On a Mac, floating toolbars instead of a "proper window" is standard interface design.
Many X applications used to be this way, too. "Let the window manager do window management," they would say.
The problem, IMO, is that the window manager doesn't really know what the windows do or how they relate, so it can't be very smart about it. For instance, I far prefer browser tabs to 20 open instances of mozilla, even though there's little difference conceptually.
I don't think gimp is very suited to picking it up just by using it (that's the problem). For instance, you want to draw a line. You look and look, and nowhere anywhere in the UI is the word "line," not on the toolbar, in the menus, anywhere. Somehow you have to know about the shift-click thing. Of course after you know the secret, it's a pretty quick and convenient way to draw a line.
I totally disagree that planning time was the problem. That may have been a valid reason/excuse at launch time, but they've continued pouring *millions* of dollars into the system for a decade!
What I wonder is, are there comparable systems elsewhere that actually work? When NBC Nightly News covered this story they had pictures of utterly mangled bags, and it made me think how hard it would be to make a system that could handle any size or shape of bag, thousands upon thousands per day, with miles of chains and thousands of bearings, and actually have it be reliable.
Why is the 'big central mainframe' the cause of the problems here?
Oh, I don't think anybody is really saying that. NBC did a report on this, including soundbytes with baggage handlers. By far the main problems were mechanical - the system broke down all the time and ate luggage like popcorn.
I'm not much concerned with them lowering prices on artists I like. I just don't want any of my hard-earned money going to support some crap which I try very hard to avoid. I'd gladly pay more for my music, movies, and TV if I knew that none of that money was going to support crap, and instead was supporting only artists that I choose to support. That is why I buy directly from an artist's personal site whenever I can. I'm not a very sharing person when it comes to adding to the riches of acts like tittany, half-dollar, or P dipshit.
I have to wonder if you have it backwards. It's true the big acts get a lot more money spent on them, but they also bring in a lot more. From what I've heard, most albums lose money, but the megahits subsidize them.
Like in colleges where the women's water polo team complains that the men's football team gets all the money & support. In many cases it's the over-pampered football team which, besides supporting itself in luxury, provides whatever few crumbs the minor sports receive.
We might not think "the masses" have the depth of feeling for art that we do, but their money is just as green and there are a whole lot more of them.
It's hard for me to understand how Rio went under, because I have a Rio S30 and think it's great. Here are the features I like, for my application (which is running):
Cheap. I paid $58 + an add-on SD card.
Lightweight
Skip-proof
Playlists (usually no need to mess with buttons while running)
Bookmarks (especially good for books on tape)
FM tuner (I like listening to the news sometimes... also for the TV audio feed at gyms)
Stopwatch (I don't wear a separate wristwatch... no need)
Backlight (imperative if you run at night or predawn)
Standard, easily replaceable battery (AAA).
A hold switch to prevent accidental button pushing.
IMHO, this cheap little player has almost the perfect feature set me. Though I can't compare it to an iPod because I don't have one.
Today, CacheLogic estimates that P2P applications consume between 60 percent and 80 percent of capacity on consumer ISP networks. The fastest growth in P2P usage is coming in Asian nations with high broadband penetration rates, Parker said.
The average size of traded files is growing, too, Parker said, and today exceeds 100 MB.
CacheLogic is in a good position to know. Find a comparably credible source that's in disagreement, then we'll have some basis for doubt.
This would mean Vonaged would have to support an uber sip server that was aware of the 3rd party voip node.
No, all Vonage would have to do is quit locking down their customers' SIP boxes, so they could accept incoming connections from wherever. Vonage would not have to support non-Vonage calls in any way, they just need to get out of the way.
Of course you can already receive VOIP calls without Vonage (or any other "provider") using a separate SIP box, but you'd rather not have to answer a different phone depending on who's calling. The solution currently is to use anybody but Vonage, but so far Vonage has the most coverage if you want a phone number in your local area code.
Vonage has one big problem, which is they don't allow direct VOIP calls - you can only make and get calls from the POTS.
In a way this make sense for them, as there really is no need for a middleman like Vonage for direct VOIP calls, but as more people get VOIP they are going to want to make VOIP calls without paying a middleman. I already do.
Plus, music storage is one of the few applications where a flipped bit here or there is unlikely to hurt anything. The effective lifespan is probably much longer if you can tolerate some error rate.
I assume this chip will feature Intel's "Matrix Raid", which allows you to have both Raid 0 and 1 on a pair of drives at the same time. So, for instance, you allocate 15 gigs from each drive to make a fast Raid0 partition for gaming / video editing scratch space / whatever, then allocate the remaining 85 gigs from each drive to make a fault-tolerant Raid1 partition for the stuff you don't want to lose.
One problem is most of us don't have much bandwidth at home, so this grid would only be useful for extremely compute-intensive jobs which do a lot of processing on a tiny amount of data without much communication among nodes.
Another problem is you'd have to do every computation on at least 2 different machines to have any confidence in the result.
How about turning the idea into a business plan, writing a proposal, and getting some venture capital?
But then the wealth created by the idea goes to the venture capitalist - i.e. to whoever had some money lying around, instead of whoever had a good idea and worked hard.
Yes, this does present a problem for a single hacker (or even a group of hackers) trying to change the books, but what about the government?
Well, there has never been a single world government in history before, so I would hope there will always be different copies under different authoritative bodies.
But I'm afraid I have to agree with your point about libraries generally not storing their own copies, but subscribing to some big service. I think we must give libraries special status in copyright law so they can independently manage their holdings. Otherwise the world's knowlege will be beholden to just a few (or one) parties.
Electronic form implies easy replication. Sure it's easy to change a copy of a computer file on your computer, but good look changing thousands of copies all at different institutions, all with read-only access!
Nobody is rushing to destroy any books or close conventional libraries with their priceless collections. But wide availability of book text online, if it ever happens, will be a great step forward for whatever society dares to allow it, because universal access is possible.
However, you are not subject to anything. You have the choice to take private transportation to your destination, and avoid random searches of your backpack.
The idea that you forfeit your constitutional rights by setting foot on public property is preposterous.
And the private transportation argument is bogus, since we also have checkpoints and random stops on the roadways.
It's a shame what they've done to the 4th ammendment.
What privacy do you have on a subway? Just curious.
One minimum standard of privacy (perhaps not relevant to the cameras) is the freedom from being patted down or searched, unless there is some particular reason and a warrant:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
However, the majority do not care for this particular provision any more. We also have random car searches, which are in flagrant violation of the same ammendment, but you can't tell the Supreme Court that.
My other prediction is that "next" medium will be delivered not by need for HD movies but by the demands of computer consumers needing a storage devices that saves more gigabytes than DVDs can possibly hope for.
Is there anything besides Blu Ray and HD-DVD on the horizon? I don't want to wait 5 years for something bigger than DVD.
I can't figure out why dual-layer writable DVD media have been SO slow to come about. All the drives already support DL, yet no media. I don't know whether it's lack of demand or pressure from content producers, but either way it doesn't bode well for a successor to 4.7GB DVD.
One thing we can expect from Google: if this is true, they will explicitly not make it for Linux.
Why do you say that? I would have expected them to do something browser-based, as usual. Like maps.google.com, which is browser-based but pushes the limits of richness for browser applications. Or gmail, a web app for a service (email) that used to run its own protocol and standalone apps, but which increasingly is browser-based.
Why on earth would you use this in a server? In a server environment you are probably going to be much more concerned with redundancy and energy efficiency, the two things notably lacking here.
That all depends on the size of the server, doesn't it? On a blade server with 20 or so processors, it might be great to have a pair of these per cabinet (1+1 failover).
Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer, larger supplies actually be more efficient?
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The problem, IMO, is that the window manager doesn't really know what the windows do or how they relate, so it can't be very smart about it. For instance, I far prefer browser tabs to 20 open instances of mozilla, even though there's little difference conceptually.
I don't think gimp is very suited to picking it up just by using it (that's the problem). For instance, you want to draw a line. You look and look, and nowhere anywhere in the UI is the word "line," not on the toolbar, in the menus, anywhere. Somehow you have to know about the shift-click thing. Of course after you know the secret, it's a pretty quick and convenient way to draw a line.
What I wonder is, are there comparable systems elsewhere that actually work? When NBC Nightly News covered this story they had pictures of utterly mangled bags, and it made me think how hard it would be to make a system that could handle any size or shape of bag, thousands upon thousands per day, with miles of chains and thousands of bearings, and actually have it be reliable.
Like in colleges where the women's water polo team complains that the men's football team gets all the money & support. In many cases it's the over-pampered football team which, besides supporting itself in luxury, provides whatever few crumbs the minor sports receive.
We might not think "the masses" have the depth of feeling for art that we do, but their money is just as green and there are a whole lot more of them.
Sounds good, except... will they really lower prices for all the other acts?
Cheap. I paid $58 + an add-on SD card.
Lightweight
Skip-proof
Playlists (usually no need to mess with buttons while running)
Bookmarks (especially good for books on tape)
FM tuner (I like listening to the news sometimes... also for the TV audio feed at gyms)
Stopwatch (I don't wear a separate wristwatch... no need)
Backlight (imperative if you run at night or predawn)
Standard, easily replaceable battery (AAA).
A hold switch to prevent accidental button pushing.
IMHO, this cheap little player has almost the perfect feature set me. Though I can't compare it to an iPod because I don't have one.
Wired is running a very similar article:
CacheLogic is in a good position to know. Find a comparably credible source that's in disagreement, then we'll have some basis for doubt.Of course you can already receive VOIP calls without Vonage (or any other "provider") using a separate SIP box, but you'd rather not have to answer a different phone depending on who's calling. The solution currently is to use anybody but Vonage, but so far Vonage has the most coverage if you want a phone number in your local area code.
In a way this make sense for them, as there really is no need for a middleman like Vonage for direct VOIP calls, but as more people get VOIP they are going to want to make VOIP calls without paying a middleman. I already do.
Plus, music storage is one of the few applications where a flipped bit here or there is unlikely to hurt anything. The effective lifespan is probably much longer if you can tolerate some error rate.
I assume this chip will feature Intel's "Matrix Raid", which allows you to have both Raid 0 and 1 on a pair of drives at the same time. So, for instance, you allocate 15 gigs from each drive to make a fast Raid0 partition for gaming / video editing scratch space / whatever, then allocate the remaining 85 gigs from each drive to make a fault-tolerant Raid1 partition for the stuff you don't want to lose.
Instead of that, do it market-based: start off for some negligible fee, then sell the hours to whomever pays the most.
Another problem is you'd have to do every computation on at least 2 different machines to have any confidence in the result.
But I'm afraid I have to agree with your point about libraries generally not storing their own copies, but subscribing to some big service. I think we must give libraries special status in copyright law so they can independently manage their holdings. Otherwise the world's knowlege will be beholden to just a few (or one) parties.
Nobody is rushing to destroy any books or close conventional libraries with their priceless collections. But wide availability of book text online, if it ever happens, will be a great step forward for whatever society dares to allow it, because universal access is possible.
And the private transportation argument is bogus, since we also have checkpoints and random stops on the roadways.
It's a shame what they've done to the 4th ammendment.
I can't figure out why dual-layer writable DVD media have been SO slow to come about. All the drives already support DL, yet no media. I don't know whether it's lack of demand or pressure from content producers, but either way it doesn't bode well for a successor to 4.7GB DVD.
Anyways, was that 300 watts with or without thost dual high-end GPUs firing away? Those suckers burn.
Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer, larger supplies actually be more efficient?