I remember seeing some underwater footage on the Blue Planet series (very informative, if you ever get a chance to watch any of them). From what I recall, there are various thermal vents on the floor of the deep sea, which is about a mile down. Where these vents occur in the sea bed, you find huge plumes of extraordinarily hot water shooting up from the floor. It is only under the immense pressure at that depth that the water doesn't become steam. Anyway, while this Strain 121 critter wasn't mentioned in the Blue Planet movies, various other animals were, complete with footage of all kinds of little things moving around and appearing very active. The presence of a thermal vent on the ocean floor is very much like an oasis in the desert, and it attracts all kinds of weirdo life forms.
As far as pressure goes, for every 33 feet of water depth you add, it's 1 ATM greater pressure than on the surface. So if you're 33 feet below the surface, the pressure is twice that of being on dry land. If you're 66 feet below the surface, it's about 3 times the pressure. For every 33 feet down, you'll add another multiple. If you're about a mile down, that corresponds (approximately) to 33 x 160, which means that the pressure down there is about 160 times that of what we're used to on dry land.
I'll add that, according to the Blue Planet series, there are only a handful (maybe 5 total?) of submarine craft in the entire world that are capable of withstanding the intense pressures of the deep sea, which makes the continued exploration of the deep sea an extremely slow and patient process.
who cares if it can't do attachments all that well, or if it doesn't have predictive text. i think the bottom line is whether it's any good at managing your porn.
Here's the problem: this device will not catch on, just like most of the other high-power PDAs that havn't caught on, because it does way too much. At the very least, it does way more than the average user will need/want. And for $700!! Why should a somebody spend that kind of money on a tiny device with limited power/resources instead of putting that cash toward a laptop? The expected answer is smaller size, better form factor, extreme portability.
But you know what? This smells just like all of the hype surrounding previous PDAs, WAP phones, now 3G phones, picture-capable, etc.
I want to know when businesses are going to realize that the only thing people want (and more importantly, will use; or even more importantly, what they will actually pay for) is a phone to make calls, a PDA to keep your address book and calendar, and a computer for everything else?
If they can win this case, wouldn't it be feasible for small hunks of SCO Unix itself to fall under copyright weirdness, too? The Inquirer article makes the same point:
"If SCO's pleaders win this one, then surely it is guilty of massive copyright infringement too? And if they do, then surely it must apply to BSD and Apache style licences as well?"
So what's the point of doing this? The only thing I can come up with is that SCO wants to invalidate the existence of gpl'ed software in some convoluted attempt to make themselves look better.
A friend of mine sent me an invite to join Friendster a month or two ago, and I played around with it. I'm not sure how many people here know what the service is supposed to be (pardon if you do, but I had no idea until I was invited to sign up), because it seems that the whole premise of Friendster is to develop contact with people through association of mutual friends.
Now, if I know somebody named Lester (which I do), he invites me, and I decide to sign up on Friendster as "Elvis Presley", who the hell cares what identity I claim? By association, I will gain contact with Lester and all of his friends (whether I know them or not), and if I pursue contact with any of these people then what does it matter if I say my name is Jim or Elvis? Whether it's a relationship that never moves beyond electronic contact (IM, email), or if I actually go spend physical time with some of Lester's friends, isn't the end result still the same? Didn't I make contact with people that I previously didn't know? What's more, I think that part of presenting one's self online involves representing your sense of humor, and what better way than to claim that you're The King?
We're not talking about people spamming the service with junk, or abusing user's rights; we're talking about pretending to be somebody else while online, which is certainly nothing new. I think that deleting such users is kinda silly, and it would be downright annoying if they have in fact deleted even one legitimate user as a result. If this approach were taken with other electronic realms, everything would eventually be shut down because "fakesters" would ruin it for everyone.
I also remember getting a machine about 10 years ago, and I remember that "the future" was all about voice recognition, automation, crazy multimedia at home, etc. It all seemed very exciting to me back then, and for the most part feels kinda "blah" now that we're here.
So where's "here"? My summary of where we are today consists of a several things. First, I think there's a bigger divergence between the computing experience of a mainstream user vs. the computing experience of a power user (probably most of/. readers fit here). There are more possibilities in software, hardware, networking, and overall usability then there were 10 years ago, but it's pretty much only the power users who really a) understand them, and b) make direct use of them. For the mainstream users, the computing experience is largely unchanged: email, websites, IM, store your digital photos (this last one may be stretching it for the average user).
While I always enjoy reading about Microsoft's latest fumble, I think they've been *trying* to make computers more specialized so that the user doesn't have to be. All of their Auto Correct features, assistant paper clip thingies, fully retarded (and grossly insecure) scriptability of every goddam product, and various other "features" that end up annoying the hell out of most of us are in fact a solid attempt to make the experience of using a computer more enjoyable for somebody like my mother. In fact, most of our mothers (and fathers) could probably do well to have a helluva lot of assistance using a computer, while most of us probably disable all of that in favor of more direct control. Keep in mind the population spread - there are way more baby boomers using computers than there are/. readers. It took my dad about 10 years to figure out that he didn't have to double-click everything with the mouse (including web pages) in order to open it. And what about our grandparents?
So for the future, while I would *like* to see all kinds of cool things that would appeal to our geekiness, I'm predicting a slow, plodding future of more of the same - increased divergence between the computing experiences of regular and power users, and way more AutoBullshit and assistance features for the average home user.
Kinda like saying that programmers shouldn't program easy to use GUIs because MS or Apple do it that way
dude, you're an idiot.
the point is not "don't do it because it's been done".
the point is: "don't do it because it's microsoft-backed, and the motivation of creating and following standards is something microsoft has proven they suck at".
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I remember seeing some underwater footage on the Blue Planet series (very informative, if you ever get a chance to watch any of them). From what I recall, there are various thermal vents on the floor of the deep sea, which is about a mile down. Where these vents occur in the sea bed, you find huge plumes of extraordinarily hot water shooting up from the floor. It is only under the immense pressure at that depth that the water doesn't become steam. Anyway, while this Strain 121 critter wasn't mentioned in the Blue Planet movies, various other animals were, complete with footage of all kinds of little things moving around and appearing very active. The presence of a thermal vent on the ocean floor is very much like an oasis in the desert, and it attracts all kinds of weirdo life forms.
As far as pressure goes, for every 33 feet of water depth you add, it's 1 ATM greater pressure than on the surface. So if you're 33 feet below the surface, the pressure is twice that of being on dry land. If you're 66 feet below the surface, it's about 3 times the pressure. For every 33 feet down, you'll add another multiple. If you're about a mile down, that corresponds (approximately) to 33 x 160, which means that the pressure down there is about 160 times that of what we're used to on dry land.
I'll add that, according to the Blue Planet series, there are only a handful (maybe 5 total?) of submarine craft in the entire world that are capable of withstanding the intense pressures of the deep sea, which makes the continued exploration of the deep sea an extremely slow and patient process.
who cares if it can't do attachments all that well, or if it doesn't have predictive text. i think the bottom line is whether it's any good at managing your porn.
Here's the problem: this device will not catch on, just like most of the other high-power PDAs that havn't caught on, because it does way too much. At the very least, it does way more than the average user will need/want. And for $700!! Why should a somebody spend that kind of money on a tiny device with limited power/resources instead of putting that cash toward a laptop? The expected answer is smaller size, better form factor, extreme portability.
But you know what? This smells just like all of the hype surrounding previous PDAs, WAP phones, now 3G phones, picture-capable, etc.
I want to know when businesses are going to realize that the only thing people want (and more importantly, will use; or even more importantly, what they will actually pay for) is a phone to make calls, a PDA to keep your address book and calendar, and a computer for everything else?
If they can win this case, wouldn't it be feasible for small hunks of SCO Unix itself to fall under copyright weirdness, too? The Inquirer article makes the same point:
"If SCO's pleaders win this one, then surely it is guilty of massive copyright infringement too? And if they do, then surely it must apply to BSD and Apache style licences as well?"
So what's the point of doing this? The only thing I can come up with is that SCO wants to invalidate the existence of gpl'ed software in some convoluted attempt to make themselves look better.
A friend of mine sent me an invite to join Friendster a month or two ago, and I played around with it. I'm not sure how many people here know what the service is supposed to be (pardon if you do, but I had no idea until I was invited to sign up), because it seems that the whole premise of Friendster is to develop contact with people through association of mutual friends.
Now, if I know somebody named Lester (which I do), he invites me, and I decide to sign up on Friendster as "Elvis Presley", who the hell cares what identity I claim? By association, I will gain contact with Lester and all of his friends (whether I know them or not), and if I pursue contact with any of these people then what does it matter if I say my name is Jim or Elvis? Whether it's a relationship that never moves beyond electronic contact (IM, email), or if I actually go spend physical time with some of Lester's friends, isn't the end result still the same? Didn't I make contact with people that I previously didn't know? What's more, I think that part of presenting one's self online involves representing your sense of humor, and what better way than to claim that you're The King?
We're not talking about people spamming the service with junk, or abusing user's rights; we're talking about pretending to be somebody else while online, which is certainly nothing new. I think that deleting such users is kinda silly, and it would be downright annoying if they have in fact deleted even one legitimate user as a result. If this approach were taken with other electronic realms, everything would eventually be shut down because "fakesters" would ruin it for everyone.
I also remember getting a machine about 10 years ago, and I remember that "the future" was all about voice recognition, automation, crazy multimedia at home, etc. It all seemed very exciting to me back then, and for the most part feels kinda "blah" now that we're here.
/. readers fit here). There are more possibilities in software, hardware, networking, and overall usability then there were 10 years ago, but it's pretty much only the power users who really a) understand them, and b) make direct use of them. For the mainstream users, the computing experience is largely unchanged: email, websites, IM, store your digital photos (this last one may be stretching it for the average user).
/. readers. It took my dad about 10 years to figure out that he didn't have to double-click everything with the mouse (including web pages) in order to open it. And what about our grandparents?
So where's "here"? My summary of where we are today consists of a several things. First, I think there's a bigger divergence between the computing experience of a mainstream user vs. the computing experience of a power user (probably most of
While I always enjoy reading about Microsoft's latest fumble, I think they've been *trying* to make computers more specialized so that the user doesn't have to be. All of their Auto Correct features, assistant paper clip thingies, fully retarded (and grossly insecure) scriptability of every goddam product, and various other "features" that end up annoying the hell out of most of us are in fact a solid attempt to make the experience of using a computer more enjoyable for somebody like my mother. In fact, most of our mothers (and fathers) could probably do well to have a helluva lot of assistance using a computer, while most of us probably disable all of that in favor of more direct control. Keep in mind the population spread - there are way more baby boomers using computers than there are
So for the future, while I would *like* to see all kinds of cool things that would appeal to our geekiness, I'm predicting a slow, plodding future of more of the same - increased divergence between the computing experiences of regular and power users, and way more AutoBullshit and assistance features for the average home user.
dude, you're an idiot.
the point is not "don't do it because it's been done".
the point is: "don't do it because it's microsoft-backed, and the motivation of creating and following standards is something microsoft has proven they suck at".