Cool, it would be. But better would be if they eliminated the keyboard completely in favor of a docking port that would connect easily as you slid the tablet (in portrait or landscape configuration) into an inexpensive tablet stand, which in turn was connected to a real life-sized keyboard.
This is what I've been waiting for. Then I could get the stand/keyboard combinations for the office, home, and one to stick in my suitcase while traveling. That would be the best of both worlds.
Who cares? If you've got a system that allows millions of attempts, you've got a fundamentally flawed system. If someone can get read access to your/etc/passwd file, you're fucked. Plain and simple.
By having a password policy requires two numeric digits, you've just simplified my job. By requiring a special character, you've done me another favor (if I know your rules - which are probably available to anyone who brings up the subject of "stupid password policies" at a bar.
I think it's not a bad team building thing to have some beer with the office-folk on Friday afternoons. I worked in one company where the executives opened up the bar in the boardroom on Friday evenings. Not for everyone though.
People simply aren't machines... they require more than just food, drink, and sleep.
Ok, sex then. Food, drink, sex, then sleep. Yep, that's pretty much it.
Your bring up a good point. Most of us here equate computer usage with productivity and that's not necessarily the case. My wife was an executive secretary at a large corporation. Naturally, the IT dept put the most advanced machines on the desks of executives to try to get them to see the light.
They loved the prestige of having the coolest sleek machines, but that was about it. What IT didn't realize was that these folks already had intelligent agents equipped with voice recognition, a natural language interface, grammer correction, data mining capabilities, etc., etc., etc. It will still be some years before workstations catch up with secretaries.
One day my wife came home angry about a specific frustration her boss was having. I listened and wrote a program that solved the problem within the context of the above. She installed it the next day and he loved it. And I found out that that was the first time in history that he began to consistantly turn on his computer every day.
That was very gratifying (and the shareware version has earned me some money). But it just goes to show that some people just don't use computers - therefore, trying to measure their productivity based upon their use thereof is iffy at best.
Perhaps they know that a ruling would go against them. So, rather than quietly killing the work, they go on the offensive to make sure that there's a lawsuit that will be reported on. Using a few lawyers to get a few million click-thrus may not be such a bad deal.
Have I told you about my idea to use a data glove and VR goggles to create a virtual Rolodex?
Seriously, If I could do a one off technical manual inexpensively, I might be really interested in this. I long for the days when I could lie on the couch and browse a tree-based manual. Search features are nice when you know basically what your looking for, but paper ergonomics are much better when you're just browsing/flipping.
In this case, open source might cause problems. Sure, the community might be able to make significant improvements to the software, but that has to be backed up by their ability to actually make the part.
"Dear sir, we regret to inform you that we are unable to fulfill your order for 9,000 nuclear reactors done in a 17th century baroque style and constructed entirely of carbon nanotubes."
In a VAX/VMS shop I used to work in our biggest problem was that because we rebooted so infrequently, we had no idea what to expect when we finally did. We'd have 18 months worth of new installs and invariably some necessary servers and/or processes would not make their way into the boot script.
I have cable broadband at home and wouldn't dream of charging that back to my employer regardless of how much it might be used for work. However, I also had a company provided cell phone and not only did they pay for it, they gave me (and others) an annual bonus for carrying it (and, well, answering it when it rang...).
But a job is like many things in life. You have tradeoffs. If your job is wonderful otherwise and you just disagree philosophically on this one point, then shell out the bucks and focus on performing to the extent that your raises will cover the new expenses. But I think I'd want to understand whether these requests are quirks or symptomatic of a larger employee relations issue.
As a fan of American open wheel racing (and technology), I wish that NASCAR and oval racing series could be viewed as a niche sport for the deep south. But the reality is that *any* NASCAR race now gets better TV ratings than the Indianapolis 500.
Jeff Gordon, not Sam Hornish or Paul Tracy, stands beside Britney Spears in the pantheon of Pepsi-Cola endorsemement dieties.
Today, $5M/car is about the starting point in Champ Car racing. So if you wanted to buy an entire generic grid it would cost you about $90M. But to win you'd want to spend more.
Ironically, in the more affordable IRL you're going to spend more than that because of subsidies offered by Toyota and Honda. And for that extra investment you get to go around the Milwaukee oval about 10 MPH slower than the Champ Cars this year.
The F1 cars are absolutely astounding. But a lot of that expense is arguably needless. Steve Matchet (sp?) is an ex-F1 Engineer turned announcer and he will readily concede the point that once everyone has, for instance, carbon fiber suspension wishbones (as opposed to the steel ones mandated in Indy and Champ Cars), the advantage is gone and you're just spending money to keep up.
The CART safety team does the same thing. They visit the local facilities, have meetings, learn the setup and operation of the hospitals, arrange for the complete medical records of all the drivers to be on site, etc. It's pretty amazing.
All of them are very good, but I think that CART has been at the forefront.
It's true that Mansell won the CART championship as a rookie and Michael Andretti washed out of F1. But the reasons were more about commitment than the quality of CART's talent pool.
Mansell moved across the pond to Florida. Andretti tried to commute to Europe from Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, he did earn some kind words of respect from the late great Ayrton Senna, and did finally manage a podium finish before his premature departure from F1.
However, as an epilogue, it should be noted that upon returning to CART, Michael Andretti won the very first race against Mansell and the rest of the field. In fact, in his second season, Mansell wasn't able to accomplish much at all against the CART field.
Since that time, CART has had two drivers graduate quickly to F1 success and two who haven't been that impressive.
CART's assets were bought by OWRS as a means to continue to the "Bridgestone Presents The Champ Cap World Series Powered By Ford". Many 'CART' teams have gone to the IRL - started by the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - the cause of the current schism in American Open-wheel racing.
The Champ Car series is still commonly called CART, but that is waning.
I think they're both flawed because they both require a music collection. I don't want a music collection. I want all the songs in the world available to me.
I want to go to a web site and check off on artists/songs and build my own playlists (or choose an album to listen to). I also want it to be able to slip in some songs/artists that I didn't know about that others with similar interests have checked on their playlists (give a an Add/Delete button for when I don't like the automated choice).
In return you can serve me targeted ads. Or, if I want, I'll pay for x minutes of commercial-free serving. Just do it. I'll buy it.
1/3 is a relatively minor percentage, but could wind up to be a major pain. With that 1/3 comes fiduciary responsibilities, probably external board representation, and government oversight.
I think the key question is: Why? Ashamed as I am to say it, I haven't RTFA, but I've just watched a favorite company of mine pretty much ruined after going public. In this case, they raised a bunch of capital and then just sat on it. It became clear that they never needed it in the first place and then the downsides of being a public company stated to appear. It now trades for 1/60th of its peak and is being taken private again in a much weaker position.
If Google has a plan for the capital, fine. But if it doesn't, this could be very bad.
The skunkworks promise bothers me. It may sound cool to do research, but you're effectively taken out of day-to-day operations where you can be cut loose without any short term effects other than the cost savings.
That's a very interesting point, but the converse needs to be considered as well: People may die trying to claim the X Prize while NASA is in a cautious mode. This could send a far different message.
Copyright laws are fine. They make the GPL possible fer chrissakes.
If I write a song and don't want anyone to hear it, that should be my right. If I want to charge $100 per listen, fine. If I want to place it in the public domain, I can do so. I could even GPL it.
No. The problem is not with copyright law, it's with a bureaucratic elimination of competition. IMHO, it's insane that anyone should be demanding distribution methods that the free market can easily provide, as the argument goes, because it would be so damn popular.
But what I've recently realized is that the whole take on the issue is rather short sighted.
Ask yourself what the real problem is. Most will probably say 'I can't make copies of my music for my own use'. Or, 'I can't preview music for free'.
With regards to the former point, people in computer science must recognize that duplication of data (except for Backup/QOS purposes) is an evil thing. How much time, effort and storage media is wasted by storing a song in a gazillion places - by a gazillion people?
If any network administrator discovered that the file containing the company's phone directory was stored locally on 400 machines, he'd have a fit.
Much better is to have it stored in a central location where anyone can access it at any time. And, it can be backed up/mirrored to make sure it's always accessible.
So the solution is central storage. Streaming audio is very do-able over broadband today. Wireless shouldn't be too awfully far behind. Your current system with CD rack/jukeboxes and/or multi-gigabyte MP3 storage can devolve into a wired/wireless receiver that will be served whatever you wish.
You'll be able to create your own playlists in many different ways. In short, you'll be the programming director of your very own set of radio stations - each of which, you can select at will.
Yeah, it will cost something. In most cases it will mean (nicely targeted) commercials inserted by the servers. But it would be a trivial thing to allow/encourage commercial free programming for a monthly fee.
And the artists would get a micro-cent every time their song is selected. Seems fair. 'Course if the had a problem with this, the could release their songs (or just a demo song) as 'zero-credit'. In other words, no charge. And the end-user could select these exclusively.
I know that there are a lot of system administrators out there that actually like to manage data. I just want it to be there when I want it. All of it.
A) While it might be a fun hack to find a way to run Linux on an X-Box, why would anyone want M$ involved? As soon as it's approved, it's no longer an interesting hack.
Okay, maybe a killer game is released only for the Lin-X-Box. So now Linux is supporting M$ hardware sales?
B) Why should Bill Gates care if such 'exploits' are released? Such an thing can't become a real success until there's a major (read: sue-able) distribution point.
IMHO, there's no inherent reason why they couldn't be good for gaming. In fact, for some games they could be vastly superior (think: Playing while lying on the couch - not necessarily good for a shoot 'em up, but much more ergonomic for a strategy game).
I think a key thing people miss is that these aren't supposed to be special purpose machines. They're just slightly ahead of their time. I'm envisioning these things as a near panacea for me.
Imagine walking around the office holding it like a clipboard and, say, granting a user access to a resource without having to go back to your desk. Then scribble a few notes in a meeting and got back to your desk and drop it into the stand and use your real keyboard for some serious coding (getting a recharge along the way).
When the quittin' horn goes off you toss it into the car and let it serve up MP3's wirelessly to you car speakers. Then out of the car into the house and it switches to your home speakers. Then time for an e-book on the couch, then in front of the TV to get realtime timing and scoring for the big race (scribbling in a few chatroom entries along the way).
Then drop it into you home stand to use you real keyboard and mouse to take care of the day's e-mail.
This all would make a nice commercial. But I haven't seen a commercial for a tablet PC yet. That may be part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, it would be. But better would be if they eliminated the keyboard completely in favor of a docking port that would connect easily as you slid the tablet (in portrait or landscape configuration) into an inexpensive tablet stand, which in turn was connected to a real life-sized keyboard.
This is what I've been waiting for. Then I could get the stand/keyboard combinations for the office, home, and one to stick in my suitcase while traveling. That would be the best of both worlds.
Who cares? If you've got a system that allows millions of attempts, you've got a fundamentally flawed system. If someone can get read access to your /etc/passwd file, you're fucked. Plain and simple.
By having a password policy requires two numeric digits, you've just simplified my job. By requiring a special character, you've done me another favor (if I know your rules - which are probably available to anyone who brings up the subject of "stupid password policies" at a bar.
I think it's not a bad team building thing to have some beer with the office-folk on Friday afternoons. I worked in one company where the executives opened up the bar in the boardroom on Friday evenings. Not for everyone though.
People simply aren't machines... they require more than just food, drink, and sleep. Ok, sex then. Food, drink, sex, then sleep. Yep, that's pretty much it.
Your bring up a good point. Most of us here equate computer usage with productivity and that's not necessarily the case. My wife was an executive secretary at a large corporation. Naturally, the IT dept put the most advanced machines on the desks of executives to try to get them to see the light.
They loved the prestige of having the coolest sleek machines, but that was about it. What IT didn't realize was that these folks already had intelligent agents equipped with voice recognition, a natural language interface, grammer correction, data mining capabilities, etc., etc., etc. It will still be some years before workstations catch up with secretaries.
One day my wife came home angry about a specific frustration her boss was having. I listened and wrote a program that solved the problem within the context of the above. She installed it the next day and he loved it. And I found out that that was the first time in history that he began to consistantly turn on his computer every day.
That was very gratifying (and the shareware version has earned me some money). But it just goes to show that some people just don't use computers - therefore, trying to measure their productivity based upon their use thereof is iffy at best.
Perhaps they know that a ruling would go against them. So, rather than quietly killing the work, they go on the offensive to make sure that there's a lawsuit that will be reported on. Using a few lawyers to get a few million click-thrus may not be such a bad deal.
Have I told you about my idea to use a data glove and VR goggles to create a virtual Rolodex?
Seriously, If I could do a one off technical manual inexpensively, I might be really interested in this. I long for the days when I could lie on the couch and browse a tree-based manual. Search features are nice when you know basically what your looking for, but paper ergonomics are much better when you're just browsing/flipping.
In this case, open source might cause problems. Sure, the community might be able to make significant improvements to the software, but that has to be backed up by their ability to actually make the part.
"Dear sir, we regret to inform you that we are unable to fulfill your order for 9,000 nuclear reactors done in a 17th century baroque style and constructed entirely of carbon nanotubes."
In a VAX/VMS shop I used to work in our biggest problem was that because we rebooted so infrequently, we had no idea what to expect when we finally did. We'd have 18 months worth of new installs and invariably some necessary servers and/or processes would not make their way into the boot script.
I have cable broadband at home and wouldn't dream of charging that back to my employer regardless of how much it might be used for work. However, I also had a company provided cell phone and not only did they pay for it, they gave me (and others) an annual bonus for carrying it (and, well, answering it when it rang...).
But a job is like many things in life. You have tradeoffs. If your job is wonderful otherwise and you just disagree philosophically on this one point, then shell out the bucks and focus on performing to the extent that your raises will cover the new expenses. But I think I'd want to understand whether these requests are quirks or symptomatic of a larger employee relations issue.
Back up this statement with facts, Coward. Or better yet: make a movie about it, and distribute worldwide. :-)
>This guy already did.
As a fan of American open wheel racing (and technology), I wish that NASCAR and oval racing series could be viewed as a niche sport for the deep south. But the reality is that *any* NASCAR race now gets better TV ratings than the Indianapolis 500.
Jeff Gordon, not Sam Hornish or Paul Tracy, stands beside Britney Spears in the pantheon of Pepsi-Cola endorsemement dieties.
Today, $5M/car is about the starting point in Champ Car racing. So if you wanted to buy an entire generic grid it would cost you about $90M. But to win you'd want to spend more. Ironically, in the more affordable IRL you're going to spend more than that because of subsidies offered by Toyota and Honda. And for that extra investment you get to go around the Milwaukee oval about 10 MPH slower than the Champ Cars this year. The F1 cars are absolutely astounding. But a lot of that expense is arguably needless. Steve Matchet (sp?) is an ex-F1 Engineer turned announcer and he will readily concede the point that once everyone has, for instance, carbon fiber suspension wishbones (as opposed to the steel ones mandated in Indy and Champ Cars), the advantage is gone and you're just spending money to keep up.
The CART safety team does the same thing. They visit the local facilities, have meetings, learn the setup and operation of the hospitals, arrange for the complete medical records of all the drivers to be on site, etc. It's pretty amazing. All of them are very good, but I think that CART has been at the forefront.
It's true that Mansell won the CART championship as a rookie and Michael Andretti washed out of F1. But the reasons were more about commitment than the quality of CART's talent pool.
Mansell moved across the pond to Florida. Andretti tried to commute to Europe from Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, he did earn some kind words of respect from the late great Ayrton Senna, and did finally manage a podium finish before his premature departure from F1.
However, as an epilogue, it should be noted that upon returning to CART, Michael Andretti won the very first race against Mansell and the rest of the field. In fact, in his second season, Mansell wasn't able to accomplish much at all against the CART field.
Since that time, CART has had two drivers graduate quickly to F1 success and two who haven't been that impressive.
CART's assets were bought by OWRS as a means to continue to the "Bridgestone Presents The Champ Cap World Series Powered By Ford". Many 'CART' teams have gone to the IRL - started by the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - the cause of the current schism in American Open-wheel racing.
The Champ Car series is still commonly called CART, but that is waning.
I think they're both flawed because they both require a music collection. I don't want a music collection. I want all the songs in the world available to me.
I want to go to a web site and check off on artists/songs and build my own playlists (or choose an album to listen to). I also want it to be able to slip in some songs/artists that I didn't know about that others with similar interests have checked on their playlists (give a an Add/Delete button for when I don't like the automated choice).
In return you can serve me targeted ads. Or, if I want, I'll pay for x minutes of commercial-free serving. Just do it. I'll buy it.
1/3 is a relatively minor percentage, but could wind up to be a major pain. With that 1/3 comes fiduciary responsibilities, probably external board representation, and government oversight.
I think the key question is: Why? Ashamed as I am to say it, I haven't RTFA, but I've just watched a favorite company of mine pretty much ruined after going public. In this case, they raised a bunch of capital and then just sat on it. It became clear that they never needed it in the first place and then the downsides of being a public company stated to appear. It now trades for 1/60th of its peak and is being taken private again in a much weaker position.
If Google has a plan for the capital, fine. But if it doesn't, this could be very bad.
Google news search for World Solar Challenge (sorted by descending date)
12-sided ones to be exact.
The skunkworks promise bothers me. It may sound cool to do research, but you're effectively taken out of day-to-day operations where you can be cut loose without any short term effects other than the cost savings.
That's a very interesting point, but the converse needs to be considered as well: People may die trying to claim the X Prize while NASA is in a cautious mode. This could send a far different message.
Copyright laws are fine. They make the GPL possible fer chrissakes.
If I write a song and don't want anyone to hear it, that should be my right. If I want to charge $100 per listen, fine. If I want to place it in the public domain, I can do so. I could even GPL it.
No. The problem is not with copyright law, it's with a bureaucratic elimination of competition. IMHO, it's insane that anyone should be demanding distribution methods that the free market can easily provide, as the argument goes, because it would be so damn popular.
But what I've recently realized is that the whole take on the issue is rather short sighted.
Ask yourself what the real problem is. Most will probably say 'I can't make copies of my music for my own use'. Or, 'I can't preview music for free'.
With regards to the former point, people in computer science must recognize that duplication of data (except for Backup/QOS purposes) is an evil thing. How much time, effort and storage media is wasted by storing a song in a gazillion places - by a gazillion people?
If any network administrator discovered that the file containing the company's phone directory was stored locally on 400 machines, he'd have a fit.
Much better is to have it stored in a central location where anyone can access it at any time. And, it can be backed up/mirrored to make sure it's always accessible.
So the solution is central storage. Streaming audio is very do-able over broadband today. Wireless shouldn't be too awfully far behind. Your current system with CD rack/jukeboxes and/or multi-gigabyte MP3 storage can devolve into a wired/wireless receiver that will be served whatever you wish.
You'll be able to create your own playlists in many different ways. In short, you'll be the programming director of your very own set of radio stations - each of which, you can select at will.
Yeah, it will cost something. In most cases it will mean (nicely targeted) commercials inserted by the servers. But it would be a trivial thing to allow/encourage commercial free programming for a monthly fee.
And the artists would get a micro-cent every time their song is selected. Seems fair. 'Course if the had a problem with this, the could release their songs (or just a demo song) as 'zero-credit'. In other words, no charge. And the end-user could select these exclusively.
I know that there are a lot of system administrators out there that actually like to manage data. I just want it to be there when I want it. All of it.
Help me out....
A) While it might be a fun hack to find a way to run Linux on an X-Box, why would anyone want M$ involved? As soon as it's approved, it's no longer an interesting hack.
Okay, maybe a killer game is released only for the Lin-X-Box. So now Linux is supporting M$ hardware sales?
B) Why should Bill Gates care if such 'exploits' are released? Such an thing can't become a real success until there's a major (read: sue-able) distribution point.
IMHO, there's no inherent reason why they couldn't be good for gaming. In fact, for some games they could be vastly superior (think: Playing while lying on the couch - not necessarily good for a shoot 'em up, but much more ergonomic for a strategy game).
I think a key thing people miss is that these aren't supposed to be special purpose machines. They're just slightly ahead of their time. I'm envisioning these things as a near panacea for me.
Imagine walking around the office holding it like a clipboard and, say, granting a user access to a resource without having to go back to your desk. Then scribble a few notes in a meeting and got back to your desk and drop it into the stand and use your real keyboard for some serious coding (getting a recharge along the way).
When the quittin' horn goes off you toss it into the car and let it serve up MP3's wirelessly to you car speakers. Then out of the car into the house and it switches to your home speakers. Then time for an e-book on the couch, then in front of the TV to get realtime timing and scoring for the big race (scribbling in a few chatroom entries along the way).
Then drop it into you home stand to use you real keyboard and mouse to take care of the day's e-mail.
This all would make a nice commercial. But I haven't seen a commercial for a tablet PC yet. That may be part of the problem.