You need to decide up front what you need out of the service... The ability to make phone calls anytime, anyplace, or a cool techno toy that can send pictures to all your pals?
you need to make a choice, but i don't think it's the one you've just put forward. don't you also have the option of buying a non-crippled V710 from someone else? sure, it'll cost you more, but that's the choice capitalism offers you.
the problem is that radio is broadcast and lasers are (more or less) point-to-point. if some orbital satellite is shooting data back to its planet, there's no laser shooting off to hit earth. even if, for some reason, an alien society is blasting lasers out into their night sky (or from satellites), the odds of them hitting earth are roughly one in umpy-bazillion. radio, on the other hand, goes out in waves, like ripples.
this is so much crap it's impressive. the day the iPod Mini was officially announced, Apple had ~35% of the portable digital audio market. their own figures put flash-based players (the segment the Mini was designed to capture) at about ~35 total, as well. assume Apple's got all of that (they clearly don't). that's 70%. that's well off from 90%, especially when talking about monopoly issues.
they also fail for the "near-monopoly on legal music downloads". napster does very well for itself (although i personally don't understand why); last i heard, around 30%. assume everyone else combined has nothing or negligible downloads, and iTMS is still maxed out at 70%. again, 70 != 90.
when will people begin to understand that being a market leader - even by a wide margin - does not make one a monopoly?
as noted, you can achieve much of what you're looking for WRT keyboard shortcuts by turning on one option. but really, you're better off just learning to use the mouse effectively. there's some great articles on asktog.com about mouse vs. keyboard activity. short summary: people tend strongly to say the keyboard's faster, but a stopwatch consistently says the mouse is faster, and there's solid psychological reasons why.
this is, of course, not an option for everyone, particularly folks with physical disabilities. in which case, revert to the first answer.
speaking as a semi-professional programmer and a professional engineer, i think the choice of AppleScript was great. it lets you get directly at what you want to do, with much less overhead than a "real" language. it's also easy to learn and easy to read. i certainly wouldn't write an app i it, but that's not what it's for. what would you have suggested they use instead? bash? <shudder>
despite all the warnings, a co-worker and i have both tried this patch, and had no ill effects. does exactly what it's supposed to. very much worth it, in my mind.
There's a guy in the office here who's a regular better, mostly on horse races. He's a bright guy, but no university grad and particle physics and astronomy are not exactly his thing; he's thoroughly non-technical. I, however, have a good background in particle physics (my astronomy is not what i'd like it to be), but i know nothing about horses. My co-worker tends to do pretty well... he does his homework, knows which horses run well in which weather conditions... and lots of other stuff i don't really understand. I sent him this story. And i think i've just gotten him interested in the topics. He came over, wanted to know where the odds came from, what i thought about the bets and the odds. Will it stick? Who knows. But i think he's at least going to check out the questions. I think Ladbrokes could do a real public service simply by publicizing these more.
Or perhaps someone else should? Dean Kaman wants to make scientists and inventors societies next rock stars? Well, maybe we just figured out how.
The life-on-titan one seems to have been pulled, btw.
Oh, and Ladbrokes is one of the top three bookies in the UK. They've been around for a while, and there's no real chance of them pulling up shop and skiting off to the bahamas.
Saying they "should" is all well and good, but why would they? that is, what's their incentive to replace the thousands and thousands of miles of copper they've got lying around? particularly in the face of declining revenues, most of them are going to look to cut costs, not incur new ones. further, i think your proposed motivation is sketchy. DSL can push more bits over standard copper than most homes care about. This becomes even more true if you don't have to carry voice over the same pairs, or have to carry less of it, as this trend suggests. The ILECs are already in a very good position to deliver bits - lots of bits - without performing any upgrade. So those of us who want FDDI to the home are just gonna have to wait.:-)
your argument gets more interesting when you note that fiber solves (mostly) the distance problems. but, again, where's the incentive? If they can already get to 90% of the population with their installed infrastructure, that last 10% would have to be pretty huge to justify the fiber infrastructure. And again, this is in the face of decreasing revenues. No, unless something significant changes, i don't thing the ex-monopolies are going to pull this one off for us.
depends where you are and what kind of service you have. CDMA in > 90% of the US is fine for 911 service. same for GSM in much of western europe (except it's not 911 there). i've called 911 exactly twice. first was when i was about 7 and wanted to see what would happen. second was a few years ago, from my mobile in the middle of a field in a town park. i've also been stranded in the middle of I-80 in... Montana?... and had to call the truck rental. the GSM phone my mate had was worthless, my CDMA had full digital service.
screen's fine... i have one running right now. big, bloated, and with way more "features" than it really needs, but parts of its function (particularly the ability to detach and come back later) are undeniably useful. i was talking specifically about the trend to push everything into the shell. can't we move on?
it would make convincing folks that it's a bloated, hideous, twisted vision of a shell that much easier. i think we should compile in a full text editor, too. oh, wait, that's already there. twice! we'll have to just put screen(1) in, too!
well damn, that's just not worth it then. okay, guys, plan's off.
Re:No...the biggest myth is:
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 1
man, you've got it easy. how's this:
IT: I suggest we do $X, because of $j, $k, and $l.
Boss: What about doing $Y?
IT: Nope, that won't work because of $p, $q, and $r.
Boss: Oh. Okay, that makes sense.
two weeks later, $Y is dropped in your lap and you're told to make it work. why? because some guy the boss played golf with told him it was a good idea. arg.
do people still consider passwords reasonable security measures? how 1980's. use ssh keys. use SecureID. use netkey challenge/response systems. s/key passcodes. but if you're going to rely on any one component, for everyone's sake, don't just use passwords.
any real security system should be composed of (at least) two-factor authentication: something you know and something you have. encrypted ssh keys are an ideal example of this, as are SecureID physical tokens used with a pin. you have to possess a physical key, and you have to know some pin. you protect both, of course, but your pin or passphrase can now be something reasonable and easy to remember, as you're not trying to force the entire security system onto it.
granted, today, we still use passwords in lots of places. but the question for "the future" isn't "what are our passwords going to look like", but "what are we going to replace them with". let's try to solve the problems rather than just hacking on extensions.
the tremendously successful, market-defining, cultural icon iPod? that one? the one that makes the covers of mainstream news mags (not tech mags)? the one that every other digital music player targets as the thing to beat? that iPod? yeah, i hope these guys didn't repeat any of their mistakes.
i'm picking on you because you exemplify superbly what's true of most of this thread, and half the posts on this story: intense fanboyism. you deduced that he was a great coder from a short conversation? what'd he do, spend the whole time reciting the Mono headers? great coder, lousy conversationalist. you can't figure out how good a coder someone is without looking at their code! and we'll ignore for the moment this flatly stupid idea that LoC/hr is some measure of a coder's skill. all the "he's nothing short of amazing" stuff just doesn't "take" without some rationale behind it, all of which is totally missing from most of the fanboy posts. "he's smarter than me, he must know what he's doing" is triangulated somewhere between funny, stupid, and dangerous. reserve judgment for people with a proven track record, but even Ken and Dennis make mistakes.
and, speaking of track records, anyone know what the current score is for people or organizations that try to "play nice" with our "friends" in Redmond? (hint: it ain't pretty)
i'm amazed by both the number of "he's the only one that gets it" (c'mon, the only one? there's an awful lot of bright people out there) and "he just doesn't get it" posts. people on both sides seem really animated. i've never met the guy, but most people i know who have ended up kinda violently opposed to him. what is it about the guy that inspires such strong emotion? is it just the fact that he's working on topics that touch on sensitive areas for many FS/OS folks (MS, and playing nice with them)? or is de Icaza the new RMS (people seem to have mostly mellowed about him)?
i've got mod points, and i was gonna try to even this thread out some, but i couldn't figure out where the -1 Fanboy rating was.
...the correct one would be to figure out your environment and build accordingly......thanks to the wonders of "./configure ; make"......it just gets compiled and run...
yet, at the same time:
...it's about those developers becoming less sloppy and making fewer assumptions about environment.
configure and autoconf is not the way to write "portable" code, and certainly not the way to "figure out your environment". configure is a hideous hack, built to accommodate the vast array of non-portable code and busted interfaces people would like to code to, and encourages people to write further non-portable code that only looks portable because configure covers your back. write to defined interfaces, use portable libraries, and there's no need for configure.
the biggest argument for configure is that it allows you to work around broken interfaces supplied by the vendor, particularly in systems where you don't have source. but the amount of work that's been poured into configure and autoconf to try to deal with these bugs in a pseudo-portable, pseudo-transparent manner is dramatically greater than the effort it takes to write a library that conforms to the portable interface. that's a much cleaner way to go, both for the code you're delivering (less code to accommodate exceptions) and the interfaces in the long term (less code weight to continue to support interface bugs). ever tried porting configure to a new platform? ugh.
first mod me -1 offtopic. then, explain to me why this is listed as "informative"? i'm assuming this is a joke (please?). i'd likely have given it a +1 funny, too. what's up?
this wouldn't be the first case of a company holding a patent and choosing not to enforce it, or at least being nice to the small guys. ever used backing store on your windowing system? before about two years ago? then that's (nominally) a patent violation - the patent, held by Bell Labs, ended about two years ago. they essentially looked the other way, realizing how fundamental it was.
what? we're talking about 256Kb pretty much anywhere. that's amazing. you can keep struggling with your flash intros and animated gif laden pages, if you like - me, i'll be doing streaming full motion video chat (using iChat, of course). i've done it over worse links. that's huge.
Slashdot Mirror
the problem is that radio is broadcast and lasers are (more or less) point-to-point. if some orbital satellite is shooting data back to its planet, there's no laser shooting off to hit earth. even if, for some reason, an alien society is blasting lasers out into their night sky (or from satellites), the odds of them hitting earth are roughly one in umpy-bazillion. radio, on the other hand, goes out in waves, like ripples.
this is so much crap it's impressive. the day the iPod Mini was officially announced, Apple had ~35% of the portable digital audio market. their own figures put flash-based players (the segment the Mini was designed to capture) at about ~35 total, as well. assume Apple's got all of that (they clearly don't). that's 70%. that's well off from 90%, especially when talking about monopoly issues.
they also fail for the "near-monopoly on legal music downloads". napster does very well for itself (although i personally don't understand why); last i heard, around 30%. assume everyone else combined has nothing or negligible downloads, and iTMS is still maxed out at 70%. again, 70 != 90.
when will people begin to understand that being a market leader - even by a wide margin - does not make one a monopoly?
as noted, you can achieve much of what you're looking for WRT keyboard shortcuts by turning on one option. but really, you're better off just learning to use the mouse effectively. there's some great articles on asktog.com about mouse vs. keyboard activity. short summary: people tend strongly to say the keyboard's faster, but a stopwatch consistently says the mouse is faster, and there's solid psychological reasons why.
this is, of course, not an option for everyone, particularly folks with physical disabilities. in which case, revert to the first answer.
speaking as a semi-professional programmer and a professional engineer, i think the choice of AppleScript was great. it lets you get directly at what you want to do, with much less overhead than a "real" language. it's also easy to learn and easy to read. i certainly wouldn't write an app i it, but that's not what it's for. what would you have suggested they use instead? bash? <shudder>
despite all the warnings, a co-worker and i have both tried this patch, and had no ill effects. does exactly what it's supposed to. very much worth it, in my mind.
There's a guy in the office here who's a regular better, mostly on horse races. He's a bright guy, but no university grad and particle physics and astronomy are not exactly his thing; he's thoroughly non-technical. I, however, have a good background in particle physics (my astronomy is not what i'd like it to be), but i know nothing about horses. My co-worker tends to do pretty well... he does his homework, knows which horses run well in which weather conditions... and lots of other stuff i don't really understand. I sent him this story. And i think i've just gotten him interested in the topics. He came over, wanted to know where the odds came from, what i thought about the bets and the odds. Will it stick? Who knows. But i think he's at least going to check out the questions. I think Ladbrokes could do a real public service simply by publicizing these more.
Or perhaps someone else should? Dean Kaman wants to make scientists and inventors societies next rock stars? Well, maybe we just figured out how.
The life-on-titan one seems to have been pulled, btw.
Oh, and Ladbrokes is one of the top three bookies in the UK. They've been around for a while, and there's no real chance of them pulling up shop and skiting off to the bahamas.
Slashdot: "Blade Runner Is The Best Sci-Fi Film"
Me: "Well, duh. Next topic, please? No need to R this FA."
Saying they "should" is all well and good, but why would they? that is, what's their incentive to replace the thousands and thousands of miles of copper they've got lying around? particularly in the face of declining revenues, most of them are going to look to cut costs, not incur new ones. further, i think your proposed motivation is sketchy. DSL can push more bits over standard copper than most homes care about. This becomes even more true if you don't have to carry voice over the same pairs, or have to carry less of it, as this trend suggests. The ILECs are already in a very good position to deliver bits - lots of bits - without performing any upgrade. So those of us who want FDDI to the home are just gonna have to wait. :-)
your argument gets more interesting when you note that fiber solves (mostly) the distance problems. but, again, where's the incentive? If they can already get to 90% of the population with their installed infrastructure, that last 10% would have to be pretty huge to justify the fiber infrastructure. And again, this is in the face of decreasing revenues. No, unless something significant changes, i don't thing the ex-monopolies are going to pull this one off for us.
depends where you are and what kind of service you have. CDMA in > 90% of the US is fine for 911 service. same for GSM in much of western europe (except it's not 911 there). i've called 911 exactly twice. first was when i was about 7 and wanted to see what would happen. second was a few years ago, from my mobile in the middle of a field in a town park. i've also been stranded in the middle of I-80 in... Montana?... and had to call the truck rental. the GSM phone my mate had was worthless, my CDMA had full digital service.
screen's fine... i have one running right now. big, bloated, and with way more "features" than it really needs, but parts of its function (particularly the ability to detach and come back later) are undeniably useful. i was talking specifically about the trend to push everything into the shell. can't we move on?
i'd love to see bash do it, too.
;-)
it would make convincing folks that it's a bloated, hideous, twisted vision of a shell that much easier. i think we should compile in a full text editor, too. oh, wait, that's already there. twice! we'll have to just put screen(1) in, too!
yeah, karma to burn.
well, one of 'em, yeah. but the did build another one to replace the one they sold, y'know.
well damn, that's just not worth it then. okay, guys, plan's off.
man, you've got it easy. how's this:
IT: I suggest we do $X, because of $j, $k, and $l.
Boss: What about doing $Y?
IT: Nope, that won't work because of $p, $q, and $r.
Boss: Oh. Okay, that makes sense.
two weeks later, $Y is dropped in your lap and you're told to make it work. why? because some guy the boss played golf with told him it was a good idea. arg.
when do they find the smaller yet, black rectangular thing in orbit?
my god, it's full of stars...
do people still consider passwords reasonable security measures? how 1980's. use ssh keys. use SecureID. use netkey challenge/response systems. s/key passcodes. but if you're going to rely on any one component, for everyone's sake, don't just use passwords.
any real security system should be composed of (at least) two-factor authentication: something you know and something you have. encrypted ssh keys are an ideal example of this, as are SecureID physical tokens used with a pin. you have to possess a physical key, and you have to know some pin. you protect both, of course, but your pin or passphrase can now be something reasonable and easy to remember, as you're not trying to force the entire security system onto it.
granted, today, we still use passwords in lots of places. but the question for "the future" isn't "what are our passwords going to look like", but "what are we going to replace them with". let's try to solve the problems rather than just hacking on extensions.
damn. i've got mod points. how do i mod you -1: "Depressing but true"?
the tremendously successful, market-defining, cultural icon iPod? that one? the one that makes the covers of mainstream news mags (not tech mags)? the one that every other digital music player targets as the thing to beat? that iPod? yeah, i hope these guys didn't repeat any of their mistakes.
OMG.
i'm picking on you because you exemplify superbly what's true of most of this thread, and half the posts on this story: intense fanboyism. you deduced that he was a great coder from a short conversation? what'd he do, spend the whole time reciting the Mono headers? great coder, lousy conversationalist. you can't figure out how good a coder someone is without looking at their code ! and we'll ignore for the moment this flatly stupid idea that LoC/hr is some measure of a coder's skill. all the "he's nothing short of amazing" stuff just doesn't "take" without some rationale behind it, all of which is totally missing from most of the fanboy posts. "he's smarter than me, he must know what he's doing" is triangulated somewhere between funny, stupid, and dangerous. reserve judgment for people with a proven track record, but even Ken and Dennis make mistakes.
and, speaking of track records, anyone know what the current score is for people or organizations that try to "play nice" with our "friends" in Redmond? (hint: it ain't pretty)
i'm amazed by both the number of "he's the only one that gets it" (c'mon, the only one? there's an awful lot of bright people out there) and "he just doesn't get it" posts. people on both sides seem really animated. i've never met the guy, but most people i know who have ended up kinda violently opposed to him. what is it about the guy that inspires such strong emotion? is it just the fact that he's working on topics that touch on sensitive areas for many FS/OS folks (MS, and playing nice with them)? or is de Icaza the new RMS (people seem to have mostly mellowed about him)?
i've got mod points, and i was gonna try to even this thread out some, but i couldn't figure out where the -1 Fanboy rating was.
the biggest argument for configure is that it allows you to work around broken interfaces supplied by the vendor, particularly in systems where you don't have source. but the amount of work that's been poured into configure and autoconf to try to deal with these bugs in a pseudo-portable, pseudo-transparent manner is dramatically greater than the effort it takes to write a library that conforms to the portable interface. that's a much cleaner way to go, both for the code you're delivering (less code to accommodate exceptions) and the interfaces in the long term (less code weight to continue to support interface bugs). ever tried porting configure to a new platform? ugh.
No more lawsuits from SCO...
...in Japan?
hey, cool! see, it is believable now!
first mod me -1 offtopic. then, explain to me why this is listed as "informative"? i'm assuming this is a joke (please?). i'd likely have given it a +1 funny, too. what's up?
this wouldn't be the first case of a company holding a patent and choosing not to enforce it, or at least being nice to the small guys. ever used backing store on your windowing system? before about two years ago? then that's (nominally) a patent violation - the patent, held by Bell Labs, ended about two years ago. they essentially looked the other way, realizing how fundamental it was.
but then, we're talking about microsoft here...
what? we're talking about 256Kb pretty much anywhere. that's amazing. you can keep struggling with your flash intros and animated gif laden pages, if you like - me, i'll be doing streaming full motion video chat (using iChat, of course). i've done it over worse links. that's huge.