The spooky music, the hint of conspiracy, the "don't you SEE where all this is GOING" attitude-- it all comes off as more stoner paranoia than insightful futurism, which it seems to take itself to be.
Honestly, I think that whether format x is better than format y is totally beside the point, and saying that "format z is dying" is a little silly.
The real "format" that matters here is "digital music stored on writeable media". That trend is more interesting and I think more meaningful. Think about your music collection 10 years ago, and think about it now. The big change is not whether you are using mp3 vs. AAC vs. Ogg. It's a bookshelf of CDs versus a cigarette pack sized device. It's a mix tape versus a play list.
Sure, format matters, but I think the bigger picture is a lot more meaningful here.
I think that's putting too much weight behind one person's opinion.
Sure, it would be nice to think that people withheld making a final decision until they carefully gathered all the information available, took into account the author's bias, and balanced the merits of all contrary points of view.
But the costs in time of gathering, understanding, and evaluating "all the information available" is huge. Managers often just make snap judgements, and often, because it's often less costly to be wrong than indecisive.
But I still wouldn't worry too much, or say that even if it made the front page, "Gnome is toast". People's negative opinion would only last until the front-page story that said "Gnome: worth a second look!"
The original post is incorrect. Nielsen's Alertbox is *about* the study. But the first sentence of his article is
Andrew Monk and colleagues from the University of York have performed a wonderful study to assess why it's so annoying when other people have cellphone conversations in public.
Actually, cars, especially station wagons, really used to have wood bodies in the 30's-40's or so. The thing that was popular in the 70's was basically wood-style contact-paper (or some other kind of adhesive, printed wood simulation).
I work for a medium-sized content website; IM has become pretty deeply ingrained in the way people communicate around here. One good example: we use it to coordinate making new areas of the site live; the content people can sit at their own desks and launch content using our CMS, we can sit at our own desks to move code from the development server to the live server. And we QA as we go (we don't have a formal QA team). I can't imagine being able to coordinate this process so well in any other medium.
What Jess is good for
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Jess seems, at first glance, to be equally as redundant. Perhaps some of you could delve into the benefits of Jess, on my account?:)
A rules engine like Jess or CLIPS allows you to express a set of rules very economically, expressively, and readably. It's not right for everything, but in many situations it allows you to do things that would be practically impossible if you expressed the same thing as if/then/else statements in code. For example, in a situation where rules need to change frequently, it's great to be able to allow an expert user to edit the rules which can live somewhere outside the code. If you find yourself recompiling frequently to suit the fickle whims of a user who wants some kind of rule changed, a rules engine can be a huge time saver.
Well, there are other nifty things you might want to do with a digital version of a text than just read it. Or format it for reading. I think that's part of the point.
Some examples of software you could create to process a text, just off the top of my head: - a concordance generator - a linguistic analyzer - a text comparison system
I haven't read this book, but if this review represents the book's main arguments well, it seems like this is more about things which create actual enjoyable aesthetic experiences.
Not really the same as this brand-as-status theory, which is just talking about an affectation of taste rather than making aesthetic evaluations. Not at all the same thing.
... about half of which are really of Panther running X Windows, not the Panther features mentioned in the review. While it's interesting to see how KDE & Gnome look, it's not really discussed in the review in detail. And the something like the new Expose feature would have been easier to see than explain.
Actually, I recall that earlier this year there was a little flap with Apple Records over the iTunes Store.
http://www.macnn.com/news/19643&startNumber=33
Seems that in 1981 Apple (Computer) had promised Apple (Records) that they wouldn't go into the music business so that they wouldn't drag the young Apple (Computer) to court.
While the idea has plenty of problems for use on a general web search engine, it could work very well to tune results on a site's internal search engine, where the user has no vested interest in one result coming up higher than the others, the user only wants good results.
It might also have potential, even if the thumbs up/thumbs down are only shown to trusted users. One of the enduring problems in tuning search engines is that the people who build the search engine aren't the people who know the content best. Getting the content people some way to say "yes, this item should come up higher for this term" is a powerful idea, IMO.
I believe "onwards and upwards" was from the TI-99/4/4a game Alpiner. If I recall correctly, Alpiner also featured a bloopy-beepy rendition of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as a soundtrack.
It's not too hard to reverse engineer a file format-- assuming you have a way to read that file.
True, what we know of ancient civilizations from their writing comes from a very small fraction of the total documents they produced. And many of those documents were often ephemeral (e.g. cargo manifests). But there really is an important qualitative difference between a piece of paper, parchment, or papyrus, which to the unmediated human eye has writing on it, and, say a shiny disc which requires a fairly fragile machine, a specific power source, to read it.
That said, while I'm not quite as optimistic that the ease of digital-to-digital copying alone is a big factor, it's also far easier than it was even 20 years ago to turn those digital assets into physical documents. And the sheer volume of artifacts we produce makes this less of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, how exactly would that avoid the /. effect? Someone actually had to deliver that page that said "buy this document" and a way to actually buy it...
It may be a "Troll", though.
The spooky music, the hint of conspiracy, the "don't you SEE where all this is GOING" attitude-- it all comes off as more stoner paranoia than insightful futurism, which it seems to take itself to be.
Honestly, I think that whether format x is better than format y is totally beside the point, and saying that "format z is dying" is a little silly.
The real "format" that matters here is "digital music stored on writeable media". That trend is more interesting and I think more meaningful. Think about your music collection 10 years ago, and think about it now. The big change is not whether you are using mp3 vs. AAC vs. Ogg. It's a bookshelf of CDs versus a cigarette pack sized device. It's a mix tape versus a play list.
Sure, format matters, but I think the bigger picture is a lot more meaningful here.
Sorry. Farming is only about 10,000 years old.
Ah, yes: Hanlon's Razor
Sure, it would be nice to think that people withheld making a final decision until they carefully gathered all the information available, took into account the author's bias, and balanced the merits of all contrary points of view.
But the costs in time of gathering, understanding, and evaluating "all the information available" is huge. Managers often just make snap judgements, and often, because it's often less costly to be wrong than indecisive.
But I still wouldn't worry too much, or say that even if it made the front page, "Gnome is toast". People's negative opinion would only last until the front-page story that said "Gnome: worth a second look!"
Actually, cars, especially station wagons, really used to have wood bodies in the 30's-40's or so. The thing that was popular in the 70's was basically wood-style contact-paper (or some other kind of adhesive, printed wood simulation).
I work for a medium-sized content website; IM has become pretty deeply ingrained in the way people communicate around here. One good example: we use it to coordinate making new areas of the site live; the content people can sit at their own desks and launch content using our CMS, we can sit at our own desks to move code from the development server to the live server. And we QA as we go (we don't have a formal QA team). I can't imagine being able to coordinate this process so well in any other medium.
Jess seems, at first glance, to be equally as redundant. Perhaps some of you could delve into the benefits of Jess, on my account? :)
A rules engine like Jess or CLIPS allows you to express a set of rules very economically, expressively, and readably. It's not right for everything, but in many situations it allows you to do things that would be practically impossible if you expressed the same thing as if/then/else statements in code. For example, in a situation where rules need to change frequently, it's great to be able to allow an expert user to edit the rules which can live somewhere outside the code. If you find yourself recompiling frequently to suit the fickle whims of a user who wants some kind of rule changed, a rules engine can be a huge time saver.
Well, there are other nifty things you might want to do with a digital version of a text than just read it. Or format it for reading. I think that's part of the point.
Some examples of software you could create to process a text, just off the top of my head:
- a concordance generator
- a linguistic analyzer
- a text comparison system
I haven't read this book, but if this review represents the book's main arguments well, it seems like this is more about things which create actual enjoyable aesthetic experiences.
Not really the same as this brand-as-status theory, which is just talking about an affectation of taste rather than making aesthetic evaluations. Not at all the same thing.
... about half of which are really of Panther running X Windows, not the Panther features mentioned in the review. While it's interesting to see how KDE & Gnome look, it's not really discussed in the review in detail. And the something like the new Expose feature would have been easier to see than explain.
It's more like 70% for big companies.8 ,17096,00.html
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/0,133
It's not saying they're *exclusively* using linux, and it's unclear whether this is server or desktop.
Not to mention Po Nudo.
Actually, I recall that earlier this year there was a little flap with Apple Records over the iTunes Store.
http://www.macnn.com/news/19643&startNumber=33
Seems that in 1981 Apple (Computer) had promised Apple (Records) that they wouldn't go into the music business so that they wouldn't drag the young Apple (Computer) to court.
While the idea has plenty of problems for use on a general web search engine, it could work very well to tune results on a site's internal search engine, where the user has no vested interest in one result coming up higher than the others, the user only wants good results.
It might also have potential, even if the thumbs up/thumbs down are only shown to trusted users. One of the enduring problems in tuning search engines is that the people who build the search engine aren't the people who know the content best. Getting the content people some way to say "yes, this item should come up higher for this term" is a powerful idea, IMO.
HTTP is a "good enough" technology. Has it stalled innovation?
I wonder if move indicates that Microsoft doesn't expect either XP Media Center Edition (or WebTV) to monopolize set top boxes.
realtors were doing loan amortizations
Banks do loan amortizations, not realtors.
Can you back this up? Can you document how many terrorists have now been caught that wouldn't have been caught without it? Kindly provide links.
I believe "onwards and upwards" was from the TI-99/4/4a game Alpiner. If I recall correctly, Alpiner also featured a bloopy-beepy rendition of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as a soundtrack.
It's not too hard to reverse engineer a file format-- assuming you have a way to read that file.
True, what we know of ancient civilizations from their writing comes from a very small fraction of the total documents they produced. And many of those documents were often ephemeral (e.g. cargo manifests). But there really is an important qualitative difference between a piece of paper, parchment, or papyrus, which to the unmediated human eye has writing on it, and, say a shiny disc which requires a fairly fragile machine, a specific power source, to read it.
That said, while I'm not quite as optimistic that the ease of digital-to-digital copying alone is a big factor, it's also far easier than it was even 20 years ago to turn those digital assets into physical documents. And the sheer volume of artifacts we produce makes this less of a problem.