Validate! If you write valid (X)HTML and CSS, IE7 gets pretty close to the mark and IE8 seems to get it spot-on outside of some newer, often browser-specific CSS properties (text-shadow, -X-border-radius, etc). Hell, even IE6 seems to render more accurately if you have a doctype tag and code that validates against said doctype. Your code won't pass validation without a doctype tag.
Too damn bad for them. I'm no longer wasting my time supporting a browser that's now TWO major versions out of date, never mind being almost a decade old. I'm sticking with jQuery's approach of the current version of all major browsers, current-1, and current+1 (latest beta, typically). I may stick a warning on the site that only shows in outdated (current-2 or order) versions, but it doesn't make sense for me to waste a massive amount of time fixing problems that are only visible to a rapidly-shrinking market-share that's outside of my target demographic anyways.
Since when has Steam used torrents? Blizzard does, but I was under the impression that Steam was using a traditional download protocol. Has this changed semi-recently?
"First Post", "Frosty Piss", and similar derivations thereof are registered copyright of Anonymous Coward. Were it not for your lax copyright laws in Canada, we'd be sending our lawyers. Expect political intrusion followed by a retroactive DMCA takedown notice, and enjoy your Friday.
I doubt that the hackintoshes are a serious concern to Apple. The fact they exists demonstrates that a certain market exists, but not one that's likely too profitable right now. It's something relatively few people are willing to do, or even have the knowledge (or at least patience) to pull off. Not much of a problem among the Slashdot crowd, but certainly among the general public. More importantly, in order to fight that off, Apple would have to transition back off of the x86 architecture - not a feat of engineering that they probably want to do again after the PPC switch.
More likely, it's for specialized chips in upcoming devices. Something along the lines of the custom-designed Intel chip that went into the Macbook Air. It's the whole argument of DRM* - you can either spend your time trying to come up with technological measures to stop people doing something, or you can innovate and make products that people want to buy by addressing an existing market (or often in Apple's case, creating an entirely new one). While Apple is certainly a very closed vendor on the whole, I think they're better off putting their resources towards innovation rather than protection.
*Yes, I'm aware of the DRM in OS X, particularly with regard to BIOS/EFI. I'd call it quite unobtrusive compared to the phone-home activation in Windows, but that's overall quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Just to clarify since I can't edit - yes, I'm aware that FEMA is part of the government. But it sounds as though this was done willingly, not by an order from some higher-ranking official. The latter would be censorship; what happened here (IMO) is realizing a stupid mistake and then attempting to rectify it.
Yes, it is. But deciding to pull a publication after you realize that it was in inexplicably awful taste isn't censorship. The government pulling that publication for you (which didn't happen, if TFS is anything to go by) would be.
Yes and no. While there are plenty of things you can't do on your websites as a designer/developer without cross-browser compatibility, you can save yourself some tremendous trouble on aesthetic work if you're willing to make some compromises. Look at border-radius, text-shadow, and box-shadow properties - none of them are critical to layout, each can add to a design, and each will fall back very gracefully in browsers that don't support the property.
If NO browsers support something, then you need a workaround. If only some support it, then you have to balance the importance of the element's presentation on the page with the ease of implementation (ex. do you use partially-supported border-radius or @font-face which takes thirty seconds, or do you a fully cross-browser hack which takes considerably longer?).
And even outside of that contest, you won't see a higher pixel count until you move up to a 2560x1600 panel, which I've yet to discover in anything smaller than a 30" screen size. Likewise, no computer monitor at a pixel count of 1920x1200 or fewer seems to be larger than 27" (obviously, this excludes TVs and other tuner-equipped panels).
So in this situation, being pedantic just changes the reason that causes the statement to be perfectly accurate.
I think it's just a very confused/misled poster, unless his radiator is off in a different room (unlikely, but I've seen it done).
While the total amount of heat produced won't change regardless of your cooling method, the noise to achieve said cooling can be remarkably different. Back when I was into that stuff (and indeed, using Windows machines), the main benefit of watercooling was to use a large radiator with very quiet fans rather than a fast, loud fan on a traditional heatsink.
Yes, but they were an hour or so apart. Obviously it was a coordinated attack, but it's not like they were flying side-by-side in a manner that very clearly says something is wrong.
low flying planes crashing into buildings is something that could reasonably happen,
No it isn't. People that witnessed that event firsthand have a reasonable fear of it happening again, but the fact that it happened once defied all odds. It's more likely to happen again as the result of a massive mechanical or electrical failure on the plane than another hijacking - but in either case we now have contingency plans to deal with planes that are no longer under control of the original pilots (hence the F16s).
Read-only and write-once tech really has no practical place in the future, outside of stuff like security feeds and other archival applications. Movies will be pretty much download-only by the time this stuff would be affordable for home use. Remember, you don't need to ship bandwidth, which is a simply unavoidable problem for any physical media.
I think it's valid to have a pre-conceived opinion as to the fairness of the law, or lack thereof. It would certainly be inappropriate to have an opinion going in as to whether the defendant was innocent or guilty, however.
I think it's safe to say that people who spend their lives on welfare and thereby teach their children that you can get free money by doing nothing are pretty damn lazy, yes. People that use the welfare system as it's intended (making sure you don't starve or freeze to death while you're between jobs) tend not be what most people would consider lazy, and I think most taxpayers can sympathize to at least some degree.
There's absolutely no need to bring racial stereotypes into the picture - it just makes you look like an asshole. I would wager that there's significantly higher usage of hard drugs among those who live their lives on welfare, though.
The ramifications/implications of those things are pretty deep, even deeper than in the broken window fallacy, but in the case of a welfare mom with 4 kids, the main difference is that by giving her more money she'll give better food, a better health but more importantly a better education to her 4 children, the difference being ultimately that these children will grow up to be more qualified and thus produce more value/wealth, but also move up in social classes.
Wishful thinking at its finest. Yes, it does happen, but that's easily the exception to the rule. If that actually worked in practice, then social classes would more or less dissolve in a generation or two; or, at least, you wouldn't see nearly the level of similarity we currently do between generations of a single family.
From what I've seen, most lower-class people tend to be in that situation because they can't manage their money to save their life, not because of their lower-paying jobs. I'm doing (very limited) freelancing between having left a desk job and prepping a startup right now, and going for a month or more making nothing but a dollar in interest on my bank account isn't breaking my back because I knew how to save effectively while I was working a day job and know how to keep my expenses low right now. I've seen houses that have a satellite dish mounted next to their broken windows through which you can see an obscenely large TV - they're making enough to pay the bill for the dish (or somehow managed to get enough credit to postpone that for a while too), but their priorities are so out of whack that they're doing that instead of fixing the damn window. In Vermont. Where winters are pretty damn cold, on a warm year. These people could win the lottery and end up broke again in six months and still have a broken window.
I think I have every right to be annoyed when my taxes go towards their welfare checks. Luckily, they probably go uncashed since I doubt they ever bothered to repair their mailbox since they're too busy trying to defrost their TV in January. I'm all for helping people get back on their feet, but I shouldn't have to explain the absurdity of cutting welfare checks to people that have put themselves in the above scenario.
Good for them. I'd make equally [in]valid requests to prohibit using the network for anything deemed "AOL", and that the network randomly get a speed boost for at least an hour a day. While I'm at it, all traffic will be encrypted at all times and the data retention policy will destroy all logging not critical to billing and other operations, and be destroyed once the operations for which the data was kept have been performed, anonymizing whenever possible.
If they want to request that a utility (which is what it would be, in this case) be run a certain way in order to suit their lifestyle, I can make similar requests to suit my own lifestyle. That doesn't stop the request being complete and utter bullshit, even if mine are going to be a lot more popular with the slashdot crowd than what your neighbors will want.
I'm not sure that I'd agree on the "guilty until proven innocent" bit (not entirely, at least), but I took issue with my school's use of the software for the same reason. While I fully support fair use, them turning a profit on MY work is absolutely no better than the guys selling DVDs of movies still in theaters on the street corner*. Not only that, it raises the cost of tuition as they certainly aren't providing access to the service for free. I see where teachers are coming from when they say that it adds value to my education, though I certainly disagree with their logic ("if someone's copying off of you, a lazy person is getting the same grade as someone who does the work; when they're out in the real world being useless, it ends up devaluing your education and that of your fellow graduates" kind of stuff. However, it's not like slackers don't exist in the real world; on the contrary, they seem to be the ones at the top of the corporate ladder making ten times as much as those that put in an honest day's work).
Anyways, I started adding copyright notices to the ends of all my papers, just so that if I ever felt particularly vindictive I probably could have made a court case out of the thing. Even as a student, I had better things to do with my time, but it at least made me feel better about their complete lack of trust or respect for a few minutes.
*Ok, at least TurnItIn applies some of their own mojo with the comparison stuff, but that's just a diff engine on steroids, and in any case would serve no purpose without students' work. So maybe a tiny bit better.
I think geeks realize that certain things simply don't work or are terribly inefficient when done on a small scale (primarily infrastructure), but outside of those situations want the government to just get the fuck out of their life. And having seen situations like Microsoft's abusive monopoly (less so these days; instead we're seeing it much more with the telcos which are just duopolies in bed with each other), we accept that regulation of certain situations is the lesser of two evils, since the majority of large companies can't be trusted to not be evil of their own accord*. It's those situations when one entity is so damn big that is able to ignore the rules of the free market by completely eliminating competition - either by undercutting them (they have the finances to sell at a loss until the competition dies), buying them, or pulling some political bullshit because they can buy off corrupt politicians.
Anyways, I don't think it fits under any one political party, since it certainly mixes elements from all sides. It's more idealist than anything else, since there are too many varying opinions from too many sides for it to ever be particularly effective, never mind that it would require pretty much a complete redistribution of power in the political system.
*This is in part due to laws related to being a publicly traded company - they're legally obligated to generate value for their shareholders, even if doing so requires them to be Epic Douchebags(TM). Unfortunately, it's hard to attach numbers to moves of good faith since they only indirectly affect revenues.
Yes, and as a result there's been about one IPO since SOX was introduced (Rackspace), and their stock immediately tanked. Despite SOX's noble intentions, all it's really done is make the criminals get more creative while giving a lot of companies incentive to stay privately held.
Slashdot Mirror
Validate! If you write valid (X)HTML and CSS, IE7 gets pretty close to the mark and IE8 seems to get it spot-on outside of some newer, often browser-specific CSS properties (text-shadow, -X-border-radius, etc). Hell, even IE6 seems to render more accurately if you have a doctype tag and code that validates against said doctype. Your code won't pass validation without a doctype tag.
Re: XHTML flash - if you MUST use it, http://validifier.com/.
Too damn bad for them. I'm no longer wasting my time supporting a browser that's now TWO major versions out of date, never mind being almost a decade old. I'm sticking with jQuery's approach of the current version of all major browsers, current-1, and current+1 (latest beta, typically). I may stick a warning on the site that only shows in outdated (current-2 or order) versions, but it doesn't make sense for me to waste a massive amount of time fixing problems that are only visible to a rapidly-shrinking market-share that's outside of my target demographic anyways.
Since when has Steam used torrents? Blizzard does, but I was under the impression that Steam was using a traditional download protocol. Has this changed semi-recently?
I argue that the single most significant contributor to our supremacy over this planet is our capacity for meme-exchange.
Please! There's no need to drag Soviet Russia and the lolcats into this.
"First Post", "Frosty Piss", and similar derivations thereof are registered copyright of Anonymous Coward. Were it not for your lax copyright laws in Canada, we'd be sending our lawyers. Expect political intrusion followed by a retroactive DMCA takedown notice, and enjoy your Friday.
I doubt that the hackintoshes are a serious concern to Apple. The fact they exists demonstrates that a certain market exists, but not one that's likely too profitable right now. It's something relatively few people are willing to do, or even have the knowledge (or at least patience) to pull off. Not much of a problem among the Slashdot crowd, but certainly among the general public. More importantly, in order to fight that off, Apple would have to transition back off of the x86 architecture - not a feat of engineering that they probably want to do again after the PPC switch.
More likely, it's for specialized chips in upcoming devices. Something along the lines of the custom-designed Intel chip that went into the Macbook Air. It's the whole argument of DRM* - you can either spend your time trying to come up with technological measures to stop people doing something, or you can innovate and make products that people want to buy by addressing an existing market (or often in Apple's case, creating an entirely new one). While Apple is certainly a very closed vendor on the whole, I think they're better off putting their resources towards innovation rather than protection.
*Yes, I'm aware of the DRM in OS X, particularly with regard to BIOS/EFI. I'd call it quite unobtrusive compared to the phone-home activation in Windows, but that's overall quite irrelevant to this discussion.
Just to clarify since I can't edit - yes, I'm aware that FEMA is part of the government. But it sounds as though this was done willingly, not by an order from some higher-ranking official. The latter would be censorship; what happened here (IMO) is realizing a stupid mistake and then attempting to rectify it.
Yes, it is. But deciding to pull a publication after you realize that it was in inexplicably awful taste isn't censorship. The government pulling that publication for you (which didn't happen, if TFS is anything to go by) would be.
Yes and no. While there are plenty of things you can't do on your websites as a designer/developer without cross-browser compatibility, you can save yourself some tremendous trouble on aesthetic work if you're willing to make some compromises. Look at border-radius, text-shadow, and box-shadow properties - none of them are critical to layout, each can add to a design, and each will fall back very gracefully in browsers that don't support the property.
If NO browsers support something, then you need a workaround. If only some support it, then you have to balance the importance of the element's presentation on the page with the ease of implementation (ex. do you use partially-supported border-radius or @font-face which takes thirty seconds, or do you a fully cross-browser hack which takes considerably longer?).
You are aware that it's easier to write cross-browser code and then add IE6 hacks than to only support IE6 from the beginning, right?
It's 2009. People still use CDs?
And even outside of that contest, you won't see a higher pixel count until you move up to a 2560x1600 panel, which I've yet to discover in anything smaller than a 30" screen size. Likewise, no computer monitor at a pixel count of 1920x1200 or fewer seems to be larger than 27" (obviously, this excludes TVs and other tuner-equipped panels).
So in this situation, being pedantic just changes the reason that causes the statement to be perfectly accurate.
I think it's just a very confused/misled poster, unless his radiator is off in a different room (unlikely, but I've seen it done).
While the total amount of heat produced won't change regardless of your cooling method, the noise to achieve said cooling can be remarkably different. Back when I was into that stuff (and indeed, using Windows machines), the main benefit of watercooling was to use a large radiator with very quiet fans rather than a fast, loud fan on a traditional heatsink.
Yes, but they were an hour or so apart. Obviously it was a coordinated attack, but it's not like they were flying side-by-side in a manner that very clearly says something is wrong.
low flying planes crashing into buildings is something that could reasonably happen,
No it isn't. People that witnessed that event firsthand have a reasonable fear of it happening again, but the fact that it happened once defied all odds. It's more likely to happen again as the result of a massive mechanical or electrical failure on the plane than another hijacking - but in either case we now have contingency plans to deal with planes that are no longer under control of the original pilots (hence the F16s).
Read-only and write-once tech really has no practical place in the future, outside of stuff like security feeds and other archival applications. Movies will be pretty much download-only by the time this stuff would be affordable for home use. Remember, you don't need to ship bandwidth, which is a simply unavoidable problem for any physical media.
I think it's valid to have a pre-conceived opinion as to the fairness of the law, or lack thereof. It would certainly be inappropriate to have an opinion going in as to whether the defendant was innocent or guilty, however.
IANAL.
I think it's safe to say that people who spend their lives on welfare and thereby teach their children that you can get free money by doing nothing are pretty damn lazy, yes. People that use the welfare system as it's intended (making sure you don't starve or freeze to death while you're between jobs) tend not be what most people would consider lazy, and I think most taxpayers can sympathize to at least some degree.
There's absolutely no need to bring racial stereotypes into the picture - it just makes you look like an asshole. I would wager that there's significantly higher usage of hard drugs among those who live their lives on welfare, though.
The ramifications/implications of those things are pretty deep, even deeper than in the broken window fallacy, but in the case of a welfare mom with 4 kids, the main difference is that by giving her more money she'll give better food, a better health but more importantly a better education to her 4 children, the difference being ultimately that these children will grow up to be more qualified and thus produce more value/wealth, but also move up in social classes.
Wishful thinking at its finest. Yes, it does happen, but that's easily the exception to the rule. If that actually worked in practice, then social classes would more or less dissolve in a generation or two; or, at least, you wouldn't see nearly the level of similarity we currently do between generations of a single family.
From what I've seen, most lower-class people tend to be in that situation because they can't manage their money to save their life, not because of their lower-paying jobs. I'm doing (very limited) freelancing between having left a desk job and prepping a startup right now, and going for a month or more making nothing but a dollar in interest on my bank account isn't breaking my back because I knew how to save effectively while I was working a day job and know how to keep my expenses low right now. I've seen houses that have a satellite dish mounted next to their broken windows through which you can see an obscenely large TV - they're making enough to pay the bill for the dish (or somehow managed to get enough credit to postpone that for a while too), but their priorities are so out of whack that they're doing that instead of fixing the damn window. In Vermont. Where winters are pretty damn cold, on a warm year. These people could win the lottery and end up broke again in six months and still have a broken window.
I think I have every right to be annoyed when my taxes go towards their welfare checks. Luckily, they probably go uncashed since I doubt they ever bothered to repair their mailbox since they're too busy trying to defrost their TV in January. I'm all for helping people get back on their feet, but I shouldn't have to explain the absurdity of cutting welfare checks to people that have put themselves in the above scenario.
Good for them. I'd make equally [in]valid requests to prohibit using the network for anything deemed "AOL", and that the network randomly get a speed boost for at least an hour a day. While I'm at it, all traffic will be encrypted at all times and the data retention policy will destroy all logging not critical to billing and other operations, and be destroyed once the operations for which the data was kept have been performed, anonymizing whenever possible.
If they want to request that a utility (which is what it would be, in this case) be run a certain way in order to suit their lifestyle, I can make similar requests to suit my own lifestyle. That doesn't stop the request being complete and utter bullshit, even if mine are going to be a lot more popular with the slashdot crowd than what your neighbors will want.
There should be no reason to assume plagarism unless something about a specific paper calls it into suspicion.
But then professors would have to actually read your paper, instead of grading based on how much they like you.
I'm not sure that I'd agree on the "guilty until proven innocent" bit (not entirely, at least), but I took issue with my school's use of the software for the same reason. While I fully support fair use, them turning a profit on MY work is absolutely no better than the guys selling DVDs of movies still in theaters on the street corner*. Not only that, it raises the cost of tuition as they certainly aren't providing access to the service for free. I see where teachers are coming from when they say that it adds value to my education, though I certainly disagree with their logic ("if someone's copying off of you, a lazy person is getting the same grade as someone who does the work; when they're out in the real world being useless, it ends up devaluing your education and that of your fellow graduates" kind of stuff. However, it's not like slackers don't exist in the real world; on the contrary, they seem to be the ones at the top of the corporate ladder making ten times as much as those that put in an honest day's work).
Anyways, I started adding copyright notices to the ends of all my papers, just so that if I ever felt particularly vindictive I probably could have made a court case out of the thing. Even as a student, I had better things to do with my time, but it at least made me feel better about their complete lack of trust or respect for a few minutes.
*Ok, at least TurnItIn applies some of their own mojo with the comparison stuff, but that's just a diff engine on steroids, and in any case would serve no purpose without students' work. So maybe a tiny bit better.
Which still beats the hell out of my 10/1 for the same price (or higher, hard to figure out since cable TV is mixed in)
I think geeks realize that certain things simply don't work or are terribly inefficient when done on a small scale (primarily infrastructure), but outside of those situations want the government to just get the fuck out of their life. And having seen situations like Microsoft's abusive monopoly (less so these days; instead we're seeing it much more with the telcos which are just duopolies in bed with each other), we accept that regulation of certain situations is the lesser of two evils, since the majority of large companies can't be trusted to not be evil of their own accord*. It's those situations when one entity is so damn big that is able to ignore the rules of the free market by completely eliminating competition - either by undercutting them (they have the finances to sell at a loss until the competition dies), buying them, or pulling some political bullshit because they can buy off corrupt politicians.
Anyways, I don't think it fits under any one political party, since it certainly mixes elements from all sides. It's more idealist than anything else, since there are too many varying opinions from too many sides for it to ever be particularly effective, never mind that it would require pretty much a complete redistribution of power in the political system.
*This is in part due to laws related to being a publicly traded company - they're legally obligated to generate value for their shareholders, even if doing so requires them to be Epic Douchebags(TM). Unfortunately, it's hard to attach numbers to moves of good faith since they only indirectly affect revenues.
Yes, and as a result there's been about one IPO since SOX was introduced (Rackspace), and their stock immediately tanked. Despite SOX's noble intentions, all it's really done is make the criminals get more creative while giving a lot of companies incentive to stay privately held.