SL was basically a 3D chat where makers could build stuff to make the environment beautiful. Unfortunately for them Facebook got really big worldwide the year after SL go on the media and took over all the mindshare. Fb is much more easier and convenient than SL for chatting and gossiping. Most people moved on and SL slowly became an empty shell. I read somewhere that it did 1 million unique logins per month in 2012 but that's nothing compared to fb, where people spend their time now.
That said, SL was able to convey more bandwidth than just a voice call. Maybe not as much as a video call but the background environment could fool people into believing they were not at their desk or on the couch at home and keep the attention high. So for a hundreds people conference it could have been a better choice than what they did at NASA, but not as much as the real thing.
In my experience Hangouts and the like kill recurrent meetings after a few iterations. They become yet another thing to see, very similar to a Youtube video, without the convenience of being 2 minutes long and with the trouble of being live and uninterruptible. I think that this kind of stuff must be either done in person or recorded and played back on demand. The first one if you care about interacting with other people.
For focused business meetings between people that know each other a video call works well and is a great time saver.
I had mod points yesterday, I'd modded this up as +1 informative.
Many people forgets that the S in CS is Science and the E in CE is Engineering. Names tell a lot sometimes. There is the same difference between (Physics && Chemistry) and Civil Engineering: if your goal is building bridges you must pick the latter.
So retro... My smart phone teleports to destination and talks in person to the recipient of the call without wasting my time and my money. It has all of the Internet inside, so I don't need a data plan. Unfortunately when it crashes it wormholes the place out of existence until it reboots. I never understood how we get back but it's usually difficult to explain the matter to bystanders.
It's not so easy. I hate DRM but I'm pretty sure that if this gets passed some customers of mine sooner or later will approach me and ask me funny things like "listen, I know there is a new thing in the web called DRM and I can use it so nobody can look at my HTML code, right? How much does it cost?" And what happens if I tell them they should not use DRM? Simple: somebody else will get the job. Once the genie is out of the bottle it's extremely difficult to put it back in there and all sort of nasty things will happen. Saying goodbye to view source won't be the worst one.
I wonder what *W3C committee members* got in return for that and if we can start a "STOP DRM" campaign and kill this madness.
Well... a CEO might resign and go somewhere else instead of doing something s/he doesn't like. They didn't so they preferred the alternative.
Recently Lavabit shutdown instead of doing something they didn't like. I don't know anything about US corporate law but maybe even public companies, even Apple, can decide to shutdown at any time for any reason. It could be as easy as buying back the company and closing it. Stockholders get their money back and don't have anything to complain about. Is there any expert out there?
That said, would I expect any CEO of world class corporations to pay attention to morals? I don't. They won't be there, stabbed in the back by some competing manager long time ago.
I expect a surge in client side cryptography, where servers store encrypted data and the keys never leave the client. This can't suit every application but it could be a good selling point for a while. Most of it will be done in JavaScript for convenience, even if it's not a good idea. Mega is just an entry level example of what can go wrong. Some "real" client application (mobile or desktop) will be developed, I wonder if they'll get mainstream. Anyway that only raises the bar for whoever wants to spy on us. There are many other ways to bypass encryption (rootkits, 0 day exploits, etc), nevertheless it's going to increase their costs.
I know it's not that phone box model but converting them into a fleet of TARDIS would be far better. They could deliver you data before it has been sent. That's being fast!
Are you suggesting they've been elopping Linux for so many years? Looks like Linux is more robust than Nokia but it's showing some cracks. They'll have to walk over my cold body to take away middle click paste from me. There will always be patches that restore it or some other sane DE.
I don't have mod points today but I'd mod you up if I could.
I agree that fun can't be the motivation, however not-fun is detrimental and it's a totally subjective matter. I give two examples.
One. I started programming with C and Perl and used them for years and I was totally happy with them (especially with Perl's text processing capabilities). Then moved on to Java which looked as a big improvement: no malloc, no free, one wonders why we had to deal with them for so long (but C was quite a regression to the CPU compared to previous high level languages). Then I looked at Ruby, which was a total marvel. About one year ago I looked at Python, used it to do some work, and I wasn't impressed. Python is quite logical in its foundation but that foundation feels somewhat wrong when one comes from Ruby. The functions vs. methods things makes everything more difficult, the : at the end of the lines feels unnatural (Python trades Ruby's "end" and Java's {} with those colons), the __name__ method names are a relic of assembly languages and I won't enter into the religious issue of syntactic spaces (you can't discuss about faith). Long story short, paradoxically Python smells of C to me and it's not fun.
Two. I'm taking a MOOC on Coursera about recommendation systems. They use a Java library called LensKit. Another MOOC on Coursera used a Python library called Orange which targets a somewhat similar application field. Even if I don't like Python, it beats Java hands down by as much as Java beats C, or more. Orange comes with great tutorials and examples. LensKit is probably much younger and is (still?) not so well known and documented. If I have to work with that I'll learn it as I did for many other Java libraries but thinking about the ease of use of Orange+Python if feel a little discouraged to do the programming assignments in LensKit+Java.
If I can chose the tools of my work, all being equal, I'll chose the easiest - more fun - one. We have so many choices today that tools that are not fun risk not being used.
"Contract" suggests two pre-existing entities -- the people, and the powerful who lord over them.
The existence of a "lord" is accidental. There might be contract between peers with no one more powerful than the others. However I'm afraid that this works better in small communities. Remember that democracy was born in small Greek city states as "direct democracy". Basically everybody switched to representative democracy when the number of people became too large, and a "lord" emerged. The Internet might enable going back to "direct" but who knows how that would work.
iframes are the only safe way to inject css and js into a third party page with no fears of conflicts with local code. Think of widgets, Facebook social widgets were using iframes last time I checked.
As a noscript user I have to allow cloudflare or many sites don't work. Many sites don't degrade gracefully nowadays and they put their main js on accelerators like cloudflare.
Exactly as I said: "If I have to worry about a war is because a possible reaction of the people of the worse off countries". But there are many pacific options. One is to default on debt. Another one is to get out of the Euro and devalue, which is close to defaulting but not as radical. Anything is better than a war.
By the way, the German WWI debt has been totally paid off only recenty.
Predictions are always difficult especially about the future, right?:-)
Taking that for granted, what I see now is a world much more interdependent than the one we lived in 1914 and 1939. Stronger countries are buying weaker ones in Europe now instead of sending their armies marching on the ruins of the enemies like they did for the last four or five millenia. That's much more efficient: you get loot and don't have to pay for an army and for reconstruction expenses at home. WW2 have been pretty destructive even for the winners on the east side of the Atlantic. Hopefully that was a lesson nobody wlll forget.
The end results might be not much different (relative poverty for the unfortunate ones) but at least we don't have to worry about having to dig graves for our friends and relatives. If I have to worry about a war is because a possible reaction of the people of the worse off countries. Currently their governments are doing their best to keep people calm and keep selling but nobody knows how long it will go on like that.
There is probably a similar trend on a global scale because China is buying activities all around the world, from the Pacific to Africa to the USA. Hopefully we won't have another World War nor another European one but let's meet here again in 20 years and see what happened.
As a non American not living in the USA I never heard about this case. This is not related to IT (Zimmerman is not Reiser). Seen from the other side of the Atlantic this is just one among the thousands of murders that also happen in Europe. I believe it doesn't belong to Slashdot. My two cents.
If you can interact directly with your users, use Teamviewer or any screen sharing program. Watch them reproduce the error and you'll learn a lot.
This is closely related to the first point of this other comment so even if you can't interact with all your users (too many of them or too many layers inbetween) there will be someone who can. Again, a recorded screen sharing session can make its way to you.
PS: I know, making the user install the screen sharing program and properly start it can be a pain but many people know how to use Skype, Google Hangouts and other similar softwares nowadays. If their IT doesn't allow them, talk to their IT.
I know it's almost offtopic but what happens if they steal a Mac? I've seen a raided office a few days ago. They got all laptops, half of them were Macs. Do they install some OSX on them?
Slashdot Mirror
SL was basically a 3D chat where makers could build stuff to make the environment beautiful. Unfortunately for them Facebook got really big worldwide the year after SL go on the media and took over all the mindshare. Fb is much more easier and convenient than SL for chatting and gossiping. Most people moved on and SL slowly became an empty shell. I read somewhere that it did 1 million unique logins per month in 2012 but that's nothing compared to fb, where people spend their time now.
That said, SL was able to convey more bandwidth than just a voice call. Maybe not as much as a video call but the background environment could fool people into believing they were not at their desk or on the couch at home and keep the attention high. So for a hundreds people conference it could have been a better choice than what they did at NASA, but not as much as the real thing.
In my experience Hangouts and the like kill recurrent meetings after a few iterations. They become yet another thing to see, very similar to a Youtube video, without the convenience of being 2 minutes long and with the trouble of being live and uninterruptible. I think that this kind of stuff must be either done in person or recorded and played back on demand. The first one if you care about interacting with other people.
For focused business meetings between people that know each other a video call works well and is a great time saver.
I had mod points yesterday, I'd modded this up as +1 informative.
Many people forgets that the S in CS is Science and the E in CE is Engineering. Names tell a lot sometimes. There is the same difference between (Physics && Chemistry) and Civil Engineering: if your goal is building bridges you must pick the latter.
So retro... My smart phone teleports to destination and talks in person to the recipient of the call without wasting my time and my money. It has all of the Internet inside, so I don't need a data plan. Unfortunately when it crashes it wormholes the place out of existence until it reboots. I never understood how we get back but it's usually difficult to explain the matter to bystanders.
I remember somebody tought that Apple was about to release a cheap iPhone.
That also means no more view source in browsers if the page owner wishes so. curl, wget and telnet 80 won't help.
It's not so easy. I hate DRM but I'm pretty sure that if this gets passed some customers of mine sooner or later will approach me and ask me funny things like "listen, I know there is a new thing in the web called DRM and I can use it so nobody can look at my HTML code, right? How much does it cost?" And what happens if I tell them they should not use DRM? Simple: somebody else will get the job. Once the genie is out of the bottle it's extremely difficult to put it back in there and all sort of nasty things will happen. Saying goodbye to view source won't be the worst one.
I wonder what *W3C committee members* got in return for that and if we can start a "STOP DRM" campaign and kill this madness.
Well... a CEO might resign and go somewhere else instead of doing something s/he doesn't like. They didn't so they preferred the alternative.
Recently Lavabit shutdown instead of doing something they didn't like. I don't know anything about US corporate law but maybe even public companies, even Apple, can decide to shutdown at any time for any reason. It could be as easy as buying back the company and closing it. Stockholders get their money back and don't have anything to complain about. Is there any expert out there?
That said, would I expect any CEO of world class corporations to pay attention to morals? I don't. They won't be there, stabbed in the back by some competing manager long time ago.
It's still exposed at least to cross-site scripting attacks, I think.
I expect a surge in client side cryptography, where servers store encrypted data and the keys never leave the client. This can't suit every application but it could be a good selling point for a while. Most of it will be done in JavaScript for convenience, even if it's not a good idea. Mega is just an entry level example of what can go wrong. Some "real" client application (mobile or desktop) will be developed, I wonder if they'll get mainstream. Anyway that only raises the bar for whoever wants to spy on us. There are many other ways to bypass encryption (rootkits, 0 day exploits, etc), nevertheless it's going to increase their costs.
I know it's not that phone box model but converting them into a fleet of TARDIS would be far better. They could deliver you data before it has been sent. That's being fast!
Are you suggesting they've been elopping Linux for so many years? Looks like Linux is more robust than Nokia but it's showing some cracks. They'll have to walk over my cold body to take away middle click paste from me. There will always be patches that restore it or some other sane DE.
I don't have mod points today but I'd mod you up if I could.
I agree that fun can't be the motivation, however not-fun is detrimental and it's a totally subjective matter. I give two examples.
One. I started programming with C and Perl and used them for years and I was totally happy with them (especially with Perl's text processing capabilities). Then moved on to Java which looked as a big improvement: no malloc, no free, one wonders why we had to deal with them for so long (but C was quite a regression to the CPU compared to previous high level languages). Then I looked at Ruby, which was a total marvel. About one year ago I looked at Python, used it to do some work, and I wasn't impressed. Python is quite logical in its foundation but that foundation feels somewhat wrong when one comes from Ruby. The functions vs. methods things makes everything more difficult, the : at the end of the lines feels unnatural (Python trades Ruby's "end" and Java's {} with those colons), the __name__ method names are a relic of assembly languages and I won't enter into the religious issue of syntactic spaces (you can't discuss about faith). Long story short, paradoxically Python smells of C to me and it's not fun.
Two. I'm taking a MOOC on Coursera about recommendation systems. They use a Java library called LensKit. Another MOOC on Coursera used a Python library called Orange which targets a somewhat similar application field. Even if I don't like Python, it beats Java hands down by as much as Java beats C, or more. Orange comes with great tutorials and examples. LensKit is probably much younger and is (still?) not so well known and documented. If I have to work with that I'll learn it as I did for many other Java libraries but thinking about the ease of use of Orange+Python if feel a little discouraged to do the programming assignments in LensKit+Java.
If I can chose the tools of my work, all being equal, I'll chose the easiest - more fun - one. We have so many choices today that tools that are not fun risk not being used.
"Contract" suggests two pre-existing entities -- the people, and the powerful who lord over them.
The existence of a "lord" is accidental. There might be contract between peers with no one more powerful than the others. However I'm afraid that this works better in small communities. Remember that democracy was born in small Greek city states as "direct democracy". Basically everybody switched to representative democracy when the number of people became too large, and a "lord" emerged. The Internet might enable going back to "direct" but who knows how that would work.
Any public wifi network will do, at restaurants, conferences, trains, airports etc. Remember firesheep? Where that worked this will work too.
iframes are the only safe way to inject css and js into a third party page with no fears of conflicts with local code. Think of widgets, Facebook social widgets were using iframes last time I checked.
As a noscript user I have to allow cloudflare or many sites don't work. Many sites don't degrade gracefully nowadays and they put their main js on accelerators like cloudflare.
Exactly as I said: "If I have to worry about a war is because a possible reaction of the people of the worse off countries". But there are many pacific options. One is to default on debt. Another one is to get out of the Euro and devalue, which is close to defaulting but not as radical. Anything is better than a war.
By the way, the German WWI debt has been totally paid off only recenty.
Predictions are always difficult especially about the future, right? :-)
Taking that for granted, what I see now is a world much more interdependent than the one we lived in 1914 and 1939. Stronger countries are buying weaker ones in Europe now instead of sending their armies marching on the ruins of the enemies like they did for the last four or five millenia. That's much more efficient: you get loot and don't have to pay for an army and for reconstruction expenses at home. WW2 have been pretty destructive even for the winners on the east side of the Atlantic. Hopefully that was a lesson nobody wlll forget.
The end results might be not much different (relative poverty for the unfortunate ones) but at least we don't have to worry about having to dig graves for our friends and relatives. If I have to worry about a war is because a possible reaction of the people of the worse off countries. Currently their governments are doing their best to keep people calm and keep selling but nobody knows how long it will go on like that.
There is probably a similar trend on a global scale because China is buying activities all around the world, from the Pacific to Africa to the USA. Hopefully we won't have another World War nor another European one but let's meet here again in 20 years and see what happened.
If both parties have too much to lose there won't be another war. That's a fortunate consequence of globalization.
Not every laptop can be upgraded to 32 GB. I'm looking for one that can. What model is it?
+1 insightful, and me too with the exception of the fireplace. It's summer here, 30 C :-)
But be careful with spaces or an IndentationError: unexpected indent could prevent that cost to be evaluated ;-)
As a non American not living in the USA I never heard about this case. This is not related to IT (Zimmerman is not Reiser). Seen from the other side of the Atlantic this is just one among the thousands of murders that also happen in Europe. I believe it doesn't belong to Slashdot. My two cents.
If you can interact directly with your users, use Teamviewer or any screen sharing program. Watch them reproduce the error and you'll learn a lot.
This is closely related to the first point of this other comment so even if you can't interact with all your users (too many of them or too many layers inbetween) there will be someone who can. Again, a recorded screen sharing session can make its way to you.
PS: I know, making the user install the screen sharing program and properly start it can be a pain but many people know how to use Skype, Google Hangouts and other similar softwares nowadays. If their IT doesn't allow them, talk to their IT.
I know it's almost offtopic but what happens if they steal a Mac? I've seen a raided office a few days ago. They got all laptops, half of them were Macs. Do they install some OSX on them?