This netbook you are talking about with over 1,000 vertical pixels? Who makes it?
'Cos I use a 11" laptop now, and it has 768 vertical pixels. I bloody well treasure every pixel I can shave off from bloated UI. I want less UI and more space for content. Most of the UI can be turned into keyboard shortcuts I can learn: my brain has far more space for UI than my laptop screen.
I know that's a joke, but actually the lawyer who looked over it for Wikipedia is staff counsel and gets a salary rather than bills by the hour. Geoff Brigham used to be a federal prosecutor and has worked in private practice.
He's a good guy: I've had a few dealings with him over content issues on Wikipedia - he does what a good lawyer should, tells you exactly what the legal situation is in plain, clear English without bullshit. When he says that SOPA was "a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet", I tend to believe him over the RIAA shill.
Wikipedia admin here that was quite involved with the shutdown. RIAA guy thinks we were 'deluded'.
Here's what actually happened. We had a discussion on Wikipedia for a few weeks. We asked the Wikimedia Foundation to instruct their General Counsel to prepare us a detailed listing of exactly what the problems are for Wikipedia with the bill. He did so, and produced a document listing a variety of problems that SOPA might cause for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. We then had a vote as to whether or not to take action.
By 'deluded', he means we as a community decided to ask a lawyer to look at the bill and tell us what he thinks, and then decided to take action. If that's delusion, I'm not sure what counts as sanity any more.
I read that and before realising it was Poe's law, I grabbed an audio CD, popped it into iTunes, ripped it to WAV, turned the WAV into FLAC, then turned the FLAC back into WAV, and checked the SHA1 on the two WAV files. See https://gist.github.com/1934901
For the benefit of audiophiles everywhere, I can confirm that "lossless means that what you put in exactly matches what you put out".;-)
User Agent strings aren't the only way of identifying browsers. Generally these days, you do UA strings and object detection. Basically the latter is running JavaScript with a whole bunch of if statements to see if certain objects are defined. document.all is an IE only thing, and window.performance only exists in IE9 for instance. window.opera only exists in Opera (duh).
With WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), you can detect to see if they have Canvas and WebGL support. With IE, you can even use conditional comments.
If you have a UA string claiming to be Firefox 2 but it responds to document.getElementsByClassName, you know something is lying to you.;-)
One thing I like a lot: you are reading something on a page and you want to search for it in another tab. You pop open a new tab, start typing the search or URL and then need to go back to the first tab to check something. You come back to the new tab and the partially-entered URL or search remains. This is good!
They have one major advantage to tap water: they are often available in places where you can't get tap water. If I'm rushing for a train, I can hop into a shop, grab a bottle of water and get on the train. Sadly, my local friendly city authorities have decided that publicly usable taps == evil socialist communism.
There's already an app you can get for Windows, Linux and OS X called F.lux which changes the colour temperate of your screen based on your time and location. http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Just installed it and my screen has a very strong yellowy-pinky tint as it is 2am.
Gender IS in preferences. You can choose between male, female and unspecified. This is to customise UI on the site so it has the appropriate pronouns. You can do this all over the place, like this:
{{gender:Jimbo Wales|man|woman|person}}
(replacing Jimbo Wales with your WP username (or a template that substitutes the current user's name) and the words man, woman and person with wikitext that you want returned)
This is used quite a bit for Userboxes so that they can make it text in the userbox switch dynamically between "This user lives in London and [they like/he likes/she likes] travelling on the Underground" or whatever.
The problem with the preferences route is unspecified may be because you haven't set it or it may be because you don't want to set it (or you don't fall into male/female because you are transgendered or whatever).
One of these days, I'll replace login with biometrics or something. I bet even then users would leave DNA swabs or fingerprint moulds floating around like post-it notes.
But the point is that it is reducing Google's costs. They fund development of MySQL and PostgreSQL because they use it. The Xbox comparison isn't a good one: Microsoft has started making a profit on Xbox, but Google are never going to make a profit in the same way from Linux or MySQL/Postgres, but making those products better reduces a cost center for Google. That's a pretty good primary reason that should pass muster with the regulators.
That it means little guys like me working for a tiny European company can run Linux and Postgres and Apache on our servers rather than paying Microsoft for a Windows/MS SQL/IIS/.NET solution is a nice secondary effect. It sure would be nice to think that Google are putting all this investment into FOSS to keep me from having to be a Microsoft customer. To argue that, I'd have to see some evidence that Google are funding FOSS development for stuff they have no direct business use for.
I went to a machine the other day and found the user's password on a post-it note.
That's common enough, right?
Except he was in/etc/sudoers. Not any more.
I'm instituting a new security policy: if you leave your password on a post-it note, you lose sudo. If I find your password on a post-it note again, I get to hit you on the head with a hammer. Eventually it will stop.
Well, in the UK, kids go to school for twelve years. That should surely be enough time to teach cursive and touch typing as part of an integrated writing curriculum!
I heard about a job advert that a large multinational in London's Square Mile put out. They needed a receptionist/secretary. They needed to be able to type and use MS Office. The typing requirements? 40 WPM. They had to reduce it down to 40 WPM to actually get applicants for a secretarial position. That tripped my "WTF? Something is wrong here." detector.
I don't understand why touch typing is not part of every school curriculum in every Western nation. They spend enough time teaching people Word and Excel these days, why not teach touch typing? In a society where a huge chunk of people will end up in an office in front of a computer all day, it seems like a basic component of literacy. If you are writing things, there's a pretty high chance those things will be written in some electronic form.
I can touch type pretty fast (90+ WPM) but that's because my mother (who had been to secretarial college and worked as a legal secretary) taught me how to touch type on a manual typewriter.
If you can put latest and greatest Android on an end-of-lifed handset they haven't gotten money for in two years, they get nothing.
If they successfully lock things down so that you need to buy a *new* handset to get the snazzy new features. If most of the reason people get new things is for software, then the hardware vendor has their own interests in making sure their stuff comes along for the ride.
I can install Windows (XP at least) or Linux on my old PC.
Ergo, I have no reason to buy a new PC.
Except, you know, to make my software run better...
Slashdot Mirror
"HTML5 ads"
HTML5 is just HTML, y'know.
HTML5 ads are things like text and banners. You know, not godawful eyesores with background music and punch the fucking monkey bullshit.
You have a very poor memory as in 1991 memory usage was not 300-500 MB just for a silly webbrowser.
To be fair, back in 1991, your choice of web browsers was rather limited.
This netbook you are talking about with over 1,000 vertical pixels? Who makes it?
'Cos I use a 11" laptop now, and it has 768 vertical pixels. I bloody well treasure every pixel I can shave off from bloated UI. I want less UI and more space for content. Most of the UI can be turned into keyboard shortcuts I can learn: my brain has far more space for UI than my laptop screen.
I know that's a joke, but actually the lawyer who looked over it for Wikipedia is staff counsel and gets a salary rather than bills by the hour. Geoff Brigham used to be a federal prosecutor and has worked in private practice.
He's a good guy: I've had a few dealings with him over content issues on Wikipedia - he does what a good lawyer should, tells you exactly what the legal situation is in plain, clear English without bullshit. When he says that SOPA was "a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet", I tend to believe him over the RIAA shill.
Have Jimmy write a letter to the editor of the NYT rebutting the claims that you were misinformed. They'll publish it.
Suggestion duly made - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Response_to_NYT_piece_on_SOPA
Wikipedia admin here that was quite involved with the shutdown. RIAA guy thinks we were 'deluded'.
Here's what actually happened. We had a discussion on Wikipedia for a few weeks. We asked the Wikimedia Foundation to instruct their General Counsel to prepare us a detailed listing of exactly what the problems are for Wikipedia with the bill. He did so, and produced a document listing a variety of problems that SOPA might cause for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. We then had a vote as to whether or not to take action.
By 'deluded', he means we as a community decided to ask a lawyer to look at the bill and tell us what he thinks, and then decided to take action. If that's delusion, I'm not sure what counts as sanity any more.
I read that and before realising it was Poe's law, I grabbed an audio CD, popped it into iTunes, ripped it to WAV, turned the WAV into FLAC, then turned the FLAC back into WAV, and checked the SHA1 on the two WAV files. See https://gist.github.com/1934901
For the benefit of audiophiles everywhere, I can confirm that "lossless means that what you put in exactly matches what you put out". ;-)
User Agent strings aren't the only way of identifying browsers. Generally these days, you do UA strings and object detection. Basically the latter is running JavaScript with a whole bunch of if statements to see if certain objects are defined. document.all is an IE only thing, and window.performance only exists in IE9 for instance. window.opera only exists in Opera (duh).
With WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), you can detect to see if they have Canvas and WebGL support. With IE, you can even use conditional comments.
If you have a UA string claiming to be Firefox 2 but it responds to document.getElementsByClassName, you know something is lying to you. ;-)
To see how this sort of thing works, take a peek at http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
One thing I like a lot: you are reading something on a page and you want to search for it in another tab. You pop open a new tab, start typing the search or URL and then need to go back to the first tab to check something. You come back to the new tab and the partially-entered URL or search remains. This is good!
Yep: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=memory+leak
Try that on OS X.
Hint: you can't.
Since when did asking my browser to not show a select list of images and other web resources count as "piracy"?
Was it about the same time as they declared it illegal to go take a piss during the commercial breaks?
The frequent browser updates over my goddamn expensive 3G connection without asking hurts in a direct, financial manner.
They have one major advantage to tap water: they are often available in places where you can't get tap water. If I'm rushing for a train, I can hop into a shop, grab a bottle of water and get on the train. Sadly, my local friendly city authorities have decided that publicly usable taps == evil socialist communism.
Glad to see you appreciate people for more than just their contribution or lack thereof to social welfare programmes.
There's already an app you can get for Windows, Linux and OS X called F.lux which changes the colour temperate of your screen based on your time and location. http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Just installed it and my screen has a very strong yellowy-pinky tint as it is 2am.
And I'm reading Slashdot.
Case closed.
Gender IS in preferences. You can choose between male, female and unspecified. This is to customise UI on the site so it has the appropriate pronouns. You can do this all over the place, like this:
{{gender:Jimbo Wales|man|woman|person}}
(replacing Jimbo Wales with your WP username (or a template that substitutes the current user's name) and the words man, woman and person with wikitext that you want returned)
This is used quite a bit for Userboxes so that they can make it text in the userbox switch dynamically between "This user lives in London and [they like/he likes/she likes] travelling on the Underground" or whatever.
The problem with the preferences route is unspecified may be because you haven't set it or it may be because you don't want to set it (or you don't fall into male/female because you are transgendered or whatever).
There have been polls and studies done though. You can read about them on http://enwp.org/WP:BIAS or http://enwp.org/WP:ACST
I heard that Google use MySQL for something like the AdSense customer database.
It was six characters [a-z] all lower case.
One of these days, I'll replace login with biometrics or something. I bet even then users would leave DNA swabs or fingerprint moulds floating around like post-it notes.
But the point is that it is reducing Google's costs. They fund development of MySQL and PostgreSQL because they use it. The Xbox comparison isn't a good one: Microsoft has started making a profit on Xbox, but Google are never going to make a profit in the same way from Linux or MySQL/Postgres, but making those products better reduces a cost center for Google. That's a pretty good primary reason that should pass muster with the regulators.
That it means little guys like me working for a tiny European company can run Linux and Postgres and Apache on our servers rather than paying Microsoft for a Windows/MS SQL/IIS/.NET solution is a nice secondary effect. It sure would be nice to think that Google are putting all this investment into FOSS to keep me from having to be a Microsoft customer. To argue that, I'd have to see some evidence that Google are funding FOSS development for stuff they have no direct business use for.
I went to a machine the other day and found the user's password on a post-it note.
That's common enough, right?
Except he was in /etc/sudoers. Not any more.
I'm instituting a new security policy: if you leave your password on a post-it note, you lose sudo. If I find your password on a post-it note again, I get to hit you on the head with a hammer. Eventually it will stop.
Well, in the UK, kids go to school for twelve years. That should surely be enough time to teach cursive and touch typing as part of an integrated writing curriculum!
I heard about a job advert that a large multinational in London's Square Mile put out. They needed a receptionist/secretary. They needed to be able to type and use MS Office. The typing requirements? 40 WPM. They had to reduce it down to 40 WPM to actually get applicants for a secretarial position. That tripped my "WTF? Something is wrong here." detector.
I don't understand why touch typing is not part of every school curriculum in every Western nation. They spend enough time teaching people Word and Excel these days, why not teach touch typing? In a society where a huge chunk of people will end up in an office in front of a computer all day, it seems like a basic component of literacy. If you are writing things, there's a pretty high chance those things will be written in some electronic form.
I can touch type pretty fast (90+ WPM) but that's because my mother (who had been to secretarial college and worked as a legal secretary) taught me how to touch type on a manual typewriter.
If you can put latest and greatest Android on an end-of-lifed handset they haven't gotten money for in two years, they get nothing.
If they successfully lock things down so that you need to buy a *new* handset to get the snazzy new features. If most of the reason people get new things is for software, then the hardware vendor has their own interests in making sure their stuff comes along for the ride.
I can install Windows (XP at least) or Linux on my old PC.
Ergo, I have no reason to buy a new PC.
Except, you know, to make my software run better...