dfj225

There are vim bindings. From the docs:

  Use the "Vim: Toggle vim mode" command from the command tab.

It wasn't my intention to focus on economics or digital products. What I am really arguing is the more fundamental aspect of information and the ability to copy and transmit it with 100% accuracy at great speed. This, I think, separates digital technology from all others. It's what makes it revolutionary and desirable. I think the impacts on society are obvious.

Edit: typos

I'd argue that software and digital technology are different from everything that the legal system has legislated on in the past because this is the first time we've been able to make 100% accurate copies for zero cost. (Ok, maybe not zero with the cost of electricity and storage, but essentially zero.) I also feel that the legal protections of the patent system, while perhaps not completely broken, are certainly not tuned to the realities of software development. Software is different. It's sui generis and I believe our laws should be adjusted to reflect that.

That said, I agree completely with your point about integration. The worst thing we can do as a community is step aside and allow others to create legislation that is not in the interest of technology or the good of the people at large.

Edit: minor grammar.

Squarespace is one of the companies in that data center. See here for their story (and some photos):

http://blog.squarespace.com/ http://status.squarespace.com/

The creator here.

You can find the source at: https://github.com/dfjones/Feedback

The app is built using NodeJS with express and socket.io.

I hacked this together in a matter of hours, so there are definitely things that could be done much better. However, I think this is a great proof-of-concept.

I think there's an interesting distinction between real-time from the point of view of the user and the technology/systems providing data to the user. I agree that in the future, communication services will be less real-time, allowing users to focus their attention on the task at hand rather than the distraction that is the latest email/text message/tweet.

However, I believe the systems that do handle this communications data will need to be increasingly real-time. There will be so much data that unless it is indexed and collated in real-time, it will be impossible to perform queries to sort through mountains of un-indexed data. I think computers will become more like intelligent agents, bringing things that require immediate action to our attention and filing/organizing everything else for our later consumption.

There are already services, such as News.me and Prismatic, providing these services for Twitter. In the future, I expect the idea behind these services to be closer to the norm rather than the exception they are today.

This would be even better if it could display change over time. To support, for example, animate the change in wind direction for the past week.

Sure, but there's nothing illegal about Apple kicking someone out of the App Store on a whim either.

Doesn't matter if you are breaking the law or not, plenty of legal apps get rejected. Apple sets their own terms outside of US law.

Right, but I don't think anyone claimed that Cisco sold a system designed for surveillance or suppression. The claims seem to be that Cisco sold networking or other common hardware that will probably be used for such purposes, or in a system (created by the Chinese government) designed for such purposes.

> How does "America" feel anything?

I should have said the American Government.

> Should companies be held accountable if foreign governments use their products for political suppression?

How could a company be responsible for something like a computer, which is capable of doing an infinite number of things? If America feels that strongly about the human rights violations going on in China, I feel that the only way to prevent American made technology from being used in that fashion is to prevent the sale of all technology to China. I'm not saying this is the right thing to do, but it doesn't seem possible to expect technology companies to police how their tech is used in foreign countries.

> I don't understand what this "fret" is about.

My perception is that they are worried that their existing knowledge (in .NET or any other MS dev tech) will not allow them to create applications for this new touch interface. Instead, they will be forced to use a new technology if they want to create an app for the new Windows 8 interface.

Thinking about it a little more, it really seems odd to combine two very different modes of operation -- one touch heavy and probably best for a tablet or some sort of mobile device and the other is the standard Windows UI operated by keyboard and mouse. Having both modes on the same hardware seems like an odd situation. Usually, a device naturally maps to one or the other mode. I suppose hardware manufacturers might build tablet/laptop hybrids or convertibles (they definitely have been trying, but I don't think any are popular) and Windows 8 might be a huge win on these devices. However, aside from this narrow subset of devices, I'm still guessing how this will play out.

For instance, the device used in the demo (assuming it has no other mode of operation) seems to me that it would be a nightmare for using Excel.

edit: added the last sentence.

> How it will work when you're using it to do real work will be where the rubber meets the road...

That's where I wonder how well received this new interface will be. I wonder if this shell will just become something that most people skip past to get to the familiar Windows desktop. Granted, my experience as a power user (read: I'm a developer writing code and using the terminal--not on Windows but on OS X or Linux) is vastly different from that of a normal consumer, but I still think there is a common ground of using the computer to create rather than purely for consumption.

Still, very interesting concept. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing this released.

> the hero is disintegrated by a laser cannon behind his back, scanned and transfered to virtual reality environment

That bit always made me laugh. Tron leads you to believe that the exciting/magical part is the virtual world, while I always thought the laser was the real world changing invention.

Have you asked why they think that? I'd like to know their reasoning. I certainly understand the allure of the device, I just can't see where the idea of it doing more than they are already doing on their computers comes from, unless they are simply referring to apps that are only available on iPad.

I don't think you can reach the conclusion that the iPad is more open than any other platform because one person, who doesn't even own an iPad yet, thinks it does more.

Although, it would be interesting to know why the author's friend has that impression. I wouldn't think it's common, at least it isn't in my (admittedly tech savvy) circles.

I agree with you in principle, but I don't ever see something like this becoming mainstream, even if it does interoperate with Twitter and is as easy to use as Twitter. Simply put, there will be no selling point. Switching would give the user the same capability of subscribing to short messages from other people as they already have on Twitter. So, why switch? Even if they can continue to follow everyone they already follow, what's the incentive aside from technology they don't understand anyway?

I'm guessing fake too. If you notice, one of the "demos" splits his video evenly over what appears to be 4 screens. If this were a real device, as described, it probably should have shown the same video on every screen.

FYI, this approach, in general and completely automated, is taken by the Spiral Project DSP generator: http://spiral.net/index.html

DSP transformations are represented in a Scheme-like language. The optimizer performs operations on this language then compiles to C code.

I worked on the Spiral project on things tangental to the DSP generator, but wrote my own optimizing DSP compiler based on Spiral technology for class in university.

> Ferguson suggests that, if nothing else, the methods used by the Egyptian government prove how fragile digital communication really is.

I don't think this instance proves how fragile the technology is, rather it proves that you can use this technology to build a system that is easily controlled from a central point. The same technology could have been used to build a robust system that was not easy to shut down completely.

IBM's website on Watson: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

This needs to be stopped. Wireless will increasingly become consumers primary Internet connection. If this becomes standard practice for wireless providers, freedom to access what content the user chooses will be effectively destroyed.

Yes, Twitter was lucky in more than one way. I agree with what you said about early adopter. I'd label these people as "willing to test products", even if that means they will encounter some bugs or issues. However, not every business will be able to say that about their first set of customers.

Well, I think from a customer point of view they see "making things more stable/reliable" as "no progress". Customers, rightly so, expect things to be stable and reliable from the start. Otherwise, they are testing your product and not every customer wants to do that.

I feel like Twitter was very lucky that they did not see a decrease in use and adoption while they had many problems with scaling.

Seems like there is a simple distinction:

Science is the pursuit of knowledge (using math, logic, and reasoning to obtain knowledge).

Engineering is the practice of applying a process to create something (either concerete or abstract--like software).

Sometimes you must perform science before you can engineer. Other times engineering is necessary before science.

> where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I think that is nearly true from the customer's perspective. They (most likely) don't have any information about the idea and only know what they interact with in the form of the execution.

In my mind (and maybe I missed some aspect of the Facebook announcement) Wave was much more ambitious due to the collaborative document editing aspect, absolutely realtime interaction, and open architecture/apis that allowed for things such as bots and interaction from external systems.

It seems that Facebook's system has some of the same elements/ideas as Wave, but I wouldn't say it fills the same space as wave.

In what country? Also, does your school require students who claim this disability to be diagnosed by a doctor?