I may be influenced by the fact that my firm's two offices are in New Orleans and Pensacola, two highly hurricane-prone areas. As a result of hurricanes, disaster preparedness has been etched into the firm's thinking (as well as my own - I was a software engineer during Katrina and worked on moving services to the cloud during that time - I am now a lawyer).
Anyway, why not go to the cloud? Something like Jungle Disk would replace a shared disk. There are also products more focused on legal work, such as Netdocuments. Of course, cost is always an issue, but Jungle Disk is relatively cheap.
As a plus, cloud systems let the attorneys work from home without needing a VPN client.
Although it might worry you, it's been going on for quite a long time.
The government granted / sold middle america to settling european immigrants. The government auctions land in the gulf of mexico to oil companies, then distributes part of the money to the states around the gulf. Also, the government grants limited monopolies to creators of works (copyright law) and inventors of useful works (patents).
We gave certain authority to the government when we adopted the constitution.
I like my notebook keyboard, but i like my desktop keyboard a lot better.
I don't like my notebook screen. I like my dual widescreens.
I think notebook shipments are going up not because people are choosing notebooks over desktops, but rather because people / families / business types who already have desktops are adding notebooks for on the go / around the house use.
A quick look says that newegg has 500 gig drives for $144. If each movie is 20 gigs, then you'd need 4 of those drives to store each movie, which comes out to 576 dollars. Assume you can compress each HD movie a bit more, and you can drop the price some more.
The problem is bandwidth. Even with bittorrent, it takes way too long to D/L 20 gigs.
Honestly, the bigger problem for the studios is people taking those 20 gig files and compressing them down more to get better quality rips than from standard DVDs -- especially in a few years from now when we have better compression algorithms utilizing faster processors. (Just like we have now: DVD compressed with MPEG-2 ripped and compressed with MPEG-4 produces decent results)
that this is about deep linking is wrong. they're totally misunderstanding the issue.
people who say that you can stop all forms of deep linking are wrong. you cannot stop deep linking to, for example, a windows media streaming server.
I know this. I have worked on it from the perspective of the website trying to stop deep linkers (who are stealing) -- yes, in this case, they ARE stealing.
if you took all the images from websites you liked and put them on a webpage on your website, but still had your users load the images from the other websites, you'd be stealing their bandwidth. it's not what the web is about. that's not sharing information, that's taking someone else's shit and using it as your own.
now, imagine if you couldnt block access to.jpg files when the referrer isn't yoursite.com.
now, imagine your business is showing high-res images of weather forecasts or penguins.
now, imagine someone says, "hey, lets take all his shit, but let him pay for the bandwidth"
that sucks.
sure, you can come up with schemes to stop them, but if they try hard enough, they can get through. i'm talking about streaming media. it's much easier to stop image deep linking.
Brief Response: If someone's deep linking to something like streaming media, it's much, much different than deep linking to, say, an article within a website.
Deep linking to streaming media is like using the image off someone else's webserver on your own website. It uses their bandwidth for your gain. It's not what the web is about. I have friends who run a site and have similar issues -- they combat deep linkers to their content. Basically, with on-demand videos on something like, say, real server or windows media server, you send a file to the player that says something like:
10: Play advertisement #1 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad1.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #1 will display on the page) 20: Play video at url rtsp://a.b.com/video.ext 30: Play advertisement #2 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad2.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #2 will display on the page)
sometimes, there will be countermeasures to make sure that the file downloaded by the player is "fresh" (some type of basic salted hash scheme) -- but even this isn't unbreakable. it's very breakable by motivated people.
basically, windows media server (very popular) doesn't support strong authentication / encryption. therefore, you have to get very creative in preventing deep linking to your content.
deep linking to an article? that's what it's all about. embedding someone else's content in your site? that's just wrong.
I'm not sure if this directly applies to the instant case, but it should be taken into account, definitely.
The problem with that is most locals don't WANT to eat nutria meat. We think of nutria like really big sewer rats. They populate our series of uncovered drainage ditches we call canals. Lots of the New Orleans area is below sea level, so we have a fairly massive series of these canals, taking all the excess rain through these canals, and pump it and all the bad stuff from lawns, streets, etc, into Lake Pontchartrain, which eventually empties into the gulf.
Interestingly, there's more of a stink from the fisherman about diverting excess water from the Mississippi into the lake to prevent the river from overflowing than there is from the runoff from the canals.
Well, actually, the lake has been coming back, and it's more of a slow process of death/rebirth, while diverting freshwater + silt into the lake eventually kills lots of stuff fairly quickly. The lake is brackish.
you know, as we get more and more broadband access across the world, more and more people will put media on the net. in fact, i'm going to blatanly plug the company i work for -- www.blastro.com -- we're in the business (just getting started) of creating media specifically for the net. of course, right now it's mostly flash and/or real/asf/qt, depending.
right now we do 28.8, 56k, 128k, 300k, and those 300k streams are pretty good looking... it's only a matter of a year or two before we can start doing megabit streams, and when that starts, we'll be able to get pretty damn close to TV quality signals.
As time progresses, I think the lines between the subsets of the net will blur. Of course, not all of them really can blur together, but I think merging and meta-meta-meta-information sites are the wave of the future.
For example. X-Net does not really blend that much with the corporate internet, but could be considered part of the undernet. Obviously the "BuyNet" and "The Corporate Internet" are/have been/will continue to merge, and many of the others will continue to do so as well.
for the purposes of examining the internet, i think it's important to look at the function of each entity.
off the top of my head i can think of a couple:
interaction fantasy information commerce
(entertainment?)
you can pretty much merge most any of those four ideas (fantasy gets a bit hard) and get a site on the net that fits it (and i think you can fit most sites into one of those categories)
example:
commerce + interaction = epinions, amazon, ebay fantasy + interaction = everquest interaction + information = slashdot information + commerce = consumer reports type sites.
yes, my ideas are influenced by Net.Gain by Hagel and Armstrong, but I don't think I'm quoting them directly.
i'm not always right, i don't claim to be right, i'm just offering my ideas for further discussion.
"Normally on average a companies stock falls %2 in the first 3 months after the split. Sony is playing its cards right by releasing its new groundbreaking product when they split their stock so they can avoid the %2 split fizzle syndrome."
I'm not sure about the 2% number, but I do know stocks -- in general -- are mostly flat after splits, but that's just on average.
The reason is because a stock split is the result of previous stock increase. Meaning: if your stock does well, it will likely split. It has nothing to do with what the stock will do in the future.
yes, i'll agree with your assessment of the sound card market, and yes, there is always a group of followers who will be happy with older equipment, but graphics cards still have a long way to go before commoditization.
it's much easier to reproduce a sound that sounds real than a 3d image that looks real, and it won't be for another 5-10 years that the video card market becomes totally commoditized.
now, the low end is already that way, and will slowly continue in that fashion for some time.
the point of my previous post was that it would be possible to get high-res antialiased 3d, which is very necessary for it to be viable.
window managers, for the most part, should be some combination of pretty, clean, and fast. without some hardware doing good AA, it's not clean, and arguably not pretty.
i'm not arguing the usefulness of a 3d desktop, rather its possibility and the necessity of good aa in hardware.
i'm not sure how it will become useful, though i think it's definitely possible for it to happen.
i think one of the things really holding back some of these 3d window managers is really good, fast, full screen antialiasing. People have spent a long time developing nice smooth fonts and pretty slick little icons to make window managers look nice.
When you translate that into a 3d window manager, you get all the aliasing effects associated. Now, once 3d cards get to the point where they can do high-res with fs-aa, we might be able to see 3d window managers be a reality.
I'd love to see my windows in 3D with full screen antialiasing at 1280x1024 (my monitor only goes that high)
3dfx's next part supposedly out in february-march, code named "napalm" will most likely have the fill-rate and full screen antialiasing capabilities to do some pretty good 3d window-managing.
also, with their t-buffer's depth of field and motion blur, you could get some pretty cool windowing effects... windows out of focus could literally be "out of focus" and windows could blur as you move them. neat!
this guy is obviously pretty smart, and i think his efforts are very noble, moreso than his actual work.
i really agree with him when he says we need to challenge our thoughts about how the world works. i mean sure, there are things that are probably true and that we've tested thoroughly, but there's probably lots of stuff that we can't really test (ancient history, origins of our species, etc) -- this is what needs to be thought about very critically.
"If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking."
Not necessarily.
Random dendrite growth would promote more connections to local axons. It's almost like the principle of spatial locality. (Not sure if that reference makes any sense here) But it's kinda like this:
dendrites that are connected to axons now serve a purpose. if you put in more dendrites, you're going to get more connections to relevant locations, not "random" it's almost like adding more bandwidth.
anyway, if an axon-dendrite connection isn't very useful to you, it will end up being inhibited and die off. it's a well known brain biology principle that, "if you don't use it, you lose it."
when you're born you have something like 10x the neurons you do when you're mature. your brain just grows A LOT of neurons and then pairs down. caffeine may help intelligence in some way, or it may stop degeneration of the brain in old age, i don't know. i haven't read literature on it.
usually adding agonists can kill off dendrites, or at least make them less sensitive. i can only guess that caffeine is acting on some type of g-protein long term activation scheme to cause activation where there really isn't any, thus causing new dendrite growth.
anyway, sorry if i'm not making sense.
import java.io.beer.*; lite l = new bufferediostream(new miller("lite")); l.drink(); l.drink(); l.urinate();
"If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking." Not necessarily. Random dendrite growth would promote more connections to local axons. It's almost like the principle of spatial locality. (Not sure if that reference makes any sense here) But it's kinda like this: dendrites that are connected to axons now serve a purpose. if you put in more dendrites, you're going to get more connections to relevant locations, not "random" it's almost like adding more bandwidth. anyway, if an axon-dendrite connection isn't very useful to you, it will end up being inhibited and die off. it's a well known brain biology principle that, "if you don't use it, you lose it." when you're born you have something like 10x the neurons you do when you're mature. your brain just grows A LOT of neurons and then pairs down. caffeine may help intelligence in some way, or it may stop degeneration of the brain in old age, i don't know. i haven't read literature on it. usually adding agonists can kill off dendrites, or at least make them less sensitive. i can only guess that caffeine is acting on some type of g-protein long term activation scheme to cause activation where there really isn't any, thus causing new dendrite growth. anyway, sorry if i'm not making sense. import java.io.beer.*; lite l = new bufferediostream(new miller("lite")); l.drink(); l.drink(); l.urinate(); or something like that.
It's well known social theory that who you know can get you places.
How important do you think social networks are in the computer world and have they been useful to you in your career? If so, who has been most helpful to you?
Slashdot Mirror
I may be influenced by the fact that my firm's two offices are in New Orleans and Pensacola, two highly hurricane-prone areas. As a result of hurricanes, disaster preparedness has been etched into the firm's thinking (as well as my own - I was a software engineer during Katrina and worked on moving services to the cloud during that time - I am now a lawyer).
Anyway, why not go to the cloud? Something like Jungle Disk would replace a shared disk. There are also products more focused on legal work, such as Netdocuments. Of course, cost is always an issue, but Jungle Disk is relatively cheap.
As a plus, cloud systems let the attorneys work from home without needing a VPN client.
Although it might worry you, it's been going on for quite a long time.
The government granted / sold middle america to settling european immigrants. The government auctions land in the gulf of mexico to oil companies, then distributes part of the money to the states around the gulf. Also, the government grants limited monopolies to creators of works (copyright law) and inventors of useful works (patents).
We gave certain authority to the government when we adopted the constitution.
I like my notebook keyboard, but i like my desktop keyboard a lot better.
I don't like my notebook screen. I like my dual widescreens.
I think notebook shipments are going up not because people are choosing notebooks over desktops, but rather because people / families / business types who already have desktops are adding notebooks for on the go / around the house use.
I haven't played a console game in at least 5 years.
I think the WII looks cool, and maybe I'll get one when it is available in stores readily.
The 360 looks good as a media extender. I like my appletv, but lack of codec support really hampers it.
Good point.
100 HD-DVD movies at $20 each = 2000 dollars.
A quick look says that newegg has 500 gig drives for $144. If each movie is 20 gigs, then you'd need 4 of those drives to store each movie, which comes out to 576 dollars. Assume you can compress each HD movie a bit more, and you can drop the price some more.
The problem is bandwidth. Even with bittorrent, it takes way too long to D/L 20 gigs.
Honestly, the bigger problem for the studios is people taking those 20 gig files and compressing them down more to get better quality rips than from standard DVDs -- especially in a few years from now when we have better compression algorithms utilizing faster processors. (Just like we have now: DVD compressed with MPEG-2 ripped and compressed with MPEG-4 produces decent results)
that this is about deep linking is wrong. they're totally misunderstanding the issue.
.jpg files when the referrer isn't yoursite.com.
people who say that you can stop all forms of deep linking are wrong. you cannot stop deep linking to, for example, a windows media streaming server.
I know this. I have worked on it from the perspective of the website trying to stop deep linkers (who are stealing) -- yes, in this case, they ARE stealing.
if you took all the images from websites you liked and put them on a webpage on your website, but still had your users load the images from the other websites, you'd be stealing their bandwidth. it's not what the web is about. that's not sharing information, that's taking someone else's shit and using it as your own.
now, imagine if you couldnt block access to
now, imagine your business is showing high-res images of weather forecasts or penguins.
now, imagine someone says, "hey, lets take all his shit, but let him pay for the bandwidth"
that sucks.
sure, you can come up with schemes to stop them, but if they try hard enough, they can get through. i'm talking about streaming media. it's much easier to stop image deep linking.
Brief Response: If someone's deep linking to something like streaming media, it's much, much different than deep linking to, say, an article within a website.
Deep linking to streaming media is like using the image off someone else's webserver on your own website. It uses their bandwidth for your gain. It's not what the web is about. I have friends who run a site and have similar issues -- they combat deep linkers to their content. Basically, with on-demand videos on something like, say, real server or windows media server, you send a file to the player that says something like:
10: Play advertisement #1 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad1.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #1 will display on the page)
20: Play video at url rtsp://a.b.com/video.ext
30: Play advertisement #2 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad2.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #2 will display on the page)
sometimes, there will be countermeasures to make sure that the file downloaded by the player is "fresh" (some type of basic salted hash scheme) -- but even this isn't unbreakable. it's very breakable by motivated people.
basically, windows media server (very popular) doesn't support strong authentication / encryption. therefore, you have to get very creative in preventing deep linking to your content.
deep linking to an article? that's what it's all about. embedding someone else's content in your site? that's just wrong.
I'm not sure if this directly applies to the instant case, but it should be taken into account, definitely.
i didn't RTFA.
So i didn't get an ipod for christmas, but YOU can help me!
See, it's legit!
http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=8224357
(please please!)
-jmatthew3
The problem with that is most locals don't WANT to eat nutria meat. We think of nutria like really big sewer rats. They populate our series of uncovered drainage ditches we call canals. Lots of the New Orleans area is below sea level, so we have a fairly massive series of these canals, taking all the excess rain through these canals, and pump it and all the bad stuff from lawns, streets, etc, into Lake Pontchartrain, which eventually empties into the gulf.
Interestingly, there's more of a stink from the fisherman about diverting excess water from the Mississippi into the lake to prevent the river from overflowing than there is from the runoff from the canals.
Well, actually, the lake has been coming back, and it's more of a slow process of death/rebirth, while diverting freshwater + silt into the lake eventually kills lots of stuff fairly quickly. The lake is brackish.
I got way off topic, sorrry.
you know, as we get more and more broadband access across the world, more and more people will put media on the net. in fact, i'm going to blatanly plug the company i work for -- www.blastro.com -- we're in the business (just getting started) of creating media specifically for the net. of course, right now it's mostly flash and/or real/asf/qt, depending.
right now we do 28.8, 56k, 128k, 300k, and those 300k streams are pretty good looking... it's only a matter of a year or two before we can start doing megabit streams, and when that starts, we'll be able to get pretty damn close to TV quality signals.
it's just a matter of time...
-jmatthew3
As time progresses, I think the lines between the subsets of the net will blur. Of course, not all of them really can blur together, but I think merging and meta-meta-meta-information sites are the wave of the future.
For example. X-Net does not really blend that much with the corporate internet, but could be considered part of the undernet. Obviously the "BuyNet" and "The Corporate Internet" are/have been/will continue to merge, and many of the others will continue to do so as well.
for the purposes of examining the internet, i think it's important to look at the function of each entity.
off the top of my head i can think of a couple:
interaction
fantasy
information
commerce
(entertainment?)
you can pretty much merge most any of those four ideas (fantasy gets a bit hard) and get a site on the net that fits it (and i think you can fit most sites into one of those categories)
example:
commerce + interaction = epinions, amazon, ebay
fantasy + interaction = everquest
interaction + information = slashdot
information + commerce = consumer reports type sites.
yes, my ideas are influenced by Net.Gain by Hagel and Armstrong, but I don't think I'm quoting them directly.
i'm not always right, i don't claim to be right, i'm just offering my ideas for further discussion.
"Normally on average a companies stock falls %2 in the first 3 months after the split. Sony is playing its cards right by releasing its new groundbreaking product when they split their stock so they can avoid the %2 split fizzle syndrome."
I'm not sure about the 2% number, but I do know stocks -- in general -- are mostly flat after splits, but that's just on average.
The reason is because a stock split is the result of previous stock increase. Meaning: if your stock does well, it will likely split. It has nothing to do with what the stock will do in the future.
yes, i'll agree with your assessment of the sound card market, and yes, there is always a group of followers who will be happy with older equipment, but graphics cards still have a long way to go before commoditization.
it's much easier to reproduce a sound that sounds real than a 3d image that looks real, and it won't be for another 5-10 years that the video card market becomes totally commoditized.
now, the low end is already that way, and will slowly continue in that fashion for some time.
-jm3
yes, neat gets old pretty quick.
the point of my previous post was that it would be possible to get high-res antialiased 3d, which is very necessary for it to be viable.
window managers, for the most part, should be some combination of pretty, clean, and fast. without some hardware doing good AA, it's not clean, and arguably not pretty.
i'm not arguing the usefulness of a 3d desktop, rather its possibility and the necessity of good aa in hardware.
i'm not sure how it will become useful, though i think it's definitely possible for it to happen.
i think one of the things really holding back some of these 3d window managers is really good, fast, full screen antialiasing. People have spent a long time developing nice smooth fonts and pretty slick little icons to make window managers look nice.
When you translate that into a 3d window manager, you get all the aliasing effects associated. Now, once 3d cards get to the point where they can do high-res with fs-aa, we might be able to see 3d window managers be a reality.
I'd love to see my windows in 3D with full screen antialiasing at 1280x1024 (my monitor only goes that high)
3dfx's next part supposedly out in february-march, code named "napalm" will most likely have the fill-rate and full screen antialiasing capabilities to do some pretty good 3d window-managing.
also, with their t-buffer's depth of field and motion blur, you could get some pretty cool windowing effects... windows out of focus could literally be "out of focus" and windows could blur as you move them. neat!
i can't wait.
this guy is obviously pretty smart, and i think his efforts are very noble, moreso than his actual work.
i really agree with him when he says we need to challenge our thoughts about how the world works. i mean sure, there are things that are probably true and that we've tested thoroughly, but there's probably lots of stuff that we can't really test (ancient history, origins of our species, etc) -- this is what needs to be thought about very critically.
for that i applaud gold.
the world would be better off if we all just spoke a standard language. stark, for instance.
"If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking."
Not necessarily.
Random dendrite growth would promote more connections to local axons. It's almost like the principle of spatial locality. (Not sure if that reference makes any sense here) But it's kinda like this:
dendrites that are connected to axons now serve a purpose. if you put in more dendrites, you're going to get more connections to relevant locations, not "random" it's almost like adding more bandwidth.
anyway, if an axon-dendrite connection isn't very useful to you, it will end up being inhibited and die off. it's a well known brain biology principle that, "if you don't use it, you lose it."
when you're born you have something like 10x the neurons you do when you're mature. your brain just grows A LOT of neurons and then pairs down. caffeine may help intelligence in some way, or it may stop degeneration of the brain in old age, i don't know. i haven't read literature on it.
usually adding agonists can kill off dendrites, or at least make them less sensitive. i can only guess that caffeine is acting on some type of g-protein long term activation scheme to cause activation where there really isn't any, thus causing new dendrite growth.
anyway, sorry if i'm not making sense.
import java.io.beer.*;
lite l = new bufferediostream(new miller("lite"));
l.drink();
l.drink();
l.urinate();
or something like that.
"If this dendrite growth is more random, making the connections it forms irrelevant to efficient pattern retrieval, it sounds very much like it would enhance associativity at the expense of logical thinking." Not necessarily. Random dendrite growth would promote more connections to local axons. It's almost like the principle of spatial locality. (Not sure if that reference makes any sense here) But it's kinda like this: dendrites that are connected to axons now serve a purpose. if you put in more dendrites, you're going to get more connections to relevant locations, not "random" it's almost like adding more bandwidth. anyway, if an axon-dendrite connection isn't very useful to you, it will end up being inhibited and die off. it's a well known brain biology principle that, "if you don't use it, you lose it." when you're born you have something like 10x the neurons you do when you're mature. your brain just grows A LOT of neurons and then pairs down. caffeine may help intelligence in some way, or it may stop degeneration of the brain in old age, i don't know. i haven't read literature on it. usually adding agonists can kill off dendrites, or at least make them less sensitive. i can only guess that caffeine is acting on some type of g-protein long term activation scheme to cause activation where there really isn't any, thus causing new dendrite growth. anyway, sorry if i'm not making sense. import java.io.beer.*; lite l = new bufferediostream(new miller("lite")); l.drink(); l.drink(); l.urinate(); or something like that.
It's well known social theory that who you know can get you places.
How important do you think social networks are in the computer world and have they been useful to you in your career? If so, who has been most helpful to you?
Thanks
-Matt Miller