.NET has been around for a while, but it finally might be beginning to pick up. The w3schools stats for February* have included.NET as an OS platform, with a small, but rising share. Perhaps MS are looking for the same (initially slow) take up of IE6 or XP.
Of course, the real news is that Firefox has hit 20%, with other non-IE taking the total to over 25%. Yeah, I know, "lies, damn lies and statistics, and all that", but it should mean the end of IE only sites, when it can be shown that they are turning away 1 out every 4 site visitors.
Again. it seems to depend on who you speak to (even in Glasgow!). Off hand, I can't remember what my colleagues, who persuaded me along to an Albacon, called it. Probably "Science fiction".
Over here in Blighty the term "SciFi" is almost exclusively used (I can certainly never remember anyone I've met using the term "SF" with repect to Science Fiction, and I've reading Sci-Fi for over 30 years).
Depends where you go. According to the fanspeak guide, SF is more commonly used. Check the location for the convention - Glasgow, Scotland. (which generally counts as "Blighty", in the scheme of things, unless their going through one of their separatist phases).
Loved the last sentence. Makes sense to me, but probably has a completely different meaning to many on the west side of the pond.
a lot of effort into the interface... but bugger all into the OS itself.... Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
Nothing like having to reboot because I'd just looked at my network settings, without changing them, to convince me that I was using a toy. Oh wait. that was Windows 95, not OS 9.
Don't know which is worse - a country going full tilt down the electronic ID route (when even the perceived benefits are less than the cost), just because, you know, it's technology. Or Bill G saying it will make things more "secure"
For those countries that require ID, just why is the manual system that has been in place suddenly no good any more?
A&B may have had a harder time of it, but after "Wrong Way" Corrigan, even Lindbergh had it tough - more people turned up to Corrigan's ticker tape parade than Lindbergh's.
I'm not sure what message that sends out, other than "we love the people who try crazy things (provided you live)". The closest recently have been the adventures of Steve Fossett and Richard Branson (amongst others).
Is this reliance on a back-up plan not just another example of a lot of Western society becoming increasingly risk-averse?
During an age of exploration, deaths were treated as a hazard of the job - Amelia Earheart's disappearance did not stop the aviation industry from developing. If the same thing happened today, there would be public outcry about how to make {fill in transportation mode} "safer" (= find someone to blame when things go wrong)
Keeping with the aviation parallels, Lindbergh would probably not have been allowed to take off today - single engine, no radio, no forward visibility and so on - and yet he is (rightly) credited with pulling off an amazing feat*, rather than "doing something foolhardy and dangerous"
* being picky, the amazing part was landing at his chosen destination (Paris), rather than flying non-stop across the Atlantic, as that had already been done back in 1919 by Alcock & Brown. Or that he did it solo.
A MacFormat (UK) recently had an interview with the guys from Shuttle - they said that the Cube (or more accurately, the demise of the Cube) had inspired them to see what they could do on the PC side
It looks as though someone has been told "disallow everything ending in 'iraq' ", and reckoned that the quickest way was to append '/iraq' to every item in the directory. Now, I don't know about you, but it could be useful to know the folder structure for an entire organisation, for example to find all the bits that are present, but don't get linked from the site. This is an example, as I don't think it is linked from the main site.
Interesting comments. I was passing through Dulles, before Sep 11, and noticed that the line in immigration for US citizens moved more slowly than the one for the foreign rascals (like me). On the other hand, on return to the UK, and changing terminals at London Heathrow, the immigration was along the lines of "EU passport? That's fine. On you go. The US citizens changing terminals did get their passports looked at, but it still wasn't as long as arriving in US.
After 9/11, it looks as though the US government really lost the plot (at least as far as airport security goes). In the UK, apart from the "no sharp objects" (but you can have all the booze you want, in nice glass bottles. Go figure), things are pretty much as they were before.
Perhaps not whole systems, but one story about the original Mac calculator, that I didn't see on the Mac Folkore was how the original calculator was written in (IIRC) Pascal, and ended up being about 2k-3k in size. However, disk space on the 400k floppy was so much at a premium, that it was nearly dropped, until the creator then hand coded it in 68000 assembler, and got the size down to around 700 bytes.
Or even "maybe they should have concentrated on PlayStation.
Their biggest mistake in the last couple of months was not having sufficient stocks of PS2 (either the old, large one or the new, maybe melting, slimline one) in time for Christmas, so that they could not be bought anywhere in UK for weeks. Not a good business decision.
Anyway, do they want to emulate mid-1990s Apple (the "beleagured" one during the Amelio days), when they had too many product lines for their own good; each different PowerMac model and, IIRC, each PowerBook model, had its own motherboard, which made for high component stocks leading to low product stocks (per model). Add to that the Newton (2 or 3 different models) and (nearly) the Pippin, as well as the printer ranges (StyleWriter and LaserWriter). The end result was range that had the top of the low end competing with the bottom of the high end, to the extent that the easy option was "neither" (or a clone), and which had extended delivery times which also put people off.
In other words, SCEI should leave off the new avenues until it can handle the demand for the current ones.
funny, really, that on Windows (where WMA is pushed as the "standard" - even though there are all the other alternatives), Winamp can cope with the new format (superset of AAC), while on the Mac (where AAC is now pushed as the "standard", at least for iTunes / iTMS), it's a bit harder to get a player.
OK, so Winamp isn't installed by default, but is is becoming the player of choice for the IT cogniscenti in place of WMP, whereas other Mac players are still the curiosity compared to iTunes.
I was just about to post that! I was too lazy to use pen and paper, so called up the Mac's calculator to do teh sums. I then noticed a "Speak Total" option, which I thought would merely read out the numbers ("one three...."), but actually read it out fully ("one quadrillion, three hundred and twenty two trillion...")*. Well, I was impressed.
* c=186,200 miles per sec
186,200 *60 *60 *24 *365.25 *225 = 1,322,105,652,000,000
True, the cost (per minute) from landline to mobile is higher than from landline to landline, but with BT (and ntl, one of the cable alternatives) having minimum call charges (if you're not on one of the plethora of landline call plans), then, for short calls, the difference is not as large as it used to be.
when was the last time you or a member of your family would put $1500 on a box bring it home... and publicly claim they have no idea what its about?
People frequently spend more than that on cars, and have no more idea of how it works than "fuel goes here. switch it on there". At what point is "the knowledge" sufficient? Basic knowledge of the 4 stroke cycle, or detailed like the compression ratio required with the octane rating of the fuel and the cylinder head swirl to ensure the best mixture?
Similarly, with computers now as pervasive in society as cars, what is the "reasonable" amount that people should know? Just the basics like the instructions in the application are loaded into memory and handled by the processor, or knowing the correct length of wires to avoid synchronisation errors of parallel bit streams?
True, the best answer is somewhere in the middle, but defining the "where" is the hard bit.
An earlier poster did suggest getting a local PAYG SIM card when going abroad (even my bottom of the range Virgin mobile is a tri-band, so usable worldwide), although I'm not sure how easy and/or expensive that is in many contries.
Based on recent computer history (for example, when Word ousted WordPerfect), to outdo the leader, you need to offer "more for less". WP, for all its power, didn't look as nice or seem as easy to use as Word (note the word "seem" - advanced Word features can be just as arcane to find as advanced WP ones), while "buy Word and Excel - get PowerPoint free" seemed like a good idea at the time. OK, so hindsight shows that looks aren't everything.
So, for a company to outdo Apple in either player or media ditribution, they need to offer something that seems to be "better" than an easy to use player, or something that gives "more" than an easy to purchase download site. Yes, there are players with more capacity / cost less / more features than an iPod, but the public aren't convinced that these make the player "better". Most competitors use tech style naming - look at the name of Sony's MP3 player as an example - when the public is still going fo rthe simple name (iPod + capacity / size). As for the download sites, what people appeciate is consistency. Tracks that are different prices, because record label A wants more money than record label B don't translate well to consumers, who may not be aware (or care) what label an artist is with. Similarly, being able to burn some bought tracks to CD, but not others, or only being able to listen to the music while you continue to subscribe to the service, does not make sense to people who can understand the concept of buying a CD. So, it looks as though the "iTunes killer" has to be something that is as consistent as iTMS for price and burn to CD, and as easy to go from download to "listen" as the iTunes / iTMS integration. The problem is that the bar is already pretty high, so a new player would have to be very very good to make people want to download it and use instead of Media Player / iTunes (those who use something like WinAmp would already consider the option, but may not be a large enough group for the "new" player to make money).
So, maybe a combined p2p / torrent / general media player, that has a link to an online store with a larger catalogue than the current leaders will become dominant. Because anything less will not be "more for less".
Huh!? Your telcos are screwing you so much that you pay to receive calls?. AFAIK, in the UK, free incoming calls is so much of a given that no company could even think of charging.
Unless CNN are only looking at when things became common, although that would preclude HDTV and Plasma displays. I suspect that they will fudge the invention date to suit themselves, since they mention CDs only indirectly as digital storage disks (although they refer to them in the article body). Funny how hard disks aren't counted (OK, so the medium is analogue, even though the information stored is digital)
Or, more specifically, how about satellite phones, to allow them to file copy faster. (Technically, sat phones are different from cellphone / mobiles, already listed, but CNN may deem them different enough).
Or, for something that Joe public would recognise, how about Central door locking for cars?
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. you could be right. So why are an increasing number of people using a server OS for general browsing?
who knows what goes on in server rooms behind closed doors...
.NET has been around for a while, but it finally might be beginning to pick up. The w3schools stats for February* have included .NET as an OS platform, with a small, but rising share. Perhaps MS are looking for the same (initially slow) take up of IE6 or XP.
Of course, the real news is that Firefox has hit 20%, with other non-IE taking the total to over 25%. Yeah, I know, "lies, damn lies and statistics, and all that", but it should mean the end of IE only sites, when it can be shown that they are turning away 1 out every 4 site visitors.
Again. it seems to depend on who you speak to (even in Glasgow!). Off hand, I can't remember what my colleagues, who persuaded me along to an Albacon, called it. Probably "Science fiction".
I went for the beer, and stayed for the fandom.
Over here in Blighty the term "SciFi" is almost exclusively used (I can certainly never remember anyone I've met using the term "SF" with repect to Science Fiction, and I've reading Sci-Fi for over 30 years).
Depends where you go. According to the fanspeak guide, SF is more commonly used. Check the location for the convention - Glasgow, Scotland. (which generally counts as "Blighty", in the scheme of things, unless their going through one of their separatist phases).
Loved the last sentence. Makes sense to me, but probably has a completely different meaning to many on the west side of the pond.
Buying a Linux laptop from Wal-Mart - $550
Buyiing a Mac mini - $499
avoiding Microsoft - priceless
a lot of effort into the interface... but bugger all into the OS itself. ... Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
Nothing like having to reboot because I'd just looked at my network settings, without changing them, to convince me that I was using a toy. Oh wait. that was Windows 95, not OS 9.
Don't know which is worse - a country going full tilt down the electronic ID route (when even the perceived benefits are less than the cost), just because, you know, it's technology. Or Bill G saying it will make things more "secure"
For those countries that require ID, just why is the manual system that has been in place suddenly no good any more?
A&B may have had a harder time of it, but after "Wrong Way" Corrigan, even Lindbergh had it tough - more people turned up to Corrigan's ticker tape parade than Lindbergh's.
I'm not sure what message that sends out, other than "we love the people who try crazy things (provided you live)". The closest recently have been the adventures of Steve Fossett and Richard Branson (amongst others).
Aww, too late...
This is one of these "Soviet Russia" satellites, isn't it
Is this reliance on a back-up plan not just another example of a lot of Western society becoming increasingly risk-averse?
During an age of exploration, deaths were treated as a hazard of the job - Amelia Earheart's disappearance did not stop the aviation industry from developing. If the same thing happened today, there would be public outcry about how to make {fill in transportation mode} "safer" (= find someone to blame when things go wrong)
Keeping with the aviation parallels, Lindbergh would probably not have been allowed to take off today - single engine, no radio, no forward visibility and so on - and yet he is (rightly) credited with pulling off an amazing feat*, rather than "doing something foolhardy and dangerous"
* being picky, the amazing part was landing at his chosen destination (Paris), rather than flying non-stop across the Atlantic, as that had already been done back in 1919 by Alcock & Brown. Or that he did it solo.
A MacFormat (UK) recently had an interview with the guys from Shuttle - they said that the Cube (or more accurately, the demise of the Cube) had inspired them to see what they could do on the PC side
It looks as though someone has been told "disallow everything ending in 'iraq' ", and reckoned that the quickest way was to append '/iraq' to every item in the directory. Now, I don't know about you, but it could be useful to know the folder structure for an entire organisation, for example to find all the bits that are present, but don't get linked from the site. This is an example, as I don't think it is linked from the main site.
Interesting comments. I was passing through Dulles, before Sep 11, and noticed that the line in immigration for US citizens moved more slowly than the one for the foreign rascals (like me). On the other hand, on return to the UK, and changing terminals at London Heathrow, the immigration was along the lines of "EU passport? That's fine. On you go. The US citizens changing terminals did get their passports looked at, but it still wasn't as long as arriving in US.
After 9/11, it looks as though the US government really lost the plot (at least as far as airport security goes). In the UK, apart from the "no sharp objects" (but you can have all the booze you want, in nice glass bottles. Go figure), things are pretty much as they were before.
we -never- truly optimize our software systems.
Perhaps not whole systems, but one story about the original Mac calculator, that I didn't see on the Mac Folkore was how the original calculator was written in (IIRC) Pascal, and ended up being about 2k-3k in size. However, disk space on the 400k floppy was so much at a premium, that it was nearly dropped, until the creator then hand coded it in 68000 assembler, and got the size down to around 700 bytes.
Or even "maybe they should have concentrated on PlayStation.
Their biggest mistake in the last couple of months was not having sufficient stocks of PS2 (either the old, large one or the new, maybe melting, slimline one) in time for Christmas, so that they could not be bought anywhere in UK for weeks. Not a good business decision.
Anyway, do they want to emulate mid-1990s Apple (the "beleagured" one during the Amelio days), when they had too many product lines for their own good; each different PowerMac model and, IIRC, each PowerBook model, had its own motherboard, which made for high component stocks leading to low product stocks (per model). Add to that the Newton (2 or 3 different models) and (nearly) the Pippin, as well as the printer ranges (StyleWriter and LaserWriter). The end result was range that had the top of the low end competing with the bottom of the high end, to the extent that the easy option was "neither" (or a clone), and which had extended delivery times which also put people off.
In other words, SCEI should leave off the new avenues until it can handle the demand for the current ones.
funny, really, that on Windows (where WMA is pushed as the "standard" - even though there are all the other alternatives), Winamp can cope with the new format (superset of AAC), while on the Mac (where AAC is now pushed as the "standard", at least for iTunes / iTMS), it's a bit harder to get a player.
OK, so Winamp isn't installed by default, but is is becoming the player of choice for the IT cogniscenti in place of WMP, whereas other Mac players are still the curiosity compared to iTunes.
I was just about to post that! I was too lazy to use pen and paper, so called up the Mac's calculator to do teh sums. I then noticed a "Speak Total" option, which I thought would merely read out the numbers ("one three ...."), but actually read it out fully ("one quadrillion, three hundred and twenty two trillion...")*. Well, I was impressed.
* c=186,200 miles per sec
186,200 *60 *60 *24 *365.25 *225 = 1,322,105,652,000,000
True, the cost (per minute) from landline to mobile is higher than from landline to landline, but with BT (and ntl, one of the cable alternatives) having minimum call charges (if you're not on one of the plethora of landline call plans), then, for short calls, the difference is not as large as it used to be.
Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.
when was the last time you or a member of your family would put $1500 on a box bring it home... and publicly claim they have no idea what its about?
People frequently spend more than that on cars, and have no more idea of how it works than "fuel goes here. switch it on there". At what point is "the knowledge" sufficient? Basic knowledge of the 4 stroke cycle, or detailed like the compression ratio required with the octane rating of the fuel and the cylinder head swirl to ensure the best mixture?
Similarly, with computers now as pervasive in society as cars, what is the "reasonable" amount that people should know? Just the basics like the instructions in the application are loaded into memory and handled by the processor, or knowing the correct length of wires to avoid synchronisation errors of parallel bit streams?
True, the best answer is somewhere in the middle, but defining the "where" is the hard bit.
Oops, I forgot about that one!
An earlier poster did suggest getting a local PAYG SIM card when going abroad (even my bottom of the range Virgin mobile is a tri-band, so usable worldwide), although I'm not sure how easy and/or expensive that is in many contries.
Based on recent computer history (for example, when Word ousted WordPerfect), to outdo the leader, you need to offer "more for less". WP, for all its power, didn't look as nice or seem as easy to use as Word (note the word "seem" - advanced Word features can be just as arcane to find as advanced WP ones), while "buy Word and Excel - get PowerPoint free" seemed like a good idea at the time. OK, so hindsight shows that looks aren't everything.
So, for a company to outdo Apple in either player or media ditribution, they need to offer something that seems to be "better" than an easy to use player, or something that gives "more" than an easy to purchase download site. Yes, there are players with more capacity / cost less / more features than an iPod, but the public aren't convinced that these make the player "better". Most competitors use tech style naming - look at the name of Sony's MP3 player as an example - when the public is still going fo rthe simple name (iPod + capacity / size). As for the download sites, what people appeciate is consistency. Tracks that are different prices, because record label A wants more money than record label B don't translate well to consumers, who may not be aware (or care) what label an artist is with. Similarly, being able to burn some bought tracks to CD, but not others, or only being able to listen to the music while you continue to subscribe to the service, does not make sense to people who can understand the concept of buying a CD. So, it looks as though the "iTunes killer" has to be something that is as consistent as iTMS for price and burn to CD, and as easy to go from download to "listen" as the iTunes / iTMS integration. The problem is that the bar is already pretty high, so a new player would have to be very very good to make people want to download it and use instead of Media Player / iTunes (those who use something like WinAmp would already consider the option, but may not be a large enough group for the "new" player to make money).
So, maybe a combined p2p / torrent / general media player, that has a link to an online store with a larger catalogue than the current leaders will become dominant. Because anything less will not be "more for less".
Unless you have an incoming calls free rate
Huh!? Your telcos are screwing you so much that you pay to receive calls?. AFAIK, in the UK, free incoming calls is so much of a given that no company could even think of charging.
Oh bummer.
Unless CNN are only looking at when things became common, although that would preclude HDTV and Plasma displays. I suspect that they will fudge the invention date to suit themselves, since they mention CDs only indirectly as digital storage disks (although they refer to them in the article body). Funny how hard disks aren't counted (OK, so the medium is analogue, even though the information stored is digital)
Or, more specifically, how about satellite phones, to allow them to file copy faster. (Technically, sat phones are different from cellphone / mobiles, already listed, but CNN may deem them different enough).
Or, for something that Joe public would recognise, how about Central door locking for cars?
Er...., well he did do some social engineering on Clause Four, but that's probably as far as it goes