I think he's referring to the experience of having Internet access almost anywhere you go. For me, the #1 use case of a smart phone is the ability to get walking directions. I am terrible at figuring out where I'm going, and being able to pull out Maps.app without WiFi and get directions is awesome.
The original Facebook had this incredible classmate finder feature. I could input all the courses I was taking, and it would tell me who else was in them. Definitely one of the most useful features Facebook has ever had. Once they added 3rd-party app support, they dropped the classmate finder feature, explaining that they expected someone else to create a better one (the logic doesn't make sense to me, but whatever). Of course, with multiple non-ubiquitous classmate finders competing, no one could ever find more than a couple of their classmates, so they were all useless.
That's a pretty wide net you're casting there. Feel the same way about Python? Ruby? Perl? PHP? Not saying you're wrong (I do think you're wrong, but that's a separate issue); just want to make sure that you have the same problem with all interpreted weakly-typed languages.
3 trillion dollars spent on matters that are in some way related to some subjects that may indirectly be connected to Bin Laden or people he has spoken to at least once in the past.
Those are some pretty strong words to use without backup, specifically with regards to Rails. Last I checked, Rails was more popular than ever, with loads of high-profile web apps and increasing enterprise adoption rates. If you'd like to provide some evidence of people "going back to proven technologies" in significant numbers, I would love to see it.
companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time
Phrasing like this pisses me off. If Google's data degraded over time, it's not that they'd be "allowing" it to degrade, they'd have to do extra work and write extra code to force it to degrade. Saying "allow" implies that degrading is what data do naturally, and that Google is somehow artificially preserving it.
You invalidated your entire comment in the parentheses. Google isn't crying "Foul!" over Apple's foray into online advertising, they're crying "Foul!" over Apple's hardware restrictions.
That's going to be difficult to do, as they change frequently (and the fact that these ones were in a Superbowl commercial will probably make them change even faster).
A color eBook reader is something that will really appeal to my girlfriend (who has many art books and comic books). I, on the other hand, use my Kindle to read novels and programming books. There might be a little colored syntax highlighting in my programming books, but that's the extent that color would affect my eBook-reading experience.
I'd much prefer a higher-contrast greyscale eBook reader. Currently, the contrast on my Kindle (and, from what I understand, the Nook and the Sony readers) is about the same as that of a dirty newspaper (about 8:1 I believe). It doesn't bother me, but I'd buy one that has paperback book contrast (about 50:1) in a heartbeat.
You're right, but it amounts to the same thing: "I don't care about privacy because I don't think a lack of privacy could negatively affect me." You should only be willing to give up privacy after considering the potential consequences.
"I don't have anything to hide" is an extremely common and misguided attitude towards privacy.
I won't rehash the problems with it here, because it's been done millions of times. Read up on it a bit.
I wouldn't use a free netbook from Google because I'm a developer. I also play games, use Photoshop, and other things that are out of the scope of web apps.
However, the primary audience of Chrome OS (people who just need to do word processing, spreadsheets, email, check the internet, etc.) would probably love it. They're already used to their computer being full of ads from the spyware they don't know how to avoid, so a free computer with (theoretically) nicer ads is probably infinitely preferable to a $300+ computer that still has ads for them.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
On a side note, I will use PHP on my servers before touching Ruby since I see no advantages for using it over PHP.
Except for where speed is of the utmost importance (in which case you're limited to C/C++, and possibly just assembly language), anything you can do in one language, you can pretty much do in any language. The question is, how EASY is it to do it in a certain language.
There may be no web app you can create in Ruby that you can't also create in PHP, but that doesn't mean PHP is always equally suitable to the job at hand. You may find that Ruby allows you to complete certain projects much faster, saving you a LOT of money. And in those cases, that would be a big advantage for using it over PHP.
Your beef with Firefox 3 is that the single feature you don't like takes too much effort to turn off?
I suppose that could possibly be considered valid, if either of these two cases were true:
1. If the change didn't save, and you had to do it again every time you used Firefox.
2. If it was REALLY, REALLY hard to turn off; as in, you need a Master's Degree in Computer Science to be able to do it.
However, neither of these are the case.
1. The preference most certainly does save itself.
2. The first search on Google for "firefox turn off awesome bar" (no quotes) returned this site. Essentially, you type "about:config" in the address bar, find the "Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" setting (they are in alphabetical order, and if that's still too many hoops, you can use the config search bar at the top), and change its value from 12 to 0. If that's too difficult for you to do (once), then I'm impressed you knew how to install Firefox in the first place.
Personally, I share your distaste for "gee-whiz UI silliness". However, I believe a lot of that comes from our general proficiency with computers. The worse you are with a computer, the more help you need from your UI. Though the UI stuff is often buggy, the intention is to make the app more usable for the common person, not just to be pretty.
I wonder if certain faces work better with this technology than others. Perhaps younger, smoother faces (like "Emily") work better than old, wrinkly faces, since they can get an accurate representation of skin texture without as much complexity.
The main advantage of the Kindle over the iPhone is actually the fact that it's not a phone; do you realize how high you jump when you're sitting in a quiet place deeply into a horror novel, and right at the scariest part, the damn thing RINGS at you?!
Slashdot Mirror
I think he's referring to the experience of having Internet access almost anywhere you go. For me, the #1 use case of a smart phone is the ability to get walking directions. I am terrible at figuring out where I'm going, and being able to pull out Maps.app without WiFi and get directions is awesome.
The original Facebook had this incredible classmate finder feature. I could input all the courses I was taking, and it would tell me who else was in them. Definitely one of the most useful features Facebook has ever had. Once they added 3rd-party app support, they dropped the classmate finder feature, explaining that they expected someone else to create a better one (the logic doesn't make sense to me, but whatever). Of course, with multiple non-ubiquitous classmate finders competing, no one could ever find more than a couple of their classmates, so they were all useless.
That's a pretty wide net you're casting there. Feel the same way about Python? Ruby? Perl? PHP? Not saying you're wrong (I do think you're wrong, but that's a separate issue); just want to make sure that you have the same problem with all interpreted weakly-typed languages.
3 trillion dollars spent on matters that are in some way related to some subjects that may indirectly be connected to Bin Laden or people he has spoken to at least once in the past.
Those are some pretty strong words to use without backup, specifically with regards to Rails. Last I checked, Rails was more popular than ever, with loads of high-profile web apps and increasing enterprise adoption rates. If you'd like to provide some evidence of people "going back to proven technologies" in significant numbers, I would love to see it.
companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time
Phrasing like this pisses me off. If Google's data degraded over time, it's not that they'd be "allowing" it to degrade, they'd have to do extra work and write extra code to force it to degrade. Saying "allow" implies that degrading is what data do naturally, and that Google is somehow artificially preserving it.
You invalidated your entire comment in the parentheses. Google isn't crying "Foul!" over Apple's foray into online advertising, they're crying "Foul!" over Apple's hardware restrictions.
That's going to be difficult to do, as they change frequently (and the fact that these ones were in a Superbowl commercial will probably make them change even faster).
I want to see the TV quiz show that asks "Why are black people so loud?"
The folks modding this "Informative" are in for a major disappointment.
If China really wanted them gone, why wouldn't they just kick them out?
A color eBook reader is something that will really appeal to my girlfriend (who has many art books and comic books). I, on the other hand, use my Kindle to read novels and programming books. There might be a little colored syntax highlighting in my programming books, but that's the extent that color would affect my eBook-reading experience. I'd much prefer a higher-contrast greyscale eBook reader. Currently, the contrast on my Kindle (and, from what I understand, the Nook and the Sony readers) is about the same as that of a dirty newspaper (about 8:1 I believe). It doesn't bother me, but I'd buy one that has paperback book contrast (about 50:1) in a heartbeat.
You're right, but it amounts to the same thing: "I don't care about privacy because I don't think a lack of privacy could negatively affect me." You should only be willing to give up privacy after considering the potential consequences.
"I don't have anything to hide" is an extremely common and misguided attitude towards privacy. I won't rehash the problems with it here, because it's been done millions of times. Read up on it a bit.
I wouldn't use a free netbook from Google because I'm a developer. I also play games, use Photoshop, and other things that are out of the scope of web apps. However, the primary audience of Chrome OS (people who just need to do word processing, spreadsheets, email, check the internet, etc.) would probably love it. They're already used to their computer being full of ads from the spyware they don't know how to avoid, so a free computer with (theoretically) nicer ads is probably infinitely preferable to a $300+ computer that still has ads for them.
On a side note, I will use PHP on my servers before touching Ruby since I see no advantages for using it over PHP.
Except for where speed is of the utmost importance (in which case you're limited to C/C++, and possibly just assembly language), anything you can do in one language, you can pretty much do in any language. The question is, how EASY is it to do it in a certain language.
There may be no web app you can create in Ruby that you can't also create in PHP, but that doesn't mean PHP is always equally suitable to the job at hand. You may find that Ruby allows you to complete certain projects much faster, saving you a LOT of money. And in those cases, that would be a big advantage for using it over PHP.
So wait, let me make sure I understand:
Your beef with Firefox 3 is that the single feature you don't like takes too much effort to turn off?
I suppose that could possibly be considered valid, if either of these two cases were true:
1. If the change didn't save, and you had to do it again every time you used Firefox.
2. If it was REALLY, REALLY hard to turn off; as in, you need a Master's Degree in Computer Science to be able to do it.
However, neither of these are the case.
1. The preference most certainly does save itself.
2. The first search on Google for "firefox turn off awesome bar" (no quotes) returned this site. Essentially, you type "about:config" in the address bar, find the "Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" setting (they are in alphabetical order, and if that's still too many hoops, you can use the config search bar at the top), and change its value from 12 to 0. If that's too difficult for you to do (once), then I'm impressed you knew how to install Firefox in the first place.
Personally, I share your distaste for "gee-whiz UI silliness". However, I believe a lot of that comes from our general proficiency with computers. The worse you are with a computer, the more help you need from your UI. Though the UI stuff is often buggy, the intention is to make the app more usable for the common person, not just to be pretty.
Tell that to Google.
I wonder if certain faces work better with this technology than others. Perhaps younger, smoother faces (like "Emily") work better than old, wrinkly faces, since they can get an accurate representation of skin texture without as much complexity.
Definitely. I bought a D-Link USB WiFi adapter, downloaded their official Mac drivers, and the thing crashed my Mac every half hour.
The main advantage of the Kindle over the iPhone is actually the fact that it's not a phone; do you realize how high you jump when you're sitting in a quiet place deeply into a horror novel, and right at the scariest part, the damn thing RINGS at you?!
Rarely do I see such a perfect opportunity to use this combination of keys: WHOOOOOOSH!!!!
More like, the claims on cold fusion from every single damn year I've been alive.
Bike to work. (Make living close enough to bike a priority.)
I want to start doing, but I work in an office where they'd care if I came to work sweaty and stinky. What's the solution to this?