I know it's fashionable to bash UI eye candy, but there is a reason for it. For instance, the human eye is very good at determining depth. Drop shadows on windows help distinguish one window from another. When I turned on xcompmgr on my Ubuntu box, it was actually quite surprising how much easier it was to determine what windows are where. When you have Anjuta, Firefox, Glade, and a bunch of other applications open, it can be hard to tell what window is here. Drop shadows help create another way of visually distinguishing window placements that can enhance usability.
Transparency when done right can also help usability. The transparent dialogs here help cement the relationship between a dialog and its parent window. That's why Mac OS X has such great usability - it not only has some visually interesting eye candy, but that eye candy is designed to provide you with a series of visual cues that clue you in on what actions you're performing. The "genie effect" when you minimize a window to the Dock is another example of this - by showing the window move into the Dock you're providing a visual clue that lets you know that you can find that window again in the Dock.
When done right, eye candy can really enhance usability, and thanks to things like the Damage extension, the Render extension, and the Composite extenstion, Linux usability is getting better.
And for the record, those who think that eye candy adds excessive processor bloat, my current Linux system is a Duron 600mHz with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX. Granted, the T&L engine helps a lot in making the UI responsive, but given that xcompmgr and the Composite extension is essentially beta code it's quite shocking how little processing power this sort of thing takes. Now that T&L engines on graphics cards are pretty much standard, it's time that X put that power to use to enhance usability.
The PC Is Evolving, Not Dying
on
The PC Is Not Dead
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.
I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.
That's why small cheap computers like the Mac mini and home theater systems like Microsoft's Media Center Edition systems are growing while the PC market itself is relatively stagnant in comparison to the boom years.
Of course, the massive success of the iPod also points to a totally new market for consumer electronics that interfaces with a traditional PC acting like a "digital hub" as Steve Jobs calls it. That's why media features like DVD burners, FireWire and memory card inputs and large displays are the big selling points in PCs these days. It's not about a monolithic device that makes you sit in front of it to do everything, it's about a whole slew of gadgets that work seamlessly together to perform different tasks.
The concept of the PC won't go away, but the way in which PCs are used is slowly changing. It's like evolution usually goes - the big creatures die out and those smaller more agile ones flourish in the aftermath.
And no, you're wrong. Proponents of the PATRIOT Act should justify why these intrusions on our rights are so necessary. The benefit of the doubt has to be on the side of liberty, not more unaccountable state power. Or do you believe that we only have rights that are granted us by our wise and all-knowing leaders?
We're currently facing a group that has already murdered thousands of civilians using hijacked airliners, and has the potential to do much worse. The threat posed by groups like al-Qaeda is real and undeniable.
The first priority of government is the protection of its people - salus populi suprema lex. We're not facing an enemy that plays by Marquis of Queensbury rules, we're facing an enemy that would have no compunction against the use of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons against civilian targets.
The PATRIOT Act doesn't wipe away freedoms, it gives the government quite specific abilities to combat terrorism. They still have to have judicial authorization, they still have to have probable cause, and the Courts have already provided some additional protections.
The PATRIOT Act may be onerous, it may need to be modified, but the argument that it somehow shreds the Constitution is hyperbole at best.
For all the talk of how the PATRIOT Act is somehow systematically unraveling our freedoms, it's not the only time this sort of thing has been done during a time of war.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus entirely, essentially ignoring the right of jury trials and the Bill of Rights. Clearly American democracy did not perish afterwards, and the right was later reinstated at the end of the war. No matter how odious the PATRIOT Act really is, it barely compares to Lincoln's actions.
During the Second World War, President Roosevelt was granted the power to try American citizens as enemy combatants as well. In the landmark case Ex parte Quirin Chief Justice Stone wrote:
Citizenship in the United States of an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences of a belligerency which is unlawful because in violation of the law of war. Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents within the meaning of the Hague Convention and the law of war. It is as an enemy belligerent that petitioner Haupt is charged with entering the United States, and unlawful belligerency is the gravamen of the offense of which he is accused.
It is quite clear that members of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are enemy belligerents in every sense of the word. They deliberate target the civilian population, do not follow the rules of warfare as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, and are willing to use the most deadly weapons in existence in order to kill as many people as possible without regard for their status as non-combatants.
More recently, library records were instrumental in locating Andrew Cunanan, the man responsible for the murder of Gianni Versace. Yet very few civil libertarians seemed to have an issue with this. If it is acceptable to search library records to find a serial murderer, why not a terrorist. And why a library records so sacrosanct when other private records such as phone conversations and financial records could already be examined by the government under RICO and other laws?
There is something about the furor over the PATRIOT Act that suggests its motivated more by political opinions than an honest belief in civil rights. Certainly those who protest the PATRIOT Act now must recognize the horrendous erosions of civil liberties that occurred in the previous Administration under the guise of the "war on drugs" including no-knock warrants and other practices.
I can find some agreement with those who say that the PATRIOT Act goes to far, and there is nothing wrong or unpatriotic about holding the law to a high standard. However, I would lend far more credence to those who make their arguments in full understanding of the nature and intent of groups like al-Qaeda. We cannot afford to give more civil protections to Tony Soprano than we do to Osama bin Laden, which was the state of US law before September 11. If the PATRIOT Act is too onerous, the critics have the obligation of suggesting how we might better balance the needs to protect the safety of our nation while maintaining civil rights.
Except the detentions at Camp X-Ray, regardless of one's opinion about them, have nothing to do with the PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act has to do with domestic anti-terrorism, not the treatment of detainees obtained in military operations.
That being said, there have been some questionable uses of PATRIOT Act provisions for non-terrorism cases that should be investigated. The PATRIOT Act is an anti-terrorism act, and if the Justice Department wishes such powers for conventional cases they should go through the legislative process to get them. The PATRIOT Act should be limited to use only in anti-terrorism prosecutions.
I'm convinced that every time some product is touted as the "iPod Killer" it's destined to be a flop. This Sony design won't be any different.
Why do people buy a flash music player like the Shuffle? To listen to music. The problem with competing with the Shuffle is that it serves one purpose and does it well. Trying to compete with it on features can easily raise the price so that it's no longer price competitive.
The other big reason is that the Shuffle is being driven by the success of the iTunes Music Store. Any other player doesn't work with the most popular online music store. Any player that wants to compete with the iPod has to either play iTMS songs (which Apple won't do for obvious reasons) or have a music store that's better than the iTMS. So far none of the competition even comes close. They either have horrible interfaces, bloated prices, or draconian DRM -- and most of the time they have all three.
Unless Sony can not only create a flash player that's cheaper, but a music store that's better, they're not going to put much of a dent in the iPod's sales figures. Personally, I don't see Sony doing either of these things.
The iPod Shuffle works because it's small, cheap, stylish, has the benefit of iTunes' excellent UI, and works with the iTunes Music Store. The Sony player is Yet Another Flash Player, and it won't sell necessarily better than an iRiver, Rio, etc. would.
Rumor has it that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Honest Politicians Society and Slashdotters with girlfriends are all filing suit claiming that they're proof of prior art...
In all seriousness, the fact that a patent like this is even entertained is a more than a bit disturbing. How in the world one can patent a logical operator is simply beyond me...
Korea is insanely net-centric, almost to the point of absurdity (as anyone who's ever been to Seoul can attest), but it also has the benefits of being considerably smaller than the US, which makes it easier to run broadband. In the US we're seeing the commoditization of dialup where the prices for dialup service have dropped over time, and eventually once the market penetration gets to a certain point broadband prices will likely drop as well (especially if Wi-Max takes off.
However, when you're dealing with a country that's several thousand miles across rather than several hundred, it's harder to lay enough fiber/cable to make things work.
If that happens, the telcos will have screwed themselves.
Why bother with a high-price telco with crappy services when you can get Vonage or Skype or any number of IP-based carriers that will be able to provide the same service cheaper and faster than traditional telcos.
You tend to see consolidation in dying industries - POTS is becoming a dying industry. Once VOIP starts really hitting the mainstream, that line of revenue will only continue to dry up.
Right now the money is in cellular service (where there's usually at least one local/regional company competing with the big boys - or at least there has been in my experience), and in VOIP. Either the telcos adapt or die.
As we've learned from both the dinosaurs and AOL/TimeWarner, sometimes being big and complex isn't a good thing from an evolutionary standpoint.
Well, it's probably subjective. I started programming with Java, and I found myself constantly fighting with the syntax. Java's syntax seems more esoteric than that of C#. Plus, I've found the.NET libraries to be generally more logically laid out and consistant, and the documentation better than the Java equivalent.
I've tried Mono, and while I've little desire to move from Python over to Mono, it's a very well done project. The GTK bindings are quite nice, and C# as a language is much, much, much easier to work with than Java.
The big "if" is whether or not Mono can become to popular without Microsoft trying to pull the plug. However, even if that does happen, C# is an ECMA standard. There are plenty of native Linux libraries that can be used in place of the Microsoft classes. For developing GUI applications under Linux, you're not going to use the Windows.Forms libraries anyway, you're going to use GTK. Mono can stand on its own as a good RAD language for developing graphical applications for GNOME.
I know it's fashionable to bash MS at every turn (and as a Mac/Linux user I do all the time), but C# is a nice language and the.NET libraries are infinitely better than the cruft of Win32/MFC and the other mess of libraries that Microsoft used to shove down programmer's throats. Mono has done an excellent job of taking those libraries and making them work on Linux.
Even without the Microsoft libraries, Mono still provides a good framework for RAD under Linux and GNOME. If we can make it as easy as possible to transition between Windows programming and Linux programming it only helps propagate Linux.
There's something to be said for the tenacity of Trek fans, but this project won't go anywhere.
First of all, unless they get Bill Gates to chip in, they'll never be able to get that much money. $50-80 million is what's scientifically termed a "huge shitload of cash." There aren't enough geeks who can pull enough change out of the couches in their parent's basement to possibly even fund one episode.
And most importantly the costs of production are a very small amount of the total costs of a show. Would the fans be willing to pay some network for airtime? How about the cost of pressing the series as a direct-to-DVD release (a possibility that would be the likeliest for an Enterprise return. How about paying the required royalties to the producers, cast, writers, and other staff covered under WGA, SGA, and DCA rules?
Sorry folks, but Enterprise is as good as dead. Unless they can kidnap Scott Bakula and the rest of the cast and build sets in their basements, Enterprise can only come back when the powers that be at Paramount decide they want it back. At least in terms of films, Star Trek is going to go away for a while, and frankly, it's about time.
The problem is that MSN Search is a direct ripoff of Google. Look at this MSN search page compared to this Google search page. The Google UI is simpler and cleaner, and Google has services that MSN doesn't (at least yet).
MSN Search adds nothing that makes the searching experience better (personally I find MSN Search to be less accurate than Google), and it doesn't fundamentally improve on what Google's doing. It's following, not leading.
Google has become a household name and a generic verb. That means that Microsoft has to somehow convince people that MSN Search is better than Google - which is a tough sell. Even if they try to bundle it with Windows, this isn't like the browser wars. You don't have the seek out and install Google on your computer, you just type in the address or click on a bookmark. Hell, I'm guessing that a good fraction of computer users already have that Google bookmark and use that for most of their searching.
Google is an entrenched brand, and Microsoft has very little chance of dislodging it.
Re:Bodes well for Tiger-candy on iBook?
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Apple Releases Mac Mini
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· Score: 3, Informative
Tiger's Core Image system is what provides that eye candy. Sadly, Core Image requires a much better GPU than the 9200.
That isn't to say that Tiger won't run on a Mac mini or an iBook - it most certainly will. You just won't get all the nifty eye candy. And really, other than the temporary "wow" factor, you can do everything you need to do without a bunch of superfluous effects.
Tiger will run an an iBook or a Mac mini, just without all the extra gewgaws. And believe me, with Dashboard, enhanced search, and the way Apple OS upgrades generally get faster with each release, even without CI it would probably be a worthwhile upgrade.
I used to live fairly close to a major street and not too far from a university campus, so wardrivers were always trying to connect to my network.
So I decided to ask WWTBOFHD? (What Would The Bastard Operator From Hell Do?)
So, I set up a nice AP called 'linksys' with no WEP. Obviously, every freeloader on the planet would try and connect to it.
Oh, and you could connect to it alright. The problem was that it was connected directly to a proxy server that rerouted every web request directly to goatse.cx and blocked everything else.
Apparently the word got around, and the number of people trying to access that AP went down precipitously after that.
You mean, news repeating. Blogs are nothing more than a billion websites updating their content with links to other sites and other news stories, with occasional commentary on them. They're as much a "distributed form of newsgathering" as the local news stand. They don't generate *anything*. They just spew the same old thing over and over and re-distribute already distributed content. Bleh. Lame.
Bloggers like Salam Pax (an Iraq living in Baghdad during the war) weren't doing original reporting? You mean the hundreds of bloggers who were in the field for the recent US elections weren't doing original reporting? You mean the many current and formerUS soldiers who were or are in Iraq aren't doing original reporting?
There are plenty of blogs worldwide who do original reporting, nor are they any particular secret.
It's interesting to see the reactions from people who still associate blogging with LiveJournals and angst-ridden teenagers. While 90% of blogs are crap, to borrow from Ted Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap.
Blogs offer a huge amount of valuable information. Blogs helped fuel the fire in the Trent Lott affair. Blogs debunked the CBS Bush-ANG memos hoax. There are blogs being written by Iraqis that offer a perspective into Iraq that you would never get anywhere else. Blogs are proving their worth in the tsunami relief efforts as well.
Blogs offer a level of immediacy that the media does not. Rather than allowing a few selected gatekeepers to control the flow of news, blogs offer a wide range of views in a system that acts as a kind of meritocracy. Bloggers tend to be voracious in taking ideas apart. Something like those crudely-forged Bush documents that Dan Rather flogged for weeks were almost immediately debunked by bloggers. Stories that don't have merit are filtered out and stories that wouldn't normally be widely disseminated get far more readership through blogs.
Blogs are nothing less than a distributed form of newsgathering that is having a major effect on online journalism. They're much more than just vanity sites.
Can anyone think of an airport that has a GPS approach pattern but no ILS?
Shutting down GPS isn't going to have an effect on navigation, as every IFR and VFR-licensed pilot is still trained on radionavigation in order to get their certification. If you're relying solely on GPS for navigation, you're not being a good pilot, and you shouldn't be anywhere near a cockpit.
I bought my PowerShot A75 back in August for about $250 - it's now down to $199 nearly everywhere.
The reason why I recommend the Canon is that it has the right mix of features for someone who doesn't need all the bells and whistles. Let's face it, 90% of people don't need a bunch of advanced controls and the other features of an SLR camera. They just want something they can use to take pictures of the kids to send to Grandma and Grandpa. The A75 is easy enough that it can be used as a point-and-shoot camera without much trouble.
What's nice is that for those of us who know what an aperature setting is, there's also enough manual controls to give you a wide variety of choices. Plus, it has a decent optical zoom, a good lens, and uses cheap CF media.
In all fairness, you will get some noise in low-light images from the sensor, you're limited to Type I CF cards, and it's a bit bulky. But still, for your average camera user, none of those things really matter.
Plus, it works just fine with iPhoto on my Mac right out of the box, and even does the same on Windows - no need for proprietary drivers like some cameras insist upon.
Granted, you could get a camera with more features for more money, but in terms of price/performance, the PowerShot A75 is a damn good camera. It was a good deal when I paid $250 for it, and it's even better now.
The problem with solar energy isn't that there isn't enough funding for them, it's that it's a bad way of generating electricity. The maximum efficiency from the current cheap silicon solar cells is about 21% - which isn't all that great. Theoretically you could build solar panels that are even more efficient - perhaps up to 70%.
Which is great, but that doesn't include the costs of transmitting that electricity. Currently electricity isn't stored, it's made as needed. You can't do that with solar. If you have a day with a high need for electricity but your production stations are getting rained on, you're screwed.
Solar has its uses, but not for widescale replacement of existing electrical infrastructure. It's not efficient enough, you can't ramp up production when needed, and it's limited to those places where you have a decent and predictable amount of sunlight. At the end of the day you can't break the laws of physics.
If we're really serious about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, our only serious option is nuclear energy. Given that France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear without any trouble, there's no reason that the rest of the world cannot do the same. Even the byproducts can be safely vitrified or recycled so that they pose no threat in the future.
The biggest obstacles to solar power are the laws of physics, which is why solar will never take off as a major source of power.
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I know it's fashionable to bash UI eye candy, but there is a reason for it. For instance, the human eye is very good at determining depth. Drop shadows on windows help distinguish one window from another. When I turned on xcompmgr on my Ubuntu box, it was actually quite surprising how much easier it was to determine what windows are where. When you have Anjuta, Firefox, Glade, and a bunch of other applications open, it can be hard to tell what window is here. Drop shadows help create another way of visually distinguishing window placements that can enhance usability.
Transparency when done right can also help usability. The transparent dialogs here help cement the relationship between a dialog and its parent window. That's why Mac OS X has such great usability - it not only has some visually interesting eye candy, but that eye candy is designed to provide you with a series of visual cues that clue you in on what actions you're performing. The "genie effect" when you minimize a window to the Dock is another example of this - by showing the window move into the Dock you're providing a visual clue that lets you know that you can find that window again in the Dock.
When done right, eye candy can really enhance usability, and thanks to things like the Damage extension, the Render extension, and the Composite extenstion, Linux usability is getting better.
And for the record, those who think that eye candy adds excessive processor bloat, my current Linux system is a Duron 600mHz with 256MB of RAM and a GeForce4 MX. Granted, the T&L engine helps a lot in making the UI responsive, but given that xcompmgr and the Composite extension is essentially beta code it's quite shocking how little processing power this sort of thing takes. Now that T&L engines on graphics cards are pretty much standard, it's time that X put that power to use to enhance usability.
What we're seeing is really the continuation of the gradual shift from "big iron" mainframes to "microcomputers" to PCs to PDAs to iPods. Technology is becoming cheaper, more flexible, and more diversified.
I think the traditional PC is close to saturation. Where the money is are in things like media center/home theater PCs, secondary computers, and specialized machines. Since most everyone has a PC, the real quest is to use PC technology to replace other existing gadgets.
That's why small cheap computers like the Mac mini and home theater systems like Microsoft's Media Center Edition systems are growing while the PC market itself is relatively stagnant in comparison to the boom years.
Of course, the massive success of the iPod also points to a totally new market for consumer electronics that interfaces with a traditional PC acting like a "digital hub" as Steve Jobs calls it. That's why media features like DVD burners, FireWire and memory card inputs and large displays are the big selling points in PCs these days. It's not about a monolithic device that makes you sit in front of it to do everything, it's about a whole slew of gadgets that work seamlessly together to perform different tasks.
The concept of the PC won't go away, but the way in which PCs are used is slowly changing. It's like evolution usually goes - the big creatures die out and those smaller more agile ones flourish in the aftermath.
We're currently facing a group that has already murdered thousands of civilians using hijacked airliners, and has the potential to do much worse. The threat posed by groups like al-Qaeda is real and undeniable.
The first priority of government is the protection of its people - salus populi suprema lex. We're not facing an enemy that plays by Marquis of Queensbury rules, we're facing an enemy that would have no compunction against the use of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons against civilian targets.
The PATRIOT Act doesn't wipe away freedoms, it gives the government quite specific abilities to combat terrorism. They still have to have judicial authorization, they still have to have probable cause, and the Courts have already provided some additional protections.
The PATRIOT Act may be onerous, it may need to be modified, but the argument that it somehow shreds the Constitution is hyperbole at best.
For all the talk of how the PATRIOT Act is somehow systematically unraveling our freedoms, it's not the only time this sort of thing has been done during a time of war.
During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus entirely, essentially ignoring the right of jury trials and the Bill of Rights. Clearly American democracy did not perish afterwards, and the right was later reinstated at the end of the war. No matter how odious the PATRIOT Act really is, it barely compares to Lincoln's actions.
During the Second World War, President Roosevelt was granted the power to try American citizens as enemy combatants as well. In the landmark case Ex parte Quirin Chief Justice Stone wrote:
It is quite clear that members of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are enemy belligerents in every sense of the word. They deliberate target the civilian population, do not follow the rules of warfare as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, and are willing to use the most deadly weapons in existence in order to kill as many people as possible without regard for their status as non-combatants.
More recently, library records were instrumental in locating Andrew Cunanan, the man responsible for the murder of Gianni Versace. Yet very few civil libertarians seemed to have an issue with this. If it is acceptable to search library records to find a serial murderer, why not a terrorist. And why a library records so sacrosanct when other private records such as phone conversations and financial records could already be examined by the government under RICO and other laws?
There is something about the furor over the PATRIOT Act that suggests its motivated more by political opinions than an honest belief in civil rights. Certainly those who protest the PATRIOT Act now must recognize the horrendous erosions of civil liberties that occurred in the previous Administration under the guise of the "war on drugs" including no-knock warrants and other practices.
I can find some agreement with those who say that the PATRIOT Act goes to far, and there is nothing wrong or unpatriotic about holding the law to a high standard. However, I would lend far more credence to those who make their arguments in full understanding of the nature and intent of groups like al-Qaeda. We cannot afford to give more civil protections to Tony Soprano than we do to Osama bin Laden, which was the state of US law before September 11. If the PATRIOT Act is too onerous, the critics have the obligation of suggesting how we might better balance the needs to protect the safety of our nation while maintaining civil rights.
Except the detentions at Camp X-Ray, regardless of one's opinion about them, have nothing to do with the PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act has to do with domestic anti-terrorism, not the treatment of detainees obtained in military operations.
That being said, there have been some questionable uses of PATRIOT Act provisions for non-terrorism cases that should be investigated. The PATRIOT Act is an anti-terrorism act, and if the Justice Department wishes such powers for conventional cases they should go through the legislative process to get them. The PATRIOT Act should be limited to use only in anti-terrorism prosecutions.
I'm convinced that every time some product is touted as the "iPod Killer" it's destined to be a flop. This Sony design won't be any different.
Why do people buy a flash music player like the Shuffle? To listen to music. The problem with competing with the Shuffle is that it serves one purpose and does it well. Trying to compete with it on features can easily raise the price so that it's no longer price competitive.
The other big reason is that the Shuffle is being driven by the success of the iTunes Music Store. Any other player doesn't work with the most popular online music store. Any player that wants to compete with the iPod has to either play iTMS songs (which Apple won't do for obvious reasons) or have a music store that's better than the iTMS. So far none of the competition even comes close. They either have horrible interfaces, bloated prices, or draconian DRM -- and most of the time they have all three.
Unless Sony can not only create a flash player that's cheaper, but a music store that's better, they're not going to put much of a dent in the iPod's sales figures. Personally, I don't see Sony doing either of these things.
The iPod Shuffle works because it's small, cheap, stylish, has the benefit of iTunes' excellent UI, and works with the iTunes Music Store. The Sony player is Yet Another Flash Player, and it won't sell necessarily better than an iRiver, Rio, etc. would.
Mono is actually rather stable, provided you're not trying to use things like Windows.Forms, which is still a bit buggy, IMHO.
If you're using Mono for GNOME/GTK development, it's actually quite stable, and much more usable than trying to write applications in old-fashioned C.
Rumor has it that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Honest Politicians Society and Slashdotters with girlfriends are all filing suit claiming that they're proof of prior art...
In all seriousness, the fact that a patent like this is even entertained is a more than a bit disturbing. How in the world one can patent a logical operator is simply beyond me...
Korea is insanely net-centric, almost to the point of absurdity (as anyone who's ever been to Seoul can attest), but it also has the benefits of being considerably smaller than the US, which makes it easier to run broadband. In the US we're seeing the commoditization of dialup where the prices for dialup service have dropped over time, and eventually once the market penetration gets to a certain point broadband prices will likely drop as well (especially if Wi-Max takes off.
However, when you're dealing with a country that's several thousand miles across rather than several hundred, it's harder to lay enough fiber/cable to make things work.
I think that crazy lady who lives by the railroad tracks is gonna need a Beowulf cluster of those things...
Here all night, try the fish (if it isn't Slashdotted.)
If that happens, the telcos will have screwed themselves.
Why bother with a high-price telco with crappy services when you can get Vonage or Skype or any number of IP-based carriers that will be able to provide the same service cheaper and faster than traditional telcos.
You tend to see consolidation in dying industries - POTS is becoming a dying industry. Once VOIP starts really hitting the mainstream, that line of revenue will only continue to dry up.
Right now the money is in cellular service (where there's usually at least one local/regional company competing with the big boys - or at least there has been in my experience), and in VOIP. Either the telcos adapt or die.
As we've learned from both the dinosaurs and AOL/TimeWarner, sometimes being big and complex isn't a good thing from an evolutionary standpoint.
For web applications yes. Client side, you can use GTK# and MySQL bindings instead.
Well, it's probably subjective. I started programming with Java, and I found myself constantly fighting with the syntax. Java's syntax seems more esoteric than that of C#. Plus, I've found the .NET libraries to be generally more logically laid out and consistant, and the documentation better than the Java equivalent.
I've tried Mono, and while I've little desire to move from Python over to Mono, it's a very well done project. The GTK bindings are quite nice, and C# as a language is much, much, much easier to work with than Java.
The big "if" is whether or not Mono can become to popular without Microsoft trying to pull the plug. However, even if that does happen, C# is an ECMA standard. There are plenty of native Linux libraries that can be used in place of the Microsoft classes. For developing GUI applications under Linux, you're not going to use the Windows.Forms libraries anyway, you're going to use GTK. Mono can stand on its own as a good RAD language for developing graphical applications for GNOME.
I know it's fashionable to bash MS at every turn (and as a Mac/Linux user I do all the time), but C# is a nice language and the .NET libraries are infinitely better than the cruft of Win32/MFC and the other mess of libraries that Microsoft used to shove down programmer's throats. Mono has done an excellent job of taking those libraries and making them work on Linux.
Even without the Microsoft libraries, Mono still provides a good framework for RAD under Linux and GNOME. If we can make it as easy as possible to transition between Windows programming and Linux programming it only helps propagate Linux.
There's something to be said for the tenacity of Trek fans, but this project won't go anywhere.
First of all, unless they get Bill Gates to chip in, they'll never be able to get that much money. $50-80 million is what's scientifically termed a "huge shitload of cash." There aren't enough geeks who can pull enough change out of the couches in their parent's basement to possibly even fund one episode.
And most importantly the costs of production are a very small amount of the total costs of a show. Would the fans be willing to pay some network for airtime? How about the cost of pressing the series as a direct-to-DVD release (a possibility that would be the likeliest for an Enterprise return. How about paying the required royalties to the producers, cast, writers, and other staff covered under WGA, SGA, and DCA rules?
Sorry folks, but Enterprise is as good as dead. Unless they can kidnap Scott Bakula and the rest of the cast and build sets in their basements, Enterprise can only come back when the powers that be at Paramount decide they want it back. At least in terms of films, Star Trek is going to go away for a while, and frankly, it's about time.
The problem is that MSN Search is a direct ripoff of Google. Look at this MSN search page compared to this Google search page. The Google UI is simpler and cleaner, and Google has services that MSN doesn't (at least yet).
MSN Search adds nothing that makes the searching experience better (personally I find MSN Search to be less accurate than Google), and it doesn't fundamentally improve on what Google's doing. It's following, not leading.
Google has become a household name and a generic verb. That means that Microsoft has to somehow convince people that MSN Search is better than Google - which is a tough sell. Even if they try to bundle it with Windows, this isn't like the browser wars. You don't have the seek out and install Google on your computer, you just type in the address or click on a bookmark. Hell, I'm guessing that a good fraction of computer users already have that Google bookmark and use that for most of their searching.
Google is an entrenched brand, and Microsoft has very little chance of dislodging it.
Tiger's Core Image system is what provides that eye candy. Sadly, Core Image requires a much better GPU than the 9200.
That isn't to say that Tiger won't run on a Mac mini or an iBook - it most certainly will. You just won't get all the nifty eye candy. And really, other than the temporary "wow" factor, you can do everything you need to do without a bunch of superfluous effects.
Tiger will run an an iBook or a Mac mini, just without all the extra gewgaws. And believe me, with Dashboard, enhanced search, and the way Apple OS upgrades generally get faster with each release, even without CI it would probably be a worthwhile upgrade.
I used to live fairly close to a major street and not too far from a university campus, so wardrivers were always trying to connect to my network.
So I decided to ask WWTBOFHD? (What Would The Bastard Operator From Hell Do?)
So, I set up a nice AP called 'linksys' with no WEP. Obviously, every freeloader on the planet would try and connect to it.
Oh, and you could connect to it alright. The problem was that it was connected directly to a proxy server that rerouted every web request directly to goatse.cx and blocked everything else.
Apparently the word got around, and the number of people trying to access that AP went down precipitously after that.
I'm such a bastard...
The next release of Mac OS X Server (10.4) will have the Blojsom blogging system built in although I'm not sure how heavily they'll promote that.
Also, I believe that there's a feature for .Mac called iBlog that lets you blog to your .Mac account, although I've not used it.
Bloggers like Salam Pax (an Iraq living in Baghdad during the war) weren't doing original reporting? You mean the hundreds of bloggers who were in the field for the recent US elections weren't doing original reporting? You mean the many current and former US soldiers who were or are in Iraq aren't doing original reporting?
There are plenty of blogs worldwide who do original reporting, nor are they any particular secret.
It's interesting to see the reactions from people who still associate blogging with LiveJournals and angst-ridden teenagers. While 90% of blogs are crap, to borrow from Ted Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap.
Blogs offer a huge amount of valuable information. Blogs helped fuel the fire in the Trent Lott affair. Blogs debunked the CBS Bush-ANG memos hoax. There are blogs being written by Iraqis that offer a perspective into Iraq that you would never get anywhere else. Blogs are proving their worth in the tsunami relief efforts as well.
Blogs offer a level of immediacy that the media does not. Rather than allowing a few selected gatekeepers to control the flow of news, blogs offer a wide range of views in a system that acts as a kind of meritocracy. Bloggers tend to be voracious in taking ideas apart. Something like those crudely-forged Bush documents that Dan Rather flogged for weeks were almost immediately debunked by bloggers. Stories that don't have merit are filtered out and stories that wouldn't normally be widely disseminated get far more readership through blogs.
Blogs are nothing less than a distributed form of newsgathering that is having a major effect on online journalism. They're much more than just vanity sites.
Can anyone think of an airport that has a GPS approach pattern but no ILS?
Shutting down GPS isn't going to have an effect on navigation, as every IFR and VFR-licensed pilot is still trained on radionavigation in order to get their certification. If you're relying solely on GPS for navigation, you're not being a good pilot, and you shouldn't be anywhere near a cockpit.
I bought my PowerShot A75 back in August for about $250 - it's now down to $199 nearly everywhere.
The reason why I recommend the Canon is that it has the right mix of features for someone who doesn't need all the bells and whistles. Let's face it, 90% of people don't need a bunch of advanced controls and the other features of an SLR camera. They just want something they can use to take pictures of the kids to send to Grandma and Grandpa. The A75 is easy enough that it can be used as a point-and-shoot camera without much trouble.
What's nice is that for those of us who know what an aperature setting is, there's also enough manual controls to give you a wide variety of choices. Plus, it has a decent optical zoom, a good lens, and uses cheap CF media.
In all fairness, you will get some noise in low-light images from the sensor, you're limited to Type I CF cards, and it's a bit bulky. But still, for your average camera user, none of those things really matter.
Plus, it works just fine with iPhoto on my Mac right out of the box, and even does the same on Windows - no need for proprietary drivers like some cameras insist upon.
Granted, you could get a camera with more features for more money, but in terms of price/performance, the PowerShot A75 is a damn good camera. It was a good deal when I paid $250 for it, and it's even better now.
The problem with solar energy isn't that there isn't enough funding for them, it's that it's a bad way of generating electricity. The maximum efficiency from the current cheap silicon solar cells is about 21% - which isn't all that great. Theoretically you could build solar panels that are even more efficient - perhaps up to 70%.
Which is great, but that doesn't include the costs of transmitting that electricity. Currently electricity isn't stored, it's made as needed. You can't do that with solar. If you have a day with a high need for electricity but your production stations are getting rained on, you're screwed.
Solar has its uses, but not for widescale replacement of existing electrical infrastructure. It's not efficient enough, you can't ramp up production when needed, and it's limited to those places where you have a decent and predictable amount of sunlight. At the end of the day you can't break the laws of physics.
If we're really serious about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, our only serious option is nuclear energy. Given that France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear without any trouble, there's no reason that the rest of the world cannot do the same. Even the byproducts can be safely vitrified or recycled so that they pose no threat in the future.
The biggest obstacles to solar power are the laws of physics, which is why solar will never take off as a major source of power.
And the one who doesn't contribute anything, whines the most, and is generally the most clueless can be selected as chief legal council!
Yes, I have a thing against lawyers...