Remember Dimension X, the 1990s Bay Area startup built around an open-source Java graphics engine? Microsoft bought them, scrapped the project, shipped the developers off to Redmond and deployed them on ActiveX projects.
I think people are looking in the wrong place. What if it's not the CIA's new surveillance technology but Google testing their new real-world indexing bots?
Though, somehow, the bodies and nervous systems of dragonflies manage to cope. Which says that it can be done, even if engineers haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Surely Interpol's top-secret image-unblurring technology is just a matter of applying the Twirl effect in the opposite direction at the same location, and perhaps applying some image-enhancement plug-ins to the resulting area? I doubt it's anything one couldn't do with off-the-shelf software.
Apple could claim that they have an obligation to the RIAA/IFPI to control access to copyrighted material stored on the iPod. If the iPod can only be filled from one copy of iTunes, it becomes somewhat less useful as a means of (illegally) distributing music than if one can copy to it from anywhere; i.e., you can't go over to a friend's house and copy their record collection onto your iPod.
In fact, didn't the RIAA make noises about suing MP3 player manufacturers for "facilitating piracy" a while ago? This measure could be part of an agreement by Apple to prevent a lawsuit.
Linux may have had the best filesystems some years ago, but I don't think it can make that claim now, with Sun's ZFS. (Incidentally, ZFS is open-source, but is unlikely to make it into Linux, save for an inefficient user-space version, because it's not licensed under the GPL. So it looks like OpenSolaris has the initiative in that area for the time being.)
Don't forget the task-specific sites; Flickr/Zooomr/Ipernity for photos, last.fm for networking by musical taste, LiveJournal and Vox for keeping a journal (including private/semi-private entries), Twitter for fine-grained status, and so on. Flickr and its ilk do a better job with photos than general-purpose sites, LJ/Vox do a better job for publishing medium-sized journal entries, and pretty much anything else will do a better job of more or less anything than MySpace, whose capabilities tend to be somewhat half-baked.
Coming from a city which was virtually colonised by Italians in the 1950s, I have grown used to coffee made using an espresso machine, and don't drink coffee made by any other means.
The problem is that having an espresso machine and knowing how to use it are two different things. In Melbourne, pretty much any cafe (at least in the inner city) will have staff who can make a decent cup of coffee. In London (where I live now), every cafe/bar has an espresso machine, but the quality of the coffee is often much worse. (Especially in chain cafes with conspicuously Italian names like Costa.)
Apparently, making a good espresso comes down to three things: having 15 bars of steam pressure, having sharp blades when grinding the beans (blunt blades burn the beans, making for bitter coffee) and making the coffee short (i.e., running relatively little steam/water through the ground beans; a common mistake is to run lots of water through them).
In the 1970s, Pinochet's Chile, with its authoritarian government, lack of civil-liberties protections and strongly corporatist ideology became a testbed for radical "free-market" policies. A lot of the reforms implemented by Reagan and Thatcher were first tested in Chile.
Right now, Australia (with its authoritarian government, lack of civil-liberties protections (there is no fair use, no safe harbour provisions, and no legal protections for free speech) and strongly corporatist ideology) is becoming the Chile of intellectual-property absolutism. Australian copyright laws are more draconian than those in the US or EU, and are only going to get more severe.
We are witnessing a historical moment: the train wreck that will destroy Google has started.
Make no mistake: Viacom will win this; under copyright law, they are absolutely in the right, and YouTube is infringing every bit as much as Napster and Kazaa were. Now $1Bn may not bankrupt Google, but similar payments to other rightsholders (Vivendi Universal, Time Warner, ABC/Disney, Sony, and so on), who are bound (by responsibilities to their shareholders) to jump in, will.
I predict that (a) within 24 hours, at least two other major media companies will announce their own lawsuits against Google, and (b) within two years, Google will have filed for bankruptcy.
I just hope they don't kill Flickr, shoehorn it into Yahoo! Photos, or lay off the original developers and replace them with someone who doesn't get the Flickr community or the concepts behind it. Flickr, with its social networking, its tags and groups and its refreshingly nonproprietary APIs and data feeds, is a lot more usable than anything developed in-house at Yahoo! It'd be a shame if it became just another Yahoo! service.
One minor casualty of Yahoo!'s ownership of Flickr has been geocoding usability. Flickr uses Yahoo!'s map system, which is a bit like Google Maps only without the coverage. Their UK maps are somewhat inadequate, with only major roads and no street names.
To say that Richard Dawkins' and Sam Harris' books have "atheist undertones" is like saying that the Pope seems vaguely Catholic. Dawkins is probably the standard-bearer for atheism as a movement and makes no attempt to say otherwise, whereas Harris is perhaps America's most pugnacious anti-religious pundit.
This law's not for mass enforcement. It's for selective enforcement. The next time a police officer doesn't like your look or attitude and notices your iPod, if you have ripped CD tracks, they can instantly fine you, without going through the court process. Similarly if you're a nuisance to the powers that be, all they'd need is to search your premises on some pretext or other and audit the contents of your PC. Perhaps we'll see this used selectively against the tiny proportion of dangeously effective opposition activists, leaving only incompetents in charge of a token opposition?
Whilst it did have a minimal instruction set, it didn't have other features associated with RISC. Its RISCyness seems to have been more omission than streamlining.
Because of Microsoft's monopoly position on the desktop, they can afford to make the DRM experience as crappy as their content partners want them to, and it will still own >90% of the market. Even if it is painful to use, what alternatives are there? As slick as Ubuntu looks, the fact that it doesn't work with a lot of proprietary mass-market hardware (you can't sync your Pocket PC with it, or use it with MTP MP3 players (and don't even think about the Zune), or anything that needs a proprietary driver that hasn't been reverse-engineered) and doesn't run Windows software well puts it out of the running for most people. And OSX runs only on Apple hardware (which, incidentally, gives Apple the ability to cut build quality and costs, knowing that people will buy anything with an Apple logo if it's the only way to run OSX), putting it out of the cheap PC market (there are cheap Mac Minis, but they're underpowered compared to cheap commodity PCs).
The great majority of the public has no alternative to Windows. They may grumble and complain, but at the end of the day, they're locked in and Microsoft know this. And if they lived with viruses, worms, spyware, malware, keylogger trojans and DDOS zombienets, they can live with draconian DRM.
Wasn't there a Japanese console, sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, which used 2.5" floppies (i.e., the hard plastic ones without shutters, also used with word-processing typewriters and synthesisers) as its media? I recall seeing some 2.5" floppies with colourful labels in Japanese at a flea market in Australia many years ago.
Though haven't they tended more towards the don't-tread-on-me branch of the Republican Party than the Democrats?
Anyway, as far as traditional religious-values conservatives leaving goes, there were the Mormons who founded Utah. Not sure about any more recent examples.
Under the present conservative government, Australia has been gradually becoming more and more authoritarian. The Office of Film and Literature Censorship has been banning increasingly many films (mostly art-house titles, though; good for populist point-scoring) and video games ("Getting Up" is banned in Australia, as are any games not suitable for children). There is a new sedition law on the books which criminalises any speech likely to cause dissatisfaction with the government or institutions. Journalists have been arrested by the Attorney-General's Department, who have "sanitised" their computers with sledgehammers. And as for not having a US-style religious right, that's in the works; the government has been putting a lot of resources into building up a conservative religious power base, funnelling resources to fundamentalist groups like the Hillsong Church, and a hardline Christian party (Family First) came within a hair's breadth of holding the balance of power (had the government gotten one fewer seat, they would control the Senate and be in a strong position to influence legislation). With no bill of rights, things look rather precarious.
Also, the fabled laid-back Aussie lifestyle will soon be a thing of the past. New workplace relations laws passed by the government shift the balance of power towards employers, meaning that Australians are soon going to enjoy long US-style working hours, two weeks of annual leave a year (down from four), and the ability to be sacked on a whim.
As is their population, with floods and famine claiming thousands of lives. The fact that the government refused international ad agencies permission to distribute food aid (out of a sense of pride, presumably) isn't helping.
North Korea may well end up as a corpse-nation, with only its rulers, their military and enough labour to sustain them surviving; everybody else starves to death, and because the delusional rulers have their fingers on the triggers of mortars/nukes poised to wipe out Seoul/Tokyo (and possibly other cities further afield), there's not much the rest of the world can do about them. Indeed, the stump of the North Korean economy (which is to say, the running of the gang in charge) could probably be sustained entirely by a nuclear protection racket ("Singapore's a nice city; it's be too bad if anything happened to it...")
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Remember Dimension X, the 1990s Bay Area startup built around an open-source Java graphics engine? Microsoft bought them, scrapped the project, shipped the developers off to Redmond and deployed them on ActiveX projects.
I think people are looking in the wrong place. What if it's not the CIA's new surveillance technology but Google testing their new real-world indexing bots?
Though, somehow, the bodies and nervous systems of dragonflies manage to cope. Which says that it can be done, even if engineers haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Surely Interpol's top-secret image-unblurring technology is just a matter of applying the Twirl effect in the opposite direction at the same location, and perhaps applying some image-enhancement plug-ins to the resulting area? I doubt it's anything one couldn't do with off-the-shelf software.
Apple could claim that they have an obligation to the RIAA/IFPI to control access to copyrighted material stored on the iPod. If the iPod can only be filled from one copy of iTunes, it becomes somewhat less useful as a means of (illegally) distributing music than if one can copy to it from anywhere; i.e., you can't go over to a friend's house and copy their record collection onto your iPod.
In fact, didn't the RIAA make noises about suing MP3 player manufacturers for "facilitating piracy" a while ago? This measure could be part of an agreement by Apple to prevent a lawsuit.
Looks like someone at Apple hasn't heard of public-key cryptography.
Linux may have had the best filesystems some years ago, but I don't think it can make that claim now, with Sun's ZFS. (Incidentally, ZFS is open-source, but is unlikely to make it into Linux, save for an inefficient user-space version, because it's not licensed under the GPL. So it looks like OpenSolaris has the initiative in that area for the time being.)
Don't forget the task-specific sites; Flickr/Zooomr/Ipernity for photos, last.fm for networking by musical taste, LiveJournal and Vox for keeping a journal (including private/semi-private entries), Twitter for fine-grained status, and so on. Flickr and its ilk do a better job with photos than general-purpose sites, LJ/Vox do a better job for publishing medium-sized journal entries, and pretty much anything else will do a better job of more or less anything than MySpace, whose capabilities tend to be somewhat half-baked.
Coming from a city which was virtually colonised by Italians in the 1950s, I have grown used to coffee made using an espresso machine, and don't drink coffee made by any other means.
The problem is that having an espresso machine and knowing how to use it are two different things. In Melbourne, pretty much any cafe (at least in the inner city) will have staff who can make a decent cup of coffee. In London (where I live now), every cafe/bar has an espresso machine, but the quality of the coffee is often much worse. (Especially in chain cafes with conspicuously Italian names like Costa.)
Apparently, making a good espresso comes down to three things: having 15 bars of steam pressure, having sharp blades when grinding the beans (blunt blades burn the beans, making for bitter coffee) and making the coffee short (i.e., running relatively little steam/water through the ground beans; a common mistake is to run lots of water through them).
In the 1970s, Pinochet's Chile, with its authoritarian government, lack of civil-liberties protections and strongly corporatist ideology became a testbed for radical "free-market" policies. A lot of the reforms implemented by Reagan and Thatcher were first tested in Chile.
Right now, Australia (with its authoritarian government, lack of civil-liberties protections (there is no fair use, no safe harbour provisions, and no legal protections for free speech) and strongly corporatist ideology) is becoming the Chile of intellectual-property absolutism. Australian copyright laws are more draconian than those in the US or EU, and are only going to get more severe.
We are witnessing a historical moment: the train wreck that will destroy Google has started.
Make no mistake: Viacom will win this; under copyright law, they are absolutely in the right, and YouTube is infringing every bit as much as Napster and Kazaa were. Now $1Bn may not bankrupt Google, but similar payments to other rightsholders (Vivendi Universal, Time Warner, ABC/Disney, Sony, and so on), who are bound (by responsibilities to their shareholders) to jump in, will.
I predict that (a) within 24 hours, at least two other major media companies will announce their own lawsuits against Google, and (b) within two years, Google will have filed for bankruptcy.
I just hope they don't kill Flickr, shoehorn it into Yahoo! Photos, or lay off the original developers and replace them with someone who doesn't get the Flickr community or the concepts behind it. Flickr, with its social networking, its tags and groups and its refreshingly nonproprietary APIs and data feeds, is a lot more usable than anything developed in-house at Yahoo! It'd be a shame if it became just another Yahoo! service.
One minor casualty of Yahoo!'s ownership of Flickr has been geocoding usability. Flickr uses Yahoo!'s map system, which is a bit like Google Maps only without the coverage. Their UK maps are somewhat inadequate, with only major roads and no street names.
Perhaps he'd need a hobby for his retirement?
To say that Richard Dawkins' and Sam Harris' books have "atheist undertones" is like saying that the Pope seems vaguely Catholic. Dawkins is probably the standard-bearer for atheism as a movement and makes no attempt to say otherwise, whereas Harris is perhaps America's most pugnacious anti-religious pundit.
This law's not for mass enforcement. It's for selective enforcement. The next time a police officer doesn't like your look or attitude and notices your iPod, if you have ripped CD tracks, they can instantly fine you, without going through the court process. Similarly if you're a nuisance to the powers that be, all they'd need is to search your premises on some pretext or other and audit the contents of your PC. Perhaps we'll see this used selectively against the tiny proportion of dangeously effective opposition activists, leaving only incompetents in charge of a token opposition?
Congratulations. You have just committed the crime of sedition.
Whilst it did have a minimal instruction set, it didn't have other features associated with RISC. Its RISCyness seems to have been more omission than streamlining.
Because of Microsoft's monopoly position on the desktop, they can afford to make the DRM experience as crappy as their content partners want them to, and it will still own >90% of the market. Even if it is painful to use, what alternatives are there? As slick as Ubuntu looks, the fact that it doesn't work with a lot of proprietary mass-market hardware (you can't sync your Pocket PC with it, or use it with MTP MP3 players (and don't even think about the Zune), or anything that needs a proprietary driver that hasn't been reverse-engineered) and doesn't run Windows software well puts it out of the running for most people. And OSX runs only on Apple hardware (which, incidentally, gives Apple the ability to cut build quality and costs, knowing that people will buy anything with an Apple logo if it's the only way to run OSX), putting it out of the cheap PC market (there are cheap Mac Minis, but they're underpowered compared to cheap commodity PCs).
The great majority of the public has no alternative to Windows. They may grumble and complain, but at the end of the day, they're locked in and Microsoft know this. And if they lived with viruses, worms, spyware, malware, keylogger trojans and DDOS zombienets, they can live with draconian DRM.
Wasn't there a Japanese console, sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, which used 2.5" floppies (i.e., the hard plastic ones without shutters, also used with word-processing typewriters and synthesisers) as its media? I recall seeing some 2.5" floppies with colourful labels in Japanese at a flea market in Australia many years ago.
Well, Apple did license the iPod chipsets from various vendors such as PortalPlayer. And I believe there are companies selling GSM chipsets.
A government will never desire to annihilate its own population.
Pol Pot did.
Granted, that was a pathological government, and not sustainable.
Though haven't they tended more towards the don't-tread-on-me branch of the Republican Party than the Democrats?
Anyway, as far as traditional religious-values conservatives leaving goes, there were the Mormons who founded Utah. Not sure about any more recent examples.
Weren't there some Libertarians talking about establishing a floating anarchocapitalist utopia on the high seas a while ago?
Under the present conservative government, Australia has been gradually becoming more and more authoritarian. The Office of Film and Literature Censorship has been banning increasingly many films (mostly art-house titles, though; good for populist point-scoring) and video games ("Getting Up" is banned in Australia, as are any games not suitable for children). There is a new sedition law on the books which criminalises any speech likely to cause dissatisfaction with the government or institutions. Journalists have been arrested by the Attorney-General's Department, who have "sanitised" their computers with sledgehammers. And as for not having a US-style religious right, that's in the works; the government has been putting a lot of resources into building up a conservative religious power base, funnelling resources to fundamentalist groups like the Hillsong Church, and a hardline Christian party (Family First) came within a hair's breadth of holding the balance of power (had the government gotten one fewer seat, they would control the Senate and be in a strong position to influence legislation). With no bill of rights, things look rather precarious.
Also, the fabled laid-back Aussie lifestyle will soon be a thing of the past. New workplace relations laws passed by the government shift the balance of power towards employers, meaning that Australians are soon going to enjoy long US-style working hours, two weeks of annual leave a year (down from four), and the ability to be sacked on a whim.
As is their population, with floods and famine claiming thousands of lives. The fact that the government refused international ad agencies permission to distribute food aid (out of a sense of pride, presumably) isn't helping.
North Korea may well end up as a corpse-nation, with only its rulers, their military and enough labour to sustain them surviving; everybody else starves to death, and because the delusional rulers have their fingers on the triggers of mortars/nukes poised to wipe out Seoul/Tokyo (and possibly other cities further afield), there's not much the rest of the world can do about them. Indeed, the stump of the North Korean economy (which is to say, the running of the gang in charge) could probably be sustained entirely by a nuclear protection racket ("Singapore's a nice city; it's be too bad if anything happened to it...")