I doubt those who would have the ability to implement it would do so; I would think anyone that knowledgeable would have a vested interest in the information remaining free.
Are you suggesting that technical aptitude naturally disposes one towards wanting to keep information free?
The idea that intelligence disposes one towards protecting freedoms is silly to me. While I would like to believe that anyone intelligent takes my position - freedoms should be protected over security or power - I realize this view has little basis in history. While many of the most intelligent people have pushed in for freedom, I'm sure a much larger number through humanity's history have taken authoritarian stance.
Beyond that, the knowledge you speak of - the ability to completely block access to certain information - is a very technical type of knowledge. Does that technical aptitude have any relation to one's political alignment? I doubt it.
Don't get me wrong. It would be nice if there were a stance in these matters that was the indisputably more intelligent choice, and that technical aptitude always went hand-in-hand with that type of social intelligence. But I have a feeling that those with such technical aptitude are usually put to use by those with a greater social intelligence and that their political alignments have little to do with their smarts.
No income = $0
Royalty rate = 7.5% income
7.5% * $0 = $0
It's nearly unthinkable that an agreement will be reached with these terms and no other provisions, but these are the terms the article provides. I'm sure there will be a separate provision for non-profits. But if passed in this form, it would be a GREAT thing for non-profit / no income webcasters.
This would be a wonderful change for public, non-profit, and college radio stations who broadcast on the airwaves as well as maintain a web stream. While the current web rate per song is pretty bad, it is the requirement that all songs need to be logged that is really making it difficult for these stations to keep their web streams up, since they don't often have the all-digital systems / small libraries of commercial ventures. It is almost as if the current legislation was drafted to prevent these types of stations from (legally) offering their content online.
This would blow away the reporting requirement and most of the fees for these stations. Fees could be easily calculated based on the small amount of revenue the stations generate. My only worry is that this amount might be higher than the per-song rate for commercial stations, and government loves business...
Typing "give [item] to [person]" usually resulted in the person saying "Hey, thanks a lot! But now you'll NEVER get it back!"
Could you give an example of this in a specific parser-based Sierra adventure game? I played quite a few of them and never ran into this problem. I'm asking out of curiosity, not as a challenge. I worried while playing them about doing something like this, but it never happened to me. Of course, I wasn't actively trying to make it impossible to finish the game.
I did, on the other hand, get a fair share of "You tried something we didn't think of" errors, but at least those didn't let you wander around aimlessly without any chance of progressing - although punishing player creativity may be just as bad.
It seems as if they're paying lip-service to DRM in order to satisfy record companies, whilst making no attempt to implement a secure system.
It's a sick fantasy to believe that Apple only uses DRM to satisfy record companies. The iTMS wouldn't be nearly as profitable if everyone could simply and easily share the song files they bought. There's no question that one person would pay for the song and send it to all his or her friends if there wasn't a technological restriction preventing them from doing so. Apple's store would be at least on the order of five times less profitable without it. Apple makes some nice things, but that doesn't change the situation: in running the largest online music store, Apple has an even larger stake in DRM than the record companies do.
Don't forget that Apple have made no attempt to disable the 'Burn to CD then reimport' workaround.
That's because this "workaround" doesn't pose much of a threat to their DRM endeavors. Some major drawbacks and some other possible hassles:
It's time consuming.
You lose significant quality in the second round of encoding.
Does iTunes successfully get the metadata for these CDs, or do you have to enter it manually or edit it from the CD text? I'm guess the latter...
So while you can make a digitally transferable version of the song you bought if you really want to and are willing to put in some work, it's really not a viable option for a collection. Even then, you're losing quality.
It seems as if they're paying lip-service to DRM in order to satisfy record companies, whilst making no attempt to implement a secure system.
So by not totally eliminating your ability to play the music you buy from them on what is likely the most prevalent music playback device (the CD player), Apple is only "paying lip-service" because including that ability enables a clumsy and time-consuming workaround?
When the DRM is successful at preventing copying in 98% of cases, and is significantly irritating and has drawbacks in the other 2%, I'd say Apple's doing a lot more than paying lip service. It's more like a french kiss.
It's kind of nice that there's no sense in removing information to downplay it. It's scary that there's no sense in removing information to downplay it.
While I hate large corporations ripping people off as much as the next guy, I don't think this says anything that bad about PayPal. This is my guess at what happened:
Deadspin starts PayPal account. Despite their claims to the contrary, they set it up as a non-profit, not informed or not paying attention to the fact that documentation of being a non-profit organization is required.
Much money is deposited into the account. Paypal likely doesn't take as big a cut because the fund is marked as a non-profit organization.
They try to withdraw the money. Yes, it's for a noble cause, etc., but an organization like PayPal with such strict rules because of their sheer volume of transactions can't make exceptions (often) unless the issue rises above the first few rungs of the company. Plus, it probably goes beyond PayPal to federal regulations in dealing with non-profits.
The fund starters make a big deal about it, pay whatever additional fees they would have had to pay otherwise (or maybe PayPal lets them off the hook to show how good a company they are), and all is again in balance.
So it doesn't seem the company is trying to rip anybody off or laugh over the graves of the dead. In this case.
PhonePod is actually pretty good. Or even better, PodPhone. "Pod" is probably associated with Apple far more than the "i" is, and there are plenty of Apple products without an i in the name.
It's sort of late to change it now, but by no means too late... I can see Jobs selling the new name already: "And we here at Apple are thinking so far into the future, we've decided to drop the "i" that we innovated to the industry in 1998 since we're doing much more than "i" could possibly express. Boom, it's gone. Goodbye "i", welcome LifePod. Look, it's small and shiny!" *Audience hemorrhages from too much excitement*
The value is in knowing. The more we know about the universe, the more we can make use of it.
Your statement is a bit contradictory. You present your position as if it is opposed to the previous post, but when you argue that the value of knowledge is that we can eventually use it to save ourselves, you are practically saying the same thing as the post you are responding to - that the primary goal of our research and knowledge should accomplish practical objectives. In other words, the value is in the fruits of the knowledge, not in knowing itself. The time period of these objectives just differs. Your example of escaping the planet is a problem that's a bit further down the road than AIDs and energy depletion, but you both seem to be of the opinion that the value of knowledge is in its practical applications. You think we should look further ahead, and the other poster wants to look more at the problems of the present day.
I think it would be much more interesting to look at the position that your first statement suggests - that the value is in knowing itself, or at least something a little further away from the idea that the primary value of knowing about the universe is in using it to our ends. While improving the life of its people might need to be the stated goal of a government organization to a certain point, I think expanding human knowledge and understanding could be its own reward. Yeah, the knowledge may save us some day, but does that need to be the reason we ask the questions? It seems to me that a lot of world-changing questions aren't asked in an attempt to solve a problem. They're inquiries that deeply stir us for what can seem to be no particular reason. The awe the sky inspires must have stirred humans for many ages. For the people who ask these questions, knowledge is its own reward. Sure, people may put it to use hundreds of years later, but finding answers provided a great deal of value to searchers on their quests for knowledge before others found additional value in practical applications.
I think a truly inspired scientist is probably just as interested in the means as the ends.
Building and using one of these seems like a fun and even practical hobby. Ever get frustrated at the plastic parts that break and render something useless? Now you can make replacements. Ever wonder what to get for the person who has everything? Well, I'm pretty sure you could make them a lot of neat personalized things with one of these that they'll be stumped as to where you could have found them.
This project obviously has a long way to go, but I think the comparison to early personal computers could be fair, given the huge realm of possibilities creating objects in 3D space opens.
Don't you mean 4GB? Last time I checked 256^(32/8) == 4294967296 or 4GB:/
4GB is the amount of addressable memory, but that number doesn't take into account the way Windows handles that memory. Because of the way its memory management scheme works, 32-bit Windows can only address a total of 2GB of kernel memory and 2GB of memory for a single application. With 4GB of memory, a single application could not access 3GB. Additionally, the limitation of 2GB of kernel memory poses problems for terminal servers and other applications that may use more than 2GB of kernel memory. See The 4GB Windows Memory Limit: What does it really mean? for more information.
My point in recommending the consideration of 64-bit Windows for amounts of memory over 2GB is that you may start to run into these limitations in 32-bit Windows with over 2GB of memory. If you actually have a reason for putting more than 2GB of memory in your computer, these limitations, and a 64-bit operating system, are things worth considering depending on your application.
Make a list of what XP-64 will do for you that XP won't. If there's anything on that list that really entices you, consider XP-64. If not, forget it, and go along your merry way. XP-64 is guaranteed to give you more driver problems than XP, so if there are no added benefits in using it (which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory), there's no reason for the headache.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
Why not just order them online, and know what you're getting?
Sometimes you need media immediately. Some people like to pick up media at the store. If you're going to be buying it at the store, why not get the good stuff, especially if it's the same price?
Additionally, it's not a guessing game once you know what you're looking for. If it comes in the Taiyo Yuden "That's" packaging and says "Made in Japan", it's Taiyo Yuden (unless it's a cheap imitation, which is still identifiable and not very common). People over at the media section of the CD Freaks Forum have discussed this to death for years. I will save you from hours of mostly non-productive reading by telling you that the packaging is unique to Taiyo Yuden, that fakes are not hard to spot and will not normally say "Made in Japan", and that most of the people on the CD Freaks forum, who have entirely too much time on their hands and enjoy obsessively testing CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs with many official and hacked firmwares for dozens of recorders, agree that Taiyo Yuden is the best.
I've seen Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs in a number of retail stores under various brand names. I'm hesitant to publicize my trick, but I suppose the Slashdot community should know. Here's how to spot Taiyo Yudens quickly in the store, without checking each label for "Made in Japan":
The spindles all have a unique bottom lip. Whereas most plastic spindle coverings are the same diameter from the top of the spindle to the bottom, Taiyo Yuden cases have a "lip" on the bottom of the plastic covering that starts about an inch from the bottom. The bottom of the clear plastic covering sticks out just a bit and then recesses to the diameter of the rest of the spindle. Taiyo Yudens comes in these cases no matter how they are branded, and I have never seen a spindle of discs with this bottom lip that are not Taiyo Yuden. I guess Taiyo Yuden supplies the plastic spindles as well as the branding on top of the disc.
In any case, I have had better luck with the consistency of Taiyo Yudens than any other brand of DVD+R. I'm not sure what the case is now, since I've only been using Taiyo Yudens for the past few years, but when DVD recording was first becoming affordable, the compatibility of much DVD media with various recorders was so terrible as to be useless (and endlessly frustrating). Taiyo Yuden makes quality discs, and it's always nice to spot them in the store when there's a deal going on.
I would love to see a listing of all the CSS and HTML that is fully-supported by both IE7 and Gecko.
Don't forget IE6 if your project is of any level of importance. It's got at least another two years of being significant enough to keep web designers hating themselves. If only it could die a quick death...
I can't comment on the book, but what makes A List Apart great is that it focuses on coding to standards and making IE work. It's not that hard once you spend enough nights struggling with it that you just sort of know what to attempt to get it to do. Resources like A List Apart can really give some insight into these tough problems that a serious designer faces.
Er, you've posted 23 times. You don't have anywhere near enough experience to make the kinds of claims (and dismissals) that you're making.
That's why I introduced my post with "I only recently started posting on Slashdot" - to indicate that I would be giving the perspective of someone who is new to posting here, not to give the expertise of someone's who's been posting for five years. There's a certain amount to be said about the general picture, and in reading the site for a few years and now beginning to post, my general impression is that the system achieves its purpose more than it doesn't. Yes, I would be horribly out of place to present my view here as some sort of fact, which is why I qualified my level of experience.
Which is reflective of the quality of discourse on Slashdot.
So you are claiming that by giving my impressions, as well as qualifying them with the statement that I am fairly new to posting, that I have lowered the quality of discourse on Slashdot? I will be the first to say that my observation may not have been formed from the greatest understanding of the intricacies of Slashdot, but at the same time, your comment that the moderation system is "mostly abused" does not begin to reflect my experience. Most of the bad moderation I have seen has been from the moderator either 1) not understanding the topic being discussed, or 2) reading and modding at a level that is far too superficial. Abuse indicates a malevolent purpose, and it seems to me (again, as someone fairly new to this) that most of the moderation system's problems result from ignorance, not abuse. If this is not the case, then abuse on Slashdot is a much larger problem than it seems to be from an outside perspective, which would be interesting information to know.
Kinda fun, but far from rigorous enough to be taken seriously.
This thought, on the other hand, perfectly reflects my experience of Slashdot so far.
Those few improvements could introduce some accountability and feedback into the now mostly abused meta/moderation system. Until then, Slashdot has little to teach the world about the right way to accumulate useful metadata in an untrustworthy environment.
I only recently started posting on Slashdot, but I find your claim that the moderation system is mostly abused pretty inaccurate. While your suggestions for improving the system seem like they would be useful, moderation, which is certainly not perfect, successfully enables a large amount of people to share ideas and thoughts. Usually, at least in my experience so far, the truly thoughtful and thought-provoking posts get modded up, not (only) the ones that most readers agree with. I haven't seen anything that could rightly be called abuse, although I'm sure it exists on a small scale.
To bring this back to the point of the article, the type of metadata associated with moderation is of one of the simplest types. It results in a category and a number. The process of generating that data, though, is complicated yet functional, and I would say it's as good a start as most other systems currently out there to validating metadata in a community (I'd like to see some examples to the contrary).
It's only about.5% of the way to generating truly descriptive metadata, but it does what it needs to do. Now the tagging idea...that has a long way to go.
Working with metadata from a non-trusted community is a few orders of difficulty harder than working with trusted metadata. All the examples from non-trusted user groups that I've seen are either 1) only able to track fairly simple data or 2) ambitious but disappointing. I'd put Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation in the first category. Relevance, quality, and a few kinds of description are possible, but these are fairly simple things to track. Most internet resources would require metadata that is much harder to validate to be useful.
A primary example of this that comes to my mind is the current crop of music recommendation services. The idea behind these sites is that they can, through one of various methods, recommend music to you based on what you like. I've experimented somewhat extensively with Pandora and Last.fm, and the difference in the quality of their suggestions is amazing.
Last.fm uses community data for recommendations. It tracks tags that users attach to songs and the collection of artists that each user listens to. Based on what artists you have listened to or which tags you select, it attempts to point out other artists you might like.
Pandora makes recommendations based on musical qualities. The data the service uses comes from the Music Genome Project, which paid people who have studied music to catalogue the musical qualities of songs in their database. Employees listen to songs and select which attributes are applicable to the song from a list of hundreds of attributes. To use the service, you enter some songs and artists that you like, and based on the musical attributes of those songs and artists, it recommends other songs you might like.
The results that the services provide, at least in my case, are like night and day. Last.fm's recommendations are heavily influenced by what's popular and how a common user would categorize an artist or song. They sort-of hit the right areas, but it doesn't get much better than Amazon's recommendations. Pandora's recommendations always seem to be more on target, even though it uses only a few artists or songs that you enter at the start, in contract to Last.fm, which can use my entire play history.
I guess a lot of this can be chalked up to the difference between association and relation - without some type of new innovation, it seems that community-based metadata can only be based on association, which is a far cry short of relation. Yes, it is a type of relation, but a set of data has qualities that a few simple tags from users are not going to be able to touch. It seems to me the next generation of metadata will only be possible when we can figure out a way to get the sort of data that Pandora uses from a community group. It's a daunting challenge that tagging and simple user activities like the Google Image Labeller have just started to slightly touch.
Although, since we're on that subject, why couldn't MS release an IE6 test application as a single EXE?
I don't see why every browser maker doesn't release a cross-platform stripped down version of their rendering engine for developers. Testing between Windows and Mac and even PDAs, cell phones, and other web appliances would be greatly simplified. Web design is not like some other development fields in which there's a certain hardware cost associated with getting into the game to develop for a platform. It's exactly the opposite - there's already a standard out there, and browser makers should be doing whatever it takes to have a better product - i.e. one that can display as many sites as possible. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot by making developers pay for software to test with their browsers - if you can get web designers to do your compatibility work for you, isn't that the easiest way to get your browser to display as many sites as possible? And isn't that what you're aiming for - the best possible web experience for your browser's user?
Unless you have 90% of the browser market, of course - then you can try to make money selling OS licenses so web developers can test on your browser. That's why it's surprising to see this package come from Microsoft and not something with the same concept from Apple...
Seriously, it would be a bit difficult to release a test kit for Safari w/o having most of the rest of the OS available.
You think? I have a strange hunch that the ITMS in the Windows version of iTunes uses the Safari rendering engine. I didn't put in enough effort to get it display other pages, though.
Test your sites on the W3C's validators . That's the only testing you should EVER do.
I'm hoping the parent was aiming to be modded Funny. Writing HTML and CSS that complies with web standards is easy. Making sites that render correctly in the browsers that 98% of Internet users is wherein comes one of the major challenges in web design.
My general strategy is to spend a certain amount of time writing compliant XHTML 1.1, then spending 5 times that amount of time making it work in IE. This is not atypical.
Unless you're doing a really simple site, browser checks are the mark of success. Passing the W3C validation at the end is like a ticker tape parade celebrating the fact that you complied to web standards while somehow getting it to render correctly in IE.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has announced that they have no plans to bring Virtual PC to the Intel-based Mac, so I don't imagine there would be a way to run this image on them.
Owners of shiny and semi-new G5s might still be in luck though...
What would have really been good news for web developers would have been if Microsoft had gone a bit further with the standards support and not broken a number of methods developers used to trick IE6.
That being said, reaching out a hand to the web development community like this is a great move on Microsoft's part. It will encourage developers to test for both IE6 and IE7 even if they couldn't normally run both (or either). I would imagine this would be enormously useful for Mac developers who don't want to buy a PC (as I imagine it would work for Mac Virtual PC).
On that subject, I've been wondering why Apple doesn't release a test kit for Safari. I would test against Safari even though it doesn't have a large market share. I test against Opera. I even make sure my pages degrade gracefully in Netscape 4 and IE and Netscape 3. But I'm not going to buy a Mac just to make sure my pages look okay to Mac users. I know 98% of the time Safari will display like Firefox or Opera, but there are noticeable exceptions (especially in styling forms). Wouldn't helping people verify web page compatibility be an opportunity for Apple to ensure the compatibility of their platform?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suggesting that technical aptitude naturally disposes one towards wanting to keep information free?
The idea that intelligence disposes one towards protecting freedoms is silly to me. While I would like to believe that anyone intelligent takes my position - freedoms should be protected over security or power - I realize this view has little basis in history. While many of the most intelligent people have pushed in for freedom, I'm sure a much larger number through humanity's history have taken authoritarian stance.
Beyond that, the knowledge you speak of - the ability to completely block access to certain information - is a very technical type of knowledge. Does that technical aptitude have any relation to one's political alignment? I doubt it.
Don't get me wrong. It would be nice if there were a stance in these matters that was the indisputably more intelligent choice, and that technical aptitude always went hand-in-hand with that type of social intelligence. But I have a feeling that those with such technical aptitude are usually put to use by those with a greater social intelligence and that their political alignments have little to do with their smarts.
No income = $0
Royalty rate = 7.5% income
7.5% * $0 = $0
It's nearly unthinkable that an agreement will be reached with these terms and no other provisions, but these are the terms the article provides. I'm sure there will be a separate provision for non-profits. But if passed in this form, it would be a GREAT thing for non-profit / no income webcasters.
This would be a wonderful change for public, non-profit, and college radio stations who broadcast on the airwaves as well as maintain a web stream. While the current web rate per song is pretty bad, it is the requirement that all songs need to be logged that is really making it difficult for these stations to keep their web streams up, since they don't often have the all-digital systems / small libraries of commercial ventures. It is almost as if the current legislation was drafted to prevent these types of stations from (legally) offering their content online.
This would blow away the reporting requirement and most of the fees for these stations. Fees could be easily calculated based on the small amount of revenue the stations generate. My only worry is that this amount might be higher than the per-song rate for commercial stations, and government loves business...
Could you give an example of this in a specific parser-based Sierra adventure game? I played quite a few of them and never ran into this problem. I'm asking out of curiosity, not as a challenge. I worried while playing them about doing something like this, but it never happened to me. Of course, I wasn't actively trying to make it impossible to finish the game.
I did, on the other hand, get a fair share of "You tried something we didn't think of" errors, but at least those didn't let you wander around aimlessly without any chance of progressing - although punishing player creativity may be just as bad.
It's a sick fantasy to believe that Apple only uses DRM to satisfy record companies. The iTMS wouldn't be nearly as profitable if everyone could simply and easily share the song files they bought. There's no question that one person would pay for the song and send it to all his or her friends if there wasn't a technological restriction preventing them from doing so. Apple's store would be at least on the order of five times less profitable without it. Apple makes some nice things, but that doesn't change the situation: in running the largest online music store, Apple has an even larger stake in DRM than the record companies do.
That's because this "workaround" doesn't pose much of a threat to their DRM endeavors. Some major drawbacks and some other possible hassles:
So while you can make a digitally transferable version of the song you bought if you really want to and are willing to put in some work, it's really not a viable option for a collection. Even then, you're losing quality.
It seems as if they're paying lip-service to DRM in order to satisfy record companies, whilst making no attempt to implement a secure system.So by not totally eliminating your ability to play the music you buy from them on what is likely the most prevalent music playback device (the CD player), Apple is only "paying lip-service" because including that ability enables a clumsy and time-consuming workaround?
When the DRM is successful at preventing copying in 98% of cases, and is significantly irritating and has drawbacks in the other 2%, I'd say Apple's doing a lot more than paying lip service. It's more like a french kiss.
Archived version of her clients page from 2004 - for those who like to see things with their own eyes.
It's kind of nice that there's no sense in removing information to downplay it. It's scary that there's no sense in removing information to downplay it.
While I hate large corporations ripping people off as much as the next guy, I don't think this says anything that bad about PayPal. This is my guess at what happened:
So it doesn't seem the company is trying to rip anybody off or laugh over the graves of the dead. In this case.
PhonePod is actually pretty good. Or even better, PodPhone. "Pod" is probably associated with Apple far more than the "i" is, and there are plenty of Apple products without an i in the name.
It's sort of late to change it now, but by no means too late... I can see Jobs selling the new name already: "And we here at Apple are thinking so far into the future, we've decided to drop the "i" that we innovated to the industry in 1998 since we're doing much more than "i" could possibly express. Boom, it's gone. Goodbye "i", welcome LifePod. Look, it's small and shiny!" *Audience hemorrhages from too much excitement*
The trademark information on the US Patent and Trademark Office's site
I've been curious about this one since yesterday. Apple doesn't seem to have any legal right to the name, but could they really call it anything else?
Your statement is a bit contradictory. You present your position as if it is opposed to the previous post, but when you argue that the value of knowledge is that we can eventually use it to save ourselves, you are practically saying the same thing as the post you are responding to - that the primary goal of our research and knowledge should accomplish practical objectives. In other words, the value is in the fruits of the knowledge, not in knowing itself. The time period of these objectives just differs. Your example of escaping the planet is a problem that's a bit further down the road than AIDs and energy depletion, but you both seem to be of the opinion that the value of knowledge is in its practical applications. You think we should look further ahead, and the other poster wants to look more at the problems of the present day.
I think it would be much more interesting to look at the position that your first statement suggests - that the value is in knowing itself, or at least something a little further away from the idea that the primary value of knowing about the universe is in using it to our ends. While improving the life of its people might need to be the stated goal of a government organization to a certain point, I think expanding human knowledge and understanding could be its own reward. Yeah, the knowledge may save us some day, but does that need to be the reason we ask the questions? It seems to me that a lot of world-changing questions aren't asked in an attempt to solve a problem. They're inquiries that deeply stir us for what can seem to be no particular reason. The awe the sky inspires must have stirred humans for many ages. For the people who ask these questions, knowledge is its own reward. Sure, people may put it to use hundreds of years later, but finding answers provided a great deal of value to searchers on their quests for knowledge before others found additional value in practical applications.
I think a truly inspired scientist is probably just as interested in the means as the ends.
Building and using one of these seems like a fun and even practical hobby. Ever get frustrated at the plastic parts that break and render something useless? Now you can make replacements. Ever wonder what to get for the person who has everything? Well, I'm pretty sure you could make them a lot of neat personalized things with one of these that they'll be stumped as to where you could have found them.
This project obviously has a long way to go, but I think the comparison to early personal computers could be fair, given the huge realm of possibilities creating objects in 3D space opens.
4GB is the amount of addressable memory, but that number doesn't take into account the way Windows handles that memory. Because of the way its memory management scheme works, 32-bit Windows can only address a total of 2GB of kernel memory and 2GB of memory for a single application. With 4GB of memory, a single application could not access 3GB. Additionally, the limitation of 2GB of kernel memory poses problems for terminal servers and other applications that may use more than 2GB of kernel memory. See The 4GB Windows Memory Limit: What does it really mean? for more information.
My point in recommending the consideration of 64-bit Windows for amounts of memory over 2GB is that you may start to run into these limitations in 32-bit Windows with over 2GB of memory. If you actually have a reason for putting more than 2GB of memory in your computer, these limitations, and a 64-bit operating system, are things worth considering depending on your application.
Make a list of what XP-64 will do for you that XP won't. If there's anything on that list that really entices you, consider XP-64. If not, forget it, and go along your merry way. XP-64 is guaranteed to give you more driver problems than XP, so if there are no added benefits in using it (which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory), there's no reason for the headache.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
Sometimes you need media immediately. Some people like to pick up media at the store. If you're going to be buying it at the store, why not get the good stuff, especially if it's the same price?
Additionally, it's not a guessing game once you know what you're looking for. If it comes in the Taiyo Yuden "That's" packaging and says "Made in Japan", it's Taiyo Yuden (unless it's a cheap imitation, which is still identifiable and not very common). People over at the media section of the CD Freaks Forum have discussed this to death for years. I will save you from hours of mostly non-productive reading by telling you that the packaging is unique to Taiyo Yuden, that fakes are not hard to spot and will not normally say "Made in Japan", and that most of the people on the CD Freaks forum, who have entirely too much time on their hands and enjoy obsessively testing CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs with many official and hacked firmwares for dozens of recorders, agree that Taiyo Yuden is the best.
I've seen Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs in a number of retail stores under various brand names. I'm hesitant to publicize my trick, but I suppose the Slashdot community should know. Here's how to spot Taiyo Yudens quickly in the store, without checking each label for "Made in Japan":
The spindles all have a unique bottom lip. Whereas most plastic spindle coverings are the same diameter from the top of the spindle to the bottom, Taiyo Yuden cases have a "lip" on the bottom of the plastic covering that starts about an inch from the bottom. The bottom of the clear plastic covering sticks out just a bit and then recesses to the diameter of the rest of the spindle. Taiyo Yudens comes in these cases no matter how they are branded, and I have never seen a spindle of discs with this bottom lip that are not Taiyo Yuden. I guess Taiyo Yuden supplies the plastic spindles as well as the branding on top of the disc.
In any case, I have had better luck with the consistency of Taiyo Yudens than any other brand of DVD+R. I'm not sure what the case is now, since I've only been using Taiyo Yudens for the past few years, but when DVD recording was first becoming affordable, the compatibility of much DVD media with various recorders was so terrible as to be useless (and endlessly frustrating). Taiyo Yuden makes quality discs, and it's always nice to spot them in the store when there's a deal going on.
Don't forget IE6 if your project is of any level of importance. It's got at least another two years of being significant enough to keep web designers hating themselves. If only it could die a quick death...
I can't comment on the book, but what makes A List Apart great is that it focuses on coding to standards and making IE work. It's not that hard once you spend enough nights struggling with it that you just sort of know what to attempt to get it to do. Resources like A List Apart can really give some insight into these tough problems that a serious designer faces.
That's why I introduced my post with "I only recently started posting on Slashdot" - to indicate that I would be giving the perspective of someone who is new to posting here, not to give the expertise of someone's who's been posting for five years. There's a certain amount to be said about the general picture, and in reading the site for a few years and now beginning to post, my general impression is that the system achieves its purpose more than it doesn't. Yes, I would be horribly out of place to present my view here as some sort of fact, which is why I qualified my level of experience.
Which is reflective of the quality of discourse on Slashdot.So you are claiming that by giving my impressions, as well as qualifying them with the statement that I am fairly new to posting, that I have lowered the quality of discourse on Slashdot? I will be the first to say that my observation may not have been formed from the greatest understanding of the intricacies of Slashdot, but at the same time, your comment that the moderation system is "mostly abused" does not begin to reflect my experience. Most of the bad moderation I have seen has been from the moderator either 1) not understanding the topic being discussed, or 2) reading and modding at a level that is far too superficial. Abuse indicates a malevolent purpose, and it seems to me (again, as someone fairly new to this) that most of the moderation system's problems result from ignorance, not abuse. If this is not the case, then abuse on Slashdot is a much larger problem than it seems to be from an outside perspective, which would be interesting information to know.
Kinda fun, but far from rigorous enough to be taken seriously.This thought, on the other hand, perfectly reflects my experience of Slashdot so far.
I only recently started posting on Slashdot, but I find your claim that the moderation system is mostly abused pretty inaccurate. While your suggestions for improving the system seem like they would be useful, moderation, which is certainly not perfect, successfully enables a large amount of people to share ideas and thoughts. Usually, at least in my experience so far, the truly thoughtful and thought-provoking posts get modded up, not (only) the ones that most readers agree with. I haven't seen anything that could rightly be called abuse, although I'm sure it exists on a small scale.
To bring this back to the point of the article, the type of metadata associated with moderation is of one of the simplest types. It results in a category and a number. The process of generating that data, though, is complicated yet functional, and I would say it's as good a start as most other systems currently out there to validating metadata in a community (I'd like to see some examples to the contrary).
It's only about .5% of the way to generating truly descriptive metadata, but it does what it needs to do. Now the tagging idea...that has a long way to go.
Working with metadata from a non-trusted community is a few orders of difficulty harder than working with trusted metadata. All the examples from non-trusted user groups that I've seen are either 1) only able to track fairly simple data or 2) ambitious but disappointing. I'd put Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation in the first category. Relevance, quality, and a few kinds of description are possible, but these are fairly simple things to track. Most internet resources would require metadata that is much harder to validate to be useful.
A primary example of this that comes to my mind is the current crop of music recommendation services. The idea behind these sites is that they can, through one of various methods, recommend music to you based on what you like. I've experimented somewhat extensively with Pandora and Last.fm, and the difference in the quality of their suggestions is amazing.
Last.fm uses community data for recommendations. It tracks tags that users attach to songs and the collection of artists that each user listens to. Based on what artists you have listened to or which tags you select, it attempts to point out other artists you might like.
Pandora makes recommendations based on musical qualities. The data the service uses comes from the Music Genome Project, which paid people who have studied music to catalogue the musical qualities of songs in their database. Employees listen to songs and select which attributes are applicable to the song from a list of hundreds of attributes. To use the service, you enter some songs and artists that you like, and based on the musical attributes of those songs and artists, it recommends other songs you might like.
The results that the services provide, at least in my case, are like night and day. Last.fm's recommendations are heavily influenced by what's popular and how a common user would categorize an artist or song. They sort-of hit the right areas, but it doesn't get much better than Amazon's recommendations. Pandora's recommendations always seem to be more on target, even though it uses only a few artists or songs that you enter at the start, in contract to Last.fm, which can use my entire play history.
I guess a lot of this can be chalked up to the difference between association and relation - without some type of new innovation, it seems that community-based metadata can only be based on association, which is a far cry short of relation. Yes, it is a type of relation, but a set of data has qualities that a few simple tags from users are not going to be able to touch. It seems to me the next generation of metadata will only be possible when we can figure out a way to get the sort of data that Pandora uses from a community group. It's a daunting challenge that tagging and simple user activities like the Google Image Labeller have just started to slightly touch.
I don't see why every browser maker doesn't release a cross-platform stripped down version of their rendering engine for developers. Testing between Windows and Mac and even PDAs, cell phones, and other web appliances would be greatly simplified. Web design is not like some other development fields in which there's a certain hardware cost associated with getting into the game to develop for a platform. It's exactly the opposite - there's already a standard out there, and browser makers should be doing whatever it takes to have a better product - i.e. one that can display as many sites as possible. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot by making developers pay for software to test with their browsers - if you can get web designers to do your compatibility work for you, isn't that the easiest way to get your browser to display as many sites as possible? And isn't that what you're aiming for - the best possible web experience for your browser's user?
Unless you have 90% of the browser market, of course - then you can try to make money selling OS licenses so web developers can test on your browser. That's why it's surprising to see this package come from Microsoft and not something with the same concept from Apple...
Seriously, it would be a bit difficult to release a test kit for Safari w/o having most of the rest of the OS available.You think? I have a strange hunch that the ITMS in the Windows version of iTunes uses the Safari rendering engine. I didn't put in enough effort to get it display other pages, though.
I'm hoping the parent was aiming to be modded Funny. Writing HTML and CSS that complies with web standards is easy. Making sites that render correctly in the browsers that 98% of Internet users is wherein comes one of the major challenges in web design.
My general strategy is to spend a certain amount of time writing compliant XHTML 1.1, then spending 5 times that amount of time making it work in IE. This is not atypical.
Unless you're doing a really simple site, browser checks are the mark of success. Passing the W3C validation at the end is like a ticker tape parade celebrating the fact that you complied to web standards while somehow getting it to render correctly in IE.
And pull the XP license for the main XP install from magical fairy land?
Doing so would totally void the point of the package, which is to provide a free, licensed XP install in Virtual PC for web development.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has announced that they have no plans to bring Virtual PC to the Intel-based Mac, so I don't imagine there would be a way to run this image on them.
Owners of shiny and semi-new G5s might still be in luck though...
What would have really been good news for web developers would have been if Microsoft had gone a bit further with the standards support and not broken a number of methods developers used to trick IE6.
That being said, reaching out a hand to the web development community like this is a great move on Microsoft's part. It will encourage developers to test for both IE6 and IE7 even if they couldn't normally run both (or either). I would imagine this would be enormously useful for Mac developers who don't want to buy a PC (as I imagine it would work for Mac Virtual PC).
On that subject, I've been wondering why Apple doesn't release a test kit for Safari. I would test against Safari even though it doesn't have a large market share. I test against Opera. I even make sure my pages degrade gracefully in Netscape 4 and IE and Netscape 3. But I'm not going to buy a Mac just to make sure my pages look okay to Mac users. I know 98% of the time Safari will display like Firefox or Opera, but there are noticeable exceptions (especially in styling forms). Wouldn't helping people verify web page compatibility be an opportunity for Apple to ensure the compatibility of their platform?
I think Microsoft has the right idea here.