It does not receive updates from Twitter and send brain waves.
You forgot the all-important yet from that sentence. I would imagine that would be an interesting step in the ongoing quest for faster access to information... Not that I'd use it.
I can attest that Android does well also (Motorola Droid, Android 2.0.1)... Most times that I get an email while at work, my phone will alert before outlook even gets the message...
I think it's weird requiring all services to go through a middle man. Why should I need to use a proxy for push email when my exchange server supports it directly? (If there's a real reason, please tell me because I'm curious)...
PS. I'm a proud owner of a Droid. Push email works quite well for me on it (directly from my server). I don't see a reason (for me) to switch to Blackberry/RIM). Is there a killer feature/functionality that a BB would give me over the Droid? Is it enough of a reason to add another point of failure in the stack?
The theory behind it is that if all software is free, then people would stop worrying about the software itself, and start worrying about how to use it. Imagine if you could take a large company who spends upwards of $100 million per year on licenses, and let them put the majority of that money back into research and development.
I am an open source advocate. However, with that said, I disagree with the OP. I firmly believe that open source and proprietary applications can and should co-exist. What's happening on the Android market is what I believe to be the next natural progression of our society. The base, the core, the building blocks are all open source. They enable anyone to compete on a fair playing field. Who cares that the majority of applications developed on top are not open? So long as they play nice (open communications, standards compliant), what harm is it doing?
Most people don't need 95% of the capabilities of Photoshop... That's why open source alternatives do exist (tho most suck). Sure, they may TRY to compete, but most fall well short of hitting the mark. But they can help to fill in that 95% gap, so that the only people who wind up paying for Photoshop are the people who actually need what it provides. That's the true power of open source. Not to fill every niche role, but to take care of the 95%. There's good $$$ in the 5%, which is why companies like Adobe exist. The world is a big place, and I firmly believe that there's both room and a need for both open source and proprietary applications...
I don't know. Maybe it's not the number of ads, but the amount of information that can be had either ad free or with unobtrusive ads that has gone up (Wikipedia etc)... To tell you the truth, now that I'm looking, I'm only seeing an abundance of ads on sites that I visit that aren't important (such as following a link in/.)... The sites that visit either out of habit (sites in my RSS reader and favorites) or for work have little to no ads at all. I guess it's not a matter of better ads on the net so much as less ads on the sites which I frequent (Do I frequent them because of the lack of ads? I don't know... Food for thought)...
Well, to answer the first question, the site receives up to around 5 million unique page views per day. Something that budget hosts would insta-ban you for having on their servers (read the fine print on those $3-$5 per month hosts, they are not worth it). To answer the second one, decent hardware and a decent internet connection aren't cheap by any means. Find me a host for under $100 that will give you a 99.999% SLA with a decent chunk of hardware (dual processors, 4gb ram, dual scsi raid 1 hdd) and a decent connection to the internet (burstable to at least 100mbit)... Not to mention that most places charge through the nose for bandwidth (Typically $20 to $50 per mbit, and when you're dealing with a site that averages 10 to 20 mbit it adds up FAST)... Sure, I could get desktop grade hardware for $50 to $75 per month, but when you're dealing with bursts of 10000 simultaneous requests, the CPU will likely just melt...
Plus, as someone who's worked on the security team of a major open source project, I can tell you that most of those budget hosts are horrendous. I've seen too many mass defacements of hosts of that caliber (a hacker finds a vulnerability in one site and is able to get to every single other site on the server) to trust them. From my experience (and a lot of people flame me for this) I believe that no site should ever be run on a mass host. IMHO simply from a security standpoint, every "live" site of any importance (if you derive income from it, I consider it to be important) should be on its own server (that can mean a virtual server too)...
I use advertisements on most of my sites not because I want to make money, but because I want to pay for the site. It's not cheap running a dedicated server (Not to mention the time I spend administrating and developing the site), typically a few hundred $$$ per month... If I can recoup that cost (which I do), than I am happy. Is that such a bad thing? I'm not talking about a lot of money here either, I average around $500 per year above my raw expenses. I think that $10 per hour for the admin duties that I do isn't bad to take...
With that said, I see such a low impact from ad-blockers (around 5% or so), that I really don't mind. I keep the ads unobtrusive, and haven't heard a single complaint (yet). It's the few bad apples that overload their sites with ads that spoil it for the rest of us who are just looking to have an expense neutral side project (or make a little bit of beer money for the time invested)...
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
This begs the question of causality. Are ad-blockers causing advertisers to put up milder (and friendlier) ads? Or is that just the general trend of the industry (after they learned that the more annoying ads don't generate steady interest)? I tend to think the latter (since once someone blocks an ad, nothing the advertiser does to that ad with the exception of changing ad servers is going to make a difference)...
Still, I can't imagine the percentage of blocked ads is going to be that high to put a major dent in the industry (yet). On one of my sites (which gets around 60k unique visitors per day), I see about a 5% difference between http stats and adsense stats. That implies to me that about 5% of my visitors have an ad-blocker. Staggering? Nope. Enough to make me change my advertising practices? Nope. Then again, my ads aren't obtrusive and are simply image/text ads from Google...
Netbooks can view YouTube. Readers with electronic paper displays can't.
Well, that's where this device is superior to the Kindle. It has a color LCD display (albeit a small one) in addition to the E-ink. If this "hack" stays open for long enough, I'd bet we'd start seeing some interesting applications that take full advantage of the dual screens (Possibly even a Youtube player). The point being that this device has the hardware to truly be a fun gadget so long as it stays rootable... I'm strongly considering the possibility of buying one now that I know they are so easy to root...
Just like normal Slashdot, everybody here missed my point entirely...
I've setup quite a few multiple monitor setups using Linux. Some work out of the box. But most required some significant xorg.conf hackery. And the documentation for xorg.conf is cryptic at best. I didn't say it wasn't possible. I didn't say it was hard in all cases. I didn't say that once setup it didn't work very well... What I did say is that it's no ways near as easy as with Windows. Don't believe me? Go Google "Dual monitor Ubuntu", and look at the replies to the forums... 46 PAGES of people with problems? And you all are tearing me apart saying that Linux isn't that good at it?
As I've said before, there are somethings that Linux does REALLY well, and multiple monitors is NOT one... Once you get it setup, it does work quite well. But getting it setup can be an exercise in madness...
You most definitely haven't tried to setup a multiple display environment in any modern Linux...
I've been using linux for the last 10 years at home, finally ditching Windows entirely about 4 years ago (So I'm pretty decent at setting up/working with Linux)... Just 2 days ago, I tried to setup a 3 monitor desktop at work (2 Nvidia cards and 1 Intel card), and gave up after 10 hours of trying to get it work. I got X using them as different sessions (One instance of Gnome per monitor), but couldn't get a unified window manager between them... And I tried 2 different distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora)
One thing Windows does REALLY well right now, is multiple monitors. What you said, is pure anti-MS hatred. There's a lot that I don't think Windows does well, and a lot that I think Linux does REALLY well, but multiple monitors clearly isn't one...
Take a read through Thomas Kuhn's Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Quite a fascinating book describing scientific paradigms and revolutions in thought.
This process is science at its best. Problem doesn't fit solution, so find new problem without bending and complicating either... It's happened before, and will happen again (until we know everything, in which case what's the point?)...
Well, my point was that in a reduced oxygen environment (A plane's cabin is typically pressurized to the equivalent of 8000 feet) without an adequate supply of hydration, it takes FAR less alcohol to get to that point. In fact, the reduced pressure/oxygen/hydration can give people headaches and hangover-like symptoms without any alcohol. Adding alcohol just adds to that mix.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit in the past few years (I did over 150k miles in the past 12 months), I would recommend against the booze. Unless you're really nervous and need to take the edge off, it'll do more harm than good. Imagine timing a hangover with jet lag... It's not fun in the least. Not to mention that the thin air makes the booze go to your head quite a bit faster (or feel as such anyway)
My routine for such a long flight normally involves sleeping for a few hours after the meal, then getting up and roaming around the plane for an hour or so, then repeat. Taking a bunch of 2 to 3 hour 'naps' will help you sync your clock to the arrival time without forcing you to stay awake (or sleep) for extended periods. As for entertainment, I try to stay away from movies. When I watch them, I tend to screw up the sleep rhythm... Oh, and last point. Buy a 2 liter bottle of water for every 4 to 6 hours of flight time (They sell them inside the terminal at most airports I've been to). Drinking that much water will do two things. First, it will give you something to do. Second, it's really hard to stay hydrated for such a long flight on those little cups the flight attendants give you.
I think you missed my point. Your reply most definitely hits the heart of what I was trying to convey. If you're writing code for a system that has the potential to kill someone, good == good enough (meaning that there is no metric of "good enough"). But if I'm writing a non-mission critical script, that is only a time saver (To be used once or twice), than "good enough" is a quite different metric...
There are 2 extremes... One in that it HAS to be perfect because there is too much at stake if something went wrong. The other being that it's not worth the time to be good, when good enough will do quite fine. It's all dependent on the requirements of the project you're currently working on.
Fair point on the fitness of the Unit Tests... I guess what I meant is that if you understand the problem, then you can still create working code even if the resultant code isn't "perfect". If you don't understand the problem, even a 'perfect solution' is bad...
I agree 100% on the difficulty of defining 'good enough'. However, I think you'll agree with me that there is a trade off between finding perfection and getting shit done. There's a fine line there, but so long as you understand the problem and are careful, I think you can safely stay on the productive side of that trade-off...
The thing that I find a lot of developers don't understand is the difference between "Good" and "Good Enough"...
In your example, the code you got working for -x, +y may not have been "Good", but if it passes the Unit Tests, then how is it really bad? Could it be optimized? Sure...
Those that seek perfection are destined to a life of search. Those that seek 'working' are destined to a life of success...
The only downside would be the absurdly high price... Imagine a 750ml bottle of Scotch made from Lunar Water(tm), with a price tag of $5.2 Million USD... $500k per ounce... $5k per drop... But I'd bet it'd sell like hotcakes!
I was torn between modding you up, and responding... I'll respond
I agree 100% with installing Active Directory. If you have more than 2 computers and/or users in the same location, it's just so much easier. You can set up group policies to do just about whatever you want (install FireFox, etc).. So if someone gets a new computer, all you need to do is join it to the domain. It'll automatically set everything else up for you. While you're at it, you can turn the AD server into a file server (well, at least add a windows share or two), and link MyDocuments and Desktop to the share. That way, whatever computer they log in to they have all their data...
It's definitely going to take some work to setup (ESP if you have no AD experience), but my god is it better in the long run...
Well, releasing a book, without a trademark on the name that you used in the title of the book? Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but I thought the publisher would at least want a TM on the name if it's used in the title of the book (to prevent any issues down the road)...
You haven't read through the previous comments, have you? I see far more people (at least at this point) complaining about the anti-apple comments than anti-apple comments...
Now, with that said, I think it's genius what they are doing from a business perspective... Making the software an beacon to their hardware profit center. From a moral perspective, I don't care what they do, cause I'm not spending $3k on a MacBook Pro... OSX may be amazing, but I am quite happy with Ubuntu, so this news has no consequence for me. If you want the freedom to do what you choose, use a free OS (Linux flavors, BSD flavors, etc). If you want the polished yet non-free OSs (OSX, Windows), then you have to live with the restrictions... It's as simple as that. They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the all-important yet from that sentence. I would imagine that would be an interesting step in the ongoing quest for faster access to information... Not that I'd use it.
I can attest that Android does well also (Motorola Droid, Android 2.0.1)... Most times that I get an email while at work, my phone will alert before outlook even gets the message...
I think it's weird requiring all services to go through a middle man. Why should I need to use a proxy for push email when my exchange server supports it directly? (If there's a real reason, please tell me because I'm curious)...
PS. I'm a proud owner of a Droid. Push email works quite well for me on it (directly from my server). I don't see a reason (for me) to switch to Blackberry/RIM). Is there a killer feature/functionality that a BB would give me over the Droid? Is it enough of a reason to add another point of failure in the stack?
Thanks...
The theory behind it is that if all software is free, then people would stop worrying about the software itself, and start worrying about how to use it. Imagine if you could take a large company who spends upwards of $100 million per year on licenses, and let them put the majority of that money back into research and development.
I am an open source advocate. However, with that said, I disagree with the OP. I firmly believe that open source and proprietary applications can and should co-exist. What's happening on the Android market is what I believe to be the next natural progression of our society. The base, the core, the building blocks are all open source. They enable anyone to compete on a fair playing field. Who cares that the majority of applications developed on top are not open? So long as they play nice (open communications, standards compliant), what harm is it doing?
Most people don't need 95% of the capabilities of Photoshop... That's why open source alternatives do exist (tho most suck). Sure, they may TRY to compete, but most fall well short of hitting the mark. But they can help to fill in that 95% gap, so that the only people who wind up paying for Photoshop are the people who actually need what it provides. That's the true power of open source. Not to fill every niche role, but to take care of the 95%. There's good $$$ in the 5%, which is why companies like Adobe exist. The world is a big place, and I firmly believe that there's both room and a need for both open source and proprietary applications...
That's just my $0.02...
I don't know. Maybe it's not the number of ads, but the amount of information that can be had either ad free or with unobtrusive ads that has gone up (Wikipedia etc)... To tell you the truth, now that I'm looking, I'm only seeing an abundance of ads on sites that I visit that aren't important (such as following a link in /.)... The sites that visit either out of habit (sites in my RSS reader and favorites) or for work have little to no ads at all. I guess it's not a matter of better ads on the net so much as less ads on the sites which I frequent (Do I frequent them because of the lack of ads? I don't know... Food for thought)...
Oh, and I agree 5000% about flash...
Well, to answer the first question, the site receives up to around 5 million unique page views per day. Something that budget hosts would insta-ban you for having on their servers (read the fine print on those $3-$5 per month hosts, they are not worth it). To answer the second one, decent hardware and a decent internet connection aren't cheap by any means. Find me a host for under $100 that will give you a 99.999% SLA with a decent chunk of hardware (dual processors, 4gb ram, dual scsi raid 1 hdd) and a decent connection to the internet (burstable to at least 100mbit)... Not to mention that most places charge through the nose for bandwidth (Typically $20 to $50 per mbit, and when you're dealing with a site that averages 10 to 20 mbit it adds up FAST)... Sure, I could get desktop grade hardware for $50 to $75 per month, but when you're dealing with bursts of 10000 simultaneous requests, the CPU will likely just melt...
Plus, as someone who's worked on the security team of a major open source project, I can tell you that most of those budget hosts are horrendous. I've seen too many mass defacements of hosts of that caliber (a hacker finds a vulnerability in one site and is able to get to every single other site on the server) to trust them. From my experience (and a lot of people flame me for this) I believe that no site should ever be run on a mass host. IMHO simply from a security standpoint, every "live" site of any importance (if you derive income from it, I consider it to be important) should be on its own server (that can mean a virtual server too)...
That's just my $0.02...
I use advertisements on most of my sites not because I want to make money, but because I want to pay for the site. It's not cheap running a dedicated server (Not to mention the time I spend administrating and developing the site), typically a few hundred $$$ per month... If I can recoup that cost (which I do), than I am happy. Is that such a bad thing? I'm not talking about a lot of money here either, I average around $500 per year above my raw expenses. I think that $10 per hour for the admin duties that I do isn't bad to take...
With that said, I see such a low impact from ad-blockers (around 5% or so), that I really don't mind. I keep the ads unobtrusive, and haven't heard a single complaint (yet). It's the few bad apples that overload their sites with ads that spoil it for the rest of us who are just looking to have an expense neutral side project (or make a little bit of beer money for the time invested)...
Well, maybe it's just me, but I have been noticing less and less flash ads lately. Less annoying and intrusive ads as well...
This begs the question of causality. Are ad-blockers causing advertisers to put up milder (and friendlier) ads? Or is that just the general trend of the industry (after they learned that the more annoying ads don't generate steady interest)? I tend to think the latter (since once someone blocks an ad, nothing the advertiser does to that ad with the exception of changing ad servers is going to make a difference)...
Still, I can't imagine the percentage of blocked ads is going to be that high to put a major dent in the industry (yet). On one of my sites (which gets around 60k unique visitors per day), I see about a 5% difference between http stats and adsense stats. That implies to me that about 5% of my visitors have an ad-blocker. Staggering? Nope. Enough to make me change my advertising practices? Nope. Then again, my ads aren't obtrusive and are simply image/text ads from Google...
Well, that's where this device is superior to the Kindle. It has a color LCD display (albeit a small one) in addition to the E-ink. If this "hack" stays open for long enough, I'd bet we'd start seeing some interesting applications that take full advantage of the dual screens (Possibly even a Youtube player). The point being that this device has the hardware to truly be a fun gadget so long as it stays rootable... I'm strongly considering the possibility of buying one now that I know they are so easy to root...
Just like normal Slashdot, everybody here missed my point entirely...
I've setup quite a few multiple monitor setups using Linux. Some work out of the box. But most required some significant xorg.conf hackery. And the documentation for xorg.conf is cryptic at best. I didn't say it wasn't possible. I didn't say it was hard in all cases. I didn't say that once setup it didn't work very well... What I did say is that it's no ways near as easy as with Windows. Don't believe me? Go Google "Dual monitor Ubuntu", and look at the replies to the forums... 46 PAGES of people with problems? And you all are tearing me apart saying that Linux isn't that good at it?
As I've said before, there are somethings that Linux does REALLY well, and multiple monitors is NOT one... Once you get it setup, it does work quite well. But getting it setup can be an exercise in madness...
You most definitely haven't tried to setup a multiple display environment in any modern Linux...
I've been using linux for the last 10 years at home, finally ditching Windows entirely about 4 years ago (So I'm pretty decent at setting up/working with Linux)... Just 2 days ago, I tried to setup a 3 monitor desktop at work (2 Nvidia cards and 1 Intel card), and gave up after 10 hours of trying to get it work. I got X using them as different sessions (One instance of Gnome per monitor), but couldn't get a unified window manager between them... And I tried 2 different distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora)
One thing Windows does REALLY well right now, is multiple monitors. What you said, is pure anti-MS hatred. There's a lot that I don't think Windows does well, and a lot that I think Linux does REALLY well, but multiple monitors clearly isn't one...
Take a read through Thomas Kuhn's Structure Of Scientific Revolutions Quite a fascinating book describing scientific paradigms and revolutions in thought.
This process is science at its best. Problem doesn't fit solution, so find new problem without bending and complicating either... It's happened before, and will happen again (until we know everything, in which case what's the point?)...
Well, my point was that in a reduced oxygen environment (A plane's cabin is typically pressurized to the equivalent of 8000 feet) without an adequate supply of hydration, it takes FAR less alcohol to get to that point. In fact, the reduced pressure/oxygen/hydration can give people headaches and hangover-like symptoms without any alcohol. Adding alcohol just adds to that mix.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit in the past few years (I did over 150k miles in the past 12 months), I would recommend against the booze. Unless you're really nervous and need to take the edge off, it'll do more harm than good. Imagine timing a hangover with jet lag... It's not fun in the least. Not to mention that the thin air makes the booze go to your head quite a bit faster (or feel as such anyway)
My routine for such a long flight normally involves sleeping for a few hours after the meal, then getting up and roaming around the plane for an hour or so, then repeat. Taking a bunch of 2 to 3 hour 'naps' will help you sync your clock to the arrival time without forcing you to stay awake (or sleep) for extended periods. As for entertainment, I try to stay away from movies. When I watch them, I tend to screw up the sleep rhythm... Oh, and last point. Buy a 2 liter bottle of water for every 4 to 6 hours of flight time (They sell them inside the terminal at most airports I've been to). Drinking that much water will do two things. First, it will give you something to do. Second, it's really hard to stay hydrated for such a long flight on those little cups the flight attendants give you.
I think you missed my point. Your reply most definitely hits the heart of what I was trying to convey. If you're writing code for a system that has the potential to kill someone, good == good enough (meaning that there is no metric of "good enough"). But if I'm writing a non-mission critical script, that is only a time saver (To be used once or twice), than "good enough" is a quite different metric...
There are 2 extremes... One in that it HAS to be perfect because there is too much at stake if something went wrong. The other being that it's not worth the time to be good, when good enough will do quite fine. It's all dependent on the requirements of the project you're currently working on.
Fair point on the fitness of the Unit Tests... I guess what I meant is that if you understand the problem, then you can still create working code even if the resultant code isn't "perfect". If you don't understand the problem, even a 'perfect solution' is bad...
I agree 100% on the difficulty of defining 'good enough'. However, I think you'll agree with me that there is a trade off between finding perfection and getting shit done. There's a fine line there, but so long as you understand the problem and are careful, I think you can safely stay on the productive side of that trade-off...
The thing that I find a lot of developers don't understand is the difference between "Good" and "Good Enough"...
In your example, the code you got working for -x, +y may not have been "Good", but if it passes the Unit Tests, then how is it really bad? Could it be optimized? Sure...
Those that seek perfection are destined to a life of search. Those that seek 'working' are destined to a life of success...
The only downside would be the absurdly high price... Imagine a 750ml bottle of Scotch made from Lunar Water(tm), with a price tag of $5.2 Million USD... $500k per ounce... $5k per drop... But I'd bet it'd sell like hotcakes!
I wonder how the 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' standpoint would be upheld given that you may not be economically able to know the laws...
This one is proportional... $10 per month IIRC... So if you canceled 23 months in, you'd only owe $105.
Actually, I think their timing couldn't be better! I've got my droid on the lower cancel penalty... For once the early adopters get benefits!
This would make me not get Verizon, if I didn't already have it without the hike tho...
I was torn between modding you up, and responding... I'll respond
I agree 100% with installing Active Directory. If you have more than 2 computers and/or users in the same location, it's just so much easier. You can set up group policies to do just about whatever you want (install FireFox, etc).. So if someone gets a new computer, all you need to do is join it to the domain. It'll automatically set everything else up for you. While you're at it, you can turn the AD server into a file server (well, at least add a windows share or two), and link MyDocuments and Desktop to the share. That way, whatever computer they log in to they have all their data...
It's definitely going to take some work to setup (ESP if you have no AD experience), but my god is it better in the long run...
Well, releasing a book, without a trademark on the name that you used in the title of the book? Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but I thought the publisher would at least want a TM on the name if it's used in the title of the book (to prevent any issues down the road)...
What about IE vulnerabilities that are inherent from its close tie to the OS? I'll bet that they didn't count vulnerabilities like today's http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/11/0053244/Microsoft-Plugs-Drive-By-and-14-Other-Holes since it wasn't a flaw in IE itself. It was just attackable through IE....
You haven't read through the previous comments, have you? I see far more people (at least at this point) complaining about the anti-apple comments than anti-apple comments...
Now, with that said, I think it's genius what they are doing from a business perspective... Making the software an beacon to their hardware profit center. From a moral perspective, I don't care what they do, cause I'm not spending $3k on a MacBook Pro... OSX may be amazing, but I am quite happy with Ubuntu, so this news has no consequence for me. If you want the freedom to do what you choose, use a free OS (Linux flavors, BSD flavors, etc). If you want the polished yet non-free OSs (OSX, Windows), then you have to live with the restrictions... It's as simple as that. They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...