I once worked for Wang Labs circa 1990, and I noticed that many of the things Wang did seemed quite inexplicable... until you considered IBM. Then the pattern became clear. Whatever IBM did, Wang tended to do something similar six months to a year later.
1984, IBM acquires Rolm. Much press ink spilled about how IBM is about to become a leader in the combined computer-telecommunications industry. Shortly thereafter Wang acquires an communications company called Intecom. 1988, IBM spits out Rolm. It appears the combined communications-telecommunications industry ain't gonna happen. Shortly thereafter Wang sells off Intecom.
1986, IBM introduces the PC Convertible, a sorta-kinda-clunky laptop that was almost IBM PC compatible. Shortly thereafter Wang introduces a clunky laptop. IBM discontinues the not-very-successful Convertible (and does not introduce another laptop for a long time) Wang discontinues there.
Wang at that time appeared to be utterly incapable of evaluating any idea in its own right. Ideas were not considered viable until it could be seen that a competitor was already doing them.
Microsoft now seems to be very much in the same mold. Apple has an MP3 player? Good, let's have an MP3 player. Google has a book search? Good, let's have a book search.
Reminds me the Book Mill in Montague, Massachusetts, whose slogan is "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." The Bookmill is a good place to look for books you didn't know you wanted.
Another good place is the New England Mobile Book Fair. The fact that the "mobile book fair" is a huge, stationary building tips you off that there's something quirky here. This huge bookstore in Newton, Massachusetts is only good for two things: finding one specific title, or pursuing utter serendipity.
Its slogan should be "Books you can't find in a place that has them all." OK, it doesn't have all of them, but your chances of finding a specific title there are way higher than at Barnes and Noble.
You see, for unknown reasons--I assume the bulk of their business must be supplying schools or something--their books are organized, first by binding (paper or hardbound); then, by publisher; and, within publisher, by title. You don't realize how bizarre this is until you experience it. After all, even if you know the title you often don't know the publisher, so the first step in finding any specific book is to look it up in their electronic copy of Books In Print.
Once you've found the book, even if you are curious about other books by the same author and are correct in suppose they're published by the same publisher, you still can't find them because they're not alphabetized by title.
Oh, and did I mention that they double-shelve their books, so even if you know the binding, publisher, title and they have it, it may not be visible on the shelf?
The images appear to have been taken at street level, e.g. by a truck, and you could read the names on store facades, etc. The view only extended up about one story.
I'm guessing the same outfit that did this for a9 is now doing it for Microsoft and has just put new signs on the sides of their trucks...
All this "unlicensed transmitter" stuff which says basically if the thing doesn't work it's not the manufacturer's fault and it's not the FCC's fault, is nonsense.
It's as if there were an "unlicensed vehicle" exception for small devices like Segways and pogo sticks, that said "you are allowed to operate this device on interstate highways, but you are required not to interfere with big trucks and you are required to accept any interference from big trucks."
The FCC's job is--or should be--to regulate spectrum usage so that garage door openers don't interfere with the Air Force, and vice versa. I think they got distracted by Janet Jackson's nipple.
Annually, whenever I seal my Hemoccult card in the self-addressed stamped envelope my personal physician provides and drop it into a mailbox, I wonder whether I'm going to get a visit from Homeland Security for illegally mailing biohazard waste.
So far, I've yet to have the doctor "The lab doesn't understand what's happened. They couldn't run the test. They say it's almost as if the sample got electron-beam sterilized somehow."
"Caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from Wikipedia as a fact."
Yes, well, caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from the Encyclopaedia Britannica... or the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics... or the World Almanac as a fact.
All of these are secondary sources. All of them are highly useful and are used as actionable sources of information every day, but none of them would be an acceptable citation in a research paper.
Furthermore, Wikipedia has always had policies that all information in Wikipedia must be derived from a published "reliable source" and that the source should be cited. Although these policies have mostly been honored in the breach, in the past year or so there has been an increasing tendency to cite sources explicitly. This is virtually a requirement for an article to become a home-page "featured article," for example. In some cases it is easier to trace the source of a fact in a Wikipedia article than in a traditional encyclopedia.
An improved technology isn't going to take off unless the _average_ consumer, buying _average_ equipment, and setting it up without special expertise, gets results that are so dramatic that everyone who sees it says "Wow!"
Color TV was that way, even with all the problems initially. Circa 1960, color TVs were fabulously expensive, persnickety, tricky to set up, had to be set up again if you moved them to a different location within the house, were tricky to tune, tended to shift color from one program to another, etc. But if you had a friend who was rich enough to afford one, you took one look at it and you said "Wow! I wannit I wannit I wannit!" So what if Dinah Shore's face changed from greenish to magentaish as she walked across the stage?
Of course, it didn't really take off until prices came down and they had solid-state circuits that didn't drift and could fudge the colors a bit so that anything close to flesh was displayed as flesh...
Technologies that are only impressive under good conditions usually fail. Right now, that's the state HDTV is in.
"The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history."
Yeah, right. Like the upheaval when they announced a top-to-bottom-all-new-strategy named.NET, and the upheaval when they decided this Internet thing was really important and reorganized themselves top-to-bottom to take advantage of it, and the upheaval in 1995 when Bill Gates said that the "social interface" was the future of computing and introduced the all-new revolutionary Microsoft BOB.
(Social interface? Come to think of it, where have I heard something like that out of Microsoft just recently...)
Microsoft is always talking about upheavals, but meanwhile what they actually do is keep cranking out big bloated monolithic versions of Windows with badly-copied slightly-distorted features in other operating systems, and strong-arming PC vendors into preloading them.
We had a power outage at work a couple of months ago. It lasted about four hours, and affected a radius of several miles.
Our spiffy new VOIP telephones went dead about three minutes into the outage.
The fifteen-year-old whaddayacallems (once one would have said PBX), which they haven't gotten around to removing yet, lasted about an hour.
My cell phone had dial tone for about two hours. (I expected better than that, actually. I was quite disappointed. My phone showed four bars of battery life, but no signal at all. Nobody else's cell phone worked, either).
A couple of plain old direct lines, used with fax machines, lasted all the way through the outage.
I have to wonder what's going on. There can't be any rocket science about backup batteries, and when I was a kid I remember that the phones kept working all the way through a two day power outage. It must be that the vibrant, dynamic, competitive power of the free market unleased from the shackles of government results in organizations that are too cheap and cheesy to install backup power for their gear.
Circa 1989, I was working for a Fortune 500 company--a very stupid one, but that's another matter--which made PCs and pretty much toed the Microsoft line. From time to time they would herd hundreds of developers into Auditorium III where people from Microsoft would give us The Word. They took Q&A from the audience.
In 1989 they were asked about Windows and OS/2, and said, unequivocally, the OS/2 was the mainstream OS and that we should develop OS/2, that Windows was a sort of toy for the home market. (At that time, Windows programs ran in conventional memory... of which Windows itself took about 300K, leaving less than 300K for the Windows application. Even in 1989 that was a severe constraint).
In 1990, they were asked the same question with a bit more edge to it, by some groups that had started OS/2 development, and they and everyone else all noticed that Window 3.0 seemed to have a lot more fit and finish to it. It was prettier, it came with all those seductive little applets like Windows Write and Paint and so forth, and just generally gave the impression that Microsoft was working harder on it than on OS/2. Again, we were flatly told that Windows was not the future and that OS/2 was the "serious" platform.
Under the circumstances, I have to feel that Microsoft did, in fact, mislead developers. By 1990, they had to have had their own applications developers committed to Windows and not to OS/2. I can't think of any reason for them to do this other than to give their own applications a head start in the Windows market.
The classification of living organisms is in constant flux. A century or so ago, there were two kingdoms: animalia and plantae. Parameciums were animals, mushrooms were plants.
When I was in high school, there were three: animal, vegetable, and protista, it being felt that single-celled organisms really weren't typical animals. It may shock some--it certainly shocked cellular biologists when I was in grad school--to know that circa 1940-1950 there was serious consideration given to the concept that protozoans were not single-celled organisms, but were "acellular." Just as with is-Pluto-a-planet you can give a good argument that they should be regarded as having a single cell (they have a nucleus, etc.) but you can also give a good argument that they are extremely different from the cells of higher organisms (they have "organelles").
Today, depending on what book you read, there seem to typically be about five kingdoms: Monera (bacteria and green algae, the procaryotes), Protista (single-celled eucaryotes), Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. I'll bet that splitting out Fungi from Plantae was controversial. Lately, they seem to be splitting the Monera into Eubacteria and Archaebacteria.
Now, this sort of activity is not meaningless, but it is hardly objective, either. How many kingdoms there are and what the textbooks print tends to depend on the social hierarchy in the scientific community, whose opinion carries the most weight with the textbook authors, and so forth.
Of course the word "planet" is never going to be finally defined. It's in the eye of the beholder, and as planetary science evolves, what characteristics are consider to be useful for classifying objects in space are going to change over time. If someone were to discover tomorrow that six of the planets have some obviously important, striking characteristic in common with each other that the other large orbiting objects lack, there would probably be a faction that would argue that that is the defining characteristic of a planet.
And so it goes.
What I don't understand is why people think this is a particularly important or interesting topic. It's as if some convention of geographers decided that Europe should not be considered a continent and millions of schoolchildren got bent out of shape about it.
Some textbooks say there are seven colors of the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Some say there are only six, omitting indigo. Why is frickin' indigo in there anyway, since hardly anyone knows what color it is, and it doesn't look particularly like a separate color? Why don't we say the colors of the spectrum are red, orange, yellow, smaragdine, green, blue, indigo, and violet?
Because Sir Isaac Newton a) happened to have a prism that dispersed the spectrum widely at the short wavelengths, making "room" for more colors at the blue-violet end, and b) had a cockamamie theory that since there are seven notes in the diatonic scale there oughta be seven colors in the spectrum. So he described the ROY G. BIV colors, and Newton being a man of rather considerable authority in the field, textbook writers blindly copied him and each other for centuries.
We're never going to have a final definition of "the colors of the spectrum," either.
(That's a quotation from the luddite character Theotocopulos in the H. G. Wells movie, Things to Come).
Not that it matter, but 99.734% of everyone using the Web is perfectly happy with the functionality that's available now.
What they want is for someone to make the current technology work. That is, make it work more reliably for the average user with an average three-year-old computer on an average-speed connection.
The only complaints I hear are problems with bugginess due in large part to a) failure to adhere to standards at server or client, and b) version skew between the set of browser-related stuff loaded on the particular user's machine and the site that's being visited.
I don't hear them in that form, however... what I hear is "for some reason I always crash on this site" or Why is this page taking forever to load?" or "I can't seem to get this site to work properly."
Nobody but overly ambitious web-designers and corporate egotists want all the fancy flash crap that takes minutes to load... or the fancy Java applet crap, now thankfully rare, that takes minutes to load and then doesn't work because you have the wrong version of the JVM.
People just want to get in, read their news, do their shopping, not have the browser hang or crash or take a minute to load a page, not get their identity stolen, and not get interrupted by advertising popping up over, under, around, or through.
Everything being discussed here is just engineering ego ("I can do way better than Tim Berners-Lee") or corporate ego ("Isn't there some way you can make our website have a real shiny metallic reflection") or vendor lock-in ("This site does not support your browser. Please use Internet Explorer version 7. Click on the link to get it free. Of course it won't run on the version of Windows you're using... or the version of Mac OS you're using... but that's your problem. Go buy a new computer.")
None of it has to do with the real needs of actual web users.
At last, the secret to wealth without work has been found.
Yes, Virginia, there IS such a thing as a free lunch.
True, the Web was a bubble, but that was then, this is now. This is totally different. You see, there's been a paradigm shift. The old fogeys who just don't "get it" are going to be left in the dust, but you, you can be in on the ground floor. This bubble is going to expand forever.
Benjamin... pssst... just two words: "Web 3.0."
(And if that doesn't work, I have an incredible deal involving arbitraging international postal reply coupons).
When I said "And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place," what I meant was that you can move or rename the targets they point to without breaking the link.
Compare Mac OS X. It has two different kinds of symlinks. It has the traditional, pure-quill, UNIX symlinks which work exactly as UNIX users expect.
It also has Mac OS "aliases," introduced IIRC in System 7, which most Mac devotees think are superior to UNIX symlinks.
Now, before I get too far into praising "aliases," let me acknowledge that the presence of both mechanisms in Mac OS X is a big, hairy, ugly, mess, and one of innumerable places where the Mac world currently suffers from having anywhere up to half a dozen or so APIs for the same basic functionality. Mac OS X now resembles, well, my house, with fifteen-year-old half-abandoned dusty possessions still lurking in the attic. Not that Windows is any better, of course.
But I digress. You may like Mac OS aliases or you may dislike them, but you can see they they are a complete, well-thought-out, finished,working mechanism that it is at least possible to admire as something more than a half-baked knockoff of symlinks.
I happen to like them, a lot, because they just work. You don't need to do anything special at a programming level to dereference them, and it doesn't matter what programming language you're using or whether you're accessing them across the network, or whatever. However you do it, when you open the alias, you open the file it points to. And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place. (The tough part is not dereferencing them... and Apple's deliberate failure to document or provide an API for creating them programmatically).
What I find hard to forgive Microsoft is that when Microsoft implements their knockoff of a well-known OS feature, it is rare that they come up with anything fresh and original. So many of their derivatives seem to be hasty knockoffs implemented by people who didn't "get" the original. And they put these half-baked implementations into shipping products, making it very difficult for Microsoft ever to finish them or fix them.
You can see this in a dozen places, like the Windows NT command language, which is a half-baked extension of the miserable quarter-baked DOS command language. Jeez, guys, you had DCL and the various UNIX shells as models, couldn't you do better than that?
And five years later, there tends to be conflicting documentation: the documentation written when badly-designed feature X was introduced, telling all good little Microsoft developers that they simply must, must, must use feature X in everything, and the documentation written a few years later warning everyone against the bad practice of using crufty old deprecated feature X...
I just wish I could shake Microsoft by the scruff of the neck and say, "Listen, if you can't improve it, then at least make a faithful copy of it."
Don't just pee in it to give it that personal flavor.
Criticizing a do-gooder on the basis that the critic would prefer to use the do-gooder's resources in a different way is fundamentally flawed. That way lies paralysis and doing nothing. It's just a complicated way of saying "be reasonable--do things my way."
It's like criticizing the space program on the basis that it would be better to use the same resources to fight poverty in the U.S. That point is arguably true, but it's silly, because if we didn't have a space program the political reality is that those resources would not be used to fight poverty.
The altruistic impulse is not fungible. If you say to Negroponte "we don't want your laptops," he's not going to say, "Great, I'll just fold up the Media Lab and send all its funds to Oxfam."
I've faced this problem in deciding how to make personal charitable donations. How can one decide when there are so many worthy causes? How can one justify donating to the American Cancer Society when perhaps the American Heart Association would be a better use of resources? Is it frivolous to donate to the EFF instead of sending that money to UNICEF? The only answer is: these are the charities I donate to, you donate to whatever charities you wish.
Nobody knows how to solve the world's problems. If it were simple and obvious we'd just solve them. The $100 laptop is an interesting idea and it might do some good.
If not, I'd wager the amount of resources and "mind share" it's diverting from anything are utterly negligible compared to, say, the amount of resources and "mind share" being used in the U. S. to launch the PlayStation 3, or fulminate about O. J. Simpson's new book, or pursue the war in Iraq.
Oh, how I hate this kind of spin: "This doesn't matter," says a Home Office spokesman. "By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport."
It matters a great deal because what they said couldn't be done can be done.
It transpired a couple of years ago that some models of the expensive Kryptonite bicycle lock could be opened with a BIC pen. The Kryptonite company could have spun this by saying "This doesn't matter, because the security expert who demonstrated this didn't really steal the bicycle, and bicycle owners actually keep their valuables in their safe deposit boxes."
What the Kryptonite company really did was acknowledge that this was a serious problem and recalled all the locks.
Would that the UK government addressed the security problem instead of the PR problem.
I hadn't thought about it, because having lived through it the importance of Commodore is obvious to me, but on consideration I realize it has sort of dropped off the PC history radar.
To put it very simply, even though I was a programmer of PDP-12's, -8's, and -11's, and very familiar with Apple ]['s because I was working in a research institution that was in the process of adopting them, my first home computer was a VIC-20. For the simple reason that... I could afford one. The base price was $300. I bought a bunch of add-ons and my total cost was about $600.
At the time, an Apple ][ cost something like $2000 if I recall correctly.
The only thing in the same price neighborhood as the VIC-20 was the Atari 400 with a full QUERTY keyboard--of membrane keys. Ugh. Practically unusable. The VIC-20 had what the time was a very nice keyboard with a very comfortable, responsive "feel" to it.
Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were the Model T of the personal computer era. Aficionados scoffed at them as cheap junk, but they were real computers that ordinary families could afford.
Hey, at a time when standalone modems cost $500, the VIC-20 had a crude but usable modem for about $60. If I recall correctly instead of frequency-shift keying between two frequencies, it just used one of the frequencies and turned it on and off. Like the Apple color video output, it was a nonstandard signal which standards-compliant modems could nevertheless tolerate. I did some work from home with it, and it was my gateway into CompuServe.
Pigs. Litterbugs. Someone ought to fine them $500. What can you say?
But... after all... one of the pivotal episodes in Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 novel "Islands in the Sky" concerns an orbital spacecraft which is alarmed by the presence of a large, unidentified spacecraft, approach closely enough to identify it, and sees that it's covered in radiation symbols. In the novel, it turns out that the AEC had, at one time, had the bright idea of disposing of radioactive waste by shooting it into space, and this is a stray canister of high-level radioactive waste. So I guess it could be worse.
And "throwing away" (such an aptly descriptive phrase: just toss the waste a discrete distance from the dwelling) seems to be a basic part of human nature. In Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian," set in Wyoming between 1874 and 1890, the narrator and his companions partake of "Sardines... and potted chicken, and devilled ham," and muses:
"But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
...or reported. I don't know whether this is a terrible thing or not. Anyone who has ever cast a frivolous vote for themself, their friend, or their pet and looked for it in the official tally has been disappointed. Only when you have a large systematic write-in campaign do they really get counted... and even then, the organizers of such campaigns routinely charge undercounting of such votes.
"What looks like an iPod scroll wheel, though, is a fakeout. It doesn't turn, and it's not touch-sensitive. Instead, it's just four buttons hidden under the compass points of a plastic ring. Scrolling accelerates as you press the top or bottom button, but the iPod's wheel is much more efficient."
What is it that's so hard to "get" about a frickin' _knob?_
There are just some situations where a button doesn't hack it. No matter how many cents it saves in manufacturing costs.
The original-equipment radio on my last car had a rotating knob as a volume control. I didn't think anything of it until I replaced it with an aftermarket radio that didn't. Like the Zune, it, too, had an oh-so-clever sounds-good-on-paper kludge: if you pressed the + button it would increment in steps of 4 units, and if you then pressed the - button within a short time interval it would decrement in steps of 1 unit. On paper, I would never have believed what a misery this substitute for a volume control knob would be. I don't think I ever realized just how often I reach to make a microadjustment in volume (different levels of traffic noise, different stations, different tracks in a classical album). Not only was the system clumsy, but of course one button feels just like another button... unless you spend some money on making them feel different.
In the 1960s I remember a little paper tape program in the bin above the PDP-1 at MIT labelled "Minsky Knob." It looked promising, because Marvin Minsky was the author of a nice little display hack called Minskytron, which... well, never mind. "Minsky Knob" was his attempt to get knob-like control using only keyboard keys. I believe striking one key caused a spot of light on the CRT to accelerate uniformly to the right, and a second press would stop it dead, while alternative presses of another key would accelerate it to uniformly to the left and stop it dead.
When the right tool for the job is knob, nobody's ever found a way to do it with a button. Minsky Knob was all but unusable in the 1960s. He couldn't figure it out then, and nobody else has been able to figure it out since.
Think about "voice typewriters." Then think about what we really have. Yes, speaker-independent voice recognition systems that can recognize the words "yes" and "no" and the digits from 0 to 9 exist, and work reasonably well for short strings of digits like ID numbers that can be read back to the caller.
No, we do not have voice typewriters, and if you don't believe that, well all I can say is, "dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."
A face recognition system that could be mounted in a dashboard and recognize whether it's my wife or myself sitting in the car, and call up and power-adjust the seat and mirror positions, is perfectly feasible... it could probably be marketed today as a $10,000 car option if there were enough yuppies willing to pay that price. A toy. A convenience. And no serious downside if the system doesn't always work perfectly.
A face recognition system good enough for airport security or "global security concerns" is nonsense.
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I once worked for Wang Labs circa 1990, and I noticed that many of the things Wang did seemed quite inexplicable... until you considered IBM. Then the pattern became clear. Whatever IBM did, Wang tended to do something similar six months to a year later.
1984, IBM acquires Rolm. Much press ink spilled about how IBM is about to become a leader in the combined computer-telecommunications industry. Shortly thereafter Wang acquires an communications company called Intecom. 1988, IBM spits out Rolm. It appears the combined communications-telecommunications industry ain't gonna happen. Shortly thereafter Wang sells off Intecom.
1986, IBM introduces the PC Convertible, a sorta-kinda-clunky laptop that was almost IBM PC compatible. Shortly thereafter Wang introduces a clunky laptop. IBM discontinues the not-very-successful Convertible (and does not introduce another laptop for a long time) Wang discontinues there.
Wang at that time appeared to be utterly incapable of evaluating any idea in its own right. Ideas were not considered viable until it could be seen that a competitor was already doing them.
Microsoft now seems to be very much in the same mold. Apple has an MP3 player? Good, let's have an MP3 player. Google has a book search? Good, let's have a book search.
A million spelling checkers are going to keep "correcting" it to axon or axiom or anion.
Reminds me the Book Mill in Montague, Massachusetts, whose slogan is "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." The Bookmill is a good place to look for books you didn't know you wanted.
Another good place is the New England Mobile Book Fair. The fact that the "mobile book fair" is a huge, stationary building tips you off that there's something quirky here. This huge bookstore in Newton, Massachusetts is only good for two things: finding one specific title, or pursuing utter serendipity.
Its slogan should be "Books you can't find in a place that has them all." OK, it doesn't have all of them, but your chances of finding a specific title there are way higher than at Barnes and Noble.
You see, for unknown reasons--I assume the bulk of their business must be supplying schools or something--their books are organized, first by binding (paper or hardbound); then, by publisher; and, within publisher, by title. You don't realize how bizarre this is until you experience it. After all, even if you know the title you often don't know the publisher, so the first step in finding any specific book is to look it up in their electronic copy of Books In Print.
Once you've found the book, even if you are curious about other books by the same author and are correct in suppose they're published by the same publisher, you still can't find them because they're not alphabetized by title.
Oh, and did I mention that they double-shelve their books, so even if you know the binding, publisher, title and they have it, it may not be visible on the shelf?
I'm not quite sure where it went, perhaps it was a casualty of the last revision, but a9 used to have extensive street-level imagery of major cities. For example, as nearly as I could tell, they had continuous photographic coverage of view of both sides of the street for every street in Boston proper.
The images appear to have been taken at street level, e.g. by a truck, and you could read the names on store facades, etc. The view only extended up about one story.
I'm guessing the same outfit that did this for a9 is now doing it for Microsoft and has just put new signs on the sides of their trucks...
It actually sounds much more like Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown's bad novel, "Deception Point."
All this "unlicensed transmitter" stuff which says basically if the thing doesn't work it's not the manufacturer's fault and it's not the FCC's fault, is nonsense.
It's as if there were an "unlicensed vehicle" exception for small devices like Segways and pogo sticks, that said "you are allowed to operate this device on interstate highways, but you are required not to interfere with big trucks and you are required to accept any interference from big trucks."
The FCC's job is--or should be--to regulate spectrum usage so that garage door openers don't interfere with the Air Force, and vice versa. I think they got distracted by Janet Jackson's nipple.
Annually, whenever I seal my Hemoccult card in the self-addressed stamped envelope my personal physician provides and drop it into a mailbox, I wonder whether I'm going to get a visit from Homeland Security for illegally mailing biohazard waste.
So far, I've yet to have the doctor "The lab doesn't understand what's happened. They couldn't run the test. They say it's almost as if the sample got electron-beam sterilized somehow."
What I want to know about that YouTube video is where it was made.
The screen shows at least six other Zunes nearby.
Is there any place in the universe other than the Microsoft campus that has over six Zunes within range of each other as of November 2006?
"Caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from Wikipedia as a fact."
Yes, well, caution--and further research--needs to be used before citing anything learned from the Encyclopaedia Britannica... or the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics... or the World Almanac as a fact.
All of these are secondary sources. All of them are highly useful and are used as actionable sources of information every day, but none of them would be an acceptable citation in a research paper.
Furthermore, Wikipedia has always had policies that all information in Wikipedia must be derived from a published "reliable source" and that the source should be cited. Although these policies have mostly been honored in the breach, in the past year or so there has been an increasing tendency to cite sources explicitly. This is virtually a requirement for an article to become a home-page "featured article," for example. In some cases it is easier to trace the source of a fact in a Wikipedia article than in a traditional encyclopedia.
An improved technology isn't going to take off unless the _average_ consumer, buying _average_ equipment, and setting it up without special expertise, gets results that are so dramatic that everyone who sees it says "Wow!"
Color TV was that way, even with all the problems initially. Circa 1960, color TVs were fabulously expensive, persnickety, tricky to set up, had to be set up again if you moved them to a different location within the house, were tricky to tune, tended to shift color from one program to another, etc. But if you had a friend who was rich enough to afford one, you took one look at it and you said "Wow! I wannit I wannit I wannit!" So what if Dinah Shore's face changed from greenish to magentaish as she walked across the stage?
Of course, it didn't really take off until prices came down and they had solid-state circuits that didn't drift and could fudge the colors a bit so that anything close to flesh was displayed as flesh...
Technologies that are only impressive under good conditions usually fail. Right now, that's the state HDTV is in.
"The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history."
.NET, and the upheaval when they decided this Internet thing was really important and reorganized themselves top-to-bottom to take advantage of it, and the upheaval in 1995 when Bill Gates said that the "social interface" was the future of computing and introduced the all-new revolutionary Microsoft BOB.
Yeah, right. Like the upheaval when they announced a top-to-bottom-all-new-strategy named
(Social interface? Come to think of it, where have I heard something like that out of Microsoft just recently...)
Microsoft is always talking about upheavals, but meanwhile what they actually do is keep cranking out big bloated monolithic versions of Windows with badly-copied slightly-distorted features in other operating systems, and strong-arming PC vendors into preloading them.
We had a power outage at work a couple of months ago. It lasted about four hours, and affected a radius of several miles.
Our spiffy new VOIP telephones went dead about three minutes into the outage.
The fifteen-year-old whaddayacallems (once one would have said PBX), which they haven't gotten around to removing yet, lasted about an hour.
My cell phone had dial tone for about two hours. (I expected better than that, actually. I was quite disappointed. My phone showed four bars of battery life, but no signal at all. Nobody else's cell phone worked, either).
A couple of plain old direct lines, used with fax machines, lasted all the way through the outage.
I have to wonder what's going on. There can't be any rocket science about backup batteries, and when I was a kid I remember that the phones kept working all the way through a two day power outage. It must be that the vibrant, dynamic, competitive power of the free market unleased from the shackles of government results in organizations that are too cheap and cheesy to install backup power for their gear.
Circa 1989, I was working for a Fortune 500 company--a very stupid one, but that's another matter--which made PCs and pretty much toed the Microsoft line. From time to time they would herd hundreds of developers into Auditorium III where people from Microsoft would give us The Word. They took Q&A from the audience.
In 1989 they were asked about Windows and OS/2, and said, unequivocally, the OS/2 was the mainstream OS and that we should develop OS/2, that Windows was a sort of toy for the home market. (At that time, Windows programs ran in conventional memory... of which Windows itself took about 300K, leaving less than 300K for the Windows application. Even in 1989 that was a severe constraint).
In 1990, they were asked the same question with a bit more edge to it, by some groups that had started OS/2 development, and they and everyone else all noticed that Window 3.0 seemed to have a lot more fit and finish to it. It was prettier, it came with all those seductive little applets like Windows Write and Paint and so forth, and just generally gave the impression that Microsoft was working harder on it than on OS/2. Again, we were flatly told that Windows was not the future and that OS/2 was the "serious" platform.
Under the circumstances, I have to feel that Microsoft did, in fact, mislead developers. By 1990, they had to have had their own applications developers committed to Windows and not to OS/2. I can't think of any reason for them to do this other than to give their own applications a head start in the Windows market.
I don't see how you can blame that one on IBM.
The classification of living organisms is in constant flux. A century or so ago, there were two kingdoms: animalia and plantae. Parameciums were animals, mushrooms were plants.
When I was in high school, there were three: animal, vegetable, and protista, it being felt that single-celled organisms really weren't typical animals. It may shock some--it certainly shocked cellular biologists when I was in grad school--to know that circa 1940-1950 there was serious consideration given to the concept that protozoans were not single-celled organisms, but were "acellular." Just as with is-Pluto-a-planet you can give a good argument that they should be regarded as having a single cell (they have a nucleus, etc.) but you can also give a good argument that they are extremely different from the cells of higher organisms (they have "organelles").
Today, depending on what book you read, there seem to typically be about five kingdoms: Monera (bacteria and green algae, the procaryotes), Protista (single-celled eucaryotes), Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. I'll bet that splitting out Fungi from Plantae was controversial. Lately, they seem to be splitting the Monera into Eubacteria and Archaebacteria.
Now, this sort of activity is not meaningless, but it is hardly objective, either. How many kingdoms there are and what the textbooks print tends to depend on the social hierarchy in the scientific community, whose opinion carries the most weight with the textbook authors, and so forth.
Of course the word "planet" is never going to be finally defined. It's in the eye of the beholder, and as planetary science evolves, what characteristics are consider to be useful for classifying objects in space are going to change over time. If someone were to discover tomorrow that six of the planets have some obviously important, striking characteristic in common with each other that the other large orbiting objects lack, there would probably be a faction that would argue that that is the defining characteristic of a planet.
And so it goes.
What I don't understand is why people think this is a particularly important or interesting topic. It's as if some convention of geographers decided that Europe should not be considered a continent and millions of schoolchildren got bent out of shape about it.
Some textbooks say there are seven colors of the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Some say there are only six, omitting indigo. Why is frickin' indigo in there anyway, since hardly anyone knows what color it is, and it doesn't look particularly like a separate color? Why don't we say the colors of the spectrum are red, orange, yellow, smaragdine, green, blue, indigo, and violet?
Because Sir Isaac Newton a) happened to have a prism that dispersed the spectrum widely at the short wavelengths, making "room" for more colors at the blue-violet end, and b) had a cockamamie theory that since there are seven notes in the diatonic scale there oughta be seven colors in the spectrum. So he described the ROY G. BIV colors, and Newton being a man of rather considerable authority in the field, textbook writers blindly copied him and each other for centuries.
We're never going to have a final definition of "the colors of the spectrum," either.
(That's a quotation from the luddite character Theotocopulos in the H. G. Wells movie, Things to Come).
Not that it matter, but 99.734% of everyone using the Web is perfectly happy with the functionality that's available now.
What they want is for someone to make the current technology work. That is, make it work more reliably for the average user with an average three-year-old computer on an average-speed connection.
The only complaints I hear are problems with bugginess due in large part to a) failure to adhere to standards at server or client, and b) version skew between the set of browser-related stuff loaded on the particular user's machine and the site that's being visited.
I don't hear them in that form, however... what I hear is "for some reason I always crash on this site" or
Why is this page taking forever to load?" or "I can't seem to get this site to work properly."
Nobody but overly ambitious web-designers and corporate egotists want all the fancy flash crap that takes minutes to load... or the fancy Java applet crap, now thankfully rare, that takes minutes to load and then doesn't work because you have the wrong version of the JVM.
People just want to get in, read their news, do their shopping, not have the browser hang or crash or take a minute to load a page, not get their identity stolen, and not get interrupted by advertising popping up over, under, around, or through.
Everything being discussed here is just engineering ego ("I can do way better than Tim Berners-Lee") or corporate ego ("Isn't there some way you can make our website have a real shiny metallic reflection") or vendor lock-in ("This site does not support your browser. Please use Internet Explorer version 7. Click on the link to get it free. Of course it won't run on the version of Windows you're using... or the version of Mac OS you're using... but that's your problem. Go buy a new computer.")
None of it has to do with the real needs of actual web users.
At last, the secret to wealth without work has been found.
Yes, Virginia, there IS such a thing as a free lunch.
True, the Web was a bubble, but that was then, this is now. This is totally different. You see, there's been a paradigm shift. The old fogeys who just don't "get it" are going to be left in the dust, but you, you can be in on the ground floor. This bubble is going to expand forever.
Benjamin... pssst... just two words: "Web 3.0."
(And if that doesn't work, I have an incredible deal involving arbitraging international postal reply coupons).
When I said "And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place," what I meant was that you can move or rename the targets they point to without breaking the link.
Compare Mac OS X. It has two different kinds of symlinks. It has the traditional, pure-quill, UNIX symlinks which work exactly as UNIX users expect.
It also has Mac OS "aliases," introduced IIRC in System 7, which most Mac devotees think are superior to UNIX symlinks.
Now, before I get too far into praising "aliases," let me acknowledge that the presence of both mechanisms in Mac OS X is a big, hairy, ugly, mess, and one of innumerable places where the Mac world currently suffers from having anywhere up to half a dozen or so APIs for the same basic functionality. Mac OS X now resembles, well, my house, with fifteen-year-old half-abandoned dusty possessions still lurking in the attic. Not that Windows is any better, of course.
But I digress. You may like Mac OS aliases or you may dislike them, but you can see they they are a complete, well-thought-out, finished, working mechanism that it is at least possible to admire as something more than a half-baked knockoff of symlinks.
I happen to like them, a lot, because they just work. You don't need to do anything special at a programming level to dereference them, and it doesn't matter what programming language you're using or whether you're accessing them across the network, or whatever. However you do it, when you open the alias, you open the file it points to. And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place. (The tough part is not dereferencing them... and Apple's deliberate failure to document or provide an API for creating them programmatically).
What I find hard to forgive Microsoft is that when Microsoft implements their knockoff of a well-known OS feature, it is rare that they come up with anything fresh and original. So many of their derivatives seem to be hasty knockoffs implemented by people who didn't "get" the original. And they put these half-baked implementations into shipping products, making it very difficult for Microsoft ever to finish them or fix them.
You can see this in a dozen places, like the Windows NT command language, which is a half-baked extension of the miserable quarter-baked DOS command language. Jeez, guys, you had DCL and the various UNIX shells as models, couldn't you do better than that?
And five years later, there tends to be conflicting documentation: the documentation written when badly-designed feature X was introduced, telling all good little Microsoft developers that they simply must, must, must use feature X in everything, and the documentation written a few years later warning everyone against the bad practice of using crufty old deprecated feature X...
I just wish I could shake Microsoft by the scruff of the neck and say, "Listen, if you can't improve it, then at least make a faithful copy of it."
Don't just pee in it to give it that personal flavor.
Criticizing a do-gooder on the basis that the critic would prefer to use the do-gooder's resources in a different way is fundamentally flawed. That way lies paralysis and doing nothing. It's just a complicated way of saying "be reasonable--do things my way."
It's like criticizing the space program on the basis that it would be better to use the same resources to fight poverty in the U.S. That point is arguably true, but it's silly, because if we didn't have a space program the political reality is that those resources would not be used to fight poverty.
The altruistic impulse is not fungible. If you say to Negroponte "we don't want your laptops," he's not going to say, "Great, I'll just fold up the Media Lab and send all its funds to Oxfam."
I've faced this problem in deciding how to make personal charitable donations. How can one decide when there are so many worthy causes? How can one justify donating to the American Cancer Society when perhaps the American Heart Association would be a better use of resources? Is it frivolous to donate to the EFF instead of sending that money to UNICEF? The only answer is: these are the charities I donate to, you donate to whatever charities you wish.
Nobody knows how to solve the world's problems. If it were simple and obvious we'd just solve them. The $100 laptop is an interesting idea and it might do some good.
If not, I'd wager the amount of resources and "mind share" it's diverting from anything are utterly negligible compared to, say, the amount of resources and "mind share" being used in the U. S. to launch the PlayStation 3, or fulminate about O. J. Simpson's new book, or pursue the war in Iraq.
Oh, how I hate this kind of spin: "This doesn't matter," says a Home Office spokesman. "By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport."
It matters a great deal because what they said couldn't be done can be done.
It transpired a couple of years ago that some models of the expensive Kryptonite bicycle lock could be opened with a BIC pen. The Kryptonite company could have spun this by saying "This doesn't matter, because the security expert who demonstrated this didn't really steal the bicycle, and bicycle owners actually keep their valuables in their safe deposit boxes."
What the Kryptonite company really did was acknowledge that this was a serious problem and recalled all the locks.
Would that the UK government addressed the security problem instead of the PR problem.
I hadn't thought about it, because having lived through it the importance of Commodore is obvious to me, but on consideration I realize it has sort of dropped off the PC history radar.
To put it very simply, even though I was a programmer of PDP-12's, -8's, and -11's, and very familiar with Apple ]['s because I was working in a research institution that was in the process of adopting them, my first home computer was a VIC-20. For the simple reason that... I could afford one. The base price was $300. I bought a bunch of add-ons and my total cost was about $600.
At the time, an Apple ][ cost something like $2000 if I recall correctly.
The only thing in the same price neighborhood as the VIC-20 was the Atari 400 with a full QUERTY keyboard--of membrane keys. Ugh. Practically unusable. The VIC-20 had what the time was a very nice keyboard with a very comfortable, responsive "feel" to it.
Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were the Model T of the personal computer era. Aficionados scoffed at them as cheap junk, but they were real computers that ordinary families could afford.
Hey, at a time when standalone modems cost $500, the VIC-20 had a crude but usable modem for about $60. If I recall correctly instead of frequency-shift keying between two frequencies, it just used one of the frequencies and turned it on and off. Like the Apple color video output, it was a nonstandard signal which standards-compliant modems could nevertheless tolerate. I did some work from home with it, and it was my gateway into CompuServe.
Pigs. Litterbugs. Someone ought to fine them $500. What can you say?
But... after all... one of the pivotal episodes in Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 novel "Islands in the Sky" concerns an orbital spacecraft which is alarmed by the presence of a large, unidentified spacecraft, approach closely enough to identify it, and sees that it's covered in radiation symbols. In the novel, it turns out that the AEC had, at one time, had the bright idea of disposing of radioactive waste by shooting it into space, and this is a stray canister of high-level radioactive waste. So I guess it could be worse.
And "throwing away" (such an aptly descriptive phrase: just toss the waste a discrete distance from the dwelling) seems to be a basic part of human nature. In Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian," set in Wyoming between 1874 and 1890, the narrator and his companions partake of "Sardines... and potted chicken, and devilled ham," and muses:
"But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
...or reported. I don't know whether this is a terrible thing or not. Anyone who has ever cast a frivolous vote for themself, their friend, or their pet and looked for it in the official tally has been disappointed. Only when you have a large systematic write-in campaign do they really get counted... and even then, the organizers of such campaigns routinely charge undercounting of such votes.
"What looks like an iPod scroll wheel, though, is a fakeout. It doesn't turn, and it's not touch-sensitive. Instead, it's just four buttons hidden under the compass points of a plastic ring. Scrolling accelerates as you press the top or bottom button, but the iPod's wheel is much more efficient."
What is it that's so hard to "get" about a frickin' _knob?_
There are just some situations where a button doesn't hack it. No matter how many cents it saves in manufacturing costs.
The original-equipment radio on my last car had a rotating knob as a volume control. I didn't think anything of it until I replaced it with an aftermarket radio that didn't. Like the Zune, it, too, had an oh-so-clever sounds-good-on-paper kludge: if you pressed the + button it would increment in steps of 4 units, and if you then pressed the - button within a short time interval it would decrement in steps of 1 unit. On paper, I would never have believed what a misery this substitute for a volume control knob would be. I don't think I ever realized just how often I reach to make a microadjustment in volume (different levels of traffic noise, different stations, different tracks in a classical album). Not only was the system clumsy, but of course one button feels just like another button... unless you spend some money on making them feel different.
In the 1960s I remember a little paper tape program in the bin above the PDP-1 at MIT labelled "Minsky Knob." It looked promising, because Marvin Minsky was the author of a nice little display hack called Minskytron, which... well, never mind. "Minsky Knob" was his attempt to get knob-like control using only keyboard keys. I believe striking one key caused a spot of light on the CRT to accelerate uniformly to the right, and a second press would stop it dead, while alternative presses of another key would accelerate it to uniformly to the left and stop it dead.
When the right tool for the job is knob, nobody's ever found a way to do it with a button. Minsky Knob was all but unusable in the 1960s. He couldn't figure it out then, and nobody else has been able to figure it out since.
Think about "voice typewriters." Then think about what we really have. Yes, speaker-independent voice recognition systems that can recognize the words "yes" and "no" and the digits from 0 to 9 exist, and work reasonably well for short strings of digits like ID numbers that can be read back to the caller.
No, we do not have voice typewriters, and if you don't believe that, well all I can say is, "dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."
A face recognition system that could be mounted in a dashboard and recognize whether it's my wife or myself sitting in the car, and call up and power-adjust the seat and mirror positions, is perfectly feasible... it could probably be marketed today as a $10,000 car option if there were enough yuppies willing to pay that price. A toy. A convenience. And no serious downside if the system doesn't always work perfectly.
A face recognition system good enough for airport security or "global security concerns" is nonsense.