Have you tried using an iPhone yet? (Just go to an Apple Store—they'll have a ton on display, all of them no doubt manhandled by dozens of dirty-fingered people.) Fingerprints aren't an issue on a glass screen with a strong backlight.
Somehow, I doubt the Ducks are going to have trouble selling out this year.
There are hockey fans in California—I'm one of them. We have ice and roller rinks; we have minor and major league teams. It is not a fanbase of tens of millions, but it seems to be enough to keep the Ducks, Kings, and Sharks in the black (and keep them from wanting to leave), to drive up Game 5 tickets to $600 in the nosebleeds, and to pay enough talent to win the Cup.
I'm not a real huge fan (of any sport, actually, although hockey is my favorite), but my father is, and he'll watch any Cup game no matter who's been eliminated. He buys the Center Ice package even though his team is local. (By the way, he's a native Californian.) Real fans will do that sort of thing; a national championship shouldn't have to depend so heavily on local interest.
I actually think that playing in a harsher environment like California is good for a team. A team like the Ducks can't depend on a vast audience of diehard fans who will support it no matter what; to be financially successful it has to win, and to win it has to put together a talented staff with a good roster. That's why teams from less hockey-centric areas like Carolina and Anaheim have been dominating the league lately; the teams from traditional hockey areas have become soft and complacent on guaranteed revenues.
What should hockey do? Move the Kings to Vancouver, the Coyotes to Edmonton, the Stars back to Minnesota, the Panthers to Detroit (once their economy stabilizes), and the Islanders to Chicago. Push the northern teams to work just as hard as the southern ones. Do something about arena subsidies so that teams need to consider where they'll get the most fans, not the sweetest deal.
Any NHL fan can tell you the sport is floundering stateside: During the first-round series between Calgary and Detroit, it was damn near impossible to get tickets to watch the (utterly horrific) Flames on home ice. Meanwhile, some friends of mine traveled to Detroit and snapped up tickets on game day! And they were cheap! And they were great seats! And the Wings were playing about 100x better than the Flames. That's because Detroit's economy is in the tank—nobody there can afford tickets at any price right now. When the Ducks played Detroit, the games in Anaheim (which is a rich area with a booming economy) were sold out, too, while seats in Detroit sat empty.
In real life, it would be like knowing not to walk around seedy streets at night wearing skimpy clothes. But in real life, even if you're wearing skimpy clothes on a seedy street, it's still rape.
Congratulations, you've just created another reason to falsify your domain registration info. Try tracking down those spammers now that they're registering their 100,000 domains under 20,000 different fake identities.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about Google creating the shortage; they're just predicting it and positioning themselves to take advantage of it.
Someone should fork PHP and do a major rewrite. Drop features like HTML embedding, introduce properly defined packages and make all functionality available in both procedural and OO fashions. Clean up the function names so they're predictable. And make some of the more dangerous functions safer. That's like saying someone should make a pizza, only without the crust, cheese, sauce, and toppings.
I'm currently writing an app with Catalyst. ("Currently" as in "paused to look something up while working on it and spotted this story".) It's based on Perl and usually combined with Template Toolkit, which uses a mini-language to describe templates. I definitely recommend it—it's about the cleanest way I've found to create a dynamic site.
Catalyst is designed to keep the different parts of your app separate from each other, unlike PHP which tends to encourage mixing presentation code with application logic. (You can write PHP apps nearly as cleanly as Catalyst apps, but Catalyst helps you do it while PHP makes it fairly inconvenient.) It basically carves your site into three big chunks—Model, which talks to the database; View, which talks to the web browser; and Controller, which bridges the other two. Typically you'll need a model for each database, a controller for each section of the site, and a view for each method used to access the site (HTML, RSS, web service, PDF...). Models are usually auto-generated, and the glue code for the views is written for you, so you basically just have to write your templates and application logic.
Because it's based on Perl, you automatically get a few bonus security features, like taint checking (which tracks user-provided data to ensure you don't use it in unsafe ways) and database libraries that use placeholders. Catalyst apps almost never use raw SQL either (they use libraries that create objects to represent the tables and records), so injection attacks are virtually impossible.
If you don't want to use Perl, Ruby on Rails is fairly similar, and I know a lot of people swear by it; Ruby has a shallower learning curve as well. It doesn't have the libraries or userbase Perl does, though.
...that DRM is the entertainment industry's version of checking under your kid's bed for monsters. It's not really there to prevent a skilled pirate (or even an unskilled one with a how-to) from circumventing it; it's there to make the movie and record companies feel better about releasing their stuff digitally. If you take that as DRM's purpose, then DVD Jon's new company makes perfect sense: they're providing the same security blanket to CD manufacturers that Apple offers to iTMS sellers.
To the extent it actually existed in the first place, this hole has now been closed. Wikipedia turned on password salting tonight while performing other routine maintenance (namely, adding a few indexes to increase performance).
As a web designer, I'm fairly aware of the browser market. I know, for example, that IE is missing huge portions of W3C standards such as CSS 2 and XHTML 1, and the parts it does implement are often buggy; that it has been plagued by security problems; and that it is missing many feaures included in browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
As far as I can tell, the only benefit of using IE is the ability to use ActiveX controls, which are part of IE's security problem and which Firefox can do with a plugin anyway.
In light of these issues, why does Microsoft believe users should choose Internet Explorer, rather than one of the free or advertising-supported alternatives?
I've tried using speech-recognition programs. They worked adequately after I went through training, and performed well on my computer, but I found that I could type a lot faster than I could speak.
Besides, a lot of what I type is Perl code. Could you imagine speaking that? "dollar-sign e-mail space equals tilde space S slash carrot left-square-bracket backslash W dot plus minus right-square-bracket plus at-sign left-square-bracket backslash W dot minus right-square-bracket dollar-sign slash space or space die space double-quote capital invalid space e dash mail space address double-quote semicolon..."
Google's already somewhat integrated into Firefox (search bar, Firefox Start). As long as that stays the same, it's in their best interest to keep Firefox going.
Google runs all of its services over the Web. They don't want Microsoft to run the Web, because then Microsoft will destroy them. Hence, it's in their best interest to keep Firefox going.
They really are planning a browser based on Firefox, and they want the Firefox lead around to make sure they don't fuck it up.
They're going to rename Firefox to Gbrowser, add twenty links to Google properties, and sell your grandmother into slavery.
Personally, I'll trade a subdomain for the elegant simplicity of the friends system, post security, threaded comments, communities, user images, easy and powerful customization, an open-source backend with some seriously useful software contributed to the community, clients, and a site that, during the 99% of the time it's running properly, is ridiculously fast.
Actually, I won't trade a subdomain for all that. I'm a paid user, so I get one anyway.
(And there's a simple solution to the emo teens: ignore them.)
LJ has always been a somewhat cash-starved operation; they make a significant amount of money from their paid users, but they also have a lot of expenses--full-time employees, an ever-expanding user base on a technology that isn't easy on hardware, bandwidth use...
As it is, most (all?) of their employees are in Portland, so they keep all their servers there, where they can quickly get at them if something happens. Having a second datacenter would be hard on their employees, hard on their budget, and hard on their architecture--for a site that, in the end, isn't critical to have running 24/7.
If nothing else, installing UPSes will allow them to shut down their systems cleanly, so they don't have to spend 12+ hours running integrity checks and replaying database logs.
They're in Portland. And the Internap facility does have redundant power, but apparently it failed somehow, which is always lots of fun.
Internap's power has failed before, but they thought it was a fluke:
We're going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesn't happen again. In the past we've always trusted Internap's insanely redundant power and UPS systems, but now that this has happened to us twice, we realize the first time wasn't a total freak coincidence. C'est la vie.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried using an iPhone yet? (Just go to an Apple Store—they'll have a ton on display, all of them no doubt manhandled by dozens of dirty-fingered people.) Fingerprints aren't an issue on a glass screen with a strong backlight.
Somehow, I doubt the Ducks are going to have trouble selling out this year.
There are hockey fans in California—I'm one of them. We have ice and roller rinks; we have minor and major league teams. It is not a fanbase of tens of millions, but it seems to be enough to keep the Ducks, Kings, and Sharks in the black (and keep them from wanting to leave), to drive up Game 5 tickets to $600 in the nosebleeds, and to pay enough talent to win the Cup.
I'm not a real huge fan (of any sport, actually, although hockey is my favorite), but my father is, and he'll watch any Cup game no matter who's been eliminated. He buys the Center Ice package even though his team is local. (By the way, he's a native Californian.) Real fans will do that sort of thing; a national championship shouldn't have to depend so heavily on local interest.
I actually think that playing in a harsher environment like California is good for a team. A team like the Ducks can't depend on a vast audience of diehard fans who will support it no matter what; to be financially successful it has to win, and to win it has to put together a talented staff with a good roster. That's why teams from less hockey-centric areas like Carolina and Anaheim have been dominating the league lately; the teams from traditional hockey areas have become soft and complacent on guaranteed revenues.
What should hockey do? Move the Kings to Vancouver, the Coyotes to Edmonton, the Stars back to Minnesota, the Panthers to Detroit (once their economy stabilizes), and the Islanders to Chicago. Push the northern teams to work just as hard as the southern ones. Do something about arena subsidies so that teams need to consider where they'll get the most fans, not the sweetest deal.
Congratulations, you've just created another reason to falsify your domain registration info. Try tracking down those spammers now that they're registering their 100,000 domains under 20,000 different fake identities.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about Google creating the shortage; they're just predicting it and positioning themselves to take advantage of it.
I suppose Microsoft got a referral from Crypto AG...
I'm currently writing an app with Catalyst. ("Currently" as in "paused to look something up while working on it and spotted this story".) It's based on Perl and usually combined with Template Toolkit, which uses a mini-language to describe templates. I definitely recommend it—it's about the cleanest way I've found to create a dynamic site.
Catalyst is designed to keep the different parts of your app separate from each other, unlike PHP which tends to encourage mixing presentation code with application logic. (You can write PHP apps nearly as cleanly as Catalyst apps, but Catalyst helps you do it while PHP makes it fairly inconvenient.) It basically carves your site into three big chunks—Model, which talks to the database; View, which talks to the web browser; and Controller, which bridges the other two. Typically you'll need a model for each database, a controller for each section of the site, and a view for each method used to access the site (HTML, RSS, web service, PDF...). Models are usually auto-generated, and the glue code for the views is written for you, so you basically just have to write your templates and application logic.
Because it's based on Perl, you automatically get a few bonus security features, like taint checking (which tracks user-provided data to ensure you don't use it in unsafe ways) and database libraries that use placeholders. Catalyst apps almost never use raw SQL either (they use libraries that create objects to represent the tables and records), so injection attacks are virtually impossible.
If you don't want to use Perl, Ruby on Rails is fairly similar, and I know a lot of people swear by it; Ruby has a shallower learning curve as well. It doesn't have the libraries or userbase Perl does, though.
Can we get that as a unified diff or something?
...that DRM is the entertainment industry's version of checking under your kid's bed for monsters. It's not really there to prevent a skilled pirate (or even an unskilled one with a how-to) from circumventing it; it's there to make the movie and record companies feel better about releasing their stuff digitally. If you take that as DRM's purpose, then DVD Jon's new company makes perfect sense: they're providing the same security blanket to CD manufacturers that Apple offers to iTMS sellers.
And this has what to do with patents, exactly?
To the extent it actually existed in the first place, this hole has now been closed. Wikipedia turned on password salting tonight while performing other routine maintenance (namely, adding a few indexes to increase performance).
This is expensive and invasive. How is it better than teachers taking attendance by hand?
As a web designer, I'm fairly aware of the browser market. I know, for example, that IE is missing huge portions of W3C standards such as CSS 2 and XHTML 1, and the parts it does implement are often buggy; that it has been plagued by security problems; and that it is missing many feaures included in browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
As far as I can tell, the only benefit of using IE is the ability to use ActiveX controls, which are part of IE's security problem and which Firefox can do with a plugin anyway.
In light of these issues, why does Microsoft believe users should choose Internet Explorer, rather than one of the free or advertising-supported alternatives?
...envisioning happy software Ewoks partying to primitive-sounding music?
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
I've tried using speech-recognition programs. They worked adequately after I went through training, and performed well on my computer, but I found that I could type a lot faster than I could speak.
Besides, a lot of what I type is Perl code. Could you imagine speaking that? "dollar-sign e-mail space equals tilde space S slash carrot left-square-bracket backslash W dot plus minus right-square-bracket plus at-sign left-square-bracket backslash W dot minus right-square-bracket dollar-sign slash space or space die space double-quote capital invalid space e dash mail space address double-quote semicolon..."
I was hoping Slashdot would snatch him up so we could get that sidebar-stretches-across-the-page bug nailed to the wall.
Actually, there's one more:
5. They want his brain, but they know all those geeks who currently love them will turn on them if they steal Goodger away from Firefox.
Actually, that sounds pretty realistic...
- Google's already somewhat integrated into Firefox (search bar, Firefox Start). As long as that stays the same, it's in their best interest to keep Firefox going.
- Google runs all of its services over the Web. They don't want Microsoft to run the Web, because then Microsoft will destroy them. Hence, it's in their best interest to keep Firefox going.
- They really are planning a browser based on Firefox, and they want the Firefox lead around to make sure they don't fuck it up.
- They're going to rename Firefox to Gbrowser, add twenty links to Google properties, and sell your grandmother into slavery.
Personally, my money's on 1 and 2, and maybe 3.Personally, I'll trade a subdomain for the elegant simplicity of the friends system, post security, threaded comments, communities, user images, easy and powerful customization, an open-source backend with some seriously useful software contributed to the community, clients, and a site that, during the 99% of the time it's running properly, is ridiculously fast.
Actually, I won't trade a subdomain for all that. I'm a paid user, so I get one anyway.
(And there's a simple solution to the emo teens: ignore them.)
LJ has always been a somewhat cash-starved operation; they make a significant amount of money from their paid users, but they also have a lot of expenses--full-time employees, an ever-expanding user base on a technology that isn't easy on hardware, bandwidth use...
As it is, most (all?) of their employees are in Portland, so they keep all their servers there, where they can quickly get at them if something happens. Having a second datacenter would be hard on their employees, hard on their budget, and hard on their architecture--for a site that, in the end, isn't critical to have running 24/7.
If nothing else, installing UPSes will allow them to shut down their systems cleanly, so they don't have to spend 12+ hours running integrity checks and replaying database logs.
Internap's power has failed before, but they thought it was a fluke:(See livejournal.com/powerloss/ for more info.)