"Here's a pic of your roommate Dave dipping his balls in T.G.I. FRIDAY'S NEW ZESTY POMEGRANATE RANCH SAUCE! Don't you want to "get some" at T.G.I. FRIDAY'S today?"
Back when I used Windows (95/98/2k) I used this great trick with the start menu: I put programs in there right at the top level, so when you clicked 'start', you could see them. The trick was, if you pressed the windows key and then pressed THE FIRST LETTER of the app's name, it would launch. (If it was the only app with that first letter. If you had two 'A' apps, it would select the first. But I had a very short list and they were all unique.) So Windows key, P, BAM! Photoshop launched. Windows, N, Netscape. Windows, E, Eudora. (Showing my age here.:-) )
> Press the Windows key, start typing an app / file name, > and hit Return to launch.
So it's like that now, except you have to press a lot more keys? Awesome.:-) You should check and see if my method works in 7. Might have to turn on the 'classic' start menu, if that's there anymore.
If we can quit spending money busting and then housing people for doing relatively harmless things to themselves, maybe next we can quit wasting trillions of dollars in decade-long wars and spend some money getting decent care for people so we can go a week without a school getting shot up.
It has very little to do with the gun lobby. The problem is, we've kind of painted ourselves into a corner here. Getting rid of guns in the U.S. is a practical impossibility. Over the last few hundred years, for various reasons, we've turned into a country with hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions of guns: many of which are small enough to fit into a pocket, and we have 3.8 MILLION square miles in which to hide them. So, you can't just snap your fingers and make them go away. You can't just look at England and say "See, it works for them! Let's do that tomorrow!" Maybe if we could do it all over again, we'd do things differently, but we can't, so let's be realistic. Wishing won't help.
Could we ask people to give them up? Guess what -- the criminals won't (they're called CRIMINALS because they don't follow the law, FYI) and we'll just become a nation of defenseless potential victims. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask yourself this: would you put a sign on your lawn that says "This house contains no guns"?
It's already against the law to do bad things with guns, and it's already against the law for felons to own guns, so passing more and more and more gun laws is NOT the answer. It's sad when things like this happen, but bad things are going to happen no matter what. Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than any of my guns have.
Screw the Web...
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... what about the Internet we lost? We used to have ftp, and gopher, and usenet, and telnet, and finger, and you could send email to webmaster@ or abuse@ or root@ and reach a human, or get things done by emailing majordomo, but nowadays it's all just these crap messaging systems and "click here if you forgot your password" and "type these letters to prove you're a human" and port 80, port 80, port 80.:-|
> Would you spend two point five BILLION pounds > (so ~FIVE BILLION dollars) in taxes that you > don't have to? > Yes or no. > If you answer yes, you're an idiot and will probably be > replaced by your board of directors within an hour.
Not if you put "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world [emphasis added] even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company." in your S-1 SEC filing, as Google famously did in 2004.
To this I would add: act as a pure computer monitor. When I hook up a computer to a TV via a DVI-to-HDMI cable and it looks like crap because of overscan I get all stabby.
But other than that, yeah, make it as dumb as possible. My parents' TVs lasted DECADES. I don't want to have to get a new one every five years because DivX/Zune Store/PlaysForSure*/Hulu/Netflix is gone.
At least in the realm of getting a small bit of info from a printed surface into a modern (i.e., powerful) mobile device. Why not just have some human-readable text in a nice machine-readable font inside a distinctly-shaped box? Mobile devices can easily read lots of kinds of text, but a) this one has high reliability and b) the font itself conveys the purpose. For a shape, the existing QR box -- a square with three smaller squares -- would work, or it could be something new.
This would solve THREE problems: 1) much less chance of malicious URLs, 2) you wouldn't need to scan it with a machine to see if you even want it in the first place, and 3) they'd be much easier to generate.
> All of the above are things that should be taken seriously if > they actually happened. Complaining on Yelp/Angies List only > and not following through in the correct legal channels gives > credence to the lawsuit against her.
Well, the sucky thing is that there are TONS of things that are true, but not provable. I've been fucked over MANY times by contractors and workers, but none of it is provable because I didn't get whatever they promised in writing, didn't take certified before and after pictures, didn't videotape them every second of every day, etc etc etc.
And then there are all the things that would cost more to pursue than they're worth -- am I really going to take the time and expense to sue some shithead who knocks a hole in my drywall, scratches an $80 table, or nails a couple studs in crooked? No, but that doesn't mean they don't suck, and that shouldn't mean that I'm not allowed to complain.
My friend just last week got some furniture from Rooms To Go and it was damaged. TODAY he stayed home to receive the replacements and not only was it also damaged, but the guys who were moving it damaged two other things on his house. (Wall and door sill.) He can (and will) complain, but if needed, how could he prove it? "Wait right there guys. Before you bring that in, I'm going to take photos of every surface you will pass, then print them, then we're all going to sign and date them, and I'm going to video record us signing and dating them, then put that video into a sealed envelope and have it notarized." What the fuck can you possibly do to protect yourself? (Speaking of which, he was told that the guys -- even though they were driving those great gaudy Rooms To Go trucks -- are not actually employees of Rooms To Go. Just FYI.)
Source: homeowner for 14 years, and I've dealt with everything from a loser concrete guy who took $500 and never did any work, to arguing with Home Depot for two years about a $60k job. YOU ARE NEVER SAFE, and you don't always have recourse.
... is that handcuffs do nothing but restrain you. An iPhone restrains you in certain ways but it also enables a whole lot of other things. It's all about trade-offs.
It's the difference between an actual prison, and a prison where you can eat delicious food, see your friends, travel to some extent, etc etc etc., versus living "free" in the woods.
Furthermore, they aren't "handcuffs" in that I can get out of them. I might lose some stuff, but then again, I might not -- it all depends on what I'm doing and how. As it happens, there is nothing on my iPhone that I a) care about and b) couldn't easily move to another system. So depending on who you are, they may not be handcuffs at all.
Finally, it's a continuum. There's a difference between "handcuffs" and "oh well, I guess I can't watch this movie I bought in iTunes anymore because I have an Android phone now." I gain nothing from some pursuit of absolute theoretical perfection. Same thing with security: what do I gain by reading SSL certificates, if I'm going to give my credit card to a 19-year-old in a restaurant to take out of my sight for five minutes the next day? "Those who would trade...", yeah yeah yeah. It is impossible to live a life that is perfect in every way. Have you ever tripped? Well then, why don't you just stare at your feet for every single step you take in all of life? Oh, because the benefits of looking around every hour of every day outweigh tripping on things a couple times a year.
The bigger problem with cell phones, really, are the odious terms from the telcos, like AT&T selling me a fixed number of bytes and then charging extra depending on what I want to do with them. Or requiring that all smartphones have data plans in the first place, and then making the "entry level" plans more and more expensive each year.
Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" was the newest phone OS for a long time, because it was followed by Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" which was only for tablets. A whole bunch of phones shipped with Gingerbread. After a long time Google released Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and then, after a much shorter time, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean".
2.3: December 2010
3.0: February 2011
4.0: October 2011 (10 months after 2.3, 8 months after 3.0)
> Even the drag racers don't use fiberglass. They use carbon fiber.
They used fiberglass before carbon fiber was affordable. (Or even existed, maybe.) And they still do.
I guess all the sites linked on this site don't exist either. Also, Corvettes don't exist. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Besides, fiberglass won't break into shards. It may break more like wood than metal (which also gets torn to confetti in multi-hundred-mile-per-hour crashes) but it's not, like, flying shards of regular window glass.
Do you even know anything about fiberglass at all?
> The hood is part of the structural strength of the vehicle.
Nearly none. It's held on the back with two small hinges and the front with a clip. It lends a bit of torsional rigidity but not much. Almost not enough to measure. Any car can be driven normally for great distances with no hood. The biggest downfalls are aerodynamics and getting water, dirt, and debris into the engine area.
Also, plastic weak enough to shatter would not be strong enough to go through a laminated windshield -- it would just break against the glass.
And someone else already pointed out -- race cars (and wannabe race cars) have used fiberglass hoods for years.
Same thing with the gun in question: the "lower" is pretty much "the plastic bits that hold the important bits in the right spot."
Still waiting for the day when Slashdot unveils the "-1, factually incorrect" mod.
Wall Street is on board with an Amazon business strategy that doesn't require it to actually make profits as long as it increases sales volumes. And if you're in any line of business where you compete with Amazon--and Amazon is in a lot of businesses, and seems to get into new ones each year--that should terrify you.
Not trolling, asking seriously: how much difference is there between an i5 and an i7? A 2 GHz i7 Air (up to 3.2 GHz -- a little higher than this XPS) is another $100.
Also, from the Ars article: "All of the additions Dell is bringing to Ubuntu 12.04 are available for free (as in beer)." So could you just buy the Windows version and configure it yourself to save $50?
> Old Jobs hasn't been in the ground long and already their first > "convenience over QC" choice has come back to bite them.
Steve Jobs did a lot of great things but he also shipped plenty of crap..Mac and MobileMe were (I think) the biggest and most recent examples. 2008:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in an e-mail to Apple employees that the company had made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe Internet service, saying that the service âoewas simply not up to Apple's standardsâ and that it "clearly needed more time and testing."
More than anything, I'm surprised they did ship Maps with such a recent bad experience under their belts. They must have been desperate. The move away from Google was about more than branding.
Sources tell AllThingsD that Google, for example, wanted more say in the iOS maps feature set. It wasn't happy simply providing back-end data. It asked for in-app branding. Apple declined. It suggested adding Google Latitude. Again, Apple declined.
I just figured "upholstered" was slang over there, like "plastered" in the US. Love it. A great day for words over here -- first escape goat, now this.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Here's a pic of your roommate Dave dipping his balls in T.G.I. FRIDAY'S NEW ZESTY POMEGRANATE RANCH SAUCE! Don't you want to "get some" at T.G.I. FRIDAY'S today?"
Back when I used Windows (95/98/2k) I used this great trick with the start menu: I put programs in there right at the top level, so when you clicked 'start', you could see them. The trick was, if you pressed the windows key and then pressed THE FIRST LETTER of the app's name, it would launch. (If it was the only app with that first letter. If you had two 'A' apps, it would select the first. But I had a very short list and they were all unique.) So Windows key, P, BAM! Photoshop launched. Windows, N, Netscape. Windows, E, Eudora. (Showing my age here. :-) )
> Press the Windows key, start typing an app / file name,
> and hit Return to launch.
So it's like that now, except you have to press a lot more keys? Awesome. :-) You should check and see if my method works in 7. Might have to turn on the 'classic' start menu, if that's there anymore.
If we can quit spending money busting and then housing people for doing relatively harmless things to themselves, maybe next we can quit wasting trillions of dollars in decade-long wars and spend some money getting decent care for people so we can go a week without a school getting shot up.
> He seemed to run the Death Star just fine....
You mean, other than having two blown up out from under him? Yeah, the guy was a fucking champ. :-)
It has very little to do with the gun lobby. The problem is, we've kind of painted ourselves into a corner here. Getting rid of guns in the U.S. is a practical impossibility. Over the last few hundred years, for various reasons, we've turned into a country with hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions of guns: many of which are small enough to fit into a pocket, and we have 3.8 MILLION square miles in which to hide them. So, you can't just snap your fingers and make them go away. You can't just look at England and say "See, it works for them! Let's do that tomorrow!" Maybe if we could do it all over again, we'd do things differently, but we can't, so let's be realistic. Wishing won't help.
Could we ask people to give them up? Guess what -- the criminals won't (they're called CRIMINALS because they don't follow the law, FYI) and we'll just become a nation of defenseless potential victims. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask yourself this: would you put a sign on your lawn that says "This house contains no guns"?
It's already against the law to do bad things with guns, and it's already against the law for felons to own guns, so passing more and more and more gun laws is NOT the answer. It's sad when things like this happen, but bad things are going to happen no matter what. Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than any of my guns have.
... what about the Internet we lost? We used to have ftp, and gopher, and usenet, and telnet, and finger, and you could send email to webmaster@ or abuse@ or root@ and reach a human, or get things done by emailing majordomo, but nowadays it's all just these crap messaging systems and "click here if you forgot your password" and "type these letters to prove you're a human" and port 80, port 80, port 80. :-|
> Would you spend two point five BILLION pounds
> (so ~FIVE BILLION dollars) in taxes that you
> don't have to?
> Yes or no.
> If you answer yes, you're an idiot and will probably be
> replaced by your board of directors within an hour.
Not if you put "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world [emphasis added] even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company." in your S-1 SEC filing, as Google famously did in 2004.
There's a big difference between a few seconds of gunfire or explosions in a show versus 3 solid minutes of "BUY THESE FINE PRODUCTS!!!!!11"
> 911 is currently used in North America, while 112
> is standard across the EU and in many other
> countries worldwide.
911 then, of course. USA! USA! USA!
You killed my CPU. Prepare to die.
To this I would add: act as a pure computer monitor. When I hook up a computer to a TV via a DVI-to-HDMI cable and it looks like crap because of overscan I get all stabby.
But other than that, yeah, make it as dumb as possible. My parents' TVs lasted DECADES. I don't want to have to get a new one every five years because DivX/Zune Store/PlaysForSure*/Hulu/Netflix is gone.
* best. name. ever.
Is that big mean company not being nice?
If they don't want to pay to play in Apple's playground, there's a simple, two step solution (with apologies to Larry Wall, I believe):
1) Make your own mobile platform
2) Make it popular
At least in the realm of getting a small bit of info from a printed surface into a modern (i.e., powerful) mobile device. Why not just have some human-readable text in a nice machine-readable font inside a distinctly-shaped box? Mobile devices can easily read lots of kinds of text, but a) this one has high reliability and b) the font itself conveys the purpose. For a shape, the existing QR box -- a square with three smaller squares -- would work, or it could be something new.
This would solve THREE problems: 1) much less chance of malicious URLs, 2) you wouldn't need to scan it with a machine to see if you even want it in the first place, and 3) they'd be much easier to generate.
One of several cartoons titled "Great moments in evolution"
Wherever he is these days, I hope Gary Larson sees this story and smiles.
Funny -- usually people bitch at Slashdot for linking to crappy blogs instead of the original source.
> All of the above are things that should be taken seriously if
> they actually happened. Complaining on Yelp/Angies List only
> and not following through in the correct legal channels gives
> credence to the lawsuit against her.
Well, the sucky thing is that there are TONS of things that are true, but not provable. I've been fucked over MANY times by contractors and workers, but none of it is provable because I didn't get whatever they promised in writing, didn't take certified before and after pictures, didn't videotape them every second of every day, etc etc etc.
And then there are all the things that would cost more to pursue than they're worth -- am I really going to take the time and expense to sue some shithead who knocks a hole in my drywall, scratches an $80 table, or nails a couple studs in crooked? No, but that doesn't mean they don't suck, and that shouldn't mean that I'm not allowed to complain.
My friend just last week got some furniture from Rooms To Go and it was damaged. TODAY he stayed home to receive the replacements and not only was it also damaged, but the guys who were moving it damaged two other things on his house. (Wall and door sill.) He can (and will) complain, but if needed, how could he prove it? "Wait right there guys. Before you bring that in, I'm going to take photos of every surface you will pass, then print them, then we're all going to sign and date them, and I'm going to video record us signing and dating them, then put that video into a sealed envelope and have it notarized." What the fuck can you possibly do to protect yourself? (Speaking of which, he was told that the guys -- even though they were driving those great gaudy Rooms To Go trucks -- are not actually employees of Rooms To Go. Just FYI.)
Source: homeowner for 14 years, and I've dealt with everything from a loser concrete guy who took $500 and never did any work, to arguing with Home Depot for two years about a $60k job. YOU ARE NEVER SAFE, and you don't always have recourse.
... is that handcuffs do nothing but restrain you. An iPhone restrains you in certain ways but it also enables a whole lot of other things. It's all about trade-offs.
It's the difference between an actual prison, and a prison where you can eat delicious food, see your friends, travel to some extent, etc etc etc., versus living "free" in the woods.
Furthermore, they aren't "handcuffs" in that I can get out of them. I might lose some stuff, but then again, I might not -- it all depends on what I'm doing and how. As it happens, there is nothing on my iPhone that I a) care about and b) couldn't easily move to another system. So depending on who you are, they may not be handcuffs at all.
Finally, it's a continuum. There's a difference between "handcuffs" and "oh well, I guess I can't watch this movie I bought in iTunes anymore because I have an Android phone now." I gain nothing from some pursuit of absolute theoretical perfection. Same thing with security: what do I gain by reading SSL certificates, if I'm going to give my credit card to a 19-year-old in a restaurant to take out of my sight for five minutes the next day? "Those who would trade...", yeah yeah yeah. It is impossible to live a life that is perfect in every way. Have you ever tripped? Well then, why don't you just stare at your feet for every single step you take in all of life? Oh, because the benefits of looking around every hour of every day outweigh tripping on things a couple times a year.
The bigger problem with cell phones, really, are the odious terms from the telcos, like AT&T selling me a fixed number of bytes and then charging extra depending on what I want to do with them. Or requiring that all smartphones have data plans in the first place, and then making the "entry level" plans more and more expensive each year.
Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" was the newest phone OS for a long time, because it was followed by Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" which was only for tablets. A whole bunch of phones shipped with Gingerbread. After a long time Google released Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" and then, after a much shorter time, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean".
> Even the drag racers don't use fiberglass. They use carbon fiber.
They used fiberglass before carbon fiber was affordable. (Or even existed, maybe.) And they still do.
I guess all the sites linked on this site don't exist either. Also, Corvettes don't exist. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Besides, fiberglass won't break into shards. It may break more like wood than metal (which also gets torn to confetti in multi-hundred-mile-per-hour crashes) but it's not, like, flying shards of regular window glass.
Do you even know anything about fiberglass at all?
> The hood is part of the structural strength of the vehicle.
Nearly none. It's held on the back with two small hinges and the front with a clip. It lends a bit of torsional rigidity but not much. Almost not enough to measure. Any car can be driven normally for great distances with no hood. The biggest downfalls are aerodynamics and getting water, dirt, and debris into the engine area.
Also, plastic weak enough to shatter would not be strong enough to go through a laminated windshield -- it would just break against the glass.
And someone else already pointed out -- race cars (and wannabe race cars) have used fiberglass hoods for years.
Same thing with the gun in question: the "lower" is pretty much "the plastic bits that hold the important bits in the right spot."
Still waiting for the day when Slashdot unveils the "-1, factually incorrect" mod.
And being big enough that they can get by without even making a profit.
Wall Street is on board with an Amazon business strategy that doesn't require it to actually make profits as long as it increases sales volumes. And if you're in any line of business where you compete with Amazon--and Amazon is in a lot of businesses, and seems to get into new ones each year--that should terrify you.
13", 1.8 GHz i5 (up to 2.8 GHz), 8 GB, 256 GB, US$1599.
Not trolling, asking seriously: how much difference is there between an i5 and an i7? A 2 GHz i7 Air (up to 3.2 GHz -- a little higher than this XPS) is another $100.
Also, from the Ars article: "All of the additions Dell is bringing to Ubuntu 12.04 are available for free (as in beer)." So could you just buy the Windows version and configure it yourself to save $50?
Bill Gates also thought (in 2004) that we'd defeat spam in two years.
The only fool bigger than one who believes a prediction from MS is one who believes a promise from MS.
> Old Jobs hasn't been in the ground long and already their first
> "convenience over QC" choice has come back to bite them.
Steve Jobs did a lot of great things but he also shipped plenty of crap. .Mac and MobileMe were (I think) the biggest and most recent examples. 2008:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in an e-mail to Apple employees that the company had made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe Internet service, saying that the service âoewas simply not up to Apple's standardsâ and that it "clearly needed more time and testing."
http://www.macworld.com/article/1134854/jobs.html
More than anything, I'm surprised they did ship Maps with such a recent bad experience under their belts. They must have been desperate. The move away from Google was about more than branding.
Sources tell AllThingsD that Google, for example, wanted more say in the iOS maps feature set. It wasn't happy simply providing back-end data. It asked for in-app branding. Apple declined. It suggested adding Google Latitude. Again, Apple declined.
http://allthingsd.com/20120926/apple-google-maps-talks-crashed-over-voice-guided-directions/
Say what you will about Apple -- they've been very good about not handing over user data to advertisers, app creators, or publishers.
I just figured "upholstered" was slang over there, like "plastered" in the US. Love it. A great day for words over here -- first escape goat, now this. :-)