It could be about a dweebish geek who just happened to be hung like a horse but was clueless about how to use this hardware. Maybe he needs to rely on telephone tech support...
To tie in to this article, I will award a Gmail invite for anyone who can prove to me that it's legal under the DMCA to stand on a street corner and recite DeCSS. It is of course illegal, which means that Free Speech is dead in America, but if you manage to prove me wrong and include an address, the invite will be on its way.
HA! No, because in your post you said "Dell's screen is better... Apple is the SUCK!" That's a troll.
No, I didn't. I said:
"When I was in the market for as new laptop, I compared an Apple Powerbook to a Dell Inspiron. The Inspiron was less expensive and had better graphics capability."
In no place does that say: "Apple is the SUCK!". I didn't mention anything about Apple sucking. If you somehow got, "Apple is the SUCK!", out of that, you have serious issues with reading comprehension.
We can't all see your thoughts unless you type them down; a reader would have had no way to know you considered anything but the screen, and for all intents and purposes you made it out to be a completely uninformed decision.
Only a complete idiot would assume this. A reasonable person would assume that after comparision the the two points that differed significantly were the screen and the price.
Try reading your post, man.
I did, you didn't.
(And don't be like the typical Slashdot ass: not everyone who talks is an Apple zealot ready to accuse you if you actually have something to say.)
I didn't even mention the word zealot. Why even bring this up? Methinks thou protest too much.
Again, in case you missed it, I did actually prove my point by linking to Apple's web site that the Powerbook's screen is still only 1280x854. That isn't even a standard resolution.
Bring Back our Flag... And you've won. I'll be waiting.
...with an M808B Scorpion Main Battle Tank.
"Red team has the flag."
"Red team has the flag."
KA-BOOOM!!!!!
"Blue team flag returned."
gg
Re:The rules are simple...
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Soviets didn't want to send a manned mission to the moon, it was too much expense for far too little return, they were content to let the US go there and plant a silly little flag instead.
This is complete bullshit. Kamanin's diaries prove this is untrue.
The Soviet Union had two huge secret projects designed to win the moon race. The L1 project would send a Soviet crew around the moon before the Americans, using a stripped-down Soyuz spacecraft launched by a Proton rocket. The L3 project would beat the American Apollo program to the lunar surface. The Soviets lost both races. In the case of being the first to send a man around the moon, that loss was measured in days or weeks.
Here you are advocating 1600X1200 when I would not use that res on my CRT.
I don't have a CRT. I have a laptop. It has an LCD, and it looks great at 1600x1200. If you want to use a CRT, fine, but they look awful and hurt my eyes.
Normal people would not want that resolution on a small laptop screen.
Than why are most laptops capable of it these days?
Are you running at a DPI higher than 96? If so, how do you like the distorted fonts and UI?
No, I'm not. Oh, and there is no distortion whatsoever. I have a UltraSharp screen, and it's almost like looking at paper it's so clear. Because my screen is so large, I have the screen real estate to increase the font size to make the words clearer, and still be able to see most of the page. I can also shrink the words down to fit more on the screen with no loss of readability. On smaller screens, you can't do these things without sacrificing usability. Believe me, having what amounts to a two-page display on a laptop is very useful for presentations and documents.
First of all, resolution is not the only measure of graphics capability.
That is true. I also compared the chipsets of both machines. The Apple had a slightly better chipset. However, I needed more screen real estate. I was used to working in 1400x1050, and now I always use 1600x1200. I also compared the Dell with an Apple after the Dell arrived, and the UltraSharp display on the Dell was much crisper.
Secondly, if that's your only criterion for a laptop, I'm sorry.
It wasn't my only criterion. Duh.
When people compare computers, they usually consider the whole package. Not just the price and the screen.
I did consider the whole package. I forgot to mention that the Dell came with a larger hard drive as well. All the other features were the same. The only major difference was the screen and the $1000 price difference. The Dell was better on three points, so that's what I purchased.
You're buying more than a monitor, when you purchase a notebook.
No, but that is the major component of it considering that that's the part you look at.
Troll.
Why, because I carefully compared features and prices and decided not to go with the Apple? I think not.
I also compared and didn't purchase an Alienware laptop. Does that also make me a troll?
There was no Mac with equivalent features, and the one that was closest was $1000 more.
I still didn't get Gigabit Ethernet
Which is absolutely useless. What other devices am I going to be talking to that use GigE? Most hotels don't have gigabit ethernet. My house and most public internet access points use WiFi. Work doesn't have gigabit. The fastest speed I can download from my house is 3 Mb/s, and my other computers all have 10/100. Gigabit is a useless added expense.
a Pro version of the OS
I have a Pro version of the OS.
or Firewire 800
Yeah, that'll be good for the iPod. Oh, wait, the iPod doesn't have it.
the external video port isn't digital.
I don't need digital out for presentations. Most TVs and projectors I encounter don't support it. It's another completely useless feature.
And it weighs a pound more (6.9 vs. the 5.7 lb powerbook).
Okay, yeah, it would be nice if the Dell weighed less. But it's not worth $1000 dollars for that.
Most of what I do is programming, and for that I like to have as much screen real estate as possible. My old laptop had 1400x1050 screen resolution, and I got used to using that. Apple doesn't even offer the "standard" screen resolution of 1280x1024 in a laptop. These other features that you mention just don't do it for me.
It is more accurate to say that you cannot buy a "cheap" mac. That is, the lowest price mac you can get is more expensive than the least expensive PC you can buy. But those two machines won't wind up being even close to either other in features or TCO. This is particularly the case with laptops.
Bullshit.
When I was in the market for as new laptop, I compared an Apple Powerbook to a Dell Inspiron. The Inspiron was less expensive and had better graphics capability. I'm not talking about a matter of 50 bucks less expensive or even a couple hundred dollars - it was an entire fucking grand. Yes, $1000 difference. Why should I spend $1000 dollars more for a less capable machine? That's absolutely ridiculous.
The resolution of the 15 inch Powerbook is still only1280x854, and the top of the line 17 inch Powerbook is 1440x900.
I think after reading this article, I'm going to write some more thorough docs, and then include those docs in the help menu.
After taking a look at your project, I have a small suggestion for you. It would be really helpful if you would put a short explanation of what your program does both on your web page and in your program (i.e. "This program renames images according to blah blah blah..."), . Right now, you can't tell exactly what JAIO does. It wasn't until I read this post that I was able to figure it out (without downloading it).
The app is Jaio, which renames digital camera images according to their EXIF data.
This is the kind of explanation I mean. However, I would try restating that in layman's terms (i.e. "What's EXIF data? Does it hurt?"). The simplest wording is probably best.
Anyway, JAIO looks pretty good. The interface is pretty simple. The naming scheme is the only really complex part, but I'm not sure how you would make it simpler. All of things I thought up end up being more complex than the text field. Good luck with your project.
Every single app I've seen designed like this turned into an abject failure. That's about a half dozen.
That's not unusual. Most software projects do fail.
You're adding in a tremndous performance hit and complexity that is usually not needed if you have some good database people.
I think you're misunderstanding him. He's merely abstracting the query from the display code, not adding a middle tier.
Furthermore, every "good" database person I've had the extreme displeasure not to be able to avoid working with has caused the other developers more pain due to the complexity of their designs than was necessary for the project to work.
The part that infuriated me the most about these people is their inability to provide basic access to their system. If they had bothered to provide a basic access library or stored procedures for the simple queries we were required to do initially, they could have tweaked the tables at their leisure. Pleas for basic access went unheeded, because performance tweaks were obviously so much more important, even though we knew from system profiling that the performance issues were not with the database. Subsequently, we had to munge SQL everytime they decided it was time for a change. I managed to shield the other developers on my team from some of this by making a basic abstraction layer, but it meant that I bore the brunt of tweaking the database code for my team, when I should have been spending all of my time implementing my own team's customer requirements. This meant I had to go to the DB "expert" on his timetable to beg for the performance tweak du jour so I could add it to our set of queries (the same set being used by other teams) so that we'd actually get rows back instead of errors.
All of the performance things that you talk about are available on RDBMS', and are more powerful than any of these new fangled middle-tier thingies.
Right, and a lot of these performance enhancements require proprietary SQL. Thus, if you abstract the queries, you can tweak the SQL without breaking the page display.
In general, it's a good idea to abstract your most commonly used queries, because you don't know initially how your backend database is going to change over the course of development. For instance:
You may have to change queries for performance reasons, and it's better to shield the team from this kind of tweaking. In this case, the entire SQL can change drastically. You may have to combine some statements, or change tables, or change datatypes. Sometimes, the old query won't even work anymore, depending on what the DBA changed, and it's definitely better to be able to fix this issue in one place quickly.
You might also have to change database vendors. I've been on two teams in the past where we were forced for political reasons to change our database vendor, and both times, query changes were required. In fact, in one instance, we were forced to change the database vendor twice. Fortunately, most of our queries had been localized to one library in this case, so only that library needed to be changed.
Your datasource may change. On one project another team decided to stop storing CORBA IORs in a nameserver, and store them in a database instead (don't ask). Fortunately, this code was abstracted from the client code, and I only had to change one method. Since the other team told us they might switch back at any time, I kept the old code as well. This way, the same method would just work from the client's point of view.
Like goatse links... That's why I don't put in an easy link.
First of all, you're not helping anybody by doing this. It actually just pisses people off, mainly because Slashcode inserts whitespace in long lines to inhibit page widening attacks. Thus, you end up with links in your post that don't work when people copy and paste them (as well as not being able to click on them).
Why not instead, post the actual url as the link contents. This way, people could both see the actual url and, more importantly, they could click on it, because it would be a functional link. Get it?
Secondly, seeing the actual link text still may not help if someone uses a clever redirect link or points to a site that seems at first glance to be innocuous. There have been many cases of posting what seems to be a legitimate link, and indeed it is legitimate at first, but then the contents are replaced after some time with a goatse page.
Finally, there are two things you can do to protect yourself from goatse links. The first is to set your "Display Link Domains" option in your user preferences. First first go to your Slashdot user page, and click on the "Preferences" tab. Under Preferences, click on the "Comments" tab. The second to last option from the bottom should look like:
Display Link Domains? (shows the actual domain of any link in brackets)
Never show link domains
Show the links domain only in recommended situations
Always show link domains
Click on the "Always show link domains" option and then click the "Save" button.
The second thing to do is to turn on your status bar in your browser. In Internet Explorer, this is under the "View" menu. Select the "Status Bar" menu item if it isn't already checked. Now, when you hover over a link in a Slashdot post, you can see the contents in the status bar. Don't click it if you don't like it.
Some usere are stuck with IE at work and get trolled into sites that may be grounds for dismissal.
In some places, browsing to anything non-work related is grounds for dismissal.
At least my links are honest even if you have to cut and paste yourself.
They may be honest, but the end result is that they still tick people off.
The point is that you aren't helping anybody by doing this, so you might as well post a real link, and let people have the convenience of being able to use the web as it was intended.
Was that by chance at the University of Minnesota?
It could also be Iowa State. They showed me their cow on a tour, but unfortunately, she turned away so I only got to see the window for a second. I guess she's bashful about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good start, but it's got too much plot.
Does this count?
It seems to me that if you performed it, it would be legal.
Don't forget to initial the crossouts!
No, I didn't. I said:
In no place does that say: "Apple is the SUCK!". I didn't mention anything about Apple sucking. If you somehow got, "Apple is the SUCK!", out of that, you have serious issues with reading comprehension.
We can't all see your thoughts unless you type them down; a reader would have had no way to know you considered anything but the screen, and for all intents and purposes you made it out to be a completely uninformed decision.
Only a complete idiot would assume this. A reasonable person would assume that after comparision the the two points that differed significantly were the screen and the price.
Try reading your post, man.
I did, you didn't.
(And don't be like the typical Slashdot ass: not everyone who talks is an Apple zealot ready to accuse you if you actually have something to say.)
I didn't even mention the word zealot. Why even bring this up? Methinks thou protest too much.
Again, in case you missed it, I did actually prove my point by linking to Apple's web site that the Powerbook's screen is still only 1280x854. That isn't even a standard resolution.
It is less capable. It can't display 1600x1200 or even 1280x1024.
"Red team has the flag."
"Red team has the flag."
KA-BOOOM!!!!!
"Blue team flag returned."
gg
This is complete bullshit. Kamanin's diaries prove this is untrue.
I don't have a CRT. I have a laptop. It has an LCD, and it looks great at 1600x1200. If you want to use a CRT, fine, but they look awful and hurt my eyes.
Normal people would not want that resolution on a small laptop screen.
Than why are most laptops capable of it these days?
Are you running at a DPI higher than 96? If so, how do you like the distorted fonts and UI?
No, I'm not. Oh, and there is no distortion whatsoever. I have a UltraSharp screen, and it's almost like looking at paper it's so clear. Because my screen is so large, I have the screen real estate to increase the font size to make the words clearer, and still be able to see most of the page. I can also shrink the words down to fit more on the screen with no loss of readability. On smaller screens, you can't do these things without sacrificing usability. Believe me, having what amounts to a two-page display on a laptop is very useful for presentations and documents.
That is true. I also compared the chipsets of both machines. The Apple had a slightly better chipset. However, I needed more screen real estate. I was used to working in 1400x1050, and now I always use 1600x1200. I also compared the Dell with an Apple after the Dell arrived, and the UltraSharp display on the Dell was much crisper.
Secondly, if that's your only criterion for a laptop, I'm sorry.
It wasn't my only criterion. Duh.
When people compare computers, they usually consider the whole package. Not just the price and the screen.
I did consider the whole package. I forgot to mention that the Dell came with a larger hard drive as well. All the other features were the same. The only major difference was the screen and the $1000 price difference. The Dell was better on three points, so that's what I purchased.
You're buying more than a monitor, when you purchase a notebook.
No, but that is the major component of it considering that that's the part you look at.
Troll.
Why, because I carefully compared features and prices and decided not to go with the Apple? I think not.
I also compared and didn't purchase an Alienware laptop. Does that also make me a troll?
I have an 8200 with the UltraSharp screen.
There was no Mac with equivalent features, and the one that was closest was $1000 more.
I still didn't get Gigabit Ethernet
Which is absolutely useless. What other devices am I going to be talking to that use GigE? Most hotels don't have gigabit ethernet. My house and most public internet access points use WiFi. Work doesn't have gigabit. The fastest speed I can download from my house is 3 Mb/s, and my other computers all have 10/100. Gigabit is a useless added expense.
a Pro version of the OS
I have a Pro version of the OS.
or Firewire 800
Yeah, that'll be good for the iPod. Oh, wait, the iPod doesn't have it.
the external video port isn't digital.
I don't need digital out for presentations. Most TVs and projectors I encounter don't support it. It's another completely useless feature.
And it weighs a pound more (6.9 vs. the 5.7 lb powerbook).
Okay, yeah, it would be nice if the Dell weighed less. But it's not worth $1000 dollars for that.
Most of what I do is programming, and for that I like to have as much screen real estate as possible. My old laptop had 1400x1050 screen resolution, and I got used to using that. Apple doesn't even offer the "standard" screen resolution of 1280x1024 in a laptop. These other features that you mention just don't do it for me.
NOT!
Bullshit.
When I was in the market for as new laptop, I compared an Apple Powerbook to a Dell Inspiron. The Inspiron was less expensive and had better graphics capability. I'm not talking about a matter of 50 bucks less expensive or even a couple hundred dollars - it was an entire fucking grand . Yes, $1000 difference. Why should I spend $1000 dollars more for a less capable machine? That's absolutely ridiculous.
The resolution of the 15 inch Powerbook is still only 1280x854, and the top of the line 17 inch Powerbook is 1440x900.
I'm using 1600x1200 on my low end Dell right now.
Don't worry, you can still play Halo.
Wow, and hour later and only two posts. Apparently this topic is too scary for Slashdot. Then again, maybe it's just not Stuff that matters.
After taking a look at your project, I have a small suggestion for you. It would be really helpful if you would put a short explanation of what your program does both on your web page and in your program (i.e. "This program renames images according to blah blah blah..."), . Right now, you can't tell exactly what JAIO does. It wasn't until I read this post that I was able to figure it out (without downloading it).
The app is Jaio, which renames digital camera images according to their EXIF data.
This is the kind of explanation I mean. However, I would try restating that in layman's terms (i.e. "What's EXIF data? Does it hurt?"). The simplest wording is probably best.
Anyway, JAIO looks pretty good. The interface is pretty simple. The naming scheme is the only really complex part, but I'm not sure how you would make it simpler. All of things I thought up end up being more complex than the text field. Good luck with your project.
That's not unusual. Most software projects do fail.
You're adding in a tremndous performance hit and complexity that is usually not needed if you have some good database people.
I think you're misunderstanding him. He's merely abstracting the query from the display code, not adding a middle tier.
Furthermore, every "good" database person I've had the extreme displeasure not to be able to avoid working with has caused the other developers more pain due to the complexity of their designs than was necessary for the project to work.
The part that infuriated me the most about these people is their inability to provide basic access to their system. If they had bothered to provide a basic access library or stored procedures for the simple queries we were required to do initially, they could have tweaked the tables at their leisure. Pleas for basic access went unheeded, because performance tweaks were obviously so much more important, even though we knew from system profiling that the performance issues were not with the database. Subsequently, we had to munge SQL everytime they decided it was time for a change. I managed to shield the other developers on my team from some of this by making a basic abstraction layer, but it meant that I bore the brunt of tweaking the database code for my team, when I should have been spending all of my time implementing my own team's customer requirements. This meant I had to go to the DB "expert" on his timetable to beg for the performance tweak du jour so I could add it to our set of queries (the same set being used by other teams) so that we'd actually get rows back instead of errors.
All of the performance things that you talk about are available on RDBMS', and are more powerful than any of these new fangled middle-tier thingies.
Right, and a lot of these performance enhancements require proprietary SQL. Thus, if you abstract the queries, you can tweak the SQL without breaking the page display.
In general, it's a good idea to abstract your most commonly used queries, because you don't know initially how your backend database is going to change over the course of development. For instance:
Now I look like Neo at the end of Matrix Revolutions.
Damn you Slashdot!
First of all, you're not helping anybody by doing this. It actually just pisses people off, mainly because Slashcode inserts whitespace in long lines to inhibit page widening attacks. Thus, you end up with links in your post that don't work when people copy and paste them (as well as not being able to click on them).
Why not instead, post the actual url as the link contents. This way, people could both see the actual url and, more importantly, they could click on it, because it would be a functional link. Get it?
Secondly, seeing the actual link text still may not help if someone uses a clever redirect link or points to a site that seems at first glance to be innocuous. There have been many cases of posting what seems to be a legitimate link, and indeed it is legitimate at first, but then the contents are replaced after some time with a goatse page.
Finally, there are two things you can do to protect yourself from goatse links. The first is to set your "Display Link Domains" option in your user preferences. First first go to your Slashdot user page, and click on the "Preferences" tab. Under Preferences, click on the "Comments" tab. The second to last option from the bottom should look like:
Click on the "Always show link domains" option and then click the "Save" button.The second thing to do is to turn on your status bar in your browser. In Internet Explorer, this is under the "View" menu. Select the "Status Bar" menu item if it isn't already checked. Now, when you hover over a link in a Slashdot post, you can see the contents in the status bar. Don't click it if you don't like it.
Some usere are stuck with IE at work and get trolled into sites that may be grounds for dismissal.
In some places, browsing to anything non-work related is grounds for dismissal.
At least my links are honest even if you have to cut and paste yourself.
They may be honest, but the end result is that they still tick people off.
The point is that you aren't helping anybody by doing this, so you might as well post a real link, and let people have the convenience of being able to use the web as it was intended.
Sorry, I should have posted the mozilla update page. I wasn't thinking. I apologize.
Shouldn't that read: Ship-Sinking Monster Waves Secrets Revealed
I mean, how are they going to get a book deal otherwise?
I did like you said, and looked up on Google how to insert a link.
You start out like this:
and then you add the url. For example, a Google result on Orrin Hatch and bills would be: and then finish the tag with: The you add a nice description: and finally, you add the closing tag: This ends up making a link that looks like this: It doesn't seem all that difficult, and looks like it could add a whole lot to the discussion.I heard that there was even a tool for browsers to help with things like this.
In summary: u g0t pwned.
It could also be Iowa State. They showed me their cow on a tour, but unfortunately, she turned away so I only got to see the window for a second. I guess she's bashful about it.
That would require killing more than 22 million citizens. I don't see that as a possibility.
As long as I keep checking in my code as someone else, I won't have to.
More importantly, where do you get the actresses for the, uh, amateur videos?