Nicknames aren't the only problem with IRC, though. It also has fundamental scalability and reliability problems. (Speaking as someone who's deployed servers and written client code for IRC.)
The scalability problem comes from the fact that every IRC server must carry all IRC traffic, not just the traffic for the users it is serving.
The reliability problem comes from the fact that the IRC protocol is based on a tree topology with a single point of failure at the root.
Then there's the fact that a lot of the basic functionality (e.g. presence information) is just a hack, implemented via CTCP rather than being part of the IRC protocol. As a result, it's often not implemented by clients, and is so unreliable that it ends up being useless. Don't believe me? Watch how many people feel the need to announce that they are away with messages, rather than using the standard "away" mechanism.
I'm no big fan of Jabber; I think it's a horrendous protocol, in fact. But it's a carefully thought out, complete and scaleable protocol, which is not the case for IRC.
Before Jobs came back to Apple, Newton was spun off into its own company, Newton Inc. It wasn't losing Apple any money; it was going to stand or fall on its own merits, and was apparently making a small profit. So there was no financial need to first re-absorb the spin-off company and then kill it.
If you look on eBay, you can find Newton-branded Newtons as well as pure Apple-branded ones.
No Wi-Fi built-in... no microphone... no Cobalt...no sliding case
I don't care about the wi-fi thing if there's a working card for it. I don't care about the lack of microphone, I have a MD recorder. I don't care about Cobalt, I'd rather have the thing work with my Mac and my Linux boxes.
And the lack of a sliding case is a huge plus. The stupid sliding design is the single thing that has kept me away from the Tungsten series so far.
1. 1% unauthorized 'warez', things not available to buy. 2. 1% downloadable music store stuff, mostly bleep.com. 3. 1% Creative Commons, including a Steve Reich performance at UCB. 4. 97% rips of my own CDs. 5. 0% rips of friends' CDs, my friends don't really share my tastes...
And you missed radio shows. I have lots of radio shows.
What about the reality show where they got a bunch of gold-digging shallow women to compete to marry a man they thought was a millionaire, then turned around and told them he had no money? I thought that was a marvellous idea, a karmic payback worthy of the Twilight Zone. Sure, the women were manipulated, disrespected and used, but I think they deserved it.
I don't think there's enough info in the article to say whether these people are being unfairly used or not. Perhaps they ended up in the show because they smelt the Hollywood money and were desperate to get their snouts in the trough? Or, yes, perhaps they were genuinely selfless fans who were tricked into taking part against their better judgement. I'd like to know before passing judgement against the show or William Shatner.
By and large, we see people being degraded on TV because people will willingly do horribly degrading things just to appear on TV, and will thank the networks afterwards. If they're happy, what's it to me if I think they've lost all dignity? All they had to do was say no.
What do you mean it's "5x what I pay for actual calls I make"?!
I mean that I make a few dollars' worth of calls per month at my current long distance rates. The fixed monthly charge is way more.
I DARE you to get even basic incoming/outgoing service for less than $20 with the traditional phone companies.
Yes, that's the whole point. I pay $30 a month for phone service. That's $30 for zero calls, $30 and 5 cents for 1 minute of long distance calls, $30 and 10 cents for 2 minutes, and so on. It's the $30 I want reduced, not the 5 cents.
Right now, VoIP involves a lot of hassle and unreliability, in return for pretty small savings. It makes more sense to switch entirely to my mobile phone; the base charge for that is $20.
The problem I have with my phone service is that the fixed per-month charge is about 5x what I pay for the actual calls I make.
I'd much rather have more expensive calls, and a lower per-month fee. I have no trouble with paying 5 cents a minute to make a call; it's paying $25+ a month for no calls that pisses me off.
Right. Someone has already pointed out a patent which covers working out how much stack a program needs at compile time, so you can't even write Hello World without potentially violating a patent.
Every piece of software is known to potentially violate existing software patents. This applies equally to Microsoft Windows and Linux. Microsoft offer you no more indemnity from lawsuits than Linux distributors do.
The portrayal of software patents as an issue where Windows is "safer" than Linux is just utterly bogus, it's Microsoft FUD from start to finish.
Al Gore didn't want any of the votes of Nader supporters.
If Gore had wanted Nader supporters to vote for him, he would have debated Nader and attempted to win over his supporters. He didn't, so clearly he wasn't interested in their votes. He got his wish. I see no problem with that.
Similarly, Kerry is apparently so confident that he doesn't feel any need for the votes of Green Party supporters. More fool him.
My mother runs Linux, because Windows kept getting destroyed by worms and viruses. She could definitely use a really simple image viewer and editor.
In fact, what I'd *really* like is a simple drag-drop application that prepares digital camera images to make them suitable for e-mailing. It would resize them to be no bigger than (say) 600 pixels in any dimension, apply a little sharpening, and save the result in the same directory as the original image, in JPEG format, with a "-email.jpg" file suffix.
Explaining unsharp masks, DPI and image sizes to my mother is just too difficult.
If you live somewhere hot, remember to try to factor in the money you no longer need to spend on air conditioning to keep the room cool when it has the monitor in.
Of course, if you live somewhere cold, the reverse applies...
It has been noted statistically that as cars have become safer, drivers have responded by driving faster and more dangerously. Part of the reason why SUVs are more dangerous than any other vehicle is that they give the driver an exaggerated--in fact, entirely illusory--impression of invulnerability.
I have, in the past, suggested that we should improve safety by taking note of this effect, and fitting car dashboards with sharpened rotating knives.
LiveJournal wasn't adequately planned from a business perspective either. Like many.com era companies, they went for massive uncontrolled growth.
Because of the ballooning user population, they've ended up in a situation where they've had to install a bunch of anonymous moderators to "control" abusive users, apparently using inadequate tools for the task and with little guidance. And as everyone knows, anonymity + power + no oversight = abusive behavior. See my signature link.
Brad admits he basically has no idea what the "abuse" team is doing, so the whole LJ organization is dysfunctional.
What you apparently missed is that I'm old enough that I started with vinyl, and ditched it as soon as possible because it was so inconvenient, unreliable, and prone to wearing out, not to mention surface noise.
As mentioned in another posting, a headphone amp solves the stereo image problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Nicknames aren't the only problem with IRC, though. It also has fundamental scalability and reliability problems. (Speaking as someone who's deployed servers and written client code for IRC.)
The scalability problem comes from the fact that every IRC server must carry all IRC traffic, not just the traffic for the users it is serving.
The reliability problem comes from the fact that the IRC protocol is based on a tree topology with a single point of failure at the root.
Then there's the fact that a lot of the basic functionality (e.g. presence information) is just a hack, implemented via CTCP rather than being part of the IRC protocol. As a result, it's often not implemented by clients, and is so unreliable that it ends up being useless. Don't believe me? Watch how many people feel the need to announce that they are away with messages, rather than using the standard "away" mechanism.
I'm no big fan of Jabber; I think it's a horrendous protocol, in fact. But it's a carefully thought out, complete and scaleable protocol, which is not the case for IRC.
The Newton software is still ahead of what the Palm and PocketPC have. All they need to do is update the hardware a bit.
Give me a Newton with USB, Wi-Fi and supported desktop sync software, make it a little smaller and lighter, and give it today's screen technology.
I don't care if it runs the same software as the 2100. I'd be using my 2100 today if it hadn't been Steved. Instead, I'm using a Palm, which sucks.
Before Jobs came back to Apple, Newton was spun off into its own company, Newton Inc. It wasn't losing Apple any money; it was going to stand or fall on its own merits, and was apparently making a small profit. So there was no financial need to first re-absorb the spin-off company and then kill it.
If you look on eBay, you can find Newton-branded Newtons as well as pure Apple-branded ones.
The T5 supports landscape mode, and I wouldn't carry a T3 caseless anyway.
Well, there are people like me who hate the sliding design T series.
The problem with the UX-50 is the eye-strainingly small screen. If they'd fix that it would, indeed, be perfect.
I don't care about the wi-fi thing if there's a working card for it. I don't care about the lack of microphone, I have a MD recorder. I don't care about Cobalt, I'd rather have the thing work with my Mac and my Linux boxes.
And the lack of a sliding case is a huge plus. The stupid sliding design is the single thing that has kept me away from the Tungsten series so far.
1. 1% unauthorized 'warez', things not available to buy.
2. 1% downloadable music store stuff, mostly bleep.com.
3. 1% Creative Commons, including a Steve Reich performance at UCB.
4. 97% rips of my own CDs.
5. 0% rips of friends' CDs, my friends don't really share my tastes...
And you missed radio shows. I have lots of radio shows.
What about the reality show where they got a bunch of gold-digging shallow women to compete to marry a man they thought was a millionaire, then turned around and told them he had no money? I thought that was a marvellous idea, a karmic payback worthy of the Twilight Zone. Sure, the women were manipulated, disrespected and used, but I think they deserved it.
I don't think there's enough info in the article to say whether these people are being unfairly used or not. Perhaps they ended up in the show because they smelt the Hollywood money and were desperate to get their snouts in the trough? Or, yes, perhaps they were genuinely selfless fans who were tricked into taking part against their better judgement. I'd like to know before passing judgement against the show or William Shatner.
By and large, we see people being degraded on TV because people will willingly do horribly degrading things just to appear on TV, and will thank the networks afterwards. If they're happy, what's it to me if I think they've lost all dignity? All they had to do was say no.
Mandrake 9.1 is all kinds of broken. I mean, it was OK in its day, but I never could get the menu editor to work reliably.
Debian testing is much more stable and less broken than Mandrake 9.1, in my experience.
I mean that I make a few dollars' worth of calls per month at my current long distance rates. The fixed monthly charge is way more.
Yes, that's the whole point. I pay $30 a month for phone service. That's $30 for zero calls, $30 and 5 cents for 1 minute of long distance calls, $30 and 10 cents for 2 minutes, and so on. It's the $30 I want reduced, not the 5 cents.
Right now, VoIP involves a lot of hassle and unreliability, in return for pretty small savings. It makes more sense to switch entirely to my mobile phone; the base charge for that is $20.
The problem I have with my phone service is that the fixed per-month charge is about 5x what I pay for the actual calls I make.
I'd much rather have more expensive calls, and a lower per-month fee. I have no trouble with paying 5 cents a minute to make a call; it's paying $25+ a month for no calls that pisses me off.
Right. Someone has already pointed out a patent which covers working out how much stack a program needs at compile time, so you can't even write Hello World without potentially violating a patent.
Every piece of software is known to potentially violate existing software patents. This applies equally to Microsoft Windows and Linux. Microsoft offer you no more indemnity from lawsuits than Linux distributors do.
The portrayal of software patents as an issue where Windows is "safer" than Linux is just utterly bogus, it's Microsoft FUD from start to finish.
So, why bother with debates at all then?
Al Gore didn't want any of the votes of Nader supporters.
If Gore had wanted Nader supporters to vote for him, he would have debated Nader and attempted to win over his supporters. He didn't, so clearly he wasn't interested in their votes. He got his wish. I see no problem with that.
Similarly, Kerry is apparently so confident that he doesn't feel any need for the votes of Green Party supporters. More fool him.
Yeah, it's getting it to appear as a drag-drop icon that's the hard part.
If someone could make a tool to turn Perl or shell scripts into drag-drop KDE applications, I could do the rest...
Because if you read the TIFF format documents, you'll see that it's a horrible mess, and uses compression methods which were patented at the time.
My mother runs Linux, because Windows kept getting destroyed by worms and viruses. She could definitely use a really simple image viewer and editor.
In fact, what I'd *really* like is a simple drag-drop application that prepares digital camera images to make them suitable for e-mailing. It would resize them to be no bigger than (say) 600 pixels in any dimension, apply a little sharpening, and save the result in the same directory as the original image, in JPEG format, with a "-email.jpg" file suffix.
Explaining unsharp masks, DPI and image sizes to my mother is just too difficult.
PNG is also a container format. You can add whatever data chunks you like to it. They could easily have defined a raw data chunk for the PNG format.
Aha, I shall go try out 1.2.1. (1.2.2, in fact, as the RC has made it to ~x86 in Gentoo.)
Last time I checked arch had a couple of major weaknesses that I *did* consider showstoppers:
1. Requires that you use files named according to its conventions, not those of your software.
2. Falls over on filenames with spaces in.
Fix those, and I'd use arch. (Yes, I know they're working on #2.)
If you live somewhere hot, remember to try to factor in the money you no longer need to spend on air conditioning to keep the room cool when it has the monitor in.
Of course, if you live somewhere cold, the reverse applies...
$7k for a wedding? I think you answered your own question.
It has been noted statistically that as cars have become safer, drivers have responded by driving faster and more dangerously. Part of the reason why SUVs are more dangerous than any other vehicle is that they give the driver an exaggerated--in fact, entirely illusory--impression of invulnerability.
I have, in the past, suggested that we should improve safety by taking note of this effect, and fitting car dashboards with sharpened rotating knives.
LiveJournal wasn't adequately planned from a business perspective either. Like many .com era companies, they went for massive uncontrolled growth.
Because of the ballooning user population, they've ended up in a situation where they've had to install a bunch of anonymous moderators to "control" abusive users, apparently using inadequate tools for the task and with little guidance. And as everyone knows, anonymity + power + no oversight = abusive behavior. See my signature link.
Brad admits he basically has no idea what the "abuse" team is doing, so the whole LJ organization is dysfunctional.
What you apparently missed is that I'm old enough that I started with vinyl, and ditched it as soon as possible because it was so inconvenient, unreliable, and prone to wearing out, not to mention surface noise.
As mentioned in another posting, a headphone amp solves the stereo image problem.