And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.".
For my pea sized brain, that is a good thing (TM). the fact that I'm comfortable in photoshop is driven home every time I try to use the GIMP. I rally want the GIMP to be successful, but my brain has been bent into the adobe way of doing things, and I'm a lost cause.
All you need to do is see someone with good photoshop skills (think professional, rather than a dabbler like me), and you'll see why adobe has kept the UI largely unchanged. The keyboard shortcuts and pallet and tool placement becomes second nature to someone with a lot of seat time. Seeing what can be done in seconds or minutes by a skilled photoshop pilot is awe inspiring. Having the core interface change would be like moving your dog's food bowl; just not a good thing.
If the iPad is a game changer, it won't be one overnight. I see the iPhone as being an instant success not because of what it was, but because of what all other phones weren't. The rest of the smartphone landscape at the time was dismal, both in terms of hardware and plans (yes, this is a USA centric view). So the instant success of the iPhone was an anomaly, not the "apple norm".
Think back to the iPod, it languished and didn't really gain a whole lot of traction until the third version. That's a lot of time to wait and watch. If the iPad does turn into a "gamechanger", it will also be over time.
The apple store will be the big game changer. I would drop my cable in a heartbeat if I could get shows (all the shows) when I want them. I pay like $100 a month to comcast for a DVR and their crappy compressed digital cable. I'd be willing to pay at least that for a vast and deep menu of shows I could watch when I want. The same holds true for books, newspapers, and magazines. The content will be the killer app, and the ease of getting that content will differentiate the iPad from all others.
If what I've outlined above happens where I can get my TV shows and movies from an apple store, it will also revive the appleTV which is like an airport express just waiting for content.
Maybe I need another layer on my tinfoil hat, but after reading the summary (and only the summary, obviously) all I can say is, "So what?"
After all, it's not like the pictures somehow snuck onto the interwebs without the users knowledge, the photographs actively put them there. Beyond that, I really don't care if someone knows my name, and where I was standing when I took a picture. In fact knowing where pictures were taken can lead to some really cool mashups of tourist photos and such.
Wake me when exif data routinely contains my passwords, social security number, and credit card number.
I was thinking of solid modeling as in CAD, not animation. Things like solidworks, autodesk inventor, or ProEngineer. Nothing like those exist on the mac.
I didn't mean to imply anything about windows other than it's not a niche OS. Being the de-facto standard OS, it should have the best of everything (in theory).:D
Why is that sad? It's a great program that puts world class non-linear editing within reach of most everybody. What is sad, is the insanely expensive and fiddly avid workstations and non-linear editors of the past.
Linux is just like macs in that there are huge disciplines where no applications exist. For example there is no credible 3D solid modeling programs or printed circuit board layout on the Mac. Now there is no credible non-linear video editing program for linux. Both platforms are a niche market, both excel in ways that windows does not, and both are a victim of that nitch-i-ness.
It's only sad if people tried to make a video editor for linux and somehow were denied by forces outside their control. If the only reason is that nobody has bothered to write a good one, then that's not sad.
I got my PhD in fluid mechanics funded by NASA, and as such my findings are easily publishable and shared with others. My analysis code (such as it was) was and is available for those would would like to use it. More importantly my experimental data is available as well.
This represents the classical pure research side of research where we all get together and talk about our findings and there really aren't any secrets. But even with this open example, there are still secrets when it comes to ideas for future funding. You only tip your cards when it comes to things you've already done, not future plans.
But more importantly, there are whole areas of research that are very closed off. Pharma is a good example. Sure there are lots of peer reviewed articles published and methods discussed, but you'll never really get into their shorts like this guy wants. There's a lot that goes on behind that curtain. And even if you are a grad student with high ideals and a desire to share all your findings, you may find that the rules of your funding prevent you from sharing.
I loved my sparc 1+ with the funky ruled reflective mouse pad, and the quirky SunOS. For some reason I always wanted pizza for lunch after working on it all morning. Ahh those were the good days, oh mosiac how we used you to find things in the larval days of the web.
Linux really ate Sun's lunch. All the reasons to own a Sun largely evaporated with Linux. I say that as a researcher and end user, not a data center wienie. As soon as linux and commodity hardware got good enough, it was all over for Sun. I really feel bad (and old) but frankly I'm surprised that they lasted this long.
The same thing happened to me, but with plumbing parts. I have to buy a whole box of elbows to make sure I have enough "right turns" and enough "left turns". Home depot has got to get the quality control issues dealt with.
You guys could whip up a nice cleaner that will get the patina of snot, chocolate bars, and despair off the keyboards. Public computer keyboards are always nasty.
As an older guy in your scenario (40ish), I'd have to say that I don't want to socialize more with most of my co-workers unless there is a charge number in it. As with the rest of life my desire to be around my co-workers follows the 80/20 rule. In this case, about 80% of my co-workers should not be near me without a charge-number.
So somebody could go to a lot of trouble to listen to me talk with one of my geek friends about the iPad or brazing bicycle frames, or audio design or some other totally boring topic that if it was at all interesting would show up on the net somewhere already. Lord help them if they want to listen in to a conversation with my or my wife's parents. I'd be bummed if I went to that much trouble for so little return.
I used to want a 900 back in the 80s, then GM bought them. I hope Spyker can undo the damage GM has done, and turn the cars into something I would like again.
I used to be lightning fast with the original graffiti, very close to my speed on the iPhone. But Palm went and changed it (I know legal reasons etc) and it got slow and sucky. The best part of graffiti was that you could take notes without looking at the device. I would think the original graffiti would be much faster than it is on that table, or they got a newbie to do the graffiti writing.
The iPhone keyboard works amazingly well. I saw the preview demo of the phone in 2007and I thought that soft keyboard was full of fail (30+ touch points in the size of two postage stamps-c'mon), but there's enough heuristics behind it that it actually works really well. I'm way faster on the iPhone keyboard than I am on a crackberry keyboard.
This hardware is about equivalent market price without the Microsoft Tax. It's a *LITTLE* underpowered, but it can still do HD video, and it can still do some minor gaming (UT2k4/Q3 type stuff) It's not that lacking.
There is no way a GMA950 can play UT2004, I have a GMA950 based macbook that I boot into XP and tried to play UT2K4, and it's horrible. More importantly things like CAD and PCB design also suck on it.
The intel built in graphics is a HUGE reason to avoid these sorts of machines. Sure if you only write single page memos in open-office then I'm sure it's fine. But if you have any sort of graphics intensive (or even graphics using) needs, run screaming from the GMA950.
Executive summary: GMA950 is a smoldering turd...Do not use.
That's a very good point. And all corporations will tell you that the only surfing you should be doing should be work related, so if you follow that rule, your chances of getting owned even on IE6 are pretty low.
Now I'm posting to slashdot during work hours, and I'm not even an IT guy, so you can see how followed that policy is. At least I'm on firefox.
Seriously, who should be the default search provider, payments or not? If I've got a choice, I'm heading to google, not because of some sort of "I love google" sort of thing, but because they have the best search. If firefox defaults to "Bing!" or "aunt martha's internet search and lemon pies", it won't matter as long as I can set it to Google.
It's the ability to choose that I want to protect, not what the default is.
It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.
Sheldon
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do you really have problems with people throwing beer bottles at you?
I have in upstate NY.
Frankly, most serious bicyclists have a bunch of stories like that. I've put many miles in the north-east, the mid-atlantic states, the west coast, the southwest, and now the midwest. I now ride in the country in Indiana (boring corn viewing experience), and it's a lot better from a politeness of drivers standpoint.
But in the USA, the car vs. driver issues are way worse than the UK and Ireland in my experience. Just another issue where we think we are #1 and really we suck.
At work I do a bit of matlab programming and the default font makes it very hard to see the difference between parenthesis and curly brackets. That's a huge glaring flaw in the defaults that come with the IDE.
Back in the dark ages when I did a lot of FORTRAN77 programming, I would output a lot of data tables. Trying to setup the print statements to make those tables with a proportional font would make me want to kill someone.
Today I pick my fonts for programming on how readable the punctuation and letters vs. numbers are, and what I've got on the computer I sit in front of. Sadly I do a lot of code snippet writing on walk-up computers, or conference room computers, where I've got a standard windows and office font load.
I also do a lot of LabView programming, and the glyphs, icons, and lines are always proportional.:)
I'm hoping for better proxy / VPN support. I pay for a web proxy and a VPN to England so I can watch BBC, channel 4, etc from the USA. The previous Boxee didn't handle the connection (with password authentication) well. Frankly it was full of fail. I am on the cusp of dumping cable and little things like a better boxee will get me there.
Slashdot Mirror
And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get
study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into
the shrink wherever you are
anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.".
Can it haul my giant bass boat?
Bubba
For my pea sized brain, that is a good thing (TM). the fact that I'm comfortable in photoshop is driven home every time I try to use the GIMP. I rally want the GIMP to be successful, but my brain has been bent into the adobe way of doing things, and I'm a lost cause.
All you need to do is see someone with good photoshop skills (think professional, rather than a dabbler like me), and you'll see why adobe has kept the UI largely unchanged. The keyboard shortcuts and pallet and tool placement becomes second nature to someone with a lot of seat time. Seeing what can be done in seconds or minutes by a skilled photoshop pilot is awe inspiring. Having the core interface change would be like moving your dog's food bowl; just not a good thing.
Sheldon
(cs4 user - yeah I bought it)
If the iPad is a game changer, it won't be one overnight. I see the iPhone as being an instant success not because of what it was, but because of what all other phones weren't. The rest of the smartphone landscape at the time was dismal, both in terms of hardware and plans (yes, this is a USA centric view). So the instant success of the iPhone was an anomaly, not the "apple norm".
Think back to the iPod, it languished and didn't really gain a whole lot of traction until the third version. That's a lot of time to wait and watch. If the iPad does turn into a "gamechanger", it will also be over time.
The apple store will be the big game changer. I would drop my cable in a heartbeat if I could get shows (all the shows) when I want them. I pay like $100 a month to comcast for a DVR and their crappy compressed digital cable. I'd be willing to pay at least that for a vast and deep menu of shows I could watch when I want. The same holds true for books, newspapers, and magazines. The content will be the killer app, and the ease of getting that content will differentiate the iPad from all others.
If what I've outlined above happens where I can get my TV shows and movies from an apple store, it will also revive the appleTV which is like an airport express just waiting for content.
Sheldon
This is how you do it:
I just downloaded the simulation and the first thing it printed was:
"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a black hole"
Maybe I need another layer on my tinfoil hat, but after reading the summary (and only the summary, obviously) all I can say is, "So what?"
After all, it's not like the pictures somehow snuck onto the interwebs without the users knowledge, the photographs actively put them there. Beyond that, I really don't care if someone knows my name, and where I was standing when I took a picture. In fact knowing where pictures were taken can lead to some really cool mashups of tourist photos and such.
Wake me when exif data routinely contains my passwords, social security number, and credit card number.
Sheldon
I was thinking of solid modeling as in CAD, not animation. Things like solidworks, autodesk inventor, or ProEngineer. Nothing like those exist on the mac.
I didn't mean to imply anything about windows other than it's not a niche OS. Being the de-facto standard OS, it should have the best of everything (in theory). :D
Why is that sad? It's a great program that puts world class non-linear editing within reach of most everybody. What is sad, is the insanely expensive and fiddly avid workstations and non-linear editors of the past.
Linux is just like macs in that there are huge disciplines where no applications exist. For example there is no credible 3D solid modeling programs or printed circuit board layout on the Mac. Now there is no credible non-linear video editing program for linux. Both platforms are a niche market, both excel in ways that windows does not, and both are a victim of that nitch-i-ness.
It's only sad if people tried to make a video editor for linux and somehow were denied by forces outside their control. If the only reason is that nobody has bothered to write a good one, then that's not sad.
Sheldon
I got my PhD in fluid mechanics funded by NASA, and as such my findings are easily publishable and shared with others. My analysis code (such as it was) was and is available for those would would like to use it. More importantly my experimental data is available as well.
This represents the classical pure research side of research where we all get together and talk about our findings and there really aren't any secrets. But even with this open example, there are still secrets when it comes to ideas for future funding. You only tip your cards when it comes to things you've already done, not future plans.
But more importantly, there are whole areas of research that are very closed off. Pharma is a good example. Sure there are lots of peer reviewed articles published and methods discussed, but you'll never really get into their shorts like this guy wants. There's a lot that goes on behind that curtain. And even if you are a grad student with high ideals and a desire to share all your findings, you may find that the rules of your funding prevent you from sharing.
Sheldon
I loved my sparc 1+ with the funky ruled reflective mouse pad, and the quirky SunOS. For some reason I always wanted pizza for lunch after working on it all morning. Ahh those were the good days, oh mosiac how we used you to find things in the larval days of the web.
Linux really ate Sun's lunch. All the reasons to own a Sun largely evaporated with Linux. I say that as a researcher and end user, not a data center wienie. As soon as linux and commodity hardware got good enough, it was all over for Sun. I really feel bad (and old) but frankly I'm surprised that they lasted this long.
Sheldon
The same thing happened to me, but with plumbing parts. I have to buy a whole box of elbows to make sure I have enough "right turns" and enough "left turns". Home depot has got to get the quality control issues dealt with.
Sheldon
You guys could whip up a nice cleaner that will get the patina of snot, chocolate bars, and despair off the keyboards. Public computer keyboards are always nasty.
Sheldon
As an older guy in your scenario (40ish), I'd have to say that I don't want to socialize more with most of my co-workers unless there is a charge number in it. As with the rest of life my desire to be around my co-workers follows the 80/20 rule. In this case, about 80% of my co-workers should not be near me without a charge-number.
Sheldon
So somebody could go to a lot of trouble to listen to me talk with one of my geek friends about the iPad or brazing bicycle frames, or audio design or some other totally boring topic that if it was at all interesting would show up on the net somewhere already. Lord help them if they want to listen in to a conversation with my or my wife's parents. I'd be bummed if I went to that much trouble for so little return.
Sheldon
I used to want a 900 back in the 80s, then GM bought them. I hope Spyker can undo the damage GM has done, and turn the cars into something I would like again.
Sheldon
I used to be lightning fast with the original graffiti, very close to my speed on the iPhone. But Palm went and changed it (I know legal reasons etc) and it got slow and sucky. The best part of graffiti was that you could take notes without looking at the device. I would think the original graffiti would be much faster than it is on that table, or they got a newbie to do the graffiti writing.
The iPhone keyboard works amazingly well. I saw the preview demo of the phone in 2007and I thought that soft keyboard was full of fail (30+ touch points in the size of two postage stamps-c'mon), but there's enough heuristics behind it that it actually works really well. I'm way faster on the iPhone keyboard than I am on a crackberry keyboard.
Sheldon
We can't start a holy war now! My armor is at the cleaners.
Cue nerd rage
Sheldon
This hardware is about equivalent market price without the Microsoft Tax. It's a *LITTLE* underpowered, but it can still do HD video, and it can still do some minor gaming (UT2k4/Q3 type stuff) It's not that lacking.
There is no way a GMA950 can play UT2004, I have a GMA950 based macbook that I boot into XP and tried to play UT2K4, and it's horrible. More importantly things like CAD and PCB design also suck on it.
The intel built in graphics is a HUGE reason to avoid these sorts of machines. Sure if you only write single page memos in open-office then I'm sure it's fine. But if you have any sort of graphics intensive (or even graphics using) needs, run screaming from the GMA950.
Executive summary: GMA950 is a smoldering turd...Do not use.
Sheldon
That's a very good point. And all corporations will tell you that the only surfing you should be doing should be work related, so if you follow that rule, your chances of getting owned even on IE6 are pretty low.
Now I'm posting to slashdot during work hours, and I'm not even an IT guy, so you can see how followed that policy is. At least I'm on firefox.
Sheldon
Seriously, who should be the default search provider, payments or not? If I've got a choice, I'm heading to google, not because of some sort of "I love google" sort of thing, but because they have the best search. If firefox defaults to "Bing!" or "aunt martha's internet search and lemon pies", it won't matter as long as I can set it to Google.
It's the ability to choose that I want to protect, not what the default is.
It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.
Sheldon
Do you really have problems with people throwing beer bottles at you?
I have in upstate NY.
Frankly, most serious bicyclists have a bunch of stories like that. I've put many miles in the north-east, the mid-atlantic states, the west coast, the southwest, and now the midwest. I now ride in the country in Indiana (boring corn viewing experience), and it's a lot better from a politeness of drivers standpoint.
But in the USA, the car vs. driver issues are way worse than the UK and Ireland in my experience. Just another issue where we think we are #1 and really we suck.
Sheldon
At work I do a bit of matlab programming and the default font makes it very hard to see the difference between parenthesis and curly brackets. That's a huge glaring flaw in the defaults that come with the IDE.
Back in the dark ages when I did a lot of FORTRAN77 programming, I would output a lot of data tables. Trying to setup the print statements to make those tables with a proportional font would make me want to kill someone.
Today I pick my fonts for programming on how readable the punctuation and letters vs. numbers are, and what I've got on the computer I sit in front of. Sadly I do a lot of code snippet writing on walk-up computers, or conference room computers, where I've got a standard windows and office font load.
I also do a lot of LabView programming, and the glyphs, icons, and lines are always proportional. :)
Sheldon
I'm hoping for better proxy / VPN support. I pay for a web proxy and a VPN to England so I can watch BBC, channel 4, etc from the USA. The previous Boxee didn't handle the connection (with password authentication) well. Frankly it was full of fail. I am on the cusp of dumping cable and little things like a better boxee will get me there.
Sheldon
So how much more does a BLESSED jailbroken unlocked iPhone 3GS sell for on ebay?
Sheldon