If you depend on case to differentiate your class names, I hope I never have to maintain your code. If there's a good reason to *ever* do this, please enlighten me.
Or you could just use PostgreSQL and get all of it and not pay. Sure lots of people have need for Oracle, but I really doubt those people are considering MySQL at the same time.
You are certainly the exception rather than the rule. For all of my gripes about Nvidia, drivers can't be one of them. Their Detonator series is easily the most stable set out there for a consumer-level card. Of course, with years of development through generations of cards, why shouldn't they be (not to mention the fact that they don't have much competition)?
Nvidia is one of the few companies I've seen that's actually gotten driver development right, now if only they wouldn't make me drool over a $400 card when a $150 card performs within 10% of it. Oh, and fix that damned Win2K/XP refresh rate stuff without requiring me to force refresh rates using an external, unsupported utility.
A little bit back towards the topic, TripleHead gaming looks like a blast. Someone buy me the card and two more 21" FD Trinitrons (hey, you gotta have symmetry:P).
There are a couple reasons I can come up with that might make this worth The Weather Channel's while:
1) I have yet to see the binary Nvidia drivers ('nvidia', not 'nv') included in a distro (like actually on the CD, I know with Debian at least you can apt-get what you need to install them). I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.
Then again, I've never written or even read an actual support contract, and I'm sure at least something could be worked out for the right price.
2) The Nvidia drivers only work on Linux. What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's? What if they're using Darwin on x86?:P
I'm pretty much just speculating because I haven't seen a press release or anything that has a statement from The Weather Channel on why they're doing it (anyone have a link to one or know some people working there?). Hell, some of their execs may just have stock in ATI or The Weather Channel may be absolutely packed with l33t h4x0rs.
It's good to see it, though. If and when they have XFree86 drivers equal to the potential of the Radeon 8500 I'll probably buy one. My understanding is that this card has a ton of potential and is fairly cheap but that the Windows drivers are a bit shaky. Sad, because I just spent way too much on a GeForce4 Ti440.
The problem with that is you're going to have to make an annoying compromise.
Should the message be intrusive enough to actually make the average user notice it and piss off more advanced users who know about web standards and how many pages designed with IE in mind simply don't follow them?
The alternative is to make the message take the form of a little icon or some other small detail (like the lock icon, or IE's privacy icon thingy) that novices aren't going to pay attention to? Then you may as well support the IE style layers anyway and throw your (very valid) political opposition to them out the window.
The usual OSS-ish solution to this is to make it a toggle-able option, at which point people start whining about what should be the default setting.
(Personal experience and evangelism follow)
I use Mozilla exclusively and have for a while now. With some decent TTF fonts in X (and after making my X server use a DPI setting that's close to Windows') 99.9% of the pages I visit look the same in Galeon, Mozilla (Windows and Linux) and IE 5 and 6. Almost all of the rest are still readily readable/navigable even with a visual glitch or two.
To be honest, the only pages that I'm having any problems with are pages on my employer's intranet. Hardly a big deal:P.
I'm happy with Mozilla's rendering the way it is, IE layers or no. I'm happy with speed and memory footprint of Galeon. If the Linux Flash plugin would move a little more quickly and not periodically crash my browser I'd have no complaints:).
The biggest is that in order to have decent Internet radio you need to have a reliable, somewhat high-speed connection to whomever you're streaming from.
if the supernode you were recieving from stops broadcasting, you just re-contact the radio station at the root of the tree, and they assign you a new parent node
This would likely be accompanied by a nice, possibly lengthy audible pause while you buffer the stream from the new location. Having multiple sources, as you stated (though apparently not as a solution to this problem), would be a possible remedy, but would require twice or more as much bandwidth to stream so you could accept your data from two or more people. This is an inconvenience for broadband, but even low quality streams (24Kbps = 3KBps) tax your average dialup line and redundancy would thus be pretty much impossible.
Even if you could get around this, your average cable or DSL connection only has, at most, 2-3x the bandwidth necessary to serve one 128Kbps stream. At lower bitrates this number increases, but the fact that each user would, as stated earlier, need more than one connection starts dragging it down again.
To even make the argument valid you'd have to assume that the majority of people would be listening on dialup, which is almost certainly not the case now and isn't likely to ever be the case.
And how many levels do you allow the tree to grow? What if a listener connected to the root drops? Everyone below him is going to drop too (since the only thing each of them knows is that they lost the stream). Then everyone is going to hit the root looking for a new stream at once which could, on a large enough scale, be a decent little DoS attack.
I'm basically just rambling because I haven't taken the time to organize my thoughts on all the reasons it won't work. I will say that you're not the first person to have the idea, but that most likely most of the people ahead of you quickly dismissed it.
I agree with you, and Mozilla has been my default browser for months. That said, there are a number of sites where it is annoying or impossible to use Mozilla.
Sites with broken MIME types for media files will often dump the contents of those files as text/plain in Mozilla. Not Mozilla's fault, but also not worth the effort of clueing in every web admin that makes this mistake when there is a browser that is smart/dumb enough to handle it.
Mozilla also seems to kick the crap out of my machine on sites with lots of graphics, java, or Flash a lot worse than IE.
IE doesn't import my Mozilla bookmarks properly, so I'd like to be able to stop using it altogether. Unfortunately I can't just yet.
There's a difference between wanting to ensure an escalated issue has correct and complete information and making sure a tech understands the "importance" of your issue.
If you meant the former, mea culpa. This is a sore spot for many techs and so perhaps I jumped down your throat unnecessarily. Your words indicated to me the latter, however.
Speaking as a tech, the best tech support I've reached is from Cyrusoft, the makers of the lovely Mulberry email client. Every inquiry I have ever made (well, all two) has been answered by Cyrus Daboo personally. Even my "thanks for your help, love the client" gushes that follow have been answered by well-written personal responses.
Don't use ridiculously bad grammar and end your post with four exclamation points when you're claiming you school the techs on the other end of the line when you call them.
Always review with the tech-support person on the phone (or in person) and make sure they understand the importance of your problem.
Everyone who calls into a call center has an "important" problem. Trying to play the "this is important" card is the surest way to get your issue slammed to the back of the queue to rot. I hear five dozen times a day how important someone's problem is (and only take about 15 calls). Have enough sense to realize that the people in the queue ahead of you have problems that are important to them as well.
It's not even so much asking. It's more trying to provide viable options to people who a) don't want to pay and b) have more money than they do tolerance for banner ads. Of course either way it's worse than it *was*, so I don't blame people for bitching. That said, if this is as bad as it gets I'll be happy enough.
I say cover your costs doing that marketing crap that you do, and leave me the fuck alone. If you're going to beg, you better tell me why because I refuse to line your pockets until you do.
I don't see how they are begging. After all, you certainly have the option (and I assume you take it, as I do) of not donating anything and putting up with a very reasonable amount of ads. You have that option because OSDN is doing its job and finding people to advertise on/..
Now, I would *love* to see a site of/.'s size be able to exist on love and good feelings alone. Unfortunately, bandwidth and servers aren't free (well, not after a point, and certainly/. is past that point).
Normally I completely agree with you, but with browsing I pretty much need to keep a hand on the mouse anyway. And actually, with this five button optical that does browser forward and back and Mozilla's middle click to open in a new tab I rarely need to use the keyboard at all for browsing except to fill out forms. Then again, Mozilla's form autofill helps out there too:).
Mozilla is especially nice for when I'm at work because I can keep one tabbed window open for things I'm actively working on with another separate tabbed window open with the sites I tend to monitor most of the day (/., k5, message boards i frequent, etc). This helps keep me organized and dramatically reduces the amount of clutter I have to deal with since I almost always have open a half dozen+ browser windows, a few gvims, two or three puttys, aim and winamp.
I switched to using it for 99% of what I do with the 0.9.9 release. There are still some pages on our company intranet that require IE, but that's about it.
Writing to support e-mail gets replies from the program's author, too. Mulberry is the only GUI mail client that could get me to stop SSH'ing into my mail server to use mutt:). Of course I still wish I could integrate gvim into it as my e-mail editor, but Mulberry does a pretty good job on its own.
PGP/GPG plugin is an extra $4. I've considered buying it a few times, especially since I managed to screw up and install it on my desktop when I was installing the SSL plugin and I get a nag screen.
id actually verifies the CD key each time you connect to the server. Now, I'm not going to pretend I know how this works in-depth, but my understanding with this (and Half-Life's WON system) is that you pass your information to their auth servers and then the game server checks with the auth server for a yes/no answer as to whether you're verified or not.
It's a simple solution really. Real CD key validation, you don't have to trust the game server.
Erm. Quake3, Half-Life and Tribes 2 all allow you to play on independent servers while enforcing cd keys. Just set up Battle.net as auth servers and allow third parties to provide the actual game daemons. Seems to work very well for those three games.
... which is not what spammers are trying to do. Hence, blocking legitimate e-mail along with spam doesn't let spammers "win" in any way.
You're confusing spammers with terrorists. While it's convenient and makes everyone think that spam is bad (which nobody will disagree that it is) it's not very accurate.
I think this is a more "if you do this everyone loses" situation than "if you do this spammers win." Of course, while that makes it sound simple enough to decide against it, I'm getting ready to do it myself simply because of the sheer annoyance of receiving these messages coupled with the fact that I get zero personal e-mail from Asia.
Because IRC networks rely on known central servers, the same way Napster did. The IRC model is the exact thing these decentralized networks are trying to avoid.
The RIAA, MPAA, etc. can shutdown 50 central servers the same way they can shutdown one. It may take a bit more effort, but that's what they pay their legal teams for.
"you figure that because someone does not want to spend a whole day figuring out how to make a change in configuration on a piece of software because it's stored in an archane manner in a completely unintuitive fashion, that they are somehow inferior or not as hardcore as you."
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If you depend on case to differentiate your class names, I hope I never have to maintain your code. If there's a good reason to *ever* do this, please enlighten me.
I think he was trying to say that if you miss a few episodes of the Simpsons, it will be ok.
Blasphemy!
Or you could just use PostgreSQL and get all of it and not pay. Sure lots of people have need for Oracle, but I really doubt those people are considering MySQL at the same time.
You are certainly the exception rather than the rule. For all of my gripes about Nvidia, drivers can't be one of them. Their Detonator series is easily the most stable set out there for a consumer-level card. Of course, with years of development through generations of cards, why shouldn't they be (not to mention the fact that they don't have much competition)?
:P).
Nvidia is one of the few companies I've seen that's actually gotten driver development right, now if only they wouldn't make me drool over a $400 card when a $150 card performs within 10% of it. Oh, and fix that damned Win2K/XP refresh rate stuff without requiring me to force refresh rates using an external, unsupported utility.
A little bit back towards the topic, TripleHead gaming looks like a blast. Someone buy me the card and two more 21" FD Trinitrons (hey, you gotta have symmetry
There are a couple reasons I can come up with that might make this worth The Weather Channel's while:
:P
1) I have yet to see the binary Nvidia drivers ('nvidia', not 'nv') included in a distro (like actually on the CD, I know with Debian at least you can apt-get what you need to install them). I would think that needing to insert some binary-only code into a kernel could significantly decrease their vendor's ability to support their machines.
Then again, I've never written or even read an actual support contract, and I'm sure at least something could be worked out for the right price.
2) The Nvidia drivers only work on Linux. What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's? What if they're using Darwin on x86?
I'm pretty much just speculating because I haven't seen a press release or anything that has a statement from The Weather Channel on why they're doing it (anyone have a link to one or know some people working there?). Hell, some of their execs may just have stock in ATI or The Weather Channel may be absolutely packed with l33t h4x0rs.
It's good to see it, though. If and when they have XFree86 drivers equal to the potential of the Radeon 8500 I'll probably buy one. My understanding is that this card has a ton of potential and is fairly cheap but that the Windows drivers are a bit shaky. Sad, because I just spent way too much on a GeForce4 Ti440.
The problem with that is you're going to have to make an annoying compromise.
:P.
:).
Should the message be intrusive enough to actually make the average user notice it and piss off more advanced users who know about web standards and how many pages designed with IE in mind simply don't follow them?
The alternative is to make the message take the form of a little icon or some other small detail (like the lock icon, or IE's privacy icon thingy) that novices aren't going to pay attention to? Then you may as well support the IE style layers anyway and throw your (very valid) political opposition to them out the window.
The usual OSS-ish solution to this is to make it a toggle-able option, at which point people start whining about what should be the default setting.
(Personal experience and evangelism follow)
I use Mozilla exclusively and have for a while now. With some decent TTF fonts in X (and after making my X server use a DPI setting that's close to Windows') 99.9% of the pages I visit look the same in Galeon, Mozilla (Windows and Linux) and IE 5 and 6. Almost all of the rest are still readily readable/navigable even with a visual glitch or two.
To be honest, the only pages that I'm having any problems with are pages on my employer's intranet. Hardly a big deal
I'm happy with Mozilla's rendering the way it is, IE layers or no. I'm happy with speed and memory footprint of Galeon. If the Linux Flash plugin would move a little more quickly and not periodically crash my browser I'd have no complaints
Hooray Mozilla!
Are you offering to man the station? :)
There are a few problems with this plan.
The biggest is that in order to have decent Internet radio you need to have a reliable, somewhat high-speed connection to whomever you're streaming from.
if the supernode you were recieving from stops broadcasting, you just re-contact the radio station at the root of the tree, and they assign you a new parent node
This would likely be accompanied by a nice, possibly lengthy audible pause while you buffer the stream from the new location. Having multiple sources, as you stated (though apparently not as a solution to this problem), would be a possible remedy, but would require twice or more as much bandwidth to stream so you could accept your data from two or more people. This is an inconvenience for broadband, but even low quality streams (24Kbps = 3KBps) tax your average dialup line and redundancy would thus be pretty much impossible.
Even if you could get around this, your average cable or DSL connection only has, at most, 2-3x the bandwidth necessary to serve one 128Kbps stream. At lower bitrates this number increases, but the fact that each user would, as stated earlier, need more than one connection starts dragging it down again.
To even make the argument valid you'd have to assume that the majority of people would be listening on dialup, which is almost certainly not the case now and isn't likely to ever be the case.
And how many levels do you allow the tree to grow? What if a listener connected to the root drops? Everyone below him is going to drop too (since the only thing each of them knows is that they lost the stream). Then everyone is going to hit the root looking for a new stream at once which could, on a large enough scale, be a decent little DoS attack.
I'm basically just rambling because I haven't taken the time to organize my thoughts on all the reasons it won't work. I will say that you're not the first person to have the idea, but that most likely most of the people ahead of you quickly dismissed it.
I agree with you, and Mozilla has been my default browser for months. That said, there are a number of sites where it is annoying or impossible to use Mozilla.
Sites with broken MIME types for media files will often dump the contents of those files as text/plain in Mozilla. Not Mozilla's fault, but also not worth the effort of clueing in every web admin that makes this mistake when there is a browser that is smart/dumb enough to handle it.
Mozilla also seems to kick the crap out of my machine on sites with lots of graphics, java, or Flash a lot worse than IE.
IE doesn't import my Mozilla bookmarks properly, so I'd like to be able to stop using it altogether. Unfortunately I can't just yet.
What are you talking about? I completely expect to see #1 on here sooner or later.
You can turn that searching junk off by selecting "Do not search from address bar" in IE's advanced options.
I was very happy when I found that option.
It will of course be sad when it finally leaves the air, but the show is 13 seasons old. It's not going to go on forever!
:(
But why?
There's a difference between wanting to ensure an escalated issue has correct and complete information and making sure a tech understands the "importance" of your issue.
If you meant the former, mea culpa. This is a sore spot for many techs and so perhaps I jumped down your throat unnecessarily. Your words indicated to me the latter, however.
Speaking as a tech, the best tech support I've reached is from Cyrusoft, the makers of the lovely Mulberry email client. Every inquiry I have ever made (well, all two) has been answered by Cyrus Daboo personally. Even my "thanks for your help, love the client" gushes that follow have been answered by well-written personal responses.
Let me give you some free support:
Don't use ridiculously bad grammar and end your post with four exclamation points when you're claiming you school the techs on the other end of the line when you call them.
Always review with the tech-support person on the phone (or in person) and make sure they understand the importance of your problem.
Everyone who calls into a call center has an "important" problem. Trying to play the "this is important" card is the surest way to get your issue slammed to the back of the queue to rot. I hear five dozen times a day how important someone's problem is (and only take about 15 calls). Have enough sense to realize that the people in the queue ahead of you have problems that are important to them as well.
It's not even so much asking. It's more trying to provide viable options to people who a) don't want to pay and b) have more money than they do tolerance for banner ads. Of course either way it's worse than it *was*, so I don't blame people for bitching. That said, if this is as bad as it gets I'll be happy enough.
I say cover your costs doing that marketing crap that you do, and leave me the fuck alone. If you're going to beg, you better tell me why because I refuse to line your pockets until you do.
/..
/.'s size be able to exist on love and good feelings alone. Unfortunately, bandwidth and servers aren't free (well, not after a point, and certainly /. is past that point).
I don't see how they are begging. After all, you certainly have the option (and I assume you take it, as I do) of not donating anything and putting up with a very reasonable amount of ads. You have that option because OSDN is doing its job and finding people to advertise on
Now, I would *love* to see a site of
Normally I completely agree with you, but with browsing I pretty much need to keep a hand on the mouse anyway. And actually, with this five button optical that does browser forward and back and Mozilla's middle click to open in a new tab I rarely need to use the keyboard at all for browsing except to fill out forms. Then again, Mozilla's form autofill helps out there too :).
Mozilla is especially nice for when I'm at work because I can keep one tabbed window open for things I'm actively working on with another separate tabbed window open with the sites I tend to monitor most of the day (/., k5, message boards i frequent, etc). This helps keep me organized and dramatically reduces the amount of clutter I have to deal with since I almost always have open a half dozen+ browser windows, a few gvims, two or three puttys, aim and winamp.
I switched to using it for 99% of what I do with the 0.9.9 release. There are still some pages on our company intranet that require IE, but that's about it.
Writing to support e-mail gets replies from the program's author, too. Mulberry is the only GUI mail client that could get me to stop SSH'ing into my mail server to use mutt :). Of course I still wish I could integrate gvim into it as my e-mail editor, but Mulberry does a pretty good job on its own.
PGP/GPG plugin is an extra $4. I've considered buying it a few times, especially since I managed to screw up and install it on my desktop when I was installing the SSL plugin and I get a nag screen.
id actually verifies the CD key each time you connect to the server. Now, I'm not going to pretend I know how this works in-depth, but my understanding with this (and Half-Life's WON system) is that you pass your information to their auth servers and then the game server checks with the auth server for a yes/no answer as to whether you're verified or not.
It's a simple solution really. Real CD key validation, you don't have to trust the game server.
Erm. Quake3, Half-Life and Tribes 2 all allow you to play on independent servers while enforcing cd keys. Just set up Battle.net as auth servers and allow third parties to provide the actual game daemons. Seems to work very well for those three games.
... which is not what spammers are trying to do. Hence, blocking legitimate e-mail along with spam doesn't let spammers "win" in any way.
You're confusing spammers with terrorists. While it's convenient and makes everyone think that spam is bad (which nobody will disagree that it is) it's not very accurate.
I think this is a more "if you do this everyone loses" situation than "if you do this spammers win." Of course, while that makes it sound simple enough to decide against it, I'm getting ready to do it myself simply because of the sheer annoyance of receiving these messages coupled with the fact that I get zero personal e-mail from Asia.
Because IRC networks rely on known central servers, the same way Napster did. The IRC model is the exact thing these decentralized networks are trying to avoid.
The RIAA, MPAA, etc. can shutdown 50 central servers the same way they can shutdown one. It may take a bit more effort, but that's what they pay their legal teams for.
"you figure that because someone does not want to spend a whole day figuring out how to make a change in configuration on a piece of software because it's stored in an archane manner in a completely unintuitive fashion, that they are somehow inferior or not as hardcore as you."
Sounds like the Windows registry to me.