Welcome to 80 years ago. Our civilization has been spamming decipherable signals at the speed of light since it's been able to.
My alien day lasts 160 years, and I slept in this morning so missed your TV signals. But your beacon was unmistakeably sent by a tasty species, and I'm kinda hungry now, etc.
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
And so what if they do? If 50 kids flap their lives away on Facebook for every one whose closed world is blown open by access to the Internet, that's okay with me. The 50 get an education in consumer mass-media and the 1 gets the opportunity grow up and out in a hurry.
But I hear what you're saying: we should really be structuring digital divide programs so that they target motivated learners who will use computers for information over entertainment, and get the other kids to go outside and play.
Come on, you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.
80% of Mac users won't use the Reader function, because they either don't know what it does or can't be bothered to click it. The other 20% probably use AdBlock or some other ad-blocking solution anyway.
Besides, as others have pointed out, if people want to use Reader on your site's content, then there is something wrong with your design. Either clean it up, or decide you don't care. There is no "arms race" that you can possibly have. What, you're going to stop serving content to Safari? Good luck with that.
Some theories posit that trichromatic vision is a genetic mutation where the M cone gene was copied and mutated to result in a slight shift. If it were a truly independent adaptation, you might expect it to be much further away, about the same distance S and M are, which would give humans near infrared vision.
Interesting, because infrared vision would be quite the advantageous adaptation. Not only would you be able to see nearby predators and prey in low light, you would be able to spot sexually aroused or feverish persons at a glance, and either approach or avoid them depending on which parts of the body were "bright".
Further proof against intelligent design, I suppose.
Use Remote Desktop for XP-only Apps
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
Specialty software runs on a dedicated Windows 2003 Server with Terminal Services enabled. Users use Remote Desktop (Win 7), CoRD (OS X), or rdesktop (Linux) to "run" the app. It's pretty amazing, you can share local drives and printers so that it "feels" like the application is running locally.
You can even keep Windows Update from applying security patches that would break your special-snowflake software, while still keeping desktops fully patched and secure.
Centralize the problem, get it away from users' desktops. Highly recommended.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well if they can't drill it at 5000', maybe you shouldn't be driving your car?
Or maybe we should all be paying a bit more to drive our cars.
The world doesn't run out of oil just because we can't drill for it in the middle of the fucking ocean. It just runs out of *cheap* oil.
Oil companies really don't have any business drilling where they can't contain a gusher. The cost of the fix and the cleanup is going to so greatly exceed the projected cost of drilling the well that the project should never have been considered in the first place. Bankrupting the company does not make shareholders happy.
SO the way to fix the problem is to require every transaction to be routed to two or more geographically diverse servers in order to take effect.
Then it doesn't matter if Goldman's robots are located in the next cage over from NYSE's servers, they still have to deal with the same communication latency as everyone else.
Unless, of course, they use quantum entanglement to keep robots on both coasts in perfect sync.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept that a new way (or method) of drawing a stylised letter "A" is a sufficiently "creative" activity worthy of the extreme levels of promotion and protection that copyright offers. Especially when the differences between this "new" letter "A" (I can't believe I'm writing this) and some other version are so minimal only typeface experts can tell the difference; the very typeface experts who benefit most from font copyrights to begin with. I smell a guild at work.
Just because you can't tell great design from mediocre design doesn't mean you should argue against protection for designers. What good fontographers do has real value, and they deserve both credit and compensation for their work.
Even though it looks like pushing pixels around, it takes creativity to know what the results should look like, and skill and judgment to push them to the right places for achieving those results.
I suppose you only use fonts designed by algorithm?
Yeah, I recently got elected to my condo board, which means that out of curiosity or a misplaced sense of responsibility I sometimes go looking for something in the NYC code.
It isn't all online, and the parts that are seem to mostly have been repealed. I think that's probably because those parts aren't changing any more so they are the easiest to post.
It's a freaking mess, but making sense of it provides jobs for a lot of lawyers and legal publishers.
There is no evidence from the screenshots on the WordPress app that WYSIWYG editing is supported. The BlogPress app does seem to allow pasting images into the editor, which is a good sign.
Everything else (menus, non-web fonts, slideshows, and other eye candy) can be done, quickly and easily, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These technologies fail gracefully, are readable by search robots and blind people, and don't require a $700 IDE to edit.
So yes, there's a lot of sites which use Flash for user interface and Rich Internet Applications. But cross-platform video and audio playback has been the killer app for a lot of us, and we'll be quite happy to switch to HTML5 media just as soon as MSIE supports it.
(Which reminds me, when will Adobe join forces with Microsoft to cripple IE9?)
Your arguments would make sense if not for the existence of HTML5.
Granted, that's an astonishingly thin rope since there just aren't very many rich internet apps built on it yet. But there are plenty of proof-of-concept games, productivity apps, and entertainment options out there. Browse through the archives at Ajaxian for some.
Nobody makes money from cross-platform web apps. And yet, Mobile Safari has been leading the way on them since the beginning, when the web *was* the iPhone SDK.
Content-editable is the standard that allows rich text HTML editing. You get a textarea with support for WYSIWYG HTML composition. Slashdot doesn't use it, but most blogs do.
Safari has supported it for years, but Mobile Safari doesn't, because it wasn't really needed on the iPhone. The iPad, OTOH, is pitched as a composition device.
The lack of support is frustrating if you use Blogger or WordPress or any decent Content Management Systen.
Even Microsoft lets you buy "just Word" for less than the price of Office.
All I want is Photoshop, so why am I paying for all of those other marquee apps as well? I'm using them on a Mac mini which cost less than the price of the suite.
Wait... don't tell me... that IS the price for Photoshop, and you just get all the other apps for free. I knew it! Damn you, Adobe!
I have an iPad. I liked it, until I tried to compose a blog post. Mobile Safari doesn't support content-editable fields.
Typing HTML code into textareas in order to compose blog posts and web pages is NOT fun. Google Docs doesn't work. and rich HTML in Gmail or other webmail services doesn't work. There are HTML editor apps, but that doesn't mean what I think it means, because they are all code editors not rich text editors.
The bottom line is that Apple supports rich text output in PDF and proprietary formats, but not HTML. Not even a little bit.
Everyone has their own priorities, of course, but until Mobile Safari supports tinyMCE and other rich text editors, I have to consider the iPad a toy. Then again, it's perfect for posting on Slashdot! (And it even supports unicode, so why should I complain?)
Being able to create AppVMs on the fly is a great idea, and one that should be a common OS feature. But it sounds like it will have the same problem that a site-specific browser does: how do you ensure that a given operation will be carried out in the proper domain?
For instance, you get an email from a colleague (in your email security domain) that includes a link. You click the link. Now, in which domain does the browser window open?
If you tell me I need to copy the link, switch to my random-crap-from-colleagues domain, paste it into the location bar and click go, then you fail. I will someday forget and click the link. Or a cross-site-scripting vulnerability or plugin exploit will click it for me.
If you tell me that a UAC-style dialog will ask me where to dispatch the action to, you fail. I will get annoyed at the constant stream of dialogs and eventually make a mistake or stop using the system altogether.
We live and work in an interconnected world. Email shares with calendar and contacts, all three of those share with the browser. We'll need whitelists or something so that hypervisors and site-specific browsers will be able to guess which domain to dispatch things to, with the default being an untrusted domain.
Would be 100% more fun with a camera
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Good points, CmdrTaco.
I walked into the Apple Store in NYC on Saturday and bought one on a whim, in and out the door in 5 minutes. It's a nice piece of gear but my first thought was, holy crap this thing is heavy. From the iFixIt teardown we know that it's basically all battery under there, and the battery life is great. But if there was an 8-hour version it would balance better in your hand.
It would be 100% more fun to play with if it had a camera. There are so many photo editing/retouching possibilities already, and being able to take and then watch home movies on the iPad would be a lot of fun because of the large display. Alas, we will have to wait for that.
I thought it was okay to type on. Just small enough to use thumbs, but large enough to put in your lap or on a table and touch type. It also makes a decent remote controller (VNC client) for a living room PC or media center.
How many dollars have been stolen from consumers by way of the politicians that have been bought to extend copyright on works that should have entered the public domain decades ago (copyright is supposed to be for the public benefit, which is why their government enacted it), and how does this compare to the money the industry claims is being stolen now?
Points for awesome.
"The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 has cost American consumers over $50 Billion in the last 12 years. By forcing average Americans to continue paying for CDs and DVDs that should have been public domain, this one misguided bill has robbed our country of a rich trove of shared cultural heritage, and set back popular culture education in schools by an average of 2.7 grade points."
It's pretty easy to make this shit up when you have the moral high ground, as the RIAA has repeated demonstrated. Who's with me?
Yeah, the software guts of your standard Diebold ATM (circa 1998) could run on a small, cheap, dedicated handheld device. It's not like you need Flash to create a banking interface.
Slashdot Mirror
It wont run on an iphone - its in pascal.
Whoa. I guess that puts the "Nobody ever wrote anything useful in Pascal" meme to rest.
Welcome to 80 years ago. Our civilization has been spamming decipherable signals at the speed of light since it's been able to.
My alien day lasts 160 years, and I slept in this morning so missed your TV signals. But your beacon was unmistakeably sent by a tasty species, and I'm kinda hungry now, etc.
Congratulations, you're a self-motivated learner. Providing resources to such a person is generally an enabling thing, regardless of what the resource is. The Internet can be a very powerful tool in such hands. However, many people just don't have that sort of drive, and will instead waste time on the Internet doing Facebook, instant messaging, games, and other not-particularly-educational things.
And so what if they do? If 50 kids flap their lives away on Facebook for every one whose closed world is blown open by access to the Internet, that's okay with me. The 50 get an education in consumer mass-media and the 1 gets the opportunity grow up and out in a hurry.
But I hear what you're saying: we should really be structuring digital divide programs so that they target motivated learners who will use computers for information over entertainment, and get the other kids to go outside and play.
The real news here is that they actually paid attention to something that was said in their support forums. :-p
3TB is a lot. But you would still need at least 4 of these drives to hold a Library of Congress.
Of course, with the LOC archiving all of Twitter, we may never see a single drive with LOC capacity.
Come on, you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.
80% of Mac users won't use the Reader function, because they either don't know what it does or can't be bothered to click it. The other 20% probably use AdBlock or some other ad-blocking solution anyway.
Besides, as others have pointed out, if people want to use Reader on your site's content, then there is something wrong with your design. Either clean it up, or decide you don't care. There is no "arms race" that you can possibly have. What, you're going to stop serving content to Safari? Good luck with that.
Some theories posit that trichromatic vision is a genetic mutation where the M cone gene was copied and mutated to result in a slight shift. If it were a truly independent adaptation, you might expect it to be much further away, about the same distance S and M are, which would give humans near infrared vision.
Interesting, because infrared vision would be quite the advantageous adaptation. Not only would you be able to see nearby predators and prey in low light, you would be able to spot sexually aroused or feverish persons at a glance, and either approach or avoid them depending on which parts of the body were "bright".
Further proof against intelligent design, I suppose.
Specialty software runs on a dedicated Windows 2003 Server with Terminal Services enabled. Users use Remote Desktop (Win 7), CoRD (OS X), or rdesktop (Linux) to "run" the app. It's pretty amazing, you can share local drives and printers so that it "feels" like the application is running locally.
You can even keep Windows Update from applying security patches that would break your special-snowflake software, while still keeping desktops fully patched and secure.
Centralize the problem, get it away from users' desktops. Highly recommended.
Well if they can't drill it at 5000', maybe you shouldn't be driving your car?
Or maybe we should all be paying a bit more to drive our cars.
The world doesn't run out of oil just because we can't drill for it in the middle of the fucking ocean. It just runs out of *cheap* oil.
Oil companies really don't have any business drilling where they can't contain a gusher. The cost of the fix and the cleanup is going to so greatly exceed the projected cost of drilling the well that the project should never have been considered in the first place. Bankrupting the company does not make shareholders happy.
SO the way to fix the problem is to require every transaction to be routed to two or more geographically diverse servers in order to take effect.
Then it doesn't matter if Goldman's robots are located in the next cage over from NYSE's servers, they still have to deal with the same communication latency as everyone else.
Unless, of course, they use quantum entanglement to keep robots on both coasts in perfect sync.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to accept that a new way (or method) of drawing a stylised letter "A" is a sufficiently "creative" activity worthy of the extreme levels of promotion and protection that copyright offers. Especially when the differences between this "new" letter "A" (I can't believe I'm writing this) and some other version are so minimal only typeface experts can tell the difference; the very typeface experts who benefit most from font copyrights to begin with. I smell a guild at work.
Just because you can't tell great design from mediocre design doesn't mean you should argue against protection for designers.
What good fontographers do has real value, and they deserve both credit and compensation for their work.
Even though it looks like pushing pixels around, it takes creativity to know what the results should look like, and skill and judgment to push them to the right places for achieving those results.
I suppose you only use fonts designed by algorithm?
Yeah, I recently got elected to my condo board, which means that out of curiosity or a misplaced sense of responsibility I sometimes go looking for something in the NYC code.
It isn't all online, and the parts that are seem to mostly have been repealed. I think that's probably because those parts aren't changing any more so they are the easiest to post.
It's a freaking mess, but making sense of it provides jobs for a lot of lawyers and legal publishers.
On your trucker's cap, of course.
I'll definitely check those out.
There is no evidence from the screenshots on the WordPress app that WYSIWYG editing is supported. The BlogPress app does seem to allow pasting images into the editor, which is a good sign.
Here's why I use Flash on the sites I build:
audio and video
Everything else (menus, non-web fonts, slideshows, and other eye candy) can be done, quickly and easily, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These technologies fail gracefully, are readable by search robots and blind people, and don't require a $700 IDE to edit.
So yes, there's a lot of sites which use Flash for user interface and Rich Internet Applications. But cross-platform video and audio playback has been the killer app for a lot of us, and we'll be quite happy to switch to HTML5 media just as soon as MSIE supports it.
(Which reminds me, when will Adobe join forces with Microsoft to cripple IE9?)
Your arguments would make sense if not for the existence of HTML5.
Granted, that's an astonishingly thin rope since there just aren't very many rich internet apps built on it yet. But there are plenty of proof-of-concept games, productivity apps, and entertainment options out there. Browse through the archives at Ajaxian for some.
Nobody makes money from cross-platform web apps. And yet, Mobile Safari has been leading the way on them since the beginning, when the web *was* the iPhone SDK.
Content-editable is the standard that allows rich text HTML editing. You get a textarea with support for WYSIWYG HTML composition. Slashdot doesn't use it, but most blogs do.
Safari has supported it for years, but Mobile Safari doesn't, because it wasn't really needed on the iPhone. The iPad, OTOH, is pitched as a composition device.
The lack of support is frustrating if you use Blogger or WordPress or any decent Content Management Systen.
Unbundle the fscking apps already.
Even Microsoft lets you buy "just Word" for less than the price of Office.
All I want is Photoshop, so why am I paying for all of those other marquee apps as well? I'm using them on a Mac mini which cost less than the price of the suite.
Wait... don't tell me... that IS the price for Photoshop, and you just get all the other apps for free. I knew it! Damn you, Adobe!
I have an iPad. I liked it, until I tried to compose a blog post. Mobile Safari doesn't support content-editable fields.
Typing HTML code into textareas in order to compose blog posts and web pages is NOT fun. Google Docs doesn't work. and rich HTML in Gmail or other webmail services doesn't work. There are HTML editor apps, but that doesn't mean what I think it means, because they are all code editors not rich text editors.
The bottom line is that Apple supports rich text output in PDF and proprietary formats, but not HTML. Not even a little bit.
Everyone has their own priorities, of course, but until Mobile Safari supports tinyMCE and other rich text editors, I have to consider the iPad a toy. Then again, it's perfect for posting on Slashdot! (And it even supports unicode, so why should I complain?)
Being able to create AppVMs on the fly is a great idea, and one that should be a common OS feature. But it sounds like it will have the same problem that a site-specific browser does: how do you ensure that a given operation will be carried out in the proper domain?
For instance, you get an email from a colleague (in your email security domain) that includes a link. You click the link. Now, in which domain does the browser window open?
If you tell me I need to copy the link, switch to my random-crap-from-colleagues domain, paste it into the location bar and click go, then you fail. I will someday forget and click the link. Or a cross-site-scripting vulnerability or plugin exploit will click it for me.
If you tell me that a UAC-style dialog will ask me where to dispatch the action to, you fail. I will get annoyed at the constant stream of dialogs and eventually make a mistake or stop using the system altogether.
We live and work in an interconnected world. Email shares with calendar and contacts, all three of those share with the browser. We'll need whitelists or something so that hypervisors and site-specific browsers will be able to guess which domain to dispatch things to, with the default being an untrusted domain.
Good points, CmdrTaco.
I walked into the Apple Store in NYC on Saturday and bought one on a whim, in and out the door in 5 minutes. It's a nice piece of gear but my first thought was, holy crap this thing is heavy. From the iFixIt teardown we know that it's basically all battery under there, and the battery life is great. But if there was an 8-hour version it would balance better in your hand.
It would be 100% more fun to play with if it had a camera. There are so many photo editing/retouching possibilities already, and being able to take and then watch home movies on the iPad would be a lot of fun because of the large display. Alas, we will have to wait for that.
I thought it was okay to type on. Just small enough to use thumbs, but large enough to put in your lap or on a table and touch type. It also makes a decent remote controller (VNC client) for a living room PC or media center.
How many dollars have been stolen from consumers by way of the politicians that have been bought to extend copyright on works that should have entered the public domain decades ago (copyright is supposed to be for the public benefit, which is why their government enacted it), and how does this compare to the money the industry claims is being stolen now?
Points for awesome.
"The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 has cost American consumers over $50 Billion in the last 12 years. By forcing average Americans to continue paying for CDs and DVDs that should have been public domain, this one misguided bill has robbed our country of a rich trove of shared cultural heritage, and set back popular culture education in schools by an average of 2.7 grade points."
It's pretty easy to make this shit up when you have the moral high ground, as the RIAA has repeated demonstrated. Who's with me?
Yeah, but children can fetch beer *and* be toilet-trained.
Yeah, the software guts of your standard Diebold ATM (circa 1998) could run on a small, cheap, dedicated handheld device. It's not like you need Flash to create a banking interface.
Right. So what you want is for your Linux Live Banking CD to act as the VMWare host that boots and runs your everyday OS off the harddrive.
Keyloggers in the guest VM won't be able to see what you're doing in the host shell, problem solved?