"Imagine a geostationary satellite parked 21 kilometers above the targeted area."
DARPA expects the reader to have a very active imagination, since geostationary orbit is at 35,786 km above sea level. Due to the atmosphere, objects below 200 KM do not so much "orbit" as "crash." I hope they didn't really do the math on this system based on satellites orbiting at 21 km.
Later they talk about an airship, which makes sense, but they also continue to use the word "satellite" off and on, and the definitions I see for satellite don't include airships or anything else that could be within the vicinity of 21 km.
OK, I deserve a "RTFA," I read the first page and mistakenly thought I was at the end when there were two pages left (that I've now read) where he discusses Chipmunk BASIC on the Mac, why he doesn't like LOGO, and why he objects to anything as functional as Applescript and Hypercard as introductory languages. Can't say I agree. Still, I stand by the part where I point out that free emulators beat buying and setting up a Commodore 64.
What's changed is access to the tools to start experimenting with coding. When you sat down at a command-line terminal like on a C64, you often had to learn a few commands in BASIC just to load a game or see your files. And if you used a Commodore 64 in a computer lab, it usually wasn't long before some kid would show off by printing repeating rainbows on the screen or something, subjecting the entire class to the power of a couple of lines of code with a loop. Now, there is no equivalent. Kids are not simply subjected to some programming in the course of using computers that might tweak their interest, they would have to decide they were interested on their own (or with pushing from someone else,) and then it's not obvious how or where to get started. On a Commodore 64, when you turn it on it starts up in a BASIC development environment, and the computer's manual came with a programming guide for the language. That's a little different in ease of getting into programming than a new Mac or Windows computer.
On the other hand, spending three years trying to get BASIC to run on either a Mac or a PC sounds bizarre. For one, why's it have to be BASIC? If I had a kid I wanted to teach programming on a Mac, I'd use Applescript, which comes with it, and will allow him to easily do some cool things interfacing with other programs and the operating system, as well as giving him an easy path out of a sandbox and into real development via Applescript Studio. Or run Hypercard under Classic, which in my opinion is still the best introduction to programming ever, because you can make things that are highly functional really fast, yet Hyperscript is a full-featured programming language you can really sink your teeth into if you want to get more advanced. If you're dead set on an archaic linearly interpreted language, LOGO's even easier to learn than BASIC.
For Applescript, open Script Editor, which should already be on your Mac.
Hypercard isn't officially available, so horque a warez copy (come on, it's abandonware, how bad are you gonna feel?), or use a competitor: Supercard HyperNext Studio
I'm slightly paranoid too, but if the system's designed "right," then I'm still a fan of the electronic documentation.
Electronic documents can be backed up in many places automatically. The system can be designed so that they users can't permanently delete anything (just use a versioning system for modifications.) It can be designed to give some people access to documents who can not modify of delete them, or can only modify certain fields, which is extremely difficult and cumbersome to even attempt with paper copies, where generally if you can access it at all, you could lose it or change it. An electronic system can keep track of who added each piece of information to a document and when they did it. Prior versions of documents can be maintained. When it comes to accountability, a properly designed electronic system trumps a physical paper system in every way. You can't just steal, lose, modify, backdate, forge, etc. Furthermore, you can't permanently lose thousands of critical documents in a fire or a flood if they're backed up securely in off-site locations.
Yes, there's such a thing as hacking, but I think that, for a particularly well designed system, it's overall going to keep a much better information trail than paper.
Not to mention it could radically improve their ability to fight crime.
Sure, so they should treat all unrated games expected to be near their borderline rating the same. If you'll notice, I was just replying to a parent saying "then I expect to see every unrated, family safe Disney game get the same treatment."
Yeah, in last month's computer security issue where they rated Virus software, they threw Symantec Antivirus for Mac in with the PC ratings. I didn't read from front to back, but I couldn't find any place where they mentioned that Macs don't have viruses. I couldn't find how they did their ratings, and suspiciously, Smantec for Mac got the exact same rating for PC. Since they were checking PC anti-virus software to see what percent of viruses it caught when throwing hundreds at it, I find it interesting they just threw the Mac software right into the same ratings with no disclaimer to mention that they didn't test it in the same way, since there aren't hundreds of Mac viruses to throw at it.
I wonder what they did to test it, anyway? They gave it a rating.
If the reason they're holding back on these games until they're rated is to avoid carrying games with mature ratings, then there's no point in them holding Disney games where it's 100% positive the game will get child-friendly rating like EC or E. If you don't want to carry any "A" games, then it makes sense not to accept pre-orders on any "RP" games that are known to be shooting for an "M" rating until they are actually rated. If the ESRB really plays hardball and requires dramatic changes to meet "M," the company may decide to go ahead and release it as "A," leaving Walmart in a pickle.
But Disney isn't going to "accidentally" include a sequence where you murder prostitutes and bathe in their blood in the next "Learning With Nemo" title, and then refuse to take it out and accept an "A" rating when they were shooting for "EC." Walmart has no reason to wait on allowing pre-orders, because there' no realistic scenario in which games everyone knows are aiming for a rating of "E10" at the highest get released as "A."
You're right that removing genericized trademarks from the vernacular can happen. Although "copier" and "copy" have made inroads, and so has "tissue" (vs. Kleenex), there are better examples. Hoover and Kodak both fought this war a long time ago, and won. You never hear a tourist ask if you'd mind "taking a kodak of them," and your friends don't ask if you've gotten a "digital kodak yet." Does your significant other (yeah, yeah, Slashdoxy Moron, whatever) ask you to "hoover" before company comes?
Language does change, and there's a good case to be made, especially for Kodak, that the change occurred due to their campaign to remove "kodak" from generic usage. So Google might win too.
What I want is to see Coca-Cola wage a campaign against all the areas in the south where people refer to all soft drinks as "coke." I don't care about the east/west war over the terms "soda" and "pop," either one's fine with me, but calling Sprite, Root Beer, Ginger Ale, Mountain Dew, et al. "coke" is just plain wrong.
I'd best include a preemptive counter-attack here. Whenever I generic use of "coke," people say it's just like using "kleenex" and "xerox" generically. No it's not, because those don't cause confusion. If you ask for a "kleenex" and someone hands you a Puffs, do you get mad? If you ask someone to "xerox" something for you, and they bring back a copy that was made on a Canon copier, do you yell at them "No! I said a XEROX!" I hope not. But when my girlfriend orders a Sprite or a Pepsi and then asks the waiter why her "coke" hasn't come yet, and they bring her a Coke, she get mad. And if her parents ask if I'd like a "coke" and I ask if they have any other soda, they think I'm crazy, because to them all "soda" is "coke." When I'm in a restaurant down there and they take my order and I say "Coke," they immediately ask what kind, and if I say "regular," they get confused. I think they're asking if I want a diet, but to them the word "coke" means basically "anything other than juice or coffee." I'd think Coca Cola, having the most valuable name brand in the world, should be extra touchy about the possibility of losing it through generic usage.
For me, this distinction about brand selectivity introduces the question, is the supposedly-genericized "google" generic or not? That is, [common usage] != [generic usage]. If you ask someone to "google something for you," will you be surprised if they got to Yahoo! to search for it? Are people using "google it" generically as "search for it in any search engine," or do people really mean "Google it?" I suspect it's the later. People could say "search for it," and I think when they say "Google it," they really mean to use Google, not the way they have no brand preference when asking for a tissue or a xerox. If someone told me they'd "Googled themself," I really would assume they were using Google, not Yahoo!. To me, this means Google, while being used commonly, isn't being used generically.
Not that anyone cares, but I propose the following definition for a planet:
- Its primary orbit must be around a star
- It must be approximately spherical due to its own gravitational field being sufficient to make it so (the allowable eccentricity from a perfect spheroid would have to be defined)
- It is not itself a star
I see the following potential problems with this:
- It may be hard to judge shape accurately enough to tell if an object is close enough to spherical to qualify
- There may be very soft things that stay gravitationally round even when very small (what happens to a drop of mercury in space?)
- Given something such as a spheroidal asteroid smaller than Pluto, it may be difficult to distinguish if it's randomly spheroidal or spheroidal due to its own gravity.
Still, I like it better than other definitions I've seen.
I do this (run a business that archives people's pictures indefinitely), but I can't guarantee my company will be around in 100 years. If it is, that still brings up the question, how do your grandchildren know to come to me to get your pictures?
There are media that should last that long if stored properly. There is always the possibility of unexpected reciprocity failure in testing, or a type of degradation of which we are not yet aware and didn't test for, but experts, including those at the Library of Congress and other notable institutions, seem to think that MDM-A Gold CD's will last over 100 years. Of course, this leaves the problems of
1. Will anything be able to read CD's? and
2. Will anything be able to view JPEG's?
I would guess that the answer to these is "yes." JPEG's are so ubiquitous and maintaining support for them on computers is so easy, I suspect they'll remain readable. Maybe the equivalent to the average web-browser or whatever won't read them then, but the 2106 equivalent to GraphicConverter will.
Player availability is more ify. CD's have already been around for 24 years, and the next generation of players (HD-DVD and Blue-Ray) will still play the original CD's. As long as small spinning disks are a popular layout for data storage, the costs of including compatibility for CD's is tiny and will keep shrinking. Meanwhile, CD's are incredibly popular. So I think we've got a lot of backwards compatibility left. When we moved from wax cylinders to flat records to tapes to CD's, maintaining backwards compatibility was essentially impossible; or at least, it was no easier than making two separate machines and gluing them together. But today everything runs of general-purpose micro processors, so maintaining backwards compatibility gets easier and easier. Add to that the fact that if you have a shellac 78-RPM record from the 1890's that you can still easily buy a brand-new record player that will play it, about 120 years later. So again, if not common, I think there will be machines available that play CD's. Or at the very least, labs you can take them to for transfer, like 8mm home movies.
If you keep track of your photos in something like Picassa, iPhoto, etc, you'll notice if they stop working, and can get a converter and move them to a modern format conveniently, when the changeover happens and it's easy to do. Keep them organized and delete the bad ones, so they're worth looking through. And when you get older, hand them down to someone younger to care for. Maybe a younger generation won't care and will lose them all, but whether you've got them on archival gold disks, held by a professional backup company, or on your own hard drive, if your family doesn't care, it won't matter. No technology will surpass basic stewardship within your family. However, the incorrect technology could destroy them all, so do some research and take some precautions.
Yeah, open source is great and would have solved this problem, but the root of this problem isn't closed source software, it's an insanely stupid purchasing agreement on the part of Hoboken Government. The Wired article talked about open source and legislative remedies, but they nailed the solution to this problem with two words: buyer beware.
If Hoboken had the "Robotic employees" [glad "Robotic was capitalized there] escorted off the premises, presumably Hoboken owns this garage. They must have spent lord knows how much money to build this state-of-the-art robot parking garage they own, and then they plan to indefinitely lease the software by the month, and of course the whole thing is worse than worthless without it.
Who would buy something under those terms? I can't imagine making a major investment where someone else is in complete control of it and gets to re-bill me whatever they want whenever they want or else the whole thing becomes useless.
I don't know what Robotic's terms with their other customers are, but it makes sense to run this the way most things are run- either let Robotic build and run the whole thing, or else pay for the whole thing (including software) and own it all. Don't buy all of it but one critical, irreplaceable part, which you rent.
Sure, there are lots of people who get service contracts from the manufacturer and such, but there are generally alternate vendors available for these. This is like buying a car, and then leasing the copy-proof key for it from the dealer.
Their new deal is for just under $200,000 to lease a piece of software for three years. I don't know how complex this software is, and it's used in an application where it's critical that it not be buggy, but I bet there are a lot of programmers here who would love to develop a project they could lease to each user for $66,000/year, without ever actually selling a license. Especially if it would ruin the user's multi-million dollar investment if they ever stopped paying for the license.
There's nothing wrong with science for science's sake, or with engineering for engineering's sake. But that doesn't mean that whatever you come up with isn't useless.
In fact, when you pursue something for the sole purpose of learning about it, rather than a concerted effort to achieve a particular goal, what you end up with usually is useless.
None of those things listed are even close to Doomsday. They're barely even little blips on the radar screen of history. Out of 6 billion people, the computer virus and the blackout killed how many? These things were moderate inconveniences for thousands, not inescapable death for billions.
Even the flu killed 30 million out of almost 2,000 million, or 1.5%. Yeah, sucks to be them, but killing 1.5% of the population didn't exactly move homo sapiens to the endangered species list.
A modern super-bug could be terrible. No one knows if the worst case scenario is the death of millions or into the billions, but I bet you'll have a hard time finding biologists who think a bug could show up that kills ALL humans. It not only would have to spread like mad, have a long incubation period, be untreatable, and not have any people with any natural immunity, it would also have to be able to get through gas-masks and biohazard suits, infiltrate our best air filters, cross oceans to desert islands people had isolated themselves on (and shoot anyone who tries to get near). And with all that going on, I wouldn't call in understated anymore.
The real Doomsday fears list is pretty short- Nuclear War, Meteor, other improbable astronomical events like supernova. Global warming is NOT a doomsday scenario. It might be a "things are really going to suck" scenario, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to stop it, but it's not going to KILL everybody, it just might make it unbearably hot, ruin crops, cause flooding, worsen natural disasters, etc. But Earth's spent many millions of years being hotter than our global warming forecasts, and life goes on. The real doomsday scenarios ARE NOT understated things that creep up on us- pretty much by definition, little gradual changes are things we adapt too, anticipate, measure, study, and, if they're really getting serous, do something about before we all die. We aren't going to suddenly switch from a negative feedback cycle to an unstoppable positive feedback cycle that destroys everything. If that were in the cards, it would have happened in the past 5 billion years. Our systems (biological and social) are much more robust and stable than that. Realistic doomsday scenarios are big, colossal, horrific events that are anything but understated.
Yes, I know quicktime lets you zoom in, but that's not what I'm talking about. I said Quicktime only supports one resolution all the way around- you can't have some one object in the image be much higher resolution and support zooming in on that object while the rest of the VR remains blocky. The entire image is one resolution, and you just get to pan around and zoom in and out of that image. The MS stuff lets you have close-up photos of individual features, so you could zoom in to read the fine print on someone's newspaper in a 360 scene of the Astrodome without having to shoot the entire thing in that resolution and try to stitch a petabyte image file and host it on the web.
Additionally, I was specifically talking not only about using Quicktime VR, but using the Kaidan lens, which makes an entire panorama out of a single shot, including a lot of processing to remove the severe lens distortion. You don't end up with a lot of resolution, and aren't going to be able to zoom much at all.
As for running around a 3d environment- it wasn't clear from their demo to what extent it lets you do that. The demo of St. Peter's Basilica was much closer to a Quicktime VR than to playing Quake, and I think the MS software would be much more confusing for most users. Furthermore, creating a complete floorplan of a house would require you to have overlapping pictures of the whole thing- every bit of hallway wall, etc. I'm guessing it would take hundreds of shots to allow it to stitch a house together, which sounds like a lot more work than walking into each room and taking a single shot with the Kaidan.
In fact, I really doubt that it could do that at all. If you had a bunch of different generic shots of similar rooms and hallways, with endless sections of generic white wall, ceiling, and floor, I doubt a person could even get them all matched up right, much less Microsoft's automatic software package.
If you're a real-estate agent, it's not really that big of an investment to buy a Kaidan 360 lens. It only takes a few seconds to take a picture with, and you only have to snap one picture. Their software builds a quicktime VR of the environment. In my opinion, a quicktime VR gives a better presentation of an environment than what was seen in the MS software anyway. The only benefit to the MS stuff is that it will let you zoom in on particular features you photographed more close-up, where I believe that Quicktime VR is the same resolution all around.
The MS stuff is still supposed to do all this auto matching-up of different people's photos and stuff, but for a simple VR tour of some location, the Kaidan lens and a digital camera seems like a superior way to go. Of course, if you're not a professional and only want to make one of these every now and then, you might want to use the MS stuff instead of having to invest in a new lens.
Re:I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RW
on
Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB
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· Score: 3, Informative
All organic compounds don't inherently degrade faster than all inorganics. Some are very stable. In fact, there's only one writable digital media I know of that's been certified by The Library Of Congress and other similar associations as an archival storage medium, and it's a CD-R that uses organic phthalocyanine dye. It's made by MAM-A (used to be Mitsui). They used to have a web page up all about it, but I can't find it now, but there is some information provided by resellers, such as inkjetart.com
It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.
"Unfortunately, there isn't a good alternative yet."
More unfortunately, there isn't likely to be.
The benefits of the network effect are simply too great. Buyers stay on eBay because there's a big selection of stuff and they can find what they want. Sellers stay on eBay because more buyers bidding on things means higher prices for their goods. You'd think the higher prices would drive people away, and I'm sure some people check Yahoo! auctions because stuff sells for less, but most people learn they can rarely ever find what they're looking for there, and that it's a waste of time to do anything other than bid a little more at eBay. So buyers won't defect until sellers defect.
Sellers won't defect unless another site offers them some other savings sufficient to offset the lower prices their auctions will go for (at least until the site gets size competitive with eBay). That is, competitors need a value proposition such that
[ebay sale price] - [competitor's sale price] is less than [ebay's fees] - [competitors fees]
So, how much do they have to reduce fees by? I studied this a few years ago, comparing auctions for like goods across a wide range of categories, and found that a competitor needs to set negative fees to offer a value proposition to sellers. That is, they would have to pay the sellers a commission on each auction to attract them.
Good luck trying to get someone to back that position for long enough to get size-competitive with eBay.
Of course, there are also other ways one might attract buyers to try to increase auction sale prices to reduce the fee gap. I wrote up a lot of these ideas for a business plan for a company that wanted to compete with eBay. First and foremost of them was to create parametric search system to help people find things based on including and excluding features particular to that product line. Unfortunately, eBay already did this. Is might be done better, but it's basically there. Ebay's searching features have improved radically in recent years.
There are many other things that could be done. A dramatically different infrastructure could greatly reduce server and bandwidth costs, taking some of the sting out of the required fee difference. But all the tricks I had left in my bag added together probably couldn't allow a new competitor to succeed. Perhaps others have better ideas.
My advice to anyone who wants to enter the general online auction market is "good luck."
Slashdot Mirror
The DARPA article you linked to says
"Imagine a geostationary satellite parked 21 kilometers above the targeted area."
DARPA expects the reader to have a very active imagination, since geostationary orbit is at 35,786 km above sea level. Due to the atmosphere, objects below 200 KM do not so much "orbit" as "crash." I hope they didn't really do the math on this system based on satellites orbiting at 21 km.
Later they talk about an airship, which makes sense, but they also continue to use the word "satellite" off and on, and the definitions I see for satellite don't include airships or anything else that could be within the vicinity of 21 km.
These aren't the pirated copies of Star Wars we're looking for.
OK, I deserve a "RTFA," I read the first page and mistakenly thought I was at the end when there were two pages left (that I've now read) where he discusses Chipmunk BASIC on the Mac, why he doesn't like LOGO, and why he objects to anything as functional as Applescript and Hypercard as introductory languages. Can't say I agree. Still, I stand by the part where I point out that free emulators beat buying and setting up a Commodore 64.
What's changed is access to the tools to start experimenting with coding. When you sat down at a command-line terminal like on a C64, you often had to learn a few commands in BASIC just to load a game or see your files. And if you used a Commodore 64 in a computer lab, it usually wasn't long before some kid would show off by printing repeating rainbows on the screen or something, subjecting the entire class to the power of a couple of lines of code with a loop. Now, there is no equivalent. Kids are not simply subjected to some programming in the course of using computers that might tweak their interest, they would have to decide they were interested on their own (or with pushing from someone else,) and then it's not obvious how or where to get started. On a Commodore 64, when you turn it on it starts up in a BASIC development environment, and the computer's manual came with a programming guide for the language. That's a little different in ease of getting into programming than a new Mac or Windows computer.
On the other hand, spending three years trying to get BASIC to run on either a Mac or a PC sounds bizarre. For one, why's it have to be BASIC? If I had a kid I wanted to teach programming on a Mac, I'd use Applescript, which comes with it, and will allow him to easily do some cool things interfacing with other programs and the operating system, as well as giving him an easy path out of a sandbox and into real development via Applescript Studio. Or run Hypercard under Classic, which in my opinion is still the best introduction to programming ever, because you can make things that are highly functional really fast, yet Hyperscript is a full-featured programming language you can really sink your teeth into if you want to get more advanced. If you're dead set on an archaic linearly interpreted language, LOGO's even easier to learn than BASIC.
And if you're set on BASIC, how on earth is it taking you three years and you're not finding it? Here's the results of my 10 seconds of searching for Mac:
Chimunk BASIC
METAL
CocoaBasic
Omikron BASIC
FutureBASIC
TWM (a GUI Builder for Future Basic)
bOSL
Or just emulate whatever BASIC environment you thought was good for learning:
Power64
Frodo
Power20
Sweet16
For LOGO:
XLogo
jLogo
ACSLogo
StarLogo
For Applescript, open Script Editor, which should already be on your Mac.
Hypercard isn't officially available, so horque a warez copy (come on, it's abandonware, how bad are you gonna feel?), or use a competitor:
Supercard
HyperNext Studio
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! You idiot!
Oh, wait a minute, now that I read it again, it makes a lot of sense. Never-mind.
I'm slightly paranoid too, but if the system's designed "right," then I'm still a fan of the electronic documentation.
Electronic documents can be backed up in many places automatically. The system can be designed so that they users can't permanently delete anything (just use a versioning system for modifications.) It can be designed to give some people access to documents who can not modify of delete them, or can only modify certain fields, which is extremely difficult and cumbersome to even attempt with paper copies, where generally if you can access it at all, you could lose it or change it. An electronic system can keep track of who added each piece of information to a document and when they did it. Prior versions of documents can be maintained. When it comes to accountability, a properly designed electronic system trumps a physical paper system in every way. You can't just steal, lose, modify, backdate, forge, etc. Furthermore, you can't permanently lose thousands of critical documents in a fire or a flood if they're backed up securely in off-site locations.
Yes, there's such a thing as hacking, but I think that, for a particularly well designed system, it's overall going to keep a much better information trail than paper.
Not to mention it could radically improve their ability to fight crime.
Sure, so they should treat all unrated games expected to be near their borderline rating the same. If you'll notice, I was just replying to a parent saying "then I expect to see every unrated, family safe Disney game get the same treatment."
Zonk cut the original headline short- it was supposed to read:
"Hard Knocks, Age Transform Marc Andreessen into giant battle robot!"
Yeah, in last month's computer security issue where they rated Virus software, they threw Symantec Antivirus for Mac in with the PC ratings. I didn't read from front to back, but I couldn't find any place where they mentioned that Macs don't have viruses. I couldn't find how they did their ratings, and suspiciously, Smantec for Mac got the exact same rating for PC. Since they were checking PC anti-virus software to see what percent of viruses it caught when throwing hundreds at it, I find it interesting they just threw the Mac software right into the same ratings with no disclaimer to mention that they didn't test it in the same way, since there aren't hundreds of Mac viruses to throw at it.
I wonder what they did to test it, anyway? They gave it a rating.
If the reason they're holding back on these games until they're rated is to avoid carrying games with mature ratings, then there's no point in them holding Disney games where it's 100% positive the game will get child-friendly rating like EC or E. If you don't want to carry any "A" games, then it makes sense not to accept pre-orders on any "RP" games that are known to be shooting for an "M" rating until they are actually rated. If the ESRB really plays hardball and requires dramatic changes to meet "M," the company may decide to go ahead and release it as "A," leaving Walmart in a pickle.
But Disney isn't going to "accidentally" include a sequence where you murder prostitutes and bathe in their blood in the next "Learning With Nemo" title, and then refuse to take it out and accept an "A" rating when they were shooting for "EC." Walmart has no reason to wait on allowing pre-orders, because there' no realistic scenario in which games everyone knows are aiming for a rating of "E10" at the highest get released as "A."
You're right that removing genericized trademarks from the vernacular can happen. Although "copier" and "copy" have made inroads, and so has "tissue" (vs. Kleenex), there are better examples. Hoover and Kodak both fought this war a long time ago, and won. You never hear a tourist ask if you'd mind "taking a kodak of them," and your friends don't ask if you've gotten a "digital kodak yet." Does your significant other (yeah, yeah, Slashdoxy Moron, whatever) ask you to "hoover" before company comes?
Language does change, and there's a good case to be made, especially for Kodak, that the change occurred due to their campaign to remove "kodak" from generic usage. So Google might win too.
What I want is to see Coca-Cola wage a campaign against all the areas in the south where people refer to all soft drinks as "coke." I don't care about the east/west war over the terms "soda" and "pop," either one's fine with me, but calling Sprite, Root Beer, Ginger Ale, Mountain Dew, et al. "coke" is just plain wrong.
I'd best include a preemptive counter-attack here. Whenever I generic use of "coke," people say it's just like using "kleenex" and "xerox" generically. No it's not, because those don't cause confusion. If you ask for a "kleenex" and someone hands you a Puffs, do you get mad? If you ask someone to "xerox" something for you, and they bring back a copy that was made on a Canon copier, do you yell at them "No! I said a XEROX!" I hope not. But when my girlfriend orders a Sprite or a Pepsi and then asks the waiter why her "coke" hasn't come yet, and they bring her a Coke, she get mad. And if her parents ask if I'd like a "coke" and I ask if they have any other soda, they think I'm crazy, because to them all "soda" is "coke." When I'm in a restaurant down there and they take my order and I say "Coke," they immediately ask what kind, and if I say "regular," they get confused. I think they're asking if I want a diet, but to them the word "coke" means basically "anything other than juice or coffee." I'd think Coca Cola, having the most valuable name brand in the world, should be extra touchy about the possibility of losing it through generic usage.
For me, this distinction about brand selectivity introduces the question, is the supposedly-genericized "google" generic or not? That is, [common usage] != [generic usage]. If you ask someone to "google something for you," will you be surprised if they got to Yahoo! to search for it? Are people using "google it" generically as "search for it in any search engine," or do people really mean "Google it?" I suspect it's the later. People could say "search for it," and I think when they say "Google it," they really mean to use Google, not the way they have no brand preference when asking for a tissue or a xerox. If someone told me they'd "Googled themself," I really would assume they were using Google, not Yahoo!. To me, this means Google, while being used commonly, isn't being used generically.
I've got plenty of "<'s" if the editors need some. I'll sell 'em for cheap.
Not that anyone cares, but I propose the following definition for a planet:
- Its primary orbit must be around a star
- It must be approximately spherical due to its own gravitational field being sufficient to make it so (the allowable eccentricity from a perfect spheroid would have to be defined)
- It is not itself a star
I see the following potential problems with this:
- It may be hard to judge shape accurately enough to tell if an object is close enough to spherical to qualify
- There may be very soft things that stay gravitationally round even when very small (what happens to a drop of mercury in space?)
- Given something such as a spheroidal asteroid smaller than Pluto, it may be difficult to distinguish if it's randomly spheroidal or spheroidal due to its own gravity.
Still, I like it better than other definitions I've seen.
Now proceed to tear it apart, add to it, etc.
I do this (run a business that archives people's pictures indefinitely), but I can't guarantee my company will be around in 100 years. If it is, that still brings up the question, how do your grandchildren know to come to me to get your pictures?
:) With constant stewardship, it doesn't matter if you media is long-lived. If your primary fails, you replace your primary and restore from backup. If your house burns down, you buy a new computer, anew backup drive, and restore from your most recent off-site backup. Nothing- the devices, the formats, the readers- have to be time-proof.
There are media that should last that long if stored properly. There is always the possibility of unexpected reciprocity failure in testing, or a type of degradation of which we are not yet aware and didn't test for, but experts, including those at the Library of Congress and other notable institutions, seem to think that MDM-A Gold CD's will last over 100 years. Of course, this leaves the problems of
1. Will anything be able to read CD's?
and
2. Will anything be able to view JPEG's?
I would guess that the answer to these is "yes." JPEG's are so ubiquitous and maintaining support for them on computers is so easy, I suspect they'll remain readable. Maybe the equivalent to the average web-browser or whatever won't read them then, but the 2106 equivalent to GraphicConverter will.
Player availability is more ify. CD's have already been around for 24 years, and the next generation of players (HD-DVD and Blue-Ray) will still play the original CD's. As long as small spinning disks are a popular layout for data storage, the costs of including compatibility for CD's is tiny and will keep shrinking. Meanwhile, CD's are incredibly popular. So I think we've got a lot of backwards compatibility left. When we moved from wax cylinders to flat records to tapes to CD's, maintaining backwards compatibility was essentially impossible; or at least, it was no easier than making two separate machines and gluing them together. But today everything runs of general-purpose micro processors, so maintaining backwards compatibility gets easier and easier. Add to that the fact that if you have a shellac 78-RPM record from the 1890's that you can still easily buy a brand-new record player that will play it, about 120 years later. So again, if not common, I think there will be machines available that play CD's. Or at the very least, labs you can take them to for transfer, like 8mm home movies.
But I think the best method is simply to have someone keep track of them. Keep them on your computer. Keep your computer backed-up at home. Then get some kind of off-site backup, like online backup, mailing good backup disks to a relative or putting them in a safety-deposit box, or hiring me
If you keep track of your photos in something like Picassa, iPhoto, etc, you'll notice if they stop working, and can get a converter and move them to a modern format conveniently, when the changeover happens and it's easy to do. Keep them organized and delete the bad ones, so they're worth looking through. And when you get older, hand them down to someone younger to care for. Maybe a younger generation won't care and will lose them all, but whether you've got them on archival gold disks, held by a professional backup company, or on your own hard drive, if your family doesn't care, it won't matter. No technology will surpass basic stewardship within your family. However, the incorrect technology could destroy them all, so do some research and take some precautions.
Actually, I've heard that there's another operating system that can run on the very same PC's that people run Windows on.
Maybe someone here on Slashdot has heard of it and can fill us in?
ice creame sundaes
I know nobody likes grammar nazi's, but you misspelled "hot grits."
Yeah, open source is great and would have solved this problem, but the root of this problem isn't closed source software, it's an insanely stupid purchasing agreement on the part of Hoboken Government. The Wired article talked about open source and legislative remedies, but they nailed the solution to this problem with two words: buyer beware.
If Hoboken had the "Robotic employees" [glad "Robotic was capitalized there] escorted off the premises, presumably Hoboken owns this garage. They must have spent lord knows how much money to build this state-of-the-art robot parking garage they own, and then they plan to indefinitely lease the software by the month, and of course the whole thing is worse than worthless without it.
Who would buy something under those terms? I can't imagine making a major investment where someone else is in complete control of it and gets to re-bill me whatever they want whenever they want or else the whole thing becomes useless.
I don't know what Robotic's terms with their other customers are, but it makes sense to run this the way most things are run- either let Robotic build and run the whole thing, or else pay for the whole thing (including software) and own it all. Don't buy all of it but one critical, irreplaceable part, which you rent.
Sure, there are lots of people who get service contracts from the manufacturer and such, but there are generally alternate vendors available for these. This is like buying a car, and then leasing the copy-proof key for it from the dealer.
Their new deal is for just under $200,000 to lease a piece of software for three years. I don't know how complex this software is, and it's used in an application where it's critical that it not be buggy, but I bet there are a lot of programmers here who would love to develop a project they could lease to each user for $66,000/year, without ever actually selling a license. Especially if it would ruin the user's multi-million dollar investment if they ever stopped paying for the license.
There's nothing wrong with science for science's sake, or with engineering for engineering's sake. But that doesn't mean that whatever you come up with isn't useless.
In fact, when you pursue something for the sole purpose of learning about it, rather than a concerted effort to achieve a particular goal, what you end up with usually is useless.
"Doomsday can be understated"
No it can't.
None of those things listed are even close to Doomsday. They're barely even little blips on the radar screen of history. Out of 6 billion people, the computer virus and the blackout killed how many? These things were moderate inconveniences for thousands, not inescapable death for billions.
Even the flu killed 30 million out of almost 2,000 million, or 1.5%. Yeah, sucks to be them, but killing 1.5% of the population didn't exactly move homo sapiens to the endangered species list.
A modern super-bug could be terrible. No one knows if the worst case scenario is the death of millions or into the billions, but I bet you'll have a hard time finding biologists who think a bug could show up that kills ALL humans. It not only would have to spread like mad, have a long incubation period, be untreatable, and not have any people with any natural immunity, it would also have to be able to get through gas-masks and biohazard suits, infiltrate our best air filters, cross oceans to desert islands people had isolated themselves on (and shoot anyone who tries to get near). And with all that going on, I wouldn't call in understated anymore.
The real Doomsday fears list is pretty short- Nuclear War, Meteor, other improbable astronomical events like supernova. Global warming is NOT a doomsday scenario. It might be a "things are really going to suck" scenario, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to stop it, but it's not going to KILL everybody, it just might make it unbearably hot, ruin crops, cause flooding, worsen natural disasters, etc. But Earth's spent many millions of years being hotter than our global warming forecasts, and life goes on. The real doomsday scenarios ARE NOT understated things that creep up on us- pretty much by definition, little gradual changes are things we adapt too, anticipate, measure, study, and, if they're really getting serous, do something about before we all die. We aren't going to suddenly switch from a negative feedback cycle to an unstoppable positive feedback cycle that destroys everything. If that were in the cards, it would have happened in the past 5 billion years. Our systems (biological and social) are much more robust and stable than that. Realistic doomsday scenarios are big, colossal, horrific events that are anything but understated.
Yes, I know quicktime lets you zoom in, but that's not what I'm talking about. I said Quicktime only supports one resolution all the way around- you can't have some one object in the image be much higher resolution and support zooming in on that object while the rest of the VR remains blocky. The entire image is one resolution, and you just get to pan around and zoom in and out of that image. The MS stuff lets you have close-up photos of individual features, so you could zoom in to read the fine print on someone's newspaper in a 360 scene of the Astrodome without having to shoot the entire thing in that resolution and try to stitch a petabyte image file and host it on the web.
Additionally, I was specifically talking not only about using Quicktime VR, but using the Kaidan lens, which makes an entire panorama out of a single shot, including a lot of processing to remove the severe lens distortion. You don't end up with a lot of resolution, and aren't going to be able to zoom much at all.
As for running around a 3d environment- it wasn't clear from their demo to what extent it lets you do that. The demo of St. Peter's Basilica was much closer to a Quicktime VR than to playing Quake, and I think the MS software would be much more confusing for most users. Furthermore, creating a complete floorplan of a house would require you to have overlapping pictures of the whole thing- every bit of hallway wall, etc. I'm guessing it would take hundreds of shots to allow it to stitch a house together, which sounds like a lot more work than walking into each room and taking a single shot with the Kaidan.
In fact, I really doubt that it could do that at all. If you had a bunch of different generic shots of similar rooms and hallways, with endless sections of generic white wall, ceiling, and floor, I doubt a person could even get them all matched up right, much less Microsoft's automatic software package.
If you're a real-estate agent, it's not really that big of an investment to buy a Kaidan 360 lens. It only takes a few seconds to take a picture with, and you only have to snap one picture. Their software builds a quicktime VR of the environment. In my opinion, a quicktime VR gives a better presentation of an environment than what was seen in the MS software anyway. The only benefit to the MS stuff is that it will let you zoom in on particular features you photographed more close-up, where I believe that Quicktime VR is the same resolution all around.
The MS stuff is still supposed to do all this auto matching-up of different people's photos and stuff, but for a simple VR tour of some location, the Kaidan lens and a digital camera seems like a superior way to go. Of course, if you're not a professional and only want to make one of these every now and then, you might want to use the MS stuff instead of having to invest in a new lens.
Covered more thoroughly in Wired last February.
It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.
More unfortunately, there isn't likely to be.
The benefits of the network effect are simply too great. Buyers stay on eBay because there's a big selection of stuff and they can find what they want. Sellers stay on eBay because more buyers bidding on things means higher prices for their goods. You'd think the higher prices would drive people away, and I'm sure some people check Yahoo! auctions because stuff sells for less, but most people learn they can rarely ever find what they're looking for there, and that it's a waste of time to do anything other than bid a little more at eBay. So buyers won't defect until sellers defect.
Sellers won't defect unless another site offers them some other savings sufficient to offset the lower prices their auctions will go for (at least until the site gets size competitive with eBay). That is, competitors need a value proposition such that
[ebay sale price] - [competitor's sale price] is less than [ebay's fees] - [competitors fees]
So, how much do they have to reduce fees by? I studied this a few years ago, comparing auctions for like goods across a wide range of categories, and found that a competitor needs to set negative fees to offer a value proposition to sellers. That is, they would have to pay the sellers a commission on each auction to attract them.
Good luck trying to get someone to back that position for long enough to get size-competitive with eBay.
Of course, there are also other ways one might attract buyers to try to increase auction sale prices to reduce the fee gap. I wrote up a lot of these ideas for a business plan for a company that wanted to compete with eBay. First and foremost of them was to create parametric search system to help people find things based on including and excluding features particular to that product line. Unfortunately, eBay already did this. Is might be done better, but it's basically there. Ebay's searching features have improved radically in recent years.
There are many other things that could be done. A dramatically different infrastructure could greatly reduce server and bandwidth costs, taking some of the sting out of the required fee difference. But all the tricks I had left in my bag added together probably couldn't allow a new competitor to succeed. Perhaps others have better ideas.
My advice to anyone who wants to enter the general online auction market is "good luck."
""one of the Seven Wonders of the United States"
Tell that to John Lasseter.