Why is it always cars for the analogies? Why not ducks? Or oranges?
Why that's like asking a NASCAR engineer why do they need engines with extremely radical cam profiles!
P.S.: The joke is probably funnier if you are like me and know nothing about cars.
Slashdot is not so different, there are some pretty useless comment here. Hell, I make a lot of them on occasion myself.
But if you read between the lines and "cherry pick", there are usually hidden gems about a software package, a piece of advice or something truly fascinating.
The noise to signal ratio is what matters, and on Slashdot it is better some days than others but in general it's a lot better than a lot of other sites. Some sites like YouTube or even to some extent Digg have almost no added value in their comments and the "noise" is pretty high.
It's not just about the freshest content (which is why I think a lot of people frequent Digg or Hacker News), the comments are what makes a user-generated-content site work... at least for me.
That's why I keep coming back here.
Considering they'll be streaming larger amounts of data than they do now. I assume the invitation is so they can slowly roll out the service, working out the kinks and installing new servers as necessary with a very reduced customer population. Much easier than having to be *absolutely* sure that everything is *perfect* before setting the doors wide open...perfect and absolute are pretty damn hard, there's always unforeseen shit in rolling out gargantuan systems like that.
The blog post/invitation page wasn't really clear about if they will charge those "beta" users or not. They should spell it out clearly and not charge the people who will beta test this.
I would assume that they wouldn't need to do a whole lot of testing since all they're doing is giving the Plus users access to more content. Their main issue will be bandwidth, but that's what the subscription fee and ads are for, right?
Anyway, what I find outrageous is the pricing+ads, the invitation was really just the icing on the cake.
uhmm, all google services are ad supported too. I won't be paying for hulu any time soon either, but the invitation model for ad supported services has precedents. If anything the weird thing is being "invited" to sign up and pay a monthly fee.
Ok, let me try to re-highlight this:
You mean to tell me you have to wait for an invitation to a paid for product that's ad-supported? What are they thinking?
Better?
Where's Weeds/Big Love/True Blood, or whatever people are watching nowadays?
Those are all on $15/month channels. People who are willing to pay for quality shows are already doing that.
Weeds is on Netflix, I think up to season 5. My wife and I discovered and got hooked on it for a while, and being able to stream an entire season over a few days with no commercials or season interruptions is amazing.
Even with Cable, we record everything on our DVR and watch it whenever we get around to it.
The TV model is dead as far as I'm concerned, I just do not have the time to watch a 20 minutes show over a 45 minutes period because of all the commercials.
I won't pirate, so if it's not on Netflix or it's not recorded on my DVR then I won't bother watching it.
You mean to tell me you have to wait for an invitation to a paid for product that's ad-supported? What are they thinking?
Their collection of shows do not seem that impressive either. Where's Weeds/Big Love/True Blood, or whatever people are watching nowadays?
I have a hard time believing that this is going to go anywhere. My $10 a month stays with Netflix, color me unimpressed.
Actually, I usually insert an R into that. I'll leave it to you to figure out where.
On a serious note, Khan Academy is wonderful. I only wish the content could be organized in a prerequisite manner across different topics (e.g. basic algebra before calculus, etc.). I guess I'll check the issue tracker, and maybe even send a patch or two
He reported it and attempted to negotiate a 60 day patch release. When those negotiations failed, he released the information to allow end users to disable the hcp handler in order to protect themselves
Two problems with this postmortem explanation:
a) He didn't have to be such a d*ck about it on the mailing list when he was asked why did he do this. His response was basically "If you are asking me then you're uninformed and you should know better."
b) How about calling Microsoft and saying: "Ok, I'm trying to negotiate 60 days for a patch to no avail. You have 30 days now instead of 60, and if you do not patch this I'm posting it on full-disclosure." Then he could have blogged about it and made MS look like $hit.
If MS was this horrible repeat offender that sits on patches forever like he implied in his follow up posts, why did he contact them to begin with? He could have just went to full-disclosure and said "MS sucks, they never listen to me, here's the vulnerability, good luck MS".
There are so many scenarios that he could have taken to avoid all this heat. It's unfortunate that he chose to do what he did.
Just because you're familiar with hammers doesn't make them the best tool for all possible jobs. Sometimes you would be better served by a saw.
The poster said he's fairly new to web applications development, so I wouldn't even say he's familiar with hammers.
Printing on the web is not really that bad, unless you need pixel perfect accuracy.
To the poster, if you need that kind of control and "CSS accuracy" then you're SOL as all browsers have their own CSS/printing quirks and you'll be in a world of hurt going down this path.
I think your best bet is to do this on the server side and serve something more appropriate like say a PDF. There are libraries out there that generate PDFs from HTML/CSS (dompdf in PHP for example).
They have their own shortcomings (e.g. dompdf doesn't respect vertical-align on table cells and even crashes when you have a table element that spans more than one page), but at least you'll know that the output will be consistent across all browsers/platforms and will be printed as such.
You could of course go gung-ho with postscript and create PDFs without the HTML/CSS translation mess. Your data and application logic are separate from presentation, aren't they?
I think consumers are starting to realize that it never is cost effective to purchase a film. At least at the release prices of about $18.
Finances are a factor, but they are not the only factor. At least for me.
When I do my monthly budget, I leave about $300 for misc. purchases (outside of the entertainment line item). $20 on a movie is not really going to make or break my world.
But, $20 on a crappy movie (that its previews looked so good) that will take storage space in my house is something I look at and feel strongly against. I hate the ripped-off feeling that ensues.
As I have stated in my post before, I buy movies that I have already watched just to have them. It's not convenience, it's really about "having" that epic movie in my collection and maybe even passing them on to my grandchildren (if you're reading this my grandchildren, good luck finding a DVD player
The movie industry really mastered the art of previews. They show you the best bits of a movie and string them together creating a false sense of a very intriguing plot.
They really shoot themselves in the foot when they do that, and I hope that they start to put less emphasis on the previews and more in the direction and story-line/character development.
I'm obviously not disagreeing with anything you said (aside from the 100% convenience), I just wanted to rant some more about it
Where in the world except for microsoft the languages is relevant for fixing up bugs or securing the CODE?
The world where you have to deal with RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew where no matter how simple the patch is, something is bound to get broken.
That's not even considering that the bug was in the hcp:// protocol that's directly related to help/remote assistance and the control panel. How will the patch affect hcp://[slashdot ate my UTF-8 Arabic characters that spelled help]?
That said, I do not have access to the code and I do not know for sure if there are any il8n issues to consider, but make no mistake about it, Windows is not your freaking weekend project that you can fix/QA and push live in five days.
Look, I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but Google's security researcher really didn't give them any chance here.
Had he reported it and it went unfixed for 3 months then I'd be rooting for him and bashing MS like there's no tomorrow. But any bug in a code base as complicated as windows cannot be humanly fixed in the time-frame he gave them.
Microsoft in the meantime has gotten much more agile and serious about fixing bugs when they're reported all the while bitching if someone dares go public too quickly for their taste ala Google.
Too quickly for their taste?
I don't know what world you live in where you can patch something as complicated as windows in five days.
Do you know how many versions and language combination of windows there are? Testing and QA that goes into it? Documentation?
It's not like your small little project where you fix a couple of lines and call it done you know.
And also, it wasn't "Google" per se, one of their security researchers did it, and according to his tweets he claims that this was done on his own time.
But sure, let's ignore the facts and label this as a clash of the titans.
Glad you took that in the spirit in which it was meant -- as a joke.
It was funny, thanks for the smile
I should have included a smiley with that comment
Or, you could have used an appropriate font
You could, you know, once in a while go upstairs and watch a movie with your mom...
My mom lives on a different continent you insensitive clod!
Sigh, I miss that basement.
Their kid will sit in front of the TV watch Cars or some Disney cartoon over and over and over. Every time I am at their house, the kid will be watching the same movie. Is this really healthy for a child?
I think my son's TV/movie watching habits are healthy. He doesn't watch Cars back to back, but every once in a while he'll ask to watch it again and I let him.
He's been recently asking to watch old cartoons that he used to watch a year ago (Blues Clues, etc.).
I sit down and watch it with him, and I'm noticing that he wants to watch it again because he has a better command of the language now and he "gets" what Blues means now. It's fun to watch him get excited and his face lighting up/laughing because he is that much more better at communicating.
Children also have a very short attention span. I notice that he misses a lot of the movie when he gets bored 20 minutes into it and starts playing with his actual cars or going for another activity. Which can explain why re-watching movies aren't that big of a deal to kids.
They demand it. They will not behave if you don't let them watch it. This is a parenting problem. How about interacting with your children instead of letting them set the rules?
I agree that this is a parenting problem. And believe you me, if my son is not on his best behavior and have not been impressing me recently (be it toilet training, learning how to spell new words, or counting past a certain number) then he gets no TV whatsoever, let alone demanding a show/movie and throwing a tantrum for it (that's grounds for timeout in my place).
What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
