Seriously, if you live in the US and you care at all about electronic freedom, then you should really do your part by helping the EFF fight the good fight. Discussing/complaining on Slashdot is great and all, but if we ever want things to change, we have to actually do something... or at least fund people who are doing something.
I should let NYCL answer for himself... but if you look at his comment history, you'll find that he re-iterates that the RIAA lawyers are indeed using unconventionally dirty tactics. He says they are unethical and/or stupid, and sometimes implies that their actions are outright illegal and they should be disbarred.
It's the RIAA's lawyers that are missing something. I'm not sure what they're missing, but I've got it narrowed down to 2 things: (1) brain cells, or (2) integrity. Or possibly some of each.
what they are doing is totally illegal. In federal practice ex parte relief is only granted as a last resort. In these cases the RIAA lies through its teeth to get the order, falsely saying that the ISP or University will destroy the records if they are given notice of the application. It amazes me that there is any judge in the U.S. who would sign such an order. I think you'll be seeing more and more judges refusing, as news of the RIAA's lies spreads.
Good question. I don't know the answer to it. Each time I think they've reached the mountain top, they come up with something even better.
It's as tough as the other question I keep wondering about with these characters:
"How mean and how heartless can someone who was born of a human mother be?" Each time I think I've seen how low they can sink, they find some way to sink even lower.
These questions are simply unanswerable.
I think it's safe to say that NYCL has a low opinion of their tactics both from an ethical standpoint and from a legal practice standpoint.
It is not our responsibility to provide a safety net for bad practices - doing so brings the whole system down, because everyone starts thinking they can make mistakes and someone will protect them from the consequences (for free at that!) Your comment criticizes safety nets for irresponsible borrowing. But allow me to extend it to social programs in general (I'm not claiming this is your opinion, since I obviously don't know; I'm merely using your comment as a starting point for this thought...). Applied to social programs in general, your comment nicely highlights the difference in thinking between the two viewpoints.
On the one side, you have people who believe that social safety nets bring down the whole system--because they are a burden to everyone (even those who are able to do without), and they allow people to be lazy.
On the other side, you have people who believe that social safety nets bring up the whole system--because they limit the formation of a highly disenfranchised class (who then turn to crime, etc.), protect everyone (even those who have, so far, been lucky enough to not need them), and they allow people to take "risks" (like getting an education), which often leads to progress.
Both viewpoints have some merit. On the balance, I think that a well-run social program can lift society more than the distributed burden it engenders (e.g. I think libraries do more good in educating than the cost we must communally bear to fund them). I do, however, agree that people need to take responsibility for their actions (e.g. irresponsible borrowing of money).
If people want to voluntarily burn their own property - more power to them. Where I live we call that freedom of speach. Where I live we also call that needless pollution.
If you disapprove of a particular book (or video game, etc.), don't burn it: rather, just don't buy it in the first place.
If you were a VC, I would suggest investigating this a lot more - it seems to be more vapourware than something that's ready for prime time. That may be putting it lightly.
Their site makes rather grandiose claims, that the screen generates a high-quality, full-color image with full depth-information, viewable from any angle by an unlimited number of viewers (i.e.: it's not just using motion tracking to simulate 3D for the one viewer). If true, this would be hugely significant!
However, their "explanation" of the technology is rather... vague. Once you strip out all the trite market-speak and "trying to sounds scientific" techno-babble, you're only left with a single useful sentence:
The pixels, or rather voxels of the holographic screen emit light beams of different intensity and colour to the various directions.
It is indeed true that if you could make a screen where each pixel can not only control color output, but also directional emission, then you could create a true 3D-screen. However they don't explain (nor even hint) at how they accomplish this massive feat.
Considering that holography is fairly mature field, and that people have been trying to create technology like this for some time... I will remain decidedly unconvinced until they present some real evidence that they have working technology. It would also be nice to have some kind of explanation of how they claim it works. I understand the notion of keeping new technology secret, but just saying "holography" is pointlessly vague. It's not like someone is going to be able to reproduce their technology if they just explain the basics of how it works.
On their site they say:
Seeing is believing. Computer animations explaining 3D technologies can often be found. The movies above are real camera shots, this is what you would see live on the HoloVizio displays.
(Emphasis in original.) Yes, seeing is believing. However, a recording of a 3D display isn't exactly convincing: it's trivial for the computer to just be motion-tracking the camera.
Unless someone can provide further details, this press release isn't convincing me that a product actually exists.
I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).
Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.
With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).
With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.
All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.
Note that in Firefox 3 you can drag tabs between Windows. So you can create a new Window and toss the tab you want into it.
You can also right-click on links and go "Open Link in New Window".
There are lots of tab-managing add-ons, and I think some of them allow you to open a tab as a new window. (E.g. this one, although it hasn't been updated to FF3 yet... or this one.)
1. What do you mean? Yes, Firefox 3 isn't compatible with (some) Firefox 2 extensions. But then again, Firefox 3 is a whole new version... and it's still at release-candidate level. I've never had extensions break during an incremental upgrade, for instance. (If they become marked as incompatible, that's the fault of the extension author, who should have set compatibility as 2.* or whatever.)
2. I've never seen that. Normally it just downloads the incremental update and applies it on the next restart.
3. Well many of us happen to like the new functionality of the combined address-bar/search-bar. However, it's trivial to return to the old-style behavior if that's what you want (e.g. this). The same is true of most other changes. Firefox is very customizable.
4. Sorry to hear that it's unstable on your system. On the systems I use, Firefox 3 has been decidedly more stable than Firefox 2. Faster, too. From various things I've read, it sounds like the typical experience is that Firefox 3 is faster, more stable, and more robust than Firefox 2. But, as always, your mileage may vary.
5. Huh? When you try to exit, there is a single confirmation box, which can be disabled. It doesn't pop up "a thousand confirmations". Exaggerate much?
6. Huh? I've never had to re-download extensions when upgrading Firefox (even when installing a whole new version). The only time extensions re-download is when a new version of the extension is available. But... how exactly do you propose to get the new version without downloading it?
I'm sorry that you seem to be having troubles with Firefox. From what I can tell, this isn't a typical experience. Also, note that you're most welcome to keep using older versions if they suit you better.
Someone in an RIAA/MPAA thread said that since physical property was getting cheaper and cheaper to manufacture and took less and less people to make that we need to stake our future to IP. I say this is hogwash I'd say it's worse than hogwash.
The argument is basically "physical property is getting cheaper and cheaper to manufacture, making it a difficult field to compete in... so let's compete in a field where the manufacturing/duplication is even cheaper (almost zero, actually).
It will be quite interesting to see how economy and law change as manufacturing prices drop further, or if "object printers" become commonplace. The same silly arguments that are currently used to restrict duplication of information will surely be used by the entrenched players to justify monopolies on objects, and laws against object printers.
I think we are indeed driving towards a world where manufacturing and duplication (of objects or information) will not be the limited step: it will be design and creativity that will be limiting. I'm not at all convinced that our current models for "creativity-rewarding" (namely copyright and patents) are up to the task of maintaining the economy when that day comes.
My guess is that Obama really wants Clinton as a VP candidate. The reason is exactly what you mentioned: too many Clinton supporters are disillusioned for some reason. Many are pledging to not vote for Obama out of some kind of principle (even though his policies are more in-line with their beliefs than the other presidential candidate's).
If Obama has Clinton as a VP candidate, then all those votes reappear. Clinton supporters will vote in order to get Clinton into office in some capacity.
From Clinton's point of view, becoming the vice-president of the United States may be a concession, but it's still a very prestigious position. Moreover, being the first female US vice-president will guarantee her a spot in the history books.
He puts forward some very sound objections to nanomachines of the Drexler variety. Really? I found his objections to be fairly imprecise. For instance:
the cogs and gears...have some questionable chemical properties. They are essentially molecular clusters with odd and special shapes, but it's far from clear that they represent stable arrangements of atoms that won't rearrange themselves spontaneously. These crystal lattices were designed using molecular modeling software, which works on the principle that if valences are satisfied and bonds aren't too distorted from their normal values, then the structures formed will be chemically stable. But this is a problematic assumption.
The simulations are performed using a variety of modeling software. Not all of them are as naive as he claims. Many of them incorporate detailed quantum effects. Getting simulations right is never easy, but many models are highly successful at reproducing real systems.
Perhaps more convincingly is the experimental confirmation of "odd and special" molecular geometries. Consider buckyballs, nanotubes, adamantane. A whole slew of strained ring-like and cage-like molecules have been synthesized. There are limits to what can be done, but the parameter space of stable compounds is immense.
there's the question of how an intricate arrangement of cogs and gears that depends on precision and rigidity to work will respond to thermal noise and Brownian bombardment at room temperature.
This question, as with many others, is addressed quantitatively in Drexler's book, "Nanosystems". He calculates rms displacements for typical structures, given the know effects of thermal vibrations and Brownian motion. His analysis indicates that these effects are not insurmountable for properly designed systems (e.g. sufficiently rigid and/or redundant).
He makes a variety of interesting points... but they all amount to "this might be a problem, so it might not work." That is a far cry from providing a detailed analysis that points out a fundamental flaw.
I'm not saying that I know for certain that the version of molecular nanotechnology proposed by Drexler (rigid diamondoid constructs) is feasible... but his case is well-reasoned and backed by quantitative calculations. To date, I've not seen a similar robust analysis contradicting his findings.
It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things. For one thing, the demographics for different sites are different, and there is undoubtedly a correlation between personal interests and selection of web-browser.
All that to say: I wouldn't worry too much about the exact numbers. What's more significant is the trends that can be seen across data-sets. Firefox had a rapid rise in popularity early on, but that leveled off. Rather than focus on an arbitrary threshold, like "breaks 20%!", I think the real story here is that Firefox usage continues to grow. Slowly but steadily the browser market is becoming more balanced.
This is significant, because a few years back, there was a real browser monopoly. I remember using the Firefox pre-1.0 betas, and many sites didn't work (they were tailor-made for IE). Nowadays, the vast majority of sites render perfectly in Firefox.
This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it!
I mean come on why would you give the hordes of gamers, who act a fool just to show off to 3 friends the chance to do the same on cable tv? the temptation is just too strong. Well, they are not going to just record in-game activity and then play it on TV without edits. That would be stupid (and boring). From TFA, it sounds more like they are going to use the in-game events to alter the storyline of the show. For instance the players in the game enter into an epic battle. Whether they win or lose affects the TV show. (An episode about retreating to the mountains vs. an episode about what to do with all the POWs they have.)
So, in principle even the actions of griefers could be intelligently woven into the storyline. Any GM worth his salt knows how to rationalize the actions of players, and make things fit into the storyline. A really good GM can even move the story in such a way that griefers will genuinely participate (or at least give up).
So for instance disruptions could be attributed to 'rebels' or 'a virus that is making our men go insane' or whatever.
Of course, that doesn't mean that this will be properly done. But I'm just saying it's certainly possible to implement this idea in a way that show-offs and griefers don't ruin the storytelling for everyone else.
What kills big successful companies is generally not poor engineering on the part of the engineers, but the fact that the engineers are beholden to marketing and upper management. I agree that management and marketing should be listening carefully to the technical advice of the engineers. The designers and engineers will have a much better idea of what will make a good (powerful, useful, easy-to-use) product.
However, the management and marketing side is not to be dismissed so easily. A good management team will know how to balance everything: price, style, design, technical features, support, user experience, etc. Moreover good management will know how to focus engineering talent on the "important problems" instead of letting all that creativity be wasted on unrelated, fuzzy, pointless tangents. Good management will know how to use expert opinions, market data, and usability tests to pick out what the most successful products will be.
Put otherwise: I would bet that the engineers who work at Apple and those who work at Microsoft are both very, very talented. The difference is that Apple has a much more focused management system, so that the products they come up with are much more polished, and seem much more "innovative". (Even though Microsoft does come up with neat ideas--but often doesn't execute them to completion properly.)*
You may raise the argument that it's marketing and upper management's job to decide what will sell and what won't, but how many engineers do you know that aren't objective enough to judge their own ideas. An engineer working on a circuit board layout is certainly qualified to comment on the quality of his ideas about circuit board layout. And an engineer working on a software module can comment on how innovative his approach is. But, again, the purpose of management is to balance the resources allocated to the various portions of a "user experience" (product specs, price, interface, support, marketing, style, etc.). Engineers are generally not qualified to make these kinds of high-level decisions.
Management has its place. Plenty of managers don't do their jobs well, which leads to crappy products and ruins companies. Then again, there are also plenty of engineers who don't do their jobs well, missing deadlines and generating crappy code. For good products, you need a good team. (This is true in both closed-source and open-source efforts.)
([*] Some may argue that Apple vs. MS is a bad comparison in this case, because Microsoft is clearly bigger hence more "successful". But what I am discussing (and parent post, too, I think) is the quality of the product/user-experience/innovation.)
I only recently discovered hulu, so maybe it's the solution I'm looking for.
I don't have a TV, and recently I've been experimenting with watching TV on my computer. A number of networks have some of their shows online, available via Flash players (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc.). Some problems I immediately noticed were: 1. Most sites are heavily Flash-based, making it very difficult to navigate (or bookmark) the content you care about. I understand using Flash for the actual player, by why the navigation elements? 2. Having to go to 3 or 4 different sites to watch the 4 or 5 shows I care about was really inefficient. Each one has a different format, navigation style, and player. 3. Keeping track of what I've watched and haven't watched was somewhat annoying. When you watch normal TV, you just watch whatever they play. But when you're watching online, you have to keep track of which episodes you've seen (for each show)... and somehow find out when new episodes of your shows have aired. The sites do a very poor job of making it easy to find this out. You usually have to go all the way to loading the player, watching an ad, and viewing the start of an episode before you can figure out if you've already seen it. (So, of course, I would use Wikipedia to keep track of all this information.)
Clearly what is needed is a site that unifies the experience. Hulu might be that site. It groups content from multiple networks, so that you don't have to go all over the place. It provides cleaner navigation (mostly HTML), and RSS feeds for keeping track of things you care about. I also notice they have optional user accounts... so I'll be interested to find out if that allows you to keep track of shows you're watching, and maybe even get recommendations?
There are still many ways in which the viewing experience is not optimal (it's Flash buffering, after all: you can't save it to watch later, and network congestion kills it... especially if you try to watch fullscreen). But convergent sites like Hulu are, in my opinion, an important step towards actual "on demand" convenient web-television. (Of course, it's still ridiculous that downloading via bit-torrent would give me the same shows, in a timely manner, at higher quality, and without ads.)
Agreed,a language being easy to install and start using can give it a huge boost in usage.
I would also note that community can have a huge effect. Obviously the size of a community will have a strong effect on whether usage of the language remains, grows, or shrinks. After all, you are more likely to learn a language if you hear about it, if it's used in many other projects, etc.
Additionally, community is important in terms of the amount of support you get. Languages with strong communities will have thousands of online tutorials, excellent forums that provide responsive help, freely available code snippets, plenty of libraries and add-ons, and so on. This kind of 'free support' is often more useful than even careful and exact core documentation.
As a personal example, I (have to) use a programing environment called "Igor Pro" at work. The language syntax bothers me a bit--but on the other hand it is specialized to do some of the things we need it to. But what I really hate about it is the lack of community. When I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I get nothing. When I try to find a pre-made package for a non-core feature, it doesn't exist.
Compare that to solving the same programming problem in, for example, Python. Even if it's not the optimal language, the fact that I get find tons of help online, and that there are so many community-developed packages and libraries, means that I can often solve the problem much faster.
When evaluating new languages (and new software products), I always take the time to find out what the community is like. It can make all the difference.
I wonder sometimes what would happen if I called claiming to be her, and talked in a ludicrous Monty Python-style falsetto Wonder no more: they would probably not question it. Check out this prank (text transcript and audio), where he's able to fast-talk his way past the whole "mother's maiden name" question, and even impersonates his mother's voice without failing the security checks.
Actually, many of the pranks on the ZUG site are relevant to this current topic. In the credit card prank, he's able to sign credit card receipts with all kinds of ludicrous names (like "not authorized", or a picture of a house), and no one ever questions him about it.
All that to say that phone-based authentication questions and signing credit card receipts do remarkably little in terms of security.
The mouse may have originated as a kludge to replace a finger/hand... but that's no longer what it is.
Similarly for a keyboard. It is not merely a kludge to replace a pen with a mechanical analogue. Even though we now have the technology for digital pens and handwriting recognition, it is still vastly faster (and less ambiguous) to type with a keyboard. (Not to mention the hand cramp most people would experience if they wrote by hand as much as they type in an average day.)
In terms of pointing devices, a mouse is better than pointing/touching directly with your hand/fingers. It's less tiring. You also don't occlude what you're pointing at. You can use the pointing device without looking down at your hand (since you can feel the mouse). It can directly incorporate additional interactions (right-click, mouse wheel). Despite the mouse's beginnings, it has stuck around mainly because it is a useful way to interact with a computer. You can try to replace the mouse with a more direct touch-based interface... but for many applications that interaction will be much less smooth than using a mouse.
I fully agree that there are some applications where touch surfaces are better. But I would be wary about throwing out the mouse and keyboard systems that we have now. Quite a bit of work has gone into optimizing their usage over the years, and it's not at all obvious that a touch surface can surpass our current efficiency with mouse/keyboard. (Hybrid approaches, like keyboards with built-in touch screen areas, seem more likely to be practically accepted in the short term, and ultimately efficient in the long term.)
Okay, this is slightly off-topic, but: Why is it that even with our modern hardware, graphics are sometimes still very laggy?
If you look at the start of the video in TFA, you'll see a demo where images are being dragged around via multi-touch. The thing that really bothers me is that the movement of the image is lagging behind the person's finger. My question is: why? Modern hardware is very fast and powerful. The demo computer probably had awesome specs, including a dedicated high-end graphics card. I have trouble believing that this kind of hardware can't update an image position at video rates.
The obvious answer is that the code isn't good. Perhaps it just hasn't been optimized (maybe it's just a tech demo). But frequently even in final implementations I see this kind of behavior.
One of the main ideas with multi-touch displays (and dragging to scroll, zoom, etc.) is to generate an "intuitive" interface that responds in a very "natural" way. But in my opinion, you totally ruin the desired natural immersion if the display cannot keep up with your actions. After all, the idea is to somewhat simulate physical interaction (e.g. shuffling papers)... but in physical reality, we don't experience any kind of "lag" waiting for physics to catch-up.
So, I think more effort should be put into cleaning up those kinds of things. It may seem like a trivial point, but those kinds of details can subtly but crucially affect the user experience (and can mean the difference between an interface that seems to respond to your thoughts, vs. one that is frustrating). I should note that this is an area where Apple has frequently done the right thing. They seem to put a lot of effort into making display transitions very fast and smooth.
To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats. The sample sizes are probably so small that the ranks are just statistical artifacts of the scores of the few people coming from each site. Also I'm sure the average scores are highly skewed by people who start taking the test and then just get bored and randomly guess some answers to get it over with. For small samples, small aberrations (e.g. a few smart, stupid, or lazy users) can obviously greatly skew the average.
Stats are nearly meaningless without some estimation of the error bars (or at least mention of the sample size!). All that to say: I wouldn't take these stats too seriously! Moreover, it's likely that as more and more Slashdotters take the test, the average will drop further and further from its statistically-anomalous level, to a more reasonable average. (As would the other listed categories, if only more people took the test.)
(Note: that's all assuming the test itself is even a valid measure of IQ, which I find rather dubious.)
I hear they're good at removing and replacing chips on motherboards, or at least on gaming consoles. Just to preempt the inevitably replies saying something along the lines of: "most people don't have the knowledge or inclination to mod their hardware... if a hack requires physical changes to the machine, this will prevent 99% of people from pirating."
It's important to remember that you only need 1% of people (or even 0.1%) to have the knowledge and inclination to perform these mods, if it allows them to make unencrypted copies of the data. All you need is a small group of dedicated hackers who generate cracked copies of games, and release these in the usual way (bit-torrent, etc.). Just as movie release groups have a lot of specialized knowledge and connections, thereby making copyright infringement trivially easy for the masses, so too will anti-TPM groups appear, who will trivialize this kind of circumvention for the masses.
TPM doesn't make copyright infringement impossible. It merely adds another layer of complexity for the hackers. Alas, hackers enjoy the challenge of breaking through these layers.
You should spend the next 3 weeks documenting your projects. The original poster did mention that he wanted to document some things.
It's difficult to tell from the short summary how much his access has been restricted--but it sounds almost as if he's been so restricted that he can't even do things like documentation. He probably still has a user account with email, web browsing, and a word processor. But that's useless if you can't look over the codebase you're trying to document. It would be quite difficult to produce error-free documentation without being able to look over the internal code and organizational files.
Even read-only access to the codebase might not be enough, since proper documentation of course involves commenting code in conjunction with summary documents.
So your suggestion of doing documentation for the next few weeks might not be possible. (Again, it depends on how much his access has really been restricted.)
But if the original submitter is truly keen on contributing to the company in his last few weeks, then he should at least make the argument that he be given read-only access to the code, so that he can prepare sensible documentation. If they don't agree to that (perhaps they are afraid of him copying the code and taking it with him?), then there's not much you can do. Erroneous documentation can actually be worse than no documentation at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"If" ??
Why don't you donate?
Seriously, if you live in the US and you care at all about electronic freedom, then you should really do your part by helping the EFF fight the good fight. Discussing/complaining on Slashdot is great and all, but if we ever want things to change, we have to actually do something... or at least fund people who are doing something.
I donate to the EFF yearly. You should consider doing the same.
Example: Another example: Another: I think it's safe to say that NYCL has a low opinion of their tactics both from an ethical standpoint and from a legal practice standpoint.
On the one side, you have people who believe that social safety nets bring down the whole system--because they are a burden to everyone (even those who are able to do without), and they allow people to be lazy.
On the other side, you have people who believe that social safety nets bring up the whole system--because they limit the formation of a highly disenfranchised class (who then turn to crime, etc.), protect everyone (even those who have, so far, been lucky enough to not need them), and they allow people to take "risks" (like getting an education), which often leads to progress.
Both viewpoints have some merit. On the balance, I think that a well-run social program can lift society more than the distributed burden it engenders (e.g. I think libraries do more good in educating than the cost we must communally bear to fund them). I do, however, agree that people need to take responsibility for their actions (e.g. irresponsible borrowing of money).
If you disapprove of a particular book (or video game, etc.), don't burn it: rather, just don't buy it in the first place.
However, their "explanation" of the technology is rather... vague. Once you strip out all the trite market-speak and "trying to sounds scientific" techno-babble, you're only left with a single useful sentence: It is indeed true that if you could make a screen where each pixel can not only control color output, but also directional emission, then you could create a true 3D-screen. However they don't explain (nor even hint) at how they accomplish this massive feat.
Considering that holography is fairly mature field, and that people have been trying to create technology like this for some time... I will remain decidedly unconvinced until they present some real evidence that they have working technology. It would also be nice to have some kind of explanation of how they claim it works. I understand the notion of keeping new technology secret, but just saying "holography" is pointlessly vague. It's not like someone is going to be able to reproduce their technology if they just explain the basics of how it works.
On their site they say: (Emphasis in original.) Yes, seeing is believing. However, a recording of a 3D display isn't exactly convincing: it's trivial for the computer to just be motion-tracking the camera.
Unless someone can provide further details, this press release isn't convincing me that a product actually exists.
Another junior academic here.
I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).
Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.
With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).
With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.
All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.
Good trick.
Note that in Firefox 3 you can drag tabs between Windows. So you can create a new Window and toss the tab you want into it.
You can also right-click on links and go "Open Link in New Window".
There are lots of tab-managing add-ons, and I think some of them allow you to open a tab as a new window. (E.g. this one, although it hasn't been updated to FF3 yet... or this one.)
Huh? Are you using the same "Firefox" as me?
1. What do you mean? Yes, Firefox 3 isn't compatible with (some) Firefox 2 extensions. But then again, Firefox 3 is a whole new version... and it's still at release-candidate level. I've never had extensions break during an incremental upgrade, for instance. (If they become marked as incompatible, that's the fault of the extension author, who should have set compatibility as 2.* or whatever.)
2. I've never seen that. Normally it just downloads the incremental update and applies it on the next restart.
3. Well many of us happen to like the new functionality of the combined address-bar/search-bar. However, it's trivial to return to the old-style behavior if that's what you want (e.g. this). The same is true of most other changes. Firefox is very customizable.
4. Sorry to hear that it's unstable on your system. On the systems I use, Firefox 3 has been decidedly more stable than Firefox 2. Faster, too. From various things I've read, it sounds like the typical experience is that Firefox 3 is faster, more stable, and more robust than Firefox 2. But, as always, your mileage may vary.
5. Huh? When you try to exit, there is a single confirmation box, which can be disabled. It doesn't pop up "a thousand confirmations". Exaggerate much?
6. Huh? I've never had to re-download extensions when upgrading Firefox (even when installing a whole new version). The only time extensions re-download is when a new version of the extension is available. But... how exactly do you propose to get the new version without downloading it?
I'm sorry that you seem to be having troubles with Firefox. From what I can tell, this isn't a typical experience. Also, note that you're most welcome to keep using older versions if they suit you better.
The argument is basically "physical property is getting cheaper and cheaper to manufacture, making it a difficult field to compete in... so let's compete in a field where the manufacturing/duplication is even cheaper (almost zero, actually).
It will be quite interesting to see how economy and law change as manufacturing prices drop further, or if "object printers" become commonplace. The same silly arguments that are currently used to restrict duplication of information will surely be used by the entrenched players to justify monopolies on objects, and laws against object printers.
I think we are indeed driving towards a world where manufacturing and duplication (of objects or information) will not be the limited step: it will be design and creativity that will be limiting. I'm not at all convinced that our current models for "creativity-rewarding" (namely copyright and patents) are up to the task of maintaining the economy when that day comes.
My guess is that Obama really wants Clinton as a VP candidate. The reason is exactly what you mentioned: too many Clinton supporters are disillusioned for some reason. Many are pledging to not vote for Obama out of some kind of principle (even though his policies are more in-line with their beliefs than the other presidential candidate's).
If Obama has Clinton as a VP candidate, then all those votes reappear. Clinton supporters will vote in order to get Clinton into office in some capacity.
From Clinton's point of view, becoming the vice-president of the United States may be a concession, but it's still a very prestigious position. Moreover, being the first female US vice-president will guarantee her a spot in the history books.
Seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Perhaps more convincingly is the experimental confirmation of "odd and special" molecular geometries. Consider buckyballs, nanotubes, adamantane. A whole slew of strained ring-like and cage-like molecules have been synthesized. There are limits to what can be done, but the parameter space of stable compounds is immense. This question, as with many others, is addressed quantitatively in Drexler's book, "Nanosystems". He calculates rms displacements for typical structures, given the know effects of thermal vibrations and Brownian motion. His analysis indicates that these effects are not insurmountable for properly designed systems (e.g. sufficiently rigid and/or redundant).
He makes a variety of interesting points... but they all amount to "this might be a problem, so it might not work." That is a far cry from providing a detailed analysis that points out a fundamental flaw.
I'm not saying that I know for certain that the version of molecular nanotechnology proposed by Drexler (rigid diamondoid constructs) is feasible... but his case is well-reasoned and backed by quantitative calculations. To date, I've not seen a similar robust analysis contradicting his findings.
It's impossible to pick one right number... because it depends on many things. For one thing, the demographics for different sites are different, and there is undoubtedly a correlation between personal interests and selection of web-browser.
Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing the numbers. An overall share of 15% to 30% seems reasonable.
All that to say: I wouldn't worry too much about the exact numbers. What's more significant is the trends that can be seen across data-sets. Firefox had a rapid rise in popularity early on, but that leveled off. Rather than focus on an arbitrary threshold, like "breaks 20%!", I think the real story here is that Firefox usage continues to grow. Slowly but steadily the browser market is becoming more balanced.
This is significant, because a few years back, there was a real browser monopoly. I remember using the Firefox pre-1.0 betas, and many sites didn't work (they were tailor-made for IE). Nowadays, the vast majority of sites render perfectly in Firefox.
This is one of those cases where I think we won. Websites are more compliant than they once were. Alternate browsers are taken seriously. This is what we clamored for a few years ago... and we've largely achieved it!
So, in principle even the actions of griefers could be intelligently woven into the storyline. Any GM worth his salt knows how to rationalize the actions of players, and make things fit into the storyline. A really good GM can even move the story in such a way that griefers will genuinely participate (or at least give up).
So for instance disruptions could be attributed to 'rebels' or 'a virus that is making our men go insane' or whatever.
Of course, that doesn't mean that this will be properly done. But I'm just saying it's certainly possible to implement this idea in a way that show-offs and griefers don't ruin the storytelling for everyone else.
However, the management and marketing side is not to be dismissed so easily. A good management team will know how to balance everything: price, style, design, technical features, support, user experience, etc. Moreover good management will know how to focus engineering talent on the "important problems" instead of letting all that creativity be wasted on unrelated, fuzzy, pointless tangents. Good management will know how to use expert opinions, market data, and usability tests to pick out what the most successful products will be.
Put otherwise: I would bet that the engineers who work at Apple and those who work at Microsoft are both very, very talented. The difference is that Apple has a much more focused management system, so that the products they come up with are much more polished, and seem much more "innovative". (Even though Microsoft does come up with neat ideas--but often doesn't execute them to completion properly.)*
You may raise the argument that it's marketing and upper management's job to decide what will sell and what won't, but how many engineers do you know that aren't objective enough to judge their own ideas. An engineer working on a circuit board layout is certainly qualified to comment on the quality of his ideas about circuit board layout. And an engineer working on a software module can comment on how innovative his approach is. But, again, the purpose of management is to balance the resources allocated to the various portions of a "user experience" (product specs, price, interface, support, marketing, style, etc.). Engineers are generally not qualified to make these kinds of high-level decisions.
Management has its place. Plenty of managers don't do their jobs well, which leads to crappy products and ruins companies. Then again, there are also plenty of engineers who don't do their jobs well, missing deadlines and generating crappy code. For good products, you need a good team. (This is true in both closed-source and open-source efforts.)
([*] Some may argue that Apple vs. MS is a bad comparison in this case, because Microsoft is clearly bigger hence more "successful". But what I am discussing (and parent post, too, I think) is the quality of the product/user-experience/innovation.)
I only recently discovered hulu, so maybe it's the solution I'm looking for.
I don't have a TV, and recently I've been experimenting with watching TV on my computer. A number of networks have some of their shows online, available via Flash players (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc.). Some problems I immediately noticed were:
1. Most sites are heavily Flash-based, making it very difficult to navigate (or bookmark) the content you care about. I understand using Flash for the actual player, by why the navigation elements?
2. Having to go to 3 or 4 different sites to watch the 4 or 5 shows I care about was really inefficient. Each one has a different format, navigation style, and player.
3. Keeping track of what I've watched and haven't watched was somewhat annoying. When you watch normal TV, you just watch whatever they play. But when you're watching online, you have to keep track of which episodes you've seen (for each show)... and somehow find out when new episodes of your shows have aired. The sites do a very poor job of making it easy to find this out. You usually have to go all the way to loading the player, watching an ad, and viewing the start of an episode before you can figure out if you've already seen it. (So, of course, I would use Wikipedia to keep track of all this information.)
Clearly what is needed is a site that unifies the experience. Hulu might be that site. It groups content from multiple networks, so that you don't have to go all over the place. It provides cleaner navigation (mostly HTML), and RSS feeds for keeping track of things you care about. I also notice they have optional user accounts... so I'll be interested to find out if that allows you to keep track of shows you're watching, and maybe even get recommendations?
There are still many ways in which the viewing experience is not optimal (it's Flash buffering, after all: you can't save it to watch later, and network congestion kills it... especially if you try to watch fullscreen). But convergent sites like Hulu are, in my opinion, an important step towards actual "on demand" convenient web-television. (Of course, it's still ridiculous that downloading via bit-torrent would give me the same shows, in a timely manner, at higher quality, and without ads.)
Agreed,a language being easy to install and start using can give it a huge boost in usage.
I would also note that community can have a huge effect. Obviously the size of a community will have a strong effect on whether usage of the language remains, grows, or shrinks. After all, you are more likely to learn a language if you hear about it, if it's used in many other projects, etc.
Additionally, community is important in terms of the amount of support you get. Languages with strong communities will have thousands of online tutorials, excellent forums that provide responsive help, freely available code snippets, plenty of libraries and add-ons, and so on. This kind of 'free support' is often more useful than even careful and exact core documentation.
As a personal example, I (have to) use a programing environment called "Igor Pro" at work. The language syntax bothers me a bit--but on the other hand it is specialized to do some of the things we need it to. But what I really hate about it is the lack of community. When I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I get nothing. When I try to find a pre-made package for a non-core feature, it doesn't exist.
Compare that to solving the same programming problem in, for example, Python. Even if it's not the optimal language, the fact that I get find tons of help online, and that there are so many community-developed packages and libraries, means that I can often solve the problem much faster.
When evaluating new languages (and new software products), I always take the time to find out what the community is like. It can make all the difference.
This article lists the US prices as:
Linux version: $560
WinXP version: $604
and the UK prices as:
Linux version: £320 (~630 USD)
WinXP version: £350 (~690 USD)
Actually, many of the pranks on the ZUG site are relevant to this current topic. In the credit card prank, he's able to sign credit card receipts with all kinds of ludicrous names (like "not authorized", or a picture of a house), and no one ever questions him about it.
All that to say that phone-based authentication questions and signing credit card receipts do remarkably little in terms of security.
The mouse may have originated as a kludge to replace a finger/hand ... but that's no longer what it is.
Similarly for a keyboard. It is not merely a kludge to replace a pen with a mechanical analogue. Even though we now have the technology for digital pens and handwriting recognition, it is still vastly faster (and less ambiguous) to type with a keyboard. (Not to mention the hand cramp most people would experience if they wrote by hand as much as they type in an average day.)
In terms of pointing devices, a mouse is better than pointing/touching directly with your hand/fingers. It's less tiring. You also don't occlude what you're pointing at. You can use the pointing device without looking down at your hand (since you can feel the mouse). It can directly incorporate additional interactions (right-click, mouse wheel). Despite the mouse's beginnings, it has stuck around mainly because it is a useful way to interact with a computer. You can try to replace the mouse with a more direct touch-based interface... but for many applications that interaction will be much less smooth than using a mouse.
I fully agree that there are some applications where touch surfaces are better. But I would be wary about throwing out the mouse and keyboard systems that we have now. Quite a bit of work has gone into optimizing their usage over the years, and it's not at all obvious that a touch surface can surpass our current efficiency with mouse/keyboard. (Hybrid approaches, like keyboards with built-in touch screen areas, seem more likely to be practically accepted in the short term, and ultimately efficient in the long term.)
Okay, this is slightly off-topic, but: Why is it that even with our modern hardware, graphics are sometimes still very laggy?
If you look at the start of the video in TFA, you'll see a demo where images are being dragged around via multi-touch. The thing that really bothers me is that the movement of the image is lagging behind the person's finger. My question is: why? Modern hardware is very fast and powerful. The demo computer probably had awesome specs, including a dedicated high-end graphics card. I have trouble believing that this kind of hardware can't update an image position at video rates.
The obvious answer is that the code isn't good. Perhaps it just hasn't been optimized (maybe it's just a tech demo). But frequently even in final implementations I see this kind of behavior.
One of the main ideas with multi-touch displays (and dragging to scroll, zoom, etc.) is to generate an "intuitive" interface that responds in a very "natural" way. But in my opinion, you totally ruin the desired natural immersion if the display cannot keep up with your actions. After all, the idea is to somewhat simulate physical interaction (e.g. shuffling papers)... but in physical reality, we don't experience any kind of "lag" waiting for physics to catch-up.
So, I think more effort should be put into cleaning up those kinds of things. It may seem like a trivial point, but those kinds of details can subtly but crucially affect the user experience (and can mean the difference between an interface that seems to respond to your thoughts, vs. one that is frustrating). I should note that this is an area where Apple has frequently done the right thing. They seem to put a lot of effort into making display transitions very fast and smooth.
Yeah it seems more like a test of how quickly you can Google for answers.
And as of now, Slashdot is ranked 15.
To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats. The sample sizes are probably so small that the ranks are just statistical artifacts of the scores of the few people coming from each site. Also I'm sure the average scores are highly skewed by people who start taking the test and then just get bored and randomly guess some answers to get it over with. For small samples, small aberrations (e.g. a few smart, stupid, or lazy users) can obviously greatly skew the average.
Stats are nearly meaningless without some estimation of the error bars (or at least mention of the sample size!). All that to say: I wouldn't take these stats too seriously! Moreover, it's likely that as more and more Slashdotters take the test, the average will drop further and further from its statistically-anomalous level, to a more reasonable average. (As would the other listed categories, if only more people took the test.)
(Note: that's all assuming the test itself is even a valid measure of IQ, which I find rather dubious.)
It's important to remember that you only need 1% of people (or even 0.1%) to have the knowledge and inclination to perform these mods, if it allows them to make unencrypted copies of the data. All you need is a small group of dedicated hackers who generate cracked copies of games, and release these in the usual way (bit-torrent, etc.). Just as movie release groups have a lot of specialized knowledge and connections, thereby making copyright infringement trivially easy for the masses, so too will anti-TPM groups appear, who will trivialize this kind of circumvention for the masses.
TPM doesn't make copyright infringement impossible. It merely adds another layer of complexity for the hackers. Alas, hackers enjoy the challenge of breaking through these layers.
So... what is going to happen to the old hardware? Are you going to going to scrap them? Hand them over to sourceforge? Sell them to another company?
Or auction them off to your readership for charity?
It's difficult to tell from the short summary how much his access has been restricted--but it sounds almost as if he's been so restricted that he can't even do things like documentation. He probably still has a user account with email, web browsing, and a word processor. But that's useless if you can't look over the codebase you're trying to document. It would be quite difficult to produce error-free documentation without being able to look over the internal code and organizational files.
Even read-only access to the codebase might not be enough, since proper documentation of course involves commenting code in conjunction with summary documents.
So your suggestion of doing documentation for the next few weeks might not be possible. (Again, it depends on how much his access has really been restricted.)
But if the original submitter is truly keen on contributing to the company in his last few weeks, then he should at least make the argument that he be given read-only access to the code, so that he can prepare sensible documentation. If they don't agree to that (perhaps they are afraid of him copying the code and taking it with him?), then there's not much you can do. Erroneous documentation can actually be worse than no documentation at all.