That's the publicly announced ~1500 or so, it does not confirm a 40% US workforce layoff. 40% would be a ludicrously desperate move for a company that at worst is described as stagnant, not exactly in trouble. When you aren't announcing any losses, just less-than-awesome gains, it doesn't make sense to just cut out that much in as short a period as a year. IBM is topheavy and I definitely agree that the management is the bulk of the problem (not only *way* too many of them, but they are also more highly paid than the technical people who do real work), and so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple thousand more get screwed over the year, but 40% would be the dumbest thing and I think even shareholders would see it as a detrimental, stupid move.
One problem they do seem to have is startup envy. They see a company come out of nowhere and achieve great fame and a sizable market cap, and wonder why they can't achieve the same percentage growth. The obvious answer (that IBM's market cap is overwhelmingly huge already, nowhere to really go) doesn't seem to occur to them.
The obvious example is in most 'single-user' home boxes, there are in reality multiple users. If each person uses their own account, things are better contained and compartmentalized. If your offspring screws up, your stuff is in order still. An account manages to install malware that effectively cripples the account? You can wipe the account and start over with less impact than wiping the sysstem.
I agree that for a large number of users in the home environment, the data owned by their 'user' is at least as important as the data owned by the system (although you downplay the importance of the system data, for us it's easy to blow away and start over from scratch, for many home users, they may as well buy a new system and start over from there based on what they are comfortable doing themselves and how much a third party would charge to do it for them). However, some people in a typical household are more responsible than others, and making people more accountable for their own stuff is a good thing.
Sudo is important above and beyond UAC because the password dialog means a user irresponsibly leaving their session open in a public place doesn't allow random person to screw with info above and beyond. There are some scenarios beyond a lab computer that can occur. It's also less likely that someone can automatically defeat the system. I dunno how UAC handles things like synergy and vnc, but if not careful, an application could know it was going to trigger UAC, and exploit some facility like vnc or synergy to insert a mouse button event in the right place at the right time. That's trickier if the prompt will require keyboard activity to be injected of unknown content to the hijacking program.
Anyway, there are ways to improve on the model. Some things that may be useful: -Ability to right click on a folder/file with an option to surrender write or all permission. This wouldn't hard to do, and users frequently are aware of what their most precious data is. They may download a bunch of pictures, then immediately mark it protected data if it was an obvious, easy thing to do. By far working with people fear of losing pictures and such is huge, but surrendering delete/modify privilege would be enough for that, fear of the wrong people reading any financial data would evoke the 'surrender all privilege' behavior. It's very much like a safe, you put it in knowing it will be a pain to get at again, but it's totally worth it given the risk. Common people understand safes and the consequences, so it isn't a stretch to believe they would cope with and effectively use an analogous computer facility if represented well.
-A logical extension of the above is to have folders that the user can mark as 'without privilege, I want to be able to read everything in this directory, and be able to create new files, but once created, I don't want to modify without having to sudo (or whatever)'. Like a safe with a convenient slot to insert documents into.
-Finally, extend multi-user to a finer granularity or at least leverage it as if it were finer grained. A practical application under an X situation, for example, would be every user having multiple accounts they can let run on their display (X allows the users group access). In practice, you'd have 'DMZ' applications (firefox, email client) that are generally characterized as dealing with complex data from sources not well trusted, with access to a very specific set of local resources (i.e. one download directory, etc). Data on a per-incident basis is promoted to a space untouchable by the browser before general usage.
To me it feels like opensource is to the business world at large what.com was in the late 90s. I see a number of startups and established businesses moving to somehow claim 'open source' without doing anything in the actual spirit of what the phrase should imply. Generally evoking the word 'open' is the cheap way to get there, regardless of anything they do, or proclaiming 'Free' on free-as-in-beer software.
The other thing a lot of companies seem to be doing is actually open sourcing something and have that act be their business plan with respect to some project, often already successful without peer, but no plan on how to actually capitalize on that. I like open source, but when I see a company coming into success with a proprietary product they sell or otherwise make money off of their complete control of something announcing open sourceing and relinquishing control, without a complementing revenue plan, I generally am happy to see the source coming, but wonder about the business sense of those running the company. Too many business plans are starting to look like: 1)Open Source and give away product and full control of the product 2)??? 3)Profit!
So between many companies cramming the word 'open' where they can, diluting the meaning in general and businesses that are genuinely embracing open source without a sound strategy (consequently leaving a bad taste in the business world when the inevitable failures come and the open source strategy becomes the scapegoat), I do think there is a danger of 'open source' being considered in general to have 'jumped the shark' from all angles.
the rigid structure of school sports and the emphasis on achieving goals that takes all the fun out of being active So specifying exactly where your each of your feet must be (one of 5 places) at any given time to earn a particular score is not rigid structure and/or goal oriented?
The interesting situation here is that it can be conducted with very little equipment (only need a TV and a few square feet of space, on the scale of treadmill/exercise bike/etc), so compared to outside competitive sport it's much more achievable. DDR has been a benefit to a lot of people in the home because it provides *more* feedback on the scale of a competitive sport without forcing you to be in public. An exercise bike/etc for the most part has very abstract goals (miles, speed, etc). When I was on an exercise bike, I made a game out of sustained speed watching the speedometer, and that was about as engrossed as I could get. DDR provides more along that line, hence the popularity. Any measurable health impact probably relates to physical activity in the private home increasing.
I don't think PE while at school had any problems making me physically active during the time when I was growing up (whether or not it was fun, you did your best to either blend in to avoid negative school or peer attention, or shine depending on your personality, neither of these circumstances involved being sedentary). You had a basketball game, you at the least jogged to stay on the same side of the court as the ball, ditto for most field based sports, you played tennis you would at least look like you were going after the ball. Some sports have a lot of opportunity for being subtly idle (large number of people in volleyball causes people to tend to stand still, to a certain extent baseball suffers the same, etc), but generally speaking you don't end up idle just because you are disinterested.
Assuming your opinion is more reflective of reality, it isn't all that appealing of a world for a complete system vendor to target. If usage is still predominantly desktops, that still says nothing of sales. The very advantages of desktops that are called out (upgradeability, maintainability) work against a company trying to sell new systems.
Now, your described usage pattern further explains why the laptop market would be the dominant one sales-wise. Looking at systems that are 'good-enough' in the traditional measures (memory, processing power, etc), other metrics start coming into play (portability). Laptops have come into the price range considered appropriate for dekstops, and while desktops have been driven further in price, it's hard to justify upgrades from even two-year-old systems utilized ~40-50% to new systems that would be utilized ~10-15%.
Laptops are a hardware vendors dream as it stands today. All-in-one pieces that generally are not suitable for significant upgrades, or when they are, upgardes only from the vendor originally purchased from. Ditto for service parts. Display goes bust on your laptop out of warranty? Either buy a new laptop or buy from your original vendor a replacement part, and probably the service to go with it. The vendors are enjoying a harder lock-in with laptops, whereas before it was a fairly tenuous situation of things technically working, but threatening to withhold support from those buying unapproved third party items.
Definitely a lose situation for MS. What does MS have to offer other than application lock-in for their platform? The answer is they simply do not. The value of a *nix core with MS-designed UI on top is simply non-existant in this day and age. MS hasn't done anything fundamentally interesting in the last decade with respect to drastic UI enhancements. The Unix desktops for the most part reproduce every benefit MS historically offered and in some cases one-upped them. Linux Distros have some of the best package management facilities around, and come with all the fundamental bells and whistles to get common people going. In general because they've worked so hard, recent linux distribution releases are as easy (in many cases easier than) as a Windows install. You go to a little application browser and you just type keywords and you have installable applications. Pop in removable media and all the details of mounting it with appropriate privilege and showing it as a usable device on the desktop is done. Plug in a number of devices and they just start working, no dialogs to navigate, no drivers need be downloaded. The application menus are much cleaner and nicely organized than the Windows Start menu, it's generally not too hard for someone to do things. The bad part is lack of good third-party commercial software (including games), and that advantage keeps MS on top for a lot of market segments, and giving that up would be suicide.
Sure, MS could probably do a decent Wine-like layer to get a bunch of supported applications working better than anything else, but in such a market the now 'non-native' versions are running, for all intents and purposes, in a 'legacy' layer. If their value add as a company would be mainly providing support for 'legacy' apps today, 10 years from now they'll be in trouble, compared to their current position.
Sure, they can also sell their Office suite (and other software) to more people if linux is supported, but I don't think it would offset the significant losses they would suffer enabling a competing platform. MS gets tons of money from third-party software developers addressing market segments MS is unable or uninterested in pursuing. Those developers as it stands today pretty much has to give MS money to release a product and reach a sizable customer base.
It's not to say they've made questionable business decisions in the quest for dominance, but a company with a realistic chance to achieve a monopoly in a situation where they really aren't punished for it has a lot to gain by being that monopoly. As it stands today they have nearly total freedom with respect to their margins, and short term skipped opportunity, financially speaking, was worth it to them for the end game.
Until the 0.7 is out, I can't use it (lack of LEAP support). And I have seen it lose it's mind completely on an ipw2100 system in WPA2 on occasion whereas a simple wpa_supplicant.conf and single wpa_supplicant run is rock solid.
And I'm no stranger to crappy, buggy drivers, my primary laptop has an Atheros chip in it now.
Current games are truly not using the full capability of the system, but it's probably not because they are failing to use enough memory, etc. It's probably because they consume the resources inefficiently and exhaust them needlessly. That means any move to reduce resources will only exacerbate any performance issues they may see today.
Copying from one tape to another is *not* copyright violation automatically. For one the tape itself may have never been broadcast, but the copyright holder grants the right to do whatever the hell you want (not going to say that home videos, for example, are illegal to copy and give away because they've never been broadcast?). For another, there is fair use, you can make a backup copy for yourself. The industry for modern media has managed to get that stupid DMCA in that makes it a crime to do what is necessary to get at your fair use rights, but for unprotected media, a copy of something you currently own is legal. You are legally obligated to destroy that copy should you resell or return/exchange the item for another, but the copies are legal.
But whether it's broadcast, via IP, whatever, it really isn't that different. If an Internet Radio station doesn't have its copyright set right, do the listeners suffer liability because they didn't know?
DVRs/VCRs are illegal because you are copying data from somewhere onto media?
At first I thought downloading would cut and dry be against copyright law, but now I'm not so sure. I don't think the obligation to determine if the source is a legitimate distribution system should fall upon the user. By 'common sense', currently most P2P networks today with obviously copyrighted materials is a legally questionably thing to do (since you are definitely becoming the source), but what happens when a source with an air of legitimacy starts up a P2P based service that turns out to be illegal? Should users be penalized just because they were frauded and allowed their upstream bandwidth to be use by the company to commit copyright violation without their knowledge?
From a legal perspective, I'm actually finding myself thinking the only sane entity to chase would be the one who initially injects the content into the P2P network (i.e., the person who posts a torrent to a tracker). The second logical place would be the tracker itself if they have a demonstrated history of ignoring copyright notices, but the users, it's hard to say. Forget the technicality of whether the protocol borrows some of their upload, their action isn't really as different from using a DVR as one might think.
Of that $7B, how much of it is iPod (absolutely zero to do with OSX), iTunes (again, zero to do with OSX), Quicktime licenses to Windows systems and streaming services (essentially zero to do with OSX), and hardware (some to do with OSX, but this is not 100% because some end up running Windows or Linux on Apple hardware, and even when OSX is included and used, it is difficult to determine if the impetus of the purchase was OSX, or the growing strength of the Apple brand name independent of OSX). So to even begin the discussion, all this has to be forgotten, probably decreasing the amount by over half. Apple's move to focus more and more on the likes of Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, etc and renaming their company is a clear indication where they are seeing the best business results, and it's not in PC sales.
The amount that is 100% purely attributable to OSX is probably low relative to the amount MS can claim for Vista. MS's $21B is also not purely Windows, with the lions share probably going to Office/Exchange licensing, but the second biggest slice is probably Windows licenses. This is not necessarily a technical merit of course, they've simply managed to get the industry to accept them as a 'must-have' in the commodity system space, which is great for a software company.
I know, Vista isn't by choice for a majority of the purchasers (got through PC purchase) and by that logic, you should somehow be able to count Apple system sales, but the different ways the two situations work make it impossible to determine how much revenue credit OSX gets in an Apple hardware purchase. MS gets a fixed, measurable license fee that is occasionally refunded, so their financial benefit from a bundled PC purchase is clearly defined, while Apple's really isn't (even if they have some internally defined value, it has no free market meaning unless they offer OS-less systems with a known discount in place, or sell Windows installed without OSX swapping their fee for MS).
Comparing to Dell is not apt either, they have little software, mostly given away for free by necessity (software nowadays is the best shot in the industry at decent margins), have no remotely popular product line outside the PC/Server market, and they largely target the commodity system market (margins are almost nothing). Apple positions itself as a prestige brand and as such enjoys a fatter profit margin on each hardware sale, plus their Quicktime and iTunes situations are larger margin situations as well. I guess your claim is that Apple computer sales in terms of profit exceeded Dell's, but that is hard to determine if you are judging Apple's total revenue to Dell, you'd have to compare direct sales, as mentioned earlier.
Apple may have done some impressive technical work, but you have to face the market reality that as of Today, MS is clearly the leader in a business sense. I don't use Windows or OSX, but I don't claim my preferred platform is beating MS business-wise either.
anyone that tries to use my computer turns into a retarded monkey. That's one of my favorite parts. I love when some guy comes by at work and asks to borrow my system, and see their confused look for a couple of minutes "Oops, I screwed up, huh, wait....".
And in a less funny, but satisfying way, it is a great deterrent for people who want to kinda take over something I'm trying to do.
As to working on qwerty, usually for me it is one sentence or fragment I screw up before I realize what I'm doing. Of course I never really touchtyped Qwerty much (was too uncomfortable for me, hunt-and-peck was 'good enough' without the discomfort of touch typing.
Probably the most interesting event was when two of us dvorak users collided. They said, "sure, use my system", probably with the same expectation of amusement I have when inviting someone to use my system for a sec, and then a second after I started typing I realized "whoops, not my system, so I need to... hey, it's coming out right, it's in dvorak!'
He was refuting the claim that Vista is no *competition* for OSX, in a thread discussing the business merits of this move. From a Business perspective, where the *money* flows is key, and by any stretch of measuring, MS has probably seen more cash-flow for Vista to date than Apple would claim directly for OSX since 10.0, adding in system sales they might attribute to OSX might shift the picture, but that's hard to measure, since iPod and OSX have been responsible for Apple overall popularity gains. Vista hasn't been a widely sought after upgrade, but PC purchases swelling have been fortuitous for MS.
But I think from Apple's perspective they know Tiger won't make a bit of difference. Some people running OSX today might buy an upgrade, people who happen to be buying Apple's after Tiger's release will get Tiger, and the people running Windows will be no more likely to switch for Tiger than they are to switch for released OSX versions. They know they can't let it fall out of date, but also know there is no significant profit potential to be milked.
Yes OSX has nice features and if I had to choose between Windows and OSX of their own merits, I'd choose OSX, but saying that Vista is no competition for it and scoffing is blatantly dismissing reality. I run linux, but I don't dare scoff and say 'Windows is no competition to linux'. Linux may be better by many measures than Windows, but to declare across the board Windows has nothing, it would make me sound like a stupid zealot.
I'm surprised anyone would think this is news. Also, as it stands today, some companies have *entirely* too much faith in FPGAs to get them through. We had two companies come give us product to try. Both implementing the exact same technology, one with an FPGA design. They talked about how wonderful FPGAs are (as if they were new to them) and that they were perfect for large-scale deployment, and they could fix *anything* in firmware. During our evaluation, despite their claims of how well it performed, we contorted the tests all over the place to meet 70% of the 'theoretical' performance, with *huge* latency penalties on any given operation no matter how we sliced it. All this coming with the bonus of an abnormally large TDP of the part.
The other solution was a traditional ASIC. Under 1/4th the TDP of the competitor, a 50-fold decrease in latency per-operation, and on the first default run, got 90% of the theoretical performance, 96% after tuning. All this at a lower cost-per-part in production by about 200 dollars.
We were skeptical of both vendors for different reasons, neither vendor was allowed to give us extra hand-holding until the first vendor was so embarassingly bad we let them go hands on with us because we were *certain* we had to be missing something if it was that embarassing. Even after giving them unprecedented advantage to offset initial results, they couldn't come close to touching the other offering.
I know, a better company could have done better, probably, but the cost delta of FPGA and ASIC was not their fault, and the TDP of their parts, while likely worse than they could have done, probably would have been higher regardless. As another poster pointed out, its more difficult in general to clock up FPGAs than ASICs, and so performance will suffer.
FPGAs have their place, and a huge benefit is prototyping. I've seen a number of companies do a proof-of-concept with an FPGA, go forward with a demo, but when time comes for mass-production, it's most often implemented as an ASIC. After decades of dealing with hardware bugs, the industry at large has gotten very good at glossing over the rough spots in firmware. Sure, some hardware bugs can never be addressed in such a way, and as a consequence, your testing has to be better up front and inevitably slow down a release process due to a fear of post-release returns, but that is a *very* healthy fear to have, and it ensures the quality will be better at release time than your FPGA-reliant competitor. First to market is generally an advantage, but it is also a *huge* opportunity for embarrassment and sending your early adopters begging for your competitors competent ASIC implementation, with a low bar to beat as well.
I've worked with some products before and despite not in any way being responsible for Windows working, I have been greatful for WHQL certification on occasion. I'll discover a problem which needs to be fixed, and unless absolutely completely unable to dodge the issue, they'll ignore it and push back on it to get the product out the door. Then, magically, some one on the Windows side of the company has a WHQL test fail due to my issue, and it suddenly becomes a show stopper.
Once upon a time, we had a very very obscure problem that they shipped that prevented WHQL certification. Until that was going to be fixed, they shipped it as a linux-only offering. Many many expensive weeks of trying to support thousands of these things that were dying left and right finally nailed down what caused the strange sudden deaths of the product, the WHQL-blocking flaw they neglected in the name of getting it out the door for linux...
In summary, WHQL isn't the whole picture, but no company producing hardware regardless of the Windows market should ignore it, unless they have an impeccable testing track record without ever looking at WHQL.
I used to agree, however recently I had the choice of no upgrade or a laptop with a FireGL V5200. I already was on a laptop with ATI, but the older generation where there are usable DRI drivers (before ATI ceased providing information essentially).
So fglrx I had last tried caused occasional hangs on VT switches, hung on gdmflexiserver, and did nothing for sleep so the ATI chip was chugging down 5 watts of power in ACPI suspend. On resume the graphics would occasionally be corrupted. Just everything was wrong.
So I tried them again (had no choice), with 8.34.8. Now sleep the whole laptop uses 400 mW without me having to bend over bacwards, gdmflexiserver has yet to crash, I have not seen video corruption (this is Feisty after I set SAVE_VBE_STATE=false and POST_VIDEO=false, methods to work around some cards, but in this case essentially letting fglrx take care of it all, like I do for an nVidia system).
Maybe it's because of Lenovo demands, but my recent ATI driver has actually been on par with my nVidia driver experiences now. With the *very* notable exception of a complete lack of AIGLX, or even more basic Composite support. Feature wise they are still missing those, but it seems they have demonstrated the *capacity* for a decent driver at least...
Yeah,I've gone through a few managers in my day. One absolutely stellar case evoked *incredible* morale (worked to compensate people in accordance with effort, worked to make sure workload was distributed, proactively monitored things mainly to ensure no one was on an unsustainable burnout path for any significant period of time). On top of being liked by employees (or because of it), he led it from new and a trickling revenue stream to a half-billion dollar per year thing after two years. Then some asshole executive demanded that something be done that our group deemed a bad idea likely to blow up in our faces, and our manager took that opinion forward with specific pitfalls to be addressed before it wouldn't blow up too badly. Manager was ignored, blew up in their faces, and when he pointed out the documentation he had brought forward earlier predicting and warning about pretty much exactly what went wrong, and pointed out the executive who signed off to dismiss our recommendation, the executive in question blasted the manager out of management over the fiasco and has since been promoted. Never before and never since have I seen such a good leader who actually made me respect what a manager *could* mean and how one could *actually* be worth something.
The guy who replaced him rattled off meaningless buzzwords and made a highly motivated effective team completely devastated. He moved desk assignments around pointlessly without explanation, imposed bizarre escalation paths to complicate every little discussion, ceased all motivational measures going on before him, and stopped working to get incentives for his employees. Basically the strategy was obviously wave his hands to look busy, make noise about how much money is coming in, but keep his head down by avoiding asking for money or anything at all that would potentially bother his manager, and waiting to be pulled to the next level before everything would hit the fan. The department ran on essentially inertia without growing meaningfully, but the manager got credit for a half-billion dollar effort, and promoted despite being utterly crappy as a leader (unliked by employees *and* unable to milk the group for meaningful work, usually a manager can at least do one of those). BTW, along the way the amount of money that could be fairly taken credit by our group declined for obvious reasons, but the manager propped it up by claiming credit for loosely related work from other groups that we helped a little along the way. Any person with half a brain at a second glance could see how his trick was being worked just from his damned presentation slide, yet it worked for him.
And yes, the number of "Wallys" has increased dramatically (even people who were doing great with leadership are left to wander as "Wally"s now). Also, people who make plenty of noise about what they do and the value they put in without actually *doing* anything has increased, and those people get a lot more credit and such than those who actually *do*. Cynicism among everyone else not merely dicking around or beating their chests is at an all time high, motivation on the ground. This is more like everywhere I end up working.
I can think of no logical reason how it ends up like this. I could understand running out of steam, but the effort/reward system seemed to just encourage a potentially highly successful group slitting its own throat.
Some people get disproportionate amounts of credits for stuff, and those tend to in two categories, people close to executives and people who get approached by customer executives first.
Too many times I've seen a technical person get shipped off for *months* to work on the technical details of achieving an unreasonable schedule. They'll work long stretches of 7 day work weeks at 10-12 hor days to make up for overly-optimistic schedules hundreds of miles from home and family. They come back to a pat on the back and maybe a 50 dollar gift card to a restaurant (though admittedly, their room/board/travel for the months away were covered..).
Meanwhile, the project manager who set the insane schedule, kept their ass comfortably in their desk chair for 9-5, M-F days, for the most part just asking the technical guy 'how close to done are you', and repeating that data to customer executives and their own management chain. This project manager gets promoted in recognition for their 'stellar work to make it happen'.
Same with sales to a degree. Some sales situations, particularly in technical sales, requires a fair amount of work. Other times, I've seen cases where a customer without provocation approaches sales and says "Here is a very large, specific set of stuff and I am buying from YOU, place the order". In making it happen, sometimes its a tall order and technical people are called in, working long weeks of long days far from home. At the end, a note comes out congratulating 'all who made it happen', and then lists everyone, the list more often than not includes some executive who barely has a vague notion about it happening at all and the salespeople who in some cases just did the equivalent of forwarding a customer note verbatim to a sales system. Technical people are just interchangeable cogs that were simply there regardless of the miracles they pull off.
People removed from the direct customer pay-out and from higher-level managers just frequently get overlooked. I've seen this in several companies and I learned a long time ago volunteering to overextend yourself just ends up screwing me and making some undeserving person look good, so I refrain from things that I know will end in travel and long hours. What little credit there is to be had for going 'above and beyond' for many doesn't scale up at all beyond putting in just a little extra effort.
Sinbad was found dead in his home this morning. There were not any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you did not enjoy his work, there is no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Actually, in a roundabout way..
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Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not fully automated, but we live in the internet world where an encyclopedia written by Wiki is among the most used references in the world...
Namely, I'm talking about MusicBrainz. Programs will analyze and produce a fingerprint, and MusicBrainz will do a fairly good job of matching that fingerprint to the track. From there, tempo, mood, etc could all be community stored info. More esoteric tracks suffer, but as Wikipedia shows, things that don't work well in theory can sometimes work surprisingly well in practice... Esoteric tracks generally have a more fanatical/enthusiastic fanbase to offset their lack of popularity. Hell, such a system could one up the GP's requested behavior and be able to make recommendations of tracks based on community opinion, both implicit (tracks that tend to be submitted by the same people and rated highly) and explicit (users specifying related tracks).
The photograph conundrum he poses is harder, since generally photographs are personal things. The low-hanging fruit of Date taken and some other things is handled by EXIF data most cameras record, and most photo managers deal with, but looking at similarities in photographs without context is more along the lines of the difficulty you bring up. Some heuristics would probably do interesting things, but a lot of environments will look too similar and sometimes related images couldn't be picked out by a person without any context. For example, a pictures taken of a landscape with some buddies on a road trip would group with some other buddies on the same roadtrip in a bar, no one could ever tell they belonged together without knowing the group and/or the circumstances. Simple fact is, if you have time to take your pictures, you have to be ready to organize them if you care, because no one or nothing could ever do a sufficiently accurate job on such individualized data.
On the drag and drop a widget (in his example 'search'), that seems goofy and impractical. Drag and drop a text-entry widget that happens to be a search into an app with multiple child panes, wtf do you search? What if the child widgets don't have any text to export, or else format it differently? Anyone adding a search widget to most structures knows the complexities and pitfalls, occasionally it is a simple 'add toolkit search and do what makes most sence', but if your program is doing things that people care about, the situation is almost always too complex for that.
However, specifically to his search inquiry, things are being tackled in a more structured way. I.e. beagle is intelligent about the filesystem and a number of popular programs and how they manage data, and how it makes sense to organize it. A popular app emerges and developers who know how to index it right and present it have to manually add the intelligence to do the right thing, and it's effective at keeping up because of a sufficiently healthy development community.
However, in a more general sense of applications sharing features more intelligently, the good old pipes of the command line set the precedent here. NeXT brought that into the GUI world and extended it to know more about the context of the data and whether the operation was applicable before a user selected it. They were/are called services. I.e. you have a text editing application. It had a menu item called 'dictionary'. Well that menu item was actually a third party app that registered itself under the name 'Dictionary'. That same menu item and app would also appear in your Terminal application, letting you spellcheck your *nix commands, since that would be so effective... Probably also in the file management that dictionary item would appear. If you had text in the active context, it would spellcheck that. If it were a file, it would know and spellcheck the file. It's similar on a very basic level to the right-click context menu in windows explorer, but much more flexible and pervasive. Don't know how well it would scale in a highly competitive software market place (many companies wanting a 'Search for related info' menu item would undoubtedly happen and then it gets interesting), but it seems like the best approach to get close to what he describes.
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That's the publicly announced ~1500 or so, it does not confirm a 40% US workforce layoff. 40% would be a ludicrously desperate move for a company that at worst is described as stagnant, not exactly in trouble. When you aren't announcing any losses, just less-than-awesome gains, it doesn't make sense to just cut out that much in as short a period as a year. IBM is topheavy and I definitely agree that the management is the bulk of the problem (not only *way* too many of them, but they are also more highly paid than the technical people who do real work), and so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple thousand more get screwed over the year, but 40% would be the dumbest thing and I think even shareholders would see it as a detrimental, stupid move.
One problem they do seem to have is startup envy. They see a company come out of nowhere and achieve great fame and a sizable market cap, and wonder why they can't achieve the same percentage growth. The obvious answer (that IBM's market cap is overwhelmingly huge already, nowhere to really go) doesn't seem to occur to them.
The obvious example is in most 'single-user' home boxes, there are in reality multiple users. If each person uses their own account, things are better contained and compartmentalized. If your offspring screws up, your stuff is in order still. An account manages to install malware that effectively cripples the account? You can wipe the account and start over with less impact than wiping the sysstem.
I agree that for a large number of users in the home environment, the data owned by their 'user' is at least as important as the data owned by the system (although you downplay the importance of the system data, for us it's easy to blow away and start over from scratch, for many home users, they may as well buy a new system and start over from there based on what they are comfortable doing themselves and how much a third party would charge to do it for them). However, some people in a typical household are more responsible than others, and making people more accountable for their own stuff is a good thing.
Sudo is important above and beyond UAC because the password dialog means a user irresponsibly leaving their session open in a public place doesn't allow random person to screw with info above and beyond. There are some scenarios beyond a lab computer that can occur. It's also less likely that someone can automatically defeat the system. I dunno how UAC handles things like synergy and vnc, but if not careful, an application could know it was going to trigger UAC, and exploit some facility like vnc or synergy to insert a mouse button event in the right place at the right time. That's trickier if the prompt will require keyboard activity to be injected of unknown content to the hijacking program.
Anyway, there are ways to improve on the model. Some things that may be useful:
-Ability to right click on a folder/file with an option to surrender write or all permission. This wouldn't hard to do, and users frequently are aware of what their most precious data is. They may download a bunch of pictures, then immediately mark it protected data if it was an obvious, easy thing to do. By far working with people fear of losing pictures and such is huge, but surrendering delete/modify privilege would be enough for that, fear of the wrong people reading any financial data would evoke the 'surrender all privilege' behavior. It's very much like a safe, you put it in knowing it will be a pain to get at again, but it's totally worth it given the risk. Common people understand safes and the consequences, so it isn't a stretch to believe they would cope with and effectively use an analogous computer facility if represented well.
-A logical extension of the above is to have folders that the user can mark as 'without privilege, I want to be able to read everything in this directory, and be able to create new files, but once created, I don't want to modify without having to sudo (or whatever)'. Like a safe with a convenient slot to insert documents into.
-Finally, extend multi-user to a finer granularity or at least leverage it as if it were finer grained. A practical application under an X situation, for example, would be every user having multiple accounts they can let run on their display (X allows the users group access). In practice, you'd have 'DMZ' applications (firefox, email client) that are generally characterized as dealing with complex data from sources not well trusted, with access to a very specific set of local resources (i.e. one download directory, etc). Data on a per-incident basis is promoted to a space untouchable by the browser before general usage.
To me it feels like opensource is to the business world at large what .com was in the late 90s. I see a number of startups and established businesses moving to somehow claim 'open source' without doing anything in the actual spirit of what the phrase should imply. Generally evoking the word 'open' is the cheap way to get there, regardless of anything they do, or proclaiming 'Free' on free-as-in-beer software.
The other thing a lot of companies seem to be doing is actually open sourcing something and have that act be their business plan with respect to some project, often already successful without peer, but no plan on how to actually capitalize on that. I like open source, but when I see a company coming into success with a proprietary product they sell or otherwise make money off of their complete control of something announcing open sourceing and relinquishing control, without a complementing revenue plan, I generally am happy to see the source coming, but wonder about the business sense of those running the company. Too many business plans are starting to look like:
1)Open Source and give away product and full control of the product
2)???
3)Profit!
So between many companies cramming the word 'open' where they can, diluting the meaning in general and businesses that are genuinely embracing open source without a sound strategy (consequently leaving a bad taste in the business world when the inevitable failures come and the open source strategy becomes the scapegoat), I do think there is a danger of 'open source' being considered in general to have 'jumped the shark' from all angles.
The interesting situation here is that it can be conducted with very little equipment (only need a TV and a few square feet of space, on the scale of treadmill/exercise bike/etc), so compared to outside competitive sport it's much more achievable. DDR has been a benefit to a lot of people in the home because it provides *more* feedback on the scale of a competitive sport without forcing you to be in public. An exercise bike/etc for the most part has very abstract goals (miles, speed, etc). When I was on an exercise bike, I made a game out of sustained speed watching the speedometer, and that was about as engrossed as I could get. DDR provides more along that line, hence the popularity. Any measurable health impact probably relates to physical activity in the private home increasing.
I don't think PE while at school had any problems making me physically active during the time when I was growing up (whether or not it was fun, you did your best to either blend in to avoid negative school or peer attention, or shine depending on your personality, neither of these circumstances involved being sedentary). You had a basketball game, you at the least jogged to stay on the same side of the court as the ball, ditto for most field based sports, you played tennis you would at least look like you were going after the ball. Some sports have a lot of opportunity for being subtly idle (large number of people in volleyball causes people to tend to stand still, to a certain extent baseball suffers the same, etc), but generally speaking you don't end up idle just because you are disinterested.
Assuming your opinion is more reflective of reality, it isn't all that appealing of a world for a complete system vendor to target. If usage is still predominantly desktops, that still says nothing of sales. The very advantages of desktops that are called out (upgradeability, maintainability) work against a company trying to sell new systems.
Now, your described usage pattern further explains why the laptop market would be the dominant one sales-wise. Looking at systems that are 'good-enough' in the traditional measures (memory, processing power, etc), other metrics start coming into play (portability). Laptops have come into the price range considered appropriate for dekstops, and while desktops have been driven further in price, it's hard to justify upgrades from even two-year-old systems utilized ~40-50% to new systems that would be utilized ~10-15%.
Laptops are a hardware vendors dream as it stands today. All-in-one pieces that generally are not suitable for significant upgrades, or when they are, upgardes only from the vendor originally purchased from. Ditto for service parts. Display goes bust on your laptop out of warranty? Either buy a new laptop or buy from your original vendor a replacement part, and probably the service to go with it. The vendors are enjoying a harder lock-in with laptops, whereas before it was a fairly tenuous situation of things technically working, but threatening to withhold support from those buying unapproved third party items.
Definitely a lose situation for MS. What does MS have to offer other than application lock-in for their platform? The answer is they simply do not. The value of a *nix core with MS-designed UI on top is simply non-existant in this day and age. MS hasn't done anything fundamentally interesting in the last decade with respect to drastic UI enhancements. The Unix desktops for the most part reproduce every benefit MS historically offered and in some cases one-upped them. Linux Distros have some of the best package management facilities around, and come with all the fundamental bells and whistles to get common people going. In general because they've worked so hard, recent linux distribution releases are as easy (in many cases easier than) as a Windows install. You go to a little application browser and you just type keywords and you have installable applications. Pop in removable media and all the details of mounting it with appropriate privilege and showing it as a usable device on the desktop is done. Plug in a number of devices and they just start working, no dialogs to navigate, no drivers need be downloaded. The application menus are much cleaner and nicely organized than the Windows Start menu, it's generally not too hard for someone to do things. The bad part is lack of good third-party commercial software (including games), and that advantage keeps MS on top for a lot of market segments, and giving that up would be suicide.
Sure, MS could probably do a decent Wine-like layer to get a bunch of supported applications working better than anything else, but in such a market the now 'non-native' versions are running, for all intents and purposes, in a 'legacy' layer. If their value add as a company would be mainly providing support for 'legacy' apps today, 10 years from now they'll be in trouble, compared to their current position.
Sure, they can also sell their Office suite (and other software) to more people if linux is supported, but I don't think it would offset the significant losses they would suffer enabling a competing platform. MS gets tons of money from third-party software developers addressing market segments MS is unable or uninterested in pursuing. Those developers as it stands today pretty much has to give MS money to release a product and reach a sizable customer base.
It's not to say they've made questionable business decisions in the quest for dominance, but a company with a realistic chance to achieve a monopoly in a situation where they really aren't punished for it has a lot to gain by being that monopoly. As it stands today they have nearly total freedom with respect to their margins, and short term skipped opportunity, financially speaking, was worth it to them for the end game.
Until the 0.7 is out, I can't use it (lack of LEAP support). And I have seen it lose it's mind completely on an ipw2100 system in WPA2 on occasion whereas a simple wpa_supplicant.conf and single wpa_supplicant run is rock solid.
And I'm no stranger to crappy, buggy drivers, my primary laptop has an Atheros chip in it now.
Current games are truly not using the full capability of the system, but it's probably not because they are failing to use enough memory, etc. It's probably because they consume the resources inefficiently and exhaust them needlessly. That means any move to reduce resources will only exacerbate any performance issues they may see today.
Copying from one tape to another is *not* copyright violation automatically. For one the tape itself may have never been broadcast, but the copyright holder grants the right to do whatever the hell you want (not going to say that home videos, for example, are illegal to copy and give away because they've never been broadcast?). For another, there is fair use, you can make a backup copy for yourself. The industry for modern media has managed to get that stupid DMCA in that makes it a crime to do what is necessary to get at your fair use rights, but for unprotected media, a copy of something you currently own is legal. You are legally obligated to destroy that copy should you resell or return/exchange the item for another, but the copies are legal.
But whether it's broadcast, via IP, whatever, it really isn't that different. If an Internet Radio station doesn't have its copyright set right, do the listeners suffer liability because they didn't know?
DVRs/VCRs are illegal because you are copying data from somewhere onto media?
At first I thought downloading would cut and dry be against copyright law, but now I'm not so sure. I don't think the obligation to determine if the source is a legitimate distribution system should fall upon the user. By 'common sense', currently most P2P networks today with obviously copyrighted materials is a legally questionably thing to do (since you are definitely becoming the source), but what happens when a source with an air of legitimacy starts up a P2P based service that turns out to be illegal? Should users be penalized just because they were frauded and allowed their upstream bandwidth to be use by the company to commit copyright violation without their knowledge?
From a legal perspective, I'm actually finding myself thinking the only sane entity to chase would be the one who initially injects the content into the P2P network (i.e., the person who posts a torrent to a tracker). The second logical place would be the tracker itself if they have a demonstrated history of ignoring copyright notices, but the users, it's hard to say. Forget the technicality of whether the protocol borrows some of their upload, their action isn't really as different from using a DVR as one might think.
Of that $7B, how much of it is iPod (absolutely zero to do with OSX), iTunes (again, zero to do with OSX), Quicktime licenses to Windows systems and streaming services (essentially zero to do with OSX), and hardware (some to do with OSX, but this is not 100% because some end up running Windows or Linux on Apple hardware, and even when OSX is included and used, it is difficult to determine if the impetus of the purchase was OSX, or the growing strength of the Apple brand name independent of OSX). So to even begin the discussion, all this has to be forgotten, probably decreasing the amount by over half. Apple's move to focus more and more on the likes of Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, etc and renaming their company is a clear indication where they are seeing the best business results, and it's not in PC sales.
The amount that is 100% purely attributable to OSX is probably low relative to the amount MS can claim for Vista. MS's $21B is also not purely Windows, with the lions share probably going to Office/Exchange licensing, but the second biggest slice is probably Windows licenses. This is not necessarily a technical merit of course, they've simply managed to get the industry to accept them as a 'must-have' in the commodity system space, which is great for a software company.
I know, Vista isn't by choice for a majority of the purchasers (got through PC purchase) and by that logic, you should somehow be able to count Apple system sales, but the different ways the two situations work make it impossible to determine how much revenue credit OSX gets in an Apple hardware purchase. MS gets a fixed, measurable license fee that is occasionally refunded, so their financial benefit from a bundled PC purchase is clearly defined, while Apple's really isn't (even if they have some internally defined value, it has no free market meaning unless they offer OS-less systems with a known discount in place, or sell Windows installed without OSX swapping their fee for MS).
Comparing to Dell is not apt either, they have little software, mostly given away for free by necessity (software nowadays is the best shot in the industry at decent margins), have no remotely popular product line outside the PC/Server market, and they largely target the commodity system market (margins are almost nothing). Apple positions itself as a prestige brand and as such enjoys a fatter profit margin on each hardware sale, plus their Quicktime and iTunes situations are larger margin situations as well. I guess your claim is that Apple computer sales in terms of profit exceeded Dell's, but that is hard to determine if you are judging Apple's total revenue to Dell, you'd have to compare direct sales, as mentioned earlier.
Apple may have done some impressive technical work, but you have to face the market reality that as of Today, MS is clearly the leader in a business sense. I don't use Windows or OSX, but I don't claim my preferred platform is beating MS business-wise either.
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And in a less funny, but satisfying way, it is a great deterrent for people who want to kinda take over something I'm trying to do.
As to working on qwerty, usually for me it is one sentence or fragment I screw up before I realize what I'm doing. Of course I never really touchtyped Qwerty much (was too uncomfortable for me, hunt-and-peck was 'good enough' without the discomfort of touch typing.
Probably the most interesting event was when two of us dvorak users collided. They said, "sure, use my system", probably with the same expectation of amusement I have when inviting someone to use my system for a sec, and then a second after I started typing I realized "whoops, not my system, so I need to... hey, it's coming out right, it's in dvorak!'
He was refuting the claim that Vista is no *competition* for OSX, in a thread discussing the business merits of this move. From a Business perspective, where the *money* flows is key, and by any stretch of measuring, MS has probably seen more cash-flow for Vista to date than Apple would claim directly for OSX since 10.0, adding in system sales they might attribute to OSX might shift the picture, but that's hard to measure, since iPod and OSX have been responsible for Apple overall popularity gains. Vista hasn't been a widely sought after upgrade, but PC purchases swelling have been fortuitous for MS.
But I think from Apple's perspective they know Tiger won't make a bit of difference. Some people running OSX today might buy an upgrade, people who happen to be buying Apple's after Tiger's release will get Tiger, and the people running Windows will be no more likely to switch for Tiger than they are to switch for released OSX versions. They know they can't let it fall out of date, but also know there is no significant profit potential to be milked.
Yes OSX has nice features and if I had to choose between Windows and OSX of their own merits, I'd choose OSX, but saying that Vista is no competition for it and scoffing is blatantly dismissing reality. I run linux, but I don't dare scoff and say 'Windows is no competition to linux'. Linux may be better by many measures than Windows, but to declare across the board Windows has nothing, it would make me sound like a stupid zealot.
I'm surprised anyone would think this is news. Also, as it stands today, some companies have *entirely* too much faith in FPGAs to get them through. We had two companies come give us product to try. Both implementing the exact same technology, one with an FPGA design. They talked about how wonderful FPGAs are (as if they were new to them) and that they were perfect for large-scale deployment, and they could fix *anything* in firmware. During our evaluation, despite their claims of how well it performed, we contorted the tests all over the place to meet 70% of the 'theoretical' performance, with *huge* latency penalties on any given operation no matter how we sliced it. All this coming with the bonus of an abnormally large TDP of the part.
The other solution was a traditional ASIC. Under 1/4th the TDP of the competitor, a 50-fold decrease in latency per-operation, and on the first default run, got 90% of the theoretical performance, 96% after tuning. All this at a lower cost-per-part in production by about 200 dollars.
We were skeptical of both vendors for different reasons, neither vendor was allowed to give us extra hand-holding until the first vendor was so embarassingly bad we let them go hands on with us because we were *certain* we had to be missing something if it was that embarassing. Even after giving them unprecedented advantage to offset initial results, they couldn't come close to touching the other offering.
I know, a better company could have done better, probably, but the cost delta of FPGA and ASIC was not their fault, and the TDP of their parts, while likely worse than they could have done, probably would have been higher regardless. As another poster pointed out, its more difficult in general to clock up FPGAs than ASICs, and so performance will suffer.
FPGAs have their place, and a huge benefit is prototyping. I've seen a number of companies do a proof-of-concept with an FPGA, go forward with a demo, but when time comes for mass-production, it's most often implemented as an ASIC. After decades of dealing with hardware bugs, the industry at large has gotten very good at glossing over the rough spots in firmware. Sure, some hardware bugs can never be addressed in such a way, and as a consequence, your testing has to be better up front and inevitably slow down a release process due to a fear of post-release returns, but that is a *very* healthy fear to have, and it ensures the quality will be better at release time than your FPGA-reliant competitor. First to market is generally an advantage, but it is also a *huge* opportunity for embarrassment and sending your early adopters begging for your competitors competent ASIC implementation, with a low bar to beat as well.
I've worked with some products before and despite not in any way being responsible for Windows working, I have been greatful for WHQL certification on occasion. I'll discover a problem which needs to be fixed, and unless absolutely completely unable to dodge the issue, they'll ignore it and push back on it to get the product out the door. Then, magically, some one on the Windows side of the company has a WHQL test fail due to my issue, and it suddenly becomes a show stopper.
Once upon a time, we had a very very obscure problem that they shipped that prevented WHQL certification. Until that was going to be fixed, they shipped it as a linux-only offering. Many many expensive weeks of trying to support thousands of these things that were dying left and right finally nailed down what caused the strange sudden deaths of the product, the WHQL-blocking flaw they neglected in the name of getting it out the door for linux...
In summary, WHQL isn't the whole picture, but no company producing hardware regardless of the Windows market should ignore it, unless they have an impeccable testing track record without ever looking at WHQL.
5.00 Gigabytes may by considered equal to 5.00 Megabytes, much like .002 dollars & .002 cents, so it may even be worse than they say.
I used to agree, however recently I had the choice of no upgrade or a laptop with a FireGL V5200. I already was on a laptop with ATI, but the older generation where there are usable DRI drivers (before ATI ceased providing information essentially).
So fglrx I had last tried caused occasional hangs on VT switches, hung on gdmflexiserver, and did nothing for sleep so the ATI chip was chugging down 5 watts of power in ACPI suspend. On resume the graphics would occasionally be corrupted. Just everything was wrong.
So I tried them again (had no choice), with 8.34.8. Now sleep the whole laptop uses 400 mW without me having to bend over bacwards, gdmflexiserver has yet to crash, I have not seen video corruption (this is Feisty after I set SAVE_VBE_STATE=false and POST_VIDEO=false, methods to work around some cards, but in this case essentially letting fglrx take care of it all, like I do for an nVidia system).
Maybe it's because of Lenovo demands, but my recent ATI driver has actually been on par with my nVidia driver experiences now. With the *very* notable exception of a complete lack of AIGLX, or even more basic Composite support. Feature wise they are still missing those, but it seems they have demonstrated the *capacity* for a decent driver at least...
Sometimes I swear someone becomes a leader because everyone else is too damn busy doing real work to bother...
Yeah,I've gone through a few managers in my day. One absolutely stellar case evoked *incredible* morale (worked to compensate people in accordance with effort, worked to make sure workload was distributed, proactively monitored things mainly to ensure no one was on an unsustainable burnout path for any significant period of time). On top of being liked by employees (or because of it), he led it from new and a trickling revenue stream to a half-billion dollar per year thing after two years. Then some asshole executive demanded that something be done that our group deemed a bad idea likely to blow up in our faces, and our manager took that opinion forward with specific pitfalls to be addressed before it wouldn't blow up too badly. Manager was ignored, blew up in their faces, and when he pointed out the documentation he had brought forward earlier predicting and warning about pretty much exactly what went wrong, and pointed out the executive who signed off to dismiss our recommendation, the executive in question blasted the manager out of management over the fiasco and has since been promoted. Never before and never since have I seen such a good leader who actually made me respect what a manager *could* mean and how one could *actually* be worth something.
The guy who replaced him rattled off meaningless buzzwords and made a highly motivated effective team completely devastated. He moved desk assignments around pointlessly without explanation, imposed bizarre escalation paths to complicate every little discussion, ceased all motivational measures going on before him, and stopped working to get incentives for his employees. Basically the strategy was obviously wave his hands to look busy, make noise about how much money is coming in, but keep his head down by avoiding asking for money or anything at all that would potentially bother his manager, and waiting to be pulled to the next level before everything would hit the fan. The department ran on essentially inertia without growing meaningfully, but the manager got credit for a half-billion dollar effort, and promoted despite being utterly crappy as a leader (unliked by employees *and* unable to milk the group for meaningful work, usually a manager can at least do one of those). BTW, along the way the amount of money that could be fairly taken credit by our group declined for obvious reasons, but the manager propped it up by claiming credit for loosely related work from other groups that we helped a little along the way. Any person with half a brain at a second glance could see how his trick was being worked just from his damned presentation slide, yet it worked for him.
And yes, the number of "Wallys" has increased dramatically (even people who were doing great with leadership are left to wander as "Wally"s now). Also, people who make plenty of noise about what they do and the value they put in without actually *doing* anything has increased, and those people get a lot more credit and such than those who actually *do*. Cynicism among everyone else not merely dicking around or beating their chests is at an all time high, motivation on the ground. This is more like everywhere I end up working.
I can think of no logical reason how it ends up like this. I could understand running out of steam, but the effort/reward system seemed to just encourage a potentially highly successful group slitting its own throat.
Some people get disproportionate amounts of credits for stuff, and those tend to in two categories, people close to executives and people who get approached by customer executives first.
Too many times I've seen a technical person get shipped off for *months* to work on the technical details of achieving an unreasonable schedule. They'll work long stretches of 7 day work weeks at 10-12 hor days to make up for overly-optimistic schedules hundreds of miles from home and family. They come back to a pat on the back and maybe a 50 dollar gift card to a restaurant (though admittedly, their room/board/travel for the months away were covered..).
Meanwhile, the project manager who set the insane schedule, kept their ass comfortably in their desk chair for 9-5, M-F days, for the most part just asking the technical guy 'how close to done are you', and repeating that data to customer executives and their own management chain. This project manager gets promoted in recognition for their 'stellar work to make it happen'.
Same with sales to a degree. Some sales situations, particularly in technical sales, requires a fair amount of work. Other times, I've seen cases where a customer without provocation approaches sales and says "Here is a very large, specific set of stuff and I am buying from YOU, place the order". In making it happen, sometimes its a tall order and technical people are called in, working long weeks of long days far from home. At the end, a note comes out congratulating 'all who made it happen', and then lists everyone, the list more often than not includes some executive who barely has a vague notion about it happening at all and the salespeople who in some cases just did the equivalent of forwarding a customer note verbatim to a sales system. Technical people are just interchangeable cogs that were simply there regardless of the miracles they pull off.
People removed from the direct customer pay-out and from higher-level managers just frequently get overlooked. I've seen this in several companies and I learned a long time ago volunteering to overextend yourself just ends up screwing me and making some undeserving person look good, so I refrain from things that I know will end in travel and long hours. What little credit there is to be had for going 'above and beyond' for many doesn't scale up at all beyond putting in just a little extra effort.
Sinbad was found dead in his home this morning. There were not any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you did not enjoy his work, there is no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Not fully automated, but we live in the internet world where an encyclopedia written by Wiki is among the most used references in the world...
Namely, I'm talking about MusicBrainz. Programs will analyze and produce a fingerprint, and MusicBrainz will do a fairly good job of matching that fingerprint to the track. From there, tempo, mood, etc could all be community stored info. More esoteric tracks suffer, but as Wikipedia shows, things that don't work well in theory can sometimes work surprisingly well in practice... Esoteric tracks generally have a more fanatical/enthusiastic fanbase to offset their lack of popularity. Hell, such a system could one up the GP's requested behavior and be able to make recommendations of tracks based on community opinion, both implicit (tracks that tend to be submitted by the same people and rated highly) and explicit (users specifying related tracks).
The photograph conundrum he poses is harder, since generally photographs are personal things. The low-hanging fruit of Date taken and some other things is handled by EXIF data most cameras record, and most photo managers deal with, but looking at similarities in photographs without context is more along the lines of the difficulty you bring up. Some heuristics would probably do interesting things, but a lot of environments will look too similar and sometimes related images couldn't be picked out by a person without any context. For example, a pictures taken of a landscape with some buddies on a road trip would group with some other buddies on the same roadtrip in a bar, no one could ever tell they belonged together without knowing the group and/or the circumstances. Simple fact is, if you have time to take your pictures, you have to be ready to organize them if you care, because no one or nothing could ever do a sufficiently accurate job on such individualized data.
On the drag and drop a widget (in his example 'search'), that seems goofy and impractical. Drag and drop a text-entry widget that happens to be a search into an app with multiple child panes, wtf do you search? What if the child widgets don't have any text to export, or else format it differently? Anyone adding a search widget to most structures knows the complexities and pitfalls, occasionally it is a simple 'add toolkit search and do what makes most sence', but if your program is doing things that people care about, the situation is almost always too complex for that.
However, specifically to his search inquiry, things are being tackled in a more structured way. I.e. beagle is intelligent about the filesystem and a number of popular programs and how they manage data, and how it makes sense to organize it. A popular app emerges and developers who know how to index it right and present it have to manually add the intelligence to do the right thing, and it's effective at keeping up because of a sufficiently healthy development community.
However, in a more general sense of applications sharing features more intelligently, the good old pipes of the command line set the precedent here. NeXT brought that into the GUI world and extended it to know more about the context of the data and whether the operation was applicable before a user selected it. They were/are called services. I.e. you have a text editing application. It had a menu item called 'dictionary'. Well that menu item was actually a third party app that registered itself under the name 'Dictionary'. That same menu item and app would also appear in your Terminal application, letting you spellcheck your *nix commands, since that would be so effective... Probably also in the file management that dictionary item would appear. If you had text in the active context, it would spellcheck that. If it were a file, it would know and spellcheck the file. It's similar on a very basic level to the right-click context menu in windows explorer, but much more flexible and pervasive. Don't know how well it would scale in a highly competitive software market place (many companies wanting a 'Search for related info' menu item would undoubtedly happen and then it gets interesting), but it seems like the best approach to get close to what he describes.