>The basic idea is this: an Unhosted app lives on a web server and contains only source code. That source code is executed on a user’s computer and encrypts and stores data on another server. That data never passes through the app server. Therefore, the app provider doesn’t have a monopoly on your data. And since that data is encrypted, it can’t be exploited by the data host either (or at least, it probably can’t). > >The data can be hosted anywhere. “It could be in your house, it could be at your ISP or it could be at your university or workplace,” says de Jong.
It looks like Yahoo! is going to kill/merge/mangle/whatever the delicious.com bookmarking service. Hysteria! Madness!
I’ve used Delicious for over 6 years. I’ve got 3,298 bookmarks stored there, with 16,669 tags. There’s a handy dandy XML exporter that let me grab them all in one file.
Then what? I could import easily to another third party service. But it’s likely that people will migrate to different services, so the network effects from Delicious are already evaporating. And any third party service will eventually die anyway.
Jim asked how it was done, so in the spirit of sharing DIY tricks, here’s the basic steps I followed to make the TRON ASCII video.
Basically, it was tying together two separate programs, in a GUI pipe.
I grabbed the .mp4 video file from YouTube, to use as the source.
The hard work of rendering the video as ASCII art was done by the command line movie player `ASCIIMoviePlayer`. That program was a technology demo by Apple at one of the WWDCs I went to (a long time ago), and it works great. It’s been updated as the open source QuickASCII project, which is cross platform. It has some nice features added, including scaling and support for colour. Seriously. Coloured ASCII art, rendered in real time from any video file. Insane. It seems to work on any Quicktime-capable format - here’s the output of the Reverend Devilhorns animated GIF, as ASCII:
I always thought TRON (1982) would have been cooler if rendered in ASCII, since that’s what terminals of the era could do. With that, I bring you the light cycle race from TRON, processed as ASCII art:
I rewatched the original the other day. Holy crap, were glasses big in 1982.
>Of course, the same society now said to be undergoing a computer revolution has long since gotten used to “revolutions” in laundry detergents, underarm deodorants, floor waxes, and other consumer products. Exhausted in Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the image had lost much of its punch.
