Perhaps your online time would be better spent by actually reading the stuff than bitching about it.
Personally I feel that was uncalled for, but your nick suggests that perhaps you can't help it. Please learn to distinguish between 'bitching' and 'discussing critically'. The latter is intended to point out how things might be made better, while the former is more about complaining for the sake of complaining. They are very different things. It seems to me that these days anything outside of Pollyanna-ish optimism and praise is being lumped into the "bitching" or "complaining" or "being negative" category, often as a technique to quash discussion, belittle or shame. Or worse, to avoid the effort needed to make improvements to the status quo. The end result seems to be a general lack of improvment where it might be warranted or even slow deterioration over time as attitudes shift from a roll-up-the-sleeves-we-can-make-it-better to a shrug-why-bother.
I should point out that my final comment about updating some of the figures only applies to some of them - the majority of the updated SVG versions are actually quite nice as they are, which I noticed as I looked through volumes 2 and 3.
I was thinking in particular of the monochrome photographic images such as Fig 52-1 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which could probably be updated with a photo of the same models using a modern camera, or perhaps a nice 3-D rendering of the same molecules. Another example would be figure 51.4 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which I can't really make out at all.
The front-page warning says "However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. "
I wonder how they expect people to read it in their browsers without the text of the document being transferred down to the computer on which the browser is running...?
Not to mention the implied requirement that an always online connection is required to read these 'free' editions, rather than being able to read from a local copy offline.
Yes, yes, we all know that in the modern day everyone has an internet connection to the cloud all the time, so this is an old-fashioned sentiment. Or wait - maybe it isn't so old-fashioned. It's still quite common that in situations where there is enough idle time to read something like this (on a plane, train, boat or automobile; in a remote vacation cabin in the woods etc) there isn't an internet connection available. Not to mention the times I deliberately set my tablet to airplane mode just so I can read a book or magazine without being distracted by notifications or tempted to look at something else online.
I'd also think that these lectures would be quite useful to those in poorer countries that don't have the funds to have an always on internet connection available personally at home, but might have access to a library or other venue where a public internet connection is available.
I appreciate their graciousness in making these lectures available gratis, but that front page warning does seem to be a bit counter to the spirit that probably drove this effort.
Personally, after glancing through some of the chapters in the first volume, I think that maybe releasing the material under whatever Creative Commons license allows them to retain the rights they want but enables people to share and contribute updates might be preferable in the long run. I'm thinking not so much of the text itself, but many of the figures seem rather outdated (eg. a poor photograph of some old ball-and-stick atomic models) and could benefit from some cosmetic updating to make them more suitable for modern eyes.
GOG runs weekly sales on their games, and seasonal mega-sales against a large portion of their catalog. I don't see why this wouldn't be the case for video, so just wait and you'll likely see something you want for a price you're willing to pay. Ah, the joys of a free and open market...
Live-action and animated stories are rarely recorded on film these days, yet we still call them films. Or movies, but I guess that still works because they, you know, move. But generally speaking, there are many words which originated in a context that no longer applies, but we still use those words, so why should tape be an exception?
Tonight on action news 7: Could the death of tape be imminent? Film at 11.
"And police officers are now at a disadvantage, because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."
Or maybe they have, because they have the legal authority to use force and the citizenry they are sworn to protect and serve do not.
I find it a very disturbing trend that "ordinary citizens" are now viewed as dangerous and "the enemy" from which the noble police (and other official institutions) must be protected. When I grew up, the general tone was that of Blackstone's Formulation ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"). Now it seems to be "It's better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty person escape".
I tried that experiment this spring, because an event I was attending offered an Uber discount. Took a Yellow Cab to the event, took an Uber ride back to Grand Central.
The Uber experience was better, cheaper and faster. At this moment in time, which is the crucial factor. Uber needs to be consistently and universally better than the yellow cab experience, otherwise they are fucked. In the mean time, they beat the pants off of yellow cab - I used the Uber app on my smart phone to catch a ride and caught that ride with no friction whatsoever. Best experience in my life for quick, on demand public transport ever. Ever. Ever.
It will not always be this way, but right now, Uber was better, and I was skeptical that this would be the case. But they came through.
I think the the Talking Heads and The Who said it all.
My view: If you catch the crest of the wave of the various "sharing economy" services that are popping up, like AirBnB or Uber, you will likely have a good experience. But as they grow and other pressures come to the fore, thus poisoning the well, it's time to get out and move on.
"Put an engineer and a physicist across the room from a beautiful woman, and tell them that if they approach the woman each step must be no larger than half the distance of the previous step. The physicist gives up because he knows he can never reach her, while the engineer starts walking because he knows he can get close enough for all practical purposes".
I detect no misogyny here. Definition: "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women". The anecdote suggests that pretty much the opposite of misogyny is in full effect here. Maybe a little mild sexism or objectification, but no misogyny.
We need to invent a short, pithy word for people who use words to vaguely imply a general sense of currently in vogue political incorrectness without understanding what those words actually mean.
It's only fair, since there is already a word ("pedant") for what I just did.:-)
Steve Gibson at least provides genuinely useful information most of the time and from what I can see does a decent job of teaching non-technical folks to understand and implement good security practices. He's a little hard to take in large doses when I've seen him on This Week in Tech and his website hurts my eyes, but I wouldn't paint him with such a broad brush. He doesn't seem to be a charlatan as much as a well-meaning but occasionally bumbling 'little guy' trying to build a business in the technology/security realm.
M-F is when you go to work then come home and drive the kids around to after school activities (which at high school age often run into the evening hours), then rush home, fix dinner, then try to watch something but you're too tired and it's too late to stay awake. On the nights where they don't have something scheduled, you can go out for dinner or some live entertainment if the kids are old enough to stay home alone.
F-S-S (Fridays straddle both categories because Saturday) is when you catch up on the household chores and then plant yourself on the sofa to work through the DVR and Netflix Disc queue because the last thing you want to do is get in the car and drive some more. And the kids don't have homework due the next day (F-S), so they can take the time to watch the Netflix disc with the family.
Anyone else with a different pattern from the three above (including mine)?
If you don't know, that isn't necessarily always the case. The average of 1, 1, 1, 2, 10 is 3. In that case, 80% are below average.
Well yeah, I do know. Because I went to school and stuff. Your pulled-out-of-your-posterior-to-make-some-sort-of-vague-point sample set is 5. The population of the U. S. is currently hovering around 316,165,718. The distribution you posit would suggest that 80% of the population ranks below earthworms. Any idiot knows a sufficiently large sample set is necessary to derive any meaning from the concept of average. Your suggestion is ridiculous. I wonder which side of the line you fall on?:-)
The elephant in the room: Requiring streaming for every customer simultaneously with no option for offline playback is a broken model with respect to how the internet works.
Granted, since any customer can arbitrarily choose any item in the Netflix library for viewing, the capability for streaming in real-time needs to work decently well. In practice, however, only the things in "My List" are likely to be viewed by a given customer, so downloading to a local cache would allow playback at optimal quality without needing ideal network performance.
It seems to me the intense desire on the part of Netflix and the "rights holders" for full control, maximum monetization and the deep rooted fear that someone might figure out how to make a copy is the real reason this is even a problem.
I would have no problem with a Netflix client that incorporated some sort of DVR-like functionality so that items of interest could be added to a local queue (sorry - queue is a deprecated term - My Local List). That would be wonderful for situations where the available network is sketchy (eg. hotel, coffeeshop) or not present (airplane, campsite, beach, etc). Rampant sharing could be minimized by allowing only one (or a few) devices to have the locally cached content, and requiring a network connection to download or release a particular item. Or if that's too complicated, just allow a limited number of authorized devices per account that can cache the same content.
I think enough customers would take advantage of this to alleviate the problems caused by real-time streaming and take a lot of power away from the intermediaries.
Between serving the public's interest, and serving one's own interest at the expense of the public? This is intended as a serious question--I like Snowden's idea, but how would we determine the difference between someone who's alerting us to government malfeasance, versus someone who's ideologically bent on disrupting government regardless of whether there's malfeasance or malevolent intent involved?
Wrong question. If the bar is set so high that people like Snowden have to prove their intentions unambigously, beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to prove their credibility, then they are lost before they begin, because the system assures that's never possible. But that's not why it's the wrong question. It's wrong because information about the workings of a government should never be secret except in the most exceptional of circumstances. Revealing information that should never be secret in the first place should not pose the risk of "disrupting government" regardless of the intent involved. If "disrupting government" merely means "learning what we are doing so you can debate the issue and vote to stop us", then the problem is more fundamental than you think.
This is/., not your bank. There is no army of Chinese hackers anxiously waiting for your password so they can assume your identity and become internet superstars. You didn't re-use an important password for/. did you? Just check the IP address for plausibility and accept the expired cert.
referred to 2 parties in an imaginary conversation
Then "we" still do not have a problem, because Google does not have a problem.
YOU have a problem. You can say that because it's clear. Do not fear clarity.
Noted. No need to shout. Thank you so much for setting me straight. Where can I sign up for your "Overcoming Fear of Clarity: Useful Techniques to Maximize Clarity When Using the English Language in Informal Settings" seminar? It sounds really interesting.
If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
Why do "we" have a problem?
In the context of the post it wasn't an all-inclusive term, but referred to 2 parties in an imaginary conversation, myself and Google. Often a prelude to talking things over and working something out.
Not YouTube's problem, is it? Viewers find videos like they find anything else, by looking for them in the places where the videos are. My grocery store doesn't tell me where I can find related groceries not in the store. I go to several stores in the area and learn what each has that distinguishes them from the other. I go to the store that has the best produce/meat/seafood/organic/whatever when I want that thing. I don't consider Stop-n-Shop evil because I have to shop at other places depending on what I want.
So what do you make money from if I become a Google Fiber customer? That's what I'm concerned about. If it's just the fair-market cost of the service I'm paying for, then that's fine. If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
Not quite true. I'd shop at a dozen different mom-and-pop stores if it gave me the opportunity to purchase what I wanted at a price acceptable to me. As a bonus I get to know some new people. Amazon isn't preferable because they same me time and gas money but because they are universally less expensive than mom-and-pop and almost always have what I was looking for. Mom and pop need an Amazon-like entity more than I do, because they can't match what Amazon can do at scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps your online time would be better spent by actually reading the stuff than bitching about it.
Personally I feel that was uncalled for, but your nick suggests that perhaps you can't help it. Please learn to distinguish between 'bitching' and 'discussing critically'. The latter is intended to point out how things might be made better, while the former is more about complaining for the sake of complaining. They are very different things. It seems to me that these days anything outside of Pollyanna-ish optimism and praise is being lumped into the "bitching" or "complaining" or "being negative" category, often as a technique to quash discussion, belittle or shame. Or worse, to avoid the effort needed to make improvements to the status quo. The end result seems to be a general lack of improvment where it might be warranted or even slow deterioration over time as attitudes shift from a roll-up-the-sleeves-we-can-make-it-better to a shrug-why-bother.
I should point out that my final comment about updating some of the figures only applies to some of them - the majority of the updated SVG versions are actually quite nice as they are, which I noticed as I looked through volumes 2 and 3.
I was thinking in particular of the monochrome photographic images such as Fig 52-1 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which could probably be updated with a photo of the same models using a modern camera, or perhaps a nice 3-D rendering of the same molecules. Another example would be figure 51.4 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which I can't really make out at all.
The front-page warning says "However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. "
I wonder how they expect people to read it in their browsers without the text of the document being transferred down to the computer on which the browser is running...?
Not to mention the implied requirement that an always online connection is required to read these 'free' editions, rather than being able to read from a local copy offline.
Yes, yes, we all know that in the modern day everyone has an internet connection to the cloud all the time, so this is an old-fashioned sentiment. Or wait - maybe it isn't so old-fashioned. It's still quite common that in situations where there is enough idle time to read something like this (on a plane, train, boat or automobile; in a remote vacation cabin in the woods etc) there isn't an internet connection available. Not to mention the times I deliberately set my tablet to airplane mode just so I can read a book or magazine without being distracted by notifications or tempted to look at something else online.
I'd also think that these lectures would be quite useful to those in poorer countries that don't have the funds to have an always on internet connection available personally at home, but might have access to a library or other venue where a public internet connection is available.
I appreciate their graciousness in making these lectures available gratis, but that front page warning does seem to be a bit counter to the spirit that probably drove this effort.
Personally, after glancing through some of the chapters in the first volume, I think that maybe releasing the material under whatever Creative Commons license allows them to retain the rights they want but enables people to share and contribute updates might be preferable in the long run. I'm thinking not so much of the text itself, but many of the figures seem rather outdated (eg. a poor photograph of some old ball-and-stick atomic models) and could benefit from some cosmetic updating to make them more suitable for modern eyes.
nice uid, btw.
Yeah, no kidding. I envy both of you. :-)
On the other hand we're all still above ground after all this time, so yay us.
GOG runs weekly sales on their games, and seasonal mega-sales against a large portion of their catalog. I don't see why this wouldn't be the case for video, so just wait and you'll likely see something you want for a price you're willing to pay. Ah, the joys of a free and open market ...
Live-action and animated stories are rarely recorded on film these days, yet we still call them films. Or movies, but I guess that still works because they, you know, move. But generally speaking, there are many words which originated in a context that no longer applies, but we still use those words, so why should tape be an exception?
Tonight on action news 7: Could the death of tape be imminent? Film at 11.
"And police officers are now at a disadvantage, because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."
Or maybe they have, because they have the legal authority to use force and the citizenry they are sworn to protect and serve do not.
I find it a very disturbing trend that "ordinary citizens" are now viewed as dangerous and "the enemy" from which the noble police (and other official institutions) must be protected. When I grew up, the general tone was that of Blackstone's Formulation ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"). Now it seems to be "It's better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty person escape".
I tried that experiment this spring, because an event I was attending offered an Uber discount. Took a Yellow Cab to the event, took an Uber ride back to Grand Central.
The Uber experience was better, cheaper and faster. At this moment in time, which is the crucial factor. Uber needs to be consistently and universally better than the yellow cab experience, otherwise they are fucked. In the mean time, they beat the pants off of yellow cab - I used the Uber app on my smart phone to catch a ride and caught that ride with no friction whatsoever. Best experience in my life for quick, on demand public transport ever. Ever. Ever.
It will not always be this way, but right now, Uber was better, and I was skeptical that this would be the case. But they came through.
or
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
I think the the Talking Heads and The Who said it all.
My view: If you catch the crest of the wave of the various "sharing economy" services that are popping up, like AirBnB or Uber, you will likely have a good experience. But as they grow and other pressures come to the fore, thus poisoning the well, it's time to get out and move on.
warning, mild misogyny ahead:
"Put an engineer and a physicist across the room from a beautiful woman, and tell them that if they approach the woman each step must be no larger than half the distance of the previous step. The physicist gives up because he knows he can never reach her, while the engineer starts walking because he knows he can get close enough for all practical purposes".
I detect no misogyny here. Definition: "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women". The anecdote suggests that pretty much the opposite of misogyny is in full effect here. Maybe a little mild sexism or objectification, but no misogyny.
We need to invent a short, pithy word for people who use words to vaguely imply a general sense of currently in vogue political incorrectness without understanding what those words actually mean.
It's only fair, since there is already a word ("pedant") for what I just did. :-)
You lost me when you said "expert Steve Gibson". If by "expert" you mean "shameless selfpromoting security wannabe", then OK.
No. These are examples of shameless, self-promoting wannabes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Steve Gibson at least provides genuinely useful information most of the time and from what I can see does a decent job of teaching non-technical folks to understand and implement good security practices. He's a little hard to take in large doses when I've seen him on This Week in Tech and his website hurts my eyes, but I wouldn't paint him with such a broad brush. He doesn't seem to be a charlatan as much as a well-meaning but occasionally bumbling 'little guy' trying to build a business in the technology/security realm.
Depends on age and life circumstances.
M-F is when you go to work then come home and drive the kids around to after school activities (which at high school age often run into the evening hours), then rush home, fix dinner, then try to watch something but you're too tired and it's too late to stay awake. On the nights where they don't have something scheduled, you can go out for dinner or some live entertainment if the kids are old enough to stay home alone.
F-S-S (Fridays straddle both categories because Saturday) is when you catch up on the household chores and then plant yourself on the sofa to work through the DVR and Netflix Disc queue because the last thing you want to do is get in the car and drive some more. And the kids don't have homework due the next day (F-S), so they can take the time to watch the Netflix disc with the family.
Anyone else with a different pattern from the three above (including mine)?
If you don't know, that isn't necessarily always the case. The average of 1, 1, 1, 2, 10 is 3. In that case, 80% are below average.
Well yeah, I do know. Because I went to school and stuff. Your pulled-out-of-your-posterior-to-make-some-sort-of-vague-point sample set is 5. The population of the U. S. is currently hovering around 316,165,718. The distribution you posit would suggest that 80% of the population ranks below earthworms. Any idiot knows a sufficiently large sample set is necessary to derive any meaning from the concept of average. Your suggestion is ridiculous. I wonder which side of the line you fall on? :-)
... 50 % of americans are below average. Oh noes!
No, cynicism is what YOU are experiencing. This seems like a profoundly optimistic act on his part.
... a very smart man.
The elephant in the room: Requiring streaming for every customer simultaneously with no option for offline playback is a broken model with respect to how the internet works.
Granted, since any customer can arbitrarily choose any item in the Netflix library for viewing, the capability for streaming in real-time needs to work decently well. In practice, however, only the things in "My List" are likely to be viewed by a given customer, so downloading to a local cache would allow playback at optimal quality without needing ideal network performance.
It seems to me the intense desire on the part of Netflix and the "rights holders" for full control, maximum monetization and the deep rooted fear that someone might figure out how to make a copy is the real reason this is even a problem.
I would have no problem with a Netflix client that incorporated some sort of DVR-like functionality so that items of interest could be added to a local queue (sorry - queue is a deprecated term - My Local List). That would be wonderful for situations where the available network is sketchy (eg. hotel, coffeeshop) or not present (airplane, campsite, beach, etc). Rampant sharing could be minimized by allowing only one (or a few) devices to have the locally cached content, and requiring a network connection to download or release a particular item. Or if that's too complicated, just allow a limited number of authorized devices per account that can cache the same content.
I think enough customers would take advantage of this to alleviate the problems caused by real-time streaming and take a lot of power away from the intermediaries.
Between serving the public's interest, and serving one's own interest at the expense of the public? This is intended as a serious question--I like Snowden's idea, but how would we determine the difference between someone who's alerting us to government malfeasance, versus someone who's ideologically bent on disrupting government regardless of whether there's malfeasance or malevolent intent involved?
Wrong question. If the bar is set so high that people like Snowden have to prove their intentions unambigously, beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to prove their credibility, then they are lost before they begin, because the system assures that's never possible. But that's not why it's the wrong question. It's wrong because information about the workings of a government should never be secret except in the most exceptional of circumstances. Revealing information that should never be secret in the first place should not pose the risk of "disrupting government" regardless of the intent involved. If "disrupting government" merely means "learning what we are doing so you can debate the issue and vote to stop us", then the problem is more fundamental than you think.
This is /., not your bank. There is no army of Chinese hackers anxiously waiting for your password so they can assume your identity and become internet superstars. You didn't re-use an important password for /. did you? Just check the IP address for plausibility and accept the expired cert.
That's some astonishingly bad advice.
*whoosh*. It was a joke.
referred to 2 parties in an imaginary conversation
Then "we" still do not have a problem, because Google does not have a problem.
YOU have a problem. You can say that because it's clear. Do not fear clarity.
Noted. No need to shout. Thank you so much for setting me straight. Where can I sign up for your "Overcoming Fear of Clarity: Useful Techniques to Maximize Clarity When Using the English Language in Informal Settings" seminar? It sounds really interesting.
If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
Why do "we" have a problem?
In the context of the post it wasn't an all-inclusive term, but referred to 2 parties in an imaginary conversation, myself and Google. Often a prelude to talking things over and working something out.
Not YouTube's problem, is it? Viewers find videos like they find anything else, by looking for them in the places where the videos are. My grocery store doesn't tell me where I can find related groceries not in the store. I go to several stores in the area and learn what each has that distinguishes them from the other. I go to the store that has the best produce/meat/seafood/organic/whatever when I want that thing. I don't consider Stop-n-Shop evil because I have to shop at other places depending on what I want.
So what do you make money from if I become a Google Fiber customer? That's what I'm concerned about. If it's just the fair-market cost of the service I'm paying for, then that's fine. If your noble stance hides the fact that you attach yourself to the fiber like a tick to suck value by monitoring my use of the service and selling that information to the highest bidder, then we have a problem.
Not quite true. I'd shop at a dozen different mom-and-pop stores if it gave me the opportunity to purchase what I wanted at a price acceptable to me. As a bonus I get to know some new people. Amazon isn't preferable because they same me time and gas money but because they are universally less expensive than mom-and-pop and almost always have what I was looking for. Mom and pop need an Amazon-like entity more than I do, because they can't match what Amazon can do at scale.