Just a side note, the movie Rules of Engagement had a few shots that were sort of first person (you were looking down he barrel of the gun). I thought it looked really cool and it reminded me of a realistic Counter-Strike or something. So, it has been done before.
Re:It is the "dept of OFFENSE", not "dept of DEFEN
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the use of our military, but:
Hmm, I think you are going to win this discussion, so I'll just add a few points.
When I said 'home theatre', I put it in quotes because most of them aren't theatre like, I was just using this term to differentiate between that and a computer.
I may be working from a biased sample, but I think a lot of people are moving to surround sound. They can be had pretty cheap these days, so I think a lot of people are buying them.
Ahh, composite cable! Even just switching to S-video would make a world of improvement. S-video to component wouldn't be as big as an improvement (unless you have an HDTV) as composite to s-video. To get your family/friends to switch, just remove the composite connection and they'll be forced to learn. On my basement setup, you have to switch the TV/and/ receiver to the input you want, and my parents have no trouble watching digital cable, DVDs, or tapes. Now... if I could just get them to recognize when the surround sound is turned off and they are listening to it in Stereo.
That is the point I was trying to make. DVD-Audio and SACD are different beasts from the next generation of video discs. A large percent of people rip their CDs onto the computer as well as copy those to their portable players. When you do this, you lose all benefits of the superior audio formats. 192 kilohertz stereo doesn't do much good when you are compressing down to 128 kbps lossy AAC files. I don't know of any portable audio players that support multi-channel (> 2 channels) audio files.
Now compare this to DVD. Most people watch DVDs on standalone 'home theatres'. I don't rip DVDs to computer (unless I want it for a plane flight) since it is more fun to watch it on the big screen with surround sound... and I'm a techy. Casual users are even more likely to watch it on standalone systems. It won't be a matter of replacing DVD players. Look how long it took people to switch to DVD from VHS... these aren't the people Blu-ray are aimed at (at least, not yet). It is aimed at people who want extra quality and features, and there is a market of us. I'm considering replacing my four year old DVD player with a new one that deinterlaces better and doesn't have a chroma problem. I don't care about our other, older, DVD player, since it isn't plugged into the nicer system. However, I'm thinking of just waiting for Blu-ray players, so I don't have to upgrade to a new DVD and then a new Blu-ray within a few years. Also, there is a large install base of users who have HDTVs and would upgrade to get the higher resolution. I can easily see the difference between HDTV and DVD quality.
Actually, hmm, maybe you are right. Maybe I am over estimating how much users care. My friend told me a horror story of one client who had S-Video going between his DVD player and Hi-Def TV.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see. We can predict all we want, but in the end, the common user is what decides the result. Over the long haul, though, Blu-ray will replace DVD, since the price will come to match that of normal DVD players.
I'm not sure what the price of the actual discs will be, but I imagine it wouldn't be much more than DVDs are today. Once players come down in price (which should be really quick), what would be the point of selling DVD players in the future? Everyone will by buying these Blu-ray players and slowly filling the installed base with Blu-ray (because honestly, HD-DVD will not win). Movies will come out in both DVD and Blu-ray format for quite a while afterwards (just look at the VHS tapes being produced). The transition won't be as fast as VHS->DVD, but it will happen. There are a lot more advantages of Blu-ray than just higher image quality (although, that is one of my biggest draws).
Andrew
PS: I think the comparison you should have made was CDs versus DVD-Audio and Super Audio CDs. These both offer higher quality or extra channels. This analogy falls short, however, since there is a much larger installed based of CDs, you can't easily rip multichannel (> stereo) audio to your computer, and no companies are automatically adopting it. My brothers recent Creative Labs audio card supports it, but that is all we have that does. Blu-ray, however, will quickly become the new standard in computers, stand alone players, and, I believe, the PS3.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...
You could hold the code hostage. Write some really awesome new app and release binaries. Tell people you'll release the source after $X donations. Once the donations have reached the goal, release the code. This is kind of like what happened with Blender.
I like the term they used in the end credits of Lord of the Rings: Data Wrangler. I just imagine some guy in buttless chaps with a cowboy hat and a lasso. A hard drive fails? He just lassos it out of the hot swappable array and another picks up the task.
Andrew
PS: I know the Archive doesn't have hot spare arrays, they use JBOD, but I was talking about the guy for LotR that has that title.
I'd believe it. Notice how when you search for [the] now, it returns exactly 8 billion pages? Who wants to bet Google has code in there that limits the number of results listed (not that you can view them anyway) so no one really knows/how/ much they have indexed. They are secretive about their computer count for competition reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if they limit how much the public knows about the number of indexed pages. However, I, like others, have noticed a bunch of new Google Alerts being sent out, so maybe they did update, but it may be much more than 8 billion.
Not necessarily. All the data would still be in plain text on their server, so they could easily find ads for your messages. The encryption would likely be done between the web server and the browser, like most encrypted sites. If you are implying that having encrypted communication with Gmail would mean more users encrypt the e-mail with, for example, PGP, then I don't believe it. I have a friend who is all about security and uses encryption both ways for his e-mail, but he doesn't bother with PGP, even when I ask him to.
The initial press release for Google indicated it was developed because one of the employees was tired of Hotmail and other free providers. When Google visited my campus, I asked one of them how much space they got in Gmail and she said they get the same as everyone else. She then added that all internal mail is done outside of Gmail. This leads me to believe they don't check their Google mail using Gmail. Of course, this could be another white lie like saying they only have 20,000+ computers (which is actually up from the 10,000 I remember hearing earlier).
Encryption would be great. I wonder why they don't now. They've got boxes up the wazoo, so it shouldn't be that much more expensive (both computationally and financially) to support it.
I believe they would release it in appliance form instead of software form. I may be speaking out of my ass, but I believe, from what I've read, that the Google operating system really takes over a system. Google File System (GFS) is specially made for performance on large clusters, and likely wouldn't run well with other software on a normal server machine. That is my guess. However, maybe Gmail is abstracted to run on other file systems. A company wouldn't need the performance that GFS provides, so maybe Google could change Gmail to run as an app in Windows or Linux with NTFS or the your Linux file system of choice.
One thing I've noticed recently, that I don't remember from before, when you log out, it now says your full e-mail address (user@gmail.com) where previously I thought it just said the username. I don't remember for sure, but I think this is something new.
This makes me wonder, is it possible Google will be adding support for other domains? Maybe you'll be able to get a Gmail address for free, but if you buy your own domain, you can use Google/Gmail for your mail server (either free or with a slight cost). That would be pretty neat, especially with this recent development of POP3 support.
I can imagine Google selling a rackmount Gmail appliance (to go along with the search appliance) for businesses, free @gmail.com accounts for everyone, and free/cheap mail hosting (with your own domain) for power users.
Now we have a Senate, House, and Presidency all in control by the GOP. 11 states have banned gay marriage. Alaska threw all reason out the window and didn't legalize marijuana (which includes hemp, an amazing industrial plant). I must say, these next four years (and definitely the next two) are going to suck... big time.
I apologize world, but my vote against W wasn't enough.
I agree. I think a browser is below what Google has in mind. I talked to a guy from Google the other day and he said that in five years, the company will be doing stuff you never imagined from Google. I think Google has a lot of tricks up their sleeve, but a browser isn't one of them.
Don't diss small investors, man. I bought my first stock when I was in 8th grade. My dad encouraged me by matching my input funds and, since he worked at a bank, he was able to get me commission free (or like $1 commission trades).
The stock went up for a while before BAM!, the.com bubble burst. I learned my lesson... invest smarter. Since then I have been more cautious when investing, which has paid off. I bought Apple a year and a half ago, right around its two year low. Since then it has gone up over 200%, greatly improving my portfolio (and dominating the NASDAQ and Dow).
The most powerful force in the universe is compound interested, and the sooner you invest, the more you can make in the end. Well, that kind of turned into a post about buying stocks young, but it isn't completely off topic. Most young people don't have much money, and you don't know anything about him, so Judge Not, because when you talk about him, someone else is judging you. People shouldn't be prevented from investing just because they don't have much money. $200+ is a lot to some.
There may not be a lot of room to expand in the search engine arena, but there is a/ton/ of innovation left in searching.
I went to a talk by Google on my campus yesterday (by the guy who wrote the MapReduce paper mentioned in the Rob Pike interview a few weeks ago) and it was very interesting. I had heard much of it before, but a lot was still new. He mentioned some problems they are working on that still plague search engines. Currently search engines just look for the words you typed. Google has advanced this a little by searching words that are almost the same as the word you typed. If you search for "burn man" (without the quotes) in Google, the first result is Burning Man. Google knows, probably using machine learning, that that burning, burn, burned, burns, etc. are all pretty much the same idea or concept. This way you don't have to run your search multiple times with different, but similar, words. The example they used in the presentation was [bay area cooking classes]. They had three results that would be relevant, but that would not be shown in the results. One of them was San Francisco cooking class. Another was Berkeley vegetarian cooking course. He showed us an internal program which would return groups based off the words you searched. It looked like it could have been what Google Sets is based off. This technique still has problems, though. He is an engineer, so he typed in "rolling hash," but more than half the results were about weed. He added "functions" to the search and became much more relevant (well, to him:) ). As you can see, there a lot of problems left with searching, and the solutions aren't trivial.
Also, when searching for [bay area], you don't know if they mean San Francisco or Tampa Bay. There are a lot of options for customization as well.
I was talking to some engineers from Google later in the day and one guy was talking about how Google in five years will be much more (and different) than you imagine Google being today. I'm not sure they will release an OS. Their mission statement is "making the world's information searchable and accessible," and an OS doesn't seem to fit in there. Another thing I've heard mentioned (from someone at Google, I think) is that currently we have the problem of having a website between you and the data you want. You still have to type in your quotes and try to think of how to find what you want. Who knows, I'm talking out of my ass here, but maybe Gbrowser does exist, but it isn't like we might imagine. Who knows, maybe it is a browser of information (not websites).
In closing, there is a lot left for Google to do. They still index only a fraction of the world's data, but they just recently branched into printed text. From talking to the Google employee, I got the impression that Google has a lot left to release under its iron curtain. They remind me of the NSA... they are farther ahead in technology and research than most give them credit for.
Or, perhaps even more appropriate, Volcano by The Presidents of the United States of America:
under the island middle of a mountain there is a big bad boomin' system blowin' speakers woofers and tweeters amplifiers melted wires the parties exploded the core is corroded under ground the puget sound cause a shiftin' and a drifin' big black boom box stuck in the hot rock it's in there flowin' it's in there growin' you don't believe me that this scenery could be a cold blooded killer it's gonna blow volcano it's gonna blow volcano it's gonna blow volcano now the island is shiftin' the plates are liftin' the core is creamy docile and dreamy stopped up and steamy happy campers poop in there pampers when the mountain becomes a fountain of white hot lava molten magna super sonic plate techtonics stero phonic lava and tonic the boom is bionic sony shut down magnavox meltdown ballistic breakdown hi fi heatwave lo fi lava cave that sulfur smells mt st helens pompeii was yellin' it's gonna blow volcano it's gonna blow volcano it's gonna blow volcano it's gonna blow volcano
If it spews ash again, it will highly devalue those little containers of ash they sell at gift shops. My parents saved a huge container from when it erupted. If we put it into a whole bunch of little containers and sold them, we could probably make a few hundred bucks:).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be silly, Jeopardy is dying. Netcraft confirms it!
Just a side note, the movie Rules of Engagement had a few shots that were sort of first person (you were looking down he barrel of the gun). I thought it looked really cool and it reminded me of a realistic Counter-Strike or something. So, it has been done before.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the use of our military, but:
"Sometimes the best defense is a good offense."
Just playing devil's advocate.
Andrew
Hmm, I think you are going to win this discussion, so I'll just add a few points.
/and/ receiver to the input you want, and my parents have no trouble watching digital cable, DVDs, or tapes. Now... if I could just get them to recognize when the surround sound is turned off and they are listening to it in Stereo.
When I said 'home theatre', I put it in quotes because most of them aren't theatre like, I was just using this term to differentiate between that and a computer.
I may be working from a biased sample, but I think a lot of people are moving to surround sound. They can be had pretty cheap these days, so I think a lot of people are buying them.
Ahh, composite cable! Even just switching to S-video would make a world of improvement. S-video to component wouldn't be as big as an improvement (unless you have an HDTV) as composite to s-video. To get your family/friends to switch, just remove the composite connection and they'll be forced to learn. On my basement setup, you have to switch the TV
Andrew
That is the point I was trying to make. DVD-Audio and SACD are different beasts from the next generation of video discs. A large percent of people rip their CDs onto the computer as well as copy those to their portable players. When you do this, you lose all benefits of the superior audio formats. 192 kilohertz stereo doesn't do much good when you are compressing down to 128 kbps lossy AAC files. I don't know of any portable audio players that support multi-channel (> 2 channels) audio files.
Now compare this to DVD. Most people watch DVDs on standalone 'home theatres'. I don't rip DVDs to computer (unless I want it for a plane flight) since it is more fun to watch it on the big screen with surround sound... and I'm a techy. Casual users are even more likely to watch it on standalone systems. It won't be a matter of replacing DVD players. Look how long it took people to switch to DVD from VHS... these aren't the people Blu-ray are aimed at (at least, not yet). It is aimed at people who want extra quality and features, and there is a market of us. I'm considering replacing my four year old DVD player with a new one that deinterlaces better and doesn't have a chroma problem. I don't care about our other, older, DVD player, since it isn't plugged into the nicer system. However, I'm thinking of just waiting for Blu-ray players, so I don't have to upgrade to a new DVD and then a new Blu-ray within a few years. Also, there is a large install base of users who have HDTVs and would upgrade to get the higher resolution. I can easily see the difference between HDTV and DVD quality.
Actually, hmm, maybe you are right. Maybe I am over estimating how much users care. My friend told me a horror story of one client who had S-Video going between his DVD player and Hi-Def TV.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see. We can predict all we want, but in the end, the common user is what decides the result. Over the long haul, though, Blu-ray will replace DVD, since the price will come to match that of normal DVD players.
Andrew
Oh, but they will.
I'm not sure what the price of the actual discs will be, but I imagine it wouldn't be much more than DVDs are today. Once players come down in price (which should be really quick), what would be the point of selling DVD players in the future? Everyone will by buying these Blu-ray players and slowly filling the installed base with Blu-ray (because honestly, HD-DVD will not win). Movies will come out in both DVD and Blu-ray format for quite a while afterwards (just look at the VHS tapes being produced). The transition won't be as fast as VHS->DVD, but it will happen. There are a lot more advantages of Blu-ray than just higher image quality (although, that is one of my biggest draws).
Andrew
PS: I think the comparison you should have made was CDs versus DVD-Audio and Super Audio CDs. These both offer higher quality or extra channels. This analogy falls short, however, since there is a much larger installed based of CDs, you can't easily rip multichannel (> stereo) audio to your computer, and no companies are automatically adopting it. My brothers recent Creative Labs audio card supports it, but that is all we have that does. Blu-ray, however, will quickly become the new standard in computers, stand alone players, and, I believe, the PS3.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...
You could hold the code hostage. Write some really awesome new app and release binaries. Tell people you'll release the source after $X donations. Once the donations have reached the goal, release the code. This is kind of like what happened with Blender.
Everyone should poke him. He may be the first person to get poked to death (due to a slashdotting).
Andrew
PS: If you don't understand poking, then you weren't able to view the Face Book page.
I like the term they used in the end credits of Lord of the Rings: Data Wrangler. I just imagine some guy in buttless chaps with a cowboy hat and a lasso. A hard drive fails? He just lassos it out of the hot swappable array and another picks up the task.
Andrew
PS: I know the Archive doesn't have hot spare arrays, they use JBOD, but I was talking about the guy for LotR that has that title.
I'd believe it. Notice how when you search for [the] now, it returns exactly 8 billion pages? Who wants to bet Google has code in there that limits the number of results listed (not that you can view them anyway) so no one really knows /how/ much they have indexed. They are secretive about their computer count for competition reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if they limit how much the public knows about the number of indexed pages. However, I, like others, have noticed a bunch of new Google Alerts being sent out, so maybe they did update, but it may be much more than 8 billion.
Andrew
Not necessarily. All the data would still be in plain text on their server, so they could easily find ads for your messages. The encryption would likely be done between the web server and the browser, like most encrypted sites. If you are implying that having encrypted communication with Gmail would mean more users encrypt the e-mail with, for example, PGP, then I don't believe it. I have a friend who is all about security and uses encryption both ways for his e-mail, but he doesn't bother with PGP, even when I ask him to.
Andrew
The initial press release for Google indicated it was developed because one of the employees was tired of Hotmail and other free providers. When Google visited my campus, I asked one of them how much space they got in Gmail and she said they get the same as everyone else. She then added that all internal mail is done outside of Gmail. This leads me to believe they don't check their Google mail using Gmail. Of course, this could be another white lie like saying they only have 20,000+ computers (which is actually up from the 10,000 I remember hearing earlier).
Andrew
Encryption would be great. I wonder why they don't now. They've got boxes up the wazoo, so it shouldn't be that much more expensive (both computationally and financially) to support it.
I believe they would release it in appliance form instead of software form. I may be speaking out of my ass, but I believe, from what I've read, that the Google operating system really takes over a system. Google File System (GFS) is specially made for performance on large clusters, and likely wouldn't run well with other software on a normal server machine. That is my guess. However, maybe Gmail is abstracted to run on other file systems. A company wouldn't need the performance that GFS provides, so maybe Google could change Gmail to run as an app in Windows or Linux with NTFS or the your Linux file system of choice.
What do you mean by expiration policies?
Andrew
One thing I've noticed recently, that I don't remember from before, when you log out, it now says your full e-mail address (user@gmail.com) where previously I thought it just said the username. I don't remember for sure, but I think this is something new.
This makes me wonder, is it possible Google will be adding support for other domains? Maybe you'll be able to get a Gmail address for free, but if you buy your own domain, you can use Google/Gmail for your mail server (either free or with a slight cost). That would be pretty neat, especially with this recent development of POP3 support.
I can imagine Google selling a rackmount Gmail appliance (to go along with the search appliance) for businesses, free @gmail.com accounts for everyone, and free/cheap mail hosting (with your own domain) for power users.
Who knows, that is just my speculation.
Andrew
*cough*CBS*cough*DAN RATHER*cough*
Hmm, informative and interesting. If I hadn't already commented, I'd use my mod points +1.
My favorite was on a button I saw at Bumbershoot:
:(
-------------------
Vote no CARB in 2004.
No Cheney
No Ashcroft
No Rumsfeld
No Bush
and definitely no Rice!
-------------------
I guess it seems the Atkins fad died down before the election
Crap shit fuck damn it all to hell.
Now we have a Senate, House, and Presidency all in control by the GOP. 11 states have banned gay marriage. Alaska threw all reason out the window and didn't legalize marijuana (which includes hemp, an amazing industrial plant). I must say, these next four years (and definitely the next two) are going to suck... big time.
I apologize world, but my vote against W wasn't enough.
Washington State is almost a guaranteed Kerry, so I voted for Badnarik.
Haha, that is one of the better analogies I've heard about the war in Iraq. Too bad I don't have mod points.
I agree. I think a browser is below what Google has in mind. I talked to a guy from Google the other day and he said that in five years, the company will be doing stuff you never imagined from Google. I think Google has a lot of tricks up their sleeve, but a browser isn't one of them.
Don't diss small investors, man. I bought my first stock when I was in 8th grade. My dad encouraged me by matching my input funds and, since he worked at a bank, he was able to get me commission free (or like $1 commission trades).
.com bubble burst. I learned my lesson... invest smarter. Since then I have been more cautious when investing, which has paid off. I bought Apple a year and a half ago, right around its two year low. Since then it has gone up over 200%, greatly improving my portfolio (and dominating the NASDAQ and Dow).
The stock went up for a while before BAM!, the
The most powerful force in the universe is compound interested, and the sooner you invest, the more you can make in the end. Well, that kind of turned into a post about buying stocks young, but it isn't completely off topic. Most young people don't have much money, and you don't know anything about him, so Judge Not, because when you talk about him, someone else is judging you. People shouldn't be prevented from investing just because they don't have much money. $200+ is a lot to some.
Andrew
There may not be a lot of room to expand in the search engine arena, but there is a /ton/ of innovation left in searching.
:) ). As you can see, there a lot of problems left with searching, and the solutions aren't trivial.
I went to a talk by Google on my campus yesterday (by the guy who wrote the MapReduce paper mentioned in the Rob Pike interview a few weeks ago) and it was very interesting. I had heard much of it before, but a lot was still new. He mentioned some problems they are working on that still plague search engines. Currently search engines just look for the words you typed. Google has advanced this a little by searching words that are almost the same as the word you typed. If you search for "burn man" (without the quotes) in Google, the first result is Burning Man. Google knows, probably using machine learning, that that burning, burn, burned, burns, etc. are all pretty much the same idea or concept. This way you don't have to run your search multiple times with different, but similar, words. The example they used in the presentation was [bay area cooking classes]. They had three results that would be relevant, but that would not be shown in the results. One of them was San Francisco cooking class. Another was Berkeley vegetarian cooking course. He showed us an internal program which would return groups based off the words you searched. It looked like it could have been what Google Sets is based off. This technique still has problems, though. He is an engineer, so he typed in "rolling hash," but more than half the results were about weed. He added "functions" to the search and became much more relevant (well, to him
Also, when searching for [bay area], you don't know if they mean San Francisco or Tampa Bay. There are a lot of options for customization as well.
I was talking to some engineers from Google later in the day and one guy was talking about how Google in five years will be much more (and different) than you imagine Google being today. I'm not sure they will release an OS. Their mission statement is "making the world's information searchable and accessible," and an OS doesn't seem to fit in there. Another thing I've heard mentioned (from someone at Google, I think) is that currently we have the problem of having a website between you and the data you want. You still have to type in your quotes and try to think of how to find what you want. Who knows, I'm talking out of my ass here, but maybe Gbrowser does exist, but it isn't like we might imagine. Who knows, maybe it is a browser of information (not websites).
In closing, there is a lot left for Google to do. They still index only a fraction of the world's data, but they just recently branched into printed text. From talking to the Google employee, I got the impression that Google has a lot left to release under its iron curtain. They remind me of the NSA... they are farther ahead in technology and research than most give them credit for.
Andrew
Or, perhaps even more appropriate, Volcano by The Presidents of the United States of America:
under the island middle of a mountain
there is a big bad boomin' system
blowin' speakers woofers and tweeters
amplifiers melted wires
the parties exploded the core is corroded
under ground the puget sound
cause a shiftin' and a drifin'
big black boom box stuck in the hot rock
it's in there flowin' it's in there growin'
you don't believe me that this scenery
could be a cold blooded killer
it's gonna blow volcano
it's gonna blow volcano
it's gonna blow volcano
now the island is shiftin' the plates are liftin'
the core is creamy docile and dreamy
stopped up and steamy
happy campers poop in there pampers
when the mountain becomes a fountain
of white hot lava molten magna
super sonic plate techtonics
stero phonic lava and tonic
the boom is bionic
sony shut down magnavox meltdown
ballistic breakdown
hi fi heatwave lo fi lava cave
that sulfur smells mt st helens
pompeii was yellin'
it's gonna blow volcano
it's gonna blow volcano
it's gonna blow volcano
it's gonna blow volcano
If it spews ash again, it will highly devalue those little containers of ash they sell at gift shops. My parents saved a huge container from when it erupted. If we put it into a whole bunch of little containers and sold them, we could probably make a few hundred bucks :).