Do you still carry around perforated sheets of $2 bills? I always loved the double aspect of that prank -- bills on a sheet/pad, and messing with people who don't know that $2s are real.* What other shenanigans and tomfoolery are you up to these days?
* Rats. I read about that years ago, but while searching for a link to people who didn't know about that trick, I see that you're still up to it as of 2 months ago. So never mind the first part and skip to "what else are you up to?"
And a rich-text editor for comments. I use caps ALL THE TIME when I'm too lazy to type <em> tags. And maybe a 30-second window to edit for those times when you should have previewed just once more.
And if they add UTF-8 support, how will I know when someone copied-and-pasted a comment from a source that recognizes curly quotes?:-)
PS: just caught the "little-endian" logo. Love it.
I think it'll take off. With prints, they're all pretty much the same, and if you don't have a printer, you can just keep it digitally and say "I'll print it later" or send it to someone else who REALLY wants to print it now. And you never need to, say, print a small square of a thing to paste on top of a bit that got damaged. I, however, am counting the days until I can use a 3D printer to fix the countless little things in my house that break or that I want to improve, like a part of a clip for a phone, or a button on a flashlight, or make a little piece of cross-track so my kid can have two different train sets cross each other. (Like Trackmaster and Take-and-Go Thomas sets.)
So half of it is I really hate how much stuff becomes trash because it cost $2 and a bit of it broke, and the other half is there are millions of little things I can make that are small, light-duty things. With 2D printing, not so much -- there's pretty much 2 things you can do with printing (photos and text) and digital takes away a lot of the need for both.
I know they don't have the ability to match Lego's 2-micron process, but there are TONS of things you can do with 1mm tolerance plastic. And the whole point of making it at home is the instant-ness of it -- unlike with printing, there's a lot of trial and error involved, and I don't want to have to wait 2 days (and pay to ship 3 ounces of plastic) to see if I designed my new toothbrush holder properly.
I started using Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.5.5 in 1995. First saw, heard of, and used Linux in 96/97. Got my first Linux system in early 1998. I never got into it heavily for full-time desktop use, but I checked it out repeatedly over the years, starting with
- RedHat 5.1 or 5.2, because RH had the reputation of being the easiest to install and use at the time. Came in a phonebook-sized tome from Que that also included Slackware and a third distro (I forget which)
- Around 1999/2000, Caldera was the new hotness. 2.2 and 2.3, I think. Installed nicely on a Compaq 5280, with color, sound, and networking with PCMCIA cards. (And before they got bought by SCO.) But it wasn't enough to pull me away from Windows 2000 on the desktop, which ran like a Swiss watch and had all the apps I actually used for work from MS and Adobe.
- Then back to Red Hat for 7.x
- Next up on the easy-to-use list was Knoppix.
- Then I didn't do much for a while but I played with Ubuntu versions 5-9.
And then XP started getting worse and worse and OS X started getting better and better and now it's all I use. (Other than for testing and servers.)
DO NOT enjoy a nice communal stroll down memory lane.
Icebike has kindly taken a few minutes of his life to tell us all that we should not pleasantly waste a few minutes of our own. LISTEN TO HIM! He knows better than you do how you should spend your time, and he has been kind enough to expose our ignorance and show us the error of our ways.
THANK YOU, ICEBIKE!
(Note: at this time, properly calibrated sarcasm detectors should look like the first 10 minutes of a Michael Bay film.)
... if it's so valuable and scarce, why is it so cheap? You would think that this is the kind of thing that really would get itself sorted out by the market, and I don't think there's "big helium" or government subsidies happening behind the scenes to mess things up.
3 old and one new phone, actually; and a few models of iPod and 2 models of iPad, plus several carriers and several cellular technologies.
> and when iDrones see an update notification they > automatically do it.
That's the whole point. They don't update because they're "iDrones", they update because it fucking works.
> And lets not forget that most updates to iTunes force > you to update the iPhone software to work correctly.
Bullshit. Every so often, you're forced to update iTunes to work with the newest OS, but this week's iTunes still works with my five-year-old original iPhone on iOS 3.x. You might need to update to the newest minor version in some cases (I'm not sure about that, but I'll go ahead and concede that to make my next point) but why not? THIS WHOLE SHIT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The fact that it's newsworthy that one company has made software updates work pretty smoothly in 2012 is pretty fucking sad.
Partly this is Android being jerked around by the carriers, but it's also a matter of a bunch of OEMs who don't give a shit about a device once it's been sold, compared to the one company that actually wants you to be a happy customer and voluntarily return to buy more, and not just say "Well my old phone from X sucks, so I'll get a new one, but I'll stick with X, because all the rest are probably just as bad and at least I'm familiar with this one."
>> Who would even buy a Kindle from WalMart or Target in the first place?
> People who shop at Target and Walmart? People who broke theirs and > need a replacement immediately? People who wants theirs immediately? > (It's the same price, after all)
People who hate the thought of having to deal with shipping something back to a retailer if there's a problem? (Me.) People who bought it on sale? ($79 and got a $30 gift card -- also me.) People who save 5% by using their Target card? Etc etc etc.
For online banking at my bank, you pick a password that is numbers and letters only, and it is case-insensitive. (The reason for this is so you can punch it in on a phone's numeric keypad.) So, 36 possible characters. Happy cracking!
McClure shared an office with someone from the Whole Earth Software Catalog. His computer, a Compaq, sat on a piece of white plywood board; he cadged a stenographer's chair from the Whole Earth office. It was high tech in the middle of funk, and funk wasn't the ideal setting in which to launch a cutting-edge enterprise. The building had no insulation to speak of, and the roof leaked. In the summer the office was an inferno, and in the winter the temperature indoors dipped into the 50s. The computer room, a modified closet, was just big enough for the disk drive and CPU cabinets. A window-mounted air conditioner -- the largest unit Sears sold -- cooled the VAX.
Or compare that to an iPad, with a glorious IPS display with twice the pixels of most desktops. And images on the web are ZOOMABLE! A 4"x4" print in an art book at 300dpi is only 1200x1200 pixels. Images on the web can EASILY be 10x bigger. Also, no screen has been 72 dpi for over ten years. They START at 100 anymore, most are 110-130 -- that's 2x-3x as many pixels per square inch than 72.
The problem with books is the colors will all be wrong. There are TONS of colors that exist in paint (to say nothing of other materials) that can't be reproduced with CMYK. Plus it depends on being photographed and processed correctly in the first place, and then printed perfectly. Oh yeah, and color will change over time. You think there's something magical about printing that makes it an exact reproduction of the original?
Add to that the fixed resolution, finite number of views for sculpture, etc etc etc... I'd take an electronic art book over a printed book every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
And to top it all off, Apple is famous for having patents for things that never see the light of day. I've been waiting ten years for my color-changing case. Like all companies, they patent everything they can think of (which is a whole other problem) but only a fraction of it ever gets made.
So, long story short: don't worry about it until it's available. And then, DON'T BUY IT.
> Everyone wants Microsoft Windows on a tablet. They're already > lining up for it. It's Windows -- the same interface, the same > applications, compatibility with all the Microsoft back end processes...
Ooh, sorry, you thought Windows 8 on ARM could join a domain? Nope.
Maybe, in order to make news relevant to readers, they chose to compare to something most readers are familiar with? That's pretty much the point of analogies and comparisons.
Why do you think we ever talked about storage in terms of "Libraries of Congress" in the first place?
> Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of > current day standards, and not a commercial.
RTMFA! It has numbers. OF COURSE the summary has the appealing bits. Welcome to journalism. Welcome to the Internet. Welcome to the human species.
Wow, +5 for that? OBVIOUSLY he didn't truly mean "not one single person on Earth." As of December 2011, Windows Phone was at 1% of the market. Double that--hell, quadruple it if you want--and it's still not that much.
Android - 190 M - 31% Symbian - 190 M - 31% iOS - 114 M - 17% Blackberry - 93 M - 14% Windows Mobile - 17 M - 3% bada - 8 M - 1% Windows Phone - 5 M - 1%
Based on Apple's history, it's actually a pretty sound decision. There might be some hiccups or issues but Apple has not, to my knowledge, released a product with fatal flaws. Your chances of receiving an unusable Apple device on Day 1 are extremely thin.* In this particular case, this is the 3rd revision of the iPhone 4, so most of the issues have been worked out. Flaws in the past have led to further development and testing.
If there are problems, they usually aren't as bad as they're made out to be, and if they are bad, Apple usually makes good on them. Plus it's just a regular old product. You can return it for little to no loss.
Or maybe she just want to make sure employees have good mobile devices since they're, you know, the future.* Maybe she recognizes how horribly Flickr missed their opportunity on mobile and doesn't want that to happen again.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you still carry around perforated sheets of $2 bills? I always loved the double aspect of that prank -- bills on a sheet/pad, and messing with people who don't know that $2s are real.* What other shenanigans and tomfoolery are you up to these days?
* Rats. I read about that years ago, but while searching for a link to people who didn't know about that trick, I see that you're still up to it as of 2 months ago. So never mind the first part and skip to "what else are you up to?"
Also, thanks for, you know, everything. :-)
This is why I come to Slashdot: for posts that are best read while imagining Comic Book Guy's voice. :-)
And a rich-text editor for comments. I use caps ALL THE TIME when I'm too lazy to type <em> tags. And maybe a 30-second window to edit for those times when you should have previewed just once more.
And if they add UTF-8 support, how will I know when someone copied-and-pasted a comment from a source that recognizes curly quotes? :-)
PS: just caught the "little-endian" logo. Love it.
> He didn't lose the money when he got fired, I would say
> he lost it by not having a golden parachute.
If nothing else, it should be your goal to steal your weight in office supplies every 8 months.
BRB -- department admin just opened a new box of post-its.
I think it'll take off. With prints, they're all pretty much the same, and if you don't have a printer, you can just keep it digitally and say "I'll print it later" or send it to someone else who REALLY wants to print it now. And you never need to, say, print a small square of a thing to paste on top of a bit that got damaged. I, however, am counting the days until I can use a 3D printer to fix the countless little things in my house that break or that I want to improve, like a part of a clip for a phone, or a button on a flashlight, or make a little piece of cross-track so my kid can have two different train sets cross each other. (Like Trackmaster and Take-and-Go Thomas sets.)
So half of it is I really hate how much stuff becomes trash because it cost $2 and a bit of it broke, and the other half is there are millions of little things I can make that are small, light-duty things. With 2D printing, not so much -- there's pretty much 2 things you can do with printing (photos and text) and digital takes away a lot of the need for both.
I know they don't have the ability to match Lego's 2-micron process, but there are TONS of things you can do with 1mm tolerance plastic. And the whole point of making it at home is the instant-ness of it -- unlike with printing, there's a lot of trial and error involved, and I don't want to have to wait 2 days (and pay to ship 3 ounces of plastic) to see if I designed my new toothbrush holder properly.
I started using Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.5.5 in 1995. First saw, heard of, and used Linux in 96/97. Got my first Linux system in early 1998. I never got into it heavily for full-time desktop use, but I checked it out repeatedly over the years, starting with
- RedHat 5.1 or 5.2, because RH had the reputation of being the easiest to install and use at the time. Came in a phonebook-sized tome from Que that also included Slackware and a third distro (I forget which)
- Around 1999/2000, Caldera was the new hotness. 2.2 and 2.3, I think. Installed nicely on a Compaq 5280, with color, sound, and networking with PCMCIA cards. (And before they got bought by SCO.) But it wasn't enough to pull me away from Windows 2000 on the desktop, which ran like a Swiss watch and had all the apps I actually used for work from MS and Adobe.
- Then back to Red Hat for 7.x
- Next up on the easy-to-use list was Knoppix.
- Then I didn't do much for a while but I played with Ubuntu versions 5-9.
And then XP started getting worse and worse and OS X started getting better and better and now it's all I use. (Other than for testing and servers.)
Everyone, LISTEN TO ICEBIKE!
DO NOT answer the OP's question.
DO NOT enjoy a nice communal stroll down memory lane.
Icebike has kindly taken a few minutes of his life to tell us all that we should not pleasantly waste a few minutes of our own. LISTEN TO HIM! He knows better than you do how you should spend your time, and he has been kind enough to expose our ignorance and show us the error of our ways.
THANK YOU, ICEBIKE!
(Note: at this time, properly calibrated sarcasm detectors should look like the first 10 minutes of a Michael Bay film.)
This guy's gonna need to redo his flowchart.
55? Oh my gracious no, double that. If you have a moment, I highly recommend you re-read the original post while imagining Mr Burns' voice.
> I like to think of myself a I/O aficionado.
> I have a friend who's a memory expert.
If I drank coffee, you'd owe me a new keyboard and/or screen. :-)
... if it's so valuable and scarce, why is it so cheap? You would think that this is the kind of thing that really would get itself sorted out by the market, and I don't think there's "big helium" or government subsidies happening behind the scenes to mess things up.
> Of course adoption is sky high; it's 1 phone
3 old and one new phone, actually; and a few models of iPod and 2 models of iPad, plus several carriers and several cellular technologies.
> and when iDrones see an update notification they
> automatically do it.
That's the whole point. They don't update because they're "iDrones", they update because it fucking works.
> And lets not forget that most updates to iTunes force
> you to update the iPhone software to work correctly.
Bullshit. Every so often, you're forced to update iTunes to work with the newest OS, but this week's iTunes still works with my five-year-old original iPhone on iOS 3.x. You might need to update to the newest minor version in some cases (I'm not sure about that, but I'll go ahead and concede that to make my next point) but why not? THIS WHOLE SHIT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The fact that it's newsworthy that one company has made software updates work pretty smoothly in 2012 is pretty fucking sad.
Partly this is Android being jerked around by the carriers, but it's also a matter of a bunch of OEMs who don't give a shit about a device once it's been sold, compared to the one company that actually wants you to be a happy customer and voluntarily return to buy more, and not just say "Well my old phone from X sucks, so I'll get a new one, but I'll stick with X, because all the rest are probably just as bad and at least I'm familiar with this one."
... the really funny part is it also eclipses the over-one-year-old Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) as well.
>> Who would even buy a Kindle from WalMart or Target in the first place?
> People who shop at Target and Walmart? People who broke theirs and
> need a replacement immediately? People who wants theirs immediately?
> (It's the same price, after all)
People who hate the thought of having to deal with shipping something back to a retailer if there's a problem? (Me.) People who bought it on sale? ($79 and got a $30 gift card -- also me.) People who save 5% by using their Target card? Etc etc etc.
For online banking at my bank, you pick a password that is numbers and letters only, and it is case-insensitive. (The reason for this is so you can punch it in on a phone's numeric keypad.) So, 36 possible characters. Happy cracking!
... why doesn't the W3C make a browser (or a rendering engine) that implements 100% of the spec 100% perfectly? (No, Amaya isn't quite it.)
Wired, May 1997 - The Epic Saga of The Well
McClure shared an office with someone from the Whole Earth Software Catalog. His computer, a Compaq, sat on a piece of white plywood board; he cadged a stenographer's chair from the Whole Earth office. It was high tech in the middle of funk, and funk wasn't the ideal setting in which to launch a cutting-edge enterprise. The building had no insulation to speak of, and the roof leaked. In the summer the office was an inferno, and in the winter the temperature indoors dipped into the 50s. The computer room, a modified closet, was just big enough for the disk drive and CPU cabinets. A window-mounted air conditioner -- the largest unit Sears sold -- cooled the VAX.
Or compare that to an iPad, with a glorious IPS display with twice the pixels of most desktops. And images on the web are ZOOMABLE! A 4"x4" print in an art book at 300dpi is only 1200x1200 pixels. Images on the web can EASILY be 10x bigger. Also, no screen has been 72 dpi for over ten years. They START at 100 anymore, most are 110-130 -- that's 2x-3x as many pixels per square inch than 72.
The problem with books is the colors will all be wrong. There are TONS of colors that exist in paint (to say nothing of other materials) that can't be reproduced with CMYK. Plus it depends on being photographed and processed correctly in the first place, and then printed perfectly. Oh yeah, and color will change over time. You think there's something magical about printing that makes it an exact reproduction of the original?
Add to that the fixed resolution, finite number of views for sculpture, etc etc etc... I'd take an electronic art book over a printed book every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Pfft, Michaelangelo's "Broken Link" pales in comparison to Rembrandt's "NO HOTLINKING" gif. Get some colture, heathen.
And to top it all off, Apple is famous for having patents for things that never see the light of day. I've been waiting ten years for my color-changing case. Like all companies, they patent everything they can think of (which is a whole other problem) but only a fraction of it ever gets made.
So, long story short: don't worry about it until it's available. And then, DON'T BUY IT.
> Everyone wants Microsoft Windows on a tablet. They're already
> lining up for it. It's Windows -- the same interface, the same
> applications, compatibility with all the Microsoft back end processes...
Ooh, sorry, you thought Windows 8 on ARM could join a domain? Nope.
Maybe, in order to make news relevant to readers, they chose to compare to something most readers are familiar with? That's pretty much the point of analogies and comparisons.
Why do you think we ever talked about storage in terms of "Libraries of Congress" in the first place?
> Give me damn benchmarks or clock speed of
> current day standards, and not a commercial.
RTMFA! It has numbers. OF COURSE the summary has the appealing bits. Welcome to journalism. Welcome to the Internet. Welcome to the human species.
More info from a year ago: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-ipad-in-your-hand-as-fast-as-a-supercomputer-of-yore/
Wow, +5 for that? OBVIOUSLY he didn't truly mean "not one single person on Earth." As of December 2011, Windows Phone was at 1% of the market. Double that--hell, quadruple it if you want--and it's still not that much.
Android - 190 M - 31%
Symbian - 190 M - 31%
iOS - 114 M - 17%
Blackberry - 93 M - 14%
Windows Mobile - 17 M - 3%
bada - 8 M - 1%
Windows Phone - 5 M - 1%
Based on Apple's history, it's actually a pretty sound decision. There might be some hiccups or issues but Apple has not, to my knowledge, released a product with fatal flaws. Your chances of receiving an unusable Apple device on Day 1 are extremely thin.* In this particular case, this is the 3rd revision of the iPhone 4, so most of the issues have been worked out. Flaws in the past have led to further development and testing.
If there are problems, they usually aren't as bad as they're made out to be, and if they are bad, Apple usually makes good on them. Plus it's just a regular old product. You can return it for little to no loss.
* Anecdotes, line up here... ->
Or maybe she just want to make sure employees have good mobile devices since they're, you know, the future.* Maybe she recognizes how horribly Flickr missed their opportunity on mobile and doesn't want that to happen again.
* and the present.