Accurate lip reading is a lot more difficult than sign language. SpeechView would have a much more usable product if they animated signing hands instead of a speaking face. I guess the software would be more complicated since it would involve speech recognition instead of just sound mimicry.
The photo alone is worth surfing over to the article. As Socrates once said, "what a rack!"
But now that they've got the 85th fastest computer, what will they have to do to maintain that coveted position? I imagine the people who are running 86th are rushing out to buy more nodes. My own computer is the world's 27,385,422nd fastest, and I'm battling like crazy to get to 27,385,421.:-)
If you think the artists would stop making music if people stopped buying CDs, you haven't been reading what the musicians themselves have been saying lately. A good place to start is with these informative articles by Janis Ian. Musicians DO NOT MAKE MONEY FROM CDs. They make money from concerts. Standard record company contracts demand that all the production and promotion costs of CDs be taken out of the musician's share of the profit, generally leaving the musicians with ZERO. They tolerate this abuse because CD sales equal exposure, which translates to gigs, which is how musicians, even famous ones, make their actual living.
Whether music is sold on little plastic discs or given away on the Internet would not materially affect most musicians at all. At this point few musicians understand how to use the Internet to promote themselves, for the same reason I don't understand plasma physics or the investment banking business. It's just not their thing. What's more, getting a recording contract has been a mark of success for musicians for a VERY long time, and it's hard to change that culture.
But it will change. Once a few net-savvy musicians achieve fame solely by free distribution and are playing big venues and making lots of money, more will follow, and the record companies will die for lack of takers.
I think of Napster as the first battle in the war of big media vs the public. Big media may have killed Napster, but the fight made tons of people aware of file sharing, and a lot of information has come out into the open about the nature and history of copyright, the relationship between people, their culture, money, and the powerful few who want it all, and the extent of corporations' leverage over our lawmakers. A lot of good will come out of this that I'm sure was completely unintended by people like Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. To me the Napster final auction is kind of like when people were selling bits and pieces of the Berlin wall.
On the other hand, I tried to post a story about the DoveBid auction when it was first announced 3 days ago, but it got rejected. See? See? It was worth space on/. after all!
Recently I read an internal Microsoft white paper that discussed the need to drive the purchase of new PC hardware by creating bigger, more demanding apps that do exciting, useful things. I go along with the exciting and useful part, but it would be nice if they weren't bent on maxxing out hardware so people will have to buy more. Maybe it's to put Palladium chips in place, I dunno. But if there seems to be a lack of motivation to make MS apps smaller, simpler or more efficient, it's not because their coders don't know how, it's because the suits don't want them to.
Remember, Jamie Kellner (new CEO of Turner broadcasting) said it's ok to go to the bathroom. He cuts you that much slack, but he does say skipping through the commercials is theft.
These media execs have such mind-boggling egos, they have no sense of reality. But what they do have is enough money to get senators to do what they want, which means the law doesn't have to make sense to normal people. Scary.
If you think there's a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats, think again. The only difference is in their selection of corporate sponsors. Congress is divided into the ones who are in somebody's pocket and the ones who won't survive the next fundraising cycle, er, I mean "election".
I live in West Seattle, and my first reaction to this story was to respond like you did. But I didn't have to because you put the facts so well. Way to go. So let me paint a more subjective picture.
In the 14 years I've lived in West Seattle the traffic has at least tripled. Not just commute traffic -- people do a lot more in their lives than just go to and from work. I'm talking about shopping, going out to eat, etc. within the immediate area. The monorail isn't going to do squat for that. In fact, it will probably bring in more people and make the situation worse. As much as I hate the traffic on the West Seattle bridge, at least it probably discourages some people from moving over here.
This is an area people don't tend to move out of. It has a large number of people who have lived here since WWII and before, have raised their families here and have mostly taken good care of their homes. Those folks are dying off now, and their houses are being bought by people who either subdivide the lots with two skinny townhouse-like structures or put up 4-story apartments and business buildings, depending on whether there is a view. Property prices (and taxes) have therefore soared in the last 10 years. Our house value has quadrupled, which I suppose would be fine if we were real estate speculators, but we just want to live here. A district of longtime homeowners is turning into a district of renters, which we all know will eventually drive the quality of the area down.
The City of Seattle bureaucrats see this as "revitalizing" the area. I see it as "devitalizing". What they get is more tax money, from the residents but more importantly from the businesses, which pay both property tax and business tax. What we residents get is more crime, more graffiti (not the cool artsy kind, the dumbass tag kind), more losers walking around with an attitude, and more cars driven by hurried, over-extended people talking on cellphones, drinking lattes and putting on makeup.
A little rant about Seattle politics... Schlach mentioned above that the monorail passed by only 800 votes. Seattle is developing a history of big projects that pass by a narrow margin. The new monorail is the most recent. Seahawks Stadium was another one, but at least it too actually passed. The Mariners baseball stadium was defeated by us mere voters, but the state legislature responded by obligingly writing a law authorizing any county with a million or more residents to issue bonds to build athletic complexes. There's only one such county in the state, guess which one. To avoid future complications they even gave the law a 2-year expiration date. The stadium the county commissioners authorized cost 3 times as much as the one the voters rejected.
Everybody is asking, "How could an online magazine lose so much money" and everybody else is giving vague answers. According to their financial reports they seem to have trimmed down considerably this year, but looking at last year they were spending about a million a month on content and production, half a million on sales and marketing, $100k on research and development (??? you tell me) and about $400k on admin. That's $24 million a year right there. Losing $11 million/year doesn't seem so far-fetched.
What interests me is that each of the two top execs made $300k last year. Not bad pay for shovelling venture capital down a hole, eh?
We probably couldn't do the whole thing anyway. Whoever patents "Bodies of rocky material orbiting larger bodies of rocky material in a vacuum" would demand outrageous license fees.
I'm proud to be the parent of a daughter who at age 6 said to my wife and me, when Ronald MacDonald walked up to us in a parade, "Hey, here comes a clown!" She didn't have a clue who the hell he was, and that was just fine with us.
I agree 100% that this type of product placement is a sad sign. But it's EA's game, and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else.
Instead of trying to destroy an incoming killer asteroid, what about capturing a small asteroid into Earth orbit in advance, and steering it into the path of an incoming one? Not to smash it but to pass close enough to gravitationally swing it off course? Seems like it would be easier to work on the engineering on an asteroid nearby, plus while it's here we could mine it.
What if we captured a medium size asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could steer it into different orbits. When an incoming killer asteroid is detected, steer our "pet" asteroid into its path -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging it off course to miss the Earth?
Remembering an earlier/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could assemble our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces in the correct orbit, rather than going out and getting one.
How about this: we capture a small asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could nudge it into different orbits. Then we could steer it into the path of an incoming killer asteroid -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging the bad boy off course to miss the Earth.
Remembering an earlier/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could even build our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces rather than going out and getting one.
If you read Sandblad's actual BugTraq posting you will see that he had notified Microsoft more than a month before posting the details of the exploit. Quoting:
Microsoft was initially contacted 2002-10-04. After several mail exchanges, their final response were that the technique used to run programs with parameters from the "Local computer zone" was no security vulnerability. A fix should instead be applied for all possibilities for content in the "Internet zone" to access the "Local computer zone".
How much time does a company have to actually fix a problem this serious? When somebody takes the trouble to notify a company about a defect, they've already demonstrated helpfulness and responsibility. It would make sense for the company to take that helpful, responsible person into the loop, and at least update them periodically about what is being done about the problem. That would give a helpful person like Sandblad a basis for continuing to wait. In this case Microsoft gave no indication that they were doing anything about the problem or intended to do anything about it. Continuing to sit on the information certainly wouldn't give them any further incentive. Sandblad reported this problem, got a thanks-but-no-thanks, then after a month of no news went over their heads to the public. I would say he handled it very responsibly.
The big mistake this guy made was a completely natural one: he confused culture with market share. In our society we place almost no value on non-owner participation. No matter what something may mean to you personally, no matter how much energy you may put into promoting it, no matter how much the owners materially profit from your efforts, it's still 100% theirs and 0% yours, and they can take it away from you at a whim.
Companies love you to be a cheerleader for Version 1 until Version 2 comes out, then you are supposed to abandon Version 1 and embrace Version 2. Britney is out, Samantha is in. Your website must shut down. Not because you did anything wrong. They just don't need you any more. You were an asset, now your loyalty to their previous products is competition. You're in the way.
Save your loyalty and devotion for your family and friends, your ideals and your personal standards -- the parts of your culture that can't be owned by others or taken away.
Fischer's anti-semitism and his apparent approval of the attack on the World Trade Center might make him an asshole, but it doesn't make him a terrorist, and it certainly doesn't retroactively make him a Soviet spy in the 1970's or vindicate any of the FBI's suspicions.
As explained in the article, the FBI had a long-running investigation of Fischer and his mother back in the 70's and earlier. It's just another illustration that the US govt has been spying on its own citizens for decades, long before there was any sort of terrorist rationalization.
I think you just hit it squarely on the head. Up next WiFi speakers and headphones (code name: Aura), with a small ui to select from your vast collection of RIAA-licensed media.
It took me years to get a PC on my desk instead of a "dumb terminal." Now that there are Smart Displays, the ones everybody already has will become "dumb displays." Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Accurate lip reading is a lot more difficult than sign language. SpeechView would have a much more usable product if they animated signing hands instead of a speaking face. I guess the software would be more complicated since it would involve speech recognition instead of just sound mimicry.
Hey I remember that, but I always thought it was the choke.
It was, "a maze of twisty passages, all alike."
The photo alone is worth surfing over to the article. As Socrates once said, "what a rack!"
:-)
But now that they've got the 85th fastest computer, what will they have to do to maintain that coveted position? I imagine the people who are running 86th are rushing out to buy more nodes. My own computer is the world's 27,385,422nd fastest, and I'm battling like crazy to get to 27,385,421.
If you think the artists would stop making music if people stopped buying CDs, you haven't been reading what the musicians themselves have been saying lately. A good place to start is with these informative articles by Janis Ian. Musicians DO NOT MAKE MONEY FROM CDs. They make money from concerts. Standard record company contracts demand that all the production and promotion costs of CDs be taken out of the musician's share of the profit, generally leaving the musicians with ZERO. They tolerate this abuse because CD sales equal exposure, which translates to gigs, which is how musicians, even famous ones, make their actual living.
Whether music is sold on little plastic discs or given away on the Internet would not materially affect most musicians at all. At this point few musicians understand how to use the Internet to promote themselves, for the same reason I don't understand plasma physics or the investment banking business. It's just not their thing. What's more, getting a recording contract has been a mark of success for musicians for a VERY long time, and it's hard to change that culture.
But it will change. Once a few net-savvy musicians achieve fame solely by free distribution and are playing big venues and making lots of money, more will follow, and the record companies will die for lack of takers.
I think of Napster as the first battle in the war of big media vs the public. Big media may have killed Napster, but the fight made tons of people aware of file sharing, and a lot of information has come out into the open about the nature and history of copyright, the relationship between people, their culture, money, and the powerful few who want it all, and the extent of corporations' leverage over our lawmakers. A lot of good will come out of this that I'm sure was completely unintended by people like Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. To me the Napster final auction is kind of like when people were selling bits and pieces of the Berlin wall.
/. after all!
On the other hand, I tried to post a story about the DoveBid auction when it was first announced 3 days ago, but it got rejected. See? See? It was worth space on
Recently I read an internal Microsoft white paper that discussed the need to drive the purchase of new PC hardware by creating bigger, more demanding apps that do exciting, useful things. I go along with the exciting and useful part, but it would be nice if they weren't bent on maxxing out hardware so people will have to buy more. Maybe it's to put Palladium chips in place, I dunno. But if there seems to be a lack of motivation to make MS apps smaller, simpler or more efficient, it's not because their coders don't know how, it's because the suits don't want them to.
Remember, Jamie Kellner (new CEO of Turner broadcasting) said it's ok to go to the bathroom. He cuts you that much slack, but he does say skipping through the commercials is theft.
These media execs have such mind-boggling egos, they have no sense of reality. But what they do have is enough money to get senators to do what they want, which means the law doesn't have to make sense to normal people. Scary.
If you think there's a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats, think again. The only difference is in their selection of corporate sponsors. Congress is divided into the ones who are in somebody's pocket and the ones who won't survive the next fundraising cycle, er, I mean "election".
Eat your own dogfood is a common, widely used term for companies using their own products. You should get out more.
Watcha gonna do when something like this happens, and the airtight MS security system is burned into your hardware?
Comforting thought, huh?
I live in West Seattle, and my first reaction to this story was to respond like you did. But I didn't have to because you put the facts so well. Way to go. So let me paint a more subjective picture.
In the 14 years I've lived in West Seattle the traffic has at least tripled. Not just commute traffic -- people do a lot more in their lives than just go to and from work. I'm talking about shopping, going out to eat, etc. within the immediate area. The monorail isn't going to do squat for that. In fact, it will probably bring in more people and make the situation worse. As much as I hate the traffic on the West Seattle bridge, at least it probably discourages some people from moving over here.
This is an area people don't tend to move out of. It has a large number of people who have lived here since WWII and before, have raised their families here and have mostly taken good care of their homes. Those folks are dying off now, and their houses are being bought by people who either subdivide the lots with two skinny townhouse-like structures or put up 4-story apartments and business buildings, depending on whether there is a view. Property prices (and taxes) have therefore soared in the last 10 years. Our house value has quadrupled, which I suppose would be fine if we were real estate speculators, but we just want to live here. A district of longtime homeowners is turning into a district of renters, which we all know will eventually drive the quality of the area down.
The City of Seattle bureaucrats see this as "revitalizing" the area. I see it as "devitalizing". What they get is more tax money, from the residents but more importantly from the businesses, which pay both property tax and business tax. What we residents get is more crime, more graffiti (not the cool artsy kind, the dumbass tag kind), more losers walking around with an attitude, and more cars driven by hurried, over-extended people talking on cellphones, drinking lattes and putting on makeup.
A little rant about Seattle politics...
Schlach mentioned above that the monorail passed by only 800 votes. Seattle is developing a history of big projects that pass by a narrow margin. The new monorail is the most recent. Seahawks Stadium was another one, but at least it too actually passed. The Mariners baseball stadium was defeated by us mere voters, but the state legislature responded by obligingly writing a law authorizing any county with a million or more residents to issue bonds to build athletic complexes. There's only one such county in the state, guess which one. To avoid future complications they even gave the law a 2-year expiration date. The stadium the county commissioners authorized cost 3 times as much as the one the voters rejected.
Makes me proud to live in a democracy.
Everybody is asking, "How could an online magazine lose so much money" and everybody else is giving vague answers. According to their financial reports they seem to have trimmed down considerably this year, but looking at last year they were spending about a million a month on content and production, half a million on sales and marketing, $100k on research and development (??? you tell me) and about $400k on admin. That's $24 million a year right there. Losing $11 million/year doesn't seem so far-fetched.
What interests me is that each of the two top execs made $300k last year. Not bad pay for shovelling venture capital down a hole, eh?
We probably couldn't do the whole thing anyway. Whoever patents "Bodies of rocky material orbiting larger bodies of rocky material in a vacuum" would demand outrageous license fees.
I'm proud to be the parent of a daughter who at age 6 said to my wife and me, when Ronald MacDonald walked up to us in a parade, "Hey, here comes a clown!" She didn't have a clue who the hell he was, and that was just fine with us.
It's.
A.
Game.
I agree 100% that this type of product placement is a sad sign. But it's EA's game, and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else.
Instead of trying to destroy an incoming killer asteroid, what about capturing a small asteroid into Earth orbit in advance, and steering it into the path of an incoming one? Not to smash it but to pass close enough to gravitationally swing it off course? Seems like it would be easier to work on the engineering on an asteroid nearby, plus while it's here we could mine it.
What if we captured a medium size asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could steer it into different orbits. When an incoming killer asteroid is detected, steer our "pet" asteroid into its path -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging it off course to miss the Earth?
/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could assemble our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces in the correct orbit, rather than going out and getting one.
Remembering an earlier
How about this: we capture a small asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could nudge it into different orbits. Then we could steer it into the path of an incoming killer asteroid -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging the bad boy off course to miss the Earth.
/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could even build our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces rather than going out and getting one.
Remembering an earlier
If you read Sandblad's actual BugTraq posting you will see that he had notified Microsoft more than a month before posting the details of the exploit. Quoting:
Microsoft was initially contacted 2002-10-04. After several mail exchanges, their final response were that the technique used to run programs with parameters from the "Local computer zone" was no security vulnerability. A fix should instead be applied for all possibilities for content in the "Internet zone" to access the "Local computer zone".
How much time does a company have to actually fix a problem this serious? When somebody takes the trouble to notify a company about a defect, they've already demonstrated helpfulness and responsibility. It would make sense for the company to take that helpful, responsible person into the loop, and at least update them periodically about what is being done about the problem. That would give a helpful person like Sandblad a basis for continuing to wait. In this case Microsoft gave no indication that they were doing anything about the problem or intended to do anything about it. Continuing to sit on the information certainly wouldn't give them any further incentive. Sandblad reported this problem, got a thanks-but-no-thanks, then after a month of no news went over their heads to the public. I would say he handled it very responsibly.
The big mistake this guy made was a completely natural one: he confused culture with market share. In our society we place almost no value on non-owner participation. No matter what something may mean to you personally, no matter how much energy you may put into promoting it, no matter how much the owners materially profit from your efforts, it's still 100% theirs and 0% yours, and they can take it away from you at a whim.
Companies love you to be a cheerleader for Version 1 until Version 2 comes out, then you are supposed to abandon Version 1 and embrace Version 2. Britney is out, Samantha is in. Your website must shut down. Not because you did anything wrong. They just don't need you any more. You were an asset, now your loyalty to their previous products is competition. You're in the way.
Save your loyalty and devotion for your family and friends, your ideals and your personal standards -- the parts of your culture that can't be owned by others or taken away.
WARNING: Using this product to view pr0n on your wrist can cause eyestrain and motion sickness.
Fischer's anti-semitism and his apparent approval of the attack on the World Trade Center might make him an asshole, but it doesn't make him a terrorist, and it certainly doesn't retroactively make him a Soviet spy in the 1970's or vindicate any of the FBI's suspicions.
As explained in the article, the FBI had a long-running investigation of Fischer and his mother back in the 70's and earlier. It's just another illustration that the US govt has been spying on its own citizens for decades, long before there was any sort of terrorist rationalization.
I think you just hit it squarely on the head. Up next WiFi speakers and headphones (code name: Aura), with a small ui to select from your vast collection of RIAA-licensed media.
It took me years to get a PC on my desk instead of a "dumb terminal." Now that there are Smart Displays, the ones everybody already has will become "dumb displays." Sigh.