It costs me less than a penny a piece to deal with an individual spam.
Okay, that works for you, fine. But I'm guessing you don't get very much spam. Imagine if you got over a thousand spam messages a day (as someone I know has been doing). That's an average of one every 86 seconds. Wouldn't you find it more of a nuisance then? Wouldn't you be considering drastic measures, or even payment, to avoid that?
I'm not saying that this proposed solution is a good one; I don't think that it is. But please don't assume that everyone's experience of spam is the same as yours, because as a problem it varies very widely.
But isn't that a necessity? If you can send messages while remaining completely anonymous, cheaply, and expect them to be seen, then you can send spam. I can't see any way around that. All the proposed solutions I've seen have involved breaking one of those parts: either the anonymity directly (e.g. authentication), the cheapness (e.g. charging, which breaks the anonymity indirectly), or the expectation of being seen (e.g. challenge/response, which needs a semi-permanent address and risks anonymity that way). All end up losing anonymity somehow.
There are many, many books on the existing P2P networks. As.txt,.pdb (Palm DOC, an open format which can be read on many machines, holding compressed plain text), HTML, PDF, &c. Some are uncorrected and/or dodgy scans, but many are pretty good, and some are immaculate. You just have to be a bit patient finding them.
And for legitimate, low-cost ebooks (half of which are unrestricted and available in many formats) and publishing opportunities, hie thee to Fictionwise.
Most of the fanboys seem to think that dislike of windows for technical reasons is evidence that MS is evil
Some probably do, and as you imply, there's little reason for that.
However, some of us think that M$ is evil for their business practices. Is it ethical to systematically buy out or destroy their competition? To deliberately spoil users' experience for the sake of market share? To use their massive cash pile and their monopoly in one field to (try to) gain it in others? To deliberately flout the legal system? And so on, and so on - the details have been debated enough already.
(For example, what does it say about them that their most credible remaining competitor in the OS market is one that can't be bought out, sued to oblivion, 'partnered' into docility, embraced and extended, or any of their usual tactics?)
If M$ behaved ethically, then their technical failings wouldn't be such a problem; people would be able to use alternatives, and M$ (like everyone else) would have the choice of improving their products or losing out. It's their immoral and illegal business practices that make such deep technical problems possible in the first place.
Erm... isn't putting "Best viewed with " just sinking to their level? We should be coding to standards, not browsers, even if those browsers have good standards support.
My own site has a link at the bottom that says Best viewed in ANY browser. I'm not suggesting everyone does this, but surely it's better than perpetuating the problem?
You never have to use AAC if you don't want to. (actually I think music ripped to AAC doesn't have password protection)
Yes, and more. AAC is just another audio format; you can convert to and from it freely, just as with MP3.
What the iTunes Music Store is selling is protected AAC files; they use the same audio coding, but have a slightly different wrapper format, and have a different file extension (.M4P I think). It's those files which are restricted - you can only play them on your up to 3 authorised machines, &c.
(I don't speak from experience here - as a non-USian, I don't have access, grump grump grump.)
Gosh, not one but two superfluous prepositions. (And a superfluous pronoun for good measure.) You Americans really like them, don't you?
Anyway, I haven't seen anyone discuss the multiplicity of electronic crime. Committing hundreds of murders is much more difficult than one - maybe more than hundreds of times harder. (I don't know, I've never tried it...) And yet committing electronic fraud (any of a number of different types) hundreds or even millions of times is little harder than doing it once. Of course, it increases your chances of being caught, but it's not much harder - which is why the economics of spam are as they are.
We all seem to agree on the Mikado's maxim that the punishment should fit the crime; but should it fit the effort expended in the crime, or should it fit the effects of the crime?
all this "mebi" and "gibi" stuff sounds like something thought up by a 5 year old!
And 'mega' and 'giga' don't?
The only difference is that we're familiar with the existing terms, so they've lost their novelty. If we adopted the new terms, then very quickly they'd lose their novelty too, and they wouldn't seem silly.
'TV' means different things to different people
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It probably depends where you are. Here in the UK, things aren't quite as bad; we have non-commercial stations, which can run hour-long programmes or films with no interruptions at all. (They still run trailers between programmes, but they're not quite as aggressive.) It's interesting to think that when they run 45-minute programmes from the US, they originally lasted an hour or more... They also tend to run less ratings-aware programmes - culture, education, programmes for intelligent people - as well as the lowest-common-denominator stuff. Believe it or not, there are programmes which you can concentrate on for a whole hour or so, programmes after which you feel you've learned something, programmes
One one of their DVD commentaries, the makers of 'Airplane' explained why their TV series 'Police Squad' (on which the 'Naked Gun' films were based) fared very badly on US TV: all their subtle jokes and clever gags went largely unnoticed, because people simply weren't used to giving TV their full attention. A comment I found very revealing. Maybe it's become a vicious circle: people don't pay attention because there's nothing worth paying attention to; and then programme makers have to make programmes suited to an audience that's not paying attention.
In any case, I find the US situation, with people searching through tens or hundreds of channels and joining programmes half-way through, very sad. Personally, I plan my viewing: I work out in advance what I'm going to watch, and then watch those programmes from start to finish. Very rarely do I look 'just to see what's on'. Of course, it helps having access to only the 5 terrestrial channels (and one's not available in my area; I haven't missed it).
But then I don't watch much TV at all. In fact, for the last several months I've watched none because there's a problem with my aerial, and I can't be bothered to fix it. (Before you ask, there is cable in my area. Or at least, the flat downstairs has it, but the company told me I was too far away. I really didn't care enough to argue with them.) So far I'm surviving quite happily on videos I recorded ages ago and some DVDs, and there are only a handful of programmes I care in the slightest about missing.
I remember when I first went off to uni - the lack of TV there (well, there was a TV room, but it was out of the way and few people bothered to go there) made me realise just how dependent on the box I'd been before. It was quite a revelation. And although I bought a portable TV after a couple of terms, and now have my own full-size set, I've never watched as much TV since then.
In any case, roll on the day when broadcasters discover that the best way to grab your attention is to make programmes worth watching!
Too much eating is bad.
Too much sleeping is bad.
Too much TV is bad.
Too much internet is bad.
Well, of course they are, but that's not saying anything profound, simply because that's what 'too much' means! 'Too much' of anything is bad, because if it wasn't bad, then it wouldn't be 'too much'. The question is: how much is too much?
Re: Everything, including tools, in moderation!
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Software Fashion
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I didn't mean to cast any aspersions on other types of engineering - technology has achieved some wonderful things, and civil, mechanical, military and other engineers regularly do amazing work.
My point was that although all of those disciplines are growing more complex and exacting, I don't believe any show the several-orders-of-magnitude change that software has. Cars can't go a million miles on a litre of fuel, bridges don't span oceans, and so on.
And while people have been predicting the 'maturity' of software development into a discipline like many others, I doubt this will happen. At least, not until the complexity and scope of software projects stops increasing geometrically, and people care more about getting things right than they do about throwing something together to meet a deadline.
Re: Everything, including tools, in moderation!
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Software Fashion
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well said.
Design patterns and UML were designed as practical tools, not dogma. If they help you do what you were doing anyway (and they often do), then great: use 'em. But if they don't, then don't. They're there to serve you, not the other way around.
UML is simply a way of describing objects and their relationships; not a way to create those things, just a way to communicate them afterwards. Similarly, design patterns are simply practical examples that have worked for people before; reusing them may save you time, and give you a common language others can recognise. That's all. The moment someone with pointy hair tries to treat them as a methodology is the moment you need to worry.
Personally, I think the main problem with software design (at any level) is that it CAN'T really be codified, bundled into a neat set of rules and procedures to be followed. It's creative. People like to call it 'engineering' and compare it with areas of physical construction, but it's too different - whereas one bridge or building is likely to be the same order of magnitude in size and complexity as another, and have similar technical challenges, software developers are constantly dealing with new ideas, greater complexity, new techniques, and greater demands. And you can't always solve these by using the same old methods. Of course, some parts are repetitive and mindless, but some parts will always be creative (or, as Alan Turing observed, you could get the computer to do them!).
Some people are naturally good at creative tasks, and others can grow to be so by exposure to good examples and guidane, but some are so used to making and following standard procedures, rules, and processes, that that's all they can do. In software developers, this can work as long as they're writing 'standard' software, but the lack of deep insight can lead to baroque monstrosities, unnecessary repetition, pointless layers of abstraction (or lack of necessary ones), vast bloated frameworks where little is needed (or vice versa), &c, simply because that's The Way Things Should Be Done. You can't codify insight itself.
And in management, it can lead to the enforcement of methodologies. When things go badly as a result of the sort of developer above, it's natural to consider how that can be avoided. But the idea that software development can be reduced to standard procedures, rules, and processes, while natural for people who've seen it work in other areas, just doesn't work for software. It may give excuses to those who can't do the job, but it merely cramps those who can. Methodologies and tools can make great slaves; but they're lousy masters.
That depends where you are; here in the UK, things will be different. (I'm not expert on the exact rules here, but I suspect that unless you have a licence, or use one of the few unlicensed bands, you're not allowed to broadcast at any power level.)
in real world terms, I can tell you that the difference between 25mW and 100mW is enough to make or break a design.
I'm sure it is. But to cope with the transmission and return, you simply need to make your transmitter/receiver four times as powerful. That's all; there's no new physical effect from the double distance, no change in the power law, nothing to make this any less feasible. The rapid development in mobile phone technology has shown that great advances are possible, and so the extra distance is nothing more than a temporary setback at worst.
Er... no. Your figures are slightly wrong. Even allowing for the fact you're describing a direct rather than inverse proportionality, you've got the 1 ft value wrong in the second case; it should be 4 mW.
And with that correction, you can see that the second set of figures is simply 4x the first. They're growing at the same rate, just with a constant multiplier. In both cases, the growth is O(n^2); there's no qualitative difference.
Which gives the power-curve law a whole new spin; power doesn't drop as the square of the distance, but as the square of double the distance
I hate to spoil such a powerful bit of writing with some mundane maths, but there's no difference between the two. If one quantity is inversely proportional to the square of another, then it's also inversely proportional to the square of any multiple of that other; the only effect is to change the constant of proportionality.
Of course, neither is terribly friendly to a technological implementation, but the wide spread of mobile phones (especially here in the UK) shows that such problems aren't insurmountable.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find that their writing style is much worse with a ballpoint or rollerball than with any of the fixed nib types? I don't know why, but I find a ball tip so much more difficult to control.
When doing a lot of writing, I prefer my Parker fountain pen; however, I also write well with a fibre-tip (preferably a fairly thick one like the Paper Mate nylon). Mechanical pencils are also good for some things (B or 2B lead).
These days, I use my Psion to make notes more often than paper, though.
Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer
For a long time, many people have been citing the relative lack of speed as a reason not to get a Mac. In some cases, that may have been a genuine reason, in which case this speed increase would persuade such people to get a Mac.
In other cases, I suspect that speed is merely an excuse used by people who have other reasons (conscious or not) for avoiding Macs; this excuse is now no longer valid, and those people will need to either find a better excuse, examine their real reasons, or reassess their preferences.
It's interesting to see how many reasons/excuses have been pretty much crossed off in recent years: 'Apple's dying', 'The OS isn't up to it', 'It's not compatible with Unix &c.', 'There's no software', 'It's not compatible with XYZ piece of hardware', and 'It's not fast enough' are now non-issues for many (most?) people. Of course, there are still some genuine concerns amongst those, but I suspect that more people dismiss Macs through ignorance, crowd-following, or inertia than from genuine need.
it was lacking... reasonable internet connectivity, ie you needed an external modem or IR cellphone but that was undeniable cool but not practical.
Why not practical? For most of the last several years I've done all my email on my 5mx; connecting with a landline modem at home and via my mobile phone when out. And over the same period it's done all of my CIX messaging, connecting the same way. (It currently has a messagebase of over 80MB with over 170,000 messages.) Web browsing is a little painful over a mobile, but I've done it occasionally; it's only FTP and news that are pretty impractical.
BTW, as a matter of style I tend to reserve the term 'PDA' for something Palm-style, and call my Psion a 'pocket computer'. I know that Palms and their ilk can do great things, but they're still really an adjunct to a desktop machine; people who've used one know that Psions are far more independent, and capable of so much more.
Don't get too excited. Psion Teklogix, producer of the original netBook and now this update, is not exactly the same company which made the Series 5mx &c. It only seems interested in corporate accounts, in large orders and vertical markets. (It was formed from Psion Enterprise and Teklogix International; I suspect that the latter had by far the stronger influence.) Psion Computers, the consumer-oriented branch and producers of the Organiser, Organiser II, Series 3/a/c/mx, Siena, Series 5/5mx, and Revo, is effectively long gone...
Please sign this online petition if you'd like to see the netBook Pro running EPOC/Symbian OS. I doubt it'll have any immediate effect, but by indicating people's interest in the platform, it may yet do some longer-term good.
I mourn the loss of Psion as was... while Symbian may have kept the core OS alive and in demand, that's no good to us if it's not being employed (or even promoted) in a form factor which can demonstrate its strengths.:(
It's a credit to Psion that, for all its screen problems, the 5mx is still an amazing bit of kit - still my machine of choice, to which nothing else comes close. I just wish that they'd recognise that achievement and cultivate it. If only they'd not chickened out of the market; a little marketing and promotion would have done wonders. [fx: sigh]
But with the internet, everyone can be a publisher.
Exactly! I know it's been said before, but this is the heart of the problem. Everyone can be a publisher. It's the reason why the internet is such a disruptive technology, such a force for change.
It's also a situation, as you say, that existing precepts, principles, and prejudices simply weren't designed for.
And it's a situation which challenges the power and the very existence of the large publishing organisations (whether in print, film, music, or whatever). No wonder they're doing all they can to prevent it:
using the might of existing laws in totally inappropriate ways,
promoting DRM schemes which will prevent individuals and smaller companies from being able to publish works themselves, and
subtly spreading the idea that only large corporations can be legitimate publishers, effectively dividing the world into 'corporates' and 'consumers', and keeping the latter in their place.
Of course, some of these actions have additional effects, e.g. DRM controlling access to the works which do get published. But I suspect that in the long term, it's this preventing-Joe-Public-from-being-a-publisher aspect which will prove to be the important one.
Technology is breaking down the exclusivity of so many means of creation and publishing - the desktop publishing revolution brought some of the power of the great publishing houses to the individual, and similar advances have brought some of the power of the recording studios, radio networks, photographic workshops, post offices, movie studios, sheet music publishers, news networks, &c. Not all the power, of course - there's no substitute for artistic talent and creativity in any sphere, and these advances tend to promote the spread of mediocre more than outstanding work.
It's sad to see the hatred and bitterness with which these advances are being treated by existing publishers, because I don't think they're as threatened as they think. People will still want good music, good books, good movies, &c, and there will still be money to be made providing them. It might not be with the exact same business model, or in the same form, but I'm sure sooner or later something will get sorted out. In the end, it's only the publishers of mediocre, worthless material who need fear. Which perhaps explains the current situation rather well...
What's the betting that M$ never even thought to ask themselves why Apple, or other companies, have a cool image? Why people want their products, why their users feel so much more attached to them than any M$ user does?
No. Brute force and ignorance, every time. "We want a cool image; find out how much that'll cost, and buy it."
Unfortunately, so far, it's a policy that's mostly worked. And if they spend enough in the right places, I fear it'll work again. What does that say about society?
A lot of what people have posted boils simply down to the rule:
You must think like a user.
Now, whether you can do this well depends on who your users are. If you're writing a tool for yourself, or for similarly technically-minded people, then congratulations, you're there already!
But in most cases, you're aiming at folks who aren't as technically-minded as you are. Now, all things are relative; this applies just as much to writers of compilers (whose users generally don't want to know about the details of context-free grammars, stack frames and optimisation, and just want to compile some code) as to writers of email clients or POS systems. But in each case, you must put yourself in your typical user's shoes - or find someone else who can.
That's not the end of the story, of course - there's still lots of creative work to be done, building abstractions and conceptual models for what your software does and working out how best to display them so the user will understand, working out the simplest way to handle each task the user might want to perform, and so on - but at the core of all of this is being able to see things from the user's PoV. If you can do that, then all the other decisions and choices will tend to go in the right direction.
In my experience, though, nothing beats actually being a user of your software! Not only do you get real understanding and lots of testing for free, but also a greater sense of achievement, and a real interest in making it the best!
Remember that speed isn't everything. Internet news has the advantages of rapid updates and ease of access, but it has disadvantages, too - mainly, shallowness. It takes time to research stories thoroughly, to gain perspective on events, and to provide balance. Even the BBC news site tends to provide 'bite-size chunks' of information, without background or detail, which can give a distorted view of things. The world is a complex place, and many issues just can't be reduced to a one-paragraph black-and-white version.
The other disadvantage of much information you find on the net is that much of it is nth-hand. Here on/. for instance, few people read the linked articles, so most of us are hearing about them from others, filtered through their perceptions, and by what they chose to say about them. This leads to sensationalism, oversimplification, misunderstandings, and other distortions. People pass on stories from other sites, link to press releases and corporate messages, retell stories in their own words, and spread rumours - hence urban legends.
Of course, newspapers and other sources aren't immune to these problems (especially TV news, which can be worse!). But newspapers tend to suffer far less from them. If you've never read one regularly, I'd suggest that you try a quality paper for a week or so, and compare what you learn from it with what you find online. Even if you don't want to get a regular paper after that, it'll help you to treat online sources more critically.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, that works for you, fine. But I'm guessing you don't get very much spam. Imagine if you got over a thousand spam messages a day (as someone I know has been doing). That's an average of one every 86 seconds. Wouldn't you find it more of a nuisance then? Wouldn't you be considering drastic measures, or even payment, to avoid that?
I'm not saying that this proposed solution is a good one; I don't think that it is. But please don't assume that everyone's experience of spam is the same as yours, because as a problem it varies very widely.
But isn't that a necessity? If you can send messages while remaining completely anonymous, cheaply, and expect them to be seen, then you can send spam. I can't see any way around that. All the proposed solutions I've seen have involved breaking one of those parts: either the anonymity directly (e.g. authentication), the cheapness (e.g. charging, which breaks the anonymity indirectly), or the expectation of being seen (e.g. challenge/response, which needs a semi-permanent address and risks anonymity that way). All end up losing anonymity somehow.
And for legitimate, low-cost ebooks (half of which are unrestricted and available in many formats) and publishing opportunities, hie thee to Fictionwise.
Some probably do, and as you imply, there's little reason for that.
However, some of us think that M$ is evil for their business practices. Is it ethical to systematically buy out or destroy their competition? To deliberately spoil users' experience for the sake of market share? To use their massive cash pile and their monopoly in one field to (try to) gain it in others? To deliberately flout the legal system? And so on, and so on - the details have been debated enough already.
(For example, what does it say about them that their most credible remaining competitor in the OS market is one that can't be bought out, sued to oblivion, 'partnered' into docility, embraced and extended, or any of their usual tactics?)
If M$ behaved ethically, then their technical failings wouldn't be such a problem; people would be able to use alternatives, and M$ (like everyone else) would have the choice of improving their products or losing out. It's their immoral and illegal business practices that make such deep technical problems possible in the first place.
My own site has a link at the bottom that says Best viewed in ANY browser. I'm not suggesting everyone does this, but surely it's better than perpetuating the problem?
Yes, and more. AAC is just another audio format; you can convert to and from it freely, just as with MP3.
What the iTunes Music Store is selling is protected AAC files; they use the same audio coding, but have a slightly different wrapper format, and have a different file extension (.M4P I think). It's those files which are restricted - you can only play them on your up to 3 authorised machines, &c.
(I don't speak from experience here - as a non-USian, I don't have access, grump grump grump.)
Gosh, not one but two superfluous prepositions. (And a superfluous pronoun for good measure.) You Americans really like them, don't you?
Anyway, I haven't seen anyone discuss the multiplicity of electronic crime. Committing hundreds of murders is much more difficult than one - maybe more than hundreds of times harder. (I don't know, I've never tried it...) And yet committing electronic fraud (any of a number of different types) hundreds or even millions of times is little harder than doing it once. Of course, it increases your chances of being caught, but it's not much harder - which is why the economics of spam are as they are.
We all seem to agree on the Mikado's maxim that the punishment should fit the crime; but should it fit the effort expended in the crime, or should it fit the effects of the crime?
And 'mega' and 'giga' don't?
The only difference is that we're familiar with the existing terms, so they've lost their novelty. If we adopted the new terms, then very quickly they'd lose their novelty too, and they wouldn't seem silly.
One one of their DVD commentaries, the makers of 'Airplane' explained why their TV series 'Police Squad' (on which the 'Naked Gun' films were based) fared very badly on US TV: all their subtle jokes and clever gags went largely unnoticed, because people simply weren't used to giving TV their full attention. A comment I found very revealing. Maybe it's become a vicious circle: people don't pay attention because there's nothing worth paying attention to; and then programme makers have to make programmes suited to an audience that's not paying attention.
In any case, I find the US situation, with people searching through tens or hundreds of channels and joining programmes half-way through, very sad. Personally, I plan my viewing: I work out in advance what I'm going to watch, and then watch those programmes from start to finish. Very rarely do I look 'just to see what's on'. Of course, it helps having access to only the 5 terrestrial channels (and one's not available in my area; I haven't missed it).
But then I don't watch much TV at all. In fact, for the last several months I've watched none because there's a problem with my aerial, and I can't be bothered to fix it. (Before you ask, there is cable in my area. Or at least, the flat downstairs has it, but the company told me I was too far away. I really didn't care enough to argue with them.) So far I'm surviving quite happily on videos I recorded ages ago and some DVDs, and there are only a handful of programmes I care in the slightest about missing.
I remember when I first went off to uni - the lack of TV there (well, there was a TV room, but it was out of the way and few people bothered to go there) made me realise just how dependent on the box I'd been before. It was quite a revelation. And although I bought a portable TV after a couple of terms, and now have my own full-size set, I've never watched as much TV since then.
In any case, roll on the day when broadcasters discover that the best way to grab your attention is to make programmes worth watching!
Too much eating is bad.
Too much sleeping is bad.
Too much TV is bad.
Too much internet is bad.
Well, of course they are, but that's not saying anything profound, simply because that's what 'too much' means! 'Too much' of anything is bad, because if it wasn't bad, then it wouldn't be 'too much'. The question is: how much is too much?
My point was that although all of those disciplines are growing more complex and exacting, I don't believe any show the several-orders-of-magnitude change that software has. Cars can't go a million miles on a litre of fuel, bridges don't span oceans, and so on.
And while people have been predicting the 'maturity' of software development into a discipline like many others, I doubt this will happen. At least, not until the complexity and scope of software projects stops increasing geometrically, and people care more about getting things right than they do about throwing something together to meet a deadline.
Design patterns and UML were designed as practical tools, not dogma. If they help you do what you were doing anyway (and they often do), then great: use 'em. But if they don't, then don't. They're there to serve you, not the other way around.
UML is simply a way of describing objects and their relationships; not a way to create those things, just a way to communicate them afterwards. Similarly, design patterns are simply practical examples that have worked for people before; reusing them may save you time, and give you a common language others can recognise. That's all. The moment someone with pointy hair tries to treat them as a methodology is the moment you need to worry.
Personally, I think the main problem with software design (at any level) is that it CAN'T really be codified, bundled into a neat set of rules and procedures to be followed. It's creative. People like to call it 'engineering' and compare it with areas of physical construction, but it's too different - whereas one bridge or building is likely to be the same order of magnitude in size and complexity as another, and have similar technical challenges, software developers are constantly dealing with new ideas, greater complexity, new techniques, and greater demands. And you can't always solve these by using the same old methods. Of course, some parts are repetitive and mindless, but some parts will always be creative (or, as Alan Turing observed, you could get the computer to do them!).
Some people are naturally good at creative tasks, and others can grow to be so by exposure to good examples and guidane, but some are so used to making and following standard procedures, rules, and processes, that that's all they can do. In software developers, this can work as long as they're writing 'standard' software, but the lack of deep insight can lead to baroque monstrosities, unnecessary repetition, pointless layers of abstraction (or lack of necessary ones), vast bloated frameworks where little is needed (or vice versa), &c, simply because that's The Way Things Should Be Done. You can't codify insight itself.
And in management, it can lead to the enforcement of methodologies. When things go badly as a result of the sort of developer above, it's natural to consider how that can be avoided. But the idea that software development can be reduced to standard procedures, rules, and processes, while natural for people who've seen it work in other areas, just doesn't work for software. It may give excuses to those who can't do the job, but it merely cramps those who can. Methodologies and tools can make great slaves; but they're lousy masters.
(The Programmer's Stone is an interesting read and develops this idea much further.)
Even if this were true, how does that help us spam-sufferers living elsewhere?
That depends where you are; here in the UK, things will be different. (I'm not expert on the exact rules here, but I suspect that unless you have a licence, or use one of the few unlicensed bands, you're not allowed to broadcast at any power level.)
I'm sure it is. But to cope with the transmission and return, you simply need to make your transmitter/receiver four times as powerful. That's all; there's no new physical effect from the double distance, no change in the power law, nothing to make this any less feasible. The rapid development in mobile phone technology has shown that great advances are possible, and so the extra distance is nothing more than a temporary setback at worst.
And with that correction, you can see that the second set of figures is simply 4x the first. They're growing at the same rate, just with a constant multiplier. In both cases, the growth is O(n^2); there's no qualitative difference.
I hate to spoil such a powerful bit of writing with some mundane maths, but there's no difference between the two. If one quantity is inversely proportional to the square of another, then it's also inversely proportional to the square of any multiple of that other; the only effect is to change the constant of proportionality.
Of course, neither is terribly friendly to a technological implementation, but the wide spread of mobile phones (especially here in the UK) shows that such problems aren't insurmountable.
When doing a lot of writing, I prefer my Parker fountain pen; however, I also write well with a fibre-tip (preferably a fairly thick one like the Paper Mate nylon). Mechanical pencils are also good for some things (B or 2B lead).
These days, I use my Psion to make notes more often than paper, though.
For a long time, many people have been citing the relative lack of speed as a reason not to get a Mac. In some cases, that may have been a genuine reason, in which case this speed increase would persuade such people to get a Mac.
In other cases, I suspect that speed is merely an excuse used by people who have other reasons (conscious or not) for avoiding Macs; this excuse is now no longer valid, and those people will need to either find a better excuse, examine their real reasons, or reassess their preferences.
It's interesting to see how many reasons/excuses have been pretty much crossed off in recent years: 'Apple's dying', 'The OS isn't up to it', 'It's not compatible with Unix &c.', 'There's no software', 'It's not compatible with XYZ piece of hardware', and 'It's not fast enough' are now non-issues for many (most?) people. Of course, there are still some genuine concerns amongst those, but I suspect that more people dismiss Macs through ignorance, crowd-following, or inertia than from genuine need.
Why not practical? For most of the last several years I've done all my email on my 5mx; connecting with a landline modem at home and via my mobile phone when out. And over the same period it's done all of my CIX messaging, connecting the same way. (It currently has a messagebase of over 80MB with over 170,000 messages.) Web browsing is a little painful over a mobile, but I've done it occasionally; it's only FTP and news that are pretty impractical.
BTW, as a matter of style I tend to reserve the term 'PDA' for something Palm-style, and call my Psion a 'pocket computer'. I know that Palms and their ilk can do great things, but they're still really an adjunct to a desktop machine; people who've used one know that Psions are far more independent, and capable of so much more.
Please sign this online petition if you'd like to see the netBook Pro running EPOC/Symbian OS. I doubt it'll have any immediate effect, but by indicating people's interest in the platform, it may yet do some longer-term good.
I mourn the loss of Psion as was... while Symbian may have kept the core OS alive and in demand, that's no good to us if it's not being employed (or even promoted) in a form factor which can demonstrate its strengths. :(
It's a credit to Psion that, for all its screen problems, the 5mx is still an amazing bit of kit - still my machine of choice, to which nothing else comes close. I just wish that they'd recognise that achievement and cultivate it. If only they'd not chickened out of the market; a little marketing and promotion would have done wonders. [fx: sigh]
Exactly! I know it's been said before, but this is the heart of the problem. Everyone can be a publisher. It's the reason why the internet is such a disruptive technology, such a force for change.
It's also a situation, as you say, that existing precepts, principles, and prejudices simply weren't designed for.
And it's a situation which challenges the power and the very existence of the large publishing organisations (whether in print, film, music, or whatever). No wonder they're doing all they can to prevent it:
Of course, some of these actions have additional effects, e.g. DRM controlling access to the works which do get published. But I suspect that in the long term, it's this preventing-Joe-Public-from-being-a-publisher aspect which will prove to be the important one.
Technology is breaking down the exclusivity of so many means of creation and publishing - the desktop publishing revolution brought some of the power of the great publishing houses to the individual, and similar advances have brought some of the power of the recording studios, radio networks, photographic workshops, post offices, movie studios, sheet music publishers, news networks, &c. Not all the power, of course - there's no substitute for artistic talent and creativity in any sphere, and these advances tend to promote the spread of mediocre more than outstanding work.
It's sad to see the hatred and bitterness with which these advances are being treated by existing publishers, because I don't think they're as threatened as they think. People will still want good music, good books, good movies, &c, and there will still be money to be made providing them. It might not be with the exact same business model, or in the same form, but I'm sure sooner or later something will get sorted out. In the end, it's only the publishers of mediocre, worthless material who need fear. Which perhaps explains the current situation rather well...
No. Brute force and ignorance, every time. "We want a cool image; find out how much that'll cost, and buy it."
Unfortunately, so far, it's a policy that's mostly worked. And if they spend enough in the right places, I fear it'll work again. What does that say about society?
But in most cases, you're aiming at folks who aren't as technically-minded as you are. Now, all things are relative; this applies just as much to writers of compilers (whose users generally don't want to know about the details of context-free grammars, stack frames and optimisation, and just want to compile some code) as to writers of email clients or POS systems. But in each case, you must put yourself in your typical user's shoes - or find someone else who can.
That's not the end of the story, of course - there's still lots of creative work to be done, building abstractions and conceptual models for what your software does and working out how best to display them so the user will understand, working out the simplest way to handle each task the user might want to perform, and so on - but at the core of all of this is being able to see things from the user's PoV. If you can do that, then all the other decisions and choices will tend to go in the right direction.
In my experience, though, nothing beats actually being a user of your software! Not only do you get real understanding and lots of testing for free, but also a greater sense of achievement, and a real interest in making it the best!
The other disadvantage of much information you find on the net is that much of it is nth-hand. Here on /. for instance, few people read the linked articles, so most of us are hearing about them from others, filtered through their perceptions, and by what they chose to say about them. This leads to sensationalism, oversimplification, misunderstandings, and other distortions. People pass on stories from other sites, link to press releases and corporate messages, retell stories in their own words, and spread rumours - hence urban legends.
Of course, newspapers and other sources aren't immune to these problems (especially TV news, which can be worse!). But newspapers tend to suffer far less from them. If you've never read one regularly, I'd suggest that you try a quality paper for a week or so, and compare what you learn from it with what you find online. Even if you don't want to get a regular paper after that, it'll help you to treat online sources more critically.