Sounds pretty reasonable. Just outside my office is a great street view of a fuel station, disproving the theory that the Google vehicles are powered by magic rather than gasoline.
Breaking! Google vans can't rotate on the spot and need fuel. Still under investigation is whether the drivers need to eat.
A couple bucks a year certainly isn't worth it on a per-person basis. However, they've probably got millions of customers. An extra two bucks a domain probably brings in tens if not hundreds of millions of additional revenue. Yeah, that's worth it.
I just bought a couple domains through GoDaddy (as I'm migrating from my old host, which charges $15/yr/domain among other stupidities) and I'm reasonably satisfied. The idea that they'd charge me to move my existing domains to them is stupid, but I'm sure I can get that dealt with over the phone.
I get what I pay for, but when I don't pay I always seem to end up with much more. I'll assume there's some sort of inverse square law that we've yet to apply to the cost of "licensed" content.
Yes, 50ms is a made up number. And it's an exceptionally large one, for no other purpose than to make a point. I just created a timed, "echo 10000 times" loop and the performance difference was next to nothing (though it appears to be specific to the order I do things in; when I increased it to a million I saw a tenfold speed difference, but the first was always the faster no matter whether it was the single or double quoted version). Not exactly real-world, so expect the numbers to change with normal usage. Still, I'd hardly call using a single instead of a double quote premature optimization, given the complete lack of effort involved.
Well the latency of the web isn't so much the problem as the scalability of the script. An extra 50ms means nothing to the end user, but if you're getting twenty page views a second, you're going to find your server getting back-logged really quickly.
However, I think (hope) the confusion may have been in the word "interpolated", which should have been 'interpreted', 'substituted', 'replaced', or any number of other words.
Or just scroll to the right in the thumbnail window, see that nothing looks interesting, and deny them 10 pages worth of ad revenue. Only two clicks, and one was to close the tab in my browser.
URLs are the key to http IMO - they're the ones to keep in memory as they're unique, unlike page titles and bookmarks. When I type "sla" in the address bar, I want slashdot.org, not some random blog post with the term 'slashdot' in the title I happened to pass by at some point.
It does learn quickly, though it's a bit annoying at first. I certainly agree about forcing the new behavior - I expect (read: hope) that this will be a toggle in the app preferences come the final release. You do have to remember that this IS beta software, so it could well be on a to-do list somewhere. The good news is that it takes both urls and titles quite happily, so it doesn't REALLY matter.
Care to cite that? The panel on my Dell 14" somethingorother laptop at work is definitely using an 8-bit panel, as is the 17" external display next to it. I'm not rattling off some random stat from a web page - I actually know what to look for, and what would turn up in a dithered 6-bit panel (and does on my home MBP) fails to do so on either of those screens.
As someone who would be quite interested in doing this, can you define "essentially" for me? Is that a "you can do anything you want so long as it's legal" essentially, or a "you can do anything that's legal, except for X, Y, and Z which are disallowed regardless" essentially?
It may be weird, but it's also remarkably common. About half the LCDs on Newegg are reported as showing 16m or 16.2m colors, rather than 16.7m (2^24). A far cry from the 280k-odd colors of a 6-bit-per-channel display, but the number they're reporting is based off of the results of a 6-bit panel using dithering. Many cheaper screens from all manufacturers follow this trend, especially those advertised towards gamers. They sacrifice color reproduction in order to get the pixels to twist faster - all of the reported 2ms panels are 6-bit dithered displays, which gives awful color reproduction (not critical for games most of the time, but a big problem for photo/video work). Of course, anything faster than 16ms is absolutely pointless since you're dealing with a 60Hz signal, but that's aside the point. More notably, the 6-bit panels are quite a bit cheaper, as one would expect.
I'm almost positive that my Macbook Pro does this as well; honestly, quite unacceptable for a "pro" machine. It's especially noticeable at the brighter edge of a gradient (ex. the Photoshop color palette).
Most people aren't going to really notice. Dithering is reasonably effective, and it still manages to give the illusion of most of the spectrum (certainly far more than 6-bit/64 levels per channel, rather than 8-bit/256). But at the end of the day it's still an illusion, and the difference IS there.
I think it's mostly related to keeping the nice curve of the edge of the device. The Touch is a lot thinner so the curve along the edge is much flatter; recessing the jack with the iPhone allowed them to not have some awkward corner sticking out.
That certainly doesn't EXCUSE the problem, but I think it's a reasonable explanation. It drives me absolutely nuts, especially given the low durability of the stock earbuds. Easily remedied by a $1.75 adapter from Monoprice so not all lost, but it still means I have to carry around a stupid adapter around with me that sticks out of the top of my phone like a two-inch antenna. As little as the style of the device means to me, even I'm bothered by a solution that ugly.
I just don't get the MMS argument. Why would I want to spend half a buck to send a picture to a phone number when I can send it over email to phonenumber@carrier.com for free?
You say that as if it's specific to any one interface. Even the fastest hard drives out there couldn't sustain the potential throughput of SATA150 (let alone SATA-II/300), but if the filesystem or manual intervention keeps the disk relatively free of fragmentation (ideally at a folder/program level, not just file contiguity), it'll read quickly. And in that case, you'll be easily saturating a FW400/USB2.0 interface; at least for large files, as small files tend to read/write a lot more slowly simply from the system overhead.
I often do this, but it's incredibly impractical if for no other reason than how slow my home upload connection is compared to the connection at work (let alone direct access to the machine). I only need to check things in OS X once in a while; if it was really critical for me to do my job, I'd bitch at our IT guy until he caved. It would bring me the same amount of shunning from the rest of the company for being "that" guy, but I'd also get twice as much done.
Not supported indeed doesn't mean "won't work". However, when the competition DOES support what you're looking to do, which are you going to pick? Corporate policies and such be damned - if you have two options, one of which WILL work and the other MAY work, you'd have to be pretty daft to go with the latter.
Did it serve its purpose? If so, why the hell would they care what language it's written in? Were they in some sort of strange denial that a PHP/MySQL app can be used in a useful/large-scale/production/"real" environment, or was there a legitimate need to recode it into a MS-centric solution? The sales people where I work talk about.NET as if it's magic powder that you can sprinkle in your server room and have everything start working (while not knowing a damn thing about it, other than our product uses it - can't blame them, but it's a pretty uninformed and inaccurate statement). Of course they're sales people so they can't talk down about the tech that powers our product, but there's plenty of un/misinformed nonsense that goes around.
Applies to maybe a quarter of the tracks on iTunes (as compared to 100% on CDs and services like Amazon's MP3 thing).
In any case, it's irrelevant. DRM-free is naturally incompatible with an all-you-can-eat subscription service. Stop paying, stop getting. Until it could be streamed live from anywhere at any time, it'll work as downloading an encrypted version.
If this gets thrown out? Surely no court could be so stupid to think that a third party's opinions of an available product can be stifled on the grounds of intellectual property laws. I can't think of anything even reasonably close to a valid excuse to allow it to go through. Perhaps they expect that it will come across as libelous (meaning a completely valid and accurate assessment that portrays them in a negative light - which just means that your company/product sucks), but the review would have to be out there first. I don't think a gag order can be issued in this kind of situation, and an NDA violation (assuming they ever held up in court, which is very rarely the case) hardly applies here.
I don't think a PR nightmare really applies. This kind of stuff rarely if ever hits mainstream media, and us geeks of Slashdot aren't really the type to buy into proprietary tools in general, let alone ones used for voting.
The exact same is true of PHP and many other easy to learn web-oriented languages. It's easy enough to write safe, secure, and efficient code, but that's not going to stop a moron using a querystring variable directly in a SQL statement (I'm sure that I have something along those lines in my early code, as most of us probably do somewhere - thankfully, it's nothing being used outside of a local testing environment). The trick isn't so much understanding what your code snippet is doing as being able to compare two snippets that do the same thing and figure out which is better and why. Can I get what I need from "SELECT * FROM users" (or better yet, 'SELECT * FROM ' . $_GET['table'])? Of course. That doesn't make it a good idea. I have old code somewhere that was running a query for every cell in a 7x30 cell table, rather than one big query with a GROUP BY clause. It's not far off from The Daily WTF quality.
What works and what you should do are not necessarily the same thing. As long as you learn what you should do before you write production code, then no harm done. Otherwise, you just help perpetuate the stereotype of (some language) is insecure, performs badly, etc.
We've all written bad code. But some people translate bad code into a bad language. Use what works and/or what you know, and follow best practices.
So as usual, something ten times better than we have now is going to be available in five years. Since these breakthroughs happen all the time, we continue our remarkably linear trend by continually filling in the gaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty reasonable. Just outside my office is a great street view of a fuel station, disproving the theory that the Google vehicles are powered by magic rather than gasoline.
Breaking! Google vans can't rotate on the spot and need fuel. Still under investigation is whether the drivers need to eat.
A couple bucks a year certainly isn't worth it on a per-person basis. However, they've probably got millions of customers. An extra two bucks a domain probably brings in tens if not hundreds of millions of additional revenue. Yeah, that's worth it.
I just bought a couple domains through GoDaddy (as I'm migrating from my old host, which charges $15/yr/domain among other stupidities) and I'm reasonably satisfied. The idea that they'd charge me to move my existing domains to them is stupid, but I'm sure I can get that dealt with over the phone.
I get what I pay for, but when I don't pay I always seem to end up with much more. I'll assume there's some sort of inverse square law that we've yet to apply to the cost of "licensed" content.
Yes, 50ms is a made up number. And it's an exceptionally large one, for no other purpose than to make a point. I just created a timed, "echo 10000 times" loop and the performance difference was next to nothing (though it appears to be specific to the order I do things in; when I increased it to a million I saw a tenfold speed difference, but the first was always the faster no matter whether it was the single or double quoted version). Not exactly real-world, so expect the numbers to change with normal usage. Still, I'd hardly call using a single instead of a double quote premature optimization, given the complete lack of effort involved.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of mentally defective people in the world.
Well the latency of the web isn't so much the problem as the scalability of the script. An extra 50ms means nothing to the end user, but if you're getting twenty page views a second, you're going to find your server getting back-logged really quickly.
However, I think (hope) the confusion may have been in the word "interpolated", which should have been 'interpreted', 'substituted', 'replaced', or any number of other words.
Not that I'm siding with the ISPs, but what good is throttling their users if the users can just disable it?
Or just scroll to the right in the thumbnail window, see that nothing looks interesting, and deny them 10 pages worth of ad revenue. Only two clicks, and one was to close the tab in my browser.
Perhaps - IANAL. But nobody forced the competition to outbid them, either. All parties knew the terms of the auction.
Great in concept, poor in practice. While all the blogs out there have pretty, meaningful URLs, most dynamic sites still have all sorts of nonsensical querystring crap that's not too helpful for finding a page. If http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=509004&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=22943372 means a whole lot to you (rather than, for example, http://tech.slashdot.org/2008/04/02/firefox-3-beta-5-released/reply/), you're a lucky man.
It does learn quickly, though it's a bit annoying at first. I certainly agree about forcing the new behavior - I expect (read: hope) that this will be a toggle in the app preferences come the final release. You do have to remember that this IS beta software, so it could well be on a to-do list somewhere. The good news is that it takes both urls and titles quite happily, so it doesn't REALLY matter.
Care to cite that? The panel on my Dell 14" somethingorother laptop at work is definitely using an 8-bit panel, as is the 17" external display next to it. I'm not rattling off some random stat from a web page - I actually know what to look for, and what would turn up in a dithered 6-bit panel (and does on my home MBP) fails to do so on either of those screens.
As someone who would be quite interested in doing this, can you define "essentially" for me? Is that a "you can do anything you want so long as it's legal" essentially, or a "you can do anything that's legal, except for X, Y, and Z which are disallowed regardless" essentially?
It may be weird, but it's also remarkably common. About half the LCDs on Newegg are reported as showing 16m or 16.2m colors, rather than 16.7m (2^24). A far cry from the 280k-odd colors of a 6-bit-per-channel display, but the number they're reporting is based off of the results of a 6-bit panel using dithering. Many cheaper screens from all manufacturers follow this trend, especially those advertised towards gamers. They sacrifice color reproduction in order to get the pixels to twist faster - all of the reported 2ms panels are 6-bit dithered displays, which gives awful color reproduction (not critical for games most of the time, but a big problem for photo/video work). Of course, anything faster than 16ms is absolutely pointless since you're dealing with a 60Hz signal, but that's aside the point. More notably, the 6-bit panels are quite a bit cheaper, as one would expect.
I'm almost positive that my Macbook Pro does this as well; honestly, quite unacceptable for a "pro" machine. It's especially noticeable at the brighter edge of a gradient (ex. the Photoshop color palette).
Most people aren't going to really notice. Dithering is reasonably effective, and it still manages to give the illusion of most of the spectrum (certainly far more than 6-bit/64 levels per channel, rather than 8-bit/256). But at the end of the day it's still an illusion, and the difference IS there.
I think it's mostly related to keeping the nice curve of the edge of the device. The Touch is a lot thinner so the curve along the edge is much flatter; recessing the jack with the iPhone allowed them to not have some awkward corner sticking out.
That certainly doesn't EXCUSE the problem, but I think it's a reasonable explanation. It drives me absolutely nuts, especially given the low durability of the stock earbuds. Easily remedied by a $1.75 adapter from Monoprice so not all lost, but it still means I have to carry around a stupid adapter around with me that sticks out of the top of my phone like a two-inch antenna. As little as the style of the device means to me, even I'm bothered by a solution that ugly.
I just don't get the MMS argument. Why would I want to spend half a buck to send a picture to a phone number when I can send it over email to phonenumber@carrier.com for free?
You say that as if it's specific to any one interface. Even the fastest hard drives out there couldn't sustain the potential throughput of SATA150 (let alone SATA-II/300), but if the filesystem or manual intervention keeps the disk relatively free of fragmentation (ideally at a folder/program level, not just file contiguity), it'll read quickly. And in that case, you'll be easily saturating a FW400/USB2.0 interface; at least for large files, as small files tend to read/write a lot more slowly simply from the system overhead.
I often do this, but it's incredibly impractical if for no other reason than how slow my home upload connection is compared to the connection at work (let alone direct access to the machine). I only need to check things in OS X once in a while; if it was really critical for me to do my job, I'd bitch at our IT guy until he caved. It would bring me the same amount of shunning from the rest of the company for being "that" guy, but I'd also get twice as much done.
Not supported indeed doesn't mean "won't work". However, when the competition DOES support what you're looking to do, which are you going to pick? Corporate policies and such be damned - if you have two options, one of which WILL work and the other MAY work, you'd have to be pretty daft to go with the latter.
I wasn't aware that prostate exams started around age 15.
Did it serve its purpose? If so, why the hell would they care what language it's written in? Were they in some sort of strange denial that a PHP/MySQL app can be used in a useful/large-scale/production/"real" environment, or was there a legitimate need to recode it into a MS-centric solution? The sales people where I work talk about .NET as if it's magic powder that you can sprinkle in your server room and have everything start working (while not knowing a damn thing about it, other than our product uses it - can't blame them, but it's a pretty uninformed and inaccurate statement). Of course they're sales people so they can't talk down about the tech that powers our product, but there's plenty of un/misinformed nonsense that goes around.
Applies to maybe a quarter of the tracks on iTunes (as compared to 100% on CDs and services like Amazon's MP3 thing).
In any case, it's irrelevant. DRM-free is naturally incompatible with an all-you-can-eat subscription service. Stop paying, stop getting. Until it could be streamed live from anywhere at any time, it'll work as downloading an encrypted version.
Can't we just hire a hit-man?
If this gets thrown out? Surely no court could be so stupid to think that a third party's opinions of an available product can be stifled on the grounds of intellectual property laws. I can't think of anything even reasonably close to a valid excuse to allow it to go through. Perhaps they expect that it will come across as libelous (meaning a completely valid and accurate assessment that portrays them in a negative light - which just means that your company/product sucks), but the review would have to be out there first. I don't think a gag order can be issued in this kind of situation, and an NDA violation (assuming they ever held up in court, which is very rarely the case) hardly applies here.
I don't think a PR nightmare really applies. This kind of stuff rarely if ever hits mainstream media, and us geeks of Slashdot aren't really the type to buy into proprietary tools in general, let alone ones used for voting.
The exact same is true of PHP and many other easy to learn web-oriented languages. It's easy enough to write safe, secure, and efficient code, but that's not going to stop a moron using a querystring variable directly in a SQL statement (I'm sure that I have something along those lines in my early code, as most of us probably do somewhere - thankfully, it's nothing being used outside of a local testing environment). The trick isn't so much understanding what your code snippet is doing as being able to compare two snippets that do the same thing and figure out which is better and why. Can I get what I need from "SELECT * FROM users" (or better yet, 'SELECT * FROM ' . $_GET['table'])? Of course. That doesn't make it a good idea. I have old code somewhere that was running a query for every cell in a 7x30 cell table, rather than one big query with a GROUP BY clause. It's not far off from The Daily WTF quality.
What works and what you should do are not necessarily the same thing. As long as you learn what you should do before you write production code, then no harm done. Otherwise, you just help perpetuate the stereotype of (some language) is insecure, performs badly, etc.
We've all written bad code. But some people translate bad code into a bad language. Use what works and/or what you know, and follow best practices.
So as usual, something ten times better than we have now is going to be available in five years. Since these breakthroughs happen all the time, we continue our remarkably linear trend by continually filling in the gaps.