My kernel handles most of the work of an SMP system. All I have to do is split whatever I'm doing into either different threads or processes. No special effort needed. No special libs or programming languages needed. So unless the cluster can squeeze out considerably more performance than my SMP system it doesn't seem worth the effort. Now if you wanted to cluster four of our maxed SMP systems that might make more sense.
MOSIX is even dead now, as far as I can tell, so there goes our handy helper.:(
I'm to lazy to run the numbers tonight to compare actual speeds but our dual CPU four-core Xeon (8 cores total) servers cost around $2500 each to build. Looking at their specs I doubt they could be doing much better and they require special clusterish programming.
But why bother? As a whole, 3D games are less fun than older 2D games anyway. Your not going to be blown away by the amazing realism on a 2 inch screen anyway so why not play the games that are more fun? The vast majority of gamers still enjoy simple puzzle and arcade style games more than 3D so there is little benefit to going 3D.
Now - stick some VR goggles on a phone and I'd love to see some killer 3D built-in. Or even some sort of holographic projector would call for 3D. That'd be sweet.;)
I used to have a text-based RPG (ie a MUD) that could predict major events for players or groups of players. It was sort of cool. We had an Oracle that you could visit and it'd predict battles, deaths, etc. We'd record when things happened and then let our program find patterns in it. Of course it wasn't 100% accurate (and couldn't say who'd do what in the next few seconds) but it worked well enough to give you an idea of things likely to happen soon. The fuzziness played along well with the theme of a fortune teller. I keep waiting for a graphical RPG to add such a toy as I think it'd be appreciated by players.
The only albums I still buy are from Weird Al. A cool enough guy to give away songs on his website and to make a song called "Don't Download this Song" which pokes fun at the message being delivered by the RIAA (and MPAA). I'll drop $250 to go to a Weird Al concert before I'd spend $15 on someone elses crappy DRM'd CD.
How long until the RIAA, MPAA, etc start suing people for creating their own content and giving it away? If the telco cartel can get laws passed so that American's can't form co-ops or have the local government provide broadband then what hope do we have that it can't be made illegal for us to provide our own content? After all, producing quality content is the same as stealing from the cartel.
I disagree with the N-Gage being a bad concept. I have an N-Gage and enjoy it a lot and constantly have people who want to try it. The only reason the N-Gage didn't do better is that they sold it mostly at game outlets rather than at phone outlets and they never really advertised it or explained what it was. The only people who saw that the N-Gage existed were at a game store - if gaming was their priority they probably didn't want an N-Gage whereas if they wanted a solid cell phone with good gaming then N-Gage would have been great for them.
Slap a Sidekick-like flip-out keyboard, a built-in camera, and better MP3 support into the N-Gage and you'd have a definite winner. It does games well and it functions as a phone well (far less issues than popular phones like the Razr). As a gaming platform, it is handy because it is in your phone so you always have it with you, has a decent sound and picture, is comfortable to play, and you can buy games on actual disks and not as downloads that you'll lose when your phone dies. As a phone, it gets a good signal, has decent battery life, is pretty comfortable to use (especially for bigger people like myself). It has a built-in MMC slot which is something that until recently has been very hard to find on American phones. It works really well as a wireless modem with it's built-in bluetooth. The games for N-Gage are actually pretty good. IMO there is little point to 3D games on something as small as a phone anyway. Worms Armageddon is awesome on N-Gage, my wife likes several of the platform games, and her little brother likes Tony Hawk and Tiger Woods Golfing. The original Gameboy rules the world of portable gaming for years and it was never the fanciest gaming platform. It's not all about 3D.
N-Gage fixed the cell phone gaming problem but due to bad marketing nobody knew it existed. The only real negative it had, after getting rid of side talking, is that it didn't have a built-in camera.
LoTR was about as faithful as you're going to get from a movie version of a book. A totally different universe than how HP or Narnia was turned into movies. I would have liked if they'd thrown in the hobbit wars and some bits like that but I'll disagree if you claim the movies didn't have a dark feeling to them. They let you feel things were hopeless and doomed for a good part of the 9+ hours of the movies which is pretty good. LoTR changed a few things - mostly to leave out side tales not important to the main plot - but mostly stuck to the storyline and the feel of the story. The Harry Potter movies from 3 onwards mangled the plot so badly that you can't even follow along without having read the books and is annoying then because it doesn't follow the books well at all. The HP movies also totally change the personality of the characters. Sucks.
iRobot wasn't that bad but it wasn't based on the story it was named after. It was more like other of Asimov's stuff. Some of Asimov's stuff is to strange (if interesting) to be made into movies anyway. I remember one especially where every character was a blob of goo. Some books just aren't meant to be movies.
My parents are that kind of nutcases - never even read HP or even seen the movies but they know it's pure evil because their Baptist church showed them a sensationalized film casting HP as real witchcraft and devil worship. Of course they could never understand my arguments that they raised their kids watching Wizard of Oz and all kinds of similar stuff. Retarded church groups that need to create witch hunts to feel okay about themselves.
Unless you have an app that needs to be very tightly written I think the easiest way to write a scalable app is just to break the app down into components that can each be on their own server or duplicated across multiple servers. If each component isn't keeping state for itself then it doesn't matter which copy of a given component you make a request on so you can split tasks between copies with simple load balancing techniques. This also helps keep your application code clean as it makes you keep your components discrete.
I perfer to create a pool of each component in virtual machines and then let VMWare manage the cluster of virtual machines - moving the VMs to the appropiate physical machines as needed to keep performance at peak. I'd suggest one copy of each component per physical machine you have. A lot easier than trying to measure everything and guess where problem areas will be (of course using both methods together is better).
I let my components communicate with each other using XML-RPC. You can use SOAP but I find XML-RPC to be more lightweight and easy to use. Individual components can be written in different languages and even run on different operating systems. Just use whatever tools make the most sense for each component. This is especially good with web apps as it makes it easy to create alternative interfaces. The web-UI becomes a thin, to-the-point, component and it's easy to write alternative UIs for mobile devices, desktop applications, command-line access, etc.
The only real blocking point is when you need to work with large amounts of data. You can use a clustering db to spread the load across multiple machines. You can also break database use up into it's own logical components. If two tables aren't logically connected then there is no reason you can't put those tables in different databases on different physical machines. Some basic tactics such as having one database for data crunching and another for caching and storing session data can be pretty effective. You've already split your application into components so it isn't to hard to see that those different components don't usually need to do everything in a single database.
Being broken into components running in their own virtual machines makes it pretty easy to address availability too. Component pools can detect when an individual component is having issues, isolate it, restart it, replace it, alert an admin, etc.
I agree. WB totally ruined the Harry Potter movies so that any true fan is disgusted. I wouldn't trust them to do any better with the Oz books. Better to give Oz to Peter Jackson. At least LoTR was done well.
I've long advocated a similar plan. I especially think it'd be great to offer to pay people through medical school if they'd work every nth year at a cost of living wage while they either taught or offered affordable healthcare. More people could afford to become doctors and to offer their services at a lower cost if not paying back substantial student loans.
Free education would be one step towards low cost, or possibly socialized, medicine. Of course you'd also want to create incentives to drive healthcare related research (free education in bioscience, shorter patents on drugs and medical related IP, etc), cut red tape, decrease absurd litigation and the related insurance needed by doctors, and bring healthcare insurance under control.
Free education and healthcare are two staples of a civilized society IMHO. Educated, healthy citizens are going to be more productive than uneducated, sickly citizens. Limited natural resources is not much of an issue for our society but limited, properly trained, human resources is a major issue. We need to stop being penny wise and pound stupid and do what it takes to make every citizen as useful as possible. We might make lower wages but things will get cheaper and better so we'll all end up better off. Rather than creating wealth at the top of our society and letting it trickle down I think it makes more sense to raise the average quality of life and pull our entire society up by it's bootstraps.
If you've studied phone networks then you're probably aware that a lot of the complexity in the system is related to billing - simply switching to a flat billing model would immediately make their network a lot cheaper, easier to manage, and more robust. If you include the savings on staff, paperwork, etc it'd have to be a staggering amount of savings. Some day a cell phone company will get bright and offer a flat plan similar to what a lot of VoIP companies offer.
Of course after having worked at Cingular / AT&T I don't think they are going to be the ones to make that breakthrough. The nitwits can't even figure out how to make their internal documentation search work correctly (it's almost impossible to find any useful information) despite people like me advising them of easy solutions like going with a Google Search Appliance. Month after month they whine about how they're falling in customer satisfaction but they keep raising their fees for things like text messaging which can't have gone up in price for them to provide. They're out of tune with their employees, customers, providers, and damn near everyone else.
I think the root issue is that at every level of the Internet bandwidth capability isn't growing to expected needs and because of that, and pure greed, it isn't possible for ISPs to offer true unlimited accounts or true broadband speeds comparable to our friends in Japan and similar places.
A lot of this comes down to a couple factors here in the US.
A) The people supplying our networks don't want us to have true broadband. These people provide television, telecommunications, etc and they have a conflict of interests with being a basic network provider.
B) It worked a lot better for our network providers to take huge amounts of tax dollars and never deliver anything. They made lots of money and delivered very little. A perfect example of big government and big business at work.
C) Our network providers and government have been making an effort to take away the right of non-profits, co-ops, and municipalities to offer network services at better speeds and prices. They don't want competition - especially not competition that could bring up questions about why our spent tax dollars didn't deliver anything useful or that would put at risk big business tv and phones.
D) ISPs are stupid and have largely chosen not to provide local versions of popular network apps and web services. They haven't even worked with content providers to provide local caching of content. If 100 customers on your local network a day are downloading pretty much the same content from YouTube then that is an easy place to cut bandwidth usage. Instead of fighting BitTorrent why not host a file sharing site on the local network. Most ISPs don't even provide a standard web cache any more. Doh.
Be glad your not an employee. When I worked at Cingular it was a nightmare when customers called in and wanted you to explain their bills. It's so complex and ass backwards that often nobody that works for Cingular can even tell you what it all means. It's pretty stupid when you have to pow wow with two or three managers to get a decent guess at what the bill is trying to say. It's a definate case of information overload being used to hide the real content from customers.
Wouldn't a random noise file, unencrypted, seem to random to be likely? It'd seem data passed through an encrypter would be less random although I realize they try to make it seem random.
Which is why we need lots of people to do it and be public about doing it. Now if they doubt me I can point to this Slashdot conversation as proof that I did intend to encrypt random noise just to mess with them.
And of course the only real way to win in US courts - make everything public and noisy and get someone with real money to hire you some good lawyers and make a big stink.
If it's encrypted they can't prove it's a document though. Can they legally require you to have a key? What if I lost or purposely deleted the key? It's no worse than having a collection of safes with missing keys - the govt can do their best to break into each one to see if anything is inside but can they demand you not own a safe with a missing key? There is no way to prove something is lost other than not being able to find it. So if they don't find your keys then they can't prove you have a key at all.
I encrypt everything just so if they ever investigate me, for whatever stupid reason they might decide to, they can demand the key and I can refuse. It's the principal of the thing. Why should we give up our privacy? What if I just want to encrpyt files by a random one time key and then erase the key? Maybe that constitutes digital art to me.
I encourage everyone to generate files containing nothing but random noise, encrypt those files, and throw away the key. If everyone does this then they can't tell what is a real encrypted file and what isn't. For good measure email some of these random files back and forth with suspicious subject lines.
The problem with black backgrounds is that it is considered unprofessional because it is most often used by sites trying to look cool. It remains the best background color because it is way easier on your eyes. I avoid using a white background unless my clients demand it.
Non-geeks remain horrified when they see how much green text on black I use in my personal desktop choices. It makes a dramatic difference at lowering eye strain though. Luckily, thanks to personal stylesheets, you can recolor just about any website to be a lovely shade of green on black. Or, for the less talented, you can get a vintage 1980's monitor to achieve the same effect.
I don't see a line between web apps and web design. It sounds, mostly, as if HTML5 is being advertised as having a few more fancy widgets. That's great but for the most part you can already achieve the same result without HTML5. It's more work and requires functional Javascript and CSS to make it work but you can do pretty complex widgets already.
I have no problem adding more tags to HTML but I do hope they remember the number of tags they've previously introduced which have added almost no value and which largely went ignored. Before adding to the complexity of HTML they need to look at what is really wrong with HTML first and make an effort to fix those things. Fancier form elements just wouldn't be that high on my list of priorities.
XSLT sucks. I used it in all my projects when it first became big and the truth is that the complexity it added was far more than it was worth. I'm sure it has value to someone but for website design it's like using a jet engine to power a lawn mower. It's just not the right solution for the job. Also you shouldn't need to create different XML/XHTML/HTML/whatever for every different browser. I'm a firm believer that your HTML should stay the same with the differences handled by your stylesheet. It wouldn't even work correctly to have it respond to size changes this way as you'd have to reload the page before you could respond. Right now I can use Javascript and CSS to respond instantly. I'd just like to not require Javascript for a display issue. Shoveling a complex load of XML/XSLT at the user and expecting their browser to sort things out isn't very realistic either. We're still having trouble getting browsers to render HTML4/CSS2 correctly and we're gonna start throwing totally new stuff out there?
I always attach Javascript through the head portion of my HTML and it works just fine. You can apply it to any elements in your page but it just needs to be applied correctly rather than making messy code inline in the HTML body. Doing it this way will make it far easier to keep your code easy to maintain too. I don't see why you'd need to cache anything - I never need to. I wouldn't force such a thing onto developers either - I'd make it as an optional meta tag in the header to select the security model. Of course I'd allow users to force the security model too - able to disallow Javascript in the body for their own protection.
If you haven't ran into issues with audio or video I'd guess you haven't tried creating many multimedia web apps. Just attaching a mp3 as a link is not a solution to a case such as an XHTML/CSS/Javascript based arcade game where you need to be able to start and stop multiple sounds as events happen. Right now the only real solution is to use a Flash-based sound manager that can be controlled with Javascript. Given that a lot of users don't have Flash this is a less than ideal solution. You don't need to use Flash for the entire app - just for the sound manager but still isn't perfect. (This is how Google has GMail produce sounds though - e.g. when using Google Talk and you have a waiting message.) You can do just about any complex form element, with some work, without resorting to Flash, Java, etc. You can't do sound without them right now. So I'd rate audio and video as more important.
Making new web standards is mostly pointless if IE won't support them and we continue to develop to the crappiest common platform. Even if we get everything we all want in HTML5 we still won't be able to use it for the enxt decade.
What slowed me way down was the need to actually pay rent. Working crappy jobs will just destroy your mind. You go from spending all your time learning and creating to doing the bidding of some PHB. Usually this involves going from creating wonderful new things to creating yet another iteration of some existing thing.
The gf/wife/family makes you less likely to work on your own projects but doesn't really impact your learning. You just no longer have any spare time or money to work on your own stuff with. Between the family and the job you just can't sit and bash out code or make cool electronics from 30 hours at a time anymore. With what I know now, as an adult, of technology, business, and human behavior I could probably make a fortune if I had the time and money to actually work on stuff like I did when I was a teenager. A good week or two of coding and I could probably make something worth several million dollars at least. But that probably isn't going to happen because even if I could get my family to leave me alone for that long I'd still end up going to find them. Creating wonderful things is no longer my first love.
Slashdot Mirror
My kernel handles most of the work of an SMP system. All I have to do is split whatever I'm doing into either different threads or processes. No special effort needed. No special libs or programming languages needed. So unless the cluster can squeeze out considerably more performance than my SMP system it doesn't seem worth the effort. Now if you wanted to cluster four of our maxed SMP systems that might make more sense.
:(
MOSIX is even dead now, as far as I can tell, so there goes our handy helper.
I'm to lazy to run the numbers tonight to compare actual speeds but our dual CPU four-core Xeon (8 cores total) servers cost around $2500 each to build. Looking at their specs I doubt they could be doing much better and they require special clusterish programming.
But why bother? As a whole, 3D games are less fun than older 2D games anyway. Your not going to be blown away by the amazing realism on a 2 inch screen anyway so why not play the games that are more fun? The vast majority of gamers still enjoy simple puzzle and arcade style games more than 3D so there is little benefit to going 3D.
;)
Now - stick some VR goggles on a phone and I'd love to see some killer 3D built-in. Or even some sort of holographic projector would call for 3D. That'd be sweet.
I used to have a text-based RPG (ie a MUD) that could predict major events for players or groups of players. It was sort of cool. We had an Oracle that you could visit and it'd predict battles, deaths, etc. We'd record when things happened and then let our program find patterns in it. Of course it wasn't 100% accurate (and couldn't say who'd do what in the next few seconds) but it worked well enough to give you an idea of things likely to happen soon. The fuzziness played along well with the theme of a fortune teller. I keep waiting for a graphical RPG to add such a toy as I think it'd be appreciated by players.
The only albums I still buy are from Weird Al. A cool enough guy to give away songs on his website and to make a song called "Don't Download this Song" which pokes fun at the message being delivered by the RIAA (and MPAA). I'll drop $250 to go to a Weird Al concert before I'd spend $15 on someone elses crappy DRM'd CD.
How long until the RIAA, MPAA, etc start suing people for creating their own content and giving it away? If the telco cartel can get laws passed so that American's can't form co-ops or have the local government provide broadband then what hope do we have that it can't be made illegal for us to provide our own content? After all, producing quality content is the same as stealing from the cartel.
I disagree with the N-Gage being a bad concept. I have an N-Gage and enjoy it a lot and constantly have people who want to try it. The only reason the N-Gage didn't do better is that they sold it mostly at game outlets rather than at phone outlets and they never really advertised it or explained what it was. The only people who saw that the N-Gage existed were at a game store - if gaming was their priority they probably didn't want an N-Gage whereas if they wanted a solid cell phone with good gaming then N-Gage would have been great for them.
Slap a Sidekick-like flip-out keyboard, a built-in camera, and better MP3 support into the N-Gage and you'd have a definite winner. It does games well and it functions as a phone well (far less issues than popular phones like the Razr). As a gaming platform, it is handy because it is in your phone so you always have it with you, has a decent sound and picture, is comfortable to play, and you can buy games on actual disks and not as downloads that you'll lose when your phone dies. As a phone, it gets a good signal, has decent battery life, is pretty comfortable to use (especially for bigger people like myself). It has a built-in MMC slot which is something that until recently has been very hard to find on American phones. It works really well as a wireless modem with it's built-in bluetooth. The games for N-Gage are actually pretty good. IMO there is little point to 3D games on something as small as a phone anyway. Worms Armageddon is awesome on N-Gage, my wife likes several of the platform games, and her little brother likes Tony Hawk and Tiger Woods Golfing. The original Gameboy rules the world of portable gaming for years and it was never the fanciest gaming platform. It's not all about 3D.
N-Gage fixed the cell phone gaming problem but due to bad marketing nobody knew it existed. The only real negative it had, after getting rid of side talking, is that it didn't have a built-in camera.
LoTR was about as faithful as you're going to get from a movie version of a book. A totally different universe than how HP or Narnia was turned into movies. I would have liked if they'd thrown in the hobbit wars and some bits like that but I'll disagree if you claim the movies didn't have a dark feeling to them. They let you feel things were hopeless and doomed for a good part of the 9+ hours of the movies which is pretty good. LoTR changed a few things - mostly to leave out side tales not important to the main plot - but mostly stuck to the storyline and the feel of the story. The Harry Potter movies from 3 onwards mangled the plot so badly that you can't even follow along without having read the books and is annoying then because it doesn't follow the books well at all. The HP movies also totally change the personality of the characters. Sucks.
iRobot wasn't that bad but it wasn't based on the story it was named after. It was more like other of Asimov's stuff. Some of Asimov's stuff is to strange (if interesting) to be made into movies anyway. I remember one especially where every character was a blob of goo. Some books just aren't meant to be movies.
My parents are that kind of nutcases - never even read HP or even seen the movies but they know it's pure evil because their Baptist church showed them a sensationalized film casting HP as real witchcraft and devil worship. Of course they could never understand my arguments that they raised their kids watching Wizard of Oz and all kinds of similar stuff. Retarded church groups that need to create witch hunts to feel okay about themselves.
Unless you have an app that needs to be very tightly written I think the easiest way to write a scalable app is just to break the app down into components that can each be on their own server or duplicated across multiple servers. If each component isn't keeping state for itself then it doesn't matter which copy of a given component you make a request on so you can split tasks between copies with simple load balancing techniques. This also helps keep your application code clean as it makes you keep your components discrete.
I perfer to create a pool of each component in virtual machines and then let VMWare manage the cluster of virtual machines - moving the VMs to the appropiate physical machines as needed to keep performance at peak. I'd suggest one copy of each component per physical machine you have. A lot easier than trying to measure everything and guess where problem areas will be (of course using both methods together is better).
I let my components communicate with each other using XML-RPC. You can use SOAP but I find XML-RPC to be more lightweight and easy to use. Individual components can be written in different languages and even run on different operating systems. Just use whatever tools make the most sense for each component. This is especially good with web apps as it makes it easy to create alternative interfaces. The web-UI becomes a thin, to-the-point, component and it's easy to write alternative UIs for mobile devices, desktop applications, command-line access, etc.
The only real blocking point is when you need to work with large amounts of data. You can use a clustering db to spread the load across multiple machines. You can also break database use up into it's own logical components. If two tables aren't logically connected then there is no reason you can't put those tables in different databases on different physical machines. Some basic tactics such as having one database for data crunching and another for caching and storing session data can be pretty effective. You've already split your application into components so it isn't to hard to see that those different components don't usually need to do everything in a single database.
Being broken into components running in their own virtual machines makes it pretty easy to address availability too. Component pools can detect when an individual component is having issues, isolate it, restart it, replace it, alert an admin, etc.
I agree. WB totally ruined the Harry Potter movies so that any true fan is disgusted. I wouldn't trust them to do any better with the Oz books. Better to give Oz to Peter Jackson. At least LoTR was done well.
I've long advocated a similar plan. I especially think it'd be great to offer to pay people through medical school if they'd work every nth year at a cost of living wage while they either taught or offered affordable healthcare. More people could afford to become doctors and to offer their services at a lower cost if not paying back substantial student loans.
Free education would be one step towards low cost, or possibly socialized, medicine. Of course you'd also want to create incentives to drive healthcare related research (free education in bioscience, shorter patents on drugs and medical related IP, etc), cut red tape, decrease absurd litigation and the related insurance needed by doctors, and bring healthcare insurance under control.
Free education and healthcare are two staples of a civilized society IMHO. Educated, healthy citizens are going to be more productive than uneducated, sickly citizens. Limited natural resources is not much of an issue for our society but limited, properly trained, human resources is a major issue. We need to stop being penny wise and pound stupid and do what it takes to make every citizen as useful as possible. We might make lower wages but things will get cheaper and better so we'll all end up better off. Rather than creating wealth at the top of our society and letting it trickle down I think it makes more sense to raise the average quality of life and pull our entire society up by it's bootstraps.
I think they've got to many mixed interests now. It's became a case of the fox guarding the hen house.
If you've studied phone networks then you're probably aware that a lot of the complexity in the system is related to billing - simply switching to a flat billing model would immediately make their network a lot cheaper, easier to manage, and more robust. If you include the savings on staff, paperwork, etc it'd have to be a staggering amount of savings. Some day a cell phone company will get bright and offer a flat plan similar to what a lot of VoIP companies offer.
Of course after having worked at Cingular / AT&T I don't think they are going to be the ones to make that breakthrough. The nitwits can't even figure out how to make their internal documentation search work correctly (it's almost impossible to find any useful information) despite people like me advising them of easy solutions like going with a Google Search Appliance. Month after month they whine about how they're falling in customer satisfaction but they keep raising their fees for things like text messaging which can't have gone up in price for them to provide. They're out of tune with their employees, customers, providers, and damn near everyone else.
I think the root issue is that at every level of the Internet bandwidth capability isn't growing to expected needs and because of that, and pure greed, it isn't possible for ISPs to offer true unlimited accounts or true broadband speeds comparable to our friends in Japan and similar places.
A lot of this comes down to a couple factors here in the US.
A) The people supplying our networks don't want us to have true broadband. These people provide television, telecommunications, etc and they have a conflict of interests with being a basic network provider.
B) It worked a lot better for our network providers to take huge amounts of tax dollars and never deliver anything. They made lots of money and delivered very little. A perfect example of big government and big business at work.
C) Our network providers and government have been making an effort to take away the right of non-profits, co-ops, and municipalities to offer network services at better speeds and prices. They don't want competition - especially not competition that could bring up questions about why our spent tax dollars didn't deliver anything useful or that would put at risk big business tv and phones.
D) ISPs are stupid and have largely chosen not to provide local versions of popular network apps and web services. They haven't even worked with content providers to provide local caching of content. If 100 customers on your local network a day are downloading pretty much the same content from YouTube then that is an easy place to cut bandwidth usage. Instead of fighting BitTorrent why not host a file sharing site on the local network. Most ISPs don't even provide a standard web cache any more. Doh.
Be glad your not an employee. When I worked at Cingular it was a nightmare when customers called in and wanted you to explain their bills. It's so complex and ass backwards that often nobody that works for Cingular can even tell you what it all means. It's pretty stupid when you have to pow wow with two or three managers to get a decent guess at what the bill is trying to say. It's a definate case of information overload being used to hide the real content from customers.
Never was a fan of WG. His vision of the future was always blurry. Ask me, I can tell you the future. Any true geek can.
If the key was deleted before anyone asked for it? Again, that's like punishing you for lossing your key to a safe.
Wouldn't a random noise file, unencrypted, seem to random to be likely? It'd seem data passed through an encrypter would be less random although I realize they try to make it seem random.
Which is why we need lots of people to do it and be public about doing it. Now if they doubt me I can point to this Slashdot conversation as proof that I did intend to encrypt random noise just to mess with them.
And of course the only real way to win in US courts - make everything public and noisy and get someone with real money to hire you some good lawyers and make a big stink.
If it's encrypted they can't prove it's a document though. Can they legally require you to have a key? What if I lost or purposely deleted the key? It's no worse than having a collection of safes with missing keys - the govt can do their best to break into each one to see if anything is inside but can they demand you not own a safe with a missing key? There is no way to prove something is lost other than not being able to find it. So if they don't find your keys then they can't prove you have a key at all.
I encrypt everything just so if they ever investigate me, for whatever stupid reason they might decide to, they can demand the key and I can refuse. It's the principal of the thing. Why should we give up our privacy? What if I just want to encrpyt files by a random one time key and then erase the key? Maybe that constitutes digital art to me.
I encourage everyone to generate files containing nothing but random noise, encrypt those files, and throw away the key. If everyone does this then they can't tell what is a real encrypted file and what isn't. For good measure email some of these random files back and forth with suspicious subject lines.
The problem with black backgrounds is that it is considered unprofessional because it is most often used by sites trying to look cool. It remains the best background color because it is way easier on your eyes. I avoid using a white background unless my clients demand it.
Non-geeks remain horrified when they see how much green text on black I use in my personal desktop choices. It makes a dramatic difference at lowering eye strain though. Luckily, thanks to personal stylesheets, you can recolor just about any website to be a lovely shade of green on black. Or, for the less talented, you can get a vintage 1980's monitor to achieve the same effect.
I don't see a line between web apps and web design. It sounds, mostly, as if HTML5 is being advertised as having a few more fancy widgets. That's great but for the most part you can already achieve the same result without HTML5. It's more work and requires functional Javascript and CSS to make it work but you can do pretty complex widgets already.
I have no problem adding more tags to HTML but I do hope they remember the number of tags they've previously introduced which have added almost no value and which largely went ignored. Before adding to the complexity of HTML they need to look at what is really wrong with HTML first and make an effort to fix those things. Fancier form elements just wouldn't be that high on my list of priorities.
XSLT sucks. I used it in all my projects when it first became big and the truth is that the complexity it added was far more than it was worth. I'm sure it has value to someone but for website design it's like using a jet engine to power a lawn mower. It's just not the right solution for the job. Also you shouldn't need to create different XML/XHTML/HTML/whatever for every different browser. I'm a firm believer that your HTML should stay the same with the differences handled by your stylesheet. It wouldn't even work correctly to have it respond to size changes this way as you'd have to reload the page before you could respond. Right now I can use Javascript and CSS to respond instantly. I'd just like to not require Javascript for a display issue. Shoveling a complex load of XML/XSLT at the user and expecting their browser to sort things out isn't very realistic either. We're still having trouble getting browsers to render HTML4/CSS2 correctly and we're gonna start throwing totally new stuff out there?
I always attach Javascript through the head portion of my HTML and it works just fine. You can apply it to any elements in your page but it just needs to be applied correctly rather than making messy code inline in the HTML body. Doing it this way will make it far easier to keep your code easy to maintain too. I don't see why you'd need to cache anything - I never need to. I wouldn't force such a thing onto developers either - I'd make it as an optional meta tag in the header to select the security model. Of course I'd allow users to force the security model too - able to disallow Javascript in the body for their own protection.
If you haven't ran into issues with audio or video I'd guess you haven't tried creating many multimedia web apps. Just attaching a mp3 as a link is not a solution to a case such as an XHTML/CSS/Javascript based arcade game where you need to be able to start and stop multiple sounds as events happen. Right now the only real solution is to use a Flash-based sound manager that can be controlled with Javascript. Given that a lot of users don't have Flash this is a less than ideal solution. You don't need to use Flash for the entire app - just for the sound manager but still isn't perfect. (This is how Google has GMail produce sounds though - e.g. when using Google Talk and you have a waiting message.) You can do just about any complex form element, with some work, without resorting to Flash, Java, etc. You can't do sound without them right now. So I'd rate audio and video as more important.
Making new web standards is mostly pointless if IE won't support them and we continue to develop to the crappiest common platform. Even if we get everything we all want in HTML5 we still won't be able to use it for the enxt decade.
What slowed me way down was the need to actually pay rent. Working crappy jobs will just destroy your mind. You go from spending all your time learning and creating to doing the bidding of some PHB. Usually this involves going from creating wonderful new things to creating yet another iteration of some existing thing.
The gf/wife/family makes you less likely to work on your own projects but doesn't really impact your learning. You just no longer have any spare time or money to work on your own stuff with. Between the family and the job you just can't sit and bash out code or make cool electronics from 30 hours at a time anymore. With what I know now, as an adult, of technology, business, and human behavior I could probably make a fortune if I had the time and money to actually work on stuff like I did when I was a teenager. A good week or two of coding and I could probably make something worth several million dollars at least. But that probably isn't going to happen because even if I could get my family to leave me alone for that long I'd still end up going to find them. Creating wonderful things is no longer my first love.