Vernor Vinge's book "Rainbow's End" exists in the near future, and the use of contacts in the method you describe has become ubiquitous.
In fact, he discusses how without the special contacts, most of the world is very plain and drab - lots of whites and greys, not much art - but when you use contacts, it becomes a fantasy world full of color, art, and beauty.
We use J2EE (Hibernate, JSF, Tomcat/Weblogic) at work, and overall, it's a great solution -- once you're familiar with it. You're right - it may not make sense for a single developer, especially one that doesn't have an understanding of how it all should tie together.
Due to our use of J2EE/JSF, we have large numbers of reusable components that make our application development (generally speaking) very quick and straightforward. Our apps generally speaking run well and efficiently. Done right, JSF/J2EE/Hibernate works great. You just don't get the newbie-friendly environment that.NET gives you.
Honestly, the best part of JSF is that it is so testable. You can easily integrate with JUnit and have it run unit tests so much easier than with any other framework that I've seen. Additionally, JSF's multi-language support is ridiculously cool. We had to migrate an existing app that was English only to English/Spanish, and it quite literally was a matter of adding a new properties file defining the new text/image links and basically - the best part - one line of code.
That's not to say that Python isn't an effective solution, either. It is. But J2EE has its place too.
You could write your entire web app using Perl, PHP, Python, C, Ruby, J2EE, or any of a number of frameworks. Generally speaking, they are all effective tools, and you just have to pick the right one for your situation.
I toured the Best Brains studios, and it was right after Joel left. I played basketball with Mike, met TV's Frank, and saw the set.
Mike Nelson is a really, really nice guy, and while he will forever be known as a second-rate Joel, I don't think it's fair. Joel left on his own accord and they brought in Mike to keep the show afloat.
Name one show where the replacement person is actually better than the original person who played the role. I can't think of one. They're nearly always worse, and it's usually because you are already familiar with the original actor.
Mike did well enough, and the show was still fantastic with him there. For example, the movie This Island Earth was easily my favorite MST3K "show" (it was really called the MST3K Movie) and Mike brought a lot to it.
From Master Ninja I:
"I know he's around here somewhere. I can hear his theme song!"
Also, from Gamera vs Megalon:
"Gamera is really neat, Gamera is full of meat, we all love Gamera!"
Apple has done so recently. Macbooks have a very easy to access hard drive and RAM.
Re:This phone is a 2 HAND device vs 1 HAND device
on
Apple iPhone Dissected
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Q: Name one smartphone that can effectively be used with one hand.
A: You can't. They all have this same characteristic - whether it's a stylus (Treo) or a Crackberry, they all require two hands for effective operation.
-The entire market will benefit by the iPhone--and the tech will get cheaper
This is the key point here. All signs are pointing to the iPhone being a success. You can bet that Nokia, RIM, and Motorola are frantically trying to come up with something to compete. However, they waited too long - Apple has 30 years of elegant UI and design expertise. When was the last time ANYTHING made by these companies was elegant, let alone the UI? The RAZR is the most popular cell phone of all time (and it also was $500 when it was released, like the iPhone), but it still had horrid software.
I have an Audiovox SMT5600 phone with Windows Mobile. I bought it almost two years ago thinking that I would use all the neat smartphone features. To this day, I can't use them, because the phone's controls are so archaic and Windows Mobile is buggy and slow.
Why do cell phones even ship with a numeric keypad anyway? I almost never use mine. It's because cell phones refused to rethink how people used traditional phones.
This is EXACTLY where the portable MP3 player market was six years ago when the iPod was introduced. Sure, MP3 players were neat... but they had no space to store anything and generally required you to use standard CD player controls (FF/RW/play/stop) to operate. MP3 player makers were confined (in their minds) by the previous generation of technology. Apple wasn't. iPods came out with a scroll wheel, easy updating and charging, and a hard drive to store a ton of songs... and the industry is turned upside down and Apple becomes one of the hottest companies in years.
The parallels here are almost too staggering to describe. This time, there's a much bigger industry that is stagnant. In five years, all of us will be amazed at how one event - the introduction of the iPhone - transformed the cell phone industry, because other smartphone makers are either going to make something elegant or they will lose the war.
Have you tried replacing the ram or HDD on your MacBook? You don't have to gut anything - just remove the battery. It's quite pleasant, really.
With that said, your point about docking stations and HDD speeds is valid. Apple does need to make more corporate-friendly stuff to get the really big piece of the pie.
I did some extensive research for an open source CMS for my WoW guild. I ended up choosing e107 and I couldn't be happier. It's a pretty dang good CMS.
For those of you looking at CMSs... the site Open Source CMS is an invaluable resource. They allow you to demo all of the popular choices and choose which one you like the best.
Openmoko is one of the most exciting open source software projects out there right now, IMO.
The Neo 1973 has GPS and the next hardware revision is supposed to have WiFi, too... since they've finally located a sufficiently small, low power, and free (as in speech) WiFi chipset and driver.
I loved the Game Gear, and that's a great analogy. However, one of the key reasons the Gameboy has crushed every other portable gaming device since the dawn of time (surpassed only by a deck of cards, perhaps) is that they have a ridiculous amount of games.
That's the same reason the Playstation beat the Saturn/N64/3DO, the PS2 beat GCN and Xbox, the NES beat the Master System, ad nauseam.
Thank you. You're exactly right. The cost of adding a few scrubbers to the local coal plant is a hell of a lot cheaper than adding the equivalent scrubbers (catalytic converter) to 1 million cars.
I'm Libertarian, too, but there is no denying the national security implications from our gasoline addiction as a country.
Ethanol is a viable choice for the following reasons:
1) It is the alternative fuel that is easiest for Average Joe American to use because it burns similarly to gasoline.. When he buys a flex fuel car, he knows that he can refill on gas or ethanol, and it makes no difference to the car. This is a big advantage over a hydrogen fuel cell, natural gas, biodiesel, or even an all-electric car - you have to make a big change to how you fill up your car. Heaven forbid you're stuck in Boondocks, Iowa, out of hydrogen fuel.
2) It is available now.
3) It reduces our dependence on foreign oil.
4) It doesn't have to be made from corn (as many people pointed out). Just because it's made from corn now doesn't mean it will be or has to be in the future. Producing more flex-fuel vehicles makes it easier to curb the oil addiction.
5) It costs about $200 (at the factory) to make a car flex fuel capable. That's a hell of a lot less than it costs to make an EV, a hybrid, a hydrogen fuel cell, or a natural gas burning car.
6) Ethanol has a higher octane rating than even premium gasoline, so it gives significantly better performance.
If we nuke the ethanol subsidy, we should really nuke the gasoline subsidies, too, that are artificially lowering the price of that fuel. Nuke the farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, medicare, welfare, social security, and the rest of the programs that our government uses to hemorrhage money.
Then maybe the average American could afford to buy an energy efficient car.
We need more phones that you can buy unlocked that give you features that the cell phone companies normally would block (Skype / WiFi integration, MP3 ringtones, bluetooth image transfers, etc).
I'm glad to see that the RIAA/MPAA's War on Customers is failing, and IANAL, but that article summary is terrible. Can you possibly make it any more confusing?
Ten years behind is a bit much. Did you use Visual Studio in 1997? I specifically remember it destroying more than a few projects on me.
XCode (and friggin CodeWarrior) trump older Visual Studios easily.
Current releases of Visual Studio are great from what I've heard. But I am productive in XCode and I am also productive in Eclipse (when it doesn't crash!)
Personally, I love XCode's UI. What's your beef with it?
Interestingly, TBS -did- pay $2 million to compensate for Boston's government ineptitude. $1 million of it goes to cover the cost of the police response. $1 million goes to "goodwill", whatever that means.
You're exactly right. Journalism at its finest.
All Apple needs to do is provide Java MIDP 2.0 and we'll have a myriad of third party apps that run on most smartphones. It probably isn't ready yet because this device is so new.
I have confidence in Apple here. They allowed third party developers for iPod. They will do so for iPhone, too. It just remains to be seen how (and when) it will be implemented.
I can think of one reason the conclusion maybe true though. Since Apple started selling tv shows and movies, I've bought very little music from them. Most of my iTunes budget goes into shows now. I've bought every episode of Monk, and various other things. I've got about 30GB of content that was purchased through ITMS between two computers. This does not include my wife's collection.
That's a great point. Most people are buying larger items now (shows, movies, etc) so naturally the number of transactions will be lower.
Also, remember this - Apple gets charged a fee for each credit card transaction they make. When the iTMS launched, Apple would aggregate all of your purchases for a day and send you one bill. I've noticed over the past year that the time they wait to bill you has gone up - sometimes as much as two days from the time of purchase. This is because Apple is charged for each transaction, so if they decrease the number of transactions (and instead increase the amount) they make more money.
Did it occur to anyone that Apple may intentionally be lowering the number of credit card transactions?
Re:Slashdot: Stating the Obvious for Nerds
on
Why Vista Took So Long
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Uh, Microsoft told us it would take less time. Therefore it's their fault when they miss their self-imposed deadline. They underestimated the difficulty of the project and therefore we should have nobody to blame but MS.
You're exactly right. Marathon has one of the best plots of any game - let alone first person shooter - ever. It's the only game that actually caused me to tear up when I beat it because it was so fantastic.
Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity are both also great.
For anyone who wants to check the game out, you should check out Aleph One, the OSS version of the game updated for new systems. It's still worth a play through for anyone who hasn't.
Is it a coincidence that Bungie created (IMO) the two FPS's with the best storylines?
One of the things that really separated DVD from VHS was size and look. The DVD was futuristic to many, durability and very obvious image quality were bonus reasons to move to the new platform.
Honestly, you're right. Additionally, DVD offers many benefits over VHS in usability - no rewinding, no fast forwarding, and no picture degradation with use.
To me, the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is just a rehash of Beta vs VHS except with one additional factor - nobody really cares.
The PS3 will help drive Blu-Ray adoption, but who really has enough cash to drop on a player and a 1080p TV? Very, very few people.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, he discusses how without the special contacts, most of the world is very plain and drab - lots of whites and greys, not much art - but when you use contacts, it becomes a fantasy world full of color, art, and beauty.
We use J2EE (Hibernate, JSF, Tomcat/Weblogic) at work, and overall, it's a great solution -- once you're familiar with it. You're right - it may not make sense for a single developer, especially one that doesn't have an understanding of how it all should tie together.
.NET gives you.
Due to our use of J2EE/JSF, we have large numbers of reusable components that make our application development (generally speaking) very quick and straightforward. Our apps generally speaking run well and efficiently. Done right, JSF/J2EE/Hibernate works great. You just don't get the newbie-friendly environment that
Honestly, the best part of JSF is that it is so testable. You can easily integrate with JUnit and have it run unit tests so much easier than with any other framework that I've seen. Additionally, JSF's multi-language support is ridiculously cool. We had to migrate an existing app that was English only to English/Spanish, and it quite literally was a matter of adding a new properties file defining the new text/image links and basically - the best part - one line of code.
That's not to say that Python isn't an effective solution, either. It is. But J2EE has its place too.
You could write your entire web app using Perl, PHP, Python, C, Ruby, J2EE, or any of a number of frameworks. Generally speaking, they are all effective tools, and you just have to pick the right one for your situation.
Mike Nelson is a really, really nice guy, and while he will forever be known as a second-rate Joel, I don't think it's fair. Joel left on his own accord and they brought in Mike to keep the show afloat.
Name one show where the replacement person is actually better than the original person who played the role. I can't think of one. They're nearly always worse, and it's usually because you are already familiar with the original actor.
Mike did well enough, and the show was still fantastic with him there. For example, the movie This Island Earth was easily my favorite MST3K "show" (it was really called the MST3K Movie) and Mike brought a lot to it.
From Master Ninja I: "I know he's around here somewhere. I can hear his theme song!" Also, from Gamera vs Megalon: "Gamera is really neat, Gamera is full of meat, we all love Gamera!"
Apple has done so recently. Macbooks have a very easy to access hard drive and RAM.
Q: Name one smartphone that can effectively be used with one hand.
A: You can't. They all have this same characteristic - whether it's a stylus (Treo) or a Crackberry, they all require two hands for effective operation.
-The entire market will benefit by the iPhone--and the tech will get cheaper
This is the key point here. All signs are pointing to the iPhone being a success. You can bet that Nokia, RIM, and Motorola are frantically trying to come up with something to compete. However, they waited too long - Apple has 30 years of elegant UI and design expertise. When was the last time ANYTHING made by these companies was elegant, let alone the UI? The RAZR is the most popular cell phone of all time (and it also was $500 when it was released, like the iPhone), but it still had horrid software.
I have an Audiovox SMT5600 phone with Windows Mobile. I bought it almost two years ago thinking that I would use all the neat smartphone features. To this day, I can't use them, because the phone's controls are so archaic and Windows Mobile is buggy and slow.
Why do cell phones even ship with a numeric keypad anyway? I almost never use mine. It's because cell phones refused to rethink how people used traditional phones.
This is EXACTLY where the portable MP3 player market was six years ago when the iPod was introduced. Sure, MP3 players were neat... but they had no space to store anything and generally required you to use standard CD player controls (FF/RW/play/stop) to operate. MP3 player makers were confined (in their minds) by the previous generation of technology. Apple wasn't. iPods came out with a scroll wheel, easy updating and charging, and a hard drive to store a ton of songs... and the industry is turned upside down and Apple becomes one of the hottest companies in years.
The parallels here are almost too staggering to describe. This time, there's a much bigger industry that is stagnant. In five years, all of us will be amazed at how one event - the introduction of the iPhone - transformed the cell phone industry, because other smartphone makers are either going to make something elegant or they will lose the war.
What, you mean, like Konqueror?
With that said, your point about docking stations and HDD speeds is valid. Apple does need to make more corporate-friendly stuff to get the really big piece of the pie.
For those of you looking at CMSs... the site Open Source CMS is an invaluable resource. They allow you to demo all of the popular choices and choose which one you like the best.
The Neo 1973 has GPS and the next hardware revision is supposed to have WiFi, too... since they've finally located a sufficiently small, low power, and free (as in speech) WiFi chipset and driver.
The minute someone makes Skype for a WiFi cellphone is the minute people start using fewer minutes.
Of course, Cingular's still getting your money because you signed a 2 year contract to get the phone in the first place.
What will be really interesting is if Openmoko takes off. Then, there's no 2 year contract... say goodbye to margins!
That's the same reason the Playstation beat the Saturn/N64/3DO, the PS2 beat GCN and Xbox, the NES beat the Master System, ad nauseam.
Thank you. You're exactly right. The cost of adding a few scrubbers to the local coal plant is a hell of a lot cheaper than adding the equivalent scrubbers (catalytic converter) to 1 million cars.
Ethanol is a viable choice for the following reasons:
1) It is the alternative fuel that is easiest for Average Joe American to use because it burns similarly to gasoline.. When he buys a flex fuel car, he knows that he can refill on gas or ethanol, and it makes no difference to the car. This is a big advantage over a hydrogen fuel cell, natural gas, biodiesel, or even an all-electric car - you have to make a big change to how you fill up your car. Heaven forbid you're stuck in Boondocks, Iowa, out of hydrogen fuel.
2) It is available now.
3) It reduces our dependence on foreign oil.
4) It doesn't have to be made from corn (as many people pointed out). Just because it's made from corn now doesn't mean it will be or has to be in the future. Producing more flex-fuel vehicles makes it easier to curb the oil addiction.
5) It costs about $200 (at the factory) to make a car flex fuel capable. That's a hell of a lot less than it costs to make an EV, a hybrid, a hydrogen fuel cell, or a natural gas burning car.
6) Ethanol has a higher octane rating than even premium gasoline, so it gives significantly better performance.
If we nuke the ethanol subsidy, we should really nuke the gasoline subsidies, too, that are artificially lowering the price of that fuel. Nuke the farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, medicare, welfare, social security, and the rest of the programs that our government uses to hemorrhage money.
Then maybe the average American could afford to buy an energy efficient car.
We need more phones that you can buy unlocked that give you features that the cell phone companies normally would block (Skype / WiFi integration, MP3 ringtones, bluetooth image transfers, etc).
Maybe a Linux phone will get us there?
I'm glad to see that the RIAA/MPAA's War on Customers is failing, and IANAL, but that article summary is terrible. Can you possibly make it any more confusing?
Ten years behind is a bit much. Did you use Visual Studio in 1997? I specifically remember it destroying more than a few projects on me. XCode (and friggin CodeWarrior) trump older Visual Studios easily. Current releases of Visual Studio are great from what I've heard. But I am productive in XCode and I am also productive in Eclipse (when it doesn't crash!) Personally, I love XCode's UI. What's your beef with it?
If it was powered by Sony lithium-ion batteries, though, I guess all of this response might have been valid. ;)
Interestingly, TBS -did- pay $2 million to compensate for Boston's government ineptitude. $1 million of it goes to cover the cost of the police response. $1 million goes to "goodwill", whatever that means.
You're exactly right. Journalism at its finest. All Apple needs to do is provide Java MIDP 2.0 and we'll have a myriad of third party apps that run on most smartphones. It probably isn't ready yet because this device is so new. I have confidence in Apple here. They allowed third party developers for iPod. They will do so for iPhone, too. It just remains to be seen how (and when) it will be implemented.
That's a great point. Most people are buying larger items now (shows, movies, etc) so naturally the number of transactions will be lower.
Also, remember this - Apple gets charged a fee for each credit card transaction they make. When the iTMS launched, Apple would aggregate all of your purchases for a day and send you one bill. I've noticed over the past year that the time they wait to bill you has gone up - sometimes as much as two days from the time of purchase. This is because Apple is charged for each transaction, so if they decrease the number of transactions (and instead increase the amount) they make more money.
Did it occur to anyone that Apple may intentionally be lowering the number of credit card transactions?
Uh, Microsoft told us it would take less time. Therefore it's their fault when they miss their self-imposed deadline. They underestimated the difficulty of the project and therefore we should have nobody to blame but MS.
Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity are both also great.
For anyone who wants to check the game out, you should check out Aleph One, the OSS version of the game updated for new systems. It's still worth a play through for anyone who hasn't.
Is it a coincidence that Bungie created (IMO) the two FPS's with the best storylines?
Honestly, you're right. Additionally, DVD offers many benefits over VHS in usability - no rewinding, no fast forwarding, and no picture degradation with use.
To me, the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is just a rehash of Beta vs VHS except with one additional factor - nobody really cares.
The PS3 will help drive Blu-Ray adoption, but who really has enough cash to drop on a player and a 1080p TV? Very, very few people.