I haven't used Sonos, but once I have enough extra cash that's what I'm going to get. I currently have a bunch of hand-me-down iPods and laptops in the various rooms that I want music. But this system does not scale very well, and comes with its own complications. I did a bunch of research, and Sonos pretty much the only system that has what I want:
Uses my existing amps/speakers -- I have an existing audio setup in each room already. Sonos can just plug into that.
No media synchronization required -- it can read files off of your NAS.
No computer involved -- I don't want to have to boot anything, or log into anything, or launch any apps, or care about remote endpoints. (yes, I'm sure there is a cpu in these things, but it's not a 'computer' to me.)
Expandable -- You can get just one and add more as you want
iPhone controllable -- I always have my phone on my person, so I can always adjust whatever's going on anywhere.
It does have downsides. The magic peering technology seems complicated and is not very well documented (at least when I was reading about it). I don't think you can use it purely wirelessly, I think at least one device needs a cat5 network connection. I think it then NATs all the other devices over an 802.11 network. It's also on the pricey end of things, although for a couple rooms it is not thousands of dollars.
They also have new models and capabilities pretty regularly so the above may already be out of date. Check it out, though.
I've also heard good things about Squeezebox, but it didn't appeal to me for several reasons that I forget.
Google is responsible for a tiny part of kernel development last I heard, unfortunately.
I don't know that much about google's private modifications, but the question of "what to give back" does not always have a clear default answer. I've modified lots of OSS in the past and not given it back, simply because my best guess was that I am the only person who will ever want feature x. There's no point in cluttering up mailing lists or documentation with something extremely esoteric. It's not because I'm lazy or selfish or greedy -- sometimes the right answer is to just keep things to yourself. (Of course, there are times when I've modified something hackishly, and had been too lazy or embarrassed to send it back upstream:)
Perhaps google answers this question in a different way than others would, but that doesn't necessarily conflict with "the spirit of OSS", whatever that might be.
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
I believe that's the point of why this is needed. Currently, if an author wants or needs precise layout with specific fonts, they pretty much have to use flash or images. This hurts accessibility to content. For example, Seth Godin's site has plenty of content, but no text. You could argue that he's doing it wrong, and he shouldn't be feeding us binary images when he's trying to convey words. On the other hand, you could argue that his site is really nice looking, conveys his message really well, and it's a pity that it's impossible to do this without resorting to such hacks that make the text un-ctrl-f'able, or unreadable by screen readers.
I believe the point of WOFF is to add semantic information to pages that authors want to appear in a very specific way, and that's a good thing.
Which is more secure? "Authentication" is just a URL, after all. (true, posts are handled slightly differently by browsers, but it's essentially the same as a get. It's all http in the end.)
I like obfuscated URLs since I don't have to create a new thing to remember to access it. I can just look up the URL in my mail client or whatever. And I don't believe that it significantly reduces the access control. Let me know if I'm wrong.
some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots.
Presumably if vaccines were either effective or ineffective the insurance companies would want to know which is which, right? Or is there some sort of calculus that says that vaccines could be effective for a given individual, but not cost effective for a larger group? I, a lay, would assume that "effective" and "cost effective" are the same, but I may be missing something.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 1
That said, you have to understand that American cyclists, for the most part, ride like complete
assholes. Despite a legal obligation to obey the exact same rules of the road as cars, they completely
ignore 99% of those rules. They don't feel a need to obey speed limits (in either direction - They'll
blow through a 15mph zone as fast as their bike can go, and they'll crawl along in a 45mph zone as though
on a leisurely ride in the park). They routinely ignore traffic signals, running red lights and stop signs
whenever convenient.
There are many areas in the us that do have separate rules for cyclists, eg "treat a red light like a stop sign" and "treat a stop sign like a yeild sign". The fact is that such laws (whether explicit or de facto) make riding and driving safer for everyone. Have you ever tried to get up to speed on a bike from a red light with a dozen cars behind you, some of which cannot see you? That's dangerous for both the cyclist and the drivers. It's much safer for the cyclist to pass through the red light as soon as it is safe, and get up to speed on his own. And a cyclist, not being enclosed in a sound-proof box with little windows can determine if it's safe very easily.
If you're targeting just one phone, fine. But you might as well just use the iPhone SDK so you don't have code all the touch interaction crap from scratch. [snip] you'd be pretty darn ignorant to go with WebGL over iPhone SDK.
If you look at the trac logs for this checkin, you'll see that the commiter has an apple.com email address. So it's probably safe to say that implementing this fits in with Apple's dev tools strategy.
I don't know a lot about OpenGL or WebGL, but it does feel like it overlaps a lot with what Flash and Silverlight provide. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that, but it seems notable to me.
How will we manage to use this? Programatically by Javascript, right? Javascript is so limited that I fail to see how it will be to make this actually usable [snip] Javascript also needs some cleanup and some more functionality.
Like what? It's a very rich language which is a pleasure to use. The historical short-coming has been it's libraries (primarily the DOM). But the language itself is really nice, as nearly anyone with enough experience will tell you.
And, besides, I can already imagine each browser doing it in it's own way and developers having to set up multiple ways to deal with the differences.
This is the case with all standards. If there are significant implementation errors, higher-level libraries will emerge that "fix" them for the users of this API. Ajax is different between browsers, is this a problem for anyone? No, there are multiple free libraries that are super-simple to use that make the right call in each browser. $.ajax({url: "foo.html"}); Just Works (tm).
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters.
There is no browser market. There are two markets that Microsoft sells to: Average home users and businesses. They build IE to cater to both of these markets, and if you are honest with yourself, you will see that they have done a pretty good job of augmenting their platform with IE. They have always been focused on "something that actually matters", which is giving their customers what works for them. Whether or not those customers are making decisions that have a positive result or negative result in the long term is besides the point.
Microsoft may not achieve their goals in a way that aligns with the interest of the masses, but they are not dumb. It is said that Microsoft knew far more about, and better understood, Netscape's defects than Netscape ever did, solely to be compatible so that IE would meet the needs of their market.
Forking Webkit or Gecko would be in the interest of web developers and standards nerds, but it would not meet the needs of Microsoft's market. I still have to fire up IE 6 at work because we have brain-dead intranet apps that require it. Until web developers or standards nerds mean more to Microsoft than average home users and businesses do, there is not much for Microsoft to do other than PR work. That said, IE 8 is actually very good. I'd probably be happy to use it if it was the only browser available.
Where are they? If C# and Java are so great, where are the apps?
gmail, amazon, your online banking, etc.
Firefox memory usage is a mystery to me. I can't conceive of how it uses so much memory just to show a few pages of text with embedded images.
Modern web standards are extraordinarily complicated. The current html spec is 756.93 KB alone. Add to that css, js, xml, http, etc. Add to that compatibility with the millions of existing web pages, and all of a sudden you have a ton of complicated code in order to display "a few pages of text".
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
If you are generating 3/5 of a terabyte of important data anually, ~$900 per year for even a 99.99% chance of a backup being available is cheap. I suspect that s3, in practice, provides greater than 99.99% success rates. Pairing s3 with a local fw drive with time machine or rsync is essentially 100% availability for the data on your computer.
Bart creates havoc at a bank, calling out "What do you mean, the bank is
out of money?", "Insolvent?!", and "You only have enough cash for the
next three customers?" Everyone panics and rushes the glass, demanding
an explanation. A Jimmy Stewart-like bank manager stammers, "I don't
have your money here. It's at Bill's house and Fred's house!" A fight
breaks out.
This is a weak summary of the great dialog that escapes my memory atm...
I very seriously doubt the designers of Java would have envisioned someone making a couple of FPS out of their creation.
Java was originally designed to be a multi-media platform for televisions. It's 2d and 3d APIs are, although simple, pretty good. Actual functionality was bolted on later (see ya Vector!).
You might consider a blog post asking for page redesign suggestions. This is common when a blogger doesn't have the time or the skills, but has a large technical audience. This sounds like you:)
You might also consider pulling the amazon noise and being more straight-forward about your desire to be compensated for your time and effort. Maybe a simple Paypal "donate" link. Or maybe you could put a call out to illustrators and creatives to create cafepress shirts/mugs/etc which you could sell from your blog. The subject matter at hand is a bottomless mine of material.
There are obviously a lot of folks who want to support your efforts and see them continue. The hard part is figuring out how to mobilize them.
Thank you very much! Couple of questions:
1. What do you mean about thumbnailing the pictures? Isn't there only one picture?
2. What should I do instead of using font tags?
3. What is semantic markup?
4. I thought the old fashioned fonts were more reflective of my 19th century personality, but maybe I'll experiment with something else.
PS There is no 'developer' just one unqualified unschooled amateur... moi.
1. Your images have certain dimensions (say, 100x300), but you are using html to make them display smaller (say, 33x100). This causes wasted bandwidth as well as wasted cpu for the viewer. The solution is to resize the actual image file to be the dimension that you want it to display.
2. 3. Font tags are an archaic method of formatting text that predates today's presentation mechanisms. Semantic markup is a way to express structure to your document. With today's presentation mechanisms, you can use
CSS to format your text. Semantic markup can give machines (eg, search engines) a clue as to how text contextually fits into a document or set of documents.
Eg:
<font size=18px face=your-font-name>Your Headline</font>
<font size=10px face=some-other-font-name>
Your article text.</font>
The above will look a certain way, but there is no inherent meaning to any of the blocks. While:
<h1>Your Headline</h1>
<p>Your article text.</p>
is not only smaller, but you've declared one section to be a "headline" and another section to be a "paragraph". So things like search engines can parse out the "headline" a possible extract of your article. You can then use CSS to make it look the way you want.
I don't think anyone expects you to be an expert in this, or holds it against you. I'm sure some really good web designers would be happy to come up with an improved fancy blogger template for you. If for no other reason than to get their name on a widely read blog.
Also, just a side note -- I don't know how much money you make from all the amazon links, but I personally find them distracting, which takes away from your valuable content.
Fat16 has been deprecated for ages (decades, I think). Windows only supports it for old floppy disks you have hanging around; it won't let you format any new devices in Fat16. Fat32 is only there for compatibility with Windows 98 and ME; the only reason XP lets you format a new disk as Fat32 is that it's (supposedly) possible to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP
Maybe you are talking about MS's advanced filesystem tools, but there's an article from MS that points out the bizarre fact that Vista's dialog for "format unformatted drive" defaults to FAT16.
To wit: "As for Windows, I would have expected it to always default to FAT32, but a quick look at the Format dialogâ(TM)s pick for one of my USB drives showed I was wrong." -- Mark Russinovich
because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
So running all the datacenters and having all the staff and paying all the electricity bills and designing and building the app store app all "costs nothing"?
The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup.
That's not correct. The price of anything is determined by the amount the buyer is willing to pay.
Installing PostgreSQL and the required Python libraries on OS X is tremendously painful.
I've been through that too. Next time, skip the pain and put a lean installation of Linux into a vm. You use your OSX apps/terminal/etc to code, but point your browser at your vm. Performance is fine on my old MBP.
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
Something doesn't quite seem right here.
I know little about Opera, but:
it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Operaâ(TM)s proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML â" Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective â" itâ(TM)s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors.
Opera Mini is probably a Java app, so it can run on the most number of phones. Porting a JVM that only needs to support a few select bits is vastly easier than porting a full-blown rendering engine from c/cpp to obj c.
Slashdot Mirror
It does have downsides. The magic peering technology seems complicated and is not very well documented (at least when I was reading about it). I don't think you can use it purely wirelessly, I think at least one device needs a cat5 network connection. I think it then NATs all the other devices over an 802.11 network. It's also on the pricey end of things, although for a couple rooms it is not thousands of dollars.
They also have new models and capabilities pretty regularly so the above may already be out of date. Check it out, though.
I've also heard good things about Squeezebox, but it didn't appeal to me for several reasons that I forget.
Google is responsible for a tiny part of kernel development last I heard, unfortunately.
I don't know that much about google's private modifications, but the question of "what to give back" does not always have a clear default answer. I've modified lots of OSS in the past and not given it back, simply because my best guess was that I am the only person who will ever want feature x. There's no point in cluttering up mailing lists or documentation with something extremely esoteric. It's not because I'm lazy or selfish or greedy -- sometimes the right answer is to just keep things to yourself. (Of course, there are times when I've modified something hackishly, and had been too lazy or embarrassed to send it back upstream :)
Perhaps google answers this question in a different way than others would, but that doesn't necessarily conflict with "the spirit of OSS", whatever that might be.
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
I believe that's the point of why this is needed. Currently, if an author wants or needs precise layout with specific fonts, they pretty much have to use flash or images. This hurts accessibility to content. For example, Seth Godin's site has plenty of content, but no text. You could argue that he's doing it wrong, and he shouldn't be feeding us binary images when he's trying to convey words. On the other hand, you could argue that his site is really nice looking, conveys his message really well, and it's a pity that it's impossible to do this without resorting to such hacks that make the text un-ctrl-f'able, or unreadable by screen readers.
I believe the point of WOFF is to add semantic information to pages that authors want to appear in a very specific way, and that's a good thing.
The real problem, IMO, is that Google Voice voicemails are world-readable to begin with. The only security is the URL scheme.
http://some-site/some-service/some-item/2bdccb1f-08d9-4f0d-a270-bc061f0c475f
http://some-site/some-service/some-item?user=youruserid&password=12345
Which is more secure? "Authentication" is just a URL, after all. (true, posts are handled slightly differently by browsers, but it's essentially the same as a get. It's all http in the end.)
I like obfuscated URLs since I don't have to create a new thing to remember to access it. I can just look up the URL in my mail client or whatever. And I don't believe that it significantly reduces the access control. Let me know if I'm wrong.
some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots.
Presumably if vaccines were either effective or ineffective the insurance companies would want to know which is which, right? Or is there some sort of calculus that says that vaccines could be effective for a given individual, but not cost effective for a larger group? I, a lay, would assume that "effective" and "cost effective" are the same, but I may be missing something.
That said, you have to understand that American cyclists, for the most part, ride like complete assholes. Despite a legal obligation to obey the exact same rules of the road as cars, they completely ignore 99% of those rules. They don't feel a need to obey speed limits (in either direction - They'll blow through a 15mph zone as fast as their bike can go, and they'll crawl along in a 45mph zone as though on a leisurely ride in the park). They routinely ignore traffic signals, running red lights and stop signs whenever convenient.
There are many areas in the us that do have separate rules for cyclists, eg "treat a red light like a stop sign" and "treat a stop sign like a yeild sign". The fact is that such laws (whether explicit or de facto) make riding and driving safer for everyone. Have you ever tried to get up to speed on a bike from a red light with a dozen cars behind you, some of which cannot see you? That's dangerous for both the cyclist and the drivers. It's much safer for the cyclist to pass through the red light as soon as it is safe, and get up to speed on his own. And a cyclist, not being enclosed in a sound-proof box with little windows can determine if it's safe very easily.
someone who thinks of "talent" as some liquid commodity you can "pump in" to a project.
Of course you can't "pump" talent. You squirt it.
If you're targeting just one phone, fine. But you might as well just use the iPhone SDK so you don't have code all the touch interaction crap from scratch. [snip] you'd be pretty darn ignorant to go with WebGL over iPhone SDK.
If you look at the trac logs for this checkin, you'll see that the commiter has an apple.com email address. So it's probably safe to say that implementing this fits in with Apple's dev tools strategy.
I don't know a lot about OpenGL or WebGL, but it does feel like it overlaps a lot with what Flash and Silverlight provide. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that, but it seems notable to me.
How will we manage to use this? Programatically by Javascript, right? Javascript is so limited that I fail to see how it will be to make this actually usable [snip] Javascript also needs some cleanup and some more functionality.
Like what? It's a very rich language which is a pleasure to use. The historical short-coming has been it's libraries (primarily the DOM). But the language itself is really nice, as nearly anyone with enough experience will tell you.
And, besides, I can already imagine each browser doing it in it's own way and developers having to set up multiple ways to deal with the differences.
This is the case with all standards. If there are significant implementation errors, higher-level libraries will emerge that "fix" them for the users of this API. Ajax is different between browsers, is this a problem for anyone? No, there are multiple free libraries that are super-simple to use that make the right call in each browser. $.ajax({url: "foo.html"}); Just Works (tm).
but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
How are things going over there at the US Mint?
Sounds like your local newspaper is suffering from a bad case of keming.
Also I am exactly 26 years old.
Happy birthday!
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters.
There is no browser market. There are two markets that Microsoft sells to: Average home users and businesses. They build IE to cater to both of these markets, and if you are honest with yourself, you will see that they have done a pretty good job of augmenting their platform with IE. They have always been focused on "something that actually matters", which is giving their customers what works for them. Whether or not those customers are making decisions that have a positive result or negative result in the long term is besides the point.
Microsoft may not achieve their goals in a way that aligns with the interest of the masses, but they are not dumb. It is said that Microsoft knew far more about, and better understood, Netscape's defects than Netscape ever did, solely to be compatible so that IE would meet the needs of their market.
Forking Webkit or Gecko would be in the interest of web developers and standards nerds, but it would not meet the needs of Microsoft's market. I still have to fire up IE 6 at work because we have brain-dead intranet apps that require it. Until web developers or standards nerds mean more to Microsoft than average home users and businesses do, there is not much for Microsoft to do other than PR work. That said, IE 8 is actually very good. I'd probably be happy to use it if it was the only browser available.
Or The Progress Bar.
Where are they? If C# and Java are so great, where are the apps?
gmail, amazon, your online banking, etc.
Firefox memory usage is a mystery to me. I can't conceive of how it uses so much memory just to show a few pages of text with embedded images.
Modern web standards are extraordinarily complicated. The current html spec is 756.93 KB alone. Add to that css, js, xml, http, etc. Add to that compatibility with the millions of existing web pages, and all of a sudden you have a ton of complicated code in order to display "a few pages of text".
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
If you are generating 3/5 of a terabyte of important data anually, ~$900 per year for even a 99.99% chance of a backup being available is cheap. I suspect that s3, in practice, provides greater than 99.99% success rates. Pairing s3 with a local fw drive with time machine or rsync is essentially 100% availability for the data on your computer.
Bart creates havoc at a bank, calling out "What do you mean, the bank is out of money?", "Insolvent?!", and "You only have enough cash for the next three customers?" Everyone panics and rushes the glass, demanding an explanation. A Jimmy Stewart-like bank manager stammers, "I don't have your money here. It's at Bill's house and Fred's house!" A fight breaks out.
This is a weak summary of the great dialog that escapes my memory atm...
Google seems to strip out non-alphanumeric symbols.
This isn't entirely true. net 11 and .net 1.1 return different results.
I very seriously doubt the designers of Java would have envisioned someone making a couple of FPS out of their creation.
Java was originally designed to be a multi-media platform for televisions. It's 2d and 3d APIs are, although simple, pretty good. Actual functionality was bolted on later (see ya Vector!).
You might consider a blog post asking for page redesign suggestions. This is common when a blogger doesn't have the time or the skills, but has a large technical audience. This sounds like you :)
You might also consider pulling the amazon noise and being more straight-forward about your desire to be compensated for your time and effort. Maybe a simple Paypal "donate" link. Or maybe you could put a call out to illustrators and creatives to create cafepress shirts/mugs/etc which you could sell from your blog. The subject matter at hand is a bottomless mine of material.
There are obviously a lot of folks who want to support your efforts and see them continue. The hard part is figuring out how to mobilize them.
Thank you very much! Couple of questions: 1. What do you mean about thumbnailing the pictures? Isn't there only one picture? 2. What should I do instead of using font tags? 3. What is semantic markup? 4. I thought the old fashioned fonts were more reflective of my 19th century personality, but maybe I'll experiment with something else. PS There is no 'developer' just one unqualified unschooled amateur... moi.
1. Your images have certain dimensions (say, 100x300), but you are using html to make them display smaller (say, 33x100). This causes wasted bandwidth as well as wasted cpu for the viewer. The solution is to resize the actual image file to be the dimension that you want it to display.
2. 3. Font tags are an archaic method of formatting text that predates today's presentation mechanisms. Semantic markup is a way to express structure to your document. With today's presentation mechanisms, you can use CSS to format your text. Semantic markup can give machines (eg, search engines) a clue as to how text contextually fits into a document or set of documents.
Eg:
<font size=18px face=your-font-name>Your Headline</font> <font size=10px face=some-other-font-name> Your article text.</font>
The above will look a certain way, but there is no inherent meaning to any of the blocks. While:
<h1>Your Headline</h1> <p>Your article text.</p>
is not only smaller, but you've declared one section to be a "headline" and another section to be a "paragraph". So things like search engines can parse out the "headline" a possible extract of your article. You can then use CSS to make it look the way you want.
I don't think anyone expects you to be an expert in this, or holds it against you. I'm sure some really good web designers would be happy to come up with an improved fancy blogger template for you. If for no other reason than to get their name on a widely read blog.
Also, just a side note -- I don't know how much money you make from all the amazon links, but I personally find them distracting, which takes away from your valuable content.
hth,
Fat16 has been deprecated for ages (decades, I think). Windows only supports it for old floppy disks you have hanging around; it won't let you format any new devices in Fat16. Fat32 is only there for compatibility with Windows 98 and ME; the only reason XP lets you format a new disk as Fat32 is that it's (supposedly) possible to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP
Maybe you are talking about MS's advanced filesystem tools, but there's an article from MS that points out the bizarre fact that Vista's dialog for "format unformatted drive" defaults to FAT16.
To wit: "As for Windows, I would have expected it to always default to FAT32, but a quick look at the Format dialogâ(TM)s pick for one of my USB drives showed I was wrong." -- Mark Russinovich
because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
So running all the datacenters and having all the staff and paying all the electricity bills and designing and building the app store app all "costs nothing"?
The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup.
That's not correct. The price of anything is determined by the amount the buyer is willing to pay.
Installing PostgreSQL and the required Python libraries on OS X is tremendously painful.
I've been through that too. Next time, skip the pain and put a lean installation of Linux into a vm. You use your OSX apps/terminal/etc to code, but point your browser at your vm. Performance is fine on my old MBP.
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
Something doesn't quite seem right here.
I know little about Opera, but:
it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Operaâ(TM)s proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML â" Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective â" itâ(TM)s faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors.
Opera Mini is probably a Java app, so it can run on the most number of phones. Porting a JVM that only needs to support a few select bits is vastly easier than porting a full-blown rendering engine from c/cpp to obj c.