Are there now more than a Britannica worth of Britannica-quality articles on Wikipedia?
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
There's an app for that web site
(To whoever posted the last three comments -- not that there's even the slimmest chance you'll read this -- no, I do not want to buy French sunglasses from you. Quel dommage.)
Ah, the late 90s. We knew everything. We knew that phones, TVs and PCs were going to "converge" until there was no real difference between them. We knew that the web was exploding and was going to keep exploding. "Broadband", that is, speeds faster than 56kb, was going to be everywhere. We knew that mobile computing was going to be big and that the web would necessarily look different on a phone as opposed to a big monitor with a keyboard and mouse.
Honest. I remember people talking about all this in the hallways and in the restaurants that always seemed to have at least two VCs interfacing animatedly in the booth behind you, before I left the Valley.
And we were right. Unfortunately, we were wrong about a few of things as well, like whether this was all going to happen "right now, at internet speed" or over the course of decades. And whether a company had to actually show a profit to be worth a gazillion bucks. And this idea that in order to have half a chance in this blindingly fast new world, you had to become the "first mover" no matter the cost. And buildings like this. I mean, who would want to work there?
Now that web-and-video-enabled phones with decent bandwidth are commonplace, what does the web look like on them? Well, if you actually try to use your phone's browser, it looks pretty unimpressive. Pages come up in tiny print. If you try to zoom in so you can actually read them, they may or may not reformat so as not to spill over the edge of the screen. Selecting links or navigating to the right text box can be pot luck. In all, pretty dismal.
Not that there haven't been efforts to make web pages look and feel differently if the browser is running on a phone. There certainly have been, and again, I recall some of those efforts from back in the day. But that's often not what happens. What happens instead, often, is an app.
I can read this blog on a phone browser, if I want to, and it looks OK, because Blogger has machinery in place to present it in "feed" form, without all the formatting of the full web version. This is exactly in line with the "one web site for all browsers" model, but it takes considerable extra effort. If I go to a random web site, including major ones, I may or may not arrive at something useful. At the end of the day, phones are just too different from the big-screen/mouse/keyboard setup.
To deal with the small screen, limited keyboard facilities and other peculiarities, phones have to do things significantly differently:
Ah, the late 90s. We knew everything. We knew that phones, TVs and PCs were going to "converge" until there was no real difference between them. We knew that the web was exploding and was going to keep exploding. "Broadband", that is, speeds faster than 56kb, was going to be everywhere. We knew that mobile computing was going to be big and that the web would necessarily look different on a phone as opposed to a big monitor with a keyboard and mouse.
Honest. I remember people talking about all this in the hallways and in the restaurants that always seemed to have at least two VCs interfacing animatedly in the booth behind you, before I left the Valley.
And we were right. Unfortunately, we were wrong about a few of things as well, like whether this was all going to happen "right now, at internet speed" or over the course of decades. And whether a company had to actually show a profit to be worth a gazillion bucks. And this idea that in order to have half a chance in this blindingly fast new world, you had to become the "first mover" no matter the cost. And buildings like this. I mean, who would want to work there?
Now that web-and-video-enabled phones with decent bandwidth are commonplace, what does the web look like on them? Well, if you actually try to use your phone's browser, it looks pretty unimpressive. Pages come up in tiny print. If you try to zoom in so you can actually read them, they may or may not reformat so as not to spill over the edge of the screen. Selecting links or navigating to the right text box can be pot luck. In all, pretty dismal.
Not that there haven't been efforts to make web pages look and feel differently if the browser is running on a phone. There certainly have been, and again, I recall some of those efforts from back in the day. But that's often not what happens. What happens instead, often, is an app.
I can read this blog on a phone browser, if I want to, and it looks OK, because Blogger has machinery in place to present it in "feed" form, without all the formatting of the full web version. This is exactly in line with the "one web site for all browsers" model, but it takes considerable extra effort. If I go to a random web site, including major ones, I may or may not arrive at something useful. At the end of the day, phones are just too different from the big-screen/mouse/keyboard setup.
To deal with the small screen, limited keyboard facilities and other peculiarities, phones have to do things significantly differently:
- Much less text fits on the screen and typing is often cumbersome, so graphics play a larger visual role.
- The layout changes, often radically. Elements appear and disappear depending on where attention is focused. Buttons are more common than links. Input elements like buttons and text boxes tend to have reserved chunks of real estate, as opposed to being part of a big page that scrolls.
- A touch screen favors gestures like swiping, pinch/spread for zooming out or in, long press instead of some altered flavor of click (right-click, shift-click, control-alt-meta-cokebottle-click ...), and so forth.
- Autocomplete is even more important.
- A phone is more apt to lose and regain connectivity, so it often makes sense to cache results deliberately, as opposed to counting on some generic caching layer to hold on to whatever happens to be around at the moment.
- Phones are mobile, so physical location can play a much bigger role. Not a lot of turn-by-turn GPS web pages out there.
- Phones are phones. You might switch from listening to a song to taking a call at any moment. To some extent different apps on the phone have to cooperate to make this happen smoothly.
Put this all together and it's going to be next to impossible to maintain a web site that can automatically look good on all the major browsers and all the major phone platforms. A better solution is to separate the information in the web site from its presentation and develop the PC/laptop presentation more or less separately from the phone presentation.
That explains why a good portion of apps are essentially web sites redone for the phone. As long as the separation is done reasonably cleanly, this is the right call. A weather web site and a weather phone app ideally share the same raw weather information, and probably a fair bit of common elements like icons for "sunny" and "fair to partly cloudy", but the web designer doesn't need to figure out how to recognize and handle a swipe gesture and the phone designer can dispense with a lot of web markup machinery.
It took me a while to pick up on this, not because it's that hard to notice but because I'm a little slow that way. "Apps", huh? Sure are a lot of them, and a lot that sound like web sites. What's the point? Must be some sort of marketing gimmick. But of course apps are not a gimmick at all.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Old albums
A few weeks ago the Encyclopædia Britannica finally threw in the towel and, after over 200 years, stopped publishing the lovely multi-volume sets that have graced bookshelves the world over. Naturally, there has been a run on the last edition (2010). When I heard the story on the radio today there were supposed to have been no more than 800 copies left. I'd be surprised if there were any left by now.
Clearly the whole point of this run is to get at the physical volumes. The contents can be had digitally for much less. The doorstop edition is valuable for the same reason any artifact is valuable apart from any utility it may have: rarity and emotional significance.
Imagine you are rummaging through an attic trying to decide what to keep and what to throw. You run across a stash of vinyl LPs of popular hits from the 70s. Odds are most if not all of the songs can be had digitally with better sound, but that's not the point. As with the 2010 Britannica it's the physical artifact that matters. Do you like that vintage artwork on the jacket with the circular imprint of the record worn into it? Do you enjoy the tactile experience of dropping the needle on the platter, the crackle and pop of surface noise, the ritual of cleaning any wayward lint from the grooves?
Then you run across an album of photos, page after plain page of pictures tucked into little white corner-pockets, colors desaturated, edges curling. Tucked into an envelope with them are the negatives. Scan them and you probably have images of reasonable quality that you can attach to an email, share on your favorite social site and archive durably. The physical artifact is less important here. It's the actual images that matter, images you can't get anywhere else. With the bits, you could create another album as good as the original one.
That's the common question that determines what's really of interest: what can't you get anywhere else? It's not a matter of songs versus pictures or LPs versus photos. If the vinyl in the Greatest Hits album is warped and cracked and the album art is nothing special, you may as well just buy the tunes online. If the photo album is something your great Aunt put together, with cutouts and notes and decorations, you probably want the physical album as much as the images.
If the content is important, then you'll want to get it into the cloud, or at least into bits on some local disk. If the artifact is important, then the web will play less of a role.
Clearly the whole point of this run is to get at the physical volumes. The contents can be had digitally for much less. The doorstop edition is valuable for the same reason any artifact is valuable apart from any utility it may have: rarity and emotional significance.
Imagine you are rummaging through an attic trying to decide what to keep and what to throw. You run across a stash of vinyl LPs of popular hits from the 70s. Odds are most if not all of the songs can be had digitally with better sound, but that's not the point. As with the 2010 Britannica it's the physical artifact that matters. Do you like that vintage artwork on the jacket with the circular imprint of the record worn into it? Do you enjoy the tactile experience of dropping the needle on the platter, the crackle and pop of surface noise, the ritual of cleaning any wayward lint from the grooves?
Then you run across an album of photos, page after plain page of pictures tucked into little white corner-pockets, colors desaturated, edges curling. Tucked into an envelope with them are the negatives. Scan them and you probably have images of reasonable quality that you can attach to an email, share on your favorite social site and archive durably. The physical artifact is less important here. It's the actual images that matter, images you can't get anywhere else. With the bits, you could create another album as good as the original one.
That's the common question that determines what's really of interest: what can't you get anywhere else? It's not a matter of songs versus pictures or LPs versus photos. If the vinyl in the Greatest Hits album is warped and cracked and the album art is nothing special, you may as well just buy the tunes online. If the photo album is something your great Aunt put together, with cutouts and notes and decorations, you probably want the physical album as much as the images.
If the content is important, then you'll want to get it into the cloud, or at least into bits on some local disk. If the artifact is important, then the web will play less of a role.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
The infinite scrollbar
It's somewhat annoying when sites decide to show, say, the first 20 items of a list on a web page and to get more you have to find the "next" button. It's nicer to bring up a list you can scroll through. As you scroll, the size and location of the scroll bar will tell you how much you've got left.
Except when it won't. Some sites -- particularly social sites, it seems -- will give you a scrolling list, but when you get near the bottom, they hit the server and bring in more items. Suddenly your scroll bar gets smaller and the space below it grows. After a while you realize that no matter how much farther you scroll, there will still be some left. But by then you're hooked. Just one more page ...
Technically, it's not a bad call. Browsers can handle pretty big scrolling lists these days, but they probably wouldn't deal well with the full list of, say, hundreds of thousands or millions. Bringing items in on demand is a nice compromise. Chances are the human doing the scrolling will grow bored long before the browser's memory limits are seriously tested, and if not it can always throw out items from the top that are now well out of sight. Score one for AJAX.
Psychologically it's pretty clever, too. The nice large scrollbar at the beginning says "Come on in! Just a little bit to look at here. Won't take too long." As noted, by the time you see what's really going on, you're drawn in.
Overall, I'm not sure I have a strong feeling about this style of widget. I guess the convenience outweighs the subtle feeling I've been played. But not by a lot.
Except when it won't. Some sites -- particularly social sites, it seems -- will give you a scrolling list, but when you get near the bottom, they hit the server and bring in more items. Suddenly your scroll bar gets smaller and the space below it grows. After a while you realize that no matter how much farther you scroll, there will still be some left. But by then you're hooked. Just one more page ...
Technically, it's not a bad call. Browsers can handle pretty big scrolling lists these days, but they probably wouldn't deal well with the full list of, say, hundreds of thousands or millions. Bringing items in on demand is a nice compromise. Chances are the human doing the scrolling will grow bored long before the browser's memory limits are seriously tested, and if not it can always throw out items from the top that are now well out of sight. Score one for AJAX.
Psychologically it's pretty clever, too. The nice large scrollbar at the beginning says "Come on in! Just a little bit to look at here. Won't take too long." As noted, by the time you see what's really going on, you're drawn in.
Overall, I'm not sure I have a strong feeling about this style of widget. I guess the convenience outweighs the subtle feeling I've been played. But not by a lot.
Monday, June 24, 2013
A note on Bitcoin foreign exchange
Bitcoin has been extremely volatile of late. That doesn't speak for its potential as a currency, though the Economist's Free Exchange blogger makes a good point: Volatility is only a problem to the extent you have to exchange with other currencies. If the virtual nation of Bitcoinia can transact its business in pure Bitcoin, then it matters much less how many dollars people think a Bitcoin is worth. Even so, the examples of volatility cited in that article, as much as 20% in a matter of weeks, are far, far below what Bitcoin has experienced over the past month or so.
In any case, we're far from such a point. There don't seem to be a lot of places where goods or services are priced purely in Bitcoin. Rather, the real price is in some reserve currency and the Bitcoin price is based on the going rate. For at least some period of time, transacting in Bitcoin will generally involve converting to and from reserve currencies. Bitcoin foreign exchange, if you will.
That's a bit of a problem. To use one of the several existing Bitcoin exchanges, you have to provide an account in conventional currency, subject to conventional banking regulations and so forth, which is pretty much the opposite of what Bitcoin is supposed to accomplish. Besides that, having a single point of failure that can bog down or fall over at any point (and is more likely to just when the need for it is most urgent), seems silly. Finally, I've seen complaints that exchanges can tend to charge fairly heavy transaction or withdrawal fees, which Bitcoin is supposed to eliminate. Can we do better?
It shouldn't be a problem to track bids, offers and trades in a distributed manner. Bitcoin already does much the same with its blockchain, and there are various flavors of distributed hash table running around. I'm sure someone could come up with something.
The bigger problem, I think, is escrow, since this is all supposed to be pseudonymous. Suppose I call myself Mr. Blue and I own a Bitcoin wallet. Ms. Green is willing to give me $X for one of my Bitcoins. We can both make sure the world knows this without going through a central exchange.
But how do we actually settle the trade? I need to give Ms. Green one Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes that easy. I initiate a transfer and few minutes to an hour later the Bitcoin world agrees that that Bitcoin is hers (or, more precisely, is now in the wallet whose identity she gave). Ms. Green then disappears and I'm one Bitcoin poorer.
To make this work, Ms. Green needs to put $X in a safe place. At that point, the dollars are no longer hers, but neither are they mine. When the Bitcoin transfer settles, and only then, I get access to the dollars and transfer them to my account.
What we need, then, is is a way of moving currency from one conventional bank account to another, securely, anonymously and cheaply, without having to trust any particular third party.
I don't know if that's technically feasible or not, but if it is, it's not clear why we would need a virtual currency.
In any case, we're far from such a point. There don't seem to be a lot of places where goods or services are priced purely in Bitcoin. Rather, the real price is in some reserve currency and the Bitcoin price is based on the going rate. For at least some period of time, transacting in Bitcoin will generally involve converting to and from reserve currencies. Bitcoin foreign exchange, if you will.
That's a bit of a problem. To use one of the several existing Bitcoin exchanges, you have to provide an account in conventional currency, subject to conventional banking regulations and so forth, which is pretty much the opposite of what Bitcoin is supposed to accomplish. Besides that, having a single point of failure that can bog down or fall over at any point (and is more likely to just when the need for it is most urgent), seems silly. Finally, I've seen complaints that exchanges can tend to charge fairly heavy transaction or withdrawal fees, which Bitcoin is supposed to eliminate. Can we do better?
It shouldn't be a problem to track bids, offers and trades in a distributed manner. Bitcoin already does much the same with its blockchain, and there are various flavors of distributed hash table running around. I'm sure someone could come up with something.
The bigger problem, I think, is escrow, since this is all supposed to be pseudonymous. Suppose I call myself Mr. Blue and I own a Bitcoin wallet. Ms. Green is willing to give me $X for one of my Bitcoins. We can both make sure the world knows this without going through a central exchange.
But how do we actually settle the trade? I need to give Ms. Green one Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes that easy. I initiate a transfer and few minutes to an hour later the Bitcoin world agrees that that Bitcoin is hers (or, more precisely, is now in the wallet whose identity she gave). Ms. Green then disappears and I'm one Bitcoin poorer.
To make this work, Ms. Green needs to put $X in a safe place. At that point, the dollars are no longer hers, but neither are they mine. When the Bitcoin transfer settles, and only then, I get access to the dollars and transfer them to my account.
What we need, then, is is a way of moving currency from one conventional bank account to another, securely, anonymously and cheaply, without having to trust any particular third party.
I don't know if that's technically feasible or not, but if it is, it's not clear why we would need a virtual currency.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
KONG Goodie Bone Dog Large Another winner.
GREAT FOR TOUGH DOGS
Another winner. This is yet another great Kong toy. For his one I break a biscuit in half and stuff it in. After three years there is no wear at all on the two I have.Note I tried the extreme model but the hole is much smaller and it is near impossible to get the treat in without it breaking apart.
Poor Quality Please save your money. This product does not stand up for your dog to chew. My Lab can destroy it in 10 minutes and i consider it unsafe due to the fact its all rubber.
Kong bone toy Kong they make the best toys for dogs that chew alot. My dog always chews on it and it still has so much life to it.
Good toy to a certain point Loved this toy since we can add treats in it. Thought Kong was durable but our 1yr old King Charles spaniel managed to chew and eat the serrated edges of the bone in one hour after receiving the bone. So hard to find toys he can not chew and destroy.
Durable and fun!! Our pup is a chewer and rather than give her endless rawhide chews that last 10 minutes we decided to buy the Goodie Bone to see if we could entertain her for a little longer. The bone itself is large well made and allnatural rubber am I the only one who loves the vanillalike smell?Either way we use this to put treats in the end and it has lasted for a while now and is holding up quite well.
Love It! I have a dog that is about 2 years old. He is small but destroys all the toys. This isn't his favorite toy but he does chew on it. This toy has outlasted any other toy that I have bought him. I love this bone. He hasn't torn it up or ripped off the edges. This toy has lasted the longest.
Durable Good toy for my 3 Italian mastiffs. Keeps them busy. My dogs are hard on toys.
Kong Bone My labradoodle puppy loves this toy quite a bit. The toy smelled a bit out of the package but a quick wash with dish detergent and a brush got rid of that. Seems like it will last quite awhile.
In love My little monster loves this thing. It's one of the few toys she hasn't managed to figure out yet so it's awesome.I don't know how it would do with larger stronger dogs but it's perfect for little ones less than 15 lbs.. I recommend using Blue Buffalo's turkey jerky treatsjust fold an entire treat in half lengthwise the cut it in half to stuff in either side.
Read more...
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Friday, June 21, 2013
Sometimes they do listen
My correspondent who complained of bank's website putting "Complete Transfer" on a button that did not, in fact, complete the transfer is happy to report that the button now says "Continue Transfer".
Yay!
Yay!
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Wikipedia tics
I'll say it again: Wikipedia is great. I use it all the time. It does its job astoundingly well, particularly given that when it was first getting started any sensible person could have told you it couldn't possibly work. Anyone can edit it? Anyone can write anything about anything? And people are going to depend on it for information on a daily basis? Riiiight.
But it does work, thanks to countless hours of effort from dedicated Wikipedians hammering out workable policies, nurturing the culture behind those polices and putting those policies into practice by editing a stupefying number of articles. It is this endless stream of repairs and improvements that keeps Wikipedia from devolving into chaos. It's a wonderful thing, but wonderful is not the same as absolutely perfect (for starters, one is achievable and the other isn't). Anyone who's read Wikipedia more than casually will inevitably have a few pet peeves. Here are some of mine (and yes, I do try to fix them when I come across them, time permitting):
But it does work, thanks to countless hours of effort from dedicated Wikipedians hammering out workable policies, nurturing the culture behind those polices and putting those policies into practice by editing a stupefying number of articles. It is this endless stream of repairs and improvements that keeps Wikipedia from devolving into chaos. It's a wonderful thing, but wonderful is not the same as absolutely perfect (for starters, one is achievable and the other isn't). Anyone who's read Wikipedia more than casually will inevitably have a few pet peeves. Here are some of mine (and yes, I do try to fix them when I come across them, time permitting):
- Link drift: Article A includes a link to article B. Article B gets merged into article C and the link is changed to point to article C -- not the section, but the whole article.
- More link drift: Article A includes a link to article B. Someone creates an article on a different meaning of B. The article for B becomes a disambiguation page, and the article on A continues to point to it.
- Digression: Article A has some connection to topic B, which people Need to Know More About. Instead of just providing a short summary and linking to the article on B, an enthusiastic editor gives the complete story of B, in nearly but not exactly the same form as in the original article (or, the digressive section moves to its own article, but the section later regrows).
- I'm really into this: An article is stuffed with unsourced Things You Didn't Know about the topic, often to the point of downright creepiness.
- Some say ... yes, but some other people say ... yes, but ... : People feel strongly about topic A. Generations of editors qualify each other's statements until the article reads like a pingpong match. Usually an effort is made to collect the clashing statements into one section, but that doesn't always keep them from escaping into the article at large.
- Actually, everybody gets this wrong: An editor makes a great point of declaring some piece of common knowledge incorrect without bothering to check if this is really the case.
- This is a very important distinction: Instead of saying something on the order of "not to be confused with [link]" or such, an editor feels that it's worth including a sentence or two on either side of some valid but not earthshaking distinction emphasizing how crucial it is (see previous item if the distinction in question is invalid)
- Take it to the discussion page, please: A discussion that ought to be lightly summarized is hashed out in excruciating detail before our eyes.
- Oh look, I can write a textbook/conference paper, too!: Editors seem to make a special effort to pepper their writing with the mannerisms of their professors or other authorities. Math articles seem particularly prone to this ("clearly ... it turns out that ...").
- My home town/band is the awesomest: Material on a place or group reads like your cousin showing you around on a visit. I actually don't mind this, so long as it's not too overboard, even though it generally runs somewhat afoul of Wikipedia's notability policy, because how else does one find out about the Anytown Moose-waxing festival or the real meaning of "incandescent oak" in that one song (don't go searching for those -- I made them up).
- This article reads like it was written by dozens of different people over the course of several years: Well, yeah. The real magic of Wikipedia is that relatively few articles read like that, particularly if they really have had a chance for dozens of different people to work on them over the course of several years.
- [One other tic occurred to me not long after I hit "Publish": Gratuitous wikification. To "wikify", in wiki parlance, is to make an ordinary term into a link to the article for that term. It's one of the things that makes wikis wikis, but sometimes people seem to go randomly overboard, occasionally with fairly odd results.]
Wikipedia's strength is in its transparency. For the most part, you can see every draft of every article if you want to, every mistake, every correction, every paragraph in need of tightening, every statement in need of a reference, every quibble, every pointless edit war -- in short, everything that a normal publication, encyclopedic or otherwise, goes to great lengths to hide. The downside is that flaws like the ones listed above are also there for all to see.
The upside is that we get Wikipedia.
The upside is that we get Wikipedia.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Multipet Look Whos Talking Cow Finally a good toy for a blind dog!
Finally a good toy for a blind dog! Finally found a toy my blind dog can find. The cow we call it moocow moos for several seconds after she activates and throws it making it easy for her to find. It's held up to everyday playing for 3 weeks now without any signs of wear so far so good. I'm back to look at the other critters in this product range. We have a babble ball but it drives me crazy.
Not as good as others I have several of the multipet look who's talking toys was disappointed with this one cow dog toy. Did not seem as though the quality was as good as the others and the sound box was sideways. I got it shifted a bit but it would not stay in place. Arrived quickly.
Another winner! I don't know what it is about the these toys that have the animal soundsbut my little dog just loves them the best. Very durable. Just too funny..
Cow Dog Toy I bought the Multipet Look Who's Talking Doy Toy to replace the one my dog had for a long time over a year. I gave it five stars because of that and that my dog really liked it and would always take it out of his toy box and take his nap with it until one day he got mad over something and chewed it apart. This one I ordered didn't last it was torn up the same day he got it. I was pretty upset because I had paid over $8.00 for it on Amazon. Then saw the same toy on Dog.Com for only $5.99. I buy a lot of dog toys off Amazon and usually they are a very good deal. The problem probably is I have one spoiled dog with three hugh boxes of toys.
So far so good My 8 month old labradoodle can chew through most toys in seconds. He has yet to gnaw this one apart. He runs around the house making it moo. I think the sound occupies him enough that he doesn't destroy it.
Fun dog toy This item appears to be well made especially for the price offered. The item is newly purchased so thelongevity cannot be assessed as yet. It was enjoyed by several small dogs. It would not hold up for medium or larger dogs.
Great doggie toy This toy is my favorite. It's adorable. But what's important is that it's also my dog's favorite. He loves the moooo sound.
No item to review I cannot review this item as the company did not send it. I'm sure it would have been a great product had I received it in the first place. I have sent numerous emails to give the company an opportunity to resolve this. VERY disappointed.
Cow toy
Love it. My greyhound Taz loves this toy fairly indistructable.Please make more I will order another soon.
Read more...
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Friday, June 14, 2013
Hedwig and the Mobile Web
I had no idea of this until I ran across it in a Sporcle quiz: Actress Hedy Lamarr, best known for her Hollywood roles in the 40s and 50s, and inspiration for Anne Hathaway's interpretation of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, was also co-owner of a patent for "spectrum hopping" technology that eventually came to be used in WiFi, Bluetooth and CDMA. The actual names on the patent are Hedy Kiesler Markey (Lamarr's legal name at the time) and avant-garde composer George Anthiel, a neighbor of hers who developed a means of controlling multiple player pianos.
This doesn't seem to be the first patent for such technology. Earlier work by Otto Blackwell et. al. uses essentially the same idea. Both use multiple frequencies, and both use a shared key to determine how to shift between frequencies. The main difference appears to be that Blackwell uses telegraph tape as a keying mechanism while Lamarr and Antheil use player piano rolls. However, there is little doubt that Lamarr's contributions to the invention were real and that the invention is significant.
It's interesting that both patents are presented as secret communication systems, as someone listening on only one frequency would only get part of the message. However, it doesn't seem like it would take long for an enemy to hit on the idea of listening on more than one frequency and combining the signals. So maybe I'm missing something. Today we use spread spectrum technology to increase bandwidth or decrease "power flux density" -- which I assume means about what it says.
It's also worth noting that Lamarr and Antheil didn't benefit significantly from their invention, which was not used in practice until after the patent had expired. Lamarr did receive stock in a wireless technology company two years before her death, but it's not clear whether that came to anything. Having made and spent millions over the course of her career, Lamarr spent much of her later years broke, and was twice arrested for shoplifting.
This doesn't seem to be the first patent for such technology. Earlier work by Otto Blackwell et. al. uses essentially the same idea. Both use multiple frequencies, and both use a shared key to determine how to shift between frequencies. The main difference appears to be that Blackwell uses telegraph tape as a keying mechanism while Lamarr and Antheil use player piano rolls. However, there is little doubt that Lamarr's contributions to the invention were real and that the invention is significant.
It's interesting that both patents are presented as secret communication systems, as someone listening on only one frequency would only get part of the message. However, it doesn't seem like it would take long for an enemy to hit on the idea of listening on more than one frequency and combining the signals. So maybe I'm missing something. Today we use spread spectrum technology to increase bandwidth or decrease "power flux density" -- which I assume means about what it says.
It's also worth noting that Lamarr and Antheil didn't benefit significantly from their invention, which was not used in practice until after the patent had expired. Lamarr did receive stock in a wireless technology company two years before her death, but it's not clear whether that came to anything. Having made and spent millions over the course of her career, Lamarr spent much of her later years broke, and was twice arrested for shoplifting.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
goDog Barnyard Buddies Lamb 24 inch Cuddly doggy toy
Maybe great for the average dog Maybe great for the average dog. I was looking for something tuff. The toy is advertised as extra durable. It took my 2yr. old boxer less than an hour to tear out one of the squeakers in the hoof. I'll keep looking for a tuffer plush toy.
My dog loves this lamb!! My dog just loves this lamb. He is a big lab so we have had to replace it before but I keep buying them because it is unstuffed and very durable. He carries it around and wants it to be with him at all times.
Pleased w/ lamb dog toy. Very pleased with the product and vendor. Toy was in excellent condition and shipped very quickly. Dog loves the toy especially the squeaker in the head. Will purchase from again.
Not for the super chewer I bought this because my 7monthold Rhodesian Ridgeback hadn't torn up her periwinkle dragon made by Go Dog Sherpa same manufacturer. Turns out Lamb Mama doesn't have the same lining as the dragon so puppy tore it apart in a few hours. Fortunately there isn't as much stuffing as other toys so there wasn't as much of a mess.
Cuddly doggy toy Great play toy as well as sleeping blanket. I love that the only stuffing is in the head so there is less destruction.
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