I mean, think about it. Let's say that you have webmail with one of the other major providers. Somebody sends you mail. You reply. They reply. Now your email has a couple of levels of ">" in it. Wouldn't it be nice if they highlighted those in different colors or something?
Oh, wait - they already do that? (Note: at least, this was common the last time I bothered with webmail which was some time ago). Guess what - that's "reading" your mail as well. In fact, they're just changing your display - without changing the verbal contact of your message - to make it more convenient for you.
Isn't that also a (reaching, but legitimate) description of providing targetted advertising? I mean, how many times have people here on/. said about ads that if they made sense, they wouldn't mind 'em? Guess what - that's targetting. And how they're supposed to make sense and be timely without some kind of processing is beyond me.
As for the article's complaint, it seems to focus around the fact that when you "delete" an email, Google doesn't guarantee that it goes away immediately. Their message seems to be talking about cache updates though - if they were willing to amend it with a service guarantee that within xx hours your email would be deleted, that would probably do the trick. Of course, then people would be arguing that they needed to provide complete file-trashing (triple overwrite, etc) as well, even though your regular email client and ISPs email account probably don't do that.
I think its just a case of being too cautious in their terms of use. In this case, being too honest where the other major providers are being "honest enough," and not worrying about caches, et cetera. Of course, they may be planning to use your old email for nefarious purposes, but somehow I doubt it. Either way, they should clarify their statement.
For instance the first time you log in, a script could ask if you'd like to change what programs you use for chat/E-mail/Web Browsing/etc.
Considering that this edition is aimed at least partially at first-time users... how do you expect them to know?
Computer: "Do you want to use Firefox or Galeon?"
User: WTF? This is weird... I just want to get the internet...
After all, its not as if they can't add other software in the future. Its like the classic Microsoft Help question, "This is the first time you've used help. What sort of database do you want me to build?" Meaningless and intrusive. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and giving unnecessary choices to the user is not the impression you want to make.
Remember, most people don't want to "use the computer." They just want to "get the TV listings," or "write a letter." Huge mindset difference.
This can be scaled up to Enterprise levels as well. The code moves away from the "quick hack" standpoint, but the goals can stay the same. Rather than trying to write an uber-app, you have a very solid, very consistent shared data layer (either a database or a set of business objects), and then tons of user specific (or role specific) applets feeding from it. That lets you have your core architecture team modeling your business reality, and your user-facing teams out talking to the users, building use cases, and writing software to solve specific problems. Cuts down on the size of the apps, and also reduces training costs as each user or group of users have exactly the software they need to do their job - no less, and specifically no more.
My personal pick would have to be JabberWacky. Even while part of your brain is thinking that the conversation is surreal and rediculous (although not as bad as most bots), there's something... moreish... about it, and you keep on chatting. Just when you're about to leave, it tosses something out that grabs you back again. Kind of like an annoying relative.
It would be far more easier to accept it, embrace new technologies and let technology and nature sort it out. In the end, we will find a way out. Its inevitable, because we have reached that stage as a species.
That's the real danger - that we haven't, quite, reached that point. We're on the cusp, evolutionarily speaking, but right now we have a lot of the power with almost no safety. We're still in a very vulnerable time, where one large catastrophe could effectively wipe us out. We've been in that situation for a long time now, but only recently have we actually gained the ability to cause such a situation as a species.
That's the real value of space flight - controlled risk reduction. Once we're off the planet in sustainable numbers, we're much less vulnerable. Once we're out of the system - continued success is almost guaranteed.
For the species, that is. Each individual can still be royally fscked up, no matter what, until and unless we come up with backups of some sort. But that's another subject entirely.
First, you ask: Maybe I'm really naive, but why can't they grow this sort of crop indoors?
Then you say: I know that it would probably cost a lot more
Ding! That's it in one. After all, if one company is growing it the expensive way, and another one (in another country if necessary) is doing it the cheap one... guess who wins? Especially in the current environment of trying to get drug prices as low as possible... Yup, its the cheap one. Go figure. So as long as growing it the cheap way is possible, that's the way that commercial entities will do it.
Hmm. Uncool, for me at least. I get more than enough personalized coverage from other sources - I already know where to go. What I rely on Google News for is a good snapshot of stuff that I haven't already heard about before. Now, if they would integrate it so that one of the boxes on the standard news site was "Personal" and one was "Local" (to balance out, L-R), that would be cool... but I think that the focus on just showing the viewer what they want to see is out of place for a news portal. Just my two cents, of course.
In my experience, the OSS that acheives success outside of the OSS community usually follows the first principle, by installing quickly and easily, and rarely requires editing config files or reading documentation to use
Amen, brother. I was looking to grab an IMAP server to use on a new hosted RedHat box the other day. This was before I realized that I could just do "up2date imap" - my eventual solution. And yes, its been a while since I used RedHat for anything - I was always a FreeBSD man before. Anyway, I found one that I really liked. No binary RPMs, but that's alright. Downloaded it, started the build, and got an error message telling me how stupid I was for not building it into an RPM and installing it that way. Oh, and if I wanted to be a dumbass, there was another flag I could use to do it the wrong way. I'm paraphrasing, but not by very much.
Can ya believe it? Probably. Anyway, my reaction was that of most people in that situation did. rm -rf and look for another solution. Now, the developers are absolutely entitled to express their attitudes about how my box has software installed on it. But I felt no qualms about therefore not using their software either. And its experiences like this that make people - even old UNIX folk like me - really wish that they could just go to a store, pay a reasonable amount of money, run "install" and have it just work.
So that's $2,714 minus the 15% off coupons you get bombarded with for being a Dell customer (or signing up on their website for that matter) - that would bring it to $2,306. Or just over half the price of the Apple offering.
Minus the 15% Dell discount coupons that are ever-present. Just because Apple always charges MSRP doesn't make it valid in a price comparison. That brings the Dell price down to $3,500. And it comes with features that the XServe doesn't, like redundant power supplies. I mean, come on Apple - these are standard (or at least available) on pretty much every single rack machine these days...
The resolution is decent, but the size is too small. Why not something the full size of a paperback book? At least as another option. Its a normal, familiar medium for reading, and would allow for actual pages that would match the conventional pages. This also encourages faster reading, skimming, et cetera. I would be a lot more comfortable purchasing something with a larger surface area. But then again, that may just be me.
Also, it doesn't help that isp's promote explorer among their userbase. The biggest loss to netscape's marketshare came when isp's started abandoning them. If isp's started pushing an alternative browser again, you'd be sure to see it climb in marketshare drastically.
Nice idea, but way too late. ISPs started pushing IE as soon as it became halfway decent. I know, I used to run one of them. We had to pay about $20/seat to give away current copies of Netscape. We had to pay $0 per seat to give away current copies of IE. IE got decent before Netscape got free, ergo IE won. $20/seat was a lot of money back then compared to our margins. And Netscape wondered why they got abandoned? Its all well and good to say, "You should have stayed with the non-MS solution," but that would have just meant that our competitors would have been selling a commodity-grade product for less money... not a good idea. And the user base, frankly, didn't give a damn, which makes it a comoddity in their minds even if our software was different.
Let's work through this. If they came up with ".sex", many workplaces would filter out sites that were listed in.sex. I mean, wouldn't you? Now, let's pretend that you've got a porn site. You want as many people to see it as possible. You could host it at whitehouse.sex and get some traffic, or at whitehouse.com and get more traffic. Which do you pick?
The point they were making is that it is useful for this particular person (who is a marathon runner). In this specific case, it might work, because long-distance running is almost purely aerobic -- as long that person has enough fat to support it.
That's not quite true. Even fat needs a certain amount of glycogen to be processed by your muscles. When you start to run low on glycogen, you "bonk" or hit the wall. You've got lots of fat - even those folk with 2% body fat have ample fuel to run a marathon - but you just can't process it effectively. That's why you carbo-load, to increase the "tinder" to help you burn fat.
Incidentally, that's also a good reason to go out slow. Your body takes 15-30 minutes to switch into fat burning mode, regardless of effort. During that time, you're burning a much higher percentage of glycogen. You want to conserve that as much as possible until you've switched to being fully aerobic, at which point you get much more bang for your glycogen buck, so to speak.
Of course, unless they're very careful, it will also enable devices to communicate when they're within a couple of feet. Still, as long as the software folk treat it as "always chatting" communication, and build in the proper safeguards, rather than assuming that every conversation is spawned by a dedicated request to speak, things should be fine. This will be fun to watch.
You could probably get there pretty quickly. I went from 2 miles to 26.2 in six months, with regular training... The second half of it is detailed on my training weblog. Its really pretty cool... the running, that is, not the website.
My car has a little cubby underneath the radio, in which I keep my celphone. When I get calls on it (ATT GSM), it noticably distorts the sound. Of course, this works no matter how loud the radio is playing. Interestingly, it also distorts it slightly when I go under bridges or into other areas where it needs to boost its power to keep the "dial tone" level connection going - but that's not bad, just noticable if you pay attention.
"They were going as far away from my design as they possibly could," he said.
How so?
"The color model and the fonts is aggressively stupid. It works, but oh my god. It's awful."
Here its obvious that Gosling not only didn't create the color model and font system that's part of X, but in fact was proposing quite different solutions as part of his NeWS competitive system. The parent quote makes it sound as if he's admitting that he created them in X, and now hates them.
C'mon now...
Besides, if you never read the articles, and just look at the exceprts, you'd never know about the asparagus. What asparagus, I hear you ask? My point exactly.
More than most fantasy, the Earthsea books spend time on internal character development. They can make you think. Their plots, frankly, are nothing to write home about - in my opinion, at least. Unless this is going to be an "adaptation" along the lines of Starship Troopers, I can't see it doing very well. But, who knows - I'd love to be wrong about that...
Yup - I'm one of them. Its a concern, but not a terribly large one if you take care of it. Running a marathon on pure water is just a bad idea, but if you take care to either drink powerade or take some salt tablets with your water, you should be fine. Powerade is by far the tastier of the two choices, by the way.
Others would disagree. What is a compression method? It's an algorithm for altering the representation of data from one form to another, smaller one.
You see, an algorithm is math. It's pure thought-- an idea of how to do something, not a method.
Not really. The idea is, "Hey, lets go through the source data and toss out some of it, while making notes in the destination file as to how to re-create it." Now, don't get me wrong. That's a great idea, and a somewhat revolutionary one. But its an un-patentable idea.
Let's look at a process now:
Check each byte of data in the source file, in order. If one is a '\', write '\\' into the destination file. If there are more three or more consecutive characters that are the same, write '\' followed by the number of repetitions followed by the character, so "\XWWWWWXXXX" would become "\\X\5W\4X" in the destination file.
That's a potentially panentable algorithm. And a pretty dumb one, but hey, nobody said that inventions had to be smart.
See the difference? One describes a concept, the other documents a repeatable process.
Scanning in snail mail and emailing images would be neat. One could always fetch the hard copy if needed
I use PayTrust for my bills - they do exactly this. What they can get electronically, they do, but any other bills go to their address and get scanned in. I get an email with highlighted information (date due, minimum payment, total payment, etc) and can set up automatic payment rules (for example, "Pay celphone bill unless its over $120 - if it is, then email me first"). And it works on anything, even little scraps of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, think about it. Let's say that you have webmail with one of the other major providers. Somebody sends you mail. You reply. They reply. Now your email has a couple of levels of ">" in it. Wouldn't it be nice if they highlighted those in different colors or something?
/. said about ads that if they made sense, they wouldn't mind 'em? Guess what - that's targetting. And how they're supposed to make sense and be timely without some kind of processing is beyond me.
Oh, wait - they already do that? (Note: at least, this was common the last time I bothered with webmail which was some time ago). Guess what - that's "reading" your mail as well. In fact, they're just changing your display - without changing the verbal contact of your message - to make it more convenient for you.
Isn't that also a (reaching, but legitimate) description of providing targetted advertising? I mean, how many times have people here on
As for the article's complaint, it seems to focus around the fact that when you "delete" an email, Google doesn't guarantee that it goes away immediately. Their message seems to be talking about cache updates though - if they were willing to amend it with a service guarantee that within xx hours your email would be deleted, that would probably do the trick. Of course, then people would be arguing that they needed to provide complete file-trashing (triple overwrite, etc) as well, even though your regular email client and ISPs email account probably don't do that.
I think its just a case of being too cautious in their terms of use. In this case, being too honest where the other major providers are being "honest enough," and not worrying about caches, et cetera. Of course, they may be planning to use your old email for nefarious purposes, but somehow I doubt it. Either way, they should clarify their statement.
For instance the first time you log in, a script could ask if you'd like to change what programs you use for chat/E-mail/Web Browsing/etc.
Considering that this edition is aimed at least partially at first-time users... how do you expect them to know?
Computer: "Do you want to use Firefox or Galeon?"
User: WTF? This is weird... I just want to get the internet...
After all, its not as if they can't add other software in the future. Its like the classic Microsoft Help question, "This is the first time you've used help. What sort of database do you want me to build?" Meaningless and intrusive. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and giving unnecessary choices to the user is not the impression you want to make.
Remember, most people don't want to "use the computer." They just want to "get the TV listings," or "write a letter." Huge mindset difference.
This can be scaled up to Enterprise levels as well. The code moves away from the "quick hack" standpoint, but the goals can stay the same. Rather than trying to write an uber-app, you have a very solid, very consistent shared data layer (either a database or a set of business objects), and then tons of user specific (or role specific) applets feeding from it. That lets you have your core architecture team modeling your business reality, and your user-facing teams out talking to the users, building use cases, and writing software to solve specific problems. Cuts down on the size of the apps, and also reduces training costs as each user or group of users have exactly the software they need to do their job - no less, and specifically no more.
My personal pick would have to be JabberWacky. Even while part of your brain is thinking that the conversation is surreal and rediculous (although not as bad as most bots), there's something... moreish... about it, and you keep on chatting. Just when you're about to leave, it tosses something out that grabs you back again. Kind of like an annoying relative.
It would be far more easier to accept it, embrace new technologies and let technology and nature sort it out. In the end, we will find a way out. Its inevitable, because we have reached that stage as a species.
That's the real danger - that we haven't, quite, reached that point. We're on the cusp, evolutionarily speaking, but right now we have a lot of the power with almost no safety. We're still in a very vulnerable time, where one large catastrophe could effectively wipe us out. We've been in that situation for a long time now, but only recently have we actually gained the ability to cause such a situation as a species.
That's the real value of space flight - controlled risk reduction. Once we're off the planet in sustainable numbers, we're much less vulnerable. Once we're out of the system - continued success is almost guaranteed.
For the species, that is. Each individual can still be royally fscked up, no matter what, until and unless we come up with backups of some sort. But that's another subject entirely.
First, you ask: Maybe I'm really naive, but why can't they grow this sort of crop indoors?
Then you say: I know that it would probably cost a lot more
Ding! That's it in one. After all, if one company is growing it the expensive way, and another one (in another country if necessary) is doing it the cheap one... guess who wins? Especially in the current environment of trying to get drug prices as low as possible... Yup, its the cheap one. Go figure. So as long as growing it the cheap way is possible, that's the way that commercial entities will do it.
Hmm. Uncool, for me at least. I get more than enough personalized coverage from other sources - I already know where to go. What I rely on Google News for is a good snapshot of stuff that I haven't already heard about before. Now, if they would integrate it so that one of the boxes on the standard news site was "Personal" and one was "Local" (to balance out, L-R), that would be cool... but I think that the focus on just showing the viewer what they want to see is out of place for a news portal. Just my two cents, of course.
Can ya believe it? Probably. Anyway, my reaction was that of most people in that situation did. rm -rf and look for another solution. Now, the developers are absolutely entitled to express their attitudes about how my box has software installed on it. But I felt no qualms about therefore not using their software either. And its experiences like this that make people - even old UNIX folk like me - really wish that they could just go to a store, pay a reasonable amount of money, run "install" and have it just work.
So that's $2,714 minus the 15% off coupons you get bombarded with for being a Dell customer (or signing up on their website for that matter) - that would bring it to $2,306. Or just over half the price of the Apple offering.
AppleCare is frankly crap in the corporate world.
Minus the 15% Dell discount coupons that are ever-present. Just because Apple always charges MSRP doesn't make it valid in a price comparison. That brings the Dell price down to $3,500. And it comes with features that the XServe doesn't, like redundant power supplies. I mean, come on Apple - these are standard (or at least available) on pretty much every single rack machine these days...
The resolution is decent, but the size is too small. Why not something the full size of a paperback book? At least as another option. Its a normal, familiar medium for reading, and would allow for actual pages that would match the conventional pages. This also encourages faster reading, skimming, et cetera. I would be a lot more comfortable purchasing something with a larger surface area. But then again, that may just be me.
Great tech, though.
Also, it doesn't help that isp's promote explorer among their userbase. The biggest loss to netscape's marketshare came when isp's started abandoning them. If isp's started pushing an alternative browser again, you'd be sure to see it climb in marketshare drastically.
Nice idea, but way too late. ISPs started pushing IE as soon as it became halfway decent. I know, I used to run one of them. We had to pay about $20/seat to give away current copies of Netscape. We had to pay $0 per seat to give away current copies of IE. IE got decent before Netscape got free, ergo IE won. $20/seat was a lot of money back then compared to our margins. And Netscape wondered why they got abandoned? Its all well and good to say, "You should have stayed with the non-MS solution," but that would have just meant that our competitors would have been selling a commodity-grade product for less money... not a good idea. And the user base, frankly, didn't give a damn, which makes it a comoddity in their minds even if our software was different.
By your argument, you could scale a one day's effort that increased performance by a measly 1% and claim a 38-fold increase over the year.
I mean, really....
By your argument, you could scale a one day's effort that increased performance by a measly 1% and claim a 38-fold increase over the year.
I mean, really...
Let's work through this. If they came up with ".sex", many workplaces would filter out sites that were listed in .sex. I mean, wouldn't you? Now, let's pretend that you've got a porn site. You want as many people to see it as possible. You could host it at whitehouse.sex and get some traffic, or at whitehouse.com and get more traffic. Which do you pick?
Both, of course.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
That's "Post" by the way. Quoting from the (usually inaccurate but not this time) story blurb at the top of the screen:
The analysis explains why these ideas are dangerous and ill considered from legal, philosophical, and technical points of view.
Emphasis mine.
The point they were making is that it is useful for this particular person (who is a marathon runner). In this specific case, it might work, because long-distance running is almost purely aerobic -- as long that person has enough fat to support it.
That's not quite true. Even fat needs a certain amount of glycogen to be processed by your muscles. When you start to run low on glycogen, you "bonk" or hit the wall. You've got lots of fat - even those folk with 2% body fat have ample fuel to run a marathon - but you just can't process it effectively. That's why you carbo-load, to increase the "tinder" to help you burn fat.
Incidentally, that's also a good reason to go out slow. Your body takes 15-30 minutes to switch into fat burning mode, regardless of effort. During that time, you're burning a much higher percentage of glycogen. You want to conserve that as much as possible until you've switched to being fully aerobic, at which point you get much more bang for your glycogen buck, so to speak.
-Richard, who loves doing 26.2
Of course, unless they're very careful, it will also enable devices to communicate when they're within a couple of feet. Still, as long as the software folk treat it as "always chatting" communication, and build in the proper safeguards, rather than assuming that every conversation is spawned by a dedicated request to speak, things should be fine. This will be fun to watch.
You could probably get there pretty quickly. I went from 2 miles to 26.2 in six months, with regular training... The second half of it is detailed on my training weblog. Its really pretty cool... the running, that is, not the website.
My car has a little cubby underneath the radio, in which I keep my celphone. When I get calls on it (ATT GSM), it noticably distorts the sound. Of course, this works no matter how loud the radio is playing. Interestingly, it also distorts it slightly when I go under bridges or into other areas where it needs to boost its power to keep the "dial tone" level connection going - but that's not bad, just noticable if you pay attention.
C'mon now...
Besides, if you never read the articles, and just look at the exceprts, you'd never know about the asparagus. What asparagus, I hear you ask? My point exactly.
More than most fantasy, the Earthsea books spend time on internal character development. They can make you think. Their plots, frankly, are nothing to write home about - in my opinion, at least. Unless this is going to be an "adaptation" along the lines of Starship Troopers, I can't see it doing very well. But, who knows - I'd love to be wrong about that...
Yup - I'm one of them. Its a concern, but not a terribly large one if you take care of it. Running a marathon on pure water is just a bad idea, but if you take care to either drink powerade or take some salt tablets with your water, you should be fine. Powerade is by far the tastier of the two choices, by the way.
You see, an algorithm is math. It's pure thought-- an idea of how to do something, not a method.
Not really. The idea is, "Hey, lets go through the source data and toss out some of it, while making notes in the destination file as to how to re-create it." Now, don't get me wrong. That's a great idea, and a somewhat revolutionary one. But its an un-patentable idea.
Let's look at a process now:That's a potentially panentable algorithm. And a pretty dumb one, but hey, nobody said that inventions had to be smart.
See the difference? One describes a concept, the other documents a repeatable process.
Scanning in snail mail and emailing images would be neat. One could always fetch the hard copy if needed
I use PayTrust for my bills - they do exactly this. What they can get electronically, they do, but any other bills go to their address and get scanned in. I get an email with highlighted information (date due, minimum payment, total payment, etc) and can set up automatic payment rules (for example, "Pay celphone bill unless its over $120 - if it is, then email me first"). And it works on anything, even little scraps of paper.
Pretty cool stuff, and very friendly.