Of course, this is really easy to reproduce because Apple put a line across the area that if covered affects the signal strength - other phones you have to kind of guess.
Out of curiosity, would something like a coat of clear fingernail polish insulate that point without affecting anything badly?
Yes, and it's been my experience that no amount of makeup will make an ugly woman look good. Ever notice how morbidly obese women wear tons of makeup as if it will cover up the fact that they're fat?
I'll go you one better. I just got back from my 20th high school reunion. The girls who were nice and fun to be around in high school were - without exception - attractive and young-looking. Some had, um, eaten well, but they were still pretty and had contagious smiles.
The girls who were spiteful and snotty in high school were - without exception - unattractive and worn. Some had nice figures but their faces where creased with scowl lines and crows feet.
Lesson learned: "good personality" is a much better makeup than anything you can buy in a store. It lasts a lot longer.
Sony's ereader, for example, has no remote access, and can be used entirely on an un-networked pc.
Same with the nook. I plugged its USB charging cable into my Linux laptop yesterday and mounted it as an external harddrive, with descriptively named directories like "my documents", "my music" (supports OGG, too!) and "my backgrounds" that I could upload files to and download files from. Put it in Airplane Mode to disable all wireless networking and you have a nicely self-contained reader.
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government
There's no such thing as "the oil lobby". We have a strong energy lobby. Right now, Shell et al are heavily invested in selling you energy in the form of petroleum distillates, but I guarantee that they'd be more than happy to charge your electric car batteries with "Conoco AMPED!" with a $0.10 per MW discount if you use their credit card.
To repeat: we have giant energy companies. They sell oil energy right now, but they'll cheerfully sell you nuclear or solar or hydrogen energy if the opportunity arises.
The way I see it, if I really care about a person, I will make sure to stay in touch and no need to re-connect.
That's an excellent point and I would have agreed with when I was a teenager and my long-lost friends were the ones I didn't have classes with that semester. Then I got older and realized that sometimes people move without remembering to notify everyone they've ever corresponded with. I parted ways with some old friends - Navy buddies, college pals, neighbors, etc. - before email was popular among non-geeks and had no way of getting in touch with them short of hiring a private investigator.
"And the whole issue with charging for Skype Over 3G? I already pay you for a monthly subscription, now I will have to pay extra to use it on my iPhone over 3G? "
Oh, isn't that a cute one? I don't even have an iPhone and that pisses me off. Basically, Skype-to-Skype calls are currently free. Well, in a few months, Skype wants to start charging you if your end of the TCP tunnel is in a 3G netblock. You're still getting the exact same service as if you were connecting over Wi-Fi, but paying Skype for the privilege of using AT&T as your ISP instead of whatever hotspot you happened to be near.
The fanboys defending them claim that AT&T is requiring Skype to do this, but haven't explained why every other VOIP provider than Skype charges the same rates whether you're calling from a 3G address or from a Wi-Fi address.
So whenever the oscillation reverses direction and the sun begins moving back toward the galactic plane, a lot of stuff out on the fringes doesn't move neatly with it.
Why? Wouldn't the same forces that caused the sun to reverse direction be acting on the Oort Cloud? If not, what's the origin of the gradient?
I could RTFA but I'd rather discuss it here, if that's OK.
I know digital photography pretty well, and a lot of the stuff they say in their digital camera reviews is just plain wrong.
I trust CR's motives. I think they're a good group of people who truly meant to do the best job they can, but I had too many experiences like yours to trust their conclusions. When I quit subscribing, they were on a huge "green" kick, to the point that they'd change their rankings based on a product's packaging or minimal energy consumption differences. Brand A might have a better widget than Brand B, and CR would report that, but B's product would have a higher final score than A's because A dissipated 23W when in use and B dissipated 20W. Readers who went solely by CR's bottom line score would end up with an inferior product just because it used an extra $0.15 of electricity for ever 300 hours of actual use.
I've seen cases where me and another person are working on code independently, and when it came time to merge, we had both ended up creating the same variable names, and pretty much the same code.
I took a lot of college classes with my best friend, Aaron. We worked on a lot of projects together and evolved a similar coding style. On one particular assignment, we had to simulate a number of telephones connecting to a switchboard with a number of incoming lines answered by a given number of operators. If you've done a CompSci degree, you've probably done the same project somewhere along the way. We worked independently, although we bounced ideas off each other (which was explicitly allowed as long as we didn't actually share code): "I was thinking about doing $X. How about you?" "Well, that would work, but I think $Y is a better fit." "Oh, good point!"
When it came time to turn in our assignments, we submitted identical code. Same variable names. Same algorithms. Same formatting. Same comments. And we had never looked at each other's work, not even at a glance.
Fortunately, our teacher knew us well enough to believe our explanation, and we were both able to independently explain exactly how our identical implementations worked and why we made the design decisions that we did.
I imagine that a lot of kernel and OS programming is just like that. Given two programmers who've been working on the same common codebases and used to the same formatting, bracket placement, variable naming standards, etc., it's very easy to imagine them producing line-for-line identical implementations without even knowing that each other's work existed.
You know, I think society was fundamentally better when people were physically afraid of screwing over their neighbors too badly. Yeah, I understand the downsides to vigilantism and a lynchmob mentality, but I'm not completely convinced that the tradeoff has been worth it.
ZFS does a _lot_ of the things WAFL has done for years. I don't really think those approaches should necessarily be able to be patented though, but as it is now, you can see how something like ZFS -- very similar to WAFL in a lot of ways would raise some red flags and at least warrant some investigation (whether or not we agree with the principles there).
Chrome does a _lot_ of the things MSIE has done for years. I don't really think those approaches should necessarily be able to be patented though, but as it is now, you can see how something like Chrome -- very similar to MSIE in a lot of ways would raise some red flags and at least warrant some investigation (whether or not we agree with the principles there).
I suppose they realize this and are just doing their corporate "due diligence" in aggressively trying to protect their IP.
Screw their "due diligence". They're just being desperate assholes and everyone knows it.
NetApp built it's bussiness being a vendor of NAS systems that had extensible file systems that spanned clever raid structures, and automatic snapshoting and they did this long before ZFS. Those are the key features of ZFS.
VMS did it earlier. Screw NetApp and their overpriced, underfeatured, patented crap. Really. I mean that.
We need to announce loudly on Oracle forums that NetApp says that Solaris shops are using illegal software. There are few things that get Larry Ellison moving faster than the idea that someone might cost him a dollar.
The desk clerk had corrected the charge and finished my bill and now was just concerned with getting rid of me so he finally said, "Sometimes, sir, hotels just try to rip you off". I had no response.
I worked the night shift at a reasonably nice motel when I was in college so that I could study during all the down-time. Although the management had their own set of annoyances like overcharging for every little thing, they were scrupulously honest. For example, the phones had the ridiculous rates printed on the face around the buttons so you could easily see the prices, and part of my night audit job was to compare the phone system's logs with the room charges. If I found that we'd accidentally overcharged someone, we'd refund it even after they'd already checked out and gone home.
I think that's why it always especially pisses me off when motels are dishonest. The place I worked for had a good reputation and a lot of repeat business, and I'm naive enough to expect that other companies want the same.
I used KMyMoney for quite a while before going with a checkbook program on my iPod. It's always with me and I've gotten in the habit of entering transactions as I'm standing at a store checkout and waiting for my transaction to be approved.
PS: Why, oh why, can't someone write a iPhone checkbook app that understands the conception of reconciliation as a batch transaction?
I recently stayed at a cheap chain motel while traveling for a softball tournament. They had a sign posted (in the disused lavoratory, etc.) along the lines of:
Theft is a problem. We have a safe in your room. If you use it and someone steals your stuff, we'll insure you up to $10,000. For your convenience, a $1.50 charge will be added to your bill for the rental of the safe. If you don't want to pay the charge, let us know and we'll remove it.
(Part in bold is as verbatim as my memory allows.)
When I checked out the next morning, I asked the clerk to remove the $1.50 fee. She kind of huffed, spent the next 5 minutes messing around with the computer, then gave me a receipt for the correct amount that I expected to pay. Two days later, I noticed that my online statement was off $1.50+tax. Sure enough, they'd charged me anyway. When I called them to say that I wanted it fixed - yes, I am that stubborn and nitpicky - they assured me that this never happens and they were so sorry.
As cheap as the motel was, that was an extra 3% or so in automatic free revenue. If they're operating at a 10% profit margin, that's about a 66% increase in actual profit. How many times to people look that closely at their credit card bills? I'd be willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, people see that the charge was correct to the nearest $10 and don't check it to the penny, or they figure it's not worthwhile and don't follow up on it.
"Hi! Is this the Dish Network sales rep? I'm Joe from the City of Hoopatella, Georgia, and we're revoking Comcast's cable franchise for breach of contract. We'll still need TV service for our offices. Think you can help us figure something out?"
Alerting people that there are unpatched security holes in earlier versions is exactly what he should be doing.
Do you follow the security notices of every package you have installed? I have 1,665 packages on my Ubuntu netbook. Each of those has a maintainer who's in charge of paying attention to that stuff for me and updating that package if something important comes along.
Same with the kernel itself: Linus tells the distro maintainers and the distro maintainers tell you.
I was talking to my dad about the classic cars of the 60s that sell for big bucks and said I couldn't see what cars from the 80s or 90s would reach that status.
Last night, I watched my friend fire up a restored 427 Cobra Jet engine from a '67 Shelby. The ground rumbled and the skies opened up to a chorus of angels singing of twin 4-barrel carbs feeding 7 liters into open headers.
I admit that there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but there are a few occasions when one thing can be objectively more lust-worthy than its replacement.
Oh, fuck off. It wasn't perfect, but it was a vast improvement over the status quo and we're trying to work out the rest. So our 234-year-old document didn't perfectly conform to your modern ideals - when was the last time you wrote code that lasted more than two centuries with less than 30 patches?
Bookstore owners have to pay sales tax. Amazon doesn't have to. End result: said store owner goes bankrupt because Amazon has a competitive advantage because of tax differences.
May I offer you a buggy whip?
Environments change. Either adapt with them or perish. If my local booksellers lobbied for Amazon to be taxed out of "fairness" and not because of any legitimate legal reason, I'd switch to doing 100% of my business with Amazon out of "fairness".
When your deep inside the bowels of a website and want to return to the home page - guess where you typically click - yep, the logo at the location of the defacto standard home page location
You are sacrificing your own customers for money - it's up to you if it's worth it or not.
Good point, except that you're wrong. The customary top-left "home logo" is still there. I just moved the navigation sidebar (with the ad at the top) from the right side of the page to the left.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, this is really easy to reproduce because Apple put a line across the area that if covered affects the signal strength - other phones you have to kind of guess.
Out of curiosity, would something like a coat of clear fingernail polish insulate that point without affecting anything badly?
Yes, and it's been my experience that no amount of makeup will make an ugly woman look good. Ever notice how morbidly obese women wear tons of makeup as if it will cover up the fact that they're fat?
I'll go you one better. I just got back from my 20th high school reunion. The girls who were nice and fun to be around in high school were - without exception - attractive and young-looking. Some had, um, eaten well, but they were still pretty and had contagious smiles.
The girls who were spiteful and snotty in high school were - without exception - unattractive and worn. Some had nice figures but their faces where creased with scowl lines and crows feet.
Lesson learned: "good personality" is a much better makeup than anything you can buy in a store. It lasts a lot longer.
Sony's ereader, for example, has no remote access, and can be used entirely on an un-networked pc.
Same with the nook. I plugged its USB charging cable into my Linux laptop yesterday and mounted it as an external harddrive, with descriptively named directories like "my documents", "my music" (supports OGG, too!) and "my backgrounds" that I could upload files to and download files from. Put it in Airplane Mode to disable all wireless networking and you have a nicely self-contained reader.
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government
There's no such thing as "the oil lobby". We have a strong energy lobby. Right now, Shell et al are heavily invested in selling you energy in the form of petroleum distillates, but I guarantee that they'd be more than happy to charge your electric car batteries with "Conoco AMPED!" with a $0.10 per MW discount if you use their credit card.
To repeat: we have giant energy companies. They sell oil energy right now, but they'll cheerfully sell you nuclear or solar or hydrogen energy if the opportunity arises.
or so that the forked software starts to have features not present in the original software.
Do they define "feature"? Because to me it sounds like any change whatsoever could be considered as violating the licence:
Replace the word "feature" with its synonym "attribute" and see how creative you can get.
Well, what's the song? Did we hear it?
The way I see it, if I really care about a person, I will make sure to stay in touch and no need to re-connect.
That's an excellent point and I would have agreed with when I was a teenager and my long-lost friends were the ones I didn't have classes with that semester. Then I got older and realized that sometimes people move without remembering to notify everyone they've ever corresponded with. I parted ways with some old friends - Navy buddies, college pals, neighbors, etc. - before email was popular among non-geeks and had no way of getting in touch with them short of hiring a private investigator.
"And the whole issue with charging for Skype Over 3G? I already pay you for a monthly subscription, now I will have to pay extra to use it on my iPhone over 3G? "
Oh, isn't that a cute one? I don't even have an iPhone and that pisses me off. Basically, Skype-to-Skype calls are currently free. Well, in a few months, Skype wants to start charging you if your end of the TCP tunnel is in a 3G netblock. You're still getting the exact same service as if you were connecting over Wi-Fi, but paying Skype for the privilege of using AT&T as your ISP instead of whatever hotspot you happened to be near.
The fanboys defending them claim that AT&T is requiring Skype to do this, but haven't explained why every other VOIP provider than Skype charges the same rates whether you're calling from a 3G address or from a Wi-Fi address.
So whenever the oscillation reverses direction and the sun begins moving back toward the galactic plane, a lot of stuff out on the fringes doesn't move neatly with it.
Why? Wouldn't the same forces that caused the sun to reverse direction be acting on the Oort Cloud? If not, what's the origin of the gradient?
I could RTFA but I'd rather discuss it here, if that's OK.
I know digital photography pretty well, and a lot of the stuff they say in their digital camera reviews is just plain wrong.
I trust CR's motives. I think they're a good group of people who truly meant to do the best job they can, but I had too many experiences like yours to trust their conclusions. When I quit subscribing, they were on a huge "green" kick, to the point that they'd change their rankings based on a product's packaging or minimal energy consumption differences. Brand A might have a better widget than Brand B, and CR would report that, but B's product would have a higher final score than A's because A dissipated 23W when in use and B dissipated 20W. Readers who went solely by CR's bottom line score would end up with an inferior product just because it used an extra $0.15 of electricity for ever 300 hours of actual use.
I've seen cases where me and another person are working on code independently, and when it came time to merge, we had both ended up creating the same variable names, and pretty much the same code.
I took a lot of college classes with my best friend, Aaron. We worked on a lot of projects together and evolved a similar coding style. On one particular assignment, we had to simulate a number of telephones connecting to a switchboard with a number of incoming lines answered by a given number of operators. If you've done a CompSci degree, you've probably done the same project somewhere along the way. We worked independently, although we bounced ideas off each other (which was explicitly allowed as long as we didn't actually share code): "I was thinking about doing $X. How about you?" "Well, that would work, but I think $Y is a better fit." "Oh, good point!"
When it came time to turn in our assignments, we submitted identical code. Same variable names. Same algorithms. Same formatting. Same comments. And we had never looked at each other's work, not even at a glance.
Fortunately, our teacher knew us well enough to believe our explanation, and we were both able to independently explain exactly how our identical implementations worked and why we made the design decisions that we did.
I imagine that a lot of kernel and OS programming is just like that. Given two programmers who've been working on the same common codebases and used to the same formatting, bracket placement, variable naming standards, etc., it's very easy to imagine them producing line-for-line identical implementations without even knowing that each other's work existed.
You know, I think society was fundamentally better when people were physically afraid of screwing over their neighbors too badly. Yeah, I understand the downsides to vigilantism and a lynchmob mentality, but I'm not completely convinced that the tradeoff has been worth it.
ZFS does a _lot_ of the things WAFL has done for years. I don't really think those approaches should necessarily be able to be patented though, but as it is now, you can see how something like ZFS -- very similar to WAFL in a lot of ways would raise some red flags and at least warrant some investigation (whether or not we agree with the principles there).
Chrome does a _lot_ of the things MSIE has done for years. I don't really think those approaches should necessarily be able to be patented though, but as it is now, you can see how something like Chrome -- very similar to MSIE in a lot of ways would raise some red flags and at least warrant some investigation (whether or not we agree with the principles there).
I suppose they realize this and are just doing their corporate "due diligence" in aggressively trying to protect their IP.
Screw their "due diligence". They're just being desperate assholes and everyone knows it.
NetApp built it's bussiness being a vendor of NAS systems that had extensible file systems that spanned clever raid structures, and automatic snapshoting and they did this long before ZFS. Those are the key features of ZFS.
VMS did it earlier. Screw NetApp and their overpriced, underfeatured, patented crap. Really. I mean that.
We need to announce loudly on Oracle forums that NetApp says that Solaris shops are using illegal software. There are few things that get Larry Ellison moving faster than the idea that someone might cost him a dollar.
The desk clerk had corrected the charge and finished my bill and now was just concerned with getting rid of me so he finally said, "Sometimes, sir, hotels just try to rip you off". I had no response.
I worked the night shift at a reasonably nice motel when I was in college so that I could study during all the down-time. Although the management had their own set of annoyances like overcharging for every little thing, they were scrupulously honest. For example, the phones had the ridiculous rates printed on the face around the buttons so you could easily see the prices, and part of my night audit job was to compare the phone system's logs with the room charges. If I found that we'd accidentally overcharged someone, we'd refund it even after they'd already checked out and gone home.
I think that's why it always especially pisses me off when motels are dishonest. The place I worked for had a good reputation and a lot of repeat business, and I'm naive enough to expect that other companies want the same.
I used KMyMoney for quite a while before going with a checkbook program on my iPod. It's always with me and I've gotten in the habit of entering transactions as I'm standing at a store checkout and waiting for my transaction to be approved.
PS: Why, oh why, can't someone write a iPhone checkbook app that understands the conception of reconciliation as a batch transaction?
I recently stayed at a cheap chain motel while traveling for a softball tournament. They had a sign posted (in the disused lavoratory, etc.) along the lines of:
Theft is a problem. We have a safe in your room. If you use it and someone steals your stuff, we'll insure you up to $10,000. For your convenience, a $1.50 charge will be added to your bill for the rental of the safe. If you don't want to pay the charge, let us know and we'll remove it.
(Part in bold is as verbatim as my memory allows.)
When I checked out the next morning, I asked the clerk to remove the $1.50 fee. She kind of huffed, spent the next 5 minutes messing around with the computer, then gave me a receipt for the correct amount that I expected to pay. Two days later, I noticed that my online statement was off $1.50+tax. Sure enough, they'd charged me anyway. When I called them to say that I wanted it fixed - yes, I am that stubborn and nitpicky - they assured me that this never happens and they were so sorry.
As cheap as the motel was, that was an extra 3% or so in automatic free revenue. If they're operating at a 10% profit margin, that's about a 66% increase in actual profit. How many times to people look that closely at their credit card bills? I'd be willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, people see that the charge was correct to the nearest $10 and don't check it to the penny, or they figure it's not worthwhile and don't follow up on it.
"Hi! Is this the Dish Network sales rep? I'm Joe from the City of Hoopatella, Georgia, and we're revoking Comcast's cable franchise for breach of contract. We'll still need TV service for our offices. Think you can help us figure something out?"
Alerting people that there are unpatched security holes in earlier versions is exactly what he should be doing.
Do you follow the security notices of every package you have installed? I have 1,665 packages on my Ubuntu netbook. Each of those has a maintainer who's in charge of paying attention to that stuff for me and updating that package if something important comes along.
Same with the kernel itself: Linus tells the distro maintainers and the distro maintainers tell you.
I was talking to my dad about the classic cars of the 60s that sell for big bucks and said I couldn't see what cars from the 80s or 90s would reach that status.
Last night, I watched my friend fire up a restored 427 Cobra Jet engine from a '67 Shelby. The ground rumbled and the skies opened up to a chorus of angels singing of twin 4-barrel carbs feeding 7 liters into open headers.
In the 80s, we got crap like this.
I admit that there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but there are a few occasions when one thing can be objectively more lust-worthy than its replacement.
Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers,
FWIW, GIMP kind of has that reputation.
FTFY.
Oh, fuck off. It wasn't perfect, but it was a vast improvement over the status quo and we're trying to work out the rest. So our 234-year-old document didn't perfectly conform to your modern ideals - when was the last time you wrote code that lasted more than two centuries with less than 30 patches?
Bookstore owners have to pay sales tax. Amazon doesn't have to. End result: said store owner goes bankrupt because Amazon has a competitive advantage because of tax differences.
May I offer you a buggy whip?
Environments change. Either adapt with them or perish. If my local booksellers lobbied for Amazon to be taxed out of "fairness" and not because of any legitimate legal reason, I'd switch to doing 100% of my business with Amazon out of "fairness".
When your deep inside the bowels of a website and want to return to the home page - guess where you typically click - yep, the logo at the location of the defacto standard home page location
You are sacrificing your own customers for money - it's up to you if it's worth it or not.
Good point, except that you're wrong. The customary top-left "home logo" is still there. I just moved the navigation sidebar (with the ad at the top) from the right side of the page to the left.