PayPal is a subsidiary of eBay. The CEO's name is John Donahue. I've written to him. If anyone else wants to:
John Donahue CEO, eBay 2055 Hamilton Ave San Jose, CA 95125
It's my belief that as of 2013, a personal letter, written in ink on physical paper in an envelope with a stamp, sent by USPS, has more impact than e-communication or online petitions.
Oh, my, sic transit Gloria mundi. I don't think anyone ever called it "Lotus 1-2-3," it was just "Lotus..." nobody knew that or if Lotus had any other product. But let's also take time for a tip of the hat to the utterly forgotten Context MBA.
"Integrated software" was very much in the air then. In fact for many years, and contrary to popular belief at the time, Appleworks outsold Lotus 1-2-3, but was "invisible" because it was sold directly by Apple while the bestseller lists were compiled from sales by distributors like Ingram and Corporate Software.
I believe Context MBA actually preceded Lotus 1-2-3, and was a very, very impressive achievement at the time. In addition to 1-2-3's three functions, it also had a reasonably capable low-end word processor--think WordPad--and a decent communications package/terminal emulator (you could use it to download data to put into the spreadsheet). It had a decent user interface and a high degree of integration--it wasn't just a suite. But it had an interesting Achilles heel: it was written in UCSD Pascal for portability.
"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64). But it imposed a performance penalty, which for some reason wasn't too bad with Multiplan but was with Context MBA, and it ran sluggishly on the IBM PC.
Lotus took the diametrically opposite track, writing in assembly language and often breaking the rules and bypassing OS and BIOS to write directly to the hardware. Lotus 1-2-3 actually became a standard informal test of PC compatibility; it wouldn't run on anything that wasn't a very faithful clone of the PC. Because of its speed, it virtually erased Context MBA from the market and from collective memory.
My personal limited experience with Context MBA was on an HP9800, a 68000-based 1981-vintage $10,000 desktop computer intended for scientific and technical applications, with good HP-IB (IEEE-488) capability. On that platform, Context MBA ran well and was a solid and very likable piece of software.
Can't find the quotation, but early on he was very clear on Amazon having focussed on books, for what seemed like very good reasons. As I recall, the point was that there were humongous numbers of titles--far more than any physical bookstore could stock; there was a well-structured database of them--Bowker's Books In Print; shipping size and weights were manageable; and there were straightforward and fairly speedy mechanisms to get any book in print from any publisher--you or I might have trouble ordering directly from a publisher, but a modest-sized business like a bookstore or like Amazon did not.
As I recall, he said that it was much more suitable business than CDs, I think because the number of books in print was far higher than the number of CDs "in print."
He gave what SEEMED like a very convincing case for books being uniquely suited to Internet commerce. I remember being very surprised when they branched out into consumer goods.
Electric recording has a harsh sound that can't compare with the human warmth of direct, acoustically-recorded 78-rpm shellac.
Although direct acoustical recording has a peaky response, the peaks occur in just the right places to make the sound richer.
There is no upper frequency cutoff at all. Logically, ultrasonic frequencies must move the recording stylus and make some impression on the disk, an impression that can be heard even if it can't be seen or measured. These homeopathic doeses of ultra-high-frequency sound explain the airy "open" feeling never experienced with vinyl LPs.
A pair of ticks separated by 1800 milliseconds on an LP distract your attention and spoil the sonic experience, but you can listen "through" a steady continuous series of ticks at 767-millisecond intervals on a scratched 78, because due to the endless repetition you can anticipate and ignore them.
Finally, and most important, when you drop a 78 on edge and it instantly shatters into three wedges held together at their points by the label, the sharp pang of sudden loss makes you feel how valuable and precious these disks are, giving you an emotional connection you can never have with unbreakable vinyl.
I loved the VAX/VMS documentation. It was complete and it was accurate. I loved the original Inside Macintosh documentation; it interesting because it was complete, accurate, and _knowledgeable_. It took helpfully opinionated stances, like "Usually, you will set this argument to nil," or "Returns an integer value of 0 or 1. Only the Shadow knows why it is an integer rather than a boolean."
A couple of years ago I needed greyscale images, nothing fancy but using color was just silly, and wasted over a day trying to get Microsoft.NET PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale to work. It kept throwing exceptions and I was just going nuts, unable to figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually I Googled, and found three-year-old forum postings explaining that Microsoft had never implemented that functionality. But in three years, they couldn't be bothered to remove it from their symbol tables or to update their documentation to at least indicate that it was "reserved for future implementation" or something.
Look for yourself: the online documentation still shows it as available. "The pixel format is 16 bits per pixel. The color information specifies 65536 shades of gray."
Mac OS X is just as bad. The so-called documentation looks and feels as if it were automatically built from header files.
Forum postings and crowd-sourced chatter is great--it's where I learned what I needed to know about PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale--but it's not a substitute for documentation. And, by the way, neither is sample code--it is valuable in show what works--or worked at the time it was written--but it does not show you the limitations or the boundaries, and nobody takes any responsibility for its future accuracy.
According p. 67 of the auto issue, "Look for a full test [of the Tesla Model S] in a forthcoming issue." Their test track is in Connecticut, and hopefully they will have done some tests in chilly weather.
Asymetrix Toolbook shipped "with" Windows well before VB. In fact the company I worked for foolishly assumed it was "part of" Windows. Toolbook, in turn, was not exactly a knockoff of HyperCard, but was certainly a member of the same genre.
LabView for the Macintosh shipped in 1986, and not only still exists but has a very solid niche in some circles. LabView is such a pure visual IDE that there are not visible lines of code as such; it is all wiring diagrams.
Bill Budge's 1983 Pinball Construction Set, for the Apple ][ and Atari, was certainly an IDE, although for a restricted class of applications.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the later incarnations of Visual Studio are considerably less "integrated" than the original Visual Basic was. Visual Studio has the feeling to me of being no more "integrated" than, say, Borland C++ or the (1985) MacPascal. Unlike VB, it just had a fairly crude resource-editor-like "drawing" environment. It feels OK when you're creating things for the first time, but the visual objects do not really "contain" code--they have a very loose and fragile connection to the code associated with them.
This is reminiscent of the "toposcope," built In the 1940s by late W. Grey Walter. It was a 22-channel EEG, or perhaps one should say EES for electroencephaloscope, which displayed a map of the brain's electrical activity in real time... if I recall correctly, on 22 "magic eye" tubes, allowing the special propagation of brain waves to be visualized.
"The idea has been around (at least) since 1968." Try 1913 or earlier, with the development of the stenotype machine, the chorded keyboard device which is used to transcribe courtroom testimony at about 200 WPM.
This may be unfair, but it's what I'd do with any other "product" as like the 2008 G1G1 XO and any other "company" that produced it. It was a while ago and hopefully things have utterly changed, but I have to say that my experience with the 2008 G1G1 program was so inexcusably bad that it poisoned MY opinion of the program. Supporters will make excuses and some may be valid, but the thing was a travesty. It fell utterly short anything we expect from a "product." It was simply not as" advertised".
The biggest disappointment to me was that it was billed as a transparent system, with all of its own OS code supposedly exposed and viewable via a "View Source" key. As delivered, and during its first year of updates anyway, that button did nothing of the sort. It would show you HTML source within the web browser, and did nothing at all elsewhere--not even give a warning.
The claimed "20 hour" battery life turned out to be about 3 hours. Several subsequent "power management" updates increased it to about 4.
At least my keyboard worked. A colleague who bought one had a keyboard failure within about a month of delivery, and it turned out that such failures were common--and that anything resembling "customer service" simply didn't exist.
Actually, I used a light pen on a PDP-1 and my problem was that I got a sort spot on the pad of my index finger. Normally, there was a shutter closed over the sensor, and you had a slide a little spring-loaded slide to uncap it. The spring was probably stronger than it should have been, and the slide had little ridges on it to give a better grip.
My finger didn't actually get blistered, but close. It got sore and painful enough to make me realize I needed to avoid using it for a day.
Vertical desktop touch screens have been with us since at least 1972. The University of Illinois' PLATO project didn't just deploy them on a significant scale, it exposed impressionable students to them.
Since then, many perfectly good touchscreen technologies have been available, commercially, and have been widely deployed e.g. in kiosks. And GUI software support behind them, e.g. Windows for Pen Computing, GO, etc. has been around for two decades.
Meanwhile, successful deployments of touchscreen technology have been widespread since, let's say, 1997 and the Palm Pilot--but always on small, handheld, horizontal-screen devices.
If large vertical touchscreens are really usable for sustained periods of time, and if they really add something of substantial value to mouse point-and-click GUI's, I find it very, very hard to believe they wouldn't have already gained traction.
I'd add that if multitouch gestures are really a significant improvement, I think it's at least as likely that they will take the form of detached, horizontal trackpads like the Apple Magic Trackpad. Horizontal surface, small-muscle coordination.
In real dollars, i.e. corrected for inflation, it's about the same as in 1979-1980.
It's interesting, without shortages and lines at the pump, how much less threatening it seems. I remember visiting my aunt that Christmas and being quite concerned because our tank wasn't big enough to hold gas for the whole round trip, and in addition to lines, many, many gas stations had short hours--there was no certainty of being able to find a gas station open on Christmas day.
I listened to the event live, and I and everyone in the room heard it as "one small step for man." And I remember at the time hearing a comment, "shouldn't he have said one small step for a man?" The audio recording is perfectly clear. There's no squelch, no gap, and nothing half-buried under static. The New York Times reported it as it was.
Neil Armstrong originally insisted he had said "a" but later acknowledged that he could not have said so. Wikipedia cites sources.
Yet some encyclopedias and history books include the "a." It is a kindly falsification of history, made out of misguided respect for Neil Armstrong's feelings.
And I find it shocking.
It is a trivial distortion, but it is a distortion of an event that was witnessed in live broadcast by half a billion people and electronically recorded.
If such a thing can be distorted simply to spare one man's feelings about a completely inconsequential mistake, what does that tell us about the trustworthiness of basic, prosaic factual details of historical events with few eyewitnesses, no electronic records, and money, politics, or national pride hanging in the balance?
I before E, except after C Or when sounded like "A" As in "neighbor" and "weigh" Except seize, inveigle, either, Weird, leisure, neither.
(Also science, conscience, sheik, ancient, being, caffeine, feisty, forfeit, protein, species, and several dozen others, including "Einstein"--twice! The amazing thing about the rule is that it works at all. It seems as if it all the exceptions are words whose spelling is so familiar that you never stop to ask...)
Christmas on Mars forms the climax of the 1955 George Pal movie, "Conquest of Space." The crew of the first ship to Mars has been debating whether God gave Mars to humankind to exploit, or just Earth. They all agree that according to the Bible God gave "the four corners of the Earth" to humankind. The question is whether God's domain extends to Mars.
If God exists on Mars, then Mars belongs to humankind as well.
Due to plot complications, the ship is forced to remain on Mars for a year, and their water supply isn't going to last that long. On Christmas Day, they are glumly playing carols on the harmonica while contemplating the prospect of their demise, when it begins to snow, providing the water they need and proving that God exists on Mars. Ergo Mars belongs to humankind, it's OK to conquer space, and the music is allowed to build to a crescendo behind the words "THE END."
As a kid reading about how they used colchicine, a toxic compound that interferes with cell division--to create polyploid varieties of fruits and vegetables that are much larger than those with the natural chromosome complement. And I realized that surely does qualify as "genetic engineering" of a sort.
That's just a stray synaptic firing. Please don't read any subtext into that. I'm not saying today's GM is the same thing. I'm not saying frankensalmon are safe. I'm not even saying polyploid vegetables are safe. And I happen to think there's a totally legitimate concern about allowing commercial interests to rush new technology into widespread use too quickly.
All I'm saying is that I suddenly realized that they've been doing genetic engineering all my life.
Guilford's "Structure of Intellect"--1960s
on
IQ 'a Myth,' Study Says
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The original idea wasn't vacuous. The researchers who coined the term, particularly Spearman, honestly thought they had found statistical evidence for a single common factor that could be called "intelligence." But I thought that had all been thoroughly exploded by the 1950s.
There was a guy way back in the 1960s who worked out a sort of abstract block diagram, 6 by 6 by 6, of 216 different "thingies" that represented some aspect of intellectual performance. What was it called? "Structure of Intellect." Google, click click, J. P. Guilford. So he spent a chunk of his career devising psychological tests that ought to detect each of those 216 intellectual abilities and then doing the correlations to show that each of the tests was really, truly measuring something different from the others. When I encountered his stuff, he had successfully demonstrated the existence of about 150 of those 216 skill or talents. In other words, intelligence isn't one thing, it's at least 150 different, independent, things.
And that was in the 1960s. I'd have hoped that by now IQ was lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Spearman. Whatever was keeping it alive? Racism? The standardized testing industry?
I don't quite see how this goes much beyond what was known a half-century ago, though it's helpful to see it confirmed. But if the officials want to test intelligence, they will just go on testing intelligence, whatever the science says.
I highly recommend it. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach, really tells you everything you wanted to know about space travel but were afraid to ask. In fact it tells you things you never even thought to ask about. Like "What really does happen to clothing that is kept in contact with skin without being changed, for weeks?" Like "When they see a turd floating through the cabin, due to someone's carelessness, how do astronauts handle the situation?"
After reading that book, I asked myself the question, "Well, if you won a free all-expenses-paid monthlong trip to the International Space Station, would you accept?" And my honest answer is... I... am... not... sure.
So, my hat's off to those who volunteered, and I hope they have thought it through. Not just the suicide part, but what comes before. Because it sounds like being homeless and living in a car, only not as comfortable.
I don't get it. Virtually every laptop or tablet has a choice of preconfigured, built-in amounts of RAM, flash memory, hard drive space. I realize the combinatorial issue, but why isn't a double-sized battery a user-configurable choice at purchase time? You can of course find all sorts of add-on third-party products but in general if you want 32 GB of flash memory in a tablet, you buy a tablet with 32 GB of flash memory preinstalled. You don't walk around with a USB stick or a compact flash card permanently poking out the side. Furthermore, how to say this except that users are willing to overpay for the convenience and security-blanket of preinstalled RAM and flash memory, so it could be a source of additional profit margin.
Why the reluctance to offer bigger batteries? Let the users who need longer runtimes buy longer runtimes, let the users who need lighter weight buy lighter weight. Is it fear that reviewers comparing competitive products would insist on citing the weight for comparable runtime instead of weight of the lightest unit?
There was a period of a couple of years when a web page hosted on my ISP's freebie 15 megabytes of web space was the top hit for a particular Google search. It was a good page--a lay discussion of a technical topic--and I enjoyed the ego boost, but I always wondered why since I was not aware of it's being linked from anywhere, let alone any high-traffic or high-creditibility page. Now I think I know.
(I have since contributed that page's content to Wikipedia. The article has evolved with contributions from others but is still very recognizably mine... and I recently received a the left-handed compliment of an angry email from someone who'd stumbled across my own web page and complained that I had plagiarized it from Wikipedia!)
"the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction)."
This is reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood special effect called the "glass shot," which looks perfect from the point of view of the camera, but not from anywhere else.
"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created." That's about like saying that if David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty vanish... as a magic trick... seen under special conditions from an audience confined to a special viewpoint... it is only a matter of time before he can do it for real.
They all starting with pretty much the same technology, suppliers, engineering competence. So if Apple can manage to put together a product with all of the elements on your wishlist, and nobody else can... maybe it's not actually obvious what should be done, maybe doing it is actually not that easy, and maybe Apple is actually good at it.
Steve Jobs called it "taste."
I once worked at a Fortune 500 company that seemed to be completely unable to identify good ideas on their merits. Every idea had to be validated, basically by seeing that the competition was already doing it. When their customers would start clamoring for the features and products their competition had, they would suddenly get very busy and whip out something, under pressure and in a rush. Their motto seemed to be "we'll do whatever IBM does, two years later and poorly." There's a lot of that in the computer industry.
Simple as that. Glad to know someone was taking it seriously. And your next impossible mission, should you choose to accept it... "the chimney company."
I am glad that it works "like a charm" for you on "the majority" of documents. Could you tell us what, exactly, it does for you on the minority?
I downloaded the no-cost XML converter from Microsoft for my Mac some years ago, for the excellent reason that they hadn't produced a version of Word that supported.docx yet. My experience was that at least half the time, it would run for many minutes trying to convert a document and then crash. These were not long documents, and I was never able to characterize what things about a document caused the crash. The conversions were always slow, like minutes, even when successful. And when the documents did convert, I often found that there were unacceptable formatting problems.
I found that NeoOffice--then the most appropriate Mac version of OpenOffice, was faster and more reliable at opening.docx files--and then saving them in.doc format--but it, too, often had formatting compatibility issues.
Slashdot Mirror
PayPal is a subsidiary of eBay. The CEO's name is John Donahue. I've written to him. If anyone else wants to:
John Donahue
CEO, eBay
2055 Hamilton Ave
San Jose, CA 95125
It's my belief that as of 2013, a personal letter, written in ink on physical paper in an envelope with a stamp, sent by USPS, has more impact than e-communication or online petitions.
Oh, my, sic transit Gloria mundi. I don't think anyone ever called it "Lotus 1-2-3," it was just "Lotus..." nobody knew that or if Lotus had any other product. But let's also take time for a tip of the hat to the utterly forgotten Context MBA.
"Integrated software" was very much in the air then. In fact for many years, and contrary to popular belief at the time, Appleworks outsold Lotus 1-2-3, but was "invisible" because it was sold directly by Apple while the bestseller lists were compiled from sales by distributors like Ingram and Corporate Software.
I believe Context MBA actually preceded Lotus 1-2-3, and was a very, very impressive achievement at the time. In addition to 1-2-3's three functions, it also had a reasonably capable low-end word processor--think WordPad--and a decent communications package/terminal emulator (you could use it to download data to put into the spreadsheet). It had a decent user interface and a high degree of integration--it wasn't just a suite. But it had an interesting Achilles heel: it was written in UCSD Pascal for portability.
"Portability" was sort of trendy at the time, because there was such a zoo of incompatible PC architectures. (The shakeout and dominance of the IBM PC architecture happened with surprising speed). Pascal and C vied for language of choiceCoding for portability had worked wonderfully well for Multiplan, Microsoft's spreadsheet. In a world of dozens of incompatible personal computer architectures, Microsoft could deliver Multiplan quickly on everything. (I remember a friend using it on his Commodore 64). But it imposed a performance penalty, which for some reason wasn't too bad with Multiplan but was with Context MBA, and it ran sluggishly on the IBM PC.
Lotus took the diametrically opposite track, writing in assembly language and often breaking the rules and bypassing OS and BIOS to write directly to the hardware. Lotus 1-2-3 actually became a standard informal test of PC compatibility; it wouldn't run on anything that wasn't a very faithful clone of the PC. Because of its speed, it virtually erased Context MBA from the market and from collective memory.
My personal limited experience with Context MBA was on an HP9800, a 68000-based 1981-vintage $10,000 desktop computer intended for scientific and technical applications, with good HP-IB (IEEE-488) capability. On that platform, Context MBA ran well and was a solid and very likable piece of software.
Can't find the quotation, but early on he was very clear on Amazon having focussed on books, for what seemed like very good reasons. As I recall, the point was that there were humongous numbers of titles--far more than any physical bookstore could stock; there was a well-structured database of them--Bowker's Books In Print; shipping size and weights were manageable; and there were straightforward and fairly speedy mechanisms to get any book in print from any publisher--you or I might have trouble ordering directly from a publisher, but a modest-sized business like a bookstore or like Amazon did not.
As I recall, he said that it was much more suitable business than CDs, I think because the number of books in print was far higher than the number of CDs "in print."
He gave what SEEMED like a very convincing case for books being uniquely suited to Internet commerce. I remember being very surprised when they branched out into consumer goods.
Electric recording has a harsh sound that can't compare with the human warmth of direct, acoustically-recorded 78-rpm shellac.
Although direct acoustical recording has a peaky response, the peaks occur in just the right places to make the sound richer.
There is no upper frequency cutoff at all. Logically, ultrasonic frequencies must move the recording stylus and make some impression on the disk, an impression that can be heard even if it can't be seen or measured. These homeopathic doeses of ultra-high-frequency sound explain the airy "open" feeling never experienced with vinyl LPs.
A pair of ticks separated by 1800 milliseconds on an LP distract your attention and spoil the sonic experience, but you can listen "through" a steady continuous series of ticks at 767-millisecond intervals on a scratched 78, because due to the endless repetition you can anticipate and ignore them.
Finally, and most important, when you drop a 78 on edge and it instantly shatters into three wedges held together at their points by the label, the sharp pang of sudden loss makes you feel how valuable and precious these disks are, giving you an emotional connection you can never have with unbreakable vinyl.
I loved the VAX/VMS documentation. It was complete and it was accurate. I loved the original Inside Macintosh documentation; it interesting because it was complete, accurate, and _knowledgeable_. It took helpfully opinionated stances, like "Usually, you will set this argument to nil," or "Returns an integer value of 0 or 1. Only the Shadow knows why it is an integer rather than a boolean."
A couple of years ago I needed greyscale images, nothing fancy but using color was just silly, and wasted over a day trying to get Microsoft .NET PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale to work. It kept throwing exceptions and I was just going nuts, unable to figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually I Googled, and found three-year-old forum postings explaining that Microsoft had never implemented that functionality. But in three years, they couldn't be bothered to remove it from their symbol tables or to update their documentation to at least indicate that it was "reserved for future implementation" or something.
Look for yourself: the online documentation still shows it as available. "The pixel format is 16 bits per pixel. The color information specifies 65536 shades of gray."
Mac OS X is just as bad. The so-called documentation looks and feels as if it were automatically built from header files.
Forum postings and crowd-sourced chatter is great--it's where I learned what I needed to know about PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale--but it's not a substitute for documentation. And, by the way, neither is sample code--it is valuable in show what works--or worked at the time it was written--but it does not show you the limitations or the boundaries, and nobody takes any responsibility for its future accuracy.
According p. 67 of the auto issue, "Look for a full test [of the Tesla Model S] in a forthcoming issue." Their test track is in Connecticut, and hopefully they will have done some tests in chilly weather.
Without even trying to do any historic digging:
Asymetrix Toolbook shipped "with" Windows well before VB. In fact the company I worked for foolishly assumed it was "part of" Windows. Toolbook, in turn, was not exactly a knockoff of HyperCard, but was certainly a member of the same genre.
LabView for the Macintosh shipped in 1986, and not only still exists but has a very solid niche in some circles. LabView is such a pure visual IDE that there are not visible lines of code as such; it is all wiring diagrams.
Bill Budge's 1983 Pinball Construction Set, for the Apple ][ and Atari, was certainly an IDE, although for a restricted class of applications.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the later incarnations of Visual Studio are considerably less "integrated" than the original Visual Basic was. Visual Studio has the feeling to me of being no more "integrated" than, say, Borland C++ or the (1985) MacPascal. Unlike VB, it just had a fairly crude resource-editor-like "drawing" environment. It feels OK when you're creating things for the first time, but the visual objects do not really "contain" code--they have a very loose and fragile connection to the code associated with them.
This is reminiscent of the "toposcope," built In the 1940s by late W. Grey Walter. It was a 22-channel EEG, or perhaps one should say EES for electroencephaloscope, which displayed a map of the brain's electrical activity in real time... if I recall correctly, on 22 "magic eye" tubes, allowing the special propagation of brain waves to be visualized.
"The idea has been around (at least) since 1968." Try 1913 or earlier, with the development of the stenotype machine, the chorded keyboard device which is used to transcribe courtroom testimony at about 200 WPM.
This may be unfair, but it's what I'd do with any other "product" as like the 2008 G1G1 XO and any other "company" that produced it. It was a while ago and hopefully things have utterly changed, but I have to say that my experience with the 2008 G1G1 program was so inexcusably bad that it poisoned MY opinion of the program. Supporters will make excuses and some may be valid, but the thing was a travesty. It fell utterly short anything we expect from a "product." It was simply not as" advertised".
The biggest disappointment to me was that it was billed as a transparent system, with all of its own OS code supposedly exposed and viewable via a "View Source" key. As delivered, and during its first year of updates anyway, that button did nothing of the sort. It would show you HTML source within the web browser, and did nothing at all elsewhere--not even give a warning.
The claimed "20 hour" battery life turned out to be about 3 hours. Several subsequent "power management" updates increased it to about 4.
At least my keyboard worked. A colleague who bought one had a keyboard failure within about a month of delivery, and it turned out that such failures were common--and that anything resembling "customer service" simply didn't exist.
Actually, I used a light pen on a PDP-1 and my problem was that I got a sort spot on the pad of my index finger. Normally, there was a shutter closed over the sensor, and you had a slide a little spring-loaded slide to uncap it. The spring was probably stronger than it should have been, and the slide had little ridges on it to give a better grip.
My finger didn't actually get blistered, but close. It got sore and painful enough to make me realize I needed to avoid using it for a day.
Vertical desktop touch screens have been with us since at least 1972. The University of Illinois' PLATO project didn't just deploy them on a significant scale, it exposed impressionable students to them.
Since then, many perfectly good touchscreen technologies have been available, commercially, and have been widely deployed e.g. in kiosks. And GUI software support behind them, e.g. Windows for Pen Computing, GO, etc. has been around for two decades.
Meanwhile, successful deployments of touchscreen technology have been widespread since, let's say, 1997 and the Palm Pilot--but always on small, handheld, horizontal-screen devices.
If large vertical touchscreens are really usable for sustained periods of time, and if they really add something of substantial value to mouse point-and-click GUI's, I find it very, very hard to believe they wouldn't have already gained traction.
I'd add that if multitouch gestures are really a significant improvement, I think it's at least as likely that they will take the form of detached, horizontal trackpads like the Apple Magic Trackpad. Horizontal surface, small-muscle coordination.
In real dollars, i.e. corrected for inflation, it's about the same as in 1979-1980.
It's interesting, without shortages and lines at the pump, how much less threatening it seems. I remember visiting my aunt that Christmas and being quite concerned because our tank wasn't big enough to hold gas for the whole round trip, and in addition to lines, many, many gas stations had short hours--there was no certainty of being able to find a gas station open on Christmas day.
I listened to the event live, and I and everyone in the room heard it as "one small step for man." And I remember at the time hearing a comment, "shouldn't he have said one small step for a man?" The audio recording is perfectly clear. There's no squelch, no gap, and nothing half-buried under static. The New York Times reported it as it was.
Neil Armstrong originally insisted he had said "a" but later acknowledged that he could not have said so. Wikipedia cites sources.
Yet some encyclopedias and history books include the "a." It is a kindly falsification of history, made out of misguided respect for Neil Armstrong's feelings.
And I find it shocking.
It is a trivial distortion, but it is a distortion of an event that was witnessed in live broadcast by half a billion people and electronically recorded.
If such a thing can be distorted simply to spare one man's feelings about a completely inconsequential mistake, what does that tell us about the trustworthiness of basic, prosaic factual details of historical events with few eyewitnesses, no electronic records, and money, politics, or national pride hanging in the balance?
I before E, except after C
Or when sounded like "A"
As in "neighbor" and "weigh"
Except seize, inveigle, either,
Weird, leisure, neither.
(Also science, conscience, sheik, ancient, being, caffeine, feisty, forfeit, protein, species, and several dozen others, including "Einstein"--twice! The amazing thing about the rule is that it works at all. It seems as if it all the exceptions are words whose spelling is so familiar that you never stop to ask...)
Christmas on Mars forms the climax of the 1955 George Pal movie, "Conquest of Space." The crew of the first ship to Mars has been debating whether God gave Mars to humankind to exploit, or just Earth. They all agree that according to the Bible God gave "the four corners of the Earth" to humankind. The question is whether God's domain extends to Mars.
If God exists on Mars, then Mars belongs to humankind as well.
Due to plot complications, the ship is forced to remain on Mars for a year, and their water supply isn't going to last that long. On Christmas Day, they are glumly playing carols on the harmonica while contemplating the prospect of their demise, when it begins to snow, providing the water they need and proving that God exists on Mars. Ergo Mars belongs to humankind, it's OK to conquer space, and the music is allowed to build to a crescendo behind the words "THE END."
The special effects aren't too good, either.
As a kid reading about how they used colchicine, a toxic compound that interferes with cell division--to create polyploid varieties of fruits and vegetables that are much larger than those with the natural chromosome complement. And I realized that surely does qualify as "genetic engineering" of a sort.
That's just a stray synaptic firing. Please don't read any subtext into that. I'm not saying today's GM is the same thing. I'm not saying frankensalmon are safe. I'm not even saying polyploid vegetables are safe. And I happen to think there's a totally legitimate concern about allowing commercial interests to rush new technology into widespread use too quickly.
All I'm saying is that I suddenly realized that they've been doing genetic engineering all my life.
The original idea wasn't vacuous. The researchers who coined the term, particularly Spearman, honestly thought they had found statistical evidence for a single common factor that could be called "intelligence." But I thought that had all been thoroughly exploded by the 1950s.
There was a guy way back in the 1960s who worked out a sort of abstract block diagram, 6 by 6 by 6, of 216 different "thingies" that represented some aspect of intellectual performance. What was it called? "Structure of Intellect." Google, click click, J. P. Guilford. So he spent a chunk of his career devising psychological tests that ought to detect each of those 216 intellectual abilities and then doing the correlations to show that each of the tests was really, truly measuring something different from the others. When I encountered his stuff, he had successfully demonstrated the existence of about 150 of those 216 skill or talents. In other words, intelligence isn't one thing, it's at least 150 different, independent, things.
And that was in the 1960s. I'd have hoped that by now IQ was lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Spearman. Whatever was keeping it alive? Racism? The standardized testing industry?
I don't quite see how this goes much beyond what was known a half-century ago, though it's helpful to see it confirmed. But if the officials want to test intelligence, they will just go on testing intelligence, whatever the science says.
I highly recommend it. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach, really tells you everything you wanted to know about space travel but were afraid to ask. In fact it tells you things you never even thought to ask about. Like "What really does happen to clothing that is kept in contact with skin without being changed, for weeks?" Like "When they see a turd floating through the cabin, due to someone's carelessness, how do astronauts handle the situation?"
After reading that book, I asked myself the question, "Well, if you won a free all-expenses-paid monthlong trip to the International Space Station, would you accept?" And my honest answer is... I... am... not... sure.
So, my hat's off to those who volunteered, and I hope they have thought it through. Not just the suicide part, but what comes before. Because it sounds like being homeless and living in a car, only not as comfortable.
I don't get it. Virtually every laptop or tablet has a choice of preconfigured, built-in amounts of RAM, flash memory, hard drive space. I realize the combinatorial issue, but why isn't a double-sized battery a user-configurable choice at purchase time? You can of course find all sorts of add-on third-party products but in general if you want 32 GB of flash memory in a tablet, you buy a tablet with 32 GB of flash memory preinstalled. You don't walk around with a USB stick or a compact flash card permanently poking out the side. Furthermore, how to say this except that users are willing to overpay for the convenience and security-blanket of preinstalled RAM and flash memory, so it could be a source of additional profit margin.
Why the reluctance to offer bigger batteries? Let the users who need longer runtimes buy longer runtimes, let the users who need lighter weight buy lighter weight. Is it fear that reviewers comparing competitive products would insist on citing the weight for comparable runtime instead of weight of the lightest unit?
There was a period of a couple of years when a web page hosted on my ISP's freebie 15 megabytes of web space was the top hit for a particular Google search. It was a good page--a lay discussion of a technical topic--and I enjoyed the ego boost, but I always wondered why since I was not aware of it's being linked from anywhere, let alone any high-traffic or high-creditibility page. Now I think I know.
(I have since contributed that page's content to Wikipedia. The article has evolved with contributions from others but is still very recognizably mine... and I recently received a the left-handed compliment of an angry email from someone who'd stumbled across my own web page and complained that I had plagiarized it from Wikipedia!)
"the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction)."
This is reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood special effect called the "glass shot," which looks perfect from the point of view of the camera, but not from anywhere else.
"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created." That's about like saying that if David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty vanish... as a magic trick... seen under special conditions from an audience confined to a special viewpoint... it is only a matter of time before he can do it for real.
They all starting with pretty much the same technology, suppliers, engineering competence. So if Apple can manage to put together a product with all of the elements on your wishlist, and nobody else can... maybe it's not actually obvious what should be done, maybe doing it is actually not that easy, and maybe Apple is actually good at it.
Steve Jobs called it "taste."
I once worked at a Fortune 500 company that seemed to be completely unable to identify good ideas on their merits. Every idea had to be validated, basically by seeing that the competition was already doing it. When their customers would start clamoring for the features and products their competition had, they would suddenly get very busy and whip out something, under pressure and in a rush. Their motto seemed to be "we'll do whatever IBM does, two years later and poorly." There's a lot of that in the computer industry.
Simple as that. Glad to know someone was taking it seriously. And your next impossible mission, should you choose to accept it... "the chimney company."
I am glad that it works "like a charm" for you on "the majority" of documents. Could you tell us what, exactly, it does for you on the minority?
I downloaded the no-cost XML converter from Microsoft for my Mac some years ago, for the excellent reason that they hadn't produced a version of Word that supported .docx yet. My experience was that at least half the time, it would run for many minutes trying to convert a document and then crash. These were not long documents, and I was never able to characterize what things about a document caused the crash. The conversions were always slow, like minutes, even when successful. And when the documents did convert, I often found that there were unacceptable formatting problems.
I found that NeoOffice--then the most appropriate Mac version of OpenOffice, was faster and more reliable at opening .docx files--and then saving them in .doc format--but it, too, often had formatting compatibility issues.