Comment Re:VR again? (Score 1) 202
Off-topic about Doom's head bob: look up a video on John Carmack walking, and you will be enlightened.
Off-topic about Doom's head bob: look up a video on John Carmack walking, and you will be enlightened.
Streaming services are dependent on the distributors supplying them with movies. First thing to know about the movie industry and streaming is that the movie industry is conservative. Second that it is very possessive about its property.
This means that the movie distributors pretty much set the terms for the streaming companies and not in a way that is in tune with the times.
They dictate the time windows that movies will be available and often also the price at which it will be available to the consumer. Movie distributors often set these the same as for rentals of physical DVDs or VHS cassettes before that.
They also mandate the use of one of a few approved DRM schemes and other restrictions, and they are not so eager to allow downloads - and they could see large buffers as being that.
Next, you should know that online streaming is not cheap for the service. The servers and the networks cost real money.
That together with the remuneration to the movie distributors means that the profit margin can actually be quite small.
It has been a couple of years since I worked in the online movie streaming business, but I would be surprised if these things changed very much.
This new institute for spying tech is not the first research institute named after Alan Turing.
The Turing Institute was a laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Glasgow, founded in 1983 and closed down in 1994.
It is designed to have much less round-trip communication between program and server which was a performance problem that plagues X.
In other cases it does not necessarily make programs more responsive, but it is designed to avoid tearing and visible redraw.
You (RMS) have said on numerous occasions that you don't use a cell phone because of privacy issues - that it can be used as a tracking device and underhandedly, for spying on its user.
What do you think of the "security-oriented" Blackphone? Secure enough for RMS?
If I were to publish my own software using a license that was like the GPL v3 except for a clause that said "This software may not be used by the military, the police or by any paramilitary or intelligence organisation, including the NSA", would that be a bad thing? If so, how and why?
(The subject line is just a joke. I'm a vegetarian and climate activist in real life and have been called "tree-hugging hippie" on more than one occasion.)
Instead of paying $1500 for Google Glass, why not make your own!
You'll need an old pair of sunglasses, a piece of cardboard, sticky tape and a felt-tip pen.
Remove the glasses from the glass frame, write "Punch Here!" on the cardboard and tape it to the upper part of the frame above the eyes. Ta da!
I don't have any old cell phones, because I don't use cell phones, and I don't want to use cell phones.
I am appalled at how cell phones have made people into zombies.
They walk the streets very slowly with eyes focused on their tiny screens, stopping in street corners, in narrow entryways, in pathways in the supermarket and sometimes suddenly in front of me. They are a nuisance.
I once saved one of these zombie-women from being run-over by a train when she while texting walked out into a railroad crossing just ahead of the falling booms ignoring the klaxons and the flashing light.
She could have died if I had not stepped in, but she just ignored that she had been in real mortal danger and continued texting.
Then there is the radiation. Science has still not concluded enough for me that cell phone radiation in the normal doses you get from a cell phone would not do me harm. On the contrary, there are more and more paper being published on the subject proving yet and yet again that cell phone radiation is harmful to brain cells of lab animals, although with much smaller heads than we have. Nerve cells get stressed and die. There are even a hypothesis that the radiation itself could cause addiction to it, although there is quite a bit of tissue in the human brain that would absorb that radiation before it would reach the centre of the brain where it would have an effect
No, I choose not to become a zombie. Thank you.
Maybe it is how jQuery is being used...
I think that any web site that relies on Javascript for basic functionality is fundamentally broken.
There is standard model for how web pages should work: it is through regular HTML and HTTP POST and GET requests. Javascript is, while useful, only an extension to HTML (so-to-speak), which should, when used, be used to enhance the user interface/user experience.
There are just too many sites out there that break the normal way of interacting with a web page through a web browser, only loading things on a single page dynamically thus breaking the use of the Back and Forward buttons, not allowing pages to be opened in new windows, etc.
Slashdot runs on SlashCode, which is open source.
The content (stories, comments and moderation) of Slashdot is user-contributed.
All that Dice Holdings really has is the domain name and the database with the user accounts.
I say we "fork" Slashdot! Let's create a new site that looks and feels like the old one.
The difficult part would be to make users migrate.
Some users will have to work on creating "stories" on the "beta" site with a link to our new site, so that they know where to migrate to. Other users can upvote those stories so that they get onto the front page.
The forked Slashdot could get its stories from "beta" site's RSS feed, at the start.
Let every First Post on Dice-Slashdot be a link to the same story on the new site.
If enough users are as committed to it as they are to complaining about the "beta" site, it can be done.
Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence. -- Dijkstra