Okay, so if my residential DSL connection is for "burstable" connections, why is it that if I google for the word 'burst' on my ISP website it comes up with zero results? Perhaps they could have told me before I signed up.
Of course bandwidth isn't free. We, **THE CUSTOMERS**, are paying you for it. Perhaps we could have it without the side-serving of bullshit and FUD that so many ISPs are giving us.
That's not how it works actually. Bandwidth shouldn't be shaped by the ISP at all. If I want to 'shape' my bandwidth or restrict BitTorrent or anything else, I'll do it myself. I can then work out what's going on and why.
Ignore the fact that it's a BSD shell, that it has some actual shell features (like tab completion, command recall etc.) and that it's POSIX compatible, and I guess it might kind of look like DOS.
CD brain\yours DEL *.* Are you sure? y Could Not Find File
Libertarians differ from the Right in that they believe in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Libertarians differ from the Left in that they believe in the Second Amendment. Libertarians shudder when politicians talk about the Almighty Lord, they shudder when they talk about the evil of video games, they shudder when they talk about family values, redistribution of wealth, the "Communications Decency Act" (or whatever doublespeak code it's being described as this week). In fact, they have a righteous cynicism when politicians say anything. Can you blame them?
WebKit is also used as the basis for other apps - Shiira.app is a Japanese open source (I think) browser that uses WebKit but offers more functions than Safari. NetNewsWire - the RSS aggregator - has a built-in tabbed browser based on WebKit.
It's also a nice PR hit. Makes Apple look like they're "on fire". Of course, if they don't start shipping people's laptops, they really will be "on fire". Hordes of geeks with Molotov cocktails hanging around at Infinite Loop...
Probably. Universal Binaries for Cocoa apps are pretty easy to ship. Carbon apps take a bit more time. UB's are easier than I originally expected them to be, but, of course, it depends on the complexity of the application and what APIs and low-level stuff the system uses. Applications that are based on newer technology and in newer languages will be easier to port than the crazy old stuff I use.
I'm guessing that most of the current software will be UB-ed within a year. There'll still be stuff (like UserLand Frontier - don't ask!) which will take longer because it uses weird system calls or other stuff which Apple haven't made available to Universal developers.
It's quite simple: it gives them an excuse for delaying delivery. I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs is down in his basement, right now, overclocking all them Intels he bought while he waits for China to deliver the rest of the machine...
PC World (the UK equivalent of CompUSA) is exactly the same. I've been dragged along there to supervise family buying computers. It's always worse than I imagine it to be. Fortunately, last time I got my mother to buy a pretty decent AMD laptop on special offer rather than the junk they were selling. I had to explain to them what a COM port was though... (legacy compatibility, before you ask).
I never buy anything that has to "think" from high street retail (specialist shops in London don't count) - it's a recipe for getting ripped off. Ethernet cable and printer paper is as much as I buy from high street, and only in emergencies.
Not only is it nearly $300, it'll add a week on the already delayed shipping time. The 2.16 is a bad investment (if you're me - if you're somebody else, buy it - it might make my 2.0 ship quicker!!)
I'm in the UK, and I just tested it. It works, it's just not advertised on the store homepage.
Just go to http://itunes.stanford.edu/ and click Open in iTunes. I've managed to subscribe to the "Best of Philosophy" podcast (Daniel Dennett has a talk on 'Intelligent Design' which looks interesting)
You kid, but due to the crappy scheduling of my university, I'm paying about £10 per lecture in travel fares. 99 cents per lecture would currently be way cheaper. The downsides? Alarm clock manufacturers go out of business.
I saw a "Mother-to-be On Board" sign at a supermarket recently.
I'm thinking about making an "Abortion-to-be Inside" sticker in the style of an Intel Inside sticker. I could then make that "ding-du-de-du-ding" sound like on the Pentium adverts than flash my dick.
Well, there are competing specs - RSS 0.91/0.92/1.0/2.0 and Atom - but they are all basically XML.
Creating RSS is pretty easy. Most CMSes now have a feed being churned out - Slash and Scoop and the like turn out XML, Typo3 does, and the bloggers do - MT, WP, Blogger, Radio etc. Plus most languages now have modules and classes you can get to simplify the writing of RSS and Atom. I know in PHP there are a few good classes to convert between the different formats, which means that you don't have to get your hands dirty writing XSLT or anything like that. Plus feedburner.com makes it so that you can produce aggregator-independent code.
As for reading it - My Yahoo, Kinja, Google Reader and the like seem to be the way forward.
In fact once a day is absolutely perfect for RSS. Once a month is even better. I read blogs that have updates a couple of times a week. RSS saves me from going to the site when they haven't updated.
As for Freshmeat and sites like that, what would be useful is if they could publish a personalised RSS feed. Exclude stuff you're not interested in (for instance, if you never listen to MP3s on Linux, there's no point it showing you new MP3 players).
Exactly. The so-called "simple solutions" in this thread DON'T SCALE beyond the single digits. That's why RSS and the such like were invented in the first place - to make it as easy to read 500 news sources as to read one.
So what? Nobody is forcing you to read looney airheads. With blogs as with most other media, Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crud. Using an RSS aggregator doesn't force you to read the 90%, it enables you to read the 10% quicker and easier than before. This is a Good Thing.
(I willingly admit, I'm probably part of the 90%. But I make up for it by having links to scatalogical videos.)
Yeah, and also, despite our belief to the contrary, we're not always connected. As a daily commuter, I spend three hours per day disconnected from the net (I have GPRS on my phone, but that's expensive and slow). My RSS aggregator lets me filter through a lot of stuff while I'm offline, so that when I am online, I can spend my time focused on the important stuff.
(And yes, I realise that posting to Slashdot thus negates the idea that I spend my time doing anything important on the Internet - but since you're reading it, you're guilty too...)
RSS is more than pressing F5 repeatedly, because while that works if you just read Slashdot, it doesn't scale. Every new site you read is another site to juggle. Analogy: having an email address for every person you contact - so that if you want to see if Jim has sent you an email you have to go and check one address, and if you want to see if Bob has sent you an email you have to go and check another. There's only so many one can actually fit in.
The other thing is keeping track of what you've seen. My RSS reader won't show me the same headline twice. If I've seen it, I don't want to see it again. So it should just disappear. Compared with refreshing the/. homepage, that's not the same. If you've seen the top story on Slashdot, you see it again and again until a new story hits the page. If you read fifty sources, this isn't efficient. Far better to automate that process and have one page (or application) that shows you all the unread stories from the different sources.
RSS itself isn't sexy, because it's just a format. But aggregators are sexy because they save people like me a lot of time.
Why did Active Desktop / CDF / PointCast / Netcaster etc. fail?
Because the content sucked. They worked with Disney, ABC, CNN and other big media types to provide the same sort of mind-numbing content that television provides. Compare that with the number of excellent tech blogs, sites like Slashdot and Digg, blogs by knowledgable experts in their subjects, more applications throwing stuff out in RSS/Atom (Flickr for instance).
And because the technology sucked. They were generally single platform, inflexible, memory hogs (yes, I remember them just as well as everybody else), advert-ridden and bandwidth inefficient - sometimes trying to do things which, at the time, were ridiculous - like high-quality streaming video over dial-up.
It is still extremely useful. I have somewhere along the lines of 250 subscriptions sitting in my desktop aggregator. I commute by train every day (and not one of those cool trains that has wifi). I roll out of bed, hit 'ping', and the morning's news streams to my laptop in the space of two or three minutes. Sit down on the train, and I can get a view of what's going on in the world that's far more interesting than reading a newspaper (and cheaper, and less physical space - I'm a broadsheet reader, and they are unmanageably large compared to my laptop).
You say that, but I distinctly remember seeing a picture of some Page 3 girls at a London/. meetup a few years back. Remember, this was a picture on the web, not definitive proof that P3 girls are/.ers.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so if my residential DSL connection is for "burstable" connections, why is it that if I google for the word 'burst' on my ISP website it comes up with zero results? Perhaps they could have told me before I signed up.
Of course bandwidth isn't free. We, **THE CUSTOMERS**, are paying you for it. Perhaps we could have it without the side-serving of bullshit and FUD that so many ISPs are giving us.
That's not how it works actually. Bandwidth shouldn't be shaped by the ISP at all. If I want to 'shape' my bandwidth or restrict BitTorrent or anything else, I'll do it myself. I can then work out what's going on and why.
Ignore the fact that it's a BSD shell, that it has some actual shell features (like tab completion, command recall etc.) and that it's POSIX compatible, and I guess it might kind of look like DOS.
CD brain\yours
DEL *.*
Are you sure? y
Could Not Find File
I've still got a bit of DOS in me it seems.
Libertarians differ from the Right in that they believe in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Libertarians differ from the Left in that they believe in the Second Amendment. Libertarians shudder when politicians talk about the Almighty Lord, they shudder when they talk about the evil of video games, they shudder when they talk about family values, redistribution of wealth, the "Communications Decency Act" (or whatever doublespeak code it's being described as this week). In fact, they have a righteous cynicism when politicians say anything. Can you blame them?
WebKit is also used as the basis for other apps - Shiira.app is a Japanese open source (I think) browser that uses WebKit but offers more functions than Safari. NetNewsWire - the RSS aggregator - has a built-in tabbed browser based on WebKit.
It's also a nice PR hit. Makes Apple look like they're "on fire". Of course, if they don't start shipping people's laptops, they really will be "on fire". Hordes of geeks with Molotov cocktails hanging around at Infinite Loop...
Probably. Universal Binaries for Cocoa apps are pretty easy to ship. Carbon apps take a bit more time. UB's are easier than I originally expected them to be, but, of course, it depends on the complexity of the application and what APIs and low-level stuff the system uses. Applications that are based on newer technology and in newer languages will be easier to port than the crazy old stuff I use.
I'm guessing that most of the current software will be UB-ed within a year. There'll still be stuff (like UserLand Frontier - don't ask!) which will take longer because it uses weird system calls or other stuff which Apple haven't made available to Universal developers.
The documentation also isn't too shabby.
It's quite simple: it gives them an excuse for delaying delivery. I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs is down in his basement, right now, overclocking all them Intels he bought while he waits for China to deliver the rest of the machine...
PC World (the UK equivalent of CompUSA) is exactly the same. I've been dragged along there to supervise family buying computers. It's always worse than I imagine it to be. Fortunately, last time I got my mother to buy a pretty decent AMD laptop on special offer rather than the junk they were selling. I had to explain to them what a COM port was though... (legacy compatibility, before you ask).
I never buy anything that has to "think" from high street retail (specialist shops in London don't count) - it's a recipe for getting ripped off. Ethernet cable and printer paper is as much as I buy from high street, and only in emergencies.
Not only is it nearly $300, it'll add a week on the already delayed shipping time. The 2.16 is a bad investment (if you're me - if you're somebody else, buy it - it might make my 2.0 ship quicker!!)
I'm in the UK, and I just tested it. It works, it's just not advertised on the store homepage.
Just go to http://itunes.stanford.edu/ and click Open in iTunes. I've managed to subscribe to the "Best of Philosophy" podcast (Daniel Dennett has a talk on 'Intelligent Design' which looks interesting)
You kid, but due to the crappy scheduling of my university, I'm paying about £10 per lecture in travel fares. 99 cents per lecture would currently be way cheaper. The downsides? Alarm clock manufacturers go out of business.
Apple didn't introduce it, but popularised it: USB.
I saw a "Mother-to-be On Board" sign at a supermarket recently.
I'm thinking about making an "Abortion-to-be Inside" sticker in the style of an Intel Inside sticker. I could then make that "ding-du-de-du-ding" sound like on the Pentium adverts than flash my dick.
(I kid, angry pro-lifer, because I care...)
Well, there are competing specs - RSS 0.91/0.92/1.0/2.0 and Atom - but they are all basically XML.
Creating RSS is pretty easy. Most CMSes now have a feed being churned out - Slash and Scoop and the like turn out XML, Typo3 does, and the bloggers do - MT, WP, Blogger, Radio etc. Plus most languages now have modules and classes you can get to simplify the writing of RSS and Atom. I know in PHP there are a few good classes to convert between the different formats, which means that you don't have to get your hands dirty writing XSLT or anything like that. Plus feedburner.com makes it so that you can produce aggregator-independent code.
As for reading it - My Yahoo, Kinja, Google Reader and the like seem to be the way forward.
In fact once a day is absolutely perfect for RSS. Once a month is even better. I read blogs that have updates a couple of times a week. RSS saves me from going to the site when they haven't updated.
As for Freshmeat and sites like that, what would be useful is if they could publish a personalised RSS feed. Exclude stuff you're not interested in (for instance, if you never listen to MP3s on Linux, there's no point it showing you new MP3 players).
Exactly. The so-called "simple solutions" in this thread DON'T SCALE beyond the single digits. That's why RSS and the such like were invented in the first place - to make it as easy to read 500 news sources as to read one.
So what? Nobody is forcing you to read looney airheads. With blogs as with most other media, Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crud. Using an RSS aggregator doesn't force you to read the 90%, it enables you to read the 10% quicker and easier than before. This is a Good Thing.
(I willingly admit, I'm probably part of the 90%. But I make up for it by having links to scatalogical videos.)
Yeah, and also, despite our belief to the contrary, we're not always connected. As a daily commuter, I spend three hours per day disconnected from the net (I have GPRS on my phone, but that's expensive and slow). My RSS aggregator lets me filter through a lot of stuff while I'm offline, so that when I am online, I can spend my time focused on the important stuff.
(And yes, I realise that posting to Slashdot thus negates the idea that I spend my time doing anything important on the Internet - but since you're reading it, you're guilty too...)
RSS is more than pressing F5 repeatedly, because while that works if you just read Slashdot, it doesn't scale. Every new site you read is another site to juggle. Analogy: having an email address for every person you contact - so that if you want to see if Jim has sent you an email you have to go and check one address, and if you want to see if Bob has sent you an email you have to go and check another. There's only so many one can actually fit in.
/. homepage, that's not the same. If you've seen the top story on Slashdot, you see it again and again until a new story hits the page. If you read fifty sources, this isn't efficient. Far better to automate that process and have one page (or application) that shows you all the unread stories from the different sources.
The other thing is keeping track of what you've seen. My RSS reader won't show me the same headline twice. If I've seen it, I don't want to see it again. So it should just disappear. Compared with refreshing the
RSS itself isn't sexy, because it's just a format. But aggregators are sexy because they save people like me a lot of time.
Why did Active Desktop / CDF / PointCast / Netcaster etc. fail?
Because the content sucked. They worked with Disney, ABC, CNN and other big media types to provide the same sort of mind-numbing content that television provides. Compare that with the number of excellent tech blogs, sites like Slashdot and Digg, blogs by knowledgable experts in their subjects, more applications throwing stuff out in RSS/Atom (Flickr for instance).
And because the technology sucked. They were generally single platform, inflexible, memory hogs (yes, I remember them just as well as everybody else), advert-ridden and bandwidth inefficient - sometimes trying to do things which, at the time, were ridiculous - like high-quality streaming video over dial-up.
It is still extremely useful. I have somewhere along the lines of 250 subscriptions sitting in my desktop aggregator. I commute by train every day (and not one of those cool trains that has wifi). I roll out of bed, hit 'ping', and the morning's news streams to my laptop in the space of two or three minutes. Sit down on the train, and I can get a view of what's going on in the world that's far more interesting than reading a newspaper (and cheaper, and less physical space - I'm a broadsheet reader, and they are unmanageably large compared to my laptop).
Yeah. E.O. Wilson went there. And he ended up peering at ants all day long.
You say that, but I distinctly remember seeing a picture of some Page 3 girls at a London /. meetup a few years back. Remember, this was a picture on the web, not definitive proof that P3 girls are /.ers.
One of my dogs has had a bout of diarreah recently. Perhaps she chewed off a piece of Jack Thompson's anatomy.