Probably too late to get noticed, so I'm replying to the first +5 comment I see. There's a good chance the "do not talk about your rejected app" deal is just a result of a boilerplate notice.
One developer, who writes only Mac software, not iPhone software, emailed:
I trawled through my emails to find bug reports and other correspondence from Apple Developer Connection (of which there is quite a bit).
Every one has the text:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE
From TFA: "The issue has nothing to do with JavaScript so turning JavaScript off in your browser will not help you." and then "The exploit requires DHTML." As far as I know, DHTML requires a client-side scripting language--the most popular of which (only?) is JavaScript.
If they ever put one of these in McCarran International Airport (Las Vegas, NV) there will be duct tape over the little alert speaker inside of a week.
Wow. That's almost as cool as being able to go DIRECTLY to php.net/whateveryouwant to see the docs AND contributed examples. PLUS it's got some pretty good AI to say "we don't have foo, did you mean..."
Say what you will about PHP itself, it's a pretty sweet setup.
That's his goal. (To be useful, not to be like EE.) Joel has written about the development of S-O several times on his site and mentions this almost every time. From the most recent post:
You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I'm talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:
A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you're being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
An old Usenet post with the exact right answer--for Windows 3.1--but it just doesn't work anymore,
And something in Japanese.
If you're very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is "Anon Y. Moose" has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.
Well, technology has gotten better since those discussion forums were set up. I thought that the programming community could do better...
Basically, he (and some others) said "this could be better" so they went ahead and made it. And no, he is absolutely 100% against experts-exchange style trickery. He just saw a need he wanted to fill, saw something that he wanted to exist so he made it. He's got the money to run it ad-free forever.
"Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."
Funny, since MS has never made a desktop before, AFAIK. Come to think of it, they aren't making this one either...
I love it when a single sentence is wrong in more than one way at the same time. (And don't tell me that "desktop" meant "desktop OS" because the name of the product being used is Windows HPC 2008 Server.)
I'd like to see someone go up with the slowest-possible laptop (some $349-on-sale POS with 512 MB) and ask for setup help and let them watch the famously-long first boot, then ask for help removing all the crapware. Bonus points if they bring a friend on the same day, standing next to them at the counter, with a just-purchased base MacBook and whipping through the setup in 3 minutes, then recording the rest of the proceedings with the iSight.:-)
...they can do your credit card purchase remotely they can spend more time helping people decide...
Except when the credit card machines are on the fritz (like after recovering from a mall-wide power outage)--I had to stand in line 20 MINUTES behind 4 PEOPLE being helped by a SINGLE CASHIER who had to write out a sales slip BY HAND for EVERY PURCHASE, even my $20 CASH transaction.
Not an Apple hater, just had a really dopey experience there once.:-)
In early 1995 my dad had a 486/DX2-66 with Windows 3.1, an HP B/W bubblejet printer, and I forget what kind of video card. When he printed there were always gaps in the print, always in the same place. Could be text from WordPerfect or an image from a browser (Chameleon, oh yeah!)--it didn't matter. It printed fine, though, if you dropped the display bit depth a notch (from 24-bit to 16, or 16 to 8, I forget which.) Nice to know nothing has changed.
The new _____ finds a note from his predecessor: "There are two envelopes in the upper drawer. When you are in trouble for the first time, open the first envelope. When you are in a big trouble for the second time, open the second envelope." In a couple of years he got into trouble, opened the first envelope he got from his predecessor and read: "Blame everything on me." He did so and got out of trouble. A couple years later he got into a big trouble again and opened the second envelope. It said: "Prepare two envelopes..."
And another question: how long have all these other companies been in the game? The iPhone just came out last year. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Palm has sold more touchscreens than anyone throughout history, and where are they today? The word "palm pilot" used to be a synonym for "PDA" the same way people once referred to any laptop as a "powerbook"
We're talking about the 1970s, not the 1870s. You need to study a little more history. The Honeywell Kitchen Computer came out in 1969. Not exactly common, but it proves that even before the 1970s the thought of personal computer ownership wasn't that far out there. (It only took a few more years--the mid/late 70s--for the first personal computers, like the the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple II to be available.) It's not a giant leap to say "Hey! Maybe they'll be small enough to carry/wear!" like the Dick Tracy wristwatch. From Wikipedia:
In January 1946, Gould changed Dick Tracy forever with the introduction of the 2-Way Wrist Radio after a visit to inventor Al Gross. This seminal communications device, worn as a wristwatch by Tracy and members of the police force, became one of the strip's most immediately recognizable icons, and can be thought of as an early precursor of later technological developments, such as cellular phones. The 2-Way Wrist Radio was eventually upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964.
I also recommend the GUI and CLI versions of HandBrake. The CLI can be scripted and the GUI can create a queue. It just so happens I'm ripping Seinfeld; using the GUI to queue up the job (4 episodes and 8 extras ripped at 640x480 2-passs H264, and the four episodes ripped as 320x240 MP4s for iPod) took less than five minutes. To make it easier I just name each file 1.mp4, 2.mp4, 3.mp4, etc. to begin with and then rename the episodes when done. The GUI takes the guesswork out of figuring out what to do for title & chapter; I've only used the CLI for disks that crash the GUI (like 2 of the 4 discs in The Simpsons - Season 10 and The Legend of Drunken Master.) (Note that the CLI can return chapter info but the GUI gives visual previews so you can see exactly what you're getting.)
And if the DVD has CSS you'll wind up with NOTHING of use by doing that. Simply copying the VIDEO_TS folder to a new DVD or disk image will result in CSS-scrambled content that can't be unscrambled because the key to unscramble it is in a non-normally-readable portion of the disk. Meaning, a program designed to read video DVDs can get at the key, but it isn't in the filesystem that the OS sees.
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s... The idea of compressing audio and storing gigabytes of data in your pocket? Just a little more practical than warp drive.
Methinks the man doth exaggerate too much. Since Star Trek showed pocket-sized communicators in the 1960s, and pocket-sized portable radios already existed at the time, so I don't think a pocked-sized computer-based music player would have been quite "mind-boggling." ANYONE who had ANYTHING to do with computers (even before Saint Moore) could clearly see that the trend was for them to become smaller and more powerful. The only reason it wouldn't have been directly predicted would have been because it was such a trivial use of technology--"Hey! Let's take a computer more powerful than the one we used in the ship we landed on the moon with, shrink it down to the size of a deck of cards, make it run off a battery, and use it to play music with!" What we were expecting and aiming for were things like wristwatch-sized video communicators and flying cars.
One minor option: if you want to offer downloadable videos, you might want to zip them before posting--not to save size (they'll come out the same +/- 1%) but to FORCE people to download. Just so some yutz who doesn't know how to download things won't visit your site every week, click the video link, and RE-download it (from your server) every time he wants to watch it, using up all your bandwidth in the process. Also there's no question of choppy streaming--the file downloads as fast (or as slow) as the intertubes allow and then it's unzipped and watched locally in all its glory.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably too late to get noticed, so I'm replying to the first +5 comment I see. There's a good chance the "do not talk about your rejected app" deal is just a result of a boilerplate notice.
+1 for "vague and self-contradictory."
From TFA: "The issue has nothing to do with JavaScript so turning JavaScript off in your browser will not help you." and then "The exploit requires DHTML." As far as I know, DHTML requires a client-side scripting language--the most popular of which (only?) is JavaScript.
SI units always use seconds. :-)
I totally agree. I mean, it's cool to dance, but what about a groove that smoothes and moves romance? :-)
If they ever put one of these in McCarran International Airport (Las Vegas, NV) there will be duct tape over the little alert speaker inside of a week.
You are now entering Slashdot: recommend IDKFA.
Wrong. As was discussed here last year, the air is thin down there and cooling is actually quite a problem. Plus they've got crap for connectivity.
So it's time now that we thank him and make it clear that were behind him. As for how, that's up to you. Maybe send encouraging emails.
Or if you stumble across some mellow songs that you think he might like, send them to him so he can listen to them while he's working.
Wow. That's almost as cool as being able to go DIRECTLY to php.net/whateveryouwant to see the docs AND contributed examples. PLUS it's got some pretty good AI to say "we don't have foo, did you mean..."
Say what you will about PHP itself, it's a pretty sweet setup.
That's his goal. (To be useful, not to be like EE.) Joel has written about the development of S-O several times on his site and mentions this almost every time. From the most recent post:
Basically, he (and some others) said "this could be better" so they went ahead and made it. And no, he is absolutely 100% against experts-exchange style trickery. He just saw a need he wanted to fill, saw something that he wanted to exist so he made it. He's got the money to run it ad-free forever.
"Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."
Funny, since MS has never made a desktop before, AFAIK. Come to think of it, they aren't making this one either...
I love it when a single sentence is wrong in more than one way at the same time. (And don't tell me that "desktop" meant "desktop OS" because the name of the product being used is Windows HPC 2008 Server.)
So many possible responses... pick one:
Really? When?
Link please?
[citation needed]
Don't think so. He had 16 MB or more--a lot at the time. :-)
I'd like to see someone go up with the slowest-possible laptop (some $349-on-sale POS with 512 MB) and ask for setup help and let them watch the famously-long first boot, then ask for help removing all the crapware. Bonus points if they bring a friend on the same day, standing next to them at the counter, with a just-purchased base MacBook and whipping through the setup in 3 minutes, then recording the rest of the proceedings with the iSight. :-)
...they can do your credit card purchase remotely they can spend more time helping people decide...
Except when the credit card machines are on the fritz (like after recovering from a mall-wide power outage)--I had to stand in line 20 MINUTES behind 4 PEOPLE being helped by a SINGLE CASHIER who had to write out a sales slip BY HAND for EVERY PURCHASE, even my $20 CASH transaction.
Not an Apple hater, just had a really dopey experience there once. :-)
In early 1995 my dad had a 486/DX2-66 with Windows 3.1, an HP B/W bubblejet printer, and I forget what kind of video card. When he printed there were always gaps in the print, always in the same place. Could be text from WordPerfect or an image from a browser (Chameleon, oh yeah!)--it didn't matter. It printed fine, though, if you dropped the display bit depth a notch (from 24-bit to 16, or 16 to 8, I forget which.) Nice to know nothing has changed.
Old joke, many variants:
The new _____ finds a note from his predecessor: "There are two envelopes in the upper drawer. When you are in trouble for the first time, open the first envelope. When you are in a big trouble for the second time, open the second envelope." In a couple of years he got into trouble, opened the first envelope he got from his predecessor and read: "Blame everything on me." He did so and got out of trouble. A couple years later he got into a big trouble again and opened the second envelope. It said: "Prepare two envelopes..."
And another question: how long have all these other companies been in the game? The iPhone just came out last year. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Palm has sold more touchscreens than anyone throughout history, and where are they today? The word "palm pilot" used to be a synonym for "PDA" the same way people once referred to any laptop as a "powerbook"
Ha! I *wish* email was as good as Slashdot. If I had the option to only view my inbox at "+5" I'd save *years* of my life. :-)
I have a friend that supports his 6 figure online income via a cellular connection.
I know a drug dealer too. ;-)
We're talking about the 1970s, not the 1870s. You need to study a little more history. The Honeywell Kitchen Computer came out in 1969. Not exactly common, but it proves that even before the 1970s the thought of personal computer ownership wasn't that far out there. (It only took a few more years--the mid/late 70s--for the first personal computers, like the the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple II to be available.) It's not a giant leap to say "Hey! Maybe they'll be small enough to carry/wear!" like the Dick Tracy wristwatch. From Wikipedia:
I also recommend the GUI and CLI versions of HandBrake. The CLI can be scripted and the GUI can create a queue. It just so happens I'm ripping Seinfeld; using the GUI to queue up the job (4 episodes and 8 extras ripped at 640x480 2-passs H264, and the four episodes ripped as 320x240 MP4s for iPod) took less than five minutes. To make it easier I just name each file 1.mp4, 2.mp4, 3.mp4, etc. to begin with and then rename the episodes when done. The GUI takes the guesswork out of figuring out what to do for title & chapter; I've only used the CLI for disks that crash the GUI (like 2 of the 4 discs in The Simpsons - Season 10 and The Legend of Drunken Master.) (Note that the CLI can return chapter info but the GUI gives visual previews so you can see exactly what you're getting.)
And if the DVD has CSS you'll wind up with NOTHING of use by doing that. Simply copying the VIDEO_TS folder to a new DVD or disk image will result in CSS-scrambled content that can't be unscrambled because the key to unscramble it is in a non-normally-readable portion of the disk. Meaning, a program designed to read video DVDs can get at the key, but it isn't in the filesystem that the OS sees.
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s... The idea of compressing audio and storing gigabytes of data in your pocket? Just a little more practical than warp drive.
Methinks the man doth exaggerate too much. Since Star Trek showed pocket-sized communicators in the 1960s, and pocket-sized portable radios already existed at the time, so I don't think a pocked-sized computer-based music player would have been quite "mind-boggling." ANYONE who had ANYTHING to do with computers (even before Saint Moore) could clearly see that the trend was for them to become smaller and more powerful. The only reason it wouldn't have been directly predicted would have been because it was such a trivial use of technology--"Hey! Let's take a computer more powerful than the one we used in the ship we landed on the moon with, shrink it down to the size of a deck of cards, make it run off a battery, and use it to play music with!" What we were expecting and aiming for were things like wristwatch-sized video communicators and flying cars.
One minor option: if you want to offer downloadable videos, you might want to zip them before posting--not to save size (they'll come out the same +/- 1%) but to FORCE people to download. Just so some yutz who doesn't know how to download things won't visit your site every week, click the video link, and RE-download it (from your server) every time he wants to watch it, using up all your bandwidth in the process. Also there's no question of choppy streaming--the file downloads as fast (or as slow) as the intertubes allow and then it's unzipped and watched locally in all its glory.