I would be referring to the USB peripheral. I agree it's probably easier to use a tablet PC than the monitor version thing. The peripheral version has a learning curve much easier than a mouse. I had never used one before but it took me about a minute before I was doing all kinds of things with it. If you can write or draw with a pencil, you can write or draw with a Waccom tablet. It's not great as a mouse substitute, but I never expected it to be. It's a seperate input device. It's just another tool.
If somebody wants to use a tablet PC for taking notes at an office meeting, I'd seriously wonder why they were taking The Paperless Office that far. I'd rather show up at a meeting with my pad of paper and a pen than a tablet. It's lighter, for one thing. I don't have to worry about dropping it carrying it under my arm. I can tear out a sheet and give it to somebody without having to figure out their email address or what have you. If I need access to actual documents, then fine, I'll bring a small laptop. If it's one of those meetings, then chances are a little bit of keyboard noise won't be a big deal, especially since others will be on their laptops as well. Plus I find laptop keyboards are pretty quiet compared to the tapping of plastic-on-plastic from a Tablet PC anyay. I don't own a PDA, but I understand you can run all sorts of programs on those these days, perhaps one of those would suit your note-taking or document-looking needs.
Maybe I'll change my mind about Tablet PCs when they're thinner and lighter. Like when that digital paper stuff that's a few millimeters wide and can flex improves. But currently paper notes can be typed up extremely fast if I ever need to. I just don't take all that many notes, I guess. I get the main ideas down, not every word, that kind of thing. Jot down half a sentence or a number or a URL. If I needed every word, I'd just record some audio.
Tablet PCs in their current form, in my opinion, are just a fad. But not even a very popular fad. If the technology gets better people might want them, but I think most people, if they really consider their options, will decide that it isn't worth it.
It's not about putting gadget-desire in front of Apple's desire for profits, it's about putting gadget-desire in front of reason and understanding. WWDC is a conference for developers. The few times the keynote has mentioned consumer products, developers have said "that's nice, but what do we care?". There's no reason to announce new iPod nanos made out of aluminum or an iPhone. I don't believe Steve even mentioned iTMS sales, which he does at the Macworld keynotes.
Anyway, if people want a summertime major consumer-oriented keynote, they should be screaming for Macworld Boston or Macworld NYC to come back. Otherwise, be prepared to wait for the iPhone to show up on apple.com.
I don't get the appeal of a tablet. The ones I've seen are clunky, the screens are all smeared and scratched, and what they do could be just as easily done on a PDA for a fraction of the cost with virtually none of the downsides. If you really need to draw and have a huge screen, get a Waccom tablet. Mine works great.
WWDC keynotes are usually more low-key, but from the reports I've seen (haven't watched the full keynote yet) Steve looked somewhat ill. It's possible he was sick and just wasn't able to be his usual self. But yeah, I think this is more about iPhone over-hype by rumor sites. There will be additional consumer-oriented announcements in the weeks to come on the Apple website, I'm sure.
CoD was definitely quite immersive. Having "lived" through that game, I would not want to be a Russian soldier circa 1943, that's for sure. I knew intellectually how bad those guys had it, but it's entirely different to play a game trying to work your way up a hill towards machine gun nests, unarmed and with your own leaders shooting at you.
Yeah, my first thought was the Civilizition series, and then some of the Maxis titles (although not Sims, I was thinking of SimCity and the like). I think Spore might be high brow too, when it comes out. It sounds like this guy has only seen Unreal Tournament and GTA. There's also a large number of puzzle games, with some very complex thought involved in the production and solving.
I really think that's the reason. VPC probably was being sold at a loss or close to it in order for people to buy a copy of windows with it. Now that they've got some competition and probably don't think they can even sell all that many copies, the margins are even lower and they might as well just drop it.
BootCamp is intended for switchers who aren't quite ready to jump into Mac OS X. It seems to be working for them too, since Apple's sales have skyrocketed lately. The fact that people are using it to play games is a side-effect, and not necessarily a bad one.
I probably wouldn't use it for webcomics either, but there have been many a time when I've found myself saying "gee, I'd love a widget for this site, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to parse this site and code up a little interface for it". Even if I would want to do some actual coding myself to change appearance/behavior, Web Clip would certainly make it easy to get started. Let it do the hard part, then I just tweak it afterwards.
You should try out Synergy. You can control iTunes from your menubar or the keyboard, among other things. It's shareware, so you can try before you buy, but it's pretty cheap for something that you'll probably find yourself using literally all the time.
Unfortunately- and I blame the likes of Bush and Dean for this- it seems that every politician these days feels they have to be on one extreme or another (or at least as close to the extreme as possible without being viewed as an absolute nut-job) in order to get elected. I'm desperately hoping that the 2008 election is a showdown between two fairly rational moderate candidates talking about domestic issues (ones that matter). It probably won't happen, but maybe somebody will do a poll and find out that the most outspoken extremists are in the minority. I'm just sick of the fear-mongering and non-issues. Maybe the mid-term elections will do something to put us back on a rational course. Maybe by 2008 we'll even see a 3rd party candidate that will take 20-30% of the popular vote, and maybe win a state or two, just enough to bring debate to the forefront and open some eyes. That's a lot of maybes and I'm not going to hold my breath, but I'd certainly be nice.
I recently read an explaination of this and that's roughly the gist of it. I didn't understand it completely, but from what I understand (and I'd love it if some astrophysicist would come along with a detailed explaination) the matter in the universe is moving away from other matter at greater the speed of light over very large distances, not because of the matter's velocity, but because space is stretching out between the matter. So, there's simply more space now than there was before, spread out all over the place, and this doesn't actually break any rules governing light speed and relativity. Again, I'd be nice if somebody who understands this better could post.
Probably a good idea to do $1,000 pet exploit found first, plus a free copy of Vista when it's done for everyone reporting at least 20 (let's be honest, it probably won't be that hard to find 20), and some other rewards for most found. Microsoft could afford to pay these guys and get some actual results out of it. The alternative really is to let all the black hats find out the exploits months in advance, report nothing, and then on release day things go absolutely nuts.
It could be a trap, you know. Bring in the black hats, and then brainwash them en masse so they don't want to use computers anymore but still buy many copies of MS products. No more security problems!
Hmm, like this one for sure. Heck, these days 85% of my software was either bundled, freeware, or shareware. The rest is stuff like Photoshop and some games from Blizzard or Aspyr.
Hehe, speaking of rehashed shows from back in the day...
Still, a very fine television series (although I'm a bit concerned about what they did at the end of Season 2 or 2.5 or whatever they called it), and probably the best sci-fi on television. I really don't like all these various Stargate spin-offs...
Fox tends to cancel good shows after moving them about so much in the schedule that people can't find it, and wondering why nobody's watching. I also think that Firefly was poorly advertised. I remember seeing a couple ads and didn't realize it was a sci-fi show. I might've watched it if I knew. Instead I heard about it from my cousin one year after they came out on DVD, put it in my mind to see it at some point, and when it appeared on the SciFi channel I grabbed everyone I knew and we watched it together, getting all of us hooked at the same time.
I really have no idea. You're talking about landlord rights and appartment contracts, which is well out of the scope of this discussion. IANAL, so all I can say is to read your contract carefully. Generally there's more covered in there than you might expect. Again, nobody is forcing you to live in any particular appartment, and it's not the cable company's fault if you have a problem with your landlord. If you don't like any part of the deal on your appartment, you don't have to move in, and you certainly can move out.
Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country. But I'm probably not going to see any of that fiber for another few years. Not because Comcast will say no, but because Verizon has to negotiate with each municipality to get a franchise, a process that can take years.
Going by your logic, a "no income tax" law would also be "poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues."
Well I at least consider a "no income tax" law to be less relevant than say, cheaper medicine, stem cell research funding, getting homeless people off the streets, helping Africa fight AIDS, Iraq, getting more jobs, and a plethora of other issues. I can also almost guarentee that there will be pork added. A bill like you describe would have people just itching to add things to it. As for poorly-worded, that depends on which intern had the job of typing up the draft. By the way, thanks for mentioning the Do Not Call List. Do you remember that list of exceptions such as political groups and candidates?
I don't think anybody's arguing for letting companies cook the books, nor throwing out anti-trust laws. I know I'm not. I am arguing for ending the regulation called cable franchising. I'm arguing for ending the monopolies that regulation has been enforcing. If a MSO makes up numbers for their accounting and colludes with other MSOs, by all means go after them. But, let other MSOs enter each other's markets. Right now the only organization that is colluding with these companies is the government.
Negotiations are definitely happening. I don't think it even matters who's negotiating what, the important thing is that it's slowing down the process, and keeping the competition out. If you want to compare, look at Australia. They tend to have more competition with cable companies overlapping their areas of service. They have excellent service from what I hear, with some pretty dramatic improvements in the last 10 years. I'm also glad you brought up public-owned cable service. So long as companies are allowed to compete against city-owned cable, I say the more the merrier.
I'm not trying to say that there's such thing as a secure system. But if you look at the facts, a Mac OS X user can be as carefree as they like from Day One. There's just no threats out there. The reasons for this can be debated forever, I don't want to go into that argument. But there is simply no malware out there. If there was, you and I both know it'd be huge front-page news.
The best people can come up with is to attach a third-party wireless device to a computer that comes with so-far-unexploitable wireless capabilities out of the box. It's silly. It's a problem that's infinitely more likely to affect a non-Mac user because the affected hardware is intended for non-Mac customers whose computers didn't come with that capability built-in. Even still, it's a lot more likely this "problem" will be fixed on the Mac faster than a windows computer.
Should Mac users be more worried? Probably. Should they think they're completely immune? No. But right now they have no reason to think that they aren't, because currently, nothing can touch them unless they install BootCamp and boot into windows.
The absolutely most important thing we can do for the species is to spread out our eggs. Right now they're all in one basket and it will only take one asteroid, or plague, or war, or anything to set us back to the stone age, or make us extinct. The cost-to-benefit ratio of pushing our space technology to the limits makes going to Mars well worth the price, even ignoring the scientific advances.
The good news for those a little less long-term oriented, is that private individuals and companies working on space technology will reduce the cost and improve technological expertise. Going to Mars may very well cost us less money than going to the moon in the 60s. I hope to see a private venture to Mars be successful in my lifetime, though I believe that governments will get there first.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be referring to the USB peripheral. I agree it's probably easier to use a tablet PC than the monitor version thing. The peripheral version has a learning curve much easier than a mouse. I had never used one before but it took me about a minute before I was doing all kinds of things with it. If you can write or draw with a pencil, you can write or draw with a Waccom tablet. It's not great as a mouse substitute, but I never expected it to be. It's a seperate input device. It's just another tool.
If somebody wants to use a tablet PC for taking notes at an office meeting, I'd seriously wonder why they were taking The Paperless Office that far. I'd rather show up at a meeting with my pad of paper and a pen than a tablet. It's lighter, for one thing. I don't have to worry about dropping it carrying it under my arm. I can tear out a sheet and give it to somebody without having to figure out their email address or what have you. If I need access to actual documents, then fine, I'll bring a small laptop. If it's one of those meetings, then chances are a little bit of keyboard noise won't be a big deal, especially since others will be on their laptops as well. Plus I find laptop keyboards are pretty quiet compared to the tapping of plastic-on-plastic from a Tablet PC anyay. I don't own a PDA, but I understand you can run all sorts of programs on those these days, perhaps one of those would suit your note-taking or document-looking needs.
Maybe I'll change my mind about Tablet PCs when they're thinner and lighter. Like when that digital paper stuff that's a few millimeters wide and can flex improves. But currently paper notes can be typed up extremely fast if I ever need to. I just don't take all that many notes, I guess. I get the main ideas down, not every word, that kind of thing. Jot down half a sentence or a number or a URL. If I needed every word, I'd just record some audio.
Tablet PCs in their current form, in my opinion, are just a fad. But not even a very popular fad. If the technology gets better people might want them, but I think most people, if they really consider their options, will decide that it isn't worth it.
It's not about putting gadget-desire in front of Apple's desire for profits, it's about putting gadget-desire in front of reason and understanding. WWDC is a conference for developers. The few times the keynote has mentioned consumer products, developers have said "that's nice, but what do we care?". There's no reason to announce new iPod nanos made out of aluminum or an iPhone. I don't believe Steve even mentioned iTMS sales, which he does at the Macworld keynotes. Anyway, if people want a summertime major consumer-oriented keynote, they should be screaming for Macworld Boston or Macworld NYC to come back. Otherwise, be prepared to wait for the iPhone to show up on apple.com.
I don't get the appeal of a tablet. The ones I've seen are clunky, the screens are all smeared and scratched, and what they do could be just as easily done on a PDA for a fraction of the cost with virtually none of the downsides. If you really need to draw and have a huge screen, get a Waccom tablet. Mine works great.
WWDC keynotes are usually more low-key, but from the reports I've seen (haven't watched the full keynote yet) Steve looked somewhat ill. It's possible he was sick and just wasn't able to be his usual self. But yeah, I think this is more about iPhone over-hype by rumor sites. There will be additional consumer-oriented announcements in the weeks to come on the Apple website, I'm sure.
CoD was definitely quite immersive. Having "lived" through that game, I would not want to be a Russian soldier circa 1943, that's for sure. I knew intellectually how bad those guys had it, but it's entirely different to play a game trying to work your way up a hill towards machine gun nests, unarmed and with your own leaders shooting at you.
Yeah, my first thought was the Civilizition series, and then some of the Maxis titles (although not Sims, I was thinking of SimCity and the like). I think Spore might be high brow too, when it comes out. It sounds like this guy has only seen Unreal Tournament and GTA. There's also a large number of puzzle games, with some very complex thought involved in the production and solving.
Man, selection sort is sooo fast.
I really think that's the reason. VPC probably was being sold at a loss or close to it in order for people to buy a copy of windows with it. Now that they've got some competition and probably don't think they can even sell all that many copies, the margins are even lower and they might as well just drop it.
BootCamp is intended for switchers who aren't quite ready to jump into Mac OS X. It seems to be working for them too, since Apple's sales have skyrocketed lately. The fact that people are using it to play games is a side-effect, and not necessarily a bad one.
I probably wouldn't use it for webcomics either, but there have been many a time when I've found myself saying "gee, I'd love a widget for this site, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to parse this site and code up a little interface for it". Even if I would want to do some actual coding myself to change appearance/behavior, Web Clip would certainly make it easy to get started. Let it do the hard part, then I just tweak it afterwards.
You should try out Synergy. You can control iTunes from your menubar or the keyboard, among other things. It's shareware, so you can try before you buy, but it's pretty cheap for something that you'll probably find yourself using literally all the time.
Unfortunately- and I blame the likes of Bush and Dean for this- it seems that every politician these days feels they have to be on one extreme or another (or at least as close to the extreme as possible without being viewed as an absolute nut-job) in order to get elected. I'm desperately hoping that the 2008 election is a showdown between two fairly rational moderate candidates talking about domestic issues (ones that matter). It probably won't happen, but maybe somebody will do a poll and find out that the most outspoken extremists are in the minority. I'm just sick of the fear-mongering and non-issues. Maybe the mid-term elections will do something to put us back on a rational course. Maybe by 2008 we'll even see a 3rd party candidate that will take 20-30% of the popular vote, and maybe win a state or two, just enough to bring debate to the forefront and open some eyes. That's a lot of maybes and I'm not going to hold my breath, but I'd certainly be nice.
I'd respond with "Magnetic North or True North?"
I recently read an explaination of this and that's roughly the gist of it. I didn't understand it completely, but from what I understand (and I'd love it if some astrophysicist would come along with a detailed explaination) the matter in the universe is moving away from other matter at greater the speed of light over very large distances, not because of the matter's velocity, but because space is stretching out between the matter. So, there's simply more space now than there was before, spread out all over the place, and this doesn't actually break any rules governing light speed and relativity. Again, I'd be nice if somebody who understands this better could post.
Probably a good idea to do $1,000 pet exploit found first, plus a free copy of Vista when it's done for everyone reporting at least 20 (let's be honest, it probably won't be that hard to find 20), and some other rewards for most found. Microsoft could afford to pay these guys and get some actual results out of it. The alternative really is to let all the black hats find out the exploits months in advance, report nothing, and then on release day things go absolutely nuts.
It could be a trap, you know. Bring in the black hats, and then brainwash them en masse so they don't want to use computers anymore but still buy many copies of MS products. No more security problems!
Hmm, like this one for sure. Heck, these days 85% of my software was either bundled, freeware, or shareware. The rest is stuff like Photoshop and some games from Blizzard or Aspyr.
Hehe, speaking of rehashed shows from back in the day...
Still, a very fine television series (although I'm a bit concerned about what they did at the end of Season 2 or 2.5 or whatever they called it), and probably the best sci-fi on television. I really don't like all these various Stargate spin-offs...
Fox tends to cancel good shows after moving them about so much in the schedule that people can't find it, and wondering why nobody's watching. I also think that Firefly was poorly advertised. I remember seeing a couple ads and didn't realize it was a sci-fi show. I might've watched it if I knew. Instead I heard about it from my cousin one year after they came out on DVD, put it in my mind to see it at some point, and when it appeared on the SciFi channel I grabbed everyone I knew and we watched it together, getting all of us hooked at the same time.
I really have no idea. You're talking about landlord rights and appartment contracts, which is well out of the scope of this discussion. IANAL, so all I can say is to read your contract carefully. Generally there's more covered in there than you might expect. Again, nobody is forcing you to live in any particular appartment, and it's not the cable company's fault if you have a problem with your landlord. If you don't like any part of the deal on your appartment, you don't have to move in, and you certainly can move out.
I don't think anybody's arguing for letting companies cook the books, nor throwing out anti-trust laws. I know I'm not. I am arguing for ending the regulation called cable franchising. I'm arguing for ending the monopolies that regulation has been enforcing. If a MSO makes up numbers for their accounting and colludes with other MSOs, by all means go after them. But, let other MSOs enter each other's markets. Right now the only organization that is colluding with these companies is the government.
Negotiations are definitely happening. I don't think it even matters who's negotiating what, the important thing is that it's slowing down the process, and keeping the competition out. If you want to compare, look at Australia. They tend to have more competition with cable companies overlapping their areas of service. They have excellent service from what I hear, with some pretty dramatic improvements in the last 10 years. I'm also glad you brought up public-owned cable service. So long as companies are allowed to compete against city-owned cable, I say the more the merrier.
I'm not trying to say that there's such thing as a secure system. But if you look at the facts, a Mac OS X user can be as carefree as they like from Day One. There's just no threats out there. The reasons for this can be debated forever, I don't want to go into that argument. But there is simply no malware out there. If there was, you and I both know it'd be huge front-page news.
The best people can come up with is to attach a third-party wireless device to a computer that comes with so-far-unexploitable wireless capabilities out of the box. It's silly. It's a problem that's infinitely more likely to affect a non-Mac user because the affected hardware is intended for non-Mac customers whose computers didn't come with that capability built-in. Even still, it's a lot more likely this "problem" will be fixed on the Mac faster than a windows computer.
Should Mac users be more worried? Probably. Should they think they're completely immune? No. But right now they have no reason to think that they aren't, because currently, nothing can touch them unless they install BootCamp and boot into windows.
The absolutely most important thing we can do for the species is to spread out our eggs. Right now they're all in one basket and it will only take one asteroid, or plague, or war, or anything to set us back to the stone age, or make us extinct. The cost-to-benefit ratio of pushing our space technology to the limits makes going to Mars well worth the price, even ignoring the scientific advances.
The good news for those a little less long-term oriented, is that private individuals and companies working on space technology will reduce the cost and improve technological expertise. Going to Mars may very well cost us less money than going to the moon in the 60s. I hope to see a private venture to Mars be successful in my lifetime, though I believe that governments will get there first.