Not sure if this is exactly a right, or not, but remember that Al Gore built the Internet with your tax dollars. Theoretically, as a 1/250,000,000th owner, you should have unfettered access. Microsoft walling off parts of the Internet as Win-only or IE-only is kind of like General Motors walling off parts of the D.W.D. Interstate Highway system for only GM brand cars.
Someone metamod down the libertarian twit who modded the parent offtopic.
The fact that the Internet was built originally with public money is actually an important point.
However as well as getting the initial funds passed to set up the Internet, Gore was also largely responsible for the structure of the 'privatisation' scheme under which private sector ISPs took over the function of the NSF backbone.
One byproduct of this is that we now get SPAM. The other byproduct is that the Internet does not depend on a rickety T1 for its backbone which would probably be a wee bit inadequate to meet current demand.
I don't have access to a recording or a transcript, but I'm fairly sure it was "I took the initiative in creating the internet." He didn't provide funding for the creation of HTML or HTTP; nor did he provide funds for httpd or apache development.
You are correct in your initial point but wrong in the second. NCSA was funded through one of the programs that Gore started when he was in Congress, the NCSA browser and Web server were built with that money. Apache began on the NCSA code base.
When Tim and I came to the US it was because the US govt were willing to fund our research. They gave the initial money to start the Web consortium. That was after the Web was already quite successful but it is untrue to state that the Clinton administration had nothing to do with it. Gore in particular was a major supporter within the administration. They used the Web during the 1992 election campaign when there were fewer than 100 users.
The misquote was by the way quite deliberate. What happened was that Declan McCullogh wrote an initial story in Wired ridiculing the idea that Gore had any involvement. He then went to his right wing creep friends at the Cato institute who put out a PR release based on his initial story. He then wrote a followup story in which he introduced the 'Gore Invented Internet' carnard which his friends at Cato took to their Republican allies who issued PR to the mainstream media.
It was from start to finish a right wing smear campaign. The only reason why it worked is that the media don't check their stories, even when there is a readily available videotape and transcript.
It is somewhat surprising that so many people worked themselves into a lather of self-richeous indignation on our behalf. Back in the early days of the Web the press was quite willing to print without question the Netscape PR pieces which asserted that Marc Andressen was the sole 'true' inventor.
If you want a giggle go to a remainder shop and buy a copy of 'Netscape Time' which some flack wrote for Jim Clarke. It is notable that Tim is the only member of the W3 team who did not join Netscape who is mentioned in the index. There are three references and on each occasion Clark makes an untrue statement to diminish Tim's contribution.
As Oscar Wilde put it 'choose your enemies carefully'. Marc and Jim made the mistake of choosing to make me an enemy and I set out to make sure that Microsoft became their enemy. They have only themeselves to blame for the failure of their company.
Dealing only with technologies available today, I would say putting GRPS in the laptop is reinventing the wheel. The laptop will have bluetooth/802.11.
Err hello, what laptop is there that offers Bluetooth today?
GPRS has always been intended to support PCMCIA format plug in cards.
What you call 'reinventing the wheel' I call 'introducing a completely unnecessary technology into the process'.
So when you want to look up a phone number from your laptop, you will need to call your laptop from your phone? And then more phone numbers for your PDA, digital camera, and mp3 player too?
Actully with SS7 layer switching it is pretty easy to do call forwarding. But you only need a phone number to receive voice calls, not to make 'em.
I would rather mess with that than trying to get my cell phone to make data calls for my laptop. For a start I don't want to be messing with two sets of batteries. On most of the occasions I need to do data communications I have my cell turned off because I am in a meeting. That is if I bother to carry it which I don't most of the time. But having to worry about two wireless links to fall off?
If you want wireless keyboard, Logitech sell one already. I have one in my office, it is OK but I am not too keen on its security. I can see a small advantage to having a standard there, but I would much rather there was something less meglomanical in its scope and had real security not more amateur hour stuff like WEP.
The big idea of bluetooth appears to be to make my cell phone talk to my laptop. Rather than stick a bluetooth card in my laptop, buy a new $600 cell phone and then try to get the two to talk I would get a GPRS card for the laptop. Calling plans will soon adapt to that use, they have in Europe.
In the home there are very few devices that I would want to have on a wireless network that do not have an AC cord attached - so power consumption is not a big issue.
The other problem with Bluetooth is that it tries to define its own stack for everything. The developers appear to be part of some OSI holdout 'IP will go away' group.
On the security side 802.11b screwed it with WEP, only that does not matter that much because you can still use IPSEC. With Bluetooth the security model is homegrown as is the encryption algorithm. If someone wants to make a name for themselves in the crypto world go hack the Bluetooth crypto.
The author of the piece is a well known bluetooth developer. When a group like that suddenly starts saying 'we can work together' it is pretty much an admission that the other side has established a dominant market position that can't be reversed.
If there is genuinely a need for a low power Wireless lan then I would much prefer that someone do 'low power 802.11b' rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel.
I used to muck arround setting machines up to dual boot. In the end the best solution I found was to buy removable disk racks so I could simply plug in a disk with the appropriate O/S - much easier than mucking about in loader hell.
However these days I simply run Linux on one of the older machines and X-Window to it as needed from one of the Windows boxes. My TombRaider box makes a pretty good X-Terminal.
When a PC has an 18 month life from being bleeding edge to obsolesence the boxes soon start to mount up.
It would be nice if the Apple cultists could recognize that there is a big difference between saying that the iPod is not markedly different from other MP3 players on offer and saying that it is utterly worthless.
The iPod does have size and weight and battery life in its favor. These are amongst the most important features for a handheld device.
The User interface issue simply can't be judged at this point. None of the people blathering on about how great the device is have seen one, let alone used one for any length of time. What they are doing is looking at the clunky demo on the Apple site and extrapolating from what they think the demands they would make of the device would be.
Having used an archos device extensively I really don't consider the user interface to be problematic in any respect whatsoever. The archos device appears as a disk drive. To load files onto the unit you just drag them onto the disk drive. If the copied file is an MP3 the archos device allows it to be played. It can also be copied off the device just like any other file.
In fact the Archos device UI is almost certainly going to be easier to use than the iPod because unlike the iPod the Archos device is not compromised by the clunky copyright management limitations that make the creative labs nomad unit a pig to use.
On the firewire issue, I really see no advantage whatsoever over USB. With 6Gb I don't copy music files onto or off the device very often. In fact I have only got 50 disks ripped so far which takes just over 2Gb so moving the files is pretty much a one time operation. When I do get round to ripping more CDs I would probably buy the 20Gb unit if necessary so I could keep my whole collection with me rather than keep loading and unloading them.
So yes, the firewire is nice but I would not rate it a major plus given my experience of using a similar device.
The major minus of the device is it is designed soley for Apple users. It is an attempt to solidify the Apple computer user base but there is nothing here for non-Apple users as Apple itself admits.
As a result I think the iPod is more likely to be a Newton than a Palm. If I was an Apple shareholder I would be very upset about the iPod. Consumer electronics are a notoriously cut throat business. Development of a peripheral of this complexity that only connects to Apple systems is unlikely to see a return of the investment.
It is a pretty good bet that the iPod will not be a winner. The economics all favor the competition. If the market demand is for a smaller size and a lithium battery then the competition will respond, in the meantime Archos, creative and the rest have a heck of a lot more room for discounting their $250 units than Apple has in their $400 product. Apple can at best sell 5% of the units the competition do - and that if the monopolize the Apple user market which they won't. They just don't have the same ecconomies of scale.
Reading the article again I think it is quite likely that Whitt has quite a different target in mind from the one that people think.
Although Whitt 'invented' Public Key Cryptography he is not a cryptographer in the sense many on the list seem to think. He is not interested much in algorithms, of the 20 odd times I have heard him speak in public or private I can only recall one occasion where we were discussing an algorithm and that was in the context of the Venona decrypts.
Whitt's almost exclusive interest is public policy concerning privacy and security. While Whitt has probably cleared his talk through Sun's PR office he is quite obviously the instigator of the piece.
The point he is making is much broader than.NET, as I am sure Whitt will explain later on. For the time being however it makes tactical sense to identify the problems with newly proposed schemes even though the real exposure comes from existing databases.
What I believe Whitt is up to is re-interpreting the privacy concerns of the pre 9/11 world as security threats in the post 9/11 world.
Not. Sun has been completely open about every aspect of java;
To the poiunt of sicking its lawyers on companies that have the temerity to develop their own extensions in their own way.
The point of having open source is so that you have control. With Java the control is firmly under the thumb of Sun. Ergo, Java is not open, nor will it ever be open if Sun gets its way.
It isn't just Microsoft who have been shut out of any influence on how the language develops. It has from start to finish been a sun only program.
Not quite. PICS had the idea built in that anyone could develop their own rating system. This scheme appears to be monolithic.
The problem with PICS is that it was politically naive. Jim Miller, the guy driving the scheme at W3C just did not understnd what he was up to. Several others at W3C did and did not like it.
The idiotic part of PICS was the idea of inserting W3C into the pitched battle between the pro and anti CDA forces. Its a bit like trying to mediate a compromise for the abortion debate. The pro-CDA people did not give a hoot about protecting children. They wanted from start to finish to control what adults could read.
The idea of the 'anyone can be a censor' scheme was to be a wrecking ammendment, I know, I invented it. The religious right lost all interest in promoting PICS the minute they realised it could not give them what they wanted - the ability to ram their morality down the throat of the rest of society.
PICS could have gained wide support in the 'adult entertainment' industry. In Germany there is a body (GUPTA?) that rates hard core porn so that punters buying it know they are getting the real hard core explicit stuff they want.
Whst killed PICS was the coertion by Congress. As soon as they passed the CDA the debate was polarized and passed to the courts where the congress was bound to lose. Adult sites were not going to rate their sites because to do so would be seen as supporting the enemy.
Absent the threat that X-Rated sites would be cut off completely most providers would rate since the ratings would give the search engines the ability to drive customers to their sites.
In the recent W3C architecture slides 'PICS' appears as an 'obsolete' technology that W3C is moving away from. The intention appears to be to move to RDF.
The article just does not give enough info to guess what the technical base would be. It would be stupid to try and roll out a labelling scheme that required the deployment of a whole new generation of browsers. I can't see the need.
What is likely however that this attempt is based on the idea of building a partition of the Web that is designed for and targetted at children rather than trying to reduce the entire Web to a child's level.
Like most./ comparison articles the author of this one has pretty obvious axe to grind.
I don't care who is administering the systems but one person is not going to have 500 systems out of their boxes, let alone fully configured in under 4 months.
Hardware failures alone are going to keep this guy pretty busy from then on.
The author clearly either has no experience of managing large numbers of machines or was completely unresponsive to his users if he did.
Any idiot can manage 500 machines if he does diddly squat.
whatever. Did you even llok at the interface that is demonstraded at the apple site? I suppose a command line would be better.......
None of the existing products have a command line interface.
You cannot evaluate a UI from a web site, you have to have the device and use it for some time.
I have had the Archos device a year, the UI is not a problem. The apple UI might be better, I doubt it however. When I was using macs four years ago it was clear that their lead in the UI field was long gone.
Apple's device costs $400 vs $250 for competing devices that are already available.
But Apple clearly will sell lots as Mac-heads are already convincing each other of the obvious superiority of the device before they have even seen one!
Apple wants that 95% figure to go down. That's why the iPod is not supported on other platforms yet. Apple is trying to give users reason to want to buy Apple Macs.
Yeah, apple will chain their new products to their failing market share in the desktop computer world. Thus guaranteeing that they will fail.
I really don't think that anyone is going to buy an iPod then make the switch to Mac because of it.
Meanwhile people who use Mac and PC will have good reason to buy something that works with both.
This is exactly the type of interfce manpultion game that is the reason why I will never buy anything off apple. Their whole marketing plan seems to be to keep changing interfaces so that anything you buy today will turn out to be incompatible and unsupported 24 months later.
Firewire standards support is pretty good across the different vendors. However, JVC is the absolute worst for absolute compliance. Blame JVC not the firewire standard for any problems you may have had integrating your JVC product into with your computer.
I don't care who is responsible. I know that USB has never given me any trouble while firewire has given me plenty. Conclusion, the stuff ain't ready for prime time in the consumer market.
When I bought the JVC camera there were no firewire boards arround. So having smug gits telling me that it is my 'fault' I paid $1800 for a DV camcorder that does not meet the 'standard' does not exactly endear me to it.
I would rather wait ten minutes to transfer my CDs than spend $150 extra so I can risk spending three hours mucking about with broken drivers for a standard that is not quite there.
This strikes me as a typical apple product. It is not innovative in any sense except in the styling. It is 50% more expensive than models with similar capabilities. The 'superiority' of the UI is mainly a function of whether you are an existing apple user.
The firewire vs USB debate leaves me cold. Try sitting down and ripping 20 CDs, then ask yourself 5 hours later if you care much whether it takes 5 minutes or 30 seconds to load them into the player.
I have an Archos unit, the USB delay has never bothered me. I have firewire on the machine but fiddling with the drivers is a real pig. I discovered after I bought my first firewire board that the 'standard' isn't. If you have a JVC camera it turns out it does not work with most boards, you have to have the B or the C version. Tedious huh?
What would strike me as really useful is the ability to record. I would like a portable dictation machine that would allow me to capture 20 hours or so of dictation and then load it into a voice->text converter for offline processing.
As it is I suspect it will not be a success because Apple are only really marketing to their existing user base. While this is not negligible, it is hardly substantial. Apple are making it very clear that they have no interest in marketing the device to the 95% of the computer user market that have PCs whether they are running Windows or Linux.
As far as innovative styling goes Sony's Vaio line matches anything Apple have come up with in the computer market in my opinion. I don't think it will be long before there are other MP3 jukeboxes that have similar styling.
Re:Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
My troll-sense tells me you're making stuff up, but whatever. He doesn't have carpal tunnel syndrome. He has hand problems but does not disclose here wether they are directly related to typing or not:
The precise nature of the disability is not the point. The number of people with problems commonly associated with RSI in 545 tech sq. is very high.
The default emacs bindings are very baddly chosen from the ergonomic point of view. The ability to implement other keybindings is not the point. Consumers have a right to expect that a product is not shipped in a state that is positively dangerous to their health.
Of course emacs being a freebie maybe we should not expect it to meet the expectations we have for purchased software. Except, isn't that the whole point RMS is attempting to make, that free software is better?
Like before you folk put MSFT and the rest of the commercial software providers out of business maybe you should develop a product that is not positively injurous to people's health?
Carpel tunnel syndrome strikes
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Having once worked in 545 Tech sq. I am reluctant to use an editor whose main author suffers from severe carpel tunnel syndrome - along with mny of the other people in the building.
meta-control-shift-hyper-q is not a good choice for 'move cursor right'
The choice of keys may hve made sense on the keyboards emacs was originally designed using. However the left hand scrunch required for many emacs opertions is particularly bad on the carpel tunnel.
And don't get me started on vi. If you like using obsolete teletype editors the EDT teletype mode was better. Using vi is like trying to edit a file by casting spells. People don't use that type of program because its good, they use it because its bad giving the loser the opportunity to flame on/. about how people who say it sucks 'don't understand' 'are not worthy' and like patronizing bullcrap.
First programming job I had in a big company I was sat down in front of a Vt100 and shown how to run the EDT tutorial mode. Having spent the morning mastering line mode and thinking 'what a piece of crap' the next section of the tutorial covered screen mode...
Re:The question is not whether you re done coding
on
Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
> Good architects are rare. Great architects are exceptionaly rare.
Bzzt! Few people have ability to make themselves
irreplaceable
You don't 'make' yourself irreplaceable. Either you are or you are not.
I once worked with a government agency where much of the work was done by consultants. The consultant's idea of making themselves irreplaceable was to take all the comments out of my configuration files to make sure that anyone else would have great difficulty getting the machines to work.
Target is to make people replaceable
and places easy to work. Make projects fasttrack,
and be there on date, and be quality dependent.
Reduce stress levels, and put project support
on people strongest points, not weakest - XP.
That sounds like the type of bubblehead speak worthy of the pointy haired one. What the heck does that utter drivel mean?
Why not leverge a few underlying synergies and look for opportunities to upwardly impact positive attributes while we are at it?
I don't see any reason to believe that the current fad for 'Extreeme Programming' is any more substantial than those that preceeded it. It shows all the signs of being a management fad, it panders to the egos of those promoting it pretending that they are some sort of elite while peddling a small number (between 5 and 7 is usual) of plattitudes that are dubbed 'core truths'. Near as I can make out all XP boils down to is 'a small number of true experts are better than severl hundred also rans'.
Unique people often are hightly opinionated,
get in way of actually doing things. After all that
company does not benefit from them.
Again what the heck does that mean? Most people are unique.
What does 'opinionated' mean? That I value my opinion over those of other people? Pretty hard to be an original thinker if you always defer to conventional thinking.
If you want to make a significant impact in a field you have to be confident enough in yourself to take on the opinionated buggers who have already established themselves. That will make you 'opinionated' in the minds of the people who think you are wrong.
The question is not whether you re done coding
on
Coder or Architect?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been in the business over twenty years. I'm 35, I was earning enough to pay taxes when I was 13. Back then we reconed that nobody could code worth a damn past 30.
I had expected to code like that until I retired to the beach, which I hoped would be long before I was 30. As it turned out however I found that my concentration had gone long before I was 30.
I can still lay out a set of APIs, document them and describe in detail how each code module connects to each other. But I just don't have the patience to fill in the boxes any more.
The only coding I have done in the past few years has been of the explortory type, working out how the new.NET tools work, doing my own technical drawing template in Visio etc.
At 28 it would not be at all surprising if you are over the hill for coding. But that does not mean that you are necessarily up to being an architect. In my experience less than one coder in 10 ever has the breadth of experience necessary to make them a passably good aarchitect. Being 'lead developer' for you 'company' means nothing to me, dotcom startups are still ten a penny. All being a lead developer means is that management thinks the sun shines out of your ass, or to be more precise management thinks the probability of the sun shining out of your ass is slightly higher than the same probability for the other candidates they could find after their last lead developer went to get a better job.
Being a coder is a useful attribute for an architect, however many of the most productive coders make the worst architects. A lot of highly productive coders are only expert in a single tool. Every problem looks to them to demand its use. They spend their time trying to get their coders to code like them thinking that it is the tools themselves not their particular level of expertise with one tool that made them productive.
I recently spent some time in a working group where one faction made a demand that the spec be documented using a 'graphical notation'. This faction then spent some considerable time trying to represent XML schemas with entity relationship diagrams, an utterly clueless and futile project that was based on the ridiculous belief that entity relationship models are the one true data model. Pity they haven't noticed that none of the mainstream programming languages developed in the last ten years is based on that data model or that XML schema in particular is utterly incompatible.
Coding is a very different skill from writing a specification. To be an architect you have to be able to do the requirements analysis yourself. You also have to be able to reverse engineer the actual requirements from the design that the end users will give you since if they could write a spec they would not be end users they would be architects.
You also have to actualy be interested in the larger purposes of the application, the business it serves and the business strategy that the application serves.
Good architects are rare. Great architects are exceptionaly rare.
Look at the World Wide Web, hundreds of network hypertext projects preceeded it, every one of which failed because it was just too damn complex.
Phd students everywhere take a year longer
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Sid Meier on Civ III
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· Score: 5, Funny
Civ II is going to have a bigger effect on the economy than bin laden.
All that time spent in front of the screen insted of working.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone metamod down the libertarian twit who modded the parent offtopic.
The fact that the Internet was built originally with public money is actually an important point. However as well as getting the initial funds passed to set up the Internet, Gore was also largely responsible for the structure of the 'privatisation' scheme under which private sector ISPs took over the function of the NSF backbone.
One byproduct of this is that we now get SPAM. The other byproduct is that the Internet does not depend on a rickety T1 for its backbone which would probably be a wee bit inadequate to meet current demand.
You are correct in your initial point but wrong in the second. NCSA was funded through one of the programs that Gore started when he was in Congress, the NCSA browser and Web server were built with that money. Apache began on the NCSA code base.
When Tim and I came to the US it was because the US govt were willing to fund our research. They gave the initial money to start the Web consortium. That was after the Web was already quite successful but it is untrue to state that the Clinton administration had nothing to do with it. Gore in particular was a major supporter within the administration. They used the Web during the 1992 election campaign when there were fewer than 100 users.
The misquote was by the way quite deliberate. What happened was that Declan McCullogh wrote an initial story in Wired ridiculing the idea that Gore had any involvement. He then went to his right wing creep friends at the Cato institute who put out a PR release based on his initial story. He then wrote a followup story in which he introduced the 'Gore Invented Internet' carnard which his friends at Cato took to their Republican allies who issued PR to the mainstream media.
It was from start to finish a right wing smear campaign. The only reason why it worked is that the media don't check their stories, even when there is a readily available videotape and transcript.
It is somewhat surprising that so many people worked themselves into a lather of self-richeous indignation on our behalf. Back in the early days of the Web the press was quite willing to print without question the Netscape PR pieces which asserted that Marc Andressen was the sole 'true' inventor.
If you want a giggle go to a remainder shop and buy a copy of 'Netscape Time' which some flack wrote for Jim Clarke. It is notable that Tim is the only member of the W3 team who did not join Netscape who is mentioned in the index. There are three references and on each occasion Clark makes an untrue statement to diminish Tim's contribution.
As Oscar Wilde put it 'choose your enemies carefully'. Marc and Jim made the mistake of choosing to make me an enemy and I set out to make sure that Microsoft became their enemy. They have only themeselves to blame for the failure of their company.
The only use for a code signing certificate is to tell a user that a piece of code is safe to use.
Err hello, what laptop is there that offers Bluetooth today?
GPRS has always been intended to support PCMCIA format plug in cards.
What you call 'reinventing the wheel' I call 'introducing a completely unnecessary technology into the process'.
Hmm, you don't seem to have read the bluetooth web site then. That was their 'big idea' 12 months ago.
If the 802.11b is dominant and sufficient, why would IEEE be working to incorporate Bluetooth into its own standard?
Ever been member of a standards group?
All your statement tells me is that someone in the IEEE has a bluetooth axe of some sort to grind.
Actully with SS7 layer switching it is pretty easy to do call forwarding. But you only need a phone number to receive voice calls, not to make 'em.
I would rather mess with that than trying to get my cell phone to make data calls for my laptop. For a start I don't want to be messing with two sets of batteries. On most of the occasions I need to do data communications I have my cell turned off because I am in a meeting. That is if I bother to carry it which I don't most of the time. But having to worry about two wireless links to fall off?
If you want wireless keyboard, Logitech sell one already. I have one in my office, it is OK but I am not too keen on its security. I can see a small advantage to having a standard there, but I would much rather there was something less meglomanical in its scope and had real security not more amateur hour stuff like WEP.
In the home there are very few devices that I would want to have on a wireless network that do not have an AC cord attached - so power consumption is not a big issue.
The other problem with Bluetooth is that it tries to define its own stack for everything. The developers appear to be part of some OSI holdout 'IP will go away' group.
On the security side 802.11b screwed it with WEP, only that does not matter that much because you can still use IPSEC. With Bluetooth the security model is homegrown as is the encryption algorithm. If someone wants to make a name for themselves in the crypto world go hack the Bluetooth crypto.
The author of the piece is a well known bluetooth developer. When a group like that suddenly starts saying 'we can work together' it is pretty much an admission that the other side has established a dominant market position that can't be reversed.
If there is genuinely a need for a low power Wireless lan then I would much prefer that someone do 'low power 802.11b' rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel.
Simple solution is for safe surf to explain to their customers how they can access their site by going through one of the anonymous proxy servers...
However these days I simply run Linux on one of the older machines and X-Window to it as needed from one of the Windows boxes. My TombRaider box makes a pretty good X-Terminal.
When a PC has an 18 month life from being bleeding edge to obsolesence the boxes soon start to mount up.
The iPod does have size and weight and battery life in its favor. These are amongst the most important features for a handheld device.
The User interface issue simply can't be judged at this point. None of the people blathering on about how great the device is have seen one, let alone used one for any length of time. What they are doing is looking at the clunky demo on the Apple site and extrapolating from what they think the demands they would make of the device would be.
Having used an archos device extensively I really don't consider the user interface to be problematic in any respect whatsoever. The archos device appears as a disk drive. To load files onto the unit you just drag them onto the disk drive. If the copied file is an MP3 the archos device allows it to be played. It can also be copied off the device just like any other file.
In fact the Archos device UI is almost certainly going to be easier to use than the iPod because unlike the iPod the Archos device is not compromised by the clunky copyright management limitations that make the creative labs nomad unit a pig to use.
On the firewire issue, I really see no advantage whatsoever over USB. With 6Gb I don't copy music files onto or off the device very often. In fact I have only got 50 disks ripped so far which takes just over 2Gb so moving the files is pretty much a one time operation. When I do get round to ripping more CDs I would probably buy the 20Gb unit if necessary so I could keep my whole collection with me rather than keep loading and unloading them.
So yes, the firewire is nice but I would not rate it a major plus given my experience of using a similar device.
The major minus of the device is it is designed soley for Apple users. It is an attempt to solidify the Apple computer user base but there is nothing here for non-Apple users as Apple itself admits.
As a result I think the iPod is more likely to be a Newton than a Palm. If I was an Apple shareholder I would be very upset about the iPod. Consumer electronics are a notoriously cut throat business. Development of a peripheral of this complexity that only connects to Apple systems is unlikely to see a return of the investment.
It is a pretty good bet that the iPod will not be a winner. The economics all favor the competition. If the market demand is for a smaller size and a lithium battery then the competition will respond, in the meantime Archos, creative and the rest have a heck of a lot more room for discounting their $250 units than Apple has in their $400 product. Apple can at best sell 5% of the units the competition do - and that if the monopolize the Apple user market which they won't. They just don't have the same ecconomies of scale.
Although Whitt 'invented' Public Key Cryptography he is not a cryptographer in the sense many on the list seem to think. He is not interested much in algorithms, of the 20 odd times I have heard him speak in public or private I can only recall one occasion where we were discussing an algorithm and that was in the context of the Venona decrypts.
Whitt's almost exclusive interest is public policy concerning privacy and security. While Whitt has probably cleared his talk through Sun's PR office he is quite obviously the instigator of the piece.
The point he is making is much broader than .NET, as I am sure Whitt will explain later on. For the time being however it makes tactical sense to identify the problems with newly proposed schemes even though the real exposure comes from existing databases.
What I believe Whitt is up to is re-interpreting the privacy concerns of the pre 9/11 world as security threats in the post 9/11 world.
To the poiunt of sicking its lawyers on companies that have the temerity to develop their own extensions in their own way.
The point of having open source is so that you have control. With Java the control is firmly under the thumb of Sun. Ergo, Java is not open, nor will it ever be open if Sun gets its way.
It isn't just Microsoft who have been shut out of any influence on how the language develops. It has from start to finish been a sun only program.
Hey Johnnie, if you crack the PICS system on the PC you can get to see all this P0rn.
The security on the system should be calibrated so that by the time the kid can bypass the controls they are ready for it.
It would be kinda self defeating though since the geeky kids who break the controls probably don't have girlfriends.
The problem with PICS is that it was politically naive. Jim Miller, the guy driving the scheme at W3C just did not understnd what he was up to. Several others at W3C did and did not like it.
The idiotic part of PICS was the idea of inserting W3C into the pitched battle between the pro and anti CDA forces. Its a bit like trying to mediate a compromise for the abortion debate. The pro-CDA people did not give a hoot about protecting children. They wanted from start to finish to control what adults could read.
The idea of the 'anyone can be a censor' scheme was to be a wrecking ammendment, I know, I invented it. The religious right lost all interest in promoting PICS the minute they realised it could not give them what they wanted - the ability to ram their morality down the throat of the rest of society.
PICS could have gained wide support in the 'adult entertainment' industry. In Germany there is a body (GUPTA?) that rates hard core porn so that punters buying it know they are getting the real hard core explicit stuff they want.
Whst killed PICS was the coertion by Congress. As soon as they passed the CDA the debate was polarized and passed to the courts where the congress was bound to lose. Adult sites were not going to rate their sites because to do so would be seen as supporting the enemy.
Absent the threat that X-Rated sites would be cut off completely most providers would rate since the ratings would give the search engines the ability to drive customers to their sites.
In the recent W3C architecture slides 'PICS' appears as an 'obsolete' technology that W3C is moving away from. The intention appears to be to move to RDF.
The article just does not give enough info to guess what the technical base would be. It would be stupid to try and roll out a labelling scheme that required the deployment of a whole new generation of browsers. I can't see the need.
What is likely however that this attempt is based on the idea of building a partition of the Web that is designed for and targetted at children rather than trying to reduce the entire Web to a child's level.
I don't care who is administering the systems but one person is not going to have 500 systems out of their boxes, let alone fully configured in under 4 months. Hardware failures alone are going to keep this guy pretty busy from then on.
The author clearly either has no experience of managing large numbers of machines or was completely unresponsive to his users if he did.
Any idiot can manage 500 machines if he does diddly squat.
None of the existing products have a command line interface.
You cannot evaluate a UI from a web site, you have to have the device and use it for some time.
I have had the Archos device a year, the UI is not a problem. The apple UI might be better, I doubt it however. When I was using macs four years ago it was clear that their lead in the UI field was long gone.
Apple's device costs $400 vs $250 for competing devices that are already available.
But Apple clearly will sell lots as Mac-heads are already convincing each other of the obvious superiority of the device before they have even seen one!
Bollocks
You hve not used one of the units. You have not seen one of the units. How on earth can you make any assesment of the UI?
The fact that so many Mac-heads are already drooling over the superiority of the UI before they have even seen it tells me that they are a cult.
The UI on the Archos device could be tweaked. But it is pretty easy to use.
Yeah, apple will chain their new products to their failing market share in the desktop computer world. Thus guaranteeing that they will fail.
I really don't think that anyone is going to buy an iPod then make the switch to Mac because of it.
Meanwhile people who use Mac and PC will have good reason to buy something that works with both.
This is exactly the type of interfce manpultion game that is the reason why I will never buy anything off apple. Their whole marketing plan seems to be to keep changing interfaces so that anything you buy today will turn out to be incompatible and unsupported 24 months later.
Firewire standards support is pretty good across the different vendors. However, JVC is the absolute worst for absolute compliance. Blame JVC not the firewire standard for any problems you may have had integrating your JVC product into with your computer.
I don't care who is responsible. I know that USB has never given me any trouble while firewire has given me plenty. Conclusion, the stuff ain't ready for prime time in the consumer market.
When I bought the JVC camera there were no firewire boards arround. So having smug gits telling me that it is my 'fault' I paid $1800 for a DV camcorder that does not meet the 'standard' does not exactly endear me to it.
I would rather wait ten minutes to transfer my CDs than spend $150 extra so I can risk spending three hours mucking about with broken drivers for a standard that is not quite there.
The firewire vs USB debate leaves me cold. Try sitting down and ripping 20 CDs, then ask yourself 5 hours later if you care much whether it takes 5 minutes or 30 seconds to load them into the player.
I have an Archos unit, the USB delay has never bothered me. I have firewire on the machine but fiddling with the drivers is a real pig. I discovered after I bought my first firewire board that the 'standard' isn't. If you have a JVC camera it turns out it does not work with most boards, you have to have the B or the C version. Tedious huh?
What would strike me as really useful is the ability to record. I would like a portable dictation machine that would allow me to capture 20 hours or so of dictation and then load it into a voice->text converter for offline processing.
As it is I suspect it will not be a success because Apple are only really marketing to their existing user base. While this is not negligible, it is hardly substantial. Apple are making it very clear that they have no interest in marketing the device to the 95% of the computer user market that have PCs whether they are running Windows or Linux.
As far as innovative styling goes Sony's Vaio line matches anything Apple have come up with in the computer market in my opinion. I don't think it will be long before there are other MP3 jukeboxes that have similar styling.
The precise nature of the disability is not the point. The number of people with problems commonly associated with RSI in 545 tech sq. is very high.
The default emacs bindings are very baddly chosen from the ergonomic point of view. The ability to implement other keybindings is not the point. Consumers have a right to expect that a product is not shipped in a state that is positively dangerous to their health.
Of course emacs being a freebie maybe we should not expect it to meet the expectations we have for purchased software. Except, isn't that the whole point RMS is attempting to make, that free software is better?
Like before you folk put MSFT and the rest of the commercial software providers out of business maybe you should develop a product that is not positively injurous to people's health?
meta-control-shift-hyper-q is not a good choice for 'move cursor right'
The choice of keys may hve made sense on the keyboards emacs was originally designed using. However the left hand scrunch required for many emacs opertions is particularly bad on the carpel tunnel.
And don't get me started on vi. If you like using obsolete teletype editors the EDT teletype mode was better. Using vi is like trying to edit a file by casting spells. People don't use that type of program because its good, they use it because its bad giving the loser the opportunity to flame on /. about how people who say it sucks 'don't understand' 'are not worthy' and like patronizing bullcrap.
First programming job I had in a big company I was sat down in front of a Vt100 and shown how to run the EDT tutorial mode. Having spent the morning mastering line mode and thinking 'what a piece of crap' the next section of the tutorial covered screen mode...
Bzzt! Few people have ability to make themselves irreplaceable
You don't 'make' yourself irreplaceable. Either you are or you are not.
I once worked with a government agency where much of the work was done by consultants. The consultant's idea of making themselves irreplaceable was to take all the comments out of my configuration files to make sure that anyone else would have great difficulty getting the machines to work.
Target is to make people replaceable and places easy to work. Make projects fasttrack, and be there on date, and be quality dependent. Reduce stress levels, and put project support on people strongest points, not weakest - XP.
That sounds like the type of bubblehead speak worthy of the pointy haired one. What the heck does that utter drivel mean?
Why not leverge a few underlying synergies and look for opportunities to upwardly impact positive attributes while we are at it?
I don't see any reason to believe that the current fad for 'Extreeme Programming' is any more substantial than those that preceeded it. It shows all the signs of being a management fad, it panders to the egos of those promoting it pretending that they are some sort of elite while peddling a small number (between 5 and 7 is usual) of plattitudes that are dubbed 'core truths'. Near as I can make out all XP boils down to is 'a small number of true experts are better than severl hundred also rans'.
Unique people often are hightly opinionated, get in way of actually doing things. After all that company does not benefit from them.
Again what the heck does that mean? Most people are unique.
What does 'opinionated' mean? That I value my opinion over those of other people? Pretty hard to be an original thinker if you always defer to conventional thinking.
If you want to make a significant impact in a field you have to be confident enough in yourself to take on the opinionated buggers who have already established themselves. That will make you 'opinionated' in the minds of the people who think you are wrong.
I had expected to code like that until I retired to the beach, which I hoped would be long before I was 30. As it turned out however I found that my concentration had gone long before I was 30.
I can still lay out a set of APIs, document them and describe in detail how each code module connects to each other. But I just don't have the patience to fill in the boxes any more.
The only coding I have done in the past few years has been of the explortory type, working out how the new .NET tools work, doing my own technical drawing template in Visio etc.
At 28 it would not be at all surprising if you are over the hill for coding. But that does not mean that you are necessarily up to being an architect. In my experience less than one coder in 10 ever has the breadth of experience necessary to make them a passably good aarchitect. Being 'lead developer' for you 'company' means nothing to me, dotcom startups are still ten a penny. All being a lead developer means is that management thinks the sun shines out of your ass, or to be more precise management thinks the probability of the sun shining out of your ass is slightly higher than the same probability for the other candidates they could find after their last lead developer went to get a better job.
Being a coder is a useful attribute for an architect, however many of the most productive coders make the worst architects. A lot of highly productive coders are only expert in a single tool. Every problem looks to them to demand its use. They spend their time trying to get their coders to code like them thinking that it is the tools themselves not their particular level of expertise with one tool that made them productive.
I recently spent some time in a working group where one faction made a demand that the spec be documented using a 'graphical notation'. This faction then spent some considerable time trying to represent XML schemas with entity relationship diagrams, an utterly clueless and futile project that was based on the ridiculous belief that entity relationship models are the one true data model. Pity they haven't noticed that none of the mainstream programming languages developed in the last ten years is based on that data model or that XML schema in particular is utterly incompatible.
Coding is a very different skill from writing a specification. To be an architect you have to be able to do the requirements analysis yourself. You also have to be able to reverse engineer the actual requirements from the design that the end users will give you since if they could write a spec they would not be end users they would be architects.
You also have to actualy be interested in the larger purposes of the application, the business it serves and the business strategy that the application serves.
Good architects are rare. Great architects are exceptionaly rare.
Look at the World Wide Web, hundreds of network hypertext projects preceeded it, every one of which failed because it was just too damn complex.
All that time spent in front of the screen insted of working.
Thats ny chance of writing a book gone