Whatever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the Web?
It required proprietary plugins that could just display crude 3D objects and pretty much nothing else. People abused 3D in the VRML days just like noobs abuse Java applets to make lake applets. Hence it died.
Proprietary plugins like flash still thrive since among the crap (like annoying flash intros and ads) they offer plenty of useful applications not-outside-this-world, easy to implement, and the plugin is tiny, multiplatform.
VRML never had a dominant plugin and each interpreted the details of VRML in the different manner. A big no-no.
I think this is actually similar to the active detection of electrical fields that many fish can do. Sharks have these "Ampules of Lorenzini" that they use to zero in on their pre from a distance by detecting the electrical signature of muscle contractions in a prey animal.
Fish have built-in magnets?
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? As in, buying a huge neodymium magnet and goin' fishing?
FTFA: Jarrell puts it more bluntly, writing about the procedure in a BMEZine article from March: "'If you had to lose or seriously damage one of your fingers, which would it be?' This was our answer." But nobody's finger fell off, and Huffman's results were better than they'd imagined.
Other scientists should really learn from those guys.
Vista doesn't come with anymore software than XP did.
It does come with a lot more software. But if I start counting it I can hardly make it up to an extra 1GB: WinFX (.NET2, Avalon, Indigo and the rest) say 200-300MB, the new card/chess games (shouldn't be all total more than 100MB-150MB tops), improvements in desktop rendering/aero and various other improvements like new IP stack, audio subsystem and so on, say 100 MB. Calendaring application, say 10 MB. DVD writing application say 30-40MB tops. Gadgets on the sidebar: say 50 MB (graphics heavy). Various other improvements: 100MB.
That still makes below 1GB. What the hell they filled the rest with, no clue.
Video and PC games are a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. So why don't they get the attention of movies or TV?
First, who the heck concluded it doesn't get enough attention. I'd say it gets enough attention, notice the E3 coverage on Internet... And there we get to the point.
TV and Movies have been here for over 70 years, part of our culture. If something is on TV, "it gets enough attention".. Aparently TV is shown on TV, and movies are shown on TV and cinemas as well.
We're used to considering what's on TV "important". The fact that thousands of online media followed who sneezes at E3, is a lot less important.
Conclusion: we just need some more time so that Internet truly becomes a respected mainstream media to non-techies, where "important" stuff can happen. Gaming is the same. Give it more time, let the gamers grow some more.
Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.''
My question is: how does prioritizing help. If a neutral net can't handle all of this at once, how could one claim a tiered Internet CAN.
And if it's not at all about being able to handle all at once (but about blackmailing service providers), but prioritizing one over the other, which of these should fail?
The quick answer is that VOIP and police stations should have high priority and the rest can go to hell. But is this (to quote the article again) "the converged, always-on, interconnected world we've all been dreaming of".
Would you let some corporate or government entity to anonymously decide which stuff is important and which is less important? Is the stuff from those who pay more, more important?
Is Coca Cola's site more important than Pepsi's site? Is Yahoo more important than Google?
Plenty of questions, for which the answers will change with every shift of power, as people "on top" work on doing what's "best for us", since we're apparently told we don't know it ourselves.
That's an interesting twist. He uses the dictionary of OSS and piracy movements: stop using laws to protect someone's business model, Internet should be free to try new methods of doing business and so on.
Is this an attempt to appeal to the techies among us?
It's a pretty weak attempt, given that the entire "tiered" model is about preserving the big ISP-s business model (they are afraid people will use what they pay for, once), and giving them the freedom to wreck Internet and blackmail any online business for extra income (sites to pay all ISP-s for priority traffic).
The FUD about YouTube and company breaking the Internet is hilarious. We don't have one single instance of a single site breaking the "Internet". Doesn't he know the Internet is not a single entity, it's a huge assload of P2P connections, and it's quite some work to break it all at once?
"A lot of times, you can add something graphical in two minutes and the customer might wet themselves when they see it. On the other hand, you can spend two months knocking out major requirements in back-end functionality and the customer will probably ask you why they're paying you since nothing's changed in the interface."
Amen to that brother.
I just had the same experience again the other day. The "CEO" turns to me and says, "So for tha past week you've only worked on the login page?"
It *is* correct, but it's misleading to tag is "webdev specific" issue. It's same in just about any work that has design and programming phases.
Dev: "I've been working past 3 months on the script part of our 3rd person shooter game engine" Boss: "Can I see how it's shaping up?" Dev:"No, it's nothing we can demo yet, just couple of demos where a ball hits a cube and the cubes rotate and such" Boss: "You're fired"
Dev:"I've been working the past 3 months on adding heuristics to our virus scanner" Boss: "Can I see it?" Dev:"Yea, here it is, enable this checkbox" Boss:"3 months for a checkbox? You're fired"
Basically this is why a project leader has some experience in the technologies involved so you don't lead pointless and potentially catastrophic conversations like these. The team leader's job is to understand his team members needs and the resourse a task really takes, and dumb it down to the management so the management has a realistic idea of the work involved.
In other words, there are not plenty of highly technical jobs, where you can just walk to your boss and tell him: "I've been porting shit from tables to CSS past month" and expect him to have a clue.
I'll miss you, I'll especially miss the times a full-blown OS was in the range of 50MB. Vista is gonna be around 8GB (11GB with debug files in the Beta2).
Of course, I'm left with managing over 14 machines here (and it's pro bono) for a few kids centers here, and Win98 is about the only thing that runs decently on these machines.
They have a firewall and Firefox instead of IE. Firefox also drops Win98 support in the next release.
In our eternal quest for cooler and newer and neater, we're burning dollars like crazy throwing our perfectly working machines and software. When will we learn...
If you rely on team members for the above, you need to keep constant communication with them through every step of the development process--this is why it's often better for you to just learn everything.
Do I sense a problem with communication here? For every work discipline that hits maturity, you see more knowledge than one man can master perfectly alone.
This is when teams happen. Team work is essential for doing just about anything bigger and more complex (there are always exceptions that show heroic productivity, but I'm personally not like that guy who slepped 2 hours/day for a week, to produce the famous Nintendo Revolution hoax videos).
What I'd recommend is that the team members (and their leader) have a healthy amount of overlap of their knowledge (for example the client-side developer knows a little PHP/SQL, the PHP/ASP/.NET/SQL guy knows some HTML/JS), but the point of having teams is that you don't HAVE to know EVERYTHING.
Seriously, where do people get their pictures for websites?
For free from sites like sxc.hu, or for $1 from sites like istockphotos.com...
But the question is: Did they file this patent so they could sue the pants off Microsoft et al. Or, did they file the patent just for protection against a suit?
As a rule, bigger companies with actual products DO file it for defence means. But top management changes, times change, it's not out of the question that should they become really desperate and profits quickly dropping into losses... they could start suing everybody.
Don't forget it's a company, not a man. A single man has certain principles or other. A big company is in a state where major phylosophical shift can happen within days.
No longer will copiers of electronic media be referred to as 'pirates'. They are now to be escalated to terrorists. That way, the MPAA & RIAA can get federal anti terrorism money to help in their fight against these evil people.
George W. Bush held a speech regarding the progress of negotiations with little Suzy, a 12-year old girl which continues it's malicious practise of enriching her hard drive with music downloaded from P2P.
George W. Bush said "we really want to do this by peaceful means, but I'm afraid that we don't have a positive development soon, I might have to drop nucular shtuff over her house."
MS has basically stopped supporting pre-2000 so why shouldn't firefox? Anyone using their computer to browse the web with firefox should probably make sure they have 2000 or better just to keep the nasties out of their system.
You advise Firefox to do what Microsoft does?
Over here there are plenty of kid centers, they take care of the kids (age 4-10) when they're not in school and help them with homework, teach them to work with computers, math and so on.
I've refurbished myself over 14 old machines we bought second hand to equip those centers with a means of those kids using interactive educational games and browsing the Internet. They are old machines: Celeron 333, 64-128 RAM, and there's something buggy in the IDE drivers which cause the HDD to become full of logical errors if I install 2000/XP.
Those machines however operate rock-solid with Windows 98SE, which most of them shipped originally with. So I reverted to a clean Win98, put on ZoneAlarm, tweaked pkenty security settings and replaced IE with Firefox. Now those are machines that are working fine, and relatively safe for online browsing experience. But with Firefox dropping 9x support, the core of that experience breaks, thus we're left without fixes to critical bugs and improvement.
If Firefox is so about giving us ALL a better browsing experience, it'll be better that they do what they say, and not cut corners in the manner Microsoft has done.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight." is sort of hypocritical to what he is fighting for. If he were truely for a free market, then the cable companies could do whatever they wanted with their product.
Internet *IS* the market. The purpose of free market is everyone has equal access to it and the prices and supply is not limited artificially.
In that context, Internet is not a product you can do whatever you want with. Otherwise you could say every country's market is it's product, therefore whatever is done with that product is up to the country.
They make a big deal about the Gameboy retro games being more expensive than Wii's retro games will be. That makes sense, though, as the actual COST of a Wii retro game is a lot less.
No cartridge/cd No box No shipping No marketting
One more: no porting. The Wii retro games run on unified emulators, while I've heard there was a good amoutn of work done to make the retro Gameboy games actually work on a Gameboy.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the Web?
It required proprietary plugins that could just display crude 3D objects and pretty much nothing else. People abused 3D in the VRML days just like noobs abuse Java applets to make lake applets. Hence it died.
Proprietary plugins like flash still thrive since among the crap (like annoying flash intros and ads) they offer plenty of useful applications not-outside-this-world, easy to implement, and the plugin is tiny, multiplatform.
VRML never had a dominant plugin and each interpreted the details of VRML in the different manner. A big no-no.
I think this is actually similar to the active detection of electrical fields that many fish can do. Sharks have these "Ampules of Lorenzini" that they use to zero in on their pre from a distance by detecting the electrical signature of muscle contractions in a prey animal.
Fish have built-in magnets?
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? As in, buying a huge neodymium magnet and goin' fishing?
FTFA:
Jarrell puts it more bluntly, writing about the procedure in a BMEZine article from March: "'If you had to lose or seriously damage one of your fingers, which would it be?' This was our answer." But nobody's finger fell off, and Huffman's results were better than they'd imagined.
Other scientists should really learn from those guys.
Vista doesn't come with anymore software than XP did.
It does come with a lot more software. But if I start counting it I can hardly make it up to an extra 1GB: WinFX (.NET2, Avalon, Indigo and the rest) say 200-300MB, the new card/chess games (shouldn't be all total more than 100MB-150MB tops), improvements in desktop rendering/aero and various other improvements like new IP stack, audio subsystem and so on, say 100 MB. Calendaring application, say 10 MB. DVD writing application say 30-40MB tops. Gadgets on the sidebar: say 50 MB (graphics heavy). Various other improvements: 100MB.
That still makes below 1GB. What the hell they filled the rest with, no clue.
Video and PC games are a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. So why don't they get the attention of movies or TV?
First, who the heck concluded it doesn't get enough attention. I'd say it gets enough attention, notice the E3 coverage on Internet... And there we get to the point.
TV and Movies have been here for over 70 years, part of our culture. If something is on TV, "it gets enough attention".. Aparently TV is shown on TV, and movies are shown on TV and cinemas as well.
We're used to considering what's on TV "important". The fact that thousands of online media followed who sneezes at E3, is a lot less important.
Conclusion: we just need some more time so that Internet truly becomes a respected mainstream media to non-techies, where "important" stuff can happen. Gaming is the same. Give it more time, let the gamers grow some more.
rs.internic.net
Good, what do you want to tell me, besides pointing me to an invalid URL (the page you're pointing me to has moved).
Check this segment FTFA:
Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.''
My question is: how does prioritizing help. If a neutral net can't handle all of this at once, how could one claim a tiered Internet CAN.
And if it's not at all about being able to handle all at once (but about blackmailing service providers), but prioritizing one over the other, which of these should fail?
The quick answer is that VOIP and police stations should have high priority and the rest can go to hell. But is this (to quote the article again) "the converged, always-on, interconnected world we've all been dreaming of".
Would you let some corporate or government entity to anonymously decide which stuff is important and which is less important?
Is the stuff from those who pay more, more important?
Is Coca Cola's site more important than Pepsi's site? Is Yahoo more important than Google?
Plenty of questions, for which the answers will change with every shift of power, as people "on top" work on doing what's "best for us", since we're apparently told we don't know it ourselves.
That's an interesting twist. He uses the dictionary of OSS and piracy movements: stop using laws to protect someone's business model, Internet should be free to try new methods of doing business and so on.
Is this an attempt to appeal to the techies among us?
It's a pretty weak attempt, given that the entire "tiered" model is about preserving the big ISP-s business model (they are afraid people will use what they pay for, once), and giving them the freedom to wreck Internet and blackmail any online business for extra income (sites to pay all ISP-s for priority traffic).
The FUD about YouTube and company breaking the Internet is hilarious. We don't have one single instance of a single site breaking the "Internet". Doesn't he know the Internet is not a single entity, it's a huge assload of P2P connections, and it's quite some work to break it all at once?
"A lot of times, you can add something graphical in two minutes and the customer might wet themselves when they see it. On the other hand, you can spend two months knocking out major requirements in back-end functionality and the customer will probably ask you why they're paying you since nothing's changed in the interface."
Amen to that brother.
I just had the same experience again the other day. The "CEO" turns to me and says, "So for tha past week you've only worked on the login page?"
It *is* correct, but it's misleading to tag is "webdev specific" issue. It's same in just about any work that has design and programming phases.
Dev: "I've been working past 3 months on the script part of our 3rd person shooter game engine"
Boss: "Can I see how it's shaping up?"
Dev:"No, it's nothing we can demo yet, just couple of demos where a ball hits a cube and the cubes rotate and such"
Boss: "You're fired"
Dev:"I've been working the past 3 months on adding heuristics to our virus scanner"
Boss: "Can I see it?"
Dev:"Yea, here it is, enable this checkbox"
Boss:"3 months for a checkbox? You're fired"
Basically this is why a project leader has some experience in the technologies involved so you don't lead pointless and potentially catastrophic conversations like these. The team leader's job is to understand his team members needs and the resourse a task really takes, and dumb it down to the management so the management has a realistic idea of the work involved.
In other words, there are not plenty of highly technical jobs, where you can just walk to your boss and tell him: "I've been porting shit from tables to CSS past month" and expect him to have a clue.
Pretty interesting, thanks. I hope localization is not hard :).
But I'll definitely check it out.
try a linux distro on those older machines before you throw them out.
I'm afraid our educational software doesn't run well under Wine.
I'll miss you, I'll especially miss the times a full-blown OS was in the range of 50MB.
Vista is gonna be around 8GB (11GB with debug files in the Beta2).
Of course, I'm left with managing over 14 machines here (and it's pro bono) for a few kids centers here, and Win98 is about the only thing that runs decently on these machines.
They have a firewall and Firefox instead of IE. Firefox also drops Win98 support in the next release.
In our eternal quest for cooler and newer and neater, we're burning dollars like crazy throwing our perfectly working machines and software. When will we learn...
If you rely on team members for the above, you need to keep constant communication with them through every step of the development process--this is why it's often better for you to just learn everything.
...
Do I sense a problem with communication here? For every work discipline that hits maturity, you see more knowledge than one man can master perfectly alone.
This is when teams happen. Team work is essential for doing just about anything bigger and more complex (there are always exceptions that show heroic productivity, but I'm personally not like that guy who slepped 2 hours/day for a week, to produce the famous Nintendo Revolution hoax videos).
What I'd recommend is that the team members (and their leader) have a healthy amount of overlap of their knowledge (for example the client-side developer knows a little PHP/SQL, the PHP/ASP/.NET/SQL guy knows some HTML/JS), but the point of having teams is that you don't HAVE to know EVERYTHING.
Seriously, where do people get their pictures for websites?
For free from sites like sxc.hu, or for $1 from sites like istockphotos.com
Next they'll patent "fun".
That would be ok, no other console producing company seems interested in this invention.
But the question is: Did they file this patent so they could sue the pants off Microsoft et al. Or, did they file the patent just for protection against a suit?
As a rule, bigger companies with actual products DO file it for defence means. But top management changes, times change, it's not out of the question that should they become really desperate and profits quickly dropping into losses... they could start suing everybody.
Don't forget it's a company, not a man. A single man has certain principles or other. A big company is in a state where major phylosophical shift can happen within days.
This is why patents actually suck so much.
Inconsistencies when going back and forth multiple times. Finally I was stuck in black page mode. Music played throughout though.
That's the gut of 2advanced: incredible designs, but let's say they were never the sharpest programmers in class.
No longer will copiers of electronic media be referred to as 'pirates'. They are now to be escalated to terrorists. That way, the MPAA & RIAA can get federal anti terrorism money to help in their fight against these evil people.
George W. Bush held a speech regarding the progress of negotiations with little Suzy, a 12-year old girl which continues it's malicious practise of enriching her hard drive with music downloaded from P2P.
George W. Bush said "we really want to do this by peaceful means, but I'm afraid that we don't have a positive development soon, I might have to drop nucular shtuff over her house."
... suck my tiny yellow balls, Mr. Jobs!
- Nintendo's CEO
That has been discussed to death and known for years. You do it with a hidden iframe and anchor links (#blahblah). That's the gut of the whole deal.
Where the hell is the PDF? ... I do have to say that the longer Microsoft remains on this path, and refuses to comply with the law
It's pretty say to safe to say that Microsoft bashing has crossed a very ugly line, if posting a PDF is suddenly "a law" you have to comply with.
Where the hell is the PDF?
What is a PDF?
Regards, 2010 year
MS has basically stopped supporting pre-2000 so why shouldn't firefox? Anyone using their computer to browse the web with firefox should probably make sure they have 2000 or better just to keep the nasties out of their system.
You advise Firefox to do what Microsoft does?
Over here there are plenty of kid centers, they take care of the kids (age 4-10) when they're not in school and help them with homework, teach them to work with computers, math and so on.
I've refurbished myself over 14 old machines we bought second hand to equip those centers with a means of those kids using interactive educational games and browsing the Internet. They are old machines: Celeron 333, 64-128 RAM, and there's something buggy in the IDE drivers which cause the HDD to become full of logical errors if I install 2000/XP.
Those machines however operate rock-solid with Windows 98SE, which most of them shipped originally with. So I reverted to a clean Win98, put on ZoneAlarm, tweaked pkenty security settings and replaced IE with Firefox. Now those are machines that are working fine, and relatively safe for online browsing experience. But with Firefox dropping 9x support, the core of that experience breaks, thus we're left without fixes to critical bugs and improvement.
If Firefox is so about giving us ALL a better browsing experience, it'll be better that they do what they say, and not cut corners in the manner Microsoft has done.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight." is sort of hypocritical to what he is fighting for. If he were truely for a free market, then the cable companies could do whatever they wanted with their product.
Internet *IS* the market. The purpose of free market is everyone has equal access to it and the prices and supply is not limited artificially.
In that context, Internet is not a product you can do whatever you want with. Otherwise you could say every country's market is it's product, therefore whatever is done with that product is up to the country.
Oh Wales... nm.
They make a big deal about the Gameboy retro games being more expensive than Wii's retro games will be. That makes sense, though, as the actual COST of a Wii retro game is a lot less.
No cartridge/cd
No box
No shipping
No marketting
One more: no porting. The Wii retro games run on unified emulators, while I've heard there was a good amoutn of work done to make the retro Gameboy games actually work on a Gameboy.