M$ did a lot of marketing for the tablets. I keep seeing ads for them, and they have a big section on their web site.
the real reason that it hasn't caught on might also be that the digitizers and or the windows GUI handling aren't good enough to make using the touchscreen and the stylus an acceptable user experience.
we have these things at my lab (for multimodal HCI studies), and while the handwriting recognition of Win Tablet isn't too bad, clicking on things in the GUI is way too unreliable. the windows GUI doesn't allow ambiguous inputs (selecting an area rather than a point), as they would occur with a finger and as they do occur when the digitizer isn't good enough. here, either the GUI should become more robust (= fault-tolerant) or the digitizers should become better. probably both. (tried with a top-notch acer centrino tablet!)
other issues with the tablet is the sheer size and weight of these things. still waiting for apple to come up with a really thin tablet that you actually WANT to take anywhere. at the moment, the tablet's i have seen suffer from over-weight, clunky-ness, short battery-life...
my prediction is that in a couple of years these problems will be solved and people will enjoy clicking on items directly (and maybe handwriting) rather than using a stupid trackpad...!
this/. story inspired me to publish a script that is able to fool bots and humans alike. It generates lists with arbitrary e-mail addresses, but hey, it also links to them from arbitrary (first&last) names that look like natural names (of John Doe, average North American person)...
You can download the complete script from my web site. Names are generated from a U.S. census database, and the distribution of first/last names approximates the actual distribution in the list.
The additional configuration options you are talking about (add'l shortcuts e.g.) would be a good idea, no doubt.
However, in general, the fact that OS X has a "narrow set of configurations" follows a simple principle: create consistency. People prefer consistency over adaptivity (several studies, check out Nielsen's work), and I believe that also comprises adaptability (configuration options): When you configure machine A in a way and machine B in another one, a guest would get a different, not satisfying experience. (OK, different logon, you might say) -- but even you would have to set it up every time you install things on a new machine or get a new account. These things are important in very dynamic environments, or where people use several machines.
The most important benefit from fewer than mroe configuration options is that novice users (let's say anyone that's not a geek) won't need to choose, and they will never activate certain configs by chance (and then spend hours looking for the error).
Me, as a geek... that's exactly what I like about OS X. Things are consistent, because there are standards and I don't have to choose and mess around. And when I want an extension (and of course I want a few), I will need to install them explicitly.
Check out the KDE (2,3) preference windows. Hell of complicated, you need to be an insider to even understand the options. Some things even seem redundant (see: themes/window managers), others are very hard to find depending on your distribution (screen config = XFree config). These things are complicated or cluttered for technical reasons (different layers), but honestly, as a user I don't want to know what an X Server or a Window Manager is. That's just the kind of UI stuff that Apple gets right, and the KDE (and, to some extend, the MS) folks don't.
it doesn't matter whether he's student or not. this is about the work being done and the market that there is for this kind of work.
comparing a highly specialized software developer to a kid serving customers at McDonalds is, with all due respect, BS.
It doesn't matter whether someone does shitty work or not. It's a question of the market, and that means: how many people are out there that could do THIS job. For McDonald's, that means: plenty. That makes the difference.
Now talking market - and you got a point there: The Romanian programmers (and highly skilled mathematicians) doing decent work in my team about three years ago netted USD 500 (and cost us about 1200 per head).... time to wake up!
you are right.
however: while the upgrade to jaguar brought a lot of functionalities, it wasn't such a big deal as upgrading from, say, NT to 2000 or from 2000 to XP.
1. the upgrade is done within half an hour
2. you don't need to reinstall many software packages
3. they didn't change the driver framework unlike in NT->2000.
you are right. they actually want your attention - which is not bad, in general. on a BA flight, they recently asked me to take down my headphones before landing. not that they were connected to anything...
(well, they were active noise cancelling ones, but that the flight attendant certainly couldn't tell!)
What was tested here was how well different office suites could READ documents that were (most likely) produced with MS Office (since MS Office has a 9x% market share, and it's unlikely that you generate.doc for web dissemination if you're using Open Office).
Unfortunately, this tells us very little about interoperability, as needed in an office/colaboration environment, where people need to read my files and my revisions to their files.
Just to read other people's files, I prefer a format like PDF anyways.
i doubt this is due to your change, if you did it properly. a lot of people use bash, me included. you might want to delete the Terminal.App preference file. (iTerm is better anyways...)
re defining: sometimes it's not bad to define a term using several samples of its context. you can use google for that -- just enter a complicated term and you'll find out how it is used and who uses it.
i do that quite often when i am looking for the correct usage of a word or a phrase in a foreign language...
Statistics work quite well not just for phrases or so-called collocations such as "high and low" (vs. *"high and small"). they can help figure out the meaning of a word (bank=credit institute vs. bank=place to rest in a park).
You can even learn (automatically learn) this stuff from parallel corpora where you can get a sentence-by-sentence translation, and you figure out statistically, which words or phrases belong together.
But that's an old story. Even the translation of complete sentences is fairly feasible in terms of syntactic structure.
Harder to translate are things like discourse markers ("then", "because") because they are highly ambiguous and you would have to understand the text in a way. I have tried to guess these discourse markers with machine learning model in my thesis about rhetorical analysis with support vector machines (shameful self-promotion), and I got around 62 percent accuracy. While that's probably better than or similar to competing approaches, it's still not good enough for a reliable translation.
And that's just one example for the hurdles in the field. The need for understanding of the text kept the field from succeeding commercially. Machine Translation in these days is a good tool for translators, for example in Localization.
very simple. Microsoft is Apple's competitor on the home PC market, just like Apple, MS offers content encoding, streaming and replay solutions (Windows Media Player vs Quicktime and iTunes). MS has also made a major step into the content market (MSN/MSNBC). The iTunes Music Store provides added value to Apple customers.
It is quite clear that this is not in Microsofts interest, and to me it is quite clear that people like Yeager may be little un-biased in their PR activities.
Doesn't mean all MS employees are evil. E.g., Microsoft Research has managed to get some very bright people to work for them...
The critique may be acceptable (music label's haven't arrived in the global economy/international culture yet), but Shawn Yeager's motivation is possibly not.
The guy that complains about Apple's restrictice licenses not only USED TO WORK FOR MICROSOFT, he also developed MusicDirect.com, a direct competitor to the iTunes Store. (Read it yourself on his Home page.
As the french say: honi soit qui mal y pense. ("shamed be he who thinks evil of it")
Sendmail crashed / stalled / left-to-walk-the-dog all the time on the powerbook, needed to be rebooted. Sometimes I didn't notice and my outgoing email stayed in the outgoing queue for days.
After I installed Postfix, everything works like a breeze. Installing Postfix is quite simple -- because there are one or two pitfalls, I wrote a short step-by-step tutorial.
Lately, on final to EIDW 28, I was cleared for landing by ATC, the TCAS goes off and what do I see coming down at about 10 o'clock?? I couldn't believe my eyes --- it was a Space Shuttle. Check this out (Screenshot).
What an honour for the small international airport at Dublin, Ireland.:)
I kind of remember people saying that PC Flightsims are great to learn IFR, but for "simple" VFR in a "simple" Cessna, they don't actually help student pilots significantly. Which means: Flight model realism isn't all that important (for serious use), after all...
Indeed I believe the fact that X-Plane is not open source, and maintained by mainly one person in lose cooperation with a few graphics people is a major disadvantage.
It's absolutly amazing that Austin could achieve this, but the project is getting at it's limits. Why?
Even the 4th release candidate still has quality issues, or, with a less friendly word: bugs. The user interface is really, really bad. Not only does it use custom widgets, but the widgets do not follow the usual expectations. The dialogs behave strangely (exit buttons), and, for example, if you increase the rendering quality, the system drops you down to the nearest airport, which comes handy if you're flying a 747 and you end up on a helipad.
People also develop flight models and (photo)realistic landscapes (e.g. the Global Scenery Project or, e.g., Cormac Shaw's high-detail scenery for Ireland and his Aer Lingus Jets at the Irish Hub.) Stuff like that generally works much better, and there is a great variety to choose from!
I also tried to evaluate FlightGear. This project is not anywhere near X-Plane. If I'm not mistaken, they only accurately simulate piston engines (other engines are a weak approximation). Besides, FlightGear doesn't compile if you don't have certain libraries installed, which turned out to be a pain on OS X...
That said, I believe that FlightGear may outperform X-Plane in a couple of years. Until then, I'll stick with X-Plane...
i have spend many hours with this simulator. It's hard for me to comment on it's realism, since I have never flown a 737 or an A320 myself. But I trust the flight model is more complex than the one of MS Flightsim, and, after all, you can create "crazy things that fly". That's why companies that actually build aircraft rely on X-Plane before prototyping.
Also X-Plane can be used to log hours towards your Airline Transport Cert -- nice! Of course, you need the 150.000$ motion platform... Still cheaper than a standard simulator.
Interestingly, the simulator Scaled Composits uses to train their pilots is available for cheap: X-Plane does the job at Scaled Composites with their own sim cockpit.
Runs on OS X, OS9 and Windows. Warning: Harder to fly than MS Flightsim -- of course!
X-Plane, being fairly realistic, even has an FAA rating so it can be used (with a $150.000 motion platform) to log hours towards your Airline Transport Certificate.
Hungary will soon be part of the European Union. Things will become much easier for you then. (You still can't order everything from the U.S. -- but from a wealth of first-world EU countries, where people talk proper English!)
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Neither is Open Office specialized (it's a bread-and-butter office productivity suite), nor is it high quality.
Mozilla, GIMP, Blender, Open Office and I guess many of the others run on OS X too, at least with the same quality (X11 GUI) as on Linux.
the newton was not a personal computer -- it was more a big PDA, as far as i remember!
M$ did a lot of marketing for the tablets. I keep seeing ads for them, and they have a big section on their web site.
the real reason that it hasn't caught on might also be that the digitizers and or the windows GUI handling aren't good enough to make using the touchscreen and the stylus an acceptable user experience.
we have these things at my lab (for multimodal HCI studies), and while the handwriting recognition of Win Tablet isn't too bad, clicking on things in the GUI is way too unreliable. the windows GUI doesn't allow ambiguous inputs (selecting an area rather than a point), as they would occur with a finger and as they do occur when the digitizer isn't good enough. here, either the GUI should become more robust (= fault-tolerant) or the digitizers should become better. probably both. (tried with a top-notch acer centrino tablet!)
other issues with the tablet is the sheer size and weight of these things. still waiting for apple to come up with a really thin tablet that you actually WANT to take anywhere. at the moment, the tablet's i have seen suffer from over-weight, clunky-ness, short battery-life...
my prediction is that in a couple of years these problems will be solved and people will enjoy clicking on items directly (and maybe handwriting) rather than using a stupid trackpad...!
You can download the complete script from my web site. Names are generated from a U.S. census database, and the distribution of first/last names approximates the actual distribution in the list.
Here is an example of what it looks like...
Folks, this is the bot-trap of the future!
The additional configuration options you are talking about (add'l shortcuts e.g.) would be a good idea, no doubt.
However, in general, the fact that OS X has a "narrow set of configurations" follows a simple principle: create consistency. People prefer consistency over adaptivity (several studies, check out Nielsen's work), and I believe that also comprises adaptability (configuration options): When you configure machine A in a way and machine B in another one, a guest would get a different, not satisfying experience. (OK, different logon, you might say) -- but even you would have to set it up every time you install things on a new machine or get a new account. These things are important in very dynamic environments, or where people use several machines.
The most important benefit from fewer than mroe configuration options is that novice users (let's say anyone that's not a geek) won't need to choose, and they will never activate certain configs by chance (and then spend hours looking for the error).
Me, as a geek... that's exactly what I like about OS X. Things are consistent, because there are standards and I don't have to choose and mess around. And when I want an extension (and of course I want a few), I will need to install them explicitly.
Check out the KDE (2,3) preference windows. Hell of complicated, you need to be an insider to even understand the options. Some things even seem redundant (see: themes/window managers), others are very hard to find depending on your distribution (screen config = XFree config). These things are complicated or cluttered for technical reasons (different layers), but honestly, as a user I don't want to know what an X Server or a Window Manager is. That's just the kind of UI stuff that Apple gets right, and the KDE (and, to some extend, the MS) folks don't.
... got the subject wrong, they are from the same university...
What's also astonishing is that one university (Dept of Physics and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana) can claim TWO nobel prizes this year -- Paul Lauterbur (Medicine, for MRI) and Tony Leggett (Physics). Quite impressing.
it doesn't matter whether he's student or not. this is about the work being done and the market that there is for this kind of work.
... time to wake up!
comparing a highly specialized software developer to a kid serving customers at McDonalds is, with all due respect, BS.
It doesn't matter whether someone does shitty work or not. It's a question of the market, and that means: how many people are out there that could do THIS job. For McDonald's, that means: plenty. That makes the difference.
Now talking market - and you got a point there: The Romanian programmers (and highly skilled mathematicians) doing decent work in my team about three years ago netted USD 500 (and cost us about 1200 per head).
you are right. however: while the upgrade to jaguar brought a lot of functionalities, it wasn't such a big deal as upgrading from, say, NT to 2000 or from 2000 to XP. 1. the upgrade is done within half an hour 2. you don't need to reinstall many software packages 3. they didn't change the driver framework unlike in NT->2000.
you are right. they actually want your attention - which is not bad, in general. on a BA flight, they recently asked me to take down my headphones before landing. not that they were connected to anything...
(well, they were active noise cancelling ones, but that the flight attendant certainly couldn't tell!)
speech recognition? works well if you just need to enter a couple of digits, also for known names...
What was tested here was how well different office suites could READ documents that were (most likely) produced with MS Office (since MS Office has a 9x% market share, and it's unlikely that you generate .doc for web dissemination if you're using Open Office).
Unfortunately, this tells us very little about interoperability, as needed in an office/colaboration environment, where people need to read my files and my revisions to their files.
Just to read other people's files, I prefer a format like PDF anyways.
ibm does not offer its xlc compiler for intel chips -- that's simply wrong in the story, sorry for that!
i doubt this is due to your change, if you did it properly. a lot of people use bash, me included. you might want to delete the Terminal.App preference file. (iTerm is better anyways...)
you're not that wrong with the concepts.
re defining: sometimes it's not bad to define a term using several samples of its context. you can use google for that -- just enter a complicated term and you'll find out how it is used and who uses it.
i do that quite often when i am looking for the correct usage of a word or a phrase in a foreign language...
But that's an old story. Even the translation of complete sentences is fairly feasible in terms of syntactic structure.
Harder to translate are things like discourse markers ("then", "because") because they are highly ambiguous and you would have to understand the text in a way. I have tried to guess these discourse markers with machine learning model in my thesis about rhetorical analysis with support vector machines (shameful self-promotion), and I got around 62 percent accuracy. While that's probably better than or similar to competing approaches, it's still not good enough for a reliable translation.
And that's just one example for the hurdles in the field. The need for understanding of the text kept the field from succeeding commercially. Machine Translation in these days is a good tool for translators, for example in Localization.
very simple. Microsoft is Apple's competitor on the home PC market, just like Apple, MS offers content encoding, streaming and replay solutions (Windows Media Player vs Quicktime and iTunes). MS has also made a major step into the content market (MSN/MSNBC). The iTunes Music Store provides added value to Apple customers.
It is quite clear that this is not in Microsofts interest, and to me it is quite clear that people like Yeager may be little un-biased in their PR activities.
Doesn't mean all MS employees are evil. E.g., Microsoft Research has managed to get some very bright people to work for them...
The guy that complains about Apple's restrictice licenses not only USED TO WORK FOR MICROSOFT, he also developed MusicDirect.com, a direct competitor to the iTunes Store. (Read it yourself on his Home page.
As the french say: honi soit qui mal y pense. ("shamed be he who thinks evil of it")
After I installed Postfix, everything works like a breeze. Installing Postfix is quite simple -- because there are one or two pitfalls, I wrote a short step-by-step tutorial.
Lately, on final to EIDW 28, I was cleared for landing by ATC, the TCAS goes off and what do I see coming down at about 10 o'clock?? I couldn't believe my eyes --- it was a Space Shuttle. Check this out (Screenshot).
What an honour for the small international airport at Dublin, Ireland. :)
I kind of remember people saying that PC Flightsims are great to learn IFR, but for "simple" VFR in a "simple" Cessna, they don't actually help student pilots significantly. Which means: Flight model realism isn't all that important (for serious use), after all...
Sorry, you obviously don't live in this world.
I ordered X-Plane a couple of weeks ago, and I think I paid about USD 10 for international shipping & handling to Ireland.
You need to get the CD simply because the software has a (weak) copy-protection -- it requires the orig CD to be in the drive.
But generally you're right, download would be much better, especially since it would save you customs.
It's absolutly amazing that Austin could achieve this, but the project is getting at it's limits. Why?
Even the 4th release candidate still has quality issues, or, with a less friendly word: bugs. The user interface is really, really bad. Not only does it use custom widgets, but the widgets do not follow the usual expectations. The dialogs behave strangely (exit buttons), and, for example, if you increase the rendering quality, the system drops you down to the nearest airport, which comes handy if you're flying a 747 and you end up on a helipad.
People also develop flight models and (photo)realistic landscapes (e.g. the Global Scenery Project or, e.g., Cormac Shaw's high-detail scenery for Ireland and his Aer Lingus Jets at the Irish Hub.) Stuff like that generally works much better, and there is a great variety to choose from!
I also tried to evaluate FlightGear. This project is not anywhere near X-Plane. If I'm not mistaken, they only accurately simulate piston engines (other engines are a weak approximation). Besides, FlightGear doesn't compile if you don't have certain libraries installed, which turned out to be a pain on OS X...
That said, I believe that FlightGear may outperform X-Plane in a couple of years. Until then, I'll stick with X-Plane...
i have spend many hours with this simulator. It's hard for me to comment on it's realism, since I have never flown a 737 or an A320 myself. But I trust the flight model is more complex than the one of MS Flightsim, and, after all, you can create "crazy things that fly". That's why companies that actually build aircraft rely on X-Plane before prototyping.
Also X-Plane can be used to log hours towards your Airline Transport Cert -- nice! Of course, you need the 150.000$ motion platform... Still cheaper than a standard simulator.
Runs on OS X, OS9 and Windows. Warning: Harder to fly than MS Flightsim -- of course!
X-Plane, being fairly realistic, even has an FAA rating so it can be used (with a $150.000 motion platform) to log hours towards your Airline Transport Certificate.
Hungary will soon be part of the European Union. Things will become much easier for you then. (You still can't order everything from the U.S. -- but from a wealth of first-world EU countries, where people talk proper English!)