If it's bad for Wikileaks to operate without transparency, it's also bad for the US government and corporations to operate without transparency.
In what way can you compare a government to a website? What does the behavior of one government have to do with Wikileaks and what standards it should meet? Perhaps a transparent government works nicely with small countries that are not players in world economy and security, but it is naive to believe that such ideology would not result in disaster for any country at the scale of the US. Are other countries with powerful global influence like China and Russia transparent? Do you expect the US to put all its cards on the table and not have China and Russia peek at them while they are placing their bets against the USA?
Lets talk about what Wikileaks is NOT. It is not open. It is not controlled by any sort of committee. It is not a process, a technology, an architecture, a standard or any other set of fixed rules that can be observed and approved upon. It is a website, entirely controlled by one man, that gained enough fame to trigger a snowball effect resulting in an influx of information which this one man now controls.
He's a man with a conscience. It's the responsibility of all men with consciences to use them. That means calling out those who do wrong.
That's lovely. But where does the "man" end and his website begin? The information can and will speak for itself. It needs to be placed online, via a technology and process that is distributed and decentralized, and the various news services will quickly filter through and pick out the important bits and publicize them.
I wonder if Assange's conscience would be bothered if someone leaked information about Ecuador's government, since he's been offered asylum there...
Here's what concerns me. We have large numbers of anonymous individuals sending information off to some guy who they assume is some sort of hero or on a moral high ground. In actuality we don't know what Assange's intentions or internal agenda is. It would be trivial for Assange to filter information and only display leaks that would damage the country of his choice. Not just at a government level, but at a corporate / economic level. It is impossible to monitor Wikileak's integrity or transparency. Do you think if Mr. Whistleblower's documents regarding Country X are not posted that Mr. Whistleblower is going to go to the established media and complain about that?
Somehow Wikileaks has assumed a level of authority and trust that it has not earned nor that is remotely justified via its internal policies and structure. I have read numerous articles about Assange, and how he wants to be in control of everything and basically tells his "volunteers" to f*** off if they question him or disagree with what he does. He holds all the keys to the kingdom.
Quotes of Assange's like this, from the interview linked in this story, concern me further:
All I can say is it’s clear there were unethical practices, but it’s too early to suggest there’s criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we’re very sure.
Who is Assange to judge and / or label corporations or individuals? Isn't his role in life to throw static files on a server so other people can download them? Shouldn't the information speak for itself and be analyzed be individuals that know far more than him and his organization? I don't think Assange is the unwilling, unwitting sacrificial lamb that has been thrust into this horrible role. There seems to be an ego to stoke, or at least that is my opinion.
Finally, one last personal nitpick. What the hell does "wiki" have to do with anything? I think he threw that term in there to gain additional trust and ride the coattails of Wikipedia. There is nothing "wiki" about wikileaks in any way whatsoever.
Can someone enlighten me as to why a dedicated piece of standalone software is required to display words and some pictures? I thought HTML had that covered. Ohhh, or is this all about DRM? Are we Slashdot readers lamenting the fact that a piece of proprietary DRM-riddled software was rejected?
Or is the USA not as evil as everyone likes to make it out to be? If this happened to any of several dozen other countries Assange would be dead already, and there is no doubt that he would be dead if the CIA were ordered to make it so.
Actually, I'm surprised some other country hasn't had him killed just to place blame on the US.
It seems this was a stunning success. The guy had never driven a car anything remotely like an actual race car, he had never flown on a plane or even ridden a roller coaster. Yet he was able to hop into a high performance racecar for the very first time, and have lap times within 3 seconds of the best and handle 100 MPH turns within 10% of experienced drivers' speed. Yeah, he was totally physically out of shape for anything remotely like racing, the temp was over 110 F inside the car, and he threw up. But he didn't wreck after 15 laps. So I'd call this a total success, and does prove, at least to some extent, that experience gained playing games can directly translate to real-world performance, assuming the game simulation is realistic enough.
You haven't provided nearly enough information. Are you talking GUI interfaces, or rendering? If rendering, is it raster or vector? If vector, then what primitives do you need? Full SVG? Is this real-time, and if so, how many polygons / pixels do you need to push and at what minimum framerate?
As a totally shoot-from-the-hip, off-the-wall recommendation, I'd say OpenGL for portability, including support on iPhone / iPad / iPod touch. Note that you'll want to stick to the OpenGL ES subset in that case.
Carmack's primary interest in game development has always been graphics related. And that is perfectly fine as far as an individual developer is concerned. After all, that is what set Wolf3D and Doom apart were the visuals. In actuality they are pure 2D games, and can be played purely from a 2D top-down perspective as there aren't any vertical aiming or other height elements. Yet all that mattered in that day and age were the visuals, so the games were stunning successes.
Quake brought the rest of the game engine totally up to par, in that it was a true 3D experience with 6 degrees of freedom.
What seems to be happening with id on iOS is a more extreme version of what Wolf3D and Doom were, which is primarily a visual experience. It's a shame that id cannot figure out how to couple the graphical side with some decent game play. I seem to hear gamers often lamenting that gameplay elements have staled for many years now, which is perhaps why the Wii (and likely Kinect) are such a success - they bring new gameplay elements (and ironically, Wii is a step backwards visually, yet it was still a huge success).
I think id needs a developer matching Carmack's talent and drive but in game design. Then instead of to trying to render a first person 3D scene as realistically as possible, and then after the fact retrofit it into a game, it can be developed from the ground up so the rendering and gameplay complement one another.
And here's the ironic part. If they could clean up these ship emissions, and then relax or completely remove all emission rules for cars, the overall pollution would go down, gas mileage would improve, oil consumption would drop, and the price of vehicles would go down (ever price a catalytic converter?). Just from cleaning up 15 ships!?!
Yes, so easy a "6-year old could do the same thing", and yet:
"The Livermore laboratory sent off a final application to the U.S. Patent Office on Nov. 23, 2006"
That provides insight to the absurdity of the patent process. Take something obvious, simple, and widely used, then say "Look! This is a brand new technique, just because no one has applied these algorithms to these sorts of images before."
Perhaps I'm atypical, but I absolutely loved my "150 in one" electronic kit. Here is a pic of the exact same kit I had when I was 8. I built every project, and came up to plenty of my own little circuits. I don't know what the modern equivalent is nowadays - perhaps heavier on the digital / logic side?
See, Microsoft can learn! Unfortunately it requires at least one complete failure doing the exact opposite of what they should have done in the first place.
My hunch is that they looked at the financial side, and assuming they don't take a loss on the hardware as a loss leader for software sales, realized they had nothing to lose selling the device outright.
Yeah, it was obvious he was primarily interested in the mechanics of how the robot arm interacted with the board and pieces, as opposed to seriously competing against the controlling computer's logic. He sacrificed a number of pieces to trivial captures by the computer's pawns for no reason at all.
I also thought the arm was moving unnecessarily fast, especially considering it apparently doesn't have any avoidance sensors.
It doesn't make much sense to me to embed mechanical / solar / whatever power sources directly into these sorts of products. This is especially true for mechanical power sources, like a crank. That should be in an extremely ergonomic external form factor that a person can operate comfortably, without risking dropping their laptop / tablet, or accidentally flinging it across the room.
Same with solar. That needs to be in a waterproof form factor that can be left laying on the ground or roof in the rain without being destroyed.
A family with two or more devices could get by with just one solar charger, or better yet, one solar and one mechanical, to give them more charging options.
When I was a kid I had one of those little generators that was rotated by my front tire, which powered a little headlight. Something like that could be used with any bicycle to generate relatively massive amounts of power (compared to a hand crank). A very simple stand (home made or otherwise) to get the back tire up off the floor and they're ready to do some serious charging.
When it comes to the internet I think it's all about scale, not necessarily free market. For example, what scale (infrastructure, etc) is required to generate and update a searchable index of the entire WWW? Isn't the main appeal of Facebook the number of users it has?
Being big is essentially a requirement - my point is whatever entity provides these specific services must be of at least a certain size in order to function or meet a critical mass of sustainability.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Oh, but they can only program in one language - C#. Just rewrite your codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines so you can port your apps to WP7! It'll be a lot of fun! Both iOS and Android support C / C++, and Android had to release a whole separate NDK to allow that. But yet they still released the importance of supporting one of the most prolific languages of all time.
This reminds me of Sony, where they have so many conflicting interests that they can't do anything well. Why can't Sony DVD players play DivX*? Because Sony also makes movies, and DivX is the leading choice for distributing movies over the internet.
So in this case MS has a programming language to push, a Silverlight platform to push, etc, etc. So it's C# only, to the detriment of WP7, in hopes that it will increase the popularity of C#.
*Perhaps they have models that play DivX now? I haven't looked in the last few years.
Uh, I have a streetlight on the power pole in my backyard, which AEP charges me around 9 bucks a month to power. It's their light, on their pole, but they charge me to power it. Sounds like I'm being ripped off.
How does this compare to Opera Mobile (not Mini)? I run Windows Mobile 6.5 (shed a tear for me) and use Opera Mobile, and am curious how much better a browsing experience I would have with Android + Firefox 4.
This is very cool, and I'm sure they got quite a kick out of interacting with the game in this way. And for the people that are saying this is impractical or a waste of paper - you're missing the point entirely. It's not like this something to be marketed or used extensively. It was done because someone had some originality coupled with technical prowess.
Now for my gripe. I was hoping they had written some new firmware / software for an existing typewriter's controller / CPU, as opposed to using thoroughly modern electronics to control the typewriter. So in the scheme of things they could have used any old printer, and any old keyboard. Kudos that they are combined into a single physical device, but I was expecting more of a hacked 80s era typewriter with no hardware modifications or interface.
How would they be simultaneously consuming data on both devices at once, and even if they are, why would it be more data? Isn't the amount of data consumed user-dependent (ie, I have 3 computers on my desk, that doesn't mean I stream 3 movies at one time, or stream 3 songs at one time - the data I consume is exactly the same as if I had a single device).
I don't see why there is a need to upgrade the network.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, is my mind totally in the gutter, or is there a significance to the mammary gland / Dolly Parton link?
If it's bad for Wikileaks to operate without transparency, it's also bad for the US government and corporations to operate without transparency.
In what way can you compare a government to a website? What does the behavior of one government have to do with Wikileaks and what standards it should meet? Perhaps a transparent government works nicely with small countries that are not players in world economy and security, but it is naive to believe that such ideology would not result in disaster for any country at the scale of the US. Are other countries with powerful global influence like China and Russia transparent? Do you expect the US to put all its cards on the table and not have China and Russia peek at them while they are placing their bets against the USA?
Lets talk about what Wikileaks is NOT. It is not open. It is not controlled by any sort of committee. It is not a process, a technology, an architecture, a standard or any other set of fixed rules that can be observed and approved upon. It is a website, entirely controlled by one man, that gained enough fame to trigger a snowball effect resulting in an influx of information which this one man now controls.
He's a man with a conscience. It's the responsibility of all men with consciences to use them. That means calling out those who do wrong.
That's lovely. But where does the "man" end and his website begin? The information can and will speak for itself. It needs to be placed online, via a technology and process that is distributed and decentralized, and the various news services will quickly filter through and pick out the important bits and publicize them.
I wonder if Assange's conscience would be bothered if someone leaked information about Ecuador's government, since he's been offered asylum there...
Here's what concerns me. We have large numbers of anonymous individuals sending information off to some guy who they assume is some sort of hero or on a moral high ground. In actuality we don't know what Assange's intentions or internal agenda is. It would be trivial for Assange to filter information and only display leaks that would damage the country of his choice. Not just at a government level, but at a corporate / economic level. It is impossible to monitor Wikileak's integrity or transparency. Do you think if Mr. Whistleblower's documents regarding Country X are not posted that Mr. Whistleblower is going to go to the established media and complain about that?
Somehow Wikileaks has assumed a level of authority and trust that it has not earned nor that is remotely justified via its internal policies and structure. I have read numerous articles about Assange, and how he wants to be in control of everything and basically tells his "volunteers" to f*** off if they question him or disagree with what he does. He holds all the keys to the kingdom.
Quotes of Assange's like this, from the interview linked in this story, concern me further:
All I can say is it’s clear there were unethical practices, but it’s too early to suggest there’s criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we’re very sure.
Who is Assange to judge and / or label corporations or individuals? Isn't his role in life to throw static files on a server so other people can download them? Shouldn't the information speak for itself and be analyzed be individuals that know far more than him and his organization? I don't think Assange is the unwilling, unwitting sacrificial lamb that has been thrust into this horrible role. There seems to be an ego to stoke, or at least that is my opinion.
Finally, one last personal nitpick. What the hell does "wiki" have to do with anything? I think he threw that term in there to gain additional trust and ride the coattails of Wikipedia. There is nothing "wiki" about wikileaks in any way whatsoever.
The blurb makes it sound like this is an imminent release. According to the interview this information won't be released until "early next year".
Can someone enlighten me as to why a dedicated piece of standalone software is required to display words and some pictures? I thought HTML had that covered. Ohhh, or is this all about DRM? Are we Slashdot readers lamenting the fact that a piece of proprietary DRM-riddled software was rejected?
Ahhh, the man who introduced me to the full-body condom, which I still use to this day.
Or is the USA not as evil as everyone likes to make it out to be? If this happened to any of several dozen other countries Assange would be dead already, and there is no doubt that he would be dead if the CIA were ordered to make it so.
Actually, I'm surprised some other country hasn't had him killed just to place blame on the US.
It seems this was a stunning success. The guy had never driven a car anything remotely like an actual race car, he had never flown on a plane or even ridden a roller coaster. Yet he was able to hop into a high performance racecar for the very first time, and have lap times within 3 seconds of the best and handle 100 MPH turns within 10% of experienced drivers' speed. Yeah, he was totally physically out of shape for anything remotely like racing, the temp was over 110 F inside the car, and he threw up. But he didn't wreck after 15 laps. So I'd call this a total success, and does prove, at least to some extent, that experience gained playing games can directly translate to real-world performance, assuming the game simulation is realistic enough.
You haven't provided nearly enough information. Are you talking GUI interfaces, or rendering? If rendering, is it raster or vector? If vector, then what primitives do you need? Full SVG? Is this real-time, and if so, how many polygons / pixels do you need to push and at what minimum framerate?
As a totally shoot-from-the-hip, off-the-wall recommendation, I'd say OpenGL for portability, including support on iPhone / iPad / iPod touch. Note that you'll want to stick to the OpenGL ES subset in that case.
Carmack's primary interest in game development has always been graphics related. And that is perfectly fine as far as an individual developer is concerned. After all, that is what set Wolf3D and Doom apart were the visuals. In actuality they are pure 2D games, and can be played purely from a 2D top-down perspective as there aren't any vertical aiming or other height elements. Yet all that mattered in that day and age were the visuals, so the games were stunning successes.
Quake brought the rest of the game engine totally up to par, in that it was a true 3D experience with 6 degrees of freedom.
What seems to be happening with id on iOS is a more extreme version of what Wolf3D and Doom were, which is primarily a visual experience. It's a shame that id cannot figure out how to couple the graphical side with some decent game play. I seem to hear gamers often lamenting that gameplay elements have staled for many years now, which is perhaps why the Wii (and likely Kinect) are such a success - they bring new gameplay elements (and ironically, Wii is a step backwards visually, yet it was still a huge success).
I think id needs a developer matching Carmack's talent and drive but in game design. Then instead of to trying to render a first person 3D scene as realistically as possible, and then after the fact retrofit it into a game, it can be developed from the ground up so the rendering and gameplay complement one another.
And here's the ironic part. If they could clean up these ship emissions, and then relax or completely remove all emission rules for cars, the overall pollution would go down, gas mileage would improve, oil consumption would drop, and the price of vehicles would go down (ever price a catalytic converter?). Just from cleaning up 15 ships!?!
Only if what you listen to requires discretion.
Yes, so easy a "6-year old could do the same thing", and yet:
"The Livermore laboratory sent off a final application to the U.S. Patent Office on Nov. 23, 2006"
That provides insight to the absurdity of the patent process. Take something obvious, simple, and widely used, then say "Look! This is a brand new technique, just because no one has applied these algorithms to these sorts of images before."
Give me a break.
Perhaps I'm atypical, but I absolutely loved my "150 in one" electronic kit. Here is a pic of the exact same kit I had when I was 8. I built every project, and came up to plenty of my own little circuits. I don't know what the modern equivalent is nowadays - perhaps heavier on the digital / logic side?
See, Microsoft can learn! Unfortunately it requires at least one complete failure doing the exact opposite of what they should have done in the first place.
My hunch is that they looked at the financial side, and assuming they don't take a loss on the hardware as a loss leader for software sales, realized they had nothing to lose selling the device outright.
Yeah, it was obvious he was primarily interested in the mechanics of how the robot arm interacted with the board and pieces, as opposed to seriously competing against the controlling computer's logic. He sacrificed a number of pieces to trivial captures by the computer's pawns for no reason at all.
I also thought the arm was moving unnecessarily fast, especially considering it apparently doesn't have any avoidance sensors.
It doesn't make much sense to me to embed mechanical / solar / whatever power sources directly into these sorts of products. This is especially true for mechanical power sources, like a crank. That should be in an extremely ergonomic external form factor that a person can operate comfortably, without risking dropping their laptop / tablet, or accidentally flinging it across the room.
Same with solar. That needs to be in a waterproof form factor that can be left laying on the ground or roof in the rain without being destroyed.
A family with two or more devices could get by with just one solar charger, or better yet, one solar and one mechanical, to give them more charging options.
When I was a kid I had one of those little generators that was rotated by my front tire, which powered a little headlight. Something like that could be used with any bicycle to generate relatively massive amounts of power (compared to a hand crank). A very simple stand (home made or otherwise) to get the back tire up off the floor and they're ready to do some serious charging.
When it comes to the internet I think it's all about scale, not necessarily free market. For example, what scale (infrastructure, etc) is required to generate and update a searchable index of the entire WWW? Isn't the main appeal of Facebook the number of users it has?
Being big is essentially a requirement - my point is whatever entity provides these specific services must be of at least a certain size in order to function or meet a critical mass of sustainability.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Oh, but they can only program in one language - C#. Just rewrite your codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines so you can port your apps to WP7! It'll be a lot of fun! Both iOS and Android support C / C++, and Android had to release a whole separate NDK to allow that. But yet they still released the importance of supporting one of the most prolific languages of all time.
This reminds me of Sony, where they have so many conflicting interests that they can't do anything well. Why can't Sony DVD players play DivX*? Because Sony also makes movies, and DivX is the leading choice for distributing movies over the internet.
So in this case MS has a programming language to push, a Silverlight platform to push, etc, etc. So it's C# only, to the detriment of WP7, in hopes that it will increase the popularity of C#.
*Perhaps they have models that play DivX now? I haven't looked in the last few years.
Uh, I have a streetlight on the power pole in my backyard, which AEP charges me around 9 bucks a month to power. It's their light, on their pole, but they charge me to power it. Sounds like I'm being ripped off.
How does this compare to Opera Mobile (not Mini)? I run Windows Mobile 6.5 (shed a tear for me) and use Opera Mobile, and am curious how much better a browsing experience I would have with Android + Firefox 4.
Wouldn't it be called Daylights?
This is very cool, and I'm sure they got quite a kick out of interacting with the game in this way. And for the people that are saying this is impractical or a waste of paper - you're missing the point entirely. It's not like this something to be marketed or used extensively. It was done because someone had some originality coupled with technical prowess.
Now for my gripe. I was hoping they had written some new firmware / software for an existing typewriter's controller / CPU, as opposed to using thoroughly modern electronics to control the typewriter. So in the scheme of things they could have used any old printer, and any old keyboard. Kudos that they are combined into a single physical device, but I was expecting more of a hacked 80s era typewriter with no hardware modifications or interface.
Regardless, job well done!
How would they be simultaneously consuming data on both devices at once, and even if they are, why would it be more data? Isn't the amount of data consumed user-dependent (ie, I have 3 computers on my desk, that doesn't mean I stream 3 movies at one time, or stream 3 songs at one time - the data I consume is exactly the same as if I had a single device).
I don't see why there is a need to upgrade the network.
ADSL is to 10Base-T what Cable is to 10Base-2. And we all know which of the two 10Base ethernets were called "cheapernet" and why.