Re:digital book needs to be screen reader open
on
The End of Paper Books
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Sadly, I don't think the death of the printed text book is going to save students any money. Publishers are just going to hide content behind a paid service rather than publishing an ebook you can easily pirate. Hell, they might even give the ebook away but require that you pay $100 for the online portion of the course materials. And your instructor will require you to sign up and pay for this service. Trust me, they will find a way to gouge students.
Sure, the people who have book collections NOW won't give them away after getting a Kindle, but what about your children or grandchildren who never have a need for a physical book collection to start with? If they can get everything they want digitally, why should they ever invest in a physical book? They *might* inherit your old collection, but they woudln't need it. At some point those books are going to end up in the trash because nobody can be bothered to store them. That's how they will become rare. Also, It isn't so much that existing books will disappear as the average person won't have them. They'll have to make a point of seeking them out, much like seeing a lion. Sure you can go to a zoo and see a lion if you want to, but most people won't see them in their day to day lives. At some point, bound books are going to be things we look at in museums. Though I thnk that'll be more than a "few" generations from now.
The real limitations are (a) the amount of data to be processed and (b) the resolution of the sensors.
Oh gee, is that all? That's a bit like saying the only thing stopping us from simulating a human brain inside a computer is processing power. Nevermind the enormous lack of basic understanding about how a thought is actually processed. Just throw a bunch of processing power at it and everything will just magically work itself out./rollseyes
When they can reduce this from a trolleycart -sized instrument to something one can support on one's head, then we'll see some more practical and less academic applications. (Yes, like porn. And games. And real virtual reality control of UAVs and waldoes.) Keep in mind that in the 80's, realtime Heads-Up Displays were this large and cumbersome... now look at them.
Are you, perhaps, confusing reading neural activity with sending specific information into the brain? As far as I can tell, the technology in the article is only for reading neurons activity, not altering them. And even at that, there's no indication that you can extract any real information out of the readings (thoughts, intentions, etc). It is simply an image of activity. I think you're reading WAYYY more into this technology than is there.
If an indie developer has a design document for a game that would best work in this new market, how should the developer proceed?
I don't know, I'm not in that part of software development. I get it. It is difficult to publish games for consoles. But I already acknowledged this much in my original comment to you. Why are you harping on it? I'm sorry that you so desperately want to publish a game that plays on a TV and uses multiple gamepads but can't. I don't know what else to say.
I have to side with Apple here. Sometimes it is not wrong to tell users that they don't really need a certain feature. Sometimes users don't know what they want/need. Software all too often gets bloated by wishlistitis.
The thing is that if you're doing any serious app development, there's more to it than the client side. I have never worked on a project that was all JS or AS. In fact, JS is generally the smallest component in my experience. If you're just writing a game or something, fine, plenty of AS3 programming and no server stuff, but that's not really a web app.
THe problem I've encountered is that most Flash developers only know Flash. They don't really understand the server side at all.
The problem is that PCs haven't been strongly marketed for set-top use since the 8-bit days,
So what? It isn't like consoles stole this market. They created a new market while general purpose computers advanced to the point where a TV was inadequate for display purposes.
and a desktop PC can't play certain genres of games.
So play to the strengths of the PC.
I'd hate to develop and self-publish a game only to have people in the audience tell me "I'd buy that if only it were for something other the PC."
If something as silly as that i stopping you, you've got other problems. Seriously, you're making a big deal out of nothing. Fact is there's a healthy enough market for good self published games on the PC. Probably more now than there ever was. Now you have the internet and services like Steam. No relying on local BBSes or whatever to get your game out there.
A Flash game can't read gamepads. It can read only player 1's keyboard and mouse, not the gamepads that players 2 through 4 are using.
A PC doesn't* display on a television. This makes it more difficult for two to four players to fit around the monitor of the family's gaming PC to play a multiplayer game. This is why most notable PC multiplayer games tend to be online, requiring a separate PC for each player even if all players are in one household.
I mean "doesn't", not "can't". A PC with a VGA or DVI video output can display on any HDTV with a VGA or HDMI input respectively, but in practice statistically nobody uses that feature. For one thing, few people that I've talked to appear to know it exists, and for another, people don't want to have to cart the family PC back and forth between the TV cabinet and the PC desk.
So what exactly is the problem? Everyone one still has a PC. It isn't like they all just gave up the PC for the gaming console. There's plenty of room for the Indie game developer. Especially with Flash on the web and Steam for the PC. Not to mention that consoles are opening up more the ability to download titles from online stores. Hell, look at indie title Minecraft making it to the Xbox 360. Who would have thunk..
And hurt the market for video games developed outside the mainstream video game industry, as console makers refused to deal with developers operating out of a home office.
Oh please. Game consoles never took away market from the PC. They they created their own market. Most of the 8-bit computers that plugged into TVs were used almost exclusively to play out-of-the-box video games anyway. It was only natural that someone would create specialized hardware to play games, and games only.
Was DVD-R available when DVD players first came out?
Like I said, it takes time for new technologies to become available to the masses. Meanwhile, nothing was stopping people from continuing to record their videos VHS. What exactly is the problem? And how would you solve it?
You can't deny that, in the long run, personal/home digital video has become *much* more accessible to the average person.The delay between DVD and DVD-R was just a hiccup.
I wasn't complaining that you have to pay for fast/frequent usenet downloads. I was just pointing out that you are paying extra for the speed. It is not inherent in the technology. In an ideal world, you would use something like HTTP to store and distribute files and pay for big pipes. That way you wouldn't have all that needless replication of data, you wouldn't have to deal with retention issues, and you wouldn't need to do clumsy things like break up large files, encode them as base64 (or whatever their using in binary groups), and introduce extra parity information.
The problem is that most usenet binaries are of an illicit nature and you can't safely host them on US servers for speedy access. I think it is anonymity that really drives the usenet binary underworld.
Websites made entirely with Flash should be killed with fire. It is bad for the user (hard to link/bookmark inside the site) and bad for admins (much more difficult to track usage and maintain). Honestly, I could live without Flash were it not for its video applications. But hopefully people will start using HTML5 for that. As a web developer (programmer, not designer) I also hate working with Flash because it is opaque. You can't make simple updates to content/functionality without loading up the authoring tool and recompiling. Also, it is still an embedded object. It does not interface smoothly with the rest of the page/site.
I'm pretty sure Flash took off because one thing: video. The total lack of standardization in video codecs and plugins in a formative years of the web really made Flash necessary for anyone who wanted to publish a single video file and be certain that just about anyone could play it. Used to be that you had to publish for all of: Quicktime, Windows Media, and RealPlayer. And then you still didn't have any control over the playback. Flash gave so much more control over video content and it is now the main use of Flash today. I think HTML5's ability to play video using a reasonable codec will take a big bite out of Flash. Yeah, there will still be a lot of Flash developers who want to make highly animated sites and don't have the Javascript/HTML skills ot make it happen with raw code, but the biggest driver for Flash use will be gone. Then there's Flash games, of course. I don't see that being taken over by HTML5. But for web "apps," I definitly see HTML5 taking a lead. Mostly because apps usually need to interact with the server a lot, which requires a fair amount of programming anyway. It isn't something you can just toss together in a graphical authoring tool.
These media create a barrier between those who can produce and those who can only consume, and one must pay dearly to surmount this barrier.
Nonsense. The new media simply bring mature technologies to those who would only consume regardless of the media. It doesn't put up any new barriers. Ok, it might be more difficult for me as an individual to produce a game for a console, but there's still PCs. Video game consoles didn't replace 8-bit microcomputers. They created a new market for people who didn't care about all potential uses for a general purpose computer. As for DVDs replacing VHS, sure it is more complicated to burn a DVD, but it is certainly not out of reach for the average consumer if they were so inclined. And now with services like YouTube you don't even need the physical media at all. This is one area where the barrier to entry has gone down. Any schmuck can now post his home videos for the world to see with the click of a button.
WIth any new media, you're going to see an initial barrier if only due to the price, but eventually it will trickle down to the consumer in some form or another. As long as there is a demand for consumers to produce content, there will be a medium for it. Even if that means retaining the old technology until the new one becomes generally available.
And yet many people find it faster by far and more reliable than any web based file storage solution.
Tha
That and they they didn't have to pay for it. Also, it is pretty anonymous.The problem with using usenet for exchanging files is that it put the already high cost of storage onto the people who maintain the servers. Eventually it got to the point where usenet servers had to be commercialized and people paid for what they downloaded. Which is fine, but it is still a strange use for what was originally intended to be a message/forum system.
A few parity files ensures data integrity, even if the parity files jacked, they can still reconstruct data to its original state.
Right, but the only reason you need that kind of parity checking in the first place is because you're abusing a system that wasn't designed to store large files. This is not really a feature of usenet so much as a way of compensating for the drawbacks of the system.
Web services MAY provide someone with a checksum of some kind, but that only tells you what you just spent forever acquiring is no good, it doesn't rebuild it.
This simply not an issue. I can't remember the last time I got a corrupted HTTP download. LIke I said, the only reason you need the partity and ability to reconstruct files with NNTP is because you're abusing a system that wasn't designed for what it is being used for.
And as for speed, I have NEVER had my connection continuously maxed out by available bandwidth from any web service, IRC, torrent, p2p, ftp, or gopher...etc, Usenet on the other hand, full bore, full speed, full utilization 24/7 on a 20Mbit(2MB)/sec connection.
And you pay for this service, no? Don't usenet servers now charge people who download a lot?
All I can say is, go ahead shift your controlling and bookkeeping departement ot the lowest bidder no matter where it is located
I don't think you understand what kind of "outsourcing" we're talking about here. Nobody is talking about moving a bookkeeping department. This is about hosting your bookkeeping software in the "cloud." You'd still have an bookkeeping/accounting department. They're just using software hosted somewhere else. Though even that is not as likely has moving something like Email into the cloud. Gmail and associated services are becoming more an more attractive to companies that dont' want to bother hosting their own basic services.
On the contrary. You're not expected to deliver for free. In fact, the high cost of setting up and maintaining basic services in-house is one of the things that drives companies to pay for the same thing as a service. Also, you can't give a fixed cost. You can estimate, but sometimes shit goes wrong. If there's some bug with the software or problem with the hardware, costs can go way up. Paying Google a few bucks a month for email/calendar services is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than paying your department to buy, setup, and maintain an Exchange server. You dont' get the same level of integration and functionality out of Google services, but what you do get is reliable and well defined. This becomes less of an issue, I thikn, as a company gets larger. Larger companies can afford to build out infrastructure for basic services, but for small companies it doesn't make sense to do these things in-house. I spent years setting up Linux mail servers (as well as other things) for companies in the late 90's and early/mid 2000's. Now I'd just tel most of them to use Gmail.
That was more about the quality of discussions. I'm talking about the way usenet is abused to store extremely large chunks of data. It is just not the right technology for that sort of thing. You get all that data needlessly replicated across the whole network unless someone explicitly blocks certain groups. It made retention a lot more challenging. It is like passing around large files by email. Sure, you can do it, but you really shouldn't.
Well there you go. That sounds like a winner. Though I'm not sure if people are hoping for the storage part to be "open source" as well. Obviously that would be a lot to ask for, but who knows. Maybe some people don't understand that storage is not free.
Movies on media will become a thing of the past, but not necessarily quickly. I'm lucky to get DVD quality out of Netflix sometime and I can barely stream full HD with 5.1 surround over my local 802.11n wireless, much less the Internet. Then there's the problem of selection. I can't get half of Netflix's total library on streaming.
I imagine they'd still need a specialized implementation for mobile devices. Or at least they should. Mobile apps work differently, whether inside a browser or not.. You just can't get the same information with the same placement on a phone that you can on a desktop browser. What they're saving is developer time and not forcing Facebook developers to know iOS programming. They're also getting tighter control over app distribution and data storage. I, personally, think they might be handicapping themselves by not taking full advantage of the hardware, but they're accustomed to providing service through a slow web browser sandbox, so whatever.
I don't understand how this news has anything to do with challenging the purported security of iOS. The article is suggesting that Facebook simply wants more control over the apps and data. There's no indication that they think iOS is insecure. BUt hey, if they think they can get adequate performance (for games) out of HTML5, more power to them.
Seriously, how hard could it be to take some random Japanese science video and put subtitles that make it sound like they've turned feces into meat? I think if someone here spoken Japanese we could settle this pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I don't think the death of the printed text book is going to save students any money. Publishers are just going to hide content behind a paid service rather than publishing an ebook you can easily pirate. Hell, they might even give the ebook away but require that you pay $100 for the online portion of the course materials. And your instructor will require you to sign up and pay for this service. Trust me, they will find a way to gouge students.
Sure, the people who have book collections NOW won't give them away after getting a Kindle, but what about your children or grandchildren who never have a need for a physical book collection to start with? If they can get everything they want digitally, why should they ever invest in a physical book? They *might* inherit your old collection, but they woudln't need it. At some point those books are going to end up in the trash because nobody can be bothered to store them. That's how they will become rare. Also, It isn't so much that existing books will disappear as the average person won't have them. They'll have to make a point of seeking them out, much like seeing a lion. Sure you can go to a zoo and see a lion if you want to, but most people won't see them in their day to day lives. At some point, bound books are going to be things we look at in museums. Though I thnk that'll be more than a "few" generations from now.
The real limitations are (a) the amount of data to be processed and (b) the resolution of the sensors.
Oh gee, is that all? That's a bit like saying the only thing stopping us from simulating a human brain inside a computer is processing power. Nevermind the enormous lack of basic understanding about how a thought is actually processed. Just throw a bunch of processing power at it and everything will just magically work itself out. /rollseyes
When they can reduce this from a trolleycart -sized instrument to something one can support on one's head, then we'll see some more practical and less academic applications. (Yes, like porn. And games. And real virtual reality control of UAVs and waldoes.) Keep in mind that in the 80's, realtime Heads-Up Displays were this large and cumbersome... now look at them.
Are you, perhaps, confusing reading neural activity with sending specific information into the brain? As far as I can tell, the technology in the article is only for reading neurons activity, not altering them. And even at that, there's no indication that you can extract any real information out of the readings (thoughts, intentions, etc). It is simply an image of activity. I think you're reading WAYYY more into this technology than is there.
Don't be too certain about that.
If an indie developer has a design document for a game that would best work in this new market, how should the developer proceed?
I don't know, I'm not in that part of software development. I get it. It is difficult to publish games for consoles. But I already acknowledged this much in my original comment to you. Why are you harping on it? I'm sorry that you so desperately want to publish a game that plays on a TV and uses multiple gamepads but can't. I don't know what else to say.
I have to side with Apple here. Sometimes it is not wrong to tell users that they don't really need a certain feature. Sometimes users don't know what they want/need. Software all too often gets bloated by wishlistitis.
The thing is that if you're doing any serious app development, there's more to it than the client side. I have never worked on a project that was all JS or AS. In fact, JS is generally the smallest component in my experience. If you're just writing a game or something, fine, plenty of AS3 programming and no server stuff, but that's not really a web app.
THe problem I've encountered is that most Flash developers only know Flash. They don't really understand the server side at all.
The problem is that PCs haven't been strongly marketed for set-top use since the 8-bit days,
So what? It isn't like consoles stole this market. They created a new market while general purpose computers advanced to the point where a TV was inadequate for display purposes.
and a desktop PC can't play certain genres of games.
So play to the strengths of the PC.
I'd hate to develop and self-publish a game only to have people in the audience tell me "I'd buy that if only it were for something other the PC."
If something as silly as that i stopping you, you've got other problems. Seriously, you're making a big deal out of nothing. Fact is there's a healthy enough market for good self published games on the PC. Probably more now than there ever was. Now you have the internet and services like Steam. No relying on local BBSes or whatever to get your game out there.
A Flash game can't read gamepads. It can read only player 1's keyboard and mouse, not the gamepads that players 2 through 4 are using.
Then don't develop Flash games. Fuck, dude.
A PC doesn't* display on a television. This makes it more difficult for two to four players to fit around the monitor of the family's gaming PC to play a multiplayer game. This is why most notable PC multiplayer games tend to be online, requiring a separate PC for each player even if all players are in one household.
I mean "doesn't", not "can't". A PC with a VGA or DVI video output can display on any HDTV with a VGA or HDMI input respectively, but in practice statistically nobody uses that feature. For one thing, few people that I've talked to appear to know it exists, and for another, people don't want to have to cart the family PC back and forth between the TV cabinet and the PC desk.
So what exactly is the problem? Everyone one still has a PC. It isn't like they all just gave up the PC for the gaming console. There's plenty of room for the Indie game developer. Especially with Flash on the web and Steam for the PC. Not to mention that consoles are opening up more the ability to download titles from online stores. Hell, look at indie title Minecraft making it to the Xbox 360. Who would have thunk..
And hurt the market for video games developed outside the mainstream video game industry, as console makers refused to deal with developers operating out of a home office.
Oh please. Game consoles never took away market from the PC. They they created their own market. Most of the 8-bit computers that plugged into TVs were used almost exclusively to play out-of-the-box video games anyway. It was only natural that someone would create specialized hardware to play games, and games only.
Was DVD-R available when DVD players first came out?
Like I said, it takes time for new technologies to become available to the masses. Meanwhile, nothing was stopping people from continuing to record their videos VHS. What exactly is the problem? And how would you solve it?
You can't deny that, in the long run, personal/home digital video has become *much* more accessible to the average person.The delay between DVD and DVD-R was just a hiccup.
I wasn't complaining that you have to pay for fast/frequent usenet downloads. I was just pointing out that you are paying extra for the speed. It is not inherent in the technology. In an ideal world, you would use something like HTTP to store and distribute files and pay for big pipes. That way you wouldn't have all that needless replication of data, you wouldn't have to deal with retention issues, and you wouldn't need to do clumsy things like break up large files, encode them as base64 (or whatever their using in binary groups), and introduce extra parity information.
The problem is that most usenet binaries are of an illicit nature and you can't safely host them on US servers for speedy access. I think it is anonymity that really drives the usenet binary underworld.
Websites made entirely with Flash should be killed with fire. It is bad for the user (hard to link/bookmark inside the site) and bad for admins (much more difficult to track usage and maintain). Honestly, I could live without Flash were it not for its video applications. But hopefully people will start using HTML5 for that. As a web developer (programmer, not designer) I also hate working with Flash because it is opaque. You can't make simple updates to content/functionality without loading up the authoring tool and recompiling. Also, it is still an embedded object. It does not interface smoothly with the rest of the page/site.
I'm pretty sure Flash took off because one thing: video. The total lack of standardization in video codecs and plugins in a formative years of the web really made Flash necessary for anyone who wanted to publish a single video file and be certain that just about anyone could play it. Used to be that you had to publish for all of: Quicktime, Windows Media, and RealPlayer. And then you still didn't have any control over the playback. Flash gave so much more control over video content and it is now the main use of Flash today. I think HTML5's ability to play video using a reasonable codec will take a big bite out of Flash. Yeah, there will still be a lot of Flash developers who want to make highly animated sites and don't have the Javascript/HTML skills ot make it happen with raw code, but the biggest driver for Flash use will be gone. Then there's Flash games, of course. I don't see that being taken over by HTML5. But for web "apps," I definitly see HTML5 taking a lead. Mostly because apps usually need to interact with the server a lot, which requires a fair amount of programming anyway. It isn't something you can just toss together in a graphical authoring tool.
These media create a barrier between those who can produce and those who can only consume, and one must pay dearly to surmount this barrier.
Nonsense. The new media simply bring mature technologies to those who would only consume regardless of the media. It doesn't put up any new barriers. Ok, it might be more difficult for me as an individual to produce a game for a console, but there's still PCs. Video game consoles didn't replace 8-bit microcomputers. They created a new market for people who didn't care about all potential uses for a general purpose computer. As for DVDs replacing VHS, sure it is more complicated to burn a DVD, but it is certainly not out of reach for the average consumer if they were so inclined. And now with services like YouTube you don't even need the physical media at all. This is one area where the barrier to entry has gone down. Any schmuck can now post his home videos for the world to see with the click of a button.
WIth any new media, you're going to see an initial barrier if only due to the price, but eventually it will trickle down to the consumer in some form or another. As long as there is a demand for consumers to produce content, there will be a medium for it. Even if that means retaining the old technology until the new one becomes generally available.
And yet many people find it faster by far and more reliable than any web based file storage solution.
Tha That and they they didn't have to pay for it. Also, it is pretty anonymous.The problem with using usenet for exchanging files is that it put the already high cost of storage onto the people who maintain the servers. Eventually it got to the point where usenet servers had to be commercialized and people paid for what they downloaded. Which is fine, but it is still a strange use for what was originally intended to be a message/forum system.
A few parity files ensures data integrity, even if the parity files jacked, they can still reconstruct data to its original state.
Right, but the only reason you need that kind of parity checking in the first place is because you're abusing a system that wasn't designed to store large files. This is not really a feature of usenet so much as a way of compensating for the drawbacks of the system.
Web services MAY provide someone with a checksum of some kind, but that only tells you what you just spent forever acquiring is no good, it doesn't rebuild it.
This simply not an issue. I can't remember the last time I got a corrupted HTTP download. LIke I said, the only reason you need the partity and ability to reconstruct files with NNTP is because you're abusing a system that wasn't designed for what it is being used for.
And as for speed, I have NEVER had my connection continuously maxed out by available bandwidth from any web service, IRC, torrent, p2p, ftp, or gopher...etc, Usenet on the other hand, full bore, full speed, full utilization 24/7 on a 20Mbit(2MB)/sec connection.
And you pay for this service, no? Don't usenet servers now charge people who download a lot?
All I can say is, go ahead shift your controlling and bookkeeping departement ot the lowest bidder no matter where it is located
I don't think you understand what kind of "outsourcing" we're talking about here. Nobody is talking about moving a bookkeeping department. This is about hosting your bookkeeping software in the "cloud." You'd still have an bookkeeping/accounting department. They're just using software hosted somewhere else. Though even that is not as likely has moving something like Email into the cloud. Gmail and associated services are becoming more an more attractive to companies that dont' want to bother hosting their own basic services.
On the contrary. You're not expected to deliver for free. In fact, the high cost of setting up and maintaining basic services in-house is one of the things that drives companies to pay for the same thing as a service. Also, you can't give a fixed cost. You can estimate, but sometimes shit goes wrong. If there's some bug with the software or problem with the hardware, costs can go way up. Paying Google a few bucks a month for email/calendar services is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than paying your department to buy, setup, and maintain an Exchange server. You dont' get the same level of integration and functionality out of Google services, but what you do get is reliable and well defined. This becomes less of an issue, I thikn, as a company gets larger. Larger companies can afford to build out infrastructure for basic services, but for small companies it doesn't make sense to do these things in-house. I spent years setting up Linux mail servers (as well as other things) for companies in the late 90's and early/mid 2000's. Now I'd just tel most of them to use Gmail.
That was more about the quality of discussions. I'm talking about the way usenet is abused to store extremely large chunks of data. It is just not the right technology for that sort of thing. You get all that data needlessly replicated across the whole network unless someone explicitly blocks certain groups. It made retention a lot more challenging. It is like passing around large files by email. Sure, you can do it, but you really shouldn't.
Well there you go. That sounds like a winner. Though I'm not sure if people are hoping for the storage part to be "open source" as well. Obviously that would be a lot to ask for, but who knows. Maybe some people don't understand that storage is not free.
As if using usenet to distribute warez wasn't inappropriate enough. Hey lets all start using it as a dropbox for all sort of random shit!
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but usenet is for discussions.
Movies on media will become a thing of the past, but not necessarily quickly. I'm lucky to get DVD quality out of Netflix sometime and I can barely stream full HD with 5.1 surround over my local 802.11n wireless, much less the Internet. Then there's the problem of selection. I can't get half of Netflix's total library on streaming.
I imagine they'd still need a specialized implementation for mobile devices. Or at least they should. Mobile apps work differently, whether inside a browser or not.. You just can't get the same information with the same placement on a phone that you can on a desktop browser. What they're saving is developer time and not forcing Facebook developers to know iOS programming. They're also getting tighter control over app distribution and data storage. I, personally, think they might be handicapping themselves by not taking full advantage of the hardware, but they're accustomed to providing service through a slow web browser sandbox, so whatever.
I don't understand how this news has anything to do with challenging the purported security of iOS. The article is suggesting that Facebook simply wants more control over the apps and data. There's no indication that they think iOS is insecure. BUt hey, if they think they can get adequate performance (for games) out of HTML5, more power to them.
That's not really saying a whole lot, is it?
Seriously, how hard could it be to take some random Japanese science video and put subtitles that make it sound like they've turned feces into meat? I think if someone here spoken Japanese we could settle this pretty quickly.