Let's see, this 15" Powerbook has 2GB ram, a 120GB HD, 1.67 PPC G4 processor, 128MB ATI Radion 9700 video chip running a 1440x960 screen, 802.11g, Slot-load 8x SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW), gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 & 800, built-in speakers, built-in microphone, DVI-I and SVGA-out, and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. And that's not counting the software shipped with it.
Funny, but it seems to me that most other notebooks are the ones missing the features...
Visit an Apple store and check out the lastest Powerbooks, as they've just updated the screens. I'm typing this on a new 15" Powerbook with a widescreen resolution of 1440x920 and it's absolutely gorgeous.
That's probably better from the RIAA's viewpoint, as sharing your music with 100,000 anonymous "friends" will take a while if you have to actually go visit them...
And I could do without the small B to P part, actually. If I'm looking for a used pro camera, I don't want to see "auctions" from every small camera store in the US selling new inventory.
Encouraging every mom and pop small business in the world to advertise their stock on ebay has pretty much ruined the service, IMHO. Especially as any given small business's stock is pretty much the same as everyone else's.
$391m last financial year, on sales of $3.2b? Please. That's a drop in the bucket for MS, and can well be written off as a marketing expense. You want to see someone hemorrhaging money, as in billions, look at GM or Ford. GM has lost nearly $4 billion this year alone.
Besides, unless they have an actual source for the actual parts cost inside MS, they're just speculating. MS could easily have a sweetheart deal with IBM or ATI or any or all of the suppliers, in exchange for future commitments on the quantities they're going to buy. A deal could also include little spiffs thrown in like mentioning the ATI graphics chip in every marketing piece.
If you're going to jump all over someone over what they wrote then you need to learn to read what they actually wrote. He said, "...solve 80% of the problem that you can with the least effort..." With "least effort" implying that solving the right 20% will gain you 80% of the results. Secondly, he also fully qualified the sentence with the word "frequently", meaning often, but not always.
Sorry. And while I understand the point you're making, I think all of you are focusing on a single word in a single sentence (i.e. create) and, quite illogically, extrapolating from there to the worst possible case. In fact, from the same article...
"The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so."
Which would imply the ability to both read and write documents. 'Nuff said.
Please. If you know the format stream to write documents, you know the stream to read them.
This doesn't mean, however, that you have the ability to RENDER them, as in format a paragraph with word breaks, hyphenation, margins, indents, tabs, and so forth, such that it looks exactly the same. For that they'd effectively have to release the entire word code base.
'Course, you don't have that ability with OpenDocument, either...
"Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone."
Interesting prognostication, but I totally fail to see how this "shift" follows from the opening of the document formats. Not all software is best done by a bunch of hackers working in their spare time, as just a casual look around SourceForge will demonstrate. With such a huge number of failed and abandoned projects, and only a relatively few high-profile success stories (LAMP), I don't believe the FOSS model is a poster child for the end-all and be-all of success.
IMHO, there's still plenty of room for dedicated teams of developers putting their jobs on the line to create great, commercial-grade software for (you can shudder now) profit.
And as far as models go, I can see an equally likely future based not solely on service and support, but subscriptions...
"...with players like Microsoft that will never allow applications run on anything but Windows..."
You mean applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (Entourage) on OSX? And RDC and Windows media player and Messenger on OSX? Those kind of players?
I'd like to see you do a search engine that lets millions of people at a time search 8,000,000,000 pages in just under 2/10th's of a second, and return highly relevant, highly accurate, highly targeted results.
The later part, btw, was what caused most people, including myself, to jump ship from AltaVista. With Google, I could finally find what I was looking for, usually at the top of page 1.
And actually, most people admire the complexity and the sheer scale.
Oh come on. Since so many games consist of shuffling papers and files back and forth from window to window, I think it would be the perfect metaphor for a console gaming system...
Reread the quote. "...and allows those of us with large digital music collections an easy way to get from PC->Stereo without any special hardware."
With existing digital music collections. From PC->Stereo. Again, from PC to Stereo. Already having such a collection on a PC stated as part of the sentence.
So intead of looking like a smart-ass-troll, you end up looking like a dumb-ass-troll.
Sad, really.
Re:Typical ... help the top 3 percent screw the re
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
Precisely. All children need to be challenged, each according to their abilities. And yet the current system assumes that, year-after-year, every child will march to the next level at the same time and in lockstep with every other child.
Could be even simpler than that. Just stream music from your Mac to the xbox hooked into the tv and sound system, similar to the existing mac-to-airport-express system.
Re:And do we really want to?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I had a high school class where you were supposed to read the book and complete all of the workbook exercises for a semester's credit. I read the book the first week, and completed the workbook the next two. Teacher graded the workbook, gave me an A+, gave me an oral exam just to make sure I hadn't cheated somehow, and transferred me then and there to the advanced class.
Had she not done so, I would have suffered through the remainder of semester, staring at the ceiling.
That's the kind of "boring" class we're talking about. Not a boring subject (no such thing), but one paced so the average--or even below-average--student can keep up.
"The idea is that every student has a chance to be at the same level as they enter the next grade..."
And that's the real problem, as not every student IS at the same level. But we continue to grind them through a system that's seemingly designed to stamp out identical, mass-produced, interchangeable parts.
And do we really want to?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"But do we know how to identify the child whose brilliance might change the world? And do we really want to?"
Do we know how to identify all of them? No. But better to identify the ones we can, and give them every advantage we can, rather than simply running them through a system that, to them, would proceed at a glacial pace.
Ummmmm... Drop a box or two at Comcast's and/or Qwest's main data centers in Denver, and you can serve an entire region. Be perfect for local search applications, streaming video, and so on.
Also, there are specific centers where the major fibre runs from city to city terminate. And many cities (New York, San Francisco, Chicago) act as hubs for entire regions. Those are prime locations.
Akamai does the same thing (servers in major dc's) on a smaller scale, and it keeps my computer from making 20 hops across the country just to get and display Yahoo's logo.
So just because there aren't seven major peering points anymore doesn't mean it can't be done, and that I can't have a box within a half-dozen hops of 90% of the world's internet users.
Slashdot Mirror
The new laptops support scrolling gestures. Just drag two fingers instead of one.
Funny, but it seems to me that most other notebooks are the ones missing the features...
Visit an Apple store and check out the lastest Powerbooks, as they've just updated the screens. I'm typing this on a new 15" Powerbook with a widescreen resolution of 1440x920 and it's absolutely gorgeous.
That's probably better from the RIAA's viewpoint, as sharing your music with 100,000 anonymous "friends" will take a while if you have to actually go visit them...
Encouraging every mom and pop small business in the world to advertise their stock on ebay has pretty much ruined the service, IMHO. Especially as any given small business's stock is pretty much the same as everyone else's.
Besides, unless they have an actual source for the actual parts cost inside MS, they're just speculating. MS could easily have a sweetheart deal with IBM or ATI or any or all of the suppliers, in exchange for future commitments on the quantities they're going to buy. A deal could also include little spiffs thrown in like mentioning the ATI graphics chip in every marketing piece.
If you're going to jump all over someone over what they wrote then you need to learn to read what they actually wrote. He said, "...solve 80% of the problem that you can with the least effort..." With "least effort" implying that solving the right 20% will gain you 80% of the results. Secondly, he also fully qualified the sentence with the word "frequently", meaning often, but not always.
With the light from 500 mirrors bouncing around, how to you know you're focusing "your" mirror.
"The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so."
Which would imply the ability to both read and write documents. 'Nuff said.
long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string
EOF
...then I can damn well READ the format.
This doesn't mean, however, that you have the ability to RENDER them, as in format a paragraph with word breaks, hyphenation, margins, indents, tabs, and so forth, such that it looks exactly the same. For that they'd effectively have to release the entire word code base.
'Course, you don't have that ability with OpenDocument, either...
Interesting prognostication, but I totally fail to see how this "shift" follows from the opening of the document formats. Not all software is best done by a bunch of hackers working in their spare time, as just a casual look around SourceForge will demonstrate. With such a huge number of failed and abandoned projects, and only a relatively few high-profile success stories (LAMP), I don't believe the FOSS model is a poster child for the end-all and be-all of success.
IMHO, there's still plenty of room for dedicated teams of developers putting their jobs on the line to create great, commercial-grade software for (you can shudder now) profit.
And as far as models go, I can see an equally likely future based not solely on service and support, but subscriptions...
You mean applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (Entourage) on OSX? And RDC and Windows media player and Messenger on OSX? Those kind of players?
The later part, btw, was what caused most people, including myself, to jump ship from AltaVista. With Google, I could finally find what I was looking for, usually at the top of page 1.
And actually, most people admire the complexity and the sheer scale.
Please. It's obvious that the woman is the mother, happy (ah, very happy) she can now keep track of the kids........
Since you'd need a Mac to stream the music from....
Oh come on. Since so many games consist of shuffling papers and files back and forth from window to window, I think it would be the perfect metaphor for a console gaming system...
With existing digital music collections. From PC->Stereo. Again, from PC to Stereo. Already having such a collection on a PC stated as part of the sentence.
So intead of looking like a smart-ass-troll, you end up looking like a dumb-ass-troll.
Sad, really.
How likely is that?
Could be even simpler than that. Just stream music from your Mac to the xbox hooked into the tv and sound system, similar to the existing mac-to-airport-express system.
Had she not done so, I would have suffered through the remainder of semester, staring at the ceiling.
That's the kind of "boring" class we're talking about. Not a boring subject (no such thing), but one paced so the average--or even below-average--student can keep up.
"The idea is that every student has a chance to be at the same level as they enter the next grade..."
And that's the real problem, as not every student IS at the same level. But we continue to grind them through a system that's seemingly designed to stamp out identical, mass-produced, interchangeable parts.
Do we know how to identify all of them? No. But better to identify the ones we can, and give them every advantage we can, rather than simply running them through a system that, to them, would proceed at a glacial pace.
You can do it... see http://www.engravingsys.com/versalaser.htm
I keep hoping that the US will export it's surplus of lawyers to China. Could be a nice little export industry ....
Also, there are specific centers where the major fibre runs from city to city terminate. And many cities (New York, San Francisco, Chicago) act as hubs for entire regions. Those are prime locations.
Akamai does the same thing (servers in major dc's) on a smaller scale, and it keeps my computer from making 20 hops across the country just to get and display Yahoo's logo.
So just because there aren't seven major peering points anymore doesn't mean it can't be done, and that I can't have a box within a half-dozen hops of 90% of the world's internet users.