There's nothing you can do right now to automatically "switch on" IPv6 across your whole Internet-connected network. There is effort involved because practically nothing supports it out of the box. (Read the zillion chick-and-egg comments in this and every other IPv6 article.) If using IPv6 were easy right now, this Slashdot article--and all of the other ones before it--wouldn't exist.
I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things. I thought about it a bit, and decided that I would go ahead and do the project myself.
Can you imagine doing a simple port of a trivial (but classic) game that nearly everyone has forgotten about and then missing that one email from John Effing Carmack himself saying, "hey, want to work with me on this?"
Somewhere there is a developer kicking himself HARD for not checking his sourceforge email account.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
They probably scrapped the plan because more elaborate engineering is often mutually exclusive with better engineering. Think about the incredible amount of development, tests, money, and materials it would take to design a rocket booster that flies itself back home versus just bolting a few parachutes on.
UAVs are still fairly tricky with today's technology and those contain about 1/10th the sophistication of these flyback boosters you speak of.
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why don't they do this?
This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes.
sudo apt-get install wordpress
Oooooh yeah, that *was* difficult!
Also, this isn't Microsoft copying Apple as much as it's copying Fantastico. Fantastico (when combined with cPanel) has had the "point and click to install your web app" thing down for year. Proprietary, yes. Buggy, yes. But it works and is a standard feature on any decent commercial Linux webhosting account.
The wife and I just started watching BSG based on all the positive talk we've been hearing about it. We're on season 1, episode 7 or something.
I have to say so far, it's a metric shitload better than Stargate. However, we have a couple of concerns. It seems the writers are being overly obtuse about things. I have no problem pondering plot twists and various character motives, but they're way too obvious about the fact that they're holding back 90% of the information about what's going on. For instance, they haven't yet told us what life was like before the cylons arrived, how they encountered humans in the first place, or what the fuck is going on with that Caprica place. I know that some of the history should remain hidden so as to exploit it in future episodes, but c'mon.
Also, it seems like its taking an extremely long time to get to know the characters, even the "good guys". It's the first sci-fi show I've ever seen that instead of trying to immerse you in the story, deliberately keeps you at bay while spoon-feeding you tiny scraps of information at a time. Watching BSG is like overhearing an argument where you can only discern the occasional word clearly enough to get the faintest grasp of what the debate is about. When it's over, you're left unsure of what exactly transpired while wondering if you'll ever find out.
The funny part is that people bitch about IE plugins and love firefox plugins.
Plugins != extensions. Plugins are for inserting additional content into web pages (Flash, Java, etc). Extensions modify the browser to provide additional functionality of the browser itself (blocking ads, adding new buttons, doing funky things with bookmarks, etc).
The summary (whether correct or not, I didn't RTFA) is implying that IE8 has no capability for extensions, not that it has no capability for plugins like ActiveX or Flash. Trust me, MS is not about to release a browser that can't support Flash, Java, or whatever.NET/silverlight stuff is popular this month.
Explain to me how Firefox is bloated. Compared to what? Its former self? Other browsers?
Yes, it's bloated compared to other browsers. In terms of speed, anyway. These days, nobody really cares that a browser can be downloaded in a 10MB package instead of 15MB and with hard drives in the hundreds of GB, they care even less about how much disk space it uses. But if you want to talk speed, Firefox and its predecessor have always been slower than Opera, IE, Konqueror, Safari, Chrome, and even other Gecko-based browsers with similar features.
I'll grant you that FireFox 3 made huge improvements, but ever since the first version of Mozilla was released, it and Firefox have always lagged substantially when it came to startup time, rendering speed, and scrolling speed. I'm no programmer, but if I had to guess, I'd say that its due to the abstraction libraries used in creating the interface. I use Galeon at work (based on the Firefox 2's Gecko engine) because on my slow machine there, it runs circles around Firefox 3 on our internal database applications. (Huge pages, lots of records and tables.)
The only thing keeping me married to Firefox for general-purpose browsing is the availability of excellent plugins like AdBlock Plus. If I could have the same functionality on a faster browser, I'd take it.
I think what I said applies to the banking sector as well. Plenty of banks have already folded, many more will, and the government is propping up some of the larger ones artificially despite the fact that they were the ones responsible for the economic mess.
However, not all banks are going to fail. The ones that have sold reasonable mortgages and didn't engage in trading toxic assets will come out of this okay and they are the only ones that deserve to, even if that puts a pinch on individuals and businesses that relied on the bad banks for their loans.
Edit your hosts file (theres even one for Windows), and put in all adservers to redirect to localhost. There. No ads, similarly, no extra bloat from Adblock. Plus, it works on whatever, e-mail, browsers, etc.
While somewhat effective, that's a very crude way of blocking ads. Adblock can block ads and other content based on regular expressions (for example, */ads/*) and can auto-subscribe to a regularly-updated blocklist. I especially like how you can pretty much click on a particular element and say, "here, block this" whether it's an ad or not. And it doesn't really add any noticeable bloat to the browser. My only gripe is that it doesn't support more browsers.
I drove an MG for several years and became a better driver for it. And "driver" is the word. People nowadays expect their automobiles to be living rooms on wheels so it is no wonder they don't have a sense of "road feel".
Absolutely correct. There's a long-held American myth that a big vehicle is inherently a safer one when in fact the exact opposite is true. Consumer Reports did a great article on this. In a small car, you're closer to the road. You get a much better sense of how fast you're going and what it will mean if you make a mistake. On top of that, small cars have much better handling capabilities due to a low center of mass.
By contrast, in a big truck or SUV, handling is far worse because the center of mass is higher. The suspension gives the driver no feedback on the road or poor handling because it's designed to insulate the driver as much as possible from the outside to make them more "comfortable." In making the driver more comfortable, they've removed the biggest impetus for responsible driving: the fear of losing your life at any given moment by making the slightest mistake.
In the article, they took the journalist and had him run an "obstacle course" in both an Escalade and a Porsche and afterwards asked him which one he'd rather be driving his kids around in if safety were the only concern. He picked the Porsche hands-down. Not only did the car force him to adopt safer driving habits due to the real-world feedback it gave, but its responsive handling and braking allowed him to avoid potential collisions far easier.
Yeah, getting into an actual collision might be worse for the occupants of the Porsche, but I'll happily take option of avoiding more collisions altogether.
So, kudos to Dell. But let's face it: the real credit belongs to Apple who forced everyone to adopt a higher standard.
Hmm. If by higher standards you mean aesthetic looks, then sure. But the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad has always held the lead in durability and overall engineering. Problem is, they never marketed it outside of the business world. If they did, it wouldn't matter anyway because in the consumer market, "looks cool" takes precedence over "works well".
Every single person I know who has seen a MacBook Air in person has said they liked it, but would be too afraid of breaking it if they actually owned one.
I think this is Dell actually trying to compete on something other than pure sales volume for once.
Circuit City died because their business motto was "screw the customer" we will see a whole lot more businesses die in the water this year simply because they have the same attitude.
I heard a guy on BBC Radio last night say something that rang very true: recessions are good for business and society overall because the strong companies with good management and a solid business model prevail while weak businesses who were simply taking advantage of a previously thriving market die off. Sure, even the best businesses in the world will take a hit on sales in a recession, but the really good ones will come out leaner and stronger with a significant lead that will put them ahead of the competition when the economy bounces back. We saw this exact thing during the dot-com crash. The companies that had actual value emerged as leaders in their market while the overvalued ones with no product to show for their millions of capital died a horrible death.
(Now if our government would just let capitalism do it's job, we would see this happen in the financial and automotive industries as well.)
It's all just a matter of priorities. Some folks think spending over $10,000 on a car is dumb, others see spending more than $500 on a computer, or more than $50 on a video card is stupid. For anyone who thinks that spending $1,500 on a pair of headphones is crazy, the simple fact is that you're not the intended audience.
Couldn't agree more. I'm one of those in the group that thinks spending $1,500 on headphones is crazy. As an example, my favorite headphones don't cost $1,500. Or even $500 or $100. My favorite headphones cost $40. ($20 if you get them on sale.) I've been buying this brand of headphone for about 12 years. They keep changing the name and model number, but the speakers are the same after each iteration. Also the "titanium membrane" is always clearly marked as a bullet-point. I believe the current version is here.
Yes, I know. Every "audiophile" or "audio geek" or "music aficionado" or what-have-you would point and laugh at headphones like these, based on the fact that they're A) low-priced, B) made cheaply and B) come from RatShack of all places. And I'm going to agree with those premises because they're not wrong. The headphones also have pretty generic design to them, the wires tend to stiffen up and get brittle after a couple of years, and the headband is so tight that your ears hurt after about two hours of use. There's no noise cancellation, no external sound isolation, and certainly no donut-shaped speaker.
But even so, they still sound damned good. No, they aren't going to knock your socks off, but I've personally tried a few $100 and $200 headphones and many of those still don't quite match up to my titanium-diaphragmed cheapies. I look at it this way: I use my headphones for entertainment. I can enjoy music and movies without being bothered about whether I'm missing some hard-to-define nearly-subsonic nuance of the sound.
What really kills me is the people who buy nice big expensive headphones and then proceed to use them for listening to lossy audio formats like MP3, AAC, and whatever ships on most commercial DVDs.
Not just because it's absolutely awesome to download horror films in a field somewhere and watch them on a real screen, but because it would force mobile phone service providers to offer it as a consumerland option.
But you have to remember who controls the features available to individual iPhone buyers. I'll give you a hint: it isn't Apple.
You'll find what you look for in life. If you're looking for whiny unrealistic brats, that's what you'll see. If you look for hard-working joes, that's what you'll find.
Arg. I'm tired of every other person who tries another VCS (especially Mercurial or git) and then goes spouting off, "man that Subversion is utter shit, useless for anything."
I'm sorry, but Subversion is a very nice tool and works just fine for a very large number of people. I use Subversion for managing my code, web sites, and other projects. I have a single "master" repository that I check projects into and out of. That repository is backed up locally, and then remotely every night. I can give people anonymous access to parts of it easily, I can create accounts for others to work on certain projects. Centralized version control ensures that I have one place to go for the bulk of my code and other work.
Just because Subversion doesn't work for your particular use case doesn't mean it needs to be entirely discarded. Some of us are quite happy with it.
You mean like laws that prevent shoplifting? What about laws that prevent other cable companys laying copper in your city? What about the laws that prevent people from broadcasting on any frequency? Do you see? I can't think of a single business model that would survive if there were no rules at all.
I said artificially. Ask random people whether it's wrong to shoplift, or to take or use something that doesn't belong to them. they'll say yes every time. Ask people whether it's wrong to take apart an appliance that you own to see how it works or make it work better and they'll say no. I'm not advocating anarchy here, I'm saying that the DMCA is a dumb law that discourages curiosity, research, communication, and the basic geek instinct all because a handful of companies got a bunch of politicians to believe that their profits were more important than citizens' rights.
Re:The original content has to come from somewhere
on
So Amazing, So Illegal
·
· Score: 1
I personally think Kitoboy's accomplishment here is more one of editing than one of actual creating. Still, an enormous amount of work went into it, if not creativity.
I wish more people had this perspective. Many of the clips that Kitoboy used seemed to be of people playing very standard chords and rhythms. Sure, they may have serious musical talent, but even if they did, it wouldn't matter. Kitoboy used his talent in making the video/song and it is a unique piece of art, even if the source material came from others. As a blatantly incomplete analogy, a lot of work and science went into creating paint of various colors over the centuries, but the paint makers aren't the ones who are admired and remembered by history, the ones who used the paint are.
Also, I would like to vote to remove the word mashup from the blog/online community vocabulary. To mash something means to essentially pulverize it into a soft, mushy state. However, using existing objects, content, material, or code to create something new actually can take a good deal of skill and/or talent and does not in any way resemble the act of mashing.
Then again, I have considered issuing my tunes as open source (there's some places to do that online.)
Yeah, there are a bunch of "free music" sites. Also if you haven't heard about it yet, check out Creative Commons. They do open-source-like licenses for media and have taken care of all the hard work, you just pick the variant that works best for you and post your content somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing you can do right now to automatically "switch on" IPv6 across your whole Internet-connected network. There is effort involved because practically nothing supports it out of the box. (Read the zillion chick-and-egg comments in this and every other IPv6 article.) If using IPv6 were easy right now, this Slashdot article--and all of the other ones before it--wouldn't exist.
From Carmack's TFA:
Can you imagine doing a simple port of a trivial (but classic) game that nearly everyone has forgotten about and then missing that one email from John Effing Carmack himself saying, "hey, want to work with me on this?"
Somewhere there is a developer kicking himself HARD for not checking his sourceforge email account.
Well that would explain it. I had no idea that a miniseries preceded it the series proper. I'll have to seek that out. Thanks!
They probably scrapped the plan because more elaborate engineering is often mutually exclusive with better engineering. Think about the incredible amount of development, tests, money, and materials it would take to design a rocket booster that flies itself back home versus just bolting a few parachutes on.
UAVs are still fairly tricky with today's technology and those contain about 1/10th the sophistication of these flyback boosters you speak of.
I believe this is the word you're looking for.
"We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist."
Kinda sounds like religion in its entirety, once you cut to the heart of it.
Before you get too excited, note that "Colbert" won the online poll.
Which is a completely different thing than actually getting the space station module named after him.
sudo apt-get install wordpress
Oooooh yeah, that *was* difficult!
Also, this isn't Microsoft copying Apple as much as it's copying Fantastico. Fantastico (when combined with cPanel) has had the "point and click to install your web app" thing down for year. Proprietary, yes. Buggy, yes. But it works and is a standard feature on any decent commercial Linux webhosting account.
The wife and I just started watching BSG based on all the positive talk we've been hearing about it. We're on season 1, episode 7 or something.
I have to say so far, it's a metric shitload better than Stargate. However, we have a couple of concerns. It seems the writers are being overly obtuse about things. I have no problem pondering plot twists and various character motives, but they're way too obvious about the fact that they're holding back 90% of the information about what's going on. For instance, they haven't yet told us what life was like before the cylons arrived, how they encountered humans in the first place, or what the fuck is going on with that Caprica place. I know that some of the history should remain hidden so as to exploit it in future episodes, but c'mon.
Also, it seems like its taking an extremely long time to get to know the characters, even the "good guys". It's the first sci-fi show I've ever seen that instead of trying to immerse you in the story, deliberately keeps you at bay while spoon-feeding you tiny scraps of information at a time. Watching BSG is like overhearing an argument where you can only discern the occasional word clearly enough to get the faintest grasp of what the debate is about. When it's over, you're left unsure of what exactly transpired while wondering if you'll ever find out.
Fun game:
Ask your friends what the current stats are on their WoW character. Strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, etc.
Then ask them what their resting heart rate is. (Them, not the character.)
Plugins != extensions. Plugins are for inserting additional content into web pages (Flash, Java, etc). Extensions modify the browser to provide additional functionality of the browser itself (blocking ads, adding new buttons, doing funky things with bookmarks, etc).
The summary (whether correct or not, I didn't RTFA) is implying that IE8 has no capability for extensions, not that it has no capability for plugins like ActiveX or Flash. Trust me, MS is not about to release a browser that can't support Flash, Java, or whatever .NET/silverlight stuff is popular this month.
Yes, it's bloated compared to other browsers. In terms of speed, anyway. These days, nobody really cares that a browser can be downloaded in a 10MB package instead of 15MB and with hard drives in the hundreds of GB, they care even less about how much disk space it uses. But if you want to talk speed, Firefox and its predecessor have always been slower than Opera, IE, Konqueror, Safari, Chrome, and even other Gecko-based browsers with similar features.
I'll grant you that FireFox 3 made huge improvements, but ever since the first version of Mozilla was released, it and Firefox have always lagged substantially when it came to startup time, rendering speed, and scrolling speed. I'm no programmer, but if I had to guess, I'd say that its due to the abstraction libraries used in creating the interface. I use Galeon at work (based on the Firefox 2's Gecko engine) because on my slow machine there, it runs circles around Firefox 3 on our internal database applications. (Huge pages, lots of records and tables.)
The only thing keeping me married to Firefox for general-purpose browsing is the availability of excellent plugins like AdBlock Plus. If I could have the same functionality on a faster browser, I'd take it.
I think what I said applies to the banking sector as well. Plenty of banks have already folded, many more will, and the government is propping up some of the larger ones artificially despite the fact that they were the ones responsible for the economic mess.
However, not all banks are going to fail. The ones that have sold reasonable mortgages and didn't engage in trading toxic assets will come out of this okay and they are the only ones that deserve to, even if that puts a pinch on individuals and businesses that relied on the bad banks for their loans.
While somewhat effective, that's a very crude way of blocking ads. Adblock can block ads and other content based on regular expressions (for example, */ads/*) and can auto-subscribe to a regularly-updated blocklist. I especially like how you can pretty much click on a particular element and say, "here, block this" whether it's an ad or not. And it doesn't really add any noticeable bloat to the browser. My only gripe is that it doesn't support more browsers.
Absolutely correct. There's a long-held American myth that a big vehicle is inherently a safer one when in fact the exact opposite is true. Consumer Reports did a great article on this. In a small car, you're closer to the road. You get a much better sense of how fast you're going and what it will mean if you make a mistake. On top of that, small cars have much better handling capabilities due to a low center of mass.
By contrast, in a big truck or SUV, handling is far worse because the center of mass is higher. The suspension gives the driver no feedback on the road or poor handling because it's designed to insulate the driver as much as possible from the outside to make them more "comfortable." In making the driver more comfortable, they've removed the biggest impetus for responsible driving: the fear of losing your life at any given moment by making the slightest mistake.
In the article, they took the journalist and had him run an "obstacle course" in both an Escalade and a Porsche and afterwards asked him which one he'd rather be driving his kids around in if safety were the only concern. He picked the Porsche hands-down. Not only did the car force him to adopt safer driving habits due to the real-world feedback it gave, but its responsive handling and braking allowed him to avoid potential collisions far easier.
Yeah, getting into an actual collision might be worse for the occupants of the Porsche, but I'll happily take option of avoiding more collisions altogether.
Hmm. If by higher standards you mean aesthetic looks, then sure. But the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad has always held the lead in durability and overall engineering. Problem is, they never marketed it outside of the business world. If they did, it wouldn't matter anyway because in the consumer market, "looks cool" takes precedence over "works well".
Every single person I know who has seen a MacBook Air in person has said they liked it, but would be too afraid of breaking it if they actually owned one.
I think this is Dell actually trying to compete on something other than pure sales volume for once.
I heard a guy on BBC Radio last night say something that rang very true: recessions are good for business and society overall because the strong companies with good management and a solid business model prevail while weak businesses who were simply taking advantage of a previously thriving market die off. Sure, even the best businesses in the world will take a hit on sales in a recession, but the really good ones will come out leaner and stronger with a significant lead that will put them ahead of the competition when the economy bounces back. We saw this exact thing during the dot-com crash. The companies that had actual value emerged as leaders in their market while the overvalued ones with no product to show for their millions of capital died a horrible death.
(Now if our government would just let capitalism do it's job, we would see this happen in the financial and automotive industries as well.)
Is Slashdot turning into Hack a Day today, or what?
Couldn't agree more. I'm one of those in the group that thinks spending $1,500 on headphones is crazy. As an example, my favorite headphones don't cost $1,500. Or even $500 or $100. My favorite headphones cost $40. ($20 if you get them on sale.) I've been buying this brand of headphone for about 12 years. They keep changing the name and model number, but the speakers are the same after each iteration. Also the "titanium membrane" is always clearly marked as a bullet-point. I believe the current version is here.
Yes, I know. Every "audiophile" or "audio geek" or "music aficionado" or what-have-you would point and laugh at headphones like these, based on the fact that they're A) low-priced, B) made cheaply and B) come from RatShack of all places. And I'm going to agree with those premises because they're not wrong. The headphones also have pretty generic design to them, the wires tend to stiffen up and get brittle after a couple of years, and the headband is so tight that your ears hurt after about two hours of use. There's no noise cancellation, no external sound isolation, and certainly no donut-shaped speaker.
But even so, they still sound damned good. No, they aren't going to knock your socks off, but I've personally tried a few $100 and $200 headphones and many of those still don't quite match up to my titanium-diaphragmed cheapies. I look at it this way: I use my headphones for entertainment. I can enjoy music and movies without being bothered about whether I'm missing some hard-to-define nearly-subsonic nuance of the sound.
What really kills me is the people who buy nice big expensive headphones and then proceed to use them for listening to lossy audio formats like MP3, AAC, and whatever ships on most commercial DVDs.
But you have to remember who controls the features available to individual iPhone buyers. I'll give you a hint: it isn't Apple.
So the reality is whiny hard-working brats?
Arg. I'm tired of every other person who tries another VCS (especially Mercurial or git) and then goes spouting off, "man that Subversion is utter shit, useless for anything."
I'm sorry, but Subversion is a very nice tool and works just fine for a very large number of people. I use Subversion for managing my code, web sites, and other projects. I have a single "master" repository that I check projects into and out of. That repository is backed up locally, and then remotely every night. I can give people anonymous access to parts of it easily, I can create accounts for others to work on certain projects. Centralized version control ensures that I have one place to go for the bulk of my code and other work.
Just because Subversion doesn't work for your particular use case doesn't mean it needs to be entirely discarded. Some of us are quite happy with it.
I said artificially. Ask random people whether it's wrong to shoplift, or to take or use something that doesn't belong to them. they'll say yes every time. Ask people whether it's wrong to take apart an appliance that you own to see how it works or make it work better and they'll say no. I'm not advocating anarchy here, I'm saying that the DMCA is a dumb law that discourages curiosity, research, communication, and the basic geek instinct all because a handful of companies got a bunch of politicians to believe that their profits were more important than citizens' rights.
I personally think Kitoboy's accomplishment here is more one of editing than one of actual creating. Still, an enormous amount of work went into it, if not creativity.
I wish more people had this perspective. Many of the clips that Kitoboy used seemed to be of people playing very standard chords and rhythms. Sure, they may have serious musical talent, but even if they did, it wouldn't matter. Kitoboy used his talent in making the video/song and it is a unique piece of art, even if the source material came from others. As a blatantly incomplete analogy, a lot of work and science went into creating paint of various colors over the centuries, but the paint makers aren't the ones who are admired and remembered by history, the ones who used the paint are.
Also, I would like to vote to remove the word mashup from the blog/online community vocabulary. To mash something means to essentially pulverize it into a soft, mushy state. However, using existing objects, content, material, or code to create something new actually can take a good deal of skill and/or talent and does not in any way resemble the act of mashing.
Yeah, there are a bunch of "free music" sites. Also if you haven't heard about it yet, check out Creative Commons. They do open-source-like licenses for media and have taken care of all the hard work, you just pick the variant that works best for you and post your content somewhere.