Well, in this case, my guess would be that the 'metal lattice' over top was the roughly patterned metal that they strike into the metal (to make the paint adhere more) showing through the paint where it was rubbed off on the high points. I guess under a high-power microscope they look pretty much the same.
So, I guess that's what nanotech looks like since a TRAINED SECURITY CONTRACTOR mistook one for the other.
Create? Hardly ever. Review? All the freakin' time.
In fact, if the Blackberries couldn't read docs and presentations none of the managers around my place would ever get around to approving any of my stuff. It's absolutely critical if they're going to be used in the corporate world at large to be able to read word documents, power point presentations, and to a much lesser extent pdfs and excel spreadsheets. Edit? Well, people can probably get by that. It must also connect to either exchange or the other ones (Netware? Domino?)that people who don't use exchange use to get appointments, mail, and contacts.
Without those features, it's going to be niche for corps.
I'm sure there'll be lots of other comments saying much the same thing, but I agree wholeheartedly with you.
I have three laptops in use in my family, and none of them use any more than 30GB on the hard drive... And I could probably clean them up to get them smaller.
Big files get stored on the main desktop at home, and the only things that typically live on the laptops are programs and enough files to keep us going at the time.
If these drives weren't so dang expensive, I'd use them right now and be perfectly happy with the capacity.
And the time for them to go seems to not have anything to do with money - rather, it's where the company is in its evolution.
I know someone who does this, he starts companies, and builds them until they get to the point where he starts to have to do more management than work*. Then he leaves it to people who like management and starts something else where he can do that work* he likes.
*You know what I mean... actual technical work where he can get into the gears and muck around with systems. I'm not trying to say that managing isn't also hard work, because it is.
I work for the government of Ontario. When we purchase things, we are exempt from GST (federal tax) but have to pay PST (to ourselves). The Federal Government is PST exempt, but has to pay GST.
I've run office 2K on it with no problems for a month or so now. Or at least I haven't found any gotcha's with Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook. Not that I've done extensive testing, just used it.
I never bothered putting 97 on it, (because I hate O97) but I don't see why it wouldn't work just as well.
See, I'm not so sure that the scroll wheel is the absolute best thing for navigating music, and I don't actually think that the success of the iPod is because of it. The iPod is successful because the whole interface is very very good. The scroll wheel is a part of this of course, but I don't think it's the central reason for the good usability of the iPod.
A scroll wheel is a 1 dimentional control of infinite length. This allows you to scroll through things quite well, but I'm not absolutely convinced that it's necessarily better than a 2 dimentional control of a fixed length or even a 2d control with on-off button presses like the Zune, given that you can have infinite length scrolls by simply holding down the button for a variable length of time. (you could actually extend that by varying the speed of your control by the strength of your button press, which would be I think a very good control scheme, but I digress)
Anyway, the other minor quibble that I do have with scroll wheels is that they absolutely force you to not only move your thumb in an up/down motion, which it is very good at given that that is how we evolved to use them, but also to move them side to side, which they aren't nearly as good at. You can move your thumb up and down forever with a lot of fine control, but you cannot get nearly as much fine control when moving side to side, and it can eventually lead to soreness and loss of use (although you'd probably have to use it far more often than on an iPod to actually make you lose the use of your thumb)
You bring up the example of the scroll wheel, and it supports my point since it's not actually an infinite length 1d control - you have to reposition your finger to continue scrolling - and it doesn't require you to use side to side movement. In fact, any mouse that has ever tried to really have positional side to side movement hasn't really caught on.
That ended up being far longer than I thought it would be.
I don't know about that, but I do have accounts in three different banks, and they do have two factor authentication - bank card and pin - for some of the access I have to them. Mostly it works pretty well...
We used to have this in Ontario, and for a while there was a huge business in reflective coverings for licence plates. These covers were, of course, illegal, so there was that little bit of income for the cops as well...
The thing was that I never noticed the speed going down when it was in, but I did notice it go up a whole heck of a lot the day after it went away.
I have two comments about it. One: speeding may not be in and of itself dangerous, but it is a contributing factor, and makes accidents that do happen more serious. All else being equal (i.e. the reduced speed changes no other driving habits) people dricving slower absolutely makes for safer highways. Two: people were always on the lookout for minivans on the side of the road. It made people look better, which I also always think is a good thing.
Yeah, and that Packard Bell PC with the round case thingy and the angled drives coming off it that I wanted so much in the mid-nineties was a figment of my imagination too. Same with that Black IBM one with the external desktop 'pod' thing that held your CD and floppy drives.
Of course, Apple was probably more successful at it that other people... Probably because they kind of went into it whole hog while everyone else kind of just dabbled here and there.
Which is exactly the problem I had in the past with a website I built using Typo3 (which is in general a reasonably good CMS)
The client was having problems editing a certain record in the db, and after much investigation I discovered that any record that had the words "insert into" in it would make the submit form die completely. Annoying to say the least.
I'll leave it to your imaginations as to what kind of web site would have the term "insert into" in news articles so as to leave my client's anonymity remain.
While I can't comment on your specific question, I do know that with the (now defunct?) COPPA you would indeed have to comply. In fact, even if you had a non-US company with an offshore datacentre, you would have to comply.
I did some research on COPPA at the time because I worked on a kid's web site, and I called the agency that administrated it. They told me that any time I was collecting information from people within the US, no matter where I, the website, or my company was set up, the law affected me.
Allow your wife to drive the car with your driver's licence. Just see how impressed the cops are when she explains that you aren't using it, so you should be able to transfer it at will between different users...
Of course, this ignores the whole fact that car analogies are about as useful as breasts on a bull when talking computers.
Hannibal is brilliant by all accounts (especially his own...) and one of the few people who understands technology and communication well enough to be able to put esoteric subjects into terms understandable to an intelligent lay person, but he's not anything close to the only person to be able to figure this kind of thing out - especially since he probably didn't spend a whole lot of time on this article compared to the amount of time someone who wanted to actually steal an election would.
If Hannibal can do this then someone who wanted to steal an election, and could spend a trivial amount of money on doing it could absolutely do the same. It is utterly absurd to think that the analysis he did in the course of researching and writing a single article couldn't be done (and probably was done a long time ago) by any one of hundreds of other organizations if they had a small team working on it for months or years.
The result? The only people for who this is news are the people who don't have a vested interest in stealing an election - and those are the people who need to know about it. Bravo to my favourite tech site for doing this.
Lazarus Long's idea was similar to yours but had a certain amount of elegance that yours misses. He said you should put them in a barrel until they're 18, feeding them through the bung hole. When they reach the age of 18, you make a sober and considered decision on whether to let them out or drive in the bung.
(You do know who Lazarus Long is, right? If not, hand in your geek card on your way out the door)
On a more reasonable tack, this problem isn't associated with kids, or even the school administrators. It's a problem with the courts and parents. The administrators' decision in this case seems to be a reasonable response to the environment they're working in (which is broken, but they still have to respond to it)
History repeats itself, just faster.
on
Wikipedia Goes Mobile
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs."
Which is exactly why Guinness, the brewery, started publishing an anual book of world records: To resolve bar disputes about the longest, fastest, first, etc... Perhaps you've heard of it?
And, of course, as a sysop messing with friends' tradewars characters to mess with their heads.
We were the FidoNet hub for our area, which of course made our QuickBBS bbs system have to live on top of Front Door for the FidoNet stuff. Couldn't tell you why we did it of course, since it was a huge outlay of time, but nevertheless.
It was our only computer too - if someone was on the board (most of the time really, we were moderately popular considering we only had one line) when I needed to use the computer for homework (read: play test drive) and I knew them, I'd go to chat mode and tell them to leave. If I didn't know them I'd pick up the phone receiver and make crackling noises until the modem booted them.
Of course they are. That's why it's the 12 top rules rather than the full guidelines, which are quite specific.
Unless that's what you're talking about, in which case I apologise, but it does seem to me that the full guidelines are quite specific, so I assumed not.
If you dig around the site, you'll find this answer from one of their usability people:
Expose actually does not have great usability results. The primary problem is that the position that the windows are placed in is not predictable. Users have to search the desktop to see where Expose decided to place the app they are looking for. Many Mac users continue to rely on the Dock and Apple-TAB to switch tasks. Flip 3D keeps the windows in their front to back order and aligns them on a known curve. Most users who know about Flip 3D use it as their primary task switching mechanism.
I thought that too, and I wondered if there was a way (ignoring for the moment whether there was a desire on anyone's part) to make some kind of adaptor connector that would go between Zune and an iPod dock connector.
What would be really really cool from the user's perspective would be a standard connector and communications protocol so we'd have a choice what player to use.
I wonder how it feels to Microsoft to be on the other side of the vendor lock-in game?
I can't really speak for Dell, but the usual way of doing it is this:
1: go to manufacturer and negotiate reasonable prices for lots and lots of stuff 2(a): wait until the manufacturer ramps up the workforce/leases on equipment and space to meet your order and has a significant portion of their income tied to your continued patronage 3(b): Tell them that they're going to lose your orders unless they reduce the price of their products and refuse to pay more when costs go up. Since such a huge part of their income comes from you, it'd be impossible for them to lose your business, no matter the cost 3: profit (massively, at the expense of pretty much everyone else)
In Canada, (since we seem to be getting into a international comparison of junk mail refusal) you can put something on your mailbox that says no junk mail please, and they'll not deliver any Unadressed Ad Mail. They will still deliver anything with your name on it (since they don't really have any way of discerning what's junk and what's real from those) but you'll be left alone with the 'give one of these to everyone at this postal code' kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in this case, my guess would be that the 'metal lattice' over top was the roughly patterned metal that they strike into the metal (to make the paint adhere more) showing through the paint where it was rubbed off on the high points. I guess under a high-power microscope they look pretty much the same.
So, I guess that's what nanotech looks like since a TRAINED SECURITY CONTRACTOR mistook one for the other.
Create? Hardly ever. Review? All the freakin' time.
In fact, if the Blackberries couldn't read docs and presentations none of the managers around my place would ever get around to approving any of my stuff. It's absolutely critical if they're going to be used in the corporate world at large to be able to read word documents, power point presentations, and to a much lesser extent pdfs and excel spreadsheets. Edit? Well, people can probably get by that. It must also connect to either exchange or the other ones (Netware? Domino?)that people who don't use exchange use to get appointments, mail, and contacts.
Without those features, it's going to be niche for corps.
I'm sure there'll be lots of other comments saying much the same thing, but I agree wholeheartedly with you.
I have three laptops in use in my family, and none of them use any more than 30GB on the hard drive... And I could probably clean them up to get them smaller.
Big files get stored on the main desktop at home, and the only things that typically live on the laptops are programs and enough files to keep us going at the time.
If these drives weren't so dang expensive, I'd use them right now and be perfectly happy with the capacity.
And the time for them to go seems to not have anything to do with money - rather, it's where the company is in its evolution.
I know someone who does this, he starts companies, and builds them until they get to the point where he starts to have to do more management than work*. Then he leaves it to people who like management and starts something else where he can do that work* he likes.
*You know what I mean... actual technical work where he can get into the gears and muck around with systems. I'm not trying to say that managing isn't also hard work, because it is.
You got to love governments
You don't know the half of it...
I work for the government of Ontario. When we purchase things, we are exempt from GST (federal tax) but have to pay PST (to ourselves). The Federal Government is PST exempt, but has to pay GST.
Off topic I know, but there you are.
I've run office 2K on it with no problems for a month or so now. Or at least I haven't found any gotcha's with Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook. Not that I've done extensive testing, just used it.
I never bothered putting 97 on it, (because I hate O97) but I don't see why it wouldn't work just as well.
See, I'm not so sure that the scroll wheel is the absolute best thing for navigating music, and I don't actually think that the success of the iPod is because of it. The iPod is successful because the whole interface is very very good. The scroll wheel is a part of this of course, but I don't think it's the central reason for the good usability of the iPod.
A scroll wheel is a 1 dimentional control of infinite length. This allows you to scroll through things quite well, but I'm not absolutely convinced that it's necessarily better than a 2 dimentional control of a fixed length or even a 2d control with on-off button presses like the Zune, given that you can have infinite length scrolls by simply holding down the button for a variable length of time. (you could actually extend that by varying the speed of your control by the strength of your button press, which would be I think a very good control scheme, but I digress)
Anyway, the other minor quibble that I do have with scroll wheels is that they absolutely force you to not only move your thumb in an up/down motion, which it is very good at given that that is how we evolved to use them, but also to move them side to side, which they aren't nearly as good at. You can move your thumb up and down forever with a lot of fine control, but you cannot get nearly as much fine control when moving side to side, and it can eventually lead to soreness and loss of use (although you'd probably have to use it far more often than on an iPod to actually make you lose the use of your thumb)
You bring up the example of the scroll wheel, and it supports my point since it's not actually an infinite length 1d control - you have to reposition your finger to continue scrolling - and it doesn't require you to use side to side movement. In fact, any mouse that has ever tried to really have positional side to side movement hasn't really caught on.
That ended up being far longer than I thought it would be.
I don't know about that, but I do have accounts in three different banks, and they do have two factor authentication - bank card and pin - for some of the access I have to them. Mostly it works pretty well...
We used to have this in Ontario, and for a while there was a huge business in reflective coverings for licence plates. These covers were, of course, illegal, so there was that little bit of income for the cops as well...
The thing was that I never noticed the speed going down when it was in, but I did notice it go up a whole heck of a lot the day after it went away.
I have two comments about it. One: speeding may not be in and of itself dangerous, but it is a contributing factor, and makes accidents that do happen more serious. All else being equal (i.e. the reduced speed changes no other driving habits) people dricving slower absolutely makes for safer highways. Two: people were always on the lookout for minivans on the side of the road. It made people look better, which I also always think is a good thing.
Yeah, and that Packard Bell PC with the round case thingy and the angled drives coming off it that I wanted so much in the mid-nineties was a figment of my imagination too. Same with that Black IBM one with the external desktop 'pod' thing that held your CD and floppy drives.
Of course, Apple was probably more successful at it that other people... Probably because they kind of went into it whole hog while everyone else kind of just dabbled here and there.
Which is exactly the problem I had in the past with a website I built using Typo3 (which is in general a reasonably good CMS)
The client was having problems editing a certain record in the db, and after much investigation I discovered that any record that had the words "insert into" in it would make the submit form die completely. Annoying to say the least.
I'll leave it to your imaginations as to what kind of web site would have the term "insert into" in news articles so as to leave my client's anonymity remain.
While I can't comment on your specific question, I do know that with the (now defunct?) COPPA you would indeed have to comply. In fact, even if you had a non-US company with an offshore datacentre, you would have to comply.
I did some research on COPPA at the time because I worked on a kid's web site, and I called the agency that administrated it. They told me that any time I was collecting information from people within the US, no matter where I, the website, or my company was set up, the law affected me.
Or:
Allow your wife to drive the car with your driver's licence. Just see how impressed the cops are when she explains that you aren't using it, so you should be able to transfer it at will between different users...
Of course, this ignores the whole fact that car analogies are about as useful as breasts on a bull when talking computers.
Hannibal is brilliant by all accounts (especially his own...) and one of the few people who understands technology and communication well enough to be able to put esoteric subjects into terms understandable to an intelligent lay person, but he's not anything close to the only person to be able to figure this kind of thing out - especially since he probably didn't spend a whole lot of time on this article compared to the amount of time someone who wanted to actually steal an election would.
If Hannibal can do this then someone who wanted to steal an election, and could spend a trivial amount of money on doing it could absolutely do the same. It is utterly absurd to think that the analysis he did in the course of researching and writing a single article couldn't be done (and probably was done a long time ago) by any one of hundreds of other organizations if they had a small team working on it for months or years.
The result? The only people for who this is news are the people who don't have a vested interest in stealing an election - and those are the people who need to know about it. Bravo to my favourite tech site for doing this.
Same with Hovercraft. Of course, the supply of hovercraft is quite a bit more limited than locomotives, but that's beside the point.
Plus, you'd have to deal with all the eels.
Lazarus Long's idea was similar to yours but had a certain amount of elegance that yours misses. He said you should put them in a barrel until they're 18, feeding them through the bung hole. When they reach the age of 18, you make a sober and considered decision on whether to let them out or drive in the bung.
(You do know who Lazarus Long is, right? If not, hand in your geek card on your way out the door)
On a more reasonable tack, this problem isn't associated with kids, or even the school administrators. It's a problem with the courts and parents. The administrators' decision in this case seems to be a reasonable response to the environment they're working in (which is broken, but they still have to respond to it)
"I guess if I were still a bartender, this would be a necessity in solving bar disputes before they escalate to fisticuffs."
Which is exactly why Guinness, the brewery, started publishing an anual book of world records: To resolve bar disputes about the longest, fastest, first, etc... Perhaps you've heard of it?
Well, it was running on an Amstrad IBM clone with a 32Mb hard drive, so I guess it might have been ok.
The ridiculous thing here is that I'm getting this advice something like 18 years too late for it to do me any good whatsoever.
Ah yes, tradewars...
And, of course, as a sysop messing with friends' tradewars characters to mess with their heads.
We were the FidoNet hub for our area, which of course made our QuickBBS bbs system have to live on top of Front Door for the FidoNet stuff. Couldn't tell you why we did it of course, since it was a huge outlay of time, but nevertheless.
It was our only computer too - if someone was on the board (most of the time really, we were moderately popular considering we only had one line) when I needed to use the computer for homework (read: play test drive) and I knew them, I'd go to chat mode and tell them to leave. If I didn't know them I'd pick up the phone receiver and make crackling noises until the modem booted them.
Thems were the days...
Of course they are. That's why it's the 12 top rules rather than the full guidelines, which are quite specific.
Unless that's what you're talking about, in which case I apologise, but it does seem to me that the full guidelines are quite specific, so I assumed not.
If you dig around the site, you'll find this answer from one of their usability people:
Expose actually does not have great usability results. The primary problem is that the position that the windows are placed in is not predictable. Users have to search the desktop to see where Expose decided to place the app they are looking for. Many Mac users continue to rely on the Dock and Apple-TAB to switch tasks. Flip 3D keeps the windows in their front to back order and aligns them on a known curve. Most users who know about Flip 3D use it as their primary task switching mechanism.
(More of his answer is here: http://shellrevealed.com/forums/thread/602.aspx )
So apparently it's based on (who'da thunk it) research. It might be flawed research of course, but they did what they did conciously...
From my own limited playing with Flip3D I can actually see what's on the screens... Not all of them, but enough to see what's going on.
I thought that too, and I wondered if there was a way (ignoring for the moment whether there was a desire on anyone's part) to make some kind of adaptor connector that would go between Zune and an iPod dock connector.
What would be really really cool from the user's perspective would be a standard connector and communications protocol so we'd have a choice what player to use.
I wonder how it feels to Microsoft to be on the other side of the vendor lock-in game?
I can't really speak for Dell, but the usual way of doing it is this:
1: go to manufacturer and negotiate reasonable prices for lots and lots of stuff
2(a): wait until the manufacturer ramps up the workforce/leases on equipment and space to meet your order and has a significant portion of their income tied to your continued patronage
3(b): Tell them that they're going to lose your orders unless they reduce the price of their products and refuse to pay more when costs go up. Since such a huge part of their income comes from you, it'd be impossible for them to lose your business, no matter the cost
3: profit (massively, at the expense of pretty much everyone else)
There's an interesting article here: http://www.harpers.org/BreakingTheChain.html
You've obviously never dealt with Wal*Mart have you?
In Canada, (since we seem to be getting into a international comparison of junk mail refusal) you can put something on your mailbox that says no junk mail please, and they'll not deliver any Unadressed Ad Mail. They will still deliver anything with your name on it (since they don't really have any way of discerning what's junk and what's real from those) but you'll be left alone with the 'give one of these to everyone at this postal code' kind of thing.