I'm happy about this not because I don't like OS X, but because it radically extends the potential life of a Mini for me.
I want to get a Mini and start using OS X as my main (but not only) OS. After living with a 17" Powerbook for a few months, I'm ready to switch - well, switch back anyway, until Win2K I was a Mac guy.
But if I end up liking it as much as I expect I will, I'll want a dual G5 at some point. Then what would become of the Mini?
Problem now solved: the Mini would become a Linux development server (something I always need a few of around).
Very nice. And by setting it up for dual-boot I get can keep it as a backup Mac as well.
It's cool that he did this, and of course Nano-ITX is the only way to do it with off-the-shelf parts. It would be nice to compare the Mac Mini to a Nanode, which is at least in the same league style-wise (IMHO).
But if you want to really compare platforms you need to take the processor into account, and for that it would be more realistic to put the Pentium-M up against the G4. And maybe also run BSD on it:-). I don't know if anyone does a nano-ITX mobo that would take a Pentium-M but one might hope...
As an aside, I think it's funny how the kids spammed up his comments section with FreeMiniMac MLM schemes.
Still think I'm going to buy one though... maybe when Tiger ships and someone has a sufficiently cool iKVM.
Google seems once again to be catering to the advertisers and ignoring the publishers.
The API will allow advertisers to self-administer the delivery, the timing and the price they will pay for their text ads.
Having used AdSense on the content publishing side, I've seen its glaring weaknesses as well as its strengths.
If you look in the webmaster and SEO forums you'll find lots of great suggestions for how to make the system work better from the publisher's point of view.
I just hope Google pays some attention to that and includes the other half of their revenue model in either this API or a forthcoming one.
I particularly want some level of keyword override when AdSense gets the context wrong, and the ability to get standards-compliant, valid XHTML out of the ad machine.
Even accepting all your assumptions, I see two problems:
1) It's going to be very hard to bring the price of your VCDs down to what the local pirates will pay. Yes, it's cheaper to mass-produce, but the pirates are copying in bulk and already there in their markets. This part could definitely work, but you'd probably lose money on the first few releases as your distribution network gets set up. Plus it would only work for very, very popular movies.
2) I can buy blank CDRs for a few cents each. Can you really operate a download service with 650MB downloads at a few cents a pop? I kinda doubt that.
So as I see it basically the VCD and download parts of your plan are loss leaders.
That means you're in big trouble if your assumptions about the DVD and ticket sales don't work out.
On Linux and Windows 2000 it looks and behaves very close to identically (though it's much faster on Win2K than on RH9/FluxBox on my slow machine) - but on OSX 10.2 it looks very different any time you deal with a dialog box of any kind.
I hate to distract from all the discussion about China, but the search engine itself is a mess.
I tried my standard test keyword, which is obscure enough to not get too many responses but real enough to get a good set (kw is "medienkunst" which is german for "media art" and also one of my domains, medienkunst.com).
On Accoona I got a bunch of sites, mostly domains I registered at some point, some active and some not. All of them have this "info" button that shows info about "my" company (some true some obvious crap).
It would appear that they just trolled whois and grouped domains together by who registered them, and then made a bunch of wild-monkeys-flying-out-of-their-asses assumptions about that connection.
So, if that's their "AI" I don't think G has to worry, Clinton or no Clinton.
Not technical writers, but writer-writers: journalists, novelists, what have you.
The keys are to support all OS's, full unicode and manymany languages, and the features actual writers need.
One of the things I dislike about MS Word (2000) is that soooooo many of its features are geared towards, well, office document production.
That makes perfect sense for the bulk of their market, but whenever I find myself writing, say, a non-technical magazine article, it makes me want to scream.
Plus it's a resource hog, but having not used Abi yet I don't want to make bets on that front;-)
I'm soooo waiting for someone to do that (and too lazy to do it myself).
I work on 'doze, Linux and OS X. I dream of having *one* copy of all my mail and bookmarks etc on a USB drive, and FF+extensions and TB+extensions for all three platforms on the same drive.
I bet someone could make money selling drives with that pre-installed...
This looks like a great thing, even if the trailers so far are a bit lame.
Imagine if a new generation of students trained in digital effects and hungry for exposure meets up with the right young writers...
Together with the next generation of HD video discs, this could easily lead to a revolution in indie film, with high-quality FX-laden goods coming at you through Netflix and the like.
On the other hand, that's what everyone said about "normal" indies when Final Cut Pro caught on.
I know a lot of people who have e-mail addresses and don't have computers.
Of course they have webmail. A few of them even have POP3 accounts on one of my servers, but they only use the webmail.
When one friend finally bought a home computer I explained to him how he could download all his email there etc etc, and he just kind of stared at me blankly.
He's a chef. The bistro where he works has some rental PCs on the net. A few times a day it's slow enough he can spend 20 minutes or so e-mailing (he gives free food to the PC girl in return).
For some people even with computers, webmail is just better. And then there are all those without computers, which at least in Europe is probably more than you'd think.
Interesting stuff, that PACE. I might well end up working with them at some point, and since I hadn't heard of them before I read your post, I actually would put you in as the referer.
Go to frost.biztos.com and message me with your full name if you want, their signup form asks for a full name; otherwise I'll just put in "Damon" next week when I sign up. (Don't have a gig right now but would like to go through PACE on the next one if possible.)
I'm doing a query tool in XUL right now, as a way of teaching myself how to do it. It's not ready for public consumption yet, not by a long shot, but when it is I'll post a link as my sig......and I was inspired directly by MAB, which just blew me away when I found it last week.
I think there are two main things one could do to put oneself on the XUL map in a really big way right now:
1) Make a truly great webmail app in XUL (duh). 2) Make a XUL developers' site in XUL.
Imagine something with the depth and breadth (or even a fraction thereof) of FlashKit.com, only for XUL, and of course *in* XUL. And of course, being in XUL, part of the discussion etc would be improving the portal itself...
I'm not up to either of those tasks yet; as I said I'm on my first XUL app right now, and it's specific to the field I work in.
But whoever does either of those things first, I think, will definitely enter the XUL hall of fame.
The more mundane but equally important thing would be to add documentation, since the docs are pretty thin at the moment.
Speaking from experience, I can tell you there are some real performance issues once you get a big mass of e-mail into a database on lower-end hardward (read: affordable hosted box). But if I were running my own mailserver without paying monthly for the hardware, I'd throw everything into Postgres in a second.
Agreed it's a cool idea, but the camera probably needs a *powered* Firewire connection. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the iPod has an unpowered 4-pin Firewire jack.
Which makes sense from the battery-life point of view... an iPod+iSight combo that only ran for a couple of hours would probably get a lot of bad press.
I noticed that too, and agree that it's a pretty slick implementation.
Very, VERY easy to get around, but slick nonetheless.
It will probably effectively thwart casual copying by non-geeks, which is all the publishers can really expect anyway.
For most people it's much easier to just do screen shots than to watch the HTTP conversation and grab out the background images. And screen cap is pretty much where DRM ends for anything delivered to browsers, so the copyright holders are going to be realistic about that.
And what do they have to lose anyway? OMG! Somebody made a crappy lo-res copy of my book and is trading it on the Intraweb! Along with an ASCII version with a few OCR mistakes and a badly-formatted e-book!
Well, Mr. King might throw a fit but I doubt if his publishers are worried.
Interesting point about VAT. In Hungary it's also 25%, though people have a lot less discretionary income.
However, in Germany it's 16% -- so the next time I buy a computer in Hungary I'm going to look very carefully at the prices in Germany and consider just having it shipped down.
Part of the reason they can get away with the 25% in Hungary is that so many people have small companies. Income tax also being ridiculously high, most people who have the option have some sort of company and use some measure of creative accounting to reduce that bill.
In Hungary prices for things like computers are generally listed without VAT (netto), partly because this makes them look cheaper and partly because a lot of people cycle the VAT through their companies, since most services (what the small companies are billing for) are also subject to VAT. The government still gets its VAT money but the burden is redistributed, with the net effect that the government loses out on a lot of payroll and income tax.
This is sure to get the Republicans riled up, especially in Florida.
I doubt the OSCE will be able to do much real monitoring here, but I would certainly welcome additional scrutiny on the paperless-voting side of things. (Obligatory link to blackbox in case anyone hasn't been there.)
I just read a Vanity Fair article on the situation in Florida and it was scary. There's an Acrobatification of it floating around... looks like the PDFs can be found here: part one,part two and... hmmm, I can't find the end bit.
My own informal poll shows a strong European anti-Bush sentiment, which we could safely assume will combine with this initiative to generate a certain kind of PR... mainly negative I expect.
Since the Green party (as other minor parties) has no chance of winning the Presidency, how does the party evaluate and justify spending resources on this contest instead of on Congressional and state-level contests?
Is it a PR thing? If you look at the Greens in Germany (granted, very different system) you see that they rose slowly over time from the smallest contests to eventually having Cabinet positions.
What is the American Green Party's overall strategy to increase their representation, and how does an unwinnable Presidential election fit into it?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm happy about this not because I don't like OS X, but because it radically extends the potential life of a Mini for me.
I want to get a Mini and start using OS X as my main (but not only) OS. After living with a 17" Powerbook for a few months, I'm ready to switch - well, switch back anyway, until Win2K I was a Mac guy.
But if I end up liking it as much as I expect I will, I'll want a dual G5 at some point. Then what would become of the Mini?
Problem now solved: the Mini would become a Linux development server (something I always need a few of around).
Very nice. And by setting it up for dual-boot I get can keep it as a backup Mac as well.
It's cool that he did this, and of course Nano-ITX is the only way to do it with off-the-shelf parts. It would be nice to compare the Mac Mini to a Nanode, which is at least in the same league style-wise (IMHO).
:-). I don't know if anyone does a nano-ITX mobo that would take a Pentium-M but one might hope...
But if you want to really compare platforms you need to take the processor into account, and for that it would be more realistic to put the Pentium-M up against the G4. And maybe also run BSD on it
As an aside, I think it's funny how the kids spammed up his comments section with FreeMiniMac MLM schemes.
Still think I'm going to buy one though... maybe when Tiger ships and someone has a sufficiently cool iKVM.
You might want to check out Antiword.
.doc files and it works great - though I have to admit I haven't tried it on anything very complex yet.
I've been using that lately on
I agree with most of what you said, but keep in mind that Google doesn't care about standards compliance per se.
Having used AdSense on the content publishing side, I've seen its glaring weaknesses as well as its strengths.
If you look in the webmaster and SEO forums you'll find lots of great suggestions for how to make the system work better from the publisher's point of view.
I just hope Google pays some attention to that and includes the other half of their revenue model in either this API or a forthcoming one.
I particularly want some level of keyword override when AdSense gets the context wrong, and the ability to get standards-compliant, valid XHTML out of the ad machine.
In case anyone was wondering, that's apparently a Genghis Khan quote.
Which means of course that I have to link to this.
It's a nice idea, but...
Even accepting all your assumptions, I see two problems:
1) It's going to be very hard to bring the price of your VCDs down to what the local pirates will pay. Yes, it's cheaper to mass-produce, but the pirates are copying in bulk and already there in their markets. This part could definitely work, but you'd probably lose money on the first few releases as your distribution network gets set up. Plus it would only work for very, very popular movies.
2) I can buy blank CDRs for a few cents each. Can you really operate a download service with 650MB downloads at a few cents a pop? I kinda doubt that.
So as I see it basically the VCD and download parts of your plan are loss leaders.
That means you're in big trouble if your assumptions about the DVD and ticket sales don't work out.
I dunno there...
On Linux and Windows 2000 it looks and behaves very close to identically (though it's much faster on Win2K than on RH9/FluxBox on my slow machine) - but on OSX 10.2 it looks very different any time you deal with a dialog box of any kind.
That shiny blue pill that is a MacinButton...
I hate to distract from all the discussion about China, but the search engine itself is a mess.
I tried my standard test keyword, which is obscure enough to not get too many responses but real enough to get a good set (kw is "medienkunst" which is german for "media art" and also one of my domains, medienkunst.com).
On Accoona I got a bunch of sites, mostly domains I registered at some point, some active and some not. All of them have this "info" button that shows info about "my" company (some true some obvious crap).
It would appear that they just trolled whois and grouped domains together by who registered them, and then made a bunch of wild-monkeys-flying-out-of-their-asses assumptions about that connection.
So, if that's their "AI" I don't think G has to worry, Clinton or no Clinton.
Yes, for writers.
;-)
Not technical writers, but writer-writers: journalists, novelists, what have you.
The keys are to support all OS's, full unicode and manymany languages, and the features actual writers need.
One of the things I dislike about MS Word (2000) is that soooooo many of its features are geared towards, well, office document production.
That makes perfect sense for the bulk of their market, but whenever I find myself writing, say, a non-technical magazine article, it makes me want to scream.
Plus it's a resource hog, but having not used Abi yet I don't want to make bets on that front
I'm soooo waiting for someone to do that (and too lazy to do it myself).
I work on 'doze, Linux and OS X. I dream of having *one* copy of all my mail and bookmarks etc on a USB drive, and FF+extensions and TB+extensions for all three platforms on the same drive.
I bet someone could make money selling drives with that pre-installed...
I guess they need to find some decent actors as well.
Based on these trailers, it looks like the FX kids don't hang out with the better part of the acting crowd. Am I surprised?
This looks like a great thing, even if the trailers so far are a bit lame.
Imagine if a new generation of students trained in digital effects and hungry for exposure meets up with the right young writers...
Together with the next generation of HD video discs, this could easily lead to a revolution in indie film, with high-quality FX-laden goods coming at you through Netflix and the like.
On the other hand, that's what everyone said about "normal" indies when Final Cut Pro caught on.
I know a lot of people who have e-mail addresses and don't have computers.
Of course they have webmail. A few of them even have POP3 accounts on one of my servers, but they only use the webmail.
When one friend finally bought a home computer I explained to him how he could download all his email there etc etc, and he just kind of stared at me blankly.
He's a chef. The bistro where he works has some rental PCs on the net. A few times a day it's slow enough he can spend 20 minutes or so e-mailing (he gives free food to the PC girl in return).
For some people even with computers, webmail is just better. And then there are all those without computers, which at least in Europe is probably more than you'd think.
Interesting stuff, that PACE. I might well end up working with them at some point, and since I hadn't heard of them before I read your post, I actually would put you in as the referer.
Go to frost.biztos.com and message me with your full name if you want, their signup form asks for a full name; otherwise I'll just put in "Damon" next week when I sign up. (Don't have a gig right now but would like to go through PACE on the next one if possible.)
Elmyr de Hory was one of the greatest forgers of all time, and a really interesting guy.
Clifford Irving, who was also a forger in his own field, wrote a really good book on de Hory, titled Fake! (with the exclamation).
And then of course Orson Welles made a film exploring these issues.
All highly recommended. The art forgery world is at least as interesting as the "legitimate" art world.
If you want to get into it, there's a primer available.
I'm doing a query tool in XUL right now, as a way of teaching myself how to do it. It's not ready for public consumption yet, not by a long shot, but when it is I'll post a link as my sig... ...and I was inspired directly by MAB, which just blew me away when I found it last week.
I think there are two main things one could do to put oneself on the XUL map in a really big way right now:
1) Make a truly great webmail app in XUL (duh).
2) Make a XUL developers' site in XUL.
Imagine something with the depth and breadth (or even a fraction thereof) of FlashKit.com, only for XUL, and of course *in* XUL. And of course, being in XUL, part of the discussion etc would be improving the portal itself...
I'm not up to either of those tasks yet; as I said I'm on my first XUL app right now, and it's specific to the field I work in.
But whoever does either of those things first, I think, will definitely enter the XUL hall of fame.
The more mundane but equally important thing would be to add documentation, since the docs are pretty thin at the moment.
You should check out the DBmail project.
Speaking from experience, I can tell you there are some real performance issues once you get a big mass of e-mail into a database on lower-end hardward (read: affordable hosted box). But if I were running my own mailserver without paying monthly for the hardware, I'd throw everything into Postgres in a second.
Agreed it's a cool idea, but the camera probably needs a *powered* Firewire connection. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the iPod has an unpowered 4-pin Firewire jack.
Which makes sense from the battery-life point of view... an iPod+iSight combo that only ran for a couple of hours would probably get a lot of bad press.
I noticed that too, and agree that it's a pretty slick implementation.
Very, VERY easy to get around, but slick nonetheless.
It will probably effectively thwart casual copying by non-geeks, which is all the publishers can really expect anyway.
For most people it's much easier to just do screen shots than to watch the HTTP conversation and grab out the background images. And screen cap is pretty much where DRM ends for anything delivered to browsers, so the copyright holders are going to be realistic about that.
And what do they have to lose anyway? OMG! Somebody made a crappy lo-res copy of my book and is trading it on the Intraweb! Along with an ASCII version with a few OCR mistakes and a badly-formatted e-book!
Well, Mr. King might throw a fit but I doubt if his publishers are worried.
Interesting point about VAT. In Hungary it's also 25%, though people have a lot less discretionary income.
However, in Germany it's 16% -- so the next time I buy a computer in Hungary I'm going to look very carefully at the prices in Germany and consider just having it shipped down.
Part of the reason they can get away with the 25% in Hungary is that so many people have small companies. Income tax also being ridiculously high, most people who have the option have some sort of company and use some measure of creative accounting to reduce that bill.
In Hungary prices for things like computers are generally listed without VAT (netto), partly because this makes them look cheaper and partly because a lot of people cycle the VAT through their companies, since most services (what the small companies are billing for) are also subject to VAT. The government still gets its VAT money but the burden is redistributed, with the net effect that the government loses out on a lot of payroll and income tax.
This is sure to get the Republicans riled up, especially in Florida.
I doubt the OSCE will be able to do much real monitoring here, but I would certainly welcome additional scrutiny on the paperless-voting side of things. (Obligatory link to blackbox in case anyone hasn't been there.)
I just read a Vanity Fair article on the situation in Florida and it was scary. There's an Acrobatification of it floating around... looks like the PDFs can be found here: part one, part two and... hmmm, I can't find the end bit.
My own informal poll shows a strong European anti-Bush sentiment, which we could safely assume will combine with this initiative to generate a certain kind of PR... mainly negative I expect.
Since the Green party (as other minor parties) has no chance of winning the Presidency, how does the party evaluate and justify spending resources on this contest instead of on Congressional and state-level contests?
Is it a PR thing? If you look at the Greens in Germany (granted, very different system) you see that they rose slowly over time from the smallest contests to eventually having Cabinet positions.
What is the American Green Party's overall strategy to increase their representation, and how does an unwinnable Presidential election fit into it?
In case anyone's curious, the name of the town is Freiburg not Freiberg.
But you probably figured that out from the URL, even if our noble editors did not.
Nice town, by the way.
you do not talk about Fight Court.
The second rule of Fight Court is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Court.