(Disclaimer: I too am livid about phorm and its implications, but facts are facts...)
That's not how phorm works, they have real "placeholder" ads that are hosted and served alongside everybody elses, so if you don't get phormed you see the raw placeholder. So in the trial the placeholder was an advert for a charity - leading to much uneducated uproar about phorm evilly replacing a charity's adverts with their own. When the phorm interceptor detects it's own placeholder it then does all the keyword matching and other database stuff to decide what to serve in its place. If you didn't get phormed because you were using a non-phorm ISP to look at the web site you'd see the charity ad, meaning that Phorm were supporting charities, and are therefore nice cuddly humane people, honest. It doesnt just randomly shaft other people's ads or stuff adwords into your web page.
If they're intent on filtering based on url or association then the counterattack is easy, just build a proxy server into every website, some kind of php/pl/net plugin that runs a web browser inside the web page you're visiting, heck it could even send gif image maps of the pages to help counteract keyword filtering. This would mean the "offensive" web requests going between the proxy web-site's server and your target web-site server, and not through your countries filter. Of course there could be a filter between THOSE two machines, hence the proxy-in-EVERY-site solution to that.
Personally I never got this Smartphone PDA thing...
I jest... All i really really want is a PSION Revo with wifi and a gig or so of storage, perfect for on-the-move emails, ssh-ing and even (no flash!) web browsing. But most importantly, and unlike every damned PDA made since 2001, it has a proper keyboard!
>They are releasing nude pictures of themselves into the wild which very possibly will remain in circulation for the rest of their lives
Indeed. We're riding the crest of a growing wave on a surfboard of digital
progress. When the digital world is saturated with everyone's sex stories,
photos and videos - as well as same with regards to drunken traffic cone
stealing, marijuana smoking and general bone breaking jackassery - everything
will be different to the way it is now.
It will no longer be scandalous for a celebrity to have a sex video leaked
onto the net, and polititians will not be forced out of office for inhaling
a spliff once or twice at college. The world will have moved on from
it's ultra-victorian attitude to sex and will remove the blinkers that keep
us somehow believing that the Queen never takes a shit.
This might even shrink the generation gap, for me it was making the
connection between my own spliff smoking and my dad's Purple Haze, Jimmi
Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin collection. Which i promptly, er,
"inherited". Future parents will no longer be able to lie that "we didn't behave
like that when we were your age" because of the digital evidence. They
will be forced to engage their children in - shock horror - open
conversations about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.
The generations after that won't even need the threat of a digital
outing to treat their children with honesty and respect, it will be
the natural order of things. And the world will be a better place for it.
Ideally horizontal resolution should not matter, at least on websites that exist
to serve information - i.e news and discussion sites that are 99% text with the
occasional picture, audio or video for context. I'd love to see some kind of web
standards push away from two options of "full-everything" and "text-only-if-you're-lucky"
to a slightly more dynamic mindset.
Essentially 640x480 (landscape) should be enough to comfortably read any of the
above sites, any sidebars full cruft (related items, video links etc) should
use CSS float to drop below the main content. And ideally the menu at the other side
- usually providing section/category links - should be hideable and remember its
hidden state via a cookie or some such - or dismissed entirely in favour of
a drop-down SELECT.
The main body text itself could then resize up to a max-width and easily shrink to
your device, even if it's a mobile with only 240px across (portrait). Essentially
slapping a table or fixed width absolute positioned divs across the page to fill 960px
(that's 1024 minus scrollbar and a bit of padding and borders) is just idiocy.
Then there's the factor of being able to have javascript turned on, but flash, drop
shadows and zooming effects turned off if you're on a low-power web dedicated system.
You can read my thoughts on this by googling "UserPreferences dom object"
Do you also leave your shower running, and subsequently not need to care about the warm-up time?
Do you also leave your TV on, so you can see what's on the instant you walk in the room?
Did you throw out your electric kettle and replace it with a thermostatic boiler so that you don't have to wait a minute for a hot drink?
If we're ever to get our Year of Linux on the Desktop then the 99.9% of the population that aren't geeks, care about the environment and their electricity build will turn on their computer when they want to do something, and turn it off when they're finished.
You can get new PS2 games still, and shops like Game(station) here in the UK also sell them second hand in 3-for-£5 like offers. But Xbox 1 games have vanished. From the bargain sections of supermarket Entertainment ailes to the big stores like HMV and Virgin, which is probably to be expected as there aren't any new Xbox 1 games any more, but the freaky part is that aforementioned Game doesnt stock the second hand Xbox 1 games anymore either!
I'd really like to know where the big pile-o unwanted X1 and even PS1 games are so i can buy them for 1p each, they must be SOMEWHERE! (Landfill, one suspects)
>That makes them an interruption, not a notification. >And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do. I for one turn off as many notifications as possible.
If i get a new email i dont mind a tray icon appearing that looks like an envelope but i DO NOT want a notification, or the taskbar button to flash, and i certainly do not want it to leap to the front of the screen. I would like to get on with doing whatever it was i was doing and check that tray icon once every hour or three to see if any emails have arrived.
On a slightly side rant this is somewhat related to the way my mobile phone OS (Sony Erricson) annoys me. I leave my phone on silent 98% of the time - unless i'm expecting a call basically, and if i get a missed call i'll phone that person back, or sms them or email them at MY convenience. But my mobile shows a red icon and a splash screen saying basically "OMG YOU MISSED A CALL!!" and i have to open an option menu, scroll down three items and select "Dismiss" to make the splash and icon go away, it then says "ARE YOU INSANE!? IF YOU DON'T RING THEM BACK RIGHT NOW CIVILISATION MIGHT END!!?!?".
And I click "Yes, Fuck Off"
There's a Ray Bradbury short story about this, it's a good few decades old so muses about intercoms, fax machines and telephones but it ends with a guy sitting at his desk not getting any actual work done because he's constantly switching between them, all to the background of muzak. Sound familiar?
The clue is in this part:
>That makes them an interruption, not a notification.
>And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do.
I for one turn off as many notifications as possible. If i get a new email i dont mind a tray icon appearing that looks like an envelope but i DO NOT want a notification, or the taskbar button to flash, and i certainly do not want it to leap to the front of the screen. I would like to get on with doing whatever it was i was doing and check that tray icon once every hour or three to see if any emails have arrived.
On a slightly side rant this is somewhat related to the way my mobile phone OS (Sony Erricson) annoys me. I leave my phone on silent 98% of the time - unless i'm expecting a call basically, and if i get a missed call i'll phone that person back, or sms them or email them at MY convenience. But my mobile shows a red icon and a splash screen saying basically "OMG YOU MISSED A CALL!!" and i have to open an option menu, scroll down three items and select "Dismiss" to make the splash and icon go away, it then says "ARE YOU INSANE!? IF YOU DON'T RING THEM BACK RIGHT NOW CIVILISATION MIGHT END!!?!?". And I click "Yes, Fuck Off"
There's a Ray Bradbury short story about this, it's a good few decades old so muses about intercoms, fax machines and telephones but it ends with a guy sitting at his desk not getting any actual work done because he's constantly switching between them, all to the background of muzak. Sound familiar?
In true Build-It-And-They will come if we just get something like MRSS going where a "Feed" is known as a "Channel" and can link to other Channels, as well as slideshows (Channel full of png links), movies (some freeish codec), tv shows (a series would just be a Channel full of consecutive episoses) and music (an albumn would just be a Channel of consecutive songs) with nice png thumbnail support, the ability to add links to "buy plastic disc edition" and the whole thing very easy to mashup and deep link (Jimbo's saturday night sci-fi feed - a Channel containing links to other host's offerings) and then just let it grow into its own sprawling Media-WWW two things will happen:
1. Any old set top box, or pc/mac piece of software will be able to be written to let you surf it, inc XBMC native support 2. Once it becomes a major source of quality content (Star Trek New Adventures, etc.) the media cartels will jump on board, and overcome the lack of DRM by embedding ads in the media directly safe in the knowledge that Joe Sixpack will watch their content using his STB remote from the sofa rather than track down a non-advert-embedded edition and mess about torrenting it
Essentially the Media-WWW will be just like Web 1.0 - links all over the place, but video and audio instead of text and the odd gif
I'd prefer a standard 3d-modelling platform (some kind of combo evolution of vrml and sketchup) that's easy to use and importantly, with a defined scale. That way you could browse online stores as you do now but if you want to see how that coffee table will look in your lounge you'd just click the "3d model" link and have it open in your easy cheesy 3d editor, which you already built your house in because, er, you're a geek or something.
Even if you weren't geeky enough to model your house you'd still be able to grab 2/3 items from various online stores and pull up a pint glass, for example, for scale - this'd be handy for visual laptop and netbook size comparison, for example.
I've advocated this on slashdot multiple times and have a slashdot journal entry rambling on about it too. Simply put:
"Channel" : An RSS-like feed in a standardised format which can contain: "Link" : Links to other Channels "Series" : Fancy name for a link but with more meta data link png title pic "Video" : Including a PNG title pic, description, link to imdb page and "buy merchandise now" sites, etc. movie in something like H264 (by all means limit your server to serving in real-time but no fancy drm or flash containers) "Audio" : As above but mp3, links to "Buy concert tickets now" etc.
And that's basically it. You could create your own channels that link to any video/music/slideshow/spoken-audio anywhere on the net, so long as it was in the correct broadcast "format", your player could have a "play channel" mode where you treat it a bit like a playlist (just the media, not folowing links) and suddenly cnbcfoxbros could have their "Saturday Night Action" feed and have every other media item an advert, and have ad breaks in the main media items themselves. If Joe sizpack's set top box plays these as easy as one,two,click then he's not going to mess about with torrents to find the non-ad-embedded-canadian-tv-station-watermark version is he?
google MRSS (IIRC) for some reasearch on the practicalities of this sort of thing but IMO if we build it: they will come.
There's another worrying angle to all this, which is the MaFIAA media mogul's ownership of the tubes themselves. If you're unfortunate to live in a place where BigMediaCo is a monopoly ISP and BigMediaCo is also a CableCo, FilmCo and MusicCo you might find one day that you can't get to YouTube, or even OtherMediaCo's online offerings.
This ties into net neutrality, obviously, but also into the fight for ultimate dominance over not just copyright but your content consumption. Essentially BigMediaCo wants the Internet that you buy from them to work exactly the same way as subscription cable or satellite, if OtherMediaCo doesn't pay carriage charges, or stick within the censorship guidelines they won't get to play. This model also fits nicely with one that the media corps are familar with and governments rely on to control what "news" you are allowed to know (goodbye wikileaks!)
I've brought a lot of conspiracy theories under one umbrella there, but with the Aussie filter, French Three strikes rules and the RIAA's antics the picture is clear: We need to take back the internet.
The key, however, is to do it cleanly and legally. To play by the rules in the wide open. My favourite current pet idea for this is an iTunes-alike music/video sync application that takes care of your media files for you (and for people who don't want the scary copying associated with basic Usb-Mass-Storage) but plugs in (via RSS-like feed and includes a background torrent engine) to Creative Commons sites like LegalTorrents and ccTunes. Not only free and legal but also easy to install and run by the non geek masses, (including the seamless re-sync of all your content downloaded to date when you're on holiday at an internet cafe and just bought a new media player).
People will continue to pirate music, films and tv shows whilst it's the easiest way to get their entertainment, but if the above app exists, and hey: runs from a liveCD on your PC, Mac, laptop and gaming console and it becomes popular the indie TV shows, Music and ultimately movies will begin to be published on it. Some kind of Miro + XBMC mashup but again, usable by non-geeks out of the box and available everywhere.
The key will be having each and every piece of media on it clearly labelled with the copyright owner and CC license, exactly how to do that and keep the pirate content off it is left as an excersise for the reader. I do, however have the tagline for such a scheme, though I doubt I'm the first to quoth:
>Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, >and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big >cellphones, not small PCs.
And you say that like it's a bad thing... the number one issue i have with the PDA/Smartphone market is that - since Psion quit the game circa 2001 - none of them have clamshell keyboards. I've longed for a wifi-ed up Revo or Series 5 for 5+ years now. The Word processor and Spreadsheet on the Greyscale, 8MB Revo are both simple and fantastic. All it needs is enough ram to use the interweb (youtube and hardcore ajax not included) and enough punch to double up as an Mp3 player and it'd get the job done nicely. Why, exactly, one needs gigs of Hz, RAM and HD to do that I have no idea.
(at the mo i'm eyeing the OpenPandora, as mooted by others below)
You are correct about all-electic-vehicles vs energy density, but the intermediate step we are moving to can tide us over the next few decades until we reach that goal/run out of oil.
To explain why I will use a reverse computer analogy.
Your DVD/CDR in the burner is the constant-speed (IC/stirling) engine The RAM buffer is the battery/ies The Hard drive/network share is the variable/unpredictable road conditions.
In the type of hybrid vehicle we're moving towards the battery doesnt need to store ALL the energy required to drive around, the energy is still stored in the liquid fuel. the engine+battery array convert and feed the energy to the non-transmission (As described in earlier posts) and in the process greatly improve the overall efficiency, conversion losses included.
I think being a "music player" is not the way to go, people already have a choice of media players and their mp3-players too, skip the licensing issues and leave that out already.
The key feature that i'd like to see in an iTunes "Killer" is seamless integration with free creative commons licenced content - all of it - a proper sock-it-to-the-man approach would be to ONLY allow integration with legal-no-payment services and then to shout it from the rooftops.
No more rummaging through archive.org, no typing funky strings into google, no browsing miriads sites like ccTunes and no jumping through hoops with torrents like at legaltorrents*
All integrated, seamless, smooth scrolling and zooming, click to download via ttp,ftp,bittorrent,mule or pigeon so long as after a minute or three it's in your media folder, auto-sync with [usb-attached-thingy], all databased up so you can log in from another system and re-download your collection and totally completely legal and free.
I even have a name for this piece of software, should I ever have time to write it, and the dotcom isn't taken yet, i simply do not have the time (dedicated husband, father of two, full time job) but i'd love to mount a coordinated attack on the media cartels this way - imagine if one day truly independent movies and "tv" shows were too released via this platform, and that it ran on a box connected to your telly...
*disclaimer: my own music is hosted at legaltorrents.com
Everyone should just get up, send their kids to school, go to work, take lunch, clock off, pick up the kids from soccer, grab dinner and go to bed an hour later/earlier depending on the time of year and the preferred amount of daylight.
Now if there were just some universally recognised way we could coordinate everyone in the northern hemisphere to do it at the same time then it'd be a smooth transition.
Can anyone think of one? Or how about we all agree to set our clocks +/- one hour and then just do everything by-the-clock like we normally do.
>But I don't want them addressable from the world at large; >I want to go through a controller that verifies access and coordinates changes.
You would already have this at home anyway, in the form of an LDAP server or at least coordinated LDAP rules. E.g. in my house the Xbox can read the network shares to play MP3s and AVIs but it can not delete them, this is controlled via LDAP and protects against hard-wired attacks, so even someone visiting who plugs their laptop into the socket behind the sofa can't delete those MP3s. And instead of a subnet mask you'd have a db of authenticated IPs and MACs alongside your basic user/password.
You would also likely have a wireless setup too, not all the devices on your future home network (e.g. the lightbulbs) will be hard wired so they'd need authentication *anyway* to know who's allowed to turn them on and off. Instead of logging in and configuring each one you'd just have a button-press system, plug it in, turn it on, press the physical plastic "register" button on your main server box and it'll be set up. Kind of like the way you tether a cordless phone to its base station but with Public/Private encryption and mac/ip filtering. This controls wether or not the neighbors can get on your LAN at all, before we even start thinking about read/delete rules on shares.
So there's already security in place, and the next logical step is to make these transparent and transient. At the moment when unplugging your laptop and taking it around to the neighbors you might get your home wifi still and be able to get on your LAN but what if you could visit the in laws in the next county, plug same laptop into *their* RJ45 socket and STILL be on your LAN?
Remember - your LAN already has security, and an internet facing NAT+firewall will not protect you against a malicious wifi or plugged-in client in your house or 100m away from it.
Back to the in-laws: In IPv4 space your laptop has to negotiate their router via UPnP (assuming they have it turned on) then find your home router via dyndns (which you have to use a demon to continually update) then connect to the only open port (which you have to set up and configure) on there to be redirect to a server inside your lan (which you've had to install and set up for this task specifically) to use some kind of virtual console or VNC session (which you have to setup and configure on your server and any client you expect to possibly take outside your house) to do anything you'd just be on your LAN, kind of.
Again, remember, you *already had to do the configuring of your security rules* just to protect your house and 100m around it anyway, everything in the previous paragraph is just a pain in the ass *on top* of that.
Instead, in IPv6 space your laptop will always be on your LAN - if you leave it on the train logge in (dumbass) you could revoke its MAC/IP from your LDAP as soon as you realise you've lost it, probably from your mobile phone. Your shares, printer and fridge will all visible just as if you were wired in in your lounge or wirelessly connected from the garden no matter where you are on the internet because the internet will be transparent, it's the way it's supposed to be.
Just replace the top/middle/third brake light with a large-ish display that shows the speed of the vehicle, if it starts dropping rapidly you know you need to brake.
Also handy when you're in fast moving traffic and round a bend to catch up to a vehicle, for several seconds you have no idea if it's stopped, going very slow or just slowish. if there's a fat "32" on it and your dash reads "64" you know to get over into the next lane.
If your dash display was also digital then when you crossed a border into a metric/non-metric country you could flip a switch, even have mph use red leds and kph orange, enough so that locl law enforcement has a quick easy way of determining you're using the wrong setting.
I'll second that, I first encountered bird's eye view while in London last summer and it's an order of magnitude better than plain-old top-down view because when (for example) you exit a tube station and are trying to find the large Forbidden Planet shop you tracked down on the map can you see:
a) The roofs of all the buildings around you?
b) The sides of all the buildings around you?
The answer (unless you've gotten off at Lilliput and Castle) is b).
I think the next evolution of this tech would be a combination of MS's birds-eye for rough detail, Google street view for higher res storefront detail (and under bridges) and both MS's photosynths ability to remove people and potentially vehicles (not just for privacy, when you're there in real life your brain filters out that "noise" from what you're looking at) and stitching ability. So you'll be able to have a full 3d render from the exact POV of each spot on your route, or sync it to the GPS on your mobile combined with Walking Directions - the beginnings of augmented reality!
You're points are valid but a handy one for me to hang this thought on, which I've made before on/.
Aside from which power tools to attach we already have two proven, working rovers on mars, why spend $billions re-invent the damned things? Just build another 6 from the same blueprints and send em on up (maybe throw a tweak to the wheel motors, mind!)
I too can see a glaring error in this: The idea that if someone watched or listend to a piece of MAFIAA media without paying it equates to a lost sale. I, for example, watched Spiderman 3 without spending a cent. Did I sneak into a cinema? or watch a Camcorder bootleg? Or watch a ripped DVD? Or download it via P2P? No, none of those things, I went to my brothers house and watched his Blu-ray copy on his PS3 via his HD TV. So not only did the MAFIAA media cartel lose a film sale, Sony lost out on a PS3 sale, and the HD TV was purchased second hand, too, so that company lost both mine AND my brother's sale.
So where do you draw the line? If we go with the MAFIAA model sony and the TV manufacturer should be able to come after me for pirating their hardware - after all I used them without purchasing a licence. Now we all know that hardware is physically sold and not licensed but the laws based on circumventing DRM would have us believe that once someone has purchased a PS3 it's still somehow Sony's. So again, where does the line lie?
I'll tell you where the line is: Unless they insist on a scanner in each and every media player and every tv that detects who's physically sat in front of it and compares their IR signatures against an online database of licensees and refuses to play said shiney disc if the database is offline or your cat is in the room then then their argument that "free-MAFIAA-media-consumption == piracy" is a lie. It's FUD, plain and simple. The problem is that they honestly seem to believe that the ultimate and only fair (for them) solution is a per-person per-view/listen/read/review/talk-about-with-friends/critisise or quote fee.
To my mind the solution is simple, cut out the MAFIAA whilst it's still legal to produce and distribute your own creations without a "copyright distributor" license, really. With the media cartels taking over the ISPs and Sony producing the living room hardware do you really believe that the end result will be that you'll be ALLOWED to record and burn a CD of your own music and have it play in any old CD player, after all, how else can they close the analogue hole without legislating total control? If you could record your own music then in theory you could record unlicensed cover versions!
The idea that you can sing a couple of songs and live off the resulting millions for the rest of you life is a lie. The idea that you can take a cartoon of a mouse drawn by people who are long dead and ethically rake cash in for it is a lie.
I too once dreamed of "getting signed" and getting rich, of having John Peel play my music on the radio and of doing a gig on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. Now that (dodgy 90's sampler) music I created is Create Commons licenced, you can find it on legaltorrents under the psudonym Cycloid.
One day soon I'm hoping someone will get a big name sponsor to fund their bit-torrent only TV show and cause the revolution to crank up a gear. It just needs to be that: Soon.
Slashdot Mirror
(Disclaimer: I too am livid about phorm and its implications, but facts are facts...) That's not how phorm works, they have real "placeholder" ads that are hosted and served alongside everybody elses, so if you don't get phormed you see the raw placeholder. So in the trial the placeholder was an advert for a charity - leading to much uneducated uproar about phorm evilly replacing a charity's adverts with their own. When the phorm interceptor detects it's own placeholder it then does all the keyword matching and other database stuff to decide what to serve in its place. If you didn't get phormed because you were using a non-phorm ISP to look at the web site you'd see the charity ad, meaning that Phorm were supporting charities, and are therefore nice cuddly humane people, honest. It doesnt just randomly shaft other people's ads or stuff adwords into your web page.
If they're intent on filtering based on url or association then the counterattack is easy, just build a proxy server into every website, some kind of php/pl/net plugin that runs a web browser inside the web page you're visiting, heck it could even send gif image maps of the pages to help counteract keyword filtering. This would mean the "offensive" web requests going between the proxy web-site's server and your target web-site server, and not through your countries filter. Of course there could be a filter between THOSE two machines, hence the proxy-in-EVERY-site solution to that.
Personally I never got this Smartphone PDA thing...
I jest... All i really really want is a PSION Revo with wifi and a gig or so of storage, perfect for on-the-move emails, ssh-ing and even (no flash!) web browsing. But most importantly, and unlike every damned PDA made since 2001, it has a proper keyboard!
24 Filesystems!? I think we've just metricised a clusterfsck
I'm still waiting for the vanilla xbox port so i can play it like halo too. Ah, perchance to dream...
>They are releasing nude pictures of themselves into the wild which very possibly will remain in circulation for the rest of their lives
Indeed. We're riding the crest of a growing wave on a surfboard of digital progress. When the digital world is saturated with everyone's sex stories, photos and videos - as well as same with regards to drunken traffic cone stealing, marijuana smoking and general bone breaking jackassery - everything will be different to the way it is now.
It will no longer be scandalous for a celebrity to have a sex video leaked onto the net, and polititians will not be forced out of office for inhaling a spliff once or twice at college. The world will have moved on from it's ultra-victorian attitude to sex and will remove the blinkers that keep us somehow believing that the Queen never takes a shit.
This might even shrink the generation gap, for me it was making the connection between my own spliff smoking and my dad's Purple Haze, Jimmi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin collection. Which i promptly, er, "inherited". Future parents will no longer be able to lie that "we didn't behave like that when we were your age" because of the digital evidence. They will be forced to engage their children in - shock horror - open conversations about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.
The generations after that won't even need the threat of a digital outing to treat their children with honesty and respect, it will be the natural order of things. And the world will be a better place for it.
Ideally horizontal resolution should not matter, at least on websites that exist to serve information - i.e news and discussion sites that are 99% text with the occasional picture, audio or video for context. I'd love to see some kind of web standards push away from two options of "full-everything" and "text-only-if-you're-lucky" to a slightly more dynamic mindset.
Essentially 640x480 (landscape) should be enough to comfortably read any of the above sites, any sidebars full cruft (related items, video links etc) should use CSS float to drop below the main content. And ideally the menu at the other side - usually providing section/category links - should be hideable and remember its hidden state via a cookie or some such - or dismissed entirely in favour of a drop-down SELECT.
The main body text itself could then resize up to a max-width and easily shrink to your device, even if it's a mobile with only 240px across (portrait). Essentially slapping a table or fixed width absolute positioned divs across the page to fill 960px (that's 1024 minus scrollbar and a bit of padding and borders) is just idiocy.
Then there's the factor of being able to have javascript turned on, but flash, drop shadows and zooming effects turned off if you're on a low-power web dedicated system. You can read my thoughts on this by googling "UserPreferences dom object"
Do you also leave your shower running, and subsequently not need to care about the warm-up time?
Do you also leave your TV on, so you can see what's on the instant you walk in the room?
Did you throw out your electric kettle and replace it with a thermostatic boiler so that you don't have to wait a minute for a hot drink?
If we're ever to get our Year of Linux on the Desktop then the 99.9% of the population that aren't geeks, care about the environment and their electricity build will turn on their computer when they want to do something, and turn it off when they're finished.
You can get new PS2 games still, and shops like Game(station) here in the UK also sell them second hand in 3-for-£5 like offers. But Xbox 1 games have vanished. From the bargain sections of supermarket Entertainment ailes to the big stores like HMV and Virgin, which is probably to be expected as there aren't any new Xbox 1 games any more, but the freaky part is that aforementioned Game doesnt stock the second hand Xbox 1 games anymore either!
I'd really like to know where the big pile-o unwanted X1 and even PS1 games are so i can buy them for 1p each, they must be SOMEWHERE! (Landfill, one suspects)
The clue is in this part:
>That makes them an interruption, not a notification.
>And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do. I for one turn off as many notifications as possible.
If i get a new email i dont mind a tray icon appearing that looks like an envelope but i DO NOT want a notification, or the taskbar button to flash, and i certainly do not want it to leap to the front of the screen. I would like to get on with doing whatever it was i was doing and check that tray icon once every hour or three to see if any emails have arrived.
On a slightly side rant this is somewhat related to the way my mobile phone OS (Sony Erricson) annoys me. I leave my phone on silent 98% of the time - unless i'm expecting a call basically, and if i get a missed call i'll phone that person back, or sms them or email them at MY convenience. But my mobile shows a red icon and a splash screen saying basically "OMG YOU MISSED A CALL!!" and i have to open an option menu, scroll down three items and select "Dismiss" to make the splash and icon go away, it then says "ARE YOU INSANE!? IF YOU DON'T RING THEM BACK RIGHT NOW CIVILISATION MIGHT END!!?!?".
And I click "Yes, Fuck Off"
There's a Ray Bradbury short story about this, it's a good few decades old so muses about intercoms, fax machines and telephones but it ends with a guy sitting at his desk not getting any actual work done because he's constantly switching between them, all to the background of muzak. Sound familiar?
The clue is in this part: >That makes them an interruption, not a notification. >And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do. I for one turn off as many notifications as possible. If i get a new email i dont mind a tray icon appearing that looks like an envelope but i DO NOT want a notification, or the taskbar button to flash, and i certainly do not want it to leap to the front of the screen. I would like to get on with doing whatever it was i was doing and check that tray icon once every hour or three to see if any emails have arrived. On a slightly side rant this is somewhat related to the way my mobile phone OS (Sony Erricson) annoys me. I leave my phone on silent 98% of the time - unless i'm expecting a call basically, and if i get a missed call i'll phone that person back, or sms them or email them at MY convenience. But my mobile shows a red icon and a splash screen saying basically "OMG YOU MISSED A CALL!!" and i have to open an option menu, scroll down three items and select "Dismiss" to make the splash and icon go away, it then says "ARE YOU INSANE!? IF YOU DON'T RING THEM BACK RIGHT NOW CIVILISATION MIGHT END!!?!?". And I click "Yes, Fuck Off" There's a Ray Bradbury short story about this, it's a good few decades old so muses about intercoms, fax machines and telephones but it ends with a guy sitting at his desk not getting any actual work done because he's constantly switching between them, all to the background of muzak. Sound familiar?
In true Build-It-And-They will come if we just get something like MRSS going where a "Feed" is known as a "Channel" and can link to other Channels, as well as slideshows (Channel full of png links), movies (some freeish codec), tv shows (a series would just be a Channel full of consecutive episoses) and music (an albumn would just be a Channel of consecutive songs) with nice png thumbnail support, the ability to add links to "buy plastic disc edition" and the whole thing very easy to mashup and deep link (Jimbo's saturday night sci-fi feed - a Channel containing links to other host's offerings) and then just let it grow into its own sprawling Media-WWW two things will happen:
1. Any old set top box, or pc/mac piece of software will be able to be written to let you surf it, inc XBMC native support
2. Once it becomes a major source of quality content (Star Trek New Adventures, etc.) the media cartels will jump on board, and overcome the lack of DRM by embedding ads in the media directly safe in the knowledge that Joe Sixpack will watch their content using his STB remote from the sofa rather than track down a non-advert-embedded edition and mess about torrenting it
Essentially the Media-WWW will be just like Web 1.0 - links all over the place, but video and audio instead of text and the odd gif
I'd prefer a standard 3d-modelling platform (some kind of combo evolution of vrml and sketchup) that's easy to use and importantly, with a defined scale. That way you could browse online stores as you do now but if you want to see how that coffee table will look in your lounge you'd just click the "3d model" link and have it open in your easy cheesy 3d editor, which you already built your house in because, er, you're a geek or something.
Even if you weren't geeky enough to model your house you'd still be able to grab 2/3 items from various online stores and pull up a pint glass, for example, for scale - this'd be handy for visual laptop and netbook size comparison, for example.
I've advocated this on slashdot multiple times and have a slashdot journal entry rambling on about it too. Simply put:
"Channel" : An RSS-like feed in a standardised format which can contain:
"Link" : Links to other Channels
"Series" : Fancy name for a link but with more meta data link png title pic
"Video" : Including a PNG title pic, description, link to imdb page and "buy merchandise now" sites, etc. movie in something like H264 (by all means limit your server to serving in real-time but no fancy drm or flash containers)
"Audio" : As above but mp3, links to "Buy concert tickets now" etc.
And that's basically it. You could create your own channels that link to any video/music/slideshow/spoken-audio anywhere on the net, so long as it was in the correct broadcast "format", your player could have a "play channel" mode where you treat it a bit like a playlist (just the media, not folowing links) and suddenly cnbcfoxbros could have their "Saturday Night Action" feed and have every other media item an advert, and have ad breaks in the main media items themselves. If Joe sizpack's set top box plays these as easy as one,two,click then he's not going to mess about with torrents to find the non-ad-embedded-canadian-tv-station-watermark version is he?
google MRSS (IIRC) for some reasearch on the practicalities of this sort of thing but IMO if we build it: they will come.
There's another worrying angle to all this, which is the MaFIAA media mogul's ownership of the tubes themselves. If you're unfortunate to live in a place where BigMediaCo is a monopoly ISP and BigMediaCo is also a CableCo, FilmCo and MusicCo you might find one day that you can't get to YouTube, or even OtherMediaCo's online offerings.
This ties into net neutrality, obviously, but also into the fight for ultimate dominance over not just copyright but your content consumption. Essentially BigMediaCo wants the Internet that you buy from them to work exactly the same way as subscription cable or satellite, if OtherMediaCo doesn't pay carriage charges, or stick within the censorship guidelines they won't get to play. This model also fits nicely with one that the media corps are familar with and governments rely on to control what "news" you are allowed to know (goodbye wikileaks!)
I've brought a lot of conspiracy theories under one umbrella there, but with the Aussie filter, French Three strikes rules and the RIAA's antics the picture is clear: We need to take back the internet.
The key, however, is to do it cleanly and legally. To play by the rules in the wide open. My favourite current pet idea for this is an iTunes-alike music/video sync application that takes care of your media files for you (and for people who don't want the scary copying associated with basic Usb-Mass-Storage) but plugs in (via RSS-like feed and includes a background torrent engine) to Creative Commons sites like LegalTorrents and ccTunes. Not only free and legal but also easy to install and run by the non geek masses, (including the seamless re-sync of all your content downloaded to date when you're on holiday at an internet cafe and just bought a new media player).
People will continue to pirate music, films and tv shows whilst it's the easiest way to get their entertainment, but if the above app exists, and hey: runs from a liveCD on your PC, Mac, laptop and gaming console and it becomes popular the indie TV shows, Music and ultimately movies will begin to be published on it. Some kind of Miro + XBMC mashup but again, usable by non-geeks out of the box and available everywhere.
The key will be having each and every piece of media on it clearly labelled with the copyright owner and CC license, exactly how to do that and keep the pirate content off it is left as an excersise for the reader. I do, however have the tagline for such a scheme, though I doubt I'm the first to quoth:
"Entertainment Wants To Be Free"
>Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years,
>and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big
>cellphones, not small PCs.
And you say that like it's a bad thing... the number one issue i have with the PDA/Smartphone market is that - since Psion quit the game circa 2001 - none of them have clamshell keyboards. I've longed for a wifi-ed up Revo or Series 5 for 5+ years now. The Word processor and Spreadsheet on the Greyscale, 8MB Revo are both simple and fantastic. All it needs is enough ram to use the interweb (youtube and hardcore ajax not included) and enough punch to double up as an Mp3 player and it'd get the job done nicely. Why, exactly, one needs gigs of Hz, RAM and HD to do that I have no idea.
(at the mo i'm eyeing the OpenPandora, as mooted by others below)
You are correct about all-electic-vehicles vs energy density, but the intermediate step we are moving to can tide us over the next few decades until we reach that goal/run out of oil.
To explain why I will use a reverse computer analogy.
Your DVD/CDR in the burner is the constant-speed (IC/stirling) engine
The RAM buffer is the battery/ies
The Hard drive/network share is the variable/unpredictable road conditions.
In the type of hybrid vehicle we're moving towards the battery doesnt need to store ALL the energy required to drive around, the energy is still stored in the liquid fuel. the engine+battery array convert and feed the energy to the non-transmission (As described in earlier posts) and in the process greatly improve the overall efficiency, conversion losses included.
I think being a "music player" is not the way to go, people already have a choice of media players and their mp3-players too, skip the licensing issues and leave that out already.
The key feature that i'd like to see in an iTunes "Killer" is seamless integration with free creative commons licenced content - all of it - a proper sock-it-to-the-man approach would be to ONLY allow integration with legal-no-payment services and then to shout it from the rooftops.
No more rummaging through archive.org, no typing funky strings into google, no browsing miriads sites like ccTunes and no jumping through hoops with torrents like at legaltorrents*
All integrated, seamless, smooth scrolling and zooming, click to download via ttp,ftp,bittorrent,mule or pigeon so long as after a minute or three it's in your media folder, auto-sync with [usb-attached-thingy], all databased up so you can log in from another system and re-download your collection and totally completely legal and free.
I even have a name for this piece of software, should I ever have time to write it, and the dotcom isn't taken yet, i simply do not have the time (dedicated husband, father of two, full time job) but i'd love to mount a coordinated attack on the media cartels this way - imagine if one day truly independent movies and "tv" shows were too released via this platform, and that it ran on a box connected to your telly...
*disclaimer: my own music is hosted at legaltorrents.com
Everyone should just get up, send their kids to school, go to work, take lunch, clock off, pick up the kids from soccer, grab dinner and go to bed an hour later/earlier depending on the time of year and the preferred amount of daylight.
Now if there were just some universally recognised way we could coordinate everyone in the northern hemisphere to do it at the same time then it'd be a smooth transition.
Can anyone think of one? Or how about we all agree to set our clocks +/- one hour and then just do everything by-the-clock like we normally do.
>But I don't want them addressable from the world at large;
>I want to go through a controller that verifies access and coordinates changes.
You would already have this at home anyway, in the form of an LDAP server or at least coordinated LDAP rules. E.g. in my house the Xbox can read the network shares to play MP3s and AVIs but it can not delete them, this is controlled via LDAP and protects against hard-wired attacks, so even someone visiting who plugs their laptop into the socket behind the sofa can't delete those MP3s. And instead of a subnet mask you'd have a db of authenticated IPs and MACs alongside your basic user/password.
You would also likely have a wireless setup too, not all the devices on your future home network (e.g. the lightbulbs) will be hard wired so they'd need authentication *anyway* to know who's allowed to turn them on and off. Instead of logging in and configuring each one you'd just have a button-press system, plug it in, turn it on, press the physical plastic "register" button on your main server box and it'll be set up. Kind of like the way you tether a cordless phone to its base station but with Public/Private encryption and mac/ip filtering. This controls wether or not the neighbors can get on your LAN at all, before we even start thinking about read/delete rules on shares.
So there's already security in place, and the next logical step is to make these transparent and transient. At the moment when unplugging your laptop and taking it around to the neighbors you might get your home wifi still and be able to get on your LAN but what if you could visit the in laws in the next county, plug same laptop into *their* RJ45 socket and STILL be on your LAN?
Remember - your LAN already has security, and an internet facing NAT+firewall will not protect you against a malicious wifi or plugged-in client in your house or 100m away from it.
Back to the in-laws: In IPv4 space your laptop has to negotiate their router via UPnP (assuming they have it turned on) then find your home router via dyndns (which you have to use a demon to continually update) then connect to the only open port (which you have to set up and configure) on there to be redirect to a server inside your lan (which you've had to install and set up for this task specifically) to use some kind of virtual console or VNC session (which you have to setup and configure on your server and any client you expect to possibly take outside your house) to do anything you'd just be on your LAN, kind of.
Again, remember, you *already had to do the configuring of your security rules* just to protect your house and 100m around it anyway, everything in the previous paragraph is just a pain in the ass *on top* of that.
Instead, in IPv6 space your laptop will always be on your LAN - if you leave it on the train logge in (dumbass) you could revoke its MAC/IP from your LDAP as soon as you realise you've lost it, probably from your mobile phone. Your shares, printer and fridge will all visible just as if you were wired in in your lounge or wirelessly connected from the garden no matter where you are on the internet because the internet will be transparent, it's the way it's supposed to be.
developers developers developers developers
developers developers developers developers
developers developers developers developers
*throws chair*
*throws chair*
developers developers developers developers
developers developers developers developers
developers developers developers developers
G.P.L.
G.P.L.?
G...P...L...!!??
Not the...
G...P...L...!!!!
developers...
[well the karma was nice while it lasted]
Just replace the top/middle/third brake light with a large-ish display that shows the speed of the vehicle, if it starts dropping rapidly you know you need to brake.
Also handy when you're in fast moving traffic and round a bend to catch up to a vehicle, for several seconds you have no idea if it's stopped, going very slow or just slowish. if there's a fat "32" on it and your dash reads "64" you know to get over into the next lane.
If your dash display was also digital then when you crossed a border into a metric/non-metric country you could flip a switch, even have mph use red leds and kph orange, enough so that locl law enforcement has a quick easy way of determining you're using the wrong setting.
I'll second that, I first encountered bird's eye view while in London last summer and it's an order of magnitude better than plain-old top-down view because when (for example) you exit a tube station and are trying to find the large Forbidden Planet shop you tracked down on the map can you see:
a) The roofs of all the buildings around you?
b) The sides of all the buildings around you?
The answer (unless you've gotten off at Lilliput and Castle) is b).
I think the next evolution of this tech would be a combination of MS's birds-eye for rough detail, Google street view for higher res storefront detail (and under bridges) and both MS's photosynths ability to remove people and potentially vehicles (not just for privacy, when you're there in real life your brain filters out that "noise" from what you're looking at) and stitching ability. So you'll be able to have a full 3d render from the exact POV of each spot on your route, or sync it to the GPS on your mobile combined with Walking Directions - the beginnings of augmented reality!
>Spirit and Opportunity
>It's like budgeting a cold fusion project
You're points are valid but a handy one for me to hang this thought on, which I've made before on /.
Aside from which power tools to attach we already have two proven, working rovers on mars, why spend $billions re-invent the damned things? Just build another 6 from the same blueprints and send em on up (maybe throw a tweak to the wheel motors, mind!)
I too can see a glaring error in this: The idea that if someone watched or listend to a piece of MAFIAA media without paying it equates to a lost sale. I, for example, watched Spiderman 3 without spending a cent. Did I sneak into a cinema? or watch a Camcorder bootleg? Or watch a ripped DVD? Or download it via P2P? No, none of those things, I went to my brothers house and watched his Blu-ray copy on his PS3 via his HD TV. So not only did the MAFIAA media cartel lose a film sale, Sony lost out on a PS3 sale, and the HD TV was purchased second hand, too, so that company lost both mine AND my brother's sale.
So where do you draw the line? If we go with the MAFIAA model sony and the TV manufacturer should be able to come after me for pirating their hardware - after all I used them without purchasing a licence. Now we all know that hardware is physically sold and not licensed but the laws based on circumventing DRM would have us believe that once someone has purchased a PS3 it's still somehow Sony's. So again, where does the line lie?
I'll tell you where the line is: Unless they insist on a scanner in each and every media player and every tv that detects who's physically sat in front of it and compares their IR signatures against an online database of licensees and refuses to play said shiney disc if the database is offline or your cat is in the room then then their argument that "free-MAFIAA-media-consumption == piracy" is a lie. It's FUD, plain and simple. The problem is that they honestly seem to believe that the ultimate and only fair (for them) solution is a per-person per-view/listen/read/review/talk-about-with-friends/critisise or quote fee.
To my mind the solution is simple, cut out the MAFIAA whilst it's still legal to produce and distribute your own creations without a "copyright distributor" license, really. With the media cartels taking over the ISPs and Sony producing the living room hardware do you really believe that the end result will be that you'll be ALLOWED to record and burn a CD of your own music and have it play in any old CD player, after all, how else can they close the analogue hole without legislating total control? If you could record your own music then in theory you could record unlicensed cover versions!
The idea that you can sing a couple of songs and live off the resulting millions for the rest of you life is a lie. The idea that you can take a cartoon of a mouse drawn by people who are long dead and ethically rake cash in for it is a lie.
I too once dreamed of "getting signed" and getting rich, of having John Peel play my music on the radio and of doing a gig on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. Now that (dodgy 90's sampler) music I created is Create Commons licenced, you can find it on legaltorrents under the psudonym Cycloid.
One day soon I'm hoping someone will get a big name sponsor to fund their bit-torrent only TV show and cause the revolution to crank up a gear. It just needs to be that: Soon.