What if you didn't want to use google maps for mapping? What if you wanted to use Yahoo Maps instead? That is the whole idea here. Let me decide what service to use for things like addresses.
Think of phone numbers. With a craftily written accelerator, Skype could be brought up by clicking on a phone number embedded on a page. Or, maybe it will do fancy crap with your corporate phone network and dial it for you that way... bottom line is it is my decision to make.
This is Slashdot, and I guess some here view the world in some kind of mechanical way free from the constraints of the real world. So yeah, if he wants to tell them to fuck off and feed their newsreader streaming crap from/dev/urandom, by all means do so. But that is a child's thing to do. Adults view the world different.
A mature adult would see that the cost of bandwidth is minimal and the untapped potential in all those people sitting on ancient feeds outweigh the potential costs. A mature adult who strives to have a successful website would find a way to tap that potential, possibly by redirecting the feed to something that nudges them to the good stuff.
But no, go ahead and stream your fucking mp3s to their newsreader. That will teach them to ever cross path your mad skillz. It will teach them so good they'll never visit your site again, never click your ads and never buy your services. Who needs their money, right? After all, rent is cheap living in the basement!
Are RSS feeds really causing an insane amount of traffic? Does that traffic cost more than it does to acquire new subscribers? I doubt it.
Let me qualify that though. Before I did anything drastic like 410'in their ass, I'd come up with the total number of subscribers to the entire pool of feeds. Most of the big-boy newsreaders will usually include a subscriber count in their User-Agent. Tally up the numbers and make sure you aren't dumping 100,000 subscribers in an attempt to save a piddly 1,000 feed-hits a day.
I'm supposed to care that with the final turndown your newsreader flakes out?
Yes. Because if the newsreader flakes out, the *person behind the computer* might blame you and never subscribe to your feed again. We are dealing with people here, not machines. Were are not here to seek spite on stupid newsreaders or "lusers who dont unsubscribe". This is business. Petty bullshit only wastes time and loses money.
Even if the newsreader was well behaved and did the right thing, you've just stupidly removed your brand from being thrown in their face every time they opened their reader. If you've got like 10,000 subscribers sitting on a bunch of year-old feeds and you cruelly dump them with a 410/404, that is lost mindshare and lost traffic.
The best solutions are the ones that encourage feed users to keep using your services by nudging them to your new stuff.
Bottom line is, it is easier to keep existing customers than it is to get new ones. Think about it.
You've got one feed for updates in each sport or event.
Imagine horse racing. You are making updates to racing scores throughout the day. Gamblers are monitoring each race. How would you structure this king of thing? One feed per day? One per season?
What about comments? You've got a feed per thread/story. When the story is closed for comments, what do you do with the feed?
What about auctions? You've got an auction and every bid triggers a new entry on your RSS feed. When the auction is over, what do you do with the feed?
Newsreaders are amazingly stupid. Google Reader, for example, will ignore both your "301 Permanent Redirect" and ignore your Atom link="self" as well. Something tells me it will ignore your "410 gone" too. You should test what major newsreaders (MyYahoo, Bloglines, Google Reader) do when you deep-six a feed with a 410.
Even still, 410 is stupid. A 301 redirect to something generic would be better, even if the readers are too brain dead to get the message. 410="lost traffic".
It would be bad SEO and hitting up 127.0.0.1 will probably confuse some newsreaders.
Worse, now you've got to either maintain a buttload of random noise in your zone file, or you have to have a wildcard entry pointing to a wildcarded virtual host and maintain a buttload of feeds in a database. Either way, you've added a bit of complexity.
No way man. You can't just dump all those people like that!
Either redirect them to a feed that says "here are some other events you might be interested in subscribing to" or create a last post on the feed that says the same thing. Dumping them with a 410 is a great way to loose your traffic.
It sounds like in this case, a redirect is the proper thing. Just be forewarned that some readers (cough Google Reader) will redirect, but ignore the "permanent" in "permanent redirect" and will continue to hit the old feed.
How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.
My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?
I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.
Every OS might implement things different. How does the OS cache something like google.com:
sparky nginx # host google.com google.com has address 74.125.67.100 google.com has address 209.85.171.100 google.com has address 74.125.45.100
Will the OS give the browser a different IP each time the API is called? Will it pick one and use it for a while? Is the behavior different on each OS? Who knows!
When you are a cross-platform browser that has to cache content, implement keep-alives, and do other crazy things, I bet it makes a hell of a lot of sense to cache DNS lookups yourself.
At first glance, one would think you'd be correct--the browser should let the OS cache the DNS. However, the browser also caches webpages and media--both in memory and on disk.
Something tells me it is the browser cache that forces all the browsers into caching DNS. I'm thinking mainly of the most common use of said cache--when you click on the back button. My hunch is if you relied on the OS to cache your DNS, clicking the back button would be a whole hell of a lot slower.
When 25% of your traffic uses it, you can't ignore it. All you can do is spitefully send out an "X-IE6-Detected: You suck, upgrade you bum" header and an extra stylesheet to feed them your alpha-blended PNG's as shitty GIF's. Well, that and pull your hair out trying to get some JavaScript stuff working.
What really irks me is when I see *NBC news shows using screenshots where the browser is IE6. Hey Microsoft IE Team, go bug your subsidiary's and get them to upgrade! Some hot shot CEO from $BANK is probably watching and will make their IT staff "upgrade" from IE7 to IE6--after all, CNBC is using it so it can't be bad, right? Then $BANK=>$FED.Bailout($BANK.FileBankruptcy());
On that note, has anybody seen a webpage screen shot on TV were the browser was not IE? And does it make one an official nerd when you date TV shows by the style of monitor they use and the OS they are running?
If you are a.NET developer, FileOptions.WriteThrough is what you are looking for it you need your shit to get written out to the filesystem right away.
using(FileStream fWrite = new FileStream("test.txt", FileMode.Create, FileSystemRights.Modify, FileShare.None, 8, FileOptions.WriteThrough)) {// do shit....// no need to Flush();
}// this will be written out using(FileStream fWrite = new FileStream("test2.txt", FileMode.Create, FileSystemRights.Modify, FileShare.None, 8, FileOptions.None)) {// do shit....
fWrite.Flush();// flush the shit do disk, kinda like fsync();
But there isn't anything like ffmpeg for batch transcoding or even one-off transcoding. A lot of commercial apps even use ffmpeg for transcoding.
Yeah learning the command line switches are kind of a bitch, but once you do, you will know more about how audio, video and metadata are combined to create "media". That said, there are some good front-ends to ffmpeg--for example MediaCoder, which lets you feel the joy of transcoding.
There never was a real build for ffmpeg. Now that they've got a stable release, I wonder when they will start pushing out official builds for various platforms (say, Win32/64)?
That said, could they actually push out binaries? One of the strange things with ffmpeg is that pretty much everywhere you go, it is compiled different. One system's ffmpeg will have a bunch of codecs installed and another will not. You can never really count on having something like H.264. Hell, I've seen one installation that didn't even have libmp3lame on it! Reminds me of PHP in many ways--so many damn compiler flags that you are pretty much guaranteed every system will be different.
Is this a legal thing, or a "we dont have a good build process yet" thing?
Now there are free customers and space in town for someone to try out some new business concepts in the electronics market.
Where are they gonna find the upfront capital to start said business? Banks? Nope--they aren't lending, too scared. Private investors? Nope--they aren't investing, too scared.
[Sarcasm] I know, lets enact a government spending freeze. Surely that will jump start lending and get investors investing, right?[/Sarcasm]
But seriously? Your idea is sound when there is a functioning source of capital.
There is way better arguments for using cash than tin-foil-hat paranoia though:
1) Banks fucking suck. They don't always post your CC transactions right away so they can lie about your true balance and fuck you over with overdrafts and NSF's. 2) It is cheaper for the merchant. Cash = no merchant fees. 3) You can tip waiters and know they have the option of pocketing the cash instead of reporting it. 4) That is about all I can think of. 4.1) Oh yeah, the NBA, CIA, and Odwalla is spying on you when you use credit/debit cards. Only Russians and Odwalla spy on your cash transactions.
That said:
1) Pay in cash, and you can't reverse the charge if the seller fucks you over. You can sue them, yeah, but that is more expensive and you might not win. CC's let you chargeback. 2) Loose your wallet, loose your cash. Loose your wallet, deactivate your credit card. 3) You can import your bank statements (after everything settles down and posts correctly) into your favorite financial app and account for your spending. 4) The NBA and the NSA have joined forces to provide you with personalized mind control based on your credit card transactions. This is a good thing because all hail Uncle Sam.
If you live alone and have no friends. There is a social aspect to sitting around a TV watching stuff that will never be replaced by sitting around a laptop or desktop.
Comskip users are a minority
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
I use ShowAnalyzer, which creates a marker file to instruct my SageTV where the commercials are.
We comskip users are huge minority, even among users of our own PVR software. It is just complex enough that most people will not bother.
TV what's that? a large low resolution for it's size monitor
Bingo. It also the most expensive monitor in your house and you can't even browse the web on it.
Which is why Paul Grahm is wrong
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
Because in the future (which is now if you use SageTV or MythTV) you'll be able to go to IMDB and get the credits using your remote control. The computer will converge with the TV, not the other way around. Paul Grahm is wrong--the TV is going to win.
"Dirty Jobs + Ford" Pretty much every show on the discovery channel has some form of product placement.
The other "trick" is the super-quick "this show sponsored by blah" ad that is put at the end of a segment. It is fast enough and bold enough to get its message through before you can react and start skipping commercials.
And yes, all of these are a direct result of TiVO and jackasses like myself who use comskip programs to auto-skip the commercials.
Re:You Got Your Blinders On
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 1
If you think people are gonna throw out there TV's and replace them with laptops to watch video, you are mistaken.
What people will throw out is their desktop once they can check their email, youtube videos, iPod videos and facebook on the TV. And I foresee the later happening pretty quick. You can already watch youtube video on your TV as well as suck down podcasts. Email and Facebook are just a matter of more people buying HDTV's.
Remember that 1080 is a pretty high resolution monitor... It will be used.
Dude, it costs way more to produce a season of shows than it does to create your latest nSync album. If you think that producers are gonna somehow be able to make their keep with live shows and t-shirts to pay the broadcast shows, you are living in a dream world.
Now pay-for-play... that *might* work. The problem is how will you discover new content when it is locked up behind something you gotta pay for? Most of the shows I now record I've found by random browsing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me like EXT4 kinda fails at this minor detail, eh?
I mean, if it isn't isn't commit the changes to the file system in the right order, it isn't exactly storing files.
Or do you care to amend your definition to read "It's purpose is to attempt to store files. It does not promise to actually store files".
What if you didn't want to use google maps for mapping? What if you wanted to use Yahoo Maps instead? That is the whole idea here. Let me decide what service to use for things like addresses.
Think of phone numbers. With a craftily written accelerator, Skype could be brought up by clicking on a phone number embedded on a page. Or, maybe it will do fancy crap with your corporate phone network and dial it for you that way... bottom line is it is my decision to make.
Fixed that for you.
This is Slashdot, and I guess some here view the world in some kind of mechanical way free from the constraints of the real world. So yeah, if he wants to tell them to fuck off and feed their newsreader streaming crap from /dev/urandom, by all means do so. But that is a child's thing to do. Adults view the world different.
A mature adult would see that the cost of bandwidth is minimal and the untapped potential in all those people sitting on ancient feeds outweigh the potential costs. A mature adult who strives to have a successful website would find a way to tap that potential, possibly by redirecting the feed to something that nudges them to the good stuff.
But no, go ahead and stream your fucking mp3s to their newsreader. That will teach them to ever cross path your mad skillz. It will teach them so good they'll never visit your site again, never click your ads and never buy your services. Who needs their money, right? After all, rent is cheap living in the basement!
(ps: booya)
Are RSS feeds really causing an insane amount of traffic? Does that traffic cost more than it does to acquire new subscribers? I doubt it.
Let me qualify that though. Before I did anything drastic like 410'in their ass, I'd come up with the total number of subscribers to the entire pool of feeds. Most of the big-boy newsreaders will usually include a subscriber count in their User-Agent. Tally up the numbers and make sure you aren't dumping 100,000 subscribers in an attempt to save a piddly 1,000 feed-hits a day.
Yes. Because if the newsreader flakes out, the *person behind the computer* might blame you and never subscribe to your feed again. We are dealing with people here, not machines. Were are not here to seek spite on stupid newsreaders or "lusers who dont unsubscribe". This is business. Petty bullshit only wastes time and loses money.
Even if the newsreader was well behaved and did the right thing, you've just stupidly removed your brand from being thrown in their face every time they opened their reader. If you've got like 10,000 subscribers sitting on a bunch of year-old feeds and you cruelly dump them with a 410/404, that is lost mindshare and lost traffic.
The best solutions are the ones that encourage feed users to keep using your services by nudging them to your new stuff.
Bottom line is, it is easier to keep existing customers than it is to get new ones. Think about it.
You've got one feed for updates in each sport or event.
Imagine horse racing. You are making updates to racing scores throughout the day. Gamblers are monitoring each race. How would you structure this king of thing? One feed per day? One per season?
What about comments? You've got a feed per thread/story. When the story is closed for comments, what do you do with the feed?
What about auctions? You've got an auction and every bid triggers a new entry on your RSS feed. When the auction is over, what do you do with the feed?
Newsreaders are amazingly stupid. Google Reader, for example, will ignore both your "301 Permanent Redirect" and ignore your Atom link="self" as well. Something tells me it will ignore your "410 gone" too. You should test what major newsreaders (MyYahoo, Bloglines, Google Reader) do when you deep-six a feed with a 410.
Even still, 410 is stupid. A 301 redirect to something generic would be better, even if the readers are too brain dead to get the message. 410="lost traffic".
It would be bad SEO and hitting up 127.0.0.1 will probably confuse some newsreaders.
Worse, now you've got to either maintain a buttload of random noise in your zone file, or you have to have a wildcard entry pointing to a wildcarded virtual host and maintain a buttload of feeds in a database. Either way, you've added a bit of complexity.
No way man. You can't just dump all those people like that!
Either redirect them to a feed that says "here are some other events you might be interested in subscribing to" or create a last post on the feed that says the same thing. Dumping them with a 410 is a great way to loose your traffic.
It sounds like in this case, a redirect is the proper thing. Just be forewarned that some readers (cough Google Reader) will redirect, but ignore the "permanent" in "permanent redirect" and will continue to hit the old feed.
How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.
My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?
I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.
Every OS might implement things different. How does the OS cache something like google.com:
sparky nginx # host google.com
google.com has address 74.125.67.100
google.com has address 209.85.171.100
google.com has address 74.125.45.100
Will the OS give the browser a different IP each time the API is called? Will it pick one and use it for a while? Is the behavior different on each OS? Who knows!
When you are a cross-platform browser that has to cache content, implement keep-alives, and do other crazy things, I bet it makes a hell of a lot of sense to cache DNS lookups yourself.
At first glance, one would think you'd be correct--the browser should let the OS cache the DNS. However, the browser also caches webpages and media--both in memory and on disk.
Something tells me it is the browser cache that forces all the browsers into caching DNS. I'm thinking mainly of the most common use of said cache--when you click on the back button. My hunch is if you relied on the OS to cache your DNS, clicking the back button would be a whole hell of a lot slower.
When 25% of your traffic uses it, you can't ignore it. All you can do is spitefully send out an "X-IE6-Detected: You suck, upgrade you bum" header and an extra stylesheet to feed them your alpha-blended PNG's as shitty GIF's. Well, that and pull your hair out trying to get some JavaScript stuff working.
What really irks me is when I see *NBC news shows using screenshots where the browser is IE6. Hey Microsoft IE Team, go bug your subsidiary's and get them to upgrade! Some hot shot CEO from $BANK is probably watching and will make their IT staff "upgrade" from IE7 to IE6--after all, CNBC is using it so it can't be bad, right? Then $BANK=>$FED.Bailout($BANK.FileBankruptcy());
On that note, has anybody seen a webpage screen shot on TV were the browser was not IE? And does it make one an official nerd when you date TV shows by the style of monitor they use and the OS they are running?
If you are a .NET developer, FileOptions.WriteThrough is what you are looking for it you need your shit to get written out to the filesystem right away.
using(FileStream fWrite = new FileStream("test.txt", FileMode.Create, FileSystemRights.Modify, FileShare.None, 8, FileOptions.WriteThrough)) {
} // this will be written out // do shit.... // flush the shit do disk, kinda like fsync();
using(FileStream fWrite = new FileStream("test2.txt", FileMode.Create, FileSystemRights.Modify, FileShare.None, 8, FileOptions.None)) {
fWrite.Flush();
}
But there isn't anything like ffmpeg for batch transcoding or even one-off transcoding. A lot of commercial apps even use ffmpeg for transcoding.
Yeah learning the command line switches are kind of a bitch, but once you do, you will know more about how audio, video and metadata are combined to create "media". That said, there are some good front-ends to ffmpeg--for example MediaCoder, which lets you feel the joy of transcoding.
There never was a real build for ffmpeg. Now that they've got a stable release, I wonder when they will start pushing out official builds for various platforms (say, Win32/64)?
That said, could they actually push out binaries? One of the strange things with ffmpeg is that pretty much everywhere you go, it is compiled different. One system's ffmpeg will have a bunch of codecs installed and another will not. You can never really count on having something like H.264. Hell, I've seen one installation that didn't even have libmp3lame on it! Reminds me of PHP in many ways--so many damn compiler flags that you are pretty much guaranteed every system will be different.
Is this a legal thing, or a "we dont have a good build process yet" thing?
Where are they gonna find the upfront capital to start said business? Banks? Nope--they aren't lending, too scared. Private investors? Nope--they aren't investing, too scared.
[Sarcasm] I know, lets enact a government spending freeze. Surely that will jump start lending and get investors investing, right?[/Sarcasm]
But seriously? Your idea is sound when there is a functioning source of capital.
Pretty much you are left out in the cold.
There is way better arguments for using cash than tin-foil-hat paranoia though:
1) Banks fucking suck. They don't always post your CC transactions right away so they can lie about your true balance and fuck you over with overdrafts and NSF's.
2) It is cheaper for the merchant. Cash = no merchant fees.
3) You can tip waiters and know they have the option of pocketing the cash instead of reporting it.
4) That is about all I can think of.
4.1) Oh yeah, the NBA, CIA, and Odwalla is spying on you when you use credit/debit cards. Only Russians and Odwalla spy on your cash transactions.
That said:
1) Pay in cash, and you can't reverse the charge if the seller fucks you over. You can sue them, yeah, but that is more expensive and you might not win. CC's let you chargeback.
2) Loose your wallet, loose your cash. Loose your wallet, deactivate your credit card.
3) You can import your bank statements (after everything settles down and posts correctly) into your favorite financial app and account for your spending.
4) The NBA and the NSA have joined forces to provide you with personalized mind control based on your credit card transactions. This is a good thing because all hail Uncle Sam.
If you live alone and have no friends. There is a social aspect to sitting around a TV watching stuff that will never be replaced by sitting around a laptop or desktop.
I use ShowAnalyzer, which creates a marker file to instruct my SageTV where the commercials are.
We comskip users are huge minority, even among users of our own PVR software. It is just complex enough that most people will not bother.
Bingo. It also the most expensive monitor in your house and you can't even browse the web on it.
Because in the future (which is now if you use SageTV or MythTV) you'll be able to go to IMDB and get the credits using your remote control. The computer will converge with the TV, not the other way around. Paul Grahm is wrong--the TV is going to win.
"Dirty Jobs + Ford"
Pretty much every show on the discovery channel has some form of product placement.
The other "trick" is the super-quick "this show sponsored by blah" ad that is put at the end of a segment. It is fast enough and bold enough to get its message through before you can react and start skipping commercials.
And yes, all of these are a direct result of TiVO and jackasses like myself who use comskip programs to auto-skip the commercials.
If you think people are gonna throw out there TV's and replace them with laptops to watch video, you are mistaken.
What people will throw out is their desktop once they can check their email, youtube videos, iPod videos and facebook on the TV. And I foresee the later happening pretty quick. You can already watch youtube video on your TV as well as suck down podcasts. Email and Facebook are just a matter of more people buying HDTV's.
Remember that 1080 is a pretty high resolution monitor... It will be used.
Dude, it costs way more to produce a season of shows than it does to create your latest nSync album. If you think that producers are gonna somehow be able to make their keep with live shows and t-shirts to pay the broadcast shows, you are living in a dream world.
Now pay-for-play... that *might* work. The problem is how will you discover new content when it is locked up behind something you gotta pay for? Most of the shows I now record I've found by random browsing.