Still, It seems like it's be worth it to get at least a *couple* of color images. I can understand that B&W images are smaller and transmit more quickly, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
I always wonder about these pictures, and I hate to sound like an idiot, but why don't they ever seem to take color photos on these things? Is there not enough light, and they have to use infrared?
Like I know that pictures of structures in space (e.g. nebulae) are colored in because they're being captured with radio telescopes rather than optical ones, but I'm imagining that these pictures are taken with a relatively normal digital camera. I know adding color would increase bandwidth, but I can't imagine that alone is the problem.
App configuration is also a chore, the only way I found to bring up an apps options is to mouse over the "hot" top right corner of screen.
I tried out the Consumer Preview, and though I didn't like the new Start menu screen, the hot corners were what really frustrated me. As far as I can remember, there are basically different menus and buttons that pop up if you go to different unmarked hot-corners, and which menus pop up depends on context. Worse, the menus have a second delay before animating into view, and they don't pop up reliably.
This all struck me as absolutely insane. When I started using it, I didn't know how to do anything. I didn't know some of the menus existed. When I figured out they existed, I didn't know which menus appeared where under which circumstances. Even when I figured that out, calling the menus up was a frustrating experience of trying to trigger the hot-corner, waiting for a second to see if it was just delayed, realizing it hadn't triggered, and trying again. Sometimes I'd move the mouse away just as the menu started appearing, and it would disappear again because I moved the mouse away.
I don't know if my description makes sense, but I'm basically claiming the UI is confusing, obscure, inconsistent, and unreliable. I'm an IT guy who has been fixing Windows computers since WFW 3.11, so if I had that much trouble, I expect that a lot of other people will be utterly lost.
They may have been innovative on some server products, but a lot of their innovation has been pretty meaningless for most businesses, even. The way most people use Windows Server and Exchange, two of their most ubiquitous products, is largely unchanged. There have been some improvements, e.g. ActiveSync and the webmail are better, but most of the real improvements seem to be irrelevant to the consumer market or the small/medium business market.
The Start page is just a full screen start menu with active tiles, nothing more.
I think the problem is that many of us don't want a full screen start menu. We want a small, efficient, unobtrusive way to launch applications without breaking context.
I suspect it's a little more subtle than this. Essentially, Microsoft has been unable to compete with Apple in terms of "innovation" because they're supporting so much legacy crap, and they're always relying on 3rd party vendors to supply the hardware. So even if they come up with some innovative cool new thing, if it requires hardware support, they're dependent on Dell and HP to build in the right hardware to make it cool.
So yes, I think this is an attempt to compete with Apple, who has been making some big gains in market share. If you include tablets, notebooks, and desktops as the same market, then Apple's recent growth has been astounding. In response, I think Microsoft has done a series of things, which I would all connect as part of a coherent strategy:
Focus on developing tablets rather than conventional desktops/laptops
Differentiate the MS tablets from Apple by making a tablet that's also capable of acting as a fully-functional PC
Create MS-brand tablets according to this vision, bypassing the need to compromise with HP, Dell, etc.
Try to remove legacy cruft from the tablet OS to keep battery life up and allow more agile development
The problem here is that a couple of these goals conflict with each other. Trying to strip out legacy stuff runs afoul of the goal of making it a "fully-functional PC". The way to resolve that issue is to push legacy stuff out of your fully-functional PCs as well, and market your tablet OS as a desktop OS. Unfortunately, that seems to have resulted in having a desktop OS with a GUI that's only suitable for tablets.
How does your laptop computer calculate remaining battery life?
How does your browser calculate remaining download time?
Probably not the way you think. Progress bars on many processes are complete bunk. They're there to show you that something is happening, but there's not a good way to calculate many things accurately, and trying to be accurate uses more computing resources than is reasonable.
I don't know the particular math they use to calculate battery life and download speed, but I'm betting there's no calculus involved. They're just sloppy guesses.
This is good news, but it's also pretty shameful. First, that only 15% of people have this kind of access, but also that 10Mbps is considered some kind of achievement. I'm assuming that this means 10Mbps download, and most of the upload speeds are still under 1Mbps. I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don't really want to solve the piracy problem.
And this is why I don't really feel sorry for content providers.
Of course they don't want to solve the piracy problem. They aren't bound by "free market forces" because they have an exclusive government-enforced monopoly on their product. That means that they can manipulate the market and set prices, and they don't really face competition of another vendor offering the same product for less. As a result, in short, they can charge much more than most of us would really be willing to pay, and to some extent they just have us all over a barrel.
But here's the thing: they know all this, and having the ability to manipulate the market, they choose to operate the market in a way that pushes massive people to illegitimate channels of distribution. It's their choice. They are capable of operating the market in such a way that much fewer people pirate, but they calculate they can make more money doing things that push people into piracy.
You may say, "Yes, and that's their decision. They have the right to do business as they like, and of course they're going to choose what makes more money." Well I guess that's so, but I don't have a lot of patience for people complaining about the consequences of their own actions. You make your bed, and then you sleep in it. If they don't like the consequences of their actions, perhaps they should behave differently.
I used to think that way, and then I learned that I'd just been misunderstanding what it means to "take notes".
When you take notes, don't just write down everything. You have to know for yourself, "What are the kinds of things that I should remember, but never do? What am I going to be struggling with when the test comes around, and wishing I'd memorized from this lecture?" So when you know this kind of thing about yourself, jot down those things, and only those things. Don't bother writing them completely enough that you'll be able to refer back to them in 10 years, but only clearly enough that you'll remember what they mean for a few hours.
Then, after class, go home and type those notes up. You only needed to remember them for a few hours, because within a few hours, you're going to be rewriting them. So don't just type them up, flesh them out. Make them clear. Write explanations for yourself that you will understand in 10 years. Not only will this give you something clear and tidy to refer back to, but the act of rewriting your notes will help you learn the information better.
So the point is, taking notes will definitely distract you from learning if you're trying to write everything out clearly, but that's not what you should be doing when you take notes. You should only be writing the bare minimum to remind yourself about the notes you'll want to write after you leave the class. This also works for business meetings.
Doesnt mean much that Valve is porting to Linux. All it means is they see a new area to make money, from sole linux users, which are a SMALL % of desktops.
I don't agree. Valve is porting their games to Linux, but they're also encouraging other developers to port to Linux and opening up the Steam platform to Linux. The way Steam works, if you buy a game on 1 platform and it's available on other platforms, you can play it on the other platform for free. This means that it's not only from sole Linux users, and Linux users don't need to be a large percentage of desktops to start out. If suddenly all my Steam games are available for Linux, I could switch to playing them on Linux instead of Windows. If the performance was superior, I would switch in a second.
So this means you could buy a game once, and choose to play it on Mac, Windows, and/or Linux, freeing us from having to buy games for a particular platform. This is even more noteworthy because of rumors that Valve is working on a Steam-based game console. Gaming is often cited as one of the things that keeps people running Windows. Many people (including myself) have a Windows desktop computer that is used solely for playing games. I think if gaming were to become truly platform independent, you might see a noticeable drop in Windows market share in the home market.
It does kind of suck that there's not a legal option to watch online. From what I understand, the only feeds available in the states are only available to people who subscribe to cable.
I wouldn't mind if there was a service that was charging or making you watch ads, but do I really need to pay for cable?
I can't find any mention of it, but does it include either IMAP or Exchange support? One of my complaints about Hotmail is that they still haven't provided any accessibility from software clients except through POP, and POP isn't really appropriate anymore for personal email addresses.
Really, IMO, they should be using the same connectors as Exchange so you can access the calendar and address book from software clients. It's not as though they're unfamiliar with the technology. I suppose they don't want to make a decent free email service, though, since it would cannibalize their more expensive services. I guess I'll just stick with Gmail.
As someone who uses both Mac OS and Windows, I'd say it was for very different reasons. People updated to Windows 7 so quickly because Windows XP was showing its age, while Vista was pretty unusable. In this case, Lion (10.7) was released a year ago and it's totally fine.
However, if you want to kill some of the marketing hype, the deal is that the upgrade cost $20, and it can be downloaded and installed very easily with very little user interaction. Compatibility with Lion isn't an issue, so there's nothing to bar you from upgrading or to make anyone nervous about the upgrade.
So upgrading is cheap, easy, trouble-free, and seamless. Of course lots of people upgraded. On the other hand, it's a very incremental upgrade. There are a few added features and a few refinements, but anyone on Lion who doesn't want to spare the $20 can easily stick with Lion and not miss a lot. The biggest benefit of upgrading IMO is increased interoperability with iOS devices, but if you don't have an iPhone or iPad, those won't help you much.
I don't know if that's true. Apparently one of the complaints that SOPA was meant to address was that people were posting content on Youtube and Google wasn't necessarily taking it down until the copyright holder requested a takedown. One of the big parts of the bill was that it took the legal responsibility from the copyright holder to seek out and police violations of their property, and instead placed it on the web host to be policing their sites for violations of other people's copyrights.
So essentially it would mean that Google would be held legally responsible for copyright violations on Youtube, even if no one had notified them that there was a copyright violation and given Google the opportunity to take it down. That would make Youtube too large of a liability to keep active, which was to my understanding one of the reasons Google vehemently opposed SOPA.
Call me paranoid, but sometimes I think that some of the anti-piracy proposals are not about stopping piracy. SOPA, for example, could have made it impossible for a site like YouTube to exist, which in turn would make it difficult to share user-generated content. Because it made it dangerous to host user content and content from independent sources, it would risk forcing sites to only allow content being distributed from major corporate sources who could be verified to own the content.
It's not certain, but it could have been viewed as pushing us back towards broadcast networks where ISPs and large media companies act as gatekeepers on what information and entertainment you have access to.
It's better for "regular people" to find someone who knows what they're doing. It's important to understand that many of these things you can do to fix a broken hard drive are actually actions of last resort. If you know your hard drive is broken and there's no other way, you might try one of these techniques, but if you aren't sure what's going on with your hard drive, you're more likely to damage your hard drive further rather than fix it.
So let an expert determine whether your hard drive is really seriously broken or if it's something easily fixable. Your problem may actually be very minor and fixable, but if you try these things, you might break it beyond repair. If someone is going to attempt any of these measures, let it be someone with some experience.
So if there's an issue here, it's just that increasingly people go to the internet not for information but for entertainment
More than that, that people are increasingly going to the internet for *everything* related to communications and information and entertainment. We've seen the isolated stories: physical album sales are down, newspaper sales are down, phone companies have lost a lot of ground to VoIP, people are "cutting the cable" and using Netflix/Hulu instead, the post office is seeing less distribution, etc. These sometimes get treated as individual stories, but the reality is they're all part of the same process.
What's almost funny is how unsurprising we find it all. Our way of life has been changing in significant ways over the last 2 decades, and each change is greeted with an initial, "Oh, that's cool," followed by us taking this new technology for granted. I guess that's the march of progress.
I don't think anyone doubted that competition between ISPs improves service. The question is more about whether there is *enough* competition, or even whether there could ever be enough.
Right now, in most places, there's a duopoly if you're lucky. Where I live, in NYC, I have no real choice. It's basically Time Warner Cable or dial-up. In order to have a robust market, I'd say you need at least 5 real ISPs going head-to-head, but you would never be able to get 5 different companies to lay down 5 different and independent infrastructures in my neighborhood.
So it makes sense that Comcast isn't even bothering to roll this out except where they're competing with FIOS. So, absent competition, what do we do?
I'm in favor of the idea of an ongoing TV series. Heavy super-powers may drain budgets, but I think something like Batman could be done in a way that would make an excellent TV series, especially if it could get a budget approaching what Game of Thrones has. Ultimately, these characters and storylines were developed for an episodic medium, and I think you could get even better results putting them into another episodic medium rather than making a couple of big movies.
Of course, budget is only have the problem. You also need talented writers who can deal with the cultural relevance of some of these characters. I think getting good writers might be the most difficult part. I would be fine with some more high-quality animated work if they could get good writers.
I wouldn't claim to know, since I have no inside knowledge, but I had assumed there was some kind of behind-the-scenes agreement among ISPs. Verizon has seemed to give up on rolling out FIOS. There's essentially no competition in NYC right now between ISPs. Once you know what your needs are, there is usually only one vendor who can provide that level of service.
Since they're monopolies, these companies should be regulated at least as strictly as the companies providing electricity. In my opinion, they should be regulated even more strictly.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, It seems like it's be worth it to get at least a *couple* of color images. I can understand that B&W images are smaller and transmit more quickly, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
I always wonder about these pictures, and I hate to sound like an idiot, but why don't they ever seem to take color photos on these things? Is there not enough light, and they have to use infrared?
Like I know that pictures of structures in space (e.g. nebulae) are colored in because they're being captured with radio telescopes rather than optical ones, but I'm imagining that these pictures are taken with a relatively normal digital camera. I know adding color would increase bandwidth, but I can't imagine that alone is the problem.
App configuration is also a chore, the only way I found to bring up an apps options is to mouse over the "hot" top right corner of screen.
I tried out the Consumer Preview, and though I didn't like the new Start menu screen, the hot corners were what really frustrated me. As far as I can remember, there are basically different menus and buttons that pop up if you go to different unmarked hot-corners, and which menus pop up depends on context. Worse, the menus have a second delay before animating into view, and they don't pop up reliably.
This all struck me as absolutely insane. When I started using it, I didn't know how to do anything. I didn't know some of the menus existed. When I figured out they existed, I didn't know which menus appeared where under which circumstances. Even when I figured that out, calling the menus up was a frustrating experience of trying to trigger the hot-corner, waiting for a second to see if it was just delayed, realizing it hadn't triggered, and trying again. Sometimes I'd move the mouse away just as the menu started appearing, and it would disappear again because I moved the mouse away.
I don't know if my description makes sense, but I'm basically claiming the UI is confusing, obscure, inconsistent, and unreliable. I'm an IT guy who has been fixing Windows computers since WFW 3.11, so if I had that much trouble, I expect that a lot of other people will be utterly lost.
They may have been innovative on some server products, but a lot of their innovation has been pretty meaningless for most businesses, even. The way most people use Windows Server and Exchange, two of their most ubiquitous products, is largely unchanged. There have been some improvements, e.g. ActiveSync and the webmail are better, but most of the real improvements seem to be irrelevant to the consumer market or the small/medium business market.
The Start page is just a full screen start menu with active tiles, nothing more.
I think the problem is that many of us don't want a full screen start menu. We want a small, efficient, unobtrusive way to launch applications without breaking context.
I suspect it's a little more subtle than this. Essentially, Microsoft has been unable to compete with Apple in terms of "innovation" because they're supporting so much legacy crap, and they're always relying on 3rd party vendors to supply the hardware. So even if they come up with some innovative cool new thing, if it requires hardware support, they're dependent on Dell and HP to build in the right hardware to make it cool.
So yes, I think this is an attempt to compete with Apple, who has been making some big gains in market share. If you include tablets, notebooks, and desktops as the same market, then Apple's recent growth has been astounding. In response, I think Microsoft has done a series of things, which I would all connect as part of a coherent strategy:
The problem here is that a couple of these goals conflict with each other. Trying to strip out legacy stuff runs afoul of the goal of making it a "fully-functional PC". The way to resolve that issue is to push legacy stuff out of your fully-functional PCs as well, and market your tablet OS as a desktop OS. Unfortunately, that seems to have resulted in having a desktop OS with a GUI that's only suitable for tablets.
How does your laptop computer calculate remaining battery life?
How does your browser calculate remaining download time?
Probably not the way you think. Progress bars on many processes are complete bunk. They're there to show you that something is happening, but there's not a good way to calculate many things accurately, and trying to be accurate uses more computing resources than is reasonable.
I don't know the particular math they use to calculate battery life and download speed, but I'm betting there's no calculus involved. They're just sloppy guesses.
This is good news, but it's also pretty shameful. First, that only 15% of people have this kind of access, but also that 10Mbps is considered some kind of achievement. I'm assuming that this means 10Mbps download, and most of the upload speeds are still under 1Mbps. I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don't really want to solve the piracy problem.
And this is why I don't really feel sorry for content providers.
Of course they don't want to solve the piracy problem. They aren't bound by "free market forces" because they have an exclusive government-enforced monopoly on their product. That means that they can manipulate the market and set prices, and they don't really face competition of another vendor offering the same product for less. As a result, in short, they can charge much more than most of us would really be willing to pay, and to some extent they just have us all over a barrel.
But here's the thing: they know all this, and having the ability to manipulate the market, they choose to operate the market in a way that pushes massive people to illegitimate channels of distribution. It's their choice. They are capable of operating the market in such a way that much fewer people pirate, but they calculate they can make more money doing things that push people into piracy.
You may say, "Yes, and that's their decision. They have the right to do business as they like, and of course they're going to choose what makes more money." Well I guess that's so, but I don't have a lot of patience for people complaining about the consequences of their own actions. You make your bed, and then you sleep in it. If they don't like the consequences of their actions, perhaps they should behave differently.
I used to think that way, and then I learned that I'd just been misunderstanding what it means to "take notes".
When you take notes, don't just write down everything. You have to know for yourself, "What are the kinds of things that I should remember, but never do? What am I going to be struggling with when the test comes around, and wishing I'd memorized from this lecture?" So when you know this kind of thing about yourself, jot down those things, and only those things. Don't bother writing them completely enough that you'll be able to refer back to them in 10 years, but only clearly enough that you'll remember what they mean for a few hours.
Then, after class, go home and type those notes up. You only needed to remember them for a few hours, because within a few hours, you're going to be rewriting them. So don't just type them up, flesh them out. Make them clear. Write explanations for yourself that you will understand in 10 years. Not only will this give you something clear and tidy to refer back to, but the act of rewriting your notes will help you learn the information better.
So the point is, taking notes will definitely distract you from learning if you're trying to write everything out clearly, but that's not what you should be doing when you take notes. You should only be writing the bare minimum to remind yourself about the notes you'll want to write after you leave the class. This also works for business meetings.
Doesnt mean much that Valve is porting to Linux. All it means is they see a new area to make money, from sole linux users, which are a SMALL % of desktops.
I don't agree. Valve is porting their games to Linux, but they're also encouraging other developers to port to Linux and opening up the Steam platform to Linux. The way Steam works, if you buy a game on 1 platform and it's available on other platforms, you can play it on the other platform for free. This means that it's not only from sole Linux users, and Linux users don't need to be a large percentage of desktops to start out. If suddenly all my Steam games are available for Linux, I could switch to playing them on Linux instead of Windows. If the performance was superior, I would switch in a second.
So this means you could buy a game once, and choose to play it on Mac, Windows, and/or Linux, freeing us from having to buy games for a particular platform. This is even more noteworthy because of rumors that Valve is working on a Steam-based game console. Gaming is often cited as one of the things that keeps people running Windows. Many people (including myself) have a Windows desktop computer that is used solely for playing games. I think if gaming were to become truly platform independent, you might see a noticeable drop in Windows market share in the home market.
Bow ties are cool.
It does kind of suck that there's not a legal option to watch online. From what I understand, the only feeds available in the states are only available to people who subscribe to cable.
I wouldn't mind if there was a service that was charging or making you watch ads, but do I really need to pay for cable?
Hotmail supports ActiveSync for mobile clients. To my knowledge, it does not support Exchange for desktop clients.
That's how Android supports Hotmail, use m.hotmail.com as the Exchange server.
Yeah, that's how *Android* supports Hotmail, but it doesn't work for desktop computers.
I can't find any mention of it, but does it include either IMAP or Exchange support? One of my complaints about Hotmail is that they still haven't provided any accessibility from software clients except through POP, and POP isn't really appropriate anymore for personal email addresses.
Really, IMO, they should be using the same connectors as Exchange so you can access the calendar and address book from software clients. It's not as though they're unfamiliar with the technology. I suppose they don't want to make a decent free email service, though, since it would cannibalize their more expensive services. I guess I'll just stick with Gmail.
As someone who uses both Mac OS and Windows, I'd say it was for very different reasons. People updated to Windows 7 so quickly because Windows XP was showing its age, while Vista was pretty unusable. In this case, Lion (10.7) was released a year ago and it's totally fine.
However, if you want to kill some of the marketing hype, the deal is that the upgrade cost $20, and it can be downloaded and installed very easily with very little user interaction. Compatibility with Lion isn't an issue, so there's nothing to bar you from upgrading or to make anyone nervous about the upgrade.
So upgrading is cheap, easy, trouble-free, and seamless. Of course lots of people upgraded. On the other hand, it's a very incremental upgrade. There are a few added features and a few refinements, but anyone on Lion who doesn't want to spare the $20 can easily stick with Lion and not miss a lot. The biggest benefit of upgrading IMO is increased interoperability with iOS devices, but if you don't have an iPhone or iPad, those won't help you much.
I don't know if that's true. Apparently one of the complaints that SOPA was meant to address was that people were posting content on Youtube and Google wasn't necessarily taking it down until the copyright holder requested a takedown. One of the big parts of the bill was that it took the legal responsibility from the copyright holder to seek out and police violations of their property, and instead placed it on the web host to be policing their sites for violations of other people's copyrights.
So essentially it would mean that Google would be held legally responsible for copyright violations on Youtube, even if no one had notified them that there was a copyright violation and given Google the opportunity to take it down. That would make Youtube too large of a liability to keep active, which was to my understanding one of the reasons Google vehemently opposed SOPA.
Call me paranoid, but sometimes I think that some of the anti-piracy proposals are not about stopping piracy. SOPA, for example, could have made it impossible for a site like YouTube to exist, which in turn would make it difficult to share user-generated content. Because it made it dangerous to host user content and content from independent sources, it would risk forcing sites to only allow content being distributed from major corporate sources who could be verified to own the content.
It's not certain, but it could have been viewed as pushing us back towards broadcast networks where ISPs and large media companies act as gatekeepers on what information and entertainment you have access to.
It's better for "regular people" to find someone who knows what they're doing. It's important to understand that many of these things you can do to fix a broken hard drive are actually actions of last resort. If you know your hard drive is broken and there's no other way, you might try one of these techniques, but if you aren't sure what's going on with your hard drive, you're more likely to damage your hard drive further rather than fix it.
So let an expert determine whether your hard drive is really seriously broken or if it's something easily fixable. Your problem may actually be very minor and fixable, but if you try these things, you might break it beyond repair. If someone is going to attempt any of these measures, let it be someone with some experience.
It's not the local government that's the problem. It's that no other ISPs are interested in the investment of stringing lines.
So if there's an issue here, it's just that increasingly people go to the internet not for information but for entertainment
More than that, that people are increasingly going to the internet for *everything* related to communications and information and entertainment. We've seen the isolated stories: physical album sales are down, newspaper sales are down, phone companies have lost a lot of ground to VoIP, people are "cutting the cable" and using Netflix/Hulu instead, the post office is seeing less distribution, etc. These sometimes get treated as individual stories, but the reality is they're all part of the same process.
What's almost funny is how unsurprising we find it all. Our way of life has been changing in significant ways over the last 2 decades, and each change is greeted with an initial, "Oh, that's cool," followed by us taking this new technology for granted. I guess that's the march of progress.
I don't think anyone doubted that competition between ISPs improves service. The question is more about whether there is *enough* competition, or even whether there could ever be enough.
Right now, in most places, there's a duopoly if you're lucky. Where I live, in NYC, I have no real choice. It's basically Time Warner Cable or dial-up. In order to have a robust market, I'd say you need at least 5 real ISPs going head-to-head, but you would never be able to get 5 different companies to lay down 5 different and independent infrastructures in my neighborhood.
So it makes sense that Comcast isn't even bothering to roll this out except where they're competing with FIOS. So, absent competition, what do we do?
I'm in favor of the idea of an ongoing TV series. Heavy super-powers may drain budgets, but I think something like Batman could be done in a way that would make an excellent TV series, especially if it could get a budget approaching what Game of Thrones has. Ultimately, these characters and storylines were developed for an episodic medium, and I think you could get even better results putting them into another episodic medium rather than making a couple of big movies.
Of course, budget is only have the problem. You also need talented writers who can deal with the cultural relevance of some of these characters. I think getting good writers might be the most difficult part. I would be fine with some more high-quality animated work if they could get good writers.
I wouldn't claim to know, since I have no inside knowledge, but I had assumed there was some kind of behind-the-scenes agreement among ISPs. Verizon has seemed to give up on rolling out FIOS. There's essentially no competition in NYC right now between ISPs. Once you know what your needs are, there is usually only one vendor who can provide that level of service.
Since they're monopolies, these companies should be regulated at least as strictly as the companies providing electricity. In my opinion, they should be regulated even more strictly.