all it does is encapsulate the request/response with a couple of handy additions:
1. ability to pass any custom object through to the callback function
2. built-in response codes, so a response that starts "200\n" is a "Good" response, you can also return error codes
2.1. this means a http error wont botch up your nicely formatted site and
2.2. it's immune to the cross-site <script src=...> attack, even if you're sending a raw JSON object because the response code botches up the compiler
There's also a bitchin 2d-array library too with like a zillion functions and a new secret project too that'll revolutionise the interweb, probably.
Each of which do NOT use prototyping, instead taking the c-style approach of passing your object in as the first argument to the function, which means it's very easy to reduce the script size by just chopping out the functions you dont use.
* which means rather embarrasingly that the manual is a little sparse out of date, but there are working examples up there you can rip the source from
Seems like a lot of effot to go to: stashing files inside a hidden volume at the end of an other volume which is encrypted and disguised as a corrput but massive jpg accessible only by a piece of software on a secret usb dongle you hide taped to the underside of your toilet cistern lid...
when you could just, you know, EITHER PAY FOR THE MUSIC / MOVIE IN THE FIRST PLACE OR NOT LISTEN TO / WATCH SAID MUSIC MOVIE AT ALL.
It's not like there's an 11th commandment saying "Thou shalt have the right to see the latest holywood superhero blockbuster for free" is there?
(it was nice to have good karma for a while there...)
It's also worth bearing in mind (ActiveX aside) that whilst there are still plenty of sites out there that try to check for "IE or Netscape" one huge factor is that IE6 has remained a stable non moving target for 6 years. That's a long time in computer years and most of the lifetime of the Web (at least as far as the puny humans are generally concerned).
There's also the MS culture of bugs-as-features. Once a bug is found, instead of being fixed and patched as in an open-source project it becomes part of the document standard behaviour. MS will bend over backwards not to break their product and upset their userbase (of millions) and that means setting it in stone - quirks and all.
This can change, If HTML5 takes off and the MS IE team step up to meeting it then they can change the culture and release regular patches, say every 3-6 months, via windows update. pre HTML5 pages will still render the same they always did but the author's onus can shift from "find a workaround to this bug because it wont get fixed for 6 years" to "report this bug to MS and assume it will be fixed within 6 months".
If you have a look over at the w3c mailing list there's a lot of argument going on regarding this. the IE team are willing to meet the HTML5 standards (and presumably be extension the CSS 2.1 standards alongside that) providing they have a way for the HTML author to "opt in" to HTML5+ mode where the author understands that future patches will probably break their pages if they're not written to the published standards.
As it stands the IE team can't meet the standards because of the very problem discussed here: that a whole chunk of the web relies on IE7 behaving like IE6 - like IE has done for the past 6 years. To fix the bugs would break the web because the web relies on the bugs to make it work.
The argument against this is that HTML should always be HTML regardless of versioning and that some people believe that rewriting the standards to meet IE's buggy behaviour and requiring browsers to emulate that is somehow better/easier for the developer than them putting
if( html_version >= 5.0 ) {//render properly this way } else {//render the way we used to do it }
The corporate culture can be tackled by browser developers quietly beavering away at HTML5 compatibility then - when MS IE7.5 is ready and meets the standards 99.5% - promoting "HTML5" as the next gen cool corporate acronym buzz-phrase must-have website technology in big letters.
Oh and then us webmeisters can rub our hands in glee as we show off our HTML5 portfolios and get tasty pay rises and job offers.:-)
By being an internet based movie rental business they're already limiting their market to "mostly geeks" - be that computer geeks or movie geeks (I on the other hand happen to fall into both categories) - they're not targetting "100% of the internet" even if they think they are... But geeks are more likely to both know of and use browsers other than IE.
Taking all of that in they're probably pissing off a much larger potential customer base than basic math would suggest
It's all very well me attaching my resume, calendar, map with directions to my new house or funding spreadsheet to an email but if the person at the other end can't read it then i've just wasted their (and my) time.
Where is the web site that says in big letters: "Download and install this 200k setup exe (signed by IBM) to install ODF support for your Office suite (MS,Lotus,etc.) to begin using ODF right this second!" that i can link to in said email with attachment?
Firefox and Thunderbird are most of the way there with that, but bloating of said products over time means that the download size is creeping up the MB scale.
My wife hinted that she might like a DS not long ago after seeing a few ads for them, she's got a geek streak for sure (hell she married a slashdotter!) but i was quietly surprised. She might get one for xmas (and i might get me a dreamcast:-)
And therin lies the problem, the w3c make a big shouty shiney deal out of "validating" HTML and CSS markup in pages - wether or not it actually produces desirable output in the shitty attempts at support by ALL the browser vendors - and not copyrighting the terms "HTML" and "CSS"* and then not allowing browsers to claim to render them unless the BROWSERS ITSELF CONFORM TO THE SPECS
*yeah i know it's too late for that now but "HTML 5" could be called "WML : Web Markup Language" instead, whilst being new and buzzword-tastic, M$ could not then release a "WML Support Upgrade" for IE7 unless the w3c said so.
"Human Rights" as far as religion, education and all that obviously do not fit the bill but the idea that we can just go stomping into the jungle and do what we please regardless of "who" or "what" lives, eats and shits there already really needs to be consigned to history long before we start stomping on other species' planets and doing it all over again.
There seem to be a few comments around here along the lines of "advertisements suck" and the occasional "bring back firefly"
Does anyone have any idea how much ressurecting Firefly would cost? That money has to come from somewhere and if we aren't paying for it up front (straight-to-video, cinema or the idealogical subscription-but-ad-free-cable) then it has to be paid for by advertising.
I havent seen Firefly, i could have torrented the lot but havent, not one second of it has passed my corneas and will not do until i get around to buying the box set. I doubt very much my purchase will cause the magical relaunch of the series but we cant have it both ways.
What needs to happen is some established dude like Rodriguez needs to stick the finger to the studios, get a whole bunch of cash from some very optimistic investor and release a kick ass film trilogy via the iTunes model (distribution and bandwidth issues aside): $2.50 for DVD ISO or AVI, $5 for the HD H.264 AVI, $10.00 for the physical DVD with making-of booklet (shipping not included).
what THEN needs to happen is for amazon to pick up the physical edition and the film reviews and word-of-mouth being very positive and not just in the "oh isnt it quaint a low-budget indie film with cardboard sets releases it's wares on the interweb" way but a "holy fuck this is some good shit i only wish it'd had a cinema release so i could see it on a big screen" way.
so long as people pay for the damned thing, knowing that not one cent is going to rupert murdoch and friends and dont just torrent it then the revolution will begin. what will probably happen is that a bunch of slashdotters will bemoan the codec, format, price, color of the website, fact that some guy shoots before some other guy and tout that as a reason not to pay for the thing because, y'know it should be free for $INSERT_REASON
I cat5-ed our house a couple years back (victorian terrace, believe me these buildings have no spare gaps between floors/walls/anywhere very efficient use of 3d space!). It just so happened however that we were in the process of gutting (back to bricks and beams) half the rooms including the kitchen and bathroom and also putting in better loft access (where the phone lines now come in and meet the main switch). I just lobbed in cat5 while we were at it mostly. And whilst there's still no "conduit" as such everything meets in 2/3 particular places and to rewire it you'd just have to secure your new wire to the old and pull from the other end. probably.
i could insert the horror story about finally finding out that the top floor had one electric cable to it all these years and not a proper ring main. the top floor being the one that had housed the office and music studio, bet that wire got warm.
>snag the Google Toolbar, which I think blocks DoubleClick ads
Suddenly a thousand monopoly/competition lawyers start rubbing their hands in glee: MS IE allows by default Google's adSense scripts to run unhindered but Google's Toolbar blocks MS-DoublClick's scripts.
The greatest lunacy IMO in developing road-worthy AI cars is in attempting to get them to visually recognise and read road signs and road layouts. If there was a standard AI car transponder system that complemented the visual representation of the world then that would be a start. Roads could then be upgraded to "AI compatible" when all their junctions,lanes and major bends are transponder-described so you could at least turn the AI on on the freeway to begin with.
In the mean time we'd need to figure out how to prevent hacking (build your own transponder to crash traffic) whilst allowing roadworks (temporary override transponders) but overall it'd be a lot less effort if the car just "knew" that in 50m there was a traffic light (signalled transponder) controlled crossroads with a turn left lane HERE and a cycle jump start zone THERE and a speed limit of X kph rather than have to have a bunch of cameras on the thing just to figure out where the white lines are.
instead of bashing on about global warming we need to bash on about
1. asthma
2. the fact that every sandstone building in an urban location is black from years of exhaust fumes, or are lungs immune from the same effect?
3. recycling is the natural norm of things, hence decomposition, bugs, worms and mould whilst use-once trow away for ever is clearly not.
4. smog
5. landfills look ugly and smell bad
6. motorways/freeways and their junctions take up vast acres of land compared to a railway system of the same capacity. look ugly and create a lot of noise
7. if you live within walking/cycling distance of your job imagine the time and money you'd save on commuting...
8....and you'd get fitter...
9....and therefore be happier
10. look up, you can't see the stars because of all the light pollution, stars are pretty, light pollution is yellow and ugly.
11. power stations are big andspew out big clouds of smoke/steam which sure doesnt look pretty
12. if you grow your own vegetables then you don't have to give your money to walmart just for the privelidge of eating...
13....and you know for a fact what pestisides and fertilizers were used to grow them...
14....and you get yet more exersise whilst gardening
I just reeled that all off the top of my head and some of it is no doubt apocryphal, but it just demonstrates that there are a whole host of reasons for going green apart from the endless arguments about global warming.
There also appears to be a cultural momentum that needs overturning. i don't know how it evolved but my guess is that back in the mid 20th century when sweets, chocolate and such were considered rare treats you got them whenever you could reasonably afford to. This attitude has stuck and now whenever we visit or host older relatives (aunties, parents etc.) they produce.... sweets and chocolate to feed to our not-even-two year old daughter. Who to be perfectly honest would be very happy to munch on a small punnet of grapes instead (themselves considered a rare, expensive treat earlier in history, at least in colder northern climates). I was secretley pleased when she tried a fruit pastle, stuck it to the window and continued to munch on some raisins.
Once she'd gone to be we, er, "permenantly confiscated" said sweets and chocolate, naturally:-)
I'm the proud owner of a toddler, and try as i might occasionally the little bugger will without doubt get her hands on a shiny disc, perhaps accidentally left in the DVD player overnight and she chewed on the remote i accidentally left on the sofa and nibbled the eject button. anyway, you can be careful but hey, i'm only human right.
Otherwise she might be ill and not feeling up to her usual daily routine of running around the park/garden/trashing-the-house generally so we stick on a bunch of disney/animal films and play them whilst she's chilling out on the sofa and she slyly grabs one whilst i pop the the kitchen to fetch some kiddy medicine.
wouldnt it be nice if i could play backups of my original copies, and not have to worry if that happens.
of course one day i'd like the ubiqutous server-under-the-stairs but in the mean time i'd rather not have to fork out another £20 quid because the only PHYSICAL COPY of the movie who's CONTENTS i purchased the RIGHTS TO WATCH got used as a teething ring.
The sheer quantity of video served by google/youtube could benefit greatly from ISP cacheing. Back when i started out it was a relatively simple task because most things on the web were static (.htm,.html,.gif,.jpeg : life was simple!) but with the advent of CGI/Perl it all became a whole lot messier and cacheing became a minefield to be avoided, at least that's what it was like back in my ISP days (in the previous century, god damn i'm old)
Streaming media on the other hand is in a position to be very cache friendly: a 30 year old episode of a sitcom is not going to change content from one minute to the next. So instead of having to get it from california to wales with every click it could come from manchester probably.
Let's take prime factorisation (two prime numbers multiply together to get a product), it's hard for classical computers to do. The simlest algorithm is to divide by every prime up to the root of the product until you get another prime out the other end. The simplest way to speed up that is to use more/faster processors. Oh and you also probably have to work out as you go along which numbers are prime and which are not.
That's a lot of number crunching. using a "true" quantumn computer you could set up a multiplication in the first instance by placing three strips of qbits alongside each other and wiring them up so that C = A * B. by locking A and B down C will happen by itself - because that's the only stable state of the system.
The beauty now is that you can do the reverse, lock C down and A and B will happen by themselves, because 1. division is the opposite of multiplication 2. you built the system to only handle integers 3. there is ONLY one factorisation of C when A and B are prime*
I've been wandering if such a setup would be possible using true analog computing: by setting up a bunch of rotating magnets that use North=1 and South=0 wired up for the multiplication. but it'd be a bitch to build even for trivial numbers of digits as binary multiplication involves a lot of carries and shifts, addition and subtraction on the other hand would probably be relatively easy but you'd still soon run out of technic lego
* actually there are three possible outcomes if you include A=1 and B=C and the reverse, the quantumn computer need not know the language/definition related argument of "is 1 prime" it's just an integer calculator.
Agreed: "Stable" version should be default version
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Like in software there's usually a Stable version, even if it's quite old and a Beta version, i'd go so far as to suggest that Wikipedia pages should have three versions
1. The Stable Page - and THIS should be the default at.../wiki/The_Page 2. The Candidate Page - The candidate to become the next stable page 3. The Current Page - Up to the minute revert war free for all
Both [1] and [2] are essentially historic versions of the page but linked to from handy labelled tabs and some kind of moderation/voting system can elevate a page from current to beta to stable.
obviously newly created articles would only have one or three versions and these would filter across all three until a moderator/vote decides to split the article into the aforementioned modus operandi
here are already 38 flavours of Vista so surely they could just market a "Pure" vista for power customers, those who would know what they were getting themselves into. Apps could be VistaPure certified if they like and i see this as less difficult from the Mac switching processors twice.
Once there's a body of VistaPure certified software out there then the momentum can be built up to a switch over for Vista II in about 5 years time with extended continued support for existing Vista (Legacy) customers.
while i'm at it i find all this installer business quite shocking, why can't an App just unzip itself into a directory in program files and then be sandoboxed there by the OS? sure if a user wants to load/save files from a dialog they can do so wherever they have permission but how hard can it be just to otherwise not allow an app to read/write ANYWHERE above/outside it's directory path? You'd still be allowed to assign an application read/write permission to any location you yourself have access to (e.g. network shares) but you should also be able to view/edit a list of that apps dir/net/registry access permissions with a right click on it's shortcut.
i.e. all non-standard-OS-file-requestor operations that attempt to invoke a directory where the path does not begin with "C:/program files/the application/" and does not contain "../" be denied. far too f**king simple.
here's a thought, suppose you have a game with threads for gameplay, rendering, ai and physics we could seperate game time into internal frames and the threads out like this:
gameplay
<
traceAttack( vec_t origin , vec_t dir );
>
physics
<
impulseForce( vec_t origin , vec_t dir , float force );
> }
this human may recieve a bullet to the chest, that's simple enough but it needs to invoke a force to knock the player back (this<physics>.impulseForce) as well as add a decal to the player skin to show the bullet impact on their bullet proof vest. It would probably also emit a sound and spawn a spark or debris model. So what seems at first to be a simple seperation of elements becomes more complex. This is where the internal frames come in - each thread would need an event queue, a list of commands to follow during each frame, and you would then add events to the tail of each thread's queues. At first glance this would probably look like it could introduce a new kind of infinite loop - whereby each thread gets more and more events tacked onto it's queue, but by seperating the execution into game-time-limited this can be overcome - so long as projectiles and explosions all have a finite velocity, and the AI characters have a realistic reflex time attatched then very little can happen infinitely quickly.
However, do we still have to limit ourselves by forcing all threads to have completed the current frame before starting the next? or can we allow a frame space, a range of say 50 frames over which the threads are allowed to run amok? - the renderer may be fixed to 50 or 60 Hz for example but the game engine may be able to run at 500 internal frames a second in order to get the physics working reasonably. Presumably the renderer can just take a snapshot of the gamestate and concentrate on rendering that.
This is where the compiler comes in, it should delegate the temporal snapshot ability of the renderer so that what the renderer is rendering does not change whilst it is rendering it, but the AI and physics threads can chat to each other about the current states of play. The programmer should be free to program these in parallel without having to worry about it too much.
Slightly OT but i've said this before, computer-controlled-car (CCC) AI should not be designed to read human-targetted road signs but detect CCC-targetted transponders that describe the road/junction/roadworks ahead down to the cm. Then if you're driving in a CCC-enabled zone you can switch on the autopilot and let it do the driving.
Obviously it'd still need to detect pedestrians, stray dogs and non-CCCs (and not crash dumbly if someone hacks the transponders) but a standard system like this would free up a chunk of proccessing power for that very task.
Slashdot Mirror
It's work in progress* at the moment but i have a basic AJAX Library up at http://cyclomedia.co.uk/projects/ajax/
all it does is encapsulate the request/response with a couple of handy additions:
1. ability to pass any custom object through to the callback function
2. built-in response codes, so a response that starts "200\n" is a "Good" response, you can also return error codes
2.1. this means a http error wont botch up your nicely formatted site and
2.2. it's immune to the cross-site <script src=...> attack, even if you're sending a raw JSON object because the response code botches up the compiler
There's also a bitchin 2d-array library too with like a zillion functions and a new secret project too that'll revolutionise the interweb, probably.
Each of which do NOT use prototyping, instead taking the c-style approach of passing your object in as the first argument to the function, which means it's very easy to reduce the script size by just chopping out the functions you dont use.
* which means rather embarrasingly that the manual is a little sparse out of date, but there are working examples up there you can rip the source from
Kinda sounds like a Gorillaz video
Seems like a lot of effot to go to: stashing files inside a hidden volume at the end of an other volume which is encrypted and disguised as a corrput but massive jpg accessible only by a piece of software on a secret usb dongle you hide taped to the underside of your toilet cistern lid...
when you could just, you know, EITHER PAY FOR THE MUSIC / MOVIE IN THE FIRST PLACE OR NOT LISTEN TO / WATCH SAID MUSIC MOVIE AT ALL.
It's not like there's an 11th commandment saying "Thou shalt have the right to see the latest holywood superhero blockbuster for free" is there?
(it was nice to have good karma for a while there...)
It's also worth bearing in mind (ActiveX aside) that whilst there are still plenty of sites out there that try to check for "IE or Netscape" one huge factor is that IE6 has remained a stable non moving target for 6 years. That's a long time in computer years and most of the lifetime of the Web (at least as far as the puny humans are generally concerned).
//render properly this way //render the way we used to do it
:-)
There's also the MS culture of bugs-as-features. Once a bug is found, instead of being fixed and patched as in an open-source project it becomes part of the document standard behaviour. MS will bend over backwards not to break their product and upset their userbase (of millions) and that means setting it in stone - quirks and all.
This can change, If HTML5 takes off and the MS IE team step up to meeting it then they can change the culture and release regular patches, say every 3-6 months, via windows update. pre HTML5 pages will still render the same they always did but the author's onus can shift from "find a workaround to this bug because it wont get fixed for 6 years" to "report this bug to MS and assume it will be fixed within 6 months".
If you have a look over at the w3c mailing list there's a lot of argument going on regarding this. the IE team are willing to meet the HTML5 standards (and presumably be extension the CSS 2.1 standards alongside that) providing they have a way for the HTML author to "opt in" to HTML5+ mode where the author understands that future patches will probably break their pages if they're not written to the published standards.
As it stands the IE team can't meet the standards because of the very problem discussed here: that a whole chunk of the web relies on IE7 behaving like IE6 - like IE has done for the past 6 years. To fix the bugs would break the web because the web relies on the bugs to make it work.
The argument against this is that HTML should always be HTML regardless of versioning and that some people believe that rewriting the standards to meet IE's buggy behaviour and requiring browsers to emulate that is somehow better/easier for the developer than them putting
if( html_version >= 5.0 )
{
}
else
{
}
The corporate culture can be tackled by browser developers quietly beavering away at HTML5 compatibility then - when MS IE7.5 is ready and meets the standards 99.5% - promoting "HTML5" as the next gen cool corporate acronym buzz-phrase must-have website technology in big letters.
Oh and then us webmeisters can rub our hands in glee as we show off our HTML5 portfolios and get tasty pay rises and job offers.
By being an internet based movie rental business they're already limiting their market to "mostly geeks" - be that computer geeks or movie geeks (I on the other hand happen to fall into both categories) - they're not targetting "100% of the internet" even if they think they are ... But geeks are more likely to both know of and use browsers other than IE.
Taking all of that in they're probably pissing off a much larger potential customer base than basic math would suggest
It's all very well me attaching my resume, calendar, map with directions to my new house or funding spreadsheet to an email but if the person at the other end can't read it then i've just wasted their (and my) time.
Where is the web site that says in big letters: "Download and install this 200k setup exe (signed by IBM) to install ODF support for your Office suite (MS,Lotus,etc.) to begin using ODF right this second!" that i can link to in said email with attachment?
Firefox and Thunderbird are most of the way there with that, but bloating of said products over time means that the download size is creeping up the MB scale.
Surely it should be: "Innocent UNLESS proven guilty"? the original seems to include a degree of inevitability
My wife hinted that she might like a DS not long ago after seeing a few ads for them, she's got a geek streak for sure (hell she married a slashdotter!) but i was quietly surprised. She might get one for xmas (and i might get me a dreamcast :-)
And therin lies the problem, the w3c make a big shouty shiney deal out of "validating" HTML and CSS markup in pages - wether or not it actually produces desirable output in the shitty attempts at support by ALL the browser vendors - and not copyrighting the terms "HTML" and "CSS"* and then not allowing browsers to claim to render them unless the BROWSERS ITSELF CONFORM TO THE SPECS
*yeah i know it's too late for that now but "HTML 5" could be called "WML : Web Markup Language" instead, whilst being new and buzzword-tastic, M$ could not then release a "WML Support Upgrade" for IE7 unless the w3c said so.
too bloody simple, obviously
"Human Rights" as far as religion, education and all that obviously do not fit the bill but the idea that we can just go stomping into the jungle and do what we please regardless of "who" or "what" lives, eats and shits there already really needs to be consigned to history long before we start stomping on other species' planets and doing it all over again.
Elightenment awaits
There seem to be a few comments around here along the lines of "advertisements suck" and the occasional "bring back firefly"
Does anyone have any idea how much ressurecting Firefly would cost? That money has to come from somewhere and if we aren't paying for it up front (straight-to-video, cinema or the idealogical subscription-but-ad-free-cable) then it has to be paid for by advertising.
I havent seen Firefly, i could have torrented the lot but havent, not one second of it has passed my corneas and will not do until i get around to buying the box set. I doubt very much my purchase will cause the magical relaunch of the series but we cant have it both ways.
What needs to happen is some established dude like Rodriguez needs to stick the finger to the studios, get a whole bunch of cash from some very optimistic investor and release a kick ass film trilogy via the iTunes model (distribution and bandwidth issues aside): $2.50 for DVD ISO or AVI, $5 for the HD H.264 AVI, $10.00 for the physical DVD with making-of booklet (shipping not included).
what THEN needs to happen is for amazon to pick up the physical edition and the film reviews and word-of-mouth being very positive and not just in the "oh isnt it quaint a low-budget indie film with cardboard sets releases it's wares on the interweb" way but a "holy fuck this is some good shit i only wish it'd had a cinema release so i could see it on a big screen" way.
so long as people pay for the damned thing, knowing that not one cent is going to rupert murdoch and friends and dont just torrent it then the revolution will begin. what will probably happen is that a bunch of slashdotters will bemoan the codec, format, price, color of the website, fact that some guy shoots before some other guy and tout that as a reason not to pay for the thing because, y'know it should be free for $INSERT_REASON
I cat5-ed our house a couple years back (victorian terrace, believe me these buildings have no spare gaps between floors/walls/anywhere very efficient use of 3d space!). It just so happened however that we were in the process of gutting (back to bricks and beams) half the rooms including the kitchen and bathroom and also putting in better loft access (where the phone lines now come in and meet the main switch). I just lobbed in cat5 while we were at it mostly. And whilst there's still no "conduit" as such everything meets in 2/3 particular places and to rewire it you'd just have to secure your new wire to the old and pull from the other end. probably.
i could insert the horror story about finally finding out that the top floor had one electric cable to it all these years and not a proper ring main. the top floor being the one that had housed the office and music studio, bet that wire got warm.
>snag the Google Toolbar, which I think blocks DoubleClick ads
Suddenly a thousand monopoly/competition lawyers start rubbing their hands in glee: MS IE allows by default Google's adSense scripts to run unhindered but Google's Toolbar blocks MS-DoublClick's scripts.
...being the opposite of conflict (fighting) must therefore mean "making sweet love to"
The greatest lunacy IMO in developing road-worthy AI cars is in attempting to get them to visually recognise and read road signs and road layouts. If there was a standard AI car transponder system that complemented the visual representation of the world then that would be a start. Roads could then be upgraded to "AI compatible" when all their junctions,lanes and major bends are transponder-described so you could at least turn the AI on on the freeway to begin with.
In the mean time we'd need to figure out how to prevent hacking (build your own transponder to crash traffic) whilst allowing roadworks (temporary override transponders) but overall it'd be a lot less effort if the car just "knew" that in 50m there was a traffic light (signalled transponder) controlled crossroads with a turn left lane HERE and a cycle jump start zone THERE and a speed limit of X kph rather than have to have a bunch of cameras on the thing just to figure out where the white lines are.
instead of bashing on about global warming we need to bash on about
...and you'd get fitter...
...and therefore be happier
...and you know for a fact what pestisides and fertilizers were used to grow them...
...and you get yet more exersise whilst gardening
1. asthma
2. the fact that every sandstone building in an urban location is black from years of exhaust fumes, or are lungs immune from the same effect?
3. recycling is the natural norm of things, hence decomposition, bugs, worms and mould whilst use-once trow away for ever is clearly not.
4. smog
5. landfills look ugly and smell bad
6. motorways/freeways and their junctions take up vast acres of land compared to a railway system of the same capacity. look ugly and create a lot of noise
7. if you live within walking/cycling distance of your job imagine the time and money you'd save on commuting...
8.
9.
10. look up, you can't see the stars because of all the light pollution, stars are pretty, light pollution is yellow and ugly.
11. power stations are big andspew out big clouds of smoke/steam which sure doesnt look pretty
12. if you grow your own vegetables then you don't have to give your money to walmart just for the privelidge of eating...
13.
14.
I just reeled that all off the top of my head and some of it is no doubt apocryphal, but it just demonstrates that there are a whole host of reasons for going green apart from the endless arguments about global warming.
There also appears to be a cultural momentum that needs overturning. i don't know how it evolved but my guess is that back in the mid 20th century when sweets, chocolate and such were considered rare treats you got them whenever you could reasonably afford to. This attitude has stuck and now whenever we visit or host older relatives (aunties, parents etc.) they produce .... sweets and chocolate to feed to our not-even-two year old daughter. Who to be perfectly honest would be very happy to munch on a small punnet of grapes instead (themselves considered a rare, expensive treat earlier in history, at least in colder northern climates). I was secretley pleased when she tried a fruit pastle, stuck it to the window and continued to munch on some raisins.
:-)
Once she'd gone to be we, er, "permenantly confiscated" said sweets and chocolate, naturally
I'm the proud owner of a toddler, and try as i might occasionally the little bugger will without doubt get her hands on a shiny disc, perhaps accidentally left in the DVD player overnight and she chewed on the remote i accidentally left on the sofa and nibbled the eject button. anyway, you can be careful but hey, i'm only human right.
Otherwise she might be ill and not feeling up to her usual daily routine of running around the park/garden/trashing-the-house generally so we stick on a bunch of disney/animal films and play them whilst she's chilling out on the sofa and she slyly grabs one whilst i pop the the kitchen to fetch some kiddy medicine.
wouldnt it be nice if i could play backups of my original copies, and not have to worry if that happens.
of course one day i'd like the ubiqutous server-under-the-stairs but in the mean time i'd rather not have to fork out another £20 quid because the only PHYSICAL COPY of the movie who's CONTENTS i purchased the RIGHTS TO WATCH got used as a teething ring.
The sheer quantity of video served by google/youtube could benefit greatly from ISP cacheing. Back when i started out it was a relatively simple task because most things on the web were static (.htm,.html,.gif,.jpeg : life was simple!) but with the advent of CGI/Perl it all became a whole lot messier and cacheing became a minefield to be avoided, at least that's what it was like back in my ISP days (in the previous century, god damn i'm old)
Streaming media on the other hand is in a position to be very cache friendly: a 30 year old episode of a sitcom is not going to change content from one minute to the next. So instead of having to get it from california to wales with every click it could come from manchester probably.
Let's take prime factorisation (two prime numbers multiply together to get a product), it's hard for classical computers to do. The simlest algorithm is to divide by every prime up to the root of the product until you get another prime out the other end. The simplest way to speed up that is to use more/faster processors. Oh and you also probably have to work out as you go along which numbers are prime and which are not.
That's a lot of number crunching. using a "true" quantumn computer you could set up a multiplication in the first instance by placing three strips of qbits alongside each other and wiring them up so that C = A * B. by locking A and B down C will happen by itself - because that's the only stable state of the system.
The beauty now is that you can do the reverse, lock C down and A and B will happen by themselves, because 1. division is the opposite of multiplication 2. you built the system to only handle integers 3. there is ONLY one factorisation of C when A and B are prime*
I've been wandering if such a setup would be possible using true analog computing: by setting up a bunch of rotating magnets that use North=1 and South=0 wired up for the multiplication. but it'd be a bitch to build even for trivial numbers of digits as binary multiplication involves a lot of carries and shifts, addition and subtraction on the other hand would probably be relatively easy but you'd still soon run out of technic lego
* actually there are three possible outcomes if you include A=1 and B=C and the reverse, the quantumn computer need not know the language/definition related argument of "is 1 prime" it's just an integer calculator.
Like in software there's usually a Stable version, even if it's quite old and a Beta version, i'd go so far as to suggest that Wikipedia pages should have three versions
.../wiki/The_Page
1. The Stable Page - and THIS should be the default at
2. The Candidate Page - The candidate to become the next stable page
3. The Current Page - Up to the minute revert war free for all
Both [1] and [2] are essentially historic versions of the page but linked to from handy labelled tabs and some kind of moderation/voting system can elevate a page from current to beta to stable.
obviously newly created articles would only have one or three versions and these would filter across all three until a moderator/vote decides to split the article into the aforementioned modus operandi
here are already 38 flavours of Vista so surely they could just market a "Pure" vista for power customers, those who would know what they were getting themselves into. Apps could be VistaPure certified if they like and i see this as less difficult from the Mac switching processors twice.
Once there's a body of VistaPure certified software out there then the momentum can be built up to a switch over for Vista II in about 5 years time with extended continued support for existing Vista (Legacy) customers.
while i'm at it i find all this installer business quite shocking, why can't an App just unzip itself into a directory in program files and then be sandoboxed there by the OS? sure if a user wants to load/save files from a dialog they can do so wherever they have permission but how hard can it be just to otherwise not allow an app to read/write ANYWHERE above/outside it's directory path? You'd still be allowed to assign an application read/write permission to any location you yourself have access to (e.g. network shares) but you should also be able to view/edit a list of that apps dir/net/registry access permissions with a right click on it's shortcut.
i.e. all non-standard-OS-file-requestor operations that attempt to invoke a directory where the path does not begin with "C:/program files/the application/" and does not contain "../" be denied. far too f**king simple.
obviously there needs to be a chip at each end to compress the signal to/from mpeg2 that'd sort out the bandwith!
comment |= (joke|irony);
here's a thought, suppose you have a game with threads for gameplay, rendering, ai and physics we could seperate game time into internal frames and the threads out like this:
class cHuman extends cBiped
{
render
<
addDecal( decal_t decal , vec_t origin );
>
gameplay
<
traceAttack( vec_t origin , vec_t dir );
>
physics
<
impulseForce( vec_t origin , vec_t dir , float force );
>
}
this human may recieve a bullet to the chest, that's simple enough but it needs to invoke a force to knock the player back (this<physics>.impulseForce) as well as add a decal to the player skin to show the bullet impact on their bullet proof vest. It would probably also emit a sound and spawn a spark or debris model. So what seems at first to be a simple seperation of elements becomes more complex. This is where the internal frames come in - each thread would need an event queue, a list of commands to follow during each frame, and you would then add events to the tail of each thread's queues. At first glance this would probably look like it could introduce a new kind of infinite loop - whereby each thread gets more and more events tacked onto it's queue, but by seperating the execution into game-time-limited this can be overcome - so long as projectiles and explosions all have a finite velocity, and the AI characters have a realistic reflex time attatched then very little can happen infinitely quickly.
However, do we still have to limit ourselves by forcing all threads to have completed the current frame before starting the next? or can we allow a frame space, a range of say 50 frames over which the threads are allowed to run amok? - the renderer may be fixed to 50 or 60 Hz for example but the game engine may be able to run at 500 internal frames a second in order to get the physics working reasonably. Presumably the renderer can just take a snapshot of the gamestate and concentrate on rendering that.
This is where the compiler comes in, it should delegate the temporal snapshot ability of the renderer so that what the renderer is rendering does not change whilst it is rendering it, but the AI and physics threads can chat to each other about the current states of play. The programmer should be free to program these in parallel without having to worry about it too much.
Slightly OT but i've said this before, computer-controlled-car (CCC) AI should not be designed to read human-targetted road signs but detect CCC-targetted transponders that describe the road/junction/roadworks ahead down to the cm. Then if you're driving in a CCC-enabled zone you can switch on the autopilot and let it do the driving.
Obviously it'd still need to detect pedestrians, stray dogs and non-CCCs (and not crash dumbly if someone hacks the transponders) but a standard system like this would free up a chunk of proccessing power for that very task.