... with the (rumored) Apple tablet, I think Steve would have a hit on his hands. It's not clear to me, though, that you will be able to. Steve has consistently pooh-poohed the idea of either attached physical keyboards or handwriting capture/recognition for the iPhone, which I think bodes somewhat ill for the much-anticipated tablet. Although to be fair, Apple may be warming up to the idea of allowing third-party keyboards with the iPhone (at least the dock port has been freed up for developers to attach third-party hardware to), so there's that.
Voice recognition is cute, but for most people cannot be the basis for a sustained interface: unless you have a compelling need to use your voice, it's usually slower than typing, far less accurate, unwieldy to edit, cognitively consuming (as you must concentrate on the screen transcribing your spoken words), and socially awkward (until, at least, the computer talks back).
"Socially awkward" doesn't even begin to describe it. Can you imagine working in a cube farm where everyone talked to their computers to get them to work? Or even a few people did? I would go stark, raving insane.
There are probably some situations where voice control of your computer makes sense. People with disabilities that affect their hands. Jobs that keep your hands busy with other controls, while you still need to bring up info on the screen. That kind of thing. But I've never really understood the impulse to bring voice control to the masses.
I'm almost certainly not buying this iSlate thingy - I already own a MBP and an iPhone, and don't really need anything in between. But I would most definitely buy an iSlate rather than a Kindle - 1) I can't see paying hundreds of dollars for something that for the most part, just reads books... especially when the e-books are almost as expensive as the paper ones. I would want the thing to be able to browse the web (you know, in full color, etc), view movies, and that kind of thing. 2) The battery life issue doesn't really matter to me, because 99% of the time I've got a plug available. For the few times I don't, I don't mind limiting use to a few hours at a time.
Not to say the Kindle is worthless - if you do a lot of flying, I can see where it would be great. Or if you read outdoors a lot. I'm sure there are other situations where it really shines. But I would find it a lot less useful than something like a giant iPod touch.
I agree 100% that forcing people to use a mouse with only one button was the dumbest-idea-evar... but those days are gone. You could always plug in a third-party mouse and have the right/middle/scroll buttons work pretty much as expected. Now even Apple has gotten with the program - the "magic mouse" has a virtual right button. You just click on the surface of the mouse where you'd expect the button to be, and you get a right click.
... but even in the older powerbooks, there were third-party utilities that gave you the ability to right-click by hitting a certain spot on the trackpad (vs. a dedicated button). And as mentioned, the new MBPs just use the two-finger-tap gesture (or click a certain corner of the trackpad) to render a right-click.
I agree that Mac laptops used to be at a disadvantage with respect to this... but now with the multi-touch trackpads I think they're ahead of the game.
... I could either get issued a company phone, or the company would pay my cell bill. There was no way I was carrying around two phones, and the company issued one was a giant clunky Blackberry, whereas my own was an iPhone. The choice was easy.
... is a mixture of pure unsupported assertations, and anecdotes pretending to be data. Any evidence to show that "strikes hurt employees more through lost wages than they gain in negotiations"? In fact, there's a lot of history that shows that unions did, in fact, make lives better for not only their own workers, but for everyone - and not only in the form of wages, but also in things like medical benefits and safe working conditions. For example: the five day work week - brought to you by the AFL-CIO.
Enough with the union bashing, already. Read a little history of the labor movement, and then see what you think.
Could it be because he has a financial interest in selling them? Why, yes. Yes it could. Not that he ever mentioned any of that in his numerous television interviews extolling the virtues of the things - you're meant to think that he's flogging them because he's genuinely convinced of their effectiveness.
To be clear: I'm not opposed to the former DHS secretary taking a post-politics job in the security industry. I'm not even against him appearing on my teevee to flog his products. What stinks, though, is when he doesn't make it clear that his words amount to an advertisement rather than news.
Hear, hear. Your chances of dying in an aircraft terrorism incident are really, really tiny. People need to stop wetting their pants every time they get a whiff of some kind of terrorist activity - it only encourages more of the same. You are far more likely to die in an auto accident, from some other form of murder, by slipping in your bathtub, or even by being struck by lightning, than you are to be killed by a terrorist. So enough with the inane security bullshit, already.
... at least in my business (I'm a defense contractor), there is zero appetite for anything but traditional "page-centric" documents. No demand for Wikis. No demand for mobile device readable documents. No demand for feeds. Your business may be different, but in these parts, we're nowhere near there yet.
Maybe the sales folks will continue to use it. Except when I get a request to specifically put it in PowerPoint, I'll either just bring up the web page live or use a PDF
This is sort of nonsensical. First of all, a PDF isn't an application, it's a file format. It's great for holding "page centric" slideshows, and I use it as the destination for Powerpoint presentations fairly often. Second, "bringing up the web page live" is hardly a substitute for a presentation. You're only going to have a live web page for stuff that's either 1) customer facing material - how to get to your location, product lines, etc; or 2) internal company stuff - HR policies, trouble ticket systems, etc, etc. When you need to brief your boss on the new servers you need to buy, you're going to show your decision process by bringing up various companies' live web pages and talking off the cuff? Good luck with that.
The point of all this is not to say that "new school" documentation isn't any good - it obviously has a lot of applications. But I really doubt that Word documents and the like are going the way of the dodo any time soon.
I'd be a bigger fan of OO.o, except that MS formats are contractually mandatory with my customer, and any formatting beyond the most simple stuff absolutely always gets mangled by conversion between OO and MS office. So, in practice, I'm never really going to be able to use OO.o for anything I have to share with anyone else until this gets fixed.
Of course, the situation is only a little better between differing releases of MS Office products, so it's not really a very fair criticism... but regardless, my contract has words to the effect that document formats will be MS Office 2003. So there you have it.
... regarding something that is a pretty commonsense business move. I like to get my MS bash on too, but seriously. Every company (if they want to stay in business) keeps tabs on both real and potential competitors. Every company also looks for opportunities to cooperate with other companies/organizations - even if these outfits are also competitors. So there's nothing particularly nefarious about MS 1) keeping tabs on what's going on with various FOSS projects, 2) looking for ways to cooperate with them, or 3) doing both at the same time. Sun, Linus, etc, no doubt are aware that what they say to MS reps could be used to improve MS products later. This isn't illegal or even unethical - it's healthy business competition, and it's good for everyone involved.
Now if the MS rep(s) misrepresented their allegiance to MS in these conversations, or improperly obtained and used Sun's/Linus's/whoever's proprietary data to improve their products, that would be something else. But there's no evidence that that's what's happening here.
The amount released in all these sources is dwarfed by the energy in the daily dose of radiation inbound from the sun. You're talking about rounding errors here. The real issue continues to be the fact that burning all this stuff increases the tendency for inbound heat to be trapped in the atmosphere.
The real money savings comes from the fact that you don't have to replace LED bulbs anywhere near as often as incandescents... and you'd still be saving that money, even if you installed a tiny, cheap heater in each fixture.
... that the main savings involved in replacing incandescent signals with LEDs isn't the energy - it's the expense of having to pay someone to replace those bulbs when they burn out, over and over again. LED bulbs last practically forever. The cost savings in bulb replacement has been a bigger factor than energy savings in driving the move to LED bulbs in signals. I'm pretty sure you could add a tiny heater to the signal enclosure and not make much of a change in the expense of operating the thing, anyway.
This problem must vary a lot depending on where you are. I live in a small town in Virginia (although along I-95) and get good coverage pretty much everywhere I go, including my very rural workplace. What's more, the service has been steadily getting better - at first, I only got EDGE service everywhere, but they lit up 3G in my hometown about a year ago, and in the workplace town a month or two ago.
What's always been inexplicable to me is that the two places that seem to have the worst reception on AT&T are New York and San Francisco. If you were to pick the two places in all of the US that would result in the worst publicity when your network failed, it would have to be those two. Why AT&T has let this go on is inexplicable - I'd be concentrating all my resources on the places that make the most easily heard complaints.
The point of TFA is that there IS trickery involved - Amazon has apparently set up a bunch of shell organizations to make it appear as though they don't have a physical presence in certain states, even though they really do. It's not at all surprising that the states involved are trying to put a stop to this.
... but this is all beside the point. Amazon doesn't pay the tax, the customer does. And there is no question that a customer in jurisdiction X is receiving the benefits of the services provided by X. And that means they should pay. The debate is really about whether Amazon should be COLLECTING the tax, and this is pretty much settled law - if you have some kind of physical presence in a state, you collect that state's sales tax. The NYT/LAT articles are about the fact that Amazon is manipulating its business organization to obfuscate the fact that they have a physical presence in states including NY and CA.
The music and video shops in your example have a presence in the local jurisdiction and benefit from its services such as roads, social programs, police/fire protection and so on. Amazon doesn't.
No kidding. Which is why Amazon isn't actually PAYING the tax. It's COLLECTING the tax, which is actually paid by the person who lives in the jurisdiction... and who is presumably partaking of the services the tax is paying for. Better go back to the drawing board on this one.
If they make their best effort to collect sales tax and some bureaucrat disagrees, the state can come down on Amazon with the full force of the law.
Given that as of right now, they're not even TRYING to collect sales taxes (even though it appears that they legally should be), I doubt that Amazon execs are exactly quaking in their boots about what state governments will do if Amazon does try to collect them. This is purely in effort on Amazon's part to not have to deal with the trouble and expense involved.
Perhaps, I'm not familiar with the tax laws in the various EU countries. I do know that there are many states that have taxes that vary by county. Counties are not easily discernible by zip codes, which makes it very difficult to accurately determine the buyer's location.
And yet, somehow, Amazon still manages to get packages to me, even though my zip code resolves to more than one jurisdiction. This problem is way, way overblown.
... it's terribly confusing for a company that ships everything it sells right to your front door to figure out where you actually live! Tell me another one.
I'm actually in this situation myself: my zipcode corresponds to both an independent city and a county in Virginia. How do the shipping companies figure out which? When they see my zip code, they throw up another screen that asks: do you live in a) Independent City X or b) Y county?
...in Chicago? I mean, how could it, with all those byzantine tax regulations? What? Both local and nationwide brick-and-mortar stores are still in operation in Chi-town? That's unpossible!
Yes, I understand that tax laws are complicated when you have to deal with multiple, overlapping jurisdictions. I also understand that Amazon only differs from, say, Wal-Mart, in that it mostly ships goods to direct to people, rather than shipping them to stores first. I'm pretty sure this is a problem any large business not only could, but already has, figured out. Jeff B. just doesn't want to.
... he apparently just pulled the indirect:direct cost ratio out of his ass! If there had been any data backing this up, it would be one thing, but apparently this analysis was at least in part based on numbers he just made up.
... every time someone starts talking about "complexity theory". When I got to the point in the original article where he just freaking made up the indirect cost as ratio as "between 5:1 and 10:1"... and then took the "average" of the two made up numbers to proceed with his "analysis", I lost all interest in the story. News flash: when you make up your own numbers, you can get any answer you want... and really big, scary numbers sell more articles. Yawn.
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... with the (rumored) Apple tablet, I think Steve would have a hit on his hands. It's not clear to me, though, that you will be able to. Steve has consistently pooh-poohed the idea of either attached physical keyboards or handwriting capture/recognition for the iPhone, which I think bodes somewhat ill for the much-anticipated tablet. Although to be fair, Apple may be warming up to the idea of allowing third-party keyboards with the iPhone (at least the dock port has been freed up for developers to attach third-party hardware to), so there's that.
"Socially awkward" doesn't even begin to describe it. Can you imagine working in a cube farm where everyone talked to their computers to get them to work? Or even a few people did? I would go stark, raving insane.
There are probably some situations where voice control of your computer makes sense. People with disabilities that affect their hands. Jobs that keep your hands busy with other controls, while you still need to bring up info on the screen. That kind of thing. But I've never really understood the impulse to bring voice control to the masses.
I'm almost certainly not buying this iSlate thingy - I already own a MBP and an iPhone, and don't really need anything in between. But I would most definitely buy an iSlate rather than a Kindle - 1) I can't see paying hundreds of dollars for something that for the most part, just reads books... especially when the e-books are almost as expensive as the paper ones. I would want the thing to be able to browse the web (you know, in full color, etc), view movies, and that kind of thing. 2) The battery life issue doesn't really matter to me, because 99% of the time I've got a plug available. For the few times I don't, I don't mind limiting use to a few hours at a time.
Not to say the Kindle is worthless - if you do a lot of flying, I can see where it would be great. Or if you read outdoors a lot. I'm sure there are other situations where it really shines. But I would find it a lot less useful than something like a giant iPod touch.
I agree 100% that forcing people to use a mouse with only one button was the dumbest-idea-evar... but those days are gone. You could always plug in a third-party mouse and have the right/middle/scroll buttons work pretty much as expected. Now even Apple has gotten with the program - the "magic mouse" has a virtual right button. You just click on the surface of the mouse where you'd expect the button to be, and you get a right click.
... but even in the older powerbooks, there were third-party utilities that gave you the ability to right-click by hitting a certain spot on the trackpad (vs. a dedicated button). And as mentioned, the new MBPs just use the two-finger-tap gesture (or click a certain corner of the trackpad) to render a right-click.
I agree that Mac laptops used to be at a disadvantage with respect to this... but now with the multi-touch trackpads I think they're ahead of the game.
... I could either get issued a company phone, or the company would pay my cell bill. There was no way I was carrying around two phones, and the company issued one was a giant clunky Blackberry, whereas my own was an iPhone. The choice was easy.
... is a mixture of pure unsupported assertations, and anecdotes pretending to be data. Any evidence to show that "strikes hurt employees more through lost wages than they gain in negotiations"? In fact, there's a lot of history that shows that unions did, in fact, make lives better for not only their own workers, but for everyone - and not only in the form of wages, but also in things like medical benefits and safe working conditions. For example: the five day work week - brought to you by the AFL-CIO.
Enough with the union bashing, already. Read a little history of the labor movement, and then see what you think.
Could it be because he has a financial interest in selling them? Why, yes. Yes it could. Not that he ever mentioned any of that in his numerous television interviews extolling the virtues of the things - you're meant to think that he's flogging them because he's genuinely convinced of their effectiveness.
To be clear: I'm not opposed to the former DHS secretary taking a post-politics job in the security industry. I'm not even against him appearing on my teevee to flog his products. What stinks, though, is when he doesn't make it clear that his words amount to an advertisement rather than news.
Hear, hear. Your chances of dying in an aircraft terrorism incident are really, really tiny. People need to stop wetting their pants every time they get a whiff of some kind of terrorist activity - it only encourages more of the same. You are far more likely to die in an auto accident, from some other form of murder, by slipping in your bathtub, or even by being struck by lightning, than you are to be killed by a terrorist. So enough with the inane security bullshit, already.
... at least in my business (I'm a defense contractor), there is zero appetite for anything but traditional "page-centric" documents. No demand for Wikis. No demand for mobile device readable documents. No demand for feeds. Your business may be different, but in these parts, we're nowhere near there yet.
This is sort of nonsensical. First of all, a PDF isn't an application, it's a file format. It's great for holding "page centric" slideshows, and I use it as the destination for Powerpoint presentations fairly often. Second, "bringing up the web page live" is hardly a substitute for a presentation. You're only going to have a live web page for stuff that's either 1) customer facing material - how to get to your location, product lines, etc; or 2) internal company stuff - HR policies, trouble ticket systems, etc, etc. When you need to brief your boss on the new servers you need to buy, you're going to show your decision process by bringing up various companies' live web pages and talking off the cuff? Good luck with that.
The point of all this is not to say that "new school" documentation isn't any good - it obviously has a lot of applications. But I really doubt that Word documents and the like are going the way of the dodo any time soon.
I'd be a bigger fan of OO.o, except that MS formats are contractually mandatory with my customer, and any formatting beyond the most simple stuff absolutely always gets mangled by conversion between OO and MS office. So, in practice, I'm never really going to be able to use OO.o for anything I have to share with anyone else until this gets fixed.
Of course, the situation is only a little better between differing releases of MS Office products, so it's not really a very fair criticism... but regardless, my contract has words to the effect that document formats will be MS Office 2003. So there you have it.
... regarding something that is a pretty commonsense business move. I like to get my MS bash on too, but seriously. Every company (if they want to stay in business) keeps tabs on both real and potential competitors. Every company also looks for opportunities to cooperate with other companies/organizations - even if these outfits are also competitors. So there's nothing particularly nefarious about MS 1) keeping tabs on what's going on with various FOSS projects, 2) looking for ways to cooperate with them, or 3) doing both at the same time. Sun, Linus, etc, no doubt are aware that what they say to MS reps could be used to improve MS products later. This isn't illegal or even unethical - it's healthy business competition, and it's good for everyone involved.
Now if the MS rep(s) misrepresented their allegiance to MS in these conversations, or improperly obtained and used Sun's/Linus's/whoever's proprietary data to improve their products, that would be something else. But there's no evidence that that's what's happening here.
The amount released in all these sources is dwarfed by the energy in the daily dose of radiation inbound from the sun. You're talking about rounding errors here. The real issue continues to be the fact that burning all this stuff increases the tendency for inbound heat to be trapped in the atmosphere.
The real money savings comes from the fact that you don't have to replace LED bulbs anywhere near as often as incandescents... and you'd still be saving that money, even if you installed a tiny, cheap heater in each fixture.
... that the main savings involved in replacing incandescent signals with LEDs isn't the energy - it's the expense of having to pay someone to replace those bulbs when they burn out, over and over again. LED bulbs last practically forever. The cost savings in bulb replacement has been a bigger factor than energy savings in driving the move to LED bulbs in signals. I'm pretty sure you could add a tiny heater to the signal enclosure and not make much of a change in the expense of operating the thing, anyway.
This problem must vary a lot depending on where you are. I live in a small town in Virginia (although along I-95) and get good coverage pretty much everywhere I go, including my very rural workplace. What's more, the service has been steadily getting better - at first, I only got EDGE service everywhere, but they lit up 3G in my hometown about a year ago, and in the workplace town a month or two ago.
What's always been inexplicable to me is that the two places that seem to have the worst reception on AT&T are New York and San Francisco. If you were to pick the two places in all of the US that would result in the worst publicity when your network failed, it would have to be those two. Why AT&T has let this go on is inexplicable - I'd be concentrating all my resources on the places that make the most easily heard complaints.
The point of TFA is that there IS trickery involved - Amazon has apparently set up a bunch of shell organizations to make it appear as though they don't have a physical presence in certain states, even though they really do. It's not at all surprising that the states involved are trying to put a stop to this.
... but this is all beside the point. Amazon doesn't pay the tax, the customer does. And there is no question that a customer in jurisdiction X is receiving the benefits of the services provided by X. And that means they should pay. The debate is really about whether Amazon should be COLLECTING the tax, and this is pretty much settled law - if you have some kind of physical presence in a state, you collect that state's sales tax. The NYT/LAT articles are about the fact that Amazon is manipulating its business organization to obfuscate the fact that they have a physical presence in states including NY and CA.
No kidding. Which is why Amazon isn't actually PAYING the tax. It's COLLECTING the tax, which is actually paid by the person who lives in the jurisdiction... and who is presumably partaking of the services the tax is paying for. Better go back to the drawing board on this one.
Given that as of right now, they're not even TRYING to collect sales taxes (even though it appears that they legally should be), I doubt that Amazon execs are exactly quaking in their boots about what state governments will do if Amazon does try to collect them. This is purely in effort on Amazon's part to not have to deal with the trouble and expense involved.
And yet, somehow, Amazon still manages to get packages to me, even though my zip code resolves to more than one jurisdiction. This problem is way, way overblown.
... it's terribly confusing for a company that ships everything it sells right to your front door to figure out where you actually live! Tell me another one.
I'm actually in this situation myself: my zipcode corresponds to both an independent city and a county in Virginia. How do the shipping companies figure out which? When they see my zip code, they throw up another screen that asks: do you live in a) Independent City X or b) Y county?
Seriously, this is not hard.
...in Chicago? I mean, how could it, with all those byzantine tax regulations? What? Both local and nationwide brick-and-mortar stores are still in operation in Chi-town? That's unpossible!
Yes, I understand that tax laws are complicated when you have to deal with multiple, overlapping jurisdictions. I also understand that Amazon only differs from, say, Wal-Mart, in that it mostly ships goods to direct to people, rather than shipping them to stores first. I'm pretty sure this is a problem any large business not only could, but already has, figured out. Jeff B. just doesn't want to.
... he apparently just pulled the indirect:direct cost ratio out of his ass! If there had been any data backing this up, it would be one thing, but apparently this analysis was at least in part based on numbers he just made up.
... every time someone starts talking about "complexity theory". When I got to the point in the original article where he just freaking made up the indirect cost as ratio as "between 5:1 and 10:1"... and then took the "average" of the two made up numbers to proceed with his "analysis", I lost all interest in the story. News flash: when you make up your own numbers, you can get any answer you want... and really big, scary numbers sell more articles. Yawn.