On the other hand, oh yes, oh yes, the people who use those things are slow as turtles.
The few times I've had the "pleasure" of using the self-scan machines, it was the machine that was slow as a turtle. I scan one item, put it down, scan the next immediately... "Please place the first item in the bagging area." It's there, you freakin' machine! So I have to pick it up and put it back down, then scan the second item again. If I ever scan one item within a second of putting the previous one down, I get to do the dance all over again. The... machine... forces... me... to... go... slow...
The only time I'll use those stupid machines is when I have exactly one item and there's no line. Otherwise, I'll wait for a human cashier. The human line may take longer on a busy day, but it saves me a huge amount of frustration.
Of course, at the stores I usually go to I've also learned which cashier's line never to get in, even if it is the shortest. These must be the people the machines are geared for, 'cause damn they're slow!
First, Flash is as closed as closed can be. Second, it's completely proprietary. Third, Macrodobe only really support Mac and Windows for the Flash Player. Still no version 8 for Linux (and they themselves have announced that there never will be an 8 for Linux), while 9 is betaing for OSX and Windows.
From a business perspective:
First, who cares? As long as I can use it to achieve my end, what difference does it make whether it's open or closed?
Second, proprietary is better. You only have to target a single platform without worrying about quirks of different interpretations of the spec. There is only one interpretation, and only one player to worry about supporting.
Third, 99% of the people run either Windows or OSX. So 1% doesn't get my message. I don't care. Reaching that 1% is not worth doubling the development and support costs.
Mind you, I'm just playing Devil's advocate here. I don't think much of Flash to begin with, and I use Linux so I'm in that unsupported 1%. I'm a big fan of portability. But you have to admit, the prospect of developing for a single, consistent platform is very seductive, especially when you look at the marginal cost of reaching those few extra people.
A couple other benefits from the non-technical end of things. Flash is harder to reverse engineer, so it's harder for the merely curious to poke at the soft underbelly of your web site. It's not perfect, but obscurity is security when you're only concerned about keeping the masses at bay and don't care about the occasional person with actual skill. Also, the designer has complete control over the Flash presentation. None of this "hope the browser renders is properly" nonsense. Everything is pixel-for-pixel the way it's supposed to be. What-I-See-Is-What-You-Get. Non-technical designers want to control everything about the presentation; they want to provide a uniform "experience" to the end-users. We geeks don't care about that, and really prefer it the other way around. Decouple the medium from the message and we're empowered. I can put the message on my Palm Pilot, or play it through a speech synthesizer, or present it in ways the designer never dreamed up. Many designers prefer Flash simply because we can't twist their message to another medium.
I'm not saying that these reasons are right, just trying to point out other perspectives.
I had a split keyboard attached to the arms of my chair a couple jobs back. It was pretty comfortable, but the best part was it kept IT from futzing with my machine! "Hey, I need to make an adjustment to your computer." "Sure, here's the keyboard." "Ummm... Maybe I can just tell you what needs to be done." They were pretty free with the domain admin password, too.:-)
The problem with freedoms is that you DON'T miss them immediately upon giving them up. By the time you miss them, it's usually too late to ask for them back.
I don't really see how freely choosing to the appropriate for a particular task is giving up freedom. It would be nice if Linux ran smoothly on a laptop, but it doesn't. It would also be nice if I had the time and inclination to fix it myself, but I don't. "Freedom" is not just RMS's kool-aid.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
That's true, but that doesn't have to equate to "eternal sufferance of crap support for your hardware".
I remember when Beta meant buggy, and now it is more and more meaning the actual software (look at Google) [...]
That's funny. I remember when "beta" meant "being tested by a limited group of users". Now it's just used to mean, "don't blame me if it breaks."
The way my momma brought me up, everything from "alpha" on up was supposed to be feature-complete. That is, all the features you intend to have in this release are present and supposed to be working. An alpha release is one you make to your own in-house testers (even if that's just yourself with a different hat). After your own tests show it to be fairly stable you stamp it "beta" and let outsiders play with it. The beta releases usually have a limited distribution, and are done to get a more real-world test than the in-house guys can do. The "release candidate" thing is relatively new, but it's a kind of post-beta test. You're saying, "Okay, here's what we think we're going to release. Play with it and if nothing serious breaks we'll ship it". Release candidates may be restricted to the beta testers, but are generally available to the userbase at large.
It's a pity that these terms have lost their meanings. "Alpha" and "beta" have simply become the developers' way of saying, "We don't want to take responsibility for this." It doesn't work? Oh, sorry, too bad, it's a beta. You didn't expect it to work, did you? Things stay in this sort of limbo for years, just because the developers don't have the cajones to say, "This is good."
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. So God did present it unto the masses, and he did rest. And on the eighth day, God looked down and saw that sin and pestilence had come unto his creation, and God said, What did you expect from a beta?
BTW it might have been legal for P T Barnum to get cute like that, but there is no doubt that anyone selling tuna as "white salmon" today would be breaking several laws. We can shake our head at the person who believes in "white salmon" without ignoring the fact that the seller committed fraud.
Right. These days, manufacturers are required to put the word "imitation" in front of "crab meat", in at least a 0.5pt font. But I wouldn't be surprised if you could actually get away with labeling tuna as "white salmon" so long as the words "made from tuna" were displayed somewhere visible by microscope.
I bought a package of chicken the other day. In big, bold letters the package boasted, "Does not contain rat feces!" (Okay, it wasn't "rat feces", but I forget exactly what evil thing they were proud not to be putting in.) On the back, in microprint, the packaging said something to the effect of, "The USDA does not allow chicken with rat feces to be sold for human consumption." What does that mean? You guessed it! No chicken product in the store contains rat feces, despite this package implying that lesser brands do.
I'm also amused when I see advertisements for products "Made with genuine USDA graded beef!" That's nice. Wonder why they don't mention which grade is being used...?
So if the major party is counting the polls, what's gonna happen? They learned their lesson from the previously-attempted dictatorships; no more 100% like Saddam, and no more close calls that might cause voter concern. The polls will come in between 60/40 and 70/30.
What, you think there's actually going to be an election? The way I see it, the current administration is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iran sometime early in 2008. And possibly goading North Korea into some sort of conflict as well. Then, come summer of 2008, the president will use his "constitutionally granted" executive power to call off the fall election on the grounds that we can't afford to change leadership during the crises with Iran and Korea. Of course the constitution grants him no such power, but since he's stacked the supreme court he'll have their blessing. At that point it won't matter what Congress or any of us say about it.
What if he licensed it under the BSD?
Then Weird Al couldn't have any legal problems, could he?
Maybe not, but that doesn't keep some bozo from suing him anyway. Since Al's a talented guy, taking a "clean room" approach to his songs is probably much easier than fending off countless bogus lawsuits.
(And I do think it's appropriate that Weird Al's original songs are now getting parodied by the next generation of comedy songwriters...)
Load up your CDROM game disks into the thing and never search for the CD again when you want to play,
and don't have to hassle with game cracks. Seriously, how hard can that be?
Rip 'em to your hard drive and mount 'em with something like Daemon-Tools or Alcohol. (I'm assuming Windows 'cause of the mention of games, which we know don't exist commercially on any other platform...:-) Seriously, almost all copy-protection techniques can be defeated, even games which try to detect a virtual CD drive at run time. Without resorting to cracks.
This technique is indispensible when you have small children who don't know how to handle CDs. (Yeah, it's a learning experience for them, but explaining over and over that "You scratched it, it's gone" gets old really fast.) And it's damned convenient for us grown-ups, too. I almost never touch a physical CD more than once any more, to make a copy. After that it goes on the backup shelf and I mount the image.
Though a 400 disk CDDA/CDROM changer would be sweet...
Thought crimes? Grow up. Just try writing a song about a boss you don't like, and see how long it will take for him/her to fire your butt. Same thing goes for racist comments. Out there in the real world, you have to be careful about what you say, how you say it, and who hears it. Otherwise, be prepared for consequences. Sounds like someone learned this lesson the hard way.
Been there, done that. Incident #1, I posted a song about my employer's change from a pretty generous bonus policy to an all but non-existant one. It was nothing crude, just saying something to the effect that the bonus was enough to buy a Happy Meal and a dessert. I posted this to an internal "social" news group where all manner of discussion was held. The next day someone in HR talked to my boss telling him to keep his eye on me, that I was a troublemaker. He was much amused by this (and by the song, for that matter) and we had a good laugh.
Incident #2, different employer. The company's firewall was set up with a boneheaded content filter -- it once blocked me from completely work-related site, complaining about "alternative lifestyles". I was looking up info on the parallel port specs, and apparently the firewall didn't like the term "bi-directional". So I set up an SSH tunnel to a proxy on my home machine and bounced the request off of that. For grins I also set up VNC, then went to our sysadmin and showed her how I could view my home desktop from work, and my work desktop from home. She just stared at it and said, "Tell me what you did, and tell me how to stop it." So I told her and said I'd take it down if she wanted me to, but short of cutting off all outside access there was no way to keep someone else from doing the same thing. She allowed me to keep it up. I learned much later that she'd had a discussion with her boss about this event regarding whether some sort of disciplinary action should be taken. They decided that I was a white hat, and it was better to have me on their side than against them.
Incident #3, same employer as #2. The department had just had a group outing to see the latest Star Wars movie. I came across a hilarious review (brought to my attention by a posting here on Slashdot, actually) of the movie and posted a link to it on our department's intranet. Aparently someone outside the department took offense at the review, decided that the site it was on was a racist site, and I got my butt summarily fired. Despite having the entire department up to and including the VP of engineering come to my defense, and despite evidence that the site wasn't actually racist. Merely the hint of it was enough to run afoul of the company's "zero tolerance" policy and I was escorted to the door.
The moral is, life just ain't fair, in the workplace or the school. Get used to it. This kid got a warning, or even multiple warnings. The school's usage policy may or may not be stupid, but at least he deserves whatever punishment he gets for repeatedly violating it.
IMHO the way a situation like this should be handled is to sit down with the kid and his parents and say, "Look. We know you're smart, and we know you're capable of getting around just about any kind of filter we can put up. We're not going to waste our time playing whack-a-mole trying to shut you down. Knock it off voluntarily or be prepared to face whatever disciplinary action we can take."
Curiously, ever since Google came on the scene I haven't had much of a need for bookmarks, let alone a need to keep them sync'd on different machines. I usually just have a few local files bookmarked and some intranet links at work.
And with the Google Toolbar I don't even need to bookmark www.google.com!
Having "logged" (pun intended) more hours than I dare to imagine playing Pitfall, I think that this is a wonderful achievement! I salute this guy. As a kid I spent half a summer drawing out sketches of all 255 screens of Pitfall, and made a list of every possible underground route.
And I thought I was the only one who wasted my youth doing that!
I hate to sound snide, but asking a bunch of computer geeks, notoriously out of touch with their feelings, to make a game about/with emotions is asking for trouble.
A) It is something that doesn't fit "the norm"
B) It can be used to set you apart from peers
Bill Clinton apparently smoked marijuana when he was in college. In the 1960s. Now really, is there anyone who went to college in the 60s who didn't try it at least once? And would you want them to run the country? Yet, it was a "scandal". The same things will happen in 20 years. Someone will be running for Madam President and her opponents will find a picture of her flashing her tits at Mardi Gras or sunbathing topless on spring break her freshman year. Yeah, BFD. Who cares? But I betcha money something like this will "scandalize" voters in the 2028 election.
No-one, but no-one, needs a million lines of detail. They will not read them. They need to find a better way of reporting if they are generating this much data.
Spreadsheets are used for more than just financial data, you know. Nor are they necessarily intended to be read line-by-line. As I was mentioning here the other day, I've routinely hit the current limit of rows when importing data from digital scopes or logic analyzers. No, I don't intend to look at each and every value, but Excel's graphing tools are adequate to produce a nice view of a waveform, fit a trend curve to it, and forecast behavior outside of the sample range. There may be better tools, but Excel is convenient and adequate for a lot of jobs. The ability to handle more data is a good thing.
Maybe.mobi could spur the wireless web... If it weren't for the fact that any content provider could already do the exact same thing today, without needing the new TLD. If they cared, which damned few seem to do. You don't need a fancy new domain to publish a clean, uncluttered, page without tons of flash and javascript. If sites wanted to do that they would. But they don't, so they won't, and a new TLD won't change that.
Sounds like WAP re-born. No one supported that, either.
Wow, a TLD that discourages stupid ads and pop-ups and gratuitous Flash animations. Hell, what's to stop people on regular computer browsers from abandoning the old home pages for these new non-crappified sites?
Given the quality of most web pages, I expect most *.mobi sites will enforce a 320x240 screen regardless of your browser. With lots, and lots, and lots of paging. With each page loading a new set of advertising, of course! Fonts will either be unreadably tiny (to cram a full screen's worth of text onto the device) or unreadably huge (to compensate for a tiny display area). There will be almost no instances of pages using the default font and font size. It's not about the content, you know; it's about promoting the corporate look-and-feel.
They claim it's to eliminate scalping, but in truth it guarantees every seat will be scalped for the highest price with all the money going to ticketmaster.
I thought this was Ticketmaster's mission statement?
My hope is that auctioning the tickets will actually mean prices will go down, since they seem to be artificially high to begin with. Unfortunately, the minimum bid will probably the ticket's normal price. Not to mention games which can be played by limiting availability (closing certain sections when they know it's not going to be a sell-out) to reduce the supply.
I wonder if the "auction surcharge" is going to include the Ticketmaster "convenience fee" or be in addition to it? Oh, never mind, I already know the answer.
Maybe you should get your tickets earlier as then there are no last minute fees. Shipping and handling charges make sense, especially as venue pickup and international deliveries make these costs variable.
They don't make sense the way Ticketmaster charges for them. The last time I ordered from Ticketmaster there was the option to have the tickets emailed to me as a PDF. This option carried a $2 "convenience fee". That's right, you have to pay two bucks for the "convenience" of using your own paper and ink, and saving Ticketmaster the cost of an envelope and postage.
As for going to the box office, you often can't. Many venues sell through Ticketmaster exclusively. If you want to see the show you have to put up with the Ticketmaster fees, which (depending on the show) can double the cost of the ticket.
I don't generally attend concerts, especially not those which sell through Ticketmaster exclusively. Fortunately some of my favorite groups play the small venues which do still have an operation box office, or even just an at-the-door cover charge. I do vote with my wallet; I think I've bought Ticketmaster tickets for maybe three shows in the past decade. Ticketmaster are just money-grubbing bastards, wringing every cent they can get out of the public. Yeah, supply and demand and all that. I guess my personal demand just isn't high enough.
That's essentially what I did. I was trying to import timing information from a logic analyzer to produce a graph of the waveform. Yes, I know, totally the wrong tool for the job, but it's what I had on hand. Anyway, the analyzer was tied to the system clock at about 24 MHz and could store maybe a couple million samples. Fortunately the actual transitions I was looking for were much less frequent. I used a perl script to filter the data and only output a sample when one of the signals changed. That got me in under the 65K limit.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, but I know a number of web sites that will show you lots of PORK being stuffed into things...
(I wonder if PORK is a forbidden meta-tag...?)
The few times I've had the "pleasure" of using the self-scan machines, it was the machine that was slow as a turtle. I scan one item, put it down, scan the next immediately... "Please place the first item in the bagging area." It's there, you freakin' machine! So I have to pick it up and put it back down, then scan the second item again. If I ever scan one item within a second of putting the previous one down, I get to do the dance all over again. The... machine... forces... me... to... go... slow...
The only time I'll use those stupid machines is when I have exactly one item and there's no line. Otherwise, I'll wait for a human cashier. The human line may take longer on a busy day, but it saves me a huge amount of frustration.
Of course, at the stores I usually go to I've also learned which cashier's line never to get in, even if it is the shortest. These must be the people the machines are geared for, 'cause damn they're slow!
From a business perspective:
Mind you, I'm just playing Devil's advocate here. I don't think much of Flash to begin with, and I use Linux so I'm in that unsupported 1%. I'm a big fan of portability. But you have to admit, the prospect of developing for a single, consistent platform is very seductive, especially when you look at the marginal cost of reaching those few extra people.
A couple other benefits from the non-technical end of things. Flash is harder to reverse engineer, so it's harder for the merely curious to poke at the soft underbelly of your web site. It's not perfect, but obscurity is security when you're only concerned about keeping the masses at bay and don't care about the occasional person with actual skill. Also, the designer has complete control over the Flash presentation. None of this "hope the browser renders is properly" nonsense. Everything is pixel-for-pixel the way it's supposed to be. What-I-See-Is-What-You-Get. Non-technical designers want to control everything about the presentation; they want to provide a uniform "experience" to the end-users. We geeks don't care about that, and really prefer it the other way around. Decouple the medium from the message and we're empowered. I can put the message on my Palm Pilot, or play it through a speech synthesizer, or present it in ways the designer never dreamed up. Many designers prefer Flash simply because we can't twist their message to another medium.
I'm not saying that these reasons are right, just trying to point out other perspectives.
You're ahead of me. All I could come up with was "Single-Shot Bowel Movement".
I had a split keyboard attached to the arms of my chair a couple jobs back. It was pretty comfortable, but the best part was it kept IT from futzing with my machine! "Hey, I need to make an adjustment to your computer." "Sure, here's the keyboard." "Ummm... Maybe I can just tell you what needs to be done." They were pretty free with the domain admin password, too. :-)
I don't really see how freely choosing to the appropriate for a particular task is giving up freedom. It would be nice if Linux ran smoothly on a laptop, but it doesn't. It would also be nice if I had the time and inclination to fix it myself, but I don't. "Freedom" is not just RMS's kool-aid.
That's true, but that doesn't have to equate to "eternal sufferance of crap support for your hardware".
That's funny. I remember when "beta" meant "being tested by a limited group of users". Now it's just used to mean, "don't blame me if it breaks."
The way my momma brought me up, everything from "alpha" on up was supposed to be feature-complete. That is, all the features you intend to have in this release are present and supposed to be working. An alpha release is one you make to your own in-house testers (even if that's just yourself with a different hat). After your own tests show it to be fairly stable you stamp it "beta" and let outsiders play with it. The beta releases usually have a limited distribution, and are done to get a more real-world test than the in-house guys can do. The "release candidate" thing is relatively new, but it's a kind of post-beta test. You're saying, "Okay, here's what we think we're going to release. Play with it and if nothing serious breaks we'll ship it". Release candidates may be restricted to the beta testers, but are generally available to the userbase at large.
It's a pity that these terms have lost their meanings. "Alpha" and "beta" have simply become the developers' way of saying, "We don't want to take responsibility for this." It doesn't work? Oh, sorry, too bad, it's a beta. You didn't expect it to work, did you? Things stay in this sort of limbo for years, just because the developers don't have the cajones to say, "This is good."
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. So God did present it unto the masses, and he did rest. And on the eighth day, God looked down and saw that sin and pestilence had come unto his creation, and God said, What did you expect from a beta?
Right. These days, manufacturers are required to put the word "imitation" in front of "crab meat", in at least a 0.5pt font. But I wouldn't be surprised if you could actually get away with labeling tuna as "white salmon" so long as the words "made from tuna" were displayed somewhere visible by microscope.
I bought a package of chicken the other day. In big, bold letters the package boasted, "Does not contain rat feces!" (Okay, it wasn't "rat feces", but I forget exactly what evil thing they were proud not to be putting in.) On the back, in microprint, the packaging said something to the effect of, "The USDA does not allow chicken with rat feces to be sold for human consumption." What does that mean? You guessed it! No chicken product in the store contains rat feces, despite this package implying that lesser brands do.
I'm also amused when I see advertisements for products "Made with genuine USDA graded beef!" That's nice. Wonder why they don't mention which grade is being used...?
What, you think there's actually going to be an election? The way I see it, the current administration is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iran sometime early in 2008. And possibly goading North Korea into some sort of conflict as well. Then, come summer of 2008, the president will use his "constitutionally granted" executive power to call off the fall election on the grounds that we can't afford to change leadership during the crises with Iran and Korea. Of course the constitution grants him no such power, but since he's stacked the supreme court he'll have their blessing. At that point it won't matter what Congress or any of us say about it.
God, I hope I'm kidding...
Well, duh. Obviously he instigated it before his departure. You don't wait until after your departure to name your successor.
Maybe not, but that doesn't keep some bozo from suing him anyway. Since Al's a talented guy, taking a "clean room" approach to his songs is probably much easier than fending off countless bogus lawsuits.
(And I do think it's appropriate that Weird Al's original songs are now getting parodied by the next generation of comedy songwriters...)
Rip 'em to your hard drive and mount 'em with something like Daemon-Tools or Alcohol. (I'm assuming Windows 'cause of the mention of games, which we know don't exist commercially on any other platform... :-) Seriously, almost all copy-protection techniques can be defeated, even games which try to detect a virtual CD drive at run time. Without resorting to cracks.
This technique is indispensible when you have small children who don't know how to handle CDs. (Yeah, it's a learning experience for them, but explaining over and over that "You scratched it, it's gone" gets old really fast.) And it's damned convenient for us grown-ups, too. I almost never touch a physical CD more than once any more, to make a copy. After that it goes on the backup shelf and I mount the image.
Though a 400 disk CDDA/CDROM changer would be sweet...
Illiad said it best today.
Been there, done that. Incident #1, I posted a song about my employer's change from a pretty generous bonus policy to an all but non-existant one. It was nothing crude, just saying something to the effect that the bonus was enough to buy a Happy Meal and a dessert. I posted this to an internal "social" news group where all manner of discussion was held. The next day someone in HR talked to my boss telling him to keep his eye on me, that I was a troublemaker. He was much amused by this (and by the song, for that matter) and we had a good laugh.
Incident #2, different employer. The company's firewall was set up with a boneheaded content filter -- it once blocked me from completely work-related site, complaining about "alternative lifestyles". I was looking up info on the parallel port specs, and apparently the firewall didn't like the term "bi-directional". So I set up an SSH tunnel to a proxy on my home machine and bounced the request off of that. For grins I also set up VNC, then went to our sysadmin and showed her how I could view my home desktop from work, and my work desktop from home. She just stared at it and said, "Tell me what you did, and tell me how to stop it." So I told her and said I'd take it down if she wanted me to, but short of cutting off all outside access there was no way to keep someone else from doing the same thing. She allowed me to keep it up. I learned much later that she'd had a discussion with her boss about this event regarding whether some sort of disciplinary action should be taken. They decided that I was a white hat, and it was better to have me on their side than against them.
Incident #3, same employer as #2. The department had just had a group outing to see the latest Star Wars movie. I came across a hilarious review (brought to my attention by a posting here on Slashdot, actually) of the movie and posted a link to it on our department's intranet. Aparently someone outside the department took offense at the review, decided that the site it was on was a racist site, and I got my butt summarily fired. Despite having the entire department up to and including the VP of engineering come to my defense, and despite evidence that the site wasn't actually racist. Merely the hint of it was enough to run afoul of the company's "zero tolerance" policy and I was escorted to the door.
The moral is, life just ain't fair, in the workplace or the school. Get used to it. This kid got a warning, or even multiple warnings. The school's usage policy may or may not be stupid, but at least he deserves whatever punishment he gets for repeatedly violating it.
IMHO the way a situation like this should be handled is to sit down with the kid and his parents and say, "Look. We know you're smart, and we know you're capable of getting around just about any kind of filter we can put up. We're not going to waste our time playing whack-a-mole trying to shut you down. Knock it off voluntarily or be prepared to face whatever disciplinary action we can take."
Curiously, ever since Google came on the scene I haven't had much of a need for bookmarks, let alone a need to keep them sync'd on different machines. I usually just have a few local files bookmarked and some intranet links at work.
And with the Google Toolbar I don't even need to bookmark www.google.com!
It was a sad, sad time to be Hello Kitty.
And I thought I was the only one who wasted my youth doing that!
I guess you've never heard of the emotional romp that is Super Princess Peach.
Bill Clinton apparently smoked marijuana when he was in college. In the 1960s. Now really, is there anyone who went to college in the 60s who didn't try it at least once? And would you want them to run the country? Yet, it was a "scandal". The same things will happen in 20 years. Someone will be running for Madam President and her opponents will find a picture of her flashing her tits at Mardi Gras or sunbathing topless on spring break her freshman year. Yeah, BFD. Who cares? But I betcha money something like this will "scandalize" voters in the 2028 election.
Spreadsheets are used for more than just financial data, you know. Nor are they necessarily intended to be read line-by-line. As I was mentioning here the other day, I've routinely hit the current limit of rows when importing data from digital scopes or logic analyzers. No, I don't intend to look at each and every value, but Excel's graphing tools are adequate to produce a nice view of a waveform, fit a trend curve to it, and forecast behavior outside of the sample range. There may be better tools, but Excel is convenient and adequate for a lot of jobs. The ability to handle more data is a good thing.
Maybe .mobi could spur the wireless web... If it weren't for the fact that any content provider could already do the exact same thing today, without needing the new TLD. If they cared, which damned few seem to do. You don't need a fancy new domain to publish a clean, uncluttered, page without tons of flash and javascript. If sites wanted to do that they would. But they don't, so they won't, and a new TLD won't change that.
Sounds like WAP re-born. No one supported that, either.
Given the quality of most web pages, I expect most *.mobi sites will enforce a 320x240 screen regardless of your browser. With lots, and lots, and lots of paging. With each page loading a new set of advertising, of course! Fonts will either be unreadably tiny (to cram a full screen's worth of text onto the device) or unreadably huge (to compensate for a tiny display area). There will be almost no instances of pages using the default font and font size. It's not about the content, you know; it's about promoting the corporate look-and-feel.
I thought this was Ticketmaster's mission statement?
My hope is that auctioning the tickets will actually mean prices will go down, since they seem to be artificially high to begin with. Unfortunately, the minimum bid will probably the ticket's normal price. Not to mention games which can be played by limiting availability (closing certain sections when they know it's not going to be a sell-out) to reduce the supply.
I wonder if the "auction surcharge" is going to include the Ticketmaster "convenience fee" or be in addition to it? Oh, never mind, I already know the answer.
They don't make sense the way Ticketmaster charges for them. The last time I ordered from Ticketmaster there was the option to have the tickets emailed to me as a PDF. This option carried a $2 "convenience fee". That's right, you have to pay two bucks for the "convenience" of using your own paper and ink, and saving Ticketmaster the cost of an envelope and postage.
As for going to the box office, you often can't. Many venues sell through Ticketmaster exclusively. If you want to see the show you have to put up with the Ticketmaster fees, which (depending on the show) can double the cost of the ticket.
I don't generally attend concerts, especially not those which sell through Ticketmaster exclusively. Fortunately some of my favorite groups play the small venues which do still have an operation box office, or even just an at-the-door cover charge. I do vote with my wallet; I think I've bought Ticketmaster tickets for maybe three shows in the past decade. Ticketmaster are just money-grubbing bastards, wringing every cent they can get out of the public. Yeah, supply and demand and all that. I guess my personal demand just isn't high enough.
That's essentially what I did. I was trying to import timing information from a logic analyzer to produce a graph of the waveform. Yes, I know, totally the wrong tool for the job, but it's what I had on hand. Anyway, the analyzer was tied to the system clock at about 24 MHz and could store maybe a couple million samples. Fortunately the actual transitions I was looking for were much less frequent. I used a perl script to filter the data and only output a sample when one of the signals changed. That got me in under the 65K limit.