Automatic updates weren't enabled on XP until one of the service packs. So millions of PCs will never know about the new browsers.
They will when they can no longer view many of their favorite websites. I'm glad YouTube and other sites are doing this. We need strong leadership to force IE6 off the web.
Pretty soon, the idea of banning IE6 from websites will hit critical mass and suddenly it'll start affecting websites used by people in businesses who refuse to upgrade out of IE6. That's when those IT departments will finally upgrade to something newer than an 8 year-old browser. In Internet years, that's like 100.
I bought a sweet 47" 1080p LCD TV about a month ago. Of course, I had to get some kind of HD movie source and I don't watch cable TV. I prefer to rent movies. Since Blockbuster is now stocking Blu-Ray movies, it was a natural choice that I choose a Blu-Ray player. I looked around at prices and all the players are fairly expensive. Sony sells a standalone Blu-Ray player for $499. Imagine my surprise when I walked around the Circuit City store and noticed a 60 GB PS3 for... $499!
I intended on buying a Blu-Ray player. But I walked out with a PS3.
I haven't owned a console game machine since the Nintendo back in the day. And my roommate is the only one who's played games on it so far but I do enjoy watching him play it. So yes, I'm one of the few who bought a PS3 specifically because it's a Blu-Ray player. But I'm sure that if a killer game comes out that I'm dying to play and I know it's not coming out for the PC (my preferred gaming platform), I'll definitely drop $60 on it for my PS3. But for now, it's my HD movie machine.
Actually, Tivo doesn't WANT to be in the hardware business! They want to be a software company, focusing on all the slick little user interface features that makes so many people loyal to their Tivos.
I was just reading an article in MIT Technology Review magazine today that describes Tivo's woes (DirectTV is about to dump them, after 7 years they're not profitable, etc). But it also says that Tivo has always been hoping that a cable company, or a digital set-top box manufacturer, or some gadget company would license their software so Tivo can get out of the hardware business.
Tivo knows they don't have the resources to fight the giants like Comcast and DirectTV. But if a giant can license their software, they can focus on what they do best... create the best interface for television time-shifting in existence.
I've been reading about various projects that are using software-based image analysis to decode CAPTCHA's. What's a CAPTCHA? It's a "completely automated public test to tell computers and humans apart". In other words, it's one of those incredibly annoying "warped text images" where you have to type the text that is warped and strangely colored. The idea behind these is that a script bot can't decode the image and type in the correct letters, but a person can. Thus, websites can keep out scripts but allow humans. This is used for such things as creating Hotmail accounts, for example.
Several projects have had excellent luck using image processing algorithms to recognize the warped and mangled text areas, separate out the letters, then figure out what alphanumeric character it is. What's interesting about this research is that it's starting a sort of Cold War between websites that use CAPTCHA's and spammers who are doing their own research to break them with script bots. As the CAPTCHA's get more complex, and the text more convoluted, the script bots are using ever more complex image processing algorithms. This escalating war could be beneficial for anyone interested in using image processing algorithms, especially when the information you're looking for exists in a graphically "noisy" environment.
Another guy spent about 24 hours creating his own image processing algorithm that uses a graphics function to discover the outlines of character shapes, then runs each character through a neural net which could recognize the shape of the character (and these characters are seriously warped, so it's not your typical OCR). Also, be sure to see his other page which talks about how his software can crack 92% of GIMPY-generated CAPTCHA's!
Google for more information about using AI image processing routines to defeat CAPTCHA's. This is an area of active research that will result in a lot of new algorithms and processes in the coming years!
Flash as an application platform (ie, Macromedia's online store uses a Flash shopping cart system) is an interesting idea for rich applications, except it doesn't degrade well. SVG is a much better way to go for Flash-style applications because they degrade far better and still retain much of their look and usefulness.
Flash is a great tool for marketing, games, and web comics... but Macromedia desperately wants it to become an application authoring platform. I think the open source community would be better served with a more aggressive push into SVG which has all the same graphical capabilities of Flash. When combined with JavaScript/AJAX and CSS, it's just as powerful.
Actually, the whole point of Google's philosophy is this: create a user interface so powerful that you can access it with a text input field. Looking for maps? Don't present a Google home page with a "maps" button. Let the user type in an address in the input field, then auto-detect it's an address and show them the map. Ditto for other types of services.
This is the secret to Google's success. They hide a tremendously complex interface behind a deceptively simple search field. The day they have to resort to a portal-type interface is the day they're admitting they can't innovate with search.
PayPal has been having problems all weekend
on
Paypal Grinds To A Halt
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· Score: 5, Informative
PayPal has been having significant outage problems for people all over the world since their major website update last Thursday. Many businesses that use PayPal for financial transactions (including my own) have seen business plummet because buyers can't use PayPal's services. Ebay's web forums are going crazy because many auction buyers can't pay.
By the way, don't trust PayPal's message that the site might be available at any specific time. They've been giving specific times all day today but for the most part, it's inaccessible through any interface... web front-end, payment processing back-end, instant payment notifications, debit cards don't work, etc.
You can read more about the trials and tribulations of this weekend's major outage from a developer's point of view at the PayPal Developer web forum. There are a lot of unhappy campers there!
You know why we don't have a 15 or 20 hour work week? Because we want more stuff. How else are we going to pay for trendy clothes for our kids, $35,000 SUV's (one for mom, one for dad), a $250k home in the suburbs, and a 1 hour commute each way? Of course, we need one or two family vacations a year so add on another $4k or $5k. And don't mention the home entertainment center, cell phone bills, DVD collection, computer upgrades, etc.
People 100 years ago didn't have such a wealth of choices to spend their hard-earned money on. Today, we make far more money, but we also spend it on far more things. Of course, if you lived like they did 100 years ago, you could probably survive quite easily on an income of less than $500 a month. There's your 15 hour work week.
And for the energy and utility markets, they're making a new line of processors called the Enron. But I hear their beta version had problems with the floating-point unit... it kept inflating numbers by 20% to 50%.
I've been working with carbon nanotubes (buckyballs) for 5 years, no filters, no clean rooms, no suits, none of that fancy stuff. Carbon nanotubes are basically a superfine black dust. I haven't any I haven't I haven't noticed haven't noticed noticed haven't noticed I haven't noticed any problems.
But see, the idea is that (hopefully) other countries will follow suit and build automated, unmanned, killing machines too. Then if war ever breaks out, it'll be our machines against their machines with a bunch of 14- to 35-year-old guys controlling the action from an RTS-style interface. We'll televise the results and both countries will make a fortune in advertising revenue. Boom-pow, everybody's happy!
I've used the method of blocking ad-serving sites by redirecting their domains to localhost for several years also. But then I got creative and decided to take it a step further. Since a lot of sites host ads in square IFRAMEs and load the ad from a separate site in the iframe, I wrote a small program that runs on my Windows box acting as a webserver which listens for these localhost redirects. It then offers up more interesting content inside those IFRAMEs where the ad would've appeared. So now, I have random content such as an RSS news article or a random Slashdot article (the front-page encapsulated version).
This adds to the "serendipity" effect of web surfing that is so hard to come by these days, and it keeps the serendipity along the lines of what *I* am interested in.
Hey 1997, this is 2004. Just hold on a little longer, there's a great new search engine just around the corner. It's called Google and it beats the pants off of the ad-crippled AltaVista!
I "found" a copy of their source code while I was, uh... "browsing" their internal networks. In the spirit of open source... here's the source code. And it really works! Save it as an.ASP file, put it on an IIS server, and browse to it.
<HTML> <BODY>
<FORM> Search using Microsoft® Search™ technology: <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=query><INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT> </FORM> <% If Request("query") <> "" Then ' User submitted a query! Search our massive database of 3,307,998,701 web pages.
Set objResults = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") ' create an object pointing to our massive database.
' Whoo boy... hope nobody hacks into our "Windows Server 2003"-protected network and steals this file. ' They might learn our little secret. objResults.Open "GET", "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o e=UTF-8&q=" & Request("query"), False objResults.Send HTML_Result = objResults.ResponseText ' get the results from our massive database.
' Now format the database results into a pretty Microsoft page. HTML_Result = Replace(HTML_Result, "images/web_logo_left.gif", "http://www.microsoft.com/homepage/gif/bnr-microso ft.gif") ' add our logo. HTML_Result = Replace(HTML_Result, "Google", "Microsoft") ' encrypt our database source (initial caps) HTML_Result = Replace(HTML_Result, "google", "microsoft") ' encrypt our database source (all lower case)
' Finally, display the results. Phew... 3 years of hard work and we're finally done! Response.Write HTML_Result End If %> </BODY> </HTML>
I was just about to post a message that *I* had seen it in action until I read yours. : ) I was the guy who set up the stage lighting. I was really intrigued by the robot because it did such a great job navigating amongst a crowd of slightly inebriated people, both milling about and dancing. And it was my friend who brought the 2-1/2 year-old girl (named Katrina). I kept a sharp eye on Katrina, hoping she wouldn't crash into the rather expensive-looking robot as she danced in front of the stage. Personally, I think the robot has far better uses than sniffing WiFi points. It's too cool to be put to such a utilitarian use.
Slashdot Mirror
Automatic updates weren't enabled on XP until one of the service packs. So millions of PCs will never know about the new browsers.
They will when they can no longer view many of their favorite websites. I'm glad YouTube and other sites are doing this. We need strong leadership to force IE6 off the web.
Pretty soon, the idea of banning IE6 from websites will hit critical mass and suddenly it'll start affecting websites used by people in businesses who refuse to upgrade out of IE6. That's when those IT departments will finally upgrade to something newer than an 8 year-old browser. In Internet years, that's like 100.
I bought a sweet 47" 1080p LCD TV about a month ago. Of course, I had to get some kind of HD movie source and I don't watch cable TV. I prefer to rent movies. Since Blockbuster is now stocking Blu-Ray movies, it was a natural choice that I choose a Blu-Ray player. I looked around at prices and all the players are fairly expensive. Sony sells a standalone Blu-Ray player for $499. Imagine my surprise when I walked around the Circuit City store and noticed a 60 GB PS3 for... $499! I intended on buying a Blu-Ray player. But I walked out with a PS3. I haven't owned a console game machine since the Nintendo back in the day. And my roommate is the only one who's played games on it so far but I do enjoy watching him play it. So yes, I'm one of the few who bought a PS3 specifically because it's a Blu-Ray player. But I'm sure that if a killer game comes out that I'm dying to play and I know it's not coming out for the PC (my preferred gaming platform), I'll definitely drop $60 on it for my PS3. But for now, it's my HD movie machine.
Good point. So help out these poor marketers... what are the hip buzzwords of 2006 that WON'T draw ridicule?
I was just reading an article in MIT Technology Review magazine today that describes Tivo's woes (DirectTV is about to dump them, after 7 years they're not profitable, etc). But it also says that Tivo has always been hoping that a cable company, or a digital set-top box manufacturer, or some gadget company would license their software so Tivo can get out of the hardware business.
Tivo knows they don't have the resources to fight the giants like Comcast and DirectTV. But if a giant can license their software, they can focus on what they do best... create the best interface for television time-shifting in existence.
Several projects have had excellent luck using image processing algorithms to recognize the warped and mangled text areas, separate out the letters, then figure out what alphanumeric character it is. What's interesting about this research is that it's starting a sort of Cold War between websites that use CAPTCHA's and spammers who are doing their own research to break them with script bots. As the CAPTCHA's get more complex, and the text more convoluted, the script bots are using ever more complex image processing algorithms. This escalating war could be beneficial for anyone interested in using image processing algorithms, especially when the information you're looking for exists in a graphically "noisy" environment.
The best place to learn more about this is PWNtcha - captcha decoder.
Another guy spent about 24 hours creating his own image processing algorithm that uses a graphics function to discover the outlines of character shapes, then runs each character through a neural net which could recognize the shape of the character (and these characters are seriously warped, so it's not your typical OCR). Also, be sure to see his other page which talks about how his software can crack 92% of GIMPY-generated CAPTCHA's!
Also check out http://www.captcha.net/.
Google for more information about using AI image processing routines to defeat CAPTCHA's. This is an area of active research that will result in a lot of new algorithms and processes in the coming years!
Flash is a great tool for marketing, games, and web comics... but Macromedia desperately wants it to become an application authoring platform. I think the open source community would be better served with a more aggressive push into SVG which has all the same graphical capabilities of Flash. When combined with JavaScript/AJAX and CSS, it's just as powerful.
Actually, the whole point of Google's philosophy is this: create a user interface so powerful that you can access it with a text input field. Looking for maps? Don't present a Google home page with a "maps" button. Let the user type in an address in the input field, then auto-detect it's an address and show them the map. Ditto for other types of services. This is the secret to Google's success. They hide a tremendously complex interface behind a deceptively simple search field. The day they have to resort to a portal-type interface is the day they're admitting they can't innovate with search.
I think it's funny that Slashdot is referred to as a "news" service!
Jon Katz, where are you??
By the way, don't trust PayPal's message that the site might be available at any specific time. They've been giving specific times all day today but for the most part, it's inaccessible through any interface... web front-end, payment processing back-end, instant payment notifications, debit cards don't work, etc.
You can read more about the trials and tribulations of this weekend's major outage from a developer's point of view at the PayPal Developer web forum. There are a lot of unhappy campers there!
You know why we don't have a 15 or 20 hour work week? Because we want more stuff. How else are we going to pay for trendy clothes for our kids, $35,000 SUV's (one for mom, one for dad), a $250k home in the suburbs, and a 1 hour commute each way? Of course, we need one or two family vacations a year so add on another $4k or $5k. And don't mention the home entertainment center, cell phone bills, DVD collection, computer upgrades, etc. People 100 years ago didn't have such a wealth of choices to spend their hard-earned money on. Today, we make far more money, but we also spend it on far more things. Of course, if you lived like they did 100 years ago, you could probably survive quite easily on an income of less than $500 a month. There's your 15 hour work week.
And for the energy and utility markets, they're making a new line of processors called the Enron. But I hear their beta version had problems with the floating-point unit... it kept inflating numbers by 20% to 50%.
I've been working with carbon nanotubes (buckyballs) for 5 years, no filters, no clean rooms, no suits, none of that fancy stuff. Carbon nanotubes are basically a superfine black dust. I haven't any I haven't I haven't noticed haven't noticed noticed haven't noticed I haven't noticed any problems.
Maybe the guy's job had been outsourced to India and they were preparing to ship his cubicle there too?
But see, the idea is that (hopefully) other countries will follow suit and build automated, unmanned, killing machines too. Then if war ever breaks out, it'll be our machines against their machines with a bunch of 14- to 35-year-old guys controlling the action from an RTS-style interface. We'll televise the results and both countries will make a fortune in advertising revenue. Boom-pow, everybody's happy!
In the words of Scotty (Star Trek IV), it's "Transparent Aluminum!"
This adds to the "serendipity" effect of web surfing that is so hard to come by these days, and it keeps the serendipity along the lines of what *I* am interested in.
If only more sites would use IFRAMEs!
Even better, ThinkGeek.com is now shipping Half Life 2 and Doom 3! Check the left side of the screen. No mention of Duke Nukem Forever.
Actually, based on their domain name, I'd guess their server dumped the core.
Hey 1997, this is 2004. Just hold on a little longer, there's a great new search engine just around the corner. It's called Google and it beats the pants off of the ad-crippled AltaVista!
Lots and lots of blank floppy disks.
I was just about to post a message that *I* had seen it in action until I read yours. : ) I was the guy who set up the stage lighting. I was really intrigued by the robot because it did such a great job navigating amongst a crowd of slightly inebriated people, both milling about and dancing. And it was my friend who brought the 2-1/2 year-old girl (named Katrina). I kept a sharp eye on Katrina, hoping she wouldn't crash into the rather expensive-looking robot as she danced in front of the stage. Personally, I think the robot has far better uses than sniffing WiFi points. It's too cool to be put to such a utilitarian use.
Next year's Accelerating Change Conference will be held three weeks after the first conference.