In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures.
In other news: Last year several thousands of SUVs were damaged by children who, for some reasons, were not constrained by their parents to stay inside all the time and instead failed to stay at the proper speed to move smoothly with the traffic. Due to the excellent structural protection from the SUVs their drivers did not suffer major physical injuries.
You haven't provided any reason that this font format is different than what we already have, and you're completely ignoring the SVG format which is actually a fully open standard, and is already supported if you properly support SVGs.
The point you didn't get: It doesn't matter.
It does not matter if this could be done with existing technology.
It does not matter that it is basically OpenType in a new packaging.
It does not matter that it does provide close to no copy protection.
It does not matter that browsers could simply ignore it.
It does not matter that font licenses make the RIAA look like the EFF.
The ONLY thing that matters is that the foundries accept WOFF, because they have the content that everybody wants to license. And if they puke on SVG, TrueType or OpenType, it wouldn't matter if these were the best formats the world has ever seen. The "new format" is more a psychological definition than a technological one. Yes, one can find a million reasons why this is stupid, unnecessary, nothing new, but it doesn't matter.
And for the (old and boring) argument against font use on the web: There IS no good typography on the web, because it cannot work due to lack of good fonts. So using the current state as an argument why WOFF is unnecessary is kind of short sighed, when the current situation is bad due to the lack of an established font solution accepted by the industry, which is exactly what WOFF is trying to change.
If you want to argue that typography is bad, please use print as your target, because this is where typography is put to good use. I write this on a display at 160DPI, the iPhone also has about 160DBI and the Nokia tablets have 240DPI. In a few years every screen will be indistinguishable from paper, all operating systems will be resolution independent and 20 years of lousy font support at 72DPI will be a fading memory of the past. The future of web typography will be much longer than its current past, so judge it on what it can do (and does on paper today), not based on failed implementations.
I believe it when I see it. It is trivial to convert a WOFF font back to Truetype or CFF. And most WOFF fonts probably won't be subsetted, so the foundries are essentially allowing their licensees to put their complete fonts on the web downloadable for everyone.
From the page I linked to in my previous post:
"For this reason FF Meta designer Erik Spiekermann, the FontFont Typeface Library – the world’s largest collection of original, contemporary typefaces –, and the FontShops endorse the WOFF specification, with default same-origin loading restrictions, as a Web font format. FontFont expects to license fonts for Web use in this format.... We hope that besides the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 other browsers will join in implementing WOFF."
Compare it to watermarking in MP3: It does not protect against unauthorized copies, it can often be removed, so why would the music industry agree to something like that? Because it made copying a little bit harder, prosecution a little bit easier, while not pissing everybody of with some pain in the ass DRM scheme.
The foundries have a problem: they would love to make money on web typography, they are scared shitless because every web font technology out today is trivial to copy. You don't even have to copy it, just link from your CSS to a licensed font on another site, might even be legal.
On the other hand they watched other industries screwing it up by annoying their customers to hell and in the end driving a lot of potentially paying customers to discover ways to avoid being hassled by the industry. So they will not try to take invent another crazy DRM method just to get their asses kicked. WOFF might not be the solution they would like to see, but probably the best thing they can hope to realistically get, if they want to earn a dime from all those companies that would love to license fonts for the web to keep their CI consistent in all media.
The interesting part of WOFF is not that it is a new font format. Actually it is mostly a wrapper around the OpenType format from Microsoft and Adobe with some goodies. The important part is that WOFF restricts where the font can be linked to. While e.g. a truetype font can be referenced from anywhere with CSS, a WOFF font has to be stored on the same site as the web page/css.
This might seem minor to you, but due to this restriction some of the large font foundries like fontfont and linotype will license their professional fonts for web use for the first time (, probably because it would make prosecution of non licensed font use doable). This is actually big and will probably be an important step for typography on the web. I hope for the end of sFir, headlines as graphics and other bad ideas.
I think the format itself is not so much a technical and more a political achievement. It actually helps that it was derived from drafts from two typographers, not from some of the browser producers. The fact that it is a new format (so no copy problem baggage) and that it will provide some very light copy protection without having to implement DRM on the browser site probably helped getting the foundries on board. And you really need the foundries if you want typography to work, the current state of free fonts is just not good enough for most professional requirements.
Gecko, webkit and Opera already support OpenType, so adding the new format will be easy. Microsoft's IE supports crippled OpenType as eOT. The primary reason for crippling it was providing some light copy protection to get the foundries on board (which failed), so maybe even Microsoft will play along this time.
If this happens, we will not only see one font technology that is supported by all browsers for the first time, but will also be able to use thousands of professional fonts along with already usable free fonts to help browsers catch up with the increased readability and expressiveness print has had for hundreds of years due to the long time experience in typography.
It just worked
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the emphasis should not be on the hardware, but on the package. True, it used USB (like the PowerMac G3 before it), but at that time this was just a faster replacement for the ADB bus that Apple had used as an universal bus before, and SCSI had been replaced by IDE as an internal connector before.
The major point of the iMac was the "just works" philosophy, as pointed out in some Apple ads that had a kid set up the iMac including internet access in a fraction of a time a HP engineer could do it with a PC. It was all about reducing the complexity that network access, multimedia and all the other nifty features had brought to computing during the last years. And that theme stuck with the iPod and the iPhone and is now widely regarded as the best way to bring technology to the masses.
So it was a revolutionary machine, just like the original Mac, and the hardware was the smallest part. I still have the original box, maxed to 128MB RAM and running MacOS 10.3. Just in case, because it "just works."
One of the problems for any entity trying to communicate like a human is that we share some common knowledge which is based on our physical existence (pigs can't fly, but fall etc.) Some AI projects like (Open)Cyc have tried to feed their AI with a very large number of simple facts, but to "understand" some concepts you have to experience them. Try to explain the difference between red and blue to someone who was born blind.
The 3D communication (holodeck) aspect mentioned is therefore an attempt to have an AI "living" in a human like space, to enable it to develop a similar world view. What's new about Rascals (Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems) seems to be something else ("Rascals is based on a core theorem proving engine that deduces results (proves theorems) about the world after pattern-matching its current situation against its knowledge base.") that is very computing intensive. Whether this will make any real difference remains to be seen, a lot of other approaches have failed and they so far have only succeeded with very limited models.
I'm myself bordering the state of Apple fan boy, but this is scary. People crying fool yesterday now praise the company for being responsive. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but if Apple had had this planed, this would be pure genius. Lowering the price and then getting the people who payed more to cheer you. Just scary how perfectly they play their crowd.
I don't think this was planed. But I think Apple knows that we now live in an attention society and that people highly regard companies who admit errors and change. In fact people overvalue this since they do not expect it (yet. Microsoft will obviously copy it someday). They did it with "greener Apple", they do it again with credits for iPhones which will generate more money for them due to people buying stuff in the Apple store.
Did apply screw me with a whole new form factor/docking connector layout?
Probably not. Apple's universal dock came in one size with adapters for the smaller iPod nano. That adapter is just a piece of plastic, so the actual connector works with any iPod/iPhone. Should be the same with the Audi, you might need that piece of plastic to make it fit tightly, but it should work without.
Phatpod iPod Nano - Like your sleek device for workouts? Too bad, go get a Shuffle - BONED
Don't get fooled: The new nano isn't that much wider: 52mm vs 40mm for the old version, but it's much shorter: 70mm instead of 90mm. Thickness remains the same with 6.5mm, weight goes up to 49g from 40g. So it looks much fatter, but actually it isn't, it's just slightly bigger.
iPod nano all new with 320*240 2" screen, can play video, coverflow, brighter display
4GB $149, 8GB $US 199
slighly wider, but much shorter, 20% heavier than previous model
iPod classic like the old iPod, now with 80GB/160GB instead of 30GB/80GB, coverflow
80GB $249, 160GB $US 349
iPod touch like the iPhone without the phone
slightly smaller and slimmer: iPhone is 45% thicker
8mm thin
WiFi, Safari
8GB $US 299, 16GB $US 399
iPhone killed the 4GB version
reduced 8GB version from $US599 to $US 399
11.6mm thin
On the one hand I welcome new tags like datagrid and menu, which will make HTML source easier to handle. Even though the increased complexity will make it harder to start with HTML. Most web developers still have problems with XHTML/CSS, advancing HTML will make that worse.
Most likely this will lead to more automatically generated code, which in the long run (in combination with XML compliance) should lead to less buggy web pages and general browser compatibility. Which is a good thing. But somehow I think that one of the reasons HTMLs use has become so widespread (Microformats etc.) is simply because it was so easy to mess around with. Making it "better" might slow down innovation in these areas, which would be sad.
His approach to NLS and chorded keyboards was inspiring but it catered more to the "make it steep as possible" school of UI.
From the text snippet you provided it seem more that he was from the "do not dumb it done" school of UI. This often comes with a steep learning curve, but that does not really have to be. E.g. it should actually be easier to learn to use a chord keyboard than to learn to touch type.
I learned typing on a C64 by placing stickers on all the keys so I couldn't cheat. Took some days to write with only a few mistakes, some years to become very fast. Most people still type with two fingers or look at the keyboard while typing, thereby limiting themselves. And they do this because it seems to be so hard to learn. A chord keyboard removes the option to start with one finger, but it also removes any option to cheat, thereby turning you into a typist within hours instead of the years most people seem to take.
A lot of good technology works in a non-intuitive way: Emacs, TeX, even MS Word if you use it right. And even if there is a sort of intuitive approach (like the typewriter similarity in Word), this does not get you far. That is one of the reasons most people use computers only in a primitive way: anything more complex requires learning.
The problem isn't the complexity, but the lack of good (i.e. not boring) training. Most users are willing to invest some time and learn new features, but only if they can assume that their time will not be wasted due to material they can not understand or because they find their questions unanswered. Online help for most software is an excellent example how to scare people away from becoming more powerful. But this could be fixed.
1968: Engelbart shows chord keyboard
on
Five Finger Keyboards
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
These single hand keyboards are called chord keyboards and a pretty old idea. In fact Douglas Engelbart used on during the mother of all demos (first: windows, mouse, internet, video conferencing etc.)
I wanted one since I saw one for the first time in a computer magazine (the Octima, about 1984), but they never caught on. Some are available, mostly for disabled people, and they are very expensive. According to people who have worked with them it just takes just a couple of days to become fast on these ones, but you cannot become as fast as a very fast typist.
I guess this is the main problem: for starters they seem to be harder, since they cannot see the letters, for pro-typists/programmers they do not offer enough gain, unless they have RSI. Maybe mobile typing will finally be their breakthrough. Took only 30 years.
It's kind of funny: most posts here complain about the Duke IT staff, either about their lack of competence or that they didn't wait until they had all the facts before claiming that this was an iPhone related problem.
Some people here who know the IT staff at Duke defended them and objected the claim of lacking competence, and there is no reason not to believe them, since everybody else is just guessing.
So most posters rushed to explain what happened without having seen the whole picture, didn't look into the details and therefore show exactly the behavior that they are attacking the Duke staff for.
It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market....
Unforgiving the smallest error? Let's check the market share of IE again...
Seriously, I wouldn't expect Safari to become a major force on Windows, I don't think that even Apple expects a lot. But to claim that the Windows world is driven by quality while the Apple world is cozy is just stupid. IE was crap for years and Firefox is still at 10% market share. Most people stick with what they know (usually Windows), so the amount of "switchers" we see is a sign that quality actually can work for people who look somewhat further, but most people never do.
Now here's my first problem: the accusation assumes that 2000 is not a good index year, which it is.
According to the article the US saw a massive reduction in air traffic after 9/11, leading to a reduction in CO2 (and CO2 only) for some years, therefore the timeframe from 2000-2004 is the only timeframe where the growth in emissions does not top the one in the EU at the same time. I'm not sure how big the influence of air traffic really is, but even if you do not RTFA, at least look at the graph on the last page. It's pretty obvious from this one why they picked 2000-2004.
I think the author makes some good points, but to say that his time-frame (1990 - 2004) is the "right one" misses the argument the other scientists want to make. They purposely chose 1997 as a starting point because that's when the countries officially decided to do something about greenhouse gas emissions.
Kyoto compares against the level of 1990, so this seems a more reasonable date then 1997. The Kyoto treaty was not the start of any action against global warming, just the formal international acknowledgment. Several countries initiated political changes before that.
Nobody's denying that nothing was done pre-1997, so using that data doesn't offer any real insight.
A number of things happened before 1997, e.g. Germany shutting down the old brown coal energy production in the former GDR, now part of the reunited Germany. This actually makes a large part of the CO2 reductions in Germany since 1990, which is kind of fake. (I'm German).
Yeah, they still should've used the other 5 greenhouse gases in their analysis, but w/ all the crazy liberals talking about "carbon neutral"-whatever, CO2 is kind of a big buzz word when it comes to addressing emissions.
Any activity announced by the US government always talks about all six greenhouse gases, so there is no reason (besides looking better) to not do so here.
And using 2000-2004 as a time frame is really short, but they do mention that they're not too hung up on this short-term data:
It's always going to go up and down, and so you can't pick any one moment in time to gauge your progress. As I said, this is a marathon, it's not a sprint. We want to see what the overall trend lines look like.
The article mentions that the period from 2000-2004 is very special due to a massive decrease in flight traffic and a following reduction in CO2 due to 9/11, sort of like Germany's one-time shutdown reduction. For ANY OTHER timeframe the claims are false. The diagram at the end of the article speaks for itself.
Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that the original analysis that the US is doing better than Europe isn't complete BS and that more people should read the article and try to understand both sides of the story instead of spreading more FUD.
Okay, its only 97.67% bullshit. I agree, more people should read the article, but you show that this does not necessarily prevent them from misinterpreting it and spreading the FUD a little bit further.
I just watched two movies: Control Room (2004) about the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq and Al Jazeera's role and The revolution will not be televised (2003) about the role of the private media in the coup in Venezuela in 2001. Neither of the two might be called very objective, but I see how difficult it would be to find an audience for more scientific analysis.
The common theme in both is how important the media has become. Now this is not really news, but during the last decade the media reaction has been part of e.g. military operation (embedded journalism) and there is a tremendous effort to control the pictures. Not so much to suppress any reporting, since it has become obvious that this will never work, but to control what is fed to the press. And unfortunately the press is not yet up to speed to get their informations from a wider number of sources.
Now with blogging, youtube, flickr etc. there seems to be a much wider range of possible information sources, even harder to suppress than in the past. But today we face the problem which of these sources to trust, there are just so many. There are attempts like newstrust, which tries to be a sort of slashdot moderation system on top of existing news. But I think we need much more of this. Like greasemonkey allows you to attach things to websites that the authors did not intend to be there, we need the option to attach other sources to any news and have a large body of people vote on which of these sources should be taken into account. I have no clue how to realize this, but this is a typical case: the government using FUD to strengthen their position. People can react and argue with the claims, but there should be a way for these comments to reach the public, not only via sites like slashdot, but by default. With the increase of media sources and media power we have to become better at using and evaluating media as a group, not only as single viewers and readers.
Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?
Because the Mac Plus and the WinXP Pro SP2 systems were the most widely used GUI based desktop machines at their respective time, thus making a comparison about productivity feasible.
I cannot really agree with these tests that just compare "start up tasks" like opening a file or booting the OS. There often is a good reason not to focus too much on these events, because don't happen that often. Responsiveness during use is a better comparison, and this is much harder. Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done. And while opening a file 0.2 seconds faster will not really improve my productivity by much, having instant access to Google and Wikipedia does.
Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well that's five seconds times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.
...are surprised that sympathy towards USA is keeping within limits for the destruction caused by the horrible hurricanes.
The world is smarter than this. There was a tremendous international response and offer to help after Katrina. The negative reaction the US is confronted with today is a result of the danger the US governments current politics put the world into due to overestimating their power and underestimating the importance of diplomacy and agreement. It's not a lack of sympathy for the US people.
In a true free market capitalism world, someone would own the air, water etc. and you would have to pay them for the right to pollute. Some senators therefore proposed to privatize everything, so somebody would care if you destroy these things. I think we are in enough trouble already with patents and intellectual property to see that making everything "owned by someone" is not necessarily the best option. But this is what a real market version would look like. Today we have a world where a number of resources are provided "for free" instead of having a price, which is part of the problem.
surely its only a matter of time before europe imposes trade tarrifs on US goods?
It's not that simple. One of the reasons for the G8 meeting is to discuss rules of engagement. If you subsidize an industry in your country, due to the rules of the WTO other countries are ALLOWED to impose trade tariffs. But so far, ignoring e.g. climate change or human rights is not something that is considered a deal breaker since there is no deal about those things. So one of the goals of the Europeans is to establish rules, so that there may be legal sanctions in the future.
The US government is trying to prevent the establishment of these rules. That does not necessarily mean that they intend to (continue to) not engage in reducing e.g. carbon emissions, but even if they promise to match the European carbon reduction goals, there won't be any way to force them to do so if they fail. They refuse to become liable.
The largest part of trade in the EU is trade between countries in the EU, currently 25 with about 450 million "consumer". Beyond that the US makes up a large part, though not enough to ruin the EU. But nobody will risk a full scale trade war, neither the Europeans nor the US, it's ways to expensive.
It's more likely that the Europeans will establish rules for products imported. They love rules, and some of them are quite good, e.g. any electric product has to comply to a number of security rules and have an CE label, due to which appliances in Europe are extremely save. They are already enforcing limits on energy consumption and use of hazardous materials, they could also limit the energy allowed to create a product. This would force producers world wide to adapt more environmental friendly ways to create products, if they still want to sell to the European market. Usually these producers will not create two separate products lines, one environmental friendly for the EU and one less friendly for e.g. the US. Raising the bar for Europe will automatically raise the bar worldwide, thus spreading those "advanced" products even beyond the EU without requiring international rules or a trade war.
Disclaimer: I'm German and this is one of very few times the German government has my full support.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news: Last year several thousands of SUVs were damaged by children who, for some reasons, were not constrained by their parents to stay inside all the time and instead failed to stay at the proper speed to move smoothly with the traffic. Due to the excellent structural protection from the SUVs their drivers did not suffer major physical injuries.
You haven't provided any reason that this font format is different than what we already have, and you're completely ignoring the SVG format which is actually a fully open standard, and is already supported if you properly support SVGs.
The point you didn't get: It doesn't matter.
The ONLY thing that matters is that the foundries accept WOFF, because they have the content that everybody wants to license. And if they puke on SVG, TrueType or OpenType, it wouldn't matter if these were the best formats the world has ever seen. The "new format" is more a psychological definition than a technological one. Yes, one can find a million reasons why this is stupid, unnecessary, nothing new, but it doesn't matter.
And for the (old and boring) argument against font use on the web: There IS no good typography on the web, because it cannot work due to lack of good fonts. So using the current state as an argument why WOFF is unnecessary is kind of short sighed, when the current situation is bad due to the lack of an established font solution accepted by the industry, which is exactly what WOFF is trying to change.
If you want to argue that typography is bad, please use print as your target, because this is where typography is put to good use. I write this on a display at 160DPI, the iPhone also has about 160DBI and the Nokia tablets have 240DPI. In a few years every screen will be indistinguishable from paper, all operating systems will be resolution independent and 20 years of lousy font support at 72DPI will be a fading memory of the past. The future of web typography will be much longer than its current past, so judge it on what it can do (and does on paper today), not based on failed implementations.
I believe it when I see it. It is trivial to convert a WOFF font back to Truetype or CFF. And most WOFF fonts probably won't be subsetted, so the foundries are essentially allowing their licensees to put their complete fonts on the web downloadable for everyone.
From the page I linked to in my previous post: "For this reason FF Meta designer Erik Spiekermann, the FontFont Typeface Library – the world’s largest collection of original, contemporary typefaces –, and the FontShops endorse the WOFF specification, with default same-origin loading restrictions, as a Web font format. FontFont expects to license fonts for Web use in this format. ... We hope that besides the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 other browsers will join in implementing WOFF."
Compare it to watermarking in MP3: It does not protect against unauthorized copies, it can often be removed, so why would the music industry agree to something like that? Because it made copying a little bit harder, prosecution a little bit easier, while not pissing everybody of with some pain in the ass DRM scheme.
The foundries have a problem: they would love to make money on web typography, they are scared shitless because every web font technology out today is trivial to copy. You don't even have to copy it, just link from your CSS to a licensed font on another site, might even be legal.
On the other hand they watched other industries screwing it up by annoying their customers to hell and in the end driving a lot of potentially paying customers to discover ways to avoid being hassled by the industry. So they will not try to take invent another crazy DRM method just to get their asses kicked. WOFF might not be the solution they would like to see, but probably the best thing they can hope to realistically get, if they want to earn a dime from all those companies that would love to license fonts for the web to keep their CI consistent in all media.
The interesting part of WOFF is not that it is a new font format. Actually it is mostly a wrapper around the OpenType format from Microsoft and Adobe with some goodies. The important part is that WOFF restricts where the font can be linked to. While e.g. a truetype font can be referenced from anywhere with CSS, a WOFF font has to be stored on the same site as the web page/css.
This might seem minor to you, but due to this restriction some of the large font foundries like fontfont and linotype will license their professional fonts for web use for the first time (, probably because it would make prosecution of non licensed font use doable). This is actually big and will probably be an important step for typography on the web. I hope for the end of sFir, headlines as graphics and other bad ideas.
I think the format itself is not so much a technical and more a political achievement. It actually helps that it was derived from drafts from two typographers, not from some of the browser producers. The fact that it is a new format (so no copy problem baggage) and that it will provide some very light copy protection without having to implement DRM on the browser site probably helped getting the foundries on board. And you really need the foundries if you want typography to work, the current state of free fonts is just not good enough for most professional requirements.
Gecko, webkit and Opera already support OpenType, so adding the new format will be easy. Microsoft's IE supports crippled OpenType as eOT. The primary reason for crippling it was providing some light copy protection to get the foundries on board (which failed), so maybe even Microsoft will play along this time.
If this happens, we will not only see one font technology that is supported by all browsers for the first time, but will also be able to use thousands of professional fonts along with already usable free fonts to help browsers catch up with the increased readability and expressiveness print has had for hundreds of years due to the long time experience in typography.
I think the emphasis should not be on the hardware, but on the package. True, it used USB (like the PowerMac G3 before it), but at that time this was just a faster replacement for the ADB bus that Apple had used as an universal bus before, and SCSI had been replaced by IDE as an internal connector before.
The major point of the iMac was the "just works" philosophy, as pointed out in some Apple ads that had a kid set up the iMac including internet access in a fraction of a time a HP engineer could do it with a PC. It was all about reducing the complexity that network access, multimedia and all the other nifty features had brought to computing during the last years. And that theme stuck with the iPod and the iPhone and is now widely regarded as the best way to bring technology to the masses.
So it was a revolutionary machine, just like the original Mac, and the hardware was the smallest part. I still have the original box, maxed to 128MB RAM and running MacOS 10.3. Just in case, because it "just works."
One of the problems for any entity trying to communicate like a human is that we share some common knowledge which is based on our physical existence (pigs can't fly, but fall etc.) Some AI projects like (Open)Cyc have tried to feed their AI with a very large number of simple facts, but to "understand" some concepts you have to experience them. Try to explain the difference between red and blue to someone who was born blind.
The 3D communication (holodeck) aspect mentioned is therefore an attempt to have an AI "living" in a human like space, to enable it to develop a similar world view. What's new about Rascals (Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems) seems to be something else ("Rascals is based on a core theorem proving engine that deduces results (proves theorems) about the world after pattern-matching its current situation against its knowledge base.") that is very computing intensive. Whether this will make any real difference remains to be seen, a lot of other approaches have failed and they so far have only succeeded with very limited models.
Now add the value of the PR. Today half of the blogosphere knows that:
Tomorrow: Nobel price in economics for the Apple sales and PR departments.
I'm myself bordering the state of Apple fan boy, but this is scary. People crying fool yesterday now praise the company for being responsive. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but if Apple had had this planed, this would be pure genius. Lowering the price and then getting the people who payed more to cheer you. Just scary how perfectly they play their crowd.
I don't think this was planed. But I think Apple knows that we now live in an attention society and that people highly regard companies who admit errors and change. In fact people overvalue this since they do not expect it (yet. Microsoft will obviously copy it someday). They did it with "greener Apple", they do it again with credits for iPhones which will generate more money for them due to people buying stuff in the Apple store.
Probably not. Apple's universal dock came in one size with adapters for the smaller iPod nano. That adapter is just a piece of plastic, so the actual connector works with any iPod/iPhone. Should be the same with the Audi, you might need that piece of plastic to make it fit tightly, but it should work without.
Don't get fooled: The new nano isn't that much wider: 52mm vs 40mm for the old version, but it's much shorter: 70mm instead of 90mm. Thickness remains the same with 6.5mm, weight goes up to 49g from 40g. So it looks much fatter, but actually it isn't, it's just slightly bigger.
iPod shuttle
just new colors
1GB, $US79
iPod nano
all new with 320*240 2" screen, can play video, coverflow, brighter display
4GB $149, 8GB $US 199
slighly wider, but much shorter, 20% heavier than previous model
iPod classic
like the old iPod, now with 80GB/160GB instead of 30GB/80GB, coverflow
80GB $249, 160GB $US 349
iPod touch
like the iPhone without the phone
slightly smaller and slimmer: iPhone is 45% thicker
8mm thin
WiFi, Safari
8GB $US 299, 16GB $US 399
iPhone
killed the 4GB version
reduced 8GB version from $US599 to $US 399
11.6mm thin
On the one hand I welcome new tags like datagrid and menu, which will make HTML source easier to handle. Even though the increased complexity will make it harder to start with HTML. Most web developers still have problems with XHTML/CSS, advancing HTML will make that worse.
Most likely this will lead to more automatically generated code, which in the long run (in combination with XML compliance) should lead to less buggy web pages and general browser compatibility. Which is a good thing. But somehow I think that one of the reasons HTMLs use has become so widespread (Microformats etc.) is simply because it was so easy to mess around with. Making it "better" might slow down innovation in these areas, which would be sad.
I will.
From the text snippet you provided it seem more that he was from the "do not dumb it done" school of UI. This often comes with a steep learning curve, but that does not really have to be. E.g. it should actually be easier to learn to use a chord keyboard than to learn to touch type.
I learned typing on a C64 by placing stickers on all the keys so I couldn't cheat. Took some days to write with only a few mistakes, some years to become very fast. Most people still type with two fingers or look at the keyboard while typing, thereby limiting themselves. And they do this because it seems to be so hard to learn. A chord keyboard removes the option to start with one finger, but it also removes any option to cheat, thereby turning you into a typist within hours instead of the years most people seem to take.
A lot of good technology works in a non-intuitive way: Emacs, TeX, even MS Word if you use it right. And even if there is a sort of intuitive approach (like the typewriter similarity in Word), this does not get you far. That is one of the reasons most people use computers only in a primitive way: anything more complex requires learning.
The problem isn't the complexity, but the lack of good (i.e. not boring) training. Most users are willing to invest some time and learn new features, but only if they can assume that their time will not be wasted due to material they can not understand or because they find their questions unanswered. Online help for most software is an excellent example how to scare people away from becoming more powerful. But this could be fixed.
These single hand keyboards are called chord keyboards and a pretty old idea. In fact Douglas Engelbart used on during the mother of all demos (first: windows, mouse, internet, video conferencing etc.)
I wanted one since I saw one for the first time in a computer magazine (the Octima, about 1984), but they never caught on. Some are available, mostly for disabled people, and they are very expensive. According to people who have worked with them it just takes just a couple of days to become fast on these ones, but you cannot become as fast as a very fast typist.
I guess this is the main problem: for starters they seem to be harder, since they cannot see the letters, for pro-typists/programmers they do not offer enough gain, unless they have RSI. Maybe mobile typing will finally be their breakthrough. Took only 30 years.
It's kind of funny: most posts here complain about the Duke IT staff, either about their lack of competence or that they didn't wait until they had all the facts before claiming that this was an iPhone related problem.
Some people here who know the IT staff at Duke defended them and objected the claim of lacking competence, and there is no reason not to believe them, since everybody else is just guessing.
So most posters rushed to explain what happened without having seen the whole picture, didn't look into the details and therefore show exactly the behavior that they are attacking the Duke staff for.
Unforgiving the smallest error? Let's check the market share of IE again ...
Seriously, I wouldn't expect Safari to become a major force on Windows, I don't think that even Apple expects a lot. But to claim that the Windows world is driven by quality while the Apple world is cozy is just stupid. IE was crap for years and Firefox is still at 10% market share. Most people stick with what they know (usually Windows), so the amount of "switchers" we see is a sign that quality actually can work for people who look somewhat further, but most people never do.
According to the article the US saw a massive reduction in air traffic after 9/11, leading to a reduction in CO2 (and CO2 only) for some years, therefore the timeframe from 2000-2004 is the only timeframe where the growth in emissions does not top the one in the EU at the same time. I'm not sure how big the influence of air traffic really is, but even if you do not RTFA, at least look at the graph on the last page. It's pretty obvious from this one why they picked 2000-2004.
I RTFA
Kyoto compares against the level of 1990, so this seems a more reasonable date then 1997. The Kyoto treaty was not the start of any action against global warming, just the formal international acknowledgment. Several countries initiated political changes before that.
A number of things happened before 1997, e.g. Germany shutting down the old brown coal energy production in the former GDR, now part of the reunited Germany. This actually makes a large part of the CO2 reductions in Germany since 1990, which is kind of fake. (I'm German).
Any activity announced by the US government always talks about all six greenhouse gases, so there is no reason (besides looking better) to not do so here.
The article mentions that the period from 2000-2004 is very special due to a massive decrease in flight traffic and a following reduction in CO2 due to 9/11, sort of like Germany's one-time shutdown reduction. For ANY OTHER timeframe the claims are false. The diagram at the end of the article speaks for itself.
Okay, its only 97.67% bullshit. I agree, more people should read the article, but you show that this does not necessarily prevent them from misinterpreting it and spreading the FUD a little bit further.
I just watched two movies: Control Room (2004) about the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq and Al Jazeera's role and The revolution will not be televised (2003) about the role of the private media in the coup in Venezuela in 2001. Neither of the two might be called very objective, but I see how difficult it would be to find an audience for more scientific analysis.
The common theme in both is how important the media has become. Now this is not really news, but during the last decade the media reaction has been part of e.g. military operation (embedded journalism) and there is a tremendous effort to control the pictures. Not so much to suppress any reporting, since it has become obvious that this will never work, but to control what is fed to the press. And unfortunately the press is not yet up to speed to get their informations from a wider number of sources.
Now with blogging, youtube, flickr etc. there seems to be a much wider range of possible information sources, even harder to suppress than in the past. But today we face the problem which of these sources to trust, there are just so many. There are attempts like newstrust, which tries to be a sort of slashdot moderation system on top of existing news. But I think we need much more of this. Like greasemonkey allows you to attach things to websites that the authors did not intend to be there, we need the option to attach other sources to any news and have a large body of people vote on which of these sources should be taken into account. I have no clue how to realize this, but this is a typical case: the government using FUD to strengthen their position. People can react and argue with the claims, but there should be a way for these comments to reach the public, not only via sites like slashdot, but by default. With the increase of media sources and media power we have to become better at using and evaluating media as a group, not only as single viewers and readers.
Because the Mac Plus and the WinXP Pro SP2 systems were the most widely used GUI based desktop machines at their respective time, thus making a comparison about productivity feasible.
I cannot really agree with these tests that just compare "start up tasks" like opening a file or booting the OS. There often is a good reason not to focus too much on these events, because don't happen that often. Responsiveness during use is a better comparison, and this is much harder. Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done. And while opening a file 0.2 seconds faster will not really improve my productivity by much, having instant access to Google and Wikipedia does.
But anyway: Here is a quote from Andy Hertzfeld about how Steve Jobs motivated them to make the Mac boot faster (taken from the documentary The triumph of the nerds by Robert X. Cringley.)
The world is smarter than this. There was a tremendous international response and offer to help after Katrina. The negative reaction the US is confronted with today is a result of the danger the US governments current politics put the world into due to overestimating their power and underestimating the importance of diplomacy and agreement. It's not a lack of sympathy for the US people.
In a true free market capitalism world, someone would own the air, water etc. and you would have to pay them for the right to pollute. Some senators therefore proposed to privatize everything, so somebody would care if you destroy these things. I think we are in enough trouble already with patents and intellectual property to see that making everything "owned by someone" is not necessarily the best option. But this is what a real market version would look like. Today we have a world where a number of resources are provided "for free" instead of having a price, which is part of the problem.
It's not that simple. One of the reasons for the G8 meeting is to discuss rules of engagement. If you subsidize an industry in your country, due to the rules of the WTO other countries are ALLOWED to impose trade tariffs. But so far, ignoring e.g. climate change or human rights is not something that is considered a deal breaker since there is no deal about those things. So one of the goals of the Europeans is to establish rules, so that there may be legal sanctions in the future.
The US government is trying to prevent the establishment of these rules. That does not necessarily mean that they intend to (continue to) not engage in reducing e.g. carbon emissions, but even if they promise to match the European carbon reduction goals, there won't be any way to force them to do so if they fail. They refuse to become liable.
The largest part of trade in the EU is trade between countries in the EU, currently 25 with about 450 million "consumer". Beyond that the US makes up a large part, though not enough to ruin the EU. But nobody will risk a full scale trade war, neither the Europeans nor the US, it's ways to expensive.
It's more likely that the Europeans will establish rules for products imported. They love rules, and some of them are quite good, e.g. any electric product has to comply to a number of security rules and have an CE label, due to which appliances in Europe are extremely save. They are already enforcing limits on energy consumption and use of hazardous materials, they could also limit the energy allowed to create a product. This would force producers world wide to adapt more environmental friendly ways to create products, if they still want to sell to the European market. Usually these producers will not create two separate products lines, one environmental friendly for the EU and one less friendly for e.g. the US. Raising the bar for Europe will automatically raise the bar worldwide, thus spreading those "advanced" products even beyond the EU without requiring international rules or a trade war.
Disclaimer: I'm German and this is one of very few times the German government has my full support.
Me bad, miscalculated, off by a factor of 1000.