What gestures would you like to see made standard in touch-based interfaces?
Well from a design perspective I'd like the standards to use the ones that are most intuitive for us to learn, most ergonomic so we don't mess up our meatspace bodies, and most quick and efficient so that we can get things done in short order on our fancy new computer devices.
One of the biggest impediments to standards in this space is patents on both the hardware underlying multi-touch (or whatever user interface comes out next year) as well as all of the software that drives the interface.
If you want to improve the state of standardization, convince either the companies to stop getting or wielding these patents, or convince your government to eliminate/defang them. They are hurting the standardization process.
This is why you always need the source and the signing keys to the software that runs on your devices. Always.
So you have the source and signing keys for every bit of software that runs on every device you have?
Nope. I wish that I did, though.
Key point is that if I ever get burned because I don't have the source to something, then I know that I probably should have tried harder to get the source, or I shouldn't have purchased the item in the first place.
I guess I'd be willing to view a major appliance like a refrigerator and a game console as different beasts. With one, I'm out a few hundred bucks in food if it's off for a few hours. With the other, it's generally okay to shut it off for a month or more.
But if we do view the game console as more of a "Black Box of Fun", then we need to treat it differently than the fridge or our personal computers. We need to take a bit of a hostile view towards it, and perhaps put it in a different subnet that can't just go poke at the ports on our other devices. We need to remember to not put our personal information on it, or trust that just because it can play game X today it will be able to play game X tomorrow.
If we can live with that kind of relationship with the game console, then great! I'm just suggesting that we put that discussion up front, and not have it be a surprise to us when the external entity decides to change the rules on how we may use our Black Box of Fun.
Okay, so my methods might sounds a little unorthodox, but the key point is that your team will be working together day in and day out on projects, and if they're geographically spread out they will not have the same in-office experiences that they would if everyone was 1 cubicle away.
Getting everyone together around a speakerphone for a conference call isn't a bad place to start, but if all you do around it is talk shop (and I mean just talk shop, no distractions allowed, etc...), I worry about the cohesiveness of your team.
Getting everyone to log in to a multiplayer game and shoot each other (or some cooperative thing, if you like) might seem like a waste of time to your boss, but even an hour or two a month could really engender greater feelings of community. Or have a birthday party and send a small version of the cake along to the people overseas so that they can join in with everyone else. Having a bit of a repor with other members of the team can really draw you together and make you more willing to help each other out so that the overall project will succeed.
And besides, who doesn't want to shoot their coworkers, from time to time?
If you hack the ATV's Netflix DRM and post it all over the internet, they probably would pull the feature. I couldn't blame them.
Right, but Netflix can disable the feature on their end, without doing a single thing to the hardware or software on my machine.
A good analogy to what Sony did is to imagine if Frigidaire decided that the "Internet-enabled Fridge/Freezer combo" I bought last year should just be a "fridge/fridge combo," and pushed a firmware update so I couldn't set the temperature of the freezer portion to anything lower than 35 deg F.
If I bought the unit from Frigidaire to use for freezing my jars of peaches, then Frigidaire has now made the unit worthless.
And even if Frigidaire says "Oh, well, you don't have to update the firmware," what if there are critical security bugs in the older versions of the firmware that would make it easy for people to break in to my fridge?
This is why you always need the source and the signing keys to the software that runs on your devices. Always.
Sony said "buy this widget X, and it can do Y" where X = the PS3 and Y = run Linux.
Then Sony pushed an update to the machine that prevented it from doing Y. Sounds like pulling the rug out from underneath people to me!
Sony advertised a machine that could play some video games...and would also run other compatible OSes. If you lost the first feature then your machine is broken and you should get it repaired. If you lost the second one it was your own choice and you probably did it in exchange for being able to access an even larger library of games
Hold on a second: What's the difference between the 1st feature and the 2nd feature? Did Sony ever make a distinction on the box or in the marketing materials that the PS3 would always play video games but might stop being able to run Linux with the OtherOS feature?
Here are a few relevant questions:
Did Sony claim that the original PS3 could run Linux?
Did Sony make it clear that they might disable this feature?
Did Sony push automatic updates to PS3s?
Did Sony tell its users that upgrading the firmware past a certain point would disable the OtherOS functionality?
Did Sony provide a mechanism for owners who were using the OtherOS feature to update their firmware to resolve "security updates"/critical bugfixes? (even allowing for a mechanism that would have disabled the ability to play games on the unit)
---
If Sony transformed a legitimately-purchased working device into a non-working device without properly informing the user, I believe that the user might have several remedies available under our current (US) legal system.
Tax forms, or the official document manuals(that are no longer printed and included with almost all products) should always be presented to users the way they are intended to be, and that is where PDF comes in.
Funny that you'd mention tax forms.
For the last couple of years my bank has tried to give me some mutant PDF fill-in-form along with data that the FOSS tools can't handle very well (I finally figure out a hack to get them to actually generate the document). Why they can't just nicely give me an HTML or plain vanilla PDF page I can't understand.
If PDF were a simple format controlled by a reasonable overlord that didn't try to bolt everything and the kitchen sink onto it, that would be fine. Or if banks and other organizations just used a small subset of PDF such that pretty much every PDF viewer out there could handle their documents, that would be acceptable as well.
The problem is that people just see "PDF" and don't see the complicated understory. Can we just have PDF_Tiny or something, and tell people to use that format instead?
Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on free and open source decoders, which allows many free MP3 decoders to develop.[citation needed] Thus, while patent fees have been an issue for companies that attempt to use MP3, they have not meaningfully impacted personal use.
Note that the sentence there is one of only 3 with a Citation Needed mark (there are 66 other references on the page), so while I'm happy to hear that a wikipedia editor believes or wants to believe that to be true, I think it's wise to be cautious on this point.
The article continues...
In September 2006, German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction on behalf of Sisvel against SanDisk in a dispute over licensing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge,[60] but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator.[61]
Unless you think the mp3 player is encoding to mp3, that looks like getting sued for selling an unlicensed player/decoder.
In February 2007, Texas MP3 Technologies sued Apple, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk in eastern Texas federal court, claiming infringement of a portable MP3 player patent that Texas MP3 said it had been assigned. Apple and Sandisk both settled the claims against them in January 2009.[62] Samsung settled as well.[63]
Same thing again -- looks like patent-holders going after mp3 players/decoders.
There are a whole hell of a lot of advantages of working with documents in text formats like plaintext and HTML.
If Firefox bakes-in a PDF reader by default, then the increasing number of people who send EVERYTHING in PDF format (it's basically become the new interchange format instead of Word or Excel documents) will transmit even MORE stuff as a PDF, now that they know that I have a PDF reader right in my@#$%$% browser. This would be fine if PDF were a lightweight, simple format that guaranteed me access to the actual text of documents, and that interacted with all of the rest of the elements on a webpage in a nice fashion. But it's not.
Putting data into PDFs on the web is like making little data silos. Is it better than receiving documents in Word or Excel format? Yes, sometimes, especially when the content is just going mono-directionally, but for any documents that I want to copy data from, PDFs can present problems.
More content in PDFs just makes me feel like it's Flash-in-a-webpage or Quicktime-in-a-webpage all over again.
The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on December 6, 1991 as ISO CD 11172. In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to June 8, 1995, submarine patents made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent free in the US by December 2012.
So yes, it's possible that the patents will expire in 2012, but it might actually take 5 more years.
With that kind of ambiguity, I can understand someone bringing the idea up in a meeting of long-term goals, but I definitely wouldn't pencil anything in on a roadmap, unless it was scheduled for after 2017.
In any case, why does the browser need to play mp3s? Baking-in a PDF reader that undoubtedly won't handle all of the quirky, latest-Adobe-version PDF add-ons is already a sketchy affair, so why put support for another format in the core? I supported Mozilla and the rest for pushing WebM, but that's because there's a known need for video/audio in the browser, and they got about *half the known software/hardware universe* to sign up for the darn thing (even Adobe + Flash signed up!).
6. In-browser preview: Firefox will also get an integrated PDF viewer (like Chrome) and will extend this capability to more popular file formats, including MP3.
The PDF file format (or at least a certain subset of PDF functionality -- everyone seems to forget about that) is available for use under what I believe are royalty-free terms.
One of the biggest reasons why Mozilla was gunning for Theora (and now WebM's VP8) to be the defacto HTML5 video codec was that those codecs are believed to be distributable under FOSS licenses, without paying any royalties.
I'm sure that there are lawyers who remember the exact patents and dates better than I, but I'm pretty sure that there are patents that read on the mp3 file format that won't expire for several years. How is Mozilla going to ship with support for mp3 files without putting themselves and their users at risk of patent litigation? And if they do ship with mp3 support, does this mean that Mozilla has given up the fight for advocating for only Free/Open codecs, and is now willing to include H.264 support in Firefox and other pieces of Mozilla software?
It's funny that you'd bring that up. Yes, actually Physicists and noted researchers are observing subtle but significant changes in the way that electricity flows through conductive materials. Electrons used to be so-called "longer" a few decades ago (end to end, mind you), so you'd actually get a fewer number of them traveling through the wire to you per second.
Now that the magnetic poles of the earth are shifting, and we're (slowly) approaching the geomagnetic "pole-arity" reversal (a little physics humor there...), electrons flowing through wires are shortening and approaching the shape of a sphere rather than an elongated sausage. You'll see this happen more strongly during the night, when your part of the Earth is facing away from the Sun and isn't experiencing as much solar radiation and bombardment of charged sub-atomic particles.
So yes, it is a good time for the University and other large groups to reconsider the way that they power their computers. Note that they'll need to install an inverter once the poles actually do reverse, however usually the reversal takes over a thousand years. That being said, taking precautions isn't a bad idea, as Wikipedia does point out:
...geologist Scott Bogue of Occidental College and Jonathan Glen of the US Geological Survey, sampling lava flows in Battle Mountain, Nevada, found evidence for a reversal that took only four years.
I'd be happy to consult with any University or Company that is considering a move to DC power or other "green power" initiatives.
For more information about the latest in advanced power tech and the influence the shifting poles has on inter- and intra-electron measure, please see the wikipedia page on such topics here.
That/. Is as close-minded and resistant to change as ever. None of you know any details of how this will work, and I'm betting most of you have never even used WebOS
Okay, I'll bite: Why should I run WebOS?
I usually run Ubuntu or Debian, and I have an Android phone because it's the closest thing out there to a generic FOSS system on my phone (MeeGo ain't there yet, and OpenMoko doesn't cut it).
I run Windows for a few very specific applications that various employers want me to run (although I'm weaning them off), and I test websites and various pieces of software on OSX, when necessary.
Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing... "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award...
Yes, Virginia, in the mainstream press we may have to explain to ordinary people that the Turing award is the computer science equivalent of a Nobel prize, the same way that we have to explain that the Fields Medal is the analogue for the field of mathematics. But this is Slashdot, and I expect my nerds and my geeks to Know This Stuff.
(and before you youngsters complain that you're young and still learning, pipe down. You all know how to look it up on Wikipedia in about 5 seconds)
Heck, they might as well change the tag line of the website to "Slashdot: News for Technically-adept persons. Articles of interest to their quaint population."
I guess having a Facebook account makes you a more important person in the eyes of this DA...
As others have pointed out, I can't possibly believe that this kind of interaction between DA and potential jurors could be anything but harmful to the DA's court case. It seems like yet another avenue for a defendant's lawyer to as for a mistrial and/or appeal.
Really, so they do collect the fish one at a time?
Yes, but only if they're using one of the bespoke fishing nets. They're totally exclusive and only available to high-rolling fish hunters (we don't call them fishermen anymore). They can even match the color of the fishing net to the color of your car or your tie. I should know -- I have two of them, myself.
It's the hot new sport of the rich for 2011. 'Bespoke Fishing: When you have nothing better to do with your money."
I hope you enjoy your magical web applications that build themselves, know how to transcode media transparently once it hits the web server, and know how to serve up certain types of media in a <video> tag by writing HTML on the fly. I'm sure that with your talents you would be snapped up by Microsoft, Google, Apache, or any one of a number of companies or organizations in a minute.
What the fuck are you talking about? A web site doesn't need to "support" WebM or any other format to use it. You just embed the video in the page and the client's browser either plays it or not.
Transcoding? Thumbnailing particular frames of video for embedding in a particular web page? Adding support for the MIME type? Support for playback through the <video> tag?
You can't just wave your hands and make all of this happen. If it worked that way then I wouldn't have to talk about lack of support for WebM in FOSS applications, I'd just wave my hands and then sit down and have a beer.
Open Source Fanatics, do the world a favor, strap on a bomb, pray to the oh mighty Richard Stallman God and blow up something.
Gosh, you know I wrote it down on my computer a long time ago, but I think it was in a proprietary format and I can't find a program to open the file, so could I please ask for your physical address again?
According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."
The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.
I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?
Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.
All their WiFi enabled smart phones look for an SSID named attwifi. The layer three gateway of that network triggers the phones to submit their phone number to that gateway, which looks it up in the ATT subscriber database and grants access if you have a data contract with them.
Wait, so if I just set my SSID to "attwifi" and mess around with some no-op challenge/response stuff when phones connect, I can pretend to be an official AP for AT&T cell phones? I sure hope all of the data flowing over that network is encrypted...
Slashdot Mirror
What gestures would you like to see made standard in touch-based interfaces?
Well from a design perspective I'd like the standards to use the ones that are most intuitive for us to learn, most ergonomic so we don't mess up our meatspace bodies, and most quick and efficient so that we can get things done in short order on our fancy new computer devices.
One of the biggest impediments to standards in this space is patents on both the hardware underlying multi-touch (or whatever user interface comes out next year) as well as all of the software that drives the interface.
If you want to improve the state of standardization, convince either the companies to stop getting or wielding these patents, or convince your government to eliminate/defang them. They are hurting the standardization process.
This is why you always need the source and the signing keys to the software that runs on your devices. Always.
So you have the source and signing keys for every bit of software that runs on every device you have?
Nope. I wish that I did, though.
Key point is that if I ever get burned because I don't have the source to something, then I know that I probably should have tried harder to get the source, or I shouldn't have purchased the item in the first place.
I guess I'd be willing to view a major appliance like a refrigerator and a game console as different beasts. With one, I'm out a few hundred bucks in food if it's off for a few hours. With the other, it's generally okay to shut it off for a month or more.
But if we do view the game console as more of a "Black Box of Fun", then we need to treat it differently than the fridge or our personal computers. We need to take a bit of a hostile view towards it, and perhaps put it in a different subnet that can't just go poke at the ports on our other devices. We need to remember to not put our personal information on it, or trust that just because it can play game X today it will be able to play game X tomorrow.
If we can live with that kind of relationship with the game console, then great! I'm just suggesting that we put that discussion up front, and not have it be a surprise to us when the external entity decides to change the rules on how we may use our Black Box of Fun.
Okay, so my methods might sounds a little unorthodox, but the key point is that your team will be working together day in and day out on projects, and if they're geographically spread out they will not have the same in-office experiences that they would if everyone was 1 cubicle away.
Getting everyone together around a speakerphone for a conference call isn't a bad place to start, but if all you do around it is talk shop (and I mean just talk shop, no distractions allowed, etc...), I worry about the cohesiveness of your team.
Getting everyone to log in to a multiplayer game and shoot each other (or some cooperative thing, if you like) might seem like a waste of time to your boss, but even an hour or two a month could really engender greater feelings of community. Or have a birthday party and send a small version of the cake along to the people overseas so that they can join in with everyone else. Having a bit of a repor with other members of the team can really draw you together and make you more willing to help each other out so that the overall project will succeed.
And besides, who doesn't want to shoot their coworkers, from time to time?
If you hack the ATV's Netflix DRM and post it all over the internet, they probably would pull the feature. I couldn't blame them.
Right, but Netflix can disable the feature on their end, without doing a single thing to the hardware or software on my machine.
A good analogy to what Sony did is to imagine if Frigidaire decided that the "Internet-enabled Fridge/Freezer combo" I bought last year should just be a "fridge/fridge combo," and pushed a firmware update so I couldn't set the temperature of the freezer portion to anything lower than 35 deg F.
If I bought the unit from Frigidaire to use for freezing my jars of peaches, then Frigidaire has now made the unit worthless.
And even if Frigidaire says "Oh, well, you don't have to update the firmware," what if there are critical security bugs in the older versions of the firmware that would make it easy for people to break in to my fridge?
This is why you always need the source and the signing keys to the software that runs on your devices. Always.
Where is the fraud.
Sony said "buy this widget X, and it can do Y" where X = the PS3 and Y = run Linux.
Then Sony pushed an update to the machine that prevented it from doing Y. Sounds like pulling the rug out from underneath people to me!
Sony advertised a machine that could play some video games...and would also run other compatible OSes. If you lost the first feature then your machine is broken and you should get it repaired. If you lost the second one it was your own choice and you probably did it in exchange for being able to access an even larger library of games
Hold on a second: What's the difference between the 1st feature and the 2nd feature? Did Sony ever make a distinction on the box or in the marketing materials that the PS3 would always play video games but might stop being able to run Linux with the OtherOS feature?
Here are a few relevant questions:
Did Sony claim that the original PS3 could run Linux?
Did Sony make it clear that they might disable this feature?
Did Sony push automatic updates to PS3s?
Did Sony tell its users that upgrading the firmware past a certain point would disable the OtherOS functionality?
Did Sony provide a mechanism for owners who were using the OtherOS feature to update their firmware to resolve "security updates"/critical bugfixes? (even allowing for a mechanism that would have disabled the ability to play games on the unit)
---
If Sony transformed a legitimately-purchased working device into a non-working device without properly informing the user, I believe that the user might have several remedies available under our current (US) legal system.
I'm started to feel like Nokia is becoming something awful
I guess it's better to have it turn into a robot that shoots out sparks and pushes grandmothers down stairs than having it turn into Microsoft...
Tax forms, or the official document manuals(that are no longer printed and included with almost all products) should always be presented to users the way they are intended to be, and that is where PDF comes in.
Funny that you'd mention tax forms.
For the last couple of years my bank has tried to give me some mutant PDF fill-in-form along with data that the FOSS tools can't handle very well (I finally figure out a hack to get them to actually generate the document). Why they can't just nicely give me an HTML or plain vanilla PDF page I can't understand.
If PDF were a simple format controlled by a reasonable overlord that didn't try to bolt everything and the kitchen sink onto it, that would be fine. Or if banks and other organizations just used a small subset of PDF such that pretty much every PDF viewer out there could handle their documents, that would be acceptable as well.
The problem is that people just see "PDF" and don't see the complicated understory. Can we just have PDF_Tiny or something, and tell people to use that format instead?
The fraunhoffer (sp) patents are royalty free for players... it's the encoders that they charge...
To quote the same Wikipedia article I've been referencing all along:
Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on free and open source decoders, which allows many free MP3 decoders to develop.[citation needed] Thus, while patent fees have been an issue for companies that attempt to use MP3, they have not meaningfully impacted personal use.
Note that the sentence there is one of only 3 with a Citation Needed mark (there are 66 other references on the page), so while I'm happy to hear that a wikipedia editor believes or wants to believe that to be true, I think it's wise to be cautious on this point.
The article continues...
In September 2006, German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction on behalf of Sisvel against SanDisk in a dispute over licensing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge,[60] but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator.[61]
Unless you think the mp3 player is encoding to mp3, that looks like getting sued for selling an unlicensed player/decoder.
In February 2007, Texas MP3 Technologies sued Apple, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk in eastern Texas federal court, claiming infringement of a portable MP3 player patent that Texas MP3 said it had been assigned. Apple and Sandisk both settled the claims against them in January 2009.[62] Samsung settled as well.[63]
Same thing again -- looks like patent-holders going after mp3 players/decoders.
There are a whole hell of a lot of advantages of working with documents in text formats like plaintext and HTML.
If Firefox bakes-in a PDF reader by default, then the increasing number of people who send EVERYTHING in PDF format (it's basically become the new interchange format instead of Word or Excel documents) will transmit even MORE stuff as a PDF, now that they know that I have a PDF reader right in my@#$%$% browser. This would be fine if PDF were a lightweight, simple format that guaranteed me access to the actual text of documents, and that interacted with all of the rest of the elements on a webpage in a nice fashion. But it's not.
Putting data into PDFs on the web is like making little data silos. Is it better than receiving documents in Word or Excel format? Yes, sometimes, especially when the content is just going mono-directionally, but for any documents that I want to copy data from, PDFs can present problems.
More content in PDFs just makes me feel like it's Flash-in-a-webpage or Quicktime-in-a-webpage all over again.
Keep the web clean and elegant. Please!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on December 6, 1991 as ISO CD 11172. In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to June 8, 1995, submarine patents made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent free in the US by December 2012.
So yes, it's possible that the patents will expire in 2012, but it might actually take 5 more years.
With that kind of ambiguity, I can understand someone bringing the idea up in a meeting of long-term goals, but I definitely wouldn't pencil anything in on a roadmap, unless it was scheduled for after 2017.
In any case, why does the browser need to play mp3s? Baking-in a PDF reader that undoubtedly won't handle all of the quirky, latest-Adobe-version PDF add-ons is already a sketchy affair, so why put support for another format in the core? I supported Mozilla and the rest for pushing WebM, but that's because there's a known need for video/audio in the browser, and they got about *half the known software/hardware universe* to sign up for the darn thing (even Adobe + Flash signed up!).
6. In-browser preview: Firefox will also get an integrated PDF viewer (like Chrome) and will extend this capability to more popular file formats, including MP3.
The PDF file format (or at least a certain subset of PDF functionality -- everyone seems to forget about that) is available for use under what I believe are royalty-free terms.
One of the biggest reasons why Mozilla was gunning for Theora (and now WebM's VP8) to be the defacto HTML5 video codec was that those codecs are believed to be distributable under FOSS licenses, without paying any royalties.
I'm sure that there are lawyers who remember the exact patents and dates better than I, but I'm pretty sure that there are patents that read on the mp3 file format that won't expire for several years. How is Mozilla going to ship with support for mp3 files without putting themselves and their users at risk of patent litigation? And if they do ship with mp3 support, does this mean that Mozilla has given up the fight for advocating for only Free/Open codecs, and is now willing to include H.264 support in Firefox and other pieces of Mozilla software?
Has electricity changed so much since then?
It's funny that you'd bring that up. Yes, actually Physicists and noted researchers are observing subtle but significant changes in the way that electricity flows through conductive materials. Electrons used to be so-called "longer" a few decades ago (end to end, mind you), so you'd actually get a fewer number of them traveling through the wire to you per second.
Now that the magnetic poles of the earth are shifting, and we're (slowly) approaching the geomagnetic "pole-arity" reversal (a little physics humor there...), electrons flowing through wires are shortening and approaching the shape of a sphere rather than an elongated sausage. You'll see this happen more strongly during the night, when your part of the Earth is facing away from the Sun and isn't experiencing as much solar radiation and bombardment of charged sub-atomic particles.
So yes, it is a good time for the University and other large groups to reconsider the way that they power their computers. Note that they'll need to install an inverter once the poles actually do reverse, however usually the reversal takes over a thousand years. That being said, taking precautions isn't a bad idea, as Wikipedia does point out:
...geologist Scott Bogue of Occidental College and Jonathan Glen of the US Geological Survey, sampling lava flows in Battle Mountain, Nevada, found evidence for a reversal that took only four years.
I'd be happy to consult with any University or Company that is considering a move to DC power or other "green power" initiatives.
For more information about the latest in advanced power tech and the influence the shifting poles has on inter- and intra-electron measure, please see the wikipedia page on such topics here.
That /. Is as close-minded and resistant to change as ever. None of you know any details of how this will work, and I'm betting most of you have never even used WebOS
Okay, I'll bite: Why should I run WebOS?
I usually run Ubuntu or Debian, and I have an Android phone because it's the closest thing out there to a generic FOSS system on my phone (MeeGo ain't there yet, and OpenMoko doesn't cut it).
I run Windows for a few very specific applications that various employers want me to run (although I'm weaning them off), and I test websites and various pieces of software on OSX, when necessary.
What can WebOS offer me?
Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing ...
"ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award...
Yes, Virginia, in the mainstream press we may have to explain to ordinary people that the Turing award is the computer science equivalent of a Nobel prize, the same way that we have to explain that the Fields Medal is the analogue for the field of mathematics. But this is Slashdot, and I expect my nerds and my geeks to Know This Stuff.
(and before you youngsters complain that you're young and still learning, pipe down. You all know how to look it up on Wikipedia in about 5 seconds)
Heck, they might as well change the tag line of the website to "Slashdot: News for Technically-adept persons. Articles of interest to their quaint population."
The Foundation:
http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
The Debian Project Page:
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
This is a more long-term solution, but think of it as the elegant solution to the problem.
I guess having a Facebook account makes you a more important person in the eyes of this DA...
As others have pointed out, I can't possibly believe that this kind of interaction between DA and potential jurors could be anything but harmful to the DA's court case. It seems like yet another avenue for a defendant's lawyer to as for a mistrial and/or appeal.
worldreader.org has this mission:
Our mission is to put a library of books into the hands of children and families in the developing world with e-reader technology.
(disclosure: A friend of mine from College is on the team)
Bonus Points: It reminds us of one of our favorite people of all time...
Ok. I am a techno-idiot. Is my current linksys router, circa. 203-ish, going to be OK, or is it going to not work?
Is that a model number or a year?
Really, so they do collect the fish one at a time?
Yes, but only if they're using one of the bespoke fishing nets. They're totally exclusive and only available to high-rolling fish hunters (we don't call them fishermen anymore). They can even match the color of the fishing net to the color of your car or your tie. I should know -- I have two of them, myself.
It's the hot new sport of the rich for 2011. 'Bespoke Fishing: When you have nothing better to do with your money."
I hope you enjoy your magical web applications that build themselves, know how to transcode media transparently once it hits the web server, and know how to serve up certain types of media in a <video> tag by writing HTML on the fly. I'm sure that with your talents you would be snapped up by Microsoft, Google, Apache, or any one of a number of companies or organizations in a minute.
What a lame AC troll...
What the fuck are you talking about? A web site doesn't need to "support" WebM or any other format to use it. You just embed the video in the page and the client's browser either plays it or not.
Transcoding? Thumbnailing particular frames of video for embedding in a particular web page? Adding support for the MIME type? Support for playback through the <video> tag?
You can't just wave your hands and make all of this happen. If it worked that way then I wouldn't have to talk about lack of support for WebM in FOSS applications, I'd just wave my hands and then sit down and have a beer.
Open Source Fanatics, do the world a favor, strap on a bomb, pray to the oh mighty Richard Stallman God and blow up something.
Gosh, you know I wrote it down on my computer a long time ago, but I think it was in a proprietary format and I can't find a program to open the file, so could I please ask for your physical address again?
Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?
According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."
The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.
I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?
Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.
All their WiFi enabled smart phones look for an SSID named attwifi. The layer three gateway of that network triggers the phones to submit their phone number to that gateway, which looks it up in the ATT subscriber database and grants access if you have a data contract with them.
Wait, so if I just set my SSID to "attwifi" and mess around with some no-op challenge/response stuff when phones connect, I can pretend to be an official AP for AT&T cell phones? I sure hope all of the data flowing over that network is encrypted...