I tried my usual searches for a couple of slightly obscure bands (e-type, sonata arctica) and got no results. Same as every other commercial service. This is what I mostly used P2P for, to find songs that were impossible to find commercially in my country, so this service is fairly useless to me - same as the others.
ALso, the site seems to have collapsed now - nice first impression guys, fail under load on your relaunch day.
Indeed, that's probably going rather too far, although I like that they are removing decorations.
Another problems is that LCDs often have problems with colour at high brightness, so those neon-green on white scrollbars might be practically invisible in many situations, e.g. off angle viewing.
I found Connexion useful, reasonably priced and decently performing. I helped a customer out over Messenger while flying over the ocean. These days, a lot of an IT persons work involves frequent internet access, to send mails, check things on the web etc. It's worth paying a few dollars more on your thousand dollar flight in order to make that time productive.
I guess they must have budgeted for domestic airlines using it though, and I guess they are not keen to do so:(
The "days of yore" for shareware could have been the early 90's. It would be interesting to see if the same result is obtained now - I think the difference might be less now, as people have become more used to the idea of open source and supporting it regardless of it being free.
This is the thing that bugs me about relgious people, even when they are not trying to convert me, even when they are friends:
I can't have an interesting discussion with them about the purpose of life, because they've already been told the answer and no longer have to think about it. They've largely opted to turn their brains off about the really interesting questions in life.
Or not, if you are writing an application that has to work in other places than Europe and the US. You can see the full range from zero decimal places to 4 decimal places for currency amounts, and sometimes prices will be of greater precision than the normal currency figures.
Microsoft made the "CURRENCY" data type which is indeed a 64 bit integer with 4 digits implicit to the right of the decimal. This is enough for most cases.
How about not making stuff up? Connectix made and released several versions of Virtual PC for Windows before Microsoft bought it. As is their typical procedure, they bought it after most of the hard work was done, put a little MS glitz on it and called it a day.
They made them: DVDA and SACD. And no-one cared. For 99% of us there is no audible difference between 16 bit and 24 bit. It doesn't matter if its actually better, there is no perceived value, so you are in a tiny niche market that is not worth anyone's while to serve.
They used USB2 readers. USB2 is 480Mbps - theoritical - or about 60MB/sec. Some of these cards are have more than 50MB/sec read/write, so it seems very likely the testing is being compromised by the actual USB2 speeds. There may be a much larger difference amongst cards than they found.
The other limitation I noticed is that they timed based on when the windows "copy" dialog appears and dissappears. But whats to say it won't continue writing for a while after that (from cache?)
If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll see that a launch would be about the same as one 10MT weapon. They did plenty of tests in Nevada last century.
If you could get past the public hysteria over nukes, it would be quite feasible. A sufficiently big reason like a certain asteroid hit or China with weapons in space would probably do it.
Still, as a regular launch method that seems a bit much...
I think you overestimate the interest people have in this kind of "personalisation". Most people will almost instantly identify such obvious fill-in-the-blanks stuff (after all it's only slightly more than the form current junk mail which fills in a few bits of info into a form letter).
Basically, unless a marketing gimick is genuinely useful or entertaining, people will learn it very fast and ignore it.
For example, if your hypothetical mail actually knew that Rob *enjoyed* his time at space mountain and suggested something else he is also likely to enjoy, with enough detail for him to agree with the idea, that would be useful and successful. If on the other hand it mindlessly suggests the same attraction again, or just selects from affiliated rides with no regards to the customers desires, that is unhelpful and pushy and will be ignored after the first time or so.
True, but XP has more drivers bundled with it, which means you don't have to dig around for the driver CD or check the manufacturer's website for a driver nearly as often when you go to connect some random bit of new (to you) hardware. In some cases, if WinXP doesn't already have a driver for something, it can go get it (through Windows Update) and install it, again without you having to find & download the driver yourself.
It's a nice idea, but I have never once seen XP already have or download a driver for a new piece of hardware I bought. Out of maybe 20 times I've tried, it always says it couldn't find a driver, even for fairly dull things like serial expander boards.
The engine and backend? That was over-engineered under-delivering crap too, that did a couple of useful things quite well and everything else badly.
What it did well: store blobs (documents), replicate them. What it did badly: everything else you might want in a database. No querying, manual weird indexes, no design management, no link integrity, and on and on. Yes, I know it was designed for only those first two things originally, but to build decent enterprise applications you NEED more than just an unstructured file storage engine.
No, because if you make a mistake submitting to spamcop thousands of people will feel the effects (potentially). Make a mistake in your own junk mail, its only you that gets hurt.
Spamcop specifically avoids those two problems (though it has others). It only blocks specific IPs identified as sources of spam. And it only blocks due to submitted spam - no manual entries.
The point is, that YOU should CHECK the results of spamcop's parsing, to make sure something dumb hasn't happened - like listing your own provider as the spammer.
This can happen outside your control because your email provider has changed configuration and messed up headers.
Spamcop only needs small numbers of properly checked submissions. Piles of submissions don't help - it's not a statistical process like Bayesian filters.
YOu are very right. The phone companies still try to operate like they are making a voice-only phone ie. a piece of consumer electronics, yet they are now primarily software vendors. They *must* involve lots of real users with beta programs and forums that the *phone developers* take part in, and ongoing maintenance releases, in order to get it right.
I had a particularly absurd conversation with a Nokia rep who insisted that they removed the ability to postpone a calendar alarm to "save space". Sure. In order to load on the Java games and leave a large chunk of unused memory for "expansions" which never eventuated.
Whereas if you actually had a forum where the developers participated, it would probably be two posts and then done. "oh duh yeah we accidentally removed that."
Text messaging: used very frequently by me and my 30-something friends. Work and play.
Camera in a phone: IF they did a decent job, I would like to have this feature. They are moving toward decent.
Email/internet: if you have any actual *need* to check email (i.e. on call for something), then why would you not want to be able to do it from your phone? It used to be a pain to drag my laptop around, now I can check it from my mobile.
Why is Slashdot so surprisingly full of people who are extremely conservative about new technology, and unimaginative about possible uses of it?
That's because in the current market, the intersection between "simple" and stylish is a tiny market. Or: those who want a stylish phone mostly want all the features as well.
NOD32 seems to be the best Antivirus for geeks, IMHO. Pretty good at finding viruses (the best if you listen to them, but hey, thats marketing), comparitively lightweight, and with lots of options that don't result in blaring alerts when you configure them in "unapproved" ways.
I found that NOD uses about 17MB of memory, compared to more than 60 for Norton's (home).
That's true if their cost structure is suited to such a market share. If on the other hand they are an enormous, expensive bueuracracy with thousands of employees, suddenly shrinking the market share means drastic measures are needed to keep the company afloat.
Yes, this is how the sharemarket leads to the destruction of companies. Grow and grow until you can only do it by hurting your customers, then they all leave and the company implodes. The smart investors see it coming and take off with vast profits, while the unlucky ones see their money dissappear.
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I tried my usual searches for a couple of slightly obscure bands (e-type, sonata arctica) and got no results. Same as every other commercial service. This is what I mostly used P2P for, to find songs that were impossible to find commercially in my country, so this service is fairly useless to me - same as the others.
ALso, the site seems to have collapsed now - nice first impression guys, fail under load on your relaunch day.
Indeed, that's probably going rather too far, although I like that they are removing decorations.
Another problems is that LCDs often have problems with colour at high brightness, so those neon-green on white scrollbars might be practically invisible in many situations, e.g. off angle viewing.
not as bad as the 1990's-esque AIM smileys
OMG u r so right!!! The 90's had like NO style!!!!!1 We r so much bettr now....lol
I found Connexion useful, reasonably priced and decently performing.
:(
I helped a customer out over Messenger while flying over the ocean.
These days, a lot of an IT persons work involves frequent internet access, to send mails, check things on the web etc. It's worth paying a few dollars more on your thousand dollar flight in order to make that time productive.
I guess they must have budgeted for domestic airlines using it though, and I guess they are not keen to do so
The "days of yore" for shareware could have been the early 90's. It would be interesting to see if the same result is obtained now - I think the difference might be less now, as people have become more used to the idea of open source and supporting it regardless of it being free.
Then again, maybe not....
This is the thing that bugs me about relgious people, even when they are not trying to convert me, even when they are friends:
I can't have an interesting discussion with them about the purpose of life, because they've already been told the answer and no longer have to think about it. They've largely opted to turn their brains off about the really interesting questions in life.
And that's just dull.
Of course, your basic unit is the cent
Or not, if you are writing an application that has to work in other places than Europe and the US.
You can see the full range from zero decimal places to 4 decimal places for currency amounts, and sometimes prices will be of greater precision than the normal currency figures.
Microsoft made the "CURRENCY" data type which is indeed a 64 bit integer with 4 digits implicit to the right of the decimal. This is enough for most cases.
How about not making stuff up? Connectix made and released several versions of Virtual PC for Windows before Microsoft bought it. As is their typical procedure, they bought it after most of the hard work was done, put a little MS glitz on it and called it a day.
Microsoft did NOT port VPC from Mac to Windows.
They made them: DVDA and SACD. And no-one cared. For 99% of us there is no audible difference between 16 bit and 24 bit. It doesn't matter if its actually better, there is no perceived value, so you are in a tiny niche market that is not worth anyone's while to serve.
They used USB2 readers. USB2 is 480Mbps - theoritical - or about 60MB/sec. Some of these cards are have more than 50MB/sec read/write, so it seems very likely the testing is being compromised by the actual USB2 speeds. There may be a much larger difference amongst cards than they found.
The other limitation I noticed is that they timed based on when the windows "copy" dialog appears and dissappears. But whats to say it won't continue writing for a while after that (from cache?)
If you read the Wikipedia article, you'll see that a launch would be about the same as one 10MT weapon. They did plenty of tests in Nevada last century.
If you could get past the public hysteria over nukes, it would be quite feasible. A sufficiently big reason like a certain asteroid hit or China with weapons in space would probably do it.
Still, as a regular launch method that seems a bit much...
I think you overestimate the interest people have in this kind of "personalisation". Most people will almost instantly identify such obvious fill-in-the-blanks stuff (after all it's only slightly more than the form current junk mail which fills in a few bits of info into a form letter).
Basically, unless a marketing gimick is genuinely useful or entertaining, people will learn it very fast and ignore it.
For example, if your hypothetical mail actually knew that Rob *enjoyed* his time at space mountain and suggested something else he is also likely to enjoy, with enough detail for him to agree with the idea, that would be useful and successful. If on the other hand it mindlessly suggests the same attraction again, or just selects from affiliated rides with no regards to the customers desires, that is unhelpful and pushy and will be ignored after the first time or so.
True, but XP has more drivers bundled with it, which means you don't have to dig around for the driver CD or check the manufacturer's website for a driver nearly as often when you go to connect some random bit of new (to you) hardware. In some cases, if WinXP doesn't already have a driver for something, it can go get it (through Windows Update) and install it, again without you having to find & download the driver yourself.
It's a nice idea, but I have never once seen XP already have or download a driver for a new piece of hardware I bought. Out of maybe 20 times I've tried, it always says it couldn't find a driver, even for fairly dull things like serial expander boards.
The engine and backend? That was over-engineered under-delivering crap too, that did a couple of useful things quite well and everything else badly.
What it did well: store blobs (documents), replicate them. What it did badly: everything else you might want in a database. No querying, manual weird indexes, no design management, no link integrity, and on and on. Yes, I know it was designed for only those first two things originally, but to build decent enterprise applications you NEED more than just an unstructured file storage engine.
Delphi is like the good parts of VB with some of the good parts of C++.
Talk about products hamstrung by marketing...
No, because if you make a mistake submitting to spamcop thousands of people will feel the effects (potentially). Make a mistake in your own junk mail, its only you that gets hurt.
Spamcop specifically avoids those two problems (though it has others).
It only blocks specific IPs identified as sources of spam.
And it only blocks due to submitted spam - no manual entries.
So, your comments are irrelevant to spamcop.
The point is, that YOU should CHECK the results of spamcop's parsing, to make sure something dumb hasn't happened - like listing your own provider as the spammer.
This can happen outside your control because your email provider has changed configuration and messed up headers.
Spamcop only needs small numbers of properly checked submissions. Piles of submissions don't help - it's not a statistical process like Bayesian filters.
YOu are very right. The phone companies still try to operate like they are making a voice-only phone ie. a piece of consumer electronics, yet they are now primarily software vendors. They *must* involve lots of real users with beta programs and forums that the *phone developers* take part in, and ongoing maintenance releases, in order to get it right.
I had a particularly absurd conversation with a Nokia rep who insisted that they removed the ability to postpone a calendar alarm to "save space". Sure. In order to load on the Java games and leave a large chunk of unused memory for "expansions" which never eventuated.
Whereas if you actually had a forum where the developers participated, it would probably be two posts and then done. "oh duh yeah we accidentally removed that."
You were forced to buy the model with the 3 IM clients and a camera?
There were no models on the market without these?
Text messaging: used very frequently by me and my 30-something friends. Work and play.
Camera in a phone: IF they did a decent job, I would like to have this feature. They are moving toward decent.
Email/internet: if you have any actual *need* to check email (i.e. on call for something), then why would you not want to be able to do it from your phone? It used to be a pain to drag my laptop around, now I can check it from my mobile.
Why is Slashdot so surprisingly full of people who are extremely conservative about new technology, and unimaginative about possible uses of it?
That's because in the current market, the intersection between "simple" and stylish is a tiny market. Or: those who want a stylish phone mostly want all the features as well.
NOD32 seems to be the best Antivirus for geeks, IMHO.
Pretty good at finding viruses (the best if you listen to them, but hey, thats marketing), comparitively lightweight, and with lots of options that don't result in blaring alerts when you configure them in "unapproved" ways.
I found that NOD uses about 17MB of memory, compared to more than 60 for Norton's (home).
That's true if their cost structure is suited to such a market share.
If on the other hand they are an enormous, expensive bueuracracy with thousands of employees, suddenly shrinking the market share means drastic measures are needed to keep the company afloat.
Yes, this is how the sharemarket leads to the destruction of companies. Grow and grow until you can only do it by hurting your customers, then they all leave and the company implodes. The smart investors see it coming and take off with vast profits, while the unlucky ones see their money dissappear.