disclaimer: I work on a startup project that is based in flash video
this is definitely a game changer, although it doesnt seem like it is getting picked up by the major blog/media sites. It simply comes down to how this will affect the economics of producing good web video and monetizing it. in a nutshell, on2 basically gave away the decoder to adobe for the flash player but kept major control over how the encoding tools could be used. They essentially jacked up the fees on encoding to make their money thinking they had a free ride on this one, and with the rise of web video / youtube, their stock price soared in the past 2 years. The big advantage they have over the other guys in flash video, ie, sorenson, was quality --- notice youtube's quality is not that great, even though the file sizes are comparable? It's cause they use ffmpeg on the backend to transcode video to the flv format. The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint (disclaimer: I do not know anyone at youtube, but we have ran into similar problems with our product, and I'm extrapolating their situtation with the logical conclusions.).
I sorta figured someone out there was gonna get ticked that there was a gatekeeper sitting on a major web tech, and I knew something had to give. I think the first clue should have been the fact that youtube was transcoding everything over to h246, but I figured that was initially just for my personal enjoyment on my iphone. <grin/> Apparently they knew a few people over at adobe. The second clue, and you cant keep things like new major codecs in the worlds most dominant web video platform a secret --- was that on2's stock price has dropped from around $3.69 three months ago to $1.48 as of this morning.
so. where does that leave web video? Well, as soon as I saw the news last night, I began checking the legal issues with transcoding to h264 for our project (does ffmpeg support it, cost, etc) and apparently, its a very accessibly standard. It's going to work with the existing netstream and video objects (whether you like them or not! whats up with the stuttering issues, adobe?) so our video editor should be able to mix sorenson, vp6, and h264 video content all in the same project (in real time, with effects! sorry, quick plug) which makes me very happy.
As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong, i do need to know myself). ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.). For raw source code, Video Lan has an encoder: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?
"What projects have you done in the past, how did they meet what was required, and in the end --- did they get the desired results?"
fuck the rest of this shit. Its all about results and meeting the needs of the market { project, client, business model }. It either payed the bills, or it didnt. And if HR is involved in interviewing the prospectives AT ANY POINT, said company is already killing itself.
last I checked my myspace account, it was free. I pay them by showing up and browsing, getting hit by advertisements while I do so. Myspace's job, like any other capitalistic venture, is to make money. Period. How they do it is basically irrelevant (outside of legal and moral implications. and those can be viewed from various philosophical positions.). So, no, they should not have "World Class Hosting and Redundancy" (which at their level, and rate of growth, is probably impossible to accomodate) --- they could if they deemed it necesary to further push stockholder equity, but as long as people put up with the current level of service (see also, cell phone companies) and keep coming back, it has passed the threshold of market acceptibility. The fallacy in the comments on this page are based around the mindset of the users here, in that, they are programmers, sys admins, and the tech crowd who are viewing this from their own professional in-grained Grand Directive, "It Must Run Perfect 99% of the Time" (or you are gone). Of course thats what the entrepreneurs tell you, but as soon as you walk out the door, they are planning how to throw the next batch of half ass experiments (see google) at that wall to see what sticks, or, what feature points are fit enough to survive at this time point in the market.
long story short? quality is a sliding scale, always subjective and based on changing market thresholds.
Favorite All Time Conversation With A Recruiter: (and this is all you need to know, kids...)
Her: well, they are looking for a Sr C# developer. Me: I've used C# since MS introduced it, even developed on the.NET beta Her: But your resume doesnt say "Sr C# developer" Me: Well, the job before didnt classify jobs that way, everyone was simply "developer", and the next job I was promoted to "Systems Analyst" (design+code+lead) Her: But your resume doesnt say "Sr C# developer" Me:...
I dont understand why their team is getting this much press, other than the fact that Volkswagen's PR dept is probably hyping stanford to get some marketing exposure for their company, as this year almost 200 teams applied to get site visits.
In terms of technology, well, outside of the Turing test, this is sorta like the Super Bowl of AI. My team/part of the project dealt with Machine Vision, which has proven to be quite difficult for a lot of people (including me!). Real time scene analysis is *very* computationally expensive, and you have to make guesses and inferences as optical signal data fluxes around constantly, a lot of the time completely rendering your approach useless.
Even though from life experiences I know that Life Isnt Fair, and the playing field is never level, some of these teams get insane advantages. I wont even go into CMU (ok, I will: they have basically Defense Contractor backing, parts, and consultants, and like 7 million dollars to spend on the project), and here stanford has sponsorship with volkswagen. I was suprised Cal Tech didnt get more major sponsors, but they might have for round 2 of the challenge. No one has near the advantage of CMU though, their main LIDAR cost more than a lot of people's whole car/setup.
Aside from that, for me this project has been a blast. The work, needless to say, is very unique and its almost like a mini-1960's space race, "first one to the finish line!". Its funny how some people try different angles, spend millions of dollars, and then get foiled by a rut in the road that hangs their car up (I'm tellin ya, if the sun shifts even slightly all vision input outside of lidar can basically go to sh!t if you arent careful, and if your lidar doesnt pick it up, well...)
Regardless of whoever makes it to the top 30, it will be interesting to see if anyone finishes this year. Darpa3, maybe?
One of the key aspects of ants is changing the local environment via phermone, like temporary registers in a computer, which is then "read" by other ants in a stochastic manner. An example of a monte carlo sim running a ant foraging demo is:
http://img126.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img126&image=3df or aging12gz.jpg
One of the top people in this field is Marco Dorigo over in Italy, and he has chaired many conferences on this subject, as well as published a few books. The best book he (along with 2 others) has published so far, imho, is "Swarm Intelligence"
Ive read this one cover to cover, and its been a terrific jump start to apply various aspects of ant properties (search, TSP, emergent task switching, graph partitioning, etc)
I see some of the posts on here complaining about user interfaces via the web not being up to snuff, or the web not being 'suitable' or proper for certain things, or 'shouldnt be used' for task x. I hate to tell you, but the web can do a lot of things and if it works, it works, point blank. Want better UIs? Check out the XUL with firefox. My company has been doing the behind the scenes js calls for over 5 years now, this is nothing new. When we saw what they ff/xul guys were doing, we instantly realized they knew how to do it right from a developer's standpoint, and its first rate. For a little background, our progressions of js-callback tech went like this: First we used a hidden background frame to pull in data behind the scenes, and process posts to the server, all managed by a multiple queue which handled all calls in an orderly fashion and async. less control than a socket, but it worked well in commercial apps. Then we moved to something like
this.oXmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
which gave us more control, but still wasnt cross platform. It could use xml, or just a variant of soap, or just text values, posting it to a ASP file. (And then MS makes something similar, calls it webservices with a asp file having a.asmx extension, and they are hailed as groundbreaking.) And then we moved on to XUL + XMLHttpRequest which is much the same as xmlhttp from ms, in fact when we ported over the IE6 specific js code, it worked almost flawlessly (the xul devs knew it was a 'good idea' and made sure they had a version in their stuff that matched the method sigs almost item for item). After we knew that the xul stuff was good under the hood, we had to know that the GUI-widgets was going to match our overly engineered 5000+ line dhtml controls (pain to write, but they sure look good.)
svg dom + xul dom intertwined (ff 1.9?) http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/
oh oh oh you say! but Avalon/XAML are coming! --- and I say yeah, its nice, and does the xml markup of guis with the code behind, same thing as XUL. And you can bet your bottom dollar MS is betting on that (and indigo, and <blah blah blah/> to force you into longhorn, as well as another upgrade cycle. Avalon is essentially the same thing as xul, but with 2d rendering done via DX on your 300 dollar gfx card.
So, since its getting late and I really should get off of this soapbox, the moral of the post is that the web can do more than you think, so give XUL a try.
is the lack of seeing "sub-groups" within a group, ie, when i research C# stuff for mono, I look in
microsoft.public.dotnet
and in that group, at the top, each subgroup within that group was listed; now, most of the time, when new groups were added, i would see the newer groups there, etc. Also, it was great for navigating through the group "tree". Usually, in a large group with a lot of subgroups, i link to the main group trunk, and then go from there when i am looking for something. From this standpoint, this isnt one step back in usability, its three steps back. I hope this isnt a sign of things to come from google, because quite honestly, its pretty lazy in terms of design and testing. Its like removing the "Refresh" button from firefox when that feature has already become a staple of web browser interfaces.
sorry kids, but unless the disease changed the animal's DNA, even if this WAS an advantage, the animal would be unable to pass this disease induced "trait" onto the next generation. Lamarkian evolution was based along these lines, that "giraffes necks got longer because they reached for higher leaves", but it has been long abandoned for darwin's view (modified somewhat over time) which was more along the lines of "giraffes with longer necks naturally held an advantage when competing for food in their environment, which cause them to have more offspring, which caused their genes to proliferate".
of course, as always, your mileage may vary.
Good book on this, and fun to read: "The Blind Watchmaker", Richard Dawkins
everything in life and dynamic systems, more specifically, is based on a rate of change. If the machines are able to learn from and reduce errors faster than any human system, then an improvement is to be gained here. I work in some of the same areas as these guys, namely Ant swarms and optimization, and I can tell you that a major idea in these areas is reduction of error, not a perfect execution of a process. Just like any system, as long as the rate of error does not exceed the rate of correction of errors, or the tollerance of errors, then that system is considered good/acceptable/well performing (for the most part at least; think of the judicial system, mistakes are made, and sometimes people are hurt, but in the end, corrections are constantly made, and the system learns from past mistakes.) Yes, humans do some of the same things, but can they collectively reduce and learn from errors as a swarm of bots?
It's more of a philosophy of the many's performance overcoming the errors of the few at an acceptable rate. The ants are an amazing example of this. A good book on these ideas is:
"Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", Eric Bonabeau, Guy Theraulaz, Marco Dorigo http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearc h/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=AQv1kd1ym6&isbn=019513159 2&itm=2
VTP needs a mention here....
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
http://vterrain.org/
from their site:
<b>The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.
This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms. VTP writes and supports a set of software tools, including an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro). The tools and their source code are freely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.
given the nature of what they are trying to do with the sematic web stuff, and how using some sort of tagging/xml schema to define relationships, does this set the stage for a rule base like set of interactions to autmatically execute when the proper relationships are created that meet pre-defined rules? this would allow interactions between servers to happen naturally and allow for self-organizational-like qualities to 'emerge' from the web.
this stuff is really cool, no doubt about it. The one thing IS, though, to write an application that running in parallel across many machines, well, only part of the code can do this, and many times code is not suited to be broken up and run in parallel like that. We have run into all the basic communication problems with this while writing a small distributed project for ant colony simulations. An ACO algo is well suited for parallelization when using them to build Traveling Salesman routes because of the nature of the algo having a loop that goes through many "fitness functions" that can be done in parallel. This is also true for things like Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming, and Particle Swarm Optimization, among others. However, just having a really well done "grid framework" such as this isnt the complete "puzzle", still software needs to be designed for it and not all models will see decent improvements being parallelized. Still, I'm sure Inferno would be at the front of the list of suitable frameworks to use to build on given its pedigree...
a list of papers on methods of parallelization of the ant algo for reference.
There are a few things that ive noticed that could really improve the visibility of open source software (imho, as always):
a.) SourceForgeMart an open source client for any platform, that hooks into a "trusted" source, such as sourceforge, and allows joe bloe user to click and install over the web in one shot. I know, i know, they can click on a link, download, find the exe/zip, execute it, config it, and then run it, but if you want to ensure the future of open source, usability for the masses is crucial. MS is going to have a really hard time selling "MS Widget X" when joe blow can just open their SourceForgeMart browser, search on a topic, and click on "Get It", and then be using it in under 30 seconds. the ultimate in on demand computing, and in reality, what comcast/blockbuster want to do with movies. If that were to occur, and the "SourceForgeMart" browser became as common as the web browser (or was incorporated into one), ruling the desktop would not even be an issue.
b.) user interfaces lets face it, as much as we all love Teh Gimp, its user interface could use some work. It can be clumsy, but as superficial as it is, I really believe that is what is holding it back. I keep wandering back to adobe ps, as much as i hate to say it. User interfaces have to become a focus in open source land. Some people are going to kick and scream "real geeks dont need shiny icons"; they need to face the fact --- the user interface is the "merchandizing" of the open source world. it is the marketing, the distrobution channel, the shiny salesman that greets the user everyday, and as I've learned the hard way as an entrepreneur, these things are very important if you want to keep on keeping on.
c.) Documentation and User Manuals when someone else gets something right, you have to tip your hat to them; MS got documentation right with VS.NET; its built in, autogenerated (hate to be the company that was selling that as a plugin before VS.NET, ouch) --- open source needs to take that to the next step, and create a framework that not only plugs into sourceforge/freshmeat, but its complete and integrates itself into those shiny new user interfaces that all you open source people are building after reading point b (sic). I could see it being composed via a web tool integrated into source forge and being delivered via a web inteface/service into the app as needed. And we arent just talking.nfo files here, more like a complete - end - all - be - all of information right inside a mini browser that pulls in things like data from google.com via a webservice and www.everything2.com for simple word definitions. Something that could educate joe blow as he went.
If someone were to create this standardized documentation and article/help publication framework (ive commercially done something similar...), made a renewed (and even standardized? no?) commitment to shiny interfaces, and wrapped it all up in the SourceForgeMart (TM) browser, I believe thats what they call a "Turnkey Solution"
heh, well what about Duke Nukem (in development) Forever? The developers themselves were talking smack about that game back in 97; Now, how did marketing screw them over there? See, now, a lot of ocmpanies think they can pull the old iD trick and just tell everyone "you will get what we give you WHEN we give it to you", and guess what kids, thats not how salesmanship works. As someone who works in both sides of these things, I have seen for myself how there needs to be a balance, and far too often the arrogance of a developer is the real cause of these things. (that, and sometimes they perhaps fib on how far along the game is; see hl2)
examples of these would be, www.stoofoo.net and www.shacknews.com... in the comments section, almost daily 'stoobattles' and 'shackbattles' are announced with much fanfare, and scheduled to begin at around 9pm EST. if you play regularly, and frequent the boards, you learn the games, when new patches come out, and meet a lot of cool people. Also, you get to know the people you play with, and it gets to be better than any lan game you can play because you play against / with these people on a regular basis. Plus, its much easier than transporting yer whole rig to a spot, and its almost like your favorite sitcom that comes on 'every tues at Xpm', you just know to show up.
I just picked up a Neuros 20gig player with an fm modulator, etc for 192.00 USD. It even has an opensource package that goes with it so you can do what you want with the unit, as well as store any sort of files on it. I believe it has Ogg Vorbis support as well, as someone took the opensource project and added it. just a nice package that is sort of under the radar.
I use http://www.everything2.com a LOT to look of topics, techinical jargon, general information, etc, as its the most up to date and general source of knowledge i have found.
<snip>Kingsington Wireless WI-FI Finder Model 33063 Retail Your life on the road just got a lot easier. With the first and only WiFi detector on the market today, you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up. Specifications: Three lights indicate signal strength Detects 802.11b and 802.11g signals from up to 200 feet away </snip>
this is actually a DRM scheme? So that files that are on your harddrive are being protected from YOU, so that you cant copy them to other computers, and can only use them how <Insert Large Corporate Entity> thinks you should use them and when...
Its a nice idea. however, the orange SPV is not ready for prime time. The one i got was from england via uk ebay.
Pros:
super small nice looking nice little OS... (you swear someone shoved a laptop in there, 132mghz, whoo!) plays cool games. is the future of phones, or at least the general direction (what you are really looking for is the samsung i600, or the mitac 8380 (june, baby!)) plays a mean game of solitaire (looks almost just like the win32 version) syncs with outlook pretty well, some say as good as any. various SDKs for it. can be unlocked and decerted to run custom apps. has ie4.0 (no frames tho) plays doom! GRPS Internet! nice.
cons:
is super small OS is not ready for prime time. needs more work. 200mghz is gonna fit this a lot better than 132mgz poor construction for a phone (i took it apart, its cheaply made) feels like it will break easy. dust gets under screen. buttons are too small buttons are hard to reach. ie4 doesnt support frames, resolutions is like 176x220 little slow sometimes. isnt quite as functional as say a standard phone should be. did i mention it was poorly constructed?
Major Smartphone Forums: http://smartphone.modaco.com (tons of info + community there)
Mitac 8380!!!! http://www.brighthand.com/article/Mio_83 80_Smartphone_Includes_Digital_Camera (come to papa! - june!)
lots of fun.
I'm selling mine to get the mitac, so. It was a fun toy, but hopefully the mitac is more ready for prime time than the spv. Fun hacker toy, but im not ready to use it as my day to day phone. Its coming tho. It *IS* the future of phones, tho. no doubt.
This is one of those things where the people on the net have so lost touch with reality that they babble. Whoever came up with this idea seriously needs to go outside their nice insulated little hole and take a look around. Life doesnt work in the cold vaccum of irc. It happens in the real world, or some facimile of it. Get a grip.
Slashdot Mirror
disclaimer: I work on a startup project that is based in flash video
this is definitely a game changer, although it doesnt seem like it is getting picked up by the major blog/media sites. It simply comes down to how this will affect the economics of producing good web video and monetizing it. in a nutshell, on2 basically gave away the decoder to adobe for the flash player but kept major control over how the encoding tools could be used. They essentially jacked up the fees on encoding to make their money thinking they had a free ride on this one, and with the rise of web video / youtube, their stock price soared in the past 2 years. The big advantage they have over the other guys in flash video, ie, sorenson, was quality --- notice youtube's quality is not that great, even though the file sizes are comparable? It's cause they use ffmpeg on the backend to transcode video to the flv format. The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint (disclaimer: I do not know anyone at youtube, but we have ran into similar problems with our product, and I'm extrapolating their situtation with the logical conclusions.).
I sorta figured someone out there was gonna get ticked that there was a gatekeeper sitting on a major web tech, and I knew something had to give. I think the first clue should have been the fact that youtube was transcoding everything over to h246, but I figured that was initially just for my personal enjoyment on my iphone. <grin/> Apparently they knew a few people over at adobe. The second clue, and you cant keep things like new major codecs in the worlds most dominant web video platform a secret --- was that on2's stock price has dropped from around $3.69 three months ago to $1.48 as of this morning.
so. where does that leave web video? Well, as soon as I saw the news last night, I began checking the legal issues with transcoding to h264 for our project (does ffmpeg support it, cost, etc) and apparently, its a very accessibly standard. It's going to work with the existing netstream and video objects (whether you like them or not! whats up with the stuttering issues, adobe?) so our video editor should be able to mix sorenson, vp6, and h264 video content all in the same project (in real time, with effects! sorry, quick plug) which makes me very happy.
As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong, i do need to know myself). ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.). For raw source code, Video Lan has an encoder: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?
"What projects have you done in the past, how did they meet what was required, and in the end --- did they get the desired results?"
fuck the rest of this shit. Its all about results and meeting the needs of the market { project, client, business model }. It either payed the bills, or it didnt. And if HR is involved in interviewing the prospectives AT ANY POINT, said company is already killing itself.
last I checked my myspace account, it was free. I pay them by showing up and browsing, getting hit by advertisements while I do so. Myspace's job, like any other capitalistic venture, is to make money. Period. How they do it is basically irrelevant (outside of legal and moral implications. and those can be viewed from various philosophical positions.). So, no, they should not have "World Class Hosting and Redundancy" (which at their level, and rate of growth, is probably impossible to accomodate) --- they could if they deemed it necesary to further push stockholder equity, but as long as people put up with the current level of service (see also, cell phone companies) and keep coming back, it has passed the threshold of market acceptibility. The fallacy in the comments on this page are based around the mindset of the users here, in that, they are programmers, sys admins, and the tech crowd who are viewing this from their own professional in-grained Grand Directive, "It Must Run Perfect 99% of the Time" (or you are gone). Of course thats what the entrepreneurs tell you, but as soon as you walk out the door, they are planning how to throw the next batch of half ass experiments (see google) at that wall to see what sticks, or, what feature points are fit enough to survive at this time point in the market.
long story short? quality is a sliding scale, always subjective and based on changing market thresholds.
Favorite All Time Conversation With A Recruiter: (and this is all you need to know, kids...)
.NET beta ...
Her: well, they are looking for a Sr C# developer.
Me: I've used C# since MS introduced it, even developed on the
Her: But your resume doesnt say "Sr C# developer"
Me: Well, the job before didnt classify jobs that way, everyone was simply "developer", and the next job I was promoted to "Systems Analyst" (design+code+lead)
Her: But your resume doesnt say "Sr C# developer"
Me:
I dont understand why their team is getting this much press, other than the fact that Volkswagen's PR dept is probably hyping stanford to get some marketing exposure for their company, as this year almost 200 teams applied to get site visits.
In terms of technology, well, outside of the Turing test, this is sorta like the Super Bowl of AI. My team/part of the project dealt with Machine Vision, which has proven to be quite difficult for a lot of people (including me!). Real time scene analysis is *very* computationally expensive, and you have to make guesses and inferences as optical signal data fluxes around constantly, a lot of the time completely rendering your approach useless.
Even though from life experiences I know that Life Isnt Fair, and the playing field is never level, some of these teams get insane advantages. I wont even go into CMU (ok, I will: they have basically Defense Contractor backing, parts, and consultants, and like 7 million dollars to spend on the project), and here stanford has sponsorship with volkswagen. I was suprised Cal Tech didnt get more major sponsors, but they might have for round 2 of the challenge. No one has near the advantage of CMU though, their main LIDAR cost more than a lot of people's whole car/setup.
Aside from that, for me this project has been a blast. The work, needless to say, is very unique and its almost like a mini-1960's space race, "first one to the finish line!". Its funny how some people try different angles, spend millions of dollars, and then get foiled by a rut in the road that hangs their car up (I'm tellin ya, if the sun shifts even slightly all vision input outside of lidar can basically go to sh!t if you arent careful, and if your lidar doesnt pick it up, well...)
Regardless of whoever makes it to the top 30, it will be interesting to see if anyone finishes this year. Darpa3, maybe?
One of the key aspects of ants is changing the local environment via phermone, like temporary registers in a computer, which is then "read" by other ants in a stochastic manner. An example of a monte carlo sim running a ant foraging demo is:
f or aging12gz.jpg
o m/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=6926rVVASg&isbn=0195131592&itm=3
http://img126.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img126&image=3d
One of the top people in this field is Marco Dorigo over in Italy, and he has chaired many conferences on this subject, as well as published a few books. The best book he (along with 2 others) has published so far, imho, is "Swarm Intelligence"
isbn:0195131592
http://search.barnesandnoble.c
Ive read this one cover to cover, and its been a terrific jump start to apply various aspects of ant properties (search, TSP, emergent task switching, graph partitioning, etc)
I see some of the posts on here complaining about user interfaces via the web not being up to snuff, or the web not being 'suitable' or proper for certain things, or 'shouldnt be used' for task x. I hate to tell you, but the web can do a lot of things and if it works, it works, point blank. Want better UIs? Check out the XUL with firefox. My company has been doing the behind the scenes js calls for over 5 years now, this is nothing new. When we saw what they ff/xul guys were doing, we instantly realized they knew how to do it right from a developer's standpoint, and its first rate. For a little background, our progressions of js-callback tech went like this:
.asmx extension, and they are hailed as groundbreaking.)
. org/wiki/XUL_is_COOL
First we used a hidden background frame to pull in data behind the scenes, and process posts to the server, all managed by a multiple queue which handled all calls in an orderly fashion and async. less control than a socket, but it worked well in commercial apps. Then we moved to something like
this.oXmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
which gave us more control, but still wasnt cross platform. It could use xml, or just a variant of soap, or just text values, posting it to a ASP file. (And then MS makes something similar, calls it webservices with a asp file having a
And then we moved on to XUL + XMLHttpRequest
which is much the same as xmlhttp from ms, in fact when we ported over the IE6 specific js code, it worked almost flawlessly (the xul devs knew it was a 'good idea' and made sure they had a version in their stuff that matched the method sigs almost item for item). After we knew that the xul stuff was good under the hood, we had to know that the GUI-widgets was going to match our overly engineered 5000+ line dhtml controls (pain to write, but they sure look good.)
XUL blows this one out of the water.
intro
http://docs.mandragor.org/files/M isc/Mozilla_applications_en/
http://en.wikibooks
file explorer! (nice)
http://filemanager.mozdev.org/
svg dom + xul dom intertwined (ff 1.9?)
http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/
oh oh oh you say! but Avalon/XAML are coming! --- and I say yeah, its nice, and does the xml markup of guis with the code behind, same thing as XUL. And you can bet your bottom dollar MS is betting on that (and indigo, and <blah blah blah/> to force you into longhorn, as well as another upgrade cycle. Avalon is essentially the same thing as xul, but with 2d rendering done via DX on your 300 dollar gfx card.
So, since its getting late and I really should get off of this soapbox, the moral of the post is that the web can do more than you think, so give XUL a try.
is the lack of seeing "sub-groups" within a group, ie, when i research C# stuff for mono, I look in
microsoft.public.dotnet
and in that group, at the top, each subgroup within that group was listed; now, most of the time, when new groups were added, i would see the newer groups there, etc. Also, it was great for navigating through the group "tree". Usually, in a large group with a lot of subgroups, i link to the main group trunk, and then go from there when i am looking for something. From this standpoint, this isnt one step back in usability, its three steps back. I hope this isnt a sign of things to come from google, because quite honestly, its pretty lazy in terms of design and testing. Its like removing the "Refresh" button from firefox when that feature has already become a staple of web browser interfaces.
/rant
sorry kids, but unless the disease changed the animal's DNA, even if this WAS an advantage, the animal would be unable to pass this disease induced "trait" onto the next generation. Lamarkian evolution was based along these lines, that "giraffes necks got longer because they reached for higher leaves", but it has been long abandoned for darwin's view (modified somewhat over time) which was more along the lines of "giraffes with longer necks naturally held an advantage when competing for food in their environment, which cause them to have more offspring, which caused their genes to proliferate".
of course, as always, your mileage may vary.
Good book on this, and fun to read: "The Blind Watchmaker", Richard Dawkins
everything in life and dynamic systems, more specifically, is based on a rate of change. If the machines are able to learn from and reduce errors faster than any human system, then an improvement is to be gained here. I work in some of the same areas as these guys, namely Ant swarms and optimization, and I can tell you that a major idea in these areas is reduction of error, not a perfect execution of a process. Just like any system, as long as the rate of error does not exceed the rate of correction of errors, or the tollerance of errors, then that system is considered good/acceptable/well performing (for the most part at least; think of the judicial system, mistakes are made, and sometimes people are hurt, but in the end, corrections are constantly made, and the system learns from past mistakes.) Yes, humans do some of the same things, but can they collectively reduce and learn from errors as a swarm of bots?
c h/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=AQv1kd1ym6&isbn=019513159 2&itm=2
It's more of a philosophy of the many's performance overcoming the errors of the few at an acceptable rate. The ants are an amazing example of this. A good book on these ideas is:
"Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems", Eric Bonabeau, Guy Theraulaz, Marco Dorigo
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksear
http://vterrain.org/
from their site:
<b>The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.
This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms. VTP writes and supports a set of software tools, including an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro). The tools and their source code are freely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.
</b>
given the nature of what they are trying to do with the sematic web stuff, and how using some sort of tagging/xml schema to define relationships, does this set the stage for a rule base like set of interactions to autmatically execute when the proper relationships are created that meet pre-defined rules? this would allow interactions between servers to happen naturally and allow for self-organizational-like qualities to 'emerge' from the web.
or i'm just a dreamer.
just a thought though...
this stuff is really cool, no doubt about it. The one thing IS, though, to write an application that running in parallel across many machines, well, only part of the code can do this, and many times code is not suited to be broken up and run in parallel like that. We have run into all the basic communication problems with this while writing a small distributed project for ant colony simulations. An ACO algo is well suited for parallelization when using them to build Traveling Salesman routes because of the nature of the algo having a loop that goes through many "fitness functions" that can be done in parallel. This is also true for things like Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming, and Particle Swarm Optimization, among others. However, just having a really well done "grid framework" such as this isnt the complete "puzzle", still software needs to be designed for it and not all models will see decent improvements being parallelized. Still, I'm sure Inferno would be at the front of the list of suitable frameworks to use to build on given its pedigree...
a list of papers on methods of parallelization of the ant algo for reference.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i e=UTF-8&q=ants+site%3Aipdps.eece.unm.edu
There are a few things that ive noticed that could really improve the visibility of open source software (imho, as always):
.nfo files here, more like a complete - end - all - be - all of information right inside a mini browser that pulls in things like data from google.com via a webservice and www.everything2.com for simple word definitions. Something that could educate joe blow as he went.
a.) SourceForgeMart
an open source client for any platform, that hooks into a "trusted" source, such as sourceforge, and allows joe bloe user to click and install over the web in one shot. I know, i know, they can click on a link, download, find the exe/zip, execute it, config it, and then run it, but if you want to ensure the future of open source, usability for the masses is crucial. MS is going to have a really hard time selling "MS Widget X" when joe blow can just open their SourceForgeMart browser, search on a topic, and click on "Get It", and then be using it in under 30 seconds. the ultimate in on demand computing, and in reality, what comcast/blockbuster want to do with movies. If that were to occur, and the "SourceForgeMart" browser became as common as the web browser (or was incorporated into one), ruling the desktop would not even be an issue.
b.) user interfaces
lets face it, as much as we all love Teh Gimp, its user interface could use some work. It can be clumsy, but as superficial as it is, I really believe that is what is holding it back. I keep wandering back to adobe ps, as much as i hate to say it. User interfaces have to become a focus in open source land. Some people are going to kick and scream "real geeks dont need shiny icons"; they need to face the fact ---
the user interface is the "merchandizing" of the open source world. it is the marketing, the distrobution channel, the shiny salesman that greets the user everyday, and as I've learned the hard way as an entrepreneur, these things are very important if you want to keep on keeping on.
c.) Documentation and User Manuals
when someone else gets something right, you have to tip your hat to them; MS got documentation right with VS.NET; its built in, autogenerated (hate to be the company that was selling that as a plugin before VS.NET, ouch) --- open source needs to take that to the next step, and create a framework that not only plugs into sourceforge/freshmeat, but its complete and integrates itself into those shiny new user interfaces that all you open source people are building after reading point b (sic). I could see it being composed via a web tool integrated into source forge and being delivered via a web inteface/service into the app as needed. And we arent just talking
If someone were to create this standardized documentation and article/help publication framework (ive commercially done something similar...), made a renewed (and even standardized? no?) commitment to shiny interfaces, and wrapped it all up in the SourceForgeMart (TM) browser, I believe thats what they call a "Turnkey Solution"
/Ant
heh. aint technology fun.
heh,
well what about Duke Nukem (in development) Forever? The developers themselves were talking smack about that game back in 97; Now, how did marketing screw them over there? See, now, a lot of ocmpanies think they can pull the old iD trick and just tell everyone "you will get what we give you WHEN we give it to you", and guess what kids, thats not how salesmanship works. As someone who works in both sides of these things, I have seen for myself how there needs to be a balance, and far too often the arrogance of a developer is the real cause of these things. (that, and sometimes they perhaps fib on how far along the game is; see hl2)
examples of these would be, www.stoofoo.net and www.shacknews.com ... in the comments section, almost daily 'stoobattles' and 'shackbattles' are announced with much fanfare, and scheduled to begin at around 9pm EST. if you play regularly, and frequent the boards, you learn the games, when new patches come out, and meet a lot of cool people. Also, you get to know the people you play with, and it gets to be better than any lan game you can play because you play against / with these people on a regular basis. Plus, its much easier than transporting yer whole rig to a spot, and its almost like your favorite sitcom that comes on 'every tues at Xpm', you just know to show up.
I just picked up a Neuros 20gig player with an fm modulator, etc for 192.00 USD. It even has an opensource package that goes with it so you can do what you want with the unit, as well as store any sort of files on it. I believe it has Ogg Vorbis support as well, as someone took the opensource project and added it. just a nice package that is sort of under the radar.
I use http://www.everything2.com a LOT to look of topics, techinical jargon, general information, etc, as its the most up to date and general source of knowledge i have found.
yer mileage may vary.
<snip>Kingsington Wireless WI-FI Finder Model 33063 Retail Your life on the road just got a lot easier. With the first and only WiFi detector on the market today, you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up.
Specifications:
Three lights indicate signal strength Detects 802.11b and 802.11g signals from up to 200 feet away </snip>
http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp ?image=33-161-101-01.JPG
this one is up there with 'I invented teh intarweb'...
this is actually a DRM scheme? So that files that are on your harddrive are being protected from YOU, so that you cant copy them to other computers, and can only use them how <Insert Large Corporate Entity> thinks you should use them and when...
javascript also supports OOP and stuff of that nature, just most people never know about it. It's quite a robust little language.
Its a nice idea. however, the orange SPV is not ready for prime time. The one i got was from england via uk ebay.
h one/default.asp
3 80_Smartphone_Includes_Digital_Camera
Pros:
super small
nice looking
nice little OS... (you swear someone shoved a laptop in there, 132mghz, whoo!)
plays cool games.
is the future of phones, or at least the general direction (what you are really looking for is the samsung i600, or the mitac 8380 (june, baby!))
plays a mean game of solitaire (looks almost just like the win32 version)
syncs with outlook pretty well, some say as good as any.
various SDKs for it.
can be unlocked and decerted to run custom apps.
has ie4.0 (no frames tho)
plays doom!
GRPS Internet! nice.
cons:
is super small
OS is not ready for prime time. needs more work.
200mghz is gonna fit this a lot better than 132mgz
poor construction for a phone (i took it apart, its cheaply made)
feels like it will break easy.
dust gets under screen.
buttons are too small
buttons are hard to reach.
ie4 doesnt support frames, resolutions is like 176x220
little slow sometimes.
isnt quite as functional as say a standard phone should be.
did i mention it was poorly constructed?
Smartphone Homesite:
http://www.microsoft.com/mobile/smartp
Major Smartphone Forums:
http://smartphone.modaco.com
(tons of info + community there)
Mitac 8380!!!!
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Mio_8
(come to papa! - june!)
lots of fun.
I'm selling mine to get the mitac, so. It was a fun toy, but hopefully the mitac is more ready for prime time than the spv. Fun hacker toy, but im not ready to use it as my day to day phone. Its coming tho. It *IS* the future of phones, tho. no doubt.
This is one of those things where the people on the net have so lost touch with reality that they babble. Whoever came up with this idea seriously needs to go outside their nice insulated little hole and take a look around. Life doesnt work in the cold vaccum of irc. It happens in the real world, or some facimile of it. Get a grip.