cause... as people discover, not just ancestors they didn't know they had, but ancestors they thought they had, but don't.
"So the years went by and he wished he was dead. He had seventeen girls and still wasn't wed.
When he'd ask his papa, papa would always say, 'No! That girl is your sister but your mama don't know!'
"So he went to his mama and he bowed his head. Told his mama what his papa had said.
His mama said, 'Son, go, man, go! Your papa ain't your papa but your papa don't know!'"
--"Ah Woe, Ah Me," Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, John Stewart, popularized by the Kingston Trio
"She's the illegitimate daughter, of the illegitimate son, of the illegitimate nephew of Napoleon."
--Ira Gershwin, _Of Thee I Sing+
"Optical quality: would that be like "industrial strength," "high definition," and "premium?"
What would you call the high-index polycarbonate plastic in my eyeglasses? I certainly hope it's "optical quality" plastic...
The current crowd in power really does seem to believe they can create their own reality. As Ron Suskind reported,
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''
But, as Ronald Reagan said—quoting John Adams, consciously or unconsciously, without attribution—"facts are stubborn things."
Boston has a on-demand real-time traffic report service called SmarTraveler. Six other cities have it as well, and doubtless there are similar services by other names. In Massachusetts it's subsidized by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and, as they say "Dial Star-One on your cellular phone, it's a free call."
Obviously the authorities think it's a good idea and want you to access it on your cellular phone. You can also access it via the web and of course via landline phones, so if the authorities don't want you to use it while driving, why did they make it a free star-one cellular call?
Don't forget the immigrants. It wasn't just money that got us where we are today.
The United States benefitted enormously from an influx of European physicists in the 1930s and 1940s, some of them escaping Hitler's Germany... Not to slight Harold Urey or E. O. Lawrence or Richard Feynman... but, call the roll of the people who gave us the scientific lead that led to our superpower status: Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Isador Rabi, Stanislaw Ulam, E. P. Wigner, Hans Bethe... and don't forget the German scientists recruited just after the war, Werner von Braun. Immigrants, every one of them.
In today's anti-immigrant and xenophobic climate, we've actually been kicking out graduate students and postdocs with Middle Eastern origins and generally making their lives miserable with red tape and problems with student visas. With that sort of treatment, they'll probably end up pursuing careers somewhere other than the U. S.
...so 80 MB for under $12K indeed sounds good. Actually, 10 MB for $12,500 sounded pretty good because it was the brand-new just-out replacement for the previous model, which was 10 MB for $22,000 or thereabouts.
It was the drive for a Datacraft 6024/5. The department only had a budget of about $30 or $40,000 for the thing, and we were very excited about the chance to get an actual disk drive and stay under budget... we'd been afraid we'd have to do it all with magnetic tape.
The 10 MB consisted of a removable top-loading disk pack and an internal fixed disk, each capable of storing 5 MB. Those 5 MB disk packs cost something like $100 or $150 each. This would have been in the early 1970s...
...that OS/2 would be the dominant operating system by, IIRC, 1993 or thereabouts.
I just did some Googling on things like "bad Gartner predictions" and "missed Gartner predictions" or '"Gartner predictions" scorecard' hoping that someone had tried to keep tabs on them, but found to my disappointment virtually no relevant hits. Everyone discusses them in the months after they're released, nobody seems to check back even as recently as a year.
Of course, with predictions like these for 2002... "During 2002, leading-edge businesses will exploit application integration to generate business innovation...." how the heck would anyone ever figure out whether or not it was fulfilled?
I can't believe people pay Gartner for this stuff.
Steve Jobs just hates people spoiling his surprises.
My first thought when Jonathan Schwartz announced that ZFS would be the file system in Leopard was that now there was a really danger that Jobs might cancel it, just out of spite... and the prove the leaker wrong.
"A tip-off on fake CDs is that they will have 20 to 24 tracks each, instead of 12 or 14," says Marcus Cohen anti-piracy counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Yes, sir, and beware of one-pound cans of coffee that contain sixteen ounces instead of thirteen, sleazy operators that will sell you a four by four by eight foot "cord" of wood, and call the cops if your bag of a dozen bagels turns out to contain thirteen.
Short measure, your infallible sign of genuine U. S. music industry product.
SIgh... must press preview... What I meant of course is that I used to have marvellous fun wasting time prowling around for things in the university library that weren't very relevant to whatever I was supposed to be doing.
And I meant to provide a link to Horseless Age.
Regardless of the maybe-not-so-unimportant details, let me just say that Google Books, with "Full View" turned on, is a treasure. I haven't had so much fun since I graduated and moved and lost access to my university library.
There's just amazing stuff in there. Look at this peek at what Princeton University was like in 1818. Before peeking, guess how many professors you think Princeton had in 1818.
How about Horseless Age, full of spiffy ads on all the hot automotive items of 1903?
How about The Boston Road Book, which lists, describes, and rates all the best roads and routes for cyclists as of 1899?
Yes, I wish Google gave access to the OCR text (they must have OCRed it in order to index it) and I wish they were a little more forthcoming with respect to your rights to use this material (can Google really stop me from reusing material that's in the public domain? Does scanning a book constitute a transformative use or whatever?)
But don't let arguing over it stop you from enjoying this fabulous resource.
Welcome to the brave new world, where everyone has a pre-existing condition.
The good news is, you'll have knowledge that could extend your life or even save it, if you could get treatment.
The bad news is, in countries with profit-based free-market medical insurance, you won't be to afford that get that treatment, because insurance companies will jack up their premiums when they find out about you.
Everyone has seen this coming for decades. Now it's here. I don't think the United States is ready for it.
Yes I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run but I'm not looking forward to yet another hiatus in which: no industrial-strength disk-recovery tools are available, in which accidentally running the wrong disk-repair tool on the wrong partition hoses it instead of fixing it, and in which yet more legacy software suffers breakage due to subtle incompatibilities in implementation.
(Yesyesyes, I know, ZFS is reliable that disk-recovery tools are not needed. And if you believe that, then you probably believed Microsoft when they said NTFS volumes never needed defragmentation).
Dear Apple:
Please let HFS+ still be an option.
Please let Classic still run on Power Mac processors.
Please let reasonably well-behaved software that uses resource forks still work.
Please let it be case-insensitive and case-preserving.
And if software engineers were true professionals with a professional code of ethics, they probably would. At the very least, it is their ethical responsibility to attempt to the very best of their ability to make management understand the futility of DRM.
...The personal accountability of consultants and technical experts is especially important because of the positions of unique trust inherent in their advisory roles. Consequently, they are accountable for seeing to it that known limitations of their work are fully disclosed, documented and explained."
For example, consider the ICCP code of ethics:
"2.5: Integrity: One will not knowingly lay claims to competence one does not demonstrably possess."
It seems to me that an engineer who, knowing that it is impossible to create a DRM system that does what it is supposed to do, nevertheless accepts an assignment to create one, is implicitly claiming competence he or she does not possess and is in violation of this point.
"2.7: Accountability:
"3.4: Statements: One shall not make false or exaggerated statements as to the state of affairs existing or expected regarding any aspect of information technology or the use of computers."
And how, exactly, is this different from the situation in the PC world?
"Many ill-fated customers who upgraded have yet to get their PCs back to perfect working order" it says here and in many other places. Vista broke quite a few hardware drivers. And if your device is more than a few years old, the MBAs who decide these things are likely to decide against spending development money just to please loyal customers, so in most cases the simplest option is... to buy your way out of it.
Conversely, there are many things Mac OS X can do that Windows can't do unless you locate commercial products or shareware. I just found out yesterday, for example, that, unlike Mac OS X, Windows XP has no built-in way to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard drive. And, of course, as far as I know there's no way to create a PDF file on a Windows machine without installing extra software.
From the article: "Basically, it's going to be awkward making phone calls with the Wing."
Might as well end the review right there.
I don't know whether the iPhone will be any better, but Steve Jobs was dead on when he said "The killer app is... making calls."
I have a Swiss Army knife, and while I find the magnifying glass, scissors, and Phillips screwdrivers to be very useful, I use it mostly as a knife. If the knife blades weren't sturdy, sharp, and easy to open, I wouldn't carry one... not even if it included a microscope, pinking shears, and a full set of Torx bits.
In his book, High-Tech Ventures, Digital Equipment Corporation pioneer Gordon Bell analyzed various factors in the potential success of startups.
As I recall, one of his great big red flags was any product whose development entailed more than two technology breakthrough.
Yeah, here it is (PDF). He says, flatly, "A successful startup cannot be based on more than two breakthroughs in the state of the art. And for each area requiring a breakthrough, an alternative technology should be available as a backup."
So, by this measure, the Wright Brothers needed breakthroughs in engines and airframe design... so success was possible.
As for LiftPort, I think I've lost count of the number of breakthroughs they need.
And I'm not sure what their backup technology would have been if, by any chance, the carbon nanotube strategy turned out to be unfeasible.
Not that I don't use them a lot myself, but I thought that in C++ you were supposed to try to avoid the use of macros altogether, and in particular were supposed to use consts for, well, defining constants.
I.e. not
#define PIXEL_WIDTH_OF_PLAY_AREA 800
#define PIXEL_HEIGHT_OF_PLAY_AREA 600
but
const int PIXEL_WIDTH_OF_PLAY_AREA=800;
const int PIXEL_HEIGHT_OF_PLAY_AREA=600;
Many things look quite impressive in the context of a demo. The MIT Media Lab has been pulling off absolutely stunning demos for... is it a decade now? Very few of them have led directly to anything real. There's no way to tell whether this is the sort of thing like Clippy that is an impressive demo but not a useful product. But the comment that "the company's unofficial Surface showman, Jeff Gattis is a clean-cut fellow who is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars" is not confidence-inspiring. It would be much more impressive if they had demonstrated the product by letting half-a-dozen people, with no training, who had never seen the product before, try to use it.
There are some very obvious practical issues. With a vertically-oriented touchscreen, the issue was what sort of gadget you could use to prop your hands so that your arms wouldn't be trembling an aching in half an hour.
WIth a horizontally-oriented table-sized touch screen, the obvious issue is that if you put it under a thick sheet of Lexan it won't be touch-sensitive any more... and if you don't put it under a thick sheet of Lexan it won't be touch-sensitive for long.
It would be an interesting contest to see whether one of these $10,000 gadgets lasts longer in a typical American home or in a "Starwood hotel, Harrah's casino or T-Mobile shops." I figure a week, tops, before someone spills a cocktail on it or tries to see whether they can operate it with their butt.
Why is it news that Google now has it, too? Has Google become like Microsoft--so automatically newsworthy that it is automatically news whenever Google copies its competitors?
I played with it A9's version a while, but have never been able to find any practical use for it. At one point I thought I had a use for it--trying to settle a question of how many stories tall a particular building was--but the views didn't show enough in the vertical direction.
And then another time I thought I a use for it--verifying the exact name of a building. Specifically, I was trying to find out whether the signage on the old old John Hancock building, the one on 197 Clarendon Street, actually said "Stephen L. Brown" building or not. The sign or plaque or whatever was obscured by parked trucks.
Meanwhile, it appears that Google Maps does not currently have any street level views of Boston at all.
I occasionally find it amusing to tune my car radio to FM 87.9, which (in the U. S.) is the default setting for most of these FM transmitter gadgets. I commute on Route 128 in Massachusetts so there is plenty of company, and more often than not there is an audible signal on 87.9.
Mostly it seems to be people listening to Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio, but you also get a sampling of other satellite stations and (most likely) iPods.
The signal will usually be audible for the better part of a minute. Oddly enough, I've never managed to identify the car doing the transmission. You'd think you could tell from the positions of the cars around you and the strength of the signal, but I can't.
I discovered this because I have an iPod FM transmitter, set for 87.9 myself (after much experimentation I was never able to find any less-used channel).
What seems perverse that the signals from other cars' transmitters are not only strong enough to hear when my transmitter is off, they are strong enough to produce annoying an audible interference when my own transmitter, inside the car, is on. You'd think a transmitter two feet from the radio would totally overpower that must be at least forty feet away with two car body's worth of shielding in between, but no.
I can deal with a hundred or so email messages. I can scroll through and skim the subject lines in a few seconds.
But I just hate it when I see that my phone's "voice mail" indicator is flashing. There aren't any subject lines. Even though most of it isn't important, there's no way to be sure.
So, there's no rational strategy once you see the light is flashing except to sit there for five minutes, listening to the damn messages in real time.
I can hope that at least some of them will give you an idea of what they're about in the first few seconds, but for every person who thinks that "Hi" is a good subject line, there is someone who thinks "Please call me" is a good voice mail message. So if that isn't someone you can ignore, I need to call them and leave them frickin' voice mail message (because in the twenty-first century, the idea of actually being able to reach anyone on the phone is absurd).
And I get to do all of this one a great big 20-column-by-4-line alphanumeric screen. With a legible, ergonomic snot-on-phlegm color scheme. And a badly designed user interface that maps every function into a number... except for a rew random keys with arrows and blobs and non-message-related legends on them. So if Idon't have the plastic card handy, Ineed to wait while an obnoxious synthesized voice says "To listen, press 5; to erase, press 8;...." And hope I don't get confused with the other voice mail systems I use on which I press 8 to listen and 5 to erase, or whatever.