This is really interesting. From TFA: "The Times said it intends to publish only about 100 or so of the records. And the other news organizations that have the material said they likely will release only a fraction."
Well, this is mostly very boring stuff. Still, having only a handful of newspapers and some journalists try to find something interesting in this large pile of documents means that there will be gems that will not be found. These cables go back to 1966 and there must be very interesting details in there about things that just aren't on the radar for these journalists.
I'm really looking forward to Wikileaks publishing all of this.
This is the typical rubbish of someone who thinks Wikileaks aims at the US. It doesn't.
I'm pretty sure Rubin doesn't know that Assange won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. And Rubin doesn't know this because he doesn't care the fuck for who is murdered by whom in Kenya. Instead he thinks that Wikileaks is evil and out to destroy the US because it exposes what some US diplomats think about Putin. What an ignorant self-important wanker.
Until not long ago hacker types were jailed for attacking sites, stealing information nobody cared for or pirating stuff. Nothing that would really matter though. Compared to
Now Julian Assange, who has all the marks of a textbook hacker hero (even if this has nothing to do with Wikileaks, but check his bio -- he was jailed for hacking, founded an ISP and contributed to quite a few Open Source projects) is *really* pissing off the mighty who are just used to do what the fuck they want.
I'm not sure what will come out of all this, but there is a good chance it will make history one way or another.
That he's now being sought because he has shagged two women in three days and wrecked the condomes he was using is not only absurd, it's stranger than fiction. This alone is something the typical nerdy type couldn't even dream of...
By dumping the X protocol along with the X.org server they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Since this baby is still a baby after more than 20 years and somehow won't grow up this might be a good idea after all.
See, I have nothing against X Window. But Ubuntu just *has* to target some market and this is either a market in which the ability to have an application display a window on a remote display is somehow important or another market with different priorities. And I assume the former market is so small compared to the latter that throwing that grey-haired baby out finally might be a good move. Remote rendering might be a unique advantage of X but how many users (and potential users) *need* or even know about it? 0.01%?
Ubuntu can't be everything for everyone. I'd be totally happy with Ubuntu moving forward this way and Debian and Fedora and everyone else staying with that baby.
... since the unexpected end of the century in '99.
(What is actually surprising is that the internet still hasn't widely adopted IP6, and ISPs are now turning to ludicrous measures - NAT - to keep avoiding what makes sense.)
NAT actually *makes* sense for many interested parties. You get some protection from consumers using their connection to actually (*gasp*) serve stuff which, along with asymmetric connections and anemic upload bandwidth, keeps the ability to offer and publish and distribute things out of the hands of the masses and in the hands of the deserving few. Allowing consumers to reach out and consume stuff is good, allowing them to serve things and to be able to connect to each other isn't.
IPv6 is a technical solution to problems nobody who counts likes to see solved. NAT'ing the hell out of the consumer-facing side of the Internet creates something that is good enough for consumers and so much more suited to stuff that ghost called "Internet with billions of servers and peers on desks and in bags and pockets" back into the bottle.
Yep but 80-90% of iPhone games are pretty shit! or low-accurracy, puzzle , block/breaking type casual games.
You buy a dedicated device for gaming having a touch pad alone would be doomed to fail. iPhone and Android devices are more than capable of throwing out enough polygons to match the current generation of handheld consoles (There are some visually impressive FPS's out there ) . but as a gaming platform they suck even simple games like breakout just dont play well. I have to agree with Assemblerex on this one.
That said , in addition to the regular array of buttons / pads - a touch pad might be a nice addition as a complementary control element - but replacing them with just a touch pad is a big mistake.
N.
The point is that buttons and the like are fairly indirect and unnatural ways of controlling something you're looking at. Touchpads/touchscreens have their limits but also their advantages. Add gyroscopes for precise movement control and you'll have something that fits much, much better with human (even pre-human) senses and real-life experiences than stupid buttons.
Whenever you have a competition between something that requires the user to learn unique skills and something that leverages deeply rooted behaviour patterns (and finger-touching/moving things you're looking at or tilting a thing to move other things on it probably is evolutionary older than humans) the latter will always win. You won't see it this way if you already have learned that former skill-set but in the long run and with new users there's absolutely no question what they will prefer.
People *can* learn but they very much prefer not having to learn.
Way, way back I learned to control a model airplane with one of the first remote controls. It didn't have proportional controls back then, you had to start a rudder moving by flicking a lever and stop it moving by flicking it again. You *can* learn these things, especially when you're young, but it's an effort nonetheless and while learning it's not fun but just frustrating. Flying a quadrocopter by tilting around an iPhone feels about one or two orders of magnitude more direct, because it appeals to hardcoded circuits deep down in the animal layers of our mind and body.
Of course bad implementations of all this will suck anyway. Bad touchpads and touchscreens, bad layout, bad ergonomics, accelerometers instead of gyroscopes and so on are just bad no matter what. They may still sell in the same way that sex sells, even if it's bad sex.
The products really aren't that "revolutionary", and certainly not magical. In fact, they're pretty ordinary. What separates Apple from the rest (and a lot of people's money) is the cult-like status they've built amongst a small but big-spending segment of the population. You HAVE to have the latest because it's the greatest thing that will ever be and ever has been.
There is certainly a good amount of marketing and hype going on, but assuming that this is all is just silly. There's an awful lot of otherwise perfectly intelligent people who manage to ignore all the really good ideas Apple has by thinking there is nothing but marketing and hype and "cult".
The thing is that "ordinary people" attach quite a bit of importance to things like elegant industrial design on the front *and* the back of devices, to lids you can open with one finger without overturning your laptop, to good large touchpads, to ports lined up right side up on one edge of the thing, to batteries that last a good while, to chargers that won't have destroyed the battery after half a year, to not having silly feet under your laptop to give the exhaust grilles room to breath at least as long as you don't try to use the thing on a bed or a soft carpet, to cases and screens and keyboards you can actually keep clean...
The point isn't that Apple is insanely great or "magic". The point is that most others are insanely bad. There is no "magic" in Apple products, there's just the most mundane cheapness and thoughtlessness in the majority of all products and every exception to it gets *noticed*.
Hell, my MacBook is two years old now, I use it 10 to 12 hours a day, carry it around and treat it like a good friend (that is not very careful). It looks as new and it still has 100% battery capacity. If this is just cult I would love to see this cult applied to more things. It works great and surely it must be much cheaper than trying to reach the same results by decent engineering and design.
You *can* sync easily the Mac AB and Google contacts. You need to have an iPhone, though (or some plist hacking). Contacts still suck though, since you can't delegate anything here, it's strictly contacts for a user and that's it. Unusable for professional needs.
You also can store all kind of documents in Google docs now. Still, it's very poor.
Yep, the only reason setting up Google Apps is hard is because Google does not care about HMI at all. They just slap together interfaces based on what their code monkeys want to do and don't give any consideration to how people actually want and need to interact with their computers.
In general, computer interfaces are awful. I've yet to see one that is actually elegant, insightful, and intuitive.
Absolutely true, yes. All Google products seem to consist of features slapped together, with no consideration for the actual user interface. It's a nightmare, actually.
But then, user interfaces are *hard*. Engineers never get this right. Google is no exception here. If you find a halfway complex application (web or not) with a really good interface count yourself lucky. It's rare.
This is one reason we still need pros (or semi-pros) to set up even the simplest things. Without actually being able to think like a engineer and without knowing what sits behind all the buttons you're lost.
One very simple example: Do you have ever set up Google Apps for a domain, with email, contacts, calendar, Google sites and so on? Yeah, it's all in the cloud and all you have to do is clicking on buttons and filling out forms. Now go and look at some user trying to set this up. More likely than not he will get as far as configuring the MX-records and then he will cry for help.
All this cloud stuff seems to be so simple, but it very much isn't. And yes, this actually is nothing a real pro would like to bother with (you'll be fighting more with the UIs than anything else) but there is high demand for this, people think they can finally get away without someone who knows what he does, but they can't.
Most of this is in no way interesting or satisfying work but just fighting half-wit user interfaces. It's sometimes insulting, actually. Instead of really setting up things and controlling things you're hanging off someone else's setup and try to beat some sense out of it. It's often frustrating, you often will have to come to the conclusion that things you would like to do just can't be done because they're not offered and you can't do anything about that. But hey, it's just work.
Me? I'd rather setup a full server park from scratch with old PCs and Linux than fighting the "cloud", but guess what's in demand more. And yes, there's a whole army of trained monkeys out there, knowing every cloud service under the sun and with superhuman point-and-click abilities, but if you really know your job and also know about problems and limitations you can still easily make some money with this. Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
The ZTE Blade, right now available only in the UK from Orange, costs £99 ($157) without a contract.
It has an 3.5" 800x480 AMOLED display, capacitive touchscreen, 512MB RAM, a 600 Mhz CPU, 3G, WiFi, GPS, Accelerometers, a 3MP camera, microSD up to 32GB and runs Android 2.1 (first 2.2 ports are available).
"Normal smartphones" will be down to not much more than $100 within the next year and these things will have a hires touchscreen and run Android.
This is not to say that there isn't room for dumb phones, mind you. But price is not the problem.
This is very bad PR for the new ID, but neither the ID card nor the software has been hacked yet. This is just another way to install some malware on a computer.
I have no doubt though that worse things will happen. The mistakes made here are so glaringly obvious that it's hard to believe that there aren't other holes to be found.
Time Machine is too easy to use. Many users even use it for archiving deleted files or older versions of files. This is madness. A Backup is not an archive. As soon as you start to rely on parts of your backup as a source of data that is not elsewhere anymore you deserve everything that may happen to you. But you'll never get this into the brains of users. Give them a backup system that is easy to use and they will use it for letting it archive stuff.
Used just as a plain silly backup system TM is great. Setup is as easy as plugging in some cheap external drive and clicking "OK" in the TM dialog popping up then. Best OS feature ever.
...this is actually opening up some interesting potential. This thing is a tool to recognize and track persons and their movements in a room, no more and no less. Have some of such things in your home, one in each room, connected to a small server. Improve the voice recognition and speech synthesis, add some software and you've got something very close to a home that is watching you, your family and your guests, knows where you are, what you're doing, what you're saying and can speak to you. Give the software access to all your personal communication and data (email, phone, voicebox, scheduling,...) and your house starts to become aware of you and your life. Could be very interesting (and also very spooky).
Open Source drivers for these things would open up a world of interesting things to do with it, no doubt.
Remember, the Apple ideology is that people should not have any desire to hack their systems; they should simply use them, and rely on Apple to take care of technical details. This has been the case for a very long time now, and as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, you can bet that there won't be any change.
Come on, this is not an ideology, it's just a product philosophy and a design principle. The iThings are meant to be used, not to be hacked. And while I'm a geek I'm very happy about these things. Something that doesn't require to be hacked and that doesn't need to be hacked and where even someone is actively taking away any temptation for me to waste my time on it is a nice change now and then.
Some people really should grow up. I love to have an device that keeps me from tinkering with it. I have more than enough other things to tinker with. Too many, actually. There's no lack of computers to fiddle with, really.
Back in the day when Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple and was building his own company (NeXT) he had the interior of the factory in which NeXTStations were built re-painted three times -- until it was *just* the right shade of grey. And this is not a joke.
First, all who are saying that thickness is unimportant should try one. This thing is thin and small enough to slip into a bag all by itself and once in there it's light enough you hardly notice it at all anymore. What's not to like about that?
The keyboard is the same size as all Mac keyboards and feels very much the same, the trackpad the same width as in the other MacBooks but not quite as high. Works perfectly well though and I did not miss a mouse. The screen is a bit smaller of course, but has the same resolution as the 13" MB and MBP.
The machine felt surprisingly snappy, the SSD and rather fast GPU seem to compensate for the not so fast CPU just fine.
There's no TRIM support in the (Apple-branded) SSD according to System Profiler.
All in all it feels like a real laptop when you use it and almost like nothing when you carry it. I liked it very much and had my credit card nearly jumping out of my pocket.
The real application for ultra-high resolution is surveillance cams. Something interesting might happen somewhere in a wide field of view, and when it does, detail is useful.
You may have a point here. With something like 120 MP and a wide lens you can cover a large area with one camera and have access to details everywhere without having to move the thing around. On the other hand you get absolutely *huge* amounts of data...
Shall we consider Helen Keller? Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder?
It would appear that the human mind can do pretty darned well in the human scheme of things with fairly limited input, mobility, etc. Especially when the mind in question is powerful.
Only if you disregard the fact that most of these persons grew up quite normally and all had an environment of largely similar human beings to integrate with.
Take a newborn with no body and/or no senses and wait what becomes of it. Most of our "intelligence" develops while interacting with the world and this needs not only our bodies and our senses but also an social environment we can relate to. Which largely consists of beings that are slightly different but basically very much the same as us. We become what we are by emulating and manipulating and learning from what happens when we do this.
Just looking at "how the brain works" often totally disregards the fact that the brain is not like a computer. Its hardware actually adapts to what it needs to do. If you look at the brain of an intelligent human you already look at something that became what it is by interacting with and surviving in a real world with real physical and social constraints and features. We're not born intelligent or sentient. We have the potential for that but without a fitting social environment and our bodies and senses and lots of very "animal" needs we never would actualize that potential.
We can cope with being born blind or deaf or unable to ever walk or not being cared for to a certain extent, but there are tight limits to that. Intelligence is very much a counterpart to a world that is complex but obeys to very strict physical laws and also a counterpart to a society that is complex but allows to learn from it by emulating others and satisfying needs by manipulating both the physical world around us and other beings who are already intelligent in the very same way.
We understand fairly well how many below-neck sensors and chemicals influence neuron cells. They have their importance in psychology, but they seem really useless when it comes to cognition.
What we call "intelligence" could very well be just a meta-phenomen. Cognition, sentience and intelligence could be just names we give to certain subjective manifestations of a process that is neither defined by these nor actually needs them. An artificial intelligence without an imperfect body with very specific social, psychological and physical needs, desires and feedback loops could easily be something we would just never care to call "intelligent" even if it were an order of magnitude more clever than us. We would still think of it as a computer or a software, not as a sentient being.
You can't separate human intelligence from our bodies, our social environment and our psychology. It's just much too closely related to surviving in a very specific environment with a very specific set of sensors, phsyical needs and social/psychological feedback loops. We are not even born as sentient intelligent beings, we're born as helpless animals with no intelligence or sentience to be found in them. Understanding the hardware of our brains does not help much for understanding intelligence, sentience or cognition. It may be useful to emulate certain aspects of these but this will still just produce useful machines.
In my opinion all this AI talk is just plain silly. We certainly can build hard- and software emulating some aspects of intelligence (and we already do this) but any AI will be so different from us just by having none of our needs, motivations and constraints that we will never recognize it as a sentient being.
Even we on Earth are already emitting more electromagnetic radiation than the sun
This is way, way off. We're not even in the same ballpark as the sun. In fact, our ballpark and the sun's ballpark aren't on the same planet.
OK, I notice this was a very misleading statement and I obviously assumed some familiarity with what we're talking about here.
Of course they're not even in the same ballpark if we talk about general EM radiation including light and IR. But if we talk about potentially signal-bearing narrow-band radio waves Earth is (and has been for quite a while) "brighter" than our sun. If there is some SETI-like project going on in a sphere of 50 lightyears radius around us (which is the distance the signals have covered now) it will have absolutely no problems with our radio waves being drowned by the radiation coming from our sun. We really stand out like a sore thumb in lots of narrow radio bands.
"Why was that, Doctor Fielgud? Did you detect electromagnetic communications or something?"
"Of course not. Any electromagnetic communications would be completely drowned out by the radiation from the system's star. 'Listening' for electromagnetic radiation is futile; no way would we ever hear another intelligence's electromagnetic communication, and even if we did it would appear to be random noise."
But this is wrong. Even we on Earth are already emitting more electromagnetic radiation than the sun and it is *not* random noise. In fact it is very different from random noise. If you'd look at our system from far away you could easily see that there's something going on here. We're standing out like a sore thumb actually.
And this "look for AI, not aliens" is incredibly silly anyway. What difference does this make from a distance? When you're looking for artificial signals it doesn't matter what made them in the first place. Either it's something generated by natural phenomens or it is not. "Looking for AI" is in no way different than "looking for Aliens".
And the huge hole in his theory is the execution environment, e.g., the cpu that the brain is running on is REALITY itself. So be sure to add that to your cost of simulation of the brain.
This is correct. Even if you would simulate a brain, which brain does it simulate? That of a newborn baby? How intelligent is that? Intelligence develops by interacting with reality, and with other actors. Within tight physical constraints. And it may well need a body to act with and to be an acting subject. There's much more to "intelligence" than just the hardware of the brain.
Simulate a brain and you've got something like a paralyzed newborn in a sensory deprivation chamber. You'd have to also simulate a body and a world around it to get to something resembling a human brain in function. And even then you'd probably just get a dribbling crazy Artifical Idiot.
In Otherland there's Treehouse (I can't believe it, there's no Wikipedia article for it!) which is no fixed thing but somehow hovers over the 'net. The only way to free the Cloud would be to use it for and by some "underground" protocol(s) or application(s). Use encrypted, distributed and redundant storage whereever you can find it and have an own way to use it, with no dedicated servers and no central user database.
I don't think you can free the cloud but maybe you can install a free ghost on it. It's silly to fight the cloud (and it's expensive too -- when costs come, the freedom goes), it may better to just use it.
The OS is open source, that is it. The market is not core functionality of the OS, you can make your own damn market. You have to get a license from redhat to use their repositories. Same fucking thing.
Heck you can even get the apk and install it on your device that lacks the market.
The OS is Open Source, but people aren't using the OS, they're using apps on it and the Google apps not only aren't free, they also are actually just interfaces to Google services running on Google servers. You can't just implement alternative apps for that without still using Google services. It's a free OS with some important core apps not being free and interfacing totally unfree proprietary services running off a proprietary data collection.
For practical purposes Android as meant to be used and in fact used by most users is as proprietary as MS Windows and switching from Android/Google to another OS with another "cloud provider" is nearly impossible for most non-geeks once they're locked in.
Google is becoming the new Microsoft, Android is becoming the new Windows and Android will stick to our fingers with Google apps and services as Windows stuck to them with MS Office and proprietary file formats. That of all things Open Source and Linux enabled this is just that kind of ironic gem that history is studded with.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really interesting. From TFA: "The Times said it intends to publish only about 100 or so of the records. And the other news organizations that have the material said they likely will release only a fraction."
Well, this is mostly very boring stuff. Still, having only a handful of newspapers and some journalists try to find something interesting in this large pile of documents means that there will be gems that will not be found. These cables go back to 1966 and there must be very interesting details in there about things that just aren't on the radar for these journalists.
I'm really looking forward to Wikileaks publishing all of this.
This is the typical rubbish of someone who thinks Wikileaks aims at the US. It doesn't.
I'm pretty sure Rubin doesn't know that Assange won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. And Rubin doesn't know this because he doesn't care the fuck for who is murdered by whom in Kenya. Instead he thinks that Wikileaks is evil and out to destroy the US because it exposes what some US diplomats think about Putin. What an ignorant self-important wanker.
Until not long ago hacker types were jailed for attacking sites, stealing information nobody cared for or pirating stuff. Nothing that would really matter though. Compared to
Now Julian Assange, who has all the marks of a textbook hacker hero (even if this has nothing to do with Wikileaks, but check his bio -- he was jailed for hacking, founded an ISP and contributed to quite a few Open Source projects) is *really* pissing off the mighty who are just used to do what the fuck they want.
I'm not sure what will come out of all this, but there is a good chance it will make history one way or another.
That he's now being sought because he has shagged two women in three days and wrecked the condomes he was using is not only absurd, it's stranger than fiction. This alone is something the typical nerdy type couldn't even dream of...
Strange days indeed.
By dumping the X protocol along with the X.org server they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Since this baby is still a baby after more than 20 years and somehow won't grow up this might be a good idea after all.
See, I have nothing against X Window. But Ubuntu just *has* to target some market and this is either a market in which the ability to have an application display a window on a remote display is somehow important or another market with different priorities. And I assume the former market is so small compared to the latter that throwing that grey-haired baby out finally might be a good move. Remote rendering might be a unique advantage of X but how many users (and potential users) *need* or even know about it? 0.01%?
Ubuntu can't be everything for everyone. I'd be totally happy with Ubuntu moving forward this way and Debian and Fedora and everyone else staying with that baby.
... since the unexpected end of the century in '99.
(What is actually surprising is that the internet still hasn't widely adopted IP6, and ISPs are now turning to ludicrous measures - NAT - to keep avoiding what makes sense.)
NAT actually *makes* sense for many interested parties. You get some protection from consumers using their connection to actually (*gasp*) serve stuff which, along with asymmetric connections and anemic upload bandwidth, keeps the ability to offer and publish and distribute things out of the hands of the masses and in the hands of the deserving few. Allowing consumers to reach out and consume stuff is good, allowing them to serve things and to be able to connect to each other isn't.
IPv6 is a technical solution to problems nobody who counts likes to see solved. NAT'ing the hell out of the consumer-facing side of the Internet creates something that is good enough for consumers and so much more suited to stuff that ghost called "Internet with billions of servers and peers on desks and in bags and pockets" back into the bottle.
Yep but 80-90% of iPhone games are pretty shit! or low-accurracy, puzzle , block/breaking type casual games.
You buy a dedicated device for gaming having a touch pad alone would be doomed to fail. iPhone and Android devices are more than capable of throwing out enough polygons to match the current generation of handheld consoles (There are some visually impressive FPS's out there ) . but as a gaming platform they suck even simple games like breakout just dont play well. I have to agree with Assemblerex on this one.
That said , in addition to the regular array of buttons / pads - a touch pad might be a nice addition as a complementary control element - but replacing them with just a touch pad is a big mistake.
N.
The point is that buttons and the like are fairly indirect and unnatural ways of controlling something you're looking at. Touchpads/touchscreens have their limits but also their advantages. Add gyroscopes for precise movement control and you'll have something that fits much, much better with human (even pre-human) senses and real-life experiences than stupid buttons.
Whenever you have a competition between something that requires the user to learn unique skills and something that leverages deeply rooted behaviour patterns (and finger-touching/moving things you're looking at or tilting a thing to move other things on it probably is evolutionary older than humans) the latter will always win. You won't see it this way if you already have learned that former skill-set but in the long run and with new users there's absolutely no question what they will prefer.
People *can* learn but they very much prefer not having to learn.
Way, way back I learned to control a model airplane with one of the first remote controls. It didn't have proportional controls back then, you had to start a rudder moving by flicking a lever and stop it moving by flicking it again. You *can* learn these things, especially when you're young, but it's an effort nonetheless and while learning it's not fun but just frustrating. Flying a quadrocopter by tilting around an iPhone feels about one or two orders of magnitude more direct, because it appeals to hardcoded circuits deep down in the animal layers of our mind and body.
Of course bad implementations of all this will suck anyway. Bad touchpads and touchscreens, bad layout, bad ergonomics, accelerometers instead of gyroscopes and so on are just bad no matter what. They may still sell in the same way that sex sells, even if it's bad sex.
The products really aren't that "revolutionary", and certainly not magical. In fact, they're pretty ordinary. What separates Apple from the rest (and a lot of people's money) is the cult-like status they've built amongst a small but big-spending segment of the population. You HAVE to have the latest because it's the greatest thing that will ever be and ever has been.
There is certainly a good amount of marketing and hype going on, but assuming that this is all is just silly. There's an awful lot of otherwise perfectly intelligent people who manage to ignore all the really good ideas Apple has by thinking there is nothing but marketing and hype and "cult".
The thing is that "ordinary people" attach quite a bit of importance to things like elegant industrial design on the front *and* the back of devices, to lids you can open with one finger without overturning your laptop, to good large touchpads, to ports lined up right side up on one edge of the thing, to batteries that last a good while, to chargers that won't have destroyed the battery after half a year, to not having silly feet under your laptop to give the exhaust grilles room to breath at least as long as you don't try to use the thing on a bed or a soft carpet, to cases and screens and keyboards you can actually keep clean...
The point isn't that Apple is insanely great or "magic". The point is that most others are insanely bad. There is no "magic" in Apple products, there's just the most mundane cheapness and thoughtlessness in the majority of all products and every exception to it gets *noticed*.
Hell, my MacBook is two years old now, I use it 10 to 12 hours a day, carry it around and treat it like a good friend (that is not very careful). It looks as new and it still has 100% battery capacity. If this is just cult I would love to see this cult applied to more things. It works great and surely it must be much cheaper than trying to reach the same results by decent engineering and design.
You *can* sync easily the Mac AB and Google contacts. You need to have an iPhone, though (or some plist hacking). Contacts still suck though, since you can't delegate anything here, it's strictly contacts for a user and that's it. Unusable for professional needs.
You also can store all kind of documents in Google docs now. Still, it's very poor.
Yep, the only reason setting up Google Apps is hard is because Google does not care about HMI at all. They just slap together interfaces based on what their code monkeys want to do and don't give any consideration to how people actually want and need to interact with their computers.
In general, computer interfaces are awful. I've yet to see one that is actually elegant, insightful, and intuitive.
Absolutely true, yes. All Google products seem to consist of features slapped together, with no consideration for the actual user interface. It's a nightmare, actually.
But then, user interfaces are *hard*. Engineers never get this right. Google is no exception here. If you find a halfway complex application (web or not) with a really good interface count yourself lucky. It's rare.
This is one reason we still need pros (or semi-pros) to set up even the simplest things. Without actually being able to think like a engineer and without knowing what sits behind all the buttons you're lost.
One very simple example: Do you have ever set up Google Apps for a domain, with email, contacts, calendar, Google sites and so on? Yeah, it's all in the cloud and all you have to do is clicking on buttons and filling out forms. Now go and look at some user trying to set this up. More likely than not he will get as far as configuring the MX-records and then he will cry for help.
All this cloud stuff seems to be so simple, but it very much isn't. And yes, this actually is nothing a real pro would like to bother with (you'll be fighting more with the UIs than anything else) but there is high demand for this, people think they can finally get away without someone who knows what he does, but they can't.
Most of this is in no way interesting or satisfying work but just fighting half-wit user interfaces. It's sometimes insulting, actually. Instead of really setting up things and controlling things you're hanging off someone else's setup and try to beat some sense out of it. It's often frustrating, you often will have to come to the conclusion that things you would like to do just can't be done because they're not offered and you can't do anything about that. But hey, it's just work.
Me? I'd rather setup a full server park from scratch with old PCs and Linux than fighting the "cloud", but guess what's in demand more. And yes, there's a whole army of trained monkeys out there, knowing every cloud service under the sun and with superhuman point-and-click abilities, but if you really know your job and also know about problems and limitations you can still easily make some money with this. Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
The ZTE Blade, right now available only in the UK from Orange, costs £99 ($157) without a contract.
It has an 3.5" 800x480 AMOLED display, capacitive touchscreen, 512MB RAM, a 600 Mhz CPU, 3G, WiFi, GPS, Accelerometers, a 3MP camera, microSD up to 32GB and runs Android 2.1 (first 2.2 ports are available).
"Normal smartphones" will be down to not much more than $100 within the next year and these things will have a hires touchscreen and run Android.
This is not to say that there isn't room for dumb phones, mind you. But price is not the problem.
This is very bad PR for the new ID, but neither the ID card nor the software has been hacked yet. This is just another way to install some malware on a computer.
I have no doubt though that worse things will happen. The mistakes made here are so glaringly obvious that it's hard to believe that there aren't other holes to be found.
Time Machine is too easy to use. Many users even use it for archiving deleted files or older versions of files. This is madness. A Backup is not an archive. As soon as you start to rely on parts of your backup as a source of data that is not elsewhere anymore you deserve everything that may happen to you. But you'll never get this into the brains of users. Give them a backup system that is easy to use and they will use it for letting it archive stuff.
Used just as a plain silly backup system TM is great. Setup is as easy as plugging in some cheap external drive and clicking "OK" in the TM dialog popping up then. Best OS feature ever.
...this is actually opening up some interesting potential. This thing is a tool to recognize and track persons and their movements in a room, no more and no less. Have some of such things in your home, one in each room, connected to a small server. Improve the voice recognition and speech synthesis, add some software and you've got something very close to a home that is watching you, your family and your guests, knows where you are, what you're doing, what you're saying and can speak to you. Give the software access to all your personal communication and data (email, phone, voicebox, scheduling, ...) and your house starts to become aware of you and your life. Could be very interesting (and also very spooky).
Open Source drivers for these things would open up a world of interesting things to do with it, no doubt.
Come on, this is not an ideology, it's just a product philosophy and a design principle. The iThings are meant to be used, not to be hacked. And while I'm a geek I'm very happy about these things. Something that doesn't require to be hacked and that doesn't need to be hacked and where even someone is actively taking away any temptation for me to waste my time on it is a nice change now and then.
Some people really should grow up. I love to have an device that keeps me from tinkering with it. I have more than enough other things to tinker with. Too many, actually. There's no lack of computers to fiddle with, really.
Back in the day when Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple and was building his own company (NeXT) he had the interior of the factory in which NeXTStations were built re-painted three times -- until it was *just* the right shade of grey. And this is not a joke.
...a few words.
First, all who are saying that thickness is unimportant should try one. This thing is thin and small enough to slip into a bag all by itself and once in there it's light enough you hardly notice it at all anymore. What's not to like about that?
The keyboard is the same size as all Mac keyboards and feels very much the same, the trackpad the same width as in the other MacBooks but not quite as high. Works perfectly well though and I did not miss a mouse. The screen is a bit smaller of course, but has the same resolution as the 13" MB and MBP.
The machine felt surprisingly snappy, the SSD and rather fast GPU seem to compensate for the not so fast CPU just fine.
There's no TRIM support in the (Apple-branded) SSD according to System Profiler.
All in all it feels like a real laptop when you use it and almost like nothing when you carry it. I liked it very much and had my credit card nearly jumping out of my pocket.
The real application for ultra-high resolution is surveillance cams. Something interesting might happen somewhere in a wide field of view, and when it does, detail is useful.
You may have a point here. With something like 120 MP and a wide lens you can cover a large area with one camera and have access to details everywhere without having to move the thing around. On the other hand you get absolutely *huge* amounts of data...
Shall we consider Helen Keller? Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder?
It would appear that the human mind can do pretty darned well in the human scheme of things with fairly limited input, mobility, etc. Especially when the mind in question is powerful.
Only if you disregard the fact that most of these persons grew up quite normally and all had an environment of largely similar human beings to integrate with.
Take a newborn with no body and/or no senses and wait what becomes of it. Most of our "intelligence" develops while interacting with the world and this needs not only our bodies and our senses but also an social environment we can relate to. Which largely consists of beings that are slightly different but basically very much the same as us. We become what we are by emulating and manipulating and learning from what happens when we do this.
Just looking at "how the brain works" often totally disregards the fact that the brain is not like a computer. Its hardware actually adapts to what it needs to do. If you look at the brain of an intelligent human you already look at something that became what it is by interacting with and surviving in a real world with real physical and social constraints and features. We're not born intelligent or sentient. We have the potential for that but without a fitting social environment and our bodies and senses and lots of very "animal" needs we never would actualize that potential.
We can cope with being born blind or deaf or unable to ever walk or not being cared for to a certain extent, but there are tight limits to that. Intelligence is very much a counterpart to a world that is complex but obeys to very strict physical laws and also a counterpart to a society that is complex but allows to learn from it by emulating others and satisfying needs by manipulating both the physical world around us and other beings who are already intelligent in the very same way.
What we call "intelligence" could very well be just a meta-phenomen. Cognition, sentience and intelligence could be just names we give to certain subjective manifestations of a process that is neither defined by these nor actually needs them. An artificial intelligence without an imperfect body with very specific social, psychological and physical needs, desires and feedback loops could easily be something we would just never care to call "intelligent" even if it were an order of magnitude more clever than us. We would still think of it as a computer or a software, not as a sentient being.
You can't separate human intelligence from our bodies, our social environment and our psychology. It's just much too closely related to surviving in a very specific environment with a very specific set of sensors, phsyical needs and social/psychological feedback loops. We are not even born as sentient intelligent beings, we're born as helpless animals with no intelligence or sentience to be found in them. Understanding the hardware of our brains does not help much for understanding intelligence, sentience or cognition. It may be useful to emulate certain aspects of these but this will still just produce useful machines.
In my opinion all this AI talk is just plain silly. We certainly can build hard- and software emulating some aspects of intelligence (and we already do this) but any AI will be so different from us just by having none of our needs, motivations and constraints that we will never recognize it as a sentient being.
Even we on Earth are already emitting more electromagnetic radiation than the sun
This is way, way off. We're not even in the same ballpark as the sun. In fact, our ballpark and the sun's ballpark aren't on the same planet.
OK, I notice this was a very misleading statement and I obviously assumed some familiarity with what we're talking about here.
Of course they're not even in the same ballpark if we talk about general EM radiation including light and IR. But if we talk about potentially signal-bearing narrow-band radio waves Earth is (and has been for quite a while) "brighter" than our sun. If there is some SETI-like project going on in a sphere of 50 lightyears radius around us (which is the distance the signals have covered now) it will have absolutely no problems with our radio waves being drowned by the radiation coming from our sun. We really stand out like a sore thumb in lots of narrow radio bands.
But this is wrong. Even we on Earth are already emitting more electromagnetic radiation than the sun and it is *not* random noise. In fact it is very different from random noise. If you'd look at our system from far away you could easily see that there's something going on here. We're standing out like a sore thumb actually.
And this "look for AI, not aliens" is incredibly silly anyway. What difference does this make from a distance? When you're looking for artificial signals it doesn't matter what made them in the first place. Either it's something generated by natural phenomens or it is not. "Looking for AI" is in no way different than "looking for Aliens".
And the huge hole in his theory is the execution environment, e.g., the cpu that the brain is running on is REALITY itself. So be sure to add that to your cost of simulation of the brain.
This is correct. Even if you would simulate a brain, which brain does it simulate? That of a newborn baby? How intelligent is that? Intelligence develops by interacting with reality, and with other actors. Within tight physical constraints. And it may well need a body to act with and to be an acting subject. There's much more to "intelligence" than just the hardware of the brain.
Simulate a brain and you've got something like a paralyzed newborn in a sensory deprivation chamber. You'd have to also simulate a body and a world around it to get to something resembling a human brain in function. And even then you'd probably just get a dribbling crazy Artifical Idiot.
In Otherland there's Treehouse (I can't believe it, there's no Wikipedia article for it!) which is no fixed thing but somehow hovers over the 'net. The only way to free the Cloud would be to use it for and by some "underground" protocol(s) or application(s). Use encrypted, distributed and redundant storage whereever you can find it and have an own way to use it, with no dedicated servers and no central user database.
I don't think you can free the cloud but maybe you can install a free ghost on it. It's silly to fight the cloud (and it's expensive too -- when costs come, the freedom goes), it may better to just use it.
The OS is open source, that is it. The market is not core functionality of the OS, you can make your own damn market. You have to get a license from redhat to use their repositories. Same fucking thing.
Heck you can even get the apk and install it on your device that lacks the market.
The OS is Open Source, but people aren't using the OS, they're using apps on it and the Google apps not only aren't free, they also are actually just interfaces to Google services running on Google servers. You can't just implement alternative apps for that without still using Google services. It's a free OS with some important core apps not being free and interfacing totally unfree proprietary services running off a proprietary data collection.
For practical purposes Android as meant to be used and in fact used by most users is as proprietary as MS Windows and switching from Android/Google to another OS with another "cloud provider" is nearly impossible for most non-geeks once they're locked in.
Google is becoming the new Microsoft, Android is becoming the new Windows and Android will stick to our fingers with Google apps and services as Windows stuck to them with MS Office and proprietary file formats. That of all things Open Source and Linux enabled this is just that kind of ironic gem that history is studded with.