You're leaving out those who are too lazy to give in to their conscience. It's really easy to sit on the couch feeling guilty once you get the hang of it.
The opposite of that can be seen with Palladium, where they've used the same system since time immemorial. The system itself really shows its age. It's not terrible, but it's hard to make characters and it's overly complicated at times. However, instead of putting their time into making a new system, they've instead taken the time to make more classes and flesh out the universe better. It's obvious that they'd do better with the less hard core crowd if they were to make the system easier, but they'd do it at the expense of alienating their fans and losing out on the opportunity to put out another book.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks that these pdfs are cutting into sales are idiots. Generating a character with a pdf as your only reference is hard, takes twice as long, and is tedious. I'm constantly flipping through the book making sure that I'm getting what I think I am when I take a certain skill, or checking to see how weapons compare against each other before I take a specialization. With a book, it's negligibly easy to flip back and forth, just keep a finger on the page you'll need in the future. With a pdf, you can bookmark it, but then you need to hunt on the screen for the right bookmark, make a few extra clicks, etc. PDFs are useful for finding out if you want to buy a book or as an occasional reference, but for anything resembling a core book or is heavily used by your character (like the expanded psionics handbook), having a physical copy is a necessity for me. Finding out whether it's a necessity or not is the sort of thing you want to see the copy for first. If you're in a bookstore, you can flip through the pages and see if it offers what you want. If you're buying online, torrenting serves the same purpose.
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes?
Yes. They already act together in lawsuits and pricing, why not act together in leaving iTunes for a company willing to give them the price they want? iTunes cannot survive without the labels, but the opposite isn't true (in the short term, anyway).
Re:There you go again!
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
pageviews do not suddenly get easier to service because that page has a video on it.
No, they get considerably harder. Hulu, if I remember correctly, dynamically alters the bitrate to compensate slow connections and improve the quality on faster ones. It also puts a load on the server that's throwing out the video regardless of the bitrate.
You are correct that Hulu is surpassed by scribd in rank, but if you look at the pageviews instead of the ranking, you'll see that twitter and hulu get more pageviews than scribd and have gotten more since at least january. Reach incorporates unrelated metrics such as unique visits, etc, which doesn't have as much of an effect as just sheer pageviews. Funny enough, that would make scribd's ridiculous bounce rate give it a higher overall rank.
Re:There you go again!
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not a single site you posted is anywhere near the volume of traffic that Twitter's seen. Hulu's the closest, but the heavy lifting is done outside of RoR.
I remember Arthur C Clarke saying that Sci Fi is something that could happen, while fantasy is something that could never happen.
Only if you use the word "could" to means "sometime in the future, but not with what we currently know." By that reasoning, fantasy could happen as well, assuming that we find some source of power that would grant people abilities indistinguishable from magic. Is that any crazier than assuming that at some point we'll be able to travel faster than the speed of light?
It seems to me that the threat of the US and Britain to the west helped the Russians on the eastern front considerably and vice versa. The Russians didn't even get Leningrad back until the US was fighting in North Africa, so I don't think you can say that it sat out until Russia had the war won, and I don't think several years of war count as "[going] in to steal the laurels". So, while you are absolutely in the wrong with respect to WWII, I will say that Russia did much more of the legwork than you'd think from American culture. There's no way to tell what would have happened if one or the other were to have stayed out of the war, but I'd say it's fairly safe to say that they both played their roles.
However, what would the world have looked like if the US hadn't taken the western half of Europe? Stalin certainly wouldn't have agreed to let everything west of berlin remain democratic, would he? Can you honestly think that things would have been better with Russia as the sole superpower? The US hurts people out of ignorance and letting the wrong people have more power than they otherwise would have, but even then it doesn't compare to the types of power and brutality you saw out of the Soviet Union or other dictatorships. The US's shit doesn't smell like roses, but it sure does a better job of keeping that shit off of their friends.
And then the user wonders why the hell their disk drive is spinning up when there's nothing in it and making all those funny noises, as mentioned in the link. The real point of his blog post...(wait for it)...the engineer was smart enough to figure out how to detect the disk in the first place, he was smart enough to figure all these workarounds out and they were all rejected for valid reasons.
What's funny is that nerds on both his blog and this site jumped all over the chance to show how, years later and with only a vague description, they're able to solve a problem that the original guy and all the microsoft engineers couldn't.
That was the most common comment on the blog post. His answer makes sense, basically saying that it would be confusing for the user that it not work the first time they put the disk in the drive but it would every time thereafter. In addition, if the disk drive were switched out for another one of the opposite type, then the user would return it with the statement that it was broken. Overall, it would cause more confusion than the training option, which had already been discarded as too onerous.
It's not a matter of whether they have a right to post them, the GP was refuting their parent in saying that Google will take down pictures due to someone requesting it. There's a world of difference between a company that will pull those pictures down whenever the owner asks and a company that must be compelled to do it.
However, I do think that this is much ado about nothing. After all, the car's not seeing anything that anybody else driving down the street wouldn't be able to see. In addition, the benefits are enormous; when looking for directions, the first thing I do after finding the destination address is to check the street view. I hate not being able to find the place because I didn't realize that the bakery they were referring to is decorated like an abandoned warehouse. I'd rather find that information out while I have the resources of the internet at my disposal instead of having to rely on a cellphone to clear up the misunderstanding.
Isn't the first requirement for a singularity be that it's able to improve itself, thus leading to an accelerating growth that ends in the subjugation of humanity? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to withhold knowledge of the scientific method as long as possible?
When weighed against the greatness of the songs those computers will write and sing, it's worth the loss of human and companion cube life. Besides, we don't know what the main character of Portal was doing there in the first place. After all, what are the chances that a woman who just HAPPENED to know how to fall infinitely far without damage would just HAPPEN to know how to operate the guns with perfect accuracy right after picking them up would just HAPPEN to be in the facility? Now, I'm not saying that she deserved it, I'm just saying that we don't know the whole story.
Why, so normal users can subsidize high-volume users?
That's not the case at all. I would gladly pay for my high-volume use, but my ISP just caps and tiers my service instead. I'm not doing anything with my connection that other people can't do, and the highest volume I use is Hulu, which is both legitimate and now the second largest video sharing site in the world. If another use that's not high volume has the highest tier internet service, then they're probably using it wrong. If they want much cheaper internet, they can easily get dialup. So, how is that subsidizing high volume users?
As you mentioned, what we have here is a failure of companies to offer good choices. Why not charge by the gigabyte, or advertise for caps right out? High volume users like me would gladly pay for high speeds all through the downloading, and if they wouldn't then let them get shoved to a lower tier or cut off. Lower volume users who still want ultra high speeds while accessing their email can sign up for a 1Gb/month connection. Most people will still buy more connection than they need, you'll corner the market on power users if their only other options are crap like they are now, and the low users can get a lower price than at other companies because their usage patterns will now match the price they're paying.
What's really dumb with this situation, though, is blaming people who are just using the connection they were given in reasonable ways. High volume users are easily stigmatized if you think about it from the point of view of people sharing the companies internet, but that's not what's advertised by the companies and that's not what I've bought. I've bought my connection, I bought it at the speed I wanted, and my ISP tells me to go eat shit if I try to use it how I want to.
I disagree. Investing in open source is all about time, not money. When you start a business selling support for open source, you expect that the developers you attract won't be in it for the money, although they'll certainly take it. When you buy the company, it's not the traditional acquisition, it's one where you buy the opportunity to take control of a few parts of the project. If you fuck with what the employees love about the project, then they'll leave and either fork or create a new one.
What Sun could have done was buy the company, leave it almost exactly the way it was but to sell support for the entire stack while encouraging the developers to work on Sun-related bugs first. Instead, they tried to fuck with the formula, and the developers left. If Sun's really wanting to, they can bring more developers on that are either in line with the new business decisions or are working for the more traditional reasons. They're not so far gone that it's irrecoverable.
I do that quite frequently in firefox. I wonder if their cable modem or DNS or something else was causing that problem on purpose. For instance, many cable modems allow you to disallow wireless connections to the admin tools, I can see the behavior your describing being the fallback for rejection.
Let's not forget that the resources consumed by those new features shows that people just can't program efficiently anymore. Why, back in the day, they could have made firefox using only 32k of ram and chutzpah!
The problem is that "most" isn't the target for high profile websites, they need to be as close to identical as possible. The assertion that cross browser testing only came about because of MS was just plain wrong. In fact, it could be argued that for a few years, cross browser testing wasn't necessary because of Microsoft since IE was the only browser with any significant market share.
It absolutely would. Speaking as someone who's spent many hours debugging problems that only appear in webkit-based browsers, not Firefox or IE, I can safely say that multiple browser testing would be necessary anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
You're leaving out those who are too lazy to give in to their conscience. It's really easy to sit on the couch feeling guilty once you get the hang of it.
Dare you impugn the honor of Robert E. Lee, good sir? He may be our enemy, but that doesn't mean he's not a gentleman!
The opposite of that can be seen with Palladium, where they've used the same system since time immemorial. The system itself really shows its age. It's not terrible, but it's hard to make characters and it's overly complicated at times. However, instead of putting their time into making a new system, they've instead taken the time to make more classes and flesh out the universe better. It's obvious that they'd do better with the less hard core crowd if they were to make the system easier, but they'd do it at the expense of alienating their fans and losing out on the opportunity to put out another book.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks that these pdfs are cutting into sales are idiots. Generating a character with a pdf as your only reference is hard, takes twice as long, and is tedious. I'm constantly flipping through the book making sure that I'm getting what I think I am when I take a certain skill, or checking to see how weapons compare against each other before I take a specialization. With a book, it's negligibly easy to flip back and forth, just keep a finger on the page you'll need in the future. With a pdf, you can bookmark it, but then you need to hunt on the screen for the right bookmark, make a few extra clicks, etc. PDFs are useful for finding out if you want to buy a book or as an occasional reference, but for anything resembling a core book or is heavily used by your character (like the expanded psionics handbook), having a physical copy is a necessity for me. Finding out whether it's a necessity or not is the sort of thing you want to see the copy for first. If you're in a bookstore, you can flip through the pages and see if it offers what you want. If you're buying online, torrenting serves the same purpose.
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes?
Yes. They already act together in lawsuits and pricing, why not act together in leaving iTunes for a company willing to give them the price they want? iTunes cannot survive without the labels, but the opposite isn't true (in the short term, anyway).
pageviews do not suddenly get easier to service because that page has a video on it.
No, they get considerably harder. Hulu, if I remember correctly, dynamically alters the bitrate to compensate slow connections and improve the quality on faster ones. It also puts a load on the server that's throwing out the video regardless of the bitrate.
You're using Alexa's rank rather than their pageviews, which shows a considerably different picture. Also, unless I'm missing something, linkedin is written in java, not ruby on rails, it just had a rather high profile experiment with ruby on rails and a facebook app.
You are correct that Hulu is surpassed by scribd in rank, but if you look at the pageviews instead of the ranking, you'll see that twitter and hulu get more pageviews than scribd and have gotten more since at least january. Reach incorporates unrelated metrics such as unique visits, etc, which doesn't have as much of an effect as just sheer pageviews. Funny enough, that would make scribd's ridiculous bounce rate give it a higher overall rank.
Not a single site you posted is anywhere near the volume of traffic that Twitter's seen. Hulu's the closest, but the heavy lifting is done outside of RoR.
I remember Arthur C Clarke saying that Sci Fi is something that could happen, while fantasy is something that could never happen.
Only if you use the word "could" to means "sometime in the future, but not with what we currently know." By that reasoning, fantasy could happen as well, assuming that we find some source of power that would grant people abilities indistinguishable from magic. Is that any crazier than assuming that at some point we'll be able to travel faster than the speed of light?
It seems to me that the threat of the US and Britain to the west helped the Russians on the eastern front considerably and vice versa. The Russians didn't even get Leningrad back until the US was fighting in North Africa, so I don't think you can say that it sat out until Russia had the war won, and I don't think several years of war count as "[going] in to steal the laurels". So, while you are absolutely in the wrong with respect to WWII, I will say that Russia did much more of the legwork than you'd think from American culture. There's no way to tell what would have happened if one or the other were to have stayed out of the war, but I'd say it's fairly safe to say that they both played their roles.
However, what would the world have looked like if the US hadn't taken the western half of Europe? Stalin certainly wouldn't have agreed to let everything west of berlin remain democratic, would he? Can you honestly think that things would have been better with Russia as the sole superpower? The US hurts people out of ignorance and letting the wrong people have more power than they otherwise would have, but even then it doesn't compare to the types of power and brutality you saw out of the Soviet Union or other dictatorships. The US's shit doesn't smell like roses, but it sure does a better job of keeping that shit off of their friends.
And then the user wonders why the hell their disk drive is spinning up when there's nothing in it and making all those funny noises, as mentioned in the link. The real point of his blog post...(wait for it)...the engineer was smart enough to figure out how to detect the disk in the first place, he was smart enough to figure all these workarounds out and they were all rejected for valid reasons.
What's funny is that nerds on both his blog and this site jumped all over the chance to show how, years later and with only a vague description, they're able to solve a problem that the original guy and all the microsoft engineers couldn't.
That was the most common comment on the blog post. His answer makes sense, basically saying that it would be confusing for the user that it not work the first time they put the disk in the drive but it would every time thereafter. In addition, if the disk drive were switched out for another one of the opposite type, then the user would return it with the statement that it was broken. Overall, it would cause more confusion than the training option, which had already been discarded as too onerous.
Yeah, localizing Simlish must have been a bitch.
It's not a matter of whether they have a right to post them, the GP was refuting their parent in saying that Google will take down pictures due to someone requesting it. There's a world of difference between a company that will pull those pictures down whenever the owner asks and a company that must be compelled to do it.
However, I do think that this is much ado about nothing. After all, the car's not seeing anything that anybody else driving down the street wouldn't be able to see. In addition, the benefits are enormous; when looking for directions, the first thing I do after finding the destination address is to check the street view. I hate not being able to find the place because I didn't realize that the bakery they were referring to is decorated like an abandoned warehouse. I'd rather find that information out while I have the resources of the internet at my disposal instead of having to rely on a cellphone to clear up the misunderstanding.
Isn't the first requirement for a singularity be that it's able to improve itself, thus leading to an accelerating growth that ends in the subjugation of humanity? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to withhold knowledge of the scientific method as long as possible?
When weighed against the greatness of the songs those computers will write and sing, it's worth the loss of human and companion cube life. Besides, we don't know what the main character of Portal was doing there in the first place. After all, what are the chances that a woman who just HAPPENED to know how to fall infinitely far without damage would just HAPPEN to know how to operate the guns with perfect accuracy right after picking them up would just HAPPEN to be in the facility? Now, I'm not saying that she deserved it, I'm just saying that we don't know the whole story.
Why, so normal users can subsidize high-volume users?
That's not the case at all. I would gladly pay for my high-volume use, but my ISP just caps and tiers my service instead. I'm not doing anything with my connection that other people can't do, and the highest volume I use is Hulu, which is both legitimate and now the second largest video sharing site in the world. If another use that's not high volume has the highest tier internet service, then they're probably using it wrong. If they want much cheaper internet, they can easily get dialup. So, how is that subsidizing high volume users?
As you mentioned, what we have here is a failure of companies to offer good choices. Why not charge by the gigabyte, or advertise for caps right out? High volume users like me would gladly pay for high speeds all through the downloading, and if they wouldn't then let them get shoved to a lower tier or cut off. Lower volume users who still want ultra high speeds while accessing their email can sign up for a 1Gb/month connection. Most people will still buy more connection than they need, you'll corner the market on power users if their only other options are crap like they are now, and the low users can get a lower price than at other companies because their usage patterns will now match the price they're paying.
What's really dumb with this situation, though, is blaming people who are just using the connection they were given in reasonable ways. High volume users are easily stigmatized if you think about it from the point of view of people sharing the companies internet, but that's not what's advertised by the companies and that's not what I've bought. I've bought my connection, I bought it at the speed I wanted, and my ISP tells me to go eat shit if I try to use it how I want to.
See, diplomacy is a game, of sorts
No kidding. I hear it's pretty cutthroat, too.
Achievement Unlocked - saying you go FP in the third comment down.
I disagree. Investing in open source is all about time, not money. When you start a business selling support for open source, you expect that the developers you attract won't be in it for the money, although they'll certainly take it. When you buy the company, it's not the traditional acquisition, it's one where you buy the opportunity to take control of a few parts of the project. If you fuck with what the employees love about the project, then they'll leave and either fork or create a new one.
What Sun could have done was buy the company, leave it almost exactly the way it was but to sell support for the entire stack while encouraging the developers to work on Sun-related bugs first. Instead, they tried to fuck with the formula, and the developers left. If Sun's really wanting to, they can bring more developers on that are either in line with the new business decisions or are working for the more traditional reasons. They're not so far gone that it's irrecoverable.
I do that quite frequently in firefox. I wonder if their cable modem or DNS or something else was causing that problem on purpose. For instance, many cable modems allow you to disallow wireless connections to the admin tools, I can see the behavior your describing being the fallback for rejection.
Right after the executives at Mozilla lose their minds and just before it's forked by the more popular version of itself that doesn't do that.
Let's not forget that the resources consumed by those new features shows that people just can't program efficiently anymore. Why, back in the day, they could have made firefox using only 32k of ram and chutzpah!
The problem is that "most" isn't the target for high profile websites, they need to be as close to identical as possible. The assertion that cross browser testing only came about because of MS was just plain wrong. In fact, it could be argued that for a few years, cross browser testing wasn't necessary because of Microsoft since IE was the only browser with any significant market share.
It absolutely would. Speaking as someone who's spent many hours debugging problems that only appear in webkit-based browsers, not Firefox or IE, I can safely say that multiple browser testing would be necessary anyway.