Re:Flash?
on
Opencroquet
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· Score: 2, Informative
The fact is you can travel NOW with a Ford T in any street.
Wrong. Some highways in Quebec have a minimum speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph). The Model T's top speed is 72 km/h (45 mph), ergo, you cannot drive it on some Quebec highways.
Also, even though you could drive it on some modern roads, it would not be without causing headaches to both yourself and other motorists, due to your low speed. Analogously, you can browse that website without Flash, you're just missing out on some of the content. You saw the screenshot, didn't you? (Assuming you got there before it was Slashdotted into oblivion)?
Why? Flash is virtually ubiquitous (77% browser penetration), fast, responsive, a friendly programming API, compact, and runs on fairly low-end hardware, by today's standards.
why are people so opposed to Flash on the net? Are they equally resentful that images have "invaded" their text-only HTML world? My website uses tables... how evil am *I*?
I mean, if you have a legitimate complaint (crashes your browser) or something, then that's fine, but I'm getting a little sick of people who consistently respond with knee-jerk negativity against anything remotely commercial, regardless of how useful and innovative it may be.
It's 2003. You don't still drive 30 mph in a '55 Chevy, why would you be so resistent to modern browser plugins?
Anyway, personally I'm glad that OS research is finally turning to the 3D realm. It only seems like the next natural progression in computer environments.
Any transmission there and back will have a 6k year life span.
Come on, I would have expected the answer to be immediately obvious to a Slashdot fan. Hello?!?! Do the words "subspace signal" ring any bells? Sheesh, no wonder the Vulcans' technology was so far ahead of ours.
Come on, with all the far more provocative reality TV out there (viewers choosing a spouse for someone, 16 whiny crybabies dumped in the Amazon, a dude pretending he's a millionaire), who's gonna watch Linus recompile his kernel?
Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?
"Blogging" has graphically illustrated for me the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't."
Thanks for the link. No, I'm not making it up. If you'd read the very document you referred to, you'd have found this section on page 32:
"In addition to other rights provided by this section, a patent shall include the right to obtain a reasonable royalty from any per-son who,..."
Granted, that section deals with royalties from entities who intentionally or inadvertently copy your patent, but another section applies to making the product available to the public for "reasonable" cost. Page 44, section 35 USC 200:
"ensure that the Government obtains sufficient rights in federally supported inventions to meet the needs of the Government and protect the public against nonuse or unreasonable use of inventions;"
The key part in there is that the government is preventing patent holders from "nonuse or unreasonable use." Not selling the pills at all would be "nonuse." Charging a billion dollars a pill would be "unreasonable use."
And if you're still not convinced, then read this section:
"The term "practical application" means to manufacture in the case of a composition or product, to practice in the case of a process or method, or to operate in the case of a machine or system; and, in each case, under such conditions as to establish that the invention is being utilized and that its benefits are to the extent permitted by law or Government regulations available to the public on reasonable terms."
"Reasonable terms" meaning an accessible cost and licensing structure.
And yes, I know the pills would be more than $200. I pulled the number out of my hat. It wasn't intended to be a realistic number. But thanks for being pedantic.
I'm seeing a lot of posts here about how evil the world is for potentially allowing this company to patent this thing and make it available only to the rich. People making these comments need to read a little bit about patent law.
Disclaimer: The following applies to Canadian/US patent law. IANAUKL.
Patents cannot be granted for things occurring naturally in nature. There have been cases where researchers discovered a cure for a disease in nature, and spent millions of dollars trying to reproduce the substance synthetically. This is because they couldn't patent the original organic material, but they *could* patent a synthetic copy.
Secondly, part of patent law states that in being granted a patent, you must make the product available to the public at reasonable cost. The company that comes up with a cure for AIDS will not be granted a patent for the cure unless it is produced in a lab, and they will not be allowed to charge $200 a pill for it.
Patents are not as unbalanced as some people seem to think. They're actually a good thing. They drive research and provide incentive to invest in new medicines, while keeping the balance of ensuring such medicines will be accessible to all, not just the rich. Particularly here in Canada, where we have universal health care.
Whereas what you should have done is wised up, thrown that proprietary ass-sucking shitbag of a development environment into the trash, and discovered the world of open source development tools.
Switching is not that bad.
Clearly, you've never used.NET. There are no open-source tools that allow you to accomplish the same breadth of tasks, with the ease and speed of VS.NET. MONO is on the right track, but is way, way behind.
I use VS.NET at work and was very surprised to learn just how easy it is to do certain things. If you're using Microsoft products from front-to-back, then whipping up an interactive web app with Windows authentication, backing on a very fast and reliable SQL database can be accomplished literally within a few minutes. It's really quite something, when you see it the first time.
Apparently, security at Los Alamos is run by the same folks who allowed the knife-weilding lunatic break into Prime Minister Chretien's home and threaten his wife for half an hour.
Impossible. If even just one, single, ignorant white trash loser ponies up his almost-maxxed-out Visa for a bottle of Penis Enlarger for every 9,999 people you convince to ignore it, they'll continue.
The more points of view you apply to solving a problem, the quicker, and better you'll solve it.
"Better?" Maybe. "Quicker?" Definitely not. If you've even been to a single high level design review, you'd know that not only does everyone have their own opinion, but they all adamently believe theirs is the only right way to do it. And they'll fight with you and argue for hours trying to convince you that their way is better than yours, John's, and Ted's. Meanwhile, Ted can't believe that John would propose something so stupid, and John thinks your idea will be a memory hog.
So where does the "quicker" part come in?
Also, I would like to refute the idea that open source projects have all these eyes scouring them. There are a helluvalotta mothballed projects on SourceForge that looked pretty cool, but there's no interest in them. Sure, there are quite a few people actively working on the latest-and-greatest, bleeding-edge Apache mods, and kernel patches, but does anyone care about the Widget Formatter that *my* company needs? No. But throw a little money behind it, and you can have 2 or 3 developers working on it, full time, who will produce software *exactly* to your specification, not just how some programmer in New Zealand thinks it shoud work, in his opinion.
You know that there are quite a few people who think nothing of running a 26 mile marathon, right?
Uh-huh, and they're extraordinary, too. What's your point?
doubting the ability of anyone to walk quickly for more than a few minutes is really funny.
The poster said "hours," not "minutes."
I walk about two miles to work and back every day.
That's not "walking for hours."
I've walked 15 miles without problems before.
At 5 mph? I doubt it. Nothing you've said here refutes my original point - anyone who can sustain a pace of 5 mph for "hours" is in extraordinary shape. I never said such people don't exist, simply that such a feat is beyond the capabilities of the average American.
Really? That's actually quite a brisk clip, you know. And "hours?" Sounds like you're in extraordinary shape. This begs the question: what the heck are you doing reading Slashdot???:)
Sorry, I got a little carried away. I just found it a little "over the top" that someone believes that a credit card company trying to protect their money is somehow an invasion of privacy, when the person has to willingly sign up for said card and willingly use it to make purchases.
Anyway, my point was that the banks are merely protecting their interests, and are not invading anyone's privacy by employing automatic fraud detection (here's another shocker: cell phone companies do it too).
But I'd still like to explore the sinister potential consequences of a society that is grooming its citizens to be so dependent on banks, to the degree that even the government is buying into it (in Canada, you can't pay your income tax with cash. They only take cheques). Isn't anyone else bothered by this trend? Is anyone still reading this thread?:)
If they manage to find something odd in a bunch of online payments, then they are obviously abusing your privacy by profiling your consumption
They're not "profiling your consumption," because it's not your money you're spending - it's theirs. Until you pay your bill, you've spent THEIR money, and thus have every right to track what you buy and protect their money from being spent fraudulently.
If someone steals your card and charges up $10K, who do you think gets stuck with the loss? Certainly not you! So if you want them to stop watching what you buy, I'd suggest you agree to be liable for any and all fraudulent charges, without limitation.
Take a Valium, you paranoid, X-File watching, crop-circle worshipping, black-helicopter-fearing freedom-junkie. If you're so scared of it, then cut up your credit card and pay for everything with cash.
On a side note, is anyone else a little worried about how it is presently impossible to live without a bank? In Canada, stores are not obligated to accept cash. That surprised me. It seems to me that cash should be the one things stores should not be allowed to decline. If I choose to pay for my gas with cash, I should be allowed - but that right is not guaranteed in Canada. Think about all the bills you pay in a month. How many of them could be paid with cash? My car payment comes out of my bank account. So does my mortgage. None of my utilities accept cash; cheque or automatic withdrawl only (i.e., bank account required). Is it possible to carry on a normal life without a bank account in present day?
It will be used even less than the in-flight phone system. What do passengers need to have with them to take advantage of the phones? Nothing. EVERYONE on those flights were potential customers of those phones, and hardly anyone used them (mostly because everyone knows how prohibitively expensive they are, and there is usually nothing so urgent that it can't wait till you get on the ground). Now, how many of those passengers are potential customers of the Wi-Fi system? Those with laptops. That is, a very small subset of the passengers. How many of those would pay for this Wi-Fi service? I'd venture, "not very many." Thus, it is not worth it and will be a money-loser.
The noise won't hinder you from typing emails
Maybe not, but the price sure will. For 30 bucks, my trivial little email to you can wait till I hit the ground.
It is an EXTREMELY attractive feature for business travellers, who will be able to actually use those flights for productive work
They made that exact same argument for the in-flight phones, and now they're tearing those out, because they're money losers. Why should we now believe that it will work this time, for an even more exclusive service (i.e., you need to have a laptop)? Speaking as an occassional business traveler myself, those flights are a short-term haven; a chance to relax for a couple of hours inbetween hectic meetings. A chance to get some friggin' rest - not an opportunity to try and cram even more work into my 16-hour day.
it also has good entertainment value for those people who are not gonna work
... assuming they have laptops and more money than brains. A $5 magazine will "entertain" me just as well for a couple of hours.
Add in maybe some sort of in-flight portal with information and a shop system
...that costs mucho-$$$ to set up, and that again, will only be accessible to those passengers with laptops. How many of those people would actually bother visiting such an in-flight trash-shop? How many would spend enough money to make it worth the startup/maintenance capital? Can you honestly not see why this will be a money-loser? Sure, it's neat and all and has all this potential, but the bottom line is, it won't make money if people don't use it.
I am also sure the crew itself will use this (for work purposes)
Then you're clearly not very familiar with how these businesses work. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." What the airlines have now for pre-/in-/ and post-flight procedures is working fine. Why would they change it, just to take advantage of some new tech that doesn't add any more value? Will using this system "for work purposes" save them any money? Think like a CFO. "Will using this system allow me to eliminate any staff?" That's the sad but true rationale for adopting new tech like this.
In Canada, we've had bandwidth caps (much lower, I might add) for some time now. One of the most common objections I heard to the decisions were from people who felt that they should be allowed to max out their "high speed" 1Mb product that they were buying. They felt that something advertised as "1Mb" should mean they can use it at that bandwidth all the time, for a flat fee. Does your cable bill go up if you watch too much TV in a month?
On the other hand, the reality is that ISPs don't budget for everyone to have their connections maxxed out all the time. The only expect people to use a small fraction of the allotted bandwidth. Doing so allows them to offer generally high speeds, for a relatively low price.
Around here, a T1 connection (1.44 Mb/s) will cost you around $1000CDN per month. Why do these people seem to think that they should be able to get the same service for $29.95/month? Don't they understand WHY T1's cost so much more?
Request to see their own credit history. Demand access to the companie's books. ALL OF 'EM. Tell them you require this of all new potential employers, because you wish to ensure that what happened to the employees of Worldcom, Enron, et. al. doesn't happen to you.
They can see your financial situation when you can see theirs. Sounds fair to me.
Dude, no offense, but that is awful, awful advice. Just terrible. You should never give anyone financial planning advice.
If you've managed to save up $150,000 over 10 years, do not blow it on living expenses. First of all, that is an absolutely enormous sum of money to be saving (1,250 after tax dollars per month) - far, far more than most people are saving for retirement. Secondly, you're neglecting the effects of compound interest. Thirdly, if by some miracle you did manage to get that kind of cash saved up over 10 years, sit on it! After 10 more years or so, you'll have a retirement nest egg that would allow you to quit working altogether, not just for 10 years or so while you burned through your life savings.
Get married. Just marry someone who prefers to feel productive (i.e., wants to work/have a career), and who doesn't want kids anytime soon. 2 people can live far more cost-effectively than 1.
ABSOLUTELY BUY A HOUSE! Stop renting as soon as you can afford to! When you rent, you're just paying down someone else's mortgage. Get your own, build your own equity, ben an owner. Houses are a safe investment, relatively speaking. Get a modest house that you can pay off fairly quickly, and put your money to work for you, rather than your landlord.
Meet with a financial advisor, do your research, read David Chilton's "The Wealthy Barber," come up with a plan, put away 10%, pay yourself first, and set your sights on leaving the workforce forever! The sooner, the better!
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Some highways in Quebec have a minimum speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph). The Model T's top speed is 72 km/h (45 mph), ergo, you cannot drive it on some Quebec highways.
Also, even though you could drive it on some modern roads, it would not be without causing headaches to both yourself and other motorists, due to your low speed. Analogously, you can browse that website without Flash, you're just missing out on some of the content. You saw the screenshot, didn't you? (Assuming you got there before it was Slashdotted into oblivion)?
why are people so opposed to Flash on the net? Are they equally resentful that images have "invaded" their text-only HTML world? My website uses tables ... how evil am *I*?
I mean, if you have a legitimate complaint (crashes your browser) or something, then that's fine, but I'm getting a little sick of people who consistently respond with knee-jerk negativity against anything remotely commercial, regardless of how useful and innovative it may be.
It's 2003. You don't still drive 30 mph in a '55 Chevy, why would you be so resistent to modern browser plugins?
Anyway, personally I'm glad that OS research is finally turning to the 3D realm. It only seems like the next natural progression in computer environments.
Come on, I would have expected the answer to be immediately obvious to a Slashdot fan. Hello?!?! Do the words "subspace signal" ring any bells? Sheesh, no wonder the Vulcans' technology was so far ahead of ours.
:s/shouldn't/should
Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?
"Blogging" has graphically illustrated for me the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't."
Native Americans run their own casinos and bingo halls, up here in Canada. They're completely independent of the government.
"In addition to other rights provided by this section, a patent shall include the right to obtain a reasonable royalty from any per-son who,..."
Granted, that section deals with royalties from entities who intentionally or inadvertently copy your patent, but another section applies to making the product available to the public for "reasonable" cost. Page 44, section 35 USC 200:
"ensure that the Government obtains sufficient rights in federally supported inventions to meet the needs of the Government and protect the public against nonuse or unreasonable use of inventions;"
The key part in there is that the government is preventing patent holders from "nonuse or unreasonable use." Not selling the pills at all would be "nonuse." Charging a billion dollars a pill would be "unreasonable use."
And if you're still not convinced, then read this section:
"The term "practical application" means to manufacture in the case of a composition or product, to practice in the case of a process or method, or to operate in the case of a machine or system; and, in each case, under such conditions as to establish that the invention is being utilized and that its benefits are to the extent permitted by law or Government regulations available to the public on reasonable terms."
"Reasonable terms" meaning an accessible cost and licensing structure.
And yes, I know the pills would be more than $200. I pulled the number out of my hat. It wasn't intended to be a realistic number. But thanks for being pedantic.
Disclaimer: The following applies to Canadian/US patent law. IANAUKL.
Patents cannot be granted for things occurring naturally in nature. There have been cases where researchers discovered a cure for a disease in nature, and spent millions of dollars trying to reproduce the substance synthetically. This is because they couldn't patent the original organic material, but they *could* patent a synthetic copy.
Secondly, part of patent law states that in being granted a patent, you must make the product available to the public at reasonable cost. The company that comes up with a cure for AIDS will not be granted a patent for the cure unless it is produced in a lab, and they will not be allowed to charge $200 a pill for it.
Patents are not as unbalanced as some people seem to think. They're actually a good thing. They drive research and provide incentive to invest in new medicines, while keeping the balance of ensuring such medicines will be accessible to all, not just the rich. Particularly here in Canada, where we have universal health care.
Switching is not that bad.
Clearly, you've never used .NET. There are no open-source tools that allow you to accomplish the same breadth of tasks, with the ease and speed of VS.NET. MONO is on the right track, but is way, way behind.
I use VS.NET at work and was very surprised to learn just how easy it is to do certain things. If you're using Microsoft products from front-to-back, then whipping up an interactive web app with Windows authentication, backing on a very fast and reliable SQL database can be accomplished literally within a few minutes. It's really quite something, when you see it the first time.
Apparently, security at Los Alamos is run by the same folks who allowed the knife-weilding lunatic break into Prime Minister Chretien's home and threaten his wife for half an hour.
I was wondering who'd actually bid on
this thing on eBay.
Impossible. If even just one, single, ignorant white trash loser ponies up his almost-maxxed-out Visa for a bottle of Penis Enlarger for every 9,999 people you convince to ignore it, they'll continue.
And therein lies your folly. It's not their bandwidth; it's the school's.
The more points of view you apply to solving a problem, the quicker, and better you'll solve it.
"Better?" Maybe. "Quicker?" Definitely not. If you've even been to a single high level design review, you'd know that not only does everyone have their own opinion, but they all adamently believe theirs is the only right way to do it. And they'll fight with you and argue for hours trying to convince you that their way is better than yours, John's, and Ted's. Meanwhile, Ted can't believe that John would propose something so stupid, and John thinks your idea will be a memory hog.
So where does the "quicker" part come in?
Also, I would like to refute the idea that open source projects have all these eyes scouring them. There are a helluvalotta mothballed projects on SourceForge that looked pretty cool, but there's no interest in them. Sure, there are quite a few people actively working on the latest-and-greatest, bleeding-edge Apache mods, and kernel patches, but does anyone care about the Widget Formatter that *my* company needs? No. But throw a little money behind it, and you can have 2 or 3 developers working on it, full time, who will produce software *exactly* to your specification, not just how some programmer in New Zealand thinks it shoud work, in his opinion.
Uh-huh, and they're extraordinary, too. What's your point?
doubting the ability of anyone to walk quickly for more than a few minutes is really funny.
The poster said "hours," not "minutes."
I walk about two miles to work and back every day.
That's not "walking for hours."
I've walked 15 miles without problems before.
At 5 mph? I doubt it. Nothing you've said here refutes my original point - anyone who can sustain a pace of 5 mph for "hours" is in extraordinary shape. I never said such people don't exist, simply that such a feat is beyond the capabilities of the average American.
Really? That's actually quite a brisk clip, you know. And "hours?" Sounds like you're in extraordinary shape. This begs the question: what the heck are you doing reading Slashdot??? :)
Well, that, or you're lying.
You forgot to mention that 10 minutes prior to writing the virus, he was sh*t-faced drunk. Don't you love how fast movie-folk sober up?
Sorry, I got a little carried away. I just found it a little "over the top" that someone believes that a credit card company trying to protect their money is somehow an invasion of privacy, when the person has to willingly sign up for said card and willingly use it to make purchases.
Anyway, my point was that the banks are merely protecting their interests, and are not invading anyone's privacy by employing automatic fraud detection (here's another shocker: cell phone companies do it too).
But I'd still like to explore the sinister potential consequences of a society that is grooming its citizens to be so dependent on banks, to the degree that even the government is buying into it (in Canada, you can't pay your income tax with cash. They only take cheques). Isn't anyone else bothered by this trend? Is anyone still reading this thread? :)
They're not "profiling your consumption," because it's not your money you're spending - it's theirs. Until you pay your bill, you've spent THEIR money, and thus have every right to track what you buy and protect their money from being spent fraudulently.
If someone steals your card and charges up $10K, who do you think gets stuck with the loss? Certainly not you! So if you want them to stop watching what you buy, I'd suggest you agree to be liable for any and all fraudulent charges, without limitation.
Take a Valium, you paranoid, X-File watching, crop-circle worshipping, black-helicopter-fearing freedom-junkie. If you're so scared of it, then cut up your credit card and pay for everything with cash.
On a side note, is anyone else a little worried about how it is presently impossible to live without a bank? In Canada, stores are not obligated to accept cash. That surprised me. It seems to me that cash should be the one things stores should not be allowed to decline. If I choose to pay for my gas with cash, I should be allowed - but that right is not guaranteed in Canada. Think about all the bills you pay in a month. How many of them could be paid with cash? My car payment comes out of my bank account. So does my mortgage. None of my utilities accept cash; cheque or automatic withdrawl only (i.e., bank account required). Is it possible to carry on a normal life without a bank account in present day?
It will be used even less than the in-flight phone system. What do passengers need to have with them to take advantage of the phones? Nothing. EVERYONE on those flights were potential customers of those phones, and hardly anyone used them (mostly because everyone knows how prohibitively expensive they are, and there is usually nothing so urgent that it can't wait till you get on the ground). Now, how many of those passengers are potential customers of the Wi-Fi system? Those with laptops. That is, a very small subset of the passengers. How many of those would pay for this Wi-Fi service? I'd venture, "not very many." Thus, it is not worth it and will be a money-loser.
The noise won't hinder you from typing emails
Maybe not, but the price sure will. For 30 bucks, my trivial little email to you can wait till I hit the ground.
It is an EXTREMELY attractive feature for business travellers, who will be able to actually use those flights for productive work
They made that exact same argument for the in-flight phones, and now they're tearing those out, because they're money losers. Why should we now believe that it will work this time, for an even more exclusive service (i.e., you need to have a laptop)? Speaking as an occassional business traveler myself, those flights are a short-term haven; a chance to relax for a couple of hours inbetween hectic meetings. A chance to get some friggin' rest - not an opportunity to try and cram even more work into my 16-hour day.
it also has good entertainment value for those people who are not gonna work
... assuming they have laptops and more money than brains. A $5 magazine will "entertain" me just as well for a couple of hours.
Add in maybe some sort of in-flight portal with information and a shop system
...that costs mucho-$$$ to set up, and that again, will only be accessible to those passengers with laptops. How many of those people would actually bother visiting such an in-flight trash-shop? How many would spend enough money to make it worth the startup/maintenance capital? Can you honestly not see why this will be a money-loser? Sure, it's neat and all and has all this potential, but the bottom line is, it won't make money if people don't use it.
I am also sure the crew itself will use this (for work purposes)
Then you're clearly not very familiar with how these businesses work. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." What the airlines have now for pre-/in-/ and post-flight procedures is working fine. Why would they change it, just to take advantage of some new tech that doesn't add any more value? Will using this system "for work purposes" save them any money? Think like a CFO. "Will using this system allow me to eliminate any staff?" That's the sad but true rationale for adopting new tech like this.
It's called a business case. It's a pretty elementary concept in business.
On the other hand, the reality is that ISPs don't budget for everyone to have their connections maxxed out all the time. The only expect people to use a small fraction of the allotted bandwidth. Doing so allows them to offer generally high speeds, for a relatively low price.
Around here, a T1 connection (1.44 Mb/s) will cost you around $1000CDN per month. Why do these people seem to think that they should be able to get the same service for $29.95/month? Don't they understand WHY T1's cost so much more?
Request to see their own credit history. Demand access to the companie's books. ALL OF 'EM. Tell them you require this of all new potential employers, because you wish to ensure that what happened to the employees of Worldcom, Enron, et. al. doesn't happen to you.
They can see your financial situation when you can see theirs. Sounds fair to me.
Meet with a financial advisor, do your research, read David Chilton's "The Wealthy Barber," come up with a plan, put away 10%, pay yourself first, and set your sights on leaving the workforce forever! The sooner, the better!
You're confusing the right to free speech with the privilege of being heard.