Thank you very much, but Linux doesn't need "friends" who use it as a Horrible Fate that they'll threaten to inflict on themselves as a way to get Mommy Microsoft's sympathetic attention.
You're right. However, it is still pretty cool to hear a guy in his position even mention Linux as any kind of alternative. 10 years ago I was in my teens and a Linux geek. I went through a little phase where I tried to get as many people to try Linux as possible. It was completely futile. I don't think I managed to permanently convert one single person. Not to mention that every one that I tried to convert hadn't even heard of Linux until I started raving about it.
As I grew older my computer became less of a toy and more of a tool to me and I started to appreciate that others held the same position and gave up entirely.
However, now-a-days I see 15 year-old kids on places as odd as ultimate-guitar.com (I'm also a guitarist and hang out on their forum a lot) talk about Linux. And with people at places like PC mag just mentioning it, it offers a lot of merit and street credit to Linux. It shows that it's not just some geek kid's toy who likes to screw around on his computer but it actually performs all of the tasks that people rely on their tool/computer to perform. Sure we don't NEED it and we can resent his attitude of it being a last resort. But just hearing him speak the name goes a million times further than hearing some hacker nerd kid rave about how awesome it is.
The PHP passes the requesting IP to the ad server (presumably for geo-location) and in return gets a block of HTML.
But that's no better than loading the script on their domain in an iframe. The only advantage I can think of is that the user's web browser doesn't have to resolve their server's domain. But if their server is down, or loading slow, your page is going to be slow. In fact, this could be worse than an iframe because at least with an iframe the rest of your page will load and only the iframe will hang. In the case of copying some PHP that calls up their server your whole page will hang at that spot. So unless it's at the very bottom of your page then you're screwed if their server goes down.
What a geo-ip ad company would need to do is give you an ip-to-country database to host on your server and a small script that resolves the geo-ip stuff on your machine. That way the only bottleneck is your server itself. If their ad servers go down or load slowly your site doesn't suffer.
As a webmaster I can tell you that it is common practice for many web sites to block bots.
Not google bot or any SE spider obviously. That results in SE listings which result in lots profitable "real" traffic. But content rippers, scrapers, hit bots etc. get blocked by competent web masters all the time since they just burn bandwidth. Most webmasters have to pay by the GB so it's in their best interest to block traffic that only burns bandwidth.
I run a few web sites and on some I have a geo-IP targeted ad that loads in an iframe. This particular ad is often a bottleneck so I wanted to solve it. My first idea was to run a wget on the server and cache the output to the hard disk so I can load the ad from the server instead of a 3rd party. This would also require one less DNS look-up.
Then I realized that it would completely fail because the ad is geo-IP. So the cache will always display the location of my server, and not the user.
The obvious solution is for ad companies to offer scripts to their affiliates that could be run on the servers hosting the sites. Of course that opens up new problems, like security issues. But if the code were open we could spot such issues.
In fact, that seems to me like such a simple and obvious solution. The only reason that ad companies don't do that (that I can think of) is that they want to appeal to people running on free hosts where they can't run server-side scripts. But there's no reason not to offer both IMO. I also thought that they wanted to keep things as absolutely simple as possible, and there's nothing simpler than saying "just copy/paste this into your html document". But any web master who rents hosting (shared or dedicated) knows how to upload a php script.
I can *kind of* see where they're coming from. If you run for-profit web pages and Firefox users don't see your ads and don't buy anything then they're costing you money in terms of bandwidth. I wouldn't liken it to theft. But if these businesses want to block a certain user because it costs them something then it makes sense.
Not saying there isn't a better way. Like others have said, why not make better ads that aren't intrusive, don't piss off your users and don't get blocked by Ad Block ?
I've actually profited from posting comments on Slashdot (without getting modded down or shunned by anyone), and/. is probably typical of the demographic that they're talking about. So it's definitely possible to appeal to this group of people and convert that traffic. But if they feel like blocking the traffic and not trying to do things better, so as to turn that loss into profit, then that's their decision to make. Those users (who use FF + AdBlock) are obviously the type who do not enjoy surfing that kind of web page anyway. And there's lots of other sites out there that will / do step up and convert the traffic by appealing to the group instead of blocking it.
The types of people who are unable to manage their own sensitive data, safely, are the same types of people who get jobs at your bank and credit card company and fail to follow safe security practices because they don't know any better.
Teaching kids the fundamentals of computer security will benefit society as a whole, just like teaching kids math, science, language etc. does. If that is not the purpose of public education then I do not know what is (with the exception of free day care service).
That wasn't a mistake. They were attempting to demonstrate how poorly implemented the school systems are by pointing out how they, too, have been victims of it.
I was using a Creative Professional EMU-1820m in Windows with Cubase SL and Fruity Loops Producer Edition 5. I recently switched to Ubuntu and haven't found anything that comes even remotely close. Not to mention that my 1820m isn't supported, although I expected as much.
I still keep Windows around for games and for a DAW.
First of all, if the users of the software aren't paying attention, who's fault is that ?
Secondly, you would think and hope that the software manufacturers would be paying attention and that they would inform their users, who may or may not be paying attention.
Full disclosure doesn't just imply disclosure to a small, specific group of people. It involves making information PUBLICLY available to EVERYONE. If someone isn't paying attention then that's their own fault. But if you don't feel like end users who are too worried with other things to be paying attention to Bugtraq are getting a fair break then point the finger at the software manufacturer instead. After all, they're the ones who sold faulty software and they're often the ones who continue to sell faulty software when bugs are not disclosed to the public, because they take the mind set of "what they don't know can't hurt them".
Unfortunately, what "they" don't know CAN hurt them. Because those same people you were talking about who are "interested in doing harm" are usually the ones to find the bugs to begin with. So they already know and those end users that you are so adamant about protecting are already at risk.
So IMO it's the responsibility of the software manufacturers to pay attention, fix bugs, release patches and inform their users that they need to apply said patches ASAP.
I mean, are you really advocating keeping information from people ? What if you had cancer, would you prefer that your doctor not inform you ? As I already stated, full disclosure is all about making information publicly available to absolutely everyone, so that absolutely everyone can make whatever choices they feel like with that information. Your argument is that full disclosure is selective about who it makes the information available to. I have to disagree. At the very least it makes the information available to the developers who made the buggy software to begin with, and competent admins who follow those lists so they know what kind of bugs are running on their servers (I used to be one of those).
That's odd. I can think of ways that driving an ice cream truck would benefit from the Internet.
Thanks to map tools like google maps you could plan better routes. I suppose you don't *need* the Internet to do that but it adds a level of convenience.
If it's a franchise of ice cream trucks we're talking about then they can use the Internet to communicate with all of their drives more efficiently (offering access to schedules from home, allowing drivers to IM each other etc.).
You can use the Internet to advertise. Not directly to your customers since they're little kids, of course, but to event organizers who's attendees would benefit from having concessions and such at the event (mini league baseball games and stuff... ice cream trucks tend to find their way to those events anyway but I'm sure there's some non-obvious events where the possibility of mutually beneficial business relationships exist).
If you're a franchise you can use the Internet to help you find new drivers. If you're an individual you can use the Internet to find additional help that can lead into developing your business into a larger one.
You could set up a web page for your ice cream service and advertise it on the packaging of each sale and in big letters on your truck. You could offer activities / games and such to keep the customers (kids) coming back to the site. At the very least you can use the site to get customer feedback (probably mostly from parents yet still helpful) but surely there would be other ways to convert the traffic to profit as well.
I use ear buds because they don't fall off my head or get uncomfortable while I'm running.
I'm also a musician / audiophile. I've produced and recorded. I own very expensive studio headphones and monitors.
Are iPod ear buds great headphones ? No. Are ear buds shit, in general ? Sure. But the iPod ear buds they are BY FAR the best ear buds that I've ever used. And I'm not saying that because I'm an apple or ipod fan boy. In fact, I despise iPods. I bought an iPod shuffle for $180 CAD and it lasted me a month. I will never buy an ipod ever again. But I still have the ear buds. I kept them because they beat the living shit out of every other pair of ear buds I've ever used.
With that said, I agree that ear buds have pretty bad quality in general. I also agree that in terms of material / manufacturing there is probably only $0.50 put in to any set of ear buds. But my only point is, if you do get suckered into buying an ipod, don't throw away the ear buds and replace them with a set of $30 ones just because you've heard they're crap cheap ones that get thrown in. The ear buds that came with my ipod were of a much higher quality standard than the bloody ipod itself. Not worth $180, obviously. But at least I got *something* out of it.
I used to watch Voltron when I was around 4 or 5 years old. I had the toy robot that you could assemble / dissemble etc.
Around the age of 11 or so the Power Rangers became "huge". Being a young, impressionable kid with no free will I watched it after school with my friends even though I thought it was "total crap". Anyway at that time I had completely forgotten about Voltron yet I KNEW that it was a rip-off of something that I used to watch as a young(er) child.
I remember absolutely loving Voltron and for years I tried to figure out what that cartoon I used to watch as a kid with the cat-like vehicles that could assemble into one. Every person I described it to, in hopes that they would remember, could only think of "power rangers!" to which I'd respond "no definitely NOT the power rangers... it was a cartoon!" and they'd just think "err... transformers ?:\"
It was actually thanks to this/. article that I've discovered... it was Voltron!:)... and now, thanks to another poster, I know why the Power Rangers was so similar. Some days it pays it to slack on work and just hang out on/.
Shit my boss is calling me... oh well, he'll understand when I tell him "it was Voltron!"
I remember liking the cat version of voltron when I was a kid... then I watched it with my kids recently (who love it) and for some reason the storyline seemed like some nutty commie propaganda.
I feel the same way about pretty much every single show that I watched as a child.
My wife is a uber comic / cartoon / movie geek. She went and bought the Thundercats season 1 box set. I LOVED the Thundercats as a kid and was very eager to watch a few episodes and bring back some childhood memories. "Yawn" is pretty much the only word I can use to describe my experience "reconnecting with my youth".
I loved the Transformers movie. But I can't sit through the cartoons any more. Any film that tries to put an adult twist on cartoons or shows from the 80's to attempt to appeal to the children of that time who are now grown up I can certainly relate to and get into. But there are tons of movies and cartoons and music that I loved as a child that I am not the slightest bit interested in anymore as an adult. But I assume that's normal.
I'm not in the least bit religious but Corinthians 13:11 comes to mind "When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things".
Nothing against people who still enjoy cartoons from their childhood, though. In fact I envy them slightly.
They don't pick these movies to make based on good scripts, good ideas, or good director/writers, they are just knocking them down one after the other because people will go see something they have good memories of. They're completely taking advantage of everyone's misplaced hope that the next one will be better, because "that was sooo awesome when I was a kid."
If one single person feels obligated to pay his/her hard earned cash on a movie for that reason alone and then feels "duped" afterwards then they got what they had coming.
Come on, seriously! I realize it's cliche on/. to bash big money but it's not like they're employing slave labour to produce these films or robbing money right out of people's wallets at gun point. You're talking as if they're exploiting a group of people and forcing them to do something against their will. They're bloody movies! If you don't like them don't go see them. It's really as simple as that.
Honestly, for a crowd who is so vocal about free speech and copyright law I get the feeling that the same group of people, if given the power, would strip the rights of anyone to make movies based on anything that they feel close to. It's like, they just can't do right. No matter what. Even though Transformers was a huge success you just can't escape the bitching and whining and, in this case, total exagerated teenage drama queen hyperbole about evil corporation raping some childhood memory and forcing you to consume it "mwuhahahahahaha we're rolling in money and it's all at the expense of some Joe Blow's precious childhood interpretation of a corny and cheesy cartoon who's sole purpose was to sell a line of toy's and make massive amounts of money anyway..."
But then, I supposed it really is the "geek" thing to do. To quote Kevin Smith / Ben Affleck "The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another".
According to the Youtube Videos I was checking out... Tech 5 compiles and runs on PC, Mac, PS3 and XBox 360 "in about 5 minutes". So yes. Tech 5 works on PS3 and XBox 360 and was designed to be portable across all platforms from the beginning.
The real trick is DESIGNING the application in such a way that it can grow gracefully, and STAY beautiful. And that's really tough - knowing what sorts of features and requirements the future will hold is difficult.
You've just described why reusable code, and simplicity, is so important.
You started off hitting the nail on the head. Applications need to be designed so that they can grow with grace and retain their elegance. However, it is impossible to predict the future and I've seen so many projects where the list of "to be supported in the future" lead to so much foundation code that's only purpose was to support features that never came to pass and they became bloated. Sure they had the room to support those features, but as the requirements grew further and further away from what the designers originally thought was going to happen, the application just ended up becoming a mess.
Thus what you need to do is design everything to be re-usable and extensible. Write your functions, classes, interfaces, libraries etc. to do one thing only, and do it very well. When you start to see a block of code getting too big, break it down into smaller blocks. Design for the possibility of unlimited extension in the future without knowing what the future will demand of your project. And most importantly, keep things as simple as possible, and continue to do so as you add more features.
Any crap programmer can write spaghetti code with or without the use of 'goto'.
If goto were not useful or necessary then languages would have dropped it years ago when CS profs started to dread it because they couldn't teach their students properly and got tired of spitting out idiot programmer after idiot programmer who tortured them with goto-ridden spaghetti code.
Telling people to NEVER use goto is like saying "never use a chainsaw because if you attempt to cut down a weed you'll just end up with a big mess". So what, we use a hand saw to cut down an oak tree ? There are far more elegant solutions for a lot of things that can be accomplished with goto. Conversely, there are occasions where goto makes for a more elegant solution.
At the very least, as you put it "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Using your own philosphy I opt for giving programmers all of the necessary tools that they may find useful, and deciding for themselves which ones to use. After all, there are some programmers out there who could write code that is 100 x more efficient and elegant using ONLY gotos in C with main as the only function than I ever could using goto-free, well designed and thought-out object oriented Java, for example.
No matter what you do, the end result will always be the same anyway. Exceptional programmers will continue to produce exceptional code and pasta chefs will continue to produce spaghetti.
Exactly. Loop breaking is just one of the most popular justifications for using goto. Solving nested loop breaking alone is an attempt to please both camps by saying "ok so there are *some* times where using goto makes sense but we were taught from the time we were still in diapers that you must NEVER use goto so we'll just fix that by applying a band-aid".
Goto has been a feature of almost every programming language for a reason. It is useful. If it weren't useful then nobody would ever use it and then we could strip it from languages and no one would complain because no one ever used it to begin with because it's useless and "dangerous".
I know what I'm about to say next is cliche but try grepping for goto in the Linux kernel source.
Just because some n00bs liked to write nightmarish spaghetti-code BASIC programs 20 - 30 years ago with millinos of gotos thus inspiring CS profs everywhere to threaten beating their students with paddles if they used a single goto does not mean that it's useless, evil or "dangerous". Any crap programmer can write messy spaghetti code with or without a goto.
Of course, by the same logic, coming up with better ways to do things is at the heart of everything technology. But I'm not convinced that adding in control structures to break out of nested loops is any better than just using a goto. It seems to me like these languages are trying to find a way to eventually get goto out of them (or they don't have goto to begin with and are now trying to make up for it's absence because they've started to realize is useful after all).
Bloat is entirely in the hands of the webmaster, not the technology. You are free to use or not use any features of HTML. Having more features gives you more choice, not more bloat. What you include in your web pages is entirely up to you.
Re:You are not fusing genetically when you marry
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
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· Score: 4, Interesting
In my experience what is "best" is to let each married couple decide for themselves what is "best".
When my common-law partner and I had children and moved in together for the first time we quickly disolved into a complete mess. I played my fair share in that. My biggest issue, looking back on it, was that I put far too much stock in what other people thought that MY marriage should be. People start treating you differently. Parents and friends try to, innocently, impose their ideals on you regarding what it means to be married and to be a parent and how you should behave and what your role is etc.
It also doesn't help that not only do you have your own family trying to be helpful, but your spouse's family, who may have been relatively distant before you actually moved in together, all of a sudden begins to act like they've known you all your life and you get the expectations from them too.
In my case it went down something like this. My family is relatively small and likes to get together every couple of months to celebrate someone's birthday. When multiple people have a birthday in the same month we merge the gathering into one and we get together for 3 - 4 hours and we try hard to plan it around everyone's schedule. The idea of celebrating something like an anniversary was entirely foreign to me. Sure, my marreid relatives celebrated, but they went out for dinner just the two of them. It wasn't a family event. My wife's family, on the other hand, is massive and they get together at every single possible opportunity (birthdays, anniversaries, 'just for the heck of it' bbqs and pool parties etc.) and they make it an all day and all night event and everyone is expected to be there. This wore me out. My wife and I had to balance two family responsibilities, but I never cared much for my wife's family and being forced to spend a great deal of time with them and listen to all of their expectations and 'advice' drove me to the point where I wanted to end it after about a year. If I didn't step up and be part of their family then somehow (in their eyes and, after absorbing so much of their opinions, in mine as well) I wasn't a good husband and father.
Of course, in the end, we compromised and worked it out. But my point is that I found when we moved in and started treating our relationship as a marriage, that the expectations on us from others grew exponentially over night. I wasn't prepared for that. We've been living together for 7 years now and I found that the most important thing is to concentrate on what the two of you want out of your relationship and to ignore all outside 'advice', regardless of how positively intentioned it may be. Every single person goes into a relationship wanting unique things out of it and most people are a little vulnerable in the beginning because they don't truly know what they're getting themselves into. And so at that point they're more likely to pay attention to what other people have to say. Particularly if there's children involved because (most) people want to be the best parents that they can be. But putting too much stock in what other people, particularly family, thinks can really drive you mad.
In other words, different strokes for different folks. Some people will want to merge every aspect of their lives and be completely happy with that arrangement, other people will want more independence. There is no "right" marriage or relationship. Everyone needs to figure out what's best for them and ignore all outside influences.
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Thank you very much, but Linux doesn't need "friends" who use it as a Horrible Fate that they'll threaten to inflict on themselves as a way to get Mommy Microsoft's sympathetic attention.
You're right. However, it is still pretty cool to hear a guy in his position even mention Linux as any kind of alternative. 10 years ago I was in my teens and a Linux geek. I went through a little phase where I tried to get as many people to try Linux as possible. It was completely futile. I don't think I managed to permanently convert one single person. Not to mention that every one that I tried to convert hadn't even heard of Linux until I started raving about it.
As I grew older my computer became less of a toy and more of a tool to me and I started to appreciate that others held the same position and gave up entirely.
However, now-a-days I see 15 year-old kids on places as odd as ultimate-guitar.com (I'm also a guitarist and hang out on their forum a lot) talk about Linux. And with people at places like PC mag just mentioning it, it offers a lot of merit and street credit to Linux. It shows that it's not just some geek kid's toy who likes to screw around on his computer but it actually performs all of the tasks that people rely on their tool/computer to perform. Sure we don't NEED it and we can resent his attitude of it being a last resort. But just hearing him speak the name goes a million times further than hearing some hacker nerd kid rave about how awesome it is.
The PHP passes the requesting IP to the ad server (presumably for geo-location) and in return gets a block of HTML.
But that's no better than loading the script on their domain in an iframe. The only advantage I can think of is that the user's web browser doesn't have to resolve their server's domain. But if their server is down, or loading slow, your page is going to be slow. In fact, this could be worse than an iframe because at least with an iframe the rest of your page will load and only the iframe will hang. In the case of copying some PHP that calls up their server your whole page will hang at that spot. So unless it's at the very bottom of your page then you're screwed if their server goes down.
What a geo-ip ad company would need to do is give you an ip-to-country database to host on your server and a small script that resolves the geo-ip stuff on your machine. That way the only bottleneck is your server itself. If their ad servers go down or load slowly your site doesn't suffer.
As a webmaster I can tell you that it is common practice for many web sites to block bots.
Not google bot or any SE spider obviously. That results in SE listings which result in lots profitable "real" traffic. But content rippers, scrapers, hit bots etc. get blocked by competent web masters all the time since they just burn bandwidth. Most webmasters have to pay by the GB so it's in their best interest to block traffic that only burns bandwidth.
I run a few web sites and on some I have a geo-IP targeted ad that loads in an iframe. This particular ad is often a bottleneck so I wanted to solve it. My first idea was to run a wget on the server and cache the output to the hard disk so I can load the ad from the server instead of a 3rd party. This would also require one less DNS look-up.
Then I realized that it would completely fail because the ad is geo-IP. So the cache will always display the location of my server, and not the user.
The obvious solution is for ad companies to offer scripts to their affiliates that could be run on the servers hosting the sites. Of course that opens up new problems, like security issues. But if the code were open we could spot such issues.
In fact, that seems to me like such a simple and obvious solution. The only reason that ad companies don't do that (that I can think of) is that they want to appeal to people running on free hosts where they can't run server-side scripts. But there's no reason not to offer both IMO. I also thought that they wanted to keep things as absolutely simple as possible, and there's nothing simpler than saying "just copy/paste this into your html document". But any web master who rents hosting (shared or dedicated) knows how to upload a php script.
I can *kind of* see where they're coming from. If you run for-profit web pages and Firefox users don't see your ads and don't buy anything then they're costing you money in terms of bandwidth. I wouldn't liken it to theft. But if these businesses want to block a certain user because it costs them something then it makes sense.
/. is probably typical of the demographic that they're talking about. So it's definitely possible to appeal to this group of people and convert that traffic. But if they feel like blocking the traffic and not trying to do things better, so as to turn that loss into profit, then that's their decision to make. Those users (who use FF + AdBlock) are obviously the type who do not enjoy surfing that kind of web page anyway. And there's lots of other sites out there that will / do step up and convert the traffic by appealing to the group instead of blocking it.
Not saying there isn't a better way. Like others have said, why not make better ads that aren't intrusive, don't piss off your users and don't get blocked by Ad Block ?
I've actually profited from posting comments on Slashdot (without getting modded down or shunned by anyone), and
Hah! My birthday is August 20 '82 ! We're almost the same age to the day!
I WIN YOU LOSE I WIN YOU LOSE HA HA HA!!!!
Er, sorry.
Don't know if anyone has notices but public schools rank pretty poorly in teaching the basics such as reading, writing, and rithmetic.
:(
My school never even taught rithmetic at all!
The types of people who are unable to manage their own sensitive data, safely, are the same types of people who get jobs at your bank and credit card company and fail to follow safe security practices because they don't know any better.
Teaching kids the fundamentals of computer security will benefit society as a whole, just like teaching kids math, science, language etc. does. If that is not the purpose of public education then I do not know what is (with the exception of free day care service).
That wasn't a mistake. They were attempting to demonstrate how poorly implemented the school systems are by pointing out how they, too, have been victims of it.
Evidently they succeeded.
What software and hardware do you use in Linux ?
I was using a Creative Professional EMU-1820m in Windows with Cubase SL and Fruity Loops Producer Edition 5. I recently switched to Ubuntu and haven't found anything that comes even remotely close. Not to mention that my 1820m isn't supported, although I expected as much.
I still keep Windows around for games and for a DAW.
This is a very odd point of view.
First of all, if the users of the software aren't paying attention, who's fault is that ?
Secondly, you would think and hope that the software manufacturers would be paying attention and that they would inform their users, who may or may not be paying attention.
Full disclosure doesn't just imply disclosure to a small, specific group of people. It involves making information PUBLICLY available to EVERYONE. If someone isn't paying attention then that's their own fault. But if you don't feel like end users who are too worried with other things to be paying attention to Bugtraq are getting a fair break then point the finger at the software manufacturer instead. After all, they're the ones who sold faulty software and they're often the ones who continue to sell faulty software when bugs are not disclosed to the public, because they take the mind set of "what they don't know can't hurt them".
Unfortunately, what "they" don't know CAN hurt them. Because those same people you were talking about who are "interested in doing harm" are usually the ones to find the bugs to begin with. So they already know and those end users that you are so adamant about protecting are already at risk.
So IMO it's the responsibility of the software manufacturers to pay attention, fix bugs, release patches and inform their users that they need to apply said patches ASAP.
I mean, are you really advocating keeping information from people ? What if you had cancer, would you prefer that your doctor not inform you ? As I already stated, full disclosure is all about making information publicly available to absolutely everyone, so that absolutely everyone can make whatever choices they feel like with that information. Your argument is that full disclosure is selective about who it makes the information available to. I have to disagree. At the very least it makes the information available to the developers who made the buggy software to begin with, and competent admins who follow those lists so they know what kind of bugs are running on their servers (I used to be one of those).
That's odd. I can think of ways that driving an ice cream truck would benefit from the Internet.
... ice cream trucks tend to find their way to those events anyway but I'm sure there's some non-obvious events where the possibility of mutually beneficial business relationships exist).
...
Thanks to map tools like google maps you could plan better routes. I suppose you don't *need* the Internet to do that but it adds a level of convenience.
If it's a franchise of ice cream trucks we're talking about then they can use the Internet to communicate with all of their drives more efficiently (offering access to schedules from home, allowing drivers to IM each other etc.).
You can use the Internet to advertise. Not directly to your customers since they're little kids, of course, but to event organizers who's attendees would benefit from having concessions and such at the event (mini league baseball games and stuff
If you're a franchise you can use the Internet to help you find new drivers. If you're an individual you can use the Internet to find additional help that can lead into developing your business into a larger one.
You could set up a web page for your ice cream service and advertise it on the packaging of each sale and in big letters on your truck. You could offer activities / games and such to keep the customers (kids) coming back to the site. At the very least you can use the site to get customer feedback (probably mostly from parents yet still helpful) but surely there would be other ways to convert the traffic to profit as well.
This is just off the top of my head
I use ear buds because they don't fall off my head or get uncomfortable while I'm running.
I'm also a musician / audiophile. I've produced and recorded. I own very expensive studio headphones and monitors.
Are iPod ear buds great headphones ? No. Are ear buds shit, in general ? Sure. But the iPod ear buds they are BY FAR the best ear buds that I've ever used. And I'm not saying that because I'm an apple or ipod fan boy. In fact, I despise iPods. I bought an iPod shuffle for $180 CAD and it lasted me a month. I will never buy an ipod ever again. But I still have the ear buds. I kept them because they beat the living shit out of every other pair of ear buds I've ever used.
With that said, I agree that ear buds have pretty bad quality in general. I also agree that in terms of material / manufacturing there is probably only $0.50 put in to any set of ear buds. But my only point is, if you do get suckered into buying an ipod, don't throw away the ear buds and replace them with a set of $30 ones just because you've heard they're crap cheap ones that get thrown in. The ear buds that came with my ipod were of a much higher quality standard than the bloody ipod itself. Not worth $180, obviously. But at least I got *something* out of it.
Because you can't trust the machine you're auditing if it has been compromised.
I used to watch Voltron when I was around 4 or 5 years old. I had the toy robot that you could assemble / dissemble etc.
... it was a cartoon!" and they'd just think "err... transformers ? :\"
/. article that I've discovered ... it was Voltron! :) ... and now, thanks to another poster, I know why the Power Rangers was so similar. Some days it pays it to slack on work and just hang out on /.
... oh well, he'll understand when I tell him "it was Voltron!"
Around the age of 11 or so the Power Rangers became "huge". Being a young, impressionable kid with no free will I watched it after school with my friends even though I thought it was "total crap". Anyway at that time I had completely forgotten about Voltron yet I KNEW that it was a rip-off of something that I used to watch as a young(er) child.
I remember absolutely loving Voltron and for years I tried to figure out what that cartoon I used to watch as a kid with the cat-like vehicles that could assemble into one. Every person I described it to, in hopes that they would remember, could only think of "power rangers!" to which I'd respond "no definitely NOT the power rangers
It was actually thanks to this
Shit my boss is calling me
I remember liking the cat version of voltron when I was a kid... then I watched it with my kids recently (who love it) and for some reason the storyline seemed like some nutty commie propaganda.
I feel the same way about pretty much every single show that I watched as a child.
My wife is a uber comic / cartoon / movie geek. She went and bought the Thundercats season 1 box set. I LOVED the Thundercats as a kid and was very eager to watch a few episodes and bring back some childhood memories. "Yawn" is pretty much the only word I can use to describe my experience "reconnecting with my youth".
I loved the Transformers movie. But I can't sit through the cartoons any more. Any film that tries to put an adult twist on cartoons or shows from the 80's to attempt to appeal to the children of that time who are now grown up I can certainly relate to and get into. But there are tons of movies and cartoons and music that I loved as a child that I am not the slightest bit interested in anymore as an adult. But I assume that's normal.
I'm not in the least bit religious but Corinthians 13:11 comes to mind "When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things".
Nothing against people who still enjoy cartoons from their childhood, though. In fact I envy them slightly.
They don't pick these movies to make based on good scripts, good ideas, or good director/writers, they are just knocking them down one after the other because people will go see something they have good memories of. They're completely taking advantage of everyone's misplaced hope that the next one will be better, because "that was sooo awesome when I was a kid."
/. to bash big money but it's not like they're employing slave labour to produce these films or robbing money right out of people's wallets at gun point. You're talking as if they're exploiting a group of people and forcing them to do something against their will. They're bloody movies! If you don't like them don't go see them. It's really as simple as that.
If one single person feels obligated to pay his/her hard earned cash on a movie for that reason alone and then feels "duped" afterwards then they got what they had coming.
Come on, seriously! I realize it's cliche on
Honestly, for a crowd who is so vocal about free speech and copyright law I get the feeling that the same group of people, if given the power, would strip the rights of anyone to make movies based on anything that they feel close to. It's like, they just can't do right. No matter what. Even though Transformers was a huge success you just can't escape the bitching and whining and, in this case, total exagerated teenage drama queen hyperbole about evil corporation raping some childhood memory and forcing you to consume it "mwuhahahahahaha we're rolling in money and it's all at the expense of some Joe Blow's precious childhood interpretation of a corny and cheesy cartoon who's sole purpose was to sell a line of toy's and make massive amounts of money anyway..."
But then, I supposed it really is the "geek" thing to do. To quote Kevin Smith / Ben Affleck "The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another".
/ rant
According to the Youtube Videos I was checking out ... Tech 5 compiles and runs on PC, Mac, PS3 and XBox 360 "in about 5 minutes". So yes. Tech 5 works on PS3 and XBox 360 and was designed to be portable across all platforms from the beginning.
Hey Theo ... haven't chatted with you in a while. How's it going ? Family doing well ?
The real trick is DESIGNING the application in such a way that it can grow gracefully, and STAY beautiful. And that's really tough - knowing what sorts of features and requirements the future will hold is difficult.
You've just described why reusable code, and simplicity, is so important.
You started off hitting the nail on the head. Applications need to be designed so that they can grow with grace and retain their elegance. However, it is impossible to predict the future and I've seen so many projects where the list of "to be supported in the future" lead to so much foundation code that's only purpose was to support features that never came to pass and they became bloated. Sure they had the room to support those features, but as the requirements grew further and further away from what the designers originally thought was going to happen, the application just ended up becoming a mess.
Thus what you need to do is design everything to be re-usable and extensible. Write your functions, classes, interfaces, libraries etc. to do one thing only, and do it very well. When you start to see a block of code getting too big, break it down into smaller blocks. Design for the possibility of unlimited extension in the future without knowing what the future will demand of your project. And most importantly, keep things as simple as possible, and continue to do so as you add more features.
It's times like this I wish you could moderate +1 Sexy
Any crap programmer can write spaghetti code with or without the use of 'goto'.
If goto were not useful or necessary then languages would have dropped it years ago when CS profs started to dread it because they couldn't teach their students properly and got tired of spitting out idiot programmer after idiot programmer who tortured them with goto-ridden spaghetti code.
Telling people to NEVER use goto is like saying "never use a chainsaw because if you attempt to cut down a weed you'll just end up with a big mess". So what, we use a hand saw to cut down an oak tree ? There are far more elegant solutions for a lot of things that can be accomplished with goto. Conversely, there are occasions where goto makes for a more elegant solution.
At the very least, as you put it "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Using your own philosphy I opt for giving programmers all of the necessary tools that they may find useful, and deciding for themselves which ones to use. After all, there are some programmers out there who could write code that is 100 x more efficient and elegant using ONLY gotos in C with main as the only function than I ever could using goto-free, well designed and thought-out object oriented Java, for example.
No matter what you do, the end result will always be the same anyway. Exceptional programmers will continue to produce exceptional code and pasta chefs will continue to produce spaghetti.
Exactly. Loop breaking is just one of the most popular justifications for using goto. Solving nested loop breaking alone is an attempt to please both camps by saying "ok so there are *some* times where using goto makes sense but we were taught from the time we were still in diapers that you must NEVER use goto so we'll just fix that by applying a band-aid".
Goto has been a feature of almost every programming language for a reason. It is useful. If it weren't useful then nobody would ever use it and then we could strip it from languages and no one would complain because no one ever used it to begin with because it's useless and "dangerous".
I know what I'm about to say next is cliche but try grepping for goto in the Linux kernel source.
Just because some n00bs liked to write nightmarish spaghetti-code BASIC programs 20 - 30 years ago with millinos of gotos thus inspiring CS profs everywhere to threaten beating their students with paddles if they used a single goto does not mean that it's useless, evil or "dangerous". Any crap programmer can write messy spaghetti code with or without a goto.
Of course, by the same logic, coming up with better ways to do things is at the heart of everything technology. But I'm not convinced that adding in control structures to break out of nested loops is any better than just using a goto. It seems to me like these languages are trying to find a way to eventually get goto out of them (or they don't have goto to begin with and are now trying to make up for it's absence because they've started to realize is useful after all).
Bloat is entirely in the hands of the webmaster, not the technology. You are free to use or not use any features of HTML. Having more features gives you more choice, not more bloat. What you include in your web pages is entirely up to you.
In my experience what is "best" is to let each married couple decide for themselves what is "best".
When my common-law partner and I had children and moved in together for the first time we quickly disolved into a complete mess. I played my fair share in that. My biggest issue, looking back on it, was that I put far too much stock in what other people thought that MY marriage should be. People start treating you differently. Parents and friends try to, innocently, impose their ideals on you regarding what it means to be married and to be a parent and how you should behave and what your role is etc.
It also doesn't help that not only do you have your own family trying to be helpful, but your spouse's family, who may have been relatively distant before you actually moved in together, all of a sudden begins to act like they've known you all your life and you get the expectations from them too.
In my case it went down something like this. My family is relatively small and likes to get together every couple of months to celebrate someone's birthday. When multiple people have a birthday in the same month we merge the gathering into one and we get together for 3 - 4 hours and we try hard to plan it around everyone's schedule. The idea of celebrating something like an anniversary was entirely foreign to me. Sure, my marreid relatives celebrated, but they went out for dinner just the two of them. It wasn't a family event. My wife's family, on the other hand, is massive and they get together at every single possible opportunity (birthdays, anniversaries, 'just for the heck of it' bbqs and pool parties etc.) and they make it an all day and all night event and everyone is expected to be there. This wore me out. My wife and I had to balance two family responsibilities, but I never cared much for my wife's family and being forced to spend a great deal of time with them and listen to all of their expectations and 'advice' drove me to the point where I wanted to end it after about a year. If I didn't step up and be part of their family then somehow (in their eyes and, after absorbing so much of their opinions, in mine as well) I wasn't a good husband and father.
Of course, in the end, we compromised and worked it out. But my point is that I found when we moved in and started treating our relationship as a marriage, that the expectations on us from others grew exponentially over night. I wasn't prepared for that. We've been living together for 7 years now and I found that the most important thing is to concentrate on what the two of you want out of your relationship and to ignore all outside 'advice', regardless of how positively intentioned it may be. Every single person goes into a relationship wanting unique things out of it and most people are a little vulnerable in the beginning because they don't truly know what they're getting themselves into. And so at that point they're more likely to pay attention to what other people have to say. Particularly if there's children involved because (most) people want to be the best parents that they can be. But putting too much stock in what other people, particularly family, thinks can really drive you mad.
In other words, different strokes for different folks. Some people will want to merge every aspect of their lives and be completely happy with that arrangement, other people will want more independence. There is no "right" marriage or relationship. Everyone needs to figure out what's best for them and ignore all outside influences.