I'm not sure bacon would be sufficient to keep people out (should you want to make a gated community), but it would be interesting. Bacon makes anything interesting. Except Gigli.
Some of that was rather amazing. The shot near the start from the external fuel tank of the shuttle separating was great. I've never seen a shot of that before.
The two shots from the solid rocket boosters as they separate from the external fuel tank were the most incredible. They were so clean (probably since they were out of the atmosphere, and the scale) that they looked like effect shots. If you showed that to me without the rest of the context, I'd think it was a CGI simulation of what it would look like. On the other hand, the shot from the shuttle when the external fuel tank drops off looks like high-quality film from the 60s or 70s, with lots of film grain.
Of course, anti-lock brakes aren't designed for Nascar. I wonder if a version could be developed that would help in those situations. It's designed for people without a ton of training, who are likely to panic in rare situations, on normal roads at normal speeds. You can't say "airplanes are terrible because you can't go under 5mph." They aren't meant for that.
But the analogy holds. If you know what you're doing, you can use managed code, or you can go unmanaged. Using managed code can be easier for routine things (like driving around town) even if you are a Nascar driver.
It also allows people to get farther than they would have before with mistakes and bad design.
The article didn't actually have much in it, it was Computer World after all, but it makes sense if you read it as visual programming tools instead of Visual Studio. The article seemed, as CW articles tend to, that it was a good article that was cut to 1/4 it's original size just because.
With today's libraries, a half-decent IDE can make a huge difference in productivity. But the comment about zooming in and out makes perfect sense if you think of the "I'll drag an IF block here, then wire it to the blah field..." kind of visual programming. The kind that people are always trying to make so that programming will be available to the "everyman". The kind that never works.
Hypercard is the closest I've ever seen this come to working well. It's so sad Apple never knew what to do with it. It was approachable, and for simple record keeping was rather easy. HyperScript worked very well and was extremely approachable, especially with it's ability to do things like "take word 5 of line 2 of textbox".
See that's the part of his post that I don't agree with at all, the 3rd paragraph. Word is not a programming language. It lets you markup text, but that's it. If you're talking about VBA, that's not Word, that's VBA. CSS doesn't begin to approach a programming language. Spreadsheets can be used that way, but they quickly become unwieldily.
I don't see how anyone could call Facebook a programming language. Could you explain that part of your comment? You can move things around and post messages, but there is no programing to it. You are limited to what is pre-scripted for you. You can't go searching for people who went to your high school between the ages of 20 and 25 who are still single and live within 250 miles of you. You can't even conditionally format people's post (i.e. highlight a specific friend, unless he posts more than X a day).
BAG's second paragraph I responded to in my comment, I simply disagree. The 3rd just seems like "how can I stretch stuff".
I mean, you can't take "So a programming language for interpretive dance would probably find the Natal very useful." line seriously, can you? Even if someone made it, it would be like whitespace, just a joke. The energy required to make even a simple Hello, World would make it useless for anything.
Wow. BadAnalagyGuy got an insightful. Someone didn't read the full comment.
Of course, this isn't true. The thing about end users is, they generally don't know what they want. Even if they had a tool that would do whatever they say, it won't solve their problem because they don't know how to formulate it. The tool would need to read their mind, to the point of making something they didn't even realize they really wanted.
Because you make much MUCH more money that way, at least until some A.G. shuts you down. Even if they were legit at some point (I don't remember), they are currently riding that edge between scummy and illegal. The money convinced someone it was worth it. It usually does.
But the ISPs don't make copies either. The end servers do. The ISPs just transport things.
I'm not arguing that taking movies off the 'net without paying for them isn't copyright infringement. I'm just arguing that the ISPs aren't doing it, they're just in the middle.
They don't get to add $500 "you paid off your card" fees. What amount are you talking about?
The high interest rates? You agreed to them in the contract. It was a one sided contract, but you agreed. You can pay off your loan at any time and get out of it.
Should credit cards be able to lend people $25k at 28% interest? Almost certainly not. Does that mean it's OK to take that money and then claim "it was unfair, I demand 7%"? No.
That's not true. At any point you can go to the credit card company and say "Here is the $3874 I owe you" and get out of your contract.
The terms are only unilaterally adjusted if you pay it off monthly. In that case, you're still in the loan, so of course your contract holds. They can't ignore the contract. You signify agreement to any changes by not canceling your account. If you've been using your credit responsibly, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you've been using it like a second source of income, yeah, you're screwed.
I do think many of the credit card company's practices are horrible, and some should be illegal. In fact, some are now (read: June 1st) thanks to the credit card reform that was passed. But it annoys me that so many people take on so much debt and then complain that they have to pay it off.
I don't see enough people taking responsibility, so I poked at your point that read that way to me.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it points out how this kind of rule is somewhat absurd. If the ISPs were directing customers to the illegal content, the argument would make perfect sense. But when acting as a simple data carrier, the argument doesn't hold water. You can't sue the post office. You can't sue AT&T because you called a scam company and told them your credit card. You can't sue Comcast because ABC news aired a report that upset you.
Now, it's illegal to use the post office for various crimes (thus postal fraud), and we could get laws like that. But asking the post office to inspect every letter/package sent to make sure it doesn't contain something illegal would be rejected outright. It's somewhat easier for ISPs since they don't need to physically open boxes/letters, but it is still a rather ridiculous request.
Your torrent site example is interesting, but those are basically catalogs. In a post office world, you sent a letter to the site asking for a catalog, and the post office sent it to you. The ISP is still a dumb pipe. Pretend that Colombia House used to sell pirated content. It's the same thing. Colombia house can get in trouble for doing it, and for using the post office to transport stolen goods, but the USPS (or UPS/FedEx if you prefer) isn't liable.
The best argument I could see against the ISPs is that they often advertise that their high speed connections will make online video better. If you assume most online video is stolen, they are technically advertising for it, but that's a stretch. There is tons of free video on YouTube that isn't stolen (cat clips, etc.), and free to view services (Hulu, etc.) that this doesn't hold water.
I always thought it was odd that the big ISPs advertised how their service was great for downloading music/MP3s years after the file sharing lawsuits started. "You can download MP3s 200x faster than dial-up! (but downloading 200x as many legal MP3s will cost you 200x as much)".
Now the argument that you would change your connection if you didn't download pirated content may hold true for you, but for many people it wouldn't. My parents don't download illegal stuff, but they like their high speed connection. As legal options increase (again Hulu, Amazon's service, iTunes, etc.) people have good reasons to want to keep high speed connections. Even for downloading family videos sent by other relatives/etc.
The thing that I find fun about all this is that ISPs are a dumb pipe. They need to be regulated like a dumb pipe, and priced like a dumb pipe. But they are trying so hard to not be a dumb pipe and pretend that they are better than everyone else because they have stupid service "X". Yet as soon as a lawsuit like this comes up, they go back to "You can't sue us, we're a dumb pipe". i would love it if these kind of lawsuits forced them to pick a side.
I can see a large market for this. It would be perfect for my Grandfather. He doesn't need photo editing or video capture. If he can turn the font size up, it would work great.
Best of all, no maintenance, nothing to install, nothing to configure and fiddle with, just an appliance. People already try to use computers like that, why shouldn't Google make that possible?
The netbook market is two markets squished into one. One is the cheap low power computer market (these things), and the other is the tiny market (something else). Windows is very heavy for just a little thing to surf. If you want a real laptop a tiny higher end netbook ($400-$500) is going to have the horsepower to be able to actually work well.
I agree with you and the other commenters that Google will push this. They may add some bits, and they'll make (or encourage others to make) web applications that can fill most people's needs. There is even 3D bindings so relatively simple games could run (and with WoW's 2004 era graphics, it may qualify too).
But that's the future. Google isn't pushing this for everyone for every purpose today, they're pushing it for this purpose. They want to grow up into a larger market (like x86), instead of taking the whole market over at once (which would be very VERY difficult).
For the near future (at least the next 12 months), this is a web-appliance OS.
The biggest near term threat to MS from this is if people buying these realize that a large number of them don't really need full computers, and the word spreads.
They are competing directly, but Google's friendlier. Google is making an appliance OS, where as SplashTop is designed as a light fast-booting OS.
But almost everyone is using a strawman (as Microsoft is). The point is not to replace Windows, it's an OS for web surfing. It's not for playing World of Warcraft, doing heavy photo editing, video editing, etc. Everyone is writing the "Google vs. Microsoft" article they want to write, instead of the tougher article about how Google is basically working to define a new class of computer (something of a netbook that's not running a general OS).
It's web-TV, but not on TV and not horrible. It's an email appliance OS that lets you read the web pages people link to in their emails.
It's not/. bias. Every place I've seen reporting the study has had the same headline, even the Mac sites (who give it names like "Deeper look into the poor apple reliability story"). Actually, since the headline is about netbooks, this is relatively unsensational for/. I hadn't seen the netbook bit because most sites have been going with the Apple angle.
Now the Mac sites have a different spin. They say that the rate is still pretty close (it's not like Apple is behind 10%"), and point out that Apple is still ahead of most PCs sold (HP/Dell/etc.). All this really says is Apple isn't number one, and I don't think that's really a surprise for anyone. Apple makes good stuff, but they do issue recalls from time to time.
There are two ways to frame the data. The logical way (Asus #1, or some such) and the sensationalist way that gets views (Apple sucks!). Guess which one every outlet chose.
He created a multinational project of cooperation between tons of people all over the globe and made a project that has helped change the computer industry and lower costs, making computing more affordable for everyone. Sounds good to me.
That's a lot better than saying you'll do things but not having done them yet.
He'll never win. The prize is very political, and I doubt they would give it to someone who isn't in their group of admired people. As a PR tool, it could be much more valuable to give it to someone else.
Are there better candidates? I'd certainly expect so. But look at the list of winners. While some are obviously good (Doctors Without Borders, The Dalai Llama) others are much more questionable.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. The test over at Quirksmode shows the various versions of WebKit to be very different, even between mobile and desktop Safari.
I don't think the GSM Pre has been released yet, so there may be no Pre over in the UK. That may be why it wasn't tested.
Well, it's not flying airplanes full of people. They've copied a system that seems to work well, and they are testing it for ultra-small UAVs. They'll get a better idea of how it works then.
There are many things people have used throughout history without understanding how they work. Salt preservation is ancient, but we didn't discover the bacteria it kills until the last 200 years.
Sometimes, "works" is good enough. And works often leads to understands.
I think this is really cool. We've been trying to do this kind of thing for years. The fly does it with a tiny-micro-fraction of the resources we were using, and does a much MUCH better job. By testing this system, perhaps we'll find out WHY our systems are tricked by certain stimulus and this one isn't.
It's not like they put a bunch of stuff together and said "this works, as far as we can tell", they took a proven system and copied it.
Slashdot Mirror
MeatGate? What kind of meat? Bacon?
ThinkGeek Tactical Bacon?
I'm not sure bacon would be sufficient to keep people out (should you want to make a gated community), but it would be interesting. Bacon makes anything interesting. Except Gigli.
Here is a mirror of the PDF: mirror. It was put up by the guy who discovered this, I'm just copying the link.
User/password is "guest" and "guest".
Be warned, it's about 25MB.
Some of that was rather amazing. The shot near the start from the external fuel tank of the shuttle separating was great. I've never seen a shot of that before.
The two shots from the solid rocket boosters as they separate from the external fuel tank were the most incredible. They were so clean (probably since they were out of the atmosphere, and the scale) that they looked like effect shots. If you showed that to me without the rest of the context, I'd think it was a CGI simulation of what it would look like. On the other hand, the shot from the shuttle when the external fuel tank drops off looks like high-quality film from the 60s or 70s, with lots of film grain.
Very very cool.
Of course, anti-lock brakes aren't designed for Nascar. I wonder if a version could be developed that would help in those situations. It's designed for people without a ton of training, who are likely to panic in rare situations, on normal roads at normal speeds. You can't say "airplanes are terrible because you can't go under 5mph." They aren't meant for that.
But the analogy holds. If you know what you're doing, you can use managed code, or you can go unmanaged. Using managed code can be easier for routine things (like driving around town) even if you are a Nascar driver.
It also allows people to get farther than they would have before with mistakes and bad design.
The article didn't actually have much in it, it was Computer World after all, but it makes sense if you read it as visual programming tools instead of Visual Studio. The article seemed, as CW articles tend to, that it was a good article that was cut to 1/4 it's original size just because.
With today's libraries, a half-decent IDE can make a huge difference in productivity. But the comment about zooming in and out makes perfect sense if you think of the "I'll drag an IF block here, then wire it to the blah field..." kind of visual programming. The kind that people are always trying to make so that programming will be available to the "everyman". The kind that never works.
Hypercard is the closest I've ever seen this come to working well. It's so sad Apple never knew what to do with it. It was approachable, and for simple record keeping was rather easy. HyperScript worked very well and was extremely approachable, especially with it's ability to do things like "take word 5 of line 2 of textbox".
See that's the part of his post that I don't agree with at all, the 3rd paragraph. Word is not a programming language. It lets you markup text, but that's it. If you're talking about VBA, that's not Word, that's VBA. CSS doesn't begin to approach a programming language. Spreadsheets can be used that way, but they quickly become unwieldily.
I don't see how anyone could call Facebook a programming language. Could you explain that part of your comment? You can move things around and post messages, but there is no programing to it. You are limited to what is pre-scripted for you. You can't go searching for people who went to your high school between the ages of 20 and 25 who are still single and live within 250 miles of you. You can't even conditionally format people's post (i.e. highlight a specific friend, unless he posts more than X a day).
BAG's second paragraph I responded to in my comment, I simply disagree. The 3rd just seems like "how can I stretch stuff".
I mean, you can't take "So a programming language for interpretive dance would probably find the Natal very useful." line seriously, can you? Even if someone made it, it would be like whitespace, just a joke. The energy required to make even a simple Hello, World would make it useless for anything.
Wow. BadAnalagyGuy got an insightful. Someone didn't read the full comment.
Of course, this isn't true. The thing about end users is, they generally don't know what they want. Even if they had a tool that would do whatever they say, it won't solve their problem because they don't know how to formulate it. The tool would need to read their mind, to the point of making something they didn't even realize they really wanted.
Because you make much MUCH more money that way, at least until some A.G. shuts you down. Even if they were legit at some point (I don't remember), they are currently riding that edge between scummy and illegal. The money convinced someone it was worth it. It usually does.
But the ISPs don't make copies either. The end servers do. The ISPs just transport things.
I'm not arguing that taking movies off the 'net without paying for them isn't copyright infringement. I'm just arguing that the ISPs aren't doing it, they're just in the middle.
You're credit score changing doesn't prevent you from leaving the contract. It doesn't force you to keep paying interest.
Also, it's entirely possible to not care about your credit score. It only matters if you want to take on debt all the time.
They don't get to add $500 "you paid off your card" fees. What amount are you talking about?
The high interest rates? You agreed to them in the contract. It was a one sided contract, but you agreed. You can pay off your loan at any time and get out of it.
Should credit cards be able to lend people $25k at 28% interest? Almost certainly not. Does that mean it's OK to take that money and then claim "it was unfair, I demand 7%"? No.
That's not true. At any point you can go to the credit card company and say "Here is the $3874 I owe you" and get out of your contract.
The terms are only unilaterally adjusted if you pay it off monthly. In that case, you're still in the loan, so of course your contract holds. They can't ignore the contract. You signify agreement to any changes by not canceling your account. If you've been using your credit responsibly, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you've been using it like a second source of income, yeah, you're screwed.
I do think many of the credit card company's practices are horrible, and some should be illegal. In fact, some are now (read: June 1st) thanks to the credit card reform that was passed. But it annoys me that so many people take on so much debt and then complain that they have to pay it off.
I don't see enough people taking responsibility, so I poked at your point that read that way to me.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it points out how this kind of rule is somewhat absurd. If the ISPs were directing customers to the illegal content, the argument would make perfect sense. But when acting as a simple data carrier, the argument doesn't hold water. You can't sue the post office. You can't sue AT&T because you called a scam company and told them your credit card. You can't sue Comcast because ABC news aired a report that upset you.
Now, it's illegal to use the post office for various crimes (thus postal fraud), and we could get laws like that. But asking the post office to inspect every letter/package sent to make sure it doesn't contain something illegal would be rejected outright. It's somewhat easier for ISPs since they don't need to physically open boxes/letters, but it is still a rather ridiculous request.
Your torrent site example is interesting, but those are basically catalogs. In a post office world, you sent a letter to the site asking for a catalog, and the post office sent it to you. The ISP is still a dumb pipe. Pretend that Colombia House used to sell pirated content. It's the same thing. Colombia house can get in trouble for doing it, and for using the post office to transport stolen goods, but the USPS (or UPS/FedEx if you prefer) isn't liable.
The best argument I could see against the ISPs is that they often advertise that their high speed connections will make online video better. If you assume most online video is stolen, they are technically advertising for it, but that's a stretch. There is tons of free video on YouTube that isn't stolen (cat clips, etc.), and free to view services (Hulu, etc.) that this doesn't hold water.
I always thought it was odd that the big ISPs advertised how their service was great for downloading music/MP3s years after the file sharing lawsuits started. "You can download MP3s 200x faster than dial-up! (but downloading 200x as many legal MP3s will cost you 200x as much)".
Now the argument that you would change your connection if you didn't download pirated content may hold true for you, but for many people it wouldn't. My parents don't download illegal stuff, but they like their high speed connection. As legal options increase (again Hulu, Amazon's service, iTunes, etc.) people have good reasons to want to keep high speed connections. Even for downloading family videos sent by other relatives/etc.
The thing that I find fun about all this is that ISPs are a dumb pipe. They need to be regulated like a dumb pipe, and priced like a dumb pipe. But they are trying so hard to not be a dumb pipe and pretend that they are better than everyone else because they have stupid service "X". Yet as soon as a lawsuit like this comes up, they go back to "You can't sue us, we're a dumb pipe". i would love it if these kind of lawsuits forced them to pick a side.
Wait... you mean to get out of a loan with a bank (basically what a credit card is)... I have to pay it off?!?
Dear god, they're screwing us!
Is the post office responsible if I mail a copied DVD to someone?
Q.E.D.
Ah, The Funniest Joke in the World. Oddly topical for this topic, eh?
I can see a large market for this. It would be perfect for my Grandfather. He doesn't need photo editing or video capture. If he can turn the font size up, it would work great.
Best of all, no maintenance, nothing to install, nothing to configure and fiddle with, just an appliance. People already try to use computers like that, why shouldn't Google make that possible?
The netbook market is two markets squished into one. One is the cheap low power computer market (these things), and the other is the tiny market (something else). Windows is very heavy for just a little thing to surf. If you want a real laptop a tiny higher end netbook ($400-$500) is going to have the horsepower to be able to actually work well.
What platform lock-in? It's Linux that opens a standards compliant web-browser by default. Anyone can make one of those.
You mean using Google services? Do you really think Google would bar people from using their services from other browsers/OSes?
I agree with you and the other commenters that Google will push this. They may add some bits, and they'll make (or encourage others to make) web applications that can fill most people's needs. There is even 3D bindings so relatively simple games could run (and with WoW's 2004 era graphics, it may qualify too).
But that's the future. Google isn't pushing this for everyone for every purpose today, they're pushing it for this purpose. They want to grow up into a larger market (like x86), instead of taking the whole market over at once (which would be very VERY difficult).
For the near future (at least the next 12 months), this is a web-appliance OS.
The biggest near term threat to MS from this is if people buying these realize that a large number of them don't really need full computers, and the word spreads.
They are competing directly, but Google's friendlier. Google is making an appliance OS, where as SplashTop is designed as a light fast-booting OS.
But almost everyone is using a strawman (as Microsoft is). The point is not to replace Windows, it's an OS for web surfing. It's not for playing World of Warcraft, doing heavy photo editing, video editing, etc. Everyone is writing the "Google vs. Microsoft" article they want to write, instead of the tougher article about how Google is basically working to define a new class of computer (something of a netbook that's not running a general OS).
It's web-TV, but not on TV and not horrible. It's an email appliance OS that lets you read the web pages people link to in their emails.
It's not a direct shot at MS and Apple.
Gruber gets another one right.
It's not /. bias. Every place I've seen reporting the study has had the same headline, even the Mac sites (who give it names like "Deeper look into the poor apple reliability story"). Actually, since the headline is about netbooks, this is relatively unsensational for /. I hadn't seen the netbook bit because most sites have been going with the Apple angle.
Now the Mac sites have a different spin. They say that the rate is still pretty close (it's not like Apple is behind 10%"), and point out that Apple is still ahead of most PCs sold (HP/Dell/etc.). All this really says is Apple isn't number one, and I don't think that's really a surprise for anyone. Apple makes good stuff, but they do issue recalls from time to time.
There are two ways to frame the data. The logical way (Asus #1, or some such) and the sensationalist way that gets views (Apple sucks!). Guess which one every outlet chose.
He created a multinational project of cooperation between tons of people all over the globe and made a project that has helped change the computer industry and lower costs, making computing more affordable for everyone. Sounds good to me.
That's a lot better than saying you'll do things but not having done them yet.
He'll never win. The prize is very political, and I doubt they would give it to someone who isn't in their group of admired people. As a PR tool, it could be much more valuable to give it to someone else.
Are there better candidates? I'd certainly expect so. But look at the list of winners. While some are obviously good (Doctors Without Borders, The Dalai Llama) others are much more questionable.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. The test over at Quirksmode shows the various versions of WebKit to be very different, even between mobile and desktop Safari.
I don't think the GSM Pre has been released yet, so there may be no Pre over in the UK. That may be why it wasn't tested.
Why should anyone treat someone differently just because they have a record of killing someone who argued with them?
Well, it's not flying airplanes full of people. They've copied a system that seems to work well, and they are testing it for ultra-small UAVs. They'll get a better idea of how it works then.
There are many things people have used throughout history without understanding how they work. Salt preservation is ancient, but we didn't discover the bacteria it kills until the last 200 years.
Sometimes, "works" is good enough. And works often leads to understands.
I think this is really cool. We've been trying to do this kind of thing for years. The fly does it with a tiny-micro-fraction of the resources we were using, and does a much MUCH better job. By testing this system, perhaps we'll find out WHY our systems are tricked by certain stimulus and this one isn't.
It's not like they put a bunch of stuff together and said "this works, as far as we can tell", they took a proven system and copied it.