I've been quite happy with NewsBlur as well. The only area it falls short for me, is that it doesn't update its feeds anywhere near as quickly as Google Reader did. Some are worse than others, too.
So for the usual stuff, its mostly fine. But whenever a blog announces some livestream event, the post doesn't appear until an hour after its over.
I would love something like this for parking, especially if it could be semi-automated. Push a button, drone flies up and does a survey of the parking lot. It then finds a space and "squats" it for you while you drive there on the ground.
I even thought of this idea like 10 years ago, when trying to come up with random ideas for fictitious gov't technology programs while bored at work. I think the name we coined was "OPLSS" (pronounced "Hopeless"), for "Objective Parking Lot Survey System".
But, just like many superpowers we'd all love to have, this sort of thing is *only* useful if you're the only one who has it. If everyone had this capability, it would cause far more problems than it would solve.
Along this line, I've often felt that if Qt existed under a "more free" license from the start, Java may not have taken over as the "language du jour" (with.NET riding on its coat tails).
Qt basically gives C++ a big part of Java's "real" advantage, which is a large common cross-platform framework that includes everything you actually need to write real applications.
Gtk+/GNOME (in popular form) basically exists because of a flamewar, so is it any surprise that the community is still like that?
It always struck me as a bunch of stuck up C developers who outright refused to use C++, on principle alone. So instead, they implemented everything C++ does on top of C, using macros and coding conventions. They later managed to spin their crusade as "actually" being about the licensing issues with Qt at the time. While those licensing arguments may have been valid, to me they always felt like little more than a cover for a C vs C++ fight. However, it made their side of the story a lot easier to sell.
Except the VB generation was always a separate group from your more traditionally educated software engineers. Java, on the other hand, has wholesale infected CompSci education.
(While I will admit that I've done a fair amount of Java and.NET development in the real world, I'm also forever grateful that I went to college *before* it took over there.)
The problems with this platform all stem from marketing and distribution channel issues, which I hope they can find a way to fix. The product itself is quite solid, and continually improving. Its just that its still having to fight against a product image of what the company was selling 3 years ago, and they're not meeting that challenge as directly as they need to be.
I kept using my old HP notebook (with a 1920x1200 display) for years after I should have replaced it, precisely because all the PC laptop manufacturers seem to have colluded to deny me the option of ever buying a display with that resolution again. This year, when they finally started coming around, they seemed to think that high res was *far* more important in a dinky 13-inch screen, and dragged their feet on 15-inch offerings as long as possible. While they may now finally exist, they're quite hard to find and in limited selection.
So I basically just waited until the Haswell 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro came out, caved, and bought that. 16:10 screen and all. (And its great, except when developers of many of the more cross-platform software projects look at this "retina" thing as something they don't really need to care about, resulting in apps the OS upscale in ways that look horrible. Just a note: "retina" support is basically resolution-independent scaling of some portions of the UI, because the full native res of the screen is actually "too" high without it.)
I like to give my users a fairly high level changelog when putting out an update to something I've been working on. Usually its to call attention to new features or important bug fixes. However, I don't go into too much detail, lest I overwhelm or confuse them. Of course I'm also working on something used by average people, not IT admins.
Also, many of the changes tend to be things never directly visible to the user. These things include bugs fixed in core parts of the app the user is only vaguely aware of or updates to data formats and network protocols. Even if changes are visible to the user, sometimes they're simply too minor to call attention to them.
Mostly, I like to give my users a reason to want to upgrade, and to know that I've actually done something in the latest update.
When you're streaming 1080p video, its fine to have a buffer several seconds or minutes long to cover any hicups on the network. For remote desktop use, not so much.
Yet "reading a book" is completely permissible. Provided, of course, that the book in question is being read off of processed dead tree. How exactly does "reading off an ebook reader" change the situation?
"Unstowed gear" does not exclusively equal "Personal electronic devices"
There are other rules about what does or doesn't have to be stowed during takeoff and landing, which have nothing to do with whether the item in question is "electronic."
Except this explanation has been shown to be a crock. Its basically given in article comment threads across the Internet, but simply does not hold up. If it were true, then please explain how "reading on a Kindle" is forbidden, while "reading the in-flight magazine or some paper book" is perfectly okay. There are a lot of non-electronic distractions that there are no rules prohibiting.
They don't say "put everything down and pay attention." They say "turn off all portable electronic devices."
You raise the question of whether something on the "new platform" is done the same way as on the "old platform" You then assert that this is the case, enabling a whole rant about how this is horrible, and therefore the company that made these products shall be destroyed in the most gruesome way possible.
At no point in this are you actually showing evidence of actually knowing how the "new platform" does anything. Rather, you're jumping to whatever conclusions enable maximum negative ranting.
There is a lot of hate for BlackBerry in the media, the tech blogger world, and the financial analyst world. While not all of it may be unfounded, most of it is quite excessive. If some piece of news has even a sliver of negativity, and is about BlackBerry, it will be spun as the worst thing ever for which the company should be condemned to the pits of hell. If the same news were about any other company, it might be little more than a shrugged off footnote.
Another thing you notice among a lot of this hate, is complete ignorance of BlackBerry 10 and everything the company has done over the course of the past two years. What far too many people simply do not mentally acknowledge, is that BlackBerry 10 is a completely and fundamentally different platform from the old BlackBerry OS. On a technical level, the only thing it has in common is the brand name. You often see people remembering a bad experience with some old BlackBerry OS phone, and using that to draw an invalid conclusion about what the company is currently producing.
And heaven help you if you're using a web-based Email system, which basically breaks all these options. You know, like nearly all "normal" people are now doing.
For those of you who think it should be possible to do all this connection testing locally on-device, mobile networks and WiFi hotspots have so many real-world issues with random port blocking and filtering that there actually is value a test independent of the user's device. I don't know whether or not this is the reason they took this approach, of course, but it is worth consideration.
I'm really seriously considering going with http://theoldreader.com/ as they're the only ones who are even attempting to make a mobile website. However, their mobile site's layout is quite cumbersome to use and desperately needs fixing.
Everyone else seems overly obsessed with being "app first, screw the rest," where said apps don't run on my phone platform of choice. But if any 3rd party apps I actually can run will support other sites in time, I may give them a shot too.
Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say
on
Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Everywhere that this statement is false, the train system is actually useful. But where this statement is true, the train system is a joke.
Or in other words, a train system is only useful if people who can easily afford a car still choose to ride the train.
I think what gets missed in parts of the country, is that a well developed public transit system needs to get you from where you are, to where you're going. Not 10 miles away from either point. Walking distance. Its not just about the main route, but its also about the local connecting routes. This isn't practical everywhere, but it might be in more places than the option exists.
KeePass and all its related implementations (KeePassX, etc, etc.). This is the only family of password management apps I've found that both share a common database format, and have functional implementations even if your platform-of-the-moment isn't "hip enough" for a more polished solution to care about supporting.
It is the same card in the US too, at least by default. But if you're like me, you can explicitly request that it just be a normal ATM card with no debit card capabilities.
This is a big reason why I outright refuse to carry a debit card, even to the point of insisting to the bank that they give me a plain old ATM card for my account.
I just feel more comfortable having a buffer between my transactions and my actual accounts, where I have to take active action for so much as a dime to go from one to the other.
And as said above, the fraud argument happens with their money, not mine.
Heck, just ask Florida. They voted in a high-speed rail. Then somebody lead a campaign to do what? End it. Why? Do you believe he was really concerned about the fiscal interests, or was he thinking of his own?
And here's the other thing that's often forgotten... Every time something like this gets proposed in Florida, it seems to parallel whatever the major inter-city highway is, while blatantly ignoring the sprawl. If a rail system is 10 miles from your home, and 20 miles from your destination, what good is it exactly? Places that do this right, tend to have some sort of light-rail system to help pick up the slack. However, the density is probably too low for such a system to be worthwhile. I suppose this is what the bus system is for, but those often seem implemented as a "barely acceptable solution" that you'd only consider if you had no other options.
IMHO, public transit is only good when those who can easily afford to drive would opt to use it instead.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been quite happy with NewsBlur as well. The only area it falls short for me, is that it doesn't update its feeds anywhere near as quickly as Google Reader did. Some are worse than others, too.
So for the usual stuff, its mostly fine. But whenever a blog announces some livestream event, the post doesn't appear until an hour after its over.
Not necessarily. They just need to give the public appearance of it so that they can get elected to office.
I would love something like this for parking, especially if it could be semi-automated. Push a button, drone flies up and does a survey of the parking lot. It then finds a space and "squats" it for you while you drive there on the ground.
I even thought of this idea like 10 years ago, when trying to come up with random ideas for fictitious gov't technology programs while bored at work. I think the name we coined was "OPLSS" (pronounced "Hopeless"), for "Objective Parking Lot Survey System".
But, just like many superpowers we'd all love to have, this sort of thing is *only* useful if you're the only one who has it. If everyone had this capability, it would cause far more problems than it would solve.
Along this line, I've often felt that if Qt existed under a "more free" license from the start, Java may not have taken over as the "language du jour" (with .NET riding on its coat tails).
Qt basically gives C++ a big part of Java's "real" advantage, which is a large common cross-platform framework that includes everything you actually need to write real applications.
Gtk+/GNOME (in popular form) basically exists because of a flamewar, so is it any surprise that the community is still like that?
It always struck me as a bunch of stuck up C developers who outright refused to use C++, on principle alone. So instead, they implemented everything C++ does on top of C, using macros and coding conventions. They later managed to spin their crusade as "actually" being about the licensing issues with Qt at the time. While those licensing arguments may have been valid, to me they always felt like little more than a cover for a C vs C++ fight. However, it made their side of the story a lot easier to sell.
Except the VB generation was always a separate group from your more traditionally educated software engineers. Java, on the other hand, has wholesale infected CompSci education.
(While I will admit that I've done a fair amount of Java and .NET development in the real world, I'm also forever grateful that I went to college *before* it took over there.)
The problems with this platform all stem from marketing and distribution channel issues, which I hope they can find a way to fix. The product itself is quite solid, and continually improving. Its just that its still having to fight against a product image of what the company was selling 3 years ago, and they're not meeting that challenge as directly as they need to be.
I kept using my old HP notebook (with a 1920x1200 display) for years after I should have replaced it, precisely because all the PC laptop manufacturers seem to have colluded to deny me the option of ever buying a display with that resolution again. This year, when they finally started coming around, they seemed to think that high res was *far* more important in a dinky 13-inch screen, and dragged their feet on 15-inch offerings as long as possible. While they may now finally exist, they're quite hard to find and in limited selection.
So I basically just waited until the Haswell 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro came out, caved, and bought that. 16:10 screen and all.
(And its great, except when developers of many of the more cross-platform software projects look at this "retina" thing as something they don't really need to care about, resulting in apps the OS upscale in ways that look horrible. Just a note: "retina" support is basically resolution-independent scaling of some portions of the UI, because the full native res of the screen is actually "too" high without it.)
I like to give my users a fairly high level changelog when putting out an update to something I've been working on. Usually its to call attention to new features or important bug fixes. However, I don't go into too much detail, lest I overwhelm or confuse them. Of course I'm also working on something used by average people, not IT admins.
Also, many of the changes tend to be things never directly visible to the user. These things include bugs fixed in core parts of the app the user is only vaguely aware of or updates to data formats and network protocols. Even if changes are visible to the user, sometimes they're simply too minor to call attention to them.
Mostly, I like to give my users a reason to want to upgrade, and to know that I've actually done something in the latest update.
Latency... Latency.... Latency...
When you're streaming 1080p video, its fine to have a buffer several seconds or minutes long to cover any hicups on the network. For remote desktop use, not so much.
Yet "reading a book" is completely permissible. Provided, of course, that the book in question is being read off of processed dead tree. How exactly does "reading off an ebook reader" change the situation?
Thus, this explanation is a completely crock.
"Unstowed gear" does not exclusively equal "Personal electronic devices"
There are other rules about what does or doesn't have to be stowed during takeoff and landing, which have nothing to do with whether the item in question is "electronic."
Except this explanation has been shown to be a crock. Its basically given in article comment threads across the Internet, but simply does not hold up.
If it were true, then please explain how "reading on a Kindle" is forbidden, while "reading the in-flight magazine or some paper book" is perfectly okay. There are a lot of non-electronic distractions that there are no rules prohibiting.
They don't say "put everything down and pay attention." They say "turn off all portable electronic devices."
And this pattern is the problem...
You raise the question of whether something on the "new platform" is done the same way as on the "old platform"
You then assert that this is the case, enabling a whole rant about how this is horrible, and therefore the company that made these products shall be destroyed in the most gruesome way possible.
At no point in this are you actually showing evidence of actually knowing how the "new platform" does anything. Rather, you're jumping to whatever conclusions enable maximum negative ranting.
There is a lot of hate for BlackBerry in the media, the tech blogger world, and the financial analyst world. While not all of it may be unfounded, most of it is quite excessive. If some piece of news has even a sliver of negativity, and is about BlackBerry, it will be spun as the worst thing ever for which the company should be condemned to the pits of hell. If the same news were about any other company, it might be little more than a shrugged off footnote.
Another thing you notice among a lot of this hate, is complete ignorance of BlackBerry 10 and everything the company has done over the course of the past two years. What far too many people simply do not mentally acknowledge, is that BlackBerry 10 is a completely and fundamentally different platform from the old BlackBerry OS. On a technical level, the only thing it has in common is the brand name. You often see people remembering a bad experience with some old BlackBerry OS phone, and using that to draw an invalid conclusion about what the company is currently producing.
And heaven help you if you're using a web-based Email system, which basically breaks all these options. You know, like nearly all "normal" people are now doing.
i can't kill -9 a process. so i need to reboot the phone whenever i put an infinite loop in.
That's because the QNX command for this is slay, which does work and basically does the same thing.
The original article began with lots of alarmist click-bait remarks, but the actual content seems to follow this obvious explanation:
BlackBerry Issues Updated Statement Regarding Alleged Email Credentials Harvesting
For those of you who think it should be possible to do all this connection testing locally on-device, mobile networks and WiFi hotspots have so many real-world issues with random port blocking and filtering that there actually is value a test independent of the user's device. I don't know whether or not this is the reason they took this approach, of course, but it is worth consideration.
I'm really seriously considering going with http://theoldreader.com/ as they're the only ones who are even attempting to make a mobile website. However, their mobile site's layout is quite cumbersome to use and desperately needs fixing.
Everyone else seems overly obsessed with being "app first, screw the rest," where said apps don't run on my phone platform of choice. But if any 3rd party apps I actually can run will support other sites in time, I may give them a shot too.
Everywhere that this statement is false, the train system is actually useful.
But where this statement is true, the train system is a joke.
Or in other words, a train system is only useful if people who can easily afford a car still choose to ride the train.
I think what gets missed in parts of the country, is that a well developed public transit system needs to get you from where you are, to where you're going. Not 10 miles away from either point. Walking distance. Its not just about the main route, but its also about the local connecting routes. This isn't practical everywhere, but it might be in more places than the option exists.
KeePass and all its related implementations (KeePassX, etc, etc.).
This is the only family of password management apps I've found that both share a common database format, and have functional implementations even if your platform-of-the-moment isn't "hip enough" for a more polished solution to care about supporting.
It is the same card in the US too, at least by default. But if you're like me, you can explicitly request that it just be a normal ATM card with no debit card capabilities.
This is a big reason why I outright refuse to carry a debit card, even to the point of insisting to the bank that they give me a plain old ATM card for my account.
I just feel more comfortable having a buffer between my transactions and my actual accounts, where I have to take active action for so much as a dime to go from one to the other.
And as said above, the fraud argument happens with their money, not mine.
And its basically ready, gold, good to go, with the public launch this coming Wednesday.
Heck, just ask Florida. They voted in a high-speed rail. Then somebody lead a campaign to do what? End it. Why? Do you believe he was really concerned about the fiscal interests, or was he thinking of his own?
And here's the other thing that's often forgotten... Every time something like this gets proposed in Florida, it seems to parallel whatever the major inter-city highway is, while blatantly ignoring the sprawl. If a rail system is 10 miles from your home, and 20 miles from your destination, what good is it exactly? Places that do this right, tend to have some sort of light-rail system to help pick up the slack. However, the density is probably too low for such a system to be worthwhile. I suppose this is what the bus system is for, but those often seem implemented as a "barely acceptable solution" that you'd only consider if you had no other options.
IMHO, public transit is only good when those who can easily afford to drive would opt to use it instead.