Then hit Ctrl+= a couple times and zoom in on the page. Or specify a minimum font size in the browser's prefs (the former tends to work out better in most browsers).
Given that everything on TPB and the other torrent sites is free, I'm not sure you can really qualify them as e-commerce websites.
Although they certainly do cover their costs and then a bit with the ads. Not "more than a million dollars in a few days", but enough that the guys aren't surviving on ramen after paying the bandwidth bills.
I've had a couple of bad experiences mixing energy drinks with spirits, and I avoid it now. The problem is that enough caffeine can keep you up and mobile well past the point when you should have passed out from alcohol, resulting in you doing really, REALLY retarded things. And what you say about "powerful psychoactive drugs" is very true - alcohol is no better (or worse) than many things that will land you in jail for 20 years.
You mix a stimulant with a depressant and you expect precisely what to happen? These aren't waveforms or chemicals that cancel out; you'll be able to make bad decisions twice as fast!
Of course, the caffeine keeping you up long enough to give you time to pound back a few extra beers isn't going to help either.
You consider the White House to be a valid source on illegal drug use stats? That sounds about as valid as a study from Mr. Kalashnikov showing that AK47s are the best machine guns available. I'd trust numbers from the DEA before the White House - they're just enforcing the policies, not trying to shove their importance down everyone's throats.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but I'd guess it's closer to 20-30% around here. If you were to look only at people between 17-25, it's probably 60%+.
Of course, it also depends how you quantify "use". Daily? Once a week? A month? A year? Ever?
Plenty of websites give you 0 HTML formatting. If your post contains something that resembles a link, it wraps it in an anchor tag for you - so you get no say in the description. Maybe these auto-generated links should follow the URLs and use the page title as the text of the anchor - but that's not always practical. What if you're linking to a PDF, or really any non-HTML document for that matter?
Maybe the browser should do that for you, rather than sites hacking on their domain appending thing like Slashdot which is only informative on non-redirected URLs anyways. I can't imagine it being an overly complex Firefox extension.
Given how many people click links blindly, it barely matters.
/^(https?:\/\/)?([A-z0-9-]+\.)+([A-z]+)^\s/ or something to that general effect? Probably >99% of the time when a dot is immediately followed by a non-space character on the web, it's part of a URL. We can detect URLs easily enough, no reason you can't just search for stuff that looks like links with the protocol optional, and add http:/// to the beginning in the actual HTML if one wasn't found.
I think we're better off tweaking our URL detectors instead of trying to add yet another shorthand (especially one that wouldn't be widely implemented)
The fact that bit.ly raised something like $2m in venture funding suggests it costs more than a self-sustaining $100 to run a popular URL shortener. As does logic.
Even something that basically amounts to one database table with two columns and an index (at a bare miniumum) gets hairy when it needs to handle millions of requests per day - as bit.ly does. And they do a lot more than that.
I doubt you'd make a legitimate cent from adsense on the homepage of a url shortener, unless people are (for some reason beyond my imagination) running a CPM campaign. You'd almost assuredly get only mis-clicks, and very few of them. Especially once you figure in that a very healthy portion of those savvy enough to use a shortener service are going to be running adblock.
Still, there's no reason that Slashdot couldn't have slashdot.org/184265 link to the same page. Thinkgeek does this - when you browse around, you get thinkgeek.com/category/subcategory/id, but linking to thinkgeek.com/id works perfectly. Slashdot, not so much (that links to the home page for whatever reason).
It's still not as short as j.mp/f00b4r, but it eliminates an additional point of failure. Of course, most of the links that people are sending over twitter et al that bit.ly is shortening are so transient in nature that it barely matters if the service dies.
What they should have is some sort of standard for built-in shortened links, that link shortening services such as bit.ly would provide by default. <link rel="short" href="http://slashdot.org/184265"/> in the head tag would suffice. There's already something similar for canonical links/permalinks, but that's mostly for SEO.
Well the good news is that you can put some of that money you saved by canceling cable towards a Hulu subscription. Or, given that this is slashdot and we hate the very idea of paying for content, a faster pipe for more effective torrenting. In either case, you probably still come out ahead (though obviously the latter runs the risk of getting you sued).
The good news is that people tend to be such cheapasses online that web-based content providers simply can't charge much - certainly nowhere near cable rates. And god only knows that the 750 channels you get through your cable package provide, what, two shows worth watching? You could pay $30-50+ for a season and still come out way ahead overall.
I think his point was that the content providers can pull down streams, preventing you from going back and watching content again. Hulu comes to mind, with shows that "expire" though I'm sure there are plenty of other places that do it as well.
Of course, how often is this a problem? Depends on the video, of course. Rule of thumb is that if it's not something they'd sell in a box-set (newscasts, late-night shows, etc) then availability being pulled after a month is typically a non-issue. For the rest... they're greedy, not stupid. So long as they've got advertisers willing to pay for spots, keeping it available is pretty much pure profit. Examples like The Simpsons which is limited to the 5 most recent episodes still leaves me a bit puzzled, yet I find myself going to Hulu whenever I get a Firefly craving despite having it in 720p on my fileserver - I guess the web interface is just easier (even with commercials), and it streams MORE reliably because of the lower bitrate and my finicky WiFi.
Well, only if you care even remotely about having some level of security. Surely you've run into a website (typically a forum) that has a ?sessid=2387498798ad87c2eea92 querystring. It's hideous and stupid, but technically you CAN use cookie-less sessions (see: php: session.use-cookies).
It's also typical to perceive something that's free as worthless. "Hey, they charge $350 for this software. It MUST be good if they can keep selling it at that price, right?" and "It can't be very good if they're not asking money for it."
Obviously that doesn't always translate over to real-world experiences (especially when it comes to software), but it's not a completely irrational thought process - and even if it were, it's still extremely common so you get to deal with it regardless.
Proportional would be paying off 1/24th of the cost every month. That would leave you with a $14.58 ETF after 23 months, not $105. Granted, $105 is better than $350, but both are still an absurd ripoff. Especially since the profits off of the service probably pay off the complete cost of the phone subsidy in less than six months. Probably sooner, with how aggressively VZW nickels and dimes^W^W^W Lincolns and Hamiltons their customers.
This is somehow Motorola's fault? Verizon is the company that forces them to have the software set up in a way that makes it incredibly easy to trigger data charges, and is the company with the absurd billing practices that prop up the idiotic software.
I can't describe how thrilled I was when Apple originally announced that the iPhone wasn't on Verizon. Not that I like AT&T, but they're more like bumbling idiots rather than the psychotic dictators that run Verizon Wireless. I'd still rather pay !Verizon for bad service than Verizon for good service if it was vastly better around here - which it isn't.
That's very clever and all (and I'm sure quite effective), but it doesn't address the original issue: RDBMSs suck at scaling. We should be able to throw a rack of servers with a load balancer and a SAN at the problem and have it go away. We shouldn't have to rewrite our application logic to scale it out any more than we currently have to write special code because our hard drives are in RAID5 (read: not at all).
The storage engines and their indexing should take care of all of this nonsense automatically. You might have to help them out by being a bit more specific than key `user_id` (`user_id`) (your stock tickers are a good example), but fundamentally the code that helps scale out a database should be part of the database and not the application that's using it.
But, life isn't so kind to us. Oh well, maybe in time.
What now? The problem is that relational databases suck at scaling, and as a result we have to come up with absurd hacks like sharding to fix problems that are the fault of the storage engines (if the engine has to do that to not fall apart when dealing with large datasets, fine; but that should be entirely behind-the-scenes and transparent to the application). If these various NoSQL tools are faster than traditional databases and your data isn't particularly relational, then great! But I'd much rather see effort put into solving the lack of horizontal scalability associated with relational DBs especially since they have no problem accommodating non-relational data.
Amazon offers full MySQL cloud-based hosting (in addition to their own simpledb stuff), and every managed cloud platform I've looked at also uses standard SQL DBs (MySQL, postgres, etc.). Then again, the term "cloud" has really just come to mean "someone else's datacenter" which includes pretty much every casual web hosting plan on the planet and plenty of higher-end stuff as well. The only problem with the cloud is that the term is wildly overused.
You don't consider being intentionally misleading to be dishonest? Remind me to never do business with you. It may not be false, but it's sure as hell dishonest.
That's my thought as well, but I still think that's false advertising. Unlimited is a very vague term (speed? content? volume?), but the idea of using it in the net neutrality sense of the word only occurs to informed geeks that are trying to find a way to make their claim valid. The idea that "unlimited" means that they're not blocking any sites isn't going to be on anyone's radar since it's simply never used that way in the context of internet access. IANAL but I'd certainly think that false advertising laws are about public perception ("unlimited - $30/mo! That means I can use as much as I want for $30/mo"), not some sort of contractual bullshit buried in page 27 of illegible fine print. Obviously there are practical limits to "unlimited" - a connection with X bandwidth has a finite amount of data it can download in a one-month period - but nobody is contesting that.
If part of the settlement is that Verizon is banned from advertising 5GB plans as "unlimited" (or, better yet, actually has to provide unlimited data), it's still a net gain.
I'm still trying to figure out how that could be used in a way that doesn't make a complete lie, or a term that would make it go from false to just douchey. Unmetered obviously doesn't work since that would be, if anything, even MORE of a lie; I suppose they could make the argument that they're not limiting what content you can access, but the net neutrality side of things is just a different type of limit.
Slashdot Mirror
Then hit Ctrl+= a couple times and zoom in on the page. Or specify a minimum font size in the browser's prefs (the former tends to work out better in most browsers).
Given that everything on TPB and the other torrent sites is free, I'm not sure you can really qualify them as e-commerce websites.
Although they certainly do cover their costs and then a bit with the ads. Not "more than a million dollars in a few days", but enough that the guys aren't surviving on ramen after paying the bandwidth bills.
I think "it seemed like a good idea at the time" is the whole reason the stuff sells.
I've had a couple of bad experiences mixing energy drinks with spirits, and I avoid it now. The problem is that enough caffeine can keep you up and mobile well past the point when you should have passed out from alcohol, resulting in you doing really, REALLY retarded things. And what you say about "powerful psychoactive drugs" is very true - alcohol is no better (or worse) than many things that will land you in jail for 20 years.
You mix a stimulant with a depressant and you expect precisely what to happen? These aren't waveforms or chemicals that cancel out; you'll be able to make bad decisions twice as fast!
Of course, the caffeine keeping you up long enough to give you time to pound back a few extra beers isn't going to help either.
You consider the White House to be a valid source on illegal drug use stats? That sounds about as valid as a study from Mr. Kalashnikov showing that AK47s are the best machine guns available. I'd trust numbers from the DEA before the White House - they're just enforcing the policies, not trying to shove their importance down everyone's throats.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but I'd guess it's closer to 20-30% around here. If you were to look only at people between 17-25, it's probably 60%+.
Of course, it also depends how you quantify "use". Daily? Once a week? A month? A year? Ever?
Probably none. They're fat, not muscular. Eating bodybuilders, on the other hand, may pan out in a crisis.
Perhaps the short "b.us" would be more appropriate for government work.
Plenty of websites give you 0 HTML formatting. If your post contains something that resembles a link, it wraps it in an anchor tag for you - so you get no say in the description. Maybe these auto-generated links should follow the URLs and use the page title as the text of the anchor - but that's not always practical. What if you're linking to a PDF, or really any non-HTML document for that matter?
Maybe the browser should do that for you, rather than sites hacking on their domain appending thing like Slashdot which is only informative on non-redirected URLs anyways. I can't imagine it being an overly complex Firefox extension.
Given how many people click links blindly, it barely matters.
/^(https?:\/\/)?([A-z0-9-]+\.)+([A-z]+)^\s/ or something to that general effect? Probably >99% of the time when a dot is immediately followed by a non-space character on the web, it's part of a URL. We can detect URLs easily enough, no reason you can't just search for stuff that looks like links with the protocol optional, and add http:/// to the beginning in the actual HTML if one wasn't found.
I think we're better off tweaking our URL detectors instead of trying to add yet another shorthand (especially one that wouldn't be widely implemented)
The fact that bit.ly raised something like $2m in venture funding suggests it costs more than a self-sustaining $100 to run a popular URL shortener. As does logic.
Even something that basically amounts to one database table with two columns and an index (at a bare miniumum) gets hairy when it needs to handle millions of requests per day - as bit.ly does. And they do a lot more than that.
I doubt you'd make a legitimate cent from adsense on the homepage of a url shortener, unless people are (for some reason beyond my imagination) running a CPM campaign. You'd almost assuredly get only mis-clicks, and very few of them. Especially once you figure in that a very healthy portion of those savvy enough to use a shortener service are going to be running adblock.
Mod parent "-1, Proved self wrong".
(Yes, I knew I had it coming when I clicked the link)
Still, there's no reason that Slashdot couldn't have slashdot.org/184265 link to the same page. Thinkgeek does this - when you browse around, you get thinkgeek.com/category/subcategory/id, but linking to thinkgeek.com/id works perfectly. Slashdot, not so much (that links to the home page for whatever reason).
It's still not as short as j.mp/f00b4r, but it eliminates an additional point of failure. Of course, most of the links that people are sending over twitter et al that bit.ly is shortening are so transient in nature that it barely matters if the service dies.
What they should have is some sort of standard for built-in shortened links, that link shortening services such as bit.ly would provide by default. <link rel="short" href="http://slashdot.org/184265" /> in the head tag would suffice. There's already something similar for canonical links/permalinks, but that's mostly for SEO.
(Note: Remove the last z if you want to see naked women.)
This is why I love slashdot. And why I kind of want to start messing with link-finding regexes to leave the last character out of the href.
Well the good news is that you can put some of that money you saved by canceling cable towards a Hulu subscription. Or, given that this is slashdot and we hate the very idea of paying for content, a faster pipe for more effective torrenting. In either case, you probably still come out ahead (though obviously the latter runs the risk of getting you sued).
The good news is that people tend to be such cheapasses online that web-based content providers simply can't charge much - certainly nowhere near cable rates. And god only knows that the 750 channels you get through your cable package provide, what, two shows worth watching? You could pay $30-50+ for a season and still come out way ahead overall.
I think his point was that the content providers can pull down streams, preventing you from going back and watching content again. Hulu comes to mind, with shows that "expire" though I'm sure there are plenty of other places that do it as well.
Of course, how often is this a problem? Depends on the video, of course. Rule of thumb is that if it's not something they'd sell in a box-set (newscasts, late-night shows, etc) then availability being pulled after a month is typically a non-issue. For the rest... they're greedy, not stupid. So long as they've got advertisers willing to pay for spots, keeping it available is pretty much pure profit. Examples like The Simpsons which is limited to the 5 most recent episodes still leaves me a bit puzzled, yet I find myself going to Hulu whenever I get a Firefly craving despite having it in 720p on my fileserver - I guess the web interface is just easier (even with commercials), and it streams MORE reliably because of the lower bitrate and my finicky WiFi.
Well, only if you care even remotely about having some level of security. Surely you've run into a website (typically a forum) that has a ?sessid=2387498798ad87c2eea92 querystring. It's hideous and stupid, but technically you CAN use cookie-less sessions (see: php: session.use-cookies).
It's also typical to perceive something that's free as worthless. "Hey, they charge $350 for this software. It MUST be good if they can keep selling it at that price, right?" and "It can't be very good if they're not asking money for it."
Obviously that doesn't always translate over to real-world experiences (especially when it comes to software), but it's not a completely irrational thought process - and even if it were, it's still extremely common so you get to deal with it regardless.
That's what toes are for!
Proportional would be paying off 1/24th of the cost every month. That would leave you with a $14.58 ETF after 23 months, not $105. Granted, $105 is better than $350, but both are still an absurd ripoff. Especially since the profits off of the service probably pay off the complete cost of the phone subsidy in less than six months. Probably sooner, with how aggressively VZW nickels and dimes^W^W^W Lincolns and Hamiltons their customers.
This is somehow Motorola's fault? Verizon is the company that forces them to have the software set up in a way that makes it incredibly easy to trigger data charges, and is the company with the absurd billing practices that prop up the idiotic software.
I can't describe how thrilled I was when Apple originally announced that the iPhone wasn't on Verizon. Not that I like AT&T, but they're more like bumbling idiots rather than the psychotic dictators that run Verizon Wireless. I'd still rather pay !Verizon for bad service than Verizon for good service if it was vastly better around here - which it isn't.
That's very clever and all (and I'm sure quite effective), but it doesn't address the original issue: RDBMSs suck at scaling. We should be able to throw a rack of servers with a load balancer and a SAN at the problem and have it go away. We shouldn't have to rewrite our application logic to scale it out any more than we currently have to write special code because our hard drives are in RAID5 (read: not at all).
The storage engines and their indexing should take care of all of this nonsense automatically. You might have to help them out by being a bit more specific than key `user_id` (`user_id`) (your stock tickers are a good example), but fundamentally the code that helps scale out a database should be part of the database and not the application that's using it.
But, life isn't so kind to us. Oh well, maybe in time.
What now? The problem is that relational databases suck at scaling, and as a result we have to come up with absurd hacks like sharding to fix problems that are the fault of the storage engines (if the engine has to do that to not fall apart when dealing with large datasets, fine; but that should be entirely behind-the-scenes and transparent to the application). If these various NoSQL tools are faster than traditional databases and your data isn't particularly relational, then great! But I'd much rather see effort put into solving the lack of horizontal scalability associated with relational DBs especially since they have no problem accommodating non-relational data.
Amazon offers full MySQL cloud-based hosting (in addition to their own simpledb stuff), and every managed cloud platform I've looked at also uses standard SQL DBs (MySQL, postgres, etc.). Then again, the term "cloud" has really just come to mean "someone else's datacenter" which includes pretty much every casual web hosting plan on the planet and plenty of higher-end stuff as well. The only problem with the cloud is that the term is wildly overused.
so its not really dishonest its just misleading
You don't consider being intentionally misleading to be dishonest? Remind me to never do business with you. It may not be false, but it's sure as hell dishonest.
That's my thought as well, but I still think that's false advertising. Unlimited is a very vague term (speed? content? volume?), but the idea of using it in the net neutrality sense of the word only occurs to informed geeks that are trying to find a way to make their claim valid. The idea that "unlimited" means that they're not blocking any sites isn't going to be on anyone's radar since it's simply never used that way in the context of internet access. IANAL but I'd certainly think that false advertising laws are about public perception ("unlimited - $30/mo! That means I can use as much as I want for $30/mo"), not some sort of contractual bullshit buried in page 27 of illegible fine print. Obviously there are practical limits to "unlimited" - a connection with X bandwidth has a finite amount of data it can download in a one-month period - but nobody is contesting that.
If part of the settlement is that Verizon is banned from advertising 5GB plans as "unlimited" (or, better yet, actually has to provide unlimited data), it's still a net gain.
I'm still trying to figure out how that could be used in a way that doesn't make a complete lie, or a term that would make it go from false to just douchey. Unmetered obviously doesn't work since that would be, if anything, even MORE of a lie; I suppose they could make the argument that they're not limiting what content you can access, but the net neutrality side of things is just a different type of limit.