What about Notepad? that piece of junk has been included with every version of windows since forever, and it hasn't improved one iota. Can microsoft really not spare five minutes for somebody to make a better version of notepad?
I think the system would have to work that way. So when you create the doc, you create it with your own and the company ID as authorized users. Then anyone who is on the company ID list can access it. If you are fired and are off the list, no documents for you! Aren't you relieved that this won't inconvenience your employer?
I'm curious about some of the implications here - in a trusted computing world, would it be possible to turn the tables and make my data trackable? Could I make my email address a trusted document and track who uses it? Keep an eye on where all my data goes, have my credit card info and paypal id as trusted docs? In a way this sound appealing, I'd get to spy on corporate use of my data. But naturally, if this is the case then government/BigCo would want a back door for 'protecting' our safety through anonymous surveillance. And if such a back door exists, how long before it is revealed to the world by hackers? Can such a secret really be kept forever?
Absolutely, is it our fault that people live in slave labor conditions? Of course not. So lets send our money to support those conditions, and hopefully make slave labor the only viable economic model the world over! Then we'll have all the cheap crap we could ever want!
I have a targus backpack and the thing fits in that ok, if only just. The other thing about this laptop, the fan runs all... the... time. And its loud. I like the slightly smaller clevo better, the D470W I think it is. But I'm not really a hardcore gamer, I just use the D900T for work. Still, I'd go with the AMD64 version of the D470W if I was going to do it again.
I think its a good move by Skype to establish a presence in brick-and-mortar stores. A few weeks ago I was shopping for VOIP, and if you walk into circuit city all you see is Vonage, no skype handsets or anything. Having skype merchandise out there in the real world brings in new customers that missed it on the internet, and it also gives credability to the service. If someone sees it at best buy or circuit city they'll know its more than another fly-by-night internet venture.
... at home, and both of them had the thumb switch fail. I ended up hacksawing the handle off and gluing the switch back with some epoxy and model airplane parts. It worked ok, but I'm not really convinced these are the way to go anymore. Now I use the touchpad on my laptop, and a cheap laser mouse on my entertainment pc, and they both work fine. BTW, this is from when the '3M' mouse was sold under a different brand name about 5 years ago. Its an old design, and it looks like the switches still suck. But the reviewer is wrong about gaming with them, I played quake II and whatever else with them just fine.
I think that's a new record for azureus on my machine. Downloaded in 3min flat.
Palm bought, and abandoned, BeOS
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
When they palm bought BeOS I expected an ARM powered, BeOS-based PDA to be forthcoming, one that could run old palm legacy apps in emulation mode or something, and have the technical advantages of BeOS. No, instead BeOS was banished to a vault someplace, never to be heard from again. What a waste! And PalmOS seems hardly different from when it first came out. Where is the continued development?
And with the phones, I think there isn't a single palm phone available that uses the ARM processor. Where are the ARM based palm phones? Has palm been too busy to write the code to run a phone on a non-dragonball machine?
PalmOS be lame in certain ways, but at least joe programmer can develop an app for it, unlike most phones out there, which are locked down with DRM. There's a certain naive openness to the system that is being found less and less in the mainstream of handheld tech. It would be ironic if the last bastion of openness on a handheld was on a windows device.
So, where are the linux based phone PDAs? Does such a thing exist? And if so, does any major cell network support it? As much control as the cell network love to have, it seems unlikely.
Yes, we all agree our IP system is broken. What I want to know is, who is out there lobbying to change it? Is there a political organization dedicated to patent reform? If such a thing exists, they can certainly count on a donation from me.
So I think the consensus is that most slashdot readers are opposed to software patents. So what?
The question is, what are we going to do about it? Where do I send my check for 100$ to get somebody lobbying senators and etc?
There was a badass beam in that one, where the decomposing giant warrior releases his atomic blast on the Ohmu. Its was so must more violent than what I was expecting, it really took me by surprise. A beam for the record books!
This argument that because consoles are better now no one will buy PC games anymore is ridiculous. As long as people have PCs they will want to play games on them. There are a lot of people that want to play games, but they are limited to either a PC or a console but not both. People that need to use a computer for work or school will not be buying consoles. That doesn't mean they won't play games just because consoles are better for that.
Yeh, like firewire dominance on the desktop...
on
Apple Backs Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
Apple's endorsement of something doesn't inspire any confidence in its 'future dominance' from me. Isn't apple the poster child of the one-brand standard?
Bah. The hubble had to be hacked in the first place because they made the lens wrong and no one noticed before launch. Because of the initial screwups, the hubble has never been able to achieve its full potential anyway. It'd be better to have one that was built right from the start.
Anyway, by your reasoning no one would ever build a new house, we'd all still be living in caves. "We've got this cave now, there's no guarantee your hut will get built, let's concentrate on this cave we've got already."
It seems like it might be possible for some company somewhere to make a console that uses linux as the OS, using commodity hardware. Have a special distribution preinstalled on the box (or even on flash memory or something) that has very limited functionality. Games written for this platform would have to run in a very standard way, and run with very standard libs and resources. There would be no installation of games, they would just run off the CD like they do on the playstation or whatever.
If such a device could be popular, then games written for it might also run on regular PCs, kind of as an afterthought. But the main market would be the kind of folks that don't ever want to install anything, just put in the disk and start playing.
Anyway, wouldn't it be neat if there was a major game console out there, and all its games just happened to run on linux.
"That it would make more financial sense to step back to the borders and allow the Sunni-Shite-Kurd war to happen, and then move to secure the Basra area up the Euphrates towards Baghdad after the war exhausts the means of war?"
Um, yeah. That's the main thing is that we do what makes the most financial sense, regardless of the human cost. Wouldn't it make even more financial sense to just nuke the whole area to a sheet of glass, then go get the oil? It would be a lot more economical without having to deal with all those people out there. Or maybe we can get saddam back! Or another heartless dictator just like him! As long as we get our oil, who cares!
I'd really like to see multiple calendars on the palm. Right now all categories of events have to reside in the same calendar, I'd like to be able to have just family stuff (like birthdays) on one calendar, have a business calendar, and then a personal calendar, and then all of the above.
Currently the palm is fine for my needs, but that's because I only use the basics these days. It is true that there has been little innovation from Palm in the past 5 years. Just little details here or there, nothing really revolutionary. I expected something big from them when they bought the BeOS, but it looks like that was simply filed away for use by no one. Too bad! This wouldn't really bother me much except that I like Palm and I'd like to see them succeed. The truth is that eventually palmtops will be as capable as desktops, and palmtop makers will need to be ready for that reality. From this standpoint microsoft has a huge advantage over Palm in the future, since Palm has no desktop capable platform. Palm's only hope here is that they seem to have (or had in the past) an ease-of-use advantage, and a simplicity and reliability that microsoft has traditionally lacked. What palm really needs is a powerful work-of-art trendy eye candy OS that is be strong enough to be used as a full on work/game platform as well as a palmtop OS. Maybe its time for apple to take the stage here again? OSXNewtonPod anyone?
I think most of the issues the author raises are pretty minor. Saving a mouse click here or there is convenient, yes, but its trivial compared to real usability issues like how do I use this application without reading a manual? Large, well placed, and convenient buttons are useless if the user doesn't know what to do with them. Having a good help system that explains the purpose of the different elements of an app is essential. There's nothing worse that being stuck in a completely opaque application with no clue as to how to proceed, and the help system has no answers. For me this kind of program is CAD or (at first) the GIMP. For some users this opaque program is mozilla or outlook. From what I've seen these programs don't really cater to the beginning user that well, there's nothing to really explain the basics like what is email, the difference bewteen a browser and the internet, what is a scroll bar, etc.
Which brings me to the topic of widgets. Why can't you help-click on anything in your gui and have it explain itself? One obvious problem with such an elaborate help system like that is that the infrastructure for it is a lot of work to build. Why should I have to explain what a scroll bar is to some noob, I'm trying to write an email client here! That's why the widgets should have help built in to them.
The other thing is that a lot of the author's issues are with widgets, like scroll bars that don't go to the edge of the screen. Like most developers have control over that! 99% of developers will never bother to develop their own scroll bars to get that extra pixel. And if they did, every application would have different widgets, and that would suck too.
All that said, I do like the point about only showing the user what is really needed. Lately as the app I've been working on has grown, the menus and toolbars have begun to look more and more intimidating. Its much better to keep what the user can see down to a small set of frequently used items, and tuck the esoterica away. Otherwise they end up having to ask themselves whether they are supposed to know what every obscure menu item does, and its a lot of work to know what is important and what may be safely ignored. And that's what I want to minimize: the amount of knowledge the user needs to know to get the job done.
I kind of hate to see a program shut down that is acheiving its goals, even though they may not be the main focus of NASA as a whole. Hypersonic flight could really be a useful technology! Unfortunately the thing that it seems most useful for is cruise missiles. On the other hand, it would be a great conventional missile interceptor.
I'd like to see a new feature in bittorrent where you could subscribe to a specific series from a server. Then when the new episode becomes available your bittorrent client would automatically start the download. Kind of a mix between tivo and bittorrent. That way you don't have to keep monitoring suprnova or whatever waiting for whatever it is to appear.
How about this for a business model: Content providers make their shows available through bittorrent, but with ads embedded. Since these torrents are the first available of the show, people who are waiting for the show would download them first. You get all the customers who want to see the show right away, and are willing to tolerance a few ads. Bittorrent statistics would accurately show how many people are out there watching the ads.
Since I started downloading a lot of anime, I've almost completely stopped watching regular TV. I keep my computer at home on all the time and start downloads on it from work with VNC, which gets me more than enough programming to watch, probably way too much actually. Anyway, to me the main thing that would make this process easier would be a bittorrent client that could subscribe to a regularly released series so I don't have to keep checking sites for the latest torrent. This could be an enhancement to the regular bittorrent server, where the server offers a number of subscriptions. If your bittorrent client registers with the server as a subscriber, the torrent server would send you the torrent file whenever a new release becomes available. This makes bittorrent servers into subscription servers with a relatively minor enhancement, and suddenly bittorrent is working like TIVO.
Slashdot Mirror
What about Notepad? that piece of junk has been included with every version of windows since forever, and it hasn't improved one iota. Can microsoft really not spare five minutes for somebody to make a better version of notepad?
I think the system would have to work that way. So when you create the doc, you create it with your own and the company ID as authorized users. Then anyone who is on the company ID list can access it. If you are fired and are off the list, no documents for you! Aren't you relieved that this won't inconvenience your employer?
I'm curious about some of the implications here - in a trusted computing world, would it be possible to turn the tables and make my data trackable? Could I make my email address a trusted document and track who uses it? Keep an eye on where all my data goes, have my credit card info and paypal id as trusted docs? In a way this sound appealing, I'd get to spy on corporate use of my data. But naturally, if this is the case then government/BigCo would want a back door for 'protecting' our safety through anonymous surveillance. And if such a back door exists, how long before it is revealed to the world by hackers? Can such a secret really be kept forever?
Absolutely, is it our fault that people live in slave labor conditions? Of course not. So lets send our money to support those conditions, and hopefully make slave labor the only viable economic model the world over! Then we'll have all the cheap crap we could ever want!
I have a targus backpack and the thing fits in that ok, if only just. The other thing about this laptop, the fan runs all... the... time. And its loud. I like the slightly smaller clevo better, the D470W I think it is. But I'm not really a hardcore gamer, I just use the D900T for work. Still, I'd go with the AMD64 version of the D470W if I was going to do it again.
I think its a good move by Skype to establish a presence in brick-and-mortar stores. A few weeks ago I was shopping for VOIP, and if you walk into circuit city all you see is Vonage, no skype handsets or anything. Having skype merchandise out there in the real world brings in new customers that missed it on the internet, and it also gives credability to the service. If someone sees it at best buy or circuit city they'll know its more than another fly-by-night internet venture.
And i forgot to mention, they also make my thumb ache after a while.
... at home, and both of them had the thumb switch fail. I ended up hacksawing the handle off and gluing the switch back with some epoxy and model airplane parts. It worked ok, but I'm not really convinced these are the way to go anymore. Now I use the touchpad on my laptop, and a cheap laser mouse on my entertainment pc, and they both work fine. BTW, this is from when the '3M' mouse was sold under a different brand name about 5 years ago. Its an old design, and it looks like the switches still suck. But the reviewer is wrong about gaming with them, I played quake II and whatever else with them just fine.
I think that's a new record for azureus on my machine. Downloaded in 3min flat.
When they palm bought BeOS I expected an ARM powered, BeOS-based PDA to be forthcoming, one that could run old palm legacy apps in emulation mode or something, and have the technical advantages of BeOS. No, instead BeOS was banished to a vault someplace, never to be heard from again. What a waste! And PalmOS seems hardly different from when it first came out. Where is the continued development?
And with the phones, I think there isn't a single palm phone available that uses the ARM processor. Where are the ARM based palm phones? Has palm been too busy to write the code to run a phone on a non-dragonball machine?
PalmOS be lame in certain ways, but at least joe programmer can develop an app for it, unlike most phones out there, which are locked down with DRM. There's a certain naive openness to the system that is being found less and less in the mainstream of handheld tech. It would be ironic if the last bastion of openness on a handheld was on a windows device.
So, where are the linux based phone PDAs? Does such a thing exist? And if so, does any major cell network support it? As much control as the cell network love to have, it seems unlikely.
Yes, we all agree our IP system is broken. What I want to know is, who is out there lobbying to change it? Is there a political organization dedicated to patent reform? If such a thing exists, they can certainly count on a donation from me.
So I think the consensus is that most slashdot readers are opposed to software patents. So what? The question is, what are we going to do about it? Where do I send my check for 100$ to get somebody lobbying senators and etc?
There was a badass beam in that one, where the decomposing giant warrior releases his atomic blast on the Ohmu. Its was so must more violent than what I was expecting, it really took me by surprise. A beam for the record books!
This argument that because consoles are better now no one will buy PC games anymore is ridiculous. As long as people have PCs they will want to play games on them. There are a lot of people that want to play games, but they are limited to either a PC or a console but not both. People that need to use a computer for work or school will not be buying consoles. That doesn't mean they won't play games just because consoles are better for that.
Apple's endorsement of something doesn't inspire any confidence in its 'future dominance' from me. Isn't apple the poster child of the one-brand standard?
Yeah, but by the time the hubble upgrades are ready there will be even newer and better hubble upgrades if only the launch were delayed. So what?
Bah. The hubble had to be hacked in the first place because they made the lens wrong and no one noticed before launch. Because of the initial screwups, the hubble has never been able to achieve its full potential anyway. It'd be better to have one that was built right from the start. Anyway, by your reasoning no one would ever build a new house, we'd all still be living in caves. "We've got this cave now, there's no guarantee your hut will get built, let's concentrate on this cave we've got already."
It seems like it might be possible for some company somewhere to make a console that uses linux as the OS, using commodity hardware. Have a special distribution preinstalled on the box (or even on flash memory or something) that has very limited functionality. Games written for this platform would have to run in a very standard way, and run with very standard libs and resources. There would be no installation of games, they would just run off the CD like they do on the playstation or whatever. If such a device could be popular, then games written for it might also run on regular PCs, kind of as an afterthought. But the main market would be the kind of folks that don't ever want to install anything, just put in the disk and start playing. Anyway, wouldn't it be neat if there was a major game console out there, and all its games just happened to run on linux.
"That it would make more financial sense to step back to the borders and allow the Sunni-Shite-Kurd war to happen, and then move to secure the Basra area up the Euphrates towards Baghdad after the war exhausts the means of war?" Um, yeah. That's the main thing is that we do what makes the most financial sense, regardless of the human cost. Wouldn't it make even more financial sense to just nuke the whole area to a sheet of glass, then go get the oil? It would be a lot more economical without having to deal with all those people out there. Or maybe we can get saddam back! Or another heartless dictator just like him! As long as we get our oil, who cares!
I'd really like to see multiple calendars on the palm. Right now all categories of events have to reside in the same calendar, I'd like to be able to have just family stuff (like birthdays) on one calendar, have a business calendar, and then a personal calendar, and then all of the above. Currently the palm is fine for my needs, but that's because I only use the basics these days. It is true that there has been little innovation from Palm in the past 5 years. Just little details here or there, nothing really revolutionary. I expected something big from them when they bought the BeOS, but it looks like that was simply filed away for use by no one. Too bad! This wouldn't really bother me much except that I like Palm and I'd like to see them succeed. The truth is that eventually palmtops will be as capable as desktops, and palmtop makers will need to be ready for that reality. From this standpoint microsoft has a huge advantage over Palm in the future, since Palm has no desktop capable platform. Palm's only hope here is that they seem to have (or had in the past) an ease-of-use advantage, and a simplicity and reliability that microsoft has traditionally lacked. What palm really needs is a powerful work-of-art trendy eye candy OS that is be strong enough to be used as a full on work/game platform as well as a palmtop OS. Maybe its time for apple to take the stage here again? OSXNewtonPod anyone?
I think most of the issues the author raises are pretty minor. Saving a mouse click here or there is convenient, yes, but its trivial compared to real usability issues like how do I use this application without reading a manual? Large, well placed, and convenient buttons are useless if the user doesn't know what to do with them. Having a good help system that explains the purpose of the different elements of an app is essential. There's nothing worse that being stuck in a completely opaque application with no clue as to how to proceed, and the help system has no answers. For me this kind of program is CAD or (at first) the GIMP. For some users this opaque program is mozilla or outlook. From what I've seen these programs don't really cater to the beginning user that well, there's nothing to really explain the basics like what is email, the difference bewteen a browser and the internet, what is a scroll bar, etc.
Which brings me to the topic of widgets. Why can't you help-click on anything in your gui and have it explain itself? One obvious problem with such an elaborate help system like that is that the infrastructure for it is a lot of work to build. Why should I have to explain what a scroll bar is to some noob, I'm trying to write an email client here! That's why the widgets should have help built in to them.
The other thing is that a lot of the author's issues are with widgets, like scroll bars that don't go to the edge of the screen. Like most developers have control over that! 99% of developers will never bother to develop their own scroll bars to get that extra pixel. And if they did, every application would have different widgets, and that would suck too.
All that said, I do like the point about only showing the user what is really needed. Lately as the app I've been working on has grown, the menus and toolbars have begun to look more and more intimidating. Its much better to keep what the user can see down to a small set of frequently used items, and tuck the esoterica away. Otherwise they end up having to ask themselves whether they are supposed to know what every obscure menu item does, and its a lot of work to know what is important and what may be safely ignored. And that's what I want to minimize: the amount of knowledge the user needs to know to get the job done.
I kind of hate to see a program shut down that is acheiving its goals, even though they may not be the main focus of NASA as a whole. Hypersonic flight could really be a useful technology! Unfortunately the thing that it seems most useful for is cruise missiles. On the other hand, it would be a great conventional missile interceptor.
I'd like to see a new feature in bittorrent where you could subscribe to a specific series from a server. Then when the new episode becomes available your bittorrent client would automatically start the download. Kind of a mix between tivo and bittorrent. That way you don't have to keep monitoring suprnova or whatever waiting for whatever it is to appear. How about this for a business model: Content providers make their shows available through bittorrent, but with ads embedded. Since these torrents are the first available of the show, people who are waiting for the show would download them first. You get all the customers who want to see the show right away, and are willing to tolerance a few ads. Bittorrent statistics would accurately show how many people are out there watching the ads.
Since I started downloading a lot of anime, I've almost completely stopped watching regular TV. I keep my computer at home on all the time and start downloads on it from work with VNC, which gets me more than enough programming to watch, probably way too much actually. Anyway, to me the main thing that would make this process easier would be a bittorrent client that could subscribe to a regularly released series so I don't have to keep checking sites for the latest torrent. This could be an enhancement to the regular bittorrent server, where the server offers a number of subscriptions. If your bittorrent client registers with the server as a subscriber, the torrent server would send you the torrent file whenever a new release becomes available. This makes bittorrent servers into subscription servers with a relatively minor enhancement, and suddenly bittorrent is working like TIVO.
And here's the link: http://www.inc.com/magazine/19980601/939.html