As an amateur photographer, lens flare drives me insane sometimes. And people want to actually ADD IT IN to existing photos??
Lens flare is evil. It detracts from the shot. The fact that some idiots want to add it into already perfect photos is an insult to photographers who try so hard to avoid it.
This is what bothers me about corporate greed. People do things that make their company BILLIONS of dollars, and don't get compensated. You'd think that if someone got a few million for every invention that makes a company a few billion, they'd be that much more motivated to come up with amazing new things.
I have a friend who managed to catch an accounting error that saved the company millions of dollars. He didn't even get a BONUS that year. If I were the CEO and I found out an employee saved us millions, I'd at least drop him a $50,000 bonus check or something, since the money wouldn't be there at all if he hadn't caught it.
Don't corporate managers see the need to reward employees for their hard work?
I got alone fine without a cel phone as an ADULT. In fact, the only reason I got one was because a friend was upgrading his phone, and gave me his old one for the hell of it, and I continued paying the MetroPCS (pay for a month in advance) bill. I ended up liking it so I got my own account. MetroPCS is spiffy because it's unlimited EVERYTHING for a flat rate every month. I don't know why other carriers don't do that.
I'm not sure why kids need celphones. I never needed one and kept in touch with friends just fine.
I'm still amazed how greedy the government is sometimes... Threatening to freeze your assets and causing all that headache? For what, maybe at most a few $thousand? Which is like a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money the government deals with on a daily basis?
Sometimes I think the government spends more than $50 trying to get you to pay that extra $50 they think you owe them. It just doesn't make sense...
The day I have to ask permission to view a file on my own computer is the day I give up computing and go into some other field like zoology.
There's a certain "principle of the thing" argument for having full control over hardware you own. If you don't own it, for instance, you rent it from the cable company (a digital cable box), that's different. But if it's yours, YOU should be the lord of the castle.
Doesn't matter if it's open source, someone else controls the actual system with all the content.
People have asked me "Why don't you move your blog (http://zorin.org/) to LiveJournal? You'll get more traffic?
More traffic is not worth loss of control. It's on MY server and I keep my own backups. There's no easy way to back up a Livejournal. If it's bought by a company that changes policies in a way I don't like, I'm screwed!
256MB of RAM is NOT ENOUGH to run OSX well. It's odd that Apple, who designed OSX, doesn't notice this and continues to sell systems which start at 256MB of RAM.
The starting RAM size should be 512, with room for expansion. One of the more annoying things they do is offer Powerbooks with 512, but with both slots full (256 in each), so expansion ability is stifled. It actually costs more to get the 512MB in ONE slot.
This is one of the few things that still pisses me off about Apple. The other thing is iBooks and iMacs needing a hack to do desktop spanning across two displays, but that's another rant. }:)
I knew someone who had this problem. I frequent TinyMUCKs, which are online text-based environments much like MUDs, only more socially oriented. TinyMUCK has a programming language called MUF (Multi-User Forth), and lots of people write MUF programs to do various silly things in the system.
A while back there was a particular developer; let's just call her M, who would go utterly BALLISTIC if anyone tried to port her code from one TinyMUCK system to another. Even though she wasn't being paid for the work, she had this obsessive requirement that she be on the system and in control of the software at all times.
Her eventually got the admins of various TinyMUCKs pissed off at her, and they wrote clones of her various programs, removing her code. She has since disappeared from the various TinyMUCKs.
Funny how life works, eh?
If you want to see an example of her paranoia, go to http://zorin.org/txt/quotes.txt and search for the string "huge warning". She must work for Microsoft, I swear. }:)
Perhaps the MySQL or Postgres developers won't do it, but who says a third party company can't set up and advertise MySQL/Postgres support services, and have a team of programmers who familiarize themselves with the code and fix problems for clients?
The best thing is these fixes can then be contributed to the official MySQL or Postgres trees. Company makes money, Customer gets problem solved, MySQL/postgres gets a bugfix. Everyone is happy!
Multicast is the SOLUTION to delivering content efficiently over the Internet. The problem is, no one seems to know how to implement it properly (outside educational networks, it seems), and no one seems to WANT to implement it properly.
Just think, if multicast were available all across the net, ANYONE would broadcast a stream to millions of listeners without requiring ridiculous amounts of bandwidth. Each link carrying the stream would only have to carry it ONCE. Routers along the way send the stream out multiple interfaces, so the wasteful duplication of content is unnecessary.
Multicast, implemented properly across the Internet, would cause a revolution in streaming content delivery. But no one seems to want to implement it.
I was always annoyed at torrent sites that need accounts for access.
Torrents work best when LOTS of people are downloading the same thing at once. If you restrict people by telling them to log in and/or register, less folks will use the torrent and it'll go slower.
The few times I've had to log in to download something, it went a lot slower than the various anonymous torrent sites out there. There just weren't enough people in the swarm.
If being pretty is so important to these people, they should run MacOS X. All the power and security of a UNIX system, but with a really nice looking UI.
Just provide an address where people can email you if the distorted text thing is unusable for them. Very few users can't use that system, and you can just create accounts of those who can't manually.
I'm not even a smoker, and don't like cigarette smoke, and I agree with you. I agree that smoking shouldn't be allowed inside public buildings, because this unnecessarily exposes non-smokers to the smoke, but outdoors?
I'm amazed at how many people whine and complain about smokers when it's outdoors in a well-ventilated area. The college campus I work at has gone as far as posting "NO SMOKING" signs in some OUTDOOR areas!
Come on; if you're outdoors, you should be able to smoke. Occasional whiffs of second hand smoke are not going to kill you! Hell, the smokers inhale it directly, all the time, and a lot of them live to ripe old ages. Get a grip.
Can a NDA that forbids the disclosure of illegal practices possibly be binding?
What are they going to do, sue you becaues you exposed their illegal business practices? In a sense, it'd probably be against the law NOT to report them, since you are witness to a crime and could be considered an accomplice if you don't...
If only we could learn how the human brain can pick out a particular speaker in a cacophany of noise and understand what he is saying.
Funny that we've been able to develop computers to do such amazing things, but we still can't do things our brain does constantly, like deal with high signal-to-noise ratios...
-Z
Re:What I would like to say to a PalmSource employ
on
Palm OS To Run On Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I bet the Nintendo DS is sold at a loss, and Nintendo makes the profits from games. Thus, they'd probably deny the license to product such an application, because people would buy DS's just to be PDA's and not for games, costing them money.
Either that or they'd sell the PDA cart at an outrageous price to make up the loss.
I love how they say "Well we have to pay for consultants/sysadmins/etc. if we run Linux!" and use that as an excuse to run it.
Hellooooo, the company's already paying for an IT staff; why not just let them learn Linux? They'll then be even more flexible, capable of administrating both Windows and Linux, and at the least you may have to give them a small pay increase for their troubles.
This especially applies to big companies with dedicated IT staff; what's wrong with letting them train to administer Linux systems? You don't need to put an ad out for a new sysadmin; in fact if one of your admins is suggesting Linux, he probably already has some knowledge and can administrate the systems from the get-go.
I don't generally mind ads one bit. I only mind ANNOYING ads.
I've clicked on banner ads a few times, name when they advertised something interesting. But I've had to disable pop-up ads and flash ads (using flash click-to-view) because pop-ups are annoying and flash ads are sometimes poorly written and suck down all available CPU, slowing down the system.
If advertisers would stop insisting on ANNOYING me, I'd dislike them a lot less. Magazine ads don't animate and attempt to distract and annoy you and are successful; so web site ads can follow this model too.
I hate the new proportional font they adopted for messages. Usenet is meant to be looked at in a fixed-width font! Proportional fonts totally screw up lovingly crafted sigs, ascii art, and so on.
Who was the nutcase at Google that thought Groups needed a facelift? It was FINE AS IT WAS. I don't know what they're smoking over there.
I'm going to use the Canadian Google Groups (google.ca) in defiance for now, but I bet it will go away soon as well.
Arrrgh. Companies can't just leave a good thing alone.
Cheap ECC DRAM may generate ECC errors now and then, but since they are correctable, you will experience much better reliability over cheap non-ECC DRAM.
ECC only costs a tiny bit more and you get a much less error-prone system. Some systems can even alert you to when ECC errors happen, so if you have a notoriously bad stick, you'll know about it harmlessly, instead of through random unexplainable system crashes.
I can't believe systems are still made without ECC today, when the incremental cost is so low.
Slashdot Mirror
As an amateur photographer, lens flare drives me insane sometimes. And people want to actually ADD IT IN to existing photos??
Lens flare is evil. It detracts from the shot. The fact that some idiots want to add it into already perfect photos is an insult to photographers who try so hard to avoid it.
-Z
This is what bothers me about corporate greed. People do things that make their company BILLIONS of dollars, and don't get compensated. You'd think that if someone got a few million for every invention that makes a company a few billion, they'd be that much more motivated to come up with amazing new things.
I have a friend who managed to catch an accounting error that saved the company millions of dollars. He didn't even get a BONUS that year. If I were the CEO and I found out an employee saved us millions, I'd at least drop him a $50,000 bonus check or something, since the money wouldn't be there at all if he hadn't caught it.
Don't corporate managers see the need to reward employees for their hard work?
-Z
I got alone fine without a cel phone as an ADULT. In fact, the only reason I got one was because a friend was upgrading his phone, and gave me his old one for the hell of it, and I continued paying the MetroPCS (pay for a month in advance) bill. I ended up liking it so I got my own account. MetroPCS is spiffy because it's unlimited EVERYTHING for a flat rate every month. I don't know why other carriers don't do that.
I'm not sure why kids need celphones. I never needed one and kept in touch with friends just fine.
-Z
I'm still amazed how greedy the government is sometimes... Threatening to freeze your assets and causing all that headache? For what, maybe at most a few $thousand? Which is like a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money the government deals with on a daily basis?
Sometimes I think the government spends more than $50 trying to get you to pay that extra $50 they think you owe them. It just doesn't make sense...
-Z
This is my primary argument against DRM.
The day I have to ask permission to view a file on my own computer is the day I give up computing and go into some other field like zoology.
There's a certain "principle of the thing" argument for having full control over hardware you own. If you don't own it, for instance, you rent it from the cable company (a digital cable box), that's different. But if it's yours, YOU should be the lord of the castle.
-Z
The easiest fix for the third one is:
.mozilla .thunderbird .firefox
cd
chmod 700
I am surprised Mozilla software doesn't set profiles non-world readable by default...
-Z
Doesn't matter if it's open source, someone else controls the actual system with all the content.
People have asked me "Why don't you move your blog (http://zorin.org/) to LiveJournal? You'll get more traffic?
More traffic is not worth loss of control. It's on MY server and I keep my own backups. There's no easy way to back up a Livejournal. If it's bought by a company that changes policies in a way I don't like, I'm screwed!
-Z
256MB of RAM is NOT ENOUGH to run OSX well. It's odd that Apple, who designed OSX, doesn't notice this and continues to sell systems which start at 256MB of RAM.
The starting RAM size should be 512, with room for expansion. One of the more annoying things they do is offer Powerbooks with 512, but with both slots full (256 in each), so expansion ability is stifled. It actually costs more to get the 512MB in ONE slot.
This is one of the few things that still pisses me off about Apple. The other thing is iBooks and iMacs needing a hack to do desktop spanning across two displays, but that's another rant. }:)
-Z
I suppose one advantage to this method is utter speed. Compiled code blows the socks off interpreted code in almost all situations.
Unfortunately, like you said, it's a major pain in the ass to maintain...
-Z
I knew someone who had this problem. I frequent TinyMUCKs, which are online text-based environments much like MUDs, only more socially oriented. TinyMUCK has a programming language called MUF (Multi-User Forth), and lots of people write MUF programs to do various silly things in the system.
A while back there was a particular developer; let's just call her M, who would go utterly BALLISTIC if anyone tried to port her code from one TinyMUCK system to another. Even though she wasn't being paid for the work, she had this obsessive requirement that she be on the system and in control of the software at all times.
Her eventually got the admins of various TinyMUCKs pissed off at her, and they wrote clones of her various programs, removing her code. She has since disappeared from the various TinyMUCKs.
Funny how life works, eh?
If you want to see an example of her paranoia, go to http://zorin.org/txt/quotes.txt and search for the string "huge warning". She must work for Microsoft, I swear. }:)
-Z
Perhaps the MySQL or Postgres developers won't do it, but who says a third party company can't set up and advertise MySQL/Postgres support services, and have a team of programmers who familiarize themselves with the code and fix problems for clients?
The best thing is these fixes can then be contributed to the official MySQL or Postgres trees. Company makes money, Customer gets problem solved, MySQL/postgres gets a bugfix. Everyone is happy!
-Z
Multicast is the SOLUTION to delivering content efficiently over the Internet. The problem is, no one seems to know how to implement it properly (outside educational networks, it seems), and no one seems to WANT to implement it properly.
Just think, if multicast were available all across the net, ANYONE would broadcast a stream to millions of listeners without requiring ridiculous amounts of bandwidth. Each link carrying the stream would only have to carry it ONCE. Routers along the way send the stream out multiple interfaces, so the wasteful duplication of content is unnecessary.
Multicast, implemented properly across the Internet, would cause a revolution in streaming content delivery. But no one seems to want to implement it.
Bummer.
-Z
I was always annoyed at torrent sites that need accounts for access.
Torrents work best when LOTS of people are downloading the same thing at once. If you restrict people by telling them to log in and/or register, less folks will use the torrent and it'll go slower.
The few times I've had to log in to download something, it went a lot slower than the various anonymous torrent sites out there. There just weren't enough people in the swarm.
-Z
If being pretty is so important to these people, they should run MacOS X. All the power and security of a UNIX system, but with a really nice looking UI.
-Z
Just provide an address where people can email you if the distorted text thing is unusable for them. Very few users can't use that system, and you can just create accounts of those who can't manually.
I'm not even a smoker, and don't like cigarette smoke, and I agree with you. I agree that smoking shouldn't be allowed inside public buildings, because this unnecessarily exposes non-smokers to the smoke, but outdoors?
I'm amazed at how many people whine and complain about smokers when it's outdoors in a well-ventilated area. The college campus I work at has gone as far as posting "NO SMOKING" signs in some OUTDOOR areas!
Come on; if you're outdoors, you should be able to smoke. Occasional whiffs of second hand smoke are not going to kill you! Hell, the smokers inhale it directly, all the time, and a lot of them live to ripe old ages. Get a grip.
-Z
Uhhh...
Can a NDA that forbids the disclosure of illegal practices possibly be binding?
What are they going to do, sue you becaues you exposed their illegal business practices? In a sense, it'd probably be against the law NOT to report them, since you are witness to a crime and could be considered an accomplice if you don't...
-Z
I've always wondered.. why DOES muscle destroy itself when it's not used much?
-Z
If only we could learn how the human brain can pick out a particular speaker in a cacophany of noise and understand what he is saying.
Funny that we've been able to develop computers to do such amazing things, but we still can't do things our brain does constantly, like deal with high signal-to-noise ratios...
-Z
I bet the Nintendo DS is sold at a loss, and Nintendo makes the profits from games. Thus, they'd probably deny the license to product such an application, because people would buy DS's just to be PDA's and not for games, costing them money.
Either that or they'd sell the PDA cart at an outrageous price to make up the loss.
-Z
I love how they say "Well we have to pay for consultants/sysadmins/etc. if we run Linux!" and use that as an excuse to run it.
Hellooooo, the company's already paying for an IT staff; why not just let them learn Linux? They'll then be even more flexible, capable of administrating both Windows and Linux, and at the least you may have to give them a small pay increase for their troubles.
This especially applies to big companies with dedicated IT staff; what's wrong with letting them train to administer Linux systems? You don't need to put an ad out for a new sysadmin; in fact if one of your admins is suggesting Linux, he probably already has some knowledge and can administrate the systems from the get-go.
-Z
I don't generally mind ads one bit. I only mind ANNOYING ads.
I've clicked on banner ads a few times, name when they advertised something interesting. But I've had to disable pop-up ads and flash ads (using flash click-to-view) because pop-ups are annoying and flash ads are sometimes poorly written and suck down all available CPU, slowing down the system.
If advertisers would stop insisting on ANNOYING me, I'd dislike them a lot less. Magazine ads don't animate and attempt to distract and annoy you and are successful; so web site ads can follow this model too.
-Z
I suppose it's a subjective thing, then. In that case, Google Groups should have an option that the user can set; proportional or fixed-width fonts.
-Z
I hate the new proportional font they adopted for messages. Usenet is meant to be looked at in a fixed-width font! Proportional fonts totally screw up lovingly crafted sigs, ascii art, and so on.
Who was the nutcase at Google that thought Groups needed a facelift? It was FINE AS IT WAS. I don't know what they're smoking over there.
I'm going to use the Canadian Google Groups (google.ca) in defiance for now, but I bet it will go away soon as well.
Arrrgh. Companies can't just leave a good thing alone.
-Z
Cheap ECC DRAM may generate ECC errors now and then, but since they are correctable, you will experience much better reliability over cheap non-ECC DRAM.
ECC only costs a tiny bit more and you get a much less error-prone system. Some systems can even alert you to when ECC errors happen, so if you have a notoriously bad stick, you'll know about it harmlessly, instead of through random unexplainable system crashes.
I can't believe systems are still made without ECC today, when the incremental cost is so low.
-Z