What it would do is create more competition in the backbone internet connectivity market and internet market as a whole.
However, Google presumably decided it was cheaper to buy entire fiber links between datacenters in the long run than renting capacity from existing network providers. And who is to blame them? I'm sure that Microsoft own lots of fiber, I'm sure that lots of 'evil' and 'cuddly' companies own fiber, it doesn't mean they are making 'Intarwebnet Two' or whatever, and you don't get stories about it here.
It is just random speculation because Google are newsworthy.
No company can OWN any part of a person, and that includes their knowledge.
You hire people to make use of their knowledge and skills. If they improve these during their time with you, then you benefit. You pay them for this. Once they have stopped working for you, you own no part of them.
It comes down to trust here. He knew Microsoft trade secrets and upcoming plans ('Copy good ideas we see') as part of his job. He was paid to not disclose those plans outside Microsoft, and so far he has not, as far as I know. Until Microsoft can prove that he breached those plans, he is innocent and all this action is at best scare tactics, and at worst a massive notice to everyone out there to never ever accept a job with Microsoft because they will treat you as owned property, including your knowledge, making you no better than a slave that gets fed and houses (via wages). Feudal capitalism, what a nightmare.
Do podcasts (and future video podcasts) utilise a mechanism like bittorrent for distribution (it makes sense to me), or does the server have to serve all the bandwidth?
This personal access to pseudo-broadcast is the future. Great for libel/slander lawyers I'm sure, but how can you monitor all broadcasts? I'm sure that automated tools that check for occurrences of certain words in podcasts and flag ones that match will become a popular way to check for your company name (or your own name if you are lucky enough to be that well known) over thousands, if not hundreds of thousand podcasts.
Music has turned from something that you collect and treasure into something you have and listen to practically all the time. It is very rare you decide you want to listen to just song X these days (in comparison to how much music is listened to overall), and actively put it and actively spend the time solely listening to it. Large mp3 collections have replaced radios at many places, great for getting rid of the music you really dislike and the DJ.
Would I pay to have my music rated by an external algorithm? No. Would I pay to have my music peer rated? No - I'd also be contributing back to it like I contribute back to Gracenote and FreeDB.
I suppose it is easiest to just rate everything *** and apply ****/***** and **/* to the tracks I really notice as standing out.
Unless the algorithm excuded the previously picked song when selecting the next song to be added to the playlist, which is a reasonable thing to include, and maybe a future version of iTunes will have that (because the same song twice in a row is really annoying, but it is much less annoying if there is but a single song between repetitions). However then it wouldn't be truly random, would it.
Maybe after a song is picked it could get a negative weighting against being picked again. For example, a ***** song would be picked, and then for the song after that it would have a ***** penalty (or don't play), then a **** penalty, then a *** penalty and so on. That would reduce the chance of songs being repeated very close to each other, yet would work with small playlists.
It isn't in decline, it is in decline relative to the total amount of blogs. Also, as the geek blogs are older, there is more chance that they will reach their end of life before the newer blogs. Thirdly a large number of them are now doing podcasts instead of blogs, or using the blogs to merely announce their geeky podcast. Some of which are alright, like the daily sourcecode.
Rating For Morning Listening (* for Aphex Twin, Slayer, etc) Rating For Afternoon Listening (**) Rating For Evening Listening (****) Rating For Party Listening (**) Rating For ${mood} Listening
Then instead of getting work done we can spend out entire lives rating music.
You can only play the same song twice in a row if the algorithm reshuffles the songlist after every song played.
If you do a static shuffling, i.e., a shuffle at the beginning of playback, and then trudge through the playlist that was generated then you will certainly get each song played the same number of times, and you won't get repeats. The only chance of getting a repeated song is if the last song of a shuffled playlist is the same as the first song of the next shuffled list, which is 1/n^2.
You can combine the two however. Have 6 queues, one for *****, another for ****, and so on. Each queue would have its own last-played pointer. Each queue would be randomly shuffled once, until all songs in that queue have been played. Then have your weighting algorithm merely choose which queue to play from, and then play the next song in that queue.
I wish iTunes would get ratings from some online source much like it gets tracknames from Gracenote. Can you imagine a server of user-submitted ratings? You could opt to use an average rating from all users, or a rating from users with particular tasks (i.e., if you are a metaller, then you'll probably not want raver's musical opinions affecting your ratings!).
Why? Because I haven't got the time to go around rating my entire music library. Judging from that article, it is dangerous to only do a few because of the weighting algorithm used - surely it would be more sensible to assume that 'not rated' meant 3 stars rather than 0 stars? That way you could rate down shitty songs, and rate up excellent songs, but ignore rating the vast majority of songs.
Tell me about it. I've been frustrated by Microsoft's inability to create a decent keymap with at least all the common accents on it - what must be half a day's work for an intern at Microsoft, I'm sure people here could create a custom xmodmap with all the common accent characters on it within 20 minutes even. I want more than é and á!
The only issue I have is that # is alt-3 on UK Apple layout, but it isn't printed on the keyboard. There is a/± key however (the former being duplicated by alt-6, yet I've never used it in my entire life. At least I've used the NOT () symbol on PC keyboards in real life. Whoa, what's the point of alt-shift-1?
I mean, for REAL money. Why? Is this a way of keeping the gullible poor and out of the higher echelons of society? I don't personally give a toss - games are for enjoyment, not a way to become rich. Play poker - fine. Play poker and lose your house? Fuckin' retard.
Maybe the online venues can also run the bot on each player on a game. If a player exhibits a correlation of their moves compared to what the bot predicted, then make them prove who they are, otherwise end their game.
In the end I just don't get the whole gambling thing. I get alcoholism. I get drug addiction. Hell, I understand why people commit many types of crime. But compulsive addictive gambling? It's those guys you see day in, day out after work on the fruit machines - dammit, save that money, the machines are designed to make money overall FROM you.
Then I think. Sod it, I'm not doing it, I'm not losing their money. It is their problem and I haven't got the time to care about them. So I don't.
I saw fucking computer generated horse racing on TV the other day, with text/phone/internet betting. What The Fuck... There was a whole channel devoted to this for some reason, but hey, if people are going to spend their money, or if they get their kicks from risking their money on random events, then fine. So be it.
This type of things is what turns Jobs livid. If Apple aren't planning to sign up every half-decent independant band they can for iTMS I'd be surprised (and how many of them bands would say 'no' to being listed on iTMS and getting ~30p a song, with Apple selling them for 20 less than the major label music)... how can a music company survive if they can't find new unsigned talent, hehe! There's only so many PopStars or whatever crappy chav-singer TV programmes you can create.
Nobody was saying that.NET wasn't an open specification for people to implement however. So your response is rather odd.
They were saying that the poster who said that Java wasn't was talking a pile of dogshit, because you can create your own Java implementation. In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of Java Virtual Machine implementations now - several of which are completely open like Kaffe. How many are there for.NET? To be honest, until more.NET VMs are created (say, dozens or hundreds) we won't know about some of the core security issues that might be an issue with.NET.
Well considering that Microsoft are the cause of 10 of the listed issues, and another 10 were fixed nearly TEN YEARS ago, the comparison is at best seriously flawed, at worst it is just a vehicle to Microsoft to spread FUD.
What would I use for developing an application today? I'd use a platform that most people had access to. I'd use a platform that also ran on my choice of operating system. I'd use one that has been proven. I'd use one that has ongoing development. I'd use one with good developer tools. I'd use one that isn't esoteric (which is also the name of a most excellent doom metal band btw, so get some of their stuff). I'd use one that I could read the source code in 2 years time without getting a headache.
Do I care about losing 10%-30% performance by using a bytecode based system instead of C? No, not really. Computers will be that much faster in 6 months time anyway (of course, the real issue is that your product will be finished 6 months earlier, so you'd have to wait a year!). If there is something that absolutely needs to be as fast as possible - well that is what JNI and unsafe are for. Create a generic version of the algorithm in $languageofchoice, and then create native versions for popular platforms.
Isn't this the same music industry that earlier this week said that Apple iTMS was expensive and all that?
Quite why they want to destroy the most popular source of revenue online (because people won't move from iTMS once they are used to it, they simply won't buy the music that isn't available).
iPod users are increasing by 6m every quarter at the moment. A music label would be retarded to not want to be on iTMS, even if only 1 in 10 iPod owners ever buys something from it, that's 2.4m new potential customers every year. Better than other online stores, where the potential is what? 200k new potential customers every year?
The music industry simply wants to get more money out of the consumer. On the other hand some music simply isn't worth 99p a track, and I can understand that the latest, just released, music should be higher priced. Still, I imagine that Apple will have to half-acquiesce - expect tracks to be 79p to $1.29 in the future on there... and most of the decent stuff to be at the higher end of the price scale.
Me? I'll keep on buying good music online or in Fopp for between £3 and £7 an album, and actually getting the CD which I can own for life. No losing music to a hard drive crash, no limitations on the duration I can listen to it to (god, those services are doing *so* good, lol), no DRM, no lossy compression until I rip it to my media drive at the quality *I* want.
How about converting school busses to run on the waste oil of the 100,000 or so fast food outlets in the country?
Over here in the UK we don't have school busses, you get the train, a normal bus, cycle or walk to school. On the other hand, we are a fairly densely populated country, and high fuel prices benefit a country that is more densely populated. For us, fuel has gone from £3.50 a gallon (imperial) to £4.50 a gallon - a nasty 25% price rise. For Americans, it has gone from $1 a gallon (US) to $2.50 (according to that article). That's a 150% price rise - that's really really nasty! Our fuel is still more expensive overall of course ($6.75 per US gallon), but we're used to it and have adapted (smaller cars, better public transport) and I expect our average yearly mileage is a lot less than an Americans because of our more compact country.
£10.50 per month for advertisement free unbiased television and radio per household that has a television.
That's for BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC THREE, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24, CBeebies, CBBC, BBC Parliament. They'll all be in high definition next year as well, if you have the equipment, for no extra money. Couple that with over 10 radio stations (not counting regional)... I've got FreesatFromSky (which cost me nothing to get) and I get 114 television stations (not counting shopping channels) for no fee a month. Cut out the crap and specialist services and there are 40 reasonably decent channels there. Freeview is another option if you want some 20 free to air channels.
How much is your cable/satellite television bill again? Good thing it has no adverts... oh
PS: They don't use roving vans, but the licence fee people are a bit zealous sometimes.
The fact that even $50 DVD players have digital 5.1 audio out, yet can't play a bloody DVD Audio disc. It's only a matter of piping the bloody digital data from the disc to the outputs.
Why? I bet it is licensing. DVD Audio would have been the outright winner by now if it had been included in standard DVD players. But no, I'm sure the audio market got all scared and said 'No' to that, so they could continue to sell their expensive dedicated players. Sadly, because of the format war, like someone else pointed out above, 90% of the market disappeared, so they made less money in the end. I also expect there is some DRM reason, if the audio was available in DRM-removed format on a 5.1 digital output, then it can easily be stolen!
Maybe Sony or Toshiba should look at that and think how bad this is for their business. But no, they won't, it doesn't apply to them, they're too big for that, they're too proud to admit it. I'm hoping that because it happened once already, it will happen again. DVDs are good enough, except for the minor percentage of people that have 60"+ HDTVs that will notice the encoding blockiness.
In the meantime, my local superstore is selling new DVDs from 97p each. Sure, the 97p DVDs aren't blockbuster films, but you can't go wrong with over an hour of classic cartoons and so on for that price.
It is good to have the main menu bar on top. It is on a screen edge, which means that the mouse cursor stops when you hit it, giving the menu bar effectively an infinite vertical height, great for Fitt's Law. The Apple menu item has infinite dimensions to the top and to the left. When the menu bar is UNDER the titlebar of the application, you lose this. Also I remember a time when the Windows taskbar, despite being at the edge of the screen, had a one or two pixel margin meaning you couldn't do this!
You use the dock to switch applications in Mac OS X. That or standard things like command-tab or shift-command-tab and so on.
Yes, having information on the screen is useful, but sometimes it is handy to have applications side by side, for example. Also, as another example, I've found that transparency is good - a transparent terminal window in Mac OS X allows you to read text through it, great for having a website with instructions on which you are following. Yes, you can have transparent windows in Windows, but Vista will be required to bring them up to (and beyond) the level in Mac OS X currently (per pixel transparency, not per-window).
Mac apps have large icons in their toolbars, and only the essential ones. Windows applications tend to have multiple icons in the toolbar, they're 24x24 pixels which is slower to hit'n'click than 48x48 pixels, and until you are familiar with the GUI half the icons are hard to decipher anyway - better off learning the keyboard shortcuts, which are listed in the menus. Your point about keyboard shortcuts is valid however - because of the DOS ancestry, keyboard shortcuts were always a necessity, and it carried through to Windows, and they are the best way to do things quickly. However Mac OS X has now caught up and overtaken windows in this regard - just by a little bit.
I've used Windows since 1994, I just don't like it. Maybe the issues I have with it are fine for you, but I get irked by things like poor filesystem layout, poor file requestors, cluttered interfaces, networking, the feeling I'm not in control, yet having to mollycoddle it and so on.
I also had an Amiga 500 and a 1200. The problems you are describing are in an OS that was written in the 80's - at least you could place icons where you wanted them (instead of having a fixed grid layout and fixed sizes and so on), at least the menu bar also doubled as the status bar (and oh no, having to press RMB, how awful). To select an application, you clicked on it and brought it to the front - application navigation wasn't brilliant (hey, 2MB RAM in the A1200 remember, how many are you running? 3 or 4?) but it worked. Bloating workbench wouldn't have been a good idea in my book, although it would have been nice to have a menu of running applications for quick selection.
As regards you points, I always thought that Mac OS was naff. It is only Mac OS X that has got me interested in the platform. And stop bringing up the mouse issue, because IT ISN'T AN ISSUE. New users can't use two buttons, I'm sorry but it is true. If you've ever dealt with someone who is new to computers, assuming they know left-from-right anyway, they don't get why you have two buttons for a while. Apple's mouse is great for them, they can just whack it and it does stuff, it is accessible. Advanced stuff is easily accessible anyway using the ctrl key, or by attaching (shock horror) a two+ button mouse. In terms of usability, having an application designed to be fully usable with one button is great in my opinion, with the much rarer options relegated to being a little bit more effort (well, your non-mousing hand is on the keyboard anyway, it isn't hard to press ctrl is it?). As regards to your driving example, maybe the left and right mouse buttons should be on the floor as pedals?
I do agree that a good desktop operating system should be usable without a mouse at all (assuming knowledge of the shortcuts, of course!), and fully by keyboard navigation. Mac OS X still has an issue with tabbing to GU
To replace textbooks in a cost effective manner would require:
1) Rugged, reliable, long-life hardware that is too boring to steal 2) eTextBooks to be a lot cheaper than the printed version
Say a textbook lasts 10 years in a school (by school, I'm talking about the UK definition of schools, not university where you buy your own or use the library) - 100 copies of $textbook will cost say £2000. 100 advanced eBook readers would currently cost £20000 and be a lot less convenient in many ways than the text book. Of course, multiply that by 10 courses (assuming the average GCSE student does 10 GCSEs these days) and you get a textbook cost of £20000, or £200/student, or £20/student-year. Aforementioned eBook hardware, assuming 10 year lifespan, would also be £20/student-year. Of course, these eTextBooks would probably be licensed on a per-year basis, say £5 a year. £50 for 10 years, but you will get updates for errata integrated easily. 100 licenses would be £50000 for the 10 years, maybe less with a bulk discount. That's £50/student-year in addition to the £20 for the hardware.
I'm just cynical, but there is a reason these things are being pushed, and it isn't concern about the weight of textbooks in a schoolbag. It is to raise revenue for textbook firms.
However, I don't think much beats using pen and paper for making notes in class. Quieter than a room full of people typing, and I think it gets the point into your head a lot quicker.
This is a new low for Slashdot. Not only is there an unexplained TLA in the article, no-one can actually work out what it stands for in the context of the story!
Slashdot Mirror
What it would do is create more competition in the backbone internet connectivity market and internet market as a whole.
However, Google presumably decided it was cheaper to buy entire fiber links between datacenters in the long run than renting capacity from existing network providers. And who is to blame them? I'm sure that Microsoft own lots of fiber, I'm sure that lots of 'evil' and 'cuddly' companies own fiber, it doesn't mean they are making 'Intarwebnet Two' or whatever, and you don't get stories about it here.
It is just random speculation because Google are newsworthy.
No company can OWN any part of a person, and that includes their knowledge.
You hire people to make use of their knowledge and skills. If they improve these during their time with you, then you benefit. You pay them for this. Once they have stopped working for you, you own no part of them.
It comes down to trust here. He knew Microsoft trade secrets and upcoming plans ('Copy good ideas we see') as part of his job. He was paid to not disclose those plans outside Microsoft, and so far he has not, as far as I know. Until Microsoft can prove that he breached those plans, he is innocent and all this action is at best scare tactics, and at worst a massive notice to everyone out there to never ever accept a job with Microsoft because they will treat you as owned property, including your knowledge, making you no better than a slave that gets fed and houses (via wages). Feudal capitalism, what a nightmare.
Do podcasts (and future video podcasts) utilise a mechanism like bittorrent for distribution (it makes sense to me), or does the server have to serve all the bandwidth?
This personal access to pseudo-broadcast is the future. Great for libel/slander lawyers I'm sure, but how can you monitor all broadcasts? I'm sure that automated tools that check for occurrences of certain words in podcasts and flag ones that match will become a popular way to check for your company name (or your own name if you are lucky enough to be that well known) over thousands, if not hundreds of thousand podcasts.
Music has turned from something that you collect and treasure into something you have and listen to practically all the time. It is very rare you decide you want to listen to just song X these days (in comparison to how much music is listened to overall), and actively put it and actively spend the time solely listening to it. Large mp3 collections have replaced radios at many places, great for getting rid of the music you really dislike and the DJ.
Would I pay to have my music rated by an external algorithm? No. Would I pay to have my music peer rated? No - I'd also be contributing back to it like I contribute back to Gracenote and FreeDB.
I suppose it is easiest to just rate everything *** and apply ****/***** and **/* to the tracks I really notice as standing out.
Indeed.
Unless the algorithm excuded the previously picked song when selecting the next song to be added to the playlist, which is a reasonable thing to include, and maybe a future version of iTunes will have that (because the same song twice in a row is really annoying, but it is much less annoying if there is but a single song between repetitions). However then it wouldn't be truly random, would it.
Maybe after a song is picked it could get a negative weighting against being picked again. For example, a ***** song would be picked, and then for the song after that it would have a ***** penalty (or don't play), then a **** penalty, then a *** penalty and so on. That would reduce the chance of songs being repeated very close to each other, yet would work with small playlists.
Oh god, yes you are right! My mistake, oops.
That looks pretty neat, I'll have to look into it some more.
earlier than the generic uptake.
It isn't in decline, it is in decline relative to the total amount of blogs. Also, as the geek blogs are older, there is more chance that they will reach their end of life before the newer blogs. Thirdly a large number of them are now doing podcasts instead of blogs, or using the blogs to merely announce their geeky podcast. Some of which are alright, like the daily sourcecode.
So what is the issue?
Maybe songs need more than one rating.
Rating For Morning Listening (* for Aphex Twin, Slayer, etc)
Rating For Afternoon Listening (**)
Rating For Evening Listening (****)
Rating For Party Listening (**)
Rating For ${mood} Listening
Then instead of getting work done we can spend out entire lives rating music.
You can only play the same song twice in a row if the algorithm reshuffles the songlist after every song played.
If you do a static shuffling, i.e., a shuffle at the beginning of playback, and then trudge through the playlist that was generated then you will certainly get each song played the same number of times, and you won't get repeats. The only chance of getting a repeated song is if the last song of a shuffled playlist is the same as the first song of the next shuffled list, which is 1/n^2.
You can combine the two however. Have 6 queues, one for *****, another for ****, and so on. Each queue would have its own last-played pointer. Each queue would be randomly shuffled once, until all songs in that queue have been played. Then have your weighting algorithm merely choose which queue to play from, and then play the next song in that queue.
I wish iTunes would get ratings from some online source much like it gets tracknames from Gracenote. Can you imagine a server of user-submitted ratings? You could opt to use an average rating from all users, or a rating from users with particular tasks (i.e., if you are a metaller, then you'll probably not want raver's musical opinions affecting your ratings!).
Why? Because I haven't got the time to go around rating my entire music library. Judging from that article, it is dangerous to only do a few because of the weighting algorithm used - surely it would be more sensible to assume that 'not rated' meant 3 stars rather than 0 stars? That way you could rate down shitty songs, and rate up excellent songs, but ignore rating the vast majority of songs.
Tell me about it. I've been frustrated by Microsoft's inability to create a decent keymap with at least all the common accents on it - what must be half a day's work for an intern at Microsoft, I'm sure people here could create a custom xmodmap with all the common accent characters on it within 20 minutes even. I want more than é and á!
/± key however (the former being duplicated by alt-6, yet I've never used it in my entire life. At least I've used the NOT () symbol on PC keyboards in real life. Whoa, what's the point of alt-shift-1?
The only issue I have is that # is alt-3 on UK Apple layout, but it isn't printed on the keyboard. There is a
I mean, for REAL money. Why? Is this a way of keeping the gullible poor and out of the higher echelons of society? I don't personally give a toss - games are for enjoyment, not a way to become rich. Play poker - fine. Play poker and lose your house? Fuckin' retard.
Maybe the online venues can also run the bot on each player on a game. If a player exhibits a correlation of their moves compared to what the bot predicted, then make them prove who they are, otherwise end their game.
In the end I just don't get the whole gambling thing. I get alcoholism. I get drug addiction. Hell, I understand why people commit many types of crime. But compulsive addictive gambling? It's those guys you see day in, day out after work on the fruit machines - dammit, save that money, the machines are designed to make money overall FROM you.
Then I think. Sod it, I'm not doing it, I'm not losing their money. It is their problem and I haven't got the time to care about them. So I don't.
I saw fucking computer generated horse racing on TV the other day, with text/phone/internet betting. What The Fuck... There was a whole channel devoted to this for some reason, but hey, if people are going to spend their money, or if they get their kicks from risking their money on random events, then fine. So be it.
This type of things is what turns Jobs livid. If Apple aren't planning to sign up every half-decent independant band they can for iTMS I'd be surprised (and how many of them bands would say 'no' to being listed on iTMS and getting ~30p a song, with Apple selling them for 20 less than the major label music) ... how can a music company survive if they can't find new unsigned talent, hehe! There's only so many PopStars or whatever crappy chav-singer TV programmes you can create.
I think your post sums up Windows vs. Mac OS X totally. :)
Nobody was saying that .NET wasn't an open specification for people to implement however. So your response is rather odd.
.NET? To be honest, until more .NET VMs are created (say, dozens or hundreds) we won't know about some of the core security issues that might be an issue with .NET.
They were saying that the poster who said that Java wasn't was talking a pile of dogshit, because you can create your own Java implementation. In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of Java Virtual Machine implementations now - several of which are completely open like Kaffe. How many are there for
Well considering that Microsoft are the cause of 10 of the listed issues, and another 10 were fixed nearly TEN YEARS ago, the comparison is at best seriously flawed, at worst it is just a vehicle to Microsoft to spread FUD.
What would I use for developing an application today? I'd use a platform that most people had access to. I'd use a platform that also ran on my choice of operating system. I'd use one that has been proven. I'd use one that has ongoing development. I'd use one with good developer tools. I'd use one that isn't esoteric (which is also the name of a most excellent doom metal band btw, so get some of their stuff). I'd use one that I could read the source code in 2 years time without getting a headache.
Do I care about losing 10%-30% performance by using a bytecode based system instead of C? No, not really. Computers will be that much faster in 6 months time anyway (of course, the real issue is that your product will be finished 6 months earlier, so you'd have to wait a year!). If there is something that absolutely needs to be as fast as possible - well that is what JNI and unsafe are for. Create a generic version of the algorithm in $languageofchoice, and then create native versions for popular platforms.
Isn't this the same music industry that earlier this week said that Apple iTMS was expensive and all that?
... and most of the decent stuff to be at the higher end of the price scale.
Quite why they want to destroy the most popular source of revenue online (because people won't move from iTMS once they are used to it, they simply won't buy the music that isn't available).
iPod users are increasing by 6m every quarter at the moment. A music label would be retarded to not want to be on iTMS, even if only 1 in 10 iPod owners ever buys something from it, that's 2.4m new potential customers every year. Better than other online stores, where the potential is what? 200k new potential customers every year?
The music industry simply wants to get more money out of the consumer. On the other hand some music simply isn't worth 99p a track, and I can understand that the latest, just released, music should be higher priced. Still, I imagine that Apple will have to half-acquiesce - expect tracks to be 79p to $1.29 in the future on there
Me? I'll keep on buying good music online or in Fopp for between £3 and £7 an album, and actually getting the CD which I can own for life. No losing music to a hard drive crash, no limitations on the duration I can listen to it to (god, those services are doing *so* good, lol), no DRM, no lossy compression until I rip it to my media drive at the quality *I* want.
How about converting school busses to run on the waste oil of the 100,000 or so fast food outlets in the country?
Over here in the UK we don't have school busses, you get the train, a normal bus, cycle or walk to school. On the other hand, we are a fairly densely populated country, and high fuel prices benefit a country that is more densely populated. For us, fuel has gone from £3.50 a gallon (imperial) to £4.50 a gallon - a nasty 25% price rise. For Americans, it has gone from $1 a gallon (US) to $2.50 (according to that article). That's a 150% price rise - that's really really nasty! Our fuel is still more expensive overall of course ($6.75 per US gallon), but we're used to it and have adapted (smaller cars, better public transport) and I expect our average yearly mileage is a lot less than an Americans because of our more compact country.
Is this meant to be flamebait?
... I've got FreesatFromSky (which cost me nothing to get) and I get 114 television stations (not counting shopping channels) for no fee a month. Cut out the crap and specialist services and there are 40 reasonably decent channels there. Freeview is another option if you want some 20 free to air channels.
... oh
£10.50 per month for advertisement free unbiased television and radio per household that has a television.
That's for BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC THREE, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24, CBeebies, CBBC, BBC Parliament. They'll all be in high definition next year as well, if you have the equipment, for no extra money. Couple that with over 10 radio stations (not counting regional)
How much is your cable/satellite television bill again? Good thing it has no adverts
PS: They don't use roving vans, but the licence fee people are a bit zealous sometimes.
You know what irks me?
The fact that even $50 DVD players have digital 5.1 audio out, yet can't play a bloody DVD Audio disc. It's only a matter of piping the bloody digital data from the disc to the outputs.
Why? I bet it is licensing. DVD Audio would have been the outright winner by now if it had been included in standard DVD players. But no, I'm sure the audio market got all scared and said 'No' to that, so they could continue to sell their expensive dedicated players. Sadly, because of the format war, like someone else pointed out above, 90% of the market disappeared, so they made less money in the end. I also expect there is some DRM reason, if the audio was available in DRM-removed format on a 5.1 digital output, then it can easily be stolen!
Maybe Sony or Toshiba should look at that and think how bad this is for their business. But no, they won't, it doesn't apply to them, they're too big for that, they're too proud to admit it. I'm hoping that because it happened once already, it will happen again. DVDs are good enough, except for the minor percentage of people that have 60"+ HDTVs that will notice the encoding blockiness.
In the meantime, my local superstore is selling new DVDs from 97p each. Sure, the 97p DVDs aren't blockbuster films, but you can't go wrong with over an hour of classic cartoons and so on for that price.
It is good to have the main menu bar on top. It is on a screen edge, which means that the mouse cursor stops when you hit it, giving the menu bar effectively an infinite vertical height, great for Fitt's Law. The Apple menu item has infinite dimensions to the top and to the left. When the menu bar is UNDER the titlebar of the application, you lose this. Also I remember a time when the Windows taskbar, despite being at the edge of the screen, had a one or two pixel margin meaning you couldn't do this!
You use the dock to switch applications in Mac OS X. That or standard things like command-tab or shift-command-tab and so on.
Yes, having information on the screen is useful, but sometimes it is handy to have applications side by side, for example. Also, as another example, I've found that transparency is good - a transparent terminal window in Mac OS X allows you to read text through it, great for having a website with instructions on which you are following. Yes, you can have transparent windows in Windows, but Vista will be required to bring them up to (and beyond) the level in Mac OS X currently (per pixel transparency, not per-window).
Mac apps have large icons in their toolbars, and only the essential ones. Windows applications tend to have multiple icons in the toolbar, they're 24x24 pixels which is slower to hit'n'click than 48x48 pixels, and until you are familiar with the GUI half the icons are hard to decipher anyway - better off learning the keyboard shortcuts, which are listed in the menus. Your point about keyboard shortcuts is valid however - because of the DOS ancestry, keyboard shortcuts were always a necessity, and it carried through to Windows, and they are the best way to do things quickly. However Mac OS X has now caught up and overtaken windows in this regard - just by a little bit.
I've used Windows since 1994, I just don't like it. Maybe the issues I have with it are fine for you, but I get irked by things like poor filesystem layout, poor file requestors, cluttered interfaces, networking, the feeling I'm not in control, yet having to mollycoddle it and so on.
I also had an Amiga 500 and a 1200. The problems you are describing are in an OS that was written in the 80's - at least you could place icons where you wanted them (instead of having a fixed grid layout and fixed sizes and so on), at least the menu bar also doubled as the status bar (and oh no, having to press RMB, how awful). To select an application, you clicked on it and brought it to the front - application navigation wasn't brilliant (hey, 2MB RAM in the A1200 remember, how many are you running? 3 or 4?) but it worked. Bloating workbench wouldn't have been a good idea in my book, although it would have been nice to have a menu of running applications for quick selection.
As regards you points, I always thought that Mac OS was naff. It is only Mac OS X that has got me interested in the platform. And stop bringing up the mouse issue, because IT ISN'T AN ISSUE. New users can't use two buttons, I'm sorry but it is true. If you've ever dealt with someone who is new to computers, assuming they know left-from-right anyway, they don't get why you have two buttons for a while. Apple's mouse is great for them, they can just whack it and it does stuff, it is accessible. Advanced stuff is easily accessible anyway using the ctrl key, or by attaching (shock horror) a two+ button mouse. In terms of usability, having an application designed to be fully usable with one button is great in my opinion, with the much rarer options relegated to being a little bit more effort (well, your non-mousing hand is on the keyboard anyway, it isn't hard to press ctrl is it?). As regards to your driving example, maybe the left and right mouse buttons should be on the floor as pedals?
I do agree that a good desktop operating system should be usable without a mouse at all (assuming knowledge of the shortcuts, of course!), and fully by keyboard navigation. Mac OS X still has an issue with tabbing to GU
To replace textbooks in a cost effective manner would require:
1) Rugged, reliable, long-life hardware that is too boring to steal
2) eTextBooks to be a lot cheaper than the printed version
Say a textbook lasts 10 years in a school (by school, I'm talking about the UK definition of schools, not university where you buy your own or use the library) - 100 copies of $textbook will cost say £2000. 100 advanced eBook readers would currently cost £20000 and be a lot less convenient in many ways than the text book. Of course, multiply that by 10 courses (assuming the average GCSE student does 10 GCSEs these days) and you get a textbook cost of £20000, or £200/student, or £20/student-year. Aforementioned eBook hardware, assuming 10 year lifespan, would also be £20/student-year. Of course, these eTextBooks would probably be licensed on a per-year basis, say £5 a year. £50 for 10 years, but you will get updates for errata integrated easily. 100 licenses would be £50000 for the 10 years, maybe less with a bulk discount. That's £50/student-year in addition to the £20 for the hardware.
I'm just cynical, but there is a reason these things are being pushed, and it isn't concern about the weight of textbooks in a schoolbag. It is to raise revenue for textbook firms.
However, I don't think much beats using pen and paper for making notes in class. Quieter than a room full of people typing, and I think it gets the point into your head a lot quicker.
Unique Individual Porn-viewing-habits
Underwear Ingesting Parrot
Unified Identity Procedure
This is a new low for Slashdot. Not only is there an unexplained TLA in the article, no-one can actually work out what it stands for in the context of the story!
Thanks for the link. I was trying to use linuxprinting.org earlier today, but the site appeared to be down.
However I managed to get the printer working using the drivers posted on the non-US site.