I know it's late, but I would still like to thank the anonymous source of the comment above. If it happened earlier in the discussion, a lot of extra light would have been shed on the whole debate.
Thanks for your answer. So it seems that this is the sane direction for Firefox developers to go. Why would they even want to bundle their own codecs with the release, if this is possible? Not only does this stir up a useless debate, but it also bloats up Firefox itself. Actually, I can forgive including Theora, since it's not commonly installed on consumer machines. But yeah, 4.0 should definitely be designed to use Directshow codecs on Windows and the relevant VLC or ffmpeg libraries elsewhere.
Yeah, that's interesting and awful. And to make the licensed portion into some sort of a binary-only library that plugs into Firefox would defeat the big advantage of HTML5, which is that it doesn't need extra plugins.
So isn't there a way in which Firefox could call the relevant codec installed on the computer through the HTML5 "video" tag and use that codec to play back the video? I mean, every Windows machine already has its own h246 decoder. Since we already own that decoder license thanks to Microsoft, why can't Firefox just take advantage of it? Obviously, the FF on other OSes would need different solutions, but just about every modern computer already can decode h264 and I have to think that FF could find a way to take advantage of this. But I don't know much about how the "video" tag is implemented to know whether this is possible. I assumed it was, because people talk about hardware-accelerated decoding, etc. Another question I have is about whether Chromium also can't play h264. Does anyone know?
Yeah, WTF? This is a big fumble by Google. Here I was, tempted to give Chrome another shot just to see this work - as it's one of the very rare things that my beloved Firefox can't do. And when I go through the bother I find what? An experience worse than Flash?
If Google knew this, shouldn't they have waited with the feature? Will there be another announcement that says: "HTML5 Youtube - now far less crappy than before? Download Chrome to see it!" And seriously, who will?
Also, Ogg Theora is just less good than h264 on several levels. For one thing, there are hardware decoders for h264, but more importantly for me, h264 just indisputably looks better. Seriously, in this grudge match of Firefox v. Google (and now others), Firefox is on the losing side. I hope the developers realize this soon. Maybe Google is not intervening because they're happy to let people say "fuck it, I guess I'll try it with Chrome" - as I'm about to.
Google is on record pretty much saying, "live with it or add a simple header to your stuff so we ignore you." It couldn't be more straightforward.
Rupert Murdoch has a pretty impressive media empire, and he's whining about Google News, but even he doesn't have the balls to add the header, because so many of his readers find his content through Google News. He's trying to get a coalition of major publishers to all pull out simultaneously, so that Google News loses most of its content and the users go away. I just don't see that working though. The absence of Murdoch material would hardly be noticeable on Google, and suddenly his competitors would be getting all the Google clicks while Murdoch gets none. That's not just less revenue. That's a real downgrade in relevance of his media empire as an opinion setter. Google is here to stay.
One thing I expect them to try: The linked articles will only be article-teasers, which all end with "to continue reading this article, please log in and make [some micropayment]." At that point, people like me would just use the mouse gesture for "back" and learn to not click on links to that source, scouring the other related links to get the same information without a paywall. But in the short term, that kind of move might generate a bit of revenue.
So like others have said, the present arrangement is as good as it's going to get for the article-producing media online.
I think the author explains this one. On his take of orcish culture there is some latent barbarism and, like several primitive tribes of humans, they practice genital mutilation (in this case as part of a coming-of-age ceremony).
If you add up Samsung's payout on this deal, it's damn close to a billion US Dollars. Wow, it took some time, but I guess that patent trolling paid off for Rambus after all. They'd never raise that kind of money the old-fashioned way, by making products that people willingly buy.
Nah, they got this patent so that an evil company can't swoop in and patent the stuff, and prevent others from implementing it without charging crippling royalties. Right? Right??
Actually, the way I read the decision, the answer to your question may be "yes." It does seem like the decision implies that non-state-backed currency is still a legal exchangeable currency. So yes, Korean banks might very well start publishing daily WoW-Won exchange rates. I think you're catching on to why this is an interesting development.
Regarding the risks to holders of a company-backed rather than a state-backed currency, I don't really see the big deal. I trust Blizzard much more than I would trust the national bank of Zimbabwe, and yet Zimbabwe dollars are traded in international markets and exchange rates are published. According to Oanda's currency converter, a million Zimbabwe Dollars will exchange for exactly US$2,702.70 today. Why are we treating WoW gold differently? It can't be because we trust Mugabe's financial wizards more than we trust Blizzard.
Yeah, it's just like that time when the Dollar tanked when Zimbabwe started printing those hundred million dollar bills? Oh wait, except that didn't happen at all. (Hint: nobody even suggested that there would be a fixed exchange rate between virtual currency and the Won.)
You're right, so clearly they could not have meant that. I assumed they meant that the arm will place an atom so that it bonds in just the way you want. There is a tolerance in that, sort of like with throwing a basketball through a hoop. Many initial trajectories will result in a basket.
If you put their stuff behind a paywall, you severely restrict the exposure of NYT star writers. That will, in turn, severely diminish their star power. There are many other good writers waiting to take their place.
Anyone hoping to maintain a stable of opinion leaders in the internet age will have to release their stuff for free. If they live behind a paywall, that's like actors that only feature in privately-screened movies. It's no way to get a robust following!
What's worse, many of these columnists will have a twitter feed and blog, so Dowd fans will still get their fill of Dowd musings in a way that does absolutely nothing for her employer. This is basically a plan to monetize NYT assets for a while, but in the long term, it guarantees a decline in the global relevance of the NYT.
If you really want to donate money to a good cause, keeping alive newspapers that do actual journalism isn't the worst thing to do, but it is also far from the best. Seriously, NYT is never going away. Their worst case scenario is letting go of several of their superstar columnists. The world would barely notice.
I've heard of many people saying that they want to prop up newspapers with their own money as an act of charity. I always ask them whether they think that this is the most effective destination for their charity, or whether they think they would get more bang for their charity buck if they sent their money elsewhere. Just about everybody who thinks about it eventually says that the most deserving charity - the one that does the most good per dollar donated - is OXFAM. I tend to agree. Something seems strange about people who would use their spare resources to save newspapers rather than lives.
Good post. I especially like the idea of kids played by adults. I can't wait for the day! But I don't understand why everyone wants this as a tool to reanimate some people from the past. I mean, it's one application, but not the most interesting one in my opinion.
Your idea of just using good actors (who may not at all look the part of the characters they play) is much more interesting. But also, the director will just have much more control. If a scene is reduced to a sequence of face-point captures, aspects of different takes could be seamlessly melded into a single sequence, or the captured data could be manipulated directly (to briefly broaden the eyes at the utterance of a certain syllable, for example). Since computers will exist to give a rough render of the results in real time, directors could just play with the underlying data until the performances are perfect.
For now, digital technology seems to remove a sense of depth from acting. But in the future, it could serve to create the opposite effect. I think that Cameron should produce a short demonstration film with the technology, maybe a conversation between JFK and MLK in the booth of a diner, something like that. Or how about a portion of a video lecture of Richard Feynman, using a cleaned-up version of the audio that was recorded in 1961?
In Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," trained actors had had tens of thousands of microtransmitters implanted into their faces so that the essence of their acting could be captured without the need for a conventional camera. Then they could play literally anyone, as their face-points could be re-mapped to a monster's face or whatever.
And this is not even close to the most interesting idea in that book, my favorite piece of scifi ever.
You might hurt the metal wall, but if the target is itself not metal, it will be quite unharmed. But maybe you could use a focused EMP like this to accelerate a bullet down a (non-conductive) barrel? That would be pretty cool.
It doesn't matter that the actual tower is completely inert. What people believe about it absolutely can cause headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. You can replicate this effect very easily by giving people sugar pills and telling them that they will lower their blood pressure, but have side effects like headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. The people who eat those inert pills really will sleep less and have more real headaches. It's not because they're somehow crazy. All humans, including the readers of slashdot, are susceptible to placebo effects.
Yeah, I totally agree with this. Hopefully that will be exactly the recommendation that these geeks make to the government. We simply cannot afford to take chances with the security of our power grid. If it's at all possible for hackers to knock it out, they will.
Future terrorism will be aimed at hollowing out national governments, to basically make them unable to control their territory. (This is already happening now in Mexico, Nigeria, Iraq, etc.) To do this, attacks disrupt the very services that provide money and legitimacy to the central government. Once the central institutions are weakened enough, militias and mafias step in to take over the services that they can no longer reliably provide. Smart terrorists will act to weaken governments in the most efficient way possible. This is measured by the standard return-on-investment metric, where you compare the cost of an attack with the monetary damage it does to the victim. Since hacking is cheap and power outages are economically devastating, the ROI on such attacks are enormous, potentially in the million% range.
So you can bet that all kinds of people who wish us ill, from domestic militias to Islamicists and foreign governments, will be trying to hack our power grid. Even a credible threat about such a hack profoundly constrains what we can do. Given the seriousness of this security issue, I suspect it's still not getting the amount of attention and funding that it deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's late, but I would still like to thank the anonymous source of the comment above. If it happened earlier in the discussion, a lot of extra light would have been shed on the whole debate.
Thanks for your answer. So it seems that this is the sane direction for Firefox developers to go. Why would they even want to bundle their own codecs with the release, if this is possible? Not only does this stir up a useless debate, but it also bloats up Firefox itself. Actually, I can forgive including Theora, since it's not commonly installed on consumer machines. But yeah, 4.0 should definitely be designed to use Directshow codecs on Windows and the relevant VLC or ffmpeg libraries elsewhere.
Also, since Eric Schmidt isn't selling his shares, the three of them together will have far more than 50% of the voting shares. (reference)
Yeah, that's interesting and awful. And to make the licensed portion into some sort of a binary-only library that plugs into Firefox would defeat the big advantage of HTML5, which is that it doesn't need extra plugins.
So isn't there a way in which Firefox could call the relevant codec installed on the computer through the HTML5 "video" tag and use that codec to play back the video? I mean, every Windows machine already has its own h246 decoder. Since we already own that decoder license thanks to Microsoft, why can't Firefox just take advantage of it? Obviously, the FF on other OSes would need different solutions, but just about every modern computer already can decode h264 and I have to think that FF could find a way to take advantage of this. But I don't know much about how the "video" tag is implemented to know whether this is possible. I assumed it was, because people talk about hardware-accelerated decoding, etc. Another question I have is about whether Chromium also can't play h264. Does anyone know?
Yeah, WTF? This is a big fumble by Google. Here I was, tempted to give Chrome another shot just to see this work - as it's one of the very rare things that my beloved Firefox can't do. And when I go through the bother I find what? An experience worse than Flash?
If Google knew this, shouldn't they have waited with the feature? Will there be another announcement that says: "HTML5 Youtube - now far less crappy than before? Download Chrome to see it!" And seriously, who will?
Also, Ogg Theora is just less good than h264 on several levels. For one thing, there are hardware decoders for h264, but more importantly for me, h264 just indisputably looks better. Seriously, in this grudge match of Firefox v. Google (and now others), Firefox is on the losing side. I hope the developers realize this soon. Maybe Google is not intervening because they're happy to let people say "fuck it, I guess I'll try it with Chrome" - as I'm about to.
Google is on record pretty much saying, "live with it or add a simple header to your stuff so we ignore you." It couldn't be more straightforward.
Rupert Murdoch has a pretty impressive media empire, and he's whining about Google News, but even he doesn't have the balls to add the header, because so many of his readers find his content through Google News. He's trying to get a coalition of major publishers to all pull out simultaneously, so that Google News loses most of its content and the users go away. I just don't see that working though. The absence of Murdoch material would hardly be noticeable on Google, and suddenly his competitors would be getting all the Google clicks while Murdoch gets none. That's not just less revenue. That's a real downgrade in relevance of his media empire as an opinion setter. Google is here to stay.
One thing I expect them to try: The linked articles will only be article-teasers, which all end with "to continue reading this article, please log in and make [some micropayment]." At that point, people like me would just use the mouse gesture for "back" and learn to not click on links to that source, scouring the other related links to get the same information without a paywall. But in the short term, that kind of move might generate a bit of revenue.
So like others have said, the present arrangement is as good as it's going to get for the article-producing media online.
I think the author explains this one. On his take of orcish culture there is some latent barbarism and, like several primitive tribes of humans, they practice genital mutilation (in this case as part of a coming-of-age ceremony).
Sorry for the weird glitch that didn't show up in the preview. That errant and useless url ruined an already dumb joke.
Ew, are you sure those are sweat spots? In http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/01/20/0020246/100-Free-Software-Compatible-PC-Launches?art_pos=3#any case, it sounds like a job for the washing machine.
If you add up Samsung's payout on this deal, it's damn close to a billion US Dollars. Wow, it took some time, but I guess that patent trolling paid off for Rambus after all. They'd never raise that kind of money the old-fashioned way, by making products that people willingly buy.
Nah, they got this patent so that an evil company can't swoop in and patent the stuff, and prevent others from implementing it without charging crippling royalties. Right? Right??
Regarding the risks to holders of a company-backed rather than a state-backed currency, I don't really see the big deal. I trust Blizzard much more than I would trust the national bank of Zimbabwe, and yet Zimbabwe dollars are traded in international markets and exchange rates are published. According to Oanda's currency converter, a million Zimbabwe Dollars will exchange for exactly US$2,702.70 today. Why are we treating WoW gold differently? It can't be because we trust Mugabe's financial wizards more than we trust Blizzard.
Yeah, it's just like that time when the Dollar tanked when Zimbabwe started printing those hundred million dollar bills? Oh wait, except that didn't happen at all. (Hint: nobody even suggested that there would be a fixed exchange rate between virtual currency and the Won.)
You're right, so clearly they could not have meant that. I assumed they meant that the arm will place an atom so that it bonds in just the way you want. There is a tolerance in that, sort of like with throwing a basketball through a hoop. Many initial trajectories will result in a basket.
If you put their stuff behind a paywall, you severely restrict the exposure of NYT star writers. That will, in turn, severely diminish their star power. There are many other good writers waiting to take their place.
Anyone hoping to maintain a stable of opinion leaders in the internet age will have to release their stuff for free. If they live behind a paywall, that's like actors that only feature in privately-screened movies. It's no way to get a robust following!
What's worse, many of these columnists will have a twitter feed and blog, so Dowd fans will still get their fill of Dowd musings in a way that does absolutely nothing for her employer. This is basically a plan to monetize NYT assets for a while, but in the long term, it guarantees a decline in the global relevance of the NYT.
If you really want to donate money to a good cause, keeping alive newspapers that do actual journalism isn't the worst thing to do, but it is also far from the best. Seriously, NYT is never going away. Their worst case scenario is letting go of several of their superstar columnists. The world would barely notice.
I've heard of many people saying that they want to prop up newspapers with their own money as an act of charity. I always ask them whether they think that this is the most effective destination for their charity, or whether they think they would get more bang for their charity buck if they sent their money elsewhere. Just about everybody who thinks about it eventually says that the most deserving charity - the one that does the most good per dollar donated - is OXFAM. I tend to agree. Something seems strange about people who would use their spare resources to save newspapers rather than lives.
Good post. I especially like the idea of kids played by adults. I can't wait for the day! But I don't understand why everyone wants this as a tool to reanimate some people from the past. I mean, it's one application, but not the most interesting one in my opinion.
Your idea of just using good actors (who may not at all look the part of the characters they play) is much more interesting. But also, the director will just have much more control. If a scene is reduced to a sequence of face-point captures, aspects of different takes could be seamlessly melded into a single sequence, or the captured data could be manipulated directly (to briefly broaden the eyes at the utterance of a certain syllable, for example). Since computers will exist to give a rough render of the results in real time, directors could just play with the underlying data until the performances are perfect.
For now, digital technology seems to remove a sense of depth from acting. But in the future, it could serve to create the opposite effect. I think that Cameron should produce a short demonstration film with the technology, maybe a conversation between JFK and MLK in the booth of a diner, something like that. Or how about a portion of a video lecture of Richard Feynman, using a cleaned-up version of the audio that was recorded in 1961?
In Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," trained actors had had tens of thousands of microtransmitters implanted into their faces so that the essence of their acting could be captured without the need for a conventional camera. Then they could play literally anyone, as their face-points could be re-mapped to a monster's face or whatever.
And this is not even close to the most interesting idea in that book, my favorite piece of scifi ever.
Didn't Andy Serkis win something for "playing" Gollum?
Wow, you mean in the future, films will make us think that 9' tall anatomically impossible blue aliens are real?
I'm wondering just how much a strong magnetic field like this could accelerate a bullet-like metal object.
You might hurt the metal wall, but if the target is itself not metal, it will be quite unharmed. But maybe you could use a focused EMP like this to accelerate a bullet down a (non-conductive) barrel? That would be pretty cool.
It doesn't matter that the actual tower is completely inert. What people believe about it absolutely can cause headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. You can replicate this effect very easily by giving people sugar pills and telling them that they will lower their blood pressure, but have side effects like headaches, nausea and sleeplessness. The people who eat those inert pills really will sleep less and have more real headaches. It's not because they're somehow crazy. All humans, including the readers of slashdot, are susceptible to placebo effects.
Yeah, I totally agree with this. Hopefully that will be exactly the recommendation that these geeks make to the government. We simply cannot afford to take chances with the security of our power grid. If it's at all possible for hackers to knock it out, they will.
Future terrorism will be aimed at hollowing out national governments, to basically make them unable to control their territory. (This is already happening now in Mexico, Nigeria, Iraq, etc.) To do this, attacks disrupt the very services that provide money and legitimacy to the central government. Once the central institutions are weakened enough, militias and mafias step in to take over the services that they can no longer reliably provide. Smart terrorists will act to weaken governments in the most efficient way possible. This is measured by the standard return-on-investment metric, where you compare the cost of an attack with the monetary damage it does to the victim. Since hacking is cheap and power outages are economically devastating, the ROI on such attacks are enormous, potentially in the million% range.
So you can bet that all kinds of people who wish us ill, from domestic militias to Islamicists and foreign governments, will be trying to hack our power grid. Even a credible threat about such a hack profoundly constrains what we can do. Given the seriousness of this security issue, I suspect it's still not getting the amount of attention and funding that it deserves.