You do have a big point here, I think. Web applications often work perfectly well on linux and there are more and more of them... i.e. the major current source of software innovation works on linux. Plus linux is catching up in terms of office software. And the distros are mostly getting decent-ish at the common tasks like photo handling. Multimedia stuff mostly works too.
We might unexpectedly find that linux is a seriously competitive desktop system quite soon. I wonder if vista performing really badly on current hardware might be the kick that needs.
How many modern garages know how to service a steam engine?
How many modern garages know how to service a car? My mercedes dealer definitely just replaces components as needed. They've never demonstrated any diagnostic ability or ability to repair parts.
Unlikely, since others can still get unreasonable patents and threaten to sue Amazon - so they need to have their patents available for defence.
That's how it works, of course; all the different major retailers get sets of patents to defend themselves against eachother.
Which is all fine, but the little guy gets squeezed out.
Linux is lucky because it has friends like IBM and Sun who are willing to make patents available that are not only free to use, but can be used in its defence, so giving it protection in these battles.
Oh, should have added - free content hosting is just a trick to get things moving, of course. Helps build a decent set of semantic content so that google can set the standard for the whole web. And the whole web is always what google is aiming at.
I wish I had mod points right now, because I'd mark you up - this is exactly what I thought. Linking attributes to an existing URL? Retrofit a semantic web to existing sites, you mean.
As if more was needed, a third party API on this stuff might well mean an XML API...
Very clever. The semantic web concept is brilliant but clearly needed some kind of initial shove to make it happen. This would do it. Once you can enter that information directly into google, and google has set the standards, why not instead put it into your pages and just let google (or anyone else) grab it and update itself? Hmmm....
I suspect what they said about quality is very significant - i.e. I wonder if they have the dpi for ebooks:
"The images are in colour, and can broadcast anything that can be shown on a regular flat screen monitor or TV, although with a slightly lower quality. These could be short film clips or flash animations like those found on the internet."
Next day shipping of a DVD beats the bandwidth of almost all broadband net connections right now.
HD DVD is even bigger capacity. Although I agree high bandwidth is on the way and ultimately both CDs and DVDs may hit problems, that's a long way off, also given the trust issues with DRM, and the "buy it for my grandmother" simplicity of CD/DVD...
Looks like the event itself (after registration) is at 10am California time (event's in San Jose), so that's 6pm british summer time or 5pm (1700) GMT.
It seems like there's not much point speculating in the time left!
I think you're right. It's important to realise though that the problems are not the obvious ones - basic UI consistency and so on is not that disastrously bad. Rather, it's the "user experience" that is the problem - the number of FAQs, the number of different utilities for the same "user purpose" , and the general need to have specialist knowledge to get item X working with item Y.
For my money, a good comparison is with iTunes/iPod and windows based DRM MP3 players - iTunes/iPod just works, and does so in a trustworthy way. At the moment, in this analogy, it's Windows which wins.
A good example is hardware. Why can't linux boxes automatically search for & install drivers for me? If compiling kernel extensions as as simple as every website claims it is, why not do it automatically with 1 click and make all hardware stuff transparent?.../End-rant.
I do something similar - having my passwords formed by a set of rules that I've developed over the years, and noting down in my palm a word which leads me to the password.
It actually takes a while to come up with new passwords to add to the repertoire, because they have to fit the system, but I have over a dozen, I guess, with some of the older ones reused and the newer ones used where I need more security.
In the CAD industry, the same thing has happened - designers are now being pushed to work in the design-enabled CAD product with engineers. This means their data links up better, updates are automated, mistakes are avoided, and much cost is saved. GM would be a major example, as discussed this week in the economist (subscription article on PLM - Product Lifecycle Management).
In the software industry there are obvious benefits - it's clear to anyone implementing an resource based windows dialog that not enough of the design can be changed without resorting to code. The designer needs a deeper and more integrated toolkit in order to enable modern, well designed products to be implemented and modified cost effectively (read: without writing lines of code to change the color of a few pixels).
Of course, MS will probably f**k up the execution of this, as other posters comment, by doing a poor 75% non-standard solution and changing their minds before it matures. Then companies can misuse it to change UI arbitrarily every release and break standards, leaving users confused. Good design practice is ever more important. But the idea is correct. Fingers crossed.
The one advantage of my noise cancelling outside-ear headphones seems to be that I can hear the stewardess on a plane asking me what I'd like to drink better with them on than with them off.
I always get the sense of replacing a large slice of aircraft noise by the music/film/etc.
But maybe I should try these isolating ones.
The sheer amount of rearranging is clearly just programmer-busy work designed to extract more money.
If MS was really interested in taking us forward, the save dialog would be the first thing to disappear. There's no reason not to just keep changes logged on disk and move to a commit/checkpoint model. Document recovery does it anyway. Save continually confuses new users as anyone who's introduced their parents to PCs will know.
To have the save dialog, looking ridiculously complex, as two of the top dozen pictures of their new UI is obscene.
With this amount of effort, it's a shame MS isn't serious about innovating & improving our experience of their systems.
Floppy disk - 1.44Mb or video or audio tape - ??
CD - 720Mb
DVD (common single layer) - 4.7Gb - 7 times more than CD, similar multiple of quality over video tape
HD-DVD (common single layer) - 15Gb - 3 times more
Blu-Ray - 25Gb - 5 times more
Are these not quite small multiples in the latest generation? Is it possible that by the time one of them comes close to winning, we'll be moving to the next generation and leaping this one? Everyone says it's what it enables that matters, but noone has HDTV, so maybe that's not a key thing to enable right now. Plus, neither will help me back up my hard disk.
I'm amazed this got moderated as a +5 when it's just blatant repeating of total myth.
Upping production merely requires building more infrastructure at this point.
http://commonsblog.org/archives/000076.php
recharging was the biggest jump I think...
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 1
I guess I noticed that when palms were younger every manager seemed to have a dead one sitting in a pile of cables in the corner of the room. Once they got rechargable lithium batteries, though, that stopped.
Personally I still use my Palm Vx... I would say that's the classic model if it's useful to you. It does enough for me. I agree about ginormous storage being very useful, too, but don't think a good enough model has come out yet (i.e. they crash too much or don't have batteries lasting long enough or don't have enough space!)
It's already a pain when there's one week a year where Europe and the US are not the normal number of hours. This will make it worse, especially at the time when the west coast is 9-10 hours apart from Europe instead of 8-9. Obviously for other people it will get easier at times, but surely global effects count in favour of keeping this stuff as simple and strandard as possible.
The vendors won't have incentive to make the drivers until linux is more successful, and until this kind of issue is solved, linux won't be more successful, I'd say. So that means it's the linux community that has to solve the issue somehow, for linux to move on.
Just my opinion, of course...
My experience is that linux hardware support is the killer issue - and it betrays an expert-only attitude in the linux community. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it almost does and there's some trick you need that, in a commercial OS, would be taken care of, but which in Linux is buried on some website that you might find if you're good at using google - and which will then require, at the very least, command line use and text file editing. The comments will imply that it's a common problem, not to worry, just edit this file... run that command... etc. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Bollocks.
If I need a new version of a driver, I need to be able to grab it as I can on Windows without recompilation. That's unacceptable. The NDIS wrapper implementation is a good example: it works and mostly well, but to get support you have to mess with the command line and text files or even scarier stuff. What you should do is be told to insert the CD that came with the device and have linux do it for you.
The office apps are already on linux; it's already fast; much of the UI and desktop is already user friendly. Installs have issues, yes, but they're down the line and mostly hidden from the user. The user is neatly kept in their home directory. Hard disk management is complex, but not much more so than Windows and partitioning is nicely automated in most installs.
I like linux a lot and use it regularly. I don't actually believe, though, that it can currently compete against commercial OSs without a massive change to some of the attitudes about what's acceptable, and a resulting change to the way Linux works. Hardware is the area where those attitudes seem to be totally exposed to the end-user.
50mph is BS, I'm afraid, that's a good fuel economy speed. For maximum throughput on a stretch of road it's actually more like 17mph!:-) All cars cruising at that speed would maximize the capacity of a motorway, with safe stopping distance available, but doesn't do much for journey times of course...
Wikipedia's entry on Anime is excellent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime
Personally I'm a big fan of Cowboy Bebop, which they use as the first pic on the page, but it's such a broad canvas that you have to look for the genres that interest you normally. Don't think that anime itself is a genre or you'll just find stuff that bores you:-)
This does seem to back up the picture of the google Wallet / G-Money initiative as a way of allowing google to provide services funded not by advertising but by something close to micro-payment.
Call it an iTunes for everything that's not music, an Amazon for self-published eBooks, or an eBay for digital content, whatever you call it, there might well be space there for a big player...?
Slashdot Mirror
You do have a big point here, I think. Web applications often work perfectly well on linux and there are more and more of them... i.e. the major current source of software innovation works on linux. Plus linux is catching up in terms of office software. And the distros are mostly getting decent-ish at the common tasks like photo handling. Multimedia stuff mostly works too. We might unexpectedly find that linux is a seriously competitive desktop system quite soon. I wonder if vista performing really badly on current hardware might be the kick that needs.
How many modern garages know how to service a car? My mercedes dealer definitely just replaces components as needed. They've never demonstrated any diagnostic ability or ability to repair parts.
Hot news: Discovery Channel Store granted patent on having hot teenage girl outside blowing soap bubbles!
That's how it works, of course; all the different major retailers get sets of patents to defend themselves against eachother.
Which is all fine, but the little guy gets squeezed out.
Linux is lucky because it has friends like IBM and Sun who are willing to make patents available that are not only free to use, but can be used in its defence, so giving it protection in these battles.
Yes, of course they counted you, you're a symptom of the growing importance of macs!
Oh, should have added - free content hosting is just a trick to get things moving, of course. Helps build a decent set of semantic content so that google can set the standard for the whole web. And the whole web is always what google is aiming at.
As if more was needed, a third party API on this stuff might well mean an XML API...
Very clever. The semantic web concept is brilliant but clearly needed some kind of initial shove to make it happen. This would do it. Once you can enter that information directly into google, and google has set the standards, why not instead put it into your pages and just let google (or anyone else) grab it and update itself? Hmmm....
HD DVD is even bigger capacity. Although I agree high bandwidth is on the way and ultimately both CDs and DVDs may hit problems, that's a long way off, also given the trust issues with DRM, and the "buy it for my grandmother" simplicity of CD/DVD...
It seems like there's not much point speculating in the time left!
I think you're right. It's important to realise though that the problems are not the obvious ones - basic UI consistency and so on is not that disastrously bad. Rather, it's the "user experience" that is the problem - the number of FAQs, the number of different utilities for the same "user purpose" , and the general need to have specialist knowledge to get item X working with item Y. For my money, a good comparison is with iTunes/iPod and windows based DRM MP3 players - iTunes/iPod just works, and does so in a trustworthy way. At the moment, in this analogy, it's Windows which wins. A good example is hardware. Why can't linux boxes automatically search for & install drivers for me? If compiling kernel extensions as as simple as every website claims it is, why not do it automatically with 1 click and make all hardware stuff transparent?... /End-rant.
It actually takes a while to come up with new passwords to add to the repertoire, because they have to fit the system, but I have over a dozen, I guess, with some of the older ones reused and the newer ones used where I need more security.
In the software industry there are obvious benefits - it's clear to anyone implementing an resource based windows dialog that not enough of the design can be changed without resorting to code. The designer needs a deeper and more integrated toolkit in order to enable modern, well designed products to be implemented and modified cost effectively (read: without writing lines of code to change the color of a few pixels).
Of course, MS will probably f**k up the execution of this, as other posters comment, by doing a poor 75% non-standard solution and changing their minds before it matures. Then companies can misuse it to change UI arbitrarily every release and break standards, leaving users confused. Good design practice is ever more important. But the idea is correct. Fingers crossed.
The one advantage of my noise cancelling outside-ear headphones seems to be that I can hear the stewardess on a plane asking me what I'd like to drink better with them on than with them off. I always get the sense of replacing a large slice of aircraft noise by the music/film/etc. But maybe I should try these isolating ones.
If MS was really interested in taking us forward, the save dialog would be the first thing to disappear. There's no reason not to just keep changes logged on disk and move to a commit/checkpoint model. Document recovery does it anyway. Save continually confuses new users as anyone who's introduced their parents to PCs will know.
To have the save dialog, looking ridiculously complex, as two of the top dozen pictures of their new UI is obscene.
With this amount of effort, it's a shame MS isn't serious about innovating & improving our experience of their systems.
...put my brain in a bottle and let me regrow the rest? Intriguing.
CD - 720Mb
DVD (common single layer) - 4.7Gb - 7 times more than CD, similar multiple of quality over video tape
HD-DVD (common single layer) - 15Gb - 3 times more
Blu-Ray - 25Gb - 5 times more
Are these not quite small multiples in the latest generation? Is it possible that by the time one of them comes close to winning, we'll be moving to the next generation and leaping this one? Everyone says it's what it enables that matters, but noone has HDTV, so maybe that's not a key thing to enable right now. Plus, neither will help me back up my hard disk.
I'm amazed this got moderated as a +5 when it's just blatant repeating of total myth. Upping production merely requires building more infrastructure at this point. http://commonsblog.org/archives/000076.php
I guess I noticed that when palms were younger every manager seemed to have a dead one sitting in a pile of cables in the corner of the room. Once they got rechargable lithium batteries, though, that stopped. Personally I still use my Palm Vx... I would say that's the classic model if it's useful to you. It does enough for me. I agree about ginormous storage being very useful, too, but don't think a good enough model has come out yet (i.e. they crash too much or don't have batteries lasting long enough or don't have enough space!)
It's already a pain when there's one week a year where Europe and the US are not the normal number of hours. This will make it worse, especially at the time when the west coast is 9-10 hours apart from Europe instead of 8-9. Obviously for other people it will get easier at times, but surely global effects count in favour of keeping this stuff as simple and strandard as possible.
The vendors won't have incentive to make the drivers until linux is more successful, and until this kind of issue is solved, linux won't be more successful, I'd say. So that means it's the linux community that has to solve the issue somehow, for linux to move on. Just my opinion, of course...
If I need a new version of a driver, I need to be able to grab it as I can on Windows without recompilation. That's unacceptable. The NDIS wrapper implementation is a good example: it works and mostly well, but to get support you have to mess with the command line and text files or even scarier stuff. What you should do is be told to insert the CD that came with the device and have linux do it for you.
The office apps are already on linux; it's already fast; much of the UI and desktop is already user friendly. Installs have issues, yes, but they're down the line and mostly hidden from the user. The user is neatly kept in their home directory. Hard disk management is complex, but not much more so than Windows and partitioning is nicely automated in most installs.
I like linux a lot and use it regularly. I don't actually believe, though, that it can currently compete against commercial OSs without a massive change to some of the attitudes about what's acceptable, and a resulting change to the way Linux works. Hardware is the area where those attitudes seem to be totally exposed to the end-user.
50mph is BS, I'm afraid, that's a good fuel economy speed. For maximum throughput on a stretch of road it's actually more like 17mph! :-) All cars cruising at that speed would maximize the capacity of a motorway, with safe stopping distance available, but doesn't do much for journey times of course...
Wikipedia's entry on Anime is excellent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime Personally I'm a big fan of Cowboy Bebop, which they use as the first pic on the page, but it's such a broad canvas that you have to look for the genres that interest you normally. Don't think that anime itself is a genre or you'll just find stuff that bores you :-)
Call it an iTunes for everything that's not music, an Amazon for self-published eBooks, or an eBay for digital content, whatever you call it, there might well be space there for a big player...?