30 second preview amounts to an ad. Without this ad, much fewer customers would buy songs. Hence it follows that it is Apple who should be charging here, not ASCAP.
The other is to track how users browse the web, for ad targeting. All they need to do is put a cookie in your browser and read it next time you see a captcha or load a Google analytics script.
Microsoft's employee guidelines explicitly prohibit not only participation in FOSS projects, but even looking at the code. FOSS libraries (with very few exceptions, e.g. Zlib) are strictly off limits. As a matter of fact, every use of FOSS code, even in binary form, has to be cleared with Legal, even if the library is in broad use in some other product. And if you're a mere peon, they will reject your request, since this is the easiest thing they can do, and you will have to spend months rolling your own.
Establishing a coherent internal FOSS policy would be a good start, assuming they do buy into the idea, and not just do it to screw everybody (which is much more likely)
iPhone is the first phone on which Internet is actually usable, and (gasp) AT&T did not foresee that people would be using their browsers. Who woulda thunk it? Personally, I hope Apple will ease their pain in a year or so by also starting selling iPhone through Verizon, Sprint and TMobile.
I often find myself working in bed, next to my (sleeping) wife. Recently, I was looking for a new laptop. MacBook Pro was one obvious option, so I thought I'd take a look at the PCs as well, given that Windows 7 is coming out soon and all. The only somewhat decent option was Sony FW series, but it disqualified itself on two counts:
1. Very noisy trackpad buttons. Jesus freaking Christ, why is it that only Apple thinks of details like this? 2. Crippled virtualization support. I know I can flash a hacked BIOS onto it, but WTF? Who was the genius that decided to disable it by default?
Their 5-th gen planes are Su-47 and Sukhoi PAK FA (look them up, India is participating financially in PAK FA project, Su-47 is all Russian). They aren't quite there yet, but I've seen Su-47 doing aerobatics and it's an impressive piece of machinery. Problem is, just like F-22 with which it's supposed to compete it's extremely expensive, and it's no match to Russian stealth capable anti-aircraft systems from S400 onwards, which are much cheaper to produce and run. But then, neither is F-22.:-)
3GS alleviates this. Its camera is pretty darn good in good light. Very sharp, focusing is intuitive, and it can focus fairly close, too (for barcodes).
100 years from now, when plumper women are in vogue again, the starved skeletons that are universally praised today as beautiful will look ridiculous. And it will happen. As resources get scarcer, demonstrating that you have adequate food supply will become important for mating and reproduction. Not to mention that most men even now like some meat on the bones anyway.
It is impossible to affect the outcome of a random process by changing the sampling strategy. This is a basic Probability Theory 101 problem - about India where everyone wants male kids, so they continue to have kids until they have a male. The question is, how does this affect the population distribution? The answer is - it does not affect it at all. The choice between male and female is random, so no matter how you sample, you will not change the outcome.
So I'm having a hard time believing a study which says there's a substantial (they say 26% !) birth rate difference between genders of babies. Sounds like someone pulled it out of his/her ass.
They have two sensors, one on each side of the keyboard. This trips up PC manufacturers trying to rip off this feature. PC manufacturers are a bunch of cheap bastards, so they put in only one sensor. This means that if that sensor gets obstructed with anything (the LCD among other things), the screen and the keyboard immediately go to max brightness.
I discovered the repulsive force of light long time ago here on Slashdot. There are even convincing demos to demonstrate the effect: Goatse, Tubgirl, 2 girs 1 cup and Lemon Party.
"Nothing" would be a fine choice if: 1. They GPL2d ZFS, DTrace and other core technologies that make Solaris attractive 2. Allocated the dev resources to port them over (or in the case of ZFS adapt them to the existing kernel better).
If they just rm -rf it, it'll be a very sad decision indeed.
Well, they have prudently removed MS.NET tests vs Java (-server) on Windows..NET was on average 15% faster there. FOSS zealotry at its best - if Microsoft beats us, let's remove the test.
.NET is actually FASTER on Windows than Java. Mono is about 15% slower, which still isn't bad, since it takes up far less RAM than Java in 64 bit mode.
There are no "macros" or text substitutions in C#. You can inspect IL fairly easily using Reflector.
LINQ kicks ass for just the functional aspect of it.
I went to Toyota's UK site and looked at what's available. Most of the cars there are available with insanely efficient diesel engines, for some cars there's more than one option. And they're more environment friendly, since there's no battery to make and recycle, fuel efficiency is comparable, and the only harmful byproduct is soot, which settles on the ground.
I would LOVE to buy those cars here in the US. Thing is, they're not available here. My plan is to wait until they are, so if Toyota wants to sell me a car, they better offer a diesel one.
IE7 doesn't do this unless you install MSN, Yahoo or Google toolbar in which case it does send your browsing data to the respective parties. This was a cause of much consternation for Microsoft, because only illiterate retards install MSN toolbar, while Google toolbar is actually marginally useful, so it sees some voluntary uptake in the more sophisticated demographic.
I know it for a fact MSFT records every URL, to the tune of tens of billions a day. And not only URL. They have the tech to store and process this much data. Google does, too. I don't know how much Yahoo stores and what it collects.
I also know it for a fact that at least for Microsoft this IS new.
#6: That still doesn't change the fact that until this problem is addressed (and Amazon has enormous leverage here, while I personally don't), Kindle will not be able to replace books for me.
And it won't be worth the money even if it give it away for free until:
1. I can resell a book on the secondary market (i.e. it gets removed from my Kindle and loaded onto somebody else's. 2. I can have only one account with access to all purchased books and newspaper subscriptions for the entire family. 3. Don't have my book access depend on whether my Amazon account is active (i.e. Amazon cancels my account and I can't read my books anymore). 4. I can loan a book to a friend. It's OK if it gets disabled on my Kindle for as long as it's "borrowed". 5. Can return a book to Amazon if I don't like it. 6. Can borrow books from the library with it.
This is relatively innocuous, compared to the thing everyone seems to be missing - namely, IE8's default setting due to which (if you don't disable it during install) it will send all your search queries, browsed page URLs (except in HTTPS mode and on the intranet) and a few other bits and pieces of data to Microsoft for the purpose of "providing you with related sites". Of course the real purpose is to collect data to feed to Bing and adCenter.
This is why Sergey Brin is running around scared, and this is why Google is releasing their own browser in a hurry (it too sends all your browsing data to Google, for the same purposes).
You see, IE still has something like 70% marketshare, and all that browsing pattern data is hugely useful for things like: 1. Discovering new sites not yet within the crawl graph 2. Improving relevance of search results 3. Fighting spam 4. Establishing true popularity metrics for web resources. 5. Extracting behavioral information for the purposes of ad targeting. 6. Establishing (through correlation with a truth set) your gender, race, ethnicity, age, income bracket and preferences (for ad targeting, too). 7. Geolocation 8. Etc, etc.
This means MSFT now has ginormous amounts of data it didn't have before, and it can sic their PHDs on it and "fucking kill Google". It is no coincidence that they pushed IE8 as a "mandatory" update. I will not be surprised in the least if within a year Bing has substantially higher relevance than everyone else.
Google has no answer to this, short of paying Mozilla a ton of money to embed the same thing into Firefox. Since this pretty much amounts to spyware, I doubt Mozilla will go for it.
1. Quit your job. You're obviously burnt out. You need 2-3 months of downtime if you're in it for the long haul. 2. Limit your unproductive internet browsing and email to 20-30 minutes a day. I.e. if you need to read documentation for something, that doesn't count toward the limit. This will be the hardest thing on the list. You will find that you now have immense amounts of free time and need to fill them with something. 3. Re-establish your sleep pattern. You should sleep no less than 8 hours a day, every day. Afternoon naps are great, too. 4. Exercise every day. Riding a bicycle is fine, as is running. If you can do free weights, that's even better. 5. All those hobby projects you've been putting off - do them. You have the time. Make sure you FINISH each project before starting on a new one. 6. After a while, try to start a software project just for yourself, whether it's a business idea, an iPhone app, a game, whatever. It must be interesting to you and challenging enough to keep your mind sharp. Don't force the pace. If you don't feel like doing it, fail fast and do something else.
After about a month or so, you'll be a different person, and your coding block will simply go away.
Slashdot Mirror
30 second preview amounts to an ad. Without this ad, much fewer customers would buy songs. Hence it follows that it is Apple who should be charging here, not ASCAP.
The other is to track how users browse the web, for ad targeting. All they need to do is put a cookie in your browser and read it next time you see a captcha or load a Google analytics script.
https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa
Microsoft's employee guidelines explicitly prohibit not only participation in FOSS projects, but even looking at the code. FOSS libraries (with very few exceptions, e.g. Zlib) are strictly off limits. As a matter of fact, every use of FOSS code, even in binary form, has to be cleared with Legal, even if the library is in broad use in some other product. And if you're a mere peon, they will reject your request, since this is the easiest thing they can do, and you will have to spend months rolling your own.
Establishing a coherent internal FOSS policy would be a good start, assuming they do buy into the idea, and not just do it to screw everybody (which is much more likely)
Nothing whips the US into shape better than robust competition.
iPhone is the first phone on which Internet is actually usable, and (gasp) AT&T did not foresee that people would be using their browsers. Who woulda thunk it? Personally, I hope Apple will ease their pain in a year or so by also starting selling iPhone through Verizon, Sprint and TMobile.
I often find myself working in bed, next to my (sleeping) wife. Recently, I was looking for a new laptop. MacBook Pro was one obvious option, so I thought I'd take a look at the PCs as well, given that Windows 7 is coming out soon and all. The only somewhat decent option was Sony FW series, but it disqualified itself on two counts:
1. Very noisy trackpad buttons. Jesus freaking Christ, why is it that only Apple thinks of details like this?
2. Crippled virtualization support. I know I can flash a hacked BIOS onto it, but WTF? Who was the genius that decided to disable it by default?
So MacBook Pro it will be (again).
Their 5-th gen planes are Su-47 and Sukhoi PAK FA (look them up, India is participating financially in PAK FA project, Su-47 is all Russian). They aren't quite there yet, but I've seen Su-47 doing aerobatics and it's an impressive piece of machinery. Problem is, just like F-22 with which it's supposed to compete it's extremely expensive, and it's no match to Russian stealth capable anti-aircraft systems from S400 onwards, which are much cheaper to produce and run. But then, neither is F-22. :-)
3GS alleviates this. Its camera is pretty darn good in good light. Very sharp, focusing is intuitive, and it can focus fairly close, too (for barcodes).
100 years from now, when plumper women are in vogue again, the starved skeletons that are universally praised today as beautiful will look ridiculous. And it will happen. As resources get scarcer, demonstrating that you have adequate food supply will become important for mating and reproduction. Not to mention that most men even now like some meat on the bones anyway.
It is impossible to affect the outcome of a random process by changing the sampling strategy. This is a basic Probability Theory 101 problem - about India where everyone wants male kids, so they continue to have kids until they have a male. The question is, how does this affect the population distribution? The answer is - it does not affect it at all. The choice between male and female is random, so no matter how you sample, you will not change the outcome.
So I'm having a hard time believing a study which says there's a substantial (they say 26% !) birth rate difference between genders of babies. Sounds like someone pulled it out of his/her ass.
>> backlit keyboards that have a sensor
They have two sensors, one on each side of the keyboard. This trips up PC manufacturers trying to rip off this feature. PC manufacturers are a bunch of cheap bastards, so they put in only one sensor. This means that if that sensor gets obstructed with anything (the LCD among other things), the screen and the keyboard immediately go to max brightness.
Seriously, all of this stuff is really old and tired. All of the cool kids are elsewhere.
I discovered the repulsive force of light long time ago here on Slashdot. There are even convincing demos to demonstrate the effect: Goatse, Tubgirl, 2 girs 1 cup and Lemon Party.
>> KDE plans to turn its entire desktop into a widget of itself
They already did. In KDE4.
"Nothing" would be a fine choice if:
1. They GPL2d ZFS, DTrace and other core technologies that make Solaris attractive
2. Allocated the dev resources to port them over (or in the case of ZFS adapt them to the existing kernel better).
If they just rm -rf it, it'll be a very sad decision indeed.
Well, they have prudently removed MS .NET tests vs Java (-server) on Windows. .NET was on average 15% faster there. FOSS zealotry at its best - if Microsoft beats us, let's remove the test.
.NET is actually FASTER on Windows than Java. Mono is about 15% slower, which still isn't bad, since it takes up far less RAM than Java in 64 bit mode.
There are no "macros" or text substitutions in C#. You can inspect IL fairly easily using Reflector.
LINQ kicks ass for just the functional aspect of it.
Sorry, dude, you're talking out of your ass.
I went to Toyota's UK site and looked at what's available. Most of the cars there are available with insanely efficient diesel engines, for some cars there's more than one option. And they're more environment friendly, since there's no battery to make and recycle, fuel efficiency is comparable, and the only harmful byproduct is soot, which settles on the ground.
I would LOVE to buy those cars here in the US. Thing is, they're not available here. My plan is to wait until they are, so if Toyota wants to sell me a car, they better offer a diesel one.
IE7 doesn't do this unless you install MSN, Yahoo or Google toolbar in which case it does send your browsing data to the respective parties. This was a cause of much consternation for Microsoft, because only illiterate retards install MSN toolbar, while Google toolbar is actually marginally useful, so it sees some voluntary uptake in the more sophisticated demographic.
I know it for a fact MSFT records every URL, to the tune of tens of billions a day. And not only URL. They have the tech to store and process this much data. Google does, too. I don't know how much Yahoo stores and what it collects.
I also know it for a fact that at least for Microsoft this IS new.
#2: http://www.teleread.org/2009/06/22/device-limits-fuzzy-on-downloads-for-kindle-books-if-so-should-the-ftc-investigate/
And a Kindle wielding friend of mine was complaining that newspaper subscription he uses is limited to one device, too. Which is insane.
#3: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44350&highlight=amazon+banning
This dude now has a $350 door stop.
#5: Yes, my bad.
#6: That still doesn't change the fact that until this problem is addressed (and Amazon has enormous leverage here, while I personally don't), Kindle will not be able to replace books for me.
And it won't be worth the money even if it give it away for free until:
1. I can resell a book on the secondary market (i.e. it gets removed from my Kindle and loaded onto somebody else's.
2. I can have only one account with access to all purchased books and newspaper subscriptions for the entire family.
3. Don't have my book access depend on whether my Amazon account is active (i.e. Amazon cancels my account and I can't read my books anymore).
4. I can loan a book to a friend. It's OK if it gets disabled on my Kindle for as long as it's "borrowed".
5. Can return a book to Amazon if I don't like it.
6. Can borrow books from the library with it.
Hear that, Jeff? Get cracking on it.
Chrome is a response to IE8, which was in development for quite a while. They saw it coming from afar.
This is relatively innocuous, compared to the thing everyone seems to be missing - namely, IE8's default setting due to which (if you don't disable it during install) it will send all your search queries, browsed page URLs (except in HTTPS mode and on the intranet) and a few other bits and pieces of data to Microsoft for the purpose of "providing you with related sites". Of course the real purpose is to collect data to feed to Bing and adCenter.
This is why Sergey Brin is running around scared, and this is why Google is releasing their own browser in a hurry (it too sends all your browsing data to Google, for the same purposes).
You see, IE still has something like 70% marketshare, and all that browsing pattern data is hugely useful for things like:
1. Discovering new sites not yet within the crawl graph
2. Improving relevance of search results
3. Fighting spam
4. Establishing true popularity metrics for web resources.
5. Extracting behavioral information for the purposes of ad targeting.
6. Establishing (through correlation with a truth set) your gender, race, ethnicity, age, income bracket and preferences (for ad targeting, too).
7. Geolocation
8. Etc, etc.
This means MSFT now has ginormous amounts of data it didn't have before, and it can sic their PHDs on it and "fucking kill Google". It is no coincidence that they pushed IE8 as a "mandatory" update. I will not be surprised in the least if within a year Bing has substantially higher relevance than everyone else.
Google has no answer to this, short of paying Mozilla a ton of money to embed the same thing into Firefox. Since this pretty much amounts to spyware, I doubt Mozilla will go for it.
Here's what I did:
1. Quit your job. You're obviously burnt out. You need 2-3 months of downtime if you're in it for the long haul.
2. Limit your unproductive internet browsing and email to 20-30 minutes a day. I.e. if you need to read documentation for something, that doesn't count toward the limit. This will be the hardest thing on the list. You will find that you now have immense amounts of free time and need to fill them with something.
3. Re-establish your sleep pattern. You should sleep no less than 8 hours a day, every day. Afternoon naps are great, too.
4. Exercise every day. Riding a bicycle is fine, as is running. If you can do free weights, that's even better.
5. All those hobby projects you've been putting off - do them. You have the time. Make sure you FINISH each project before starting on a new one.
6. After a while, try to start a software project just for yourself, whether it's a business idea, an iPhone app, a game, whatever. It must be interesting to you and challenging enough to keep your mind sharp. Don't force the pace. If you don't feel like doing it, fail fast and do something else.
After about a month or so, you'll be a different person, and your coding block will simply go away.