To be fair, I haven't used Opera on my main computer for about two years, so I should try the new release. I used it on my BlackBerry Bold for about two days, but after crashing my phone eighteen times in 48 hours, I figured I'd give up the ghost.
Right, maybe emulated is the wrong word. What I meant by that was IE is the ultimate fallback - it does just about everything every other browser does, but doesn't seem to do any of it very well - it's inclusion for the sake of "me too" at this point.
Yeah, Google removed the beta tag from a lot of their products, but given their visible patterns, Chrome has a high chance of getting really fun when ChromeOS comes out - I'd bet dollars to donuts that the version released soon before or soon after the ChromeOS release will have made a few milestone improvements that really move it from just being adoptable to really being desirable for a larger audience of people.
The Acid3 test sort of bugs me. Yes, it's nice that browsers are fast, but even the most complex pages have lower kilobyte counts than most internet connections allow for, which means servers are the lag points, not your browser.
I'd love to see a usability test sometime, rather than a flat-out speed rating. Webkit's neat, but with so many people using their browsers as a primary operating base - and we see proof of this approach in Google's development of the Chrome OS - usability is being sorely ignored in many technological benchmarks.
I can't tell you how annoying it is to have Firebox' Live Bookmarks fail to load every ten minutes, it breaks the RSS experience. And while IE has its flaws and benefits, it's emulated, not inovating and old hat. Chrome is nice, I like how my computer treats it, but it's still in the works.
Who's going to decide to pick up a new browser based on a speed test? Yes, CNet included some key features and noticed bugs, but Shiira and Arora both get termed works-in-progress, which does not make them underdogs now, it makes them next year's underdogs. And by the time they're ready for mass adoption, all of their good points will likely have been emulated as thoroughly as anyone cares for.
Acid3 is like telling people your browser has 700 horse power, instead of the 300 horsepower their browsers have. No one cares if you top out at 200mph, the speed limit's still 60, folks.
Ok, perhaps I was over-specific, or the article was. I believe people should be given credit for their work. Monetarily or otherwise. I don't mean just in this case. I'm aware that tracking and crediting is a massive job, and I don't blame anyone for failing to embark on it, nor for not making themselves the examples by being the first to do so, but still. I just think it's a good idea.
Even if the software is free, it would be reassuring to see the government encourage further development by offering the coders behind these libraries some sort of honorarium - a public recognition that their work is being used for big things. Even if it's the slap-in-the-face One Dollar honorarium, public acknowledgement is big.
No, not a lack of copyright but basically, I can't be charged for possessing information, such as I can't be charged for having BrittneySpears.mp3 or SuperMarioMegaROM.smc on my computer. Downloading things might be still considered a civil matter though, but after you downloaded them you are free.
So... It's only illegal if you get caught in the act? We don't expect this to cause issues? I didn't monitor you downloading the mp3, but you have on your computer a file identical to three thousand others, and not a Britney CD in your ownership? Are you arguing this does not fall under the definiton of "stolen property"? All arguments about imaginary property aside, of course.
If you want to go all PvP on this, go right ahead. I don't want to be stuck in the crossfire, and without some form of lw or regulation, I've got no way to remove myself from the arena without leaving the net, which is a growing non-option.
There will never be a sandbox for malware devs to play in without affecting people who flat out don't want to be involved. I don't care about you and your beef with FSF OR MS. It's none of my business, I'm just a user. ALl I want is a law that enables me to say "Leave me the frack alone and let me have my level playing field."
Twitter's not just bad for this - oh my, a new form of spam, I never saw it coming - but for poor context community as well. I feed my Tweets to my blog in a widget (Geekiest phrase ever, I know) and, thus, am searchable. Now, I put up a "Legal" page about my site - claiming authorship and all - and immediately was added by nearly forty Law-oriented "Free Advice" Twits who likely had never read another of my posts. I changed the page's name from "Legal" to "Disclaimer" and the additions halted. Changing the page to "Copyright" had the same effect - media trolls, dozens of them, now on my block list. It's incredible.
Twitter's nice for micro-posting, but seriously. This shilling thing? Been going on for some time. It's nothing new.
Are there more than one contest going at once, that there's a need for multiple feeds? Or, more appropriately, can some of this content not be removed completely? Keeping a full feed archive seems a bit of overkill, especially for closed events from five years ago. Why not PDF the event archive for downloading and keep a single feed for active items? Overpreparation is a growing problem I'm seeing on the web. Far too few people/events/businesses are prepared to minimize anything for the sake of optimization.
Ther employee signs at hiring that the checks may be made "periodically" with no further info on just how periodically. It happens in the US, yes. But I'm from Canada.
Credit checks aren't for viewing potential wealth. My company regularely checks credit records of current employees as part of its loss prevention. If you're deep in debt, you're more likely to steal from the company - so they argue. How does this not equate to people being googled to see if they're really jerks?
I don't agree with the easy extension of this practice into the realm of "Gosh, you (insert personal behaviour not related to job) so I'm not hiring you" but even HR can have a failure of non-bias sometimes.
And if said HR person accesses from home rather than the office? Research or not, lots of offices have VPNs, and VPN means MySpace, Facebook are blocked.
I think the point here is not the ability or commonality of the researching phase, but what exactly is embarrassing to the employer. If someone finds out I'm an anti-semite murderer and confirms it's actully me, I'm legitimately not getting the job. But if I fail to be hired because someone found my Wiccan-centric blog and decided that a Pagan in power is embarrassing to the Christian ideals of the company's execs - that's discrimination, no matter how you cut it. The problem isn't the practice, the problem is the extension of the practice beyond its valid use, and the total lack of regulation therein because no regulation is possible.
Cap at 100k? And you expect to attract high-power, high-earning execs to your company how? Sunshine enemas? Be logical. If a programmer makes thirty to forty thousand per year, and his boss makes twenty percent more - move five or six steps up the logical chain and of course you get million dollar salaries. Is it fair? Not really, by most logic.
But even if you project a 20% pay raise per position five steps up the chain, you still have nearly 100k salaries - and I don't expect jumps as low as 20% are realistic. In my company, salary more than doubles from location manager to district manager - five steps up from that (Which is roughly executive level) puts salaries nearly half a million a year. I'd call that estimate conservative and I work bloody retail, where there is NO profit margin WHATSOEVER.
This isn't an attempt to curry favour with execs, as I don't know any who read Slashdot in the first place. Your use of 100k-no-bonus just makes me wonder where in gay hell your logic is coming from.
Guesswork isn't my field; I'm a salesman, not an accountant. However, yes, I expect they may be shrinking headcount, but if you answer "No paycut no how" you're likely to be the first one on the block. Self-preservation is a bit more useful than wariness in some cases, it's up to the contractors themselves to decide which is in their best interest. Taking your ball and going home is usually not the best option.
All this Microsoft bashing, and no one takes the chance that they're giving these contractors a pretty good choice? If I had to choose between taking a pay cut and losing my job, in a market where getting a new one is shaky at the best of times, I'd take the pay cut. At least it then gives me stability till the end of my contracted time.
Way to go, doomsayers.
It does smell a lot like a publicity stunt, but for people concerned with speed in an OS, and with major improvements over Vista, it's not a bad move. If I think something is crap, I don't want a patch, I want something new. It's the same reason more people buy new computers rather than upgrading the same case or modding an existing box.
Windows 7 runs smoother. It's quicker. It's even, to a degree, prettier than Vista. For a programmer, this might be nothing but frustration at the greed of Microsoft, and look like a jerk move. But for a consumer who's been holding off because of bad Vista press, it's Windows Classic.
And the difference is... What. CTRL+TAB versus ALT+TAB? I thought when tabbed browsing came along everyone got the memo that other programs worked the same way. Or am I missing something fundamentally evil about a less-cluttered taskbar?
Unfortunately, Nexus suffered when the control set changed and no one got told before they picked up the controller - game documentation always sucks in my opinion. But the storyline was solid, better than previous, and the Revolution disc had a massive dose of nostalgia for revamped, reworked missions, which was nice. NineBreaker stood as a great training game - I actually went through it on the new control set and played Nexus with a much higher rate of success, which was nice. It's a good window into how the game designers think you should play the game, which is a chance most of us don't get often.
Last Raven was and remains frustrating. It's a very unbalanced game, with not a lot to it other than "Let's play seven or eight repititions of the same ten-mission scenario, but with ALTERNATE ENDINGS!" I'm sure whatever exec thought that up got a raise, but two years in, I still haven't unlocked everything, and I only keep playing because I'm damned stubborn.
Armored Core 4... Was NOT canon AC. Sure, it was graphically beautiful, but with new publisher backing... Let's just say, I've been playing LR for two years off and on, and after about an hour with AC4, I put it up for sale on eBay and forgot it existed.
There seems to be a certain balance between nostalgia, cult praise, and actual playability that works for remixed games, something that new titles in the same series never seem to match up to.
Look at some prominent titles for this. Any Final Fantasy reissue is always well done because Square Enix actually seems to care about not getting hate mail. And, in a recent Armored Core release (Nexus) there was a B-Sides disc included that had updated missions from all of the previous games. It wasn't a reset or a rehash of sorts, but more of a look back with updates, which worked very well for alot of fans of the original series.
If the effort is made, not to keep the bloodlines pure, but to either step completely away from the original or to update for the sake of nostalgia and proof-of-concept, it seems to work more often than not. TDoes feel like there's some kind of inverse correlation to fan praise though, which makes me very frightened of a re-release of, say, Final Fantasy 7 for some distant future PS4/XBox360-replacement console. It's sure a fine line to walk.
Imagine you have a bug cue of 1000 items. Every day you look at three and fix them - thoroughly, concisely, permanently. Every day, thirty more bug reports come in. Are you still looking at bugreps, or people just bitching?
So what's the answer? Rather than patching, do we take the sandbox approach and rebuild from the ground up, scrapping all backward compatibility - and the decisions made under that system? Unfortunately, all Law is retroactive to a certain degree.
Infraction always comes before legislation, even though retroactive enforcement beyond the current case is considered ex parte. Precedent-based law is a dangerous thing, but unavoidable since, contrary to popular fiction, prescience is still a few years away. And even then, Minority Report style enforcement has its flaws. As does every system. That's what patches are for, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Another great idea just BEGGING for poor execution. Although I do have to say, the innovation aspect does sound interesting.
To be fair, I haven't used Opera on my main computer for about two years, so I should try the new release. I used it on my BlackBerry Bold for about two days, but after crashing my phone eighteen times in 48 hours, I figured I'd give up the ghost.
Right, maybe emulated is the wrong word. What I meant by that was IE is the ultimate fallback - it does just about everything every other browser does, but doesn't seem to do any of it very well - it's inclusion for the sake of "me too" at this point.
Yeah, Google removed the beta tag from a lot of their products, but given their visible patterns, Chrome has a high chance of getting really fun when ChromeOS comes out - I'd bet dollars to donuts that the version released soon before or soon after the ChromeOS release will have made a few milestone improvements that really move it from just being adoptable to really being desirable for a larger audience of people.
The Acid3 test sort of bugs me. Yes, it's nice that browsers are fast, but even the most complex pages have lower kilobyte counts than most internet connections allow for, which means servers are the lag points, not your browser. I'd love to see a usability test sometime, rather than a flat-out speed rating. Webkit's neat, but with so many people using their browsers as a primary operating base - and we see proof of this approach in Google's development of the Chrome OS - usability is being sorely ignored in many technological benchmarks. I can't tell you how annoying it is to have Firebox' Live Bookmarks fail to load every ten minutes, it breaks the RSS experience. And while IE has its flaws and benefits, it's emulated, not inovating and old hat. Chrome is nice, I like how my computer treats it, but it's still in the works. Who's going to decide to pick up a new browser based on a speed test? Yes, CNet included some key features and noticed bugs, but Shiira and Arora both get termed works-in-progress, which does not make them underdogs now, it makes them next year's underdogs. And by the time they're ready for mass adoption, all of their good points will likely have been emulated as thoroughly as anyone cares for. Acid3 is like telling people your browser has 700 horse power, instead of the 300 horsepower their browsers have. No one cares if you top out at 200mph, the speed limit's still 60, folks.
Ok, perhaps I was over-specific, or the article was. I believe people should be given credit for their work. Monetarily or otherwise. I don't mean just in this case. I'm aware that tracking and crediting is a massive job, and I don't blame anyone for failing to embark on it, nor for not making themselves the examples by being the first to do so, but still. I just think it's a good idea.
Even if the software is free, it would be reassuring to see the government encourage further development by offering the coders behind these libraries some sort of honorarium - a public recognition that their work is being used for big things. Even if it's the slap-in-the-face One Dollar honorarium, public acknowledgement is big.
No, not a lack of copyright but basically, I can't be charged for possessing information, such as I can't be charged for having BrittneySpears.mp3 or SuperMarioMegaROM.smc on my computer. Downloading things might be still considered a civil matter though, but after you downloaded them you are free.
So... It's only illegal if you get caught in the act? We don't expect this to cause issues? I didn't monitor you downloading the mp3, but you have on your computer a file identical to three thousand others, and not a Britney CD in your ownership? Are you arguing this does not fall under the definiton of "stolen property"? All arguments about imaginary property aside, of course.
If you want to go all PvP on this, go right ahead. I don't want to be stuck in the crossfire, and without some form of lw or regulation, I've got no way to remove myself from the arena without leaving the net, which is a growing non-option. There will never be a sandbox for malware devs to play in without affecting people who flat out don't want to be involved. I don't care about you and your beef with FSF OR MS. It's none of my business, I'm just a user. ALl I want is a law that enables me to say "Leave me the frack alone and let me have my level playing field."
Twitter's not just bad for this - oh my, a new form of spam, I never saw it coming - but for poor context community as well. I feed my Tweets to my blog in a widget (Geekiest phrase ever, I know) and, thus, am searchable. Now, I put up a "Legal" page about my site - claiming authorship and all - and immediately was added by nearly forty Law-oriented "Free Advice" Twits who likely had never read another of my posts. I changed the page's name from "Legal" to "Disclaimer" and the additions halted. Changing the page to "Copyright" had the same effect - media trolls, dozens of them, now on my block list. It's incredible.
Twitter's nice for micro-posting, but seriously. This shilling thing? Been going on for some time. It's nothing new.
I never thought it would happen. But someone out-geeked Slashdot.
I sked a Toreador, but he laughed at the iron-y.
Are there more than one contest going at once, that there's a need for multiple feeds? Or, more appropriately, can some of this content not be removed completely? Keeping a full feed archive seems a bit of overkill, especially for closed events from five years ago. Why not PDF the event archive for downloading and keep a single feed for active items? Overpreparation is a growing problem I'm seeing on the web. Far too few people/events/businesses are prepared to minimize anything for the sake of optimization.
Ther employee signs at hiring that the checks may be made "periodically" with no further info on just how periodically. It happens in the US, yes. But I'm from Canada.
Credit checks aren't for viewing potential wealth. My company regularely checks credit records of current employees as part of its loss prevention. If you're deep in debt, you're more likely to steal from the company - so they argue. How does this not equate to people being googled to see if they're really jerks?
I don't agree with the easy extension of this practice into the realm of "Gosh, you (insert personal behaviour not related to job) so I'm not hiring you" but even HR can have a failure of non-bias sometimes.
And if said HR person accesses from home rather than the office? Research or not, lots of offices have VPNs, and VPN means MySpace, Facebook are blocked.
I think the point here is not the ability or commonality of the researching phase, but what exactly is embarrassing to the employer. If someone finds out I'm an anti-semite murderer and confirms it's actully me, I'm legitimately not getting the job. But if I fail to be hired because someone found my Wiccan-centric blog and decided that a Pagan in power is embarrassing to the Christian ideals of the company's execs - that's discrimination, no matter how you cut it. The problem isn't the practice, the problem is the extension of the practice beyond its valid use, and the total lack of regulation therein because no regulation is possible.
Cap at 100k? And you expect to attract high-power, high-earning execs to your company how? Sunshine enemas? Be logical. If a programmer makes thirty to forty thousand per year, and his boss makes twenty percent more - move five or six steps up the logical chain and of course you get million dollar salaries. Is it fair? Not really, by most logic.
But even if you project a 20% pay raise per position five steps up the chain, you still have nearly 100k salaries - and I don't expect jumps as low as 20% are realistic. In my company, salary more than doubles from location manager to district manager - five steps up from that (Which is roughly executive level) puts salaries nearly half a million a year. I'd call that estimate conservative and I work bloody retail, where there is NO profit margin WHATSOEVER.
This isn't an attempt to curry favour with execs, as I don't know any who read Slashdot in the first place. Your use of 100k-no-bonus just makes me wonder where in gay hell your logic is coming from.
Guesswork isn't my field; I'm a salesman, not an accountant. However, yes, I expect they may be shrinking headcount, but if you answer "No paycut no how" you're likely to be the first one on the block. Self-preservation is a bit more useful than wariness in some cases, it's up to the contractors themselves to decide which is in their best interest. Taking your ball and going home is usually not the best option.
All this Microsoft bashing, and no one takes the chance that they're giving these contractors a pretty good choice? If I had to choose between taking a pay cut and losing my job, in a market where getting a new one is shaky at the best of times, I'd take the pay cut. At least it then gives me stability till the end of my contracted time. Way to go, doomsayers.
It does smell a lot like a publicity stunt, but for people concerned with speed in an OS, and with major improvements over Vista, it's not a bad move. If I think something is crap, I don't want a patch, I want something new. It's the same reason more people buy new computers rather than upgrading the same case or modding an existing box.
Windows 7 runs smoother. It's quicker. It's even, to a degree, prettier than Vista. For a programmer, this might be nothing but frustration at the greed of Microsoft, and look like a jerk move. But for a consumer who's been holding off because of bad Vista press, it's Windows Classic.
And the difference is... What. CTRL+TAB versus ALT+TAB? I thought when tabbed browsing came along everyone got the memo that other programs worked the same way. Or am I missing something fundamentally evil about a less-cluttered taskbar?
Unfortunately, Nexus suffered when the control set changed and no one got told before they picked up the controller - game documentation always sucks in my opinion. But the storyline was solid, better than previous, and the Revolution disc had a massive dose of nostalgia for revamped, reworked missions, which was nice. NineBreaker stood as a great training game - I actually went through it on the new control set and played Nexus with a much higher rate of success, which was nice. It's a good window into how the game designers think you should play the game, which is a chance most of us don't get often.
Last Raven was and remains frustrating. It's a very unbalanced game, with not a lot to it other than "Let's play seven or eight repititions of the same ten-mission scenario, but with ALTERNATE ENDINGS!" I'm sure whatever exec thought that up got a raise, but two years in, I still haven't unlocked everything, and I only keep playing because I'm damned stubborn.
Armored Core 4... Was NOT canon AC. Sure, it was graphically beautiful, but with new publisher backing... Let's just say, I've been playing LR for two years off and on, and after about an hour with AC4, I put it up for sale on eBay and forgot it existed.
There seems to be a certain balance between nostalgia, cult praise, and actual playability that works for remixed games, something that new titles in the same series never seem to match up to.
Look at some prominent titles for this. Any Final Fantasy reissue is always well done because Square Enix actually seems to care about not getting hate mail. And, in a recent Armored Core release (Nexus) there was a B-Sides disc included that had updated missions from all of the previous games. It wasn't a reset or a rehash of sorts, but more of a look back with updates, which worked very well for alot of fans of the original series.
If the effort is made, not to keep the bloodlines pure, but to either step completely away from the original or to update for the sake of nostalgia and proof-of-concept, it seems to work more often than not. TDoes feel like there's some kind of inverse correlation to fan praise though, which makes me very frightened of a re-release of, say, Final Fantasy 7 for some distant future PS4/XBox360-replacement console. It's sure a fine line to walk.
Imagine you have a bug cue of 1000 items. Every day you look at three and fix them - thoroughly, concisely, permanently. Every day, thirty more bug reports come in. Are you still looking at bugreps, or people just bitching?
So what's the answer? Rather than patching, do we take the sandbox approach and rebuild from the ground up, scrapping all backward compatibility - and the decisions made under that system? Unfortunately, all Law is retroactive to a certain degree.
Infraction always comes before legislation, even though retroactive enforcement beyond the current case is considered ex parte. Precedent-based law is a dangerous thing, but unavoidable since, contrary to popular fiction, prescience is still a few years away. And even then, Minority Report style enforcement has its flaws. As does every system. That's what patches are for, right?