Unless you buy into conspiracy theories, they were killed by lone nutters. The assassination of someone with a high profile wil draw a lot of unwanted attention on the way the US conducts this sort of business, as well as an public outcry.
Yeah, because the people in charge of these big infrastructure projects are idiots, and wouldn't have thought of that!
Seriously though, I expect they are going to 1: put them in rocky places not prone to sandstorms (the Sahara is not just a sea of sand) 2: spread them out so that all the collector won't be affected by the same event, and 3: have pretty robust storage mechanism (which they have to do any way for nights). I'm sure they've thought of other ways too, because it is their job, whereas I've spent a couple of minutes thinking about it after reading about it on Slashdot.
In a way, yes (I'm aware that an SSD would drastically improve a lot of my current problems), but launch times just keep getting worse, without a corresponding increase in functionality. Photoshop and Illustrator used to be much faster launching. Every iteration gets worse, even with upgrading the hardware.
It's both, I think. Sure you can argue that there are better hardware components around, but the reality is that, as sold, most hardware packages are contributing to the problem. My iMac here, for example, has all the processing power I need, but clearly has a IO bottleneck. The processor mostly sits pretty idle and the RAM unused while the disk grinds. Yes, and SSD would improve the situation, but it wasn't sold with one. The dual core was a disappointment, I thought it would drastically improve multitasking, but it's not noticeably better than multitasking on a single core G4 (loaded with software from its day).
I guess my point is that hardware needs to be better balanced. Yeah you can do this yourself, but eh.
I agree. Benchmarks seem to consist of things like filters that take over a minute. I'm a digital artist, and I work in Illustrator and Photoshop all day long. I very rarely run a filter that takes anything like that long. I do, however, switch on and off layers, change tools and look through menus thousands of times a day. I really, really don't care that a filter I would never do is going to be twice as quick (under ideal conditions presumably, without all the other stuff that tends to be running on a real in-use computer), I want all the little stuff I do to be instant.
I will take: "this will take four minutes roughly, and more if you start doing other stuff" over "this will take two minutes and you UI will barely respond and no I won't stop until I'm done" anytime.
PCs are failing hard at something the same vendors have figured out is really important for mobile computing, and that is UI responsiveness.
My experience is this:I upgrade on a 4-year average, and I usually do so because I can no longer run a recent Adobe CS at a usable speed. Every upgrade allows me to work on more complex and bigger files, for sure, but the responsiveness of the UI has definitely gone down. Illustrator CS5 feels slower on my 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb of RAM than Illustrator 9 did on a 500Mhz G4 with 256mb of RAM. This is true even working on very simple stuff. Launch times are absolutely atrocious, cancelling a mistakenly called operation (like say, applying a texture) still virtually impossible (why the hell do they even bother with the "cancel" button on progress bars?). It's not just Adobe, Apple's never managed to claw back the responsiveness of the classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Office... well, it's got seriously nasty.
Big-ticket software has made using a modern computer like wading through molasses. Yeah, it gives you a lot speed for some things that are processor intensive, but pressing a button, opening a menu, or bringing up a dialogue are all going to be slower. In some cases, much slower. This is EXACTLY the opposite of what I want. I don't care if a filter that was going to take two minutes takes four, if I can go and do something else without everything being as slow fuck. Even as I type this, the computer occasionally failing to keep up. I mean really, typing words into a web browser while playing an MP3: I was doing this in 1998 with no lag.
If I really believed there was still innovation in PCs I would say that instant-response UIs--where cancel buttons worked and processes just got slower rather than stepping destroying responsiveness--were going going to be the next big thing. However, I don't think anyone gives a shit, because all the software vendors have gone down this road.
I can see screenshots and videos on the web. It sure doesn't look like it's optimised for fingers in the same way purpose-built UIs are. I don't see how it could be.
I know you're being deliberately obtuse, but here's what it means: you need to design the whole damn UI to work with fingers. Some bandaid software on a mouse-centric UI will not work nearly so well, and this has clearly been borne out by the market. If you want to make a touch UI, you need to do it properly.
I will make a bet with you right now. This little laptop thing will go nowhere. It will be eaten alive by the iPad and Android tablet devices. Toshiba will stop selling it within a year-18 months.
Yeah, so Toshiba should consider the following options, 1: develop or licence a real touch OS, or 2: don't throw money and R&D away on a device with an OS that will guarantee failure.
There is more to making a touch GUI than a few big buttons. The entire interface has to be geared toward it. Admittedly, I haven't used Windows 7 on a touch-based device, but if Microsoft has been as thorough in making the interface touch-suitable as they are about visual consistency in their UIs, then... it will be pretty unusable if you want to do much more than hit the start button.
This man was not some "poor wretch" who was "wrongfully convicted".
No, he was a poor wretch who was rightfully convicted. There's no contradiction there. People who do shitty things have nearly always had shitty things done to them--this is not some liberal fantasy, it's a fact (I'll add the caveat that I don't know the background to this particular case). Having bad things happen to you doesn't excuse doing bad things yourself, but it doesn't mean that we can't have some pity for fallen to to bottom of the social-contract heap.
My take on the death penalty is this: premeditated murder is the total breaking of our social contract, because it exactly cancels out the value of the murderer. It follows that we no longer have an responsibility to preserve the life of murderers. But I don't think that makes it right to kill them, either. So... lock em up I guess. It's the best we can do.
Nice, man! That's exactly what I was arguing, well spotted!
Sarcasm aside, I think you're stretching for an analogy there. At the risk of seeming very obvious: paedophiles directly and severely impact on the human rights of children, whereas storm-chasers inconvenience scientists (and there isn't really a right to do science without inconvenience).
U.S went from having pockets of people who think singing is a sin to... well something considerably more tolerant at least.
... yeah, your argument went a bit off the rails there... heh, I kid, because I think you're right to a certain extent. Education is important, but it must be universal. But I would argue freedom of speech is the most important thing. Far more important than democracy, education, or wealth for setting up a free, democratic and wealthy society.
Indeed, I think its a kind of arrogance. As you say, we tend to picture the people that live in poorer countries as being desperate and ignorant.
The reality is that they are a complex product of a bunch of different things, just as people in rich countries. I recently went on holiday to Swaziland. Swaziland is pretty poor, by any standards, but the people were not fanatical or ignorant by any means. I was quite surprised when we asked night-watchman of our camp (who was part of an evangelical church by the way) whether being gay was okay in Swaziland, he laughed and said "of course!". (The very fact I was surprised exposes the "poor=fanatical bigot" sort of mentality we have in the west.)
Religious fanaticism seems to be a property of middle-eastern cultures mixed with Islam. I don't think it has anything to do with their wealth.
Maybe, but look at it another way. Maybe doing things (that give you a profound experience) is as important as finding things out. Now, I bet for your average slashdotter, finding things out is one of the most profound experiences you can have, but not for everyone.
It's very easy to get on your high horse and proclaim SCIENCE!, but in the end, what is science for? It is for making living better or more interesting. Maybe for these people storm-chasing is a big part of what makes living interesting.
I think we should avoid making science stifle life.
This is a problem both the left and the right don't seem to be able to face. The majority of people in a lot of middle eastern counties support a kind of religious tyranny whether they are wealthy or not. Not all people, by any means, but a majority. Bring democracy and wealth to these places without liberalism is not going to get the results we want. In fact it's going to bring disaster, by giving radical religious tyranny democratic legitimacy and the wealth to throw their weight around.
The liberal part of rich liberal democracies is the most important ingredient. Democracy is more of a safety valve, the riches a by-product (and luck, of course).
I admit I don't know much about how large businesses are run (never worked for one!), so you might be right. Although, I suspect startups will move to software-as-service, and will stick with it as they get big.
The big now problem seems to be how you collaborate on stuff, and shift information around, not number of features in an office suite. That's gotta hurt Microsoft in the long run (right?).
I think your post is indicative of what's holding Microsoft back. The whole ground is shifting, and it's Apple and Google that have managed to move into (or even create) this new world, and Microsoft has not.
Here's what I think a lot of people think the "computing" landscape will look like in a few years: most people will have a phone or iPad-like device instead of a laptop or desktop computer. They will probably dock with a big screen and keyboard for serious work. Most documents will be held in 'the cloud', with local cache. The software to work on them will either be web-based or small and cheap.
This trend will be most noticeable in developing markets, where people will use their phones for what rich countries were using desktop PCs for up until now. For example, in Africa I noticed huge numbers of people have phones (not the latest and greatest, but not old crap either), but virtually no one owned their own PC. They will probably skip the PC step altogether, because in a year or two their phones will do most of what they would find useful in a PC anyway. They will go to Wifi hotspots and use their phones, in much the same way as they go to internet cafes now.
Apple is obviously a major contender (and driver) of this landscape. Google too.
Microsoft will retain its stranglehold on (some) business for quite a while, but that will be seen as a small part of a much larger marketplace. It will continue to exist and make money for a long time to come, but it won't have much pull over the general direction of computing.
Yeah, it's interesting isn't it. I think it's because it's become clear that the kind of big-ticket software that Microsoft has built itself on just isn't where the real money's going to be in a few years. It's reached a peak complexity-wise, features-wise, and usefulness-wise. Instead, collaborative service software (i.e. Google) will be the way a lot of businesses go, and consumers will go with small, cheap, and cheerful (i.e. the Apple App Store), and social network type stuff (Facebook and its successors). Portability is where it's at, and Microsoft has missed so many beats it can't catch up, especially because it means essentially cannibalising they big-ticket software business.
I'm a little wary of this trend, even though I can definitely see its value. I'm a heavy user of said big-ticket software myself (Adobe products mostly), and I don't want to see it stagnate. That said, I think it's pretty stagnant already, and needs a serious shake-up. Microsoft and Adobe's products are absurdly complex and bloated these days; there simply has to be a simpler way. And a cheaper way too!
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you buy into conspiracy theories, they were killed by lone nutters. The assassination of someone with a high profile wil draw a lot of unwanted attention on the way the US conducts this sort of business, as well as an public outcry.
Yeah, because the people in charge of these big infrastructure projects are idiots, and wouldn't have thought of that!
Seriously though, I expect they are going to 1: put them in rocky places not prone to sandstorms (the Sahara is not just a sea of sand) 2: spread them out so that all the collector won't be affected by the same event, and 3: have pretty robust storage mechanism (which they have to do any way for nights). I'm sure they've thought of other ways too, because it is their job, whereas I've spent a couple of minutes thinking about it after reading about it on Slashdot.
In a way, yes (I'm aware that an SSD would drastically improve a lot of my current problems), but launch times just keep getting worse, without a corresponding increase in functionality. Photoshop and Illustrator used to be much faster launching. Every iteration gets worse, even with upgrading the hardware.
It's both, I think. Sure you can argue that there are better hardware components around, but the reality is that, as sold, most hardware packages are contributing to the problem. My iMac here, for example, has all the processing power I need, but clearly has a IO bottleneck. The processor mostly sits pretty idle and the RAM unused while the disk grinds. Yes, and SSD would improve the situation, but it wasn't sold with one. The dual core was a disappointment, I thought it would drastically improve multitasking, but it's not noticeably better than multitasking on a single core G4 (loaded with software from its day).
I guess my point is that hardware needs to be better balanced. Yeah you can do this yourself, but eh.
I agree. Benchmarks seem to consist of things like filters that take over a minute. I'm a digital artist, and I work in Illustrator and Photoshop all day long. I very rarely run a filter that takes anything like that long. I do, however, switch on and off layers, change tools and look through menus thousands of times a day. I really, really don't care that a filter I would never do is going to be twice as quick (under ideal conditions presumably, without all the other stuff that tends to be running on a real in-use computer), I want all the little stuff I do to be instant.
I will take: "this will take four minutes roughly, and more if you start doing other stuff" over "this will take two minutes and you UI will barely respond and no I won't stop until I'm done" anytime.
PCs are failing hard at something the same vendors have figured out is really important for mobile computing, and that is UI responsiveness.
My experience is this:I upgrade on a 4-year average, and I usually do so because I can no longer run a recent Adobe CS at a usable speed. Every upgrade allows me to work on more complex and bigger files, for sure, but the responsiveness of the UI has definitely gone down. Illustrator CS5 feels slower on my 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb of RAM than Illustrator 9 did on a 500Mhz G4 with 256mb of RAM. This is true even working on very simple stuff. Launch times are absolutely atrocious, cancelling a mistakenly called operation (like say, applying a texture) still virtually impossible (why the hell do they even bother with the "cancel" button on progress bars?). It's not just Adobe, Apple's never managed to claw back the responsiveness of the classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Office... well, it's got seriously nasty.
Big-ticket software has made using a modern computer like wading through molasses. Yeah, it gives you a lot speed for some things that are processor intensive, but pressing a button, opening a menu, or bringing up a dialogue are all going to be slower. In some cases, much slower. This is EXACTLY the opposite of what I want. I don't care if a filter that was going to take two minutes takes four, if I can go and do something else without everything being as slow fuck. Even as I type this, the computer occasionally failing to keep up. I mean really, typing words into a web browser while playing an MP3: I was doing this in 1998 with no lag.
If I really believed there was still innovation in PCs I would say that instant-response UIs--where cancel buttons worked and processes just got slower rather than stepping destroying responsiveness--were going going to be the next big thing. However, I don't think anyone gives a shit, because all the software vendors have gone down this road.
I can see screenshots and videos on the web. It sure doesn't look like it's optimised for fingers in the same way purpose-built UIs are. I don't see how it could be.
I know you're being deliberately obtuse, but here's what it means: you need to design the whole damn UI to work with fingers. Some bandaid software on a mouse-centric UI will not work nearly so well, and this has clearly been borne out by the market. If you want to make a touch UI, you need to do it properly.
I will make a bet with you right now. This little laptop thing will go nowhere. It will be eaten alive by the iPad and Android tablet devices. Toshiba will stop selling it within a year-18 months.
Yeah, so Toshiba should consider the following options, 1: develop or licence a real touch OS, or 2: don't throw money and R&D away on a device with an OS that will guarantee failure.
There is more to making a touch GUI than a few big buttons. The entire interface has to be geared toward it. Admittedly, I haven't used Windows 7 on a touch-based device, but if Microsoft has been as thorough in making the interface touch-suitable as they are about visual consistency in their UIs, then... it will be pretty unusable if you want to do much more than hit the start button.
Touch interface with a non-touch OS GUI. I don't think this is gonna fly, fellas.
This man was not some "poor wretch" who was "wrongfully convicted".
No, he was a poor wretch who was rightfully convicted. There's no contradiction there. People who do shitty things have nearly always had shitty things done to them--this is not some liberal fantasy, it's a fact (I'll add the caveat that I don't know the background to this particular case). Having bad things happen to you doesn't excuse doing bad things yourself, but it doesn't mean that we can't have some pity for fallen to to bottom of the social-contract heap.
My take on the death penalty is this: premeditated murder is the total breaking of our social contract, because it exactly cancels out the value of the murderer. It follows that we no longer have an responsibility to preserve the life of murderers. But I don't think that makes it right to kill them, either. So... lock em up I guess. It's the best we can do.
"The Ten Things You Should Not Do, Unless You Really Want To".
Or God tells you to.
Nice, man! That's exactly what I was arguing, well spotted!
Sarcasm aside, I think you're stretching for an analogy there. At the risk of seeming very obvious: paedophiles directly and severely impact on the human rights of children, whereas storm-chasers inconvenience scientists (and there isn't really a right to do science without inconvenience).
You argue like Hitler, man!
(See what I did there?)
U.S went from having pockets of people who think singing is a sin to... well something considerably more tolerant at least.
... yeah, your argument went a bit off the rails there... heh, I kid, because I think you're right to a certain extent. Education is important, but it must be universal. But I would argue freedom of speech is the most important thing. Far more important than democracy, education, or wealth for setting up a free, democratic and wealthy society.
Indeed, I think its a kind of arrogance. As you say, we tend to picture the people that live in poorer countries as being desperate and ignorant.
The reality is that they are a complex product of a bunch of different things, just as people in rich countries. I recently went on holiday to Swaziland. Swaziland is pretty poor, by any standards, but the people were not fanatical or ignorant by any means. I was quite surprised when we asked night-watchman of our camp (who was part of an evangelical church by the way) whether being gay was okay in Swaziland, he laughed and said "of course!". (The very fact I was surprised exposes the "poor=fanatical bigot" sort of mentality we have in the west.)
Religious fanaticism seems to be a property of middle-eastern cultures mixed with Islam. I don't think it has anything to do with their wealth.
Maybe, but look at it another way. Maybe doing things (that give you a profound experience) is as important as finding things out. Now, I bet for your average slashdotter, finding things out is one of the most profound experiences you can have, but not for everyone.
It's very easy to get on your high horse and proclaim SCIENCE!, but in the end, what is science for? It is for making living better or more interesting. Maybe for these people storm-chasing is a big part of what makes living interesting.
I think we should avoid making science stifle life.
Okay, just going out on a limb here, but maybe people kinda expect the Russians to be secretive and diabolical, but hold NATO to an higher standard?
This is a problem both the left and the right don't seem to be able to face. The majority of people in a lot of middle eastern counties support a kind of religious tyranny whether they are wealthy or not. Not all people, by any means, but a majority. Bring democracy and wealth to these places without liberalism is not going to get the results we want. In fact it's going to bring disaster, by giving radical religious tyranny democratic legitimacy and the wealth to throw their weight around.
The liberal part of rich liberal democracies is the most important ingredient. Democracy is more of a safety valve, the riches a by-product (and luck, of course).
I admit I don't know much about how large businesses are run (never worked for one!), so you might be right. Although, I suspect startups will move to software-as-service, and will stick with it as they get big.
The big now problem seems to be how you collaborate on stuff, and shift information around, not number of features in an office suite. That's gotta hurt Microsoft in the long run (right?).
Well, except that charges have been files, but not verdict has been reached. If there any indication this will be taken seriously in Pakistani courts?
I think your post is indicative of what's holding Microsoft back. The whole ground is shifting, and it's Apple and Google that have managed to move into (or even create) this new world, and Microsoft has not.
Here's what I think a lot of people think the "computing" landscape will look like in a few years: most people will have a phone or iPad-like device instead of a laptop or desktop computer. They will probably dock with a big screen and keyboard for serious work. Most documents will be held in 'the cloud', with local cache. The software to work on them will either be web-based or small and cheap.
This trend will be most noticeable in developing markets, where people will use their phones for what rich countries were using desktop PCs for up until now. For example, in Africa I noticed huge numbers of people have phones (not the latest and greatest, but not old crap either), but virtually no one owned their own PC. They will probably skip the PC step altogether, because in a year or two their phones will do most of what they would find useful in a PC anyway. They will go to Wifi hotspots and use their phones, in much the same way as they go to internet cafes now.
Apple is obviously a major contender (and driver) of this landscape. Google too.
Microsoft will retain its stranglehold on (some) business for quite a while, but that will be seen as a small part of a much larger marketplace. It will continue to exist and make money for a long time to come, but it won't have much pull over the general direction of computing.
Yeah, it's interesting isn't it. I think it's because it's become clear that the kind of big-ticket software that Microsoft has built itself on just isn't where the real money's going to be in a few years. It's reached a peak complexity-wise, features-wise, and usefulness-wise. Instead, collaborative service software (i.e. Google) will be the way a lot of businesses go, and consumers will go with small, cheap, and cheerful (i.e. the Apple App Store), and social network type stuff (Facebook and its successors). Portability is where it's at, and Microsoft has missed so many beats it can't catch up, especially because it means essentially cannibalising they big-ticket software business.
I'm a little wary of this trend, even though I can definitely see its value. I'm a heavy user of said big-ticket software myself (Adobe products mostly), and I don't want to see it stagnate. That said, I think it's pretty stagnant already, and needs a serious shake-up. Microsoft and Adobe's products are absurdly complex and bloated these days; there simply has to be a simpler way. And a cheaper way too!
In my experience, Firefox is the most stable browser on a Mac. Virtually never crashes.
Yes, this probably is because it handles Flash better than other browsers, but there you go; I use Flash.
My last name is O'Leary and over the past 5 years web sites have not gotten any better, and arguably have gotten worse [...]
I think this was one of the take-home points of this article. Don't get to clever with names by sanitising and dividing, just accept fookin' input.