Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.
We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all our own non-trivial stuff in them. We tend to have "important" docs like high-quality resumes (*.doc is shifty for that), digital copies of your e-filed tax returns, blueprints, and certain legal docs and paystubs that just GOTTA be assured to look the same in all platforms. Thus, no, our trying to change the world by pasting into plain text, taking a screenshot, or giving a link to an [insecure] HTML server doesn't fix the issue. Sending a doc in some esoteric typeset format? ditto.
Just like the "solution" to facebook we all know, what will fix this one problem it is the appearance of yet another a run-everywhere competitor. Sadly, none of those tend to be very Free & Open
I spent 20 minutes trying to watch the last 10 minutes of a 1 hour video last weekend because this was happening continuously. I can watch videos all day every day with any other streaming service, but for some reason, Youtube just can't get it's act together.
Two things I've noticed: youtube seems to have different servers depending on the display size of your stream. Found a single video in a series that is buffering hard? Switching from 360p to 480p sometimes GREATLY improves delivery because you are fetching from a different nearby server that does not require buffering (not sure if that's changed recently)
A recent and stupid change is that when you backtrack in a video, your browser requests the old data AGAIN. Sometimes even if just a few seconds old. Bonus: It will *drop* your current buffer section too even if it was several minutes long! Other players don't do that even with videos that are 60 minutes long.
The only thing that comes to mind for that regression is mobile delivery experience on poor fragmented hardware with a bad least common denominator. After all, it's not the same to deliver a buffer of 300MB to a desktop for a 10 minute video than to a mobile running Froyo whose max ram is 256MB. If that is indeed what's done, perhaps they have some write once, roll out everywhere API and are betting against desktops for simplicity of encoding.
I got a support call recently from a user whose whole office puzzled me when they said their local IT branch has them on version 17. Our official policy only observes 2 versions and I had never thought hard about those stray callers that blatantly appear to be ~10 versions "behind".
Thanks for reminding me that LTS is the reason behind this. I much preferred the days of you could say "you're running 2.0 and should upgrade to 3.0" You can no longer tell that the huge number gap is no more than 12 months because of Mozilla's crazy version madness. FF 17 was released Nov 20 2012!
Same reason why the world never keeps electing bad new leaders: great past record and *promises* somewhere else is no guarantee of future performance at their new post. With this in mind, even lawyers now put warnings like that in their own advertisements, even though the point is that "I won 30 million for this guy and 20 for that one" is what is supposed to have you hire them in the first place;)
Oops, should have removed the word "never" after my edits.
Wow, all that time spent trying to rank people. Why did you hire all these bad employees in the first place? Seems like an HR/management problem to me.
Same reason why the world never keeps electing bad new leaders: great past record and *promises* somewhere else is no guarantee of future performance at their new post. With this in mind, even lawyers now put warnings like that in their own advertisements, even though the point is that "I won 30 million for this guy and 20 for that one" is what is supposed to have you hire them in the first place;)
Yep, you are correct. Some months ago I was able to set my UA simply to Internet Explorer 10 and got every video as HTML5. That trick seems to not work anymore though.
You didn't say if the other UA tricks were tested so... try an extension with selectable agents and pick Safari for iPad or iPhone. Coupled with adblock, disabling flash and using noscript is closer to my setup and probably confuses their sniffing. I haven't tested in while
a) It's a poorer system. It's pre-approval, on mass, which means the user doesn't know why an app needs access to resources before approving them. iOS seeks approval at the time of requiring the resource, enabling the user to know what the resource is needed for.
This. I don't have IOS myself, but heard that its non-stock apps (rather, the OS API) require user approval before sending out tweets such as an embarrassing #softwarepirateconfession resulting from your misunderstanding what the app really wanted to do. We all know how much dialogs do in the hands of Joe Bloggs, but to us here it is fair enough warning.
I would expect that OS protection from Android alone, and NOT Apple. The added burden [and power] placed on the user is uncharacteristic of Apple anyway. Yet, Android's "best effort" in this area is as follows: 1) Google or mobile carriers install Facebook and other sneaky tracking apps by default. 2) User opens app BUT isn't given any permission manifest warnings 3) PROFIT!! User has already given up their rights without being asked, because stick Android prefs are an all-or-nothing gamble.
Alternate timeline steps [which/.ers on Android bitterly face as rite of passage] 4) Suppose the user uninstalls the app.* (i) Some weeks later said user tries to get it again from the Market. (ii) They are forced to notice that said app required Fine-grained Network Location services, SMS, full internet access, user identity, address book, and five other categories. (iii) The app could be Facebook, but more commonly it's some game (grrrr) or Samsung utility. 5) User has heart attack... at the implications of what the app did all along with months worth of information secretly gathered without express consent.
* Likely uninstalled to counter the cryptic internal RAM space problems that only we understand. Probably only after rooting to gain the ability to cut unwanted shovelware;)
Whatever. The early version numbers were little known, and when I came on board the browser was around 0.8 or 0.9 already. I recall having tried the predecessor, plain old "Mozilla browser" around 1.2 and wasn't expecting of my first trial of phoenix. Yet it was good enough to wean me off of Opera. Things were fine for a while, but by version 2.0 I was already preferring to install 0.9 to get around the sluggishness and large memory consumption of new builds on my single core PC. That was before I used extensions, even. Today, the browser never starts under 100MB even after their "on-demand" loading was implemented to lazily get around the real problems of their memory model. Under heavy work usage, FF will blow up to 1GB. It can't get any bigger because enterprises still won't comfortably deploy more 64 bit windows on our 64 bit machines. That leads to the theoretical 4GB ceiling going down to 3GB. Combined with bare essentials like antivirus, Outlook.exe and java-based VPN software, ram gets pinched so hard that Firefox just quits.
I never understood why they can't copy 15-year old practices and just give you a warning that memory is low. If it weren't for built-in tab sessions, what would this FF world have come to?
Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment and just go full HTML5.
Google has some lies and secrets here. Their defacto behavior, which I'll call a "claim" is that you must have flash to play video xyz even in the HTML5 mode. This happens with MOST popular videos because they are monetized (the secret there is that Google's advertisement modules aren't ready in HTML5 yet)
To debunk this, just load an iPad or iPhone and see if you're *ever* forced to suffer even half of the consecuences... when sir Steve Job decided to ignore Flash on mobile. The takeaway is that faking your UA string with a FF extension yields those nice mp4 files without fuss, and I don't recall seeing video ads in player with that variant. The annoying thing is you have to put up with the mobile navigation, AND as of about 9 months ago, clicking a playlist link to with a preordered list of long series of videos (videogame Let's plays) would link you to a standalone vid. When you have about 100 videos and need to continue from #86, it's a major pain to rely on searches and the unreliable sidebar randomly hinting episode #2 or #98 but not #87. I'm pretty sure there's some express secret reason youtube doesn't like you binging^W playing sequential videos.
GIMP is a terminally retarded toy. Every second you use it it feels like fighting with windmills. Say you have a greylevel png you want to turn into transparency (for use as avatar). Clone the channel as alpha? Well... simple tasks must not have straight-forward solutions, hurray for teh gimp, you are the king!
If someone has any recommendations for a capable photo editor, that can work with logos, etc., please, I'm all ears. F**k teh gimp!
I was trying to draw a white square around a logo yesterday. My two standby's let me down: Paint for Windows 7 killed the gif file by adding ugly, unprofessional dithering that killed my site logo. I noticed just seconds before uploading to the site.
Loaded up trusty GIMPshop since I recall it didn't previously mess up my transparencies as badly as paint... and didn't find the outline tool... wait, you there's not even a straight LINE tool in it, google? you must combine obscure selection tools with some hidden stroke options just to draw a few lines? what? why does paint do this better? supposedly this is because gimp is an editor rather than a drawing program. No wonder they take us free software fans as a joke. This is not something I'd notice day to day until I ran into it, and I'd lose face to a professional asking for help skirting the PS price barrier
Corporations, fucking everything for short-term profit.
"This for that." We had "free" internet for a long time. Our brains were conditioned and we don't outright flee. The piper has come to collect their dues, and it's too late to find some alternative. The funny thing is we *think* "I already pay my monthly bandwidth dues." But none of that goes to compensate the guy on the other side of the pipe
When the product is actually NOT free so we can "vote with our wallets," what's a fair balance between 1) how much you feel you're downloading vs. 2) how much the corporation feels it deserves for that digital copy of their product
"The relevance of tick bites to the production of IgE antibodies to the mammalian oligosaccharide galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose".
Mr. finalist, we give you have 10 seconds to explain the title of your thesis, never mind its contents. Then, empirically prove your dance matches it. AAAAnnnd. GO!!!
A year ago we learned that a private company like Apple "for technical reasons" needed 14 days to update a page with a simple text message. They sought to delay complying with the UK court order that would expose lies that had hurt Samsung.
Government websites, despite exhibiting worst-of-the-worst bureaucracy known to all of us, now show a tangible "worst case" upper bound. Great! now we can point all private companies' lying lawyers to that and ask why the private sector is suddenly 7 times slower.
It's not like some the old ads will go away. These new ads are coming in *addition* to them, so we'll need new and untested heuristics and an increasing number of processing cycles. This does not even address the fact that some of us use browsers that are already too slow because they do not support adblock, or any other plugins. Expecially on mobile. *Sigh*
Turning javascript off as an ad-fighting measure makes the web useless on android. Try it on slashdot sometime.
I can continue listing other domestic terrorism by Christians.
And don't even try the "they aren't true Christians" nonsense.
A random dictionary's definition of christian:a person who believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ
I would *add* that "believing" is not enough, and practicing is where the true follower is... But Jesus gave his own litmus test, so why must you and I try to define "true" christian and waste time with the "no true scottsman fallacy": "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35) There is no "love" in blowing people up and doing what some of these churches are individually doing to blemish the name of who they claim to follow. Jesus knew this about the wolves entering the flock. See Acts 20:29. The net result? false doctrine and interpretation create a rift between people and God.
We tried it. My co-worker sent me $15. After the initial email, we both tied our debit cards to our email addresses, and I had the funds in my account in less than 5 minutes. Since our cards are now linked I imagine it will be even quicker in the future.
Probably perfect for frequent restaurant goers who like to split the bill but never have exact cash. One pays the full bill via Credit Card and gets compensated later. It's still a problem figuring out how accurate, and when that will be, besides the obvious matter of how trustworthy your friends are. Since google itself filed a patent for bill splitting just days ago, tons of copycat implementations will come up regardless of legality, and someone will smooth out the kinks.
Thanks I too stopped at Ubuntu 10. I'm not sure why I hadn't looked at this distro before. The full monty looks good from what I see on their page and wikipedia which includes printing, multimedia and liveusb support. I'm going to get it.
I'm more concerned that Soulskill killed a fun potential application of Betteridge's law of headlines. Curses! It's supposed to pose a question for me answer in nerdrage!
Good point. Most of us can't trust GPG anymore, due to having made those GPG keys under Windows. Dual-booting is my only real option since I can't completely abandon Windows. I thought of live USB booting, but found no trustworthy linux distribution anyway. Redhat has government ties, derivatives like Centos are not safe either. Ubuntu? It was the firs big disappointment with GUI decisions, so few would trust it with our security in face of NSL meddling. Mandrake and derivatives? Too dead, and fail to boot properly. Debian and Slackware? Don't feel like going in blind to a world where I don't know the package manager, or the compiling setups and so on.
I got as far as setting up usb-stick persistence when I forced myself to choose a potentially compromised system. But persistance means that if I log in anywhere I'm tainting that USB setup forever, defeating the purpose of having a Live USB. Do I really want to go full tinfoil and use obscure browsers and untrustworthy extensions, disable JS and renounce all US search engines and services, when I still have to do my banking, check my US email address and watch the ocassional video playlist. Who am I kidding? my router and ISP know it's me going on Youtube, accessing my email accounts, and have nearly a decade of browsing logs, google searches and random stuff that flags us as slightly dissident geeks with potential for trouble.
I2P died to me when I found it has no real exit nodes, so it's basically a black hole if you have nobody to talk to on the other end. Many of us have little use for GPG encryption besides feeling better about what would happen if someone stole our hard drives.
I've worked in the software and IT industry for quite a few years, and in that time I've learned that there are things you do that need to be precise, because you can make a hell of a mess if you don't.
"Measure fifty times... cut ONCE." Radioactivity justifies taking this koan as close to verbatim as possible.
Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash",... ?
Incorrect. Several commercials for large, well known US companies often did that in the late nineties. They knew scant few people were aware of how to visit, so they had to encourage them to go by making it easy. This allowed them to enhance the point of a 30 second commercial, and had the appeal that eventually people would look up a product out of curiosity while never getting the urge to call an 800 number and get trapped by a live salesperson.
Since the potential medium was not as mainstream to trigger as saying "call us now at the number on your screen" and leaving it on would be just as ignored as car commercial / lawyer ad fine print, reading the url was disruptive yet new-fangled enough to stand out. They just follow the queue of the professional 1-800 number ads... and dumbly recite the whole url letter by letter to ensure the viewers could at least tell it was important. It's similar to how on facebook's baby days, ads had improved to say "visit us at facebook.com/somelargecompanyurl." Nowadays they just say follow *us* (no explanation or canonical name) on facebook and don't even list their own megacompany public url.
That's a downside of today's internet: sometimes you dumbly stare at some unknown company with a mystery logo pushing a cryptic ad that just points to a facebook or twitter page, which can then link elsewhere. No NAME, no PHONE*, and some presumed immunity to needing to list a fine print. They pay for cheap print ad space forcing curious eyes to a page that does all the talking in as much space as they want at virtually no additional cost. On their actual page (if they dare drive you to their own servers) they enjoy sneakily unleashing as many ads and affiliate crosslinks as they want... let alone being able to track the visitors the second they land on the page.
* no hope of any interaction with real people should you have some trouble with what just caught your eye for a possible sale... OR RETURN
Let me know when it can call out all the TVTropes in a story...or would that cause an endless loop?
This troper believes that the fun in visiting tvtropes is knowing other geeks have enjoyed each story... or *hated* it, and in many other ways been driven to break down the story for your enjoyment due to resonating with that story emotionally. Call it pride in exclusivity, sort of like coming to slashdot looking for fellow geek observations, tips, jokes, and so on. In short, tvtropes is fun because you're finding someone else that you share some knowledge with in a way the corresponding Wikipedia article cannot fulfill. So... once a computer is doing the "thinking", even making a knowledge tree 1000 times denser than the depth of TVtropes, we'd know there is no emotion in it, and that it won't be growing on its own from outside contributions, or real-life anecdotes tangentially related to the content, or even grow (would the computer be "watching" new series and recalculate everthing, or would it be too busy maintaining a finite set of data frozen in time.) It COULD be done given enough tech, but knowing implementations, it'd feel like landing at some endless Google linkbait farm that links endlessly to itself, and TRYING to force yourself to enjoy the crickets chirping while you click.
The flaw here is using the same infrastructure that they totally own, and believing they do not have countermeasures.
You can be sure the NSA had a clear roadmap for this chess game caused by the Snowden leaks... way before Snowden dreamed of being employed for them. We are only an NSA freakout away from having them push some undisclosed tech, or at least poison the torrents like **AA does with movie / music torrents.
True, we haven't seen kill switches widely used in the US, but we're starting to get used to "[This video] is not available in your area" and "the US government has seized this domain," unexpected tracing of bitcoin transactions to specific people, as well as overpowering Tor with their own nodes and targeting encrypted services. We only know of the ones that closed down, and not the ones that said "Yes, ma'am"
As I write this, I don't see a single mention on cnn.com of this story. It seems that the public and the media has moved on, and no longer cares.
It is irresponsible for the Guardian or anyone to release urgent leaks in a "controlled" [molasses] manner. In turn, the surveillance they're supposed to oppose is real, and anything BUT "controlled". Before all the info is revealed the govt has ample time to hide and deny things, or take countermeasures. At worst, they just tighten the screws in handcuffs we're not even aware have been attached to us.
Why? because the leaks come from a single source, the newspaper's agreement to handle the leak payload on behalf of Snowden comes with the advantage of PROLONGED newspaper sales and eyeballs. In reality, at the first sign of trouble, the people who mattered, good or terrorists, have already decided to find alternative means while the rest of us wait for the dread to increase before taking any action.
The trusted internet never existed and never will. WWW started with US interests in mind, and everyone joined the bandwagon. The US will keep furthering them, and shut it down if it comes to that. If you wants "secure," encryption is a dud. You must lay your own pipes. Fat chance of that happening for the average joe, the same way as nobody lays copper phone cords to a select group of friends they trust. We grew too dependent on infrastructure and it's too late now.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?
Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.
We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all our own non-trivial stuff in them. We tend to have "important" docs like high-quality resumes (*.doc is shifty for that), digital copies of your e-filed tax returns, blueprints, and certain legal docs and paystubs that just GOTTA be assured to look the same in all platforms. Thus, no, our trying to change the world by pasting into plain text, taking a screenshot, or giving a link to an [insecure] HTML server doesn't fix the issue. Sending a doc in some esoteric typeset format? ditto.
Just like the "solution" to facebook we all know, what will fix this one problem it is the appearance of yet another a run-everywhere competitor. Sadly, none of those tend to be very Free & Open
* Remember zip files?
I spent 20 minutes trying to watch the last 10 minutes of a 1 hour video last weekend because this was happening continuously. I can watch videos all day every day with any other streaming service, but for some reason, Youtube just can't get it's act together.
Two things I've noticed: youtube seems to have different servers depending on the display size of your stream. Found a single video in a series that is buffering hard? Switching from 360p to 480p sometimes GREATLY improves delivery because you are fetching from a different nearby server that does not require buffering (not sure if that's changed recently)
A recent and stupid change is that when you backtrack in a video, your browser requests the old data AGAIN. Sometimes even if just a few seconds old. Bonus: It will *drop* your current buffer section too even if it was several minutes long! Other players don't do that even with videos that are 60 minutes long.
The only thing that comes to mind for that regression is mobile delivery experience on poor fragmented hardware with a bad least common denominator. After all, it's not the same to deliver a buffer of 300MB to a desktop for a 10 minute video than to a mobile running Froyo whose max ram is 256MB. If that is indeed what's done, perhaps they have some write once, roll out everywhere API and are betting against desktops for simplicity of encoding.
I got a support call recently from a user whose whole office puzzled me when they said their local IT branch has them on version 17.
Our official policy only observes 2 versions and I had never thought hard about those stray callers that blatantly appear to be ~10 versions "behind".
Thanks for reminding me that LTS is the reason behind this. I much preferred the days of you could say "you're running 2.0 and should upgrade to 3.0" You can no longer tell that the huge number gap is no more than 12 months because of Mozilla's crazy version madness. FF 17 was released Nov 20 2012!
Same reason why the world never keeps electing bad new leaders: great past record and *promises* somewhere else is no guarantee of future performance at their new post. With this in mind, even lawyers now put warnings like that in their own advertisements, even though the point is that "I won 30 million for this guy and 20 for that one" is what is supposed to have you hire them in the first place ;)
Oops, should have removed the word "never" after my edits.
Wow, all that time spent trying to rank people. Why did you hire all these bad employees in the first place? Seems like an HR/management problem to me.
Same reason why the world never keeps electing bad new leaders: great past record and *promises* somewhere else is no guarantee of future performance at their new post. With this in mind, even lawyers now put warnings like that in their own advertisements, even though the point is that "I won 30 million for this guy and 20 for that one" is what is supposed to have you hire them in the first place ;)
Yep, you are correct. Some months ago I was able to set my UA simply to Internet Explorer 10 and got every video as HTML5. That trick seems to not work anymore though.
You didn't say if the other UA tricks were tested so...
try an extension with selectable agents and pick Safari for iPad or iPhone. Coupled with adblock, disabling flash and using noscript is closer to my setup and probably confuses their sniffing.
I haven't tested in while
a) It's a poorer system. It's pre-approval, on mass, which means the user doesn't know why an app needs access to resources before approving them. iOS seeks approval at the time of requiring the resource, enabling the user to know what the resource is needed for.
This.
I don't have IOS myself, but heard that its non-stock apps (rather, the OS API) require user approval before sending out tweets such as an embarrassing #softwarepirateconfession resulting from your misunderstanding what the app really wanted to do. We all know how much dialogs do in the hands of Joe Bloggs, but to us here it is fair enough warning.
I would expect that OS protection from Android alone, and NOT Apple. The added burden [and power] placed on the user is uncharacteristic of Apple anyway. Yet, Android's "best effort" in this area is as follows:
1) Google or mobile carriers install Facebook and other sneaky tracking apps by default.
2) User opens app BUT isn't given any permission manifest warnings
3) PROFIT!! User has already given up their rights without being asked, because stick Android prefs are an all-or-nothing gamble.
Alternate timeline steps [which /.ers on Android bitterly face as rite of passage]
4) Suppose the user uninstalls the app.*
(i) Some weeks later said user tries to get it again from the Market.
(ii) They are forced to notice that said app required Fine-grained Network Location services, SMS, full internet access, user identity, address book, and five other categories.
(iii) The app could be Facebook, but more commonly it's some game (grrrr) or Samsung utility.
5) User has heart attack... at the implications of what the app did all along with months worth of information secretly gathered without express consent.
* Likely uninstalled to counter the cryptic internal RAM space problems that only we understand. Probably only after rooting to gain the ability to cut unwanted shovelware ;)
So we should be celebrating Firefox 0.8?
Whatever. The early version numbers were little known, and when I came on board the browser was around 0.8 or 0.9 already.
I recall having tried the predecessor, plain old "Mozilla browser" around 1.2 and wasn't expecting of my first trial of phoenix. Yet it was good enough to wean me off of Opera.
Things were fine for a while, but by version 2.0 I was already preferring to install 0.9 to get around the sluggishness and large memory consumption of new builds on my single core PC. That was before I used extensions, even. Today, the browser never starts under 100MB even after their "on-demand" loading was implemented to lazily get around the real problems of their memory model. Under heavy work usage, FF will blow up to 1GB. It can't get any bigger because enterprises still won't comfortably deploy more 64 bit windows on our 64 bit machines. That leads to the theoretical 4GB ceiling going down to 3GB. Combined with bare essentials like antivirus, Outlook.exe and java-based VPN software, ram gets pinched so hard that Firefox just quits.
I never understood why they can't copy 15-year old practices and just give you a warning that memory is low. If it weren't for built-in tab sessions, what would this FF world have come to?
Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment and just go full HTML5.
Google has some lies and secrets here.
Their defacto behavior, which I'll call a "claim" is that you must have flash to play video xyz even in the HTML5 mode. This happens with MOST popular videos because they are monetized (the secret there is that Google's advertisement modules aren't ready in HTML5 yet)
To debunk this, just load an iPad or iPhone and see if you're *ever* forced to suffer even half of the consecuences... when sir Steve Job decided to ignore Flash on mobile. The takeaway is that faking your UA string with a FF extension yields those nice mp4 files without fuss, and I don't recall seeing video ads in player with that variant. The annoying thing is you have to put up with the mobile navigation, AND as of about 9 months ago, clicking a playlist link to with a preordered list of long series of videos (videogame Let's plays) would link you to a standalone vid. When you have about 100 videos and need to continue from #86, it's a major pain to rely on searches and the unreliable sidebar randomly hinting episode #2 or #98 but not #87. I'm pretty sure there's some express secret reason youtube doesn't like you binging^W playing sequential videos.
GIMP is a terminally retarded toy. Every second you use it it feels like fighting with windmills. Say you have a greylevel png you want to turn into transparency (for use as avatar). Clone the channel as alpha? Well... simple tasks must not have straight-forward solutions, hurray for teh gimp, you are the king!
If someone has any recommendations for a capable photo editor, that can work with logos, etc., please, I'm all ears. F**k teh gimp!
I was trying to draw a white square around a logo yesterday. My two standby's let me down:
Paint for Windows 7 killed the gif file by adding ugly, unprofessional dithering that killed my site logo. I noticed just seconds before uploading to the site.
Loaded up trusty GIMPshop since I recall it didn't previously mess up my transparencies as badly as paint... and didn't find the outline tool... wait, you there's not even a straight LINE tool in it, google? you must combine obscure selection tools with some hidden stroke options just to draw a few lines? what? why does paint do this better?
supposedly this is because gimp is an editor rather than a drawing program. No wonder they take us free software fans as a joke. This is not something I'd notice day to day until I ran into it, and I'd lose face to a professional asking for help skirting the PS price barrier
Corporations, fucking everything for short-term profit .
"This for that." We had "free" internet for a long time. Our brains were conditioned and we don't outright flee.
The piper has come to collect their dues, and it's too late to find some alternative.
The funny thing is we *think* "I already pay my monthly bandwidth dues." But none of that goes to compensate the guy on the other side of the pipe
When the product is actually NOT free so we can "vote with our wallets," what's a fair balance between
1) how much you feel you're downloading vs.
2) how much the corporation feels it deserves for that digital copy of their product
"The relevance of tick bites to the production of IgE antibodies to
the mammalian oligosaccharide galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose".
Mr. finalist, we give you have 10 seconds to explain the title of your thesis, never mind its contents. Then, empirically prove your dance matches it. AAAAnnnd. GO!!!
A year ago we learned that a private company like Apple "for technical reasons" needed 14 days to update a page with a simple text message. They sought to delay complying with the UK court order that would expose lies that had hurt Samsung.
Government websites, despite exhibiting worst-of-the-worst bureaucracy known to all of us, now show a tangible "worst case" upper bound. Great! now we can point all private companies' lying lawyers to that and ask why the private sector is suddenly 7 times slower.
bzzzt! There is *no* upside : )
It's not like some the old ads will go away. These new ads are coming in *addition* to them, so we'll need new and untested heuristics and an increasing number of processing cycles.
This does not even address the fact that some of us use browsers that are already too slow because they do not support adblock, or any other plugins. Expecially on mobile. *Sigh*
Turning javascript off as an ad-fighting measure makes the web useless on android. Try it on slashdot sometime.
I can continue listing other domestic terrorism by Christians.
And don't even try the "they aren't true Christians" nonsense.
A random dictionary's definition of christian:a person who believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ
I would *add* that "believing" is not enough, and practicing is where the true follower is...
But Jesus gave his own litmus test, so why must you and I try to define "true" christian and waste time with the "no true scottsman fallacy": "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35)
There is no "love" in blowing people up and doing what some of these churches are individually doing to blemish the name of who they claim to follow. Jesus knew this about the wolves entering the flock. See Acts 20:29. The net result? false doctrine and interpretation create a rift between people and God.
We tried it. My co-worker sent me $15. After the initial email, we both tied our debit cards to our email addresses, and I had the funds in my account in less than 5 minutes. Since our cards are now linked I imagine it will be even quicker in the future.
Probably perfect for frequent restaurant goers who like to split the bill but never have exact cash. One pays the full bill via Credit Card and gets compensated later. It's still a problem figuring out how accurate, and when that will be, besides the obvious matter of how trustworthy your friends are. Since google itself filed a patent for bill splitting just days ago, tons of copycat implementations will come up regardless of legality, and someone will smooth out the kinks.
Thanks
I too stopped at Ubuntu 10. I'm not sure why I hadn't looked at this distro before. The full monty looks good from what I see on their page and wikipedia which includes printing, multimedia and liveusb support. I'm going to get it.
I'm more concerned that Soulskill killed a fun potential application of Betteridge's law of headlines. Curses!
It's supposed to pose a question for me answer in nerdrage!
Good point. Most of us can't trust GPG anymore, due to having made those GPG keys under Windows.
Dual-booting is my only real option since I can't completely abandon Windows. I thought of live USB booting, but found no trustworthy linux distribution anyway. Redhat has government ties, derivatives like Centos are not safe either. Ubuntu? It was the firs big disappointment with GUI decisions, so few would trust it with our security in face of NSL meddling. Mandrake and derivatives? Too dead, and fail to boot properly. Debian and Slackware? Don't feel like going in blind to a world where I don't know the package manager, or the compiling setups and so on.
I got as far as setting up usb-stick persistence when I forced myself to choose a potentially compromised system. But persistance means that if I log in anywhere I'm tainting that USB setup forever, defeating the purpose of having a Live USB. Do I really want to go full tinfoil and use obscure browsers and untrustworthy extensions, disable JS and renounce all US search engines and services, when I still have to do my banking, check my US email address and watch the ocassional video playlist. Who am I kidding? my router and ISP know it's me going on Youtube, accessing my email accounts, and have nearly a decade of browsing logs, google searches and random stuff that flags us as slightly dissident geeks with potential for trouble.
I2P died to me when I found it has no real exit nodes, so it's basically a black hole if you have nobody to talk to on the other end. Many of us have little use for GPG encryption besides feeling better about what would happen if someone stole our hard drives.
(Cue apk and an obligatory hosts file rant, since this is both a hosts file hack AND an APK ...)
Haha, got a kick about the double-entendre that you can use capital APK's fix and apk files to install the app.
I've worked in the software and IT industry for quite a few years, and in that time I've learned that there are things you do that need to be precise, because you can make a hell of a mess if you don't.
"Measure fifty times... cut ONCE."
Radioactivity justifies taking this koan as close to verbatim as possible.
Speaking of Windows sounds: Ever hear a person say "h", "t", "t", "p", "colon", "backslash", "backslash", ... ?
Incorrect. Several commercials for large, well known US companies often did that in the late nineties. They knew scant few people were aware of how to visit, so they had to encourage them to go by making it easy. This allowed them to enhance the point of a 30 second commercial, and had the appeal that eventually people would look up a product out of curiosity while never getting the urge to call an 800 number and get trapped by a live salesperson.
Since the potential medium was not as mainstream to trigger as saying "call us now at the number on your screen" and leaving it on would be just as ignored as car commercial / lawyer ad fine print, reading the url was disruptive yet new-fangled enough to stand out. They just follow the queue of the professional 1-800 number ads... and dumbly recite the whole url letter by letter to ensure the viewers could at least tell it was important. It's similar to how on facebook's baby days, ads had improved to say "visit us at facebook.com/somelargecompanyurl." Nowadays they just say follow *us* (no explanation or canonical name) on facebook and don't even list their own megacompany public url.
That's a downside of today's internet: sometimes you dumbly stare at some unknown company with a mystery logo pushing a cryptic ad that just points to a facebook or twitter page, which can then link elsewhere. No NAME, no PHONE*, and some presumed immunity to needing to list a fine print. They pay for cheap print ad space forcing curious eyes to a page that does all the talking in as much space as they want at virtually no additional cost. On their actual page (if they dare drive you to their own servers) they enjoy sneakily unleashing as many ads and affiliate crosslinks as they want... let alone being able to track the visitors the second they land on the page.
* no hope of any interaction with real people should you have some trouble with what just caught your eye for a possible sale... OR RETURN
Let me know when it can call out all the TVTropes in a story...or would that cause an endless loop?
This troper believes that the fun in visiting tvtropes is knowing other geeks have enjoyed each story... or *hated* it, and in many other ways been driven to break down the story for your enjoyment due to resonating with that story emotionally. Call it pride in exclusivity, sort of like coming to slashdot looking for fellow geek observations, tips, jokes, and so on. In short, tvtropes is fun because you're finding someone else that you share some knowledge with in a way the corresponding Wikipedia article cannot fulfill.
So... once a computer is doing the "thinking", even making a knowledge tree 1000 times denser than the depth of TVtropes, we'd know there is no emotion in it, and that it won't be growing on its own from outside contributions, or real-life anecdotes tangentially related to the content, or even grow (would the computer be "watching" new series and recalculate everthing, or would it be too busy maintaining a finite set of data frozen in time.) It COULD be done given enough tech, but knowing implementations, it'd feel like landing at some endless Google linkbait farm that links endlessly to itself, and TRYING to force yourself to enjoy the crickets chirping while you click.
The flaw here is using the same infrastructure that they totally own, and believing they do not have countermeasures.
You can be sure the NSA had a clear roadmap for this chess game caused by the Snowden leaks... way before Snowden dreamed of being employed for them.
We are only an NSA freakout away from having them push some undisclosed tech, or at least poison the torrents like **AA does with movie / music torrents.
True, we haven't seen kill switches widely used in the US, but we're starting to get used to "[This video] is not available in your area" and "the US government has seized this domain," unexpected tracing of bitcoin transactions to specific people, as well as overpowering Tor with their own nodes and targeting encrypted services. We only know of the ones that closed down, and not the ones that said "Yes, ma'am"
As I write this, I don't see a single mention on cnn.com of this story. It seems that the public and the media has moved on, and no longer cares.
It is irresponsible for the Guardian or anyone to release urgent leaks in a "controlled" [molasses] manner.
In turn, the surveillance they're supposed to oppose is real, and anything BUT "controlled". Before all the info is revealed the govt has ample time to hide and deny things, or take countermeasures. At worst, they just tighten the screws in handcuffs we're not even aware have been attached to us.
Why? because the leaks come from a single source, the newspaper's agreement to handle the leak payload on behalf of Snowden comes with the advantage of PROLONGED newspaper sales and eyeballs.
In reality, at the first sign of trouble, the people who mattered, good or terrorists, have already decided to find alternative means while the rest of us wait for the dread to increase before taking any action.
The trusted internet never existed and never will. WWW started with US interests in mind, and everyone joined the bandwagon. The US will keep furthering them, and shut it down if it comes to that. If you wants "secure," encryption is a dud. You must lay your own pipes. Fat chance of that happening for the average joe, the same way as nobody lays copper phone cords to a select group of friends they trust. We grew too dependent on infrastructure and it's too late now.