I've heard that the average time to render a frame has stayed around 3 hours, from "Andre and Wally B" to now. May or not be true, but it's probably close. It's amazing to look at the differences between "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 3", which makes a particularly good test case because they have the same characters but they're 15 years apart. I remember being amazed at how things looked in Toy Story, from Rex's bumpy texture to the messed-up paint at the bottom of Andy's door, but if you watch the first right after watching the third, you'll be amazed at the differences. I'd say it's most noticeable in the human characters but if you look closely you'll see it everywhere.
If they let you turn off all the crap you don't want and just use it for a handful of feeds, and if the UI is good, this could be awesome. Digg (despite its troubles in the past) does have a lot of talent and infrastructure. (Remember when they were good? All the cool things they had in labs.digg.com? (or whatever the URL was.))
Google has actually created a huge opportunity here for a lot of companies, and there are plenty of people who could do great work to fill the vacuum that Google is creating. Despite my initial "awwww!" at losing Reader, it will be very interesting to see what gets built in the next six months.
And if anyone has their own host and wants something full-featured right now, look no further than Tiny Tiny RSS which, despite the name, is not all that tiny. If you use PHP and want to start rolling your own, I recommend starting with MagpieRSS.
If you can't be bothered to read the summary carefully enough to see that you're putting words into his mouth and that was NOT the question he asked... you are Slashdot's target demographic. (Judging by the fact that at least 4 mods so far agree with you.) Um, stay right where you are, I guess, and keep stabbing that 'reply' button.
In case anyone wants to break with tradition and not reward factually incorrect posts, the OP said/asked... "It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features... in a much better form factor. The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins?" See? SEE? He wants to hack... just a like a proper Pi owner!
... off topic with regard to this book review, but maybe the right person will read this, so here goes. When using Terminal with caps lock accidentally on, I discovered that in Mac OS X (10.6 and 10.7 at least), 'CAL' will give you sideways output as opposed to 'cal':
mac:~ me$ cal
March 2013 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 mac:~ me$ CAL
March 2013 Mo 4 11 18 25 Tu 5 12 19 26 We 6 13 20 27 Th 7 14 21 28 Fr 1 8 15 22 29 Sa 2 9 16 23 30 Su 3 10 17 24 31
Same for 'CaL', 'Cal', 'CAl', 'cAl', 'cAL', and 'caL'. I can't find this documented anywhere. Anyone know about this? 'which cal' with any case points to '/usr/bin/cal' (with whatever case you type in); 'man cal' fails for anything except all lowercase.
>> Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash >> as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted >> on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability >> and performance.
> That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The > real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. > i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you > could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them > via the App Store.
Why can't they both be true? Flash had mostly crappy performance on pretty much every mobile device out there. OK, so it doesn't drain battery or crash when it's not turned turned on -- so you're saying Flash is great... until you need to run it? I think even Adobe would concede that point, since they gave up on Flash on mobile over a year ago. They were on pretty much every mobile platform but iOS, and Apple haters love pointing out that Apple does not have dominant market share, so why give up? Oh, right: because it sucked.
Also remember that Flash was off the iPhone from day 1, and the app store came quite a bit later. Steve Jobs challenged Adobe for years: "Show me a mobile version of Flash that doesn't suck and I'll use it." Adobe never delivered.
> Keep your hands of anything you don't know what means, and > only change the things the user changes (i.e. if the user fixes > a spelling mistake in the middle of a paragraph, don't change > the paragraph formatting, don't break the paragraph into several > paragraphs, and don't touch anything outside that paragraph.
So if I add 6 sentences to a paragraph that causes that paragraph to go to the next page, and an item at the end of the paragraph that is linked to a large footnote gets pushed to the next page, and the section becomes a page longer as a result, and the whole document becomes a page longer as a result... magic happens? What about watermarks, custom headers and footers, tables, and the million other things that every modern word processor lets you do?
I'm not saying this new thing is any worse than what's already out there -- I'm saying I doubt it's any better. Reverse-engineering and perfectly interpreting 20 years of MS Office formats is just about impossible.
> Are the days of ISPs providing in-house > email servers coming to an end?
Considering that AT&T farmed out their email to Yahoo about five years ago, I would say the answer is probably "yes." Or at least "yes, in some cases."
I know of very few people who use their ISP-supplied email addresses. One reason I quit using mine is because I've had 10 ISPs in the last 15 years. Out of all the things an ISP can provide me, an email account is probably the least useful.
Whenever I get an email with a bunch of recipients, I look at all the addresses and I'd say maybe 1/4 are using email from an ISP. (And of those, probably half are AOL.) The rest are mostly split between gmail, yahoo, and hotmail.
Someone at Google thinks that a) they have figured out a way to predict future success and b) this is the best way they can take advantage of that knowledge? Just... wow.
Because it cost 3x as much as other devices that did a WHOLE lot more? And, as described in the bit you quoted, it was badly-designed? Seriously -- it was a $250 one-trick pony. ALL it did was let friends play music, and IF and ONLY IF they were using the exact right combination of things: Android phones, music in your account, etc. The only product deserving of a swifter death was the Microsoft Kin.
How did you possibly get a +5 for that? EVERY phone with a display over 300ppi qualifies as "retina." Once you can't see the pixels, you can't see the pixels. 300, 400, 500, 1000 -- doesn't matter. (Unless you have really good eyes and hold your phone really close to your face, or if you look at your phone through a loupe.)
The identical phone with a 300ppi display would have better video performance and/or longer batter life, or could use a less expensive GPU. At 441ppi, there are more twice as many pixels per square inch to push around than there would be at 300ppi.
> Firefox OS and Chromebooks kind of prove the point.
They will prove the point IF people buy them. Otherwise, they'll be thrown onto the Great Internet Appliance Slag Heap next to the iOpeners and 3Com Audreys.
> What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run > OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?
That I will stick with OS X on the desktop because it still sucks less than the others. 10.7 and 10.8 brought some annoyances but nothing unbearable. I'm hoping 10.9 is a genuine improvement. (If they'd just quit messing with the trackpad settings with every release I'd be a happy camper.) I'm still running 10.6 on every machine under my control that supports it.
The reasoning here is sound, and the theory has been borne out over the past dozen years since this was written:
A transaction can't be worth so much as to require a decision but worth so little that that decision is automatic. There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small, and it derives not from the interface used or the time required, but from the very act of deciding. Micropayments, like all payments, require a comparison: "Is this much of X worth that much of Y?" There is a minimum mental transaction cost created by this fact that cannot be optimized away, because the only transaction a user will be willing to approve with no thought will be one that costs them nothing, which is no transaction at all... micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free?... users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Clay Shirky, 12/19/2000
Read the whole piece -- it has tons of good info. (And it's an entertaining read.)
> It's the obnoxious, intrusive and privacy-stealing > ads that are the problem.
Which is to say, most of them.:-)
My rationale for blocking ads: Most ads come from ad networks. These networks can be hacked to serve malicious ads (or maybe people just pay for malicious ads and they don't get caught by QC -- don't know, don't care.) The fucking New York Times fell victim to this so it's not a minor problem. I block ads as a security measure.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that the average time to render a frame has stayed around 3 hours, from "Andre and Wally B" to now. May or not be true, but it's probably close. It's amazing to look at the differences between "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 3", which makes a particularly good test case because they have the same characters but they're 15 years apart. I remember being amazed at how things looked in Toy Story, from Rex's bumpy texture to the messed-up paint at the bottom of Andy's door, but if you watch the first right after watching the third, you'll be amazed at the differences. I'd say it's most noticeable in the human characters but if you look closely you'll see it everywhere.
If they let you turn off all the crap you don't want and just use it for a handful of feeds, and if the UI is good, this could be awesome. Digg (despite its troubles in the past) does have a lot of talent and infrastructure. (Remember when they were good? All the cool things they had in labs.digg.com? (or whatever the URL was.))
Google has actually created a huge opportunity here for a lot of companies, and there are plenty of people who could do great work to fill the vacuum that Google is creating. Despite my initial "awwww!" at losing Reader, it will be very interesting to see what gets built in the next six months.
> This is why I am writing my own simple reader.
Aah... you too? :-)
And if anyone has their own host and wants something full-featured right now, look no further than Tiny Tiny RSS which, despite the name, is not all that tiny. If you use PHP and want to start rolling your own, I recommend starting with MagpieRSS.
If you can't be bothered to read the summary carefully enough to see that you're putting words into his mouth and that was NOT the question he asked... you are Slashdot's target demographic. (Judging by the fact that at least 4 mods so far agree with you.) Um, stay right where you are, I guess, and keep stabbing that 'reply' button.
In case anyone wants to break with tradition and not reward factually incorrect posts, the OP said/asked... "It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features... in a much better form factor. The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins?" See? SEE? He wants to hack... just a like a proper Pi owner!
... off topic with regard to this book review, but maybe the right person will read this, so here goes. When using Terminal with caps lock accidentally on, I discovered that in Mac OS X (10.6 and 10.7 at least), 'CAL' will give you sideways output as opposed to 'cal':
Same for 'CaL', 'Cal', 'CAl', 'cAl', 'cAL', and 'caL'. I can't find this documented anywhere. Anyone know about this? 'which cal' with any case points to '/usr/bin/cal' (with whatever case you type in); 'man cal' fails for anything except all lowercase.
> I've disassembled first generation Pentium chips,
> removing the golden cover that protects the die
> beneath.
Speaking of which, there's real gold in them thar chips! About $20 worth, if you still have any original Pentiums around.
Pentium Pros have almost $50 worth. And to think, I gave away (or sold very cheaply -- I forget) a dual-PPro monster all those years ago...
Thanks. Posts like this (and people like you) are why I still come to Slashdot.
As demonstrated in this documentary.
>> Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash
>> as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted
>> on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability
>> and performance.
> That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The
> real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter.
> i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you
> could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them
> via the App Store.
Why can't they both be true? Flash had mostly crappy performance on pretty much every mobile device out there. OK, so it doesn't drain battery or crash when it's not turned turned on -- so you're saying Flash is great... until you need to run it? I think even Adobe would concede that point, since they gave up on Flash on mobile over a year ago. They were on pretty much every mobile platform but iOS, and Apple haters love pointing out that Apple does not have dominant market share, so why give up? Oh, right: because it sucked.
Also remember that Flash was off the iPhone from day 1, and the app store came quite a bit later. Steve Jobs challenged Adobe for years: "Show me a mobile version of Flash that doesn't suck and I'll use it." Adobe never delivered.
> Keep your hands of anything you don't know what means, and
> only change the things the user changes (i.e. if the user fixes
> a spelling mistake in the middle of a paragraph, don't change
> the paragraph formatting, don't break the paragraph into several
> paragraphs, and don't touch anything outside that paragraph.
So if I add 6 sentences to a paragraph that causes that paragraph to go to the next page, and an item at the end of the paragraph that is linked to a large footnote gets pushed to the next page, and the section becomes a page longer as a result, and the whole document becomes a page longer as a result... magic happens? What about watermarks, custom headers and footers, tables, and the million other things that every modern word processor lets you do?
I'm not saying this new thing is any worse than what's already out there -- I'm saying I doubt it's any better. Reverse-engineering and perfectly interpreting 20 years of MS Office formats is just about impossible.
"OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application"
If that's true, it'll be the first time in 20 years.
> Are the days of ISPs providing in-house
> email servers coming to an end?
Considering that AT&T farmed out their email to Yahoo about five years ago, I would say the answer is probably "yes." Or at least "yes, in some cases."
I know of very few people who use their ISP-supplied email addresses. One reason I quit using mine is because I've had 10 ISPs in the last 15 years. Out of all the things an ISP can provide me, an email account is probably the least useful.
Whenever I get an email with a bunch of recipients, I look at all the addresses and I'd say maybe 1/4 are using email from an ISP. (And of those, probably half are AOL.) The rest are mostly split between gmail, yahoo, and hotmail.
Someone at Google thinks that a) they have figured out a way to predict future success and b) this is the best way they can take advantage of that knowledge? Just... wow.
> I don't know why they killed the Nexus Q.
Because it cost 3x as much as other devices that did a WHOLE lot more? And, as described in the bit you quoted, it was badly-designed? Seriously -- it was a $250 one-trick pony. ALL it did was let friends play music, and IF and ONLY IF they were using the exact right combination of things: Android phones, music in your account, etc. The only product deserving of a swifter death was the Microsoft Kin.
Dice is trying to revive the old Slashdot by upping the frequency of dupes.
Better book early -- you don't want to be in the back of what will surely be a very long line.
> I'm surprised by how many people expected it to be
> so much better than the S3. When does a phone
> ever completely change in less than a year?
Well, everyone seems to get all wound up when each new iPhone is "only" incrementally better than the last...
How did you possibly get a +5 for that? EVERY phone with a display over 300ppi qualifies as "retina." Once you can't see the pixels, you can't see the pixels. 300, 400, 500, 1000 -- doesn't matter. (Unless you have really good eyes and hold your phone really close to your face, or if you look at your phone through a loupe.)
The identical phone with a 300ppi display would have better video performance and/or longer batter life, or could use a less expensive GPU. At 441ppi, there are more twice as many pixels per square inch to push around than there would be at 300ppi.
> 3-14 doesn't exist.
Sure it does. Just keep waiting...
How will I spend Pi Day? Probably by reading the same story from previous years.
> Firefox OS and Chromebooks kind of prove the point.
They will prove the point IF people buy them. Otherwise, they'll be thrown onto the Great Internet Appliance Slag Heap next to the iOpeners and 3Com Audreys.
> What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run
> OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?
That I will stick with OS X on the desktop because it still sucks less than the others. 10.7 and 10.8 brought some annoyances but nothing unbearable. I'm hoping 10.9 is a genuine improvement. (If they'd just quit messing with the trackpad settings with every release I'd be a happy camper.) I'm still running 10.6 on every machine under my control that supports it.
... because I remembered a joke after reading the last story, too late to post it. :-)
"I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the Internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called 'Bring Back the Porn!'"
-- Dr. Cox, Scrubs
The reasoning here is sound, and the theory has been borne out over the past dozen years since this was written:
A transaction can't be worth so much as to require a decision but worth so little that that decision is automatic. There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small, and it derives not from the interface used or the time required, but from the very act of deciding. Micropayments, like all payments, require a comparison: "Is this much of X worth that much of Y?" There is a minimum mental transaction cost created by this fact that cannot be optimized away, because the only transaction a user will be willing to approve with no thought will be one that costs them nothing, which is no transaction at all... micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free?... users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Clay Shirky, 12/19/2000
Read the whole piece -- it has tons of good info. (And it's an entertaining read.)
> It's the obnoxious, intrusive and privacy-stealing
> ads that are the problem.
Which is to say, most of them. :-)
My rationale for blocking ads: Most ads come from ad networks. These networks can be hacked to serve malicious ads (or maybe people just pay for malicious ads and they don't get caught by QC -- don't know, don't care.) The fucking New York Times fell victim to this so it's not a minor problem. I block ads as a security measure.