TV stations still have a very valuable asset--that chunk of the EM that says "we can reach X-thousand people who have $40 worth of ICs". They'll have to re-tool their game plan to take advantage of it. Local news and local advertising is still a big winner. You can't beat catching up on local events in 30 minutes with a video iPod. Churches, schools, city/county events can all be televised live, and still leave time for syndicated programming for those without video iPods or TiVos.
The local TV affiliate that starts a REAL educational show--not this happy horseshit Teletubby crap--with guest lecturers and subjects geared towards adults (who have MONEY, duh), will make a killing.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
I think the sync problems with Outlook were pretty bad, and probably more important than the developer tools.
Palm, IMO, missed the boat entirely. When presented with users that wanted to sync to Outlook, and who'd abandon them in a moment for a MS-branded solution, and users who are known for their fanatical devotion, they went for the Outlook users. Palm could re-invent itself as a Mac-hero by un-fucking the problems with iSync. They've chased a rabbit down the hole to be the premiere handheld, but they just don't have the oomph to go head-to-head with MS.
Yet if I visit Jacksonville, Housten, Atlanta (hell just about anywhere in the south) I HAVE to rent a car, public transit is poor or non-existant. Yet they wonder why they have smog issues, and traffic congestion?
The South does not have a long history of large cities. All the big cities in the South are relatively recent, most of them came about post-automobile. You can't plan a big city with a massive public transportation system, because you cannot count on the city to be contained. New York has limits--Manhattan's on an island. But Atlanta? You just build out. Now your carefully planned and executed public transportation plan fails to take into account massive suburban development, and people are driving cars again.
Public boards move slowly. Very, very slowly. In order to have a mass transit system in a modern US city, you have to take the public part out of it and allow private companies to provide services where they are profitable.
As for expensive oil prices, well... accounting for inflation, gas prices aren't that bad. And gas is still a highly efficient carrier of energy. If gas prices really become a problem, people will be making moves to change their habits.
This is what you will get when you have public transportation. If the government is involved in providing a good or service, and if the good or service is threatened, the government is the one that has to solve the problem.
This will entail the intrusion of the government on your civil liberties in one form or another.
Now, if you're willing to completely exonerate the government from wrongdoing--say by passing a law that says the government can't be held legally responsible for incidents or accidents that happen under its purview--then you can have your civil liberties. You may also have a bomb on your bus, but it's worth it to avoid the occasional nerd getting hassled by the cops, right?
Light mode, while looking different than the old version, isn't that bad for me on Firefox 1.0.6 on Windows. The "post comments" page isn't as good as it used to be, but it's not total ass.
All in all, it will suit me just fine until a better stylesheet is offered.
(When I came on to Slashdot today, I thought something bad had happened at first. Glad to see it's actually just progress.)
You and I both hope for a utopia, but realistically, is it even possible?
I recall a time when this was largely true, back in the late 70s and early 80s. Remember when rap wasn't about "poppin' caps" and "hoes", and "rebellious" rock songs were about smoking in the boy's room? Yeah, good times.
My parents recall a time even earlier that was better than that. Some parts of that time were pretty rough on people with non-white skin, but even they were moving forward regardless of discrimination. Incomes were rising, education was rising, homes had a mom and a dad.
Maybe destroying the phone would get stern looks from a judge, but otherwise, there was no assault.
If society adopts a set of norms, such as public politeness and respect for each other, and the majority of the public enforces it, you eliminate at least half of the need for intrusive government, both legislative and judicial.
Multiculturalism is stupid. I like a monoculture based on not being a shithead. I hope that cell-yakking teen dies in a car fire.
Since this is Slashdot, I will couch the example in terms Slashdotters can understand:
You have a nerd. He's smart. He wants to do what he wants to do, and what he wants to do is almost never go through the bug-list and fix bugs. He wants to do new and clever things which may or may not be of any value to anybody but the nerd.
You have a boss. He berates and exploits the nerd to get him to do his fucking job, which is maintaining and supporting the application he wrote which has a bug-list as long as his arm.
If you don't want to work in a structured corporate environment where you have a boss, and maybe a boss's boss, then quit and start your own business. Except if you do, I should warn you that you'll soon start to understand where your boss was coming from as you discover than people are, by and large, lazy and ungrateful shits.
In the microcosm of business, you need slaves and you need taskmasters. Being a slave sucks, and the taskmasters are sucky, but the cotton isn't going to pick itself.
Now do you see why we need to pay some attention to this!
Not really. Assuming the people with an agenda are absolutely correct that there is global warming. How is this bad for humanity? By all standards, we're living longer and better now than when it was colder. So where's the problem?
I'm sure that plenty scary scenarios can be spun out of moonbeams, but the actual statistical trend is that warmer == better living conditions for Man.
(Species extinction is not a problem. Species die out all the time. So long as the species is not Man, I fail to see the problem.)
And so you vote for the party *most* commited to them?!?
What do you mean by this? If you mean "pork", then "a plague on both their houses" is more accurate. If you mean transfer of capital from one group to another through direct payments by the government, then the Republicans are not the worst perpetrators here. If you mean "tax cuts", you need economic re-education, as a tax cut is not an entitlement.
Seems to me it's just plain-old crummy teaching, not a social sea-change towards anti-intellectualism.
We've systematically turned our public school system into a group-think factory, where decisions are made for political reasons and not for educational reasons. Is it any wonder that people turn to the "softer" sciences like sociology, law or (to complete the vicious cycle) education?
The next round of Feynman-like super-scientists will probably depend heavily on the ranks of the home-schooled.
As I understand him, putting all your eggs in the database basket limits you to the speed of your database server.
This is, of course, pure bunk because Google does exactly this and Google scales well. Difference is the money available to you, Web programmer, and Google, Web moneybags. It's bunkum, but very wise bunkum nonetheless, unless you have a billionaire uncle who signs documents without reading them.
The workaround for the limits of your database is, Adam claims, to share your data in RSS/Atom feeds where it can be cached by other servers, RSS readers, etc., freeing your server to serve your expected and accounted-for load.
It's very easy to set up and use. It's very MySQL specific--if you want to use PostgreSQL, you'll spend some time removing MySQL-specific DB calls both from the core and from contributed modules. In order to work around the fundamental brokenness of older MySQL installations, Drupal does things itself that normally you would rely on the database to do for you. Foreign keys, for example. Sometimes the contributors do stupid things. One of the basic modules, search, requires a particularly up-to-date version of PHP (and/or upgraded versions of the preg library) in order to run without errors. This was a bad decision that should never have been allowed. I simply commented out that part of the search module and carried on.
In operation, it's fast. It has a lot of modules, and writing new ones is pretty easy. Although it does not look like an OO system, the way it's been constructed it acts like one. Object-orientation built out of function calls, will wonders never cease. The contributed modules are of varying quality. It's non-trivial to wade into them looking to fix things unless you're conversant with Drupal-specific functions. The workflow of how modules work is sane. They have by default a "verification" phase for submitting forms.
It tends towards the "two- or three-column Web layout that everybody uses", with a main body and one or two sidebars. I hate, hate, hate this look, but everybody expects it. Pah! Savages.
I've found that unsophisticated users can use the Web forms to create content well enough. Even very unsophisticated users can manage the content on their site. In order to allow this, however, you'll spend a lot of time in the admin pages making tweaks and changing settings.
Multiple theme options. It doesn't lend itself well to "this page looks like this, but this page is completely different", but it can be done.
As a CMS, it's not the most sophisticated, but it meets 90% of what even sophisticated users need. You can even use it to manage documents and suchlike, if not perfectly. The image-handling functions are painfully Web-application-like. It's not iPhoto.
I run several Drupal-backed sites, and to admin them is pretty simple. Often I find myself frustrated with Drupal for some simple thing that it won't let me do without writing a new module, but in calmer times I remember where I'd be if I had built the site from scratch--still writing code, not getting paid to admin a functioning site. That said, using the default admin sidebar, you'll spend half your life drilling down through stupid link-trees to get to frequently used commands. You will save yourself much trouble by creating a custom menu, or a custom page accessible only to the administrative users with common links and tasks.
I don't understand the point--so white males make up the overwhelming majority of CEOs in the West. What of it? A majority of the shitholes in Africa are run by black men. What of that? A majority of the CEOs were raised by women. What of that?
Why bring race or sex into it at all? Unless you have ulterior motives, there is none.
When some Washington blowhard suggests that "cracking" tools be banned, Slashdot gets positively wet with demands that the Government prosecute illegal actions, not possession of tools to be used in illegal ways. How is being in posession of white skin and a dick any different?
BTW, nice job trying to tapdance out of bigotry by suggesting otherwise.
You can say she's a moderate. You can also say that she's a confuser. That is just as accurate. Decisions like the recent Ten Commandments one, where they say "this is okay, this is not" only serve to confuse the issue, requiring that every subsequent case be brought all the way to the Supreme Court.
There is no clear guidance from a "moderate". I don't like Ginsburg's decicions, for instance, but at least I know where she stands.
This is why I didn't go Amiga in 199-mumble, even though I was interested in video. I would read magazines--Amiga magazines--and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell the computer was all about. Chip RAM? Fast RAM? Frobnizes and gribblefrunks, and if you got an A500, you had to use left-handed Torx drivers to spaz your bortz, but an A1200 was totally different.
It was totally indecipherable. And in order to make it Really Work, you had to take a soldering gun to it. That's fine I guess, but contrary to a lot of Slashdotters' beliefs, it's not that much fun to go after your $2000 toy with heavy machinery and end up with a paperweight because you're all thumbs.
The ads in Amiga mags were hilarious, too. Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install.
Man, the Duos were among the best laptops ever built. I don't understand why the Duo/dock situation has never caught on again. Especially now with so many folks road-warrioring it with laptops.
A "very thing majority" is like being "a little pregnant". If you're basing this on the last Presidential election, remember that GWB was under all-out assault by the Left, and still managed a majority win. Even Bill Clinton couldn't manage that.
Regardless, telling even 50.000001% of your potential fanbase that they are fools and retards is a poor decision. This was what the Left never grasped in the last election. "Either vote for us, or be a dumbfuck" is not a winning strategy.
I agree with your other points. Wesley complained about Laura Ingraham's book "Shut up and Sing", but that was the point she was making. Don't harrangue us at your concerts, just sing.
Well, assuming your scenario is correct--which I understand is up to quite a lot of debate--is the answer to emissions control to punish the country that is also the most likely to develop an alternative? Say we continue our SUV lifestyle, and an American company develops the emission-free engine. Suddenly we go from spewing stuff out our pipes to spewing nothing.
Isn't that better than simply cutting emissions in order to Do Something Before We All Die?
Let's not forget something, too. The same people who complain about global warming emissions are the same folks who have prevented new nuclear power stations from being built in this country. We have emission-free energy available, but we're not allowed to use it.
There is a close collaboration between pro-environment and anti-capitalist advocates. Often, once you accept one, you end up by default accepting the other. Yet the best hope for a cleaner environment is to allow the market to work, within reasonable bounds.
I think the problem people have with celebrity politics is not that they speak their mind, it's that they tend to whine when speaking their mind gets them in trouble with their fans. If you come out for or against some issue, and you get a boatload of ire from fans, running to hide behind the First Amendment is both ridiculous and childish. Sure, you have the right to voice your opinions. We have a right to voice opinions back, and even enact voluntary boycotts of your products. If you're okay with that, fine. If you're not okay with it, rather than whine about it, next time keep your mouth shut. Being a celebrity is just like any other job, and a celebrity's job is to be liked (failing that, at least recognized), and being liked means not accusing half the country for being retarded for voting for the other guy.
It doesn't help that celebrities tend to be left or far-left in their politics, which is at odds with a majority of Americans. There's a whole lot of middle class folks thinking, "Sure, it's easy for them to advocate higher taxes and more spending--they have the money to pay for it. I'd rather buy a bass boat next year than see some avant-garde artist display a piece mocking the middle-class America that subsidized his show."
It's the same difference between "second-hand smoke can kill you" and "a mugger with a gun can kill you". One is true, maybe, kinda, if you're predisposed, and if you hang out in a lot of smokey bars; the other is true, more immediate, and concrete steps can be taken to prevent it with results noticable almost immediately.
So, for second-hand smoke, you avoid going to bars and maybe ask people to step outside to smoke, and for the mugger you carry a gun and shoot him in the face. Maybe second-hand smoke is a bunch of hooey, but so long as the choices made are voluntary, I have no problem. Maybe the mugger was just trying to steal money from you to buy bread for his family, but that kind of behavior is not acceptable in a civilized society, so neither do I have a problem with his head ventilated.
They might have such devices, but it's not so that generals in remote locations can direct a battle. The Army spends a lot of time and money training their soldiers and officers to be independent thinkers and to react intelligently to new situations, but grounded on solid foundations of tactics and mission objectives. Directing blips on a screen is more likely to be harmful than useful. There's a lot that simple locations cannot tell you about what's going on on the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
The local TV affiliate that starts a REAL educational show--not this happy horseshit Teletubby crap--with guest lecturers and subjects geared towards adults (who have MONEY, duh), will make a killing.
Palm, IMO, missed the boat entirely. When presented with users that wanted to sync to Outlook, and who'd abandon them in a moment for a MS-branded solution, and users who are known for their fanatical devotion, they went for the Outlook users. Palm could re-invent itself as a Mac-hero by un-fucking the problems with iSync. They've chased a rabbit down the hole to be the premiere handheld, but they just don't have the oomph to go head-to-head with MS.
The South does not have a long history of large cities. All the big cities in the South are relatively recent, most of them came about post-automobile. You can't plan a big city with a massive public transportation system, because you cannot count on the city to be contained. New York has limits--Manhattan's on an island. But Atlanta? You just build out. Now your carefully planned and executed public transportation plan fails to take into account massive suburban development, and people are driving cars again.
Public boards move slowly. Very, very slowly. In order to have a mass transit system in a modern US city, you have to take the public part out of it and allow private companies to provide services where they are profitable.
As for expensive oil prices, well... accounting for inflation, gas prices aren't that bad. And gas is still a highly efficient carrier of energy. If gas prices really become a problem, people will be making moves to change their habits.
This will entail the intrusion of the government on your civil liberties in one form or another.
Now, if you're willing to completely exonerate the government from wrongdoing--say by passing a law that says the government can't be held legally responsible for incidents or accidents that happen under its purview--then you can have your civil liberties. You may also have a bomb on your bus, but it's worth it to avoid the occasional nerd getting hassled by the cops, right?
All in all, it will suit me just fine until a better stylesheet is offered.
(When I came on to Slashdot today, I thought something bad had happened at first. Glad to see it's actually just progress.)
I recall a time when this was largely true, back in the late 70s and early 80s. Remember when rap wasn't about "poppin' caps" and "hoes", and "rebellious" rock songs were about smoking in the boy's room? Yeah, good times.
My parents recall a time even earlier that was better than that. Some parts of that time were pretty rough on people with non-white skin, but even they were moving forward regardless of discrimination. Incomes were rising, education was rising, homes had a mom and a dad.
Then the hippies came and turned it all to shit.
All movie theaters were built for a previous evolutionary cycle of humans when we all sported a single arm, to judge by the Marxism-inspired armrests.
If society adopts a set of norms, such as public politeness and respect for each other, and the majority of the public enforces it, you eliminate at least half of the need for intrusive government, both legislative and judicial.
Multiculturalism is stupid. I like a monoculture based on not being a shithead. I hope that cell-yakking teen dies in a car fire.
Bravo!
You have a nerd. He's smart. He wants to do what he wants to do, and what he wants to do is almost never go through the bug-list and fix bugs. He wants to do new and clever things which may or may not be of any value to anybody but the nerd.
You have a boss. He berates and exploits the nerd to get him to do his fucking job, which is maintaining and supporting the application he wrote which has a bug-list as long as his arm.
If you don't want to work in a structured corporate environment where you have a boss, and maybe a boss's boss, then quit and start your own business. Except if you do, I should warn you that you'll soon start to understand where your boss was coming from as you discover than people are, by and large, lazy and ungrateful shits.
In the microcosm of business, you need slaves and you need taskmasters. Being a slave sucks, and the taskmasters are sucky, but the cotton isn't going to pick itself.
Not really. Assuming the people with an agenda are absolutely correct that there is global warming. How is this bad for humanity? By all standards, we're living longer and better now than when it was colder. So where's the problem?
I'm sure that plenty scary scenarios can be spun out of moonbeams, but the actual statistical trend is that warmer == better living conditions for Man.
(Species extinction is not a problem. Species die out all the time. So long as the species is not Man, I fail to see the problem.)
We've systematically turned our public school system into a group-think factory, where decisions are made for political reasons and not for educational reasons. Is it any wonder that people turn to the "softer" sciences like sociology, law or (to complete the vicious cycle) education?
The next round of Feynman-like super-scientists will probably depend heavily on the ranks of the home-schooled.
This is, of course, pure bunk because Google does exactly this and Google scales well. Difference is the money available to you, Web programmer, and Google, Web moneybags. It's bunkum, but very wise bunkum nonetheless, unless you have a billionaire uncle who signs documents without reading them.
The workaround for the limits of your database is, Adam claims, to share your data in RSS/Atom feeds where it can be cached by other servers, RSS readers, etc., freeing your server to serve your expected and accounted-for load.
RSS/Atom is a product. I can see immediately that it is, or is not for me. The SW is just ideas. Good ideas, but nothing in the sack.
In operation, it's fast. It has a lot of modules, and writing new ones is pretty easy. Although it does not look like an OO system, the way it's been constructed it acts like one. Object-orientation built out of function calls, will wonders never cease. The contributed modules are of varying quality. It's non-trivial to wade into them looking to fix things unless you're conversant with Drupal-specific functions. The workflow of how modules work is sane. They have by default a "verification" phase for submitting forms.
It tends towards the "two- or three-column Web layout that everybody uses", with a main body and one or two sidebars. I hate, hate, hate this look, but everybody expects it. Pah! Savages.
I've found that unsophisticated users can use the Web forms to create content well enough. Even very unsophisticated users can manage the content on their site. In order to allow this, however, you'll spend a lot of time in the admin pages making tweaks and changing settings.
Multiple theme options. It doesn't lend itself well to "this page looks like this, but this page is completely different", but it can be done.
As a CMS, it's not the most sophisticated, but it meets 90% of what even sophisticated users need. You can even use it to manage documents and suchlike, if not perfectly. The image-handling functions are painfully Web-application-like. It's not iPhoto.
I run several Drupal-backed sites, and to admin them is pretty simple. Often I find myself frustrated with Drupal for some simple thing that it won't let me do without writing a new module, but in calmer times I remember where I'd be if I had built the site from scratch--still writing code, not getting paid to admin a functioning site. That said, using the default admin sidebar, you'll spend half your life drilling down through stupid link-trees to get to frequently used commands. You will save yourself much trouble by creating a custom menu, or a custom page accessible only to the administrative users with common links and tasks.
Why bring race or sex into it at all? Unless you have ulterior motives, there is none.
When some Washington blowhard suggests that "cracking" tools be banned, Slashdot gets positively wet with demands that the Government prosecute illegal actions, not possession of tools to be used in illegal ways. How is being in posession of white skin and a dick any different?
BTW, nice job trying to tapdance out of bigotry by suggesting otherwise.
There is no clear guidance from a "moderate". I don't like Ginsburg's decicions, for instance, but at least I know where she stands.
It was totally indecipherable. And in order to make it Really Work, you had to take a soldering gun to it. That's fine I guess, but contrary to a lot of Slashdotters' beliefs, it's not that much fun to go after your $2000 toy with heavy machinery and end up with a paperweight because you're all thumbs.
The ads in Amiga mags were hilarious, too. Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install.
Man, the Duos were among the best laptops ever built. I don't understand why the Duo/dock situation has never caught on again. Especially now with so many folks road-warrioring it with laptops.
Regardless, telling even 50.000001% of your potential fanbase that they are fools and retards is a poor decision. This was what the Left never grasped in the last election. "Either vote for us, or be a dumbfuck" is not a winning strategy.
I agree with your other points. Wesley complained about Laura Ingraham's book "Shut up and Sing", but that was the point she was making. Don't harrangue us at your concerts, just sing.
Isn't that better than simply cutting emissions in order to Do Something Before We All Die?
Let's not forget something, too. The same people who complain about global warming emissions are the same folks who have prevented new nuclear power stations from being built in this country. We have emission-free energy available, but we're not allowed to use it.
There is a close collaboration between pro-environment and anti-capitalist advocates. Often, once you accept one, you end up by default accepting the other. Yet the best hope for a cleaner environment is to allow the market to work, within reasonable bounds.
I think the problem people have with celebrity politics is not that they speak their mind, it's that they tend to whine when speaking their mind gets them in trouble with their fans. If you come out for or against some issue, and you get a boatload of ire from fans, running to hide behind the First Amendment is both ridiculous and childish. Sure, you have the right to voice your opinions. We have a right to voice opinions back, and even enact voluntary boycotts of your products. If you're okay with that, fine. If you're not okay with it, rather than whine about it, next time keep your mouth shut. Being a celebrity is just like any other job, and a celebrity's job is to be liked (failing that, at least recognized), and being liked means not accusing half the country for being retarded for voting for the other guy.
It doesn't help that celebrities tend to be left or far-left in their politics, which is at odds with a majority of Americans. There's a whole lot of middle class folks thinking, "Sure, it's easy for them to advocate higher taxes and more spending--they have the money to pay for it. I'd rather buy a bass boat next year than see some avant-garde artist display a piece mocking the middle-class America that subsidized his show."
So, for second-hand smoke, you avoid going to bars and maybe ask people to step outside to smoke, and for the mugger you carry a gun and shoot him in the face. Maybe second-hand smoke is a bunch of hooey, but so long as the choices made are voluntary, I have no problem. Maybe the mugger was just trying to steal money from you to buy bread for his family, but that kind of behavior is not acceptable in a civilized society, so neither do I have a problem with his head ventilated.
They might have such devices, but it's not so that generals in remote locations can direct a battle. The Army spends a lot of time and money training their soldiers and officers to be independent thinkers and to react intelligently to new situations, but grounded on solid foundations of tactics and mission objectives. Directing blips on a screen is more likely to be harmful than useful. There's a lot that simple locations cannot tell you about what's going on on the ground.