Analyze the available EULAs, 90% of it boils probably down to the same few terms. Make a list of these terms, label each with a descriptive short name, and maybe a symbol.
I envision a middle finger, a guy bent over, and maybe a frowny face.
Probably not at all. Just continuing the joke about CLIs and usability. The snippet above, by the way, is in fact valid HB code, assuming you've already copied the DVD's VIDEO_TS folder to your desktop.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
You just answered ALL of your questions right there. CHROME HAS BEEN OUT LESS THAN A WEEK! Does anyone here realize that Netscape was open-sourced and became Mozilla OVER A DECADE AGO?!?!? And their browser has only been really usable in the last few years. Netscape 4 mostly sucked, and then Mozilla spent manyyears making a huge, bloated, SLOW suite before finally realizing FIVE YEARS LATER that "hey! maybe people just want a good, fast browser!" Then they took two more years to reach 1.0. And yet here's Google, receiving metric tons of shit on Slashdot because Chrome isn't perfect on day 1.
Despite all the Google haters that are coming out of the woodwork on Slashdot these days, I think that Chrome will have more market share than Firefox by the end of the year. Even with this first release, I can see that it has MOUNDS of potential. It is already MUCH faster than Firefox on many JavaScript-heavy sites--which is to say, almost every single popular site on the Web today. (Last time I checked, the front page of eBay had a third of a megabyte of JS code.) And not just faster on page loads, it's faster and more responsive when closing and switching among tabs. I can see this in just a few hours of usage. I can't wait to spend more time with it and see how it holds up after a several-day-long browsing session, which makes Firefox and Safari crawl. That said, I've already seen several pages that it renders incorrectly, and there are some UI changes I'd like to see, but there comes a point where what it lacks in usability in one area (UI) can be made up for in another area (lack of delays.)
No doubt. They should have said "Remote wipe is useful in situations such as..." and then link to all the stories we've seen about lost laptops in the last year.
That's why I like Macs. They're much easier to use. For example: ~/bin/HandBrakeCLI --input ~/Desktop/SIMPSONS_S10_D2/VIDEO_TS/ -o ~/Desktop/S10D2/1.mp4 --title 1 -f mp4 --width 640 --height 480 --vb 1500 --deinterlace --two-pass --encoder x264 See?:-)
(Actually, Handbrake has a nifty GUI. I only use the command line for DVDs that crash the GUI when loading, like two of the four discs in Season 10 of The Simpsons.)
No, no, no! "The only drawback", as you put it, is that they exist at all. We should be moving AWAY from physical media. I don't want to shuffle tapes, I don't want to shuffle discs, and I sure as hell don't want a bagful of USB keys with movies. (Seriously, this is retarded--how do you organize a few hundred USB keys?) Movies and music are DATA. Data lives on a SERVER and gets read or copied as needed. I've got tons of movies and shows (and songs, of course) stored on my server and I watch them with the Mac mini that's hooked up to my TV, occasionally on my computer or laptop in the bedroom, and on my iPod or laptop when traveling. I rip my movies so they come in at about 1 GB apiece so when I travel with my laptop I can easily have fifty or a hundred with me. Who the hell wants to carry around a hundred USB keys? If you're content to have DRM, you may as well buy movies from the iTunes store.
I've been using Firefox on Windows since it was called Phoenix 0.2 (though I spend most of my time now in Safari on a Mac) and have never installed AdBlock. Why? Because an ad-blocking/etc/hosts file does most of the work AND works on all browsers on the machine. It's not perfect but it's very effective and I'm always amazed at how many ads my most-visited sites have whenever I view them on someone else's machine.
Here's a review from a non-Windows fanboi: Chrome's performance absolutely kicks ass. Sure, I had to boot my Windows box to see it, but I am thoroughly impressed so far. And I'm sure I'll be more impressed the more time goes by if their "it won't get painfully slow over time" claim is true. I can't wait 'till the OS X version is out. (Though my true hope is for Apple to say "Holy crap! This is a great idea! We'll use this as the basis for Safari 5!")
Any time a company annoys a customer, they risk losing that customer. Just because "everyone does it" is no excuse for doing so.
But therein lies the rub. If every other company really is doing it, then IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER, because a) customers will get pissed and want to leave, but stay after all, because every other company else is just as bad, and they figure they'll just stick with what they know, or b) even if they do leave, some customer from company B will be equally pissed at company B and come into the warm embrace of company A. Just like with cell phones, airlines, cable companies, etc... you're gonna get screwed no matter what, because they all suck, so you just pick your poison and deal with it.
I just bought a Seagate 250 GB external USB HDD. It came with a Y-shaped USB connector which you're supposed to plug into TWO USB ports and the drive. I figured that was for low-power (USB 1.0?) computers* so I took a chance and just used a regular mini-USB cable I had from a camera and it's been working fine with just one USB (2.0) port. Except on my MacBook Pro--I can plug it into the USB port on the right and it works but if I use the port on the left the drive just makes a funny noise and won't mount.
* or crazy things like the way you can plug a device into a Mac and it's fine but if you plug it into the USB port on the keyboard you get a "not enough power" warning. WTF?!?
In other news, I was pleasantly surprised with my GPS--a Garmin Nuvi 200. It doesn't come with an AC adapter (only a car charger) but the charging jack is actually a mini-USB port. I can use a USB->mini-USB cable to charge it from my computer. But wait! There's more! I went to Garmin's site to see if they sold an AC adapter. They do--it's a thing that plugs into your wall and then gives you a cigarette-lighter thingie that you then plug your car charger into. How stupid is that?!? A) That's bulky, kludgy, clumpy, ugly, and B) it means I can't just LEAVE MY CAR CHARGER IN MY CAR!!! Luckily I made another happy discovery--I can use the tiny AC->USB adapter that came with (you guessed it) my iPhone along with the mini-USB cable and charge it that way. SUCCESS!
Of course, FireWire was designed from the beginning to have enough power to drive USEFUL devices, and it was much, much, much faster than USB for years, and I've never had any trouble with my FireWire devices. Oh well.
A couple more random bits: I've got a 60 GB iPod and an iPhone. Both use the same connector so one stays at home (plugged into the AC brick) and the other travels with me in my ever-present backpack. (If I only had one job I'd just leave it at work.) For my cameras, I use a card reader--I've always thought it was the dumbest thing in the world to have a camera with a removable card and get pictures from it by turning on the camera (draining the batteries) and connecting it directly to a computer. (Plus, my first digital camera had a SERIAL port and took FOREVER to transfer pictures.) Other than the aforementioned hard drive (which travels with its USB cable wrapped around it) those are the only devices I have. So an overabundance of chargers is not a problem for me.
I've got a baby, a mac, and several distant relatives, some with macs and some with PCs. iChat is noticably better than skype. As a bonus 10.5 has screen sharing built in too, just as easy to use.
For extra ease if use, Google for the terminal command to make iChat auto-accept incoming requests.
Again: NO ONE CARES. (OK, technically, I guess I should say ALMOST no one cares.) I see a lot of people with a lot of iPods in several circumstances--work, school, walking around town--and I'm not exaggerating when I say that 90% of them use the distinctive, easy-to-notice stock white earbuds. Even students in school who could easily put a bigger, better pair of headphones into the giant backpacks they carry, don't. One more time: sound quality is NOT what people care about. They want portability and ease-of-use, and a tiny pair of earbuds you can jam into your pocket or purse fits the bill.
Most people are NOT music enthusiasts, let alone audiophiles. Music, for most people, is pleasant noise that they hear while they're DOING other stuff. Most people do NOT sit alone, perfectly still, in a dim room, equidistant from two stereo speakers, listening to Pink Floyd or Mozart. Music is background sound while they're driving, working, playing, etc. And thus, sound quality is NOT of paramount importance. In fact, it barely even registers.
You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7.
Yeah, and now those same 650 MB CDs (actually, 700MB now) cost about a quarter apiece in quantity. We've got spindles of them around here, you just grab one when you need one.
Speaking of spindles, a hundred 700 MB CDs = 70 GB. So for the cost of 3 or 4 GBs worth of Flash, you can have about 20x the capacity in a write-once format. (Or buy RWs, if you want to bother keeping track of them.)
BTW, I worked with a digital photographer in 1996 and we were happy when blank CDs dropped from $9 to $7 APIECE. We used to load one up in his 1x burner, start a backup, and go to lunch.
Greed, plus a small market. MP3s, let alone CDs, already sound better than FM radio, and 9 out of 10 people on the street wouldn't be able to hear the difference between ANY format on the typical home or car stereo system or iPod earbuds. And even if you can hear a difference when doing A/B testing, NO ONE CARES! Say it with me: ONE HUNDRED MILLION iPods sold. Hearing the best possible representation of music is no more important to 99% of the populace than getting the best possible gas milage or eating the best possible food or finding the shortest possible route to work or the best possible parking space. There are MANY other factors that are more important to most people than accuracy or features. Do you drink distilled water? No--bottled, filtered, or plain old tap is GOOD ENOUGH.
Here you are, just a few seconds away from the best line in the entire movie (and that's really saying something): "How do you shoot women and children?" "Easy! You just don't lead'em so much!"
Wow. The THIRD SENTENCE in the original blog post said "On July 30th, Microsoft filed two trademarks..." and the BBC reported that as "Australian blogger Long Zheng has found two patent applications made by Microsoft on 30 July..."
So: first we had Slashdot visitors not reading the articles. Then we had Slashdot editors and summary-writers evidently not reading the articles, and I thought that was pretty bad. Now Slashdot is linking to a story on the BBC, and the BBC evidently didn't read the original blog post when they wrote their article, to which Slashdot linked with, of course, no fact-checking whatsoever.
How to fix things: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ -> Contact Us -> Website -> Style, accuracy, grammar
Maybe someday we'll see http://slashdot.org/ -> Contact Us -> Website -> Style, accuracy, grammar:-) Hell, it would be a better use of electrons than Idle.
Yup, and that's the reason I CAN'T, though I'd love to and my job would most likely allow it if I asked. Small house, no spare room, new baby, I'd never get anything done. Luckily my (day) job is only a 10-minute drive.
And just below that is another radio button labeled "Don't always use https". What does that mean? Is it the same as "Sometimes use https", or "Never use https" ? What strange wording.
What are you, 13? You complain about the writing of the book in a review filled with awkward sentences and the occasional typo? This review really sounds like it was written by someone still in middle school. Maybe 9th grade.
I've seen this in every single Slashdot discussion about Star Wars. I swear someone just throws it out there as a gift so someone else can get a +5 for replying and pointing out that Harrison made it up.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Analyze the available EULAs, 90% of it boils probably down to the same few terms. Make a list of these terms, label each with a descriptive short name, and maybe a symbol.
I envision a middle finger, a guy bent over, and maybe a frowny face.
Probably not at all. Just continuing the joke about CLIs and usability. The snippet above, by the way, is in fact valid HB code, assuming you've already copied the DVD's VIDEO_TS folder to your desktop.
Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.
You just answered ALL of your questions right there. CHROME HAS BEEN OUT LESS THAN A WEEK! Does anyone here realize that Netscape was open-sourced and became Mozilla OVER A DECADE AGO?!?!? And their browser has only been really usable in the last few years. Netscape 4 mostly sucked, and then Mozilla spent many years making a huge, bloated, SLOW suite before finally realizing FIVE YEARS LATER that "hey! maybe people just want a good, fast browser!" Then they took two more years to reach 1.0. And yet here's Google, receiving metric tons of shit on Slashdot because Chrome isn't perfect on day 1.
Despite all the Google haters that are coming out of the woodwork on Slashdot these days, I think that Chrome will have more market share than Firefox by the end of the year. Even with this first release, I can see that it has MOUNDS of potential. It is already MUCH faster than Firefox on many JavaScript-heavy sites--which is to say, almost every single popular site on the Web today. (Last time I checked, the front page of eBay had a third of a megabyte of JS code.) And not just faster on page loads, it's faster and more responsive when closing and switching among tabs. I can see this in just a few hours of usage. I can't wait to spend more time with it and see how it holds up after a several-day-long browsing session, which makes Firefox and Safari crawl. That said, I've already seen several pages that it renders incorrectly, and there are some UI changes I'd like to see, but there comes a point where what it lacks in usability in one area (UI) can be made up for in another area (lack of delays.)
No doubt. They should have said "Remote wipe is useful in situations such as..." and then link to all the stories we've seen about lost laptops in the last year.
That's why I like Macs. They're much easier to use. For example: :-)
~/bin/HandBrakeCLI --input ~/Desktop/SIMPSONS_S10_D2/VIDEO_TS/ -o ~/Desktop/S10D2/1.mp4 --title 1 -f mp4 --width 640 --height 480 --vb 1500 --deinterlace --two-pass --encoder x264
See?
(Actually, Handbrake has a nifty GUI. I only use the command line for DVDs that crash the GUI when loading, like two of the four discs in Season 10 of The Simpsons.)
No, no, no! "The only drawback", as you put it, is that they exist at all. We should be moving AWAY from physical media. I don't want to shuffle tapes, I don't want to shuffle discs, and I sure as hell don't want a bagful of USB keys with movies. (Seriously, this is retarded--how do you organize a few hundred USB keys?) Movies and music are DATA. Data lives on a SERVER and gets read or copied as needed. I've got tons of movies and shows (and songs, of course) stored on my server and I watch them with the Mac mini that's hooked up to my TV, occasionally on my computer or laptop in the bedroom, and on my iPod or laptop when traveling. I rip my movies so they come in at about 1 GB apiece so when I travel with my laptop I can easily have fifty or a hundred with me. Who the hell wants to carry around a hundred USB keys? If you're content to have DRM, you may as well buy movies from the iTunes store.
I've been using Firefox on Windows since it was called Phoenix 0.2 (though I spend most of my time now in Safari on a Mac) and have never installed AdBlock. Why? Because an ad-blocking /etc/hosts file does most of the work AND works on all browsers on the machine. It's not perfect but it's very effective and I'm always amazed at how many ads my most-visited sites have whenever I view them on someone else's machine.
Here's a review from a non-Windows fanboi: Chrome's performance absolutely kicks ass. Sure, I had to boot my Windows box to see it, but I am thoroughly impressed so far. And I'm sure I'll be more impressed the more time goes by if their "it won't get painfully slow over time" claim is true. I can't wait 'till the OS X version is out. (Though my true hope is for Apple to say "Holy crap! This is a great idea! We'll use this as the basis for Safari 5!")
Then PHP wins because it has TWO! :-)
Any time a company annoys a customer, they risk losing that customer. Just because "everyone does it" is no excuse for doing so.
But therein lies the rub. If every other company really is doing it, then IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER, because a) customers will get pissed and want to leave, but stay after all, because every other company else is just as bad, and they figure they'll just stick with what they know, or b) even if they do leave, some customer from company B will be equally pissed at company B and come into the warm embrace of company A. Just like with cell phones, airlines, cable companies, etc... you're gonna get screwed no matter what, because they all suck, so you just pick your poison and deal with it.
Also interesting is that people at MS apparently nicknamed it 'Porn Mode'.
Those crafty Microsoftians, always innovating! Only 3 years behind this time... I think that's a new record! *rolls eyes*
USB is good but it's not perfect.
I just bought a Seagate 250 GB external USB HDD. It came with a Y-shaped USB connector which you're supposed to plug into TWO USB ports and the drive. I figured that was for low-power (USB 1.0?) computers* so I took a chance and just used a regular mini-USB cable I had from a camera and it's been working fine with just one USB (2.0) port. Except on my MacBook Pro--I can plug it into the USB port on the right and it works but if I use the port on the left the drive just makes a funny noise and won't mount.
* or crazy things like the way you can plug a device into a Mac and it's fine but if you plug it into the USB port on the keyboard you get a "not enough power" warning. WTF?!?
In other news, I was pleasantly surprised with my GPS--a Garmin Nuvi 200. It doesn't come with an AC adapter (only a car charger) but the charging jack is actually a mini-USB port. I can use a USB->mini-USB cable to charge it from my computer. But wait! There's more! I went to Garmin's site to see if they sold an AC adapter. They do--it's a thing that plugs into your wall and then gives you a cigarette-lighter thingie that you then plug your car charger into. How stupid is that?!? A) That's bulky, kludgy, clumpy, ugly, and B) it means I can't just LEAVE MY CAR CHARGER IN MY CAR!!! Luckily I made another happy discovery--I can use the tiny AC->USB adapter that came with (you guessed it) my iPhone along with the mini-USB cable and charge it that way. SUCCESS!
Of course, FireWire was designed from the beginning to have enough power to drive USEFUL devices, and it was much, much, much faster than USB for years, and I've never had any trouble with my FireWire devices. Oh well.
A couple more random bits: I've got a 60 GB iPod and an iPhone. Both use the same connector so one stays at home (plugged into the AC brick) and the other travels with me in my ever-present backpack. (If I only had one job I'd just leave it at work.) For my cameras, I use a card reader--I've always thought it was the dumbest thing in the world to have a camera with a removable card and get pictures from it by turning on the camera (draining the batteries) and connecting it directly to a computer. (Plus, my first digital camera had a SERIAL port and took FOREVER to transfer pictures.) Other than the aforementioned hard drive (which travels with its USB cable wrapped around it) those are the only devices I have. So an overabundance of chargers is not a problem for me.
I've got a baby, a mac, and several distant relatives, some with macs and some with PCs. iChat is noticably better than skype. As a bonus 10.5 has screen sharing built in too, just as easy to use.
For extra ease if use, Google for the terminal command to make iChat auto-accept incoming requests.
Again: NO ONE CARES. (OK, technically, I guess I should say ALMOST no one cares.) I see a lot of people with a lot of iPods in several circumstances--work, school, walking around town--and I'm not exaggerating when I say that 90% of them use the distinctive, easy-to-notice stock white earbuds. Even students in school who could easily put a bigger, better pair of headphones into the giant backpacks they carry, don't. One more time: sound quality is NOT what people care about. They want portability and ease-of-use, and a tiny pair of earbuds you can jam into your pocket or purse fits the bill.
Most people are NOT music enthusiasts, let alone audiophiles. Music, for most people, is pleasant noise that they hear while they're DOING other stuff. Most people do NOT sit alone, perfectly still, in a dim room, equidistant from two stereo speakers, listening to Pink Floyd or Mozart. Music is background sound while they're driving, working, playing, etc. And thus, sound quality is NOT of paramount importance. In fact, it barely even registers.
You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7.
Yeah, and now those same 650 MB CDs (actually, 700MB now) cost about a quarter apiece in quantity. We've got spindles of them around here, you just grab one when you need one.
Speaking of spindles, a hundred 700 MB CDs = 70 GB. So for the cost of 3 or 4 GBs worth of Flash, you can have about 20x the capacity in a write-once format. (Or buy RWs, if you want to bother keeping track of them.)
BTW, I worked with a digital photographer in 1996 and we were happy when blank CDs dropped from $9 to $7 APIECE. We used to load one up in his 1x burner, start a backup, and go to lunch.
Greed, plus a small market. MP3s, let alone CDs, already sound better than FM radio, and 9 out of 10 people on the street wouldn't be able to hear the difference between ANY format on the typical home or car stereo system or iPod earbuds. And even if you can hear a difference when doing A/B testing, NO ONE CARES! Say it with me: ONE HUNDRED MILLION iPods sold. Hearing the best possible representation of music is no more important to 99% of the populace than getting the best possible gas milage or eating the best possible food or finding the shortest possible route to work or the best possible parking space. There are MANY other factors that are more important to most people than accuracy or features. Do you drink distilled water? No--bottled, filtered, or plain old tap is GOOD ENOUGH.
Ack! I borked the line. It's not "How DO you shoot..." it's "How CAN you shoot..." Not that anyone cares, we're pretty far OT by now.
Here you are, just a few seconds away from the best line in the entire movie (and that's really saying something):
"How do you shoot women and children?"
"Easy! You just don't lead'em so much!"
Wow. The THIRD SENTENCE in the original blog post said "On July 30th, Microsoft filed two trademarks..." and the BBC reported that as "Australian blogger Long Zheng has found two patent applications made by Microsoft on 30 July..."
So: first we had Slashdot visitors not reading the articles. Then we had Slashdot editors and summary-writers evidently not reading the articles, and I thought that was pretty bad. Now Slashdot is linking to a story on the BBC, and the BBC evidently didn't read the original blog post when they wrote their article, to which Slashdot linked with, of course, no fact-checking whatsoever.
Holy Fuck, it really is turtles all the way down.
How to fix things: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ -> Contact Us -> Website -> Style, accuracy, grammar
Maybe someday we'll see http://slashdot.org/ -> Contact Us -> Website -> Style, accuracy, grammar :-) Hell, it would be a better use of electrons than Idle.
Yup, and that's the reason I CAN'T, though I'd love to and my job would most likely allow it if I asked. Small house, no spare room, new baby, I'd never get anything done. Luckily my (day) job is only a 10-minute drive.
And for some of us, work is where we go to get away from home. :-)
And just below that is another radio button labeled "Don't always use https". What does that mean? Is it the same as "Sometimes use https", or "Never use https" ? What strange wording.
What are you, 13? You complain about the writing of the book in a review filled with awkward sentences and the occasional typo? This review really sounds like it was written by someone still in middle school. Maybe 9th grade.
Hmm... I clicked 'watch in high quality' but it didn't help.
... and why is he suddenly posting here so much? Is he new? :-)
I've seen this in every single Slashdot discussion about Star Wars. I swear someone just throws it out there as a gift so someone else can get a +5 for replying and pointing out that Harrison made it up. :-)