Why not drop the the redundant term 'search'.... and just make a Google Desktop? After all, it has the word google - which makes the term search redundant.
The gmail interface has the glimmerings of a word processor already with its rich text interface, theres already a video player... the real google desktop can't be too far behind.
Sad sad sad though that theres no linux support.
Pakistan's total bandwidth is between 155-600Mbps depending on who u ask. Most of it comes on a single undersea fibreoptic cable, which is knocked out of commisison at least twice a month. There are over a million internet users so its just not enough bandwidth. A large chunk is for Multinatinationals so there's even less available for consumers.
The copper wire is OLD and in many places even telephone calls are full of static so dialup is out of the question. A new infrastructure is needed.
See http://pakistan.blogspot.com for more details.
It's funny all these people complaining about 1-10mbps broadband while here in Pakistan a 64k link is considered "broadband". hell a modem with a somewhat clear line is "almost broadband"!
We need more bandwidth! and cheap wireless is the only way to provide it, with major nodes on fibre and the rest wireless. Ideally a mesh network would be wonderfull! People add nodes, network extends, a central authority keeps an eye on it and if a certain area is getting congested it adds a fibre optic mother node there.
In Pakistan, and I suspect most of the third world, ISP's have way more users than bandwidth. The most common connection is a 33.6K, as the obsolete phone lines around here don't support 56K. Now with a good ISP, this is fast enough to browse the web. However, with most ISP's you get far less than 33K. To get a idea of how slow it is, people often type in their password for hotmail [for some reason its very popular here], go do something, come back click on a email, go make coffee, dust the house, etc. I am not exaggerating here.
Email is the one thing which is fast as when downloading an email you are accesing a local server which operates at the full speed of your connection.
So email searches [and or content via email] is a brilliant idea. Pakistan's entire bandwidth is less than a typical college lab's in one of the better uni's in the US, and till that gets better things aren't going to get better soon. The internet divide is very much here, and the more u can afford the faster u can browse, with the majority not being able to afford any access.
This is the third world. Shipping is a lot of money, and is not reliable unless you pay for DHL or fedex which costs an arm and a leg here.
Most people (99.x%, I'm not sure about the.x) don't have a credit card to order with over the internet. For one book its way overkill to order.
I have ordered books from amazon. By regular mail one shipment took 8 months, the other never arrived. Sometimes shipments do get here, but then our customs stop it and u have to pay them to get it released.
Imagine all the bureacacy u face in the US, multiply it by 20, reduce its effiency by 100, and you will have an idea of how a typical third world govt. operates. Amongst many other clever ideas, the govt. has also imposed a high tax on second hand books, which has led to a virtual stoppage of imports. Same with magazines.
Pakistan's education budget uptill recently just about covered our education ministries fleet of mercedes, houses, and every other thing they could think of. Our current govt. has been making lots of noises about actually doing something, but these very same people increased the taxes on secondhand books. It's similar in a ways to how every govt. works around the world, saying/claiming one thing while they keep on doing whatever it is they do.
Oh, and snapping pictures of mags/books with a mobile phone camera is one of the dumbest things possible. As mentioned above thats only good for pictures, and not text. And most people with a expensive phone could probably afford to buy a mag or two.
Anyways, here we just pool our resources and use a xerox machine. Makes more sense and you get a usable copy. Alternative suggestions are welcome. Buying 10 copies of a 100 dollar acadmic book is not.
Legality? It all depends on where you live. As someone said, you have to go to great lengths for a little knowledge.
Here in Pakistan, foreign books and magazines start at 10 dollars (no matter what the actual price) and go up to 50 dollars. Local books are priced from 5 to 25 dollars.
Here, a middle class salaried person makes around a 100 dollars or less a month. He/she has to support a family. You can imagine that books are the last thing they are every going to buy. Even for the well off, buying a book is something which has to be planned in advance, budgeted, then finally bought.
Since we have low literacy rates here, there isn't much local content of high quality available.
Magazines are one thing, but as long as books are priced beyond your typical consumer, there is something wrong with the business model. If the costs have been covered in the first world then there should be cheaper priced editions available in the rest of the world.
The problem is not that playboy is too expensive, it is that technical books and magazines are priced well beyond reason. Our govt. is too blame also as they do not do anything at all about getting books into the country, providing translations etc.
Anyways my point was, over here our main source of new content is Piracy. either someone gets one copy and reprints it here, or they get a scanned copy from a agent/pirater abroad etc. etc. So the more piracy going on the more stuff we get to read.
The choice isn't about pirating or buying. It's about being able to read the damn things. Pakistan has a developing IT industry, and 99% of the students don't have enough money to buy ONE copy of a typical academic book per year.
The sole purpose of that machine is to browse the web and check email. Nothing else is done, no word processing or games or anything. Windows makes a lot of sense but every few months assorted viruses/spyware/junk would bring that machine to a crawl. With linux it is still working the same as it was the day it was set up. With windows you have to reinstall/clean/disinfect the pc if you hand it over to a non computer literate user every half a year or so.
Not using IE and outlook express could have done the trick, but the linux way there are less stability/crashing problems.
RPM's do make things a lot easier. You just double click and the thing is installed. Even easier than windows. I install the new Mozilla every few months on my linux pc (used primarily as a server) through the command line, and every time I have to figure out how to do it once again, as I hardly ever use the shell. Yes its simple, but the commands are not obvious, and I would rather not have to use them. The redhat updater updates everything else but Mozilla for some strange reason, so I have to d/l install that seperately.
I have a friend how is a linux admin for a big organization, and who set up my routing/apache/squid etc. Now linux is great in the sense that once he set it up it has never crashed. Winxp under the same load would have mysteriously died long ago.
When Moz 1.4 final is released, will Firebird then be based on 1.4, or will it remain based on the Moz 1.3 codebase?
Also Moz needs better default fonts still. I had to install the vera fonts to make it look decent. In IE the fonts looks so much better. I know, thats becasue its using the fonts in windows and what not, and moz just can't include anti aliased fonts that won't work on systems x,y and z, but there needs to a system with prebuilt decent fonts.
Moz is now so much better than IE, but default Moz on linux looks like a POS. Yes yes I installed truetype fonts now its fine but a lot of people don't know how to do all that.
All this is becasue I had installed linux for a non computer person, who updated mozilla and then was stuck with the default fonts.
You best bet is Zeldman's book. Go see the website and the Amazon page on it.
Also his website and the online magazine AListApart contain more usefull stuff on css and web design than most books.
I checked the HTML and Slashdot does not use CSS.
If they just stipped out all the font and the other styling tages and stuffed them into a CSS file that alone would cut down on the page sizes appreciably. They don't even have to mess with the table tags at the begninning, just the fonts/colors etc.
That cannot be very hard to implement, and would make their perl code a lot easier to read also.
If the generated html looks like as it does currenttly, I shudder to think of what the perl code looks like. I can understand why they haven't touched the design in so long, what with then having to look up the perl also.
The design/layout is ok, just add css!
Well I answered my own question... Netgear just updated their site.
NETGEAR, Inc., a worldwide provider of technologically advanced networking products, today announced it will soon be releasing a free, downloadable firmware upgrade for its existing line of wireless networking products based upon the IEEE 802.11g-draft specification. The firmware will incorporate the final changes of the 802.11g specification ratified today by the IEEE task force.
Available this week as a free download from NETGEARâ(TM)s Web site, firmware upgrades for the WGR614 54Mbps Cable/DSL Wireless Router and WG602 54Mbps Wireless Access Point will allow users to easily upgrade their products to comply with the final 802.11g specification.
I just ordered a Netgear WRG614 802.11G wireless router and a WG511 pcmia access card from Amazon... Does anyone know whether this and all the other older models are software upgradeable to the final standards?
Or a year later when I want to use 802.11G somewhere else I'll need to buy a pcmia card supporting the final specs instead of the only the draft?
Aside: When are all the cool gadgets like 802.11G wireless cameras coming out? I want a camra which I can put anywhere then log into it from a wifi pocketpc or laptop.. things like these have some serious potential (for good and bad I must admit).
A wifi enabled tv/projector would be really cool also. I just flip open my laptop, it finds the projector and asks me whether i want use it... shoot all sorts of things.. like transmitting my music selection out to my car, etc. Wifi makes it all possible.
I completely agree with all that you say.. the RIAA are Scum of the Earth etc etc.
But my parents have never even heard of the RIAA!! So your argument is moot. Think about it: How many non slashdot readers do you know who complain about the RIAA? They might complain about the high cost of music and the shit coming out these days, but they don't associate these things with the RIAA.
The point is, the RIAA has a near monopoly on the music biz, and if they play their cards right even now after all their stupidity, they can establish an even stronger monopoly digitally.
I don't think any music service is going to be coming up soon which instead of paying the RIAA will start paying artists directly. They will start but it's going to take them a long long time to grow. And the RIAA can always chop their balls off once they really start growing.
I thought of that, but since I'm sitting all the way over in pakistan where there is no warranty and it can't be fixed I wanted a new one.
Building one here isn't really feasible either since computer parts are double, sometimes triple US prices, and you cannot get anything besides standard tower casings here. I want something the size of a vcr like the tivo. My AMD pc with the stock fan is NOISY!
You know, with the advent of services like iTunes, and others like Sony, etc etc. It is quite possible that a monopoly will finally be established by the RIAA. It is so convenient to buy music online from someplace like iTunes that people over the years will shift to buying their music online. Everyone wants their favourite music and all the copyrights are owned by the big labels. Any service to attract users will have to have a contract with the RIAA so they can sell all the golden oldies. I mean, if some service pops up and they just have a bunch of unknowns not many people will buy from them. Its the Bruce Springsteens and the Beatles of the world who move music. As for Kazaa and others, hell they'll keep going strong but they will get harder and harder to use as the RIAA cracks down. I do not forsee my parents using Kazaa. They used it, and the fact that half the songs are low quality and u get many different results for a single song.. Well they don't care, all they want is to put in the name of a song and get back ONE result which they KNOW will work. Kazaa and napster to them are not worth the effort of searching and seeing if the songs are good quality and error free. They will however happily use iTunes. And that is why iTunes and similar vendors are going to make it big in the next 5 years as normal poeple start using them and discover how convenient they are. It is not the ubergeeks sitting downloading tons of music from kazaa and irc. Hell they can do that all they want it still won't detract from the ever increasing success of pay music. I predict that in the future, people will be like: Yeah, the smiths are really poor, they still use kazaa! Many different online vendors | all having to deal with the RIAA implies a possible monopoly especially with DRM techonology maturing.
I live in a country with no tivo service..
so it strikes me as useless to be paying for a service which I am not going to use just to be able to use hardware which I am paying for. The tivo hardware might be subsidized, but I think there should be a way of buying it without having to also buy service from Tivo.
Is there any comparably priced alternative?
This is slightly off topic but still:
I live in Pakistan and have been wanting a tivo/replaytv for a long while now. The thing which has stopped me from ordering it from amazon is the fact that it needs to be activated. Now, I don't think it is possible to activate from outside the US/Canada. I know they don't work if they are not activited. Secondly,the tivo program guide is not valid outside the us anyways so i don't need their service.
So: Is it possible to just buy the tivo and program it manually? Will it run without the activation? Any hacks to use to without activation?
You know its been a couple of years since IE6 and mozilla is finally with 1.4 ahead of IE...
well guess who is going to come out with a browser which will knock the stuffing out of Moz?
Then it'll spend another 2 years catching up by which time Longhorn will render all non-ms apps useless. Of course by that time Linux will be finally usable so that should be all right.
For those who think Moz bas been better than IE for a while now they are wrong just try using both on WinXP. although 1.4 seems to be pulling up front now.
Slashdot Mirror
Its quite good actually. A lot better than most other scfi crap (which to be fair, most of the scifi shows are just that - crap).
Why not drop the the redundant term 'search'.... and just make a Google Desktop? After all, it has the word google - which makes the term search redundant. The gmail interface has the glimmerings of a word processor already with its rich text interface, theres already a video player... the real google desktop can't be too far behind. Sad sad sad though that theres no linux support.
Pakistan's total bandwidth is between 155-600Mbps depending on who u ask. Most of it comes on a single undersea fibreoptic cable, which is knocked out of commisison at least twice a month. There are over a million internet users so its just not enough bandwidth. A large chunk is for Multinatinationals so there's even less available for consumers. The copper wire is OLD and in many places even telephone calls are full of static so dialup is out of the question. A new infrastructure is needed. See http://pakistan.blogspot.com for more details.
It's funny all these people complaining about 1-10mbps broadband while here in Pakistan a 64k link is considered "broadband". hell a modem with a somewhat clear line is "almost broadband"! We need more bandwidth! and cheap wireless is the only way to provide it, with major nodes on fibre and the rest wireless. Ideally a mesh network would be wonderfull! People add nodes, network extends, a central authority keeps an eye on it and if a certain area is getting congested it adds a fibre optic mother node there.
Email is the one thing which is fast as when downloading an email you are accesing a local server which operates at the full speed of your connection. So email searches [and or content via email] is a brilliant idea. Pakistan's entire bandwidth is less than a typical college lab's in one of the better uni's in the US, and till that gets better things aren't going to get better soon. The internet divide is very much here, and the more u can afford the faster u can browse, with the majority not being able to afford any access.
This is the third world. Shipping is a lot of money, and is not reliable unless you pay for DHL or fedex which costs an arm and a leg here. Most people (99.x%, I'm not sure about the .x) don't have a credit card to order with over the internet. For one book its way overkill to order.
I have ordered books from amazon. By regular mail one shipment took 8 months, the other never arrived. Sometimes shipments do get here, but then our customs stop it and u have to pay them to get it released.
Imagine all the bureacacy u face in the US, multiply it by 20, reduce its effiency by 100, and you will have an idea of how a typical third world govt. operates. Amongst many other clever ideas, the govt. has also imposed a high tax on second hand books, which has led to a virtual stoppage of imports. Same with magazines.
Pakistan's education budget uptill recently just about covered our education ministries fleet of mercedes, houses, and every other thing they could think of. Our current govt. has been making lots of noises about actually doing something, but these very same people increased the taxes on secondhand books. It's similar in a ways to how every govt. works around the world, saying/claiming one thing while they keep on doing whatever it is they do.
Oh, and snapping pictures of mags/books with a mobile phone camera is one of the dumbest things possible. As mentioned above thats only good for pictures, and not text. And most people with a expensive phone could probably afford to buy a mag or two. Anyways, here we just pool our resources and use a xerox machine. Makes more sense and you get a usable copy. Alternative suggestions are welcome. Buying 10 copies of a 100 dollar acadmic book is not. Legality? It all depends on where you live. As someone said, you have to go to great lengths for a little knowledge.
Here in Pakistan, foreign books and magazines start at 10 dollars (no matter what the actual price) and go up to 50 dollars. Local books are priced from 5 to 25 dollars. Here, a middle class salaried person makes around a 100 dollars or less a month. He/she has to support a family. You can imagine that books are the last thing they are every going to buy. Even for the well off, buying a book is something which has to be planned in advance, budgeted, then finally bought. Since we have low literacy rates here, there isn't much local content of high quality available. Magazines are one thing, but as long as books are priced beyond your typical consumer, there is something wrong with the business model. If the costs have been covered in the first world then there should be cheaper priced editions available in the rest of the world. The problem is not that playboy is too expensive, it is that technical books and magazines are priced well beyond reason. Our govt. is too blame also as they do not do anything at all about getting books into the country, providing translations etc. Anyways my point was, over here our main source of new content is Piracy. either someone gets one copy and reprints it here, or they get a scanned copy from a agent/pirater abroad etc. etc. So the more piracy going on the more stuff we get to read. The choice isn't about pirating or buying. It's about being able to read the damn things. Pakistan has a developing IT industry, and 99% of the students don't have enough money to buy ONE copy of a typical academic book per year.
I second that. But that would defeat the purpose of getting lots of beta testers.
The sole purpose of that machine is to browse the web and check email. Nothing else is done, no word processing or games or anything. Windows makes a lot of sense but every few months assorted viruses/spyware/junk would bring that machine to a crawl. With linux it is still working the same as it was the day it was set up. With windows you have to reinstall/clean/disinfect the pc if you hand it over to a non computer literate user every half a year or so. Not using IE and outlook express could have done the trick, but the linux way there are less stability/crashing problems.
RPM's do make things a lot easier. You just double click and the thing is installed. Even easier than windows. I install the new Mozilla every few months on my linux pc (used primarily as a server) through the command line, and every time I have to figure out how to do it once again, as I hardly ever use the shell. Yes its simple, but the commands are not obvious, and I would rather not have to use them. The redhat updater updates everything else but Mozilla for some strange reason, so I have to d/l install that seperately. I have a friend how is a linux admin for a big organization, and who set up my routing/apache/squid etc. Now linux is great in the sense that once he set it up it has never crashed. Winxp under the same load would have mysteriously died long ago.
When Moz 1.4 final is released, will Firebird then be based on 1.4, or will it remain based on the Moz 1.3 codebase? Also Moz needs better default fonts still. I had to install the vera fonts to make it look decent. In IE the fonts looks so much better. I know, thats becasue its using the fonts in windows and what not, and moz just can't include anti aliased fonts that won't work on systems x,y and z, but there needs to a system with prebuilt decent fonts. Moz is now so much better than IE, but default Moz on linux looks like a POS. Yes yes I installed truetype fonts now its fine but a lot of people don't know how to do all that. All this is becasue I had installed linux for a non computer person, who updated mozilla and then was stuck with the default fonts.
You best bet is Zeldman's book. Go see the website and the Amazon page on it. Also his website and the online magazine AListApart contain more usefull stuff on css and web design than most books.
I checked the HTML and Slashdot does not use CSS. If they just stipped out all the font and the other styling tages and stuffed them into a CSS file that alone would cut down on the page sizes appreciably. They don't even have to mess with the table tags at the begninning, just the fonts/colors etc. That cannot be very hard to implement, and would make their perl code a lot easier to read also. If the generated html looks like as it does currenttly, I shudder to think of what the perl code looks like. I can understand why they haven't touched the design in so long, what with then having to look up the perl also. The design/layout is ok, just add css!
I just ordered a Netgear WRG614 802.11G wireless router and a WG511 pcmia access card from Amazon... Does anyone know whether this and all the other older models are software upgradeable to the final standards? Or a year later when I want to use 802.11G somewhere else I'll need to buy a pcmia card supporting the final specs instead of the only the draft? Aside: When are all the cool gadgets like 802.11G wireless cameras coming out? I want a camra which I can put anywhere then log into it from a wifi pocketpc or laptop.. things like these have some serious potential (for good and bad I must admit). A wifi enabled tv/projector would be really cool also. I just flip open my laptop, it finds the projector and asks me whether i want use it... shoot all sorts of things.. like transmitting my music selection out to my car, etc. Wifi makes it all possible.
I completely agree with all that you say.. the RIAA are Scum of the Earth etc etc. But my parents have never even heard of the RIAA!! So your argument is moot. Think about it: How many non slashdot readers do you know who complain about the RIAA? They might complain about the high cost of music and the shit coming out these days, but they don't associate these things with the RIAA. The point is, the RIAA has a near monopoly on the music biz, and if they play their cards right even now after all their stupidity, they can establish an even stronger monopoly digitally. I don't think any music service is going to be coming up soon which instead of paying the RIAA will start paying artists directly. They will start but it's going to take them a long long time to grow. And the RIAA can always chop their balls off once they really start growing.
I thought of that, but since I'm sitting all the way over in pakistan where there is no warranty and it can't be fixed I wanted a new one. Building one here isn't really feasible either since computer parts are double, sometimes triple US prices, and you cannot get anything besides standard tower casings here. I want something the size of a vcr like the tivo. My AMD pc with the stock fan is NOISY!
You know, with the advent of services like iTunes, and others like Sony, etc etc. It is quite possible that a monopoly will finally be established by the RIAA. It is so convenient to buy music online from someplace like iTunes that people over the years will shift to buying their music online. Everyone wants their favourite music and all the copyrights are owned by the big labels. Any service to attract users will have to have a contract with the RIAA so they can sell all the golden oldies. I mean, if some service pops up and they just have a bunch of unknowns not many people will buy from them. Its the Bruce Springsteens and the Beatles of the world who move music.
As for Kazaa and others, hell they'll keep going strong but they will get harder and harder to use as the RIAA cracks down. I do not forsee my parents using Kazaa. They used it, and the fact that half the songs are low quality and u get many different results for a single song.. Well they don't care, all they want is to put in the name of a song and get back ONE result which they KNOW will work. Kazaa and napster to them are not worth the effort of searching and seeing if the songs are good quality and error free. They will however happily use iTunes. And that is why iTunes and similar vendors are going to make it big in the next 5 years as normal poeple start using them and discover how convenient they are. It is not the ubergeeks sitting downloading tons of music from kazaa and irc. Hell they can do that all they want it still won't detract from the ever increasing success of pay music. I predict that in the future, people will be like: Yeah, the smiths are really poor, they still use kazaa!
Many different online vendors | all having to deal with the RIAA implies a possible monopoly especially with DRM techonology maturing.
I live in a country with no tivo service.. so it strikes me as useless to be paying for a service which I am not going to use just to be able to use hardware which I am paying for. The tivo hardware might be subsidized, but I think there should be a way of buying it without having to also buy service from Tivo. Is there any comparably priced alternative?
This is slightly off topic but still: I live in Pakistan and have been wanting a tivo/replaytv for a long while now. The thing which has stopped me from ordering it from amazon is the fact that it needs to be activated. Now, I don't think it is possible to activate from outside the US/Canada. I know they don't work if they are not activited. Secondly,the tivo program guide is not valid outside the us anyways so i don't need their service. So: Is it possible to just buy the tivo and program it manually? Will it run without the activation? Any hacks to use to without activation?
You know its been a couple of years since IE6 and mozilla is finally with 1.4 ahead of IE... well guess who is going to come out with a browser which will knock the stuffing out of Moz? Then it'll spend another 2 years catching up by which time Longhorn will render all non-ms apps useless. Of course by that time Linux will be finally usable so that should be all right. For those who think Moz bas been better than IE for a while now they are wrong just try using both on WinXP. although 1.4 seems to be pulling up front now.