I think this will really take off when big LCD TV's get cheap. I would definitly use a computer in my living room, but the screen resolution is not very good. With a flat HDTV connected to a computer, that would be great. When you can get a 32 inch LCD for like $800 then the computer in the living room will become as common as a VCR I imagine (it will probably be smaller too).
So DVDs will have WMA support. Good. More people will buy them and use them. Don't say that "they suck because the do WMA," start complaining if they ONLY do WMA. I think it is good if a DVD player does more, just more options. Imagine one that could do MP*, WMA, avi, vcd, etc, etc.....
That woudl be a good thing.
Think about the elderly. One day you are going to be 80. Are you going to be able to see the screen and use the keyboard as well as you do now? Most of us can't type for more then 2 hours on a standard keyboard as it is without having thingly, numb wrists and fingers. In the next few years, the number of elderly people are going to explode in number. They my not be "disabled," but they will be old. The research that is done in HCI now will be well worth it to them (and hence us).
Considering MS in thier accessibility research. Look up how many times MS Research has been published in the Journal of Human-Computer Interactions. There are some big brains in MS Research, and many of them are working on this problem.
I strongly disagree with that last statement. Jr High is exactly the place to be playing with computers. Jr. High is one of the greatest times for the formation of self concept. Imagine what a different world High School would be if doing cool things with a computer was actually cool with your peers.
Social and psychological aspects aside, Jr. High was when I first learned how to program. Started in 6th grade with Logo, then to Basic (on TRS-80), then to GW-basic, and finally to pascal in 8th grade. By my sophomore year in HS we actually did a project where we wrote a decent LOGO compiler.
School is all about exposure. Should these laptops and techology replace some of the traditional tools, no. Should it replace the arts, no. Should it augment it, definitly! Give the kids a Wacom tablet and Fractal Design Painter (or whatever it is called now) and see what they come up with.
Just say that both of them did. Kind of like Calculus, where everyone says it was pretty much a tie between Newton and Leibnitz ( I know that isn't spelled right.)
I've had similar experiences as the people mentioned in the article. I guess I've somewhat "grown out" of the need to be wired 24/7. I use high-speed at work. At home I want to do other things then sit in front of my computer like I do all day. Because of that, a 56K connection to slurp down email is fine. Dial in, start downloading the mail locally, make dinner, read it after dinner. For any big files, I burn a CD on my machine at work. I can't justify spending $50 bucks a month just for convience or to be elite. Broadband was cool in school, now there really isn't anything interesting to do with it that justifies the cost (well outside of network games).
I've never had any stability issues with any of the services I've used (Verizon DSL and @Home cable), but they charge WAY to much.
It would be worth it if they had a 128K up and down static IP for like $20 a month, then I would do it. As it is, it isn't.
Ok..so then I get added to the "watch list." There are going to be some pretty damn bored FBI agents then trailing me as I go to Best Buy and the mall.
I don't know what everyone that is griping out the "Face Recognition" either. In the US, there has never been a right to privcacy in public space. There isn't even a "reasonable expectation" of privacy. Public is just that, public. If face recognition can do the same job as 5,000 FBI agents eye-balling the city, then great. It is cheaper and more accurate, and I believe fewer innocent people and mis-identifications would happen.
If people start mandating cameras and the like in people's own houses, without a warrant, where there is a "reasonable expectation" to privacy, then people should be pissed. But in public, and even in the workplace, there really isn't a gripe.
But before that, how about decent software that checks airline lists against lists of known felons/terrorists. Sure people would lie, and maybe a few people would be delayed from mis-IDs, but that is a place where it is needed.
They have violence in them, but it is highly abstracted. Those games are the best for problem solving and abstract thinking in my opnion.
Really, this isn't to surprising
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
If you look at what Compaq has been doing for the past few months, it is not surprising that something like this was going to happen. Remember about a month ago, Compaq announced that they were going to get out of the PC market and get more into Software services. Now this happens. HP has a rather successful hardware business, but was lacking in its services area. Now it has Compaq to handle the services side. Thus the combined entity can compete with IBM. Now the only thing left would be if MS then bought HP, then you would have software-hardware-services all in one big happy family.
In about 10 years I see (without government mucking around with things):
1)HP-MS-Compaq working on the Windows platform
2)IBM-RedHat doing the Free software thing
3)Intel In bed with both of the above
4)Sun struggling to survive. Eventually dropping Solaris, concentrating on Java, and selling stuff with Linux.
I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but I could see this happening.
I currently work for a small software company that does do the subscription model of sales for the manufacturing community. We in fact do more development now then when we did the "usual release" scheme. When you do the usual release scheme you bunch up all of your updates and patches into one big glob and then call it a new version. With the subscription, you are constantly adding new features and fixes. Subscriptions make v1.2 or v2.0 or whatever irrelavent, because the customer is just subscribed to the product.
There is a lot of support for this type of licensing in the industry, primarily because there isn't a big chunck spent at a time. The product that my company produces if bought in one fell swoop costs in the several tens of thousands of dollars or so at least, now with seat-based subscriptions companies are much more open to purchasing it and then ramping the number of subscriptions as it gets integrated.
I don't know if this is an industry wide phenomenon, but it is my experience and $.02.
This reminds me of a quote from the game Alpha Centauri. I believe Pravin Lal says is: "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he sees himself your master." Just a random observation...
I have known several professors that do Algorithm research. Much of the research is all theoretical and done with the numbers, so often times ther IS NO implementation to get from them, much less source code, much less in a language that is useful.
...they dont innovate, they dont help us, they just make things worse...
Do you have any idea on how many papers MS Research publishes? At ACM SIGGRAPH alone they publish more then most universities, or is the only kind of innovation that counts the kind that will decode a DVD in 3 lines of perl.
I have one question: Why do the fanatic few of the/. community want MS to die? Think about it. What drives technology? Contrary to what many of you will no doubt say, it is the consumer. Why do you think that Intel and AMD put so much investment to make faster and faster chips? Not so that people can crack RC5 faster, no, it is to make business and consumers want Word to run faster. MS has done one thing, and we all benefit from it, it has taken the rather cryptic computer and has given it to our grandmothers.
If MS would "die," then who will take over? Linux? Perhaps, when 30,000 of the best software people in the industry form another company that because of good decisions dominates the market. I honestly and truely don't think the Bazzaar method will fly for the joe-bob consumer who wants to know for a fact that the new version of Deer Hunter will work on his new Gateway and who doesn't even know that there is a video card in his box.
Think about it. The majority of cosumers do not know ANYTHING about computers, much less the depth of knowledge that it takes to maintain a *nix box.
OS X is a start, but I don't think anyone will buy it, because then people couldn't use the DVDs that they already have.
The reason that you can buy a 7-800Mhz computer now for $800 is because of Microsoft. Sure you may have to pay for the OS, sure it crashes, but you have a 99% chance that it will install and run, for the most part, smoothy on any x86 computer.
If MS would die, I would venture to say that it would pretty much cripple the economy. Think of all of the money that companies would have to pay to retrain all of their personnell. Think of all of the investments in the schools. Think of the stock market.
If you look back, the "economic slowdown," started about the same time that the decision againist MS happened. That was when people realized that technology wasn't invincible, and now LOTS of "true geeks" are now worse off because all of their stock options in "true geek" companies are worthless (look at Akamai). Plus the "college geeks" will now find it VERY hard to find good internships.
Ok..enough of my ranting. ..till will probably be moderated down to troll anyway.
Humanity has so much more potential, but we'll happily squander it to see our sitcoms, eat our plastic food, drink our caffiene and play our video games...and consume the pablum-sacrament of corporatized news. What about ranting? Ranting has to be in there someplace?
Oh. ..and I assume you are running your machine that you used to type this on solar power and it was manufactured out of materials that you found in your yard, right?
Sure the content does matter, but the presentation of the content DOES make a difference. For example, say that you are developing a site for distance learning. Do you think that the students, especially 4th graders or so, would get as much out of a flat grey-background-black-text page as they would with a page that is formatted in a way that they expect, with colors that matter? Take a cognitive psych course, you will see that the brain does indeed process things better when things are presented better.
Another example: try building a web application with flat content. Now I know that this doesn't apply to lynx/console gurus, but try to get your grandma to use lynx, then have her use IE, ask which one she likes better.
CSS (which is a w3 standard, one of which Netscape/AOL/Sun/TimeWarner support) great for presentation management when it works. Mozilla is getting there, IE is getting there too. NS is sad.
If you want your kids to know how programming really works, have them build even a simple compiler. Have it compile to Java Byte code. That would be the best "Computer Science" thing for them to do. Teach more fundamentals that won't go out of style when technology changes. Do project that show how things work, not how to use things.
It is unfortunate, but we are not even the issue here. I am sure that the record companies really care less about someone makeing a copy of a CD and giving it to a friend. What DOES worry them are people in China taking one CD and them making 10,000 perfect copies and then selling those. That is where the laws and everything come in. The fact that it prevents us from using our new toys is just an unfortunate side problem. They didn't worry about tapes because, as we all know, they become crappy over time, and hence not very useful to duplicate on a large scale. DVDs, CDs, mp3s, all can be duped an infinite number of times, so that is where they panic.
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I think this will really take off when big LCD TV's get cheap. I would definitly use a computer in my living room, but the screen resolution is not very good. With a flat HDTV connected to a computer, that would be great. When you can get a 32 inch LCD for like $800 then the computer in the living room will become as common as a VCR I imagine (it will probably be smaller too).
So DVDs will have WMA support. Good. More people will buy them and use them. Don't say that "they suck because the do WMA," start complaining if they ONLY do WMA. I think it is good if a DVD player does more, just more options. Imagine one that could do MP*, WMA, avi, vcd, etc, etc. ....
That woudl be a good thing.
It isn't MGS2 the game, but it is the action figure that comes from the game.
Think about the elderly. One day you are going to be 80. Are you going to be able to see the screen and use the keyboard as well as you do now? Most of us can't type for more then 2 hours on a standard keyboard as it is without having thingly, numb wrists and fingers. In the next few years, the number of elderly people are going to explode in number. They my not be "disabled," but they will be old. The research that is done in HCI now will be well worth it to them (and hence us).
Considering MS in thier accessibility research. Look up how many times MS Research has been published in the Journal of Human-Computer Interactions. There are some big brains in MS Research, and many of them are working on this problem.
I strongly disagree with that last statement. Jr High is exactly the place to be playing with computers. Jr. High is one of the greatest times for the formation of self concept. Imagine what a different world High School would be if doing cool things with a computer was actually cool with your peers.
Social and psychological aspects aside, Jr. High was when I first learned how to program. Started in 6th grade with Logo, then to Basic (on TRS-80), then to GW-basic, and finally to pascal in 8th grade. By my sophomore year in HS we actually did a project where we wrote a decent LOGO compiler.
School is all about exposure. Should these laptops and techology replace some of the traditional tools, no. Should it replace the arts, no. Should it augment it, definitly! Give the kids a Wacom tablet and Fractal Design Painter (or whatever it is called now) and see what they come up with.
Just say that both of them did. Kind of like Calculus, where everyone says it was pretty much a tie between Newton and Leibnitz ( I know that isn't spelled right.)
I've had similar experiences as the people mentioned in the article. I guess I've somewhat "grown out" of the need to be wired 24/7. I use high-speed at work. At home I want to do other things then sit in front of my computer like I do all day. Because of that, a 56K connection to slurp down email is fine. Dial in, start downloading the mail locally, make dinner, read it after dinner. For any big files, I burn a CD on my machine at work. I can't justify spending $50 bucks a month just for convience or to be elite. Broadband was cool in school, now there really isn't anything interesting to do with it that justifies the cost (well outside of network games).
I've never had any stability issues with any of the services I've used (Verizon DSL and @Home cable), but they charge WAY to much.
It would be worth it if they had a 128K up and down static IP for like $20 a month, then I would do it. As it is, it isn't.
I would like to see this: All /. readers add a comment to this thread. In this put the OS projects that you have worked on or are currently working on.
Me: none......so I don't comment on things like this.
That would get the Nobel Prize for medicine. A cure for AIDS would have to be pretty odd to get the Physics nod.
Ok. .so then I get added to the "watch list." There are going to be some pretty damn bored FBI agents then trailing me as I go to Best Buy and the mall.
I don't know what everyone that is griping out the "Face Recognition" either. In the US, there has never been a right to privcacy in public space. There isn't even a "reasonable expectation" of privacy. Public is just that, public. If face recognition can do the same job as 5,000 FBI agents eye-balling the city, then great. It is cheaper and more accurate, and I believe fewer innocent people and mis-identifications would happen.
If people start mandating cameras and the like in people's own houses, without a warrant, where there is a "reasonable expectation" to privacy, then people should be pissed. But in public, and even in the workplace, there really isn't a gripe.
But before that, how about decent software that checks airline lists against lists of known felons/terrorists. Sure people would lie, and maybe a few people would be delayed from mis-IDs, but that is a place where it is needed.
Civilazation, Civ 2, Alpha Centauri.
They have violence in them, but it is highly abstracted. Those games are the best for problem solving and abstract thinking in my opnion.
If you look at what Compaq has been doing for the past few months, it is not surprising that something like this was going to happen. Remember about a month ago, Compaq announced that they were going to get out of the PC market and get more into Software services. Now this happens. HP has a rather successful hardware business, but was lacking in its services area. Now it has Compaq to handle the services side. Thus the combined entity can compete with IBM. Now the only thing left would be if MS then bought HP, then you would have software-hardware-services all in one big happy family.
In about 10 years I see (without government mucking around with things):
1)HP-MS-Compaq working on the Windows platform
2)IBM-RedHat doing the Free software thing
3)Intel In bed with both of the above
4)Sun struggling to survive. Eventually dropping Solaris, concentrating on Java, and selling stuff with Linux.
I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but I could see this happening.
"..... Mr. President, we cannot allow a Mine Shaft Gap! ... "
We were useing VSS, but we switched to StarTeam from the company Starbase (www.starbase.com). It is a lot better then VSS.
At least there still isn't a dongle that you have to put in/on your machine like many other software packages (like CAD).
I currently work for a small software company that does do the subscription model of sales for the manufacturing community. We in fact do more development now then when we did the "usual release" scheme. When you do the usual release scheme you bunch up all of your updates and patches into one big glob and then call it a new version. With the subscription, you are constantly adding new features and fixes. Subscriptions make v1.2 or v2.0 or whatever irrelavent, because the customer is just subscribed to the product.
There is a lot of support for this type of licensing in the industry, primarily because there isn't a big chunck spent at a time. The product that my company produces if bought in one fell swoop costs in the several tens of thousands of dollars or so at least, now with seat-based subscriptions companies are much more open to purchasing it and then ramping the number of subscriptions as it gets integrated. I don't know if this is an industry wide phenomenon, but it is my experience and $.02.
This reminds me of a quote from the game Alpha Centauri. I believe Pravin Lal says is: "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he sees himself your master." Just a random observation...
I have known several professors that do Algorithm research. Much of the research is all theoretical and done with the numbers, so often times ther IS NO implementation to get from them, much less source code, much less in a language that is useful.
...they dont innovate, they dont help us, they just make things worse... Do you have any idea on how many papers MS Research publishes? At ACM SIGGRAPH alone they publish more then most universities, or is the only kind of innovation that counts the kind that will decode a DVD in 3 lines of perl.
I have one question: Why do the fanatic few of the /. community want MS to die? Think about it. What drives technology? Contrary to what many of you will no doubt say, it is the consumer. Why do you think that Intel and AMD put so much investment to make faster and faster chips? Not so that people can crack RC5 faster, no, it is to make business and consumers want Word to run faster. MS has done one thing, and we all benefit from it, it has taken the rather cryptic computer and has given it to our grandmothers.
.enough of my ranting. . .till will probably be moderated down to troll anyway.
If MS would "die," then who will take over? Linux? Perhaps, when 30,000 of the best software people in the industry form another company that because of good decisions dominates the market. I honestly and truely don't think the Bazzaar method will fly for the joe-bob consumer who wants to know for a fact that the new version of Deer Hunter will work on his new Gateway and who doesn't even know that there is a video card in his box.
Think about it. The majority of cosumers do not know ANYTHING about computers, much less the depth of knowledge that it takes to maintain a *nix box.
OS X is a start, but I don't think anyone will buy it, because then people couldn't use the DVDs that they already have.
The reason that you can buy a 7-800Mhz computer now for $800 is because of Microsoft. Sure you may have to pay for the OS, sure it crashes, but you have a 99% chance that it will install and run, for the most part, smoothy on any x86 computer.
If MS would die, I would venture to say that it would pretty much cripple the economy. Think of all of the money that companies would have to pay to retrain all of their personnell. Think of all of the investments in the schools. Think of the stock market.
If you look back, the "economic slowdown," started about the same time that the decision againist MS happened. That was when people realized that technology wasn't invincible, and now LOTS of "true geeks" are now worse off because all of their stock options in "true geek" companies are worthless (look at Akamai). Plus the "college geeks" will now find it VERY hard to find good internships.
Ok.
Humanity has so much more potential, but we'll happily squander it to see our sitcoms, eat our plastic food, drink our caffiene and play our video games...and consume the pablum-sacrament of corporatized news. What about ranting? Ranting has to be in there someplace? Oh. . .and I assume you are running your machine that you used to type this on solar power and it was manufactured out of materials that you found in your yard, right?
Sure the content does matter, but the presentation of the content DOES make a difference. For example, say that you are developing a site for distance learning. Do you think that the students, especially 4th graders or so, would get as much out of a flat grey-background-black-text page as they would with a page that is formatted in a way that they expect, with colors that matter? Take a cognitive psych course, you will see that the brain does indeed process things better when things are presented better.
Another example: try building a web application with flat content. Now I know that this doesn't apply to lynx/console gurus, but try to get your grandma to use lynx, then have her use IE, ask which one she likes better.
CSS (which is a w3 standard, one of which Netscape/AOL/Sun/TimeWarner support) great for presentation management when it works. Mozilla is getting there, IE is getting there too. NS is sad.
If you want your kids to know how programming really works, have them build even a simple compiler. Have it compile to Java Byte code. That would be the best "Computer Science" thing for them to do. Teach more fundamentals that won't go out of style when technology changes. Do project that show how things work, not how to use things.
It is unfortunate, but we are not even the issue here. I am sure that the record companies really care less about someone makeing a copy of a CD and giving it to a friend. What DOES worry them are people in China taking one CD and them making 10,000 perfect copies and then selling those. That is where the laws and everything come in. The fact that it prevents us from using our new toys is just an unfortunate side problem. They didn't worry about tapes because, as we all know, they become crappy over time, and hence not very useful to duplicate on a large scale. DVDs, CDs, mp3s, all can be duped an infinite number of times, so that is where they panic.