Translations that aren't in 19th century English trying to sound like Attic Greek?
Nice introductions and footnotes benefiting from recent scholarship?
I could go on, but most of the other nice things about newer-than-1923 editions of classics are only found in (or are only good in) print books, for now. Project Gutenberg is noble and all, but it's fairly awful as a source of top-notch copies of the classics. Until one of the GitHub-alike projects to build on it takes off (if ever) it'll likely stay that way.
They display the Metacritic score for most games on the game pages and some of the list views (and almost all of the ones that don't have a metascore suck).
Firefox runs like ass on my systems. It's really as bad as I say.
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but it's absolute shit on my work MacBook, and it's not much better on my Win7 desktop at home. My whole office has slowly switched to Chrome over the last year because just having Firefox open was making everything else on our systems slower.
I might not realize how bad it is if I didn't have Chrome to compare it to, which does everything I want it to (including key extensions/plugins) faster and with less fuss. Sort of like when Phoenix—the future Firefox—came out and suddenly IE and the full Mozilla browser seemed intolerably clunky and resource hungry.
It's not just for the PS3. Pretty sure the 360 can use it. TV might be able to. PS3, XBMC, and Windows Media Player all can.
Note that it doesn't work so great over wireless with 720p or higher content, so you'll need to have a wired connection (preferably Gigabit, especially if you want to play 1080p video) between the PC and the 360 or TV. Your computer will also need enough horsepower to transcode HD video on the fly, or you're out of luck—I've got an old dual-core Pentium D that does just fine, picked it up used for $100 at a PC recycling place.
Anything under a 20GB system partition is going to be cramped, and even 20 is pushing it. I gave Win7 20 on my 60GB SSD for my HTPC and very quickly regretted not just making the whole disk one partition, or at least giving Windows 30GB. I had to do lots of tweaking to get it to stop pressing right up against the 20GB limit and constantly showing me low-disk warnings, and it still uses all but a couple GB of the space. That's after telling it to put hibernation and virtual memory stuff on the other partition.
Considering that it ships with very little, application-wise, I really don't know WTF they're doing with ~15-20x more space than WinXP. Even with needing to have both 32 and 64 bit libs I don't get how that much bloat between Vista and XP is justified. What does it all do?
Firefox kicks on my MacBook's system fan when I start it with one or two tabs. Chrome doesn't when I start it with two dozen tabs, and it still launches faster.
Firefox with a dozen tabs open noticeably increases occurrences of the Spinning Beachball system wide. It's almost as bad about that as Eclipse, in fact. Chrome doesn't start to crowd out my other work or even itself slow down until I reach ~40 tabs open; until then, new tabs open damn near instantly and switching tabs takes just about no time at all, while the same cannot be said for Firefox.
As a bonus, a crashed tab generally doesn't kill the whole browser.
In short, I can tell when Firefox is open even if I'm not using it, while I can't with Chrome.
A US government that may be justifiably overthrown by force is one that won't give a shit about getting its hands dirty.
Good luck fighting a rag-tag insurgency against a modern military that doesn't have one hand tied behind its back. Your only hope in that situation would be getting the military to stop supporting the government. Civilian guns would be of very nearly zero help. They only work (sort of) in places like Syria because those governments know foreign powers will come in and stomp all over them if they get too aggressive (see: Libya); who's gonna enforce a no-fly zone on the US?
I got clued in when I realized that I slept way better and felt amazing when my wife and I travelled. The main reasons, as best I can tell:
* lots (loooots) of walking, much of it outdoors * very nearly zero minutes spent sitting, staring at a computer screen; solo down-time is filled with reading a book for pleasure or travel guides.
I eat better when we travel, too—limited or no snacking, not by conscious effort, but because I'm too busy moving around to idly stuff my face. When I'm busy like that, I don't miss computer shit at all; being away from it is a relief so deep that I can feel in my bones, in fact.
We need to start thinking of sitting at a computer for hours on end as dangerous and distasteful, like excessive drinking or smoking, I think, complete with some stigmatization of those who go overboard and active discouragement throughout society, including at work. We do that a bit with WoW nerds and the like, but all the people who zone out for 3+ hours a night on Wikipedia, TV-tropes, Facebook, Slashdot, Netflix, internet shopping sites, doing obsessive packrat-like downloading, playing less-nerdy games like The Sims or Farmville, etc. are doing just as much harm to themselves and are far more common I would guess.
And as long as I'm wishing, dedicated bike routes along commuter corridors would be awesome.
I used to think I had a natural 28-hour rhythm, but these days I'm leaning toward environmental factors as the cause rather than anything built-in to by body.
If I get some sun during the day, and I'm fairly active, and I stop looking at screens and having bright lights on a bit before the sun goes down, my 28-hour sleep cycle disappears in a hurry.
So, in short, if I live entirely unlike the modern suburb-dwelling American office worker that I am then my sleep becomes way more healthy. Go figure. <sarcasm>Who could possibly have guessed that our common work and living habits are bad for us, and that the typical middle-class lifestyle is in many ways toxic?</sarcasm>
Maybe you've tried it, but if you haven't, give completely unplugging at home a try. Get outside after work, cook meals, read, do anything but spend more than a few minutes (and then only when necessary) looking at a screen, especially computer screens. I struggle with it (I love computer games, damnit) but I'm slowly cutting myself off from tech, and the days or weeks when I stay the hell away from screened devices as much as possible I feel way, way better (and I get more accomplished). Even replacing idle browsing and video-game playing with watching a movie in a dark room is an improvement, if you can't ditch screens completely—especially if you use the time to do some pushups or something while you watch.
I didn't intend it that way but it kind of works, since Lovecraft did that kind of shit all the time.
"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!"
Maybe if he weren't taking the time to write "The window! The window!" his odds of escaping would improve.
Javascript running via a 3D world written in Java would have a Lovecraftian madness-inducing quality. You'd take one look at it and start bleeding from the eyes while producing an inhuman scream, before vomiting up most of your internal organs.
I mean, either of those things (Javascript, or a 3D world written in Java) are capable of getting you half way there all on their own. Both cannot exist, yet they do. Even thinking of the two being combined is enough to PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU R'LYEH WGAH'NAGL FHTAGN **carrier lost**
Yeah, I saw those examples in reverse-order as far as readability. I usually agree about including optional braces, but in that example the bracketless one was very eye-friendly IMO, while the one with minimal line breaks seemed like it would be headache inducing if I had to look at that kind of thing all day.
... help them actually code procedures correctly for insurance, and maybe assemble one whole entire bill without committing at least one major error, and to stop sending me bills that I shouldn't have gotten at all then telling me to just ignore it when I call?
Because not having to call someone—usually more than once—to get the hospital's billing fuckups fixed after a majority of visits would be awesome.
I'm a fan of Openfire. Nice admin interface, easy to install, easy to hack (it's just Java, and it's a relatively sane specimen from that ecosystem).
It's my impression that ejabberd is considered the best XMPP server, but it's written in Erlang so your C-family skills won't get you far in hacking it, it's less friendly to administrate (unless your config is extremely boring), and, as with so many Erlang projects, the documentation is mediocre and assumes you know Erlang—especially Mnesia, which Erlang developers seem to love more than anything else in the entire world, to the point that they can't help directly exposing mere sysadmins to its greatness.
Both appear to support voice chat, though I've never tried to use it.
Arcana usage, that a confusing program as Calibre is praised for making it so much easier to manage your device says enough. If your car became easier to drive by operating it standing it on your head, you would want a word with its designer.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds Calibre simultaneously necessary and completely awful.
I class it with things like XBMC and every single digital music library tool I've every used: software that does some stuff I really want to do, but that I dread using because it's so goddamn obtuse.
Formatting in physical books tends to be far better as page size is fixed, many are much cheaper (used, remaindered, etc.), you can resell them to recover part of the purchase price, and whole categories of books are far better in printed form than digital —footnote-heavy books, anything where large pages are useful, and anything where having two full pages visible at once is helpful, to name a few.
E-book readers have a long way to go before they'll woo everyone in the newer generations away from paper books, I think. I wish they'd get there, but I don't see them going past their current status as devices for reading Tom Clancy novels while sunbathing, since that's where the bulk of the market is.
They're a suitable (superior, even) replacement the mass-market fiction paperback, but not much else.
It's for people who were letting their programming frameworks do what the fuck every they want with their database structures and decided to take that one step farther.
Admittedly, I kind of like it for low(er) value things where you're likely to have some variation in the structures being inserted, like logging and tracking the status of long-running tasks (upsert and appending to arrays FTW). That's about the only use I've found for the tech, though, and I admit that even in those cases its use is largely a result of laziness.
Slashdot Mirror
Translations that aren't in 19th century English trying to sound like Attic Greek?
Nice introductions and footnotes benefiting from recent scholarship?
I could go on, but most of the other nice things about newer-than-1923 editions of classics are only found in (or are only good in) print books, for now. Project Gutenberg is noble and all, but it's fairly awful as a source of top-notch copies of the classics. Until one of the GitHub-alike projects to build on it takes off (if ever) it'll likely stay that way.
They display the Metacritic score for most games on the game pages and some of the list views (and almost all of the ones that don't have a metascore suck).
So they do have ratings, they just outsource it.
We have that.
It's called tk with classic widgets.
Well.
That certainly explains a lot about Android.
"Hm, I could fix this bug we introduced in 3.0 and still haven't fixed, orrrrr... drunk feature sprint!"
*the next day*
"Damn, that drunk code I wrote sucks. Back to the drawing board. Maybe I should fix that bug after all. Better get drunk first"
And that just loops infinitely.
Firefox runs like ass on my systems. It's really as bad as I say.
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but it's absolute shit on my work MacBook, and it's not much better on my Win7 desktop at home. My whole office has slowly switched to Chrome over the last year because just having Firefox open was making everything else on our systems slower.
I might not realize how bad it is if I didn't have Chrome to compare it to, which does everything I want it to (including key extensions/plugins) faster and with less fuss. Sort of like when Phoenix—the future Firefox—came out and suddenly IE and the full Mozilla browser seemed intolerably clunky and resource hungry.
PS3 Media Server
It's not just for the PS3. Pretty sure the 360 can use it. TV might be able to. PS3, XBMC, and Windows Media Player all can.
Note that it doesn't work so great over wireless with 720p or higher content, so you'll need to have a wired connection (preferably Gigabit, especially if you want to play 1080p video) between the PC and the 360 or TV. Your computer will also need enough horsepower to transcode HD video on the fly, or you're out of luck—I've got an old dual-core Pentium D that does just fine, picked it up used for $100 at a PC recycling place.
With Vista, Windows became gi-fucking-gantic.
Anything under a 20GB system partition is going to be cramped, and even 20 is pushing it. I gave Win7 20 on my 60GB SSD for my HTPC and very quickly regretted not just making the whole disk one partition, or at least giving Windows 30GB. I had to do lots of tweaking to get it to stop pressing right up against the 20GB limit and constantly showing me low-disk warnings, and it still uses all but a couple GB of the space. That's after telling it to put hibernation and virtual memory stuff on the other partition.
Considering that it ships with very little, application-wise, I really don't know WTF they're doing with ~15-20x more space than WinXP. Even with needing to have both 32 and 64 bit libs I don't get how that much bloat between Vista and XP is justified. What does it all do?
Firefox kicks on my MacBook's system fan when I start it with one or two tabs. Chrome doesn't when I start it with two dozen tabs, and it still launches faster.
Firefox with a dozen tabs open noticeably increases occurrences of the Spinning Beachball system wide. It's almost as bad about that as Eclipse, in fact. Chrome doesn't start to crowd out my other work or even itself slow down until I reach ~40 tabs open; until then, new tabs open damn near instantly and switching tabs takes just about no time at all, while the same cannot be said for Firefox.
As a bonus, a crashed tab generally doesn't kill the whole browser.
In short, I can tell when Firefox is open even if I'm not using it, while I can't with Chrome.
Dirty socialist!
(before the downmods: kidding.)
(actually, around here, pointing out that I didn't mean that seriously might cause downmods)
Finally someone got it right.
A US government that may be justifiably overthrown by force is one that won't give a shit about getting its hands dirty.
Good luck fighting a rag-tag insurgency against a modern military that doesn't have one hand tied behind its back. Your only hope in that situation would be getting the military to stop supporting the government. Civilian guns would be of very nearly zero help. They only work (sort of) in places like Syria because those governments know foreign powers will come in and stomp all over them if they get too aggressive (see: Libya); who's gonna enforce a no-fly zone on the US?
In Ruby there are usually many ways to do something, but only one that doesn't make you feel dirty.
I got clued in when I realized that I slept way better and felt amazing when my wife and I travelled. The main reasons, as best I can tell:
* lots (loooots) of walking, much of it outdoors
* very nearly zero minutes spent sitting, staring at a computer screen; solo down-time is filled with reading a book for pleasure or travel guides.
I eat better when we travel, too—limited or no snacking, not by conscious effort, but because I'm too busy moving around to idly stuff my face. When I'm busy like that, I don't miss computer shit at all; being away from it is a relief so deep that I can feel in my bones, in fact.
We need to start thinking of sitting at a computer for hours on end as dangerous and distasteful, like excessive drinking or smoking, I think, complete with some stigmatization of those who go overboard and active discouragement throughout society, including at work. We do that a bit with WoW nerds and the like, but all the people who zone out for 3+ hours a night on Wikipedia, TV-tropes, Facebook, Slashdot, Netflix, internet shopping sites, doing obsessive packrat-like downloading, playing less-nerdy games like The Sims or Farmville, etc. are doing just as much harm to themselves and are far more common I would guess.
And as long as I'm wishing, dedicated bike routes along commuter corridors would be awesome.
I used to think I had a natural 28-hour rhythm, but these days I'm leaning toward environmental factors as the cause rather than anything built-in to by body.
If I get some sun during the day, and I'm fairly active, and I stop looking at screens and having bright lights on a bit before the sun goes down, my 28-hour sleep cycle disappears in a hurry.
So, in short, if I live entirely unlike the modern suburb-dwelling American office worker that I am then my sleep becomes way more healthy. Go figure. <sarcasm>Who could possibly have guessed that our common work and living habits are bad for us, and that the typical middle-class lifestyle is in many ways toxic?</sarcasm>
Maybe you've tried it, but if you haven't, give completely unplugging at home a try. Get outside after work, cook meals, read, do anything but spend more than a few minutes (and then only when necessary) looking at a screen, especially computer screens. I struggle with it (I love computer games, damnit) but I'm slowly cutting myself off from tech, and the days or weeks when I stay the hell away from screened devices as much as possible I feel way, way better (and I get more accomplished). Even replacing idle browsing and video-game playing with watching a movie in a dark room is an improvement, if you can't ditch screens completely—especially if you use the time to do some pushups or something while you watch.
"lp0 on fire"
Awesome. More shit that can cause your app work on one Android tablet and not on another. Because there wasn't enough of that already.
I didn't intend it that way but it kind of works, since Lovecraft did that kind of shit all the time.
"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!"
Maybe if he weren't taking the time to write "The window! The window!" his odds of escaping would improve.
Javascript running via a 3D world written in Java would have a Lovecraftian madness-inducing quality. You'd take one look at it and start bleeding from the eyes while producing an inhuman scream, before vomiting up most of your internal organs.
I mean, either of those things (Javascript, or a 3D world written in Java) are capable of getting you half way there all on their own. Both cannot exist, yet they do. Even thinking of the two being combined is enough to PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU R'LYEH WGAH'NAGL FHTAGN **carrier lost**
Yeah, I saw those examples in reverse-order as far as readability. I usually agree about including optional braces, but in that example the bracketless one was very eye-friendly IMO, while the one with minimal line breaks seemed like it would be headache inducing if I had to look at that kind of thing all day.
... help them actually code procedures correctly for insurance, and maybe assemble one whole entire bill without committing at least one major error, and to stop sending me bills that I shouldn't have gotten at all then telling me to just ignore it when I call?
Because not having to call someone—usually more than once—to get the hospital's billing fuckups fixed after a majority of visits would be awesome.
Where's the Processlike Carbon Nanotube Fiber?
It seems like on Android, the less you rely on built-in libraries/APIs the better your app will be.
Which is the opposite of how things tend to go with iOS development.
I'm a fan of Openfire. Nice admin interface, easy to install, easy to hack (it's just Java, and it's a relatively sane specimen from that ecosystem).
It's my impression that ejabberd is considered the best XMPP server, but it's written in Erlang so your C-family skills won't get you far in hacking it, it's less friendly to administrate (unless your config is extremely boring), and, as with so many Erlang projects, the documentation is mediocre and assumes you know Erlang—especially Mnesia, which Erlang developers seem to love more than anything else in the entire world, to the point that they can't help directly exposing mere sysadmins to its greatness.
Both appear to support voice chat, though I've never tried to use it.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds Calibre simultaneously necessary and completely awful.
I class it with things like XBMC and every single digital music library tool I've every used: software that does some stuff I really want to do, but that I dread using because it's so goddamn obtuse.
Formatting in physical books tends to be far better as page size is fixed, many are much cheaper (used, remaindered, etc.), you can resell them to recover part of the purchase price, and whole categories of books are far better in printed form than digital —footnote-heavy books, anything where large pages are useful, and anything where having two full pages visible at once is helpful, to name a few.
E-book readers have a long way to go before they'll woo everyone in the newer generations away from paper books, I think. I wish they'd get there, but I don't see them going past their current status as devices for reading Tom Clancy novels while sunbathing, since that's where the bulk of the market is.
They're a suitable (superior, even) replacement the mass-market fiction paperback, but not much else.
It's for people who were letting their programming frameworks do what the fuck every they want with their database structures and decided to take that one step farther.
Admittedly, I kind of like it for low(er) value things where you're likely to have some variation in the structures being inserted, like logging and tracking the status of long-running tasks (upsert and appending to arrays FTW). That's about the only use I've found for the tech, though, and I admit that even in those cases its use is largely a result of laziness.