To me it sounds like this book would have been far better had the author taken the opportunity to "awaken" the main character and allow him to learn about his humanity.
Maybe by not doing so, he hopes to "awaken" his readership instead? There's something to be said for books that don't follow standard formulae too, especially in the all-too-genre young adult section.
You might say that "it's easy to change your default search engine" but it's not always easy for the average user to do this. And Microsoft are hardly likely to make this any easier.
I fear that you're missing the point here - slightly, at any rate. If the MSN searches get to be "good enough" and the desktop integration works well (ie: better than the current GoogleBar at least), then even if it was trivial to change it, why would I? Unless I had a personal beef with Microsoft, of course.
For the most part, most people just want things to work. If it works, that's all they care about - even if it was trivial to change, there's little to no incentive.
That's one thing that I always appreciate product builders keeping an eye on - for example, the 3.5tb XServe RAID, while more expensive (and providing more features), specifies maximum heat output of 1365 btu for the disk array and 990 for the server (assuming all 17 disks running full tilt with both G5s pegged). Not bad for a 4.25tb system. Under lower load, heat output from both drops substantially.
It gets even cheaper if you want more than one (or other Apple equipment). If you're a development shop, sign up for ADC. The first fully loaded RAID array is discounted about the same amount as the ADC membership fee. The second through nth are considerably cheaper.
Put the control signals in your ringtone, and turn your TV on by calling your cellphone. Use custom ringtones and call from different phones to change the channel, adjust the volume,...
Cool idea, but doesn't this mean that your celphone is now restricted to being next to your TV, and you need to use your home phone to change channels (or another cel I guess), and that there's a multi-second lagtime? The whole IR->Sound concept does have a lot of intreguing hack possibilities to it though.
plus freeware and shareware collections like Fred Fish, Aminet, etc & the Public Domain libraries that were around.
Aah... I'd actually forgotten about Fred Fish, can you believe it? Thanks for the trip down memory lane there, pandrijeczko. Even to this day, I miss my Amiga (possibly the first A2000 sold in Dallas). And Carrier Command, of course.
On the other hand, by allowing beta "in-house" distributions, there is the risk of being perpetually in beta. Here, if someone wants the software at all, they put their name on a web form to become a "member". The software never exits "beta" and they never have to distribute their source code changes
This is a very good point. There are a lot of parallels between it and the "private club" drinking rules in some parts of the South. Basically, there are still cities that are so dry that you're not even allowed to serve alcohol with dinner. However, there's an exemption in there for "private clubs". So basically everywhere is a "private club" which offers a free, simple membership to its guests. Convenient and legal. The kind of "internal beta program" you describe sounds awfully similar from a legal standpoint.
Back to the private clubs, there's even an organization (called Unicard) which came up and allows you to join it, which then provides you with "reciprocal memberships" at almost everywhere. Saves you from having to carry around a stack of membership cards.
Something similar could easily happen here - have a "BetaTestClub" come up, and contract (completely legally) with software firms to provide confidential software testing. It could recruit unpaid "testers" from everywhere via its website, and allow you do download software to test. Since the software would be officially unreleased (and you could have some nastyRestrictive contracts between the BTC and the corporations involved), the corps wouldn't be forced to release their code mods to anyone.
I take advantage of this - like many others, my car has a small storage bin directly below the radio. I drop my celphone in there while I'm driving. The interference, while at a fixed volume, will disrupt my music sufficiently to detect an incoming call even if I would otherwise miss the ringer. Of course, it also serves to detect things like long bridges, so its not perfect. I can tune it out (while still checking to see if its lit up), but it annoys my passengers sometimes.
Re:Deaf Guy Wanted For Music Listening
on
Birth of the iPod
·
· Score: 1
Just have a look at some of the bike photos from this years tour.
I have seen some Time Trial set ups where the saddle is nothing more but a thin "slice" of carbon fibre.
There's a simple explanation for this. When you're biking seriously, you're not just sitting on the seat - a lot of your weight is supported by your legs on the pedals even when it looks like you're sitting down. That, and on a long ride (especially as you get up to, or surpass, a century), a little discomfort is way better than the chafing that would occur with a wider seat. Just think about it, shudder, and move on.
On another note, I'm working on something similar but in a slightly different manner. Machine shops themselves would send in a CAD file, and then we would quote them on a cycle time based on our machinery that they could purchase (since I work for a CNC Machine Distributor, who is also ironically suffering from a DOS attack).
So... they're already suffering a DOS, and you link to them from slashdot? That's just mean...
20 answers and only 1 is useful to the chap who asked the question.
I am increasingly beginning to wonder if/. is the place to look for an answer.
Congratulations! You made the signal to noise ratio 21:1. A distinct improvement. Oh, and the answer to your pondering is, "No, of course slashdot isn't the place to look for a[n] [useful|on-topic|] answer. Its just a blog.
still, just like with spam, getting one sucker to pay would make the whole thing profitable. I'm sure $40000 is a lot of money in Nigeria, more than enough to live for a year.
You know, a lot of people would agree with that statement even if was "In the USA," especially if that $40k wasn't taxed.
Well when you call something affordable in this sense your talking about it being affordable to the average person, not just me. 250$ for basically just a music player with high capacity. You can carry 3 or 4 albums or more on a 60$ player (i.e. Creative MuVo).
Does the average person need to carry 4 gigs of music around with them and if so is it worth 250$? Probably not even if it is cool.
I hate to break it to you, but the average person doesn't need to carry any amount of music around with them. Many people choose to do so, but it is a luxury expense and is treated accordingly, subject to the whims and vagrancies of fashion rather than being a cold utility calculation. This is something that Apple has understood from day one, much to the delight of their investors.
So when do they become affordable (about 50% of their current base price)?
When they stop selling so quickly that they run into supply shortages even at the current price? Obviously, many people feel that they are currently affordable.
To answer your question less tounge in cheek (although that's the real reason), it would take a significant price drop in HD prices to spur additional price cuts. $399 for the 40GB model really isn't bad when you stop and think about the materials cost.
The conciet of most space travel novels is that we meet another race and have something in common with them. Unless you buy into some sort of star-trek "we were all seeded by a single race" theory, the premise is fairly unlikely. Having evolved from a different start in a different place, and having advanced with different needs and goals in a different environment, it is fairly unlikely that humans have any concepts in common with extraterrestrial races. Best case scenario maybe the desire for self-preservation. Unless they've never had a problem preserving themselves.
Actually, C. J. Cherryh is pretty good at characterization like this - that impulse was part of the reason for the Chanur Cycle of novels. While I would put them more in the category of spacegoing fantasy, rather than hard SF, they did have some interesting ideas. For one, the main characters were non-human. A human was involved, but only peripherally (to the book content, more involved with the plot). If you haven't read her yet (or even if you have), I recommend that you give 'em a go.
But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be called elitist:-/
Not by me - although I would have a couple of other choice comments for one simple reason... Let's leave the movie-bashing at least until after you've seen the movie, mmm-kay?
Governments can enforce that vendors must provide proper documentation of their software data formats before a deal is struck, especially if the system is going to run national infrastructures, such as IRS, etc. Especially when the system costs in the hundred of millions (if not billions), why don't they enforce that? I would be multibillionaire if I knew the answer.
Well, for large scale data apps, it is available. Heck, I've taken courses in both Informix and Oracle internal structures - in memory and on disk. The information is certainly useful to have in rare but uncomfortable-when-they-happen situations. So not only are the structures (semi)-public, but there is a pool of people who can help you if you need the help. Also, a lot of major companies use source-code escrow in case they ever fold, with automatic release clauses in their larger contracts. This is not an unknown problem these days.
BMW's iDrive was considered to be orders of magnitude superior to MB's COMAND system, which (according to Edmunds) pretty much requires you to read a 512 page owner's manual before you can use it. I've even seen reviews talking about how good it is to have voice recognition capabilities, because without using it there are some option screens that the reviewer was never able to find in the bizarre menu system!
Here's hoping that Audi got it right with their new app. Then again, they often do... and they have the advantage of learning from the others' mistakes.
Yes, I do have my issues with the Unix way. One thing f.ex. I don't really like is that expansions of wildcard is done by the shell, instead of providing a library call where a program can decide which arguments are to be expanded and which arent.
That's funny - that's one of the things that I love about the UNIX shells. a) it means that all programs can assume that any wildcards they see are intended for their use. b) it means that every program uses wildcards in exactly the same way.
The second point is the most important one by far. Under Windows, some programs support wildcards, some don't. You can never really be sure what's going to happen. As you start writing complicated scripts, this gets even worse. With UNIX shells, you have consistency. I would argue - and this is part of the UNIX philosophy as well - that consistency and simplicity are more important than adding individual "improvements." Heck, the standardization of the UI is what made Windows so successful in the first place (yes, Mac too), not the idea of a windowing system - and its why people expect to be able to use an unfamiliar program without too much difficulty (unlike, say, a given X program before gnome/kde came along (and often afterwards)). Funny that MSFT/APPL get the UI standardization right (although less often these days), and UNIX got the shell part down, but neither one of them got both.
Why would you necessarily want to do that? What if you'd flown somewhere and rented the car? I could still forsee someone designing a system like that - I've used a modem dialler that sulked unless you tell it your current number, when all I want is to dial exactly what I put - no second guessing on the area code or anything, thanks.
That was exactly what I was thinking of in the original comment, fwiw. I had one in my rental the first time I went up to Philly, and it was great for stuff like that. I could randomly just flip to food->[chain] and find places to eat if I didn't have a good local recommendation or just wanted something general. Very cool for the traveler.
I did put my hotel and our office in there (it let you pick recent destinations, so that was fine - no programming needed), but I shouldn't have - I went back a couple of weeks later and realized that despite having just been there, and staying at the same hotel, I didn't know where our office was!
And I hear your pain on the modem dialer. Allowing you to set your home area code so that it can do stuff for you: cool. Forcing it: crap. Another good example would be the traditional MS help app, which asks you how you want to optimize the dictionary storage (or something like that) the first time you use it. Don't know anyone, ever, who picked anything other than (Default->OK). Lots of people get confused/alarmed by it though.
I guess the underlying UI lesson here is that what's important to the developer is not necessarily (or even probably) important to the user. And its our job as developers to shield the user from the decisions that we make - that is, after all, what high level software is: an abstraction layer to allow users to think and work in a business domain rather than a systems one. Which is why modern software even tries to move away from thinking of things like "files" (check out iTunes/iPhoto/etc) where possible. Frustrating to geeks who are trained to think in the systems domain, very good for new (and future) users.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
While this is true, "those three" still move the vast majority of IM traffic across the 'net. It would be like coming up with a proprietary email system - sure you can do it, but you'd still need gateways to talk to most other people (just like MSFT had for Exchange at first, which probably (guessing here) had a higher userbase than Jabber does).
I'm not arguing that they shouldn't use it, don't get me wrong, just that they're not going to feel much market pressure to do so. At least the first one to shift isn't.
IANAL, (especially in England) but I think he may have a defence based on equitable estoppel. It certainly applies in Canada and the US - not sure about England. But if they had previously supported him and suddenly did a 180, then he has recourse to fight it, and recoup his legal costs.
And people wonder why corporations slam down ideas like this just as fast as they can - its to avoid being trapped into exactly this kind of situation, especially if (in this case) the website were to become popular (as it did), then start to experince random downtime, making them look bad... And whether or not they make themselves look bad is irrelevant. As this example showed, they have to look out for their interests.
Not to go too offtopic here, but as the owner of a hosting company that pushes a lot of bandwidth, our cost per GB is about 34 cents. Slashdot probably pays less than that
Just as an OT clarification, that was $1 per (gb per day) per Yr. So a volume savings of 10gb per day, or about 3.65 terabytes per year.
But since both sections use the inventory system, which part should be the used by 90% of the time?
From the user's perspective, they should see what they need to see. The systems may share a common code-base, but that's not their problem. And its a very solvable one - I've worked in the enterprise inventory/logistics field since '95:-) Just because a developer takes advantage of common code, or common data, their end-user can and should remain blisfully ignorant of the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
To me it sounds like this book would have been far better had the author taken the opportunity to "awaken" the main character and allow him to learn about his humanity.
Maybe by not doing so, he hopes to "awaken" his readership instead? There's something to be said for books that don't follow standard formulae too, especially in the all-too-genre young adult section.
You might say that "it's easy to change your default search engine" but it's not always easy for the average user to do this. And Microsoft are hardly likely to make this any easier.
I fear that you're missing the point here - slightly, at any rate. If the MSN searches get to be "good enough" and the desktop integration works well (ie: better than the current GoogleBar at least), then even if it was trivial to change it, why would I? Unless I had a personal beef with Microsoft, of course.
For the most part, most people just want things to work. If it works, that's all they care about - even if it was trivial to change, there's little to no incentive.
That's one thing that I always appreciate product builders keeping an eye on - for example, the 3.5tb XServe RAID, while more expensive (and providing more features), specifies maximum heat output of 1365 btu for the disk array and 990 for the server (assuming all 17 disks running full tilt with both G5s pegged). Not bad for a 4.25tb system. Under lower load, heat output from both drops substantially.
It gets even cheaper if you want more than one (or other Apple equipment). If you're a development shop, sign up for ADC. The first fully loaded RAID array is discounted about the same amount as the ADC membership fee. The second through nth are considerably cheaper.
Put the control signals in your ringtone, and turn your TV on by calling your cellphone. Use custom ringtones and call from different phones to change the channel, adjust the volume, ...
Cool idea, but doesn't this mean that your celphone is now restricted to being next to your TV, and you need to use your home phone to change channels (or another cel I guess), and that there's a multi-second lagtime? The whole IR->Sound concept does have a lot of intreguing hack possibilities to it though.
plus freeware and shareware collections like Fred Fish, Aminet, etc & the Public Domain libraries that were around.
Aah... I'd actually forgotten about Fred Fish, can you believe it? Thanks for the trip down memory lane there, pandrijeczko. Even to this day, I miss my Amiga (possibly the first A2000 sold in Dallas). And Carrier Command, of course.
On the other hand, by allowing beta "in-house" distributions, there is the risk of being perpetually in beta. Here, if someone wants the software at all, they put their name on a web form to become a "member". The software never exits "beta" and they never have to distribute their source code changes
This is a very good point. There are a lot of parallels between it and the "private club" drinking rules in some parts of the South. Basically, there are still cities that are so dry that you're not even allowed to serve alcohol with dinner. However, there's an exemption in there for "private clubs". So basically everywhere is a "private club" which offers a free, simple membership to its guests. Convenient and legal. The kind of "internal beta program" you describe sounds awfully similar from a legal standpoint.
Back to the private clubs, there's even an organization (called Unicard) which came up and allows you to join it, which then provides you with "reciprocal memberships" at almost everywhere. Saves you from having to carry around a stack of membership cards.
Something similar could easily happen here - have a "BetaTestClub" come up, and contract (completely legally) with software firms to provide confidential software testing. It could recruit unpaid "testers" from everywhere via its website, and allow you do download software to test. Since the software would be officially unreleased (and you could have some nastyRestrictive contracts between the BTC and the corporations involved), the corps wouldn't be forced to release their code mods to anyone.
Hmm.
I take advantage of this - like many others, my car has a small storage bin directly below the radio. I drop my celphone in there while I'm driving. The interference, while at a fixed volume, will disrupt my music sufficiently to detect an incoming call even if I would otherwise miss the ringer. Of course, it also serves to detect things like long bridges, so its not perfect. I can tune it out (while still checking to see if its lit up), but it annoys my passengers sometimes.
Just have a look at some of the bike photos from this years tour.
I have seen some Time Trial set ups where the saddle is nothing more but a thin "slice" of carbon fibre.
There's a simple explanation for this. When you're biking seriously, you're not just sitting on the seat - a lot of your weight is supported by your legs on the pedals even when it looks like you're sitting down. That, and on a long ride (especially as you get up to, or surpass, a century), a little discomfort is way better than the chafing that would occur with a wider seat. Just think about it, shudder, and move on.
On another note, I'm working on something similar but in a slightly different manner. Machine shops themselves would send in a CAD file, and then we would quote them on a cycle time based on our machinery that they could purchase (since I work for a CNC Machine Distributor, who is also ironically suffering from a DOS attack).
So... they're already suffering a DOS, and you link to them from slashdot? That's just mean...
20 answers and only 1 is useful to the chap who asked the question.
/. is the place to look for an answer.
I am increasingly beginning to wonder if
Congratulations! You made the signal to noise ratio 21:1. A distinct improvement. Oh, and the answer to your pondering is, "No, of course slashdot isn't the place to look for a[n] [useful|on-topic|] answer. Its just a blog.
still, just like with spam, getting one sucker to pay would make the whole thing profitable. I'm sure $40000 is a lot of money in Nigeria, more than enough to live for a year.
You know, a lot of people would agree with that statement even if was "In the USA," especially if that $40k wasn't taxed.
Well when you call something affordable in this sense your talking about it being affordable to the average person, not just me. 250$ for basically just a music player with high capacity. You can carry 3 or 4 albums or more on a 60$ player (i.e. Creative MuVo).
Does the average person need to carry 4 gigs of music around with them and if so is it worth 250$? Probably not even if it is cool.
I hate to break it to you, but the average person doesn't need to carry any amount of music around with them. Many people choose to do so, but it is a luxury expense and is treated accordingly, subject to the whims and vagrancies of fashion rather than being a cold utility calculation. This is something that Apple has understood from day one, much to the delight of their investors.
So when do they become affordable (about 50% of their current base price)?
When they stop selling so quickly that they run into supply shortages even at the current price? Obviously, many people feel that they are currently affordable.
To answer your question less tounge in cheek (although that's the real reason), it would take a significant price drop in HD prices to spur additional price cuts. $399 for the 40GB model really isn't bad when you stop and think about the materials cost.
The conciet of most space travel novels is that we meet another race and have something in common with them. Unless you buy into some sort of star-trek "we were all seeded by a single race" theory, the premise is fairly unlikely. Having evolved from a different start in a different place, and having advanced with different needs and goals in a different environment, it is fairly unlikely that humans have any concepts in common with extraterrestrial races. Best case scenario maybe the desire for self-preservation. Unless they've never had a problem preserving themselves.
Actually, C. J. Cherryh is pretty good at characterization like this - that impulse was part of the reason for the Chanur Cycle of novels. While I would put them more in the category of spacegoing fantasy, rather than hard SF, they did have some interesting ideas. For one, the main characters were non-human. A human was involved, but only peripherally (to the book content, more involved with the plot). If you haven't read her yet (or even if you have), I recommend that you give 'em a go.
But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be called elitist :-/
Not by me - although I would have a couple of other choice comments for one simple reason... Let's leave the movie-bashing at least until after you've seen the movie, mmm-kay?
Well, since I can't resist it turns out (pathetic, isn't it?): there's a surprisingly nice summary available from Edmunds.
Governments can enforce that vendors must provide proper documentation of their software data formats before a deal is struck, especially if the system is going to run national infrastructures, such as IRS, etc. Especially when the system costs in the hundred of millions (if not billions), why don't they enforce that? I would be multibillionaire if I knew the answer.
Well, for large scale data apps, it is available. Heck, I've taken courses in both Informix and Oracle internal structures - in memory and on disk. The information is certainly useful to have in rare but uncomfortable-when-they-happen situations. So not only are the structures (semi)-public, but there is a pool of people who can help you if you need the help. Also, a lot of major companies use source-code escrow in case they ever fold, with automatic release clauses in their larger contracts. This is not an unknown problem these days.
I'll see your nit...
BMW's iDrive was considered to be orders of magnitude superior to MB's COMAND system, which (according to Edmunds) pretty much requires you to read a 512 page owner's manual before you can use it. I've even seen reviews talking about how good it is to have voice recognition capabilities, because without using it there are some option screens that the reviewer was never able to find in the bizarre menu system!
Here's hoping that Audi got it right with their new app. Then again, they often do... and they have the advantage of learning from the others' mistakes.
Yes, I do have my issues with the Unix way. One thing f.ex. I don't really like is that expansions of wildcard is done by the shell, instead of providing a library call where a program can decide which arguments are to be expanded and which arent.
That's funny - that's one of the things that I love about the UNIX shells. a) it means that all programs can assume that any wildcards they see are intended for their use. b) it means that every program uses wildcards in exactly the same way.
The second point is the most important one by far. Under Windows, some programs support wildcards, some don't. You can never really be sure what's going to happen. As you start writing complicated scripts, this gets even worse. With UNIX shells, you have consistency. I would argue - and this is part of the UNIX philosophy as well - that consistency and simplicity are more important than adding individual "improvements." Heck, the standardization of the UI is what made Windows so successful in the first place (yes, Mac too), not the idea of a windowing system - and its why people expect to be able to use an unfamiliar program without too much difficulty (unlike, say, a given X program before gnome/kde came along (and often afterwards)). Funny that MSFT/APPL get the UI standardization right (although less often these days), and UNIX got the shell part down, but neither one of them got both.
Why would you necessarily want to do that? What if you'd flown somewhere and rented the car? I could still forsee someone designing a system like that - I've used a modem dialler that sulked unless you tell it your current number, when all I want is to dial exactly what I put - no second guessing on the area code or anything, thanks.
That was exactly what I was thinking of in the original comment, fwiw. I had one in my rental the first time I went up to Philly, and it was great for stuff like that. I could randomly just flip to food->[chain] and find places to eat if I didn't have a good local recommendation or just wanted something general. Very cool for the traveler.
I did put my hotel and our office in there (it let you pick recent destinations, so that was fine - no programming needed), but I shouldn't have - I went back a couple of weeks later and realized that despite having just been there, and staying at the same hotel, I didn't know where our office was!
And I hear your pain on the modem dialer. Allowing you to set your home area code so that it can do stuff for you: cool. Forcing it: crap. Another good example would be the traditional MS help app, which asks you how you want to optimize the dictionary storage (or something like that) the first time you use it. Don't know anyone, ever, who picked anything other than (Default->OK). Lots of people get confused/alarmed by it though.
I guess the underlying UI lesson here is that what's important to the developer is not necessarily (or even probably) important to the user. And its our job as developers to shield the user from the decisions that we make - that is, after all, what high level software is: an abstraction layer to allow users to think and work in a business domain rather than a systems one. Which is why modern software even tries to move away from thinking of things like "files" (check out iTunes/iPhoto/etc) where possible. Frustrating to geeks who are trained to think in the systems domain, very good for new (and future) users.
In any case, this is all nonsense. AOL, Yahoo, and The Beast should all just implement the server-to-server protocol used by Jabber. It's on the IETF standards track and will eventually be used by everyone who isn't one of those three.
While this is true, "those three" still move the vast majority of IM traffic across the 'net. It would be like coming up with a proprietary email system - sure you can do it, but you'd still need gateways to talk to most other people (just like MSFT had for Exchange at first, which probably (guessing here) had a higher userbase than Jabber does).
I'm not arguing that they shouldn't use it, don't get me wrong, just that they're not going to feel much market pressure to do so. At least the first one to shift isn't.
IANAL, (especially in England) but I think he may have a defence based on equitable estoppel. It certainly applies in Canada and the US - not sure about England. But if they had previously supported him and suddenly did a 180, then he has recourse to fight it, and recoup his legal costs.
And people wonder why corporations slam down ideas like this just as fast as they can - its to avoid being trapped into exactly this kind of situation, especially if (in this case) the website were to become popular (as it did), then start to experince random downtime, making them look bad... And whether or not they make themselves look bad is irrelevant. As this example showed, they have to look out for their interests.
Not to go too offtopic here, but as the owner of a hosting company that pushes a lot of bandwidth, our cost per GB is about 34 cents. Slashdot probably pays less than that
Just as an OT clarification, that was $1 per (gb per day) per Yr. So a volume savings of 10gb per day, or about 3.65 terabytes per year.
But since both sections use the inventory system, which part should be the used by 90% of the time?
:-) Just because a developer takes advantage of common code, or common data, their end-user can and should remain blisfully ignorant of the fact.
From the user's perspective, they should see what they need to see. The systems may share a common code-base, but that's not their problem. And its a very solvable one - I've worked in the enterprise inventory/logistics field since '95