Many cookie-ridden websites nowdays still force client browsers to send all site/domain cookies for every request to static content. This is a much bigger problem, esp. in the age of asymmetric (DSL) connections.
For example, the numerous images slashdot uses for the design are all on the.slashdot.org domain, for which my browser has 7 cookies stored (some of them from Google Analytics, one of the biggest culprits). This means that for each request (even HEAD) to these images and other static content, all those cookies are sent to the slashdot servers, wasting precious outgoing ("upload") bandwidth.
People are simply becoming more stupid. In 50 years you'll have to adapt the Turing Test so that even ELIZA would pass.
I'm pretty sure that most bots already handle "they're" vs. "their" and "there" much better than their human counterparts. Perhaps it's better to build common grammatical and spelling mistakes into bots to convince judges (who, incidentally, also seem to be getting more stupid each year).;-P
not really
Most pr0n sites there have a small thing on the bottom that says that your name will not be given out to other entities (other sites, gov't, random people)
You must be kidding... First and foremost, they don't have to. Law enforcement agencies have a multitude of ways to track such uses and transactions without the site owner cooperating or knowing it. Furthermore, they might just be lying, esp. since they are often forced to hand out such information when it's requested by authorities due to legislation.
but the whole fight against CP is symbolic and based upon morality. It is not doing much for the actual victims.
I don't even think it is based upon morality, it's more about control and making it easier for the public to swallow legislation that restricts citizens' rights. The recipe is very simple: if you want to control people "offline", make them be afraid of bombs and use terrorism to scare them into submission. If you want to control them "online", use CP.
By paying to access these sites, people are paying for more content, and therefore paying for more children to be abused.
So, if those websites are not restricted to paying customers, they will not be blocked?
I think you have it backwards there, people who actually pay for that stuff are tracked down easily and make up good headlines (well received by the public), so the government would be very interested in keeping these websites online to bait them.
There's huge value in any website with millions of daily visitors.
That is true, it means that most of these visitors get what they wanted. However, it also means a huge cost (most of the time) and not everything that has value can be turned into a healthy business.
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years?;-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
It may not have the best keyboard as I found out after purchasing one, but the fact that it is completely fanless (thus noiseless) and the battery lasts 5 hours easily with WLAN on, makes more than up for it...
People who have good ideas and the capability and motivation to evolve and refine them, usually aren't employees. They are entrepreneurs (or kook heads working in their garages).
If you are very lucky and actually have one of these rare geniuses as employees, they will not need special motivation to lay their ideas at your feet, they will due it out of joy / because they think it's appropriate and needs to be done, unless they really hate their job.
Also, do not underestimate the effect of an honest reaction to a worthless idea. Even if they agree with you, people take offense at being confronted with the reality of half-assed ideas or their own finite capability in general. So don't even start asking for ideas (from those people who don't bring them by themselves) if you can't keep a straight face while telling them how great their worthless idea is.
It's a very common delusion that if you just feed and treat your employees well, they will love you enough to give you more than you're paying them for, ingenious ideas that will fatten your wallet while they will get a tiny bonus. They won't - we live in a capitalist world and both creative and selfless employees are scarce, while jealousy is omnipresent. It's not nice, but it's their right, just like it is yours (as an employer) to reconsider at any moment whether you're getting from them what you're paying for.
Are you really suggesting they should throw away all that work, re-writing large portions of their game engine, putting actual improvements on hold, rather than use an already-written runtime layer that allows them to use their existing code?
Most of their client was not even changed since it used only DX7 or DX8 and it's terrible. Some parts of it still freeze until data arrives from the network, so the UI stops working when there is lag. It does not seem to use many actual DX9 features that would be hard to port though. It wouldn't surprise me if they used custom drawing routines (i.e. writing directly to the frame buffer) for most things, including all of the UI.
So why should a game company pay a bunch of developers full time for a year to port the game? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars they will *never* make back on a market like that.
EVE is a niche game, it could easily find a few 1000s more customers among Linux users who have nearly no choice in the MMOG market.
For a company with 300+ employees, how hard can it be to write a client with native Linux support? Even Vendetta Online has one and EVE uses Python mostly on the client side (= portable).
CCP is yet another Windows shop that would rather throw a lot of money at a crummy DirectX wrapper than look over the fence and embrace native Linux development.
Sure, browsers suck, but what options do we have?
on
The Case Against Web Apps
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
you want to use one of the modern scripting languages for rapid development of your application - what cross-platform UI, installer, updater do you use? Will the scarce options you have result in an application that doesn't suck as much as a typical AJAX application?
if your app needs network access, will your users have to configure their firewalls, socks proxies, port numbers and will it be as easy for them as just going through HTTP (possibly through a "hostile environment" MSIE.dll)?
do you have the resources to support a multitude of older versions of your app, used by people who did not bother or want or manage to update to the latest version?
what will you do about the competition that decompiles/uses parts of your application written in Perl/Ruby/Python/...? Security by obscurity?
I hate crappy AJAX GUIs as much as everyone else, but I also know that writing a decent "offline" application in a suitable language takes at least one order of magnitude more effort - and that is before you attempt to implement some of the features every web app has naturally (automatic updating etc.).
It's convenient to rant about the stuff we use every day, but when was the last time *you* wrote and supported a non-web based, cross-platform application with GUI and had first hand experience with all the problems involved? Nowdays we're all spoilt web developers, aren't we...
Finally, the formerly democratic governments have realized that the voter does not punish legislation (and illegal actions on behalf of the government agencies that are legalized later) against his own interests and now they are beginning to exploit it.
I am opposed to elitism in general, but people who are so easily manipulated with FUD tactics and those who think voting expresses only ideological affinity, should not be allowed to vote.
FOSS is not demand-driven unfortunately, so higher demand due to a recession does not mean the projects will flourish. On the contrary, the FOSS contributors might no longer be able to provide their time and money due to economic difficulties.
IMHO, FOSS just needs a lot more guidance, direction, focus, leadership. Experimentation and ad hoc development are good, but the net output is still subpar. We could have fewer, but much better apps with all the manpower spent on FOSS.
I think they forgot to choose one. My recommendation: Cherry 4400 series (with trackball). Compact, feels solid, can take a beating. Any better (affordable) suggestions?
Who organized this shit? Usability experts my ass!
After so many years of thriving from selling people inferior and broken products, my guess is that they would be using comedians. They have every reason to make fun of their customers.
The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features: 'Audioscrobbler,'
I'd say they surpassed Pandora only because Pandora locked out all non-US users a while back. For people who just wanted to listen to music and find out about new artists, Pandora was so much better IMO, last.fm has a clunky, overloaded UI and is too much like myspace...
It's in most cases actually cheaper to pay two part-time employees than one full-time. For one, you are paying the same hourly rate regardless of how many checks you write. You pay for 60 hours of work, it's the same amount if you pay one person or if you pay three. Also, part-time gets no overtime, so no wage increase. Part-time also gets no benefits or stock options and such-like.
Not really. In some countries (like Austria) there are always per-employee taxes/fees and you have to consider all the overhead of having possibly multiple desks / PCs / telephones / wiring / per-user licenses / keycards (together with the costs of servicing these components as well as e-mail etc. for more users). Other related costs include the cost per paycheck (accounting), the cost/overhead of coordinating more people (up to needing more administrative/management staff when your teams become too big) etc. etc.... And whether part-time gets no benefits / stock options is more related to the kind of job / company than to the number of hours per week.
... but if your boss needs a particular amount of work done, it may be a lot more expensive for him to achieve that with 2 (or 3) part-time workers. Also, part-time sometimes means "partly committed" as well (or busy working on something else). Being your own boss may be a good solution, but it could also be the road to the 70-100 hour week hell.;-)
Generally, investing into hardware will usually mean more people with salaries like programmers' on the payroll (designing the architecture, the maintenance tools, installing the software and hardware, keeping it running...). A lot of these things can be automated / done with little effort, but it takes someone as competent (and expensive) as a good programmer to get it right.
In the long run, your best investment is still the good programmer, as long as you can keep him happy and productive, because then you can grow more/faster (by buying hardware as well).
There is really no large qualitative or quantitative difference between e-mail spam and targeted ads nowdays. Both account for a lot of traffic, both are usually not appealing nor desired (targeted ads being generally more intrusive). Why does e-mail spam have a so much worse reputation? Because it's limited to a few daring advertisers I suppose (and you can't have that advertising spot!).
No, it should work like any other kind of URLs i.e. <img src=http://blah.foo/image.jpg.torrent> should work and embed the image directly. AFAIK Opera just has a built-in downloader but no seamless support like this (correct me if I'm wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
For example, the numerous images slashdot uses for the design are all on the .slashdot.org domain, for which my browser has 7 cookies stored (some of them from Google Analytics, one of the biggest culprits). This means that for each request (even HEAD) to these images and other static content, all those cookies are sent to the slashdot servers, wasting precious outgoing ("upload") bandwidth.
I'm pretty sure that most bots already handle "they're" vs. "their" and "there" much better than their human counterparts. Perhaps it's better to build common grammatical and spelling mistakes into bots to convince judges (who, incidentally, also seem to be getting more stupid each year). ;-P
not really Most pr0n sites there have a small thing on the bottom that says that your name will not be given out to other entities (other sites, gov't, random people)
You must be kidding ... First and foremost, they don't have to. Law enforcement agencies have a multitude of ways to track such uses and transactions without the site owner cooperating or knowing it. Furthermore, they might just be lying, esp. since they are often forced to hand out such information when it's requested by authorities due to legislation.
but the whole fight against CP is symbolic and based upon morality. It is not doing much for the actual victims.
I don't even think it is based upon morality, it's more about control and making it easier for the public to swallow legislation that restricts citizens' rights. The recipe is very simple: if you want to control people "offline", make them be afraid of bombs and use terrorism to scare them into submission. If you want to control them "online", use CP.
By paying to access these sites, people are paying for more content, and therefore paying for more children to be abused.
So, if those websites are not restricted to paying customers, they will not be blocked?
I think you have it backwards there, people who actually pay for that stuff are tracked down easily and make up good headlines (well received by the public), so the government would be very interested in keeping these websites online to bait them.
There's huge value in any website with millions of daily visitors.
That is true, it means that most of these visitors get what they wanted. However, it also means a huge cost (most of the time) and not everything that has value can be turned into a healthy business.
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years? ;-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
It may not have the best keyboard as I found out after purchasing one, but the fact that it is completely fanless (thus noiseless) and the battery lasts 5 hours easily with WLAN on, makes more than up for it ...
We could also add the news media, for reporting this story, thus telling people how to get the stuff.
You might succeed in Germany, where heise was sued successfully for putting a link to Slysoft's website in a story about Slysoft...
If you are very lucky and actually have one of these rare geniuses as employees, they will not need special motivation to lay their ideas at your feet, they will due it out of joy / because they think it's appropriate and needs to be done, unless they really hate their job.
Also, do not underestimate the effect of an honest reaction to a worthless idea. Even if they agree with you, people take offense at being confronted with the reality of half-assed ideas or their own finite capability in general. So don't even start asking for ideas (from those people who don't bring them by themselves) if you can't keep a straight face while telling them how great their worthless idea is.
It's a very common delusion that if you just feed and treat your employees well, they will love you enough to give you more than you're paying them for, ingenious ideas that will fatten your wallet while they will get a tiny bonus. They won't - we live in a capitalist world and both creative and selfless employees are scarce, while jealousy is omnipresent. It's not nice, but it's their right, just like it is yours (as an employer) to reconsider at any moment whether you're getting from them what you're paying for.
Are you really suggesting they should throw away all that work, re-writing large portions of their game engine, putting actual improvements on hold, rather than use an already-written runtime layer that allows them to use their existing code?
Most of their client was not even changed since it used only DX7 or DX8 and it's terrible. Some parts of it still freeze until data arrives from the network, so the UI stops working when there is lag. It does not seem to use many actual DX9 features that would be hard to port though. It wouldn't surprise me if they used custom drawing routines (i.e. writing directly to the frame buffer) for most things, including all of the UI.
Sound is kind of important for games.
definetely not for EVE ...
So why should a game company pay a bunch of developers full time for a year to port the game? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars they will *never* make back on a market like that.
EVE is a niche game, it could easily find a few 1000s more customers among Linux users who have nearly no choice in the MMOG market.
CCP is yet another Windows shop that would rather throw a lot of money at a crummy DirectX wrapper than look over the fence and embrace native Linux development.
I hate crappy AJAX GUIs as much as everyone else, but I also know that writing a decent "offline" application in a suitable language takes at least one order of magnitude more effort - and that is before you attempt to implement some of the features every web app has naturally (automatic updating etc.).
It's convenient to rant about the stuff we use every day, but when was the last time *you* wrote and supported a non-web based, cross-platform application with GUI and had first hand experience with all the problems involved? Nowdays we're all spoilt web developers, aren't we ...
I am opposed to elitism in general, but people who are so easily manipulated with FUD tactics and those who think voting expresses only ideological affinity, should not be allowed to vote.
IMHO, FOSS just needs a lot more guidance, direction, focus, leadership. Experimentation and ad hoc development are good, but the net output is still subpar. We could have fewer, but much better apps with all the manpower spent on FOSS.
I think they forgot to choose one. My recommendation: Cherry 4400 series (with trackball). Compact, feels solid, can take a beating. Any better (affordable) suggestions?
Avatars interacting in a 3D virtual world etc. ... When will the USPTO stop being so dumb?
Who organized this shit? Usability experts my ass!
After so many years of thriving from selling people inferior and broken products, my guess is that they would be using comedians. They have every reason to make fun of their customers.
The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features: 'Audioscrobbler,'
I'd say they surpassed Pandora only because Pandora locked out all non-US users a while back. For people who just wanted to listen to music and find out about new artists, Pandora was so much better IMO, last.fm has a clunky, overloaded UI and is too much like myspace ...
It's in most cases actually cheaper to pay two part-time employees than one full-time. For one, you are paying the same hourly rate regardless of how many checks you write. You pay for 60 hours of work, it's the same amount if you pay one person or if you pay three. Also, part-time gets no overtime, so no wage increase. Part-time also gets no benefits or stock options and such-like.
Not really. In some countries (like Austria) there are always per-employee taxes/fees and you have to consider all the overhead of having possibly multiple desks / PCs / telephones / wiring / per-user licenses / keycards (together with the costs of servicing these components as well as e-mail etc. for more users). Other related costs include the cost per paycheck (accounting), the cost/overhead of coordinating more people (up to needing more administrative/management staff when your teams become too big) etc. etc. ... And whether part-time gets no benefits / stock options is more related to the kind of job / company than to the number of hours per week.
... but if your boss needs a particular amount of work done, it may be a lot more expensive for him to achieve that with 2 (or 3) part-time workers. Also, part-time sometimes means "partly committed" as well (or busy working on something else). Being your own boss may be a good solution, but it could also be the road to the 70-100 hour week hell. ;-)
In the long run, your best investment is still the good programmer, as long as you can keep him happy and productive, because then you can grow more/faster (by buying hardware as well).
There is really no large qualitative or quantitative difference between e-mail spam and targeted ads nowdays. Both account for a lot of traffic, both are usually not appealing nor desired (targeted ads being generally more intrusive). Why does e-mail spam have a so much worse reputation? Because it's limited to a few daring advertisers I suppose (and you can't have that advertising spot!).
You mean like Opera already does?
No, it should work like any other kind of URLs i.e. <img src=http://blah.foo/image.jpg.torrent> should work and embed the image directly. AFAIK Opera just has a built-in downloader but no seamless support like this (correct me if I'm wrong).