The first part of your comment about USB winning the war for portable storage by providing a default interface makes enormous sense.
The second part of your comment also makes enormous sense. However, it suffers from the chicken and egg problem. Until many people carry around a USB keychain drive, this just won't be viable.
However, most people already carry around a cellphone. And if a cellphone could contain some flash storage, and have an interface any store could read, your idea could catch on quickly. I definitely don't want to carry around a thumb drive all the time, if I'm already carrying a cell phone or an MP3 player. So those devices might be where your idea gains traction. And I agree that it makes great sense. I travel a lot, and it drives me crazy when I'm in a grocery store out of state and I can't take advantage of any specials without signing up for a loyalty card I don't want.
What a dumb thing to say. The question is whether a shuffle deserved a spot in the review, not whether some arbitrary quota of Apple commentary had been reached within the review. The fact is that Apple makes a computer that deserved benchmarks, and they also make a thumb-drive that deserved review.
I read the review and I felt some temptation to go out and buy one of these drives, particularly since my current thumb drive uses USB 1.1 and is three years old. When I read the grandparent post suggesting a Shuffle, I had a Homer Simpson D'oh! moment. Like, how could I have forgotten how much cooler it would be to pay $45 more, and receive all the great features of a Shuffle?
So I totally agree with the grandparent post. A Shuffle really deserved to be included in this review. Do the Shuffles perform comparably to the other drives mentioned when it comes to transferring files? I have no idea, since it wasn't in the review. I wish I knew.
I suspect I'm always going to be a WordPerfect fan, at least when I'm trying to do real writing instead of just get business done. But I'm nevertheless so grateful that OpenOffice.org exists.
Just today, I got a friggin' Excel spreadsheet from my distributor. They wanted me to complete it and send it back to them. It would kill me to fork over my hard-earned dough for Microsoft Office, but thanks to OpenOffice.org I never have to. I just fired up the OpenOffice spreadsheet, inserted the data, saved it as an.xls file, and my distributor won't have any idea I don't even own Microsoft Office.
This wasn't the time and place, but whenever I get a chance I tell people they can probably get by with OpenOffice.org instead of purchasing Microsoft Office. OpenOffice 1.1 is more than good enough for most tasks, so I can't wait to see how good 2.0 is. It's always nice to use a fantastic product that also just happens to keep me from having to pay the Microsoft tax.
Yes, well, maybe you'd have less if you weren't publicly providing your email on one of the most viewed forums on the internet.
A funny, but misleading, comment. Slashdot's popularity has little to do with how much spam Taco gets. He could have posted the same contact info at PeterLorreFansUnite.com and the spam spiders still would have found him. He'd be getting roughly the same amount of spam even if his address was posted on one of the most obscure sites on the net.
I publish Vegan.com and until I abandoned the domain for use of email last autumn I was getting something like 2000 spams a day. And as much as I'd like to think otherwise, I suspect Slashdot gets a tiny bit more traffic than Vegan.com;)
I found this book tremendously useful
on
Getting Things Done
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I read Getting Things Done about six months ago when I was starting my publishing company. It has been very, very useful to me. I got infinitely more from this book than from reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
The central idea of this book, which was not really covered in the Slashdot review, is that you should not be using your brain to remember things about work. Every time you have a thought relevant to work -- an idea, a task to accomplish, a goal to achieve -- you should have some kind of information management system in place so that your thought gets recorded for future review and action.
I married Allen's advice with a cheap digital voice recorder and with a great piece of free Windows software called Keynote. Keynote is a tabbed outliner, where each of the main ten or so components to my life each get their own outline (in my case: speaking dates, website development, to do's, etc). It's really the only software that is keeping me using Windows. I use my Mac for nearly everything else.
Getting Things Done is perhaps the only business book that I intend to re-read. If you feel stressed about your work, and have this lingering feeling you're not as effective as you need to be, I really suggest a weekend with this book. Just know that you should be joining its advice with a software solution like Keynote, plus a (real-world) filing cabinet, as you seek to empty the stuff in your brain into its appropriate places.
Oh, and one more thing. Getting Things Done is a great piece of writing. And how often can you say that about a business book?
It says right on Amazon's front page, "100% of your donation will go to the American Red Cross."
So it looks like Amazon.com is not only giving this front-page billing, they are also personally paying the credit card transaction fee, in effect losing at least a couple pennies for each dollar contributed.
Slate just posted an interesting analysis of the differences between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The article indicates that Blu-Ray is a far superior standard, and the only reason that some studios are lining up behind HD-DVD is to spare the expense of buying new production equipment. HD-DVD disks can be made using existing production machinery, whereas Blu-Ray requires all-new equipment to manufacture.
So I've read the 50 or so responses so far, and they all amount to "Bravo Hormel...thanks for having a sense of humor."
But let's not forget that spam is anything but a value-neutral product. Sure, it doesn't look or taste like there's any real meat in there, but there is. And if you're going to eat the stuff, you ought to know how meat is produced.
It's always bothered me how few people in the tech community are clued into the cruelties associated with factory farming. Hormel is not a company that deserves anyone's praise, and it certainly doesn't deserve free ads on Slashdot.
The whole blogging thing has of course made an enormous impact on the Internet. There was a great article in Wired from a couple months back that shows that the very top blogs (fark, plastic, etc.) have traffic comparable to NYTimes.com and other mainstream media. Basically the people who got in on this meme fast, and did the best work, developed huge audiences.
The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.
I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.
But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.
In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.
To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."
Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.
One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.
Cute comparison. But I bet you aren't one of those people who has an email account getting over 1000 spams a day. I'm giving up that account because it's taking me a half hour every other day to sort out the remaining spam, even after Thunderbird's spam filter has run.
By the same token, I bet if some delivery person was putting a thousand unwanted packages in your living room each day, and you couldn't stop him, you would, in fact, choose to move.
I went into their search box (that I found through somebody else's post here) and looked up whether they carried the first ten bands that popped into my head. YMMV:
Doors: no
Boston: only their last album
Rush: no
Zappa: one obscure collaboration
Springsteen: no
Allman Bros: no
Beach Boys: one obscure CD
Nirvana: no
Guns and Roses: no
Jefferson airplane: no
All in all, this is definitely not a site catering to mainstream rock tastes. Maybe that's why they don't allow searching of their catalog before signup.
Now let me hit send and see how long it takes before the first, "Dude, your musical tastes blow," flame.
This is a topic I think I have a pretty good background to comment on. So let's start by getting the obvious out of the way: if you want to use a computer efficiently, you have to learn to type or you'll be wasting a great deal of time.
The more interesting question is, will typing skills remain as essential in ten years as they are today? And to that, I'd say: absolutely...for some people.
I've written several book-length projects. One I did through voice recognition, the others through typing. If you haven't used voice recognition lately, you're in for a shock. On any current computer, the software has no trouble keeping up with you, and if you train it properly, you'll get 95% accuracy.
I'd be stunned if we don't get 99.5% accuracy in ten years. So, will typing be an essential skill then? For some people, perhaps not. But for writers and thinkers, yes.
What I've found, is if I'm trying to communicate something simple and straight forward, voice recognition is better. You can speak close to 200 words a minute, but you're a fantastic typist if you can do 80. So for simple writing, you can double your productivity using voice recognition.
Trouble is, sometimes you can't -- and shouldn't -- think as quickly as you can speak. For making complex arguments, or for writing in a way that carries a rhythym, you're still best off typing -- assuming you know how to type!
And for anyone who's ever had to edit text, let me say that there's no way you could ever edit as accurately and quickly with speech recognition as you could at the keyboard.
I can envision ten years down the road most people doing emails and surfing the web mainly by voice recognition and mouse input. But if typing skills vanish, certain types of writing and communication will suffer enormously. And I worry that tomorrow's creators, trained on voice recognition and never learning to type -- will never realize what they're missing out on.
Picture Hemingway with a microphone and you'll understand. For some writing, there's just no substitute for typing your words directly onto the screen or page.
I'm more than willing to hand over my 30% share of the 27 million dollars left by Sani Abacha, the late Nigerian dictator, if they call off assassinating me.
I'm lacking a technical background and I grew up using Macs. With that in mind, the idea of adding tons of extensions to Mozilla doesn't thrill me. I can't help but be reminded of pre OS-X Macintoshes, where it got to the point that Macs shipped with a half-dozen extensions. And it was impossible to put the computer to any serious use without accumulating a dozen more.
Naturally, the more extensions you loaded, the more time it took your computer to boot and the more system crashes and incompatibilities occurred. It got to the point that I spent significant time enabling and disabling extensions to try to identify incompatibilities and the sources of my computer crashes. I don't know anything about Mozilla architecture, but might an extension-based Firefox be edging us down that same path?
I know I'd personally prefer it if the Firefox team evaluated the best extensions, and incorporated them into the main code for optimum compatibility.
So here's my question to people familiar with the Mozilla codebase: is my comparison between Pre-OSX Macs and Firefox valid?
There are more than a dozen posts since this article was posted, but none so far have mentioned the obvious comment. For all Microsoft's sleazy business practices, this article is evidence that they are exercising great integrity when it comes to publishing Slate. That article completely (and justifiably) ripped Internet Explorder a new one. After reading that article, I view Slate far more favorably than I used to.
I've always thought Microsoft made the best keyboards and mice, but second-rate everything else. Turns out that they also deserve credit for making content sites.
If there's one thing we should have learned by now from the music business, it's that they've built an industry by trotting out a new and improved product every 3-5 years, each time with the promise that if you buy it, you're done for life.
That was the promise way back when the first CD's came out. You'd then buy your the complete discography of your favorite band, thinking that even though you were shelling out $15 a disk, you were getting top quality recordings that were on indestructable media.
Then, five years later, guess what? The record companies remastered and re-released those same tracks. It doesn't matter if your favorite artist is Rush or Cat Stevens or Miles Davis, it all got re-mastered. Doesn't it ever strike you as odd, and perhaps intentional, that the first release of every popular CD was mastered so poorly it needed to be redone just five years later?
So along comes the iTunes store, and we're seeing the same damned thing. Once again, there's promises of how great the music sounds. But instead of crappy mastering, they are using crappy bit rates. And you know exactly where this is leading. Five years from now, they'll bump up their sampling rates to 192 kps or something. And even though you've already bought and paid for all your favorite songs, you're going to be asked to buy them all again if you want the best sound. And in another five years they'll probably jump to uncompressed SACD quality downloads, and you'll feel this big incentive to buy the same songs yet again.
Not that I care. I stopped buying CDs a long time ago. The entire business is run by dishonorable people, and now it looks like that mentality is dragging down one of the computer industry's more principled companies.
because Commodore stuff was never really that good (the Amiga had its moments though).
Lord forgive me for jumping to the defense of a computer that's been dead nearly 20 years. But somebody's gotta answer this.
I forget what Apple IIe's cost around 1985, but they were well over a grand; actually I think close to two grand...unreachable if you were a high school student mowing lawns. On the other hand, you could get a Commodore for $200, and a disk drive for another $200, plug it up to a TV and you were set.
Additionally, the graphics and especially the sound were much better on the C64 than the Apple IIe. The Commodore had a SID chip, which was polyphonic (I think) and offered four different kinds of sound envelopes. You could even tweak the ADSR...all this on a computer that was released in, what, 1983? The Apples and their tinny speaker sure couldn't do that, not without some expensive add on sound card anyway.
I remember a friend who lived down the block who had an Apple used to always be furious that the same games looked and sounded so much better on my cheap computer than his expensive one.
I think for the time, Commodore made amazing hardware and practically gave it away relative to what others were charging. Really odd to see them dissed over something like this.
Do you really think there's a CIO out there who hasn't yet heard of Linux? That's like suggesting that there's a CFO somewhere who's never heard of SAP or Peoplesoft.
CIOs may not use Linux, they may not even have any interest in using Linux, but by now certainly every CIO has at least heard of it and can probably describe Linux better than half the people on Slashdot.
For me, Skype is one of the last products that's keeping me tied to an XP box. Your performance may vary, but I've found that the quality of calls I make anywhere in the US is significantly higher than what I get through a regular phone line (assuming both parties are using broadband.)
Overseas, I've had less luck. From my place in Central NY, my Skype calls to a friend in Amsterdam are generally intolerable, although he reports that it works fine when he talks to his brother in Philly. I've had poor but acceptable connections using Skype to talk to a friend in Madrid.
Voice quality has continued to improve slightly with each new release of Skype. But for me, the verdict is Skype is sensational within North America, and barely tolerable or outright unusable for calling overseas.
Still, I wish everyone had broadband and Skype. Even without taking the fact that it's free, it just sounds measurably better than standard long distance calls within the US.
Back in the olden days, free access to BBS's was constrained by your local telco calling area. Which meant that you could reach one, and stay on as long as you'd like, for free, so long as it was less than about 20 miles away.
And these days, the magic distance is perhaps a quarter mile.
And as Linux distributions get heavier, they lose another compelling advantage -- the ability to run on legacy hardware.
Fr'instance, I have a Thinkpad 600 with 64 MB of RAM. The thing is just sitting in a box right now because I've been unable to find a distribution that will run gracefully on this machine.
And when you think about it, 64 MB is a still a helluva lot of memory to be incapable of running a reasonably current OS. I'm sure (and I sure hope!) that somebody could recommend a Linux distribution that's suitable for a machine like mine. But it says something that I spent at least a couple of hours looking at various obscure distributions, and couldn't find one that did the trick.
Here's a link to the bread machine I was talking about. It uses quick-rise yeast that you can buy in any grocery store. This was the best fifty bucks I've ever spent, and now the unit has dropped to forty bucks.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 05KIR0/qid=1085939586/
Even though I have an affiliate ID with Amazon, I have not embedded it here, since I think it's sleazy when people do that on Slashdot.
TV dinners are industrialized, mass produced slop made from the cheapest ingredients. Even school lunches are gourmet by comparison. And the oddest part about TV dinners is that, even though they are billed as being convenient, since they are frozen food it takes forever until they are ready.
It's Sunday morning and I'm feeling cranky, and I'd like to write several more paragraphs about how awful TV dinners are. But instead, I'm going to rise to the occasion and try to write something genuinely helpful. Below, I'll offer some suggestions on what to eat instead of TV dinners, which are always your worst choice. Everything below is tastier and healthier than TV dinners -- while being just as convenient.
Spaghetti & Tomato sauce -- in the time it takes to boil water and heat up a jar of sauce, you're in business. Usually, I'll take a couple more minutes to mince up some garlic, and saute it in my pan with some olive oil before adding sauce. You can also buy pre-minced garlic in jars in any grocery store.
Most of the time, I'll also grill some fresh peppers in my George Foreman grill to add to the sauce. You can start the peppers as you heat up the water to boil, and they'll be ready to cut up and add to the sauce well before the rest of the meal is ready. Anaheim or bell peppers are great choices.
Grilled Veggies speaking of the George Foreman grill, which you can buy for less than $30 on Amazon, I use this thing all the time for ultra-healthy snacks. You can grill up just about any type of vegetable. My favorites are broccoli and cauliflower. I'll usually break them into pieces, then grill them give minutes or so. Then flip them around in the grill, turn off the power, and keep the grill on them for another five minutes or so. I'll then top with some non-transfatty acid margarine and some flax oil in a serving bowl.
Bread Machine.Amazon.com offers a West Bend bread machine that makes a small loaf suitable for one or two people in less than an hour. You can modify the recipes so that the breads are nearly all whole grain. And it takes only about five minutes to measure out the ingredients. Then, just go away for 45 minutes, and when you get back you've got a piping hot loaf of bread, that costs something like 30 cents even if you've used organic flour.
I hope some of this is helpful. If this inspires you, you can also try some cookbooks geared to convenient and healthy eating. There's one called _The Everyday Vegan_ which I think is especially good as a source of convenient recipes to replace TV dinners. I have no financial interest in the sale of this book; I just think it's great.
And you understand that if I customarily stick a thumb in your eye everytime I say hello, that this is simply my way of greeting you. No sense in getting worked up that I just stuck a thumb in your eye. You should be more tolerant.
People who go around saying words like unthaw and irregardless are sticking a thumb in the eye of those of us who like language to be clear and not annoying. Of course we understand what's being said--that is not what is at issue.
You seem to be saying that people should be free to violate every rule of grammar and clear speaking without being corrected. "Good lord" indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
The second part of your comment also makes enormous sense. However, it suffers from the chicken and egg problem. Until many people carry around a USB keychain drive, this just won't be viable.
However, most people already carry around a cellphone. And if a cellphone could contain some flash storage, and have an interface any store could read, your idea could catch on quickly. I definitely don't want to carry around a thumb drive all the time, if I'm already carrying a cell phone or an MP3 player. So those devices might be where your idea gains traction. And I agree that it makes great sense. I travel a lot, and it drives me crazy when I'm in a grocery store out of state and I can't take advantage of any specials without signing up for a loyalty card I don't want.
What a dumb thing to say. The question is whether a shuffle deserved a spot in the review, not whether some arbitrary quota of Apple commentary had been reached within the review. The fact is that Apple makes a computer that deserved benchmarks, and they also make a thumb-drive that deserved review.
I read the review and I felt some temptation to go out and buy one of these drives, particularly since my current thumb drive uses USB 1.1 and is three years old. When I read the grandparent post suggesting a Shuffle, I had a Homer Simpson D'oh! moment. Like, how could I have forgotten how much cooler it would be to pay $45 more, and receive all the great features of a Shuffle?
So I totally agree with the grandparent post. A Shuffle really deserved to be included in this review. Do the Shuffles perform comparably to the other drives mentioned when it comes to transferring files? I have no idea, since it wasn't in the review. I wish I knew.
Just today, I got a friggin' Excel spreadsheet from my distributor. They wanted me to complete it and send it back to them. It would kill me to fork over my hard-earned dough for Microsoft Office, but thanks to OpenOffice.org I never have to. I just fired up the OpenOffice spreadsheet, inserted the data, saved it as an .xls file, and my distributor won't have any idea I don't even own Microsoft Office.
This wasn't the time and place, but whenever I get a chance I tell people they can probably get by with OpenOffice.org instead of purchasing Microsoft Office. OpenOffice 1.1 is more than good enough for most tasks, so I can't wait to see how good 2.0 is. It's always nice to use a fantastic product that also just happens to keep me from having to pay the Microsoft tax.
A funny, but misleading, comment. Slashdot's popularity has little to do with how much spam Taco gets. He could have posted the same contact info at PeterLorreFansUnite.com and the spam spiders still would have found him. He'd be getting roughly the same amount of spam even if his address was posted on one of the most obscure sites on the net.
I publish Vegan.com and until I abandoned the domain for use of email last autumn I was getting something like 2000 spams a day. And as much as I'd like to think otherwise, I suspect Slashdot gets a tiny bit more traffic than Vegan.com ;)
The central idea of this book, which was not really covered in the Slashdot review, is that you should not be using your brain to remember things about work. Every time you have a thought relevant to work -- an idea, a task to accomplish, a goal to achieve -- you should have some kind of information management system in place so that your thought gets recorded for future review and action.
I married Allen's advice with a cheap digital voice recorder and with a great piece of free Windows software called Keynote. Keynote is a tabbed outliner, where each of the main ten or so components to my life each get their own outline (in my case: speaking dates, website development, to do's, etc). It's really the only software that is keeping me using Windows. I use my Mac for nearly everything else.
Getting Things Done is perhaps the only business book that I intend to re-read. If you feel stressed about your work, and have this lingering feeling you're not as effective as you need to be, I really suggest a weekend with this book. Just know that you should be joining its advice with a software solution like Keynote, plus a (real-world) filing cabinet, as you seek to empty the stuff in your brain into its appropriate places.
Oh, and one more thing. Getting Things Done is a great piece of writing. And how often can you say that about a business book?
So it looks like Amazon.com is not only giving this front-page billing, they are also personally paying the credit card transaction fee, in effect losing at least a couple pennies for each dollar contributed.
In other words, they can't be faulted one iota.
Slate just posted an interesting analysis of the differences between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The article indicates that Blu-Ray is a far superior standard, and the only reason that some studios are lining up behind HD-DVD is to spare the expense of buying new production equipment. HD-DVD disks can be made using existing production machinery, whereas Blu-Ray requires all-new equipment to manufacture.
But let's not forget that spam is anything but a value-neutral product. Sure, it doesn't look or taste like there's any real meat in there, but there is. And if you're going to eat the stuff, you ought to know how meat is produced.
It's always bothered me how few people in the tech community are clued into the cruelties associated with factory farming. Hormel is not a company that deserves anyone's praise, and it certainly doesn't deserve free ads on Slashdot.
The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.
I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.
But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.
In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.
To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."
Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.
One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.
By the same token, I bet if some delivery person was putting a thousand unwanted packages in your living room each day, and you couldn't stop him, you would, in fact, choose to move.
Doors: no
Boston: only their last album
Rush: no
Zappa: one obscure collaboration
Springsteen: no
Allman Bros: no
Beach Boys: one obscure CD
Nirvana: no
Guns and Roses: no
Jefferson airplane: no
All in all, this is definitely not a site catering to mainstream rock tastes. Maybe that's why they don't allow searching of their catalog before signup. Now let me hit send and see how long it takes before the first, "Dude, your musical tastes blow," flame.
The more interesting question is, will typing skills remain as essential in ten years as they are today? And to that, I'd say: absolutely...for some people.
I've written several book-length projects. One I did through voice recognition, the others through typing. If you haven't used voice recognition lately, you're in for a shock. On any current computer, the software has no trouble keeping up with you, and if you train it properly, you'll get 95% accuracy.
I'd be stunned if we don't get 99.5% accuracy in ten years. So, will typing be an essential skill then? For some people, perhaps not. But for writers and thinkers, yes.
What I've found, is if I'm trying to communicate something simple and straight forward, voice recognition is better. You can speak close to 200 words a minute, but you're a fantastic typist if you can do 80. So for simple writing, you can double your productivity using voice recognition.
Trouble is, sometimes you can't -- and shouldn't -- think as quickly as you can speak. For making complex arguments, or for writing in a way that carries a rhythym, you're still best off typing -- assuming you know how to type!
And for anyone who's ever had to edit text, let me say that there's no way you could ever edit as accurately and quickly with speech recognition as you could at the keyboard.
I can envision ten years down the road most people doing emails and surfing the web mainly by voice recognition and mouse input. But if typing skills vanish, certain types of writing and communication will suffer enormously. And I worry that tomorrow's creators, trained on voice recognition and never learning to type -- will never realize what they're missing out on.
Picture Hemingway with a microphone and you'll understand. For some writing, there's just no substitute for typing your words directly onto the screen or page.
I'm more than willing to hand over my 30% share of the 27 million dollars left by Sani Abacha, the late Nigerian dictator, if they call off assassinating me.
Naturally, the more extensions you loaded, the more time it took your computer to boot and the more system crashes and incompatibilities occurred. It got to the point that I spent significant time enabling and disabling extensions to try to identify incompatibilities and the sources of my computer crashes. I don't know anything about Mozilla architecture, but might an extension-based Firefox be edging us down that same path?
I know I'd personally prefer it if the Firefox team evaluated the best extensions, and incorporated them into the main code for optimum compatibility.
So here's my question to people familiar with the Mozilla codebase: is my comparison between Pre-OSX Macs and Firefox valid?
I've always thought Microsoft made the best keyboards and mice, but second-rate everything else. Turns out that they also deserve credit for making content sites.
That was the promise way back when the first CD's came out. You'd then buy your the complete discography of your favorite band, thinking that even though you were shelling out $15 a disk, you were getting top quality recordings that were on indestructable media.
Then, five years later, guess what? The record companies remastered and re-released those same tracks. It doesn't matter if your favorite artist is Rush or Cat Stevens or Miles Davis, it all got re-mastered. Doesn't it ever strike you as odd, and perhaps intentional, that the first release of every popular CD was mastered so poorly it needed to be redone just five years later?
So along comes the iTunes store, and we're seeing the same damned thing. Once again, there's promises of how great the music sounds. But instead of crappy mastering, they are using crappy bit rates. And you know exactly where this is leading. Five years from now, they'll bump up their sampling rates to 192 kps or something. And even though you've already bought and paid for all your favorite songs, you're going to be asked to buy them all again if you want the best sound. And in another five years they'll probably jump to uncompressed SACD quality downloads, and you'll feel this big incentive to buy the same songs yet again.
Not that I care. I stopped buying CDs a long time ago. The entire business is run by dishonorable people, and now it looks like that mentality is dragging down one of the computer industry's more principled companies.
Lord forgive me for jumping to the defense of a computer that's been dead nearly 20 years. But somebody's gotta answer this.
I forget what Apple IIe's cost around 1985, but they were well over a grand; actually I think close to two grand...unreachable if you were a high school student mowing lawns. On the other hand, you could get a Commodore for $200, and a disk drive for another $200, plug it up to a TV and you were set.
Additionally, the graphics and especially the sound were much better on the C64 than the Apple IIe. The Commodore had a SID chip, which was polyphonic (I think) and offered four different kinds of sound envelopes. You could even tweak the ADSR...all this on a computer that was released in, what, 1983? The Apples and their tinny speaker sure couldn't do that, not without some expensive add on sound card anyway.
I remember a friend who lived down the block who had an Apple used to always be furious that the same games looked and sounded so much better on my cheap computer than his expensive one.
I think for the time, Commodore made amazing hardware and practically gave it away relative to what others were charging. Really odd to see them dissed over something like this.
Do you really think there's a CIO out there who hasn't yet heard of Linux? That's like suggesting that there's a CFO somewhere who's never heard of SAP or Peoplesoft.
CIOs may not use Linux, they may not even have any interest in using Linux, but by now certainly every CIO has at least heard of it and can probably describe Linux better than half the people on Slashdot.
Overseas, I've had less luck. From my place in Central NY, my Skype calls to a friend in Amsterdam are generally intolerable, although he reports that it works fine when he talks to his brother in Philly. I've had poor but acceptable connections using Skype to talk to a friend in Madrid.
Voice quality has continued to improve slightly with each new release of Skype. But for me, the verdict is Skype is sensational within North America, and barely tolerable or outright unusable for calling overseas.
Still, I wish everyone had broadband and Skype. Even without taking the fact that it's free, it just sounds measurably better than standard long distance calls within the US.
And these days, the magic distance is perhaps a quarter mile.
And you call that progress? ;)
Fr'instance, I have a Thinkpad 600 with 64 MB of RAM. The thing is just sitting in a box right now because I've been unable to find a distribution that will run gracefully on this machine.
And when you think about it, 64 MB is a still a helluva lot of memory to be incapable of running a reasonably current OS. I'm sure (and I sure hope!) that somebody could recommend a Linux distribution that's suitable for a machine like mine. But it says something that I spent at least a couple of hours looking at various obscure distributions, and couldn't find one that did the trick.
Here's a link to the bread machine I was talking about. It uses quick-rise yeast that you can buy in any grocery store. This was the best fifty bucks I've ever spent, and now the unit has dropped to forty bucks. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 05KIR0/qid=1085939586/
Even though I have an affiliate ID with Amazon, I have not embedded it here, since I think it's sleazy when people do that on Slashdot.
TV dinners are industrialized, mass produced slop made from the cheapest ingredients. Even school lunches are gourmet by comparison. And the oddest part about TV dinners is that, even though they are billed as being convenient, since they are frozen food it takes forever until they are ready.
It's Sunday morning and I'm feeling cranky, and I'd like to write several more paragraphs about how awful TV dinners are. But instead, I'm going to rise to the occasion and try to write something genuinely helpful. Below, I'll offer some suggestions on what to eat instead of TV dinners, which are always your worst choice. Everything below is tastier and healthier than TV dinners -- while being just as convenient.
Spaghetti & Tomato sauce -- in the time it takes to boil water and heat up a jar of sauce, you're in business. Usually, I'll take a couple more minutes to mince up some garlic, and saute it in my pan with some olive oil before adding sauce. You can also buy pre-minced garlic in jars in any grocery store.
Most of the time, I'll also grill some fresh peppers in my George Foreman grill to add to the sauce. You can start the peppers as you heat up the water to boil, and they'll be ready to cut up and add to the sauce well before the rest of the meal is ready. Anaheim or bell peppers are great choices.
Grilled Veggies speaking of the George Foreman grill, which you can buy for less than $30 on Amazon, I use this thing all the time for ultra-healthy snacks. You can grill up just about any type of vegetable. My favorites are broccoli and cauliflower. I'll usually break them into pieces, then grill them give minutes or so. Then flip them around in the grill, turn off the power, and keep the grill on them for another five minutes or so. I'll then top with some non-transfatty acid margarine and some flax oil in a serving bowl.
Bread Machine.Amazon.com offers a West Bend bread machine that makes a small loaf suitable for one or two people in less than an hour. You can modify the recipes so that the breads are nearly all whole grain. And it takes only about five minutes to measure out the ingredients. Then, just go away for 45 minutes, and when you get back you've got a piping hot loaf of bread, that costs something like 30 cents even if you've used organic flour.
I hope some of this is helpful. If this inspires you, you can also try some cookbooks geared to convenient and healthy eating. There's one called _The Everyday Vegan_ which I think is especially good as a source of convenient recipes to replace TV dinners. I have no financial interest in the sale of this book; I just think it's great.
So it's odd to see them choose their cheaper brand to be their game box, since game boxes are by definition amped up versions of regular machines.
Maybe they just think Compaq sounds a lot cooler than Hewlett-Packard.
And you understand that if I customarily stick a thumb in your eye everytime I say hello, that this is simply my way of greeting you. No sense in getting worked up that I just stuck a thumb in your eye. You should be more tolerant.
People who go around saying words like unthaw and irregardless are sticking a thumb in the eye of those of us who like language to be clear and not annoying. Of course we understand what's being said--that is not what is at issue.
You seem to be saying that people should be free to violate every rule of grammar and clear speaking without being corrected. "Good lord" indeed.