Ah but its the Colbert Report and Daily Show killing your efficiency there. If you only watched non-news shows from iTunes then you could easily watch 12+ different shows a year before you approached a basic cable or satellite subscription. Now as slashdotters we all live by Colbert and Stewart, but there's a huge market of tv watchers out there that prefer to watch ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX news instead, and all they would have to do is buy one of those HD broadcast antennas and they could get their daily news fix for free, and still pay less than a cable subscription to watch CSI and L&O on AppleTV. Just something to think about.
Writing an essay that proposes a plan for a more fine-grained payment structure for big content providers: +4, Interesting
Writing an article that uses hard math to show how $1.99 generates more revenue for content providers than subscription/advertising currently does: +5, Informative
Writing your 3rd blog post about how you feel you should pay less for television because of bogus math and then posting it to slashdot with a tagline so awe-inspiring that the editors put it on the front page without even reading the article: Priceless
I saw one of these inside the international terminal of San Francisco Airport. Not only did it have every type of iPod known to man as well as power adapters, it also had GBA SPs, Sony PSPs (no games for either, sadly), a couple laptop travel accessory kits, and some headphones. It was rather shocking that one of the most exciting vending machines I saw during my trip to Japan was before I ever got on the plane.
While I can sympathize with some of what the writer is saying (if you're going to design an event for your mmorpg that is so cool that everybody on the server is going to want to see it, hadn't you better make sure your servers can actually handle everybody seeing it?) the c atchphrase he uses at the end is just plain silly.
"If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?"
Right, just because you have to wait in a queue to get in must mean that nobody can get in at all. It's not because there are already a few thousand people playing on that server or anything.
I can foresee a problem with this when you start using these sorts of passwords for places with password expiration. You can't use your original clever creation, so now you must come up with variations on it every couple months or so; like incrementing the number at the end, so you have JJW!TH9835 etc. But then you start having "version" issues where some passwords expire faster, and some not at all... so you might have JJW!TGGL9839 and HMW!TH9842. Of course, you could change ALL your passwords whenever one of them expires... but then you have to remember every single place you've set up such a password.
If the goal were really to make sure you had the latest versions, they could simply make the latest iMovie require the latest iDVD.
Let's be at least a little more realistic here. Clearly most of the iLife apps leverage iTunes with the little mini-iTunes browsers to choose songs for slideshows etc. You'll note that all the new transitions in iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD are the same, so those are probably shared between them. It's very possible that the entire slideshow code is partially shared between iPhoto and iMovie, with the later just recording the result. Finally, this is speculation, but since iMovie allows imports from SoundTrack (complete with a SoundTrack-like view of the audio which I would bet is a shared control), I wouldn't be at all surprised if it also worked the same way with GarageBand.
I'm not saying this is a good excuse to force people to buy the whole suite, but at least admit that the interdependencies stretch farther than iMovie and iDVD. It is reasonable for Apple to be concerned with users having the latest and greatest versions of all these apps when there is so much emphasis on their interconnectivity. If they aren't careful, they could wind up with their own version of "DLL Hell."
I did a little poking around and found a map of the original Atari version, including notes on how to get into the easter egg room. It would seem that this Flash version is somewhat incomplete, both the "microdot" and easter egg (as well as half the mazes) appear to be absent.
Interestingly enough, the creator of Adventure, Warren Robinett apparently also co-created my absolute favorite Apple II game, Rocky's Boots! Ah, the memories of building the ultimate death machine to tackle that little aligator at the end...
This caused me a little concern when I made my Apple purchase since, according to the FedEx tracking page, it still hadn't arrived in the US almost a day after it left Taiwan. Then I noticed that the page sorts the entries strictly by the time the event occured and not by when it is actually entered into the tracking database. So, the package being received in Anchorage was listed as happening before it left Taiwan by about 30 minutes.
If CN was following the natural progression of the series, the first episode they would have shown was Ballad of the Fallen Angels. Among other things, this ep. featured a church getting blown up, perhaps not the greatest thing to show on a Sunday after this week.
The author of this article brings up a lot of interesting points, but I think one thing he failed to address was some of the advantages the file extension style of metadata continues to have over the other types discussed. I have been tinkering with OS X for the last few months, and while I have generally been pleased or tolerant of the changes I am experiencing coming from the windows/linux pc world, there is one issue that really strikes me as I read this article. I am a student at Stanford University which has all of its users home directories mounted on a very large AFS network along with countless other schools. This is a very useful feature as I can seamlessly use my home directory on almost every campus machine (be it Mac or *nix, no Windows implementation yet I'm afraid). Naturally, when an AFS implementation was released for OS X, I wanted to give it a whirl. You can imagine my surprise when upon mounting/afs in OS X, the Finder window that automagically opens for newly connected/inserted media almost immediately locked up. I thought it might just be a bad implementation in the AFS client, but after reading a few posts on mailing lists I figured out what was actually going on:
** Background **
For those of you who are not familiar with AFS, it is a large-scale network filesystem which uses the domain names of the various server as sort of their filesystem roots. For example, John Doe's home directory at MIT might be/afs/athena.mit.edu/users/j/d/jdoe.
** Background **
Apparently, when OS X connects to a network file system and opens the Finder window for that file system, it also goes out to check to see if there are any applications it should know about in that directory. Now here's the kicker, apparently the Finder doesn't just stop at checking for the.app extension (remember OS X apps are actually "bundles"/directories that have a.app extension) but it also figures it might as well look in every singled directory for an included metadata file named "Contents" which every OS X application is supposed to have. So basically, my machine was opening every single server root in/afs, connecting to something like 40-50 AFS servers *worldwide* to see if they were applications or not. Needless to say this can take quite a long time, especially on a slow connection, and could probably have been mostly avoided if it had simply respected the file extension all applications have to use anyway. I guess the morale of this story is, file system and seperate file metadata are all fine and good, but they can be a real pain in the rear for networking file systems if they are the only means of determining file type.
I've seen a lot of people post about how it would be a risk for mission critical operations, but what about the general risk of making the source readable to all. It should not be overlooked that some random person with a grudge against the US Government might get his/her hands on the source, and it is likely that any flaws that they find could be used destructively against the project before the bug is found by the developer community. It could be quite dangerous if some script kiddie in decided to totally screw over the FAA's software.
The reason that it looks so much like Outlook is because (I would assume) Helixcode is using bonobo components from their Outlook clone, Evolution. Helixcode has been taking some pretty large strides with their component architecture, it'll be nice when more Gnome apps begin to follow their example.
Helixcode and Eazel are basically competitors, both are trying to provide a very pretty interface, and then sell services/support based on that interface. Honestly I'm a little shocked that Eazel currently recommends downloading Helixcode Gnome in order to use the Nautilus preview release.
It would be interesting if Helixcode and Eazel decided to merge, they could really be an interface powerhouse.
>Apart from that, Debian offers (fast) updates to vulnerable packages, in the form of a security.debian.org apt-rule, where fixed/patched versions are available.
Does anyone know why the security.debain.org apt source is not included in sources.list in the basic installation? Debian seems to rely on users to discover this their own (which is not unreasonable, since it is flaunted on www.debian.org). Still, wouldn't it just be easier for the installer to add this to the default sources.list along with the deb and deb-src of the chosen debian dist?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah but its the Colbert Report and Daily Show killing your efficiency there. If you only watched non-news shows from iTunes then you could easily watch 12+ different shows a year before you approached a basic cable or satellite subscription. Now as slashdotters we all live by Colbert and Stewart, but there's a huge market of tv watchers out there that prefer to watch ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX news instead, and all they would have to do is buy one of those HD broadcast antennas and they could get their daily news fix for free, and still pay less than a cable subscription to watch CSI and L&O on AppleTV. Just something to think about.
Writing an essay that proposes a plan for a more fine-grained payment structure for big content providers: +4, Interesting
Writing an article that uses hard math to show how $1.99 generates more revenue for content providers than subscription/advertising currently does: +5, Informative
Writing your 3rd blog post about how you feel you should pay less for television because of bogus math and then posting it to slashdot with a tagline so awe-inspiring that the editors put it on the front page without even reading the article: Priceless
I saw one of these inside the international terminal of San Francisco Airport. Not only did it have every type of iPod known to man as well as power adapters, it also had GBA SPs, Sony PSPs (no games for either, sadly), a couple laptop travel accessory kits, and some headphones. It was rather shocking that one of the most exciting vending machines I saw during my trip to Japan was before I ever got on the plane.
Just look at that about box. A blue -> green gradient right on top of a blue -> orange gradient?! Ow my poor eyes.
While I can sympathize with some of what the writer is saying (if you're going to design an event for your mmorpg that is so cool that everybody on the server is going to want to see it, hadn't you better make sure your servers can actually handle everybody seeing it?) the c atchphrase he uses at the end is just plain silly.
"If there's an absolutely excellent game, but no one can get online to play it, is it still excellent?"
Right, just because you have to wait in a queue to get in must mean that nobody can get in at all. It's not because there are already a few thousand people playing on that server or anything.
I can foresee a problem with this when you start using these sorts of passwords for places with password expiration. You can't use your original clever creation, so now you must come up with variations on it every couple months or so; like incrementing the number at the end, so you have JJW!TH9835 etc. But then you start having "version" issues where some passwords expire faster, and some not at all... so you might have JJW!TGGL9839 and HMW!TH9842. Of course, you could change ALL your passwords whenever one of them expires... but then you have to remember every single place you've set up such a password.
Let's be at least a little more realistic here. Clearly most of the iLife apps leverage iTunes with the little mini-iTunes browsers to choose songs for slideshows etc. You'll note that all the new transitions in iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD are the same, so those are probably shared between them. It's very possible that the entire slideshow code is partially shared between iPhoto and iMovie, with the later just recording the result. Finally, this is speculation, but since iMovie allows imports from SoundTrack (complete with a SoundTrack-like view of the audio which I would bet is a shared control), I wouldn't be at all surprised if it also worked the same way with GarageBand.
I'm not saying this is a good excuse to force people to buy the whole suite, but at least admit that the interdependencies stretch farther than iMovie and iDVD. It is reasonable for Apple to be concerned with users having the latest and greatest versions of all these apps when there is so much emphasis on their interconnectivity. If they aren't careful, they could wind up with their own version of "DLL Hell."
I did a little poking around and found a map of the original Atari version, including notes on how to get into the easter egg room. It would seem that this Flash version is somewhat incomplete, both the "microdot" and easter egg (as well as half the mazes) appear to be absent.
Interestingly enough, the creator of Adventure, Warren Robinett apparently also co-created my absolute favorite Apple II game, Rocky's Boots! Ah, the memories of building the ultimate death machine to tackle that little aligator at the end...
This caused me a little concern when I made my Apple purchase since, according to the FedEx tracking page, it still hadn't arrived in the US almost a day after it left Taiwan. Then I noticed that the page sorts the entries strictly by the time the event occured and not by when it is actually entered into the tracking database. So, the package being received in Anchorage was listed as happening before it left Taiwan by about 30 minutes.
Yay International Date Line!
If CN was following the natural progression of the series, the first episode they would have shown was Ballad of the Fallen Angels. Among other things, this ep. featured a church getting blown up, perhaps not the greatest thing to show on a Sunday after this week.
The author of this article brings up a lot of interesting points, but I think one thing he failed to address was some of the advantages the file extension style of metadata continues to have over the other types discussed. I have been tinkering with OS X for the last few months, and while I have generally been pleased or tolerant of the changes I am experiencing coming from the windows/linux pc world, there is one issue that really strikes me as I read this article. I am a student at Stanford University which has all of its users home directories mounted on a very large AFS network along with countless other schools. This is a very useful feature as I can seamlessly use my home directory on almost every campus machine (be it Mac or *nix, no Windows implementation yet I'm afraid). Naturally, when an AFS implementation was released for OS X, I wanted to give it a whirl. You can imagine my surprise when upon mounting /afs in OS X, the Finder window that automagically opens for newly connected/inserted media almost immediately locked up. I thought it might just be a bad implementation in the AFS client, but after reading a few posts on mailing lists I figured out what was actually going on:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/users/j/d/jdoe.
.app extension (remember OS X apps are actually "bundles"/directories that have a .app extension) but it also figures it might as well look in every singled directory for an included metadata file named "Contents" which every OS X application is supposed to have. So basically, my machine was opening every single server root in /afs, connecting to something like 40-50 AFS servers *worldwide* to see if they were applications or not. Needless to say this can take quite a long time, especially on a slow connection, and could probably have been mostly avoided if it had simply respected the file extension all applications have to use anyway. I guess the morale of this story is, file system and seperate file metadata are all fine and good, but they can be a real pain in the rear for networking file systems if they are the only means of determining file type.
** Background **
For those of you who are not familiar with AFS, it is a large-scale network filesystem which uses the domain names of the various server as sort of their filesystem roots. For example, John Doe's home directory at MIT might be
** Background **
Apparently, when OS X connects to a network file system and opens the Finder window for that file system, it also goes out to check to see if there are any applications it should know about in that directory. Now here's the kicker, apparently the Finder doesn't just stop at checking for the
I've seen a lot of people post about how it would be a risk for mission critical operations, but what about the general risk of making the source readable to all. It should not be overlooked that some random person with a grudge against the US Government might get his/her hands on the source, and it is likely that any flaws that they find could be used destructively against the project before the bug is found by the developer community. It could be quite dangerous if some script kiddie in decided to totally screw over the FAA's software.
I would suggest the following primer (no spoilers) to anyone who finds it questionable after the first couple episodes.
The reason that it looks so much like Outlook is because (I would assume) Helixcode is using bonobo components from their Outlook clone, Evolution. Helixcode has been taking some pretty large strides with their component architecture, it'll be nice when more Gnome apps begin to follow their example.
Helixcode and Eazel are basically competitors, both are trying to provide a very pretty interface, and then sell services/support based on that interface. Honestly I'm a little shocked that Eazel currently recommends downloading Helixcode Gnome in order to use the Nautilus preview release.
It would be interesting if Helixcode and Eazel decided to merge, they could really be an interface powerhouse.
>Apart from that, Debian offers (fast) updates to vulnerable packages, in the form of a security.debian.org apt-rule, where fixed/patched versions are available.
Does anyone know why the security.debain.org apt source is not included in sources.list in the basic installation? Debian seems to rely on users to discover this their own (which is not unreasonable, since it is flaunted on www.debian.org). Still, wouldn't it just be easier for the installer to add this to the default sources.list along with the deb and deb-src of the chosen debian dist?