I daresay that most of people's run-ins with a bartender aren't negative. Having a rateyourcop site is akin to having a rateyourtaxaudit site. Sure your tax audit could go well, but it's a pain in the ass you'd rather not deal with either way, and it never really leaves you with the feeling that, "Gosh, I can't wait to do that again! 5 Stars!"
Yours and another post above have me worried a bit. I'm not saying that police don't have a lot of power, and I'm not saying a percentage don't cross the line, and I'm not saying that crossing the line for a cop isn't worse than crossing the line for a bartender. But to say that public anonymous critiques of particular people are simply "annoying" is incredibly naive.
While I can't say that public non-anonymous critique isn't ripe for retribution, I think you may as well allow cops to respond with the charge given to their critic. You could use a drop-down menu, for crying out loud.
Comment, Anon User: Yah, this boy in blue (Officer Henry McCoy) came up to my door, knocked, then forced his way in when I opened the door. They can't do that. It's unconstitutional.
Response from Officer McCoy: Shots and screams heard from home.
Comment, Anon User: This cop in my neighborhood (Officer Jane Thompson), all she does is drive around and eat donuts. Is there anything else for these people to spend our taxpayer money on?
Response from Officer Thompson: Appropriately assigned as town is near maximum security prison. Patrols agreed upon by town council.
I suppose as long as the officer bothers to respond, and as long as you don't make an Ebay like tally of positive and negative comments....
Sorry, it's just a bad idea. Small town cops will pay the highest price through unfounded rumors and retaliatory comments.
So what? Free speech has nothing to do with what's "fair".
No, but the Internet is a little skewed, don't you think? "Reviews" are often "criticisms", especially when anonymity and charged opinion is concerned. Check your local gaming forum for details. (Hardware and book reviews do a better job, mostly because there are user accounts tied to the reviews...not always. But even then, it's anonymous accounts -- and a rateyourcop site isn't going to have the single-author prolificness to tell whether they're angry or right.)
And then you think of rating your cop. I don't know any cops, though I'm sure my city of 100,000 has at least one. And if I did meet them, I would probably give them an honest rating, because I tend to be sort of level-headed, even on the anonymous Internet (well, since my 2nd year of Everquest back in 99...). But most people have bad experiences with police, even if the police were doing the right thing. "Yah, I was doing 85 miles per hour in a 30, but American Idol was on. The cop laughed at that, but still gave me a ticket. Bastard."
Cops have a sucky enough job as it is and while I see a rating system like this as useful for many things, it'll be used for pettiness most of all. The serious issues cops get called out on have more efficient means of getting handled.
Not a cop. I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
Maybe the way CRTs work sits better with (and covers up the flaws better than) cheap LCDs when used with existing standard-def TV signals
We bought an HD CRT tv a few years ago. 34" widescreen weighing in at 200 lbs. We're always tempted to get a wallmountable plasma or LCD, but we do watch some standard-def TV every once in awhile, and you're right, standard def TV is pretty much unwatchable on the panels (IMHO). And the CRT we have gives a better picture than the plasmas and LCDs...black is, well, black, no "effects". HD is wonderful and standard def is watchable.
But if you want to buy it from me, you'll need to hire your own crane.
I agree. I live in a 3G town with an Edge iPhone. We'll go out to lunch and check movie trailers or whatever on YouTube or Apple's site. I'm always surprised by how fast the videos buffer. Click on it and in 5 seconds we're watching. Web sites vary in speed depending on how much data is on their front page--Google search results pop right up.
I guess 3G would be more like wireless speeds when you can find that signal, and I was ready to wait for the 3G iPhone. I'm glad I didn't -- I'm around wireless all day anyway, and if I'm at a pay-for-net coffee shop, edge is fast enough for reading News of Nerds and Stuff That Matters. I've used the Tilt and can say that any speed tradeoffs are easily outdone by the iPhone interface.
For whatever reason Apple waited for 3G, one of them is likely "it just doesn't matter that much".
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class.
You get to sit down and almost immediately are offered a drink while you wait for the rest of the plane to board. They could duplicate this outside the gate, sure, but then you run the risk of boarding the plane drunk, which is a no-no. Getting drunk on the plane...well, as long as you're not a complete ass, there's not much they can do about it.
Like the bards of olde, OS devs don't code for money. They code for prestige and fame amongst their fellows! Surely this site will decide who is the greatest dev to walk the earth. And that dev will have his own code set in stone and copied for ages to come. That developer will be legend.
Unless, heaven forbid, the voting is more like the U.S.'s political system.
It's a little tricky because talent is only as good as what's seen. From a business perspective, they don't care so much about the getting there, as long as there's something done within deadline (but they want to know you're working to meet that deadline so they count your lines of code).
Nice thing about open source code is that it is reviewed by other developers as it goes. This site might be worthwhile if it has good input from thoughtful people. Like Slashdot people! The shiny...happy kind...! Right?
Lots of people have websites with cool drawings of fast planes. I scanned the material on their site and didn't see anything concerning a flux capacitor, so my cynicism is slightly abated.
I often think that D&D should have a basic character generation book, a world book, and a monster manual. No real rules...no dice. Just stuff for ideas and basic gauging of relative strength. We'd have D&D sessions at recess (yes...in the 6th grade) just walking around the athletic field. That being said, I can see how MMORPGs are going to affect a DM:
DM: You are running down the middle of the street. A team of wild black horses pulling a demonic carriage is heading right for you.
Player: I dive out of the way onto the sidewalk and draw my sword as they pass by!
DM: You can't clear the curb with a jump. Do you want to think of something else?
Player: I spin to the side as the horses dash past and hamstring the lead, hoping to take them all down.
DM: You can't "spin". Do you want to attack the carriage or not?
Player: I attack carriage.
DM: You hit for 10 points of damage. The carriage hits you for 8 points of damage. You have 5 hit points left. Attack again?
I have the direct comparison, because I run windos for gaming. Stuff that takes me seconds to do using two OS X machines ("hey I need this file", "ok, I'll copy it into your inbox" (drag & drop some, done)" is a hassle on windos ("I don't see you on the network.", "Try my IP, it's...", "hm, why does it take so long?", "I think I'm in the wrong workgroup, where do you change that, again?" (hint, it's nowhere even near the network configuration, it's in an entirely different dialog...) ).
Odd, I've got a wireless setup at home (even the desktop uses wireless). Desktop has the USB printer shared. New laptop was printing in 5 seconds through the desktop. Start - Run: \\desktop press OK. Right-click on the printer and choose connect. Print. Same thing works for the shared photos, etc.
I'm not for or against any OS as long as it does what I need it to do and doesn't do what I don't want it to do. These days, it seems the latter is more work than the former.
From geek to "I bought my first computer two years ago", they all agree that OS X is so much better and ask themselves how they could ever put up with the horror that is the windos GUI.
It's probably true that OS X has a better GUI than Windows (Apple has pretty much always beat them there). But Windows took over the market due to many factors, not least of which was inexpensive hardware. Apple tried to compete by allowing Power Computing (or whatever they were called) build their machines instead of just Apple. Hardware prices dropped a bit, but that was about the same time that MacOS was producing 7.5.3 and up...the worst of their operating system line until OS X. So like an inexpensive restaurant with bad food, Apple fell behind and Windows moved forward. At least you could empty the trash and open a folder at the same time...
And now, I'd agree that, even though Apple doesn't seem to have the full features of a Directory-based network like MS or Novell, their OS is finally better than Windows. But their hardware is not twice as much. I can build a screaming machine for under $1000 -- a similar machine would cost me $3000 on Apple hardware.
A properly run Windows box isn't so much worse than an Apple box that I feel like overspending by that much.
From the grandparent comment: It's not a Mac vs Linux thing -- as the poster above states, there are very successful Windows Mobile phones that are doing a much better job at business applications than iPhone. Blackberry and Palm are sort of run-of-the-mill these days and don't offer much more than a normal Internet-ready phone. Exchange integration is the big thing -- everyone wants their calendar anywhere, even if they don't have Internet access.
One thing I'd really like on the iPhone is a grdesktop client and ssh client. Exchange integration will make the iPhone widely accepted by businesses running Exchange, but IT guys need their tools too.
Someone who worked for the music industry noted this (I paraphrase because I don't think I could find the CNET article):
The music industry was so busy thinking of ways to sue people rather than thinking of ways to take advantage of the Internet, that there's a generation of users who will likely never buy online music because they've always gotten it for free. If the RIAA had worked from the start to have a model to sell songs via the internet, people would be more used to buying the songs that way.
If anything locked down is a piece of crap then I guess you're right. But if you're saying it's locked down and is a piece of crap on its own, I think I disagree. Me and probably 95% of the people who have ever touched one.
Opinions aside, I wonder if Apple was so against opening it up because they wanted to reserve the right to change the APIs to fit any updates they planned in the future. With control of the few installed apps, they can make core changes to the OS to extend the abilities of the iPhone, then rewrite the parts of the apps to fit with the new core. If they let anyone make apps, they'd either break them everytime the core changed (see the last 3 updates for examples) or they'd have to stabilize the core (which is probably what they've done now that they're releasing an SDK).
I wonder if this is just prep for iPhone 2...let people go crazy with the first iPhone, and save the lockdown for the greater iPhone 2 soon to arrive.
"Dude...3G is cool and all, but you can't even customize your apps on iPhone2. Check out this gnarly rdesktop client I've made..."
Who's to say it couldn't just be purchased by the same place that runs the "Got Milk?" and "Milk: it does the body good" commercials? Advertising for a healthy product plus tie-ins for centralized shipping (not mail-order but for farmers and trucking companies), information (as noted above), etc.
I am sure that the UI advice that Apple pays for is likely not as good.
Well, Apple's forté is the User Interface. It's certainly not famous for it's "Walmart pricing coupled with tremendous centralized networking capabilities!" So I'm pretty sure it's the UI in all its aesthetic efficiency where Apple gained its following. Follow the shiny OS with shiny computers, and now they're stealing market share!
I don't really know, but I sort of assume that with all the big names and big money in Scientology, that's at times it's less of a crazy cult and more of an exclusive club. While anyone with money can seemingly join, the key seems to be money. I doubt your $15,000 entry fee is only getting you classes in "feeling good". You're likely invited to hobnob at parties with the Cruises and Travoltas of the world, play golf on well-watered lawns, get cheap tickets to UFC, etc etc.
Again, not sure at all if that's true, never heard anything about it. But it seems likely to me. I give it 80/20.;-)
The most recent game I played, The Witcher, has this interface. Take a weapon from your inventory bag, and the slots you can drag and drop it into in your character (hands, for example, but not the feet) light up. I think that's exactly what the patent means. Yahoo doesn't specify (at least in the/. write-up) that it's web-only, so I predict this being nixed by prior art.
And my guess is, the 4 month old Witcher is hardly the first application to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the phrase, "But it's a Sony" sort of covers all the bases.
I daresay that most of people's run-ins with a bartender aren't negative. Having a rateyourcop site is akin to having a rateyourtaxaudit site. Sure your tax audit could go well, but it's a pain in the ass you'd rather not deal with either way, and it never really leaves you with the feeling that, "Gosh, I can't wait to do that again! 5 Stars!"
Yours and another post above have me worried a bit. I'm not saying that police don't have a lot of power, and I'm not saying a percentage don't cross the line, and I'm not saying that crossing the line for a cop isn't worse than crossing the line for a bartender. But to say that public anonymous critiques of particular people are simply "annoying" is incredibly naive.
While I can't say that public non-anonymous critique isn't ripe for retribution, I think you may as well allow cops to respond with the charge given to their critic. You could use a drop-down menu, for crying out loud.
Comment, Anon User: Yah, this boy in blue (Officer Henry McCoy) came up to my door, knocked, then forced his way in when I opened the door. They can't do that. It's unconstitutional.
Response from Officer McCoy: Shots and screams heard from home.
Comment, Anon User: This cop in my neighborhood (Officer Jane Thompson), all she does is drive around and eat donuts. Is there anything else for these people to spend our taxpayer money on?
Response from Officer Thompson: Appropriately assigned as town is near maximum security prison. Patrols agreed upon by town council.
I suppose as long as the officer bothers to respond, and as long as you don't make an Ebay like tally of positive and negative comments....
Sorry, it's just a bad idea. Small town cops will pay the highest price through unfounded rumors and retaliatory comments.
So what? Free speech has nothing to do with what's "fair".
No, but the Internet is a little skewed, don't you think? "Reviews" are often "criticisms", especially when anonymity and charged opinion is concerned. Check your local gaming forum for details. (Hardware and book reviews do a better job, mostly because there are user accounts tied to the reviews...not always. But even then, it's anonymous accounts -- and a rateyourcop site isn't going to have the single-author prolificness to tell whether they're angry or right.)
And then you think of rating your cop. I don't know any cops, though I'm sure my city of 100,000 has at least one. And if I did meet them, I would probably give them an honest rating, because I tend to be sort of level-headed, even on the anonymous Internet (well, since my 2nd year of Everquest back in 99...). But most people have bad experiences with police, even if the police were doing the right thing. "Yah, I was doing 85 miles per hour in a 30, but American Idol was on. The cop laughed at that, but still gave me a ticket. Bastard."
Cops have a sucky enough job as it is and while I see a rating system like this as useful for many things, it'll be used for pettiness most of all. The serious issues cops get called out on have more efficient means of getting handled.
Not a cop. I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
Maybe the way CRTs work sits better with (and covers up the flaws better than) cheap LCDs when used with existing standard-def TV signals
We bought an HD CRT tv a few years ago. 34" widescreen weighing in at 200 lbs. We're always tempted to get a wallmountable plasma or LCD, but we do watch some standard-def TV every once in awhile, and you're right, standard def TV is pretty much unwatchable on the panels (IMHO). And the CRT we have gives a better picture than the plasmas and LCDs...black is, well, black, no "effects". HD is wonderful and standard def is watchable.
But if you want to buy it from me, you'll need to hire your own crane.
I agree. I live in a 3G town with an Edge iPhone. We'll go out to lunch and check movie trailers or whatever on YouTube or Apple's site. I'm always surprised by how fast the videos buffer. Click on it and in 5 seconds we're watching. Web sites vary in speed depending on how much data is on their front page--Google search results pop right up.
I guess 3G would be more like wireless speeds when you can find that signal, and I was ready to wait for the 3G iPhone. I'm glad I didn't -- I'm around wireless all day anyway, and if I'm at a pay-for-net coffee shop, edge is fast enough for reading News of Nerds and Stuff That Matters. I've used the Tilt and can say that any speed tradeoffs are easily outdone by the iPhone interface.
For whatever reason Apple waited for 3G, one of them is likely "it just doesn't matter that much".
(Sent from my iPhone)
I never even understood why you would want to board the plane first in first class.
You get to sit down and almost immediately are offered a drink while you wait for the rest of the plane to board. They could duplicate this outside the gate, sure, but then you run the risk of boarding the plane drunk, which is a no-no. Getting drunk on the plane...well, as long as you're not a complete ass, there's not much they can do about it.
Like the bards of olde, OS devs don't code for money. They code for prestige and fame amongst their fellows! Surely this site will decide who is the greatest dev to walk the earth. And that dev will have his own code set in stone and copied for ages to come. That developer will be legend.
Unless, heaven forbid, the voting is more like the U.S.'s political system.
It's a little tricky because talent is only as good as what's seen. From a business perspective, they don't care so much about the getting there, as long as there's something done within deadline (but they want to know you're working to meet that deadline so they count your lines of code).
Nice thing about open source code is that it is reviewed by other developers as it goes. This site might be worthwhile if it has good input from thoughtful people. Like Slashdot people! The shiny...happy kind...! Right?
He was a businessman, and not one who changed our culture (either as techies or as people in general).
As an adventurer, a go-getter, a risk-taker, he inspires us to live. He's worth mentioning.
SGI bought their assets which I take to mean "stuff". Servers, switches, racks, pocket protectors...
If anything, we would want Iran to have 100% free and uncensored access for all citizens.
After the bombing.
Lots of people have websites with cool drawings of fast planes. I scanned the material on their site and didn't see anything concerning a flux capacitor, so my cynicism is slightly abated.
I often think that D&D should have a basic character generation book, a world book, and a monster manual. No real rules...no dice. Just stuff for ideas and basic gauging of relative strength. We'd have D&D sessions at recess (yes...in the 6th grade) just walking around the athletic field. That being said, I can see how MMORPGs are going to affect a DM:
DM: You are running down the middle of the street. A team of wild black horses pulling a demonic carriage is heading right for you.
Player: I dive out of the way onto the sidewalk and draw my sword as they pass by!
DM: You can't clear the curb with a jump. Do you want to think of something else?
Player: I spin to the side as the horses dash past and hamstring the lead, hoping to take them all down.
DM: You can't "spin". Do you want to attack the carriage or not?
Player: I attack carriage.
DM: You hit for 10 points of damage. The carriage hits you for 8 points of damage. You have 5 hit points left. Attack again?
Player: Sure.
Whenever I see new handheld gyroscopic devices I think of one word:
Holodeck.
Put ads on their knowledgebase site.
I have the direct comparison, because I run windos for gaming. Stuff that takes me seconds to do using two OS X machines ("hey I need this file", "ok, I'll copy it into your inbox" (drag & drop some, done)" is a hassle on windos ("I don't see you on the network.", "Try my IP, it's ...", "hm, why does it take so long?", "I think I'm in the wrong workgroup, where do you change that, again?" (hint, it's nowhere even near the network configuration, it's in an entirely different dialog...) ).
Odd, I've got a wireless setup at home (even the desktop uses wireless). Desktop has the USB printer shared. New laptop was printing in 5 seconds through the desktop. Start - Run: \\desktop press OK. Right-click on the printer and choose connect. Print. Same thing works for the shared photos, etc.
I'm not for or against any OS as long as it does what I need it to do and doesn't do what I don't want it to do. These days, it seems the latter is more work than the former.
From geek to "I bought my first computer two years ago", they all agree that OS X is so much better and ask themselves how they could ever put up with the horror that is the windos GUI.
It's probably true that OS X has a better GUI than Windows (Apple has pretty much always beat them there). But Windows took over the market due to many factors, not least of which was inexpensive hardware. Apple tried to compete by allowing Power Computing (or whatever they were called) build their machines instead of just Apple. Hardware prices dropped a bit, but that was about the same time that MacOS was producing 7.5.3 and up...the worst of their operating system line until OS X. So like an inexpensive restaurant with bad food, Apple fell behind and Windows moved forward. At least you could empty the trash and open a folder at the same time...
And now, I'd agree that, even though Apple doesn't seem to have the full features of a Directory-based network like MS or Novell, their OS is finally better than Windows. But their hardware is not twice as much. I can build a screaming machine for under $1000 -- a similar machine would cost me $3000 on Apple hardware.
A properly run Windows box isn't so much worse than an Apple box that I feel like overspending by that much.
From the grandparent comment: It's not a Mac vs Linux thing -- as the poster above states, there are very successful Windows Mobile phones that are doing a much better job at business applications than iPhone. Blackberry and Palm are sort of run-of-the-mill these days and don't offer much more than a normal Internet-ready phone. Exchange integration is the big thing -- everyone wants their calendar anywhere, even if they don't have Internet access.
One thing I'd really like on the iPhone is a grdesktop client and ssh client. Exchange integration will make the iPhone widely accepted by businesses running Exchange, but IT guys need their tools too.
Someone who worked for the music industry noted this (I paraphrase because I don't think I could find the CNET article):
The music industry was so busy thinking of ways to sue people rather than thinking of ways to take advantage of the Internet, that there's a generation of users who will likely never buy online music because they've always gotten it for free. If the RIAA had worked from the start to have a model to sell songs via the internet, people would be more used to buying the songs that way.
the iphone is a locked down piece of crap.
If anything locked down is a piece of crap then I guess you're right. But if you're saying it's locked down and is a piece of crap on its own, I think I disagree. Me and probably 95% of the people who have ever touched one.
Opinions aside, I wonder if Apple was so against opening it up because they wanted to reserve the right to change the APIs to fit any updates they planned in the future. With control of the few installed apps, they can make core changes to the OS to extend the abilities of the iPhone, then rewrite the parts of the apps to fit with the new core. If they let anyone make apps, they'd either break them everytime the core changed (see the last 3 updates for examples) or they'd have to stabilize the core (which is probably what they've done now that they're releasing an SDK).
I wonder if this is just prep for iPhone 2...let people go crazy with the first iPhone, and save the lockdown for the greater iPhone 2 soon to arrive.
"Dude...3G is cool and all, but you can't even customize your apps on iPhone2. Check out this gnarly rdesktop client I've made..."
You own milk.com, don't you?
Who's to say it couldn't just be purchased by the same place that runs the "Got Milk?" and "Milk: it does the body good" commercials? Advertising for a healthy product plus tie-ins for centralized shipping (not mail-order but for farmers and trucking companies), information (as noted above), etc.
I am sure that the UI advice that Apple pays for is likely not as good.
Well, Apple's forté is the User Interface. It's certainly not famous for it's "Walmart pricing coupled with tremendous centralized networking capabilities!" So I'm pretty sure it's the UI in all its aesthetic efficiency where Apple gained its following. Follow the shiny OS with shiny computers, and now they're stealing market share!
I don't really know, but I sort of assume that with all the big names and big money in Scientology, that's at times it's less of a crazy cult and more of an exclusive club. While anyone with money can seemingly join, the key seems to be money. I doubt your $15,000 entry fee is only getting you classes in "feeling good". You're likely invited to hobnob at parties with the Cruises and Travoltas of the world, play golf on well-watered lawns, get cheap tickets to UFC, etc etc.
;-)
Again, not sure at all if that's true, never heard anything about it. But it seems likely to me. I give it 80/20.
The most recent game I played, The Witcher, has this interface. Take a weapon from your inventory bag, and the slots you can drag and drop it into in your character (hands, for example, but not the feet) light up. I think that's exactly what the patent means. Yahoo doesn't specify (at least in the /. write-up) that it's web-only, so I predict this being nixed by prior art.
And my guess is, the 4 month old Witcher is hardly the first application to do this.