FWIW, I work with a lot of code that was written pre-standard, and the pre-standard compilers to match, every day, and it can be very frustrating when things that are trivial in standard C++ take extra code clutter and testing time to achieve "just because". I feel your pain!:-)
Ironic how the non-standard shortcuts, now that everyone's been "forced" to code to standards, are now considered to be "extra code clutter." Makes one wonder why people used them in the first place. From this perspective, it sounds to me like the intentional "breakage" in GCC 3 was a Good Thing.
What I don't understand though, is how people (read: the ad geniuses) at these companies can seriously think that their cheesy ass ads will ACTUALLY draw customers.
With ten years of empirical research they'd *know* what motivates people to purchase. sigh.
Apparently, they think they do. From TFA:
The many forms of marketing and advertising it enables---permission email, keyword-targeted search engine advertising, floating animated page takeovers, interactive onpage rich media ads, streaming audio and video, consumer-fueled "viral marketing," to name a few--have excited early adopters and now mainstream marketers in ways that traditional advertising has not seen the likes of since the early days of color television.
"Viral Marketing" -- WOW! "Interactive on-page rich media ads" -- SWEET! "Floating animated page takeovers" -- SIGN ME UP!
It almost sounds as if they're proud of these things.
Re:Not being trollish, but... [generic-man]
on
Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
"...Doubleclick is one of the most comment advertising hosts, but you can block anything with "doubleclick" in the url by using this expression: http://*doubleclick* Voila. That blocks nearly all ads on the page."
Excellent post. Just wanted to add to that last line that you'll not only block nearly all ads on the page, but on any other page that use the same ad provider, as well. In the case of doubleclick, this seems like half of the Internet. Bonus!
Due to the nature of centralized online advertising, if you focus initially on a few well-selected sites (covering the normal gamut of your online surfing activities) and are judicious in your pattern-matching expressions, you'll find that you'll be blocking 90% of all ads in a matter of minutes (even on sites you've never visited)!
Give it a shot; it's quite satisfying. >8)
Re:The question every firefox user is asking
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Quote from the headline: from the all-nine-users-cheer dept.
Wow! I thought I was the only one who even knew about Stunts! I stopped trying to dig up that game on the Internet a long time ago. Has someone made an open source clone? That would rule; I'll have to look. =)
Another great game that I would wax nostalgic to see done well and updated: Scorched Earth (The Mother of All Games). I think I remember seeing an xscorch before, but had a hard time getting it to work. Now that I'm a little bit older, though, I bet I could make some decent contributions, if it's still active.
For those like me who just cannot stand that brightly colored distraction at the top of the app:
Drag any toolbar button on the line with the flashy advertisement down about half its height. This will make a new bar with only that button on it.
Next, drag the rest of the buttons down to the new bar.
Once the last button is moved to the new bar, the old one (and the flashy ad with it!) will disappear and your new ad-less toolbar will move up to replace it.
Locking the toolbars here will prevent it from returning the next time you start the app.
If you've used the program, you'll note that it's extremely complete in terms of interface. Hardly an effort worth taking for just one free app on platforms where a simple display of the.pdf would suffice for most people. I wouldn't count the possibility of future Adobe products for Linux out just yet. They did a great deal of the underlying interface structure--arguably the hardest common ground between programs; they'd be insane not to reuse it.
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
When your PHB comes back from the latest conference with the impression that it's the latest thing that "everyone's" doing (and was also, incidentally, developed by the same people by whom the conference was funded).
Actually, from what I understand, they didn't just give free copies of their proprietary product, but instead created a separate-but-similar free version which was modified to suit the needs of the kernel development community. Unfortunately, one need which he didn't seem to forsee was the "need" for programmers to be able to communicate with it using programs other than the product itself. I put "need" in quotes because I'm not sure if it was exactly necessary for Tridge to do what he did, but for a hacker, that's not necessarily the point. >8)
It's a POSIX-compliant OS. POSIX is the standard to which Linux was built to comply, not "UNIX" which is a proprietary system. That's like saying you can't bake a cake without "reverse-engineering" one from a local bakery.
Terrorists seem to care very little whom they kill. They use killing to make their point. Modern militaries try to kill only the people who are armed against them, and the least amount necessary to get the job done. They use killing if necessary to enforce their point.
A subtle distinction, for sure, but an important one.
Yes, the horrible brainwashing that causes us to work long hours of usually-unpaid overtime to ensure the safety of the people using the equipment we design while operating it in the most unsafe environment imaginable. Forgive me, I should not have fallen for such a obvious dastardly government plot to, um, keep its citizens alive...?
Just a note of clarification that your above comment reminded me about: you only get access to the SIPRNet if you work on a classified project that requires network access and you personally have a need to use it for the project. Basically, it's one of the many things that must be taken care of when a project goes classified, and requires an appropriately brain-melting amount of paperwork and red tape to get put into place.
Slashdot Mirror
/snicker...if they moved to that system they'd have to call it PornRank.
Who cares if they change staff, it's not like it's going to impact on world peace/trade or anything else as a matter of fact.
Might impact the development of one of the most critical tools on the Internet, but you're right, that'd just be news for nerds.
Oh, wait...
Hail and Well Met!
FWIW, I work with a lot of code that was written pre-standard, and the pre-standard compilers to match, every day, and it can be very frustrating when things that are trivial in standard C++ take extra code clutter and testing time to achieve "just because". I feel your pain! :-)
Ironic how the non-standard shortcuts, now that everyone's been "forced" to code to standards, are now considered to be "extra code clutter." Makes one wonder why people used them in the first place. From this perspective, it sounds to me like the intentional "breakage" in GCC 3 was a Good Thing.
Well, at least he's up front about it. >8)
Honesty is the best policy.
Wish I had mod points. You should do a site with these. >8)
The world according to Google.
Hey, so there really IS something on the other side of that big lake!
Who knew?
"This will eventually lead to better quality advertising as well as more polished ads."
There's a contradiction in terms in that sentence somewhere...
What I don't understand though, is how people (read: the ad geniuses) at these companies can seriously think that their cheesy ass ads will ACTUALLY draw customers.
Get a free iPod, I did
Words fail here.
Apparently, they think they do. From TFA:
"Viral Marketing" -- WOW!
"Interactive on-page rich media ads" -- SWEET!
"Floating animated page takeovers" -- SIGN ME UP!
It almost sounds as if they're proud of these things.
"...Doubleclick is one of the most comment advertising hosts, but you can block anything with "doubleclick" in the url by using this expression: http://*doubleclick* Voila. That blocks nearly all ads on the page."
Excellent post. Just wanted to add to that last line that you'll not only block nearly all ads on the page, but on any other page that use the same ad provider, as well. In the case of doubleclick, this seems like half of the Internet. Bonus!
Due to the nature of centralized online advertising, if you focus initially on a few well-selected sites (covering the normal gamut of your online surfing activities) and are judicious in your pattern-matching expressions, you'll find that you'll be blocking 90% of all ads in a matter of minutes (even on sites you've never visited)!
Give it a shot; it's quite satisfying. >8)
Quote from the headline:
from the all-nine-users-cheer dept.
Reding is gud
Wow! I thought I was the only one who even knew about Stunts! I stopped trying to dig up that game on the Internet a long time ago. Has someone made an open source clone? That would rule; I'll have to look. =)
Another great game that I would wax nostalgic to see done well and updated: Scorched Earth (The Mother of All Games). I think I remember seeing an xscorch before, but had a hard time getting it to work. Now that I'm a little bit older, though, I bet I could make some decent contributions, if it's still active.
Erm, thanks?
I figure us OCDs gotta stick together. >8p
Thus the reason they're dubbed the "Increasingly Innacurately-Named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy".
(Yes, I know you put a sarcasm tag in there, but I'm not quite sure that you actually meant it in that respect.)
For those like me who just cannot stand that brightly colored distraction at the top of the app:
Drag any toolbar button on the line with the flashy advertisement down about half its height. This will make a new bar with only that button on it.
Next, drag the rest of the buttons down to the new bar.
Once the last button is moved to the new bar, the old one (and the flashy ad with it!) will disappear and your new ad-less toolbar will move up to replace it.
Locking the toolbars here will prevent it from returning the next time you start the app.
If you've used the program, you'll note that it's extremely complete in terms of interface. Hardly an effort worth taking for just one free app on platforms where a simple display of the .pdf would suffice for most people. I wouldn't count the possibility of future Adobe products for Linux out just yet. They did a great deal of the underlying interface structure--arguably the hardest common ground between programs; they'd be insane not to reuse it.
Ba-Dum *ching*
That's, obviously, another issue entirely, and up to Tridge and BM to work out. >8)
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
When your PHB comes back from the latest conference with the impression that it's the latest thing that "everyone's" doing (and was also, incidentally, developed by the same people by whom the conference was funded).
Actually, from what I understand, they didn't just give free copies of their proprietary product, but instead created a separate-but-similar free version which was modified to suit the needs of the kernel development community. Unfortunately, one need which he didn't seem to forsee was the "need" for programmers to be able to communicate with it using programs other than the product itself. I put "need" in quotes because I'm not sure if it was exactly necessary for Tridge to do what he did, but for a hacker, that's not necessarily the point. >8)
It's a POSIX-compliant OS. POSIX is the standard to which Linux was built to comply, not "UNIX" which is a proprietary system. That's like saying you can't bake a cake without "reverse-engineering" one from a local bakery.
Terrorists seem to care very little whom they kill. They use killing to make their point. Modern militaries try to kill only the people who are armed against them, and the least amount necessary to get the job done. They use killing if necessary to enforce their point.
A subtle distinction, for sure, but an important one.
Yes, the horrible brainwashing that causes us to work long hours of usually-unpaid overtime to ensure the safety of the people using the equipment we design while operating it in the most unsafe environment imaginable. Forgive me, I should not have fallen for such a obvious dastardly government plot to, um, keep its citizens alive...?
Just a note of clarification that your above comment reminded me about: you only get access to the SIPRNet if you work on a classified project that requires network access and you personally have a need to use it for the project. Basically, it's one of the many things that must be taken care of when a project goes classified, and requires an appropriately brain-melting amount of paperwork and red tape to get put into place.