This is just a rehash of the same technology that was used to make expiring email. Omniva/Disappearing Inc. was doing this at the turn of millennium and just like with this technology, the point wasn't to prevent a moderately determined person from making copies of the emails by doing a screen capture, printing the email (there was actually some cute technology "preventing" even that), or transcribing the damn thing. It was to apply document retention policy of corporations and government industries. And of course to raise money from gullible investors. I mean, after all, there are trillions of images being uploaded to Facebook every few seconds...
in a few years most online games will be played with an extremely simple client where even the graphics are generated remotely along with all the game logic. the client will be able to run on cheap hardware (no more crazy gaming rigs) and DRM will become unnecessary...
it will be very little time before the technological superiority of the alternative browsers causes them to add special features not available for Internet Explorer users.
this would be a bad thing. i could care less about IE's demise but what you're talking about would effectively recreate the very problem we have now - just because it's not M$ doesn't make it not evil.
existing browsers would do very well to keep to the standards only.
Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?
i did. for $30 from the microsoft store (i'm an alumnus). was curious. it's actually pretty cool looking. works great on my bootcamp partition when i have an itch to play some TF2:)
The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me
why?
photography had already been around for 100+ years at the time. the astronauts had hasselblads and were shooting on the best medium format film available.
that's not entirely true as the target device could be targetted with a "power beam". i do agree however that it is still likely to be terribly wasteful. better local storage of energy is definitely a better idea.
i'm amazed at the battery life of the ipod classic, for example, as compared to that of the 4th generation ipod (in just 3 years went from 16 real hours to real life 30+ hours and it's smaller to boot)
your arguments are almost as tiresome as your overuse of the word "glib". of course this being slashdot, maybe you mean g[ee]lib. in which case please specify the version.
otoh, talk about a simple way to extend a human's active life span by 30+% were it possible to actually eliminate the need for sleep. i am also skeptical since every cognizant living organism regardless of its family seems to require downtime but nevertheless would be really interested in gaining back those 6-7 hours i currently "waste"...
(yes i realize all the downsides including more energy/resources being consumed per individual, etc.)
Just to keep history in perspective, AOL didn't kill Netscape, and neither did Microsoft. The latter did their bit, but the primary Netscape killer were the Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management.
The reason that AOL was able to buy Netscape in the first place because Netscape was already failing financially and in market share. The reason Netscape was failing financially was because of its own misuse of the hottest property ever squandered in the age of the Web: www.netscape.com. The home page of the first popular consumer browser, the word once synonymous with the World Wide Web (and, however incorrectly, The Internet) was never taken advantage of. It was pathetic.
Also, in addition to vain infighting of the worst kind, the company was overrun with useless middle management from various hastily and foolishly made acquisitions which included deals for positions of "power" at Netscape. I think there was something like 30 Vice Presidents (most made via acquisitions, not promotions from within) at one point, when it was maybe 2000 employees? That's more VPs than Microsoft had at the time (with 20000 employees)... There were 7 (seven!) people between a senior engineer and Jim Barksdale...
Microsoft's role in the demise of Netscape was simply to provide a hard hitting competitor, something Netscape had no idea how to counter. Yes, Microsoft pulled some evil tricks, such as giving away free software (11 years later we are still seeing that this model can work!) purposefully breaking JavaScript using their monstrous, non-compliant JScript (which singlehandedly pushed back the coming of Web 2.0 at least 5 years), various deals for IE only installations brokered with computer makers, i.e. their usual bag of tricks.
Netscape's response was to flail and fail instead of doing something original like, say, making netscape.com into what Google eventually would become... The talent was there, more importantly the *audience* was there, but there was no one brave enough at the helm to take advantage of it. Or, more fairly, there was too much dead weight for those brave and talented folks to carry...
Makes sense to me. I think the brain stores insane amounts of information during hyper critical events. Possibly every single event and then the data gets cached and eventually purged. But if the event is important much more information information is retained as part of permanent memory.
I've been in quite a few high speed accidents on a motorcycle (went off at 90mph once, thankfully at a race track where i slid into the long runoff and was unhurt) and most of the time I had a very vivid memory of the actual accident which almost seemed like I had watched it in slow motion.
This has happened enough, however, that I'm quite aware of it being a *memory* not an actual slowing down event. If you ask me *how* it happened, I'd answer "I'm not sure, it happened so fast" because despite having an accurate account of the effects of the accident the actual moment where the accident started was lost (it was not yet a critical event).
once when i fell on a wet highway at around 50mph and i remember sliding and looking round and wondering if the mercedes behind me was going to stop in time and even seeing the driver's face turning to horror as he "slowly" realized that i had gone down in front of them but the actual moment of the accident (locking up the front brakes in this case) was very very sudden and "real time". i'm not sure what happened, just that something moved into my lane and i squeezed the brake harder than the slick surface could handle...
there was another rainy day accident where i washed out the front of the bike, i remember very little about the moment the bike went on it's side, but once the accident was under way i remember in vivid detail the sparks it was throwing as i was sliding behind it and i thought the sparks were very pretty and wondered if the bike would end up hitting any parked cars and whether i'd be able to pick it up and ride off or have to walk it home and whether the local police would be able to ascertain that i was going more than twice the speed limit and inclement weather (yes, i was being an idiot).
so i think the brain becomes hyper aware, you are able to make decisions more quickly, and "take detailed notes" once you're in a perilous situation. later, as you recall it, it seems, due to the amount of data, that a slow motion effect occurred.
that being said, i think the experiment is faulty because it's only testing the speed of VISUAL data aggregation. it doesn't show, for example, whether or not we THINK faster during perilous situations which could account for the feeling of "slow down".
an interesting and somewhat interesting experiment would be to do something unexpected to a subject and then show some complex images to the subject and see how many things they remember about the image as compared to showing them the image for the same length of time but not under duress.
i am referring to the thousands and thousands who lynch blacks, burn korean stores, stone adulterous women to death, hack children's limbs off, loot disaster areas, etc.
an individual would never do these things on their own, it is only within the mob that they find relative safety to work themselves into a frenzy, be it with the numbers and beneath the safety of the KKK's robes, or the rwandan genocidal gangs.
yes, not everyone is free from consequence, there are arrests, there are even trials, but do you honestly believe that those who are eventually held responsible are even 1% of those who participate? therefore, as a participant in the mob you are virtually free from consequence (except perhaps that of your conscience).
i know i will get reamed for this but for me the moment was when darth vader told luke that he was his father in V
IV was a wonderful swashbuckling space fantasy, a complete story from start to finish with perfect, unburdened characters. everything that came after became a soap opera for nerds and revisionist crap from GL. empire and jedi had some great moments (the battle on planet hoth, infiltrating jabba the hutt) but the series went downhill quickly when contrived personal relationships overshadowed adventure. i know most fans worship V as the ultimate of the first trilogy, but c'mon people, the muppet was laughable...
i have not seen I, II, or III. not saying it to brag some sort of snobbery, i just feel no need to see them and my time is worth more. from what i've heard of them i haven't missed anything.
...are not all that different. the reason mobs work is that you end up pretty much anonymous as well. and, if the mob is large enough, virtually free from consequence.
it is why when i read all the seemingly innocuous comments containing anger, hate, and provocations out there it scares me. how easy it would be for these frustrated, bitter people to turn their online anger into real violence given the chance to remain anonymous.
example: some kid on a forum i used to administer started baiting a non-white member with stupid trollish comments. within a few hours it exploded into a full white-supremacy thread and he wasn't alone with the vitriol.
sure, most trolls are really just trying to get your goat. but the stuff that anonymity "allows" people to say doesn't come from nowhere. to me it's a sign that given the right situation, the words would turn into actions.
that kid, probably no more than 16 years old, would let himself get swept up in a real lynching, i'm sure of it.
The situation is not so good for professional-grade equipment which very often use proprietary format to store hi quality pictures (each different series from each different manufacturer use their own home-made format for "RAW" pictures). Very often those format are poorly documented, kept secret or protected from reverse-engineering by DCMA. They are near to no tool to handle them (appart from the software that came with the device). In 30 years, the knoledge about one peculiar format may very well be lost, and no more software could be found that can open it (and pretty much sure that, had that software be excavated from somewhere, the deprecated OS and hardware running it will be missing too).
i started converting all my RAWs to DNG. it's already being adopted by the biggies and even though adobe hasn't made their converter open source, dcraw has.
i'm now making plans on how to convert the 15,000 RAW files that i have on various DVDs and external drives to DNG without losing all the meta information in Lightroom, but that's another topic...
Slashdot Mirror
This is just a rehash of the same technology that was used to make expiring email. Omniva/Disappearing Inc. was doing this at the turn of millennium and just like with this technology, the point wasn't to prevent a moderately determined person from making copies of the emails by doing a screen capture, printing the email (there was actually some cute technology "preventing" even that), or transcribing the damn thing. It was to apply document retention policy of corporations and government industries. And of course to raise money from gullible investors. I mean, after all, there are trillions of images being uploaded to Facebook every few seconds...
in a few years most online games will be played with an extremely simple client where even the graphics are generated remotely along with all the game logic. the client will be able to run on cheap hardware (no more crazy gaming rigs) and DRM will become unnecessary...
"Yes, welfare and income redistribution is doing horrible things in 3rd world countries like Denmark,Norway,Sweden,France,Germany,Belgium etc..."
Well, if you like that kind of thing...feel free to move there.
Isn't choice a wonderful thing?
heh. the "love it or leave it" argument still has legs!?!?!
you know what else is a choice? who you vote for and what you'd like your country to become. isn't choice a wonderful thing?
Macs can boot from CD or USB drive. Don't know why you'd need firewire.
the target disk mode is not about booting off an external drive. it's using the mac as external drive.
springing a leak and spewing helium gas into the subterranean tunnel
the biggest delay is apparently due to the difficulty of maintaining a serious attitude while in the tunnel...
it was all going very well until you said:
it will be very little time before the technological superiority of the alternative browsers causes them to add special features not available for Internet Explorer users.
this would be a bad thing. i could care less about IE's demise but what you're talking about would effectively recreate the very problem we have now - just because it's not M$ doesn't make it not evil.
existing browsers would do very well to keep to the standards only.
i've been using google trends for several years to see what information people really need as they go about their daily lives.
Global Warming vs. Paris Hilton
Global Warming vs. Iraq
(ignore the bottom chart, it is irrelevant to my study)
...no train available from LA to SF for instance.
really? (i've taken this route and it's a great trip)
oh god, don't do it. don't go there. don't drill it!
don't they remember?
Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware?
:)
i did. for $30 from the microsoft store (i'm an alumnus). was curious. it's actually pretty cool looking. works great on my bootcamp partition when i have an itch to play some TF2
worth $30.
all that jabber can be summarized as follows: refactoring.
The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me
why?
photography had already been around for 100+ years at the time. the astronauts had hasselblads and were shooting on the best medium format film available.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-hass.html
if i were Sun i'd be building an equivalent to SimpleDB. a MySQL cloud. sun could do it. sun should do it. that could be worth 1 billion.
imagine a db cloud that everyone already knows how to use...
that's not entirely true as the target device could be targetted with a "power beam". i do agree however that it is still likely to be terribly wasteful. better local storage of energy is definitely a better idea.
i'm amazed at the battery life of the ipod classic, for example, as compared to that of the 4th generation ipod (in just 3 years went from 16 real hours to real life 30+ hours and it's smaller to boot)
your arguments are almost as tiresome as your overuse of the word "glib". of course this being slashdot, maybe you mean g[ee]lib. in which case please specify the version.
what a ridiculous argument. you think said kid cares that said film is in high definition???
the Peel 50 is my favourite top gear segment ever!
otoh, talk about a simple way to extend a human's active life span by 30+% were it possible to actually eliminate the need for sleep. i am also skeptical since every cognizant living organism regardless of its family seems to require downtime but nevertheless would be really interested in gaining back those 6-7 hours i currently "waste"...
(yes i realize all the downsides including more energy/resources being consumed per individual, etc.)
Just to keep history in perspective, AOL didn't kill Netscape, and neither did Microsoft. The latter did their bit, but the primary Netscape killer were the Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management.
The reason that AOL was able to buy Netscape in the first place because Netscape was already failing financially and in market share. The reason Netscape was failing financially was because of its own misuse of the hottest property ever squandered in the age of the Web: www.netscape.com. The home page of the first popular consumer browser, the word once synonymous with the World Wide Web (and, however incorrectly, The Internet) was never taken advantage of. It was pathetic.
Also, in addition to vain infighting of the worst kind, the company was overrun with useless middle management from various hastily and foolishly made acquisitions which included deals for positions of "power" at Netscape. I think there was something like 30 Vice Presidents (most made via acquisitions, not promotions from within) at one point, when it was maybe 2000 employees? That's more VPs than Microsoft had at the time (with 20000 employees)... There were 7 (seven!) people between a senior engineer and Jim Barksdale...
Microsoft's role in the demise of Netscape was simply to provide a hard hitting competitor, something Netscape had no idea how to counter. Yes, Microsoft pulled some evil tricks, such as giving away free software (11 years later we are still seeing that this model can work!) purposefully breaking JavaScript using their monstrous, non-compliant JScript (which singlehandedly pushed back the coming of Web 2.0 at least 5 years), various deals for IE only installations brokered with computer makers, i.e. their usual bag of tricks.
Netscape's response was to flail and fail instead of doing something original like, say, making netscape.com into what Google eventually would become... The talent was there, more importantly the *audience* was there, but there was no one brave enough at the helm to take advantage of it. Or, more fairly, there was too much dead weight for those brave and talented folks to carry...
R.I.P.
Makes sense to me. I think the brain stores insane amounts of information during hyper critical events. Possibly every single event and then the data gets cached and eventually purged. But if the event is important much more information information is retained as part of permanent memory.
I've been in quite a few high speed accidents on a motorcycle (went off at 90mph once, thankfully at a race track where i slid into the long runoff and was unhurt) and most of the time I had a very vivid memory of the actual accident which almost seemed like I had watched it in slow motion.
This has happened enough, however, that I'm quite aware of it being a *memory* not an actual slowing down event. If you ask me *how* it happened, I'd answer "I'm not sure, it happened so fast" because despite having an accurate account of the effects of the accident the actual moment where the accident started was lost (it was not yet a critical event).
once when i fell on a wet highway at around 50mph and i remember sliding and looking round and wondering if the mercedes behind me was going to stop in time and even seeing the driver's face turning to horror as he "slowly" realized that i had gone down in front of them but the actual moment of the accident (locking up the front brakes in this case) was very very sudden and "real time". i'm not sure what happened, just that something moved into my lane and i squeezed the brake harder than the slick surface could handle...
there was another rainy day accident where i washed out the front of the bike, i remember very little about the moment the bike went on it's side, but once the accident was under way i remember in vivid detail the sparks it was throwing as i was sliding behind it and i thought the sparks were very pretty and wondered if the bike would end up hitting any parked cars and whether i'd be able to pick it up and ride off or have to walk it home and whether the local police would be able to ascertain that i was going more than twice the speed limit and inclement weather (yes, i was being an idiot).
so i think the brain becomes hyper aware, you are able to make decisions more quickly, and "take detailed notes" once you're in a perilous situation. later, as you recall it, it seems, due to the amount of data, that a slow motion effect occurred.
that being said, i think the experiment is faulty because it's only testing the speed of VISUAL data aggregation. it doesn't show, for example, whether or not we THINK faster during perilous situations which could account for the feeling of "slow down".
an interesting and somewhat interesting experiment would be to do something unexpected to a subject and then show some complex images to the subject and see how many things they remember about the image as compared to showing them the image for the same length of time but not under duress.
well, they fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405584 (which broke in .10)
it may not matter to you, but my favourite addon ChromaTabs was broken because of that one.
is it newsworthy? of course not. i got the auto-update notice long before i saw it on slashdot. guess it's a slow day.
i am referring to the thousands and thousands who lynch blacks, burn korean stores, stone adulterous women to death, hack children's limbs off, loot disaster areas, etc.
an individual would never do these things on their own, it is only within the mob that they find relative safety to work themselves into a frenzy, be it with the numbers and beneath the safety of the KKK's robes, or the rwandan genocidal gangs.
yes, not everyone is free from consequence, there are arrests, there are even trials, but do you honestly believe that those who are eventually held responsible are even 1% of those who participate? therefore, as a participant in the mob you are virtually free from consequence (except perhaps that of your conscience).
i know i will get reamed for this but for me the moment was when darth vader told luke that he was his father in V
IV was a wonderful swashbuckling space fantasy, a complete story from start to finish with perfect, unburdened characters. everything that came after became a soap opera for nerds and revisionist crap from GL. empire and jedi had some great moments (the battle on planet hoth, infiltrating jabba the hutt) but the series went downhill quickly when contrived personal relationships overshadowed adventure. i know most fans worship V as the ultimate of the first trilogy, but c'mon people, the muppet was laughable...
i have not seen I, II, or III. not saying it to brag some sort of snobbery, i just feel no need to see them and my time is worth more. from what i've heard of them i haven't missed anything.
...are not all that different. the reason mobs work is that you end up pretty much anonymous as well. and, if the mob is large enough, virtually free from consequence.
it is why when i read all the seemingly innocuous comments containing anger, hate, and provocations out there it scares me. how easy it would be for these frustrated, bitter people to turn their online anger into real violence given the chance to remain anonymous.
example: some kid on a forum i used to administer started baiting a non-white member with stupid trollish comments. within a few hours it exploded into a full white-supremacy thread and he wasn't alone with the vitriol.
sure, most trolls are really just trying to get your goat. but the stuff that anonymity "allows" people to say doesn't come from nowhere. to me it's a sign that given the right situation, the words would turn into actions.
that kid, probably no more than 16 years old, would let himself get swept up in a real lynching, i'm sure of it.
The situation is not so good for professional-grade equipment which very often use proprietary format to store hi quality pictures (each different series from each different manufacturer use their own home-made format for "RAW" pictures). Very often those format are poorly documented, kept secret or protected from reverse-engineering by DCMA. They are near to no tool to handle them (appart from the software that came with the device). In 30 years, the knoledge about one peculiar format may very well be lost, and no more software could be found that can open it (and pretty much sure that, had that software be excavated from somewhere, the deprecated OS and hardware running it will be missing too).
i started converting all my RAWs to DNG. it's already being adopted by the biggies and even though adobe hasn't made their converter open source, dcraw has.
i'm now making plans on how to convert the 15,000 RAW files that i have on various DVDs and external drives to DNG without losing all the meta information in Lightroom, but that's another topic...