I'm guessing you missed the short-lived moratorium on userpics (avatars) with images of breastfeeding. LiveJournal's idea of "porn" isn't limited to the hardcore, illegal stuff.
This is correct. It also typically has merely a few hours' or a day's worth of programming data available via this method, whereas TMS will happily feed you the next 14 days' worth of listings as often as you like.
That's correct. The "assembly" done by Tribune Media Services (which runs Zap2It Labs and the old DataDirect service) is a largely manual process. Studios, local stations, etc all actually pay for the privilege of having their data listed, but they don't compose it in a friendly, terse format, or organize metadata (episode number, actors, original airdate, etc) in a standardized, convenient way. That task is left to TMS' peons, and subscribing to that data can easily run several hundred dollars per month, per market (think "Greater Los Angeles", which may have a dozen different content providers, hundreds of local stations, etc).
Frankly, $5/mo sounds like they got a great deal. If they can get it down closer to $2/mo, that sounds like one of the best deals in the industry for free software.
Problem for me being, if I set my default threshold to 2, but click on the -1 threshold from the front page (e.g. clicking "32" in the comment link "15 of 32"), it still snaps to either my default threshold, or, worse, clicking either the default threshold or "read more" links after I've been at, say, +2, take me to -1 instead. Zuh?
Ever tried to setup a remote frontend for Myth? Fiddled with lirc for freakin days to get it right? NFS shares? This stuff is probably trivial to some, but for me it was a major pain in the ass. If the AppleTV is really as easy to setup as Pogue is claiming - literally plug in an HDMI cable and the power cable - I'm buying one for every room in the house. Let the MythTV backend do the recording. Apple has apparently made a really spectacular frontend.
I was going to ignore, but I had to plug Myth2iPod. Singly the greatest hack I've seen come out of the MythTV community. And, it should work with AppleTV - AppleTV plays DivX content, and Myth will happily transcode to DivX. Setup a feed in iTunes, and fiddle with the encoding settings in myth2iPod (e.g., better quality, maybe encode to h.264) and leave iTunes running on a computer in the basement with a network share. Bingo, instant MythTV feed to AppleTV via iTunes and myth2iPod. And that's available *now*. I'm sure some Mac developer will come up with an even slicker solution - you can run the frontend on a Mac these days, after all.
Verizon also employs plenty of people in the region. Bell Atlantic's headquarters was in Philadelphia practically from birth until the merger (90's?)
My major beefs with Comcast: - Constant rate hikes - Local monopoly on home sports coverage - Channels disappearing from their analog lineup - Pretty steep internet and phone rates
My experience with Verizon: - Decent service - Cheaper internet
There was a recent/. article describing the installation for their FIOS TV service, and it blew me away. Tech spending hours at your house on a weekend evening? All Comcast ever did was punch a hole through my wall, test cables from outside and plug in the digital box. (Thanks.)
Really, I don't see the downside of some competition in the TV area and I'll happily cancel my service with Comcast when they offer the FIOS TV service.
I have Vonage, and this story obviously worries me quite a bit. But your point about Verizon misses the mark for its other services - Verizon are also providing competition in other areas (eg, cable TV). Comcast is the undisputed king in my area (Philly) but I am seriously considering switching to Verizon's TV service after seeing their lineup and pricing. Not to mention, I don't have many options here (no view of the southern sky = no satellite TV) and I'm tired of giving my money to the local monopoly - on TV, at least. But I agree in principle that this kind of anticompetitive behavior really doesn't serve anyone, and it's yet another example of patent law abuse that screws the average consumer.
Re:I call bullshit on this
on
Finding New Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree, but with a slightly less hostile view to coders, since I am one:
I like to code. I'm a programmer because I like to write code. If given the choice between learning and re-implementing somebody else's solution - for non-trivial tasks, this is usually the best way to go, but also takes a long time - and writing my own solution, I tend to gravitate toward the latter. Why? It usually is faster development-wise. Probably not in the long-run, since well-known code is also usually well-tested and my solution could invariably have bugs that the other would not. But I'd be intimately familiar with whatever I come up with, and it lets me write code immediately, instead of learning somebody else's and trying to meld our two styles/approaches.
It's not arrogance; it's a decision with a slight bias against delayed gratification.
We still have "investigative reporting" (e.g. Bob Woodward et al). My point is most average joes would not normally have the kind of clout with the press that a Woodward-type has, but scandals like the guard memos and such have elevated bloggers to the point where the major cable outlets regularly devote segments to "the blogosphere." My favorite crossover is when the beat reporters get into the blog game - even getting their blogs promoted by the major media outlets (as is the case with my local paper's website, philly.com). Some of the reporter blogs are extremely readable, providing better coverage where the regular constraints of daily publication are not applied.
See e.g. Dick Polman or Howard Kurtz - great reporters with great blogs. When traditional media embraces this kind of outlet, I think you can make an argument that "new media" has arrived, yes.
The Webb campaign worked hard to get the Allen tape - which was eventually picked up by local and national media outlets - out to bloggers and smaller media webs. The fact that the buzz on such a story is able to start at the grassroots and eventually affect national media coverage is tremendous, and not something that was seen as recently as a decade ago. "Regular news programming" probably would've taken a pass on SR Sidarth's tape had it not been viewed tens of thousands of times on YouTube prior to landing on their desk or showing up in some of the higher-profile blogs out there.
The Allen gaffe and to a lesser extent the Foley scandal were representative of our web-enabled, always-Google-cached, everything-logged and archived lives. I think anyone who wants to run for office has to seriously consider everything they've ever said online as potential political ammunition for the opposition. Of course, politicians have spinsters and communications staffs working hard to mitigate any potentially embarassing material out there. But in an age where all it takes is a group of bloggers with some patience, free time, and Google to unravel, for example, a major media outlet's story about a certain president's National Guard service, you know the internet has truly arrived as a deadly effective political weapon.
CAT: So, what is it? KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole. RIMMER: A _white_ hole? KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it. LISTER: So, that thing's spewing time back into the universe? (He dons
his fur-lined hat.) KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board. CAT: So, what is it? KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole. RIMMER: A _white_ hole? KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it. LISTER: (Minus the hat.) So, that thing's spewing time back into the
universe? (He dons his fur-lined hat, again.) KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board. LISTER: What time phenomena? KRYTEN: Like just then, when time repeated itself. CAT: So, what is it?
Re:My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user
on
Would You Date Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Upgrading to a 2.6 kernel inexplicably made my X-windows much, much, snappier.
It's not "inexplicable," the 2.6 kernel was the first to support a preemptible kernel right out of the box (instead of as a patch for the 2.4 series).
That article is hilarious. You gain a whole 28 pixels because they removed the left-hand document ruler. C'mon.
Monitors are wider these days. It's vertical screen real-estate that users will notice more. At least in the old Office versions, I can completely remove toolbars or combine the ones I use into one custom toolbar. The ribbon still bugs me, and making it an auto-hide just adds a step to typical usage.
Nothing was really "broken" about the old system, it just needed more consistency and easier configurability. Changing to a completely new and unproven design just increases training costs for businesses and slows adoption of their new version.
If I tell you I can get you a laptop for $100, are you at all suspicious? Anyone with some common sense will suss out that my source might be slightly less-than-reputable. The problem, of course, is very very few people in these cases are "truly" ignorant.
Apparently, they were the first airline to offer tickets on budget flights online:
EasyJet was the first low-cost British airline and, presciently, the first to start taking bookings over the internet, although, as Stelios admits, he wasn't won over straight away.
'We started off as something very obscure like 1145678.com. And I said: "This is never going to fill the planes. It's just for nerds." Then some time in 1997 we bought the domain easyjet.com for about £1,000 and put up a proper website. At that time we had the telephone number in big letters on the side of the plane. And we put a different telephone number on the website. Week after week I watched how quickly the numbers were growing and that gave me the confidence in April 1997 to launch a booking site.'
Israeli airlines and airports have the reputation for being the safest in the world.
Can I just point out that they have two international airports?
Israel does a fine job, but let's not assume we can deploy and trust anything like this in an O'Hare, Laguardia, Dulles, LAX, etc without nearly psychic success rates.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you missed the short-lived moratorium on userpics (avatars) with images of breastfeeding. LiveJournal's idea of "porn" isn't limited to the hardcore, illegal stuff.
This is correct. It also typically has merely a few hours' or a day's worth of programming data available via this method, whereas TMS will happily feed you the next 14 days' worth of listings as often as you like.
That's correct. The "assembly" done by Tribune Media Services (which runs Zap2It Labs and the old DataDirect service) is a largely manual process. Studios, local stations, etc all actually pay for the privilege of having their data listed, but they don't compose it in a friendly, terse format, or organize metadata (episode number, actors, original airdate, etc) in a standardized, convenient way. That task is left to TMS' peons, and subscribing to that data can easily run several hundred dollars per month, per market (think "Greater Los Angeles", which may have a dozen different content providers, hundreds of local stations, etc).
Frankly, $5/mo sounds like they got a great deal. If they can get it down closer to $2/mo, that sounds like one of the best deals in the industry for free software.
Problem for me being, if I set my default threshold to 2, but click on the -1 threshold from the front page (e.g. clicking "32" in the comment link "15 of 32"), it still snaps to either my default threshold, or, worse, clicking either the default threshold or "read more" links after I've been at, say, +2, take me to -1 instead. Zuh?
Ever tried to setup a remote frontend for Myth? Fiddled with lirc for freakin days to get it right? NFS shares? This stuff is probably trivial to some, but for me it was a major pain in the ass. If the AppleTV is really as easy to setup as Pogue is claiming - literally plug in an HDMI cable and the power cable - I'm buying one for every room in the house. Let the MythTV backend do the recording. Apple has apparently made a really spectacular frontend.
I was going to ignore, but I had to plug Myth2iPod. Singly the greatest hack I've seen come out of the MythTV community. And, it should work with AppleTV - AppleTV plays DivX content, and Myth will happily transcode to DivX. Setup a feed in iTunes, and fiddle with the encoding settings in myth2iPod (e.g., better quality, maybe encode to h.264) and leave iTunes running on a computer in the basement with a network share. Bingo, instant MythTV feed to AppleTV via iTunes and myth2iPod. And that's available *now*. I'm sure some Mac developer will come up with an even slicker solution - you can run the frontend on a Mac these days, after all.
Verizon also employs plenty of people in the region. Bell Atlantic's headquarters was in Philadelphia practically from birth until the merger (90's?)
/. article describing the installation for their FIOS TV service, and it blew me away. Tech spending hours at your house on a weekend evening? All Comcast ever did was punch a hole through my wall, test cables from outside and plug in the digital box. (Thanks.)
My major beefs with Comcast:
- Constant rate hikes
- Local monopoly on home sports coverage
- Channels disappearing from their analog lineup
- Pretty steep internet and phone rates
My experience with Verizon:
- Decent service
- Cheaper internet
There was a recent
Really, I don't see the downside of some competition in the TV area and I'll happily cancel my service with Comcast when they offer the FIOS TV service.
I have Vonage, and this story obviously worries me quite a bit. But your point about Verizon misses the mark for its other services - Verizon are also providing competition in other areas (eg, cable TV). Comcast is the undisputed king in my area (Philly) but I am seriously considering switching to Verizon's TV service after seeing their lineup and pricing. Not to mention, I don't have many options here (no view of the southern sky = no satellite TV) and I'm tired of giving my money to the local monopoly - on TV, at least. But I agree in principle that this kind of anticompetitive behavior really doesn't serve anyone, and it's yet another example of patent law abuse that screws the average consumer.
I agree, but with a slightly less hostile view to coders, since I am one:
I like to code. I'm a programmer because I like to write code. If given the choice between learning and re-implementing somebody else's solution - for non-trivial tasks, this is usually the best way to go, but also takes a long time - and writing my own solution, I tend to gravitate toward the latter. Why? It usually is faster development-wise. Probably not in the long-run, since well-known code is also usually well-tested and my solution could invariably have bugs that the other would not. But I'd be intimately familiar with whatever I come up with, and it lets me write code immediately, instead of learning somebody else's and trying to meld our two styles/approaches.
It's not arrogance; it's a decision with a slight bias against delayed gratification.
Shouldn't be too difficult to find the culprit, just look for someone extremely dissatisfied with their service.
Great, that narrowed down the list by about two. Any other ideas?
some of are happy with our new Jumping-Slug Sabres logo
I always thought it looked like Barney Rubble's hair, or a furry version of the Chargers logo...
We still have "investigative reporting" (e.g. Bob Woodward et al). My point is most average joes would not normally have the kind of clout with the press that a Woodward-type has, but scandals like the guard memos and such have elevated bloggers to the point where the major cable outlets regularly devote segments to "the blogosphere." My favorite crossover is when the beat reporters get into the blog game - even getting their blogs promoted by the major media outlets (as is the case with my local paper's website, philly.com). Some of the reporter blogs are extremely readable, providing better coverage where the regular constraints of daily publication are not applied.
See e.g. Dick Polman or Howard Kurtz - great reporters with great blogs. When traditional media embraces this kind of outlet, I think you can make an argument that "new media" has arrived, yes.
The Webb campaign worked hard to get the Allen tape - which was eventually picked up by local and national media outlets - out to bloggers and smaller media webs. The fact that the buzz on such a story is able to start at the grassroots and eventually affect national media coverage is tremendous, and not something that was seen as recently as a decade ago. "Regular news programming" probably would've taken a pass on SR Sidarth's tape had it not been viewed tens of thousands of times on YouTube prior to landing on their desk or showing up in some of the higher-profile blogs out there.
The Allen gaffe and to a lesser extent the Foley scandal were representative of our web-enabled, always-Google-cached, everything-logged and archived lives. I think anyone who wants to run for office has to seriously consider everything they've ever said online as potential political ammunition for the opposition. Of course, politicians have spinsters and communications staffs working hard to mitigate any potentially embarassing material out there. But in an age where all it takes is a group of bloggers with some patience, free time, and Google to unravel, for example, a major media outlet's story about a certain president's National Guard service, you know the internet has truly arrived as a deadly effective political weapon.
You mean a "White Hole":
CAT: So, what is it?
KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole.
RIMMER: A _white_ hole?
KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it.
LISTER: So, that thing's spewing time back into the universe? (He dons
his fur-lined hat.)
KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board.
CAT: So, what is it?
KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole.
RIMMER: A _white_ hole?
KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it.
LISTER: (Minus the hat.) So, that thing's spewing time back into the
universe? (He dons his fur-lined hat, again.)
KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board.
LISTER: What time phenomena?
KRYTEN: Like just then, when time repeated itself.
CAT: So, what is it?
Upgrading to a 2.6 kernel inexplicably made my X-windows much, much, snappier.
It's not "inexplicable," the 2.6 kernel was the first to support a preemptible kernel right out of the box (instead of as a patch for the 2.4 series).
That article is hilarious. You gain a whole 28 pixels because they removed the left-hand document ruler. C'mon.
Monitors are wider these days. It's vertical screen real-estate that users will notice more. At least in the old Office versions, I can completely remove toolbars or combine the ones I use into one custom toolbar. The ribbon still bugs me, and making it an auto-hide just adds a step to typical usage.
Nothing was really "broken" about the old system, it just needed more consistency and easier configurability. Changing to a completely new and unproven design just increases training costs for businesses and slows adoption of their new version.
The people in Congress are not the brightest critters out there.
I disagree. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got an internet to send through this system of tubes over here...
*snicker*
Can't win, eh?
I suppose I should've said "top of the line" for a hundred bucks, but I'll just give up at this point.
Thanks for the laugh, anyway.
No, I've been through this with several friends.
If I tell you I can get you a laptop for $100, are you at all suspicious? Anyone with some common sense will suss out that my source might be slightly less-than-reputable. The problem, of course, is very very few people in these cases are "truly" ignorant.
It's still a felony in most states. It's called "receiving stolen property", and ignorance is not an excuse.
I vote for three buttons, but I agree with the rest of your post.
Right, so his action is hypocritical, not ironic. /grammernazi
Israeli airlines and airports have the reputation for being the safest in the world.
Can I just point out that they have two international airports?
Israel does a fine job, but let's not assume we can deploy and trust anything like this in an O'Hare, Laguardia, Dulles, LAX, etc without nearly psychic success rates.