981–990 of 1001 posts
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UPnP, Universal Plug and Play.
Yep, that's it. How useful is it in practice? I haven't ventured into those settings ever since I got my Airport Extreme.
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Internally in Google it was really, really hard to get in the Wave team. So many people felt the opportunity to show what they can and get a career boost. So, presumably, they had best Google engineers working on that product. What I want to say is an obvious thing -- stellar team doesn't imply success.
The alternative facts: maybe the great team they had did maximize their chance of success, it was just one of those 90% of "startups" that don't hit the market.
Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…
I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process. You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program wi…
This meant that you could search out a whole bunch of files you wanted, and queue them up for downloading, and whenever the sharers came back online the downloads would start and go through. These days, BitTorrent operates the same way.
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Maybe in 15 years... toddlers nowadays have so many smartphone cameras being pointed at them for their mom's Instasnapbooktwit feed, they will probably grow up being used to have lenses pointed at them.
Tbh it looks like the opposite might be happening, exactly as a reaction to the invasive approach from their exhibitionist parents who grew up before the ‘00s (when exposure was valuable and scarce). Most kids I see are moving towards technologies where recording is managed very consciously (staged ala instagram or ephemeral ala snapchat). Camera awareness has gone up, hoodies have become everyday clothing... Rather…
When they reach the age when all that is legal, the need for privacy goes down quite a bit.
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3D printing is absolutely revolutionizing a hobby of mine.
> Maker of artisinal, small-batch simulation models for the discerning infectious disease consumer. Could you talk more about what that entails? That sounds fascinating as hell.
Basically, I'm an epidemiologist, and I work on mathematical and computational models of disease spread, usually trying to respond to either clinical or policy questions.
Let me know if you want more information?
MS Silverlight. I thought the world needed a better Flash and with MS behind it and IE was still popular enough. I was a corporate C# developer so I saw everything through Microsoft. It turns out iPhone killed Flash. MS could hardly get anyone to adopt Silverlight.
1) Bad API (too complex).
2) Awkward installer.
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I can explain. On stereo you will be hard pressed by most people. The issue is where and how is everything done from recording all the way to mastering. Technically here is how it works. CDs are at 44.1khz sample rate and you record at 96khz back in 2000s, similar how video recordings are 8k for 4k or 1080p. Then when you exported your mix to be mastered it would get knocked down to 44.1khz not very noticeable in the…
But the question remains. Given Nyquist theorem and an upper limit to human ear response, what is the advantage of going over ~40kHZ? I understand you can encode more information, but decoding to higher frequencies than we can hear doesn't seem (to the novice) to be beneficial. Do we somehow 'detect' harmonics above what we can hear? Or is the extra information used to process something else differently, like the rel…
I can tell the difference with my now-old ears, if it is a good recording of real-world instruments in a common space.
That is a lot of qualifiers, but on playback you can ‘feel’ that other space.
I believe that it is because of the way that the higher frequency components of the sound interact with the environment and effectively down-transpose and affect the rest of the signal before they hit the listener’s ear.
E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
100% agree. imagine my shock when as a young technology analyst I discovered that E-Ink was a smallcap tech company in Taiwan and basically produced kindle displays, store price tags and that cool double sided phone that one time. I thought it was a huge deal when they managed to do color E-Ink. but no one cared.
I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…
Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old geezer, but that was kind of socialising was my favourite thing about the internet. It's a shame I haven't been able to experience it in over a decade. It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.