Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... "just say no".
Like it or not, Flash is here to stay. There are some things you just cannot do in HTML/DHTML/AJAX/whatever. Vector animation is not a fad. Now, if there would be some standard cross-platform solution to do all this, and not some proprietary binary blob, compiled only for those platforms Macromedia chooses. I'm still waiting for my 8.0 Flash player for Linux.
Is anyone else concerned that we're building ourselves into badly tuned measure and control feedback loops? Hardware that reacts to its owner's feelings will influence the emotional state based on that same state for input. Oscillation might become a problem. Alternatively we could lock ourselves into one state through reinforcement from our reactive art.
That's not a problem since, unless you are a sociopath, you would like to be happy. So improve the mood of unhappy people, and reinforce the happiness of the rest. Come to think of it, there is no need for a loop. Just show nice, thought provoking art all the time.
There's no way the little beeper in a phone would be able to reproduce the sound.
Well, I've just tried that mp3 ringtone on my K750i Sony Ericsson, and I can hear it very clearly from the other room. On the other hand, my 54 y/o mom can't, and my 29 y/o brother sais it's faint. In 24 myself. That sound is only 15 KHz, and the mp3 has 48Khz sampling rate. And the buzzer in the mobile is perfectly able to reproduce high frequencies, it's the low freqs that cannot be reproduced.
IMO, adventure games need some sort of pointing device.
Grim Fandango, which is more or less the best adventure ever made, did not use the mouse. In fact, it was allot closer to a shooter then an adventure game, control-wise, and I think it would play great on a game pad. So, solutions for making console-friendly adventure games certainly existed before. Wii will not change anything, adventure games don't sell.
Can you please tell me someone who's been sentenced to ten years for copying a film?
The key to a successful police state is not to jail the entire population. This would be expensive and inefficient. You must be able to use discretionary enforcement and create the criminals as needed, thus keeping everyone in a state of constant fear.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
I find it quite amussing they are trying to apply the latest buzzwords in coding, when coding is such a small part in a game. Just look at the credits of an average, $5milion+ budget game: there are hundreds of artists, but only a few programmers. A good game needs, in this order: - good game-play - good art (sounds, atmosphere, etc.) - good engineering The first two things are related to creativity, and I don't think they can be helped by agile development.
I'm not saying a better graphics engine doesn't make a game better, just that most games that fail usually don't fail because of bugs or poor performance in the software. They fail because they are sucky games.
This was moded funny, but I don't seem to get the joke. If you are implying that the extra information given, 0.074 liters/100 Km is useless, then I assure you it's not. This is how we measure fuel efficiency around here. 3145 MPG means absolutely nothing to me. For comparison, a regular car achieves something in the range 5-15 l/100Km, so 74 ml/100Km is quite impressive.
VoIP phone spamming won't be any different than current telemarketing.
Wrong ! That's just like saying email spam won't be any different than junk mail. VoIP spam is a nightmare in the making. A normal telemarketer needs to pay to have access to the phone network, and needs to be a business so it could be held accountable for any wrongdoings. It cannot operate from China or the long distance costs would kill it. There is only so much calls you can initiate per second from a normal telco trunk. You also need a human operator for each call, the costs per call tipically do not allow you to waste them with recorded message. Enter VoIP Telemarketing: anonymous Viagra kings, enjoying the anonymity and low cost of the Internet calls to make billions of robot calls from zombied machines. In my opinion, it's the worst threat facing VoIP today.
I never asked how much homes cost exactly but my wifes parents sent her aunt $1000 and she used it to nearly triple the size of her home.
That is completely and utterly ridiculous. I live in Eastern Europe, and the average salary around here is about 200euro/month. The last time I've checked, a cheap car costs 5000-10.000 euro, and a normal house in the suburbs around 100.000 euro. Just give that old stupid idea "they make less, but the price of living is much lower" a rest, will you. The only thing that is cheap in 3rd world country is the value of labor. If we could produce cars, food and clothes so cheaply, what would prevent us from flooding your markets with them? You already know the answer to that one, we make cheap low quality stuff. Expanding that house might have cost $1000, but would any westerner live in it?
Also 15 hours/day doesn't sound bad.
Then suggest it to your employer. A quick method to almost double your salary, right?
OK, so it would take eight (8) minutes to charge your 2000 mAh capacitor from a standard household 15 amp circuit; less if you use a dedicated high-current circuit (which could be 50+ amps).
I think you are confusing the current intensities in the battery with that from the outlet. The energy required to charge your laptop is not that great. Assuming a 2Ah/12V battery, that's just 24Wh = 86400 Ws. A 220V/15A circuit can deliver that in just 26 seconds. Trouble is, when you are transforming energy from high to low voltage, your current increases proportionally, so 220V/15A is the same energy as 12V/275A. The prospect of having a 275Ampere current flowing through my 3000$ laptop is not that nice.
I'm not entirely certain I'd want this sort of thing powering my laptops and cell phones.
Remember, the capacitors you experminted with had at most the 25th part of the energy density required to power your laptop. Assuming you try so scurtcircuit a capacitor-battery with a few Ah capacity (like your laptop has), the few thousand Amperes that would flow through your screwdriver would instantly vaporize it with a loud bang followed by the whining of a little school girl that has melted metal on her face.
On another note, every time someone proposes to replace batteries with capacitors, I wonder how they make up for the huge variation of voltage that a capacitor delivers. Basically, the voltage of a capacitor is proportional to the amount of charge stored, whereas a battery provides more or less constant voltage.
That's an excelent point. One solution to avoid a switching supply, would be to create a simple circuit that ties capacitors series/parallel as they discharge, to keep a more or less constant voltage.
BTW, everyone is focused on the power storage applications, but let's not forget the implications in electronics. Electrolytic capacitors are some of the largest electronic components, so large capacities in small volumes would help miniaturization quite allot.
they would only need a few seconds to be fully charged
That's very unlikely, assuming that these capacitors can reach the power densities that current NiMh cells can. The current needed to charge them so fast is tremendous, the cells would explode. For example, for a AA cell of 2000 mAh, you would need 720 Amperes to charge in 10 seconds, or 1.44 KA to charge in 5 seconds.
The nanotubes are there to tremendously increase the surface of one electrode. All electrolytic capacitors I know use some sort of oxide as dielectric, and I presume the oxide would cover the whole nanotube. The other electrode is constituted by the solid/liquid electrolyte that the nanotubes are immersed in, surrounding them from all directions and utilizing the exceptional surface increase. So the nanotubes from one electrode are not immersed in dielectric (insulator), they are immersed in the other electrode.
your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that
Yes, but how much of that is due to the serial interface? So let's assume a flash array can be written at 10MB/s. You can partition you flash chip in multiple arrays and write multiple blocks in parallel. You can use multiple flash chips in the drive. So, with a few simple tricks the speed of flash can increase by one order of magnitude, limited only by what ATA/SATA can provide (100 - 150 MB/s). Plus, no fragmentation.
Also, the best part of the memory of a 512MB OR 1GB Laptop is free under light usage like a word processor and Winamp. Well, not actually free, any free memory is used as disk cache for reading, but that can be discarded. Also, many of the memory pages are mapped as "read-only", for example all executable files running. Those do not need to be swapped out or written to the hibernate file - they can be discarded and read back again from the hard-drive when the thread executing them becomes active.
As an extra idea to speed up hibernation - what about compressing the read/write pages with a fast algorithm like lzop prior to writing them to disk? I regularly work with core dumps and they are usually compressible with gzip at a ratio of 15:1 or better. Here's what the homepage for lzop claims:
On modern systems, when making backups of terrabyte of data, lzop is usually IO-bound and not CPU-bound, which means that you can both decrease storage requirements and effectively reduce backup time by quite an amount.
This story is obviously false. A desktop computer with Windows, used by a PHB, cannot last more than a few months without a reformat.
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
on
Death By DMCA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If the networks can no longer count on people watching at least some ads, how are they to pay for content? The day most people have "auto-commercial-skip" is the day advertisers stop paying to be a part of the program.
I guess that's the broadcasters problem, not mine. They should adapt their business model around this. Maybe air shorter, more interesting and targeted commercials, that people want to watch. I am willing to fill a questionnaire to help them select the best commercials for me. I don't know and I don't care how they would pay for content. However, what they should not be allowed to do, is telling me what I can do with my TV and my video recorder, in my house.
From any one cam, some video fields will be junk taken during a film frame transition.
I think it would be very difficult to match the exact focus, diaphragm and position of the cameras, impossible with shots from multiple theaters. Every defence in the lighting or geometry of the image would create a pumping effect. I propose a much simpler solution: Take a PAL (50 Hz) camera and modify all it's Xtals with PLL oscillators 4% slower (48 Hz). The Phase Loop is locked on the cinema frames (24 fps), for example by using a photo-diode pointed to the screen, so that every odd/even frame of the camera falls on the same frame of the projector. Then simply extract the digital movie and accept a 4% speed-up, or slow it down digitally to a 24 fps avi.
In my experience however, the worst problem with cam releases are the very high noise of the CCD and the low dynamic range (contrast) of the image. This is because film has a much broader dynamic range than TV/LCD monitors, and a professional telecine takes this into account and lights up dark scenes. When this contrast range is smashed with a low quality camera, what you get are saturated, very white areas with all details lost (a 100% white face with only the eyes visible), or very dark scenes where it's hard to distinguish between the movie action and the grains.
As is done in astronomy, one can use multiple images of the same thing to reduce image noise.
Bah. Just use a higher resolution CCD. I agree though that this sort of equipment is much more expensive than a consumer camera.
So i could publicly accuse my hypothetical school of anything online, and no matter how bad the slur you would not expel me?
Yes. Common sense dictates that they can only sanction you for what you do/say in school. If they feel their image has been affected they can sue you. If they feel threatened they can notify the authorities. However, they should not be able to unilaterally act as judge and jury of your actions outside the school.
Also these things are expected to run a few HOURS on a good cranking, not "having to stop using the computer every few minutes to crank it back up." If these kids can walk to school they can crank for 10 or so minutes to get their laptop running before class, and the same at home when they're in for the night.
The minimum acceptable crank time to operating time is 1:10, i.e. one minute of cranking the generator powers 10 minutes of operation. The hoped-for power consumption in ebook mode is 1:40 to 1:60, i.e. one minute of cranking powers 40 minutes to one hour of ebook reading.
It's much harder to produce energy by manual labor than people think. For example lifting a 100Kg weight for one meter generates 1KJ = 0.3Wh = 10 minutes of operation for a 2W laptop. That's even worse than what Bill Gates said:
...get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type.
Unshare (or outright delete, if you're paranoid...) any items over 500, and you should be (relatively) safe, unless they already have your IP.
500 mp3s ? 2GB? That's nothing. I have 10s of GB, and many users have TBs of data. If you are concerned about a raid, I suggest you do what I do: - if you run only Windows XP (2000 has security problems on NTFS), - if you have a large partition formatted with NTFS - and if you are the only user interested in the mp3 collection, then you should encrypt your download/shared folder using NTFS encryption. Create a new folder with an benign name, set the encryption check box, and move all your collection in it, and set your p2p app to download in it (or a sub-folder). Optionally, use a disk shredder to delete all traces of the unencrypted files. Do not encrypt a non-empty folder, this can be insecure. After all this, your collection is as safe as your login password. Use a good password and you are 100% RIAA-proof. The encryption is fast and transparent to the user - no need to type the password every time you access the data. A forensic examiner can of course reset the password of your account, but then they loose any chance to decrypt your data. Also, they cannot force you to give them the password (unless you live in UK:). If asked, simply claim that the folder contains very private love letters...
You could use the same technique to hide clandestine applications by installing them in the encrypted subfolders, but there would be lots of traces in registry identifying the application and it's install location.
However, for the rest of us, 128-bit Diffie-Hellman with no man-in-the-middle protection is sufficient. Think about it--while it is feasible for the NSA to attack a select number encrypted conversations, it would be computationally infeasible for them...
I agree that none of this phone's buyers will have their conversations listened, it's a gizmo with a small market share. However, if such a system - end to end encryption using DH - should become wide spread, you can bet NSA will develop the technology to break it a wide scale, it is not computationally infeasible. An average computer can probably decode and re-encode hundreds of AES encoded 14 kbps voice streams simultaneously; custom hardware would make MIM attacks very accessible.
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Now, if there would be some standard cross-platform solution to do all this, and not some proprietary binary blob, compiled only for those platforms Macromedia chooses. I'm still waiting for my 8.0 Flash player for Linux.
All in all, it's a nice data set to play with. Mirrors here.
Come to think of it, there is no need for a loop. Just show nice, thought provoking art all the time.
That sound is only 15 KHz, and the mp3 has 48Khz sampling rate. And the buzzer in the mobile is perfectly able to reproduce high frequencies, it's the low freqs that cannot be reproduced.
So, solutions for making console-friendly adventure games certainly existed before. Wii will not change anything, adventure games don't sell.
The key to a successful police state is not to jail the entire population. This would be expensive and inefficient.
You must be able to use discretionary enforcement and create the criminals as needed, thus keeping everyone in a state of constant fear.
I find it quite amussing they are trying to apply the latest buzzwords in coding, when coding is such a small part in a game. Just look at the credits of an average, $5milion+ budget game: there are hundreds of artists, but only a few programmers.
A good game needs, in this order:
- good game-play
- good art (sounds, atmosphere, etc.)
- good engineering
The first two things are related to creativity, and I don't think they can be helped by agile development.
I'm not saying a better graphics engine doesn't make a game better, just that most games that fail usually don't fail because of bugs or poor performance in the software. They fail because they are sucky games.
I hear it can be quite entertaining.
For comparison, a regular car achieves something in the range 5-15 l/100Km, so 74 ml/100Km is quite impressive.
That's just like saying email spam won't be any different than junk mail.
VoIP spam is a nightmare in the making. A normal telemarketer needs to pay to have access to the phone network, and needs to be a business so it could be held accountable for any wrongdoings. It cannot operate from China or the long distance costs would kill it. There is only so much calls you can initiate per second from a normal telco trunk. You also need a human operator for each call, the costs per call tipically do not allow you to waste them with recorded message.
Enter VoIP Telemarketing: anonymous Viagra kings, enjoying the anonymity and low cost of the Internet calls to make billions of robot calls from zombied machines. In my opinion, it's the worst threat facing VoIP today.
I live in Eastern Europe, and the average salary around here is about 200euro/month. The last time I've checked, a cheap car costs 5000-10.000 euro, and a normal house in the suburbs around 100.000 euro.
Just give that old stupid idea "they make less, but the price of living is much lower" a rest, will you.
The only thing that is cheap in 3rd world country is the value of labor. If we could produce cars, food and clothes so cheaply, what would prevent us from flooding your markets with them? You already know the answer to that one, we make cheap low quality stuff. Expanding that house might have cost $1000, but would any westerner live in it?
Then suggest it to your employer. A quick method to almost double your salary, right?
The energy required to charge your laptop is not that great. Assuming a 2Ah/12V battery, that's just 24Wh = 86400 Ws. A 220V/15A circuit can deliver that in just 26 seconds.
Trouble is, when you are transforming energy from high to low voltage, your current increases proportionally, so 220V/15A is the same energy as 12V/275A.
The prospect of having a 275Ampere current flowing through my 3000$ laptop is not that nice.
Assuming you try so scurtcircuit a capacitor-battery with a few Ah capacity (like your laptop has), the few thousand Amperes that would flow through your screwdriver would instantly vaporize it with a loud bang followed by the whining of a little school girl that has melted metal on her face.
One solution to avoid a switching supply, would be to create a simple circuit that ties capacitors series/parallel as they discharge, to keep a more or less constant voltage.
BTW, everyone is focused on the power storage applications, but let's not forget the implications in electronics.
Electrolytic capacitors are some of the largest electronic components, so large capacities in small volumes would help miniaturization quite allot.
The current needed to charge them so fast is tremendous, the cells would explode.
For example, for a AA cell of 2000 mAh, you would need 720 Amperes to charge in 10 seconds, or 1.44 KA to charge in 5 seconds.
The nanotubes are there to tremendously increase the surface of one electrode. All electrolytic capacitors I know use some sort of oxide as dielectric, and I presume the oxide would cover the whole nanotube. The other electrode is constituted by the solid/liquid electrolyte that the nanotubes are immersed in, surrounding them from all directions and utilizing the exceptional surface increase.
So the nanotubes from one electrode are not immersed in dielectric (insulator), they are immersed in the other electrode.
Yes, but how much of that is due to the serial interface?
So let's assume a flash array can be written at 10MB/s. You can partition you flash chip in multiple arrays and write multiple blocks in parallel. You can use multiple flash chips in the drive.
So, with a few simple tricks the speed of flash can increase by one order of magnitude, limited only by what ATA/SATA can provide (100 - 150 MB/s). Plus, no fragmentation.
Also, many of the memory pages are mapped as "read-only", for example all executable files running. Those do not need to be swapped out or written to the hibernate file - they can be discarded and read back again from the hard-drive when the thread executing them becomes active.
As an extra idea to speed up hibernation - what about compressing the read/write pages with a fast algorithm like lzop prior to writing them to disk? I regularly work with core dumps and they are usually compressible with gzip at a ratio of 15:1 or better. Here's what the homepage for lzop claims:
This story is obviously false.
A desktop computer with Windows, used by a PHB, cannot last more than a few months without a reformat.
I guess that's the broadcasters problem, not mine. They should adapt their business model around this. Maybe air shorter, more interesting and targeted commercials, that people want to watch. I am willing to fill a questionnaire to help them select the best commercials for me. I don't know and I don't care how they would pay for content.
However, what they should not be allowed to do, is telling me what I can do with my TV and my video recorder, in my house.
I think it would be very difficult to match the exact focus, diaphragm and position of the cameras, impossible with shots from multiple theaters. Every defence in the lighting or geometry of the image would create a pumping effect.
I propose a much simpler solution:
Take a PAL (50 Hz) camera and modify all it's Xtals with PLL oscillators 4% slower (48 Hz). The Phase Loop is locked on the cinema frames (24 fps), for example by using a photo-diode pointed to the screen, so that every odd/even frame of the camera falls on the same frame of the projector. Then simply extract the digital movie and accept a 4% speed-up, or slow it down digitally to a 24 fps avi.
In my experience however, the worst problem with cam releases are the very high noise of the CCD and the low dynamic range (contrast) of the image. This is because film has a much broader dynamic range than TV/LCD monitors, and a professional telecine takes this into account and lights up dark scenes. When this contrast range is smashed with a low quality camera, what you get are saturated, very white areas with all details lost (a 100% white face with only the eyes visible), or very dark scenes where it's hard to distinguish between the movie action and the grains.
Bah. Just use a higher resolution CCD. I agree though that this sort of equipment is much more expensive than a consumer camera.
Yes. Common sense dictates that they can only sanction you for what you do/say in school. If they feel their image has been affected they can sue you. If they feel threatened they can notify the authorities.
However, they should not be able to unilaterally act as judge and jury of your actions outside the school.
You are wrong:
It's much harder to produce energy by manual labor than people think. For example lifting a 100Kg weight for one meter generates 1KJ = 0.3Wh = 10 minutes of operation for a 2W laptop.
That's even worse than what Bill Gates said:
500 mp3s ? 2GB? That's nothing. I have 10s of GB, and many users have TBs of data.
If you are concerned about a raid, I suggest you do what I do:
- if you run only Windows XP (2000 has security problems on NTFS),
- if you have a large partition formatted with NTFS
- and if you are the only user interested in the mp3 collection,
then you should encrypt your download/shared folder using NTFS encryption.
Create a new folder with an benign name, set the encryption check box, and move all your collection in it, and set your p2p app to download in it (or a sub-folder). Optionally, use a disk shredder to delete all traces of the unencrypted files. Do not encrypt a non-empty folder, this can be insecure.
After all this, your collection is as safe as your login password. Use a good password and you are 100% RIAA-proof. The encryption is fast and transparent to the user - no need to type the password every time you access the data.
A forensic examiner can of course reset the password of your account, but then they loose any chance to decrypt your data. Also, they cannot force you to give them the password (unless you live in UK
You could use the same technique to hide clandestine applications by installing them in the encrypted subfolders, but there would be lots of traces in registry identifying the application and it's install location.
Happy sharing !
I agree that none of this phone's buyers will have their conversations listened, it's a gizmo with a small market share. However, if such a system - end to end encryption using DH - should become wide spread, you can bet NSA will develop the technology to break it a wide scale, it is not computationally infeasible. An average computer can probably decode and re-encode hundreds of AES encoded 14 kbps voice streams simultaneously; custom hardware would make MIM attacks very accessible.