If you want the time and date on the Desktop, just open System Preferences and go to the Date and Time pane. In there you'll have the option to display the date and time on the Desktop in a window of varying transparency that floats over all else.
The man-nature dichotomy is not just hippie bullshit. All sorts of people who are most definitely not hippies (religious right, extractive businesses, etc.) employ the dichotomy to make themselves feel "chosen" or to assuage their consciences.
It looks like they fixed it to simply state "Unfortunately Amazon Unbox is not compatible with Macintosh computer or iPods" or some-such. I wonder if someone got the memo.
It's been done (sort of)
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This sort of "adaptive learning" for applications has already been done, albeit in a limited and utterly frustrating way courtesy of MS Office and their magical hiding menus.
As a Mac user who has to interact with PCs quite often at work, I find this not only not helpful, but completely obnoxious. I realize this is probably due to MS's fairly awful learning algorithm, but I think the lesson here is that it's going to take a long, long, long time before anything like this can make its way to the desktop without pissing off 50% of the users. Or more.
Farewell Dell! One market you can't take over by undercutting on price!
Don't let the door hit you on the ass!
P.S. I know I may be modded troll for this one, but its about time this happened. Maybe all of those "analysts" will stop spewing about "iPod-killers" whenever someone comes out with a cheaper mp3 player. They may be driven by price alone, but consumers aren't always (as we have seen here).
WiFi! Music! Games! Talks nice with Xbox! iPod/PSP/DS/GameBoy/kitchen sink-killer!
If we're lucky, the marketing department will know exactly how to package and advertise this product so we all know to buy one. Maybe it'll even jump off the shelves at us. Literally!
A few years ago, I broke both bones in my forearm -- the radius was broken so badly that I had pulverized a small portion of it so the two parts didn't line up exactly. They didn't notice this in the x-rays (and so couldn't cut into my hip as they hadn't gotten my authorization for that), so they tried artifical (read: cadaver) bone to regrow the spot. Didn't work.
A few months later, they enrolled me in a trial of a similar sort of ultrasonic technology by which my bone should regrow. They had been getting a 94% success rate with fibias, but the arm was something new. Needless to say, I was one of those lucky minorities that didn't show any growth. Months later, I was back on the table with new bone being brought in from my hip. Six weeks after that, I was healed. While cool, there is certainly no replacement for real bone.
Since ipindex.net is down and now parked domain, flumps.org has a mirror at http://www.flumps.org/ip/. It may be a little out of date, but it's still interesting to look and see who has which type of network.
I think you're confusing "full-featured" with "better".
Sure, the iPod is not as full-featured as some other players, but I think the fact that they're harder to use automatically removes them from the "better" category. Ease of use is a feature, too, even for geeks like us.
Apparently my comment (sincere, might I add) was modded as troll my a few people. Fine. They can have their opinion, and I'll have mine.
The point is, I don't need the mayor of New York, a city in which I do not live, suggesting how I operate as a private citizen. If he wants to keep a DNA database of all workers in New York, that's his prerogative. Good luck getting elected next time.
Wow! I can't wait for all these great new features that Office will let me do to make my documents look great!
1. Change my fonts.
2. Change my font sizes.
3. Tell Word where a picture should sit on the page (c00l!)
4. Change my margins (I never new I could do that!)
5. 1 million rows in Excel so I can finally tell my database to kiss off.
All this and more with a great, sure-to-be-lagless preview as I mouse over EVERYTHING!
But don't take my Word (tehe) for it. This video tells me how my documents can LOOK GREAT!
Currently, many nanotech applications are in products (or proposed to be in products) that would come in direct contact with our bodies. Take sunscreen, for example. Some brands of sunscreen are being made with nanoparticles (thus making them nanotechnology) that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Do we have a clue what happens when those nanoparticles interact with our brain cells? Hell no! Has that stopped it from being on the market? Hell no!
The issue at stake here is that we have a whole slew of products that have a significantly larger potential impact on our health. I'm not talking about the "smart" counter-top that will make plates out of itself just before dinner (although that would be cool -- I think Popular Science came up with that gem). I'm talking about practical applications of nanotech NOW. Nanoparticle sunscreen is just the first part. You'd better bet that the whole biomedical industry is looking into more advanced, more invasive nanotech applications. The jurisdiction would fall under the FDA sooner or later. Better sooner than later so they're not caught with their pants down.
(I'm sure I'll get modded down for this one, but I think that we need to be cautionary to some degree. Otherwise we may have another DDT or thalidomide on our hands.)
Note that I didn't say which version of IIS. I can't speak to IIS 6, but previous versions weren't exactly Fort Knox. Plus, many businesses don't upgrade to whichever is the latest version of X to come out of Redmond (or any software firm, really).
With IIS's myriad of security issues, you'd think this would have happened a long time ago. I guess we just have to chalk it up to the slow movements of corporations (or the death of those who used IIS;).
The PDA is dead! Long live the PDA!
on
The Future of the PDA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The UMPC, in its current form and price (and usability) will not be an issue in the "downfall" of the PDA. It may have the ability to sideline the PDA in some markets and applications, but those will be relatively limited. Onto my real point. . .
"Increasingly capable cellphones", as the summary puts it, will be the real challenge to the PDA. Many people bought PDAs to be electronic datebooks, address books, and the like. Some people felt it worthwhile to carry them, others (myself included) found it to be a hassle. Cellphones, on the other hand, are far more likely to make it into our pockets. The natural evolution was to add PDA-like functionality. So PDAs evolved into cellphones or cellphones evolved into PDAs. I would argue that there are examples of both (the Treo being a phonified PDA and Series 60 devices being PDAified cellphones).
My take home message is thus: The PDA is not dead. It has merely evolved thanks to the advent of widespread mobile phones. If we look at some current cellphones, many have more power than the original Palm Pilots. About the only thing they lack is a more sophisticated input method (that may be arguable, though, when T9 is compared to Graffiti).
Some manufacturers will still make "pure" PDAs, but the PDA is not dead. The PDA has merely evolved.
One thing I know that's missing from Postgres is the relative lack of advertisement or PR. I realize that it's an open source project, but it's something to consider. In my field (landscape ecology), ESRI gets most of everyones business, including spatial databases. It's unfortunate that so many people shell out a truckload of money for ArcSDE when they could be using PostGIS, a free extension of Postgres to allow for the storage, querying, and manipulation of spatial data. Plus, it easily imports the industry standard shapefile.
PostGIS is gaining momentum in my field, but it, along with Postgres, needs more advertisement. When I started learning Postgres, I was a little leery. I had thought it was going to be incredibly complex and arcane, but I was pleasantly surprised. PostgreSQL just needs to get the word out.
Indeed it does sound a bit like a rehash of SimEarth. If that's the case, I hope it is to a T. I hope the include all of the biosphere, atmosphere, etc. controls so we can play around with the many potential outcomes our planet may encounter. I for one learned a truckload from playing SimEarth as a kid.
On another note, the real innovative part of this game (which is clear if you want the video), is that the components of each environment, biome, society, civilization, and planet are all procedurally generated. Hundreds of artists are no longer required to flesh out a realistic looking world. The real benefit here (in addition to the rebirth of SimEarth) is that each planet you visit will be strikingly complete and unique.
Some clarifications
on
Treo 700w Review
·
· Score: 4, Informative
While most of your comments are true, you do ignore one glaring detail: Opera is available for the Treo.
Palm has provided the necessary Java runtime environment free of charge to 650 users (and $5.99 for others). Once downloaded, you can run Opera or Kmaps (an excellent Java app that downloads data from Google Local and even gets the scrolling part down well) or any other Java app compiled for Palm OS. I use both routinely on my Treo 600 and get pretty decent performance out of Opera. With a GPRS connection no less!
(While I agree that the first generation 650s froze often, those issues have been fixed with firmware updates. This doesn't excuse the initial lock-ups, but it's not a fault of Palm OS necessarily, just as 240x240 is not necessarily a fault of Windows Mobile (although the lack of 320x320 is)).
This analogy is certainly compelling and has some truth to it. In biology/ecology, there have been differing levels of competition throughout time. At first it was RNA vs. DNA in the competition for genetic storage. DNA won, with RNA relegated to second place (DNA was like a RAID 1 of RNA). Then it was single cellular organisms against multicellular organisms. Even though cells in a multicellular organism lost their direct ability to pass on their genes (the endgame in evolution), the made the rest of the organism more successful. Since all the cells were related, they were passing on there genes by proxy.
Multi-cellularity clearly won, and then the competition moved on to society. Social animals were generally more successful than their non-social counterparts. Certainly there are exceptions, but I think humans are a good example of the success of social behavior. With the social/non-social debate settled, I propose that the competition has moved up a tier into culture. We now have a battle of cultures, with each vying for dominance (consciously or unconsciously? I'm not sure).
Carrying this analogy over to cultural environmentalism, I think it somewhat holds. In the past, the superior competitors created products based on proprietary technologies and innovations. While this is still somewhat the case, many of the same features found in proprietary products can now be found in open products. The competition has moved up a level from providing a product with X features to providing a service on top of that product. The question is no longer, "Can you provide X?" but, "Can you do this with X?" The product has been commoditized. The real competition is now for those services that can be provided on top of X.
I know this is not a ground-breaking idea, but it proves that his analogy holds some water. Some businesses have already realized the commoditization of the product. UPS has moved into inventory management. IBM has thrown their weight behind consulting services, services that often work in conjunction with open solutions.
The future is not just open products, but what you can do with those products to set yourself apart from the competition.
Apple has modified the iTunes MiniStore in response to the anger caused by its release of personal information.
This is why I like Apple. And it's also the difference between Apple and MS. Users matter.
Why bird's eye could never have mosaiced images
on
Windows Live goes Local
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Even if it wouldn't be seamless, it seems they could still offer the option of scrolling around multiple photos in a mosaic format. Maybe they don't want to break the illusion that you are in this space by allowing you to have a mosaic view of all photos available in an area. Maybe someone can create this (though Microsoft will probably shut it down like Google shut down the Google Maps poster maker).
There's actually a reason why MS did what they did with the Bird's Eye imagery. Since it was taken at an angle (it's an oblique aerial photo), the edges of the images won't necessarily mosaic with the edges of the other images properly, giving us a weird, multi-perspective view. Some buildings would lean on way, while others would lean the opposite, even if they were neighbors.
Granted, this happens in vertical aerial photos like those Google has and MS has in their aerial photo section. However, this "leaning tower" effect is minimized because of the angle of the photo and special methods used to reduce such distortion (known as orthorectification). As such, orthophotos can be panned and scrolled without too much oddness, whereas oblique aerial photos (MS's Bird's Eye view) will look extremely awkward and thus will probably be stuck in a sort of static viewing mode.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want the time and date on the Desktop, just open System Preferences and go to the Date and Time pane. In there you'll have the option to display the date and time on the Desktop in a window of varying transparency that floats over all else.
The man-nature dichotomy is not just hippie bullshit. All sorts of people who are most definitely not hippies (religious right, extractive businesses, etc.) employ the dichotomy to make themselves feel "chosen" or to assuage their consciences.
Same price as iPod. Wireless. Lame.
It looks like they fixed it to simply state "Unfortunately Amazon Unbox is not compatible with Macintosh computer or iPods" or some-such. I wonder if someone got the memo.
This sort of "adaptive learning" for applications has already been done, albeit in a limited and utterly frustrating way courtesy of MS Office and their magical hiding menus.
As a Mac user who has to interact with PCs quite often at work, I find this not only not helpful, but completely obnoxious. I realize this is probably due to MS's fairly awful learning algorithm, but I think the lesson here is that it's going to take a long, long, long time before anything like this can make its way to the desktop without pissing off 50% of the users. Or more.
Farewell Dell! One market you can't take over by undercutting on price!
Don't let the door hit you on the ass!
P.S. I know I may be modded troll for this one, but its about time this happened. Maybe all of those "analysts" will stop spewing about "iPod-killers" whenever someone comes out with a cheaper mp3 player. They may be driven by price alone, but consumers aren't always (as we have seen here).
WiFi! Music! Games! Talks nice with Xbox! iPod/PSP/DS/GameBoy/kitchen sink-killer!
If we're lucky, the marketing department will know exactly how to package and advertise this product so we all know to buy one. Maybe it'll even jump off the shelves at us. Literally!
A few years ago, I broke both bones in my forearm -- the radius was broken so badly that I had pulverized a small portion of it so the two parts didn't line up exactly. They didn't notice this in the x-rays (and so couldn't cut into my hip as they hadn't gotten my authorization for that), so they tried artifical (read: cadaver) bone to regrow the spot. Didn't work.
A few months later, they enrolled me in a trial of a similar sort of ultrasonic technology by which my bone should regrow. They had been getting a 94% success rate with fibias, but the arm was something new. Needless to say, I was one of those lucky minorities that didn't show any growth. Months later, I was back on the table with new bone being brought in from my hip. Six weeks after that, I was healed. While cool, there is certainly no replacement for real bone.
Since ipindex.net is down and now parked domain, flumps.org has a mirror at http://www.flumps.org/ip/. It may be a little out of date, but it's still interesting to look and see who has which type of network.
Feel free to vote out everyone in Congress except Russ Feingold. He's the one Congressman that fits your bill.
I think you're confusing "full-featured" with "better".
Sure, the iPod is not as full-featured as some other players, but I think the fact that they're harder to use automatically removes them from the "better" category. Ease of use is a feature, too, even for geeks like us.
Apparently my comment (sincere, might I add) was modded as troll my a few people. Fine. They can have their opinion, and I'll have mine.
The point is, I don't need the mayor of New York, a city in which I do not live, suggesting how I operate as a private citizen. If he wants to keep a DNA database of all workers in New York, that's his prerogative. Good luck getting elected next time.
Fuck you!
Wow! I can't wait for all these great new features that Office will let me do to make my documents look great!
1. Change my fonts.
2. Change my font sizes.
3. Tell Word where a picture should sit on the page (c00l!)
4. Change my margins (I never new I could do that!)
5. 1 million rows in Excel so I can finally tell my database to kiss off.
All this and more with a great, sure-to-be-lagless preview as I mouse over EVERYTHING!
But don't take my Word (tehe) for it. This video tells me how my documents can LOOK GREAT!
Currently, many nanotech applications are in products (or proposed to be in products) that would come in direct contact with our bodies. Take sunscreen, for example. Some brands of sunscreen are being made with nanoparticles (thus making them nanotechnology) that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Do we have a clue what happens when those nanoparticles interact with our brain cells? Hell no! Has that stopped it from being on the market? Hell no!
The issue at stake here is that we have a whole slew of products that have a significantly larger potential impact on our health. I'm not talking about the "smart" counter-top that will make plates out of itself just before dinner (although that would be cool -- I think Popular Science came up with that gem). I'm talking about practical applications of nanotech NOW. Nanoparticle sunscreen is just the first part. You'd better bet that the whole biomedical industry is looking into more advanced, more invasive nanotech applications. The jurisdiction would fall under the FDA sooner or later. Better sooner than later so they're not caught with their pants down.
(I'm sure I'll get modded down for this one, but I think that we need to be cautionary to some degree. Otherwise we may have another DDT or thalidomide on our hands.)
HA HA!
Note that I didn't say which version of IIS. I can't speak to IIS 6, but previous versions weren't exactly Fort Knox. Plus, many businesses don't upgrade to whichever is the latest version of X to come out of Redmond (or any software firm, really).
With IIS's myriad of security issues, you'd think this would have happened a long time ago. I guess we just have to chalk it up to the slow movements of corporations (or the death of those who used IIS ;).
The UMPC, in its current form and price (and usability) will not be an issue in the "downfall" of the PDA. It may have the ability to sideline the PDA in some markets and applications, but those will be relatively limited. Onto my real point. . .
"Increasingly capable cellphones", as the summary puts it, will be the real challenge to the PDA. Many people bought PDAs to be electronic datebooks, address books, and the like. Some people felt it worthwhile to carry them, others (myself included) found it to be a hassle. Cellphones, on the other hand, are far more likely to make it into our pockets. The natural evolution was to add PDA-like functionality. So PDAs evolved into cellphones or cellphones evolved into PDAs. I would argue that there are examples of both (the Treo being a phonified PDA and Series 60 devices being PDAified cellphones).
My take home message is thus: The PDA is not dead. It has merely evolved thanks to the advent of widespread mobile phones. If we look at some current cellphones, many have more power than the original Palm Pilots. About the only thing they lack is a more sophisticated input method (that may be arguable, though, when T9 is compared to Graffiti).
Some manufacturers will still make "pure" PDAs, but the PDA is not dead. The PDA has merely evolved.
One thing I know that's missing from Postgres is the relative lack of advertisement or PR. I realize that it's an open source project, but it's something to consider. In my field (landscape ecology), ESRI gets most of everyones business, including spatial databases. It's unfortunate that so many people shell out a truckload of money for ArcSDE when they could be using PostGIS, a free extension of Postgres to allow for the storage, querying, and manipulation of spatial data. Plus, it easily imports the industry standard shapefile.
PostGIS is gaining momentum in my field, but it, along with Postgres, needs more advertisement. When I started learning Postgres, I was a little leery. I had thought it was going to be incredibly complex and arcane, but I was pleasantly surprised. PostgreSQL just needs to get the word out.
Indeed it does sound a bit like a rehash of SimEarth. If that's the case, I hope it is to a T. I hope the include all of the biosphere, atmosphere, etc. controls so we can play around with the many potential outcomes our planet may encounter. I for one learned a truckload from playing SimEarth as a kid.
On another note, the real innovative part of this game (which is clear if you want the video), is that the components of each environment, biome, society, civilization, and planet are all procedurally generated. Hundreds of artists are no longer required to flesh out a realistic looking world. The real benefit here (in addition to the rebirth of SimEarth) is that each planet you visit will be strikingly complete and unique.
While most of your comments are true, you do ignore one glaring detail: Opera is available for the Treo.
Palm has provided the necessary Java runtime environment free of charge to 650 users (and $5.99 for others). Once downloaded, you can run Opera or Kmaps (an excellent Java app that downloads data from Google Local and even gets the scrolling part down well) or any other Java app compiled for Palm OS. I use both routinely on my Treo 600 and get pretty decent performance out of Opera. With a GPRS connection no less!
(While I agree that the first generation 650s froze often, those issues have been fixed with firmware updates. This doesn't excuse the initial lock-ups, but it's not a fault of Palm OS necessarily, just as 240x240 is not necessarily a fault of Windows Mobile (although the lack of 320x320 is)).
This analogy is certainly compelling and has some truth to it. In biology/ecology, there have been differing levels of competition throughout time. At first it was RNA vs. DNA in the competition for genetic storage. DNA won, with RNA relegated to second place (DNA was like a RAID 1 of RNA). Then it was single cellular organisms against multicellular organisms. Even though cells in a multicellular organism lost their direct ability to pass on their genes (the endgame in evolution), the made the rest of the organism more successful. Since all the cells were related, they were passing on there genes by proxy.
Multi-cellularity clearly won, and then the competition moved on to society. Social animals were generally more successful than their non-social counterparts. Certainly there are exceptions, but I think humans are a good example of the success of social behavior. With the social/non-social debate settled, I propose that the competition has moved up a tier into culture. We now have a battle of cultures, with each vying for dominance (consciously or unconsciously? I'm not sure).
Carrying this analogy over to cultural environmentalism, I think it somewhat holds. In the past, the superior competitors created products based on proprietary technologies and innovations. While this is still somewhat the case, many of the same features found in proprietary products can now be found in open products. The competition has moved up a level from providing a product with X features to providing a service on top of that product. The question is no longer, "Can you provide X?" but, "Can you do this with X?" The product has been commoditized. The real competition is now for those services that can be provided on top of X.
I know this is not a ground-breaking idea, but it proves that his analogy holds some water. Some businesses have already realized the commoditization of the product. UPS has moved into inventory management. IBM has thrown their weight behind consulting services, services that often work in conjunction with open solutions.
The future is not just open products, but what you can do with those products to set yourself apart from the competition.
Apple has modified the iTunes MiniStore in response to the anger caused by its release of personal information.
This is why I like Apple. And it's also the difference between Apple and MS. Users matter.
Even if it wouldn't be seamless, it seems they could still offer the option of scrolling around multiple photos in a mosaic format. Maybe they don't want to break the illusion that you are in this space by allowing you to have a mosaic view of all photos available in an area. Maybe someone can create this (though Microsoft will probably shut it down like Google shut down the Google Maps poster maker).
There's actually a reason why MS did what they did with the Bird's Eye imagery. Since it was taken at an angle (it's an oblique aerial photo), the edges of the images won't necessarily mosaic with the edges of the other images properly, giving us a weird, multi-perspective view. Some buildings would lean on way, while others would lean the opposite, even if they were neighbors.
Granted, this happens in vertical aerial photos like those Google has and MS has in their aerial photo section. However, this "leaning tower" effect is minimized because of the angle of the photo and special methods used to reduce such distortion (known as orthorectification). As such, orthophotos can be panned and scrolled without too much oddness, whereas oblique aerial photos (MS's Bird's Eye view) will look extremely awkward and thus will probably be stuck in a sort of static viewing mode.