Chrome OS is getting Flash integration. It's intended to have remote computer control, though I don't think that has been integrated yet. And there is Google's cloud printing.
Not a ton of wins. But enough to be interesting to some of us OS geeks.
There are certain things in computing that take so long, you're better off waiting for technology to catch up a bit before even bothering to start out on the trip.
20 light years is so ridiculously far away, any ship you build now will be easily overtaken by a ship created before that first ship reaches 1% of its journey. Even building that ship is so far away as to be meaningless.
If you want to build a ship to go 20 light years from here, we need to first research enough technology and gain enough knowledge to build permanent stations in orbit. Then the moon. Then Mars. Build up a huge industrial base by increasing the number of humans we can support. Move from fossil fuels to more plentiful fuel supplies. And then, we're still light years away from hitting 20 light years off.
It was an idea with a side effect they didn't think about. I'm guessing most of the people involved in making World of Warcraft have never been stalked. Or at least, they don't get stalked if they don't mention what they work on.
The point was to try to make their forums more civilized. It's not like their idea was to kick puppies. They didn't want to charge microtransactions every time you logged on, or show commercials while you craft, or scan your computer for illegal movies. If people had a permanent, immutable identity that they were stuck with, they might protect their reputation a little more and be less jerks towards each other.
If you choose to see that as the same thing as wild car acceleration followed by death, and fundamental betrayal of trust, that's your choice. To me, it just sounds like a committee of dudes in Irvine who haven't had to deal with certain things.
They announced it, people complained, they listened and decided not to do it.
Cable is a bit more understandable, as the cable provider isn't actually the content provider.
Unskippable ads in books (those one-page ads have been at the back of pulp novels for years) would be like the unskippable ads at the beginning of DVD's. Spend $20 for a piece of content, they make an extra $1 on something that will annoy you every time you watch the movie. Everybody wins, a little, except the customer.
Here in Boston, 15 minutes of commercials is the norm. When I saw a movie in London, there was well over 30 minutes of commercials. While I consider the amount here grossly overdone, the amount in London was just despicable.
I'd be curious to see what the going payout is for commercials before a movie. If a ticket is ten dollars, and a movie is 2 hours long, do they really make 8 cents per minute per person by showing these things? If not, wouldn't higher throughput trump single sales? Or is the throughput not the bottleneck, so much as maximizing the dollars-per-patron?
I'm kind of shocked Jackson actually fell for a cut of the net. I know his clout currently stems from the LOTR movies, but Hollywood Accounting is as old and straightforward a rule as you will find in LA these days. First year acting students are told not to take a cut of the net. How did he fall for that?
1a: Film it in 3D. 3D dies before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D. 1b: Film it in 3D. 3D is still alive before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D and decent-looking 3D. 2a: Film it in 2D. 3D dies before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D. 2b: Film it in 2D. 3D is still alive before the movie comes out, and some hack executive forces a godawful 3D conversion.
Filming in 3D might take a little more time, but you do cover your bases.
While I'd generally agree, I'm very happy Valve took chances on Portal and Left 4 Dead. Blizzard seems content to evolve their IP's, with WoW being very different than Warcraft, and the failed Ghost being very different than Starcraft. But there is something special about when Valve releases a whole new world to explore. TF2, while it didn't have much of a "world" world, did feel like a 1950's take on a very 1990's genre.
And they have enough, and release infrequently enough, to keep the interest up. But here's hoping Blizzard starts taking more creative risks like Valve.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever heard of. They had an idea they thought would make the experience better. They put it to the public. The public hated the idea. They responded to the public and binned the idea.
And you're complaining that you can't trust them? You could just as easily say that they're trying new ideas to improve the experience, and they're clearly listening to their customers.
There is a pretty big difference between looking for ways of making people responsible for their actions online and hitting your wife.
The application itself isn't really enough to guide a missile by anyway. For that, you'd need to gather the information at a firmware level. Which would mean reading the data that the plane is sending out constantly anyway, in a separate unit.
All this would let you do is know where a plane is, which isn't a hard task considering you're looking at it.
Also note that the iPhone app works because THE AIRPLANE IS BROADCASTING THIS INFORMATION CONSTANTLY. If this information is a security threat, why did they create an air traffic control system where this information is public? If you can't be arsed to encrypt your own broadcasts, is it really shocking when someone actually reads them?
The iPhone app sells for $2. A Stinger costs $38,000 dollars. The iPhone app profits all go to one author in the UK. The profits from a Stinger go to Raytheon.
You want highly skilled people working quickly on the operating system and router configurations. It's less common to swap out a RAID HDD, than to deal with hacked accounts.
Some of the best IT personnel I know have worked from the beach in Asia. They could do that, because A: beaches in Asia are cheap and beautiful, and B: they were able to zoom in on problems and fix them quickly from a command line. Why do you need physical access to a virtual machine? Especially when the best a GUI is going to do for you is format a command line input that you know by heart anyway.
And yes, very little of this was experimental stuff, and there were other IT people on-site to deal with the occasional hardware problem. But do you really want to put your experiments into a production environment before you understand them thoroughly? Experiments that would require physical access seem like either major hardware upgrades or serious breaches of OS security. Again, your team shouldn't need to be in your data center.
Buffalo is also relatively near New York city and Boston, MA. If you need to go visit your datacenter by spending a weekend in New York City, things aren't so bad. And it's not too much of a stretch to draw graduates from MIT.
Good luck drawing people to Northern Canada. All you have up there is cows and land.
Compared to hurricanes, mudslides, snowstorms, and other natural disasters, earthquakes are pretty tame. They happen once every few years, and rarely knock out the power. The snowstorms in the Pacific Northwest caused much more extensive computer outages than the occasional earthquake in California.
Really, the only problem is that you're shaking active hard drives for about 30 seconds, which is never good. But most are good enough to park their heads, and it rarely causes a real head crash.
The concept behind peak oil is that there is a fixed amount of stuff in the ground, and we're depleting it at increasing rates. At some point between now and 2030 production will start decreasing, as the wells we can reach will be depleted.
Of course, there are lots of artificial factors in the market. OPEC shot the cost of gas through the roof in the 70's, and market manipulations helped drive gas up during the collapse of 2008. But as a force like entropy, supplies will peak and recede in our short-term lifetime.
1 - This hasn't been a problem in years. You can get electric bicycles up to 70 now. Really the question is torque, where more energy efficient cars and driving inherently just don't have much acceleration oomph.
2 - This is the sticking point. 200 miles requires a lot of expensive batteries. Electric-Gas plug-in hybrids seem like a good compromise... 40 miles on electric for normal commutes, full range on gas for family trips.
3 - Electric vehicles are launching immediately from Toyota, Chevy, and Nissan, to be shortly followed by Dhailmer, Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mini, Peugeot, and pretty much everyone else at this point. Also, that "tiny firm" in Santa Rosa now owns the NUMMI manufacturing plant in Fremont, at a span of about 88 football fields.
The average American family owns two cars. For long family trips, they only need one that can go great distances. The other is almost entirely used for work commuting, a task for which electric vehicles are particularly suited.
While the cost of electrics may not be plummeting quickly, the cost of Gas keeps going ever higher as our supplies dwindle. At some point, the cost of running a gas car will overtake the higher initial cost of electrics even if they don't manage to get the initial cost of electrics down.
Also, *players* don't win TF2, teams do. This may seem like a small point, but in Unreal and other games you could win matches by being great on your own. In TF2, a team of OK people sticking together will beat a team of amazingly hot people that spread out. Sure there are advanced tactics, yadda yadda, but mainly you need to stick with your teammates. If you die and respawn on your own, wait for another teammate to respawn and run in with them. If you see a mass of your guys, get over to them and try to guard their back. And spam the "medic" key at the slightest provocation.
Also, if you're dying, withdraw. Instead of fighting to the respawn (and arduous walk back), retreat to live, get healed, and go back in. It feels better, and it's usually much faster than dying / respawning.
Oh, to counter spies, shoot any teammate that seem like they're coming up to you. If it's a spy, they'll take damage and be revealed. If it's a teammate, you can't hurt them. You'll see teammates occasionally do this to you too. That's why.
To counter snipers, stay away from big open areas and keep jumping.
Jump into Team Fortress 2 as a medic or engineer. Medics just heal teammates and try to stay away from the enemy, and Engineers put up gun turrets that do all of their work for them. Both are fun classes on their own, and can help ease into the experience.
Also, I just saw what they were charging for in-game items. OMFG that's a lot of scratch for a hat. Hopefully the game will go free-to-play at some point, which would justify those costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome OS is getting Flash integration. It's intended to have remote computer control, though I don't think that has been integrated yet. And there is Google's cloud printing.
Not a ton of wins. But enough to be interesting to some of us OS geeks.
You've clearly never owned a Tandy.
Considering it's running on a computer without a keyboard or mouse, that sounds like a good fit.
There are certain things in computing that take so long, you're better off waiting for technology to catch up a bit before even bothering to start out on the trip.
20 light years is so ridiculously far away, any ship you build now will be easily overtaken by a ship created before that first ship reaches 1% of its journey. Even building that ship is so far away as to be meaningless.
If you want to build a ship to go 20 light years from here, we need to first research enough technology and gain enough knowledge to build permanent stations in orbit. Then the moon. Then Mars. Build up a huge industrial base by increasing the number of humans we can support. Move from fossil fuels to more plentiful fuel supplies. And then, we're still light years away from hitting 20 light years off.
It was an idea with a side effect they didn't think about. I'm guessing most of the people involved in making World of Warcraft have never been stalked. Or at least, they don't get stalked if they don't mention what they work on.
The point was to try to make their forums more civilized. It's not like their idea was to kick puppies. They didn't want to charge microtransactions every time you logged on, or show commercials while you craft, or scan your computer for illegal movies. If people had a permanent, immutable identity that they were stuck with, they might protect their reputation a little more and be less jerks towards each other.
If you choose to see that as the same thing as wild car acceleration followed by death, and fundamental betrayal of trust, that's your choice. To me, it just sounds like a committee of dudes in Irvine who haven't had to deal with certain things.
They announced it, people complained, they listened and decided not to do it.
Cable is a bit more understandable, as the cable provider isn't actually the content provider.
Unskippable ads in books (those one-page ads have been at the back of pulp novels for years) would be like the unskippable ads at the beginning of DVD's. Spend $20 for a piece of content, they make an extra $1 on something that will annoy you every time you watch the movie. Everybody wins, a little, except the customer.
Here in Boston, 15 minutes of commercials is the norm. When I saw a movie in London, there was well over 30 minutes of commercials. While I consider the amount here grossly overdone, the amount in London was just despicable.
I'd be curious to see what the going payout is for commercials before a movie. If a ticket is ten dollars, and a movie is 2 hours long, do they really make 8 cents per minute per person by showing these things? If not, wouldn't higher throughput trump single sales? Or is the throughput not the bottleneck, so much as maximizing the dollars-per-patron?
I'm kind of shocked Jackson actually fell for a cut of the net. I know his clout currently stems from the LOTR movies, but Hollywood Accounting is as old and straightforward a rule as you will find in LA these days. First year acting students are told not to take a cut of the net. How did he fall for that?
The options (and outcomes) are:
1a: Film it in 3D. 3D dies before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D.
1b: Film it in 3D. 3D is still alive before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D and decent-looking 3D.
2a: Film it in 2D. 3D dies before the movie comes out, and it is displayed in 2D.
2b: Film it in 2D. 3D is still alive before the movie comes out, and some hack executive forces a godawful 3D conversion.
Filming in 3D might take a little more time, but you do cover your bases.
While I'd generally agree, I'm very happy Valve took chances on Portal and Left 4 Dead. Blizzard seems content to evolve their IP's, with WoW being very different than Warcraft, and the failed Ghost being very different than Starcraft. But there is something special about when Valve releases a whole new world to explore. TF2, while it didn't have much of a "world" world, did feel like a 1950's take on a very 1990's genre.
And they have enough, and release infrequently enough, to keep the interest up. But here's hoping Blizzard starts taking more creative risks like Valve.
This is the dumbest argument I've ever heard of. They had an idea they thought would make the experience better. They put it to the public. The public hated the idea. They responded to the public and binned the idea.
And you're complaining that you can't trust them? You could just as easily say that they're trying new ideas to improve the experience, and they're clearly listening to their customers.
There is a pretty big difference between looking for ways of making people responsible for their actions online and hitting your wife.
There is only no creative value in their work if you can convince a judge, who once was a lawyer, that what lawyers do has no creative value.
I've seen some pretty creative lawyers in my day.
The application itself isn't really enough to guide a missile by anyway. For that, you'd need to gather the information at a firmware level. Which would mean reading the data that the plane is sending out constantly anyway, in a separate unit.
All this would let you do is know where a plane is, which isn't a hard task considering you're looking at it.
Also note that the iPhone app works because THE AIRPLANE IS BROADCASTING THIS INFORMATION CONSTANTLY. If this information is a security threat, why did they create an air traffic control system where this information is public? If you can't be arsed to encrypt your own broadcasts, is it really shocking when someone actually reads them?
Knowledge is Power. Power can be used by the Terrorists. Ban Wikipedia.
The iPhone app sells for $2. A Stinger costs $38,000 dollars. The iPhone app profits all go to one author in the UK. The profits from a Stinger go to Raytheon.
Not that I'm pessimistic.
You want highly skilled people working quickly on the operating system and router configurations. It's less common to swap out a RAID HDD, than to deal with hacked accounts.
Some of the best IT personnel I know have worked from the beach in Asia. They could do that, because A: beaches in Asia are cheap and beautiful, and B: they were able to zoom in on problems and fix them quickly from a command line. Why do you need physical access to a virtual machine? Especially when the best a GUI is going to do for you is format a command line input that you know by heart anyway.
And yes, very little of this was experimental stuff, and there were other IT people on-site to deal with the occasional hardware problem. But do you really want to put your experiments into a production environment before you understand them thoroughly? Experiments that would require physical access seem like either major hardware upgrades or serious breaches of OS security. Again, your team shouldn't need to be in your data center.
Buffalo is also relatively near New York city and Boston, MA. If you need to go visit your datacenter by spending a weekend in New York City, things aren't so bad. And it's not too much of a stretch to draw graduates from MIT.
Good luck drawing people to Northern Canada. All you have up there is cows and land.
Compared to hurricanes, mudslides, snowstorms, and other natural disasters, earthquakes are pretty tame. They happen once every few years, and rarely knock out the power. The snowstorms in the Pacific Northwest caused much more extensive computer outages than the occasional earthquake in California.
Really, the only problem is that you're shaking active hard drives for about 30 seconds, which is never good. But most are good enough to park their heads, and it rarely causes a real head crash.
The concept behind peak oil is that there is a fixed amount of stuff in the ground, and we're depleting it at increasing rates. At some point between now and 2030 production will start decreasing, as the wells we can reach will be depleted.
Of course, there are lots of artificial factors in the market. OPEC shot the cost of gas through the roof in the 70's, and market manipulations helped drive gas up during the collapse of 2008. But as a force like entropy, supplies will peak and recede in our short-term lifetime.
1 - This hasn't been a problem in years. You can get electric bicycles up to 70 now. Really the question is torque, where more energy efficient cars and driving inherently just don't have much acceleration oomph.
2 - This is the sticking point. 200 miles requires a lot of expensive batteries. Electric-Gas plug-in hybrids seem like a good compromise... 40 miles on electric for normal commutes, full range on gas for family trips.
3 - Electric vehicles are launching immediately from Toyota, Chevy, and Nissan, to be shortly followed by Dhailmer, Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mini, Peugeot, and pretty much everyone else at this point. Also, that "tiny firm" in Santa Rosa now owns the NUMMI manufacturing plant in Fremont, at a span of about 88 football fields.
The average American family owns two cars. For long family trips, they only need one that can go great distances. The other is almost entirely used for work commuting, a task for which electric vehicles are particularly suited.
While the cost of electrics may not be plummeting quickly, the cost of Gas keeps going ever higher as our supplies dwindle. At some point, the cost of running a gas car will overtake the higher initial cost of electrics even if they don't manage to get the initial cost of electrics down.
Also, *players* don't win TF2, teams do. This may seem like a small point, but in Unreal and other games you could win matches by being great on your own. In TF2, a team of OK people sticking together will beat a team of amazingly hot people that spread out. Sure there are advanced tactics, yadda yadda, but mainly you need to stick with your teammates. If you die and respawn on your own, wait for another teammate to respawn and run in with them. If you see a mass of your guys, get over to them and try to guard their back. And spam the "medic" key at the slightest provocation.
Also, if you're dying, withdraw. Instead of fighting to the respawn (and arduous walk back), retreat to live, get healed, and go back in. It feels better, and it's usually much faster than dying / respawning.
Oh, to counter spies, shoot any teammate that seem like they're coming up to you. If it's a spy, they'll take damage and be revealed. If it's a teammate, you can't hurt them. You'll see teammates occasionally do this to you too. That's why.
To counter snipers, stay away from big open areas and keep jumping.
Jump into Team Fortress 2 as a medic or engineer. Medics just heal teammates and try to stay away from the enemy, and Engineers put up gun turrets that do all of their work for them. Both are fun classes on their own, and can help ease into the experience.
Also, I just saw what they were charging for in-game items. OMFG that's a lot of scratch for a hat. Hopefully the game will go free-to-play at some point, which would justify those costs.