The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system. The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it.
Yes, if you use any environment for long enough, it will become natural. But that doesn't give it high usability. Daily annoyances are the speech bubbles that keep popping up without rhyme or reason from the icon bars, the ever changing ways in which icons rearrange and present themselves in Explorer, the inconsistent and confusing presentation of the file system (sometimes the Desktop is at the root, sometimes "My Computer" is, sometimes it's the "C:\" drive), to an absolutely hare-brained arrangement of the control panel and administrative tools (just you try to locate the disk partitioning tools on XP home edition).
And if that is not enough, there are so many options and backwards compatibility settings and versions of programs that Windows doesn't even achieve the one thing he lauds it for: consistency. Programs follow conventions and looks from Windows 95 to XP, and the zillions of options mean that one XP desktop may behave completely differently from the next.
Among this set of choices, Macintosh OS X clearly is the usability winner, if not for any other reason, simply because Apple essentially started from scratch and removed a lot of useless junk.
For instance I work directly for CLRC, a government laboratory, however I work at a University. So while my work is government sponsered, and government funded, I don't work at a government laboratory. I therefore have alot of freedoms and (much) less bureaucracy than if I work directly at my parent institution.
You have a lot of freedoms because you are a graduate student. In any case, if you are in the UK, isn't your university owned and run by the government as well?
You need to recognize the distinction between government-conducted research and government-funded private research.
And why do I need to do that? The government pays and the government chooses what gets and doesn't get done. Any private company that did that would loudly proclaim the work and the results as "theirs" under those circumstances. If anything, we are far too generous as tax payers by letting universities and companies retain many of the patents that come out of that publically funded research.
In any case, I actually have worked in both environments, and I don't see the distinction. People in government research labs work as hard as they do in private research labs or at universities, and usually for less money and less fame.
That said, though, running a research effort is nothing like running a utility. If you want a glimpse into how the government would run the Internet, look at Amtrak. In other words, badly.
Yeah, you are giving us the typical "the government can't do anything right" drivel. I wonder whether you apply the same logic to the military. Do you think the government is doing a poor job at running the military? Maybe we should ask the military to be self-sufficient (they could take over a different country every few years to stay in business)?
As for Amtrak, Amtrak is doing a good job given very difficult political circumstances. Asking Amtrak to be self-sufficient is completely unreasonable--all of our other transportation systems are heavily subsidized.
Oh, I should add that you can run gcc both in-device and on your desktop.
If you plug in a 512M CF card, the whole thing is more powerful and has more memory and disk storage than most workstations had less than a decade ago.
Command line applications compile and run just fine. Most Linux GUI apps don't because it runs Qt/Embedded by default. However, there is an X11 server and environment available for it (see handhelds.org).
The summary gets it wrong. The SL-5600 has 32M of SDRAM and 64M of Flash; the SL-5500 has 64M of SDRAM and 16M of Flash "ROM". See here.
The reason is probably that without using an add-on Flash card, the old SL-5500 stored a lot of stuff in RAM, which was easily lost. The only reason I can imagine why they lowered the amount of SDRAM is for battery life, although that seems kind of short-sighted to me.
that people keep claiming that something like that, a 400MHz RISC processor and 32M of RAM isn't fast enough for running X11 and therefore requires an embedded window system that is incompatible with what we run on our desktops.
The problem with your statement is that "free market" and "strongly regulated" are mutually exclusive.
You misread. I said, I either want free markets or strong regulation. What I don't want is big private oligopolies and monopolies, which are the most inefficient way of providing services. But big oligopolies and monopolies is just what we are increasingly getting.
But usually mixing is a disaster, like in California where they capped the price at which utilities could retail while deregulating the wholesale market. Of course, that wasn't an economic decision, it was a political exercise to discredit deregulation.
That is a pretty silly conspiracy theory. Pretty much all the people who would have had an interest in "discrediting deregulation" opposed it at the time.
You are right that things might not have gone quite as badly if this had been a completely open market, but you are pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It was industry that wanted price restrictions (the restrictions worked both ways) because they were hoping to bilk consumers out of some more money. Well, they never thought prices could go the other way as far as they did, and it backfired.
But the whole exercise was pointless. Competition in the power industry might possibly have saved consumers a few percent on average in the long term under a best case free-market scenario, but at the cost of much less price stability. To a regular CA consumer, price stability is much more important than a few percent long term savings. The only customers for whom this would conceivably have been an interesting proposition would have been very large consumers of electricity.
What you really had is two powerful, large industry groups negotiating something, egged on by a bunch of pseudo-free-market ideologues. The public at large was the innocent bystander and victim.
Oh boy, there speaks someone who has never worked for a Government doing research.
Actually, I have. As have many graduate students.
Really, you seriously think so? Want to back that up with some specific cases, I really doubt that is the case.
The Internet, most basic computer science research, a large fraction of medical and drug development, most of the results in basic physics, etc. A lot of those, are, of course, in collaboration with industry, but the projects are selected and financed by the US government through institutes like (D)ARPA and NIH.
People don't release code open source as some kind of embarrassing step-daughter of commercial business models. They release open source either because they need market share for some related idea/product/service, or they simply want community contributions. And why do other people start using and contributing to open source projects? Because of its longevity: it doesn't matter what Linus or Stallman or whoever does, I can be certain that the Linux kernel and the GNU C compiler will be around, and if there are enough people in the same boat as me, I can be pretty certain that they will be maintained. That's the real advantage of open source.
Escrow models break this: I have no guarantee that the source will be released, and I personally won't be able to pay to get it in its entirety. From my point of view as a user and potential contributor, escrowed code is as uncertain as commercial code.
There are enough people who have an incentive to release code open source to keep us all happy. And against open source competition, even escrowed code doesn't stand much of a chance.
Debian has several text-to-speech systems built-in. One of them is Festival, based on a research prototype from Edinburgh. It's a few years behind IBM and ATT, but passable. With more training data, it would get better. There are also several open source speech recognition engines of varying quality, again, mostly derived from university research (I believe Cambridge, CMU, and a few others).
Up to now, Microsoft has not really made any significant contributions to speech technology. They have bought lots of companies and hired away experts from other companies and universities. Those people are now toiling away at Microsoft research and waiting for their options to be worth something. Whether they'll make significant contributions to speech research while at Microsoft remains to be seen.
These systems seem to be getting incrementally better, but it doesn't look like a big breakthrough.
Of course, the intonation is roughly that kind of compromise a PR spokesman employs who is trying to sound convincing but has no clue what he is saying. That's not surprising, given that the TTS systems really do not have any understanding of the meaning of what they are saying.
Get yourself a $200 PC (lots of other companies are offering them as well) and you'll have something much more flexible, without Philips or some other company spying on you.
The "paper-based displays" (eInk and the like) aren't really made of paper--they are some complicated construct made out of various polymers. They have some advantages over OLEDs, but it's up in the air whether they are going to be cheaper.
To make something like that go, we need better battery technologies, better wireless technologies, better display technologies, and better processors. Let's see, those are being developed by a lot of small companies and some big ones like Toshiba, Ericsson, Kodak, TransMeta, Via, etc. Whether we get nifty looking designs like that write-PDA/telephone depends entirely whether those other companies manage to pull off the enabling technologies. It seems almost insulting to give the kudos to the design company that then puts them together in a nice looking but functionally fairly obvious package.
And I don't actually foresee all those things coming about so fast anyway. Small OLED screens will hopefully be widespread in 10 years, but they'll still be expensive as wall covering. Noise cancelation of non-periodic signals is hard. And the market for mood-ring-contact-lenses seems even smaller than the market for mood rings.
When did government ever do anything better, cheaper, quicker than industry?
All the time. For example, Medicare/Medicaid is far more efficient than just about any privately run health plan, and government research is highly efficient and has been responsible for most of the real innovations over the last 50 years.
When it comes to big organizations and big projects, the government works very well. The real question is: what big private company has been better, cheaper, or quicker than the government? Enron? IBM? AT&T? Don't make me laugh. Big corporations are command economies but without the transparency and checks-and-balances of governments, and the often do their business free of they kind of competitive pressures that make markets efficient.
I am all for a private sector and free markets in telecommunications. The trouble is that we don't have it. And if the choice is between unregulated inefficient corporate behemoths and public utilities or strongly regulated private utilities, the latter is much preferable and likely to be more efficient.
Probes, yes. People, no, at least not in the foreseeable future: the amount of money we would spend on sending people would be much more effectively spent on probes. We can send a great number of probes for the cost of a single manned mission. Probes could return samples, for example, and they can be remotely controlled, albeit slowly. Probes also greatly reduce the risk of contamination of Mars with terrestrial organisms. Besides, there are many other interesting bodies in the solar system and probes allow us to explore all of them at least to some degree; human exploration of Mars is putting all our eggs in one basket for the near future.
Once propulsion and other technologies have advanced more, then we can think about sending people again.
This photo interpretation is only a little bit better than Rorschach Ink blot for crying out loud.
Well, all those photos are taken from orbit. If we had landers, we wouldn't have to guess.
A few dozen robotic landers under remote control could explore more area and yield more results than human explorers, and they'd still be a lot cheaper than sending people.
For the amount of money it takes to send people there, we can send hundreds of probes; it really doesn't matter if a few of them fail. The "million dollar toy" you speak of was one attempt to cut costs; it didn't work--no big loss. Robotic exploration is the way to go--human exploration just doesn't make sense at this stage.
i agree you can get more speed out of something without transactional isolation -- but i hope you never need it. when it rains, it pours... and i've run into the need for transactions even in web-apps. every millisecond counts, not speed-wise, but logic-wise.
Of course, transactions are needed in many applications--you don't want to sell the same hotel room twice. However, the database is only one of many places where transactions can be implemented, and it is often not the best place. Of course, most people trained in commercial computing won't even consider other design possibilities.
You have successfully managed to reduce issues of free speech, fair use, artist's rights, information access, and scientific and technological progress to a stupid one sentence catch phrase intended to arouse emotions.
You are on your way to becoming a talking head on television, or, if you are not photogenic enough, a speech writer for one of our representatives. Or, you can become a spokesperson for one of the big companies, proclaiming that toxic sludge is good for people. You are even more qualified if you (as seems likely) simply plagiarized your posting.
Most fusion reactions generate radioactive waste through neutron capture. So, it's not the clean, unlimited energy supply you think.
But we do have a clean source of fusion-based energy. We don't need any new technologies to take advantage of it either--with current technologies, we could build hydrogen-generating plants in the Sahara (near the ocean) and ship the hydrogen anywhere in the world, safely. It's not quite as cheap as digging oil out of the ground if you just go by drilling costs, but it's a lot cheaper if you take environmental costs into consideration.
you probably won't find too many databases on the 'net that need the kind of performance some commercial brands give.
Quite true: open source databases are often much faster than their commercial counterparts. Of course, there is a reason commercial databases are such a dog: it's all the features they support and all the transactional and consistency guarantees they are trying to make. The question is: do people need all that? And the answer may well turn out to be no for most database applications.
The diamond ring is the human male's antlers. It's there to complete the mating ritual and keep the mate interested. It's easily recognizable, it demonstrates the necessary ability on the part of the male to provide for the young and defend territory, it's completely useless, it requires a vast investment of resources to purchase, and it is harmful to other members of the species. Many of those features happen to be implemented by the diamond cartel, but that makes little difference to its purpose. And, if you ask me, compared to antlers, it's a lot less of a nuisance.
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Yes, if you use any environment for long enough, it will become natural. But that doesn't give it high usability. Daily annoyances are the speech bubbles that keep popping up without rhyme or reason from the icon bars, the ever changing ways in which icons rearrange and present themselves in Explorer, the inconsistent and confusing presentation of the file system (sometimes the Desktop is at the root, sometimes "My Computer" is, sometimes it's the "C:\" drive), to an absolutely hare-brained arrangement of the control panel and administrative tools (just you try to locate the disk partitioning tools on XP home edition).
And if that is not enough, there are so many options and backwards compatibility settings and versions of programs that Windows doesn't even achieve the one thing he lauds it for: consistency. Programs follow conventions and looks from Windows 95 to XP, and the zillions of options mean that one XP desktop may behave completely differently from the next.
Among this set of choices, Macintosh OS X clearly is the usability winner, if not for any other reason, simply because Apple essentially started from scratch and removed a lot of useless junk.
You have a lot of freedoms because you are a graduate student. In any case, if you are in the UK, isn't your university owned and run by the government as well?
And why do I need to do that? The government pays and the government chooses what gets and doesn't get done. Any private company that did that would loudly proclaim the work and the results as "theirs" under those circumstances. If anything, we are far too generous as tax payers by letting universities and companies retain many of the patents that come out of that publically funded research.
In any case, I actually have worked in both environments, and I don't see the distinction. People in government research labs work as hard as they do in private research labs or at universities, and usually for less money and less fame.
That said, though, running a research effort is nothing like running a utility. If you want a glimpse into how the government would run the Internet, look at Amtrak. In other words, badly.
Yeah, you are giving us the typical "the government can't do anything right" drivel. I wonder whether you apply the same logic to the military. Do you think the government is doing a poor job at running the military? Maybe we should ask the military to be self-sufficient (they could take over a different country every few years to stay in business)?
As for Amtrak, Amtrak is doing a good job given very difficult political circumstances. Asking Amtrak to be self-sufficient is completely unreasonable--all of our other transportation systems are heavily subsidized.
If you plug in a 512M CF card, the whole thing is more powerful and has more memory and disk storage than most workstations had less than a decade ago.
Yes, both from its built-in keyboard and via ssh.
Can I compile and run most linux apps?
Command line applications compile and run just fine. Most Linux GUI apps don't because it runs Qt/Embedded by default. However, there is an X11 server and environment available for it (see handhelds.org).
The reason is probably that without using an add-on Flash card, the old SL-5500 stored a lot of stuff in RAM, which was easily lost. The only reason I can imagine why they lowered the amount of SDRAM is for battery life, although that seems kind of short-sighted to me.
that people keep claiming that something like that, a 400MHz RISC processor and 32M of RAM isn't fast enough for running X11 and therefore requires an embedded window system that is incompatible with what we run on our desktops.
You misread. I said, I either want free markets or strong regulation. What I don't want is big private oligopolies and monopolies, which are the most inefficient way of providing services. But big oligopolies and monopolies is just what we are increasingly getting.
But usually mixing is a disaster, like in California where they capped the price at which utilities could retail while deregulating the wholesale market. Of course, that wasn't an economic decision, it was a political exercise to discredit deregulation.
That is a pretty silly conspiracy theory. Pretty much all the people who would have had an interest in "discrediting deregulation" opposed it at the time.
You are right that things might not have gone quite as badly if this had been a completely open market, but you are pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It was industry that wanted price restrictions (the restrictions worked both ways) because they were hoping to bilk consumers out of some more money. Well, they never thought prices could go the other way as far as they did, and it backfired.
But the whole exercise was pointless. Competition in the power industry might possibly have saved consumers a few percent on average in the long term under a best case free-market scenario, but at the cost of much less price stability. To a regular CA consumer, price stability is much more important than a few percent long term savings. The only customers for whom this would conceivably have been an interesting proposition would have been very large consumers of electricity.
What you really had is two powerful, large industry groups negotiating something, egged on by a bunch of pseudo-free-market ideologues. The public at large was the innocent bystander and victim.
Actually, I have. As have many graduate students.
Really, you seriously think so? Want to back that up with some specific cases, I really doubt that is the case.
The Internet, most basic computer science research, a large fraction of medical and drug development, most of the results in basic physics, etc. A lot of those, are, of course, in collaboration with industry, but the projects are selected and financed by the US government through institutes like (D)ARPA and NIH.
PCs come in more form factors than stereos. One of them fits your need, at a reasonable price.
Escrow models break this: I have no guarantee that the source will be released, and I personally won't be able to pay to get it in its entirety. From my point of view as a user and potential contributor, escrowed code is as uncertain as commercial code.
There are enough people who have an incentive to release code open source to keep us all happy. And against open source competition, even escrowed code doesn't stand much of a chance.
Up to now, Microsoft has not really made any significant contributions to speech technology. They have bought lots of companies and hired away experts from other companies and universities. Those people are now toiling away at Microsoft research and waiting for their options to be worth something. Whether they'll make significant contributions to speech research while at Microsoft remains to be seen.
Of course, the intonation is roughly that kind of compromise a PR spokesman employs who is trying to sound convincing but has no clue what he is saying. That's not surprising, given that the TTS systems really do not have any understanding of the meaning of what they are saying.
Get yourself a $200 PC (lots of other companies are offering them as well) and you'll have something much more flexible, without Philips or some other company spying on you.
The "paper-based displays" (eInk and the like) aren't really made of paper--they are some complicated construct made out of various polymers. They have some advantages over OLEDs, but it's up in the air whether they are going to be cheaper.
And I don't actually foresee all those things coming about so fast anyway. Small OLED screens will hopefully be widespread in 10 years, but they'll still be expensive as wall covering. Noise cancelation of non-periodic signals is hard. And the market for mood-ring-contact-lenses seems even smaller than the market for mood rings.
All the time. For example, Medicare/Medicaid is far more efficient than just about any privately run health plan, and government research is highly efficient and has been responsible for most of the real innovations over the last 50 years.
When it comes to big organizations and big projects, the government works very well. The real question is: what big private company has been better, cheaper, or quicker than the government? Enron? IBM? AT&T? Don't make me laugh. Big corporations are command economies but without the transparency and checks-and-balances of governments, and the often do their business free of they kind of competitive pressures that make markets efficient.
I am all for a private sector and free markets in telecommunications. The trouble is that we don't have it. And if the choice is between unregulated inefficient corporate behemoths and public utilities or strongly regulated private utilities, the latter is much preferable and likely to be more efficient.
Once propulsion and other technologies have advanced more, then we can think about sending people again.
Well, all those photos are taken from orbit. If we had landers, we wouldn't have to guess.
A few dozen robotic landers under remote control could explore more area and yield more results than human explorers, and they'd still be a lot cheaper than sending people.
For the amount of money it takes to send people there, we can send hundreds of probes; it really doesn't matter if a few of them fail. The "million dollar toy" you speak of was one attempt to cut costs; it didn't work--no big loss. Robotic exploration is the way to go--human exploration just doesn't make sense at this stage.
Of course, transactions are needed in many applications--you don't want to sell the same hotel room twice. However, the database is only one of many places where transactions can be implemented, and it is often not the best place. Of course, most people trained in commercial computing won't even consider other design possibilities.
You are on your way to becoming a talking head on television, or, if you are not photogenic enough, a speech writer for one of our representatives. Or, you can become a spokesperson for one of the big companies, proclaiming that toxic sludge is good for people. You are even more qualified if you (as seems likely) simply plagiarized your posting.
Most fusion reactions generate radioactive waste through neutron capture. So, it's not the clean, unlimited energy supply you think.
But we do have a clean source of fusion-based energy. We don't need any new technologies to take advantage of it either--with current technologies, we could build hydrogen-generating plants in the Sahara (near the ocean) and ship the hydrogen anywhere in the world, safely. It's not quite as cheap as digging oil out of the ground if you just go by drilling costs, but it's a lot cheaper if you take environmental costs into consideration.
Quite true: open source databases are often much faster than their commercial counterparts. Of course, there is a reason commercial databases are such a dog: it's all the features they support and all the transactional and consistency guarantees they are trying to make. The question is: do people need all that? And the answer may well turn out to be no for most database applications.
The diamond ring is the human male's antlers. It's there to complete the mating ritual and keep the mate interested. It's easily recognizable, it demonstrates the necessary ability on the part of the male to provide for the young and defend territory, it's completely useless, it requires a vast investment of resources to purchase, and it is harmful to other members of the species. Many of those features happen to be implemented by the diamond cartel, but that makes little difference to its purpose. And, if you ask me, compared to antlers, it's a lot less of a nuisance.