Ah, but Gecko is just the renderer, eh? It doesn't actually rely on any widget set; in fact, it doesn't even have to have a presentation layer at all! The neet for QT depends on what you put Gecko into, like Pheonix or Galeon.
I have to question the actual feasability of Mozilla on a handheld.. well, current handhelds. Mozilla, while powerfull and efficient, is also monsterously huge in comparison to the miniscume persistant storage of handhelds and their small execution space.
I''m sad to say that I think a 32 meg Zaurus couldn't run Mozilla well.. at least, not *stock* Mozilla.
Silent remove popups, my good chum, and you silently lose your advertisers. And as the advertisers go, so does the project.
This is the inherent problem with Free-as-in-Beer projects -- how the heck do you pay for them? After all, even if you work for free, bandwidth still costs money at the very least. Ideals are one thing, and to be respected, but so is the drive to eat and pay the rent.
Popups do suck, and I do hate 'em, but you hafta understand that for a lot of people they are one of the only game in town to finance our little ideas. Advertising execs may not understand that POPUPS DO NOT WORK, but that doesn't stop them from shelling out untold millions on them.
However, there is the concept of a happy media. On my multi-million-hits-a-month site (non-linkage intentional), the idea is simple -- I only get paid for for each IP unique view once every 24 hours. My solution? Only show that IP an ad once every 24 hours. Yes, that means that the users have to close a popup the first time they visit me a day, but it also means that they only have to close that popup once a day. Not a perfect solution, but I haven't yet found a better alternative yet (except for these textads things, they seem to be picking up as of late)
More than that, if we get to the point of non-agregate releases (e.g. not requiring whole albums to be released at a time), it can free up artists from having to come up with 4 extra tracks of "filler" to pad out the rest of the 74 minutes.
I was watchin' something on PBS last night about the Vatican Archives and the rush to get them all digitized and such before time destroys them and one of the things they covered was that there is no prejudice given -- all will be preserved regardless of content, starting with those on greatest disrepair.. Stuff like the original letter sent by a certain English King demanding a divorce and the the official records of the trial of Galileo, stuff that doesn't shine to brightly on them now.
Ah, I could've been wrong - I haven't followed fotobilder dev for quite a while and I know in the early early days a pure database version was on the table but it makes sense, with the amount of images it's designed to store, that it uses the file system for the actually binary data.
I'm running a moderately large site that deals heavily with images and at first I thought it would be great store all the images in the database along with the incidentals. Happily I had pause for thought because the site went big and decided to go with file system storage for the images instead, and I'm glad I did:
* Size: I didn't anticipate the user would upload 5 gig of images * Access: You need some sort of extraneous code to pull those images from the database * Communication: your code must know how to fake being a proper image (right headers, creation/change times, etc) * Size 2: A lot of databases can't store high-res images (read: large images) in a database without serious penalties (like chopping them up into little bits to fit into a MySQL bigblob)
Speed can be addressed in the perl world via FastCGI or Mod_perl and similar ways on other platforms, but you'll still have to do disk reads to get the data and you'll pay a price for having one more often used script in memory.
Storage size can be counteracted with clever tricks or "professional grade" (read: expensive) DB Engines like Oracle and DB2 which have binary data storage as one of their features, but you'll need to pay money and have a big muscly machine to run 'em.
For my money, 90% image serving can and should be done from filesystem because that's what web servers are made for. The other 10% are weird meta things like this that could use the file system but are designed to use database.
My big thing is using your head and ask yourself what will be easier in the long run? Sure, binary data slung around with Perl DBI sounds convenient, but how conevneint is it to run "ismcheck" on a 100 GB database, eh?
While Paypal can, indeed, be fucked up the donkey ass, you need to be fair: that charge is being levied by the credit card companies themselves, as a friend of mind who uses CCBill for his adult site got a notice outlining the same payment schecdule.
On a completely runrelated note, Myriad just completed constrution of its new 200,000 sq/ft palace^H^H^H^H office complex in the University of Utah Research park.
The Janitor^H^H^H^H^H A spokesperson for Myriad says that even though the entire complex was paid for with tidy suitcases of unmarked hundreds, that this has nothing to do with their Gene patents.
P.S.: Yes, Myriad did just complete their new complex, it's the corner of Wakara way and Collins Road near the Evans & Southerland R&D Facility.
Okay. make a gasoline engine produce usable power without revving it, I dare you.
What you said was also true about effiency, but the simple fact is electic motors can turn slower while still having torque whereas IC engines must spin faster.
Just an FYI, in case anyone is interested; the vast majority of commerical locomotives in the USA are already, in fact, electric, and have been since the 1950's. The diesel engines are there, sure, but they are there to generate power to turn electric motors.
This is because electric motors have many degrees more torque at low speeds than any comparable internal combustion engine.
While you may understandably think that a cheaper feature-for-feature iPod competitor would cause apple to drop the price on the iPod to match, there is reason this won't happen.
It's a common misconception that Apple in the business of selling hardware and software, much like people think that Nike sells shoes.
But Nike does not sell shoes and Apple does not sell computers. They are first and foremost Image companies, selling themselves -- they are their product. This is not a commant on quality, speed or anything of the sort, but it is on price. When you buy and iPod, you are first anf foremost paying for the the fact that is not simply a hard drive, decoder and DAC, but that it's a work of art put together by skilled Apple designers.
This is why Apple won't bother to match prices, because they don't need to. Though brand names may be little more than stories we tell each other, they are more than enough to justify a higher cost on an equal product. If the iPod does the same but looks better and has a better backstory, people will have little trouble justifying the extra cost.
Better than metatags, IMO, is Googlebombing -- i.e. making a bunch of sites point to yours.
I actually managed to pull off a wholey unplanned yet quite effective googlebomb in the last few months. A side project of mine, Quizilla, has ome feature where it give you HTML coede to past into your weblog. Well, since Quizilla is a free service , I put an advetising string in that HTML, "brought to you by Quizilla", with a link to the site.
Well, through some circumstances that got really popular really quick and people were pasting a lot og this HTML into their pages.. and what happened when Google indexed all those pages?
Instant Googlebomb.
I'm kinda sad I wasn't selling anything, or else I'd be rich.
This annoys me for one key reason: I am a programmer, not a designer.
Now, if I want to make any web-interface code I have to write 500 lbs of html code just to make my HTML pages look decent instead of just being able to use a couple of nice <font> and <b> tags.
I don't want have to write a style sheet just to make project pages look good, thank you very much.
Isn't this what the sun Blade line was supposed to be, albeit with Solaris?
Considering that Sun won't be able to make a profit at below, say, $600 (sans display), I'm not sure how may people would see the benefit of saving a little money over a better design. While I am a great Linux fan, I still think that commercial unixes off benefits that Linux and other Free OSes don't have -- not the least of which is a large corporate support base.
Of course, I am talking from a Unix developers point of view, and it's very possible that Sun wants to position these new ones toward secretaries and the like. However, as a developer I'd rather bay a little extra money and get an authentic Unix machine if I had the chance.
Of course, even a fake unix machine in out of my financial grasp right now *sheepish grin*
I've used P2E a few times and I'm actually pretty happy with it save a few issues:
1. Don't run the executables off a CD-ROM drive. They will run slow as dirt unless they are loaded from some sort fo fast media, faster than CD.
2. You may have to declare ("use" or "require") stuff you wouldn't have to normally. A good example is "Storable" that is used by some modules -- you may have to explicitly declare that in your code to get it to "compile" right. The program will actually tell you what you need, though (usually).
Many of us who have only skimed the surface of "the scene" but have no real connection to it -- this would include the majority of people -- often have have the belief that Courier Groups, et al, are generally one rung up the ladder from clubs in treehouses and that they are little more than bunches of hyperactive teens who want to be part of something.
Yet, while you were in DoD, you were a Sysadmin and in most respects a professional, skilled, mature, and above all appeared to be a responsible person which lends come creadance to the idea that these groups (or at least the "older ones") are not the inept preteens they may appear to be.
We've all read the.nfo files that say who in the group is in charge and who does what -- my question is: are the organizations really that structured and organized as all of this literature would have us believe? Are they more than just clubs run by Middle school students?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but Gecko is just the renderer, eh? It doesn't actually rely on any widget set; in fact, it doesn't even have to have a presentation layer at all! The neet for QT depends on what you put Gecko into, like Pheonix or Galeon.
I have to question the actual feasability of Mozilla on a handheld.. well, current handhelds. Mozilla, while powerfull and efficient, is also monsterously huge in comparison to the miniscume persistant storage of handhelds and their small execution space.
I''m sad to say that I think a 32 meg Zaurus couldn't run Mozilla well.. at least, not *stock* Mozilla.
Silent remove popups, my good chum, and you silently lose your advertisers. And as the advertisers go, so does the project.
This is the inherent problem with Free-as-in-Beer projects -- how the heck do you pay for them? After all, even if you work for free, bandwidth still costs money at the very least. Ideals are one thing, and to be respected, but so is the drive to eat and pay the rent.
Popups do suck, and I do hate 'em, but you hafta understand that for a lot of people they are one of the only game in town to finance our little ideas. Advertising execs may not understand that POPUPS DO NOT WORK, but that doesn't stop them from shelling out untold millions on them.
However, there is the concept of a happy media. On my multi-million-hits-a-month site (non-linkage intentional), the idea is simple -- I only get paid for for each IP unique view once every 24 hours. My solution? Only show that IP an ad once every 24 hours. Yes, that means that the users have to close a popup the first time they visit me a day, but it also means that they only have to close that popup once a day. Not a perfect solution, but I haven't yet found a better alternative yet (except for these textads things, they seem to be picking up as of late)
The problem is, of course, getting the initial crop of well-funded advertisers to tide you over the first few tenuous months.
Look at our equation: (unproven concept + unknown artists + little initial exposure = few listeners) = few advertisers.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that it'd be hard.
More than that, if we get to the point of non-agregate releases (e.g. not requiring whole albums to be released at a time), it can free up artists from having to come up with 4 extra tracks of "filler" to pad out the rest of the 74 minutes.
Somebody must be hoarding all the IPs
Yes, they are.
I was watchin' something on PBS last night about the Vatican Archives and the rush to get them all digitized and such before time destroys them and one of the things they covered was that there is no prejudice given -- all will be preserved regardless of content, starting with those on greatest disrepair.. Stuff like the original letter sent by a certain English King demanding a divorce and the the official records of the trial of Galileo, stuff that doesn't shine to brightly on them now.
Ahem.. you assume I can AFFORD Oracle! I had to sell a kidney to buy winter tires for my car this year!
Ah, I could've been wrong - I haven't followed fotobilder dev for quite a while and I know in the early early days a pure database version was on the table but it makes sense, with the amount of images it's designed to store, that it uses the file system for the actually binary data.
I'm running a moderately large site that deals heavily with images and at first I thought it would be great store all the images in the database along with the incidentals. Happily I had pause for thought because the site went big and decided to go with file system storage for the images instead, and I'm glad I did:
* Size: I didn't anticipate the user would upload 5 gig of images
* Access: You need some sort of extraneous code to pull those images from the database
* Communication: your code must know how to fake being a proper image (right headers, creation/change times, etc)
* Size 2: A lot of databases can't store high-res images (read: large images) in a database without serious penalties (like chopping them up into little bits to fit into a MySQL bigblob)
Speed can be addressed in the perl world via FastCGI or Mod_perl and similar ways on other platforms, but you'll still have to do disk reads to get the data and you'll pay a price for having one more often used script in memory.
Storage size can be counteracted with clever tricks or "professional grade" (read: expensive) DB Engines like Oracle and DB2 which have binary data storage as one of their features, but you'll need to pay money and have a big muscly machine to run 'em.
For my money, 90% image serving can and should be done from filesystem because that's what web servers are made for. The other 10% are weird meta things like this that could use the file system but are designed to use database.
My big thing is using your head and ask yourself what will be easier in the long run? Sure, binary data slung around with Perl DBI sounds convenient, but how conevneint is it to run "ismcheck" on a 100 GB database, eh?
While Paypal can, indeed, be fucked up the donkey ass, you need to be fair: that charge is being levied by the credit card companies themselves, as a friend of mind who uses CCBill for his adult site got a notice outlining the same payment schecdule.
On a completely runrelated note, Myriad just completed constrution of its new 200,000 sq/ft palace^H^H^H^H office complex in the University of Utah Research park.
The Janitor^H^H^H^H^H A spokesperson for Myriad says that even though the entire complex was paid for with tidy suitcases of unmarked hundreds, that this has nothing to do with their Gene patents.
P.S.: Yes, Myriad did just complete their new complex, it's the corner of Wakara way and Collins Road near the Evans & Southerland R&D Facility.
Now, I could use this to power my night-light.. but it'd probably glow all by itself.
Okay. make a gasoline engine produce usable power without revving it, I dare you.
What you said was also true about effiency, but the simple fact is electic motors can turn slower while still having torque whereas IC engines must spin faster.
Just an FYI, in case anyone is interested; the vast majority of commerical locomotives in the USA are already, in fact, electric, and have been since the 1950's. The diesel engines are there, sure, but they are there to generate power to turn electric motors.
This is because electric motors have many degrees more torque at low speeds than any comparable internal combustion engine.
Kinda reminds me of this, eh?
While you may understandably think that a cheaper feature-for-feature iPod competitor would cause apple to drop the price on the iPod to match, there is reason this won't happen.
It's a common misconception that Apple in the business of selling hardware and software, much like people think that Nike sells shoes.
But Nike does not sell shoes and Apple does not sell computers. They are first and foremost Image companies, selling themselves -- they are their product. This is not a commant on quality, speed or anything of the sort, but it is on price. When you buy and iPod, you are first anf foremost paying for the the fact that is not simply a hard drive, decoder and DAC, but that it's a work of art put together by skilled Apple designers.
This is why Apple won't bother to match prices, because they don't need to. Though brand names may be little more than stories we tell each other, they are more than enough to justify a higher cost on an equal product. If the iPod does the same but looks better and has a better backstory, people will have little trouble justifying the extra cost.
Bring me my bow of burning code.
Bring me my arrows of design.
Better than metatags, IMO, is Googlebombing -- i.e. making a bunch of sites point to yours.
I actually managed to pull off a wholey unplanned yet quite effective googlebomb in the last few months. A side project of mine, Quizilla, has ome feature where it give you HTML coede to past into your weblog. Well, since Quizilla is a free service , I put an advetising string in that HTML, "brought to you by Quizilla", with a link to the site.
Well, through some circumstances that got really popular really quick and people were pasting a lot og this HTML into their pages.. and what happened when Google indexed all those pages?
Instant Googlebomb.
I'm kinda sad I wasn't selling anything, or else I'd be rich.
Good point, well made.
This annoys me for one key reason: I am a programmer, not a designer.
Now, if I want to make any web-interface code I have to write 500 lbs of html code just to make my HTML pages look decent instead of just being able to use a couple of nice <font> and <b> tags.
I don't want have to write a style sheet just to make project pages look good, thank you very much.
Isn't this what the sun Blade line was supposed to be, albeit with Solaris?
Considering that Sun won't be able to make a profit at below, say, $600 (sans display), I'm not sure how may people would see the benefit of saving a little money over a better design. While I am a great Linux fan, I still think that commercial unixes off benefits that Linux and other Free OSes don't have -- not the least of which is a large corporate support base.
Of course, I am talking from a Unix developers point of view, and it's very possible that Sun wants to position these new ones toward secretaries and the like. However, as a developer I'd rather bay a little extra money and get an authentic Unix machine if I had the chance.
Of course, even a fake unix machine in out of my financial grasp right now *sheepish grin*
I've used P2E a few times and I'm actually pretty happy with it save a few issues:
1. Don't run the executables off a CD-ROM drive. They will run slow as dirt unless they are loaded from some sort fo fast media, faster than CD.
2. You may have to declare ("use" or "require") stuff you wouldn't have to normally. A good example is "Storable" that is used by some modules -- you may have to explicitly declare that in your code to get it to "compile" right. The program will actually tell you what you need, though (usually).
Many of us who have only skimed the surface of "the scene" but have no real connection to it -- this would include the majority of people -- often have have the belief that Courier Groups, et al, are generally one rung up the ladder from clubs in treehouses and that they are little more than bunches of hyperactive teens who want to be part of something.
.nfo files that say who in the group is in charge and who does what -- my question is: are the organizations really that structured and organized as all of this literature would have us believe? Are they more than just clubs run by Middle school students?
Yet, while you were in DoD, you were a Sysadmin and in most respects a professional, skilled, mature, and above all appeared to be a responsible person which lends come creadance to the idea that these groups (or at least the "older ones") are not the inept preteens they may appear to be.
We've all read the
"I honestly don't think there as much of a diffrence between auto hobiests and computer as first appears."
... except grease.. lots of grease.. and I only know one person who has a case that you need a pit to work on.