What a bunch of size queens. Bigger isn't necessarily better. In many ways, big companies are what's wrong with our economy, while small companies provide more and better jobs.
I'm over 40 and can't focus closer than 18 inches anyway, so it doesn't matter to me.:)
Seriously, I work with a lot of people who have worse presbyopia than I do (mine's in the early stages), and this trend toward higher resolution displays isn't necessarily a good thing for them. Quadruple the resolution of the display like this, and developers are going to try to take advantage of that to squeeze more and more detail (e.g. smaller text) into that 3.5" screen. But all that resolution doesn't do any good if you have to hold it at arm's length to focus. (Show me a 60-year-old with a laptop LCD set to its native resolution instead of being down-sampled for larger images, and I'll show you someone using strong corrective lenses.) With lower-res screens (such as 72dpi) the text was big enough to read even if you couldn't focus on it, because the dot pitch required it. Not any more. So you're going to see more and more over-50s using "phone glasses" just to read the durn things.
In all seriousness, these are warning signs that things are going to get very nasty in the Korean Peninsula very soon.
When a totalitarian regime plays the "we are being victimized by the rest of the world" card in their nationalistic propaganda, the people will generally believe it and will unite in support of the leader, sometimes for decades. But when a regime tries to stoke the nationalistic fires by playing the "we are the greatest country in the world" card and making impossible promises of how gloriously successful they will be in the coming years, promises that will very quickly be seen by everyone as the bullshit they are, something's gonna happen and it's gonna happen soon.
Any mature and competent journalist knows that they are at risk of being dis-invited from future press conferences and "media events" if they report unfavorably about a company, refuse to honor "embargoed" news, or otherwise piss off that company. It's what happens. It's one of the factors that gets weighed when deciding whether to run a story, and you do it – or don't do it –depending on whether the action is worth enduring the re-action. When Gizmodo ran the "iPhone 4" story, they knew there would be consequences. If they weren't prepared to be dis-invited to WWDC, if maintaining "access" was important enough to them, they wouldn't have run the story. Obviously it wasn't. And it was their choice.
The article's whole line of argument is utterly unsound. The author apparently doesn't grasp technology or economics. Her home DSL and her 3G data plan are simply not the same thing.
"Data access" is not universally fungible. The cost to deliver 1MB of data by DSL is not the same as delivering it by 3G, which is not the same as delivering it by CD+USPS, which is also not the same as delivering it by wifi+shared-T1, etc. If AT&T charges me separately (at a higher rate) to deliver data to me by 3G, distinct from their charge to deliver it to me by DSL, that's just good business sense and smart use of finite resources.
Furthermore, the value to me of these various delivery channels is not the same: the ability to load a weather map on my phone in the middle of nowhere is worth more than loading it from the comfort of my home. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other. The ability to download a complete distro of Linux at 6Mbps is worth more than doing it at 56Kbps. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other.
So I guess they solved all of the other societal and economic problems in South Africa now, that they are considering this porn ban.
See, that's just it. Since the dismantling of Apartheid, South Africa has made such progress on human rights and social justice (still far from perfect, but way better than it used to be) that they have to take measures like this to try to fsck the place up again.
Do you honestly believe that creating.xxx would do anything at all to solve the pop-up and hijacking problems you mention in your first paragraph? People who engage in such underhanded tactics are not going to willingly restrict themselves to a porn domain.
EPOC was wonderful. I bought one used Psion Series3 after another for 10 years as they kept breaking, and/or performed surgery to replace the exhausted batteries, just so I could keep using the software. I looked at Blackberry, PalmOS, and WinMobile devices from time to time, but couldn't stand any of them. I finally retired the Psion last year, replacing it with an iPod Touch.
As long as pharmaceutical development is a private for-profit enterprise, the motives of the entities engaging in it will always be suspect, and that suspicion will usually be warranted.
How is this different from transmitting a virus via floppy diskette, other than the fact that he carried it on the inside of his hand, and the read/write mechanism was RF instead of magnetic?
"I'm not against flash, but i would like to be able to opt it out without losing any feature of the website i'm browsing."
That's a bit like asking to use a black and white TV, but without losing any attributes of the movie you're watching. You'll get your wish if you're watching "Psycho", but only for part of "The Wizard of Oz", and for "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" you're just plain out of luck.
Before Adobe bought Macromedia and decided to turn Flash into a video-streaming plugin, it actually did serve as a good solution to the balkanization of nonstandard HTML/javascript/CSS implementations for developers who wanted or needed a consistent user interface across platforms. Granted, it required that the user install the Flash plugin, but once they did, you could be reasonably certain that all of your buttons were placed, looked, and functioned correctly, that all of your UI feedback animations played correctly, that the correct fonts were displayed and scaled correctly, etc. Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
They needed an excuse? Lucky her. One of my former employers fired me one day for no stated reason whatsoever (and no legitimate reason I could figure out). At-will employment sucks for the employee.
Answering the "is-a-new-tesla-greener-than-an-existing-hummer?" in the header:
Yes, collectively in the long term. Every new electric car put on the road will contribute via networking effects to the development of an infrastructure to support electrics, and every gas-burning car taken off the road will contribute to the dismantling of the infrastructure that drills (and spills) for oil underwater, ships (and slicks) it in tankers around the world, etc. A new car is only manufactured once; it will continue to interact as a part of our environment for years (possibly decades) to come.
Back in high school I took a computer class in which the instructor gave out punch cards as prizes. (The cards were being phased out by the school's data processing center.) The semester-end grand prize was the "Herman DOLLARith" award, which had an Eisenhower dollar coin attached. The weekly prizes were "Herman HOLErith" cards, which instead had a hole cut out, filled by aluminum foil that had been embossed with a dollar coin.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's good for rousing the idiot reactionaries. Why does Fox News publish any story (not counting the celebrity gossip pieces)?
“insulting,” “sickening” and “frankly, horrifying.”
Yep the fake outrage from the right-wingers is happening just as you'd expect.
What a bunch of size queens. Bigger isn't necessarily better. In many ways, big companies are what's wrong with our economy, while small companies provide more and better jobs.
Now I won't have anybody calling me.... :-(
I'm over 40 and can't focus closer than 18 inches anyway, so it doesn't matter to me. :)
Seriously, I work with a lot of people who have worse presbyopia than I do (mine's in the early stages), and this trend toward higher resolution displays isn't necessarily a good thing for them. Quadruple the resolution of the display like this, and developers are going to try to take advantage of that to squeeze more and more detail (e.g. smaller text) into that 3.5" screen. But all that resolution doesn't do any good if you have to hold it at arm's length to focus. (Show me a 60-year-old with a laptop LCD set to its native resolution instead of being down-sampled for larger images, and I'll show you someone using strong corrective lenses.) With lower-res screens (such as 72dpi) the text was big enough to read even if you couldn't focus on it, because the dot pitch required it. Not any more. So you're going to see more and more over-50s using "phone glasses" just to read the durn things.
In all seriousness, these are warning signs that things are going to get very nasty in the Korean Peninsula very soon.
When a totalitarian regime plays the "we are being victimized by the rest of the world" card in their nationalistic propaganda, the people will generally believe it and will unite in support of the leader, sometimes for decades. But when a regime tries to stoke the nationalistic fires by playing the "we are the greatest country in the world" card and making impossible promises of how gloriously successful they will be in the coming years, promises that will very quickly be seen by everyone as the bullshit they are, something's gonna happen and it's gonna happen soon.
Any mature and competent journalist knows that they are at risk of being dis-invited from future press conferences and "media events" if they report unfavorably about a company, refuse to honor "embargoed" news, or otherwise piss off that company. It's what happens. It's one of the factors that gets weighed when deciding whether to run a story, and you do it – or don't do it –depending on whether the action is worth enduring the re-action. When Gizmodo ran the "iPhone 4" story, they knew there would be consequences. If they weren't prepared to be dis-invited to WWDC, if maintaining "access" was important enough to them, they wouldn't have run the story. Obviously it wasn't. And it was their choice.
The article's whole line of argument is utterly unsound. The author apparently doesn't grasp technology or economics. Her home DSL and her 3G data plan are simply not the same thing.
"Data access" is not universally fungible. The cost to deliver 1MB of data by DSL is not the same as delivering it by 3G, which is not the same as delivering it by CD+USPS, which is also not the same as delivering it by wifi+shared-T1, etc. If AT&T charges me separately (at a higher rate) to deliver data to me by 3G, distinct from their charge to deliver it to me by DSL, that's just good business sense and smart use of finite resources.
Furthermore, the value to me of these various delivery channels is not the same: the ability to load a weather map on my phone in the middle of nowhere is worth more than loading it from the comfort of my home. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other. The ability to download a complete distro of Linux at 6Mbps is worth more than doing it at 56Kbps. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other.
nobody knowing you're a dog.
That's not a bug; it's a feature.
Based on my stress levels and mood, the machine just told me to go to the bar for a while.
Rounding error.
Moving 90% wouldn't do any good, because it's the sleazy 10% who would never comply that are the problem in the first place.
Based on the taste of the "high-gravity" beers that have been coming to market lately, I think I'll stick to drinking the traditional brews.
See, that's just it. Since the dismantling of Apartheid, South Africa has made such progress on human rights and social justice (still far from perfect, but way better than it used to be) that they have to take measures like this to try to fsck the place up again.
Do you honestly believe that creating .xxx would do anything at all to solve the pop-up and hijacking problems you mention in your first paragraph? People who engage in such underhanded tactics are not going to willingly restrict themselves to a porn domain.
And in other news, studies show that many people who are members of organized religion, also accept the scientific method and its conclusions.
Never underestimate the ability of the human mind to hedge its bets.
EPOC was wonderful. I bought one used Psion Series3 after another for 10 years as they kept breaking, and/or performed surgery to replace the exhausted batteries, just so I could keep using the software. I looked at Blackberry, PalmOS, and WinMobile devices from time to time, but couldn't stand any of them. I finally retired the Psion last year, replacing it with an iPod Touch.
As long as pharmaceutical development is a private for-profit enterprise, the motives of the entities engaging in it will always be suspect, and that suspicion will usually be warranted.
How is this different from transmitting a virus via floppy diskette, other than the fact that he carried it on the inside of his hand, and the read/write mechanism was RF instead of magnetic?
"I'm not against flash, but i would like to be able to opt it out without losing any feature of the website i'm browsing."
That's a bit like asking to use a black and white TV, but without losing any attributes of the movie you're watching. You'll get your wish if you're watching "Psycho", but only for part of "The Wizard of Oz", and for "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" you're just plain out of luck.
Before Adobe bought Macromedia and decided to turn Flash into a video-streaming plugin, it actually did serve as a good solution to the balkanization of nonstandard HTML/javascript/CSS implementations for developers who wanted or needed a consistent user interface across platforms. Granted, it required that the user install the Flash plugin, but once they did, you could be reasonably certain that all of your buttons were placed, looked, and functioned correctly, that all of your UI feedback animations played correctly, that the correct fonts were displayed and scaled correctly, etc. Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.
They needed an excuse? Lucky her. One of my former employers fired me one day for no stated reason whatsoever (and no legitimate reason I could figure out). At-will employment sucks for the employee.
Answering the "is-a-new-tesla-greener-than-an-existing-hummer?" in the header:
Yes, collectively in the long term. Every new electric car put on the road will contribute via networking effects to the development of an infrastructure to support electrics, and every gas-burning car taken off the road will contribute to the dismantling of the infrastructure that drills (and spills) for oil underwater, ships (and slicks) it in tankers around the world, etc. A new car is only manufactured once; it will continue to interact as a part of our environment for years (possibly decades) to come.
Back in high school I took a computer class in which the instructor gave out punch cards as prizes. (The cards were being phased out by the school's data processing center.) The semester-end grand prize was the "Herman DOLLARith" award, which had an Eisenhower dollar coin attached. The weekly prizes were "Herman HOLErith" cards, which instead had a hole cut out, filled by aluminum foil that had been embossed with a dollar coin.