Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the Twitter API. If the assumptions I make are wrong, I apologize.
Over the past week, Twitter has reduced the number of API calls from 350 to 175 an hour.
Okay, if you're making that many calls to Twitter then there might be an inherent flaw with their RESTful interfaces. I think for a long time, the "web" as we know it has suffered from the lack of the Event/Listener paradigm. This is a pretty simple design concept that I'm going to refer to as the Observer. Let's say I want to know what Stephen Hawking is tweeting about and I want to know 24/7. Now if you have to make more than one call, something is wrong. That one call should be a notification to Twitter who I am, where you can contact me and what I want to keep tabs on--be it a keyword or user. So all I should ever have to do is tell Twitter I want to know everything from Stephen Hawking and everything with #stephenhawking or whatever and from that point on, it will try to submit that message to me via any number of technologies. Simple pub/sub message queues could be implemented here to alleviate my need to continually go to Twitter and say: "Has Stephen Hawking said anything new yet? *millisecond pause* Has Stephen Hawking said anything new yet? *millisecond pause*..." ad infinitum. I'm not claiming Twitter does this but a cursory glance at the API looks like it's missing this sort of Observer paradigm that allows for the scalability they need.
I'm not leveling the finger at Twitter, it's a widespread problem that even I have been a part of. Ruby makes coding RESTful interfaces so easy that it's very very tempting to just throw up a few controllers that are basically CRUD interfaces for databases and to call it a day. I suspect that Twitter is feeling the impending pain of popularity right about now...
I did not read the article, so I don't know if it's answered there.
It is now apparent that for a comparable amount of information stored, a more complex algorithm (with maybe even N passes required) could be employed to produce better results to the human eye. To me, this article seems to miss the beauty of keeping it simple and going with the square. I would also bet that all of his examples are done by starting out on a square based pixel image. How would one scan an image in one pass with his new suggested method? This might become a better standard but I would wager it would make a lot of things computationally more expensive and displaying the images more complex. Not to mention manipulation of the image gets a bit trickier and probably throws a monkey wrench in a lot of our widely implemented compression technologies that already produce this sort of "creative blocks" of multiple pixels.
I'm not an expert in this field and I find his further research neat and mildly innovative but I would bet that when it comes down to weighing the practicality of implementation that squares remain.
Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.
Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.
The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."
And will they please release the management utilities via open source?
From the article
A number of third-party tools have been developed over the years to simplify certain aspects of organization-wide Firefox roll-outs. One of those tools is the Client Customization Kit (CCK), which was developed by Firefox modification consultant Michael Kaply while he was employed by IBM. Kaply still actively maintains the tool and released an updated version for Firefox 3.6 in March. IBM is using it alongside other tools to ensure that its Firefox adoption plan goes smoothly.
IBM already has developed the initial version. CCK is currently Mozilla Public License 1.1 and I have not seen any notice that they're changing that so your question is answered.
I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere.
Oh, I couldn't care less about that. Let me explain "What freedom means to me." My company has more than a few apps that kept us on IE6 for the longest time. Why did they select IE6? Well, at the time, Internet Exploder was the only browser that allowed them to maintain strict policies and security settings across the company. It's still one of their big selling points that they have "slipstream installation" and "Group policy enhancements (total of 1,500, with 140 new in Internet Explorer 8)." Well, now that IBM has developed the Client Customization Kit and maybe -- just maybe -- they can get it to a point where an administrator can control proxy and policy settings in Firefox from one central IT position. It's this. It's this concept that is the answer to my question why I'm still developing to support the browser from hell. And I know I'm not alone.
So I'm adding one marble to the 'like' side of the scales of IBM (which they'll need a lot more of to tilt it back to even). I hope to see some serious support come out of this for FF's CCK.
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man.
Going to have to disagree with that one. Given his loony statements about children in the US wearing US flag t-shirts on cinco de mayo...
People can still be brilliant and yet get other things so painfully wrong you think they're Kim Peek or an idiot savant. Although I find his stances in other realms loathsome, his movie reviews and books on movies nearly mandatory reading for enhancing your appreciation of movies. If ever there were a finer or more well known movie critic, name them. I'm not going to deny this and it's not like this is the only case where this happens. I have Orson Scott Card spouting idiot political drivel in some sort of LDS worshipping context yet I really enjoyed his novels as a kid. This has happened for a long time with perhaps the most extreme case being Knut Hamsun. Yeah it makes me think less of them and their opinions on matters unrelated to their work but it doesn't entirely remove the acknowledgment they deserve in their field.
I'm intimately familiar with the history of Roger Ebert's comments on video games. From the article,
Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.
Then he goes on to say that there were 4,547 comments left with ~300 supporting his view. He claims it's longer than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov.
What he said is that he shouldn't have said it. That he should have been more informed of video games before making that statement. But, in the end, he's still saying that video games can never be art. Ebert is bull headed. I've seen the footage where he breaks down into a fight with Siskel. A decent argument is one thing but Ebert's harder to sway than a dead mule. So he made a statement. And what you're going to get is the definition of the word 'art.' He even admits Sony bent over backwards to give him the chance to play a beautiful non-combat oriented game... and of his dismissal of this he says, "I was too damned bull-headed."
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. However, as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake, a misstep or that he was flat out wrong. You've squeezed all you can squeeze out of him which is basically that he regrets saying it but he still believes it is true.
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art. We call a single color art. Hell, we even call graffiti art. The crudest symbols our kind could muster gets to be called art. But, goddammit, for some strange reason the second you express yourself through a series of complexly arrange ones and zeros interacting with the viewer, you can't call it art.
Mr. Ebert, I may be far younger than you and I may be far less informed than you but I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games. I can only take solace in knowing that future generations will see it differently... permanently.
I asked Jordan Kavoosi if his business was a scam. If he had failed to pay writers. If his tattoos made him look like a dbag. He sent me a YouTube video response.
And in case he decides to take down his brilliant acting resumes (complete with sunglasses) like he did with other videos, here are some mirrors. I... I teared up during his re-enactment of the ending of 300. Frank Miller would be proud.
Hilarious article though, well done CityPages. I liked the dialogue with the judge and the story of Kavoosi's tattoos at the end. Clear infatuation with himself, I'd avoid.
This tool appears to just be a well written exploit targeting not just IE but a number of other Microsoft products. I assume it relies on the "Remember my password" functionality in order to get the password. If the browsers are caching passwords without your consent, they are worthless. I know of generalized tools that will do this for any site you remember a password for: IE PassView, Google Chrome Pass, Messanger Key for instant messengers and even Password Fox.
When you click "remember my password" the browser stores it in a semi-obfuscated way. Yes, it encrypts it but it must also put the key it uses to encrypt your password on your hard drive somewhere. Since your browser is not also a rootkit, any application you run on your box can access everything your browser can write. Therefore you need only spend the time to figure out where the encryption key is being stored and what kind of encryption the browser is employing to encrypt your password. When your mail client or chat client are remembering your passwords, it's no different. We could have a lengthy debate about whether 'remember your password' should be allowed but apparently the majority of users are okay with it considering the convenience it grants them. If they use the same machine to surf malicious websites, this makes it easier for malware to steal the passwords than a complex keylogging system... and I guess people who click "Remember this password" are just fine with that prospect.
A few simple lines of code later and you too can write your own command line password discovery tool. Slap a seksi user interface on that and apparently you can sell it for $49.
Not everyone wants to whore themselves out for money.
Oh so you're telling me that he works for free as a lawyer now? Or is being a paid lawyer not a whore compared to putting your image on a T-shirt and selling it? I accept large sums of cash to arrange ones and zeros on electronic devices, am I whoring myself out for money?
This is the correct response when you become an instant global entertainer--not a $351,000 lawsuit. Or are you going to sue me now for teasing you about losing a lucrative merchandising opportunity?
OP have you ever used an Android phone? The platform is maturing extremely fast. I just switched from an iPhone 3g to an Evo 4g and I don't have regrets.
Evo 4g? I don't care. I want the one with the bigger geebees.
It's funny that a lot of these points end with something like "HTML 5 is working on it" or "HTML 5 is just begun" or "Hopefully they all merge to one." And that's the idea of an unfinished specification. With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).
Right now, YouTube might be forced to stick with Flash in regards to some videos but in the future I think we will see YouTube move as much as it can to HTML 5 and offer Flash as a premium service to content owners who want to deliver their content through Flash's DRM. And I'm fine with that. I don't care that you can redistribute videos of a snapping turtle laying eggs in my parent's garden.
Remember, YouTube is Google and Google has supported HTML 5 at least vocally and with their Chrome browser to the best of their ability.
I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!
Indeed, hope the liquid mirror option becomes practical and viable so we can achieve more amazing photographs and data like this. Although I have to wonder why they didn't use an orbiting satellite like Hubble to avoid Earth's atmosphere when photographing such an amazing thing. Have terrestrial adaptive optic solutions already caught up with orbiting satellites?
As the economy is getting worse they keep upping the price of the music on itunes so that young people can afford less and less of it, while at the same time complaining that sales are down.
Hey, I really really hate iTMS. I've posted on here about how crappy it is time and time again so I'll spare you that rant. But what on Earth are you talking about? Aren't songs still 99 cents? Several years later even? Are they even adjusting for inflation (I know we had little one year but...)? Hell, in the past four months I've bought more $5 albums (that's albums) from Amazon's MP3 Service than compact discs. You were kind of right about the budget thing. I would not recommend telling them that they'll lose the poor college student market and use that as logic that their entire revenue will drop out from under them though. As a working professional I'd argue that if the prices dropped more, I'd undoubtedly end up spending more than that.
If they think passing ACTA is a good idea it's not. It's not going to make someone friendly to your business if you sue them.
I thought the whole idea of a global ACTA was so that the RIAA and MPAA would feel okay with distributing music and movies digitally on a global level? Because it would require local governments to allow/enforce their terms and conditions for licensing and copyright? And that's why China and India hate it -- it would burden them something fierce with enforcement.
I mean, every single time there's an article on YouTube or BBC iPlayer or Hulu or <TV Station> making their shows free online the rest of the world cries out that it's only for the US or UK. I thought the purpose of ACTA was to try to satisfy the content owners who have been preventing technology from disseminating their product? Yeah from our angle it really sucks for the end consumer but on the other hand you might be able to watch Hulu in China. These two things are linked.
Find another strategy...
There is no other strategy. Capitalism is great but a nasty side effect are these crazy contracts, men in the middle, managers, labels, exclusivity, distribution contracts, etc that result in this maelstrom of lawsuits when some people just want to listen to music. Bands love their fans. That's the source of their income. But tack on what the music industry has become and suddenly they look like the biggest danger to their fans.
In my opinion, it's not a new strategy but rather they need a total restructuralization of how the industry functions. Distribution is cheap. The labels are leeches. Isn't this obvious?
I bought three last week, and their customer service already knew what was going on. A tech already came out next-day to replace the faulty components. No questions asked. Next?
From the article,
According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.
So last week you bought three computers dated between May 2003 and July 2005? The suit names Optiplexes with bad capacitors and that's what you purchased last week? Or are you telling me that this continues to this day in 2010, seven years after it started?
You may have other problems than faulty computers -- like a faulty lie generator or even employment at Dell.
Hey, I'd love to. Could you send me an computer that I can install the development package on? And an iPhone to test? And waive the $100/year App Store fee?
Maybe you should try searching on Bing.
I toyed around with it when it first launched, never used it really though. Wasn't satisfied with it evidently I wasn't alone.
But most of all, maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back for being so closed minded and get outside for a little while
I am so utterly confused. To date, I do not believe I have purchased a product from Google. I have a Motorola DROID phone with their OS on it, I have used their search engine, I probably have given them ad revenue but I cannot think of a single instance where I've paid Google directly from my pocketbook. There is something closed minded about appreciating this fact?
What was it that I exhibited that was closed minded?
....without your Google Android phone.
Last Sunday I was canoeing on the Potomac (Brunswick to Point of Rocks) without my DROID. Seriously. Did not want to lose that. Really enjoyed it and heavily recommend it.
Here's to wishful thinking...
Thanks for the wishes but I don't really need them. I apologize if my post sounded like I was patting myself on the back. Had Google caved to the Chinese government you probably would have gotten a healthy dosage of me cursing the above facts and lamenting that their just as big of a pile of shit as Apple or Microsoft. At least Google shows a little bit of promise.
It disturbs me that you were moderated Insightful.
Rather than lose China, I'd comply with the government's wishes and obey the law (i.e. filter). Nice guys who "do no evil" ultimately finish last.
On the other hand, they have my vocal support. I'm glad I went with an Android based phone. I'm glad I've developed only on Android and not iPhone. I never used Bing. I never used Bing Cashback even though my friends told me it was giving them money back. And I'm glad I've used Google. Given two competing products of the same functionality in the future I'd go with Google's. At the same time I am aware they are flawed, have privacy issues and will play ball with the American government by folding faster than superman on laundry day.
I'm not a blind stark raving idiot fanboy but upon hearing of Google's commitment to move to unfiltered search results, they have achieved something in my mind and brought themselves to a level of idealism that I identify with.
Does it hurt their pocketbook? You bet. But to say it does nothing else is disingenuous. You may not consider my admiration monetarily worth anything but it is something.
The article is a little confusing on how they're going to change their strategy. The Official Blog has that info:
We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.
Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.
It's kind of funny, the "landing page" is a false image of a search box and when you click anywhere on the page, you go to Google Hong Kong. How this is okay as opposed to a redirect, I'll never know... and once that page starts eventually taking users to unfiltered results of Tiananmen Square, I think the Chinese Government will take a few more steps to stop it.
Of course it looks like ibtimes has a policy that only allows them to link to more ibtimes sites instead of -- you know -- the original source of all their quotes.
What if the second child was born on Tuesday but was not a twin of the Tuesday boy?
Say, the Tuesday 75 weeks later. It's still a Tuesday...
According to the quote that would have to be a girl born on Tuesday because the quote in question states that one and only one of the children is a boy born on Tuesday. It cannot be a boy born on Tuesday. The only information you get form that statement is that one of the two ordered children cannot be a boy born on Tuesday. We have two genders. We have seven days. That's fourteen permutations. We have two children that can possess those fourteen permutations but we know that one of those permutations is impossible so we have 27 permutations instead of 28. Now count how many of those available 27 permutations are boys and you'll find it's 13.
First off, I am a huge Martin Gardner fan and if this puzzle intrigues you and you haven't heard of him, get one of his books.
This problem hinges very greatly on how it is phrased and I think it's more a trick of English converting to statistics than it is a true puzzle. If you were to rephrase this problem as "My first child was a boy born on Tuesday now what are the odds that my next child is a boy?" But they don't. They phrase it as after the fact of both births we are now studying a set of two objects that have been determined prior to me asking the question. This ordering causes the set to be enumerable. Which brings in an interesting piece of information theory to this game. Whenever you say something about one child that is exclusive to that child and that trait is enumerable than you have just affected the outcome of that second child. In the original two childs problem this is just gender. But in the above problem it pairs gender with day of week the child was born on. Now since ordering matters you recognize that whether or not the older or younger child is the one in question creates a different scenario and you can't have twins because only one was born on Tuesday. The article does a good job of explaining this.
The interesting thing is that the answer to this comes down to 13/27. And the larger the enumerable set is of possibilities, the closer this converges to 1/2. If you did this with a specific day of the year, your answer would be 729/1459 which is even closer to 1/2. The general rule is that for a set with N possibilities you would have (N*2 - 1)/(N*4 - 1). Now, what's interesting is if N is unbounded or unenumerable? What if I said "I have two children, one of whom is a boy that likes the number 1835736583. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?" Wouldn't it converge to 1/2?
Personally, I've always enjoyed the beauty of Euler's identity, any form of Gaussian (normal) distribution which has a standard form here and entropy in regards to information theory. Of course, these are just personal favorites -- the last two because I am a computer scientist with so much college work hinging on them. You probably have personal favorites in chemistry or physics or another field even. Honestly, the loan formula is probably one of the most widely used and life changing formulas in the United States today -- especially given the recent financial crisis. I think it would be best for you to draw up your own formulas in a geometric display rather than someone else's symbols. I suppose that would require extreme precision on the end of the artist and also introduce interesting problems with the elasticity of your skin... but I'm one for originality especially if you're about to mark yourself in a relatively permanent way.
Diana Ross was not available for comment's. Rejoicing software developer's liberally apply apostrophe's in the street's but are they celebrating too soon?
Slashdot Mirror
Over the past week, Twitter has reduced the number of API calls from 350 to 175 an hour.
Okay, if you're making that many calls to Twitter then there might be an inherent flaw with their RESTful interfaces. I think for a long time, the "web" as we know it has suffered from the lack of the Event/Listener paradigm. This is a pretty simple design concept that I'm going to refer to as the Observer. Let's say I want to know what Stephen Hawking is tweeting about and I want to know 24/7. Now if you have to make more than one call, something is wrong. That one call should be a notification to Twitter who I am, where you can contact me and what I want to keep tabs on--be it a keyword or user. So all I should ever have to do is tell Twitter I want to know everything from Stephen Hawking and everything with #stephenhawking or whatever and from that point on, it will try to submit that message to me via any number of technologies. Simple pub/sub message queues could be implemented here to alleviate my need to continually go to Twitter and say: "Has Stephen Hawking said anything new yet? *millisecond pause* Has Stephen Hawking said anything new yet? *millisecond pause* ..." ad infinitum. I'm not claiming Twitter does this but a cursory glance at the API looks like it's missing this sort of Observer paradigm that allows for the scalability they need.
...
I'm not leveling the finger at Twitter, it's a widespread problem that even I have been a part of. Ruby makes coding RESTful interfaces so easy that it's very very tempting to just throw up a few controllers that are basically CRUD interfaces for databases and to call it a day. I suspect that Twitter is feeling the impending pain of popularity right about now
Why are we suffering from it since so ?
I did not read the article, so I don't know if it's answered there.
It is now apparent that for a comparable amount of information stored, a more complex algorithm (with maybe even N passes required) could be employed to produce better results to the human eye. To me, this article seems to miss the beauty of keeping it simple and going with the square. I would also bet that all of his examples are done by starting out on a square based pixel image. How would one scan an image in one pass with his new suggested method? This might become a better standard but I would wager it would make a lot of things computationally more expensive and displaying the images more complex. Not to mention manipulation of the image gets a bit trickier and probably throws a monkey wrench in a lot of our widely implemented compression technologies that already produce this sort of "creative blocks" of multiple pixels.
I'm not an expert in this field and I find his further research neat and mildly innovative but I would bet that when it comes down to weighing the practicality of implementation that squares remain.
Climategate's Final Days
Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.
Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.
The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."
And will they please release the management utilities via open source?
From the article
A number of third-party tools have been developed over the years to simplify certain aspects of organization-wide Firefox roll-outs. One of those tools is the Client Customization Kit (CCK), which was developed by Firefox modification consultant Michael Kaply while he was employed by IBM. Kaply still actively maintains the tool and released an updated version for Firefox 3.6 in March. IBM is using it alongside other tools to ensure that its Firefox adoption plan goes smoothly.
IBM already has developed the initial version. CCK is currently Mozilla Public License 1.1 and I have not seen any notice that they're changing that so your question is answered.
K THX BYE
Anytime, brah.
I hope this means that if IBM can't navigate a vendor's site with Firefox, they'll just look elsewhere.
Oh, I couldn't care less about that. Let me explain "What freedom means to me." My company has more than a few apps that kept us on IE6 for the longest time. Why did they select IE6? Well, at the time, Internet Exploder was the only browser that allowed them to maintain strict policies and security settings across the company. It's still one of their big selling points that they have "slipstream installation" and "Group policy enhancements (total of 1,500, with 140 new in Internet Explorer 8)." Well, now that IBM has developed the Client Customization Kit and maybe -- just maybe -- they can get it to a point where an administrator can control proxy and policy settings in Firefox from one central IT position. It's this. It's this concept that is the answer to my question why I'm still developing to support the browser from hell. And I know I'm not alone.
So I'm adding one marble to the 'like' side of the scales of IBM (which they'll need a lot more of to tilt it back to even). I hope to see some serious support come out of this for FF's CCK.
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. Going to have to disagree with that one. Given his loony statements about children in the US wearing US flag t-shirts on cinco de mayo ...
People can still be brilliant and yet get other things so painfully wrong you think they're Kim Peek or an idiot savant. Although I find his stances in other realms loathsome, his movie reviews and books on movies nearly mandatory reading for enhancing your appreciation of movies. If ever there were a finer or more well known movie critic, name them. I'm not going to deny this and it's not like this is the only case where this happens. I have Orson Scott Card spouting idiot political drivel in some sort of LDS worshipping context yet I really enjoyed his novels as a kid. This has happened for a long time with perhaps the most extreme case being Knut Hamsun. Yeah it makes me think less of them and their opinions on matters unrelated to their work but it doesn't entirely remove the acknowledgment they deserve in their field.
Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.
Then he goes on to say that there were 4,547 comments left with ~300 supporting his view. He claims it's longer than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov.
... and of his dismissal of this he says, "I was too damned bull-headed."
... permanently.
What he said is that he shouldn't have said it. That he should have been more informed of video games before making that statement. But, in the end, he's still saying that video games can never be art. Ebert is bull headed. I've seen the footage where he breaks down into a fight with Siskel. A decent argument is one thing but Ebert's harder to sway than a dead mule. So he made a statement. And what you're going to get is the definition of the word 'art.' He even admits Sony bent over backwards to give him the chance to play a beautiful non-combat oriented game
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. However, as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake, a misstep or that he was flat out wrong. You've squeezed all you can squeeze out of him which is basically that he regrets saying it but he still believes it is true.
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art. We call a single color art. Hell, we even call graffiti art. The crudest symbols our kind could muster gets to be called art. But, goddammit, for some strange reason the second you express yourself through a series of complexly arrange ones and zeros interacting with the viewer, you can't call it art.
Mr. Ebert, I may be far younger than you and I may be far less informed than you but I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games. I can only take solace in knowing that future generations will see it differently
I asked Jordan Kavoosi if his business was a scam. If he had failed to pay writers. If his tattoos made him look like a dbag. He sent me a YouTube video response.
... I teared up during his re-enactment of the ending of 300. Frank Miller would be proud.
And in case he decides to take down his brilliant acting resumes (complete with sunglasses) like he did with other videos, here are some mirrors. I
Hilarious article though, well done CityPages. I liked the dialogue with the judge and the story of Kavoosi's tattoos at the end. Clear infatuation with himself, I'd avoid.
This tool appears to just be a well written exploit targeting not just IE but a number of other Microsoft products. I assume it relies on the "Remember my password" functionality in order to get the password. If the browsers are caching passwords without your consent, they are worthless. I know of generalized tools that will do this for any site you remember a password for: IE PassView, Google Chrome Pass, Messanger Key for instant messengers and even Password Fox.
... and I guess people who click "Remember this password" are just fine with that prospect.
When you click "remember my password" the browser stores it in a semi-obfuscated way. Yes, it encrypts it but it must also put the key it uses to encrypt your password on your hard drive somewhere. Since your browser is not also a rootkit, any application you run on your box can access everything your browser can write. Therefore you need only spend the time to figure out where the encryption key is being stored and what kind of encryption the browser is employing to encrypt your password. When your mail client or chat client are remembering your passwords, it's no different. We could have a lengthy debate about whether 'remember your password' should be allowed but apparently the majority of users are okay with it considering the convenience it grants them. If they use the same machine to surf malicious websites, this makes it easier for malware to steal the passwords than a complex keylogging system
A few simple lines of code later and you too can write your own command line password discovery tool. Slap a seksi user interface on that and apparently you can sell it for $49.
Not everyone wants to whore themselves out for money.
Oh so you're telling me that he works for free as a lawyer now? Or is being a paid lawyer not a whore compared to putting your image on a T-shirt and selling it? I accept large sums of cash to arrange ones and zeros on electronic devices, am I whoring myself out for money?
This is the correct response when you become an instant global entertainer--not a $351,000 lawsuit. Or are you going to sue me now for teasing you about losing a lucrative merchandising opportunity?
"stop tourists"
So the Gulf oil spill was an inside job? Senator Robert Byrd threatened to talk, that's why he had to go. It's all starting to make sense now!
OP have you ever used an Android phone? The platform is maturing extremely fast. I just switched from an iPhone 3g to an Evo 4g and I don't have regrets.
Evo 4g? I don't care. I want the one with the bigger geebees.
It's funny that a lot of these points end with something like "HTML 5 is working on it" or "HTML 5 is just begun" or "Hopefully they all merge to one." And that's the idea of an unfinished specification. With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).
Right now, YouTube might be forced to stick with Flash in regards to some videos but in the future I think we will see YouTube move as much as it can to HTML 5 and offer Flash as a premium service to content owners who want to deliver their content through Flash's DRM. And I'm fine with that. I don't care that you can redistribute videos of a snapping turtle laying eggs in my parent's garden.
Remember, YouTube is Google and Google has supported HTML 5 at least vocally and with their Chrome browser to the best of their ability.
I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!
Indeed, hope the liquid mirror option becomes practical and viable so we can achieve more amazing photographs and data like this. Although I have to wonder why they didn't use an orbiting satellite like Hubble to avoid Earth's atmosphere when photographing such an amazing thing. Have terrestrial adaptive optic solutions already caught up with orbiting satellites?
Today Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, was seen shaking the robotic arm of a submersible BP robot at the IPO celebration ...
As the economy is getting worse they keep upping the price of the music on itunes so that young people can afford less and less of it, while at the same time complaining that sales are down.
Hey, I really really hate iTMS. I've posted on here about how crappy it is time and time again so I'll spare you that rant. But what on Earth are you talking about? Aren't songs still 99 cents? Several years later even? Are they even adjusting for inflation (I know we had little one year but ...)? Hell, in the past four months I've bought more $5 albums (that's albums) from Amazon's MP3 Service than compact discs. You were kind of right about the budget thing. I would not recommend telling them that they'll lose the poor college student market and use that as logic that their entire revenue will drop out from under them though. As a working professional I'd argue that if the prices dropped more, I'd undoubtedly end up spending more than that.
If they think passing ACTA is a good idea it's not. It's not going to make someone friendly to your business if you sue them.
I thought the whole idea of a global ACTA was so that the RIAA and MPAA would feel okay with distributing music and movies digitally on a global level? Because it would require local governments to allow/enforce their terms and conditions for licensing and copyright? And that's why China and India hate it -- it would burden them something fierce with enforcement.
I mean, every single time there's an article on YouTube or BBC iPlayer or Hulu or <TV Station> making their shows free online the rest of the world cries out that it's only for the US or UK. I thought the purpose of ACTA was to try to satisfy the content owners who have been preventing technology from disseminating their product? Yeah from our angle it really sucks for the end consumer but on the other hand you might be able to watch Hulu in China. These two things are linked.
Find another strategy ...
There is no other strategy. Capitalism is great but a nasty side effect are these crazy contracts, men in the middle, managers, labels, exclusivity, distribution contracts, etc that result in this maelstrom of lawsuits when some people just want to listen to music. Bands love their fans. That's the source of their income. But tack on what the music industry has become and suddenly they look like the biggest danger to their fans.
In my opinion, it's not a new strategy but rather they need a total restructuralization of how the industry functions. Distribution is cheap. The labels are leeches. Isn't this obvious?
I bought three last week, and their customer service already knew what was going on. A tech already came out next-day to replace the faulty components. No questions asked. Next?
From the article,
According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.
So last week you bought three computers dated between May 2003 and July 2005? The suit names Optiplexes with bad capacitors and that's what you purchased last week? Or are you telling me that this continues to this day in 2010, seven years after it started?
You may have other problems than faulty computers -- like a faulty lie generator or even employment at Dell.
Maybe you should try developing for the iPhone.
Hey, I'd love to. Could you send me an computer that I can install the development package on? And an iPhone to test? And waive the $100/year App Store fee?
Maybe you should try searching on Bing.
I toyed around with it when it first launched, never used it really though. Wasn't satisfied with it evidently I wasn't alone.
But most of all, maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back for being so closed minded and get outside for a little while
I am so utterly confused. To date, I do not believe I have purchased a product from Google. I have a Motorola DROID phone with their OS on it, I have used their search engine, I probably have given them ad revenue but I cannot think of a single instance where I've paid Google directly from my pocketbook. There is something closed minded about appreciating this fact?
What was it that I exhibited that was closed minded?
....without your Google Android phone.
Last Sunday I was canoeing on the Potomac (Brunswick to Point of Rocks) without my DROID. Seriously. Did not want to lose that. Really enjoyed it and heavily recommend it.
Here's to wishful thinking...
Thanks for the wishes but I don't really need them. I apologize if my post sounded like I was patting myself on the back. Had Google caved to the Chinese government you probably would have gotten a healthy dosage of me cursing the above facts and lamenting that their just as big of a pile of shit as Apple or Microsoft. At least Google shows a little bit of promise.
It disturbs me that you were moderated Insightful.
Rather than lose China, I'd comply with the government's wishes and obey the law (i.e. filter). Nice guys who "do no evil" ultimately finish last.
On the other hand, they have my vocal support. I'm glad I went with an Android based phone. I'm glad I've developed only on Android and not iPhone. I never used Bing. I never used Bing Cashback even though my friends told me it was giving them money back. And I'm glad I've used Google. Given two competing products of the same functionality in the future I'd go with Google's. At the same time I am aware they are flawed, have privacy issues and will play ball with the American government by folding faster than superman on laundry day.
I'm not a blind stark raving idiot fanboy but upon hearing of Google's commitment to move to unfiltered search results, they have achieved something in my mind and brought themselves to a level of idealism that I identify with.
Does it hurt their pocketbook? You bet. But to say it does nothing else is disingenuous. You may not consider my admiration monetarily worth anything but it is something.
We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.
Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.
It's kind of funny, the "landing page" is a false image of a search box and when you click anywhere on the page, you go to Google Hong Kong. How this is okay as opposed to a redirect, I'll never know ... and once that page starts eventually taking users to unfiltered results of Tiananmen Square, I think the Chinese Government will take a few more steps to stop it.
Of course it looks like ibtimes has a policy that only allows them to link to more ibtimes sites instead of -- you know -- the original source of all their quotes.
What if the second child was born on Tuesday but was not a twin of the Tuesday boy?
Say, the Tuesday 75 weeks later. It's still a Tuesday...
According to the quote that would have to be a girl born on Tuesday because the quote in question states that one and only one of the children is a boy born on Tuesday. It cannot be a boy born on Tuesday. The only information you get form that statement is that one of the two ordered children cannot be a boy born on Tuesday. We have two genders. We have seven days. That's fourteen permutations. We have two children that can possess those fourteen permutations but we know that one of those permutations is impossible so we have 27 permutations instead of 28. Now count how many of those available 27 permutations are boys and you'll find it's 13.
First off, I am a huge Martin Gardner fan and if this puzzle intrigues you and you haven't heard of him, get one of his books.
This problem hinges very greatly on how it is phrased and I think it's more a trick of English converting to statistics than it is a true puzzle. If you were to rephrase this problem as "My first child was a boy born on Tuesday now what are the odds that my next child is a boy?" But they don't. They phrase it as after the fact of both births we are now studying a set of two objects that have been determined prior to me asking the question. This ordering causes the set to be enumerable. Which brings in an interesting piece of information theory to this game. Whenever you say something about one child that is exclusive to that child and that trait is enumerable than you have just affected the outcome of that second child. In the original two childs problem this is just gender. But in the above problem it pairs gender with day of week the child was born on. Now since ordering matters you recognize that whether or not the older or younger child is the one in question creates a different scenario and you can't have twins because only one was born on Tuesday. The article does a good job of explaining this.
The interesting thing is that the answer to this comes down to 13/27. And the larger the enumerable set is of possibilities, the closer this converges to 1/2. If you did this with a specific day of the year, your answer would be 729/1459 which is even closer to 1/2. The general rule is that for a set with N possibilities you would have (N*2 - 1)/(N*4 - 1). Now, what's interesting is if N is unbounded or unenumerable? What if I said "I have two children, one of whom is a boy that likes the number 1835736583. What's the probability that my other child is a boy?" Wouldn't it converge to 1/2?
Personally, I've always enjoyed the beauty of Euler's identity, any form of Gaussian (normal) distribution which has a standard form here and entropy in regards to information theory. Of course, these are just personal favorites -- the last two because I am a computer scientist with so much college work hinging on them. You probably have personal favorites in chemistry or physics or another field even. Honestly, the loan formula is probably one of the most widely used and life changing formulas in the United States today -- especially given the recent financial crisis. I think it would be best for you to draw up your own formulas in a geometric display rather than someone else's symbols. I suppose that would require extreme precision on the end of the artist and also introduce interesting problems with the elasticity of your skin ... but I'm one for originality especially if you're about to mark yourself in a relatively permanent way.
Diana Ross was not available for comment's. Rejoicing software developer's liberally apply apostrophe's in the street's but are they celebrating too soon?