Appleseed is a lot more near completion than Diaspora is. They are already working for 6 years on it, and currently have a working prototype running on test servers.
Diaspora is now saying how their demo is "pretty fast" with message passing. They do show 6 connected servers in the video, but there is only one active user. And they never talk about scaling up (to thousands/millions of users). Scalability should be a factor considered from the start for this kind of application. They don't mention anything related to it in their "road map," instead they have items like "Implement awesome user interface."
I'm not trying to ridicule Diaspora here, actually I also donated to them. I would love to see a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook. But I think Appleseed is much more ahead.
So for all the money the Diaspora guys collected for just presenting an idea, I think the Appleseed guys also deserve to get some funds to continue working on their project.
Re:It might have been valuable back in 1998 or so
on
Sex.com is Going Down
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· Score: 1
And even typing "sex" in the url bar won't bring you to sex.com. By default, IE will do a Bing search, Chrome will do a Google search, and Firefox will simply try to connect to the "sex" domain, which will fail (unless you have a web server named sex on your internal network).
If it wasn't so bad in the EU yet, our rights are certainly deteriorating. We currently have two Pirate Party members in the European Parliament, we need more of them! Christian Engström, the first Pirate Party MEP, already spoke out after a previous leak of ACTA documents.
Most of the time I cross such a shortened url, I want to see the full url before the redirect is completed. Tinyurl's preview option let me do that, without an account/login, it just saves the setting in a cookie.
Bit.ly has a Firefox plugin to preview urls, but I don't want to install a browser plugin for each service. And what if I'm using another browser?
I'm hoping Google will implement something similar to Tinyurl's system.
In this case Google should really change the name since its been used in an existing programming language for years.
Google already let another company change the name of their programming language, although that company used the name first. That company (RemObjects) had a language named Chrome, an Object Pascal based language for.NET. When Google published their Chrome web browser, RemObjects renamed the language to Oxygene (Wikipedia link). The details of the deal between RemObjects and Google were never disclosed, but I guess a nice amount of money changed hands.
I think it's very annoying when you read the first page on Google Fast Flip, and you click through to the publisher's site, you're back at the top of the article. So you have to search the page to find which part you already read, and where to continue reading. Seems definitely not quicker to me...
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service.
FYI, here in Belgium, operators scramble to please the crowd at music festivals. Youth is an important demographic to them, and for all the big festivals one of the main GSM operators is a main sponsor. The extra demand is countered by having mobile cell towers placed somewhere near the festival ground to provide extra capacity.
Obviously, when thousands of people are texting, there will be delays. But in my experience, even then it would take at most 15 minutes to deliver a SMS message.
Indeed, I was wondering about Bazaar (bzr) in particular. TFA assumes "Each tool emphasizes a distinct approach to working and collaboration, which in turn influences how the team works."
But the very first line on http://bazaar-vcs.org/ states: "Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works. While other systems require you to adapt to their model of working, Bazaar adapts to the way you want to work, and you can try it out in five minutes."
An overview of different possible workflows is given on this page. The most simple solutions don't need a server at all, you can use a centralized repo like svn/cvs, or more complicated distributed setups (like with git/hg) are possible.
Also don't connect them to dimmer switches (even if you leave the dimmers at 100% all the time)
Many dimmers designed for incandescents work by rapidly turning the light on and off. This is a very bad thing for inductive loads such as fluorescent starter coils, and will destroy the device in no time flat.
Just use the correct type of dimmer for the application. There are dimmers for resistive, inductive and capacitive loads (examples of these loads are resp. incandescents, fluorescents and transformers). Classic dimmers for resistive loads cost less than the other two kinds. Also dimmers for two or all tree types of loads exist, of course they cost even more.
Free access isn't available here in Belgium, and premium accounts are 9,99 euro/month...
From the Spotify FAQ: What countries is Spotify available in? We've released our free advertising supported version in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. In most other countries Spotify Premium is available for purchase. When will Spotify Free be available in my country? At this time we don't know when we may launch in more countries.
About the one-button mouse: Apple's "Mighty Mouse," introduced in 2005, has no visible button, but can be configured in software to have 1, 2 or 3 buttons. With the "unibody" macbooks, this concept was ported to the macbook trackpad. The glass trackpad acts as one big button, but can be configured for right-click (by clicking the right hand side of the pad).
Besides, Apple releases new versions of OS X that are basically service packs at full price all the time
I'm running OS X 10.5.6 at the moment, I view it as Leopard SP6 (with service packs being smaller, but more frequent than on Windows). And yes, I also get security and other patches which don't increase the minor version.
And concerning the price, Apple releases a new version +/- each 18 months for $129, that's a lot less than even Vista Home Basic ($199), the version without Aero and a lot of other features. Yes, OS X has different versions too, but the home user has no need for them (except for the 5-installations family pack for $199).
The quote posted here does not correspond to the linked blog entry anymore, as the blog was updated. Essentially, it now states the list with the error was not provided by StopBadware.org, but created by Google themselves.
The changed part:
We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning.
If you want to know just how badly the RIAA labels screw over their artists, read any treatise by any RIAA musician (except Mad Donna or the dufus drummer from Metallica). There are good ones by Courtney Love and Steve Albini that will make you feel REAL sorry for the fools who sign with major labels.
Another interesting new feature is the experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL. From the manual:
With this new feature, if an application inside your Windows guest uses 3D features through the OpenGL programming interfaces, these will not be emulated in software (which is slow), but instead VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware. This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
The 3D acceleration currently has the following limitations: 1. It is only available in Windows XP and 32-bit Vista guests with the Windows Guest Additions installed. 2. Only OpenGL acceleration is presently available in those guests; Direct3D is not yet supported and will be added in a future release.
The article indicates they want to filter peer-to-peer traffic, not completely block it. That would require an enormous effort and a lot of resources, to do content filtering on p2p connections. I'm wondering if it's even possible at all, as the original files are split up in blocks which are transferred between different peers. Seems to me a case of big words by government officials who don't know the technology...
I don't think they're evil, but this is a good point for Mozilla to review their funding options. From the article:
[Mozilla CEO John] Lilly admits Mozilla will have to wean itself off its dependence on Google dollars. "Our goal is to be an advocate for the web for 50 or even 100 years, and you can't depend on any one organisation," he added.
Even if you do, you can buy the DRM-free tracks. Apple's ready to sell anything that the labels will let them sell.
Unfortunately, that's not that much. Only one of the big labels (EMI) offers DRM-free music via iTunes.
There were rumors Apple was going to offer all tracks publiced by Sony, Universal and Warner DRM-free beginning on December 9th, but that was rapidly claimed to be untrue.
The Wikipedia article talks about efficiencies between 40% and 80% for near field transmission. Indeed, that seems like a serious waste just for the convenience of not having to plug in your device...
FYI, far field transmissions using microwave can reach an efficiency of 95%, but I don't think you want such a beam in your house:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Support this project, I did: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project
Appleseed is a lot more near completion than Diaspora is. They are already working for 6 years on it, and currently have a working prototype running on test servers.
Diaspora is now saying how their demo is "pretty fast" with message passing. They do show 6 connected servers in the video, but there is only one active user. And they never talk about scaling up (to thousands/millions of users). Scalability should be a factor considered from the start for this kind of application. They don't mention anything related to it in their "road map," instead they have items like "Implement awesome user interface."
I'm not trying to ridicule Diaspora here, actually I also donated to them. I would love to see a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook. But I think Appleseed is much more ahead.
So for all the money the Diaspora guys collected for just presenting an idea, I think the Appleseed guys also deserve to get some funds to continue working on their project.
And even typing "sex" in the url bar won't bring you to sex.com. By default, IE will do a Bing search, Chrome will do a Google search, and Firefox will simply try to connect to the "sex" domain, which will fail (unless you have a web server named sex on your internal network).
If it wasn't so bad in the EU yet, our rights are certainly deteriorating. We currently have two Pirate Party members in the European Parliament, we need more of them! Christian Engström, the first Pirate Party MEP, already spoke out after a previous leak of ACTA documents.
Most of the time I cross such a shortened url, I want to see the full url before the redirect is completed. Tinyurl's preview option let me do that, without an account/login, it just saves the setting in a cookie.
Bit.ly has a Firefox plugin to preview urls, but I don't want to install a browser plugin for each service. And what if I'm using another browser?
I'm hoping Google will implement something similar to Tinyurl's system.
Do you really think Facebook gets meaningful traffic from Google?
Of course they do. Hint, people don't search for "facebook" in Google, they search for other people's names.
In this case Google should really change the name since its been used in an existing programming language for years.
Google already let another company change the name of their programming language, although that company used the name first. That company (RemObjects) had a language named Chrome, an Object Pascal based language for .NET. When Google published their Chrome web browser, RemObjects renamed the language to Oxygene (Wikipedia link). The details of the deal between RemObjects and Google were never disclosed, but I guess a nice amount of money changed hands.
I think it's very annoying when you read the first page on Google Fast Flip, and you click through to the publisher's site, you're back at the top of the article. So you have to search the page to find which part you already read, and where to continue reading. Seems definitely not quicker to me...
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service.
FYI, here in Belgium, operators scramble to please the crowd at music festivals. Youth is an important demographic to them, and for all the big festivals one of the main GSM operators is a main sponsor. The extra demand is countered by having mobile cell towers placed somewhere near the festival ground to provide extra capacity.
Obviously, when thousands of people are texting, there will be delays. But in my experience, even then it would take at most 15 minutes to deliver a SMS message.
Indeed, I was wondering about Bazaar (bzr) in particular. TFA assumes "Each tool emphasizes a distinct approach to working and collaboration, which in turn influences how the team works."
But the very first line on http://bazaar-vcs.org/ states: "Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works. While other systems require you to adapt to their model of working, Bazaar adapts to the way you want to work, and you can try it out in five minutes."
An overview of different possible workflows is given on this page. The most simple solutions don't need a server at all, you can use a centralized repo like svn/cvs, or more complicated distributed setups (like with git/hg) are possible.
Also don't connect them to dimmer switches (even if you leave the dimmers at 100% all the time)
Many dimmers designed for incandescents work by rapidly turning the light on and off. This is a very bad thing for inductive loads such as fluorescent starter coils, and will destroy the device in no time flat.
Just use the correct type of dimmer for the application. There are dimmers for resistive, inductive and capacitive loads (examples of these loads are resp. incandescents, fluorescents and transformers). Classic dimmers for resistive loads cost less than the other two kinds. Also dimmers for two or all tree types of loads exist, of course they cost even more.
That link goes to the 1.2 version of the Sun plugin. The current one, which is also reviewed in TFA, is version 3.0.
Free access isn't available here in Belgium, and premium accounts are 9,99 euro/month...
From the Spotify FAQ:
What countries is Spotify available in?
We've released our free advertising supported version in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. In most other countries Spotify Premium is available for purchase.
When will Spotify Free be available in my country?
At this time we don't know when we may launch in more countries.
About the one-button mouse: Apple's "Mighty Mouse," introduced in 2005, has no visible button, but can be configured in software to have 1, 2 or 3 buttons. With the "unibody" macbooks, this concept was ported to the macbook trackpad. The glass trackpad acts as one big button, but can be configured for right-click (by clicking the right hand side of the pad).
Concrete examples are in this video.
Besides, Apple releases new versions of OS X that are basically service packs at full price all the time
I'm running OS X 10.5.6 at the moment, I view it as Leopard SP6 (with service packs being smaller, but more frequent than on Windows). And yes, I also get security and other patches which don't increase the minor version.
And concerning the price, Apple releases a new version +/- each 18 months for $129, that's a lot less than even Vista Home Basic ($199), the version without Aero and a lot of other features. Yes, OS X has different versions too, but the home user has no need for them (except for the 5-installations family pack for $199).
OMG, I have turned into a Mac fanboy! :-)
The quote posted here does not correspond to the linked blog entry anymore, as the blog was updated. Essentially, it now states the list with the error was not provided by StopBadware.org, but created by Google themselves.
The changed part:
We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning.
The issue is also explained on StopBadware.org's blog.
If you want to know just how badly the RIAA labels screw over their artists, read any treatise by any RIAA musician (except Mad Donna or the dufus drummer from Metallica). There are good ones by Courtney Love and Steve Albini that will make you feel REAL sorry for the fools who sign with major labels.
FYI, the links:
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA
The Problem With Music by Steve Albini
Via an older article on Cnet I found the Chrome extensions document, spotlighted on November 29th by Google programmer Aaron Boodman. From the document:
Use Cases
The following lists some types of extensions that we'd like to eventually support:
This list is non-exhaustive, and we expect it to grow as the community expresses interest in further extension types.
Emphasis mine.
Another interesting new feature is the experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL. From the manual:
With this new feature, if an application inside your Windows guest uses 3D features through the OpenGL programming interfaces, these will not be emulated in software (which is slow), but instead VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware.
This works for all supported host platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris), provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
The 3D acceleration currently has the following limitations:
1. It is only available in Windows XP and 32-bit Vista guests with the Windows Guest Additions installed.
2. Only OpenGL acceleration is presently available in those guests; Direct3D is not yet supported and will be added in a future release.
The article indicates they want to filter peer-to-peer traffic, not completely block it. That would require an enormous effort and a lot of resources, to do content filtering on p2p connections. I'm wondering if it's even possible at all, as the original files are split up in blocks which are transferred between different peers. Seems to me a case of big words by government officials who don't know the technology...
I don't think they're evil, but this is a good point for Mozilla to review their funding options. From the article:
[Mozilla CEO John] Lilly admits Mozilla will have to wean itself off its dependence on Google dollars. "Our goal is to be an advocate for the web for 50 or even 100 years, and you can't depend on any one organisation," he added.
You don't have to buy your media from the ITMS...
Even if you do, you can buy the DRM-free tracks. Apple's ready to sell anything that the labels will let them sell.
Unfortunately, that's not that much. Only one of the big labels (EMI) offers DRM-free music via iTunes.
There were rumors Apple was going to offer all tracks publiced by Sony, Universal and Warner DRM-free beginning on December 9th, but that was rapidly claimed to be untrue.
Apple DOES offer iTunes Plus.
Yes, it is sold at a premium price.
No, it's not. It was when Apple introduced iTunes Plus, but now the DRM-free tracks are sold at the same price as those with DRM.
However, for those concerned about DRM, it at least affords an alternative that is higher quality and DRM free.
Unfortunately, still only part of the catalogue is offered as DRM-free tracks...
The Wikipedia article talks about efficiencies between 40% and 80% for near field transmission. Indeed, that seems like a serious waste just for the convenience of not having to plug in your device...
FYI, far field transmissions using microwave can reach an efficiency of 95%, but I don't think you want such a beam in your house :-)
laissez-faire