several projectors could be used to 'layer' screens into a 3d block display
No.
"3D" is not simply layering a bunch of 2D images on top of each other. Frankly that enough folks thought so to mod up this mistake is appalling.
You can demonstrate this for yourself pretty trivially: Print out a series of images on acetate (overhead transparency plastic.) Now stack them. Look 3D? No, it looks like a bunch of layers on top of each other.
So what about just printing the outlines of each layer at that depth? Still the same problem, you've got a bunch of outlines a micron deep (or however thick your print medium is) and whatever value you select wide, at regular intervals. Still looks & acts nothing like 3D.
BTW this is the same reason one doesn't get "3D screens" by layering a stack of LCDs.
The closest this could get to a 3D effect would be by layering images of objects at different depths. Unfortunately if you moved your head, to actually use your stereo vision to see the depth differences, you'd also ruin the effect by having clipping issues with layers 'bleeding' through.
Last year a shop in downtown Montreal had this in their window. It was interesting for novelty value, mebbe designers would go gaga over it. I could imagine some uses for it.
The hook was it being video, apparently floating in the shop window. No wires, no frame, in was creepily like Picture-In-Picture for the real world.
In the brightly lit shop window the image was equally bright, whatever in the ceiling driving it was pretty powerful. The only evidence there was anything 'going on' at all, beyond a block of video floating in space, was two, nearly invisible, mono-filament lines holding up the sheet of plastic. Also from the sides of the shop window one could spot the edges of the plastic if one looked carefully at the edge of the bright moving distracting video (in short - not obvious at all.)
Uses aside from novelty value?
Well as many folks have noted this is just an improvement on the old frosted-sheet-of-plastic trick so anywhere that goes this can can too. Places where you want a display with the only accessible part being a bit of plastic, like in public venues. Also spots where you don't want a lot of hardware 'hanging around' but want a cleaner look.
I could see this being popular for indoor stadiums, hanging off the edge of the deck above. Those fans are woefully under-served with TV during games (sarcasm).
Airports are gonna love this. Many have gone from banks of big CRTs squatting over folks to frames of flat panels, this will be the next step in their search for sleek 22nd century tax-paid coolness.
Designers, heck yeah! The mantra has been "thin is in", but they've still been vexed by cables and how to handle that awkward screen when it's not in use. Here is something that can mounted in the ceiling ($$$), the screen put in a convenient corner, and (with the house cleaner dusting it regularly) won't spoil the elegant lines of the room with evidence of proletarian TV tastes. I bet HGTV just ordered a shipping container of 'em.
For the rest of us? Unless you've got a real desire for 'floating TV' I bet most/.'ers would rather spend their money on more features & toys then just 'look it *floats*!'.
Wikipedia isn't the code. Wikipedia isn't the Foundation. Wikipedia isn't the board. Wikipedia isn't the domain, or the hardware, or the bandwidth. Wikipedia isn't even the current corpus.
Those are all trees - step back and see the forest.
Wikipedia is contributions that have been made to it, the ways people use it, the value people find in it. If Wikipedia turns evil, through tainting by Google, or subversive grants, or Emperor Ming's Mind Control Ray, then we can start another one.
It's happened before & it'll happen again.
You're investing everything in some sort of centralized deified eternal object, and it simply t'aint that way.
Ten minutes after there is sufficient concern that folks feel a need to fork there will be a new domain, a donated server, a chunk of bandwidth, and a tip jar. Sure Wikipedia costs money, you honestly think it can't be found? Four phone calls and Wikipedia Next-Generation is funded for three months. Honestly.
That's all it takes, it's that easy, if there's a need.
Otherwise you've just got Angry Bob's personal Wikipedia and who cares?
What counts is the community, dedicated to the Wikipedia idea. That community isn't stupid or sheep like or without resources.
So yes, Wikipedia could fail. Any service or institution can fail. But the strength of a Wikipedia is that anyone can pick up the pieces and start the ball rolling again.
It's not a Tragedy of the Commons, it's the Strength of the Commons.
The mag might be a dinosour, the writer a hack but history has a habit of repeating (Tragedy of the Commons., Garrett Hardin, 1968.). Especially in the face of plunderers.
I call BS.
Go to Wikipedia's Forking FAQ. There are directions for creating your own Wikipedia clone. The software. The settings. The content. It's all there: Free, open, legal.
Now reconcile that with your Tragedy of the Commons & Plunderer insinuations.
I've seen SMIL used, indeed it's pretty much the standard for structuring on-demand web video with credits, intros, & ads before or after the feature.
As to SMIL typically not including useful (search engine friendly) metadata, that's more an issue with authors not taking advantage of this then a shortcoming in the format.
Presumably with multimedia search becoming a standard service we'll see sites getting smart about exposing their resources and attracting users.
But, yes I recall SGML - I used to create medical instrument documentation in it in the '80's. I also recall downloading a beta version of Mosaic onto a then uber-cool Sunstation & being impressed, showing it off to the others in the lab with me.
However if you're trying (awkwardly) to make a connection between SGML & SMIL I disagree.
SGML never had wide distribution. SMIL has nearly ubiquitous distribution, already. Take a look at the list of apps supporting it. Where SMIL is lacking is in developer awareness, hence all the "gee whizz" comments on this yet-another-niche-ML. However awareness of an existing functionality is a far easier hurdle then distribution of an entirely new & redundant format.
Finally, whats your connection to Annodex? Not doing a bit of astroturfing are we?
Seriously, who gives a flip what John Dvorak burped up this week? He's a whored out hack whose career has declined to regularly posting outrageous things in a bid to get attention and pretend some degree of relevancy.
PC Magazine is zombie, it's empire crumbled, aside from it's regular product comparison charts (which are widely blamed for much of today's feature-bloat) nobody would still be aware of it's continued existence. From that sad little bailiwick Dvorak bleats for attention and worse yet the gullible wanna-be defenders rush to dispute him.
This week he's on a smear against Google & Wikipedia. It could as well been another (willfully) know-nothing Linux FUD article, or another Mac-troll, or whatever. They're all trash and only PHB's struck in the 80's still pay the slightest attention to his "opinions" (quotes because I don't think be means a bit of what he says himself.)
The folks who run Wikipedia are notably honest. To date the folks at Google have done pretty well by their "No Evil" credo. Everything on Wikipedia is open so if need be it could be quickly reconstituted elsewhere. Thus, whatever the negotiations between Wikipedia & Google there's nothing to fear.
If the current Wikipedia administration does something heinously stupid the project will route around them. Besides which the best guesses are Google is talking bandwidth & caching, perhaps prioritized ranking, not ownership.
Dvorak, he's taking an old quote out of context and trying to create a scare. That's not reporting, or even editorializing, that's just baiting, pure & simple. Don't play into his game, he's the SCO of journalism.
Possibly she does, However I suspect that depends for many their reaction depends on how experienced they are with online communication.
In direct social interaction it's possible to wander away from the boors, the cranks, the simply or creatively obnoxious. However in online conversation they're able to continually re-interject themselves in conversation after conversation until the whole space becomes overwhelmed and falls apart.
In the real world the host would have long ago gone up to the offending party and asked them to cool it, or to leave. TNH is simply pointing out the exact same responsibilities in an online host and the unlikelihood of not doing so suddenly resulting in constructive conversation.
BTW, "disenvoweling" is the tactic of removing all of the vowels from a particularly noxious post. By leaving the style but not the substance it reflects that this person did post and it was judged inappropriate by the host, serves as a warning to other like-minded folks
This is akin to the tactic of slicing off 1/2 of those annoying pseudo-anonymous "WORK FROM HOME" / "HERBAL DIET" / etc. placards affixed to many of the street poles in the US. By not entirely removing these, but rendering their contact #'s incomplete, it informs following sign posters that their investment will be quickly disabled and to not waste their time doing so there.
If you find these sorts of checks & balances offensive I suggest you open up an online conversation space without any such moderation. Or check out the squirming spam & flamer ridden remains of many, including much of Usenet.
Theresa Neilson Hayden, who maintains a lively, smart, community on her Making Light blog, was invited by the South by Southwest Conference to sit on their "Spammers, Trolls and Stalkers: The Pandora's Box of Community" panel. Instead she submitted her suggestions, a magnificent set of common-sense policies for maintaining a virtual community from the host's viewpoint:
1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.
5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.
6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.
The rest of the list is also quite good, including a comment on/.
You're right, I don't think you read the article very closely. It is one that deserves that close reading because there are lots of ideas, and opinions in it, many of which are worthy of consideration.
Your point that Purdue, and other schools, requires classes in specific applications of CS, is part of what Kay is talking about. There seems to be very little discussion, hence education, at undergraduate level, of the more fundamental questions of languages as directives, how they shape thinking, what strategies are implicit in their design.
As to "every language has it's purpose" true, but it's a legitimate question as to how many meet their purpose, how many do so well, or efficiently, or supportably, or by any other metric. As the article points out there are only a few 'important' languages that have any real impact, much of the rest is variations on themes. Besides Kay isn't talking individual languages so much much as the themes they embody, using them as examples.
(That the fanboys are coming out in defense of slights to their favorite language, or picking on another, shows just how trivial sound-bite oriented many folks are. Picking those out of the article is akin to the Farside comic What Dogs Hear: "blah blahblah blah Ginger blah blahblah Ginger blahblah blah" but with their own hot-button nouns inserted.)
As to arrogant, in this article he seemed quite honest, even humble, in recognizing other's insights and his & others missed opportunities. He does keep coming back to SmallTalk because he is an authority on SmallTalk, it is a good example of many of his points, good and bad, and familiar to many readers. He even refers to his opinions as trivial and opines that nobody has done a really good language yet by the terms he's discussing.
Finally, that he is able to make declarative statements (Xerox not "inventing the GUI") is testament to his having been there, and involved, in these topics for 40 years. His is a first person knowledge of the tropes he talks about over the years is why the interview happened and he & his opinions are being sought. That's not ego, that's being interviewed.
First off determine if wireless is really what you want. Write down, then price out scenarios, keep in mind every few months you don't do this the prices drop and the products improve.
I reccomend buying a few Linksys WRT54GS boxes for getting your feet wet. They're ~US$50. Don't cheap out and buy the WRT54G's for a few bucks less as the GS has a bit more flash memory you might want a year or two down the road.
Download the free Sveasoft firmware, or any of the other distribs out there. Sveasoft is due for a new release any-day-now, however if you want beta versions or access to their support board you'll need to pony up US$20.
Determine which spots you'll want wireless in, then set up some test spots in 'em and figure out what kinda reception you'll get, the characteristics of your greenhouses, what kinda output works best.
Figure out if 802.11a, or b, or g, works best for your needs. You can also hugely increase the transmission power with the third party firmwares but you're also increasing the noise (and heat!) too so test-test-test.
Power will be a big concern, you'll want as clean a supply as you can manage. Also a reasonable climate, these boxes are tough but if you can avoid abusing 'em you'll get longer service. The #1 killer is heat buildup & the #2 is power surges.
On a map apply what you've learned from your testing, figure out where you'll want base stations, repeaters, where they'll tie into the existing HomePNA, where you can run Ethernet, etc. Only after this go ahead an purchase the deployment hardware (it'll probably be US$10 cheaper by then.)
If security is a big concern then not only turn on wireless encryption but also set up a proper VPN. The Linksys WRT54GS/Sveasoft's can be endpoints, or servers, or pass-through, so take advantage of this.
Finally, keep an eye on your traffic. All the security in the world isn't worth anything if nobody is listening for problems. Document everything. Write a guide for folks to follow when you're out of town, or laid off, or whatever. Keep a closet of spares & make some contingency plans.
You're right - probably 90% of images have lens and flash settings, mebbe a copyright, nothing else.
But the percentage with more information is growing. Already there are cameras with GPS in them, and GPS-track-to-photo-correlation software has been around a couple of years. Plus there's all of those images with the keywords, titles, and other information filled in by cataloging programs, personal & professional.
Any of that information is gonna be interesting to a search engine. Indeed it's likely to be better quality information the the html surrounding the image and this is information that is part of it.
Pulling out the data is trivial. The extra cycles are almost nothing. The storage is a fraction of everything else that is being indexed along with the image. And so if 90% are duds, the 10% are still gonna be gold. So, even with a 10% 'hit' rate, isn't it worth indexing this along with everything else?
So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this?
This is really quite simple to comprehend. To access all the data you mention one would need to fetch those images, extract the data, and build an indexed database of image locations+extracted data, indexed by the extracted information. That would require HUGE amounts of traffic and storage.
Wow - you mean...
Exactly what search engines DO?!!
How the freak do you think Yahoo!, Google, MSN et al generate their current image lookups? The content isn't provided by "organizations which can index their own data and provide searching capabilities"; this is the service search engines provide.
They crawl the web, index the html (& pdf & doc & xml & xls & etc.), slurp the photos in & generate thumbnails, then use the indexed information to pull up pages of likely thumbnails based on your search. And yeah, it "require(s) HUGE amounts of traffic and storage."
So, with l3v1's utterly amazing cluelessness aside, does anyone with a lick of sense have any ideas why the engines aren't sucking the EXIF/IPTC metadata out of the images they're already pulling down & thumbnailing?
Explicit embedded metadata being ignored
on
Inspecting MSN Search
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What continues to surprise me is how image searches ignore the information embedded in images. EXIF & IPTC (& NewsML) all have fields for author, caption, longitude & latitude, keywords, etc. Yet none of the search engines appear to pay any attention to these.
Many pictures include this sort of search-rich information, either from the camera or added manually, using cataloging software. Google's Picasa 2 freeware (Windows only) embeds it's key words just so. Microsoft Research's excellent freeware (Windows only) World-Wide Media eXchange tools do the same for geo-coding photos. There are numerous other tools that can do the same, leading to a significent set of internally 'tagged' material.
So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this? They're already loading the images and creating thumbnails, how much extra work is it to extract any additional information in the file and use that in it's indexing too, especially compared to the potentially increased accuracy?
We woke up to pictures in our e-mail boxes of the enemy playing NAKED in our wall of popcorn.
Pity you didn't have any geek business students in your house. Then the next day the other house could have waken to your new website "www.nakedcollegeboysinpopcorn.com" and your house all buying sweet new cars a week later from the profits.
You might get lucky, they might come through, but at this point you've lost control and are unlikely to get it back.
Things you could do are imply possible more work as a carrot, or offer a premium for the source code, or pull out the stick of a lawsuit, publicizing your experience, etc.
But those are long shots.
Complicating this is the possibility of it all being international. I know lots of posters are assuming that but outsourcing doesn't require this, it could as well be to some shop down the hall, next building over, whatever. If they're outside your jurisdiction then trying to sue 'em won't be worth the distraction & costs, write it all off as a bad investment and get to work on replacing the code.
Clearly what does need to be done is your folks getting your outsourcing strategy in order. As everyone has pointed out you were fools not to require clear source, not to test the product before paying for it, for not for having an explicit resolution policy written into the contract.
My advice would be in the future to work through a reputable 3rd party who does know this stuff. There is no end of middlemen who have boilerplate contracts, service guarantees, and extensive rosters of coders. The overhead they'll add is far less then what it would cost you to do the same.
The caveat with the 3rd parties is again, getting locked in. Make sure that if you do find a good vendor(s) you can eventually form a direct relationship without paying the 3rd party in perpetuity. Make sure to read all of the fine print, for all parties, before selecting anyone.
The "few thousand birds" comment is funny, though.
Are you saying that there haven't been more then 2,000 satellites launched?
I was making a rather confident guess but a minutes searching bring up this AIAA article which seems to confirm my supposition.
Indeed looking at the numbers it seems reasonable to assume the US's aerospace industry alone has launched more then 2,000 satellites in it's history. Heck there are even high schools that have assembled and had satellites launched.
"Metal whiskers", vacuum deposition, etc. are well recognized issues in satellite construction. After a few thousand birds at many millions a pop the industry is quite savvy about avoiding these.
The impending EU ban on lead in consumer products has no effect on the satellite industry (they're exempt; Li'l Jr. is unlikely to be teething on Intelsat 9008b and most of it's components aren't off-the-shelf but specialized radiation-hardened product runs).
But thank you for reading the previous/. story on this and now trendily applying it to everything trying to sound knowledgable.
"My code won't compile" "Metal whiskers!"
"My candidate lost!" "Metal whiskers!"
"Erectile dysfuntion" (all together now) "Metal whiskers!"
One reason might be early reports have the Comcast box a heinous monstrosity with an unacceptably crappy interface and a list of crippling 'quirks' that betray it's barely-into-beta status.
Needless to say most Mac, and TiVo, users expect better...
And weirder, but not surprisingly, the responses here on/.
For those of us in Canada this isn't news. There's a special branch of the armed services that patrols the far north, made up primarily of natives. This is done not only to 'keep an eye on things' but to maintain sovereignty.
There's also more effort being put into patrolling the waters now. The Russians have made a play for shipping, and the US too, trying for a new NW Passage. Canada isn't enthused about this considering it'd have to handle any rescues and should there be an accident, likely in those challenging waters, the environmental consequences would be catastrophic for the region.
A bit further down the melt is having terrible effects. The famous ice highways that have been an important means of supplying northern communities and projects are experiencing unpredictable weather and dramatically changing 'ground' conditions. Routes that have been reliable for 40 years are now unusable and new ones difficult to find.
Outside of deep winter the thaw line is wreaking devastation on communities as roads and foundations heave and subside. Inexorably moving northward the land is turning into the half-frozen tundra-bog that used to be typical of further south.
Along with this change the animals and plants are struggling to keep up as seasons alter, new competitors emerge, and interdependencies fail. Rodents, owls, plants, insects, all sorts of things are showing up in places they haven't been for thousands of years and affecting what had been there. That this is alarming the cultures who've also lived there thousands of years is an understatement.
Heck, even in 'southern' Canada the warming is having a direct effect. Snow cover is less every year. This is actually kinda good news for the ski industry as the expectation is US resorts will suffer in comparison and business will move north. However along with this the hydrology of areas is changing as the spring flood are also less and less every year.
Agriculturally Canadian farmers are increasingly adopting plants they couldn't successfully raise before. Crops are going into the ground earlier and the growing season keeps getting longer. This isn't all a panacea though, for instance PEI potatoes benefit from the cold that kills soil pathogens every winter, without that blights could become a huge problem.
Climate-wise Canada is getting very concerned for what the future holds for it. Planning for large projects now regularly includes future climate considerations. Even trade is affected: Already bulk international water sales have been outlawed for fear of setting precedent.
This newish century is shaping up to be an interesting one on planet Earth. Where much of the big history of the last century was human events this one may well be that of human effects.
Well, you COULD go to the source discussions I linked to in my post...
But the short answer is no, DirectShow is an MS-proprietary architecture and nobody is making noises about reverse-engineering TiVo's decryption filter. It's likely TiVo will make a QuickTime part for their Mac base but that, though not as closed, still isn't Linux-amenable.
On the other hand, and as I tried to make it clear, once a.tivo has been decrypted you're free to use it as you would any other mpeg2 file. So code yourself a front end that'll run on Win2K/XP and deliver the goods via a web interface and you're set. Or wait a week for someone else to.
Further discussion would probably be best on the appropriate threads over on the TiVo BBS.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, we all know there's only one location in England, right? Er, Britain. Or is it the UK? Mebbe I'm thinking of the Commonwealth.
Anyway, those = London
France = Paris
Germany = Berlin
"Here" = Michigan?
"3D" is not simply layering a bunch of 2D images on top of each other. Frankly that enough folks thought so to mod up this mistake is appalling.
You can demonstrate this for yourself pretty trivially: Print out a series of images on acetate (overhead transparency plastic.) Now stack them. Look 3D? No, it looks like a bunch of layers on top of each other.
So what about just printing the outlines of each layer at that depth? Still the same problem, you've got a bunch of outlines a micron deep (or however thick your print medium is) and whatever value you select wide, at regular intervals. Still looks & acts nothing like 3D.
BTW this is the same reason one doesn't get "3D screens" by layering a stack of LCDs.
The closest this could get to a 3D effect would be by layering images of objects at different depths. Unfortunately if you moved your head, to actually use your stereo vision to see the depth differences, you'd also ruin the effect by having clipping issues with layers 'bleeding' through.
The hook was it being video, apparently floating in the shop window. No wires, no frame, in was creepily like Picture-In-Picture for the real world.
In the brightly lit shop window the image was equally bright, whatever in the ceiling driving it was pretty powerful. The only evidence there was anything 'going on' at all, beyond a block of video floating in space, was two, nearly invisible, mono-filament lines holding up the sheet of plastic. Also from the sides of the shop window one could spot the edges of the plastic if one looked carefully at the edge of the bright moving distracting video (in short - not obvious at all.)
Uses aside from novelty value?
Well as many folks have noted this is just an improvement on the old frosted-sheet-of-plastic trick so anywhere that goes this can can too. Places where you want a display with the only accessible part being a bit of plastic, like in public venues. Also spots where you don't want a lot of hardware 'hanging around' but want a cleaner look.
I could see this being popular for indoor stadiums, hanging off the edge of the deck above. Those fans are woefully under-served with TV during games (sarcasm).
Airports are gonna love this. Many have gone from banks of big CRTs squatting over folks to frames of flat panels, this will be the next step in their search for sleek 22nd century tax-paid coolness.
Designers, heck yeah! The mantra has been "thin is in", but they've still been vexed by cables and how to handle that awkward screen when it's not in use. Here is something that can mounted in the ceiling ($$$), the screen put in a convenient corner, and (with the house cleaner dusting it regularly) won't spoil the elegant lines of the room with evidence of proletarian TV tastes. I bet HGTV just ordered a shipping container of 'em.
For the rest of us? Unless you've got a real desire for 'floating TV' I bet most /.'ers would rather spend their money on more features & toys then just 'look it *floats*!'.
YMMV.
Wikipedia isn't the code. Wikipedia isn't the Foundation. Wikipedia isn't the board. Wikipedia isn't the domain, or the hardware, or the bandwidth. Wikipedia isn't even the current corpus.
Those are all trees - step back and see the forest.
Wikipedia is contributions that have been made to it, the ways people use it, the value people find in it. If Wikipedia turns evil, through tainting by Google, or subversive grants, or Emperor Ming's Mind Control Ray, then we can start another one.
It's happened before & it'll happen again.
You're investing everything in some sort of centralized deified eternal object, and it simply t'aint that way.
Ten minutes after there is sufficient concern that folks feel a need to fork there will be a new domain, a donated server, a chunk of bandwidth, and a tip jar. Sure Wikipedia costs money, you honestly think it can't be found? Four phone calls and Wikipedia Next-Generation is funded for three months. Honestly.
That's all it takes, it's that easy, if there's a need.
Otherwise you've just got Angry Bob's personal Wikipedia and who cares?
What counts is the community, dedicated to the Wikipedia idea. That community isn't stupid or sheep like or without resources.
So yes, Wikipedia could fail. Any service or institution can fail. But the strength of a Wikipedia is that anyone can pick up the pieces and start the ball rolling again.
It's not a Tragedy of the Commons, it's the Strength of the Commons.
Go to Wikipedia's Forking FAQ. There are directions for creating your own Wikipedia clone. The software. The settings. The content. It's all there: Free, open, legal.
Now reconcile that with your Tragedy of the Commons & Plunderer insinuations.
Nope, doesn't hold.
As to SMIL typically not including useful (search engine friendly) metadata, that's more an issue with authors not taking advantage of this then a shortcoming in the format.
Presumably with multimedia search becoming a standard service we'll see sites getting smart about exposing their resources and attracting users.
But, yes I recall SGML - I used to create medical instrument documentation in it in the '80's. I also recall downloading a beta version of Mosaic onto a then uber-cool Sunstation & being impressed, showing it off to the others in the lab with me.
However if you're trying (awkwardly) to make a connection between SGML & SMIL I disagree.
SGML never had wide distribution. SMIL has nearly ubiquitous distribution, already. Take a look at the list of apps supporting it. Where SMIL is lacking is in developer awareness, hence all the "gee whizz" comments on this yet-another-niche-ML. However awareness of an existing functionality is a far easier hurdle then distribution of an entirely new & redundant format.
Finally, whats your connection to Annodex? Not doing a bit of astroturfing are we?
PC Magazine is zombie, it's empire crumbled, aside from it's regular product comparison charts (which are widely blamed for much of today's feature-bloat) nobody would still be aware of it's continued existence. From that sad little bailiwick Dvorak bleats for attention and worse yet the gullible wanna-be defenders rush to dispute him.
This week he's on a smear against Google & Wikipedia. It could as well been another (willfully) know-nothing Linux FUD article, or another Mac-troll, or whatever. They're all trash and only PHB's struck in the 80's still pay the slightest attention to his "opinions" (quotes because I don't think be means a bit of what he says himself.)
The folks who run Wikipedia are notably honest. To date the folks at Google have done pretty well by their "No Evil" credo. Everything on Wikipedia is open so if need be it could be quickly reconstituted elsewhere. Thus, whatever the negotiations between Wikipedia & Google there's nothing to fear.
If the current Wikipedia administration does something heinously stupid the project will route around them. Besides which the best guesses are Google is talking bandwidth & caching, perhaps prioritized ranking, not ownership.
Dvorak, he's taking an old quote out of context and trying to create a scare. That's not reporting, or even editorializing, that's just baiting, pure & simple. Don't play into his game, he's the SCO of journalism.
What's more SMIL is already supported by Quicktime, Real, MS Media Player, & MS Internet Explorer (& Firefox with some effort).
For platforms SMIL is available on Linux, Linux/PDA, Windows, Windows CE, MacOS, & MacOS X.
For content creation numerous SMIL tools are out there, inlcuding most industry standard ones.
For those curious here's a SMIL tutorial, in SMIL.
In direct social interaction it's possible to wander away from the boors, the cranks, the simply or creatively obnoxious. However in online conversation they're able to continually re-interject themselves in conversation after conversation until the whole space becomes overwhelmed and falls apart.
In the real world the host would have long ago gone up to the offending party and asked them to cool it, or to leave. TNH is simply pointing out the exact same responsibilities in an online host and the unlikelihood of not doing so suddenly resulting in constructive conversation.
BTW, "disenvoweling" is the tactic of removing all of the vowels from a particularly noxious post. By leaving the style but not the substance it reflects that this person did post and it was judged inappropriate by the host, serves as a warning to other like-minded folks
This is akin to the tactic of slicing off 1/2 of those annoying pseudo-anonymous "WORK FROM HOME" / "HERBAL DIET" / etc. placards affixed to many of the street poles in the US. By not entirely removing these, but rendering their contact #'s incomplete, it informs following sign posters that their investment will be quickly disabled and to not waste their time doing so there.
If you find these sorts of checks & balances offensive I suggest you open up an online conversation space without any such moderation. Or check out the squirming spam & flamer ridden remains of many, including much of Usenet.
Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space .
Suggestions include:
The rest of the list is also quite good, including a comment onYour point that Purdue, and other schools, requires classes in specific applications of CS, is part of what Kay is talking about. There seems to be very little discussion, hence education, at undergraduate level, of the more fundamental questions of languages as directives, how they shape thinking, what strategies are implicit in their design.
As to "every language has it's purpose" true, but it's a legitimate question as to how many meet their purpose, how many do so well, or efficiently, or supportably, or by any other metric. As the article points out there are only a few 'important' languages that have any real impact, much of the rest is variations on themes. Besides Kay isn't talking individual languages so much much as the themes they embody, using them as examples.
As to arrogant, in this article he seemed quite honest, even humble, in recognizing other's insights and his & others missed opportunities. He does keep coming back to SmallTalk because he is an authority on SmallTalk, it is a good example of many of his points, good and bad, and familiar to many readers. He even refers to his opinions as trivial and opines that nobody has done a really good language yet by the terms he's discussing.
Finally, that he is able to make declarative statements (Xerox not "inventing the GUI") is testament to his having been there, and involved, in these topics for 40 years. His is a first person knowledge of the tropes he talks about over the years is why the interview happened and he & his opinions are being sought. That's not ego, that's being interviewed.
- I reccomend buying a few Linksys WRT54GS boxes for getting your feet wet. They're ~US$50. Don't cheap out and buy the WRT54G's for a few bucks less as the GS has a bit more flash memory you might want a year or two down the road.
- Download the free Sveasoft firmware, or any of the other distribs out there. Sveasoft is due for a new release any-day-now, however if you want beta versions or access to their support board you'll need to pony up US$20.
- Determine which spots you'll want wireless in, then set up some test spots in 'em and figure out what kinda reception you'll get, the characteristics of your greenhouses, what kinda output works best.
- Figure out if 802.11a, or b, or g, works best for your needs. You can also hugely increase the transmission power with the third party firmwares but you're also increasing the noise (and heat!) too so test-test-test.
- Power will be a big concern, you'll want as clean a supply as you can manage. Also a reasonable climate, these boxes are tough but if you can avoid abusing 'em you'll get longer service. The #1 killer is heat buildup & the #2 is power surges.
- On a map apply what you've learned from your testing, figure out where you'll want base stations, repeaters, where they'll tie into the existing HomePNA, where you can run Ethernet, etc. Only after this go ahead an purchase the deployment hardware (it'll probably be US$10 cheaper by then.)
- If security is a big concern then not only turn on wireless encryption but also set up a proper VPN. The Linksys WRT54GS/Sveasoft's can be endpoints, or servers, or pass-through, so take advantage of this.
Finally, keep an eye on your traffic. All the security in the world isn't worth anything if nobody is listening for problems. Document everything. Write a guide for folks to follow when you're out of town, or laid off, or whatever. Keep a closet of spares & make some contingency plans.But the percentage with more information is growing. Already there are cameras with GPS in them, and GPS-track-to-photo-correlation software has been around a couple of years. Plus there's all of those images with the keywords, titles, and other information filled in by cataloging programs, personal & professional.
Any of that information is gonna be interesting to a search engine. Indeed it's likely to be better quality information the the html surrounding the image and this is information that is part of it.
Pulling out the data is trivial. The extra cycles are almost nothing. The storage is a fraction of everything else that is being indexed along with the image. And so if 90% are duds, the 10% are still gonna be gold. So, even with a 10% 'hit' rate, isn't it worth indexing this along with everything else?
Exactly what search engines DO?!!
How the freak do you think Yahoo!, Google, MSN et al generate their current image lookups? The content isn't provided by "organizations which can index their own data and provide searching capabilities"; this is the service search engines provide.
They crawl the web, index the html (& pdf & doc & xml & xls & etc.), slurp the photos in & generate thumbnails, then use the indexed information to pull up pages of likely thumbnails based on your search. And yeah, it "require(s) HUGE amounts of traffic and storage."
So, with l3v1's utterly amazing cluelessness aside, does anyone with a lick of sense have any ideas why the engines aren't sucking the EXIF/IPTC metadata out of the images they're already pulling down & thumbnailing?
Many pictures include this sort of search-rich information, either from the camera or added manually, using cataloging software. Google's Picasa 2 freeware (Windows only) embeds it's key words just so. Microsoft Research's excellent freeware (Windows only) World-Wide Media eXchange tools do the same for geo-coding photos. There are numerous other tools that can do the same, leading to a significent set of internally 'tagged' material.
So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this? They're already loading the images and creating thumbnails, how much extra work is it to extract any additional information in the file and use that in it's indexing too, especially compared to the potentially increased accuracy?
Hare are his:
You might get lucky, they might come through, but at this point you've lost control and are unlikely to get it back.
Things you could do are imply possible more work as a carrot, or offer a premium for the source code, or pull out the stick of a lawsuit, publicizing your experience, etc.
But those are long shots.
Complicating this is the possibility of it all being international. I know lots of posters are assuming that but outsourcing doesn't require this, it could as well be to some shop down the hall, next building over, whatever. If they're outside your jurisdiction then trying to sue 'em won't be worth the distraction & costs, write it all off as a bad investment and get to work on replacing the code.
Clearly what does need to be done is your folks getting your outsourcing strategy in order. As everyone has pointed out you were fools not to require clear source, not to test the product before paying for it, for not for having an explicit resolution policy written into the contract.
My advice would be in the future to work through a reputable 3rd party who does know this stuff. There is no end of middlemen who have boilerplate contracts, service guarantees, and extensive rosters of coders. The overhead they'll add is far less then what it would cost you to do the same.
The caveat with the 3rd parties is again, getting locked in. Make sure that if you do find a good vendor(s) you can eventually form a direct relationship without paying the 3rd party in perpetuity. Make sure to read all of the fine print, for all parties, before selecting anyone.
Good luck, and learn this lesson well.
Are you saying that there haven't been more then 2,000 satellites launched?
I was making a rather confident guess but a minutes searching bring up this AIAA article which seems to confirm my supposition.
Indeed looking at the numbers it seems reasonable to assume the US's aerospace industry alone has launched more then 2,000 satellites in it's history. Heck there are even high schools that have assembled and had satellites launched.
"Metal whiskers", vacuum deposition, etc. are well recognized issues in satellite construction. After a few thousand birds at many millions a pop the industry is quite savvy about avoiding these.
The impending EU ban on lead in consumer products has no effect on the satellite industry (they're exempt; Li'l Jr. is unlikely to be teething on Intelsat 9008b and most of it's components aren't off-the-shelf but specialized radiation-hardened product runs).
But thank you for reading the previous /. story on this and now trendily applying it to everything trying to sound knowledgable.
"My code won't compile" " Metal whiskers! "
"My candidate lost!" " Metal whiskers! "
"Erectile dysfuntion" (all together now) " Metal whiskers! "
Am I the only one who didn't switch mental gears from networking fast enough and initially parsed the headline as a referring to a different "IP"?
Needless to say most Mac, and TiVo, users expect better...
And weirder, but not surprisingly, the responses here on /.
For those of us in Canada this isn't news. There's a special branch of the armed services that patrols the far north, made up primarily of natives. This is done not only to 'keep an eye on things' but to maintain sovereignty.
There's also more effort being put into patrolling the waters now. The Russians have made a play for shipping, and the US too, trying for a new NW Passage. Canada isn't enthused about this considering it'd have to handle any rescues and should there be an accident, likely in those challenging waters, the environmental consequences would be catastrophic for the region.
A bit further down the melt is having terrible effects. The famous ice highways that have been an important means of supplying northern communities and projects are experiencing unpredictable weather and dramatically changing 'ground' conditions. Routes that have been reliable for 40 years are now unusable and new ones difficult to find.
Outside of deep winter the thaw line is wreaking devastation on communities as roads and foundations heave and subside. Inexorably moving northward the land is turning into the half-frozen tundra-bog that used to be typical of further south.
Along with this change the animals and plants are struggling to keep up as seasons alter, new competitors emerge, and interdependencies fail. Rodents, owls, plants, insects, all sorts of things are showing up in places they haven't been for thousands of years and affecting what had been there. That this is alarming the cultures who've also lived there thousands of years is an understatement.
Heck, even in 'southern' Canada the warming is having a direct effect. Snow cover is less every year. This is actually kinda good news for the ski industry as the expectation is US resorts will suffer in comparison and business will move north. However along with this the hydrology of areas is changing as the spring flood are also less and less every year.
Agriculturally Canadian farmers are increasingly adopting plants they couldn't successfully raise before. Crops are going into the ground earlier and the growing season keeps getting longer. This isn't all a panacea though, for instance PEI potatoes benefit from the cold that kills soil pathogens every winter, without that blights could become a huge problem.
Climate-wise Canada is getting very concerned for what the future holds for it. Planning for large projects now regularly includes future climate considerations. Even trade is affected: Already bulk international water sales have been outlawed for fear of setting precedent.
This newish century is shaping up to be an interesting one on planet Earth. Where much of the big history of the last century was human events this one may well be that of human effects.
But the short answer is no, DirectShow is an MS-proprietary architecture and nobody is making noises about reverse-engineering TiVo's decryption filter. It's likely TiVo will make a QuickTime part for their Mac base but that, though not as closed, still isn't Linux-amenable.
On the other hand, and as I tried to make it clear, once a .tivo has been decrypted you're free to use it as you would any other mpeg2 file. So code yourself a front end that'll run on Win2K/XP and deliver the goods via a web interface and you're set. Or wait a week for someone else to.
Further discussion would probably be best on the appropriate threads over on the TiVo BBS.