Shutdown like this remind that it is never good to rely on one service
or company. From all the services closed, I liked Google desktop quite a bit
on my linux box a couple of years ago. It could slow down the machine too much at some points and
it had also not been clear to me how much and I fell back to rely on good old unix
tools or beagle.
I'm also surprised that it was
pulled so fast. Google video had some nice features and was much cleaner
than you tube. They initially got the social networking right and good videos showed
up first. I would have thought, that only
a bankrupt or sold company would trigger such a shutdown.
This is a healthy company pulling content
and there was no data disaster at work.
I lost even more confidence in such free services.
What will be tragic in the future that many organizations
do not know any more how to be independent because everything
has evaporated into the cloud and so much more IT culture got lost or
outsourced. Most will no more know what an editor or what a backup is.
I would not be surprised if in 20 years,
Cloud services will be hated like drug dealers: they have given away
free stuff until most customers and companies are dependent.
At that point, when all local IT culture has been wiped out,
they can charge whatever they want.
What I appreciate most about Perl and C is the stability
and culture. It is not just a hype which _might_ be around in
10 years. It is one of the languages, which will persist, it is a language
I can rely on, just because experience has shown me that.
In a rapidly evolving time, it is good to have some things which
persist.
I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in.
Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise.
It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results.
Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect
code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.
I share some of the critics that not all information is visible on the
website: The cruising speed is 70 km/h as can be seen in the technical data sheet.
But I also did not find information on how much the batteries are loaded by take off.
For such projects, optimism and vision is important. Most people do not have that.
Concerns like these would have killed any previous challenges.
There were for example proofs that it is impossible to fly to the moon. They did not
predict that one can build rockets with stages for example. One a few
people of a million have the vision and the energy to go after such a project
and that is why we admire it. Pessimism is poison in this game. Fortunately, there
are some who do it nevertheless, even if it looks impossible.
Imagine to have solar powered tanking stations between continents, which
solar powered planes could use to boost their batteries. Imagine much
better solar panels, much better motors, better materials. Imagine many
many planes, which constantly take off and land, day and night.
No noise, silent transportation. Airports could be built closer to places
where people live. This is technology which might be used in 50 years and
which might be needed then.
> Convergence doesn't happen. Technologies diverge, for the most part.
That is exactly the reason why I ordered an iPad.
The iPod is great to read nontechnical books, write quick emails or have
a glance at news while away from the office. It does not replace the
desktop, where I can program, develop, write comfortably, where things
are backed up and synced with other computers, where I have reliability
and openness of the operating system and complete control, what process
is running.
But I do not like to read technical books on the PC, nor on the iPod.
I want to have my library with me, on a different device. I imagine having
the iPod in my pocket, write on my laptop and have a tablet as a reference.
Yes, the interface will be key. The article very
well describes why tablet PCs have failed so far: they had
crappy, sucking interfaces so far.
It does not have to be Apple: also "Courier" from Microsoft looks
as if it is going to be a winner: because the interface looks nice.
Whether Apple or Microsoft will succeed is not yet clear. It is no
question for me that there will be something between a smart phone
and a laptop, which will stay to read journals, newspapers, books
or articles.
Divergence will occur also naturally because
smart phones and tablets will be locked down pretty heavily. Nobody
who minds the future will bet entirely on a platform which is
closed. As for a book reader, I do not care as long as it displays
PDFs and Djvu files nicely, and in high quality.
It is a bad idea to hand over email responsibilities to an external
company:
A university email is often used as a verification that a person is
affiliated with the place. This is useful for example for site licences.
Google could change privacy settings in the future. Imagine that
external parties could buy lists of "names" or "grades".
Once hooked, it is difficult to switch back. Once, the IT
culture has been outsourced, also the IT talent has disappeared
and higher education becomes dependent on external companies.
There is a lot of research and confidential information going over email.
If I were a researcher working in a cutting edge field, I would be
worried to have information about the projects safe.
Google delivers now. Will it in 10 years? What happens if
Sergey and Larry have moved on completely and accountants eying primarily the stock market have taken
over? It might become more expensive for a university in the future. Or, due to lack
of other possibilities, one is forced to accept a partner which is less
careful about privacy settings.
A lot of students and faculty already use gmail now. But they do not
have to. If somebody wants, it is possible to have all benefits from
external email providers. Why force it?
Some redundancy is nice. Its can be beneficial to have different email addresses
and use them for different things. If one provider does not deliver, one can use an other one.
Being forced to use an external email provider leave less options and adds more dependencies.
the new technology with color, faster page build and better energy efficiency is welcome.
My biggest complaint with electronic ink is the "flicking" before a page turn.
I was told that it is necessary to remove any traces from the previous text. Its certainly
a personal thing, but I find this annoying. Every page flip reminds on how unfinished
the current e-ink technology is.
The biggest challenge today with electronic texts is that page build needs to
be fast. PDF does not perform well. DJVU texts perform much better, are smaller
in general and can be read more comfortablly. An ebook reader should be able to read
both formats comfortably. Browsing through a book should be fast. I don't see the
need for a new format. Give me a reader which can read PDF and DJVU with a decent
resolution and page build speed and I'm sold. It is definitely also a software issue
because on my Ipod Touch, I can read PDFs
more comfortably than with the acrobat hog on the desktop. The Blio looks like a step
in the right direction (no OSX nor linux support however for now and I do not
see it on the app store neither for the iphone).
obvious questions:
if it is browser based, can one read the book without being online?
Can one download the book temporarily or for good? Are records kept
from where and how long a reader reads a book and what kind of books
are read? Will this be tied to your online profile and get you
reader specific ads?
There is only one sad thing: that websites force mobile devices
to versions which are tailored for mobile devices. Usually, the
mobile versions of websites are very limited. Especially, in news sites,
one does not find things any more. Worse still is to get automatically
redirected to mobile pages which do not work.
The infoworld article mentions scalability as a problem.
This could be the crux since it is difficult to maintain different
scaled versions at the same time, especially for web applications.
So, better keep one, but one which can run nicely on mobile devices
i.e. avoid flash if possible.
Mobile devices have got very powerful already. While desktop
performance gains have flattened, it is amazing what can be
packed into a phone today. This is likely to continue and in the
long term, one might not have to worry too much about differences
between mobile and desktop any more.
The nice thing about QT pro is that it is fast and small. I can edit and trim a movie
in the time final cut etc has started up. I like small, minimal and powerful tools. Anyway,
the QT episode had the effect that the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard had a
rather chilly effect on me...
This is especially annoying with Quicktime.
The new quicktime in Snow Leopard is no match
in comparison with the old Quicktime 7 Pro:
The editing features are now limited to trimming
for example, the export possibilities rudimentary.
Fortunately, one can still reinstall Quicktime 7
additionally in Snow Leopard, but one can not change
the default application binding for Quicktime. This is
a serious problem.
For me, Quicktime pro is half the reason to use a Mac.
Changes like this from Leopard to Snow leopard always
make me nervous and I'm glad to have Linux catching up.
Even apple might screw things up in future, possibly
due to pressure of the movie and music industry.
One can for example suspect that the lack of
cut and paste ability or export of sound only etc is due
to such industry pressure. The average user can
no more cut out advertisements for example. I do not see
any technical reason why the new limitations are in place
if quicktime pro is ditched.
An other reason for the current limitations could be that a new QT pro is in the making.
I hope this is the case. Still, one should be able to change
the default application binding to an old version of quicktime!
yes, latex is nice, but it would be even better, if basic TeX would be understood by browsers. About 10 years ago, IBM had a cool plugin called texexplorer. The plugin would compile latex on the fly. No need to publish a PDF. It worked pretty well for basic documents which would not rely on macros.
Still, to address the question of the submitter, it would be nice to have something like
It would not have to be the full latex stack but the ability to place mini latex pages into HTML documents. Its a pity techexplorer technology seems have disappeared. If IBM would opensource it, it could become an add-on for firefox.
Computer algebra systems are high level programming language. Writing good code does not need documentation. The code itself shows what is done. Here is an example which takes two pictures and procuces a GIF movie interpolating them:
It takes over a minute to process. A simple C program doing the same is a multiple times larger but also needs multiple less time to process. But it needs to be documented because even simple things like reading in a picture
fgets(buffer,1025,in); if(strncmp(buffer,"P6",2)){ fprintf(stderr,"Unsupported file format (need PPM raw)\n"); exit(1); }
do fgets(buffer,1025,in); while(*buffer == '#'); // get picture dimension x_size = atoi(strtok(buffer," ")); y_size = atoi(strtok(NULL," ")); fgets(buffer,1025,in); // get color map size c_size = atoi(buffer);
But C it is worth the effort. For more advanced image manipulation tasks for example, Mathematica often can no more be used, due to memory or just because it takes too long (Math link does not help here very much since objects like a movie (a vector of images) can just not be fed into computer algebra systems without getting into memory problems, which deals with a movie as a whole). For computer vision stuff for example, one needs to deal with large chunks of the entire movie). While the simplicity of programming with high level programming languages is compelling, speed often matters.
There is an other nice benefit of a simple language like C: the code will work in 20 years. Computer algebra systems evolve very fast and much what is done today does not work tomorrow any more in a new version. Higher level languages evolve also faster. And large junks of internal CAS code are a "black box" invisible for the user. Both worlds makes sense: the low level primitive, transparent and fast low level language and the slower, but extremely elegant high level language.
Mathematical models always only work in a certain range
As Newtonian mechanics well for smaller velocities and macroscopic
bodies it has to be replaced for large velocities or in smaller scales.
Exponential growth laws have to be replaced by logistic growth. etc
Models are especially popular in probability theory. The text mentions
Gaussian Copula function, the "rocket fuel" for collateralized debt obligation,
which is cited as one of the reasons for the finance disaster.
See "The formula
that killed Wall street".
Slashdot Mirror
Shutdown like this remind that it is never good to rely on one service or company. From all the services closed, I liked Google desktop quite a bit on my linux box a couple of years ago. It could slow down the machine too much at some points and it had also not been clear to me how much and I fell back to rely on good old unix tools or beagle.
changed my startup page to Yandex. The black bar is too bad. Its strange how little things can annoy so much.
I'm also surprised that it was pulled so fast. Google video had some nice features and was much cleaner than you tube. They initially got the social networking right and good videos showed up first. I would have thought, that only a bankrupt or sold company would trigger such a shutdown. This is a healthy company pulling content and there was no data disaster at work. I lost even more confidence in such free services. What will be tragic in the future that many organizations do not know any more how to be independent because everything has evaporated into the cloud and so much more IT culture got lost or outsourced. Most will no more know what an editor or what a backup is. I would not be surprised if in 20 years, Cloud services will be hated like drug dealers: they have given away free stuff until most customers and companies are dependent. At that point, when all local IT culture has been wiped out, they can charge whatever they want.
What I appreciate most about Perl and C is the stability and culture. It is not just a hype which _might_ be around in 10 years. It is one of the languages, which will persist, it is a language I can rely on, just because experience has shown me that. In a rapidly evolving time, it is good to have some things which persist.
At least, with the Cloud, Mr Beeks does not need to go places any more to get those "stupid old crop reports" from the department of Agriculture ...
I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in. Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise. It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results. Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.
for the best sound, we do everything!
I share some of the critics that not all information is visible on the website: The cruising speed is 70 km/h as can be seen in the technical data sheet. But I also did not find information on how much the batteries are loaded by take off.
For such projects, optimism and vision is important. Most people do not have that. Concerns like these would have killed any previous challenges. There were for example proofs that it is impossible to fly to the moon. They did not predict that one can build rockets with stages for example. One a few people of a million have the vision and the energy to go after such a project and that is why we admire it. Pessimism is poison in this game. Fortunately, there are some who do it nevertheless, even if it looks impossible.
Imagine to have solar powered tanking stations between continents, which solar powered planes could use to boost their batteries. Imagine much better solar panels, much better motors, better materials. Imagine many many planes, which constantly take off and land, day and night. No noise, silent transportation. Airports could be built closer to places where people live. This is technology which might be used in 50 years and which might be needed then.
Swell, botnets can even operate with computers which had been turned off.
That is exactly the reason why I ordered an iPad. The iPod is great to read nontechnical books, write quick emails or have a glance at news while away from the office. It does not replace the desktop, where I can program, develop, write comfortably, where things are backed up and synced with other computers, where I have reliability and openness of the operating system and complete control, what process is running.
But I do not like to read technical books on the PC, nor on the iPod. I want to have my library with me, on a different device. I imagine having the iPod in my pocket, write on my laptop and have a tablet as a reference.
Yes, the interface will be key. The article very well describes why tablet PCs have failed so far: they had crappy, sucking interfaces so far. It does not have to be Apple: also "Courier" from Microsoft looks as if it is going to be a winner: because the interface looks nice. Whether Apple or Microsoft will succeed is not yet clear. It is no question for me that there will be something between a smart phone and a laptop, which will stay to read journals, newspapers, books or articles.
Divergence will occur also naturally because smart phones and tablets will be locked down pretty heavily. Nobody who minds the future will bet entirely on a platform which is closed. As for a book reader, I do not care as long as it displays PDFs and Djvu files nicely, and in high quality.
Weird. The story made me suddenly phobic of close-ups of Mars mooning.
Its not the "Iranian Cyber Army", it is the "Cyber Army of Iran"!
the new technology with color, faster page build and better energy efficiency is welcome. My biggest complaint with electronic ink is the "flicking" before a page turn. I was told that it is necessary to remove any traces from the previous text. Its certainly a personal thing, but I find this annoying. Every page flip reminds on how unfinished the current e-ink technology is.
The biggest challenge today with electronic texts is that page build needs to be fast. PDF does not perform well. DJVU texts perform much better, are smaller in general and can be read more comfortablly. An ebook reader should be able to read both formats comfortably. Browsing through a book should be fast. I don't see the need for a new format. Give me a reader which can read PDF and DJVU with a decent resolution and page build speed and I'm sold. It is definitely also a software issue because on my Ipod Touch, I can read PDFs more comfortably than with the acrobat hog on the desktop. The Blio looks like a step in the right direction (no OSX nor linux support however for now and I do not see it on the app store neither for the iphone).
obvious questions: if it is browser based, can one read the book without being online? Can one download the book temporarily or for good? Are records kept from where and how long a reader reads a book and what kind of books are read? Will this be tied to your online profile and get you reader specific ads?
There is only one sad thing: that websites force mobile devices to versions which are tailored for mobile devices. Usually, the mobile versions of websites are very limited. Especially, in news sites, one does not find things any more. Worse still is to get automatically redirected to mobile pages which do not work.
The infoworld article mentions scalability as a problem. This could be the crux since it is difficult to maintain different scaled versions at the same time, especially for web applications. So, better keep one, but one which can run nicely on mobile devices i.e. avoid flash if possible.
Mobile devices have got very powerful already. While desktop performance gains have flattened, it is amazing what can be packed into a phone today. This is likely to continue and in the long term, one might not have to worry too much about differences between mobile and desktop any more.
The nice thing about QT pro is that it is fast and small. I can edit and trim a movie in the time final cut etc has started up. I like small, minimal and powerful tools. Anyway, the QT episode had the effect that the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard had a rather chilly effect on me ...
This is especially annoying with Quicktime. The new quicktime in Snow Leopard is no match in comparison with the old Quicktime 7 Pro:
The editing features are now limited to trimming for example, the export possibilities rudimentary.
Fortunately, one can still reinstall Quicktime 7 additionally in Snow Leopard, but one can not change the default application binding for Quicktime. This is a serious problem.
For me, Quicktime pro is half the reason to use a Mac. Changes like this from Leopard to Snow leopard always make me nervous and I'm glad to have Linux catching up. Even apple might screw things up in future, possibly due to pressure of the movie and music industry.
One can for example suspect that the lack of cut and paste ability or export of sound only etc is due to such industry pressure. The average user can no more cut out advertisements for example. I do not see any technical reason why the new limitations are in place if quicktime pro is ditched. An other reason for the current limitations could be that a new QT pro is in the making. I hope this is the case. Still, one should be able to change the default application binding to an old version of quicktime!
Maybe social networks need to become "friends" first to allow mutual aggregation of customers ...
yes, latex is nice, but it would be even better, if basic TeX would
be understood by browsers. About 10 years ago, IBM had a cool plugin called texexplorer.
The plugin would compile latex on the fly. No need to publish a PDF. It worked
pretty well for basic documents which would not rely on macros.
Still, to address the question of the submitter, it would be nice to have something like
<latex>
$\int_0^1 \frac{\sqrt{\sin(x)}}{1+x^2} \; dx$.
</latex>
It would not have to be the full latex stack but the ability to place mini latex pages into
HTML documents. Its a pity techexplorer technology seems have disappeared. If IBM would
opensource it, it could become an add-on for firefox.
I seriously expected imperial fighter units to be developed by NASA first, when reading the title.
Computer algebra systems are high level programming language. Writing good code does not need
documentation. The code itself shows what is done. Here is an example which takes two pictures
and procuces a GIF movie interpolating them:
A=Import["image1.jpg"]; B=Import["image2.jpg"];
width=Length[A[[1,1]]]; height=Length[A[[1]]];
ImageInterpolate[t_]:=Image[(t A[[1]]+B[[1]] (1-t)),Byte,ColorSpace->RGB,ImageSize->{width,height}];
Export["mix.gif",Table[ImageInterpolate[k/50],{k,0,50}],"GIF"]
It takes over a minute to process. A simple C program doing the same is a multiple times larger but also
needs multiple less time to process. But it needs to be documented because even simple things like
reading in a picture
fgets(buffer,1025,in);
if(strncmp(buffer,"P6",2)){
fprintf(stderr,"Unsupported file format (need PPM raw)\n");
exit(1);
}
do fgets(buffer,1025,in); while(*buffer == '#'); // get picture dimension
x_size = atoi(strtok(buffer," "));
y_size = atoi(strtok(NULL," "));
fgets(buffer,1025,in); // get color map size
c_size = atoi(buffer);
if((image = (char *) malloc(3*x_size*y_size*sizeof(char)))==NULL){
fprintf(stderr,"Memory allocation error while loading picture\n");
exit(1);
}
i = 0;
ptr = image;
while(!feof(in) && i<3*x_size*y_size){ *ptr++ = fgetc(in); i++;}
fclose(in);
But C it is worth the effort. For more advanced image manipulation tasks for example,
Mathematica often can no more be used, due to memory or just because it takes too long
(Math link does not help here very much since objects like a movie (a vector of images) can just
not be fed into computer algebra systems without getting into memory problems, which deals with a movie as a whole).
For computer vision stuff for example, one needs to deal with large chunks of the entire movie).
While the simplicity of programming with high level programming languages is compelling, speed often matters.
There is an other nice benefit of a simple language like C: the code will work in 20 years. Computer algebra
systems evolve very fast and much what is done today does not work tomorrow any more in a new version. Higher
level languages evolve also faster. And large junks of internal CAS code are a "black box" invisible for the
user. Both worlds makes sense: the low level primitive, transparent and fast low level language and the slower, but
extremely elegant high level language.
Mathematical models always only work in a certain range As Newtonian mechanics well for smaller velocities and macroscopic bodies it has to be replaced for large velocities or in smaller scales. Exponential growth laws have to be replaced by logistic growth. etc Models are especially popular in probability theory. The text mentions Gaussian Copula function, the "rocket fuel" for collateralized debt obligation, which is cited as one of the reasons for the finance disaster. See "The formula that killed Wall street".
it is probably more the prospect of roasting for all eternety in a burning pit.