Hydrocodone has 0 requirements to be "cut" with acetaminophen. Neither does oxycodone. It's just done as a way of limiting a patient's intake of the various painkillers that are mixed with acetaminophen. Look at the dosing for Vicodin for instance (I had neck surgery a while ago for a herniated neck disc & did a bit of research);
- 5mg hydrocodone for 500mg acetaminophen - 7.5 for 750 etc
Similar ratios with oxycodone.
So you really end up being limited by the amount of (unecessary) acetaminophen which has _nothing_ to do with the RX painkillers in question. The fact that liver damage etc is so prevalent with acetaminophen simply means they need to remove that component of it, and people consume that as as seperate pill.
Such silliness. Don't force people to take acetaminophen if they don't need it - damage from that is a very real problem with these painkillers. It makes no sense - "let's prevent people from overdosing on the painkiller by adding in something that will cause liver failure if they take too much of it!" "omgz grate idea I just happen to have a great deal worked out with this acetaminophen provider. We'll all get rich!"
Even if it's a real list, it could be something as simple as a pilfered company document off a laptop, a script-kiddie wannabe hacker employee showing off to his friends on IRC, or any of a hundred scenarios.
Do I doubt it's difficult to own a bunch of HP-UX boxes? Nah.
Have I learned to not spastically freak out every time some random people claim they hacked something? Yah.
Trouble is, T-Mobile wouldn't exactly be forthcoming with any confirmations.
At the end of the day, you just have to plan around being hacked. You have to ensure your payment method associated with external services can handle being owned. You have to be ready for people getting your SSN and private info, since it's moronically being used for frivolous purposes everywhere.
Which is not to say you shouldn't do your best to keep your data protected and secure - I just try to plan around any data I give out to various companies being owned.
Yeah, that's pretty terrible. You can be equally unclear if they had links to Nazism, or the Republican National Committee. Too bad spinspotter dotbombed - http://spinspotter.com/
I totally agree, we should limit all information gathering strategy to the strictest sense of the law, regardless of intent. Who cares that security researchers dissect these issues and come up with strategies to combat them! We should all fly blind because you have to get a little dirty to figure out what's going on.
"To notify the affected institutions and victims, we stored all the data that was sent to us, in accordance with Principle 2, and worked with ISPs and law enforcement agencies, including the United States Departmentof Defense (DoD) and FBI Cybercrime units, to assist us with this effort. This cooperation also led to the suspension of the current Torpig domains owned by the cyber riminals"
Those terrible, evil security researchers! They should be locked up - clearly the government and OS providers are doing a bangup job of protecting users private data by analyzing these threats in detail & shutting them down. Let's definitely keep the actual smart people who are willing to help and work with legal agencies shut down, so these poor malware providers can not be hassled by people using the only tactics that will actually provide information on how this shit works so we can have a small chance of temporarily shutting down a huge botnet, and getting some users patched.
I just bought a 9800gt not too long ago for my gaming box. Owned. I always seem to delay making purchases just long enough that stuff like this happens and I feel like I got gyped!
Though, I'm pretty happy with the 9800gt so all is well. Certainly much better than my old unstable 7950gt SLI setup.
The high end game card market will never go away - too profitable. They will artificially drive prices up unless they have a large incentive to not (eg ATI/AMD stick it to nVidia with proc/gpu combos). There's no money to be made in volume, really - they make their real killing in releasing a high end card and keeping the prices jacked up for as long as humanly possible.
As for the ATI vs nVidia fanboyism, that mostly exists in Linux. On my windows gaming box, the drivers for both have always been stable. As much as I eat, work, live & breathe *NIX, I would not consider gaming in the OS. So moot point for me. Windows for me has always just been a source of professional frustration or my personal gaming box (I prefer PC console for most games still)
Well, to your UPS truck point - how do you think bookstores get their books? Same UPS trucks, I'd imagine. Except instead of delivering 1 to 1 customer wherever they are, they deliver several depending on popularity / saleability. Big bookstores like Powells and Eliott Bay probably aggregate fairly well - their profit margins are much less so they have to be as efficient as possible everywhere. Amazon is certainly efficient minded, but they have the advantage of gross sales margin.
In my specific case, I'd be taking the bus into work regardless, so there's no additional fuel consumption required.
Anyway, the math would be exceedingly difficult, as with the Amazon Marketplace 3rd party vendors have their own setup. I'd be willing to wager that many people do oneoff/one at a time deliveries off Amazon (espcially Prime members with free shipping) whereas if they had to go book shopping, they'd be better at aggregating purchases and whatnot.
Anyway there is still the point of who you want to support financially..
I've always felt vaguely guilty about all the box I've ordered from Amazon over the years. Probably about 800-900ish. It's just so damned convenient to click n ship, and with Amazon Prime, I don't pay for 2day (or greater) shipping.
However, it does have an impact;
- Extra (recyclable) packing material - Extra resource usage in shipping and delivery (fuel etc) - Most importantly, I really love smaller, independent bookstores.
I work on the same block as Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, yet almost never go in there. Several other good bookstores are in the area.
I supposed one could argue that I'm providing work for people regardless - I guess it comes down to where you want your support in the form of money to go. This article brings up a very late new years resolution - buy most books in local bookstores!
WRT to this article, I found it to be particularly sensationalist and uninteresting. Amazon does have a huge issue in restricting 'adult' material such as pr0n, sex toys etc - not to mention unexpected search results (try like 'Girl Scout Cookies') and this is clearly not the way to address it. However it's not like they're refusing to sell or display adult books.
I'm really impressed with Handbrake. I actually use it to transcode a bunch of stuff so my ps3 will play it. They have a bunch of really handy presets for various device, such as ps3, iPod video, xbox 360 long with things like tv/animation etc.
They have a CLI mode which is useful for scripting.
HandBrake GUI on Linux is now a full fledged port, not just a hacky frontend to the CLI tool.
Job managment is great too, with a real time adjustable queue, ability to pause/resume etc.
One thing I haven't found out how to do is splice AVIs, I use avidemux for that. Which is another amazingly awesome program.
3 people who figure this AV crap out that I have 0 interest in. I just want the friggin' thing to do the thing, man.
Simple, except the computer noticed 700 things wrong in the first few minutes of the TMI accident, causing the one audible alarm to ring continuously until it was shut off as useless. The one visual alarm blinked for days, indicating nothing useful. And the print queue was quickly flooded with 700 error reports followed by thousands of updates and corrections, making it almost instantly hours behind. The operators had to guess at what the problem was.
I could not agree with this post more. Unfortunately not enough people do. Healthy price competition is one thing, creating a miserable work environment and a crappy shopping experience for all is another.
Ever been to a walmart or costco on a Saturday afternoon? Is that really the experience we want spreading everywhere?
Ask yourself, how are prices so low and where is the money going? It's an obvious observation, but we're dumping out our wealth on other countries to get the lowest price, which ultimately eliminates 10s of thousands of jobs, making our economy poorer and more people dependent on being supported by government programs etc.
I lament the disappearance of small, well run shops with caring owners who make fine products and charge a fair price.
Unfortunately this trend is here to stay. Funny how the globalization of markets has nothing to do with healthy cross-cultural exchange, and everything to do with creating items Americans want as cheaply as possible, with miserable working conditions all round.
Well, to that point, someone else mentioned that despite his intentions that might not happen.
I worked at a company that provided a DRM service (not very well known) - despite our intentions to avoid the "screw the customers with DRM license server disappearing" it happened. You need some infrastructure just to _unlock_ the games.
Think about the scenarios;
- Valve goes under, provides an "unlock" to every game people have purchased.
In that one, Valve would need to maintain some infrastructure just to do the unlock. Users would need to connect while the 'unlock' service was still up. Companies that go out of business aren't known to keep infrastructure running for very long. If you miss out on that window, you have a permanently locked purchased game. You would have to download an 'illegal' copy.
- More likely, Valve got in financial trouble and gets acquired. I know google was thinking about it once.
In this scenario, you have an entirely different company with different corporate values that may or may not see eye to eye with any Valve employees. They may later shut down Steam if it continued to be unprofitable and business direction moved away from it.
The point is, if you have to rely on an external service for anything after the initial purchase and registration, you are playing roulette with your money.
I just make a backup copy of the media, and store the original in the case which ends up in a box full of games.
I say that like I actually don't have a bunch of scratched up unplayable media:-)
With the proliferation of broadband (and as long as I have it!) I've been downloading games more often.
Though, it's nice to be able to hitup a local close game store and get up and running in an hour or so, rather than downloading large games which takes several hours..
I say that like you don't have to then download hours of patches for every game you purchase lately.
I bought the game, I own the media. I should NOT have to connect to the internet, download a client, download whatever updates it deems are necessary. Maybe there's some cheesy exploit I like in the FPS I'm playing alone? You got my money - leave me alone!
It was really frustrating when I was between broadband watching Steam try to download huge updates so I could play the game I bought specifically so I'd have the media and wouldn't need to download anything. Naive me, assuming you can actually play a game you own the discs to.
PS - how is this not DRM?
- The files are encrypted with a 'unique' key - Steam acts as the DRM license server - Any attempt to play the game without access to Steam the new DRM license server will fail - You access or validate the game by a user/login combo - If Steam ever goes away, has server/capacity issues (which they have, when new games are released) you are shit out of luck to play the game you PAID for
The _only_ current difference I can see is that you can 'transfer' it between PCs and play it. Guess what - you could do that with DRM as well, albeit laboriously and somewhat error prone. Most services even allow you several "free" additional downloads that give you another license.
It's so similar to DRM that this is just a lame publicity stunt.
There's no way a cell phone can replace the simplicity and multi-device support of a good universal remote. These remotes are actually _designed_ for their function, whereas a phone is designed for, you know, taking calls and running a few apps.
- You dont pay a monthly fee to use a remote control - Who wants to pay for multiple goddamn cell phones that work as remotes, so if you are gone your visitors or spouse can watch tv? Be srsly - Good remotes are designed to be simple for the technologically inept. You select a simple action like "Watch TV" "Watch DVD" "Play Game" which are customizable and switch everything on or off as needed. If there are errors, the help button will resolve the issues in a simple way your grandma can figure out
This is akin to taking a simple, small tool and trying to replace it with a monolithic "do everything" solution. It would be overly complex and would fail, fail, fail.
How are these terrible articles getting through? Modding queue with a hangover, are we?
Learn it, love it. At a certain point, computer autoadjusting loses to friction coefficient.
I'm amazed by people who ignore the fact that they're moving an object that weighs several thousand pounds at speed.
It's especially bad with 4x4/awd owners; they feel invulnerable because they can get traction to go - ignoring that 4x4/awd doesn't mean jack for stopping and not much for cornering. Those are usually the most dangerous drivers - inexperienced SUV owners.
I've long thought that it's a dangerous precedent how easy it is to get a license. The drivers test doesn't cover the freeway, merging or anything vaguely resembling 'emergency' driving. I think all that should be covered - there should be a few 'evasive driving' courses available in each state, or whatever makes the most sense.
So many crazy distracted drivers out there - I'm surprised there aren't a lot more accidents..
Keeping "Josh" types around is wrong, and any company who does that is almost invariably ignorant. Lemme explain why.
Take amount of time it takes to write a particular piece of software and compare it to how long it can be in service. You'll quickly see why writing clean, easily maintainable code is so much more important than churning crap out to meet a deadline.
Which, realistically, is the root of the problem. Business is like a blind, hungry animal with no knowledge of the future, and complete ignorance of the past.
When you couple that with most business folks complete lack of understanding of tech fundamentals, you end up with a dangerous situation.
I can't count the number of jobs I've worked at that has had subpar dev/ops members that are as highly regarded as "Josh". They are usually highly protective of their "turf", and unwilling to share info. In my experience, that is one of two things; either total incompetence and they are wanting to protect their ego and company standing, or they want job security. In reality, these "brilliant" people are usually supbar employees who are viewed as heroes when they fix problems that _they caused_. Business not knowing tech or how to tell if a tech employee is good, ends up praising the worst possible employee behavior and loves the worst quality employee. Comically sad.
Intelligent people eventually realize that job security by claiming turf & not sharing info means that their life eventually becomes a living hell of their own creation as they are now chained to this crappy software or project that is probably breaking all the time, a beast to maintain, and if that project goes away, likely so will they.
Another point - no single dev is going to be as productive or useful as a well integrated dev team. In sane orgs, there's a flow of dev -> qa -> ops moving through various environments. That's a lot of hands touching code, having to understand and test it, having to support it. If there is no clean handoff, documentation, or willingness to help/defend/explain their code, it is not supportable for the business. You might meet a few deadlines but you will lose out every single time in the long haul.
Dev teams have to integrate code. How many devs have had to work with reticent, subpar coders who don't provide documentation or clean integration paths, with unreadable code? It just wastes valuable time on the project, frustrates your entire dev team and leads to inferior quality products.
Your business will _fail_ if you foster "heroes" like Josh. You will never have a maintainable code base, scalability, or supportable code in the most important environment, production. Which is another important point; no other environment matters but production. Everything else is to support a clean, supportable, scalable production environment.
No single team member should be indispensable. It's an indication that your hiring practices are flawed, or the company is not willing to staff up enough to provide redundancy. Having been that "indispensable" employee several times, I can tell you that it sucks balls and any sane person will fight like hell to get out of it. It means you can never go on vacation without being bothered.
Specific to "Josh" - immediate firing is in order. Are his (negative) contributions in light of his flawed methodologies worth the amount of money a sexual harassment lawsuit would cost?
Time to wake up. The myth of the reticent superhacker who saves corporate is beyond stupid. It's criminally negligent on behalf of hiring managers because of the long term problems it brings.
If your company is a small startup, it's workable in the beginning, but you really need to be careful that best practices are instituted as it makes sense, with the eventual goal being a clean SLDC or similar process that provides clean, well maintained, supportable production environments and applications.
Engineer to business; grow up and get a clue. We have to understand your world when costing things, you need to understand what constitutes a good tech employee and a bad one.
They're both about as ill-informed, uninteresting, and/or blatantly untrue. Actually reading the reasoning behind the theory is like listening to my cousin babble about how he had to reinstall Vista so it would be on the "inner discs" of his hd platter thereby running faster.
Slow news night?
Sometimes a static queue isn't such a horrible thing.:P
Or is this the most asinine "news" story since, well, the last idle story?
1) Blockbuster is a business. They have every right to change their policies to benefit them. You, conversely, have every right to cancel your subscription and STFU. You do have a further right to be a whining loser and post to/. about it. The moderator had a DUTY to not allow such sucky stories, but they have failed:(
2) If this was about them changing their policy and not informing people, I could maybe understand indignation, if not necessarily care.
3) Blockbuster is beating netflix _precisely_ because they have so many physical stores. The ability to drunkenly stumble in on a Friday night to rent some romantic comedy guaranteed to get you laid is a nice feature.
4) I use Blockbuster total access and I could care less about this policy change. I barely manage to remember or actually mail out more than 3 or 4 times a month.
In summation, I feel that you should go picket your nearest blockbuster, hand out pamphlets to customers walking in etc. Get the word out.
Why not simply create an online petition? They're not always that effective, but it is a non-destructive way to get thousands of people to show they don't like it. Facebook groups seem to be all the rage as well.
If you explain in simple terms to the average internet user that your online browsing habits are being logged by a company who is attempting to monetize that information, possibly share it with 3rd party companies, it has no expiration date and the data can be associated with you and turned over to law enforcement, I'm sure people would be concerned.
This is just typical google arrogance though - when you're on top, you can afford to ignore everyone. Not like there are any real alternatives with as many features or search result quality.
I personally just block the cookies, though I can envision a future where if you don't allow tracking cookies as they like, you aren't allowed to use their service. That will happen.
I wouldn't use the autoclick stuff for fear that small companies that use adsense would have to foot the bill. Which is a sucky thing to do - if you're using a service, you have to put up with their lameness. You can protest etc, but it's your choice to use that service.
It'll be interesting to see what eventually happens to these huge portals that arguably "are" the web these days.
This is slashdot, citations are only required for the important stuff like obscure vim macro commands to prove its superiority over emacs.
As Colbert would say, a tip of my hat for bringing some real figures into the discussion;p
The problem with punishing a company as others have stated is it affects the average worker much more negatively than some exec who just lists it as a "failed strategy" (read: got caught) if they're questioned about it.
Sucks how most financial systems end up rewarding the wrong people off the sweat of the honest, hardworking folk, and the elite never have any comebacks. Kinda makes me wish I believed in some metaphysical retribution system, be it Judgement day or karma;)
If they have physical access to the machine they can compromise it. You can disable cd/floppy booting, put BIOS and grub passwords in, but they can simply remove the HD, take it home, root it, put it back in. Probably hard to do it inconspicuously, but you get what I'm saying.
Maybe something like a thin client with their My Documents or/home being on a network share or something along those lines would be better.
This is all sounding like more trouble than its worth. At some point you have to trust your staff. Good internal system monitoring (for suspicious behavior, p2p traffic etc) and firewall / ACLs, employee education and strong employee HR legalese that "I will not hax0r my pc or DDoS the world" is really the best that's expected.
If you make your workplaces some draconian hellhole, no one will want to work there. There is a tradeoff between productivity and security.
Anyway, I've had good success with both cfengine and puppet for centralized config management on servers.. or even something goofy like executing scripts on user logon over Samba 3..
- Linux installation isn't very complicated on it, but not terribly useful. As others have mentioned, it's a limited RAM system and with current firmware there is no access to the accelerated hardware. I've ran Xubuntu and Yellow Dog on it. Both worked fine, but the system was too slow to play HD movies etc. Also, you need a keyboard to boot between PS3 os and Linux. There is a project to be able to select using a controller at boot but it wasn't functional.
- No IR support. That means in order to use any kind of all-in-one remote you need to buy something like the Nyko blue wave (gives you a USB IR device). Even with that, you cannot power the system on and off. Not everyone wants to waste power by leaving their components on indefinitely
- To your point of "nearly flawless" video etc, the fact that it _requires_ upnp to play over network is silly. Most everyone would prefer a simple CIFS share, which would work on windows and Linux. Installing a totally unsecured upnp server == suck.
Also, the video formats it supports is highly restrictive, requiring many folks to reencode or transcode their media files. It seems almost arbitrary what formats they support. This is the list. The fact is even if you have files encoded in their 'blessed' list, there are options that cause playback failure (compression settings etc). Very frustrating.
I was unable to reliably play fairly low bitrate avi's over a upnp server using the wireless adapter. I had to hardware it to my network.
- As a gaming console, it's okay. It has much longer than expected loading times for games across the board, though. For instance, GTA4 takes ~ 3-5 min from disk insertion until it's ready to play. EA Fight Night 3 is constantly taking 1-2 min to switch contexts (different fighting modes, training etc).
I bought it as a cheap console addon to replace my broken DVD player. For that, it does well. It certainly has gotten much better with the firmware updates - the travesty of limited to no ps2 game compatability (depending on which version of ps3 you get) is a joke.
With gaming consoles, you either need to do something breakaway awesome (like WII) or vastly improve on old stuff (like 360). A slightly better but buggy and limited release will give you small initial adoption, and without a large initial explosion the platform will never truly be successful compared to its rivals.
They basically got owned by the R&D time & costs of developing their architecture making the 360 development much quicker and less buggy. Also by their arrogance in thinking the market would be happy with an inferior product they'd patch up later with firmware.
Slashdot Mirror
Just when I thought I'd heard the worst usages of 'cloud', someone upped the ante!
Now sites with a lot of users are considered the cloud? Is WoW the cloud? MySpace is "the" cloud?
Requiring applications meet certain criteria for your site is now somehow part of "the Oppressive cloud"?
Seriously, go die. Thx.
Hydrocodone has 0 requirements to be "cut" with acetaminophen. Neither does oxycodone. It's just done as a way of limiting a patient's intake of the various painkillers that are mixed with acetaminophen. Look at the dosing for Vicodin for instance (I had neck surgery a while ago for a herniated neck disc & did a bit of research);
- 5mg hydrocodone for 500mg acetaminophen
- 7.5 for 750
etc
Similar ratios with oxycodone.
So you really end up being limited by the amount of (unecessary) acetaminophen which has _nothing_ to do with the RX painkillers in question. The fact that liver damage etc is so prevalent with acetaminophen simply means they need to remove that component of it, and people consume that as as seperate pill.
Such silliness. Don't force people to take acetaminophen if they don't need it - damage from that is a very real problem with these painkillers. It makes no sense - "let's prevent people from overdosing on the painkiller by adding in something that will cause liver failure if they take too much of it!" "omgz grate idea I just happen to have a great deal worked out with this acetaminophen provider. We'll all get rich!"
I'll wait for some validation. Cuz, you know;
prodsrv1|192.168.1.200|root@cia.gov sekret files|for realz|RHEL4
isn't especially convincing.
Even if it's a real list, it could be something as simple as a pilfered company document off a laptop, a script-kiddie wannabe hacker employee showing off to his friends on IRC, or any of a hundred scenarios.
Do I doubt it's difficult to own a bunch of HP-UX boxes? Nah.
Have I learned to not spastically freak out every time some random people claim they hacked something? Yah.
Trouble is, T-Mobile wouldn't exactly be forthcoming with any confirmations.
At the end of the day, you just have to plan around being hacked. You have to ensure your payment method associated with external services can handle being owned. You have to be ready for people getting your SSN and private info, since it's moronically being used for frivolous purposes everywhere.
Which is not to say you shouldn't do your best to keep your data protected and secure - I just try to plan around any data I give out to various companies being owned.
Yeah, that's pretty terrible. You can be equally unclear if they had links to Nazism, or the Republican National Committee. Too bad spinspotter dotbombed - http://spinspotter.com/
I totally agree, we should limit all information gathering strategy to the strictest sense of the law, regardless of intent. Who cares that security researchers dissect these issues and come up with strategies to combat them! We should all fly blind because you have to get a little dirty to figure out what's going on.
"To notify the affected institutions and victims, we stored all the data that was sent to us, in accordance with Principle 2, and worked with ISPs and law enforcement agencies, including the United States Departmentof Defense (DoD) and FBI Cybercrime units, to assist us with this effort. This cooperation also led to the suspension of the current Torpig domains owned by the cyber riminals"
Those terrible, evil security researchers! They should be locked up - clearly the government and OS providers are doing a bangup job of protecting users private data by analyzing these threats in detail & shutting them down. Let's definitely keep the actual smart people who are willing to help and work with legal agencies shut down, so these poor malware providers can not be hassled by people using the only tactics that will actually provide information on how this shit works so we can have a small chance of temporarily shutting down a huge botnet, and getting some users patched.
What was your point again?
I just bought a 9800gt not too long ago for my gaming box. Owned. I always seem to delay making purchases just long enough that stuff like this happens and I feel like I got gyped!
Though, I'm pretty happy with the 9800gt so all is well. Certainly much better than my old unstable 7950gt SLI setup.
The high end game card market will never go away - too profitable. They will artificially drive prices up unless they have a large incentive to not (eg ATI/AMD stick it to nVidia with proc/gpu combos). There's no money to be made in volume, really - they make their real killing in releasing a high end card and keeping the prices jacked up for as long as humanly possible.
As for the ATI vs nVidia fanboyism, that mostly exists in Linux. On my windows gaming box, the drivers for both have always been stable. As much as I eat, work, live & breathe *NIX, I would not consider gaming in the OS. So moot point for me. Windows for me has always just been a source of professional frustration or my personal gaming box (I prefer PC console for most games still)
Well, to your UPS truck point - how do you think bookstores get their books? Same UPS trucks, I'd imagine. Except instead of delivering 1 to 1 customer wherever they are, they deliver several depending on popularity / saleability. Big bookstores like Powells and Eliott Bay probably aggregate fairly well - their profit margins are much less so they have to be as efficient as possible everywhere. Amazon is certainly efficient minded, but they have the advantage of gross sales margin.
In my specific case, I'd be taking the bus into work regardless, so there's no additional fuel consumption required.
Anyway, the math would be exceedingly difficult, as with the Amazon Marketplace 3rd party vendors have their own setup. I'd be willing to wager that many people do oneoff/one at a time deliveries off Amazon (espcially Prime members with free shipping) whereas if they had to go book shopping, they'd be better at aggregating purchases and whatnot.
Anyway there is still the point of who you want to support financially..
I've always felt vaguely guilty about all the box I've ordered from Amazon over the years. Probably about 800-900ish. It's just so damned convenient to click n ship, and with Amazon Prime, I don't pay for 2day (or greater) shipping.
However, it does have an impact;
- Extra (recyclable) packing material
- Extra resource usage in shipping and delivery (fuel etc)
- Most importantly, I really love smaller, independent bookstores.
I work on the same block as Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, yet almost never go in there. Several other good bookstores are in the area.
I supposed one could argue that I'm providing work for people regardless - I guess it comes down to where you want your support in the form of money to go. This article brings up a very late new years resolution - buy most books in local bookstores!
WRT to this article, I found it to be particularly sensationalist and uninteresting. Amazon does have a huge issue in restricting 'adult' material such as pr0n, sex toys etc - not to mention unexpected search results (try like 'Girl Scout Cookies') and this is clearly not the way to address it. However it's not like they're refusing to sell or display adult books.
/agree
I'm really impressed with Handbrake. I actually use it to transcode a bunch of stuff so my ps3 will play it. They have a bunch of really handy presets for various device, such as ps3, iPod video, xbox 360 long with things like tv/animation etc.
They have a CLI mode which is useful for scripting.
HandBrake GUI on Linux is now a full fledged port, not just a hacky frontend to the CLI tool.
Job managment is great too, with a real time adjustable queue, ability to pause/resume etc.
One thing I haven't found out how to do is splice AVIs, I use avidemux for that. Which is another amazingly awesome program.
3 people who figure this AV crap out that I have 0 interest in. I just want the friggin' thing to do the thing, man.
Simple, except the computer noticed 700 things wrong in the first few minutes of the TMI accident, causing the one audible alarm to ring continuously until it was shut off as useless. The one visual alarm blinked for days, indicating nothing useful. And the print queue was quickly flooded with 700 error reports followed by thousands of updates and corrections, making it almost instantly hours behind. The operators had to guess at what the problem was.
Sounds like Nagios at my work :-)
Yeah, the arrogant, condescending and elitist nature of the summary pretty much made me want to cockpunch the reviewer.
There are hundreds of millions of blogs in the world. Not reading some random dotcom shmoe's blog means what again?
I could not agree with this post more. Unfortunately not enough people do. Healthy price competition is one thing, creating a miserable work environment and a crappy shopping experience for all is another.
Ever been to a walmart or costco on a Saturday afternoon? Is that really the experience we want spreading everywhere?
Ask yourself, how are prices so low and where is the money going? It's an obvious observation, but we're dumping out our wealth on other countries to get the lowest price, which ultimately eliminates 10s of thousands of jobs, making our economy poorer and more people dependent on being supported by government programs etc.
I lament the disappearance of small, well run shops with caring owners who make fine products and charge a fair price.
Unfortunately this trend is here to stay. Funny how the globalization of markets has nothing to do with healthy cross-cultural exchange, and everything to do with creating items Americans want as cheaply as possible, with miserable working conditions all round.
Well, to that point, someone else mentioned that despite his intentions that might not happen.
I worked at a company that provided a DRM service (not very well known) - despite our intentions to avoid the "screw the customers with DRM license server disappearing" it happened. You need some infrastructure just to _unlock_ the games.
Think about the scenarios;
- Valve goes under, provides an "unlock" to every game people have purchased.
In that one, Valve would need to maintain some infrastructure just to do the unlock. Users would need to connect while the 'unlock' service was still up. Companies that go out of business aren't known to keep infrastructure running for very long. If you miss out on that window, you have a permanently locked purchased game. You would have to download an 'illegal' copy.
- More likely, Valve got in financial trouble and gets acquired. I know google was thinking about it once.
In this scenario, you have an entirely different company with different corporate values that may or may not see eye to eye with any Valve employees. They may later shut down Steam if it continued to be unprofitable and business direction moved away from it.
The point is, if you have to rely on an external service for anything after the initial purchase and registration, you are playing roulette with your money.
I just make a backup copy of the media, and store the original in the case which ends up in a box full of games.
I say that like I actually don't have a bunch of scratched up unplayable media :-)
With the proliferation of broadband (and as long as I have it!) I've been downloading games more often.
Though, it's nice to be able to hitup a local close game store and get up and running in an hour or so, rather than downloading large games which takes several hours..
I say that like you don't have to then download hours of patches for every game you purchase lately.
Sigggh
I bought the game, I own the media. I should NOT have to connect to the internet, download a client, download whatever updates it deems are necessary. Maybe there's some cheesy exploit I like in the FPS I'm playing alone? You got my money - leave me alone!
It was really frustrating when I was between broadband watching Steam try to download huge updates so I could play the game I bought specifically so I'd have the media and wouldn't need to download anything. Naive me, assuming you can actually play a game you own the discs to.
PS - how is this not DRM?
- The files are encrypted with a 'unique' key
- Steam acts as the DRM license server
- Any attempt to play the game without access to Steam the new DRM license server will fail
- You access or validate the game by a user/login combo
- If Steam ever goes away, has server/capacity issues (which they have, when new games are released) you are shit out of luck to play the game you PAID for
The _only_ current difference I can see is that you can 'transfer' it between PCs and play it. Guess what - you could do that with DRM as well, albeit laboriously and somewhat error prone. Most services even allow you several "free" additional downloads that give you another license.
It's so similar to DRM that this is just a lame publicity stunt.
There's no way a cell phone can replace the simplicity and multi-device support of a good universal remote. These remotes are actually _designed_ for their function, whereas a phone is designed for, you know, taking calls and running a few apps.
- You dont pay a monthly fee to use a remote control
- Who wants to pay for multiple goddamn cell phones that work as remotes, so if you are gone your visitors or spouse can watch tv? Be srsly
- Good remotes are designed to be simple for the technologically inept. You select a simple action like "Watch TV" "Watch DVD" "Play Game" which are customizable and switch everything on or off as needed. If there are errors, the help button will resolve the issues in a simple way your grandma can figure out
This is akin to taking a simple, small tool and trying to replace it with a monolithic "do everything" solution. It would be overly complex and would fail, fail, fail.
How are these terrible articles getting through? Modding queue with a hangover, are we?
Learn it, love it. At a certain point, computer autoadjusting loses to friction coefficient.
I'm amazed by people who ignore the fact that they're moving an object that weighs several thousand pounds at speed.
It's especially bad with 4x4/awd owners; they feel invulnerable because they can get traction to go - ignoring that 4x4/awd doesn't mean jack for stopping and not much for cornering. Those are usually the most dangerous drivers - inexperienced SUV owners.
I've long thought that it's a dangerous precedent how easy it is to get a license. The drivers test doesn't cover the freeway, merging or anything vaguely resembling 'emergency' driving. I think all that should be covered - there should be a few 'evasive driving' courses available in each state, or whatever makes the most sense.
So many crazy distracted drivers out there - I'm surprised there aren't a lot more accidents..
Keeping "Josh" types around is wrong, and any company who does that is almost invariably ignorant. Lemme explain why.
Take amount of time it takes to write a particular piece of software and compare it to how long it can be in service. You'll quickly see why writing clean, easily maintainable code is so much more important than churning crap out to meet a deadline.
Which, realistically, is the root of the problem. Business is like a blind, hungry animal with no knowledge of the future, and complete ignorance of the past.
When you couple that with most business folks complete lack of understanding of tech fundamentals, you end up with a dangerous situation.
I can't count the number of jobs I've worked at that has had subpar dev/ops members that are as highly regarded as "Josh". They are usually highly protective of their "turf", and unwilling to share info. In my experience, that is one of two things; either total incompetence and they are wanting to protect their ego and company standing, or they want job security. In reality, these "brilliant" people are usually supbar employees who are viewed as heroes when they fix problems that _they caused_. Business not knowing tech or how to tell if a tech employee is good, ends up praising the worst possible employee behavior and loves the worst quality employee. Comically sad.
Intelligent people eventually realize that job security by claiming turf & not sharing info means that their life eventually becomes a living hell of their own creation as they are now chained to this crappy software or project that is probably breaking all the time, a beast to maintain, and if that project goes away, likely so will they.
Another point - no single dev is going to be as productive or useful as a well integrated dev team. In sane orgs, there's a flow of dev -> qa -> ops moving through various environments. That's a lot of hands touching code, having to understand and test it, having to support it. If there is no clean handoff, documentation, or willingness to help/defend/explain their code, it is not supportable for the business. You might meet a few deadlines but you will lose out every single time in the long haul.
Dev teams have to integrate code. How many devs have had to work with reticent, subpar coders who don't provide documentation or clean integration paths, with unreadable code? It just wastes valuable time on the project, frustrates your entire dev team and leads to inferior quality products.
Your business will _fail_ if you foster "heroes" like Josh. You will never have a maintainable code base, scalability, or supportable code in the most important environment, production. Which is another important point; no other environment matters but production. Everything else is to support a clean, supportable, scalable production environment.
No single team member should be indispensable. It's an indication that your hiring practices are flawed, or the company is not willing to staff up enough to provide redundancy. Having been that "indispensable" employee several times, I can tell you that it sucks balls and any sane person will fight like hell to get out of it. It means you can never go on vacation without being bothered.
Specific to "Josh" - immediate firing is in order. Are his (negative) contributions in light of his flawed methodologies worth the amount of money a sexual harassment lawsuit would cost?
Time to wake up. The myth of the reticent superhacker who saves corporate is beyond stupid. It's criminally negligent on behalf of hiring managers because of the long term problems it brings.
If your company is a small startup, it's workable in the beginning, but you really need to be careful that best practices are instituted as it makes sense, with the eventual goal being a clean SLDC or similar process that provides clean, well maintained, supportable production environments and applications.
Engineer to business; grow up and get a clue. We have to understand your world when costing things, you need to understand what constitutes a good tech employee and a bad one.
They're both about as ill-informed, uninteresting, and/or blatantly untrue. Actually reading the reasoning behind the theory is like listening to my cousin babble about how he had to reinstall Vista so it would be on the "inner discs" of his hd platter thereby running faster.
Slow news night?
Sometimes a static queue isn't such a horrible thing. :P
Or is this the most asinine "news" story since, well, the last idle story?
1) Blockbuster is a business. They have every right to change their policies to benefit them. You, conversely, have every right to cancel your subscription and STFU. You do have a further right to be a whining loser and post to /. about it. The moderator had a DUTY to not allow such sucky stories, but they have failed :(
2) If this was about them changing their policy and not informing people, I could maybe understand indignation, if not necessarily care.
3) Blockbuster is beating netflix _precisely_ because they have so many physical stores. The ability to drunkenly stumble in on a Friday night to rent some romantic comedy guaranteed to get you laid is a nice feature.
4) I use Blockbuster total access and I could care less about this policy change. I barely manage to remember or actually mail out more than 3 or 4 times a month.
In summation, I feel that you should go picket your nearest blockbuster, hand out pamphlets to customers walking in etc. Get the word out.
Why not simply create an online petition? They're not always that effective, but it is a non-destructive way to get thousands of people to show they don't like it. Facebook groups seem to be all the rage as well.
If you explain in simple terms to the average internet user that your online browsing habits are being logged by a company who is attempting to monetize that information, possibly share it with 3rd party companies, it has no expiration date and the data can be associated with you and turned over to law enforcement, I'm sure people would be concerned.
This is just typical google arrogance though - when you're on top, you can afford to ignore everyone. Not like there are any real alternatives with as many features or search result quality.
I personally just block the cookies, though I can envision a future where if you don't allow tracking cookies as they like, you aren't allowed to use their service. That will happen.
I wouldn't use the autoclick stuff for fear that small companies that use adsense would have to foot the bill. Which is a sucky thing to do - if you're using a service, you have to put up with their lameness. You can protest etc, but it's your choice to use that service.
It'll be interesting to see what eventually happens to these huge portals that arguably "are" the web these days.
This is slashdot, citations are only required for the important stuff like obscure vim macro commands to prove its superiority over emacs.
As Colbert would say, a tip of my hat for bringing some real figures into the discussion ;p
The problem with punishing a company as others have stated is it affects the average worker much more negatively than some exec who just lists it as a "failed strategy" (read: got caught) if they're questioned about it.
Sucks how most financial systems end up rewarding the wrong people off the sweat of the honest, hardworking folk, and the elite never have any comebacks. Kinda makes me wish I believed in some metaphysical retribution system, be it Judgement day or karma ;)
If they have physical access to the machine they can compromise it. You can disable cd/floppy booting, put BIOS and grub passwords in, but they can simply remove the HD, take it home, root it, put it back in. Probably hard to do it inconspicuously, but you get what I'm saying.
Maybe something like a thin client with their My Documents or /home being on a network share or something along those lines would be better.
This is all sounding like more trouble than its worth. At some point you have to trust your staff. Good internal system monitoring (for suspicious behavior, p2p traffic etc) and firewall / ACLs, employee education and strong employee HR legalese that "I will not hax0r my pc or DDoS the world" is really the best that's expected.
If you make your workplaces some draconian hellhole, no one will want to work there. There is a tradeoff between productivity and security.
Anyway, I've had good success with both cfengine and puppet for centralized config management on servers.. or even something goofy like executing scripts on user logon over Samba 3..
- Linux installation isn't very complicated on it, but not terribly useful. As others have mentioned, it's a limited RAM system and with current firmware there is no access to the accelerated hardware. I've ran Xubuntu and Yellow Dog on it. Both worked fine, but the system was too slow to play HD movies etc. Also, you need a keyboard to boot between PS3 os and Linux. There is a project to be able to select using a controller at boot but it wasn't functional.
- No IR support. That means in order to use any kind of all-in-one remote you need to buy something like the Nyko blue wave (gives you a USB IR device). Even with that, you cannot power the system on and off. Not everyone wants to waste power by leaving their components on indefinitely
- To your point of "nearly flawless" video etc, the fact that it _requires_ upnp to play over network is silly. Most everyone would prefer a simple CIFS share, which would work on windows and Linux. Installing a totally unsecured upnp server == suck.
Also, the video formats it supports is highly restrictive, requiring many folks to reencode or transcode their media files. It seems almost arbitrary what formats they support. This is the list. The fact is even if you have files encoded in their 'blessed' list, there are options that cause playback failure (compression settings etc). Very frustrating.
I was unable to reliably play fairly low bitrate avi's over a upnp server using the wireless adapter. I had to hardware it to my network.
- As a gaming console, it's okay. It has much longer than expected loading times for games across the board, though. For instance, GTA4 takes ~ 3-5 min from disk insertion until it's ready to play. EA Fight Night 3 is constantly taking 1-2 min to switch contexts (different fighting modes, training etc).
I bought it as a cheap console addon to replace my broken DVD player. For that, it does well. It certainly has gotten much better with the firmware updates - the travesty of limited to no ps2 game compatability (depending on which version of ps3 you get) is a joke.
With gaming consoles, you either need to do something breakaway awesome (like WII) or vastly improve on old stuff (like 360). A slightly better but buggy and limited release will give you small initial adoption, and without a large initial explosion the platform will never truly be successful compared to its rivals.
They basically got owned by the R&D time & costs of developing their architecture making the 360 development much quicker and less buggy. Also by their arrogance in thinking the market would be happy with an inferior product they'd patch up later with firmware.