I have to admit, I assumed that virtual pets were a fad that would vanish. But Neopets, Nintendogs, etc. seem to be going strong. I guess the genre must have an appeal of its own beyond novelty.
Standard word formation using a normal suffix. Sorry to break it to you, but English does that.
("Irregardless," on the other hand, is using the prefix improperly, as "regardless" itself already means "without regard," so "without without regard" makes no sense.)
RTFD (Read The Fine Dictionary): podcasting != streaming.
In fact, streaming is antithetical to podcasting, as the whole idea of podcasting is for your client to download the content during idle time and transfer it to a portable audio device so that you can play it away from your computer.
I suspect many people dispense with the second transfer and simply play the files on their computers, but the fact remains that podcasts are designed to be downloaded for later playback, not to be streamed.
Or what a blog is in comparison to a personal daily-updated website.
Shorter. Fewer letters to type, fewer syllables to say.
Do you always refer to the "television set," or do you turn on the "TV" or "telly?" Do you drive a "horseless carriage" or "automobile"... or you you drive a "car?" Do people call your "cellular phone" or do they call your "cell?"
Same thing.
As for podcasting, it really is different from streaming audio. It's downloadable audio (or video) that is announced via a subscription system (generally RSS these days) and then -- and here's the key -- automatically downloaded by a client during idle time (and optionally transferred to an audio player). The idea was originally that the podcast client would download content overnight and transfer it to your iPod, and you could then play it anywhere you wanted during the day. It's been generalized, but the name stuck.
Very interesting. I'd always wondered how Europeans came to rely on compasses when the magnetic pole was so far west from true north. The diagram showing the magnetic meridians shows that, for whatever reason, the direction of the field ends up being much more aligned with geographical north than one might expect.
...to BSD and Darwin. I've been using Fedora Core since it was first released, and I've watched SELinux go from a slightly clunky annoyance in FC2 to just another part of the system in FC4 as they refined the targeted policy. I'm not sure how much of that was done by the NSA and how much by Red Hat, but it's made a huge difference -- more, even, than the slowly improving security GUI in Fedora Core (though SELinux desperately needs something to make it easier to administer).
Back to BSD/Darwin, I do have to wonder -- how well would a successful Darwin port of SELinux interact with Mac OS X's security model? The page on the website talks about 10.3 and the latest snapshot is dated July.
I also wonder if they finally managed to make proper installers for windows which take care to uninstall previous versions, so I don't end up with multiple entries in the Add/Remove Programs list
Whare have you been? They fixed that ages ago. 1.0.3, I think.
Sure, the proof of concept uses JavaScript. But the problem itself has nothing to do with scripting. One could easily generate a 2.5MB HTML file with a really long title. 2 million "A"s in a row will probably compress pretty well, so if you serve it with on-the-fly compression, it doesn't have to take much extra time or bandwidth to retrieve.
Bingo: exploited with no scripting involved at all.
If the lead character is going to die and the world be destroyed, it should either be at the beginning of the game or the outcome of losing the game. Otherwise, it might make a good story -- but what's the point of a game that you are guaranteed to lose?
I haven't played many console games lately, but I have an example from the Might and Magic series on the PC. Might and Magic is a role-playing series, and Heroes of Might and Magic is a turn-based strategy series. The Heroes series created a new setting, with its own creatures, nations, etc., which also became the setting for Might and Magic 6 and 7. Heroes 4 moved to a new world populated by refugees from an apocalyptic event very much like the consequences of losing MM7. (Or winning it if you were playing evil characters.) That was annoying itself in a "Hey, I won that!" sort of way. But a game that you can't win, even in the context of the game itself? That doesn't sound like there's much reward for playing it.
You want to make a new document based on your old one (maybe it'll use a similar structure or something). You open it up, make some changes, then save it as a new file, leaving the old one unchanged.
With continuous save (by which I don't mean the auto-save that current apps like MS Office do, where it saves to a temp file), you have to hit "Save as..." or the new-paradigm equivalent immediately, or else your old document is going to end up looking just like the new one. This is only really a problem during the transition phase, while people get used to the new procedure, and it's arguable that it's better in the long run, since as things stand right now you can easily forget that you haven't already branched a new file and save over the old one.
Then there's the issue where you load something and want to make a temporary change, say, for printing or in prep for a screencap or copying and pasting into another app. Or you start typing in the wrong window. If the document is saved continuously, not only do you have to undo the changes before you close the application, but you end up changing the file modification date. Maybe it's not critical for the data, but if you're sorting by when you changed something...
I think this is the way to go, make it unusuable for 7 days, and the responsible person will probably notice this and pay the bill
That's generally what would happen. They'd call us complaining their website was down, or they weren't getting any email, so we'd check the servers and see that everything was working fine, then we'd check WHOIS and find that the domain name had expired a couple of weeks ago and still showed the old address. (They'd send us the new address since we billed monthly.) In most cases they'd just send the registrar the money and they'd be accessible again in a couple of hours.
Yeah, but any two-bit comp sci major would still have had to do research to get any numbers and to compile registrars' policies on correcting the data.
Simple answer (at least for suburban/urban dwellers): Get a P.O. box, either at the post office or a retail store that provides them. A small P.O. box runs less than $40/year.
I work at an ISP. We've had customers in the past whose domain names expired because they didn't update their address and phone number with their registrar, the person whose email address was on the record left the company, and they didn't get the renewal notice.
It doesn't happen as often now as it used to. Either businesses are getting better at remembering that their domain names need to be updated along with everything else, or the registrars are better at finding other ways to notify them of renewals.
But I ran into one case (with Network Solutions, IIRC -- it was a few years ago) where I personally updated the contact information associated with a role account and discovered, a year or two later, that the registrar had somehow resurrected the old, deleted contact info.
Yeah, I generally go through my sent-items folder once every week or two and move messages manually. It's a pain, but it's very useful later on when I'm looking for stuff.
Back when I was using Eudora, I had filters on outgoing mail that would automatically file messages I sent to my most frequent correspondents. That didn't seem to be available when I switched to Thunderbird (which was actually pre-1.0 -- I found a lot of import-from-Eudora bugs and helped test the fixes, but I really needed something that would keep the original MIME structure intact).
With 1.5 around the corner, it's probably time to design some new filters and see what they do to outgoing mail.
I'm surprised they let you put that much Thunderbird on your tab. I mean, they'll want you to pay up eventually, right?
(In all seriousness -- OK, in slightly more seriousness, this reminds me of an experiment a friend of mine did in college, whereby she drank wine coolers while writing email to determine at what point it began affecting her writing.)
That was my first thought, too, but then I remembered the way I used to use Eudora. At least when I last used it, Eudora was a standard MDI app with a sidebar for the folder view (which could switch to a list of stationery and other stuff). If you always kept your subwindows maximized, you ended up with every message being in the same position.
It's not the same as tabs, but it's similar for some use cases.
That said, I used Eudora that way because I had to. Well, choice is good and all that (up to a point), so maybe enough people will like this way of working with email to justify keeping it.
Last spring I bought a computer with Norton Internet Security pre-installed. I've seriously considered uninstalling it. The only alerts I've ever received have been asking me to confirm that some program I've just updated is allowed to make DNS queries, and warnings that some horrible, evil program wants to access the net. Which would be OK, except for the fact that the only horrible, evil program it complains about is Sun's Java update checker.
Last week I spent at least an hour and went through a half dozen reboots trying to update Java on this machine, something that was a simple, 5-minute task on the two Windows systems I updated at work, because Norton kept interfering with the updater. I could disable the firewall for the installation, but the updater wouldn't launch again after it was jammed.
It was actually easier to upgrade Java on my Fedora Core box, even though I went to the effort to combine Jpackage.org's nosrc.rpm with the binary installer from Sun instead of just installing Sun's RPM.
The previous Windows box I had at home ran McAfee briefly, but it interfered too much with the system. Of course, that was a Windows Me box, so lousy performance comes with the territory.
There's a difference between the way the page is constructed and the way it's used. From a navigational perspective, it's atomic. Your browser may have retrieved 12 files from 3 different servers, but from the user's perspective it's one page until they start breaking things down with "View image" etc.
The big problem is that, unlike books, the Web is digital and dynamic -- what you read at a given URL today can be moved, edited, deleted, or p0wned by the time you get there tomorrow.
Sure, it can be moved -- but that doesn't mean it should be. Keeping a page at a particular location makes it much easier for people to find it, whether via search engines, their own bookmarks, links on other sites, etc.
This doesn't mean it can't change. Linking to, say, a product page on Amazon is extremely useful. You can expect the price, reviews, recommendations, etc. to change over time, but you should expect the same product to be there the following year as long as they still sell it.
I don't know, bookmarking a particular map view is incredibly useful.
But Gmail? Nah. And who needs to bookmark a "thank you for rating your Amazon purchase, now go back to the actual listing" response?
The trick is to figure out whether use of AJAX would improve or degrade a particular aspect of the site or app. If it'll improve it, then by all means, use it. If it'll degrade it, don't bother writing up the code, no matter how cool it sounds.
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I have to admit, I assumed that virtual pets were a fad that would vanish. But Neopets, Nintendogs, etc. seem to be going strong. I guess the genre must have an appeal of its own beyond novelty.
related+ly = in a related manner.
Standard word formation using a normal suffix. Sorry to break it to you, but English does that.
("Irregardless," on the other hand, is using the prefix improperly, as "regardless" itself already means "without regard," so "without without regard" makes no sense.)
RTFD (Read The Fine Dictionary): podcasting != streaming.
In fact, streaming is antithetical to podcasting, as the whole idea of podcasting is for your client to download the content during idle time and transfer it to a portable audio device so that you can play it away from your computer.
I suspect many people dispense with the second transfer and simply play the files on their computers, but the fact remains that podcasts are designed to be downloaded for later playback, not to be streamed.
Carjacking. Skyjacking. Podjacking.
It's official. English is officially jacked up.
Or what a blog is in comparison to a personal daily-updated website.
Shorter. Fewer letters to type, fewer syllables to say.
Do you always refer to the "television set," or do you turn on the "TV" or "telly?" Do you drive a "horseless carriage" or "automobile"... or you you drive a "car?" Do people call your "cellular phone" or do they call your "cell?"
Same thing.
As for podcasting, it really is different from streaming audio. It's downloadable audio (or video) that is announced via a subscription system (generally RSS these days) and then -- and here's the key -- automatically downloaded by a client during idle time (and optionally transferred to an audio player). The idea was originally that the podcast client would download content overnight and transfer it to your iPod, and you could then play it anywhere you wanted during the day. It's been generalized, but the name stuck.
Very interesting. I'd always wondered how Europeans came to rely on compasses when the magnetic pole was so far west from true north. The diagram showing the magnetic meridians shows that, for whatever reason, the direction of the field ends up being much more aligned with geographical north than one might expect.
...to BSD and Darwin. I've been using Fedora Core since it was first released, and I've watched SELinux go from a slightly clunky annoyance in FC2 to just another part of the system in FC4 as they refined the targeted policy. I'm not sure how much of that was done by the NSA and how much by Red Hat, but it's made a huge difference -- more, even, than the slowly improving security GUI in Fedora Core (though SELinux desperately needs something to make it easier to administer).
Back to BSD/Darwin, I do have to wonder -- how well would a successful Darwin port of SELinux interact with Mac OS X's security model? The page on the website talks about 10.3 and the latest snapshot is dated July.
I also wonder if they finally managed to make proper installers for windows which take care to uninstall previous versions, so I don't end up with multiple entries in the Add/Remove Programs list
Whare have you been? They fixed that ages ago. 1.0.3, I think.
And it's not as if people don't use air horns at, say, sporting events....
Sure, the proof of concept uses JavaScript. But the problem itself has nothing to do with scripting. One could easily generate a 2.5MB HTML file with a really long title. 2 million "A"s in a row will probably compress pretty well, so if you serve it with on-the-fly compression, it doesn't have to take much extra time or bandwidth to retrieve.
Bingo: exploited with no scripting involved at all.
If the lead character is going to die and the world be destroyed, it should either be at the beginning of the game or the outcome of losing the game. Otherwise, it might make a good story -- but what's the point of a game that you are guaranteed to lose?
I haven't played many console games lately, but I have an example from the Might and Magic series on the PC. Might and Magic is a role-playing series, and Heroes of Might and Magic is a turn-based strategy series. The Heroes series created a new setting, with its own creatures, nations, etc., which also became the setting for Might and Magic 6 and 7. Heroes 4 moved to a new world populated by refugees from an apocalyptic event very much like the consequences of losing MM7. (Or winning it if you were playing evil characters.) That was annoying itself in a "Hey, I won that!" sort of way. But a game that you can't win, even in the context of the game itself? That doesn't sound like there's much reward for playing it.
Not only two browsers, but two browsers using entirely different code bases and developed by entirely different groups of people.
Had it been, say, Camino and Firefox, or Safari and Konqueror, I might be a little more inclined to believe them, but come on!
Of course, they claim it's the OS-wide Java update... but how exactly is that supposed to be related to native code that uses HTTP?
Consider one-off templating.
You want to make a new document based on your old one (maybe it'll use a similar structure or something). You open it up, make some changes, then save it as a new file, leaving the old one unchanged.
With continuous save (by which I don't mean the auto-save that current apps like MS Office do, where it saves to a temp file), you have to hit "Save as..." or the new-paradigm equivalent immediately, or else your old document is going to end up looking just like the new one. This is only really a problem during the transition phase, while people get used to the new procedure, and it's arguable that it's better in the long run, since as things stand right now you can easily forget that you haven't already branched a new file and save over the old one.
Then there's the issue where you load something and want to make a temporary change, say, for printing or in prep for a screencap or copying and pasting into another app. Or you start typing in the wrong window. If the document is saved continuously, not only do you have to undo the changes before you close the application, but you end up changing the file modification date. Maybe it's not critical for the data, but if you're sorting by when you changed something...
I think this is the way to go, make it unusuable for 7 days, and the responsible person will probably notice this and pay the bill
That's generally what would happen. They'd call us complaining their website was down, or they weren't getting any email, so we'd check the servers and see that everything was working fine, then we'd check WHOIS and find that the domain name had expired a couple of weeks ago and still showed the old address. (They'd send us the new address since we billed monthly.) In most cases they'd just send the registrar the money and they'd be accessible again in a couple of hours.
Yeah, but any two-bit comp sci major would still have had to do research to get any numbers and to compile registrars' policies on correcting the data.
Simple answer (at least for suburban/urban dwellers): Get a P.O. box, either at the post office or a retail store that provides them. A small P.O. box runs less than $40/year.
I work at an ISP. We've had customers in the past whose domain names expired because they didn't update their address and phone number with their registrar, the person whose email address was on the record left the company, and they didn't get the renewal notice.
It doesn't happen as often now as it used to. Either businesses are getting better at remembering that their domain names need to be updated along with everything else, or the registrars are better at finding other ways to notify them of renewals.
But I ran into one case (with Network Solutions, IIRC -- it was a few years ago) where I personally updated the contact information associated with a role account and discovered, a year or two later, that the registrar had somehow resurrected the old, deleted contact info.
Yeah, I generally go through my sent-items folder once every week or two and move messages manually. It's a pain, but it's very useful later on when I'm looking for stuff.
Back when I was using Eudora, I had filters on outgoing mail that would automatically file messages I sent to my most frequent correspondents. That didn't seem to be available when I switched to Thunderbird (which was actually pre-1.0 -- I found a lot of import-from-Eudora bugs and helped test the fixes, but I really needed something that would keep the original MIME structure intact).
With 1.5 around the corner, it's probably time to design some new filters and see what they do to outgoing mail.
I'm surprised they let you put that much Thunderbird on your tab. I mean, they'll want you to pay up eventually, right?
(In all seriousness -- OK, in slightly more seriousness, this reminds me of an experiment a friend of mine did in college, whereby she drank wine coolers while writing email to determine at what point it began affecting her writing.)
That was my first thought, too, but then I remembered the way I used to use Eudora. At least when I last used it, Eudora was a standard MDI app with a sidebar for the folder view (which could switch to a list of stationery and other stuff). If you always kept your subwindows maximized, you ended up with every message being in the same position.
It's not the same as tabs, but it's similar for some use cases.
That said, I used Eudora that way because I had to. Well, choice is good and all that (up to a point), so maybe enough people will like this way of working with email to justify keeping it.
Last spring I bought a computer with Norton Internet Security pre-installed. I've seriously considered uninstalling it. The only alerts I've ever received have been asking me to confirm that some program I've just updated is allowed to make DNS queries, and warnings that some horrible, evil program wants to access the net. Which would be OK, except for the fact that the only horrible, evil program it complains about is Sun's Java update checker.
Last week I spent at least an hour and went through a half dozen reboots trying to update Java on this machine, something that was a simple, 5-minute task on the two Windows systems I updated at work, because Norton kept interfering with the updater. I could disable the firewall for the installation, but the updater wouldn't launch again after it was jammed.
It was actually easier to upgrade Java on my Fedora Core box, even though I went to the effort to combine Jpackage.org's nosrc.rpm with the binary installer from Sun instead of just installing Sun's RPM.
The previous Windows box I had at home ran McAfee briefly, but it interfered too much with the system. Of course, that was a Windows Me box, so lousy performance comes with the territory.
Then there's Firefly:
"Noah's Ark is a problem. We'll have to call it 'early quantum state phenomenon.' Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat."
There's a difference between the way the page is constructed and the way it's used. From a navigational perspective, it's atomic. Your browser may have retrieved 12 files from 3 different servers, but from the user's perspective it's one page until they start breaking things down with "View image" etc.
The big problem is that, unlike books, the Web is digital and dynamic -- what you read at a given URL today can be moved, edited, deleted, or p0wned by the time you get there tomorrow.
Sure, it can be moved -- but that doesn't mean it should be. Keeping a page at a particular location makes it much easier for people to find it, whether via search engines, their own bookmarks, links on other sites, etc.
This doesn't mean it can't change. Linking to, say, a product page on Amazon is extremely useful. You can expect the price, reviews, recommendations, etc. to change over time, but you should expect the same product to be there the following year as long as they still sell it.
I don't know, bookmarking a particular map view is incredibly useful.
But Gmail? Nah. And who needs to bookmark a "thank you for rating your Amazon purchase, now go back to the actual listing" response?
The trick is to figure out whether use of AJAX would improve or degrade a particular aspect of the site or app. If it'll improve it, then by all means, use it. If it'll degrade it, don't bother writing up the code, no matter how cool it sounds.