Wait till you see how high Comcast and friends jack up the prices once all desktop publishing and more is done online, and everyone's files are no longer stored locally. Not to mention net TV and phone continuing to expand. Did anyone NOT see this coming?
The thing is, the ISPs are in the same situation that the North American auto companies are in. They twiddled their thumbs and failed to innovate and keep ahead of the trends, and now they're crying for handouts.
Boo hoo, Toyota got the jump on us, and we're losing market share. Boo hoo, we didn't pay attention when web content providers got creative and started offering heavier media.
When did North America lose it's drive to innovate? Push the boundries? The ISPs should have been upgrading the networks a decade ago.
Time to deregulate and let some foreign company with vision jump in and start laying fiber like it's... actually... in demand!
I'm less irate about the guy who had the painted black one getting a fine. But the bright orange and green toys? Come on.
I would take this to court and challenge the police to prove that my lime-green, striped, roundy toy with the word NERF on the side is a facimile. And if so, arrest every 9 year old kid and give him a fine too.
Prove it! This is crazy.
Those people exist. My last 2 jobs I suggested FOSS alternatives and the immediate response was "If we aren't paying for it, then we have no recourse to bitch at the supplier if something goes wrong."
For the same reason that I still think Commander Keen is fun. Shiny new-ness isn't necessarily better. Better graphics doesn't make a game more fun. If it works, don't fix it. At least the consumptive trend of planned obsolescence hasn't touched everything.
I completely agree with you. People may not be willing to pay the higher cost for clean energy, until the hidden costs of 'dirty' energy become more evident and impact their lives more directly. Notice the increased willingness to by more expensive hybrid cars now that people are more aware of the global pollution/warming issues? That will have to continue, along with more and more reports of rising health problems from pollution, etc.
The fact that joysticks haven't replaced steering wheels has nothing to do with people just not "getting into them".
Look at a joystick: you have about 1 or two inches of physical movement room from the center point to one side. Versus a wheel which you have to turn hand over hand through a full revolution or so to do a sharp turn.
Now imagine the difference between a slight nudge to avoid a pothole, versus doing a U-Turn. You can't expect people to restrict themselves to tiny millimeter movements while driving. People have a physical reaction to make a 'big' movement when avoiding being side-swiped. And people talk on the phone and juggle maps while driving (I'm not saying this is good). Can you imagine if a sneeze made you jostle the joystick of your car and it caused the thing to do a sharp turn at 100 km/h?
Crazy. The steering wheel is many times better for cars than a joystick. Not to mention that a joystick is a two dimensional controller and a wheel is a one dimensional controller.
Too often, the cost of energy is examined as just the $ that the consumer pays. By that measure, solar, is much more expensive than oil/coal/nuclear for example, and getting it below that cost may be close to impossible.
But, that price of the coal/oil/nuclear is not the REAL price of that form of energy. Much of the costs are offloaded onto the environments they are drawn from in the form of damage and pollution. Other costs are offloaded onto the people who live where the resources are mined in the form of land loss and damage, and low wages.
It is also offloaded as risk. Nuclear is cleaner, but you have greater risk. Risk of an attack/failure at the reactor, risk of what will happen to the waste for the next several thousand generations, risk with the radioactive fuel materials falling into the wrong hands. Etc. These may have higher or lower probabilities but they exist.
So yes, coal/oil/nuclear are cheaper in dollars and cents, but not cheaper when you factor in the hidden costs to society as a whole.
Moral of the story: as we move to cleaner energy sources in the future, the dollar cost may be higher, but there will be fewer hidden costs.
Oh my god, it sounds like something out of Orwell's 1984. Complete with made up words for things, invasion of privacy and 'big brother' constantly watching. This site was an eye-opener for sure!
How does this contradict with a recent article that says that fewer people actually buy from web advertisements than recently though and that the demographic that clicks on web ads is typically the less educated people with less money or inclination to shop online? (paraphrasing here).
They can target their ads all they want, but I still ignore them.
I increasingly see advertising as an intrusion into my life. I rely more and more on Adblock, and I prefer TV shows on DVD. But as I get more clever, the advertisements get more and more insidious. Now they are popped up on the TV screen during the actual show in the lower corner. Or the radio DJ starts plugging a 'sponsor' or product and I catch myself listening b/c it's the DJ's voice and I'm expecting a news report or something. And don't get me started on the insanity of paying $10 to go to the movie theater, and watch 5-10 minutes of adverts before the movie starts. Arg!
Really, I think this is going to backlash very soon. I hope.
Wrong. This is not at all like yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater. If you did that the worst that would happen is people near you would look over with a startled/angry face and notice there's no fire and wouldn't get up. The people farther away would see that people near you aren't getting up so they wouldn't get up. You'd make a few angry and/or startled people.
What this kid is doing is costing LOTS of taxpayer dollars (my dollars), taking emergency personnel away from potentially real emergencies, risking lives, scaring the people who get busted in on, and making emergency personnel a bit less likely to jump when the next legit call comes in. It's much more than a prank.
Difficult to program in?? Try figuring out how to use a certian function or class in.Net and you have to navigate the *horrid* MSDN site. Conversely the PHP.net site is fast, easy to search and navigate, and has tons and tons of helpful user comments on each item. I haven't found anything that comes anywhere close to the online PHP.net reference for any other language I've used.
Add to that, the massive headache that new.net users face (I was one last month) when getting set up. Configuring their own PC, the IDE, all the libraries and packages and then getting Visual Studio set up. Compared to PHP, you grab a cheap PHP web hosting provider and a friggin text editor or the IDE of your choice and you're running a hello-world in under 10 minutes.
Add to that the massive library of FREE addons, libraries, scripts and opensource projects that you can learn from or incorporate... and I'd say the massive number of PHP newbies out there indicates how EASY it is to use. Did I mention free? And open - as in not tied to the whims of one corporation.
I'll refrain from listing good IDEs since I see another responder has done so.
Ug. Look, Microsoft did not invent the 'master page' idea. They took a common concept - templating - and gave it their own Microsoft Name and implementation method. And then they spout it like it's some kind of great new invention.
From what I can tell, it is equivalent to having each of your PHP pages include a header and footer into each page.
<?php require("tpl/header.php"); ?>
This is my inner page content.
<?php require("tpl/footer.php"); ?>
There are also various PHP templating engines that do this for you in various ways, including features like caching. Check out Smarty and Pear.
Hopefully this will mean that some/actual/ progress will be made on Thunderbird. I've been using it for years and I do like it, but the Lightening calendar add on is terrible, and it lacks some 'nice to have' features.
As to those who've lost their email due to corrupted files... this happens to Outlook too. Just write a batch script to backup your mail folder once in a while. Problem solved.
And no, Gmail is not a viable alternative to a desktop mail client. Don't get me wrong, I think Google's services are great and I use Gmail for somethings, but having your entire email universe in Google's hands is foolish.
Anyway, I hope this announcement will mean some major upgrades to T bird and soon.
Have I missed the system requirements for this game. My computer can barely handle HL2ep2 and dies on Bioshock... so I really hope this isn't as graphically intense. From what I've seen it doesn't look like it- no reflective water or smoke effects or what ever... but I'd like to know in advance if I need a new graphics card.
You can tag content as 'inappropriate' and if it gets tagged by enough people it will be removed from the system. You can also approve what gets populated to your world. Read the article it describes this.
Your data isn't just in Facebook's servers, but also potentially those of all the third part apps you've ever added to your profile. I've stripped out all my personal info so my profile is bare bones... but it's kinda too late since I had it in there before.
Not just personal data, but your relationship to all your friends list. If you 'went to school with' so and so, then it's easy to find out what school you went to based on what school your friend went to. If you have cousins on there... odds are one of them has a last name the same as your mother's maiden name. Yeah... the 'how do you know this person' info is bad too.
There are tons of slashdotters who are very passionate about Linux and trying to encourage people to switch over from Windows to one of the nicer Distros.
That's nice. But DO something about.
If you tagged this article 'thisistheyear' and you really DO want this to be the year... then do something that will actually help:
- There has been alot of new Linux users who have experienced hostility and noobie bashing on Linux forums. So, why don't you step up and help noobies (like me) with their troubles without talking down to them or sending them to the man pages.
- Write professional, clear, tutorials geared to helping new Linux users figure out common tasks. Something like.. "this is how you did it in Windows... this is how you do it in Ubuntu".
- Provide in-person training to people you know. Hold the tech-speek.
Really, I tried to use Ubuntu on a new laptop, and after running into several issues and getting virtually spit on in the forums, I gave up. It's a shame.
I hope that this is the year... but let's actually help the cause!
You're right on when you observe that people don't like one single bit of change in their operating system. And that's not an attitude that applies to software in general, but rather a symptom of the fact that operating systems are supposed to be 'invisible'. Once I learn how to use it... I typically stop realizing that I'm using it, until it either crashes or slows down.
The operating system on a computer is like the background music in a movie. It enhances everything, but once you notice it... it has failed in it's purpose.
I have a friend who thought that the check box "Allow this application to know who I am and access my information" meant:
Allow it to know my name. Allow it to 'know' the info I put into the application itself. Ie, what I type INTO the funwall. She didn't know that it meant 'access my PROFILE information'.
I think this should be clarified to: "know who I am and access all of my profile information."
There isn't even any question here. If you do work for an employer, then they have paid you for your labour. So anything you did while working for them is owned by them 100%. No question unless you have a different agreement.
The only way you can legally and morally open source this project is if they give you ALL rights to it.
You would have to have them sign something like...
"ABC Company hereby releases all rights legal and otherwise, responsibility and liability for Software X (see definition below) to John Smith from this date - Feb 6, 2008 forward. Etc etc."
A lawyer could help you with this... or you could write it yourself and they would have their lawyers look over it.
Either way, you aren't able to touch this without a signed release - then keep copies of this in several safe places forever... because you know damn well that when this becomes the next big thing (if), then they'll be coming after a piece of your pie.
If I was American, I'd vote for which ever candidate has ACTUALLY read the Patriot Act. Anyone? Anyone? No? Oh right... only the person who typed it actually knows what it says.
Ok, then who is the strongest candidate AGAINST it?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait till you see how high Comcast and friends jack up the prices once all desktop publishing and more is done online, and everyone's files are no longer stored locally. Not to mention net TV and phone continuing to expand. Did anyone NOT see this coming?
The thing is, the ISPs are in the same situation that the North American auto companies are in. They twiddled their thumbs and failed to innovate and keep ahead of the trends, and now they're crying for handouts.
Boo hoo, Toyota got the jump on us, and we're losing market share. Boo hoo, we didn't pay attention when web content providers got creative and started offering heavier media.
When did North America lose it's drive to innovate? Push the boundries? The ISPs should have been upgrading the networks a decade ago.
Time to deregulate and let some foreign company with vision jump in and start laying fiber like it's... actually... in demand!
I'm less irate about the guy who had the painted black one getting a fine. But the bright orange and green toys? Come on. I would take this to court and challenge the police to prove that my lime-green, striped, roundy toy with the word NERF on the side is a facimile. And if so, arrest every 9 year old kid and give him a fine too. Prove it! This is crazy.
Those people exist. My last 2 jobs I suggested FOSS alternatives and the immediate response was "If we aren't paying for it, then we have no recourse to bitch at the supplier if something goes wrong."
Someone show me a real world weapon that looks like those nerf guns? How in the hell are they considered a facsimile?
For the same reason that I still think Commander Keen is fun. Shiny new-ness isn't necessarily better. Better graphics doesn't make a game more fun. If it works, don't fix it. At least the consumptive trend of planned obsolescence hasn't touched everything.
I completely agree with you. People may not be willing to pay the higher cost for clean energy, until the hidden costs of 'dirty' energy become more evident and impact their lives more directly. Notice the increased willingness to by more expensive hybrid cars now that people are more aware of the global pollution/warming issues? That will have to continue, along with more and more reports of rising health problems from pollution, etc.
The fact that joysticks haven't replaced steering wheels has nothing to do with people just not "getting into them".
Look at a joystick: you have about 1 or two inches of physical movement room from the center point to one side. Versus a wheel which you have to turn hand over hand through a full revolution or so to do a sharp turn.
Now imagine the difference between a slight nudge to avoid a pothole, versus doing a U-Turn. You can't expect people to restrict themselves to tiny millimeter movements while driving. People have a physical reaction to make a 'big' movement when avoiding being side-swiped. And people talk on the phone and juggle maps while driving (I'm not saying this is good). Can you imagine if a sneeze made you jostle the joystick of your car and it caused the thing to do a sharp turn at 100 km/h?
Crazy. The steering wheel is many times better for cars than a joystick. Not to mention that a joystick is a two dimensional controller and a wheel is a one dimensional controller.
Thank you! Wow, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one who gets this concept. Exactly, it's not all or nothing!
You're looking at it wrong.
Too often, the cost of energy is examined as just the $ that the consumer pays. By that measure, solar, is much more expensive than oil/coal/nuclear for example, and getting it below that cost may be close to impossible.
But, that price of the coal/oil/nuclear is not the REAL price of that form of energy. Much of the costs are offloaded onto the environments they are drawn from in the form of damage and pollution. Other costs are offloaded onto the people who live where the resources are mined in the form of land loss and damage, and low wages.
It is also offloaded as risk. Nuclear is cleaner, but you have greater risk. Risk of an attack/failure at the reactor, risk of what will happen to the waste for the next several thousand generations, risk with the radioactive fuel materials falling into the wrong hands. Etc. These may have higher or lower probabilities but they exist.
So yes, coal/oil/nuclear are cheaper in dollars and cents, but not cheaper when you factor in the hidden costs to society as a whole.
Moral of the story: as we move to cleaner energy sources in the future, the dollar cost may be higher, but there will be fewer hidden costs.
Oh my god, it sounds like something out of Orwell's 1984. Complete with made up words for things, invasion of privacy and 'big brother' constantly watching. This site was an eye-opener for sure!
How does this contradict with a recent article that says that fewer people actually buy from web advertisements than recently though and that the demographic that clicks on web ads is typically the less educated people with less money or inclination to shop online? (paraphrasing here).
They can target their ads all they want, but I still ignore them.
I increasingly see advertising as an intrusion into my life. I rely more and more on Adblock, and I prefer TV shows on DVD. But as I get more clever, the advertisements get more and more insidious. Now they are popped up on the TV screen during the actual show in the lower corner. Or the radio DJ starts plugging a 'sponsor' or product and I catch myself listening b/c it's the DJ's voice and I'm expecting a news report or something. And don't get me started on the insanity of paying $10 to go to the movie theater, and watch 5-10 minutes of adverts before the movie starts. Arg!
Really, I think this is going to backlash very soon. I hope.
Wrong. This is not at all like yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater. If you did that the worst that would happen is people near you would look over with a startled/angry face and notice there's no fire and wouldn't get up. The people farther away would see that people near you aren't getting up so they wouldn't get up. You'd make a few angry and/or startled people.
What this kid is doing is costing LOTS of taxpayer dollars (my dollars), taking emergency personnel away from potentially real emergencies, risking lives, scaring the people who get busted in on, and making emergency personnel a bit less likely to jump when the next legit call comes in. It's much more than a prank.
Difficult to program in?? Try figuring out how to use a certian function or class in .Net and you have to navigate the *horrid* MSDN site. Conversely the PHP.net site is fast, easy to search and navigate, and has tons and tons of helpful user comments on each item. I haven't found anything that comes anywhere close to the online PHP.net reference for any other language I've used.
.net users face (I was one last month) when getting set up. Configuring their own PC, the IDE, all the libraries and packages and then getting Visual Studio set up. Compared to PHP, you grab a cheap PHP web hosting provider and a friggin text editor or the IDE of your choice and you're running a hello-world in under 10 minutes.
Add to that, the massive headache that new
Add to that the massive library of FREE addons, libraries, scripts and opensource projects that you can learn from or incorporate... and I'd say the massive number of PHP newbies out there indicates how EASY it is to use. Did I mention free? And open - as in not tied to the whims of one corporation.
I'll refrain from listing good IDEs since I see another responder has done so.
From what I can tell, it is equivalent to having each of your PHP pages include a header and footer into each page. There are also various PHP templating engines that do this for you in various ways, including features like caching. Check out Smarty and Pear.
The "Nothing To Hide" argument was effectively addressed and invalidated by Daniel J. Solove in:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID998565_code249137.pdf?abstractid=998565&mirid=1
I think originally learned about this article on an old Slashdot story...
Ah yes, here it is: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2054219
Wow, that AS 7007 incident story was interesting. Kinda makes me think the internet is more vulnerable to global 'attack' than I thought before....
Hopefully this will mean that some /actual/ progress will be made on Thunderbird. I've been using it for years and I do like it, but the Lightening calendar add on is terrible, and it lacks some 'nice to have' features.
As to those who've lost their email due to corrupted files... this happens to Outlook too. Just write a batch script to backup your mail folder once in a while. Problem solved.
And no, Gmail is not a viable alternative to a desktop mail client. Don't get me wrong, I think Google's services are great and I use Gmail for somethings, but having your entire email universe in Google's hands is foolish.
Anyway, I hope this announcement will mean some major upgrades to T bird and soon.
Have I missed the system requirements for this game. My computer can barely handle HL2ep2 and dies on Bioshock... so I really hope this isn't as graphically intense. From what I've seen it doesn't look like it- no reflective water or smoke effects or what ever... but I'd like to know in advance if I need a new graphics card.
You can tag content as 'inappropriate' and if it gets tagged by enough people it will be removed from the system. You can also approve what gets populated to your world. Read the article it describes this.
Your data isn't just in Facebook's servers, but also potentially those of all the third part apps you've ever added to your profile. I've stripped out all my personal info so my profile is bare bones... but it's kinda too late since I had it in there before.
Not just personal data, but your relationship to all your friends list. If you 'went to school with' so and so, then it's easy to find out what school you went to based on what school your friend went to. If you have cousins on there... odds are one of them has a last name the same as your mother's maiden name. Yeah... the 'how do you know this person' info is bad too.
There are tons of slashdotters who are very passionate about Linux and trying to encourage people to switch over from Windows to one of the nicer Distros.
That's nice. But DO something about.
If you tagged this article 'thisistheyear' and you really DO want this to be the year... then do something that will actually help:
- There has been alot of new Linux users who have experienced hostility and noobie bashing on Linux forums. So, why don't you step up and help noobies (like me) with their troubles without talking down to them or sending them to the man pages.
- Write professional, clear, tutorials geared to helping new Linux users figure out common tasks. Something like.. "this is how you did it in Windows... this is how you do it in Ubuntu".
- Provide in-person training to people you know. Hold the tech-speek.
Really, I tried to use Ubuntu on a new laptop, and after running into several issues and getting virtually spit on in the forums, I gave up. It's a shame.
I hope that this is the year... but let's actually help the cause!
You're right on when you observe that people don't like one single bit of change in their operating system. And that's not an attitude that applies to software in general, but rather a symptom of the fact that operating systems are supposed to be 'invisible'. Once I learn how to use it... I typically stop realizing that I'm using it, until it either crashes or slows down.
The operating system on a computer is like the background music in a movie. It enhances everything, but once you notice it... it has failed in it's purpose.
I have a friend who thought that the check box "Allow this application to know who I am and access my information" meant:
Allow it to know my name. Allow it to 'know' the info I put into the application itself. Ie, what I type INTO the funwall. She didn't know that it meant 'access my PROFILE information'.
I think this should be clarified to: "know who I am and access all of my profile information."
There isn't even any question here. If you do work for an employer, then they have paid you for your labour. So anything you did while working for them is owned by them 100%. No question unless you have a different agreement.
The only way you can legally and morally open source this project is if they give you ALL rights to it.
You would have to have them sign something like...
"ABC Company hereby releases all rights legal and otherwise, responsibility and liability for Software X (see definition below) to John Smith from this date - Feb 6, 2008 forward. Etc etc."
A lawyer could help you with this... or you could write it yourself and they would have their lawyers look over it.
Either way, you aren't able to touch this without a signed release - then keep copies of this in several safe places forever... because you know damn well that when this becomes the next big thing (if), then they'll be coming after a piece of your pie.
If I was American, I'd vote for which ever candidate has ACTUALLY read the Patriot Act. Anyone? Anyone? No? Oh right... only the person who typed it actually knows what it says.
Ok, then who is the strongest candidate AGAINST it?