As a long-time user of Firefox, I think it is great, especially with extensions... so I hope it's around for a long time. Plus isn't the vast majority of Mozilla's income from search engines looking to be listed on Firefox?
Odies pretty much nails it... although one subtle difference is that presumably Akamai and the other CDN providers are available for all to use... whereas Google's co-located servers may be primarily for its data/apps.
Perhaps less that "wisdom of the crowds" are dumb, but more that the vocal minority tend to drown out the quieter majority... and the percentage of nutcases is much higher in the former group.
This is a first: an Ethics Hero who emerged from the shadow of an Unethical Website designation. Back in 2004, Alek O. Komarnitsky received national attention for a whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his Christmas lights on from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek's design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on were only an illusion, the Scoreboard weighed in with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. Alek objected, and has maintained a spirited defense of his stunt in e-mail exchanges with the Scoreboard.
But you can't keep a Christmas spirit down. At a significant cost in time and money, Alek figured out a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights, at http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam---the very same site that the Scoreboard previously deplored. He has done this for a couple of years now, but has added a new feature in 2007. To quote Jolly Old Alec himself
"There are three live webcams and X10 powerline control technology system so web surfers can not only view the action, but also *control* the 17,000 lights. Heck, you can even inflate/deflate the giant Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Homer SimpsonWhile people around the world (157 countries last year) enjoy seeing the lights ON, environmentalists will be happy to know that they can turn the lights OFF with a click of the mouse. Better yet, this is the 4th year I'm using 100% Wind Energy and even though that is "clean" energy, I even did a Carbon Offset contribution for the 0.61 Tons of CO2 for the ~MegaWatt-Hour of power consumed; that's about the same as one cross-country airline trip. Finally, by providing viewing via webcam, you don't need to burn fossil fuels by driving around to see Christmas lights - Al Gore would be proud!
But HEY, the $3/day in electrical costs are well worth the joy it brings to people (especially the kids) when they see the display in person and/or on the web. And new this year is a Hi-Def option, so gather your family around the large screen"
The website, Alek reminds us, is free, and also exists to raise awareness of Celiac Disease,which afflicts his two sons as well as many others. He says his lights have raised nearly $20,000 for the cause.
I've visited Alek's site, and it is fun, and you can turn the lights on and off, as well as inflate and deflate Homer. You win, Alek! The Scoreboard hereby pardons www.komar.org, and declares you a true Ethics Hero, and a damn persistent one, I must say. Thanks from all us kids, and a very Merry Christmas to you!
You've certainly earned it.
A little more info from the BRS Labs website:
"The system takes the input from existing video security cameras (no need to change equipment); recognizes and identifies the objects in each frame and passes that data to its Machine Learning Engine. There, the system 'learns' what activity is normal for each unique area viewed by each camera. It then stores these LEARNED memories, much the same way the human brain does, and refers back to them with any and all future activities observed by the camera. If any behavior falls outside of the norm, alerts are generated."
Mod Parent up.
I've done X10 for years and yea, while it has issues such as reliability, it's dirt simple and cheap. Plus it's fairly easy to interface via serial & USB devices and script stuff.
As we saw recently, tons of media coverage about the swine flu caused a dramatic change in people's behavior and basically destroyed the Mexican tourist market... even though it didn't seem much worse that the "average" flu...
We might be disagreeing on semantics, but at least for my water bill, we have tiered pricing as I live in the Western US.
I.e. if I use 10,000 gallons of water (ballpark numbers), I get charged a base rate per thousand gallons. However, for each thousand gallons above that, I'm charged 2x that base rate. And then for each thousand gallons above 50,000 gallons, I'm charged 5x the base rate.
And yes, this is a "monthly load" rather than an instantaneous load... but I think somewhat similar to tier'ed ala-carte pricing that the bandwidth providers would like to do... so seems like a reasonable analogy (?)
While it is true that most costs are fixed and therefore the
costs are no different if every customers takes an Internet break one day,
one has to plan to for peak capacity... or something like a
95% threshold. No different than other utilities such as electricity,
plumbing, etc.
So the reverse is also true - if every customer decided to say,
watch grass grow one day,
the costs are also the same!
This is exactly why Tony Werner, Comcast chief technical officer
said they engineer for the peak hour. Having said that, it would
be nice to get 160mbps for $60/month (as in Japan)... although
I always find it disappointing that almost all of these stories focus
on the download speeds and ignore the upload speeds which are
at least of interest to folks such as/. readers.
It's fun to read article in The Sun (ditto the National Enquirer).
While there may be some validity in the findings (especially
if you wear a tin foil hat), if you RTFM,
it's a hilarious read complete with pictures of Patrick Duffy
from the 1970's TV show "Man from Atlantis" along with
an artists impression of the "lost metropolis" under water.
Speaking of nifty water shots, here's some cool pictures
and time-lapse webcam images of the
Antarctica Cruise Ship Ocean Nova which recently ran aground. Good news
is everyone is safe, but they had to evacuate the passengers to another ship;
guess they got quite an adventure!;-)
Since so many people are checking online, I bet TV viewership goes down - be interesting to compare and see how strong an inverse relationship it ends up being.
I.e. in the old days, everyone would watch the TV anchors drone on so they could hear a snippet what each particular viewer was interested in. But using pull (instead of push) technology, you can zoom in on what you are interested in much more quickly and efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
As a long-time user of Firefox, I think it is great, especially with extensions ... so I hope it's around for a long time. Plus isn't the vast majority of Mozilla's income from search engines looking to be listed on Firefox?
Odies pretty much nails it ... although one subtle difference is that presumably Akamai and the other CDN providers are available for all to use ... whereas Google's co-located servers may be primarily for its data/apps.
Perhaps less that "wisdom of the crowds" are dumb, but more that the vocal minority tend to drown out the quieter majority ... and the percentage of nutcases is much higher in the former group.
Can't wait to watch grass grow on 100+ plasma/LCD's at your local big box store.
Alek O. Komarnitsky
(December 2007)
This is a first: an Ethics Hero who emerged from the shadow of an Unethical Website designation. Back in 2004, Alek O. Komarnitsky received national attention for a whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his Christmas lights on from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek's design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on were only an illusion, the Scoreboard weighed in with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. Alek objected, and has maintained a spirited defense of his stunt in e-mail exchanges with the Scoreboard. But you can't keep a Christmas spirit down. At a significant cost in time and money, Alek figured out a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights, at http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam---the very same site that the Scoreboard previously deplored. He has done this for a couple of years now, but has added a new feature in 2007. To quote Jolly Old Alec himself "There are three live webcams and X10 powerline control technology system so web surfers can not only view the action, but also *control* the 17,000 lights. Heck, you can even inflate/deflate the giant Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Homer SimpsonWhile people around the world (157 countries last year) enjoy seeing the lights ON, environmentalists will be happy to know that they can turn the lights OFF with a click of the mouse. Better yet, this is the 4th year I'm using 100% Wind Energy and even though that is "clean" energy, I even did a Carbon Offset contribution for the 0.61 Tons of CO2 for the ~MegaWatt-Hour of power consumed; that's about the same as one cross-country airline trip. Finally, by providing viewing via webcam, you don't need to burn fossil fuels by driving around to see Christmas lights - Al Gore would be proud! But HEY, the $3/day in electrical costs are well worth the joy it brings to people (especially the kids) when they see the display in person and/or on the web. And new this year is a Hi-Def option, so gather your family around the large screen" The website, Alek reminds us, is free, and also exists to raise awareness of Celiac Disease,which afflicts his two sons as well as many others. He says his lights have raised nearly $20,000 for the cause. I've visited Alek's site, and it is fun, and you can turn the lights on and off, as well as inflate and deflate Homer. You win, Alek! The Scoreboard hereby pardons www.komar.org, and declares you a true Ethics Hero, and a damn persistent one, I must say. Thanks from all us kids, and a very Merry Christmas to you! You've certainly earned it.
Welllll ... the webcam is also used to broadcast Halloween Decorations and Christmas Lights.
If it's penguins you want on your screen:
Gentoo Penguins - King Penguins - Penguin being attacked by a Skua!
Very well organized and lots of fun - here's the presentation I did on Antarctica at Boulder Ignite a few months ago.
The WIRED piece threads what is written in the summary around the story of how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs discovered Cosmic Radiation after being puzzled for a year about background noise on their radio telescopes ... even scraping pigeon poop off their gear as a possible source until they realized the signal was real - Homer Simpson would have said D'OH! ;-)
I.e. my guess is with a memory overflow after two characters, the network stack wasn't exactly the fastest thing around.
Yep - also wonder if the underlying code shares some of the Motion Source which is what Duncan used to catch the perp.
A little more info from the BRS Labs website:
...
but still send an alarm when a
burgler steals your stuff!
"The system takes the input from existing video security cameras (no need to change equipment); recognizes and identifies the objects in each frame and passes that data to its Machine Learning Engine. There, the system 'learns' what activity is normal for each unique area viewed by each camera. It then stores these LEARNED memories, much the same way the human brain does, and refers back to them with any and all future activities observed by the camera. If any behavior falls outside of the norm, alerts are generated."
Sounds impressive, but will the algorithms be sophisticated enough to watch grass grow and realize that it's normal behavior for the garbage truck to come by weekly
Guess I'm going to be sued now ... or at least modded down into oblivion! ;-)
Mod parent +999 ... this is a serious PIA and it would be nice if this was not the behavior.
Mod Parent up. I've done X10 for years and yea, while it has issues such as reliability, it's dirt simple and cheap. Plus it's fairly easy to interface via serial & USB devices and script stuff.
As we saw recently, tons of media coverage about the swine flu caused a dramatic change in people's behavior and basically destroyed the Mexican tourist market ... even though it didn't seem much worse that the "average" flu ...
We might be disagreeing on semantics, but at least for my water bill, we have tiered pricing as I live in the Western US.
... but I think somewhat similar to tier'ed ala-carte pricing that the bandwidth providers would like to do ... so seems like a reasonable analogy (?)
I.e. if I use 10,000 gallons of water (ballpark numbers), I get charged a base rate per thousand gallons. However, for each thousand gallons above that, I'm charged 2x that base rate. And then for each thousand gallons above 50,000 gallons, I'm charged 5x the base rate.
And yes, this is a "monthly load" rather than an instantaneous load
So the reverse is also true - if every customer decided to say, watch grass grow one day, the costs are also the same!
This is exactly why Tony Werner, Comcast chief technical officer said they engineer for the peak hour. Having said that, it would be nice to get 160mbps for $60/month (as in Japan) ... although
I always find it disappointing that almost all of these stories focus
on the download speeds and ignore the upload speeds which are
at least of interest to folks such as /. readers.
Rick Astly passes away - rolls over in his grave.
It's fun to read article in The Sun (ditto the National Enquirer). While there may be some validity in the findings (especially if you wear a tin foil hat), if you RTFM, it's a hilarious read complete with pictures of Patrick Duffy from the 1970's TV show "Man from Atlantis" along with an artists impression of the "lost metropolis" under water.
;-)
Speaking of nifty water shots, here's some cool pictures and time-lapse webcam images of the Antarctica Cruise Ship Ocean Nova which recently ran aground. Good news is everyone is safe, but they had to evacuate the passengers to another ship; guess they got quite an adventure!
Exact same thing here ... non-event and nifty to see the syslog event about the leap-second ...
Here's the actual info & specs from Red themselves - be sure to scroll down to the bottom where they have the "Oh ... by the way - 3D" teaser.
Crazy stuff (makes my
Canon 40D look pokey) - we'll see if they deliver.
xroach was a classic - great fun!
watching grass grow
P.S. Some dude with a balding spot is in front of the corpse flower right now.
Since so many people are checking online, I bet TV viewership goes down - be interesting to compare and see how strong an inverse relationship it ends up being.
;-)
I.e. in the old days, everyone would watch the TV anchors drone on so they could hear a snippet what each particular viewer was interested in. But using pull (instead of push) technology, you can zoom in on what you are interested in much more quickly and efficiently.
P.S. In the meantime, I'm support the HULK for President!