Their point stands if you substitute another word. My thesaurus skills are failing me at the moment, so let's temporarily define "foobar" as meaning "of a nature that you would not like the general public to see".
1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post foobar photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.
2. If you engage in foobar activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in foobar activities.
We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.
In fact, in my experience -- which may differ from that of others -- Facebook was the first social network site *not* to suffer from the "must get as many friends as possible" problem.
The first one to come to my attention was sixdegrees.com -- long dead, although someone seems to have grabbed the domain again -- which had the potential to provide some interesting numbers. Just how many friends-of-friends do I have? How many 3rd degree friends, etc. But it was ruined by hordes of people taking it as a challenge to get as many first-degree "friends" as possible: spamming all their 2nd degree friends and asking for a reciprocal "add", massively skewing the figures. MySpace was the same.
Perhaps *because* it is used for fairly personal updates and conversations, fewer people seem to add strangers as Facebook contacts.
At least, that's the way it seems to be among my circle of friends.
It's a pain to turn off all the default features that facebook conveniently opts-in for you. By WHY should we have to?
Because Facebook is *for* sharing information. The less you share, the less useful it is. Yes, I am interested in photographs taken of my friends by friends of theirs that I haven't met. Yes, I'm happy for them to see similar photos of me. Yes, I want to converse in comment threads with friends-of-friends.
If the default FB privacy settings were very tight, most people would not find the site useful. Not enough people would delve into the settings and open them up. Most people would try it, find little of interest, and never visit again.
It's the openness that attracts people to the site.
what's worrying me is that my friends might have intrusive apps that ask for "friend info" and then my info that was supposed to be in a relatively private circle suddenly become much more public than they were supposed to be.
I seem to be saying this a lot in this discussion - but you can disable that.
There's a privacy setting to control what friends' apps can see about you -- distinct from what friends can see about you.
You might argue that the default is too open. I can sympathise with that -- on the other hand the purpose of the system is to share information with friends, and if everyone had it locked down, it would defeat that purpose.
But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.
Yeah it does, if you can be bothered with the admin.
You can create groups, and categorise your contacts into them. Then you can specify how much of your profile and your activity can be seen by each group.
I have a "limited profile" group, into which I place people who ask to be a "friend", when I feel it would be rude to ignore them, but don't really want them to see everything.
You can also choose to prevent friends-of-friends from seeing your stuff.
At worst, the defaults are possibly a bit too open.
Coca Cola *does* have a Facebook page, and appears to spend money keeping it alive.
Now, I'm not saying they'd be in *trouble* without one. But it does appear that Coke's marketing people thing it's a worthwhile investment, and I bet Facebook viral stuff pushed by Pepsi is threatening Coke sales (admittedly, tiny percentages, but still large numbers I suspect).
My company -- very much not consumer-oriented -- has someone who as part of their job, tends corporate Facebook and Twitter identities, intended as something a customer would follow.
But, example -- I went to a music festival with a group of about 10 people, some of whom I'm close to, some of whom I'm not. We did all the organisation -- when and where to meet up, where to camp, who's driving, what to take, etc. in a thread in a private Facebook group.
I think that having an asynchronous, persistent system like that is a lot easier for ongoing conversations with more than, say, 4 people.
Yes, email, or a forum, or Google Wave (RIP) fits the bill too. But in this case the originator of the conversation chose Facebook, so it's likely that anyone not on it would have been excluded from the conversation (maybe you'd be happy with that? Let everyone else discuss the options, and then phone you with their decisions, as a fait accomplis?)
I don't see a reason *not* to get a FB account. It costs nothing. You can alleviate privacy concerns by not putting anything private on there.
It depends on network effects. Are many of your friends/family using Facebook? If so, it might be polite to them if you were to sign up.
Nobody forces you to put sensitive private information on there. You can block any apps that irritate you.
My contacts have settled down into a very mature use pattern now; it's used for twitter-like microblogging, sharing photos, and -- crucially -- for forum-like discussions e.g. planning a party or some other kind of get-together. I haven't had a virtual sheep thrown at me, nor been bitten by a virtual zombie, for years.
Sure, you could say "I can use email for that", but if everyone else would prefer to use Facebook, your not being on it causes them a nuisance.
It's also quite handy for remembering people's birthdays;)
I don't think you can fully appreciate the deep beauty of the Mandelbrot set until you've coded your own program to render it. Sure, once you've done it, use someone else's implementation -- it's sure to be faster, more flexible and have a nicer UI. But writing your own makes you understand the underlying maths.
I wrote mine in Basic on a BBC Micro. I'd leave it overnight to render a full screen 320x256, 4bpp.
If you've not written a Mandelbrot renderer, I'd suggest either starting blind, or studying the example above, then rewriting it without looking at the original.
Screens are different, but as resolutions improve, less so year on year.
Are you talking about reading code? I agree that a monospace font is essential for code -- although I wouldn't choose Courier. Consolas FTW!
For prose, why would you care about a single or a double space? Or in most cases, rn vs m -- when reading prose in your native language, you usually recognise whole words rather than a letter at a time, and I think serif fonts generally aid that.
I should have mentioned, what really matters for audio is latency -- for example, if you're playing an electric guitar through GarageBand or Logic's amp simulators, latency in the sound card can be very noticeable (I've had issues even with GarageBand running natively on a G4 Mac Mini).
It "feels" as if a virtualised OSX would introduce extra latency, but I don't want to jump to conclusions. Does anyone have experience with doing latency-sensitive audio work in VirtualBox?
How can a fixie be "faster" at accelerating than a multi-geared bike? Just put the geared bike into the gear that corresponds most closely to your fixie's gearing.
Courier/Courier New. It's actually easier to read due to the serif and the wide spacing,
I'm willing to believe that you find Courier easier to read; I mean we're all different.
But research shows that for body text, a variable spaced, serif font like Times is easiest for most people to read, which is why almost all newspapers, books and web pages use it.
It seems to me that suffering is a more complicated sensation than pain, requiring that the subject is thinking about their condition, wishing it would stop, dwelling on the unfairness of it, etc. All of that requires quite a sophisticated brain.
Tricky, since an Association Football pitch, for non-international matches could be as small as 45m * 91m = 4,095m^2 or as large as 91m * 120m = 10,920m^2
But then I suppose "several" is sufficiently vague to compensate for the variation.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said anything about incriminating.
I'm talking photos at a bar or a party.
Why would you mind people seeing those?
Their point stands if you substitute another word. My thesaurus skills are failing me at the moment, so let's temporarily define "foobar" as meaning "of a nature that you would not like the general public to see".
1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post foobar photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.
2. If you engage in foobar activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in foobar activities.
the idea of losing your job over something your asshole friend posted was not at all addressed by your post.
Don't they have unfair dismissal laws where you come from?
We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.
In fact, in my experience -- which may differ from that of others -- Facebook was the first social network site *not* to suffer from the "must get as many friends as possible" problem.
The first one to come to my attention was sixdegrees.com -- long dead, although someone seems to have grabbed the domain again -- which had the potential to provide some interesting numbers. Just how many friends-of-friends do I have? How many 3rd degree friends, etc. But it was ruined by hordes of people taking it as a challenge to get as many first-degree "friends" as possible: spamming all their 2nd degree friends and asking for a reciprocal "add", massively skewing the figures. MySpace was the same.
Perhaps *because* it is used for fairly personal updates and conversations, fewer people seem to add strangers as Facebook contacts.
At least, that's the way it seems to be among my circle of friends.
Advertise carpet cleaning products and offer discounts on Doritos from a specific online retailer.
Crap! I'd better cancel my Facebook account; someone might target some ads at me...
It's a pain to turn off all the default features that facebook conveniently opts-in for you. By WHY should we have to?
Because Facebook is *for* sharing information. The less you share, the less useful it is. Yes, I am interested in photographs taken of my friends by friends of theirs that I haven't met. Yes, I'm happy for them to see similar photos of me. Yes, I want to converse in comment threads with friends-of-friends.
If the default FB privacy settings were very tight, most people would not find the site useful. Not enough people would delve into the settings and open them up. Most people would try it, find little of interest, and never visit again.
It's the openness that attracts people to the site.
what's worrying me is that my friends might have intrusive apps that ask for "friend info" and then my info that was supposed to be in a relatively private circle suddenly become much more public than they were supposed to be.
I seem to be saying this a lot in this discussion - but you can disable that.
There's a privacy setting to control what friends' apps can see about you -- distinct from what friends can see about you.
You might argue that the default is too open. I can sympathise with that -- on the other hand the purpose of the system is to share information with friends, and if everyone had it locked down, it would defeat that purpose.
You can disable that if it really bothers you.
But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.
Yeah it does, if you can be bothered with the admin.
You can create groups, and categorise your contacts into them. Then you can specify how much of your profile and your activity can be seen by each group.
I have a "limited profile" group, into which I place people who ask to be a "friend", when I feel it would be rude to ignore them, but don't really want them to see everything.
You can also choose to prevent friends-of-friends from seeing your stuff.
At worst, the defaults are possibly a bit too open.
Delete your Facebook account like I did.
... or you could keep it, and not post anything you consider private on it.
Coca Cola *does* have a Facebook page, and appears to spend money keeping it alive.
Now, I'm not saying they'd be in *trouble* without one. But it does appear that Coke's marketing people thing it's a worthwhile investment, and I bet Facebook viral stuff pushed by Pepsi is threatening Coke sales (admittedly, tiny percentages, but still large numbers I suspect).
My company -- very much not consumer-oriented -- has someone who as part of their job, tends corporate Facebook and Twitter identities, intended as something a customer would follow.
Yeah, the phone has its uses.
But, example -- I went to a music festival with a group of about 10 people, some of whom I'm close to, some of whom I'm not. We did all the organisation -- when and where to meet up, where to camp, who's driving, what to take, etc. in a thread in a private Facebook group.
I think that having an asynchronous, persistent system like that is a lot easier for ongoing conversations with more than, say, 4 people.
Yes, email, or a forum, or Google Wave (RIP) fits the bill too. But in this case the originator of the conversation chose Facebook, so it's likely that anyone not on it would have been excluded from the conversation (maybe you'd be happy with that? Let everyone else discuss the options, and then phone you with their decisions, as a fait accomplis?)
I don't see a reason *not* to get a FB account. It costs nothing. You can alleviate privacy concerns by not putting anything private on there.
To be fair, as long as he's using FB on his droid, there's no scope for a 3rd party app to put malware on his PC.
Is it time to get a Facebook Account?
It depends on network effects. Are many of your friends/family using Facebook? If so, it might be polite to them if you were to sign up.
Nobody forces you to put sensitive private information on there. You can block any apps that irritate you.
My contacts have settled down into a very mature use pattern now; it's used for twitter-like microblogging, sharing photos, and -- crucially -- for forum-like discussions e.g. planning a party or some other kind of get-together. I haven't had a virtual sheep thrown at me, nor been bitten by a virtual zombie, for years.
Sure, you could say "I can use email for that", but if everyone else would prefer to use Facebook, your not being on it causes them a nuisance.
It's also quite handy for remembering people's birthdays ;)
I don't think you can fully appreciate the deep beauty of the Mandelbrot set until you've coded your own program to render it. Sure, once you've done it, use someone else's implementation -- it's sure to be faster, more flexible and have a nicer UI. But writing your own makes you understand the underlying maths.
I wrote mine in Basic on a BBC Micro. I'd leave it overnight to render a full screen 320x256, 4bpp.
Now it's a piece of cake in Processing or Processing.js, and renders pretty much instantly:
http://processingjs.org/learning/topic/mandelbrot
If you've not written a Mandelbrot renderer, I'd suggest either starting blind, or studying the example above, then rewriting it without looking at the original.
I hope he installed an Aaaaaaaarr! CD.
Aha! You got me; I was thinking about reading, and you were (correctly, in the context of TFA) thinking about editing.
In a Word-like program, I would turn on visible whitespace markers when copy editing, to spot double spaces and wayward carriage returns.
"rn" vs "m", I'm not so sure about, though I like to think I would easily notice the difference.
Try this http://bigital.com/english/files/.../web_legibility_readability.pdf
Screens are different, but as resolutions improve, less so year on year.
Are you talking about reading code? I agree that a monospace font is essential for code -- although I wouldn't choose Courier. Consolas FTW!
For prose, why would you care about a single or a double space? Or in most cases, rn vs m -- when reading prose in your native language, you usually recognise whole words rather than a letter at a time, and I think serif fonts generally aid that.
Good to know.
I should have mentioned, what really matters for audio is latency -- for example, if you're playing an electric guitar through GarageBand or Logic's amp simulators, latency in the sound card can be very noticeable (I've had issues even with GarageBand running natively on a G4 Mac Mini).
It "feels" as if a virtualised OSX would introduce extra latency, but I don't want to jump to conclusions. Does anyone have experience with doing latency-sensitive audio work in VirtualBox?
Bah. Who needs to build a Hackintosh? I have Snow Leopard running in VirtualBox.
What's AV performance like? One reason it would be nice to build a Hackintosh is to have a cheap, fast box to run something like Logic Pro on.
How can a fixie be "faster" at accelerating than a multi-geared bike? Just put the geared bike into the gear that corresponds most closely to your fixie's gearing.
Courier/Courier New. It's actually easier to read due to the serif and the wide spacing,
I'm willing to believe that you find Courier easier to read; I mean we're all different.
But research shows that for body text, a variable spaced, serif font like Times is easiest for most people to read, which is why almost all newspapers, books and web pages use it.
It seems to me that suffering is a more complicated sensation than pain, requiring that the subject is thinking about their condition, wishing it would stop, dwelling on the unfairness of it, etc. All of that requires quite a sophisticated brain.
Tricky, since an Association Football pitch, for non-international matches could be as small as 45m * 91m = 4,095m^2 or as large as 91m * 120m = 10,920m^2
But then I suppose "several" is sufficiently vague to compensate for the variation.
I still use a first-gen Xbox for XBMC.
It hasn't got the power to decode 720p, but SD is perfectly good enough for me.