American leaders, EU leaders... all serving at the mandate of vast numbers of people utterly petrified at the thought of ethnic stereotypes lurking around every corner, waiting to launch unspeakable horrors.
Bill represents the classic Microsoft at the top of its game, devious in business if not so much in software development, with the computing world on a string.
Ballmer represents the Vista era Microsoft on the decline, where a pathology of disorganization and unaccountability has infected its way up from engineering through management, a tired, bewildered behemoth watching impotently as its market slowly but steadily escapes to FOSS and Apple.
You are right, but all too often I see this posited as the device's sole virtue. The real value of the iPhone is that it has an extremely considered user interface, nearly free of arbitrary visuals and adherence to arbitrary convention.
From what I've seen, I don't think OpenMoko has a bad UI, but compared to all the fat stripped from and nuances considered within Apple's touch interface, it's kind of like comparing a higher-end bike from Target and a professional ultralight custom touring model.
Have you seen what Lego has been up to this decade in terms of web services? I just discovered this yesterday:
Lego Factory is a whole system where you can not only download a free app to build a virutal model with nearly the entire library of Lego pieces, but you can then make instructions and automatically order a set of the pieces required to build it in real life.
Amazing. Even something this close to where my mind was at age 10, and I still couldn't have dreamed of it.
I remember buying the December 1999 issue of PC Gamer in high school, eagerly sifting through the feature story for plot and gameplay details and examining in awe the screenshots.
Now I've been through college and have been in the workforce for a couple years. While I don't play as many games now as I did then, I'm still no less the gamer; now I only play good ones.:)
And while the jaded adult in me says DNF will never even approach the rapturous wonder it held in high school, the excitable highschooler in me still hasn't given up on someday running out of gum.
Seriously, though, this report doesn't help their credibility.
Why should we care which TLDs are more likely to contain malware? Are we actually going to learn anything from making random correlations like this? Obviously there are also plenty of scammers at "less dangerous" TLDs and plenty of honest folks at the "dangerous" ones, and there are of course vastly more precise ways to determine the safety of a site than by its TLD.
So of what value is this distinction then, apart from an amusing press release to make it look like McAfee is hard at work researching computer security? Are crack houses more likely to have even street numbers? Are blue eyed people more likely to be sex offenders?
It does get one thinking, though... So many things on the internet appear to be governed purely by entropy; how many of them could conceivably be used for steganographic purposes?
Imagine a series of/. accounts set up for bots to automatically comment on stories, with an algorithm somewhere to scrape and concatenate certain characters based on a key consisting of times and offsets...
Come to think of it, there's no reason why this necessarily couldn't be the case with some of the vast volumes of blog comment spam out there. Spread out wide enough and with a resilient enough algorithm, there could be more than enough signal to cover for the noise of spam-killed comments...
Free is all well and good, but all too often it leads to crappy ads and abridged enjoyment.
I'd still gladly pay for this content -- just not $2 per episode that I'll only watch once. What I can't imagine I'm alone in really wanting to see here, and what I have yet to see tested, is a nice, simple subscription model like Netflix that lets me pay a single monthly fee to watch a reasonable amount of new programming.
Netflix almost offers that right now for a number of shows, except that the streaming of shows is tied to their DVD release, so you can't watch anything until the season's over. But all that's keeping them from becoming a genuine alternative to broadcast viewing is a bit of licensing, for which I'd gladly pay a few more Washingtons a month.
All things considered, isn't skipping a few beers each month worth not having to deal with ads?
Do you really want a robot like that to end up with a huge identity crisis and ponder back and forth whether it should ask out the recon drone it has a crush on?
To be honest, MacOS was just starting to get kind of iffy right around then.
Its glorious early lead as not only a GUI-based OS but one with a smart design team behind it was beginning to fade as the technology in and around it began to grow too complex for its architecture while Copland became something of a Longhorn (to anachro-neologize) and Gil Amelio didn't seem to know what exactly to do.
In 1995, Windows 95 was really something of a breath of fresh air -- it brought into one place a number of UI conventions that turned out to be quite enduring, had some pretty decent design behind it (compare a screenshot of 95's visual simplicity with Vista's ostentatious baroqueness some time), and was more up-to-date technologically than MacOS 7.1.
It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they?
The real problem here is that Microsoft is just regurgitating what we saw from Jeff Han two years ago.
Draggable freely-resizeable photo viewer? Amazing, MS, welcome to 2006! Pinch-zoom map viewer? Again, good to see you MS engineers watched Han's TED presentation on Youtube; I liked it too!
So they can integrate a (laggy) version of the tech into the OS. Step 1, done.
Now, how about some actual design? Copying two-year-old TED videos doesn't count; let's see some insight into how this tech can be used to make managing files easier, make navigating data relationships easier, and so on. Seriously, fire half your UI "design" team and replace them with the folks who built Photosynth; maybe bring in some of the Zune embedded UI team too; they might figure out how to actually make a decent multi-touch UI for Windows 7.
Or will Ballmer be content to just have "OH LOOK PHOTO SORTING" on top of a slightly less stable and slightly more DRMed future Windows release?
Apart from the "let's start a country where we're the government" possibility, I think there are a number of other more likely applications if this really is a more cost-effective and efficient way of establishing a habitable community at sea.
Scientific research, tourism, even resource extraction could benefit from a better way of building sea platforms.
I just looked over the info at Roku's site and I think I'm finally prepared to say... This is the one we've all been waiting for.
While Roku's refreshingly good industrial and UI design looks like it should help, though, here's the real reason this is going to be huge:
I don't think I can overstate the importance of having a single monthly payment to rent a good number of movies and TV shows versus the failed model of "buying" movies that will never leave your set-top box or even the yet unproven model of renting them at $4 a pop with the remote. This is why Netflix beat Blockbuster and it's why they'll beat Apple TV.
This is the thing that will kill the DVD and cable at the same time.
What it comes down to, for now, is Netflix's significantly preferable all-you-can-eat model versus Apple TV's significantly greater selection. But the Netflix selection is only getting bigger.
As with the Apple Computer, it was the hardware innovation that served as the foundation for everything else groundbreaking.
I think this is basically the other half of that now -- losing the XO's forward-thinking, human-centered UI in favor of the lowest (oh, so low) common denominator destroys a lot of what made the device so uniquely important.
The Apple parallel is valid again here; it's like replacing System 2 with CP/M because it's the industry standard.
They might as well wish they could read minds, teleport, and find Carmen Sandiego.
My guess is that just as a child might believe all of those to be possible, the people who suggested this have such a rudimentary understanding of computer systems that they simply lack the perspective to understand why they can't just "hack all IPs simultaneously" like in the movies.
They've spent their careers increasing their understanding of military procedure, management, and bureaucracy navigation and have simply had no reason to better understand information technology.
Though I suppose now they somewhat do. Perhaps we could prepare a reading list for them?
Three strikes and your ability to send and receive torrent packets is suspended until you can prove you're going to be responsible with them again.
But, then, to sharpen your metaphor: If you were a store owner and recognized a three-time shoplifter, would you disallow him from entering any building anywhere for any reason?
Proposed legislation like this is based on an out-of-date mindset that internet access is some sort of above-and-beyond privilege to be closely regulated.
To people who have worked in the paper-laden chambers of legislative bodies for many years and have their assistants print out their e-mails for them to read, perhaps it still looks this way to them. But it is not.
Enough daily tasks, both personal and public, now require access to the internet such that I think it's time for internet access to be considered a civil right, to be suspended only for those genuinely too dangerous to remain at large.
Denying internet access isn't like a sentence of probation anymore; it's more akin to house arrest and should only be applied when the punishment fits the crime.
Indeed it's no longer the ingenious neologism it once was, but have you a more apropos term in mind?
I think it still captures the spirit of the system quite well -- As a firewall, China's filter network keeps things the Party wants to keep out from entering, and things it wants to keep from getting out from leaving. And I think the visual of China's iconic, ancient landmark actually makes for an excellent metaphor for both the scale and the socially archaic nature of the system.
The Great Wall was of course doomed to eventually become a strange curio from a less enlightened time, just as China's system of social suppression will likely one day be seen as backward by future generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Laserjet 4MX, is that you?
Do these four words qualify as a bona-fide /. meme yet?
American leaders, EU leaders... all serving at the mandate of vast numbers of people utterly petrified at the thought of ethnic stereotypes lurking around every corner, waiting to launch unspeakable horrors.
The majority has spoken. Congratulations.
Bill represents the classic Microsoft at the top of its game, devious in business if not so much in software development, with the computing world on a string.
Ballmer represents the Vista era Microsoft on the decline, where a pathology of disorganization and unaccountability has infected its way up from engineering through management, a tired, bewildered behemoth watching impotently as its market slowly but steadily escapes to FOSS and Apple.
The image of Borg Bill is a lot less depressing.
You are right, but all too often I see this posited as the device's sole virtue. The real value of the iPhone is that it has an extremely considered user interface, nearly free of arbitrary visuals and adherence to arbitrary convention.
From what I've seen, I don't think OpenMoko has a bad UI, but compared to all the fat stripped from and nuances considered within Apple's touch interface, it's kind of like comparing a higher-end bike from Target and a professional ultralight custom touring model.
Have you seen what Lego has been up to this decade in terms of web services? I just discovered this yesterday:
Lego Factory is a whole system where you can not only download a free app to build a virutal model with nearly the entire library of Lego pieces, but you can then make instructions and automatically order a set of the pieces required to build it in real life.
Amazing. Even something this close to where my mind was at age 10, and I still couldn't have dreamed of it.
Drug dealing has been found in 12% of the city's alleys. The municipal government will be walling off all alleyways starting next month.
DUI has been found in 8% of the city's streets. All streets will be closed to automobiles starting in August.
Child abuse has been found in 1% of the city's homes. The use of homes for residential purposes will be discontinued later this year.
I remember buying the December 1999 issue of PC Gamer in high school, eagerly sifting through the feature story for plot and gameplay details and examining in awe the screenshots.
:)
Now I've been through college and have been in the workforce for a couple years. While I don't play as many games now as I did then, I'm still no less the gamer; now I only play good ones.
And while the jaded adult in me says DNF will never even approach the rapturous wonder it held in high school, the excitable highschooler in me still hasn't given up on someday running out of gum.
Seriously, though, this report doesn't help their credibility.
Why should we care which TLDs are more likely to contain malware? Are we actually going to learn anything from making random correlations like this? Obviously there are also plenty of scammers at "less dangerous" TLDs and plenty of honest folks at the "dangerous" ones, and there are of course vastly more precise ways to determine the safety of a site than by its TLD.
So of what value is this distinction then, apart from an amusing press release to make it look like McAfee is hard at work researching computer security? Are crack houses more likely to have even street numbers? Are blue eyed people more likely to be sex offenders?
It does get one thinking, though... So many things on the internet appear to be governed purely by entropy; how many of them could conceivably be used for steganographic purposes?
/. accounts set up for bots to automatically comment on stories, with an algorithm somewhere to scrape and concatenate certain characters based on a key consisting of times and offsets...
Imagine a series of
Come to think of it, there's no reason why this necessarily couldn't be the case with some of the vast volumes of blog comment spam out there. Spread out wide enough and with a resilient enough algorithm, there could be more than enough signal to cover for the noise of spam-killed comments...
Free is all well and good, but all too often it leads to crappy ads and abridged enjoyment.
I'd still gladly pay for this content -- just not $2 per episode that I'll only watch once. What I can't imagine I'm alone in really wanting to see here, and what I have yet to see tested, is a nice, simple subscription model like Netflix that lets me pay a single monthly fee to watch a reasonable amount of new programming.
Netflix almost offers that right now for a number of shows, except that the streaming of shows is tied to their DVD release, so you can't watch anything until the season's over. But all that's keeping them from becoming a genuine alternative to broadcast viewing is a bit of licensing, for which I'd gladly pay a few more Washingtons a month.
All things considered, isn't skipping a few beers each month worth not having to deal with ads?
Do you really want a robot like that to end up with a huge identity crisis and ponder back and forth whether it should ask out the recon drone it has a crush on?
To be honest, MacOS was just starting to get kind of iffy right around then.
Its glorious early lead as not only a GUI-based OS but one with a smart design team behind it was beginning to fade as the technology in and around it began to grow too complex for its architecture while Copland became something of a Longhorn (to anachro-neologize) and Gil Amelio didn't seem to know what exactly to do.
In 1995, Windows 95 was really something of a breath of fresh air -- it brought into one place a number of UI conventions that turned out to be quite enduring, had some pretty decent design behind it (compare a screenshot of 95's visual simplicity with Vista's ostentatious baroqueness some time), and was more up-to-date technologically than MacOS 7.1.
It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they?
The real problem here is that Microsoft is just regurgitating what we saw from Jeff Han two years ago.
Draggable freely-resizeable photo viewer? Amazing, MS, welcome to 2006! Pinch-zoom map viewer? Again, good to see you MS engineers watched Han's TED presentation on Youtube; I liked it too!
So they can integrate a (laggy) version of the tech into the OS. Step 1, done.
Now, how about some actual design? Copying two-year-old TED videos doesn't count; let's see some insight into how this tech can be used to make managing files easier, make navigating data relationships easier, and so on. Seriously, fire half your UI "design" team and replace them with the folks who built Photosynth; maybe bring in some of the Zune embedded UI team too; they might figure out how to actually make a decent multi-touch UI for Windows 7.
Or will Ballmer be content to just have "OH LOOK PHOTO SORTING" on top of a slightly less stable and slightly more DRMed future Windows release?
If history is anything to go by...
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/07/imagine-no-drm-with-.html
Yeah, I think that's the sound of GP going down a large well...
Apart from the "let's start a country where we're the government" possibility, I think there are a number of other more likely applications if this really is a more cost-effective and efficient way of establishing a habitable community at sea.
Scientific research, tourism, even resource extraction could benefit from a better way of building sea platforms.
I just looked over the info at Roku's site and I think I'm finally prepared to say... This is the one we've all been waiting for.
While Roku's refreshingly good industrial and UI design looks like it should help, though, here's the real reason this is going to be huge:
I don't think I can overstate the importance of having a single monthly payment to rent a good number of movies and TV shows versus the failed model of "buying" movies that will never leave your set-top box or even the yet unproven model of renting them at $4 a pop with the remote. This is why Netflix beat Blockbuster and it's why they'll beat Apple TV.
This is the thing that will kill the DVD and cable at the same time.
What it comes down to, for now, is Netflix's significantly preferable all-you-can-eat model versus Apple TV's significantly greater selection. But the Netflix selection is only getting bigger.
I think this is basically the other half of that now -- losing the XO's forward-thinking, human-centered UI in favor of the lowest (oh, so low) common denominator destroys a lot of what made the device so uniquely important.
The Apple parallel is valid again here; it's like replacing System 2 with CP/M because it's the industry standard.
My guess is that just as a child might believe all of those to be possible, the people who suggested this have such a rudimentary understanding of computer systems that they simply lack the perspective to understand why they can't just "hack all IPs simultaneously" like in the movies.
They've spent their careers increasing their understanding of military procedure, management, and bureaucracy navigation and have simply had no reason to better understand information technology.
Though I suppose now they somewhat do. Perhaps we could prepare a reading list for them?
Works for me.
Three strikes and your ability to send and receive torrent packets is suspended until you can prove you're going to be responsible with them again.
But, then, to sharpen your metaphor: If you were a store owner and recognized a three-time shoplifter, would you disallow him from entering any building anywhere for any reason?
Proposed legislation like this is based on an out-of-date mindset that internet access is some sort of above-and-beyond privilege to be closely regulated.
To people who have worked in the paper-laden chambers of legislative bodies for many years and have their assistants print out their e-mails for them to read, perhaps it still looks this way to them. But it is not.
Enough daily tasks, both personal and public, now require access to the internet such that I think it's time for internet access to be considered a civil right, to be suspended only for those genuinely too dangerous to remain at large.
Denying internet access isn't like a sentence of probation anymore; it's more akin to house arrest and should only be applied when the punishment fits the crime.
Indeed it's no longer the ingenious neologism it once was, but have you a more apropos term in mind?
I think it still captures the spirit of the system quite well -- As a firewall, China's filter network keeps things the Party wants to keep out from entering, and things it wants to keep from getting out from leaving. And I think the visual of China's iconic, ancient landmark actually makes for an excellent metaphor for both the scale and the socially archaic nature of the system.
The Great Wall was of course doomed to eventually become a strange curio from a less enlightened time, just as China's system of social suppression will likely one day be seen as backward by future generations.
Whatever, mr. high six digits!
To silence others who say things that may make you uncomfortable is not a human right.
To be able to say things that may make people uncomfortable is.
I would ask the BC HRT: Is your mandate to preserve human rights? Or is it to restrict them?