Um I think I knew that already but thanks. That is why I said the non-syncing interface sucks. My main problem is the hiding of files, forcing an easily corruptible model, having underpowered text viewing features, and in general separating the "use as a hard disk" feature and forcing you to basically turn off the iPod to use it as a hard disk. I want to treat the iPod as a hard disk including all songs and video on it, erase from it by deleting files on it, and have a full synced backup of its ENTIRE contents on my computer. The iPod is mobile but the DRM forced it to be tied to a limited number of computers. Completely ignoring that it might be used by people who are nomadic moving between computers and also maybe in a cafe where there are a hundred computers all being refreshed daily. Syncing (as in rsync) might be useful when you want to do it intentionally but it is a total annoyance if you are already connecting the thing via usb and can use the device as an external disk. I hated the troublesome sync on my Palm and with this it is just dumb. Maybe for people who don't know how to use computers but I expect it was 1) because of the MAFIAA and 2) because the mount as hard disk feature is something Apple has experience with in the past. And maybe 3) so people don't mess their iPods up. Fact is I use my iPod more to shuttle and backup data, and play movies, than music. Maybe I store a movie on the hard disk side in the iPod for when I have time to convert it to mp4 (which takes an hour maybe) and launch iTunes and thread it into the other side of the iPod. When I use Red Kawa it sometimes can't even store the mp4 video on the iPod through iTunes, and I have to manually import into iTunes, then copy manually from iTunes library to iTunes on the iPod.
If I synced I would have my files deleted because they are not on this computer, etc. Perhaps I'm not the main demographic. I want to use the hardware the way I need to use, when I want to. The hard disk mode saved me when I had my site hacked a month ago. The video is fun but conversion to mp4 is extremely painful. Apple certainly could spare to include an mp4 video converter (or wmv player even) that runs when you plug it in. I don't want to slow my PC down when I'm doing work but the CPU on the iPod is just idling while it's charging.
But I don't think I agree when you say the iPod is incapable of being an ebook reader. At least when I define an ebook as an ASCII file under 500KB and if possible bold/italic/underline. Maybe displaying gif/png/jpeg though not required.
The CPU's likely more powerful than the Apple II that had a full word processor on it (felt like emacs a bit). I don't understand why it would have to parse a hundred notes and the name. It only has to load the next screen. Maybe the nano is a weakling but I have a color ipod and this thing is plenty powerful enough, the only problem maybe being the backlight being so strong it probably drains the battery. Anyway nobody's going to read an ebook on a nano-sized screen but I ought to be able to load a gig of text and view it. If I could put a hyperlinked set of manuals on it that would be useful too.
TFA is interesting but there's a lot else that can be done. I'm skeptical that a soldier would not get very tired in this setup, being wired into it, and that he could do better than a robotic unit could at this recognition of dim distant moving targets.
There were some posts about a "sixth sense" i.e. electromagnetic or something spooky. Maybe so, maybe we can sense quantum phenomena even but most likely this is an illusion that is based on a "background thread" circuit that is triggered by matching combinations of perceptions that may be below conscious levels.
These could include reflection (whites of the eyes), how a figure or features in the visual field move on short time scales, air currents and static electricity conducted by them (which is electromagnetic of course and you can feel it), scent / pheromones, all kinds of audible and vibratory cues including heartbeats of people around you, the list goes on. Possibly I bet we feel danger also when we are in an environment that is too noisy to pick up on these things, and we may feel stress when higher priorities are assigned to some combinations. For example I think you'd be jumpier if you detected someone weaving out of the corner of your eye when a train is rushing past the platform in front of you.
That said, I don't think I like the idea of soldiers killing people based on subsconscious cues. That's really bad to understate it. They would do much better to call Jaron Lanier who is working on synthetic senses. I read a very cool article about an experiment into synthesizing new senses (and I think it was Lanier but I could be wrong). By wearing a buzzer around your waist 24 hrs a day that buzzes depending on the direction of North, you actually can rewire your brain to get not only a strong sense of direction and never get lost, but also build an internal map of a city in your head based on it. There is a feeling of loss apparently when you stop.
Soldiers should get a version of this that can sense frequencies of sound, electromagnetic phenomena, subtle rhythmical signatures, and maybe satellite data too. A terahertz or audio based system like this would indeed create a "spidey sense" that is a new, real, synthesized sense, and my guess is TFA is while not totally a lie at least a bit of bluster to shield the other research they're doing. Very likely the low hanging fruit does not require expensive hardware, which is bad news for unequipped forces especially in urban environments.
According to a Bloomberg News article I found, the global cellphone market is forecast to grow 12% over the previous year and reach 1.14 billion units in 2007.
The same article describes how Motorola grabbed 4% more of the market,with Sony Ericcsson the star performer grabbing 8%.
Sony Ericcsson models (at least the one with music that I wanted to buy) when I looked cost about $500 bucks. These things aren't subsidized either. You pay a chunk up front and then a chunk all along.
So Ballmer says Apple will grab 2%? Wow. 2% of 1.14 billion is 22.8 million units. At $500 each, that's over 11 billion dollars. Apple's sales for the fiscal year ending Sept. 2006 was$19 billion. So Ballmer says they are going to have *only* this incredible success, whereas if Apple pulls anything at all interesting out of this hat it has a chance at going like Sony Ericcson, which actually has worse design and features than the iPhone?
That, plus the trend for phones toward full browsers, larger screens and music. Maybe not in the U.S. where people don't spend money and are happy with motorola bricks, but there is a distinct possibility the iPhone could grab market overseas too.
My forecast is Microsoft needs to start ordering in chairs by the busload.
Incidentally the crackers who ruined my server were trying to run a Bank of America phishing scam. Is there something about BoA that makes them an easy target? I can guess all sorts of lousy things but I'd like to know if anyone has real info.
I would be far more interested in a list of companies buying spam and profiting from spam. Names, addresses, phone/fax/email. Having reported this stuff and been hit once recently myself and not recovered from it yet, that is the only thing I want to see now. Get those blasted bankers, insurance and real estate agents into some concrete confinement!
Could be, I certainly was wowed by my nephew's. I would probably enjoy it but can't see myself with one on the train, I don't play games that much. Probably would prefer a zaurus or a linux-based palmtop. I really like the wilcom which has a phone and wince in it though the keyboard's a bit too small.
But I do believe that Apple is not making nearly enough use of having Mac OS X on the iPod. At least I think they do! It could be leveraged much more and there really is no excuse for limiting "notes" files to 4K. I mean that is brain dead. The notion that to view a file on my ipod I have to be careful how long a memo is, and if it's a long web page I have to save as a text file and then upload to a free text to notes converter site is totally outrageous. Apple's made 100 million of these things and the reason Blair or whoever mentioned fingerprint readers is that they are indeed useful for storing info. I used to read books on my palm all the time and this has a much more fabulous screen. All I need is the ability to make the font bigger, the ability to page down without twirling around the donut at glacial speed, and the ability to actually open a file over 4K. These things are all totally within reach of a simple software update. So why doesn't Apple do it? So they can sell iPhones??
It would be neat if you could hold a wimote in each hand as if you are holding a pair of tongs (or poles, or chopsticks), and pick things up. Like a UFO catcher type game, or lots of things.
I was at Tokyo U. computing artifacts dept in 97 and I can attest that it was relaxing if not thrilling when the light went out while I was on the toilet.
On the other hand the system they are talking about sounds a bit spooky if overzealous. Might be necessary, though some offices I've been in they try to get you out because otherwise the heating would have to be kicked in and cost more money..
This is great. Higher quality AND no DRM, whereas normally you'd think you would have to pay more for non-DRM. I take this as a serious attempt to get rid of DRM and make customers happy.
I can be made happier by getting rid of syncing. I HATE to sync! Hate, hate, hate!
I figure the idea of being able to use only a limited number of computers, and having to sync, is based on Apple's initial wish to make studios happy about their support for drm.
And there is one good thing about syncing I suppose, I used an Internet cafe computer once that had a hundred songs from in an iTunes library left on it. Huh!
The iPod's "sync only specific files" interface sucks and is outdated when you can have so many on your iPod too. And if I drag movies to my ipod in the iTunes app it just silently fails instead of say, starting a size conversion thread or telling me why. Dumb.
And I use my iPod like a hard disk a lot. It would be much better if I can drag music or video onto my iPod to a folder I can play/view from when detached from the computer. How about an expert mode that lets you view all the data in the ipod? And a database at Apple, or some other site like iMDB could be used to update the metadata db in the iPod. Right now everything is nailed down and nearly unhackable (how about a perl app for that Apple?).
If I could I'd like to ask for the iPod to be able to play video in it while connected, convert movies automatically (Red Kawa's iPod converter is so-so but best I've found on windows, though the Mac based handbrake is cool). I'd like to be able to view website archives and pdfs too, and while I'm at it, I'd like to be able to store absolutely huge astro or landscape photos and be able to zoom in on them with the ipod too. Oh and make it possible to use the ipod tactile interface for pageup/pagedown and maybe up/down/left/right too. A tap code would be acceptable to get into that mode.
In conclusion now that Apple is working hard to eliminate drm, I'd like them to make the iPod's software more user-friendly too, and they can start by taking the training wheels off. I'm not going to complain about how the video ipod dies after a couple hours of watching video (okay I just did complain but..) however it feels like Apple just used the function built into MacOS to let you plug in another mac as an external hard disk. That's totally 20th century.
Same about the "corrupted" state my ipod is perpetually in and the "do not unplug" logo. Very fragile I think. They should make use of the iPod screen when plugged in too, and most importantly, dare I repeat myself, GET RID OF THE SYNC! PLEASE! I don't want a sync.
I want to put music, movies, and ebooks (text or html files) in my iPod, I want to be able to put real sized photos in and read real sized text files with a real sized font size, and I want a real backup of my entire iPod on my hard disk. I don't want to have to delete things from my hard disk to delete them from my iPod or some such insanity. Now that Apple's sold enough of these things they can certainly afford to take the time to stop the insanity and STOP THE SYNC! Thank you.
A year ago I went looking for code to draw Gantt like charts (for project scheduling, not the whole kebab). I ended up rolling my own in GD with perl (making a wxPerl gui app). Reading this made me think (why doesn't he put it on CPAN) and then my next thought was (maybe I should put my own code up there before talking).
Not sure when I'll have time but anyway keep up the good work.
For everyone talking about design, yes it would not be a bad thing to take a first step to seeking designers interested in working on open source projects. Probably a bunch at every design department of a university and even high school maybe. Professionals may do it on their free time. Even choosing colors that go well is nice, and having a designer do a mockup of what they think it should look like might be enough for a programmer to grab on to.
It might be nice if there was an easier way to build charts (and yes I know JPGraph) but it seems you always want something custom in there, and only the person actually using it will know for sure if it is enough. Some more perl-based pluggable tools on CPAN for this would be a boon to a lot of people.
Incidentally I've done this before with driving the gimp from a perl program designed interactively with a readline-based gimp shell. It worked fabulously, and composited 1000 photos and as many html pages in about 5 minutes. But it was a one-off job. A simpler way to drive these tools (natural language based?) and get them configured would make them more accessible to people.
I was a little skeptical at first about the iPhone just because cell phones are already a massive industry with a lot more money flying around, and a very fast upgrade cycle. Though in the sluggish, low price U.S. market that may not be the case I had trouble seeing it competing with the hundreds of models in Japan say (though someone told me iPhone would be out through Softbank).
But these analysts sound really dumb, I'm sorry. They are saying things Apple must know and AT&T and others must have told them. Personally I think I might rather have a Willcom phone running CE with a keyboard etc but I'll wait until the iPhone comes out.
And about this thing about the iPhone being closed. This doesn't make any sense at all. All the other phones out there run applications. If it really is closed then maybe it could die but my guess is just that Apple wants to carefully control what goes in it (that's how the big phone providers like NTT DoCoMo etc. get rich) and supply all the valuable components themselves as widgets with the result being that it will be easier for developers to develop for it once you just buy into it, like writing a small HTML web page instead of programming a complex Java app and tuning it for different models. If Apple's smart they won't even charge much for it. A lot of phones on sale now can open (and some can edit) MS Office files but that may not be what enterprises really want.
An easy way to do purchases and view remote databases would be needed for impulse buys on iTunes anyway, and those components would be useful too. What I'd like to see is a system that makes it really cheap and easy to develop for the iPhone and server apps to it. My guess is Apple will provide those things. It is so open ended there is nothing for the analysts to grab onto yet. For example, if it automatically switched all phone calls onto a WLAN and synched to it wirelessly, that alone might be worth it.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will really try to go it alone, or try to create an ecosystem of vendors and create a lucrative, inclusive content production/distribution system. It might even boost Mac sales but I think they are just keeping most of the functionality under wraps on purpose. There are already copycat systems appearing.
It was about 1981 or 82 and my friend Stephen Hayes, then IIRC a Junior at Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey, showed me assembler code he had written for the Apple ][. I had pored over Steve Wozniak's code which was distributed with my Apple ][ as well. Hayes' assembler didn't look like dot matrix printouts, he wrote and debugged it in pencil, a function to a sheet of paper. What he built that I remember:
A Robotron arcade game clone. Was just like the real thing. I think I worked on the splash screen maybe.
A monochrome high resolution, realtime 3D Asteroids game which I have never seen before or since then. Your isoceles tetrahedral spaceship can be aimed anywhere in 3D using two game paddles (a dial and button each) for altitude and azimuth. The asteroids are dodecahedrons and what have you, and everything (shooting, pulverizing of asteroids, etc.) happens in an oblong IIRC wraparound game space.
A polyphonic synthesizer (also in 6502 assembler like everything else). You could press and release several (up to 5 or 7 IRIC) keys on the keyboard simultaneously, individually and for arbitrary lengths of time, and the program generated *simultaneously voiced* complex chords by adding together the notes. This was mind-numbing. He wrapped it in tin foil and gave a concert to the school on the stage of the school auditorium. It was the Cars, a song which was going through my head the other day which is maybe why I remember now. At any rate nobody was expecting you could do something like this with an Apple ][.
Programming the Apple in Basic was fun, but Pascal (using the 16KB language card) and 6502 assembler were awesome. Pascal was the reason I loved my brother's later Apple/// and why I felt such loss when it got discontinued. The idea that you can do things that weren't expected is a great thing about open source. If anything, making it easier to write safe low-level code and add safely and cheaply add circuits with clip-on fpga based units would be fabulous for education. I only wish I still had my 5 1/4" floppy data! And I wish I could use the Apple P.I.E. (Programmers' Interactive Editor) for daily work.
They killed the goose. It means the door is still open to wierd ideas like FTL, causality breakdown, the world as a simulation, the infinite probability drive, the bistromathic drive and oh, er, uhm, magic. It leers sideways at the anthropic principle, saying that the laws of the universe may be appropriate for human life but still appear to have a good deal of wiggle room, if not fully fledged bandersnatches and snarks hiding in wait. It means the rock-solid, steel-cased words physicists used to use to describe the world are really squishy, feeble things you wouldn't want to bet your life on. "Light Cone" indeed! You, giggling yes you, go out into the hall.
Thank you very much for your comment, even though it is perhaps a drastic suggestion. However as to your disagreement, I am in agreement with you. "Zaro boogs" indeed. However (and maybe I didn't express it well) my suggestion is that a feature freeze is implemented, which is why zero bugs is a goal.
Certainly there will be a threshold below which something is not considered a bug, but the idea is simply that if everybody (or at least a bunch of governments and business organizations) can agree on a frozen feature set then it becomes possible to more quickly remove bugs, improve security and even (if desirable) accelerate parts of it for use on lesser machines. Eventually snapshots of whole systems using a single unified directory structure, a single window manager, etc. that are frozen into place can easily be downloaded by people onto their machines and they know it will work and be sufficient for the task.
I think that if Microsoft, Intel and all the other companies that need to bloat software to make money are not in the driver's seat, it should be possible to greatly improve quality and reduce cost.
Probably it will also require the creation of experts who are not biased or paid by an interested company or its shills, to actually evaluate software packages or plugins and grade them as to how well they do their core job and interoperate with the rest of the system. Enforcing sanity, if you will. Does this make sense?
It's good to know that he's looking for a new gig.
This is the line that comes just before, "And then you win".
In the 19th century he might have been a colorful character but in the 21st century he is just an unscrupulous snake oil deale who is making a living out of being a nuisance to huge numbers of people. It just seems to be a relatively new art form / career because of the scale of it and the utter lack of ethics on the part of businessmen, politicians and journalists who collude with him.
The smart thing to do is monitor him and everyone he contacts like a hawk, and build up a dossier of all the participants of this community of jerks who will do anything to make a buck. Get all their names, addresses and account information and bag them all at once. Publish a book like the Clinton one that outlines the hypocrisy of each person, and how the money flows. It will include everyone from the RIAA to SCO to Microsoft to spammers to banks to congresspeople to organized crime to the White House, and probably has more to do with real crime than anything that actually makes it into the news... It is almost as if someone is controlling it all while laughing hysterically like a Batman movie criminal. What other reason is there for elected officials and judges to just let these dramas unwind and unwind? The alternate of course is just wait for him to retire and die, as soon as possible. It is hard to imagine someone like this doing anything but preying on society.
I get where you're coming from but the reality is probably more interesting. Of course businesses in general won't be looking at source code, but they will have MD5 (or better)hashes. Imagine this instead: finding vulnerabilities in code for popular apps will become bragging rights for budding engineers and a revolution is started when in addition to the ODF being used as a standard document format, major institutions also buy into a standard amount of horsepower and a standard feature set, that is for example OpenOffice.org version 3.50. It fufills every need unless you feel a need for bloatware. Then all that is left is to make sure that version is bulletproof, which happens gradually but is a fixed target. Once the number of bugs found approaches zero, two interesting things happen.
1. A set of standardized "flavors" gets decided on. By flavors I refer to a concept of Ingy dot Net's which he described at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo this month. He has a pretty complicated source tree with IIRC >200 modules submitted by many people. A flavor is defined as an operating set of modules as defined by a given person, and you can subscribe to a flavor.
2. The many eyes, the need for thesis projects, the Open Courseware and increased prowess of China and other countries lead to such competition that you get a lot more really sharp people extending code and creating new functions. This increases inversely as developers' available time increases. Corporate IT people finally get a stable infrastructure at least for the core system and are able to spend more time identifying real needs, which they can then share with developers around the world for cheap, quick, useful extensions.
I think this is a possible future. It doesn't take a genius to realize that an endless number of distros, constantly increasing features, and a perpetual subscription to slow script-driven code is just wasteful.
Vista wants 5GHz, it wants 10GHz, and if you had 50GHz Vista or Son of Vista or Mother of All Vista would happily borg it all up in 10 years I'm sure. Just how much power do you need to run a word processor? Electrical costs and hyperactive displays aren't needed. Maybe video streams, encryption and "calm computing" awareness of the user will eat up some of it.
It is entirely likely that sets of hardware and software requirements will become defined at a few levels of progressive capability, and people will finally know what to buy: the hardware+software package that has it all installed, and perhaps buy an extra certificate to add to a per-seat subscription to spam/virus/firewall/vulnerability related system updates.
Your argument only states the obvious, that no company will take on a science project at the risk of its bottom line. However, risk can be distributed, a fixed target is a fixed goal, and some companies and academic and governmental organizations will want to hire people to ensure infrastructure reliability and look at these problems.
A huge amount of effort that is currently wasted on Windows can be turned, through sharing and coordination of effort over the net, to cleaning up and eventually extending intelligently a fixed number of core business systems for a minimum number of necessary usage scenarios. It is possible that humans are intelligent enough for this kind of self-organizing mechanism to appear despite the pressures capitalism places on computing system development.
Sounds quite neat, I'd go into this field maybe if I was starting over again.. or maybe not. Unfortunately it also makes a number of horror and terror plots spring to mind including enough for a bookshelf of novels and finally a reason why people shouldn't bring viral vector laden liquid onto planes (besides their own blood). WMD just got a lot cheaper..
I'd rather see several detailed screenshots per machine with detailed info on exactly what software packages are used, how he likes them, and how, and how much, they are used.
I must be the only one who thinks displays look cooler with something displayed in them.
That said it is almost enough to get me to buy those dual 30" ultrasharp displays. I mean they must be readable if Dell has them at home, right? Just how much do those suckers cost I wonder.. Quality of LCD display is pretty important to me as my eyes need rest.
Thanks for your insight. I would value it as $5000 dollars lost but that is tough to prove, except for about $200 of telephone calls. The attachment problem is interesting, it sounds like someone needs an open source package so people can add this kind of functionality. I didn't even receive an automated response from Google, though.
As recent threads have noted it pays to spam, which is why this has grown into such a sophisticated industry. It almost (not quite?) seems like spending that time taking revenge on the phisher is more useful.. wouldn't google and yahoo (if they could get around liability) prefer to distribute a tool that admins could configure to drive a spike into hosts that deliver this junk? It's a matter of time...:) I can hope at least that there is an intelligent and calm triage process that is able to neutralize the most heinous incidents. Maybe they could teach ISPs something. My replacement server came with no iptables turned on and without even a compiler I could use to install some security software.
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This is why leaves die before they pay for themselves? I dunno.. your argument requires technology to stand still does it not?
Um I think I knew that already but thanks. That is why I said the non-syncing interface sucks. My main problem is the hiding of files, forcing an easily corruptible model, having underpowered text viewing features, and in general separating the "use as a hard disk" feature and forcing you to basically turn off the iPod to use it as a hard disk. I want to treat the iPod as a hard disk including all songs and video on it, erase from it by deleting files on it, and have a full synced backup of its ENTIRE contents on my computer. The iPod is mobile but the DRM forced it to be tied to a limited number of computers. Completely ignoring that it might be used by people who are nomadic moving between computers and also maybe in a cafe where there are a hundred computers all being refreshed daily. Syncing (as in rsync) might be useful when you want to do it intentionally but it is a total annoyance if you are already connecting the thing via usb and can use the device as an external disk. I hated the troublesome sync on my Palm and with this it is just dumb. Maybe for people who don't know how to use computers but I expect it was 1) because of the MAFIAA and 2) because the mount as hard disk feature is something Apple has experience with in the past. And maybe 3) so people don't mess their iPods up. Fact is I use my iPod more to shuttle and backup data, and play movies, than music. Maybe I store a movie on the hard disk side in the iPod for when I have time to convert it to mp4 (which takes an hour maybe) and launch iTunes and thread it into the other side of the iPod. When I use Red Kawa it sometimes can't even store the mp4 video on the iPod through iTunes, and I have to manually import into iTunes, then copy manually from iTunes library to iTunes on the iPod.
If I synced I would have my files deleted because they are not on this computer, etc. Perhaps I'm not the main demographic. I want to use the hardware the way I need to use, when I want to. The hard disk mode saved me when I had my site hacked a month ago. The video is fun but conversion to mp4 is extremely painful. Apple certainly could spare to include an mp4 video converter (or wmv player even) that runs when you plug it in. I don't want to slow my PC down when I'm doing work but the CPU on the iPod is just idling while it's charging.
Hi, thanks for your reply.
But I don't think I agree when you say the iPod is incapable of being an ebook reader. At least when I define an ebook as an ASCII file under 500KB and if possible bold/italic/underline. Maybe displaying gif/png/jpeg though not required.
The CPU's likely more powerful than the Apple II that had a full word processor on it (felt like emacs a bit). I don't understand why it would have to parse a hundred notes and the name. It only has to load the next screen. Maybe the nano is a weakling but I have a color ipod and this thing is plenty powerful enough, the only problem maybe being the backlight being so strong it probably drains the battery. Anyway nobody's going to read an ebook on a nano-sized screen but I ought to be able to load a gig of text and view it. If I could put a hyperlinked set of manuals on it that would be useful too.
TFA is interesting but there's a lot else that can be done. I'm skeptical that a soldier would not get very tired in this setup, being wired into it, and that he could do better than a robotic unit could at this recognition of dim distant moving targets.
There were some posts about a "sixth sense" i.e. electromagnetic or something spooky. Maybe so, maybe we can sense quantum phenomena even but most likely this is an illusion that is based on a "background thread" circuit that is triggered by matching combinations of perceptions that may be below conscious levels.
These could include reflection (whites of the eyes), how a figure or features in the visual field move on short time scales, air currents and static electricity conducted by them (which is electromagnetic of course and you can feel it), scent / pheromones, all kinds of audible and vibratory cues including heartbeats of people around you, the list goes on. Possibly I bet we feel danger also when we are in an environment that is too noisy to pick up on these things, and we may feel stress when higher priorities are assigned to some combinations. For example I think you'd be jumpier if you detected someone weaving out of the corner of your eye when a train is rushing past the platform in front of you.
That said, I don't think I like the idea of soldiers killing people based on subsconscious cues. That's really bad to understate it. They would do much better to call Jaron Lanier who is working on synthetic senses. I read a very cool article about an experiment into synthesizing new senses (and I think it was Lanier but I could be wrong). By wearing a buzzer around your waist 24 hrs a day that buzzes depending on the direction of North, you actually can rewire your brain to get not only a strong sense of direction and never get lost, but also build an internal map of a city in your head based on it. There is a feeling of loss apparently when you stop.
Soldiers should get a version of this that can sense frequencies of sound, electromagnetic phenomena, subtle rhythmical signatures, and maybe satellite data too. A terahertz or audio based system like this would indeed create a "spidey sense" that is a new, real, synthesized sense, and my guess is TFA is while not totally a lie at least a bit of bluster to shield the other research they're doing. Very likely the low hanging fruit does not require expensive hardware, which is bad news for unequipped forces especially in urban environments.
Excellent points and what I want too.
According to a Bloomberg News article I found, the global cellphone market is forecast to grow 12% over the previous year and reach 1.14 billion units in 2007.
The same article describes how Motorola grabbed 4% more of the market,with Sony Ericcsson the star performer grabbing 8%.
Sony Ericcsson models (at least the one with music that I wanted to buy) when I looked cost about $500 bucks. These things aren't subsidized either. You pay a chunk up front and then a chunk all along.
So Ballmer says Apple will grab 2%? Wow. 2% of 1.14 billion is 22.8 million units. At $500 each, that's over 11 billion dollars. Apple's sales for the fiscal year ending Sept. 2006 was$19 billion. So Ballmer says they are going to have *only* this incredible success, whereas if Apple pulls anything at all interesting out of this hat it has a chance at going like Sony Ericcson, which actually has worse design and features than the iPhone?
That, plus the trend for phones toward full browsers, larger screens and music. Maybe not in the U.S. where people don't spend money and are happy with motorola bricks, but there is a distinct possibility the iPhone could grab market overseas too.
My forecast is Microsoft needs to start ordering in chairs by the busload.
Incidentally the crackers who ruined my server were trying to run a Bank of America phishing scam. Is there something about BoA that makes them an easy target? I can guess all sorts of lousy things but I'd like to know if anyone has real info.
I would be far more interested in a list of companies buying spam and profiting from spam. Names, addresses, phone/fax/email. Having reported this stuff and been hit once recently myself and not recovered from it yet, that is the only thing I want to see now. Get those blasted bankers, insurance and real estate agents into some concrete confinement!
Could be, I certainly was wowed by my nephew's. I would probably enjoy it but can't see myself with one on the train, I don't play games that much. Probably would prefer a zaurus or a linux-based palmtop. I really like the wilcom which has a phone and wince in it though the keyboard's a bit too small.
But I do believe that Apple is not making nearly enough use of having Mac OS X on the iPod. At least I think they do! It could be leveraged much more and there really is no excuse for limiting "notes" files to 4K. I mean that is brain dead. The notion that to view a file on my ipod I have to be careful how long a memo is, and if it's a long web page I have to save as a text file and then upload to a free text to notes converter site is totally outrageous. Apple's made 100 million of these things and the reason Blair or whoever mentioned fingerprint readers is that they are indeed useful for storing info. I used to read books on my palm all the time and this has a much more fabulous screen. All I need is the ability to make the font bigger, the ability to page down without twirling around the donut at glacial speed, and the ability to actually open a file over 4K. These things are all totally within reach of a simple software update. So why doesn't Apple do it? So they can sell iPhones??
Perhaps someone who finds his work useful would like to edit his English site docs or provide other translations?
It would be neat if you could hold a wimote in each hand as if you are holding a pair of tongs (or poles, or chopsticks), and pick things up. Like a UFO catcher type game, or lots of things.
I was at Tokyo U. computing artifacts dept in 97 and I can attest that it was relaxing if not thrilling when the light went out while I was on the toilet.
On the other hand the system they are talking about sounds a bit spooky if overzealous. Might be necessary, though some offices I've been in they try to get you out because otherwise the heating would have to be kicked in and cost more money..
This is great. Higher quality AND no DRM, whereas normally you'd think you would have to pay more for non-DRM. I take this as a serious attempt to get rid of DRM and make customers happy.
I can be made happier by getting rid of syncing. I HATE to sync! Hate, hate, hate!
I figure the idea of being able to use only a limited number of computers, and having to sync, is based on Apple's initial wish to make studios happy about their support for drm.
And there is one good thing about syncing I suppose, I used an Internet cafe computer once that had a hundred songs from in an iTunes library left on it. Huh!
The iPod's "sync only specific files" interface sucks and is outdated when you can have so many on your iPod too. And if I drag movies to my ipod in the iTunes app it just silently fails instead of say, starting a size conversion thread or telling me why. Dumb.
And I use my iPod like a hard disk a lot. It would be much better if I can drag music or video onto my iPod to a folder I can play/view from when detached from the computer. How about an expert mode that lets you view all the data in the ipod? And a database at Apple, or some other site like iMDB could be used to update the metadata db in the iPod. Right now everything is nailed down and nearly unhackable (how about a perl app for that Apple?).
If I could I'd like to ask for the iPod to be able to play video in it while connected, convert movies automatically (Red Kawa's iPod converter is so-so but best I've found on windows, though the Mac based handbrake is cool). I'd like to be able to view website archives and pdfs too, and while I'm at it, I'd like to be able to store absolutely huge astro or landscape photos and be able to zoom in on them with the ipod too. Oh and make it possible to use the ipod tactile interface for pageup/pagedown and maybe up/down/left/right too. A tap code would be acceptable to get into that mode.
In conclusion now that Apple is working hard to eliminate drm, I'd like them to make the iPod's software more user-friendly too, and they can start by taking the training wheels off. I'm not going to complain about how the video ipod dies after a couple hours of watching video (okay I just did complain but..) however it feels like Apple just used the function built into MacOS to let you plug in another mac as an external hard disk. That's totally 20th century.
Same about the "corrupted" state my ipod is perpetually in and the "do not unplug" logo. Very fragile I think. They should make use of the iPod screen when plugged in too, and most importantly, dare I repeat myself, GET RID OF THE SYNC! PLEASE! I don't want a sync.
I want to put music, movies, and ebooks (text or html files) in my iPod, I want to be able to put real sized photos in and read real sized text files with a real sized font size, and I want a real backup of my entire iPod on my hard disk. I don't want to have to delete things from my hard disk to delete them from my iPod or some such insanity. Now that Apple's sold enough of these things they can certainly afford to take the time to stop the insanity and STOP THE SYNC! Thank you.
A year ago I went looking for code to draw Gantt like charts (for project scheduling, not the whole kebab).
I ended up rolling my own in GD with perl (making a wxPerl gui app). Reading this made me think (why doesn't he put it on CPAN) and then my next thought was (maybe I should put my own code up there before talking).
Not sure when I'll have time but anyway keep up the good work.
For everyone talking about design, yes it would not be a bad thing to take a first step to seeking designers interested in working on open source projects. Probably a bunch at every design department of a university and even high school maybe. Professionals may do it on their free time. Even choosing colors that go well is nice, and having a designer do a mockup of what they think it should look like might be enough for a programmer to grab on to.
It might be nice if there was an easier way to build charts (and yes I know JPGraph) but it seems you always want something custom in there, and only the person actually using it will know for sure if it is enough. Some more perl-based pluggable tools on CPAN for this would be a boon to a lot of people.
Incidentally I've done this before with driving the gimp from a perl program designed interactively with a readline-based gimp shell. It worked fabulously, and composited 1000 photos and as many html pages in about 5 minutes. But it was a one-off job. A simpler way to drive these tools (natural language based?) and get them configured would make them more accessible to people.
TFA is to an AP news story but displayed on iWon. Is this not the same iWon that keeps spamming me all the time????
Who the hell are these people?
Ahah! So I am not standing out in the hall alone. Thank you.
I was a little skeptical at first about the iPhone just because cell phones are already a massive industry with a lot more money flying around, and a very fast upgrade cycle. Though in the sluggish, low price U.S. market that may not be the case I had trouble seeing it competing with the hundreds of models in Japan say (though someone told me iPhone would be out through Softbank).
But these analysts sound really dumb, I'm sorry. They are saying things Apple must know and AT&T and others must have told them. Personally I think I might rather have a Willcom phone running CE with a keyboard etc but I'll wait until the iPhone comes out.
And about this thing about the iPhone being closed. This doesn't make any sense at all. All the other phones out there run applications. If it really is closed then maybe it could die but my guess is just that Apple wants to carefully control what goes in it (that's how the big phone providers like NTT DoCoMo etc. get rich) and supply all the valuable components themselves as widgets with the result being that it will be easier for developers to develop for it once you just buy into it, like writing a small HTML web page instead of programming a complex Java app and tuning it for different models. If Apple's smart they won't even charge much for it. A lot of phones on sale now can open (and some can edit) MS Office files but that may not be what enterprises really want.
An easy way to do purchases and view remote databases would be needed for impulse buys on iTunes anyway, and those components would be useful too. What I'd like to see is a system that makes it really cheap and easy to develop for the iPhone and server apps to it. My guess is Apple will provide those things. It is so open ended there is nothing for the analysts to grab onto yet. For example, if it automatically switched all phone calls onto a WLAN and synched to it wirelessly, that alone might be worth it.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will really try to go it alone, or try to create an ecosystem of vendors and create a lucrative, inclusive content production/distribution system. It might even boost Mac sales but I think they are just keeping most of the functionality under wraps on purpose. There are already copycat systems appearing.
It was about 1981 or 82 and my friend Stephen Hayes, then IIRC a Junior at Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey, showed me assembler code he had written for the Apple ][. I had pored over Steve Wozniak's code which was distributed with my Apple ][ as well. Hayes' assembler didn't look like dot matrix printouts, he wrote and debugged it in pencil, a function to a sheet of paper. What he built that I remember:
/// and why I felt such loss when it got discontinued. The idea that you can do things that weren't expected is a great thing about open source. If anything, making it easier to write safe low-level code and add safely and cheaply add circuits with clip-on fpga based units would be fabulous for education. I only wish I still had my 5 1/4" floppy data! And I wish I could use the Apple P.I.E. (Programmers' Interactive Editor) for daily work.
A Robotron arcade game clone. Was just like the real thing. I think I worked on the splash screen maybe.
A monochrome high resolution, realtime 3D Asteroids game which I have never seen before or since then. Your isoceles tetrahedral spaceship can be aimed anywhere in 3D using two game paddles (a dial and button each) for altitude and azimuth. The asteroids are dodecahedrons and what have you, and everything (shooting, pulverizing of asteroids, etc.) happens in an oblong IIRC wraparound game space.
A polyphonic synthesizer (also in 6502 assembler like everything else). You could press and release several (up to 5 or 7 IRIC) keys on the keyboard simultaneously, individually and for arbitrary lengths of time, and the program generated *simultaneously voiced* complex chords by adding together the notes. This was mind-numbing. He wrapped it in tin foil and gave a concert to the school on the stage of the school auditorium. It was the Cars, a song which was going through my head the other day which is maybe why I remember now. At any rate nobody was expecting you could do something like this with an Apple ][.
Programming the Apple in Basic was fun, but Pascal (using the 16KB language card) and 6502 assembler were awesome. Pascal was the reason I loved my brother's later Apple
They killed the goose. It means the door is still open to wierd ideas like FTL, causality breakdown, the world as a simulation, the infinite probability drive, the bistromathic drive and oh, er, uhm, magic. It leers sideways at the anthropic principle, saying that the laws of the universe may be appropriate for human life but still appear to have a good deal of wiggle room, if not fully fledged bandersnatches and snarks hiding in wait. It means the rock-solid, steel-cased words physicists used to use to describe the world are really squishy, feeble things you wouldn't want to bet your life on. "Light Cone" indeed! You, giggling yes you, go out into the hall.
Thank you very much for your comment, even though it is perhaps a drastic suggestion. However as to your disagreement, I am in agreement with you. "Zaro boogs" indeed. However (and maybe I didn't express it well) my suggestion is that a feature freeze is implemented, which is why zero bugs is a goal.
Certainly there will be a threshold below which something is not considered a bug, but the idea is simply that if everybody (or at least a bunch of governments and business organizations) can agree on a frozen feature set then it becomes possible to more quickly remove bugs, improve security and even (if desirable) accelerate parts of it for use on lesser machines. Eventually snapshots of whole systems using a single unified directory structure, a single window manager, etc. that are frozen into place can easily be downloaded by people onto their machines and they know it will work and be sufficient for the task.
I think that if Microsoft, Intel and all the other companies that need to bloat software to make money are not in the driver's seat, it should be possible to greatly improve quality and reduce cost.
Probably it will also require the creation of experts who are not biased or paid by an interested company or its shills, to actually evaluate software packages or plugins and grade them as to how well they do their core job and interoperate with the rest of the system. Enforcing sanity, if you will. Does this make sense?
It's good to know that he's looking for a new gig.
This is the line that comes just before, "And then you win".
In the 19th century he might have been a colorful character but in the 21st century he is just an unscrupulous snake oil deale who is making a living out of being a nuisance to huge numbers of people. It just seems to be a relatively new art form / career because of the scale of it and the utter lack of ethics on the part of businessmen, politicians and journalists who collude with him.
The smart thing to do is monitor him and everyone he contacts like a hawk, and build up a dossier of all the participants of this community of jerks who will do anything to make a buck. Get all their names, addresses and account information and bag them all at once. Publish a book like the Clinton one that outlines the hypocrisy of each person, and how the money flows. It will include everyone from the RIAA to SCO to Microsoft to spammers to banks to congresspeople to organized crime to the White House, and probably has more to do with real crime than anything that actually makes it into the news... It is almost as if someone is controlling it all while laughing hysterically like a Batman movie criminal. What other reason is there for elected officials and judges to just let these dramas unwind and unwind? The alternate of course is just wait for him to retire and die, as soon as possible. It is hard to imagine someone like this doing anything but preying on society.
I get where you're coming from but the reality is probably more interesting. Of course businesses in general won't be looking at source code, but they will have MD5 (or better)hashes. Imagine this instead: finding vulnerabilities in code for popular apps will become bragging rights for budding engineers and a revolution is started when in addition to the ODF being used as a standard document format, major institutions also buy into a standard amount of horsepower and a standard feature set, that is for example OpenOffice.org version 3.50. It fufills every need unless you feel a need for bloatware. Then all that is left is to make sure that version is bulletproof, which happens gradually but is a fixed target. Once the number of bugs found approaches zero, two interesting things happen.
1. A set of standardized "flavors" gets decided on. By flavors I refer to a concept of Ingy dot Net's which he described at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo this month. He has a pretty complicated source tree with IIRC >200 modules submitted by many people. A flavor is defined as an operating set of modules as defined by a given person, and you can subscribe to a flavor.
2. The many eyes, the need for thesis projects, the Open Courseware and increased prowess of China and other countries lead to such competition that you get a lot more really sharp people extending code and creating new functions. This increases inversely as developers' available time increases. Corporate IT people finally get a stable infrastructure at least for the core system and are able to spend more time identifying real needs, which they can then share with developers around the world for cheap, quick, useful extensions.
I think this is a possible future. It doesn't take a genius to realize that an endless number of distros, constantly increasing features, and a perpetual subscription to slow script-driven code is just wasteful.
Vista wants 5GHz, it wants 10GHz, and if you had 50GHz Vista or Son of Vista or Mother of All Vista would happily borg it all up in 10 years I'm sure. Just how much power do you need to run a word processor? Electrical costs and hyperactive displays aren't needed. Maybe video streams, encryption and "calm computing" awareness of the user will eat up some of it.
It is entirely likely that sets of hardware and software requirements will become defined at a few levels of progressive capability, and people will finally know what to buy: the hardware+software package that has it all installed, and perhaps buy an extra certificate to add to a per-seat subscription to spam/virus/firewall/vulnerability related system updates.
Your argument only states the obvious, that no company will take on a science project at the risk of its bottom line. However, risk can be distributed, a fixed target is a fixed goal, and some companies and academic and governmental organizations will want to hire people to ensure infrastructure reliability and look at these problems.
A huge amount of effort that is currently wasted on Windows can be turned, through sharing and coordination of effort over the net, to cleaning up and eventually extending intelligently a fixed number of core business systems for a minimum number of necessary usage scenarios. It is possible that humans are intelligent enough for this kind of self-organizing mechanism to appear despite the pressures capitalism places on computing system development.
Sounds quite neat, I'd go into this field maybe if I was starting over again.. or maybe not. Unfortunately it also makes a number of horror and terror plots spring to mind including enough for a bookshelf of novels and finally a reason why people shouldn't bring viral vector laden liquid onto planes (besides their own blood). WMD just got a lot cheaper..
I'd rather see several detailed screenshots per machine with detailed info on exactly what software packages are used, how he likes them, and how, and how much, they are used.
I must be the only one who thinks displays look cooler with something displayed in them.
That said it is almost enough to get me to buy those dual 30" ultrasharp displays. I mean they must be readable if Dell has them at home, right? Just how much do those suckers cost I wonder.. Quality of LCD display is pretty important to me as my eyes need rest.
Thanks for your insight. I would value it as $5000 dollars lost but that is tough to prove, except for about $200 of telephone calls. The attachment problem is interesting, it sounds like someone needs an open source package so people can add this kind of functionality. I didn't even receive an automated response from Google, though.
As recent threads have noted it pays to spam, which is why this has grown into such a sophisticated industry. It almost (not quite?) seems like spending that time taking revenge on the phisher is more useful.. wouldn't google and yahoo (if they could get around liability) prefer to distribute a tool that admins could configure to drive a spike into hosts that deliver this junk? It's a matter of time...:) I can hope at least that there is an intelligent and calm triage process that is able to neutralize the most heinous incidents. Maybe they could teach ISPs something. My replacement server came with no iptables turned on and without even a compiler I could use to install some security software.