2. The article summaries are shortened on the front page, and you have to tap the headline in order to load the whole thing along with contents. This breaks up the site's flow and makes it harder just to peruse articles
Second that. It's also my main (only, really) gripe with the mobile beta site. The summary is way too short. I'd actually rather have either the full article, and the ability to collapse it rapidly just like on the main site.
11. Profit! 12. People are using bitcoins to fund illegal online purchases, and are willing to accept the extra cost to obtain "black-market", untraceable currency. After all, mafias are willing to declare revenue on empty restaurants/hotels as a way to launder money.
No wonder they had advanced tools for retouching pictures. The Soviets were masters at removing officials from pictures (after they'd been thrown out of the party and/or sent to the gulags) almost from the beginning of their rule.
The interesting part is that they use Chinese cellphone networks, which leak into North Korea at the border, to get the videos out. (The Burmese opposition also does that, connecting to Bengladeshi networks.)
I wonder why China lets that happen, as it would be trivial for them to ban any data coverage in this area and/or report any suspicious activity to the North Korean authorities. Maybe it's a way for them to put some pressure on their North Korean "ally", which has become somewhat of an embarrasment to them lately.
If cell phone coverage goes down, they could still use carrier pigeons to send Flash drives to China or South Korea...
Cool down everybody. The Launchpad is just the OS X version of Launcher we had on Classic.
During the keynote nobody said Launchpad would be restricted to the App Store and frankly I don't see Apple forcing you to put your apps in two different places depending on whether you've bought it from them or not.
Apple also knows damn well Adobe, Microsoft and the other big software publishers will NEVER want to give Apple 30% of their revenue, they're not going to restrict non-App Store installs unless they want to kill the Mac platform altogether. Maybe in future releases of Mac OS X they'll embark on some dirty tactics to force publishers to be on the App Store exclusively, but it will be an uphill battle: unlike on the iPhone, other software distributions channels exist and are well-entrenched. Also, why would they have helped Valve port Steam on the Mac if they wanted 100% control of distribution?
I really, really liked how in the midst of all the panic, chaos and destruction, all the cellular networks and intercontinental connections are still running just fine, just so that the Indian researcher can give one last call to his family. How incredibly convenient!
Possibly the worst movie ever (well maybe Transformers was even worse). I need to see it again. Drunk.
I would say VersionTracker, but it appears cnet Downloads now owns them and made it as useless as cnet downloads.
Indeed, hadn't been on VersionTracker for a while and was surprised by the crap it's become. It was the one easy-to-use Mac software repository. I would point it out to all the new Mac users when they were looking for specific shareware, usually they found what they wanted pretty quickly.
When someone uses Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked.
Wait, what? This is a good idea how exactly, apart from Facebook and Bing cashing in big on gullible marketers who still think that "personnalized adverts" are the next big thing?
Newsflash: being friends on the web doesn't say much about what people have in common. Parsing my friends' list on Google, I can't honestly find more than 10 people that may suggest things that I may like. They also tend to be my real-life friends, and will give me this information in REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS.
Pitching specific search results based on user profiling is also completely broken (in my case). I happen to work on two very different topics, and my Google searches for either topic are frequently polluted as Google thinks I am looking for information related to the other one. Which forces me to reset my Google search preferences and cookies every now and then. Also, Google will tend to rank up contents similar to websites/articles I've visited. When researching political topics (which is my job) it gets in the way of getting a clear, comprehensive picture of the issue at hand.
Even for more mundane stuff such as online shopping, "personalized" ads are usually pointless. Case in point: last week I made an online reservation for a hotel in a certain country. Now half the ads I see are for hotels in the same city. Great, except that I've completed my trip and won't be going back there for the next 2-3 years...
I can't imagine that the Iran market is big enough to justify the risk of getting caught. But that's just me.
Yeah, that's just you. An oil-rich country with 70 million inhabitants, many of them middle-class, urbanized, literate, and under 30, is a gold mine.
Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.
As a side note, finding common computing equipment and parts there is not a problem, and virtually everything imported to Iran either transits via Dubai or (more often than not) directly bought there to wholesale companies. The goods are then loaded on small wooden boats and shipped to Iran. Most of this trade escapes any sort of control (at least on the Dubai side of things).
In other words, the "US embargo on Iran" is a frigging joke, and a total waste of time.
Exactly. Similar story here, but with a twist: we bought a Mac for my grandmother, well into her eighties, and who hadn't ever touched a computer before.
But, being an avid bridge player, she wanted to play bridge online with her friends. Turns out they all use the same, Windows-only, bridge software from the French Federation of Bridge.
So I installed... Parallels and Windows XP on top of OS X. I was of course worried that the setup would be too complicated for her, so I made it as simple as possible (shortcuts in Dock etc). But she's got it mastered now, and I think she's even figured how to install other Windows software!
And seeing this 85 year old granny using a laptop with bleeding-edge virtual machine and 2 operating systems to play bridge online never ceases to amaze me.
Perhaps the military see it as a possible solution to reduce contrails on fighter jets?
Stealth aircraft aren't any good if they leave a visible contrail behind;) (Actually I'm not sure if/how they've dealt with that on current stealth aircraft?)
Judging from how my little brothers manage their game collection (Wii, DS, PSP) I am pretty convinced that the ability to sell their old games (to a game store) is what allows them to buy the newer ones, usually first-hand.
Otherwise they wouldn't have nearly enough pocket money to buy them.
Restrictions on the second-hand market are silly. It will just push more people on Piratebay, since that other silly restriction pushed by the industry, DRM, has also failed spectacularly.
I can't believe they couldn't find a catchy acronym this time, like with the PATRIOT Act back in 2001!
C'mon guys, use some imagination! How about the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Dirty Icky Erotomaniac Pedophiles, Offenders, Rapists and Nazis Act" : the KIDDIEPORN Act. Brilliant, right?
However, the fastest the TGV can go in commercial operation is around 320 km/h, so the Chinese train will top it by some 40 km/h. Kudos to the engineers!
This would make a great downtown (or airport-to-city) taxi if it has a large enough luggage compartment, and if hopping on and off the thing isn't too difficult.
I don't have stats at hand but I'm guessing that the vast majority of taxi rides are 1-person. Seems to be the case here in Paris at least.
In many Asian countries, short-distance taxis are motorcycles (well mopeds really) who can take 1 or 2 passengers. This hasn't caught on in the West for reasons of safety and comfort. But I can see this type of car delivering the same kind of service.
Okay, I'm a bit late to the party but here it goes...
My current job is to produce economic research and reports, based on dozens - hundreds actually - different sources. Much of the info is first-hand, but Google and the internet in general are invaluable tools, and they've made accessing databases, government/industry statistics, and most importantly news ridiculously easy. It's safe to say that without the Internet my work would take at least 5 times as much time and my reports wouldn't carry nearly as much info.
That said, yes you can - and will - be be totally drowned (knocked out even) by the sheer volume of information coming down the intertubes: contradictory figures, conflicting evidence, interesting info published by anonymous sources on little-known websites, hordes of self-proclaimed experts claiming to know better, etc.
Even if the information you are looking at is factually correct, the constant feed of new data and the multiplication of diifferent can make it insanely difficult to get the "big picture". Much, much more than 20 years back for instance, when all you had were the 3-4 reference books and researches written on the matter, all by well-identified authors. If these sources were inaccurate, then tough luck - but at least you could lay the blame on them.
My technique to cope with source multiplication and inaccurate data is to divide my working time:
1-Gather as much info as possible and save it locally for later use. Start writing the rough draft of my report, look for new information as needed.
2-When actually writing my findings, I don't want to be even near the internet. I'll base myself on what I have saved locally, and I won't try to update anything. Conflicting data appears at this stage, but by then I have usually already made up my mind on which sources are trustable and which are not.
3-Final checking is done against the sources I trust. If in doubt, call up an expert in the field to see what s/he thinks. If something new has appeared in the meantime, it is quite easy to shoehorn it into the report.
So does Internet make you stupid? No - just temporarily sick from information overload. But it's up to the user to step back and decide he has enough correct data to work with.
As an aside, I'd appreciate iTunes letting me easily select blocks of music I could keep in the same order, even when listening to randomized music. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" should always be followed by "With a Little Help from My Friends" (and maybe the album's entirety).
Okay, not a perfect solution and maybe you've heard of it but anyways: Before importing an album, select the songs you want to keep together, and, in the "Advanced" menu, select the "Join CD tracks" option.
Apple sells DRM free tracks. But how many people do you know that buy from iTMS that have a DRM free collection?
Me. I have gladly paid for some iTunes Plus downloads (not many I admit), but have yet to buy a single DRMed track. My policy over that won't change, ever. Hopefully (although I doubt it), if enough people do it, Apple and the record labels will start picking up the clue.
If there's an album I want, but is DRM'ed on iTMS, I'll just leech it off BitTorrent. I am not purchasing it on a CD because I don't want to bother with a physical medium and don't believe in dedicating storage space to little pieces of round plastic.
I'm still waiting for Amazon's service to start operating here in Europe. This will give me a much wider choice of albums to download legally. (Not that it'll completely stop me from downloading off bittorrent, mind you. I can only afford an album once every while, and I don't buy unless I'm sure it's really good)
One thing that will keep me buying iTunes Plus tracks as much as possible is the superb customer service: I recently lost one album due to hard drive failure. I wrote them an e-mail and the next day I got an answer telling me that I just needed to log in to the iTunes store and said album would be re-downloaded again. Minutes later, I was listening to it again. How cool is that?
How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?
Okay, so there are probably some actual privacy issues arising from being able to track passing vehicles remotely, but come on, that comment above is so over the top it's not even funny.
The bearded men with the funny accent are not out to get you. The black helicopters are not after you, or your car, or your gun(s). And officials / VIPs actually at risk of being blown up by an IED - not that I know any off the top of my head - would have the radio signal jammed anyways.
Grow. The. Fuck. Up. Seriously.
(okay, or maybe it's april fools, and I'm drunk and didn't note the sarcasm / joke in the ferkin' summary)
Slashdot Mirror
They'll just spend the better part of those 12 hours to get WiFi on board.
2. The article summaries are shortened on the front page, and you have to tap the headline in order to load the whole thing along with contents. This breaks up the site's flow and makes it harder just to peruse articles
Second that. It's also my main (only, really) gripe with the mobile beta site. The summary is way too short. I'd actually rather have either the full article, and the ability to collapse it rapidly just like on the main site.
11. Profit!
12. People are using bitcoins to fund illegal online purchases, and are willing to accept the extra cost to obtain "black-market", untraceable currency. After all, mafias are willing to declare revenue on empty restaurants/hotels as a way to launder money.
No wonder they had advanced tools for retouching pictures. The Soviets were masters at removing officials from pictures (after they'd been thrown out of the party and/or sent to the gulags) almost from the beginning of their rule.
Examples here:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/false.html
Heh... Function follows need I guess.
Well, the river between China and North Korea is not very wide. I can see a data delivery solution involving a slingshot and a USB thumbdrive :)
The interesting part is that they use Chinese cellphone networks, which leak into North Korea at the border, to get the videos out. (The Burmese opposition also does that, connecting to Bengladeshi networks.)
I wonder why China lets that happen, as it would be trivial for them to ban any data coverage in this area and/or report any suspicious activity to the North Korean authorities. Maybe it's a way for them to put some pressure on their North Korean "ally", which has become somewhat of an embarrasment to them lately.
If cell phone coverage goes down, they could still use carrier pigeons to send Flash drives to China or South Korea...
Cool down everybody. The Launchpad is just the OS X version of Launcher we had on Classic.
During the keynote nobody said Launchpad would be restricted to the App Store and frankly I don't see Apple forcing you to put your apps in two different places depending on whether you've bought it from them or not.
Apple also knows damn well Adobe, Microsoft and the other big software publishers will NEVER want to give Apple 30% of their revenue, they're not going to restrict non-App Store installs unless they want to kill the Mac platform altogether. Maybe in future releases of Mac OS X they'll embark on some dirty tactics to force publishers to be on the App Store exclusively, but it will be an uphill battle: unlike on the iPhone, other software distributions channels exist and are well-entrenched. Also, why would they have helped Valve port Steam on the Mac if they wanted 100% control of distribution?
I really, really liked how in the midst of all the panic, chaos and destruction, all the cellular networks and intercontinental connections are still running just fine, just so that the Indian researcher can give one last call to his family. How incredibly convenient!
Possibly the worst movie ever (well maybe Transformers was even worse). I need to see it again. Drunk.
I would say VersionTracker, but it appears cnet Downloads now owns them and made it as useless as cnet downloads.
Indeed, hadn't been on VersionTracker for a while and was surprised by the crap it's become. It was the one easy-to-use Mac software repository. I would point it out to all the new Mac users when they were looking for specific shareware, usually they found what they wanted pretty quickly.
Sad.
When someone uses Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked.
Wait, what? This is a good idea how exactly, apart from Facebook and Bing cashing in big on gullible marketers who still think that "personnalized adverts" are the next big thing?
Newsflash: being friends on the web doesn't say much about what people have in common. Parsing my friends' list on Google, I can't honestly find more than 10 people that may suggest things that I may like. They also tend to be my real-life friends, and will give me this information in REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS.
Pitching specific search results based on user profiling is also completely broken (in my case). I happen to work on two very different topics, and my Google searches for either topic are frequently polluted as Google thinks I am looking for information related to the other one. Which forces me to reset my Google search preferences and cookies every now and then. Also, Google will tend to rank up contents similar to websites/articles I've visited. When researching political topics (which is my job) it gets in the way of getting a clear, comprehensive picture of the issue at hand.
Even for more mundane stuff such as online shopping, "personalized" ads are usually pointless. Case in point: last week I made an online reservation for a hotel in a certain country. Now half the ads I see are for hotels in the same city. Great, except that I've completed my trip and won't be going back there for the next 2-3 years...
Or could it also be that paid-for downloads and streaming audio and video have increased, thus decreasing the share of P2P traffic in the total?
(No I didn't RTFA, it's way too early for that)
I can't imagine that the Iran market is big enough to justify the risk of getting caught. But that's just me.
Yeah, that's just you. An oil-rich country with 70 million inhabitants, many of them middle-class, urbanized, literate, and under 30, is a gold mine.
Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.
As a side note, finding common computing equipment and parts there is not a problem, and virtually everything imported to Iran either transits via Dubai or (more often than not) directly bought there to wholesale companies. The goods are then loaded on small wooden boats and shipped to Iran. Most of this trade escapes any sort of control (at least on the Dubai side of things).
In other words, the "US embargo on Iran" is a frigging joke, and a total waste of time.
Exactly. Similar story here, but with a twist: we bought a Mac for my grandmother, well into her eighties, and who hadn't ever touched a computer before.
But, being an avid bridge player, she wanted to play bridge online with her friends. Turns out they all use the same, Windows-only, bridge software from the French Federation of Bridge.
So I installed... Parallels and Windows XP on top of OS X. I was of course worried that the setup would be too complicated for her, so I made it as simple as possible (shortcuts in Dock etc). But she's got it mastered now, and I think she's even figured how to install other Windows software!
And seeing this 85 year old granny using a laptop with bleeding-edge virtual machine and 2 operating systems to play bridge online never ceases to amaze me.
Perhaps the military see it as a possible solution to reduce contrails on fighter jets?
Stealth aircraft aren't any good if they leave a visible contrail behind ;) (Actually I'm not sure if/how they've dealt with that on current stealth aircraft?)
Judging from how my little brothers manage their game collection (Wii, DS, PSP) I am pretty convinced that the ability to sell their old games (to a game store) is what allows them to buy the newer ones, usually first-hand.
Otherwise they wouldn't have nearly enough pocket money to buy them.
Restrictions on the second-hand market are silly. It will just push more people on Piratebay, since that other silly restriction pushed by the industry, DRM, has also failed spectacularly.
I can't believe they couldn't find a catchy acronym this time, like with the PATRIOT Act back in 2001!
C'mon guys, use some imagination! How about the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Dirty Icky Erotomaniac Pedophiles, Offenders, Rapists and Nazis Act" : the KIDDIEPORN Act. Brilliant, right?
Oh, wait...
The record on rail, 574 km/h, belongs to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record#Record_of_2007 . Maglevs go faster but compete in a different category :)
However, the fastest the TGV can go in commercial operation is around 320 km/h, so the Chinese train will top it by some 40 km/h. Kudos to the engineers!
This would make a great downtown (or airport-to-city) taxi if it has a large enough luggage compartment, and if hopping on and off the thing isn't too difficult.
I don't have stats at hand but I'm guessing that the vast majority of taxi rides are 1-person. Seems to be the case here in Paris at least.
In many Asian countries, short-distance taxis are motorcycles (well mopeds really) who can take 1 or 2 passengers. This hasn't caught on in the West for reasons of safety and comfort. But I can see this type of car delivering the same kind of service.
Crappy products perform less, break more than good ones!
News at 11!
*Wooooosh!*
Okay, I'm a bit late to the party but here it goes...
My current job is to produce economic research and reports, based on dozens - hundreds actually - different sources. Much of the info is first-hand, but Google and the internet in general are invaluable tools, and they've made accessing databases, government/industry statistics, and most importantly news ridiculously easy. It's safe to say that without the Internet my work would take at least 5 times as much time and my reports wouldn't carry nearly as much info.
That said, yes you can - and will - be be totally drowned (knocked out even) by the sheer volume of information coming down the intertubes: contradictory figures, conflicting evidence, interesting info published by anonymous sources on little-known websites, hordes of self-proclaimed experts claiming to know better, etc.
Even if the information you are looking at is factually correct, the constant feed of new data and the multiplication of diifferent can make it insanely difficult to get the "big picture". Much, much more than 20 years back for instance, when all you had were the 3-4 reference books and researches written on the matter, all by well-identified authors. If these sources were inaccurate, then tough luck - but at least you could lay the blame on them.
My technique to cope with source multiplication and inaccurate data is to divide my working time:
1-Gather as much info as possible and save it locally for later use. Start writing the rough draft of my report, look for new information as needed.
2-When actually writing my findings, I don't want to be even near the internet. I'll base myself on what I have saved locally, and I won't try to update anything. Conflicting data appears at this stage, but by then I have usually already made up my mind on which sources are trustable and which are not.
3-Final checking is done against the sources I trust. If in doubt, call up an expert in the field to see what s/he thinks. If something new has appeared in the meantime, it is quite easy to shoehorn it into the report.
So does Internet make you stupid? No - just temporarily sick from information overload. But it's up to the user to step back and decide he has enough correct data to work with.
Rich people: get us off this rock.
No, that's not how it works: rich people will get themselves off this rock. You and I are stuck here.
As an aside, I'd appreciate iTunes letting me easily select blocks of music I could keep in the same order, even when listening to randomized music. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" should always be followed by "With a Little Help from My Friends" (and maybe the album's entirety).
:)
Okay, not a perfect solution and maybe you've heard of it but anyways: Before importing an album, select the songs you want to keep together, and, in the "Advanced" menu, select the "Join CD tracks" option.
More info here. Hope that helps
Apple sells DRM free tracks. But how many people do you know that buy from iTMS that have a DRM free collection?
Me. I have gladly paid for some iTunes Plus downloads (not many I admit), but have yet to buy a single DRMed track. My policy over that won't change, ever. Hopefully (although I doubt it), if enough people do it, Apple and the record labels will start picking up the clue.
If there's an album I want, but is DRM'ed on iTMS, I'll just leech it off BitTorrent. I am not purchasing it on a CD because I don't want to bother with a physical medium and don't believe in dedicating storage space to little pieces of round plastic.
I'm still waiting for Amazon's service to start operating here in Europe. This will give me a much wider choice of albums to download legally. (Not that it'll completely stop me from downloading off bittorrent, mind you. I can only afford an album once every while, and I don't buy unless I'm sure it's really good)
One thing that will keep me buying iTunes Plus tracks as much as possible is the superb customer service: I recently lost one album due to hard drive failure. I wrote them an e-mail and the next day I got an answer telling me that I just needed to log in to the iTunes store and said album would be re-downloaded again. Minutes later, I was listening to it again. How cool is that?
How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?
Okay, so there are probably some actual privacy issues arising from being able to track passing vehicles remotely, but come on, that comment above is so over the top it's not even funny.
The bearded men with the funny accent are not out to get you. The black helicopters are not after you, or your car, or your gun(s). And officials / VIPs actually at risk of being blown up by an IED - not that I know any off the top of my head - would have the radio signal jammed anyways.
Grow. The. Fuck. Up. Seriously.
(okay, or maybe it's april fools, and I'm drunk and didn't note the sarcasm / joke in the ferkin' summary)