if it's bendable, then it kind of defeats the object. While those users were stupid to try and fit it in a slot-loading drive, CDs should be rigid so that they work in these things. Also, the amount of CD drives this will ruin could balance against the environmental benefits of the DVD.
'Familiar' does not necessarily equate with 'intuitive'.
Take the stupid menu systems found on many Windows apps (and in a lot of Linux and OS X) today. Items will be buried far down in the menus, difficult to find and confusing. Just a simple search box, or a tabbed Ribbon-like UI (for example, in Office 2007 or Sugar) would make menus so much easier to navigate.
Can people not drop this now? True, analogue tapes and vinyl disks generate a warmer sound, but that is why most songs are taped to an analogue medium before being copied back to a CD and then sent out to Mrs P Williams of 11 Williams Way, Slough.
As unlikely as it may seem, Microsoft could be a saviour in this case. If I remember correctly, its (rather good) implementation of patience solitaire has been in Windows since 1990. Far before the patent was issued. So there.
It is. Layouts can be configured for Photoshop, games and any other app on the Optimus Max, and its successor, the Optimus Touch. I simply fail to see how this patent will get through, and Apple will have to come up with a bloody good innovation to get it through.
I'm expecting something not too dissimilar to the current Apple keyboard, but with OLED keys. Or, perhaps, on the supposed tablet sub-notebook that several rumour sites have claimed exists, a keyboard which can disappear and become part of the screen, á la the iPhone or the iPod Touch.
I would like to express my interest in patenting a system by which inventions can be protected from copies by other individuals or companies. This is a system I have trademarked as Patents(tm) and I intend to take them on to the market as soon as the patent is issued. I enclose a cheque for $16500 and a coupon for a meal at the Ritz in London; please reply with my patent certificate as soon as is possible.
If it's been patented by M$, then I know I won't be seeing it on my Macs and Linux boxes any time soon. What a stupid, sad system that shouldn't have a reason to exist in the first place.
It's no different to most WMA players not supporting DRMed AAC, and only supporting MS's DRMed WMA. Which can be said of many, many low-end Flash players.
Then I can see this becoming a two-way road with no middle path: one the one hand, there is the backlink model Google uses, which, when abuse is edited out, becomes impossible to analyse. On the other hand, there is the community model Wikia will use, which is transparent and easier to analyse, but will make it more difficult to weed out abuse. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and there is no compromise between the two.
Overall, I'll probably continue to use Google as my primary search engine, with Ask as my secondary engine, because they're both engines that I have counted on in the past to give me reliable, unbiased results (bar the 'miserable failure' incident, but with Bush in the White House it is somewhat accurate).
Such a model would
also make it possible to carry out smear attacks and to ruin the rankings
of competing companies, parties, organisations, whatever - a practice that
IMHO should be left to search engine admins.
Oh yeah. Let's give the highly underpaid, highly overworked admins yet more
unrelated tasks to carry out! Can't you people do your own company smear attacks? Why do you want to bother the admins with that? Besides, smearing competitors is technically new content, and content creation is not done in the server room. It just overheats the computers and there's no space to put another air conditioner anyway. Try the art department, but tell them to keep the picture sizes down this time!
What I meant was when, for example, a company that attempts to Googlebomb itself has its PageRank reset to zero directly in the database. That should be left to admins.
Point well made - while spam attacks may be pretty obvious, they could be spread out over time to make them less obvious.
Additionally, I can see this search engine being very much affected by public mood. For example, say there was a royal death and a certain right-wing 'upmarket' tabloid newspaper decided to claim that it was a conspiracy by the Government to kill the royal off. This is linked to from said newspaper's web site, and this people improve its ranking. Therefore it floats to the top of the results pile, thus giving it more exposure and setting off a vicious cycle.
Just a hypothetical situation, but certainly possible. Such a model would also make it possible to carry out smear attacks and to ruin the rankings of competing companies, parties, organisations, whatever - a practice that IMHO should be left to search engine admins.
I assume that iSnake will lock itself to a particular health insurance provider, still to be announced by the manufacturer, and will be bricked on software updates if found to be unlocked?
Closed source software is very important to how people use computers, even if they tend to use OSS. For example, if, say, Windows XP or Mac OS X were fully open source, would you really choose Linux over them?
In a nutshell, the point I'm trying to make is that closed source software can be very good. True, that can't be said of certain products, but Windows XP wasn't all that bad, Office 2007 (ignoring OOXML) is excellent, and since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple have always made a brilliant example of how to create good software; I'm typing this on Mac OS X Tiger now and it's excellent. True, its kernel is open-source, as are the GNU tools, and several of the APIs, but the rest of it is closed, and I truly don't mind using it.
While it's good to have something for free, it will take something enormous to get open-source on almost every machine in the way, say, Windows is. For example, a real innovation that makes open-source software dead simple to set up, and different to anything before it. Because - let's face it - Linux is a jargon minefield for the inexperienced user, and while Vista is no better, XP and Mac OS X are dead simple - two editions, that's it.
That said, I do have a problem with fierce monopolisation of software using closed-source, which makes Vista my case in point. So my case briefly is that I don't mind using closed-source software if it's good enough and reasonably priced. If it's open-source, that's the icing on the cake.
True, in comparison to other manufacturers', Apple's after-sales support is incredibly good. I have a friend who told me that when he sent his iMac G5 in a few years ago to be repaired because a single column of pixels down the side had gone, it was replaced with a brand-new Intel iMac with all the files transferred across for him.
All-in-ones are actually pretty much the same to upgrade as any other system; if anything it's slightly easier to upgrade because the layout on the inside is neater. They're certainly not as hard to work with as some would have you believe, although the display is a nearly unavoidable problem.
True, Apple doesn't exactly make life easy by soldering the iMac's processor to the motherboard, bit if you want to replace the RAM, HD or optical drive it's dead easy. This would, I imagine, even be true on the Dell XPS pile of phlegm. And TBH, I'd rather have something that runs my favourite flavour of UNIX out of the box, doesn't have trouble running Linux and will even run Windows without fault.
I also feel I will be in the minority when I say all-in-one is how computers should be. They're no more difficult to work with or upgrade than normal computers, and there's less cable mess at the back to remove when you do want to do something with it. Especially if it's a consumer computer for someone who doesn't know their *Points from their mouse pointers, using an all-in-one machine makes sense. That's why if someone has never touched a computer before and wants to buy one, I generally recommend an iMac: superior OS, guaranteed to work with the hardware, easy set-up.
The people who will be most affected by it, are those who don't use computers, cause they are magical machines, and hard to use.
Only because us technicians wear lab coats and glasses when working with them.
I think the Americans could take a leaf out of our book across the pond here. There are frequent news items, promotions and notices about the digital switchover. Some are actually targeted around programmes that people who are most likely to be in the dark will watch (eg daytime programmes, such as Countdown and Deal or No Deal. While DTT boxes aren't free, they're very cheap. The continuity announcers on the 'big five' channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five) frequently promote the digital services over the end credits and idents into programmes.
While I'm sure there will still be people claiming they never knew it was happening, awareness seems to be a lot higher over here than over there.
It should also be pointed out that the computer that defeated the martins in Independence Day where macs.
In a way, the film was a victory for Apple because it showed that as David's PowerBook could upload a (completely compatible) virus to the aliens' computer, '274 million hostile alien life forms can't be wrong!'
Not even the most secure OS in the world will necessarily do the job. For example, yesterday I reinstalled Mac OS X (Tiger) and the first thing I had to set about doing was enabling the firewall and downloading all the updates from 10.4.6. Even Linux or OpenBSD (as suggested by the tags), the most formidable open-source OSes in existence, would require a lot of configuration and a lot of plugging to make completely watertight.
While Windows sucks, as the OP said Mac OS X can't be called a golden bullet to fix everything. Neither can Linux, or OpenBSD. The only truly secure way is to have integrated circuits hard-wired to the program, or to use pen and paper.
True, there are rip-offs of OSX, Linux and every other OS out there in Vista, and the Zune does feel like a Windows Live Frankenstein with all the worst bits of every mp3 player in existence, but M$ has come up with some great software lately.
Office 2007 is very innovative, and while the ribbon interface has its detractors, I think it's great and IMO you can't blame them for trying something new. True, OOXML is a steaming pile of Ballamer's excrement, but it's a brilliant app. It still does turn up the occasional gem in the Downloads section that makes Windows experiences slightly more bearable (although for some reason it doesn't work on Vista).
While patents != innovation and M$ has certainly been involved in many questionable business practices lately, Office 2007 shows that it still does have the ability to innovate - and I fear that if they lose that (which is the way Microsoft seems to be going) then the company will eventually fade away. Although, with people like Ballamer at the helm, that's no bad thing.
Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like -- the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects
This sort of ignorance is something I'd expect from an eleven year-old - or, dare I say it, a MySpace user! How on Earth can this person be allowed to teach at a university if they are teaching this as 'advanced' HTML?
Slashdot Mirror
if it's bendable, then it kind of defeats the object. While those users were stupid to try and fit it in a slot-loading drive, CDs should be rigid so that they work in these things. Also, the amount of CD drives this will ruin could balance against the environmental benefits of the DVD.
Either way, this was given away in the Daily Mail, which seems to forget that slot-loading drives exist outside Macintosh computers. This is the same paper that seems to think that you can author an A-level media studies course on an iPod, and could therefore pass while being illiterate.
'Familiar' does not necessarily equate with 'intuitive'.
Take the stupid menu systems found on many Windows apps (and in a lot of Linux and OS X) today. Items will be buried far down in the menus, difficult to find and confusing. Just a simple search box, or a tabbed Ribbon-like UI (for example, in Office 2007 or Sugar) would make menus so much easier to navigate.
Can people not drop this now? True, analogue tapes and vinyl disks generate a warmer sound, but that is why most songs are taped to an analogue medium before being copied back to a CD and then sent out to Mrs P Williams of 11 Williams Way, Slough.
Indeed; the Internet is littered with examples of prior art. So this is going to be an impossible case to win.
As unlikely as it may seem, Microsoft could be a saviour in this case. If I remember correctly, its (rather good) implementation of patience solitaire has been in Windows since 1990. Far before the patent was issued. So there.
It is. Layouts can be configured for Photoshop, games and any other app on the Optimus Max, and its successor, the Optimus Touch. I simply fail to see how this patent will get through, and Apple will have to come up with a bloody good innovation to get it through.
I'm expecting something not too dissimilar to the current Apple keyboard, but with OLED keys. Or, perhaps, on the supposed tablet sub-notebook that several rumour sites have claimed exists, a keyboard which can disappear and become part of the screen, á la the iPhone or the iPod Touch.
Sorry, Rob Malda patented the comment counter in September 1997. You're welcome to arrange a contract with him if you want to use it.
To: Officer, US Patent Office
Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to express my interest in patenting a system by which inventions can be protected from copies by other individuals or companies. This is a system I have trademarked as Patents(tm) and I intend to take them on to the market as soon as the patent is issued. I enclose a cheque for $16500 and a coupon for a meal at the Ritz in London; please reply with my patent certificate as soon as is possible.
Yours faithfully,
E.E. Cretin
If it's been patented by M$, then I know I won't be seeing it on my Macs and Linux boxes any time soon. What a stupid, sad system that shouldn't have a reason to exist in the first place.
It's no different to most WMA players not supporting DRMed AAC, and only supporting MS's DRMed WMA. Which can be said of many, many low-end Flash players.
"I'm sorry, John. I'm having a baby, and it's yours," said the synthesised voice of the MasturBot® 2500x+ With Extra Input Bandwidth.
Then I can see this becoming a two-way road with no middle path: one the one hand, there is the backlink model Google uses, which, when abuse is edited out, becomes impossible to analyse. On the other hand, there is the community model Wikia will use, which is transparent and easier to analyse, but will make it more difficult to weed out abuse. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and there is no compromise between the two.
Overall, I'll probably continue to use Google as my primary search engine, with Ask as my secondary engine, because they're both engines that I have counted on in the past to give me reliable, unbiased results (bar the 'miserable failure' incident, but with Bush in the White House it is somewhat accurate).
What I meant was when, for example, a company that attempts to Googlebomb itself has its PageRank reset to zero directly in the database. That should be left to admins.
Point well made - while spam attacks may be pretty obvious, they could be spread out over time to make them less obvious.
Additionally, I can see this search engine being very much affected by public mood. For example, say there was a royal death and a certain right-wing 'upmarket' tabloid newspaper decided to claim that it was a conspiracy by the Government to kill the royal off. This is linked to from said newspaper's web site, and this people improve its ranking. Therefore it floats to the top of the results pile, thus giving it more exposure and setting off a vicious cycle.
Just a hypothetical situation, but certainly possible. Such a model would also make it possible to carry out smear attacks and to ruin the rankings of competing companies, parties, organisations, whatever - a practice that IMHO should be left to search engine admins.
I assume that iSnake will lock itself to a particular health insurance provider, still to be announced by the manufacturer, and will be bricked on software updates if found to be unlocked?
Closed source software is very important to how people use computers, even if they tend to use OSS. For example, if, say, Windows XP or Mac OS X were fully open source, would you really choose Linux over them?
In a nutshell, the point I'm trying to make is that closed source software can be very good. True, that can't be said of certain products, but Windows XP wasn't all that bad, Office 2007 (ignoring OOXML) is excellent, and since Mac OS X was introduced, Apple have always made a brilliant example of how to create good software; I'm typing this on Mac OS X Tiger now and it's excellent. True, its kernel is open-source, as are the GNU tools, and several of the APIs, but the rest of it is closed, and I truly don't mind using it.
While it's good to have something for free, it will take something enormous to get open-source on almost every machine in the way, say, Windows is. For example, a real innovation that makes open-source software dead simple to set up, and different to anything before it. Because - let's face it - Linux is a jargon minefield for the inexperienced user, and while Vista is no better, XP and Mac OS X are dead simple - two editions, that's it.
That said, I do have a problem with fierce monopolisation of software using closed-source, which makes Vista my case in point. So my case briefly is that I don't mind using closed-source software if it's good enough and reasonably priced. If it's open-source, that's the icing on the cake.
True, in comparison to other manufacturers', Apple's after-sales support is incredibly good. I have a friend who told me that when he sent his iMac G5 in a few years ago to be repaired because a single column of pixels down the side had gone, it was replaced with a brand-new Intel iMac with all the files transferred across for him.
All-in-ones are actually pretty much the same to upgrade as any other system; if anything it's slightly easier to upgrade because the layout on the inside is neater. They're certainly not as hard to work with as some would have you believe, although the display is a nearly unavoidable problem.
True, Apple doesn't exactly make life easy by soldering the iMac's processor to the motherboard, bit if you want to replace the RAM, HD or optical drive it's dead easy. This would, I imagine, even be true on the Dell XPS pile of phlegm. And TBH, I'd rather have something that runs my favourite flavour of UNIX out of the box, doesn't have trouble running Linux and will even run Windows without fault.
I also feel I will be in the minority when I say all-in-one is how computers should be. They're no more difficult to work with or upgrade than normal computers, and there's less cable mess at the back to remove when you do want to do something with it. Especially if it's a consumer computer for someone who doesn't know their *Points from their mouse pointers, using an all-in-one machine makes sense. That's why if someone has never touched a computer before and wants to buy one, I generally recommend an iMac: superior OS, guaranteed to work with the hardware, easy set-up.
Put all the data on a server.
Only because us technicians wear lab coats and glasses when working with them.
I think the Americans could take a leaf out of our book across the pond here. There are frequent news items, promotions and notices about the digital switchover. Some are actually targeted around programmes that people who are most likely to be in the dark will watch (eg daytime programmes, such as Countdown and Deal or No Deal. While DTT boxes aren't free, they're very cheap. The continuity announcers on the 'big five' channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five) frequently promote the digital services over the end credits and idents into programmes.
While I'm sure there will still be people claiming they never knew it was happening, awareness seems to be a lot higher over here than over there.
In a way, the film was a victory for Apple because it showed that as David's PowerBook could upload a (completely compatible) virus to the aliens' computer, '274 million hostile alien life forms can't be wrong!'
Not even the most secure OS in the world will necessarily do the job. For example, yesterday I reinstalled Mac OS X (Tiger) and the first thing I had to set about doing was enabling the firewall and downloading all the updates from 10.4.6. Even Linux or OpenBSD (as suggested by the tags), the most formidable open-source OSes in existence, would require a lot of configuration and a lot of plugging to make completely watertight.
While Windows sucks, as the OP said Mac OS X can't be called a golden bullet to fix everything. Neither can Linux, or OpenBSD. The only truly secure way is to have integrated circuits hard-wired to the program, or to use pen and paper.
In Soviet Russia, tiimmmeeee ssssssllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwssssssssss YYYYYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
True, there are rip-offs of OSX, Linux and every other OS out there in Vista, and the Zune does feel like a Windows Live Frankenstein with all the worst bits of every mp3 player in existence, but M$ has come up with some great software lately.
Office 2007 is very innovative, and while the ribbon interface has its detractors, I think it's great and IMO you can't blame them for trying something new. True, OOXML is a steaming pile of Ballamer's excrement, but it's a brilliant app. It still does turn up the occasional gem in the Downloads section that makes Windows experiences slightly more bearable (although for some reason it doesn't work on Vista).
While patents != innovation and M$ has certainly been involved in many questionable business practices lately, Office 2007 shows that it still does have the ability to innovate - and I fear that if they lose that (which is the way Microsoft seems to be going) then the company will eventually fade away. Although, with people like Ballamer at the helm, that's no bad thing.
This sort of ignorance is something I'd expect from an eleven year-old - or, dare I say it, a MySpace user! How on Earth can this person be allowed to teach at a university if they are teaching this as 'advanced' HTML?