Update: So I decided to run my own Flash ad. I gave it a $25/day budget and bid the $0.10 minimum. It immediately showed up, and appeared every time I refreshed for at least several hours. According to Google, it was shown 6,607 times. But here's the interesting thing (which, frankly, completely demolishes my whole theory): it was pulled, despite it only costing me $0.40 (ie, with tons of budget remaining). Why? Because clickthrough was too low -- 0.06%, to be precise. So now I'm changing my theory. The reason there are so few Flash ads isn't that Google has priced the keyword out of the market. Rather, it's because it's difficult to make an ad that achieves sufficient clickthrough on such a general term as Flash. Even if you're willing to pay the minimum, Google isn't willing to show it unless it performs. Whether or not that's a problem (and I'm not sure it is), it's entirely different than what I initially was guessing, and completely undermines my theory of Google using monopolistic pressure to sustain noncompetitive pricing. So... never mind.
The versioning system allows your application to specify a desired version with as much precision as it needs. By dropping version fields, you end up wild carding a field. -- google.load() versioning
The explanation I always liked was that HP wasn't precisely linked to the number of hits you could take, but the general amount of damage you could handle before going down -- you might avoid it, roll with it, take it in the armor, parry it (while getting tired), etc. It's just a number to make handling the behind-the-scenes a little easier.
While the auto-fail is still there, there aren't any fixed rules as to what exactly happens. There's a major change to the other end, though -- every 20 is a critical, not just an auto-success. No more confirmation rolls. However, it doesn't double your dice, just maximizing them.
The world we would live in with [100% leisure time] is my biggest nightmare.
The point of advancement is to answer questions. The more questions we answer, the easier life gets for sure, but you continue the quest to answer questions. We should never be content with where we are as a people.
I don't know about you, but I use my leisure time to research, to solve problems, to work on things interesting to me. The entire Open Source movement is about using leisure time to make useful, important things, mostly without pay. Do you seriously think that being able to provide food, shelter, and clothing for the entire world is a bad thing?
Scarcity is a problem. I don't know about "evil," but definitely a problem. Quite a few extremely talented people don't get to work at "furthering the species" because they're busy trying to get by. There are people starving in Africa who could do wonderful things for the human race if only they weren't dying from hunger. There are people working in sweatshops in Asia for pennies a day who could join you in your quest to answer questions if only they weren't using all their time to stitch up a shoe.
What do you think we're advancing for, anyway? If you don't have a goal in mind, how are you supposed to get there? When we get to the point that we can eliminate scarcity, I'd rejoice that I can finally stop working for a paycheck and start working for personal interest -- I can write the book I've wanted to, make another music album, work on the sufficiently smart compiler, and so on.
Scarcity is a barrier to advancement, not the reason for it.
All software can be hacked. All software has bugs. People just have an expectation that it performs at a certain level. Should everybody working on operating systems be deemed incompetent because there are still security issues?
However we are absolutely positively NOT talking about unintentional bugs here.
I apologize if I misread this, but it sure seems like they were extending their statement to all software, not just DRM software (which, I agree, is impossible in the end). I wasn't referring to dpbsmith's quoting of the ICCP's code of ethics, which I have no issue with.
The ethics of programming are complicated enough as it is. One might say that unintentional bugs are ethically equivalent to mistakes made in any other field. On that note, I don't think it's wrong to try, either. It's just that the OP's point of view is so common today, and it bothers me.
If everybody hates the song, they're still going to hate it no matter how many times it gets aired.
Actually, some psychological studies have shown that repeated listening to a song (or repeated exposure to practically anything) will increase the probability that a person enjoys it. That is, if a radio station plays something a hundred times, people will grow to like the song better than something played only once.
Either way, I don't know about "immoral," but it's an interesting practice (considering radio stations have to pay royalties on the songs they play).
I use gmail in much the same way: searching for from:google (I'm being recruited by them) or to:sydney (my wife) in gmail brings up the expected list, sorted by date. (For your clients, you'd just put any email address they use on a contact, and then search for that contact, instead of using a folder.) I've got tags for the mailing lists I'm on (work somewhat like folders, but a message can be in more than one simultaneously), and the archive is already kept forever (I'm using "518 MB (18%) of my 2856 MB", according to the web client).
Sounds like you're running your own (somewhat large) business -- good luck! Hope that the way you handle email works out for you.:)
I never understood the "keep everything in the inbox" mentality. I deal with an email, and then archive it. My work inbox is empty. My gmail inbox has two messages in it -- both reminders to do something when I get home.
How can you deal with almost 10K emails in your inbox? I'm honestly interested.
And that's only for major artists -- minor artists get playtime but never see the royalties. Sound Exchange never bothers to pass the royalties on, but still collects them.
I stick by all the posts I've ever made, some may have been incorrect or my opinion may have changed since I wrote them, but I stick by the fact that for that time in my life they were correct for me.
Absolutely. If I didn't mean what I said, I wouldn't have said it. Of course, this might fall into the "nothing to hide" argument vs. privacy, and it gets sticky.
Still, it's amazing what people do or say when they think they're anonymous.
Got an interesting anecdote for that. I was working support at a college when we get a call about boot problems. They were getting the "insert system disk and press any key to continue message" that means you left your floppy in.
So of course, we tell her to eject the disk and press enter. She says there's no disk in there. My supervisor was actually the one handling the call, and he politely puts her on hold and comes around to the front desk. I tell him that if there's really no floppy in the drive, she's got a problem with her hard drive (most likely the MBR) -- bad things. So he sends someone over to take a look.
Fifteen minutes later, he comes back. She had a floppy in the drive.
In my experience, if you play Monopoly RIGHT (by the official rules) and focus on the game instead of gabbing about other things the whole time, it can take two hours or less, sometimes as little as one hour.
Every time I play with my wife, she beats me in less than 45 minutes. That's my cop-out excuse.:)
Honestly, if you ever run more than one program at once (think browser, three terminals, music player, etc.), you're taking advantage. As long as the OS can handle it, multi-tasking is much nicer with multiple processors.
(OT) Re:Textmate had me at customizable snippets..
on
TextMate
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· Score: 1
Honestly, my productivity has shot through the roof because creating simple things like for loops takes about 8-12 key hits to get all the infrastructure done, and with all the proper brackets and semicolons all perfectly placed and formatted. I shit you not when I say that this has eliminated 90% of my debug problems.
Just a thought (not ragging on you or anything), but what does it say about our programming languages when a cut-and-paste feature is the best part of an editor?
Slashdot Mirror
..., and if you have enough minorities they start to outnumber the "majority".
By "majority" in that last sense, you mean plurality. Either way, though, I'm much more a fan of that system.
"It will be SIM locked."
The T-Mobile CEO has said that you can buy an unlocked device, though it's more expensive ($400, IIRC).
He updated his post to note that he was wrong:
Python instead of Java for databases -- with SQLAlchemy you can churn out something interesting pretty quick, with minimal boilerplate.
The explanation I always liked was that HP wasn't precisely linked to the number of hits you could take, but the general amount of damage you could handle before going down -- you might avoid it, roll with it, take it in the armor, parry it (while getting tired), etc. It's just a number to make handling the behind-the-scenes a little easier.
While the auto-fail is still there, there aren't any fixed rules as to what exactly happens. There's a major change to the other end, though -- every 20 is a critical, not just an auto-success. No more confirmation rolls. However, it doesn't double your dice, just maximizing them.
The new tools that they're developing are Windows-only, and yes, they use DirectX.
Where's the moderation for +!, Awesome?
You know, the top Google result for this is: "Radioactive Horse Manure Seen as New Terror Threat"
I don't know about you, but I use my leisure time to research, to solve problems, to work on things interesting to me. The entire Open Source movement is about using leisure time to make useful, important things, mostly without pay. Do you seriously think that being able to provide food, shelter, and clothing for the entire world is a bad thing?
Scarcity is a problem. I don't know about "evil," but definitely a problem. Quite a few extremely talented people don't get to work at "furthering the species" because they're busy trying to get by. There are people starving in Africa who could do wonderful things for the human race if only they weren't dying from hunger. There are people working in sweatshops in Asia for pennies a day who could join you in your quest to answer questions if only they weren't using all their time to stitch up a shoe.
What do you think we're advancing for, anyway? If you don't have a goal in mind, how are you supposed to get there? When we get to the point that we can eliminate scarcity, I'd rejoice that I can finally stop working for a paycheck and start working for personal interest -- I can write the book I've wanted to, make another music album, work on the sufficiently smart compiler, and so on.
Scarcity is a barrier to advancement, not the reason for it.
-- MontyApollo (Emphasis added.)
I apologize if I misread this, but it sure seems like they were extending their statement to all software, not just DRM software (which, I agree, is impossible in the end). I wasn't referring to dpbsmith's quoting of the ICCP's code of ethics, which I have no issue with.
The ethics of programming are complicated enough as it is. One might say that unintentional bugs are ethically equivalent to mistakes made in any other field. On that note, I don't think it's wrong to try, either. It's just that the OP's point of view is so common today, and it bothers me.
Really? Every piece of software ever created? (Yes, I know -- hyperbole to make a point. Still, we should at least try for bug-free, right?)
Actually, some psychological studies have shown that repeated listening to a song (or repeated exposure to practically anything) will increase the probability that a person enjoys it. That is, if a radio station plays something a hundred times, people will grow to like the song better than something played only once.
Either way, I don't know about "immoral," but it's an interesting practice (considering radio stations have to pay royalties on the songs they play).
Ah, that makes a little more sense then.
I use gmail in much the same way: searching for from:google (I'm being recruited by them) or to:sydney (my wife) in gmail brings up the expected list, sorted by date. (For your clients, you'd just put any email address they use on a contact, and then search for that contact, instead of using a folder.) I've got tags for the mailing lists I'm on (work somewhat like folders, but a message can be in more than one simultaneously), and the archive is already kept forever (I'm using "518 MB (18%) of my 2856 MB", according to the web client).
Sounds like you're running your own (somewhat large) business -- good luck! Hope that the way you handle email works out for you. :)
I never understood the "keep everything in the inbox" mentality. I deal with an email, and then archive it. My work inbox is empty. My gmail inbox has two messages in it -- both reminders to do something when I get home.
How can you deal with almost 10K emails in your inbox? I'm honestly interested.
And that's only for major artists -- minor artists get playtime but never see the royalties. Sound Exchange never bothers to pass the royalties on, but still collects them.
See As We May Think: the Memex.
Absolutely. If I didn't mean what I said, I wouldn't have said it. Of course, this might fall into the "nothing to hide" argument vs. privacy, and it gets sticky.
Still, it's amazing what people do or say when they think they're anonymous.
Where's the moderation for +1, Awesome?
Got an interesting anecdote for that. I was working support at a college when we get a call about boot problems. They were getting the "insert system disk and press any key to continue message" that means you left your floppy in.
So of course, we tell her to eject the disk and press enter. She says there's no disk in there. My supervisor was actually the one handling the call, and he politely puts her on hold and comes around to the front desk. I tell him that if there's really no floppy in the drive, she's got a problem with her hard drive (most likely the MBR) -- bad things. So he sends someone over to take a look.
Fifteen minutes later, he comes back. She had a floppy in the drive.
Honestly, if you ever run more than one program at once (think browser, three terminals, music player, etc.), you're taking advantage. As long as the OS can handle it, multi-tasking is much nicer with multiple processors.