Right, and there are 8 tabs on the iPhone. My point was that you're limited to viewing one at a time, unlike on a larger screen where you can just open a second window and have some reference material up while you're typing something out, or whatever. More significantly, any processes that the non-frontmost tab are running can be safely frozen in order to conserve system resources; on a desktop this isn't always an option (think streaming audio/video in the background while you do something useful in front).
Could we drop this already? Any computer is going to be unhappy when you give it a brand-new OS for its sixth birthday (unless the OS is a command-line version of Linux). Vista has its share of problems and then some, but performance has never once been one of them in my experience.
Then again, I don't buy off the shelf PCs bundled with all sorts of sluggish crapware. I buy overpriced PCs bundled with shiny, snobbish crapware! Yes, I'm a Mac user, and while MS couldn't pay me to switch back, I'm still defending Vista (is that the smell of burnt karma in the morning?)
How on earth would caching images on an online server save me money? If it very aggressively cached content on the device itself, maybe...
If you meant compressed, that would be a different story entirely. However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones. Still, the bandwidth savings would be a big plus. If I could cut down on the bandwidth usage significantly at the expense of some jpeg artifacting, I'd be all over it when on the road.
It seems to me that a mobile version of Chrome would end up almost easier than the desktop version. Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser, the whole threading issue that actually makes Chrome fairly unique pretty much goes away. Of course there's also the new Javascript engine which will end up being fairly critical on mobile phones, especially as phones and what we expect to do with them advances.
I always like to see more options available for people, but I don't really see a whole lot of difference on the user's side of things between different mobile browsers provided they all render HTML and CSS the same way (as Gecko and Webkit finally do). It really just comes down to whose affiliate link gets stuck in the google search URL. Aside from just slow rendering in general (which is mostly a hardware limitation), my only real complaint about Safari on the iPhone is a lack of an adblocker, and that's only for the bandwidth savings (if nothing else, it would be nice if it could delay the requests for content that match the filterset.g list until all of the content from the original domain is downloaded just to speed up progressive rendering of the actual content).
Unlike on my desktop, I really don't care tremendously which browser I'm using on a mobile device, unless one is significantly faster than the other. The UI will mostly be device/OS-dependent, and most extensions and/or plugins are pretty much impossible at least logistically (adblock again really being the only thing that you could implement and would make sense to do). If Mozilla produces a mobile browser then more power to them, but they have to provide a benefit over what's already in place in order to get people to switch and quite frankly I don't see it happening on a handset. I live and die by my Firefox extensions on the desktop, but... we'll see, I guess.
As compared to the rights of the people living in those states? It seems to do nothing except move the power UP the chain rather than down it towards us, the citizens, which seems rather fundamentally incompatible with our whole theoretical "power to the people" America thing.
Not really, this is more like being a few minutes late for a meeting discussion a promotion. Also bad, but quite a bit less dangerous.
I'd still like to see the suit go through. If these guys can't be trusted to even follow the rules in the election, I'd rather not think about the shenanigans that'll take place once one of them gets the top job.
In order for it to be socialism, we have to actually get something out of it. This is just the government taking control of something else. We may see an immediate short-term benefit (which is all anyone ever cares about, or we wouldn't have this problem in the first place) but it'll fuck us over long-term.
Hah, had this problem a few times back when I played MUDs heavily. As an admin, I found it helpful on more than one occasion to have made my clan's official store food be a pack of ramen noodles.
Yeah, but that doesn't really matter what activity you're doing if you'll only get two hours of sleep because you have to get up for work.
Between fighting a sleeping schedule and management, I decided to just avoid the problem entirely and go freelance. Of course I don't have a family to support and have relatively low expenses combined with a cash reserve from the day job (I knew I'd do it eventually so I'd saved accordingly) so I can go for a while if it doesn't work out without having to wonder if I'll be able to eat the next day.
Staying up all night gaming isn't really a problem when you normally sleep from 5am to noon instead of midnight to 7am.:) Plus you sound really dedicated when you say that you were programming until 4am. Nobody has to know that you started at 9pm or whatever.
It's really not just a weight thing. I'm extremely thin (to the point where most people would probably think I'm anorexic) yet I hover somewhere between depressed and horrendously bored 95% of the time. I don't touch MMOs but I've certainly spent my fair share of time and then some playing games, though I'm mostly just writing code these days. It's really a more generic social issue - I've got a 300lb gamer-obsessive friend who's always having a blast, even when there's not a controller in his hands. I'm still trying to figure out his trick.
Point being it's not just you, and it's certainly not because of being overweight. I had a neighbor who was suicidal and he was quite healthy, physically at least. I'm not going to be the guy that gives out sage advice on the subject because even if I know it would help I won't/can't follow it myself, probably for the same reasons you wouldn't follow it either (an "it wouldn't help" attitude, at a very high level; though it goes much deeper than that)
Certain forms of piracy certainly do! It is common knowledge that certain gangs in the London area mass produce pirate DVDs to sell to fund other, more sinister, activities. If it is true in London, it is probably true in many other parts of the world (I just happen to live near London).
Yes, and people that PAY for pirated material are douche bags. What's your point? If you're too much of a cheap-ass to pay full price, then steal it via TPB. I realize that people will steal my and others' work and quite frankly I don't care - so long as my name is still attached to it, I'm still getting exposure, which is a good thing even if it's not as good as it could be. If someone else is profiting from my work (ie, not a legitmate reseller where I'm still seeing some of it), then that person can go shove a skyscraper up his ass.
For all of the shit that internet pirates take about moral issues, it's the people that buy bootlegs out of the trunk (boot, you Londoner!) of a car that have the real issue. Not only does the person that produced the content not see a cent, but some random asshole profits from it. "Well as long as I paid something, it's on them to make it right" must be the argument, but that's BS through-and-through.
You make a fair point about the advertisements on the torrent sites. It's a substantial chunk of change, but so are their server costs (especially TPB, that's been raided and moved countries a couple of times). I'm sure the guys running it are doing all right for themselves. BUT the difference is that I'm still not paying for it. The 'premium' (paid) access to some trackers is just as bad as buying bootlegs since you're paying someone who's in no way supporting the content producer for access to said content. The price you pay for each piece of content may be substantially less, but you're still opening your wallet. Of course that kind of paid system COULD be legitimized in a method not entirely unlike a piracy tax of sorts (which the content producers actually see).
Anyways, </rant> If you're going to pirate, have fun. But don't PAY to steal something. It's retarded on so many levels it's not even funny.
Well usually the code samples that people have in the php.net/functionname pages are terrible and best avoided, but if nothing else they provide decent inspiration. Even if that inspiration is sometimes for how not to do things. While I do 90% of my work in PHP, it being so loosely typed comes with a SERIOUS lack of best practice guidelines.
Having said all of that, PHP's reference material accessibility has probably been one of the biggest factors in my decision to do most of my work in it (LAMP servers being so ubiquitous is another). I always found the.net documentation really painful to work with when I was doing a little work in that department, and it did nothing to lower my dislike for Microsoft. Oh well.
1. All the talk about "tracking" is nonsense. An RFID anything has a range measured in inches normally. Stuff it in your wallet sandwiched in between more cards and it pretty much won't work.
Yes, but when you need to swipe it to get into a building, it's easy enough to get a general patten of where people are going. The ability to shut down a lost badge (as compared to dealing with a leaked password or lost key) is NOT the only reason a lot of companies have RFID-based employee badges. There's a log of who goes through what door at what time. Now multiply that out by a state-wide ID system rather than something that just works in the office, and you can see where the privacy concern emerges. Within five years or so, there will be a centralized access system that uses RFID-based licenses, provided "for your convenience". Swipe your license at your front door which is connected into The System (you can grant relatives access), at parking meters to automatically charge you, anywhere for as it would be trivial to associate your credit card data into the thing, etc.
No, it's not an always-on GPS, but it can be used almost as effectively while remaining a hundred times more discreet. Think Gattaca, except with silicon instead of blood. I think we need to stop making movies like that, as they clearly give the government ideas (they're never the type to innovate, but they'll be happy to take credit).
Actually as it's all a bunch of static crap from 1994 frontpage, it probably will be fine. It's the rush of database connections and non-cached dynamic content that causes most sites to die in a slashdotting.
Indeed, the slashdot.org/~username page is probably one of the most significant elements of Slashdot's success, for the reasons you've stated. On smaller forums you tend to discuss a specific topic not a piece of news so you'll naturally go back frequently; it's also a lot easier to find the thing again simply due to the size of most forums. On Digg, the discussions (at least in my experience) are read once, leave a couple comments, and never come back; the quality of the dicussions is reflective of this methodology./. is somewhere in the middle, but it works well given the post frequency, the number of members, and the subscription model.
Hands up, everybody who has slashdot.org/~username in their bookmark bar. Come on now.
If the government is going to regulate pricing, wouldn't it legally have to be equal for everyone lest they run afoul of some non-discrimination law? It seems to me that whether they set rates at $50k/song/listener or $0.0005/song/listener, those rates need to be the same regardless of the broadcast medium. Obviously getting an accurate listener count for radio is impossible, but they should be obligated to use the same estimates they provide to their advertisers (whether they're knowingly inflated or otherwise).
Then again, the government doesn't really care about breaking the law, so that's probably already the case.
Most people's options suck. The majority of music I like is under an RIAA label, and that's true for almost everyone. Either I steal it (bad), pay for it and support the RIAA (definitely bad) even though I'm _slightly_ supporting the artist (definitely good), or I go without it entirely (bad).
Unfortunately, I'm not giving up the music. So I either have to steal it (and risk getting sued) or have to support the very organization that spends all of its time working against me and itself. Which would you suggest? I've done both, and don't really care for either option. If pirating it and donating directly to the artist was an option I'd do it, but that's never the case for RIAA-signed artists.
Yes, payola is illegal. It's also standard operating procedure, and nobody gives a damn that it happens (or nobody in a position to do anything, at least).
And let's face it - Pandora wouldn't be nearly as successful as it has been if it could only play indie music. Say what you want about quality, but there's a tremendously larger audience for mainstream music, pretty much by definition (now technically mainstream and indie aren't mutually exclusive, but it tends to work out that way more often than not).
Lucky you. There's not a system on my home network that can be reliably accessed through anything but the IP address. I've experienced the same reliability on every network I've ever touched.
Now internet-wide DNS is pretty damn solid, but that tends to happen when there are about seven levels of fall-back. LANs tend not to be nearly that robust.
Having said that, IPv6 addresses are stupidly over-complicated. Adding two groups onto IPv4 would probably have been more than enough for quite a number of years to come (281,474,976,710,656 IPs should be plenty for a while), even if it's not quite as futureproof as IPv6 which is something like 1 IP for every four atoms in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess all we need to do is elect Obama, then.
Ubuntama '08! /sarc
Right, and there are 8 tabs on the iPhone. My point was that you're limited to viewing one at a time, unlike on a larger screen where you can just open a second window and have some reference material up while you're typing something out, or whatever. More significantly, any processes that the non-frontmost tab are running can be safely frozen in order to conserve system resources; on a desktop this isn't always an option (think streaming audio/video in the background while you do something useful in front).
Could we drop this already? Any computer is going to be unhappy when you give it a brand-new OS for its sixth birthday (unless the OS is a command-line version of Linux). Vista has its share of problems and then some, but performance has never once been one of them in my experience.
Then again, I don't buy off the shelf PCs bundled with all sorts of sluggish crapware. I buy overpriced PCs bundled with shiny, snobbish crapware! Yes, I'm a Mac user, and while MS couldn't pay me to switch back, I'm still defending Vista (is that the smell of burnt karma in the morning?)
How on earth would caching images on an online server save me money? If it very aggressively cached content on the device itself, maybe...
If you meant compressed, that would be a different story entirely. However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones. Still, the bandwidth savings would be a big plus. If I could cut down on the bandwidth usage significantly at the expense of some jpeg artifacting, I'd be all over it when on the road.
It seems to me that a mobile version of Chrome would end up almost easier than the desktop version. Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser, the whole threading issue that actually makes Chrome fairly unique pretty much goes away. Of course there's also the new Javascript engine which will end up being fairly critical on mobile phones, especially as phones and what we expect to do with them advances.
I always like to see more options available for people, but I don't really see a whole lot of difference on the user's side of things between different mobile browsers provided they all render HTML and CSS the same way (as Gecko and Webkit finally do). It really just comes down to whose affiliate link gets stuck in the google search URL. Aside from just slow rendering in general (which is mostly a hardware limitation), my only real complaint about Safari on the iPhone is a lack of an adblocker, and that's only for the bandwidth savings (if nothing else, it would be nice if it could delay the requests for content that match the filterset.g list until all of the content from the original domain is downloaded just to speed up progressive rendering of the actual content).
Unlike on my desktop, I really don't care tremendously which browser I'm using on a mobile device, unless one is significantly faster than the other. The UI will mostly be device/OS-dependent, and most extensions and/or plugins are pretty much impossible at least logistically (adblock again really being the only thing that you could implement and would make sense to do). If Mozilla produces a mobile browser then more power to them, but they have to provide a benefit over what's already in place in order to get people to switch and quite frankly I don't see it happening on a handset. I live and die by my Firefox extensions on the desktop, but... we'll see, I guess.
As compared to the rights of the people living in those states? It seems to do nothing except move the power UP the chain rather than down it towards us, the citizens, which seems rather fundamentally incompatible with our whole theoretical "power to the people" America thing.
Not really, this is more like being a few minutes late for a meeting discussion a promotion. Also bad, but quite a bit less dangerous.
I'd still like to see the suit go through. If these guys can't be trusted to even follow the rules in the election, I'd rather not think about the shenanigans that'll take place once one of them gets the top job.
In order for it to be socialism, we have to actually get something out of it. This is just the government taking control of something else. We may see an immediate short-term benefit (which is all anyone ever cares about, or we wouldn't have this problem in the first place) but it'll fuck us over long-term.
Yeah, but it's part of physics.h so get over it.
Hah, had this problem a few times back when I played MUDs heavily. As an admin, I found it helpful on more than one occasion to have made my clan's official store food be a pack of ramen noodles.
Yeah, but that doesn't really matter what activity you're doing if you'll only get two hours of sleep because you have to get up for work.
Between fighting a sleeping schedule and management, I decided to just avoid the problem entirely and go freelance. Of course I don't have a family to support and have relatively low expenses combined with a cash reserve from the day job (I knew I'd do it eventually so I'd saved accordingly) so I can go for a while if it doesn't work out without having to wonder if I'll be able to eat the next day.
Staying up all night gaming isn't really a problem when you normally sleep from 5am to noon instead of midnight to 7am. :) Plus you sound really dedicated when you say that you were programming until 4am. Nobody has to know that you started at 9pm or whatever.
It's really not just a weight thing. I'm extremely thin (to the point where most people would probably think I'm anorexic) yet I hover somewhere between depressed and horrendously bored 95% of the time. I don't touch MMOs but I've certainly spent my fair share of time and then some playing games, though I'm mostly just writing code these days. It's really a more generic social issue - I've got a 300lb gamer-obsessive friend who's always having a blast, even when there's not a controller in his hands. I'm still trying to figure out his trick.
Point being it's not just you, and it's certainly not because of being overweight. I had a neighbor who was suicidal and he was quite healthy, physically at least. I'm not going to be the guy that gives out sage advice on the subject because even if I know it would help I won't/can't follow it myself, probably for the same reasons you wouldn't follow it either (an "it wouldn't help" attitude, at a very high level; though it goes much deeper than that)
Yes, and people that PAY for pirated material are douche bags. What's your point? If you're too much of a cheap-ass to pay full price, then steal it via TPB. I realize that people will steal my and others' work and quite frankly I don't care - so long as my name is still attached to it, I'm still getting exposure, which is a good thing even if it's not as good as it could be. If someone else is profiting from my work (ie, not a legitmate reseller where I'm still seeing some of it), then that person can go shove a skyscraper up his ass.
For all of the shit that internet pirates take about moral issues, it's the people that buy bootlegs out of the trunk (boot, you Londoner!) of a car that have the real issue. Not only does the person that produced the content not see a cent, but some random asshole profits from it. "Well as long as I paid something, it's on them to make it right" must be the argument, but that's BS through-and-through.
You make a fair point about the advertisements on the torrent sites. It's a substantial chunk of change, but so are their server costs (especially TPB, that's been raided and moved countries a couple of times). I'm sure the guys running it are doing all right for themselves. BUT the difference is that I'm still not paying for it. The 'premium' (paid) access to some trackers is just as bad as buying bootlegs since you're paying someone who's in no way supporting the content producer for access to said content. The price you pay for each piece of content may be substantially less, but you're still opening your wallet. Of course that kind of paid system COULD be legitimized in a method not entirely unlike a piracy tax of sorts (which the content producers actually see).
Anyways, </rant> If you're going to pirate, have fun. But don't PAY to steal something. It's retarded on so many levels it's not even funny.
Oh the irony. It's almost painful.
Well usually the code samples that people have in the php.net/functionname pages are terrible and best avoided, but if nothing else they provide decent inspiration. Even if that inspiration is sometimes for how not to do things. While I do 90% of my work in PHP, it being so loosely typed comes with a SERIOUS lack of best practice guidelines.
Having said all of that, PHP's reference material accessibility has probably been one of the biggest factors in my decision to do most of my work in it (LAMP servers being so ubiquitous is another). I always found the .net documentation really painful to work with when I was doing a little work in that department, and it did nothing to lower my dislike for Microsoft. Oh well.
Well yeah, but that doesn't make it legal. The government has been doing whatever the fuck it wants for years.
Yes, but when you need to swipe it to get into a building, it's easy enough to get a general patten of where people are going. The ability to shut down a lost badge (as compared to dealing with a leaked password or lost key) is NOT the only reason a lot of companies have RFID-based employee badges. There's a log of who goes through what door at what time. Now multiply that out by a state-wide ID system rather than something that just works in the office, and you can see where the privacy concern emerges. Within five years or so, there will be a centralized access system that uses RFID-based licenses, provided "for your convenience". Swipe your license at your front door which is connected into The System (you can grant relatives access), at parking meters to automatically charge you, anywhere for as it would be trivial to associate your credit card data into the thing, etc.
No, it's not an always-on GPS, but it can be used almost as effectively while remaining a hundred times more discreet. Think Gattaca, except with silicon instead of blood. I think we need to stop making movies like that, as they clearly give the government ideas (they're never the type to innovate, but they'll be happy to take credit).
And no, you can't borrow my tinfoil hat.
Aren't police allowed to place tracker bugs on your vehicle without your knowledge anyways?
Not without a warrant.
Actually as it's all a bunch of static crap from 1994 frontpage, it probably will be fine. It's the rush of database connections and non-cached dynamic content that causes most sites to die in a slashdotting.
You used the correct you{r|'re}, proving Darkness404's point.
Indeed, the slashdot.org/~username page is probably one of the most significant elements of Slashdot's success, for the reasons you've stated. On smaller forums you tend to discuss a specific topic not a piece of news so you'll naturally go back frequently; it's also a lot easier to find the thing again simply due to the size of most forums. On Digg, the discussions (at least in my experience) are read once, leave a couple comments, and never come back; the quality of the dicussions is reflective of this methodology. /. is somewhere in the middle, but it works well given the post frequency, the number of members, and the subscription model.
Hands up, everybody who has slashdot.org/~username in their bookmark bar. Come on now.
If the government is going to regulate pricing, wouldn't it legally have to be equal for everyone lest they run afoul of some non-discrimination law? It seems to me that whether they set rates at $50k/song/listener or $0.0005/song/listener, those rates need to be the same regardless of the broadcast medium. Obviously getting an accurate listener count for radio is impossible, but they should be obligated to use the same estimates they provide to their advertisers (whether they're knowingly inflated or otherwise).
Then again, the government doesn't really care about breaking the law, so that's probably already the case.
Most people's options suck. The majority of music I like is under an RIAA label, and that's true for almost everyone. Either I steal it (bad), pay for it and support the RIAA (definitely bad) even though I'm _slightly_ supporting the artist (definitely good), or I go without it entirely (bad).
Unfortunately, I'm not giving up the music. So I either have to steal it (and risk getting sued) or have to support the very organization that spends all of its time working against me and itself. Which would you suggest? I've done both, and don't really care for either option. If pirating it and donating directly to the artist was an option I'd do it, but that's never the case for RIAA-signed artists.
Yes, payola is illegal. It's also standard operating procedure, and nobody gives a damn that it happens (or nobody in a position to do anything, at least).
And let's face it - Pandora wouldn't be nearly as successful as it has been if it could only play indie music. Say what you want about quality, but there's a tremendously larger audience for mainstream music, pretty much by definition (now technically mainstream and indie aren't mutually exclusive, but it tends to work out that way more often than not).
Lucky you. There's not a system on my home network that can be reliably accessed through anything but the IP address. I've experienced the same reliability on every network I've ever touched.
Now internet-wide DNS is pretty damn solid, but that tends to happen when there are about seven levels of fall-back. LANs tend not to be nearly that robust.
Having said that, IPv6 addresses are stupidly over-complicated. Adding two groups onto IPv4 would probably have been more than enough for quite a number of years to come (281,474,976,710,656 IPs should be plenty for a while), even if it's not quite as futureproof as IPv6 which is something like 1 IP for every four atoms in the universe.