So, you take an old game that still has some interest, ad adds, then release it for free? Thats kind of like what Valve did for Counterstrike, only they forgot the 'free' part. They certainly nailed the ads though, both in game on walls and on the scoreboard.
This school portal idea (which is kind of obvious/inevitable) is less interesting than the laptop program itself. There's still a lot of argument over whether laptops for this age group are a boon or a distraction.
I think the problem is it can be both for different people, or even the same person in different circumstances.
I'm horrible at handwriting, I hate doing it, and would have done a lot better in school had I typed everything, been able to copy/paste and arbitrarily reformat documents post-writing, and all the other upsides of computers.
I'd also get horribly bored as the stupid kids slow down the class and start gaming, chatting, or whatever I could get away with and likely continue to do so even when I should be paying attention, thus bringing myself down as well.
I really don't remember, I think It was around quicktime 6.0 or so that that pissed me off-- IT was before the 7.0 Sorenson codec stuff. As for iTunes itself, I'm currently using something a few versions old as the last time I let iTunes autoupdate itself it left in an un-launchable version (crashed due to a missing file) and needed to be reinstalled.
I like my ipod for the most part, but iTunes is probably the worst part. It's only mildly better than the previous (and related) apple PC software I used, quicktime, which in addition to having arbitrary annoying restrictions and nag screens also came up with one of the worst UI elements ever: the volume dial in software.
However as horrible as it is, I'm still looking into buying a MacBook Pro, simply because it seems like a well made piece of hardware that will run what I want on it, in addition to letting me run OS X which I'm willing to give a fair try even if iTunes is horrible. Worst case I can just install linux or XP.
For the record, my favorite media player so far is foobar2000 on windows, but even that lacks in its database searching interface.
My guess would be"to be honest I'm not really sure officer, I was just trying to keep a set distance from the car ahead of me and keep with the flow of traffic". Never used it though, so I can't tell you if it works or would just get you a lecture on driving without paying attention to your instruments.
That's the core problem with closed source. I cannot trust it. Maybe it has a good reason to access the passwd file. But do you expect the best or worst? As a security expert, I expect the worst by default until proven wrong. Everything else is playing russian roulette with your system security. You can't just trust a program intrinsically until proven wrong, because when you're proven wrong, it usually is too late.
I expect the most common -- That it's just looking up homedirs or usernames. If you really didn't trust it, chroot it or run it in a virtual machine. You can trust it just fine then.
It's also not as if theres some secure encrypted path from your HD to your CPU. You can strace it or disasm it all the same. Not as clear as reading C, but also tells you exactly what its doing (as opposed to trying to follow obfuscated code with intentional but easy to miss exploits).
If I want to log my own machine, its no more malicious than if I want to videotape my house -- It just changes from an illegal and unethical voyeur cam into a security camera.
Now, when others are subjected to either without knowing it then you get into ethics, but I'd still question the term 'malware' applying.
If you wanted to be the only user of your machine, keylogging it would actually be a good idea to see if your roomate is using it without permission.
and it doesnt even require one single bit of anything
Well, aside from a full webbrowser with a modern version of flash and enough resources to pull off audio decoding at the same time. Yeah, doesn't sound like much, but kind of rules out streaming this from any kind of embeded device (i.e nintendo ds with homebrew, a cellphone, pda, etc.)
If I'm at my desktop I might as well just listen to all the music I have stored on it. I suppose this could be useful for using other peoples machines or maybe laptops where you dont have the storage to throw at a local collection.
To extend on that idea, I'd also add common keybindings and a central place to register global keybindings. Maybe even mix it with some kind of app api structure (i.e "this keybinding calls this function, or this menu entry, or this button")-- The kind of stuff that Leopard's new scripting is promising, and Microsoft's new console (MONAD?) bragged about but didnt yet deliver.
The other thing I'd personally spend some developers on is picking up XMLTerm, the abandoned mozilla Xterm project that was capable of inline rendering whatever Gecko could render. For example letting you have a shell script spit out a html table, or images.
People that complain about the GPL are almost always parties interested in taking working code from the original author, and using/improving on it, without giving anything back. Why should we care if you want to freeload on someone else's work?
Admittedly they're usually not as vocal, but theres plenty of people who prefer the BSD idea of freedom-- Otherwise there would be no BSD licensed code.
I don't dislike the GPL. but it definitely complicates things. A lot of times when working on something I just want to work on the part that is new or innovative, and use some pre-existing software as a 'base assumption'. I.E if I want to write some special backup software, I want to work on the logic of backing up, working off the assumption that I have a working FTP server on the other end rather than having to write one from scratch. Things like the loosely worded "linking clause" makes this really hard to do with GPL'd middleware (libraries, parsers, example code).
Not everyone that complains about GPL'd software just wants to rename gaim and sell it for $20. Some of us just don't want to reinvent the wheel every time we work on something new, but can't always afford to GPL everything that had some interaction with the GPL'd base.
The problem is the numbers don't look good. To quantify what you're looking for you'd want "number of hours spent idle" i.e if a sysadmin did his job well and has everything running smoothly, how many hours does he have with nothing needing to be done?
Once any manager or other authority type sees that number though rather than seeing you did a good job at keeping things reliable, they'll see you as lazy and assign work you shouldn't be doing (other peoples jobs).
Really just about anything other than data entry is hard to quantify in the computer field. Someone suggested troubletickets.. but theres a huge difference between a ticket that requires you to restart apache, and one that requires you to strace half your system to debug, and raw ticket numbers don't tell you that.
On the same note, lines of code mean nothing to actual programming, nor do "functions per day" or anything similar as again, you can't quantify the effort required in an easy line vs hard line. Is it a simple debug print or core logic you had to scratch out on a whiteboard to keep sane?
Just because you use lynx doesn't mean you don't have a capable display. Theres no reason it couldnt shell to a gui display (local or remote, via $DISPLAY). I think some people would actually prefer that.
Of course it would work infinitely better if people were embeding video directly instead of wrapping it in flash, but you could probably rig up some kind of detection to strip down wrapper/downloaders into just the flv which mplayer will then play happily.
If those two had anything to do with eachother, maybe. until then lets stick to the actual facts instead of trying to apply something simple that anyone on slashdot should already understand to something 'more basic' that just complicates things.
It's an open AP. Theres plenty of them ran by people like me who wish to share their internet access to those nearby who need to bum a quick connection.
You using my open AP doesn't "steal" anything from me. Most of my bandwidth goes unused anyways, and if I wanted to use it QoS gives it to me when I need it. Admittedly most standard routers arnt configured that way, but most standard users dont care.
Really the question is how is this guy supposed to know that the Open access point ISN'T for public use? Theres nothing indicating that. SSID isn't something private sounding (probably 'linksys'), theres no password, no encryption, no mac limitation, no vpn forcing routing.. NOTHING to indicate that it isnt for public use.
Too complicated for you? Heres a worthless analogy that at least applies. It's like if I was at your business in the lobby and grabbed the phone you had in the waiting room and made a call. Maybe it was for employees/customers only, maybe it wasnt, no sign was around to tell me one way or the other and when I picked it up it worked without any hassle.
Software support mostly. Everything I want to run runs on windows, but not everything I want to run runs on Linux. Specifically Firefox, gaim, xchat, gvim, etc have all been ported to windows. Foobar2000, flashfxp/ftprush, official IM clients with full support of extended features, all the games, good video editing, good audio editing, etc do not run on linux.
On top of that last time I used linux on the desktop (~2 years ago, admittedly), there was still plenty of issues doing things that work fine out of the box on windows, like slapping two videocards in and stretching your display across them both. Or having apps register global hotkeys to control them without having to switch out of what you're doing to find them. Or playing sound from more than one source at once. Or playing >2channel audio with any soundcard capable of it (instead of just the single audigy i think it was that alsa boasted support for).
Really for both sides you get used to what you have and there is usually not enough compelling reasons to switch.
I'm not sure what would be better, but the current way (either inputs inside a table, or <label for="asdf">Asdf</label> <input id="asdf" name="asdf"/><br> with a LOT of css to position it) is just a pain in the ass (and only works for simple forms, try duplicating the kind of paper form you fill out at a doctors office for example)
while we're at it, can we like.. require everyone fully support css? I'm tired of putting ID's and Class's on inputs with unique names, when CSS says I should do
input[@name=date]
But of course none of the big three browsers come close to supporting it.
I'd like to rush to 70 just because earlier content is generally solo, as wow punishes group play with harsh xp splitting, long chain quests that you cant just jump in on, and the fact that unless your friends are lvling alts, the lvl difference alone will make it impossible to play with each other.
Note that I'm talking purely about getting alts to 70, as I have a 70 warlock main. I think the solution would be allowing you to buy alts with gold from your main, or some kind of 70 questline to get you a free 60 or something.
It actually wouldn't, most 720p h264 movies i've seen end up at just about 4 gigabytes.
I imagine dual layer dvd would be more than enough, although then we're shrinking the second criteria a lot (how many stand alone players support burned media x)
All the big names pay the royalties for you. Apple (iTunes), AOL(Winamp), etc all have big bulk deals that allow them to distribute their product for free while they just pay all at once.
Hrm. I've never personally seen one of those, but I wonder what the legality is of responding with your own megaphone? Maybe even following them around, refuting everything they say over and over, citing examples of negative things they did, etc. Or making a parody campaign running under the platform of banning non-police megaphone use in the streets and tell everyone to vote for you instead
I'd rather just see people able to post addendums to their comments. Maybe make them free to subscribers and cost a karma point or two otherwise (to prevent people from getting careless and using it as a crutch)
Hey genius, what about receiving an emergency call? Does your magical device know to turn itself off when one of my loved ones was just rushed to the hospital? Or is you seeing Transformers uninterrupted more important?
What needs to be done is just let the phones listen for a certain signal, possibly even over bluetooth since most phones come with that (albeit disabled) but anything would work. This signal would be broadcasting a hint saying "You're in a theater" and then later "The movie is starting". Your phone would pick up on this and be able to prompt you with "Location [some id number] suggests setting your phone on vibrate" with which you could either accept, auaccept + autoaccept future requests from that id, or deny.
Similar beaconing could be used for places to announce they have free wifi for your smartphone to use, or any other number of useful location specific things.
That would give you a mostly quiet theater without cutting people off who are on call or have an emergency happen.
latency of two moving people around some obstacle means you either let them both know where eachother is before they should be able to render, or you'll be able to induce lag to allow yourself to teleport around the game which is just as bad.
Then theres issues of "can it be seen through?" for example when I replaced all fences (which in a real engine blurs to solid after some distance). Is it cheating to tweak your drivers with rivatuner to change how it blurs them so you can see through them? What about replacing the texture with an empty texture? Replacing the enemy models with sold colors?
Even defining cheating with 100% accuracy is impossible, saying you can stop cheating is laughable.
I don't have Cable or a HD ready TV, but I'd like to be able to have PVR features with broadcast TV to record the shows that I always miss when I'm at work or even just being able to pause TV when my wife interrupts.
You could just torrent the tv episodes automatically to the box. Assuming you're watching stuff late anyways, the only real difference is you'll automatically have no comercials and likely better quality.
I've been debating getting an HDTV but really, paying Time Warner extra just for HD channels seems silly. I won't bother investing in HDTV until I can afford a nice HTPC able to feed whatever hidef content I can get on its harddrive.
Slashdot Mirror
#nigger goes in the cotton field
So, you take an old game that still has some interest, ad adds, then release it for free? Thats kind of like what Valve did for Counterstrike, only they forgot the 'free' part. They certainly nailed the ads though, both in game on walls and on the scoreboard.
I'm horrible at handwriting, I hate doing it, and would have done a lot better in school had I typed everything, been able to copy/paste and arbitrarily reformat documents post-writing, and all the other upsides of computers.
I'd also get horribly bored as the stupid kids slow down the class and start gaming, chatting, or whatever I could get away with and likely continue to do so even when I should be paying attention, thus bringing myself down as well.
I really don't remember, I think It was around quicktime 6.0 or so that that pissed me off-- IT was before the 7.0 Sorenson codec stuff. As for iTunes itself, I'm currently using something a few versions old as the last time I let iTunes autoupdate itself it left in an un-launchable version (crashed due to a missing file) and needed to be reinstalled.
I like my ipod for the most part, but iTunes is probably the worst part. It's only mildly better than the previous (and related) apple PC software I used, quicktime, which in addition to having arbitrary annoying restrictions and nag screens also came up with one of the worst UI elements ever: the volume dial in software.
However as horrible as it is, I'm still looking into buying a MacBook Pro, simply because it seems like a well made piece of hardware that will run what I want on it, in addition to letting me run OS X which I'm willing to give a fair try even if iTunes is horrible. Worst case I can just install linux or XP.
For the record, my favorite media player so far is foobar2000 on windows, but even that lacks in its database searching interface.
My guess would be"to be honest I'm not really sure officer, I was just trying to keep a set distance from the car ahead of me and keep with the flow of traffic".
Never used it though, so I can't tell you if it works or would just get you a lecture on driving without paying attention to your instruments.
I expect the most common -- That it's just looking up homedirs or usernames. If you really didn't trust it, chroot it or run it in a virtual machine. You can trust it just fine then.
It's also not as if theres some secure encrypted path from your HD to your CPU. You can strace it or disasm it all the same. Not as clear as reading C, but also tells you exactly what its doing (as opposed to trying to follow obfuscated code with intentional but easy to miss exploits).
If I want to log my own machine, its no more malicious than if I want to videotape my house -- It just changes from an illegal and unethical voyeur cam into a security camera.
Now, when others are subjected to either without knowing it then you get into ethics, but I'd still question the term 'malware' applying.
If you wanted to be the only user of your machine, keylogging it would actually be a good idea to see if your roomate is using it without permission.
Well, aside from a full webbrowser with a modern version of flash and enough resources to pull off audio decoding at the same time. Yeah, doesn't sound like much, but kind of rules out streaming this from any kind of embeded device (i.e nintendo ds with homebrew, a cellphone, pda, etc.)
If I'm at my desktop I might as well just listen to all the music I have stored on it. I suppose this could be useful for using other peoples machines or maybe laptops where you dont have the storage to throw at a local collection.
To extend on that idea, I'd also add common keybindings and a central place to register global keybindings. Maybe even mix it with some kind of app api structure (i.e "this keybinding calls this function, or this menu entry, or this button")-- The kind of stuff that Leopard's new scripting is promising, and Microsoft's new console (MONAD?) bragged about but didnt yet deliver.
The other thing I'd personally spend some developers on is picking up XMLTerm, the abandoned mozilla Xterm project that was capable of inline rendering whatever Gecko could render. For example letting you have a shell script spit out a html table, or images.
Admittedly they're usually not as vocal, but theres plenty of people who prefer the BSD idea of freedom-- Otherwise there would be no BSD licensed code.
I don't dislike the GPL. but it definitely complicates things. A lot of times when working on something I just want to work on the part that is new or innovative, and use some pre-existing software as a 'base assumption'. I.E if I want to write some special backup software, I want to work on the logic of backing up, working off the assumption that I have a working FTP server on the other end rather than having to write one from scratch. Things like the loosely worded "linking clause" makes this really hard to do with GPL'd middleware (libraries, parsers, example code).
Not everyone that complains about GPL'd software just wants to rename gaim and sell it for $20. Some of us just don't want to reinvent the wheel every time we work on something new, but can't always afford to GPL everything that had some interaction with the GPL'd base.
The problem is the numbers don't look good. To quantify what you're looking for you'd want "number of hours spent idle" i.e if a sysadmin did his job well and has everything running smoothly, how many hours does he have with nothing needing to be done?
Once any manager or other authority type sees that number though rather than seeing you did a good job at keeping things reliable, they'll see you as lazy and assign work you shouldn't be doing (other peoples jobs).
Really just about anything other than data entry is hard to quantify in the computer field. Someone suggested troubletickets.. but theres a huge difference between a ticket that requires you to restart apache, and one that requires you to strace half your system to debug, and raw ticket numbers don't tell you that.
On the same note, lines of code mean nothing to actual programming, nor do "functions per day" or anything similar as again, you can't quantify the effort required in an easy line vs hard line. Is it a simple debug print or core logic you had to scratch out on a whiteboard to keep sane?
Just because you use lynx doesn't mean you don't have a capable display. Theres no reason it couldnt shell to a gui display (local or remote, via $DISPLAY). I think some people would actually prefer that.
Of course it would work infinitely better if people were embeding video directly instead of wrapping it in flash, but you could probably rig up some kind of detection to strip down wrapper/downloaders into just the flv which mplayer will then play happily.
If those two had anything to do with eachother, maybe. until then lets stick to the actual facts instead of trying to apply something simple that anyone on slashdot should already understand to something 'more basic' that just complicates things.
It's an open AP. Theres plenty of them ran by people like me who wish to share their internet access to those nearby who need to bum a quick connection.
You using my open AP doesn't "steal" anything from me. Most of my bandwidth goes unused anyways, and if I wanted to use it QoS gives it to me when I need it. Admittedly most standard routers arnt configured that way, but most standard users dont care.
Really the question is how is this guy supposed to know that the Open access point ISN'T for public use? Theres nothing indicating that. SSID isn't something private sounding (probably 'linksys'), theres no password, no encryption, no mac limitation, no vpn forcing routing.. NOTHING to indicate that it isnt for public use.
Too complicated for you? Heres a worthless analogy that at least applies. It's like if I was at your business in the lobby and grabbed the phone you had in the waiting room and made a call. Maybe it was for employees/customers only, maybe it wasnt, no sign was around to tell me one way or the other and when I picked it up it worked without any hassle.
Software support mostly. Everything I want to run runs on windows, but not everything I want to run runs on Linux. Specifically Firefox, gaim, xchat, gvim, etc have all been ported to windows. Foobar2000, flashfxp/ftprush, official IM clients with full support of extended features, all the games, good video editing, good audio editing, etc do not run on linux.
On top of that last time I used linux on the desktop (~2 years ago, admittedly), there was still plenty of issues doing things that work fine out of the box on windows, like slapping two videocards in and stretching your display across them both. Or having apps register global hotkeys to control them without having to switch out of what you're doing to find them. Or playing sound from more than one source at once. Or playing >2channel audio with any soundcard capable of it (instead of just the single audigy i think it was that alsa boasted support for).
Really for both sides you get used to what you have and there is usually not enough compelling reasons to switch.
Fully agreed, especially about the forms.
/><br> with a LOT of css to position it) is just a pain in the ass (and only works for simple forms, try duplicating the kind of paper form you fill out at a doctors office for example)
I'm not sure what would be better, but the current way (either inputs inside a table, or <label for="asdf">Asdf</label> <input id="asdf" name="asdf"
while we're at it, can we like.. require everyone fully support css? I'm tired of putting ID's and Class's on inputs with unique names, when CSS says I should do
input[@name=date]
But of course none of the big three browsers come close to supporting it.
I'd like to rush to 70 just because earlier content is generally solo, as wow punishes group play with harsh xp splitting, long chain quests that you cant just jump in on, and the fact that unless your friends are lvling alts, the lvl difference alone will make it impossible to play with each other.
Note that I'm talking purely about getting alts to 70, as I have a 70 warlock main. I think the solution would be allowing you to buy alts with gold from your main, or some kind of 70 questline to get you a free 60 or something.
It actually wouldn't, most 720p h264 movies i've seen end up at just about 4 gigabytes.
I imagine dual layer dvd would be more than enough, although then we're shrinking the second criteria a lot (how many stand alone players support burned media x)
All the big names pay the royalties for you. Apple (iTunes), AOL(Winamp), etc all have big bulk deals that allow them to distribute their product for free while they just pay all at once.
The rap star says we should vote for... OR DIE
Hrm. I've never personally seen one of those, but I wonder what the legality is of responding with your own megaphone? Maybe even following them around, refuting everything they say over and over, citing examples of negative things they did, etc. Or making a parody campaign running under the platform of banning non-police megaphone use in the streets and tell everyone to vote for you instead
I'd rather just see people able to post addendums to their comments. Maybe make them free to subscribers and cost a karma point or two otherwise (to prevent people from getting careless and using it as a crutch)
Hey genius, what about receiving an emergency call? Does your magical device know to turn itself off when one of my loved ones was just rushed to the hospital? Or is you seeing Transformers uninterrupted more important?
What needs to be done is just let the phones listen for a certain signal, possibly even over bluetooth since most phones come with that (albeit disabled) but anything would work. This signal would be broadcasting a hint saying "You're in a theater" and then later "The movie is starting". Your phone would pick up on this and be able to prompt you with "Location [some id number] suggests setting your phone on vibrate" with which you could either accept, auaccept + autoaccept future requests from that id, or deny.
Similar beaconing could be used for places to announce they have free wifi for your smartphone to use, or any other number of useful location specific things.
That would give you a mostly quiet theater without cutting people off who are on call or have an emergency happen.
latency of two moving people around some obstacle means you either let them both know where eachother is before they should be able to render, or you'll be able to induce lag to allow yourself to teleport around the game which is just as bad.
Then theres issues of "can it be seen through?" for example when I replaced all fences (which in a real engine blurs to solid after some distance). Is it cheating to tweak your drivers with rivatuner to change how it blurs them so you can see through them? What about replacing the texture with an empty texture?
Replacing the enemy models with sold colors?
Even defining cheating with 100% accuracy is impossible, saying you can stop cheating is laughable.
You could just torrent the tv episodes automatically to the box. Assuming you're watching stuff late anyways, the only real difference is you'll automatically have no comercials and likely better quality.
I've been debating getting an HDTV but really, paying Time Warner extra just for HD channels seems silly. I won't bother investing in HDTV until I can afford a nice HTPC able to feed whatever hidef content I can get on its harddrive.