Screw them up - show up with your "computer" - a Sony PS3 with Linux on it, or a BeagleBoard running Ubuntu. Say "OK, here's my computer, install your stuff."
I would find it interesting to hear how they deal with That Which Is Neither Windows Nor X86.
For portable use, get something like a Nokia 810 and Bluetooth keyboard. Again, That Which Is Neither Windows Nor X86.
This game is truly an amazing concept, and I don't minimize the difficulty of having such a large set of objects that interact with the game world in a meaningful fashion - indeed, I'd like to see something like this in a PS3 game.
However, I think these 20-Q games are also amazing: they are a small ball, running off IIRC an AAA battery or two, that plays a pretty good game of 20 questions. I've thought of some pretty weird things and it has gotten it right amazingly often (OK, I'll be fair: if I'm thinking "Airwolf" and it guesses "helicopter" I'll give it a pass). All that on a device that you can pick up in stores for $10.
Let us try to act as though we understand how to spell, and use the proper contraction form "let's" when we are forming the contraction of "let us", shall we?
Of course, given the/. propensity for "loose", "your" when the contraction "you're" is intended, and the eternal battle against the mindset of "An apostrophe! Look out, here comes an 's'!", perhaps we should just call Butch in on this one.
Who wants the job? Perhaps somebody who wants to have power, without all that pesky "running for office and actually being elected by the people" stuff. Somebody who wants to make rules about how everybody is to run their computers, without all that pesky "being responsible for what goes wrong" stuff.
Part of the reason is that Ibiquity, the folks behind the HD radio standard, managed to get the FCC to approve a MANDATORY encryption key as a part of the standard. In other words, ALL HD radio traffic is encrypted with a key that you have to license from Ibiquity - full stop.
No matter if you can make your own decoder chip - you SHALL license the key from Ibiquity or you won't be able to decode ANY traffic.
And as a result, if you want to do something and Ibiquity doesn't want you to - you don't do it.
And Ibiquity doesn't want your spiffy new radio outputting any form of digital stream - no USB, no Firewire, no SPIDF, no Uncle Mikey.
So when Griffin wanted to have the RadioSharkHD stream the HD over USB to your computer - BZZZZT! Wrong answer.
"But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this"
Nor should it be. That's like saying my car should be able to traverse water too. There are tools for crossing water and tools for crossing land - and they are usually different.
But for simple "Here's a video of my cat yodeling" or "here's a sample of the music file you are about to download" you SHOULDN'T need a plug-in any more than you need a plug-in to view a picture (with apologies to the Lynx users among us).
However: there is no way HTML5 will replace Flash even for those sorts of applications until a large enough set of installed browsers can properly handle HTML5 that webmasters can safely ignore the hold-outs - and even if a large meteor were to strike a certain city in the American northwest that installed base will be quite some time in coming. Flash already has that installed base (modulo the iPhone and a few embedded devices).
Now, if you can make it such that HTML5 can be used to ram annoying advertising down our throats while denying us the ability to save the content we WANT to save - well then, I predict adoption to be swift and sure.
And when will Macrobee integrate GPS into PDF in a fashion my N800 can use to show me exactly where I am, or where I took a wrong turn and missed the animal exhibit I was looking for?
Also, there is the idea of "Do I want to visit this?" - do YOU know if you'd want to visit the Sedgwick County Zoo? How can you tell if it is a bunch of concrete cages with sickly animals or a well-run zoo with really good exhibits? After all, NO zoo is going to say on their website "We SUCK!" Being able to take a quick spin around BEFORE you go there can mean the difference between spending your limited vacation time on good sites or spending your time saying "well, this wasn't worth the trip."
Actually, extending StreetView to things off the street makes sense to me, for certain values of "things off the street" - there's a few businesses and the like I'd like to see mapped.
Example: I'd like to see my local zoo or one of our local museums set up so that I could use my GPS to find my way around - and being able to see some of the exhibits would be a bonus.
If *I* ran those places, I'd be begging Google to scan my site!
Ahh, but their forgot the time aspect of this: that acre of land produces only so much grass per unit time, so technically the units should be miles per (acre * year) or some such.
In other words,
d/(d*d*t) or 1/(d*t)
So it really is an area swept through space-time rather than a line through space.
Amateurs the lot of you - that's why it keeps clawing its way out of the grave.
FIRST: You stake its heart. That will immobilize it, but it doesn't kill it. But immobilizing it is the first step. NEXT: Fill its mouth with garlic and sew it shut. That is to keep it from calling out to its minions to be freed. THEN: Behead it with a grave-diggers shovel. FINALLY: Bury it at a cross-roads, and consecrate the ground.
I wonder just how somebody like this stupid oxygen thief (woman killed a motorcyclist because she was too busy doing her nails to actually drive her car) might think "It's OK if I hit somebody now - I have this airbag!".
<sarcasm> ZOMFGWTFBBQ!!1!!! Damn Republicans! Them and their middle-of-the-country Bible Belt politics always trying to take away our rights! It really.....
Just a moment.....
I was just handed this note that Rep. Linda T. Sanchez is actually a Democrat from California.
Nevermind... </sarcasm>
Seriously, had a Republican from Oklahoma proposed this, what do you think the odds that the <cough>editors </cough> would have taken the time to add the "(R-OK)" to that story.
Come on Slashdot - how about just being consistent - ALWAYS add the party and state affiliation to any US politicians name, and ideally do the same for politicians from other lands as well.
For example, without Javascript and running Index2, you cannot delete messages from the system - all the delete anchors are of the form '<a href="#" onclick="stuff">' and so are useless.
And if you aren't running index2, you don't get notifications of responses and the like anymore - at least that has been my experience.
I get very suspicious of any site that doesn't go into detail on their methodology for making a claim like this.
Especially when the site seems to be a web advertiser.
Have they corrected for the fact that Linux users are more likely to be able to use a variety of ad blocking and filtering tools, and thus may not be showing up in their statistics?
I always try to be clear about exactly what I am measuring - what are these guys measuring? When they say "market share", what "market" are they referring to? "Users who see our ads?" "Users visiting this set of sites (many of which refuse to work with That Which Is Not Internet Explorer)?"
Absent a statement of exactly of WHAT this is 1%, and a statement of methodologies used to make that measurement, this is a very questionable number.
As I keep pointing out on each IPv6 story, there will be little motivation to move to IPv6 until you can hit major sites, like cnn.com and slashdot.org, using nothing but IPv6 packets.
We've made a bit of progress, in that now, if you have IPv6 connectivity to "the Internet", you can in theory do the name resolution entirely by IPv6 packets, now that the root name servers support IPv6.
Note to the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" crowd: yes, you can form an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 address, but that doesn't mean the target machine will actually be able to understand it - it is still a completely different packet type than an IPv4 packet.
So, does slashdot.org have IPv6 enabled? Does the colo housing slashdot.org's servers route IPv6 packets from the Internet to the slashdot.org servers? Can "the Internet" route IPv6 packets to the colo?
If a tech site like slashdot.org doesn't have the ability to handle IPv6 traffic, then why should I get all hot and bothered about trying to get IPv6? And if I'm not going to demand it, then why should my ISP spend the effort to supply it?
An open letter to any hardware vendor considering making chips for these higher speed protocols:
Please add the timestamp counters needed to support IEEE-1588 Precise Timing Protocol. These counters don't add much in the way of complexity when added to the NIC, but they are VERY complex to add after the fact.
Being able to synchronize the clocks of 2 hosts to 5nS or less may seem esoteric right now, but for these sorts of transfer speeds, you are going to have a significant number of users (Test and Measurement folks like me, scientists at places like CERN and FermiLab, grid computing) who will need that kind of time sync.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw them up - show up with your "computer" - a Sony PS3 with Linux on it, or a BeagleBoard running Ubuntu. Say "OK, here's my computer, install your stuff."
I would find it interesting to hear how they deal with That Which Is Neither Windows Nor X86.
For portable use, get something like a Nokia 810 and Bluetooth keyboard. Again, That Which Is Neither Windows Nor X86.
This game is truly an amazing concept, and I don't minimize the difficulty of having such a large set of objects that interact with the game world in a meaningful fashion - indeed, I'd like to see something like this in a PS3 game.
However, I think these 20-Q games are also amazing: they are a small ball, running off IIRC an AAA battery or two, that plays a pretty good game of 20 questions. I've thought of some pretty weird things and it has gotten it right amazingly often (OK, I'll be fair: if I'm thinking "Airwolf" and it guesses "helicopter" I'll give it a pass). All that on a device that you can pick up in stores for $10.
"Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent . . ." "
I wasn't aware the Miranda decision and the Bill of Rights applied to the UK.
Let us try to act as though we understand how to spell, and use the proper contraction form "let's" when we are forming the contraction of "let us", shall we?
Of course, given the /. propensity for "loose", "your" when the contraction "you're" is intended, and the eternal battle against the mindset of "An apostrophe! Look out, here comes an 's'!", perhaps we should just call Butch in on this one.
Who wants the job? Perhaps somebody who wants to have power, without all that pesky "running for office and actually being elected by the people" stuff. Somebody who wants to make rules about how everybody is to run their computers, without all that pesky "being responsible for what goes wrong" stuff.
I've often wanted to dig up 2 acoustic coupled modems, 4 tin cans, and 2 strings, and see if I could get the modems to work over that.
Part of the reason is that Ibiquity, the folks behind the HD radio standard, managed to get the FCC to approve a MANDATORY encryption key as a part of the standard. In other words, ALL HD radio traffic is encrypted with a key that you have to license from Ibiquity - full stop.
No matter if you can make your own decoder chip - you SHALL license the key from Ibiquity or you won't be able to decode ANY traffic.
And as a result, if you want to do something and Ibiquity doesn't want you to - you don't do it.
And Ibiquity doesn't want your spiffy new radio outputting any form of digital stream - no USB, no Firewire, no SPIDF, no Uncle Mikey.
So when Griffin wanted to have the RadioSharkHD stream the HD over USB to your computer - BZZZZT! Wrong answer.
"But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this"
Nor should it be. That's like saying my car should be able to traverse water too. There are tools for crossing water and tools for crossing land - and they are usually different.
But for simple "Here's a video of my cat yodeling" or "here's a sample of the music file you are about to download" you SHOULDN'T need a plug-in any more than you need a plug-in to view a picture (with apologies to the Lynx users among us).
However: there is no way HTML5 will replace Flash even for those sorts of applications until a large enough set of installed browsers can properly handle HTML5 that webmasters can safely ignore the hold-outs - and even if a large meteor were to strike a certain city in the American northwest that installed base will be quite some time in coming. Flash already has that installed base (modulo the iPhone and a few embedded devices).
Now, if you can make it such that HTML5 can be used to ram annoying advertising down our throats while denying us the ability to save the content we WANT to save - well then, I predict adoption to be swift and sure.
And when will Macrobee integrate GPS into PDF in a fashion my N800 can use to show me exactly where I am, or where I took a wrong turn and missed the animal exhibit I was looking for?
Also, there is the idea of "Do I want to visit this?" - do YOU know if you'd want to visit the Sedgwick County Zoo? How can you tell if it is a bunch of concrete cages with sickly animals or a well-run zoo with really good exhibits? After all, NO zoo is going to say on their website "We SUCK!" Being able to take a quick spin around BEFORE you go there can mean the difference between spending your limited vacation time on good sites or spending your time saying "well, this wasn't worth the trip."
Actually, extending StreetView to things off the street makes sense to me, for certain values of "things off the street" - there's a few businesses and the like I'd like to see mapped.
Example: I'd like to see my local zoo or one of our local museums set up so that I could use my GPS to find my way around - and being able to see some of the exhibits would be a bonus.
If *I* ran those places, I'd be begging Google to scan my site!
"Just decommission a few nuclear warheads each year."
Except that nuclear warheads use Plutonium-239, and the power plants NASA uses are based on Plutonium-238.
And converting Pu-239 into Pu-238 is much more difficult than converting rad-waste into Pu-238.
Ahh, but their forgot the time aspect of this: that acre of land produces only so much grass per unit time, so technically the units should be miles per (acre * year) or some such.
In other words,
d/(d*d*t) or 1/(d*t)
So it really is an area swept through space-time rather than a line through space.
Amateurs the lot of you - that's why it keeps clawing its way out of the grave.
FIRST: You stake its heart. That will immobilize it, but it doesn't kill it. But immobilizing it is the first step.
NEXT: Fill its mouth with garlic and sew it shut. That is to keep it from calling out to its minions to be freed.
THEN: Behead it with a grave-diggers shovel.
FINALLY: Bury it at a cross-roads, and consecrate the ground.
Now, was that so hard?
I wonder just how somebody like this stupid oxygen thief (woman killed a motorcyclist because she was too busy doing her nails to actually drive her car) might think "It's OK if I hit somebody now - I have this airbag!".
"I wonder how much stereotyping had to do with the omission?"
In fairness, I doubt the submitter thought about the idea of adding the party and state information.
That's why I think the <cough>editors</cough> ought to do that.
<sarcasm>
ZOMFGWTFBBQ!!1!!! Damn Republicans! Them and their middle-of-the-country Bible Belt politics always trying to take away our rights! It really.....
Just a moment.....
I was just handed this note that Rep. Linda T. Sanchez is actually a Democrat from California.
Nevermind...
</sarcasm>
Seriously, had a Republican from Oklahoma proposed this, what do you think the odds that the <cough>editors </cough> would have taken the time to add the "(R-OK)" to that story.
Come on Slashdot - how about just being consistent - ALWAYS add the party and state affiliation to any US politicians name, and ideally do the same for politicians from other lands as well.
"Slashdot still works with javascript disabled."
Sort of.
For example, without Javascript and running Index2, you cannot delete messages from the system - all the delete anchors are of the form '<a href="#" onclick="stuff">' and so are useless.
And if you aren't running index2, you don't get notifications of responses and the like anymore - at least that has been my experience.
I get very suspicious of any site that doesn't go into detail on their methodology for making a claim like this.
Especially when the site seems to be a web advertiser.
Have they corrected for the fact that Linux users are more likely to be able to use a variety of ad blocking and filtering tools, and thus may not be showing up in their statistics?
I always try to be clear about exactly what I am measuring - what are these guys measuring? When they say "market share", what "market" are they referring to? "Users who see our ads?" "Users visiting this set of sites (many of which refuse to work with That Which Is Not Internet Explorer)?"
Absent a statement of exactly of WHAT this is 1%, and a statement of methodologies used to make that measurement, this is a very questionable number.
As I keep pointing out on each IPv6 story, there will be little motivation to move to IPv6 until you can hit major sites, like cnn.com and slashdot.org, using nothing but IPv6 packets.
We've made a bit of progress, in that now, if you have IPv6 connectivity to "the Internet", you can in theory do the name resolution entirely by IPv6 packets, now that the root name servers support IPv6.
Note to the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" crowd: yes, you can form an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 address, but that doesn't mean the target machine will actually be able to understand it - it is still a completely different packet type than an IPv4 packet.
So, does slashdot.org have IPv6 enabled? Does the colo housing slashdot.org's servers route IPv6 packets from the Internet to the slashdot.org servers? Can "the Internet" route IPv6 packets to the colo?
If a tech site like slashdot.org doesn't have the ability to handle IPv6 traffic, then why should I get all hot and bothered about trying to get IPv6? And if I'm not going to demand it, then why should my ISP spend the effort to supply it?
This could be totally revolutionary! Just think, this could totally change the meaning of "Money talks"!
"That gives me an idea. Delayed emails that do not get sent until after my death. "
It's been done.
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/
Or you could just take a video of yourself while you are alive, stitch together a few key phases, set up a Flash applet, and have a real remembrance.
"Yes. It's Wonderful. Isn't it."
(Mods: If you don't place the quote, turn in your Geek cards.)
"How dare you imply that the undead do not have a social life!!"
Bruce, Bruce, Bruce - <tisk> <tisk> <tisk>
How callous of you, to use such a bigoted term.
They prefer "Living-impaired" or "alternately-metabolized".
(OT: Are you going to Dayton?)
"I can count how many times I've rooted for Real on a one-bit integer. "
Signed, or unsigned?
An open letter to any hardware vendor considering making chips for these higher speed protocols:
Please add the timestamp counters needed to support IEEE-1588 Precise Timing Protocol. These counters don't add much in the way of complexity when added to the NIC, but they are VERY complex to add after the fact.
Being able to synchronize the clocks of 2 hosts to 5nS or less may seem esoteric right now, but for these sorts of transfer speeds, you are going to have a significant number of users (Test and Measurement folks like me, scientists at places like CERN and FermiLab, grid computing) who will need that kind of time sync.