Only the wealthy can afford e-book readers and the subsequent fees.
I bought a Nook this summer for $150. Since then, B&N have given me 112 free classic books - not the Google Books versions, but nicely typeset and edited copies - and about another dozen current novels. There is no maintenance or rental cost to keep those copies forever, and I can mount my Nook as a USB hard drive to copy off the files for backup (or to upload my own PDFs, or ebooks I've obtained from other vendors).
And if $150 / 125 per book is too expensive, consider that I could have installed the iPhone or iPad or Android or desktop versions of the Nook software and still have gotten the same books for free. Given the huge amount of free content available for ebook readers, we're already to the point that they're significantly cheaper than their printed equivalents, even if there's a non-zero initial hardware cost.
You make a very compelling argument against the existence of Free Software, and yet here I am writing this on a FOSS operating system running a FOSS desktop and a FOSS browser that connects to the Internet via a chain of FOSS routers.
This is not the RIAA here, authors need book sales to get paid. Rant all you want about free information, but unless you have a real solution for the business model, the only authors you'll see dedicating themselves to the art are cranks writing manifestos and dilettantes who are already well-off enough to do it as a hobby.
Cory Doctorow disagrees with you. As far as I know, he was not rich when he started making all his books free for the downloading.
So HDMI needs 2.8gbps so support 1920x1080 @ 60Hz.
Here at work, I can display a window running on my desktop at home over a 256Kbps outbound DSL connection. The trick is that it doesn't send the state of every pixel in the window 60 times per second - it only sends the diffs. Unless you actually need to update the entire screen at 60Hz, the method scales pretty well.
Well, if the acid tests didn't involve purposely broken broken it wouldn't be so bad.
The Acid tests are unit tests for browsers. When you write unit tests at work, do you only check for correct results with good data or do you also check that your programs handle bad inputs gracefully? Of course Acid tests are purposefully broken. Every good unit test in the world is.
Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.
Remember when we were all out at the bar, and you were bitching that you needed a new place to live, and I said that my roommate was clearing out? He, um, changed his mind.
And it could be ported to other kernels, a BSD for instance.
I'd love to run OpenBSD on my Wi-Fi router. It's so much easier for me to administer a standard BSD installation than an ad-hoc Linux system with distro-specific configuration and init scripts.
5. Invisible and unmeasurable sales. Nobody will know and can put in a business case that this is why you bought that router.
They do because I tell them. No, seriously. I use the comments form on vendor websites to thank them for making Linux-compatible hardware. I don't do it out of gratitude - they got my real thanks at the cash register - but out of the self-interest of making them aware of the market.
Nothing like a punchdown block to impress the techs.
Yep, and it's really not hard at all to do. You only have to look at one for about 5 seconds before you can figure out how to wire one yourself. Pro-tip: spring for a pack of bridge clips instead of trying to wire the bridges yourself. Unless you do this for a living, you'll probably never get good enough to take the cool shortcuts. The best part about the block is that it's shorthand for "I've already tried all the easy stuff - you can go ahead and start on the more complicated problems."
It uses them alongside their own contact list. A given contact can be in either or both lists. If that were the distinguishing characteristic, it seems like that would be easy enough to handle in a Google Voice app.
Toktumi's Line2 has a dialer that can originate a VOIP call or pass off the call to the iPhone's own voice system. It also has its own address book. Honestly, I don't really see the difference between Line2 and Google Voice for these purposes.
Common residential service used something approaching zip cord from about 1960 on, maybe earlier. This isn't even twisted. You wonder why your DSL service is so crappy? I wonder how it even works at all. 10Base-T would barf on 30 feet of straight-line zip cord, and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1.
When I moved into my current house nearly 10 years ago, I noticed that the (multiple) incoming phone lines all came into my garage, every jack in my house was individually ran back to the same spot, and the whole mess was literally a ball of tangle cabled and wire nuts. Being the ex-telco geek that I almost was - carrying a CO access badge and everything - I spent a few hours one weekend replacing the whole mess with a punchdown block. When I got DSL, I ran a new wire directly from the block to the modem and installed a line filter right at the block so that all other jacks in the house are covered.
We were having DSL problems once due to a cracked insulator on the pole that let water into the wires every time we got a heavy rainstorm. The lineman came out to my house and asked to see how my house was wired. When he found my punchdown block and the dedicated line and found out that I'd installed it all, he stopped sniffing around the house and went outside to find the problem. That by itself was worth the hassle.
Incidentally, don't say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo". The "a as in..." bit is superfluous. Just say "alpha, bravo" and keep the clutter to a minimum.
Customer service: Sir, our program can't hold your whole last name so it will be abbreviated on your mailing label.
Me: Your program can't handle last names with eight letters?
Her: Well, I have S-I-E-R-R-A-T-A-N-G-O-R-O-M-E-O...
Me: [facepalm.]
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
First - and I'd like you to think about this honestly before you answer - would you be as supportive if the web site in question advocated burning Bibles? Or would you hold that action up as a protest against the intrusion of Christianity on American government or similar? Be honest with yourself.
Second, I appreciate that Rackspace has some corporate ethics. I hope they similarly appreciate that I won't be contracting for services with them again because they've demonstrated a willingness to cut off paying customers on a whim. Screw them. Maybe next month someone in charge of such things would decide that my past donations to Ducks Unlimited means that I endorse torturing waterfowl and drop my account.
Rackspace has had enough high-publicity problems already without them deciding to take on the role of moral enforcer. Well, good luck with that!
In general, "all but foo" means that everything foo-like has happened, short of foo itself. In this case, it means that ACTA hasn't been officially dropped, but it might as well have been because everything up to (but not including) its formal abandonment has taken place.
Yep - mostly. I do a lot of image processing at work and discovered that all libraries suck most heinously if you work outside their assumptions. I eventually wrote my own, and started with a base class that uses calls to ImageMagick's "convert" command for every operation that our other in-house code would ever need. Then I subclassed it with format-specific classes that use better tools for specific operations.
For instance, we very often have to split multi-page images into individual pages. The base class implements that with convert's "+adjoin" operator which pretty much always works for every image format. Unfortunately, it's slow as hell on large TIFF images. I overloaded TiffImage.split() to call the "tiffsplit" utility instead. On a sample image I just now tested, "convert +adjoin foo.tif" took 19.7 seconds, while "tiffsplit foo.tif" took 3.0. Similarly, joining them back together with "convert -adjoin" took 18.4 seconds, while "tiffcp" took 12.5 seconds. Based on that, TiffImage.combine() calls "tiffcp".
The resulting library is a set of the most optimized methods I know of for performing all those operations, backed up with benchmarks. Each subclass is actually pretty simple since it only contains those few functions, but the payoff is a huge win.
Still, the best optimization for ImageMagick is to replace it with GraphicsMagick. I've yet to have a problem with that upgrade.
In other words you document the intent of every paragraph of code, and a high level explanation of how it does it.
No offense, but I despise that style of commenting. I can tell what your code is doing by reading the code. What I don't know is why you're doing it that way. Why are you looking for needles? Have you proven needles are the only thing in your haystack made out of iron so that the code won't detect nails, screws, and hatchets six months from now? Is there a reason your haystack is a list and not a binary tree? These are the things I need to know to maintain your code. I don't need to be told how a loop works.
Well, that was shorthand for longer comments like "Customer Foo sends poorly-formatted XML, so look at the 3rd word in the 4th line for their invoice number, as per bug 1351 from Jane."
Remember that comments are not for describing what the code technically does (that is what the code is for), comments are for what the code is intended to do.
Amen. The best practice I ever adopted was adding comments like "As per bug #1351", so that a year later I can remember why I picked took a seemingly screwy approach (that maybe implements a workaround for a customer's weird proprietary stuff) instead of doing it the obvious way.
It doesn't "beat out" Flip's products, either. It just barely matches them on feature set -- not a difficult task, because the Flip recorders are likewise extremely poorly specified, and sold mostly on hype.
I bought a Flip for two reasons: 1) it was cheap, 2) it's extremely simple and I don't need 1,000 "professional" settings to record my kid's piano recital. Sure, there are better cameras, but there weren't any that were better and cheaper and easier to use when I bought mine.
And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
That's easily solvable:
Create a subdirectory called "storedprocs" inside your SCM directory.
Inside that subdirectory, make files with names like "checkinvoice.sql" that store the sequence of commands required to create a stored procedure - one per file. Start each one with a statement like CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION myschema.checkinvoice([...]).
Manage those files with your SCM system. Group them by database, or by project, or by phase of the moon, or by whatever else makes sense to you.
To update every stored procedure you've ever written, or to build out a new database: cd storedprocs; psql < *.sql
Stored procedures don't have to be any more difficult to manage than any other code.
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Who are you arguing with? I never said anything to the contrary of your claims.
Only the wealthy can afford e-book readers and the subsequent fees.
I bought a Nook this summer for $150. Since then, B&N have given me 112 free classic books - not the Google Books versions, but nicely typeset and edited copies - and about another dozen current novels. There is no maintenance or rental cost to keep those copies forever, and I can mount my Nook as a USB hard drive to copy off the files for backup (or to upload my own PDFs, or ebooks I've obtained from other vendors).
And if $150 / 125 per book is too expensive, consider that I could have installed the iPhone or iPad or Android or desktop versions of the Nook software and still have gotten the same books for free. Given the huge amount of free content available for ebook readers, we're already to the point that they're significantly cheaper than their printed equivalents, even if there's a non-zero initial hardware cost.
You make a very compelling argument against the existence of Free Software, and yet here I am writing this on a FOSS operating system running a FOSS desktop and a FOSS browser that connects to the Internet via a chain of FOSS routers.
This is not the RIAA here, authors need book sales to get paid. Rant all you want about free information, but unless you have a real solution for the business model, the only authors you'll see dedicating themselves to the art are cranks writing manifestos and dilettantes who are already well-off enough to do it as a hobby.
Cory Doctorow disagrees with you. As far as I know, he was not rich when he started making all his books free for the downloading.
So HDMI needs 2.8gbps so support 1920x1080 @ 60Hz.
Here at work, I can display a window running on my desktop at home over a 256Kbps outbound DSL connection. The trick is that it doesn't send the state of every pixel in the window 60 times per second - it only sends the diffs. Unless you actually need to update the entire screen at 60Hz, the method scales pretty well.
Well, if the acid tests didn't involve purposely broken broken it wouldn't be so bad.
The Acid tests are unit tests for browsers. When you write unit tests at work, do you only check for correct results with good data or do you also check that your programs handle bad inputs gracefully? Of course Acid tests are purposefully broken. Every good unit test in the world is.
Normally when *I* drink Jaeger all night, I end up shitting in the fucking shower in the morning.
Remember when we were all out at the bar, and you were bitching that you needed a new place to live, and I said that my roommate was clearing out? He, um, changed his mind.
And it could be ported to other kernels, a BSD for instance.
I'd love to run OpenBSD on my Wi-Fi router. It's so much easier for me to administer a standard BSD installation than an ad-hoc Linux system with distro-specific configuration and init scripts.
5. Invisible and unmeasurable sales. Nobody will know and can put in a business case that this is why you bought that router.
They do because I tell them. No, seriously. I use the comments form on vendor websites to thank them for making Linux-compatible hardware. I don't do it out of gratitude - they got my real thanks at the cash register - but out of the self-interest of making them aware of the market.
Nothing like a punchdown block to impress the techs.
Yep, and it's really not hard at all to do. You only have to look at one for about 5 seconds before you can figure out how to wire one yourself. Pro-tip: spring for a pack of bridge clips instead of trying to wire the bridges yourself. Unless you do this for a living, you'll probably never get good enough to take the cool shortcuts. The best part about the block is that it's shorthand for "I've already tried all the easy stuff - you can go ahead and start on the more complicated problems."
It uses them alongside their own contact list. A given contact can be in either or both lists. If that were the distinguishing characteristic, it seems like that would be easy enough to handle in a Google Voice app.
Toktumi's Line2 has a dialer that can originate a VOIP call or pass off the call to the iPhone's own voice system. It also has its own address book. Honestly, I don't really see the difference between Line2 and Google Voice for these purposes.
Common residential service used something approaching zip cord from about 1960 on, maybe earlier. This isn't even twisted. You wonder why your DSL service is so crappy? I wonder how it even works at all. 10Base-T would barf on 30 feet of straight-line zip cord, and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1.
When I moved into my current house nearly 10 years ago, I noticed that the (multiple) incoming phone lines all came into my garage, every jack in my house was individually ran back to the same spot, and the whole mess was literally a ball of tangle cabled and wire nuts. Being the ex-telco geek that I almost was - carrying a CO access badge and everything - I spent a few hours one weekend replacing the whole mess with a punchdown block. When I got DSL, I ran a new wire directly from the block to the modem and installed a line filter right at the block so that all other jacks in the house are covered.
We were having DSL problems once due to a cracked insulator on the pole that let water into the wires every time we got a heavy rainstorm. The lineman came out to my house and asked to see how my house was wired. When he found my punchdown block and the dedicated line and found out that I'd installed it all, he stopped sniffing around the house and went outside to find the problem. That by itself was worth the hassle.
Incidentally, don't say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo". The "a as in..." bit is superfluous. Just say "alpha, bravo" and keep the clutter to a minimum.
Customer service: Sir, our program can't hold your whole last name so it will be abbreviated on your mailing label.
Me: Your program can't handle last names with eight letters?
Her: Well, I have S-I-E-R-R-A-T-A-N-G-O-R-O-M-E-O...
Me: [facepalm.]
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
First - and I'd like you to think about this honestly before you answer - would you be as supportive if the web site in question advocated burning Bibles? Or would you hold that action up as a protest against the intrusion of Christianity on American government or similar? Be honest with yourself.
Second, I appreciate that Rackspace has some corporate ethics. I hope they similarly appreciate that I won't be contracting for services with them again because they've demonstrated a willingness to cut off paying customers on a whim. Screw them. Maybe next month someone in charge of such things would decide that my past donations to Ducks Unlimited means that I endorse torturing waterfowl and drop my account.
Rackspace has had enough high-publicity problems already without them deciding to take on the role of moral enforcer. Well, good luck with that!
In general, "all but foo" means that everything foo-like has happened, short of foo itself. In this case, it means that ACTA hasn't been officially dropped, but it might as well have been because everything up to (but not including) its formal abandonment has taken place.
I can't help but think these donations and effort could have been directed to people more in need.
Everything can be directed to people more in need.
Does it work any better now?
Yep - mostly. I do a lot of image processing at work and discovered that all libraries suck most heinously if you work outside their assumptions. I eventually wrote my own, and started with a base class that uses calls to ImageMagick's "convert" command for every operation that our other in-house code would ever need. Then I subclassed it with format-specific classes that use better tools for specific operations.
For instance, we very often have to split multi-page images into individual pages. The base class implements that with convert's "+adjoin" operator which pretty much always works for every image format. Unfortunately, it's slow as hell on large TIFF images. I overloaded TiffImage.split() to call the "tiffsplit" utility instead. On a sample image I just now tested, "convert +adjoin foo.tif" took 19.7 seconds, while "tiffsplit foo.tif" took 3.0. Similarly, joining them back together with "convert -adjoin" took 18.4 seconds, while "tiffcp" took 12.5 seconds. Based on that, TiffImage.combine() calls "tiffcp".
The resulting library is a set of the most optimized methods I know of for performing all those operations, backed up with benchmarks. Each subclass is actually pretty simple since it only contains those few functions, but the payoff is a huge win.
Still, the best optimization for ImageMagick is to replace it with GraphicsMagick. I've yet to have a problem with that upgrade.
In other words you document the intent of every paragraph of code, and a high level explanation of how it does it.
No offense, but I despise that style of commenting. I can tell what your code is doing by reading the code. What I don't know is why you're doing it that way. Why are you looking for needles? Have you proven needles are the only thing in your haystack made out of iron so that the code won't detect nails, screws, and hatchets six months from now? Is there a reason your haystack is a list and not a binary tree? These are the things I need to know to maintain your code. I don't need to be told how a loop works.
Well, that was shorthand for longer comments like "Customer Foo sends poorly-formatted XML, so look at the 3rd word in the 4th line for their invoice number, as per bug 1351 from Jane."
Remember that comments are not for describing what the code technically does (that is what the code is for), comments are for what the code is intended to do.
Amen. The best practice I ever adopted was adding comments like "As per bug #1351", so that a year later I can remember why I picked took a seemingly screwy approach (that maybe implements a workaround for a customer's weird proprietary stuff) instead of doing it the obvious way.
It doesn't "beat out" Flip's products, either. It just barely matches them on feature set -- not a difficult task, because the Flip recorders are likewise extremely poorly specified, and sold mostly on hype.
I bought a Flip for two reasons: 1) it was cheap, 2) it's extremely simple and I don't need 1,000 "professional" settings to record my kid's piano recital. Sure, there are better cameras, but there weren't any that were better and cheaper and easier to use when I bought mine.
And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
That's easily solvable:
Stored procedures don't have to be any more difficult to manage than any other code.
The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you?
As it turns out, yes. I was using this a decade ago in Gnus.
You mean, aside from the lack of credibility attributed to psychiatry in general?
Please come out of the closet, Mr. Cruise.