Reading the article, I find it very "pie in the sky". It stands to reason that if we have the ability to produce this sort of technology, then we're really behind in so many other areas by comparison. If we can make "pixelated lenses", then why don't we have car windows that automatically darken when sunlight gets too bright? If we can determine the abberations of a person's eye in such a small form factor, then why can't a car tell when the driver is squinting and only darken the glass where the light source that is causing the squinting is coming through? If all of this stuff can be done in such a small form factor, then why don't we have a market for "winter helmets" in cold regions that users can wear to warm their faces with heated air, play digital music via a bluetooth link from the music player in their pockets, provide a heads up display with newsticker, external temperature and wind speed, and the current track playing, and track eye movements for interacting with the music player, cellphone or PDA? That sounds technically feasible and would appeal to lots of people in areas where it gets cold in the Winter. Even more to the point, why do we have windsheild wipers when it would be possible to create a grid around a windsheild that blows hot dry air or possibly a laser grid to just melt snow and ice on contact? To me, all the applications I just came up with are in the same league with what this guy proposes. And I think his idea is much more far fetched than my own.
Sez the conservative Christian Fundamentalist: "This is more evolution junk! Hah! First they claim we descended from monkeys and now they're saying we're related to sharks! I'm sure glad my bible tells the truth and I know the I'm a direct creation of God and all women are descended from my rib. Then I don't have to rely on the voodoo of scientific lies that try to obscure the word."
With mail clients that do their own filtering (like Thunderbird), there's not a chance in hell of getting unsolicited bulk mail as much as the user who is stuck with crap webmail. However, it's why I always say, RUN YOUR OWN DAMN MAIL SERVER! It's what I do. And it's heaven compared to what everyone I know has to endure. And it's not all that hard...
The only way to overcome the problem of carpal tunnel syndrome with regard to computer interfaces is to get rid of physical input devices altogether. Voice, eye tracking, subvocal implants, those are the input devices that will rid us of the current spate of RSI and the limitations of the WIMP paradigm. Imagine not needing to even have a screen but just knowing the reply you got from your computer inherently. That's where we're headed in the next 10-15 years. This is just a ploy to garner some money from people who have a problem that isn't beaing dealt with correctly. It's a lot like the flagellists of the days of yore. They whipped themselves because they believed it was the only honest way to talk to god. These days they've wised up and just pray internally. Same thing. Make sense?
Um... speaking as a former user of Nokia (total crap) and Goldstar (total crap), my move to Moto has been excellent. The UI is aesthetically flawless and intuitive. So intuitive that I don't even need to know what I want to do with the phone to do it. I just open it and things happen. It's the most uer friendly phone I've ever encountered. Take voice recognition for example.
The common assumption: You speak the name or number and the phone dials the right place
The cold hard reality: You have to first manually enter the number into the system and then you have to give it three voice samples and hope you don't have a cold when you ask it to call "home" and it calls "Joan"
The Moto reality: You just say the name or number and it dials the right place every time
Sorry Moto wins hands down. And it looks so incredibly stylish compared to everything else. I love how it coordinates with all my outfits and looks right when I'm holding it near my flowing brown mane as the wind blows and I ash my cigarette into a nearby receptacle (OK street urchin's pocket). If only the real world could be designed by Moto. Just imagine how beautiful everything would look!
If Apple had gone with the Intel chips instead of staying with IBM's PowerPC as they did, they'd see the benefits of the new virtualization technology that Intel is debutting. Codenamed "Vanderpool", the new VT extentions to the Intel Pentium would have allowed multiple virtual instances of Mac OS X to run on a single Mac! It doesn't appear that IBM has competing technology in it's PowerPC roadmap. And when I talk about virtualization I'm not talking about your silly old VMware or Virtual PC style virtualization on top of a host OS. I'm talking about a truly partitionable CPU with each virtual machine running at native speed. The future is all about virtualization and that's where Apple missed out by staying with PowerPC. Oh wait...;P
Just keep with the set top box and hide it. That's what I'm going to be doing soon. I'm moving my homebrew Linux Media Center, DirecTV terminal and amplifier down to the basement underneath where the brand spankin' new 37" HD LCD monitor is wall mounted. And I'm only passing the cables through the wall to the back of the monitor (DVI, audio in, audio out and a USB cable for plugging stuff into the homebrew media center). I installed an outlet directly behind the wall mounted monitor as well. No wires. No mess. Just a nice looking monitor. The speakers are next. I'm building them into the walls... It doesn't matter what the industry does if you are willing to expend a little effort. Installing this stuff isn't that hard.
DISCLAIMER: If you burn your house down, set fire to your cat, smoke your tail, etc... I'm not responsible.;P
Have you been digging through my files? I used to post on Usenet as the "Rat's Ass" with my definitive moniker "Givin' it to ya Rat Style". And many of my posts were even more incoherent. (It's amazing what boredom + Jose Cuervo + Usenet will get you!). So.... Ratboy. Meet the Rat's Ass.
I used to be an RMS hate-ah until I noticed how he's always been right looking back. I still don't get why people get their panties in a bunch over profiteering. It's one thing to "produce" "content" or make a product or provide a service and sell it for reasonable amounts. It's another to be greedy and overvalue your work. For example, I saw this one guy who did some work in a Windows domain to resolve some naming issues. The company he did the consulting for was charged $250 an hour for his time. But since I know how to do exactly what he did, I'd say he overvalued his work. Reconfiguring users, groups and file sharing permisions in an AD domain is not a rocket scientist. It's drudgery, sure... but it's not worth $250 an hour. At best, maybe $15 an hour. He spent four days working on it and put in four hour days. So he made off with $4000 to do that work and the company paid gladly! In my opinion, they were scammed. They would have been far better off just hiring their own IT guy at $60,000 a year to handle those issues as they occur. Who cares if he spends the rest of his time playing World of Warcraft? Even if he only does the same kind of work the consultant did 15 times in a year (typical for most Windows admins), they would break even. Now THAT's some business sense you can use!
The same thing with music. The crap that the music industry and the RIAA controlled music machine produces might be popular, but that doesn't mean it has value. In truth, the songs you hear vomiting out of your radios and CD players daily might be worth about $.10 a pop. Paying $.50 per track to download is massive profit for the music industry. But they want more! THey can't get enough money! And that's what's wrong. These fuckers need to be taught a lesson. Back in the 80s I used to be able to buy a new record for $7.00. The record would have an average of 10-12 songs on it. That worked out to about $.58 per track which was robbery back then. If I was to release my work for public consumption and charged just $1.00 per album, I guarantee I'd be well within my rights. But if I did it expecting $20 an album, that would be ridiculous. That's what the RIAA controlled music machine is doing. STOP THEM NOW!!!
So in conclusion I have to say the problem is when people believe they are entitled to more money than they deserve for their work. Oh and another thing... it's all the fault of the middle man. Analyze every facet of our society and look for the middle man. You'll notice something. He doesn't actually do anything useful but typically gets paid a lot more than the people who do the real work. Think about the CEO who was just a venture capitalist and put some money into a project to bring it to fruition. Yes, he took a risk and maybe the product worked out. Yes, he deserves something in return. However, these guys usualy go nuts and keep 90% of the money for themselves then give the actual inventor/creator a pittance. If Linus Torvalds had turned to VCs for getting Linux out there, you can bet it never would have worked out as it did now. There's be some bloated fat idiot talking about the profits of his company and their bold venture into the Unix-like OS business. Linus would either be dead or fired or making the wage of a janitor somewhere in that company.
So in conclusion let me say that this all proves that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole of humanity and I call for a complete code audit of the species' DNA. Somewhere along the line something wrong got injected and it resulted in the fucked up world we have now where money is king and the poor are shit upon. Destroy all capitalist dogs!!!! Down with commies!!! Eliminate the anarchists!!! Deneuter the Dadaist!!!! Spay the white supremacists!!!!, Trepan the Moonies!!!! and overall... don't forget the sperm whale!!
Yes. More stimulating work implies challenges and new knowledge. New knowledge always trumps money if you have a brain. I prefer working in a job where I feel like I'm either bettering myself, or I'm contributing to the people in society who have less. That is always far more preferable to making loads of cash. If you're a rational human being anyway...;P
...what about the radio. How does it interact with this? I get the part about the phones being able to cook the egg with their radiated power (makes you wonder what it does to brains) but the radio mentioned seems to serve no purpose other than to play background music. Why would you need that for this to work? Anyone care to clue me in?
True. But that's not because nerds hit puberty early. It's because nerds are either spindly, lanky beings, or... they're fat/pudgy doughboys. Me? I've always had a striking physique that resembles a cross between Adonis, Ah-nold Schwarzenegger and Kevin Sorbo. From birth.;P
1. Drudge is a fucking treasonous liar 2. Everyone who supports/supported the Bush administration is either an idiot or just agrees to shut their minds and hearts to the truth 3. George W. Bush is a fucking criminal but not as big a criminal as Dick Cheney 4. Real Americans don't support war, they prevent it
...this should have been posted tomorrow for Troll Tuesday. It's a great troll.
Of course, he's right, but he's not taking into account that this won't matter in a few more years. Yes, people should back up. If they don't and they've been repeatedly warned then they only have themselves to blame for not heeding the warnings. It's still a tragedy though. One simple way to avoid it, is to make certain that you have a section of the file system that is NOT accesible to the user under normal circumstances. It is optimized for security and is impenetrable because it's not even connected to the net. Console access only. However, it has access to the user's files and is scheduled to do nightly backups. This should be a DEFAULT configuration for ALL OSes. And you know what? It will be. Thanks to full virtualization (Intel's VT AKA "Vanderpool" and AMD's "Pacifica"), this will happen in all future OSes. Security experts have predicted that future systems will run multiple VMs on top of a virtualization layer (VERY different from VMWare and Virtual PC as there is no guest OS) to provide secure environments and isolated environments. This stuff is coming fast and if you're not already up on it, you'd better be:
Guess again. I play, piano, guitar, upright bass, didgeridoo and compose my own music as well as produce others. But I still consider the computer to be the ultimate musical instrument. It's much more varied than the others and much more expressive if you know how to use it. Of course, what else should I expect and a jealous AC...;P
Did you mean "can't"? I'll assume you did, otherwise the list would be long and pointless.
Here is one example. There is no equivalent of the 'sleep' command in Windows NT 4 or 2k. I had to write my own sleep command in VB script just to accomplish a simple "sleep 5s". And since VB script is such a fucking mess, my script would only run on some machines unless I wanted to do version checking. You shouldn't HAVE to do version checking in a script!! I'm very well versed in CMD scripting and I can say it's very lacking when compared to Bash. Now... if I add Cygwin to the mix, then Windows becomes far more usable but very kludgy. The main problem is that Microsoft seems to abhor following the standards of structured programming. VB script sucks in so many insane ways. CMD in Win2k is still lacking. I've seen some things expanded in Win2k3, but I don't care much at this point. I will say that Monad looks interesting because of it's ability to pipeline data in an OOP fashion. But that's a feature that I've been able to live without so far and it won't be making it into Windows mainstream any time soon. Thats' just one example.
What I've seen is that with an out of the box Windows installation, you CAN'T make a system do to many interesting things without buying a bunch of add ons. With an out of the box Linux system, you've got much more comprehensive development tools that allow you to make your box do pretty much anything you want it to. Hell, I made my own CUSTOM PVR (that works worlds better than the crap software that was bundled with the capture card) using Linux and all I needed to do was compile one external driver for the PVR-250 card and write a bunch of Bash scripts utilizing Zenity for GUI interaction. Everything I needed was in my base Fedora Core 3 installation. I didn't need to buy anything other than the PVR-250... I challenge you to do the same with Windows.
I'd gladly accept that challenge. I'm pretty certain my Dual PII 300 with 768 Megs of RAM would be only slightly slower than your workstation. Chances are there would be maybe 20-30 second differences in most math intensive filters. I've got a P4 workstation as well and it doesn't do much better than the old dual P II...
To parent poster: This isn't really directed at just your post. In fact most of it is responses to other people. But I do address the laziness issue:
Jesus Christ! Why do people get so riled about this subject. The accusations of "elitism" top it all off too. There is no elitism in my post. I was being nice. I acknowledge that everyone has limitations and it's not their fault. I know that my limitations for example relate to subjects like math and money/business. So I accept that other people are better at it than I am. Are they elitists because they excel at something I don't? For fuck's sake NO!!! They just have different abilities and strengths. But, I also counter that MOST people are capable of learning computer stuff. I also believe that knowing how to use a computer is as important in any computer related field as, well... breathing. But I DID say that I don't expect people to move to Linux. Some of that is due to their laziness and some of it is due to their natural limitations. How is that insulting? It's NOT. It's the truth plain and simple! If I wanted to be insulting, I'd say, "Most people can't move to Linux because they are too stupid to know what's good for them and I don't want to waste my time dealing with them. Let them have their Windows spoon feeding". Now THAT IS insulting. It's also not what I believe. I didn't say people who don't use Linux or Unix are idiots. I said people can't or won't use Linux because of laziness (caused by society not forcing them to educate themselves) or inherent limitations that are beyond anyone's control. Does that make them lesser people? Not any more than my inability to do advanced math makes me some kind of failure. Christ people!! READ why don't you?!
Let me try this again...
1. Linux works very well for me in every way. I haven't run into ANY application that *I* NEED (other than the occasional game) that makes me think Linux isn't ready for the desktop 2. Windows is too limiting and costly for me 3. Macintosh is too costly for me even if it is the best of all the OSes 4. Windows works well for *OTHER* people and I don't fault them for using it 5. If *OTHER* people expended some of their time making the move to Linux they'd likely feel the same way I do
I'm always amazed by the stories I hear of people who've "tried" Linux only to find that it "sucks" in their opinion. And then when they explain why, it's because they only spent a few hours or days on it. I challenge ANYONE here who has only strictly worked on one platform (Mac or Windows) to switch and only spend a few hours or days and finding that their every need is satisfied. That's just STUPID. It's like moving into a house that needs some work and expecting it to be your dream home in a few days. If you folks have ever moved out of your parent's homes and bought your own place, you'd know that. Well assuming you're like me and you start with a teardown of the existing stuff you don't like about the house. (I have a tendency to completely rewire my homes from top to bottom, repair all the plaster using old fashioned plastering techniques, then prime and paint everything. It usually takes me about three to four years to get the house right) This is pretty typical of the average person. Now apply that to an OS switch and you'll see where I'm coming from. Look at your desktop (Windows or Mac). Unless you're a pretty boring person, it's likely that you've massively customized the environment beyond what it was like when it came from the factory. Did that take you a few hours? Days? Don't lie... unless you already had a standard desktop setup with custom wallpaper, some kind of profile to store the location of your icons, launcher bar, screensaver, etc... it probably took you quite a few weeks. But you persisted. If the same level of persistence were applied to Linux, you can make the switch. This is true of ANYONE. Even the people with some inherent limitations. The fact that that kind of persistence is lacking when it comes to something that is less well known is a failing of society.
Actually I've worked in pro studios and seen a wide array of software/hardware combos. I used to be in the audio business. Probably the best system I worked with was a Mac based Studer Dyaxis back in the early 90s (beat the pants off of ProTools circa 1994). I've also worked with ProTools, MoTU, Reason, etc... However, these are not affordable to the home user or the home based business. So I went to what I could afford and moved to Win 3.1 first. Things were horrible back then and I pined away for a Mac but knew I'd never be able to afford one that could do what I wanted. When CoolEdit Pro 2000 came out, I'd say they far surpassed when ProTools had to offer even if the processing was not done by DSPs. It would appear that Adobe agreed with me because they bought it and it is now known as Adobe Audition. Is there better software than that? Yes. I've also used Sonic Foundy/Sony's products as well and Steinberg's Cubase VST 24. However, I can't afford to keep shelling out money for new systems, new OSes and new software every couple of years. So I've moved my audio work to Linux as well and am very pleasantly surprised by programs like Rezound (for mastering/stereo editing), Ardour (for multitrack recording with excellent effects processing), and Roasegarden (the closest thing to Cubase that Linux has going). As far as multichanel audio boards, I'm using an Event Echo Layla (20 bit) eight channel board. Very nice system compared to what I was using back in the ProTools days. Thanks to ALSA, there is plenty of support for very good multichannel boards. You won't get the top names in the business, but then again that's not necessarily bad. There are plenty of lesser known brands in all facets of life that are equivalent or superior to the name brands. The same applies to audio hardware. The fact that you think Linux has little to offer to the audio producer illustrates just how unfamiliar you are with the territory. There is little that you can do in the Mac or Windows audio world that you can't do in Linux. Hell... I can even ship my data out of my Linux box to AES/EBU for final tranfer to pro DAT to send off to any mastering house I want.
Well... I'm an artist (musician primarily). That's why I got into working with computers. It's only natural that as a musician/photographer/graphic artist, I'd want to get to know more about my instrument (the computer). So learning to create music/edit photos/create original images with computers spilled over into gaining knowledge about networking, Bash scripting, compiling from source, etc... Oddly, it seems that I'm an exception. But I don't think I'm all that different from the average person. I think most people are capable of doing this stuff. They just don't realize it and don't really have (as you said) the time to put into it. Which is still a failing of society. Our time is taken up by way too many things that should be handled by competent infrastructure.
...I was reminded of the fact that Apple started it all. Not so much that they invented digital cameras, but they were the first to produce a consumer digital camera. I got to play with one back in the mid 90s. I rented it for about $40 for a day and went out to shoot a bunch of photos. I then took them to my girlfriend's Mac and pulled them in. I had to go through this cycle a few times because the storage was internal to the camera and transfers were time consuming. Just as with the iPods today, Apple was first on the scene with digital cameras and barely anyone remembers that. I wonder how the iPod will fare a little over a decade from now?
But look at who they're surveying... These folks will NEVER use Linux no matter what. I'm a 24/7 Linux user myself and I know that for a fact. The main reason why is that with the possible exception of Apple's Mac OS X, Unix is not something that Joe and Jane Average can work with. The main reason being that if you want to do interesting things in Unix, you MUST be exposed to the shell and some form of scripting or (gasp!) programming. Sure, that works fine for me and a lot of other folks. And people like us can dumb a Linux distro down enough for grandma to use it. But, in doing that we also wind up having to support our creation. I know. I've done it. My wife and my parents (previously all computerphobes) are now Linux users. It is possible to make a Linux system easy enough for someone who knows nothing about computers to use. It's a lot harder to make Linux work for someone who actually has some inkling of what they want to do, but aren't quite at the level reqiured to just make it work with custom scripting/coding.
I see GIMP in relation to Photoshop in the same way that the old Syntrillium CoolEdit (a Windows audio editor) was to Digidesign's ProTools. CoolEdit was arguably much more powerful in terms of features. It was also far more scientific with special filters that appealed to egg heads more than audio designers. But if you asked a ProTools fan to work with CoolEdit, they'd curl up and die. The main reason is that ProTools lack of abilities is what made it easy for them to use. In the same way, GIMP throws a lot more features/filters at the user than Photoshop in it's default configuration. Those extra features are confusing to people who are used to Photoshop. I made the transition from Photoshop to GIMP right around the time that PS 3.5 was out. I'd say that currently GIMP does everything that Photoshop 3.5 did and more. The UI took some getting used to, but once I was used to it, it did everything I needed. Still... that doesn't help people who don't want to have to get used to something. It's a sad truth simply because they could better themselves if they put the effort in, but most people simply don't want to.
You know that if Photoshop or Dreamweaver were ported to Linux that people wouldn't leave their current platforms. There isn't much that Linux offers them immediately, so why would they do it? Again, another sad truth is that many people don't have enough of a long term view to see how much they'd save in both OS upgrade costs and hardware costs. Most folks aren't smart enough to realize that if they switched to Linux, they wouldn't have to pay for upgrades. However, more importantly, they don't realize that they could hold onto their machines a while longer because the newer versions of Linux rarely push you off of your current hardware onto the latest and greatest. I've got a box that will hit ten years old next year and it's running the latest apps I need (GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, BIND, Wine, eDonkey2000, GAIM, GRdesktop, VNC, RealPlayer 10, Xine 1.x, MPlayer, Grip, Rio Karma Music Manager Lite, Icecast/Ices etc...). Not only that, but it's supporting five simultaneous users all doing similar things. I challenge anyone to take a nine year old Mac or Windows box and run the latest OS and apps on them. But this is something that most people don't even realize is possible. They've been conditioned to believe that they need new machines every couple of years. That'show bad it is in the computer industry right now. I don't see it getting any better either. As soon as people want to make money with this stuff they will stop at nothing to convince you you need to buy more stuff. In perpetuity.
So, I don't expect to see the average person running Linux anytime soon. Anyone who does is being foolish. But this is not due to failings in the Linux distros, the core of open source itself, or even the GIMP project. It's due to the failing of our society to educate people enough to actually understand the tools they work with day in an
but alas, libertarian nut-jobs like me never get elected to anything.
Thank god. Otherwise we'd be forced into living like the pioneers with an ad ded element of having to be able to afford to pay for all sorts of services you take for granted now but would have to pay for if taxes disappeared. If you ask
me that sounds pretty shitty in most SANE people's views. No thanks. I like h aving police, rubbish collection, efficient and cheap mail delivery, freeways, p ublic (and national) parks, wildlife reserves, public schools, public libraries,
and a whole host of other tax funded services. It makes life VERY nice compare d to the alternative. Do you honestly think it's better to pay for everything y ourself out of pocket?
Consider this. Let's say your hellish dream came true and the taxes were slashe d tremendously. The police in your area were privatized. There were no more pu blic police. So... you get into an accident. What do you do? You have to call
your insurance company to get someone to help? How much are your insurance pre miums now that they also have to support a private police force for accident man agement? Not only that, but what if you decide to go with a cheaper insurance c ompany to save money and the quality of the cops they employ isn't as good as th e person you got in the accident with. Even though the other person CAUSED the accident, his insurance company's lawyers and cops will do everything possible t o make sure you take the fall and your company has to pay out.
What about a break in at your house? Assuming you're not a total nutcase who th inks that your Smith and Wesson is enough insurance. There are those of us who do not believe that violence is EVER justified. Home insurance company has cops
who will be there at 4:00AM when the burglary occurred? Assuming they do, cons ider how limited their scope of investigation would be considering that no one p rivate corporation will NEVER have complete jurisdiction over every aspect of so ciety as governments do now. So... let's say their investigation gets stymied b ecause they aren't allowed to persue certain avenues. You don't get your stuff back. The company pays you what they feel is a fair compensation. And your pre miums go up. Who wins there? Not you.
Sorry, you libertarians need to think things through a few more steps before thi nking you have everything solved. The world may not be rosy as it is, but if yo u want to complain about the current US government, the fault doesn't lie within
the Federal, local or state governments. It lies within the private corporatio ns that are fucking with these institutions. A libertarian system would simply amplify what's happening and we'd be even worse off than we are now. Especially
those of us that actually LIKE having the government take care of things we sho uldn't have to pay for...
Slashdot Mirror
Reading the article, I find it very "pie in the sky". It stands to reason that if we have the ability to produce this sort of technology, then we're really behind in so many other areas by comparison. If we can make "pixelated lenses", then why don't we have car windows that automatically darken when sunlight gets too bright? If we can determine the abberations of a person's eye in such a small form factor, then why can't a car tell when the driver is squinting and only darken the glass where the light source that is causing the squinting is coming through? If all of this stuff can be done in such a small form factor, then why don't we have a market for "winter helmets" in cold regions that users can wear to warm their faces with heated air, play digital music via a bluetooth link from the music player in their pockets, provide a heads up display with newsticker, external temperature and wind speed, and the current track playing, and track eye movements for interacting with the music player, cellphone or PDA? That sounds technically feasible and would appeal to lots of people in areas where it gets cold in the Winter. Even more to the point, why do we have windsheild wipers when it would be possible to create a grid around a windsheild that blows hot dry air or possibly a laser grid to just melt snow and ice on contact? To me, all the applications I just came up with are in the same league with what this guy proposes. And I think his idea is much more far fetched than my own.
Sez the conservative Christian Fundamentalist: "This is more evolution junk! Hah! First they claim we descended from monkeys and now they're saying we're related to sharks! I'm sure glad my bible tells the truth and I know the I'm a direct creation of God and all women are descended from my rib. Then I don't have to rely on the voodoo of scientific lies that try to obscure the word."
How in the fucking hell was my original post a troll? I was being serious. Jesus fucking christ the moderators have shit for brains.
With mail clients that do their own filtering (like Thunderbird), there's not a chance in hell of getting unsolicited bulk mail as much as the user who is stuck with crap webmail. However, it's why I always say, RUN YOUR OWN DAMN MAIL SERVER! It's what I do. And it's heaven compared to what everyone I know has to endure. And it's not all that hard...
The only way to overcome the problem of carpal tunnel syndrome with regard to computer interfaces is to get rid of physical input devices altogether. Voice, eye tracking, subvocal implants, those are the input devices that will rid us of the current spate of RSI and the limitations of the WIMP paradigm. Imagine not needing to even have a screen but just knowing the reply you got from your computer inherently. That's where we're headed in the next 10-15 years. This is just a ploy to garner some money from people who have a problem that isn't beaing dealt with correctly. It's a lot like the flagellists of the days of yore. They whipped themselves because they believed it was the only honest way to talk to god. These days they've wised up and just pray internally. Same thing. Make sense?
Um... speaking as a former user of Nokia (total crap) and Goldstar (total crap), my move to Moto has been excellent. The UI is aesthetically flawless and intuitive. So intuitive that I don't even need to know what I want to do with the phone to do it. I just open it and things happen. It's the most uer friendly phone I've ever encountered. Take voice recognition for example.
The common assumption: You speak the name or number and the phone dials the right place
The cold hard reality: You have to first manually enter the number into the system and then you have to give it three voice samples and hope you don't have a cold when you ask it to call "home" and it calls "Joan"
The Moto reality: You just say the name or number and it dials the right place every time
Sorry Moto wins hands down. And it looks so incredibly stylish compared to everything else. I love how it coordinates with all my outfits and looks right when I'm holding it near my flowing brown mane as the wind blows and I ash my cigarette into a nearby receptacle (OK street urchin's pocket). If only the real world could be designed by Moto. Just imagine how beautiful everything would look!
If Apple had gone with the Intel chips instead of staying with IBM's PowerPC as they did, they'd see the benefits of the new virtualization technology that Intel is debutting. Codenamed "Vanderpool", the new VT extentions to the Intel Pentium would have allowed multiple virtual instances of Mac OS X to run on a single Mac! It doesn't appear that IBM has competing technology in it's PowerPC roadmap. And when I talk about virtualization I'm not talking about your silly old VMware or Virtual PC style virtualization on top of a host OS. I'm talking about a truly partitionable CPU with each virtual machine running at native speed. The future is all about virtualization and that's where Apple missed out by staying with PowerPC. ;P
Oh wait...
Just keep with the set top box and hide it. That's what I'm going to be doing soon. I'm moving my homebrew Linux Media Center, DirecTV terminal and amplifier down to the basement underneath where the brand spankin' new 37" HD LCD monitor is wall mounted. And I'm only passing the cables through the wall to the back of the monitor (DVI, audio in, audio out and a USB cable for plugging stuff into the homebrew media center). I installed an outlet directly behind the wall mounted monitor as well. No wires. No mess. Just a nice looking monitor. The speakers are next. I'm building them into the walls... It doesn't matter what the industry does if you are willing to expend a little effort. Installing this stuff isn't that hard.
;P
DISCLAIMER: If you burn your house down, set fire to your cat, smoke your tail, etc... I'm not responsible.
Have you been digging through my files? I used to post on Usenet as the "Rat's Ass" with my definitive moniker "Givin' it to ya Rat Style". And many of my posts were even more incoherent. (It's amazing what boredom + Jose Cuervo + Usenet will get you!). So.... Ratboy. Meet the Rat's Ass.
I used to be an RMS hate-ah until I noticed how he's always been right looking back. I still don't get why people get their panties in a bunch over profiteering. It's one thing to "produce" "content" or make a product or provide a service and sell it for reasonable amounts. It's another to be greedy and overvalue your work. For example, I saw this one guy who did some work in a Windows domain to resolve some naming issues. The company he did the consulting for was charged $250 an hour for his time. But since I know how to do exactly what he did, I'd say he overvalued his work. Reconfiguring users, groups and file sharing permisions in an AD domain is not a rocket scientist. It's drudgery, sure... but it's not worth $250 an hour. At best, maybe $15 an hour. He spent four days working on it and put in four hour days. So he made off with $4000 to do that work and the company paid gladly! In my opinion, they were scammed. They would have been far better off just hiring their own IT guy at $60,000 a year to handle those issues as they occur. Who cares if he spends the rest of his time playing World of Warcraft? Even if he only does the same kind of work the consultant did 15 times in a year (typical for most Windows admins), they would break even. Now THAT's some business sense you can use!
The same thing with music. The crap that the music industry and the RIAA controlled music machine produces might be popular, but that doesn't mean it has value. In truth, the songs you hear vomiting out of your radios and CD players daily might be worth about $.10 a pop. Paying $.50 per track to download is massive profit for the music industry. But they want more! THey can't get enough money! And that's what's wrong. These fuckers need to be taught a lesson. Back in the 80s I used to be able to buy a new record for $7.00. The record would have an average of 10-12 songs on it. That worked out to about $.58 per track which was robbery back then. If I was to release my work for public consumption and charged just $1.00 per album, I guarantee I'd be well within my rights. But if I did it expecting $20 an album, that would be ridiculous. That's what the RIAA controlled music machine is doing. STOP THEM NOW!!!
So in conclusion I have to say the problem is when people believe they are entitled to more money than they deserve for their work. Oh and another thing... it's all the fault of the middle man. Analyze every facet of our society and look for the middle man. You'll notice something. He doesn't actually do anything useful but typically gets paid a lot more than the people who do the real work. Think about the CEO who was just a venture capitalist and put some money into a project to bring it to fruition. Yes, he took a risk and maybe the product worked out. Yes, he deserves something in return. However, these guys usualy go nuts and keep 90% of the money for themselves then give the actual inventor/creator a pittance. If Linus Torvalds had turned to VCs for getting Linux out there, you can bet it never would have worked out as it did now. There's be some bloated fat idiot talking about the profits of his company and their bold venture into the Unix-like OS business. Linus would either be dead or fired or making the wage of a janitor somewhere in that company.
So in conclusion let me say that this all proves that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole of humanity and I call for a complete code audit of the species' DNA. Somewhere along the line something wrong got injected and it resulted in the fucked up world we have now where money is king and the poor are shit upon. Destroy all capitalist dogs!!!! Down with commies!!! Eliminate the anarchists!!! Deneuter the Dadaist!!!! Spay the white supremacists!!!!, Trepan the Moonies!!!! and overall... don't forget the sperm whale!!
Yes. More stimulating work implies challenges and new knowledge. New knowledge always trumps money if you have a brain. I prefer working in a job where I feel like I'm either bettering myself, or I'm contributing to the people in society who have less. That is always far more preferable to making loads of cash. If you're a rational human being anyway... ;P
...what about the radio. How does it interact with this? I get the part about the phones being able to cook the egg with their radiated power (makes you wonder what it does to brains) but the radio mentioned seems to serve no purpose other than to play background music. Why would you need that for this to work? Anyone care to clue me in?
True. But that's not because nerds hit puberty early. It's because nerds are either spindly, lanky beings, or... they're fat/pudgy doughboys. Me? I've always had a striking physique that resembles a cross between Adonis, Ah-nold Schwarzenegger and Kevin Sorbo. From birth. ;P
Simple facts:
1. Drudge is a fucking treasonous liar
2. Everyone who supports/supported the Bush administration is either an idiot or just agrees to shut their minds and hearts to the truth
3. George W. Bush is a fucking criminal but not as big a criminal as Dick Cheney
4. Real Americans don't support war, they prevent it
Have a nice day
Of course, he's right, but he's not taking into account that this won't matter in a few more years. Yes, people should back up. If they don't and they've been repeatedly warned then they only have themselves to blame for not heeding the warnings. It's still a tragedy though. One simple way to avoid it, is to make certain that you have a section of the file system that is NOT accesible to the user under normal circumstances. It is optimized for security and is impenetrable because it's not even connected to the net. Console access only. However, it has access to the user's files and is scheduled to do nightly backups. This should be a DEFAULT configuration for ALL OSes. And you know what? It will be. Thanks to full virtualization (Intel's VT AKA "Vanderpool" and AMD's "Pacifica"), this will happen in all future OSes. Security experts have predicted that future systems will run multiple VMs on top of a virtualization layer (VERY different from VMWare and Virtual PC as there is no guest OS) to provide secure environments and isolated environments. This stuff is coming fast and if you're not already up on it, you'd better be:
1. The Xen Project is the leader
2. Intel VT
3. AMD Pacifica
Wake up! A big change is coming...
Guess again. I play, piano, guitar, upright bass, didgeridoo and compose my own music as well as produce others. But I still consider the computer to be the ultimate musical instrument. It's much more varied than the others and much more expressive if you know how to use it. Of course, what else should I expect and a jealous AC... ;P
Did you mean "can't"? I'll assume you did, otherwise the list would be long and pointless.
Here is one example. There is no equivalent of the 'sleep' command in Windows NT 4 or 2k. I had to write my own sleep command in VB script just to accomplish a simple "sleep 5s". And since VB script is such a fucking mess, my script would only run on some machines unless I wanted to do version checking. You shouldn't HAVE to do version checking in a script!! I'm very well versed in CMD scripting and I can say it's very lacking when compared to Bash. Now... if I add Cygwin to the mix, then Windows becomes far more usable but very kludgy. The main problem is that Microsoft seems to abhor following the standards of structured programming. VB script sucks in so many insane ways. CMD in Win2k is still lacking. I've seen some things expanded in Win2k3, but I don't care much at this point. I will say that Monad looks interesting because of it's ability to pipeline data in an OOP fashion. But that's a feature that I've been able to live without so far and it won't be making it into Windows mainstream any time soon. Thats' just one example.
What I've seen is that with an out of the box Windows installation, you CAN'T make a system do to many interesting things without buying a bunch of add ons. With an out of the box Linux system, you've got much more comprehensive development tools that allow you to make your box do pretty much anything you want it to. Hell, I made my own CUSTOM PVR (that works worlds better than the crap software that was bundled with the capture card) using Linux and all I needed to do was compile one external driver for the PVR-250 card and write a bunch of Bash scripts utilizing Zenity for GUI interaction. Everything I needed was in my base Fedora Core 3 installation. I didn't need to buy anything other than the PVR-250... I challenge you to do the same with Windows.
I'd gladly accept that challenge. I'm pretty certain my Dual PII 300 with 768 Megs of RAM would be only slightly slower than your workstation. Chances are there would be maybe 20-30 second differences in most math intensive filters. I've got a P4 workstation as well and it doesn't do much better than the old dual P II...
To parent poster: This isn't really directed at just your post. In fact most of it is responses to other people. But I do address the laziness issue:
Jesus Christ! Why do people get so riled about this subject. The accusations of "elitism" top it all off too. There is no elitism in my post. I was being nice. I acknowledge that everyone has limitations and it's not their fault. I know that my limitations for example relate to subjects like math and money/business. So I accept that other people are better at it than I am. Are they elitists because they excel at something I don't? For fuck's sake NO!!! They just have different abilities and strengths. But, I also counter that MOST people are capable of learning computer stuff. I also believe that knowing how to use a computer is as important in any computer related field as, well... breathing. But I DID say that I don't expect people to move to Linux. Some of that is due to their laziness and some of it is due to their natural limitations. How is that insulting? It's NOT. It's the truth plain and simple! If I wanted to be insulting, I'd say, "Most people can't move to Linux because they are too stupid to know what's good for them and I don't want to waste my time dealing with them. Let them have their Windows spoon feeding". Now THAT IS insulting. It's also not what I believe. I didn't say people who don't use Linux or Unix are idiots. I said people can't or won't use Linux because of laziness (caused by society not forcing them to educate themselves) or inherent limitations that are beyond anyone's control. Does that make them lesser people? Not any more than my inability to do advanced math makes me some kind of failure. Christ people!! READ why don't you?!
Let me try this again...
1. Linux works very well for me in every way. I haven't run into ANY application that *I* NEED (other than the occasional game) that makes me think Linux isn't ready for the desktop
2. Windows is too limiting and costly for me
3. Macintosh is too costly for me even if it is the best of all the OSes
4. Windows works well for *OTHER* people and I don't fault them for using it
5. If *OTHER* people expended some of their time making the move to Linux they'd likely feel the same way I do
I'm always amazed by the stories I hear of people who've "tried" Linux only to find that it "sucks" in their opinion. And then when they explain why, it's because they only spent a few hours or days on it. I challenge ANYONE here who has only strictly worked on one platform (Mac or Windows) to switch and only spend a few hours or days and finding that their every need is satisfied. That's just STUPID. It's like moving into a house that needs some work and expecting it to be your dream home in a few days. If you folks have ever moved out of your parent's homes and bought your own place, you'd know that. Well assuming you're like me and you start with a teardown of the existing stuff you don't like about the house. (I have a tendency to completely rewire my homes from top to bottom, repair all the plaster using old fashioned plastering techniques, then prime and paint everything. It usually takes me about three to four years to get the house right) This is pretty typical of the average person. Now apply that to an OS switch and you'll see where I'm coming from. Look at your desktop (Windows or Mac). Unless you're a pretty boring person, it's likely that you've massively customized the environment beyond what it was like when it came from the factory. Did that take you a few hours? Days? Don't lie... unless you already had a standard desktop setup with custom wallpaper, some kind of profile to store the location of your icons, launcher bar, screensaver, etc... it probably took you quite a few weeks. But you persisted. If the same level of persistence were applied to Linux, you can make the switch. This is true of ANYONE. Even the people with some inherent limitations. The fact that that kind of persistence is lacking when it comes to something that is less well known is a failing of society.
Actually I've worked in pro studios and seen a wide array of software/hardware combos. I used to be in the audio business. Probably the best system I worked with was a Mac based Studer Dyaxis back in the early 90s (beat the pants off of ProTools circa 1994). I've also worked with ProTools, MoTU, Reason, etc... However, these are not affordable to the home user or the home based business. So I went to what I could afford and moved to Win 3.1 first. Things were horrible back then and I pined away for a Mac but knew I'd never be able to afford one that could do what I wanted. When CoolEdit Pro 2000 came out, I'd say they far surpassed when ProTools had to offer even if the processing was not done by DSPs. It would appear that Adobe agreed with me because they bought it and it is now known as Adobe Audition. Is there better software than that? Yes. I've also used Sonic Foundy/Sony's products as well and Steinberg's Cubase VST 24. However, I can't afford to keep shelling out money for new systems, new OSes and new software every couple of years. So I've moved my audio work to Linux as well and am very pleasantly surprised by programs like Rezound (for mastering/stereo editing), Ardour (for multitrack recording with excellent effects processing), and Roasegarden (the closest thing to Cubase that Linux has going). As far as multichanel audio boards, I'm using an Event Echo Layla (20 bit) eight channel board. Very nice system compared to what I was using back in the ProTools days. Thanks to ALSA, there is plenty of support for very good multichannel boards. You won't get the top names in the business, but then again that's not necessarily bad. There are plenty of lesser known brands in all facets of life that are equivalent or superior to the name brands. The same applies to audio hardware. The fact that you think Linux has little to offer to the audio producer illustrates just how unfamiliar you are with the territory. There is little that you can do in the Mac or Windows audio world that you can't do in Linux. Hell... I can even ship my data out of my Linux box to AES/EBU for final tranfer to pro DAT to send off to any mastering house I want.
Well... I'm an artist (musician primarily). That's why I got into working with computers. It's only natural that as a musician/photographer/graphic artist, I'd want to get to know more about my instrument (the computer). So learning to create music/edit photos/create original images with computers spilled over into gaining knowledge about networking, Bash scripting, compiling from source, etc... Oddly, it seems that I'm an exception. But I don't think I'm all that different from the average person. I think most people are capable of doing this stuff. They just don't realize it and don't really have (as you said) the time to put into it. Which is still a failing of society. Our time is taken up by way too many things that should be handled by competent infrastructure.
...I was reminded of the fact that Apple started it all. Not so much that they invented digital cameras, but they were the first to produce a consumer digital camera. I got to play with one back in the mid 90s. I rented it for about $40 for a day and went out to shoot a bunch of photos. I then took them to my girlfriend's Mac and pulled them in. I had to go through this cycle a few times because the storage was internal to the camera and transfers were time consuming. Just as with the iPods today, Apple was first on the scene with digital cameras and barely anyone remembers that. I wonder how the iPod will fare a little over a decade from now?
But look at who they're surveying... These folks will NEVER use Linux no matter what. I'm a 24/7 Linux user myself and I know that for a fact. The main reason why is that with the possible exception of Apple's Mac OS X, Unix is not something that Joe and Jane Average can work with. The main reason being that if you want to do interesting things in Unix, you MUST be exposed to the shell and some form of scripting or (gasp!) programming. Sure, that works fine for me and a lot of other folks. And people like us can dumb a Linux distro down enough for grandma to use it. But, in doing that we also wind up having to support our creation. I know. I've done it. My wife and my parents (previously all computerphobes) are now Linux users. It is possible to make a Linux system easy enough for someone who knows nothing about computers to use. It's a lot harder to make Linux work for someone who actually has some inkling of what they want to do, but aren't quite at the level reqiured to just make it work with custom scripting/coding.
I see GIMP in relation to Photoshop in the same way that the old Syntrillium CoolEdit (a Windows audio editor) was to Digidesign's ProTools. CoolEdit was arguably much more powerful in terms of features. It was also far more scientific with special filters that appealed to egg heads more than audio designers. But if you asked a ProTools fan to work with CoolEdit, they'd curl up and die. The main reason is that ProTools lack of abilities is what made it easy for them to use. In the same way, GIMP throws a lot more features/filters at the user than Photoshop in it's default configuration. Those extra features are confusing to people who are used to Photoshop. I made the transition from Photoshop to GIMP right around the time that PS 3.5 was out. I'd say that currently GIMP does everything that Photoshop 3.5 did and more. The UI took some getting used to, but once I was used to it, it did everything I needed. Still... that doesn't help people who don't want to have to get used to something. It's a sad truth simply because they could better themselves if they put the effort in, but most people simply don't want to.
You know that if Photoshop or Dreamweaver were ported to Linux that people wouldn't leave their current platforms. There isn't much that Linux offers them immediately, so why would they do it? Again, another sad truth is that many people don't have enough of a long term view to see how much they'd save in both OS upgrade costs and hardware costs. Most folks aren't smart enough to realize that if they switched to Linux, they wouldn't have to pay for upgrades. However, more importantly, they don't realize that they could hold onto their machines a while longer because the newer versions of Linux rarely push you off of your current hardware onto the latest and greatest. I've got a box that will hit ten years old next year and it's running the latest apps I need (GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, BIND, Wine, eDonkey2000, GAIM, GRdesktop, VNC, RealPlayer 10, Xine 1.x, MPlayer, Grip, Rio Karma Music Manager Lite, Icecast/Ices etc...). Not only that, but it's supporting five simultaneous users all doing similar things. I challenge anyone to take a nine year old Mac or Windows box and run the latest OS and apps on them. But this is something that most people don't even realize is possible. They've been conditioned to believe that they need new machines every couple of years. That'show bad it is in the computer industry right now. I don't see it getting any better either. As soon as people want to make money with this stuff they will stop at nothing to convince you you need to buy more stuff. In perpetuity.
So, I don't expect to see the average person running Linux anytime soon. Anyone who does is being foolish. But this is not due to failings in the Linux distros, the core of open source itself, or even the GIMP project. It's due to the failing of our society to educate people enough to actually understand the tools they work with day in an
...they're in demand. Because no one has actually ever seen one yet considering that no one is still clear on exactly what .Net really is. ;P
For the humor impaired: The above is a joke. It's funny. Laugh.
Thank god. Otherwise we'd be forced into living like the pioneers with an ad
ded element of having to be able to afford to pay for all sorts of services you
take for granted now but would have to pay for if taxes disappeared. If you ask
me that sounds pretty shitty in most SANE people's views. No thanks. I like h
aving police, rubbish collection, efficient and cheap mail delivery, freeways, p
ublic (and national) parks, wildlife reserves, public schools, public libraries,
and a whole host of other tax funded services. It makes life VERY nice compare
d to the alternative. Do you honestly think it's better to pay for everything y
ourself out of pocket?
Consider this. Let's say your hellish dream came true and the taxes were slashe
d tremendously. The police in your area were privatized. There were no more pu
blic police. So... you get into an accident. What do you do? You have to call
your insurance company to get someone to help? How much are your insurance pre
miums now that they also have to support a private police force for accident man
agement? Not only that, but what if you decide to go with a cheaper insurance c
ompany to save money and the quality of the cops they employ isn't as good as th
e person you got in the accident with. Even though the other person CAUSED the
accident, his insurance company's lawyers and cops will do everything possible t
o make sure you take the fall and your company has to pay out.
What about a break in at your house? Assuming you're not a total nutcase who th
inks that your Smith and Wesson is enough insurance. There are those of us who
do not believe that violence is EVER justified. Home insurance company has cops
who will be there at 4:00AM when the burglary occurred? Assuming they do, cons
ider how limited their scope of investigation would be considering that no one p
rivate corporation will NEVER have complete jurisdiction over every aspect of so
ciety as governments do now. So... let's say their investigation gets stymied b
ecause they aren't allowed to persue certain avenues. You don't get your stuff
back. The company pays you what they feel is a fair compensation. And your pre
miums go up. Who wins there? Not you.
Sorry, you libertarians need to think things through a few more steps before thi
nking you have everything solved. The world may not be rosy as it is, but if yo
u want to complain about the current US government, the fault doesn't lie within
the Federal, local or state governments. It lies within the private corporatio
ns that are fucking with these institutions. A libertarian system would simply
amplify what's happening and we'd be even worse off than we are now. Especially
those of us that actually LIKE having the government take care of things we sho
uldn't have to pay for...