I run - and have run for 10 years - a site that would best be described as a "specialty index" or "specialty search" site on a given subject. (Figuring out what subject is trivial, and no points will be awarded.) In 1994, there were 7 sites to link to; today I link to over 1,000, all with brief reviews of what they offer, categorization, geographical organization, search, etc.
I've never charged for listings, or for use of the site. But over the years, I've gradually found ways to make it less of a financial drain on me. Banner ads are passe now, but donations, obviously - I take PayPal, and it covered a few months of bandwidth last year. Affiliate programs - that takes care of a couple more months. But AdSense has definitely been a boon.
The point I'm getting to, though, is that I can take my existing code (which I wrote myself) and within a day, set up a site with similar functionality about any other subject. It'd take me a little bit of time to populate it with data, but not too long, and no one's ever described my site as only "somewhat" valid.:)
Now my wife (again, trivially determined, no points for figuring out) wants to apply the technology to a site about one of her interest areas . I figure it can't hurt.
In fact, it's already met it for years. The state Department of Transportation web site has sample images available, and it looks like even the old format ones pretty much met the new bill's requirements.
The sample images don't show the anti-counterfeiting measure, but there's a color-shifting sorta holographic overlay. The machine-readable measures - barcode on the older ones, 2-dimensional code on the newer ones - are obvious. And yes, the photos are digital, printed right onto the plastic.
And of course, all the other things that are required by the bill - full name, current address, date of birth, gender - are also fully met by Hawaii's current licenses.
If you can't tell, under the old ones, it was standard to get your Social Security number as your license number. When I first got a state ID card, they were still using the old format, but I was able to "opt out" having my SSN visible (though it may have still been in the bar code). By the time I got my license a few years later (after one from another state expired), they'd switched over to the new style. I still occasionally run into people who look confused when they need my SSN for employment purposes and can't find it on my license, though.
You'll need them on both ends, of course. And you're more likely to be calling people who have (or can be persuaded to get) a Mac and an iSight, or something comparable on the PC side, than ones who have these admittedly nifty but scarcer-than-hens-teeth gizmos.
What about it? Look at the wavelengths observed by each of NASA's first generation of orbital "great observatories," and you'll realize that James Webb isn't comparable to Hubble at all - it's much more a successor to Spitzer.
If you want a laptop, you usually want to use it for work, you know, to have a mobile computer away from your main desktop.
Geez, I must be a mutant or something.
I don't "want" things "for work." If I perceive something as "work" I don't want to be doing it in the first place, and having a laptop so I can take "work" with me more places and spend more time doing it would merely be indicative of a more severe masochistic streak than I could ever hope to cultivate. I "want" things that help me do the things I want to do/accomplish.*
My laptop is not some sort of ancillary device to a desktop. It is my primary computer. One of my part-time jobs regularly takes place in two different locations, 45 miles (and 4000+ meters of altitude) apart. Another sends me to UN meetings, which can be anywhere in the world, for a week or two at a time.
The absurdity of having a "main" computer that sits at home rapidly becomes apparent when one is only at home a few days out of some months.
* Although I do not want things for work, the existence of work, and the need to accomplish things other people want accomplished, can serve (and has served) as an excellent means of justifying the acquisition of things that are useful to me in ways beyond said work.
Microsoft's got tons of money, so it can have a presence in a lot of different market spaces, but bog-standard Windows clients and Office are still its cash cows. It's had mixed results trying to leverage its strength on the desktop into other segments.
Windows server: Sure, some folks buy it, but plenty don't. So far, Microsoft only has about one third of this space, and Linux is nipping at its heels. They knifed Windows for Itanium, to the disappointment of both Itanium users.
Windows CE/Mobile/Tablet/whatever: Still no monopoly, and since sales of PDAs are shrinking and tablet PC's haven't really caught on, even if MS did take over this market...
Game Consoles: XBox did just have its first profitable quarter. Ever. But it doesn't seem to sell so well overseas, and Nintendo and Sony haven't been persuaded to go away yet.
Media: Media Center PC's aren't selling so well, and in a world with iTuneszillastomping around, Windows Media suddenly seems less likely to rule the universe than it did a few years ago, even with "PlaysForSure."
Internet Services: Even with its added features, MSN Messenger doesn't seem to be destroying AIM or Yahoo Messenger. MSN doesn't seem to be destroying anybody in general, even if Verizon throws it in free with DSL, and even if MSN is the homepage for Internet Explorer. Now Microsoft wants to go after Google, too.
It's pretty interesting to consider that Windows Client and Office are so frickin' profitable that Microsoft can afford to throw gobs of money at their unprofitable products and divisions (which are pretty much everything but Windows Client and Office) and still have huge heaps of cash left over.
(Oh, and I left off Apple, because if 95% of the world abruptly switched to Apple, Microsoft is second only to Apple itself in Mac software development, and would still be one of the most profitable companies out there, on sales of Office for Mac, VirtualPC, etc. Also, because as long as Apple is out there, and isn't owned by Microsoft, Microsoft can point at it and say "look, there are other choices, we're not that much of a monopoly!":)
Perhaps proportionally equal time would be better. Give 99.9% of the space to the 99.9% of scientists who agree on something, and you should have just enough space left to point out that 0.1% of scientists think otherwise.
Office 2003? That's for Windows. Office 2004 is Mac-only.;)
-Dan
Re:Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thre
on
The Lost 1984 Mac Video
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah... the fact that it got rated "insightful" is amusing in its own way.
Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thread?
on
The Lost 1984 Mac Video
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
When the Mac introduction happened in 1984, there was a lengthy, somewhat heated thread on the "SLASHDOT-L" BITNET Listserv. I foolishly didn't save a copy of it, but I'm sure someone out there has it and will post it in the next few days. From my recollections, people were of divided opinions.
A small minority thought it was "insanely great," and I suppose they still do. Most readers, though, found flaws with it.
Some viewed the Macintosh as "just a toy," and insisted that they were holding out for a real computer - the Lisa.
Some thought it had promise, but wouldn't be truly useful until Apple added support for the Commodore-based SIDplayer music format.
Quite a lot said it was too expensive. Some of these pointed out that there were any number of kit computers they could build for less, while others questioned having a screen built in - and a small one at that - when most people already had televisions.
Purists were quick to point out that the Mac lacked features that had been developed years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and others. Why wasn't the keyboard more of a chording model? And why did the mouse have only one button? Even Engelbart's original patent drawings, they argued, had shown a multi-button mouse. What good was a single button?
And of course, there were the hardcore geeks and techies, who were quick to point out that it wasn't any good if it couldn't run a real operating system, like VAX/VMS.
Ah, the good old days. If anyone has a copy of the thread, please post it!
You conveniently ignore all the software like OpenOffice.org that Sun gave to you
Wow... how's the ol' short-term memory doing these days?
StarOffice's original creators, StarDivision (whom Sun bought in 1999) had been giving us StarOffice prior to Sun's purchase. And it had been on Linux since at least 1996.
I must say, though, that I applaud Sun for maintaining the status quo by continuing to offer a free version of the program. It takes an innovative industry-leading company to keep things the way they are.
(Not to say that Sun hasn't given us great things... I'm eternally indebted to Bill Joy for vi for example. But StarOffice/OpenOffice may not be the best example.
Sun bought device drivers from SCO? Wow. I admin an SCO OpenSewer box (don't worry, it's only a couple months away from retirement) and find the idea that SCO would have device drivers worth buying, or indeed that SCO would even know the difference between "device driver" and "deposition," amusing.
While we Slashdotters might enjoy the idea of being able to tinker with our cameras - and indeed, some cameras offer the ability to do that a little, like Canon's Digital Rebel, which uses a "dumbed down" version of the firmware from the EOS-10D, and can be partially "un-crippled" by a firmware hack - issues of interoperability and standards support are probably more important.
Simply put, people want things that just work. They want cameras that they can plug into a USB port and have recognized, automatically, by Apple's iPhoto, Microsoft's whatever-its-name-is, etc. And they want image files that can be opened in just about anything.
Those expectations are reasonable, and most name-brand digital cameras meet them. A large number of off-brand and "cheap" digital cameras from companies like Sakar, though, don't even come close.
Example: There's a "Kidz Cam" sold various places; I spotted it in a local warehouse store for about $25. It's made by Sakar, and the packaging has a web address for some "internetcoach.com" thing. I was considering getting one for my daughter (if only to dissuade her from asking to use my Canon) but a quick Google found that in addition to being widely viewed as utter crap, it's also not compatible with anything but the (Windows) software that comes with it - and barely compatible with that.
The general recommendation was to hit eBay and buy a few-years-old camera from a more respectable brand.:)
I should clarify: I don't like supporting Windows PC's at all, period, full stop. Being paid a buck or so a minute for touching those festering heaps of malware merely dulls the pain.:) This is part of why I don't use Windows at home - I get enough grief from it at job sites.
And no, I wouldn't charge my parents. Heck, when I can afford it, I buy them computers. But I'm not trying to make it unnaturally easy for them to continue using Windows, either. I'm 8000km away from them, so I can't just drop by and run a bunch of tools to scan their system, so I usually give them more general guidance over the phone.
Like I said in my post, they're heading away from Windows and toward Mac OS X.
My parents are roughly retirement age; my father retired at the end of last year; my mom turns 65 in about a year. Although my father did work with IBM System 3 gear back in the 1960s, I am the "techie" in my branch of the family tree. (Strangely, my cousin Jon, born within a week of me, is also a techie, working for NeuStar or whatever their name is now. Must have been a solar flare around then...)
When I was a teen, they had Commodores. I went to college, got into the x86 architecture (though not into Windows) and after some years, my parents made the move to PC's as well. Most of my computer-owning relatives have PC's as well - my sister and her husband, aunts on both sides.
Now, I've had Macs for the last few years. I still have a Linux PC as well, but I've been making it clear to them that Windows is bad mojo, and - perhaps more importantly - that I am only going to offer them limited help with their Windows PC's. (I support Windows PC's for a living, and don't like doing it for free.) They've seen my Macs. They know I'm happy with them. And they know my Macs do nifty stuff and don't have the security problems Windows has.
My sister and her husband have a bad case of Mac envy right now, and are saving up for one. They had been saving for an $800 eMac, but boy, does that $500 Mac mini look appealing.
My parents just made a "things to buy" list, and there's an Apple logo on it. Again, I think the Mac mini will appeal to them, since they've already got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Where I'm going with this is: some grandparents and other people may buy a Simputer or whatever if they see Ed McMahon flogging it on an infomercial, but these days, a lot of folks have descendants or friends who are "tech-savvy," and they look to them for advice. And if those "tech-savvy" folks don't have, or don't like, a Simthingy, they'll be recommending something else, whether it's a PC or a Mac.
I've heard that Karen Meech, who's one of the investigators on the Deep Impact science team, will be coordinating observations from a bunch of the Mauna Kea Observatories using different instruments, different wavelengths, et cetera.
(Yes, I will be asking if I can be "on shift" that night... and if I don't get lucky, I'll probably go partway up the mountain for some stargazing and perhaps a look at a comet.)
Gene therapy in utero might be rather risky; I suspect doing it in vitro might actually be more effective. Catch those cells before they start dividing, you know?
The only possible problem I can see is when women give birth to those adorable little rhesus monkeys... could lead to negative press.;)
Been there. Done that. In some sense, I'm still there, since I have FM6Developer on my Powerbook. But... oh, the sheer ugliness I have seen people inflict upon one another with FileMaker. And its "I'm going to randomly resize several windows NOW, so there!" behavior makes it anathema to me.
Someday, we'll all have easy-to-use interfaces to SQL RDBMSes. Unfortunately, people will still use them to set up one huge fscking table with 200 fields per row... sigh.
The Shuffle will probably also take a nice chunk out of the USB drive market, whether it means to or not.
A friend said "Store files along with your music"... It's my next thumbdrive.
I concur. Sure, I can get a plain old thumbdrive for $20-$30, probably, but the places I actually wind up using a thumbdrive tend to be 12-24 hours away by jet, and it wouldn't hurt at all to have some tunes available.
A thumbdrive I can use when I'm not using it. It's like having tea and no tea.
Microsoft Office 2004 Mac doesn't have a DB module either, you know. Not that this is a Bad Thing, since if it did, that would mean Access, and... well.... ew.
Yeah, that (cassette or 8-track slot replaced with slot for iPod) is pretty much what I was thinking, too.
And...yeah, they do change the dock with new generations at least sometimes (although in the case of the iPod photo, it's because it needs more output jacks) but I think all the current generation click-wheel iPods (except the iPod photo, which is really another generation in a sense) fit the same docks, regardless of capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Note to self: You already have enough Macs. Next time, buy stock.
I've never charged for listings, or for use of the site. But over the years, I've gradually found ways to make it less of a financial drain on me. Banner ads are passe now, but donations, obviously - I take PayPal, and it covered a few months of bandwidth last year. Affiliate programs - that takes care of a couple more months. But AdSense has definitely been a boon.
The point I'm getting to, though, is that I can take my existing code (which I wrote myself) and within a day, set up a site with similar functionality about any other subject. It'd take me a little bit of time to populate it with data, but not too long, and no one's ever described my site as only "somewhat" valid. :)
Now my wife (again, trivially determined, no points for figuring out) wants to apply the technology to a site about one of her interest areas . I figure it can't hurt.
The sample images don't show the anti-counterfeiting measure, but there's a color-shifting sorta holographic overlay. The machine-readable measures - barcode on the older ones, 2-dimensional code on the newer ones - are obvious. And yes, the photos are digital, printed right onto the plastic.
And of course, all the other things that are required by the bill - full name, current address, date of birth, gender - are also fully met by Hawaii's current licenses.
If you can't tell, under the old ones, it was standard to get your Social Security number as your license number. When I first got a state ID card, they were still using the old format, but I was able to "opt out" having my SSN visible (though it may have still been in the bar code). By the time I got my license a few years later (after one from another state expired), they'd switched over to the new style. I still occasionally run into people who look confused when they need my SSN for employment purposes and can't find it on my license, though.
Oops, you're right. These are just plain ordinary (well, SIP) phones that happen to have screens. My bad. I thought they were something more.
Oh well.
You'll need them on both ends, of course. And you're more likely to be calling people who have (or can be persuaded to get) a Mac and an iSight, or something comparable on the PC side, than ones who have these admittedly nifty but scarcer-than-hens-teeth gizmos.
What about it? Look at the wavelengths observed by each of NASA's first generation of orbital "great observatories," and you'll realize that James Webb isn't comparable to Hubble at all - it's much more a successor to Spitzer.
- I don't "want" things "for work." If I perceive something as "work" I don't want to be doing it in the first place, and having a laptop so I can take "work" with me more places and spend more time doing it would merely be indicative of a more severe masochistic streak than I could ever hope to cultivate. I "want" things that help me do the things I want to do/accomplish.*
- My laptop is not some sort of ancillary device to a desktop. It is my primary computer. One of my part-time jobs regularly takes place in two different locations, 45 miles (and 4000+ meters of altitude) apart. Another sends me to UN meetings, which can be anywhere in the world, for a week or two at a time.
The absurdity of having a "main" computer that sits at home rapidly becomes apparent when one is only at home a few days out of some months.* Although I do not want things for work, the existence of work, and the need to accomplish things other people want accomplished, can serve (and has served) as an excellent means of justifying the acquisition of things that are useful to me in ways beyond said work.
Windows server: Sure, some folks buy it, but plenty don't. So far, Microsoft only has about one third of this space, and Linux is nipping at its heels. They knifed Windows for Itanium, to the disappointment of both Itanium users.
Server appications: IIS has lost market share to Apache in recent years, and Exchange isn't ubiquitous yet either. SQL server enjoys showing the web its limits.
Windows CE/Mobile/Tablet/whatever: Still no monopoly, and since sales of PDAs are shrinking and tablet PC's haven't really caught on, even if MS did take over this market...
Game Consoles: XBox did just have its first profitable quarter. Ever. But it doesn't seem to sell so well overseas, and Nintendo and Sony haven't been persuaded to go away yet.
Media: Media Center PC's aren't selling so well, and in a world with iTuneszilla stomping around, Windows Media suddenly seems less likely to rule the universe than it did a few years ago, even with "PlaysForSure."
Internet Services: Even with its added features, MSN Messenger doesn't seem to be destroying AIM or Yahoo Messenger. MSN doesn't seem to be destroying anybody in general, even if Verizon throws it in free with DSL, and even if MSN is the homepage for Internet Explorer. Now Microsoft wants to go after Google, too.
It's pretty interesting to consider that Windows Client and Office are so frickin' profitable that Microsoft can afford to throw gobs of money at their unprofitable products and divisions (which are pretty much everything but Windows Client and Office) and still have huge heaps of cash left over.
(Oh, and I left off Apple, because if 95% of the world abruptly switched to Apple, Microsoft is second only to Apple itself in Mac software development, and would still be one of the most profitable companies out there, on sales of Office for Mac, VirtualPC, etc. Also, because as long as Apple is out there, and isn't owned by Microsoft, Microsoft can point at it and say "look, there are other choices, we're not that much of a monopoly!" :)
Perhaps proportionally equal time would be better. Give 99.9% of the space to the 99.9% of scientists who agree on something, and you should have just enough space left to point out that 0.1% of scientists think otherwise.
Office 2003? That's for Windows. Office 2004 is Mac-only. ;)
-Dan
Yeah... the fact that it got rated "insightful" is amusing in its own way.
When the Mac introduction happened in 1984, there was a lengthy, somewhat heated thread on the "SLASHDOT-L" BITNET Listserv. I foolishly didn't save a copy of it, but I'm sure someone out there has it and will post it in the next few days. From my recollections, people were of divided opinions.
A small minority thought it was "insanely great," and I suppose they still do. Most readers, though, found flaws with it.
Some viewed the Macintosh as "just a toy," and insisted that they were holding out for a real computer - the Lisa.
Some thought it had promise, but wouldn't be truly useful until Apple added support for the Commodore-based SIDplayer music format.
Quite a lot said it was too expensive. Some of these pointed out that there were any number of kit computers they could build for less, while others questioned having a screen built in - and a small one at that - when most people already had televisions.
Purists were quick to point out that the Mac lacked features that had been developed years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and others. Why wasn't the keyboard more of a chording model? And why did the mouse have only one button? Even Engelbart's original patent drawings, they argued, had shown a multi-button mouse. What good was a single button?
And of course, there were the hardcore geeks and techies, who were quick to point out that it wasn't any good if it couldn't run a real operating system, like VAX/VMS.
Ah, the good old days. If anyone has a copy of the thread, please post it!
StarOffice's original creators, StarDivision (whom Sun bought in 1999) had been giving us StarOffice prior to Sun's purchase. And it had been on Linux since at least 1996.
I must say, though, that I applaud Sun for maintaining the status quo by continuing to offer a free version of the program. It takes an innovative industry-leading company to keep things the way they are.
(Not to say that Sun hasn't given us great things... I'm eternally indebted to Bill Joy for vi for example. But StarOffice/OpenOffice may not be the best example.
Sun bought device drivers from SCO? Wow. I admin an SCO OpenSewer box (don't worry, it's only a couple months away from retirement) and find the idea that SCO would have device drivers worth buying, or indeed that SCO would even know the difference between "device driver" and "deposition," amusing.
Simply put, people want things that just work. They want cameras that they can plug into a USB port and have recognized, automatically, by Apple's iPhoto, Microsoft's whatever-its-name-is, etc. And they want image files that can be opened in just about anything.
Those expectations are reasonable, and most name-brand digital cameras meet them. A large number of off-brand and "cheap" digital cameras from companies like Sakar, though, don't even come close.
Example: There's a "Kidz Cam" sold various places; I spotted it in a local warehouse store for about $25. It's made by Sakar, and the packaging has a web address for some "internetcoach.com" thing. I was considering getting one for my daughter (if only to dissuade her from asking to use my Canon) but a quick Google found that in addition to being widely viewed as utter crap, it's also not compatible with anything but the (Windows) software that comes with it - and barely compatible with that.
The general recommendation was to hit eBay and buy a few-years-old camera from a more respectable brand. :)
And no, I wouldn't charge my parents. Heck, when I can afford it, I buy them computers. But I'm not trying to make it unnaturally easy for them to continue using Windows, either. I'm 8000km away from them, so I can't just drop by and run a bunch of tools to scan their system, so I usually give them more general guidance over the phone.
Like I said in my post, they're heading away from Windows and toward Mac OS X.
My parents are roughly retirement age; my father retired at the end of last year; my mom turns 65 in about a year. Although my father did work with IBM System 3 gear back in the 1960s, I am the "techie" in my branch of the family tree. (Strangely, my cousin Jon, born within a week of me, is also a techie, working for NeuStar or whatever their name is now. Must have been a solar flare around then...)
When I was a teen, they had Commodores. I went to college, got into the x86 architecture (though not into Windows) and after some years, my parents made the move to PC's as well. Most of my computer-owning relatives have PC's as well - my sister and her husband, aunts on both sides.
Now, I've had Macs for the last few years. I still have a Linux PC as well, but I've been making it clear to them that Windows is bad mojo, and - perhaps more importantly - that I am only going to offer them limited help with their Windows PC's. (I support Windows PC's for a living, and don't like doing it for free.) They've seen my Macs. They know I'm happy with them. And they know my Macs do nifty stuff and don't have the security problems Windows has.
My sister and her husband have a bad case of Mac envy right now, and are saving up for one. They had been saving for an $800 eMac, but boy, does that $500 Mac mini look appealing.
My parents just made a "things to buy" list, and there's an Apple logo on it. Again, I think the Mac mini will appeal to them, since they've already got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Where I'm going with this is: some grandparents and other people may buy a Simputer or whatever if they see Ed McMahon flogging it on an infomercial, but these days, a lot of folks have descendants or friends who are "tech-savvy," and they look to them for advice. And if those "tech-savvy" folks don't have, or don't like, a Simthingy, they'll be recommending something else, whether it's a PC or a Mac.
(Yes, I will be asking if I can be "on shift" that night... and if I don't get lucky, I'll probably go partway up the mountain for some stargazing and perhaps a look at a comet.)
(Fortunately, air traffic over the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station, where such things happen nightly, is minimal to zero.)
The only possible problem I can see is when women give birth to those adorable little rhesus monkeys... could lead to negative press. ;)
Someday, we'll all have easy-to-use interfaces to SQL RDBMSes. Unfortunately, people will still use them to set up one huge fscking table with 200 fields per row... sigh.
A friend said "Store files along with your music" ... It's my next thumbdrive.
I concur. Sure, I can get a plain old thumbdrive for $20-$30, probably, but the places I actually wind up using a thumbdrive tend to be 12-24 hours away by jet, and it wouldn't hurt at all to have some tunes available.
A thumbdrive I can use when I'm not using it. It's like having tea and no tea.
Microsoft Office 2004 Mac doesn't have a DB module either, you know. Not that this is a Bad Thing, since if it did, that would mean Access, and... well.... ew.
Yeah, that (cassette or 8-track slot replaced with slot for iPod) is pretty much what I was thinking, too.
And...yeah, they do change the dock with new generations at least sometimes (although in the case of the iPod photo, it's because it needs more output jacks) but I think all the current generation click-wheel iPods (except the iPod photo, which is really another generation in a sense) fit the same docks, regardless of capacity.
I could be wrong, though.