Back in Napster's hey-day, I knew of a guy who, when answering the phone to customers, would ask them what their favourite song was and then try and pull it off Napster while he was talking to them. Napster + 10Mbit internet connection + a cable from line-out into the phone system, and 80% of the time customers on hold would find themselves listening to their favourite song. Now *that's* a neat bandwidth demo:)
Um... you sure you're not confusing Bruce Sterling (the sci-fi/cyberpunk novelist we're talking about here) with Bruce Schneier (the guy who wrote Applied Cryptography, among other things?)
"Thankyou for calling technical support. If your cup holder is broken, please press 1. If you would like a knowledgeable support person, please enter the dotted-quad representation of a/28 netmask."
(with apologies to whomever I stole this from... it's from a.sig somewhere but I can't find the source!)
I highly recommend Stephen Baxter to anyone who's looking for truly visionary science fiction - work that reflects the dreams and ambitions of our generation the way Asimov and Clarke's finest works reflected theirs. His 'Space' trilogy (Time, Space, Origin) is among the most thought-provoking and downright entertaining material I've ever read, and 'Titan' is a superb space adventure story that loses nothing through trying to remain scientifically plausible. (I haven't read his Xeelee novels yet but they're definitely on the list.)
Once you're done with that lot, read 'Deep Future' (a collection of non-fiction essays based on the research and interviews he did for the Space trilogy) and marvel at how much of this stuff is actually (theoretically!) possible, if only we could all stop fighting long enough to do some *real* science:)
"If you really hate the taste of coffee, but just drink it because you like the hit of caffeine... !! What a waste of money!! Why not just buy Jolt?? It's a lot cheaper."
Ok - I suspect this may be one of those weird transatlantic cultural differences, but here in the UK, almost everyone makes their own tea and coffee. (as in boils the water, etc., rather than buying it from Starbucks) You're almost guaranteed to find a kettle in every home and office, so hot water is basically free, and a pack of good filter coffee granules is about five pounds. I'd reckon on getting at least twenty or thirty cups out of a bag of coffee. That works out at less than 25 pence a cup. And that's for good filter coffee. Instant is a lot cheaper - my household goes through a £5 jar in a month, and that's 3 people drinking about 10 cups a week, each - less than 5p a cup if you drink it black without sugar. By contrast, a can of Coke or equivalent is about 60p, making coffee by far the cheapest way of getting your daily caffeine kick. (Jolt is a bad comparison since in the UK it's imported and therefore expensive)
Yeah, a Starbucks triple grande latte mocha Alpacino with chocolate sprinkles costs more than a can of Coke - but that's not paying for caffeine, that's paying for convenience and branding and gimmicks.
"Patients with AD had an average daily caffeine intake of 73.9 +/- 97.9 mg during the 20 years that preceded diagnosis of AD, whereas the controls had an average daily caffeine intake of 198.7 +/- 135.7 mg during the corresponding 20 years of their lifetimes"
Have they accounted for the possibility that the heavy caffeine consumption is actually linked to a more mentally active lifestyle? In my experience, people who drink a lot of caffeinated drinks do so because they're doing mentally taxing work - coding, writing essays, studying - and they find the stimulant effects help their concentration. On the other hand, when was the last time you heard of someone brewing a fresh pot of coffee before sitting down to watch Springer or a football game?
I'd guess someone who spends 20 years using their brains in a problem-solving capacity daily - coding, designing bridges, balancing accounts, whatever - will probably drink a lot more coffee than someone who spends 20 years working on checkouts, answering phones or watching TV. There's also evidencesuggesting that staying mentally active can have beneficial effects on mental health in later life. Which makes me wonder if caffeine has any specific effect on mental health, or is there just a correlation between caffeine intake, daily mental activity and subsequent mental health?
Much as I feel the same, I don't think that's quite true. Surely there are some cases where it's appropriate to use a light-weight animation and something like.mpg would be overkill.
Agreed. Animated GIFs can be very useful - it's just that 99% of sites seem to use them purely for advertising and obnoxious eye candy.
The best use of an animated GIF I've seen is at : http://www.ibanez.co.jp/world/guitar/uv_jem/pages/ uv777p.html - the little animation of the selector switch and pickups at the bottom is a fantastic way of conveying a large amount of information in a very small space.
Computer graphics have now advanced to the point where, given enough time and processing power, you can simulate almost anything with near-photographic realism. ILM, Digital Domain, Weta, et al can create completely convincing digital characters, but (leaving aside the issue of how a digital performance is based on the the 'actor' - e.g. Andy Serkis' 'performance' in LOTR:TTT, or Dex in SW:AOTC) they're still entirely dependent on human voice actors to complete the performance.
OK, the point of this article is on-demand realtime speech synthesis - roughly analogous to the 3D engines used in games. It has to compromise quality and detail for the sake of speed and responsiveness. Could there be a market for 'voice rendering' - a system which can take a script (possibly with some additional mark-up to indicate emotions, emphasis, timing, etc.) and generate an audio version which approaches a reading of the same script by a competent voice actor?
As well as the obvious 'virtual thespian' Hollywood angle, I'm thinking about stuff like low-budget audio drama - people who have the time and the technology to tweak a voice script, but can't afford professional actors to do it the old-fashioned way. There could be applications for creating audio books for the visually impaired, or to make life easier for students working through Shakespeare and Chaucer - I'm still amazed every time I hear Shakespeare read out loud how much meaning can be conveyed by the nuances of the human voice, compared to dry printed prose.
Is anyone actively working on anything like this? If not, why not? Is it really that hard to fool the human ear? Or is it just a case that it's still cheaper and easier just to employ people to read things into a mic?
I think there's numerous applications for wearable technology. The whole desktop/keyboard paradigm has evolved from machines which took up an entire basement - even the best PDAs are still basically trying to fit a conventional office setup (phone, organiser, calendar, word processor, etc.) into a tiny little magical electric gizmo. No wonder people end up leaving them behind when they want to relax. At the other extreme, personal stereos are a great example of wearable technology. They don't read email, they don't browse the web - hell, most of them even use a good old-fashioned cable to connect the player to the headset - but they work, they're useful, and they've gained enough acceptance that you can wear headphones on the train without looking like a freak.
I was reading recently (don't recall where, sorry) about a set of goggles with a build-in camera and HUD, that would OCR Japanese characters on notices and signs and display their English translations. Even if it only worked with basic words like 'hotel', 'metro', 'toilet', this would be of huge benefit to English speakers lost in downtown Tokyo. This sort of angle could be a major selling point for wearable kit once it matures. With GPS, wearable hardware would be able to tell where you are and which direction you're facing - you wouldn't need a keyboard or voice interface to tell it where you were, 'cos it would already 'know'. It'd be like those infrared audio guides in museums, only it would work everywhere. Imagine wandering the streets of Prague or Athens, looking at some wonderful old building, and being able to find out who built it and when without having to dig out the guidebook and hunt through the index.
My point is, everyone's thinking about wearable tech as a way of taking things with you - email, phones, internet access - and missing the potential killer apps which you just *can't* do with desk-based hardware.
I don't think bots are the problem... I've had several online conversations which I'd assumed were chat-bots but turned out to be real people. I guess when Turing designed his test, he probably didn't anticipate the massive advances in human stupidity that we've witnessed in the last few decades:)
There's another side to this whole subscription issue - or 'metered billing' as it's referred to in the article. The industry is trying to steer us towards a subscription rather than purchasing model - i.e. you pay for Windows by the year, rather than buying it outright. In the case of operating systems and server apps, this equates to more revenue for the vendor and a more stable long-term business model - but what about desktop applications?
I'm primarily an ASP/.NET coder, but I do the odd bit of content creation - mainly images and animations for web sites. I run my core apps (OS, email, browsers, text editors) every day. About once a week, I'll fire up Corel Photopaint for an afternoon or so to make up some buttons or something. I use Microsoft Access for two days every quarter, to perform updates to a clients' database.
This means over the course of a year, I use Photopaint for about two hundred hours and Access for eight days. Yet I (or rather my employer) has paid the same price for these applications as someone who uses them all day, every day. There are applications - Photoshop springs to mind - which I don't use at all, because they wouldn't get used frequently enough to justify the cost of the licenses. But if we could pay for these apps on a per-usage or daily basis - actual 'metered billing', the same as water or electricity or bandwidth - they'd become cost-effective. Not to mention the vast number of people who just pirate applications 'cos they only use them occasionally and they're not prepared to pay for it.
Ok, this is highly unlikely because it means less money for the software companies, and if open software continues to improve as it has in the last few years, it'll be redundant before long anyway. But it would make an interesting angle for companies trying to convince their users of the merits of the subscription model.
The 'angle' here is that, by reducing the number of transactions required for the merchant to collect payment, they're making it more profitable for merchants. At the moment, merchants can't flog things for 50c each using Visa, because the Visa transaction charges mean they actually make a loss on each purchase.
Thing I don't understand - Peppercoin claim if you only buy one MP3, you'll only be charged 50c.
"You will be billed on your credit or charge card for the amount you spend, and the merchants will be paid legal tender for the content they sell." [from the Peppercoin Consumer FAQ]
So how can Peppercoin charge 50c to my Visa card without putting themselves out of pocket due to transaction charges? Or are they hoping I'll be an insignificant minority and that everyone's gonna use this thing so much that the transaction payments will become insignificant?
OK, Rivest's a smart guy and micropayment is a hard problem, but this just sounds like so much BS right now...
Granted. I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story. There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor. Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.
There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.
Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now.:)
I was in South Africa last month, and when I got back to the UK and unpacked my stuff I still had some 'South African' water in my hiking flask. I just realised, when I emptied it I should have checked to see whether the water remembered to go the wrong way down the plughole:)
I take your point, but c'mon - according to these results, the world-renowned York Castle Museum ranks ahead of the National History Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre... The 'big' museums all have.com or.edu or.ac.uk addresses because they're established. That's the other great thing about.movie - with a very few exceptions, movie sites spring up a couple of months before the release, hang around until the DVD sales drop off, and then they're history. There's no long-term investment in their online presence. The Natural History museum have already printed www.nhm.ac.uk on countless brochures, letterheads and souvenirs, and I can't see them switching to.museum just 'cos it's there.
I've read everything Neal Stephenson's published, and all Gibson's stuff except this latest one. I love them both dearly, but there's a contrast between their writing that always strikes me.
I think Gibson uses technology to tell his stories, whereas Stephenson creates his stories so he can talk about technology. Remove the gadgets and tech noir from Neuromancer, and I think it would still stand fairly well as a story because the narrative is driven by character interaction. Wintermute could just as easily be a mythical god, or even some mysterious gang boss in the roaring forties - there's really not a great deal that *requires* 'him' to be an AI. On the other hand, Cryptonomicon (which I consider one of the finest books ever written), Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are all basically stories about tech. Imagine Snow Crash without the eponymous virus, or Cryptonomicon without the Enigma ciphers. Stephenson goes into loving detail explaining the intricacies of his technology - the Cryptonomicon analogy between Turing's bicycle chain and the Enigma machines springs to mind - while Gibson will open a novel (Count Zero) with 'They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair' and never once explains in the next 335 pages what a slamhound is or how you slot one. One can't help thinking that Stephenson created the Raft because It Would Be Cool, where Gibson created Freeside 'cos he needed somewhere to set the next few chapters and a space station seemed as good as anywhere.
Of course, if I had a fraction of either of their talent, I wouldn't be writing comments on Slashdot...:)
I must admit, I'm not surprised to see.name going tits-up, and I'll be surprised to see how.me.uk plays out over the next year or two. I think this whole notion of trying to cater to individuals is pretty well doomed - there's always going to be too many people with the same name, and they're going to end up as the exclusive preserves of the rich and vain people who happened to get there first. If they really want to sell domains to individuals, give them a bit of character... hands up anyone who wants their own.geek domain?
On a more general note, I may be missing something *really* significant, but I really think that the internet DNS system suffers heavily from piss-poor management. As it stands, we've got all these fairly uninspiring TLDs -.museum,.aero..info, the list goes on. I can't believe any commercial organisation are going to go for a.biz or a.info domain without trying to get the.com as well. One of my clients provides information publishing services to the media industry, and they're now buying.com,.co.uk,.biz and.info for every domain they register - not 'cos it's bringing them any extra revenue, but because they're worried about cybersquatters and competitors trading on their brand.
Added to this, I really don't think ICANN are doing a particularly good job setting up the 'new' TLDs. I've said this before on/., but why the hell isn't there a.movie TLD? Every mainstream film that's released these days has an official website with a fat marketing budget behind it. Movies tend to have short, easily memorable name, and - more importantly - they're almost always unique names, to avoid people confusing one movie with another. Since films don't really depend on their internet presence for revenue the way many companies do, they'd probably be a lot more receptive to using something other than.com at the end. As long as the registration process was vetted the same way as.edu or.ac.uk, you'd rapidly create a system where a.movie site was guaranteed to be the 'real deal', leaving the fanboys to fight over www.starwarsepisode3.com. I'm sure there's numerous other candidates -.game,.book,.show, maybe.band or.music or somesuch. Certainly none of them can be any worse than.museum - do a Google search for 'museum', and see how many pages of results you have to go through to find a.museum TLD. I got bored after about a hundred results.
.sex and.xxx offer possibilities, too. It can't be that hard for an ISP or hosting company to insist that their customers use a specific TLD for pornographic sites. All concerned parents have to do is block access to.sex and voila! they can sleep at night believing their kiddies are safe from the child-eating internet porn monsters.
At the end of the day, if ICANN want to provide TLDs as a service, they've got to accept that no-one's going to get rich, and if they want to get rich, they should be identifying their potential markets just like any other business and working to meet the needs of those markets. TLDs like.name and.aero just seem like a waste of everybody's time and bandwidth.
Something that I think every time I'm watching the trailers in the cinema and see the www.sony.com/movie or www.something-the-movie.com - why the hell isn't there a.movie TLD? Think about it. Every film that comes out these days has an official website. Every film (with isolated exceptions, typically decades apart) has a unique name, to avoid confusion with competing movies. Mainstream movie titles are almost invariably short, snappy and memorable - ideal domain names, in other words. And it's not like the people behind these official sites are short of cash - the domain registrars could charge *serious* money for official.movie domains and it would be a drop in the ocean compared to Arnie's salary. Set up.movie, restrict applications to genuine, official promotional websites to keep the fanboys out, and charge (say) a couple of grand each. Instant revenue for ICANN, and a little less confusion for the rest of us.
Granted, this post is inversely relevant to the thread, since 'Rendezvous with Rama' has a sufficiently distinctive title to avoid the problem... and judging from the site that's up there at the moment, I think these guys probably blew their entire promotional budget on one Powerpoint license... but I can't believe I'm the only person in the world who thinks.movie is a good idea. Better than.museum, that's for sure (for the record, a Google search for 'museum' doesn't return a SINGLE.musem domain within the top 100 search results... nice going, ICANN.)
I'm a web developer running Win2K on all my dev machines. I run Opera, IE, Netscape and Phoenix on a daily basis. I paid for Opera 6. I paid for Opera 7 while it was still in beta. I paid for them because I believe any company who can fit something as comprehensive as Opera 7 into a 3Mb download deserve a little recognition, and at least now if it all goes wrong and Opera disappears into obscurity, I won't feel like it was my fault.:)
Technically, it has it's problems - although many of them aren't Opera's fault. Too many existing sites are developed for IE/Netscape instead of being built around standards. I fire up IE for non-Opera compatible sites at least a couple of times a day - online banking being the main culprit. And I still can't get my head around the Opera 7 mail client. Outlook Express ain't perfect, but at least I can find my mail...
Thing is, I *like* Opera. Opera's tabbed browsing is the best I've ever seen. Opera handles 99% of existing websites and about 1% of known security exploits. I like the interface, I like the philosophy behind it, I like the fact that it supports alpha-channel PNGs even though there's not a website on earth that uses them properly 'cos IE still won't support them. I like the fact that you can zoom a page visually as opposed to just enlarging the font size - really useful if you're running 1600x1200 on a 17" monitor and someone's hardcoded their text to be 8px high. And - to be perfectly frank - I just like the fact that *someone* is taking W3C standards seriously, and I think that's worth $39. In terms of hours-usage-per-dollar, Opera represents much better value for money than Quake III or Deus Ex, and I didn't feel like either of those ripped me off...:)
Slashdot Mirror
"maybe a dictatorship in terms of final word or a democratic vote will work."
Linus.
Kernel.
The defense rests, your honour
Back in Napster's hey-day, I knew of a guy who, when answering the phone to customers, would ask them what their favourite song was and then try and pull it off Napster while he was talking to them. Napster + 10Mbit internet connection + a cable from line-out into the phone system, and 80% of the time customers on hold would find themselves listening to their favourite song. Now *that's* a neat bandwidth demo :)
Like autumn harvest,
Writing haikus correctly,
Is very diffic
Um... you sure you're not confusing Bruce Sterling (the sci-fi/cyberpunk novelist we're talking about here) with Bruce Schneier (the guy who wrote Applied Cryptography, among other things?)
I highly recommend Stephen Baxter to anyone who's looking for truly visionary science fiction - work that reflects the dreams and ambitions of our generation the way Asimov and Clarke's finest works reflected theirs. His 'Space' trilogy (Time, Space, Origin) is among the most thought-provoking and downright entertaining material I've ever read, and 'Titan' is a superb space adventure story that loses nothing through trying to remain scientifically plausible. (I haven't read his Xeelee novels yet but they're definitely on the list.)
Once you're done with that lot, read 'Deep Future' (a collection of non-fiction essays based on the research and interviews he did for the Space trilogy) and marvel at how much of this stuff is actually (theoretically!) possible, if only we could all stop fighting long enough to do some *real* science :)
Ok - I suspect this may be one of those weird transatlantic cultural differences, but here in the UK, almost everyone makes their own tea and coffee. (as in boils the water, etc., rather than buying it from Starbucks) You're almost guaranteed to find a kettle in every home and office, so hot water is basically free, and a pack of good filter coffee granules is about five pounds. I'd reckon on getting at least twenty or thirty cups out of a bag of coffee. That works out at less than 25 pence a cup. And that's for good filter coffee. Instant is a lot cheaper - my household goes through a £5 jar in a month, and that's 3 people drinking about 10 cups a week, each - less than 5p a cup if you drink it black without sugar. By contrast, a can of Coke or equivalent is about 60p, making coffee by far the cheapest way of getting your daily caffeine kick. (Jolt is a bad comparison since in the UK it's imported and therefore expensive)
Yeah, a Starbucks triple grande latte mocha Alpacino with chocolate sprinkles costs more than a can of Coke - but that's not paying for caffeine, that's paying for convenience and branding and gimmicks.
See http://www.darwinawards.com/personal/personal2000- 25.html for what claims to be the world's only documented case of cryogenic ingestion.
Have they accounted for the possibility that the heavy caffeine consumption is actually linked to a more mentally active lifestyle? In my experience, people who drink a lot of caffeinated drinks do so because they're doing mentally taxing work - coding, writing essays, studying - and they find the stimulant effects help their concentration. On the other hand, when was the last time you heard of someone brewing a fresh pot of coffee before sitting down to watch Springer or a football game?
I'd guess someone who spends 20 years using their brains in a problem-solving capacity daily - coding, designing bridges, balancing accounts, whatever - will probably drink a lot more coffee than someone who spends 20 years working on checkouts, answering phones or watching TV. There's also evidence suggesting that staying mentally active can have beneficial effects on mental health in later life. Which makes me wonder if caffeine has any specific effect on mental health, or is there just a correlation between caffeine intake, daily mental activity and subsequent mental health?
Agreed. Animated GIFs can be very useful - it's just that 99% of sites seem to use them purely for advertising and obnoxious eye candy.
The best use of an animated GIF I've seen is at : http://www.ibanez.co.jp/world/guitar/uv_jem/pages/ uv777p.html - the little animation of the selector switch and pickups at the bottom is a fantastic way of conveying a large amount of information in a very small space.
There's just one fatal flaw with your otherwise excellent proposal, exemplified thus:
Checkout Guy: That'll be $22.95, please.
Darth Jeff: We don't have any proper money, but (waves hand) Jedi Dollars will do fine.
You see the problem? :)
Yeah... but after a couple of minutes, you don't even see the code any more; all you see is blonde, brunette, redhead...
Computer graphics have now advanced to the point where, given enough time and processing power, you can simulate almost anything with near-photographic realism. ILM, Digital Domain, Weta, et al can create completely convincing digital characters, but (leaving aside the issue of how a digital performance is based on the the 'actor' - e.g. Andy Serkis' 'performance' in LOTR:TTT, or Dex in SW:AOTC) they're still entirely dependent on human voice actors to complete the performance.
OK, the point of this article is on-demand realtime speech synthesis - roughly analogous to the 3D engines used in games. It has to compromise quality and detail for the sake of speed and responsiveness. Could there be a market for 'voice rendering' - a system which can take a script (possibly with some additional mark-up to indicate emotions, emphasis, timing, etc.) and generate an audio version which approaches a reading of the same script by a competent voice actor?
As well as the obvious 'virtual thespian' Hollywood angle, I'm thinking about stuff like low-budget audio drama - people who have the time and the technology to tweak a voice script, but can't afford professional actors to do it the old-fashioned way. There could be applications for creating audio books for the visually impaired, or to make life easier for students working through Shakespeare and Chaucer - I'm still amazed every time I hear Shakespeare read out loud how much meaning can be conveyed by the nuances of the human voice, compared to dry printed prose.
Is anyone actively working on anything like this? If not, why not? Is it really that hard to fool the human ear? Or is it just a case that it's still cheaper and easier just to employ people to read things into a mic?
--I think there's numerous applications for wearable technology. The whole desktop/keyboard paradigm has evolved from machines which took up an entire basement - even the best PDAs are still basically trying to fit a conventional office setup (phone, organiser, calendar, word processor, etc.) into a tiny little magical electric gizmo. No wonder people end up leaving them behind when they want to relax. At the other extreme, personal stereos are a great example of wearable technology. They don't read email, they don't browse the web - hell, most of them even use a good old-fashioned cable to connect the player to the headset - but they work, they're useful, and they've gained enough acceptance that you can wear headphones on the train without looking like a freak.
I was reading recently (don't recall where, sorry) about a set of goggles with a build-in camera and HUD, that would OCR Japanese characters on notices and signs and display their English translations. Even if it only worked with basic words like 'hotel', 'metro', 'toilet', this would be of huge benefit to English speakers lost in downtown Tokyo. This sort of angle could be a major selling point for wearable kit once it matures. With GPS, wearable hardware would be able to tell where you are and which direction you're facing - you wouldn't need a keyboard or voice interface to tell it where you were, 'cos it would already 'know'. It'd be like those infrared audio guides in museums, only it would work everywhere. Imagine wandering the streets of Prague or Athens, looking at some wonderful old building, and being able to find out who built it and when without having to dig out the guidebook and hunt through the index.
My point is, everyone's thinking about wearable tech as a way of taking things with you - email, phones, internet access - and missing the potential killer apps which you just *can't* do with desk-based hardware.
I don't think bots are the problem... I've had several online conversations which I'd assumed were chat-bots but turned out to be real people. I guess when Turing designed his test, he probably didn't anticipate the massive advances in human stupidity that we've witnessed in the last few decades :)
There's another side to this whole subscription issue - or 'metered billing' as it's referred to in the article. The industry is trying to steer us towards a subscription rather than purchasing model - i.e. you pay for Windows by the year, rather than buying it outright. In the case of operating systems and server apps, this equates to more revenue for the vendor and a more stable long-term business model - but what about desktop applications?
I'm primarily an ASP/.NET coder, but I do the odd bit of content creation - mainly images and animations for web sites. I run my core apps (OS, email, browsers, text editors) every day. About once a week, I'll fire up Corel Photopaint for an afternoon or so to make up some buttons or something. I use Microsoft Access for two days every quarter, to perform updates to a clients' database.
This means over the course of a year, I use Photopaint for about two hundred hours and Access for eight days. Yet I (or rather my employer) has paid the same price for these applications as someone who uses them all day, every day. There are applications - Photoshop springs to mind - which I don't use at all, because they wouldn't get used frequently enough to justify the cost of the licenses. But if we could pay for these apps on a per-usage or daily basis - actual 'metered billing', the same as water or electricity or bandwidth - they'd become cost-effective. Not to mention the vast number of people who just pirate applications 'cos they only use them occasionally and they're not prepared to pay for it.
Ok, this is highly unlikely because it means less money for the software companies, and if open software continues to improve as it has in the last few years, it'll be redundant before long anyway. But it would make an interesting angle for companies trying to convince their users of the merits of the subscription model.
The 'angle' here is that, by reducing the number of transactions required for the merchant to collect payment, they're making it more profitable for merchants. At the moment, merchants can't flog things for 50c each using Visa, because the Visa transaction charges mean they actually make a loss on each purchase.
Thing I don't understand - Peppercoin claim if you only buy one MP3, you'll only be charged 50c.
So how can Peppercoin charge 50c to my Visa card without putting themselves out of pocket due to transaction charges? Or are they hoping I'll be an insignificant minority and that everyone's gonna use this thing so much that the transaction payments will become insignificant?
OK, Rivest's a smart guy and micropayment is a hard problem, but this just sounds like so much BS right now...
--One time we ran out of zeros and had to use the letter 'o'....
Granted. I don't see how any word processor can justifiably require a 1.6Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM. In fact, I think Office 97 on a Pentium Pro 200 was perfectly usable in it's day and is just as usable now, but that's not the whole story. There's a whole plethora of applications which are now commonplace, which weren't even considered feasible ten (?) years ago. I can remember a piece of DOS software on my old 286 which displayed JPEG images. That was it. It took noticeable time just to decode the file, and then sample it down to 320x200 to display on a normal VGA monitor. Nowadays, we don't even consider the decoding process when viewing JPGs.
There's other similar applications - DivX movies, strong encryption, even MP3 audio - which we now take for granted 'cos we've got so much horsepower to play with that processing overhead is no longer an issue. Now we're getting into the realm of PVRs, digital camcorders, encoding real-time video straight into DivX - applications which appeal to ordinary home users, and which require some *serious* megahertz. The games industry provides a convenient milestone - anyone can tell that Quake III looks better than the original Wolfenstein 3D, but more importantly, they can see that they're fundamentally the same thing. It's a lot harder to compare modern video editing software with that of ten years ago, because ten years ago the only people editing movies on their home PCs were masochistic millionaires.
Rather than focusing on all those wasted MHz driving more and more bloated word-processors, consider some of the things we just *couldn't* do with slower hardware, and wonder what we're going to be taking for granted ten years from now. :)
I was in South Africa last month, and when I got back to the UK and unpacked my stuff I still had some 'South African' water in my hiking flask. I just realised, when I emptied it I should have checked to see whether the water remembered to go the wrong way down the plughole :)
I take your point, but c'mon - according to these results, the world-renowned York Castle Museum ranks ahead of the National History Museum, the Smithsonian, the Louvre... The 'big' museums all have .com or .edu or .ac.uk addresses because they're established. That's the other great thing about .movie - with a very few exceptions, movie sites spring up a couple of months before the release, hang around until the DVD sales drop off, and then they're history. There's no long-term investment in their online presence. The Natural History museum have already printed www.nhm.ac.uk on countless brochures, letterheads and souvenirs, and I can't see them switching to .museum just 'cos it's there.
I've read everything Neal Stephenson's published, and all Gibson's stuff except this latest one. I love them both dearly, but there's a contrast between their writing that always strikes me.
I think Gibson uses technology to tell his stories, whereas Stephenson creates his stories so he can talk about technology. Remove the gadgets and tech noir from Neuromancer, and I think it would still stand fairly well as a story because the narrative is driven by character interaction. Wintermute could just as easily be a mythical god, or even some mysterious gang boss in the roaring forties - there's really not a great deal that *requires* 'him' to be an AI. On the other hand, Cryptonomicon (which I consider one of the finest books ever written), Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are all basically stories about tech. Imagine Snow Crash without the eponymous virus, or Cryptonomicon without the Enigma ciphers. Stephenson goes into loving detail explaining the intricacies of his technology - the Cryptonomicon analogy between Turing's bicycle chain and the Enigma machines springs to mind - while Gibson will open a novel (Count Zero) with 'They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair' and never once explains in the next 335 pages what a slamhound is or how you slot one. One can't help thinking that Stephenson created the Raft because It Would Be Cool, where Gibson created Freeside 'cos he needed somewhere to set the next few chapters and a space station seemed as good as anywhere.
Of course, if I had a fraction of either of their talent, I wouldn't be writing comments on Slashdot... :)
I must admit, I'm not surprised to see .name going tits-up, and I'll be surprised to see how .me.uk plays out over the next year or two. I think this whole notion of trying to cater to individuals is pretty well doomed - there's always going to be too many people with the same name, and they're going to end up as the exclusive preserves of the rich and vain people who happened to get there first. If they really want to sell domains to individuals, give them a bit of character... hands up anyone who wants their own .geek domain?
On a more general note, I may be missing something *really* significant, but I really think that the internet DNS system suffers heavily from piss-poor management. As it stands, we've got all these fairly uninspiring TLDs - .museum, .aero. .info, the list goes on. I can't believe any commercial organisation are going to go for a .biz or a .info domain without trying to get the .com as well. One of my clients provides information publishing services to the media industry, and they're now buying .com, .co.uk, .biz and .info for every domain they register - not 'cos it's bringing them any extra revenue, but because they're worried about cybersquatters and competitors trading on their brand.
Added to this, I really don't think ICANN are doing a particularly good job setting up the 'new' TLDs. I've said this before on /., but why the hell isn't there a .movie TLD? Every mainstream film that's released these days has an official website with a fat marketing budget behind it. Movies tend to have short, easily memorable name, and - more importantly - they're almost always unique names, to avoid people confusing one movie with another. Since films don't really depend on their internet presence for revenue the way many companies do, they'd probably be a lot more receptive to using something other than .com at the end. As long as the registration process was vetted the same way as .edu or .ac.uk, you'd rapidly create a system where a .movie site was guaranteed to be the 'real deal', leaving the fanboys to fight over www.starwarsepisode3.com. I'm sure there's numerous other candidates - .game, .book, .show, maybe .band or .music or somesuch. Certainly none of them can be any worse than .museum - do a Google search for 'museum', and see how many pages of results you have to go through to find a .museum TLD. I got bored after about a hundred results.
.sex and .xxx offer possibilities, too. It can't be that hard for an ISP or hosting company to insist that their customers use a specific TLD for pornographic sites. All concerned parents have to do is block access to .sex and voila! they can sleep at night believing their kiddies are safe from the child-eating internet porn monsters.
At the end of the day, if ICANN want to provide TLDs as a service, they've got to accept that no-one's going to get rich, and if they want to get rich, they should be identifying their potential markets just like any other business and working to meet the needs of those markets. TLDs like .name and .aero just seem like a waste of everybody's time and bandwidth.
Something that I think every time I'm watching the trailers in the cinema and see the www.sony.com/movie or www.something-the-movie.com - why the hell isn't there a .movie TLD? Think about it. Every film that comes out these days has an official website. Every film (with isolated exceptions, typically decades apart) has a unique name, to avoid confusion with competing movies. Mainstream movie titles are almost invariably short, snappy and memorable - ideal domain names, in other words. And it's not like the people behind these official sites are short of cash - the domain registrars could charge *serious* money for official .movie domains and it would be a drop in the ocean compared to Arnie's salary. Set up .movie, restrict applications to genuine, official promotional websites to keep the fanboys out, and charge (say) a couple of grand each. Instant revenue for ICANN, and a little less confusion for the rest of us.
Granted, this post is inversely relevant to the thread, since 'Rendezvous with Rama' has a sufficiently distinctive title to avoid the problem... and judging from the site that's up there at the moment, I think these guys probably blew their entire promotional budget on one Powerpoint license... but I can't believe I'm the only person in the world who thinks .movie is a good idea. Better than .museum, that's for sure (for the record, a Google search for 'museum' doesn't return a SINGLE .musem domain within the top 100 search results... nice going, ICANN.)
</RANT>
I'm a web developer running Win2K on all my dev machines. I run Opera, IE, Netscape and Phoenix on a daily basis. I paid for Opera 6. I paid for Opera 7 while it was still in beta. I paid for them because I believe any company who can fit something as comprehensive as Opera 7 into a 3Mb download deserve a little recognition, and at least now if it all goes wrong and Opera disappears into obscurity, I won't feel like it was my fault. :)
Technically, it has it's problems - although many of them aren't Opera's fault. Too many existing sites are developed for IE/Netscape instead of being built around standards. I fire up IE for non-Opera compatible sites at least a couple of times a day - online banking being the main culprit. And I still can't get my head around the Opera 7 mail client. Outlook Express ain't perfect, but at least I can find my mail...
Thing is, I *like* Opera. Opera's tabbed browsing is the best I've ever seen. Opera handles 99% of existing websites and about 1% of known security exploits. I like the interface, I like the philosophy behind it, I like the fact that it supports alpha-channel PNGs even though there's not a website on earth that uses them properly 'cos IE still won't support them. I like the fact that you can zoom a page visually as opposed to just enlarging the font size - really useful if you're running 1600x1200 on a 17" monitor and someone's hardcoded their text to be 8px high. And - to be perfectly frank - I just like the fact that *someone* is taking W3C standards seriously, and I think that's worth $39. In terms of hours-usage-per-dollar, Opera represents much better value for money than Quake III or Deus Ex, and I didn't feel like either of those ripped me off... :)