I would disagree that the MS site " is supposed to be an (unbiased) news aggregate". From the MS point of view, I'm sure it is supposed to be a proft-making enterprise.
This is not about what MS would like to claim, it is about how they are perceived in the marketplace. As others have noted, paid placement is something the marketplace has voted overwhelmingly undesirable. That is as true for news aggregators as it is for search engines.
Since aggregators contain no original reporting, they can't scooped. Every story they point to has already been published, so, in a very real sense, aggregators are scooped on every story.
Incorrect. The intent of an aggregate is to scoop every site I never/less often visit. That is why it needs to be fair to work properly. But if I find that going to any site directly gets me news faster than going to the aggregate (because of delays to allow top placement of MSNBC articles), then it makes it much less likely I will use the aggregate. A bias does not benefit the aggregate in the marketplace.
Google seems as likely to use a Slashdot story about an event as it is an original report in something like the International Herald Tribune.
Well maybe, just maybe, how Slashdot covers a story (i.e., included discussion) is more newsworthy than a link to any standard AP wire regurgitation. Wouldn't that make Google's form of selection more like what you want than Microsoft's is? I think it's funny that you prefer a human editor to judge what makes a better story, but for some reason you are trying to defend MS for using an automated system to place not the best story first, but merely their story. Make up your mind.
...Slashdot discovers businesses prefer to sell their own products, not their competitors.
The problem is that the "product" is supposed to be an (unbiased) news aggregate. As someone who runs an aggregator (Mac Aggregate Tracker), I can tell you there is zero net benefit in even appearing to show favor, let alone in specifically saying you give special treatment, as MS has admitted.
Maybe you don't see it, but the real result is probably going to be that at no time will anyone else scoop MSNBC according to Newsbot. Their software will gather news from other sites and if it finds something that MSNBC isn't covering, it will simply not publish. Instead, it would likely notify some grunt reporter to kick out an article so that MSNBC gets top billing. Holding news in that way, or any other shenanigans they come up with because they decide to self-promote, does not benefit the news consumer.
Most games (hell, software projects of all kinds) don't get finished mainly because they are started by the wrong people. Some joker with minimal OpenGL experience comes up with a "wouldn't it be cool" idea and then immediately thinks they have to announce it to the world. They then spend all their time without a solid plan engaged in activities that do little more than stroke their own ego. Those people are best told not to finish, but to not even start.
...for those of us who read Slashdot, the question becomes "why?"
For this particular person that reads Slashdot, the full question is "Why don't you shut the hell up until you can actually market a turnkey MythTV box that competes with the likes of TiVo?" I tinker enough with technology all day long and I will gladly pay good money so I don't have to tinker some more just to replace a VCR.
With some old leftover hardware and a $150 TV card, it was ridiculously easy to set up, even though a little Linux experience did help. Sure, the commercial detection is "programmed" and prone to miss commercials or (on occasion) think that the program itself is the commercial . ..
No exactly a ringing endorsement there. I paid $199 for my TiVo four years ago (running sans guide for the last 3), and when I wear it out I'll gladly get another one, or whatever else might be on the market that's better. So you've got maybe a good couple years to put out a sub-$300 package that I can plunk down on the couch and just watch. If you think that's so easy to do, welcome to your new millionaire lifestyle. If not, get used to your parent's basement and your "free" PVR that thinks programs are commercials.
But it's annoying to me when they insist on being ignorant about the tools that they need to do their jobs, and that I'm paid to maintain.
Are they really the tools the users wanted to do the job, or are they merely the ones you IT guys imposed on them? Do they get the job done because of you or in spite of you? Everything you say seems you indicate you are part of the problem. That's par for the course, too, with most corporate IT.
Nobody says "I'm car-illiterate" with a little chuckle after they wrap a sedan around a tree, but users who accidentally destroy their computers somehow think it's IT's fault.
If they picked the car they wrapped around the tree, they know they're responsible. If they sit down and the only computer stuff they can use is mandated by IT, damn straight it's IT's fault if tools don't work right for the users.
Bah! Gartner's fabricated estimate is totally unnecessary for this. Actual usage measurements, like the Google Zeitgeist are more telling. Linux has never broken 1% and as a desktop system I really wouldn't count on it passing the Mac any year soon.
That's how they know who distributed the binary and whose account to revoke.
This isn't about the binary, it's about the source. They can certainly try to tag the source, but it's easy enough to run a diff on two copies. Trying to tag the source would only seem to make it easier to track down how they handle binary tagging. It all still adds up to a lot of dumb moves trying to avoid following the GPL as intended.
However, redistribution terminates Sveasoft subscription rights.
How would they know? Any subscriber can just give the CD to a buddy to distribute. Regardless, it seems they're definitely trying to skirt the spirit of the GPL, and for that I hope they sink into obscurity, at which point their subscription isn't worth squat anyway.
I am a developer myself, so this post is in no way meant to offend developers. However it's true that developers (generally) do not see things the same way that most users do.
I'm also a developer and I'd say you're probably right when it comes to common Linux open source apps, but if you hop over to a platform like Mac OS X you can easily find developers that not only scratch their own itches, but do it in a way that is usable. I know a lot is said about how open source frees up a developer to do their own thing, but the reality is that if Linux wants to make a serious push into the desktop market it has to do away with all the choice-for-the-sake-of-choice nonsense. The big problem is that so much garbage is released free-like-beer that too many people accept it rather than paying even $5 for something that works well. Linux will never make inroads on the desktop simply because nobody is will to pay for usability.
I used cnnsi@mydomain. cnnsi sold it and now I get several hundred spam a day there.
Are you sure they sold it, or were you merely a target of a dictionary attack (the dictionary being domains)? Same will go for amtrack@. All a spammer has to do is decide it's a significant enough domain to add to a dictionary and, BAM, you're getting spam there without any kind of TOS violation on Amtrack's part. Common word domains like amazon@ have long been dinged, and it is foolish to blame the company for your own poorly thought out system.
If you really want to use a catch-all to track who sells your address, you have to use a hash or something else that you keep entirely secret and is not easy to guess, like c66915c4ff6a27e5f3aac08f58130ba9 for . . . guess who!:-) Otherwise you're just adding to the abuse that the spammers are dishing out to you.
My own experience with a catch-all is that you're safe until you're hit by a dictionary attack, and then it never stops. I have domains with next to no traffic and a catch-all is fine, but in the last year I've had two of them get hit by dictionary attacks and after that each domain gets an increasing stream of spam attempts, currently around 1000/day. That's bad enough that I shut off the catch-all for the one I don't really use it with. The other one keeps SpamCop full.
Math is interesting, math is fun, math is usefull, but math is not a sport.
Math is natural - math is good
Not everybody derives
But everybody should
Math is interesting - math is fun
Math is best when it's....one plus one
one plus one
Of course, by geeky implication from this, it's clear why George Michael liked 1+1. Most guys would instead go for 1+0, and really go for 0+1+0. Yeah!:-)
If you mis-dial a number on a cell-phone, it costs more, so it's nice to check the make sure you dialed correctly.
That still doesn't imply a need for a screen. I mean, you have as a given this device that does speech input and output. Why can't it speak the number to you? You could certain opt for a screen, but having different shells allows you not carry a lot of bulky/fragile extras when you don't need them.
That, and you would certainly need a screen to keep a phone-book in your cell phone, which was something I left out of my original feature list.
But that's still a feature external to the core module. An address book abstracts as a special kind of dialing pad, and its output could also be spoken just as easily. Also, having an address book negates a lot of the need for a screen to verify the exact numbers dialed.
Allow someone to record their own ringtones. I've been considering making my phone ring with just me saying "ring."
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why we have mechanical ringing anymore. Doesn't a cell call essentially "start" when it is dialed? Why then can't the "ring" on the other end simply be me speaking already: "Hey, Sam, this is Doc and I've been thinking about . .." It all goes right to voice mail if they don't pick up! And instead of annoying tones interrupting people talking, you just have another person talking.
I just want a couple of useful features in a nice inexpensive phone I won't be afraid to actually use.
I'll go the extra step and say phones should be modular, since 90% of the "features" being added have nothing to do with the core phone functionality at all.
Folds up to protect the screen from my pocket.
Why even have a screen? A land line certainly doesn't need one. The cell phone core is simple, and can probably be provided on the cheap with one-button operation. A generic core with a headset connector that did nothing but dial 911 should sell by the boatload for $50. That connector would also allow it to dock with more advanced shells to provide the extended features that are popular at any given time. Adding a standard keypad and screen, folding or not/camera or not, is an upgrade that the buyer can decide on at any time.
A ringtone that sounds like a phone. This is a pet peeve, I don't want some annoying song to play when I get a call, I just want something to let me know I have a call, that's it.
The problem is that a phone just rings, it doesn't ring at you. The standard scene is at a party where someone's phone rings and everyone has to check to see if it's theirs. I still don't see the point in any standard ring tones, because there is always a chance for overlap. Instead, what I would like to be able to do is record my friend's voice and and associate it with their number. That way I'll at least get a good chuckle when they call and my phone says something like "Hey, Doc, any chance you'll let me out of your pants?"
Rugged. Should take at the very least a 3-foot drop.
Get a rugged shell! But, really, if the core module is small enough you should need to futz with it enough so that it's a real drop hazard. If you hooked it to a Bluetooth shell that supported voice dialing, you could just use a headset and never even pull the damn thing out.
I'm reasonably certain that's the comment that earned your ire based on the kinds of projects I see you have on the web site.
You're at least half right. The fact that I do a lot of Mac work certainly brought your comment to my attention, but I would probably have been just as likely to kill file (or "foe", as Slashdot has it) you if you had made the same comments about Windows. My issue wasn't with the Mac bashing (hell, I take issue with Apple on a number of their decisions), but the general mindlessness of platform bashing.
1. While Apple products probably deserve to be called streamlined, I did go a bit far in calling them dumbed down. I wasn't thinking when I said that, and I was allowing myself to play the stereotype without examining it. The last time I used a Mac was in about 1995, so my impressions of it are out of date and irrelevant by now.
I take no issue with someone simply saying Apple dumbs stuff down, but when it's completely unsubstantiated I really don't have time to listen to it. You never said what the particulars were such that a Mac is too simplified for your needs. Instead, you just made wide-sweeping platform statements. That's a bad position to take for any system. You at least acknowledge that now, but it's not like you didn't have a chance to reconsider your position before your post, in the 5+ years that Mac OS X has been around and covered by Slashdot with increasing interest.
2. Apple's DOES have a proprietary architecture in the sense that I have to buy their hardware to run their OS. There just no denying that. I would be all over OS X if I could run it on x86 and other machine architectures and I didn't have to buy their hardware to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't have as much control over my computing environment as does Apple.
Untrue for the most part for most people. What you are missing here is that Apple makes systems and should be compared to any other Wintel system company. You pay an OS "tax" when you get Dell the same way you do when you get a Mac. You can still install Linux on either company's hardware, but you can't take the OS one provides and put it on the other's hardware. There is no real difference that is worthy of comment. Only geeks imagine the x86 provides exceptional freedom of choice because we can more easily build and upgrade our own machines. Still, there is nothing "entirely proprietary" about Apple's RAM, IDE, USB, PCI, AGP, etc, etc.
I also find it odd to say you'd run the OS if it weren't for the hardware, which makes little sense to me. It's not like Apple is the one putting out shoddy beige boxes. Again, as a geek, you probably imagine that because you can throw together a box for $500 it's the same as running a company to sell $500 systems. I tend to actually price out comparable system, and I usually find the Apple machines to be a better deal for the same features than I can get from the likes of Dell. Honestly, what really keeps people on an x86 architecture if not Windows, and yet somehow you see fit to single out Apple for the "proprietary" label?
I suppose OS X would, given its quality today, spoil me again and again make me dissatisfied with Windows. But I'm not sure I can afford that now.
John Searle said "The best education instills a permanent sense of dissatisfaction." From that perspective, I have been dissatisfied by every platform I've used, including the Mac. One of the the first assumptions I make when tackling a new problem is that the obvious solution can be improved upon. That's led me to hop between a bunch of different systems in the past to find a better solution, and I'll like hop away from Apple again when someone puts together a better system.
Despite its overwhelming market share, Windows shows no indication of being a satisfying system. Not even what Longhorn could potentially be is particularly interesting. All I can say is that if you find Windows to be satisfying, then it probably
One thing that nature is particularly good at is the development of dynamic, self-organizing systems.
No, nature is particularly terrible at doing that, but it cranks out so many different attempts over such an enormous time span that it looks good to us lowly humans. The idea of "biomorphic" software generally fails because we don't want to merely operate as a "hand of god" and take a come-what-may attitude, we have specific problems we want our software to solve. If we have a solution in mind, then it doesn't make sense to create a system that takes time/effort to self-organize.
Periodically I check the other folders (obviously).
If you think that is an obvious step, then you haven't found an actual solution to spam. I'm tired of everyone and their mother coming out with half-assed filtering schemes that do nothing more than shuffle off probable spam into a special place that you still have to look though to avoid possible misclassification. So you are left searching for needles in proportionally larger haystacks. That may work reasonably well for the email traffic you have, but I think you'll find that that kind of solution simply doesn't scale. I get thousands of spam every day along with the handful of good messages, and the only way to really manage that given the current state of email is a blocklist at the server level issuing a slew 550 rejects.
Now the problem with the stealth paradigm is that it can be boring for those already dead: you really want to wait for a 20 minute stalk match with the last two players?
The bigger issue is that multiplayer usually doesn't support a real stealth game type. That is, the "mission" is too obvious for both sides, and so you know what the win/lose situation is. The plot behind single player, however, is that your enemies aren't specifically looking for you or actively guarding a "flag". They're just putting in another day's work, expecting it to be as uneventful as the last 100 days.
I want to stalk an enemy who isn't necessarily stalking me.) The max time limit of 4-5 minutes in most maps (though it can seem like forever) also helps as well as the ability to stalk a specific target (e.g. the VP or the bomb sites) on offense.
Exactly. What needs to be offered is a multiplayer setup where no individual/team knows the win condition for their opponent. Your mission might be to kill a particular person, but that person (and their team) might instead have their mission as moving a package from point A to point B. So even if you allowed respawning in general, nobody would run-and-gun on the chance that their death is the sole aim of the other guys.
Maybe your connection is idle. But what about the server's? It only takes a few people making use of their idle connection to swamp the server's full bandwidth.
Well I did call for 100% utilization, not 200%. So, yeah, every chain has a weakest link, which is why I favored a solution that the server controlled. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the basic way to handle this is already in place with the link element. If a site is being overloaded due to unfollowed "next" links, it can feed up a page that doesn't have them.
This is known locally as the Slashdot effect. My connection isn't busy, but darned if I can read those linked sites.
That's not an interesting statement, though. What would be interesting is if you were to actually measure the differences between a Slashdotting using a pre-cache and not using it. I think you will find that a pre-cache allows the load to be better spread out over time. A normal Slashdotting is just the kind of burst traffic I was talking about. Doing a preload allows both the client and the server to respond to the request over the minute (or whatever) it takes to read to a page before moving on to the next one. Yes, the server will likely see more traffic than without caching due to misses, but just as with the CPU, you get much better performance with a cache that misses sometimes than without a cache at all.
So it's not unreasonable to mod down someone who posts a single line like "Wrong!". Sure, it's truthful, but it really isn't helpful to the rest of the readers.
That's not at all what happened. It wasn't a single line. They gave the date and a link to a previous Slashdot story that backed it up. Are you people not even reading the threads you're responding to and/or modding offtopic?
There's the link tag for html headers, which specifies the next page, previous page, and things like that.
Ah, I knew it was too good an idea to be all my own! For those not aware of how to use the link element for that, I found this page as well as this one. I don't know how widely it is used by site designers, and I can't say I know of any web browsers that use it, but I would say it is definitely something a proxy server should be taking advantage of. It's use is even stated directly in the second document:
User agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to reduce the perceived load time.
Some people (including myself) have an issue with people using the one word sentance, "Wrong." The poster comes across as arrogant regardless of the validity of the parent. Perhaps that is why it was modded down.
That is still a bad moderation. You'd ding someone because they're honest and straightforward with you? Because they're clear and not hiding behind needlessly flowered words? That's messed up, and it brings to mind a Ted Koppel quote:
Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach.
"Priming the cache" and "doing a breadth-first fetch on a page" are both things that create *more* network traffic on the off-chance that it might save some number of microseconds for the user.
More traffic isn't necessarily bad. While what you say is true, you fail to note that user-initiated traffic is done in bursts. Just like your CPU is idle >95% of the time, so is your network connection. So all users benefit, both in real and perceived performance, when there is a steady 100% utilization.
So everyone just grabs what they can get and everyone is worse off.
Again true, but naive. What would be better is if there were a mechanism to prioritize the pre-fetch cache. Every page has one link that is pretty much the most likely next page. Then a secondary link, and so on. Ideally, a site owner should be able to put that priority list somewhere in the page such that a user agent can start getting it after the current page has loaded and is being read. Otherwise, maybe the user agent can favor new content (i.e., compare this load of Slashdot with the one done five minutes ago and grab the links in the diff). That's a far cry from a mad grab, and would probably benefit all parties involved.
Is it just me or does this picture make it look like, with a new paint job, they've got a smiley face just waiting to happen? Somewhat related, how long before these things get commercial sponsors and start looking like race cars?
I feel for you, I do, but I think the whole MacEQ thing will keep MMPOG off the Mac for a while. Lets face it, Mac users are second citizains when it comes to games.
Being "second-class citizens" is better than being denied entry at the border. The big mistake of MacEQ is that it wasn't just EQ. I knew a guy who only had a PC with Windows to play EverCrack and first thought MacEQ was going to be the perfect way to get it and Unix on the same system without rebooting. Then he discovered that he was going to be jammed into a ghetto and never get to play with all his regular EQ using friends. He ended up still switching to the Mac and ditching EQ completely. If they'd done it right, I'm sure he would have suckered at least me into playing with him. Instead they started losing subscriptions across the board.
So, no, there is no expectation on my part that CoH/CoV will ever see light on the Mac, but I'd still like them to just come out and say that. I can at least count on id putting out DOOM III on the Mac, so I've set aside the money. Without any announcement about CoV, I won't budget for the game at all so if the do decide to make a port then suddenly I'm one less person who will play the game when I would actually have loved to have given them boatloads of cash. Another huge mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
I would disagree that the MS site " is supposed to be an (unbiased) news aggregate". From the MS point of view, I'm sure it is supposed to be a proft-making enterprise.
This is not about what MS would like to claim, it is about how they are perceived in the marketplace. As others have noted, paid placement is something the marketplace has voted overwhelmingly undesirable. That is as true for news aggregators as it is for search engines.
Since aggregators contain no original reporting, they can't scooped. Every story they point to has already been published, so, in a very real sense, aggregators are scooped on every story.
Incorrect. The intent of an aggregate is to scoop every site I never/less often visit. That is why it needs to be fair to work properly. But if I find that going to any site directly gets me news faster than going to the aggregate (because of delays to allow top placement of MSNBC articles), then it makes it much less likely I will use the aggregate. A bias does not benefit the aggregate in the marketplace.
Google seems as likely to use a Slashdot story about an event as it is an original report in something like the International Herald Tribune.
Well maybe, just maybe, how Slashdot covers a story (i.e., included discussion) is more newsworthy than a link to any standard AP wire regurgitation. Wouldn't that make Google's form of selection more like what you want than Microsoft's is? I think it's funny that you prefer a human editor to judge what makes a better story, but for some reason you are trying to defend MS for using an automated system to place not the best story first, but merely their story. Make up your mind.
The problem is that the "product" is supposed to be an (unbiased) news aggregate. As someone who runs an aggregator (Mac Aggregate Tracker), I can tell you there is zero net benefit in even appearing to show favor, let alone in specifically saying you give special treatment, as MS has admitted.
Maybe you don't see it, but the real result is probably going to be that at no time will anyone else scoop MSNBC according to Newsbot. Their software will gather news from other sites and if it finds something that MSNBC isn't covering, it will simply not publish. Instead, it would likely notify some grunt reporter to kick out an article so that MSNBC gets top billing. Holding news in that way, or any other shenanigans they come up with because they decide to self-promote, does not benefit the news consumer.
People
Most games (hell, software projects of all kinds) don't get finished mainly because they are started by the wrong people. Some joker with minimal OpenGL experience comes up with a "wouldn't it be cool" idea and then immediately thinks they have to announce it to the world. They then spend all their time without a solid plan engaged in activities that do little more than stroke their own ego. Those people are best told not to finish, but to not even start.
For this particular person that reads Slashdot, the full question is "Why don't you shut the hell up until you can actually market a turnkey MythTV box that competes with the likes of TiVo?" I tinker enough with technology all day long and I will gladly pay good money so I don't have to tinker some more just to replace a VCR.
With some old leftover hardware and a $150 TV card, it was ridiculously easy to set up, even though a little Linux experience did help. Sure, the commercial detection is "programmed" and prone to miss commercials or (on occasion) think that the program itself is the commercial . . .
No exactly a ringing endorsement there. I paid $199 for my TiVo four years ago (running sans guide for the last 3), and when I wear it out I'll gladly get another one, or whatever else might be on the market that's better. So you've got maybe a good couple years to put out a sub-$300 package that I can plunk down on the couch and just watch. If you think that's so easy to do, welcome to your new millionaire lifestyle. If not, get used to your parent's basement and your "free" PVR that thinks programs are commercials.
But it's annoying to me when they insist on being ignorant about the tools that they need to do their jobs, and that I'm paid to maintain.
Are they really the tools the users wanted to do the job, or are they merely the ones you IT guys imposed on them? Do they get the job done because of you or in spite of you? Everything you say seems you indicate you are part of the problem. That's par for the course, too, with most corporate IT.
Nobody says "I'm car-illiterate" with a little chuckle after they wrap a sedan around a tree, but users who accidentally destroy their computers somehow think it's IT's fault.
If they picked the car they wrapped around the tree, they know they're responsible. If they sit down and the only computer stuff they can use is mandated by IT, damn straight it's IT's fault if tools don't work right for the users.
Bah! Gartner's fabricated estimate is totally unnecessary for this. Actual usage measurements, like the Google Zeitgeist are more telling. Linux has never broken 1% and as a desktop system I really wouldn't count on it passing the Mac any year soon.
That's how they know who distributed the binary and whose account to revoke.
This isn't about the binary, it's about the source. They can certainly try to tag the source, but it's easy enough to run a diff on two copies. Trying to tag the source would only seem to make it easier to track down how they handle binary tagging. It all still adds up to a lot of dumb moves trying to avoid following the GPL as intended.
However, redistribution terminates Sveasoft subscription rights.
How would they know? Any subscriber can just give the CD to a buddy to distribute. Regardless, it seems they're definitely trying to skirt the spirit of the GPL, and for that I hope they sink into obscurity, at which point their subscription isn't worth squat anyway.
I am a developer myself, so this post is in no way meant to offend developers. However it's true that developers (generally) do not see things the same way that most users do.
I'm also a developer and I'd say you're probably right when it comes to common Linux open source apps, but if you hop over to a platform like Mac OS X you can easily find developers that not only scratch their own itches, but do it in a way that is usable. I know a lot is said about how open source frees up a developer to do their own thing, but the reality is that if Linux wants to make a serious push into the desktop market it has to do away with all the choice-for-the-sake-of-choice nonsense. The big problem is that so much garbage is released free-like-beer that too many people accept it rather than paying even $5 for something that works well. Linux will never make inroads on the desktop simply because nobody is will to pay for usability.
I used cnnsi@mydomain. cnnsi sold it and now I get several hundred spam a day there.
Are you sure they sold it, or were you merely a target of a dictionary attack (the dictionary being domains)? Same will go for amtrack@. All a spammer has to do is decide it's a significant enough domain to add to a dictionary and, BAM, you're getting spam there without any kind of TOS violation on Amtrack's part. Common word domains like amazon@ have long been dinged, and it is foolish to blame the company for your own poorly thought out system.
If you really want to use a catch-all to track who sells your address, you have to use a hash or something else that you keep entirely secret and is not easy to guess, like c66915c4ff6a27e5f3aac08f58130ba9 for . . . guess who! :-) Otherwise you're just adding to the abuse that the spammers are dishing out to you.
My own experience with a catch-all is that you're safe until you're hit by a dictionary attack, and then it never stops. I have domains with next to no traffic and a catch-all is fine, but in the last year I've had two of them get hit by dictionary attacks and after that each domain gets an increasing stream of spam attempts, currently around 1000/day. That's bad enough that I shut off the catch-all for the one I don't really use it with. The other one keeps SpamCop full.
Math is interesting, math is fun, math is usefull, but math is not a sport.
Math is natural - math is good
Not everybody derives
But everybody should
Math is interesting - math is fun
Math is best when it's....one plus one
one plus one
Of course, by geeky implication from this, it's clear why George Michael liked 1+1. Most guys would instead go for 1+0, and really go for 0+1+0. Yeah! :-)
If you mis-dial a number on a cell-phone, it costs more, so it's nice to check the make sure you dialed correctly.
That still doesn't imply a need for a screen. I mean, you have as a given this device that does speech input and output. Why can't it speak the number to you? You could certain opt for a screen, but having different shells allows you not carry a lot of bulky/fragile extras when you don't need them.
That, and you would certainly need a screen to keep a phone-book in your cell phone, which was something I left out of my original feature list.
But that's still a feature external to the core module. An address book abstracts as a special kind of dialing pad, and its output could also be spoken just as easily. Also, having an address book negates a lot of the need for a screen to verify the exact numbers dialed.
Allow someone to record their own ringtones. I've been considering making my phone ring with just me saying "ring."
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why we have mechanical ringing anymore. Doesn't a cell call essentially "start" when it is dialed? Why then can't the "ring" on the other end simply be me speaking already: "Hey, Sam, this is Doc and I've been thinking about . . ." It all goes right to voice mail if they don't pick up! And instead of annoying tones interrupting people talking, you just have another person talking.
I just want a couple of useful features in a nice inexpensive phone I won't be afraid to actually use.
I'll go the extra step and say phones should be modular, since 90% of the "features" being added have nothing to do with the core phone functionality at all.
Folds up to protect the screen from my pocket.
Why even have a screen? A land line certainly doesn't need one. The cell phone core is simple, and can probably be provided on the cheap with one-button operation. A generic core with a headset connector that did nothing but dial 911 should sell by the boatload for $50. That connector would also allow it to dock with more advanced shells to provide the extended features that are popular at any given time. Adding a standard keypad and screen, folding or not/camera or not, is an upgrade that the buyer can decide on at any time.
A ringtone that sounds like a phone. This is a pet peeve, I don't want some annoying song to play when I get a call, I just want something to let me know I have a call, that's it.
The problem is that a phone just rings, it doesn't ring at you. The standard scene is at a party where someone's phone rings and everyone has to check to see if it's theirs. I still don't see the point in any standard ring tones, because there is always a chance for overlap. Instead, what I would like to be able to do is record my friend's voice and and associate it with their number. That way I'll at least get a good chuckle when they call and my phone says something like "Hey, Doc, any chance you'll let me out of your pants?"
Rugged. Should take at the very least a 3-foot drop.
Get a rugged shell! But, really, if the core module is small enough you should need to futz with it enough so that it's a real drop hazard. If you hooked it to a Bluetooth shell that supported voice dialing, you could just use a headset and never even pull the damn thing out.
I'm reasonably certain that's the comment that earned your ire based on the kinds of projects I see you have on the web site.
You're at least half right. The fact that I do a lot of Mac work certainly brought your comment to my attention, but I would probably have been just as likely to kill file (or "foe", as Slashdot has it) you if you had made the same comments about Windows. My issue wasn't with the Mac bashing (hell, I take issue with Apple on a number of their decisions), but the general mindlessness of platform bashing.
1. While Apple products probably deserve to be called streamlined, I did go a bit far in calling them dumbed down. I wasn't thinking when I said that, and I was allowing myself to play the stereotype without examining it. The last time I used a Mac was in about 1995, so my impressions of it are out of date and irrelevant by now.
I take no issue with someone simply saying Apple dumbs stuff down, but when it's completely unsubstantiated I really don't have time to listen to it. You never said what the particulars were such that a Mac is too simplified for your needs. Instead, you just made wide-sweeping platform statements. That's a bad position to take for any system. You at least acknowledge that now, but it's not like you didn't have a chance to reconsider your position before your post, in the 5+ years that Mac OS X has been around and covered by Slashdot with increasing interest.
2. Apple's DOES have a proprietary architecture in the sense that I have to buy their hardware to run their OS. There just no denying that. I would be all over OS X if I could run it on x86 and other machine architectures and I didn't have to buy their hardware to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't have as much control over my computing environment as does Apple.
Untrue for the most part for most people. What you are missing here is that Apple makes systems and should be compared to any other Wintel system company. You pay an OS "tax" when you get Dell the same way you do when you get a Mac. You can still install Linux on either company's hardware, but you can't take the OS one provides and put it on the other's hardware. There is no real difference that is worthy of comment. Only geeks imagine the x86 provides exceptional freedom of choice because we can more easily build and upgrade our own machines. Still, there is nothing "entirely proprietary" about Apple's RAM, IDE, USB, PCI, AGP, etc, etc.
I also find it odd to say you'd run the OS if it weren't for the hardware, which makes little sense to me. It's not like Apple is the one putting out shoddy beige boxes. Again, as a geek, you probably imagine that because you can throw together a box for $500 it's the same as running a company to sell $500 systems. I tend to actually price out comparable system, and I usually find the Apple machines to be a better deal for the same features than I can get from the likes of Dell. Honestly, what really keeps people on an x86 architecture if not Windows, and yet somehow you see fit to single out Apple for the "proprietary" label?
I suppose OS X would, given its quality today, spoil me again and again make me dissatisfied with Windows. But I'm not sure I can afford that now.
John Searle said "The best education instills a permanent sense of dissatisfaction." From that perspective, I have been dissatisfied by every platform I've used, including the Mac. One of the the first assumptions I make when tackling a new problem is that the obvious solution can be improved upon. That's led me to hop between a bunch of different systems in the past to find a better solution, and I'll like hop away from Apple again when someone puts together a better system.
Despite its overwhelming market share, Windows shows no indication of being a satisfying system. Not even what Longhorn could potentially be is particularly interesting. All I can say is that if you find Windows to be satisfying, then it probably
One thing that nature is particularly good at is the development of dynamic, self-organizing systems.
No, nature is particularly terrible at doing that, but it cranks out so many different attempts over such an enormous time span that it looks good to us lowly humans. The idea of "biomorphic" software generally fails because we don't want to merely operate as a "hand of god" and take a come-what-may attitude, we have specific problems we want our software to solve. If we have a solution in mind, then it doesn't make sense to create a system that takes time/effort to self-organize.
Periodically I check the other folders (obviously).
If you think that is an obvious step, then you haven't found an actual solution to spam. I'm tired of everyone and their mother coming out with half-assed filtering schemes that do nothing more than shuffle off probable spam into a special place that you still have to look though to avoid possible misclassification. So you are left searching for needles in proportionally larger haystacks. That may work reasonably well for the email traffic you have, but I think you'll find that that kind of solution simply doesn't scale. I get thousands of spam every day along with the handful of good messages, and the only way to really manage that given the current state of email is a blocklist at the server level issuing a slew 550 rejects.
Now the problem with the stealth paradigm is that it can be boring for those already dead: you really want to wait for a 20 minute stalk match with the last two players?
The bigger issue is that multiplayer usually doesn't support a real stealth game type. That is, the "mission" is too obvious for both sides, and so you know what the win/lose situation is. The plot behind single player, however, is that your enemies aren't specifically looking for you or actively guarding a "flag". They're just putting in another day's work, expecting it to be as uneventful as the last 100 days.
I want to stalk an enemy who isn't necessarily stalking me.) The max time limit of 4-5 minutes in most maps (though it can seem like forever) also helps as well as the ability to stalk a specific target (e.g. the VP or the bomb sites) on offense.
Exactly. What needs to be offered is a multiplayer setup where no individual/team knows the win condition for their opponent. Your mission might be to kill a particular person, but that person (and their team) might instead have their mission as moving a package from point A to point B. So even if you allowed respawning in general, nobody would run-and-gun on the chance that their death is the sole aim of the other guys.
Maybe your connection is idle. But what about the server's? It only takes a few people making use of their idle connection to swamp the server's full bandwidth.
Well I did call for 100% utilization, not 200%. So, yeah, every chain has a weakest link, which is why I favored a solution that the server controlled. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the basic way to handle this is already in place with the link element. If a site is being overloaded due to unfollowed "next" links, it can feed up a page that doesn't have them.
This is known locally as the Slashdot effect. My connection isn't busy, but darned if I can read those linked sites.
That's not an interesting statement, though. What would be interesting is if you were to actually measure the differences between a Slashdotting using a pre-cache and not using it. I think you will find that a pre-cache allows the load to be better spread out over time. A normal Slashdotting is just the kind of burst traffic I was talking about. Doing a preload allows both the client and the server to respond to the request over the minute (or whatever) it takes to read to a page before moving on to the next one. Yes, the server will likely see more traffic than without caching due to misses, but just as with the CPU, you get much better performance with a cache that misses sometimes than without a cache at all.
So it's not unreasonable to mod down someone who posts a single line like "Wrong!". Sure, it's truthful, but it really isn't helpful to the rest of the readers.
That's not at all what happened. It wasn't a single line. They gave the date and a link to a previous Slashdot story that backed it up. Are you people not even reading the threads you're responding to and/or modding offtopic?
There's the link tag for html headers, which specifies the next page, previous page, and things like that.
Ah, I knew it was too good an idea to be all my own! For those not aware of how to use the link element for that, I found this page as well as this one. I don't know how widely it is used by site designers, and I can't say I know of any web browsers that use it, but I would say it is definitely something a proxy server should be taking advantage of. It's use is even stated directly in the second document:
Some people (including myself) have an issue with people using the one word sentance, "Wrong." The poster comes across as arrogant regardless of the validity of the parent. Perhaps that is why it was modded down.
That is still a bad moderation. You'd ding someone because they're honest and straightforward with you? Because they're clear and not hiding behind needlessly flowered words? That's messed up, and it brings to mind a Ted Koppel quote:
-1: Wrong . . .August 3
Let's see . . .
Three digit UID? Check
Link to un-Slashdottable site (Slashdot itself!)? Check.
Informative? Check.
Modded offtopic anyway? Check.
Honestly, some people should be flagged as too stupid to ever get mods again.
"Priming the cache" and "doing a breadth-first fetch on a page" are both things that create *more* network traffic on the off-chance that it might save some number of microseconds for the user.
More traffic isn't necessarily bad. While what you say is true, you fail to note that user-initiated traffic is done in bursts. Just like your CPU is idle >95% of the time, so is your network connection. So all users benefit, both in real and perceived performance, when there is a steady 100% utilization.
So everyone just grabs what they can get and everyone is worse off.
Again true, but naive. What would be better is if there were a mechanism to prioritize the pre-fetch cache. Every page has one link that is pretty much the most likely next page. Then a secondary link, and so on. Ideally, a site owner should be able to put that priority list somewhere in the page such that a user agent can start getting it after the current page has loaded and is being read. Otherwise, maybe the user agent can favor new content (i.e., compare this load of Slashdot with the one done five minutes ago and grab the links in the diff). That's a far cry from a mad grab, and would probably benefit all parties involved.
Is it just me or does this picture make it look like, with a new paint job, they've got a smiley face just waiting to happen? Somewhat related, how long before these things get commercial sponsors and start looking like race cars?
I feel for you, I do, but I think the whole MacEQ thing will keep MMPOG off the Mac for a while. Lets face it, Mac users are second citizains when it comes to games.
Being "second-class citizens" is better than being denied entry at the border. The big mistake of MacEQ is that it wasn't just EQ. I knew a guy who only had a PC with Windows to play EverCrack and first thought MacEQ was going to be the perfect way to get it and Unix on the same system without rebooting. Then he discovered that he was going to be jammed into a ghetto and never get to play with all his regular EQ using friends. He ended up still switching to the Mac and ditching EQ completely. If they'd done it right, I'm sure he would have suckered at least me into playing with him. Instead they started losing subscriptions across the board.
So, no, there is no expectation on my part that CoH/CoV will ever see light on the Mac, but I'd still like them to just come out and say that. I can at least count on id putting out DOOM III on the Mac, so I've set aside the money. Without any announcement about CoV, I won't budget for the game at all so if the do decide to make a port then suddenly I'm one less person who will play the game when I would actually have loved to have given them boatloads of cash. Another huge mistake.