mikemol

You know, some of us like to be able to watch a large block of multimedia data multiple times without chewing through bandwidth allocation, or spending exorbitant amounts of money on a high-end DOCSIS or crap-hardware VDSL connection.

I have several Blu-Ray discs, but I've loaned them (and my PS3) to my parents until I get around to getting a BD drive for my Linux box. I do miss watching video in 720p, though; interlaced DVD is unpleasant, to say the least.

Hulu and boxee would be nice for some things, if the streaming servers for baseball games wouldn't get bogged down, or something causes a stutter or pause as bandwidth runs thin.

Also, I get poor cell signal in my new ground-floor apartment, so my $80/mo cell bill providing service to my smartphone isn't doing me any good. I switched to using Google Voice for the time being, but that doesn't well if something's hogging bandwidth. (Just because I can rate control going out, doesn't mean I can rate control what's trying to come in from the other side of that pipe.)

I wired my apartment to avoid wifi noise, but 6Mb/s DSL just isn't good enough for some common network multitasking activities. DOCSIS in apartment contexts is a horrible choice; you quickly get too many people on the same loop. VDSL may or may not be available; tech says one thing after a test, phone company's system says another. With VDSL, though, I'll get tied to a crap router with a built-in 802.1x identifying key, so I can't use my own setup.

That greatly depends on the nature of the original data. Some forms of data are already compressed, such as images. Most websites apply gzip or DEFLATE (gzip is built on DEFLATE) compression serverside if your browser indicates it understands it.

Meh. I got my vanity domain back with FreeYourID. first.last.name. :)

Only because they figured out who, er...nm.

What might it cost to buy off the data to a reliable datastore? Could the format of the data be opened to let outsiders write the processing tools?

"Nothing is stopping the church from hosting their own website"

Except, possibly, finding an ISP whose TOS are more tolerant of customer content. I'm sure they exist, I just wouldn't know where to find them.

I fear that by life difficult for power users, Apple (and any vendor who follows their path) will reduce the number of power users that evolve every year--and we need power users as seeds for growing developers.

A creative developer doesn't start off with developer-grade skills, he starts off as a child(newbie), learns to walk(normal user), learns to run (leg power user), then figures out how to attach rockets to his legs without killing himself.

Windows SxS was supposed to ensure that programs would get linked to the latest version of a DLL that the program would be compatible with. There are even conditional forwarders set up for it. You could have a program that would only link against the oldest version, if it needed to.

They were very, very close to a working versioned symbols system.

Non sequitur; you can't call your actions driven by being a rational person, yet choose to exclude data points because run counter to your desired conclusion.

If you're excluding data points because they lead you away from your desired conclusion, then you're not thinking rationally, you're rationalizing.

"(boy remember when Classmates was the place to be?)"

No.

'Adaptive optics' generally means lenses and the like whose shape (and possibly other properties) varies during operation to meet current operational requirements.

Not only no on-board fuel, but no on-board propellant, either. There goes everything I learned about rockets from Heinlein. Slick!

No. Startup founders will adapt. It's what they do.

If I had to guess, it looks like it's a competition for dish presentation? So, it'd get its energy from the ego and competitiveness of the people who participate. No idea what they're looking for for a revenue model, unless they're trying to serve as a cooks' competitive photo-portfolio.

And it doesn't capture keyboard input except from known text widgets? My paranoia rests with pagewide onKey* hooks and the like. I'm not a JS guy, though, but I'd assume those are possible. That's why I was curious about total opt-out of key trappings.

For PC hardware, in-house there's a 1.8GHz Athlon running Asterisk. Out in the field, I think our lowest end is a P4 2.2GHz.

Non-PC hardware? I don't know; embedded devices all kinda blur together for me.

Sure, as long as you're aware that you're reading marketing material, and are aware of the bias that goes with that. People often are more sheeple than critical thinkers, though.

[I think] The anger is generally on the part of the critical thinkers against those exploiting sheeple. You can think as critically as you like, but that doesn't mean you won't be drowned out by those who don't.

Is it plausible to turn off all text capture, or use an 'opt-in' approach to fields and hooks, rather than an opt-out?

(edit: On the part of the site administrator, I mean.)

A point of worry. You mention tracking keyboard actions. Does that include as they're typing into text and password fields? If you're trying to avoid capturing that kind of data, how can you be sure you're filtering out, e.g. custom JS-driven text widgets?

Looks like it works now. Wish I'd taken a screenshot earlier.

FF 3.6.8 on Win7 Ultimate x64. Display at 1600x1200 @ 120dpi.

Beta signup form broken? It looks like all the input fields from "website you'd like to use" onward (including submit button/links) are missing.

In general, I think the problem breaks down this way:

1) Humans respond in intuitive, predictable ways to graphics, particularly with a greater emphasis on emotional response. (As opposed to an analytical response.)

2) All information sources have bias, and any marketing competence on the part of the infographic creator will tend to subconsciously amplify the bias of the graphic's creator.

3) Combining the creator's bias with the infographic's tendency to more easily invoke emotional responses over analytical ones results in a reaction more couched in that emotion than in logic.

IIRC, USA Today was criticized for this, decades ago.

[edited to fix concatenation of numbers to a single line.)

Scarcity is a natural property of supply, which is a natural factor of price. As a property without inherent artificial component, scarcity cannot artificially affect price without said scarcity itself being given an artificial component such as being purposefully controlled to that end.

Even if growing and selling were legalized, the cartels are essentially private in-house, in-industry armies. I expect there'd be a flare-up of violence as they attempt to intimidate legal growers into backing off.

Within a few years, though, they'd probably catch on that they can accomplish the same means via more traditional trusts and regulatory capture. They'll have to, before the market price drops through the floor, killing off their revenues.

Not throwing advocacy one way or another, just an observation on the cartels' likely follow-up response.

(pedantic) For a physical object, scarcity isn't inherently an artificially inflating factor. Enforced scarcity is a different matter. (/pedantic)

And good on them; that'd be good for my grandmother, especially now that my grandfather's old SLR has died.

There's still a demographic out there that doesn't pick up on new tech quickly, either because they can't, they won't, or they don't have time to learn.

Low-latency email carrying is awesomely variable. It's asynchronous, and I can reply quickly if I want to. If I don't want to (such as if a fast response is more a waste of time, or encouraging unnecessary queries), I can hold off for an hour or two without annoying most people.

I've been accused of turning email into instance-messaging, if the email service is low-latency enough. GMail's typical turnaround for me is under a minute, sometimes under 30 seconds, if the response doesn't need to be extensive. (It usually doesn't.)

Thanks to presence notification and expectation of synchronous communication, IM tends to be very synchronous, and almost as draining and disruptive as phone calls.

Good point. I think Microsoft calls those SKUs. (They just didn't put the same brand name on it, I suppose.)

Understood, and I think I agree with you. I was thinking in terms of larger prices (i.e. $500 on up; I tend to work with custom and specialized software in my day job.).

I suppose that's true; below a certain point, the effect of a price is pretty inelastic.