If Mozilla and other open source browsers implement a workable rendering engine for this, it may encourage others to give Mozilla a shot where they otherwise wouldn't. Of course, IE would follow at some point if they found out people were switching, but at that point people will have hopefully seen the light. (For all I know, mozilla already has it... kitchen sink and all that).
I don't know what kind of audience would really care about music notation, but I know there are a bunch of us guitar-wanna-bes who frequent good ol' ASCII-art notation sites for our favorite songs, which are obviously lacking in detail. And word can spread quickly if people are notating using this format and recommending a proper browser to view them with.
There are plenty of techs that were initially planned/researched for space but also help directly back here on Earth, although I'm too lazy to do some quick googling right now.
The one I'm really waiting for is aerogel. Well, waiting for it to be mass-produced and affordable, anyway. It's insulation, weight, and strength are just incredible. (It was previously on Slashdot in the Time's Best Inventions of 2002, and was recently used in the collection of comet dust on the Stardust mission).
And a choice quote from this NYT article, by aerogel's current researcher, Dr. Tsou:
"It's the lowest density of any solid, and it has the highest thermoinsulation properties. Though it would be very expensive, you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot."
I agree with the penalty payment system for helping the false-positive problem. - Ironport's Bonded Sender Program (who pay TRUSTe to do the validation) is a good first-step in that direction.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the idea is that you sign up with them, set up a "bond" with a bunch of money, and they add you to their RBL-type whitelist. When a mail server receives an email, they do a DNS-lookup of the sending-mailer's IP address suffixed with a specific domain, and if they're part of the whitelist, they can either let the email through, or as in SpamAssasssin's case, give it a -4.3 score to "help" it get through the filter.
If it was indeed a spam message, the user complains and Ironport deducts $20 from the bond, costing the sending company real money.
The only major hurdle is that the setup fees are far too big right now for anyone but big commercial mailers to use their service ($1000 just for the application fee, plus a multi-thousand dollar annual fee, separate from the "bond").
If another company could set up a similar but affordable service, and convince the majority of spam-filter software makers to use them, the penalty-based micropayment system could work even for individuals, while still allowing normal SMTP email a chance to get through (just less of a chance).
And of course, it's still not a perfect solution - it can easily be abused by spiteful users, but it along with advanced filters can make email a little more palatable.
Re:probably best left on the drawing board...
on
2003 Vaporware Awards
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· Score: 1, Informative
My vote - Deus Ex: Invisible War.
I'm a HUGE Deus Ex fanboy, but this sequel just doesn't feel a thing like the original. Has a serious case of "consolitis", due to the dev's designing for both X-Box and PC without considering the PC's strengths/weaknesses.
They took out most of what made the first so good and replaced them with dumbed-down versions or nothing at all.
Not to mention the complete rush job they did to get it out the door before christmas - there's a minimal patch out now, but I'm still waiting for a major one that improves playability to the point where I'd actually give it another shot.
And I seriously think they paid off most of the review sites - the game they're describing certainly isn't the one I bought. Anyone out there who actually liked DX:IW?
A version of Windows will have a major security hole exploi... ah crap, happened before I could finish my post.
Re:Next game please!
on
Human Pac Man
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's been mentioned on/. many times before, but the Cave Quake II game is about as close as you can get, albeit still in a small room. If you've never seen it before, you must watch the movies.
The movies have been updated since I last looked, and I didn't immediately see one of my favorites where an inexperienced player dons the headset, walks close to an in-game ledge, and literally falls down when his character does. Quite immersive, apparently.:)
Absolutely, IT doesn't matter. IT got hyped up to the nines, I was all excited for ITs release, whatever IT was. "Revolutionize an industry", they claimed.
Excuse my lack of knowledge in legal matters, but wouldn't this also make exclusive agreements/contracts illegal?
eg. When Pepsi makes a deal with a university where they'll sell them soda for cheaper than usual, so long as the university doesn't sell any Coke products?
You're right - I misread the summary as meaning older texts to be added to a "museum", in which case you would want to preserve formatting so that existing citations would match up when looked at 100 years down the road.
As for citations not meaning much to most people, perhaps, but the works that are most often referenced and studied by others (be them scientific, religious, or [soon to be] classic literature) are also likely the ones you want to preserve and have an accurate, concise way to reference any given passage.
As for all ebooks going forward, I'm sure a format-independent methodology could and should be used. And just as I'm too lazy to RTFA, I'm also too lazy to do a bit of googling to find any existing citation formats for the "new age".:)
Unfortunately, for citations and other references, it's useful if not necessary to specify page, paragraph, and sometimes even line numbers and have them to point to the same place regardless of the "format".
Something like this could be kludged by going overboard with <p id="chpt.1,p.55,par.4"> type tags using HTML, but there's something to be said for preserving the exact formatting of the original text.
A lesser problem is properly preserving hypenation, which can pose a problem with HTML as well. I'd love to be rid of format-induced hyphens forever (ie. the ones at the end of a line), but as most of these archival projects involve massive amounts of OCRing pages, and computers can have a tough time figuring out which hyphens are because of formatting and which are simply part of the word that just ended up at the end of a line, a human would have to manually fix these up.
I agree that PDFs are a horrible format, as I enjoy reading eBooks on my 160x160 Treo, but text and HTML have their own problems as well.
On the cool clear morning of December 6, 1917, the munitions ship Mont Blanc, already on fire from a collision in Halifax Harbour with the Belgian relief ship Imo, glances off pier 6 in the north end of Halifax sparking a fire in the dockyard. West Street firemen were the first to arrive at the pier 6 fire. For all but one of them, it would be their last alarm. At 9:04:35 am the Mont Blanc explodes with a force of 2.9 kilotons. The Halifax Explosion killed between 1600 and 2000 people, wounded another 9000, and left 25,000 people homeless.
... every software company out there requires online Activation before you can use their product.
Not only will reinstalling a computer takes AGES due to all the products you need to activate (and heaven forbid you changed some hardware - time to call them all up one-by-one and plead your case), but you won't even be able to install any package from a software company who has gone belly up.
One of the best features of some MUDs I've played was the fact that after reaching a certain point in the game (level, quest goal, whatever), you could become one of the games content creators.
You'd be given access to a rudimentary scripting language, given a "starting point" in the online world (a door, a cave entrance, whatever), and could create your locations and quests from that point on.
Your creation would be "moderated" by other random people who have also been granted this benefit, so as to avoid buggy or inappropriate areas, but aside from that, you could do pretty much anything.
Granted, the MUDs I would play typically only had about 100 people (30-40 who be online at peak times), so managing this amount of new content was relatively easy. MMORPGs would have a harder time dealing with this I'm sure, but it could be done much like/.'s moderation system.
It made for an ever-expanding and truely dynamic gaming universe, and kept it interesting. Some quests were typical hack-n-slash, others completely story-based, others purely puzzle oriented, and everything inbetween. And by only allowing this ability after reaching a certain point/level in the game, each content-creator was likely to be interesting in extending the game, and not trying to screw it up (of course, this was before Macro's were commonplace, so to reach a high level meant actually playing the game).
I think I'd actually be interesting in one of these new-fangled graphical MMORPGs if they'd incorporate a similar feature, if only as another creative outlet for me to explore.
Absolutely, and instead of them wanting approval just to send you spam, they'll send you their "message" as the name of the user wanting approval.
Reminds me of a commercial I saw for some long distance coverage...
phone rings, man picks up Operator: You have a collect call from "Itsbob Wehadababyitsaboy", would you like to accept the charges? Man: No thank you hangs up Woman: Who was that, dear? Man: It was Bob. They had a baby. It's a boy.
You already have the choice. Don't use P2P, and suffer through the company's overloaded servers instead.
But I for one perfer to get a 110 KB/sec download if it means I have to share a bit of upload too. Far better than waiting "in queue" with one of the major download sites for a spot to open up.
Much (not all) Slashdot (and pro-OSS) discussion never actually references sources, preferring to stick to anecdotal second hand knowledge - "Windows always crashes" etc.
To qualify as "second hand knowledge", it would have to be something that hasn't occured to you. Is there actually a person out there to whom "Windows always crashes" does not apply?;)
So, you should be angry at the company who markets the equivalent commercial program, and not Google. If they're infringing on your trademark, then you should sue the company who is misleading customers, not the search engine that happened to be the medium that allowed it.
This is like suing the New York Times for allowing Company X to put out an ad for Company Y - is the NYT required to research every ad they run to make sure no trademarks are being infringed upon? No! It's up to Company Y to enforce it, and their only avenue for reimbursement is to sue Company X. The NYT does not (and should not) have any responsibility for it.
A related story is that Napster 2.0 is about to be launched by its new owners, Roxio. VERY similar to iTunes ($0.99 per track), but even more flexible re: pricing. $9.99 for an entire album, or $9.99/month for unlimited downloads (hard to believe they're willing to do that when eMusic obviously couldn't support it).
The DRM is Microsoft's WMA 9.0, but they claim you can burn to CD, transfer to "compatible" portable devices, and can have them on up to 3 different computers - all similar to iTunes.
Details are still sketchy on which tunes/bands they'll be offering, just which devices their app will consider "compatible", etc. but it will be interesting to see if/how successful this will be.
A possible explanation: keep in mind they will also include results where a different page had that term in it but was linking to the one they show you even if it doesn't directly include that term. (did that make any sense?)
For example, if I post a link that contains the word "two" that points to a page about "speaker bracelets" (or just containing those words), that could actually increase the set of matching documents when you search for all three.
I don't think they're often enough to sway the results this much, but who knows.
It is a good sign - and I suspect it's because the grand majority of P2P users (well, computer users in general) know at least one "geek" they can turn to for advice. I myself have been asked by at least 10 different family members and friends about this whole "lawsuit" thing with music, and quickly responded that the RIAA is full of it and they have little to fear - and certainly never trust anything they say, since they're rather well known for outright lying.
I've always wondered - if they were going to go through the hassle or "redefining" the meter to that number (path light travels in a vacuum over 1/299,792,458 of a second), why not just make it an even 1/300,000,000 of a second. That way the speed of light would be exactly 300,000 km/s and make everybody's math a little easier. Sure people would have to make minor changes to already-measured distances (and I'd assume that anything on Earth would be small enough to basically ignore the variation), but just do it once and be done with it.
Not trolling or anything - I'm actually curious. I know the formal definition of a second has something to do with Cesium-133's cycle or something, but does it matter?
I've noticed the same, and I speculate it's because our hard drive tech is still in the stone age, relatively. Your typical cheap IDE drive hasn't sped up at nearly the same rate as processor/memory/bus tech has, and let's face it - 90% of what you do on a computer in a typical day requires some level of drive (or net) access.
The true test of speed improvement is when you're doing something very CPU intensive that can entirely fit in memory - otherwise almost all of your time is spent waiting for the drive. And CPU's are so blazingly fast (and have been for the past couple years) that it's rare to find an application where that's the case.
I can't speak for SCSI, Firewire, SIDE, or any other drive techs 'cause I'm a cheap S.O.B. and won't pay the big bucks for them. (And even regular RAM access is painfully slow compared to on-board cache).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what kind of audience would really care about music notation, but I know there are a bunch of us guitar-wanna-bes who frequent good ol' ASCII-art notation sites for our favorite songs, which are obviously lacking in detail. And word can spread quickly if people are notating using this format and recommending a proper browser to view them with.
Here's hoping...
The one I'm really waiting for is aerogel. Well, waiting for it to be mass-produced and affordable, anyway. It's insulation, weight, and strength are just incredible. (It was previously on Slashdot in the Time's Best Inventions of 2002, and was recently used in the collection of comet dust on the Stardust mission).
Pictures, F.A.Q., and a couple more articles.
And a choice quote from this NYT article, by aerogel's current researcher, Dr. Tsou:
And it just looks so cool!For those unfamiliar with the concept, the idea is that you sign up with them, set up a "bond" with a bunch of money, and they add you to their RBL-type whitelist. When a mail server receives an email, they do a DNS-lookup of the sending-mailer's IP address suffixed with a specific domain, and if they're part of the whitelist, they can either let the email through, or as in SpamAssasssin's case, give it a -4.3 score to "help" it get through the filter.
If it was indeed a spam message, the user complains and Ironport deducts $20 from the bond, costing the sending company real money.
The only major hurdle is that the setup fees are far too big right now for anyone but big commercial mailers to use their service ($1000 just for the application fee, plus a multi-thousand dollar annual fee, separate from the "bond").
If another company could set up a similar but affordable service, and convince the majority of spam-filter software makers to use them, the penalty-based micropayment system could work even for individuals, while still allowing normal SMTP email a chance to get through (just less of a chance).
And of course, it's still not a perfect solution - it can easily be abused by spiteful users, but it along with advanced filters can make email a little more palatable.
I'm a HUGE Deus Ex fanboy, but this sequel just doesn't feel a thing like the original. Has a serious case of "consolitis", due to the dev's designing for both X-Box and PC without considering the PC's strengths/weaknesses.
They took out most of what made the first so good and replaced them with dumbed-down versions or nothing at all.
Not to mention the complete rush job they did to get it out the door before christmas - there's a minimal patch out now, but I'm still waiting for a major one that improves playability to the point where I'd actually give it another shot.
And I seriously think they paid off most of the review sites - the game they're describing certainly isn't the one I bought. Anyone out there who actually liked DX:IW?
A version of Windows will have a major security hole exploi... ah crap, happened before I could finish my post.
The movies have been updated since I last looked, and I didn't immediately see one of my favorites where an inexperienced player dons the headset, walks close to an in-game ledge, and literally falls down when his character does. Quite immersive, apparently. :)
I think you meant: Windows 2009 Personal-and-Home-for-Middle-class-Income-Families Edition..... and Doom3.
And IT turned out to be a damn scooter... hmph.
eg. When Pepsi makes a deal with a university where they'll sell them soda for cheaper than usual, so long as the university doesn't sell any Coke products?
As for citations not meaning much to most people, perhaps, but the works that are most often referenced and studied by others (be them scientific, religious, or [soon to be] classic literature) are also likely the ones you want to preserve and have an accurate, concise way to reference any given passage.
As for all ebooks going forward, I'm sure a format-independent methodology could and should be used. And just as I'm too lazy to RTFA, I'm also too lazy to do a bit of googling to find any existing citation formats for the "new age". :)
Something like this could be kludged by going overboard with <p id="chpt.1,p.55,par.4"> type tags using HTML, but there's something to be said for preserving the exact formatting of the original text.
A lesser problem is properly preserving hypenation, which can pose a problem with HTML as well. I'd love to be rid of format-induced hyphens forever (ie. the ones at the end of a line), but as most of these archival projects involve massive amounts of OCRing pages, and computers can have a tough time figuring out which hyphens are because of formatting and which are simply part of the word that just ended up at the end of a line, a human would have to manually fix these up.
I agree that PDFs are a horrible format, as I enjoy reading eBooks on my 160x160 Treo, but text and HTML have their own problems as well.
From http://www.halifaxfiremuseum.org/
Not only will reinstalling a computer takes AGES due to all the products you need to activate (and heaven forbid you changed some hardware - time to call them all up one-by-one and plead your case), but you won't even be able to install any package from a software company who has gone belly up.
You'd be given access to a rudimentary scripting language, given a "starting point" in the online world (a door, a cave entrance, whatever), and could create your locations and quests from that point on.
Your creation would be "moderated" by other random people who have also been granted this benefit, so as to avoid buggy or inappropriate areas, but aside from that, you could do pretty much anything.
Granted, the MUDs I would play typically only had about 100 people (30-40 who be online at peak times), so managing this amount of new content was relatively easy. MMORPGs would have a harder time dealing with this I'm sure, but it could be done much like /.'s moderation system.
It made for an ever-expanding and truely dynamic gaming universe, and kept it interesting. Some quests were typical hack-n-slash, others completely story-based, others purely puzzle oriented, and everything inbetween. And by only allowing this ability after reaching a certain point/level in the game, each content-creator was likely to be interesting in extending the game, and not trying to screw it up (of course, this was before Macro's were commonplace, so to reach a high level meant actually playing the game).
I think I'd actually be interesting in one of these new-fangled graphical MMORPGs if they'd incorporate a similar feature, if only as another creative outlet for me to explore.
Reminds me of a commercial I saw for some long distance coverage...
phone rings, man picks up
Operator: You have a collect call from "Itsbob Wehadababyitsaboy", would you like to accept the charges?
Man: No thank you
hangs up
Woman: Who was that, dear?
Man: It was Bob. They had a baby. It's a boy.
But I for one perfer to get a 110 KB/sec download if it means I have to share a bit of upload too. Far better than waiting "in queue" with one of the major download sites for a spot to open up.
This is like suing the New York Times for allowing Company X to put out an ad for Company Y - is the NYT required to research every ad they run to make sure no trademarks are being infringed upon? No! It's up to Company Y to enforce it, and their only avenue for reimbursement is to sue Company X. The NYT does not (and should not) have any responsibility for it.
As a devout atheist, I'm horribly offended at your God +5 remark. You'll be hearing from my lawyers.
The DRM is Microsoft's WMA 9.0, but they claim you can burn to CD, transfer to "compatible" portable devices, and can have them on up to 3 different computers - all similar to iTunes.
Details are still sketchy on which tunes/bands they'll be offering, just which devices their app will consider "compatible", etc. but it will be interesting to see if/how successful this will be.
For example, if I post a link that contains the word "two" that points to a page about "speaker bracelets" (or just containing those words), that could actually increase the set of matching documents when you search for all three.
I don't think they're often enough to sway the results this much, but who knows.
It is a good sign - and I suspect it's because the grand majority of P2P users (well, computer users in general) know at least one "geek" they can turn to for advice. I myself have been asked by at least 10 different family members and friends about this whole "lawsuit" thing with music, and quickly responded that the RIAA is full of it and they have little to fear - and certainly never trust anything they say, since they're rather well known for outright lying.
Not trolling or anything - I'm actually curious. I know the formal definition of a second has something to do with Cesium-133's cycle or something, but does it matter?
The true test of speed improvement is when you're doing something very CPU intensive that can entirely fit in memory - otherwise almost all of your time is spent waiting for the drive. And CPU's are so blazingly fast (and have been for the past couple years) that it's rare to find an application where that's the case.
I can't speak for SCSI, Firewire, SIDE, or any other drive techs 'cause I'm a cheap S.O.B. and won't pay the big bucks for them. (And even regular RAM access is painfully slow compared to on-board cache).