Re:An opinionated an biased review
on
Google Lively Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd suspect that's a result of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google
If that were true, what's the reason for the Google Video policies, then?
I suspect the reason for filtering adult material has more to do with good business sense than anything else. If you allow adult materials, then your site is likely to become a haven for such materials rather than achieving its original goal. Sort of like how the various free internet backup and file sharing solutions became havens for warez rather than achieving a solid business goal.
Any enclosed space is a potential hazard. They need to either design this pump so that leakage is near impossible, OR people need to keep the "business end" outside of their garages. And the only way to enforce that is to require by code that the companies who install these things to install them in an outdoor environment.
Apparently the mods are on crack today. Either that or they're dumb enough to believe an AC troll without applying even a small modicum of critical thinking. So here's a complete repost for you!
clearly, imagined fear is far more important than efficiency
You know the ironic part of this thread? I said I was in favor of having home hydrogen fueling stations. Yet clearly I'm a villain because I'm the only one who's NOT ignoring the very real safety issues presented by generating hydrogen in your garage. How evil of me! Being worried that the average Slashdotter doesn't blow himself to kingdom come by accident!:-/
Several folks have mentioned propane tanks as an area where we currently use a highly explosive gas as a fuel. What those posters fail to consider is that the average propane user does not refill his tank at home. Nor does the local gas station. They exchange propane tanks rather than deal with the hazards of recharging an existing pressure tank. In addition, propane tanks are generally kept outdoors for general safety. You'll notice that gas stations use metal-mesh lockers outside to store the tanks. And your gas grill? You probably keep that outside too.
So to reiterate, I love the idea of a personal hydrogen refueling station. My only concern is the safety matters inherit in having such a station in the average homeowner's garage.
clearly, imagined fear is far more important than efficiency
You know the ironic part of this thread? I said I was in favor of having home hydrogen fueling stations. Yet clearly I'm a villain because I'm the only one who's NOT ignoring the very real safety issues presented by generating hydrogen in your garage. How evil of me! Being worried that the average Slashdotter doesn't blow himself to kingdom come by accident!:-/
Several folks have mentioned propane tanks as an area where we currently use a highly explosive gas as a fuel. What those posters fail to consider is that the average propane user does not refill his tank at home. Nor does the local gas station. They exchange propane tanks rather than deal with the hazards of recharging an existing pressure tank. In addition, propane tanks are generally kept outdoors for general safety. You'll notice that gas stations use metal-mesh lockers outside to store the tanks. And your gas grill? You probably keep that outside too.
So to reiterate, I love the idea of a personal hydrogen refueling station. My only concern is the safety matters inherit in having such a station in the average homeowner's garage.
I'm not worried about the fuel. I'm worried about the fueling station. Having a hydrogen device in your garage does not strike me as a very safe thing to do unless very specific precautions are taken.
I'm sorry my friend, but I don't know anybody stupid enough to attempt that one.
I've seen half a dozen such posts here on Slashdot, so it shouldn't be too hard to find some damn fool. Just stand back while they do it. Oh, and make sure they're doing it in the open?;-)
First off, gas isn't typically stored indoors, so I'm not sure why hydrogen would be.
You mean, like a garage? Granted, most folks wouldn't have any gas in their garage other than in their car's tank. (Though they might have a container for their mower.) However, they might have one of these hydrogen fueling stations in their garage. Which is what has me concerned. I'm in no way concerned about hydrogen in general.
In fact, hydrogen is very safe out in the open because of the fact that it blows upward so quickly. It's enclosed spaces that we need to worry about. Liiiiikkkeeee.... a hydrogen fueling station in your garage, perhaps?
Plus on top of that it's relatively straightforward to design a stress release and emergency discharge. Try doing that with a gas tank.
Gas tanks are not under pressure, so there's no need for an emergency discharge. In fact, the results of such a discharge would be LESS desirable than containing it as they'd help spread a fire rather than put it out. This is in direct opposition to the failure mode of hydrogen. Hydrogen will produce a brilliant flame as it vents, but it will be gone in a moment. As long as you're in the open it isn't a problem.
Sierran already explained the situation fairly well, but I think it bears repeating. One of the primary advantages of gasoline is that it is an extremely safe fuel. Gasoline does NOT explode and is actually quite difficult to burn. It's only once you give gasoline time to evaporate that you have a problem. Fumes from gasoline are far more flammable and explosive than liquid gasoline. (I'm sure you can find some yahoo friend who can demonstrate the trick of putting a match out by dunking it in a barrel of gas.)
Hydrogen on the other hand does not have a liquid form at temperatures that are attainable by household equipment. As a result, it easily vaporizes and mixes with oxygen to create the perfect situation for an explosion. One spark and POOF! you're dead. I do NOT recommend attempting the match trick with a container of hydrogen.
Furthermore, hydrogen for vehicular use is usually kept in a highly compressed form. The fueling equipment will somehow need to pressurize your car's fuel tank with the hydrogen in a safe and economical fashion. That's nowhere near as easy as it is with gasoline, where we simply pump a liquid. This makes the hydrogen pump that much more dangerous to work with. (Being in a home environment, one of my first concerns is children playing with the equipment when their parents aren't watching.)
So to summarize: Gasoline == Safe Fuel Hydrogen == Dangerous Fuel
Now if you'll excuse me, my head is going to go have a rather painful talk with my desk about mods modding the wrong people around here.:-/
...that hydrogen is extremely flammable, often explosive, and very dangerous to work with, sounds like a smashing idea!
Seriously though, I think a home fueling station would be a great start. Not only because it provides a convenient source of fuel, but also because it pushes the energy requirements to the grid. (Which isn't a bad thing if we finally build more nuclear power plants!) As long as the safety concerns of generating hydrogen at home are worked out, I'm all for it.
Re:Twitter is up...down...up...down...Whats on TV?
on
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine having to do your taxes on a "web 2.0" application the night before they were due and having the website down because of heavy traffic.
That's already a problem. Most desktop apps for taxes do regular updates from the server to ensure they have the latest information. They also allow for e-filing, which is another area of connectivity that could fail.
The solution is not to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it's too hard. The solution is to size capacity for the expected load. Companies like Google and Amazon are leading the way in planning for sudden spikes in capacity requirements.
Obama only plans to cut the Constellaton program, which is Bush's plan to send people to Mars
Sorry, you've been misinformed. The Constellation program is the program to build the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, along with the Orion crew capsule and Altair lander module. The roadmap of the Constellation program includes an eventual flight to Mars. However, no funding has been allocated for that leg of the program, nor has any planning in earnest been done.
If Obama kills the Constellation program, the United States will be left without a manned space program. Period. End of story.
Just keep in mind, there's nothing stopping web developers from using straight HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and GIF for basic animation.
The key word there is BASIC. Complex animations, applications, and games are where Flash excels. Web Browsers did not provide sufficient facilities until recently. And only then because the browser makers got fed up with the W3C's stance that HTML did not need to be updated, and ended up doing an end run around their process. In result, most web browsers (except IE, surprise, surprise) support APIs for complex animations. They are also adding support for long term storage, sophisticated networking, predictable parsing, and other features that will greatly aid web developers.
This minor coup has not gone unnoticed by the W3C. In order to maintain the coherency of their organization, they went ahead and accepted HTML 5 as a working draft. The specification is getting top priority and is being handled in an open manner that is most unlike the W3C's business as usual. In other words, a win for both browser and web app developers.:-)
I can sympathize with the rest of your rant, but I can't help but get the feeling that you're approaching the situation wrong. Your reasoning smacks of "I don't like this solution, therefore I'll find excuses why it's bad". Which is something we all do at some point in time. None the less, the proper approach is, "We considered solution X and solution Y. We evaluated what it would take to make each solution work for us and decided upon solution Y because it had attributes A, B, and C that were desirable to our environment."
Granted, the difference between those two may seem minor. But it's the difference between eBay scaling with dozens of Windows and Solaris boxes using IIS and iPlanet J2EE vs. Google scaling with thousands of unreliable Linux servers, all predicated on reliability built into the application.
Management invariably tries to standardize the wrong tools because they have no idea how software development works. They think in terms of the IDE as "the tool set" rather than the MAKE or ANT build systems, compiler toolchain, version control, and other behind the scene tools.
If you want the standardization to go well, make sure the build tools are standardized. Once anyone can build the project (IDE or no), it won't matter what the "standard" IDE is. (Unless it's Rational Application Developer. That's just a piece of shit right there. Universally agreed upon.) Developers will still download their own editor or IDE tools to make themselves happy without disturbing the greater whole.
What you're describing is a standard sweetheart top. They're pretty common over here too. Like I said, that's a variation on the sweetheart top that provides a space for something to be pinned. (In this case, a name tag.;-))
Risque? WTF? That's a variation on a standard sweetheart top that allows broaches to be pinned. (As she has in the photo.) If you've ever gone outside you've probably seen a woman wear a similar top.
I know the old joke about Slashdotters and women, but dear God man. Show that you have at least a mild understanding of the fairer sex!
My God you're a sexist pig. Is it so horrible for a woman to dress up for an occasion? Especially when going to an event that's important to her husband? (Yes, that guy leaning over in the photo is her husband.)
FWIW, I have met Ms. Ellsworth at a Commodore Convention before. Her photo on Wikipedia does not do her justice. And besides that, she really knows her stuff when it comes to the Commodore.
"the web" was a collection of applications that ran over the internet.
We have a winner. AJAX applications do not "break the web". They create richer documents and points of interest on the web. You can still link from one HTML application to the next, so the hypertext functionality is not lost.
What *is* a challenge is to find good methods of indexing these richer HTML applications for purposes of searching, indexing, and cataloging. Since these applications can pull and display information in a variety of ways, search engines are presented with a challenge when they treat the application as a simple textual document.
A secondary factor may be the settings of the different computers you have the LCDs attached to - if (God forbid) you're using Windows systems, check that both have "Cleartype" enabled and that it has been tweaked for that particular monitor's arrangement of RGB on the screen. It really does make a difference.
You know what works even better? Make the font bigger. The larger the glyphs are on the screen, the less your focusing system has to strain to clearly read the character.
A game like Battlezone is actually well served by 2D vector drawing. All you have to do is do a quick rasterization of the vertexes (x2d = x3d/z3d, y2d = y3d/z3d), then pass the result to the 2D vector routines. Rendering engine done.
While I can't view the site right now, COMET support sounds like one of the more interesting feature requirements. The only thing that I don't get is (and maybe this is explained on the currently-slashdotted site), isn't this solved by Server-Sent DOM Events? That effectively provides a smooth and scalable form of COMET support. Of course, only Opera supports it at the moment, so maybe that's the problem...
Well I'll be damned. It's the Aurora! I hereby apologize to everyone I argued with that it didn't exist. I do NOT apologize to Dan Brown and his fans. His books are still sloppily written when it comes to so-called "real" secret technologies. The Aurora may exist, but it sure as hell isn't playing taxi to the Delta Force!:-P
You're assuming that most ATMs are designed to handle 10 digit PINs. Any ATM that doesn't handle such a PIN (and most don't; the standard is 4 digit) would need a software update at the least, and a complete replacement at the most.
Slashdot Mirror
If that were true, what's the reason for the Google Video policies, then?
I suspect the reason for filtering adult material has more to do with good business sense than anything else. If you allow adult materials, then your site is likely to become a haven for such materials rather than achieving its original goal. Sort of like how the various free internet backup and file sharing solutions became havens for warez rather than achieving a solid business goal.
Two more words: Not safe.
Any enclosed space is a potential hazard. They need to either design this pump so that leakage is near impossible, OR people need to keep the "business end" outside of their garages. And the only way to enforce that is to require by code that the companies who install these things to install them in an outdoor environment.
Apparently the mods are on crack today. Either that or they're dumb enough to believe an AC troll without applying even a small modicum of critical thinking. So here's a complete repost for you!
I have zero tolerance for mod abuse.
You know the ironic part of this thread? I said I was in favor of having home hydrogen fueling stations. Yet clearly I'm a villain because I'm the only one who's NOT ignoring the very real safety issues presented by generating hydrogen in your garage. How evil of me! Being worried that the average Slashdotter doesn't blow himself to kingdom come by accident! :-/
Several folks have mentioned propane tanks as an area where we currently use a highly explosive gas as a fuel. What those posters fail to consider is that the average propane user does not refill his tank at home. Nor does the local gas station. They exchange propane tanks rather than deal with the hazards of recharging an existing pressure tank. In addition, propane tanks are generally kept outdoors for general safety. You'll notice that gas stations use metal-mesh lockers outside to store the tanks. And your gas grill? You probably keep that outside too.
So to reiterate, I love the idea of a personal hydrogen refueling station. My only concern is the safety matters inherit in having such a station in the average homeowner's garage.
I'm not worried about the fuel. I'm worried about the fueling station. Having a hydrogen device in your garage does not strike me as a very safe thing to do unless very specific precautions are taken.
I've seen half a dozen such posts here on Slashdot, so it shouldn't be too hard to find some damn fool. Just stand back while they do it. Oh, and make sure they're doing it in the open? ;-)
You mean, like a garage? Granted, most folks wouldn't have any gas in their garage other than in their car's tank. (Though they might have a container for their mower.) However, they might have one of these hydrogen fueling stations in their garage. Which is what has me concerned. I'm in no way concerned about hydrogen in general.
In fact, hydrogen is very safe out in the open because of the fact that it blows upward so quickly. It's enclosed spaces that we need to worry about. Liiiiikkkeeee.... a hydrogen fueling station in your garage, perhaps?
Gas tanks are not under pressure, so there's no need for an emergency discharge. In fact, the results of such a discharge would be LESS desirable than containing it as they'd help spread a fire rather than put it out. This is in direct opposition to the failure mode of hydrogen. Hydrogen will produce a brilliant flame as it vents, but it will be gone in a moment. As long as you're in the open it isn't a problem.
But in a garage...
Sierran already explained the situation fairly well, but I think it bears repeating. One of the primary advantages of gasoline is that it is an extremely safe fuel. Gasoline does NOT explode and is actually quite difficult to burn. It's only once you give gasoline time to evaporate that you have a problem. Fumes from gasoline are far more flammable and explosive than liquid gasoline. (I'm sure you can find some yahoo friend who can demonstrate the trick of putting a match out by dunking it in a barrel of gas.)
Hydrogen on the other hand does not have a liquid form at temperatures that are attainable by household equipment. As a result, it easily vaporizes and mixes with oxygen to create the perfect situation for an explosion. One spark and POOF! you're dead. I do NOT recommend attempting the match trick with a container of hydrogen.
Furthermore, hydrogen for vehicular use is usually kept in a highly compressed form. The fueling equipment will somehow need to pressurize your car's fuel tank with the hydrogen in a safe and economical fashion. That's nowhere near as easy as it is with gasoline, where we simply pump a liquid. This makes the hydrogen pump that much more dangerous to work with. (Being in a home environment, one of my first concerns is children playing with the equipment when their parents aren't watching.)
So to summarize:
Gasoline == Safe Fuel
Hydrogen == Dangerous Fuel
Now if you'll excuse me, my head is going to go have a rather painful talk with my desk about mods modding the wrong people around here. :-/
...that hydrogen is extremely flammable, often explosive, and very dangerous to work with, sounds like a smashing idea!
Seriously though, I think a home fueling station would be a great start. Not only because it provides a convenient source of fuel, but also because it pushes the energy requirements to the grid. (Which isn't a bad thing if we finally build more nuclear power plants!) As long as the safety concerns of generating hydrogen at home are worked out, I'm all for it.
That's already a problem. Most desktop apps for taxes do regular updates from the server to ensure they have the latest information. They also allow for e-filing, which is another area of connectivity that could fail.
The solution is not to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that it's too hard. The solution is to size capacity for the expected load. Companies like Google and Amazon are leading the way in planning for sudden spikes in capacity requirements.
Sorry, you've been misinformed. The Constellation program is the program to build the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, along with the Orion crew capsule and Altair lander module. The roadmap of the Constellation program includes an eventual flight to Mars. However, no funding has been allocated for that leg of the program, nor has any planning in earnest been done.
If Obama kills the Constellation program, the United States will be left without a manned space program. Period. End of story.
The key word there is BASIC. Complex animations, applications, and games are where Flash excels. Web Browsers did not provide sufficient facilities until recently. And only then because the browser makers got fed up with the W3C's stance that HTML did not need to be updated, and ended up doing an end run around their process. In result, most web browsers (except IE, surprise, surprise) support APIs for complex animations. They are also adding support for long term storage, sophisticated networking, predictable parsing, and other features that will greatly aid web developers.
This minor coup has not gone unnoticed by the W3C. In order to maintain the coherency of their organization, they went ahead and accepted HTML 5 as a working draft. The specification is getting top priority and is being handled in an open manner that is most unlike the W3C's business as usual. In other words, a win for both browser and web app developers. :-)
(Emphasis mine)
Thank you for proving my point.
I can sympathize with the rest of your rant, but I can't help but get the feeling that you're approaching the situation wrong. Your reasoning smacks of "I don't like this solution, therefore I'll find excuses why it's bad". Which is something we all do at some point in time. None the less, the proper approach is, "We considered solution X and solution Y. We evaluated what it would take to make each solution work for us and decided upon solution Y because it had attributes A, B, and C that were desirable to our environment."
Granted, the difference between those two may seem minor. But it's the difference between eBay scaling with dozens of Windows and Solaris boxes using IIS and iPlanet J2EE vs. Google scaling with thousands of unreliable Linux servers, all predicated on reliability built into the application.
Management invariably tries to standardize the wrong tools because they have no idea how software development works. They think in terms of the IDE as "the tool set" rather than the MAKE or ANT build systems, compiler toolchain, version control, and other behind the scene tools.
If you want the standardization to go well, make sure the build tools are standardized. Once anyone can build the project (IDE or no), it won't matter what the "standard" IDE is. (Unless it's Rational Application Developer. That's just a piece of shit right there. Universally agreed upon.) Developers will still download their own editor or IDE tools to make themselves happy without disturbing the greater whole.
What you're describing is a standard sweetheart top. They're pretty common over here too. Like I said, that's a variation on the sweetheart top that provides a space for something to be pinned. (In this case, a name tag. ;-))
You're right. I mistook the item in the image. Point still stands, though. :-)
Risque? WTF? That's a variation on a standard sweetheart top that allows broaches to be pinned. (As she has in the photo.) If you've ever gone outside you've probably seen a woman wear a similar top.
I know the old joke about Slashdotters and women, but dear God man. Show that you have at least a mild understanding of the fairer sex!
My God you're a sexist pig. Is it so horrible for a woman to dress up for an occasion? Especially when going to an event that's important to her husband? (Yes, that guy leaning over in the photo is her husband.)
Grow up and get a life, will you?
At least one, probably. Maybe two. :-P
FWIW, I have met Ms. Ellsworth at a Commodore Convention before. Her photo on Wikipedia does not do her justice. And besides that, she really knows her stuff when it comes to the Commodore.
We have a winner. AJAX applications do not "break the web". They create richer documents and points of interest on the web. You can still link from one HTML application to the next, so the hypertext functionality is not lost.
What *is* a challenge is to find good methods of indexing these richer HTML applications for purposes of searching, indexing, and cataloging. Since these applications can pull and display information in a variety of ways, search engines are presented with a challenge when they treat the application as a simple textual document.
You know what works even better? Make the font bigger. The larger the glyphs are on the screen, the less your focusing system has to strain to clearly read the character.
A game like Battlezone is actually well served by 2D vector drawing. All you have to do is do a quick rasterization of the vertexes (x2d = x3d/z3d, y2d = y3d/z3d), then pass the result to the 2D vector routines. Rendering engine done.
While I can't view the site right now, COMET support sounds like one of the more interesting feature requirements. The only thing that I don't get is (and maybe this is explained on the currently-slashdotted site), isn't this solved by Server-Sent DOM Events? That effectively provides a smooth and scalable form of COMET support. Of course, only Opera supports it at the moment, so maybe that's the problem...
Seems they're way ahead of you.
Well I'll be damned. It's the Aurora! I hereby apologize to everyone I argued with that it didn't exist. I do NOT apologize to Dan Brown and his fans. His books are still sloppily written when it comes to so-called "real" secret technologies. The Aurora may exist, but it sure as hell isn't playing taxi to the Delta Force! :-P
Case in point.
You don't seriously think that most readers remember (or even think about!) such niggling details, do you? :-P
You're assuming that most ATMs are designed to handle 10 digit PINs. Any ATM that doesn't handle such a PIN (and most don't; the standard is 4 digit) would need a software update at the least, and a complete replacement at the most.