Kudos. I created the first e-commerce site in Flash, before most people even knew what Flash was, and no one really gives a shit. Unfortunately, hitting one out of the park in terms of web development requires better PR than technical skills. With AJAX, it's simpy taken this long to become popular. At least we can be thankful that, now that it is popular, we're already ahead of the curve, eh?
I'm glad to see another serious technical article on the pros and cons of implementing an AJAX solution. Most everyone who says the acronym "AJAX" usually falls into one of two camps - either the "OMFGZ teh AJAX is so amazing! It will change the interweb!" How? Oh, it allows parts of the page to be updated without a refresh. How interesting. Perhaps you could go a little more in-depth? No? Thanks...
The other camp... too many Slashdotters, IMO... feel the need to flex their superior understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the internet and development and offer this gem: "AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. Nothing to see here".
The automobile was just an assortment of pre-existing technologies, and it radically changed the world. It also introduced a whole bevy of new challenges, both technical and otherwise, that we still haven't fully figured out yet. It was not a transportation panacea, and AJAX is no cure-all. But just because it doesn't solve every problem doesn't mean it doesn't have the power to be revolutionary.
This will benefit MS in the long run - the goal is not to take programmers and turn them into graphic designers, but rather to make sure that the programmers understand the principles of good design. If the person who designs something cannot communicate with the person who builds it, that will cause serious problems - and with Microsoft products, it sometimes has. Any decision that is even slightly ambiguous or left from the design instructions might be made by a person who has no schooling in design principles, and this aims to correct that.
That is the reason Apple UIs, while flawed as well, are generally superior to the Windows UI (and this is coming from a very big Windows fan) in terms of basic design principles. Programmers often underestimate or misunderstand the importance (or even existence!) of concrete, in-depth ideas of what it is about the design of interactive products - universally - makes them easy and pleasant to use.
The world of Slashdot readers is populated with a high percentage of people who are actually interested in a professional gamer's KTD. The rest of the world is not.
And it's not just because the rest of the world is still populated primarily by the sort of middle aged and old folks who still don't understand computers. Go to any high school, any college campus in the modern world and most of the students care about rugby, or football, or what have you. They will grow old continuing to care about such things, and it will not be a generational change. This will always be fringe.
It's not breakable, slick. At least not for any practical purposes - Ars Technica Threw it out of a car at 50mph and then ran over it - twice - and the player continued to function normally. The cosmetics were pretty trashed and the screen damaged, but if the most you'll do is drop it on the pavement from 3 1/2 feet, I'd say it's pretty safe.
flash-based player
Flash memory is expensive. You can get 40 gigs of space but it is hard disk space, which runs the considerable risk of dying if you drop it on a hard floor from elbow level, and will skip if shaken too hard. You are also paying for the benefits of solid-state memory.
1. It is both efficient and sturdy. In addition to reading online reviews, I've been using my own for just over 24 hours now and it is fantastic. Did you not read the last Slashdot post on its durability testing? I'd call withstanding being hurled out the window of a moving car at 50mph, then run over twice and still playing fine pretty sturdy. Yes, it looks and feels very fragile at first, but slipped into one of those rubber sheaths and it's almost indestructable.
It costs 199 or 249 - for a flash-based player with that much capacity, it is a very reasonable price. And remember, you aren't just paying for the technology, but the unparalleled industrial design genius that has been poured into the iPod. Its interface is, after all, the standard against which all others are judged.
The user interface is one of the top reasons people buy iPods - almost every review of every MP3 player compares the interface to the iPod and almost every other brand falls short - the iPod truly is the standard against which all else is compared.
In industrial design, as with programming, the best solution is difficult/expensive to attain but is elegant and almost mind-bogglingly simple. A perfect example: the iPod click-wheel and the way it works with the iPod OS.
The great thing about the Nano (from an Apple perspective anyway) is that it hits the price vs. features sweet spot that fills the last gap - anyone who didn't have an iPod before, because the big'uns are too expensive or the Shuffle is too... well, the non-geek is pretty incredulous when told "no, it doesn't have a screen".
The Mini's, while selling well, really did overlap the iPod's market, because they were practically the same size - essentially trading price for capacity. That leaves the two on pretty equal standing, whereas the Nano changes the dynamic altogether. The price AND size/weight vs capacity will draw in that previously alienated market who want a fully functional player but not their entire library in their pocket. Bravo Apple!
I don't understand why it is so "assumed" by the author and most of the readers that there is something inherently wrong with a 72% profit margin. Many industries routinely mark up their final prices more than 1000% percent over cost - and that is perfectly justified as well. It's called capitalism... charge as much as you can get away with. Where is the crime?
That's not a boycott - no one had to be "informed" that they shouldn't buy Divx. They just looked at the product "features" and thought to themselves, "that sounds stupid. I'm not buying that" because it WAS stupid.
Unfortunately, I believe we're at a different point in society now, and most people will be perfectly happy to let their new DVD player autodetect and utilize their unprotected 802.11g router they bought because the guy at CompUSA said to.
I don't think the big news here is that Apple is making a Shuffle-Mini hybrid, but that Fourty percent of the world's Samsung Flash memory stock is going to be eaten by a single buyer. Think about how many different manufacturers and resellers buy that memory - and 40% of it is going to Apple. Wow.
While it is an interesting project from a hobbyist and academic standpoint, I'm not really sure what practical value it holds (unless the intent is to sell a mature algorithm to spammers, which is not the case since the project is being published). This is nothing more than a personal scripting project - no new forray into new concepts of computer science or pattern recognition; no new breakthroughs of computer-based heuristics.
I'm 20 years old for god's sake. When I was in high school I did the same thing (except I wasn't stupid enough to get caught). My point is simply that the law is the law, and I summarized what that particular law says. No one can escape it. No one should be able to. If you get caught you pay the price.
Only the sensationalist news media has called the teens "hackers". Believe it or not, most judges understand the difference, and their defense lawyers will at least argue the point enough to inform any jury that gaining access is not the same as hacking.
Regardless
The law is not about hacking, it is about Unauthorized Entry. You don't have to pick the lock to be somewhere you shouldn't, and you don't have to cut through any fences to be prosecuted.
It has generally been the trend that the more complex a system becomes, similarities it will have to the foundations of the modern operating system. ATMs are a prime example of machines that started as moderately sophisticated PCBs and now routinely run Windows Embedded.
If a vehicle is "smart" enough to handle driving, it will have the computational power and flexibility to run reasonably sophisticated software. Consider that increasing wireless bandwidth (WiMax, anyone?) will lead to offloading the heavy-duty positional and map processing to a remote service over the Internet, with the software to display becoming a thin client for a remote database. A clever programmer will find a stack overflow in MapQuestClientForYourCar and BAM! Suddenly cars are automatically veering for each other instead of away.
The level of scrutiny and security applied to such systems will have to be on par, or higher than, such applications as air traffic controlling before it can be considered safe.
"The ministry plans to request a budget of more than 1 billion yen to help fund the project"
More than a billion yen! That could pay for... the airfare of bringing in specialists to work on the project. A billion yen is 9 million dollars. If the US President said he was committing 9 million to developing a tacticle holographic television it'd be the biggest joke since "I did not have sexual relations..."
Are we forgetting this is in a country where people regularly pay more than a million in their currency for a car?
Why should you have to relearn? Appending to your skillset regularly is what separates the 30k/year programmers from the 150k/year ones. Then you don't have to wear the same old ratty clothes!
Aye, I said companies have been selling them. We have several dual-gigabit cards in servers where I work, but you're right it's mostly for fault tolerance. If network bandwidth really was a problem, then the infrastructure would be upgraded to handle the necessary load, not just dole out extra NICs and load-balance.
Such gimmicky devices never take off. They proport to be some groundbreaking new amazingness when in actuality it's "a bunch of WiFi transceivers stacked on top of each other". That's not new, and it's not amazing. Companies have for years sold network cards that work by load-balancing traffic across multiple CAT5 lines - a good idea, sure, but it's never going to be widely accepted. How many double-100baseT NICs do you have? If you needed more than 100mbps, you'd buy gigabit ethernet. People who need more wireless speed are going to wait for the next step in technology, not a bunch of the same thing duct-taped together and put in a shiny plastic case.
I wrote a very robust calculator in C++ when I was 9, and no one gave a shit except my dad, who thought it was pretty cool. Windows GUI apps in C++ are 10 degrees of difficulty over C#. Is it because she's a girl, or because she's from Pakistan? Or both? Getting her MS cert is laudable, to be sure, but I didn't get to meet Bill when I taught myself Visual Basic at age 8. Moth is right - it's nothing but circumstance. Tell the right person about yourself and suddenly you're international news.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos. I created the first e-commerce site in Flash, before most people even knew what Flash was, and no one really gives a shit. Unfortunately, hitting one out of the park in terms of web development requires better PR than technical skills. With AJAX, it's simpy taken this long to become popular. At least we can be thankful that, now that it is popular, we're already ahead of the curve, eh?
I'm glad to see another serious technical article on the pros and cons of implementing an AJAX solution. Most everyone who says the acronym "AJAX" usually falls into one of two camps - either the "OMFGZ teh AJAX is so amazing! It will change the interweb!" How? Oh, it allows parts of the page to be updated without a refresh. How interesting. Perhaps you could go a little more in-depth? No? Thanks...
The other camp... too many Slashdotters, IMO... feel the need to flex their superior understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the internet and development and offer this gem: "AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. Nothing to see here".
The automobile was just an assortment of pre-existing technologies, and it radically changed the world. It also introduced a whole bevy of new challenges, both technical and otherwise, that we still haven't fully figured out yet. It was not a transportation panacea, and AJAX is no cure-all. But just because it doesn't solve every problem doesn't mean it doesn't have the power to be revolutionary.
This will benefit MS in the long run - the goal is not to take programmers and turn them into graphic designers, but rather to make sure that the programmers understand the principles of good design. If the person who designs something cannot communicate with the person who builds it, that will cause serious problems - and with Microsoft products, it sometimes has. Any decision that is even slightly ambiguous or left from the design instructions might be made by a person who has no schooling in design principles, and this aims to correct that. That is the reason Apple UIs, while flawed as well, are generally superior to the Windows UI (and this is coming from a very big Windows fan) in terms of basic design principles. Programmers often underestimate or misunderstand the importance (or even existence!) of concrete, in-depth ideas of what it is about the design of interactive products - universally - makes them easy and pleasant to use.
The microrobot is much smaller as less massive than previous controllable microrobots.
Do you even glance at these before hitting "publish"?
It's the same as me offering subdomains on my privately-held domain, but having a catchall as well. Why is this even an issue?
The world of Slashdot readers is populated with a high percentage of people who are actually interested in a professional gamer's KTD. The rest of the world is not.
And it's not just because the rest of the world is still populated primarily by the sort of middle aged and old folks who still don't understand computers. Go to any high school, any college campus in the modern world and most of the students care about rugby, or football, or what have you. They will grow old continuing to care about such things, and it will not be a generational change. This will always be fringe.
It's not breakable, slick. At least not for any practical purposes - Ars Technica Threw it out of a car at 50mph and then ran over it - twice - and the player continued to function normally. The cosmetics were pretty trashed and the screen damaged, but if the most you'll do is drop it on the pavement from 3 1/2 feet, I'd say it's pretty safe.
flash-based player Flash memory is expensive. You can get 40 gigs of space but it is hard disk space, which runs the considerable risk of dying if you drop it on a hard floor from elbow level, and will skip if shaken too hard. You are also paying for the benefits of solid-state memory.
1. It is both efficient and sturdy. In addition to reading online reviews, I've been using my own for just over 24 hours now and it is fantastic. Did you not read the last Slashdot post on its durability testing? I'd call withstanding being hurled out the window of a moving car at 50mph, then run over twice and still playing fine pretty sturdy. Yes, it looks and feels very fragile at first, but slipped into one of those rubber sheaths and it's almost indestructable.
It costs 199 or 249 - for a flash-based player with that much capacity, it is a very reasonable price. And remember, you aren't just paying for the technology, but the unparalleled industrial design genius that has been poured into the iPod. Its interface is, after all, the standard against which all others are judged.
The user interface is one of the top reasons people buy iPods - almost every review of every MP3 player compares the interface to the iPod and almost every other brand falls short - the iPod truly is the standard against which all else is compared.
In industrial design, as with programming, the best solution is difficult/expensive to attain but is elegant and almost mind-bogglingly simple. A perfect example: the iPod click-wheel and the way it works with the iPod OS.
The great thing about the Nano (from an Apple perspective anyway) is that it hits the price vs. features sweet spot that fills the last gap - anyone who didn't have an iPod before, because the big'uns are too expensive or the Shuffle is too... well, the non-geek is pretty incredulous when told "no, it doesn't have a screen". The Mini's, while selling well, really did overlap the iPod's market, because they were practically the same size - essentially trading price for capacity. That leaves the two on pretty equal standing, whereas the Nano changes the dynamic altogether. The price AND size/weight vs capacity will draw in that previously alienated market who want a fully functional player but not their entire library in their pocket. Bravo Apple!
I don't understand why it is so "assumed" by the author and most of the readers that there is something inherently wrong with a 72% profit margin. Many industries routinely mark up their final prices more than 1000% percent over cost - and that is perfectly justified as well. It's called capitalism... charge as much as you can get away with. Where is the crime?
That's not a boycott - no one had to be "informed" that they shouldn't buy Divx. They just looked at the product "features" and thought to themselves, "that sounds stupid. I'm not buying that" because it WAS stupid. Unfortunately, I believe we're at a different point in society now, and most people will be perfectly happy to let their new DVD player autodetect and utilize their unprotected 802.11g router they bought because the guy at CompUSA said to.
I don't think the big news here is that Apple is making a Shuffle-Mini hybrid, but that Fourty percent of the world's Samsung Flash memory stock is going to be eaten by a single buyer. Think about how many different manufacturers and resellers buy that memory - and 40% of it is going to Apple. Wow.
While it is an interesting project from a hobbyist and academic standpoint, I'm not really sure what practical value it holds (unless the intent is to sell a mature algorithm to spammers, which is not the case since the project is being published). This is nothing more than a personal scripting project - no new forray into new concepts of computer science or pattern recognition; no new breakthroughs of computer-based heuristics.
I'm 20 years old for god's sake. When I was in high school I did the same thing (except I wasn't stupid enough to get caught). My point is simply that the law is the law, and I summarized what that particular law says. No one can escape it. No one should be able to. If you get caught you pay the price.
Only the sensationalist news media has called the teens "hackers". Believe it or not, most judges understand the difference, and their defense lawyers will at least argue the point enough to inform any jury that gaining access is not the same as hacking.
Regardless
The law is not about hacking, it is about Unauthorized Entry. You don't have to pick the lock to be somewhere you shouldn't, and you don't have to cut through any fences to be prosecuted.
My new BMW was built in South Carolina using American and German parts. My Toyota was built in Ohio using American and Japanese parts.
Isn't there some saying about it being better to not say anything and avoid looking stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt?
It has generally been the trend that the more complex a system becomes, similarities it will have to the foundations of the modern operating system. ATMs are a prime example of machines that started as moderately sophisticated PCBs and now routinely run Windows Embedded.
If a vehicle is "smart" enough to handle driving, it will have the computational power and flexibility to run reasonably sophisticated software. Consider that increasing wireless bandwidth (WiMax, anyone?) will lead to offloading the heavy-duty positional and map processing to a remote service over the Internet, with the software to display becoming a thin client for a remote database. A clever programmer will find a stack overflow in MapQuestClientForYourCar and BAM! Suddenly cars are automatically veering for each other instead of away.
The level of scrutiny and security applied to such systems will have to be on par, or higher than, such applications as air traffic controlling before it can be considered safe.
"The ministry plans to request a budget of more than 1 billion yen to help fund the project" More than a billion yen! That could pay for... the airfare of bringing in specialists to work on the project. A billion yen is 9 million dollars. If the US President said he was committing 9 million to developing a tacticle holographic television it'd be the biggest joke since "I did not have sexual relations..." Are we forgetting this is in a country where people regularly pay more than a million in their currency for a car?
relearning your skillset annually.
Why should you have to relearn? Appending to your skillset regularly is what separates the 30k/year programmers from the 150k/year ones. Then you don't have to wear the same old ratty clothes!
Aye, I said companies have been selling them. We have several dual-gigabit cards in servers where I work, but you're right it's mostly for fault tolerance. If network bandwidth really was a problem, then the infrastructure would be upgraded to handle the necessary load, not just dole out extra NICs and load-balance.
Such gimmicky devices never take off. They proport to be some groundbreaking new amazingness when in actuality it's "a bunch of WiFi transceivers stacked on top of each other". That's not new, and it's not amazing. Companies have for years sold network cards that work by load-balancing traffic across multiple CAT5 lines - a good idea, sure, but it's never going to be widely accepted. How many double-100baseT NICs do you have? If you needed more than 100mbps, you'd buy gigabit ethernet. People who need more wireless speed are going to wait for the next step in technology, not a bunch of the same thing duct-taped together and put in a shiny plastic case.
I wrote a very robust calculator in C++ when I was 9, and no one gave a shit except my dad, who thought it was pretty cool. Windows GUI apps in C++ are 10 degrees of difficulty over C#. Is it because she's a girl, or because she's from Pakistan? Or both? Getting her MS cert is laudable, to be sure, but I didn't get to meet Bill when I taught myself Visual Basic at age 8. Moth is right - it's nothing but circumstance. Tell the right person about yourself and suddenly you're international news.
I tried told the Secret Service that it wasn't trespassing because it's public property when they caught me climbing in the window to the Oval Office