I really don't think anyone will have too much success playing a MUD from an iPhone. Might be fun to try for about ten seconds, but I expect that the net result would be a very busy IT staff dealing with shattered devices and the suicide rate quadrupling.
I didn't know that the iPod or iPhone was limited to one OS. That's so very odd...
Oh wait, it's not. Get off you anti-Apple soapbox and grow up a bit.
To be fair, most of the web apps designed around the iPhone either fail entirely in a desktop browser (user-agent detection), fail entirely in anything other than Safari (use of certain CSS properties, for example), or have no good desktop equivalent.
This won't be a problem for any of these students, but data speeds aside, the heavy javascript that's in most web apps just doesn't play too nicely with the iPhone's processor. Even over WiFi, most web apps are fairly slow to load, and of course tend to be quite a bit slower than locally installed apps. At least that's been my experience since the day after the original iPhone came out. Local caching can solve some of that (I believe there's some funky thing in Safari roughly equivalent to Google Gears for client-side data caching), but a lot of the problem stems from slow responses on HTTP requests - which is a problem both on "real" apps and web apps that go through some sort of web services layer (Facebook for iPhone, for example)
Some insightful comments, sure. But most would be giving them shit and making remarks about it being the next Vista and whatnot. But to paraphrase someone's sig, Slashdot has scattered insight in a sea of mediocrity - so that's really to be expected;)
I thought Linux was supposed to be to OS X as OS X is to Windows in terms of stability (ie, not just rock-solid, but it will punch you in the gut if you try to crash it)... is this not the case?
You could say the same about Gmail, GCal, Google Docs and all of that other stuff, but then again Chrome hasn't spent the last several years in beta either.
Thanks for killing my joke, but since you answered seriously - what kind of tricky stuff are you doing to detect full-disk encryption on any machine that touches the network? And more importantly (assuming that this requires a boot-time password; I've never bothered with any serious encryption), do you have something that detects the sticky note on the bottom of the laptop with said password?
I guess I can sleep a little better knowing that the IRS is working hard to ensure that they only screw me over once per year.
But I'm only commenting to point out how much the thinkgeek advertisement I got when expanding this post bothers me. "MORE FLEXIBLE SCREWING". Yeah, just the mental image I needed on a Saturday morning. Thanks a lot.
Better idea: you're already paying an outrageous amount for data services (yes, voice is data), and as text messages are well under a kilobyte even with various overhead, they should all be free. Period. Even at 1c/1000 messages, they'd still be turning a hefty profit, percentage-wise anyways. If Amazon charges 10c/GB for S3 traffic and doesn't lose money, cell carriers can easily get away with 1c/MB - it's not up to their usual levels of extortion, but it's still basically free money.
Seriously, data is so damn cheap in absolutely any other market (even in places with stupidly low monthly caps like Australia) but not only will the cellular industry not cut us a break on the service that costs by far the least to provide, but they take that as an opportunity to screw us over the hardest.
I hope all content providers immediately drop support for sending texts to Verizon customers, with a clear explanation that it's due to their greed. That way they'll lose all of the revenue on both sides, not to mention get all of Verizon's customers pissed.
Is that ever really an issue? I have plenty of legitimately-obtained software, and a not-unhealthy-but-more-than-zero amount of not so legitimately obtained software. However, in 100% of my software, I know which is the case.
It's safe to say that accidentally finding a piece of cracked software is quite unlikely. Maybe the distributor is in violation of a redistribution license (like the GPL), but that's not something you're likely to know by reading it on their site - they wouldn't go advertising the fact.
The GPL was just an example, albeit a poor one. Think Creative Commons, which has about a dozen or so different license combination, or opensource.org which compiles a good fifty different fairly-widely-used licenses.
Coming up with some fairly simple and basic terms and wrapping a relatively generic policy around them isn't out of the question. * Your information {may|may not|may, but only anonymously} be seen by third parties. * Personally identifiable information {may|may not} be shared with advertisers in order to effectively target advertising. * Content you produce on this site {may|may not} be sold, licensed, or otherwise made available to third parties.
Etc. It can't be as boilerplate as the GPL, and would require more licenses than CC has available, but it would basically amount to dropping in different paragraphs of boilerplate to a document, each of which is determined by a dropdown box addressing one of maybe a dozen or so typical privacy areas. And that could easily enough translate into the cute and easy to decode icons attached to the CC licenses too.
True, but unlike when you're going against the government, there's at least the implication that by agreeing to their TOS, you're entering into some sort of nonformal contract (a shrink-wrap EULA basically) in that they have to hold up to their end of the bargain. If nothing else, you could probably sue them if you find them to be in violation of their posted privacy policy. Hell, if you go for the maximum allowed in small claims court, chances are they'll determine it not worth their time and you'll win your five grand by default.
Not much, but it's something. At least in theory. Like you, I assume the worst and hope for the best, and plan accordingly.
I do still like the idea of some rough equivalent to Creative Commons/OSI for privacy/usage polices.
I think Slashdot's approach with the quick-reply AJAXified version is fine: preview and cancel, with two useless buttons that nobody uses. And after you preview, you still usually have to wait about 15 minutes to post the comment because you type at a rate of more than two words per hour.
Audio previews should really wipe out all but the true extremes - only the most determined idiots and geniuses will actually submit their comments. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen.
And here in the states, ten over is typically the minimum to not get rear-ended. Except when someone spots a cop, in which case a plethora of cars all slam their brakes at once to get down to the speed limit and immediately increase the chance of an accident a hundred-fold.
I really can't think of any normal situation where you'd need to go over 80mph to avoid an accident (and the abnormal ones are a hell of a stretch), but I suppose I'd feel a little better knowing that if I absolutely had to, it would be physically available to be even if it's crazy-illegal.
Either you're a pre-teen or you've forgotten how most teenagers' minds work. How on earth do you expect to create a relationship of trust when you start off the conversation with "I don't trust you, so here's a tool to help reinforce that."?
If you don't trust a teen to drive, then don't let them get a license. Demonstrating that lack of trust by gimping a tool isn't the solution (yes, I consider a car to be a tool, since I just use mine to get from point a to point b). It may be a band-aid, but band-aids are crappy remedies, not things that actually fix the problem (which is this lack of trust). It's not like you start building a trusting relationship when they turn 16 - you've had the past decade and a half to work on that.
Disclosure: I'm only 21, but I consistently get rated late-thirties in all of those stupid "real age" tests.
What? I've been driving on the interstate since I got my learner's permit at 15. So has everyone else I known with a license. Anecdotal, of course, but that seems a pretty odd generalization (especially since it's next to unenforceable).
You're dead-on with the other points though. Responsibility is doing the right thing when you have a choice to do wrong, not when it's your only option.
Depends how the app is designed. If you code well, it's not really that big of an issue (like most languages/frameworks, just throw more hardware at it and the load balancer should figure most of it out). Most.NET-based code/apps I've seen tend to be... unusual, and very often in ways that seriously harm scalability.
If you're writing a system that requires multiple servers, chances are that Win2k3 licensing costs are the least of your worries. It's not insignificant, but it's probably a pittance compared to the developers' salaries.
Did you watch Armageddon? Specifically what happens on the ground?
Yes, it matters.
Not that hollywood is exactly a bastion of truth, but I'd still rather not spend my last days in a riot. At least not one that I wasn't responsible for starting.
No kidding. Ever look at how AJAX is handled on.net sites created in VS? javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$cphMain$lnkTotalDnsManager','') Talk about maintainable!
I have to give credit where credit is due - master pages are pretty damn handy, but the rest of what I've worked with in VS seems like a bunch of cobbled-together nonsense produced by people who failed their programming classes with the goal of creating the slowest IDE in the history of the known universe.
It's a loan that we have no expectation to collect on, let alone see an ROI. Many, many talking heads and politicians said it would be great if we saw most if it come back in, but not one of them expects to see a full return let alone actually turn a profit.
It's just delaying the inevitable slightly, so rather than all of the banks and other lenders collapsing all at once, it might be spread out over a few months and a couple of them might actually survive (while having eaten up all of the good assets from those that collapsed, at pennies on the dollar) creating one or two mind-numbingly large financial institutions while most of the country has to declare bankruptcy as their mortgages are foreclosed. Best yet, it'll happen in the dead of winter rather than now in early October when it might not kill the entire northern half of the country.
Good news is that the wheelbarrows are unnecessary. We'll just need to make sure that our ISPs cover the extra bandwidth from all of the extra zeroes on ebanking and that good stuff. The only thing I ever carry cash for is coffee, everything else I buy is done electronically in some way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't think anyone will have too much success playing a MUD from an iPhone. Might be fun to try for about ten seconds, but I expect that the net result would be a very busy IT staff dealing with shattered devices and the suicide rate quadrupling.
I didn't know that the iPod or iPhone was limited to one OS. That's so very odd...
Oh wait, it's not. Get off you anti-Apple soapbox and grow up a bit.
To be fair, most of the web apps designed around the iPhone either fail entirely in a desktop browser (user-agent detection), fail entirely in anything other than Safari (use of certain CSS properties, for example), or have no good desktop equivalent.
This won't be a problem for any of these students, but data speeds aside, the heavy javascript that's in most web apps just doesn't play too nicely with the iPhone's processor. Even over WiFi, most web apps are fairly slow to load, and of course tend to be quite a bit slower than locally installed apps. At least that's been my experience since the day after the original iPhone came out. Local caching can solve some of that (I believe there's some funky thing in Safari roughly equivalent to Google Gears for client-side data caching), but a lot of the problem stems from slow responses on HTTP requests - which is a problem both on "real" apps and web apps that go through some sort of web services layer (Facebook for iPhone, for example)
Some insightful comments, sure. But most would be giving them shit and making remarks about it being the next Vista and whatnot. But to paraphrase someone's sig, Slashdot has scattered insight in a sea of mediocrity - so that's really to be expected ;)
I thought Linux was supposed to be to OS X as OS X is to Windows in terms of stability (ie, not just rock-solid, but it will punch you in the gut if you try to crash it)... is this not the case?
You could say the same about Gmail, GCal, Google Docs and all of that other stuff, but then again Chrome hasn't spent the last several years in beta either.
BSD is what caused the chair to be picked up in the first place. I think the reaction is a BSOD.
Thanks for killing my joke, but since you answered seriously - what kind of tricky stuff are you doing to detect full-disk encryption on any machine that touches the network? And more importantly (assuming that this requires a boot-time password; I've never bothered with any serious encryption), do you have something that detects the sticky note on the bottom of the laptop with said password?
I guess I can sleep a little better knowing that the IRS is working hard to ensure that they only screw me over once per year.
Yeah, hence the 'GoatseTV' quip.
But I'm only commenting to point out how much the thinkgeek advertisement I got when expanding this post bothers me. "MORE FLEXIBLE SCREWING". Yeah, just the mental image I needed on a Saturday morning. Thanks a lot.
We know they're abusing their power. We know that they're incompetent!
And it never changes! It just happens again and again and again!
Isn't that the definition of a government?
Better idea: you're already paying an outrageous amount for data services (yes, voice is data), and as text messages are well under a kilobyte even with various overhead, they should all be free. Period. Even at 1c/1000 messages, they'd still be turning a hefty profit, percentage-wise anyways. If Amazon charges 10c/GB for S3 traffic and doesn't lose money, cell carriers can easily get away with 1c/MB - it's not up to their usual levels of extortion, but it's still basically free money.
Seriously, data is so damn cheap in absolutely any other market (even in places with stupidly low monthly caps like Australia) but not only will the cellular industry not cut us a break on the service that costs by far the least to provide, but they take that as an opportunity to screw us over the hardest.
I hope all content providers immediately drop support for sending texts to Verizon customers, with a clear explanation that it's due to their greed. That way they'll lose all of the revenue on both sides, not to mention get all of Verizon's customers pissed.
5,000,000 hours per year per person?
I'd like to borrow your time machine, if you don't mind. Using my knowledge of the stock market could make me trillions! Or even billions! </dr.evil>
Is that ever really an issue? I have plenty of legitimately-obtained software, and a not-unhealthy-but-more-than-zero amount of not so legitimately obtained software. However, in 100% of my software, I know which is the case.
It's safe to say that accidentally finding a piece of cracked software is quite unlikely. Maybe the distributor is in violation of a redistribution license (like the GPL), but that's not something you're likely to know by reading it on their site - they wouldn't go advertising the fact.
The GPL was just an example, albeit a poor one. Think Creative Commons, which has about a dozen or so different license combination, or opensource.org which compiles a good fifty different fairly-widely-used licenses.
Coming up with some fairly simple and basic terms and wrapping a relatively generic policy around them isn't out of the question.
* Your information {may|may not|may, but only anonymously} be seen by third parties.
* Personally identifiable information {may|may not} be shared with advertisers in order to effectively target advertising.
* Content you produce on this site {may|may not} be sold, licensed, or otherwise made available to third parties.
Etc. It can't be as boilerplate as the GPL, and would require more licenses than CC has available, but it would basically amount to dropping in different paragraphs of boilerplate to a document, each of which is determined by a dropdown box addressing one of maybe a dozen or so typical privacy areas. And that could easily enough translate into the cute and easy to decode icons attached to the CC licenses too.
True, but unlike when you're going against the government, there's at least the implication that by agreeing to their TOS, you're entering into some sort of nonformal contract (a shrink-wrap EULA basically) in that they have to hold up to their end of the bargain. If nothing else, you could probably sue them if you find them to be in violation of their posted privacy policy. Hell, if you go for the maximum allowed in small claims court, chances are they'll determine it not worth their time and you'll win your five grand by default.
Not much, but it's something. At least in theory. Like you, I assume the worst and hope for the best, and plan accordingly.
I do still like the idea of some rough equivalent to Creative Commons/OSI for privacy/usage polices.
Katana? That's clearly just a special-order XXL shaving razor.
I think Slashdot's approach with the quick-reply AJAXified version is fine: preview and cancel, with two useless buttons that nobody uses. And after you preview, you still usually have to wait about 15 minutes to post the comment because you type at a rate of more than two words per hour.
Audio previews should really wipe out all but the true extremes - only the most determined idiots and geniuses will actually submit their comments. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen.
And here in the states, ten over is typically the minimum to not get rear-ended. Except when someone spots a cop, in which case a plethora of cars all slam their brakes at once to get down to the speed limit and immediately increase the chance of an accident a hundred-fold.
I really can't think of any normal situation where you'd need to go over 80mph to avoid an accident (and the abnormal ones are a hell of a stretch), but I suppose I'd feel a little better knowing that if I absolutely had to, it would be physically available to be even if it's crazy-illegal.
Either you're a pre-teen or you've forgotten how most teenagers' minds work. How on earth do you expect to create a relationship of trust when you start off the conversation with "I don't trust you, so here's a tool to help reinforce that."?
If you don't trust a teen to drive, then don't let them get a license. Demonstrating that lack of trust by gimping a tool isn't the solution (yes, I consider a car to be a tool, since I just use mine to get from point a to point b). It may be a band-aid, but band-aids are crappy remedies, not things that actually fix the problem (which is this lack of trust). It's not like you start building a trusting relationship when they turn 16 - you've had the past decade and a half to work on that.
Disclosure: I'm only 21, but I consistently get rated late-thirties in all of those stupid "real age" tests.
What? I've been driving on the interstate since I got my learner's permit at 15. So has everyone else I known with a license. Anecdotal, of course, but that seems a pretty odd generalization (especially since it's next to unenforceable).
You're dead-on with the other points though. Responsibility is doing the right thing when you have a choice to do wrong, not when it's your only option.
Depends on the direction. It could well be accelerating at 9.8m/s^2. But if that's the case, you're screwed anyways.
Depends how the app is designed. If you code well, it's not really that big of an issue (like most languages/frameworks, just throw more hardware at it and the load balancer should figure most of it out). Most .NET-based code/apps I've seen tend to be... unusual, and very often in ways that seriously harm scalability.
If you're writing a system that requires multiple servers, chances are that Win2k3 licensing costs are the least of your worries. It's not insignificant, but it's probably a pittance compared to the developers' salaries.
Did you watch Armageddon? Specifically what happens on the ground?
Yes, it matters.
Not that hollywood is exactly a bastion of truth, but I'd still rather not spend my last days in a riot. At least not one that I wasn't responsible for starting.
As long as they leave Bawls (with an 's' ScuttleMonkey!) the hell alone. The only way to improve upon it is to make the bottles bigger.
No kidding. Ever look at how AJAX is handled on .net sites created in VS? javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$cphMain$lnkTotalDnsManager','')
Talk about maintainable!
I have to give credit where credit is due - master pages are pretty damn handy, but the rest of what I've worked with in VS seems like a bunch of cobbled-together nonsense produced by people who failed their programming classes with the goal of creating the slowest IDE in the history of the known universe.
It's a loan that we have no expectation to collect on, let alone see an ROI. Many, many talking heads and politicians said it would be great if we saw most if it come back in, but not one of them expects to see a full return let alone actually turn a profit.
It's just delaying the inevitable slightly, so rather than all of the banks and other lenders collapsing all at once, it might be spread out over a few months and a couple of them might actually survive (while having eaten up all of the good assets from those that collapsed, at pennies on the dollar) creating one or two mind-numbingly large financial institutions while most of the country has to declare bankruptcy as their mortgages are foreclosed. Best yet, it'll happen in the dead of winter rather than now in early October when it might not kill the entire northern half of the country.
Good news is that the wheelbarrows are unnecessary. We'll just need to make sure that our ISPs cover the extra bandwidth from all of the extra zeroes on ebanking and that good stuff. The only thing I ever carry cash for is coffee, everything else I buy is done electronically in some way or another.