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Comment Re:why does your phone need software running on yo (Score 4, Funny) 519

Well, you can't just have people willy-nilly adding files to the filesystem of the device they've purchased. We should be considerate and politely ask the device if it'll alter its filesystem on our behalf, and when it tells us to go blow donkeys for wanting r/w permission to /, we sit back and acknowledge Apple's wisdom and the groundbreaking intuition of their software!

It's kinda sad that the extremely sophisticated design of that communication isn't really there to facilitate advanced functions... it just facilitates advanced lockdown. You don't tell the device what to do; you tell it what you'd like, and then ask if that's okay. Given that, I applaud The Evad3rs for making iOS devices bend to their owners' will.

Comment Re:Keep it in memory (Score 1) 85

Perhaps it's necessary to write it out to the file system before you can transfer it to the GPU RAM, likely due to that tiny heap issue the guys above mentioned? So you'd need to write portions of it to RAM and flush it out to the GPU, tiny chunks at a time perhaps?

Normally works great, but... looks like someone screwed up, perhaps? Maybe a debug flag that renames the file extension instead of deleting the image got left on... We could speculate for hours, but if it wasn't an accident... that's pretty pathetic. Given how small the images are, it'd be trivial to "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/media/dongpic.jpg.nomedia count=filesize" or whatever, for every single one that comes in!

Comment Re:Going to hurt videos available at some point (Score 4, Insightful) 381

fine... open your wallet... takers are SOOOO annoying.

I fucking wish I could pay as little to watch a TV show or movie as a comparable set of ads would return in revenue for being in front of my eyeballs.

Instead, some dickhead thinks I should pay ~5-10 cents a minute to watch one episode of his TV show. Naturally, 1080p costs twice as much too.

Comment Re:How does firefox handle searches? (Score 1) 101

I've experienced what he's talking about, though I can't remember if it was with HTTPS Everywhere for Chrome or Firefox. I think that what happens is that the HTML (and maybe the JS) for a particular page come down over the HTTPS link, but for some reason, the CSS and/or various other pieces don't, and get pulled down over HTTP... or perhaps they fail entirely. Like they come from a CDN or something that doesn't do HTTPS but that shares a root DNS name that HTTPS Everywhere is programmed to re-write.

Anyway, the pages look like a website designed by a badger in 1996: Line after line of links at the top of the page corresponding to what would have been a site navigation bar. Stuff like that.

The funny part is that sometimes the content you were looking for never even shows up. You just get the outline of the page and the JS that was supposed to pull it all down never got to run :P

Comment Re:The amusing part (Score 1) 271

Mail is now the included client in Windows 8, and has dropped support for POP3, but added ActiveSync.

Oh thank the heavens.... POP3 is so terrible that I'd actually rather be shoehorned into something proprietary but near-universally supported. I really do hope that support for it starts disappearing, because I just want to smack anyone who thinks that suggesting "We support POP" is a good answer to the "How do I get email on device or application X" question.

Comment Re:I can assure you... (Score 1) 642

All the benchmarks and real life usage I have seen show Windows 8 to boot faster and be as fast as Windows 7 at worst. How is that more bloated?

"Bitch/whine/cry. Metro sucks, I don't have a touchscreen, Valve hates Windows, I'll never use it, cry cry cry."

That should be all the evidence you need. After all, if all these people are complaining about it as though Microsoft unloaded a dump truck full of Legos onto their bathroom floors, it must be terrible!

Windows has been a fairly lean, ever-evolving piece of tech for quite some time now, starting with Windows 2000. Any time anything changes, you'll find a subset of vocal assholes that'll go out of their way to flip their shit whenever given the chance (rumor has it that New Coke was actually better), and I personally just find it to be fucking annoying. They'll eventually shut up when the next thing to bitch about comes along.

I've used every iteration of Windows for pretty much its entire lifecycle as a flagship OS since Windows ME. They all worked just fine. XP was great. Vista was great. 7 was great. And Windows 8... Yup. Great.

There are things about every single iteration of the product that are improvements and drawbacks from previous versions. I could list them and whine like a bitch on the internet all day, but instead I just read up on how the new stuff works, learn how to use it effectively, and enjoy being more informed than the average, whiny troll.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it'll never get any better. People will never like what they don't understand, but it's very easy to read a single description and mock or hate something forever. Take the time to educate yourself of the differences in the old vs. the new. Actually justify your own opinions, and simply enjoy the fact that your opinion will be worth more than that of just about all the trolls put together.

Comment Re:Headers (Score 1) 562

I get the concept. I'm saying that the sales tactics and the excuses that are used for why everything is a big pile of lies and bullshit don't hold water. Unlike the pool. Furthermore, the fact that these practices are in place gives some implication that transfer-based fees and caps solve is one of instantaneous capacity---otherwise the carriers would be happy to make things unlimited again, but there's not enough capacity for it!---and that's a complete lie.

It's a profit-driven adjustment to the status quo designed to fuck over consumers everywhere, and has us paying attention to all the wrong things when it comes to our data connections. It doesn't matter how fast it "can" be. It matters whether or not I can actually use it for what I bought it for---the bandwidth---without being billed to absurdity for using it.

I'll bust out the calculator:
  • ((25 Mbps) * 1 month) / (1 gigabyte) = 8025.34
  • 8025.34 GB * $10 per GB = $80253

Okay, so at the "standard" $10/GB rate, it's an amazingly affordable eighty thousand dollars per month to actually get what I thought I had for $50. Great. But that's LTE! Cellular is expensive because of spectrum/costs/blah blah blah. What about a wired line? I think that's $10 per 100 GB, or $802 per month. Gotta love DSL. It's cheap!

These usage fees are obviously outrageous when you look at them, and it's no different from the wholesale fleecing of the public that was SMS pricing until... well shit, the cellular companies still break it off in you for SMS. They don't let you pay for a limited quantity anymore. It's all or nothing.

Comment Re:Headers (Score 1) 562

Of course. But that's not the point!

Of all the ways one could address consumer demand for a solution to a problem---bandwidth is limited---they've taken the absolute most indirect and cheapest route to address the problem. The keep the solution because it's so profitable (huge ROI because it's low cost), in spite of the fact that it doesn't actually solve the damned problem. We've seen this before: you're holding it wrong.

Companies' transfer caps treat the customer like an asshole: they sell you on the bandwidth, and then turn right back around and pretend that you're only paying for the privilege of a connection. Actually sending data across it at anything near a significant percentage of its rated speed is gonna cost you more. A lot more.* Better pull back on the using of what you thought you were paying for: An always-on internet connection with a[n ideally] 25Mbps speed.

Bandwidth and transfer are the same damn thing, and when you equalize the units, it's pretty obvious that you're getting screwed.

* Since we know how bandwidth works, this, too, is pure profit (or close to it, when peering fees are considered).

Comment Re:Headers (Score 5, Insightful) 562

Lets face it, once they have the infrastructure in place, they dont need to charge extra for it. Sure bandwidth costs may increase as usage increases, but so what.. they are charging for it.

That's the obnoxious thing. See, they sell you a connection; let's use an LTE-Wifi puck as an example. They say "speeds up to 25 Megabits per second," then they turn right around and give you a completely different number but disguise or attempt to justify it as a different metric altogether, such as "5 Gigabytes per month."

Those are both measurements of bandwidth. All they did was move the scale. So let's even out the units:

  • (5 gigabytes) / (1 month) == 1.99368468 KBps
  • (25 megabits per second) / (1 kilobyte per second) == 3200 KBps

However:

  • 3200 KBps != 1.993 KBps
  • Conclusion: Someone's lying.

When you attempt to solve a problem with bandwidth by restricting transfer, all you do is alter the actual bandwidth that someone is paying for, while simultaneously shoving into the customer's hands an extremely effective method for automatically increasing their bill. This creates massive incentive to never use the service at all, which increases the quality of service for those that do use it, and generates significantly more profit than increasing capacity to compensate for actual usage. As a bonus, since the service is faster, it's easier for the less conscious to run up their own bills. Win-fucking-win-fucking-win. For everyone except the customer.

It's just fucking wrong. Transfer caps are an artificial construct that do not actually address the problem. While they can work in theory, the fact that networks slow down in spite of the fact that they exist goes to show that they're a titanic pile of bullshit. They comically generate the money needed to address the actual problem with the service but they will stay around forever. Because fuck the customer.

Comment Re:Who would pay $50 for an iOS App? (Score 1) 231

Its function truly is piracy, but it has a lot of utility in legitimate scenarios.

That said, it's on my phone so that I can downgrade, and so that I can try apps that don't have a free version. I've wasted too much money on apps that I literally had to buy before figuring out they don't work right or don't fit the bill for what I want.

Returns on iOS are non-trivial.

Comment Re:Damn it, Torvolds! (Score 2) 661

Because standardized aspect ratios are generally a good thing.

Why? Other than watching videos, aspect aspect ratio should never be worried about when designing software or content.

For one it makes for cheaper screens, if the fabs are just creating them the same across all devices.

But that's exactly the logic that's gotten us into the steaming pile of shit that is the selection from which we have to choose today when purchasing a laptop!

Not that you're wrong, but they say history repeats itself.

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