The next big step for a PVR will be when it can record two weeks of everything on every channel. I find there is plenty of space on my Tivo for everything I think I might want to watch in advance. The problem comes when there are two or more things you want to watch that are airing at the same time. Also, every once in a great while I will realize that I don't have anything on the Tivo worth watching. At that point, I would like to have a two week archive of everything to browse.
The category is probably a bit too large for a new editor to be accepted easily, but the subcategories would make a great place to apply. Even though it is fairly well maintained at this point, none of it has a listed editor. There are three more sites waiting in the unreviewed queue there too.
The Open Directory Project has a category for Tenchi.
It seems to be fairly well maintained and it has a listed editor, but there are many other Anime titles, many of which are quite good, that are not so lucky.
I urge you to look through, find an series that you like and apply to be an editor.
The Open Directory Project lists several Linux game programming sites. However, there are only six listed and two more waiting to be reviewed. If you are interested in linux game programming and building an open directory, you should apply to maintain the category. Book reviews such as this one and many undiscovered web sites are waiting for somebody like you.
I'm planning to hike the Appalachain Trail next summer. As a geek, I'm planning to bring along a few lightweight electronics.
Palm Pilot - lighter than paper copies of maps, trailguides, and light reading.
A Digital Watch - Although those will run for years on a small light battery anyway
A Cell Phone - Anybody have any experience with solar powered batteries, which is what I'm currently planning?
A flashlight - Just a mini-mag-light, but it would be nice not to have to carry extra batteries
If there were something like this available by the time I leave, I would get it in a heartbeat. Hiking all day with a heavy pack would create more than enough energy for a couple hours of palm pilot use and a phone call or two.
Of course they say "an ounce on your foot is like a pound on your back", so it might be better just to carry two extra AA batteries anyway. And of course if I'm carrying too much the palm pilot and the phone would be the first things to get mailed home.
...the lowest form of speech you can get (excluding... flag burning, which [isn't] even speech).
Are you from the same country (USA) as me? Here we have the right to disagree with our government. It is my civil obligation to speak up when I disagree with my government.
Burning the flag is a statement that you disagree with government, and disagree strongly. If such a political statement is not speech, and not protected speech as intended by the framers of the constitution, I don't know what is.
It works with some site's banners, but not all. For example it works with megatokyo but not with slashdot. I suspect that the style sheet is overridden on sites that use style sheets. Is there any way to prevent this?
I have been excited about OS X because this is the first time in a long time that the most recent versions of my software will work on a Macintosh. Previous versions of Mac OS have supported up to Java 1.1.8. OS X supports Java 1.2. I have been using Java2 features such as the new Swing GUI for some time in my programs.
The good:
Java actually works. Programs that are pure Java are able to run just fine. This is an amazing step for Macintosh.
The bad:
Running java programs on a mac is not easy. I had to use a command line to run all my software. Since this is the first command line on a Mac, I assume that Mac users will not be willing to go that route. Neither class files or jar files are double clickable. By contrast, jar files on windows are associated with Java and open right up when you click on them. Apple does have a tool that will package your as a Mac Application. However, it appears that it can only be run on a Macintosh and as a GUI. Since I don't develop on a Mac, this isn't really a good option. I would consider switching, but if I did, then I would like to be able to build everthing from a make file, so I'm hesitant.
Apple has done a poor job of porting the MRJ, the java hooks into the Mac OS. Specifically, I was upset to find that the command for opening a web browser hasn't been implemented. I have a
crossplatform class for opening a web browser from Java, but as of yet have not been able to get it to work with OS X. This can be done on other systems by using a command line, but applications on OS X appear as directories on the command line, and most Mac apps don't accept command lines anyway.
I also consider the MRJ to be a poor solution because after using these system specific classes your applications will not compile on other systems that do not have these libraries. You have to jump through hoops using the Reflection API in Java to be be able to find the classes at runtime so that your stuff will compile on other systems.
Overall:
I'd say Java on the Mac is good enough. I'll start supporting OS X as a platform that my programs run on. Provided they don't have to open a web browser, and given that the user has a bit of command line savvy.
...much better than the early CD players of the 80's (thanks to superior D/A conversion algorithms and better error correction).
CD players have gotten worse, not better. Most of today's CD players don't do error correction well.
Write on a cd with dry erase marker. Old cd players are able to handle 4 or more lines from the center to the edge before they crap out. Today's players are lucky if they can handle one.
Part of the reason for this is portable CD players. In an effort to make them use less power they have cut out any components they don't really need. Unfortunatly, error correction uses quite a bit of your battery life. Because of mass production, these are now used in both portables and component systems.
Advertising on slashdot as it stands now is doomed to fail. You cannot have tack an ad system onto something, you really have to integrate it. I don't think there is any way around that fact.
The advertising potential of slashdot us huge. I have spent so much money on stuff that has been suggested by slashdot articles or that I read about in somebody's comments. I maybe once looked for some gifts by clicking on a slashdot ad.
The problem with ads is the same as the problem of slashdot without a moderation system. You don't know what you are really going to get until you look into it. Ads are sold to the highest bidder and there isn't somebody that is much like me reviewing them saying, "this is something you should look into."
Do you know how many people visit my website because I put links in my signature that I think people will find useful? Its a lot. Something like that is the best way to get make advertising on slashdot work.
I would visit something if it is given a testimonial by people that I respect on slashdot. If people were given the option of testimonials to slashdot advertised products in their sigs and could somehow receive some benefit from doing so, I would be much more likely to visit.
If you could work out some way to rate sigs that is separate from comment moderation and have some threshold that somebody's sig has to cross to be visible.... And of course and easy interface for people to see what products are available for their testimonial.
Nobody wants to give up their journalistic integrity by caving in to advertisers, but I don't think that its any better to advertise things that you wouldn't yourself recommend.
Names do not have to be functional. Sun gets pissed off when people use Java in the name of the product just because it was written in Java, and rightly so. It makes no sense to me that people name their products/websites things like WinSoAndSo, XWidget, EShop, or JavaInvaders.
Does Ebay have the word 'auctions' in its name? Does Yahoo use the word 'directory'? You can name your product something off the wall, and people will pick up on it.
Name your stuff creativly. It doesn't hurt and you won't be crowding in on somebody else's brand image. (Its called creating your own hype folks.)
ICQ does the same thing. You cannot set your email address associated with your ICQ account to anything that has "icq" in it. It fails silently. I usually give out email addresses that reflect the source in them and it took me a long time to figure out why ICQ was not letting me set my email address.
Hotmail is said to not be vulnerable. I belive that hotmail (and many other web based email providers) strip out all but some allowed subset of html (sort of like slashdots allowed html in comments.) I use Eudora and when I send a forwarded message it asks me if I want to send it plain or styled. I always select plain.
I believe that any email that passes through webmail, or has html stripped by some email program like Eudora will be innoculated.
Add this to the list of things that web mail programs will have to check for though....
This story is well hidden. Not on the front page. Not in a section. At the bottom of the slashback. I wonder if I will not only get the first post, but the only post?
OOP is Non-Table-Frindly.
OO systems are not very good at ad-hoc queries
OO systems are in essence Xenophobic
A pitfall of OOP: When all you have is hammer, everything looks like an... object. Somebody on java.lang.help recently wanted to program a chess program with GUI. They were going to have pieces, and squares on the board. Have each piece associated with a square. It was suggested to them that the board might be best left unsubdivided into squares. A piece could just have a position on the board which would allow it to move between squares for example.
Along the same lines programmers working with tables often try to treat each piece of data in their database as an object. In many instances it would be better to simply look as the entire database as an object and forget about the smaller objects.
One of the reasons that OO is helpful is because you do not need to worry about the format of the data in an object. If you want to use a database or a flat file it is all the same outside the object.
Using OOP it is much easier to adopt a new data format. There is no such thing as an OO way of storing data that perpetuates itself Xenophobically.
The way to do something ad-hoc in OO is to subclass. Usually when you subclass you are saying that you specifically want to deal with how the data is stored and you are willng to accept the consequences. If you data is in an SQL database, nothing prevents your from using the correct tool for the job and also using SQL queries. You just run the risk of making your data unusable to your object. But again a risk that your proceedural program would face as well.
To sum up:
If objects are getting in your way, make your objects bigger. Everything is still proceedural inside an object.
If objects are causing you to structure your data in a certain way, you can change.
OO doesn't prevent you from hacking. It just discourages it.
Yes that part is easy. The problem is of course getting the files to have the same fields. UPS and Fedex do things differently. They both work on "zones" but the zone tables (zip to zip) are cumbersome and hard to work with without quite a bit of formatting. Also the rate tables need to be massaged a bit. To save space, it seems that some of the columns are bunched together: zone1, zone2, zone3-4, zone5-6, etc. Blah.
Slashdot Mirror
The next big step for a PVR will be when it can record two weeks of everything on every channel. I find there is plenty of space on my Tivo for everything I think I might want to watch in advance. The problem comes when there are two or more things you want to watch that are airing at the same time. Also, every once in a great while I will realize that I don't have anything on the Tivo worth watching. At that point, I would like to have a two week archive of everything to browse.
There were two of them that I never used, but which included me in their user directory. These boxes quickly filled up with spam.
So in some cases, just opening a free email account can get you spammed.
The category is probably a bit too large for a new editor to be accepted easily, but the subcategories would make a great place to apply. Even though it is fairly well maintained at this point, none of it has a listed editor. There are three more sites waiting in the unreviewed queue there too.
I urge you to look through, find an series that you like and apply to be an editor.
The Open Directory Project lists several Linux game programming sites. However, there are only six listed and two more waiting to be reviewed. If you are interested in linux game programming and building an open directory, you should apply to maintain the category. Book reviews such as this one and many undiscovered web sites are waiting for somebody like you.
And when I first looked at this I thought it was another anti-opensource article.
- Palm Pilot - lighter than paper copies of maps, trailguides, and light reading.
- A Digital Watch - Although those will run for years on a small light battery anyway
- A Cell Phone - Anybody have any experience with solar powered batteries, which is what I'm currently planning?
- A flashlight - Just a mini-mag-light, but it would be nice not to have to carry extra batteries
If there were something like this available by the time I leave, I would get it in a heartbeat. Hiking all day with a heavy pack would create more than enough energy for a couple hours of palm pilot use and a phone call or two.Of course they say "an ounce on your foot is like a pound on your back", so it might be better just to carry two extra AA batteries anyway. And of course if I'm carrying too much the palm pilot and the phone would be the first things to get mailed home.
Are you from the same country (USA) as me? Here we have the right to disagree with our government. It is my civil obligation to speak up when I disagree with my government.
Burning the flag is a statement that you disagree with government, and disagree strongly. If such a political statement is not speech, and not protected speech as intended by the framers of the constitution, I don't know what is.
And I shouldn't use my insightful comments to slashdot to advertise my stuff in my signature either.
It works with some site's banners, but not all. For example it works with megatokyo but not with slashdot. I suspect that the style sheet is overridden on sites that use style sheets. Is there any way to prevent this?
Did they have a zip of all the entries and did anybody mirror it?
The good:
Java actually works. Programs that are pure Java are able to run just fine. This is an amazing step for Macintosh.
The bad:
Running java programs on a mac is not easy. I had to use a command line to run all my software. Since this is the first command line on a Mac, I assume that Mac users will not be willing to go that route. Neither class files or jar files are double clickable. By contrast, jar files on windows are associated with Java and open right up when you click on them. Apple does have a tool that will package your as a Mac Application. However, it appears that it can only be run on a Macintosh and as a GUI. Since I don't develop on a Mac, this isn't really a good option. I would consider switching, but if I did, then I would like to be able to build everthing from a make file, so I'm hesitant.
Apple has done a poor job of porting the MRJ, the java hooks into the Mac OS. Specifically, I was upset to find that the command for opening a web browser hasn't been implemented. I have a crossplatform class for opening a web browser from Java, but as of yet have not been able to get it to work with OS X. This can be done on other systems by using a command line, but applications on OS X appear as directories on the command line, and most Mac apps don't accept command lines anyway.
I also consider the MRJ to be a poor solution because after using these system specific classes your applications will not compile on other systems that do not have these libraries. You have to jump through hoops using the Reflection API in Java to be be able to find the classes at runtime so that your stuff will compile on other systems.
Overall:
I'd say Java on the Mac is good enough. I'll start supporting OS X as a platform that my programs run on. Provided they don't have to open a web browser, and given that the user has a bit of command line savvy.
CD players have gotten worse, not better. Most of today's CD players don't do error correction well.
Write on a cd with dry erase marker. Old cd players are able to handle 4 or more lines from the center to the edge before they crap out. Today's players are lucky if they can handle one.
Part of the reason for this is portable CD players. In an effort to make them use less power they have cut out any components they don't really need. Unfortunatly, error correction uses quite a bit of your battery life. Because of mass production, these are now used in both portables and component systems.
The advertising potential of slashdot us huge. I have spent so much money on stuff that has been suggested by slashdot articles or that I read about in somebody's comments. I maybe once looked for some gifts by clicking on a slashdot ad.
The problem with ads is the same as the problem of slashdot without a moderation system. You don't know what you are really going to get until you look into it. Ads are sold to the highest bidder and there isn't somebody that is much like me reviewing them saying, "this is something you should look into."
Do you know how many people visit my website because I put links in my signature that I think people will find useful? Its a lot. Something like that is the best way to get make advertising on slashdot work.
I would visit something if it is given a testimonial by people that I respect on slashdot. If people were given the option of testimonials to slashdot advertised products in their sigs and could somehow receive some benefit from doing so, I would be much more likely to visit.
If you could work out some way to rate sigs that is separate from comment moderation and have some threshold that somebody's sig has to cross to be visible.... And of course and easy interface for people to see what products are available for their testimonial.
Nobody wants to give up their journalistic integrity by caving in to advertisers, but I don't think that its any better to advertise things that you wouldn't yourself recommend.
There are limits on physical property. Property and inheritance taxes mean that you will constanty have to pay for whatever you own.
Does Ebay have the word 'auctions' in its name? Does Yahoo use the word 'directory'? You can name your product something off the wall, and people will pick up on it.
Name your stuff creativly. It doesn't hurt and you won't be crowding in on somebody else's brand image. (Its called creating your own hype folks.)
(At least I didn't say petrified. oops.)
ICQ does the same thing. You cannot set your email address associated with your ICQ account to anything that has "icq" in it. It fails silently. I usually give out email addresses that reflect the source in them and it took me a long time to figure out why ICQ was not letting me set my email address.
I believe that any email that passes through webmail, or has html stripped by some email program like Eudora will be innoculated.
Add this to the list of things that web mail programs will have to check for though....
Use templates.
I hereby give him permision to use my first post anyway he wants. ;-)
This story is well hidden. Not on the front page. Not in a section. At the bottom of the slashback. I wonder if I will not only get the first post, but the only post?
Oh wait, that's because when I type I'm writing perl....
OO systems are not very good at ad-hoc queries
OO systems are in essence Xenophobic
A pitfall of OOP: When all you have is hammer, everything looks like an ... object. Somebody on java.lang.help recently wanted to program a chess program with GUI. They were going to have pieces, and squares on the board. Have each piece associated with a square. It was suggested to them that the board might be best left unsubdivided into squares. A piece could just have a position on the board which would allow it to move between squares for example.
Along the same lines programmers working with tables often try to treat each piece of data in their database as an object. In many instances it would be better to simply look as the entire database as an object and forget about the smaller objects.
One of the reasons that OO is helpful is because you do not need to worry about the format of the data in an object. If you want to use a database or a flat file it is all the same outside the object.
Using OOP it is much easier to adopt a new data format. There is no such thing as an OO way of storing data that perpetuates itself Xenophobically.
The way to do something ad-hoc in OO is to subclass. Usually when you subclass you are saying that you specifically want to deal with how the data is stored and you are willng to accept the consequences. If you data is in an SQL database, nothing prevents your from using the correct tool for the job and also using SQL queries. You just run the risk of making your data unusable to your object. But again a risk that your proceedural program would face as well.
To sum up:
Yes that part is easy. The problem is of course getting the files to have the same fields. UPS and Fedex do things differently. They both work on "zones" but the zone tables (zip to zip) are cumbersome and hard to work with without quite a bit of formatting. Also the rate tables need to be massaged a bit. To save space, it seems that some of the columns are bunched together: zone1, zone2, zone3-4, zone5-6, etc. Blah.