I don't recall if I had to remove my shoes, but I do recall security procedures in the UK being at least as inconvenient as those in the US. One of the most rediculous was only being able to bring one piece of carry-on including your laptop (ie. you must choose between a laptop and a carry-on bag).
What a lame story about nothing. Good to see that AI self-promoting hacks industry is alive and well after what seems like a few years hiatus (haven't heard from Captain Cyborg in a while).
I was a CompSci student at Edinburgh University, and was into WindowMaker and Enlightenment, but I don't think that is how I first found Slashdot. As I recall an uber-geeky friend of mine introduced me to it.
It took me about 4 tries before I could pre-purchase that album due to the extremely flaky website. Its a shame because its a great concept, but if it fails, it will probably be due to the awful execution. You would imagine that the creators of "Ok Computer" would know some decent web designers...
It seems that the most likely use of this is as a remote backup, given how cheap desktop storage is these days (about $2/GB last time I checked), and the bandwidth constraints of pulling large quantities of data from a remote server when you need it.
What is needed is a convenient automatic "trickle backup" system. This will do incremental backups to this service whenever you are online, but which is smart enough to stop if you need your internet connection, or if you disconnect. In such circumstances it will resume the backup process seamlessly once you go back online, or once your upstream is available again.
This seems like an obvious idea to me, and so it may already exist - but if not, I could see it being a very nice open source project. Unfortunately I've got one or two projects keeping me way too busy already or I would consider it.
To do it really-well might require server-side support though, so you could do things like coalescing incremental backups without having to pull the data back to the client and re-uploading.
Are you sure that intelligence isn't simply the combination of billions of neurons each processing information?
I have a bachelors degree in Artificial Intelligence, and I certainly wouldn't claim that intelligence doesn't simply boil down to mathematical computation at some point, indeed, I suspect that it probably does. Its just that we don't understand it yet.
Thoof(disclaimer: its my website) uses Bayesian analysis (you could call it AI, so much as anything is AI) to determine what you are interested in reading, based on a variety of factors, including:
The referring website (and what other people from that site liked)
Your OS/Browser (and what other people with your OS/Browser liked)
Your geographic location (and what other people close to you liked)
What you yourself read
It also allows users to edit stories, a mechanism conceptually similar to a wiki, but with an additional voting process to help prevent abuse.
Unlike AideRSS, Thoof isn't an RSS aggregator, rather users submit stories, in a manner similar to Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
How does lowering corporate taxes do anything other than making it a little less likely that the unfit will die? (Or at least extending the amount of time they can hold out for)?
The money is intended to lower the risk on venturing into a totally new industry or on a new technology.
That is what Venture Capital is for, and Venture Capital works just fine without forcefully taking money from taxpayers.
Your mentality seems to be that this money appears from nowhere, but it doesn't, for a government to give money to one person, that money must be taken from another. Taxation is the main thing stifling European businesses, not the lack of corporate welfare.
Why are European governments taking money from European taxpayers, and giving it to the stodgy big companies of yesteryear, supposedly to promote research in an area that is more than adequately served by the free market?
This is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, and a good demonstration of all that is wrong with beurocratic top-down European Union thinking (and I speak as a European).
If you really want to promote innovation, then stop wasting taxpayer money on this type of crap and lower corporate taxes, encouraging an environment where the fit will thrive and the unfit will die.
We have been using the JScience package to record a variety of internal data about a (we hope!) large scale statistics intensive website we've been building. It is actually a breath of fresh air not to have to worry about accidentally confusing impressions per minute with unique visitors per hour, but rather letting the compiler do the worrying for you. This will be a great addition to Java, but you don't need to wait, JScience's implementation is robust and we've been using it in production for months.
Last time I checked, Mongrel was still single threaded, meaning that if you wanted to put together a decent website, you had to run multiple mongrel instances and have Apache load balance between them. The unfortunate reality of Rails in my experience, having deployed several Rails websites (example), is that it is still a toy, it certainly isn't "enterprise ready", and while its possible to make it scale, its an uphill struggle (I'm not the only one who thinks so).
I can, on the other hand, highly recommend Wicket, its what we used to build Thoof, and so-far its scaling very well indeed.
"[if founders turn us down] as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test."
Yeah, they scored too high and thus know better than to sell their equity for peanuts. I mean, wealthy or not, what an arrogant twat.
total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture
I can imagine few worse things for starting a technology business than to be immersed in the incestuous and insular world of Silicon Valley. Most Internet users don't live in Silicon Valley, why would it be an advantage to be isolated from them?
When Graham calls the winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept.
And they are willing to admit such underhanded pressure tactics? Sounds like these guys are everything that is wrong with venture capital.
Weird, I replied to this and my reply appears to have disappeared. Here we go again:
This is only true as long as the content is only moderately popular. For really popular content, they'd rather distribute the load among the users downloading it.
Not so, the more popular the content, the cheaper the bandwidth required for each individual download, meaning that it makes even more sense to distribute from a centralized server.
Plus, if this turns out to be a highly desirable feature, browsers will soon support P2P without the need for external/plugin software.
I wouldn't hold your breath. P2P has been around for at least 7 years now, and I'm not aware of any credible movement towards integrating a P2P client into any popular web browser by default (makers of web browsers these days tend to be very bloat conscious).
BitTorrent Inc's biggest problem, ironically, is the success of the BitTorrent protocol. The premise behind the company seems to have been no more sophisticated than "The BitTorrent protocol is a success, we must be able to build a business around it, lets get people to pay for downloads". It demonstrates a serious lack of critical thinking about their own business model (something that is unfortunately common among those that have an early success in their careers, at the BitTorrent guys did).
The flaw in this logic is a failure to understand the success of the BitTorrent protocol. People use BitTorrent because they don't have the money to pay for the bandwidth to distribute what they are distributing because they don't have a revenue model.
However, if you have a half-decent revenue model, such as advertising, revenue easily offsets the bandwidth costs of distributing video from a central server over HTTP, so why put your users through the pain of having to install a piece of client software?
BitTorrent's problem is that anyone that can afford to pay them for their services can probably afford to distribute their content over HTTP from a centralized server, and why wouldn't they given the much lower barrier to entry for their users?
I'd say it has more to do with the trademark suit.
Rubbish. The trademark suit occurred after they launched it. This is almost definitely Apple caving to Cingular's paranoia. Apple could have revolutionized the mobile phone industry by making a mobile phone that was a true general purpose device, what a terrible missed opportunity.
I desperately want to use 2.0 as my primary browser, I find its form spellchecker invaluable for websites such as this one, but I too have found that it freezes up and must be force-quit several times a day on my Mac, enough to make me stick with 1.5 despite 2.0's features.
Sounds to me like Mozilla really need to get their act together, especially given the revenue they are supposed to be generating through Google, there isn't really an excuse for this.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't recall if I had to remove my shoes, but I do recall security procedures in the UK being at least as inconvenient as those in the US. One of the most rediculous was only being able to bring one piece of carry-on including your laptop (ie. you must choose between a laptop and a carry-on bag).
What a lame story about nothing. Good to see that AI self-promoting hacks industry is alive and well after what seems like a few years hiatus (haven't heard from Captain Cyborg in a while).
Ah them were the days...
It took me about 4 tries before I could pre-purchase that album due to the extremely flaky website. Its a shame because its a great concept, but if it fails, it will probably be due to the awful execution. You would imagine that the creators of "Ok Computer" would know some decent web designers...
I found this in 30 seconds through Google, did you even look before submitting your question to Slashdot?
I was basing my estimate on $500 for a 1TB drive, and yes, I screwed up - that would be 50c/Gb, but where do you get 20c/Gb?
What is needed is a convenient automatic "trickle backup" system. This will do incremental backups to this service whenever you are online, but which is smart enough to stop if you need your internet connection, or if you disconnect. In such circumstances it will resume the backup process seamlessly once you go back online, or once your upstream is available again.
This seems like an obvious idea to me, and so it may already exist - but if not, I could see it being a very nice open source project. Unfortunately I've got one or two projects keeping me way too busy already or I would consider it.
To do it really-well might require server-side support though, so you could do things like coalescing incremental backups without having to pull the data back to the client and re-uploading.
I have a bachelors degree in Artificial Intelligence, and I certainly wouldn't claim that intelligence doesn't simply boil down to mathematical computation at some point, indeed, I suspect that it probably does. Its just that we don't understand it yet.
- The referring website (and what other people from that site liked)
- Your OS/Browser (and what other people with your OS/Browser liked)
- Your geographic location (and what other people close to you liked)
- What you yourself read
It also allows users to edit stories, a mechanism conceptually similar to a wiki, but with an additional voting process to help prevent abuse.Unlike AideRSS, Thoof isn't an RSS aggregator, rather users submit stories, in a manner similar to Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
Your mentality seems to be that this money appears from nowhere, but it doesn't, for a government to give money to one person, that money must be taken from another. Taxation is the main thing stifling European businesses, not the lack of corporate welfare.
This is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, and a good demonstration of all that is wrong with beurocratic top-down European Union thinking (and I speak as a European).
If you really want to promote innovation, then stop wasting taxpayer money on this type of crap and lower corporate taxes, encouraging an environment where the fit will thrive and the unfit will die.
We have been using the JScience package to record a variety of internal data about a (we hope!) large scale statistics intensive website we've been building. It is actually a breath of fresh air not to have to worry about accidentally confusing impressions per minute with unique visitors per hour, but rather letting the compiler do the worrying for you. This will be a great addition to Java, but you don't need to wait, JScience's implementation is robust and we've been using it in production for months.
I can, on the other hand, highly recommend Wicket, its what we used to build Thoof, and so-far its scaling very well indeed.
The flaw in this logic is a failure to understand the success of the BitTorrent protocol. People use BitTorrent because they don't have the money to pay for the bandwidth to distribute what they are distributing because they don't have a revenue model.
However, if you have a half-decent revenue model, such as advertising, revenue easily offsets the bandwidth costs of distributing video from a central server over HTTP, so why put your users through the pain of having to install a piece of client software?
BitTorrent's problem is that anyone that can afford to pay them for their services can probably afford to distribute their content over HTTP from a centralized server, and why wouldn't they given the much lower barrier to entry for their users?
...I hope he uses the proceeds to hire a lawyer with more sense than to refer to potential buyers as "vultures" - what a moron.
Sounds to me like Mozilla really need to get their act together, especially given the revenue they are supposed to be generating through Google, there isn't really an excuse for this.