Agreed. I'm actually kind of surprised and saddened that the death of someone as influential in the nerd/geek genres of horror and SF as Richard Matheson hasn't even merited 40 Slashdot posts yet.
As well as "The Twilight Zone" and "I am Legend", he was responsible for (amongst many, many others):
* The Incredible Shrinking Man * Five Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe screenplays * Hammer's screenplay for "The Devil Rides Out" * Being a *major* influence on Stephen King (he's credited repeatedly in King's "Danse Macabre").
I guess he was just one of those guys that quietly produced a bunch of iconic, influential work in the background (like Nigel Kneale, but more so). That, and I'm getting old...
Just a quick book recommendation that addresses (amongst other things) the PhD vs. military tensions during the early period of the space shuttle program:
It also candidly covers some of the pressures of being in the astronaut corps, warts & all. It's also by turns inspiring, tragic, irreverent and very funny, and not at all like many of the officially endorsed astronaut autobiographies. The author became an astronaut via the military track, and describes the mental and sociological adjustments he had to make as an (initially) male chauvinist jock astronaut, training alongside scientists and (shock horror!) women.
Disclaimer: Not affiliated with the author in any way, just a fan of the book.
... I'd recommend the installation of WiFiFoFum. It's basically like iStumbler for the iPhone, so you can at least see if the local access points are ad-hoc or infrastructure, & other stuff like that. I always run it before connecting my phone/iPad to any public hotspots.
Disclaimer: not connected to the development of this app, just a happy user.
Well, if you're referring to Android, then I think the answer is yes & no. It's probably more accurate to describe it as a phone OS based around a Linux kernel, as opposed to a mobile incarnation of an open GNU/Linux (which a lot of people would simply refer to as Linux). I think it could also be accurately described as a less-open fork of Linux. The distinction is a pretty fuzzy one, though. And you're right, in that there are also things like the Maemo/Meego/Mer/Sailfish effort (as others have noted).
As I understand it, this Ubuntu effort is more purely an open GNU/Linux implementation, with added-on phone-centric bits. The cool thing about this is that if you have a high-end Ubuntu Touch phone, then you'll be able to plug it into a docking station and use it as a full-fat Linux desktop. This also means (of course) that it's more independent as a device, and doesn't rely on touching base all the time with the Google mothership, which might appeal to some users from a privacy point of view. If this does mature to the point of being very usable, I for one might be very tempted.
>Who ought to be blamed for Red October? Sean Connery. What kind of Russian has a Scottish accent. "I know this book. Your conclusions were all wrong. Halsey acted foolishly."
Ah, but that's because Marko Ramius was actually Lithuanian by birth. Everyone knows that the Lithuanians were the Scots of the USSR.
Now that JJ Abrams is directing both Star Wars and Star Trek, can we get William Shatner to play a villain in the new Star Wars movie just for the entertainment value of the fan bases exploding at each other?
Parent poster is less insightful than (s)he thinks (s)he is. However, I appreciate them taking the time to present the argument, so I'll take the time to try to provide a reasoned rebuttal.
Yes, the content companies are still going to continue to try to push DRM on the world, but that doesn't mean that it's:
(a) not fundamentally a broken design (see the many, many arguments elsewhere on the web as to why DRM is fundamentally a "security by obscurity" approach, possibly modulo uber-draconian TPM approaches),
(b) something that needs to be inflicted on *everyone* at the web infrastructure level &
(c) something to be passively accepted as inevitable.
If a large subset of web users want to watch DRM-encumbered "Gossip Girl" streams, they're free to use something like Flash or Silverlight that's added on top of HTML specifically for that purpose. Right now, as an end-user, I can choose to use or not use such things, but I don't want this baked into the HTML standard itself.
If someone comes up with a proprietary, protected media delivery system that's actually good enough in terms of performance to work for the general consumer crowd, then fine. If it's more stuttery rubbish like we have now, then so be it: it clearly doesn't cut the mustard anyway. Note that I type this as someone who only last night ran into exactly the problems mentioned here: the preceding ad on the website would play, but the video I wanted to watch wouldn't.
Stuffing everyone into the same DRM straitjacket at the HTML level just makes no sense from the user's point of view (but plenty of financial sense for the media companies, who can then impose restrictions on *everyone* at once, even if they have no interest whatsoever in GenericMediaCorp's output). Personally, in such a world, I'd probably just use two browsers anyway: one that doesn't support the DRM extensions for most of the stuff I want to actually do, & one that does, just for watching the occasional DRMed video. So it's functionally equivalent anyway, in that I have the Silverlight plugin installed, but I think I've only used it three times in as many years.
So yes: "please use other applications as necessary" *is* the better answer, as it at least allows users to vote with (the electronic equivalent of) their feet. The most obvious example of this is that the drop in Flash video popularity in the last few years can't be entirely unrelated to its exclusion from iOS devices, for example. A fragmented market for DRM on the web is a *good* thing for end users.
Agreed. Al Jazeera is already available as one of the free OTA digital channels in many places in Europe - this should not be seen as a big deal.
It's my understanding that many of its journalists have been trained in the West, and/or with Western news organizations such as the BBC. The BBC produced a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Al Jazeera a few years ago, & the staff definitely came across as modern, professional journalists to a fault. In one instance, the real-time translator stayed at his post even while his family were in an area of heavy fighting and he was unable to determine if they had been injured.
Having watched it myself, as a white, non-Muslim Westerner with no connections or affiliations at all to the Middle East, I have generally found their news coverage to be more content-rich and less opinion-piece-filled than many of the major US news networks. if nothing else, their service is mercifully free of the obnoxious Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck "talking head" types that are unfortunately so common on the US networks.
Same here. My folks have a (pre-Intel!) Mac Mini which still works well for them with OS X 10.5, & my parents were both much more keen on that than their old Windows machine.
However, I got my mother an iPad during this last year, and she totally loves it. She still uses the Mac for paying bills online & other more involved stuff, but otherwise, it's the tablet all the way.
The user support calls from my parents (which were already fairly rare with the Mac Mini) are now almost completely a thing of the past. I actually had the first one in months today, & the solution basically boiled down to my asking "Have you tried turning it off & on again?". And this was only something I needed to talk her through because the tablet had been so reliable previously that she hadn't actually realized there was a way to totally power it down, as opposed to just putting it into sleep mode.
Nokia's N-series mini tablets (& N900 phone) offered a hidden-but-documented "red pill/blue pill" option, so that knowledgeable users could effectively choose to switch off the consumer failsafes & tinker, secure in the knowledge that if they broke stuff while experimenting, they were on their own:
This gave the benefits of both a safe, supported "appliance" experience for Muggles, & a hackable (in the old-school sense) environment for the techie types. I think it's a shame that this didn't become standard practice for tablets & smartphones.
These days, to do the "red pill" kind of thing, one usually has to resort to Jailbreaking/rooting gear via exploits, & I think the world as a whole is generally poorer for it. Sadly, even the Nokia of today is not the Nokia of old. I still yearn for a manufacturer/customer relationship that's collaborative, rather than confrontational.
Caveat: like many others, I did eventually succumb & buy a couple of Apple mobile devices (phone, iPad) a few years ago in order to benefit from the much more stable ecosystem (I was already using their truly excellent laptops at that point, & Android was still very rough), so it could certainly be argued that I eventually voted with the herd (rather than the Hurd, har har). However, I only bought them after I definitely knew I could Jailbreak them, and I won't run any version of iOS that I can't (added bonus: no Apple Maps fiasco experience for me).
I would love to see the track marks after the run. I'm guessing there's all sorts of sliding around.
I saw some pictures of the cross-sectional profiles of the wheel tracks from the Thrust SSC test runs years ago, & they actually change and get more complex as the speed increases. But, yes: such vehicles do churn up the track pretty seriously. I seem to recall that for these speed tests, they have to do a pair of runs in opposite directions within the same hour (to compensate for wind effects), so they usually just do them next to each other, to avoid the furrows from the first run messing up the second.
Apologies for responding to my own post, but I forgot to point out that Thrust SSC didn't use rocket motors: it was a jet car. It's my recollection that Guinness actually keeps track of different land speed records, based on whether the car's a rocket-powered vehicle, jet-powered, conventional fuel, solar, etc.
A few years ago, I went to a talk by the chief structural engineer of the Thrust SSC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC), the first car to break the sound barrier. One of the challenges they had to overcome was actually preventing the thing either taking off or plowing itself into the ground. The wheels alone were a major feat of engineering. The thing went so fast that you actually hit the horizon point very quickly. His discussion of the F1-style steering (but with the turning scaled down dramatically) was pretty interesting too.
One of the best bits of the talk was when he explained how the thing was more-or-less all volunteer effort, & the tea lady (whom I think was the wife of one of the engineering crew) doubled as the camera crew as well. Apparently, she took a camcorder up with her in the passenger seat of a two-seat microlight to get some footage from the air above the test plains as the car went past. The footage was really impressive and dramatic, & you can clearly see the bow shock picked out in 2D in the dust in front of the car as it blasts along (almost like something from a Roadrunner cartoon, but in real life). Then, a couple of seconds or so later, the microlight (carrying the camera, tea lady & all) suddenly jerks alarmingly and drops quite a bit, demonstrating beautifully that the bow shock is actually 3D...
Except that in the event of damage, you've got no chance of getting a free replacement disc containing the material that you supposedly already "licensed". You are expected to re-buy the disc, so you have, in fact, been sold a physical item.
This is where the argument falls down: the companies are trying to have their cake & eat it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I'm actually kind of surprised and saddened that the death of someone as influential in the nerd/geek genres of horror and SF as Richard Matheson hasn't even merited 40 Slashdot posts yet.
As well as "The Twilight Zone" and "I am Legend", he was responsible for (amongst many, many others):
* The Incredible Shrinking Man /Edgar Allan Poe screenplays
* Five Roger Corman
* Hammer's screenplay for "The Devil Rides Out"
* Being a *major* influence on Stephen King (he's credited repeatedly in King's "Danse Macabre").
I guess he was just one of those guys that quietly produced a bunch of iconic, influential work in the background (like Nigel Kneale, but more so). That, and I'm getting old...
Just a quick book recommendation that addresses (amongst other things) the PhD vs. military tensions during the early period of the space shuttle program:
http://www.amazon.com/Riding-Rockets-Outrageous-Shuttle-Astronaut/dp/0743276833
It also candidly covers some of the pressures of being in the astronaut corps, warts & all. It's also by turns inspiring, tragic, irreverent and very funny, and not at all like many of the officially endorsed astronaut autobiographies. The author became an astronaut via the military track, and describes the mental and sociological adjustments he had to make as an (initially) male chauvinist jock astronaut, training alongside scientists and (shock horror!) women.
Disclaimer: Not affiliated with the author in any way, just a fan of the book.
... I'd recommend the installation of WiFiFoFum. It's basically like iStumbler for the iPhone, so you can at least see if the local access points are ad-hoc or infrastructure, & other stuff like that. I always run it before connecting my phone/iPad to any public hotspots.
Disclaimer: not connected to the development of this app, just a happy user.
Wow. That's a pretty damning indictment of the Wii U...
Well, if you're referring to Android, then I think the answer is yes & no. It's probably more accurate to describe it as a phone OS based around a Linux kernel, as opposed to a mobile incarnation of an open GNU/Linux (which a lot of people would simply refer to as Linux). I think it could also be accurately described as a less-open fork of Linux. The distinction is a pretty fuzzy one, though. And you're right, in that there are also things like the Maemo/Meego/Mer/Sailfish effort (as others have noted).
As I understand it, this Ubuntu effort is more purely an open GNU/Linux implementation, with added-on phone-centric bits. The cool thing about this is that if you have a high-end Ubuntu Touch phone, then you'll be able to plug it into a docking station and use it as a full-fat Linux desktop. This also means (of course) that it's more independent as a device, and doesn't rely on touching base all the time with the Google mothership, which might appeal to some users from a privacy point of view. If this does mature to the point of being very usable, I for one might be very tempted.
And quickly. Before the mug melts...
"Ask me about Loom"
>Who ought to be blamed for Red October?
Sean Connery. What kind of Russian has a Scottish accent. "I know this book. Your conclusions were all wrong. Halsey acted foolishly."
Ah, but that's because Marko Ramius was actually Lithuanian by birth. Everyone knows that the Lithuanians were the Scots of the USSR.
Now that JJ Abrams is directing both Star Wars and Star Trek, can we get William Shatner to play a villain in the new Star Wars movie just for the entertainment value of the fan bases exploding at each other?
Star Wars Episode 7: Sith My Dad Says
Parent poster is less insightful than (s)he thinks (s)he is. However, I appreciate them taking the time to present the argument, so I'll take the time to try to provide a reasoned rebuttal.
Yes, the content companies are still going to continue to try to push DRM on the world, but that doesn't mean that it's:
(a) not fundamentally a broken design (see the many, many arguments elsewhere on the web as to why DRM is fundamentally a "security by obscurity" approach, possibly modulo uber-draconian TPM approaches),
(b) something that needs to be inflicted on *everyone* at the web infrastructure level &
(c) something to be passively accepted as inevitable.
If a large subset of web users want to watch DRM-encumbered "Gossip Girl" streams, they're free to use something like Flash or Silverlight that's added on top of HTML specifically for that purpose. Right now, as an end-user, I can choose to use or not use such things, but I don't want this baked into the HTML standard itself.
If someone comes up with a proprietary, protected media delivery system that's actually good enough in terms of performance to work for the general consumer crowd, then fine. If it's more stuttery rubbish like we have now, then so be it: it clearly doesn't cut the mustard anyway. Note that I type this as someone who only last night ran into exactly the problems mentioned here: the preceding ad on the website would play, but the video I wanted to watch wouldn't.
Stuffing everyone into the same DRM straitjacket at the HTML level just makes no sense from the user's point of view (but plenty of financial sense for the media companies, who can then impose restrictions on *everyone* at once, even if they have no interest whatsoever in GenericMediaCorp's output). Personally, in such a world, I'd probably just use two browsers anyway: one that doesn't support the DRM extensions for most of the stuff I want to actually do, & one that does, just for watching the occasional DRMed video. So it's functionally equivalent anyway, in that I have the Silverlight plugin installed, but I think I've only used it three times in as many years.
So yes: "please use other applications as necessary" *is* the better answer, as it at least allows users to vote with (the electronic equivalent of) their feet. The most obvious example of this is that the drop in Flash video popularity in the last few years can't be entirely unrelated to its exclusion from iOS devices, for example. A fragmented market for DRM on the web is a *good* thing for end users.
Agreed. Al Jazeera is already available as one of the free OTA digital channels in many places in Europe - this should not be seen as a big deal.
It's my understanding that many of its journalists have been trained in the West, and/or with Western news organizations such as the BBC. The BBC produced a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Al Jazeera a few years ago, & the staff definitely came across as modern, professional journalists to a fault. In one instance, the real-time translator stayed at his post even while his family were in an area of heavy fighting and he was unable to determine if they had been injured.
Having watched it myself, as a white, non-Muslim Westerner with no connections or affiliations at all to the Middle East, I have generally found their news coverage to be more content-rich and less opinion-piece-filled than many of the major US news networks. if nothing else, their service is mercifully free of the obnoxious Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck "talking head" types that are unfortunately so common on the US networks.
Mod parent up.
Same here. My folks have a (pre-Intel!) Mac Mini which still works well for them with OS X 10.5, & my parents were both much more keen on that than their old Windows machine.
However, I got my mother an iPad during this last year, and she totally loves it. She still uses the Mac for paying bills online & other more involved stuff, but otherwise, it's the tablet all the way.
The user support calls from my parents (which were already fairly rare with the Mac Mini) are now almost completely a thing of the past. I actually had the first one in months today, & the solution basically boiled down to my asking "Have you tried turning it off & on again?". And this was only something I needed to talk her through because the tablet had been so reliable previously that she hadn't actually realized there was a way to totally power it down, as opposed to just putting it into sleep mode.
Perhaps you're referring to Minitel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Well, in all fairness, "Men In Black" does have some fairly quotable lines.
Or whom, y'know, had their cable & internet service taken out by a falling tree...
Nokia's N-series mini tablets (& N900 phone) offered a hidden-but-documented "red pill/blue pill" option, so that knowledgeable users could effectively choose to switch off the consumer failsafes & tinker, secure in the knowledge that if they broke stuff while experimenting, they were on their own:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Red_Pill_mode
This gave the benefits of both a safe, supported "appliance" experience for Muggles, & a hackable (in the old-school sense) environment for the techie types. I think it's a shame that this didn't become standard practice for tablets & smartphones.
These days, to do the "red pill" kind of thing, one usually has to resort to Jailbreaking/rooting gear via exploits, & I think the world as a whole is generally poorer for it. Sadly, even the Nokia of today is not the Nokia of old. I still yearn for a manufacturer/customer relationship that's collaborative, rather than confrontational.
Caveat: like many others, I did eventually succumb & buy a couple of Apple mobile devices (phone, iPad) a few years ago in order to benefit from the much more stable ecosystem (I was already using their truly excellent laptops at that point, & Android was still very rough), so it could certainly be argued that I eventually voted with the herd (rather than the Hurd, har har). However, I only bought them after I definitely knew I could Jailbreak them, and I won't run any version of iOS that I can't (added bonus: no Apple Maps fiasco experience for me).
Does this mean that we can at least look forward to a sudden cluster of blind superheroes in Texas in about 15 years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics)
I would love to see the track marks after the run. I'm guessing there's all sorts of sliding around.
I saw some pictures of the cross-sectional profiles of the wheel tracks from the Thrust SSC test runs years ago, & they actually change and get more complex as the speed increases. But, yes: such vehicles do churn up the track pretty seriously. I seem to recall that for these speed tests, they have to do a pair of runs in opposite directions within the same hour (to compensate for wind effects), so they usually just do them next to each other, to avoid the furrows from the first run messing up the second.
Apologies for responding to my own post, but I forgot to point out that Thrust SSC didn't use rocket motors: it was a jet car. It's my recollection that Guinness actually keeps track of different land speed records, based on whether the car's a rocket-powered vehicle, jet-powered, conventional fuel, solar, etc.
A few years ago, I went to a talk by the chief structural engineer of the Thrust SSC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC), the first car to break the sound barrier. One of the challenges they had to overcome was actually preventing the thing either taking off or plowing itself into the ground. The wheels alone were a major feat of engineering. The thing went so fast that you actually hit the horizon point very quickly. His discussion of the F1-style steering (but with the turning scaled down dramatically) was pretty interesting too.
One of the best bits of the talk was when he explained how the thing was more-or-less all volunteer effort, & the tea lady (whom I think was the wife of one of the engineering crew) doubled as the camera crew as well. Apparently, she took a camcorder up with her in the passenger seat of a two-seat microlight to get some footage from the air above the test plains as the car went past. The footage was really impressive and dramatic, & you can clearly see the bow shock picked out in 2D in the dust in front of the car as it blasts along (almost like something from a Roadrunner cartoon, but in real life). Then, a couple of seconds or so later, the microlight (carrying the camera, tea lady & all) suddenly jerks alarmingly and drops quite a bit, demonstrating beautifully that the bow shock is actually 3D...
So yeah: still pretty cool, actually.
Since this is Slashdot, I should probably note that there is prior art for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_Pursuit_Vehicle :-)
Except that in the event of damage, you've got no chance of getting a free replacement disc containing the material that you supposedly already "licensed". You are expected to re-buy the disc, so you have, in fact, been sold a physical item.
This is where the argument falls down: the companies are trying to have their cake & eat it.
Whatever happens, I can predict one thing: the world tomorrow will be uglier, more crowded and less educated that the world today.
Harry Harrison beat you to that prediction a while ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!
To some extent, see also "WALL-E".