See, I don't get it. I thought Adobe was begging Apple to get Flash on the iPhone. Why would they drop the ball on providing proper OS X support?
Yeah, that one's lost on me, too. "Come on, Apple! Let us play on the iPad! I know we've been unable to deliver a non-half-assed OS X version in a decade, but this time it'll be different! I promise!" Will I completely understand and sympathize with the argument against walled gardens, Adobe's done absolutely nothing to help their case.
I don't think that's true. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, VLC is software-only. Either way, it's ludicrous that an open source project can get decent video performance while Adobe can't.
Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs.
The Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal. As far as OS X, though, nothing changes the fact that Flash uses 3x as much CPU as VLC to render the same video. Spare me the apologist line of "Flash does more work than VLC!" - maybe that's their whole problem. You'd think something as widely used would have some optimized codepaths for the most common use case of playing Youtube videos.
Amanda works by backing up filesystems to dump files on the backup server, then writing those dump files all in one go. It might take an ancient system an hour to spool its dump to the backup server, but the tape doesn't have to worry about that.
Am I the only one who thinks that Twitter is created by and for morons?
No. There are plenty of "get off my lawn!" types to go around. I'm not going to write the next Great American Novel on Twitter, but neither can I text my Underwood typewriter and have it relay the message to my friends.
No, really, I'm sure that photovoltaic cells will do a lot of good to us here in the Arctic Circle where the Sun shines a few hours a day most of the year. Really, it's better to spend money on useless shit like this than to treat rheumatic children.
You're a shortsighted dumbass. There's no other way I can put it. If my country could invest a billion dollars to make North and South Korea get along, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. Your country is investing a thousandth that to make every place south of you a little saner and you're whining? Finland is part of the world, and spending a rounding-error amount to make that world a nicer place to live seems like a reasonable idea.
I still think we should decrease our use of energy, instead of inventing new ways to increase its production.
Why? Save for the production process (which this guy made easier and cheaper per watt), solar energy contributes zero to the net energy in the ecosystem. The sun's going to beat down on my roof anyway. If I can transport some of that energy to where I can conveniently use it, why shouldn't I?
That's not really fair. I owned an used an Amiga until '99 or so and was very active in Amiga newsgroups and mailing lists. I'm not a hater by any stretch of the imagination, and I think my nerd credentials are up to date. And yet, I think that's a valid question: why do people still use Amigas? I can't imagine any objective way in which they'd be better than another modern desktop. Subjectively, sure: some people just want to use something different. That's cool. But nostalgia and quirkiness aside, are there any other reasons to use one?
Don't read that as an attack or criticism, because it's not. Again, I like Amigas and have nothing whatsoever against them. I just can't imagine wanting to use one as my primary desktop today.
Unless you're dealing with purchases by the gallon, mpg is irrelevant. Miles per fill is relevant for trip planning,
I have a 21 gallon tank, times 25 MPG equals about 525 miles per tank. That has nothing to do with purchases by the gallon.
and gallons per 100 miles is great for cost estimation.
You missed my point: I don't care about cost estimation. I'm going to make the drive anyway, regardless of cost (to a point). It's very similar to how I handle electrical bills: if I go to buy a new air conditioner, I'll weigh the energy efficiency very heavily. Once it's installed in my house, though, for the most part I don't really care. If it's hot, I'm going to use it regardless of what electricity costs today because unless costs go up by an insane amount it's not a major part of my budget. If gasoline went to $10 a gallon, or electricity went to $0.40/kWh, I'd start following costs more closely. Until then, it doesn't really affect me or play a part in my decision making.
For much the same reason that I can drop a hamburger patty on the ground in my own kitchen, pick it up, wipe it off, and cook it anyway while a McDonald's would be closed for the same reason. For the same reason I can make my tween kids mow my own lawn while I'd get in serious trouble for employing a child. For the same reason I can put an Apple sticker on my HP netbook, but I'd be sued 8 ways from Sunday if I tried to sell them as Apples.
More interesting (to me) is why you think personal, non-profit activities should be regulated just like their commercial counterparts.
Authors who inspire readers enough to donate money or pay in order to keep the author rolling will survive. Many authors will thrive.
I downloaded Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe" from his website for free. I liked it so much that I ended up buying a copy to have. Judging by his sales numbers, it seems like I'm not the only one.
Not all newer vehicles benefit from higher octane gas, but it's more than the Car Talk guys would have you believe.
The Car Talk guys are both MIT graduates and hardcore geeks. In the 70s, they opened a do-it-yourself car repair shop called "Hacker's Haven". I'm inclined to believe their assessment of anything involving cars over a random Slashdotter's.:-)
Perhaps you have no idea what they do when you're not watching them on the particular road you saw them on. Perhaps you don't see them when they're pulling a trailer, or hauling a soccer team around, or carrying three kayaks, etc.
When I see Debbie Soccermom driving a Yukon with a "(man) + (woman) + (kid)" sticker in the back window, I can state with 99% confidence that she doesn't pull trailers or tote kayaks around. Our minivan seats 2 adults and 5 kids comfortably.
I was driving the kids to school last year (we don't have buses and the local school isn't within walking distance) and started pointing out how many SUVs you saw with a woman driving and one kid in the rearmost seat. They picked up the meme and ran with it, kind of like their own version of "slugbug". We'll be driving down the street and one will yell "soccer mom in an SUV with a kid in the back seat!" As often as I hear that, I'm pretty certain they don't all haul boats and kayaks in their spare time.
Thank you. I drive a '98 Oldsmobile. I could "upgrade" it, but why? I don't put a lot of miles on it so its relatively poor gas mileage isn't that big a deal. It's very comfortable. I paid it off 6 years ago. I've had to fix things on it, but in the last year that included an ignition switch (that I took apart, cleaned, reassembled, and reinstalled myself) and an alternator (which cost less than $150 and took me about an hour, including the trip to the parts store). I have no desire to replace my comfortable, paid-for car.
I mean, you "get" a certain amount of miles out of a gallon of gas instead of "needing" a certain amount of gas to go 100km.
America's a pretty large country and we tend to take a lot of long-distance road trips. When I used to visit the in-laws, we'd pile into the family minivan and drive 1,100 miles each way to get there. As others have said, MPG is good for calculating range. If I filled up with gas in Chicago, should I get more gas in Cleveland just to be "safe", or can I wait until I'm in Pennsylvania?
Still I think it's easier to compare lp100km rather than mpg. It's trivial to calculate how much a kilometer costs me.
For my family, the cost of fuel is unimportant. For daily driving, it adds up slowly enough that other expenses like maintenance and insurance are more important considerations. For long trips, the cost can be significant, but not enough to deter the trip even if we had to pay twice as much. Now, fuel economy will still factor into my next purchase, but once I own the vehicle, it's just not something that I care to think about. I already have the thing and I'll pay to put gas into it whenever I need to. Once I've done that, I'm more interested in how far I can go until I have to do it again.
No, he was right. Unless the restaurant paid their license fee to ASCAP (I think; I'm not in the trade) they were breaking the law. Do you think all those chain restaurants really want to teach that stupid "happy happy birthday, from all of us to you! (hey!)" song to their waitresses?
I'd love to write a best-selling novel, but until Bedford St. Martin's gives me 100% assurance that they will publish and advertise my novel before I start writing it, I'm not going to write a word of it.
If you think your novel will sell, and BSM won't publish it, you're free to distribute it through other publishers. How well's that working out for an iOS app that Apple won't publish?
All ads have done is resulted in a proliferation of free apps with limited functionality and lots of adverts. It's cluttered the marketplace and made it difficult to distinguish between applications and value.
I like the model of the Textie app. It comes in only one ad-supported version. If you try the app and like it but hate the ads, you can pay $0.99 as an in-app purchase to disable them.
I think that's a win for all involved. I don't have to pay a penny to initially test the full version of the app and there's no crippled demo version that I have to extrapolate from. The developer gets a lot more downloads than if it were a paid app, and doesn't have to deal with 1-star reviews on a demo version like "this demo version sucks cause it doesn't have all the features of the paid app and $0.99 is too expensive they should give it away for free".
The VCs dispute that patents are needed to secure investment.
I got the point, but he was wrong. The VCs are the people who do the investing. If they say they'll still invest even without patent protections, then the premise that VCs won't invest without patent protections has been refuted.
The patent lawyers and big patent holders often tell us that patents are needed to secure investment, so it's interesting to see now that venture capitalists are refuting that.
A venture capitalist said that patents are not needed to secure investment. That pretty damn well refutes the idea that venture capitalists won't invest without patents.
Do a poll in some home for old people. Result? 90% 'of course we need to regulate the evil internet'. So I expect everyone's grandma to be able to look up numbers on the internet.
I've seen the stereotype you're talking about. I've also seen my next door neighbor, in her late 80s, sign up for Facebook and Twitter because it "looks pretty neat-o!". She's on her 4th laptop in 8 years because they seem to get bounced around when she and her husband fly to Hawaii for their twice-a-year multi-month stay at their condo.
You're thinking of old people as tapioca-droolers parked in front of Matlock. I think of old people as the wealthy, active travelers who spend more recreational time on the Internet than I do.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I don't get it. I thought Adobe was begging Apple to get Flash on the iPhone. Why would they drop the ball on providing proper OS X support?
Yeah, that one's lost on me, too. "Come on, Apple! Let us play on the iPad! I know we've been unable to deliver a non-half-assed OS X version in a decade, but this time it'll be different! I promise!" Will I completely understand and sympathize with the argument against walled gardens, Adobe's done absolutely nothing to help their case.
I don't think that's true. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, VLC is software-only. Either way, it's ludicrous that an open source project can get decent video performance while Adobe can't.
It's Adobe fault for Apple's incompetence...
In much the same way that it's VLC's fault for Adobe's incompetence.
Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs.
The Linux thing might be true. Even if there was one universally implemented GL desktop standard, that's not the same as having a universally implemented hardware decoding API. They're pretty much orthogonal. As far as OS X, though, nothing changes the fact that Flash uses 3x as much CPU as VLC to render the same video. Spare me the apologist line of "Flash does more work than VLC!" - maybe that's their whole problem. You'd think something as widely used would have some optimized codepaths for the most common use case of playing Youtube videos.
Amanda works by backing up filesystems to dump files on the backup server, then writing those dump files all in one go. It might take an ancient system an hour to spool its dump to the backup server, but the tape doesn't have to worry about that.
Dude, don't argue with the apk. It just makes it stick around longer.
Am I the only one who thinks that Twitter is created by and for morons?
No. There are plenty of "get off my lawn!" types to go around. I'm not going to write the next Great American Novel on Twitter, but neither can I text my Underwood typewriter and have it relay the message to my friends.
No, really, I'm sure that photovoltaic cells will do a lot of good to us here in the Arctic Circle where the Sun shines a few hours a day most of the year. Really, it's better to spend money on useless shit like this than to treat rheumatic children.
You're a shortsighted dumbass. There's no other way I can put it. If my country could invest a billion dollars to make North and South Korea get along, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. Your country is investing a thousandth that to make every place south of you a little saner and you're whining? Finland is part of the world, and spending a rounding-error amount to make that world a nicer place to live seems like a reasonable idea.
I still think we should decrease our use of energy, instead of inventing new ways to increase its production.
Why? Save for the production process (which this guy made easier and cheaper per watt), solar energy contributes zero to the net energy in the ecosystem. The sun's going to beat down on my roof anyway. If I can transport some of that energy to where I can conveniently use it, why shouldn't I?
That's not really fair. I owned an used an Amiga until '99 or so and was very active in Amiga newsgroups and mailing lists. I'm not a hater by any stretch of the imagination, and I think my nerd credentials are up to date. And yet, I think that's a valid question: why do people still use Amigas? I can't imagine any objective way in which they'd be better than another modern desktop. Subjectively, sure: some people just want to use something different. That's cool. But nostalgia and quirkiness aside, are there any other reasons to use one?
Don't read that as an attack or criticism, because it's not. Again, I like Amigas and have nothing whatsoever against them. I just can't imagine wanting to use one as my primary desktop today.
Unless you're dealing with purchases by the gallon, mpg is irrelevant. Miles per fill is relevant for trip planning,
I have a 21 gallon tank, times 25 MPG equals about 525 miles per tank. That has nothing to do with purchases by the gallon.
and gallons per 100 miles is great for cost estimation.
You missed my point: I don't care about cost estimation. I'm going to make the drive anyway, regardless of cost (to a point). It's very similar to how I handle electrical bills: if I go to buy a new air conditioner, I'll weigh the energy efficiency very heavily. Once it's installed in my house, though, for the most part I don't really care. If it's hot, I'm going to use it regardless of what electricity costs today because unless costs go up by an insane amount it's not a major part of my budget. If gasoline went to $10 a gallon, or electricity went to $0.40/kWh, I'd start following costs more closely. Until then, it doesn't really affect me or play a part in my decision making.
Why do we make such a distinction?
For much the same reason that I can drop a hamburger patty on the ground in my own kitchen, pick it up, wipe it off, and cook it anyway while a McDonald's would be closed for the same reason. For the same reason I can make my tween kids mow my own lawn while I'd get in serious trouble for employing a child. For the same reason I can put an Apple sticker on my HP netbook, but I'd be sued 8 ways from Sunday if I tried to sell them as Apples.
More interesting (to me) is why you think personal, non-profit activities should be regulated just like their commercial counterparts.
Authors who inspire readers enough to donate money or pay in order to keep the author rolling will survive. Many authors will thrive.
I downloaded Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe" from his website for free. I liked it so much that I ended up buying a copy to have. Judging by his sales numbers, it seems like I'm not the only one.
Not all newer vehicles benefit from higher octane gas, but it's more than the Car Talk guys would have you believe.
The Car Talk guys are both MIT graduates and hardcore geeks. In the 70s, they opened a do-it-yourself car repair shop called "Hacker's Haven". I'm inclined to believe their assessment of anything involving cars over a random Slashdotter's. :-)
Perhaps you have no idea what they do when you're not watching them on the particular road you saw them on. Perhaps you don't see them when they're pulling a trailer, or hauling a soccer team around, or carrying three kayaks, etc.
When I see Debbie Soccermom driving a Yukon with a "(man) + (woman) + (kid)" sticker in the back window, I can state with 99% confidence that she doesn't pull trailers or tote kayaks around. Our minivan seats 2 adults and 5 kids comfortably.
I was driving the kids to school last year (we don't have buses and the local school isn't within walking distance) and started pointing out how many SUVs you saw with a woman driving and one kid in the rearmost seat. They picked up the meme and ran with it, kind of like their own version of "slugbug". We'll be driving down the street and one will yell "soccer mom in an SUV with a kid in the back seat!" As often as I hear that, I'm pretty certain they don't all haul boats and kayaks in their spare time.
Thank you. I drive a '98 Oldsmobile. I could "upgrade" it, but why? I don't put a lot of miles on it so its relatively poor gas mileage isn't that big a deal. It's very comfortable. I paid it off 6 years ago. I've had to fix things on it, but in the last year that included an ignition switch (that I took apart, cleaned, reassembled, and reinstalled myself) and an alternator (which cost less than $150 and took me about an hour, including the trip to the parts store). I have no desire to replace my comfortable, paid-for car.
I mean, you "get" a certain amount of miles out of a gallon of gas instead of "needing" a certain amount of gas to go 100km.
America's a pretty large country and we tend to take a lot of long-distance road trips. When I used to visit the in-laws, we'd pile into the family minivan and drive 1,100 miles each way to get there. As others have said, MPG is good for calculating range. If I filled up with gas in Chicago, should I get more gas in Cleveland just to be "safe", or can I wait until I'm in Pennsylvania?
Still I think it's easier to compare lp100km rather than mpg. It's trivial to calculate how much a kilometer costs me.
For my family, the cost of fuel is unimportant. For daily driving, it adds up slowly enough that other expenses like maintenance and insurance are more important considerations. For long trips, the cost can be significant, but not enough to deter the trip even if we had to pay twice as much. Now, fuel economy will still factor into my next purchase, but once I own the vehicle, it's just not something that I care to think about. I already have the thing and I'll pay to put gas into it whenever I need to. Once I've done that, I'm more interested in how far I can go until I have to do it again.
No, he was right. Unless the restaurant paid their license fee to ASCAP (I think; I'm not in the trade) they were breaking the law. Do you think all those chain restaurants really want to teach that stupid "happy happy birthday, from all of us to you! (hey!)" song to their waitresses?
Did you know that the average Foxconn employee is paid 113 euros per month?
Did you know that we have no idea whether that's a good or bad local wage? I wouldn't work for that salary, but the economy's different where I live.
I'd love to write a best-selling novel, but until Bedford St. Martin's gives me 100% assurance that they will publish and advertise my novel before I start writing it, I'm not going to write a word of it.
If you think your novel will sell, and BSM won't publish it, you're free to distribute it through other publishers. How well's that working out for an iOS app that Apple won't publish?
All ads have done is resulted in a proliferation of free apps with limited functionality and lots of adverts. It's cluttered the marketplace and made it difficult to distinguish between applications and value.
I like the model of the Textie app. It comes in only one ad-supported version. If you try the app and like it but hate the ads, you can pay $0.99 as an in-app purchase to disable them.
I think that's a win for all involved. I don't have to pay a penny to initially test the full version of the app and there's no crippled demo version that I have to extrapolate from. The developer gets a lot more downloads than if it were a paid app, and doesn't have to deal with 1-star reviews on a demo version like "this demo version sucks cause it doesn't have all the features of the paid app and $0.99 is too expensive they should give it away for free".
The VCs dispute that patents are needed to secure investment.
I got the point, but he was wrong. The VCs are the people who do the investing. If they say they'll still invest even without patent protections, then the premise that VCs won't invest without patent protections has been refuted.
To refute something means to disprove it.
From TFS:
A venture capitalist said that patents are not needed to secure investment. That pretty damn well refutes the idea that venture capitalists won't invest without patents.
Do a poll in some home for old people. Result? 90% 'of course we need to regulate the evil internet'. So I expect everyone's grandma to be able to look up numbers on the internet.
I've seen the stereotype you're talking about. I've also seen my next door neighbor, in her late 80s, sign up for Facebook and Twitter because it "looks pretty neat-o!". She's on her 4th laptop in 8 years because they seem to get bounced around when she and her husband fly to Hawaii for their twice-a-year multi-month stay at their condo.
You're thinking of old people as tapioca-droolers parked in front of Matlock. I think of old people as the wealthy, active travelers who spend more recreational time on the Internet than I do.
Your mom makes a good pepperoni, but I wouldn't call her kitchen a restaurant.