Safari protects your personal information on shared or public Macs when surfing the web. Go ahead and check your bank account and.Mac email at the library or shop for birthday presents on the family Mac. Using Safari's new Private Browsing feature, no information about where you visit on the web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached. It's as if you were never there.
I presume this searching feature of A9 would require cookies and that sort of thing, which is probably disabled by private browsing anyway, but I nevertheless find it a disturbing feature.
It obviously is meant for data-mining purposes, just in the same way they use your past purchases to make suggestions for books or thinks you would like to buy. It could serve well in a search engine environment if they can find out which links people chose. "People who selected links like you also selected these...".
But from a privacy standpoint, it is horrible. They shouldn't have that kind of information linked to an account in which you are not anonymous, and they have your name, address, and credit card number. Who would use a search engine like that for general purpose searches? They are trying to achieve Wal-Mart style data mining without regard for privacy issues.
This is so awful, I wouldn't be surprised if many stopped using Amazon.com simply out of protest. Anyone know the popular alternatives to Amazon.com?
Powerbooks are pretty quiet. I imagine that there are PC laptop manufacturers out there that do just as well in their design. Just a guess, but maybe Sony VAIOs? I recall when they came out, they were way ahead of the crowd in terms of design because they were so much thinner than the standard laptop.
Ok, I'm not as religous a microsoft hater as many here, but is there ANY good reason to have this run on XP?
You'll find a lot of exotic computer gadgets you find on the net tend to use Windows. I presume it's simply because it's probably cheaper to develop for just one platform, and they choose to use the most common one. Here are some examples of fancy displays and input devices I've found on the net...
I can recall a few years ago anxiously waiting to see "Enterprise" for the first time on television, having been a fan of the franchise. I immediately grimaced upon hearing the theme song and new it was going to suck. The electric guitar style theme music was incredibly outdated and wreaked of a routinely formulaic bad-taste Hollywood production. And as I recall, it didn't even have lyrics in that broadcast. The lyrics made it even worse when I eventually heard that vesion, just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.
That episode started with that one crew-member yapping about how she couldn't sleep because the stars were moving the opposite direction she was used to in her quarters. I kept thinking she was going to whine "but Dawson!" any moment. As for Scott Bakula, he was already typecasted from "Quantum Leap" and didn't fit the role. The whole concept of a series that was supposed to happen before the original series should have been a warning, since one of the big attractions of Star Trek was the fictional technology, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt when I first heard that.
But they just royally screwed it up. They really overdid the large breasts thing, blatantly pandering to an adolescent demographic. And the writing was awful. As an example, there was that episode where Archer tells a ship of Klingons that they have a defenceless alien vessel riding in the wake of their ship. I recall thinking that no character with half a brain would ever do that and it was just plain ridiculous, even to anyone who wasn't familiar with the franchise. I just recently saw an episode where Archer speaks with a senior Starfleet officer who's uniform had a friggin collar. A jump-suit with a collar. Another mistake. They just keep making them.
It takes some serious stupidity to screw up a franchise that had such a dedicated fan base as Star Trek, yet the people behind "Enterprise" have managed to do just that. Even if they manage to improve the writing now, bad first impressions last. I don't think this series is worth saving. I think people are clinging onto it out of dedication to the Star Trek franchise. If that is the case, they ought to just cancel this series and come up with a completely new one, or just focus on the movies. I'm personally a fan of the franchise, but it has gotten off-track in a direction I don't care to follow.
Can no one answer the simple question of what constitutes a "journalist"?
Who knows. I've seen more informative comments in discussions on this site than I have from "journalists" in print publications and television. Some "journalists" manage to produce interviews using only one camera by filming a subject's replies, then filming themselves asking the questions all over again after the interview (known as noddies). I doubt "integrity" is part of the equation. Taking things like this into consideration, I don't see why bloggers can't be considered journalists.
Is that a Click Wheel on the E1060? If they collaborated with Apple, maybe they licensed the Click Wheel and are using it for navigating the phone's functions. It may make it easier to access them.
are peoples lives so empty and devoid of meaning these days that they'll attempt to fill it with someone elses empty and devoid rambling on their own empty and devoid lives?
Soap operas, tabloids, entertainment "news"... there's a lot of crap that's worse and has been around for decades. Besides which, at no time in history has civilisation been so capable of recording the minutia of everyday lives, which historians will appreciate in the future. Archaeologists struggle to reconstruct information about the everyday lives of people from ancient civilisations and would love to be privy to this much detail.
I can see some places where it is useful, like velcro and the shape of a coke bottle
About that... check this out. I read the article on Guerrillanews.com ages ago, but they seemed to have changed their site and I can't find if they still have it somewhere. I think it's about the copyright of images of the contour coke bottle. It has this "David vs. Goliath" thing with Coca-cola as the villian. But this "derivative art" copyright thing seems kind of screwy to me, and it seems like allowing the copyright to be public domain would be the right thing, rather than transferring it to derivative works.
It's pretty rare -- the feature didn't really seem to take off -- but it does exist here and there.
I recall System 7 on the Macintosh had a feature like this called "Balloon Help" back in the early nineties. It may have been in earlier versions, I forget.
could anyone provide one where a software patent was indeed a good thing for an inovative feature?
I think the case of spreadsheets, which set precedence for software patents, is a good example of what you're asking. I imagine that software ought to have some of the same qualities of inventing physical things. If an inventor has spent an inordinate amount of time creating something innovative then he or she should be able to reap rewards from it and not have someone come along and rip off their plans and sell it themselves. Inventors should have the option of making a living solely from inventing, otherwise there would be a significant lack of development of technology.
However, many of the software patents that are being introduced that produce such a backlash are such trivial and unimaginative ideas. They actually don't improve technology, but rather hinder its progress, which is the exact opposite of what the whole patent system is meant to achieve. It's supposed to provide incentive for people to innovate, not create bureaucratic obstacles for them.
And there is also the fact that software in it's very essence is different from physical objects. Software can be quickly distributed from just a single copy, while physical inventions have to be manufactured one by one. Software evolves much faster, and subjecting the development of ideas for software to the same slow bureaucratic rules that apply to physical objects can hinder the overall efficiency of the development of software. But whatever the case, people have to be able to focus on creating ideas to improve technology as their main occupation for making a living, and patents are supposed to allow them to do that.
Nice links! Here- I cleaned them up since Slashdot tends to add random spaces to posted URLs for some reason, and I formatted them as anchors. I noticed the random spaces don't appear if you remove the "http://"...
Modded insightful? Methinks someone out there has mod points and a drinking problem.
Public Service Announcement... Don't MUI (Mod Under the Influence)... man, my sleeping pills are kicking in, and I wonder if you're not supposed Slashdot Under the influence... keep forgetting what I'm tryng to say... oh yeah... check this link... of to bed... zzzzzzzz
with IE on the majority of desktops all one has to do is type some crap in the url and you are swept away to msn search
I never really used the URL field for searching for some reason. It just did't feel intuitive using the same field for the URL and searching. I always had Google on my Favourites bar when I was on a PC (I'm on a Mac with Safari now, though).
But they could integrate web searches with desktop searches probably better than Google can by integrating it with applications as part of their API (searching application-specific documents), like OS X Tiger's Spotlight. And there may also be other unexpected ways they could end up integrating the OS/browser/search engine features. One thing I've always found frustrating with search engines is finding pages I have visited and either forgot to bookmark, or misplaced the bookmark for. They could end up giving search results ranked in order of pages already visited or bookmarked, since that information is held by the browser.
They could also integrate the search function with finding the words on a page. Say you're looking for a phrase on Google. When you click on a link, you still have to do a ctrl-F and re-type the phrase to jump to the position of that phrase on the page. Google has the highlighted words in the cache function, but you still have to ctrl-F and ctrl-G to quickly jump from one to another. In an integrated system, the search engine and ctrl-F could be integrated better, if not made into the same feature. They could make it so that clicking on a search engine result opens up the page and automatically jumps to the first position of the search phrase. And subsequent incidences can be found by just pressing ctrl-G. They could skip the ctrl-F part altogether.
Safari does this partially by putting whatever you've typed in the search field that is built into the browser automatically in the text field when you hit command-F. However, it doesn't handle phrases in quotations the same as the search engine, so you always have to edit out the quotations.
M$'s revenue stream will collapse, due to a fairly large number of pissed off corporate customers.
I bet that's why they are switching to G5 processors too. They're making the XBox less like PCs to keep them away from being in direct competition with PC makers.
They're focusing on how to prevent consumers from accessing material when they should be focusing on making it easier for consumers to pay for material. In the days of Napster's popularity, if the record companies decided to integrate a payment subscription system with high-speed downloading servers, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy. People would pay to be able to download MP3s with no proper tags and no errors at the maximum speed their connections could handle rather than unreliable and unstable P2P sources. They could have worked on producing software for ISPs to use for automating the billing process. They could have bought into Napster during it's popularity and turned it into a subscription service, and even if other P2P applications were around, Napster had brand-name recognition that people would go for. But instead on focusing on how to use the technology's potential, they sent in the lawyers to block it. Brand name has more pull for consumers than cost-effectiveness. Just look at sneakers- people don't try to buy the cheapest ones around but go with expensive brand names instead.
I was referring to hardware only, and I obviously know about OS X.
I wasn't aware there was an LC III and now I am. But they still stuck with "II"s quite a bit for the Macintosh line.
I was referring to the specific model when I said "product generation". For example the PowerBook G4 can refer to a number of different releases of different configurations under the same name.
I could swear I read or heard somewhere ages ago that Apple chose to stick with the "II" suffix, at least for the Apple II line, because the Apple/// wasn't successful. They go on to create an Apple IV, V, and VI. Instead, they had the Apple//e,//c, and//gs. Can anyone else verify this?
I would love this built into OS X but it is just for Windows right now.
I can recall seeing some kind of 3D finder for OS X before, so I did a google and found it. It's called 3DOSX. However, I also found another one called 3D-Space VFS as well. They aren't the same thing as the UI the Slashdot post is talking about, but still are some kind of 3D interface.
Slashdot Mirror
From this page...
I presume this searching feature of A9 would require cookies and that sort of thing, which is probably disabled by private browsing anyway, but I nevertheless find it a disturbing feature.
It obviously is meant for data-mining purposes, just in the same way they use your past purchases to make suggestions for books or thinks you would like to buy. It could serve well in a search engine environment if they can find out which links people chose. "People who selected links like you also selected these...".
But from a privacy standpoint, it is horrible. They shouldn't have that kind of information linked to an account in which you are not anonymous, and they have your name, address, and credit card number. Who would use a search engine like that for general purpose searches? They are trying to achieve Wal-Mart style data mining without regard for privacy issues. This is so awful, I wouldn't be surprised if many stopped using Amazon.com simply out of protest. Anyone know the popular alternatives to Amazon.com?
Does anyone know good ways of silencing laptops?
Powerbooks are pretty quiet. I imagine that there are PC laptop manufacturers out there that do just as well in their design. Just a guess, but maybe Sony VAIOs? I recall when they came out, they were way ahead of the crowd in terms of design because they were so much thinner than the standard laptop.
Ok, I'm not as religous a microsoft hater as many here, but is there ANY good reason to have this run on XP?
You'll find a lot of exotic computer gadgets you find on the net tend to use Windows. I presume it's simply because it's probably cheaper to develop for just one platform, and they choose to use the most common one. Here are some examples of fancy displays and input devices I've found on the net...
Some of their products may be compatible with other operating systems, but most I looked at have a Windows bias.
I'm left wondering what the grandparent meant with 'true 3D display'
Well, there are volumetric and autostereo displays which could be adequate.
I can recall a few years ago anxiously waiting to see "Enterprise" for the first time on television, having been a fan of the franchise. I immediately grimaced upon hearing the theme song and new it was going to suck. The electric guitar style theme music was incredibly outdated and wreaked of a routinely formulaic bad-taste Hollywood production. And as I recall, it didn't even have lyrics in that broadcast. The lyrics made it even worse when I eventually heard that vesion, just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.
That episode started with that one crew-member yapping about how she couldn't sleep because the stars were moving the opposite direction she was used to in her quarters. I kept thinking she was going to whine "but Dawson!" any moment. As for Scott Bakula, he was already typecasted from "Quantum Leap" and didn't fit the role. The whole concept of a series that was supposed to happen before the original series should have been a warning, since one of the big attractions of Star Trek was the fictional technology, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt when I first heard that.
But they just royally screwed it up. They really overdid the large breasts thing, blatantly pandering to an adolescent demographic. And the writing was awful. As an example, there was that episode where Archer tells a ship of Klingons that they have a defenceless alien vessel riding in the wake of their ship. I recall thinking that no character with half a brain would ever do that and it was just plain ridiculous, even to anyone who wasn't familiar with the franchise. I just recently saw an episode where Archer speaks with a senior Starfleet officer who's uniform had a friggin collar. A jump-suit with a collar. Another mistake. They just keep making them.
It takes some serious stupidity to screw up a franchise that had such a dedicated fan base as Star Trek, yet the people behind "Enterprise" have managed to do just that. Even if they manage to improve the writing now, bad first impressions last. I don't think this series is worth saving. I think people are clinging onto it out of dedication to the Star Trek franchise. If that is the case, they ought to just cancel this series and come up with a completely new one, or just focus on the movies. I'm personally a fan of the franchise, but it has gotten off-track in a direction I don't care to follow.
Can no one answer the simple question of what constitutes a "journalist"?
Who knows. I've seen more informative comments in discussions on this site than I have from "journalists" in print publications and television. Some "journalists" manage to produce interviews using only one camera by filming a subject's replies, then filming themselves asking the questions all over again after the interview (known as noddies). I doubt "integrity" is part of the equation. Taking things like this into consideration, I don't see why bloggers can't be considered journalists.
So Gates thinks he can coerce the Danish government with 800 jobs? Well Denmark can retaliate by withholding LEGO from the US! Oh the horror!
Is that a Click Wheel on the E1060? If they collaborated with Apple, maybe they licensed the Click Wheel and are using it for navigating the phone's functions. It may make it easier to access them.
what next? saving images to your iPod Photo will be labeled Photocasting?
You mean like this stuff? Actually, you may be onto something- adding moblog photos to podcasting sounds like the next step.
are peoples lives so empty and devoid of meaning these days that they'll attempt to fill it with someone elses empty and devoid rambling on their own empty and devoid lives?
Soap operas, tabloids, entertainment "news"... there's a lot of crap that's worse and has been around for decades. Besides which, at no time in history has civilisation been so capable of recording the minutia of everyday lives, which historians will appreciate in the future. Archaeologists struggle to reconstruct information about the everyday lives of people from ancient civilisations and would love to be privy to this much detail.
I can see some places where it is useful, like velcro and the shape of a coke bottle
About that... check this out. I read the article on Guerrillanews.com ages ago, but they seemed to have changed their site and I can't find if they still have it somewhere. I think it's about the copyright of images of the contour coke bottle. It has this "David vs. Goliath" thing with Coca-cola as the villian. But this "derivative art" copyright thing seems kind of screwy to me, and it seems like allowing the copyright to be public domain would be the right thing, rather than transferring it to derivative works.
It's pretty rare -- the feature didn't really seem to take off -- but it does exist here and there.
I recall System 7 on the Macintosh had a feature like this called "Balloon Help" back in the early nineties. It may have been in earlier versions, I forget.
could anyone provide one where a software patent was indeed a good thing for an inovative feature?
I think the case of spreadsheets, which set precedence for software patents, is a good example of what you're asking. I imagine that software ought to have some of the same qualities of inventing physical things. If an inventor has spent an inordinate amount of time creating something innovative then he or she should be able to reap rewards from it and not have someone come along and rip off their plans and sell it themselves. Inventors should have the option of making a living solely from inventing, otherwise there would be a significant lack of development of technology.
However, many of the software patents that are being introduced that produce such a backlash are such trivial and unimaginative ideas. They actually don't improve technology, but rather hinder its progress, which is the exact opposite of what the whole patent system is meant to achieve. It's supposed to provide incentive for people to innovate, not create bureaucratic obstacles for them.
And there is also the fact that software in it's very essence is different from physical objects. Software can be quickly distributed from just a single copy, while physical inventions have to be manufactured one by one. Software evolves much faster, and subjecting the development of ideas for software to the same slow bureaucratic rules that apply to physical objects can hinder the overall efficiency of the development of software. But whatever the case, people have to be able to focus on creating ideas to improve technology as their main occupation for making a living, and patents are supposed to allow them to do that.
- www.boingboing.net/2004/07/14/more_roomba_hacking
. html
- www.roombacommunity.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=6&t
o picdays=0&start=50&sid=4b9bfe3e721838e9d7363430ab6 fed2f
- www.boingboing.net/2003/01/17/hacking_the_vacuumr
o .html
- www.engadget.com/entry/4967632541028408/
- www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1231080,00.asp
MOD PARENT NOT ME ("No Karma Bonus" checked, not karma whoring)Modded insightful? Methinks someone out there has mod points and a drinking problem.
Public Service Announcement... Don't MUI (Mod Under the Influence)... man, my sleeping pills are kicking in, and I wonder if you're not supposed Slashdot Under the influence... keep forgetting what I'm tryng to say... oh yeah... check this link... of to bed... zzzzzzzz
with IE on the majority of desktops all one has to do is type some crap in the url and you are swept away to msn search
I never really used the URL field for searching for some reason. It just did't feel intuitive using the same field for the URL and searching. I always had Google on my Favourites bar when I was on a PC (I'm on a Mac with Safari now, though).
But they could integrate web searches with desktop searches probably better than Google can by integrating it with applications as part of their API (searching application-specific documents), like OS X Tiger's Spotlight. And there may also be other unexpected ways they could end up integrating the OS/browser/search engine features. One thing I've always found frustrating with search engines is finding pages I have visited and either forgot to bookmark, or misplaced the bookmark for. They could end up giving search results ranked in order of pages already visited or bookmarked, since that information is held by the browser.
They could also integrate the search function with finding the words on a page. Say you're looking for a phrase on Google. When you click on a link, you still have to do a ctrl-F and re-type the phrase to jump to the position of that phrase on the page. Google has the highlighted words in the cache function, but you still have to ctrl-F and ctrl-G to quickly jump from one to another. In an integrated system, the search engine and ctrl-F could be integrated better, if not made into the same feature. They could make it so that clicking on a search engine result opens up the page and automatically jumps to the first position of the search phrase. And subsequent incidences can be found by just pressing ctrl-G. They could skip the ctrl-F part altogether.
Safari does this partially by putting whatever you've typed in the search field that is built into the browser automatically in the text field when you hit command-F. However, it doesn't handle phrases in quotations the same as the search engine, so you always have to edit out the quotations.
Just curious- where on the net can you find out how to read all this alphanumeric slang?
M$'s revenue stream will collapse, due to a fairly large number of pissed off corporate customers.
I bet that's why they are switching to G5 processors too. They're making the XBox less like PCs to keep them away from being in direct competition with PC makers.
typo correction: "with proper tags and no errors" (oops)
They're focusing on how to prevent consumers from accessing material when they should be focusing on making it easier for consumers to pay for material. In the days of Napster's popularity, if the record companies decided to integrate a payment subscription system with high-speed downloading servers, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy. People would pay to be able to download MP3s with no proper tags and no errors at the maximum speed their connections could handle rather than unreliable and unstable P2P sources. They could have worked on producing software for ISPs to use for automating the billing process. They could have bought into Napster during it's popularity and turned it into a subscription service, and even if other P2P applications were around, Napster had brand-name recognition that people would go for. But instead on focusing on how to use the technology's potential, they sent in the lawyers to block it. Brand name has more pull for consumers than cost-effectiveness. Just look at sneakers- people don't try to buy the cheapest ones around but go with expensive brand names instead.
I meant they didn't go on to create an Apple IV... blah blah blah... I'm falling asleep and accidentally pressed "submit" instead of "preview".
ADDENDUM to my earlier post...
I would love this built into OS X but it is just for Windows right now.
I can recall seeing some kind of 3D finder for OS X before, so I did a google and found it. It's called 3DOSX. However, I also found another one called 3D-Space VFS as well. They aren't the same thing as the UI the Slashdot post is talking about, but still are some kind of 3D interface.
So now the question is, how loud is the fan in normal use?
Check out this discussion in an earlier story to get an idea.
I meant for hardware. But as someone already pointed out, that isn't the case either.