There's *way* too much money in banner advertising for something like this to actually work. Sites would become Netscape un-friendly *very* fast, in an effort to eliminate obstacles to revenue.
Or, even worse, banners would start to come in new shapes and sizes. As it is, they're common enough to be almost subliminally recognizable, and therefore ignored. If they start to change because of banner-blocking, they're going to be just as obnoxious as when they first started to become popular.
Leave the banners alone, I say -- at least as far as the major apps go. If you really don't like them, there are several good third-party progs that will take care of them fairly effectively (including/. banners, which I no longer see).
is it just me, or is a DDoS attack *neither* hacking nor cracking? Cracking involves some sort of infiltration, overcoming obstacles, etc., whereas DDoSing basically just involves flooding.
What if we could find that place in our brains the generates the pictures we "see" in our mind's eye, and then piped it to a television screen?
Suddenly, there'd be no more need for special effects. For a good movie, you'd just need to hire someone who can stay focused for a few minutes at a time.
Or it might be terrifying to see our own thoughts. What if we did it in realtime, would we get feedback and start blowing synapses?
I was thinking about this just the either night, actually. What would life be like if we had a "direct computer interface"?
Computers are basically an easy way to do things that are hard with our default hardware. Spreadsheets are easy to grasp conceptually, but hard to do on paper. Word processing is not a strange concept, it's just that there's never been a way to implement it before.
A direct computer interface would break down the barriers even more. Wouldn't it be nice to have an address book you could access just by wanting it? All of a sudden, "mental note" would no longer be just a catch phrase.
Need directions? Browse to mapquest and look at a map, without ever taking your eyes of the road.
Waiting in the doctor's office? Well isn't it lucky that you just installed Quake 7?
Not that story this supports the case against Microsoft or anything....
I'm glad to hear that BeOS is not quite beaten yet, though. They have a wonderful product, and if it weren't for the lack of vendor support (which is partially Microsoft's fault), I'd probably be using it right now.
How many other systems come with apps that give you haiku error messages? Now that's just cool...
My local public library uses Cyber Patrol, and the last time I was there it blocked out a whole assload of sites, including my own site (*angelic halo*) about graphic design. Pure as can be.
It doesn't really matter that Cyber Patrol doesn't work, because the people implementing it are, by and large, morons. They don't read slashdot. They don't know it's crap. They just see the glossy brochures and listen to the smooth talking salesman who tells them that their problems will be over....
CyberPatrol is a joke. It's crap. But unless people keep making (increasingly public) rumblings about it, nobody is going to know that.
(As I recall, that's how Microsoft came to power....oh well...)
When my friend told me about this, I though he said that "www.eunuchs.com" was up for sale. I immediately went to the bank and gave them a convincing argument about why they should loan me to money to get the site.
Now I'm sitting here with $400,000 burning a hole in my pocket, and no website for me and my kind!
We had some software here at work that was suffering from overflows caused by new employees who were entering data "incorrectly"; i.e., the system wasn't idiotproofed.
What I did was program a new interface to the system, which had buffer overflow checking. The users entered the data, the program warned them if it was too long or the wrong format, and then when everything worked we passed it to the actual system.
A bit tricky to program in this particular case, but the idea could work very well for some systems.
Just as there is a warez subculture, there is a text subculture; The goal is to collect as much information as possible. I have found numerous ftp and Hotline sites devoted exclusively to texts -- you just have to look around for them. Once you find a few, they'll point you to others, and next thing you know you'll have information overload.
Fortunately, I had read about this site before it got crushed by the juggernaut slashdot effect.
The idea of a massively multiplayer game has been around for quite a while. Having a single world in which hundreds or thousands of people can interact is not *too* difficult, if you plan your programming carefully.
I spent about six months designing a project with a friend of mine that would do something very similar; It was an interactive online world in which anyone could participate. I found that the biggest issues that came up were the networking code, and the "action data" code (i.e., the information sent to the server describing what a person was doing). Both of these had to be tiny and fast.
We achieved some good working results, but then decided that the best way to do it would be to have a sort of distributed system, in which the processing was spread out onto the computers of anyone who was logged in. We did some preliminary work on this, and it seemed to get great results, but neither of us felt up to rewriting the damn thing as a distributed application, so we gave it up.
Aaanyway, my point is that if anyone is really interested in the subject, there's more out there than just this one. A couple of programmers could hack something together without too much trouble, as long as they are clever and creative. Too many game designers rely on legacy frameworks, instead of innovating.
It's not the government's business what Joe Schmoe is looking at when his wife's not home.
...unless it's kiddie porn or some such, in which case neither banning erotica nor promoting censorware is going to accomplish much, because
it's impossible to ban erotica, and
censorware is not difficult to bypass.
(Unless you're an innocent, non-sexual-content website, in which case you will almost certainly be blocked -- It's happened to me more than once).
Instead of making new laws, people just need to go out and enforce the ones that already exist. Find illegal porn producers and bust them...hard. Make an example. Put the fear of God into whoever was considering rounding up some teenage girls and getting out the old Polaroid camera.
Putting their heads on spikes throughout city streets might be a good start. *grin*
While having full-on Newtonian physics sounds just mad-awesome on the box, is it really that wonderful of a feature? Pseudo-Newtonian physics have been simulated fairly well for years now, and the average gamer probably can't even tell the difference.
I'm certainly waiting for the day when all movement is generated according to strict laws of physics, but until I get a 3Ghz AMD Asskickaron in my computer, I think that I'll trade smooth gameplay and lower load for that fraction of a fraction of a difference.
I don't think people are ready to give up the printed page yet. Online documentation just means more windows open, more multitasking, more system load.
The few times when I actually bother to RTFM, I almost always print it out first.
I used to go down to the local computer store, which had bins and bins of the latest shareware, all on precious 5 1/4 disks. Each one held some sort of magic that would transform my XT with Hercules graphics into a completely absorbing experience.
Video games, clones of major applications, dinky little Pascal compilers, my first version of Spacewar....
But there was a key to all of that magic. Back then, there were no auto-installing CDs. There was no "setup.exe" There would just be a single file, with that ever-familiar extension: ".ZIP"
I had been on the scene long enough to know what was up, so I not only had PKZIP/PKUNZIP installed on my 4 meg harddrive, but I even had it in the PATH.
A few keystrokes later, the magic was unlocked.
We don't know how much we owe to this great man. I genuinely mourn his passing.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, even worse, banners would start to come in new shapes and sizes. As it is, they're common enough to be almost subliminally recognizable, and therefore ignored. If they start to change because of banner-blocking, they're going to be just as obnoxious as when they first started to become popular.
Leave the banners alone, I say -- at least as far as the major apps go. If you really don't like them, there are several good third-party progs that will take care of them fairly effectively (including /. banners, which I no longer see).
Sheesh.
Am I the only person who thinks that this article didn't really say *anything*?
BeOS....definitely BeOS.
Suddenly, there'd be no more need for special effects. For a good movie, you'd just need to hire someone who can stay focused for a few minutes at a time.
Or it might be terrifying to see our own thoughts. What if we did it in realtime, would we get feedback and start blowing synapses?
Gah...shades of a clockwork orange...
Computers are basically an easy way to do things that are hard with our default hardware. Spreadsheets are easy to grasp conceptually, but hard to do on paper. Word processing is not a strange concept, it's just that there's never been a way to implement it before.
A direct computer interface would break down the barriers even more. Wouldn't it be nice to have an address book you could access just by wanting it? All of a sudden, "mental note" would no longer be just a catch phrase.
Need directions? Browse to mapquest and look at a map, without ever taking your eyes of the road.
Waiting in the doctor's office? Well isn't it lucky that you just installed Quake 7?
Either that, or people need to stop using the address books, which are for lusers anyway! :o)
Now I have to tell my girlfriend to delete all my old e-mails, because they had that subject line, and you never know!
someone should send these things to romero and tell him to make a real game :o)
I'm glad to hear that BeOS is not quite beaten yet, though. They have a wonderful product, and if it weren't for the lack of vendor support (which is partially Microsoft's fault), I'd probably be using it right now.
How many other systems come with apps that give you haiku error messages? Now that's just cool...
Good things: TOWERS OF HANOI!! Boo-ya!
I can hear the voice already: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the antislashdot party?
It doesn't really matter that Cyber Patrol doesn't work, because the people implementing it are, by and large, morons. They don't read slashdot. They don't know it's crap. They just see the glossy brochures and listen to the smooth talking salesman who tells them that their problems will be over....
CyberPatrol is a joke. It's crap. But unless people keep making (increasingly public) rumblings about it, nobody is going to know that.
(As I recall, that's how Microsoft came to power....oh well...)
Now I'm sitting here with $400,000 burning a hole in my pocket, and no website for me and my kind!
D'oh!
:o)
What I did was program a new interface to the system, which had buffer overflow checking. The users entered the data, the program warned them if it was too long or the wrong format, and then when everything worked we passed it to the actual system.
A bit tricky to program in this particular case, but the idea could work very well for some systems.
"Luke, I am your fahther...."
Search for texts, textz, text archive, etc.
The idea of a massively multiplayer game has been around for quite a while. Having a single world in which hundreds or thousands of people can interact is not *too* difficult, if you plan your programming carefully.
I spent about six months designing a project with a friend of mine that would do something very similar; It was an interactive online world in which anyone could participate. I found that the biggest issues that came up were the networking code, and the "action data" code (i.e., the information sent to the server describing what a person was doing). Both of these had to be tiny and fast.
We achieved some good working results, but then decided that the best way to do it would be to have a sort of distributed system, in which the processing was spread out onto the computers of anyone who was logged in. We did some preliminary work on this, and it seemed to get great results, but neither of us felt up to rewriting the damn thing as a distributed application, so we gave it up.
Aaanyway, my point is that if anyone is really interested in the subject, there's more out there than just this one. A couple of programmers could hack something together without too much trouble, as long as they are clever and creative. Too many game designers rely on legacy frameworks, instead of innovating.
Oh, well.... :o)
If you could have any of the three fancy new chips in your dream computer, which would it be?
Please reply with your answer. Thanks!
They don't another incident like the one in which Microsoft stole the GUI that they stole from Xerox!
*gets down off his soapbox*
I'm certainly waiting for the day when all movement is generated according to strict laws of physics, but until I get a 3Ghz AMD Asskickaron in my computer, I think that I'll trade smooth gameplay and lower load for that fraction of a fraction of a difference.
The few times when I actually bother to RTFM, I almost always print it out first.
Three cheers for paper and ink!
I used to go down to the local computer store, which had bins and bins of the latest shareware, all on precious 5 1/4 disks. Each one held some sort of magic that would transform my XT with Hercules graphics into a completely absorbing experience.
Video games, clones of major applications, dinky little Pascal compilers, my first version of Spacewar....
But there was a key to all of that magic. Back then, there were no auto-installing CDs. There was no "setup.exe" There would just be a single file, with that ever-familiar extension: ".ZIP"
I had been on the scene long enough to know what was up, so I not only had PKZIP/PKUNZIP installed on my 4 meg harddrive, but I even had it in the PATH.
A few keystrokes later, the magic was unlocked.
We don't know how much we owe to this great man. I genuinely mourn his passing.