Yeah, I get that he was joking. I don't think he was seriously trying to ridicule those Norwegians for wasting precious time and resources on a foolish pursuit. His use of that phrase simply inspired me to question its significance. People tell me to get a life all the time. From my perspective, I'm enjoying the one I have quite nicely.
Sometimes I wonder what people mean by this phrase. "get a life"-- what does one need to do to qualify as having a life? I'm assuming that this is the stereotypical checklist for those seeking a life:
Job
spouse
house
401K plan
kids
People like Jeff Hornby (no flame intended for the parent poster) must look at these Norwegians and assume that they're not sufficiently burdened by the items on this list such that they have free time to pursue hobby activities like this casemod. Perhaps when people say, "get a life," it's out of jealousy from the perspective of someone who feels bogged down by their own life and they wish for others to become similarly restrained.
I personally think all of our lives would be less interesting if everyone had "a life."
These terms make sense to people in the world of CMS's. Here is a quick rundown:
ACID compliant- refers to the database in the backend. It's postgreSQL, so the Salon developer didn't really do anything for the ACID compliance. This basically means it can maintain data integrity to a pretty good standard if there's a power failure or some other hardware problem.
Templated- This means users of the system can create a couple of different templates that define the look and feel for different sections on a website. The PERL will dynamically pull content out of the DB and plug it into the proper spots with HTML formatting applied without a human having to code HTML pages for every content item.
Backwards compatible- this is kind of a vague term. Probably is intended to mean that you can have a website built and then install this package and it will still be able to serve the HTML pages you had previously created. Because it's a complete webserver, though, this attribute may be affected if you had previously been using a different CMS system (like Vignette) that requires special plugins to be loaded by the webserver.
vertical integration- gotta scratch my head on that one. It's a business organization term. So right there, it should trigger some marketoid alarms.
You are very correct. I agree with everything you've said here. I appreciate you covering the other aspects of this issue that I left out in favor of brevity.
This is not completely fair. Most hardware companies depend on code in their drivers that their staff did not write. As contracts generally go, the outside developer usually imposes limits on use and distribution of their work. It's invariably more expensive to purchase outsourced code without restrictions.
Woohoo!! Tiger will have native support for RAW digital image formats:
RAW Camera Image Support
Open images in the RAW file format used by Canon, Nikon and other models using the Apple Preview application.
Speaking as someone who is tired of using the Nikon software to look at my.nef images, this is terrific news. This is another feature that's definitely not available on the Microsoft platform.
I wasn't saying it's a bad thing there will be no counterstrike. Just brought this up as an example of how Steam introduces complications to their product that are having a ripple effect. No Counterstrike at a large lanparty like this is the fallout.
Due to problems experienced at previous LANparties hosted by the Texas Gaming Festival, the upcoming 1,000-person lanparty in Austin, Texas will not feature any tournaments based on games that depend on Steam technology. This means no CounterStrike.
Government-offered WiFi sound fine, except for the horrible cost overruns
The danger of cost overruns is present in every government project. Whether it be road construction, bridge building, school lunches, etc. No state is passing laws to protect city governments from cost overruns generated by embarking on those projects. City governments are held accountable for cost overruns by voters, so this is a red herring criticism of municipal wirless.
Would you tolerate the government closing down bookstores and insisting you use the government library?
This doesn't relate to the topic. There is no movement afoot for the government to close down any business and require citizens to use a government service.
Consider my private water park example earlier. Without public swimming pools, fewer kids would learn to swim. Swimming lessons are not taught at private water parks. Public swimming pools prepare citizens to become consumers of private water parks. They are inspired to pay the premium prices at the water parks because they provide features not found in public swimming pools such as wave machines, water slides, and the like. This is analogous to the value-add private ISPs can bring to wireless.
Is it fair for the cities to decide that it should be free and drive them out of business?
This is the same criticism that:
Taxi cab companies probably yelled at New York City Council meetings when they were planning a subway system.
Water park / slide companies express when a city plans a public swimming pool.
Private universities present when a state is budgeting for a state college.
Toll road vendors use when a city plans a new freeway.
Barnes and Noble screams when a city puts in a new public library
City-sponsored wifi isn't going to put anyone out of business. It's simply going to push the commercial providers to the next level of service offerings. That's the same as what happens in all the private vs. public examples I've given above. The government provides the baseline infrastructure that supports all kinds of interest in a given technology or service. Then the private sector extends that infrastructure with value-add features and quality that inspires consumers to pay for the private offerings. In the case of wifi, cities will probably put in 802.11g for now. Providers like Verizon can tout 802.11n for 100Mbps+ Wi-Fi with a monthly service fee.
The corporations are resisting this because they are missing a product lifecycle they can run consumers through (802.11g) that they can improve upon in subsequent years for people to upgrade to. Or, they'd like to offer multiple tiers of products at a range of prices to sell to rich and poor consumers. If the govt. carries the bottom end, corporations are somewhat limited to the upper tier offerings.
I believe that the electricity used by a distributed network of PCs is more expensive than renting time on a supercomputer. This formula gets more attractive, however, when the pCs contain powerful vector processing capabilities similar to those of a G5 PPC chip. Since not very many businesses have standardized their desktops to G5 hardware, I am skeptical that your claim is true.
During Bush Sr.'s tenure, we also lost the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas. Another Basic Science project that just wasn't sexy enough to fund.
To me, this is another example where "early adopters" get burnt, but the masses will not even notice. I've owned my Tivo since something like 2001 and used it exclusively with analog cable. I suspect there are a lot of us out there. Probably more than there are HD subscribers with HD Tivos. I'm just not persuaded that I need HDTV and I'm happy to hold off on getting one until it's the cheap standard that costs the same as normal TV's cost now.
By that time, all this kind of stuff will be sorted.
This blurb on Slashdot is an advertorial. There's absolutely no real meat to the ZDNet article. It's got one quote from a guy at mySQL mentioning three new features. The older slashdot story pointing to the changelog at mySQL has way more information than this ZDnet piece. And it doesn't conveniently feature a big banner ad for SUN hardware.
It was submitted from an anonymous reader. I am betting that anonymous reader is a sales guy at ZDnet looking to boost hit reports for their Sun banner ads. "I'll call those dorks at slashdot and pay them to link to a little pseudo story about mySQL."
I agree with your tactics here and want to recommend an additional technique. When the new Lucas turd is released at your theater, get ten of your like-minded anti-commercial friends together to go see the film. Buy tickets for one of the first weekend screenings that are expected to sell out. This is key. As soon as the commercials start, have all ten of your team march out to the manager, and demand your money back on those tickets because of the commercials. The manager will give you a refund, and have to swallow the ten empty seats on opening weekend as lost potential revenue due to the blight of pre-movie commercials.
For those interested, here's a website organizing people to protest commercials in theaters. Interestingly, these folks call themselves "CaptiveAudience.org" -- Regal Theaters uses the term "captive audience" on the section of the Regal website where they try to solicit corporations to buy ads in their theaters. (Check the flash animation on the left.)
Sign the petition to be presented to Regal Cinema.
For those of you who have this issue of make but haven't read every single sentence, check out the Kite Photography article. There's like a safety checklist on page 81 where they warn potential kite photographers of dangers such as sun exposure but fail to mention power lines. Perhaps they've pegged their readership as being comfortable around electricity, but not necessarily being outside in the sun.
Apple has had ONE general consumer hit product, the iPod line.
The iMac sold more units than any other single PC model. The newer versions continue to sell in huge numbers. Sounds like something of a consumer hit if you ask me.
Mybe you're right. With the right indexing, TOC, menu, etc. video can be a resonable medium to publish in. Consider the difference between a well-organized DVD of content with a very granular menu vs. broadcast television. The stream-based nature of TV makes it difficult to access content because the viewer has to wait for their desired content to arrive... sitting through irrelevant content in the process. At best the viewer can choose a different stream (channel) and hope there is more relevant content coming soon.
Here's kind of an example of what you're talking about.
You know, there is a ski resort in Colorado that is now called "Durango" after the town it is near. It had existed for decades under a different name... "Purgatory." The (new) owners of the resort succumbed to a very real financial pressure-- church-organized ski trips were avoiding their resort because of the (in their eyes) controversial name.
Churches organize all kinds of trips for their younger members. Keeps them active with other church kids so they don't wander off to socialize with the non-believers and potentially decide to abandon christianity. Museums likely are sensitive to this revenue stream and don't want to get blacklisted like that Colorado ski resort.
Because the form variables representing the captcha values are different from blog to blog, this is a very expensive proposition for the spammers to have a human sift through the HTML, identify the form post variable, and then set up their captcha-decoding scheme as you describe. Comment spam is really only occurring where there are a great many sites using a uniform posting mechanism. Obfuscation of this kind on a per-site basis makes it really unappealing for comment spammers to continue this behavior.
Yes, this is a theoretical exploit for captchas. In reality, however, this is not happening for blog postings. You have additional obfuscation capability when inserting the variables in the Wordpress scripts. Change the name of the Captcha variable and the spammers have to custom-write their scripting to match your site. Not likely to happen on a site as small and insignificant as mine.
As for the sibling poster here complaining about the loss of blind people reading my site, this only prevents them from posting comments, while at the same time allowing me to keep the comment system running. Without this captcha, I'd have turned comments off by now.
Once I installed this, I haven't received anymore poker spam.(you have to scroll down to the Trencaspammers plugin info). It uses a graphical code the commenter has to type in.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was joking.
Yeah, I get that he was joking. I don't think he was seriously trying to ridicule those Norwegians for wasting precious time and resources on a foolish pursuit. His use of that phrase simply inspired me to question its significance. People tell me to get a life all the time. From my perspective, I'm enjoying the one I have quite nicely.
a part of me says these guys need to get a life.
Sometimes I wonder what people mean by this phrase. "get a life"-- what does one need to do to qualify as having a life? I'm assuming that this is the stereotypical checklist for those seeking a life:
- Job
- spouse
- house
- 401K plan
- kids
People like Jeff Hornby (no flame intended for the parent poster) must look at these Norwegians and assume that they're not sufficiently burdened by the items on this list such that they have free time to pursue hobby activities like this casemod. Perhaps when people say, "get a life," it's out of jealousy from the perspective of someone who feels bogged down by their own life and they wish for others to become similarly restrained.I personally think all of our lives would be less interesting if everyone had "a life."
Now our printed pages will have pop-ups, too.
My only point was that that blurb doesn't tell me what it is.
It's full featured, ACID compliant, templated, backwards compatible, vertically integrated, etc..
These terms make sense to people in the world of CMS's. Here is a quick rundown:
You are very correct. I agree with everything you've said here. I appreciate you covering the other aspects of this issue that I left out in favor of brevity.
Seth
This is not completely fair. Most hardware companies depend on code in their drivers that their staff did not write. As contracts generally go, the outside developer usually imposes limits on use and distribution of their work. It's invariably more expensive to purchase outsourced code without restrictions.
Woohoo!! Tiger will have native support for RAW digital image formats:
Speaking as someone who is tired of using the Nikon software to look at my
why would they switch technologies after investing $50 billion a year in their CMOS foundries etc.
Hopefully, competition.
I wasn't saying it's a bad thing there will be no counterstrike. Just brought this up as an example of how Steam introduces complications to their product that are having a ripple effect. No Counterstrike at a large lanparty like this is the fallout.
Due to problems experienced at previous LANparties hosted by the Texas Gaming Festival, the upcoming 1,000-person lanparty in Austin, Texas will not feature any tournaments based on games that depend on Steam technology. This means no CounterStrike.
Government-offered WiFi sound fine, except for the horrible cost overruns
The danger of cost overruns is present in every government project. Whether it be road construction, bridge building, school lunches, etc. No state is passing laws to protect city governments from cost overruns generated by embarking on those projects. City governments are held accountable for cost overruns by voters, so this is a red herring criticism of municipal wirless.
Would you tolerate the government closing down bookstores and insisting you use the government library?
This doesn't relate to the topic. There is no movement afoot for the government to close down any business and require citizens to use a government service.
Consider my private water park example earlier. Without public swimming pools, fewer kids would learn to swim. Swimming lessons are not taught at private water parks. Public swimming pools prepare citizens to become consumers of private water parks. They are inspired to pay the premium prices at the water parks because they provide features not found in public swimming pools such as wave machines, water slides, and the like. This is analogous to the value-add private ISPs can bring to wireless.
Is it fair for the cities to decide that it should be free and drive them out of business?
This is the same criticism that:
City-sponsored wifi isn't going to put anyone out of business. It's simply going to push the commercial providers to the next level of service offerings. That's the same as what happens in all the private vs. public examples I've given above. The government provides the baseline infrastructure that supports all kinds of interest in a given technology or service. Then the private sector extends that infrastructure with value-add features and quality that inspires consumers to pay for the private offerings. In the case of wifi, cities will probably put in 802.11g for now. Providers like Verizon can tout 802.11n for 100Mbps+ Wi-Fi with a monthly service fee.
The corporations are resisting this because they are missing a product lifecycle they can run consumers through (802.11g) that they can improve upon in subsequent years for people to upgrade to. Or, they'd like to offer multiple tiers of products at a range of prices to sell to rich and poor consumers. If the govt. carries the bottom end, corporations are somewhat limited to the upper tier offerings.
I believe that the electricity used by a distributed network of PCs is more expensive than renting time on a supercomputer. This formula gets more attractive, however, when the pCs contain powerful vector processing capabilities similar to those of a G5 PPC chip. Since not very many businesses have standardized their desktops to G5 hardware, I am skeptical that your claim is true.
Try to pass the blame all you want, the President can work with a hostile congress.
By your reckoning, the current Bush should have no problem implementing anything he wants because his party controls the House and the Senate.
During Bush Sr.'s tenure, we also lost the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas. Another Basic Science project that just wasn't sexy enough to fund.
To me, this is another example where "early adopters" get burnt, but the masses will not even notice. I've owned my Tivo since something like 2001 and used it exclusively with analog cable. I suspect there are a lot of us out there. Probably more than there are HD subscribers with HD Tivos. I'm just not persuaded that I need HDTV and I'm happy to hold off on getting one until it's the cheap standard that costs the same as normal TV's cost now.
By that time, all this kind of stuff will be sorted.
seth
This blurb on Slashdot is an advertorial. There's absolutely no real meat to the ZDNet article. It's got one quote from a guy at mySQL mentioning three new features. The older slashdot story pointing to the changelog at mySQL has way more information than this ZDnet piece. And it doesn't conveniently feature a big banner ad for SUN hardware.
It was submitted from an anonymous reader. I am betting that anonymous reader is a sales guy at ZDnet looking to boost hit reports for their Sun banner ads. "I'll call those dorks at slashdot and pay them to link to a little pseudo story about mySQL."
I agree with your tactics here and want to recommend an additional technique. When the new Lucas turd is released at your theater, get ten of your like-minded anti-commercial friends together to go see the film. Buy tickets for one of the first weekend screenings that are expected to sell out. This is key. As soon as the commercials start, have all ten of your team march out to the manager, and demand your money back on those tickets because of the commercials. The manager will give you a refund, and have to swallow the ten empty seats on opening weekend as lost potential revenue due to the blight of pre-movie commercials.
For those interested, here's a website organizing people to protest commercials in theaters. Interestingly, these folks call themselves "CaptiveAudience.org" -- Regal Theaters uses the term "captive audience" on the section of the Regal website where they try to solicit corporations to buy ads in their theaters. (Check the flash animation on the left.)
Sign the petition to be presented to Regal Cinema.
For those of you who have this issue of make but haven't read every single sentence, check out the Kite Photography article. There's like a safety checklist on page 81 where they warn potential kite photographers of dangers such as sun exposure but fail to mention power lines. Perhaps they've pegged their readership as being comfortable around electricity, but not necessarily being outside in the sun.
Seth
Apple has had ONE general consumer hit product, the iPod line.
The iMac sold more units than any other single PC model. The newer versions continue to sell in huge numbers. Sounds like something of a consumer hit if you ask me.
Mybe you're right. With the right indexing, TOC, menu, etc. video can be a resonable medium to publish in. Consider the difference between a well-organized DVD of content with a very granular menu vs. broadcast television. The stream-based nature of TV makes it difficult to access content because the viewer has to wait for their desired content to arrive... sitting through irrelevant content in the process. At best the viewer can choose a different stream (channel) and hope there is more relevant content coming soon.
Here's kind of an example of what you're talking about.
You know, there is a ski resort in Colorado that is now called "Durango" after the town it is near. It had existed for decades under a different name... "Purgatory." The (new) owners of the resort succumbed to a very real financial pressure-- church-organized ski trips were avoiding their resort because of the (in their eyes) controversial name.
Churches organize all kinds of trips for their younger members. Keeps them active with other church kids so they don't wander off to socialize with the non-believers and potentially decide to abandon christianity. Museums likely are sensitive to this revenue stream and don't want to get blacklisted like that Colorado ski resort.
Because the form variables representing the captcha values are different from blog to blog, this is a very expensive proposition for the spammers to have a human sift through the HTML, identify the form post variable, and then set up their captcha-decoding scheme as you describe. Comment spam is really only occurring where there are a great many sites using a uniform posting mechanism. Obfuscation of this kind on a per-site basis makes it really unappealing for comment spammers to continue this behavior.
Yes, this is a theoretical exploit for captchas. In reality, however, this is not happening for blog postings. You have additional obfuscation capability when inserting the variables in the Wordpress scripts. Change the name of the Captcha variable and the spammers have to custom-write their scripting to match your site. Not likely to happen on a site as small and insignificant as mine.
As for the sibling poster here complaining about the loss of blind people reading my site, this only prevents them from posting comments, while at the same time allowing me to keep the comment system running. Without this captcha, I'd have turned comments off by now.
Once I installed this, I haven't received anymore poker spam.(you have to scroll down to the Trencaspammers plugin info). It uses a graphical code the commenter has to type in.