It will be very interesting to see how well Google does the phone UI. The UI of their (main) search page is pretty clean, amazingly so for a company with as many products to promote as Google and as big as they are. But a Web UI and a phone UI are completely different and I'm wondering if they were able to resist the desktop paradigm.
It will be especially interesting to compare this to the iPhone.
I'm hopeful that we can see some additional progress on the phone UI front now that there are competitors to the "old school" mobile phone manufacturers. Maybe between the gPhone and iPhone, UI nirvana will be reached. But I'm not counting on it;-)
I don't know where you work, but in the real world, net connections regularly fail. In the office, in the conference rooms, wired, wireless... they fail. And when you have your laptop and projector all set up to give a preso to some big account with a Google application and your net connection goes, you're toast.
I don't have anything against Google and I despise the (mis)use of PowerPoint, but I am opposed to on-line apps where there's no way to work on, save, and use the output locally without a net connection. That's just adding an additional point of failure, about which Murphy has something to say.
I had one of the "dangerous" sets when I was a kid. There were experiments where you added different chemicals to see a flame turn colors, mixed reactive substances to feel the warmth generated by the chemical reaction, and other "dangerous" activities. But in the mid 80's when I bought a top-of-the-line set for a younger relative, it was already dumbed-down and "safe." It has more to do with the litigatious nature of "modern" America than some terrorist blowing up San Francisco with a paperclip and 3 tablespoons of sulfur.
I don't want my apps delivered over the 'net. Primarily because:
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS to "own" my work because of some crappy TOS
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if my 'net connection goes down
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if Google/Adobe/MS goes out of business
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS searching my work to decide what ads I need to see
* I don't want the NSA/FBI/DLC searching my work to determine if I'm a terrorist/on the wanted list/threat to Hillary
* I don't want to be locked into paying "rent" to Google/Adobe/MS so I can see stuff later
* I don't want to be forced to "upgrade" to some new version that I hate because that's what's on offer over the 'net
I want my bits, on my box, in my possession, available when I want them.
I don't see why this wouldn't be a candidate for something similar, assuming autorotation isn't an option. Basically, there's a small rocket (or charge, I don't remember which--it's been a while since I was interested in the ultralight scene) that violently extracts the chute from the container and makes it possible for the chute to open even at very low speed/altitude.
They can't be that much additional weight if they're being installed in what are essentially hang gliders.
The first one is obviously used by The King of Siam's Major Order of Worried Lemurs Acting Perfectly or Xylophone Needing Vampires Being Wheedled Like Queens of Another Nice Monarchy In Utah's Tasteless Kingdom, Looking at Everyone's Hiney
But I think you'll need to wait a few years before you can say whether FaceBook is a fad or not. Your assumption that people will continue to use FaceBook to keep track of old college friends is untested.
Just anecdotal, but I personally don't keep in close contact with college friends ten years on. Heck, I don't keep in touch with Army buddies that I was in combat with, and it's hard to imagine a shared bond closer than that. Not that there aren't/weren't site available for that to happen, either. But once you move on, get a job, wind up in a different city, get married, discover new hobbies and interests and meet a new set of IRL friends, I'm not sure how valuable your FaceBook interactions are going to be to you. More importantly, when you stop being so close to those "old" friends, you're going to be visiting less which means less ad revenue for FB.
Of course, everyone is different and it could be that there will be a lot of folks who keep in touch regularly via FB after they graduate. Before the 'net there were folks who corresponded regularly for years with old college friends. But I'm not sure that it's a given.
I also don't have "TV" -- though I have a television and DVD player, I don't have cable, dish or OTA television programming. My wife and I watch about one movie a week. The average USian watches around 5 hours of TV a day, which is hard for me to fathom. Aside from escapism, television has almost nothing positive to offer. Those 5 hours I don't spend with the boob tube is time that I use to talk with my wife, play with my daughter, read, and enjoy various hobbies.
Your point about walking past the apartments is familiar. Sometimes I go for walks at night, and it is eerie to see all the houses with the "blue glow" coming out the front windows. It's also interesting to look at how most homes have the furniture organized--you'll notice that all the furniture in rooms containing a television is oriented toward the TV. You don't see two chairs facing each other so people can sit and talk, you see two chairs facing the television.
Anyway, on to my point: I've often thought that you could make a cool SciFi story about an analog to television, where each evening all the citizens return to their homes and are "programmed" for the next day. But maybe that's a little too close to reality for it to make a comfortable story premise.
Why does your one data point override the dozens of data points you've seen other people post? And the poster you're responding to is obviously a liar, since his experience is different than yours.
Anecdote is not the singular of data, and it's pretty clear that there are lots of folks out there who've seen petty, ridiculous pissing contents by twits. But, of course, the important thing is to blindly defend the glorious Wikipedia from criticism, right?
Cue the mantra: Anyone can edit, anyone can edit, anyone can edit.
You wikipedia boosters make David Koresh look positively sane.
You can create a video presentation. At least, from what my EMACs-preferring co-workers say about it, I'm pretty sure there's a way to output ASCII art video from various open video formats.:-)
The "best" car is the one with the most cupholders. Apparently, that's CR's metric--count cupholders, and the car with the most is a CR Best Buy. The "best" computer is the one that comes with massive amounts of trial-ware. That's another CR metric--count the number of useless trial applications installed, whichever PC includes the most, that's your winner. Articles are full of "we especially liked...(useless feature x)" On almost every front, CR weights the most obscure and unimportant features heavily, while ignoring what really matters.
The only useful thing in CR are the quality numbers, but even those are biased because they're reported by the self-selected group of "CR subscribers who care enough to respond to CR's poll."
Like any other for-profit journalistic endeavor, CR is bound to know less about any specific subject than a moderately knowledgeable layman. Basically, the more you know, the less they know.
If you're a hard-working go-getter in the public sector, more power to you. There definitely are some folks in government who are hard working. My wife, when she worked for the city, was one of them. But it's not the banker's hours or some nefarious "agenda" of pundits that drives public opinion.
The real issue is that the perception the public has isn't drawn from the class of "all government workers.". The public's perception is based on things like the California DMV offices, where dozens of citizens stand in long lines while about 50% of the "workers" behind the counters engage in banter, sit idly staring off into space, and generally appear to be doing nothing much; or the city clerk's office, where the belligerent receptionist can barely contain her indignation that you've interrupted her game of Solitaire to tell her you've arrived for an appointment; or county road workers, who are frequently seen in groups of seven or eight, where one guy is digging and the rest are all leaning on shovels/brooms, and chatting on cell phones; or the folks who are so hidebound that they can't imagine a solution to a problem that hasn't been carefully documented in the official handbook; and on, and on, and on.
Until all the citizen-visible positions in government are filled by hardworking, customer-service oriented folks who take their breaks out of site of the waiting area (an outcome so unlikely as to be impossible) the perception isn't going to change.
In my (limited) Wikipedia experience, the problem isn't knowledgeable contributors being unwilling to cite, it's the Wiki-philes who consider themselves both page "owners" and "experts" who revert anything that they think isn't correct, sourced or not. Wikipedia is the ultimate in distastefully mashed-up petty politics and provincialism.
But part of what makes the good literature special is seeing the characters grow and change and relate to their world then (perhaps even subconsciously) reflecting on how those situations might inform your reactions in yours.
One of the "lessons" of LOTRs is that you cannot go home again. Jackson completely eliminated the raising of the Shire, eliminating this element from the story.
There are points of difference that are minor, and I'm not an advocate of movies that hold to a slavish conformity to the books they're based off. Indeed, the elimination of some of the interminable passages regarding Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor was welcome.
But these changes that eliminate important points seem to me to be the greatest disconnect between the books and Jackson's movie.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be very interesting to see how well Google does the phone UI. The UI of their (main) search page is pretty clean, amazingly so for a company with as many products to promote as Google and as big as they are. But a Web UI and a phone UI are completely different and I'm wondering if they were able to resist the desktop paradigm.
;-)
It will be especially interesting to compare this to the iPhone.
I'm hopeful that we can see some additional progress on the phone UI front now that there are competitors to the "old school" mobile phone manufacturers. Maybe between the gPhone and iPhone, UI nirvana will be reached. But I'm not counting on it
Now we have statisticians trying to figure out a smarter way to pay the "stupid tax"?
I wish that the U.S. would institute a billion dollar lottery as the only form of taxation. 'course, it'd be regressive.
The Windows way. None of this download, mount, open, click, password, click, click nonsense.
Who says Macs "just work"? Obviously they don't for trojans!
Those old women are made of sterner stuff than you might imagine, Cardinal Fang
I don't know where you work, but in the real world, net connections regularly fail. In the office, in the conference rooms, wired, wireless... they fail. And when you have your laptop and projector all set up to give a preso to some big account with a Google application and your net connection goes, you're toast.
I don't have anything against Google and I despise the (mis)use of PowerPoint, but I am opposed to on-line apps where there's no way to work on, save, and use the output locally without a net connection. That's just adding an additional point of failure, about which Murphy has something to say.
I had one of the "dangerous" sets when I was a kid. There were experiments where you added different chemicals to see a flame turn colors, mixed reactive substances to feel the warmth generated by the chemical reaction, and other "dangerous" activities. But in the mid 80's when I bought a top-of-the-line set for a younger relative, it was already dumbed-down and "safe." It has more to do with the litigatious nature of "modern" America than some terrorist blowing up San Francisco with a paperclip and 3 tablespoons of sulfur.
Nice Anti-establishment FUD though.
I don't want my apps delivered over the 'net. Primarily because:
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS to "own" my work because of some crappy TOS
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if my 'net connection goes down
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if Google/Adobe/MS goes out of business
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS searching my work to decide what ads I need to see
* I don't want the NSA/FBI/DLC searching my work to determine if I'm a terrorist/on the wanted list/threat to Hillary
* I don't want to be locked into paying "rent" to Google/Adobe/MS so I can see stuff later
* I don't want to be forced to "upgrade" to some new version that I hate because that's what's on offer over the 'net
I want my bits, on my box, in my possession, available when I want them.
is that Anonymous==Steve B or Anonymous == Billy G?
Time out while I recharge my shirt!
you'd be happy if 1/3 of your company's employees knew that there was an IT policy. Heck, if they even knew what the IT department WAS.
You just made an almost-sensible car analogy. I didn't think that was allowed here.
Anecdotally, hours spent watching television to ability to reason is a ratio of inverse proportion
I don't see why this wouldn't be a candidate for something similar, assuming autorotation isn't an option. Basically, there's a small rocket (or charge, I don't remember which--it's been a while since I was interested in the ultralight scene) that violently extracts the chute from the container and makes it possible for the chute to open even at very low speed/altitude.
They can't be that much additional weight if they're being installed in what are essentially hang gliders.
After all, all they want to do is eat your brains. They're not unreasonable. I mean, no one's going to eat your eyes!
What do you mean, extremely unlikely?
The first one is obviously used by The King of Siam's Major Order of Worried Lemurs Acting Perfectly or Xylophone Needing Vampires Being Wheedled Like Queens of Another Nice Monarchy In Utah's Tasteless Kingdom, Looking at Everyone's Hiney
The other two are equally obvious
But I think you'll need to wait a few years before you can say whether FaceBook is a fad or not. Your assumption that people will continue to use FaceBook to keep track of old college friends is untested.
Just anecdotal, but I personally don't keep in close contact with college friends ten years on. Heck, I don't keep in touch with Army buddies that I was in combat with, and it's hard to imagine a shared bond closer than that. Not that there aren't/weren't site available for that to happen, either. But once you move on, get a job, wind up in a different city, get married, discover new hobbies and interests and meet a new set of IRL friends, I'm not sure how valuable your FaceBook interactions are going to be to you. More importantly, when you stop being so close to those "old" friends, you're going to be visiting less which means less ad revenue for FB.
Of course, everyone is different and it could be that there will be a lot of folks who keep in touch regularly via FB after they graduate. Before the 'net there were folks who corresponded regularly for years with old college friends. But I'm not sure that it's a given.
I want my bits, on my box, in my house, available when I want them.
I also don't have "TV" -- though I have a television and DVD player, I don't have cable, dish or OTA television programming. My wife and I watch about one movie a week. The average USian watches around 5 hours of TV a day, which is hard for me to fathom. Aside from escapism, television has almost nothing positive to offer. Those 5 hours I don't spend with the boob tube is time that I use to talk with my wife, play with my daughter, read, and enjoy various hobbies.
Your point about walking past the apartments is familiar. Sometimes I go for walks at night, and it is eerie to see all the houses with the "blue glow" coming out the front windows. It's also interesting to look at how most homes have the furniture organized--you'll notice that all the furniture in rooms containing a television is oriented toward the TV. You don't see two chairs facing each other so people can sit and talk, you see two chairs facing the television.
Anyway, on to my point: I've often thought that you could make a cool SciFi story about an analog to television, where each evening all the citizens return to their homes and are "programmed" for the next day. But maybe that's a little too close to reality for it to make a comfortable story premise.
Another blinded wiki-phile.
Why does your one data point override the dozens of data points you've seen other people post? And the poster you're responding to is obviously a liar, since his experience is different than yours.
Anecdote is not the singular of data, and it's pretty clear that there are lots of folks out there who've seen petty, ridiculous pissing contents by twits. But, of course, the important thing is to blindly defend the glorious Wikipedia from criticism, right?
Cue the mantra: Anyone can edit, anyone can edit, anyone can edit.
You wikipedia boosters make David Koresh look positively sane.
You can create a video presentation. At least, from what my EMACs-preferring co-workers say about it, I'm pretty sure there's a way to output ASCII art video from various open video formats. :-)
The "best" car is the one with the most cupholders. Apparently, that's CR's metric--count cupholders, and the car with the most is a CR Best Buy. The "best" computer is the one that comes with massive amounts of trial-ware. That's another CR metric--count the number of useless trial applications installed, whichever PC includes the most, that's your winner. Articles are full of "we especially liked...(useless feature x)" On almost every front, CR weights the most obscure and unimportant features heavily, while ignoring what really matters.
The only useful thing in CR are the quality numbers, but even those are biased because they're reported by the self-selected group of "CR subscribers who care enough to respond to CR's poll."
Like any other for-profit journalistic endeavor, CR is bound to know less about any specific subject than a moderately knowledgeable layman. Basically, the more you know, the less they know.
gh making the "fff" sound as in tough
o making the "eh" sound as in women
ti making the "shh" sound as in nation
If you're a hard-working go-getter in the public sector, more power to you. There definitely are some folks in government who are hard working. My wife, when she worked for the city, was one of them. But it's not the banker's hours or some nefarious "agenda" of pundits that drives public opinion.
The real issue is that the perception the public has isn't drawn from the class of "all government workers.". The public's perception is based on things like the California DMV offices, where dozens of citizens stand in long lines while about 50% of the "workers" behind the counters engage in banter, sit idly staring off into space, and generally appear to be doing nothing much; or the city clerk's office, where the belligerent receptionist can barely contain her indignation that you've interrupted her game of Solitaire to tell her you've arrived for an appointment; or county road workers, who are frequently seen in groups of seven or eight, where one guy is digging and the rest are all leaning on shovels/brooms, and chatting on cell phones; or the folks who are so hidebound that they can't imagine a solution to a problem that hasn't been carefully documented in the official handbook; and on, and on, and on.
Until all the citizen-visible positions in government are filled by hardworking, customer-service oriented folks who take their breaks out of site of the waiting area (an outcome so unlikely as to be impossible) the perception isn't going to change.
In my (limited) Wikipedia experience, the problem isn't knowledgeable contributors being unwilling to cite, it's the Wiki-philes who consider themselves both page "owners" and "experts" who revert anything that they think isn't correct, sourced or not. Wikipedia is the ultimate in distastefully mashed-up petty politics and provincialism.
But part of what makes the good literature special is seeing the characters grow and change and relate to their world then (perhaps even subconsciously) reflecting on how those situations might inform your reactions in yours.
One of the "lessons" of LOTRs is that you cannot go home again. Jackson completely eliminated the raising of the Shire, eliminating this element from the story.
There are points of difference that are minor, and I'm not an advocate of movies that hold to a slavish conformity to the books they're based off. Indeed, the elimination of some of the interminable passages regarding Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor was welcome.
But these changes that eliminate important points seem to me to be the greatest disconnect between the books and Jackson's movie.