So - the question remains: who's doing anything more than cosmetic work on modern user interfaces? Several people have commented on the fact that it's a huge hurdle for a truly non-technical person to understand any of the existing UIs. I completely agree.
All these UI designs are natural extensions of previous ones. It's probably better to extend a flawed interface that everyone's familiar with instead of building a better one from scratch. Anyone looking to build an interface should probably keep one eye on Microsoft's manual of style regardless of the platform. They key thing is to keep things easy and the users at ease.
The most important connection between contemporary UIs is their reliance on the screen/mouse/keyboard combination. Compare how you use a computer to how you do anything else in life and it becomes obvious how much of a burden these UIs place on the user. It really isn't natural, we've just adapted. And so to answer your question, I don't think we'll see a major jump in usability until an avenue appears that will allow us to at least ditch the mouse. Touchscreen or similiar is probably the next step - as this technology becomes cheaper and more common, applications will start to be written to better deal with this kind of interface. Beyond that is probably voice recognition, that alone would make the Microsoft Start menu almost unnecessary. Beyond that... I can't even guess. It's Sci-fi territory.
For the forseable future, those of us who work with computers in a technical capacity will probably keep our own interfaces just out of habit. The rest of the world will most certainly move in a simpler direction, towards computers you can talk to and poke at.
Because this seems to be a continual (and somewhat legendary) problem, I think the powers that be (Taco et al) should put a system in place wherein they give sysadmins some sort of warning before they post a slashdot article
I agree completely. I can imagine a situation where someone might post a little bit of cool code they had written on their home web server, then watch as their poor DSL connection is completely crushed because someone posted to Slashdot. It's a very uncool thing when it happens.
So I thought about the problem and I realized that to successfully combat the problem would take a good deal of work. The Slashdot editors would essentially have to do minor research on each piece, write ahead and get permission to post it, correlate the timing, and finally end up posting the article a week after it had been submitted. They wouldn't have to do all this with major sites of course, like CNN or the NY Times, but it would be a godsend for all the poor saps who just want to post something cool.
I doubt this will happen since it would mean running Slashdot more like a real news source and less like a bulletin board. If the Slashdot editors can't be bothered to do things like check URLs or spelling, they certainly wouldn't be up for long term planning. A little bit of a shame actually.
hang on for the ride, kids. it's gonna get weird. i bet we see AI legistlation in the next 10 years.
That's what they were saying 10 years ago. Better projects than this one have failed to pan out in any meaningful way, I guess CNN was still looking for A.I. stories. I personally don't see any of our current technology and techniques delivering A.I.; if it comes to be, it will be do to something that hasn't even been discovered yet.
Just how did Creative Labs become the de facto standard of sound cards back in the days of DOS gaming?
Price, the Soundblaster was the best buy for the money. Few DOS games used sampled sounds since they took up so much space, rather they focused on MIDI music. To get the best quality music took a Roland MT32 or Sound Canvas which cost somewhere between $400 and $1000, a Soundblaster cost $130 and it could play and record audio samples. Unless you had money to burn or you were into computer music, it was the best choice.
Very interesting stuff, thanks for the info. I have a feeling that if I want to get much more in depth, I'll have to start reading equations.
Gotta love moderating. My original article stays a 1 and your reply gets a 2.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, it's a 2 because I used my bonus point (high karma) and not because some moderator thinks I'm really smart. My original post was at 5 yesterday and got knocked down to 4 today as "overrated." Perhaps I'm being punished for not specifying lossy compression, oh well.
Maybe moderation scores are a good source of random noise?
You know that isn't the case. Most moderation is pretty easy to predict. There's just enough randmosity to keep things interesting - it'd be boring if only reasonable, knowledgable people got modded up.
The 1 minute explanation of entropy signature analysis is that it seeks to quantify in R^(n+m) space, the statistical properties of a stream of data by applying n statistical tests to the data. How well or poorly the data passes these tests helps identify the method of generation.
I'm curious about this statement. Assuming a truly random number source, an excellent encryption system, and removing any identifying marks (header, etc.), a cryptographic string should be indistinguishable from random data. Any given byte should statistically appear the same number of times as any other, any pattern should appear the same number of times as any other pattern of the same length. Is there some important mathematical precept I'm missing or are you merely talking about the idiosyncrasies of convention algorithms?
In case anyone was wondering why I spend time working with LavaRnd, cryptographically strong PRNGs, Lava Lite ® lamps and other random oddiments
When I came across the original SGI Lava Lamp number generator so long ago, I thought it was one of the coolest things around. I have yet to come across something that could generate as random a number in as closed a space... cool stuff.
you shouldn't generalise that all audio compression is lossy.
You're right, sorry about that. My mind was working in the confines of the article which was focused on lossy algorithms exclusively (jpgs). My other justification is that lossless algorithms aren't that interesting from a steganography standpoint, mainly because they're not nearly as often used. Mp3, jpg, mpg, etc. are all lossy and they're transferred daily, these are the file types that steganography would be most useful in.
So, how can the algorithms mentioned in the article (which is interesting, but rather short on facts...) distinguish between the noise added by a steganographically embedded encrypted message and the noise caused by a slightly underspecced A to D converter?
You're right, there isn't too much of a difference between random noise and an encrypted communication. If you had a pure digital stream that had just been converted from analog, you could stick data in the least significant bits and no one would be the wiser. For example, a CD is just a sequence of 16 bit words iterated 44,100 times a second; you could just replace the least significant bit in each word with bits from your hidden message and it would be indistiguishable from random noise.
The problem arises when you try to compress digital information. These compression algorithms use the most optimum way to represent data that they can find and discard the least significant data, so they would completely destroy the afore mentioned hidden message. To hide data in a compressed file you need to play with how the compression mechanism stores the data, and the resulting file is most probably not going to be optimally compressed when you're done. What this guy is doing is looking at how the information was compressed, extract the overlying data that was being stored, and making sure the compression algorithm was indeed optimal. If there are any odd quirks in the compressed data or it doesn't look like the compression was optimal, it may be because data is hidden inside.
I hope this is a good enough explanation. I'm short on the examples but the underlying ideas are pretty basic.
There will never be a way to restrict the access of information totally, a single Slashdot brainstorming session could come up with enough bizarre hacks to keep us safe for quite a while. What has freaked the companies out is how easy it is for the common person to gain access to copyrighted materials. And that's exactly how far things are going to be pushed; when the computers people buy in stores can't be made to easily access copyrighted materials, the companies will breath a collective sigh of relief and relax. We'll have burrowed tunnels through whatever protection mechanism that's in place but no one will really care.
Fact is, even the company itself may not know; sometimes the switch comes because the company didn't make it trying to execute Plan A, and Plan B is to sell out to advertisers or some acquisition. Anyone have either logic or heuristics to offer as far as trying to navigate these situations?
You are exactly right. There is no way to know what a company is going to do in the future, the best you can do is try to predict their future actions by looking at their past actions. In my mind Google has maintained an impressive consumer focus and generally done right by their users, this gives them positive points. A new company has no past to judge by, so I can't judge them positively or negatively. But the important thing to note here is that I'm judging both companies on their actions, not what they say. So in the end it doesn't matter what the new company says is in their future, Google still wins my business because they've proven themselves to me.
I brought up this whole line of reasoning because it seems like a lot of Slashdot readers are very anxious to "get ahead" or at least get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. We're riding the technology wave here, we don't want to stick with what's proven, we want to move ahead. It would be a shame to lose a good product just because we were taken in by some marketing hype. It happens enough in the real world, let's hope it doesn't happen here.
The thing that has most impressed me about Google isn't its technology, but the restraint and good sense they've shown in the Internet community. While every other search engine has tried a go at the portal route, Google has focused on simply being a search engine. They've continued to add features that improve the user's experience at the same time other engines sell their results to the highest bidder.
Some of the most annoying companies in existance came about because they pulled a massive version of bait and switch, they adopted a consumer friendly strategy for the short term but changed when they got big enough to destroy the competition. Google has done remarkably little despite their impressive potential marketing position. Companies like this is where our business should go, it is our power as consumers to make decisions like this.
My point is that if/when something better than Google comes along, you should think twice before changing your homepage. When choosing a company, it's not just who provides the best product in the short term, you have to take into account long term as well.
Let's see... is the cool part of the internet being able to use IRC, or being able to create your own, personal piece of cyberspace with which others around the world can interact?
That would indeed be pretty cool and might start pulling people in but it won't happen until a impressive 3D toolset becomes available. Most of the Internet community can't build their own web page, they'll be absolutely clueless when it comes to building their own 3D virtual residence. Not only would the backend 3D stuff need to be powerful enough that the elite architects can build their metaphysical wonders, but there needs to be an easy way for people to simply draw out what they want things to look like. When creating virtual worlds becomes an easy thing to do (and in my opinion, it's one of the hardest things to do currently), enough people will be doing it that the population can begin to grow.
Interestingly enough, the trigger point of growth in Stephenson's Metaverse was the development of facial recognition software. When the technology grew to the point that you could communicate almost as effectively in cyberspace as F2F, the Metaverse became a serious business. I suspect there is more than a little truth to this idea, a 3D environment would grow if people had some real reason to be there. But I suspect most people who are working on this sort of thing would burn their code rather than let someone program a virtual fashion boutique.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there
This is definately one thing that has never been, "build it and they will come." Multiple people have tried building 3D worlds and they end up sucking. The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there? The coolness factor wears off in time, and users go back to communicating to people using a single window rather than a full screen environment.
The most likely way something anywhere near the Metaverse will originate will be through the current massive online games. As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
So in conclusing, the beginnings of the Metaverse are already here. Sign up for your EQ account today and get in on the ground floor, I suspect Verant will be providing what you're looking for in 5 years.
You can get 16:1 compression on text files? What compression program is that?
Oh yeah, nothing compresses better than text files. Grab a pure text file and compress it into a.zip file, you'll see what I mean.
The key is that most lossless compression algorithms generate a dictionary of common patterns, then replace the file with an ID representing the pattern. This is really easy to do with the english language, essentially you can replace each word with a binary number. More over, common words and patterns can be represented by smaller binary numbers. I don't want to get too technical (and at this point it gets harder to explain without drawing pictures) but you get the idea.
Text files are so small that we generally don't worry about compressing them, but it's certainly a viable thing to do. And if you're trying to send large amounts of text all over the place, it will certainly make things run faster for you.
What you seem to want are "bloated" formats that can't be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time.
That's a stupid design, I don't want that. I'm merely pointing out how small books are in comparison to the binary files we're used to. As for proprietary, that word may not be the best description, I merely used it because that's the reality of the situation. I highly doubt any publisher is going to accept an open solution, they'll buy it from a 3rd party company that will make certain assurances. The core of my argument is that this is not necessarly a bad thing.
One last thing: the works of William Shakespeare are in the public domain. No amount of copying of his works could possibly be illegal.
I know, I looked up the file sizes online to make sure that you could indeed fit the complete works in a file smaller than a standard mp3. With compression (16:1) you definately could. I just needed a suitably thick tome for my comparison.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
Companies have been building their software in recent years to make copying more difficult. They understand that copying is inevitable, but by using sophisticated install programs and liberal use of the Windows registry, they have made it tricky to simply copy a program. The software industry has been dealing with digital copying the longest, it makes sense that they would've gravitated toward some level of protection by now.
I'd like to expand on some points I made in the previous post. The first thing to consider about electronic books is how small they are. A single mp3 weighs in around 5 megs, which is quite a bit larger than a compressed version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place.
I also understand that there are books currently being released in unsecured formats and there isn't a problem with copying. My response is that the distribution channels aren't really there yet for wide spread piracy. When someone thinks of music they think (or used to) Napster; when someone thinks of books, no Internet solution pops in their heads, yet. As more books become available in electronic format, more people will look into copying them because the selection will be there.
As I stated before, it's my opinion that a proprietary format is needed to "keep the honest people honest". I'm not saying Adobe is the best solution for that, I personally would prefer a more open design, but it makes a lot of sense to me to keep heading in this direction. Just my two cents.
There should be no proprietary text formatting options.
I disagree. If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous. You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did.
It's obvious to me that the publishing industry does need a proprietary and relatively secure format for sending out their books. They also need to grit their teeth and accept the fact that people are going to copy their stuff. Really you don't have to do much to "keep the honest people honest".
Anyway, the geek crowd who knows how to bypass this stuff is the same geek crowd that will wait in line to get their book signed by the author. I don't think too much worry is warranted.
But lately, Pete Abrams has taken to wholesale quoting of pop culture with a small dash of funny on the top.
I've actually enjoyed it quite a bit lately, mostly because it's funny. Anyone can write a long, twisted story arc and argue how good it is, what's great about Sluggy is how many daily strips Pete manages to end with a punchline. The current storyline is pretty silly but I've been getting a chuckle from it nearly every day. It is true that humor is subjective, but if you don't find Sluggy funny then you're getting a lot less from it than I am.
You don't want Sealand, you want Freedom Ship. Who knows whether it will ever see the light of day, but the idea intrigues me. More the idea of travelling around the world over the course of 2 years, but it has several benefits that could appeal to the Slashdot crowd.
I really don't see why Dolby would have a problem with people cracking open their standard. It isn't useful for copying, you don't need to be able to open the audio stream to copy it. The only reason you'd want to decode the audio is if you planned on watching it which Dolby shouldn't have a problem with. Am I missing something obvious or is Dolby just being a jerk?
What if the President of the USA, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, the entire Senate, the entire House of Representatives, etc. etc. were simultaneously assassinated? Can you even imagine ensuing chaos?
It wouldn't be that bad actually. One of the major strengths the US government has is a fairly clear line of succession, it's always obvious who is in charge in a given situation. And really it isn't even important who specifically is in charge, just so long as someone is. I doubt we'd really be too worried about it anyway, we'd be far more concerned about what killed them.
The point is though that this small minority is also under the best protection. You estimate the number to be 0.0004% of our population (a little over a thousand people), inverse that to say they have 250,000 times better security than the rest of us. As this applies to the Internet, we just need to make sure that our main routers have the same level of protection. That rule of thumb makes sense to me, if there are 10,000 machines behind a connection then it should be 10,000 times harder to take down that connection than a single machine. I know it doesn't sound like a good metric, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I think this post was fair game, I don't see why it was moderated down. One of the wonderful things about Slashdot discussions is that they expand beyond the confines of the original topic. Anyway,
I really hate those watermarks that appear on TV in the corners. I don't need them to tell me what station I'm watching.
Maybe you know what show you're watching but not everybody does. As the number of channels available on cable and the like increase, the stations continue to get nervous that maybe they're not distinguishing themselves enough from their competitors. I personally think it's a valid strategy, the cable stations do have a tendancy to run together and it's a benefit to be able to glance down and see what you're watching. The main disadvantage is that we'll probably be stuck with them forever, long after the technology provides a way to toggle them on and off.
why oh why do people host their projects in the US ?... what are the problems with this approach ?
Simply locating the project elsewhere isn't enough; for it to be beyond the reach of the US government, it couldn't be supported by the US at all including its citizens. As a US citizen I can be held accountable for whatever I do regardless of where the project is located. Even if I could work in a project in a foreign country without breaking any laws, I could still be sued by an American company if they didn't like the project I had worked on.
So you do indeed have a situation where US laws can restrict a lot of software development. These laws may seem unfair but they also prevent Microsoft from moving to the Cayman islands when the US threatens to break them up.
Chris Daylor in TIme, makes a few good points. IF you look at biological virology, and compare it to computer viruses, the similarities are striking.
I agree, it's a very good point. A thought that occured to me after I read the article was comparing innoculation methods of the biological world against those in the computer.
One way the human body can be made ready to deal with some strain of virus is to inject a dead of version of the virus into the blood stream, the body produces white blood cells to fight off the attack. In essence you're priming the body against a possible future attack.
The computer equivalent would be to release a virus into the world that makes use of a given exploit but isn't actually harmful. For example, it infects a machine, attacks other machines for an hour, then pops up a message on the user's screen telling them what to do to fix it. It'd be a downright illegal thing to do, but it would effectively strengthen the Internet against some form of attack.
The Internet was built with our best understanding of organized systems, it's ironic that it winds up resembling an untidy organtic entity. I suspect we'll have to crack open books on biology more than once to successfully tame this thing, this is only the beginning after all.
After all, many Americans (in my observation) really do think the US is the greatest nation in the world
This attitude comes directly from American culture. We Americans are immersed in American culture to such a great extent that we have to go out of our way to see something that originated from another country. It is simply human nature assume that your way is the best; when you don't see many foreign movies, listen to foreign music, or read foreign books, this belief is continually reenforced.
People in other countries experience American culture as well but they're able to put it in better context. They realize that the American way is just one way of life and leave it at that. For Americans, there is nothing that challenges our lifestyle and our country in any meaningful way.
Don't know if I explained it very well, but I think that's the just of it. Until something comes along and successfully challenges our culture (France overpowers Hollywood, Indian music becomes a worldwide trend, etc.), we're going to remain a pretty arrogant people.
Slashdot Mirror
So - the question remains: who's doing anything more than cosmetic work on modern user interfaces? Several people have commented on the fact that it's a huge hurdle for a truly non-technical person to understand any of the existing UIs. I completely agree.
All these UI designs are natural extensions of previous ones. It's probably better to extend a flawed interface that everyone's familiar with instead of building a better one from scratch. Anyone looking to build an interface should probably keep one eye on Microsoft's manual of style regardless of the platform. They key thing is to keep things easy and the users at ease.
The most important connection between contemporary UIs is their reliance on the screen/mouse/keyboard combination. Compare how you use a computer to how you do anything else in life and it becomes obvious how much of a burden these UIs place on the user. It really isn't natural, we've just adapted. And so to answer your question, I don't think we'll see a major jump in usability until an avenue appears that will allow us to at least ditch the mouse. Touchscreen or similiar is probably the next step - as this technology becomes cheaper and more common, applications will start to be written to better deal with this kind of interface. Beyond that is probably voice recognition, that alone would make the Microsoft Start menu almost unnecessary. Beyond that... I can't even guess. It's Sci-fi territory.
For the forseable future, those of us who work with computers in a technical capacity will probably keep our own interfaces just out of habit. The rest of the world will most certainly move in a simpler direction, towards computers you can talk to and poke at.
Because this seems to be a continual (and somewhat legendary) problem, I think the powers that be (Taco et al) should put a system in place wherein they give sysadmins some sort of warning before they post a slashdot article
I agree completely. I can imagine a situation where someone might post a little bit of cool code they had written on their home web server, then watch as their poor DSL connection is completely crushed because someone posted to Slashdot. It's a very uncool thing when it happens.
So I thought about the problem and I realized that to successfully combat the problem would take a good deal of work. The Slashdot editors would essentially have to do minor research on each piece, write ahead and get permission to post it, correlate the timing, and finally end up posting the article a week after it had been submitted. They wouldn't have to do all this with major sites of course, like CNN or the NY Times, but it would be a godsend for all the poor saps who just want to post something cool.
I doubt this will happen since it would mean running Slashdot more like a real news source and less like a bulletin board. If the Slashdot editors can't be bothered to do things like check URLs or spelling, they certainly wouldn't be up for long term planning. A little bit of a shame actually.
hang on for the ride, kids. it's gonna get weird. i bet we see AI legistlation in the next 10 years.
That's what they were saying 10 years ago. Better projects than this one have failed to pan out in any meaningful way, I guess CNN was still looking for A.I. stories. I personally don't see any of our current technology and techniques delivering A.I.; if it comes to be, it will be do to something that hasn't even been discovered yet.
Just how did Creative Labs become the de facto standard of sound cards back in the days of DOS gaming?
Price, the Soundblaster was the best buy for the money. Few DOS games used sampled sounds since they took up so much space, rather they focused on MIDI music. To get the best quality music took a Roland MT32 or Sound Canvas which cost somewhere between $400 and $1000, a Soundblaster cost $130 and it could play and record audio samples. Unless you had money to burn or you were into computer music, it was the best choice.
Very interesting stuff, thanks for the info. I have a feeling that if I want to get much more in depth, I'll have to start reading equations.
Gotta love moderating. My original article stays a 1 and your reply gets a 2.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, it's a 2 because I used my bonus point (high karma) and not because some moderator thinks I'm really smart. My original post was at 5 yesterday and got knocked down to 4 today as "overrated." Perhaps I'm being punished for not specifying lossy compression, oh well.
Maybe moderation scores are a good source of random noise?
You know that isn't the case. Most moderation is pretty easy to predict. There's just enough randmosity to keep things interesting - it'd be boring if only reasonable, knowledgable people got modded up.
The 1 minute explanation of entropy signature analysis is that it seeks to quantify in R^(n+m) space, the statistical properties of a stream of data by applying n statistical tests to the data. How well or poorly the data passes these tests helps identify the method of generation.
I'm curious about this statement. Assuming a truly random number source, an excellent encryption system, and removing any identifying marks (header, etc.), a cryptographic string should be indistinguishable from random data. Any given byte should statistically appear the same number of times as any other, any pattern should appear the same number of times as any other pattern of the same length. Is there some important mathematical precept I'm missing or are you merely talking about the idiosyncrasies of convention algorithms?
In case anyone was wondering why I spend time working with LavaRnd, cryptographically strong PRNGs, Lava Lite ® lamps and other random oddiments
When I came across the original SGI Lava Lamp number generator so long ago, I thought it was one of the coolest things around. I have yet to come across something that could generate as random a number in as closed a space... cool stuff.
you shouldn't generalise that all audio compression is lossy.
You're right, sorry about that. My mind was working in the confines of the article which was focused on lossy algorithms exclusively (jpgs). My other justification is that lossless algorithms aren't that interesting from a steganography standpoint, mainly because they're not nearly as often used. Mp3, jpg, mpg, etc. are all lossy and they're transferred daily, these are the file types that steganography would be most useful in.
So, how can the algorithms mentioned in the article (which is interesting, but rather short on facts...) distinguish between the noise added by a steganographically embedded encrypted message and the noise caused by a slightly underspecced A to D converter?
You're right, there isn't too much of a difference between random noise and an encrypted communication. If you had a pure digital stream that had just been converted from analog, you could stick data in the least significant bits and no one would be the wiser. For example, a CD is just a sequence of 16 bit words iterated 44,100 times a second; you could just replace the least significant bit in each word with bits from your hidden message and it would be indistiguishable from random noise.
The problem arises when you try to compress digital information. These compression algorithms use the most optimum way to represent data that they can find and discard the least significant data, so they would completely destroy the afore mentioned hidden message. To hide data in a compressed file you need to play with how the compression mechanism stores the data, and the resulting file is most probably not going to be optimally compressed when you're done. What this guy is doing is looking at how the information was compressed, extract the overlying data that was being stored, and making sure the compression algorithm was indeed optimal. If there are any odd quirks in the compressed data or it doesn't look like the compression was optimal, it may be because data is hidden inside.
I hope this is a good enough explanation. I'm short on the examples but the underlying ideas are pretty basic.
There will never be a way to restrict the access of information totally, a single Slashdot brainstorming session could come up with enough bizarre hacks to keep us safe for quite a while. What has freaked the companies out is how easy it is for the common person to gain access to copyrighted materials. And that's exactly how far things are going to be pushed; when the computers people buy in stores can't be made to easily access copyrighted materials, the companies will breath a collective sigh of relief and relax. We'll have burrowed tunnels through whatever protection mechanism that's in place but no one will really care.
Fact is, even the company itself may not know; sometimes the switch comes because the company didn't make it trying to execute Plan A, and Plan B is to sell out to advertisers or some acquisition. Anyone have either logic or heuristics to offer as far as trying to navigate these situations?
You are exactly right. There is no way to know what a company is going to do in the future, the best you can do is try to predict their future actions by looking at their past actions. In my mind Google has maintained an impressive consumer focus and generally done right by their users, this gives them positive points. A new company has no past to judge by, so I can't judge them positively or negatively. But the important thing to note here is that I'm judging both companies on their actions, not what they say. So in the end it doesn't matter what the new company says is in their future, Google still wins my business because they've proven themselves to me.
I brought up this whole line of reasoning because it seems like a lot of Slashdot readers are very anxious to "get ahead" or at least get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. We're riding the technology wave here, we don't want to stick with what's proven, we want to move ahead. It would be a shame to lose a good product just because we were taken in by some marketing hype. It happens enough in the real world, let's hope it doesn't happen here.
The thing that has most impressed me about Google isn't its technology, but the restraint and good sense they've shown in the Internet community. While every other search engine has tried a go at the portal route, Google has focused on simply being a search engine. They've continued to add features that improve the user's experience at the same time other engines sell their results to the highest bidder.
Some of the most annoying companies in existance came about because they pulled a massive version of bait and switch, they adopted a consumer friendly strategy for the short term but changed when they got big enough to destroy the competition. Google has done remarkably little despite their impressive potential marketing position. Companies like this is where our business should go, it is our power as consumers to make decisions like this.
My point is that if/when something better than Google comes along, you should think twice before changing your homepage. When choosing a company, it's not just who provides the best product in the short term, you have to take into account long term as well.
Let's see ... is the cool part of the internet being able to use IRC, or being able to create your own, personal piece of cyberspace with which others around the world can interact?
That would indeed be pretty cool and might start pulling people in but it won't happen until a impressive 3D toolset becomes available. Most of the Internet community can't build their own web page, they'll be absolutely clueless when it comes to building their own 3D virtual residence. Not only would the backend 3D stuff need to be powerful enough that the elite architects can build their metaphysical wonders, but there needs to be an easy way for people to simply draw out what they want things to look like. When creating virtual worlds becomes an easy thing to do (and in my opinion, it's one of the hardest things to do currently), enough people will be doing it that the population can begin to grow.
Interestingly enough, the trigger point of growth in Stephenson's Metaverse was the development of facial recognition software. When the technology grew to the point that you could communicate almost as effectively in cyberspace as F2F, the Metaverse became a serious business. I suspect there is more than a little truth to this idea, a 3D environment would grow if people had some real reason to be there. But I suspect most people who are working on this sort of thing would burn their code rather than let someone program a virtual fashion boutique.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there
This is definately one thing that has never been, "build it and they will come." Multiple people have tried building 3D worlds and they end up sucking. The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there? The coolness factor wears off in time, and users go back to communicating to people using a single window rather than a full screen environment.
The most likely way something anywhere near the Metaverse will originate will be through the current massive online games. As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
So in conclusing, the beginnings of the Metaverse are already here. Sign up for your EQ account today and get in on the ground floor, I suspect Verant will be providing what you're looking for in 5 years.
You can get 16:1 compression on text files? What compression program is that?
Oh yeah, nothing compresses better than text files. Grab a pure text file and compress it into a .zip file, you'll see what I mean.
The key is that most lossless compression algorithms generate a dictionary of common patterns, then replace the file with an ID representing the pattern. This is really easy to do with the english language, essentially you can replace each word with a binary number. More over, common words and patterns can be represented by smaller binary numbers. I don't want to get too technical (and at this point it gets harder to explain without drawing pictures) but you get the idea.
Text files are so small that we generally don't worry about compressing them, but it's certainly a viable thing to do. And if you're trying to send large amounts of text all over the place, it will certainly make things run faster for you.
What you seem to want are "bloated" formats that can't be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time.
That's a stupid design, I don't want that. I'm merely pointing out how small books are in comparison to the binary files we're used to. As for proprietary, that word may not be the best description, I merely used it because that's the reality of the situation. I highly doubt any publisher is going to accept an open solution, they'll buy it from a 3rd party company that will make certain assurances. The core of my argument is that this is not necessarly a bad thing.
One last thing: the works of William Shakespeare are in the public domain. No amount of copying of his works could possibly be illegal.
I know, I looked up the file sizes online to make sure that you could indeed fit the complete works in a file smaller than a standard mp3. With compression (16:1) you definately could. I just needed a suitably thick tome for my comparison.
I think this is silly. You know the same could be said of software and look what M$ turned into.
Companies have been building their software in recent years to make copying more difficult. They understand that copying is inevitable, but by using sophisticated install programs and liberal use of the Windows registry, they have made it tricky to simply copy a program. The software industry has been dealing with digital copying the longest, it makes sense that they would've gravitated toward some level of protection by now.
I'd like to expand on some points I made in the previous post. The first thing to consider about electronic books is how small they are. A single mp3 weighs in around 5 megs, which is quite a bit larger than a compressed version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This is the root of my concern, books take up so little space that someone could download hundreds of books and store them on their home system. You may point out that someone who does this probably won't actually read the books (and you'd probably be right), but a massive copyright violation did just take place.
I also understand that there are books currently being released in unsecured formats and there isn't a problem with copying. My response is that the distribution channels aren't really there yet for wide spread piracy. When someone thinks of music they think (or used to) Napster; when someone thinks of books, no Internet solution pops in their heads, yet. As more books become available in electronic format, more people will look into copying them because the selection will be there.
As I stated before, it's my opinion that a proprietary format is needed to "keep the honest people honest". I'm not saying Adobe is the best solution for that, I personally would prefer a more open design, but it makes a lot of sense to me to keep heading in this direction. Just my two cents.
There should be no proprietary text formatting options.
I disagree. If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous. You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did.
It's obvious to me that the publishing industry does need a proprietary and relatively secure format for sending out their books. They also need to grit their teeth and accept the fact that people are going to copy their stuff. Really you don't have to do much to "keep the honest people honest".
Anyway, the geek crowd who knows how to bypass this stuff is the same geek crowd that will wait in line to get their book signed by the author. I don't think too much worry is warranted.
But lately, Pete Abrams has taken to wholesale quoting of pop culture with a small dash of funny on the top.
I've actually enjoyed it quite a bit lately, mostly because it's funny. Anyone can write a long, twisted story arc and argue how good it is, what's great about Sluggy is how many daily strips Pete manages to end with a punchline. The current storyline is pretty silly but I've been getting a chuckle from it nearly every day. It is true that humor is subjective, but if you don't find Sluggy funny then you're getting a lot less from it than I am.
You don't want Sealand, you want Freedom Ship. Who knows whether it will ever see the light of day, but the idea intrigues me. More the idea of travelling around the world over the course of 2 years, but it has several benefits that could appeal to the Slashdot crowd.
I really don't see why Dolby would have a problem with people cracking open their standard. It isn't useful for copying, you don't need to be able to open the audio stream to copy it. The only reason you'd want to decode the audio is if you planned on watching it which Dolby shouldn't have a problem with. Am I missing something obvious or is Dolby just being a jerk?
What if the President of the USA, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, the entire Senate, the entire House of Representatives, etc. etc. were simultaneously assassinated? Can you even imagine ensuing chaos?
It wouldn't be that bad actually. One of the major strengths the US government has is a fairly clear line of succession, it's always obvious who is in charge in a given situation. And really it isn't even important who specifically is in charge, just so long as someone is. I doubt we'd really be too worried about it anyway, we'd be far more concerned about what killed them.
The point is though that this small minority is also under the best protection. You estimate the number to be 0.0004% of our population (a little over a thousand people), inverse that to say they have 250,000 times better security than the rest of us. As this applies to the Internet, we just need to make sure that our main routers have the same level of protection. That rule of thumb makes sense to me, if there are 10,000 machines behind a connection then it should be 10,000 times harder to take down that connection than a single machine. I know it doesn't sound like a good metric, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I think this post was fair game, I don't see why it was moderated down. One of the wonderful things about Slashdot discussions is that they expand beyond the confines of the original topic. Anyway,
I really hate those watermarks that appear on TV in the corners. I don't need them to tell me what station I'm watching.
Maybe you know what show you're watching but not everybody does. As the number of channels available on cable and the like increase, the stations continue to get nervous that maybe they're not distinguishing themselves enough from their competitors. I personally think it's a valid strategy, the cable stations do have a tendancy to run together and it's a benefit to be able to glance down and see what you're watching. The main disadvantage is that we'll probably be stuck with them forever, long after the technology provides a way to toggle them on and off.
why oh why do people host their projects in the US ? ... what are the problems with this approach ?
Simply locating the project elsewhere isn't enough; for it to be beyond the reach of the US government, it couldn't be supported by the US at all including its citizens. As a US citizen I can be held accountable for whatever I do regardless of where the project is located. Even if I could work in a project in a foreign country without breaking any laws, I could still be sued by an American company if they didn't like the project I had worked on.
So you do indeed have a situation where US laws can restrict a lot of software development. These laws may seem unfair but they also prevent Microsoft from moving to the Cayman islands when the US threatens to break them up.
Chris Daylor in TIme, makes a few good points. IF you look at biological virology, and compare it to computer viruses, the similarities are striking.
I agree, it's a very good point. A thought that occured to me after I read the article was comparing innoculation methods of the biological world against those in the computer.
One way the human body can be made ready to deal with some strain of virus is to inject a dead of version of the virus into the blood stream, the body produces white blood cells to fight off the attack. In essence you're priming the body against a possible future attack.
The computer equivalent would be to release a virus into the world that makes use of a given exploit but isn't actually harmful. For example, it infects a machine, attacks other machines for an hour, then pops up a message on the user's screen telling them what to do to fix it. It'd be a downright illegal thing to do, but it would effectively strengthen the Internet against some form of attack.
The Internet was built with our best understanding of organized systems, it's ironic that it winds up resembling an untidy organtic entity. I suspect we'll have to crack open books on biology more than once to successfully tame this thing, this is only the beginning after all.
After all, many Americans (in my observation) really do think the US is the greatest nation in the world
This attitude comes directly from American culture. We Americans are immersed in American culture to such a great extent that we have to go out of our way to see something that originated from another country. It is simply human nature assume that your way is the best; when you don't see many foreign movies, listen to foreign music, or read foreign books, this belief is continually reenforced.
People in other countries experience American culture as well but they're able to put it in better context. They realize that the American way is just one way of life and leave it at that. For Americans, there is nothing that challenges our lifestyle and our country in any meaningful way.
Don't know if I explained it very well, but I think that's the just of it. Until something comes along and successfully challenges our culture (France overpowers Hollywood, Indian music becomes a worldwide trend, etc.), we're going to remain a pretty arrogant people.