"Unlike YouTube, where videos from professional media and amateurs alike are uploaded for the world to view, Flickr members can limit who the videos are shared with, through privacy settings."
YouTube's broadcast settings allow limited distribution as well. Up to 25 people can be added to a whitelist of viewers. Flickr and YouTube differ a tiny bit here on how privacy restrictions are implemented, but for 99% of use cases they have competitive parity.
The more significant difference would be that Flickr is going to allow 10x file sizes over YouTube. This allows for much greater control over the resolution quality, and hence will be much more attractive to "artistic" use.
More generally, though, this would seem to be yet another case of old-becomes-new-again. iFilm.com (now spike.com) has been running a similar service for over 10 years now. Perhaps there are significant differences in their terms of service? Perhaps the combination of still images plus moving pictures is some huge new convergence previously overlooked? Perhaps the brand recognition of Flickr will make this more successful than iFilm has been?
In the absence of answers to these questions, my snap judgement of this announcement is "ho hum".
Simple, clear graphics are not that dissimilar from simple, clear scripts. Neither is a quantifiable entity unto itself, and each requires definition to be useful in any form worthy for business.
There are plenty of "designer" businesses needing only a little "scripting" to get them to the next level. And there are plenty of "hacker" businesses who would benefit greatly from just a little "design work".
This has been the case since (as memory serves me) at least 1994 or so. No kidding. Same creative folks have no cgi-bin scripts; same kernel haxors have disgusting looking web sites.
Why is there no barter marketplace for this work? So much entry-level work is left undone simply because there is a gulf between mouse-people and keyboard-people.
Content owners hate fair use. They are never going to help enable it.
My peeve in fair use these days is ringtones. What about making a 10-second sample of a song for use as a ring-tone violates fair use? (You're just playing 10 seconds of a song you already "own" on a "music player" called a phone, right?) And yet, if you look at iTunes, they will only allow you to make ringtones of songs that the owners have explicitly permitted such usage.
This tendency for computing projects in non-computing organizations to be "just barely functioning" is discussed by Joel Spolsky in a talk he gave to some students of CS at Yale recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html
I have some disks I wiped with crypto-generated randomness. Indistinguishable from encrypted disks without metadata (as linux dm-crypt can do for example). I cannot prove that there is no data on them. Completely impossible. Am I a criminal according to this law? Or do they need to have some proof that there is data on the disk?
You are exceedingly adept with computers, more so than the feds. Of course you're a criminal.
Explains how we got here, what we're facing, and why we are screwed. US Government is FUCKED by private interests, largely because there is no line between the two any more.
I'm getting my son EU citizenship and teaching him French. Hopefully that's enough to ease his transition to a new continent.
Strap on your tinfoil hats, gents. The RIAA stoops to a new low... poisoning the well for all of us who love to email terabytes of illegal MP3s to our co-workers.
There are plenty. Many people do not consider this book to be a balanced discussion of the subject matter at hand. This type of controversy should be mentioned in any prominent book review.
The USA has been a country for well over 200 years. We started with a decent set of guidelines for basic laws, expecting to fill in the details over time, as we saw the need. (See a need, fill a need. Just like BigWeld says.)
Fast forward to today. We've been making laws for 231 years, +/- my errors in American History and Math. There are so many, I repeat so many, laws on the books that it's unreasonable to expect any single person to know and obey them all. Even big organizations sometimes slip up and violate laws they didn't mean.
To make matters worse, sometimes decent, logical laws get passed, and yet there are so many laws on the books that it's impossible to police things to make sure none of them get broken. And so, shady entities have a wide margin of arbitrage between legality and enforcement, from which to pry their takings. Usually the frequency and severity of the punishments is inversely proportional to the obscurity of the law (more obscure == less penalty) and so it's actually profitable and more efficient to dance around in the gray areas of legality. Bummer.
(You're wondering where I loop back around and relate this to TFA? Me too. Lemme think.)
Oh yeah. Public employees usually aren't the most talented or savvy of the lot. There are some awesome people in the public sector, but in general the _average_ govt. employee is not as strong a worker as the _median_ govt. employee. "Free market" capitalism combined with capped government salaries ensure this.
So our expectations of public bureaucracy need to be lowered, sadly. This is just another example of why. Expecting the highly unlikely to happen and getting saddened by it not happening isn't really fair or logical.
Some systems need to be changed from without, not within. And expecting them to change themselves just isn't going to happen.
I put government into this category.
We need a new government system.
We need a radical departure from today's way!
Who is with me?! Yeah! Let's set off a firecracker every six inches along the entire state line of California, all at once. The ensuing shocks will cause the state to break free and sail towards Hawaii. At which point we'll, uh, wait a sec...
1. Light firecrackers 2. Sail California into the Pacific 3. ?? 4. Profit!
5. Justice Dept. barges in, seizes computers 6. EFF steps in 7. ?? 8. Profit again!
To anyone who knows Linux (or BSD, or any Unix) it's a no-brainer to run the fast, open, free, fully-configurable stuff.
It's only a legitimately difficult decision to make when a company doesn't have Unix expertise. (Which is often.) Pay the cost to replace your IT staff, or pay the cost to rent software from Microsoft?
I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.
These "I switched to Linux and I saved money articles" are old and meaningless.
"I switched my career from real-estate to oncology and now I make more money!" Great, but what's the real-world cost of doing so, if it's not already a simple option?
(I'm a multi-platform guy with a hybrid environment at home, so save your breath if you're going to point the Finger of Anti-Linux SentimEnt at me.)
Ditto. 10 days ago I searched all over Budapest for a replacement battery for my Sony camera. Every store I went into looked at me apologetically when they saw I was looking for Sony parts.
(I swore off Sony electronics about 5 years ago, but in this case I found the camera. Even as a *free* camera, I'm still getting burned by Sony's stupidities. And on a related note, if you're looking for a cheap Sony camera, check out ebay in a few hours... mine will be up there.)
If the universe is "infinite", then there's plenty of room for lots of strange anomalies out there. A region which has nothing in it is just a blerp in the standard distribution of matter. One which would seem entirely consistent with anomalies in random distributions, sequences, etc.
Not only that, but since the universe is constantly expanding and at an ever-increasing rate, greater and greater becomes the possibility of finding big "holes".
Cool, yes. But it doesn't really surprise me at all. Then again, I'm just a programmer so what do I know?
Nobody can know for sure, but many suspect that this isn't one million accountants and ebayers downloading Safari. It's more likely a combination of curious iPhone developers, eager Apple fanboys, and a bunch of your average browser-tier developers.
I got an Apple ][ back in 1978 when I was 10. It had only a couple of crappy text games on it, and I wished I had more. So I taught myself to program.
Fast-forward 28 years, and I am still programming, making mid-six-figures in salary, and I never finished college.
Would I take away my early exposure to computers? Um, hell no. Will I give my 3-year-old a computer when he is ten? That depends upon whether or not I can "restrict" his usage to "productive" tasks and harmless media. So, probably.
But will I give him a Nintendo when he is ten? Absolutely not. My parents would never buy me an Atari console as a kid, making me save my lawn-mowing money up to buy one when I was sixteen. And you know what? By the time I bought that thing, I really didn't even play it that much because programming was so much more engrossing.
And I still thank my parents for being so discerning between types of electronic media. It makes all the difference. There's a good chance that if they had bought me an Atari at age ten instead of an Apple ][, I'd probably be a college dropout working at Starbucks instead of a highly recruited UI engineer.
So, like anything else, it depends. Bottom line: parents are around for a reason. Namely, to make the correct decisions involving the upbringing of their children. Sure it's easier to just buy them a console and plug them in for a few hours a day. But that's not what parenting is about at its core.
Every black hole in existence in the universe is a result of some fairly advanced civilization reaching a point where each eventually says "Hey, let's build a Large Hadron Collider and see what happens".
The rest, as they say, is astronomical history....
This is a security model inversion which is better suited to Wikis than traditional security, and it's Good.
Traditional security (i.e. non-communal) says "only privileged users can make changes", and "the more privileged you are, the more you can change".
This security inverts that concept and focuses not on who can change what, but rather on how pervasive their changes are once they have made them. If the old model is a Privilege-Heirarchy model, then this is a Popularity-Broadcasting model. It says "anyone can change anything", and "only if you matter will your changes be seen by anyone else who matters".
It removes the temptation to vandalize anonymously, because anonymous folks have no rep and therefore no power. It idealizes having a good reputation, because therein lies the path to the biggest podium.
Just remove it. Manually. On every keyboard I own there is a nice hole where the caps lock used to be. A little unsightly, sure, but I never ever press it by accident, and if I need the functionality I just push on the little stub of where a key used to be.
And I'm a very happy man!
Now, if you wanted to move it to where the "Help" key is on a Mac, be my guest....
This was really just a gag article posted by Slashdot editors to take the pulse of herd attitude regarding Flickr. Obviously, to judge by the number of indignant "Flickr has every right!" and "Down with screenshots!" posts, it's apparent that Flickr is still in the upper-right quadrant of Slashdot love.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unlike YouTube, where videos from professional media and amateurs alike are uploaded for the world to view, Flickr members can limit who the videos are shared with, through privacy settings."
YouTube's broadcast settings allow limited distribution as well. Up to 25 people can be added to a whitelist of viewers. Flickr and YouTube differ a tiny bit here on how privacy restrictions are implemented, but for 99% of use cases they have competitive parity.
The more significant difference would be that Flickr is going to allow 10x file sizes over YouTube. This allows for much greater control over the resolution quality, and hence will be much more attractive to "artistic" use.
More generally, though, this would seem to be yet another case of old-becomes-new-again. iFilm.com (now spike.com) has been running a similar service for over 10 years now. Perhaps there are significant differences in their terms of service? Perhaps the combination of still images plus moving pictures is some huge new convergence previously overlooked? Perhaps the brand recognition of Flickr will make this more successful than iFilm has been?
In the absence of answers to these questions, my snap judgement of this announcement is "ho hum".
Simple, clear graphics are not that dissimilar from simple, clear scripts. Neither is a quantifiable entity unto itself, and each requires definition to be useful in any form worthy for business.
There are plenty of "designer" businesses needing only a little "scripting" to get them to the next level. And there are plenty of "hacker" businesses who would benefit greatly from just a little "design work".
This has been the case since (as memory serves me) at least 1994 or so. No kidding. Same creative folks have no cgi-bin scripts; same kernel haxors have disgusting looking web sites.
Why is there no barter marketplace for this work? So much entry-level work is left undone simply because there is a gulf between mouse-people and keyboard-people.
Get it together!
The point of MapReduce is that It Works. Cheaply. Reliably. It's not a solution for the Cathedral, it's one for the Bazaar.
Comparing it to a DBMS on fanciness is pointless, because the DBMS solution fails where MapReduce succeeds.
Content owners hate fair use. They are never going to help enable it.
My peeve in fair use these days is ringtones. What about making a 10-second sample of a song for use as a ring-tone violates fair use? (You're just playing 10 seconds of a song you already "own" on a "music player" called a phone, right?) And yet, if you look at iTunes, they will only allow you to make ringtones of songs that the owners have explicitly permitted such usage.
Feh.
This tendency for computing projects in non-computing organizations to be "just barely functioning" is discussed by Joel Spolsky in a talk he gave to some students of CS at Yale recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html
Rings true to me.
I have some disks I wiped with crypto-generated randomness. Indistinguishable from encrypted disks without metadata (as linux dm-crypt can do for example). I cannot prove that there is no data on them. Completely impossible. Am I a criminal according to this law? Or do they need to have some proof that there is data on the disk?
You are exceedingly adept with computers, more so than the feds. Of course you're a criminal.
Why We Fight.
Explains how we got here, what we're facing, and why we are screwed. US Government is FUCKED by private interests, largely because there is no line between the two any more.
I'm getting my son EU citizenship and teaching him French. Hopefully that's enough to ease his transition to a new continent.
Strap on your tinfoil hats, gents. The RIAA stoops to a new low... poisoning the well for all of us who love to email terabytes of illegal MP3s to our co-workers.
There are plenty. Many people do not consider this book to be a balanced discussion of the subject matter at hand. This type of controversy should be mentioned in any prominent book review.
The USA has been a country for well over 200 years. We started with a decent set of guidelines for basic laws, expecting to fill in the details over time, as we saw the need. (See a need, fill a need. Just like BigWeld says.)
Fast forward to today. We've been making laws for 231 years, +/- my errors in American History and Math. There are so many, I repeat so many, laws on the books that it's unreasonable to expect any single person to know and obey them all. Even big organizations sometimes slip up and violate laws they didn't mean.
To make matters worse, sometimes decent, logical laws get passed, and yet there are so many laws on the books that it's impossible to police things to make sure none of them get broken. And so, shady entities have a wide margin of arbitrage between legality and enforcement, from which to pry their takings. Usually the frequency and severity of the punishments is inversely proportional to the obscurity of the law (more obscure == less penalty) and so it's actually profitable and more efficient to dance around in the gray areas of legality. Bummer.
(You're wondering where I loop back around and relate this to TFA? Me too. Lemme think.)
Oh yeah. Public employees usually aren't the most talented or savvy of the lot. There are some awesome people in the public sector, but in general the _average_ govt. employee is not as strong a worker as the _median_ govt. employee. "Free market" capitalism combined with capped government salaries ensure this.
So our expectations of public bureaucracy need to be lowered, sadly. This is just another example of why. Expecting the highly unlikely to happen and getting saddened by it not happening isn't really fair or logical.
Some systems need to be changed from without, not within. And expecting them to change themselves just isn't going to happen.
I put government into this category.
We need a new government system.
We need a radical departure from today's way!
Who is with me?! Yeah! Let's set off a firecracker every six inches along the entire state line of California, all at once. The ensuing shocks will cause the state to break free and sail towards Hawaii. At which point we'll, uh, wait a sec...
1. Light firecrackers
2. Sail California into the Pacific
3. ??
4. Profit!
5. Justice Dept. barges in, seizes computers
6. EFF steps in
7. ??
8. Profit again!
We can't fail....
> With a pipe, there ARE two ends to it you know.
Aye, and one end is very hot! I avoid touching it with my mouth, and I recommend you do too.
To anyone who knows Linux (or BSD, or any Unix) it's a no-brainer to run the fast, open, free, fully-configurable stuff.
It's only a legitimately difficult decision to make when a company doesn't have Unix expertise. (Which is often.) Pay the cost to replace your IT staff, or pay the cost to rent software from Microsoft?
I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.
These "I switched to Linux and I saved money articles" are old and meaningless.
"I switched my career from real-estate to oncology and now I make more money!" Great, but what's the real-world cost of doing so, if it's not already a simple option?
(I'm a multi-platform guy with a hybrid environment at home, so save your breath if you're going to point the Finger of Anti-Linux SentimEnt at me.)
Ditto. 10 days ago I searched all over Budapest for a replacement battery for my Sony camera. Every store I went into looked at me apologetically when they saw I was looking for Sony parts.
(I swore off Sony electronics about 5 years ago, but in this case I found the camera. Even as a *free* camera, I'm still getting burned by Sony's stupidities. And on a related note, if you're looking for a cheap Sony camera, check out ebay in a few hours... mine will be up there.)
If the universe is "infinite", then there's plenty of room for lots of strange anomalies out there. A region which has nothing in it is just a blerp in the standard distribution of matter. One which would seem entirely consistent with anomalies in random distributions, sequences, etc.
Not only that, but since the universe is constantly expanding and at an ever-increasing rate, greater and greater becomes the possibility of finding big "holes".
Cool, yes. But it doesn't really surprise me at all. Then again, I'm just a programmer so what do I know?
Nobody can know for sure, but many suspect that this isn't one million accountants and ebayers downloading Safari. It's more likely a combination of curious iPhone developers, eager Apple fanboys, and a bunch of your average browser-tier developers.
No story here.
This is why slashdot needs a "Score: 7, Soil Yourself".
Methinks you need a hot date, my friend. Get out into the sunlight a bit.
$0.45 / gallon of electricity?? Huh? Could I get that in kilo-watts of gasoline, just so I have a better frame of reference?
Like anything, it depends upon specifics....
I got an Apple ][ back in 1978 when I was 10. It had only a couple of crappy text games on it, and I wished I had more. So I taught myself to program.
Fast-forward 28 years, and I am still programming, making mid-six-figures in salary, and I never finished college.
Would I take away my early exposure to computers? Um, hell no. Will I give my 3-year-old a computer when he is ten? That depends upon whether or not I can "restrict" his usage to "productive" tasks and harmless media. So, probably.
But will I give him a Nintendo when he is ten? Absolutely not. My parents would never buy me an Atari console as a kid, making me save my lawn-mowing money up to buy one when I was sixteen. And you know what? By the time I bought that thing, I really didn't even play it that much because programming was so much more engrossing.
And I still thank my parents for being so discerning between types of electronic media. It makes all the difference. There's a good chance that if they had bought me an Atari at age ten instead of an Apple ][, I'd probably be a college dropout working at Starbucks instead of a highly recruited UI engineer.
So, like anything else, it depends. Bottom line: parents are around for a reason. Namely, to make the correct decisions involving the upbringing of their children. Sure it's easier to just buy them a console and plug them in for a few hours a day. But that's not what parenting is about at its core.
Every black hole in existence in the universe is a result of some fairly advanced civilization reaching a point where each eventually says "Hey, let's build a Large Hadron Collider and see what happens".
The rest, as they say, is astronomical history....
This is a security model inversion which is better suited to Wikis than traditional security, and it's Good.
Traditional security (i.e. non-communal) says "only privileged users can make changes", and "the more privileged you are, the more you can change".
This security inverts that concept and focuses not on who can change what, but rather on how pervasive their changes are once they have made them. If the old model is a Privilege-Heirarchy model, then this is a Popularity-Broadcasting model. It says "anyone can change anything", and "only if you matter will your changes be seen by anyone else who matters".
It removes the temptation to vandalize anonymously, because anonymous folks have no rep and therefore no power. It idealizes having a good reputation, because therein lies the path to the biggest podium.
Just remove it. Manually. On every keyboard I own there is a nice hole where the caps lock used to be. A little unsightly, sure, but I never ever press it by accident, and if I need the functionality I just push on the little stub of where a key used to be.
And I'm a very happy man!
Now, if you wanted to move it to where the "Help" key is on a Mac, be my guest....
This was really just a gag article posted by Slashdot editors to take the pulse of herd attitude regarding Flickr. Obviously, to judge by the number of indignant "Flickr has every right!" and "Down with screenshots!" posts, it's apparent that Flickr is still in the upper-right quadrant of Slashdot love.
Well done. Carry on!
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, not far from Apple worldwide corporate headquarters. I work as a software engineer, sometimes 15 hours a day.
More than half of my salary goes to my lodging and food.
It would seem that sci-fi will never be anything other than what it is: a fiction.
Never? That's a very, very long time. I would never bet against never. Never always wins. (Especially if you believe in an infinite universe.)