Experiment is nice, lovely, news-worthy and, I think, kinda pointless. Mostly because Universities never seemed to have suffered from the lack of or "slowness" of internet connection in the first place (though any amount of bandwidth can be readily consumed by students doing whatever students normally do;) ). Have you seen one that'd be disconnected? Not that it would lack fiber to every dorm room, but rather a complete lack of connectivity? I thought so.
The more important experiment is that Google Fiber in Kansas. Wiring residential area is way more difficult and costly. Plus most residential areas lack any sort of substantial ISP competition, and a proof of working, profitable (at least a tiny bit) alternative means of connection that gives local telco/cable run for their money would make more difference than wiring any university. Unless you're planning to move into a dorm and live there.
Because so far in most cases the way to "prevent/reverse man-made climate change" is "well, just make it too expensive to pollute" and "let's trade carbon credits!" Guess who's interested in trading? Organizing an exchange with some fees to come with it? Help companies to make "the most" out of credits companies would get for free via assistance of a broker? Compensate for "rigid requirements" with wonders of free market?
Yeah. And, as price of pollution credits goes up, so will the fees.
Instead of making a non-monetized restriction on pollution and regulations that reflect reality, everyone seems to be completely certain that regulation has to include an exchange and stupid across-the-board unobtainable (without trading) goals.
I think the primary problem is not the climate change, but the amount of entities that want to earn easy money on proposed solutions.
Oh, for a moment there I thought they decided to force carriers to cover all fees from the bill. You know, so it'd be one total, not total + FCC Mystery Line Fee, USF Fee, blah blah blah. Either that, or soon we'll see "Employee Handwashing Fee", "Cleaning Surplus Reimbursement Surcharge" and "Poison Control Center Fee" being imposed at fast food restaurants. Oh well. I can dream...
What surprises me is that it's been almost a day and we don't have a giant first page headlines "WE CONFIRMED SHE IS EVIL! Email details... ". Nothing beyond regular (and sometimes understandable) stuff.
Which probably will result in more conspiracy theory to the tune of "Well we know She's Evil, it's just only those months of emails that weren't released must contain the Pure Evilness!", which is kinda silly.
I think every governor should have emails released, frankly, before he/she leaves office. The whole transparency thing, people love to talk about so much (but never deliver). That way someone who's about to become a public official will know that the public will see all communication for sure, without a need to file information requests (plus some states don't seem to care much to store the data as long as Alaska does). It will probably disrupt their "ability to negotiate" (like releasing the list of people who visit the White House) but isn't transparency worth it?
In most cases people don't really have much choice. You go to register to do something, and marketing department demands that registration form has a mandatory City, Address, Zip, blah blah, whatever their data appetite demands (and probably with data validation too, so doing New York, Blah Street, won't work). Sure, some people will stop right there. But if "free" thing you gain access to by filling out registration form seems compelling enough, people will fill in the address. And only a few of them will be clever enough to give some other (easily remembered, in case of site's trickery) address. That data will live in archive forever, because marketing will never ever allow deleting anything. Until it gets stolen (heck, probably afterwards too, but there will be a marketing blurb about being very secure, tested daily for hacker intrusions and stuff like that, wash, rinse, repeat)
Yes, it's "giving up", but I think it's better to have T-Mobile's kind of capping (where speed gets reduced) than a nice little surprise on your bill with per-GB (or whatever the "over the bucket" bucket size is). It means your bill stays predictable, which is what most users want. If it's slow, it's not a problem for most users, annoying, but not a problem
What I'm curious about is why do they re-activate the network per state. As of right now, just California and a few New England states seem to be "online". One server per state? Sounds a bit odd. Oh and the map is stored on Flickr. For a moment there I thought someone hacked their blog system too, and just posted faked-up "we're about to go live again" message.
Sounds pretty much like warning system for earthquakes, that shows up as an urgent message on practically all phones in Japan.
The back-end is still probably going to be SMS/MMS based (FCC document vaguely mentions the future ability to send audio/video with these messages). As long as it's not over-used (say, blasting everyone with "flood warning" messages every time there is a flood warning would be kinda annoying -- I already know that as soon as it rains, everything in my county is under "flood warning") it would be fine.
Alas, Netflix won't be able to save cult shows. Mostly because it would eat up all of their cash with dubious return. Unless ratings are wildly underestimated, $10 a month won't cut it to make anything more advanced than a talk or "reality" show with no special effects
Patiently awaiting a clever hack that will allow storing any data there instead of just music. Documents in MP3 wrapper? 50Gb free storage anywhere? Sweet:)
Sure, as soon as you get global warming effects in the form of floods or snow or drought in your apartment, your WiFi coverage will suffer tremendously:( Frankly, when the roof is missing, people tend not to get too upset about bad WiFi reception.
For normal outside activities just use cell 3G/4G signal:)
What are they, trying to write their own web server from a scratch?
Besides, they will probably get an earful from the "security companies" they have hired, because it implies that even after all the audits not all security holes were found.
Per Steam support article the saves won't be compatible, which kills primary advantage of linking your PSN and Steam accounts. Yes, you will be able to play on PC/Mac and PSN. No, your progress won't be tracked, so you'd have to play them independently, not just picking up where you left off on PS3. Hopefully with time they will resolve this problem (or make some sort of PC/Mac utility that will convert the save data).
Some other Steam games (i.e. Torchlight) also have this limitation when you go from Mac to PC -- saves don't work cross-platform, which is a bit pity.
So, one step closer to "buy once, play everywhere", but not there yet:)
I think the really important aspect is if users actually remember/care about the version number of browser. Do they know it's Firefox 3 (16.6?) or Firefox 4? I don't think Google ever advertised the version number in any significant way. It's always "Download Google Chrome", not "Firefox 4, Free Download". If Firefox moves away from major version numbers completely then yeah, call it 5-6-17-293-whatever. It's "Firefox"
Oh well, 40 million bucks (40-50 estimation from this bloomberg article) doesn't buy much of a wall these days I guess. I wonder how many times did they have to re-write it from the scratch, what amount was spent on "market studies" ("Would you pay us $50 a month of online access? No? Whyyyy?") and how many pennies were spent on actual QA.
has already decided to end daylight-saving time. Because "power savings" from this back-and-forth are 0.2%. And hassles from switch time are simply not worth it:) Heck, Arizona lived without DST without problems...
There are voice actions already, but it takes so much more computational power to make it really-really fast, recognize any accent (which google is having a very hard time with right now) take context into account, and be able to intelligently ask user for clarification. So, I guess in about 5-10 years it will get to the point of Star Trek, where you can address computer and not worry about speech pattern or performing deletion of all files when you said "delay all files".
Generally voice interface is more efficient when we can't type/select something or when a short-hand is too difficult to program. Examples -- car systems and hands-free phones ("Call John Smith at work"/"Navigate to 12th street" - until autopilot works flawlessly typing that stuff is difficult), directories, where saying a name would be faster than flipping though a large list without knowing how exactly it's spelled.
If you can type, it's faster to press control-o and click enter than say "Computer: open last used file" and get a confirmation. But if you don't know shortcuts and having difficulty with movement, speech recognition is already your only option.
For typing I'd rather prefer a neural short-hand: you don't bother family (or are forced to lock yourself in a soundproof room to dictate a large amount of text) and you eliminate the slowest part of your "think -> type -> text" route.
You don't expect that president of Egypt personally was calling providers, do you? He flipped a switch. A big sign "SHUT DOWN INTERNET NOW" lit up in a special room, and well trained officials called ISPs with instruction to turn off that internet thingie. And ISPs said "Sure, no problem! Done!" Killswitch:)
Ah yes, the chance to kick Bing, who can miss that:) Alas, while checking their license for the rant on this search "scandal" I found this paragraph:
In order to reward you for your participation in the Bing Rewards Preview, you need to download the Bing Bar which contains the Reward Counter. The Reward Counter collects information about your interaction with Bing and different search engines including the number of web searches you do each day, the types of searches you complete (such as for news or images), and the number of search ads you click on.
(emphasis mine)
There you go, tracking of "your interaction with Bind and different search engines" (including but doesn't say it's limited to, thank you lawyers). So yes, they're tracking it, throwing it into whole pot, and then re-use on Bing results. Anything that Google returned and user clicked on would be tainted thanks to this clause. You clicked on it (after installing toolbar), it got added. Ta-da!
I wonder what'd happen if we actually got to the ideal state of search engines, where all search engines converge to some "best" search result (given identical search request context)?
Having a flag in the header is nice. But the real question is, would Firefox (and Chrome) add "no signature/generic signature" mode, where headers sent out to the server get synchronized to the lowest common denominator for a large set of users? You know, so that browser can't be sufficiently identified by the headers alone. And http://panopticlick.eff.org would say "Browser plugin details: one in 2", and "User Agent" one in, say, 10. Plus the heck with system fonts.
I know in some other countries "local/communal" networks are still doing quite well, and usually instead of everyone buying an internet access individually, whole building (condo/apartments/whatever) has a network that is plugged into an ISP via somewhat thicker and more economical connection.
Given that some networks grow to a large size, you get multiple buildings connected together, up to several city blocks. And then you get peering between communal networks, local gaming servers etc.
Biggest issue is, of course, that users still need to connect to "real" internet, so full fork is not possible. The second biggest issue, is that you need a substantial degree of participation. If out of whole subdivision only three/four houses want to fork, while everyone else is happy enough with their current connection, there's no chance of making a dent in ISP's policies or creating an alternative to "normal" connection.
There's no content beyond what's provided via proxy. And I doubt that Blizzard would allow local network to run local servers without paying a large amount of money (which also kills the whole idea -- if you have lots of money, you're okay with non-neutral Internet, cause you can afford it). So, other than local file sharing, which in most cases would be just a pile of pirated stuff, there's nothing to attract regular users.
Maybe Google will actually decide to provide an alternative to telcos, but given their recent alliance with Verizon and overall "don't poke the hornet's nest" attitude (gigabit project is still up in the air, phone services from Gizmo are non-existent, Google Voice doesn't do SMS etc) I kinda doubt it.
So, start connecting to your nerdy neighbors, but forget about becoming an Internet Alternative for a looooong time.
And a bit of an occasional gesture. If someone suggest the "minority report-style controls" do a simple experiment: Stand in front of the mirror and do: - "file moving" (grand gesture - one side to the other) - "resizing" (grabing and stretching wide) - "turning and button pushing" (poking at the different spots of the mirror)
Now repeat for 20 minutes. What are you saying? Your arms are kinda tired? Well duh. Gestures without a surface to put your arms on are exhausting and hard, especially if you have to do it non-stop for a long period of time. It may improve your physique eventually (giant strong arms, tiny legs from sitting in the chair)
Occasional gestures are fine. Say, silence alarm by "batting it away" or switch from one screen set to the other with rotational gesture. But for most activities - get a good hand rest, or touch-surface, or a mouse:)
that people probably don't care if someone steals their "commenting" account password. The only reason to create it in a first place was because they just wanted to show their nick.
I bet if someone checked Washington Post account database passwords, there'd be the same amount of "Blahblahs" and "F*ckoff123"
I find it a bit odd that an extra "f" would have duped "the system". I believe what may have been happening is that human verification part of the equation could have been "hacked".
You create an account, you specify where the banner data lives, it gets submitted for an approval.
Except in this case whoever looked at the data saw "trusted" domain and figured everything is fine. Heck, the "fake" domain could have served an innocent javascript up until owners knew that banner got approved, then swapped out the script and off the drive-by script malware goes.
And then Google/Doubleclick detects bait-and-switch ("hey, we didn't approve this virus!") and it gets flagged.
Slashdot Mirror
Experiment is nice, lovely, news-worthy and, I think, kinda pointless. ;) ). Have you seen one that'd be disconnected? Not that it would lack fiber to every dorm room, but rather a complete lack of connectivity? I thought so.
Mostly because Universities never seemed to have suffered from the lack of or "slowness" of internet connection in the first place (though any amount of bandwidth can be readily consumed by students doing whatever students normally do
The more important experiment is that Google Fiber in Kansas. Wiring residential area is way more difficult and costly. Plus most residential areas lack any sort of substantial ISP competition, and a proof of working, profitable (at least a tiny bit) alternative means of connection that gives local telco/cable run for their money would make more difference than wiring any university. Unless you're planning to move into a dorm and live there.
Because so far in most cases the way to "prevent/reverse man-made climate change" is "well, just make it too expensive to pollute" and "let's trade carbon credits!"
Guess who's interested in trading? Organizing an exchange with some fees to come with it? Help companies to make "the most" out of credits companies would get for free via assistance of a broker? Compensate for "rigid requirements" with wonders of free market?
Yeah. And, as price of pollution credits goes up, so will the fees.
Instead of making a non-monetized restriction on pollution and regulations that reflect reality, everyone seems to be completely certain that regulation has to include an exchange and stupid across-the-board unobtainable (without trading) goals.
I think the primary problem is not the climate change, but the amount of entities that want to earn easy money on proposed solutions.
Oh, for a moment there I thought they decided to force carriers to cover all fees from the bill. You know, so it'd be one total, not total + FCC Mystery Line Fee, USF Fee, blah blah blah.
Either that, or soon we'll see "Employee Handwashing Fee", "Cleaning Surplus Reimbursement Surcharge" and "Poison Control Center Fee" being imposed at fast food restaurants.
Oh well. I can dream...
What surprises me is that it's been almost a day and we don't have a giant first page headlines "WE CONFIRMED SHE IS EVIL! Email details ... ". Nothing beyond regular (and sometimes understandable) stuff.
Which probably will result in more conspiracy theory to the tune of "Well we know She's Evil, it's just only those months of emails that weren't released must contain the Pure Evilness!", which is kinda silly.
I think every governor should have emails released, frankly, before he/she leaves office. The whole transparency thing, people love to talk about so much (but never deliver). That way someone who's about to become a public official will know that the public will see all communication for sure, without a need to file information requests (plus some states don't seem to care much to store the data as long as Alaska does). It will probably disrupt their "ability to negotiate" (like releasing the list of people who visit the White House) but isn't transparency worth it?
In most cases people don't really have much choice.
You go to register to do something, and marketing department demands that registration form has a mandatory City, Address, Zip, blah blah, whatever their data appetite demands (and probably with data validation too, so doing New York, Blah Street, won't work).
Sure, some people will stop right there. But if "free" thing you gain access to by filling out registration form seems compelling enough, people will fill in the address.
And only a few of them will be clever enough to give some other (easily remembered, in case of site's trickery) address.
That data will live in archive forever, because marketing will never ever allow deleting anything.
Until it gets stolen (heck, probably afterwards too, but there will be a marketing blurb about being very secure, tested daily for hacker intrusions and stuff like that, wash, rinse, repeat)
Yes, it's "giving up", but I think it's better to have T-Mobile's kind of capping (where speed gets reduced) than a nice little surprise on your bill with per-GB (or whatever the "over the bucket" bucket size is). It means your bill stays predictable, which is what most users want. If it's slow, it's not a problem for most users, annoying, but not a problem
What I'm curious about is why do they re-activate the network per state.
As of right now, just California and a few New England states seem to be "online". One server per state? Sounds a bit odd.
Oh and the map is stored on Flickr. For a moment there I thought someone hacked their blog system too, and just posted faked-up "we're about to go live again" message.
Sounds pretty much like warning system for earthquakes, that shows up as an urgent message on practically all phones in Japan.
The back-end is still probably going to be SMS/MMS based (FCC document vaguely mentions the future ability to send audio/video with these messages).
As long as it's not over-used (say, blasting everyone with "flood warning" messages every time there is a flood warning would be kinda annoying -- I already know that as soon as it rains, everything in my county is under "flood warning") it would be fine.
Alas, Netflix won't be able to save cult shows. Mostly because it would eat up all of their cash with dubious return.
Unless ratings are wildly underestimated, $10 a month won't cut it to make anything more advanced than a talk or "reality" show with no special effects
Patiently awaiting a clever hack that will allow storing any data there instead of just music. :)
Documents in MP3 wrapper? 50Gb free storage anywhere? Sweet
Sure, as soon as you get global warming effects in the form of floods or snow or drought in your apartment, your WiFi coverage will suffer tremendously :(
Frankly, when the roof is missing, people tend not to get too upset about bad WiFi reception.
For normal outside activities just use cell 3G/4G signal :)
What are they, trying to write their own web server from a scratch?
Besides, they will probably get an earful from the "security companies" they have hired, because it implies that even after all the audits not all security holes were found.
Per Steam support article the saves won't be compatible, which kills primary advantage of linking your PSN and Steam accounts. Yes, you will be able to play on PC/Mac and PSN. No, your progress won't be tracked, so you'd have to play them independently, not just picking up where you left off on PS3. Hopefully with time they will resolve this problem (or make some sort of PC/Mac utility that will convert the save data).
Some other Steam games (i.e. Torchlight) also have this limitation when you go from Mac to PC -- saves don't work cross-platform, which is a bit pity.
So, one step closer to "buy once, play everywhere", but not there yet :)
I think the really important aspect is if users actually remember/care about the version number of browser.
Do they know it's Firefox 3 (16.6?) or Firefox 4?
I don't think Google ever advertised the version number in any significant way.
It's always "Download Google Chrome", not "Firefox 4, Free Download".
If Firefox moves away from major version numbers completely then yeah, call it 5-6-17-293-whatever. It's "Firefox"
Oh well, 40 million bucks (40-50 estimation from this bloomberg article) doesn't buy much of a wall these days I guess.
I wonder how many times did they have to re-write it from the scratch, what amount was spent on "market studies" ("Would you pay us $50 a month of online access? No? Whyyyy?") and how many pennies were spent on actual QA.
Just wondering...
has already decided to end daylight-saving time. :) Heck, Arizona lived without DST without problems...
Because "power savings" from this back-and-forth are 0.2%. And hassles from switch time are simply not worth it
I thought they ported Java onto Javascript/HTML5. You know, so there'd be an emulator of a java that runs emulator of PDP that runs a game.
And the whole thing is inside of a Virtual box, that is installed on top of an instance running inside of a cloud :)
There are voice actions already, but it takes so much more computational power to make it really-really fast, recognize any accent (which google is having a very hard time with right now) take context into account, and be able to intelligently ask user for clarification. So, I guess in about 5-10 years it will get to the point of Star Trek, where you can address computer and not worry about speech pattern or performing deletion of all files when you said "delay all files".
Generally voice interface is more efficient when we can't type/select something or when a short-hand is too difficult to program.
Examples -- car systems and hands-free phones ("Call John Smith at work"/"Navigate to 12th street" - until autopilot works flawlessly typing that stuff is difficult), directories, where saying a name would be faster than flipping though a large list without knowing how exactly it's spelled.
If you can type, it's faster to press control-o and click enter than say "Computer: open last used file" and get a confirmation. But if you don't know shortcuts and having difficulty with movement, speech recognition is already your only option.
For typing I'd rather prefer a neural short-hand: you don't bother family (or are forced to lock yourself in a soundproof room to dictate a large amount of text) and you eliminate the slowest part of your "think -> type -> text" route.
You don't expect that president of Egypt personally was calling providers, do you? :)
He flipped a switch. A big sign "SHUT DOWN INTERNET NOW" lit up in a special room, and well trained officials called ISPs with instruction to turn off that internet thingie. And ISPs said "Sure, no problem! Done!"
Killswitch
Ah yes, the chance to kick Bing, who can miss that :)
Alas, while checking their license for the rant on this search "scandal" I found this paragraph:
(emphasis mine)
There you go, tracking of "your interaction with Bind and different search engines" (including but doesn't say it's limited to, thank you lawyers). So yes, they're tracking it, throwing it into whole pot, and then re-use on Bing results. Anything that Google returned and user clicked on would be tainted thanks to this clause. You clicked on it (after installing toolbar), it got added. Ta-da!
I wonder what'd happen if we actually got to the ideal state of search engines, where all search engines converge to some "best" search result (given identical search request context)?
Having a flag in the header is nice. But the real question is, would Firefox (and Chrome) add "no signature/generic signature" mode, where headers sent out to the server get synchronized to the lowest common denominator for a large set of users?
You know, so that browser can't be sufficiently identified by the headers alone. And http://panopticlick.eff.org would say "Browser plugin details: one in 2", and "User Agent" one in, say, 10. Plus the heck with system fonts.
I know in some other countries "local/communal" networks are still doing quite well, and usually instead of everyone buying an internet access individually, whole building (condo/apartments/whatever) has a network that is plugged into an ISP via somewhat thicker and more economical connection.
Given that some networks grow to a large size, you get multiple buildings connected together, up to several city blocks. And then you get peering between communal networks, local gaming servers etc.
Biggest issue is, of course, that users still need to connect to "real" internet, so full fork is not possible. The second biggest issue, is that you need a substantial degree of participation. If out of whole subdivision only three/four houses want to fork, while everyone else is happy enough with their current connection, there's no chance of making a dent in ISP's policies or creating an alternative to "normal" connection.
There's no content beyond what's provided via proxy. And I doubt that Blizzard would allow local network to run local servers without paying a large amount of money (which also kills the whole idea -- if you have lots of money, you're okay with non-neutral Internet, cause you can afford it). So, other than local file sharing, which in most cases would be just a pile of pirated stuff, there's nothing to attract regular users.
Maybe Google will actually decide to provide an alternative to telcos, but given their recent alliance with Verizon and overall "don't poke the hornet's nest" attitude (gigabit project is still up in the air, phone services from Gizmo are non-existent, Google Voice doesn't do SMS etc) I kinda doubt it.
So, start connecting to your nerdy neighbors, but forget about becoming an Internet Alternative for a looooong time.
And a bit of an occasional gesture.
If someone suggest the "minority report-style controls" do a simple experiment:
Stand in front of the mirror and do:
- "file moving" (grand gesture - one side to the other)
- "resizing" (grabing and stretching wide)
- "turning and button pushing" (poking at the different spots of the mirror)
Now repeat for 20 minutes. What are you saying? Your arms are kinda tired? Well duh.
Gestures without a surface to put your arms on are exhausting and hard, especially if you have to do it non-stop for a long period of time.
It may improve your physique eventually (giant strong arms, tiny legs from sitting in the chair)
Occasional gestures are fine. Say, silence alarm by "batting it away" or switch from one screen set to the other with rotational gesture. But for most activities - get a good hand rest, or touch-surface, or a mouse :)
that people probably don't care if someone steals their "commenting" account password.
The only reason to create it in a first place was because they just wanted to show their nick.
I bet if someone checked Washington Post account database passwords, there'd be the same amount of "Blahblahs" and "F*ckoff123"
I find it a bit odd that an extra "f" would have duped "the system". I believe what may have been happening is that human verification part of the equation could have been "hacked".
You create an account, you specify where the banner data lives, it gets submitted for an approval.
Except in this case whoever looked at the data saw "trusted" domain and figured everything is fine. Heck, the "fake" domain could have served an innocent javascript up until owners knew that banner got approved, then swapped out the script and off the drive-by script malware goes.
And then Google/Doubleclick detects bait-and-switch ("hey, we didn't approve this virus!") and it gets flagged.