Sure DVD+R and DVD-R are similar but aren't we forgetting that DVD(anything) is quite different than CD and yet both co-exist in a single player.
The disc track format may be dissimilar, but the rest is almost the same. The discs are the same size, can be put into the same transport mechanism, work by spinning, and are fed through mostly identical visual and audio codecs. So when you are saying they are dissimilar, we are probably talking mainly of the pickup mechanism.
The solution, like in some CD/DVD combos, may be to have to different laser pickups. Still a lot cheaper than building two units.
Actually, if you listen to the director's commentary on Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn, this wasn't always the case.
The director of Star Trek II specifically introduced naval terminology and traditions into the series from that film. It seemed to have taken and stuck.
That's why I use iFrame popup instead of window popups. With popup blockers already appearing built into browsers, I'm assuming that they will be standard everywhere soon.
With scripting, you can make iFrames draggable, closeable and behave and look just like regular windows but they are, in essence, windows within a window and are tied closely to the current browser.
There are reasons to have popups like, for example, color or date pickers (with a calendar). It is actually much easier to build a draggable DIV than a draggable iFrame but the draggable DIV doesn't show up on top of certain HTML elements and hence becomes useless (even with an infinitely high z-index).
By the way, you can get draggable iFrames to work in both MSIE and Mozilla. I just bought my iMac for testing but I'm pretty sure I can get it to work in the mac versions too as they all have the necessary language and DHTML components. All I can say though is that JavaScript and DHTML are definitely vendor dependant, and I don't care if you are mozilla or Apple or Microsoft, they ALL have quirks and bugs that go outside of the specifications. In many ways, my high speed photoshop-style image scripting program (for use on web servers) was easier to write in C# than trying to figure out how to make things work across every browser out there!
Anyways, programmer alert. I wouldn't depend on popups working in the future if your app depends on it. Make sure to use iFrames or have a non popup dependant way of doing the same thing!
Oh, I tend to differ. We are mostly a Microsoft company and I had no confidence, in the past, with going to Linux.
But now we are slowly but surely switching many of our servers over. For me, the biggest drive to the new servers comes from the fact that Linux is getting as easy to use as Windows. Have you seen, for example, the MySql Administrator GUI? That with something like Navicat makes it a pure SQL Server killer for web applications. I admit I'm writing on Windows, but the actual server will run on Linux. We plan on moving file servers to Linux as well. These cross platform tools are great for converting people too.
I'm sure PHP and the Eclipse development environment are driving the change as well.
And before you crap on me for being too simple-minded and being focused on this amateur ease of use stuff, we develop software that builds websites. It is built on C#, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript/DHTML, CSS and ties into DNS, SMTP, load balancers, database servers, replication, an image scripting language that we wrote to do PhotoShop style manipulations live (and quickly) and a dozen other technologies.
The point is, that we aren't simplistic and it's not that I want to show off what we are doing all this great work. The point is, as a company, we have the skills to do many things but we really don't care about technology for technology's sake. Who wants to learn all the db management command line stuff when we have to deal with integrating 20 other languages. Using the best simple tools for the job appeals to me. We like the stuff to be as easy to use as possible because we'd rather concentrate on writing software and that is where Linux is stealing the market from Microsoft. The tools are getting to the point where developers can focus on the writing of the software instead of how to use the command line interface to the database.
Apple could do this better than any other company; but, as a student of usability, I don't think eBooks will catch on for a while. Its an interesting idea but there are major problems:
1. The biggest one is that screen resolution just isn't there yet. Even on my 23" 1920x1200 LCD screen or my 22" 1600x1200 CRT, I still prefer to print out a page. It is easier on the eyes, especially for long times. The problem is 10x worse on a mini screen. I would suffer if I had to read everything on my PDA.
2. Books are lighter, easier to carry, and sustain more damage. I can drop my book, cram it into a pack, and at worst get ruffled pages.
3. If a book gets stolen, I'm out a few dollars for a paperback and at most about $75 for a computer book. Paranoia ensues for carrying around a $400 e-book reader.
4. If it's Apple, there will be some fancy (and good) newfangled navigation but few things beat the speed and ease of use of flipping through pages. A post-it or even a piece of toilet paper makes a great bookmark. Years of printing have actually standardized a nice user interface for books that works well: contents at front, pages on the side of each page, chapter title at the top of each page and an index at the back.
Even in front of a computer with the Internet (the greatest eBook), I still crack open real books when needing programming info. Sure I'll find obscure stuff on the Internet, but for a little in depth reading, a good book is hard to beat.
Money is expensive is not in conflict with the program. In fact, this is the point:
Under the old system, you pay before you get results.
Under a prize system, you only pay if and when you receive results.
Under both systems you still pay but under the latter system, you are guaranteed results. In the cases where results are not generated, the prize system is cheaper.
Since multiple companies may fight for the same prize at the same time, you encourage growth in the aerospace industry, even for those companies that did not win the prize.
The news is going to be censored whether or not Google decides to remove politically sensitive news or not. If they don't remove it, ALL of Google news is censored. If they remove part of, then yes, those parts will be censored.
But don't mix up the bad guys. The real bad guy here is the Chinese government, not Google.
I know this is unpopular with many Slashdot readers and often, these sorts of posts got modded as trolls, but why are corporations so quickly and easily linked to *evil* and get modded up? It's rare and hard to take the side that perhaps corporations aren't evil while still being profit motivated without being modded down. It seems to me that branding corporations as evil is somehow popular and, regrettably, posts like this are often unpopular.
Woe barfy, whoever said that this was a judgement on what SHOULD be. In fact, the very first line in my post says "I don't necessarily agree with the way EA handles its employees..." In fact, I DO employee people myself, and I treat them with the utmost respect, pay them well and have a happy working atmosphere at the top of my list.
I do agree with you that "truly free" markets don't take into account damage to environment and all but it was not the point of my post. And it's true I didn't describe how monopolies are bad and such in my post but I really didn't want to spend 10 pages as a pre-cursor to my point. By the way, this is what I hate most about making slashdot posts. It's so easy to get nailed on semantics that are not part of my point.
My point, again, and rephrased is this: The reason why EA can get away with their practices is because they can replace anyone they lose with somebody else. The supply/demand curve dictates that they can get away with a lot. In fact, were it not for the law, they might even do worse.
Should they be doing this? Of course not. Should harmful employment acts be outlawed. I'd have to say yes. Is this going to help you, a potential game developer? Probably not a whole heckuva lot.
The best solution for a person looking for a job is to get into an industry that NEEDS you. Yes, you can legislate the hell out of EA but all it would do is shift the supply/demand curve. The job is MORE enticing now (since it doesn't have the negative work environment), the demand for workers is the same and the supply of workers is higher. The result is you get paid less or lose other benefits in other areas.
This isn't telling what should be. This is telling what IS. If you still choose to go into the game industry, all the power to you. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't go into it with the mistaken belief that you can legislate yourself into a good job. If the job gets better, it is now harder for you to get the job.
Another way of making electric cars easier to live with is to have an automatic charging station in the garage much like a digital camera dock at home. One that you wouldn't have to think about. Granted, you'd have to own a garage but you have to start somewhere.
Basically, you'd drive in and the car would attach to a charger. Given that many people aren't ultra precision drivers, there would have to be some sort of robotic arm that could connect to the car.
Yes, it would cost money but in mass, it shouldn't add too much to the price tag of an expensive electric car. For daily commutes to the office, shopping and to friends it should work just fine with the added benefit of not having to go the gas station. Now the negative (always have to charge) becomes a positive (never having to think about fueling).
This is a good point. Many people don't realize that if you have an electrical heater, you may as well leave everything else on (when it's cold anyways).
My girlfriend at first kept worrying about the power loss of leaving her computer on. So I explained to her that with an electric heater balanced at a certain temperature, the computer was moot. Any electricity the computer wasn't using would be made up for by the elctric heater.
How Free Markets Work
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't necessarily agree with the way EA handles its employees but mandating EA's policies is not the way to handle this issue. Granted, if you are an EA employee, you might think so.
I'm not trying to be patronizing if you understand what I'm going to explain but it is clear that many don't.
1. The *price* of a going employee at EA is a function of the supply of employees and the demand EA has for these employees. With such a high supply of willing programmers who want to break into the games industry, EA can pretty much dictate the price of the employee. Please note that I *'ed price because price does not necessarily mean just a wage. In this case, it also includes working hours and work environment.
2. Many slashdot readers are complaining that you cannot get a fair wage in the games industry despite working so hard, having to know so much, and basically not making what you are owed.
3. Now the point is this: Your skills, your hard work and your knowledge are NOT what constitutes your value. Often they are related but not always. This is not what makes free markets work. The fact is, to make a better wage, get into an industry where the supply for workers is lower than the demand. You can probably find some great paying work doing business sytems. I'm only being slightly cheeky here.
4. Which brings us full circle. A lot of programmers don't WANT to be in anything other than the games industry. This is why there is such an oversupply of talented game programmers compared to other technical talents. How sexy is programming a database after all? The point is, the cost of BEING a games programmer is higher due to supply/demand. If no-one wanted to be in the games industry, you can bet EA would be doing a lot more to attract game programmers with reasonable hours, better pay, better work environment, etc. Mandating that the government (or anyone else) get involved simply tries to cover up the underlying supply/demand issues.
So, the solution to YOU getting paid better, is get out of this industry. They don't NEED another game programmer and every new one reduces the average compensation to each employee. Not only that, it ironically raises the value of employees in every other sector. So if you love game programming, be prepared to bite the bullet: lots of other people love it too.
Mandating that EA treats employees better will have marginally better treatment (though in the long run, manipulating free economics almost always backfires), people will see that you can get into games programming (which they already love) AND be treated well, the supply will go up again, demand is (relatively) stable, and there will just be a bunch of unemployed games programmers.
You see, when we complain about EA, people get scared of going into the industry, free economics works(!) Already a lot of people who may have considered going into this industry might have second thoughts.
The mistake is to think that you should get what you deserve: you don't. You get what you are worth.
Except that the Internet Archive archives the same data over time. So, for example, a single website might be archived 100 times in slightly differing forms.
So while the amount of data predicted might still be wrong and probably is, it is not OBVIOUSLY wrong owing to the size of the Internet Archive.
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I necessarily agree just yet. I DO understand what you are saying (as I did from the start) and I understand that having no access is better than having a tiny bit of access. It is obviously safer to just block everything. It also has to do with tradeoffs. Obviously, the safest thing is having the browser not access the web.:) I don't believe you introduce a lot of security risk but simply loading an image into the browser though. It will always go through an image object first and whereupon that it does, it is no less safe than putting in an image object from the Internet. It seems to me that a lot of the bugs happen not from referencing the file but by having it execute when you don't mean it to be executed.
FYI, the reward was not to force the issue to get solved my way by paying for it. As I mention in the post, I believe the issue should be resolved anyways. My point for the reward is to make it happen sooner if possible. There may, for example, be somebody who would be willing to do it if there was a reward who wouldn't work on any other code anyways. This would simply speed up the process. I did not for one second think that the issue would be shoehorned in because I offered money which is why I posted that this reward may be controversial. It would obviously need to pass the quality control for Mozilla.
Secondly, this is not entirely for selfish reasons. Lots of people could take advantage of this and I've seen other code do image previews before a file is uploaded. I wrote my code for users of my software and you can get all the functionality in MSIE which is going to be most of my client base anyways. It is only selfish in that I have spent many months making Mozilla work in an effort to promote open source software and I will not get to see the results of that effort. So in that sense, yes, I suppose it is selfish. But really, this change would have a positive effect on many people building dynamic websites.
I don't think that is any more selfish than working on Mozilla so you can be part of something greater. I want to be part of promoting open source software. And again, I re-iterate, there are benefits to all users.
I am also somewhat disappointed in that I put a lot of faith into developing on Mozilla. Many of the issues with people hating closed source is that the code can be changed and you are left out in the cold when it happens. The irony is that this happened to me with Mozilla. I developed in good faith on a platform, spent a lot of time, money and sweat on it, and at the end of the day, they change it on me and there is nothing I can do about it. I don't see anything malicious behind the changes and I know it happens but I do take a wee bit of offense to the undertone of the message, regardless of how subtle it may be.
Okay, the counterpoint is what I thought it was but I wanted to make sure. By the way, I appreciate you taking the time to hash this out.
I see that there is probably one piece of code that handles all security.
That said, I see that getting it to support image loading isn't the major problem. I can understand the security risks of "linking" to a file but with a little bit of work, image loading should be no problem.
All you would have to do is when reading the image, look for the header bits to identify that it is indeed an image. Furthermore, unlike a link, there are absolutely no execute permissions. You are not dropping to the OS to execute the file in any way, shape or form. You are loading the image into the browser.
Now, granted, there have been image loading exploits but this is moot since any image loading exploits could be much more easily exploited by putting the image somewhere on the web and then loading it.
I understand worms and side effects but when reading that image into the browser, there is no way to execute a file. There is no way to read the file either except to get the width/height.
So even if it was VBS or EXE and it did get through the first layer of security by doing something funky with the URL, you STILL couldn't get it to run anything. At most, you could get an image to load into the browser that was invalid and crash the browser. And once again, you can do this through a web image much more easily anyways.
I don't mean to be dense but I don't see how loading an image from the local hard drive could compromise anything. At least not anything more than loading an image off the net.
It seems that a bug allowed non-image files to load as images and then you could detect that the file existed. But if you designed it such that only images could load and everything else would throw an onerror, why would this be a security issue at all? The only thing you could derive was that an image exists along with the width/height of the image.
Furthermore, I can assume that the local file exists because HE SELECTED IT! This is in my comment. If you fill in one of those handy INPUT TYPE=FILE boxes and select the image on your hard drive, I can give you an instant preview before uploading. And with some fancy javascript, I can create a fully WYSIWYG website template builder that will let you do everything before even uploading a single file.
Oops. Sorry to reply to my own message but I thought people might find this humorous. I didn't find it funny at the time but this was my message to my Chief Operating Officer in my company when I found out about FireFox 1.0 breaking my work. I think you can sense the passion: -----
Fucker of fucking fuck fuck fucking fuckers. Fuck!
And you thought my morning was already bad.
Mother fucking Mozilla fucking Firefox release fucking fucking 1.0 disabled the ability to fucking access images on a local drive. Basically, this fucking fucker fuck fuck means that the image previews, which was one of the fucking main aspects of my fucking program doesn't work in fucking Mozilla now which means that the fucking fucker of fucking 9 months of fucking cross-compatibility fucking code is a fucking waste.
Fuck!
Sunny -----
As a more serious side note, and relating to the article (which I forgot to mention in my parent post), this bug and the related one in the link (can't open local files at all. It just fails SILENTLY which is the worst) has forced a lot of people from being unable to use Mozilla in an Enterprise because you can't open local files from the browser.
Obviously it shouldn't execute local links directly but a warning message telling you what you are about to do should be okay. In Mozilla/Firefox, the browser just doesn't do anything. It throws in error in the JavaScript console but end users don't see it. The only way around it is to edit your configuration file which nobody wants to do. At this time, it seems even that is buggy.
One major weakness I've found for Firefox (and one that ticks me off to no end) is that there is no way for Firefox to load a local image.
I've actually offered a US $1000 bounty for anybody who can fix this and incorporate it into the main code base. See Link Here.
One thing that kills me about this is I spent 6-9 months developing software to work on MSIE and Mozilla. Mozilla would be a very small portion of my client base but I wanted to help promote open source. But since they made this change that disallows you from loading local images, all this work is gone to waste.
Anyways, I guess there are two things:
1. The fact that I developed on a 1.2 browser and the newer versions were NOT backward compatible. This sucks big ass. Imagine investing the time, money and effort on this and have it wasted. I know you could tell me I should have upgraded the browser but the point was that you always need to support the older browsers. I never even suspected that the newer browsers would purposely break something that worked in the older ones.
2. It's not a security issue. What damage can be done by loading an image that is on your computer. The most I could steal (info wise) is the width/height of that image and the fact that that image exists.
3. I wonder how my commercial incentive (the reward) plays out in an open source world. People are either going to be happy or hate it I presume. Either way, if you solve it and get it introduced into the release version, you get $1000.
costs up to ten times as much to fix an error by the time it hits the market as it would to catch it during the design.
I call bullshit.
Getting software programs to run error free from the start is extremely expensive. Just ask the guys who send things into space. Their development costs are several orders of magnitude higher because the cost of a bug is the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment. And sometimes they still have bugs.
I don't disagree that it *would be nice* to catch all the bugs before launch but saying that it is cheaper is a false start. Delaying time to market is also extremely expensive in the face of competitors.
Note: I'm not saying let's do away with making sure software works. I'm just saying this particular statement is a red herring.
Of all the days for me to not read Slashdot in the morning. I actually saw and used this system about 6 years ago though the prototype was literally the size of a freezer with a little eyepiece sticking out.
They believed, at the time, that they could get it small enough to fit on a pair of glasses in the future.
As for causing blindness (which is pretty much everyone's first reaction), this entirely has to do with the power of the laser and nobody is going to put a powerful laser in it. It's sort of like saying, don't use lightbulbs because they can cause blindness if they are powerful enough.
As for how it actually looks, it is just as if you were looking into an eyepiece of a camcorder (at least in their prototype) with the image somewhere in front of you. The cool thing though was since it was actually writing on your eye, you could take away the black backing and have the image appear in mid air. The usefulness is (a) that you can see the images overlaid on top of your vision and (b) you wouldn't need something bulky to do it.
Their eventual application potentials were to, for example, embed them into cell phones. You could bring your phone up to your eye and then could do stuff like read email on a full sized screen.
Hmm, I Just RTFA. Obviously this is a different company. The unit I saw was actually full color already though low resolution (640x480 I think). Remember, several years ago though.
Note that white pixels aren't a magic bullet. You get some brightness but give up saturation. It works like this:
Given four pixels of RGBW, you can get your brightest color by having all four pixels on. This would result in total brightness of:
1 white pixel for every combination of RGB and
1 white pixel for every white pixel.
So you get the equivalent of 2 white pixels for every 4 pixels or a factor of 1/2 let's say.
In regular RGB, you get a factor of 1/3 because you get the equivalent of 1 white pixel for every set of RGB pixels.
Looking at this, you get 50% more maximum brightness from RGBW vs RGB.
It's not a magic bullet because you lose saturation. For example, if you want a fully saturated red, in the RGBW format, you get 1 full red pixel for every four pixels. In RGB, you get 1 full red pixel for every three pixels. So RGBW gives a factor of 1/4 while RGB gives a factor of 1/3 for a fulls aturated red. This is a reduction in brightness of a full saturation red of 25%.
In other words, your brightest color is 50% higher in RGBW but you brightest red (at full saturation) is 25% less which means you have to fudge around with values to get a picture that seems to make sense or you get a bright picture with dark spots with a lot of saturation in them. So you might, programatically (and this is probably what samsung is doing) increase full saturation red to include white in it. This makes the color brighter but also reduces the saturation.
A lot of projectors with a white component have two modes. A dimmer mode that doesn't use the "W" pixel at all but has richer colors (used for movie viewing) and a presentation mode that does use the "W" when brightness is a factor such as in a meeting (e.g. the room may have light leaking in from windows).
Not saying it is good or bad. Just that a RGBW is not a magic bullet.
Interlacing is used to reduce flickering? I think not. It used to be used to reduce *bandwidth*.
An interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz (30 full fields per second divided by 2) is going to have the same flicker as a non-interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz.
This is actually a very complex subject to do with how people view images, resolution vs fields per second, what type of images you are viewing, movement vs. still images, etc. but in terms of reducing flicker, I would say, at the very least, the statement is deceptive.
In fact, one of the major problems with old Amigas running in interlaced mode was the annoying (you got it) flicker. This is because a horizontal line that was exactly 1 pixel would turn on and off every 60th of a second. So in this case, it would depend on how you defined the world flicker too.
To be fair, I think what you meant to say was that given the same bandwidth on a non-digitally compressed transmission and without digitally upconverting the signal, you can get 60 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) instead of 30 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) meaning that you will probably get less inter-frame flicker. But even this is deceptive because if you built televisions specifically for 30 frames per second, you could simply reformulate the glow on the screen to last an extra 1/60th of a second longer. But perhaps this is (a) hard to do and (b) back then they wanted the extra fields per second for smoother motion. By the way, a lot of the bandwidth savings doesn't apply to digital due to the way that digital compression works. This was a controversial point during the discussions on HDTV resolutions.
Fudge. I'm trying to cover all my bases here so I don't get flamed for not knowing what I'm talking about. Suffice it to say, interlacing and reduction of flicker do NOT walk hand in hand. It is simply one factor, of many, that comes into play.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure DVD+R and DVD-R are similar but aren't we forgetting that DVD(anything) is quite different than CD and yet both co-exist in a single player.
The disc track format may be dissimilar, but the rest is almost the same. The discs are the same size, can be put into the same transport mechanism, work by spinning, and are fed through mostly identical visual and audio codecs. So when you are saying they are dissimilar, we are probably talking mainly of the pickup mechanism.
The solution, like in some CD/DVD combos, may be to have to different laser pickups. Still a lot cheaper than building two units.
Actually, if you listen to the director's commentary on Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn, this wasn't always the case.
The director of Star Trek II specifically introduced naval terminology and traditions into the series from that film. It seemed to have taken and stuck.
That's why I use iFrame popup instead of window popups. With popup blockers already appearing built into browsers, I'm assuming that they will be standard everywhere soon.
With scripting, you can make iFrames draggable, closeable and behave and look just like regular windows but they are, in essence, windows within a window and are tied closely to the current browser.
There are reasons to have popups like, for example, color or date pickers (with a calendar). It is actually much easier to build a draggable DIV than a draggable iFrame but the draggable DIV doesn't show up on top of certain HTML elements and hence becomes useless (even with an infinitely high z-index).
By the way, you can get draggable iFrames to work in both MSIE and Mozilla. I just bought my iMac for testing but I'm pretty sure I can get it to work in the mac versions too as they all have the necessary language and DHTML components. All I can say though is that JavaScript and DHTML are definitely vendor dependant, and I don't care if you are mozilla or Apple or Microsoft, they ALL have quirks and bugs that go outside of the specifications. In many ways, my high speed photoshop-style image scripting program (for use on web servers) was easier to write in C# than trying to figure out how to make things work across every browser out there!
Anyways, programmer alert. I wouldn't depend on popups working in the future if your app depends on it. Make sure to use iFrames or have a non popup dependant way of doing the same thing!
Oh, I tend to differ. We are mostly a Microsoft company and I had no confidence, in the past, with going to Linux.
But now we are slowly but surely switching many of our servers over. For me, the biggest drive to the new servers comes from the fact that Linux is getting as easy to use as Windows. Have you seen, for example, the MySql Administrator GUI? That with something like Navicat makes it a pure SQL Server killer for web applications. I admit I'm writing on Windows, but the actual server will run on Linux. We plan on moving file servers to Linux as well. These cross platform tools are great for converting people too.
I'm sure PHP and the Eclipse development environment are driving the change as well.
And before you crap on me for being too simple-minded and being focused on this amateur ease of use stuff, we develop software that builds websites. It is built on C#, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript/DHTML, CSS and ties into DNS, SMTP, load balancers, database servers, replication, an image scripting language that we wrote to do PhotoShop style manipulations live (and quickly) and a dozen other technologies.
The point is, that we aren't simplistic and it's not that I want to show off what we are doing all this great work. The point is, as a company, we have the skills to do many things but we really don't care about technology for technology's sake. Who wants to learn all the db management command line stuff when we have to deal with integrating 20 other languages. Using the best simple tools for the job appeals to me. We like the stuff to be as easy to use as possible because we'd rather concentrate on writing software and that is where Linux is stealing the market from Microsoft. The tools are getting to the point where developers can focus on the writing of the software instead of how to use the command line interface to the database.
All I can say is, nobody, and I mean NOBODY is allowed to smoke or light candles in my new house.
Apple could do this better than any other company; but, as a student of usability, I don't think eBooks will catch on for a while. Its an interesting idea but there are major problems:
1. The biggest one is that screen resolution just isn't there yet. Even on my 23" 1920x1200 LCD screen or my 22" 1600x1200 CRT, I still prefer to print out a page. It is easier on the eyes, especially for long times. The problem is 10x worse on a mini screen. I would suffer if I had to read everything on my PDA.
2. Books are lighter, easier to carry, and sustain more damage. I can drop my book, cram it into a pack, and at worst get ruffled pages.
3. If a book gets stolen, I'm out a few dollars for a paperback and at most about $75 for a computer book. Paranoia ensues for carrying around a $400 e-book reader.
4. If it's Apple, there will be some fancy (and good) newfangled navigation but few things beat the speed and ease of use of flipping through pages. A post-it or even a piece of toilet paper makes a great bookmark. Years of printing have actually standardized a nice user interface for books that works well: contents at front, pages on the side of each page, chapter title at the top of each page and an index at the back.
Even in front of a computer with the Internet (the greatest eBook), I still crack open real books when needing programming info. Sure I'll find obscure stuff on the Internet, but for a little in depth reading, a good book is hard to beat.
The news is going to be censored whether or not Google decides to remove politically sensitive news or not. If they don't remove it, ALL of Google news is censored. If they remove part of, then yes, those parts will be censored.
But don't mix up the bad guys. The real bad guy here is the Chinese government, not Google.
I know this is unpopular with many Slashdot readers and often, these sorts of posts got modded as trolls, but why are corporations so quickly and easily linked to *evil* and get modded up? It's rare and hard to take the side that perhaps corporations aren't evil while still being profit motivated without being modded down. It seems to me that branding corporations as evil is somehow popular and, regrettably, posts like this are often unpopular.
Woe barfy, whoever said that this was a judgement on what SHOULD be. In fact, the very first line in my post says "I don't necessarily agree with the way EA handles its employees..." In fact, I DO employee people myself, and I treat them with the utmost respect, pay them well and have a happy working atmosphere at the top of my list.
I do agree with you that "truly free" markets don't take into account damage to environment and all but it was not the point of my post. And it's true I didn't describe how monopolies are bad and such in my post but I really didn't want to spend 10 pages as a pre-cursor to my point. By the way, this is what I hate most about making slashdot posts. It's so easy to get nailed on semantics that are not part of my point.
My point, again, and rephrased is this: The reason why EA can get away with their practices is because they can replace anyone they lose with somebody else. The supply/demand curve dictates that they can get away with a lot. In fact, were it not for the law, they might even do worse.
Should they be doing this? Of course not. Should harmful employment acts be outlawed. I'd have to say yes. Is this going to help you, a potential game developer? Probably not a whole heckuva lot.
The best solution for a person looking for a job is to get into an industry that NEEDS you. Yes, you can legislate the hell out of EA but all it would do is shift the supply/demand curve. The job is MORE enticing now (since it doesn't have the negative work environment), the demand for workers is the same and the supply of workers is higher. The result is you get paid less or lose other benefits in other areas.
This isn't telling what should be. This is telling what IS. If you still choose to go into the game industry, all the power to you. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't go into it with the mistaken belief that you can legislate yourself into a good job. If the job gets better, it is now harder for you to get the job.
Another way of making electric cars easier to live with is to have an automatic charging station in the garage much like a digital camera dock at home. One that you wouldn't have to think about. Granted, you'd have to own a garage but you have to start somewhere.
Basically, you'd drive in and the car would attach to a charger. Given that many people aren't ultra precision drivers, there would have to be some sort of robotic arm that could connect to the car.
Yes, it would cost money but in mass, it shouldn't add too much to the price tag of an expensive electric car. For daily commutes to the office, shopping and to friends it should work just fine with the added benefit of not having to go the gas station. Now the negative (always have to charge) becomes a positive (never having to think about fueling).
This is a good point. Many people don't realize that if you have an electrical heater, you may as well leave everything else on (when it's cold anyways).
My girlfriend at first kept worrying about the power loss of leaving her computer on. So I explained to her that with an electric heater balanced at a certain temperature, the computer was moot. Any electricity the computer wasn't using would be made up for by the elctric heater.
I don't necessarily agree with the way EA handles its employees but mandating EA's policies is not the way to handle this issue. Granted, if you are an EA employee, you might think so.
I'm not trying to be patronizing if you understand what I'm going to explain but it is clear that many don't.
1. The *price* of a going employee at EA is a function of the supply of employees and the demand EA has for these employees. With such a high supply of willing programmers who want to break into the games industry, EA can pretty much dictate the price of the employee. Please note that I *'ed price because price does not necessarily mean just a wage. In this case, it also includes working hours and work environment.
2. Many slashdot readers are complaining that you cannot get a fair wage in the games industry despite working so hard, having to know so much, and basically not making what you are owed.
3. Now the point is this: Your skills, your hard work and your knowledge are NOT what constitutes your value. Often they are related but not always. This is not what makes free markets work. The fact is, to make a better wage, get into an industry where the supply for workers is lower than the demand. You can probably find some great paying work doing business sytems. I'm only being slightly cheeky here.
4. Which brings us full circle. A lot of programmers don't WANT to be in anything other than the games industry. This is why there is such an oversupply of talented game programmers compared to other technical talents. How sexy is programming a database after all? The point is, the cost of BEING a games programmer is higher due to supply/demand. If no-one wanted to be in the games industry, you can bet EA would be doing a lot more to attract game programmers with reasonable hours, better pay, better work environment, etc. Mandating that the government (or anyone else) get involved simply tries to cover up the underlying supply/demand issues.
So, the solution to YOU getting paid better, is get out of this industry. They don't NEED another game programmer and every new one reduces the average compensation to each employee. Not only that, it ironically raises the value of employees in every other sector. So if you love game programming, be prepared to bite the bullet: lots of other people love it too.
Mandating that EA treats employees better will have marginally better treatment (though in the long run, manipulating free economics almost always backfires), people will see that you can get into games programming (which they already love) AND be treated well, the supply will go up again, demand is (relatively) stable, and there will just be a bunch of unemployed games programmers.
You see, when we complain about EA, people get scared of going into the industry, free economics works(!) Already a lot of people who may have considered going into this industry might have second thoughts.
The mistake is to think that you should get what you deserve: you don't. You get what you are worth.
Hello. McFly.
[man walks away with tail between his legs]
Except that the Internet Archive archives the same data over time. So, for example, a single website might be archived 100 times in slightly differing forms.
So while the amount of data predicted might still be wrong and probably is, it is not OBVIOUSLY wrong owing to the size of the Internet Archive.
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I necessarily agree just yet. I DO understand what you are saying (as I did from the start) and I understand that having no access is better than having a tiny bit of access. It is obviously safer to just block everything. It also has to do with tradeoffs. Obviously, the safest thing is having the browser not access the web. :) I don't believe you introduce a lot of security risk but simply loading an image into the browser though. It will always go through an image object first and whereupon that it does, it is no less safe than putting in an image object from the Internet. It seems to me that a lot of the bugs happen not from referencing the file but by having it execute when you don't mean it to be executed.
FYI, the reward was not to force the issue to get solved my way by paying for it. As I mention in the post, I believe the issue should be resolved anyways. My point for the reward is to make it happen sooner if possible. There may, for example, be somebody who would be willing to do it if there was a reward who wouldn't work on any other code anyways. This would simply speed up the process. I did not for one second think that the issue would be shoehorned in because I offered money which is why I posted that this reward may be controversial. It would obviously need to pass the quality control for Mozilla.
Secondly, this is not entirely for selfish reasons. Lots of people could take advantage of this and I've seen other code do image previews before a file is uploaded. I wrote my code for users of my software and you can get all the functionality in MSIE which is going to be most of my client base anyways. It is only selfish in that I have spent many months making Mozilla work in an effort to promote open source software and I will not get to see the results of that effort. So in that sense, yes, I suppose it is selfish. But really, this change would have a positive effect on many people building dynamic websites.
I don't think that is any more selfish than working on Mozilla so you can be part of something greater. I want to be part of promoting open source software. And again, I re-iterate, there are benefits to all users.
I am also somewhat disappointed in that I put a lot of faith into developing on Mozilla. Many of the issues with people hating closed source is that the code can be changed and you are left out in the cold when it happens. The irony is that this happened to me with Mozilla. I developed in good faith on a platform, spent a lot of time, money and sweat on it, and at the end of the day, they change it on me and there is nothing I can do about it. I don't see anything malicious behind the changes and I know it happens but I do take a wee bit of offense to the undertone of the message, regardless of how subtle it may be.
Okay, the counterpoint is what I thought it was but I wanted to make sure. By the way, I appreciate you taking the time to hash this out.
I see that there is probably one piece of code that handles all security.
That said, I see that getting it to support image loading isn't the major problem. I can understand the security risks of "linking" to a file but with a little bit of work, image loading should be no problem.
All you would have to do is when reading the image, look for the header bits to identify that it is indeed an image. Furthermore, unlike a link, there are absolutely no execute permissions. You are not dropping to the OS to execute the file in any way, shape or form. You are loading the image into the browser.
Now, granted, there have been image loading exploits but this is moot since any image loading exploits could be much more easily exploited by putting the image somewhere on the web and then loading it.
I understand worms and side effects but when reading that image into the browser, there is no way to execute a file. There is no way to read the file either except to get the width/height.
So even if it was VBS or EXE and it did get through the first layer of security by doing something funky with the URL, you STILL couldn't get it to run anything. At most, you could get an image to load into the browser that was invalid and crash the browser. And once again, you can do this through a web image much more easily anyways.
I don't mean to be dense but I don't see how loading an image from the local hard drive could compromise anything. At least not anything more than loading an image off the net.
It seems that a bug allowed non-image files to load as images and then you could detect that the file existed. But if you designed it such that only images could load and everything else would throw an onerror, why would this be a security issue at all? The only thing you could derive was that an image exists along with the width/height of the image.
Furthermore, I can assume that the local file exists because HE SELECTED IT! This is in my comment. If you fill in one of those handy INPUT TYPE=FILE boxes and select the image on your hard drive, I can give you an instant preview before uploading. And with some fancy javascript, I can create a fully WYSIWYG website template builder that will let you do everything before even uploading a single file.
Only problem is, I can't do it anymore.
Oops. Sorry to reply to my own message but I thought people might find this humorous. I didn't find it funny at the time but this was my message to my Chief Operating Officer in my company when I found out about FireFox 1.0 breaking my work. I think you can sense the passion:
-----
Fucker of fucking fuck fuck fucking fuckers. Fuck!
And you thought my morning was already bad.
Mother fucking Mozilla fucking Firefox release fucking fucking 1.0 disabled the ability to fucking access images on a local drive. Basically, this fucking fucker fuck fuck means that the image previews, which was one of the fucking main aspects of my fucking program doesn't work in fucking Mozilla now which means that the fucking fucker of fucking 9 months of fucking cross-compatibility fucking code is a fucking waste.
Fuck!
Sunny
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As a more serious side note, and relating to the article (which I forgot to mention in my parent post), this bug and the related one in the link (can't open local files at all. It just fails SILENTLY which is the worst) has forced a lot of people from being unable to use Mozilla in an Enterprise because you can't open local files from the browser.
Obviously it shouldn't execute local links directly but a warning message telling you what you are about to do should be okay. In Mozilla/Firefox, the browser just doesn't do anything. It throws in error in the JavaScript console but end users don't see it. The only way around it is to edit your configuration file which nobody wants to do. At this time, it seems even that is buggy.
One major weakness I've found for Firefox (and one that ticks me off to no end) is that there is no way for Firefox to load a local image.
I've actually offered a US $1000 bounty for anybody who can fix this and incorporate it into the main code base. See Link Here.
One thing that kills me about this is I spent 6-9 months developing software to work on MSIE and Mozilla. Mozilla would be a very small portion of my client base but I wanted to help promote open source. But since they made this change that disallows you from loading local images, all this work is gone to waste.
Anyways, I guess there are two things:
1. The fact that I developed on a 1.2 browser and the newer versions were NOT backward compatible. This sucks big ass. Imagine investing the time, money and effort on this and have it wasted. I know you could tell me I should have upgraded the browser but the point was that you always need to support the older browsers. I never even suspected that the newer browsers would purposely break something that worked in the older ones.
2. It's not a security issue. What damage can be done by loading an image that is on your computer. The most I could steal (info wise) is the width/height of that image and the fact that that image exists.
3. I wonder how my commercial incentive (the reward) plays out in an open source world. People are either going to be happy or hate it I presume. Either way, if you solve it and get it introduced into the release version, you get $1000.
I call bullshit.
Getting software programs to run error free from the start is extremely expensive. Just ask the guys who send things into space. Their development costs are several orders of magnitude higher because the cost of a bug is the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment. And sometimes they still have bugs.
I don't disagree that it *would be nice* to catch all the bugs before launch but saying that it is cheaper is a false start. Delaying time to market is also extremely expensive in the face of competitors.
Note: I'm not saying let's do away with making sure software works. I'm just saying this particular statement is a red herring.
My friend calls the white version of ricers "bread boys" as in, look at that silly breaded out mustang. Mus' be a bread boy.
;)
No, I'm not racist (as in anti-white). I make fun of all races equally, including my own.
Of all the days for me to not read Slashdot in the morning. I actually saw and used this system about 6 years ago though the prototype was literally the size of a freezer with a little eyepiece sticking out.
They believed, at the time, that they could get it small enough to fit on a pair of glasses in the future.
As for causing blindness (which is pretty much everyone's first reaction), this entirely has to do with the power of the laser and nobody is going to put a powerful laser in it. It's sort of like saying, don't use lightbulbs because they can cause blindness if they are powerful enough.
As for how it actually looks, it is just as if you were looking into an eyepiece of a camcorder (at least in their prototype) with the image somewhere in front of you. The cool thing though was since it was actually writing on your eye, you could take away the black backing and have the image appear in mid air. The usefulness is (a) that you can see the images overlaid on top of your vision and (b) you wouldn't need something bulky to do it.
Their eventual application potentials were to, for example, embed them into cell phones. You could bring your phone up to your eye and then could do stuff like read email on a full sized screen.
Hmm, I Just RTFA. Obviously this is a different company. The unit I saw was actually full color already though low resolution (640x480 I think). Remember, several years ago though.
Agreed.
And it kills me that some people still can't agree to put the horizontal resolution first.
To those who write it 480x640 (without meaning a vertical screen): The war is over. Please come out of the jungle.
Note that white pixels aren't a magic bullet. You get some brightness but give up saturation. It works like this:
Given four pixels of RGBW, you can get your brightest color by having all four pixels on. This would result in total brightness of:
1 white pixel for every combination of RGB and
1 white pixel for every white pixel.
So you get the equivalent of 2 white pixels for every 4 pixels or a factor of 1/2 let's say.
In regular RGB, you get a factor of 1/3 because you get the equivalent of 1 white pixel for every set of RGB pixels.
Looking at this, you get 50% more maximum brightness from RGBW vs RGB.
It's not a magic bullet because you lose saturation. For example, if you want a fully saturated red, in the RGBW format, you get 1 full red pixel for every four pixels. In RGB, you get 1 full red pixel for every three pixels. So RGBW gives a factor of 1/4 while RGB gives a factor of 1/3 for a fulls aturated red. This is a reduction in brightness of a full saturation red of 25%.
In other words, your brightest color is 50% higher in RGBW but you brightest red (at full saturation) is 25% less which means you have to fudge around with values to get a picture that seems to make sense or you get a bright picture with dark spots with a lot of saturation in them. So you might, programatically (and this is probably what samsung is doing) increase full saturation red to include white in it. This makes the color brighter but also reduces the saturation.
A lot of projectors with a white component have two modes. A dimmer mode that doesn't use the "W" pixel at all but has richer colors (used for movie viewing) and a presentation mode that does use the "W" when brightness is a factor such as in a meeting (e.g. the room may have light leaking in from windows).
Not saying it is good or bad. Just that a RGBW is not a magic bullet.
Interlacing is used to reduce flickering? I think not. It used to be used to reduce *bandwidth*.
An interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz (30 full fields per second divided by 2) is going to have the same flicker as a non-interlaced image refreshing at 60Hz.
This is actually a very complex subject to do with how people view images, resolution vs fields per second, what type of images you are viewing, movement vs. still images, etc. but in terms of reducing flicker, I would say, at the very least, the statement is deceptive.
In fact, one of the major problems with old Amigas running in interlaced mode was the annoying (you got it) flicker. This is because a horizontal line that was exactly 1 pixel would turn on and off every 60th of a second. So in this case, it would depend on how you defined the world flicker too.
To be fair, I think what you meant to say was that given the same bandwidth on a non-digitally compressed transmission and without digitally upconverting the signal, you can get 60 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) instead of 30 fields per second (at 30 frames per second) meaning that you will probably get less inter-frame flicker. But even this is deceptive because if you built televisions specifically for 30 frames per second, you could simply reformulate the glow on the screen to last an extra 1/60th of a second longer. But perhaps this is (a) hard to do and (b) back then they wanted the extra fields per second for smoother motion. By the way, a lot of the bandwidth savings doesn't apply to digital due to the way that digital compression works. This was a controversial point during the discussions on HDTV resolutions.
Fudge. I'm trying to cover all my bases here so I don't get flamed for not knowing what I'm talking about. Suffice it to say, interlacing and reduction of flicker do NOT walk hand in hand. It is simply one factor, of many, that comes into play.