Note to you: people in a relationship don't get worked up into a rant about being in a relationship instead of being single... You need to get some... The sooner, the better... For everyone. Cheers:)
"it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. OperaÃ(TM)s proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML Ã" Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective Ã" itÃ(TM)s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors."
That's great, it also lets Opera see everything your are doing and to target you for some extra juicy advertising. That's fantastic!
And yet by doing that, you are always copying yesterday's design and never quite catching up to the competition. That's what the Soviets discovered the hard way and the Chinese are set to rediscover. You can't pretend to innovate by copying. You have innovate independently to get ahead.
A truly geeky ring would be useful in some manner. For instance, I've long entertained the idea of a ring that could be used to start a fire (damned if I know how to do it). The discussion in the comments about exotic materials are not materially different than the average non-geeky wedding ring conversion. i.e "should I get white gold? Maybe Platinum? Oh, I do so like that diamond... bla bla". It's just shifted a little bit in the periodic table.
My wife is the antithesis of a geek and she would hear nothing of my ideas. However, our rings are fairly unique in that they were hand sawed with our names on them.
I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who got a pre-production HTC handset like this from their (nameless) employer. To prove I've played with it: the friend's phone had a mode where unlocking it required connecting a grid of dots in a particular order. This may exist on other phones but I'd never seen it before. Cute gimmick. Unless HTC and Google sort out the HW and UI it's a non-starter as an iphone competitor. This may change in production but the touchscreen is simply horrible. It's unresponsive and inaccurate. This is plainly visible in this video of the device. Apart from that, the device is big and fat. I did not get a chance to test call quality or battery life. The UI itself is not as simple as the iPhone's. It's yet another spin on the usual icons in windows maze that invariably leave you lost. Apple's "secret" sauce is execution. Their phone is pretty, their HW works with the software (the touchscreen anyway, not the 3G issues...:) and they've made it dead simple to download $999.99 useless apps. It all works together well. Shipping Android on subpar HW, such as the example I saw, will doom it to being yet another of the "other" phones.
I'm guessing you have it backwards. The referencing webpage marks up the file as a Java object. I imagine the GIF part is to get past the socialsite server's image validity tests so that it will agree to host the file.
This same old tired idea keeps popping up over and over again with a change of buzzwords. Now it's the cloud, before it was the network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_computer) and there was the Audrey in between. However, the latency is always there and _your_ data is always elsewhere. Two very problematic issues that will always doom these efforts.
Apple's lame excuses aside, the reason there is no "background processing" or notification capability in the official SDK is so as not to harm AT&T's SMS cash cow. Look at the thought and effort that AT&T put into SMS pricing tiers. It would be worthless if there was a hint of SMS like capability in the SDK. A lot of money says Apple intentionally crippled its SDK/phone capabilities to keep SMS around. I don't know if e-mail is truly push on the device (i.e. it buzzes in your pocket after you've not looked it at for an hour.) If it is, then this would potentially kill SMS but I find it hard to believe.
Yet Another Interface Definition Language... What's wrong with XDR? 3/4 of the companies I've worked for had some engineer who had to unroll his own RPC format with matching IDL for some "technical" reason that had no basis in reality. They were all pretty crummy implementations. All you hot shot engineers, please, just stop re-inventing the wheel.
If google really cared about not being evil they would go the extra mile to anonymize the data without compromising its integrity. They could assign meaningless unique IDs to names and IP addresses (and any other identifying information) and hand that over along with the judge's consent. But, hey guess what, Google is just as evil as Viacom so that won't happen.
Generally, airlines and airports have many "security" measures which have nothing to do with security. 1. economy passengers must use the lavatories to the back of the plane. I recall the 9/11 hijackers flew first class... In any case, the steel cockpit door is locked, right? 2. ID is required to fly. On some flights, you get to show your ID again at the gate. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the airlines ensuring there is no secondary market for flight tickets. 3. An oft heard question is "Sir, do you have any liquids" (because I couldn't find them if I tried). I've boarded flights with liquids that were never found. It's very hit or miss. To the TSA agent reading slashdot, come get me! 4. Finding liquids causes no harm. A would be attacker can keep trying to smuggle liquids on board until he succeeds. The worst that happens is that his special brew gets dumped a few times. 5. Dim, poorly trained and paid TSA screeners. I've seen many verboten items make it to flights (a diving knife for example).
You're advocating or at the very least acquiescing to the tyranny of the majority. In a nutshell, just because most people believe L, doesn't make L tenable in any frame of reference. This is particularly important when, the majority, X, believe K should be done to the minority, Y.
In addition, you have a somewhat naive belief that laws are written by majorities.
Some good examples of where this is not true:
1. File sharing. I'd wager that a large majority shares files (and other items) in what would be considered illegal based on current law and precedent. Clearly the majority does not agree or even abide by these laws.
2. Read up about the history of margarine here. It's incredible how special interests of a tiny minority subvert the law for over 100 years.
First, kudos to the U.S. for buying plutonium from the Russians. What better way to get it off their hands? Second, many people should rejoice, this is a golden opportunity to decommission a warhead or two for the plutonium in it.
"People want their computers to be protected against any form of intrusion - from within or without - regardless of how it's classified."
You have two options for pointing your finger: 1. Microsoft for providing an inherently broken product. Why should you need to install anything in addition to the base OS? 2. Yourself for not installing something other than Windows.
Except Pixar has an army of shader developers working for 2 years on tweaking the rendering of practically every scene to ensure its photorealism. Scanline renderers may be faster but the human effort required to achieve photorealism is huge. Ray tracing alone is not a silver a bullet but if it produces better results with less human effort, it's a net win.
I found this on Pixar's RenderMan page (https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/renderman.html):
"Ray Tracing and Global Illumination The ray tracing and global illumination features have been integrated with Pixar's highly evolved implementation of the REYES "scanline" rendering algorithm so that you only incur the overhead associated with these effects when and where you need them. RenderMan shader developers can selectively invoke RenderMan's new ray tracing subsystem to invent new solutions to difficult production problems or to achieve physically correct illumination effects."
My interpretation: If you can't figure out how to manually tweak the scene, throw CPU power at it.
I couldn't agree more. Anyone who claims "The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well" at a company with >5,000 people is either drinking the kool-aid or is selling something.
I don't understand why you think the fake IE error page is slimy. That's a side effect of the method they use to opt you out. When you opt out they probably store a cookie on your browser that says you opted out. The DNS server has no way of knowing if you opted out so it always redirects to the same "typo" server which then checks your cookie and displays an error for you.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person".
Unless you're the church, of course.
Tell him you will take a long vacation and will not be available for tech support. You are priceless!
Note to you: people in a relationship don't get worked up into a rant about being in a relationship instead of being single... You need to get some... The sooner, the better... For everyone. Cheers :)
The ones with my million dollar portfolios? Yes, they are.
My ISP can't peer through my SSL traffic. Opera would have to.
"it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. OperaÃ(TM)s proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML Ã" Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective Ã" itÃ(TM)s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors."
That's great, it also lets Opera see everything your are doing and to target you for some extra juicy advertising. That's fantastic!
And yet by doing that, you are always copying yesterday's design and never quite catching up to the competition. That's what the Soviets discovered the hard way and the Chinese are set to rediscover. You can't pretend to innovate by copying. You have innovate independently to get ahead.
A truly geeky ring would be useful in some manner. For instance, I've long entertained the idea of a ring that could be used to start a fire (damned if I know how to do it).
The discussion in the comments about exotic materials are not materially different than the average non-geeky wedding ring conversion. i.e "should I get white gold? Maybe Platinum? Oh, I do so like that diamond... bla bla". It's just shifted a little bit in the periodic table.
My wife is the antithesis of a geek and she would hear nothing of my ideas. However, our rings are fairly unique in that they were hand sawed with our names on them.
Don't you be denigrating Bresenham's line drawing algorithm. Truly a work of algorithmic beauty.
HW manufacturers don't understand why they should cripple their products and lose a buck so Mr. Hollenshead can make a buck.
I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who got a pre-production HTC handset like this from their (nameless) employer. :) and they've made it dead simple to download $999.99 useless apps. It all works together well.
To prove I've played with it: the friend's phone had a mode where unlocking it required connecting a grid of dots in a particular order. This may exist on other phones but I'd never seen it before. Cute gimmick.
Unless HTC and Google sort out the HW and UI it's a non-starter as an iphone competitor.
This may change in production but the touchscreen is simply horrible. It's unresponsive and inaccurate. This is plainly visible in this video of the device. Apart from that, the device is big and fat. I did not get a chance to test call quality or battery life.
The UI itself is not as simple as the iPhone's. It's yet another spin on the usual icons in windows maze that invariably leave you lost.
Apple's "secret" sauce is execution. Their phone is pretty, their HW works with the software (the touchscreen anyway, not the 3G issues...
Shipping Android on subpar HW, such as the example I saw, will doom it to being yet another of the "other" phones.
I'm guessing you have it backwards. The referencing webpage marks up the file as a Java object. I imagine the GIF part is to get past the socialsite server's image validity tests so that it will agree to host the file.
This same old tired idea keeps popping up over and over again with a change of buzzwords. Now it's the cloud, before it was the network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_computer) and there was the Audrey in between.
However, the latency is always there and _your_ data is always elsewhere. Two very problematic issues that will always doom these efforts.
Apple's lame excuses aside, the reason there is no "background processing" or notification capability in the official SDK is so as not to harm AT&T's SMS cash cow.
Look at the thought and effort that AT&T put into SMS pricing tiers. It would be worthless if there was a hint of SMS like capability in the SDK. A lot of money says Apple intentionally crippled its SDK/phone capabilities to keep SMS around.
I don't know if e-mail is truly push on the device (i.e. it buzzes in your pocket after you've not looked it at for an hour.) If it is, then this would potentially kill SMS but I find it hard to believe.
Yet Another Interface Definition Language...
What's wrong with XDR?
3/4 of the companies I've worked for had some engineer who had to unroll his own RPC format with matching IDL for some "technical" reason that had no basis in reality. They were all pretty crummy implementations. All you hot shot engineers, please, just stop re-inventing the wheel.
If google really cared about not being evil they would go the extra mile to anonymize the data without compromising its integrity. They could assign meaningless unique IDs to names and IP addresses (and any other identifying information) and hand that over along with the judge's consent.
But, hey guess what, Google is just as evil as Viacom so that won't happen.
Note the "good" guys:
John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer
vs. the "bad" guys:
John G. Roberts Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Let's hope the "good" guys maintain their majority.
Generally, airlines and airports have many "security" measures which have nothing to do with security.
1. economy passengers must use the lavatories to the back of the plane. I recall the 9/11 hijackers flew first class... In any case, the steel cockpit door is locked, right?
2. ID is required to fly. On some flights, you get to show your ID again at the gate. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the airlines ensuring there is no secondary market for flight tickets.
3. An oft heard question is "Sir, do you have any liquids" (because I couldn't find them if I tried). I've boarded flights with liquids that were never found. It's very hit or miss. To the TSA agent reading slashdot, come get me!
4. Finding liquids causes no harm. A would be attacker can keep trying to smuggle liquids on board until he succeeds. The worst that happens is that his special brew gets dumped a few times.
5. Dim, poorly trained and paid TSA screeners. I've seen many verboten items make it to flights (a diving knife for example).
You're advocating or at the very least acquiescing to the tyranny of the majority. In a nutshell, just because most people believe L, doesn't make L tenable in any frame of reference. This is particularly important when, the majority, X, believe K should be done to the minority, Y.
In addition, you have a somewhat naive belief that laws are written by majorities.
Some good examples of where this is not true:
1. File sharing. I'd wager that a large majority shares files (and other items) in what would be considered illegal based on current law and precedent. Clearly the majority does not agree or even abide by these laws.
2. Read up about the history of margarine here. It's incredible how special interests of a tiny minority subvert the law for over 100 years.
3. Prohibition?
First, kudos to the U.S. for buying plutonium from the Russians. What better way to get it off their hands?
Second, many people should rejoice, this is a golden opportunity to decommission a warhead or two for the plutonium in it.
"People want their computers to be protected against any form of intrusion - from within or without - regardless of how it's classified."
You have two options for pointing your finger:
1. Microsoft for providing an inherently broken product. Why should you need to install anything in addition to the base OS?
2. Yourself for not installing something other than Windows.
Except Pixar has an army of shader developers working for 2 years on tweaking the rendering of practically every scene to ensure its photorealism. Scanline renderers may be faster but the human effort required to achieve photorealism is huge.
Ray tracing alone is not a silver a bullet but if it produces better results with less human effort, it's a net win.
I found this on Pixar's RenderMan page (https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/renderman.html):
"Ray Tracing and Global Illumination
The ray tracing and global illumination features have been integrated with Pixar's highly evolved implementation of the REYES "scanline" rendering algorithm so that you only incur the overhead associated with these effects when and where you need them. RenderMan shader developers can selectively invoke RenderMan's new ray tracing subsystem to invent new solutions to difficult production problems or to achieve physically correct illumination effects."
My interpretation: If you can't figure out how to manually tweak the scene, throw CPU power at it.
I couldn't agree more. Anyone who claims "The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well" at a company with >5,000 people is either drinking the kool-aid or is selling something.
I don't understand why you think the fake IE error page is slimy. That's a side effect of the method they use to opt you out. When you opt out they probably store a cookie on your browser that says you opted out. The DNS server has no way of knowing if you opted out so it always redirects to the same "typo" server which then checks your cookie and displays an error for you.
Have you actually read the directive you linked to?
Where does it say anything about the president suspending congress?