A mime type doesn't magically enable streaming media. It just associates a URL with the software needed to view it. Which has to be installed and configured. The leading media players are notoriously flaky, and also tend to fight with each other over control of media types.
In a perfect world, all online video would use some open standard that would easily be playable by the user's favorite software — or the software that came with the system. In the real world, online video uses proprietary formats and fancy compression schemes that are always having to be updated. If you're an open source zealot, you can just refuse to look at anything that doesn't use formats that you approve of. But the rest of us have to deal with proprietary streams — and Flash video players make that a lot easier.
You're right, all-Flash sites suck. But for simple web applications and graphics, Flash is unsurpassed. Many banner ads on Slashdot are Flash applications. (I'm looking at one as I type this.) I've seen a lot of cool games written in Flash — and the best ones are minimalistic.
I'm beginning to see sites using a Flash application to do streaming media, instead of an embedded player. Seems to work much better than the usual media players from Microsoft, Apple, and Real.
You're right, mythology does change over time. But I think it's fair to distinguish a myth about vampires told by a Romanian peasant who believes that they actually exist and a story about vampires in Southern California made up by a TV script writer who just wants to tell a good story. Once you get away from traditional legends and into deliberate fabrication, you move from mythology to fantasy. Of course, there's a huge grey area between mythology and fantasy, because fantasy is built on mythological traditions and ideas. But I would insist that Buffy and Xena are nowhere near that grey area. Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi aren't at all interested in mythology, except as an excuse to tell their own stories.
Yeah, good point. I shouldn't have implied that the notion of Hard SF was meaningless. I was just responding to somebody who questioned my statement that most people don't know or care about the SF-fantasy distinction. He claimed that I was talking about Hard SF and ordinary SF as if it were the same thing. My point was that to most people it is.
Who says I don't know these terms? I just don't suffer from the illusion that my vocabulary is shared by every English-speaking person. But don't take my word for it — pick 5 people who don't read or watch the same stuff you do, and ask them, "what's hard science fiction?" I'll bet you get at least 3 blank looks.
Buffy and Xena do borrow from mythology, but neither is true to established mythology. Most of the monsters on Buffy were invented for the show, and Xena considers mythological characters (and also historical characters, such as Julius Caesar) to be outlines they can impose their own stories on, without being at all faithful to the originals. (Note that Xena is on a first-name basis with both Julius Caesar and Helen of Troy. Helen was probably not a real person, but the Siege of Troy did happen — at least a thousand years before Caesar was born.) Both Buffy and Xena are more fantasy than mythology.
Lara Croft and Indiana Jones also rate as fantasy, since their backstories have only token connections to the real world.
Now, here's the thing: most people don't distinguish between fantasy and science fiction. It may be obvious to you and me that, say, Buffy and Star Trek are different genres. That's because we see vampires as purely imaginary, and interstellar travel as something that could happen someday. But to most people, one is not "more real" than the other, either because they're very credulous about vampires, or they're very skeptical about starships.
The problem here is that most people who read or watch (or even write) fantasy and SF just don't give a shit about what's scientifically possible and what's not. They just want to escape from reality for a while. Vampires and spaceships, magic and time travel — it's all the same to them. And to someone like that, any precise definition of what's SF and what's not is boring, dweebish nitpicking.
You'll notice they stopped maintaining the facility at the same time the Soviet Union fell apart. No more MAD, no more secret underground headquarters.
No TV is old enough to enter the public domain naturally.
Or ever will be. Despite the Consitution's insistence that IP be protected for a "limited time" (Section 8, clause 8) we keep seeing retroactive extensions of copyright. Before 1919, the "natural" expiration of copyright occurred after 28 years, with a possible 14 year extension. Since then, we've seen a series of retroactive extensions of old copyrights. Works for hire (which would cover most TV shows) were extended to 75 years in 1976 and to 95 years in 1998 — just in time to keep all the Hollywood 30s classics from entering the public domain.
If the current term stands, we'll start to see 50s TV shows enter the public domain 40 years from now. But of course it won't. Not unless Congress magically finds the backbone to stand up to the media monopolies. Or until the Supreme Court realizes that allowing retroactive extensions makes a joke of clause 8 and reserves itself on this issue.
Nobody seems to have noticed that TFA is just a summary of a TV show. And one that doesn't seem to have that much to say about Delta 32 either. Anyway, judging from Google, Delta 32 is old news.
Geeks are suprisingly clueless on time zones. Look at how many web sites don't handle them correctly. I used to be technical editor for a customer support web site serving people in every time zone. The web team would announce down times like "7 PM Pacific Standard Time". Which wasn't even correct, since it was summer and daylight savings time was in effect. Even if it had been correct, it would have been hard to figure out by people in, say, Germany. I had to practically beat people over the head to get them to add the UTC offset.
And here's what's really ironic: most of the developers were from India. Which is not only on the other side of the planet, but has a unique (UTC +5.5) countrywide time zone. You would think that an Indian geek would be more aware of time zone issues than an insular U.S. geek. Not the case.
Turn, turn, turn
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Meanwhile, a great force and a high pitched whining sound has been reported from Judge Greene's grave as he spins at nearly 10K RPM.
Not quite true. Greene was pretty hard on AT&T, but he didn't actually break them up. They broke themselves up voluntarily, using the anti-trust suit as an excuse to convert themselves from a utility to a commercial company. The theory was that they had been prevented from cashing in on all the cool stuff they invented (transistors, communications sattelites, and Unix are highlights from a very long list) because as a public utility, they couldn't engage in commercial ventures. If they spun off the RBOCs, they could go into any business they wanted to.
The big flaw in that strategy was that they didn't know how to be a commercial company. Every venture of theirs collapse because of bureaucratic nonsense and bad planning. I worked for the company that built Unix PC for them (basically, one of our 68010 time-sharing boxes clumsily mated with some of their telecom hardware plus an ineptly designed keyboard and display). AT&T spent something like a billion dollars developing this product and paying for initial production — and never even tried to sell it. By the time it reached the market, they decided that they were going to to IBM-compatibles instead. Which made a certain amount of sense — except that product line didn't sell either.
How many different ways did they screw up? Let's see, "phone stores", the TCI buyout...
Bell labs only changed their name. They're still around today operating as Lucent.
Wrong. Bell Labs is part of Lucent. Lucent was formed when AT&T decided to spin off its telecom hardware business, so Lucent is basically the same as Western Electric.
Except neither company really does what its predecessor does. Back when it was a monopoly/utility and under no pressure to maximize its bottom line, AT&T poured millions into Bell Labs, and considered the odd Nobel Prize adequate recompense. And Western Electric used to manufacturer (and recycle!) 95% of the telephones used in the U.S; nowadays they don't make anything smaller than an exchange. Those days will never come again.
Actually, with hardware generally the failures follow a bath-tub curve. Quite a few disks are dead on arrival, or die in the first few hundred hours.
So to go back to the 70-babies analogy, there's a lot of infant mortality.
A long time ago, I worked for a pre-PC workstation/server manufacturer. To avoid shipping systems that would die soon after arrival, we'd "burn in" our systems: put them in a special overheated room and leave them running for a couple of days. I guess with commodity hardware it's more economic to let your customers do the burn-in. Which is a pain in the ass — the first time I installed a home router, I wasted a couple of hours figuring out that the thing was DOA, and another hour taking it back to the store. Lucky I didn't order it online!
If you assume that the failures are spread out evenly across time, a 1000-disk system will have a failure every 500 hours, or about every 3 weeks!
Not a sound assumption. Things don't fail uniformly over time. Suppose 70 babies are born with a life expectancy of 70 years. Is one of them guaranteed to die every year for the next 70 years? Obviously not. If they avoid some joint disaster (like they all take a trip on the Titanic), most of them will die within a decade or so of the 70-year mark.
Same with disk drives — most failures will be clustered around the 57-year mark. Not that your attitude towards redunancy is wrong. Just as people sometimes die in infancy, some disk drives break down quickly. So there's a chance that you'll lose some drives from your thousand-disk system in the first year.
How big a chance? To answer that question, you need more statistics about drive failure — and a much better grasp of probability theory.
Getting to the Greek letters at all is obviously quite rare...
In fact, this is the first time it's ever happened — we've never had more than 21 named storms in a single season before. If you buy the theory that this year was just a peak in a long cycle, then it'll be another 80 years before we have to resort to Greek letters again. But if you buy the theory that global warming is generating extra hurricanes, we may run out of Greek letters awfully quickly. Though that'd be the least of our problems!
I'm reminded of the joke: "How can I make money in the stock market?" "Easy: buy stock at a low price, sell it at a high price." Strictly true, but not very useful. Exactly how do you "just start"?
The answer to that depends on what you hope to learn. Programming is a big topic and there are a lot of ways to approach it.
Probably most Slashdotters will answer this question with something practical and job-oriented. "Get a copy of Kernighan and Ritchie, C is a language everybody should know." "Download Perl." "Download the Java SDK." "Use the VBA engine in Word to write macros." Etc. All worth doing if you're looking for a career as a programmer. But I sense that this guy is motivated more by intellectual curiousity than by career development. (As he should be — the developer job market is a tad oversupplied.) He's used computers most of his life, but has an unsatisified curiousity about how the suckers work.
One good way to satisfy that curiousity would be with the very basics: machine language and assembly language. These are not useful skills for most programmers, who only need to know the high-level abstractions of the systems they work with. (Some people would disagree with me on that.) But for satisfying your curiousity about just what computers do, it's a nice exercise.
Or instead of going very low level, you can go very high level, and learn some basic computer science while you're at it. That the route if you read the classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and work its Scheme programming exercises.
Then again, learning programming on your own is not for everybody. If somebody has managed to be around computers for a long time, but has never go around to learning programming, he probably is the sort of person who needs some initial handholding. Community colleges often have good classes.
Yeah, right. It takes a lot of brains to sit around making lame comments. Whereas designing software to defeat spam filters and CAPCHAs requires no brain power at all.
Actually, the Gods from Space crowd don't exempt Euros either. The Stargate Conspiracy insists that western civilization is the result of ancient Egyptian Star Gods. It also claims that a secret conspiracy is still travelling to the stars and bringing back alien technology, using it to build wealth and power. So even Euros aren't smart of enough to invent computers and iPods — it's all alient technology!
If this all sounds familiar, it's because The Stargate Conspiracy was optioned by Hollywood, and made into first a movie and then a TV show. What I find really weird is that Hollywood has made the evil conspiracy into the good guys!
Slashdot Mirror
In a perfect world, all online video would use some open standard that would easily be playable by the user's favorite software — or the software that came with the system. In the real world, online video uses proprietary formats and fancy compression schemes that are always having to be updated. If you're an open source zealot, you can just refuse to look at anything that doesn't use formats that you approve of. But the rest of us have to deal with proprietary streams — and Flash video players make that a lot easier.
I'm beginning to see sites using a Flash application to do streaming media, instead of an embedded player. Seems to work much better than the usual media players from Microsoft, Apple, and Real.
Nor do I claim that hard SF doesn't exist. I had another point entirely.
You're right, mythology does change over time. But I think it's fair to distinguish a myth about vampires told by a Romanian peasant who believes that they actually exist and a story about vampires in Southern California made up by a TV script writer who just wants to tell a good story. Once you get away from traditional legends and into deliberate fabrication, you move from mythology to fantasy. Of course, there's a huge grey area between mythology and fantasy, because fantasy is built on mythological traditions and ideas. But I would insist that Buffy and Xena are nowhere near that grey area. Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi aren't at all interested in mythology, except as an excuse to tell their own stories.
Yeah, good point. I shouldn't have implied that the notion of Hard SF was meaningless. I was just responding to somebody who questioned my statement that most people don't know or care about the SF-fantasy distinction. He claimed that I was talking about Hard SF and ordinary SF as if it were the same thing. My point was that to most people it is.
Who says I don't know these terms? I just don't suffer from the illusion that my vocabulary is shared by every English-speaking person. But don't take my word for it — pick 5 people who don't read or watch the same stuff you do, and ask them, "what's hard science fiction?" I'll bet you get at least 3 blank looks.
And of course Wikipedia's definitions of "hard sci-fi" and "space opera" are universally accepted!
Lara Croft and Indiana Jones also rate as fantasy, since their backstories have only token connections to the real world.
Now, here's the thing: most people don't distinguish between fantasy and science fiction. It may be obvious to you and me that, say, Buffy and Star Trek are different genres. That's because we see vampires as purely imaginary, and interstellar travel as something that could happen someday. But to most people, one is not "more real" than the other, either because they're very credulous about vampires, or they're very skeptical about starships.
The problem here is that most people who read or watch (or even write) fantasy and SF just don't give a shit about what's scientifically possible and what's not. They just want to escape from reality for a while. Vampires and spaceships, magic and time travel — it's all the same to them. And to someone like that, any precise definition of what's SF and what's not is boring, dweebish nitpicking.
You'll notice they stopped maintaining the facility at the same time the Soviet Union fell apart. No more MAD, no more secret underground headquarters.
If the current term stands, we'll start to see 50s TV shows enter the public domain 40 years from now. But of course it won't. Not unless Congress magically finds the backbone to stand up to the media monopolies. Or until the Supreme Court realizes that allowing retroactive extensions makes a joke of clause 8 and reserves itself on this issue.
Nobody seems to have noticed that TFA is just a summary of a TV show. And one that doesn't seem to have that much to say about Delta 32 either. Anyway, judging from Google, Delta 32 is old news.
And here's what's really ironic: most of the developers were from India. Which is not only on the other side of the planet, but has a unique (UTC +5.5) countrywide time zone. You would think that an Indian geek would be more aware of time zone issues than an insular U.S. geek. Not the case.
The big flaw in that strategy was that they didn't know how to be a commercial company. Every venture of theirs collapse because of bureaucratic nonsense and bad planning. I worked for the company that built Unix PC for them (basically, one of our 68010 time-sharing boxes clumsily mated with some of their telecom hardware plus an ineptly designed keyboard and display). AT&T spent something like a billion dollars developing this product and paying for initial production — and never even tried to sell it. By the time it reached the market, they decided that they were going to to IBM-compatibles instead. Which made a certain amount of sense — except that product line didn't sell either.
How many different ways did they screw up? Let's see, "phone stores", the TCI buyout...
Except neither company really does what its predecessor does. Back when it was a monopoly/utility and under no pressure to maximize its bottom line, AT&T poured millions into Bell Labs, and considered the odd Nobel Prize adequate recompense. And Western Electric used to manufacturer (and recycle!) 95% of the telephones used in the U.S; nowadays they don't make anything smaller than an exchange. Those days will never come again.
The "don't fix the roof because it's not raining" attitude doesn't work with Civil Liberties — or anything else.
A long time ago, I worked for a pre-PC workstation/server manufacturer. To avoid shipping systems that would die soon after arrival, we'd "burn in" our systems: put them in a special overheated room and leave them running for a couple of days. I guess with commodity hardware it's more economic to let your customers do the burn-in. Which is a pain in the ass — the first time I installed a home router, I wasted a couple of hours figuring out that the thing was DOA, and another hour taking it back to the store. Lucky I didn't order it online!
Sorry, I forgot to hop in my time machine and check for posts that hadn't been written yet.
Same with disk drives — most failures will be clustered around the 57-year mark. Not that your attitude towards redunancy is wrong. Just as people sometimes die in infancy, some disk drives break down quickly. So there's a chance that you'll lose some drives from your thousand-disk system in the first year.
How big a chance? To answer that question, you need more statistics about drive failure — and a much better grasp of probability theory.
The answer to that depends on what you hope to learn. Programming is a big topic and there are a lot of ways to approach it.
Probably most Slashdotters will answer this question with something practical and job-oriented. "Get a copy of Kernighan and Ritchie, C is a language everybody should know." "Download Perl." "Download the Java SDK." "Use the VBA engine in Word to write macros." Etc. All worth doing if you're looking for a career as a programmer. But I sense that this guy is motivated more by intellectual curiousity than by career development. (As he should be — the developer job market is a tad oversupplied.) He's used computers most of his life, but has an unsatisified curiousity about how the suckers work.
One good way to satisfy that curiousity would be with the very basics: machine language and assembly language. These are not useful skills for most programmers, who only need to know the high-level abstractions of the systems they work with. (Some people would disagree with me on that.) But for satisfying your curiousity about just what computers do, it's a nice exercise.
Or instead of going very low level, you can go very high level, and learn some basic computer science while you're at it. That the route if you read the classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and work its Scheme programming exercises.
Then again, learning programming on your own is not for everybody. If somebody has managed to be around computers for a long time, but has never go around to learning programming, he probably is the sort of person who needs some initial handholding. Community colleges often have good classes.
Brains!
If this all sounds familiar, it's because The Stargate Conspiracy was optioned by Hollywood, and made into first a movie and then a TV show. What I find really weird is that Hollywood has made the evil conspiracy into the good guys!