Furthermore, the story submitter specifically stated:
Since I'm not looking for illegal downloads or to hide what I'm doing, I'm less concerned about anonymity than I am about region restrictions, reliability, latency, and security of passwords and traffic through their network.
( emphasis mine )
But yes, for those reading along and who hid under a rock the other day, it's a good thing to keep in mind. Note that most proxies/VPNs collect at least basic IP information for legal purposes, though.
Besides which, although there is certainly crime that occurs which takes place on said streets, a far greater amount of non-crime takes place on those streets. This cannot be said for the news servers in question.
In addition, the streets weren't created for the facilitation of said crimes. While some news servers may have originally been set up purely for the discussions, the servers in question most certainly were not.
Finally (as far as this post goes), as alien as it may seem, the government does in fact put police on those streets, doing regular patrols or responding to alerts. While this doesn't prevent all crime, nor address all crime, let alone get those doing the crime punished appropriately, it's not entirely useless. Most news server administrators, however, look only at their bank accounts as subscription fees come in - they purposefully do not monitor what their service is actually hosting / indexing, although invariably they know quite well what the on-goings are.
That doesn't really diminish your conclusion - but the argument-by-analogy is rather weak.
You could just directly argue that a news service has no task in monitoring what's going on any more than ISPs do (that's the task of law enforcement and/or copyright holders, depending on applicable jurisdiction and the material in question) and that the demands placed on them by the court are undue and will with no uncertainty mean the end of their business which also provides legal services. I'm not sure if that's what they'll try in the appeal (if any), though.
That means that they look at the technical arguments the defendants put forth, examine them, say "nice try", and then agree with the rebuttal that these news server admins who take membership fees for their services which exists largely as the hosting and distribution of material for which they have no implicit or explicit permission to do so, know damn well that this is how their service is used and thus that their service operates on the boundaries of the law at best. The boundaries were just shifted, again.
The devices using Android with bundled Chrome-ish thing isn't so much a choice, though.
And yes, advertising - and certainly bundling - helps Chrome as well. Too bad Mozilla doesn't have umpteenbillion for that sort of thing.
But the context is people actively switching to Chrome (or those who get Chrome pushed on them by some other installer, try it, then decide to keep using it rather than uninstalling it as they would most co-installed shovelware.)
FireFox became the #2 browser in the world when there were few reasonable alternatives... there was IE, Netscape (which really started to suck after 4.7something), Opera (non-free at the time) and what's now known as FireFox.
But they didn't win out because they annoyed typical end users but because they actually offered a better browser than IE (speed, features) or Opera (being free).
Now I'm not saying that Chrome is a better browser than FireFox - though some would argue it is.
What I am saying, however, is that FireFox 7 is a lesser browser than previous iterations.
That whole crowd that got them to that #2 spot is looking at all of the relatively recent changes almost as if betraying them. Take for example the decision to remove the status bar. What happened? People made add-ons to bring the status bar back, such as status-4-evar. Note that before that time, there was no add-on to remove the status bar. Of course it also wasn't needed - it was an option to show/hide it right from a menu. But somebody behind the development of FireFox pushed through the change anyway and tried to dress it up as being a change for the good (more screen space - even though just hiding it would do that much), a new better API for add-ons (which could just as well have been applied to the status bar), etc. while it was obvious to most that it was a "Chrome doesn't have a status bar - why do we?" move.
And when most of what they're doing is to be 'more like Chrome', then why wouldn't a user just switch to Chrome?
What - we just had the "omg how do I save my pictures/videos for my great-great-great-grandchildren!?!?" 3-monthly Slashdot story, so now the "aaaargh! I can't let some schmuck discover all the home made porn and paste it all over the interwebs!!!" was overdue?
Seriously, people... HDD tech hasn't changed enough to make the same answers from 5 years ago any different now.
I only use a few addons and have never seen Firefox use much more than 400mb in versions 5 & 6. With 7 it hovers in the mid 200s.
I realize it's anecdotal - but I've seen it regularly at 700MB+. It doesn't help that either FireFox, or Windows, decides that all that memory usage isn't needed when I go do something else for a while (like, say, watch a DVD) and puts it into the page file. Then when I want to get back to FireFox, it churns for a while getting all that back into RAM.
But here's the thing... right now it sits at 370MB - in Safe Mode as I was testing something for a different comment. Now let me open the same URLs into Chrome and check its memory usage.
Chrome does make this annoying as there's a bunch of chrome.exe processes, so adding them up: 51+10+13+21+12+127+10+10+8 = 262MB.
That's still more than I think would actually be reasonable, but it's also 100MB less than FireFox. And, in the mean time, FireFox is up to 380MB - having done nothing else than alt-tab to Chrome and Back.. and typing this extra text. I'm pretty sure this text doesn't weigh in at several MB, though.
Agreed - and FireFox 7 doesn't seem to have changed anything here.
The following is with all add-ons enabled, statistics from FireBug, zooming in from one level to another over Lancaster, PA: First, it just enlarges the existing tiles. Then I get a bunch of blue/grey tiles. Then I get a bunch of green/brown larger tiles. Then I get the enlarged tiles again. Then it just sits there. Time taken: at this point: 7.something seconds (disappeared from view) Then all of a sudden, some more accesses and a bunch of the correct tiles pop into view. Total time: 8.32s
Now again in Safe Mode, for the people who like to blame Add-ons: Same visual behavjor Total time: about 7.5 seconds (timed by watch, so give or take a fraction of a second).
But it's not just FireFox. Trying the same area in Internet Explorer version 8. Same visual behavior. Total time: approximately 12 seconds.
Now let's try Chrome (latest version, just downloaded). First the existing tiles are a bit enlarged. Then the correct tiles are loaded. Total time: approximately 2 seconds.
I don't know if they have specifically optimized something for Chrome there - but the performance difference is staggering. But, as I don't generally enjoy using Chrome, I usually start up Google Earth instead when I need to browse around. That's even faster. If I need a route or whatever I can type in the 'From / To' and the delay in drawing the map doesn't bother me that much.
Would that be the 7 that only came out a few days ago?
The same 7 that still doesn't have an MSI installer? (yeah, I hate it too.. but Microsoft has made things such that only MSIs work smoothly with the system, the rest require odd kludges. As much as cursing Microsoft is a stress-reliever, practical thought dictates that an MSI should be written. Yes, I'm familiar with the 3rd party solution that even allows us to wrap the standard installer into an MSI, thanks. )
The same 7 that wasn't (and still isn't) offered to me as an update? (apparently due to phased rollouts)
The same 7 which, when it was offered at random (I guess that uses a different path from the About screen one), told me 3 Add-ons were not yet compatible (they are now) even though none of the changes in FireFox 7 were likely to have affected them? ( yes, blame the add-on developers... no, wait, blame checking for a version number tag... no, blame needing add-ons at all. )
No, I couldn't imagine at all why people would have tried Chrome years ago and stuck around with it while the team behind FireFox sort of, almost, got its act together... but then decided to be more like Chrome (yes, I read the denial write-up that was covered on Slashdot.) and alienated a chunk of their existing userbase as a result because they took some of the perceived worst aspects of Chrome rather than the good ones.
Example: They removed the 'http://' in front of addresses in the address bar. All good and well - apparently this makes it look less cluttered and people who have never used the internet before won't be scared off by the "ache tee tee pee colon slash slash" thing. ( But then FF scares the bejeebus out of them when they visit a 'secure' site by still leaving the 'https://' in front. )
A common knee-jerk reaction was "zomg how am I supposed to copy/paste a link now?" To which the defendants said "it will still add the 'http://' when you copy the URL".
And sure enough, click in the address field, copy it (ctrl+c, ctrl+insert, right-click and choose Copy) and voila... 'http://' is magically inserted in front.
Now, accidentally press ctrl+v or shift+insert or right-click and mis-click on Paste. Not to worry, ctrl+z (undo) restores the URL. Select it, copy it, paste somewhere. Whoops - now where did my http:/// go?
Now, yes, obviously that's a bug in a completely different section of FireFox that has nothing to do with the 'http://' insertion code. But back when 'http://' wasn't removed, this was a non-issue. The bug may have been there, but you wouldn't have hit it.
I guess it's a good thing that new features expose old bugs... but a typical end-user is just going to be annoyed.
I still use FireFox for the add-ons, but they're pushing their luck with a lot of people.
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years.
Do you suppose that maybe, just maybe, that's because no such solution exists?
Seriously, if there had been some manner of breakthrough in storage technology that would radically have changed the replies people gave 3 months ago, 6 months ago, 9 months ago, 12 months ago, etc. don't you think it would have been not only front page news at Slashdot but on practically any technology website worth its salt?
No, I'm with GP. Stop asking the same question if you can reasonably expect the answers to be the same, too.
For those needing car analogies: Slashdot is the car. The editors and commenters are the drivers. The people submitting these types of articles are the whiney kids going "Are we there yet?".
Unfortunately, the drivers in this case are horrible parents and humor their kids with "No, not yet." / "No, but we are somewhere else and let me tell you all about it even if it's not what you asked about.".
A sane parent would have done the "No. I'll tell you when we're there*. Now stop asking or I'm going to pull over"-threat thing. ( * I.e. by posting about the aforementioned technological breakthrough. )
But did they only come up with this sinister plan once Li-Ion made its way onto their market, then?
Because apparently that sinister plan wasn't in place for regular alkaline batteries. And it wasn't in plan for NiCd batteries. And while my older candybar phone still has a NiMH battery, my newer one has a LiPo ( I guess I skipped the Li-Ion generation ). And this while LiPo tech has been around for over a decade.
Yeah, that's called "the traveling salesman problem"
Odd - I call it 'Itinerary' - but that's only because my TomTom labels it as such. It's not entirely automated in that I can't specify a destination and then say 'along the route to the destination, find me X, Y and Z' - but I can look at the route it's already plotted for me and find said X, Y and Z on the map and add them as waypoints.
Of course the question becomes what is more efficient.. shortest? fastest? least turns? most highways? least highways? most traffic congestion avoidance? etc.
When the acceleration is enough that it's hard to pump blood up into your head, you experience nausea and lots of small pains.
For the more adventurous among you, you can test mild varieties of this yourself by swinging your arm, extended, making circles with your hand.
Do this at a normal pace, compare that hand to the other, it'll be a fair bit more red. Do this faster, and you'll start to feel some of that 'small pains' - it's not entirely unlike when your hand's 'asleep', but more painful. Go faster still and you'll have successfully flung blood cells up toward your skin, which is now mottled with little red pinpricks. Don't worry, it should disappear in a day or two. ( But if it doesn't, don't blame me.. blame yourself for actually trying this, you nutter. )
Now imagine that scaled up just that tiny bit more and involving not just your fingertips but pretty much your entire body including internal organs.
Doesn't sound particularly comfortable to me.
Pretty sure I also read about this story several months back, somewhere.. oh well.
Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out).
What on Earth are you on about?
I can even watch homestarrunner.com (the ubiquitous example) toons on my old Windows Mobile 5 device with a 200MHz OMAP thing, and it plays back smoothly.
Now we have hardware accellerated video decoding, full flash on mobile devices that actually runs half-decently
Oh, you're one of those people who think Flash is only used for video.
While I'm no fan of iPad hand-outs (the NL Senate just got a bunch and I'm left wondering why they wouldn't just opt for a more open model.. given that they have to pay for the dev anyway, it doesn't matter much if that's on iOS or Android or whatever), and on the other hand I'm not knowledgeable enough about whether or not the devs and apps are in place for kindergarten (that's little kids, right? tablets of any sort for little kids? what?) to say "they should have gone with a Dell Mini with Ubuntu" like that dude further up the replies, I do know this...
Meanwhile, I'm still having to supply basic community-use classroom materials that the school should be supplying (kleenex, hand sanitizer, paper towels, etc.).
Stop it on 2 out of 3 of those. Kleenex? really? What, are their noses so delicate that they can't withstand a paper towel when they have snot flying all over the place? Alternatively, whatever happened to handkerchiefs? They're not just formal dress accessories, you know. And hand sanitizer?? Is this a parents freaking out at you thing or have you missed all the bits about hand sanitizers doing little good while they can do quite a bit of harm? Yes, of course you wouldn't want little Johnny to stick his fingers into little Lily's mouth right after he wiped his butt.. but isn't that why you teach them to wash their hands? Or is this a wash hands and then 'just to be sure' thing? Not saying you should be taking pointers from a comedian, but here.. have a laugh anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FG6J6RPB9U
So it's basically months upon months of everything related to RIAA, especially legal proceedings....then a 10 month hiatus....and then submissions / comments on everything from paleontology to astronomy to general tech company musings.
Yeahhh.. what happened?
I mean, I guess Mr. Beckerman might just be trying to keep things to his blog ( http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ ) rather than on/., but even that has seen more frequent posts in the past.
Did you know Flash can do more than just playing video?
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, pick me! Oh thank you, Sir!
The correct answer is: Yes, but we don't want the flash ads, online minigames are the facedevilbook's work so who needs that crap when you can play Angry Birds on your iDevice, and who seriously still watches Strongbad e-mails anyway?
At least, that's the excuses I've gathered from previous discussions.
Not only are you deluded in the fact that you think they lost "plenty of money" from you no longer buying CDs every paycheck (let's be optimistic and you used to buy $40 worth each two weeks - that's $1,040) even though the RIAA net profit is still comfortably (they like to argue otherwise) in the billions and they miss much more from people who 'pirate' for whatever reason......but your 'boycott' lapses every once in a while because you'd still like to listen to a particular band?
That's not a boycott... that's just a spending habit change. It's still a good change - I'm not blasting you... but let's face it, it's not a boycott and it's not (even combined with other, actual, boycotters) what's going to bring the RIAA to its knees.
Oh goodie! A call for a boycott - because those work so well when there's still millions who won't join in on said boycott:D/sarcasm
Let's give it a shot, though...
Starting with the production companies... Voltage Pictures - not much to boycott there. Grosvenor Park - no watching "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Disaster Movie" (no loss there) or "Righteous Kill" Film Capital Europe Funds - again, not much to boycott. First Light Production - no "K-19 The Widowmaker" Kingsgate - zilch
Ohhhh... this one should get some teenage girls going "omg I have to boycott them!? noooooooeees": Summit Entertainment - That's right, no more watching the "Twilight" saga, the "Step Up" series, "Push", "Knowing" (ot: great opening sequence), "The Brothers Grimm", "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", "Memento", "Vanilla Sky",
I guess we'll leave the distribution companies be, but just for kicks, they include Warner Brothers Pictures, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, Summit Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Including them, and the other distributions, means you can now put more than half of the movies made, EVER, on your boycott list. That shouldn't be too hard, eh.
Oh, another good one.. Effects: Company 3 - They have worked on, among other, "Tower Heist", "Conan the Barbarian" but also the "Transformers" series, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, "X-Men: The Last Stand", "Sucker Punch", "Rango"... shit, they go all the way back to "Being John Malkovich". That's 202 more movies - many of which quite popular - that you can add to your boycott list.
And we haven't even gotten to the fact that you want the crew to be included. You do realize that eventually, it's entirely likely that you will have put, say, 95% of all movies out of Hollywood - and whatever bunch more that the distributors and investment companies etc. touch outside of Hollywood - on your boycott list, right?
Yes, the real power is in the consumer. The question however is not whether the consumer has the power to bring down corporations; that power is a given. The question is whether that consumer has the power to stop themselves from enjoying entertainment just because somebody on Slashdot is entirely deluded on the feasibility of boycotts in general, and especially those scoped as large as you just have.
If you just want to boycott the studio that's actually doing the suing, rather than some make-up artist who would give you puzzling looks as to what the hell you're on, then boycott Voltage Pictures.
How can vector animations (e.g. Homestar Runner) be taken care of? Converting an SWF animation to H.264 bloats it by a factor of ten or more in my tests, which makes a 2 GB/mo plan feel like it's 200 MB/mo.
Now why would you want to convert it to a discrete video?
Just convert it to a different vector format - SVG, for example.
For one thing, this spikes my CPU far, far more than even the most ridiculous of flash-based websites (which indeed need to go away in so far as there not being a plain HTML equivalent accessible) I've encountered.
For another, it's just plain glitchy. This may depend on the SVG interpreter in play, but In the 'flipping a coin' example - http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/MatrixTransform.svg - there is a discontinuity in the animation once the text hits an exact 45Â angle where the text just stretches horribly. The 'SVG Girl' demo even outright crashes FireFox. ( I know, Flash sometimes crashes, too.. but at least that's just the plugin, not the entire app.)
Problem is, there's just not much attention for SVG, at least as part of animation/multimedia. FireFox was late to the game in adding (partial) SMIL support for SVG, Adobe's only barely offering SVG authoring tools, and ever since Apple rediscovered the notion of drawing pixels directly to the screen, Canvas has gotten far, far more love.
I suppose one could argue that HomeStarRunner should be moved over to Canvas - which, given the lack of real need for HomeStarRunner to be presented as vectors in the browser isn't all that odd a suggestion.
Either way, Flash isn't really needed, most of what it does can be done today.. just that the in-browser result is even less reliable than Flash.
Which doesn't make the naming any less confusing, of course.
First there's System32. On 32bit systems, these are the 32bit system files. On 64bit systems, these are the 64bit system files. When a 64bit system refers to System32, it gets System32. When a 32bit system refers to System32, it instead gets...
SysWOW64. When a 64bit app accesses this folder, it still gets this folder. When a 32bit app accesses this folder, it gets this folder. Neither, however, should be accessing this folder - even though a 64bit app might have to interface with 32bit system files.
Which leaves the situation that a 32bit app needs to interface with the 64bit system files. On Vista/7 64bit, this can be done by accessing the hidden folder SysNative. On Windows XP 64bit, this can be done in the same way but only if a specific hotfix is installed (not installed by default nor pushed out by Windows Update), or by temporarily disabling the File System Redirect.
The confusion carries on through with the CSIDL and KNOWNFOLDERID names.
I haven't touched this stuff in a few years now, but I recall it being some backward compatibility issue. Presumably in Windows' own components that would be bypassing the file system redirection as otherwise the filesystem redirection should mean there is no backward compatibility issue.
Thankfully, an end-user doesn't typically have to deal with these things at all. But when troubleshooting, it can definitely be a pain.
Correct, but it is subject to other forces which I would have thought to have largely disrupted the tracks - perhaps not quite on this short a timescale.
wow... I'd seen the older, older, pictures but they were so horribly blurry that somebody might as well have sneezed on the image. But seeing these, I'm impressed that the tracks are still quite so visible. In fact, I can't help but think that astronauts pretty much scarred the otherwise pristine (as impacted soil goes) surface. Still better than a giant Pepsi logo, I suppose:)
Hopefully they'll get even higher resolution images at some point - I want to know where those golf balls landed.
Yeah, I figured somebody would come up with the usual "guns don't kill people", "should we outlaw hammers, too?" rhetoric. Go bounce a hammer off a shiny surface and hit somebody with it without you even being aware of it and get back to me.
Re: guns - yeahhh.
That said, just to address the 'responsible' thing - there are two forms of that word. You're thinking of legal responsibility. And no, I don't think that Wicked Lasers et al should be legally responsible for what people do with the lasers they sell. The other form is in the action or inaction one takes in a matter -before- legal responsibility even becomes an issue.
For example, if a bar owner here lets a guest leave drunk with car keys in hand, they're not responsible for the theoretical death of the guest / some other as a result of the drunk driving (depends on jurisdiction, though). But a bar owner that shows responsibility will still stop that guest, check for friends to take the guest / call the guest a cab instead.
The companies that sell these high power laser pointers are like the bar owner that just puts up a sign "don't drink and drive" and think they've done a good job. As far as the law goes, they have. But that's a pathetically minimal effort.
Just my opinion - I can see the other side of the argument and the slippery slope, I just disagree with it and think the slope isn't nearly as slippery as those quipping about hammers believe it to be:)
The goggles they do something. I am pretty sure they come with proper eye protection
I didn't realize they came with a pair for everybody else that might get hit by the same beam. Does the laser pointer come with a 30 second advance warning, too?
Or should we all just start wearing them by default - http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/news/article_1e221000-e502-56f6-b5e5-90530677a8c2.html - just because some people are irresponsible and some companies are irresponsible enough to sell to irresponsible people? ( yes, I am suggesting that Wicked Lasers, and other companies making a mint on their main market of people abusing lasers for teh lulz, are acting irresponsibly no matter how many warning labels they put up, disclaimers they list, and safety products they sell. )
The general public has no use case for a 1W laser - or even many energy levels well below that. Those who do can go fill in paperwork and registration forms - no different from guns (not that that is working out particularly well in a market that's flooded with the things).
It is pretty exciting - not just for astronomers in general, but also (and especially) for her. If it fosters her interest in astronomy or just science in general even more, that is also very exciting. It's also exciting that this is one of many recent stories about young people making these discoveries - and part of that is because the barrier to entry has become pretty low.
But what it isn't, is "an incredible achievement". This doesn't diminish the fact that she's the one that spotted it and should get all the credit she's due, but that should stand on its own without hyperbole.
I'm sure she doesn't really care what words are used, though, and is perfectly excited regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, puto didn't claim it was.
Furthermore, the story submitter specifically stated:
( emphasis mine )
But yes, for those reading along and who hid under a rock the other day, it's a good thing to keep in mind.
Note that most proxies/VPNs collect at least basic IP information for legal purposes, though.
Ah, but governments are special.
Besides which, although there is certainly crime that occurs which takes place on said streets, a far greater amount of non-crime takes place on those streets.
This cannot be said for the news servers in question.
In addition, the streets weren't created for the facilitation of said crimes.
While some news servers may have originally been set up purely for the discussions, the servers in question most certainly were not.
Finally (as far as this post goes), as alien as it may seem, the government does in fact put police on those streets, doing regular patrols or responding to alerts. While this doesn't prevent all crime, nor address all crime, let alone get those doing the crime punished appropriately, it's not entirely useless.
Most news server administrators, however, look only at their bank accounts as subscription fees come in - they purposefully do not monitor what their service is actually hosting / indexing, although invariably they know quite well what the on-goings are.
That doesn't really diminish your conclusion - but the argument-by-analogy is rather weak.
You could just directly argue that a news service has no task in monitoring what's going on any more than ISPs do (that's the task of law enforcement and/or copyright holders, depending on applicable jurisdiction and the material in question) and that the demands placed on them by the court are undue and will with no uncertainty mean the end of their business which also provides legal services.
I'm not sure if that's what they'll try in the appeal (if any), though.
You're right, judges aren't techies.
That means that they look at the technical arguments the defendants put forth, examine them, say "nice try", and then agree with the rebuttal that these news server admins who take membership fees for their services which exists largely as the hosting and distribution of material for which they have no implicit or explicit permission to do so, know damn well that this is how their service is used and thus that their service operates on the boundaries of the law at best.
The boundaries were just shifted, again.
I'm guessing they'll appeal, though.
The devices using Android with bundled Chrome-ish thing isn't so much a choice, though.
And yes, advertising - and certainly bundling - helps Chrome as well. Too bad Mozilla doesn't have umpteenbillion for that sort of thing.
But the context is people actively switching to Chrome (or those who get Chrome pushed on them by some other installer, try it, then decide to keep using it rather than uninstalling it as they would most co-installed shovelware.)
FireFox became the #2 browser in the world when there were few reasonable alternatives... there was IE, Netscape (which really started to suck after 4.7something), Opera (non-free at the time) and what's now known as FireFox.
But they didn't win out because they annoyed typical end users but because they actually offered a better browser than IE (speed, features) or Opera (being free).
Now I'm not saying that Chrome is a better browser than FireFox - though some would argue it is.
What I am saying, however, is that FireFox 7 is a lesser browser than previous iterations.
That whole crowd that got them to that #2 spot is looking at all of the relatively recent changes almost as if betraying them.
Take for example the decision to remove the status bar. What happened? People made add-ons to bring the status bar back, such as status-4-evar.
Note that before that time, there was no add-on to remove the status bar. Of course it also wasn't needed - it was an option to show/hide it right from a menu.
But somebody behind the development of FireFox pushed through the change anyway and tried to dress it up as being a change for the good (more screen space - even though just hiding it would do that much), a new better API for add-ons (which could just as well have been applied to the status bar), etc. while it was obvious to most that it was a "Chrome doesn't have a status bar - why do we?" move.
And when most of what they're doing is to be 'more like Chrome', then why wouldn't a user just switch to Chrome?
What - we just had the "omg how do I save my pictures/videos for my great-great-great-grandchildren!?!?" 3-monthly Slashdot story, so now the "aaaargh! I can't let some schmuck discover all the home made porn and paste it all over the interwebs!!!" was overdue?
Seriously, people... HDD tech hasn't changed enough to make the same answers from 5 years ago any different now.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.org+how+to+dispose+of+hdd
I realize it's anecdotal - but I've seen it regularly at 700MB+. It doesn't help that either FireFox, or Windows, decides that all that memory usage isn't needed when I go do something else for a while (like, say, watch a DVD) and puts it into the page file. Then when I want to get back to FireFox, it churns for a while getting all that back into RAM.
But here's the thing... right now it sits at 370MB - in Safe Mode as I was testing something for a different comment.
Now let me open the same URLs into Chrome and check its memory usage.
Chrome does make this annoying as there's a bunch of chrome.exe processes, so adding them up:
51+10+13+21+12+127+10+10+8 = 262MB.
That's still more than I think would actually be reasonable, but it's also 100MB less than FireFox.
And, in the mean time, FireFox is up to 380MB - having done nothing else than alt-tab to Chrome and Back.. and typing this extra text. I'm pretty sure this text doesn't weigh in at several MB, though.
Agreed - and FireFox 7 doesn't seem to have changed anything here.
The following is with all add-ons enabled, statistics from FireBug, zooming in from one level to another over Lancaster, PA:
First, it just enlarges the existing tiles.
Then I get a bunch of blue/grey tiles.
Then I get a bunch of green/brown larger tiles.
Then I get the enlarged tiles again.
Then it just sits there.
Time taken: at this point: 7.something seconds (disappeared from view)
Then all of a sudden, some more accesses and a bunch of the correct tiles pop into view.
Total time: 8.32s
Now again in Safe Mode, for the people who like to blame Add-ons:
Same visual behavjor
Total time: about 7.5 seconds (timed by watch, so give or take a fraction of a second).
But it's not just FireFox. Trying the same area in Internet Explorer version 8.
Same visual behavior.
Total time: approximately 12 seconds.
Now let's try Chrome (latest version, just downloaded).
First the existing tiles are a bit enlarged.
Then the correct tiles are loaded.
Total time: approximately 2 seconds.
I don't know if they have specifically optimized something for Chrome there - but the performance difference is staggering.
But, as I don't generally enjoy using Chrome, I usually start up Google Earth instead when I need to browse around. That's even faster. If I need a route or whatever I can type in the 'From / To' and the delay in drawing the map doesn't bother me that much.
Would that be the 7 that only came out a few days ago?
The same 7 that still doesn't have an MSI installer?
(yeah, I hate it too.. but Microsoft has made things such that only MSIs work smoothly with the system, the rest require odd kludges. As much as cursing Microsoft is a stress-reliever, practical thought dictates that an MSI should be written. Yes, I'm familiar with the 3rd party solution that even allows us to wrap the standard installer into an MSI, thanks. )
The same 7 that wasn't (and still isn't) offered to me as an update? (apparently due to phased rollouts)
The same 7 that suddenly was no longer offered because it mysteriously hid addons?
( Thankfully, there's an Add-On Recovery Tool. *groan* http://lifehacker.com/5845069/add+on-recovery-tool-restores-missing-add+ons-in-firefox-7 )
The same 7 which, when it was offered at random (I guess that uses a different path from the About screen one), told me 3 Add-ons were not yet compatible (they are now) even though none of the changes in FireFox 7 were likely to have affected them?
( yes, blame the add-on developers... no, wait, blame checking for a version number tag... no, blame needing add-ons at all. )
No, I couldn't imagine at all why people would have tried Chrome years ago and stuck around with it while the team behind FireFox sort of, almost, got its act together... but then decided to be more like Chrome (yes, I read the denial write-up that was covered on Slashdot.) and alienated a chunk of their existing userbase as a result because they took some of the perceived worst aspects of Chrome rather than the good ones.
Example: They removed the 'http://' in front of addresses in the address bar. All good and well - apparently this makes it look less cluttered and people who have never used the internet before won't be scared off by the "ache tee tee pee colon slash slash" thing. ( But then FF scares the bejeebus out of them when they visit a 'secure' site by still leaving the 'https://' in front. )
A common knee-jerk reaction was "zomg how am I supposed to copy/paste a link now?"
To which the defendants said "it will still add the 'http://' when you copy the URL".
And sure enough, click in the address field, copy it (ctrl+c, ctrl+insert, right-click and choose Copy) and voila... 'http://' is magically inserted in front.
Now, accidentally press ctrl+v or shift+insert or right-click and mis-click on Paste.
Not to worry, ctrl+z (undo) restores the URL.
Select it, copy it, paste somewhere.
Whoops - now where did my http:/// go?
Now, yes, obviously that's a bug in a completely different section of FireFox that has nothing to do with the 'http://' insertion code. But back when 'http://' wasn't removed, this was a non-issue. The bug may have been there, but you wouldn't have hit it.
I guess it's a good thing that new features expose old bugs... but a typical end-user is just going to be annoyed.
I still use FireFox for the add-ons, but they're pushing their luck with a lot of people.
Do you suppose that maybe, just maybe, that's because no such solution exists?
Seriously, if there had been some manner of breakthrough in storage technology that would radically have changed the replies people gave 3 months ago, 6 months ago, 9 months ago, 12 months ago, etc. don't you think it would have been not only front page news at Slashdot but on practically any technology website worth its salt?
No, I'm with GP. Stop asking the same question if you can reasonably expect the answers to be the same, too.
For those needing car analogies:
Slashdot is the car. The editors and commenters are the drivers. The people submitting these types of articles are the whiney kids going "Are we there yet?".
Unfortunately, the drivers in this case are horrible parents and humor their kids with "No, not yet." / "No, but we are somewhere else and let me tell you all about it even if it's not what you asked about.".
A sane parent would have done the "No. I'll tell you when we're there*. Now stop asking or I'm going to pull over"-threat thing.
( * I.e. by posting about the aforementioned technological breakthrough. )
But did they only come up with this sinister plan once Li-Ion made its way onto their market, then?
Because apparently that sinister plan wasn't in place for regular alkaline batteries.
And it wasn't in plan for NiCd batteries.
And while my older candybar phone still has a NiMH battery, my newer one has a LiPo ( I guess I skipped the Li-Ion generation ).
And this while LiPo tech has been around for over a decade.
Don't worry, LiFePO4's time in your cellphone will come (apparently it's already in use in the OLPC ( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_Batteries#GoldPeak_LiFePO4 ) ).
Odd - I call it 'Itinerary' - but that's only because my TomTom labels it as such. It's not entirely automated in that I can't specify a destination and then say 'along the route to the destination, find me X, Y and Z' - but I can look at the route it's already plotted for me and find said X, Y and Z on the map and add them as waypoints.
And if you really wanted to do a traveling salesman problem thing.. ..plenty of options to choose from for a limited number of destinations.
http://www.google.com/search?q=traveling+salesman+google+maps
Of course the question becomes what is more efficient.. shortest? fastest? least turns? most highways? least highways? most traffic congestion avoidance? etc.
For the more adventurous among you, you can test mild varieties of this yourself by swinging your arm, extended, making circles with your hand.
Do this at a normal pace, compare that hand to the other, it'll be a fair bit more red.
Do this faster, and you'll start to feel some of that 'small pains' - it's not entirely unlike when your hand's 'asleep', but more painful.
Go faster still and you'll have successfully flung blood cells up toward your skin, which is now mottled with little red pinpricks. Don't worry, it should disappear in a day or two. ( But if it doesn't, don't blame me.. blame yourself for actually trying this, you nutter. )
Now imagine that scaled up just that tiny bit more and involving not just your fingertips but pretty much your entire body including internal organs.
Doesn't sound particularly comfortable to me.
Pretty sure I also read about this story several months back, somewhere.. oh well.
Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out).
What on Earth are you on about?
I can even watch homestarrunner.com (the ubiquitous example) toons on my old Windows Mobile 5 device with a 200MHz OMAP thing, and it plays back smoothly.
Oh, you're one of those people who think Flash is only used for video.
While I'm no fan of iPad hand-outs (the NL Senate just got a bunch and I'm left wondering why they wouldn't just opt for a more open model.. given that they have to pay for the dev anyway, it doesn't matter much if that's on iOS or Android or whatever), and on the other hand I'm not knowledgeable enough about whether or not the devs and apps are in place for kindergarten (that's little kids, right? tablets of any sort for little kids? what?) to say "they should have gone with a Dell Mini with Ubuntu" like that dude further up the replies, I do know this...
Stop it on 2 out of 3 of those. Kleenex? really? What, are their noses so delicate that they can't withstand a paper towel when they have snot flying all over the place? Alternatively, whatever happened to handkerchiefs? They're not just formal dress accessories, you know. And hand sanitizer?? Is this a parents freaking out at you thing or have you missed all the bits about hand sanitizers doing little good while they can do quite a bit of harm?
Yes, of course you wouldn't want little Johnny to stick his fingers into little Lily's mouth right after he wiped his butt.. but isn't that why you teach them to wash their hands? Or is this a wash hands and then 'just to be sure' thing?
Not saying you should be taking pointers from a comedian, but here.. have a laugh anyway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FG6J6RPB9U
So it's basically months upon months of everything related to RIAA, especially legal proceedings.. ..then a 10 month hiatus.. ..and then submissions / comments on everything from paleontology to astronomy to general tech company musings.
Yeahhh.. what happened?
I mean, I guess Mr. Beckerman might just be trying to keep things to his blog ( http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ ) rather than on /., but even that has seen more frequent posts in the past.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, pick me! Oh thank you, Sir!
The correct answer is: Yes, but we don't want the flash ads, online minigames are the facedevilbook's work so who needs that crap when you can play Angry Birds on your iDevice, and who seriously still watches Strongbad e-mails anyway?
At least, that's the excuses I've gathered from previous discussions.
So, wait a minute...
Not only are you deluded in the fact that you think they lost "plenty of money" from you no longer buying CDs every paycheck (let's be optimistic and you used to buy $40 worth each two weeks - that's $1,040) even though the RIAA net profit is still comfortably (they like to argue otherwise) in the billions and they miss much more from people who 'pirate' for whatever reason... ...but your 'boycott' lapses every once in a while because you'd still like to listen to a particular band?
That's not a boycott... that's just a spending habit change.
It's still a good change - I'm not blasting you... but let's face it, it's not a boycott and it's not (even combined with other, actual, boycotters) what's going to bring the RIAA to its knees.
Oh goodie! A call for a boycott - because those work so well when there's still millions who won't join in on said boycott :D /sarcasm
Let's give it a shot, though...
Starting with the production companies...
Voltage Pictures - not much to boycott there.
Grosvenor Park - no watching "Love in the Time of Cholera", "Disaster Movie" (no loss there) or "Righteous Kill"
Film Capital Europe Funds - again, not much to boycott.
First Light Production - no "K-19 The Widowmaker"
Kingsgate - zilch
Ohhhh... this one should get some teenage girls going "omg I have to boycott them!? noooooooeees":
Summit Entertainment - That's right, no more watching the "Twilight" saga, the "Step Up" series, "Push", "Knowing" (ot: great opening sequence), "The Brothers Grimm", "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", "Memento", "Vanilla Sky",
I guess we'll leave the distribution companies be, but just for kicks, they include Warner Brothers Pictures, Lionsgate Home Entertainment, Summit Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Including them, and the other distributions, means you can now put more than half of the movies made, EVER, on your boycott list. That shouldn't be too hard, eh.
Oh, another good one..
Effects: Company 3 - They have worked on, among other, "Tower Heist", "Conan the Barbarian" but also the "Transformers" series, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, "X-Men: The Last Stand", "Sucker Punch", "Rango"... shit, they go all the way back to "Being John Malkovich". That's 202 more movies - many of which quite popular - that you can add to your boycott list.
And we haven't even gotten to the fact that you want the crew to be included. You do realize that eventually, it's entirely likely that you will have put, say, 95% of all movies out of Hollywood - and whatever bunch more that the distributors and investment companies etc. touch outside of Hollywood - on your boycott list, right?
Yes, the real power is in the consumer. The question however is not whether the consumer has the power to bring down corporations; that power is a given. The question is whether that consumer has the power to stop themselves from enjoying entertainment just because somebody on Slashdot is entirely deluded on the feasibility of boycotts in general, and especially those scoped as large as you just have.
If you just want to boycott the studio that's actually doing the suing, rather than some make-up artist who would give you puzzling looks as to what the hell you're on, then boycott Voltage Pictures.
But, again, there's just not much to boycott there, even though I guess their list is growing:
http://www.imdb.com/company/co0179337/
Now why would you want to convert it to a discrete video?
Just convert it to a different vector format - SVG, for example.
There's certainly enough flexibility to make SVG animations - there's a few here:
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/
There are, however, a few problems with that.
For one thing, this spikes my CPU far, far more than even the most ridiculous of flash-based websites (which indeed need to go away in so far as there not being a plain HTML equivalent accessible) I've encountered.
For another, it's just plain glitchy. This may depend on the SVG interpreter in play, but In the 'flipping a coin' example - http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/MatrixTransform.svg - there is a discontinuity in the animation once the text hits an exact 45Â angle where the text just stretches horribly.
The 'SVG Girl' demo even outright crashes FireFox. ( I know, Flash sometimes crashes, too.. but at least that's just the plugin, not the entire app.)
Problem is, there's just not much attention for SVG, at least as part of animation/multimedia. FireFox was late to the game in adding (partial) SMIL support for SVG, Adobe's only barely offering SVG authoring tools, and ever since Apple rediscovered the notion of drawing pixels directly to the screen, Canvas has gotten far, far more love.
I suppose one could argue that HomeStarRunner should be moved over to Canvas - which, given the lack of real need for HomeStarRunner to be presented as vectors in the browser isn't all that odd a suggestion.
Either way, Flash isn't really needed, most of what it does can be done today.. just that the in-browser result is even less reliable than Flash.
Which doesn't make the naming any less confusing, of course.
First there's System32. On 32bit systems, these are the 32bit system files. On 64bit systems, these are the 64bit system files. When a 64bit system refers to System32, it gets System32. When a 32bit system refers to System32, it instead gets...
SysWOW64. When a 64bit app accesses this folder, it still gets this folder. When a 32bit app accesses this folder, it gets this folder. Neither, however, should be accessing this folder - even though a 64bit app might have to interface with 32bit system files.
Which leaves the situation that a 32bit app needs to interface with the 64bit system files. On Vista/7 64bit, this can be done by accessing the hidden folder SysNative. On Windows XP 64bit, this can be done in the same way but only if a specific hotfix is installed (not installed by default nor pushed out by Windows Update), or by temporarily disabling the File System Redirect.
The confusion carries on through with the CSIDL and KNOWNFOLDERID names.
I haven't touched this stuff in a few years now, but I recall it being some backward compatibility issue. Presumably in Windows' own components that would be bypassing the file system redirection as otherwise the filesystem redirection should mean there is no backward compatibility issue.
Thankfully, an end-user doesn't typically have to deal with these things at all. But when troubleshooting, it can definitely be a pain.
Correct, but it is subject to other forces which I would have thought to have largely disrupted the tracks - perhaps not quite on this short a timescale.
wow... I'd seen the older, older, pictures but they were so horribly blurry that somebody might as well have sneezed on the image. But seeing these, I'm impressed that the tracks are still quite so visible. In fact, I can't help but think that astronauts pretty much scarred the otherwise pristine (as impacted soil goes) surface. :)
Still better than a giant Pepsi logo, I suppose
Hopefully they'll get even higher resolution images at some point - I want to know where those golf balls landed.
Yeah, I figured somebody would come up with the usual "guns don't kill people", "should we outlaw hammers, too?" rhetoric. Go bounce a hammer off a shiny surface and hit somebody with it without you even being aware of it and get back to me.
Re: guns - yeahhh.
That said, just to address the 'responsible' thing - there are two forms of that word. You're thinking of legal responsibility. And no, I don't think that Wicked Lasers et al should be legally responsible for what people do with the lasers they sell. The other form is in the action or inaction one takes in a matter -before- legal responsibility even becomes an issue.
For example, if a bar owner here lets a guest leave drunk with car keys in hand, they're not responsible for the theoretical death of the guest / some other as a result of the drunk driving (depends on jurisdiction, though). But a bar owner that shows responsibility will still stop that guest, check for friends to take the guest / call the guest a cab instead.
The companies that sell these high power laser pointers are like the bar owner that just puts up a sign "don't drink and drive" and think they've done a good job. As far as the law goes, they have. But that's a pathetically minimal effort.
Just my opinion - I can see the other side of the argument and the slippery slope, I just disagree with it and think the slope isn't nearly as slippery as those quipping about hammers believe it to be :)
I didn't realize they came with a pair for everybody else that might get hit by the same beam. Does the laser pointer come with a 30 second advance warning, too?
Or should we all just start wearing them by default - http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/news/article_1e221000-e502-56f6-b5e5-90530677a8c2.html - just because some people are irresponsible and some companies are irresponsible enough to sell to irresponsible people?
( yes, I am suggesting that Wicked Lasers, and other companies making a mint on their main market of people abusing lasers for teh lulz, are acting irresponsibly no matter how many warning labels they put up, disclaimers they list, and safety products they sell. )
The general public has no use case for a 1W laser - or even many energy levels well below that. Those who do can go fill in paperwork and registration forms - no different from guns (not that that is working out particularly well in a market that's flooded with the things).
It is pretty exciting - not just for astronomers in general, but also (and especially) for her. If it fosters her interest in astronomy or just science in general even more, that is also very exciting. It's also exciting that this is one of many recent stories about young people making these discoveries - and part of that is because the barrier to entry has become pretty low.
But what it isn't, is "an incredible achievement". This doesn't diminish the fact that she's the one that spotted it and should get all the credit she's due, but that should stand on its own without hyperbole.
I'm sure she doesn't really care what words are used, though, and is perfectly excited regardless.