The big revolution from, say, 1973 to 1980 was making computers affordable, an activity which the IBMs of the world had no interest in whatsoever. They saw microprocessors as a direct thread to mainframes and sought use them in limited ways and protect products like the DataMaster from cannibalization by cheap general-purpose PCs. The result was that the personal computer revolution was fueled by technies and hobbyists.
From 1980 to 1990 it was all about making computers usable and seducing ordinary people who had no interest in learning how to program in BASIC or learn a traditional CLI. The result was a revolution in usability. The overall computer usability experience (not just the GUI shell, but quality, installability, and usability of applications, ease of adding peripherals, etc.) probably peaked in the Mac world circa Apple System 7.
Ever since then, it's all been slowly downhill, as user familiarity and "computer literacy" have increased the tolerance of the general public for complexity, crashes, and other things that are now accepted as "what computers are like." Usability has been in a slow but perceptible decline.
You can see it in all sorts of little things. The latest Dell computer we got has six USB ports on the back, two of which are totally unlabelled and four of which are in close proximity to the letters "A," "B," "C," "D" in circles which are spaced closely together and are not aligned with the USB connectors they are probably labelling. There are color-coded, iconically labelled jacks for speakers and headphones, and but no obvious clue as to where mouse and keyboard are supposed to plug in.
Meanwhile, every new gadget I buy has a microprocessor in it... and usability problems. The $10 thermometer I bought in a drugstore has several different measurement modes, all incomprehensible, controlled by two unlabelled buttons and an LCD screen which displays not only the temperature but smiley faces and pictures of a running stick figure while emitting incomprehensible beeps. I can guess that if it tells me my temperature is 98-something degrees it is probably in Fahrenheit mode and if it tells me it's 37-something degrees it is probably in Celsius mode, but I'm darned if I know how to set it, or what it is that I'm doing that causes the mode to change.
My cell phone comes with a 100-page manual but frequently emits strange beeps and displays messages that the manual does not explain. (In this case, the explanation is that the cell phone user interface as experienced by the user is a combination of what the phone itself does and what the specific set of services offered by Verizon does. But the user experience is one of a low-quality UI.
Thank goodness there is at least one arena in which the market is apparently still rewarding usable design.
It's too bad that silly public hysteria when they started filling the atmosphere with radioactive fallout in the 1950s doomed such projects (at least until those who remember the 1950s die off).
We coulda had Project Orion. We coulda sea-level canal across Nicaragua excavated by peaceful nuclear blasts. We coulda had electricity too cheap to meter.
All spoiled, spoiled I tell you. Just on account of a few dead sheep, some irradiated Japanese sailors, a few U.S. soldiers with cancer, a little bit of fogged film (cardboard cartons made from fallout-tainted woodpulp), and a few "Sunshine Units"-worth of strontium-90 in the milk. And some problems working the bugs out of Windscale, Detroit Fermi, Browns Ferry, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl.
The title escapes me but there was an SF story published circa 1956 about a group of astronauts whose drinking water is purified from their wastes, and get into trouble (perish, IIRC) because psychologically they cannot accept the idea and start believing that the water tastes foul...
I remember another about astronauts who, under conditions of weightlessness, start gibbering "I'm falling! I'm falling" and go mad...
I once rented a car at a Wisconsin airport on a very cold winter day. Instead of the heat being on, the air conditioning was on. There was nobody with me to help, the controls were unfamiliar and somewhat counterintuitive, I was in slow-moving but solid traffic on a long exit road that had no place to pull over, and the window frosted over solid and became opaque before I could figure out how to turn on the defroster.
All sorts of seemingly comfort-related issues (adjusting the side mirrors, turning on the defroster, turning OFF the radio) can become safety issues quickly.
The Windows code may not control the brakes, but will it control the hazard flashers?
I understand that the manuals for some of these high-end cars where everything is controlled from a computer joystick are 200 pages long, and the owners trade video-game-like "cheats" that simplify navigating through a long menu system.
Energy = energy, danger = danger
on
Jet Engine on a Chip
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Each disposable cartridge would pack as much energy as a few heavy handfuls of lithium-ion batteries."
We don't really want to carry larger and larger packages of energy on our person. As it is, we are seeing accidents like this one due to today's ordinary lithium-ion batteries. And I recently got a recall notice from Verizon about the kind of batteries used in my cell phone, so this isn't an isolated incident.
When someone tosses a 9V battery in their pocket and it gets shorted out by a coin, they are startled, yell, and pick the hot coin out of their pocket.
When a cell phone battery acts up, Shelley Kaehr got a handful of battery acid and set fire to the floor.
Multiply that by "a few heavy handfuls" and you start to get the possibility of really serious personal injury.
What we need are breakthroughs on the power consumption side, not ever-increasing power supplies
Christensen tells you not to listen to your customers too much.
Drucker says that above all you must listen to your customers.
Peters says you must have a corporate culture in place and it's more important that you follow the values of the corporate culture than what those values happen to be.
I'm afraid I don't remember the name of the current that stress how vital it is to deliberately piss off and drive away the customers that are costing you money (e.g. by asking for tech support)...
Whatever you feel like doing with your customers, you can find a management "expert" to back you up.
Color TV was launched in the late 1950s, amid heavy advertising. I lived in a very upscale suburban community at the time and knew a number of early adopters.
It was a mess. Nothing on them was watchable but cartoons, where it didn't really matter whether if a red shirt became orange when the character walked to the left side of the screen or magenta when he walked to the right. On ordinary programs people could sort of get the flesh tones in an acceptable range by jumping up every five minutes to fiddle with the controls, but everything would go to hell whenever there was a commercial break or a different program.
Basically everybody denied that this happened--in theory it didn't happen if your set was properly set up by a technician and never moved and all the broadcasters did what they were supposed to do. In practice, people just enjoyed the fact that the picture was in color, even if all the people on the screen looked as if they were about to die of cyanosis.
It took a good decade-and-a-half before broadcasting practice and self-adjusting television sets co-evolved to the point where an ordinary joe could just shell out $400, have the set delivered and set up, connect it to an ordinary-quality antenna or cable TV outlet, and expect to be able to sit down and watch television all evening, switching channels freely, without having to leap up to fiddle with the knobs.
It will probably take a decade-and-a-half for HDTV to "be perfected," as they used to say.
Of course, maybe people won't care. I have a friend who bought a more expensive digital camera than she wanted last year because someone else convinced her that she had to have five megapixels. It came out of the box with a 16 megabyte card and the resolution set to "standard quality" which happened to be 1600x1200. Having paid a premium for five megapixels, she has happily shot pictures all year at two megapixels and is perfectly pleased with the results.
So perhaps people will be perfectly happy with low-definition HDTV, just as they were happy with off-color television.
Don't astronomers use some fairly powerful sky-pointing lasers in connection with "adaptive optics" (which correct for the imperfections in the optical characteristics of the atmosphere?)
Of course they're supposed to clear their uses of these lasers with the FAA...
It's not obvious how to protect pilots directly from this, but it would seem to be fairly feasible to protect them indirectly by building a device that could track down the sources of the laser exposure.
It would be some kind of recording device to place in a plane that views the ground through a wide-angle lens and constantly records the view, together with GPS coordinates and altitude. Assuming that the laser is located on the ground, it would seem as if it would be fairly easy to detect laser exposures and determine the ground location of the laser.
...about as much as I trust the statements that CD-R's will last for a century.
After all, it's such a confident, unqualified statement. The process, they say, "will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years." Now, me, I'm no expert and I'm constantly getting taken by surprise by little adjustments in our understanding of the physical universe... you know, like plate tectonics and black holes and asteroid collisions causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So, I'm really glad there are people that know what will happen over the next 200,000 years. People who can also assure me "We know that nuclear plants work and are safe." I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
But those Brits are real experts. After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale.
Unless the article is leaving out some, dare I say key piece of information... in about a week, students will have figured out that the computer doesn't know whether the USB token belongs to the person who inserts it or not.
In about two weeks, they will be borrowing them from older siblings.
In about three weeks, there will be a brisk trade in USB tokens issued to older students who have no interest in the school-approved content that is actually linked to the key, but great interest in money.
In about three months, forged adult-ID USB token will be for sale on eBay.
Even a plain old ID card has a signature and a photo on it, so someone can see whether it matches the holder of the card or not. But these anonymous bits of colored plastic are just an invitation to abuse.
In a corporate setting, I suppose you've signed something that says you're responsible for all use made of the token, and you would be suspiciously unable to do your job if you loaned it to someone else... and subject to dismissal if someone finds out. I don't see how that can be applied in a school context.
Unless they were planning to Superglue the token to the kid?
In theory, if Jeeves actually did a good job of understanding natural language--as good as decade-old AI--it would be very useful for certain kinds of searches that are difficult on Google (without using a certain amount of lateral thinking).
For example, there is a series of detective novels by in which the author Jack London, best known as the author of "The Call of the Wild," is a character (the detective, in fact).
If you can't remember the author or title and want to find these books, it is very difficult to do so with Google. Most searches return mishmashes of results about the author Jack London and detective novels by other authors.
If the premise of AskJeeves were correct, it would be perfect for this search.
But, in fact, if you type in "What are some detective novels in which Jack London appears as a character?" you get exactly the same kind of mishmash as Google gives you. AskJeeves isn't, for example, smart enough to go in turn to amazon.com and search in "books" for "Jack London detective" (which returns "The Golden Gate Murders" by Peter King as the second hit).
AskJeeves doesn't seem to do much more than throw away irrelevant words.
If the "natural language" feature of AskJeeves worked, it would be part of my search toolkit. In fact, every time I've used AskJeeves, the results I get are inferior to those I get with Google or Yahoo.
I wonder how much money McAfee spent in legal advice before doing this... I wonder how long before the spyware vendors sue, saying that their software performs a valuable service, as shown by the fact that users deliberately and knowingly install it...
Should be no surprise
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is an old, old issue. This was mentioned in the trade press about the time that the iPod was announced, and again when the iTunes Music Store was announced. During the mid-1990s, all music-related Macintosh gear (MIDI interfaces, etc.) was available only from third parties because Apple didn't want to violate the settlement.
Apple must have seen this coming, must have consciously violated the settlement, and must surely must have made some calculations of what it would eventually mean in costs.
Furthermore, there's a sort of precedent for Apple's taking calculated risks with trademarks. Steve Jobs decide on the name "Macintosh;" announced it within Apple; claimed (falsely!) within Apple that he had cut a deal with McIntosh Laboratories, a maker of high-end audio gear. Only after the name was set in stone did Apple approach McIntosh. Whatever the details, Apple gambled and won, because McIntosh Labs did agree to let them use the name.
The notice explains clearly why they are doing it: the hundreds of WiFi access points set up by students are, in fact, interfering with each other.
This shows two things. a) Yes, folks, it really is necessary to have a regulatory agency like the FCC control use of the frequency spectrum. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace will not magically solve technical engineering problems by itself.
b) The FCC currently isn't doing its job; they are allowing companies to set standards and sell gear that does interfere.
(This is nothing new, of course. The reason why your television set only picks up channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, etc. that the FCC botched the initial allocation of VHF spectrum. Adjacent channel assignments (2, 3, 4) weren't supposed to interfere with each other, but did)
Assuming it works perfectly, what this system has to do is make an artificially-intelligent guess as to what the low-resolution picture is showing, synthesize a high-res version of its guess, and show you that. Your brain can do the same thing, but you're aware of some effort and stress in the process (and you're also aware of uncertainty).
What will happen when you know that a friend of yours is sitting in the stadium at a football game that you're watching at home and you zoom in on a couple of pinkish pixels that represent the place where you know he is sitting? Whose face will it display when you zoom in? A generic anime-like face? Your friend's face? What?
When it guesses wrong, the mistakes it makes will be dillies.
The article said it showed that a dark spot in the river was a hippopotamus. How did it know? Did it have a database that said "this film takes place in a locale where dark spots in the river are probably hippopotami?" Or when you zoom in on dark spots in other bodies of water, will it deduce and render a hippopotamus, too? Hippopotami in the Okeefenokee swamp? In the Hudson river? In Walden Pond?
As with colorized films, the effect will be exciting for about a week. Then your brain will catch on that it is being cheated, and the zoomed in images will look clear and sharp yet, subtlely, unsatisfying, because it is showing only what the brain already knows is there... or fake, stereotyped detail that will look phony once you catch on to its characteristic "look." Finally, the only fun in the system will be deliberately zooming in on things you know it will make mistakes on to see the comic effect.
Yes, there are certain phrases that alway tell me that I'm hearing the sound of an axe being ground.
One is the "thus-and-such is dead" meme. First of all, who cares? Most technologies experience very slow declines. The floppy became "dead" for me when I bought a PowerMac G4 in 2000 which didn't include a floppy drive, and at the instance when I decided I didn't to spend $89 for an an add-on external floppy drive. But it's still "alive" for my wife because the Win98 box she bought at about the same time has one.
Why should anyone bother to try to declare the exact point at which some slowly-declining technology is "dead?" Usually, it is motivated by some company that hopes to influence consumers to stop using it. I notice the reporter spoke to Dell and Gateway. Very likely there are product managers at those companies responsible for some models that don't have floppies, who are annoyed that those pesky customers persist in buying floppy-equipped models instead and hoping this article will influence consumers.
The other one is the phrase "X-killer." This always seems to be traceable to marketing and sales and is never close to being true. The "X-killers" never have more than a rough similarity to the product they're supposed to be killing. Let me see, which IBM product was supposed to be the "VAX-killer?" Adobe InDesign was said to be a "Quark killer" when it was introduced in... when? 2001? Indeed Quark is experiencing what looks like a long slow, painful decline, due mostly to self-inflicted wounds, partly as a result of outsourced software development that neither succeeded brilliantly nor failed utterly, and somewhat due to InDesign... but the process is taking years and years and years.
All I see something that says "Support UT" (University of Texas) that appears to be promoting donations to the University. I see a color portrait of Dr. Nancy Kwallek and no actual data or statistics or description of methods used.
Do you have a citation for the study itself? The article, for some reason, does not give one.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I'm just talking about the machine we received, which my company resells with our equipment.
It came with a Dell-branded USB keyboard and mouse. It has no PS/2-style ports on it.
And it came with no manual. Presumably we pay less for them that way.
Just let me know when they find Mark Twain's Curious Republic of Gondour
I don't think I would deliberately try to get a criminal infuriated at me.
I don't even try to get ordinary citizens infuriated at me.
Nigeria is only a few hundred dollars away (these days it may be more relevant to measure airfare in dollars than miles).
The big revolution from, say, 1973 to 1980 was making computers affordable, an activity which the IBMs of the world had no interest in whatsoever. They saw microprocessors as a direct thread to mainframes and sought use them in limited ways and protect products like the DataMaster from cannibalization by cheap general-purpose PCs. The result was that the personal computer revolution was fueled by technies and hobbyists.
From 1980 to 1990 it was all about making computers usable and seducing ordinary people who had no interest in learning how to program in BASIC or learn a traditional CLI. The result was a revolution in usability. The overall computer usability experience (not just the GUI shell, but quality, installability, and usability of applications, ease of adding peripherals, etc.) probably peaked in the Mac world circa Apple System 7.
Ever since then, it's all been slowly downhill, as user familiarity and "computer literacy" have increased the tolerance of the general public for complexity, crashes, and other things that are now accepted as "what computers are like." Usability has been in a slow but perceptible decline.
You can see it in all sorts of little things. The latest Dell computer we got has six USB ports on the back, two of which are totally unlabelled and four of which are in close proximity to the letters "A," "B," "C," "D" in circles which are spaced closely together and are not aligned with the USB connectors they are probably labelling. There are color-coded, iconically labelled jacks for speakers and headphones, and but no obvious clue as to where mouse and keyboard are supposed to plug in.
Meanwhile, every new gadget I buy has a microprocessor in it... and usability problems. The $10 thermometer I bought in a drugstore has several different measurement modes, all incomprehensible, controlled by two unlabelled buttons and an LCD screen which displays not only the temperature but smiley faces and pictures of a running stick figure while emitting incomprehensible beeps. I can guess that if it tells me my temperature is 98-something degrees it is probably in Fahrenheit mode and if it tells me it's 37-something degrees it is probably in Celsius mode, but I'm darned if I know how to set it, or what it is that I'm doing that causes the mode to change.
My cell phone comes with a 100-page manual but frequently emits strange beeps and displays messages that the manual does not explain. (In this case, the explanation is that the cell phone user interface as experienced by the user is a combination of what the phone itself does and what the specific set of services offered by Verizon does. But the user experience is one of a low-quality UI.
Thank goodness there is at least one arena in which the market is apparently still rewarding usable design.
It's too bad that silly public hysteria when they started filling the atmosphere with radioactive fallout in the 1950s doomed such projects (at least until those who remember the 1950s die off).
We coulda had Project Orion. We coulda sea-level canal across Nicaragua excavated by peaceful nuclear blasts. We coulda had electricity too cheap to meter.
All spoiled, spoiled I tell you. Just on account of a few dead sheep, some irradiated Japanese sailors, a few U.S. soldiers with cancer, a little bit of fogged film (cardboard cartons made from fallout-tainted woodpulp), and a few "Sunshine Units"-worth of strontium-90 in the milk. And some problems working the bugs out of Windscale, Detroit Fermi, Browns Ferry, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl.
...no, I'm not kidding and I'm not talking about slashdotting. So special thanks are due to the poster of the "In case of slashdotting" article.
I haven't been able to connect to The Register for three days now, BTW. I'm glad that others have been able to.
The title escapes me but there was an SF story published circa 1956 about a group of astronauts whose drinking water is purified from their wastes, and get into trouble (perish, IIRC) because psychologically they cannot accept the idea and start believing that the water tastes foul...
I remember another about astronauts who, under conditions of weightlessness, start gibbering "I'm falling! I'm falling" and go mad...
I once rented a car at a Wisconsin airport on a very cold winter day. Instead of the heat being on, the air conditioning was on. There was nobody with me to help, the controls were unfamiliar and somewhat counterintuitive, I was in slow-moving but solid traffic on a long exit road that had no place to pull over, and the window frosted over solid and became opaque before I could figure out how to turn on the defroster.
All sorts of seemingly comfort-related issues (adjusting the side mirrors, turning on the defroster, turning OFF the radio) can become safety issues quickly.
The Windows code may not control the brakes, but will it control the hazard flashers?
I understand that the manuals for some of these high-end cars where everything is controlled from a computer joystick are 200 pages long, and the owners trade video-game-like "cheats" that simplify navigating through a long menu system.
"Each disposable cartridge would pack as much energy as a few heavy handfuls of lithium-ion batteries."
We don't really want to carry larger and larger packages of energy on our person. As it is, we are seeing accidents like this one due to today's ordinary lithium-ion batteries. And I recently got a recall notice from Verizon about the kind of batteries used in my cell phone, so this isn't an isolated incident.
When someone tosses a 9V battery in their pocket and it gets shorted out by a coin, they are startled, yell, and pick the hot coin out of their pocket.
When a cell phone battery acts up, Shelley Kaehr got a handful of battery acid and set fire to the floor.
Multiply that by "a few heavy handfuls" and you start to get the possibility of really serious personal injury.
What we need are breakthroughs on the power consumption side, not ever-increasing power supplies
Available candidates:
Christensen tells you not to listen to your customers too much.
Drucker says that above all you must listen to your customers.
Peters says you must have a corporate culture in place and it's more important that you follow the values of the corporate culture than what those values happen to be.
I'm afraid I don't remember the name of the current that stress how vital it is to deliberately piss off and drive away the customers that are costing you money (e.g. by asking for tech support)...
Whatever you feel like doing with your customers, you can find a management "expert" to back you up.
Storing CO2 emissions underground is not the same as zero emissions.
Moving oil from underground to the surface is not the same as "producing" oil.
And breeder reactors do not create more fuel than they consume.
These may all be worthy activities, but let's try not to engage in magical thinking.
As Barry Commoner observed: "Everything must go someplace. Everything is connected to everything else. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
"Apart from a tendency to burst into flame and crash, the Hindenburg is an efficient mode of transportation with a luxurious ride..."
"The Tacoma Narrows bridge is a slim and elegant marvel of civil engineering, apart from a tendency to twist and shake in high winds..."
"But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"
Color TV was launched in the late 1950s, amid heavy advertising. I lived in a very upscale suburban community at the time and knew a number of early adopters.
It was a mess. Nothing on them was watchable but cartoons, where it didn't really matter whether if a red shirt became orange when the character walked to the left side of the screen or magenta when he walked to the right. On ordinary programs people could sort of get the flesh tones in an acceptable range by jumping up every five minutes to fiddle with the controls, but everything would go to hell whenever there was a commercial break or a different program.
Basically everybody denied that this happened--in theory it didn't happen if your set was properly set up by a technician and never moved and all the broadcasters did what they were supposed to do. In practice, people just enjoyed the fact that the picture was in color, even if all the people on the screen looked as if they were about to die of cyanosis.
It took a good decade-and-a-half before broadcasting practice and self-adjusting television sets co-evolved to the point where an ordinary joe could just shell out $400, have the set delivered and set up, connect it to an ordinary-quality antenna or cable TV outlet, and expect to be able to sit down and watch television all evening, switching channels freely, without having to leap up to fiddle with the knobs.
It will probably take a decade-and-a-half for HDTV to "be perfected," as they used to say.
Of course, maybe people won't care. I have a friend who bought a more expensive digital camera than she wanted last year because someone else convinced her that she had to have five megapixels. It came out of the box with a 16 megabyte card and the resolution set to "standard quality" which happened to be 1600x1200. Having paid a premium for five megapixels, she has happily shot pictures all year at two megapixels and is perfectly pleased with the results.
So perhaps people will be perfectly happy with low-definition HDTV, just as they were happy with off-color television.
Don't astronomers use some fairly powerful sky-pointing lasers in connection with "adaptive optics" (which correct for the imperfections in the optical characteristics of the atmosphere?)
Of course they're supposed to clear their uses of these lasers with the FAA...
It's not obvious how to protect pilots directly from this, but it would seem to be fairly feasible to protect them indirectly by building a device that could track down the sources of the laser exposure.
It would be some kind of recording device to place in a plane that views the ground through a wide-angle lens and constantly records the view, together with GPS coordinates and altitude. Assuming that the laser is located on the ground, it would seem as if it would be fairly easy to detect laser exposures and determine the ground location of the laser.
A year to develop? $100,000 each to manufacture?
...about as much as I trust the statements that CD-R's will last for a century.
After all, it's such a confident, unqualified statement. The process, they say, "will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years." Now, me, I'm no expert and I'm constantly getting taken by surprise by little adjustments in our understanding of the physical universe... you know, like plate tectonics and black holes and asteroid collisions causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So, I'm really glad there are people that know what will happen over the next 200,000 years. People who can also assure me "We know that nuclear plants work and are safe." I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
But those Brits are real experts. After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale.
Unless the article is leaving out some, dare I say key piece of information... in about a week, students will have figured out that the computer doesn't know whether the USB token belongs to the person who inserts it or not.
In about two weeks, they will be borrowing them from older siblings.
In about three weeks, there will be a brisk trade in USB tokens issued to older students who have no interest in the school-approved content that is actually linked to the key, but great interest in money.
In about three months, forged adult-ID USB token will be for sale on eBay.
Even a plain old ID card has a signature and a photo on it, so someone can see whether it matches the holder of the card or not. But these anonymous bits of colored plastic are just an invitation to abuse.
In a corporate setting, I suppose you've signed something that says you're responsible for all use made of the token, and you would be suspiciously unable to do your job if you loaned it to someone else... and subject to dismissal if someone finds out. I don't see how that can be applied in a school context.
Unless they were planning to Superglue the token to the kid?
In theory, if Jeeves actually did a good job of understanding natural language--as good as decade-old AI--it would be very useful for certain kinds of searches that are difficult on Google (without using a certain amount of lateral thinking).
For example, there is a series of detective novels by in which the author Jack London, best known as the author of "The Call of the Wild," is a character (the detective, in fact).
If you can't remember the author or title and want to find these books, it is very difficult to do so with Google. Most searches return mishmashes of results about the author Jack London and detective novels by other authors.
If the premise of AskJeeves were correct, it would be perfect for this search.
But, in fact, if you type in "What are some detective novels in which Jack London appears as a character?" you get exactly the same kind of mishmash as Google gives you. AskJeeves isn't, for example, smart enough to go in turn to amazon.com and search in "books" for "Jack London detective" (which returns "The Golden Gate Murders" by Peter King as the second hit).
AskJeeves doesn't seem to do much more than throw away irrelevant words.
If the "natural language" feature of AskJeeves worked, it would be part of my search toolkit. In fact, every time I've used AskJeeves, the results I get are inferior to those I get with Google or Yahoo.
I wonder how much money McAfee spent in legal advice before doing this... I wonder how long before the spyware vendors sue, saying that their software performs a valuable service, as shown by the fact that users deliberately and knowingly install it...
This is an old, old issue. This was mentioned in the trade press about the time that the iPod was announced, and again when the iTunes Music Store was announced. During the mid-1990s, all music-related Macintosh gear (MIDI interfaces, etc.) was available only from third parties because Apple didn't want to violate the settlement.
Apple must have seen this coming, must have consciously violated the settlement, and must surely must have made some calculations of what it would eventually mean in costs.
Furthermore, there's a sort of precedent for Apple's taking calculated risks with trademarks. Steve Jobs decide on the name "Macintosh;" announced it within Apple; claimed (falsely!) within Apple that he had cut a deal with McIntosh Laboratories, a maker of high-end audio gear. Only after the name was set in stone did Apple approach McIntosh. Whatever the details, Apple gambled and won, because McIntosh Labs did agree to let them use the name.
The notice explains clearly why they are doing it: the hundreds of WiFi access points set up by students are, in fact, interfering with each other.
This shows two things. a) Yes, folks, it really is necessary to have a regulatory agency like the FCC control use of the frequency spectrum. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace will not magically solve technical engineering problems by itself.
b) The FCC currently isn't doing its job; they are allowing companies to set standards and sell gear that does interfere.
(This is nothing new, of course. The reason why your television set only picks up channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, etc. that the FCC botched the initial allocation of VHF spectrum. Adjacent channel assignments (2, 3, 4) weren't supposed to interfere with each other, but did)
Assuming it works perfectly, what this system has to do is make an artificially-intelligent guess as to what the low-resolution picture is showing, synthesize a high-res version of its guess, and show you that. Your brain can do the same thing, but you're aware of some effort and stress in the process (and you're also aware of uncertainty).
What will happen when you know that a friend of yours is sitting in the stadium at a football game that you're watching at home and you zoom in on a couple of pinkish pixels that represent the place where you know he is sitting? Whose face will it display when you zoom in? A generic anime-like face? Your friend's face? What?
When it guesses wrong, the mistakes it makes will be dillies.
The article said it showed that a dark spot in the river was a hippopotamus. How did it know? Did it have a database that said "this film takes place in a locale where dark spots in the river are probably hippopotami?" Or when you zoom in on dark spots in other bodies of water, will it deduce and render a hippopotamus, too? Hippopotami in the Okeefenokee swamp? In the Hudson river? In Walden Pond?
As with colorized films, the effect will be exciting for about a week. Then your brain will catch on that it is being cheated, and the zoomed in images will look clear and sharp yet, subtlely, unsatisfying, because it is showing only what the brain already knows is there... or fake, stereotyped detail that will look phony once you catch on to its characteristic "look." Finally, the only fun in the system will be deliberately zooming in on things you know it will make mistakes on to see the comic effect.
Yes, there are certain phrases that alway tell me that I'm hearing the sound of an axe being ground.
One is the "thus-and-such is dead" meme. First of all, who cares? Most technologies experience very slow declines. The floppy became "dead" for me when I bought a PowerMac G4 in 2000 which didn't include a floppy drive, and at the instance when I decided I didn't to spend $89 for an an add-on external floppy drive. But it's still "alive" for my wife because the Win98 box she bought at about the same time has one.
Why should anyone bother to try to declare the exact point at which some slowly-declining technology is "dead?" Usually, it is motivated by some company that hopes to influence consumers to stop using it. I notice the reporter spoke to Dell and Gateway. Very likely there are product managers at those companies responsible for some models that don't have floppies, who are annoyed that those pesky customers persist in buying floppy-equipped models instead and hoping this article will influence consumers.
The other one is the phrase "X-killer." This always seems to be traceable to marketing and sales and is never close to being true. The "X-killers" never have more than a rough similarity to the product they're supposed to be killing. Let me see, which IBM product was supposed to be the "VAX-killer?" Adobe InDesign was said to be a "Quark killer" when it was introduced in... when? 2001? Indeed Quark is experiencing what looks like a long slow, painful decline, due mostly to self-inflicted wounds, partly as a result of outsourced software development that neither succeeded brilliantly nor failed utterly, and somewhat due to InDesign... but the process is taking years and years and years.
What study, exactly?
All I see something that says "Support UT" (University of Texas) that appears to be promoting donations to the University. I see a color portrait of Dr. Nancy Kwallek and no actual data or statistics or description of methods used.
Do you have a citation for the study itself? The article, for some reason, does not give one.
For your ROFL pleasure, take a look at this in-depth tech support article: How to determine if you have a Hewlett-Packard iPod