A small hyperbole I'll admit. However, I (long with apparently 80-90%) of the country live within 200 miles of the US. I also live in a town of about 500 people exactly half way between (30 minutes each way) 2 fairly major cities (Winnipeg being one of them). The cable companies and the telco have basically told me and a lot of others that there are no plans for high speed access in the near future (read - until forced to by the government). The only other option is SkyCable, however they are still months from offering residential service in my area (I could pay close to C-Com's rates and get a business connection - not!)
Ummm... I think this is primarily because of the modems being USB and 95 doesn't support USB. The lack of Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc. is a simple reality of the market. As the market demands, drivers will appear. So quit whining and start demanding:-)
On the sight they address latency issue and acknowledge it will be a hindrence to game players. They claim a latency of 0.5 Seconds.
Remember, for a lot of rural Canadians (2nd largest country in the world) this is the only option other then dial up modems (which for us rural hicks never never approaches 28.8, much less 56 anything).
I used to do something crudely similar when I was about 14 (_many_ years ago). I discovered that if I wired a standard red LED across the speaker output on my stereo I had a fairly lame and cheap colour organ. I then discovered, that if I wired a 9V battery, photoresister (bulk pack from ratshack) with my headphones I could listen to the stereo without being directly plugged in. The audio sucked, but at that point the hack made up for any loss of signal. To increase range all I did was rip apart a pair of cheap kids binoculars and focussed the beam to a spot on my desk where I taped down the photoresister.
Why does an banner ad company need to use cookies, etc. to track the ads that I as an individual look at? seems like an overly complex solution.
If ads had a This sucks button, and if banner companies know the page the ad is being displayed on - shouldn't that be enough? Isn't this generally how TV / printed media ads work? Eventually the advertising agents will figure out that advertising tampons during a monster truck show isn't a good idea. If banner ad companies track the ads that suck on a given page that should be plenty of 'demographic' information.
In short, track the ads that are not filtered, and are not flagged as ones that suck and correlate that to the web page (or site if the page content varies to much). Technically simple solution, alleviates privacy concerns and gathers a lot of useful information about the types of ads that are useful.
I think if you look at what is called 'art' and trace it back, you'll find that ultimately it was a tool.
Any new tool that is given to humanity, ultimately will be used by humanity to express ourselves. (Hammers and chisels to cut stone into tools, buildings, sculptures)
Ultimately interacting with computers will be used to create art. If you loosely consider anyone who builds or creates something with a computer a programmer, then eventually _some_ programmers will be artists and the things created with computers will be art.
It is especially interesting to look at cultures that have certain forms of expression supressed. I have a Mennonite background. Some 'sects' forbid owning / playing musical instruments. I have yet to hear a choir that can rival a Sunday morning service at an old coloney Mennonite church for wonderful natural harmony.
If people only cut code for living, and don't express themselves outside of the app/dev cycle, eventually the code becomes a personal expression - in terms of layout of structures, names of variables, comments, etc. Supress this through coding standards and who knows where the expressive forces will emerge.
On the other hand emacs is wonderfully plugable. One can create all sorts of nifty little add ons for reading mail, news, etc. Why not add some WYSIWYG display modules, a graphics viewing engine and I think you'd have a product that could be slimmed down to rivel pine's streamlined effeciency or be bloated to the point of sufficating even the whole MS Office suite.
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A small hyperbole I'll admit. However, I (long with apparently 80-90%) of the country live within 200 miles of the US. I also live in a town of about 500 people exactly half way between (30 minutes each way) 2 fairly major cities (Winnipeg being one of them). The cable companies and the telco have basically told me and a lot of others that there are no plans for high speed access in the near future (read - until forced to by the government). The only other option is SkyCable, however they are still months from offering residential service in my area (I could pay close to C-Com's rates and get a business connection - not!)
Ummm... I think this is primarily because of the modems being USB and 95 doesn't support USB. The lack of Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc. is a simple reality of the market. As the market demands, drivers will appear. So quit whining and start demanding :-)
Remember, for a lot of rural Canadians (2nd largest country in the world) this is the only option other then dial up modems (which for us rural hicks never never approaches 28.8, much less 56 anything).
Ahh, the good 'ol days....
Why does an banner ad company need to use cookies, etc. to track the ads that I as an individual look at? seems like an overly complex solution.
If ads had a This sucks button, and if banner companies know the page the ad is being displayed on - shouldn't that be enough? Isn't this generally how TV / printed media ads work? Eventually the advertising agents will figure out that advertising tampons during a monster truck show isn't a good idea. If banner ad companies track the ads that suck on a given page that should be plenty of 'demographic' information.
In short, track the ads that are not filtered, and are not flagged as ones that suck and correlate that to the web page (or site if the page content varies to much). Technically simple solution, alleviates privacy concerns and gathers a lot of useful information about the types of ads that are useful.
I think if you look at what is called 'art' and trace it back, you'll find that ultimately it was a tool. Any new tool that is given to humanity, ultimately will be used by humanity to express ourselves. (Hammers and chisels to cut stone into tools, buildings, sculptures) Ultimately interacting with computers will be used to create art. If you loosely consider anyone who builds or creates something with a computer a programmer, then eventually _some_ programmers will be artists and the things created with computers will be art. It is especially interesting to look at cultures that have certain forms of expression supressed. I have a Mennonite background. Some 'sects' forbid owning / playing musical instruments. I have yet to hear a choir that can rival a Sunday morning service at an old coloney Mennonite church for wonderful natural harmony. If people only cut code for living, and don't express themselves outside of the app/dev cycle, eventually the code becomes a personal expression - in terms of layout of structures, names of variables, comments, etc. Supress this through coding standards and who knows where the expressive forces will emerge.
On the other hand emacs is wonderfully plugable. One can create all sorts of nifty little add ons for reading mail, news, etc. Why not add some WYSIWYG display modules, a graphics viewing engine and I think you'd have a product that could be slimmed down to rivel pine's streamlined effeciency or be bloated to the point of sufficating even the whole MS Office suite.