20 minutes into the future, Mardi Gras will be replaced by "Sky Fall", a week-long festival where this year's space junk is intentionally grounded by remote control to crash into the sea or burn up in the atmosphere.
Google's Picasa is another system where though it can track photo albums through folders, that is only a staging space for a public presentation that is utterly folder-less (Picasaweb, via the "Albums" view in Picasa).
While at first I didn't have a problem, when I started to upload the heavy stuff (photos from vacations in Disney, UK, Italy, California), the need to subdivide became obvious, yet my main front page remains this huge mess (at least it is a huge *chronological* mess, making it better than flickr's photostreams). Back-dated photos from older trips are almost never seen simply because I can't group the N albums of "Italy 2008" into a single entity.
If I had the time, I'd have already written my own front-page using the rss and webdata API's, but, well, I work for a living.
Even if they tell you to your face exactly what their intentions are, you can only ever speculate if they are telling the truth.
Agreed, and this is ever more true in (classical) music than in literature. Stravinsky's commentary on musical aesthetics and his own works are full of contradictions, both to the popular view of his works and to his own past commentary.
1 most television sucks, and will continue to suck even if you were to tape or tivo it and watch it later 2 the tv that doesn't suck is on DVD almost before the season is over, or for cable shows, is repeated so often you manage to catch it anyways. 3 HULU - on-demand watching already provided by the networks for at least some shows 4 TV Episode sales/rentals on iTunes approved by the networks for at least some shows 5 you can't take it with you. Your TiVo-taped programs, unlike a videotape, dvd, or something on the ipod, is stuck in the TiVo, and in fact the media producers ("Hollywood") went overboard on keeping the TiVo "crippled" in that way even more than the RIAA attacked the iPod (which is why it is such a pile of suck for your iPod when you get a new computer).
the issue, as i write below, is all about flash video. by not supporting it, even though technically it is possible, it is producing a device that pleases the content makers, but not the general public that is as much interested in a tool that supports their growing social media habit (youtube, blogs, facebook) as it does their occasional needs to read/watch commercial content.
the problem with not providing flash on touch devices has nothing to do with all of the "flash programming" and "navigation" issues around the flashy hovers/mouseovers we're all used to associating with flash. a gui is a gui, and if current flash developers think the touch-screen is a step backwards, they are the ones with the closed minds. things change with technology, so adapt or be left behind, but quit blaming the new technology (even if it really is more than 25 years old) for your own lack of imagination.
on the key problem, the issue is simple: flash video, as served by youtube, is the de facto standard for open video linking and embedding on the web.
remove flash support (even with youtube adding apple's proprietary format to a percentage of its content), and you are explicitly removing support for the majority of the video on the web, especially as linked by blogs and facebook.
apple is intentionally crippling their device for the web in order to drive more users to iTunes for video content. while that works to a point for the damned phones, for a larger device trying to find its raison d'etre as a potential replacement for netbooks, telling your potential userbase that the $200 netbook does more (and for free and with real freedom) than your $500 table with its appstore costs and restrictions, is NOT a good selling point.
apple is selling itself as a device for commercial content makers, but at the cost of not realizing you can't sell a device to the general public today if word gets out it is a bane to social networking. without full youtube and facebook video support, it is exactly that.
and the point of many others on the pro-php side is that there would be far MORE errors if it was written as a c++ application, due to what they see as that language's inherent complexities and lack of readability. I quit C++ for pretty much that very reason 13 years ago. Modern C++ is, in my opinion, self-obfuscating.
Now, PHP is also obfuscated now, for much the same reason - supporting multiple programming techniques (procedural, fake OO, and now real OO), large numbers of old deprecated libraries with different coding standards, and examples that poorly separate concerns (MVC) leading to bad mixes of logic and rendering until one goes out of their way to learn a template engine (and there's zillions of those, too).
But I don't have time for the mundanities of memory management and crap like that, especially when trying to figure out what the policy is for some library and how it is different from the next library I use, and for that matter, just how many libraries for C++ are out there, open-sourced and actively supported and maintained?
If FB was rewritten from scratch, to the design it is now (keeping in mind this is now effectively the 4th major iteration of it), then a C++ implementation would certainly be more efficient, if still more expensive from a developer resource perspective (C++ programmers are rare and expensive, 'cause nobody wants to work in it anymore because of all that tedium). But once written, it would be frozen because C++ produces generally far less maintainable code in my experience because of its difficulty and lack of readability.
Web applications in non-critical fields (and social networking is certainly non-critical) have to evolve, often and easily, and c++ does not provide that - it is better for a web app to risk a little instability than it is to provide 99.99% uptime but be impossible to change.
there's also the whole question of "what is the bottleneck". hint: it ain't the php servers, its the database (and its mirrors). this is true for any web app - most of the "power" of such a huge database app is in transaction handling and the like, and in that, the underlying php code is itself written in C++ - these servers will be doing the same amount of work (for this part of the process, 80/20 rules and all that) no matter what the rest of the http/html processing code is doing.
and a huge chunk of both of those systems run on other languages as well. they both evolved from assembling lots of tools, all written in their own languages. some were converted to a more standard library/language upon acquisition, some not. and *for the most part* yahoo and google are *just* formatting data into a web page, or more often now formatting data into web services and letting their huge javascript libraries do the rendering. Real MVC
my point wasn't that "big corps don't use P-languages" my point was that corporations use what they believe is the right tool for the job.
my point was that "the P languages are weekend hobby languages" is likely true not because "they're more fun" but because they fit the type of work that hobbyists do.
It is as it always has been: the right tool for the job.
The kinds of at home projects someone does are the kind for which Ruby and Python (and PHP) are optimized for. Why? Because they themselves evolved to the directions of the userbase who were already doing those kinds of projects. They have requirements, these languages meet them.
These languages do NOT quite meet the requirements of the projects that happen in the professional workplace, just like a $100 power-tool from Home Depot won't quite be the right thing involved when building a 10 story office. Integration with existing tools and already written software (a BIG, HUGE, DON'T EVER TRY TO REWRITE THE WORLD FROM SCRATCH AGAIN requirement), a history of professional support, perhaps a corporate name to back it up (and while/.'ers don't give Microsoft any respect, the rest of the world does, so deal). These are the requirements for professional software development.
"fun" never enters into it.
Ease of use, yes, but that ease of use is driven by what you intend to do with it. If you use the tool for the types of tasks for which it was designed, it is easy to use. If I try to get all transactional and cross-app integrated with PHP, it's a pain, unless I use a higher-level webservice abstraction. If I try to write a simple tiny blog-like webpage in Java, it's far too stressful because there are so many pieces involved that are necessary for more "mission-critical" work that I have to implement even though I don't care.
taking the CSS out of the files is one thing (which DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink do), but that's not necessarily solving the media file encoding problem because it still leaves us with a gigantic (4gig) iso file or collection of.nfo/.vob files.
even with a decrypted system, i've still got similar problems to the original poster: any attempt to rip has sound of out sync (or skipping with silence blocks), or chapters it simply won't rip at all.
i'm going to give automvk a try, myself and see if that's better than what i've got so far.
Streaming audio can't compete at the same level anytime soon, if for no other reason than it's not organized enough.
And once it gets organized (Live365, for example), it immediately gets attacked by the RIAA and the publishers (ASCAP, BMI, etc) for royalty rates that are set relative to the average audience size (just like broadcast radio), at which point most internet radio is also a "loss-leader" for nothing.
Free is relative: the music industry refuses to let anything be free for long. So either internet radio (REAL internet radio, not just internet relays of broadcast signals with commercials) is going to have to go commercial itself or work on the donations model, or it is going to find itself shrunk down to the very same mainstream channels we see everywhere else (broadcast, HD, Sirius XM).
Worst part about all that is, of course, that for minority stations, the musicians and songwriters on those stations don't get paid a dime. All of that general license fund money is divided up by broadcast airplay statistics, no matter where it came from (this is the same for the business licenses that stores, bars, and restaurants all pay). So I can play 100% Ozric Tentacles all the time, but almost every dime I pay ASCAP goes to the songwriter for "I Kissed A Girl".
Nobody really reads much usenet anymore, and during the decline earlier in this decade, the problem was that the poster would post but the replies would come in private email. So yes, the question might get answered, but the answer never got shared.
The reason? Spam. Usenet posts became the #1 source of email addresses to spam because anybody could easily and cheaply hook up to a usenet feed and just gobble them up. So nobody posted anymore 'cause nobody wanted their address to end up on a spam list from hell.
Eventually with little proof online that anybody was reading the questions, people just stopped posting them.
Usenet was a wonderful thing when it was needed. Today, while the idea of a central yet open (re: infinitely cloned) repository of all topics of conversation may seem nice, it'll never happen again so long as spam is a problem.
Part of the hacker mind is that whole idea of getting noticed, and for me, feeling noticed was getting my stuff out there where it could be seen - i went into user interfaces.
so rather than trying to force-feed him into low level unix hacking, start from the top - set up a http/php/mysql environment and give him something to do like, say, make an app that catalogs the dvd and cd collection.
with that, you should see the "don't repeat yourself" start to come into play - as you start the boring job of entering data, you figure there's got to be a way to automate that, and then you can encourage them into looking at ajax and freedb's web services to auto-populate the fields on cd insert and other hacks like that.
the hack is the short-cut that works better than the real solution, but in order to appreciate the hack (and come up with your own), you have to at least start making the real solution first.
add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.
this is REALLY missing the point of "max 2 hours" limits on meters. they were never meant to be a replacement for all-day parking in a garage. they were meant to be a way to keep commuters and all-day tourists from hogging up a spot all day, keeping locals and casual shoppers (and those visiting municipal facilities or medical offices) from having convenient access.
by allowing someone to just casually "push a button" from where they are and hold the spot another two hours, they effectively have created a new commuter spot and while its nice that the city gets the money, it makes things worse for the locals who actually need access for only an hour or two.
WHY has this become so entrenched with the upper echelons of the US Government? WHAT has this got to do with Congress, and indeed the Government in general? Because the RIAA and the MPAA have some of the highest-paid lobbyists in the country, only just behind big pharma and big tobacco.
Those are 4 that basically are paying off *both* sides, rather than just one side or the other (like the NRA). It doesn't matter who wins - they pay the incumbent at all times. If we still had a Republican Congress, this still would have gotten passed, and just as easily.
i was talking "sucks today", not "has always sucked" in the historical sense.
"entire novels" - when the novel is written in metered, often rhymed, poetry, and you've disciplined yourself since you were a child to recite poetry, it makes it easier. they could recite a few "entire novels", but not the 300-3000 that someone might read in a decade.
Google would be a bane to memory of people's memory didn't suck to start with. For starters, it would require that they actually remember to use Google in the first place!
Seriously, the number of questions I'm asked or I see online that would be answered by the "I'm Feeling Lucky" link of Google is just astounding.
Starting as a physics major 20 years ago at a lowly liberal arts school (JMU - ok, not so lowly, but the physics dept was still small with only 10 majors / year), I had the requirement of taking numerical methods programming with Fortran (we used Flex Fortran, some of the features of which eventually ended up in Fortran 90).
i recall seeing touch screens as the "next big thing" all over the place in the '84 Knoxville World's Fair, full 12x10 screens and all, yet my first touch device was a palm in 2002.
Now, the one place they made it HUGE was in restaurants, where hardly a place lacks one (half dozen) now. context is key - a place to enter orders without looking for a keyboard, a place to manage table occupancy, integrated with the credit card system to avoid an extra piece of hardware that could break - the new systems had it all and have had it for over ten years now.
...inherent in the very idea that a Japanese robot from a Japanese car company will be leading an orchestra in the center of what used to be America's car manufacturing empire?
"After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January"
Well, probably the main reason for this is one of those 200 most popular files (well, several 'cause lots of people seeded different copies): The new Christmas episode of Doctor Who!
Lots of us Yanks would rather not wait 6-8 months to get their Who fix when the sci-fi channel finally gets around to it.
The lack of lifeboats, the "woman & children first" and "rich people first" attitudes around that resource, the freezing cold of the water that killed within half an hour anybody floating in it, and the fact that the first ship to arrive arrived hours later 'cause the nearest ship wasn't paying attention to its radio.
Another hour or two on the surface would have just delayed the inevitable, but there was still nowhere else for the people to go.
Slashdot Mirror
20 minutes into the future, Mardi Gras will be replaced by "Sky Fall", a week-long festival where this year's space junk is intentionally grounded by remote control to crash into the sea or burn up in the atmosphere.
Google's Picasa is another system where though it can track photo albums through folders, that is only a staging space for a public presentation that is utterly folder-less (Picasaweb, via the "Albums" view in Picasa).
While at first I didn't have a problem, when I started to upload the heavy stuff (photos from vacations in Disney, UK, Italy, California), the need to subdivide became obvious, yet my main front page remains this huge mess (at least it is a huge *chronological* mess, making it better than flickr's photostreams). Back-dated photos from older trips are almost never seen simply because I can't group the N albums of "Italy 2008" into a single entity.
If I had the time, I'd have already written my own front-page using the rss and webdata API's, but, well, I work for a living.
Even if they tell you to your face exactly what their intentions are, you can only ever speculate if they are telling the truth.
Agreed, and this is ever more true in (classical) music than in literature. Stravinsky's commentary on musical aesthetics and his own works are full of contradictions, both to the popular view of his works and to his own past commentary.
1 most television sucks, and will continue to suck even if you were to tape or tivo it and watch it later
2 the tv that doesn't suck is on DVD almost before the season is over, or for cable shows, is repeated so often you manage to catch it anyways.
3 HULU - on-demand watching already provided by the networks for at least some shows
4 TV Episode sales/rentals on iTunes approved by the networks for at least some shows
5 you can't take it with you. Your TiVo-taped programs, unlike a videotape, dvd, or something on the ipod, is stuck in the TiVo, and in fact the media producers ("Hollywood") went overboard on keeping the TiVo "crippled" in that way even more than the RIAA attacked the iPod (which is why it is such a pile of suck for your iPod when you get a new computer).
the issue, as i write below, is all about flash video. by not supporting it, even though technically it is possible, it is producing a device that pleases the content makers, but not the general public that is as much interested in a tool that supports their growing social media habit (youtube, blogs, facebook) as it does their occasional needs to read/watch commercial content.
the problem with not providing flash on touch devices has nothing to do with all of the "flash programming" and "navigation" issues around the flashy hovers/mouseovers we're all used to associating with flash. a gui is a gui, and if current flash developers think the touch-screen is a step backwards, they are the ones with the closed minds. things change with technology, so adapt or be left behind, but quit blaming the new technology (even if it really is more than 25 years old) for your own lack of imagination.
on the key problem, the issue is simple: flash video, as served by youtube, is the de facto standard for open video linking and embedding on the web.
remove flash support (even with youtube adding apple's proprietary format to a percentage of its content), and you are explicitly removing support for the majority of the video on the web, especially as linked by blogs and facebook.
apple is intentionally crippling their device for the web in order to drive more users to iTunes for video content. while that works to a point for the damned phones, for a larger device trying to find its raison d'etre as a potential replacement for netbooks, telling your potential userbase that the $200 netbook does more (and for free and with real freedom) than your $500 table with its appstore costs and restrictions, is NOT a good selling point.
apple is selling itself as a device for commercial content makers, but at the cost of not realizing you can't sell a device to the general public today if word gets out it is a bane to social networking. without full youtube and facebook video support, it is exactly that.
and the point of many others on the pro-php side is that there would be far MORE errors if it was written as a c++ application, due to what they see as that language's inherent complexities and lack of readability. I quit C++ for pretty much that very reason 13 years ago. Modern C++ is, in my opinion, self-obfuscating.
Now, PHP is also obfuscated now, for much the same reason - supporting multiple programming techniques (procedural, fake OO, and now real OO), large numbers of old deprecated libraries with different coding standards, and examples that poorly separate concerns (MVC) leading to bad mixes of logic and rendering until one goes out of their way to learn a template engine (and there's zillions of those, too).
But I don't have time for the mundanities of memory management and crap like that, especially when trying to figure out what the policy is for some library and how it is different from the next library I use, and for that matter, just how many libraries for C++ are out there, open-sourced and actively supported and maintained?
If FB was rewritten from scratch, to the design it is now (keeping in mind this is now effectively the 4th major iteration of it), then a C++ implementation would certainly be more efficient, if still more expensive from a developer resource perspective (C++ programmers are rare and expensive, 'cause nobody wants to work in it anymore because of all that tedium). But once written, it would be frozen because C++ produces generally far less maintainable code in my experience because of its difficulty and lack of readability.
Web applications in non-critical fields (and social networking is certainly non-critical) have to evolve, often and easily, and c++ does not provide that - it is better for a web app to risk a little instability than it is to provide 99.99% uptime but be impossible to change.
there's also the whole question of "what is the bottleneck". hint: it ain't the php servers, its the database (and its mirrors). this is true for any web app - most of the "power" of such a huge database app is in transaction handling and the like, and in that, the underlying php code is itself written in C++ - these servers will be doing the same amount of work (for this part of the process, 80/20 rules and all that) no matter what the rest of the http/html processing code is doing.
So look for a new job with less of a PHB and on the day you quit, leave a copy of the book on his desk.
and a huge chunk of both of those systems run on other languages as well. they both evolved from assembling lots of tools, all written in their own languages. some were converted to a more standard library/language upon acquisition, some not. and *for the most part* yahoo and google are *just* formatting data into a web page, or more often now formatting data into web services and letting their huge javascript libraries do the rendering. Real MVC
my point wasn't that "big corps don't use P-languages" my point was that corporations use what they believe is the right tool for the job.
my point was that "the P languages are weekend hobby languages" is likely true not because "they're more fun" but because they fit the type of work that hobbyists do.
It is as it always has been: the right tool for the job.
The kinds of at home projects someone does are the kind for which Ruby and Python (and PHP) are optimized for. Why? Because they themselves evolved to the directions of the userbase who were already doing those kinds of projects. They have requirements, these languages meet them.
These languages do NOT quite meet the requirements of the projects that happen in the professional workplace, just like a $100 power-tool from Home Depot won't quite be the right thing involved when building a 10 story office. Integration with existing tools and already written software (a BIG, HUGE, DON'T EVER TRY TO REWRITE THE WORLD FROM SCRATCH AGAIN requirement), a history of professional support, perhaps a corporate name to back it up (and while /.'ers don't give Microsoft any respect, the rest of the world does, so deal). These are the requirements for professional software development.
"fun" never enters into it.
Ease of use, yes, but that ease of use is driven by what you intend to do with it. If you use the tool for the types of tasks for which it was designed, it is easy to use. If I try to get all transactional and cross-app integrated with PHP, it's a pain, unless I use a higher-level webservice abstraction. If I try to write a simple tiny blog-like webpage in Java, it's far too stressful because there are so many pieces involved that are necessary for more "mission-critical" work that I have to implement even though I don't care.
Right tool for the right job.
As it always has been.
taking the CSS out of the files is one thing (which DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink do), but that's not necessarily solving the media file encoding problem because it still leaves us with a gigantic (4gig) iso file or collection of .nfo/.vob files.
even with a decrypted system, i've still got similar problems to the original poster: any attempt to rip has sound of out sync (or skipping with silence blocks), or chapters it simply won't rip at all.
i'm going to give automvk a try, myself and see if that's better than what i've got so far.
Streaming audio can't compete at the same level anytime soon, if for no other reason than it's not organized enough.
And once it gets organized (Live365, for example), it immediately gets attacked by the RIAA and the publishers (ASCAP, BMI, etc) for royalty rates that are set relative to the average audience size (just like broadcast radio), at which point most internet radio is also a "loss-leader" for nothing.
Free is relative: the music industry refuses to let anything be free for long. So either internet radio (REAL internet radio, not just internet relays of broadcast signals with commercials) is going to have to go commercial itself or work on the donations model, or it is going to find itself shrunk down to the very same mainstream channels we see everywhere else (broadcast, HD, Sirius XM).
Worst part about all that is, of course, that for minority stations, the musicians and songwriters on those stations don't get paid a dime. All of that general license fund money is divided up by broadcast airplay statistics, no matter where it came from (this is the same for the business licenses that stores, bars, and restaurants all pay). So I can play 100% Ozric Tentacles all the time, but almost every dime I pay ASCAP goes to the songwriter for "I Kissed A Girl".
Nobody really reads much usenet anymore, and during the decline earlier in this decade, the problem was that the poster would post but the replies would come in private email. So yes, the question might get answered, but the answer never got shared.
The reason? Spam. Usenet posts became the #1 source of email addresses to spam because anybody could easily and cheaply hook up to a usenet feed and just gobble them up. So nobody posted anymore 'cause nobody wanted their address to end up on a spam list from hell.
Eventually with little proof online that anybody was reading the questions, people just stopped posting them.
Usenet was a wonderful thing when it was needed. Today, while the idea of a central yet open (re: infinitely cloned) repository of all topics of conversation may seem nice, it'll never happen again so long as spam is a problem.
Part of the hacker mind is that whole idea of getting noticed, and for me, feeling noticed was getting my stuff out there where it could be seen - i went into user interfaces.
so rather than trying to force-feed him into low level unix hacking, start from the top - set up a http/php/mysql environment and give him something to do like, say, make an app that catalogs the dvd and cd collection.
with that, you should see the "don't repeat yourself" start to come into play - as you start the boring job of entering data, you figure there's got to be a way to automate that, and then you can encourage them into looking at ajax and freedb's web services to auto-populate the fields on cd insert and other hacks like that.
the hack is the short-cut that works better than the real solution, but in order to appreciate the hack (and come up with your own), you have to at least start making the real solution first.
add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.
this is REALLY missing the point of "max 2 hours" limits on meters. they were never meant to be a replacement for all-day parking in a garage. they were meant to be a way to keep commuters and all-day tourists from hogging up a spot all day, keeping locals and casual shoppers (and those visiting municipal facilities or medical offices) from having convenient access.
by allowing someone to just casually "push a button" from where they are and hold the spot another two hours, they effectively have created a new commuter spot and while its nice that the city gets the money, it makes things worse for the locals who actually need access for only an hour or two.
Those are 4 that basically are paying off *both* sides, rather than just one side or the other (like the NRA). It doesn't matter who wins - they pay the incumbent at all times. If we still had a Republican Congress, this still would have gotten passed, and just as easily.
Just like the DMCA.
i was talking "sucks today", not "has always sucked" in the historical sense.
"entire novels" - when the novel is written in metered, often rhymed, poetry, and you've disciplined yourself since you were a child to recite poetry, it makes it easier. they could recite a few "entire novels", but not the 300-3000 that someone might read in a decade.
Google would be a bane to memory of people's memory didn't suck to start with. For starters, it would require that they actually remember to use Google in the first place!
Seriously, the number of questions I'm asked or I see online that would be answered by the "I'm Feeling Lucky" link of Google is just astounding.
Starting as a physics major 20 years ago at a lowly liberal arts school (JMU - ok, not so lowly, but the physics dept was still small with only 10 majors / year), I had the requirement of taking numerical methods programming with Fortran (we used Flex Fortran, some of the features of which eventually ended up in Fortran 90).
i recall seeing touch screens as the "next big thing" all over the place in the '84 Knoxville World's Fair, full 12x10 screens and all, yet my first touch device was a palm in 2002.
Now, the one place they made it HUGE was in restaurants, where hardly a place lacks one (half dozen) now. context is key - a place to enter orders without looking for a keyboard, a place to manage table occupancy, integrated with the credit card system to avoid an extra piece of hardware that could break - the new systems had it all and have had it for over ten years now.
duh?
...inherent in the very idea that a Japanese robot from a Japanese car company will be leading an orchestra in the center of what used to be America's car manufacturing empire?
"After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January"
Well, probably the main reason for this is one of those 200 most popular files (well, several 'cause lots of people seeded different copies): The new Christmas episode of Doctor Who!
Lots of us Yanks would rather not wait 6-8 months to get their Who fix when the sci-fi channel finally gets around to it.
The lack of lifeboats, the "woman & children first" and "rich people first" attitudes around that resource, the freezing cold of the water that killed within half an hour anybody floating in it, and the fact that the first ship to arrive arrived hours later 'cause the nearest ship wasn't paying attention to its radio.
Another hour or two on the surface would have just delayed the inevitable, but there was still nowhere else for the people to go.