Right, I know that. I think you're missing the point.
As long as a user's bandwidth is good, the effect is the same, right? So if I'm hooked up to Abilene/Internet2 then I can download high-quality video without the server doing jumping-jacks to accommodate me and other users. Furthermore, if I'm using a clever protocol like BitTorrent, network performance can be close to optimal and the community of sharing actually strengthens network performance. So, improving Internet access/bandwidth worldwide and building upon/innovating protocols for sharing are much more important than worrying about streaming.
It seems to me that the only ones who should be concerned about the current state of streaming technology are the media corporations and their organs like Hulu, as well as Google (the gatekeeper of much, if not most, of the web's video). Their motivation to develop newer streaming technology is to keep video content locked up, serve up advertising, or both, with higher quality as the bait.
For those who care about freedom and don't care about the ability of NBC Universal/Comcast to restrict viewers from saving video to their computers, why would improving streaming technology be an urgent priority (as the post I was responding to suggests)? The software now available seems to suffice for things like live webcasts...there is plenty of room for improvement and real-world limitations, just like in every other area, but I just don't see any urgency here.
Let me suggest something I do think is urgent: The preservation of all the videos that are currently in Google's hands, locked up inside the YouTube and Google Video Flash players. We should be ripping these videos, archiving them, and sharing them if we care about the permanancy of our cultural artifacts.
Streaming video needs an Apache. By that, I mean a very standardized server and set of protocols for delivering files encoded in a non-proprietary, free-to-use, free-to-decode, unrestricted-in-every-imaginable-sense manner.
I have to wonder how important streaming media in Flash-based or HTML5-based players would be if the content producers (e.g. Hulu and its investors) would give up the ghost and just let us download the video in a traditional manner. To me, it seems like what you're proposing is unnecessary. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Example:
I just finished watching these videos, available in Theora or H.264. When I click on any of those links, my browser fires up the mplayer plugin for Mozilla. The videos stream, and the bulk of the work is being done by my CPU and GPU. I could just as easily not watch the video in my browser, and just download the video and open it when it finishes. Or, I could have mplayer or xine or vlc or gstreamer or who-knows-what open the video automatically in a new window when I begin downloading such a file. Would any of these ways of watching the video, which seem perfectly fine to me and put the bulk of the burden on my CPU and GPU, necessitate a new "video Apache"? Serving up video doesn't seem that different than serving up any binary file, if the users just open the files in their own client programs instead of watching through a Hulu-like web player.
...sorry, it's been a long time since I actually laughed out loud at anything on/. If BG has any vision of the future, it's the classroom scenes from Serenity.
An app that checks the web to find out if there are updates to 3rd party software you install on Windows is not anywhere as good as a package manager in a distro like Debian. That said, I'm glad there's *something* out there for Windows that searches for upgrades to non-Microsoft software on your machine, even though I assume there's some data-mining involved.
MS has actually made their search engine better than Google (the different categories and combining them together shows this, and it's greatly improved over Live search).
Seriously? I'm not sure how that's even a coherent argument. Regardless, you haven't been paying attention to any of the pay schemes, the funny inaccurate results, the problems with indexing (even when web developers have a sitemap for spiders to look at, they may have to ask in a forum so an MS employee can manually add the pages), the slowness of msnbot sometimes and the aggressiveness of msnbot other times (i.e. DoS attacks that bring down servers), the general disregard for robots.txt, and on and on. I'd provide citations but there are ample examples on the web...just use your search engine of choice;) Or maybe use Google; it's just a hunch, but I bet Bing is less likely to turn up bad press for Bing...
This story has been carried verbatim by (at least) two dozen big news outlets. But I really, really wish the study was made available when the researchers decided to speak to the press; what this story amounts to is an ad for the upcoming issue of Clinical Psychology Review. It might be important to, y'know, take a look at the data and methodology of the study before discussing its conclusions all over the Web. What good is RTFA when the primary source is currently unpublished?
Anyone else wanna see scholarly print journals replaced with something like arXiv?
Actually, in the original context , that "kill all the lawyers" line is in praise of lawyers, for they are obstacles to a tyrant's plans.
Methinks you need to read the page you link to. It asserts that the line is not in praise of lawyers:
The argument of this remark as in fact being favorable to lawyers is a marvel of sophistry, twisting of the meaning of words in unfamiliar source, disregard of the evident intent of the original author and ad hominem attack. Whoever first came up with this interpretation surely must have been a lawyer...
The audience must have doubled over in laughter at [the famous line]. Far from "eliminating those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution" or portraying lawyers as "guardians of independent thinking", it's offered as the best feature imagined of yet for utopia. It's hilarious. A very rough and simplistic modern translation would be "When I'm the King, there'll be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in every pot" "AND NO LAWYERS". It's a clearly lawyer-bashing joke...
In fact, Shakespeare used lawyers as figures of derision on several occasions...
As long as there are lawyer[s], there will be "lawyer jokes". And lawyers will show how those jokes ring true by trying to explain how such lampooning really constitutes praise for their profession, thus by example justifying the jokes more than ever.
...because giant alien robots and spacecraft are trashing a city? Oh, right. It's doesn't take place in the U.S.
Scratch that, it probably will. Aliens don't usually plan one-country invasions. Anyone wanna take bets on whether this will be better or worse than Transformers 3?
...since I know there will never be accurate data for the amount of netbooks running GNU/Linux. But at least those of us who've installed it on a netbook can have some kind of solidarity. I've rolled my own build of Ubuntu on seven netbooks for friends and family, and I'm sure there are others like me.
I have been working for a large university for almost a decade, and have a staff of student IT workers that changes from year-to-year. We use as much free software in-house as possible. Almost all, if not all, of my students are into anime/manga. Most of them run Ubuntu or another distro at home. There is much overlap between the anime/manga clubs on campus and computer/video game clubs; in fact, they throw conventions that combine those interests (and other aspects of geek culture).
Japanese entertainment is as much a part of geek culture nowadays as American comics and video games, so it's not a stretch to think otaku would be interested in Ubuntu. In fact, one of my students goes to Anime Boston every year, and I just sent him a link to this/. story.
Besides, I think it's cool to have Ubuntu manga out there, especially cost-free and under a CC license.
Here's more info on this spammer.
If slashdot blocks posts from 60.217.227.225, we'd be all set, unless these posts are being made with a proxy. If that's the case, how about blocking any posts with hrefs to coolforsale.com and flagging the UUID?
If in addition you travel with british airways, I would say a dose of Valium or Prozac and a strong whisky would do the trick.
My BA flight to Nairobi was heaven compared to my experiences with other airlines, but my luggage was lost at Heathrow. YMMV, just like with any corporation you deal with, especially in an industry as messed up as air travel. Not that I'd ever downplay the miraculous powers of a strong whisky...
I can think of a ton of ways to filter out spammers that just keep generating new UUIDs, especially if they post links to the same website and the UUIDs have that same website in their name...
Besides the obvious problems with this that I've already seen posted here...
Couldn't a user install everything from an approved repo and crash the machine by filling up all the disk space? Seems like an attack vector for denial of service attacks.
Besides, if it got out that he was forbidding warrants like this, Republicans would scream bloody murder and claim that he was putting the nation at risk to protect the rights of dirty hippies.
If you wanted to ban these warrants for evermore, and you are the president, this is the only way in the US system you can do it; the only other modality is by getting Congress to pass a law, but it's questionable he'd have the votes for it, and he'd put himself at significant political risk.
Another myth: Obama with his hands tied, not only by Republicans, not only by his own party, but also by his own staff. Obama swept into office with a ringing endorsement from the U.S. population (and much of the world) and a Democrat Congress with a filibuster-proof majority. He also picked his staff, which includes the Attorney General. Something like this is small potatoes; it would probably have taken little more than a memo to stop subpoenas like this. Take a look at what the Bush administration did with e-mails and memos, especially where the Justice Dept is concerned.
I see two possibilities: 1. Obama is not a freedom fighter and doesn't care about these types of subpoenas. 2. Obama is not a freedom fighter and is happy to suppress dissidence through methods like these subpoenas.
Also, I don't see how "keeping the next guy from doing it" would work, even if Obama were so inclined. I'm not convinced much, if anything, can stop the President and his staff from breaking the law and getting away with it. Again, the Justice Dept of the Bush administration provides plenty of examples.
There's another word for it: "absurd". There's no other way for the Obama administration to kill subpoenas like this? Cuz Obama has, um...no power over the Justice Dept, right? This is as bad as the theories that Obama was just placating white conservative voters in the election campaign, only to "unmask" himself the day after inauguration as a progressive...
I know you made it clear how silly what you were writing was, but then there's no need to entertain the idea. Unless some small part of you believes it could happen...
if the Milgram experiment taught us anything, it's that human morals are things easily set aside given the right circumstances.
If the Milgram experiment taught us anything, it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. Take a look at Erich Fromm's analysis some time:
I believe that the most important finding of Milgram's study is the strength of the reactions *against* the cruel behavior. To be sure, 65 per cent of the subjects could be "conditioned" to *behave* cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. . . The main result of Milgram's study seems to be one he does not stress: the presence of conscience in most subjects, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. Thus, while the experiment can be interpreted as another proof of the easy dehumanization of man, the subjects' reactions show rather the contrary -- the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. This suggests an important approach to the study of cruelty in real life: to consider not only cruel *behavior* but the -- often unconscious -- guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, p. 75)
On the following pages, he soundly debunks the widely-accepted conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment which, beyond being completely absurd, was a criminal act on the part of Zimbardo, IMO. That he was ever elected president of the APA is beyond me.
During the last 30 years, the brands possessing the most value (for the money) for the typical customer has changed dramatically. In 1979, heaven for the consumer was Sony audio and visual appliances and Honda cars. Now, heaven for the consumer is Panasonic audio and visual appliances and Toyota cars.
30 years from now, what will be heaven for the consumer?
Slashdot Mirror
Streaming is not downloading. At all.
Right, I know that. I think you're missing the point.
As long as a user's bandwidth is good, the effect is the same, right? So if I'm hooked up to Abilene/Internet2 then I can download high-quality video without the server doing jumping-jacks to accommodate me and other users. Furthermore, if I'm using a clever protocol like BitTorrent, network performance can be close to optimal and the community of sharing actually strengthens network performance. So, improving Internet access/bandwidth worldwide and building upon/innovating protocols for sharing are much more important than worrying about streaming.
It seems to me that the only ones who should be concerned about the current state of streaming technology are the media corporations and their organs like Hulu, as well as Google (the gatekeeper of much, if not most, of the web's video). Their motivation to develop newer streaming technology is to keep video content locked up, serve up advertising, or both, with higher quality as the bait.
For those who care about freedom and don't care about the ability of NBC Universal/Comcast to restrict viewers from saving video to their computers, why would improving streaming technology be an urgent priority (as the post I was responding to suggests)? The software now available seems to suffice for things like live webcasts...there is plenty of room for improvement and real-world limitations, just like in every other area, but I just don't see any urgency here.
Let me suggest something I do think is urgent: The preservation of all the videos that are currently in Google's hands, locked up inside the YouTube and Google Video Flash players. We should be ripping these videos, archiving them, and sharing them if we care about the permanancy of our cultural artifacts.
Streaming video needs an Apache. By that, I mean a very standardized server and set of protocols for delivering files encoded in a non-proprietary, free-to-use, free-to-decode, unrestricted-in-every-imaginable-sense manner.
I have to wonder how important streaming media in Flash-based or HTML5-based players would be if the content producers (e.g. Hulu and its investors) would give up the ghost and just let us download the video in a traditional manner. To me, it seems like what you're proposing is unnecessary. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Example:
I just finished watching these videos, available in Theora or H.264. When I click on any of those links, my browser fires up the mplayer plugin for Mozilla. The videos stream, and the bulk of the work is being done by my CPU and GPU. I could just as easily not watch the video in my browser, and just download the video and open it when it finishes. Or, I could have mplayer or xine or vlc or gstreamer or who-knows-what open the video automatically in a new window when I begin downloading such a file. Would any of these ways of watching the video, which seem perfectly fine to me and put the bulk of the burden on my CPU and GPU, necessitate a new "video Apache"? Serving up video doesn't seem that different than serving up any binary file, if the users just open the files in their own client programs instead of watching through a Hulu-like web player.
Let's not forget, Raskin is responsible for the one-button mouse :P
it's in cydia.
...or in Rock, cydia's a bit outdated.
No less a visionary than Bill Gates
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!111
...sorry, it's been a long time since I actually laughed out loud at anything on /. If BG has any vision of the future, it's the classroom scenes from Serenity.
An app that checks the web to find out if there are updates to 3rd party software you install on Windows is not anywhere as good as a package manager in a distro like Debian. That said, I'm glad there's *something* out there for Windows that searches for upgrades to non-Microsoft software on your machine, even though I assume there's some data-mining involved.
MS has actually made their search engine better than Google (the different categories and combining them together shows this, and it's greatly improved over Live search).
Seriously? I'm not sure how that's even a coherent argument. Regardless, you haven't been paying attention to any of the pay schemes, the funny inaccurate results, the problems with indexing (even when web developers have a sitemap for spiders to look at, they may have to ask in a forum so an MS employee can manually add the pages), the slowness of msnbot sometimes and the aggressiveness of msnbot other times (i.e. DoS attacks that bring down servers), the general disregard for robots.txt, and on and on. I'd provide citations but there are ample examples on the web...just use your search engine of choice ;) Or maybe use Google; it's just a hunch, but I bet Bing is less likely to turn up bad press for Bing...
differ[ence ]
:P
This story has been carried verbatim by (at least) two dozen big news outlets. But I really, really wish the study was made available when the researchers decided to speak to the press; what this story amounts to is an ad for the upcoming issue of Clinical Psychology Review. It might be important to, y'know, take a look at the data and methodology of the study before discussing its conclusions all over the Web. What good is RTFA when the primary source is currently unpublished?
Anyone else wanna see scholarly print journals replaced with something like arXiv?
Actually, in the original context , that "kill all the lawyers" line is in praise of lawyers, for they are obstacles to a tyrant's plans.
Methinks you need to read the page you link to. It asserts that the line is not in praise of lawyers:
The argument of this remark as in fact being favorable to lawyers is a marvel of sophistry, twisting of the meaning of words in unfamiliar source, disregard of the evident intent of the original author and ad hominem attack. Whoever first came up with this interpretation surely must have been a lawyer...
The audience must have doubled over in laughter at [the famous line]. Far from "eliminating those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution" or portraying lawyers as "guardians of independent thinking", it's offered as the best feature imagined of yet for utopia. It's hilarious. A very rough and simplistic modern translation would be "When I'm the King, there'll be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in every pot" "AND NO LAWYERS". It's a clearly lawyer-bashing joke...
In fact, Shakespeare used lawyers as figures of derision on several occasions...
As long as there are lawyer[s], there will be "lawyer jokes". And lawyers will show how those jokes ring true by trying to explain how such lampooning really constitutes praise for their profession, thus by example justifying the jokes more than ever.
...because giant alien robots and spacecraft are trashing a city? Oh, right. It's doesn't take place in the U.S.
Scratch that, it probably will. Aliens don't usually plan one-country invasions. Anyone wanna take bets on whether this will be better or worse than Transformers 3?
...since I know there will never be accurate data for the amount of netbooks running GNU/Linux. But at least those of us who've installed it on a netbook can have some kind of solidarity. I've rolled my own build of Ubuntu on seven netbooks for friends and family, and I'm sure there are others like me.
Facebook stays afloat by data mining and selling data. Not advertising, that's just icing on the cake.
I have been working for a large university for almost a decade, and have a staff of student IT workers that changes from year-to-year. We use as much free software in-house as possible. Almost all, if not all, of my students are into anime/manga. Most of them run Ubuntu or another distro at home. There is much overlap between the anime/manga clubs on campus and computer/video game clubs; in fact, they throw conventions that combine those interests (and other aspects of geek culture).
/. story.
Japanese entertainment is as much a part of geek culture nowadays as American comics and video games, so it's not a stretch to think otaku would be interested in Ubuntu. In fact, one of my students goes to Anime Boston every year, and I just sent him a link to this
Besides, I think it's cool to have Ubuntu manga out there, especially cost-free and under a CC license.
Here's more info on this spammer. If slashdot blocks posts from 60.217.227.225, we'd be all set, unless these posts are being made with a proxy. If that's the case, how about blocking any posts with hrefs to coolforsale.com and flagging the UUID?
If in addition you travel with british airways, I would say a dose of Valium or Prozac and a strong whisky would do the trick.
My BA flight to Nairobi was heaven compared to my experiences with other airlines, but my luggage was lost at Heathrow. YMMV, just like with any corporation you deal with, especially in an industry as messed up as air travel. Not that I'd ever downplay the miraculous powers of a strong whisky...
I can think of a ton of ways to filter out spammers that just keep generating new UUIDs, especially if they post links to the same website and the UUIDs have that same website in their name...
Besides the obvious problems with this that I've already seen posted here... Couldn't a user install everything from an approved repo and crash the machine by filling up all the disk space? Seems like an attack vector for denial of service attacks.
I read the title in my RSS feed and assumed it would be about 4chan :P
Besides, if it got out that he was forbidding warrants like this, Republicans would scream bloody murder and claim that he was putting the nation at risk to protect the rights of dirty hippies.
If you wanted to ban these warrants for evermore, and you are the president, this is the only way in the US system you can do it; the only other modality is by getting Congress to pass a law, but it's questionable he'd have the votes for it, and he'd put himself at significant political risk.
Another myth: Obama with his hands tied, not only by Republicans, not only by his own party, but also by his own staff. Obama swept into office with a ringing endorsement from the U.S. population (and much of the world) and a Democrat Congress with a filibuster-proof majority. He also picked his staff, which includes the Attorney General. Something like this is small potatoes; it would probably have taken little more than a memo to stop subpoenas like this. Take a look at what the Bush administration did with e-mails and memos, especially where the Justice Dept is concerned.
:P
I see two possibilities:
1. Obama is not a freedom fighter and doesn't care about these types of subpoenas.
2. Obama is not a freedom fighter and is happy to suppress dissidence through methods like these subpoenas.
Also, I don't see how "keeping the next guy from doing it" would work, even if Obama were so inclined. I'm not convinced much, if anything, can stop the President and his staff from breaking the law and getting away with it. Again, the Justice Dept of the Bush administration provides plenty of examples.
But, by God, I hope you're right
It's a long shot and a conspiracy theory, though.
There's another word for it: "absurd". There's no other way for the Obama administration to kill subpoenas like this? Cuz Obama has, um...no power over the Justice Dept, right? This is as bad as the theories that Obama was just placating white conservative voters in the election campaign, only to "unmask" himself the day after inauguration as a progressive...
I know you made it clear how silly what you were writing was, but then there's no need to entertain the idea. Unless some small part of you believes it could happen...
...this is the least entertaining bat story in the past day.
if the Milgram experiment taught us anything, it's that human morals are things easily set aside given the right circumstances.
If the Milgram experiment taught us anything, it's the exact opposite of what you're saying. Take a look at Erich Fromm's analysis some time:
I believe that the most important finding of Milgram's study is the strength of the reactions *against* the cruel behavior. To be sure, 65 per cent of the subjects could be "conditioned" to *behave* cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. . . The main result of Milgram's study seems to be one he does not stress: the presence of conscience in most subjects, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. Thus, while the experiment can be interpreted as another proof of the easy dehumanization of man, the subjects' reactions show rather the contrary -- the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. This suggests an important approach to the study of cruelty in real life: to consider not only cruel *behavior* but the -- often unconscious -- guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, p. 75)
On the following pages, he soundly debunks the widely-accepted conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment which, beyond being completely absurd, was a criminal act on the part of Zimbardo, IMO. That he was ever elected president of the APA is beyond me.
During the last 30 years, the brands possessing the most value (for the money) for the typical customer has changed dramatically. In 1979, heaven for the consumer was Sony audio and visual appliances and Honda cars. Now, heaven for the consumer is Panasonic audio and visual appliances and Toyota cars. 30 years from now, what will be heaven for the consumer?
Thomas L. Friedman, is that you?
You need to read up before starting a GTK/Qt flamewar.