You'd distribute the mashup, alongwith a special player application.
The viewer would be required to have a Star Wars DVD.
The mashup file would use frames from the original DVD by reference.
The player would composite the two video sources ( the mashup, and the DVD ).
This is much like the Video Internet.
We're not helping Microsoft fast enough. So they say, "let us help you help us better". The more people are online, the better for everyone, especially a company like Microsoft.
Read "What are Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett up to?"
200,000 youths?!?!! Depending on which source you believe, there are only about 1 million youths ( ages 9-25 ) in all of Hong Kong. Even the sources disagree on the exact demographics of Hong Kong. Total population estimates ballpark around 6.9million.
That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.
If I recall correctly, another company called FlithyFlicks was adding extra sex to regular movies, for audiences who liked their movies extra spicy.
What's really in question is whether a work of art is mutable.
In my opinion, no work should be considered final. One should be free to create and distribute mashups of audio/video works, books, and even (*gasp*) software.
Let people decide what they want. Let there be freedom of renovation!
I am delighted with this news. Mr. Buffet, hats off to you for setting a great example.
With amounts of this magnitude, the Bill & Melinda Gates could bring about significant change in many third-world countries.
Many insights mined from software development are applicable to philanthropy.
Here are a few ideas (if I may be so bold as to offer money-handling advice to the world's richest people), to make the most of the diminishing returns principle.
Utilitarian Analysis: Find out where help is needed most, and provide help there. Use a statistically-weighted view of the world. Target places with the highest rates of mortality/hunger/illiteracy/disease. Mr. Gates, I urge you to load the world in a resource profiler.
Well-defined, prioritized metrics: One metric to consider is the number of people who were near starvation-levels in 2006.
Prioritization is very important. We'd rather see a well-fed population, at minor risk from malaria, than emaciated, unwashed masses in mosquito nets.
Sustainability: Balance providing immediate help, with changing the rate and direction of the longer-term trend, to make people self-sustaining. The BMG foundation does this well, by supporting education-related causes.
Alterna-governments: Superficially placate, but otherwise side-step sluggish, corrupt third-world bureaucracies. Work with a programmer's ruthless efficiency and disregard for bureaucracy. Money gives one long spider-legs with which to roll out parallel infrastructure, and get help to the neediest, despite their governments. Contrast this with the Bush administration's "militant do-gooder" approach of actually fighting established power in other countries to supposedly help the underprivileged.
Nobody expects Joe Enduser to pick up K&R and start poring through the kernel source when they have a problem. Most users will rely on nebulous others anyway.
But programmers hate being frustrated, left with their hands tied, at the mercy of a closed-source vendor.
And businesses don't like waiting for a support company to fix a bug, or implement a feature.
Improvements to Linux will come as more businesses understand the value of coopetition. Eventually, the cost of Windows malware outbreaks might make it not worthwile.
I agree with most of your comment. Here's where I take a different view --
Given that I'm not Microsoft, or Red Hat, I'd rather be a Red Hat stockholder than a Microsoft stockholder.
Also, I'd rather be monetizing services for rapidly spreading open-source software, than trying to get developing nations to pay for my proprietary software.
I urge you to focus on the direction and rate of the change, rather than the magnitude of the status quo.
There are too many people in the world not using computers yet. Eventually, most will. But if everyone paid Windows licensing fees, many developing nations would have to hand over most of their GNP to Microsoft. That's absurd!
In my humble opinion, it makes sense for India, China and several other developing countries to throw their collective might behind internationalized open-source software running on commodity hardware. When there are literally a million eyeballs scouring OSS for bugs, we'll see phenomenal changes in this playing field!
If intellectual property were enriched Uranium, intellectual property law would be the mechanism in an atomic bomb that prevents critical mass, and an economic boom.
The evening news should not go unquestioned. Think of all the mischievous, world-changing possibilities that open when TV and the net converge even closer.
Video streams from two (or multiple) sources could be synchronized and composited together according to instructions on a control channel. The video sources could be DVD's, or video streams from the net.
The compositing logic could be on an HDTV, or set-top box.
You could watch TV with friends anywhere in cyberspace. You could syndicate and rebroadcast your own channel, intended to be merged and watched with "mainstream media". Think MST3K, Third Voice, or Wayne's World. Real-time critiques of old-style TV. Just you wait till Howard Stern starts ripping on the evening news.
In low-bandwidth conditions, TV becomes like "pop-up video", as you IM with friends who are watching the same TV show, at the same time, on your TV set.
Imagine special DVD players into which two DVD's are loaded simultaneously.
One DVD can make a live mash-up of the other DVD. So you pop in "The Phantom Menace", and
a "remixer" DVD that carries control data, and additional audio-video data to show you a special edit of George Lucas' film.
I've proposed an algorithm to reduce AdWords' YMMV factor.
Short version -- Google should use an algorithm similar to AdSense to automatically pick keywords most relevant to the advertiser's URL.
You should have to pay less to bid on keywords that are relevant to your web site's content. It should be expensive to outbid Mr. Cringely on the keyword "Cringely".
Ahh, you're looking for a VideoDrome.
Lighting the subject ( i.e., the user ), correctly according to surroundings is computationally easy in a VideoDrome. Each object is illuminated exactly as if it were immersed in a virtual environment, because it actually is.
Cyberspies from China
Try to steal your information
Freelance spyhunter helps the
Fed's investigation
And if you like these kinds of cracks
It's Cyberpenetration.
Haptic interfaces are difficult to create and expensive to manufacture. If you think about cost-benefit, increasing the the resolution of haptics should be the last priority. i.e., You may want to feel Cindy Crawford's nipple between your thumb and forefinger, but your boss just wants you to drive the clunky VR-Exoskeleton to move blocks of data around.
A thoroughly immersive visual interface, combined with basic haptics is a better starting point.
Raster graphics probably won't cut it for VR.
The visual rendering system might be all vector graphics. Say, hardware-accelerated SVG.
Of course, the rendering hardware will have to be analog.
A very good application for VR is Integrated Development Environments for software development.
A monitor provides a very narrow bandwidth between coder and code.
The quality of software developed should improve significantly as this bottleneck is removed.
More generally, as broadband becomes commodified, and wireless net access ubiquitous, the monitor becomes the next bottleneck. Monitors have got to go!
What might a VR IDE for programmers look like?
Let's compromise depth perception so we can run conventional applications in a VR Window Manager, with custom hardware.
Imagine yourself sitting in a swivel chair. The chair is surrounded by a circular desk. The desk is surrounded by a cylindrical display. So effectively, you're sitting inside a hollow tube. It's as if you wrapped a huge monitor around yourself in a tall 360degree tube.
The desk is the equivalent of KDE/GNOME's panel, and also contains a virtual keyboard.
All applications that are running are always visible on the tube. You can move to any application by swivelling on the chair, or scrolling up or down in the tube.
Zoom up the tube, to your emacs ( or vim ) window.
Not quite VR, but close enough to a coder's reality.:-)
Part myth. Unix might have come out of Berkeley, but LSD came from Zurich.
Incidentally, why are they running Solaris at Berkeley? What does the B in OpenBSD stand for?
( Not that it was necessarily an OS flaw that was exploited here ).
Why make an Origami Boulder, when you can buy one from a famous artiste?
When it comes to polygons/square inch, his foldings outdo traditional Origami by orders of magnitude.
The result is decidedly organic looking.
I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 5150 from Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10.
The first few things I noticed upon upgrading were:
Previously working network configuration was trashed. Network connectivity foobarred.
Previously working Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse stopped working.
Mozilla wouldn't launch, and kept telling me that a profile was already in use.
Come on, people. How hard is it to ship a distro without glaring fuckups?
Linux geeks easily dismiss people who find Linux difficult to use as lusers, luddites, neo-phobes.
That keeps us from the realization that there really isn't a single Linux distro that is easy enough for your Grandma to use. ( Counterexamples to this are exceptions, rather than norm. )
Join me in this thought experiment --
Boot up Linux.
Close your eyes.
Decide that you're a person with minimal technical knowledge.
Open your eyes and look at the screen afresh, as if for the first time.
Ask, "What am I looking at?"
Without presuming any Linux knowledge, try to do a simple thing, such as read the news on CNN.
Where's a browser?
How many steps does it take to get to the browser?
Start->Network->WWW->Browsers->Mozilla
Why can't Linux be easier and reach more people?
We have to stop being condescending to Joe DontKnow, and make Linux easy for him.
This is where Microsoft ( and Apple ) kicks Linux ass.
They study usability and cater to the user.
They put icons for the most frequently used applications right in front of the user.
We need a distro with intelligent design, and a sweet default look'n'feel.
A tightly integrated distro, where everything is in its place, for an obvious reason.
I want a distro that women, or very effete men, have fussed and agonized over.
Not a bunch of apps cobbled together for/by Klingon coders.
Linspire users, I'd love to hear your first-hand experiences.
Desktop Linux? Suuuuure. Would you like some Reality with that?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd distribute the mashup, alongwith a special player application. The viewer would be required to have a Star Wars DVD. The mashup file would use frames from the original DVD by reference. The player would composite the two video sources ( the mashup, and the DVD ). This is much like the Video Internet.
We're not helping Microsoft fast enough. So they say, "let us help you help us better". The more people are online, the better for everyone, especially a company like Microsoft. Read "What are Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett up to?"
That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.
Sources:
Stripper factory!?!! That would be a Hardon Collider.
What's really in question is whether a work of art is mutable.
In my opinion, no work should be considered final. One should be free to create and distribute mashups of audio/video works, books, and even (*gasp*) software. Let people decide what they want. Let there be freedom of renovation!
Didn't humans block out the Sun as a means of depriving the machines of energy?
Prioritization is very important. We'd rather see a well-fed population, at minor risk from malaria, than emaciated, unwashed masses in mosquito nets.
Nobody expects Joe Enduser to pick up K&R and start poring through the kernel source when they have a problem. Most users will rely on nebulous others anyway.
But programmers hate being frustrated, left with their hands tied, at the mercy of a closed-source vendor. And businesses don't like waiting for a support company to fix a bug, or implement a feature.
Improvements to Linux will come as more businesses understand the value of coopetition. Eventually, the cost of Windows malware outbreaks might make it not worthwile.
I agree with most of your comment. Here's where I take a different view --
Given that I'm not Microsoft, or Red Hat, I'd rather be a Red Hat stockholder than a Microsoft stockholder.
Also, I'd rather be monetizing services for rapidly spreading open-source software, than trying to get developing nations to pay for my proprietary software.
I urge you to focus on the direction and rate of the change, rather than the magnitude of the status quo.
There are too many people in the world not using computers yet. Eventually, most will. But if everyone paid Windows licensing fees, many developing nations would have to hand over most of their GNP to Microsoft. That's absurd!
In my humble opinion, it makes sense for India, China and several other developing countries to throw their collective might behind internationalized open-source software running on commodity hardware. When there are literally a million eyeballs scouring OSS for bugs, we'll see phenomenal changes in this playing field!
If intellectual property were enriched Uranium, intellectual property law would be the mechanism in an atomic bomb that prevents critical mass, and an economic boom.
Consider this metric!
The evening news should not go unquestioned. Think of all the mischievous, world-changing possibilities that open when TV and the net converge even closer. Video streams from two (or multiple) sources could be synchronized and composited together according to instructions on a control channel. The video sources could be DVD's, or video streams from the net. The compositing logic could be on an HDTV, or set-top box. You could watch TV with friends anywhere in cyberspace. You could syndicate and rebroadcast your own channel, intended to be merged and watched with "mainstream media". Think MST3K, Third Voice, or Wayne's World. Real-time critiques of old-style TV. Just you wait till Howard Stern starts ripping on the evening news. In low-bandwidth conditions, TV becomes like "pop-up video", as you IM with friends who are watching the same TV show, at the same time, on your TV set. Imagine special DVD players into which two DVD's are loaded simultaneously. One DVD can make a live mash-up of the other DVD. So you pop in "The Phantom Menace", and a "remixer" DVD that carries control data, and additional audio-video data to show you a special edit of George Lucas' film.
I've proposed an algorithm to reduce AdWords' YMMV factor.
Short version -- Google should use an algorithm similar to AdSense to automatically pick keywords most relevant to the advertiser's URL.
You should have to pay less to bid on keywords that are relevant to your web site's content. It should be expensive to outbid Mr. Cringely on the keyword "Cringely".
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
====
"Sexy? What's wrong with being sexy?" -- Spinal Tap
Keyboards are quaint. So how could Scotty type really fast on a Qwerty keyboard?
Ahh, you're looking for a VideoDrome. Lighting the subject ( i.e., the user ), correctly according to surroundings is computationally easy in a VideoDrome. Each object is illuminated exactly as if it were immersed in a virtual environment, because it actually is.
Cyberspies from China
Try to steal your information
Freelance spyhunter helps the
Fed's investigation
And if you like these kinds of cracks
It's Cyberpenetration.
Haptic interfaces are difficult to create and expensive to manufacture. If you think about cost-benefit, increasing the the resolution of haptics should be the last priority. i.e., You may want to feel Cindy Crawford's nipple between your thumb and forefinger, but your boss just wants you to drive the clunky VR-Exoskeleton to move blocks of data around.
A thoroughly immersive visual interface, combined with basic haptics is a better starting point.
Raster graphics probably won't cut it for VR. The visual rendering system might be all vector graphics. Say, hardware-accelerated SVG. Of course, the rendering hardware will have to be analog.
A very good application for VR is Integrated Development Environments for software development. A monitor provides a very narrow bandwidth between coder and code. The quality of software developed should improve significantly as this bottleneck is removed. More generally, as broadband becomes commodified, and wireless net access ubiquitous, the monitor becomes the next bottleneck. Monitors have got to go!
What might a VR IDE for programmers look like? Let's compromise depth perception so we can run conventional applications in a VR Window Manager, with custom hardware. Imagine yourself sitting in a swivel chair. The chair is surrounded by a circular desk. The desk is surrounded by a cylindrical display. So effectively, you're sitting inside a hollow tube. It's as if you wrapped a huge monitor around yourself in a tall 360degree tube. The desk is the equivalent of KDE/GNOME's panel, and also contains a virtual keyboard. All applications that are running are always visible on the tube. You can move to any application by swivelling on the chair, or scrolling up or down in the tube. Zoom up the tube, to your emacs ( or vim ) window. Not quite VR, but close enough to a coder's reality. :-)
"This is China."
-- "The Diamond Age", Neal Stephenson
God finally meets GodKilla. They have a fight. Guess who wins.
Incidentally, why are they running Solaris at Berkeley? What does the B in OpenBSD stand for? ( Not that it was necessarily an OS flaw that was exploited here ).
Why make an Origami Boulder, when you can buy one from a famous artiste?
When it comes to polygons/square inch, his foldings outdo traditional Origami by orders of magnitude. The result is decidedly organic looking.
Read Cory Doctorow's excellent sci-fi short story "0wnz0red". ( Salon ad-clickthrough required ).
Perl. No strong-typing. Concise code.
I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 5150 from Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10. The first few things I noticed upon upgrading were:
- Previously working network configuration was trashed. Network connectivity foobarred.
- Previously working Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse stopped working.
- Mozilla wouldn't launch, and kept telling me that a profile was already in use.
Come on, people. How hard is it to ship a distro without glaring fuckups?Linux geeks easily dismiss people who find Linux difficult to use as lusers, luddites, neo-phobes. That keeps us from the realization that there really isn't a single Linux distro that is easy enough for your Grandma to use. ( Counterexamples to this are exceptions, rather than norm. )
Join me in this thought experiment --
- Boot up Linux.
- Close your eyes.
- Decide that you're a person with minimal technical knowledge.
- Open your eyes and look at the screen afresh, as if for the first time.
- Ask, "What am I looking at?"
- Without presuming any Linux knowledge, try to do a simple thing, such as read the news on CNN.
Where's a browser?
How many steps does it take to get to the browser?
Start->Network->WWW->Browsers->Mozilla
Why can't Linux be easier and reach more people? We have to stop being condescending to Joe DontKnow, and make Linux easy for him. This is where Microsoft ( and Apple ) kicks Linux ass. They study usability and cater to the user. They put icons for the most frequently used applications right in front of the user.We need a distro with intelligent design, and a sweet default look'n'feel. A tightly integrated distro, where everything is in its place, for an obvious reason. I want a distro that women, or very effete men, have fussed and agonized over. Not a bunch of apps cobbled together for/by Klingon coders.
Linspire users, I'd love to hear your first-hand experiences.
Desktop Linux? Suuuuure. Would you like some Reality with that?