I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
This is something that I see repeatedly when it comes to criticizing Linux. "I want to do X, and it doesn't [work as well|work at all]". Reply: "Why would you want to do that? That's not a good thing to do. You should do this instead." So in this: "I want to play a movie from disk, and the battery won't last." The response: "Don't play it from disk." This might be solving the user's immediate issue (if he has time/inclination to rip the disk ahead of time, and assuming that the battery isn't dying even when the DVD is not in use), but it also neatly avoids the need to address the actual problem (crap battery life).
I don't know that "jerkwad" is the right word, but "typical" surely is.
I have plenty of anecdotal evidence (5 laptops, 3 different people) that linux power management is really great. Maybe you just aren't doing it right?
But if poster can take the same laptop, and the same person, with the only difference being the OS that is installed.... maybe that's a bit more empirical than "5 laptops 3 different people"?
This post was generally full of speculation, but made me aware that there's a lot more I could be doing to add on protections to my general surfing.
There's really only one thing you need to do to "add protections". Ready? Don't click the dancing bunnies. Only download software from trusted locations, when it's something you're specifically seeking out. In my last 25 years of computing, I've managed to not get any viruses or trojans I did not actively want to install for research purposes. Malware scanning disabled,"safe surfing" and its annoying ilk disabled, and no antivirus except manual clamav scans once a month to make sure I didn't do something stupid.
All of the protections you can install, all of the blacklists you can use -- they're all a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
Because perhaps this is in fact news for nerds. Why a web browser, which is where most of us spend most our time, would not want to implement safety features is a great topic which merits debate. Seems like a cut and dried example of front page material to me.
If it were a concise, well-written article, then I would agree. As it stands, it's rambling, repetitive, and just a bit painful to read.
Have you considered the vast amount of collective time that's spent reverting childish edits that primarily occur on this category of page, the ones where we see a whole section of text replaced with "He sucks [insert choice word here]"? Or even better, the ones where people will insert random , plausible, and completely made-up sentences in the middle of a paragraph?
've never shared the willingness of those users to inform random strangers of their personal lives, names, hobbies, interests, personal or personally identifying photos, and general location
For what it's worth - I've been posting to twitter for a while now and never once revealed any of these things. I have, however, found a number of people who write excellent haiku and short, evocative poetry(And a much higher number who write very bad forms of the same). Many others who just have amusing things to say.
That's my real objection when people say it exists only to please the vanity of the people posting -- that may capture the majority of users, but far from all.
I think it's more a matter of both wanting to provide the information to anyone who's interested in seeing it; and not caring if it's visible to anyone not interested.
As far as whether it's a "because we can" feature, I don't see it. There are mobile clients that already append location to every tweet -- taking space in the message itself to do so. (google - site:twitter.com myloc.me -- this turns about 280,000 such posts from just that one site). So it seems to me that the folks at twitter are adding this based on actual usage today, and not just as a new shiny feature.
In advertising, you can claim to be the best at anything you want -- because it's basically assumed not be a reasonable statement. You cannot, however, claim to be better than anyone else unless you can prove it. Claiming to be the most populous MMO sounds good, and avoids them the trouble involved if they wanted to say "More populous than anyone else" -- because then they'd have to be able to prove it to avoid false advertising claims.
Re-reading your post, I'm still finding a fundamental assumption that it's successful based on the emotional appeal of its marketing, and not out of any inherent usefulness of the service itself. Am I wrong in seeing this assumption?
I never claimed that it was a neverending stream of wisdom that passed through twitter. Rather, that just because a lot of crap/does/ pass through, that's no reason to discount it as a service with inherent value. Babies and bathwater and all that.
Have you pointed out the failing or failure? I'm still waiting... because stating that you think something is useless doesn't qualify. We're all about facts here.
To make my question more specific: in which of those scenarios would you be disinclined to tell anyone your physical whereabouts and at the same time, would be glad that an automated system did this for you?
Tracking location of people you attend a conference with. Sharing a road trip with friends. Treasure hunts. The list goes on.
Just because you are unable to think of a use case -- or that such use cases are not personally important to you -- does not mean such a use case doesn't exist.
Let me rephrase your post, if I may presume: "I can't see a use for it, therefore it is not useful. Because so many other people find it useful in spite of this, it is a failing in them."
There are many, many more mobile java apps out there that don't require porting between platforms, because they're already on a standard platform. On the blackberry, speech recognition, GPS navigation, et all are all in java - and perform very well. Why have to make a custom compiled port for each platform, when you really can just "write once, run anywhere"? Not to mention the key word in your anti-"interpreted" diatribe: "closed". The supply of open source compiled apps for mobile devices is much smaller than J2ME/et al.
That being said: google/android just gives all that the big fat middle finger by not supporting the java mobile standards in the interest of establishing themselves as a standard. Ridiculous.
Alas, my friend. The Mac people have forgotten that they are Unix people. Or perhaps they have never known at all... Ah, the tragedy of it cuts me to the quick.
That's great in theory. In reality, if you can't prove you don't owe them, they don't stop (without sufficient threats of legal action that you then carry through). And even stopping them from calling you won't save your credit report.
Did you read TFS? This is about a bunch of private sector bill collectors harassing private citizens for debts they don't owe; because they can't tell the difference between US and Micronesian SSNs.
... also because the respective governments can't buy a clue, and refuse to do anything about the root cause of the situation (clash of SSN).
Especially if they keep it up after you have provided reasonable evidence that you don't owe them money.
Here's the problem - it's very hard to provide reasonable evidence here. Think about: every day, all day, these guys hear variations on excused, but one that they hear predominantly is "What? No, you've got the wrong person. I don't owe you money."
It's very hard to prove that you don't owe money - especially when they have documetnation that confirms you are the right person. Even though the documentation is flawed, how can you reasonably convince them of that -- keeping in mind that they hear "It wasn't me" all the time.
Sounds like I'm not expressing myself clearly. There are a theoretically infinite number of addresses that map to specific coordinates. A given set of directions that someone wants to link to will contain the source coordinates and one or more destination coordinates.
In order to provide a shortlink as described, every set of unique directions requested consisting of 2..n coordinates must be perpetually mapped to a shortlink that can be accessed directly for all time.
To make the same point using a different (and easier to follow) example, let's look at google search. In order to provide a shortlink for every set of search results, they would also have to save every unique query, and a shortlink resolution for it.
Now expand that to every site that wants to provide shortlinks, and you quickly see that this is not only cumbersome, but a huge burden for any site that allows posting of "Get" parameters as input that determines what is displayed.
Don't forget about the sites that use plain old static HTML - if they wanted to provide shortlinks, they would have to first create a link for each document; update each page of their site manually; then begin running a resolver service to resolve that shortlink to the correct HTML page.
The more I think about this, the more I am finding it's actually extremely irritating and presumptive. Because a subset of people think URL shorteners are a bad idea (or maybe it's only GP? I dunno), they're actively campaigning to have any web site that wants to provide short URLs implement a new standard. Meanwhile, in the real world, existing URL shorteners work exactly as intended -- no changes to web sites required.
Oh no - not hundreds of milliseconds! Anything but that, for a site I will use a shortener to visit one time in my life! Sounds to me like another case of "I don't understand why people want this, so nobody should have it".
Shortlink is a good idea for what it does - but it still puts the onus on the web site owner to create and permanently save a shortlink for every piece of content that can differ based on "get" parameters. When you're a google, that's a lot of latitudes and longitudes to have to retain forever.
The only argument I've heard against shorteners so far boils down to "but people can misuse it!" -- which in the end boils down to "this is For Your Own Good". Never something I've been particularly fond of - especially on the Internet.
I'm a little confused as to why you'd expect privacy from a public service that you can submit URLs to. It's not like someone says "Hey, yeah, sopssa gave us this URL! And thePowerOfGrayskull clicked on this one!" -- hence the word "aggregate". If you don't want the information you post publicly to be used, don't post it.
Secondarily I'm a little confused as to what you're replying to, since this has nothing to do with the GP post, but that's a whole separate issue.
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I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
This is something that I see repeatedly when it comes to criticizing Linux. "I want to do X, and it doesn't [work as well|work at all]". Reply: "Why would you want to do that? That's not a good thing to do. You should do this instead." So in this: "I want to play a movie from disk, and the battery won't last." The response: "Don't play it from disk." This might be solving the user's immediate issue (if he has time/inclination to rip the disk ahead of time, and assuming that the battery isn't dying even when the DVD is not in use), but it also neatly avoids the need to address the actual problem (crap battery life).
I don't know that "jerkwad" is the right word, but "typical" surely is.
I have plenty of anecdotal evidence (5 laptops, 3 different people) that linux power management is really great. Maybe you just aren't doing it right?
But if poster can take the same laptop, and the same person, with the only difference being the OS that is installed.... maybe that's a bit more empirical than "5 laptops 3 different people"?
This post was generally full of speculation, but made me aware that there's a lot more I could be doing to add on protections to my general surfing.
There's really only one thing you need to do to "add protections". Ready? Don't click the dancing bunnies. Only download software from trusted locations, when it's something you're specifically seeking out. In my last 25 years of computing, I've managed to not get any viruses or trojans I did not actively want to install for research purposes. Malware scanning disabled,"safe surfing" and its annoying ilk disabled, and no antivirus except manual clamav scans once a month to make sure I didn't do something stupid.
All of the protections you can install, all of the blacklists you can use -- they're all a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
Because perhaps this is in fact news for nerds. Why a web browser, which is where most of us spend most our time, would not want to implement safety features is a great topic which merits debate. Seems like a cut and dried example of front page material to me.
If it were a concise, well-written article, then I would agree. As it stands, it's rambling, repetitive, and just a bit painful to read.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
've never shared the willingness of those users to inform random strangers of their personal lives, names, hobbies, interests, personal or personally identifying photos, and general location
For what it's worth - I've been posting to twitter for a while now and never once revealed any of these things. I have, however, found a number of people who write excellent haiku and short, evocative poetry(And a much higher number who write very bad forms of the same). Many others who just have amusing things to say.
That's my real objection when people say it exists only to please the vanity of the people posting -- that may capture the majority of users, but far from all.
As far as whether it's a "because we can" feature, I don't see it. There are mobile clients that already append location to every tweet -- taking space in the message itself to do so. (google - site:twitter.com myloc.me -- this turns about 280,000 such posts from just that one site). So it seems to me that the folks at twitter are adding this based on actual usage today, and not just as a new shiny feature.
(I wish they'd stop claiming 'most populous MMO')
In advertising, you can claim to be the best at anything you want -- because it's basically assumed not be a reasonable statement. You cannot, however, claim to be better than anyone else unless you can prove it. Claiming to be the most populous MMO sounds good, and avoids them the trouble involved if they wanted to say "More populous than anyone else" -- because then they'd have to be able to prove it to avoid false advertising claims.
I never claimed that it was a neverending stream of wisdom that passed through twitter. Rather, that just because a lot of crap /does/ pass through, that's no reason to discount it as a service with inherent value. Babies and bathwater and all that.
Have you pointed out the failing or failure? I'm still waiting... because stating that you think something is useless doesn't qualify. We're all about facts here.
To make my question more specific: in which of those scenarios would you be disinclined to tell anyone your physical whereabouts and at the same time, would be glad that an automated system did this for you?
Tracking location of people you attend a conference with. Sharing a road trip with friends. Treasure hunts. The list goes on.
Just because you are unable to think of a use case -- or that such use cases are not personally important to you -- does not mean such a use case doesn't exist.
Let me rephrase your post, if I may presume: "I can't see a use for it, therefore it is not useful. Because so many other people find it useful in spite of this, it is a failing in them."
Indeed. There's a reason that people say such things "hurt" -- it's not metaphorical.
That being said: google/android just gives all that the big fat middle finger by not supporting the java mobile standards in the interest of establishing themselves as a standard. Ridiculous.
Get a compiler, and make them.
Alas, my friend. The Mac people have forgotten that they are Unix people. Or perhaps they have never known at all... Ah, the tragedy of it cuts me to the quick.
That's great in theory. In reality, if you can't prove you don't owe them, they don't stop (without sufficient threats of legal action that you then carry through). And even stopping them from calling you won't save your credit report.
Wait, this is slashdot. Aren't we all supposed to never back down, until someone finally gives up in disgust?
Did you read TFS? This is about a bunch of private sector bill collectors harassing private citizens for debts they don't owe; because they can't tell the difference between US and Micronesian SSNs.
... also because the respective governments can't buy a clue, and refuse to do anything about the root cause of the situation (clash of SSN).
Especially if they keep it up after you have provided reasonable evidence that you don't owe them money.
Here's the problem - it's very hard to provide reasonable evidence here. Think about: every day, all day, these guys hear variations on excused, but one that they hear predominantly is "What? No, you've got the wrong person. I don't owe you money."
It's very hard to prove that you don't owe money - especially when they have documetnation that confirms you are the right person. Even though the documentation is flawed, how can you reasonably convince them of that -- keeping in mind that they hear "It wasn't me" all the time.
In order to provide a shortlink as described, every set of unique directions requested consisting of 2..n coordinates must be perpetually mapped to a shortlink that can be accessed directly for all time.
To make the same point using a different (and easier to follow) example, let's look at google search. In order to provide a shortlink for every set of search results, they would also have to save every unique query, and a shortlink resolution for it.
Now expand that to every site that wants to provide shortlinks, and you quickly see that this is not only cumbersome, but a huge burden for any site that allows posting of "Get" parameters as input that determines what is displayed.
Don't forget about the sites that use plain old static HTML - if they wanted to provide shortlinks, they would have to first create a link for each document; update each page of their site manually; then begin running a resolver service to resolve that shortlink to the correct HTML page.
The more I think about this, the more I am finding it's actually extremely irritating and presumptive. Because a subset of people think URL shorteners are a bad idea (or maybe it's only GP? I dunno), they're actively campaigning to have any web site that wants to provide short URLs implement a new standard. Meanwhile, in the real world, existing URL shorteners work exactly as intended -- no changes to web sites required.
Ah, see? If only that had phrased it that way in the first place!
Shortlink is a good idea for what it does - but it still puts the onus on the web site owner to create and permanently save a shortlink for every piece of content that can differ based on "get" parameters. When you're a google, that's a lot of latitudes and longitudes to have to retain forever.
The only argument I've heard against shorteners so far boils down to "but people can misuse it!" -- which in the end boils down to "this is For Your Own Good". Never something I've been particularly fond of - especially on the Internet.
URL Shortners Are Bad....They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.
And in other news, GOTO's considered harmful?
Secondarily I'm a little confused as to what you're replying to, since this has nothing to do with the GP post, but that's a whole separate issue.
$29 is for an upgrade from Leopard. Apparently you cannot upgrade straight from Tiger, and it's unlikely to work standalone if that's your idea.
Only to an insane person would that sentence make a modicum of sense. Or a mac owner. :D