http://nic.ly/ is down (and not resolving) as a result of this, and at least a couple of the root servers for.ly (dns.lttnet.net and dns1.lttnet.net) are down, although out-of-country resolution is still functional (although, it's not clear to me if they're simply running off of caches).
I suspect bit.ly is pretty happy they've been pimping j.mp lately.:)
Twitter recently bought Atebits, which produced the Tweetie 2 twitter client for the iPhone. Previously, Tweetie 2 was a $2.99 app. Upon acquisition, Twitter released an updated version, renamed it simply "Twitter", and gave it away for free.
You should see some of the negatives reviews that were left. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, some of it angry that they paid for something that became free (ignoring the value they received in the meantime), but a lot of it sounding like, "I paid for this app because not everyone had it, now anyone can get it? Lame." (That's almost a direct quote from one of the complaints.)
Exclusivity is a tangible item to some people; it's what makes collectors spend ridiculous amounts to find that last item for their collection, or buy $24k Rolex watches. I might personally think it's ludicrous, but there you go.
Specifically, turn off data roaming. (Wi-Fi is fine.)
A trip to Canada in January netted me a $3k phone bill. $3k to use Rogers. There's a few Canadians snickering at the thought right now.;)
For others in this situation: a call to customer support saying, basically, "OMG three thousand WTF?!" got me retroactively switched for the month to an international data roaming plan; I ended up paying the difference in cost to upgrade, which was still a few hundred, but after you've seen the $3000 phone bill, a few hundred bucks looks pretty good. I also learned very clearly: turn off data roaming, or make arrangements in advance to switch to an international roaming plan (wouldn't have been practical in this case, but would have been for a planned trip).
Excellent point. Just to head off other people talking out of their ass (wishful thinking, I know), the pinout for the iPod/iPhone connector ought to be required reading before commenting on what it can and can't do. That connector provides interfaces for USB and Firewire, audio in/out, video out (composite and s-video), serial, and dedicated power.
It's not an ideal situation, but a single cable covers just about every possible use case. That's a big deal, ergonomically, and it means Apple can standardize internally on an interface across multiple product lines.
It's unfortunate: the knee-jerk reaction to "we need a universal charger" will miss the opportunity to standardize on a SINGLE interface cable for mobile devices, rather than using USB for power and data, a headphone jack for audio output, and who knows what proprietary arrangement for audio input and video output.
There's an excellent point hiding here. There is value in "getting the needle in the arm", so to speak. Take an online game like Fantastic Contraption (something I lost a lot of time to recently): you can play 20 increasingly-difficult levels for free, and if you liked it, you can give the guy $10 and get access to additional content. I had no problem parting ways with $10 after the amount of entertainment I got out of it, especially when I consider how much it might have cost to spend that same amount of time at the movies, etc.
Of course, this model depends on what you're selling actually being desirable.
A few quick searches (net-stalking myself, apparently Cuil doesn't think I'm cool) revealed a link to a 404'd page (given that they just started turning on the PR machine, that's surprising in and of itself).
I never realized how much I used the "see the cached version of this page" feature of Google until that moment.
Sent Mar. 31, 2007, over a year ago. It's not exactly news that the great state of Illinois is rolling over on this.:p Heck, one of their extortion centers operates locally: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15512
That being said: I can't find a reference to the legislation being referred to in the article; does someone have a link?
This can be difficult, depending on the level of formal education they come to the table with. 10-15 years of industry experience means nothing to most post-secondary institutions.
I was "googled" rather extensively for the last two jobs I've applied for. In both cases, I believe my blog has helped my case, rather than hurt it: I talk about interests that I have outside of work, about observations regarding the field that I'm in, and generally give people a more broad sense of who I am. By the same token, I've spent quite a bit of time in front of a computer searching for the names of interviewers as well; knowing their biases, interests, and frame of reference ahead of time puts you on a solid footing with them from the first introduction.
It's strange to see people who don't understand that they will be evaluated on the information they make available about themselves. When you enter an interview, you will be judged on what you say, how you react, your body language, and a host of other things; why on earth would publically-available information on the internet be any different? Similarly, if you provided internal documents or confidential information to the press, you'd be fired; why exactly would posting it on your blog for the world to see be treated differently?
When I was younger, I never posted online unless it was under a nom de plume, and as a result I behaved like a child; when there are no consequences for what you say, you say stupid and malicious things. As I matured, I stopped hiding behind those anonymous alter-egos, and starting taking responsibility (and a certain degree of pride) in the things I said online. You can find some incredibly dumb things that I posted while in university, and you can hopefully find some more insightful things posted more recently, but I'll accept responsibility for what you find, because that was me at the time I wrote it. Employers may make of that what they will, but they'll know enough about me to make a reasonable hiring decision.
Food for thought: tattoos applied during childhood can cause employment difficulties later in life. Ah, the joys of making permanent, lasting decisions before one has reached the level of maturity to properly balance those choices. Perhaps children should post under anonymous identities until they are better able to appreciate the effect their words can have later in life?
When's the last time you had a good idle? I bogleg at the thought of how far you've come since those days.
(Sorry, only Greg and a few others will have any clue what I'm talking about. 2001 called, and it wants it's "whips out his Python" jokes back, along with 46 "bog" and five Deathblade emotes, by the way.)
I grew up as a geek in a small rural town. That meant two things: first, any money I had went into my computer, meaning the truck I drove was a POS; and second, the teasing you took by being a geek in the lower grades turned into the teasing you take having a slow POS when your low-GPA, V8-loving classmates are getting their licenses.
Karma's a bitch, though. Being a geek today means a lifestyle that those same knuckle-draggers can only envy (assuming, of course, that you're working right now), and their "old-n-busted" will have a tough time keeping up with my "new hotness".
Seriously, while I might have gotten a bit of satisfaction out of the way things played out, I just sort of naturally gravitated towards import modification after finally coming up for air after immersing myself in technology for so long. Racing (autocross is my primary interest right now, although I make it to the drag strip every so often) and performance tuning makes the time and effort you put in "real" to others around you in a way that an elegant hack can never be. Go ahead, tell a non-geek friend or family member that you're entering the International Obfuscated C Code Contest this year, and compare that reaction to the one you get when you say you ran your car at Real Street Drags last week and smoked a few V8s with your little four-banger.
Still, I don't see automotive performance being a mainstream geek thing. Sites like DSMtuners are filled with/. readers, but whenever I mention that my car is up on jackstands again, most of the folks I work with give me that "why wouldn't you just have your mechanic do that?" look.
That's one of the nice things about Subversion; if the repository format changes, you have two tools ("svnadmin dump" and "svnadmin load") at your disposal to export a repository to an intermediate XML format, and then re-import it into a more recent version. They've had to change the on-disk format a few times during development, and this dump/load functionality has been invaluable for handling cases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
http://nic.ly/ is down (and not resolving) as a result of this, and at least a couple of the root servers for .ly (dns.lttnet.net and dns1.lttnet.net) are down, although out-of-country resolution is still functional (although, it's not clear to me if they're simply running off of caches).
I suspect bit.ly is pretty happy they've been pimping j.mp lately. :)
Thankfully, ana.ly still works. :)
ComputerWorld actually linked to Encyclopedia Dramatica? Yeah, this is going to go well. :)
Why would I be offended? I can run Android on my iPhone now. ;-)
Yep. Basically, they're buying exclusivity.
Twitter recently bought Atebits, which produced the Tweetie 2 twitter client for the iPhone. Previously, Tweetie 2 was a $2.99 app. Upon acquisition, Twitter released an updated version, renamed it simply "Twitter", and gave it away for free.
You should see some of the negatives reviews that were left. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, some of it angry that they paid for something that became free (ignoring the value they received in the meantime), but a lot of it sounding like, "I paid for this app because not everyone had it, now anyone can get it? Lame." (That's almost a direct quote from one of the complaints.)
Exclusivity is a tangible item to some people; it's what makes collectors spend ridiculous amounts to find that last item for their collection, or buy $24k Rolex watches. I might personally think it's ludicrous, but there you go.
What, no Google Maps link? :)
My primary Linux laptop is an Inspiron 1721, with two mirrored drives.
And how big was the runtime you needed to actually execute it?
Banging rocks together gives me that beat, yo. I'm a rapper.
Specifically, turn off data roaming. (Wi-Fi is fine.)
A trip to Canada in January netted me a $3k phone bill. $3k to use Rogers. There's a few Canadians snickering at the thought right now. ;)
For others in this situation: a call to customer support saying, basically, "OMG three thousand WTF?!" got me retroactively switched for the month to an international data roaming plan; I ended up paying the difference in cost to upgrade, which was still a few hundred, but after you've seen the $3000 phone bill, a few hundred bucks looks pretty good. I also learned very clearly: turn off data roaming, or make arrangements in advance to switch to an international roaming plan (wouldn't have been practical in this case, but would have been for a planned trip).
Bought an automobile in the last few years? Then you're probably already living with this.
Interesting. 64-bit Flash has been working just fine for me, albeit slow and memory-hungry. But that's a "feature" of the 32-bit version too. ;)
Excellent point. Just to head off other people talking out of their ass (wishful thinking, I know), the pinout for the iPod/iPhone connector ought to be required reading before commenting on what it can and can't do. That connector provides interfaces for USB and Firewire, audio in/out, video out (composite and s-video), serial, and dedicated power.
It's not an ideal situation, but a single cable covers just about every possible use case. That's a big deal, ergonomically, and it means Apple can standardize internally on an interface across multiple product lines.
It's unfortunate: the knee-jerk reaction to "we need a universal charger" will miss the opportunity to standardize on a SINGLE interface cable for mobile devices, rather than using USB for power and data, a headphone jack for audio output, and who knows what proprietary arrangement for audio input and video output.
My wife had no idea what I was talking about when I made a comment about that a week or two ago. Ahh, "Vignettes". ;-)
There's an excellent point hiding here. There is value in "getting the needle in the arm", so to speak. Take an online game like Fantastic Contraption (something I lost a lot of time to recently): you can play 20 increasingly-difficult levels for free, and if you liked it, you can give the guy $10 and get access to additional content. I had no problem parting ways with $10 after the amount of entertainment I got out of it, especially when I consider how much it might have cost to spend that same amount of time at the movies, etc.
Of course, this model depends on what you're selling actually being desirable.
A few quick searches (net-stalking myself, apparently Cuil doesn't think I'm cool) revealed a link to a 404'd page (given that they just started turning on the PR machine, that's surprising in and of itself).
I never realized how much I used the "see the cached version of this page" feature of Google until that moment.
http://digg.com/tech_news/University_of_Illinois_joins_the_RIAA_and_MPAA_against_Piracy
:p Heck, one of their extortion centers operates locally: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15512
Sent Mar. 31, 2007, over a year ago. It's not exactly news that the great state of Illinois is rolling over on this.
That being said: I can't find a reference to the legislation being referred to in the article; does someone have a link?
This can be difficult, depending on the level of formal education they come to the table with. 10-15 years of industry experience means nothing to most post-secondary institutions.
Something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyMDNzhfwn0
I was "googled" rather extensively for the last two jobs I've applied for. In both cases, I believe my blog has helped my case, rather than hurt it: I talk about interests that I have outside of work, about observations regarding the field that I'm in, and generally give people a more broad sense of who I am. By the same token, I've spent quite a bit of time in front of a computer searching for the names of interviewers as well; knowing their biases, interests, and frame of reference ahead of time puts you on a solid footing with them from the first introduction.
It's strange to see people who don't understand that they will be evaluated on the information they make available about themselves. When you enter an interview, you will be judged on what you say, how you react, your body language, and a host of other things; why on earth would publically-available information on the internet be any different? Similarly, if you provided internal documents or confidential information to the press, you'd be fired; why exactly would posting it on your blog for the world to see be treated differently?
When I was younger, I never posted online unless it was under a nom de plume, and as a result I behaved like a child; when there are no consequences for what you say, you say stupid and malicious things. As I matured, I stopped hiding behind those anonymous alter-egos, and starting taking responsibility (and a certain degree of pride) in the things I said online. You can find some incredibly dumb things that I posted while in university, and you can hopefully find some more insightful things posted more recently, but I'll accept responsibility for what you find, because that was me at the time I wrote it. Employers may make of that what they will, but they'll know enough about me to make a reasonable hiring decision.
Food for thought: tattoos applied during childhood can cause employment difficulties later in life. Ah, the joys of making permanent, lasting decisions before one has reached the level of maturity to properly balance those choices. Perhaps children should post under anonymous identities until they are better able to appreciate the effect their words can have later in life?
Greg,
When's the last time you had a good idle? I bogleg at the thought of how far you've come since those days.
(Sorry, only Greg and a few others will have any clue what I'm talking about. 2001 called, and it wants it's "whips out his Python" jokes back, along with 46 "bog" and five Deathblade emotes, by the way.)
If anyone wants to see the original presentation that Google took offline, here's a link:
/ 20060302_analyst_day.ppt
http://tomcaster.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006
I grew up as a geek in a small rural town. That meant two things: first, any money I had went into my computer, meaning the truck I drove was a POS; and second, the teasing you took by being a geek in the lower grades turned into the teasing you take having a slow POS when your low-GPA, V8-loving classmates are getting their licenses.
Karma's a bitch, though. Being a geek today means a lifestyle that those same knuckle-draggers can only envy (assuming, of course, that you're working right now), and their "old-n-busted" will have a tough time keeping up with my "new hotness".
Seriously, while I might have gotten a bit of satisfaction out of the way things played out, I just sort of naturally gravitated towards import modification after finally coming up for air after immersing myself in technology for so long. Racing (autocross is my primary interest right now, although I make it to the drag strip every so often) and performance tuning makes the time and effort you put in "real" to others around you in a way that an elegant hack can never be. Go ahead, tell a non-geek friend or family member that you're entering the International Obfuscated C Code Contest this year, and compare that reaction to the one you get when you say you ran your car at Real Street Drags last week and smoked a few V8s with your little four-banger.
Still, I don't see automotive performance being a mainstream geek thing. Sites like DSMtuners are filled with /. readers, but whenever I mention that my car is up on jackstands again, most of the folks I work with give me that "why wouldn't you just have your mechanic do that?" look.
Oh, you mean divine's patent that they acquired with the purchase of Open Market? It must be tough for them, having been featured so many times on Fucked Company...
That's one of the nice things about Subversion; if the repository format changes, you have two tools ("svnadmin dump" and "svnadmin load") at your disposal to export a repository to an intermediate XML format, and then re-import it into a more recent version. They've had to change the on-disk format a few times during development, and this dump/load functionality has been invaluable for handling cases like this.