I agree with most other comments, the date itself is not that important. Leopard (seems to) offers much more than visual improvements and seems like a worthy successor to Tiger.
Even if there are plenty of new features, many that I'm sure I'll love since it will help me be more efficient (Time Machine, the new Spotlight, etc), there is no "killer feature" that I can say it's groundbreaking. Am I asking for too much? Maybe. But XGrid has been around for a few years and it is not yet the killer feature I hope it will become: easy grid computing for anyone. Might not be that important in home (though many homes have more than one computer, but there's not a lot of number crunching in there), but for small and medium enterprises, that really could be a significant money and time saver.
Humm.. that was too early in the morning. Of course, Tele Atlas' competitor is NAVTEQ, not Tom Tom. If I'm not wrong, NAVTEQ is bigger. It has been bought by Nokia last month. While Tele Atlas was bought by Tom Tom themselves earlier last summer, so it shades a new light on my parent post. I don't think NAVTEQ have any "crowdsourcing" type of GPS/Road data tool yet.
Agreed. And this isn't something new. The two major road data providers, TomTom and Tele Atlas, already have their "crowdsourcing" tools to improve the maps of their GPS Nav systems (and any other other of their customers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!). See MapShare and MapInsight, their official tools. Of course, OpenStreetMap is could be considered another pertinent project bridging GPS and crowdsourcing. Oh, and by the way, you have real-time traffic in Google Earth too you know. And we discussed p2p networks for road traffic some time ago.
And now, totally off-topic, I would have liked/. to discuss the last Microsoft Virtual Earth release this week. It's really major. My story submission about it was rejected. There's even a Google SketchUp competitor in there and many features we won't see anytime soon on Google Maps / Google Earth (and other few worthy competitors).
Is this something that would suit your needs: Beagle for Linux, Spotlight for OSX? I haven't tried Beagle (I don't have root access on my Debian installation at work), but Spotlight is probably my most cherished feature in OSX... it's so useful.
From the site: "Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes."
Really. Don't want to get stucked by one of the numerous webmap providers? Use OpenLayers.org. OpenLayers, open source, will legally allow you to connect to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other providers' data and switch between any without ever changin your code. No jokes, this is the best choice. Of course, it allows you to do *much* more. Want to learn more? Also, OpenLayers works perfectly with other widely used webmapping software, such as GeoServer.org and many others. See also the webmapping section over Slashgeo.org. (Yes I'm one of the founders, but it's really on-topic!:-) Why not read this entry on the webmapping APIs and data access.
the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious Not serious, well, many "edutainment" games are quite fun and doesn't make me feel like I'm "losing my time"! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game
iPod and its cheap earbuds bear some of the responsibility for rendering this degradation in sound quality less objectionable I'm very satisfied with these earbuds and I'm probably not alone. I do feel these earbuds sound great. And no, I'm not your audiophile, just a regular guy who's satisfied and unhappy reading such a quote, fanboyism aside.
Sweden, denmark, Canada etc.. are socialists. Sorry to admit, as a Canadian, I confirm we can't be considered socialists, especially with the actual Conservative government and the power of the oil industry in the western provinces.
I hope people won't use this opportunity to dismiss global warming as a whole. There are numerous global warming studies and this "bugged" one is only one of them. Of course, no model is perfect, they're models! But I consider global warming a scientific fact nonetheless.
From TA: "Based on past showers, there should be up to 200 bright meteors visible per hour, and they may have an unusual blue-green colour."
[that's the info I wanted from the article... perfect timing since we'll be canoing with friends at that date... now, if only the god of blow-away-clouds can be with us...]
On the UTF-8 support topic, this post from May 2006 on the slash dev mailing list (link here, but scrambled by sourceforge), the maintainer of Solidot successfully modified slash to support Chinese characters. Maybe the dev team could reuse their patches? Does it works? Yes, here's the proof.
In think Unicode support has been completed, but has not been added to the slashcode code. If you search the slashcode dev mailing list on sourceforge, you'll find posts about a Chinese (if my memory is right) guy who modified Slash to support unicode characters. That was about two years ago?
I'm not claiming I have an accurate opinion on Thunderbird, but still, here is more:-)
Really? It has better IMAP searching than most other clients out there. I don't really use IMAP. See my other answers to GP. Main reason: my IMAP servers have low storage limits, so all my email is stored locally.
As for search, I've been blown away by Spotlight's integration in Mail. I'd like something similar built into Thunderbird. I'd like it built in, I know there's Beagle, but we can't install such beast on our desktops at work.
User-defined tags do work now and didn't work with 1.0. Yes and no:-) When I saw TB2 would support tags, I was *really* happy... until I found out what it really was. It's very far from any "real" (my opinion) user tagging system such as Delicious, Flikr and the like.
Can you clarify? It seems to support all the same character sets Firefox supports. Example: I'm having problems with email addresses with the ' character in it (in the name attached, not the actual email address), TB splits it in two recipients, one invalid. That's one problem, but there's more. Switching from html to plain text often results in UTF8 defects.
Anyway, don't take me wrong, I like Thunderbird enough to keep using it every day as my main work tool. But there are many ruff corners and the UI is bad. I hope it will improve, even if it departs from the Mozilla foundation. Maybe the new Mozilla Penelope will be for me?
Thanks for the info!:-) I've done some reading and you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail with.mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits per user too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway!:-) I am not planning to run my own IMAP server yet (and I could not at work anyway!)
Thanks for the info! I've done some reading and you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail with.mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway!:-)
Thanks for telling me I'm wrong, but you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail/.mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway!:-)
I'm guessing that you receive your email via a POP server. If you used an IMAP server, and you could switch between clients 10 times a day with no grief. Actually, I use IMAP at home and at work, but I don't know how to use it efficiently: since I have over 5,000 emails (much more in fact), many that I want/need to keep for work-related purposes, I move them in specific folders. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of IMAP? IMAP is not meant for syncing thousands of emails, am I wrong? Because of this, I always felt that even if my email is IMAP, this was more or less useless since my email archive is not IMAP compatible because if its size. (tell me and wrong and I'll gladly change my habits!) (and yes, I use the TB feature to delete attachments after copying them on the HD:-)
I suspect its because thunderbird doesn't really offer anything more than its competitors and because it has few must-have extensions. I use Thunderbird as my only email client at work, but in my opinion, Thunderbird doesn't offer more, it offers less. Not less such as in less bloated, but less such as in features-that-I-would-like-and-I-can-find-in-other -email-clients. The addressbook sucks. Search too. As you said, there isn't enough good extensions so far (e.g. the pitchdark theme that I like so much as not been updated to TB2.0). No support for user tags (no, the "tags" they included in 2.0 (which were there in previous versions) does not count as support for tags). Poor support of non-english characters. etc.
But why do I keep using it? Because I hope it will become as good as Firefox and switching email clients is never as straightforward as one would like. And I'm not saying FF does not have flaws, in my opinion benefits outweighs the flaws. I'm not sure if this is true with TB. I have no idea, and I'm probably not alone failing to predict the future, if a new status for Thunderbird will actually help the project or not... I guess we'll find out in a few months/years!
From TFA: ""Some of that data we show on the site itself: Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. Essentially, we're interested in measuring the 'social engagement' of each post. To make this a little less hand-wavy, I think we'll agree that a bookmark is nice but a comment involves more work, a trackback even more so, etc. - hence, engagement). Once we have all this data, we apply our 'secret sauce', which comes in a form of statistical analysis with respect to the author's previous history/posts. PostRank is not a global score, it's with respect to the blogger him/herself.""
Secret sauce? Why do I prefer open sauce?;-)
One other way to filter RSS is by geographic location through using GeoRSS. However, the source RSS must be offered in GeoRSS for this geolocalization filtering to work... but it's only a matter of time, we'll get there. (hey, even slash has a plugin that works for publishing GeoRSS)
I though Vista was the last of its kind? Will 7 really be something deeply different? Can they dare try or is this road too risky (and do they know what to try)?
I'm amazed at the pace technology goes. Even if I don't (regularly) use their products, Microsoft still plays a very important role in the industry and 7 will (probably?) be important whether we want it or not. Between virtualization and Web OSes, where will 7 lead its customers? (Aero-like feats don't count as major contributions to operating systems...) And with Linux making (slow but real?) inroads into homes, as well as MacOS X, which innovations / killer features will 7 provide? (ok, I admit, I haven't read TFA...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most other comments, the date itself is not that important. Leopard (seems to) offers much more than visual improvements and seems like a worthy successor to Tiger.
Even if there are plenty of new features, many that I'm sure I'll love since it will help me be more efficient (Time Machine, the new Spotlight, etc), there is no "killer feature" that I can say it's groundbreaking. Am I asking for too much? Maybe. But XGrid has been around for a few years and it is not yet the killer feature I hope it will become: easy grid computing for anyone. Might not be that important in home (though many homes have more than one computer, but there's not a lot of number crunching in there), but for small and medium enterprises, that really could be a significant money and time saver.
Humm.. that was too early in the morning. Of course, Tele Atlas' competitor is NAVTEQ, not Tom Tom. If I'm not wrong, NAVTEQ is bigger. It has been bought by Nokia last month. While Tele Atlas was bought by Tom Tom themselves earlier last summer, so it shades a new light on my parent post. I don't think NAVTEQ have any "crowdsourcing" type of GPS/Road data tool yet.
Agreed. And this isn't something new. The two major road data providers, TomTom and Tele Atlas, already have their "crowdsourcing" tools to improve the maps of their GPS Nav systems (and any other other of their customers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!). See MapShare and MapInsight, their official tools. Of course, OpenStreetMap is could be considered another pertinent project bridging GPS and crowdsourcing. Oh, and by the way, you have real-time traffic in Google Earth too you know. And we discussed p2p networks for road traffic some time ago.
/. to discuss the last Microsoft Virtual Earth release this week. It's really major. My story submission about it was rejected. There's even a Google SketchUp competitor in there and many features we won't see anytime soon on Google Maps / Google Earth (and other few worthy competitors).
And now, totally off-topic, I would have liked
Is this something that would suit your needs: Beagle for Linux, Spotlight for OSX? I haven't tried Beagle (I don't have root access on my Debian installation at work), but Spotlight is probably my most cherished feature in OSX... it's so useful.
Here's the official press release. There's additional articles on Bloomberg and TradingMarkets.
This news was predicted after TomTom bought Tele Atlas last July, NAVTEQ's main competitor.
I've been amazed by the Prefuse.org open source visualization project and its Vizster subproject. My only sadness is it's still beta.
From the site: "Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes."
For your information, OpenStreetMap uses the OpenLayers.org API to render its maps. The two have very different purposes.
Really. Don't want to get stucked by one of the numerous webmap providers? Use OpenLayers.org. OpenLayers, open source, will legally allow you to connect to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other providers' data and switch between any without ever changin your code. No jokes, this is the best choice. Of course, it allows you to do *much* more. Want to learn more? Also, OpenLayers works perfectly with other widely used webmapping software, such as GeoServer.org and many others. See also the webmapping section over Slashgeo.org. (Yes I'm one of the founders, but it's really on-topic! :-) Why not read this entry on the webmapping APIs and data access.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game
Remember this /. story about RFID Passports Cloned Without Opening the Package? I'm not sure if RFID and security will ever get along at a satisfying level or if will be similar to the systematic breaking of DRM locks. Amongst other RFID stories, this "Security analysis report" paper [91 pages pdf, 967k] is most informative (via this blog).
I hope people won't use this opportunity to dismiss global warming as a whole. There are numerous global warming studies and this "bugged" one is only one of them. Of course, no model is perfect, they're models! But I consider global warming a scientific fact nonetheless.
From TA: "Based on past showers, there should be up to 200 bright meteors visible per hour, and they may have an unusual blue-green colour."
[that's the info I wanted from the article... perfect timing since we'll be canoing with friends at that date... now, if only the god of blow-away-clouds can be with us...]
On the UTF-8 support topic, this post from May 2006 on the slash dev mailing list (link here, but scrambled by sourceforge), the maintainer of Solidot successfully modified slash to support Chinese characters. Maybe the dev team could reuse their patches? Does it works? Yes, here's the proof.
In think Unicode support has been completed, but has not been added to the slashcode code. If you search the slashcode dev mailing list on sourceforge, you'll find posts about a Chinese (if my memory is right) guy who modified Slash to support unicode characters. That was about two years ago?
As for search, I've been blown away by Spotlight's integration in Mail. I'd like something similar built into Thunderbird. I'd like it built in, I know there's Beagle, but we can't install such beast on our desktops at work. User-defined tags do work now and didn't work with 1.0. Yes and no
Anyway, don't take me wrong, I like Thunderbird enough to keep using it every day as my main work tool. But there are many ruff corners and the UI is bad. I hope it will improve, even if it departs from the Mozilla foundation. Maybe the new Mozilla Penelope will be for me?
Thanks for the info! :-) I've done some reading and you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail with .mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits per user too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway! :-) I am not planning to run my own IMAP server yet (and I could not at work anyway!)
Thanks for the info! I've done some reading and you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail with .mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway! :-)
Thanks for telling me I'm wrong, but you see, both at work (Thunderbird on Debian) and at home (Mail/.mac), my IMAP servers have storage limits too low for my needs. So if I get it right, IMAP can't help me. Thanks anyway! :-)
But why do I keep using it? Because I hope it will become as good as Firefox and switching email clients is never as straightforward as one would like. And I'm not saying FF does not have flaws, in my opinion benefits outweighs the flaws. I'm not sure if this is true with TB. I have no idea, and I'm probably not alone failing to predict the future, if a new status for Thunderbird will actually help the project or not... I guess we'll find out in a few months/years!
From TFA: ""Some of that data we show on the site itself: Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. Essentially, we're interested in measuring the 'social engagement' of each post. To make this a little less hand-wavy, I think we'll agree that a bookmark is nice but a comment involves more work, a trackback even more so, etc. - hence, engagement). Once we have all this data, we apply our 'secret sauce', which comes in a form of statistical analysis with respect to the author's previous history/posts. PostRank is not a global score, it's with respect to the blogger him/herself.""
;-)
Secret sauce? Why do I prefer open sauce?
One other way to filter RSS is by geographic location through using GeoRSS. However, the source RSS must be offered in GeoRSS for this geolocalization filtering to work... but it's only a matter of time, we'll get there. (hey, even slash has a plugin that works for publishing GeoRSS)
I though Vista was the last of its kind? Will 7 really be something deeply different? Can they dare try or is this road too risky (and do they know what to try)?
;-)
I'm amazed at the pace technology goes. Even if I don't (regularly) use their products, Microsoft still plays a very important role in the industry and 7 will (probably?) be important whether we want it or not. Between virtualization and Web OSes, where will 7 lead its customers? (Aero-like feats don't count as major contributions to operating systems...) And with Linux making (slow but real?) inroads into homes, as well as MacOS X, which innovations / killer features will 7 provide? (ok, I admit, I haven't read TFA...