That already exists; it's called Splashtop Browser. Of course, that's commercial and proprietary and requires certain hardware, so even Google OS is an improvement.
Off the top of my head it might be the very crack that the commenter above you in the comment-tree hierarchy talked about. Link? Here, for your convenience.
Why would you run an app that would organize the contacts on your phone, if you're the least bit worried about who the heck they are? Now, the iBlacklist may be just as legit as any app in the App Store, but there's a rather large chance that a version is floating around that actually sends your contacts' names, emails, and phone numbers to an Asiatic hacker or something. Or that the crack itself sends your data to said Asiatic hacker.
I'd say "there's a reason they're unapproved", but the examples of apps rejected by Apple are, to be honest, rather ridiculous sometimes - and they don't inspect the traffic that comes out of their test machines, I'd presume - so I can't say that "there's a reason they're unapproved"... although it does seem like an apt comeback (cue the apt-get comeback joke) to this sort of cracking.
Point? Don't put your data on a machine you can't lock down yourself, I suppose.
Try my own theme using Stylish. It's green on black, and you can go in and edit it to amber on black if you so choose. It actually works with mod points and posting, unlike the other dark slashdot themes out there.:)
I need portability - I use at least three different computers regularly. In this case, if it's not the cloud, it has to be the sneakernet, and I am notorious for losing flash drives. Therefore, yes, there is a role for cloud computing even if it is only a niche consisting of five people. It just depends on whether you round down or not afterwards.
Ditto happened to Caro Hosting several months ago. The backup generator, which had just been turned on because of a power outage,caught on fire. Said hosting service kept backups only of data, did not have actual failover servers (which they'd promised). Needless to say, providers were switched soon after.
Oddly, physicians *do* use Wikipedia as well as, or to supplement, a desk reference. The only good thing about this is that they also edit it more often than the general public does if said material is wrong. I'd find the study, but I don't want to spend the time to do that right now - much like the same reason most of Wikipedia's articles remain unreferenced.
You could always just tell him that tuna has mercury and he may as well eat a lightbulb to poison himself adequately. I guess that'd take care of your smell problem.
Although I do admit, cheese smells terrible too...
If it's to your taste to have little, polished games instead of the big huge epic games that are common on consoles, you could go into the Flash game field. Here's the thing: I know a pair of Flash devs, and they work HARD. Seriously. Spend two hours looking through your ActionScript code looking for the rare scenario of where the game modes overlap and the player gets twenty boss enemies at once instead of two, and you'll want to pull your hair out. (Yes, they are two guys who have specifically complained of this particular scenario, and they are already most of the way bald.:)
Design is not the same thing as programming in the big guns' world. In the small end of the world (Flash games, iPhone apps, etc.) yes, you can do both ends of the business but you will need to do a lot of work. There aren't many people that pull it off.
And can I reskin that, and use all my other extensions to boot (? No, the only thing I'm sticking with FF for is the extensions database.
Here, I'll even paste in all my enabled extensions and explain what they do. I use each and every one of them EVERY SINGLE DAY. Replace all of them, and you'll have me. Yep, that's a challenge. Email me if you can find all of them for any other browser.
Extensions: ChatZilla (IRC client) DashBlog (blogging extension) FEBE (extension backup service) Forecastfox (forecasts in the statusbar) Google Gears (look it up) Java (for those chemistry websites that have Java-based viewers) NoScript (see above) Stylish (CSS substitution) Tab Mix Plus (tab manager) +various themes I won't enumerate here
Then I just send a letter to the webmaster complaining that they broke, say, Lynx or a screenreader (not that I use either, but you know, accessibility is big around here). That works just fine for Flash idiot devs - just because it's a screenreader doesn't mean it intermeshes perfectly with Adobe's idea of "accessibility" which requires more work by the devs who put their whole freaking site into Flash - and by that point, it's less work to learn basic HTML and stick a menu at the bottom for navigational purposes.
And yes, by the way, I let scripts through on Slashdot. It freezes up when it's populating the comments, but I just do that at the beginning of my browsing session (I close the browser once a day) and then close tabs as I go (I have never required more than 10 at a time). *shrug* But that's offtopic.
And I am proud of who I am (officially diagnosed, you insensitive clod!) - and, judging from the growth of forums such as Wrongplanet, the rise in Autism may be perfectly balanced with the rise in the prominence of the Internet. Over textual communication, nobody cares that you flap your hands, or that you can't keep eye contact without getting this weird fidgety feeling, or that you don't quite get anything until the second or third time.
time for a back of the napkin calculation to not-really-but-sort-of prove my point: 10%*7(couldn't find a number for how many they fill you up with, so i made one up)*50%(other factors and multiple pregnancies counting as one) ~=30-40%
I think they only put in three or four at most. The Octomom had more than twice the usual number implanted.
btw - Myst uses the same method. Once you go somewhere you can "zip" back there at a click. Of course, you'd probably miss a bunch of clues going from here to there, but who cares?
In my world, all sites that make people spend time on them have two main components: the draw component, and the retention component.
Draw = main attraction. Like the fact that it's a gaming platform. Or in the case of (say) Wikipedia, the information.
Retention = what keeps the people there. On single consoles, perhaps it's achievements or replayability. On social game platforms, almost always it's the community. "Gaming platforms as social networks" indeed.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation (X) Blacklists suck (X) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. (X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
No one expects twelve different instances of geeks saying "No One expects the Spanish Inquisition!!1!!!!!1!111!!!!one1!", 9 or so of which get modded down as redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
That already exists; it's called Splashtop Browser. Of course, that's commercial and proprietary and requires certain hardware, so even Google OS is an improvement.
There's a grain of truth here. Cookies have a nice cutesy name to them that makes them seem innocent. It's "just" an edible text file, that's all!
Why not call them something else? Take a page out of PETA's book; call them turds or something!
Off the top of my head it might be the very crack that the commenter above you in the comment-tree hierarchy talked about. Link? Here, for your convenience.
Why would you run an app that would organize the contacts on your phone, if you're the least bit worried about who the heck they are? Now, the iBlacklist may be just as legit as any app in the App Store, but there's a rather large chance that a version is floating around that actually sends your contacts' names, emails, and phone numbers to an Asiatic hacker or something. Or that the crack itself sends your data to said Asiatic hacker.
I'd say "there's a reason they're unapproved", but the examples of apps rejected by Apple are, to be honest, rather ridiculous sometimes - and they don't inspect the traffic that comes out of their test machines, I'd presume - so I can't say that "there's a reason they're unapproved"... although it does seem like an apt comeback (cue the apt-get comeback joke) to this sort of cracking.
Point? Don't put your data on a machine you can't lock down yourself, I suppose.
Meh, in Soviet Russia, hot grits joke about you.
*shrug* You get what you pay for, and since I don't see any subscribers in this particular subthread...
Yes, and in the Indian version he gets it from a supernatural yogi or something. *shrug* There's no accounting for taste.
Try my own theme using Stylish. It's green on black, and you can go in and edit it to amber on black if you so choose. It actually works with mod points and posting, unlike the other dark slashdot themes out there. :)
in actuality their vict^Wcostumers get pwned by exploitable holes in IE anydangway.
Yes, and their costumers get pwned all the time because they installed the AIEEE-brand faux fur ruffles instead of the fiery foxhair ruffles.
I need portability - I use at least three different computers regularly. In this case, if it's not the cloud, it has to be the sneakernet, and I am notorious for losing flash drives. Therefore, yes, there is a role for cloud computing even if it is only a niche consisting of five people. It just depends on whether you round down or not afterwards.
Ditto happened to Caro Hosting several months ago. The backup generator, which had just been turned on because of a power outage,caught on fire. Said hosting service kept backups only of data, did not have actual failover servers (which they'd promised). Needless to say, providers were switched soon after.
Oddly, physicians *do* use Wikipedia as well as, or to supplement, a desk reference. The only good thing about this is that they also edit it more often than the general public does if said material is wrong. I'd find the study, but I don't want to spend the time to do that right now - much like the same reason most of Wikipedia's articles remain unreferenced.
and the FF plugin ".NET Framework" that installed automatically and apparently can't be uninstalled...
You could always just tell him that tuna has mercury and he may as well eat a lightbulb to poison himself adequately. I guess that'd take care of your smell problem.
Although I do admit, cheese smells terrible too...
If it's to your taste to have little, polished games instead of the big huge epic games that are common on consoles, you could go into the Flash game field. Here's the thing: I know a pair of Flash devs, and they work HARD. Seriously. Spend two hours looking through your ActionScript code looking for the rare scenario of where the game modes overlap and the player gets twenty boss enemies at once instead of two, and you'll want to pull your hair out. (Yes, they are two guys who have specifically complained of this particular scenario, and they are already most of the way bald. :)
Design is not the same thing as programming in the big guns' world. In the small end of the world (Flash games, iPhone apps, etc.) yes, you can do both ends of the business but you will need to do a lot of work. There aren't many people that pull it off.
Paint is fine. Don't go for broke with (say) Photoshop and the like just to do pixel art.
And can I reskin that, and use all my other extensions to boot (? No, the only thing I'm sticking with FF for is the extensions database.
Here, I'll even paste in all my enabled extensions and explain what they do. I use each and every one of them EVERY SINGLE DAY. Replace all of them, and you'll have me. Yep, that's a challenge. Email me if you can find all of them for any other browser.
Extensions:
ChatZilla (IRC client)
DashBlog (blogging extension)
FEBE (extension backup service)
Forecastfox (forecasts in the statusbar)
Google Gears (look it up)
Java (for those chemistry websites that have Java-based viewers)
NoScript (see above)
Stylish (CSS substitution)
Tab Mix Plus (tab manager)
+various themes I won't enumerate here
Then I just send a letter to the webmaster complaining that they broke, say, Lynx or a screenreader (not that I use either, but you know, accessibility is big around here). That works just fine for Flash idiot devs - just because it's a screenreader doesn't mean it intermeshes perfectly with Adobe's idea of "accessibility" which requires more work by the devs who put their whole freaking site into Flash - and by that point, it's less work to learn basic HTML and stick a menu at the bottom for navigational purposes.
And yes, by the way, I let scripts through on Slashdot. It freezes up when it's populating the comments, but I just do that at the beginning of my browsing session (I close the browser once a day) and then close tabs as I go (I have never required more than 10 at a time). *shrug* But that's offtopic.
And I am proud of who I am (officially diagnosed, you insensitive clod!) - and, judging from the growth of forums such as Wrongplanet, the rise in Autism may be perfectly balanced with the rise in the prominence of the Internet. Over textual communication, nobody cares that you flap your hands, or that you can't keep eye contact without getting this weird fidgety feeling, or that you don't quite get anything until the second or third time.
time for a back of the napkin calculation to not-really-but-sort-of prove my point:
10%*7(couldn't find a number for how many they fill you up with, so i made one up)*50%(other factors and multiple pregnancies counting as one) ~=30-40%
I think they only put in three or four at most. The Octomom had more than twice the usual number implanted.
That's what I said! (See sig.)
Wrong. It refers to the lid on the front of a car. Get a car geek (mechanic) to point this out for you next time :P
btw - Myst uses the same method. Once you go somewhere you can "zip" back there at a click. Of course, you'd probably miss a bunch of clues going from here to there, but who cares?
In my world, all sites that make people spend time on them have two main components: the draw component, and the retention component.
Draw = main attraction. Like the fact that it's a gaming platform. Or in the case of (say) Wikipedia, the information.
Retention = what keeps the people there. On single consoles, perhaps it's achievements or replayability. On social game platforms, almost always it's the community. "Gaming platforms as social networks" indeed.
I'll oblige ya. Here's the copypasta, filled in for your convenience:
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
No one expects twelve different instances of geeks saying "No One expects the Spanish Inquisition!!1!!!!!1!111!!!!one1!", 9 or so of which get modded down as redundant.
Oh, wait.