If you use dial-up internet, Slashdot can take an age to load. Knowing this, the good eggs at Slashdot have a 'dial-up' preference in your account options that tinkers with the CSS to show you a smaller homepage, (I think with fewer adverts than the default) and the page load times become bearable again.
What is this "dial-up internet" you speak of? Are you referring perhaps to the text-to-speech stuff that [all hail]Google[/all hail] offers?
Seriously, though, I was unaware of this apparently very cool feature..
Slashdot has ads? Who would have thought that! *starting IE* IE? IE????? That's it, you're banned from Slashdot, you money-grubbing Microsoft-loving Zealot!
Hmm 1 flash animation for blackberry, using javascript to document.write link to a javascript file hosted by doubleclick with context info and the fact that I am not logged in. This means that
- doubleclick gets to send random code to my machine which IE will execute, presumably sandboxed but who knows what vulnerabilities are in there. - doubleclick gets my IP, my logged in status, and what article I am viewing - I get an animated flash in the middle of my screen
I wouldn't mind inserting text based ads into the static html, but I will not consent to any ad that 1) sends information to a third party 2) asks my computer to execute javascript from somewhere else (or execute anything at all, really) or 3) moves Ok, so maybe slashdot was a bad example.. My point was that these ads were unobtrusive and relevant. I like that. As for the javascript and whatnot, I tend to ignore what doubleclick does. Granted I do have an anti-virus installed as well as an anti-spyware package. It seems to me that while doubleclick does "potentially" have power to harm the end-users computer, it wouldn't exactly be in their best interests to do so. Obviously other sites may be less scrupulous. Of course, those other sites might not be advertisers and not blocked by your ad-blocking plugin, so that may be a moot point.
Personally, I have no aversion to ads at all, provided they're done in a clean, consistent, unobtrusive manner. I realize that many websites exist solely on the revenue from advertising, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
What drives me absolutely bonkers are sites that insist on using popups, especially those that work to circumvent any popup blocker I have installed. Sites that use CSS/Flash ads that glide over the screen, obscure text, etc. are equally annoying as they detract from the site itself.
Other sites insist on using ads from servers that can't keep up with the traffic and often take forever to respond, leaving my browser chugging away at nothing. All too often this prevents parts of the page from loading.
Slightly less annoying are the ads that are purposely put right in the middle of the text I'm trying to read, interrupting my train of thought and seriously impeding anything I'm learning from the article. These are slightly less annoying as they are usually simplistic text ads or small banners.
Slashdot seems to have a decent handle on ads. They exist, I see them, and occasionally I click on them because they actually happen to be relevant. They're unobtrusive, and even the flash based ones seem to load relatively quickly. Rarely, if ever, do I have any problems with the advertising here.
So I think there definitely is a place for advertising on a web site. And web sites that strive to ensure that the ads are both relevant and in good taste are sites that I will visit again. I don't mind so much the tracking and whatnot as I don't see it having any effect on me. And I clear out cookies and whatnot often enough that it should disrupt them anyway.
That said, I don't see ad blocking software being anything illegal. You're putting your content on the net and expecting people to visit it. If I don't want to see the ads and I use a blocker to prevent that, then so be it. Perhaps you as the site owner should find another way to entice me to view those ads. Perhaps linking within the articles themselves? I've seen that on a number of sites and it seems to work well.
Another quick thought.. If we classify Ad blockers as "illegal" because they prevent the website owner from earning revenue through ads, does that mean that text-only browsers like elinks and lynx are illegal as well? They don't load images either....
Que Jack Thompson raving like a lunatic...again. Absolutely. And he'll definitely have a valid point this time. How dare Take Two release this onto the public after they were slapped down by the ESRB. Wait.. What? Oh, it's a warez release? Hrm...
How dare this get released into the warez scene where innocent young children can access it.... What? Illegal? Not innocent?... Umm..
How dare Take Two make something that could potentially be stolen and released into the warez scene where possibly innocent children may or may not come into contact with it.....
Trust me, 1s and 0s can have a great influence on your life. Goatse, Tubgirl, Lemonparty, etc... they're just 1s and 0s, but they can influence you. They can shatter a man's soul. Or make a/b/tard really happy I suppose. Ah, I had not considered that aspect. Touché, good sir, touché....
was allegedly under the influence of Grand Theft Auto
Whoa.. I've heard of people smoking some crazy stuff, but a video game? How the hell do you smoke that? You can burn the cd, but then you're smokin the cd.. burn the computer? How the hell do you burn a series of 1s and 0s? And how do said binary digits "influence" you?
I believe you can build a storage engine in MySQL that deals with column-based storage. I'm not sure if it's been done yet, but I don't see why it couldn't be.
Since when is a column store database and a relational database mutually exclusive concepts? I thought that both column store and row store (i.e. traditional) databases were just different means of storing data, and had nothing to do with whether a database was relational or not. I think the article misinterpreted what he said.
Agreed. It definitely looks like a storage preference. Though column-based storage has definite benefits over row-based when it comes to store once, read many operations. Kinda like what you'd find in a data warehouse situation...
Also, I don't think it's news that Michael Stonebraker (a great name, by the way), co-founder and CEO of a company that (surprise!) happens to develop column store database software, thinks that column store databases are going to be the Next Big Thing. Right or wrong, his opinion can't exactly be considered unbiased...
Ah, interesting.. An article on Blues News refers to this interview over at Joystiq where this is stated :
Given the internets and what they are -- with their tubes and all -- I want to sort of talk about the concerns people have. We take the concerns people have very seriously. There's been some concern like, "What happens if it's three years from now, or ten years from now, when I want to play this game. And, you know, Irrational Games has been hit by a meteor?" We will unset the online activation at some point in the future -- we're not talking about when. If people have concern about that they shouldn't be worried about that. This activation is for the early period of the game when it's really hot and there are people really trying to find ways to play the game without buying it. Of course, there are a lot of people who are legitimately trying to play it. We're not trying to be Draconian, we're trying to find a balance.
Well, perhaps I will buy the game.. After I see this activation thing being disabled...
Now what happens if 2k games goes under and the server is no longer there to activate it, they haven't made a comment yet about that either. This bothers me the most. I just installed Fallout again a few weeks ago to give it another whirl. I heard about Fallout 3 coming out and figured I'd play the first two again. This is a 10 year old game.. Chances are, if it had something like the Bioshock protection, the servers would have been turned off long ago. But, I paid for the goddamn game, I wanna play it. But, because of the DRM crap they have these days, I'm screwed..
I've been watching Bioshock for a while now and I *really* want to play it. I could get it for the XBox (if I owned one) and I'm pretty sure it would still work in 10 years (if the XBox worked), but FPS games suck on consoles.. I want this on the PC. But there's no way I'm paying for a game with copy protection like this.. I guess 2K loses another sale because of DRM...
...and it was overlooked all this time. How's that for a security flaw? But is it a security flaw? Or does someone need to figure out a way to exploit it first?
Personally, I think God divided by zero during his big bang calculations and this is the result..
The bigger part to me is where they replaced a part without checking whether it was a suitable replacement. 10G != 4G. Seems to be a simple mistake.. He purchased the newer IMU which, one would expect, built upon the previous one. Instead, it reduced some of the specs, causing a problem. A pretty easy thing to understand.
For instance, one expects that an upgraded OS would include all of the features in the current OS, plus some additional ones. Instead, one winds up with Vista.:)
It was not a blow up rocket fuel type of explosion, it was a ruptured pressure vessel not even part of the rocket, escaping gas caused a pressure wave that did the damage. Nothing spectacular, it happens from time to time in industrial settings where high pressure are used.
I believe that ruptured pressure vessel was part of a rocket, or at the very least, part of the equipment required to get the rocket off the ground. Granted, it's probably not as spectacular an explosion, but as part of the process, the accident does count as a rocketry accident.
Could they have deployed a parachute or something to prevent such an obvious destruction of said vehicle? The worst part, they might not be able to analyze the cause of the failure if the machine is toasted.
I don't believe the vehicle was high enough in the air for a parachute to have made any difference. By the time it would have deployed, the vehicle was on the ground.
I'm with you. I'm with you 110%. This is EXACTLY why I have long opposed private spaceflight. Long story short, profit = cut corners = death. We saw it at the composites factory, and we'll see more of it. Scaled has *NOT* released a detailed report on what happened. It could have been anything from human error to a bad part that caused that explosion. NASA has had plenty of human error problems, and I believe it was faulty parts (damaged o-rings) that caused Challenger to explode back in 1986? The Columbia accident seems to be a combination of both, but that's also debatable.
Private interests just do not have the long term perspective necessary to take the appropriate caution to prevent deaths. This is why space colonization should always be a government function.
Would NASA cut corners like this and end up killing someone? Hell no. How do we know that NASA isn't cutting corners? It's not like they publish information like this...
For those that are not aware, this was John's post on a PUBLIC forum. John has continually posted information regarding his team's experiences and any important information they have learned. He's taken the open source mentality into the rocketry arena and many teams are all the better for it. This is the type of information that NASA would happily write a few hundred page reports on and they encase in cement and bury.
I've been lurking on the rocketry group for a while now and it's great to see the open discussions about everything from rocket design to safety. I've learned more in a few months that I ever did watching all those NASA shuttle launches over the years.
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
If I may, doesn't anyone remember the recent explosion at Mojave that claimed 3 lives? While rocketry related, it wasn't a flight test. It was also a team with vastly more resources. Testing new technology has it's dangers, especially when highly combustible materials are involved.
John and his team have an excellent track record thus far, and have continued to make safety a main issue. I'm sure that this experience will teach them even more, helping to make the next flight even safer.
Failed? I think not. Just so you're aware, Armadillo was the only team last year to even attempt the lunar lander prize, and except for some bad luck, would have walked away with it.
This year, there may be a few other challengers, but I think John and company will walk away with it. John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried, and it's working.
Of course, it's possible that it's poorly worded on their part or poorly interpreted on mine, and the differing energy densities are, in fact, a property of the shape rather than the process used to create it - but that's not the way I read it.
I read it the opposite way.. That the energy densities are a a property of the shape, rather than the bending involved. If it were the bending, then wouldn't the energy densities depend on the material used to create the shape?
I'm curious as to the practical aspects of this formula. It seems to me that creating a mobius strip with equal densities throughout is somehow useful, but I can't determine why..
I have to agree with this... I am not, by any means, an artist. I don't want anyone to get the impression that anything more complicated than a stick figure comes naturally to me.
That said, I don't find the GiMP to be *that* incredibly difficult. I can usually open it up and create/modify what I need within a reasonable amount of time.
The last time I used Photoshop (admittedly, a long time ago.. Pre version 6 days I think..), I spent a lot of time banging around in the interface trying to figure out simple stuff.. I think the GiMP interface is fine, and I don't see the usability issue... But then again, I'm not an artist...
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add to the Slashdot love-in for a mo'
If you use dial-up internet, Slashdot can take an age to load. Knowing this, the good eggs at Slashdot have a 'dial-up' preference in your account options that tinkers with the CSS to show you a smaller homepage, (I think with fewer adverts than the default) and the page load times become bearable again.
What is this "dial-up internet" you speak of? Are you referring perhaps to the text-to-speech stuff that [all hail]Google[/all hail] offers?Seriously, though, I was unaware of this apparently very cool feature..
- doubleclick gets to send random code to my machine which IE will execute, presumably sandboxed but who knows what vulnerabilities are in there.
- doubleclick gets my IP, my logged in status, and what article I am viewing
- I get an animated flash in the middle of my screen
I wouldn't mind inserting text based ads into the static html, but I will not consent to any ad that 1) sends information to a third party 2) asks my computer to execute javascript from somewhere else (or execute anything at all, really) or 3) moves Ok, so maybe slashdot was a bad example.. My point was that these ads were unobtrusive and relevant. I like that. As for the javascript and whatnot, I tend to ignore what doubleclick does. Granted I do have an anti-virus installed as well as an anti-spyware package. It seems to me that while doubleclick does "potentially" have power to harm the end-users computer, it wouldn't exactly be in their best interests to do so. Obviously other sites may be less scrupulous. Of course, those other sites might not be advertisers and not blocked by your ad-blocking plugin, so that may be a moot point.
Personally, I have no aversion to ads at all, provided they're done in a clean, consistent, unobtrusive manner. I realize that many websites exist solely on the revenue from advertising, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
What drives me absolutely bonkers are sites that insist on using popups, especially those that work to circumvent any popup blocker I have installed. Sites that use CSS/Flash ads that glide over the screen, obscure text, etc. are equally annoying as they detract from the site itself.
Other sites insist on using ads from servers that can't keep up with the traffic and often take forever to respond, leaving my browser chugging away at nothing. All too often this prevents parts of the page from loading.
Slightly less annoying are the ads that are purposely put right in the middle of the text I'm trying to read, interrupting my train of thought and seriously impeding anything I'm learning from the article. These are slightly less annoying as they are usually simplistic text ads or small banners.
Slashdot seems to have a decent handle on ads. They exist, I see them, and occasionally I click on them because they actually happen to be relevant. They're unobtrusive, and even the flash based ones seem to load relatively quickly. Rarely, if ever, do I have any problems with the advertising here.
So I think there definitely is a place for advertising on a web site. And web sites that strive to ensure that the ads are both relevant and in good taste are sites that I will visit again. I don't mind so much the tracking and whatnot as I don't see it having any effect on me. And I clear out cookies and whatnot often enough that it should disrupt them anyway.
That said, I don't see ad blocking software being anything illegal. You're putting your content on the net and expecting people to visit it. If I don't want to see the ads and I use a blocker to prevent that, then so be it. Perhaps you as the site owner should find another way to entice me to view those ads. Perhaps linking within the articles themselves? I've seen that on a number of sites and it seems to work well.
Another quick thought.. If we classify Ad blockers as "illegal" because they prevent the website owner from earning revenue through ads, does that mean that text-only browsers like elinks and lynx are illegal as well? They don't load images either....
How dare this get released into the warez scene where innocent young children can access it.
How dare Take Two make something that could potentially be stolen and released into the warez scene where possibly innocent children may or may not come into contact with it.
Your honor, I call President Bush to the stand...
was allegedly under the influence of Grand Theft Auto
Whoa.. I've heard of people smoking some crazy stuff, but a video game? How the hell do you smoke that? You can burn the cd, but then you're smokin the cd.. burn the computer? How the hell do you burn a series of 1s and 0s? And how do said binary digits "influence" you?
I believe you can build a storage engine in MySQL that deals with column-based storage. I'm not sure if it's been done yet, but I don't see why it couldn't be.
Since when is a column store database and a relational database mutually exclusive concepts? I thought that both column store and row store (i.e. traditional) databases were just different means of storing data, and had nothing to do with whether a database was relational or not. I think the article misinterpreted what he said.
Agreed. It definitely looks like a storage preference. Though column-based storage has definite benefits over row-based when it comes to store once, read many operations. Kinda like what you'd find in a data warehouse situation...
Also, I don't think it's news that Michael Stonebraker (a great name, by the way), co-founder and CEO of a company that (surprise!) happens to develop column store database software, thinks that column store databases are going to be the Next Big Thing. Right or wrong, his opinion can't exactly be considered unbiased...
Hrm.. You must be new here....
Translation: Let's see if we can stall on releasing the video long enough for the bad publicity to blow over and everyone forgets about it.
...
o me/News?news_id=349
I didn't want you to forget about this, so I'm replying to your post..
Here's the video, along with even more info
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/H
Ah, interesting.. An article on Blues News refers to this interview over at Joystiq where this is stated :
Given the internets and what they are -- with their tubes and all -- I want to sort of talk about the concerns people have. We take the concerns people have very seriously. There's been some concern like, "What happens if it's three years from now, or ten years from now, when I want to play this game. And, you know, Irrational Games has been hit by a meteor?" We will unset the online activation at some point in the future -- we're not talking about when. If people have concern about that they shouldn't be worried about that. This activation is for the early period of the game when it's really hot and there are people really trying to find ways to play the game without buying it. Of course, there are a lot of people who are legitimately trying to play it. We're not trying to be Draconian, we're trying to find a balance.
Well, perhaps I will buy the game.. After I see this activation thing being disabled...
I've been watching Bioshock for a while now and I *really* want to play it. I could get it for the XBox (if I owned one) and I'm pretty sure it would still work in 10 years (if the XBox worked), but FPS games suck on consoles.. I want this on the PC. But there's no way I'm paying for a game with copy protection like this.. I guess 2K loses another sale because of DRM...
...and it was overlooked all this time. How's that for a security flaw? But is it a security flaw? Or does someone need to figure out a way to exploit it first?Personally, I think God divided by zero during his big bang calculations and this is the result..
For instance, one expects that an upgraded OS would include all of the features in the current OS, plus some additional ones. Instead, one winds up with Vista.
I believe that ruptured pressure vessel was part of a rocket, or at the very least, part of the equipment required to get the rocket off the ground. Granted, it's probably not as spectacular an explosion, but as part of the process, the accident does count as a rocketry accident.It was not a blow up rocket fuel type of explosion, it was a ruptured pressure vessel not even part of the rocket, escaping gas caused a pressure wave that did the damage. Nothing spectacular, it happens from time to time in industrial settings where high pressure are used.
Could they have deployed a parachute or something to prevent such an obvious destruction of said vehicle? The worst part, they might not be able to analyze the cause of the failure if the machine is toasted.
I don't believe the vehicle was high enough in the air for a parachute to have made any difference. By the time it would have deployed, the vehicle was on the ground.Would NASA cut corners like this and end up killing someone? Hell no. How do we know that NASA isn't cutting corners? It's not like they publish information like this...
For those that are not aware, this was John's post on a PUBLIC forum. John has continually posted information regarding his team's experiences and any important information they have learned. He's taken the open source mentality into the rocketry arena and many teams are all the better for it. This is the type of information that NASA would happily write a few hundred page reports on and they encase in cement and bury.
I've been lurking on the rocketry group for a while now and it's great to see the open discussions about everything from rocket design to safety. I've learned more in a few months that I ever did watching all those NASA shuttle launches over the years.
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis". Ignoring the huge dangers of rocketry by cutting corners during design may be cheaper in the short run, but as soon as real human lives are lost because of it, you can bet your ass they are going to have to spend more time and money testing their designs "on paper".
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all.
If I may, doesn't anyone remember the recent explosion at Mojave that claimed 3 lives? While rocketry related, it wasn't a flight test. It was also a team with vastly more resources. Testing new technology has it's dangers, especially when highly combustible materials are involved.John and his team have an excellent track record thus far, and have continued to make safety a main issue. I'm sure that this experience will teach them even more, helping to make the next flight even safer.
Carmack, not Romero... Carmack had nothing to do with Daikatana...
Failed? I think not. Just so you're aware, Armadillo was the only team last year to even attempt the lunar lander prize, and except for some bad luck, would have walked away with it.
This year, there may be a few other challengers, but I think John and company will walk away with it. John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried, and it's working.
We'll see! Only 65 days left!
From John's post to the Amateur Rocketry list :
We have video that we will be releasing, but Matt had to leave for Germany the next day, so it won't be digitized for a week and a half.
So, it's coming, just not released yet.
Of course, it's possible that it's poorly worded on their part or poorly interpreted on mine, and the differing energy densities are, in fact, a property of the shape rather than the process used to create it - but that's not the way I read it.
I read it the opposite way.. That the energy densities are a a property of the shape, rather than the bending involved. If it were the bending, then wouldn't the energy densities depend on the material used to create the shape?
I'm curious as to the practical aspects of this formula. It seems to me that creating a mobius strip with equal densities throughout is somehow useful, but I can't determine why..
I have to agree with this... I am not, by any means, an artist. I don't want anyone to get the impression that anything more complicated than a stick figure comes naturally to me.
...
That said, I don't find the GiMP to be *that* incredibly difficult. I can usually open it up and create/modify what I need within a reasonable amount of time.
The last time I used Photoshop (admittedly, a long time ago.. Pre version 6 days I think..), I spent a lot of time banging around in the interface trying to figure out simple stuff.. I think the GiMP interface is fine, and I don't see the usability issue... But then again, I'm not an artist
Google Notebook is on-line and depends on an outside source. So I have no real control over it... Nor can I access it offline.
:)
That said, it does look pretty interesting, so I'm gonna give it a whirl..
Maybe something in Firefox one day that'll tell you that your bookmarking something again?
5 3
Ask and ye shall receive!
http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/
Or the Mozilla Addons page for it :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15