Early in my career, 1992 onwards, I made multimedia (when that was still a cool new thing!) training and presentations in Macromedia Authorware which largely followed a flowchart metaphor - the idea being that it would help non-programmer content specialists to make multimedia training. There was some bigger power under the hood since you could add pascal like scripts to the icons. Very unfortunately the scripting language didn't support functions and procedures, you had to go to the icons flow for that. Still I made some pretty nice for the time multimedia training and reference programs, helped by a graphical designer for a slick look. In addition we recorded professional voice overs, and even had fullscreen video, these required Realmagic moeg-1 overlay cards.
Macromedia was bought by Adobe, mainly for Flash, and eventually Authorware was discontinued. A pity that it wasn't open-sourced, the product / environment still had good promise.
Updated ipads are around the corner and for very little money the kindle fire 8hd seem nice enough, certainly for many people though not if you want to develop etc on the move.
They can work with bluetooth keyboards and pack decent power in a minimal space.
When traveling I don t want the cable hassle of a sepeate screen and cpu, not to mention they have separate power supplies for longer use.
My ipad 2 is really slow since the last update I was able to apply. Previously it was absolutely great to bring on trips to watch videos, do some browsing and emailing, yet now I only use it as a wake up alarm. Of course a current gen (or soon upcoming) ipad is more powerful and integrates nicely with my other apple devices and icloud photo syncing etc, but a Fire HD8 seems sufficient for my use case at a much lower cost.
Hence, thinking about saving a few hundred dollars with this FireHD8, at the expense of some less usage comfort (the icloud syncing mainly). I realise that the screen resolution is lower than on an ipad, but at least for me 720p is ample to enjoy videos on a tablet.
I had indeed a good experience with 2 xiaomi products. I am happy that you also seem to know about the quaint and charming mechanical HMT watches (sadly bankrupt since a good year), and I do like most of the Apple products I own or have owned, except for iTunes. What is exactly the problem?
I don't have the current Macbook Pro but when playing with it in the shop I thought that the adapting touch bar was a useful innovation, very nice to scroll through photos, do video edits etc. I fail to see why I should pour hate on it, after all you can set it to standard F keys if I am not mistaken.
Yes, the MagSafe adapter is a loss. It saved my Macbook Air once. Also agree about the ports. Apple is usually ahead of the curve in removing old ports and adopting new ones, but here they went too quickly. Not fun to have to bring an adapter hub.
I currently live in Hong Kong and my job regularly brings me to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which are just next door.
I agree with ShanghaiBill's observations. Not to say that it is a worker's paradise over there but far from as bad as naive and outdated opinions allude to.
I would like to add that the professional expertise of my customers over there is excellent.
I currently live in in Hong Kong. I needed a remotely controllable webcam for baby monitoring and a friend suggested me to check out xiaomi.
Indeed, I found a well-designed Apple-like product that works well for a good price. I also found their other products on display well made and beautiful for a sensible price.
In the end I came home not only with the webcam but also with their elegant "urban backpack", a well designed non-utilitarian looking backpack that is just perfect to gonto the office with, and not even embarassing when visiting customers.
Xiaomi earned my goodwill.
I think it is a typo. The Cnet article mentions "The tablet's A8X processor will be getting an upgrade too, jumping over to the A9 chip used in the iPhone 6S. "
It does look like a decent tablet for a reasonable price.
From what I understand, an advantage of Fabric is that it allows selective distribution, unlike a traditional blockchain with a global distribution of the "truth" in a more granular way than possible with a permission based ledger. This kinda marries the business benefit of a normal selective network and that of using a distributed ledger. I am not a programmer, this is my interpretation.
This selective distribution makes the blockchain interesting for more solutions for example in financial services.
Considering the technicalities involved it makes sense to offer it as a generic cloud service. Interesting developments for sure.
I expect that in general people are happy with IOS or Android. Not sure how much having both would bring extra, and it is clunky to have them together.
But, perhaps, a thin ebook reader a la kindle would be an interesting back for an iOS or an android device. Because the electronic paper of those readers is much more pleasant to read books than traditional screens.
With infant twin kids around, I don't have enough free time to truly dedicate myself to a raspberry pi project. However a few projects seem interesting:
- find an antique furniture style radio and convert the interior to an internet radio. This was not my own idea, it is a documented project.
- with some luck my fossilised macintosh 512k with 2 floppys (how I loved that machine!) is still in the basement of my parents. I thought it would be fun to replace the interior with a pi 3, and use an lcd screen instead of the crt of course.
- a diy picture frame style screen that displays all kinds of info from different feeds in separate areas of the screen. Weather, news headlines, picture of the day etc
So now MacKeeper is an antivirus software? Rather it is the company with the most annoying popups anywhere for Mac users. Useless software that is aggressively marketed.
Having lost dear family members and friends to cancer variants, I follow such news items with interest.
Yes, this above study was with mice, not yet a trial on humans. But even so I have the impression that significant breakthroughs are now being made regularly, and then there is Microsoft throwing machine learning at the problem, all of which leads me to wonder - will we soonish be able to cure all cancer? That would be truly a breakthrough for for society.
Any insights from people in the field?
That is a good point. LTE support would be good for independence - but only if the battery can last long enough.
I can imagine Apple adding that eventually, if and when they can do so in a still svelte case with enough battery life.
The deplorable level of the unambitious lazy failing class... instead of looking at their own weaknesses and failings all they do is spewing bitterness...
An interesting interview and it made me reflect back on Bezos's success.
I think that he has -much like Steve Jobs back then- a good feel of what will be important and successful in a few years, and acts upon it.
The runaway success of Alexa and Echo is discussed in the interview, and it seems they worked on it since a few years already; and also think of for example Amazon Cloud. I once read that the initial germ of this other success was his insistence to build all of Amazon's functionality using web services, long before that became common. Or the lead with the Kindle format.
Then there are interesting recent experiments with drone delivery and supermarket experience.
From a business POV, he does a lot of things right in a proactive way.
I am curious about the main pros and cons of a Wear 2 watch vs the current Apple Watch, next to the fact that they are tied to their own ecosystem of course.
I have the first generation Apple Watch since a good year, and my wife has the new one. We like them. I am actually a big fan of traditional mechanical watches and yet I find that I wear the AW at least two days per week (I have 10 other mechanical watches in my rotation, hence relatively it is worn a lot).
What I like most: the discreet tapping notifications and reminders, the dial with integrated activity plots, the ease of Apple pay, occasionally it is quicker to answer a call on the watch than on the phone. Also the dial designs while less plentiful than on android watches are restrained and in good taste (nothing is as offputting as a screen dial that is bright like a torch). I like to use Siri to control a few homekit devices (Siri switch on standing lamp) through it. The daily charging is less an issue than I expected. The build quality and feel is quite premium, my stainless one feels more posh than most watches in the mall at similar price levels.
At first glance, Android Wear 2 seems comparable in functionality with the difference of having round dials in the case of LG. I must say that round dials look better to me for time display. Not so sure yet for general information display, rectangular seems better for that.
Any comments on the relative merits of Android Wear 2? What does it do that the Apple Watch doesn't and vice versa?
Regardless, I think that the true breakthrough of this category of devices will come when eventually more health related sensors will be added. It is well known that Apple hired people with PHDs on non-invasive sensors for blood glucose, blood oxygen etc; I can imagine Google having done the same.
In my company we have such an approach for specific areas:
- Our training prices are linked to the GDP, in a few levels. In the lowest band countries this can be 40% of the full price. We do need enough participants however to cover the effort of coming over. Our training is an enabler for the software, it is mainly cost recovery.
- For specific software and services there can be special country promotions to boost adoption also in lower GDP countries. We don't do that explicitely for everything though.
This is an interesting summary. And I do think that an intelligent and wider use of sensors will eventually become the killer app for wearables, because everyone wants to be healthy.
I did specifically mention the Apple Watch, because it is known that the company has hired people with PHDs on various non-invasive sensors like blood oxygen, but also and importantly, blood sugar, and more. I looked up this tech, and it seems it is not ready for prime time, you'd want it to work out of the box and for everyone no matter what kind of skin you have (not only race, but also how dry). And then there is the challenge of passing regulations, because anything more than a heartbeat sensor requires certification. These certifications take a long time, and in the case of Apple, they wouldn't want to wait 3-5 years to release an Apple Watch with updated sensors, hence if my intuition is right they could be working on sensors in a bracelet which can be certified separately, and which could communicate with the watch using the little port near the lugs.
Anyway, whatever brand will release a comprehensive health monitoring wearable at a good price may well have a product hit on its hands on the level of an iPhone. Hence the interest of Apple and others in this domain. I find this category of health monitoring devices very interesting since they could truly improve life quality in various ways, detecting disease earlier, tracking diets, etc That is progress to me.
Of course this being slashdot, many will point out the risk on privacy leaks - like imagine an insurance company gtting hold of your wearable stats. Yes, proper data privacy will be a crucial element in the design of these devices.
These are interesting times, I think we will see such an upgraded smartwatch (perhaps by Apple, perhaps a clever startup) in the next 5 years, and I think it will be huge.
Slashdot Mirror
Early in my career, 1992 onwards, I made multimedia (when that was still a cool new thing!) training and presentations in Macromedia Authorware which largely followed a flowchart metaphor - the idea being that it would help non-programmer content specialists to make multimedia training. There was some bigger power under the hood since you could add pascal like scripts to the icons. Very unfortunately the scripting language didn't support functions and procedures, you had to go to the icons flow for that.
Still I made some pretty nice for the time multimedia training and reference programs, helped by a graphical designer for a slick look. In addition we recorded professional voice overs, and even had fullscreen video, these required Realmagic moeg-1 overlay cards.
Macromedia was bought by Adobe, mainly for Flash, and eventually Authorware was discontinued. A pity that it wasn't open-sourced, the product / environment still had good promise.
Pulling out of the climate agreement unfortunately makes me think of this cartoon: https://climatesanity.files.wo...
Updated ipads are around the corner and for very little money the kindle fire 8hd seem nice enough, certainly for many people though not if you want to develop etc on the move. They can work with bluetooth keyboards and pack decent power in a minimal space. When traveling I don t want the cable hassle of a sepeate screen and cpu, not to mention they have separate power supplies for longer use.
My ipad 2 is really slow since the last update I was able to apply. Previously it was absolutely great to bring on trips to watch videos, do some browsing and emailing, yet now I only use it as a wake up alarm. Of course a current gen (or soon upcoming) ipad is more powerful and integrates nicely with my other apple devices and icloud photo syncing etc, but a Fire HD8 seems sufficient for my use case at a much lower cost.
Hence, thinking about saving a few hundred dollars with this FireHD8, at the expense of some less usage comfort (the icloud syncing mainly). I realise that the screen resolution is lower than on an ipad, but at least for me 720p is ample to enjoy videos on a tablet.
I had indeed a good experience with 2 xiaomi products. I am happy that you also seem to know about the quaint and charming mechanical HMT watches (sadly bankrupt since a good year), and I do like most of the Apple products I own or have owned, except for iTunes. What is exactly the problem?
I don't have the current Macbook Pro but when playing with it in the shop I thought that the adapting touch bar was a useful innovation, very nice to scroll through photos, do video edits etc. I fail to see why I should pour hate on it, after all you can set it to standard F keys if I am not mistaken.
Yes, the MagSafe adapter is a loss. It saved my Macbook Air once. Also agree about the ports. Apple is usually ahead of the curve in removing old ports and adopting new ones, but here they went too quickly. Not fun to have to bring an adapter hub.
I currently live in Hong Kong and my job regularly brings me to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which are just next door.
I agree with ShanghaiBill's observations. Not to say that it is a worker's paradise over there but far from as bad as naive and outdated opinions allude to.
I would like to add that the professional expertise of my customers over there is excellent.
I currently live in in Hong Kong. I needed a remotely controllable webcam for baby monitoring and a friend suggested me to check out xiaomi. Indeed, I found a well-designed Apple-like product that works well for a good price. I also found their other products on display well made and beautiful for a sensible price.
In the end I came home not only with the webcam but also with their elegant "urban backpack", a well designed non-utilitarian looking backpack that is just perfect to gonto the office with, and not even embarassing when visiting customers.
Xiaomi earned my goodwill.
I think it is a typo. The Cnet article mentions "The tablet's A8X processor will be getting an upgrade too, jumping over to the A9 chip used in the iPhone 6S. "
It does look like a decent tablet for a reasonable price.
From what I understand, an advantage of Fabric is that it allows selective distribution, unlike a traditional blockchain with a global distribution of the "truth" in a more granular way than possible with a permission based ledger. This kinda marries the business benefit of a normal selective network and that of using a distributed ledger. I am not a programmer, this is my interpretation. This selective distribution makes the blockchain interesting for more solutions for example in financial services. Considering the technicalities involved it makes sense to offer it as a generic cloud service. Interesting developments for sure.
Oh yes I also have an HMT Janata and a black and a white pilot HMT. Lovely!
I expect that in general people are happy with IOS or Android. Not sure how much having both would bring extra, and it is clunky to have them together.
But, perhaps, a thin ebook reader a la kindle would be an interesting back for an iOS or an android device. Because the electronic paper of those readers is much more pleasant to read books than traditional screens.
One counterexample: I saw plenty of Macs in use at IBM, far from an art-focused company.
It would be good if Chrome would filter out all popups advertising that horrid MacKeeper crapware.
With infant twin kids around, I don't have enough free time to truly dedicate myself to a raspberry pi project. However a few projects seem interesting:
- find an antique furniture style radio and convert the interior to an internet radio. This was not my own idea, it is a documented project.
- with some luck my fossilised macintosh 512k with 2 floppys (how I loved that machine!) is still in the basement of my parents. I thought it would be fun to replace the interior with a pi 3, and use an lcd screen instead of the crt of course.
- a diy picture frame style screen that displays all kinds of info from different feeds in separate areas of the screen. Weather, news headlines, picture of the day etc
So now MacKeeper is an antivirus software? Rather it is the company with the most annoying popups anywhere for Mac users. Useless software that is aggressively marketed.
Having lost dear family members and friends to cancer variants, I follow such news items with interest.
Yes, this above study was with mice, not yet a trial on humans. But even so I have the impression that significant breakthroughs are now being made regularly, and then there is Microsoft throwing machine learning at the problem, all of which leads me to wonder - will we soonish be able to cure all cancer? That would be truly a breakthrough for for society.
Any insights from people in the field?
Thanks for the correction about IOS and Android Wear - I didn't know.
That is a good point. LTE support would be good for independence - but only if the battery can last long enough. I can imagine Apple adding that eventually, if and when they can do so in a still svelte case with enough battery life.
The deplorable level of the unambitious lazy failing class... instead of looking at their own weaknesses and failings all they do is spewing bitterness...
An interesting interview and it made me reflect back on Bezos's success.
I think that he has -much like Steve Jobs back then- a good feel of what will be important and successful in a few years, and acts upon it.
The runaway success of Alexa and Echo is discussed in the interview, and it seems they worked on it since a few years already; and also think of for example Amazon Cloud. I once read that the initial germ of this other success was his insistence to build all of Amazon's functionality using web services, long before that became common. Or the lead with the Kindle format.
Then there are interesting recent experiments with drone delivery and supermarket experience.
From a business POV, he does a lot of things right in a proactive way.
I am curious about the main pros and cons of a Wear 2 watch vs the current Apple Watch, next to the fact that they are tied to their own ecosystem of course. I have the first generation Apple Watch since a good year, and my wife has the new one. We like them. I am actually a big fan of traditional mechanical watches and yet I find that I wear the AW at least two days per week (I have 10 other mechanical watches in my rotation, hence relatively it is worn a lot). What I like most: the discreet tapping notifications and reminders, the dial with integrated activity plots, the ease of Apple pay, occasionally it is quicker to answer a call on the watch than on the phone. Also the dial designs while less plentiful than on android watches are restrained and in good taste (nothing is as offputting as a screen dial that is bright like a torch). I like to use Siri to control a few homekit devices (Siri switch on standing lamp) through it. The daily charging is less an issue than I expected. The build quality and feel is quite premium, my stainless one feels more posh than most watches in the mall at similar price levels.
At first glance, Android Wear 2 seems comparable in functionality with the difference of having round dials in the case of LG. I must say that round dials look better to me for time display. Not so sure yet for general information display, rectangular seems better for that.
Any comments on the relative merits of Android Wear 2? What does it do that the Apple Watch doesn't and vice versa?
Regardless, I think that the true breakthrough of this category of devices will come when eventually more health related sensors will be added. It is well known that Apple hired people with PHDs on non-invasive sensors for blood glucose, blood oxygen etc; I can imagine Google having done the same.
I should have added, these are not consumer or office level softwares that could be simply bought abroad and brought back.
In my company we have such an approach for specific areas:
- Our training prices are linked to the GDP, in a few levels. In the lowest band countries this can be 40% of the full price. We do need enough participants however to cover the effort of coming over. Our training is an enabler for the software, it is mainly cost recovery.
- For specific software and services there can be special country promotions to boost adoption also in lower GDP countries. We don't do that explicitely for everything though.
This is an interesting summary. And I do think that an intelligent and wider use of sensors will eventually become the killer app for wearables, because everyone wants to be healthy.
I did specifically mention the Apple Watch, because it is known that the company has hired people with PHDs on various non-invasive sensors like blood oxygen, but also and importantly, blood sugar, and more. I looked up this tech, and it seems it is not ready for prime time, you'd want it to work out of the box and for everyone no matter what kind of skin you have (not only race, but also how dry). And then there is the challenge of passing regulations, because anything more than a heartbeat sensor requires certification. These certifications take a long time, and in the case of Apple, they wouldn't want to wait 3-5 years to release an Apple Watch with updated sensors, hence if my intuition is right they could be working on sensors in a bracelet which can be certified separately, and which could communicate with the watch using the little port near the lugs.
Anyway, whatever brand will release a comprehensive health monitoring wearable at a good price may well have a product hit on its hands on the level of an iPhone. Hence the interest of Apple and others in this domain. I find this category of health monitoring devices very interesting since they could truly improve life quality in various ways, detecting disease earlier, tracking diets, etc That is progress to me.
Of course this being slashdot, many will point out the risk on privacy leaks - like imagine an insurance company gtting hold of your wearable stats. Yes, proper data privacy will be a crucial element in the design of these devices.
These are interesting times, I think we will see such an upgraded smartwatch (perhaps by Apple, perhaps a clever startup) in the next 5 years, and I think it will be huge.