I advised them prior to them leaving Iconix to start RockYou and shortly after they started angel round. I'm surprised they even got funding, I saw their code when they first got going -- hideously bad. It looked like little kids had created their sad PHP "infrastructure" and Flash slideshow app. They wanted help writing crontab tasks to run queries that took several minutes -- which I was able to pare down to under a second with proper query writing. Seems they had never heard of sub-selects or how to properly structure joins.
But, they clearly had connections within the entertainment industry and hit a chord with their target market of teenage girls and "bling" for their MySpace pages. And they got lots of money for a pretty easy concept.
Seeing them storing sensitive user data in plain text shows that not much has changed in their "core infrastructure". In fact, they were doing it back then too and I told them that was bullshit -- too bad they chose not to listen. Hopefully they've now learned how to use PHP's MCrypt Library, or at least use hashes. But this security failure has been going on since 2005/2006
Why is Jobs so revered? Because he had VISION. Because he was willing to take RISKS. Because he did NOTHING HALF-ASSED.
Your lack of respect someone who's not a hands on engineer is a mirror to engineering's perception that management and MBA types have no respect for them. Just because some one's occupation is different than yours does not make their efforts or contribution any less significant. How many companies have you founded? How many of those companies have become household names? How many of those have become the most valuable companies in the United States?
If you really want to see a story of vision and risk, look at Pixar. He took that from Lucas who had no clue what to do with it and turned it into an animation powerhouse which singlehandedly brought 3D Feature Length Animated Movies into the mainstream. Did he do the animation? Did he write the stories or create the characters? Did he take part in day to day production or management? No. But he saw their abilities and desire to innovate, he took the risks and he did everything he could to help them in their success. And like he did to Apple with NeXT, when Disney bought Pixar, Pixar essentially took over Disney Studios and he himself took over the entirety of Disney.
The guy has immense talent and skill in his area of expertise that is deserving of respect and yes, even hype -- why do you begrudge him that?
There's so many opinions flying around here about this, yet I honestly can't pass judgment on any of this information. All I do know is that the existing evidence is more than sufficient to merit formal charges and an arrest warrant.
If the DA has not put in for a warrant for Zimmerman as a suspect for murder by end of business on Monday, then I think the DOJ should pursue a more vigorous investigation into racism and misconduct within the DA's office and the Police Department.
Frankly, Zimmerman's story has stunk from the get go, the actions of the police have stunk and the more information comes out, the more the entire thing stinks. If we don't see the DA take swift and immediate action on Monday, we'll know where their motives truly lie.
The Affordable Care Act failing to pass muster in the Supreme Court would imperil the planned 2013 Legislative Lobby agenda by the RIAA and MPAA to introduce that Affordable Media Act (AMA) which would provide Government Subsidies to help keep Blu-Ray and Access to Media Streaming Services at existing Prices in exchange for the requirement for all American Tax Payers to show proof of the purchase of at least $500 per year in Digital Media from any one of a number of participants in a Government run Media Marketplace (member including Walmart, iTunes Music Store, Amazon and others) or pay a tax penalty of $100,000.00 or 10 years imprisonment since it can be assumed that by not buying media from an authorized Marketplace Member, you are engaged in Copyright Infringement.
American's want online media -- let's provide it to them in a lawful and controlled manner.
Wowza is low cost, supports AWS hosting and has DVR functionality built-in, you just point the client at the DVR App to start recording broadcasts. It will save this broadcast as an FLV file on the server, one for each broadcast. You can extend this functionality to whatever edge case you may have by using Java POJO coding as well as transcode using FFMPEG. Another nice plus is that it can support playback at various bitrates so you can offer adaptive playback to support lower bandwidth clients as well as those with fast connections. On the whole, it's very straight forward to get up and running with Wowza.
The draw back is that it uses RTMP for incoming stream recording and since there is no HTML-based Device support (yet), use of a webcam or external camera requires you use Flash based technology for the Broadcast Client. The good news is that you can develop a Flash based client for all platforms, aside from Mobile Browser. Android, iOS and WebOS can be delivered as Native Apps written with Flex with a captive Adobe Air Binary inside, Air also allows you to create Desktop Apps for Windows and Mac, though Linux support has been tossed due to lack of interest from Flash hating Linux users (however Linux support can be had by using older SDKs if it is an absolute must have). Wowza supports re-streaming, so the videos could be streamed as mp4 instead of flv and via other protocols (such as HLS) so other non-Flash based players (such as an HTML5 video tag in a mobile browser) could play back the recorded video.
The major cost here is in the development of a tailor-made broadcast and playback client to the various platforms (a good AS3 developer could write a single core codebase that has a web, and native app UI to minimize cost). The Wowza license is $50/month on AWS and similarly priced to host on your own hardware. Unless you have several hundred or more regular viewers, bandwidth costs should not be a factor.
I pay nearly $1500 A WEEK in income tax and I'd like to know what the hell our Government thinks it's doing by sitting idly by and saying "Geez, the Chinese Government is attacking our Corporate Citizens and by proxy, our Economic Security and the future Security of our entire Nation -- that's too bad"
Why isn't this seen as a DECLARATION OF WAR? We make an international incident of locking up Kim Dot Com for some file sharing BUT DO NOTHING while the Chinese Government assails our Corporations with a literal Army of Hackers.
Why are we not destroying this army of hackers, why are we not taking down the Chinese Internet Infrastructure or putting up a great firewall around China in retribution for this behavior.
Are we so badly owned that we can not afford to do a thing? Is this how much we fear our Chinese masters?
We had better either take down the US Flag and start flying the Red flag of China or we had better hit them hard and without mercy as we would anyone who would harm Americans.
I use my iPad almost every day -- if only to watch Netflix and Hulu on, the small screen form factor is perfect for watching on the nightstand, dining or coffee table. Also, I keep it in the newspaper pocket of my briefcase, so it's handier to get to than my laptop if I want to do something online or use a full site instead of just a scaled down mobile version. I also use it for tablet testing my web ui projects.
It seems they have since removed some of the images from their site. When this issue first went viral, they had still images taken from the movies, such as Elijah Wood as Frodo, a still of the Boromir (the one usually associated with the Boromir "walk into Mordor" meme) and others that all advertised the Hobbit Pub and their products or upcoming live act performances. If you go back to he related headline above, you'll see others bringing this issue up at that time.
What cultural heritage do you have to show that illustrates why "The Hobbit Pub" should be able to take still images from the LoTR films and place them on their promotional material?
As I said in my post, I'm all for them using fan art and art inspired by the Hobbit and LoTR in general, that are original and either donated to them or placed under public license. But, taking images from the movie is indeed copyright infringement and they are making use of those works in order to profit from them. Can I make this distinction more clear? Is this not reasonable?
It's not just the use of the name "The Hobbit" it's the use of Still Images from the LOTR movies in their promotional material. Essentially, these people are lifting copyrighted imagery and using it to promote themselves -- most definitely NOT cool and if I was one of the parties that ponied up hundreds of millions to make these films, I'd be a bit peeved by someone taking that work and using it without permission to make a profit.
I can only imagine that Stephen Fry and Sir Ian McKellen do not know the full story here and possibly think that this is a matter of a harmless pub merely using the word "Hobbit" in their name and have not seen the website or promotional material produced by this pub.
And for the record, the web site and promo material is completely amateur and quite tacky. Hopefully any money given to the pub to support them would mandate that they cease using imagery from the movies and perhaps use hand drawn illustrations by fans and artists who wish to contribute artwork for them to use.
That any sudden rise under the surface of a pockmark or crater can only be one thing -- festering acne. Next time hit that zit with some cleansers after popping it.
Considering the vast political and ideological decide between States like California, New York, Washington vs Georgia, Texas and Mississippi, wouldn't we be better off ending the Union of States and allowing like minded States to refactor into new Unions with new Constitutions? It seems our entire political system is at a partisan standstill with both sides stonewalling the other and a government that has racked up a debt unequaled in even recent history.
If States like Texas, Tennassee and Georgia want to live like wealth worshipping Taliban, let them. I for one think we'd be better off reevaluating the Union and it's effect on the population in general. At the rate were going, Civil War is not all that unlikely as the media continues to drive politics to further extremes. So perhaps a good look now and willingness to let go of the Union and getting a fresh political perspective could prevent our Nation's situation from getting worse. Besides, the Coastal and Northern Union would still maintain the largest GDP in the world without having to pay for the welfare of the barely literate parochial types in the Confederacy.
"The Dragon's scheduled late March/early April test flight to the ISS will be unmanned"
Considering SpaceX's record of launch failures, I hope they stick to unmanned flights for many years to come. Otherwise, the Dragon -- named after a mythical man-eating creature that killed it's prey with it's flames could prove to be a very suitable name.
Mammoths can't fit through a Walk-In Refrigerator's doors, aren't carnivorous and who's going to say no to some good ol' Bedrock-Style BBQ Mammoth Ribs?
Did they get along? Were they friendly? How did this "meeting" go?
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far. It's one thing to refer to them as "she" and even to grow fond of them and revere them with the same affection you'd give a pet -- but to somehow imply they have consciousness is just silly.
"It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language"
Ahh -- yes, I see, so I should write my Apps in Python, except where they need to be rewritten in C/C++ because that will run faster than when written in Python, but Python is not slow when you rewrite portions -- so don't rewrite in a faster language because Pyton is fast enough.
Wrong. Bush was a Republican and therefor a bad guy. He is quite literally Satan incarnate who on his first day in office ordered the near flawless Government IT Network of peace loving Linux machines running 100% Open Source Software scrapped and spent a large part of the US budget surplus of half a trillion dollars on surplus Pentium hardware slated for the scrap heaps of China running Windows and vast licensing of buggy and proprietary commercial software personally delivered by Steve Balmer. Everything the Bush Administration did was to further their overarching conspiracy of something or other.
Don't believe me? Then you need to educate yourself with some Michael Moore documentaries and Alex Jones videos over on Youtube, the only news site you can trust./sarcasm
50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't..
But we still have the know-how and we are actively building new launch systems that can and will support manned spaceflight. Just because we had to retire the Shuttle's before we have a replacement ready doesn't mean we can't. Besides, using the Suyuz craft is far more cost effective than continuing shuttle flights.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
Yes we are. Just because we don't have the biggest dick on the Super-Collider block doesn't mean we aren't participating. How many colliders do we need? Do you know how big and expensive the LHC is? Does the world need a second one? What would the benefits be aside from facilitating a race? In case you don't know, US scientists can run tests on the LHC and US scientists have access to the data that comes from the LHC. As do other scientists around the world. Particle Physics is no longer the domain of a handful of competing and jealously mistrusting egos, it's a large global effort that requires international cooperation to analyze and review the data these machines generate.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
And how many missions did those 3 different spacecraft fly? How long did it take to develop the Shuttle and how many missions did those fly? How many missions are our new craft supposed to fly? Are the new craft more safe and advanced than the craft of 50 years ago?
It takes a lot longer to build a gun than a slingshot.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
Mach 3.5? Have you not heard of the Falcon project? They are exceeding Mach 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
That's a tad bit faster IMHO.
I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.
Rest assured that you sound just like every other conservative minded adult concerned about his children's future since the dawn of time. Things are never as good as they used to be when we were young -- but that has more to do with the loss of childhood's naive innocence and the acquisition of much cynicism through the years of our life than it does with the demise of our culture or civilization.
What? And leave out the bit where Data gets to use his anatomical completeness on a homosexual-looking Chief of Security who wants to get back in touch with her feminine side while infected with the tequila-virus from space?
Slashdot Mirror
I advised them prior to them leaving Iconix to start RockYou and shortly after they started angel round. I'm surprised they even got funding, I saw their code when they first got going -- hideously bad. It looked like little kids had created their sad PHP "infrastructure" and Flash slideshow app. They wanted help writing crontab tasks to run queries that took several minutes -- which I was able to pare down to under a second with proper query writing. Seems they had never heard of sub-selects or how to properly structure joins.
But, they clearly had connections within the entertainment industry and hit a chord with their target market of teenage girls and "bling" for their MySpace pages. And they got lots of money for a pretty easy concept.
Seeing them storing sensitive user data in plain text shows that not much has changed in their "core infrastructure".
In fact, they were doing it back then too and I told them that was bullshit -- too bad they chose not to listen.
Hopefully they've now learned how to use PHP's MCrypt Library, or at least use hashes.
But this security failure has been going on since 2005/2006
Why is Jobs so revered?
Because he had VISION.
Because he was willing to take RISKS.
Because he did NOTHING HALF-ASSED.
Your lack of respect someone who's not a hands on engineer is a mirror to engineering's perception that management and MBA types have no respect for them. Just because some one's occupation is different than yours does not make their efforts or contribution any less significant. How many companies have you founded? How many of those companies have become household names? How many of those have become the most valuable companies in the United States?
If you really want to see a story of vision and risk, look at Pixar. He took that from Lucas who had no clue what to do with it and turned it into an animation powerhouse which singlehandedly brought 3D Feature Length Animated Movies into the mainstream. Did he do the animation? Did he write the stories or create the characters? Did he take part in day to day production or management? No. But he saw their abilities and desire to innovate, he took the risks and he did everything he could to help them in their success. And like he did to Apple with NeXT, when Disney bought Pixar, Pixar essentially took over Disney Studios and he himself took over the entirety of Disney.
The guy has immense talent and skill in his area of expertise that is deserving of respect and yes, even hype -- why do you begrudge him that?
There's so many opinions flying around here about this, yet I honestly can't pass judgment on any of this information.
All I do know is that the existing evidence is more than sufficient to merit formal charges and an arrest warrant.
If the DA has not put in for a warrant for Zimmerman as a suspect for murder by end of business on Monday, then I think the DOJ should pursue a more vigorous investigation into racism and misconduct within the DA's office and the Police Department.
Frankly, Zimmerman's story has stunk from the get go, the actions of the police have stunk and the more information comes out, the more the entire thing stinks. If we don't see the DA take swift and immediate action on Monday, we'll know where their motives truly lie.
The Affordable Care Act failing to pass muster in the Supreme Court would imperil the planned 2013 Legislative Lobby agenda by the RIAA and MPAA to introduce that Affordable Media Act (AMA) which would provide Government Subsidies to help keep Blu-Ray and Access to Media Streaming Services at existing Prices in exchange for the requirement for all American Tax Payers to show proof of the purchase of at least $500 per year in Digital Media from any one of a number of participants in a Government run Media Marketplace (member including Walmart, iTunes Music Store, Amazon and others) or pay a tax penalty of $100,000.00 or 10 years imprisonment since it can be assumed that by not buying media from an authorized Marketplace Member, you are engaged in Copyright Infringement.
American's want online media -- let's provide it to them in a lawful and controlled manner.
We can build our Moon Base for super-cheap with exported Mexican labor!
NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!! NEWT!!!
Wowza is low cost, supports AWS hosting and has DVR functionality built-in, you just point the client at the DVR App to start recording broadcasts. It will save this broadcast as an FLV file on the server, one for each broadcast. You can extend this functionality to whatever edge case you may have by using Java POJO coding as well as transcode using FFMPEG. Another nice plus is that it can support playback at various bitrates so you can offer adaptive playback to support lower bandwidth clients as well as those with fast connections. On the whole, it's very straight forward to get up and running with Wowza.
The draw back is that it uses RTMP for incoming stream recording and since there is no HTML-based Device support (yet), use of a webcam or external camera requires you use Flash based technology for the Broadcast Client. The good news is that you can develop a Flash based client for all platforms, aside from Mobile Browser. Android, iOS and WebOS can be delivered as Native Apps written with Flex with a captive Adobe Air Binary inside, Air also allows you to create Desktop Apps for Windows and Mac, though Linux support has been tossed due to lack of interest from Flash hating Linux users (however Linux support can be had by using older SDKs if it is an absolute must have). Wowza supports re-streaming, so the videos could be streamed as mp4 instead of flv and via other protocols (such as HLS) so other non-Flash based players (such as an HTML5 video tag in a mobile browser) could play back the recorded video.
The major cost here is in the development of a tailor-made broadcast and playback client to the various platforms (a good AS3 developer could write a single core codebase that has a web, and native app UI to minimize cost). The Wowza license is $50/month on AWS and similarly priced to host on your own hardware. Unless you have several hundred or more regular viewers, bandwidth costs should not be a factor.
I pay nearly $1500 A WEEK in income tax and I'd like to know what the hell our Government thinks it's doing by sitting idly by and saying "Geez, the Chinese Government is attacking our Corporate Citizens and by proxy, our Economic Security and the future Security of our entire Nation -- that's too bad"
Why isn't this seen as a DECLARATION OF WAR? We make an international incident of locking up Kim Dot Com for some file sharing BUT DO NOTHING while the Chinese Government assails our Corporations with a literal Army of Hackers.
Why are we not destroying this army of hackers, why are we not taking down the Chinese Internet Infrastructure or putting up a great firewall around China in retribution for this behavior.
Are we so badly owned that we can not afford to do a thing?
Is this how much we fear our Chinese masters?
We had better either take down the US Flag and start flying the Red flag of China or we had better hit them hard and without mercy as we would anyone who would harm Americans.
I use my iPad almost every day -- if only to watch Netflix and Hulu on, the small screen form factor is perfect for watching on the nightstand, dining or coffee table. Also, I keep it in the newspaper pocket of my briefcase, so it's handier to get to than my laptop if I want to do something online or use a full site instead of just a scaled down mobile version. I also use it for tablet testing my web ui projects.
But mainly it's movies, movies, movies.
Julian Assange's creampie rampage caused 70+ abortions?
Now I know why they were so adamant about getting an extradition order.
It seems they have since removed some of the images from their site. When this issue first went viral, they had still images taken from the movies, such as Elijah Wood as Frodo, a still of the Boromir (the one usually associated with the Boromir "walk into Mordor" meme) and others that all advertised the Hobbit Pub and their products or upcoming live act performances. If you go back to he related headline above, you'll see others bringing this issue up at that time.
What cultural heritage do you have to show that illustrates why "The Hobbit Pub" should be able to take still images from the LoTR films and place them on their promotional material?
As I said in my post, I'm all for them using fan art and art inspired by the Hobbit and LoTR in general, that are original and either donated to them or placed under public license. But, taking images from the movie is indeed copyright infringement and they are making use of those works in order to profit from them. Can I make this distinction more clear? Is this not reasonable?
It's not just the use of the name "The Hobbit" it's the use of Still Images from the LOTR movies in their promotional material. Essentially, these people are lifting copyrighted imagery and using it to promote themselves -- most definitely NOT cool and if I was one of the parties that ponied up hundreds of millions to make these films, I'd be a bit peeved by someone taking that work and using it without permission to make a profit.
I can only imagine that Stephen Fry and Sir Ian McKellen do not know the full story here and possibly think that this is a matter of a harmless pub merely using the word "Hobbit" in their name and have not seen the website or promotional material produced by this pub.
And for the record, the web site and promo material is completely amateur and quite tacky. Hopefully any money given to the pub to support them would mandate that they cease using imagery from the movies and perhaps use hand drawn illustrations by fans and artists who wish to contribute artwork for them to use.
That any sudden rise under the surface of a pockmark or crater can only be one thing -- festering acne.
Next time hit that zit with some cleansers after popping it.
Oh, you must be one of those "Real Americans".
Learn some rhetoric.
Considering the vast political and ideological decide between States like California, New York, Washington vs Georgia, Texas and Mississippi, wouldn't we be better off ending the Union of States and allowing like minded States to refactor into new Unions with new Constitutions? It seems our entire political system is at a partisan standstill with both sides stonewalling the other and a government that has racked up a debt unequaled in even recent history.
If States like Texas, Tennassee and Georgia want to live like wealth worshipping Taliban, let them. I for one think we'd be better off reevaluating the Union and it's effect on the population in general. At the rate were going, Civil War is not all that unlikely as the media continues to drive politics to further extremes. So perhaps a good look now and willingness to let go of the Union and getting a fresh political perspective could prevent our Nation's situation from getting worse. Besides, the Coastal and Northern Union would still maintain the largest GDP in the world without having to pay for the welfare of the barely literate parochial types in the Confederacy.
"The Dragon's scheduled late March/early April test flight to the ISS will be unmanned"
Considering SpaceX's record of launch failures, I hope they stick to unmanned flights for many years to come. Otherwise, the Dragon -- named after a mythical man-eating creature that killed it's prey with it's flames could prove to be a very suitable name.
Mammoths can't fit through a Walk-In Refrigerator's doors, aren't carnivorous and who's going to say no to some good ol' Bedrock-Style BBQ Mammoth Ribs?
Did they get along? Were they friendly?
How did this "meeting" go?
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far. It's one thing to refer to them as "she" and even to grow fond of them and revere them with the same affection you'd give a pet -- but to somehow imply they have consciousness is just silly.
"It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language"
Ahh -- yes, I see, so I should write my Apps in Python, except where they need to be rewritten in C/C++ because that will run faster than when written in Python, but Python is not slow when you rewrite portions -- so don't rewrite in a faster language because Pyton is fast enough.
Alrighty then.
Just went down in flames
Wrong. Bush was a Republican and therefor a bad guy. He is quite literally Satan incarnate who on his first day in office ordered the near flawless Government IT Network of peace loving Linux machines running 100% Open Source Software scrapped and spent a large part of the US budget surplus of half a trillion dollars on surplus Pentium hardware slated for the scrap heaps of China running Windows and vast licensing of buggy and proprietary commercial software personally delivered by Steve Balmer. Everything the Bush Administration did was to further their overarching conspiracy of something or other.
Don't believe me? Then you need to educate yourself with some Michael Moore documentaries and Alex Jones videos over on Youtube, the only news site you can trust. /sarcasm
50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't..
But we still have the know-how and we are actively building new launch systems that can and will support manned spaceflight.
Just because we had to retire the Shuttle's before we have a replacement ready doesn't mean we can't.
Besides, using the Suyuz craft is far more cost effective than continuing shuttle flights.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
Yes we are. Just because we don't have the biggest dick on the Super-Collider block doesn't mean we aren't participating. How many colliders do we need? Do you know how big and expensive the LHC is? Does the world need a second one? What would the benefits be aside from facilitating a race? In case you don't know, US scientists can run tests on the LHC and US scientists have access to the data that comes from the LHC. As do other scientists around the world. Particle Physics is no longer the domain of a handful of competing and jealously mistrusting egos, it's a large global effort that requires international cooperation to analyze and review the data these machines generate.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
And how many missions did those 3 different spacecraft fly? How long did it take to develop the Shuttle and how many missions did those fly?
How many missions are our new craft supposed to fly? Are the new craft more safe and advanced than the craft of 50 years ago?
It takes a lot longer to build a gun than a slingshot.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
Mach 3.5?
Have you not heard of the Falcon project? They are exceeding Mach 17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
That's a tad bit faster IMHO.
I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.
Rest assured that you sound just like every other conservative minded adult concerned about his children's future since the dawn of time.
Things are never as good as they used to be when we were young -- but that has more to do with the loss of childhood's naive innocence and the acquisition of much cynicism through the years of our life than it does with the demise of our culture or civilization.
Care to tell us how they were rotating previously?
Judging by the amount of vitriol on your rant, it seems you got ... *snigger* ... TROLLED.
What? And leave out the bit where Data gets to use his anatomical completeness on a homosexual-looking Chief of Security who wants to get back in touch with her feminine side while infected with the tequila-virus from space?