I'm glad to see that republicans have an ad hoc rule to fix things after the fact, but why don't Americans fix this and other problems at the source by switching to instant-runoff voting everywhere?
We'd love to. Unfortunately, a run-off system takes power away from the 2 parties that have power, so no politicians will support it. So despite what people want, or what's good for democracy, it will never happen.
Same thing with gerrymandering. It disrupts true democracy, but the powers-that-be don't care. They care about power more than they care about representing our people.
As somebody that's making an Atari 2600 game now for fun, I'd LOVE to have 256 bytes of ram to work with. The machine only has 128. It's painful and wonderful all at the same time.
A title screen wasn't anything new, all the games I made (early 80's TRS-80 color) had title screens as did most of everyone else's. Not sure why the 2600 didn't have them.
Mainly because of ROM space restraints. Putting in a nice title graphic could quickly use up your precious ROM space. More ROM space required more ROM chips, which, when the atari first game out, were somewhat expensive per-unit, so Atari made less profit off of each cartridge (and/or had to charge more). . Particularly if you got above the 4K limit, which meant you had to introduce extra circuitry in the cartridge to handle bank switching, which would raise the price further.
By later in the atari's life, these presumably became significantly cheaper, so more games had title screens.
What we really need is the ability to turn on and off specific permissions by app. Perhaps with the ability to limit internet permission to certain IPs/URLs per app. That would solve most of the problem.
This is the #1 reason why I install cyanogenmod on every phone I use. It lets you deny/approve individual permissions per app.
Java allowed developers to write programs with GUIs that ran on six different OSes. It has been almost two decades since this worked well, and I have yet to encounter a single Java program with a GUI that I want to use. In every case, a native application for the platform I am using is significantly better.
Many developers (including myself) would consider Jetbrains' IDEs to be some of the best development tools available today. They are written in java.
Just because you've encountered a lot of garbage, doesn't mean that it's all garbage.
<nerd-alert>According to The Padawan Menace, (a silly lego Star Wars TV special) Han went by the name Ian when he snuck into the Jedi Training facility on Coruscant as a child.</nerd-alert>
So you're saying that the customer demands cross-site scripting hell, where to look at a simple article I have to have fifteen different sites' javascript enabled, including probably half a dozen ad/tracking sites that have nothing to do with reading text on a screen?
Seriously, most of todays screens are so big that you can fit 2 pages side-by-side, which is a lot more convenient than one page at a time in portrait mode. Ditto for individual windows. Rotating them into portrait mode will cause neck strain as you have to tilt your head back to properly see the top.
Have you tried it? I have two 24" monitors, one portrait, one landscape. I use it for writing code, where having more vertical space is really helpful. My eyes are even with the center of the portrait monitor, and I don't get neck strain at all. Things on the very top and very bottom of the screen aren't quite as comfortable to look at, but general those are things that only require occasional glances (IDE menus, status bar, etc). Overall, I find it incredibly useful, and quite comfortable.
Sure, it may not be for everyone, but why state negative assumptions about something that you haven't tried?
GoogleTalk is deprecated and its XMPP federation is broken. Hangouts does not support XMPP, the protocol is proprietary. This is the reason I use neither, I stopped using GT when federation stopped working and I refuse to use Hangouts unless I can use my own client. I never stopped using IRC and it is the only IM service I use today.
I receive all my hangouts messages in pidgin using XMPP, so somehow it works.
(I'm not saying they have it all working correctly. I've never completely understood the mess that is voice/hangouts/google talk/etc. But I do know that when I get a hangouts message, it appears both on my phone and in pidgin via XMPP)
But there was another study where atheist couples are less likely to divorce (if they get married) than Christian - does this mean that Christian couples that don't go to church are most likely doomed?
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. While there can be valid reasons for Christians to not attend church, I'd guess that the vast majority of that class of people are folks who claim to have a faith, but either haven't really thought through if they REALLY believe what their faith suggests, or are just too lazy/uncommitted to actually take any sort of action based on their beliefs. Both of which would point towards character traits that could be detrimental to surviving the challenges associated with marriage.
Why, slashdot, why, do you let this guy post this nonsense? It almost makes me miss John Katz.
Ok, time for an off-topic side story. Feel free to mod me off-topic, but I can't resist.
My kids (6 years old) came home with a book list of books they were supposed to get from the library and read. One of them was about some Dogs from some farm. So my wife comes home with the book from the library. As I start reading it, I notice the author's name: John Katz. That can't be the same John Katz can it? Turns out, yes. John Katz, after moving on from posting drivel on slashdot, is now writing children's books. And my school district was making my children read them. There's no escape!
So I'm pretty sure, once slashdot finally gets the message that nobody here cares a lick about what Bennett Hassleton thinks, he'll turn up somewhere else equally miserable.
To any newbies that don't know how to do it, you can hide all of redelm's spam crap. Click his name, then click the little orb by his name, and make him a foe.
Then go the comments preferences page, scroll down, and set a -5 (or whatever) modifier to your foes. You won't have to see his crap again.
You jest, but that's a prety big deal in places like Thailand, which's a left-handed, but borders right-handed countries. How will an autonomous vehicle handle crossing the border?
Same fror French Guiana in South America.
If my cell phone can understand the intricacies of all the time zone rules of the world, I think we can manage for a computerized car to obey differing traffic laws.
On a similar note, I don't know that T-Mobile's music streaming policy is terribly unfair, since they're whitelisting all the major streaming music providers. If they made Pandora free while Slacker had to pay, that's not 'net neutral'. Since everyone who streams audio is included, it's a blurry area for net neutrality.
While I mostly agree with you, it's not all of them. Google Play Music (which is the music streaming service that I primarily use) isn't included. (That being said, I regularly go over my 500mb quota, and I've NEVER been penalized or noticeably throttled when I do. So I can't complain at all)
thats funny, because i went to their site and could not find any screenshots of this OS claiming to be very well designed. and then you tell me about the seashell picture, which they do not indicate will lead to a screenshot.
Believe me, it took me a long time to find that screenshot.
If their website's design is anything like their OS design, count me out. I'm not sure how that's supposed to be usable and elegant.
To see a sample screenshot of the desktop, I click on a tiny thumbnail of a seashell? Or a pink feathery-looking thing? Why are those icons the only way to see screenshots of the thing? And the majority of the text on the page is nothing more than flowery text explaining that it's open-source. Where's any actual description of what makes it different from other distributions?
Not that there's anything horribly wrong about all that, but for an OS that's supposed to be all about design, usability and elegance, their website looks like a fluff PR piece. It sure doesn't inspire me to want to try it.
(Although, to be honest, I'm happy that the main page of their project actually tells what the project is, instead a list of bullets about news items, which seems to be the case with most open-source projects)
You're not an outlier, but you did do exactly the right thing. You cancelled in person, instead of over the phone.
In my town, there's a perpetual 45-minute line of people at the comcast office. Even though the lady that works there is helpful and friendly, I'd rather talk to an idiot on the phone for 20 minutes than waste an hour or more driving to the office, waiting in line, and dealing with the issue in person.
Not really. They got away with it at no real cost. Chances are our "small Nevada hosting provider" was cooperating fully with Microsoft, and playing the victim card helps avoid bad press. Or it could be covering up a National Security Letter.
I don't know, the message from No-IP includes the statement: "While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected." This sounds an awful lot like code for "Microsoft paid us a metric crap-ton of money, but part of the agreement is that we wouldn't tell how much."
This is coming from the company that recently decided that Hangouts only works in their Chrome browser.
According to this help section on Google Hangout, this is not currently true.
You say this is a "recent" decision, so I may have missed it. Please give us a citation.
Looks like you're right. Although, today, when I tried to install it in firefox (version 29), I got this error message, which told me that I needed to download Chrome (it did NOT tell me that my browser was too old).
So I stand corrected, I apologize, but I do cast some of that blame onto their own error message.
Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...
I recently read an article (I wish I could find it again) that describes how and why Netflix does this. Basically, they train their viewers to watch for many certain qualities and attributes of movies, which are then tagged and categorized to set up their recommendation and category systems.
For example, they might use a few movies as a baseline for a ratings system so their viewer/ranker staff are on the same page ("on a scale of 1-10, how sweet and sappy is this movie? Does it have a strong female lead? Does it feature cute animals?"), then the viewers watch the film and fill out extensive and standardized tagging information about it, which they build their ratings from.
The article describes it in much better detail, but it's clear that the level of standardization and depth in their tagging and categorizing is beyond what you'd be able to get from the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad to see that republicans have an ad hoc rule to fix things after the fact, but why don't Americans fix this and other problems at the source by switching to instant-runoff voting everywhere?
We'd love to. Unfortunately, a run-off system takes power away from the 2 parties that have power, so no politicians will support it. So despite what people want, or what's good for democracy, it will never happen.
Same thing with gerrymandering. It disrupts true democracy, but the powers-that-be don't care. They care about power more than they care about representing our people.
only having 256bytes of ram for everything
As somebody that's making an Atari 2600 game now for fun, I'd LOVE to have 256 bytes of ram to work with. The machine only has 128. It's painful and wonderful all at the same time.
A title screen wasn't anything new, all the games I made (early 80's TRS-80 color) had title screens as did most of everyone else's. Not sure why the 2600 didn't have them.
Mainly because of ROM space restraints. Putting in a nice title graphic could quickly use up your precious ROM space. More ROM space required more ROM chips, which, when the atari first game out, were somewhat expensive per-unit, so Atari made less profit off of each cartridge (and/or had to charge more). . Particularly if you got above the 4K limit, which meant you had to introduce extra circuitry in the cartridge to handle bank switching, which would raise the price further.
By later in the atari's life, these presumably became significantly cheaper, so more games had title screens.
What we really need is the ability to turn on and off specific permissions by app. Perhaps with the ability to limit internet permission to certain IPs/URLs per app. That would solve most of the problem.
This is the #1 reason why I install cyanogenmod on every phone I use. It lets you deny/approve individual permissions per app.
Java allowed developers to write programs with GUIs that ran on six different OSes. It has been almost two decades since this worked well, and I have yet to encounter a single Java program with a GUI that I want to use. In every case, a native application for the platform I am using is significantly better.
Many developers (including myself) would consider Jetbrains' IDEs to be some of the best development tools available today. They are written in java.
Just because you've encountered a lot of garbage, doesn't mean that it's all garbage.
Han Solo's lesser known brother?
<nerd-alert>According to The Padawan Menace, (a silly lego Star Wars TV special) Han went by the name Ian when he snuck into the Jedi Training facility on Coruscant as a child.</nerd-alert>
Dang, if only I still had my mod points from yesterday. You would get all of them for that post.
So you're saying that the customer demands cross-site scripting hell, where to look at a simple article I have to have fifteen different sites' javascript enabled, including probably half a dozen ad/tracking sites that have nothing to do with reading text on a screen?
Yes.
Seriously, most of todays screens are so big that you can fit 2 pages side-by-side, which is a lot more convenient than one page at a time in portrait mode. Ditto for individual windows. Rotating them into portrait mode will cause neck strain as you have to tilt your head back to properly see the top.
Have you tried it? I have two 24" monitors, one portrait, one landscape. I use it for writing code, where having more vertical space is really helpful. My eyes are even with the center of the portrait monitor, and I don't get neck strain at all. Things on the very top and very bottom of the screen aren't quite as comfortable to look at, but general those are things that only require occasional glances (IDE menus, status bar, etc). Overall, I find it incredibly useful, and quite comfortable.
Sure, it may not be for everyone, but why state negative assumptions about something that you haven't tried?
GoogleTalk is deprecated and its XMPP federation is broken. Hangouts does not support XMPP, the protocol is proprietary. This is the reason I use neither, I stopped using GT when federation stopped working and I refuse to use Hangouts unless I can use my own client. I never stopped using IRC and it is the only IM service I use today.
I receive all my hangouts messages in pidgin using XMPP, so somehow it works.
(I'm not saying they have it all working correctly. I've never completely understood the mess that is voice/hangouts/google talk/etc. But I do know that when I get a hangouts message, it appears both on my phone and in pidgin via XMPP)
But there was another study where atheist couples are less likely to divorce (if they get married) than Christian - does this mean that Christian couples that don't go to church are most likely doomed?
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. While there can be valid reasons for Christians to not attend church, I'd guess that the vast majority of that class of people are folks who claim to have a faith, but either haven't really thought through if they REALLY believe what their faith suggests, or are just too lazy/uncommitted to actually take any sort of action based on their beliefs. Both of which would point towards character traits that could be detrimental to surviving the challenges associated with marriage.
The link to the actual article in the summary doesn't work. Does anybody have the right link?
Once again, proving just how much work is done by the "editors" around here.
Huh. It started working again. Nevermind.
The link to the actual article in the summary doesn't work. Does anybody have the right link?
Once again, proving just how much work is done by the "editors" around here.
Why, slashdot, why, do you let this guy post this nonsense? It almost makes me miss John Katz.
Ok, time for an off-topic side story. Feel free to mod me off-topic, but I can't resist.
My kids (6 years old) came home with a book list of books they were supposed to get from the library and read. One of them was about some Dogs from some farm. So my wife comes home with the book from the library. As I start reading it, I notice the author's name: John Katz. That can't be the same John Katz can it? Turns out, yes. John Katz, after moving on from posting drivel on slashdot, is now writing children's books. And my school district was making my children read them. There's no escape!
So I'm pretty sure, once slashdot finally gets the message that nobody here cares a lick about what Bennett Hassleton thinks, he'll turn up somewhere else equally miserable.
To any newbies that don't know how to do it, you can hide all of redelm's spam crap. Click his name, then click the little orb by his name, and make him a foe.
Then go the comments preferences page, scroll down, and set a -5 (or whatever) modifier to your foes. You won't have to see his crap again.
You jest, but that's a prety big deal in places like Thailand, which's a left-handed, but borders right-handed countries. How will an autonomous vehicle handle crossing the border?
Same fror French Guiana in South America.
If my cell phone can understand the intricacies of all the time zone rules of the world, I think we can manage for a computerized car to obey differing traffic laws.
On a similar note, I don't know that T-Mobile's music streaming policy is terribly unfair, since they're whitelisting all the major streaming music providers. If they made Pandora free while Slacker had to pay, that's not 'net neutral'. Since everyone who streams audio is included, it's a blurry area for net neutrality.
While I mostly agree with you, it's not all of them. Google Play Music (which is the music streaming service that I primarily use) isn't included. (That being said, I regularly go over my 500mb quota, and I've NEVER been penalized or noticeably throttled when I do. So I can't complain at all)
thats funny, because i went to their site and could not find any screenshots of this OS claiming to be very well designed. and then you tell me about the seashell picture, which they do not indicate will lead to a screenshot.
Believe me, it took me a long time to find that screenshot.
If their website's design is anything like their OS design, count me out. I'm not sure how that's supposed to be usable and elegant.
To see a sample screenshot of the desktop, I click on a tiny thumbnail of a seashell? Or a pink feathery-looking thing? Why are those icons the only way to see screenshots of the thing? And the majority of the text on the page is nothing more than flowery text explaining that it's open-source. Where's any actual description of what makes it different from other distributions?
Not that there's anything horribly wrong about all that, but for an OS that's supposed to be all about design, usability and elegance, their website looks like a fluff PR piece. It sure doesn't inspire me to want to try it.
(Although, to be honest, I'm happy that the main page of their project actually tells what the project is, instead a list of bullets about news items, which seems to be the case with most open-source projects)
You're not an outlier, but you did do exactly the right thing. You cancelled in person, instead of over the phone.
In my town, there's a perpetual 45-minute line of people at the comcast office. Even though the lady that works there is helpful and friendly, I'd rather talk to an idiot on the phone for 20 minutes than waste an hour or more driving to the office, waiting in line, and dealing with the issue in person.
Is the line shorter in other towns?
Not really. They got away with it at no real cost. Chances are our "small Nevada hosting provider" was cooperating fully with Microsoft, and playing the victim card helps avoid bad press. Or it could be covering up a National Security Letter.
I don't know, the message from No-IP includes the statement: "While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected." This sounds an awful lot like code for "Microsoft paid us a metric crap-ton of money, but part of the agreement is that we wouldn't tell how much."
Hangouts (and by extension the Helpouts service since it uses Hangouts) works just fine in FireFox.
Source: I'm a Helpouts service provider. I use FF, not Chrome.
See my statement above. I apologize for spreading false information, but I DID get that false information from an error message on Google's web page.
This is coming from the company that recently decided that Hangouts only works in their Chrome browser.
According to this help section on Google Hangout, this is not currently true.
You say this is a "recent" decision, so I may have missed it. Please give us a citation.
Looks like you're right. Although, today, when I tried to install it in firefox (version 29), I got this error message, which told me that I needed to download Chrome (it did NOT tell me that my browser was too old).
So I stand corrected, I apologize, but I do cast some of that blame onto their own error message.
This is coming from the company that recently decided that Hangouts only works in their Chrome browser.
Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...
I recently read an article (I wish I could find it again) that describes how and why Netflix does this. Basically, they train their viewers to watch for many certain qualities and attributes of movies, which are then tagged and categorized to set up their recommendation and category systems.
For example, they might use a few movies as a baseline for a ratings system so their viewer/ranker staff are on the same page ("on a scale of 1-10, how sweet and sappy is this movie? Does it have a strong female lead? Does it feature cute animals?"), then the viewers watch the film and fill out extensive and standardized tagging information about it, which they build their ratings from.
The article describes it in much better detail, but it's clear that the level of standardization and depth in their tagging and categorizing is beyond what you'd be able to get from the general public.