Beta was unfinished, everyone knew that, so the grousing that somehow it was "clearly inferior" or would break Slashdot was completely misplaced. Slashdot made it clear from the start that this was being put out for feedback purposes, not because it was feature complete. They said it wasn't feature complete.
It's possible to have capslock functionality without giving it its own key. What about Alt-Numlock for that tiny subset of situations where it's necessary?
If Apple ever sells OS X for non Apple hardware, then sure. But as of now, given it requires non-commodity hardware that most people don't have, it may well increase marketshare, but it's not going to take over the world in the same way Windows has.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my PC (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. About 30 minutes. About 10 minutes. About 5 minutes. About 5 hours. About 4 minutes. 11 seconds...
I wouldn't worry about negative push back for saying you like a particular release of Windows. Windows 7 was fairly well received around these parts too.
Windows 10, at least going by features, seems to be the first Desktop Windows that's genuinely exciting since Windows 95. While there was a major architectural change with the move to NT for 2000 and XP, it didn't seem to impact the end user experience as much. And 8 was genuinely interesting, but was ultimately a tablet operating system.
So I'm looking forward to using it. And hoping desperately the reliability isn't as bad as it sounds.
Then Microsoft will have to make yet another new version of Windows to undo the damage. Or, finally, the mass exodus to platforms like Ubuntu will have happened by then, which would be no bad thing if Canonical could fix/replace Unity.
Maybe, but that's not going to help here. Despite the headline, the article is about the publisher of the content delaying the loading of the page to screw advertisers, not the advertisers trying to screw the readers.
If the publisher is delaying the page loading process, then it doesn't matter if you have adblock or not, you're going to see delays.
It has happened over and over and over again, and seems to be the hallmark of this decade in tech: take a working project...
...and that's where I have the problem, because really, I think D2 is terrible, and D1 is far too ridden with bugs and limitations that exist because/. was once running on a 386 in Malda's closet over a 14.4 modem.
Of course, there's a good case to be made that the existing code base should just be fixed, namely:
- Remove sillier numeric limits for D1.
- Unicode. It's 2015, there's no excuse. Page widening is not a problem with CSS's max-width.
- Some CSS clean up.
Which would probably not take anything like as much time as Beta was going to, but, oh well...
1. The complaints about beta I felt were misplaced. They shouldn't have made the beta default for anyone (and perhaps they should have refined it just a little more first...) but I think Slashdotters seriously overreacted to what was an easy to opt-out of test of a new UI. (And frankly, with D1 broken - thanks Pudge - and D2 horrible, I was looking forward to someone doing something about the/. UI.)
2. I'm pretty sure that if they'd covered GamerGate in depth, you'd - based upon what you've written here - been so unhappy you'd never have come back.
3. I go the other way - there was a failure to ensure discussions wouldn't be derailed by trolls and anti-diversity fanatics, especially in the aftermath of a somewhat extreme anti-diversity campaign in one corner of tech. Slashdot's articles were of interest to some of us, unfortunately the massive wave of abusive moderation and anti-diversity crapflooders meant we couldn't have an adult discussion about the issues.
Where we agree however is that, much as I'm reluctant to attack anyone by name, the types of articles that were posted by Haselton were never right for Slashdot.
Haselton wasn't even the first time they did this. Real Slashdotters remember a guy called Jon Katz who Malda brought in largely to introduce original commentary - just like Haselton. It was a disaster. Slashdotters became increasingly annoyed by the posts, just as with Haselton.
Why did Slashdot do it again? No idea. I'm guessing they thought it might be worth a try again, perhaps thinking it was Katz, not this kind of commentary, people disliked.
As an aside, when I used to blog more actively, people (nobody working for Slashdot I might add) asked me if I should offer to write similar pieces for Slashdot et al. Leaving aside my appalling writing skills, this is why...
It doesn't really mean that, though that helps. It means that at some point you must have had a way to inject your software onto it. That might mean physical access to the computer. Or it might mean physical access to the operating system image before it was loaded onto the computer. Or it might mean physical access to the bespoke software image before it was loaded onto the computer.
One scenario, for example. You work for a company that produces software to control lottery random number machines. You insert, suitably obfuscated, code working on this principle into the software before release. The code is audited, but as all eyes are on modules relating to the retrieval and display of the random number, your code is largely ignored and just assumed to be poorly written, not evil, per-se.
Your accomplice then gets a job as a janitor at SuperMegaBall HQ, one of your clients. They're able to use a cellphone to extract the secure login credentials, which you then crack, and said accomplice is then able to gain full access to the computer with the credentials and upload a software update that'll give you the numbers you want.
This is so foolproof I could work as the scriptwriter for "Scorpion". *kills myself*
They were, to be fair, rock solid. I was using a couple until the late 2000s as my DSL gateway and email servers, and it was largely the lack of support (from the rest of the world) for SCSI-2 that made me reluctantly shut them down for the last time.
I'm not sure I've heard anyone suggest ARM is superior. It happens to be fulfilling a good niche as an architecture that provides decent performance per watt. But you're not seeing anyone wanting to use it in areas where power isn't a concern.
I suspect ARM will eventually be the architecture that's supplanted, not ix86 or ix86-64. Intel's getting good at producing low power ix86 family CPUs - I have one in my tablet, and the mobile space isn't really wedded to any architecture, but the desktop space is.
Gold "outperforming" (rising in price faster than) an index based on real world valuations would seem, to me, to be evidence gold is a poor (actually atrocious) substitute for a well managed fiat currency.
You know, it kinda makes sense, but given that I've had months where I've been unable to play a specific game or two (without turning off various features that severely degrade performance) because "the latest driver" from AMD/ATI has had one issue or another, with no bug fixes available short of running the unsupported beta version, the idea of being forced to upgrade a driver that is currently not causing any problems is a definitely negative to me.
It'd be one thing if display card drivers were always being updated to fix bugs/security holes, but in practice, 99% of the updates I see are actually to support new cards (which isn't something I need or want a software update for), or to fiddle with the hardware optimization in theory to improve performance (which might be useful, but there's no reason to force such an update on people.)
Windows Update needs the ability to "pin" versions much as apt-get does. For security updates, fine, force them, but if an update is solely there to "improve performance" - or will have no affect whatsoever, it absolutely needs to be blockable.
Yes but now everyone will associate that joke with its author, so she won't feel like nobody knows that the world's worst attempt at a joke was written by her.
Well, to be fair to the BBC, they make a hell of a lot of money from reselling their content to other markets, presumably including the rest of Yurp. It's hard to see them being able to recover that lost revenue short of a license fee increase.
They might cut their bandwidth cost in half. Computational cost for each video will possibly increase
You'll be surprised what can be done with a codec like MPEG-1 if you have unlimited computational power. Much of the point of better codecs is to reduce the computational power needed to achieve a substantial reduction in bandwidth for a given level of quality. So while it'll likely increase, the amount is unlikely to be substantial, not even a doubling of processing power.
Google has gone out of their way to invest in video codecs to ensure there are non-encumbered standards that are in the same ballpark as H.264. There will always be incentive to improve bandwidth by producing better codecs.
I suspect actually that patents are holding back codecs, not helping. Who wants to innovate in that space if you know that whatever you end up with is likely going to be crippled with other people's patents given you'll have to build on the work of others to make something affective?
I get the impression H.265 isn't good enough given what you suggest it needs to do. It's only a 50% reduction in bandwidth compared to H.264. The fact Carmack can just casually announce he's dropping support suggests that the industry itself didn't see it as much more than a convenience.
...yeah, I don't know if you missed the TFS, but the summary is actually about the fact that people are deciding not to use H.265, because they don't like the licensing terms...
HTML5 video cannot be set to "Click to play" at present.
This idea seems to be a horrible hack to get around the fact that Mozilla, Google, et al, refuse to deal with the lack of any popular support for "autoplay" being a thing.
Why did it take so long anyway? Skimmed milk and fat free yogurt has existed for how many decades, and it's only NOW that the people in lab coats are figuring out neither taste as good as the real thing?
You perhaps should read the article you noted. Bowman didn't buy something advertised as "Not Monsanto", in fact he deliberately bought seed that had been advertised as not for planting, by someone he knew was using transgenic seed.
Like I said, every time I hear someone bitching about Monsanto, and then look into it, I find the supportable party is the latter.
The reason you're seeing new packaging with slightly smaller sizes isn't some conspiracy to help the government cover up inflation (why?), but because of an opposite fact: Wal-Mart has gone seriously into groceries lately and is treating its suppliers the same way it treats non-grocery suppliers. It expects businesses to sell to it at a loss.
Problem is that margins for grocery suppliers are already razor thin. So they're trying to match Wal-mart's price demands by reducing the cost of each product, which, in this case, means changing the quantities per package.
Usually, though not always, the strange quantities do not make their way into real supermarkets like Publix. But occasionally they do - sometimes it's easier to just sell one product, and you notice, and you think it's a conspiracy.
Inflation by any real measure is static or going down. A gallon of milk cost around $4.20 six months ago. It's approx $3.50 here now. A gallon of concentrated orange juice was $5 six months ago, now it's $4 (and I'm not talking sale prices.)
You don't notice these things because you never notice when things go down in price as much as when they go up. When things go up you worry about whether you can afford to continue eating what you eat. When they go down, you think "Oh, that's nice" and carry on.
Slashdot Mirror
Beta was unfinished, everyone knew that, so the grousing that somehow it was "clearly inferior" or would break Slashdot was completely misplaced. Slashdot made it clear from the start that this was being put out for feedback purposes, not because it was feature complete. They said it wasn't feature complete.
It's possible to have capslock functionality without giving it its own key. What about Alt-Numlock for that tiny subset of situations where it's necessary?
Also https://xkcd.com/1172/
(Yay I posted an XKCD at last! That means I automatically get +6 Insightful!)
Alas constants tend to also have a lot of digits in them, so you'd win on the underscores, but lose for the other non-alphas.
Maybe it's time underscore was its own key anyway...
If Apple ever sells OS X for non Apple hardware, then sure. But as of now, given it requires non-commodity hardware that most people don't have, it may well increase marketshare, but it's not going to take over the world in the same way Windows has.
FTFY
I wouldn't worry about negative push back for saying you like a particular release of Windows. Windows 7 was fairly well received around these parts too.
Windows 10, at least going by features, seems to be the first Desktop Windows that's genuinely exciting since Windows 95. While there was a major architectural change with the move to NT for 2000 and XP, it didn't seem to impact the end user experience as much. And 8 was genuinely interesting, but was ultimately a tablet operating system.
So I'm looking forward to using it. And hoping desperately the reliability isn't as bad as it sounds.
Then Microsoft will have to make yet another new version of Windows to undo the damage. Or, finally, the mass exodus to platforms like Ubuntu will have happened by then, which would be no bad thing if Canonical could fix/replace Unity.
Maybe, but that's not going to help here. Despite the headline, the article is about the publisher of the content delaying the loading of the page to screw advertisers, not the advertisers trying to screw the readers.
If the publisher is delaying the page loading process, then it doesn't matter if you have adblock or not, you're going to see delays.
Of course, there's a good case to be made that the existing code base should just be fixed, namely:
- Remove sillier numeric limits for D1.
- Unicode. It's 2015, there's no excuse. Page widening is not a problem with CSS's max-width. - Some CSS clean up.
Which would probably not take anything like as much time as Beta was going to, but, oh well...
1. The complaints about beta I felt were misplaced. They shouldn't have made the beta default for anyone (and perhaps they should have refined it just a little more first...) but I think Slashdotters seriously overreacted to what was an easy to opt-out of test of a new UI. (And frankly, with D1 broken - thanks Pudge - and D2 horrible, I was looking forward to someone doing something about the /. UI.)
2. I'm pretty sure that if they'd covered GamerGate in depth, you'd - based upon what you've written here - been so unhappy you'd never have come back.
3. I go the other way - there was a failure to ensure discussions wouldn't be derailed by trolls and anti-diversity fanatics, especially in the aftermath of a somewhat extreme anti-diversity campaign in one corner of tech. Slashdot's articles were of interest to some of us, unfortunately the massive wave of abusive moderation and anti-diversity crapflooders meant we couldn't have an adult discussion about the issues.
Where we agree however is that, much as I'm reluctant to attack anyone by name, the types of articles that were posted by Haselton were never right for Slashdot.
Haselton wasn't even the first time they did this. Real Slashdotters remember a guy called Jon Katz who Malda brought in largely to introduce original commentary - just like Haselton. It was a disaster. Slashdotters became increasingly annoyed by the posts, just as with Haselton.
Why did Slashdot do it again? No idea. I'm guessing they thought it might be worth a try again, perhaps thinking it was Katz, not this kind of commentary, people disliked.
As an aside, when I used to blog more actively, people (nobody working for Slashdot I might add) asked me if I should offer to write similar pieces for Slashdot et al. Leaving aside my appalling writing skills, this is why...
It doesn't really mean that, though that helps. It means that at some point you must have had a way to inject your software onto it. That might mean physical access to the computer. Or it might mean physical access to the operating system image before it was loaded onto the computer. Or it might mean physical access to the bespoke software image before it was loaded onto the computer.
One scenario, for example. You work for a company that produces software to control lottery random number machines. You insert, suitably obfuscated, code working on this principle into the software before release. The code is audited, but as all eyes are on modules relating to the retrieval and display of the random number, your code is largely ignored and just assumed to be poorly written, not evil, per-se.
Your accomplice then gets a job as a janitor at SuperMegaBall HQ, one of your clients. They're able to use a cellphone to extract the secure login credentials, which you then crack, and said accomplice is then able to gain full access to the computer with the credentials and upload a software update that'll give you the numbers you want.
This is so foolproof I could work as the scriptwriter for "Scorpion". *kills myself*
They were, to be fair, rock solid. I was using a couple until the late 2000s as my DSL gateway and email servers, and it was largely the lack of support (from the rest of the world) for SCSI-2 that made me reluctantly shut them down for the last time.
I'm not sure I've heard anyone suggest ARM is superior. It happens to be fulfilling a good niche as an architecture that provides decent performance per watt. But you're not seeing anyone wanting to use it in areas where power isn't a concern.
I suspect ARM will eventually be the architecture that's supplanted, not ix86 or ix86-64. Intel's getting good at producing low power ix86 family CPUs - I have one in my tablet, and the mobile space isn't really wedded to any architecture, but the desktop space is.
Gold "outperforming" (rising in price faster than) an index based on real world valuations would seem, to me, to be evidence gold is a poor (actually atrocious) substitute for a well managed fiat currency.
You know, it kinda makes sense, but given that I've had months where I've been unable to play a specific game or two (without turning off various features that severely degrade performance) because "the latest driver" from AMD/ATI has had one issue or another, with no bug fixes available short of running the unsupported beta version, the idea of being forced to upgrade a driver that is currently not causing any problems is a definitely negative to me.
It'd be one thing if display card drivers were always being updated to fix bugs/security holes, but in practice, 99% of the updates I see are actually to support new cards (which isn't something I need or want a software update for), or to fiddle with the hardware optimization in theory to improve performance (which might be useful, but there's no reason to force such an update on people.)
Windows Update needs the ability to "pin" versions much as apt-get does. For security updates, fine, force them, but if an update is solely there to "improve performance" - or will have no affect whatsoever, it absolutely needs to be blockable.
Yes but now everyone will associate that joke with its author, so she won't feel like nobody knows that the world's worst attempt at a joke was written by her.
Well, to be fair to the BBC, they make a hell of a lot of money from reselling their content to other markets, presumably including the rest of Yurp. It's hard to see them being able to recover that lost revenue short of a license fee increase.
You'll be surprised what can be done with a codec like MPEG-1 if you have unlimited computational power. Much of the point of better codecs is to reduce the computational power needed to achieve a substantial reduction in bandwidth for a given level of quality. So while it'll likely increase, the amount is unlikely to be substantial, not even a doubling of processing power.
Google has gone out of their way to invest in video codecs to ensure there are non-encumbered standards that are in the same ballpark as H.264. There will always be incentive to improve bandwidth by producing better codecs.
I suspect actually that patents are holding back codecs, not helping. Who wants to innovate in that space if you know that whatever you end up with is likely going to be crippled with other people's patents given you'll have to build on the work of others to make something affective?
I get the impression H.265 isn't good enough given what you suggest it needs to do. It's only a 50% reduction in bandwidth compared to H.264. The fact Carmack can just casually announce he's dropping support suggests that the industry itself didn't see it as much more than a convenience.
...yeah, I don't know if you missed the TFS, but the summary is actually about the fact that people are deciding not to use H.265, because they don't like the licensing terms...
HTML5 video cannot be set to "Click to play" at present.
This idea seems to be a horrible hack to get around the fact that Mozilla, Google, et al, refuse to deal with the lack of any popular support for "autoplay" being a thing.
Why did it take so long anyway? Skimmed milk and fat free yogurt has existed for how many decades, and it's only NOW that the people in lab coats are figuring out neither taste as good as the real thing?
You perhaps should read the article you noted. Bowman didn't buy something advertised as "Not Monsanto", in fact he deliberately bought seed that had been advertised as not for planting, by someone he knew was using transgenic seed.
Like I said, every time I hear someone bitching about Monsanto, and then look into it, I find the supportable party is the latter.
The reason you're seeing new packaging with slightly smaller sizes isn't some conspiracy to help the government cover up inflation (why?), but because of an opposite fact: Wal-Mart has gone seriously into groceries lately and is treating its suppliers the same way it treats non-grocery suppliers. It expects businesses to sell to it at a loss.
Problem is that margins for grocery suppliers are already razor thin. So they're trying to match Wal-mart's price demands by reducing the cost of each product, which, in this case, means changing the quantities per package.
Usually, though not always, the strange quantities do not make their way into real supermarkets like Publix. But occasionally they do - sometimes it's easier to just sell one product, and you notice, and you think it's a conspiracy.
Inflation by any real measure is static or going down. A gallon of milk cost around $4.20 six months ago. It's approx $3.50 here now. A gallon of concentrated orange juice was $5 six months ago, now it's $4 (and I'm not talking sale prices.)
You don't notice these things because you never notice when things go down in price as much as when they go up. When things go up you worry about whether you can afford to continue eating what you eat. When they go down, you think "Oh, that's nice" and carry on.