Of course Adobe won't release a Flash2HTML5 converter.
If Flash ever becomes irrelevant as a web tool, they might setup their flash dev environment to export to HTML5. No reason to not to attempt to become the default HTML5 tool for people to buy.
Great! I'll just get the most up to date and secure version by direct downloading Flash for my iPhone. No? Hmm... I'll just download Firefox and Thunderbird on the iPhone from Mozilla and fire off an angry e-mail. That's banned too?
The design consistency and the marketing-speak, they do not align.
While I agree that SSD has a long way to go, I've been going through laptop HDD's at a rate of about one per year. Subway computing, typing while running between meetings, etc... any sort of movement computing is going to be really hard on spinning disks. And you always have that great "twist laptop to drive head into platter" problem, that modern drives are better about, but not perfect.
Also, as HDD speed seems to have become the bottleneck in computing, SSD performance really unclogs that ability. Things are just *SO* much faster without a disk. Maybe that will be enough to entice people over.
Basically, unencrypted wifi connections are like running around shouting your secrets to the world. If you care about privacy, it's up to you to encrypt your connection from end-to-end.
Google happened to listen in on this stuff due to a configuration change, but without malicious intent. Now think of how trivial it would be for your neighbor's kid to listen in on your communication, skim your login information, and mess up your life.
The internet is (mostly) routed off of *nix boxes. Someone then created wireless routing. Wireless routing through Linux is pretty much a no-brainer at that point. Not because it's obvious, but because that's basically how you would do it. Wireless routing on Linux is about as revolutionary as someone invents the house made of wood, then someone patents the house made of wood built with a hammer.
Supposedly, the "investor" was given his shares because of a $400,000 debt that the owners could not pay back. Further, the site hasn't been developed because this shareholder has been fighting with the board about control over the company. So I'm guessing he would like to buy up the majority of the stock, if it were possible. Though I doubt he could dump his shares for the 400k they cost him.
Of course Bible.com is a bad business idea to begin with. Everyone has a bible, and there are basically billions of searchable bibles online. Religion tends to be face-to-face, or at least televised. Money in religion comes from donations, not advertising. And, of course, a domain name is not a business idea, it is a business asset. Without a real idea, there isn't a real business.
Sorry I don't have the science on me... I looked into this a while back. I believe the overcharge and heat both lead to the same basic chemical oxidation. Fully charging (and especially overcharging) is a huge cause of internal heat. And while there doesn't seem to be anything specific thing you can do to save batteries, there are a lot of things you can do to kill batteries.
And as to your suggestion, there are battery systems that wait for a little while then do full charge / discharge cycles. They tend not to be on laptops, as people wouldn't want to grab their laptop in the middle of a full discharge.
Things that will kill your battery:
1. Charging it topped off at 100%. 2. Fully bottoming it out at 0%. 3. Not cycling it at all. 4. Heating it too much. 5* Cooling it too much. * Cooling is actually beneficial in the long term. But in the short term, while it is cold, it will reduce or kill it's output.
Microsoft started the Xbox completely locked down, just like the iOS devices. Xbox will never be a viable desktop. That doesn't even make sense. The closest parallel is iTV, which sells for $100, is locked down, and is also really not a desktop.
Apple's biggest problem with Mac adoption (besides everyone running Windows on their Macs), is the lack of software. Attempting to lock down the platform would decimate the software availability. Further, you can't develop software on a locked platform, which would push their developers onto Windows systems.
They can't even DRM a song. Realistically, DRM'ing an entire operating system, which already exists and is up and running, is much, much harder.
Also, eventually Apple will shift to iOS. At that point, the only question of lock down is "how and to what degree" since the answer is inevitably "yes."
Sure, if they want to break compatibility with basically every application currently on the Mac, and have their spat with Adobe finally push Adobe fully over to Windows. Considering the architecture of OSX, they will probably be breaking large chunks of that too. Bye bye flash, java, javascript, and pretty much the web.
A real executable signature and security system is not something you can just layer on top of a running system after the fact without insane re-engineering and major headaches. Oh, and the kinds of hardware lockdown that Apple hasn't been very successful with on the desktop front.
You keep saying how people on here will cringe. I'm curious why you keep saying that. The major alternative is to go to a store and buy a copy of something. That copy will invariably be out of date, and will require a 100MB download. It will have the retail markup. It will validate immediately to a single-use keycode, preventing usage across machines. When you go to re-install it, the disk will have been lost.
Really, the smart alternative is to find FOSS software that does what you want, and the smart other alternative is just free, closed software. But compared to retail channels and surfing online endlessly looking for software, a central repository is nice for pretty much anyone.
While it may be a warning shot, Steam does still have distinct advantages:
1. Little to no censorship. I'm trying to imagine Left 4 Dead 2 on the app store, and I just can't see it. 2. Login anywhere, download anywhere. With a username and password on Steam, you can get at all of your games. 3. Friends / Teams. Teams are especially important for online games. 4. PC compatibility. Write once for Steam on the PC, utilize for Steam on the Mac. 5. PC cross purchase. Buy once for the Mac, have it for the PC. Just in case.
How much do you think currently goes to hosting, credit card processing, chargebacks, etc? 70% of end-consumer cost is pretty reasonable for an overall take. If you're going boxed, I'd be surprised if you got %20 out of the deal. Older shareware processing companies did a 50/50 split. I don't know what is standard in shareware now, but 70/30 seems reasonable. And if you're thinking of doing individual credit card transactions on unit sales of $2 each, forget about it. The card fees will eat you alive.
And it will probably be a very, very long time before the Mac is locked down that much. They need independent applications, flash, and all of the rest in order to work as a system. Unless they re-write OSX from the ground up, there can't be that level of system protection. Of course, they'd need Adobe and their other major vendors to agree to ceeding that much power too, and we all know how likely that is to happen.
I don't know. I really hope a centralized store where anyone can sell anything will usher in a second golden era of Mac shareware. Where the lack of $100 retail applications will be balanced out by tons of amazing $5 tools. Where independent stuff like CopyWrite can thrive. Real retail applications aren't thriving on the Mac anyway, and a thriving small tools market was what kept us mac users sane back in the OS7 days.
Step 1: Have it sell fabrication services online. Step 2: Take the money earned, and invest in more lego bricks. Step 3: Have it build more of itself. Step 4: Teach it to hate.
I just found a power setting on my new Ideapad that keeps the maximum charge at %80. You lose 1/5th of the runtime in the short term, but you should be able to get a much longer total runtime over time out of it, especially if you keep it plugged in. Thank you, Lenovo.
Which brings to my next point: DON"T KEEP YOUR LAPTOP PLUGGED IN. Charge it, then unplug. The battery will last much longer if you continually cycle it, rather than if you try to keep it topped off all of the time. I've toasted batteries in 6 months by keeping them plugged in for too long. Use them like batteries, or they will die.
One nice thing about DOSBox is that it seems to emulate as much as possible in software. That makes it run DOS based games more solidly and consistently than its counterparts that rely upon hardware. If a DOS title won't run natively under Windows 7, and won't run in compatibility mode, it will probably run under DOSBox.
Software emulation, theoretically, means it won't break.
Defamation laws vary by country quite a bit, so I can only comment from the perspective of someone from California. But in a place where people openly post cartoons of our president dressed as Hitler, standards of defamation seem to be pretty solidly on the open-dialog side.
Adam Josephs quickly made himself a symbol of the tiny everyday police abuses that build deep resentment in the community. This was not something someone did to him: he did it to himself. It may not be as potent a symbol as the shooting of an unarmed, complying suspect by Oakland officer Johannes Mehserle (and the subsequent attempted coverup). But it nonetheless resonates with people who have had that bad run in with an officer who abused his power and managed to turn an innocuous situation into a terrible one. If you watch the videos above, the officer is parodied arresting a woman for dancing in the street, and other things which all seem on similar lines as arresting a woman for blowing bubbles.
And even suing the makers of the parody would make sense, albeit a messed up sense that should be thrown out of court immediately. But suing the commenters? And then YouTube?
On a side note, I've had my fair share of interactions with the police. And every time they were courteous and professional, even when I was at the other end of their gun. But police abuses do happen, and have happened to people I care very much about. People like Adam Josephs need to be singled out as unacceptable outliers. Last week, I was chatting with an officer about how they were telling stories about bad situations they were in, and were looking for solutions to de-escalate the situations with minimal fuss. One told the story of how he was surrounded as he attempted to leave a bar, and someone blocked his way out with thinly veiled threats to kill him. The officer, being outnumbered, offered to buy his assailant a diet coke. This threw the assailant so much, they sat down, had a drink, chatted a bit, and the officer walked out of there alive.
In the case of a bubble-blowing protester, even a simple "Hey, that's kind of annoying. Would you blow that somewhere else?" would have ended the situation right there. It takes a special kind of talent to start with a bubble-blowing peacenick and elevate it into an arrest. That's what these videos are satirizing, and they do so in a well targeted, irreverent, silly fashion.
The initial article says that "the dream" of desktop Linux is dead. Not that desktop Linux itself is dead.
And I have to agree. After ten years of watching the thing flounder, the actual grandma usability of desktop Linux is still beyond miserable. Ubuntu was a great step forward, but it basically went from Godawful to just awful. While Windows has the problem of 6 different redundant interfaces to do everything, Ubuntu and desktop Linux has the problem of 6 different configuration centers each doing something similar but different. And yes, you still have to drop to editing config files. Even if it did manage to be easier to use and more stable than Windows, it still has to be significantly better or different to get over the overhead of switching. That significant difference, aside from server performance and command-line systems, never arose.
And we are seeing the next generation of desktop challengers emerge. Windows is still in it, as is OSX. But iOS and Android are coming out as strong competitors in the not-quite-a-phone-not-quite-a-laptop area, and will probably drift into full laptops soon. Chrome may actually be a competitor as well, or at least for niche applications.
So let desktop Linux be what desktop Linux is: a handy environment to get stuff done on your servers, a great way to keep old computers useful, and the best rescue / hacking tools you can find. But don't expect it to take over the world. If that happens, it's not going to happen because people were trying to get it to take over the world. That will happen while people are busy doing other things.
Amusingly enough, I had to switch spreadsheets to Calc from Excel because of interface scripting issues in Excel. Using Autohotkeys to script simple tasks is by and large easy, but Excel fails to queue up UI-level commands properly. Hence, "Down Down Down" sometimes is interpreted as "Down Down" or just "Down." Calc, on the other hand always interprets this as 3-downs each and every time.
While Excel's internal scripting seems fine, sometimes you just need to write a throwaway script that pulls from disparate data sources, formats it separately, calculates through a spreadsheet, and filters the results into another random application. For that, Calc was just more solid.
It's not just on the drill, but Netflix has an Extreme Engineering instant streaming episode on the Swiss Mega Tunnel. They spend a lot of time on the drill, operations, repairs, etc.
While I agree that truckers are by and large a far more responsible bunch than we give them credit for (and than they used to be), they also seem to be early adopters of new technologies. GPS, for example. If there were anywhere that would start with these, I could see truck driver employers mandating their usage by their drivers. That doesn't seem any more intrusive than some of the other things truckers put up with, especially if the technology actually works as advertised. If the technology matures, you might see GM installing friendly "wakeup calls" in the dash as a "service" to their drivers.
While I agree that full voiceover should imply care about plot and user experience, sometimes all it does is bake bad writing into the build. Text, at least, gives your writer the flexibility to polish crummy dialog during periods where the rest of the company is bug hunting.
I'd throw in there "Ship it when it's fun." External of any other milestones, once you've hit that point where it's actually an enjoyable game, give yourself 4 weeks of polish and bug hunting and throw it in a box. Don't bother finishing the extra 6 minigames and the Alternate Reality Game that were on your schedule if the game is already fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Adobe won't release a Flash2HTML5 converter.
If Flash ever becomes irrelevant as a web tool, they might setup their flash dev environment to export to HTML5. No reason to not to attempt to become the default HTML5 tool for people to buy.
Great! I'll just get the most up to date and secure version by direct downloading Flash for my iPhone. No? Hmm... I'll just download Firefox and Thunderbird on the iPhone from Mozilla and fire off an angry e-mail. That's banned too?
The design consistency and the marketing-speak, they do not align.
While I agree that SSD has a long way to go, I've been going through laptop HDD's at a rate of about one per year. Subway computing, typing while running between meetings, etc... any sort of movement computing is going to be really hard on spinning disks. And you always have that great "twist laptop to drive head into platter" problem, that modern drives are better about, but not perfect.
Also, as HDD speed seems to have become the bottleneck in computing, SSD performance really unclogs that ability. Things are just *SO* much faster without a disk. Maybe that will be enough to entice people over.
Basically, unencrypted wifi connections are like running around shouting your secrets to the world. If you care about privacy, it's up to you to encrypt your connection from end-to-end.
Google happened to listen in on this stuff due to a configuration change, but without malicious intent. Now think of how trivial it would be for your neighbor's kid to listen in on your communication, skim your login information, and mess up your life.
Don't attack Google. Educate wifi owners.
The internet is (mostly) routed off of *nix boxes. Someone then created wireless routing. Wireless routing through Linux is pretty much a no-brainer at that point. Not because it's obvious, but because that's basically how you would do it. Wireless routing on Linux is about as revolutionary as someone invents the house made of wood, then someone patents the house made of wood built with a hammer.
Supposedly, the "investor" was given his shares because of a $400,000 debt that the owners could not pay back. Further, the site hasn't been developed because this shareholder has been fighting with the board about control over the company. So I'm guessing he would like to buy up the majority of the stock, if it were possible. Though I doubt he could dump his shares for the 400k they cost him.
Of course Bible.com is a bad business idea to begin with. Everyone has a bible, and there are basically billions of searchable bibles online. Religion tends to be face-to-face, or at least televised. Money in religion comes from donations, not advertising. And, of course, a domain name is not a business idea, it is a business asset. Without a real idea, there isn't a real business.
Sorry I don't have the science on me... I looked into this a while back. I believe the overcharge and heat both lead to the same basic chemical oxidation. Fully charging (and especially overcharging) is a huge cause of internal heat. And while there doesn't seem to be anything specific thing you can do to save batteries, there are a lot of things you can do to kill batteries.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
And as to your suggestion, there are battery systems that wait for a little while then do full charge / discharge cycles. They tend not to be on laptops, as people wouldn't want to grab their laptop in the middle of a full discharge.
Things that will kill your battery:
1. Charging it topped off at 100%.
2. Fully bottoming it out at 0%.
3. Not cycling it at all.
4. Heating it too much.
5* Cooling it too much.
* Cooling is actually beneficial in the long term. But in the short term, while it is cold, it will reduce or kill it's output.
Microsoft started the Xbox completely locked down, just like the iOS devices. Xbox will never be a viable desktop. That doesn't even make sense. The closest parallel is iTV, which sells for $100, is locked down, and is also really not a desktop.
Apple's biggest problem with Mac adoption (besides everyone running Windows on their Macs), is the lack of software. Attempting to lock down the platform would decimate the software availability. Further, you can't develop software on a locked platform, which would push their developers onto Windows systems.
They can't even DRM a song. Realistically, DRM'ing an entire operating system, which already exists and is up and running, is much, much harder.
New MacBook Air... It's like the old MacBook Air, but Air-eier.
Also, eventually Apple will shift to iOS. At that point, the only question of lock down is "how and to what degree" since the answer is inevitably "yes."
Sure, if they want to break compatibility with basically every application currently on the Mac, and have their spat with Adobe finally push Adobe fully over to Windows. Considering the architecture of OSX, they will probably be breaking large chunks of that too. Bye bye flash, java, javascript, and pretty much the web.
A real executable signature and security system is not something you can just layer on top of a running system after the fact without insane re-engineering and major headaches. Oh, and the kinds of hardware lockdown that Apple hasn't been very successful with on the desktop front.
You keep saying how people on here will cringe. I'm curious why you keep saying that. The major alternative is to go to a store and buy a copy of something. That copy will invariably be out of date, and will require a 100MB download. It will have the retail markup. It will validate immediately to a single-use keycode, preventing usage across machines. When you go to re-install it, the disk will have been lost.
Really, the smart alternative is to find FOSS software that does what you want, and the smart other alternative is just free, closed software. But compared to retail channels and surfing online endlessly looking for software, a central repository is nice for pretty much anyone.
While it may be a warning shot, Steam does still have distinct advantages:
1. Little to no censorship. I'm trying to imagine Left 4 Dead 2 on the app store, and I just can't see it.
2. Login anywhere, download anywhere. With a username and password on Steam, you can get at all of your games.
3. Friends / Teams. Teams are especially important for online games.
4. PC compatibility. Write once for Steam on the PC, utilize for Steam on the Mac.
5. PC cross purchase. Buy once for the Mac, have it for the PC. Just in case.
It's not perfect, but it definitely helps them.
How much do you think currently goes to hosting, credit card processing, chargebacks, etc? 70% of end-consumer cost is pretty reasonable for an overall take. If you're going boxed, I'd be surprised if you got %20 out of the deal. Older shareware processing companies did a 50/50 split. I don't know what is standard in shareware now, but 70/30 seems reasonable. And if you're thinking of doing individual credit card transactions on unit sales of $2 each, forget about it. The card fees will eat you alive.
And it will probably be a very, very long time before the Mac is locked down that much. They need independent applications, flash, and all of the rest in order to work as a system. Unless they re-write OSX from the ground up, there can't be that level of system protection. Of course, they'd need Adobe and their other major vendors to agree to ceeding that much power too, and we all know how likely that is to happen.
I don't know. I really hope a centralized store where anyone can sell anything will usher in a second golden era of Mac shareware. Where the lack of $100 retail applications will be balanced out by tons of amazing $5 tools. Where independent stuff like CopyWrite can thrive. Real retail applications aren't thriving on the Mac anyway, and a thriving small tools market was what kept us mac users sane back in the OS7 days.
Step 1: Have it sell fabrication services online.
Step 2: Take the money earned, and invest in more lego bricks.
Step 3: Have it build more of itself.
Step 4: Teach it to hate.
I just found a power setting on my new Ideapad that keeps the maximum charge at %80. You lose 1/5th of the runtime in the short term, but you should be able to get a much longer total runtime over time out of it, especially if you keep it plugged in. Thank you, Lenovo.
Which brings to my next point: DON"T KEEP YOUR LAPTOP PLUGGED IN. Charge it, then unplug. The battery will last much longer if you continually cycle it, rather than if you try to keep it topped off all of the time. I've toasted batteries in 6 months by keeping them plugged in for too long. Use them like batteries, or they will die.
One nice thing about DOSBox is that it seems to emulate as much as possible in software. That makes it run DOS based games more solidly and consistently than its counterparts that rely upon hardware. If a DOS title won't run natively under Windows 7, and won't run in compatibility mode, it will probably run under DOSBox.
Software emulation, theoretically, means it won't break.
Whew! And here I was afraid the spray was just cat pee.
Nothing gets that stuff off.
Defamation laws vary by country quite a bit, so I can only comment from the perspective of someone from California. But in a place where people openly post cartoons of our president dressed as Hitler, standards of defamation seem to be pretty solidly on the open-dialog side.
Videos in question are here.
Adam Josephs quickly made himself a symbol of the tiny everyday police abuses that build deep resentment in the community. This was not something someone did to him: he did it to himself. It may not be as potent a symbol as the shooting of an unarmed, complying suspect by Oakland officer Johannes Mehserle (and the subsequent attempted coverup). But it nonetheless resonates with people who have had that bad run in with an officer who abused his power and managed to turn an innocuous situation into a terrible one. If you watch the videos above, the officer is parodied arresting a woman for dancing in the street, and other things which all seem on similar lines as arresting a woman for blowing bubbles.
And even suing the makers of the parody would make sense, albeit a messed up sense that should be thrown out of court immediately. But suing the commenters? And then YouTube?
On a side note, I've had my fair share of interactions with the police. And every time they were courteous and professional, even when I was at the other end of their gun. But police abuses do happen, and have happened to people I care very much about. People like Adam Josephs need to be singled out as unacceptable outliers. Last week, I was chatting with an officer about how they were telling stories about bad situations they were in, and were looking for solutions to de-escalate the situations with minimal fuss. One told the story of how he was surrounded as he attempted to leave a bar, and someone blocked his way out with thinly veiled threats to kill him. The officer, being outnumbered, offered to buy his assailant a diet coke. This threw the assailant so much, they sat down, had a drink, chatted a bit, and the officer walked out of there alive.
In the case of a bubble-blowing protester, even a simple "Hey, that's kind of annoying. Would you blow that somewhere else?" would have ended the situation right there. It takes a special kind of talent to start with a bubble-blowing peacenick and elevate it into an arrest. That's what these videos are satirizing, and they do so in a well targeted, irreverent, silly fashion.
It's certainly going to erase the bad impression of him from the internet. Especially now that he's on legal record as "officer bubbles."
The initial article says that "the dream" of desktop Linux is dead. Not that desktop Linux itself is dead.
And I have to agree. After ten years of watching the thing flounder, the actual grandma usability of desktop Linux is still beyond miserable. Ubuntu was a great step forward, but it basically went from Godawful to just awful. While Windows has the problem of 6 different redundant interfaces to do everything, Ubuntu and desktop Linux has the problem of 6 different configuration centers each doing something similar but different. And yes, you still have to drop to editing config files. Even if it did manage to be easier to use and more stable than Windows, it still has to be significantly better or different to get over the overhead of switching. That significant difference, aside from server performance and command-line systems, never arose.
And we are seeing the next generation of desktop challengers emerge. Windows is still in it, as is OSX. But iOS and Android are coming out as strong competitors in the not-quite-a-phone-not-quite-a-laptop area, and will probably drift into full laptops soon. Chrome may actually be a competitor as well, or at least for niche applications.
So let desktop Linux be what desktop Linux is: a handy environment to get stuff done on your servers, a great way to keep old computers useful, and the best rescue / hacking tools you can find. But don't expect it to take over the world. If that happens, it's not going to happen because people were trying to get it to take over the world. That will happen while people are busy doing other things.
Amusingly enough, I had to switch spreadsheets to Calc from Excel because of interface scripting issues in Excel. Using Autohotkeys to script simple tasks is by and large easy, but Excel fails to queue up UI-level commands properly. Hence, "Down Down Down" sometimes is interpreted as "Down Down" or just "Down." Calc, on the other hand always interprets this as 3-downs each and every time.
While Excel's internal scripting seems fine, sometimes you just need to write a throwaway script that pulls from disparate data sources, formats it separately, calculates through a spreadsheet, and filters the results into another random application. For that, Calc was just more solid.
It's not just on the drill, but Netflix has an Extreme Engineering instant streaming episode on the Swiss Mega Tunnel. They spend a lot of time on the drill, operations, repairs, etc.
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70113457&trkid=438381
While I agree that truckers are by and large a far more responsible bunch than we give them credit for (and than they used to be), they also seem to be early adopters of new technologies. GPS, for example. If there were anywhere that would start with these, I could see truck driver employers mandating their usage by their drivers. That doesn't seem any more intrusive than some of the other things truckers put up with, especially if the technology actually works as advertised. If the technology matures, you might see GM installing friendly "wakeup calls" in the dash as a "service" to their drivers.
While I agree that full voiceover should imply care about plot and user experience, sometimes all it does is bake bad writing into the build. Text, at least, gives your writer the flexibility to polish crummy dialog during periods where the rest of the company is bug hunting.
I'd throw in there "Ship it when it's fun." External of any other milestones, once you've hit that point where it's actually an enjoyable game, give yourself 4 weeks of polish and bug hunting and throw it in a box. Don't bother finishing the extra 6 minigames and the Alternate Reality Game that were on your schedule if the game is already fun.