You clearly missed the point - he was highlighting how we got into this mess by letting the unexpected pace of technological advancement catch us unawares. Thomas Watson is often attributed with saying, in the 40's, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - he probably never said this but it's not a long stretch from people's attitudes. Even in the late 60's computers were big, slow and vastly expensive, there was no real expectation that they'd ever find a place outside of big business, academia or the military. Certainly nobody seriously predicted that within their lifetime you'd be able to carry two or three of the things around on your person with ease, or that they'd become so cheap we'd essentially be happy to replace them ever 12-24 months (ala smartphones).
Even in the early 90's, when I was tinkering with these things at school, attitudes were starting to change and people were seeing mass use of computers in business and even a place for home computers, there were still plenty of people who thought this was a fad, and even more who couldn't have envisioned how popular the internet would become within even ten, let alone 20 years. If we'd over-estimated in the first instance we would be fine right now, but if you'd been the guy over-estimating way back then, you'd have been laughed out of your job with comments similar to the GP post. hindsight is a wonderful thing.
ISPs have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves. They sell ever faster services on the back of promises that it will let you stream video, then complain when people use it to... surprise surprise... stream video. It's no different to the days when they offered "unlimited downloads" then complained if anyone went over a few gigs per month. They want to sell you a service that you will never use, in the hope they can sell the same service to lots of other people who'll also never use it and then they won't actually need to provide the service. They need to wake up and smell the coffee, if they can't deliver this stuff they shouldn't promise it and they certainly shouldn't be taking our money for it.
Not so much stupid (although I don't doubt a lot of people are), it's more that these attacks are so unrelenting, a person only needs to drop their guard once, at the wrong time, to get stung. It's pretty hard for even those aware of such attack vectors (such as researchers in the area) to be perpetually vigilant.
Oh, and I should add, all of the above becomes moot the second someone writes a script to find the best deals that spoofs various user agents and picks the lowest quote on that basis.
Unless the awareness reinforces the trend. Maybe Firefox users are split between intelligent users who have made an informed choice and script kiddies who like playing with plugins. Perhaps it's integral to the process that the intelligent users are going to discover the differences and buy their insurance using Chrome, so the awareness reinforces rather than destroys the trend. Or maybe the thing was just badly scripted or the guy had some of the scripts cached and it actually doesn't make any difference.
I suspect this is as much to do with the uptake in ebook readers as any change to the search indexing. Previously, if you were searching for this book you probably had a very specific interest in it and often wanted to buy a copy, now the people searching are more likely looking for free reading material, so the ranks have adjusted to accommodate that (since "people looking for free stuff" is a much wider market than "people with interest in a particular book", so it's easy to swing the ranking in favour of the former).
I would guess (read, hope) that while the process means books which are commonly available might be handled in the quick yet destructive manner, books which are more rare or have historic significance beyond the data would be treated much more carefully (at the lower end of the scale, someone with a hand scanner maybe, at the upper end perhaps even people manually transcribing). Ultimately, though, while I think it's a crime for a book to be destroyed, if it's a choice between it mouldering away in a basement somewhere until it falls apart or Google destroying it early in the interest of preserving the data, surely it's better that the ideas rather than the physical object are preserved (I appreciate in reality it's not just a black and white either/or choice).
Alternatively, those in countries without free healthcare might be able to pay for their treatment by agreeing to have ads displayed via their implants...
I saw some footage on the news and it certainly seemed like the guy could distinguish objects to a reasonable level - he was able to point out which was the fork when various similar sized items of cutlery and other objects were laid out in front of him, and to not only read his name (okay, it was in pretty big letters, but even so pretty cool) but also spot that they had spelled it wrong (ironically they'd missed out an "i"). Early days, clearly, but even being able to perceive this level of detail after being completely blind must seem amazing.
Earlier than that - George Stratton was doing this one-hundred and twenty years ago. His experiment involved covering one eye and inverting the image in the other (the apparatus he used at the time was too heavy to do both eyes 24 hours a day). He found after 4-5 days everything looked the right way around, but if he concentrated on objects they would reverse. Other than that he could move around and operate as normal. Upon removing the device it was only a few hours until his sight returned to normal.
While they could have used a little more time to tell the story from the movie, I don't see how they could have filled two whole new seasons. There were enough filler episodes in season one for me to think we could have expected more of the same. If they had a story to tell, why drag it out - tell it in one or two seasons if that's all you've got and tell it really well. If you pull that off, you can always come back later and tell other stories in the same universe, better to keep it short and sweet than to get canned before you've had chance to get your message across. I know for a writer it must seem like a bonus being able to get a show extended over several years (hey, you know you'll be eating for those years), but is there really so little artistic integrity left that writers are always willing to sell out their big story for a few bucks, and so little intelligence that they refuse to see that's a shortcut to cancellation?
Most shows here in the UK get only six episodes per season to tell their story. Very infrequently it'll be 8 or 12 but mostly just six, which makes for some very tightly scripted story arcs. The good ones always leave you wishing the seasons were longer, but I guess that's preferable to actually having longer seasons that are full of filler episodes that don't go anywhere. Pretty much every US show I've got into in the last decade at least, no matter how much I enjoyed them, fell foul of filler at some points.
The big problem I had with Heroes was that the writers seemed to want to replicate season one, bringing together a group of unknowns towards some big finale, but as a viewer I had investment in the original characters. I wanted to see where they were going, but the only way the writers could reconcile the original characters was to neuter them in various ways (Peter loses his powers, Sylar becomes "good", etc). That and the writer's strike bringing an early close (and an early end to pretty much the only new character with any mileage) to the season meaning the first few episodes were slow and dragged out and the last few were rushed and nonsensical really didn't help. I couldn't bring myself to watch season 3 after that, I pretty much expected it to be cancelled in short order so there seemed little point getting back into it even if it was good.
Of course, once the cameras are in there it'd be foolish not to sell the feed to both markets. Whatever the true reason, it's almost certainly not going to be so they can tell the guy to remove his big hat, or the teen to stop texting. In their eyes that costs money, it doesn't make it (based on past experience, I doubt they see the connection between a positive cinema experience and return custom).
No, no, you're doing it wrong. If you tell them that, their instinct will be, "gee, we must not be making these adverts loud, flashy and annoying enough". Instead, each time pick the least offensive ad, go for the one with the slightly less annoying music/visuals/actors and maybe, over several hundred iterations, we can get to the point where all ads are just the name of the product displayed in soft grey on a plain black background for 5 seconds (at which point we tell them our favourite was the one that got cut off early by the projectionist after only 3 seconds...)
What we should do is find a photo of the head of the studi... I mean "company" behind this, print off thousands of masks of his face and hand them out to wear in cinemas. Anonymity for all.
Exactly this! The irony is, the last handful of times I actually have ventured to the cinema, I get to sit through big anti-piracy ads telling me how copied movies are low quality and have people talking, using their phones and walking back and forth to the toilet captured on them. Then I get to watch the movie (which, for me and my girlfriend, costs 50% more than just buying the DVD) and witness ALL of the things they just told me were bad about pirated movies IN REAL LIFE. Way to take out a huge advertisement highlighting all the reasons I prefer not to go to the cinema (and then make me sit through it even though I've already paid for your damn movie and am clearly not pirating it).
It depends what the incentives are. If this is coming from the cinemas themselves, you're probably right, the people working there won't care enough to watch everyone once the novelty wears off (or the people they will be watching are not the ones who they should be watching, if you catch my drift). If it's coming from elsewhere - MPAA for instance - then maybe the cinema just gets a small handout and they give the film directly to the studios, or maybe they get a bounty for spotting people recording, suddenly there's a real reason to be paying attention.
The two don't have to be mutually exclusive - MK really does seem to be a massive film boff and I'm sure this kind of thing winds him up incredibly, so if he can kill two birds with one stone, raise awareness of this nonsense and hopefully put "serious" film-makers off trying the same AND fill some air time, it's pretty much a win-win for him I'd have thought.
It's actually not a bad idea for video - and from Apple's point of view it helps gain traction for their supported flavour of codec - but unfortunately some of us still have to use Flash for non-video related functionality, whether it's building/maintaining sites that "those upstairs" insist have to have Flash embedded, or even using certain config/CMS tools that require Flash (one of the ones I regularly work with uses a Flex front-end). It's a bit misleading to say this is "Flash on the iPhone", by any stretch, it's not even Flash video on the iPhone, since the entirety of the conversion is handled by a third party before it even reaches the iPhone.
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You clearly missed the point - he was highlighting how we got into this mess by letting the unexpected pace of technological advancement catch us unawares. Thomas Watson is often attributed with saying, in the 40's, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - he probably never said this but it's not a long stretch from people's attitudes. Even in the late 60's computers were big, slow and vastly expensive, there was no real expectation that they'd ever find a place outside of big business, academia or the military. Certainly nobody seriously predicted that within their lifetime you'd be able to carry two or three of the things around on your person with ease, or that they'd become so cheap we'd essentially be happy to replace them ever 12-24 months (ala smartphones).
Even in the early 90's, when I was tinkering with these things at school, attitudes were starting to change and people were seeing mass use of computers in business and even a place for home computers, there were still plenty of people who thought this was a fad, and even more who couldn't have envisioned how popular the internet would become within even ten, let alone 20 years. If we'd over-estimated in the first instance we would be fine right now, but if you'd been the guy over-estimating way back then, you'd have been laughed out of your job with comments similar to the GP post. hindsight is a wonderful thing.
ISPs have absolutely nobody to blame but themselves. They sell ever faster services on the back of promises that it will let you stream video, then complain when people use it to... surprise surprise... stream video. It's no different to the days when they offered "unlimited downloads" then complained if anyone went over a few gigs per month. They want to sell you a service that you will never use, in the hope they can sell the same service to lots of other people who'll also never use it and then they won't actually need to provide the service. They need to wake up and smell the coffee, if they can't deliver this stuff they shouldn't promise it and they certainly shouldn't be taking our money for it.
Not so much stupid (although I don't doubt a lot of people are), it's more that these attacks are so unrelenting, a person only needs to drop their guard once, at the wrong time, to get stung. It's pretty hard for even those aware of such attack vectors (such as researchers in the area) to be perpetually vigilant.
Oh, and I should add, all of the above becomes moot the second someone writes a script to find the best deals that spoofs various user agents and picks the lowest quote on that basis.
It seems just asking for your age would be a better way of determining... well, your age.
Unless the awareness reinforces the trend. Maybe Firefox users are split between intelligent users who have made an informed choice and script kiddies who like playing with plugins. Perhaps it's integral to the process that the intelligent users are going to discover the differences and buy their insurance using Chrome, so the awareness reinforces rather than destroys the trend. Or maybe the thing was just badly scripted or the guy had some of the scripts cached and it actually doesn't make any difference.
I suspect this is as much to do with the uptake in ebook readers as any change to the search indexing. Previously, if you were searching for this book you probably had a very specific interest in it and often wanted to buy a copy, now the people searching are more likely looking for free reading material, so the ranks have adjusted to accommodate that (since "people looking for free stuff" is a much wider market than "people with interest in a particular book", so it's easy to swing the ranking in favour of the former).
I would guess (read, hope) that while the process means books which are commonly available might be handled in the quick yet destructive manner, books which are more rare or have historic significance beyond the data would be treated much more carefully (at the lower end of the scale, someone with a hand scanner maybe, at the upper end perhaps even people manually transcribing). Ultimately, though, while I think it's a crime for a book to be destroyed, if it's a choice between it mouldering away in a basement somewhere until it falls apart or Google destroying it early in the interest of preserving the data, surely it's better that the ideas rather than the physical object are preserved (I appreciate in reality it's not just a black and white either/or choice).
They probably mean he was able to differentiate seven shades of grey.
Alternatively, those in countries without free healthcare might be able to pay for their treatment by agreeing to have ads displayed via their implants...
I saw some footage on the news and it certainly seemed like the guy could distinguish objects to a reasonable level - he was able to point out which was the fork when various similar sized items of cutlery and other objects were laid out in front of him, and to not only read his name (okay, it was in pretty big letters, but even so pretty cool) but also spot that they had spelled it wrong (ironically they'd missed out an "i"). Early days, clearly, but even being able to perceive this level of detail after being completely blind must seem amazing.
Earlier than that - George Stratton was doing this one-hundred and twenty years ago. His experiment involved covering one eye and inverting the image in the other (the apparatus he used at the time was too heavy to do both eyes 24 hours a day). He found after 4-5 days everything looked the right way around, but if he concentrated on objects they would reverse. Other than that he could move around and operate as normal. Upon removing the device it was only a few hours until his sight returned to normal.
While they could have used a little more time to tell the story from the movie, I don't see how they could have filled two whole new seasons. There were enough filler episodes in season one for me to think we could have expected more of the same. If they had a story to tell, why drag it out - tell it in one or two seasons if that's all you've got and tell it really well. If you pull that off, you can always come back later and tell other stories in the same universe, better to keep it short and sweet than to get canned before you've had chance to get your message across. I know for a writer it must seem like a bonus being able to get a show extended over several years (hey, you know you'll be eating for those years), but is there really so little artistic integrity left that writers are always willing to sell out their big story for a few bucks, and so little intelligence that they refuse to see that's a shortcut to cancellation?
Most shows here in the UK get only six episodes per season to tell their story. Very infrequently it'll be 8 or 12 but mostly just six, which makes for some very tightly scripted story arcs. The good ones always leave you wishing the seasons were longer, but I guess that's preferable to actually having longer seasons that are full of filler episodes that don't go anywhere. Pretty much every US show I've got into in the last decade at least, no matter how much I enjoyed them, fell foul of filler at some points.
The big problem I had with Heroes was that the writers seemed to want to replicate season one, bringing together a group of unknowns towards some big finale, but as a viewer I had investment in the original characters. I wanted to see where they were going, but the only way the writers could reconcile the original characters was to neuter them in various ways (Peter loses his powers, Sylar becomes "good", etc). That and the writer's strike bringing an early close (and an early end to pretty much the only new character with any mileage) to the season meaning the first few episodes were slow and dragged out and the last few were rushed and nonsensical really didn't help. I couldn't bring myself to watch season 3 after that, I pretty much expected it to be cancelled in short order so there seemed little point getting back into it even if it was good.
Of course, once the cameras are in there it'd be foolish not to sell the feed to both markets. Whatever the true reason, it's almost certainly not going to be so they can tell the guy to remove his big hat, or the teen to stop texting. In their eyes that costs money, it doesn't make it (based on past experience, I doubt they see the connection between a positive cinema experience and return custom).
No, no, you're doing it wrong. If you tell them that, their instinct will be, "gee, we must not be making these adverts loud, flashy and annoying enough". Instead, each time pick the least offensive ad, go for the one with the slightly less annoying music/visuals/actors and maybe, over several hundred iterations, we can get to the point where all ads are just the name of the product displayed in soft grey on a plain black background for 5 seconds (at which point we tell them our favourite was the one that got cut off early by the projectionist after only 3 seconds...)
... which sounds like a recipe for awful, lowest-common-denominator, characterless films with no artistic vision.
So... business as usual?
What we should do is find a photo of the head of the studi... I mean "company" behind this, print off thousands of masks of his face and hand them out to wear in cinemas. Anonymity for all.
Exactly this! The irony is, the last handful of times I actually have ventured to the cinema, I get to sit through big anti-piracy ads telling me how copied movies are low quality and have people talking, using their phones and walking back and forth to the toilet captured on them. Then I get to watch the movie (which, for me and my girlfriend, costs 50% more than just buying the DVD) and witness ALL of the things they just told me were bad about pirated movies IN REAL LIFE. Way to take out a huge advertisement highlighting all the reasons I prefer not to go to the cinema (and then make me sit through it even though I've already paid for your damn movie and am clearly not pirating it).
It depends what the incentives are. If this is coming from the cinemas themselves, you're probably right, the people working there won't care enough to watch everyone once the novelty wears off (or the people they will be watching are not the ones who they should be watching, if you catch my drift). If it's coming from elsewhere - MPAA for instance - then maybe the cinema just gets a small handout and they give the film directly to the studios, or maybe they get a bounty for spotting people recording, suddenly there's a real reason to be paying attention.
The two don't have to be mutually exclusive - MK really does seem to be a massive film boff and I'm sure this kind of thing winds him up incredibly, so if he can kill two birds with one stone, raise awareness of this nonsense and hopefully put "serious" film-makers off trying the same AND fill some air time, it's pretty much a win-win for him I'd have thought.
No, they were managing that quite well for a long time before the cameras made their debut.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
It's actually not a bad idea for video - and from Apple's point of view it helps gain traction for their supported flavour of codec - but unfortunately some of us still have to use Flash for non-video related functionality, whether it's building/maintaining sites that "those upstairs" insist have to have Flash embedded, or even using certain config/CMS tools that require Flash (one of the ones I regularly work with uses a Flex front-end). It's a bit misleading to say this is "Flash on the iPhone", by any stretch, it's not even Flash video on the iPhone, since the entirety of the conversion is handled by a third party before it even reaches the iPhone.