Google News could use more depth. As it is, "top stories" run for many days and categorized in the broadest possible way, making deeper search into less popular stories very difficult. If not for the search feature and Google Alerts, the site would be indistinguishable from the Associated Press wire. Personalization just doesn't allow enough options. I would like to see more refined categories. For example, instead of the blunt "Nanotechnology" category, subheadings for solar energy news would draw lots of interest, to name just one possibility. Or create sister sites: "Google Geek News," "Google Punditry News," "Google Phun News." Sure, their RSS reader allows anyone to create a personalized aggregator, but again that places an obstacle in the way, all the work involved in generating lists. (Just emulate originalsignal.com!)
Eh, but the news is nothing really. The medium is the message. Google just wants to put ads in front of us. They have better resources than any company to help each of us find the news that will appeal to us and keep us coming back. YouTube is not the answer I was hoping for.
You said it right.
Ballmer sez the iPhone is nuthin, then MS announces this original(TM) idea. How ridiculous! Don't they have any shame? They have NO innovative ideas and could not mortgage all their stock to come up with even ONE original idea. Jobs was right at the Apple board meeting: developing great products is NOT "as easy as writing a check."
Poor poor pitiful college grads who take a job at Microsoft. No glory, only shame.
Before/. posted this item, I had just read a letter to the Scratch team asking Where is the Source? Apparently, the developers got a $2 million grant to produce Scratch, promising in its grant application that it would release code throughout development, but instead closed the project to its own developers and will release the source only later this year. (The link includes a response-letter from Mitchel Resnick, the MIT team leader.) I dunno, not a big deal, but Scratch is an open source project, so stay tuned, ye developers.
Pons and Fleischmann didn't begin with lab experiments but with a theory, that protons packed together under intense pressure would have a quantum probability of fusing, similar to the way that electrons tunnel. Palladium soaks up hydrogen (that's why it is used) and inside a palladium electrode, the hydrogen is forced by electric charge to be highly pressurized. Lab experiments have verified that funny things happen, resembling nuclear fusion, but to say there is no plausible theory as to why is just plain wrong.
Quit giving mod poits to posts that deconstruct the notion of "security" and get to the nitty gritty. The most prevalent operating system on the planet is the most insecure. Period. By design, not because it attracts the most attention for being the most widespread, i.e. not because hackers attack it most. It has the most vulnerabilities! You who have mod points to give are being suckers if you think it is intelligent to parse the meaning of "security."
When Apple chose Intel chips, a huge mindshare of tech enthusiasts became enamored of Intel. I look into myself and see the irrational plus sign in front of Intel and minus sign in front of AMD, though I'd been a huge fan of AMD before. What the f? Both companies are just awesome innovators. I hope they keep sharpening each other. proverbially, as steel against steel. Gotta love the geniuses in our midst.
I'm on an older iMac, a G3, running the latest OS X, and it's surprisingly adequate for everything but rendering 3D and movie work. I do pro Photoshop work on it, all of my email and web browsing, iTunes listening, VLC movie-watching, Open Office and LaTEX word processing, everything. On Craigslist you can easily find a computer like mine for $100. Nevermind Apple's corporate interest in making a profit, what they've accomplished is amazing as an intellectual achievement. It's like being able to drive 100 mph in a Model T, and it gets only faster with each new release of the operating system. I feel sorry for Windows suckers stuck on the side of the road.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and board-member of Apple, said something cryptic after the introduction of the iPhone at Apple's last keynote. "Wimax is coming."
Broadband over UHF/VHF is covered by the 802.22 specification, and use of white space is an ongoing endeavor. (See dailywireless.org, 2006 and 2007", for example.)
The chief obstacles are political, not technological. The National Association of Broadcasters has tremendous lobbying power and wants to protect its business interests. Most people still get their news from television, and political campaign spending on TV ads is a huge source of revenue for broadcasters. Although they receive their spectrum for free in exchange for public-interest duties, news coverage of political issues is at an all-time low. (Check out this Illinois study.) Broadcasters have discovered that by reducing coverage of political issues, they increase ad revenue while also giving an advantage to whatever candidate has the most money to spend.
The problems are least of all technological. Vecima Networks of Canada, for example, already sells wireless ISP systems that can use the 470 to 862 MHz frequency band. (UHF channels 14 through 79.)
I hope readers here understand that interference is a side-issue. Despite the switch to digital TV, the FCC is still of a mindset that open spectrum should be auctioned to established players, for established uses. The amount of white-space TV spectrum going unused is staggering, even in major metro areas Just imagine how many billions of dollars it is worth to certain companies to maintain the current state of affairs, and that is how much they would be willing to spend on lobbying.
When Limewire is installed, sharing of one's iTunes library is active by default. This can't be turned off without starting up the program and thereby "making available" any copyrighted music in the iTunes library. I didn't notice this until an upload of my music had begun, making me culpable as a copyright infringer.
Rather than being a problem just with Limewire, this illustrates how dangerous the "making available" extension of copyright would be. Simply showing one's files to the world by means of software that could also share them would make one a criminal.
SCO deserves all the bad press it can get on Slashdot, but Groklaw has led the way. What a fantastic job they've done over there! Kudos, you fine folks.
Eric Schmidt said "wimax is coming." Does this mean Apple will partner with Sprint-Nextel, when its transition to wimax is complete? Or could this mean that Google has some wimax plans of its own?
You're wrong though. I think it is very likely that Mac users will discover the Help feature on Macs, just because it is so damned helpful and easy to use. Learning EVERY keyboard shortcut involves nothing more than typing "keyboard shortcuts" into the help form. The original poster, an alleged power Windows user, claimed he'd been a victim of poor Mac design, when in fact Apple has gone to great pains to make using OS X transparent. The help files are extremely helpful.
If Web 2.0 means sites that aggregate info that isn't boring, how can that fail? If it refers to sites like Facebook, where people can connect with real people, how can that fail, unless everyone is boring to everyone else? People go out of their way to find what interests them, but not TOO far out of their way. Minimizing the work of finding what is interesting--is that Web 2.0? Speeding up page-loads? Speeding up connect times to what is interesting? I don't see anything really new about the info available on the net. The only difference is how it is easier to find what one wants.
InfraSearch was another early attempt at collaborative search, based on Gnutella. Sun bought it for about $20 million in stock (estimated) then did nothing with it.
Wilder Penfield discovered something remarkable in an early experiment. A subject whose brain is stimulated with an electrode can be made to repeat a behavior over and over--moving an arm, for example--but from the subject's point of view, the behavior seems entirely willed. The electrode makes them do it, but they think they've chosen to do it.
Page 35 of their downloadable pdf shows that each cell can hold multiple bits. Each cell can be set to one of ten states by multiple pulses of current, so comparisons to binary storage don't work. The manufacturing process is not complex, basic CMOS in about 20 stages, but the part of the cell that stores data is only about 20 nanometers wide. Replacement of hard drives is a very trivial application. IBM and Intel are planning to incorporate this tech inside ICs to reduce latency of fetching data. The big news is more highly integrated systems on chip. It doesn't look pie-in-the-sky, somewhere-way-down-the-road to me.
the silent mac minority
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Today I watched my dear father struggle for four hours (4! whole hours) trying to make his complicated new digital camera work with Windows XP. I could not believe the complications he experienced. On a Mac, this would have been simple, easy, intuitive. What amazed me was his persistence. That's what Windows people do, they persist. See, the Windows experience is not just an OS experience, it is an application experience. So f***ed up.
Like most fans of the Mac, I let fanbois of the Mac do my talking for me. I sit back and keep quiet. I am more than a little pleased when they go overboard. As electric as they get in their praises for the Mac, I am silently even more electric.
On a Mac, you hook your camera up to the computer and you're done. On XP, you persist for 4 hours. What a difference a sixth of a day makes.
So the "Mac user experience" is about how not to waste time. My dear old dad is in his 70s and won't switch to Mac. I enjoy watching his frustrations, actually, because his comments are priceless, and he doesn't have that much to do. But seriously, who would willingly accept Windows as the way to experience the wonders of modern CPUs? People with a lot of time on their hands.
Penny got her PhD when she was 21, has held a post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was offered a MacArthur grant the first year they came out (but turned it down), and is extremely well respected in her field. Virtually all of the top mathematicians in the U.S. know her or know her work in the field of partial differential equations. She's quite brilliant. Withdrawing a paper is no big deal.
You're way off. Only point 1 is accurate.
2. The artist pays for studio time. The label pays up front then recoups from the artist. Worse, the label decides how much the artist will spend on that studio time--invariably so much that the artist becomes indentured until the label is repaid.
3. The rep from the label contacts independent promoters, who have a lock on commercial radio airplay. Labels can't get songs on the air without payiing these agents--it's a really shameful aspect of the music industry.
4. and 5. The label screws the artist on distribution as well. There is a clause to recoup unsold/damaged stock (about 10%) which comes out of the artist's proceeds. Distributors are distinct from labels, as well, and can screw the artist independent of the label.
6. The labels/distributors don't want independent music iin record stores. Want to get your CD in there? You can't, because the labels control what can be sold.
It's good for you to have an opinion that isn't cynical, except that you're almost entirely wrong. Research it.
Software companies have to be eyeing USB drives as a medium to thwart piracy. Either flash prices drop and the whole software package goes onto the drive, or the DVD/CD distribution gets packaged with a USB-drive dongle. How can Adobe, for example, sit idly by when its entire library of titles can be found on every single Hotline server? (Just visit tracker-tracker.com) Knee-jerk response? Adobe benefits from piracy. Boardroom and shareholder response? Piracy hurts the bottom line and has to be stopped.
My first computer, a Power Mac, came with a 256 MB hard drive, for which I paid over 200 bucks. I was amazed at the time that hard drives were so cheap! Now I'm kooky with amazement that USB drives are so cheap. A 256 MB USB drive costs about 20 bucks at Wal-Mart--i.e., the 1993 dollar equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal.
Whether it's double Moore's Law or anything close, the falling cost of USB drives is reaching that critical kind of tension when things can snap and people start talking about paradigm shifts. Not that anyone remembers reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions--it came out on paper, after all.
Dean Kamen's stirling generator is more interesting. It produces potable water, unlike the DoD monstrosity, and can also run on any fuel. Several of them could fit in a pickup truck, which strikes me as an advantage in disaster relief situations. The air-conditioning feature of the DoD turbines is interesting, but electricity = A/C, so it's not a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Google News could use more depth. As it is, "top stories" run for many days and categorized in the broadest possible way, making deeper search into less popular stories very difficult. If not for the search feature and Google Alerts, the site would be indistinguishable from the Associated Press wire. Personalization just doesn't allow enough options. I would like to see more refined categories. For example, instead of the blunt "Nanotechnology" category, subheadings for solar energy news would draw lots of interest, to name just one possibility. Or create sister sites: "Google Geek News," "Google Punditry News," "Google Phun News." Sure, their RSS reader allows anyone to create a personalized aggregator, but again that places an obstacle in the way, all the work involved in generating lists. (Just emulate originalsignal.com!)
Eh, but the news is nothing really. The medium is the message. Google just wants to put ads in front of us. They have better resources than any company to help each of us find the news that will appeal to us and keep us coming back. YouTube is not the answer I was hoping for.
You said it right. Ballmer sez the iPhone is nuthin, then MS announces this original(TM) idea. How ridiculous! Don't they have any shame? They have NO innovative ideas and could not mortgage all their stock to come up with even ONE original idea. Jobs was right at the Apple board meeting: developing great products is NOT "as easy as writing a check." Poor poor pitiful college grads who take a job at Microsoft. No glory, only shame.
In TFA Palast says that he IS an American, but only the BBC will air his stories.
Before /. posted this item, I had just read a letter to the Scratch team asking Where is the Source? Apparently, the developers got a $2 million grant to produce Scratch, promising in its grant application that it would release code throughout development, but instead closed the project to its own developers and will release the source only later this year. (The link includes a response-letter from Mitchel Resnick, the MIT team leader.) I dunno, not a big deal, but Scratch is an open source project, so stay tuned, ye developers.
Pons and Fleischmann didn't begin with lab experiments but with a theory, that protons packed together under intense pressure would have a quantum probability of fusing, similar to the way that electrons tunnel. Palladium soaks up hydrogen (that's why it is used) and inside a palladium electrode, the hydrogen is forced by electric charge to be highly pressurized. Lab experiments have verified that funny things happen, resembling nuclear fusion, but to say there is no plausible theory as to why is just plain wrong.
Quit giving mod poits to posts that deconstruct the notion of "security" and get to the nitty gritty. The most prevalent operating system on the planet is the most insecure. Period. By design, not because it attracts the most attention for being the most widespread, i.e. not because hackers attack it most. It has the most vulnerabilities! You who have mod points to give are being suckers if you think it is intelligent to parse the meaning of "security."
When Apple chose Intel chips, a huge mindshare of tech enthusiasts became enamored of Intel. I look into myself and see the irrational plus sign in front of Intel and minus sign in front of AMD, though I'd been a huge fan of AMD before. What the f? Both companies are just awesome innovators. I hope they keep sharpening each other. proverbially, as steel against steel. Gotta love the geniuses in our midst.
I'm on an older iMac, a G3, running the latest OS X, and it's surprisingly adequate for everything but rendering 3D and movie work. I do pro Photoshop work on it, all of my email and web browsing, iTunes listening, VLC movie-watching, Open Office and LaTEX word processing, everything. On Craigslist you can easily find a computer like mine for $100. Nevermind Apple's corporate interest in making a profit, what they've accomplished is amazing as an intellectual achievement. It's like being able to drive 100 mph in a Model T, and it gets only faster with each new release of the operating system. I feel sorry for Windows suckers stuck on the side of the road.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and board-member of Apple, said something cryptic after the introduction of the iPhone at Apple's last keynote. "Wimax is coming."
Broadband over UHF/VHF is covered by the 802.22 specification, and use of white space is an ongoing endeavor. (See dailywireless.org, 2006 and 2007", for example.)
The chief obstacles are political, not technological. The National Association of Broadcasters has tremendous lobbying power and wants to protect its business interests. Most people still get their news from television, and political campaign spending on TV ads is a huge source of revenue for broadcasters. Although they receive their spectrum for free in exchange for public-interest duties, news coverage of political issues is at an all-time low. (Check out this Illinois study.) Broadcasters have discovered that by reducing coverage of political issues, they increase ad revenue while also giving an advantage to whatever candidate has the most money to spend.
The problems are least of all technological. Vecima Networks of Canada, for example, already sells wireless ISP systems that can use the 470 to 862 MHz frequency band. (UHF channels 14 through 79.)
I hope readers here understand that interference is a side-issue. Despite the switch to digital TV, the FCC is still of a mindset that open spectrum should be auctioned to established players, for established uses. The amount of white-space TV spectrum going unused is staggering, even in major metro areas Just imagine how many billions of dollars it is worth to certain companies to maintain the current state of affairs, and that is how much they would be willing to spend on lobbying.
When Limewire is installed, sharing of one's iTunes library is active by default. This can't be turned off without starting up the program and thereby "making available" any copyrighted music in the iTunes library. I didn't notice this until an upload of my music had begun, making me culpable as a copyright infringer. Rather than being a problem just with Limewire, this illustrates how dangerous the "making available" extension of copyright would be. Simply showing one's files to the world by means of software that could also share them would make one a criminal.
SCO deserves all the bad press it can get on Slashdot, but Groklaw has led the way. What a fantastic job they've done over there! Kudos, you fine folks.
Eric Schmidt said "wimax is coming." Does this mean Apple will partner with Sprint-Nextel, when its transition to wimax is complete? Or could this mean that Google has some wimax plans of its own?
Help is on by default. Keyboard Shortcuts work by default--if you know the shortcuts.
You're wrong though. I think it is very likely that Mac users will discover the Help feature on Macs, just because it is so damned helpful and easy to use. Learning EVERY keyboard shortcut involves nothing more than typing "keyboard shortcuts" into the help form. The original poster, an alleged power Windows user, claimed he'd been a victim of poor Mac design, when in fact Apple has gone to great pains to make using OS X transparent. The help files are extremely helpful.
If Web 2.0 means sites that aggregate info that isn't boring, how can that fail? If it refers to sites like Facebook, where people can connect with real people, how can that fail, unless everyone is boring to everyone else? People go out of their way to find what interests them, but not TOO far out of their way. Minimizing the work of finding what is interesting--is that Web 2.0? Speeding up page-loads? Speeding up connect times to what is interesting? I don't see anything really new about the info available on the net. The only difference is how it is easier to find what one wants.
InfraSearch was another early attempt at collaborative search, based on Gnutella. Sun bought it for about $20 million in stock (estimated) then did nothing with it.
Wilder Penfield discovered something remarkable in an early experiment. A subject whose brain is stimulated with an electrode can be made to repeat a behavior over and over--moving an arm, for example--but from the subject's point of view, the behavior seems entirely willed. The electrode makes them do it, but they think they've chosen to do it.
Page 35 of their downloadable pdf shows that each cell can hold multiple bits. Each cell can be set to one of ten states by multiple pulses of current, so comparisons to binary storage don't work. The manufacturing process is not complex, basic CMOS in about 20 stages, but the part of the cell that stores data is only about 20 nanometers wide. Replacement of hard drives is a very trivial application. IBM and Intel are planning to incorporate this tech inside ICs to reduce latency of fetching data. The big news is more highly integrated systems on chip. It doesn't look pie-in-the-sky, somewhere-way-down-the-road to me.
Excellent post. Amen, brother. You got it right.
Today I watched my dear father struggle for four hours (4! whole hours) trying to make his complicated new digital camera work with Windows XP. I could not believe the complications he experienced. On a Mac, this would have been simple, easy, intuitive. What amazed me was his persistence. That's what Windows people do, they persist. See, the Windows experience is not just an OS experience, it is an application experience. So f***ed up. Like most fans of the Mac, I let fanbois of the Mac do my talking for me. I sit back and keep quiet. I am more than a little pleased when they go overboard. As electric as they get in their praises for the Mac, I am silently even more electric. On a Mac, you hook your camera up to the computer and you're done. On XP, you persist for 4 hours. What a difference a sixth of a day makes. So the "Mac user experience" is about how not to waste time. My dear old dad is in his 70s and won't switch to Mac. I enjoy watching his frustrations, actually, because his comments are priceless, and he doesn't have that much to do. But seriously, who would willingly accept Windows as the way to experience the wonders of modern CPUs? People with a lot of time on their hands.
Penny got her PhD when she was 21, has held a post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was offered a MacArthur grant the first year they came out (but turned it down), and is extremely well respected in her field. Virtually all of the top mathematicians in the U.S. know her or know her work in the field of partial differential equations. She's quite brilliant. Withdrawing a paper is no big deal.
You're way off. Only point 1 is accurate. 2. The artist pays for studio time. The label pays up front then recoups from the artist. Worse, the label decides how much the artist will spend on that studio time--invariably so much that the artist becomes indentured until the label is repaid. 3. The rep from the label contacts independent promoters, who have a lock on commercial radio airplay. Labels can't get songs on the air without payiing these agents--it's a really shameful aspect of the music industry. 4. and 5. The label screws the artist on distribution as well. There is a clause to recoup unsold/damaged stock (about 10%) which comes out of the artist's proceeds. Distributors are distinct from labels, as well, and can screw the artist independent of the label. 6. The labels/distributors don't want independent music iin record stores. Want to get your CD in there? You can't, because the labels control what can be sold. It's good for you to have an opinion that isn't cynical, except that you're almost entirely wrong. Research it.
Software companies have to be eyeing USB drives as a medium to thwart piracy. Either flash prices drop and the whole software package goes onto the drive, or the DVD/CD distribution gets packaged with a USB-drive dongle. How can Adobe, for example, sit idly by when its entire library of titles can be found on every single Hotline server? (Just visit tracker-tracker.com) Knee-jerk response? Adobe benefits from piracy. Boardroom and shareholder response? Piracy hurts the bottom line and has to be stopped.
My first computer, a Power Mac, came with a 256 MB hard drive, for which I paid over 200 bucks. I was amazed at the time that hard drives were so cheap! Now I'm kooky with amazement that USB drives are so cheap. A 256 MB USB drive costs about 20 bucks at Wal-Mart--i.e., the 1993 dollar equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal.
Whether it's double Moore's Law or anything close, the falling cost of USB drives is reaching that critical kind of tension when things can snap and people start talking about paradigm shifts. Not that anyone remembers reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions--it came out on paper, after all.
Dean Kamen's stirling generator is more interesting. It produces potable water, unlike the DoD monstrosity, and can also run on any fuel. Several of them could fit in a pickup truck, which strikes me as an advantage in disaster relief situations. The air-conditioning feature of the DoD turbines is interesting, but electricity = A/C, so it's not a big deal.