Due to technical glitches (contact list lost, etc), it did not build customer confidence nearly as well as it could have. I am on my second Skype ID (the first one had its contact list erased twice), and as such, not willing to put up money up front on skype in/out.
Also, they did not go at all after corporate customers. I'd love my university to have Skype officialy, and just be able to type the name of the person I want and boom, I talk to them. But no, there has been NO marketing of this that I have been aware of. So in the end I can talk only to my friends, because no staff/etc has Skype IDs.
Basically, I think Skype had great potential, but I think that that potential has been in great part wasted by a lack of marketing push, lack of innovation, and lack of stability.
I really cannot think that using linux on the desktop is a good idea.
I used to be a linux fanatic up to about 3 months ago, running it on all my PCs and laptops, installing it for family, etc etc. But three months ago I really had enough, something clicked in my mind, I got a Mac laptop and -- there is NO going back.
Some of the reasons:
The install process. In linux, if you need an application that you can get via apt-get, good. Otherwise? Compile your own. Which means that as the libraries get replaced due to security or other issues, you have to recompile those third party applications. Also, you have to figure out by yourself which development packages you need. And so on and so forth. Are we kidding? On a Mac, I drag these things in the application folder and that's it! Also on linux, once something breaks in the dependencies, good luck fixing it.
Video. I like 24 inch and 30 inch flat panels. Getting them to work under linux is a pain. If the card is too old, Ubuntu does not support it well. If it is too new, neither. Also, 1920x1200 is not a standard resolution. Oh, and once you get it running, try to have your laptop automatically adapt to the native resolution of the LCD you happen to connect it. You need at the very least to restart X. And don't dream of dealing with the fact that, at work, my laptop is on the left of the flat panel (and I like to use them both), and at home, on the right. On a Mac? You plug the LCD in and you are done. Nothing to tinker with. Rearranging the logical position of the screens? Just drag them around.
Configuration files. In linux, everybody assumes you love the command line. I needed recently to have a file containing an encrypted partition to store there my email. In linux, the instruction began thus: "It is very simple. Create a file/etc/idontknowwhat containing the list of partitio...." are we kidding? And if the partition is on a USB stick I have to do it on every PC on which I want to read my email?? On the Mac, I just create an encrypted partition with the disk and that's it, no tinkering with configuration files.
Wireless. In linux, after a few times I suspend/wake up my laptop, and change networks, always something goes wrong, and I have to reboot to see the network again (on a Thinkpad X40). Never had issues on my Mac.
I can get frequency scaling, disk spinoff, and all that to work on linux, but just because I am (or used to be) a hacker. On a Mac? No issues, it just works.
And the list goes on and on... I have come to the conclusion that linux is fine if you (a) like tinkering with computers per se, or (b) install it on a server. Otherwise, it's essentially a way to waste your time.
The US used to be a huge attraction to all students worldwide interested in computer science.
The US job market was great, the US graduate programs were head and shoulders above the rest of the world.
Now, however, things are changing, and I see fewer and fewer applicants from India -- the number of top IIT students applying is decreasing.
There are three main reasons:
The India tech industry is picking up fast, and top graduates from top school can now command very good salaries in India itself. For a country like India, where family ties matter and people, other things being equal, would be happy to stay where they are, this matters a lot.
The post-9/11 US visa and immigration policy is a hindrance -- other things being equal, it is easier for Indians to study in the UK or Continental Europe, for instance. Getting the permanent resident status to work after a PhD is also easier in many other countries now.
There have always been top-quality graduate programs outside of the US, but these programs did not use to cater to foreigners -- instruction was in the local language rather than English, and the application process for foreigners was not straightforward. Both factors are changing fast. Universities in many countries (The Netherlands, Switzerland, of course the UK, places across Scandinavia, etc) are now catering to foreign students with graduate courses in English, scholarships, and feasible application process.
Taken together, these things mean that the US graduate programs are slowly losing their worldwide pre-eminence and appeal, and the US will more and more be just one player among many. I do not think that US people should be happy of this, but in a sense, it will lead to a more pluralist and democratic world...
I can understand it. I grew up doing email, now email is my main communication medium, I am in my 40s, and you know what? I am shifting more and more towards IM myself.
Why? Consider the following:
No spam.
Email fills your inbox. If you don't have time to answer something, it stays there, begging for your time forever - or at least, for the couple of weeks it takes me to realize that no, I will never in fact get back to that, and I'll file it away from my attention. You have all these "open" communication threads, things to which you own an answer but you don't care enough. IM is not like that. If you are away, people don't IM you. If you have an IM conversation, when it's closed, it's closed, you move on to other stuff - you don't have this feeling of these hundreds of threads demanding your attention.
IM requires symmetrical effort. In email, a lot of the messages I get are sent to more than one person: workplace mailing lists, even the usual habit of CCs. The junk accumulates, and this is a bigger problem than spam, as there are no effective automatic filters for workplace mailing-lists. In IM, if somebody IMs me, they are giving me their full attention.
We as humans are not geared to multiprocessing and having a hundred open threads of communication. I want to talk or IM with someone, say what we want to say, then move on to other things with our full attention, without this lingering feeling that there is a zillion things we haven't really taken care of and we are leaving open.
If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore. Young people communicate more, and I can fully understand why they prefer IM, so more similar to speech, so more natural, so more lightweight. I am going the same direction myself, and let me tell you, it feels liberating. I look forward to the day when all the communication with colleagues and friends is over IM, and email is relegated to that twice-a-week habit that is now for me physical mail.
I much prefer to run Openoffice under X11. In fact, I wish I could run firefox under X11 as well. Under X11, I can cut and paste using mouse buttons; otherwise, all I have is that apple-C -V stuff (how slow, how inconvenient).
Under X11, I can move focus to a window simply by sliding the mouse on it; otherwise, I have to click on it (and as a consequence, only top-level windows can be in focus; it is quite convenient often to be able to type into an only partially-exposed window!).
So the more applications run under X11, the happer I am.
But did the guy actually build a LED?
Because we are all good at writing a fuzzy description of how something should produce light (maybe with the help of wobbly math). Quite another feat is to actually produce the device.
Oh, and patents don't matter. Anybody with time and money to burn can file one.
One difference is that in the dot-com era, you saw companies valued billions operating in a market that was worth a fraction of that - in the hope that in the "new economy" there would suddenly be billions of new dollars pouring into all possible sectors of the economy.
In contrast, Google is profitable, this service must have been set up with a smallish (50?) number of employees, and the DA 411 market is worth some 8 billion dollars per year - and that is before advertisement is taken into account. So your comparison does not run very deep.
Not really. Kids, and less time, came later.
I stopped buying because I was offended by the presumption that I was returning CDs after copying them. And I stopped buying because, for classical music, there is no very good way of deciding whether you really like an interpretation, except by listening to it from beginnig to end carefully. I did not want to feed a lottery $18 at a time.
I used to be a music lover - I still am, in a way.
But 10 years ago, one of my standard weekend occupations was a trip to Tower Records.
There, I would buy 5-6 CDs of classical music. I would listen to them all, return a couple of them or so (I often bought the same piece played by different interpreters / orchestras, returning interpretations I found less interesting), and get 5-6 more CDs, and so on and so forth, a visit every other weekend on average.
Then came mp3's and copying. But I didn't do it. I liked having the albums - for some classical music, the booklet is interesting - and more than that, I didn't have the kind of time required to copy all the CDs I wanted to have. It was beautifully simple - buy, listen, return a few and buy many more. Money was not a problem, as I worked and I didn't have kids at the time. I didn't (and don't) have a TV - what harm there was in spending $40 / week for something I loved? It was below my threshold of attention.
But then Tower started to decline returns. That very day, I stopped buying CDs, and in the intervening years, I must have bought 10 of them in total - mostly folkloristic music I bought while traveling. I simply could not put up with the idea of plunging $18 to try a new interpretation of a Missa by Bach - and not being able to return it if I didn't like it.
So I stopped buying music altogether. I don't copy it either, because I still don't have a lot of time. Rather, other hobbies - digital photography, then kids, then other things still - gradually replaced the space music had in my life.
It is sad, but I am still young, and who knows, perhaps I will live again through an era where I can easily browse through all the interpretations of the Zauberflute, listen to them, and buy them at top quality.
So in my case, the music industry lost a customer, due purely to their fear of piracy.
The typical journal publication process consists of these phases. VBP = Value Added by Publishers:
Authors write and submit paper. The paper is typically typeset in latex, with high-quality figures already present. VBP = 0.
The editor sends copies of the paper to reviewers. Some editors receive a small compensation for this (typically to pay a slice of the time of a secretary), but often do not. VBP The reviewers review the paper. Reviewers, typically faculty or researchers, are not paid for this. VBP = 0.
Authors are notified, and if the paper is accepted, revise it. VBP = 0.
Another round of review may follow, to ensure the reviewer's comments have been duly taken into account. VBP = 0.
The publishing staff adapts the paper to the journal format. All of the typesetting has been done in latex by the authors already, only the format may be changed. VBP Paper is published. For the on-line version, VBP > 0, as the publisher has to have the storage and bandwidth to archive the journal (bandwidth is the main cost). For the print version, the journal has to be shipped to many libraries, and definitely VBP > 0, as the shipping operation is complex.
So I think that libraries should pay some price if they want paper copies, but else, there is not much value added by the publishers.
Indeed, high quality open journals are starting to exist, like the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, among others.
What I still cannot figure out is why, when I write a paper, I have to transfer copyright. That's a drastic step! Why can't I just license the content?
But things are changing. Various funding agencies are considering open availability of research results (= papers) as a prerequisite for funding, and various public universities are considering making a condition for performing funded work that the results be made available for free to all via digital libraries. And this make sense as well: as the work is funded by taxpayer's dollars, it should be available to all.
Part of the reason I resigned from IEEE is that I disagree with its access policy to journals, and standards (having to PAY to access an IEEE standard??).
I recently started doing research on sociological aspects of social networks and
collaborative web sites. This is a job that a sociologist could do. Instead I,
as a CS person, am doing it. Why? Because to do what I am doing, you need to be pretty good at algorithms, math, and other CS topics.
My general impression is that CS is more and more useful to do any kind of job, and in fact, a CS degree or background is one of the most flexible ones to have. All jobs require CS, and if you know the core topics in CS well, it will go a long way.
When I first heard about "hotmail", I thought it was some kind of porno email service. Am I the only one??
Now it has become "live hotmail" -- it just keeps getting better and better!
I am tempted to get a "live hotmail" account just to use to email bigot friends of mine... too bad the usernames "young" or "tasty" are most likely taken...
I guess their support address is "soft@live.hotmail.com" ?
This is funny. I create a new Yahoo ID whenever I want to sign up for something that I know in the long run will generate spam - so I can keep the emails on the yahoo account, which I will then stop looking at after a short while. I must have created nearly a hundred Yahoo IDs, of which I remember at most 3-4!! Clearly, some people have a different resistance to Yahoo IDs:-)
Very true. Also support for google apps for your domain is bad - you email them, and they reply to you after many days, if ever. It's free, but it's certainly not a reliable hosting solution.
People do this kind of things because they realize that 99% of their writing is utterly uninteresting and un-confidential, and 1% is confidential. Just keep that 1% secure, and use whatever is most convenient for the rest.
I use such online editors for sharing shopping lists with my wife, write meeting agendas or minutes collaboratively (if the meeting is not supposed to be secret, why bother with security), and lots and lots of other things. If you think carefully, a very small portion of your stuff is truly secret, in the sense that you incur trouble/loss if it gets out. Or at least so it is for me.
Interesting. Watermarking music is something that may happen.
When there was some thought of watermarking bullets (so you know who purchased them, after retrieving them from bodies), the NRA clamored enough that the thing went nowhere.
It gives you an interesting insight into the scale of values: watermarking music, yes (poor music companies!), watermarking bullets, no (just bury the guy).
I guess we won't have a decent version of Gmail on it then... on my Razor, I am using the java program downloaded for the Google site, and it works well - much better than web access. Even though the iPhone has a better browser than most cellphones, a Gmail-specific app would be much better than web access. For accessing Gmail, I suspect my Razr, at $100 with contract with Cingular, is both cheaper and better...
Gmail makes workers more efficient (much easier to manage one's email, accessible from mobile phones, etc). Most companies would be better off by giving their email to manage to Google via Gmail for Your Domain, and focus on more core competencies than email. Of course, the IT departments may not necessarily like this...
And no, I am definitely not a Google employee.
I checked, via pgp.mit.edu. In my university, with 16000+ people, I am the only one with a PGP key signed by someone outside of my university, and I think that no more than 20 people have a PGP key uploaded to pgp.mit.edu.
And there is simply NO WAY I can convince staff (or pretty much anyone) to accept my PGP-signed emails as something especially valuable (and as a replacement for a paper signature), or to send me confidential information via encrypted email instead of having me go pick up paper folders somewhere.
On the other hand, everybody seems to accept as "signed" the pdf letters I produce, which include a photographed copy of my signature.
I have given up.
I work on one of the UC campuses, and there is no such censorship here.
The tradition of the university, and of the UC system in general, makes me believe that if a CIO dared suggest similar censorship here, the faculty and students would cry that this is against academic freedom, and the CIO would be sent packing in very short order. But this is just what I believe, since to this day, no CIO has attempted such censorship (he would be stopped before implementation).
We do, however, keep track of network usage, and if we see huge network usage from specific users or groups, we typically ask whether there are instructional or research reasons for it. If not, we try to bring the usage within some reasonable limit by discussing with the users. Not as a matter of censorship, but as a matter of sharing of an expensive resource.
I am very happy with 24" monitors at home and work. When I work, I can view two windows side-to-side (editors, or browsers) and still have space left. When I play with digital photography, the photo takes 80% of the area, and I still have space on the side for controls, etc. It is simpler to setup in linux (nothing to be done), you can put a window smack in the center when you need it, it works better for watching DVDs or doing slide shows... and the cost is not so much more than 2 19": I paid mine (a Dell) $800.
There is no way from Gmail to attach a document created with writely. Sure, I can email the document from writely - but usually I would want to write a couple of explanation lines in the email, telling the recipient what it is all about... Also, there is no way to just email it - I need to edit the sharing settings first. How boring.
No versioning for spreadsheets. If my co-editors mess up and erase everything, it is gone for good - unless I saved it with a different name to make a backup. Would you trust important data to this?
In writely, if I try to edit the share settings, it does not recognize entries that are in my Gmail contact list.
In writely, if I try to edit the share settings, and type an email quickly, the javascript cannot keep up, and looses characters. Example, I type "belmondo" and I get "bemoo".
Lots of buttons to push, slow to use. In Word (argh!) at least I have lots of keyboard shortcuts that work. I really would not want to have to edit a long document in this.
I guess I will have to wait until it matures a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Skype blew quite a few opportunities.
Due to technical glitches (contact list lost, etc), it did not build customer confidence nearly as well as it could have. I am on my second Skype ID (the first one had its contact list erased twice), and as such, not willing to put up money up front on skype in/out.
Also, they did not go at all after corporate customers. I'd love my university to have Skype officialy, and just be able to type the name of the person I want and boom, I talk to them. But no, there has been NO marketing of this that I have been aware of. So in the end I can talk only to my friends, because no staff/etc has Skype IDs.
Basically, I think Skype had great potential, but I think that that potential has been in great part wasted by a lack of marketing push, lack of innovation, and lack of stability.
- The install process. In linux, if you need an application that you can get via apt-get, good. Otherwise? Compile your own. Which means that as the libraries get replaced due to security or other issues, you have to recompile those third party applications. Also, you have to figure out by yourself which development packages you need. And so on and so forth. Are we kidding? On a Mac, I drag these things in the application folder and that's it! Also on linux, once something breaks in the dependencies, good luck fixing it.
- Video. I like 24 inch and 30 inch flat panels. Getting them to work under linux is a pain. If the card is too old, Ubuntu does not support it well. If it is too new, neither. Also, 1920x1200 is not a standard resolution. Oh, and once you get it running, try to have your laptop automatically adapt to the native resolution of the LCD you happen to connect it. You need at the very least to restart X. And don't dream of dealing with the fact that, at work, my laptop is on the left of the flat panel (and I like to use them both), and at home, on the right. On a Mac? You plug the LCD in and you are done. Nothing to tinker with. Rearranging the logical position of the screens? Just drag them around.
- Configuration files. In linux, everybody assumes you love the command line. I needed recently to have a file containing an encrypted partition to store there my email. In linux, the instruction began thus: "It is very simple. Create a file
/etc/idontknowwhat containing the list of partitio...." are we kidding? And if the partition is on a USB stick I have to do it on every PC on which I want to read my email?? On the Mac, I just create an encrypted partition with the disk and that's it, no tinkering with configuration files.
- Wireless. In linux, after a few times I suspend/wake up my laptop, and change networks, always something goes wrong, and I have to reboot to see the network again (on a Thinkpad X40). Never had issues on my Mac.
- I can get frequency scaling, disk spinoff, and all that to work on linux, but just because I am (or used to be) a hacker. On a Mac? No issues, it just works.
And the list goes on and on... I have come to the conclusion that linux is fine if you (a) like tinkering with computers per se, or (b) install it on a server. Otherwise, it's essentially a way to waste your time.- The India tech industry is picking up fast, and top graduates from top school can now command very good salaries in India itself. For a country like India, where family ties matter and people, other things being equal, would be happy to stay where they are, this matters a lot.
- The post-9/11 US visa and immigration policy is a hindrance -- other things being equal, it is easier for Indians to study in the UK or Continental Europe, for instance. Getting the permanent resident status to work after a PhD is also easier in many other countries now.
- There have always been top-quality graduate programs outside of the US, but these programs did not use to cater to foreigners -- instruction was in the local language rather than English, and the application process for foreigners was not straightforward. Both factors are changing fast. Universities in many countries (The Netherlands, Switzerland, of course the UK, places across Scandinavia, etc) are now catering to foreign students with graduate courses in English, scholarships, and feasible application process.
Taken together, these things mean that the US graduate programs are slowly losing their worldwide pre-eminence and appeal, and the US will more and more be just one player among many. I do not think that US people should be happy of this, but in a sense, it will lead to a more pluralist and democratic world...I can understand it. I grew up doing email, now email is my main communication medium, I am in my 40s, and you know what? I am shifting more and more towards IM myself. Why? Consider the following:
We as humans are not geared to multiprocessing and having a hundred open threads of communication. I want to talk or IM with someone, say what we want to say, then move on to other things with our full attention, without this lingering feeling that there is a zillion things we haven't really taken care of and we are leaving open.
If you are wondering, I might get only about 30/40 emails a day, and I may write only 20 or so, but still it's a chore. Young people communicate more, and I can fully understand why they prefer IM, so more similar to speech, so more natural, so more lightweight. I am going the same direction myself, and let me tell you, it feels liberating. I look forward to the day when all the communication with colleagues and friends is over IM, and email is relegated to that twice-a-week habit that is now for me physical mail.
I much prefer to run Openoffice under X11. In fact, I wish I could run firefox under X11 as well. Under X11, I can cut and paste using mouse buttons; otherwise, all I have is that apple-C -V stuff (how slow, how inconvenient). Under X11, I can move focus to a window simply by sliding the mouse on it; otherwise, I have to click on it (and as a consequence, only top-level windows can be in focus; it is quite convenient often to be able to type into an only partially-exposed window!). So the more applications run under X11, the happer I am.
Mod parent up!
But did the guy actually build a LED? Because we are all good at writing a fuzzy description of how something should produce light (maybe with the help of wobbly math). Quite another feat is to actually produce the device. Oh, and patents don't matter. Anybody with time and money to burn can file one.
One difference is that in the dot-com era, you saw companies valued billions operating in a market that was worth a fraction of that - in the hope that in the "new economy" there would suddenly be billions of new dollars pouring into all possible sectors of the economy. In contrast, Google is profitable, this service must have been set up with a smallish (50?) number of employees, and the DA 411 market is worth some 8 billion dollars per year - and that is before advertisement is taken into account. So your comparison does not run very deep.
Not really. Kids, and less time, came later. I stopped buying because I was offended by the presumption that I was returning CDs after copying them. And I stopped buying because, for classical music, there is no very good way of deciding whether you really like an interpretation, except by listening to it from beginnig to end carefully. I did not want to feed a lottery $18 at a time.
I used to be a music lover - I still am, in a way. But 10 years ago, one of my standard weekend occupations was a trip to Tower Records. There, I would buy 5-6 CDs of classical music. I would listen to them all, return a couple of them or so (I often bought the same piece played by different interpreters / orchestras, returning interpretations I found less interesting), and get 5-6 more CDs, and so on and so forth, a visit every other weekend on average.
Then came mp3's and copying. But I didn't do it. I liked having the albums - for some classical music, the booklet is interesting - and more than that, I didn't have the kind of time required to copy all the CDs I wanted to have. It was beautifully simple - buy, listen, return a few and buy many more. Money was not a problem, as I worked and I didn't have kids at the time. I didn't (and don't) have a TV - what harm there was in spending $40 / week for something I loved? It was below my threshold of attention.
But then Tower started to decline returns. That very day, I stopped buying CDs, and in the intervening years, I must have bought 10 of them in total - mostly folkloristic music I bought while traveling. I simply could not put up with the idea of plunging $18 to try a new interpretation of a Missa by Bach - and not being able to return it if I didn't like it.
So I stopped buying music altogether. I don't copy it either, because I still don't have a lot of time. Rather, other hobbies - digital photography, then kids, then other things still - gradually replaced the space music had in my life.
It is sad, but I am still young, and who knows, perhaps I will live again through an era where I can easily browse through all the interpretations of the Zauberflute, listen to them, and buy them at top quality.
So in my case, the music industry lost a customer, due purely to their fear of piracy.
jmv has it exactly right.
The typical journal publication process consists of these phases. VBP = Value Added by Publishers:
- Authors write and submit paper. The paper is typically typeset in latex, with high-quality figures already present. VBP = 0.
- The editor sends copies of the paper to reviewers. Some editors receive a small compensation for this (typically to pay a slice of the time of a secretary), but often do not. VBP The reviewers review the paper. Reviewers, typically faculty or researchers, are not paid for this. VBP = 0.
- Authors are notified, and if the paper is accepted, revise it. VBP = 0.
- Another round of review may follow, to ensure the reviewer's comments have been duly taken into account. VBP = 0.
- The publishing staff adapts the paper to the journal format. All of the typesetting has been done in latex by the authors already, only the format may be changed. VBP Paper is published. For the on-line version, VBP > 0, as the publisher has to have the storage and bandwidth to archive the journal (bandwidth is the main cost). For the print version, the journal has to be shipped to many libraries, and definitely VBP > 0, as the shipping operation is complex.
So I think that libraries should pay some price if they want paper copies, but else, there is not much value added by the publishers.Indeed, high quality open journals are starting to exist, like the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, among others.
What I still cannot figure out is why, when I write a paper, I have to transfer copyright. That's a drastic step! Why can't I just license the content?
But things are changing. Various funding agencies are considering open availability of research results (= papers) as a prerequisite for funding, and various public universities are considering making a condition for performing funded work that the results be made available for free to all via digital libraries. And this make sense as well: as the work is funded by taxpayer's dollars, it should be available to all.
Part of the reason I resigned from IEEE is that I disagree with its access policy to journals, and standards (having to PAY to access an IEEE standard??).
I recently started doing research on sociological aspects of social networks and collaborative web sites. This is a job that a sociologist could do. Instead I, as a CS person, am doing it. Why? Because to do what I am doing, you need to be pretty good at algorithms, math, and other CS topics.
My general impression is that CS is more and more useful to do any kind of job, and in fact, a CS degree or background is one of the most flexible ones to have. All jobs require CS, and if you know the core topics in CS well, it will go a long way.
When I first heard about "hotmail", I thought it was some kind of porno email service. Am I the only one??
Now it has become "live hotmail" -- it just keeps getting better and better! I am tempted to get a "live hotmail" account just to use to email bigot friends of mine... too bad the usernames "young" or "tasty" are most likely taken...
I guess their support address is "soft@live.hotmail.com" ?
This is funny. I create a new Yahoo ID whenever I want to sign up for something that I know in the long run will generate spam - so I can keep the emails on the yahoo account, which I will then stop looking at after a short while. I must have created nearly a hundred Yahoo IDs, of which I remember at most 3-4!! Clearly, some people have a different resistance to Yahoo IDs :-)
Very true. Also support for google apps for your domain is bad - you email them, and they reply to you after many days, if ever. It's free, but it's certainly not a reliable hosting solution.
People do this kind of things because they realize that 99% of their writing is utterly uninteresting and un-confidential, and 1% is confidential. Just keep that 1% secure, and use whatever is most convenient for the rest.
I use such online editors for sharing shopping lists with my wife, write meeting agendas or minutes collaboratively (if the meeting is not supposed to be secret, why bother with security), and lots and lots of other things. If you think carefully, a very small portion of your stuff is truly secret, in the sense that you incur trouble/loss if it gets out. Or at least so it is for me.
Interesting. Watermarking music is something that may happen. When there was some thought of watermarking bullets (so you know who purchased them, after retrieving them from bodies), the NRA clamored enough that the thing went nowhere. It gives you an interesting insight into the scale of values: watermarking music, yes (poor music companies!), watermarking bullets, no (just bury the guy).
I guess we won't have a decent version of Gmail on it then... on my Razor, I am using the java program downloaded for the Google site, and it works well - much better than web access. Even though the iPhone has a better browser than most cellphones, a Gmail-specific app would be much better than web access. For accessing Gmail, I suspect my Razr, at $100 with contract with Cingular, is both cheaper and better...
Gmail makes workers more efficient (much easier to manage one's email, accessible from mobile phones, etc). Most companies would be better off by giving their email to manage to Google via Gmail for Your Domain, and focus on more core competencies than email. Of course, the IT departments may not necessarily like this... And no, I am definitely not a Google employee.
I checked, via pgp.mit.edu. In my university, with 16000+ people, I am the only one with a PGP key signed by someone outside of my university, and I think that no more than 20 people have a PGP key uploaded to pgp.mit.edu. And there is simply NO WAY I can convince staff (or pretty much anyone) to accept my PGP-signed emails as something especially valuable (and as a replacement for a paper signature), or to send me confidential information via encrypted email instead of having me go pick up paper folders somewhere. On the other hand, everybody seems to accept as "signed" the pdf letters I produce, which include a photographed copy of my signature. I have given up.
This sounds like the perfect tool to shadow your significant other. Get a pair, then put one into his/her car...
Other application: hide one in the car before you lend it to your teenage kid for the evening.
I am sure this is going to be a successful gadget!
I work on one of the UC campuses, and there is no such censorship here. The tradition of the university, and of the UC system in general, makes me believe that if a CIO dared suggest similar censorship here, the faculty and students would cry that this is against academic freedom, and the CIO would be sent packing in very short order. But this is just what I believe, since to this day, no CIO has attempted such censorship (he would be stopped before implementation).
We do, however, keep track of network usage, and if we see huge network usage from specific users or groups, we typically ask whether there are instructional or research reasons for it. If not, we try to bring the usage within some reasonable limit by discussing with the users. Not as a matter of censorship, but as a matter of sharing of an expensive resource.
I am very happy with 24" monitors at home and work. When I work, I can view two windows side-to-side (editors, or browsers) and still have space left. When I play with digital photography, the photo takes 80% of the area, and I still have space on the side for controls, etc. It is simpler to setup in linux (nothing to be done), you can put a window smack in the center when you need it, it works better for watching DVDs or doing slide shows... and the cost is not so much more than 2 19": I paid mine (a Dell) $800.
Goffice? Gaffice! A mix of "gaffe" and "gaffer tape" ;-)
- There is no way from Gmail to attach a document created with writely. Sure, I can email the document from writely - but usually I would want to write a couple of explanation lines in the email, telling the recipient what it is all about... Also, there is no way to just email it - I need to edit the sharing settings first. How boring.
- No versioning for spreadsheets. If my co-editors mess up and erase everything, it is gone for good - unless I saved it with a different name to make a backup. Would you trust important data to this?
- In writely, if I try to edit the share settings, it does not recognize entries that are in my Gmail contact list.
- In writely, if I try to edit the share settings, and type an email quickly, the javascript cannot keep up, and looses characters. Example, I type "belmondo" and I get "bemoo".
- Lots of buttons to push, slow to use. In Word (argh!) at least I have lots of keyboard shortcuts that work. I really would not want to have to edit a long document in this.
I guess I will have to wait until it matures a bit.