Another plausible but false story: "Slashdot to start supporting ÃUnicodeÃ(TM) characters"

Your post advocates a

( ) technical
( ) legislative
(x) market-based
( ) vigilante

approach to fixing the app store. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.

(x) Apple is doing quite well these days, thankyouverymuch, and doesn't really give a shit how you think they should be run. (You, in general, public at large, and probably you, in particular, JLG.)

(x) Scammy developers will pay people in 4th-world countries to say their app is great.

(x) Probably a bunch more reasons that I don't have the energy to think up this second.

... Throwback Tuesday!

"... the password gropers have finally Peak Stupid."

I think you accidentally a verb.

> Their function is (literally) to prevent applicants
> from connecting with hiring managers

Now now, you're selling HR short.

It's also their responsibility to be able to supply a valid reason to fire any person at any time.

Because ninety percent of everything is crap. This is not limited to job applications.

I was signing up for an online service just this morning. The page made no mention of password requirements anywhere, nor did it have a colorful JavaScript "weak/OK/strong" indicator, which is pretty standard and I'm sure can be done with a line or two of jquery. It's not an essential account so I used a simple password -- just a series of lowercase letters. I clicked submit, then got a message that my password must have a number. I added a number, clicked submit, and was told that I need a special character. I added one, clicked submit again, and this time the message was that it must contain both upper- and lowercase letters. Fourth time was the charm. :-\

I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.

I first went online with a brand-new, crazy-fast 14.4 that I had to set the DIP switches on in 1995. So I wasn't there in 1989, but I'm not a total noob, either. Busy signals 90% of the time? Not in 1995. You're exaggerating just a shade, perhaps. Maybe once every couple days I couldn't connect, but I usually got through on the second call, and pretty much always by the third. I didn't get cable until 2000 or so.

I have no problem with how he runs his business -- phone lines, idle time, etc., yeah, I get that -- but it's 2014 and even though "literally" now means "figuratively", the word "unlimited" still means "unlimited". My only complaint with him is that he shouldn't say "unlimited" if there are, in fact, limits. That's all. There's a perfectly good word available for him to use: "unmetered" -- and I know he knows that word because he buries it under the asterisk. It is quite simply dishonest, whether it's AT&T or Comcast selling UNLIMITED* broadband or a little mom-and-pop shop like this.

IF IT'S FUCKING LIMITED, DON'T FUCKING CALL IT UNLIMITED!

How hard is it to just say "Add $5.00/month for unmetered, interactive usage" without an asterisk and a bunch of bullshit between "Add $5" and the description of what you actually get for your five bucks?

In theory it's usually good when bad things happen to congress for exactly that reason, but the violation here is "we've been spying on you and know all your dirty little secrets" ... so maybe not so much.

Is it "Formal Specification" or "Specification Formal"? Will the process take the form of "PHP to Formal Specification" or will it be "Formal Specification from PHP"? How about "php2spec"?

Once it got to the point that you could buy a decent (read: non-gaming) machine for about the same as the parts would cost, I quit building. The last one I built was an AMD K6-2/450 for close to $1,000 and the first one I bought was a refurbished 1 GHz PIII HP Pavilion for I think $850, to which I added an ATI TV-Wonder video capture card and a 32 MB video card with DVI to drive a used 18.1" IBM flat panel that I picked up for a song. (I think $800 at the time.) It came with Windows ME and I "upgraded" to 98 SE the day I got it (boot time dropped from about 90 seconds to about 45); later I put on Windows 2000 and that thing ran like a swiss watch for years.

- Lenny, Strange Days

/etc/hosts

Install once, update if you care to, but it's not essential. Requires no configuration after installation, works for ALL browsers on your system with no setup, does not require the browser to "support" it in any way (i.e., extensions), never ever gets broken by browser updates, works on ancient computers with grossly out-of-date browsers. Works with ANY tcp/ip-based app on your system, really, so it lowers vectors for IM apps, Acrobat, etc.

The first computer I used it on was an 800 MHz G3 iBook with 640 MB RAM. Some people may say a large hosts file will slow down your computer, but I've never seen that happen myself in over a decade of using it on literally every computer I have.

It may not block EVERY ad like a dedicated extension does, but it comes really really close, and I like the fact that it works with all browsers and never requires updating. When I get a new computer, I put the hosts file on and pretty much never touch it again. A handful of sites (like hulu) will not work with an adblocker and it's a manual process to edit the file, but for unix types, that's not a problem. It blocks google's sponsored links so you may need to take that out too, for people who google "sears" and click the first (sponsored) link instead of the first actual link.

No reason not to do security in layers and use it WITH adblocking extensions, I suppose, but I've never felt the need to.

SPUG: "The group is on hiatus."

The most recent "previous meeting" mentioned was 12/5/2006, and there's a link at the bottom that says "Palm is hiring" if you want a hint of when that page was last updated.

Even the link to the article about the death of Palm is two years old now. Seriously man, it has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.