I actually do drop some of the "he said, she said" stuff, since I actually read it in voices. My wife humors me and tells me that they're very good, but I think she's being generous. Luna is just Hermione a little deeper and slower, and Hermione is just Ron in drag, as voices go. Harry gets my voice, unaltered.
Didn't Clarke say something along the lines of, "Any science, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic."? The it's Ma-Fi (magic fiction, but maybe someone thought the reverse was true, and that this magic was indistinguishable from science.
Actually, I find it's often the opposite. People who DON'T know how to use the Internet search for web sites rather than typing them into the address bar. I don't know how many times I've had a conversation similar to this one:
Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Me: No, just type it into the location bar.
Them: What? I'll search for it here. OK, which one is it? Should I click on the top link.
Me: (resigned) Yeah, I guess... (mumble something underneath my breath about how cousins should not be allowed to marry)
People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com" and stare blankly at that over-crowded page searching for the "mail" link. As Ross Perot used to say, it's just sad.
Companies have tried this sort of thing before. In the early days of Lotus 123, they realized that people were making pretty good money writing custom applications within Lotus using their scripting language, and so they made some machiovellian modifications to their licensing agreement that made all scripts written in their language their property.
My understanding is that there were some legal challenges to that, but the main thing was that they essentially killed the golden goose. Lotus was (and still is, in it's present incarnation as "Notes" under IBM) a great system, with amazing flexibility. A lot of people swear by it, using it to run just about everything in their business. But that sort aggressive licensing took a lot of wind out of L123's sales--pun intended--and other companies were ready to fill the void, turning it into an also-ran.
My joke site (SSLI: Search for Satanic Lyrics) used to be the number one result for "Satanic Lyrics, but about two months ago, ZAP! Gone from the frone page of Google. It's something like number 50 now, so instead of getting... ummm... three visitors a day, I get something like one a week:-)
The allegation doesn't actually appear to be true. I just did a search on Google for web advertising, and the top three ads, in order, are for ingenio.com, looksmart.com, and finally, Google's own AdWords.
Based on this, and the fact that AdWords doesn't seem to be anywhere near the top for search results makes me feel like they are probably not doing anything evil.
There are so many theoretical problems with automated stock picking systems that I could spend all day working on this post. Instead, I'll ignore all but two.
First, no matter how well you can predict based on patterns, when you are picking individual stocks, there is such a huge influence from the chaos of human nature that, from day to day, no matter how appropriate your predictions are (based on history), they may have nothing at all to do with reality.
Additionally, if you get enough of these stock picking systems in operation, they can actually change the dynamics of the market, keeping them from being accurate for years as they all try to account for the activities associated with each others' predictions.
The problem with stocks is that in order to know how they are going to perform, you have to know not only what the company is going to do and how their customers are going to respond, but also how the investing public is going to take that news. It's an odd mix of fundementals and faith, in my experience.
1) No. OS X is built on a Unix (well, Mach) core, and has a lot of the normal utilities built right in. Need Perl, PHP, Apache? They're all there. Prefer VI to Word? Go for it! In the Applications/Utilities folder, there's a program called Terminal.app that unlocks the door you're looking to get through.
2) I find Java performance to be quite good. I played a Java-based flight simulator that ran great on my MacBook. But if there's a particular application that you want to try out, I'd say go to an Apple store if one is nearby and download it to the desktop and give it a whirl. They don't monitor that stuff too closely.
3) I work on a Windows machine most of the time, but my personal system is a MacBook, and I find the latter to be much more stable overall. I essentially never reboot it, unless there is a software update that requires it. I did have the RSS problem, but I'll detail that in the hardware question.
4) There's lots and lots of free (as in speech) software. Apple even has a download section dedicated to it: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/ . And since you've got Perl, etc., there are a lot of programs you can download and run without even having to recompile.
5) In general, I think workmanship is great. Easy access to parts, long-lasting and reliable systems. Problems do come up, but Apple's pretty good about fixing them. My old iBook is almost 6 years old, and it's my wife's main computer now, and works great. It did have to have the logic board replaced because of a video problem, but they took it and fixed it and returned it in three days without a hassle, even though it was officially out of warranty. My current MacBook has the RSS (random shutdown syndrome), and I just brought it in last night. My understanding is that they've resolved that, and if history is any indicator, I'll still be using this system in 4 years.
6) Speed is subjective, but basically, we're talking about the same hardware you might run windows on, so many--if not most--applications should run just the same. And if you want to run Windows, there's BootCamp, which lets you dual boot, or Parallels, which lets you run a virtual machine without the overhead of emulation. Lots of great reviews out there. Seach/. or google for more info.
7) The two finger trackpad is AWESOME. I mean, it's OK for the second button and all; much better for right-clicking than control-click, in my mind. But the key is two-finger scrolling. Once you're used to it, you'll feel like any laptop that doesn't support it is a toy. Two finger scrolling a pretty great jump forward in human-computer interface.
1) No. OS X is built on a Unix (well, Mach) core, and has a lot of the normal utilities built right in. Need Perl, PHP, Apache? They're all there. Prefer VI to Word? Go for it! In the Applications/Utilities folder, there's a program called Terminal.app that unlocks the door you're looking to get through.
2) I find Java performance to be quite good. I played a Java-based flight simulator that ran great on my MacBook. But if there's a particular application that you want to try out, I'd say go to an Apple store if one is nearby and download it to the desktop and give it a whirl. They don't monitor that stuff too closely.
3) I work on a Windows machine most of the time, but my personal system is a MacBook, and I find the latter to be much more stable overall. I essentially never reboot it, unless there is a software update that requires it. I did have the RSS problem, but I'll detail that in the hardware question.
4) There's lots and lots of free (as in speech) software. Apple even has a download section dedicated to it: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/ . And since you've got Perl, etc., there are a lot of programs you can download and run without even having to recompile.
5) In general, I think workmanship is great. Easy access to parts, long-lasting and reliable systems. Problems do come up, but Apple's pretty good about fixing them. My old iBook is almost 6 years old, and it's my wife's main computer now, and works great. It did have to have the logic board replaced because of a video problem, but they took it and fixed it and returned it in three days without a hassle, even though it was officially out of warranty. My current MacBook has the RSS (random shutdown syndrome), and I just brought it in last night. My understanding is that they've resolved that, and if history is any indicator, I'll still be using this system in 4 years.
6) Speed is subjective, but basically, we're talking about the same hardware you might run windows on, so many--if not most--applications should run just the same. And if you want to run Windows, there's BootCamp, which lets you dual boot, or Parallels, which lets you run a virtual machine without the overhead of emulation. Lots of great reviews out there. Seach/. or google for more info.
7) The two finger trackpad is AWESOME. I mean, it's OK for the second button and all; much better for right-clicking than control-click, in my mind. But the key is two-finger scrolling. Once you're used to it, you'll feel like any laptop that doesn't support it is a toy. Two finger scrolling a pretty great jump forward in human-computer interface.
Hope this all helps!
Hey man,
Even a broken clock (at least an analog one) is right twice a day. If people didn't acknowledge that Dvorak is right when he is, then they'd be as silly as he often is.
I just had a thought today about the hints of Google-Apple love... Wouldn't it be great if Apple's iWork suite were updated with hooks into the Google apps? Maybe that's what they're waiting for in order to release their Excel competitor. Imagine that; a desktop product which automatically integrates with an on-line, open collaborative storage system... That'd be awesome!
A friend of mine is a comic book artist, and one night I was hanging around with some of his sequential art friends--ranging from underground comic artists to DC/Marvel artists who have drawn stuff you'd recognize--and almost all of them had myspace sites to connect with their fan bases.
Between that and movies (myspace.com/moviename), it's pretty amazing to see how that service has become mainstreamed and co-opted by the adult/business world.
One of the first sites I was asked to design was a CD trading system which never went anywhere. The founders were too cheap to license a database or build a system to grow one organically, but they wanted names of all of the artists, albums and song titles that people owned on the CDs they wanted to trade.
So at their request, I built a system which would send a query to the CDDB.com page (back before they became Gracenote), excise out the useful data, and store it, one album at a time.
I got it through proof of concept, and then explained while it was technically possible to continue in this vein (I had probably pulled three albums correctly in testing, one more at the demo), they would be fools to continue because the page format could change at any time, and if the fine folks at CDDB figured out what we were doing, the owners would be begging for a lawsuit.
They still didn't want to do the right thing, so the project eventually got dropped (I think Napster made the CD go bye-bye), I moved on to greener pastures, and the owners went on to found a handful of failed dot-bombs, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Me: No, just type it into the location bar.
Them: What? I'll search for it here. OK, which one is it? Should I click on the top link.
Me: (resigned) Yeah, I guess... (mumble something underneath my breath about how cousins should not be allowed to marry)
People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com" and stare blankly at that over-crowded page searching for the "mail" link. As Ross Perot used to say, it's just sad.
My understanding is that there were some legal challenges to that, but the main thing was that they essentially killed the golden goose. Lotus was (and still is, in it's present incarnation as "Notes" under IBM) a great system, with amazing flexibility. A lot of people swear by it, using it to run just about everything in their business. But that sort aggressive licensing took a lot of wind out of L123's sales--pun intended--and other companies were ready to fill the void, turning it into an also-ran.
Based on this, and the fact that AdWords doesn't seem to be anywhere near the top for search results makes me feel like they are probably not doing anything evil.
Similarly, for click-through advertising, they aren't on top, although they are indeed on top for pay-per-click advertising
There are so many theoretical problems with automated stock picking systems that I could spend all day working on this post. Instead, I'll ignore all but two.
First, no matter how well you can predict based on patterns, when you are picking individual stocks, there is such a huge influence from the chaos of human nature that, from day to day, no matter how appropriate your predictions are (based on history), they may have nothing at all to do with reality.
Additionally, if you get enough of these stock picking systems in operation, they can actually change the dynamics of the market, keeping them from being accurate for years as they all try to account for the activities associated with each others' predictions.
The problem with stocks is that in order to know how they are going to perform, you have to know not only what the company is going to do and how their customers are going to respond, but also how the investing public is going to take that news. It's an odd mix of fundementals and faith, in my experience.
Snakes on a Plain!
2) I find Java performance to be quite good. I played a Java-based flight simulator that ran great on my MacBook. But if there's a particular application that you want to try out, I'd say go to an Apple store if one is nearby and download it to the desktop and give it a whirl. They don't monitor that stuff too closely.
3) I work on a Windows machine most of the time, but my personal system is a MacBook, and I find the latter to be much more stable overall. I essentially never reboot it, unless there is a software update that requires it. I did have the RSS problem, but I'll detail that in the hardware question.
4) There's lots and lots of free (as in speech) software. Apple even has a download section dedicated to it: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/ . And since you've got Perl, etc., there are a lot of programs you can download and run without even having to recompile.
5) In general, I think workmanship is great. Easy access to parts, long-lasting and reliable systems. Problems do come up, but Apple's pretty good about fixing them. My old iBook is almost 6 years old, and it's my wife's main computer now, and works great. It did have to have the logic board replaced because of a video problem, but they took it and fixed it and returned it in three days without a hassle, even though it was officially out of warranty. My current MacBook has the RSS (random shutdown syndrome), and I just brought it in last night. My understanding is that they've resolved that, and if history is any indicator, I'll still be using this system in 4 years.
6) Speed is subjective, but basically, we're talking about the same hardware you might run windows on, so many--if not most--applications should run just the same. And if you want to run Windows, there's BootCamp, which lets you dual boot, or Parallels, which lets you run a virtual machine without the overhead of emulation. Lots of great reviews out there. Seach /. or google for more info.
7) The two finger trackpad is AWESOME. I mean, it's OK for the second button and all; much better for right-clicking than control-click, in my mind. But the key is two-finger scrolling. Once you're used to it, you'll feel like any laptop that doesn't support it is a toy. Two finger scrolling a pretty great jump forward in human-computer interface.
Hope this all helps!
1) No. OS X is built on a Unix (well, Mach) core, and has a lot of the normal utilities built right in. Need Perl, PHP, Apache? They're all there. Prefer VI to Word? Go for it! In the Applications/Utilities folder, there's a program called Terminal.app that unlocks the door you're looking to get through. 2) I find Java performance to be quite good. I played a Java-based flight simulator that ran great on my MacBook. But if there's a particular application that you want to try out, I'd say go to an Apple store if one is nearby and download it to the desktop and give it a whirl. They don't monitor that stuff too closely. 3) I work on a Windows machine most of the time, but my personal system is a MacBook, and I find the latter to be much more stable overall. I essentially never reboot it, unless there is a software update that requires it. I did have the RSS problem, but I'll detail that in the hardware question. 4) There's lots and lots of free (as in speech) software. Apple even has a download section dedicated to it: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/ . And since you've got Perl, etc., there are a lot of programs you can download and run without even having to recompile.
5) In general, I think workmanship is great. Easy access to parts, long-lasting and reliable systems. Problems do come up, but Apple's pretty good about fixing them. My old iBook is almost 6 years old, and it's my wife's main computer now, and works great. It did have to have the logic board replaced because of a video problem, but they took it and fixed it and returned it in three days without a hassle, even though it was officially out of warranty. My current MacBook has the RSS (random shutdown syndrome), and I just brought it in last night. My understanding is that they've resolved that, and if history is any indicator, I'll still be using this system in 4 years.
6) Speed is subjective, but basically, we're talking about the same hardware you might run windows on, so many--if not most--applications should run just the same. And if you want to run Windows, there's BootCamp, which lets you dual boot, or Parallels, which lets you run a virtual machine without the overhead of emulation. Lots of great reviews out there. Seach /. or google for more info.
7) The two finger trackpad is AWESOME. I mean, it's OK for the second button and all; much better for right-clicking than control-click, in my mind. But the key is two-finger scrolling. Once you're used to it, you'll feel like any laptop that doesn't support it is a toy. Two finger scrolling a pretty great jump forward in human-computer interface.
Hope this all helps!
Just a few possible problems with surfing during meetings.
Guilty as charged!
Between that and movies (myspace.com/moviename), it's pretty amazing to see how that service has become mainstreamed and co-opted by the adult/business world.
What if it became illegal to have blue eyes? To be left-handed? To have a black or Jewish grandparent?
It's a big deal. Trust me.
So at their request, I built a system which would send a query to the CDDB.com page (back before they became Gracenote), excise out the useful data, and store it, one album at a time.
I got it through proof of concept, and then explained while it was technically possible to continue in this vein (I had probably pulled three albums correctly in testing, one more at the demo), they would be fools to continue because the page format could change at any time, and if the fine folks at CDDB figured out what we were doing, the owners would be begging for a lawsuit.
They still didn't want to do the right thing, so the project eventually got dropped (I think Napster made the CD go bye-bye), I moved on to greener pastures, and the owners went on to found a handful of failed dot-bombs, I guess.
Ah, the good old days.