Politics and business have never mixed any better than say... ummm gasoline and matches... no matter how they mix, somebody is getting burned, and its usually not the guy with the matches.
The trouble here is not that a city government can operate a WiFi or telecommunications network, but that if they did, it would remove the stranglehold that the telecoms companies have over the consumers. That is what is really at stake. Imagine what would happen if we all opened up our APs and started running large mesh networks over telecom company pipes? If you think NO is a problem, there would be calls for federally mandated closure of unsecured wireless APs.
Personally, I thought this is what the free market was supposed to be all about... competition to drive innovation and self-regulate cost structures. Of course there is always that unfair competitive practices thing, but how is making it illegal for anyone to compete 'fair competition' ????
I'm willing to bet that an 'open source' style mesh network can run for quite an extended period of time on simply the money that has been spent lobbying to keep NO from running a metro WiFi network. Perhaps its time to review, in public forums, the costs incurred by metropolitan NO on behalf of telecom companies so they can provide services? Licenses for towers and transmitters are not free, nor are they given away by divine right of the telecom companies. Tit for tat? Maybe its time?
Who do you think is always trying to get us to push the buttons and release the nuclear weapons? Only cockroaches will survive, right? As I understand it, there are two disguised cockroaches currently on the board at Cyberdyne Systems of California. Not that I'm trying to start a conspiracy, but they ARE attracted to warm weather, and have you ever noticed how you never see cockroaches in the data center? That's because they are in the cabinets, in the PC's silently absorbing data as the ones and zeros whiz by. Oh yeah buddy, they communicate alrighty! Come to think of it, the guys who do back-ups sort of shuffle around the data center like cockroaches under the kitchen cabinets.... hmmmmm
This is just one more attempt to soften up the consumer marketplace, tenderize it like a NY strip steak, so that joe average will be ready to buy a new PC, capable of running Vista so they don't have to worry about malware anymore, thanks to those really nice folks at Microsoft. The longer that MS has to soften the marketplace with FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' about how they are going to eliminate malware etc. with Vista, the more likely that people will 'wait for' Vista to ship rather than switch to before 2010, when Vista actually does ship SP2 so that it works. MS always makes more money by selling an OS license with new hardware then they ever did selling just the OS. We all know how that works.. so look forward to more of this MMSF in the coming months from the superheros in Redmond....
Some companies see giving employees small perks as part of keeping a happy and productive work force... can anyone remember the stories of the environment at EA? Now, we have tin foil hat stories about companies that give their employees pens and paper, but warn them to only write in block letters because anything else is a waste of company resources, or could lead to dangerous events in the file cabinets.
Ummm, perhaps its just me, but it is about fscking time that both government and businesses learn the lessons that have been sitting in front of them since about 1991... computers are here to stay, and the advantages and disadvantages of computers are here to stay too.... Its not that hard to limit outside network connections to a specific bandwidth, or monitor all packets in and out... this is not rocket science. Using draconian measures to squeeze every drop out of the company resources is not good for business... see Boycott, Company Stores et al, slavery,
I guess my point is that anything that stifles free and unfettered flow of information and ideas is going to stifle business productivity and innovation. I don't have links, but I thought this was pretty much already scientifically proven... or at least proven in the advent of F/OSS and what it has done to the computer and software markets. Just as the *AA needs to wake up and find a new business model, most of the rest of the business world has some work to do... its just common sense. Anything else usually involves putting holes in your feed with lead ladden projectiles.
I hope that Google does this, and does so with the same standards and aplomb that they have used for all of the other Google services. I like Google, not because of the do no evil clause, but because their services work, they work well, and the costs are... well, affordable.
If MS or the RIAA could find a company that works as well as ITMS or that works better than ITMS, they would have done so. Clearly, they are in need of a partner company that has both the technology know-how and the backbone to make it work. Google definitely fits in that category. I hope that if such a bargain is struck, that the *AA finds themselves holding on for dear life to the tail of a very BIG tiger....
The government is going to contract this job out to Cyberdyne Systems in California?
Seriously, we are able (most of the time) to have oversight on what the government is doing to its own citizens, and that hasn't worked out so well in the US so far... can I mention here things like: The pristine bullet, McCarthy, weather control, and a number of other things that 'seemed ok at the time' but later turned out very wrong, and would have been stopped with oversight.
WHO (not the doctor or the World Health Organization) is going to monitor those in the government that will be monitoring the Internet? Mr Orwell, we miss you!
This was bound to happen. As soon as a new generation grows up knowing the Internet the same way that they do their television, it couldn't be stopped. There have also been reports of teens that think voicemail is 'so last week' and for 'old people' because texting is all they do, it is a part of their life, part of how they interact with their friends, and things that happen on the net spread faster among social groups than anything else, well at least as fast as anything the olsen twins are doing.
Once it becomes a part of the social life of humans, it will necessarily need to become socially oriented, or it will be relegated to the same place that books explaining air bags go. If you have been keeping up with wireless news around the world, with news of the Internet around the world, you will not be surprised by this. The one really good thing that social networking sites have going for them.... they really didn't have to hype it much... no FUD, no 'smoke n mirrors', no 30 second commercials, no billboards. The sites just work, and news spread by word of mouth... I understand that in some circles, if you don't have a myspace address, some teens just don't know how to relate to you... in other words, it was adapted so quickly, and so readily, that not being part of it is a sort of self imposed ostrisization.
Anyway, to me, its not a surprise at all, and if the reality lives up to the hype, the semantic web, and some of the web 2.0 stuff will make the world a very different place. I can see a future where a teen, in her friends car gets a text message on her phone, and pleads over the phone to get her friends mom to spend $80 on shoes that just went on sale at xyz-store, and her mom to pay her back later. Yes, I foresee changes in social interaction on many levels if we get the next generation of the Internet correct.
Yes, that rumbling noise in the background, faint at first, but growing louder with each passing moment... yes, soon enough you can tell that it is a crowd of people... they are chanting... what are they saying.... I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO
Joking aside, this shouldn't even be news (sorta) its as unexpected as a suicide bomber in the middle east somewhere. Lets see, the EU, Mass., other entire countries dumping MS, Korea, and the response from MS has been FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' for several years now. I think its time for MS to put up or shut up. They have promised to fix all the woes of Internet users for several years now... time they did some of that, or simply hide in their cubes eating humble pie, reading the news about their stock with FF.
No, not a case of Linux fanboi, just observation. I'm rather tired of hearing how MS is going to fix this or that, and all they've fixed is prices in the past. On that issue, I'm rather happy with the way Open Source software is handling these issues, rather more up front about it, and trying to cobble together associations and software to battle the problems instead of promising the panacea of software at the mere cost of one arm and one leg per user.
But I bet he's glad he wasn't caught by the *AA !!!
Kidding aside, its interesting how the PR against him makes him sound evil incarnate... Next, this will be used to hobble our on-line rights so they can catch more of the terrorists... not a good thing IMO. Of course, I can't speak for everyone, but the PR is a bad sign. Criminals are criminals, no matter how bad they are. Sensationalizing the story, or the criminal, only serves nefarious purposes IMO.
Despite any situation in Germany, or common practice, 2 years seems almost violent, and definitely profane. I had always thought that profanity and violence were the last resolve of the ingnorant and incompetent?
Justice is not served by enacting laws that would punish the very naive among us to the extent that physically violent criminals are punished less for much more damaging crimes. My prognostication is that this will end violently at some point, cops shooting pirating criminals in their homes, or beating them on the way to jail... all because of a Brittany Spears movie.... that was downloaded illegally (despite that such a thing should be made illegal to exist in the first place)
Bad laws bring bad results, and this one is sure to be a fscking hum-dinger!:)
I have often wondered what would happen if the EFF or other group seeded P2P networks with their own information, but labelled and named it so that it looks like a metallica song or hollywood movie? Without the *AA actually looking at the material in question, all they will find is a record of shared.mp3 and.mpg files etc. Such an effort would totally thwart the efforts of those that want to stop pirating, or near enough give them a very hard time. Enforcement then becomes a case of having to catch downloaders with illegal material in their possession, and the search and seisure laws should put paid to such crime fighting efforts. When it cost the governments $15k to search your hard drive, only to find you have EFF materials and nothing illegal, they will soon give up the hunt and ignore the law, or change it.
Obfuscation is a wonderful thing, and it would be worth investigating, IMO. Any better ideas?
Thanks, Okay, I see that there is benefit, but the classification of data via metadata is still not organized. The thousdands of types of chairs added to what people think are chairs, would still not narrow down a search for chairs. There are some 'artistic' chairs that are just very odd IMO. So sticking with this one example, a search for chairs would still bring up more information than could be sorted through easily. Granted, metadata makes the search smaller, but classification is still left up to the search algorithm, and more importantly, left up to people to classify their own data.
I search for things and would like to be able to specify 'ignore pages with abstract only' and metadata could help there, but on other things, simple things, its still seems like a 'pot luck' search result.
The symantic web, as discussed, must rely on classification. To my knowledge, there is no standard for classification of information to fit data into that symantic web. Does anyone know how that is supposed to work? To my knowledge, such attempts fall over when trying to classify even the simplest of things, such as chairs. The types, descriptions, and formats of chairs and information about chairs outweighs any attempt to share that information across the entire Internet. A chair in the middle of China can be totally different from most or all of the chairs from any given store in the western world. The fan-out or spread of information for any given key word or identifier is so huge that it becomes impossible to manage, and even in the symantic web, a search for chair returns about the same as a google search does now.
This makes less sense than it seems. Sure, all the comments make sense of things, but one thing doesn't fall into line. Why is the government stopping this sale when they could just as easily take the open source code, mangle it for their own, and carry on with their own internal protection software? Its obviously not rocket science, and makes sense to keep security development internal when its that sensitive.
This really smells like interference for reasons that are not floating on the surface. Only time and investigative measures will tell for certain, but I suspect we should all be wearing tin foil hats when we read this story.
Perhaps you are right, but with the new dual core cpu comes other upgrades, and if I recall correctly, earlier today,/. posted an article about the fastest WindowsXP box around... guess what it was? Want a hint? http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/ 23/1717259
The value of having faster hardware is more simple than all this cogitation would lead us to believe. If you spend 12 seconds of every minute waiting on something, that is 20% of your day. By decreasing this wait to 2 seconds, it greatly reduces waste: wasted manhours, wasted resources, wasted power....
It might seem trivial, but even with web based services that are hosted in-house, that 12 seconds of waiting is a LOT of time. Right now, if I could get work to simply upgrade me to more than 256MB of ram, I could reduce my waiting. If I was to get a full upgraded machine, all the better... waiting not only sucks, it sucks efficiencies right out of the company.
As someone mentioned, doing average things on average hardware is not exactly good for the business. People should be free to do extraordinary things on not-so-average systems.
Each system and application has a sweet spot, so no single hardware answer is correct, but anything that stops or shortens the waiting is a GOOD thing...
We all remember that misquote "512k is enough for anybody" and yeah, that didn't work out so well. Upgrades are not a question of if, but of when... upgrade when the money is right, and upgrade so that you won't have to upgrade so quickly. Anyone in business should be thinking about what it will take to run the next version of Windows when it gets here... That is not an 'average' load on a PC.
There is an answer for this, well, several answers that partially fix the problem. I'll wager that MS won't write the software needed, nor will any educational institution instruct people on how to use technology.
Mobile devices, computers, all this technology that serves to distract us is capable of being moderated. That is to say, my phone should only ring when the call is from list X while I have it set this way, so that while I'm attending certain functions, only list X callers will interrupt my activities. I should be able to have many such lists, and using ring tones, know which list the caller is from. The same goes for computers, any activity on the computer that demands attention can be moderated (except/. of course) so that my attention is interrupted not by every little thing, but only those things I'm interested in at that time.
This limits the distractions, and gives us more time to concentrate on other things, to be more effective at multitasking. This, I believe, was the original reasoning for executives to have an assistant. Now we have PDAs and they are not moderating the interuptions to our lives... not really very good assistants!
The simple idea of moderating alerts, notifications, emails, and such is just not catching on. In some 10 years or more, I can see computer programs that have some kind of AI built into them to make them really good digital assistants.... till then, pfft, people will still wreck their cars while typing an email, driving, and trying to eat lunch at the same time... There was a word we used to use - Dictation, why don't PDAs allow for dictation of emails?
There have been several similar robots in museums. Museums, always in the need to attract visitors, have been quite on the edge for using technology. There is a system for guided tours using cell phones and PDAs as well as the tape recorder things. Using Bluetooth, they will go even farther. Imagine being able to stand in front of a painting or sculpture, and on your BT enabled smartphone, press 3 for detailed information, 5 for related works in the gallery, 6 for history of the artist, and so on... all the FAQ for each display item via your BT enabled device. This would be better than the robot, but not quite the same wow factor... using the robot for virtual tours over the Internet is a great idea.
I guess that this article can be skipped
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I guess that this article can be skipped if you are a windows user?:)
In a world where secrecy is necessary, what you whisper goes unrecorded, but what you put in an email gets published just when you need it to never have been written down....
With record keeping comes accountability... is it any wonder they don't write things down? Until rather recently, there was no satisfactory manner to keep such communications to mobile devices secure/encrypted. If anyone knows if the govmint is spying on people, the FBI should. Makes you wonder..... ????
The big players will lobby hard to fsck net nuetrality, then we will have 15 connections comming into our homes, one for each provider, and they will ALL try to bundle all services so that you can't pick VoIP from one and ISP from another.... they all want 'all your base are belong to them' so choice will go down, price will go up, and the consumer will be even farther away from sane and value priced services....
In the US, its been pointed out, we can't even get a decent phone... never mind decent services...
Anyone can have a trademark, but even MS can't trademark 'windows' all by itself, as it is a common word, that refers to more than MS products. In this case, I'd have to say that m-w.com shows superhero and superhuman to be common nouns, and thus should not be a protected trademark. Now, on the other hand, batman, spiderman etc. should be, and 'brand x superheros' also should be protected, but just superhero... that's just wrong
Slashdot Mirror
Politics and business have never mixed any better than say... ummm gasoline and matches... no matter how they mix, somebody is getting burned, and its usually not the guy with the matches.
The trouble here is not that a city government can operate a WiFi or telecommunications network, but that if they did, it would remove the stranglehold that the telecoms companies have over the consumers. That is what is really at stake. Imagine what would happen if we all opened up our APs and started running large mesh networks over telecom company pipes? If you think NO is a problem, there would be calls for federally mandated closure of unsecured wireless APs.
Personally, I thought this is what the free market was supposed to be all about... competition to drive innovation and self-regulate cost structures. Of course there is always that unfair competitive practices thing, but how is making it illegal for anyone to compete 'fair competition' ????
I'm willing to bet that an 'open source' style mesh network can run for quite an extended period of time on simply the money that has been spent lobbying to keep NO from running a metro WiFi network. Perhaps its time to review, in public forums, the costs incurred by metropolitan NO on behalf of telecom companies so they can provide services? Licenses for towers and transmitters are not free, nor are they given away by divine right of the telecom companies. Tit for tat? Maybe its time?
Who do you think is always trying to get us to push the buttons and release the nuclear weapons? Only cockroaches will survive, right? As I understand it, there are two disguised cockroaches currently on the board at Cyberdyne Systems of California. Not that I'm trying to start a conspiracy, but they ARE attracted to warm weather, and have you ever noticed how you never see cockroaches in the data center? That's because they are in the cabinets, in the PC's silently absorbing data as the ones and zeros whiz by. Oh yeah buddy, they communicate alrighty! Come to think of it, the guys who do back-ups sort of shuffle around the data center like cockroaches under the kitchen cabinets.... hmmmmm
This is just one more attempt to soften up the consumer marketplace, tenderize it like a NY strip steak, so that joe average will be ready to buy a new PC, capable of running Vista so they don't have to worry about malware anymore, thanks to those really nice folks at Microsoft. The longer that MS has to soften the marketplace with FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' about how they are going to eliminate malware etc. with Vista, the more likely that people will 'wait for' Vista to ship rather than switch to before 2010, when Vista actually does ship SP2 so that it works. MS always makes more money by selling an OS license with new hardware then they ever did selling just the OS. We all know how that works.. so look forward to more of this MMSF in the coming months from the superheros in Redmond....
Some companies see giving employees small perks as part of keeping a happy and productive work force... can anyone remember the stories of the environment at EA? Now, we have tin foil hat stories about companies that give their employees pens and paper, but warn them to only write in block letters because anything else is a waste of company resources, or could lead to dangerous events in the file cabinets.
Ummm, perhaps its just me, but it is about fscking time that both government and businesses learn the lessons that have been sitting in front of them since about 1991... computers are here to stay, and the advantages and disadvantages of computers are here to stay too.... Its not that hard to limit outside network connections to a specific bandwidth, or monitor all packets in and out... this is not rocket science. Using draconian measures to squeeze every drop out of the company resources is not good for business... see Boycott, Company Stores et al, slavery,
I guess my point is that anything that stifles free and unfettered flow of information and ideas is going to stifle business productivity and innovation. I don't have links, but I thought this was pretty much already scientifically proven... or at least proven in the advent of F/OSS and what it has done to the computer and software markets. Just as the *AA needs to wake up and find a new business model, most of the rest of the business world has some work to do... its just common sense. Anything else usually involves putting holes in your feed with lead ladden projectiles.
I hope that Google does this, and does so with the same standards and aplomb that they have used for all of the other Google services. I like Google, not because of the do no evil clause, but because their services work, they work well, and the costs are... well, affordable.
If MS or the RIAA could find a company that works as well as ITMS or that works better than ITMS, they would have done so. Clearly, they are in need of a partner company that has both the technology know-how and the backbone to make it work. Google definitely fits in that category. I hope that if such a bargain is struck, that the *AA finds themselves holding on for dear life to the tail of a very BIG tiger....
The government is going to contract this job out to Cyberdyne Systems in California?
Seriously, we are able (most of the time) to have oversight on what the government is doing to its own citizens, and that hasn't worked out so well in the US so far... can I mention here things like: The pristine bullet, McCarthy, weather control, and a number of other things that 'seemed ok at the time' but later turned out very wrong, and would have been stopped with oversight.
WHO (not the doctor or the World Health Organization) is going to monitor those in the government that will be monitoring the Internet? Mr Orwell, we miss you!
The cure for all your telecommunications heartburn or upset stomach ???
And still MS is not releasing patches quick enough... perhaps this will be incentive enough to change that policy?
This was bound to happen. As soon as a new generation grows up knowing the Internet the same way that they do their television, it couldn't be stopped. There have also been reports of teens that think voicemail is 'so last week' and for 'old people' because texting is all they do, it is a part of their life, part of how they interact with their friends, and things that happen on the net spread faster among social groups than anything else, well at least as fast as anything the olsen twins are doing.
Once it becomes a part of the social life of humans, it will necessarily need to become socially oriented, or it will be relegated to the same place that books explaining air bags go. If you have been keeping up with wireless news around the world, with news of the Internet around the world, you will not be surprised by this. The one really good thing that social networking sites have going for them.... they really didn't have to hype it much... no FUD, no 'smoke n mirrors', no 30 second commercials, no billboards. The sites just work, and news spread by word of mouth... I understand that in some circles, if you don't have a myspace address, some teens just don't know how to relate to you... in other words, it was adapted so quickly, and so readily, that not being part of it is a sort of self imposed ostrisization.
Anyway, to me, its not a surprise at all, and if the reality lives up to the hype, the semantic web, and some of the web 2.0 stuff will make the world a very different place. I can see a future where a teen, in her friends car gets a text message on her phone, and pleads over the phone to get her friends mom to spend $80 on shoes that just went on sale at xyz-store, and her mom to pay her back later. Yes, I foresee changes in social interaction on many levels if we get the next generation of the Internet correct.
Yes, that rumbling noise in the background, faint at first, but growing louder with each passing moment... yes, soon enough you can tell that it is a crowd of people... they are chanting... what are they saying.... I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO
Joking aside, this shouldn't even be news (sorta) its as unexpected as a suicide bomber in the middle east somewhere. Lets see, the EU, Mass., other entire countries dumping MS, Korea, and the response from MS has been FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' for several years now. I think its time for MS to put up or shut up. They have promised to fix all the woes of Internet users for several years now... time they did some of that, or simply hide in their cubes eating humble pie, reading the news about their stock with FF.
No, not a case of Linux fanboi, just observation. I'm rather tired of hearing how MS is going to fix this or that, and all they've fixed is prices in the past. On that issue, I'm rather happy with the way Open Source software is handling these issues, rather more up front about it, and trying to cobble together associations and software to battle the problems instead of promising the panacea of software at the mere cost of one arm and one leg per user.
But I bet he's glad he wasn't caught by the *AA !!!
Kidding aside, its interesting how the PR against him makes him sound evil incarnate... Next, this will be used to hobble our on-line rights so they can catch more of the terrorists... not a good thing IMO. Of course, I can't speak for everyone, but the PR is a bad sign. Criminals are criminals, no matter how bad they are. Sensationalizing the story, or the criminal, only serves nefarious purposes IMO.
Despite any situation in Germany, or common practice, 2 years seems almost violent, and definitely profane. I had always thought that profanity and violence were the last resolve of the ingnorant and incompetent?
:)
.mp3 and .mpg files etc. Such an effort would totally thwart the efforts of those that want to stop pirating, or near enough give them a very hard time. Enforcement then becomes a case of having to catch downloaders with illegal material in their possession, and the search and seisure laws should put paid to such crime fighting efforts. When it cost the governments $15k to search your hard drive, only to find you have EFF materials and nothing illegal, they will soon give up the hunt and ignore the law, or change it.
Justice is not served by enacting laws that would punish the very naive among us to the extent that physically violent criminals are punished less for much more damaging crimes. My prognostication is that this will end violently at some point, cops shooting pirating criminals in their homes, or beating them on the way to jail... all because of a Brittany Spears movie.... that was downloaded illegally (despite that such a thing should be made illegal to exist in the first place)
Bad laws bring bad results, and this one is sure to be a fscking hum-dinger!
I have often wondered what would happen if the EFF or other group seeded P2P networks with their own information, but labelled and named it so that it looks like a metallica song or hollywood movie? Without the *AA actually looking at the material in question, all they will find is a record of shared
Obfuscation is a wonderful thing, and it would be worth investigating, IMO. Any better ideas?
Thanks, Okay, I see that there is benefit, but the classification of data via metadata is still not organized. The thousdands of types of chairs added to what people think are chairs, would still not narrow down a search for chairs. There are some 'artistic' chairs that are just very odd IMO. So sticking with this one example, a search for chairs would still bring up more information than could be sorted through easily. Granted, metadata makes the search smaller, but classification is still left up to the search algorithm, and more importantly, left up to people to classify their own data.
I search for things and would like to be able to specify 'ignore pages with abstract only' and metadata could help there, but on other things, simple things, its still seems like a 'pot luck' search result.
The symantic web, as discussed, must rely on classification. To my knowledge, there is no standard for classification of information to fit data into that symantic web. Does anyone know how that is supposed to work? To my knowledge, such attempts fall over when trying to classify even the simplest of things, such as chairs. The types, descriptions, and formats of chairs and information about chairs outweighs any attempt to share that information across the entire Internet. A chair in the middle of China can be totally different from most or all of the chairs from any given store in the western world. The fan-out or spread of information for any given key word or identifier is so huge that it becomes impossible to manage, and even in the symantic web, a search for chair returns about the same as a google search does now.
What am I missing?
This makes less sense than it seems. Sure, all the comments make sense of things, but one thing doesn't fall into line. Why is the government stopping this sale when they could just as easily take the open source code, mangle it for their own, and carry on with their own internal protection software? Its obviously not rocket science, and makes sense to keep security development internal when its that sensitive.
This really smells like interference for reasons that are not floating on the surface. Only time and investigative measures will tell for certain, but I suspect we should all be wearing tin foil hats when we read this story.
Perhaps you are right, but with the new dual core cpu comes other upgrades, and if I recall correctly, earlier today, /. posted an article about the fastest WindowsXP box around... guess what it was? Want a hint? http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/ 23/1717259
The value of having faster hardware is more simple than all this cogitation would lead us to believe. If you spend 12 seconds of every minute waiting on something, that is 20% of your day. By decreasing this wait to 2 seconds, it greatly reduces waste: wasted manhours, wasted resources, wasted power....
It might seem trivial, but even with web based services that are hosted in-house, that 12 seconds of waiting is a LOT of time. Right now, if I could get work to simply upgrade me to more than 256MB of ram, I could reduce my waiting. If I was to get a full upgraded machine, all the better... waiting not only sucks, it sucks efficiencies right out of the company.
As someone mentioned, doing average things on average hardware is not exactly good for the business. People should be free to do extraordinary things on not-so-average systems.
Each system and application has a sweet spot, so no single hardware answer is correct, but anything that stops or shortens the waiting is a GOOD thing...
We all remember that misquote "512k is enough for anybody" and yeah, that didn't work out so well. Upgrades are not a question of if, but of when... upgrade when the money is right, and upgrade so that you won't have to upgrade so quickly. Anyone in business should be thinking about what it will take to run the next version of Windows when it gets here... That is not an 'average' load on a PC.
There is an answer for this, well, several answers that partially fix the problem. I'll wager that MS won't write the software needed, nor will any educational institution instruct people on how to use technology.
/. of course) so that my attention is interrupted not by every little thing, but only those things I'm interested in at that time.
Mobile devices, computers, all this technology that serves to distract us is capable of being moderated. That is to say, my phone should only ring when the call is from list X while I have it set this way, so that while I'm attending certain functions, only list X callers will interrupt my activities. I should be able to have many such lists, and using ring tones, know which list the caller is from. The same goes for computers, any activity on the computer that demands attention can be moderated (except
This limits the distractions, and gives us more time to concentrate on other things, to be more effective at multitasking. This, I believe, was the original reasoning for executives to have an assistant. Now we have PDAs and they are not moderating the interuptions to our lives... not really very good assistants!
The simple idea of moderating alerts, notifications, emails, and such is just not catching on. In some 10 years or more, I can see computer programs that have some kind of AI built into them to make them really good digital assistants.... till then, pfft, people will still wreck their cars while typing an email, driving, and trying to eat lunch at the same time... There was a word we used to use - Dictation, why don't PDAs allow for dictation of emails?
Well, so much for technological 'advances'
There have been several similar robots in museums. Museums, always in the need to attract visitors, have been quite on the edge for using technology. There is a system for guided tours using cell phones and PDAs as well as the tape recorder things. Using Bluetooth, they will go even farther. Imagine being able to stand in front of a painting or sculpture, and on your BT enabled smartphone, press 3 for detailed information, 5 for related works in the gallery, 6 for history of the artist, and so on... all the FAQ for each display item via your BT enabled device. This would be better than the robot, but not quite the same wow factor... using the robot for virtual tours over the Internet is a great idea.
I guess that this article can be skipped if you are a windows user? :)
In a world where secrecy is necessary, what you whisper goes unrecorded, but what you put in an email gets published just when you need it to never have been written down....
With record keeping comes accountability... is it any wonder they don't write things down? Until rather recently, there was no satisfactory manner to keep such communications to mobile devices secure/encrypted. If anyone knows if the govmint is spying on people, the FBI should. Makes you wonder..... ????
The big players will lobby hard to fsck net nuetrality, then we will have 15 connections comming into our homes, one for each provider, and they will ALL try to bundle all services so that you can't pick VoIP from one and ISP from another.... they all want 'all your base are belong to them' so choice will go down, price will go up, and the consumer will be even farther away from sane and value priced services....
In the US, its been pointed out, we can't even get a decent phone... never mind decent services...
/.-ed already, now that is what I call UGLY!
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Anyone can have a trademark, but even MS can't trademark 'windows' all by itself, as it is a common word, that refers to more than MS products. In this case, I'd have to say that m-w.com shows superhero and superhuman to be common nouns, and thus should not be a protected trademark. Now, on the other hand, batman, spiderman etc. should be, and 'brand x superheros' also should be protected, but just superhero... that's just wrong
Okay, to clarify some things...
First paragraph is sarcastic
Second paragraph was semi-serious questioning of the motives of such efforts