Don't think its a free solution, but a lot of people have access to through their companies. Easy enough to walk through (just a browser and the occasional confirmation box), and once you get them in the meeting, you can make them a presenter so they can share their screen and pass control.
Not as quick as logmein, but I have yet to see a system (including pretty locked down corporate computers) that can't join a WebEx.
It is one of those AP courses that is kind of a joke and might even teach bad habits that have to be corrected in further study. AP Economics and Statistics are similar to this. Good schools rarely give any sort of meaningful credit for them, and admissions officers often look down on them (i.e. the people who take AP Stats at a school that also offered AP Calc are seen as taking the easy way out). You might get a credit for it if you are an English major, but if you are doing anything that depends on that knowledge, they are going to want you to take a real university course.
AP CS is tested in Java these days, which is all fine and dandy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the materials are outdated and the testing poor.
Does this moron get paid to post here or something?
I always have enough Karma that I get the "disable advertising" checkbox, but I rarely bother checking it since I don't particularly mind them and slashdot has got to pay the bills somehow...
Today I am clicking it. I am clicking it in protest of Bennett's continued ability to submit walls of moronic text to the front page. I am clicking it with hopes that I am depriving Dice of a minuscule amount or revenue that might help them consider whether they should continue publishing this swill.
This is like arguing that credit cards are terrible because someone could come to your house and you could pay them with a fake credit card on one of those carbon-paper imprint readers. Then they would get home and process the transaction and realize the number was fake.
That's absurd. It's not that credit cards are terrible, it is that the people in the story aren't set up to properly handle credit card transactions. That's why people only use those things in low-risk environments. You might accept $15 worth of bitcoin without being able to validate the transaction (like a festival t-shirt vendor might have accepted a credit card without a phone line before things like Square), but if you are dealing with a $1000 transaction from a stranger, you are probably going to make sure it clears before you hand over the goods.
Also, since some of the peripherals are USB, you might be able to hijack a connection there.
Crack open the keypad area, cut the wires and connect them to your device (also defeats anything that tries to use a non-standard connector). Twist the wires back together when you are done (it isn't like you are trying to reconstruct the wires from a parallel port...usb is easy). If the keypad is still needed, then you hijack the receipt printer or you add a USB hub to your device and hook the keypad up to that.
Because half of the gift (and lets be honest, this is reddit secret santa...it is filled with $20 gifts that will get thrown away next month) is the cool feeling this girl got upon discovering that Bill Gates was her secret santa.
If the return address just said bill gates, she wouldn't believe it (just some reddit user trying to stay anonymous)--now she knows it was him and can forever tell the story of how Bill Gates gave her a christmas present.
As to the content of the gift...the book and the stuffed cow are basically on par with what you might be expected to receive from the reddit SS. While I think it would be hilarious if he sent her a Surface instead of her requested iPad and said "here, try this instead", I don't really think that is in keeping with Bill's style. The cow donation is much more in line with Bill. He still managed to give a gift that is probably one of the most valuable reddit SS gifts (in dollar terms), but without turning the SS into some lottery where you buy your "ticket" for $20 (sending someone a gift) and hope that you get some super rich dude to come in and pay off your student loans. Online SS things (I've never done reddit, but have done it on smaller forums) are more fun when it's not about who spent the most $$$ on the gift, but rather who did the best job of stalking their recipient's post history to find them a gift that they would truly enjoy. Honestly, an ipad is kind of a shitty gift--obviously anyone would be happy to receive one so it doesn't require any effort on the part of the giver other than pulling out $500.
Unfortunately, that is the state of many of those ad providers....they are scummy.
I am a member of a forum that keeps struggling with this stuff. On the desktop version, you keep getting these ads that make noise or pop out from the space they are supposed to stay in. On the mobile version, you've got ads that are supposed to be constrained to the dedicated ad space, but instead sometimes decide that they should *always* float on the bottom of the screen (or worse, decide they should actually take up half of the screen instead of the dedicated space).
When users report these with enough info (screenshot, snippet of the source, etc), they can track them down and slap the advertiser on the wrist for letting them through. But sure enough they crop up again (for a different company/product) a week later...just as bad as the spammers. You can't really expect the ad companies to verify every bit of code and ad that goes out...these things are sometimes only worth pennies, so they have to trust that their clients to submit clean ads and wait for people to report bad actors.
Trash either the Newton or the Palm (probably the Newton). They are both basically the same thing. The Palm followed the Newton and was successful and actually influenced people...so I would leave that one in. Having both is like having both the ipad and those ancient fujitsu tablets.
If you really want another PDA/Phone thing...it belongs to blackberry. They were heavily used in their own right, and they directly contributed to the success of the iphone...people had them thrust upon them at work, were already warmed to the idea of a smartphone, and now are mostly using iphones. They may have clung to the BB for a long time, but when their kids and family all had iphones and they realized it could do everything their BB could do in a more friendly manner (and without running a BES), they were ready to move.
Instead, I just barely insert the plunger immediately after stirring and topping off the water. A bit of coffee drips out, but for the most part the plunger forms a vacuum that holds the coffee in the chamber.
With it like this, I can leave it to steep for a decent amount of time without having to bother with the inverted method.
I would take the expense of maintaining my vehicle and getting to plug it in at work (with a guaranteed charge at end of day) any day over the prospect of having my car searched and being arrested for plugging it in to an available outlet.
Oh god yes. I rented a Toyota a couple of weeks ago with some entirely touch interface. Usually I escape the sort of full-touch vehicles since rentals are always base models without the fancy upgrades, but now base models are starting to have this stuff.
The Rav4 was an otherwise decent vehicle, but they managed to make even controlling the radio a huge pain in the ass. The touchscreen was not easy to use, couldn't be used without looking (I rent a lot of cars, and have yet to meet a real-button radio that I couldn't control by feel). Some of this was made up for by having steering wheel controls, but they weren't sufficient and for anything besides volume/preset controls, I still had to look at the screen to see what I was about to click on.
There was otherwise some cool technology in there. The connection to my phone with bluetooth was the best implementation I have seen yet and the back-up camera was nifty for parallel parking an unfamiliar car (although I always wonder about those cameras...they let you see stuff you wouldn't normally see, but you lose the field of view and situational awareness that comes from actually turning your head like you are supposed to while reversing. Why not put the screen behind you so you can see it while looking backwards?). I'd say we are probably in a transitional phase. They can do all of this cool stuff, but they haven't figured out how to make it easy and intuitive. Better voice controls are probably part of it (and steering wheel radio controls are great once you've got your radio presets), but the current touchscreen guis are terrible.
I don't understand all of the people talking about theft.
Isn't the point of this that the drones are available to deliver something you want right away, directly to you?
The drones are about as fast as a pizza...do you routinely order a pizza and then leave the house to return hours later and wonder why your pizza is cold? No, this is for when you order something and want it immediately (otherwise you would be ok with a normal package). You place your order, they pack it, and the drone flies it over. You walk outside, say "Hey Drone!", grab the box, and walk back inside. I don't see why you would bother using the drone to deliver if you aren't going to be home for the next 5 hours...
They have already agreed to that contract. At least in every municipality I have lived in, it is against the law to not pick up your dog shit. You don't own the lawn outside a condo building, so you don't have the right to leave your dog shit behind. Paying for a service to pick it up is just coddling the irresponsible owners and teaching them that it is ok (in addition to not being effective...even if the service comes once a day, the likelyhood of there being fresh shit on the lawn at any point in time is pretty high).
My apartment building started having a dog-shit problem (although my favorite, was the person who would pick up and bag their animal's shit, but would proceed to drop the baggie on the ground outside the entrance to the apartment...I think that is actually *worse* than just leaving it out in the grass). Management started posting notices that if the problem continued, they would just start saying "no dogs in the building". They pointed out that they would not be cancelling leases...which means that either you have to say goodbye to Fluffy, or you are on the hook for $$$$ in order to break your lease and find a new home on short notice. Kind of a hard-ass approach, but I haven't stepped in dog-shit since.
Exactly. The problem with the algorithm method is that there is no end to the stupidity that is present in password requirements.
Site A requires a symbol, but only accepts !?#$%.
Site B requires a number, but god-forbid that number is at the beginning or end of your password.
Site C won't accept any symbols, but needs upper/lower/number
Site D has reasonable complexity requirements, but requires you to change the password every 30 days, despite being a service that you only access if something is wrong, and even then, never more than once a month (one of my student loan providers used to do this. I think I complained enough that they realized that password change requirements were stupid...especially on a website where the worst thing you could do would be pay my bill for me).
I like the algorithm method (and even if the algorithm would be obvious to a human with access to 3-4 passwords, it would save you from some bot getting one password and simply trying the same pair at every major service), but when you have sets of requirements like this, it is impossible to implement. A and C are mutually exclusive, B is annoying (and actually reduces brute force complexity) but avoidable, and D will break your whole algorithm the first time it changes (unless you add a counter, but then you have to remember what iteration you are on).
I keep a little list in a google doc of the rarely accessed but important sites that have weird password requirements (since it is rare they tell you the requirements on the login page)...then at least I know that I may have had to modify my algorithm because '^*()' aren't valid characters, or that the requirements were dumb enough that I just said "screw it" and used some old insecure password that has probably been unknowingly leaked 15 times while hoping for the best.
I wonder if they ever considered making money the way a lot of deal sites and forums do...by inserting their referral link into amazon links.
Obviously make it a voluntary option, but I would think they could squeeze out a lot of revenue just taking any unreferred link and turning it into a referral. I suppose Amazon might not love this, but it is not that different than what forum operators do when they add referrals to every outgoing amazon link.
This seems like a decent short term business model. I wonder how many identities and credit card numbers you could sell (for bitcoins of course) before people realized that every single one was bad (at least with stolen CC numbers, you expect many to be no good when you buy then) and stopped purchasing from you? And how many times could you repeat this under a new name?
Bandwidth is cheap, so I don't care about redownloading (also, spotify caches things), but god is spotify a terrible program.
Takes forever to start up, hangs a lot when changing screens, uses a ton of memory, sometimes can't regain audio focus (e.g. if I stop playback, watch a video with something like DTS that causes my receiver to switch modes, and then later try to play a song in spotify again), etc.
It's like a drug though. I know it is bad for posterity's sake since I no longer have a "collection" that can serve as a reference to what I was listening to in the past. They really should add something better than "starring" stuff...If you star an artist, you get every single song added to one giant list that is not easy to navigate; they should have an "add to personal library" type option that lets you grab whole albums or artists, but still leaves the starred section for truly great individual songs. But even though it's bad for future me, present me loves being able to play anything with a click and discover new things super easily (and be able to play whatever I want at work without trying to synchronize a large collection).
It was pretty powerful, and even without the features, I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes). You could search your library at will without changing anything in the playlist. They were in separate windows and the paradigm was pretty clear--you play music in the playing window, you search for music in the library.
Then, the playlist had ITS OWN INTERNAL MINI PLAYLIST! You could queue up specific tracks to play next (using j or q keyboard shortcuts IIRC). This great, because you could have your playlist on shuffle, but still be able to specify what song you want to hear next, all while still keeping your playlist sorted by artist/album/whatever. Infinitely better than software where the solution to "shuffle" was to actually shuffle your current playlist which makes browsing more difficult.
I will miss Winamp, but I must confess, I use it far less these days. Spotify has changed the way I listen to music--I no longer acquire music permanently and listen to much of it at work (vs using winamp for many many years as a student). This may not be a good thing...right now I can browse through my music folder and go on a nostalgia trip, much like my parents can flip through their records and CDs...with spotify, I will have to actually remember what I was listening to 15 years ago instead of stumbling across it when I set winamp to "shuffle all". But, it means I have cut out winamp. At work, I use Spotify...and at home mostly listen to music on my HTPC through spotify or XBMC. Winamp only gets used when I am using my desktop for something that doesn't have its own sound (like gaming or editing videos)...which is pretty much only when I work from home.
I once tried to add a section to Bennett Haselton's wikipedia highlighting his absurd set of slashdot "essays" (the ones questioning the 5th ammendment).
I mean...I was doing it to call out the fact that he is an idiot, but the content itself was accurate and cited to the original stories. I think it is notable enough for inclusion--thousands of people read and commented on those stories and I wouldn't have any idea who Bennet Haselton is if not for those posts. His wikipedia page even includes a section for "Other Internet Activities".
I don't understand what it is about smartphones that make people think this is ok.
10 years ago, we didn't have tons people carrying around a book to read because they "get bored waiting at red lights"...and when you saw someone reading in the car, it was often notable as a "bad thing". Now it is rare that I pull up to a light (on a motorcycle so I am high up and can see what people are doing in their laps) and don't see some asshole who thinks checking up on his facebook or instagram newsfeed is more important than paying attention to his surroundings. It is a little more rare in slow moving traffic, but I still see it all the time.
At least I understand the pressure that comes with texts/work emails. Someone is communicating with you and you have a strong desire to read/respond, even if you know it is wrong. But checking fucking facebook while driving because you can't handle sitting in the car? I can't believe that there are people who are seriously arguing that this is OK.
Can snapchat really have more than like 5 employees? Instagram had 13 when they went for $1b to facebook and it had a *lot* more functionality than snapchat.
I doubt you become the 5th employee without an equity grant...so my guess is that none of those people would be hurting for a job after a $3b sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think its a free solution, but a lot of people have access to through their companies. Easy enough to walk through (just a browser and the occasional confirmation box), and once you get them in the meeting, you can make them a presenter so they can share their screen and pass control.
Not as quick as logmein, but I have yet to see a system (including pretty locked down corporate computers) that can't join a WebEx.
It is one of those AP courses that is kind of a joke and might even teach bad habits that have to be corrected in further study. AP Economics and Statistics are similar to this. Good schools rarely give any sort of meaningful credit for them, and admissions officers often look down on them (i.e. the people who take AP Stats at a school that also offered AP Calc are seen as taking the easy way out). You might get a credit for it if you are an English major, but if you are doing anything that depends on that knowledge, they are going to want you to take a real university course.
AP CS is tested in Java these days, which is all fine and dandy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the materials are outdated and the testing poor.
This isn't "search nearby my actual location"...it is "search nearby the the spot on the map I just clicked".
If you've got a privacy complaint about that...then I don't know what to say.
I always have enough Karma that I get the "disable advertising" checkbox, but I rarely bother checking it since I don't particularly mind them and slashdot has got to pay the bills somehow...
Today I am clicking it. I am clicking it in protest of Bennett's continued ability to submit walls of moronic text to the front page. I am clicking it with hopes that I am depriving Dice of a minuscule amount or revenue that might help them consider whether they should continue publishing this swill.
This is like arguing that credit cards are terrible because someone could come to your house and you could pay them with a fake credit card on one of those carbon-paper imprint readers. Then they would get home and process the transaction and realize the number was fake.
That's absurd. It's not that credit cards are terrible, it is that the people in the story aren't set up to properly handle credit card transactions. That's why people only use those things in low-risk environments. You might accept $15 worth of bitcoin without being able to validate the transaction (like a festival t-shirt vendor might have accepted a credit card without a phone line before things like Square), but if you are dealing with a $1000 transaction from a stranger, you are probably going to make sure it clears before you hand over the goods.
Crack open the keypad area, cut the wires and connect them to your device (also defeats anything that tries to use a non-standard connector). Twist the wires back together when you are done (it isn't like you are trying to reconstruct the wires from a parallel port...usb is easy). If the keypad is still needed, then you hijack the receipt printer or you add a USB hub to your device and hook the keypad up to that.
If the return address just said bill gates, she wouldn't believe it (just some reddit user trying to stay anonymous)--now she knows it was him and can forever tell the story of how Bill Gates gave her a christmas present.
As to the content of the gift...the book and the stuffed cow are basically on par with what you might be expected to receive from the reddit SS. While I think it would be hilarious if he sent her a Surface instead of her requested iPad and said "here, try this instead", I don't really think that is in keeping with Bill's style. The cow donation is much more in line with Bill. He still managed to give a gift that is probably one of the most valuable reddit SS gifts (in dollar terms), but without turning the SS into some lottery where you buy your "ticket" for $20 (sending someone a gift) and hope that you get some super rich dude to come in and pay off your student loans. Online SS things (I've never done reddit, but have done it on smaller forums) are more fun when it's not about who spent the most $$$ on the gift, but rather who did the best job of stalking their recipient's post history to find them a gift that they would truly enjoy.
Honestly, an ipad is kind of a shitty gift--obviously anyone would be happy to receive one so it doesn't require any effort on the part of the giver other than pulling out $500.
I am a member of a forum that keeps struggling with this stuff. On the desktop version, you keep getting these ads that make noise or pop out from the space they are supposed to stay in. On the mobile version, you've got ads that are supposed to be constrained to the dedicated ad space, but instead sometimes decide that they should *always* float on the bottom of the screen (or worse, decide they should actually take up half of the screen instead of the dedicated space).
When users report these with enough info (screenshot, snippet of the source, etc), they can track them down and slap the advertiser on the wrist for letting them through. But sure enough they crop up again (for a different company/product) a week later...just as bad as the spammers. You can't really expect the ad companies to verify every bit of code and ad that goes out...these things are sometimes only worth pennies, so they have to trust that their clients to submit clean ads and wait for people to report bad actors.
Not even loosely based on android...more along the lines of still android, but way better than TouchWiz.
If you really want another PDA/Phone thing...it belongs to blackberry. They were heavily used in their own right, and they directly contributed to the success of the iphone...people had them thrust upon them at work, were already warmed to the idea of a smartphone, and now are mostly using iphones. They may have clung to the BB for a long time, but when their kids and family all had iphones and they realized it could do everything their BB could do in a more friendly manner (and without running a BES), they were ready to move.
Instead, I just barely insert the plunger immediately after stirring and topping off the water. A bit of coffee drips out, but for the most part the plunger forms a vacuum that holds the coffee in the chamber.
With it like this, I can leave it to steep for a decent amount of time without having to bother with the inverted method.
I would take the expense of maintaining my vehicle and getting to plug it in at work (with a guaranteed charge at end of day) any day over the prospect of having my car searched and being arrested for plugging it in to an available outlet.
The Rav4 was an otherwise decent vehicle, but they managed to make even controlling the radio a huge pain in the ass. The touchscreen was not easy to use, couldn't be used without looking (I rent a lot of cars, and have yet to meet a real-button radio that I couldn't control by feel). Some of this was made up for by having steering wheel controls, but they weren't sufficient and for anything besides volume/preset controls, I still had to look at the screen to see what I was about to click on.
There was otherwise some cool technology in there. The connection to my phone with bluetooth was the best implementation I have seen yet and the back-up camera was nifty for parallel parking an unfamiliar car (although I always wonder about those cameras...they let you see stuff you wouldn't normally see, but you lose the field of view and situational awareness that comes from actually turning your head like you are supposed to while reversing. Why not put the screen behind you so you can see it while looking backwards?). I'd say we are probably in a transitional phase. They can do all of this cool stuff, but they haven't figured out how to make it easy and intuitive. Better voice controls are probably part of it (and steering wheel radio controls are great once you've got your radio presets), but the current touchscreen guis are terrible.
The drones are about as fast as a pizza...do you routinely order a pizza and then leave the house to return hours later and wonder why your pizza is cold? No, this is for when you order something and want it immediately (otherwise you would be ok with a normal package). You place your order, they pack it, and the drone flies it over. You walk outside, say "Hey Drone!", grab the box, and walk back inside. I don't see why you would bother using the drone to deliver if you aren't going to be home for the next 5 hours...
My apartment building started having a dog-shit problem (although my favorite, was the person who would pick up and bag their animal's shit, but would proceed to drop the baggie on the ground outside the entrance to the apartment...I think that is actually *worse* than just leaving it out in the grass). Management started posting notices that if the problem continued, they would just start saying "no dogs in the building". They pointed out that they would not be cancelling leases...which means that either you have to say goodbye to Fluffy, or you are on the hook for $$$$ in order to break your lease and find a new home on short notice. Kind of a hard-ass approach, but I haven't stepped in dog-shit since.
I like the algorithm method (and even if the algorithm would be obvious to a human with access to 3-4 passwords, it would save you from some bot getting one password and simply trying the same pair at every major service), but when you have sets of requirements like this, it is impossible to implement. A and C are mutually exclusive, B is annoying (and actually reduces brute force complexity) but avoidable, and D will break your whole algorithm the first time it changes (unless you add a counter, but then you have to remember what iteration you are on).
I keep a little list in a google doc of the rarely accessed but important sites that have weird password requirements (since it is rare they tell you the requirements on the login page)...then at least I know that I may have had to modify my algorithm because '^*()' aren't valid characters, or that the requirements were dumb enough that I just said "screw it" and used some old insecure password that has probably been unknowingly leaked 15 times while hoping for the best.
I though that was still paypal's primary niche.
When their publication destination is a website (or even newsprint), "web resolution" is also publication quality.
Obviously make it a voluntary option, but I would think they could squeeze out a lot of revenue just taking any unreferred link and turning it into a referral. I suppose Amazon might not love this, but it is not that different than what forum operators do when they add referrals to every outgoing amazon link.
This seems like a decent short term business model. I wonder how many identities and credit card numbers you could sell (for bitcoins of course) before people realized that every single one was bad (at least with stolen CC numbers, you expect many to be no good when you buy then) and stopped purchasing from you? And how many times could you repeat this under a new name?
Takes forever to start up, hangs a lot when changing screens, uses a ton of memory, sometimes can't regain audio focus (e.g. if I stop playback, watch a video with something like DTS that causes my receiver to switch modes, and then later try to play a song in spotify again), etc.
It's like a drug though. I know it is bad for posterity's sake since I no longer have a "collection" that can serve as a reference to what I was listening to in the past. They really should add something better than "starring" stuff...If you star an artist, you get every single song added to one giant list that is not easy to navigate; they should have an "add to personal library" type option that lets you grab whole albums or artists, but still leaves the starred section for truly great individual songs. But even though it's bad for future me, present me loves being able to play anything with a click and discover new things super easily (and be able to play whatever I want at work without trying to synchronize a large collection).
It was pretty powerful, and even without the features, I liked the fact that the active playlist was held completely separate from the library (as opposed to say...struggling with itunes). You could search your library at will without changing anything in the playlist. They were in separate windows and the paradigm was pretty clear--you play music in the playing window, you search for music in the library.
Then, the playlist had ITS OWN INTERNAL MINI PLAYLIST! You could queue up specific tracks to play next (using j or q keyboard shortcuts IIRC). This great, because you could have your playlist on shuffle, but still be able to specify what song you want to hear next, all while still keeping your playlist sorted by artist/album/whatever. Infinitely better than software where the solution to "shuffle" was to actually shuffle your current playlist which makes browsing more difficult.
I will miss Winamp, but I must confess, I use it far less these days. Spotify has changed the way I listen to music--I no longer acquire music permanently and listen to much of it at work (vs using winamp for many many years as a student). This may not be a good thing...right now I can browse through my music folder and go on a nostalgia trip, much like my parents can flip through their records and CDs...with spotify, I will have to actually remember what I was listening to 15 years ago instead of stumbling across it when I set winamp to "shuffle all". But, it means I have cut out winamp. At work, I use Spotify...and at home mostly listen to music on my HTPC through spotify or XBMC. Winamp only gets used when I am using my desktop for something that doesn't have its own sound (like gaming or editing videos)...which is pretty much only when I work from home.
I mean...I was doing it to call out the fact that he is an idiot, but the content itself was accurate and cited to the original stories. I think it is notable enough for inclusion--thousands of people read and commented on those stories and I wouldn't have any idea who Bennet Haselton is if not for those posts. His wikipedia page even includes a section for "Other Internet Activities".
Still got nuked from orbit almost immediately.
10 years ago, we didn't have tons people carrying around a book to read because they "get bored waiting at red lights"...and when you saw someone reading in the car, it was often notable as a "bad thing". Now it is rare that I pull up to a light (on a motorcycle so I am high up and can see what people are doing in their laps) and don't see some asshole who thinks checking up on his facebook or instagram newsfeed is more important than paying attention to his surroundings. It is a little more rare in slow moving traffic, but I still see it all the time.
At least I understand the pressure that comes with texts/work emails. Someone is communicating with you and you have a strong desire to read/respond, even if you know it is wrong. But checking fucking facebook while driving because you can't handle sitting in the car? I can't believe that there are people who are seriously arguing that this is OK.
I doubt you become the 5th employee without an equity grant...so my guess is that none of those people would be hurting for a job after a $3b sale.