Move your servers to a more free-speech friendly country.
Yes... except that we are quickly running out of free-speech friendly countries (Canada was one of the most free).
Eh?! Canada is a generally pretty liberal place, but they seem to be a bit trigger-happy when it comes to censorship -- I've seen an awful lot of news stories like this one over the years (not just internet, bookstores, etc too)....
It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...
Wasn't it chrome where the super fast javascript was only available on x86 32-bit builds though?
I use (linux) 64-bit versions, and javascript performance of FF (3.5.6) and chrome (4.0.266.0) seems to be pretty much identical...
[... and so does the general performance; the main advantage of chrome on this system seems to be the per-tab processes, especially in low-memory situations, where they make it much easier to keep the browser size under control.]
Yes, the Acela is heavy, and yes the Acela is heavy because of safety regs (although the FRA regs were revised in the late 1990's to make accommodations for the Acela) but that's not the cause of any performance problems. I worked on the testing of the Acela trainsets in Pueblo and in NJ in 2000 and the trainset can sustain speeds of well over 150 mph for hours at a time. The power cars are plenty powerful
Note, though, that one of the biggest advantages of lightweight cars is that they can have far greater acceleration for a given amount of power, and that high acceleration is even more valuable when you have a crazily variable track like the NEC, as it reduces the penalty for being forced to periodically reduce speed.
The FRA strength regulations are a bad joke, and seem to have been arrived at through a series of knee-jerk reactions aimed mostly at providing political cover in the aftermath of accidents, rather than any kind of considered thought. The question I have is whether the FRA as an organization is simply too hide-bound to ever provide anything more reasonable.
[Basically when somebody proposes any restriction on cell-phone use (e.g., putting cell suppressors in movie theaters), many people flip out, way beyond any rational response. It's like... they simply cannot live without their cell phone for any length of time...]
I think it's more that aluminum is more expensive/difficult to use in manufacturing, not so much the raw materials cost...
My impression is that one of the tricks they use in keeping the prices relatively low is to lowball absolutely everything they can get away with. I'm guessing that when someone does do an aluminum netbook, it will be a company like Sony, who will make the price quite high and position it as a posh upscale model.
I agree that it'd be very cool to get an Al netbook. My little electronic dictionary (which has a form factor kinda like the smallest netbook ever) has an aluminum outer casing, and it just feels great -- stiff (plastic-cased models are surprisingly bendy), cool to the touch, and a sort of "heft" without really being heavy -- and robust (I've had it repaired a few times, but it's always been due to plastic parts breaking!).
With netbooks there seems an even better reason to go with Al though: heat dissipation. Judging from the way you can practically burn your fingers typing on the keyboard of many netbooks, a giant free heatsink might be just what they need to one-up the competition on processor speed...
If Slashdot's primary function was to simply present a news story without regard to comments, there'd be little need for a moderation system or comments for that matter. The only reason Slashdot got as far as it did was the moderation system that allows fruitful discussion of articles. Without it, Slashdot would be long dead.
Yup. It's always amusing to see these "LOL! sladhdot is all dups and wackiz editrz, and flurbalgog.com totally pnsz sldhsdot!1!" comments, because usually they manage to miss the point completely.
Slashdot has always been about the comments; the stories merely need to be good enough to get people to start talking. It still hits the sweet spot of a lively but informative conversation because it has:
a nerdy but informed user base (as opposed to digg, for instance, which has a huge but largely mouth-breather user base)
a well-tuned comment system that tends to keep noise in check, but still largely avoids moderation wars and allows minority opinions to be seen (the usual accusations of "groupthink" have some basis, but are typically way overstated); I think one thing slashdot has shown is that restricted moderation with positive and negative feedback mechanisms works far better than "everybody can moderate" systems
enough users so that there's a reasonable selection of interesting and informed comments for the moderation system to grab hold of, and enough minority or unusual viewpoints to provide some back and forth.
I don't know how severe a 3.4 quake is, maybe it really is inconsequential - but my point still stands in that it probably caused the residents of Basel to shit themselves.
It seems very unlikely, as a 3.4 quake is extremely weak -- like a truck passing. People may have noticed it, but It's hard to believe they shat themselves or had property damaged (even minor damage like glasses falling off the table is unlikely).
This basically sounds like people are simply scared of what they think might happen ("tampering with mother nature!" and that sort of thing), and are abusing the law to shut this guy down.
Comparing the annexation of Tibet with, what? Panama?
Texas? California? Or, much better, Hawai'i?
So wait, if China were to legalize human slavery, you'd be OK with that because the U.S. (and many other countries) did it for a long time?
I think the relevant aphorism is: "two wrongs don't make a right" -- if the U.S. does something bad, then criticize that, but it is not a reason to stop criticizing (e.g.) China.
There was no specific invention in the patent - but they stumbled onto a very general idea that is the basis for the entire internet 15 years later. The argument needs to be along the lines that no one company should be allowed to own a patent on technology that it actually took the entire industry 15 years to develop.
It's also entirely stupid that somebody should be able to patent this kind of fairly obvious evolutionary development. Software patents should be about insanely clever non-obvious-to-even-very-smart-and-experienced-people specific and narrowly defined algorithms. They should be about hard stuff.
As it is, people seem to patent just about every random idea they have with the idea that something will stick, and the patent office will usually be too stupid to realize how blatantly obvious it is.
the public transportation is so poor that most people would be unable to function without driving. They would quickly lose their job and become homeless. This certainly isn't true for many cities,
Name one outside NYC.
In the U.S., places I've personally lived without a car, without any problem: Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh,...
Places where I haven't lived, but where friends have lived without a car, without any problem: Chicago, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco,...
Outside the U.S., of course, decent public transportation tends to be the norm rather than the exception.
the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Right, and it will be replaced with content that doesn't require advertising to support it.
Or, perhaps, the advertising industry, and advertising-supported websites, will learn to restrain themselves, and ad-blocking will gradually become less necessary (perhaps tuned to block only the obnoxious advertising).
Gmail side text ads are a good example of non-intrusive advertising. In fact, I rather like the side ads in gmail, and am a bit sad that adblock blocks them.
Advertisers on the web have, in general, behaved unreasonably and irresponsibly, and nobody should be surprised at the public backlash -- and unlike with other media, the public have some power in this fight. At this point, it's up to those who depend on advertising to prove that they can behave responsibly, and win back the public's trust. If many go out of business in the process, oh well, them's the breaks.
Another reason I like recent FF better is that it apparently respects the settings in ~/.fonts.conf, whereas google chrome (currently) seems to just ignore them. Since I can get much better rendering for some fonts (typically CJK fonts) by such tweaking, chrome looks uglier in comparison.
Also, chrome seems to steal keystrokes it shouldn't -- in particular in text-boxes, if you have gtk's "emacs bindings" mode on, ^N should just move to the next line; in FF it does, but google steals that for its global "new window" binding.
Hmm, I should really report these as bugs I guess...
Also the form-factor is important -- netbooks may be smallish, but their shape and size is still irritatingly awkward, both to carry around and to hold while reading.
Together with the short battery life and unreadable screen in many environments, this makes a netbook a pretty poor replacement for an e-reader (or for a book!).
Do people actually do this? Do folks actually read in the bathtub?
Don't the pages get all weird from the humidity? What if you drop your book in the water? Don't your wet hands mess up the pages?
I love to read in the bathtub, it's really relaxing...
The problems you mention are certainly real, but it just takes a bit of care to avoid them -- keep the door open a bit to avoid excessively humidity, a towel nearby to dry your hands before touching the book, and a place to store the book out of splash-range while washing etc (I just have a plastic bag hanging on a hook, works great).
Actually one of the biggest probs I have is that if the book is really engrossing, the water eventually cools down to the point where it's uncomfortable!
Obviously, the problem this device has is that at $490 it's far too expensive ($200-$300 would probably be a more practical price point). Android is still basically a beta product, and we don't know if the guts of this device are up to snuff. It needs to have a long battery life, a CPU that is beefy enough to not add long delays yet use very little power, and things like an SD card reader.
Another huge problem is that the damn thing is twice as bulky and heavy as it could be, to support functionality that's mainly useful for fluffy demos, but not so much for actual reading or learning.
To put it another way: it comes with a giant permanently attached sales brochure that doubles the weight of the product.
Another sign that marketing is in charge of development I suppose...
Urban Dictionary is a funny case, because while it's often very useful, there's so much crap there that it takes a lot of wading and a certain amount of judgment to find the info you're looking for. Given the extent to which a lot of the crap (and info) is pretty er, profane, I'm not sure it's the best target for automatic usage by people that don't know what they're getting into...
Vampires shouldn't glitter in sunlight - THEY SHOULD EXPLODE!
I'd watch that movie!
Kristen Stewart: oooh, Edward you're sooooo sexy, it almost makes my miserable life worthwhile!
Robert Pattinson: I will make sweet lov*** KERBLOOM *** [Kristen is drenched in sparkly blood and steaming wriggly bits] Kristen Stewart: oooooooooh, Edward!!! [starts licking off the blood in an orgasmic frenzy]
Yes, because those CPU's are now running 100% load all the time. So no speedstepping down to a couple of hundred Mhz and saving power that way (which can be a lot).
I run boinc on my home machine, but I also turn on linux's "no freq boost for niced processes" mode, and since boinc processes are niced, this means that all the cores dedicated to boinc run at the lowest possible cpu frequency. The reason I did it was to keep the fan noise low when I'm not using the machine, but I imagine it makes a power difference as well.
I.e.:
for X in/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load; do echo 1 > $X; done
[Not that this guy probably bothered with anything like this...]
Also, they can have a much more natural white point. I like the fact that you can get CFLs with a white around 6000, which is closer to what you get from the sun on a bright day. Just a much nicer quality of light.
Haver you ever seen the spectrum of a CFL though? Every one I've is completely freaky, absolutely nothing like a blackbody spectrum (such as the sun, or an incandescent bulb), basically lots of extremely narrow high-intensity spikes at widely-distributed points.
LED bulbs don't have a perfect black-body spectrum either, but the one's I've seen a spectrum for are much, much closer than the typical CFL.
Me: I'll take "Meta-Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask" for $100000000, Alex
Alex: The answer is "Microsoft marketing"
Me: Who made up all these questions anyway?
Alex: Correct! [ding ding ding ding ding]
[fade to black as stage and studio are buried under an avalanche of cash, the cheers quickly turning to "my god, help me, I'm being crushed...! can't... breathe... arghhhh23*@#!.!.j3..."]
Re:Android WILL take over.
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
"- Apples UI design is definitely better."
Yep, well, you just defeated your own argument.
Not really. It's not enough for the UI to be "better", it has to be significantly better to offset Android's other advantages, and as far as I've seen, it isn't (unlike, for instance, the ipod, where the competition often seemed laughably incompetent).
The iphone's real advantage at this point, is simply mindshare; I guess we'll see if that's enough to keep them on top.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... except that we are quickly running out of free-speech friendly countries (Canada was one of the most free).
Eh?! Canada is a generally pretty liberal place, but they seem to be a bit trigger-happy when it comes to censorship -- I've seen an awful lot of news stories like this one over the years (not just internet, bookstores, etc too)....
[usually for reasons of "obscenity" or "hate crime", e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Canada ]
It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...
Wasn't it chrome where the super fast javascript was only available on x86 32-bit builds though?
I use (linux) 64-bit versions, and javascript performance of FF (3.5.6) and chrome (4.0.266.0) seems to be pretty much identical...
[... and so does the general performance; the main advantage of chrome on this system seems to be the per-tab processes, especially in low-memory situations, where they make it much easier to keep the browser size under control.]
Yes, the Acela is heavy, and yes the Acela is heavy because of safety regs (although the FRA regs were revised in the late 1990's to make accommodations for the Acela) but that's not the cause of any performance problems. I worked on the testing of the Acela trainsets in Pueblo and in NJ in 2000 and the trainset can sustain speeds of well over 150 mph for hours at a time. The power cars are plenty powerful
Note, though, that one of the biggest advantages of lightweight cars is that they can have far greater acceleration for a given amount of power, and that high acceleration is even more valuable when you have a crazily variable track like the NEC, as it reduces the penalty for being forced to periodically reduce speed.
The FRA strength regulations are a bad joke, and seem to have been arrived at through a series of knee-jerk reactions aimed mostly at providing political cover in the aftermath of accidents, rather than any kind of considered thought. The question I have is whether the FRA as an organization is simply too hide-bound to ever provide anything more reasonable.
Hmm, looks more like a case of "cell rage"...
[Basically when somebody proposes any restriction on cell-phone use (e.g., putting cell suppressors in movie theaters), many people flip out, way beyond any rational response. It's like ... they simply cannot live without their cell phone for any length of time...]
But what is it with Americans preferring numb cars that totally insulate them from what the car is doing?
They can't feel anything through all the layers of fat anyway...
I think it's more that aluminum is more expensive/difficult to use in manufacturing, not so much the raw materials cost...
My impression is that one of the tricks they use in keeping the prices relatively low is to lowball absolutely everything they can get away with. I'm guessing that when someone does do an aluminum netbook, it will be a company like Sony, who will make the price quite high and position it as a posh upscale model.
I agree that it'd be very cool to get an Al netbook. My little electronic dictionary (which has a form factor kinda like the smallest netbook ever) has an aluminum outer casing, and it just feels great -- stiff (plastic-cased models are surprisingly bendy), cool to the touch, and a sort of "heft" without really being heavy -- and robust (I've had it repaired a few times, but it's always been due to plastic parts breaking!).
With netbooks there seems an even better reason to go with Al though: heat dissipation. Judging from the way you can practically burn your fingers typing on the keyboard of many netbooks, a giant free heatsink might be just what they need to one-up the competition on processor speed...
If Slashdot's primary function was to simply present a news story without regard to comments, there'd be little need for a moderation system or comments for that matter. The only reason Slashdot got as far as it did was the moderation system that allows fruitful discussion of articles. Without it, Slashdot would be long dead.
Yup. It's always amusing to see these "LOL! sladhdot is all dups and wackiz editrz, and flurbalgog.com totally pnsz sldhsdot!1!" comments, because usually they manage to miss the point completely.
Slashdot has always been about the comments; the stories merely need to be good enough to get people to start talking. It still hits the sweet spot of a lively but informative conversation because it has:
I don't know how severe a 3.4 quake is, maybe it really is inconsequential - but my point still stands in that it probably caused the residents of Basel to shit themselves.
It seems very unlikely, as a 3.4 quake is extremely weak -- like a truck passing. People may have noticed it, but It's hard to believe they shat themselves or had property damaged (even minor damage like glasses falling off the table is unlikely).
This basically sounds like people are simply scared of what they think might happen ("tampering with mother nature!" and that sort of thing), and are abusing the law to shut this guy down.
Comparing the annexation of Tibet with, what? Panama?
Texas? California? Or, much better, Hawai'i?
So wait, if China were to legalize human slavery, you'd be OK with that because the U.S. (and many other countries) did it for a long time?
I think the relevant aphorism is: "two wrongs don't make a right" -- if the U.S. does something bad, then criticize that, but it is not a reason to stop criticizing (e.g.) China.
There was no specific invention in the patent - but they stumbled onto a very general idea that is the basis for the entire internet 15 years later. The argument needs to be along the lines that no one company should be allowed to own a patent on technology that it actually took the entire industry 15 years to develop.
It's also entirely stupid that somebody should be able to patent this kind of fairly obvious evolutionary development. Software patents should be about insanely clever non-obvious-to-even-very-smart-and-experienced-people specific and narrowly defined algorithms. They should be about hard stuff.
As it is, people seem to patent just about every random idea they have with the idea that something will stick, and the patent office will usually be too stupid to realize how blatantly obvious it is.
the public transportation is so poor that most people would be unable to function without driving. They would quickly lose their job and become homeless. This certainly isn't true for many cities,
Name one outside NYC.
In the U.S., places I've personally lived without a car, without any problem: Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, ...
Places where I haven't lived, but where friends have lived without a car, without any problem: Chicago, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, ...
Outside the U.S., of course, decent public transportation tends to be the norm rather than the exception.
the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Right, and it will be replaced with content that doesn't require advertising to support it.
Or, perhaps, the advertising industry, and advertising-supported websites, will learn to restrain themselves, and ad-blocking will gradually become less necessary (perhaps tuned to block only the obnoxious advertising).
Gmail side text ads are a good example of non-intrusive advertising. In fact, I rather like the side ads in gmail, and am a bit sad that adblock blocks them.
Advertisers on the web have, in general, behaved unreasonably and irresponsibly, and nobody should be surprised at the public backlash -- and unlike with other media, the public have some power in this fight. At this point, it's up to those who depend on advertising to prove that they can behave responsibly, and win back the public's trust. If many go out of business in the process, oh well, them's the breaks.
Another reason I like recent FF better is that it apparently respects the settings in ~/.fonts.conf, whereas google chrome (currently) seems to just ignore them. Since I can get much better rendering for some fonts (typically CJK fonts) by such tweaking, chrome looks uglier in comparison.
Also, chrome seems to steal keystrokes it shouldn't -- in particular in text-boxes, if you have gtk's "emacs bindings" mode on, ^N should just move to the next line; in FF it does, but google steals that for its global "new window" binding.
Hmm, I should really report these as bugs I guess...
Also the form-factor is important -- netbooks may be smallish, but their shape and size is still irritatingly awkward, both to carry around and to hold while reading.
Together with the short battery life and unreadable screen in many environments, this makes a netbook a pretty poor replacement for an e-reader (or for a book!).
Do people actually do this? Do folks actually read in the bathtub?
Don't the pages get all weird from the humidity? What if you drop your book in the water? Don't your wet hands mess up the pages?
I love to read in the bathtub, it's really relaxing...
The problems you mention are certainly real, but it just takes a bit of care to avoid them -- keep the door open a bit to avoid excessively humidity, a towel nearby to dry your hands before touching the book, and a place to store the book out of splash-range while washing etc (I just have a plastic bag hanging on a hook, works great).
Actually one of the biggest probs I have is that if the book is really engrossing, the water eventually cools down to the point where it's uncomfortable!
Obviously, the problem this device has is that at $490 it's far too expensive ($200-$300 would probably be a more practical price point). Android is still basically a beta product, and we don't know if the guts of this device are up to snuff. It needs to have a long battery life, a CPU that is beefy enough to not add long delays yet use very little power, and things like an SD card reader.
Another huge problem is that the damn thing is twice as bulky and heavy as it could be, to support functionality that's mainly useful for fluffy demos, but not so much for actual reading or learning.
To put it another way: it comes with a giant permanently attached sales brochure that doubles the weight of the product.
Another sign that marketing is in charge of development I suppose...
Urban Dictionary is a funny case, because while it's often very useful, there's so much crap there that it takes a lot of wading and a certain amount of judgment to find the info you're looking for. Given the extent to which a lot of the crap (and info) is pretty er, profane, I'm not sure it's the best target for automatic usage by people that don't know what they're getting into...
a cheesy vampire emo movie
Thank god I'm not the only one who thinks that...
Vampires shouldn't glitter in sunlight - THEY SHOULD EXPLODE!
I'd watch that movie!
Kristen Stewart: oooh, Edward you're sooooo sexy, it almost makes my miserable life worthwhile!
Robert Pattinson: I will make sweet lov *** KERBLOOM ***
[Kristen is drenched in sparkly blood and steaming wriggly bits]
Kristen Stewart: oooooooooh, Edward!!! [starts licking off the blood in an orgasmic frenzy]
Yes, because those CPU's are now running 100% load all the time. So no speedstepping down to a couple of hundred Mhz and saving power that way (which can be a lot).
I run boinc on my home machine, but I also turn on linux's "no freq boost for niced processes" mode, and since boinc processes are niced, this means that all the cores dedicated to boinc run at the lowest possible cpu frequency. The reason I did it was to keep the fan noise low when I'm not using the machine, but I imagine it makes a power difference as well.
I.e.:
[Not that this guy probably bothered with anything like this...]
Also, they can have a much more natural white point. I like the fact that you can get CFLs with a white around 6000, which is closer to what you get from the sun on a bright day. Just a much nicer quality of light.
Haver you ever seen the spectrum of a CFL though? Every one I've is completely freaky, absolutely nothing like a blackbody spectrum (such as the sun, or an incandescent bulb), basically lots of extremely narrow high-intensity spikes at widely-distributed points.
LED bulbs don't have a perfect black-body spectrum either, but the one's I've seen a spectrum for are much, much closer than the typical CFL.
Then, they'll bring that capability to the masses as another "lol codmw2 suxx on pc give us DS" Airman
They want a DS port of codmw2?!
Hmmm.... I'd buy that!
Me: I'll take "Meta-Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask" for $100000000, Alex
Alex: The answer is "Microsoft marketing"
Me: Who made up all these questions anyway?
Alex: Correct! [ding ding ding ding ding]
[fade to black as stage and studio are buried under an avalanche of cash, the cheers quickly turning to "my god, help me, I'm being crushed...! can't ... breathe... arghhhh23*@#!.!.j3..."]
"- Apples UI design is definitely better."
Yep, well, you just defeated your own argument.
Not really. It's not enough for the UI to be "better", it has to be significantly better to offset Android's other advantages, and as far as I've seen, it isn't (unlike, for instance, the ipod, where the competition often seemed laughably incompetent).
The iphone's real advantage at this point, is simply mindshare; I guess we'll see if that's enough to keep them on top.
Google on the other hand however won't hire you unless you have a Masters or PhD.
FWIW, I know quite a number of people who work for Google and have only a Bachelors.
Does this remind anyone of the Drew Carey show, with their concoction of coffee and beer? Buzz Beer!
The concept is intriguing, but... it sounds like it'd taste pretty vile...