Most of the anti-Ajax FUD comes from people who've never really tried to use it...
In a nutshell: AJAX work pays my bills; it still is a band aid; far from "ultimate" worthy; I never said cross-platform (misnomver)/cross-browser was impossible (you still have to put up with all the crap that comes with...the *whole* architecture of HTML + CSS + JS not being implemented the same). Not intending to toot my own horn, but I've done things with AJAX that I haven't seen anywhere on the net.
So, in short: don't pigeon hole me with the clueless people. Do you even know what FUD means? Lambasting a claim of ultimacy on a band aid of a solution is not instilling fear nor uncertainty nor doubt. Wait: gross assumptions made on the internet about someone else? Never!:)
I don't see Ajax replacing Word, but I do see it replacing Peoplesoft and SAP.
Google has spreadsheets and word processing. It has been attempted, is being attempted, and will continue to be attempted. I'm saying I'll never bet on them winning with the current incarnations because they are grossly inadequate for the task.
s there anyone left in our industry that hasn't heard of Ajax, the ultimate client-side technology for web developers?
Hah! Ultimate? Hardly.
AJAX is a hack to add more "dynamicallness" to web sites. HTML currently relies on HTTP and HTTP suffer a fatal flaw: it is client-initiated. Put another way: it's a poll technology. There is no way to allow the server to initiate a connection to a client.
As sites integrate more and more AJAX you tend to notice that what they are ultimately striving for is a standard desktop application. But it won't work as is and so AJAX is just a mere band aid. Ever try to use Google calender or gmail with a slow/latencied connection or when their servers are busy? I've had to wait over 30 seconds for an event to display in their calendar without any GUI notification that it's working. This can be mitigated but my point that such failures as a GUI are prevalent in AJAX applications because they're trying to be something they can't -- a desktop app.
I don't care how nifty AJAX makes web sites but don't call it "ultimate". Please.
No, the "ultimate" technology will not include HTML, HTTP, or JavaScript in their current incarnations as all have fatal flaws that just can't measure up to a standard desktop app in terms of functionality. This would be fine if the goal was different but it's not and it's precisely why (all things being a equal as possible) I will never bet on an online office suite trumping a true desktop app.
Nevermind that what web apps are heralded for -- cross-platformness -- requires a lot of effort to make happen. IE, FF, opera, and safari just don't act the same way in terms of rendering and JS functionality. There are so many things working against this AJAX movement that I'm amazed that it works (mostly).
If it can be rendered perceptible, it can be copied.
More specifically, the flaw in DRM is that you have to give the consumer both the door with a lock but also the key. Without the "door" you have nothing to watch; without the "key" you can't watch it. So it is a fundamental requirement that you have both. This is the flaw.
Even if you get a brain implant to decrypt it: you still have the key locked up in that device and just need a technician (honestly, if it comes to average people getting a brain implant then this stuff is no longer the "brain surgeon"/"rocket scientist" material that is used proverbially) and a willing person.
The only challenge to DRM is the difficulty in extracting the key.
I think the irony is that the site is named "TrustedReviews." I'm glad that the review itself was, as far as I can tell, relatively honest, but these scores grossly overstate what the actual rating
Never heard of the site before and will never use it now. Never heard of the product before and will never buy it now.
Just take a look at professional athletes. They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago. We're starting to see more and more offspring of atheletes following in the footsteps of their parents. And to top it off, they make more money and have more prospects for reproducing.
Our genetic upper-class is already here.
The ironic thing is that the professional athletes exist in that form only because the non-professional athletes pay, IMHO, obscene amounts of money. If people wouldn't pay the money, the professional sports wouldn't exist, the athletes would not be as prominent, and their "prospects for reproducing" would be no different than anyone else. Which means their "upper-classness" is a direct dependence upon their ability to entertain not their genetics.
Their genes are the key to the door but the peoples' money is the bouncer.
I'm not sure the effort and materials costs associated with replacing a power supply are worth $24 per year...
True, but how about when you have to buy a new PSU (new computer/device) or replace your current PSU when it shells out? Then it becomes economical.
Not quite the same thing with incadescent vs. CFL though. You'd be better off replacing all of them right now because the marginal cost of a regular bulb (~$0.50) is much less than the energy savings of a CFL (~$36.00 YMMV).
The article title "Copper wire as fast as fiber?" is blatantly wrong. Flashy to make a better, more controversial headline.
The article title implies that a copper wire can have more bandwidth than a fiber. Read on:
He points out that a bundle of 50 Cat 3 twisted-pair wires (the kind that might be used in the last segment of the phone network) has 10Gbps of available bandwidth to distribute to the fifty homes at the end of those wires. By contrast, fiber to the home has only 2.5Gbps to distribute to its homes.
See the switch in argument? From "copper > fiber" in the title (and other locations within the article to boot) to "copper*50 > fiber*1". I'm sure if I bundle 10,000,000 twisted pairs then I can out-bandwidth a single fiber any day, but does that mean I should say copper is faster than fiber?
It's like titling my article "3.5 inch floppies hold more than a hard drive?" but then say if I combine 2 billion floppies in parallel then I get 3 TB of storage where as a single hard drive only holds 700 GB.
Apples and oranges.
That said, I think the article is trying to point out that the existing copper can be better utilized and achieve higher bandwidth than if a new, single fiber were trenched in its place. I see little controversy in this. But this does not mean "copper > fiber".
I have to admit that this is probably one of the most confusing and poorly written Ars article I've ever read.
You might not like it but its just a fact. The mobile market place is the next big rush.
Not trying to be rude, but you're just now figuring this out?:)
.mobi didn't happen because of evil registrars, it happened because the marketplace wanted it.
The market "wants it" because the current market can't handle it. Suppose for a second that websites used CSS properly and could handle user-agents correctly: would the.mobi TLD be necessary?
On a completely side point: I can't imagine that an emerging market force of the mobile market could win out politicians and sexually conservative folks in getting.xxx or.porn created as a TLD.
That's not just a formatting change; that's a radical restructuring of the way you'd want to design the web site. I don't think you can accomplish all that with CSS.
Touche. It won't reduce the bandwidth but you can easily hide your content. Some sites look *radically* different with and without style. For example, if you have the web developer extension for Firefox (or something equivalent) then hit up mozilla.org and then disable the styles (if not then copy the HTML into a blank page and strip off the link tags). There's two approaches here: minimal HTML design and dress it up with CSS (which is what mozilla.org does) or layout your entire site in HTML (as is usually done) and fine-tune with CSS. As of this writing, mozilla.org is 2796 bytes (excluding style sheets but including the links to them) but you might be deceived of that number by looking at the page.
If I can't claim brokenness on improper use of style then I do so on the user agent not being wholly reliable. If it was then you could switch your output *at render time* instead of at the virtual host level of your web server.
My point was that there are definitely ways to solve this issue without resorting to a new TLD with $25/year fees. Otherwise we better start.print for printing pages and.jsfree for javascript-free pages. It's wholly the wrong approach and the fact that it's being done indicates it's broken.
...have to be a lot larger than what minesweeper buttons normally are.
The version of minesweeper I play (not installed on my work machine so I can't name it) scales the size of the buttons to the window size. So beginner on full screen makes each button thing the size of a saltine. If the program were designed to use a touch screen then a modifier key would indicate what you want done with that square: tap to reveal, ctrl+tap to mark as mine, alt+tap to mark as questionable.
There are people who solve the biggest setting in under 90 seconds. You don't do that with your fingers!
Actually, it's currently 53.445 seconds for expert and zero for beginner. Both require a lot of luck on the initial layout. (Solving the beginner in zero time is being lucky enough that all the mines are revealing in your initial click.)
When a new TLD is created because of a style issue: the web is broken. This approach of splitting mobile content from "normal" content is the wrong way to do this. CSS has media types and a media type of "handheld" FOR EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE!
The only benefit to.mobi is to be cash cow for the registrar. That's it. A properly design site should take advantage of the already existing method for handling this very situation. The website should change to me, not the other way around.
Microsoft's voice recognition demonstration of writing a letter would be appropriate to mention here:
"Dear mom comma"
[displays "Dear aunt,"]
"Fix aunt"
[displays "Dear aunt, let's set"]
"Delete that...delete that...delete that"
[displays "Dear aunt, let's set so"]
"I think it's picking up an echo...delete..select all"
[adds "double the killer delete select all"]
[presenter manually selects all and deletes it]
I cannot imagine pedantically-spoken tasks like writing code or modifying route tables or firewall rules would be if done with voice.
"Show route table without D-N-S lookups" vs. `route -n` "Show last forty lines of var-log-messages" vs. `tail -fn 40/var/log/messages` "Synchronize recursively machine foo directory home-bob-web to machine bar directory home-bob-web with sym-links and permissions and times and owner" vs. `rsync -rlpto foo:/home/bob/web bar:/home/bob/web`
Can't ignore that the syntax alone to make sure it understands precisely what you mean will require training. How can you specify the directory "etc" instead of "etsee" or "e-t-c" (depending on how you say it)? What about init.d? Is that "init/./d/" or "init.d" or "init/.d/" or "initdotd" or "init/dot/d" or "initdot/d" or "in/it/dot/d"?
BAH! This is hurting my brain just thinking about it!
Oh, don't get me started on that!:) 3D desktops are only good for research grants and movies (e.g., Jurassic Park). I run KDE with 12 desktops. Ctrl plus and F-key gets me directly to a specific desktop; or alt-ctrl-shift and h,j,k,l to navigate left,down,up,right (think vi/vim). I'd pull out my hair if I had to wait for a fancy cube to rotate. [True] transparency is eye candy and rarely would be of practical use.
I'm all for pushing off window rendering to the GPU though: free up those CPU cycles for actually doing work instead of displaying it.
How are we confined?
Mostly confined by economics. A stylus & pad or a touch screen are nowhere near as cheap as a mouse, which is why you only find a keyboard and mouse at a given computer. My bad for not clarifying that. So it's not a true confinement but a confinement out of practice and cost.
And I don't see the advantage of touch screens for larger buttons - you already have the mouse, it's easier just to use that, no?
There's a reason restaurant systems are touch pad based instead of mice. (For those that don't have a touch screen system (I think "Squirrel" is the name of one) they have registers with buttons which is the analog, heh, analog.) For such kind of data entry (that's really all it is) physical movement of a hand will be faster than using a mouse or a keyboard. I'd bet you could play minesweeper or solitare faster with a touchscreen than a mouse.
What I was really getting at is that we have created more input methods than we commonly use despite each having its strengths and weaknesses. I can't imagine typing a letter with just a mouse and I can't imagine editing text with anything but a keyboard (sorry, lifelong vim (no gvim) user here).
Voice recognition is NOT the answer
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Voice recognition is a common thing I read here, but I whole-heartedly disagree. I already think office noise chatter is too high. I don't wnat to imagine when everyone is talking to their computer to tell it what to do.
What most replies here lack the understanding in is that an input method has its purposes and its uses. See the whole CLI vs. GUI argument here. Voice is just another input. It's great for GPS navigation or a mobile phone in your car, but for an office suite? Definitely not: ugh! How about in a library? How about at a LAN party? Anywhere where there are many people.
Voice recognition isn't the "killer app" of input devices. I think a combination of keyboard, mouse, stylus, joy stick, voice recognition, and touch screen would be a good start. Voice recognition for dictation, keyboard for editing, stylus for graphics drawing, mouse for web browsing (fine grain arbitrary clicking), touch screen for fast navigation of larger buttons (coarse grain arbitrary clicking), etc.
Why must we be confined to the keyboard and mouse?
...the smaller you make them, the less responsive they are.
Seitz: 160 megapixel in a 60x170mm sensor = 15,686 pixels per mm^2 1Ds: 11.4 MP in a 35.8x23.8mm sensor = 13,379 pixels per mm^2 Rebel: 6.3 MP in a 22.7x15.1mm sensor = 18,379 pixels per mm^2
The digital rebel has a higher pixel density than the Seitz. According to your quote, that makes the Seitz more responsive than the rebel but less than the 1Ds.
Like usual around here, the invocation of Moore is just to get/. editors to accept the story. The density has clearly been exceeded by *much* cheaper cameras. The only thing novel here is the 11.97 time increase in sensor area over the 1Ds......well, and the gigabit ethernet but...:)
(I prefer Canon so substitute in your preferred cameras where you see fit.)
I'm not the first to say this but I delved a bit into the sites code and it is by far a textbook case. It's clearly work of a coder who has never done this stuff before.
First, some links call JS functions. I *hate* this. I'm talking the three lnks under the "Browse" section on the main page.
Second, regarding the links above. They initiate an ajax update of a div. What it doesn't do is tell the user that it is updating. Just now, I waited 30 seconds for the div to update. This is certainly due to slashdotting but it demonstrates poor design.
Third, again regarding the links above. All three contents update the same DIV which means the content stays stale and is now mislabeled.
Fourth, he uses a global variable to store the XMLHttpRequest/XMLHTTP object. This means you can't have multiple outstanding requests.
That's just the first page and the ajax at a cursory glance.
The visual aspects are equally appalling and it doesn't seem like it will scale at all. Right now there are 27 people who have seen The Matrix. What happens when a million people use this site. Personally, I don't care to see all million names.
I also don't get this tags movement. Mostly, why should genres be freeform? Currently there's "scifi" and there's "sci-fi". Doesn't make sense to tag with genres, characters, or people. These are all fixed things.
All that said: the site is poorly executed for what it's trying to achieve. The Wikipedia link is nice but what about IMDB? How about pulling up the WP or IMDB page in an iframe (but that's "old school", what about an innerHTML on a DIV)? Perhaps do some web service interaction with amazon and get some reference links out of it? How about web service interaction to google?
What does this site do for me? Tell me what other people watch? I don't want to know what everybody watches, I want to know what other people like me watch and recommend. I like Baseketball but I guarantee my dad doesn't so why should his tastes impact mine?
Not to rag too much on a 15 year old, but overall the site isn't slashdot worthy. But what else is new around here? All I know is that if this site was in a text book...man...that'd be one sucky book.
You know, I had a thoughtful and insightful list of maybe half-a-dozen things/comments about KDE I would want as a power user. Then KWin seg faulted on me and I had to restart X thus losing my comments.
...were actually filmed digitally, meaning the resolution can't exceed HD by definition.
Sure you can. Just find a camcorder that can exceed 1920x1080 progressive (1080p) and you've surpassed what HDTV can currently do at the top end.
Note also that film isn't unlimited resolution, although I'm not sure what the equivelant resolution of modern film stock would be in pixels.
I have yet to hear anything near definitive about this (mostly in the context of photography though). I've seen comparisons and rationalizations but....meh.
If you are capable of learning on your own, then why attend college in the first place?
I cannot possibly believe that you are a professor at a university after having said that.
Make a list of professors whom have a doctorate. Then make a list of professors whom do not have a doctorate. Which list is longer?
Make a list of physicians (I'm not talking nurses here) whom have a doctorate (MD, DO). Then make a list of those that do not. Which list is longer?
Degrees are like keys to door locks. You definitely don't need the key to get through the door but it's much easier, less messy, and the owner doesn't get as pissed off when you smash the door down or climb through the window.
And if you are attending a university where classes can be passed without attending lectures, then you are wasting your money, your parent's money, or some sort of scholarship money.
Any class can be passed without attending lectures. The *real* trick to college is in learning that you only need to satisify what the professor wants; learning the material is ancillary to this point. The professor wants to give tests: what happens when you don't take them? The professor wants you to do group work: what happens when you don't work within the group? The professor wants 12 point Times font: what happens when you do comic sans? The professor wants homework done for every lecture: what happens if you miss those? The professor has a scoring rubrick for something: what happens when you do any equally well project but fail the rubrick?
The underlying assumption is in doing homework, correctly answering test questions, making up an essay on the spot, etc. that you learn the material but no where is it a direct requirement. If I had a perfect memory that lasted me a semester from when I learn it then I could ace each and every class without a problem and obtain 40 doctorates but end up learned jack squat.
Nevermind that listening to someone speak is by far from the only means of learning. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, PHP or SQL but I have mastered both by using it. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, photolithography but I have successfully developed a process to etch circuit boards (by way of taking a black/white picture -- to scale -- of a schematic and then using photolithography with that negative). I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, wiring a house but can easily install new outlets, switches, circuit breaker panels, etc. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, driving a semi but I have a class A license and have driven Chicago to LA twice and managed rush hour traffic on both ends without a problem. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, photography but I can take some amazing photographs.
No, you are definitely not a professor...or, perhaps more pendantically, not a professor I would want to have since you clearly do not understand what learning really is. I don't have to sit in a class room to learn but it's pretty much the easiest route to get those slips of paper that now sit in my fire-proof safe.
However, as a point that does support your position I put this forth. Currently, I am attempting to learn all the subjects necessary to get into medical school (biology, microbiology, anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry, pharmacology, etc.). Coming from an engineering background I have a ways to go in terms of raw knowledge but am there as a scientist. But! I face a future challenge of getting in without having that lab experience or tangible proof (i.e., grades) that I do indeed "know" the subject matter. With thousands? of applicants, I'm open to suggestions on how to not be discarded for not having these tangible items. I don't need to sit in a class room to learn it and I don't much desire to pay to take some classes unnecessarily. Do you have some good suggestions or have I successfully answered my first quote of you?
Why isn't Star Wars on either of the next-gen formats? I bet Lucas is waiting to do the re-re-re-release on HD DVD 2.0 though, but that's Lucas.
So then why not Star Trek or the Matrix trilogy? Why not sell movies that cater to geeks whom I'd be willing to bet would spend hard currency on? I'm thinking ST Nemesis or ST Voyager...something recently filmed with film capable of superseeding high def.
I find the current selection appalling and find it ludicrous that they think a movie three decades old is going to really benefit from high def.
Maybe even Battlestar Galactica 2003 mini-series and on?
If you want to sell your latest widget they why use mediocre stock? From what I've seen, I see no reason to dump a couple pay checks on a new player and TV. I'm not going to dump a couple grand to watch Hitch and 50 First Dates in super-mega-awesome format.
Coming soon: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on HD DVD; Citizen Kane on Blu Ray; and Casablanca Extendend Edition on HD DVD with 84 hours of unseen footage. OH PLEASE, gimme a break from your marketers!
...CAPTCHAs, if effective (which a market for human solvers suggests), only prove that a human has responded.
But isn't that what a fair amount of anti-spam stuff does? Making a human respond adds cost to the spamming, even if outsourced to india. $100 for 50 hours of CAPTCHA solving is still $100. And humans are much slower than if a computer could post away without needing such a verification.
Grey-listing filters on email requires the spammer store the actual message to retry later. Not much cost but more than if it didn't exist.
So the real problem is coming up with CAPTCHAs in real-time with no permanent (this session ID) correlation made between the image link and the answer. Then hiring "slave labor" to make this mapping for you will be completely useless.
Then the "other side" will volly back with an image algorithm to thwart CAPTCHA, then we'll get CAPTCHA 2.0 with synergistic AJAX-enabled authentication, and then we'll have Terminators ruling the world.
I'm saying that a non-trivial portion of my power bill is rooted in DC use and a single AC->DC conversion would most likely be more efficient since all of it is likely 5 VDC or 3.3 VDC. Distributing 5 or 3.3 VDC around your house doesn't seem practical to me (would require decent sized wires to avoid the voltage drop), but 12 or 24 seems more reasonable and 12->5 DC/DC aren't hard to find.
More efficient conversion means less heat generation which means less A/C demand during summer (at least for us Americans). This is the secondary effect of converting a datacenter to DC: you save on AC->DC conversion AND on cooling to remove that waste heat.
Tesla was right about AC for many applications but DC has its merits and any useful application of DC is a credit to Edison's scientific achievements.
Edison died in 1931. Tesla died in 1943. The Bell Labs transistor was successfully built in 1947.
Neither Edison nor Tesla had the fair knowledge of the proliferation of transistors 60-70 years posthumous. I don't know about you but practically every on-grid device in my apartment is DC based. TV, computer, clocks, cordless phones, DVD player, etc. The only things not are large appliances or those motor-based: stove, refridgerator, water heater, washer (clothes & dishes), clothes dryer, furnace fan, etc.
However and generally speaking, the DC devices are "always on" while the AC ones are "as needed". So, the inefficiences of multiple AC->DC conversions is always there and their transformers will always have some loss even with zero output power.
I highly suspect having a 12VDC or 24VDC bus in your house would also be advantageous for getting rid of the multitude of wall warts. It would rid the need of an AC->DC PSU in your computer (a DC->DC PSU will still be needed of course) to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
In a nutshell: AJAX work pays my bills; it still is a band aid; far from "ultimate" worthy; I never said cross-platform (misnomver)/cross-browser was impossible (you still have to put up with all the crap that comes with...the *whole* architecture of HTML + CSS + JS not being implemented the same). Not intending to toot my own horn, but I've done things with AJAX that I haven't seen anywhere on the net.
So, in short: don't pigeon hole me with the clueless people. Do you even know what FUD means? Lambasting a claim of ultimacy on a band aid of a solution is not instilling fear nor uncertainty nor doubt. Wait: gross assumptions made on the internet about someone else? Never!
Google has spreadsheets and word processing. It has been attempted, is being attempted, and will continue to be attempted. I'm saying I'll never bet on them winning with the current incarnations because they are grossly inadequate for the task.
Hah! Ultimate? Hardly.
AJAX is a hack to add more "dynamicallness" to web sites. HTML currently relies on HTTP and HTTP suffer a fatal flaw: it is client-initiated. Put another way: it's a poll technology. There is no way to allow the server to initiate a connection to a client.
As sites integrate more and more AJAX you tend to notice that what they are ultimately striving for is a standard desktop application. But it won't work as is and so AJAX is just a mere band aid. Ever try to use Google calender or gmail with a slow/latencied connection or when their servers are busy? I've had to wait over 30 seconds for an event to display in their calendar without any GUI notification that it's working. This can be mitigated but my point that such failures as a GUI are prevalent in AJAX applications because they're trying to be something they can't -- a desktop app.
I don't care how nifty AJAX makes web sites but don't call it "ultimate". Please.
No, the "ultimate" technology will not include HTML, HTTP, or JavaScript in their current incarnations as all have fatal flaws that just can't measure up to a standard desktop app in terms of functionality. This would be fine if the goal was different but it's not and it's precisely why (all things being a equal as possible) I will never bet on an online office suite trumping a true desktop app.
Nevermind that what web apps are heralded for -- cross-platformness -- requires a lot of effort to make happen. IE, FF, opera, and safari just don't act the same way in terms of rendering and JS functionality. There are so many things working against this AJAX movement that I'm amazed that it works (mostly).
More specifically, the flaw in DRM is that you have to give the consumer both the door with a lock but also the key. Without the "door" you have nothing to watch; without the "key" you can't watch it. So it is a fundamental requirement that you have both. This is the flaw.
Even if you get a brain implant to decrypt it: you still have the key locked up in that device and just need a technician (honestly, if it comes to average people getting a brain implant then this stuff is no longer the "brain surgeon"/"rocket scientist" material that is used proverbially) and a willing person.
The only challenge to DRM is the difficulty in extracting the key.
Never heard of the site before and will never use it now. Never heard of the product before and will never buy it now.
The ironic thing is that the professional athletes exist in that form only because the non-professional athletes pay, IMHO, obscene amounts of money. If people wouldn't pay the money, the professional sports wouldn't exist, the athletes would not be as prominent, and their "prospects for reproducing" would be no different than anyone else. Which means their "upper-classness" is a direct dependence upon their ability to entertain not their genetics.
Their genes are the key to the door but the peoples' money is the bouncer.
True, but how about when you have to buy a new PSU (new computer/device) or replace your current PSU when it shells out? Then it becomes economical.
Not quite the same thing with incadescent vs. CFL though. You'd be better off replacing all of them right now because the marginal cost of a regular bulb (~$0.50) is much less than the energy savings of a CFL (~$36.00 YMMV).
The article title implies that a copper wire can have more bandwidth than a fiber. Read on:
See the switch in argument? From "copper > fiber" in the title (and other locations within the article to boot) to "copper*50 > fiber*1". I'm sure if I bundle 10,000,000 twisted pairs then I can out-bandwidth a single fiber any day, but does that mean I should say copper is faster than fiber?
It's like titling my article "3.5 inch floppies hold more than a hard drive?" but then say if I combine 2 billion floppies in parallel then I get 3 TB of storage where as a single hard drive only holds 700 GB.
Apples and oranges.
That said, I think the article is trying to point out that the existing copper can be better utilized and achieve higher bandwidth than if a new, single fiber were trenched in its place. I see little controversy in this. But this does not mean "copper > fiber".
I have to admit that this is probably one of the most confusing and poorly written Ars article I've ever read.
Not trying to be rude, but you're just now figuring this out?
The market "wants it" because the current market can't handle it. Suppose for a second that websites used CSS properly and could handle user-agents correctly: would the
On a completely side point: I can't imagine that an emerging market force of the mobile market could win out politicians and sexually conservative folks in getting
Touche. It won't reduce the bandwidth but you can easily hide your content. Some sites look *radically* different with and without style. For example, if you have the web developer extension for Firefox (or something equivalent) then hit up mozilla.org and then disable the styles (if not then copy the HTML into a blank page and strip off the link tags). There's two approaches here: minimal HTML design and dress it up with CSS (which is what mozilla.org does) or layout your entire site in HTML (as is usually done) and fine-tune with CSS. As of this writing, mozilla.org is 2796 bytes (excluding style sheets but including the links to them) but you might be deceived of that number by looking at the page.
If I can't claim brokenness on improper use of style then I do so on the user agent not being wholly reliable. If it was then you could switch your output *at render time* instead of at the virtual host level of your web server.
My point was that there are definitely ways to solve this issue without resorting to a new TLD with $25/year fees. Otherwise we better start
The version of minesweeper I play (not installed on my work machine so I can't name it) scales the size of the buttons to the window size. So beginner on full screen makes each button thing the size of a saltine. If the program were designed to use a touch screen then a modifier key would indicate what you want done with that square: tap to reveal, ctrl+tap to mark as mine, alt+tap to mark as questionable.
Actually, it's currently 53.445 seconds for expert and zero for beginner. Both require a lot of luck on the initial layout. (Solving the beginner in zero time is being lucky enough that all the mines are revealing in your initial click.)
When a new TLD is created because of a style issue: the web is broken. This approach of splitting mobile content from "normal" content is the wrong way to do this. CSS has media types and a media type of "handheld" FOR EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE!
.mobi is to be cash cow for the registrar. That's it. A properly design site should take advantage of the already existing method for handling this very situation. The website should change to me, not the other way around.
The only benefit to
Microsoft's voice recognition demonstration of writing a letter would be appropriate to mention here:
I cannot imagine pedantically-spoken tasks like writing code or modifying route tables or firewall rules would be if done with voice.
"Show route table without D-N-S lookups" vs. `route -n`
"Show last forty lines of var-log-messages" vs. `tail -fn 40
"Synchronize recursively machine foo directory home-bob-web to machine bar directory home-bob-web with sym-links and permissions and times and owner" vs. `rsync -rlpto foo:/home/bob/web bar:/home/bob/web`
Can't ignore that the syntax alone to make sure it understands precisely what you mean will require training. How can you specify the directory "etc" instead of "etsee" or "e-t-c" (depending on how you say it)? What about init.d? Is that "init/./d/" or "init.d" or "init/.d/" or "initdotd" or "init/dot/d" or "initdot/d" or "in/it/dot/d"?
BAH! This is hurting my brain just thinking about it!
Oh, don't get me started on that!
I'm all for pushing off window rendering to the GPU though: free up those CPU cycles for actually doing work instead of displaying it.
Mostly confined by economics. A stylus & pad or a touch screen are nowhere near as cheap as a mouse, which is why you only find a keyboard and mouse at a given computer. My bad for not clarifying that. So it's not a true confinement but a confinement out of practice and cost.
There's a reason restaurant systems are touch pad based instead of mice. (For those that don't have a touch screen system (I think "Squirrel" is the name of one) they have registers with buttons which is the analog, heh, analog.) For such kind of data entry (that's really all it is) physical movement of a hand will be faster than using a mouse or a keyboard. I'd bet you could play minesweeper or solitare faster with a touchscreen than a mouse.
What I was really getting at is that we have created more input methods than we commonly use despite each having its strengths and weaknesses. I can't imagine typing a letter with just a mouse and I can't imagine editing text with anything but a keyboard (sorry, lifelong vim (no gvim) user here).
Voice recognition is a common thing I read here, but I whole-heartedly disagree. I already think office noise chatter is too high. I don't wnat to imagine when everyone is talking to their computer to tell it what to do.
What most replies here lack the understanding in is that an input method has its purposes and its uses. See the whole CLI vs. GUI argument here. Voice is just another input. It's great for GPS navigation or a mobile phone in your car, but for an office suite? Definitely not: ugh! How about in a library? How about at a LAN party? Anywhere where there are many people.
Voice recognition isn't the "killer app" of input devices. I think a combination of keyboard, mouse, stylus, joy stick, voice recognition, and touch screen would be a good start. Voice recognition for dictation, keyboard for editing, stylus for graphics drawing, mouse for web browsing (fine grain arbitrary clicking), touch screen for fast navigation of larger buttons (coarse grain arbitrary clicking), etc.
Why must we be confined to the keyboard and mouse?
Seitz: 160 megapixel in a 60x170mm sensor = 15,686 pixels per mm^2
1Ds: 11.4 MP in a 35.8x23.8mm sensor = 13,379 pixels per mm^2
Rebel: 6.3 MP in a 22.7x15.1mm sensor = 18,379 pixels per mm^2
The digital rebel has a higher pixel density than the Seitz. According to your quote, that makes the Seitz more responsive than the rebel but less than the 1Ds.
Like usual around here, the invocation of Moore is just to get
(I prefer Canon so substitute in your preferred cameras where you see fit.)
I'm not the first to say this but I delved a bit into the sites code and it is by far a textbook case. It's clearly work of a coder who has never done this stuff before.
First, some links call JS functions. I *hate* this. I'm talking the three lnks under the "Browse" section on the main page.
Second, regarding the links above. They initiate an ajax update of a div. What it doesn't do is tell the user that it is updating. Just now, I waited 30 seconds for the div to update. This is certainly due to slashdotting but it demonstrates poor design.
Third, again regarding the links above. All three contents update the same DIV which means the content stays stale and is now mislabeled.
Fourth, he uses a global variable to store the XMLHttpRequest/XMLHTTP object. This means you can't have multiple outstanding requests.
That's just the first page and the ajax at a cursory glance.
The visual aspects are equally appalling and it doesn't seem like it will scale at all. Right now there are 27 people who have seen The Matrix. What happens when a million people use this site. Personally, I don't care to see all million names.
I also don't get this tags movement. Mostly, why should genres be freeform? Currently there's "scifi" and there's "sci-fi". Doesn't make sense to tag with genres, characters, or people. These are all fixed things.
All that said: the site is poorly executed for what it's trying to achieve. The Wikipedia link is nice but what about IMDB? How about pulling up the WP or IMDB page in an iframe (but that's "old school", what about an innerHTML on a DIV)? Perhaps do some web service interaction with amazon and get some reference links out of it? How about web service interaction to google?
What does this site do for me? Tell me what other people watch? I don't want to know what everybody watches, I want to know what other people like me watch and recommend. I like Baseketball but I guarantee my dad doesn't so why should his tastes impact mine?
Not to rag too much on a 15 year old, but overall the site isn't slashdot worthy. But what else is new around here? All I know is that if this site was in a text book...man...that'd be one sucky book.
My list now consists of one things:
That would be super!
Sure you can. Just find a camcorder that can exceed 1920x1080 progressive (1080p) and you've surpassed what HDTV can currently do at the top end.
I have yet to hear anything near definitive about this (mostly in the context of photography though). I've seen comparisons and rationalizations but....meh.
I cannot possibly believe that you are a professor at a university after having said that.
Make a list of professors whom have a doctorate. Then make a list of professors whom do not have a doctorate. Which list is longer?
Make a list of physicians (I'm not talking nurses here) whom have a doctorate (MD, DO). Then make a list of those that do not. Which list is longer?
Degrees are like keys to door locks. You definitely don't need the key to get through the door but it's much easier, less messy, and the owner doesn't get as pissed off when you smash the door down or climb through the window.
Any class can be passed without attending lectures. The *real* trick to college is in learning that you only need to satisify what the professor wants; learning the material is ancillary to this point. The professor wants to give tests: what happens when you don't take them? The professor wants you to do group work: what happens when you don't work within the group? The professor wants 12 point Times font: what happens when you do comic sans? The professor wants homework done for every lecture: what happens if you miss those? The professor has a scoring rubrick for something: what happens when you do any equally well project but fail the rubrick?
The underlying assumption is in doing homework, correctly answering test questions, making up an essay on the spot, etc. that you learn the material but no where is it a direct requirement. If I had a perfect memory that lasted me a semester from when I learn it then I could ace each and every class without a problem and obtain 40 doctorates but end up learned jack squat.
Nevermind that listening to someone speak is by far from the only means of learning. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, PHP or SQL but I have mastered both by using it. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, photolithography but I have successfully developed a process to etch circuit boards (by way of taking a black/white picture -- to scale -- of a schematic and then using photolithography with that negative). I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, wiring a house but can easily install new outlets, switches, circuit breaker panels, etc. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, driving a semi but I have a class A license and have driven Chicago to LA twice and managed rush hour traffic on both ends without a problem. I have never once heard and/or attended a lecture over, say, photography but I can take some amazing photographs.
No, you are definitely not a professor...or, perhaps more pendantically, not a professor I would want to have since you clearly do not understand what learning really is. I don't have to sit in a class room to learn but it's pretty much the easiest route to get those slips of paper that now sit in my fire-proof safe.
However, as a point that does support your position I put this forth. Currently, I am attempting to learn all the subjects necessary to get into medical school (biology, microbiology, anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry, pharmacology, etc.). Coming from an engineering background I have a ways to go in terms of raw knowledge but am there as a scientist. But! I face a future challenge of getting in without having that lab experience or tangible proof (i.e., grades) that I do indeed "know" the subject matter. With thousands? of applicants, I'm open to suggestions on how to not be discarded for not having these tangible items. I don't need to sit in a class room to learn it and I don't much desire to pay to take some classes unnecessarily. Do you have some good suggestions or have I successfully answered my first quote of you?
Why isn't Star Wars on either of the next-gen formats? I bet Lucas is waiting to do the re-re-re-release on HD DVD 2.0 though, but that's Lucas.
So then why not Star Trek or the Matrix trilogy? Why not sell movies that cater to geeks whom I'd be willing to bet would spend hard currency on? I'm thinking ST Nemesis or ST Voyager...something recently filmed with film capable of superseeding high def.
I find the current selection appalling and find it ludicrous that they think a movie three decades old is going to really benefit from high def.
Maybe even Battlestar Galactica 2003 mini-series and on?
If you want to sell your latest widget they why use mediocre stock? From what I've seen, I see no reason to dump a couple pay checks on a new player and TV. I'm not going to dump a couple grand to watch Hitch and 50 First Dates in super-mega-awesome format.
Coming soon: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on HD DVD; Citizen Kane on Blu Ray; and Casablanca Extendend Edition on HD DVD with 84 hours of unseen footage. OH PLEASE, gimme a break from your marketers!
But isn't that what a fair amount of anti-spam stuff does? Making a human respond adds cost to the spamming, even if outsourced to india. $100 for 50 hours of CAPTCHA solving is still $100. And humans are much slower than if a computer could post away without needing such a verification.
Grey-listing filters on email requires the spammer store the actual message to retry later. Not much cost but more than if it didn't exist.
Maybe I missed the memo/boat on this, but aren't CAPTCHAs here specifically to stop automated spamming, automated account creation, etc.? After all CAPTCHA == Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
So the real problem is coming up with CAPTCHAs in real-time with no permanent (this session ID) correlation made between the image link and the answer. Then hiring "slave labor" to make this mapping for you will be completely useless.
Then the "other side" will volly back with an image algorithm to thwart CAPTCHA, then we'll get CAPTCHA 2.0 with synergistic AJAX-enabled authentication, and then we'll have Terminators ruling the world.
Tell me, what digital device would not benefit from shorter switching times?
I know and I wasn't disputing that.
I'm saying that a non-trivial portion of my power bill is rooted in DC use and a single AC->DC conversion would most likely be more efficient since all of it is likely 5 VDC or 3.3 VDC. Distributing 5 or 3.3 VDC around your house doesn't seem practical to me (would require decent sized wires to avoid the voltage drop), but 12 or 24 seems more reasonable and 12->5 DC/DC aren't hard to find.
More efficient conversion means less heat generation which means less A/C demand during summer (at least for us Americans). This is the secondary effect of converting a datacenter to DC: you save on AC->DC conversion AND on cooling to remove that waste heat.
Edison died in 1931.
Tesla died in 1943.
The Bell Labs transistor was successfully built in 1947.
Neither Edison nor Tesla had the fair knowledge of the proliferation of transistors 60-70 years posthumous. I don't know about you but practically every on-grid device in my apartment is DC based. TV, computer, clocks, cordless phones, DVD player, etc. The only things not are large appliances or those motor-based: stove, refridgerator, water heater, washer (clothes & dishes), clothes dryer, furnace fan, etc.
However and generally speaking, the DC devices are "always on" while the AC ones are "as needed". So, the inefficiences of multiple AC->DC conversions is always there and their transformers will always have some loss even with zero output power.
I highly suspect having a 12VDC or 24VDC bus in your house would also be advantageous for getting rid of the multitude of wall warts. It would rid the need of an AC->DC PSU in your computer (a DC->DC PSU will still be needed of course) to boot.