This Escher-like description of fallback attempts sounds markedly worse than using a presently widely-supported technology that uses a single codec, and this is precisely why web developers don't particularly want to move to HTML 5 video. Spend many, many man hours encoding different versions of every single video plus a Flash container for all the various IE versions that it seems will never die? All because HTML 5 is 'exciting' and 'progressive'? No thanks.
Until the HTML 5 spec is sorted out and a video encoding standard is agreed on, it's useless. Flash has its problems, but it's also mature and has deep penetration. HTML 5 is no Flash killer, just overhyped by way of its future potential. Web devs are working on the web now, not in the utopian future.
"Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ?"
It is. It's more effort because you need to sniff for user agents and then decide either which browsers to support or not, or create different content for different clients depending on which codec they support. On the other hand we have Flash which is basically guaranteed to work as-is in over 90% of clients. I'd call that the easier choice.
It was a meta-joke, referencing the popular gag, "there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't'. The joke is, of course, that people understanding binary and people not understanding binary comprises only 2 sets, hence the little endian '2' meta-joke after it.
You should also now see how comprehensively destroyed any joke is by having somebody explain it. Now neither joke is funny and it's all your fault. I hope you're proud if yourself.
"If the kid in question isn't already curious about programming, I'd bet money he won't ever be."
That's not a great bet to make. I had no interest in programming, hardware, or even really using a computer until I was about 22. I played games but they were just games, not something I was interested in doing as a hobby. My school didn't really have much of an IT programme beyond "touch-type all this crap into a word-processing terminal so you can earn minimum wage doing exactly that when you leave here!" It took watching a roommate put a PC together for the first time to get me interested in it. I'm a late starter, but I can match the profile you've posted word-for-word and I f*cking LOVE what I do now.
My point is that it's never too late to develop an interest. It'd be a real shame if it turned out that the kid would have adored programming if only he'd been introduced to it by somebody who knew how.
Not to try to get you to break with a long-standing and honourable/. tradition, but if you'd actually read TFA you might have noticed that it's not the OP's kid we're talking about.
I think asking one's friends for their opinions is a valid activity in parenthood. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think that we are all genetically bestowed with the ability to know everything about everything parenthood-related. If that's the case then I'm afraid you're probably wrong.
Of course how your friends pick up their own opinions that you're asking for is entirely outside your control...
"Right. You know how when the 'new' Facebook had 'better privacy features' that it wanted you to add in everything visible to everyone more or less by default?"
This kind of misses the point that you must opt-in to using Facebook in the first place for that to even be relevant.
Nah, that's just Facebook Connect. It's Facebook's own implementation of OpenID, and makes Facebook users able to use the same credentials to log into any site that uses it. People are a bit more likely to have a Facebook account than an OpenID one, so I guess that's why they've used Facebook Connect instead of OpenID (or any of the other providers).
Sure, but at the same time it has opened up an interesting debate, and it's helped consolidate at least one independent development company's views on the issues people have with DRM and game quality. Publicity stunt or not (certainly that's how I saw it initially), it's stirred up quite a lot of dialogue - and that's never a bad thing.
This. The fact is that all this New Meejah marlarkey is not only easy enough to be accessible to the mainstream public-at-large, but a major part of modern life and data infrastructure. Jesus, even my mother's managed to rack up 100k posts on a single messageboard and teaches her online pals how to use their own computers - it doesn't make her a geek, it makes her a person who picked up a tool and learned how to use it pretty well. She's not going to be sitting in a basement building robots or walking about with a pocket protector because of that.
Dude, seriously.:/ Did your dad sit you down one day and say, "listen son, this is how you use a hammer"? No. You just pick it up and bang it on stuff. Humans generally like to pick stuff up and bang it on other stuff. It's easy. Watch a little kid playing with their toy shape-sorting bus, and how they use one shape to bang another shape into the little holes. Hammers are not rocket science. OP's dad might bang his thumb accidentally with the hammer but he ain't gonna think to himself "man I should get some training on this thing before I do myself an injury" because he'll know what he did wrong right away. With Ubuntu OTOH, that is not going to be quite so immediately obvious.
That's not really so unusual, surely? My main domain's robots.txt is set to disallow all search engines from spidering any of the content, but it's still accessible to humans.
Kinda like... y'know, it's cool if you wanna look at my collection of Hansard re-written as slash fiction, but I don't want google associating it with my moniker. Obviously I could just choose to store it somewhere else under a different pseudonym but whichever. My point (such as it is) is that surely your guys could have been doing something similar.
Obviously I don't know what the offending content was, could have been much worse than Hansard slash fic. If such a thing exists.
To be honest, that is actually one of the difficulties with GIMP. Nice, neat program and it's powerful and tweakable which is great, but interface-wise it's not really like other image-editing tools so there's going to be a learning curve there. I moved from Paintshop 6 or something to Fireworks 4 through Adobe Photoshop, and the interfaces of all of those tools are so similar that once you've used one, it's just a case of getting used to the minor differences of another. Even MSPaint looks pretty much the same. The GIMP, though, can be utterly incomprehensible, especially if you're used to just starting up a tool and, like, going ahead and using it. I realise that the idea of just switching something on and having it work is antithesis to the nature of many/.ers, but to normal humans it's sort of standard expectation.
Heh, non-tech HR are very unlikely to ever get the rewards system right. HR's bright idea to reward the good guys on my team and stop them all leaving after six months (the average time of service) was to introduce a system whereby our performance would be graded on a points system per quarter and whoever gets the most points by the end of the timespan gets a 250 bonus and a bottle of crap wine from the shop across the road. I can imagine this concept works for our marketing team because they're naturally gregarious and competitive. It doesn't work for my own team because we're a small group, don't have anything to prove to each other, and are united in loathing of this nerd cage match bullshit. The average length of service is still six months - until the shitty pay and indifference from management is addressed, quelle surprise!, the top performers will continue to haemorrhage from the company.
Slashdot Mirror
This Escher-like description of fallback attempts sounds markedly worse than using a presently widely-supported technology that uses a single codec, and this is precisely why web developers don't particularly want to move to HTML 5 video. Spend many, many man hours encoding different versions of every single video plus a Flash container for all the various IE versions that it seems will never die? All because HTML 5 is 'exciting' and 'progressive'? No thanks.
Until the HTML 5 spec is sorted out and a video encoding standard is agreed on, it's useless. Flash has its problems, but it's also mature and has deep penetration. HTML 5 is no Flash killer, just overhyped by way of its future potential. Web devs are working on the web now, not in the utopian future.
"Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ?"
It is. It's more effort because you need to sniff for user agents and then decide either which browsers to support or not, or create different content for different clients depending on which codec they support. On the other hand we have Flash which is basically guaranteed to work as-is in over 90% of clients. I'd call that the easier choice.
It was a meta-joke, referencing the popular gag, "there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't'. The joke is, of course, that people understanding binary and people not understanding binary comprises only 2 sets, hence the little endian '2' meta-joke after it.
You should also now see how comprehensively destroyed any joke is by having somebody explain it. Now neither joke is funny and it's all your fault. I hope you're proud if yourself.
"If the kid in question isn't already curious about programming, I'd bet money he won't ever be."
That's not a great bet to make. I had no interest in programming, hardware, or even really using a computer until I was about 22. I played games but they were just games, not something I was interested in doing as a hobby. My school didn't really have much of an IT programme beyond "touch-type all this crap into a word-processing terminal so you can earn minimum wage doing exactly that when you leave here!" It took watching a roommate put a PC together for the first time to get me interested in it. I'm a late starter, but I can match the profile you've posted word-for-word and I f*cking LOVE what I do now.
My point is that it's never too late to develop an interest. It'd be a real shame if it turned out that the kid would have adored programming if only he'd been introduced to it by somebody who knew how.
Not to try to get you to break with a long-standing and honourable /. tradition, but if you'd actually read TFA you might have noticed that it's not the OP's kid we're talking about.
I think asking one's friends for their opinions is a valid activity in parenthood. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think that we are all genetically bestowed with the ability to know everything about everything parenthood-related. If that's the case then I'm afraid you're probably wrong.
Of course how your friends pick up their own opinions that you're asking for is entirely outside your control...
"Right. You know how when the 'new' Facebook had 'better privacy features' that it wanted you to add in everything visible to everyone more or less by default?"
This kind of misses the point that you must opt-in to using Facebook in the first place for that to even be relevant.
"maybe people would be less willing to laugh if the nationality and/or skin-tone of the targets was one they cared more for"
I doubt that, tbh - people generally mock fraudsters and scammers without prejudice to anything else about them. Rest of your post is spot-on, though.
Nah, that's just Facebook Connect. It's Facebook's own implementation of OpenID, and makes Facebook users able to use the same credentials to log into any site that uses it. People are a bit more likely to have a Facebook account than an OpenID one, so I guess that's why they've used Facebook Connect instead of OpenID (or any of the other providers).
I am having difficulty understanding why purchasing a publication from a retailer counts as IP violation.
Behold, the solution:
http://lifehacker.com/399765/turn-a-drawer-into-a-hideaway-charging-station
the violence will be nerfed.
Haha, I doubt it. They can't nerf the entire stated purpose of the game.
Sure, but at the same time it has opened up an interesting debate, and it's helped consolidate at least one independent development company's views on the issues people have with DRM and game quality. Publicity stunt or not (certainly that's how I saw it initially), it's stirred up quite a lot of dialogue - and that's never a bad thing.
Now the telco companies will have another way to missell their "faster-than-the-speed-of-light" broadband!
This. The fact is that all this New Meejah marlarkey is not only easy enough to be accessible to the mainstream public-at-large, but a major part of modern life and data infrastructure. Jesus, even my mother's managed to rack up 100k posts on a single messageboard and teaches her online pals how to use their own computers - it doesn't make her a geek, it makes her a person who picked up a tool and learned how to use it pretty well. She's not going to be sitting in a basement building robots or walking about with a pocket protector because of that.
Dude, seriously. :/ Did your dad sit you down one day and say, "listen son, this is how you use a hammer"? No. You just pick it up and bang it on stuff. Humans generally like to pick stuff up and bang it on other stuff. It's easy. Watch a little kid playing with their toy shape-sorting bus, and how they use one shape to bang another shape into the little holes. Hammers are not rocket science. OP's dad might bang his thumb accidentally with the hammer but he ain't gonna think to himself "man I should get some training on this thing before I do myself an injury" because he'll know what he did wrong right away. With Ubuntu OTOH, that is not going to be quite so immediately obvious.
How will these diseases spread if none of them have ever had sex?
"Tell me, Mr. /.er, what good is a communications device... when you are unable to speak?"
\ :AgentTelco:
That's not really so unusual, surely? My main domain's robots.txt is set to disallow all search engines from spidering any of the content, but it's still accessible to humans. Kinda like... y'know, it's cool if you wanna look at my collection of Hansard re-written as slash fiction, but I don't want google associating it with my moniker. Obviously I could just choose to store it somewhere else under a different pseudonym but whichever. My point (such as it is) is that surely your guys could have been doing something similar. Obviously I don't know what the offending content was, could have been much worse than Hansard slash fic. If such a thing exists.
To be honest, that is actually one of the difficulties with GIMP. Nice, neat program and it's powerful and tweakable which is great, but interface-wise it's not really like other image-editing tools so there's going to be a learning curve there. I moved from Paintshop 6 or something to Fireworks 4 through Adobe Photoshop, and the interfaces of all of those tools are so similar that once you've used one, it's just a case of getting used to the minor differences of another. Even MSPaint looks pretty much the same. The GIMP, though, can be utterly incomprehensible, especially if you're used to just starting up a tool and, like, going ahead and using it. I realise that the idea of just switching something on and having it work is antithesis to the nature of many /.ers, but to normal humans it's sort of standard expectation.
Heh, non-tech HR are very unlikely to ever get the rewards system right. HR's bright idea to reward the good guys on my team and stop them all leaving after six months (the average time of service) was to introduce a system whereby our performance would be graded on a points system per quarter and whoever gets the most points by the end of the timespan gets a 250 bonus and a bottle of crap wine from the shop across the road. I can imagine this concept works for our marketing team because they're naturally gregarious and competitive. It doesn't work for my own team because we're a small group, don't have anything to prove to each other, and are united in loathing of this nerd cage match bullshit. The average length of service is still six months - until the shitty pay and indifference from management is addressed, quelle surprise!, the top performers will continue to haemorrhage from the company.