It's interesting because the first thing I wondered when I looked at the Grocery site was, "Hmm, I wonder if this makes Amazon Prime worth it."
Of course, then I realised that I wouldn't actually be saving anything, since I wouldn't have been 2-day shipping the stuff to me in the first place. But still, I think you're absolutely right about it being a tool for Prime / locking.
I ran a packet sniffer at one point. The actual database of words that are in wikipedia is stored clientside, and updated periodically. Trillian actually runs a specialized mirror on their own servers of wikipedia, which the Trillian client queries when you hover your mouse over one of the words.. The server outputs very barebones text I believe, not even XML wrapped, so it's extremely minimal bandwidth usage even for you.
It's also lightning fast, the tooltip appears almost instantly. It's by far my favorite feature.
>> Opera's special "feature" is more of a bug actually and causes hardship on web pages designers to handle its non-standard way of performing such a simple function.
If you look at the hopeful featureset for Firefox 2, you'll notice they want to add caching just like Opera. A great deal of the 'features' of Firefox are really ripoffs of Opera's innovations. This is not to say Firefox is a bad browser. It's not, and it's much better than IE. I used Firefox for a while though, but Opera's caching feature just was too useful for me to give up. It's literally instantaneous.
Yes, I know a page is dynamic, and it may now be out of date, but that's what I want, I want to go back to exactly what i saw before. If i want new updated data, I can just hit reload. And I've -never- run into a problem where a page isn't 'meant' to be viewed again after submitting form data...it's never ever messed up.
>CPU speeds increase every year, and perhaps someone will produce a free version based on these people's techniques.
If you read the white paper, you'll see that they're patent pending. This company could sue anyone who would release a free version.
Remember when the GIF patent holder tried to collect royalties on every image editor that used GIFs? That's why I won't/can't use proprietary patented image formats.
>After all, electronic storage media is infinite, and bandwidth is free!
I can't really tell if you're being sarcastic here=)
Media IS cheap, as is bandwidth (provided you live in an area that provides it of course, but such areas are rapidly expanding). The price you pay for their product is probably a lot more than you get for not using some extra CD-Rs or DVD-Rs (which have incredibly small per gigabyte costs).
Nope, only JPEG. And modern video compression (H.263, H.264) has enough overhead as it is, having key frames be encoded in something that takes several seconds to decode would not work out well.
>Archive a bunch of images sometime. Then it's useful. I needed to put several thousand images (scanlations of manga) onto a cd. It went over the 700mb limit. Using this, I could have saved $0.10 on cds and 2 minutes of time. Not a big deal, but if you do such things a lot, it could add up. So the program is probably worth about $5. Maybe $10, but that could be a bit much.
The 2 minutes time saving...remember it takes 6-8 seconds to compress as well, so multiply that by several thousand images. I don't know about you, but if I had to wait 8 seconds between each manga frame, it would be highly annoying.
There's gotta be a better format than this already out there, and probably free.
>Photogs would like the fact that it's lossless compression.
Except that it's lossless compression of JPG, which is a lossy compression format...not a lossless compression of the original image. The defects from JPG are still gonna be there.
The linked page shows average decompression times of 6-8 seconds for 600-800 KB files, rising with the size of the file. Who would benefit from this? It's obviously too slow to speed up web pages, and would be far too CPU intensive for consumer cameras. Professional photographers would have no use for this since they would use RAW images.
I mean, it's cool and all to be able to compress JPGs by that much more, but the size gains are negated by the time it takes to decompress them. This seems just like those super high compression algorithms that have rather amazing compression rates, but take -forever- to compress or decompress, making them unusable. The difference is those are obviously and labeled as simply for scientific research into compression, but Aladdin seems to be trying to market this product for public consumption. The listed uses ( http://www.stuffit.com/imagecompression/ ) seem trivial at best.
It's pretty simple. If you're running AdBlock, and an ad company is paying for ads 'per impression' (as opposed to per click), you're essentially stealing from company. Why would Opera want to be a party to that?
In any case, most websites that run ads 'per impression' have to keep up a minimum 'click-through' ratio. Running AdBlock would actually hurt the website's clickthrough rating, and make it more likely that ad companies will drop them, or give them fewer campaigns.
If you're on dialup, now you have the extra burden of downloading images that you don't even see.
Because the FAA changes the location of legal crash-intoable mountains every quarter. The software would have to be reloaded from the ground every quarter, possibly disrupting the fabric of space time.
er, while the definition of firmware is reprogrammability, that's not really important. You're right, they can be modified, so it is important to hardcode at least some major sites into the system, like the statue of liberty, sears tower, etc., or maybe it has to all be hardcoded, and not restrict airspace like over neighborhoods and such like normal no fly zones/altitude limits, but only on possible terrorist targets, which don't change all that often.
The article says that if you try to bank into the nofly zone, autopilot pushes the other way. What if you intentionally flew directly in to the zone, and pushed the opposite way of where the autopilot was trying to push...would it be able to get into the zone? I'm not a pilot, but it seems to me like that could be a viable way to break the system.
The article says that the system includes provisions for if the GPS is jammed, such as using airport nav beacons. I would think that the gps coordinates would be firmware, and not user-configurable.
Who controls approval? If that's the way it will work, what's to stop me from watching another approval transaction or two and copying it? shared secrets only work so long as one of the sharers is not at gunpoint.
Just one concern...what's to stop the hijackers from busting the autopilot controls in the cockpit? I would think that it would be sensitive to bullets or repeated bashing. It's not like you need an autopilot when you're right next to a city, just point the nose and go. What kind of range should these no fly zones have, and what should be protocol for when an airport is in/next to a city?
wow, contrary to what people are saying, at least bitwise is supereasy to get set up with, when I clicked the read comic, I counted maybe 40 seconds between when I started and when I finished, and now it'll take even less time.
On top of that, it was a good comic. Can't wait for second chapter. 3 cheers for micropayments!
Used for therapy already.
on
Biofeedback Gaming
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used software set up with an EEG (which measures brainwave activity), and the goal was to make the fishes on the screen more tranquil by relaxing myself. This game seems like it may train people to be more anxious constantly. (I'm not dissing the idea, which is really cool.)
Uh. Right. It IS a measurement of distance. See the Kessel spice run entails going past a collection of blackholes and stars called the Maw. What he's saying is he flew around it in only 12 parsecs. Like he took a shortcut. The closer you get the more dangerous it is, from the threat of being pulled in. He had to do it in 12 parsecs to escape Imperial spice guards, which didn't help him as he still had to dump his spice, which led to him at Mos Eisley with Chewie. Huzzah!
Umm, you don't have to. I run XP Pro. It gets really annoying because it has this thing that keeps asking me to sign up for ".NET Passport" at the bottom, but it doesn't actually require you to have it to access to the net. I think you interpreted that sentence wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Very fun read.
It's interesting because the first thing I wondered when I looked at the Grocery site was, "Hmm, I wonder if this makes Amazon Prime worth it."
Of course, then I realised that I wouldn't actually be saving anything, since I wouldn't have been 2-day shipping the stuff to me in the first place. But still, I think you're absolutely right about it being a tool for Prime / locking.
-Cliff
And of COURSE Skype had to be bought out just months ago by an American company (eBay).
Er, Origin was bought out -by- EA several years later.
Everquest was developed by Verant, NOT Sony. Sony only bought Verant out several years later. Sony, if anything, killed Everquest.
However, way before Everquest was the hugely popular Ultima Online, developed by Origin (bought out EA several years later).
Opera has had an email-style RSS feed aggregator for a long time now.
I ran a packet sniffer at one point. The actual database of words that are in wikipedia is stored clientside, and updated periodically. Trillian actually runs a specialized mirror on their own servers of wikipedia, which the Trillian client queries when you hover your mouse over one of the words.. The server outputs very barebones text I believe, not even XML wrapped, so it's extremely minimal bandwidth usage even for you.
It's also lightning fast, the tooltip appears almost instantly. It's by far my favorite feature.
>> Opera's special "feature" is more of a bug actually and causes hardship on web pages designers to handle its non-standard way of performing such a simple function.
If you look at the hopeful featureset for Firefox 2, you'll notice they want to add caching just like Opera. A great deal of the 'features' of Firefox are really ripoffs of Opera's innovations. This is not to say Firefox is a bad browser. It's not, and it's much better than IE. I used Firefox for a while though, but Opera's caching feature just was too useful for me to give up. It's literally instantaneous.
Yes, I know a page is dynamic, and it may now be out of date, but that's what I want, I want to go back to exactly what i saw before. If i want new updated data, I can just hit reload. And I've -never- run into a problem where a page isn't 'meant' to be viewed again after submitting form data...it's never ever messed up.
Cliff
>CPU speeds increase every year, and perhaps someone will produce a free version based on these people's techniques.
If you read the white paper, you'll see that they're patent pending. This company could sue anyone who would release a free version.
Remember when the GIF patent holder tried to collect royalties on every image editor that used GIFs? That's why I won't/can't use proprietary patented image formats.
>After all, electronic storage media is infinite, and bandwidth is free!
I can't really tell if you're being sarcastic here=)
Media IS cheap, as is bandwidth (provided you live in an area that provides it of course, but such areas are rapidly expanding). The price you pay for their product is probably a lot more than you get for not using some extra CD-Rs or DVD-Rs (which have incredibly small per gigabyte costs).
Nope, only JPEG. And modern video compression (H.263, H.264) has enough overhead as it is, having key frames be encoded in something that takes several seconds to decode would not work out well.
>Archive a bunch of images sometime. Then it's useful. I needed to put several thousand images (scanlations of manga) onto a cd. It went over the 700mb limit. Using this, I could have saved $0.10 on cds and 2 minutes of time. Not a big deal, but if you do such things a lot, it could add up. So the program is probably worth about $5. Maybe $10, but that could be a bit much.
The 2 minutes time saving...remember it takes 6-8 seconds to compress as well, so multiply that by several thousand images. I don't know about you, but if I had to wait 8 seconds between each manga frame, it would be highly annoying.
There's gotta be a better format than this already out there, and probably free.
>Photogs would like the fact that it's lossless compression.
Except that it's lossless compression of JPG, which is a lossy compression format...not a lossless compression of the original image. The defects from JPG are still gonna be there.
The linked page shows average decompression times of 6-8 seconds for 600-800 KB files, rising with the size of the file. Who would benefit from this? It's obviously too slow to speed up web pages, and would be far too CPU intensive for consumer cameras. Professional photographers would have no use for this since they would use RAW images.
I mean, it's cool and all to be able to compress JPGs by that much more, but the size gains are negated by the time it takes to decompress them. This seems just like those super high compression algorithms that have rather amazing compression rates, but take -forever- to compress or decompress, making them unusable. The difference is those are obviously and labeled as simply for scientific research into compression, but Aladdin seems to be trying to market this product for public consumption. The listed uses ( http://www.stuffit.com/imagecompression/ ) seem trivial at best.
Who's gonna be buying this?
-Cliff Spradlin
It's pretty simple. If you're running AdBlock, and an ad company is paying for ads 'per impression' (as opposed to per click), you're essentially stealing from company. Why would Opera want to be a party to that?
In any case, most websites that run ads 'per impression' have to keep up a minimum 'click-through' ratio. Running AdBlock would actually hurt the website's clickthrough rating, and make it more likely that ad companies will drop them, or give them fewer campaigns.
If you're on dialup, now you have the extra burden of downloading images that you don't even see.
Basically, I don't think AdBlock helps anyone.
Am I the only one who noticed that these documents say Confidential until April 2002?
Because the FAA changes the location of legal crash-intoable mountains every quarter. The software would have to be reloaded from the ground every quarter, possibly disrupting the fabric of space time.
er, while the definition of firmware is reprogrammability, that's not really important. You're right, they can be modified, so it is important to hardcode at least some major sites into the system, like the statue of liberty, sears tower, etc., or maybe it has to all be hardcoded, and not restrict airspace like over neighborhoods and such like normal no fly zones/altitude limits, but only on possible terrorist targets, which don't change all that often.
The article says that if you try to bank into the nofly zone, autopilot pushes the other way. What if you intentionally flew directly in to the zone, and pushed the opposite way of where the autopilot was trying to push...would it be able to get into the zone? I'm not a pilot, but it seems to me like that could be a viable way to break the system.
The article says that the system includes provisions for if the GPS is jammed, such as using airport nav beacons. I would think that the gps coordinates would be firmware, and not user-configurable.
Who controls approval? If that's the way it will work, what's to stop me from watching another approval transaction or two and copying it? shared secrets only work so long as one of the sharers is not at gunpoint.
This is a really cool idea. I'm all for it.
Just one concern...what's to stop the hijackers from busting the autopilot controls in the cockpit? I would think that it would be sensitive to bullets or repeated bashing. It's not like you need an autopilot when you're right next to a city, just point the nose and go. What kind of range should these no fly zones have, and what should be protocol for when an airport is in/next to a city?
wow, contrary to what people are saying, at least bitwise is supereasy to get set up with, when I clicked the read comic, I counted maybe 40 seconds between when I started and when I finished, and now it'll take even less time.
On top of that, it was a good comic. Can't wait for second chapter. 3 cheers for micropayments!
I used software set up with an EEG (which measures brainwave activity), and the goal was to make the fishes on the screen more tranquil by relaxing myself. This game seems like it may train people to be more anxious constantly. (I'm not dissing the idea, which is really cool.)
Uh. Right. It IS a measurement of distance. See the Kessel spice run entails going past a collection of blackholes and stars called the Maw. What he's saying is he flew around it in only 12 parsecs. Like he took a shortcut. The closer you get the more dangerous it is, from the threat of being pulled in. He had to do it in 12 parsecs to escape Imperial spice guards, which didn't help him as he still had to dump his spice, which led to him at Mos Eisley with Chewie. Huzzah!
Umm, you don't have to. I run XP Pro. It gets really annoying because it has this thing that keeps asking me to sign up for ".NET Passport" at the bottom, but it doesn't actually require you to have it to access to the net. I think you interpreted that sentence wrong.