The Zapruder film was the beginning. In recent years, I've been dumbfounded by the vast extension in recording and documentation of things like crimes in progress, natural disasters, America's Funniest Home Videos, you name it. A plane crashes, and the next day there are ten different home videos from people in the vicinity who had camcorders.
I believe the cost of traditional photography in constant dollars dropped enormously between my parents' time and mine. I know we took about ten times as many silver-on-paper and Kodacolor dye-on-paper snapshots as my parent did. Then we got a camcorder. My parents captured about three hours total of 8 mm silent home movies. I have about forty hours of 8mm and digital-8 camcorder tape.
And since my wife and I got digital cameras, we've been taking five to ten times as many pictures as we did when we used film cameras.
Now, YES, I'm on the format treadmill. Got most of the old 8mm movies transferred to VHS. Got most of the VHS transferred to DVD. Got a lot of the old slides scanned. Got most of my digital images burned to CD. In the last five years, I've probably spent a hundred hours, or 0.2% of my life, on nothing but struggling to copy from old formats to new. I've spent a small fortune getting Shutterfly to print pictures, because to tell the truth I have much more faith in the prints surviving than the CD's.
So, I don't see a digital dark age. I see a bizarre situation in which the quantity of material recorded in digital form continues to increase exponentially for quite some time. _Most_ of it will get lost, and the percentage that survives, say, a hundred years will keep going DOWN exponentially with time.
But I'm guessing the total quantity of 21st century material available to historians of the 23rd century will, in absolute numbers, be just about the same as the total quantity of 20th century material.
It's one of those mind-boggling things like personal death that one can never quite come to grips with. The future is unknown, and we can accept that. But the fact that most of the past is unknown is equally true--and very hard to accept.
Even if you assume that U. S. managers are currently more effective because of experience, training, etc. it is hard to believe a high-speed communications line and a culture gap won't be a counteracting handicap.
When all of the low- and midlevel tasks are being performed in [insert country here], the workers there will quickly learn whatever is needed to manage and then will have an advantage due to their understanding of local conditions.
There's no reason for this process not to continue up to the very top. It's hard to believe that someone can keep the corporate headquarters and all the money here indefinitely when all the work is being done somewhere else.
IBM treated India rather poorly a few decades ago, using it as a cash cow and a market for technology that was considered obsolete in the U. S. A few years from now I expect the CEO of IBM will be Indian, and the U. S. will be a backwater and treated rather poorly.
Why on earth would anyone want to have this kind of news delivered to them as a linear video stream of images of talking heads?
Even ink-on-newsprint would be a more efficient way to deliver this, as it makes it easier to glance through the news and pick out the items of interest.
Sounds like it would only be of use to what we used to call "magazine managers," people whose only knowledge was a shallow smattering of buzzwords picked from from BYTE and Datamation.
Say! Maybe they could use this Internat thing, the World Wild Web I think they call it. I hear it has "links" that make it easy to "navigate" and you can even "download" files over it...
I don't have "a negative vibe against advertising IN GENERAL." I sometimes buy hobby-related magazines specifically for the advertising--to see what's new, who's offering what interesting things, and so forth.
I've never been bothered by Google's sponsored links.
I LIKE honest salesmanship.
What I don't like is people trying to force stuff in my face when they have absolutely no reason to believe I have any interest in it, and a good deal of reason to believe I have no interest in it.
I have a negative attitude toward SOME kinds of advertising IN PARTICULAR. Dishonest, pushy, obnoxious advertising.
1914 description of a rogue wave...
on
World's Tallest Wave
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...from Jack London's short story, _Samuel_, in _The Strength of the Strong_. (Online here).
"Dud I say ut was a God-Almighty gale? Ut was worse nor thot. The devil himself must ha' hod a hond un the brewun' o' ut, ut was thot fearsome. I ha' looked on some sights, but I om no carun' tull look on the like o' thot again. No mon dared tull be un hus bunk. No, nor no mon on the decks. All honds of us stood on top the house an' held on an' watched. The three mates was on the poop, with two men ot the wheel, an' the only mon below was thot whusky- blighted captain snorun' drunk.
"An' then I see ut comun', a mile away, risun' above all the waves like an island un the sea - the buggest wave ever I looked upon. The three mates stood tulgether an' watched ut comun', a-prayun' like we thot she would no break un passun' us. But ut was no tull be. Ot the last, when she rose up like a mountain, curlun' above the stern an' blottun' out the sky, the mates scattered, the second an' third runnun' for the mizzen-shrouds an' climbun' up, but the first runnun' tull the wheel tull lend a hond. He was a brave men, thot Samuel Henan. He run straight un tull the face o' thot father o' all waves, no thunkun' on humself but thunkun' only o' the shup. The two men was lashed tull the wheel, but he would be ready tull hond un the case they was kult. An' then she took ut. We on the house could no see the poop for the thousand tons o' watter thot hod hut ut. Thot wave cleaned them out, took everythung along wuth ut - the two mates, climbun' up the mizzen-ruggun', Samuel Henan runnun' tull the wheel, the two men ot the wheel, aye, an' the wheel utself. We never saw aught o' them, for she broached tull what o' the wheel goun', an' two men o' us was drownded off the house, no tull mention the carpenter thot we pucked up ot the break o' the poop wuth every bone o' hus body broke tull he was like so much jelly."
...that would link to websites about the products!
Consumers could scan those bar codes with a handheld device of some kind and be taken effortlessly to the site!
Why, it would be like a... a... digital _convergence_ between the physical world and the Internet!
You could give the devices away to Wired subscribers and Radio Shack customers. You'd want them to appeal to the right demographics, so they shouldn't look too industrial or nerdish.
You could make them look like a cute little cat or something.
You call call them:CuteCats!
What a fantastic idea! I wonder why nobody has ever thought of anything like this before.
Kids still love "The Little Mermaid," "The Lion King," and "Beauty and the Beast." These are all viable franchises, both as animations and as stage shows. Why? Because they tell a good story.
It's all up to Disney. The 2D animation form is highly relevant and even the work Disney was doing just a few years ago is popular.
Does anyone really believe that the success of the Pixar films is due primarily to the technology they employed?
I'm not suggesting that Disney should go in for "South Park" style material, but the success of "South Park" shows that even the crudest "limited animation" techniques--a la UPA in the 1950s--can achieve commercial success today.
If Disney's institutional memory has forgotten how to make good 2D animations in just a few short years, OK, but that's their own failure and they shouldn't blame it on the technique itself.
It will increase the effectiveness of the teacher by, MAYBE, 2% and increase the cost of equipping the classrooms by... um... $5000 per classroom? A quarter of a million bucks?
For gear which will probably become obsolete in five years?
At a time when schools are having problems buying textbooks?
And teachers are being laid off?
Better they should fix the boilers. And rehire some teachers.
P. S. For a long thread on this, search the Spotlight forum under http://discussions.info.apple.com/ on the word "emperor" for the topic "The emperor's new clothes".
http://discussions.info.apple.com./ The URLs seem to be generated on the fly so I have to say enter there and click Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, then Spotlight.
Many users do find that Spotlight "works for them" and many are experiencing problems similar to those I mention. I am experiencing them on three out of three Macintoshes I personally use, including one where I did a clean install on an empty partition.
There is quite a collection of lore accumulating involving re-indexing ones whole system by using mdutil and/or dragging whole drives in and out of the privacy pane. Some of these techniques work for some people some of the time.
Some fairly popular topics, with multiple threads, include "how can I remove Spotlight" and shareware utilities such as Path Finder that do oldstyle plain vanilla searching.
Spotlight will probably be awesome someday. If it is working for you now, I'm happy for you.
They haven't used Spotlight, have they?
on
The Death of Folders?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Pie-in-the-sky. Please spare me the deep-think prognostications of people who obviously are unfamiliar with how the facility actually works (or doesn't) in the real world.
When it is good, Spotlight is very, very good. And when it is bad, it is horrid. So far, in my experience, Spotlight has been very, very good about 50% of the time I've really used it (i.e. to find something I wanted to find, as opposed to playing around with it). And horrid the other 50%.
Spotlight has several big problems.
a) It doesn't find things reliably. This isn't like using Google on the Web, where you're happy with the results you find, and mostly don't know about what relevant hits Google missed. You have a very good idea what's on your hard drive, and it is incredibly annoying when Spotlight does NOT find a file you know is there.
There is ongoing discussion of why Spotlight doesn't find things reliably, and, of course, many people who say "It works for me," but the number of users reporting that Spotlight is not finding files they know are there is very significant.
There are various reasons for this. One is that Spotlight has a fairly long built-in exclusion list of directories it doesn't think you really want to search, but, unfortunately, it does not explicitly show you what they are. This is not, however, the only issue.
b) It doesn't find things quickly. Wags are starting to call it "stoplight." Frankly, I'm scared to type anything directly into the search field. I've gotten to the point where I type the search target into a text editor and paste it into the edit field.
The problem is that Spotlight oh-so-cleverly gives real-time live updating of the partial query as you type it in. So if you type in "Slashdot", for example, by the time you have typed in two characters it is trying to display every file on your computer that begins with "sl". For reasons that aren't clear to me, this frequently locks up the Finder's UI with a spinning pizza wheel. The entire Finder becomes unusable--you can't even activate another window and search for the file manually--for big fractions of a minute.
c) A signficant number of users are reporting frequent occasions when Spotlight causes their whole system to slow down. And, in at least one case, I've pinned down a situation in which Spotlight, for some reason, actually causes another program to fail with file I/O errors unless it is prevented from accessing the directories that program is using.
So, Spotlight is sometimes wonderful... but other times is unreliable, slow itself, slows down the rest of the system, and makes other programs unstable.
But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
A Tyrannosaurus stud Said "I don't have cold blood My kisses aren't mere pecks So, baby, let's have sex 'Cause when I hear your moans I want to jump your medullary bones!"
Some of the advances in technology that have occurred in the last five decades have been really stunning. The advances in chips and computers seem to be the most obvious, but it's almost equally unbelievable what's happened with magnets and motors.
In the early 1900s the development of small, lightweight fractional-horsepower electric motors that ran on ordinary house current paved the way for a revolution in home appliances. The first "vacuum cleaners" were trucks that drove up to houses with long vacuum hoses. The idea of a self-contained portable vacuum cleaner that you could plug into the wall and push around was revolutionary...
Now, a Toyota Prius has an SEVENTY-horsepower electric motor in it that's not much all that much bigger or heavier than that in those first home vacuum cleaners. Well... than a one-horsepower motor on a lathe or drill press, anyway.
My life is full of incredibly tiny yet powerful motors like the ones that make little those little R2-D2 noises as they zoom the lens on my digital camera.
I'm amazingly ignorant of how all this electromechanical techonology works. I hear words like "neodymium magnets" but I certainly have no idea why neodymium would be good for magnets... or where in the world neodymium is mined and whether it's a strategic resource like the cobalt that was so important in alnico magnets...
There have been innumerable "Mac look-alike" models introduced in the Wintel space. I wish I could recall the name of the model some company introduced circa 1991 which had almost the same form factor as the classic Mac, 9" screen and all. I'll bet it left out the built-in handle; that's the sort of detail the Mac-alikes always forget.
There have always been Mac lookalikes. Remember the eOne from eMachines.
Apart from press interest at their introduction, all of them sank in the marketplace without so much as a ripple.
Anyone who says that there is much difference overall in price or power between a Mac and a PC is grinding an axe. The fact is they're using technologies that are pretty much on a par and the price/performance is pretty much on a par.
But the Wintel Bizarro-world Mac-alike machines usually ARE overpriced and underpowered. And the form factor and "look" usually look like a cheesy knockoff; it's obvious they are not using industrial designers of the caliber that Apple uses.
Love it or hate it, the original iMac, for example, showed an amazing design integrity in carrying the "translucency" theme throughout the entire design; not only the case, but the keyboard, the mouse, _and the power cord_ were translucent. I'll bet those power cords added cost. That's the sort of detail the would-be Mac-alikes never seem to include.
It's the overall integrity of the product design that gives Apple that "wow" factor. It's also the overall integrity of the product design that makes Apple's products so comfortable and usable.
So, someone else can throw just as many components into a little box as Apple can? I never doubted it for a second. The point is, Apple doesn't just throw components into a box.
Does anyone know of CD or recording that collects all the most familiar music and sounds of the greatest video games? It would seem as if it's about time to do this, since a lot of the old consoles are still functioning in collections, so it's probably POSSIBLE to get a recording of a functioning Pac-Man or Space Invaders game even today...
(Come to think of it, I'd gladly buy a recording of the sounds made by an IBM 407 accounting machine...)
National Do Not Call list law is passed. I put my phone number on the list. Literally within weeks, the number of telemarketing calls plummets from a flood to a tiny trickle. (The trickle being charities and political campaigns).
CAN SPAM act is passed. Nothing happens.
And most of the SPAM has every appearance of being generated in the U. S. You gotta think the CAN SPAM act is ineffective, perhaps by design.
I've no doubt the technology under the hood is good, but the user interface is awful.
I and many other users have noticed that Spotlight frequently fails to find files that I know are on my hard drive. I don't know how much of that is because nobody understands what, exactly you're searching for (does a query for "time" match QuickTime or not?); how much is because of poorly documented exclusions (big areas, like the Library and System folders, that are excluded by default); and how much is because it hasn't actually completed indexing when it says it has.
It has a weird habit, even on a fast machine, of locking up the entire Finder and spinning the pizza wheel after you type about three characters. Apparently it insists on finding every file that matches the search fragment before it will let you type more characters to refine the search. The lockups can take a big fraction of a minute.
In many cases Spotlight will fail to find files that the old Find facility would have found... and take longer to do it.
Jeez, folks, someone was just asking a question...
The speed of light is just c. The familiar equation e = mc^2 is read "e equals em cee SQUARED."
Energy has the dimensions of a mass times the SQUARE of a speed. For example, kinetic energy is 0.5 mv^2. Think of accelerating a car. It takes longer to accelerate from 30 to 60 than it does to accelerate from 0 to 30
There should, I think, have been at least a nod given to George Gamow whose 1947 book, "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland," attempted to explain relativity and quantum mechanics by putting Mr. Tompkins into situations like this. If I remember correctly, one of the episodes literally did involve his riding a bicycle in a Wonderland in which c was something like twenty miles an hour.
Edward F. Moore's 1959 self-reproducers
on
Self-Replicating Robots
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How is this any more impressive than what Edward F. Moore did in 1959? There was a Scientific American article about it, and I saw him demonstrate it at a lecture in the late sixties.
Basically he had a two-dimension row of pieces, rather like jigsaw puzzle pieces, held upright between two pieces of plexiglass. The pieces had just the right shape; they were basically diamonds with a truncated bottom (so they sat in one particular orientation) and sides. Initially they'd all be sitting flat. He would "add heat" by shaking the contraption laterally. Nothing would happen, because the blunt ends would hit against each other.
Then he'd take two of them and tilt them and slide them together, producing a single two-celled "organism." There were little hook-like projections that held them together.
He would shake the thing again. This time, because the two "cells" were tilted, their ends would scoop up underneath the blunt ends of the neighboring "cells," tilting them up into the proper position to hook together too.
So, when he shook the thing in its initial state, nothing would happen. But when locked two of them together into a "creature" and shook them, they caused the other "cells" to assemble into two-celled organisms just like the original one.
In other words, the organism had created copies of itself.
It really worked; there was no deception; after the lecture practically everyone swarmed around and played with the thing and it didn't require any sleight-of-hand twists of the wrist.
I thought it was a strained tour-de-force then, and I think these "self-replicating robots" are just a fancier example of the same thing.
Why not take some substantial CHUNK of partly-finished code, some chunk for which the licensing issues HAVE been resolved, slap on a disclaimer about it being pre-alpha, buggy, etc, and post it somewhere?
If it's open source, there shouldn't be Apple-Steve-Jobs-like issues about maintaining secrecy until the actual moment of release.
Slashdot Mirror
The Zapruder film was the beginning. In recent years, I've been dumbfounded by the vast extension in recording and documentation of things like crimes in progress, natural disasters, America's Funniest Home Videos, you name it. A plane crashes, and the next day there are ten different home videos from people in the vicinity who had camcorders.
I believe the cost of traditional photography in constant dollars dropped enormously between my parents' time and mine. I know we took about ten times as many silver-on-paper and Kodacolor dye-on-paper snapshots as my parent did. Then we got a camcorder. My parents captured about three hours total of 8 mm silent home movies. I have about forty hours of 8mm and digital-8 camcorder tape.
And since my wife and I got digital cameras, we've been taking five to ten times as many pictures as we did when we used film cameras.
Now, YES, I'm on the format treadmill. Got most of the old 8mm movies transferred to VHS. Got most of the VHS transferred to DVD. Got a lot of the old slides scanned. Got most of my digital images burned to CD. In the last five years, I've probably spent a hundred hours, or 0.2% of my life, on nothing but struggling to copy from old formats to new. I've spent a small fortune getting Shutterfly to print pictures, because to tell the truth I have much more faith in the prints surviving than the CD's.
So, I don't see a digital dark age. I see a bizarre situation in which the quantity of material recorded in digital form continues to increase exponentially for quite some time. _Most_ of it will get lost, and the percentage that survives, say, a hundred years will keep going DOWN exponentially with time.
But I'm guessing the total quantity of 21st century material available to historians of the 23rd century will, in absolute numbers, be just about the same as the total quantity of 20th century material.
It's one of those mind-boggling things like personal death that one can never quite come to grips with. The future is unknown, and we can accept that. But the fact that most of the past is unknown is equally true--and very hard to accept.
And I mean all the way up to the top.
Even if you assume that U. S. managers are currently more effective because of experience, training, etc. it is hard to believe a high-speed communications line and a culture gap won't be a counteracting handicap.
When all of the low- and midlevel tasks are being performed in [insert country here], the workers there will quickly learn whatever is needed to manage and then will have an advantage due to their understanding of local conditions.
There's no reason for this process not to continue up to the very top. It's hard to believe that someone can keep the corporate headquarters and all the money here indefinitely when all the work is being done somewhere else.
IBM treated India rather poorly a few decades ago, using it as a cash cow and a market for technology that was considered obsolete in the U. S. A few years from now I expect the CEO of IBM will be Indian, and the U. S. will be a backwater and treated rather poorly.
Why on earth would anyone want to have this kind of news delivered to them as a linear video stream of images of talking heads?
Even ink-on-newsprint would be a more efficient way to deliver this, as it makes it easier to glance through the news and pick out the items of interest.
Sounds like it would only be of use to what we used to call "magazine managers," people whose only knowledge was a shallow smattering of buzzwords picked from from BYTE and Datamation.
Say! Maybe they could use this Internat thing, the World Wild Web I think they call it. I hear it has "links" that make it easy to "navigate" and you can even "download" files over it...
I don't have "a negative vibe against advertising IN GENERAL." I sometimes buy hobby-related magazines specifically for the advertising--to see what's new, who's offering what interesting things, and so forth.
I've never been bothered by Google's sponsored links.
I LIKE honest salesmanship.
What I don't like is people trying to force stuff in my face when they have absolutely no reason to believe I have any interest in it, and a good deal of reason to believe I have no interest in it.
I have a negative attitude toward SOME kinds of advertising IN PARTICULAR. Dishonest, pushy, obnoxious advertising.
...from Jack London's short story, _Samuel_, in _The Strength of the Strong_. (Online here).
"Dud I say ut was a God-Almighty gale? Ut was worse nor thot. The devil himself must ha' hod a hond un the brewun' o' ut, ut was thot fearsome. I ha' looked on some sights, but I om no carun' tull look on the like o' thot again. No mon dared tull be un hus bunk. No, nor no mon on the decks. All honds of us stood on top the house an' held on an' watched. The three mates was on the poop, with two men ot the wheel, an' the only mon below was thot whusky- blighted captain snorun' drunk.
"An' then I see ut comun', a mile away, risun' above all the waves like an island un the sea - the buggest wave ever I looked upon. The three mates stood tulgether an' watched ut comun', a-prayun' like we thot she would no break un passun' us. But ut was no tull be. Ot the last, when she rose up like a mountain, curlun' above the stern an' blottun' out the sky, the mates scattered, the second an' third runnun' for the mizzen-shrouds an' climbun' up, but the first runnun' tull the wheel tull lend a hond. He was a brave men, thot Samuel Henan. He run straight un tull the face o' thot father o' all waves, no thunkun' on humself but thunkun' only o' the shup. The two men was lashed tull the wheel, but he would be ready tull hond un the case they was kult. An' then she took ut. We on the house could no see the poop for the thousand tons o' watter thot hod hut ut. Thot wave cleaned them out, took everythung along wuth ut - the two mates, climbun' up the mizzen-ruggun', Samuel Henan runnun' tull the wheel, the two men ot the wheel, aye, an' the wheel utself. We never saw aught o' them, for she broached tull what o' the wheel goun', an' two men o' us was drownded off the house, no tull mention the carpenter thot we pucked up ot the break o' the poop wuth every bone o' hus body broke tull he was like so much jelly."
--while in other news, Microsoft finds Linux highly lacking.
...that would link to websites about the products!
:CuteCats!
Consumers could scan those bar codes with a handheld device of some kind and be taken effortlessly to the site!
Why, it would be like a... a... digital _convergence_ between the physical world and the Internet!
You could give the devices away to Wired subscribers and Radio Shack customers. You'd want them to appeal to the right demographics, so they shouldn't look too industrial or nerdish.
You could make them look like a cute little cat or something.
You call call them
What a fantastic idea! I wonder why nobody has ever thought of anything like this before.
Kids still love "The Little Mermaid," "The Lion King," and "Beauty and the Beast." These are all viable franchises, both as animations and as stage shows. Why? Because they tell a good story.
It's all up to Disney. The 2D animation form is highly relevant and even the work Disney was doing just a few years ago is popular.
Does anyone really believe that the success of the Pixar films is due primarily to the technology they employed?
I'm not suggesting that Disney should go in for "South Park" style material, but the success of "South Park" shows that even the crudest "limited animation" techniques--a la UPA in the 1950s--can achieve commercial success today.
If Disney's institutional memory has forgotten how to make good 2D animations in just a few short years, OK, but that's their own failure and they shouldn't blame it on the technique itself.
It will increase the effectiveness of the teacher by, MAYBE, 2% and increase the cost of equipping the classrooms by... um... $5000 per classroom? A quarter of a million bucks?
For gear which will probably become obsolete in five years?
At a time when schools are having problems buying textbooks?
And teachers are being laid off?
Better they should fix the boilers. And rehire some teachers.
...I'm sure they would have said that the need for lifeboats had been overhyped. By greedy lifeboat companies trying to spike sales.
P. S. For a long thread on this, search the Spotlight forum under http://discussions.info.apple.com/ on the word "emperor" for the topic "The emperor's new clothes".
http://discussions.info.apple.com./ The URLs seem to be generated on the fly so I have to say enter there and click Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, then Spotlight.
Many users do find that Spotlight "works for them" and many are experiencing problems similar to those I mention. I am experiencing them on three out of three Macintoshes I personally use, including one where I did a clean install on an empty partition.
There is quite a collection of lore accumulating involving re-indexing ones whole system by using mdutil and/or dragging whole drives in and out of the privacy pane. Some of these techniques work for some people some of the time.
Some fairly popular topics, with multiple threads, include "how can I remove Spotlight" and shareware utilities such as Path Finder that do oldstyle plain vanilla searching.
Spotlight will probably be awesome someday. If it is working for you now, I'm happy for you.
Pie-in-the-sky. Please spare me the deep-think prognostications of people who obviously are unfamiliar with how the facility actually works (or doesn't) in the real world.
When it is good, Spotlight is very, very good. And when it is bad, it is horrid. So far, in my experience, Spotlight has been very, very good about 50% of the time I've really used it (i.e. to find something I wanted to find, as opposed to playing around with it). And horrid the other 50%.
Spotlight has several big problems.
a) It doesn't find things reliably. This isn't like using Google on the Web, where you're happy with the results you find, and mostly don't know about what relevant hits Google missed. You have a very good idea what's on your hard drive, and it is incredibly annoying when Spotlight does NOT find a file you know is there.
There is ongoing discussion of why Spotlight doesn't find things reliably, and, of course, many people who say "It works for me," but the number of users reporting that Spotlight is not finding files they know are there is very significant.
There are various reasons for this. One is that Spotlight has a fairly long built-in exclusion list of directories it doesn't think you really want to search, but, unfortunately, it does not explicitly show you what they are. This is not, however, the only issue.
b) It doesn't find things quickly. Wags are starting to call it "stoplight." Frankly, I'm scared to type anything directly into the search field. I've gotten to the point where I type the search target into a text editor and paste it into the edit field.
The problem is that Spotlight oh-so-cleverly gives real-time live updating of the partial query as you type it in. So if you type in "Slashdot", for example, by the time you have typed in two characters it is trying to display every file on your computer that begins with "sl". For reasons that aren't clear to me, this frequently locks up the Finder's UI with a spinning pizza wheel. The entire Finder becomes unusable--you can't even activate another window and search for the file manually--for big fractions of a minute.
c) A signficant number of users are reporting frequent occasions when Spotlight causes their whole system to slow down. And, in at least one case, I've pinned down a situation in which Spotlight, for some reason, actually causes another program to fail with file I/O errors unless it is prevented from accessing the directories that program is using.
So, Spotlight is sometimes wonderful... but other times is unreliable, slow itself, slows down the rest of the system, and makes other programs unstable.
But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
A Tyrannosaurus stud
Said "I don't have cold blood
My kisses aren't mere pecks
So, baby, let's have sex
'Cause when I hear your moans
I want to jump your medullary bones!"
Some of the advances in technology that have occurred in the last five decades have been really stunning. The advances in chips and computers seem to be the most obvious, but it's almost equally unbelievable what's happened with magnets and motors.
In the early 1900s the development of small, lightweight fractional-horsepower electric motors that ran on ordinary house current paved the way for a revolution in home appliances. The first "vacuum cleaners" were trucks that drove up to houses with long vacuum hoses. The idea of a self-contained portable vacuum cleaner that you could plug into the wall and push around was revolutionary...
Now, a Toyota Prius has an SEVENTY-horsepower electric motor in it that's not much all that much bigger or heavier than that in those first home vacuum cleaners. Well... than a one-horsepower motor on a lathe or drill press, anyway.
My life is full of incredibly tiny yet powerful motors like the ones that make little those little R2-D2 noises as they zoom the lens on my digital camera.
I'm amazingly ignorant of how all this electromechanical techonology works. I hear words like "neodymium magnets" but I certainly have no idea why neodymium would be good for magnets... or where in the world neodymium is mined and whether it's a strategic resource like the cobalt that was so important in alnico magnets...
There have been innumerable "Mac look-alike" models introduced in the Wintel space. I wish I could recall the name of the model some company introduced circa 1991 which had almost the same form factor as the classic Mac, 9" screen and all. I'll bet it left out the built-in handle; that's the sort of detail the Mac-alikes always forget.
There have always been Mac lookalikes. Remember the eOne from eMachines.
Apart from press interest at their introduction, all of them sank in the marketplace without so much as a ripple.
Anyone who says that there is much difference overall in price or power between a Mac and a PC is grinding an axe. The fact is they're using technologies that are pretty much on a par and the price/performance is pretty much on a par.
But the Wintel Bizarro-world Mac-alike machines usually ARE overpriced and underpowered. And the form factor and "look" usually look like a cheesy knockoff; it's obvious they are not using industrial designers of the caliber that Apple uses.
Love it or hate it, the original iMac, for example, showed an amazing design integrity in carrying the "translucency" theme throughout the entire design; not only the case, but the keyboard, the mouse, _and the power cord_ were translucent. I'll bet those power cords added cost. That's the sort of detail the would-be Mac-alikes never seem to include.
It's the overall integrity of the product design that gives Apple that "wow" factor. It's also the overall integrity of the product design that makes Apple's products so comfortable and usable.
So, someone else can throw just as many components into a little box as Apple can? I never doubted it for a second. The point is, Apple doesn't just throw components into a box.
Does anyone know of CD or recording that collects all the most familiar music and sounds of the greatest video games? It would seem as if it's about time to do this, since a lot of the old consoles are still functioning in collections, so it's probably POSSIBLE to get a recording of a functioning Pac-Man or Space Invaders game even today...
(Come to think of it, I'd gladly buy a recording of the sounds made by an IBM 407 accounting machine...)
National Do Not Call list law is passed. I put my phone number on the list. Literally within weeks, the number of telemarketing calls plummets from a flood to a tiny trickle. (The trickle being charities and political campaigns).
CAN SPAM act is passed. Nothing happens.
And most of the SPAM has every appearance of being generated in the U. S. You gotta think the CAN SPAM act is ineffective, perhaps by design.
...which IMHO is a disaster.
I've no doubt the technology under the hood is good, but the user interface is awful.
I and many other users have noticed that Spotlight frequently fails to find files that I know are on my hard drive. I don't know how much of that is because nobody understands what, exactly you're searching for (does a query for "time" match QuickTime or not?); how much is because of poorly documented exclusions (big areas, like the Library and System folders, that are excluded by default); and how much is because it hasn't actually completed indexing when it says it has.
It has a weird habit, even on a fast machine, of locking up the entire Finder and spinning the pizza wheel after you type about three characters. Apparently it insists on finding every file that matches the search fragment before it will let you type more characters to refine the search. The lockups can take a big fraction of a minute.
In many cases Spotlight will fail to find files that the old Find facility would have found... and take longer to do it.
Jeez, folks, someone was just asking a question...
The speed of light is just c. The familiar equation e = mc^2 is read "e equals em cee SQUARED."
Energy has the dimensions of a mass times the SQUARE of a speed. For example, kinetic energy is 0.5 mv^2. Think of accelerating a car. It takes longer to accelerate from 30 to 60 than it does to accelerate from 0 to 30
There should, I think, have been at least a nod given to George Gamow whose 1947 book, "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland," attempted to explain relativity and quantum mechanics by putting Mr. Tompkins into situations like this. If I remember correctly, one of the episodes literally did involve his riding a bicycle in a Wonderland in which c was something like twenty miles an hour.
...as a Toyota Prius mechanic.
How is this any more impressive than what Edward F. Moore did in 1959? There was a Scientific American article about it, and I saw him demonstrate it at a lecture in the late sixties.
Basically he had a two-dimension row of pieces, rather like jigsaw puzzle pieces, held upright between two pieces of plexiglass. The pieces had just the right shape; they were basically diamonds with a truncated bottom (so they sat in one particular orientation) and sides. Initially they'd all be sitting flat. He would "add heat" by shaking the contraption laterally. Nothing would happen, because the blunt ends would hit against each other.
Then he'd take two of them and tilt them and slide them together, producing a single two-celled "organism." There were little hook-like projections that held them together.
He would shake the thing again. This time, because the two "cells" were tilted, their ends would scoop up underneath the blunt ends of the neighboring "cells," tilting them up into the proper position to hook together too.
So, when he shook the thing in its initial state, nothing would happen. But when locked two of them together into a "creature" and shook them, they caused the other "cells" to assemble into two-celled organisms just like the original one.
In other words, the organism had created copies of itself.
It really worked; there was no deception; after the lecture practically everyone swarmed around and played with the thing and it didn't require any sleight-of-hand twists of the wrist.
I thought it was a strained tour-de-force then, and I think these "self-replicating robots" are just a fancier example of the same thing.
So what's the big deal?
Why not take some substantial CHUNK of partly-finished code, some chunk for which the licensing issues HAVE been resolved, slap on a disclaimer about it being pre-alpha, buggy, etc, and post it somewhere?
If it's open source, there shouldn't be Apple-Steve-Jobs-like issues about maintaining secrecy until the actual moment of release.
nobody will notice or care.