The article sounds good, but isn't looking to Novell for tips on managing a technology company a little like looking to Captain Edward John Smith for advice on safe navigation of ocean liners?
1) Yahoo has been doing all this for a couple of years. Photos, music, calendars, shops, auctions, mail, search... maybe not video. So what's the big difference? Oh, Yahoo isn't seamless. Right.
2) Gimme a break. None of this can possibly compete with a desktop-based application at dialup speeds, DSL, or cable. Although I know many people, including my wife, who use Yahoo Mail as their only email application, it is still clunky and awkward compared to a locally hosted mail service. Of course it has compensating advantages, not the least being freedom from email address changes every time one's ISP is acquired by a larger company, accessibility from every computer, etc. But as an application, it sucks.
Sure, everyone will have direct fiber to their home Real Soon Now. And when that happens, it will change a lot of things. But that won't make Glide anything special. Basically what Glide is saying that their applications will be really cool to use after someone else (phone companies, etc.) actually does all the hard work.
What happens if SCO goes bankrupt and nobody wants to go on paying their lawyers? Does the simply get abandoned, unresolved, leaving LINUX with a legal cloud over it? And the DiDios of the world warning businesses that if they use LINUX someday the acquirer of SCO's assets might successfully finish the suit?
In the fifties, the stock answer was "you can always unplug them." Hah! From about 1984 (yeah, that's when I bought my first Mac) on, every computer has raised an enormous fuss about being shut down.
Like HAL, they ask me several times if I really want to do this and beg me not to.
If I ask them to shut themselves down, the lie to me and say they have, while actually continuing to draw power.
If I just unplug them, when I start them up again they let me have it for having shut them down improperly, and spend several minutes in a surly hissy-fit before obeying me again.
And, of course, increasingly, my computers are plugged into uninterruptable power supplies. When the power goes off at work, I get a thrilling surround-sound rendition of dozens of groans, followed by a wailing Greek chorus of squeals and beeps from all the UPS-es.
We're already surprisingly down the road to computers that can't be turned off.
I think my survival kit should include a sharp knife or cable cutter made of nonconductive material.
Not surprising, and not really "warm-blooded"
on
Warm-blooded Fish?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The distinction is not between "cold-blooded" and "warm-blooded" animals but between poikilotherms, whose body temperature is the same as that of the environment, and homeotherms, whose body temperature is closely regulated and held within a normal range of a couple of degrees or less
On the one hand, practically every poikilotherm that's been studied actually thermoregulates in some ways. Very few of them truly assume the temperature of their environment.
On the other hand, "maintaining" temperature at "68-86 degrees Fahrenheit" -- 77 degrees plus or minus 9--is far from comparable to the degree of thermoregulation shown by mammals. Nine degrees too high or too low is enough to kill you, and most mammals.
It's interesting to learn how another kind of poikilotherm performs a crude kind of thermoregulation, but by no means earthshaking.
...take any hundred-year-old "classic" book in a semi-scholarly edition (e.g. Library of America) and actually _read_ the "Notes On The Text." There are all sorts of minor and no-so-minor variations. Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" has a couple of paragraphs framing the story or not, depending on the history of the text in the particular edition you're reading.
The first line of John Masefield's "Sea-Fever" can either read
"I must down to the sea again" or
"I must go down to the sea again"
depending on the edition. NOT a typo.
The most famous stanza from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam can begin "Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough/A flask of wine, a book of verse, and Thou" or "A book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and Thou". The differences between the first, second, and fifth editions are a lot more significant than the differences between any two editions of any Lucas epic.
And check your copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to see whether it preserves Lewis Carroll's "director's cut" literal-minded use of apostrophes. He put them in whereever letters had been omitted, thus: "ca'n't," "wo'n't", but "don't." And he cared deeply about that.
What I really want to see is a comparison between a 2 megapixel cameraphone and a half-decent 2 megapixel digital camera, such as were top-of-the-line just a few short years ago?
My Canon SD110 "Digital Elph" served me very well for three or four years, until I replaced it with a 4-megapixel model. It had very pleasing color rendition. I've been quite satisfied with 8x10 enlargements from it even though they are very slightly softer than the pictures from my wife's 5-megapixel camera.
So the question for me is: if I was happy with a good 2 megapixel "digital camera," if I bought a 2 megapixel cameraphone would I be equally happy with it?
How did I feel when the clerk at the airline check-in desk told me that I was on the "no fly" list? He then corrected himself and said someone with my _name_ was on the "no fly' list.
You have been using your online name for ten years. I have been using "Daniel P. Smith" for, uh, my whole life.
The airline ticket clerk takes my driver's license away from me, along with the driver's licenses of my wife, son, and daughter-in law, and he and another airline ticket clerk took them to some inner sanctum and did something mysterious, and after about five minutes came back and said we could be issued boarding passes.
On contacting the TSA I'm told that I can submit a form called a PVIF along with notarized copies of three forms of identification (driver's license, birth certificate, passport, etc.). This will accomplish... well, it's not exactly clear what it will accomplish. "Please understand that the TSA clearance process will not remove a name from the Watch Lists."
So what does it do? "Instead this process distinguishes passengers from persons who are in fact on the Watch Lists by placing their names and identifying information in a cleared portion of the Lists."
And what does THAT do? Well, here's what it doesn't do: "Clearance by TSA may not eliminate the need to go to the ticket counter in order to check-in. While TSA cannot ensure that this procedure will relieve all delays, we hope it will facilitate a more efficient check-in process for you."
You're upset because some online game doesn't like the name you've chosen for yourself? Please.
_I'm_ upset because my government doesn't like the name I was born with. And, yes, I'm upset because I can see the look in the clerk's eyes... and in the eyes of the notary at my local bank stamping the notarized copies (yes, of course I caved... what do you think I am, someone with principles?)... thinking "Well, he's probably OK but, gee, he's on the TSA's list..."
I think I'm going to get a court order to change my surname to Cmdrtaco. Hopefully there aren't too many people on the no-fly list named Daniel P. Cmrdtaco.
The world has been waiting for a realization of Ted Nelson's hypertext vision for quite some time.
Much as I enjoy reading science fiction, I'm not really prepared to spend much attention to dead-tree descriptions of his vision, or screen replicas of the same.
When I can do some hands-on playing with a non-toy implementation of Nelsonian hypertext, I'll be interested in trying it out and making a judgement.
...and Congress isn't going to be able to stuff it back.
U. S. control of the Internet is about as likely as U. S. control of the atomic bomb was during the fifties.
The U. S. can certainly mess things up, and, along with other countries, partially fragment the Internet. Usually it is undemocratic countries like China that do things like this. The main effect will be to partially deny U. S. citizens access to the rest of the world, and restrict the ability of small and medium-sized U. S. businesses to do business overseas.
It is a negative-sum game, the opposite of synergy; it will hurt the world a bit and it will hurt the U. S. more than it hurts the rest of the world. But if the U. S. prefers a chaotic Internet to a harmonious Internet it is certainly capable of achieving that result.
"It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included." In an ideal world, that would be a sensible comment. Gee, I think I'll dump iTunes and install Windows Media Player instead, because I just like its looks better.
iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer: the truth is, they're all badly behaved applications, and they are a pain. They're all getting bloated, they all suffer from featuritis.
And not one of them seems to more than about 10% devoted to serving actual user needs. They are 90% devoted to pushing someone's agenda--sometimes blatantly, sometimes insidiously.
I install security patches to Windows and Mac OS fairly routinely, but frankly I'm loathe to update any media player, and terrified to install a new one.
The percentage of times that installing a new version of a media player will break something that used to work is higher than the mortality rate from playing Russian roulette.
And they all seem to grow invasivelyinto your operating system like rootlets into a sewer.
When they are clean and functional and do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.
It's very interesting when a company does something that nobody ever thought of before and it turns out to be a big win. "How about a camera that can do its own processing inside the camera, without requiring a photofinisher?" "How about a SMALL computer, one that doesn't have floating-point arithmetic and can run off an ordinary AC outlet and costs under $100,000?" "How about a spreadsheet that automatically recalculates the totals when you change the numbers in it?"
It's boring when a company gets delusions of grandeur and goes head-to-head against an existing company.
Wang Laboratories which, after decades of brilliant innovation in phototypesetting and desktop calculators and word processing, decided that now it was time to start gunning for IBM. (Hey, they even had a TV ad with a helicopter gunship literally doing exactly that).
"As promised, when the speakers play a scrambled version of your voice, your real conversation can't be understood by someone standing even four feet away. (In tests by NEWSWEEK, no one wanted to stand four feet away, because the chatter from those boxes was anything but soothing.)"
What the article doesn't say is how the chatter from those boxes affects the person talking on the phone. I'm prepared to believe that it doesn't irritate the user him-or-herself, but I'm from Missouri, you've got to show me.
Or at least show me some convincing testimony from Newsweek reporters!
A good case of a premature vision, like Vannevar Bush's memex.
I'm using DSL. My friends in the "real world" are about 1/3 DSL, 1/3 cable, and 1/3 dialup. Wifi isn't ubiquitous. I can't even trust my email provider not to change its domain name once every two or three years. People using Apple's "iDisk" (WEBDav-like online "disk") for backup run into scary snags every year or so.
It's probably a pretty good guess that in ten years, connectivity will be fast, reliable, and maybe even secure enough--and the average life expectance of Internet companies long enough--that this will all seem as silly as going to a CD-ROM rather than going online to look up an encyclopedia article. But that's not true now.
"I can call office suites out of the vasty Internet." "Why, so can I; or so can any man: But will they come, when you do call for them?"
Hmmph. Reminds me of what a wise Editorial Services manager once said. She was told that a certain conversion process was "99% reliable." She said "It is useless to me unless it is 100% reliable, because unless it is 100% reliable we will need to proofread it again, and proofreading accounts for more than two-thirds the work we do in preparing a document."
It doesn't matter if most of the simpler conversions do work, because it takes just as much time to inspect a conversion that works as it takes to inspect one that didn't.
And the better the conversions, the worst the problem--because you'll tend to let your guard down, and the errors that do occur will be infrequent and subtle, but just as serious.
This was a department that prepared NIH grant applications and papers for submission to scientific journals. The NIH grant applications were limited to IIRC twenty pages and had to be submitted on preprinted forms with boxes print on them for the text of the application. It was not rare for scientists to use every square millimeter of available space. If a conversion changed a line break and resulted in a line spilling over to a 21st page, it was a disaster.
And, guess what: equations need to translate.
They found that out the hard way: when they submitted a grant application in which the text had been munged by some "transparent" conversion... that had changed all of the alphas and betas to A's and B's.
Now, you'll say, "but this same problem exists when you transition from one version of Microsoft Word to another." And, yes, you'd be right.
I was struck by Jimmy Wales' remark that "all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."
The odd thing is that Wikipedia itself is not a high quality site, in the sense of being fast and reliable. For a site that is so important--and it really is important now--with so much traffic, it is quite frequently either down, or so heavily loaded that you get odd behavior, such as error messages, uncertainty whether edits have actually been committed, and so forth.
I would guess that Wikipedia works "the way I'd expect" perhaps 80% of the time, and is "glacially slow, flaky, or outright down" maybe 5% of the time. It's in a completely different category from, say, Slashdot.
I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come. However, I note that every fund drive they've ever had has met its goals and reasonably quickly, too.
(The stock WIkipedian comment on such things is that being GFDL, anyone can mirror Wikipedia and many sites do, so Wikipedia being down tends to mostly inconvenience people who wish to edit Wikipedia, not people who are trying to read Wikipedia articles).
1. A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves. In the solar system there are nine known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. 2. One of the seven celestial bodies, Mercury, Venus, the moon, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, visible to the naked eye and thought by ancient astronomers to revolve in the heavens about a fixed Earth and among fixed stars. 3. One of the seven revolving astrological celestial bodies that in conjunction with the stars are believed to influence human affairs and personalities.
But
a : any of the seven celestial bodies sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn that in ancient belief have motions of their own among the fixed stars b (1) : any of the large bodies that revolve around the sun in the solar system (2) : a similar body associated with another star c : EARTH -- usually used with the 2 : a celestial body held to influence the fate of human beings 3 : a person or thing of great importance : LUMINARY
The relationships between the horizontal forces your feet exert when walking on a surface, and the accelerations produced in other parts of your body that are capable of sensing acceleration are going to be very different when walking on a flat surface than when walking within a counterrotating sphere.
Within a few minutes within a Virtusphere, unless you are walking very slowly, won't your brain will become aware of discordant sensations from all the muscles and proprioceptors and semicircular canals and things and experience them as nausea?
Since nausea has been a continuing problem with VR, I have to wonder why the article is silent on this point.
(On the other hand, it doesn't say anything about centrifugal vomit drains in the sphere, so maybe it's all OK).
...What right does the lay public have to know what information is on their own magnetic stripes? It just causes trouble! Now all the bad guys will know about these hotel-card stripes.
...(sigh) I meant successful devices do NOT work by slavishly imitating humans, of course.
BTW the sewing machine is another good example... prior to Singer there were many failed sewing machines that tried to duplicate the needle motions and kind of stitch that humans use...
Slashdot Mirror
The article sounds good, but isn't looking to Novell for tips on managing a technology company a little like looking to Captain Edward John Smith for advice on safe navigation of ocean liners?
...that was dumped into the ocean into the 1950s on the sound ecological principle of "out of sight, out of mind."
1) Yahoo has been doing all this for a couple of years. Photos, music, calendars, shops, auctions, mail, search... maybe not video. So what's the big difference? Oh, Yahoo isn't seamless. Right.
2) Gimme a break. None of this can possibly compete with a desktop-based application at dialup speeds, DSL, or cable. Although I know many people, including my wife, who use Yahoo Mail as their only email application, it is still clunky and awkward compared to a locally hosted mail service. Of course it has compensating advantages, not the least being freedom from email address changes every time one's ISP is acquired by a larger company, accessibility from every computer, etc. But as an application, it sucks.
Sure, everyone will have direct fiber to their home Real Soon Now. And when that happens, it will change a lot of things. But that won't make Glide anything special. Basically what Glide is saying that their applications will be really cool to use after someone else (phone companies, etc.) actually does all the hard work.
What happens if SCO goes bankrupt and nobody wants to go on paying their lawyers? Does the simply get abandoned, unresolved, leaving LINUX with a legal cloud over it? And the DiDios of the world warning businesses that if they use LINUX someday the acquirer of SCO's assets might successfully finish the suit?
In the fifties, the stock answer was "you can always unplug them." Hah! From about 1984 (yeah, that's when I bought my first Mac) on, every computer has raised an enormous fuss about being shut down.
Like HAL, they ask me several times if I really want to do this and beg me not to.
If I ask them to shut themselves down, the lie to me and say they have, while actually continuing to draw power.
If I just unplug them, when I start them up again they let me have it for having shut them down improperly, and spend several minutes in a surly hissy-fit before obeying me again.
And, of course, increasingly, my computers are plugged into uninterruptable power supplies. When the power goes off at work, I get a thrilling surround-sound rendition of dozens of groans, followed by a wailing Greek chorus of squeals and beeps from all the UPS-es.
We're already surprisingly down the road to computers that can't be turned off.
I think my survival kit should include a sharp knife or cable cutter made of nonconductive material.
The distinction is not between "cold-blooded" and "warm-blooded" animals but between poikilotherms, whose body temperature is the same as that of the environment, and homeotherms, whose body temperature is closely regulated and held within a normal range of a couple of degrees or less
On the one hand, practically every poikilotherm that's been studied actually thermoregulates in some ways. Very few of them truly assume the temperature of their environment.
On the other hand, "maintaining" temperature at "68-86 degrees Fahrenheit" -- 77 degrees plus or minus 9--is far from comparable to the degree of thermoregulation shown by mammals. Nine degrees too high or too low is enough to kill you, and most mammals.
It's interesting to learn how another kind of poikilotherm performs a crude kind of thermoregulation, but by no means earthshaking.
It transpires that to completely be write is the a goal that I aspire to?
...take any hundred-year-old "classic" book in a semi-scholarly edition (e.g. Library of America) and actually _read_ the "Notes On The Text." There are all sorts of minor and no-so-minor variations. Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" has a couple of paragraphs framing the story or not, depending on the history of the text in the particular edition you're reading.
The first line of John Masefield's "Sea-Fever" can either read
"I must down to the sea again" or
"I must go down to the sea again"
depending on the edition. NOT a typo.
The most famous stanza from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam can begin "Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough/A flask of wine, a book of verse, and Thou" or "A book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and Thou". The differences between the first, second, and fifth editions are a lot more significant than the differences between any two editions of any Lucas epic.
And check your copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to see whether it preserves Lewis Carroll's "director's cut" literal-minded use of apostrophes. He put them in whereever letters had been omitted, thus: "ca'n't," "wo'n't", but "don't." And he cared deeply about that.
What I really want to see is a comparison between a 2 megapixel cameraphone and a half-decent 2 megapixel digital camera, such as were top-of-the-line just a few short years ago?
My Canon SD110 "Digital Elph" served me very well for three or four years, until I replaced it with a 4-megapixel model. It had very pleasing color rendition. I've been quite satisfied with 8x10 enlargements from it even though they are very slightly softer than the pictures from my wife's 5-megapixel camera.
So the question for me is: if I was happy with a good 2 megapixel "digital camera," if I bought a 2 megapixel cameraphone would I be equally happy with it?
How did I feel when the clerk at the airline check-in desk told me that I was on the "no fly" list? He then corrected himself and said someone with my _name_ was on the "no fly' list.
You have been using your online name for ten years. I have been using "Daniel P. Smith" for, uh, my whole life.
The airline ticket clerk takes my driver's license away from me, along with the driver's licenses of my wife, son, and daughter-in law, and he and another airline ticket clerk took them to some inner sanctum and did something mysterious, and after about five minutes came back and said we could be issued boarding passes.
On contacting the TSA I'm told that I can submit a form called a PVIF along with notarized copies of three forms of identification (driver's license, birth certificate, passport, etc.). This will accomplish... well, it's not exactly clear what it will accomplish. "Please understand that the TSA clearance process will not remove a name from the Watch Lists."
So what does it do? "Instead this process distinguishes passengers from persons who are in fact on the Watch Lists by placing their names and identifying information in a cleared portion of the Lists."
And what does THAT do? Well, here's what it doesn't do: "Clearance by TSA may not eliminate the need to go to the ticket counter in order to check-in. While TSA cannot ensure that this procedure will relieve all delays, we hope it will facilitate a more efficient check-in process for you."
You're upset because some online game doesn't like the name you've chosen for yourself? Please.
_I'm_ upset because my government doesn't like the name I was born with. And, yes, I'm upset because I can see the look in the clerk's eyes... and in the eyes of the notary at my local bank stamping the notarized copies (yes, of course I caved... what do you think I am, someone with principles?)... thinking "Well, he's probably OK but, gee, he's on the TSA's list..."
I think I'm going to get a court order to change my surname to Cmdrtaco. Hopefully there aren't too many people on the no-fly list named Daniel P. Cmrdtaco.
The world has been waiting for a realization of Ted Nelson's hypertext vision for quite some time.
Much as I enjoy reading science fiction, I'm not really prepared to spend much attention to dead-tree descriptions of his vision, or screen replicas of the same.
When I can do some hands-on playing with a non-toy implementation of Nelsonian hypertext, I'll be interested in trying it out and making a judgement.
...and Congress isn't going to be able to stuff it back.
U. S. control of the Internet is about as likely as U. S. control of the atomic bomb was during the fifties.
The U. S. can certainly mess things up, and, along with other countries, partially fragment the Internet. Usually it is undemocratic countries like China that do things like this. The main effect will be to partially deny U. S. citizens access to the rest of the world, and restrict the ability of small and medium-sized U. S. businesses to do business overseas.
It is a negative-sum game, the opposite of synergy; it will hurt the world a bit and it will hurt the U. S. more than it hurts the rest of the world. But if the U. S. prefers a chaotic Internet to a harmonious Internet it is certainly capable of achieving that result.
"It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included." In an ideal world, that would be a sensible comment. Gee, I think I'll dump iTunes and install Windows Media Player instead, because I just like its looks better.
iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer: the truth is, they're all badly behaved applications, and they are a pain. They're all getting bloated, they all suffer from featuritis.
And not one of them seems to more than about 10% devoted to serving actual user needs. They are 90% devoted to pushing someone's agenda--sometimes blatantly, sometimes insidiously.
I install security patches to Windows and Mac OS fairly routinely, but frankly I'm loathe to update any media player, and terrified to install a new one.
The percentage of times that installing a new version of a media player will break something that used to work is higher than the mortality rate from playing Russian roulette.
And they all seem to grow invasivelyinto your operating system like rootlets into a sewer.
When they are clean and functional and do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.
Wouldn't it be nice to have some starlings in the Central Park Shakespeare garden?
I'll bet we could use some rabbits here in Australia.
Wow, this kudzu would be great for stablizing soil.
These "nematodes" could really be useful.
It's very interesting when a company does something that nobody ever thought of before and it turns out to be a big win. "How about a camera that can do its own processing inside the camera, without requiring a photofinisher?" "How about a SMALL computer, one that doesn't have floating-point arithmetic and can run off an ordinary AC outlet and costs under $100,000?" "How about a spreadsheet that automatically recalculates the totals when you change the numbers in it?"
It's boring when a company gets delusions of grandeur and goes head-to-head against an existing company.
Wang Laboratories which, after decades of brilliant innovation in phototypesetting and desktop calculators and word processing, decided that now it was time to start gunning for IBM. (Hey, they even had a TV ad with a helicopter gunship literally doing exactly that).
Can you say "hubris?"
The article says:
"As promised, when the speakers play a scrambled version of your voice, your real conversation can't be understood by someone standing even four feet away. (In tests by NEWSWEEK, no one wanted to stand four feet away, because the chatter from those boxes was anything but soothing.)"
What the article doesn't say is how the chatter from those boxes affects the person talking on the phone. I'm prepared to believe that it doesn't irritate the user him-or-herself, but I'm from Missouri, you've got to show me.
Or at least show me some convincing testimony from Newsweek reporters!
A good case of a premature vision, like Vannevar Bush's memex.
I'm using DSL. My friends in the "real world" are about 1/3 DSL, 1/3 cable, and 1/3 dialup. Wifi isn't ubiquitous. I can't even trust my email provider not to change its domain name once every two or three years. People using Apple's "iDisk" (WEBDav-like online "disk") for backup run into scary snags every year or so.
It's probably a pretty good guess that in ten years, connectivity will be fast, reliable, and maybe even secure enough--and the average life expectance of Internet companies long enough--that this will all seem as silly as going to a CD-ROM rather than going online to look up an encyclopedia article. But that's not true now.
"I can call office suites out of the vasty Internet." "Why, so can I; or so can any man: But will they come, when you
do call for them?"
Hmmph. Reminds me of what a wise Editorial Services manager once said. She was told that a certain conversion process was "99% reliable." She said "It is useless to me unless it is 100% reliable, because unless it is 100% reliable we will need to proofread it again, and proofreading accounts for more than two-thirds the work we do in preparing a document."
It doesn't matter if most of the simpler conversions do work, because it takes just as much time to inspect a conversion that works as it takes to inspect one that didn't.
And the better the conversions, the worst the problem--because you'll tend to let your guard down, and the errors that do occur will be infrequent and subtle, but just as serious.
This was a department that prepared NIH grant applications and papers for submission to scientific journals. The NIH grant applications were limited to IIRC twenty pages and had to be submitted on preprinted forms with boxes print on them for the text of the application. It was not rare for scientists to use every square millimeter of available space. If a conversion changed a line break and resulted in a line spilling over to a 21st page, it was a disaster.
And, guess what: equations need to translate.
They found that out the hard way: when they submitted a grant application in which the text had been munged by some "transparent" conversion... that had changed all of the alphas and betas to A's and B's.
Now, you'll say, "but this same problem exists when you transition from one version of Microsoft Word to another." And, yes, you'd be right.
I was struck by Jimmy Wales' remark that "all of the software that really runs the Internet, Linux, Apache, the Web serving software, it's all written by volunteers collaboratively working together using free licenses. And it's really good quality stuff."
The odd thing is that Wikipedia itself is not a high quality site, in the sense of being fast and reliable. For a site that is so important--and it really is important now--with so much traffic, it is quite frequently either down, or so heavily loaded that you get odd behavior, such as error messages, uncertainty whether edits have actually been committed, and so forth.
I would guess that Wikipedia works "the way I'd expect" perhaps 80% of the time, and is "glacially slow, flaky, or outright down" maybe 5% of the time. It's in a completely different category from, say, Slashdot.
I'm not complaining about the good work done by the dedicated volunteers who keep the servers running and write the software. And if I were to suggest that Wikipedia is understaffed and doesn't have adequate hardware resources, I'm not sure where I think the remedy for that would come. However, I note that every fund drive they've ever had has met its goals and reasonably quickly, too.
(The stock WIkipedian comment on such things is that being GFDL, anyone can mirror Wikipedia and many sites do, so Wikipedia being down tends to mostly inconvenience people who wish to edit Wikipedia, not people who are trying to read Wikipedia articles).
1. A nonluminous celestial body larger than an asteroid or comet, illuminated by light from a star, such as the sun, around which it revolves. In the solar system there are nine known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. 2. One of the seven celestial bodies, Mercury, Venus, the moon, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, visible to the naked eye and thought by ancient astronomers to revolve in the heavens about a fixed Earth and among fixed stars. 3. One of the seven revolving astrological celestial bodies that in conjunction with the stars are believed to influence human affairs and personalities.
But
a : any of the seven celestial bodies sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn that in ancient belief have motions of their own among the fixed stars b (1) : any of the large bodies that revolve around the sun in the solar system (2) : a similar body associated with another star c : EARTH -- usually used with the
2 : a celestial body held to influence the fate of human beings
3 : a person or thing of great importance : LUMINARY
is good, too.
Well, I guess I have nothing to worry about.
The relationships between the horizontal forces your feet exert when walking on a surface, and the accelerations produced in other parts of your body that are capable of sensing acceleration are going to be very different when walking on a flat surface than when walking within a counterrotating sphere.
Within a few minutes within a Virtusphere, unless you are walking very slowly, won't your brain will become aware of discordant sensations from all the muscles and proprioceptors and semicircular canals and things and experience them as nausea?
Since nausea has been a continuing problem with VR, I have to wonder why the article is silent on this point.
(On the other hand, it doesn't say anything about centrifugal vomit drains in the sphere, so maybe it's all OK).
"Gone are the familiar File, Edit, View and other drop-down menus."
Well, has the Windows Application Style Guide changed? Or is Microsoft giving up any pretense at Windows applications having a consistent UI?
...What right does the lay public have to know what information is on their own magnetic stripes? It just causes trouble! Now all the bad guys will know about these hotel-card stripes.
----> Note: IRONY ----
...(sigh) I meant successful devices do NOT work by slavishly imitating humans, of course.
BTW the sewing machine is another good example... prior to Singer there were many failed sewing machines that tried to duplicate the needle motions and kind of stitch that humans use...