As far as I can tell, Cisco wasn't involved in the decisions. It looks like the writer went to the two ISPs for comment, but came up dry--well, except for that one anoymous comment. Then the writer asked Cisco what they thought about the whole thing to fill out the piece. Probably the ISPs are afraid of being targeted in retaliation and want to keep a low profile.
I'm not worried. We are pretty soon going to have a bunch of people that are heartbroken about their data from 10 years ago being lost. The travel photos, the e-mailed love letters, the brilliant blog posts. And these people will create demand for longer-term storage and data collection techniques we don't have now. Why should it happen in the near future if it hasn't already? Because we first needed a generation of people that use computers and the internet as the primary way of expressing their life. Nobody was in that boat ten years ago. Now anybody reading this is. So consumer-grade "lifetime" storage options will enjoy a more prominent place on the market. And if you can get some old data to stick around for a half century or more, the value of it bumps up to "time capsule" status. Which means somebody might think to archive your mess of media around the time you die. Maybe some younger cousin of yours will take care of it. Heck, funeral parlors might offer data archival as a service 20 years from now.
So if the mold solution is really very similar to the real rail system, then either Japanese commuters are amazingly "natural" in regards to where they live, where they work, and demographic distribution, or the Japanese railroad engineers missed the human factor when designing the grid. The first possibility is somehow beautiful and creepy at the same time.
That is an interesting question. As a US engineer working with Japanese engineers, I am constantly comparing things they do to how we do, and wondering where general differences are and how they came about.
You may notice that the London map is heavily organized around separate lines. The Tokyo map is much more interconnected, like they threw that slime on the ground and planned it out by nature. It may be that the Tokyo engineers were allowed to use a purer approach than the Londoners, less confined by politics. In Seattle, I know that when we talk about where our fledgling light rail system is going to go or not go, it is done piecemail with major battles fought over a single line at one time. I.e. We connect from downtown Seattle to the airport, hitting these neighborhoods. The concept of the route has to be simple enough to be explained in one sentence for it to succeed on a ballot. If some engineers rolled in to town promising some system that maximizes coverage of all points in most efficient way, etc., that goes down in flames. When your bosses are grumpy, cheap, and have a short attention span--then rail networks get built piecemeal without the advantages of overall planning.
It's a little sad that somebody, in pursuit of an audience, had to angle the story towards "we could be using mold to make design decisions." Your mass transit planners are not going to call in a consultant with a suitcase full of mold, obviously. The paths chosen for rail have so many political factors that the "most efficient" model has little relevance.
But just stop thinking of utility for a moment. Look at those pictures of the mold growing to reach all points and form little roads between them. That is fantastic! "Because you could then plan light rail and freight logistics and--" STOP! No, don't jump on to the practical applications yet. Take a moment to think about that simple little organism doing that complicated thing and how cool that is. Those pictures are breathtaking.
And after that, maybe try to write a matching algorithm to see if you can predict which paths will form by the slime. And then see if that algorithm offers something that the human-designed ones don't have already. And then maybe integrate and devise new algorithms based on what was learned. And then see what practical applications there are for these algorithms. This is what the scientists and engineers will actually end up doing if it is possible. Can we stop acting like bored little brats that every scientific observation isn't immediately useful?
Yes, you could use Sikuli to fire up a text editor, individually press the keys to write all the lines of code, launch the compiler/linker/whatever. So it meets your weird definition of completeness. However, I suspect you could not use Sikuli to write a program that writes a Sikuli program to write Sikuli. I could be wrong, though.
Come on, let's cut through the default Slashdot snark. The image capture aspect of Sikuli is brilliant! I don't like the tagline "program anything with Sikuli" because 99% of software should be written in something else. But think of writing test scripts that can use the image matching features. If the software works as advertised, then you could throw together UI test cases way faster than anything else I've seen. System administration tasks should be a good match too. The resulting code would be brittle and hard to maintain, but for quick one-off scripts, sure... I can see it.
I think I get what you're saying... When someone casually lists some heinous action in a list of considered options, it makes it seem like that person is nearly ready to do that heinous thing. I.e. if I say, "stomping on babies is logistically impractical," then it sounds like I'm morally ambivalent about babystomping, right? Still, you have to consider the tone of voice that people use when writing papers for their academic peers. If you want to be taken seriously and get your paper published, you don't voice your moral opinions in the paper. And in social sciences, knowledge is probably advanced more easily if the moralizing is left out. That's for something for Mr. Sunstein to do on a PR visit to the Colbert Report or Daily Show, I suppose. It's all about context.
Don't let yourself get bent out of shape over this. Read the paper which is being quoted by the article before you start believing nonsense and posting your own. The Klein article misrepresents and quotes out of context. For example, here is the Cass Sunstein quote that Aaron Klein picks and edits to his liking:
"We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial
or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."
What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do,
what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1)
Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind
of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government
might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy
theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in
counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such
parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential
effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions.
However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration
of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).
Note the last sentence. Sunstein leaves the 2 points quoted by Klein out of the recommendation. The paper itself is somewhat insightful and worth a skim. There are things to disagree with perhaps, but this isn't some civil liberty crushing maniac.
They have a budget of $7.2 billion for grants. It seems like they could wi-max a bunch of major cities, but not the whole US. Or maybe they just want to make the internet "affordable"--not necessarily free. Subsidize people's ISP service? Ugh. I don't want to pay for my neighbor to download Zombie Strippers off the internet.
I do like the emphasis on making things competitive. There are a lot of us that have just one practical choice for broadband, either the phone or cable company. And then there is maybe some not-really-high-speed 3G/GPRS solution available. But without knowing details, I don't see how they encourage competition when there is a monopoly on wired or wireless access.
Seriously, what useful thing can the FCC do here?
Here is my plan: Make sure all the schools and libraries have got broadband-equipped computers to match demand. Let people that can't afford home internet ride the bus down to the library or stay after school. This is probably 90% covered already. It's too boring and unambitious of a plan to be very interesting, but it would do just fine. You'd have plenty of change left over from that $7.2 billion--go stimulate something else more useful with it, i.e. education, mass transit. We don't need to make sure every person is connected to a high-speed multimedia wonderland all the time for free. The emphasis should be on education and basic needs like typing up resumes, checking your e-mail, etc.
You have to go try it yourself, giving or receiving, whichever is appropriate. If you hit the spot right, and the subject can feel it, then it is usually really obvious to the person getting stimulated. Subjective reports shouldn't be the basis of a scientific study, which is part of the problem here. From a man's point of view, you have to know the woman well enough to judge her reactions and how much you can trust her recounting of an experience. From a woman's point of view, you just have to be able to judge what physical actions cause your orgasm. These subjective things don't translate into a scientific study well, but that is plenty for an individual to figure out for him or herself if a form of sexual stimulation is legitimate or not. There are many things that you can form a reasonable individual opinion about that are hard or impossible to evaluate through the scientific method.
The funny thing is that T-Mobile offers a pretty decent plan with 3G data for $50/month which would be my first choice. But if you buy the subsidized phone, you get the spendy $80/month plan which doesn't really have good value to warrant the extra cost, IMO. Difference seems to be just more minutes and unlimited SMSs. So I could see buying the unsubsidized phone, and just getting the cheaper T-Mobile data plan separately.
Also, T-Mobile is one of the major carriers that refused to turn over customer information to US officials without a warrant. And they got KZJ, who is much sexier than the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy.
Just buy it with a credit card. And pay the debt off at $20/month or whatever is convenient. You'll be better off in the long run, because we'll get the carriers to start competing as big dumb pipes. The emphasis will be on coverage/speed for the buck, instead of some wacky chase after the latest "It" phone. We should all stop being scared off by upfront costs and letting phone carriers handle our financing through subsidies.
Companies and orgs already barrage newspapers with press releases in hopes of favorable coverage. And they often rely on writers and editors to be so rushed that they will carry their advertisements without working for the benefit of their readers to verify facts and judge value of the content. Posting misinformation on wikileaks anonymously is just a logical and painfully rational extension of marketing.
Look at it another way: even if real, honest, factual content is posted anonymously on wikileaks, with no sources available, all an implicated individual or institution has to do is deny the content is true in some vague way. And the flakier our news reporting gets, the harder it is to convince anyone that anything is true. In the end, we will just wander around cynical and unconvinced of anything, but also unwilling to act since no information seems actionable.
We need old-fashioned journalists that report facts with verifiable sources. Not the cheap, Web 3.0, crowdsourced crap.
If the software is calling a web service that performs the translation, then on the smartphone the software is trivial--a simple client that gets some user input, sends it to the internet, and receives translated text back. If this is the case, then there's no point in calling it "smartphone software", the brains are all on a server somewhere. And that server software deserves to be compared apples-to-apples to other online translation services like say... Babel Fish, to determine how worthy it is. Adding the "smartphone software" bit seems like a marketing ploy.
The polarized 3D movies are nothing like the anaglyphic stuff that the BBC is planning to use here. Polarized stereooptics (RealD, IMAX3D, and others) works by getting light to arrive at the viewers eyes from two different angles, and filtering so one set of angled light exclusively hits the left eye, and the other hits the right. Unlike anaglyphic, the colors themselves are not used to filter. As a result, it looks vastly better than the anaglyphic filtering you get with the cheapie red/cyan glasses. To set this up polarized stereooptics in the home is currently pretty expensive, like $xx,xxx, so the home viewing experience of 3D TV is going to be cheap and gimmicky until that changes.
Also, the glasses they hand out are big enough to go over your normal glasses. I'm doubling up on the specs myself, and it doesn't bother me.
Battery life on mobile devices is still a large issue, and if you are just connecting headsets and syncing up with PCs the extra range isn't needed. So WiFi Direct sounds better for some applications maybe. But we are all sick of our phones crapping out after an hour or two of "heavy" use, and trading range for battery life doesn't make sense for nearly all of the existing uses.
"The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic.'"
Mozilla basically asked if it would be okay if Mozilla (not you, not me, not everybody else) could put strong encryption in their software. They didn't get a court ruling--they got permission. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean they are some champions of free speech rights. No, it means that they have successfully looked after their own interests. And other, particularly smaller, open source developers shouldn't expect to have the same good fortune in getting permission.
Not to be too grumpy. It is good news that somebody was exempted from a stupid regulation.
I agree. I think the page thumbnails are really just an automated way to create something like an icon or illustration next to each link. The thumbnails aren't actually useful--they are just decoration. It's not a bad way to make the accompanying article descriptions more interesting to read through. But it's silly to portray this small s/w engineering feat as some groundbreaking new way to review information.
It has Android on it. That was about the only thing that made the G1 phone interesting. The HTC hardware is solid, but nothing groundbreaking. The BREW store has always sucked, because of Qualcomm's unreasonable barriers to entry for developers. They stuck with their gated community of content and buy-before-you-try for years and just figured it was the natural order for most of their users not to care about mobile phone apps.
Arguably, the Java-based Android OS is bad for app performance compared to BREW's native C code. But if you want an exciting console for people that are relatively poor (emerging market), then its fairly obvious to have something like Android Market or iPhone App Store that is full of freeware, shareware, and amateur projects.
Good points in your post. I have one comment on...
"People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day? "
As a guy that has steadily gained weight over the last decade from sitting in front of a machine 8-12 hours/day every day, I wouldn't mind rethinking the whole less-movement-is-better premise. Humans weren't made to do this, and if we could get back to our days of heightened physical activity, we'd be a lot better off. Our bodies evolved to work well in an active lifestyle.
There's a gal in my cube row that has her monitor and keyboard raised up so she can stand while she works. Hmmmmm. I might just do the same thing.
Well, this time, you will not have to carry around a plastic toy cat with you and look like a damn fool. That could make all the difference, you know.
Re:Let's call it 'Google Tips and Tricks'
on
Google Apps Hacks
·
· Score: 1
I think people want to feel like they are doing something really clever, zany, or outside-the-mainstream. So we have the word "hack" in the title of the book, even if a lot of things inside aren't really hacks. I wish the technical newbies out there would appreciate that most worthwhile things in programming are done without hacking, and that doing things in a well-considered way can be more enjoyable than crapping something together that works on Tuesday if you stand on one foot and the light hits it right.
But that won't happen. So let me tell you about how you can hack these blue boxes with "United States Postal Service" printed on them. Yeah, you hack your stamp onto the front of an envelope and code up the address in this secret format. Then you put the envelope in the box, and lo and behold, your message is delivered. The system does your bidding because you are a clever little hacker.
It often happens that people being interviewed talk ungrammatically. But usually, the interviewer fixes up the text, gets approval from the interviewee on the edited text, and something easy to read gets published.
This is almost certainly a verbatim dump of Brian Aker's speech, and I think it makes him sound like a scatter-brained schizophrenic. Which isn't really fair, because most of us would sound this way when giving interviews. Read TV closed captions without audio on news programs, and even press secreteries speak in these fragments. Aker, or whoever manages media contacts at MySQL should insist on proper editing for interviews.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, Cisco wasn't involved in the decisions. It looks like the writer went to the two ISPs for comment, but came up dry--well, except for that one anoymous comment. Then the writer asked Cisco what they thought about the whole thing to fill out the piece. Probably the ISPs are afraid of being targeted in retaliation and want to keep a low profile.
Maybe if this was based on an open standard defining how to implement the same services on a non-Google platform, this would all be more palatable.
I'm not worried. We are pretty soon going to have a bunch of people that are heartbroken about their data from 10 years ago being lost. The travel photos, the e-mailed love letters, the brilliant blog posts. And these people will create demand for longer-term storage and data collection techniques we don't have now. Why should it happen in the near future if it hasn't already? Because we first needed a generation of people that use computers and the internet as the primary way of expressing their life. Nobody was in that boat ten years ago. Now anybody reading this is. So consumer-grade "lifetime" storage options will enjoy a more prominent place on the market. And if you can get some old data to stick around for a half century or more, the value of it bumps up to "time capsule" status. Which means somebody might think to archive your mess of media around the time you die. Maybe some younger cousin of yours will take care of it. Heck, funeral parlors might offer data archival as a service 20 years from now.
So if the mold solution is really very similar to the real rail system, then either Japanese commuters are amazingly "natural" in regards to where they live, where they work, and demographic distribution, or the Japanese railroad engineers missed the human factor when designing the grid. The first possibility is somehow beautiful and creepy at the same time.
That is an interesting question. As a US engineer working with Japanese engineers, I am constantly comparing things they do to how we do, and wondering where general differences are and how they came about.
You may notice that the London map is heavily organized around separate lines. The Tokyo map is much more interconnected, like they threw that slime on the ground and planned it out by nature. It may be that the Tokyo engineers were allowed to use a purer approach than the Londoners, less confined by politics. In Seattle, I know that when we talk about where our fledgling light rail system is going to go or not go, it is done piecemail with major battles fought over a single line at one time. I.e. We connect from downtown Seattle to the airport, hitting these neighborhoods. The concept of the route has to be simple enough to be explained in one sentence for it to succeed on a ballot. If some engineers rolled in to town promising some system that maximizes coverage of all points in most efficient way, etc., that goes down in flames. When your bosses are grumpy, cheap, and have a short attention span--then rail networks get built piecemeal without the advantages of overall planning.
It's a little sad that somebody, in pursuit of an audience, had to angle the story towards "we could be using mold to make design decisions." Your mass transit planners are not going to call in a consultant with a suitcase full of mold, obviously. The paths chosen for rail have so many political factors that the "most efficient" model has little relevance.
But just stop thinking of utility for a moment. Look at those pictures of the mold growing to reach all points and form little roads between them. That is fantastic! "Because you could then plan light rail and freight logistics and--" STOP! No, don't jump on to the practical applications yet. Take a moment to think about that simple little organism doing that complicated thing and how cool that is. Those pictures are breathtaking.
And after that, maybe try to write a matching algorithm to see if you can predict which paths will form by the slime. And then see if that algorithm offers something that the human-designed ones don't have already. And then maybe integrate and devise new algorithms based on what was learned. And then see what practical applications there are for these algorithms. This is what the scientists and engineers will actually end up doing if it is possible. Can we stop acting like bored little brats that every scientific observation isn't immediately useful?
Yes, you could use Sikuli to fire up a text editor, individually press the keys to write all the lines of code, launch the compiler/linker/whatever. So it meets your weird definition of completeness. However, I suspect you could not use Sikuli to write a program that writes a Sikuli program to write Sikuli. I could be wrong, though.
Come on, let's cut through the default Slashdot snark. The image capture aspect of Sikuli is brilliant! I don't like the tagline "program anything with Sikuli" because 99% of software should be written in something else. But think of writing test scripts that can use the image matching features. If the software works as advertised, then you could throw together UI test cases way faster than anything else I've seen. System administration tasks should be a good match too. The resulting code would be brittle and hard to maintain, but for quick one-off scripts, sure... I can see it.
I think I get what you're saying... When someone casually lists some heinous action in a list of considered options, it makes it seem like that person is nearly ready to do that heinous thing. I.e. if I say, "stomping on babies is logistically impractical," then it sounds like I'm morally ambivalent about babystomping, right? Still, you have to consider the tone of voice that people use when writing papers for their academic peers. If you want to be taken seriously and get your paper published, you don't voice your moral opinions in the paper. And in social sciences, knowledge is probably advanced more easily if the moralizing is left out. That's for something for Mr. Sunstein to do on a PR visit to the Colbert Report or Daily Show, I suppose. It's all about context.
Don't let yourself get bent out of shape over this. Read the paper which is being quoted by the article before you start believing nonsense and posting your own. The Klein article misrepresents and quotes out of context. For example, here is the Cass Sunstein quote that Aaron Klein picks and edits to his liking:
"We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."
Sounds really scary right? Okay, here is the full paragraph from Sunstein's paper, available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 :
What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).
Note the last sentence. Sunstein leaves the 2 points quoted by Klein out of the recommendation. The paper itself is somewhat insightful and worth a skim. There are things to disagree with perhaps, but this isn't some civil liberty crushing maniac.
I'm asking this seriously, not rhetorically.
They have a budget of $7.2 billion for grants. It seems like they could wi-max a bunch of major cities, but not the whole US. Or maybe they just want to make the internet "affordable"--not necessarily free. Subsidize people's ISP service? Ugh. I don't want to pay for my neighbor to download Zombie Strippers off the internet.
I do like the emphasis on making things competitive. There are a lot of us that have just one practical choice for broadband, either the phone or cable company. And then there is maybe some not-really-high-speed 3G/GPRS solution available. But without knowing details, I don't see how they encourage competition when there is a monopoly on wired or wireless access.
Seriously, what useful thing can the FCC do here?
Here is my plan: Make sure all the schools and libraries have got broadband-equipped computers to match demand. Let people that can't afford home internet ride the bus down to the library or stay after school. This is probably 90% covered already. It's too boring and unambitious of a plan to be very interesting, but it would do just fine. You'd have plenty of change left over from that $7.2 billion--go stimulate something else more useful with it, i.e. education, mass transit. We don't need to make sure every person is connected to a high-speed multimedia wonderland all the time for free. The emphasis should be on education and basic needs like typing up resumes, checking your e-mail, etc.
You have to go try it yourself, giving or receiving, whichever is appropriate. If you hit the spot right, and the subject can feel it, then it is usually really obvious to the person getting stimulated. Subjective reports shouldn't be the basis of a scientific study, which is part of the problem here. From a man's point of view, you have to know the woman well enough to judge her reactions and how much you can trust her recounting of an experience. From a woman's point of view, you just have to be able to judge what physical actions cause your orgasm. These subjective things don't translate into a scientific study well, but that is plenty for an individual to figure out for him or herself if a form of sexual stimulation is legitimate or not. There are many things that you can form a reasonable individual opinion about that are hard or impossible to evaluate through the scientific method.
The funny thing is that T-Mobile offers a pretty decent plan with 3G data for $50/month which would be my first choice. But if you buy the subsidized phone, you get the spendy $80/month plan which doesn't really have good value to warrant the extra cost, IMO. Difference seems to be just more minutes and unlimited SMSs. So I could see buying the unsubsidized phone, and just getting the cheaper T-Mobile data plan separately.
Also, T-Mobile is one of the major carriers that refused to turn over customer information to US officials without a warrant. And they got KZJ, who is much sexier than the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy.
Just buy it with a credit card. And pay the debt off at $20/month or whatever is convenient. You'll be better off in the long run, because we'll get the carriers to start competing as big dumb pipes. The emphasis will be on coverage/speed for the buck, instead of some wacky chase after the latest "It" phone. We should all stop being scared off by upfront costs and letting phone carriers handle our financing through subsidies.
Exactly.
Companies and orgs already barrage newspapers with press releases in hopes of favorable coverage. And they often rely on writers and editors to be so rushed that they will carry their advertisements without working for the benefit of their readers to verify facts and judge value of the content. Posting misinformation on wikileaks anonymously is just a logical and painfully rational extension of marketing.
Look at it another way: even if real, honest, factual content is posted anonymously on wikileaks, with no sources available, all an implicated individual or institution has to do is deny the content is true in some vague way. And the flakier our news reporting gets, the harder it is to convince anyone that anything is true. In the end, we will just wander around cynical and unconvinced of anything, but also unwilling to act since no information seems actionable.
We need old-fashioned journalists that report facts with verifiable sources. Not the cheap, Web 3.0, crowdsourced crap.
If the software is calling a web service that performs the translation, then on the smartphone the software is trivial--a simple client that gets some user input, sends it to the internet, and receives translated text back. If this is the case, then there's no point in calling it "smartphone software", the brains are all on a server somewhere. And that server software deserves to be compared apples-to-apples to other online translation services like say... Babel Fish, to determine how worthy it is. Adding the "smartphone software" bit seems like a marketing ploy.
The polarized 3D movies are nothing like the anaglyphic stuff that the BBC is planning to use here. Polarized stereooptics (RealD, IMAX3D, and others) works by getting light to arrive at the viewers eyes from two different angles, and filtering so one set of angled light exclusively hits the left eye, and the other hits the right. Unlike anaglyphic, the colors themselves are not used to filter. As a result, it looks vastly better than the anaglyphic filtering you get with the cheapie red/cyan glasses. To set this up polarized stereooptics in the home is currently pretty expensive, like $xx,xxx, so the home viewing experience of 3D TV is going to be cheap and gimmicky until that changes.
Also, the glasses they hand out are big enough to go over your normal glasses. I'm doubling up on the specs myself, and it doesn't bother me.
Battery life on mobile devices is still a large issue, and if you are just connecting headsets and syncing up with PCs the extra range isn't needed. So WiFi Direct sounds better for some applications maybe. But we are all sick of our phones crapping out after an hour or two of "heavy" use, and trading range for battery life doesn't make sense for nearly all of the existing uses.
"The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic.'"
Mozilla basically asked if it would be okay if Mozilla (not you, not me, not everybody else) could put strong encryption in their software. They didn't get a court ruling--they got permission. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean they are some champions of free speech rights. No, it means that they have successfully looked after their own interests. And other, particularly smaller, open source developers shouldn't expect to have the same good fortune in getting permission.
Not to be too grumpy. It is good news that somebody was exempted from a stupid regulation.
I agree. I think the page thumbnails are really just an automated way to create something like an icon or illustration next to each link. The thumbnails aren't actually useful--they are just decoration. It's not a bad way to make the accompanying article descriptions more interesting to read through. But it's silly to portray this small s/w engineering feat as some groundbreaking new way to review information.
Agreed. You could pretty much pick any activity from life, and make cutsey little generalized rules from it...
10 Business Lessons I Learned from Picking Dingleberries Out of My Ass
Would someone please pay me to write life lessons from any randomly chosen activity? I will start work tomorrow with a $50,000 advance.
It has Android on it. That was about the only thing that made the G1 phone interesting. The HTC hardware is solid, but nothing groundbreaking. The BREW store has always sucked, because of Qualcomm's unreasonable barriers to entry for developers. They stuck with their gated community of content and buy-before-you-try for years and just figured it was the natural order for most of their users not to care about mobile phone apps.
Arguably, the Java-based Android OS is bad for app performance compared to BREW's native C code. But if you want an exciting console for people that are relatively poor (emerging market), then its fairly obvious to have something like Android Market or iPhone App Store that is full of freeware, shareware, and amateur projects.
Good points in your post. I have one comment on...
"People keep lauding the Minority Report UI like it's a good idea. Do you really want to have to hold your arms up like that and move them around all day? "
As a guy that has steadily gained weight over the last decade from sitting in front of a machine 8-12 hours/day every day, I wouldn't mind rethinking the whole less-movement-is-better premise. Humans weren't made to do this, and if we could get back to our days of heightened physical activity, we'd be a lot better off. Our bodies evolved to work well in an active lifestyle.
There's a gal in my cube row that has her monitor and keyboard raised up so she can stand while she works. Hmmmmm. I might just do the same thing.
Well, this time, you will not have to carry around a plastic toy cat with you and look like a damn fool. That could make all the difference, you know.
I think people want to feel like they are doing something really clever, zany, or outside-the-mainstream. So we have the word "hack" in the title of the book, even if a lot of things inside aren't really hacks. I wish the technical newbies out there would appreciate that most worthwhile things in programming are done without hacking, and that doing things in a well-considered way can be more enjoyable than crapping something together that works on Tuesday if you stand on one foot and the light hits it right.
But that won't happen. So let me tell you about how you can hack these blue boxes with "United States Postal Service" printed on them. Yeah, you hack your stamp onto the front of an envelope and code up the address in this secret format. Then you put the envelope in the box, and lo and behold, your message is delivered. The system does your bidding because you are a clever little hacker.
This is almost certainly a verbatim dump of Brian Aker's speech, and I think it makes him sound like a scatter-brained schizophrenic. Which isn't really fair, because most of us would sound this way when giving interviews. Read TV closed captions without audio on news programs, and even press secreteries speak in these fragments. Aker, or whoever manages media contacts at MySQL should insist on proper editing for interviews.