Hate to break it to you, but most of Raskin's work on the Mac was a direct response to the work already completed at Xerox PARC, including but
not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
Not trying to say that the Mac was totally unoriginal, but the Mac didn't spring forth fully formed as a creation of Apple alone.
Raskin didn't claim the work was a creation of Apple, he claimed it was a creation of Raskin. Here's some of the evidence he would give for that contention:
(from This page, emphasis added)
My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and
create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started.
Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics
System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.
It can be summed up in the Prisoners' Dilemma. The best outcome for the prisoners taken
together can only happen if they both keep silent. The best outcome for each prisoner individually is if he rats the other out
and the other keeps silent. Result: both rat the other out, and both loose collectivly and individually.
In this traditional form of the Prisoners' Dilemma the only reason the prisoners have a problem at all is that they don't have the legal freedom to communicate or make enforceable contracts with one another. Otherwise the prisoners would just make a side agreement that nullifies the incentive structure offered by their captors.
In the real world, tragedy of the commons often occurs when the government tries to manage some common resource (say, grazing land) and doesn't let interested private parties negotiate and contract with one another in order to resolve territory disputes, just as the police didn't let those criminals negotiate and contract with one another.
The tragedy of the commons thus suggests we shouldn't let government regulate privacy but should rather let the producers and consumers of information contract freely.
A psychologist has tried that in real life (minus the horrible fate) by placing $5 into a bowl each round with 5 players. When the buzzer sounds, they are each free to grab all the money they can out of the bowl. If there is still money in the bowl, he adds another $5 and play continues. He set a maximum payout of $500. He never had to pay out the whole $500. (I may have the amounts wrong, but that's the jist of the experiment).
Does this psychologist let the kids discuss and form a strategy? In real life, people do that...
The parent post is overrated in that it contains misinformation as well as information.
Both Xerox AND Apple can reasonably be said to have pioneered the GUI. There was a collection of people with interesting ideas who were hired by Xerox PARC, worked there for a while, then moved to Apple and continued to have good ideas. The idea of a GUI predates the work done at Xerox PARC. Xerox did a lot of good work but they didn't produce anything polished enough to be marketable to end-users. Apple did a lot of good work, some before and some after visiting Xerox, that eventually produced a marketable product.
Yes, Apple paid Xerox for access to their research. But that doesn't mean Apple did nothing new of their own. The work that led up to the Lisa and the Macintosh was extremely impressive and went quite a ways past what Xerox had done at the time of the Apple visit.
There's a fair bit of good info at MacKiDo on this subject.
I think you're confusing hostility towards blacks with hostility towards certain liberal black causes. For instance, you claim Rush shows hostility towards blacks, but Rush Limbaugh's usual guest host for many years was Walter Williams, a black conservative. Thomas Sowell is another prominent black conservative. There are many others. If anything, the current situation is the abberation; historically speaking the Republican party was the party that represented the interests of blacks. When the party was founded many people called it the Black Republican Party as it was tied that firmly to the Abolitionist movement.
A little web-surfing finds the claim that 40% of the UAW typically votes Republican. And according to this link a Gallop poll at one point in the campaign found 30% of union members intending to vote for Bush, 61% intending to vote for Gore.
So just because you can't imagine black or union members voting republican, doesn't mean they don't do so.
(as for me, I vote libertarian)
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
Do you really need statistics to know that blacks don't vote republican? Why should they? It's like commiting suicide. It's like a union member voting republican you might as well cut your head off.
Lots of union members vote republican. The fact that somebody belongs to a union doesn't mean they LIKE belonging to a union. The interests of the union management and the interests of the rank-and-file are only sometimes in accord. Other times people are stuck paying dues to a union that supports candidates they dislike. And there are a lot of blackrepublicans too. They may not be in the majority but their numbers are significant. (Didn't Bush get about 30% of the black vote this time around?)
I remember the Apple marketeers insisting that it was not a computer. Didn't they coin the term "personal digital assistant" for precisely that reason?
Yup. The core idea of Newton and the idea behind all the best Newton applications was to do a few specific things well rather than trying to be all things to all people. The first product was too expensive because it was ahead of its time, and subsequent products largely jettisoned the "keep it simple" idea in the hopes of getting sales wherever one could find them.
Palm ran with the original idea and did it better, only incorporating Newton ideas if and when the technology came down in price enough to make the new tech affordable. The first Palm didn't even support beaming, and the idea of one fixed screen size was hardcoded in instead of trying to work on "anything from a post-it note to a whiteboard". Fewer degrees of freedom and a narrow focus is what made Palm devices cheap to build, easy to support, and ubiquitous.
But they pay for [the first class mail] monopoly with a guarantee of universal one-price service, which pretty much nullifies the ability to reap large profits.
FedEx and UPS offer universal one-price service on package delivery. Not because they have to, but because it turns out that it's more efficient to charge one price than to try to figure out what the perfect price is for every combination of routes. You'd lose more money running helplines explaining to people why their package bounced for lack of 20 cents than you'd gain from charging more delivering to people in the boonies.
FedEx and UPS have service that is MORE universal than that of the post office; they deliver door-to-door just about everywhere whereas the post office in remote locations tends to deliver to a "mail stop" that might be many miles from the recipient address.
If competition were legal, I'd expect better universal service at a lower price.
[The Post office is] actually self sufficent, relying upon postage instead of government funds to recoup operating costs.
That's as may be, but it's still relying on government to enfore the postal monopoly on first-class mail. Because FedEx isn't allowed to start delivering small non-time-critical envelopes for less than the Post Office does, the Post Office can reap monopoly profits on that service.
Still, I think the platform was doomed from the beginning. Bad management didn't help, but the whole "Insanely Great" culture, utterly immune to outside criticism and rational priorities, is what ultimately killed it.
You may be right. The Newton was a lot more expensive than it needed to be because priorities weren't set; there was a "kitchen sink" mentality whereby every cool feature it might conceivably have, got thrown in. Both hardware and software were overengineered.
Although to be fair, this was a new device aimed at a new market, so nobody really knew what direction it might take. Palm learned a lot from the Newton experience and managed to take a few good ideas and leave the rest for future products in the indefinite future rather than try to be all things to all people.
Here are some features one could have left off the Newton MP2k hardware:
(1) the stylus holder. There's a pop-out bracket to hold the stylus upright when the newton is flat on a table.
(2) the ribbon cable punch-out. Take off the cover and look at the hinge area; there's a thin rectangle area one might punch out to put in a ribbon cable for a hypothetical cover that would contain a scaled-down keyboard.
(3) The internal modem slot. Swing open the serial-port cover; next to the serial port there's a square area where one might install an RJ11 jack to connect to an internal modem. No such modem was ever made.
...and so on. The rubberized coating felt great, but probably wasn't worth the cost. It was reainforced well enough that you could drive a car over it. There were screw holes for mounting it on a tripod or anti-theft kit. It was better than it needed to be, hence more expensive.
As for the software, all Newton programs were interpreted into bytecode at run time. The advantage of this is it would in theory let Apple change processors later, but they never did. The disadvantage is that all code ran slow. Newton used Unicode. Newton could talk directly to printers. Newton could "beam" information in the days before there was an IRDA standard.
It was a general-purpose computer rather than a PDA. The additional complexity drove up engineering and manufacturing costs to where average people couldn't afford the product at the price Apple could afford to sell, so only us "early adopter" geeks went for it.
Apple was preparing to spin off the company into a separate firm, Newton Inc.
Actually, Apple did spin off Newton Inc. as a separate company. But only for one month, then Steve brought it back in-house. And failed to do anything with it until all the talent had bled off to Palm and elsewhere (Phillips, Casio, etcetera).
Perfected in NewtOS 2.1, Rosetta is, bar none, the best handwriting system available for any PDA in existence.
As the person who tested it, I agree.:-) The Rosetta recognition engine was developed in-house by Apple's ATG group. Despite it being a master work of genius, Apple didn't really know what to do with it and trimmed most of the staff; they all work elsewhere now. The official product name was "Apple Printed Recognizer". The unofficial name was changed to "Mondello" (after a local restaurant) due to a trademark issue, but they never changed the easter egg.
(The egg: write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" in the NotePad; it'll respond with "That's me!")
The best recognizer I know of in the windows world these days is on pen-based windows machines; Paragraph now sells a Windows office suite that includes an updated version of Calligrapher, the engine they refined as the Newton's cursive recognizer. At the time of Newton 2.0, Calligrapher had a print-only mode that was getting to be pretty good, just not as good as Mondello. It's not bad running on a Windows PC.
[I'm Glen Raphael; I wrote NewtPaint, founded the Stanford Newton User's Group, and worked in the Newton System Group and later for LandWare, Inc. as a Newton developer. I loved that product, but nowadays I'm trying to make do with a Pilot.]
"assuming breeder reactors"...
That's one hell of an assumption...
In the US, we choose not to reprocess partly for political reasons (fear of proliferation, largely misguided) and partly for economic reasons (ie, uranium is so cheap and easily available now relative to the demand for it that there's no immediate need to build breeder reactors.)
In the short term we don't need breeder reactors. In the long term, breeder reactors are a relatively straightforward solution (probably not the only one) to humanity's power needs. Given the existence of this technology, it's silly to think we'd have to run out of power any time before the sun explodes. The only problems we have with power production are those we inflict upon ourselves when we let the ignorant, the superstitious, and the paranoid define our power-generation policies.
In posting the above message, when I tried to include a few paragraphs from the Reason article on technological fixes to global warming, Slashdot aborted the posting due to "lameness filter encountered". How does one avoid triggering the lameness filter? In my own humble opinion, deleting the blockquoted portion made the posting MORE, not less, lame.
Any suggestions?
Reason magazine ran an article by Gregory Benford a few years ago that suggests many possibilities for a technological fix, giving the pros and cons to each proposal.
Some of the ideas explored were to plant a lot of trees, to seed the oceans with iron, and to increase the reflectivity of the planet
My favorite idea is what Benford calls "the geritol solution" of seeding the oceans with iron filings to produce plankton blooms to soak up the CO2. This might even be done at a profit if the resultant fishing rights are properly exploited.
That approach, invented and pioneered by scientist John Martin, definitely shows promise.
These facts come from an article by
Bernard Cohen.
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder
reactors, will last for several billion
years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at
that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years.
Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very
big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents
per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and
10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as
the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can
be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents
per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that
price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent
per gallon.
How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in
Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from
seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and
certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain
that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound
and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at
$400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil
$5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium,
so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium.
All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied
by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact
3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium
from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity
usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He
argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift,
the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of
6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun
will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a
renewable resource.
Comments:
Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life
of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his
postulated 5 billion years.
He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy
is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy
intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely
acceptable.
Who would run Gnome or KDE when they can have Aqua - a professionally designed
UI which has undergone professional usability testing?
Eazel also has professional usability testers. In fact, just last week Andy Hertzfield gave a presentation of Nautilus to a room full of user interface experts at a BayCHI meeting because Eazel is trying to hire more usability experts.
Eazel is trying to make the Gnome inerface to Linux seriously cool and seriously usable. I hope they give Apple some competition because MacOS X still seems to need it.
Finally government-subsidized fuel means that small cars are not attractive for most people. (Gas costs upto 4 times as much in Europe)
The gas in the US is not government-subsidized, it simply isn't overtaxed quite as much as the gas in Europe. Last time I looked, a bit over a third of the cost of gas around here -- I'm in California -- is due to state and local gas taxes plus local sales taxes.
there, after about fifteen seconds of barfing and beeping, every username and password in plaintext. Ah, cracking was much simpler then...
I'm guessing it was a Corvus Constellation network of Apple IIs sharing a common hard drive. As for me, I got a brief talking to by the Vice President for printing out that password table but that was about it.
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the worst movies I've seen all year. Fortunately it's so bad that it transcends badness and becomes unintentional camp. I was giggling all the way through it. Some reasons to laugh include:
* the pretentious introductory narration
* the Queen's attempts to argue politics (I wanted her to explain things a little more clearly at the end. For example, she could have said: "You are all now equal! Well, except that we still have all the magic powers and I still have the power to control dragons and I'm still the Queen. But besides that, equal. Whatever that means, since I never made it clear what it was that you lack [voting rights? ability to own land? what?] and the other characters haven't expressed any want for it.")
* the Main Villain's overacting
* The Assistant Villain's overacting (Keanu Reeves would have been perfect in this role)
* Elf's aluminum breastplate. (She's a thin model wearing plate armor that gives her the illusion of huge metal breasts. It reminded me of the fake rubber butt-muscles in the Bat-suit, in that any foe who interacted with such a character in real life would fall on the floor laughing, making it easier to dispatch them.)
* Repeated attempts to fix continuity problems by having Elf say something like "you must do this alone."
* Weird time and weather changes from scene to scene. (How can it be dark and stormy in all the computer-generated castle exterior shots when it's bright and sunny in the concurrent outdoor scenes?)
In other words, this is a must-see bad movie. Bring a friend to a matinee and prepare to laugh yourself silly.
Dennis Branch, admin for TheIndex. No, your name isn't there. Neither is anarchocapitalism. Everything else is though, so I don't know why those searches should have failed. We'll look into it. Possibly it's related to ping time. ???
Nope. I've figured it out, it was a user interface issue. I had a search results window up and was typing most of these queries into the "Refine this search:" box at the top. I'd type "pig", get no results, hit the back button on my browser in order to get a search box, type a different query and so on. Based on the way other search engines work, I expected that putting text in that search window would by default do a new search on whatever text I typed in that window. But -- I can tell by looking at the URL -- it's doing a sub-search instead, including whatever term I initially searched for.
You might want to change that UI. "Refine this search" doesn't imply to me what you want it to imply. You could make this a new search instead but put the previous search terms in the input area so the user can refine by adding more terms on the end. Or you could have a radio button that toggles whether the new search is a subsearch.
Search on "Jerome Russell" (A company that makes hair color products, hoping to find "www.jeromerussell.com or a company that sells their products). No results found.
Search on "hair color". No results.
Search on "hair". No results.
Search on "color". No results.
Search on "poultry". No results.
Search on "pig". No results.
Search on "anarchocapitalism". No results.
Search on my name ("Glen Raphael"). No results.
Just think of all the time I just saved not looking at any useless web pages! I think I'm sticking with Google for now...
During his keynote at this year's COMDEX, Bill Gates demonstrated a prototype of what they call "the tablet PC". Near as I can tell, it's an attempt to provide OS-level support for the features of Newton OS 2.1 in slate-format Windows PCs.
The technical demonstration included reflowable ink text ( which could be italicized, made bold, highlighted or searched), shape recognition, sketch ink, gesture recognition, and markup recognition. There was very little there that Newton didn't do first, but since Newton is gone I'm glad somebody has picked up the ball and is running with it.
You can find Bill's speech here. (Search for the word "tablet")
As a sample, here's Microsoft's Bert Keely describing ink text as if Microsoft invented it:
"Well, we've got this ability to support handwritten ink. And handwritten ink is expressive, it's intuitive to
use, it's very personal. There would seem to be some great benefits if we could bring that into the
electronic world. Of course, the very first step is to make sure that the ink flows from the pen just as
quickly and smoothly as it does on paper. Now, we've been doing a lot of work on this, and I think we've
really achieved it, and I want to zoom way in, so you can see the quality of these strokes. Now, it looks
simple, but there's a lot of computer science going on here.
First of all, we're capturing the ink at 133 samples a second, versus the 30 or 40 samples a second you
get with the mouse. Second, we immediately convert the strokes to Bezier splines, which smoothes them.
And then we anti-alias the edges, which make them look even better. I think my doctor's handwriting
could use some of this technology. Of course, that's how we match paper. But, with the power of the
PC, we can also go way beyond paper. So I want to show you the notes that I've taken in preparation
for my meeting, and maybe show you how we can work with the handwritten ink. Okay.
So here's a sentence that I think is just a little bit too long, and I'd like to be able to shorten it. So I just
want to select some ink and cut it, and I'd like to have the document reflow just like it would in a word
processor. Well, we can do that, because the software is recognizing the format of the ink as being either
words, or drawings, or even mark up, so it will do the right thing. And if it recognizes it as words, then it
will treat it like a word processor would. In fact, we can format our ink just like we would text. So I can
add bold, italics, highlighting, whatever."
Most of us technical people despise managers for being ignorant, illogical, egotistical people that make us waste more time dealing with office politics than with doing
our jobs.
If your manager is like that, you should be looking for another job. Seriously. Of the dozen managers I've worked for only one was truly bad, most have been fabulous. A manager is someone who protects you from the stuff you'd rather not deal with, helps you get the resources you need, sticks up for you when others criticise, puts up with your idiosyncracies, and mostly stays out the way to let you do your job.
I'd agree that politicians are like managers if my manager were forcing me to work at gunpoint and could send me to jail if I didn't obey his arbitrary dictates, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.:-) Also, I've often had the opportunity to interview my own manager and decide unilaterally whether I want to work for him. I've never really had that option with a politician.
But our government is so big and complicated with so many organizations and laws acting at cross purposes to one another, that its capacity for evil is limited. So even though I vote Libertarian and encourage others to do the same, I regard national politics primarily as a form of entertainment. Sometimes it's a comedy, often it's a tragedy as well, but it rarely proves uninteresting.
Yes, it's often pointless and cruel (as when we bomb pharmeceutical factories or jail casual drug users), but like a traffic accident, government is just too horrible not to watch.
A libertarian society distributes power to those who possess property.
Everyone possesses property. At a minimum, each person owns their own mind, their own body, and what they produce with these resources. Hence, you are effectively claiming a libertarian society distributes power to everyone. With which I would agree.
No checks and balances, no way to reduce or eliminate abuses of that power (such as, say,
industrial pollution)
One check is that person A can't infringe upon the property rights of person B. (Another check is that groups of people can still voluntarily pool their resources to solve large problems.) In a libertarian society if you can prove somebody else is damaging your property -- say, by releasing toxic sludge that leaks onto it -- you have a legal claim against that somebody. Certainly this isn't a perfect system for reducing pollution or conflict, but neither is the current system perfect. Utopia is not an option. "Better than the status quo" is about the best that could be hoped for, and I think Free Market Environmentalists can make a case that their methods would accomplish this.
Contrast the Sierra Club with the Nature Conservancy. Both are trying to preserve nature, but one uses primarily political means and the other uses primarily free-market means. The advantage of the Sierra Club's politicking ways is that it can in theory control a lot more land. The disadvantage is that they never really WIN any of their battles. The most they can grant an at-risk parcel of land is a stay of execution, never a full pardon. Next year's Congress or Forest Service can always undo any good done by this year's Congress; eternal vigilance is required to see that the politicians stay bought.
Which method do you think is ultimately a more efficient way to save a patch of snail darter habitat: (a) lobby the government every single year forever and ever to maintain political control over a plot of land, or (b) buy the land once from the people who own it now, and own it thereafter?
All the way through this I was thinking how nice it is to see candidates actually answer the questions asked and take controversial stands.
There's a reason Gore and Bush don't do the same thing, which is that they have a chance of winning. By virtue of being ahead in the polls, Gore and Bush have a lot to lose and little to gain by taking risks. Third party candidates have nowhere to go but up in the polls; taking the chance of answering controversial questions directly and honestly helps them.
The moral of the story: we need to broaden future debates to include more candidates, in order to get more information out and raise the standard of debate.
Browne and McReynolds both strike me as more intelligent and intellectually involved than The Two Nitwits. I'd love to see both of these guys -- and Nader -- in the TV debates.
Slashdot Mirror
My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started.
Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.
In the real world, tragedy of the commons often occurs when the government tries to manage some common resource (say, grazing land) and doesn't let interested private parties negotiate and contract with one another in order to resolve territory disputes, just as the police didn't let those criminals negotiate and contract with one another.
The tragedy of the commons thus suggests we shouldn't let government regulate privacy but should rather let the producers and consumers of information contract freely.
Does this psychologist let the kids discuss and form a strategy? In real life, people do that...If the use of your nickname is annoying, Amazon tells you how to turn it off here.
Both Xerox AND Apple can reasonably be said to have pioneered the GUI. There was a collection of people with interesting ideas who were hired by Xerox PARC, worked there for a while, then moved to Apple and continued to have good ideas. The idea of a GUI predates the work done at Xerox PARC. Xerox did a lot of good work but they didn't produce anything polished enough to be marketable to end-users. Apple did a lot of good work, some before and some after visiting Xerox, that eventually produced a marketable product.
Yes, Apple paid Xerox for access to their research. But that doesn't mean Apple did nothing new of their own. The work that led up to the Lisa and the Macintosh was extremely impressive and went quite a ways past what Xerox had done at the time of the Apple visit.
There's a fair bit of good info at MacKiDo on this subject.
A little web-surfing finds the claim that 40% of the UAW typically votes Republican. And according to this link a Gallop poll at one point in the campaign found 30% of union members intending to vote for Bush, 61% intending to vote for Gore.
So just because you can't imagine black or union members voting republican, doesn't mean they don't do so.
(as for me, I vote libertarian)
Lots of union members vote republican. The fact that somebody belongs to a union doesn't mean they LIKE belonging to a union. The interests of the union management and the interests of the rank-and-file are only sometimes in accord. Other times people are stuck paying dues to a union that supports candidates they dislike. And there are a lot of black republicans too. They may not be in the majority but their numbers are significant. (Didn't Bush get about 30% of the black vote this time around?)
Yup. The core idea of Newton and the idea behind all the best Newton applications was to do a few specific things well rather than trying to be all things to all people. The first product was too expensive because it was ahead of its time, and subsequent products largely jettisoned the "keep it simple" idea in the hopes of getting sales wherever one could find them.
Palm ran with the original idea and did it better, only incorporating Newton ideas if and when the technology came down in price enough to make the new tech affordable. The first Palm didn't even support beaming, and the idea of one fixed screen size was hardcoded in instead of trying to work on "anything from a post-it note to a whiteboard". Fewer degrees of freedom and a narrow focus is what made Palm devices cheap to build, easy to support, and ubiquitous.
FedEx and UPS offer universal one-price service on package delivery. Not because they have to, but because it turns out that it's more efficient to charge one price than to try to figure out what the perfect price is for every combination of routes. You'd lose more money running helplines explaining to people why their package bounced for lack of 20 cents than you'd gain from charging more delivering to people in the boonies.
FedEx and UPS have service that is MORE universal than that of the post office; they deliver door-to-door just about everywhere whereas the post office in remote locations tends to deliver to a "mail stop" that might be many miles from the recipient address.
If competition were legal, I'd expect better universal service at a lower price.
That's as may be, but it's still relying on government to enfore the postal monopoly on first-class mail. Because FedEx isn't allowed to start delivering small non-time-critical envelopes for less than the Post Office does, the Post Office can reap monopoly profits on that service.
You may be right. The Newton was a lot more expensive than it needed to be because priorities weren't set; there was a "kitchen sink" mentality whereby every cool feature it might conceivably have, got thrown in. Both hardware and software were overengineered.
Although to be fair, this was a new device aimed at a new market, so nobody really knew what direction it might take. Palm learned a lot from the Newton experience and managed to take a few good ideas and leave the rest for future products in the indefinite future rather than try to be all things to all people.
Here are some features one could have left off the Newton MP2k hardware:
(1) the stylus holder. There's a pop-out bracket to hold the stylus upright when the newton is flat on a table.
(2) the ribbon cable punch-out. Take off the cover and look at the hinge area; there's a thin rectangle area one might punch out to put in a ribbon cable for a hypothetical cover that would contain a scaled-down keyboard.
(3) The internal modem slot. Swing open the serial-port cover; next to the serial port there's a square area where one might install an RJ11 jack to connect to an internal modem. No such modem was ever made.
As for the software, all Newton programs were interpreted into bytecode at run time. The advantage of this is it would in theory let Apple change processors later, but they never did. The disadvantage is that all code ran slow. Newton used Unicode. Newton could talk directly to printers. Newton could "beam" information in the days before there was an IRDA standard.
It was a general-purpose computer rather than a PDA. The additional complexity drove up engineering and manufacturing costs to where average people couldn't afford the product at the price Apple could afford to sell, so only us "early adopter" geeks went for it.
Oh, well; on to the next big thing...
Actually, Apple did spin off Newton Inc. as a separate company. But only for one month, then Steve brought it back in-house. And failed to do anything with it until all the talent had bled off to Palm and elsewhere (Phillips, Casio, etcetera).
Perfected in NewtOS 2.1, Rosetta is, bar none, the best handwriting system available for any PDA in existence.
As the person who tested it, I agree. :-) The Rosetta recognition engine was developed in-house by Apple's ATG group. Despite it being a master work of genius, Apple didn't really know what to do with it and trimmed most of the staff; they all work elsewhere now. The official product name was "Apple Printed Recognizer". The unofficial name was changed to "Mondello" (after a local restaurant) due to a trademark issue, but they never changed the easter egg.
(The egg: write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" in the NotePad; it'll respond with "That's me!")
The best recognizer I know of in the windows world these days is on pen-based windows machines; Paragraph now sells a Windows office suite that includes an updated version of Calligrapher, the engine they refined as the Newton's cursive recognizer. At the time of Newton 2.0, Calligrapher had a print-only mode that was getting to be pretty good, just not as good as Mondello. It's not bad running on a Windows PC.
[I'm Glen Raphael; I wrote NewtPaint, founded the Stanford Newton User's Group, and worked in the Newton System Group and later for LandWare, Inc. as a Newton developer. I loved that product, but nowadays I'm trying to make do with a Pilot.]
That's one hell of an assumption...
In the US, we choose not to reprocess partly for political reasons (fear of proliferation, largely misguided) and partly for economic reasons (ie, uranium is so cheap and easily available now relative to the demand for it that there's no immediate need to build breeder reactors.)
In the short term we don't need breeder reactors. In the long term, breeder reactors are a relatively straightforward solution (probably not the only one) to humanity's power needs. Given the existence of this technology, it's silly to think we'd have to run out of power any time before the sun explodes. The only problems we have with power production are those we inflict upon ourselves when we let the ignorant, the superstitious, and the paranoid define our power-generation policies.
In posting the above message, when I tried to include a few paragraphs from the Reason article on technological fixes to global warming, Slashdot aborted the posting due to "lameness filter encountered". How does one avoid triggering the lameness filter? In my own humble opinion, deleting the blockquoted portion made the posting MORE, not less, lame. Any suggestions?
That approach, invented and pioneered by scientist John Martin, definitely shows promise.
-=-=-
How long will nuclear energy last?
These facts come from an article by Bernard Cohen.
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
Comments:
- Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life
of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his
postulated 5 billion years.
- He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
- He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely acceptable.Eazel also has professional usability testers. In fact, just last week Andy Hertzfield gave a presentation of Nautilus to a room full of user interface experts at a BayCHI meeting because Eazel is trying to hire more usability experts.
Eazel is trying to make the Gnome inerface to Linux seriously cool and seriously usable. I hope they give Apple some competition because MacOS X still seems to need it.
The gas in the US is not government-subsidized, it simply isn't overtaxed quite as much as the gas in Europe. Last time I looked, a bit over a third of the cost of gas around here -- I'm in California -- is due to state and local gas taxes plus local sales taxes.
Plaintext. Who woulda thunk it...
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the worst movies I've seen all year. Fortunately it's so bad that it transcends badness and becomes unintentional camp. I was giggling all the way through it. Some reasons to laugh include:
* the pretentious introductory narration
* the Queen's attempts to argue politics (I wanted her to explain things a little more clearly at the end. For example, she could have said: "You are all now equal! Well, except that we still have all the magic powers and I still have the power to control dragons and I'm still the Queen. But besides that, equal. Whatever that means, since I never made it clear what it was that you lack [voting rights? ability to own land? what?] and the other characters haven't expressed any want for it.")
* the Main Villain's overacting
* The Assistant Villain's overacting (Keanu Reeves would have been perfect in this role)
* Elf's aluminum breastplate. (She's a thin model wearing plate armor that gives her the illusion of huge metal breasts. It reminded me of the fake rubber butt-muscles in the Bat-suit, in that any foe who interacted with such a character in real life would fall on the floor laughing, making it easier to dispatch them.)
* Repeated attempts to fix continuity problems by having Elf say something like "you must do this alone."
* Weird time and weather changes from scene to scene. (How can it be dark and stormy in all the computer-generated castle exterior shots when it's bright and sunny in the concurrent outdoor scenes?)
In other words, this is a must-see bad movie. Bring a friend to a matinee and prepare to laugh yourself silly.
You might want to change that UI. "Refine this search" doesn't imply to me what you want it to imply. You could make this a new search instead but put the previous search terms in the input area so the user can refine by adding more terms on the end. Or you could have a radio button that toggles whether the new search is a subsearch.
Here are a few theindex search results:
Search on "Jerome Russell" (A company that makes hair color products, hoping to find "www.jeromerussell.com or a company that sells their products). No results found.
Search on "hair color". No results.
Search on "hair". No results.
Search on "color". No results.
Search on "poultry". No results.
Search on "pig". No results.
Search on "anarchocapitalism". No results.
Search on my name ("Glen Raphael"). No results.
Just think of all the time I just saved not looking at any useless web pages! I think I'm sticking with Google for now...
The technical demonstration included reflowable ink text ( which could be italicized, made bold, highlighted or searched), shape recognition, sketch ink, gesture recognition, and markup recognition. There was very little there that Newton didn't do first, but since Newton is gone I'm glad somebody has picked up the ball and is running with it.
You can find Bill's speech here. (Search for the word "tablet")
As a sample, here's Microsoft's Bert Keely describing ink text as if Microsoft invented it:
-Glen "NewtPaint" Raphael
If your manager is like that, you should be looking for another job. Seriously. Of the dozen managers I've worked for only one was truly bad, most have been fabulous. A manager is someone who protects you from the stuff you'd rather not deal with, helps you get the resources you need, sticks up for you when others criticise, puts up with your idiosyncracies, and mostly stays out the way to let you do your job.
I'd agree that politicians are like managers if my manager were forcing me to work at gunpoint and could send me to jail if I didn't obey his arbitrary dictates, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. :-) Also, I've often had the opportunity to interview my own manager and decide unilaterally whether I want to work for him. I've never really had that option with a politician.
But our government is so big and complicated with so many organizations and laws acting at cross purposes to one another, that its capacity for evil is limited. So even though I vote Libertarian and encourage others to do the same, I regard national politics primarily as a form of entertainment. Sometimes it's a comedy, often it's a tragedy as well, but it rarely proves uninteresting.
Yes, it's often pointless and cruel (as when we bomb pharmeceutical factories or jail casual drug users), but like a traffic accident, government is just too horrible not to watch.
Everyone possesses property. At a minimum, each person owns their own mind, their own body, and what they produce with these resources. Hence, you are effectively claiming a libertarian society distributes power to everyone. With which I would agree.
No checks and balances, no way to reduce or eliminate abuses of that power (such as, say, industrial pollution)
One check is that person A can't infringe upon the property rights of person B. (Another check is that groups of people can still voluntarily pool their resources to solve large problems.) In a libertarian society if you can prove somebody else is damaging your property -- say, by releasing toxic sludge that leaks onto it -- you have a legal claim against that somebody. Certainly this isn't a perfect system for reducing pollution or conflict, but neither is the current system perfect. Utopia is not an option. "Better than the status quo" is about the best that could be hoped for, and I think Free Market Environmentalists can make a case that their methods would accomplish this.
Contrast the Sierra Club with the Nature Conservancy. Both are trying to preserve nature, but one uses primarily political means and the other uses primarily free-market means. The advantage of the Sierra Club's politicking ways is that it can in theory control a lot more land. The disadvantage is that they never really WIN any of their battles. The most they can grant an at-risk parcel of land is a stay of execution, never a full pardon. Next year's Congress or Forest Service can always undo any good done by this year's Congress; eternal vigilance is required to see that the politicians stay bought.
Which method do you think is ultimately a more efficient way to save a patch of snail darter habitat:
(a) lobby the government every single year forever and ever to maintain political control over a plot of land, or
(b) buy the land once from the people who own it now, and own it thereafter?
I choose (b).
There's a reason Gore and Bush don't do the same thing, which is that they have a chance of winning. By virtue of being ahead in the polls, Gore and Bush have a lot to lose and little to gain by taking risks. Third party candidates have nowhere to go but up in the polls; taking the chance of answering controversial questions directly and honestly helps them.
The moral of the story: we need to broaden future debates to include more candidates, in order to get more information out and raise the standard of debate.
Browne and McReynolds both strike me as more intelligent and intellectually involved than The Two Nitwits. I'd love to see both of these guys -- and Nader -- in the TV debates.
(As for me, I'm voting for Browne.)