Cell phones do save lives in accidents though, especially in rural areas where it would be harder for emergancy crews to find/get to the site.
Cell phones can also prevent emergancies from happening. Here at UGA a girl last year was being followed home from downtown by a serial rapist. She got out her phone and called 911 and the man fled instead of having to deal with the cops.
Cell phones can be a nuisence when people abuse them, but they are a good thing.
s/cell phone/handgun/gi and s/called 911/shot at the fucker/ and s/the cops/physical therapy/;
Seriously, I know they can be useful. I couldn't own one, because the potential for abuse is so great. E.g., my girlfriend and I live in seperate cities, so I drive to see her on the weekends. Even though I leave at about the same time every Friday, getting there at about the same time, I know that if I had a cell phone, I would call every time, just to tell her that. Which is clearly stupid.
I'm with you every step there. My POV is, basically, there were lots of reasons to switch from.gif to.png, but not really many to switch from.jpeg to.png. And switching from.mp3 to.ogg seems more like the latter. That's just my impression. And the ogg advocacy is putting the cart before the horse, because, while it could grow into a really great audio codec, it hasn't yet, AFAIK, so the hype should let up a bit. I do understand that they're trying to generate income, so maybe the hype is unavoidable. But that is, IMO, all the more reason to take it with a grain or two of salt.
My 2 cents.
I've been considering the PWPs. Basically, there is no perfect solution as M1 and M2 can always be abused. But I think a (-1 Crapflood) moderation would help a lot (you could set Crapflood to equal -5 in your preferences). But it will turn out just like "Troll" and "Flamebait"...most of the posts modded as either of those, well, aren't. So whatever.
See the way patents use to work is that a company would disclose a non-obvious method, in return for a temporary monopoly. A tabbed interface is quite obvious, and it's disclosure of it's inner workings does nothing for the public good.
Just by seeing one (tabbed interface), I can duplicate it's effect. I don't need a patent desclosure to figgure it out - so therefore it's a trivial invention, obvious to one skilled in the arts.
That is just a side effect of your knowledge of programming. That is, you might invent a magic salad chopper that most people, when looking at it, won't understand. You haven't patented the chopping of vegetables (just as Adobe hasn't patented the customization of UIs), but you did patent this one machine that chops vegetables. But, someone who has worked in the field (engineering, focusing on turbines or whatever it is your chopper is based on) might see it and think, "ah, of course." Now, should he be permitted to go recreate your invention? Patent law says no.
The other day my friend called me on my mobile phone, from his mobile phone, because he'd just had an accident on his bike. I was able to call another friend (on their mobile phone) to arrange a car to go and get him.
...to take him to the hospital and save his life? Just because it involved an accident doesn't make it an emergency. Sounds more like you (all) managed to save him an hour or two of inconvenience, but call it what it is.
their role is to wade through the submission bin and decide which stories that were submitted could generate good conversation on the comments, and which will get plenty of page hits.
More correctly, their role is to choose stories that will generate the most revenue. Cynics might suggest that this does not mean just choosing stories that will get ad views, but might also include running stories that make advertisers or potential advertisers look good (e.g., "ATI All-In-Wonder Released!"), or choosing stories that generate excitement about the parent company's other projects.
i don't recall reading them claim to be journalists
Eh, don't have a reference, but it has happened multiple times, IIRC, usually in context like, "it's okay if we screw the users who comment, because we are a news site." That sort of thing. The fact is, the editors do play that role, and as a for-profit company, they have an obligation to notify readers of potential conflicts of interest, as much for their own protection (i.e., to avoid the conspiracy theories that are so popular) as for the readers'. I was just saying that the caustic tone was unnecessary and unwelcome.
Freshmeat, Themes.org, and Slashdot are all part of the world-controlling conspiracy under the VA Software umbrella better known as the Sinister Andover Keiretsu
Now, I'm not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, but is the sarcasm really necessary? It is common practice for journalists to acknowledge up front any potential conflicts of interest, just so that the reader is on the right
page. Slashdot readers were right to point this out, and whining about it is frankly not appropriate. You do claim to be real journalists every now and
again, so let's stop acting like we're in kindergarten, hm?
I agree that was kind of lame of him to convert from mp3 to ogg with the only reasoning being the apparent perceived bragging rights, which he even uses in this post, about how all his CDs are in ogg. You do realize it is even lamer for you to talk down to him because he is not as 37337 as you.
Hehe, you don't know who you're talking to. Whomever is 37337, it is certainly not me...never got the hang of IRC, probably having my box hacked right now, use Windows at work, etc. I do not have a single.ogg file, nor do I understand why I would want to. It was, in fact, as a non-37337 that I was responding: clearly the OP has as much experience [points] as I do in these matters.
If the Free Software community focusses on these kinds of superficial goalse.g., convincing people to convert their mp3's to ogg'sthen Linux and BSD will end up just as much laughingstocks as Windows is currently. If people understand Free Software, they will want it; I am convinced of that. The correct approach is not to fool them into using Free alternatives, it is to educate them.
Thanks for giving it to me straight, and rock on through the ages. That goes for everyone, actually, Win and Lin users alike: rock and roll till you pass the fsck out, this party's groovin' and it's just getting started. RnR will never die, and Real Men Rock. Peace, I'm out.
This is not acceptable language for discourse among mature adults.
and decided to convert all of my MP3 files into Ogg-Vorbis files
Surely you had a reason to do such a thing (as of course you're aware that recompressing lossy->lossy is a Bad Thing)...
I've been pretty happy with the conversion, even though it was supposed to be a bit lossy
No, it is lossy, that's a technical term, BION.
(I can't hear any difference)
You either have shitty speakers or are a moron who should have been recording to tape.
Anyway, now I'm looking for a portable music player that plays Ogg-Vorbis files, and I'm coming up empty. I *really* don't want to have to convert the tunes back to MP3 on the fly to put them onto a portable player.
Okay, let me get this straight...not only did you not have a reason for converting in the first place, you actually had a reason not to have converted. Smart move... But honestly, if you didn't notice the quality loss converting to Vorbis, go ahead and convert back.
Now for the response:
We want to work with you to make Vorbis playback a possibility on your machine, and licensing terms are extremely flexible to accommodate small companies (even one-man shops) up to the big guys.
IOW, it's about ideology, not technology. Clue: most computer sound systems aren't good enough to reproduce 128kbps accurately (as your own testimony confirms), and mp3 gets a lot better. Even if Vorbis is better technologically, they are fighting an existing de facto standard. NTM, there are more Free mp3 players than Free Vorbis players, IIANM. So the "open" argument holds 0mL of water.
Face it, you should have expelled the bug from your ass (or whatever your gruesome metaphor was) rather than complied with it.
It's also quite a PITA for people checking into the hotel. You've been on a plane for 6 hours, waited for your luggage, spent 45 minutes cooped up in a cab or awful rental car...you just want to hop in the shower, change into your white slacks and teal Polo shirt, and hit the bar, maybe chatting up a few ladies or doing a little dancing. You definitely don't want to have to go searching through your luggage looking for your laptop, whose battery is dead from the flight so you need to untangle the AC adapter, oh and find the dongle for the ethernet card, etc. When you come back to your room at 2 or 3 in the morning (maybe not alone!) after several drinks (hey, company's paying), you want to just flip open the laptop and check your email, no hassle.
What do you do when a customer asks for a non-smoking room so he can smoke?
This is a weird question. Most guests who are smokers, yet don't like the smell of old smoke (or are smokers, but not of tobacco), are intelligent enough to get a non-smoking room and apply a simple conversion process once inside it (i.e., light up).
Apple has stopped using SCSI for their systems since the G3 IIRC and went for IDE instead. To compensate for external hot-pluggable drives, they've added Firewire.
This was a dark day in Apple history, IMO.:( Apple seems to have done this in an effort to drive down costs, to try and compete better in the low-end PC market. As a result, while you can pick up an SE/30 with a still-functional original hard drive, you don't have to go far to find some iBook user who needed their drive replaced.
Yeah yeah, like a router sans hub. That would be pretty cool, and should retail at $10-15 (it is basically two NICs and a little logic, so figure 2 x $4 + $5, give or take). Wouldn't that make network administration easy? Each computer could have (according to its own knowledge) the same static IP, and you just use a little dongle to set the "real" external address.
But then what happens if the DHCP server assigns somone 10.0.10.10 and then someone comes in with that static IP?
Could you possibly keep track of MAC addresses and check every N packets whether there has been a change?
If you allow global IPs and do some funky route hacking, it would be trivial for someone to boot up their laptop with an IP of 216.239.39.101 and suddenly nobody in the hotel can get to Google.
That would be awesome. Supporting static IPs seems tricky. The router could try to ping everything in 192.168 until it gets a response, right? Do Windows boxers respond to ping?
But, isn't it possible by just looking at all packets coming in on the interface? Oh, but the gateway needs to be configured, client side. That's the kicker...the gateway could be anything, IINM. Or not...the gateway must be encoded somehow in the packets.
Hey, maybe I should read something about how TCP/IP works before posting. I'll leave this here as an anchor point for those who wish to respond to the article, that way it will be simpler for everyone.:)
I could see the newsgroup filtering work in a couple reasonable ways. For example, you could "filter" a newsgroup by just not showing messages which match the filter. And you could implement delete by either just not showing the message, or possibly issuing a cancel for it (making this choice a user preference).
This actually kind of supports my original point, though. Some functions of a newsgroup "filter" would be present in the email counterpart, but you are not going to have 100% feature overlap (without majorly crippling either or both). That being the case, you either force the user to remember what kind of filter they are dealing with, or make it difficult for them to be confused (by using, as you suggest different color schemes, widgets, layouts, and terminology).
An example of this in Unix would be regexes and globs: they are similar, but by giving them different names (instead of using vague words like "wildcard" or "pattern") and trying to make it clear when and where each is used, we avoid confusion and errors.
BTW, I have a great example of email/news confusion; in college, my friends and I commandeered an unused school newsgroup for a little while. I showed my girlfriend how to access it from pine (de facto standard school email client), and she ended up hitting "R" to reply to a news message of mine, incorrectly assuming that this would perform the same function as it does when reading mail. Of course, the newsgroup function would more accurately be called "follow up", as it responds with a *public* message. Basically, if the pine interface had differentiated a little better between the two UIs (or, mea culpa, if I'd explained it a little better to begin with), it would have prevented a little bit of embarrasment on the parts of my friends and me.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones can also prevent emergancies from happening. Here at UGA a girl last year was being followed home from downtown by a serial rapist. She got out her phone and called 911 and the man fled instead of having to deal with the cops.
Cell phones can be a nuisence when people abuse them, but they are a good thing.
s/cell phone/handgun/gi and s/called 911/shot at the fucker/ and s/the cops/physical therapy/;
Seriously, I know they can be useful. I couldn't own one, because the potential for abuse is so great. E.g., my girlfriend and I live in seperate cities, so I drive to see her on the weekends. Even though I leave at about the same time every Friday, getting there at about the same time, I know that if I had a cell phone, I would call every time, just to tell her that. Which is clearly stupid.
Exactly, thank you.
I'm with you every step there. My POV is, basically, there were lots of reasons to switch from .gif to .png, but not really many to switch from .jpeg to .png. And switching from .mp3 to .ogg seems more like the latter. That's just my impression. And the ogg advocacy is putting the cart before the horse, because, while it could grow into a really great audio codec, it hasn't yet, AFAIK, so the hype should let up a bit. I do understand that they're trying to generate income, so maybe the hype is unavoidable. But that is, IMO, all the more reason to take it with a grain or two of salt.
My 2 cents.
I've been considering the PWPs. Basically, there is no perfect solution as M1 and M2 can always be abused. But I think a (-1 Crapflood) moderation would help a lot (you could set Crapflood to equal -5 in your preferences). But it will turn out just like "Troll" and "Flamebait"...most of the posts modded as either of those, well, aren't. So whatever.
Just by seeing one (tabbed interface), I can duplicate it's effect. I don't need a patent desclosure to figgure it out - so therefore it's a trivial invention, obvious to one skilled in the arts.
That is just a side effect of your knowledge of programming. That is, you might invent a magic salad chopper that most people, when looking at it, won't understand. You haven't patented the chopping of vegetables (just as Adobe hasn't patented the customization of UIs), but you did patent this one machine that chops vegetables. But, someone who has worked in the field (engineering, focusing on turbines or whatever it is your chopper is based on) might see it and think, "ah, of course." Now, should he be permitted to go recreate your invention? Patent law says no.
...to take him to the hospital and save his life? Just because it involved an accident doesn't make it an emergency. Sounds more like you (all) managed to save him an hour or two of inconvenience, but call it what it is.
More correctly, their role is to choose stories that will generate the most revenue. Cynics might suggest that this does not mean just choosing stories that will get ad views, but might also include running stories that make advertisers or potential advertisers look good (e.g., "ATI All-In-Wonder Released!"), or choosing stories that generate excitement about the parent company's other projects.
i don't recall reading them claim to be journalists
Eh, don't have a reference, but it has happened multiple times, IIRC, usually in context like, "it's okay if we screw the users who comment, because we are a news site." That sort of thing. The fact is, the editors do play that role, and as a for-profit company, they have an obligation to notify readers of potential conflicts of interest, as much for their own protection (i.e., to avoid the conspiracy theories that are so popular) as for the readers'. I was just saying that the caustic tone was unnecessary and unwelcome.
"Slashteam": can we please moderate stories, already? This thing has T R O L L all over it with the <blink> tag...I mean, "propellorheads?"
Now, I'm not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, but is the sarcasm really necessary? It is common practice for journalists to acknowledge up front any potential conflicts of interest, just so that the reader is on the right page. Slashdot readers were right to point this out, and whining about it is frankly not appropriate. You do claim to be real journalists every now and again, so let's stop acting like we're in kindergarten, hm?
Hehe, you don't know who you're talking to. Whomever is 37337, it is certainly not me...never got the hang of IRC, probably having my box hacked right now, use Windows at work, etc. I do not have a single .ogg file, nor do I understand why I would want to. It was, in fact, as a non-37337 that I was responding: clearly the OP has as much experience [points] as I do in these matters.
If the Free Software community focusses on these kinds of superficial goalse.g., convincing people to convert their mp3's to ogg'sthen Linux and BSD will end up just as much laughingstocks as Windows is currently. If people understand Free Software, they will want it; I am convinced of that. The correct approach is not to fool them into using Free alternatives, it is to educate them.
Thanks for giving it to me straight, and rock on through the ages. That goes for everyone, actually, Win and Lin users alike: rock and roll till you pass the fsck out, this party's groovin' and it's just getting started. RnR will never die, and Real Men Rock. Peace, I'm out.
This is not acceptable language for discourse among mature adults.
and decided to convert all of my MP3 files into Ogg-Vorbis files
Surely you had a reason to do such a thing (as of course you're aware that recompressing lossy->lossy is a Bad Thing)...
I've been pretty happy with the conversion, even though it was supposed to be a bit lossy
No, it is lossy, that's a technical term, BION.
(I can't hear any difference)
You either have shitty speakers or are a moron who should have been recording to tape.
Anyway, now I'm looking for a portable music player that plays Ogg-Vorbis files, and I'm coming up empty. I *really* don't want to have to convert the tunes back to MP3 on the fly to put them onto a portable player.
Okay, let me get this straight...not only did you not have a reason for converting in the first place, you actually had a reason not to have converted. Smart move... But honestly, if you didn't notice the quality loss converting to Vorbis, go ahead and convert back.
Now for the response:
We want to work with you to make Vorbis playback a possibility on your machine, and licensing terms are extremely flexible to accommodate small companies (even one-man shops) up to the big guys.
IOW, it's about ideology, not technology. Clue: most computer sound systems aren't good enough to reproduce 128kbps accurately (as your own testimony confirms), and mp3 gets a lot better. Even if Vorbis is better technologically, they are fighting an existing de facto standard. NTM, there are more Free mp3 players than Free Vorbis players, IIANM. So the "open" argument holds 0mL of water.
Face it, you should have expelled the bug from your ass (or whatever your gruesome metaphor was) rather than complied with it.
the sims is not to realistic in real life their is way more partys
You are overreacting dude. Instead of
.
;(
s/[:;][()]//g
you should be thinking
s/([:;])-([()])/$1$2/g
Trust me, no nose is necessary, or even recommended.
It's also quite a PITA for people checking into the hotel. You've been on a plane for 6 hours, waited for your luggage, spent 45 minutes cooped up in a cab or awful rental car...you just want to hop in the shower, change into your white slacks and teal Polo shirt, and hit the bar, maybe chatting up a few ladies or doing a little dancing. You definitely don't want to have to go searching through your luggage looking for your laptop, whose battery is dead from the flight so you need to untangle the AC adapter, oh and find the dongle for the ethernet card, etc. When you come back to your room at 2 or 3 in the morning (maybe not alone!) after several drinks (hey, company's paying), you want to just flip open the laptop and check your email, no hassle.
This is a weird question. Most guests who are smokers, yet don't like the smell of old smoke (or are smokers, but not of tobacco), are intelligent enough to get a non-smoking room and apply a simple conversion process once inside it (i.e., light up).
This was a dark day in Apple history, IMO. :( Apple seems to have done this in an effort to drive down costs, to try and compete better in the low-end PC market. As a result, while you can pick up an SE/30 with a still-functional original hard drive, you don't have to go far to find some iBook user who needed their drive replaced.
Yes, my reaction was along similar lines: you are going to take some old rock stars' advice on disk systems?!?
Sir, I strongly approve of your noseless smiley. Keep up the good work.
Yeah yeah, like a router sans hub. That would be pretty cool, and should retail at $10-15 (it is basically two NICs and a little logic, so figure 2 x $4 + $5, give or take). Wouldn't that make network administration easy? Each computer could have (according to its own knowledge) the same static IP, and you just use a little dongle to set the "real" external address.
Could you possibly keep track of MAC addresses and check every N packets whether there has been a change?
If you allow global IPs and do some funky route hacking, it would be trivial for someone to boot up their laptop with an IP of 216.239.39.101 and suddenly nobody in the hotel can get to Google.
Known as a "man-in-the-lobby" attack. ;)
But, isn't it possible by just looking at all packets coming in on the interface? Oh, but the gateway needs to be configured, client side. That's the kicker...the gateway could be anything, IINM. Or not...the gateway must be encoded somehow in the packets.
Hey, maybe I should read something about how TCP/IP works before posting. I'll leave this here as an anchor point for those who wish to respond to the article, that way it will be simpler for everyone. :)
It does if it isn't cocaine.
Yeah, clouds are awesome.
When you put it in those terms...why did I go to high school again?
This actually kind of supports my original point, though. Some functions of a newsgroup "filter" would be present in the email counterpart, but you are not going to have 100% feature overlap (without majorly crippling either or both). That being the case, you either force the user to remember what kind of filter they are dealing with, or make it difficult for them to be confused (by using, as you suggest different color schemes, widgets, layouts, and terminology).
An example of this in Unix would be regexes and globs: they are similar, but by giving them different names (instead of using vague words like "wildcard" or "pattern") and trying to make it clear when and where each is used, we avoid confusion and errors.
BTW, I have a great example of email/news confusion; in college, my friends and I commandeered an unused school newsgroup for a little while. I showed my girlfriend how to access it from pine (de facto standard school email client), and she ended up hitting "R" to reply to a news message of mine, incorrectly assuming that this would perform the same function as it does when reading mail. Of course, the newsgroup function would more accurately be called "follow up", as it responds with a *public* message. Basically, if the pine interface had differentiated a little better between the two UIs (or, mea culpa, if I'd explained it a little better to begin with), it would have prevented a little bit of embarrasment on the parts of my friends and me.