I am also not a huge fan of the awesome bar (though the new IE bar also sucks).
Sometimes it is nice but other times I will be typing part of a domain (which is what I still do...since I am used to thinking about domains and not title tags) and it will decide to give me shit that it thinks is more relevant than what I am currently typing.
If I start typing a domain, odds are I am looking for something in that domain and the best way to handle that is to give me increasingly deep directory tree entries in that same domain...not some random smattering of junk that I happen to visit more often or recently than what I am actually typing.
yup, I am typing this from freshly upgraded firefox. I put my mouse over a few of the persona styles and they had nasty dithering effects (and I am not on a large display).
This is why people complain about bloat...what is the point of this junk? Weren't there already addons/themes that let you do this kind of stuff? I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains...because I see a whole new way to make the internet an awfully annoying place...screw animated gifs and blink tags, I am going to change your damn browser.
I wish every login box on every site had a metadata link for the allowable password lengths and allowable characters. My worst scenario for remembering passwords is where I've forgotten what crazy password I originally had to comply with, so it isn't in normal form.
I struggle with this all of the time. One of my bank accounts has two passwords: one entered on the keyboard and one entered with an on screen keyboard. I am almost always within attempt of locking myself out of the account when I finally get the two passwords right. The two had different length/character requirements (beyond the obvious on screen keyboard not having funny symbols) but I can never remember which is which and what abominations of a password I had to create to fit. If they would just tell me on the damn password form the same info they put on the new account form, I would log in fine every time (actually I often end up getting deep enough into the "forgot password" dialog that it shows me the password requirements for a new one which jogs my memory).
not that using the same password for every site is necessarily a good idea...but I also hate it when sites have stupid password requirements that make me unable to use a password that I would like to use.
I don't generate a new password for every site, although I have thought about moving to pattern based password for different sites along the lines of taking a password and integrating the first two letters in a non obvious way. Something like 12s34l56 for slashdot and 12a34m56 for amazon (with a real password...not 123456). Don't do it an obvious way...no passslashdot7, passebay7, passamazon7 as it would make it immediately obvious to anyone looking at your password what your google password would then be.
Since I don't do that...I instead use password tranches until I actually make the switch. I've got some crap password that some of my friends even know--easy to type, easy to crack--that gets used for things like the screen lock on my desktop and what are essentially public shares on my home network. As things move up in importance, they get better passwords.
On a side note, whenever a bank or something gives you a login where you have to choose a picture and a phrase to be displayed at login, does anyone else pick something like a picture of a daisy and the most gratuitously awful phrase you can think of? No phisher is ever going to try to fake that and I secretly wonder if the customer service people can see it when I talk to them on the phone.
technically an all lowercase password is just as secure as any other password. You could take a set of random characters and have them all end up as lowercase letters. It is only bad because of the common belief that brute force attacks (and god forbid--dictionary attacks) check all of the lowercase options first. In that case, it is probably also better to start all of your passwords with a 'z' since they tend to check in alphabetical order.
I hate it when systems specifically require odd crap though...requiring a mixed password (must have 2 of the 3 following features or something) is good but saying that my 8-character password must include at least two numbers is actually decreasing the keyspace fairly significantly since you can limit several parts of the password to 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 as opposed to every single letter/number/punctuation.
You are right about how the current system works...but that is not how it worked when these were made (assuming they were from earlier in his life...dunno when he died but the system changed in 1978).
The policy used to be the other way...if you had a movie and forgot to include a proper copyright notice, it lapsed into the public domain. There are some famous examples of this such as the movie Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Therefor you could tell if they sought protection by whether or not the notice was present. Either way though...CBS owns the physical media. If you had another copy, you could reproduce it as much as you want and CBS couldn't stop you but nothing says they have to give you their copy.
I think people are just confusing the concepts of patents and copyright. Patents exist to *force* you to reveal how your invention works in exchange for a limited period of enforced monopou. You could concievably hide the mechanism and have it be yours forever (as a trade secret) but then you would have no recourse if someone reverse engineers it. Copyright is a free protection (no fees or application like a patent) on something that would have to be revealed to profit off at all. It still has a similar goal of allowing the original creator to profit (by selling it themselves or licensing) but it has been far more corrupted by continued adjustments to the law--most likely because corporations tend to benefit a lot (compared to consumers) when patents expire while consumers benefit far more than producers when copyright periods end.
I live somewhere where biking is normal and, for things like a trip to the grocery store, often faster than driving and finding parking (and many don't own cars...instead using public transit and zipcars/igocars). As such, I don't get funny looks from people for running errands on a bike although some people are quite surprised by a desire to ride a few miles to work (what do they think all of those FULL downtown bike racks that empty at 5:00 are used for?).
I do hear about this behavior from people who live in smaller towns or suburbs though. It seems like the only ways to avoid being thought of as a DUI rider or a Hobo when you ride to the store is to either suit up in full lycra or cover your bike/cargo rack with over the top environmentalist stickers.
That's why you find a dedicated server where you can build up a rapport with the people who run it (can't be done in MW2).
I play TF2 and DoD:s on a pair of servers that I have started playing on basically exclusively. They have some stricter rules (no swearing, etc..some of the peoples kids also play on the server) which might take a bit of getting used to--not that I am a 12 year old potty mouthed style gamer but the occasional "holy shit that was a nice shot" still slips out. The rules discourage the total asshats from playing for long.
We have some pretty talented players...and occasionally strangers to the community will start to get really worked up about hacking and such. Knowing the admins means you don't have to argue with people accusing you of cheating...and you don't have to worry about being votekicked for being too good. At the same time, cheaters and asshats are dealt with quickly.
How does that work exactly? I had a verizon BB Storm from my company for a few months (january to june of last year) and it would have noticeably different data connections displayed in the corner icon.
Was verizon not fully switched over at that time? My AT&T phone gets exactly what you were describing...3g sometimes--even if there is a stronger 2g signal
Just make the transaction on a boat somewhere between costa rica and the US?
hell...with futures markets, china can buy the sugar and sell it to the US before it is even planted and then a few years later just say "oh yeah, that sugar is coming on the boat from costa rica"
It may or may not be true that the droid has worse reception than your previous phone.
Be careful about comparing 3g and non-3g phones however. They have this annoying habit of trying to join a really bad 3g signal before hopping on a stronger 2g signal...I suppose this is ok when you want fast data but kind of sucks when all you want is a clear voice call.
Although this study seems to have made a good call on the estimates of when you would have actually received money.
10% seems like a good figure. It might vary between games and other apps since being unable to pirate a game might just push you to another game (although not being able to pirate ANY game might make you eventually pay for a non-free one). Utility apps however, the goal is to do a specific task rather than a general "be entertained" so faced with either paying or not using the app, there may not be an alternative and thus the payment rate would increase.
Maybe they average out to 10%, maybe they dont--but 10% is still a whole lot better than the numbers often used for music/games/movies (especially movies since paying money might mean $1 at the redbox or part of a netflix subscription rather than full retail DVD).
Oh...yeah, that part is less interesting. It doesn't work on all games but on some games it will pop you out to desktop...some it won't (its nice when a game breaks alt-tab...but sucks when it makes you lose).
I was referring to my global hotkeys for winamp...it is quite nice to control music from inside the game without having to move your hand far from wasd. Skip silent parts/songs you don't want to hear and pause for intense moments of battle.
The lenovo I am typing this on right now (Thinkpad T400) has perfectly normal function keys with XP...my old thinkpad T23 also had normal function keys too.
you are probably using one of thier "consumer" models. Step up to a "business" model and everything will work just fine.
Caps lock sucks unless you need it (I see a lot of old systems like the ones used by airport ticketing agents that seem to like all caps...capslock is probably cheaper than rewriting some ancient mainframe code to work with lowercase)
What is wrong with the windows key though? I love that thing. It was intended to be used for universal OS level shortcuts (I guess sort of like SysRq but more fun). Things like windows-l to lock the screen (works on ubuntu too) and any custom shortcuts you may want to define since you won't have to worry about fighting with application specific shortcut keys.
Just pressing it brings up the start menu...on my ubuntu netbook, I have the windows key set to swap between the open windows and the NBR launcher. I use it most frequently though for the lock screen function and to control winamp--I have win-z through win-v bound as global hotkeys for previous/stop/playpause/next (it is wonderful and works from within games)
I'd imagine that while it might be profitable, the margins are probably nothing close to the margins in a more developed country.
There are lots of people in the world who can live for a day on the price of a popular adsense keyword...so I would imagine people in countries with a much lower cost and standard of living are not bringing in very much revenue for google. There is still some small benefit from the additional users/market share (and google's structure is very portable...just translate and go) but as soon as things start to become difficult, the profits might not be there to cover the expenses of dealing with messed up governments and widespread hacking.
I would bet china generates far far less revenue per user than the US so the added difficulties could very well make it unprofitable to continue service.
I wish I could give you a link...because I swear I have seen something like this (or at least a blog that had a reasonable amount of their posts about this)
It is not that hard to get your phone unlocked if you have been a subscriber in good standing (this might not work if you bought an iphone or similar last week on a huge subsidy).
you may get away with just asking for the unlock code but I usually just tell them that I will be traveling outside the country and would like to unlock my phone...works just fine.
Re:My brain/eyes are incompatible with 3D TV/movie
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Hot Or Not — 3D TV
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· Score: 1
That was the worst part of the 3d gimick...
Something would be popping out in the foreground and I would want to see what it was but it would be blurry and I couldn't focus because it wasn't actually a real object.
I think they should be careful about using the 3d effect on shots with narrow depth of field...especially if they are blurring stuff in the foreground.
Although I have noticed that the price of computer displays seems to have fallen a lot more than TVs.
If not for the issue of lacking a tuner (I actually don't mind using an external tuner as it often makes setup with a reciever and other inputs simpler when the TV is nothing more than a dumb monitor), a computer monitor would be perfect for what I want. I don't want speakers (the stereo has them), I don't want internet junk (the computer/xbmc/other appliance has that), I just want a screen. It just seems like I can get much better deals on computer monitors from slickdeals than I can on comparatively (or slightly larger since they need to accept only a few standard input resolutions which should save some money sized TVs.
Another side note...I might actually like to buy a CRT HDTV but they are all but gone now (without the old ones showing up on the used market yet)...one of the moderate sized, not very deep ones...even an "HD-Ready". It seems like I would never have to worry about 720p vs 1080i vs 1080p if I had one that worked like every CRT computer screen I have owned (and just supported it all natively). I don't really need the flat panel aspect...newer CRTs were pretty narrow and my reciever/amp unit needs a fair amount of depth so the LCD doesn't really save space.
Price has little to do with cost. It is the market. If oil- and coal-generated electicity is sold for 14/kwh, nuclear power can sell for the same, no problem. Why would windpower outfits sell for less than, say, 11/kwh? They are leaving money on the table. Not many corporations do that.
Just a quick note on how this works (you are absolutely right). All electricity is bulk purchased from the generators for the same price. The price scales based on demand. The power generators submit minimum bids that they will generate above. An expensive to operate (but quick to turn on) natural gas plant might say "we can bring up 100MW when price hits 30/kwh". The coal plant (a bit cheaper to run but takes a while to bring up and down) might say "We will give you 300MW at any price above 15/kw". What I find to be the clever bit is that nuclear plants bid zero, effectively saying "We will give you 2000MW no matter what" because it takes a LONG time to bring a nuclear plant up after it has been shut down and once it is running, the costs are incredibly low. The grid operators then look at how much electricity demand they have at any point in time and set the purchase price at the lowest price that will meet that demand. *All* of the producers then get paid that same amount (so while the nukes bid zero, they never actually get paid zero).
I would guess that wind and solar fall into the nuke category of bidding zero since they have no real control or storage options. I would imagine that hydro operates like a mix of gas/coal since while they don't have fuel costs, there is some benefit to keeping your reservoir topped off (higher pressure head of water) and they can turn on and off at a moments notice.
Yes, but enron traders actually had the ability to phone up the operators at power plants and get them to shut down at the proper times to drive up the price of electricity on contracts the traders were controlling (illegal). This was possible because before they became a huge energy trading company when the markets were opened, they were an infrastructure level energy company...google does not have natural gas pipelines anywhere.
Also, while Enron's energy traders were total douches and did some pretty unethical stuff, Enron's big issue was the accounting fraud. They got into deep trouble with the basically imaginary income they were booking on other projects--the trading segment was doing fine until skilling forced his accounting through and started abusing mark to market practices.
Except text messages are a sort of unintentional hidden feature that was expanded for the masses. Basically it sends them as a part of the control codes that would otherwise normally be sent (for more info find that old/. story about the marginal cost of text messages being zero). This is great because someone figured out how to send messages without having to really update any network infrastructure since it was already in the specs...you just had to put a user friendly UI on the phones.
The only problem is that it was never designed to be a high-reliability, instant service. This is why I got happy new years text messages from people on the east coast at 1AM central time....the system got overloaded with people trying to send messages at the same time and they took a long time to get delivered.
If you want a reliable form of communication, you need to open up a dedicated line of some sort where you know your message is getting through...either make a real phone call, or send something over a data connection that you can verify has actually been sent (email or IM)
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes it is nice but other times I will be typing part of a domain (which is what I still do...since I am used to thinking about domains and not title tags) and it will decide to give me shit that it thinks is more relevant than what I am currently typing.
If I start typing a domain, odds are I am looking for something in that domain and the best way to handle that is to give me increasingly deep directory tree entries in that same domain...not some random smattering of junk that I happen to visit more often or recently than what I am actually typing.
This is why people complain about bloat...what is the point of this junk? Weren't there already addons/themes that let you do this kind of stuff? I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains...because I see a whole new way to make the internet an awfully annoying place...screw animated gifs and blink tags, I am going to change your damn browser.
It was like giving myspace page designers control over your browser
I struggle with this all of the time. One of my bank accounts has two passwords: one entered on the keyboard and one entered with an on screen keyboard. I am almost always within attempt of locking myself out of the account when I finally get the two passwords right. The two had different length/character requirements (beyond the obvious on screen keyboard not having funny symbols) but I can never remember which is which and what abominations of a password I had to create to fit. If they would just tell me on the damn password form the same info they put on the new account form, I would log in fine every time (actually I often end up getting deep enough into the "forgot password" dialog that it shows me the password requirements for a new one which jogs my memory).
I don't generate a new password for every site, although I have thought about moving to pattern based password for different sites along the lines of taking a password and integrating the first two letters in a non obvious way. Something like 12s34l56 for slashdot and 12a34m56 for amazon (with a real password...not 123456). Don't do it an obvious way...no passslashdot7, passebay7, passamazon7 as it would make it immediately obvious to anyone looking at your password what your google password would then be.
Since I don't do that...I instead use password tranches until I actually make the switch. I've got some crap password that some of my friends even know--easy to type, easy to crack--that gets used for things like the screen lock on my desktop and what are essentially public shares on my home network. As things move up in importance, they get better passwords.
On a side note, whenever a bank or something gives you a login where you have to choose a picture and a phrase to be displayed at login, does anyone else pick something like a picture of a daisy and the most gratuitously awful phrase you can think of? No phisher is ever going to try to fake that and I secretly wonder if the customer service people can see it when I talk to them on the phone.
I hate it when systems specifically require odd crap though...requiring a mixed password (must have 2 of the 3 following features or something) is good but saying that my 8-character password must include at least two numbers is actually decreasing the keyspace fairly significantly since you can limit several parts of the password to 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 as opposed to every single letter/number/punctuation.
The policy used to be the other way...if you had a movie and forgot to include a proper copyright notice, it lapsed into the public domain. There are some famous examples of this such as the movie Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Therefor you could tell if they sought protection by whether or not the notice was present. Either way though...CBS owns the physical media. If you had another copy, you could reproduce it as much as you want and CBS couldn't stop you but nothing says they have to give you their copy.
I think people are just confusing the concepts of patents and copyright. Patents exist to *force* you to reveal how your invention works in exchange for a limited period of enforced monopou. You could concievably hide the mechanism and have it be yours forever (as a trade secret) but then you would have no recourse if someone reverse engineers it. Copyright is a free protection (no fees or application like a patent) on something that would have to be revealed to profit off at all. It still has a similar goal of allowing the original creator to profit (by selling it themselves or licensing) but it has been far more corrupted by continued adjustments to the law--most likely because corporations tend to benefit a lot (compared to consumers) when patents expire while consumers benefit far more than producers when copyright periods end.
I do hear about this behavior from people who live in smaller towns or suburbs though. It seems like the only ways to avoid being thought of as a DUI rider or a Hobo when you ride to the store is to either suit up in full lycra or cover your bike/cargo rack with over the top environmentalist stickers.
I play TF2 and DoD:s on a pair of servers that I have started playing on basically exclusively. They have some stricter rules (no swearing, etc..some of the peoples kids also play on the server) which might take a bit of getting used to--not that I am a 12 year old potty mouthed style gamer but the occasional "holy shit that was a nice shot" still slips out. The rules discourage the total asshats from playing for long.
We have some pretty talented players...and occasionally strangers to the community will start to get really worked up about hacking and such. Knowing the admins means you don't have to argue with people accusing you of cheating...and you don't have to worry about being votekicked for being too good. At the same time, cheaters and asshats are dealt with quickly.
Was verizon not fully switched over at that time? My AT&T phone gets exactly what you were describing...3g sometimes--even if there is a stronger 2g signal
hell...with futures markets, china can buy the sugar and sell it to the US before it is even planted and then a few years later just say "oh yeah, that sugar is coming on the boat from costa rica"
Be careful about comparing 3g and non-3g phones however. They have this annoying habit of trying to join a really bad 3g signal before hopping on a stronger 2g signal...I suppose this is ok when you want fast data but kind of sucks when all you want is a clear voice call.
10% seems like a good figure. It might vary between games and other apps since being unable to pirate a game might just push you to another game (although not being able to pirate ANY game might make you eventually pay for a non-free one). Utility apps however, the goal is to do a specific task rather than a general "be entertained" so faced with either paying or not using the app, there may not be an alternative and thus the payment rate would increase.
Maybe they average out to 10%, maybe they dont--but 10% is still a whole lot better than the numbers often used for music/games/movies (especially movies since paying money might mean $1 at the redbox or part of a netflix subscription rather than full retail DVD).
I was referring to my global hotkeys for winamp...it is quite nice to control music from inside the game without having to move your hand far from wasd. Skip silent parts/songs you don't want to hear and pause for intense moments of battle.
you are probably using one of thier "consumer" models. Step up to a "business" model and everything will work just fine.
What is wrong with the windows key though? I love that thing. It was intended to be used for universal OS level shortcuts (I guess sort of like SysRq but more fun). Things like windows-l to lock the screen (works on ubuntu too) and any custom shortcuts you may want to define since you won't have to worry about fighting with application specific shortcut keys.
Just pressing it brings up the start menu...on my ubuntu netbook, I have the windows key set to swap between the open windows and the NBR launcher. I use it most frequently though for the lock screen function and to control winamp--I have win-z through win-v bound as global hotkeys for previous/stop/playpause/next (it is wonderful and works from within games)
There are lots of people in the world who can live for a day on the price of a popular adsense keyword...so I would imagine people in countries with a much lower cost and standard of living are not bringing in very much revenue for google. There is still some small benefit from the additional users/market share (and google's structure is very portable...just translate and go) but as soon as things start to become difficult, the profits might not be there to cover the expenses of dealing with messed up governments and widespread hacking.
I would bet china generates far far less revenue per user than the US so the added difficulties could very well make it unprofitable to continue service.
I wish I could give you a link...because I swear I have seen something like this (or at least a blog that had a reasonable amount of their posts about this)
you may get away with just asking for the unlock code but I usually just tell them that I will be traveling outside the country and would like to unlock my phone...works just fine.
Something would be popping out in the foreground and I would want to see what it was but it would be blurry and I couldn't focus because it wasn't actually a real object.
I think they should be careful about using the 3d effect on shots with narrow depth of field...especially if they are blurring stuff in the foreground.
If not for the issue of lacking a tuner (I actually don't mind using an external tuner as it often makes setup with a reciever and other inputs simpler when the TV is nothing more than a dumb monitor), a computer monitor would be perfect for what I want. I don't want speakers (the stereo has them), I don't want internet junk (the computer/xbmc/other appliance has that), I just want a screen. It just seems like I can get much better deals on computer monitors from slickdeals than I can on comparatively (or slightly larger since they need to accept only a few standard input resolutions which should save some money sized TVs.
Another side note...I might actually like to buy a CRT HDTV but they are all but gone now (without the old ones showing up on the used market yet)...one of the moderate sized, not very deep ones...even an "HD-Ready". It seems like I would never have to worry about 720p vs 1080i vs 1080p if I had one that worked like every CRT computer screen I have owned (and just supported it all natively). I don't really need the flat panel aspect...newer CRTs were pretty narrow and my reciever/amp unit needs a fair amount of depth so the LCD doesn't really save space.
Just a quick note on how this works (you are absolutely right). All electricity is bulk purchased from the generators for the same price. The price scales based on demand. The power generators submit minimum bids that they will generate above. An expensive to operate (but quick to turn on) natural gas plant might say "we can bring up 100MW when price hits 30/kwh". The coal plant (a bit cheaper to run but takes a while to bring up and down) might say "We will give you 300MW at any price above 15/kw". What I find to be the clever bit is that nuclear plants bid zero, effectively saying "We will give you 2000MW no matter what" because it takes a LONG time to bring a nuclear plant up after it has been shut down and once it is running, the costs are incredibly low. The grid operators then look at how much electricity demand they have at any point in time and set the purchase price at the lowest price that will meet that demand. *All* of the producers then get paid that same amount (so while the nukes bid zero, they never actually get paid zero).
I would guess that wind and solar fall into the nuke category of bidding zero since they have no real control or storage options. I would imagine that hydro operates like a mix of gas/coal since while they don't have fuel costs, there is some benefit to keeping your reservoir topped off (higher pressure head of water) and they can turn on and off at a moments notice.
Also, while Enron's energy traders were total douches and did some pretty unethical stuff, Enron's big issue was the accounting fraud. They got into deep trouble with the basically imaginary income they were booking on other projects--the trading segment was doing fine until skilling forced his accounting through and started abusing mark to market practices.
At least littering and spitting are avoidable offenses...and provable.
The only problem is that it was never designed to be a high-reliability, instant service. This is why I got happy new years text messages from people on the east coast at 1AM central time....the system got overloaded with people trying to send messages at the same time and they took a long time to get delivered.
If you want a reliable form of communication, you need to open up a dedicated line of some sort where you know your message is getting through...either make a real phone call, or send something over a data connection that you can verify has actually been sent (email or IM)