"I started out thinking I wanted to see if a bad guy could make your laptop blow up. But that didn't happen," he said. "There are all kinds of things engineers build into these batteries to make them safe, and this is just one of them. I don't know if you could really melt the thing down."
Do most people even want to own movies? There are very few movies I'd ever want to watch a 2nd time, and if they suddenly became unavailable it wouldn't be a huge loss. In contrast, I think most people feel the opposite about music; a good song or album bears many repeated listenings and there is huge advantage in owning your own copy on your own media that nobody will be able to take away from you.
It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.
Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.
I've tried the DIY approach with my MacBooks and was never able to get reliable backups in the face of my household (including myself) closing and sleeping or shutting down the laptops in the middle of a backup. I finally got a Time Capsule and all those problems disappeared.
My guess is that the Time Capsule firmware along with AFP and Apple's native file systems all incorporate a lot of work into making Time Machine backups across WiFi from intermittently available computers a lot more reliable.
OTOH, I've not had any luck using the Time Capsule as a backup share for Windows 7. The Win7 Backup and Restore refuses to backup to a remote file system unless it's been formatted as NTFS. Norton Ghost doesn't work either, as apparently Time Capsule's Samba implementation has a 2GB limitation on the size of individual files, and full disk image backups are much larger than that.
So yes, I'm stuck with two separate backup solutions for the house. Thanks Apple and Microsoft!
I feel this way about social networking sites. As a software engineer I feel free to play with the interface on just about any program or device and try things out. On Facebook though, I worry about making a social error, blasting a personal message to the wrong people, or giving up more info than I want Facebook or its apps to have, and it tends to paralyze me. It's one of the few times I will ask somebody "what does this thing do?" or "how do you make it do that?". I guess that makes me "social-networking-stupid".
All the data that Google will be able to collect from these laptops and the Google services they enable are going to be worth way more to Google than $20 / mo. Google should be providing the laptop free of charge in exchange.
IBM Research a while back developed a product called Data Explorer (http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/) that used visual programming to create scientific visualizations of masses of data. It worked pretty well for many types of visualizations and it was popular amongst researchers at the time.
I've driven a number of CC-equipped vehicles over the years and they're all great on the straight-and-level roads but get to a corner or a hill and a lot of them can't cope.
You're turning corners while under cruise control?
Expecting humans to willingly take the time and effort to do it themselves to their source data manually is not realistic and a waste of time because it may not be known in advance the best way to organize for all consumers.
I highly doubt that it is realistic for non-humans to organize data in some optimal way for all consumers either. A particular taxonomy reflects a particular point of view of the world, and given all the different ways in which people view the world, coming to agreement over all consumers is impossible. It can work in limited population groups, such as scientists, art historians, or Usenet admins, but even then there are massive amounts of disagreement over the particular classification of any specific piece of information.
If anything, the public should be realizing that modern nuclear technology coupled with real, effective corporate compliance and government monitoring would make nuclear energy extremely safe and productive.
Emphasis mine. People now realize that those emphasized words are in realm of fantasy. The systems we build to support our energy needs need to be safe and effective without the need for elaborate corporate compliance measures and government monitoring, which will never be maintained over the long term.
IMHO, the EU is a perfect example of a central governing body where states rights being dominant would actually work well.
Wait, are you saying the the EU is working well? With Greece, then Ireland, and now Portugal having to undergo draconian austerity measures to deal with their inept local governing bodies spending too much, over-leveraging, and allowing the banks to screw them over?
The problem with the EU is that the individual states entered into a economic union without a strong central political union. So each state does what it wants without regard for the other states, but when they screw up, they can't just devalue their currencies and work their way out of it like they used to be able to. They instead get taken over by the other states in the EU who are pissed off at them for dragging down their economic union, trapped in a debt spiral that they'll probably never escape.
Oh, the horror...of having an ad on the cover of a device when it is turned off.
That's exactly what the horror is: the device is turned off and it is still displaying advertisements, like some undead zombie. This isn't the same as a static discrete logo on the corner or the bevel of some device (and no, I would not buy a device or an article of clothing that prominently featured a logo). The situation here is that you turn off a device and it's sitting on your coffee table still auto-updating advertising at you. *shudder*
Interesting post. I had no idea that ads were used to support the game. I purchased my copy for $5.99 at the App Store and play it on my MacBook Pro. I would never have tried it if I had to watch ads to play it. That would be incredibly annoying, even for 99 cents.
In our office, the dozen or so MacBook Pros we bought in 2007 have mostly died due to video failures, and my personal MacBook Pro purchased around that time is also going flaky. It's a crap shoot bringing them in to the Apple store for repair; sometimes they can pull a failure code from the diagnostics, and then they'll replace the mainboard for you without charge, but most of the time they want to charge you hundreds of $ for the repair.
Our older Thinkpads are still going strong.
Finally! The inability to have a real full screen application was one of the most frustrating aspects of transitioning to Mac OS X. The next most frustrating aspect was all the Apple fans telling me my head was just wired wrong if I missed that ability. Now, we have Apple promoting the full screen capability as a major innovation:
The app and nothing but the app.
On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can make a window in an app full screen with one click, switch to another app’s full-screen window with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your other apps — all without ever leaving the full-screen experience. Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.*
Sounds like Princeton University. Socially, the worst four years of my life, but academically it was amazing. I seriously considered moving from engineering to liberal arts due to the direct interaction I had with the philosophy and literature professors during precepts. The thing about Princeton was that professors focused on teaching undergraduates and not so much on their research or their graduate students. From what I understand that's pretty rare.
I agree, Streetview is wrong for this. The most annoying thing is that the camera seems to be about 10 feet off the floor, almost at ceiling level (at least for the Van Gogh museum). I keep wanting to slide the view point down a few feet to get a view level with the paintings, but instead I always wind up looking down at it from the ceiling. (BTW, this a beef that lots of people have with Streetview in the city streets: the camera is much higher than a normal person's height, so viewers can get a peek over your fence or into your home that normally wouldn't be possible if you were just walking outside).
OTOH, there is the slide show option (at least for the Van Gogh museum) that's much better for viewing the art.
It was very interesting to read about the smaller apparent image size (the "gathering in" effect mentioned in the article) of some stereoscopic moves. I've noticed this as well and it seems to be related to whether your eyes are converging or diverging. For instance, when using cross-eyed free viewing of stereo pairs (left eye sees image displayed on the right and vice-versa) the image looks small and cramped, whereas when using wall-eyed free viewing the image appears large and expansive. Does anybody have any insight into this and how it relates to stereoscopic projection in movie theaters? Perhaps this effect is just due to badly adjusting the convergence points in the editing process?
Sun's SunRay workstation worked the same way. Boot off the net, instant access to your work at a meeting exactly as you left it in your office, including 3D graphics streaming from a GPU server. Ahead of its time in so many ways. I miss Sun.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
Usenet is a store and forward message system that used to run on UUCP and dial-up connections. Bluetooth has the RFCOMM protocol. I think it would work.
... has a half-life of less than a day. Guess that might be appropriate for a prototype machine, but hopefully Google will be moving on to Cr-50 sometime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
"I started out thinking I wanted to see if a bad guy could make your laptop blow up. But that didn't happen," he said. "There are all kinds of things engineers build into these batteries to make them safe, and this is just one of them. I don't know if you could really melt the thing down."
Do most people even want to own movies? There are very few movies I'd ever want to watch a 2nd time, and if they suddenly became unavailable it wouldn't be a huge loss. In contrast, I think most people feel the opposite about music; a good song or album bears many repeated listenings and there is huge advantage in owning your own copy on your own media that nobody will be able to take away from you.
It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.
Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.
I've tried the DIY approach with my MacBooks and was never able to get reliable backups in the face of my household (including myself) closing and sleeping or shutting down the laptops in the middle of a backup. I finally got a Time Capsule and all those problems disappeared.
My guess is that the Time Capsule firmware along with AFP and Apple's native file systems all incorporate a lot of work into making Time Machine backups across WiFi from intermittently available computers a lot more reliable.
OTOH, I've not had any luck using the Time Capsule as a backup share for Windows 7. The Win7 Backup and Restore refuses to backup to a remote file system unless it's been formatted as NTFS. Norton Ghost doesn't work either, as apparently Time Capsule's Samba implementation has a 2GB limitation on the size of individual files, and full disk image backups are much larger than that.
So yes, I'm stuck with two separate backup solutions for the house. Thanks Apple and Microsoft!
I feel this way about social networking sites. As a software engineer I feel free to play with the interface on just about any program or device and try things out. On Facebook though, I worry about making a social error, blasting a personal message to the wrong people, or giving up more info than I want Facebook or its apps to have, and it tends to paralyze me. It's one of the few times I will ask somebody "what does this thing do?" or "how do you make it do that?". I guess that makes me "social-networking-stupid".
All the data that Google will be able to collect from these laptops and the Google services they enable are going to be worth way more to Google than $20 / mo. Google should be providing the laptop free of charge in exchange.
IBM Research a while back developed a product called Data Explorer (http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/) that used visual programming to create scientific visualizations of masses of data. It worked pretty well for many types of visualizations and it was popular amongst researchers at the time.
I've driven a number of CC-equipped vehicles over the years and they're all great on the straight-and-level roads but get to a corner or a hill and a lot of them can't cope.
You're turning corners while under cruise control?
Expecting humans to willingly take the time and effort to do it themselves to their source data manually is not realistic and a waste of time because it may not be known in advance the best way to organize for all consumers.
I highly doubt that it is realistic for non-humans to organize data in some optimal way for all consumers either. A particular taxonomy reflects a particular point of view of the world, and given all the different ways in which people view the world, coming to agreement over all consumers is impossible. It can work in limited population groups, such as scientists, art historians, or Usenet admins, but even then there are massive amounts of disagreement over the particular classification of any specific piece of information.
If anything, the public should be realizing that modern nuclear technology coupled with real, effective corporate compliance and government monitoring would make nuclear energy extremely safe and productive.
Emphasis mine. People now realize that those emphasized words are in realm of fantasy. The systems we build to support our energy needs need to be safe and effective without the need for elaborate corporate compliance measures and government monitoring, which will never be maintained over the long term.
IMHO, the EU is a perfect example of a central governing body where states rights being dominant would actually work well.
Wait, are you saying the the EU is working well? With Greece, then Ireland, and now Portugal having to undergo draconian austerity measures to deal with their inept local governing bodies spending too much, over-leveraging, and allowing the banks to screw them over?
The problem with the EU is that the individual states entered into a economic union without a strong central political union. So each state does what it wants without regard for the other states, but when they screw up, they can't just devalue their currencies and work their way out of it like they used to be able to. They instead get taken over by the other states in the EU who are pissed off at them for dragging down their economic union, trapped in a debt spiral that they'll probably never escape.
Oh, the horror ...of having an ad on the cover of a device when it is turned off.
That's exactly what the horror is: the device is turned off and it is still displaying advertisements, like some undead zombie. This isn't the same as a static discrete logo on the corner or the bevel of some device (and no, I would not buy a device or an article of clothing that prominently featured a logo). The situation here is that you turn off a device and it's sitting on your coffee table still auto-updating advertising at you. *shudder*
Interesting post. I had no idea that ads were used to support the game. I purchased my copy for $5.99 at the App Store and play it on my MacBook Pro. I would never have tried it if I had to watch ads to play it. That would be incredibly annoying, even for 99 cents.
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it.
Fixed:
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
In our office, the dozen or so MacBook Pros we bought in 2007 have mostly died due to video failures, and my personal MacBook Pro purchased around that time is also going flaky. It's a crap shoot bringing them in to the Apple store for repair; sometimes they can pull a failure code from the diagnostics, and then they'll replace the mainboard for you without charge, but most of the time they want to charge you hundreds of $ for the repair. Our older Thinkpads are still going strong.
The app and nothing but the app. On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can make a window in an app full screen with one click, switch to another app’s full-screen window with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your other apps — all without ever leaving the full-screen experience. Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.*
Sounds like Princeton University. Socially, the worst four years of my life, but academically it was amazing. I seriously considered moving from engineering to liberal arts due to the direct interaction I had with the philosophy and literature professors during precepts. The thing about Princeton was that professors focused on teaching undergraduates and not so much on their research or their graduate students. From what I understand that's pretty rare.
I agree, Streetview is wrong for this. The most annoying thing is that the camera seems to be about 10 feet off the floor, almost at ceiling level (at least for the Van Gogh museum). I keep wanting to slide the view point down a few feet to get a view level with the paintings, but instead I always wind up looking down at it from the ceiling. (BTW, this a beef that lots of people have with Streetview in the city streets: the camera is much higher than a normal person's height, so viewers can get a peek over your fence or into your home that normally wouldn't be possible if you were just walking outside).
OTOH, there is the slide show option (at least for the Van Gogh museum) that's much better for viewing the art.
It was very interesting to read about the smaller apparent image size (the "gathering in" effect mentioned in the article) of some stereoscopic moves. I've noticed this as well and it seems to be related to whether your eyes are converging or diverging. For instance, when using cross-eyed free viewing of stereo pairs (left eye sees image displayed on the right and vice-versa) the image looks small and cramped, whereas when using wall-eyed free viewing the image appears large and expansive. Does anybody have any insight into this and how it relates to stereoscopic projection in movie theaters? Perhaps this effect is just due to badly adjusting the convergence points in the editing process?
They'll probably green lasers in the US before they'll ban semi-automatic handguns.
Rats. ban green lasers, not green them.
They'll probably green lasers in the US before they'll ban semi-automatic handguns.
Sun's SunRay workstation worked the same way. Boot off the net, instant access to your work at a meeting exactly as you left it in your office, including 3D graphics streaming from a GPU server. Ahead of its time in so many ways. I miss Sun.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
Usenet is a store and forward message system that used to run on UUCP and dial-up connections. Bluetooth has the RFCOMM protocol. I think it would work.
Basically it seems that the FCC accepted most of the guidance that Google and Verizon collaborated upon back in August. Basic net neutrality for wired connections, no net neutrality for wireless: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/google-verizon-propose-open-vs-paid-internets/
... has a half-life of less than a day. Guess that might be appropriate for a prototype machine, but hopefully Google will be moving on to Cr-50 sometime soon.