I had a Kindle subscription to the NYT, but canceled it recently because it didn't have a lot of the cool stuff - like the puzzle. I couldn't see the point to paying for a neutered product.
Remember who's administratation coined the term "Narco-Terrorist" to justify an attack on another former military strong-man turned deamon-du-jour in the late 1980's? Wasn't his name Bush also?
Speaking as someone with a tech writing background, I have to say that most of the Apache documentation isn't all that easy to use. It's great if you're looking for a specific fact, but there's not a lot of context surrounding those facts. It makes it a little difficult for people to narrow down the problem space with looking for a solution to an issue.
This is a challenge I've face with most OSS. The support community IS the documentation, even if it's in German (they write good code there, too, don't they?)
I agree that their support (both RH and JBoss) are $$$. We use both here, so we'll probably suck it up and purchase support for another year, but it's still easier to manage than the (less-than-comperable?) offering from MS, especially when you look at the flexibility it gives us.
make your system idiot-proof, and the world will make a better idiot....
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
fundementally important, given the weaknesses of the old preOSX Mac OS. Protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, yadda-yadda.
The BSD layer finally gave Apple a stable (secure? we'll see) foundation upon which to build their compelling UI.
I don't know if this is such a no-brainer in the embedded/mobile space. I wonder how much of Motorola's Linux-on-phones developer relation challenges are realted to their bad business practices, or technical challenges. Given the number of sucessful embedded linux products there are out there, I'm going to vote for bad business,
anyway, a main-stream *NIX based PDA/smartphone would be a winner in my book as long as it's hackable
Check the EQ settings. I've got a 4G that clips out aocustic jazz when I have the EQ set on Electronic. Turning it off gennerally gives me the best results overall.
I know in iTunes you can apply EQ settings to the individual track, but it occurs to me that I've never actually check to see if the iPod honors those...
I have a soft spot for Sterling engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine) and though that they might have a place in waste-heat recovery applications. Cars might be a bit of challenge do to the nature of the free-moving piston (anyone know of research in this area?), but I through that a CRT-heat or CPU-heat powered piston with a magnet moving inside a fixed coil would be a nifty way to generate a few extra Watts...maybe enough to charge my cell-phone or trickle charge a couple AA batteries.......
my personal opinion is that the Google appliance is WAY too expensive, which is why enterprises haven't run to get on board with it. When we looked at it, as a small state agency, there was no way we could justify the cost.
Rolling a semi-distributed solution out to everyone's desktop seems like it might (without know any details) be a cheaper way to do it. It's not like there aren't CPU cycles just going to waste there or anything....
I sent an email inquery to them right after it was announced, and no one ever contacted me. I even talked to someone at Sun (a different division), and still never heard from them....
Hey! That's a great idea! We could connect them all into this really big neural network that would make a great executive manager of a bunch of processes....Wow, that's amazing clever! Has anyone out there seen a working example of the design pattern?!?...oh really...a brain, you say? How..how..analog..
I bought the mini for the price and form factor with the plan to upgrade it for performance. Adding RAM helped a lot with the pin-wheel-o'-death, but I haven't gotten to the HD upgrade yet. And, I haven't been watching the HR market lately.
What's good in the 2.5", 5400-7200RPM 80GB+/- market now? I'm looking to avoid the scenerio where a crappy drive fails in the 2nd year of the warrenty and you just have to decide to get the next one bigger rather than do the warrenty repair.
Must be all that science fiction that makes them parnoid. Stuff like 1984, Brave New World, and The Terminator, etc. I'm sure once the State has completed the Sum Total of All Knowlege National DNA registry, we'll be able to get a grant to analyze the data to find a common genetic profile for people drawn to such subversive rubbish.
We'll have some nice camps in the desert for them to stay at...
first, I didn't RTFA, but I wanted to relate our exprience at a recent technology conference my employer hosted. The names of the guilty/innocent have been scrubed to keep this post from being moderated into Flamebait.
Part of the conference was a series of hands-on labs that we were hosting using loaner equipment from major manufactures. The network was provided my a major ISP through a national hotel (where this part of the conference was being held).
The labs were assembled by volunteers, and were pretty much infected beyond use with spyware and viruses within about 10 minutes of coming online. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. We had 20+ people scrubbing the machines off-line for literally HOURS, only to have them reinfected once they came back online (now behind a firewall).
To compound the issue, we couldn't feasibly reimage the machines because the vendor donating them gave us at least 10 different models with 2-3 variations on each model.
In the end we threw in the towel, refunded people's money, and let the Mac lab (which remained unaffected) continue their presentations.
If I read the article correctly, what's really being tested is how fast RH and MS turned out patched to their httpd stacks. 30 days is not something I'd be particualrly proud of. 71 days on the part of RH is laughable.
What I want to know is how fast did the Apache/PHP/MySQL crowd have their problems patched. Just because RH dropped the ball doesn't mean that the entire *AMP community was left holding the bag.
Testing a single (albeit popular) distrbution is like condeming the entire US highway system because one stretch of it in downtown Boston is littered with potholes.
Did Bill get a new PR firm? I've seem more Gates stories in the last week than most of last year? Is he trying to make a shift from IT Industrialist to High-Tech Cultural Pundit?
Looking at it from a marketing point of view, its like money in the bank for MS. Nothing like having your founder out there framing the next technological debate in terms of what you have coming out of the R&D lab.
that's pretty amazing that some would try to blatently repackage an OSS vertical app. But then, on second through, human nature being what it is, maybe it's not so amazing, just sad. Maybe the 300K Euros was for integration, training, etc.....or maybe it was just greed.
I've seen both custom and COTS solutions succeed, and I've seen them both fail miserably.
As a number of folks have pointed out, the PM/planning/Requirements gathering has a huge amount to do with the eventual success. As does the willingness of the users to actually adopt the system.
You'd hope the if you involve all of the stakeholders at the right point they will buy into the final solution, but in reality, the corporate politics can kill a technically exellent solution more effectivly than a politically supported but technically weak solution.
If people have some degree of buy-in to a solution, they'll overlook a lot of v1.0 warts. If they hate it for political reasons, they won't rest until those responsible for it have been sack, the people who sacked them sacked, and so on...
unfortunatly, this usually leaves the user community (e.g., the company) in the same or worse mess than they started.
the problem with URLs (particularly in web-based applications) is that they tend to be unintelligible to the users. Our applications pass around a number of unique identifiers between pages, which results in a relativly readable (but generic) URL stub with a whole mess'o' hex strings following. This trailing information has been encoded to make the parser's job easier, not the users.
So, we provide a clear context (breadcrumb, menu highlighting, etc) in the UI that tells the user at a glance where he/she is in the app.
Baiscally, for anything other than a trivial app or largely static content, the URL shouldn't be used as a way-finding tool.
I'm not tryig to troll-bait, either. However, this piece is exactly the type of story we need on/. It's all about technology and how it effects everyone's daily lives. Technology doesn't exist in a vaccuum - it's all part of the larger society.
I think it's our responsibility as technologist to pay attention to the social impact of our work. We can choose to proceed in the face of the social consequences, but it's our duty to consider them. Social institutions and relationships are a lot harder to debug than technology. There's really no way to ship a Neighborhood 2.0 or Family 1.1 after the origional one is fsck'd.
I agree with you. I think the people who will use non-GUIs, and even stick with 2D GUIs are the same hard-core (or cheap) group of geeks who got the thing going in the first place. However, we (meaning/.ers) are the tip of the wedge of computer users. I think the real growth of the industry is going to be in pervasive computing. Central home computers, wearables, smart appliances, pda/phone - all of these will need to be managed from the home computer soon. Also, the ability to do desktop video is becoming more and more common, especically as the baby-boomers start to retire and play more. (Few things will make a 60-ish year old grand parent sit in front of a computer for hours like pictures and movies of grandkids).
So I guess I see that it's going to be a series of forces coming together that's really going to make this a reality.
that's the real benefit of a 3D based UI. The Desktop metaphoere is over 30 years old. It's based on a set of technological assumptions and capabilities that were the reality in the until the mid-late 90's. 2D graphics, popularized with the intro of the Mac in 80 and jumpstarted with Windows is the door through which the current hot UI, 3D graphics, entered the game.
Just as 2D GUIs were a huge improvement over text-based interfaces, so will "true" 3D interfaces be an improvement over the 2D methaphorical "desktop". The problem is, we haven't found the right metaphore. We've been trying to for 20 odd years with a whole bunch of the VR-ish schemes, but we haven't found the right combinations of controls and abstract representations of the information.
I think some of the problem is the impedence mismatch between the data sets in the information being displayed and our cultural expectations of the 3D, semi-immersive experience. How exciting is a text email in a 3D space? Is an interface that had a 3D model of the person who sent it to you speak the message be a better metaphore? Would it make you more "productive?" Maybe that's a bad question to ask the Slashdot community, but it would certantily make my grandma more willing to use a computer system.
The fact is, the productivty enhancement curve of desktop interfaces is flattening. They're still being deployed more widely, (out of the office and into industrial automation type applications), but the high-water mark of the amount of productivity/economic benefit they bring to most tasks has been established.
So where to go next? How do you make a better interface to Amazon to keep customers coming back, offering them a better experience? Make the interface "thinner". Well, let's start by making the metaphore into the information less bound by a 30 year old view of how to progamaticlly visulize information. And, say, there's a lot of specialized processing power lying around in GPUs that most people already have (the same people who also tend to buy a lot on line, concidentialy).
So I see this requirment as essential to the continued growth of the computer and IT sectors (i.e., our jobs). And that's not just a purely self-interested statement. I don't really see the IT and computer sectors going away barring a massive change to society today. What I really want the industry to take on is a way to make things more accessible for the people like my grandma - the people who don't choose to use technology the way we do, but rather are being forced to use it by the commercial adoption of technology (think of how much banking is done through ATMs, and how hard it can be to actually see a live person).
I don't think either MAc OSX or Longhorn will get us there, but they're logical steps in the right direction. This requirement may make the PC industry wake up and realize that if X86 is platform and is going to be for the forseeable future, standards are going to need to be a lot tighter going forward. Not just standards of hardware and OS-level interoperation, but true data-to-users interaction. Of course "getting it right" might not be in the interests of some of the market's players - planned obselence goes a long way toward makeing the quarterly figures for the stockholders.
I had a Timbuk2 bike messenger bag that I use to carry a Vaio and a change of clothes to and from work. It's a great bag, and I see that they now have a laptop model. The cool thing, they're bags have a rubberized skin thatm makes them largly water proof (though not water-tight).
I crashed my bike once and landed flat on my back on top of the Vaio and the bag/clothes combo saved the laptop from even a dent.
I think if you want a messenger bag, get it from the folks who make professional messenager bags.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a Kindle subscription to the NYT, but canceled it recently because it didn't have a lot of the cool stuff - like the puzzle. I couldn't see the point to paying for a neutered product.
like this? http://www2.norwich.edu/mkabay/overviews/infowar_1 995.htm
Remember who's administratation coined the term "Narco-Terrorist" to justify an attack on another former military strong-man turned deamon-du-jour in the late 1980's? Wasn't his name Bush also?
Speaking as someone with a tech writing background, I have to say that most of the Apache documentation isn't all that easy to use. It's great if you're looking for a specific fact, but there's not a lot of context surrounding those facts. It makes it a little difficult for people to narrow down the problem space with looking for a solution to an issue.
This is a challenge I've face with most OSS. The support community IS the documentation, even if it's in German (they write good code there, too, don't they?)
I agree that their support (both RH and JBoss) are $$$. We use both here, so we'll probably suck it up and purchase support for another year, but it's still easier to manage than the (less-than-comperable?) offering from MS, especially when you look at the flexibility it gives us.
make your system idiot-proof, and the world will make a better idiot....
fundementally important, given the weaknesses of the old preOSX Mac OS. Protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, yadda-yadda.
The BSD layer finally gave Apple a stable (secure? we'll see) foundation upon which to build their compelling UI.
I don't know if this is such a no-brainer in the embedded/mobile space. I wonder how much of Motorola's Linux-on-phones developer relation challenges are realted to their bad business practices, or technical challenges. Given the number of sucessful embedded linux products there are out there, I'm going to vote for bad business,
anyway, a main-stream *NIX based PDA/smartphone would be a winner in my book as long as it's hackable
Check the EQ settings. I've got a 4G that clips out aocustic jazz when I have the EQ set on Electronic. Turning it off gennerally gives me the best results overall.
I know in iTunes you can apply EQ settings to the individual track, but it occurs to me that I've never actually check to see if the iPod honors those...
I have a soft spot for Sterling engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine) and though that they might have a place in waste-heat recovery applications. Cars might be a bit of challenge do to the nature of the free-moving piston (anyone know of research in this area?), but I through that a CRT-heat or CPU-heat powered piston with a magnet moving inside a fixed coil would be a nifty way to generate a few extra Watts...maybe enough to charge my cell-phone or trickle charge a couple AA batteries.......
my personal opinion is that the Google appliance is WAY too expensive, which is why enterprises haven't run to get on board with it. When we looked at it, as a small state agency, there was no way we could justify the cost.
Rolling a semi-distributed solution out to everyone's desktop seems like it might (without know any details) be a cheaper way to do it. It's not like there aren't CPU cycles just going to waste there or anything....
my $0.02
I sent an email inquery to them right after it was announced, and no one ever contacted me. I even talked to someone at Sun (a different division), and still never heard from them....
Hey! That's a great idea! We could connect them all into this really big neural network that would make a great executive manager of a bunch of processes....Wow, that's amazing clever! Has anyone out there seen a working example of the design pattern?!? ...oh really...a brain, you say? How..how..analog..
(ps...it's humor)
I'm just lonely nad bored....is that such a bad thing?
I bought the mini for the price and form factor with the plan to upgrade it for performance. Adding RAM helped a lot with the pin-wheel-o'-death, but I haven't gotten to the HD upgrade yet. And, I haven't been watching the HR market lately.
What's good in the 2.5", 5400-7200RPM 80GB+/- market now? I'm looking to avoid the scenerio where a crappy drive fails in the 2nd year of the warrenty and you just have to decide to get the next one bigger rather than do the warrenty repair.
Must be all that science fiction that makes them parnoid. Stuff like 1984, Brave New World, and The Terminator, etc. I'm sure once the State has completed the Sum Total of All Knowlege National DNA registry, we'll be able to get a grant to analyze the data to find a common genetic profile for people drawn to such subversive rubbish.
We'll have some nice camps in the desert for them to stay at...
first, I didn't RTFA, but I wanted to relate our exprience at a recent technology conference my employer hosted. The names of the guilty/innocent have been scrubed to keep this post from being moderated into Flamebait.
Part of the conference was a series of hands-on labs that we were hosting using loaner equipment from major manufactures. The network was provided my a major ISP through a national hotel (where this part of the conference was being held).
The labs were assembled by volunteers, and were pretty much infected beyond use with spyware and viruses within about 10 minutes of coming online. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. We had 20+ people scrubbing the machines off-line for literally HOURS, only to have them reinfected once they came back online (now behind a firewall).
To compound the issue, we couldn't feasibly reimage the machines because the vendor donating them gave us at least 10 different models with 2-3 variations on each model.
In the end we threw in the towel, refunded people's money, and let the Mac lab (which remained unaffected) continue their presentations.
just my $.023233432322
If I read the article correctly, what's really being tested is how fast RH and MS turned out patched to their httpd stacks. 30 days is not something I'd be particualrly proud of. 71 days on the part of RH is laughable.
What I want to know is how fast did the Apache/PHP/MySQL crowd have their problems patched. Just because RH dropped the ball doesn't mean that the entire *AMP community was left holding the bag.
Testing a single (albeit popular) distrbution is like condeming the entire US highway system because one stretch of it in downtown Boston is littered with potholes.
Did Bill get a new PR firm? I've seem more Gates stories in the last week than most of last year? Is he trying to make a shift from IT Industrialist to High-Tech Cultural Pundit?
Looking at it from a marketing point of view, its like money in the bank for MS. Nothing like having your founder out there framing the next technological debate in terms of what you have coming out of the R&D lab.
that's pretty amazing that some would try to blatently repackage an OSS vertical app. But then, on second through, human nature being what it is, maybe it's not so amazing, just sad. Maybe the 300K Euros was for integration, training, etc.....or maybe it was just greed.
What did your company eventually end up doing?
I've seen both custom and COTS solutions succeed, and I've seen them both fail miserably.
As a number of folks have pointed out, the PM/planning/Requirements gathering has a huge amount to do with the eventual success. As does the willingness of the users to actually adopt the system.
You'd hope the if you involve all of the stakeholders at the right point they will buy into the final solution, but in reality, the corporate politics can kill a technically exellent solution more effectivly than a politically supported but technically weak solution.
If people have some degree of buy-in to a solution, they'll overlook a lot of v1.0 warts. If they hate it for political reasons, they won't rest until those responsible for it have been sack, the people who sacked them sacked, and so on...
unfortunatly, this usually leaves the user community (e.g., the company) in the same or worse mess than they started.
the problem with URLs (particularly in web-based applications) is that they tend to be unintelligible to the users. Our applications pass around a number of unique identifiers between pages, which results in a relativly readable (but generic) URL stub with a whole mess'o' hex strings following. This trailing information has been encoded to make the parser's job easier, not the users.
So, we provide a clear context (breadcrumb, menu highlighting, etc) in the UI that tells the user at a glance where he/she is in the app.
Baiscally, for anything other than a trivial app or largely static content, the URL shouldn't be used as a way-finding tool.
I'm not tryig to troll-bait, either. However, this piece is exactly the type of story we need on /. It's all about technology and how it effects everyone's daily lives. Technology doesn't exist in a vaccuum - it's all part of the larger society.
.02 USD
I think it's our responsibility as technologist to pay attention to the social impact of our work. We can choose to proceed in the face of the social consequences, but it's our duty to consider them. Social institutions and relationships are a lot harder to debug than technology. There's really no way to ship a Neighborhood 2.0 or Family 1.1 after the origional one is fsck'd.
just my
I agree with you. I think the people who will use non-GUIs, and even stick with 2D GUIs are the same hard-core (or cheap) group of geeks who got the thing going in the first place. However, we (meaning /.ers) are the tip of the wedge of computer users. I think the real growth of the industry is going to be in pervasive computing. Central home computers, wearables, smart appliances, pda/phone - all of these will need to be managed from the home computer soon. Also, the ability to do desktop video is becoming more and more common, especically as the baby-boomers start to retire and play more. (Few things will make a 60-ish year old grand parent sit in front of a computer for hours like pictures and movies of grandkids).
So I guess I see that it's going to be a series of forces coming together that's really going to make this a reality.
that's the real benefit of a 3D based UI. The Desktop metaphoere is over 30 years old. It's based on a set of technological assumptions and capabilities that were the reality in the until the mid-late 90's. 2D graphics, popularized with the intro of the Mac in 80 and jumpstarted with Windows is the door through which the current hot UI, 3D graphics, entered the game.
Just as 2D GUIs were a huge improvement over text-based interfaces, so will "true" 3D interfaces be an improvement over the 2D methaphorical "desktop". The problem is, we haven't found the right metaphore. We've been trying to for 20 odd years with a whole bunch of the VR-ish schemes, but we haven't found the right combinations of controls and abstract representations of the information.
I think some of the problem is the impedence mismatch between the data sets in the information being displayed and our cultural expectations of the 3D, semi-immersive experience. How exciting is a text email in a 3D space? Is an interface that had a 3D model of the person who sent it to you speak the message be a better metaphore? Would it make you more "productive?" Maybe that's a bad question to ask the Slashdot community, but it would certantily make my grandma more willing to use a computer system.
The fact is, the productivty enhancement curve of desktop interfaces is flattening. They're still being deployed more widely, (out of the office and into industrial automation type applications), but the high-water mark of the amount of productivity/economic benefit they bring to most tasks has been established.
So where to go next? How do you make a better interface to Amazon to keep customers coming back, offering them a better experience? Make the interface "thinner". Well, let's start by making the metaphore into the information less bound by a 30 year old view of how to progamaticlly visulize information. And, say, there's a lot of specialized processing power lying around in GPUs that most people already have (the same people who also tend to buy a lot on line, concidentialy).
So I see this requirment as essential to the continued growth of the computer and IT sectors (i.e., our jobs). And that's not just a purely self-interested statement. I don't really see the IT and computer sectors going away barring a massive change to society today. What I really want the industry to take on is a way to make things more accessible for the people like my grandma - the people who don't choose to use technology the way we do, but rather are being forced to use it by the commercial adoption of technology (think of how much banking is done through ATMs, and how hard it can be to actually see a live person).
I don't think either MAc OSX or Longhorn will get us there, but they're logical steps in the right direction. This requirement may make the PC industry wake up and realize that if X86 is platform and is going to be for the forseeable future, standards are going to need to be a lot tighter going forward. Not just standards of hardware and OS-level interoperation, but true data-to-users interaction. Of course "getting it right" might not be in the interests of some of the market's players - planned obselence goes a long way toward makeing the quarterly figures for the stockholders.
My $0.02
..imagine a Beowolf cluster of .... oh, never mind...
I had a Timbuk2 bike messenger bag that I use to carry a Vaio and a change of clothes to and from work. It's a great bag, and I see that they now have a laptop model. The cool thing, they're bags have a rubberized skin thatm makes them largly water proof (though not water-tight). I crashed my bike once and landed flat on my back on top of the Vaio and the bag/clothes combo saved the laptop from even a dent. I think if you want a messenger bag, get it from the folks who make professional messenager bags.