Everything. When you have Terabytes of storages you stop thinking about storing photos, you store a non-stop video stream of everything. A 'photo' will just be a bookmark into that video stream. It means high quality lifelogging will be practical.
Games are another thing, some modern games already take up 20GB and sooner or later they will find their way to smartphones and tablets. It would be possible to stream them instead of storing them on the phone, but so far there aren't really many games that do that and even those that do tend to have GBs of cache on the HDD.
For phones, sure, we are reasonably close at hitting diminishing returns. But when it comes to Google Glass, the Oculus Rift or augmented and virtual reality in general we are nowhere near at hitting it. It will probably take 20K screens 2 inch in size before we hit diminishing returns there. Nvidia also just demoed a few nifty light field displays that would need even more resolution then a classical 2D display, so that's out even further.
Also lets not forget about our good old monitors at home, 4K monitors are finally back on the market, but still far from having any kind of mass market penetration and when it comes to big curved monitors, you'd probably need 8K or 16K before you are done.
You'll do have to take care about a whole lot of compatibility issues when you want to deploying something that should run on IE6, but still, even then, the actual deployment of an HTML app is still vastly easier then trying to deploy a regular application across as many platforms as do support HTML.
Try to imagine the web wouldn't run in your web browser, but would instead come in the form of.deb packages that you "apt-get install" or setup.exe files you'd have to double click. The experience of a web implemented via the means of classical desktop software would be so terrible it would be unbearable.
I think "learning from the old masters" really isn't the problem. It's not that we don't have lots of smart people writing software. I think the core problem is that we haven't figured out how to do upgrades and backward compatibility properly, which the old masters haven't figured out either. You can go and develop a HTML replacement that is better and faster, sure, but now try to deploy it. Not only do you have to update billions of devices, you also have to update millions of servers. Good luck with that. It's basically impossible and that's why nobody is even trying it.
In a way HTML/Javascript is actually the first real attempt at trying to solve that issue. As messed up as it might be in itself, deploying a HTML app to billion of people is actually completely doable, it's not even very hard, you just put it on your webserver and send people a link. Not only is it easy, it's also reasonably secure. Classic management of software on the desktop never managed to even get near that ease of deploying software.
If software should improve in the long run we have to figure out a way how to make it not take 10 years to add a new function to the C++ standard. So far we simply haven't. The need for backward compatibility and the slowness of deploying new software slows everything to a crawl.
The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).
Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.
There is a separate space on Amazon where you can rate the seller. The problem is when it's done in the normal reviews it's mostly useless as it's not attached to any specific seller, so you don't know which seller to avoid.
That said, the way seller ratings are handled by Amazon is quit terrible, it's a tiny squished box in the sidebar that can't hold much text and is a pain to navigate. There no longer is a full page list of all the seller reviews and there is no way to sort them. Seller reviews are also just about the seller, so you don't know what product people actually bought, which is often the very information you are looking for.
Furthermore when Amazon itself is the problem then there is no way to review them outside the regular reviews.
I think the best solution would be to just give the user to boxes for the review, one for the product itself and the other for the shipping and then present both of these to the user via the normal review interface and not have them spread out on completely different pages.
The problem with the whitespace is that it makes copy&paste between different block levels extremely troublesome and fragile. It leads to lots of issues that you would never have with a proper block-end statement.
The problem is that both options are even worse then Google. People abandon their blogs all the time and free services are essentially the only way how content can stay alive for longer then the author is interesting in it. If people would host their stuff on their own stuff, the Internet would be even more of a collection of dead links then it already is.
The state doesn't post videos of peoples on the Internet for shits and giggles and companies like Google take quite some effort to blur everybody faces before publishing anything. Furthermore the problem with this guy isn't even the camera, if he would just walk around and stare at people he would get pretty much the same reaction. So all he is showing is essentially that people get aggressive when you violate social norms. Surveillance on the other side doesn't really do that, England is full of cameras, yet reports on people going crazy because of it are extremely rare, a surveillance camera in the background will simply get ignored by people assuming that they even notice it in the first place.
It doesn't. The button and axis order can be pretty messed up and from what I can tell there is no way to configure it at a system level. It does however work quite good in fighting games and such that come with the ability to remap the buttons.
I don't think it's the filming that's illegal, but just the publishing. So Google Glass should be fine as long as people don't upload it to Youtube afterwards.
That's not what he is taking about. Have a look at this video of Steve Jobs is hacking together a database app by some drag&drop on a NeXTStep machine 20 years ago to get a sense of what he is getting at.
It's not like the computing world hasn't made any progress, as a lot of the stuff demoed back then is now more or less common place in every OS, which wasn't the case back then, but at least as far as desktops are concerned we haven't really made much progress beyond that. Human/computer interaction is still much the same as demoed back then.
Javascript can certainly cause a lot of problems, but none of them are really related to it being non-free. Sticking a GPL on top of the Javascript code doesn't really solve anything. It doesn't make webpages more accessible or machine readable, it doesn't make it load faster, it doesn't make it run faster and it doesn't even make it easier to modify. If the server starts to ship on updated Javascript my Greasemonkey scripts would break just the same no matter if the Javascript is GPL or not. Lots of the time the Javascript code isn't even code that does something interesting, but just used for transition animations and such because CSS3 is not yet ready for widespread use.
I think the FSF should better spend their time on advocating good web practices, encourage people to provide APIs for their websites, make sure that data can be important and exported from the cloud and such. If it's Free Software or not doesn't really matter, as while it runs on your computer, you don't really control it either way, as it all depends on what kind of data the server ships to you. If the data format from the server changes, all your Free Software Javascript would be rendered useless.
the biggest (and hardest challenge of all times) will be in entertainment.
But entertainment is also something that can be trivially copied. A single movie can entertain billions of people. Furthermore entertainment also doesn't get used up, I can still get my entertainment from 50 year old episodes of Twilight Zone. So while I certainly do agree that entertainment is growing, I don't exactly see it as a solution, sooner or later there will be enough entertainment for everybody.
Entertainment is also not immune to automation. Games can already do a whole lot of things procedurally, what's to stop them from being flexible enough in 30 years to procedurally generate a movie or some futuristic VR experience? There is still a whole lot of work to be done before you can have procedural storytelling and acting, but we will be getting there.
> does it matter that much if you play on a 4k or 2k screen?
Depends on your viewing distance and the size of the monitor. A current monitor only has 100dpi and for normal viewing distances you can resolve something around 200dpi, maybe 300dpi when you sit closer. A lot of the times it will probably be preferable to get better frame rates then resolution improvements. But monitors get bigger and computers get fasters and once you can run your games in 4k at 60fps, why not? In the end it's simply a trade-off, look at consoles, they can do HD in theory, but most games don't even do 720p, instead they render lower resolutions and scale them up, as the smoother gameplay is more important then the resolution.
Also VR is coming and the field of view that a VR headset gives you is far larger then what a monitor provides, meaning you do need all the resolution you can get.
If you think that "this time is different", can you explain why?
Past machines where limited to completely repetitious jobs. They could repeat the exact same movements a lot of times and really fast, but they couldn't react to the environment. This is changing now. You now have machines that are equipped with cameras and all kinds of sensors. They are no longer limited to highly repetitious tasks, they can sense their environment and react to it, which allows you to build things like self driving cars or robots that can safely interact with humans. And that's just the start of it, the ability to react to the environment will allow them to be used in a lot of places that have traditionally could not have been automated.
It might not exactly be a conclusive proof that we never ever get to see aliens, but the basic reasoning is pretty sound. Our whole idea of "meeting aliens" is based on conditions and expectations that will drastically change as technology moves forward. The same is true with a lot of futurist stuff, people imagine what they would do when they had access to all that cool technology, completely ignoring the fact that they will no longer exists then. It will be their grand children that have grown up with that technology and will likely use it in quite different ways then their grandfathers would have imagined. Things get even worse when you throw in the whole transhumanists stuff, when it's no longer about gadgets, but about changing humans themselves, as then essentially all bets are off. How can you predict how you will behave then when you can have a implant that will twiddle your pleasure center directly and essentially allow you to complete change the motivational framework that drives you today?
The distances and time frames that come into play when it comes to aliens and space travel are simply so huge that a classic visit in 1950 sci-fi style visit will never happen. Before a visit happens we and them will very likely all be post-singularity creates that are far beyond our current biological selfs.
Just eliminating Flash and Javascript for example would eliminate a vast majority of the world's browsing headaches.
CSS3 allows to do some animation effects that are currently done in Javascript, but that's probably the best you will ever get. I don't think we will ever get completely get rid of Javascript, it has just become to integral to what people do on the web these days.
But it's not just the web developers that are to be blamed for this. Browser developers have done extremely little to actually derive benefit from the HTML markup. Stuff like Readability should have been a standard part of all browsers years ago, yet it's still missing in Firefox.
If you plan to die soon, you are in trouble. While you can record account logins and passwords, giving those to other people is frequently a TOS violation. Giving accounts to other people, splitting them up or merging them is simply not something most services support or outright forbid. DRM-free downloads are possible with some services, but it can be a lot of hassle to download them all and archive them in a manner that would be useful. Only chance here is that the laws get changed to give you back some of your consumer rights, it seems to be slowly happening in Europe already.
If you plan to die in 60 years or so, I really wouldn't worry. Those things being digital means that there is zero collectors value for them, so by the time the data gets handed over to your kids they will be of as much use as old VHS recordings of Star Trek, i.e. worthless, as you can get better quality versions of those shows for free on Hulu.
So the kid, who is 12 and should have known better, went into his fathers office, climbed up the shelf, pulled down metal balls and proceeded to eat them.
The kid didn't just ate them for the fun of it, it swallowed them accidentally while pretending to have a pierced tongue. You might still call that stupid, but that's well in the realm of normal child stupidity (I for one prefer to call that creativity).
These are not children's toys
It's looks like a toy, it plays like a toy and is fun like a toy. The very problem with them is that it is not obvious how dangerous those things can be.
Slashdot Mirror
MNG was horribly over engineered, bloated with features and never really supported by anybody, neither tools nor browsers.
What would they store?
Everything. When you have Terabytes of storages you stop thinking about storing photos, you store a non-stop video stream of everything. A 'photo' will just be a bookmark into that video stream. It means high quality lifelogging will be practical.
Games are another thing, some modern games already take up 20GB and sooner or later they will find their way to smartphones and tablets. It would be possible to stream them instead of storing them on the phone, but so far there aren't really many games that do that and even those that do tend to have GBs of cache on the HDD.
...but how do they sign up for that email account?
Via your mobile phone number, Gmail has been doing that for a while for new accounts.
For phones, sure, we are reasonably close at hitting diminishing returns. But when it comes to Google Glass, the Oculus Rift or augmented and virtual reality in general we are nowhere near at hitting it. It will probably take 20K screens 2 inch in size before we hit diminishing returns there. Nvidia also just demoed a few nifty light field displays that would need even more resolution then a classical 2D display, so that's out even further.
Also lets not forget about our good old monitors at home, 4K monitors are finally back on the market, but still far from having any kind of mass market penetration and when it comes to big curved monitors, you'd probably need 8K or 16K before you are done.
You'll do have to take care about a whole lot of compatibility issues when you want to deploying something that should run on IE6, but still, even then, the actual deployment of an HTML app is still vastly easier then trying to deploy a regular application across as many platforms as do support HTML.
Try to imagine the web wouldn't run in your web browser, but would instead come in the form of .deb packages that you "apt-get install" or setup.exe files you'd have to double click. The experience of a web implemented via the means of classical desktop software would be so terrible it would be unbearable.
I think "learning from the old masters" really isn't the problem. It's not that we don't have lots of smart people writing software. I think the core problem is that we haven't figured out how to do upgrades and backward compatibility properly, which the old masters haven't figured out either. You can go and develop a HTML replacement that is better and faster, sure, but now try to deploy it. Not only do you have to update billions of devices, you also have to update millions of servers. Good luck with that. It's basically impossible and that's why nobody is even trying it.
In a way HTML/Javascript is actually the first real attempt at trying to solve that issue. As messed up as it might be in itself, deploying a HTML app to billion of people is actually completely doable, it's not even very hard, you just put it on your webserver and send people a link. Not only is it easy, it's also reasonably secure. Classic management of software on the desktop never managed to even get near that ease of deploying software.
If software should improve in the long run we have to figure out a way how to make it not take 10 years to add a new function to the C++ standard. So far we simply haven't. The need for backward compatibility and the slowness of deploying new software slows everything to a crawl.
The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).
Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.
There is a separate space on Amazon where you can rate the seller. The problem is when it's done in the normal reviews it's mostly useless as it's not attached to any specific seller, so you don't know which seller to avoid.
That said, the way seller ratings are handled by Amazon is quit terrible, it's a tiny squished box in the sidebar that can't hold much text and is a pain to navigate. There no longer is a full page list of all the seller reviews and there is no way to sort them. Seller reviews are also just about the seller, so you don't know what product people actually bought, which is often the very information you are looking for.
Furthermore when Amazon itself is the problem then there is no way to review them outside the regular reviews.
I think the best solution would be to just give the user to boxes for the review, one for the product itself and the other for the shipping and then present both of these to the user via the normal review interface and not have them spread out on completely different pages.
The problem with the whitespace is that it makes copy&paste between different block levels extremely troublesome and fragile. It leads to lots of issues that you would never have with a proper block-end statement.
you really only have two viable options
The problem is that both options are even worse then Google. People abandon their blogs all the time and free services are essentially the only way how content can stay alive for longer then the author is interesting in it. If people would host their stuff on their own stuff, the Internet would be even more of a collection of dead links then it already is.
The state doesn't post videos of peoples on the Internet for shits and giggles and companies like Google take quite some effort to blur everybody faces before publishing anything. Furthermore the problem with this guy isn't even the camera, if he would just walk around and stare at people he would get pretty much the same reaction. So all he is showing is essentially that people get aggressive when you violate social norms. Surveillance on the other side doesn't really do that, England is full of cameras, yet reports on people going crazy because of it are extremely rare, a surveillance camera in the background will simply get ignored by people assuming that they even notice it in the first place.
It doesn't. The button and axis order can be pretty messed up and from what I can tell there is no way to configure it at a system level. It does however work quite good in fighting games and such that come with the ability to remap the buttons.
Only the Xbox360 requires royalties, a PS3 will take any generic USB controller.
If the industry's most prominent trade show looks like it was organized by teenage boys,
How does the gaming industry compare to other industries? Aren't car shows still filled with booth babes?
I don't think it's the filming that's illegal, but just the publishing. So Google Glass should be fine as long as people don't upload it to Youtube afterwards.
That's not what he is taking about. Have a look at this video of Steve Jobs is hacking together a database app by some drag&drop on a NeXTStep machine 20 years ago to get a sense of what he is getting at.
It's not like the computing world hasn't made any progress, as a lot of the stuff demoed back then is now more or less common place in every OS, which wasn't the case back then, but at least as far as desktops are concerned we haven't really made much progress beyond that. Human/computer interaction is still much the same as demoed back then.
Javascript can certainly cause a lot of problems, but none of them are really related to it being non-free. Sticking a GPL on top of the Javascript code doesn't really solve anything. It doesn't make webpages more accessible or machine readable, it doesn't make it load faster, it doesn't make it run faster and it doesn't even make it easier to modify. If the server starts to ship on updated Javascript my Greasemonkey scripts would break just the same no matter if the Javascript is GPL or not. Lots of the time the Javascript code isn't even code that does something interesting, but just used for transition animations and such because CSS3 is not yet ready for widespread use.
I think the FSF should better spend their time on advocating good web practices, encourage people to provide APIs for their websites, make sure that data can be important and exported from the cloud and such. If it's Free Software or not doesn't really matter, as while it runs on your computer, you don't really control it either way, as it all depends on what kind of data the server ships to you. If the data format from the server changes, all your Free Software Javascript would be rendered useless.
the biggest (and hardest challenge of all times) will be in entertainment.
But entertainment is also something that can be trivially copied. A single movie can entertain billions of people. Furthermore entertainment also doesn't get used up, I can still get my entertainment from 50 year old episodes of Twilight Zone. So while I certainly do agree that entertainment is growing, I don't exactly see it as a solution, sooner or later there will be enough entertainment for everybody.
Entertainment is also not immune to automation. Games can already do a whole lot of things procedurally, what's to stop them from being flexible enough in 30 years to procedurally generate a movie or some futuristic VR experience? There is still a whole lot of work to be done before you can have procedural storytelling and acting, but we will be getting there.
So, what, the professor thinks we should just create a race of slaves?
We already did, numerous times. All domesticated animals are essentially slaves or worse.
> does it matter that much if you play on a 4k or 2k screen?
Depends on your viewing distance and the size of the monitor. A current monitor only has 100dpi and for normal viewing distances you can resolve something around 200dpi, maybe 300dpi when you sit closer. A lot of the times it will probably be preferable to get better frame rates then resolution improvements. But monitors get bigger and computers get fasters and once you can run your games in 4k at 60fps, why not? In the end it's simply a trade-off, look at consoles, they can do HD in theory, but most games don't even do 720p, instead they render lower resolutions and scale them up, as the smoother gameplay is more important then the resolution.
Also VR is coming and the field of view that a VR headset gives you is far larger then what a monitor provides, meaning you do need all the resolution you can get.
If you think that "this time is different", can you explain why?
Past machines where limited to completely repetitious jobs. They could repeat the exact same movements a lot of times and really fast, but they couldn't react to the environment. This is changing now. You now have machines that are equipped with cameras and all kinds of sensors. They are no longer limited to highly repetitious tasks, they can sense their environment and react to it, which allows you to build things like self driving cars or robots that can safely interact with humans. And that's just the start of it, the ability to react to the environment will allow them to be used in a lot of places that have traditionally could not have been automated.
It might not exactly be a conclusive proof that we never ever get to see aliens, but the basic reasoning is pretty sound. Our whole idea of "meeting aliens" is based on conditions and expectations that will drastically change as technology moves forward. The same is true with a lot of futurist stuff, people imagine what they would do when they had access to all that cool technology, completely ignoring the fact that they will no longer exists then. It will be their grand children that have grown up with that technology and will likely use it in quite different ways then their grandfathers would have imagined. Things get even worse when you throw in the whole transhumanists stuff, when it's no longer about gadgets, but about changing humans themselves, as then essentially all bets are off. How can you predict how you will behave then when you can have a implant that will twiddle your pleasure center directly and essentially allow you to complete change the motivational framework that drives you today?
The distances and time frames that come into play when it comes to aliens and space travel are simply so huge that a classic visit in 1950 sci-fi style visit will never happen. Before a visit happens we and them will very likely all be post-singularity creates that are far beyond our current biological selfs.
Just eliminating Flash and Javascript for example would eliminate a vast majority of the world's browsing headaches.
CSS3 allows to do some animation effects that are currently done in Javascript, but that's probably the best you will ever get. I don't think we will ever get completely get rid of Javascript, it has just become to integral to what people do on the web these days.
But it's not just the web developers that are to be blamed for this. Browser developers have done extremely little to actually derive benefit from the HTML markup. Stuff like Readability should have been a standard part of all browsers years ago, yet it's still missing in Firefox.
If you plan to die soon, you are in trouble. While you can record account logins and passwords, giving those to other people is frequently a TOS violation. Giving accounts to other people, splitting them up or merging them is simply not something most services support or outright forbid. DRM-free downloads are possible with some services, but it can be a lot of hassle to download them all and archive them in a manner that would be useful. Only chance here is that the laws get changed to give you back some of your consumer rights, it seems to be slowly happening in Europe already.
If you plan to die in 60 years or so, I really wouldn't worry. Those things being digital means that there is zero collectors value for them, so by the time the data gets handed over to your kids they will be of as much use as old VHS recordings of Star Trek, i.e. worthless, as you can get better quality versions of those shows for free on Hulu.
So the kid, who is 12 and should have known better, went into his fathers office, climbed up the shelf, pulled down metal balls and proceeded to eat them.
The kid didn't just ate them for the fun of it, it swallowed them accidentally while pretending to have a pierced tongue. You might still call that stupid, but that's well in the realm of normal child stupidity (I for one prefer to call that creativity).
These are not children's toys
It's looks like a toy, it plays like a toy and is fun like a toy. The very problem with them is that it is not obvious how dangerous those things can be.