These are my thoughts on why, if you’re in the U.S., you should not only vote but give (something) to a campaign. The basic argument is that the more money raised in small donations ($25, $10, $5) the less damage money will do to politics.
As anybody who’s read this tumblelog in the past few months has notices, I’m a big fan of Obama’s—and if you’re still reading, there’s a better than even chance that you are as well. Ad buys in some of the Super Tuesday states are a expensive—so if you’ve been quietly supportive for a while and are willing to donate a few dollars it could go a long way. Think of it as buying your candidate a cup of coffee—or maybe a well deserved drink.
“In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.”
I was living in Ireland in 2002, and I can attest: It literally was within weeks that plastic bags disappeared from the cityscapes. Then, it was only a 5-cent charge per bag. It really was a beautiful and inspiring thing to witness.
Tiff and I stopped using them a few months back and switched to canvas. I don’t know anyone who made this switch and regretted it: in addition to the environmental benefits, you can just carry so much more in canvas, and much more comfortably.
The hard part is remembering to bring the canvas bags with you, but we devised a pretty good system for that, too: whenever we forgot to bring them, we had to buy more. So now we have about 8 of them and have gotten pretty good at remembering to bring a few with us. (Tip: keep them in the car.)
Mr. Obama inspired a crowd of nearly 15,000 to show up at an arena in Boise, Idaho, to hear him speak at a rally on Saturday. That’s triple the number of Democrats who caucused statewide in 2004, the Idaho Statesman says.
— New York Times Blog (via Dan). This is one reason I support Obama, despite disagreeing with some of his policy plans: he inspires people to care about politics again. Involving the previously apathetic, and getting them to care passionately about our leadership, will help our country more than any minor policy decision ever could.
I’m still confused about this move by Microsoft. They’re not buying a young, energetic, growing company but an old (relatively), flagging company that can’t seem to turn itself around. Add this to the expected backlash (engineers leaving, users switching) and the need to go into debt to get it done, this deal makes absolutely no sense.
Agreed. I don’t see how this will benefit either company.
Instead of having two massive companies with no direction who waste a lot of money but can’t beat Google, we’ll have one even more massive company with even less direction that will waste even more money and still won’t beat Google.
But there’s an important distinction as long as the companies remain separate: Microsoft doesn’t need to beat Google. If Microsoft would get their act together and focus their efforts into something coherent (which they’ve never done) instead of flailing their arms everywhere, they’d see that they can easily coexist with Google.
Instead, Microsoft is trying to imitate Google’s products badly, while Google is trying to imitate Microsoft’s products badly.
Buying Yahoo will only make this worse - and won’t bring any additional success to anyone.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?
Barack Obama: I think the Bubble Sort would be the wrong way to go.
Skip to about 23 minutes in to see that quote. Good watch regarldess, though.
The first Super Tuesday primary polls in the country open in 6 hours.
Go vote!
If you don’t vote in the primaries, you have no right to complain about the badcandidates nominated by the big parties when the general election rolls around.
While FedEx and UPS have a bit more latency than a TCP/IP connection, you simply can’t beat the bandwidth of sticking a hard drive into a box and having it show up somewhere else the next day with all of its data.
That’s damn impressive, considering how young it is (8 months). Since most phone contracts are for 2 years, many people haven’t even had an opportunity to get a new phone yet.
…it was just last April Steve Ballmer said there was “no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
[…] the Times swallows whole and passes along the myth that Americans got into this hole because of their discretionary, more or less frivolous, spending on non-essential consumer items. […] Americans’ debt trap was built by stagnating incomes and skyrocketing costs for housing, health care, and education—known to non-business reporters as “the essentials.”
Our parents’ generation could buy a great house for 2-3 times their annual salary.
Their parents’ generation could buy a great house for about one year’s salary.
Have you looked at housing prices recently?
Today, thanks to low or stagnant income growth, an average two-income family, after paying for housing, insurance, child care, and other essentials, has less disposable income than their single-income counterpart in the early 1970s. That’s incredible.
[…] the results suggest that Democrats are fracturing along gender and racial lines as they choose between a black man and a white woman.
No, we’re fracturing along cultural lines as we choose between an inspiring person appealing to young and smart people, and a manufactured, Rove-tactical, lobbyist-funded product appealing to old people and the uninformed.
Race and gender have nothing to do with this.
I’m a white male from Columbus, Ohio. Does that mean I was supposed to vote for Kucinich?
Don’t let the price scare you away just yet — this is one of the most useful, satisfying, and well-performing computer peripherals I’ve ever purchased. How often have you ever heard anyone say that about their scanners?
Apparently he had spent $35 million of his own money. As a businessman, he had to recognize that it was a bad investment, and it was worth dumping it now before sinking more money into it.
It’s now nearly certain that the Democratic nomination will be decided by the super-delegates at the DNC, not by the primaries’ popular vote. I fear that this is likely to go to Hillary, since the Clintons have a lot of power within the party.
On Super Tuesday, after not seeing an Obama landslide, I proposed the hypothetical idea of Obama losing the nomination and running independently. People criticized that, saying that it would split the Democratic voters in the general election and the Republicans would win.
But what if such a party-splitting move happens on the other side, too? What if the rumors and speculation are true, and Michael Bloomberg is preparing to run as an independent? There are plenty of Republicans who really don’t like McCain or Huckabee, and would prefer the economic policies of Bloomberg. A great party split could happen: the economic conservatives could break away from the religious conservatives.
(If Huckabee isn’t McCain’s running mate, what if God calls on him to run independently? I considered this, but he and God don’t have enough money for a viable independent run.)
If the general election is between one Republican and two Democrats, the Democrats will lose, no question.
But what if it becomes a race between four viable candidates instead of two, plus an optional Nader slot?
Hillary (D), Obama (I), McCain (R), Bloomberg (I), and Ron Paul (N).
I’d love to see that. Having more viable candidates in the general election would do wonders to help the douche-and-turd problem.
Mormon assface Mitt Romney leaving the race isn’t as interesting as what he said as the door was bumping him in the ass(face). If he continued the campaign, he said, it would “make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win. In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”
Did Mitt Romney just admit that he was a terrible candidate?
A Tumblr account came up today in spamwatch for an “Oppositional Defiance Disorder” blog. That sounded like bullshit, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia:
The diagnostic criteria for this disorder are as follows:
Deliberately annoying people
Blaming others for own mistakes
Easily annoyed
Angry and resentful
Spiteful or even vengeful
[…] The DSM-IV cites a prevalence of 2-16% for ODD.
Sadly, I’m sure tons of kids are being medicated for this.
When I was a kid, we called those kids “annoying” or “assholes”. At what point do personality flaws (often caused by parenting flaws) become a “disorder”?
I didn’t do my homework in school because I’m smart and lazy. Is there a disorder for that now? (That’s not ADD, although smart and lazy people are frequently misdiagnosed with ADD.)
My frustrated mother brought me to a psychologist for a couple of years during high school, thinking there was some psychological problem that could be overcome and I’d start doing my homework. I thought he was ineffective and useless, but he was spot-on: he told my mother that there was nothing wrong with me, and I was just lazy.
Instead of borrowing against my future mental and physical health by being a medicated zombie throughout my childhood, I was just given mediocre grades and my mother grounded me a lot. Looking back on it, that was definitely the right course of action compared to any medicated alternatives.
This was awesome. It’s fun trying to figure out how to transport three giant, 50-pound boxes from the glass-cube Apple store to our office with just two people.
I never know what to put in these “write your own security question” boxes. I don’t have pets, the definition of “my first car” is vague, I didn’t have a favorite elementary school teacher, and everyone knows where I’m from.
Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo […]. Billions of keys on the keyboard is taboo. Computerese is taboo. Large manuals, or many of them (large manuals are a sure sign of bad design) is taboo. Self- instructional programs are NOT taboo.
An excellent, accurate, funny design memo from Jef Raskin to the Apple team that developed the Macintosh.
[…] The best book to be reading at this time is a borrowed book. Something someone told you that you just have to read, or you’ll like this. Because you can just think.. I’m reading your book in my underwear and you have no idea. […]
I was wrong about the timing of this relative to the shipping of 8800GT-equipped Mac Pros. This means that at least one of these is true about those Mac Pros:
The have 10.5.2 on them already. (Most of them are still in transit. I don’t think anyone has reviewed or benchmarked them yet.)
They shipped with the video driver installed separately on 10.5.1.
They actually were delayed because of the 8800 GT’s short supply, and it’s complete coincidence that they waited almost until 10.5.2’s release that contained their driver.
And this is why it’s not wise to bet any money on Apple speculation.
And it’s now $199. This happened with absolutely no fanfare or unveiling event… seems like it’s not much of a priority for Apple anymore, although it’s significant that it got to 2.0 at all.
I have noticed that the person living in a household who pays the energy bills is the only one interested in turning off the lights when leaving a room. Given human nature, this is unlikely to change. That’s why I have two inventions to close the gap.
We continue to believe that the Yahoo deal is an expensive way of growing the online business for Microsoft,” wrote Sid Parakh, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, in a research note. “The 14 percent decline in Microsoft’s stock price (since its announcement of intent to acquire Yahoo) has wiped out over $43 billion (or 98 percent of its offer for Yahoo!) in shareholder wealth. Add to that the likely scenario in which Microsoft pays [roughly] $50 billion for Yahoo, Microsoft is essentially paying $93 billion for Yahoo.
But how often does a political issue come up for which experience helps? If it is the same issue that has come up for years – say the conflict between the Israel and the Palestinians – then the only experience anyone has is in failing to fix it.
Scott Adams on the relevance of “experience” among presidential candidates.
One of the latest additions to this glossary is “tumblelogging,” which refers to short blogs, sometimes even called “tlogs,” for those who don’t gag on the term. They’re usually only a sentence or two long, and they serve a more artistic purpose than regular blogs, usually including artwork by the “tlogger” or a video, song, link or picture.
Wow… this terminology was painfully wrong and foreign, so I did some Google Bingo to find out how prevalent these terms really are.
I have no doubt that’s a nice machine, and I am certainly glad his all-too-familiar, all-too-painful wait is over. That said, can one of the Fanbois explain to me what makes Apple computers any better than a PC set up by an intelligent user?
I think I’m qualified to answer this because, as you know, I was a great Windows user. I maximized Windows’ potential for many years, having only switched to Macs in 2004. I was such a good user that I didn’t even run antivirus software because I hated the performance penalties. I was just smart about how I used it.
Let’s start with hardware. Sure, it’s cheap, but PC hardware is crappy. It’s badly designed, it looks tacky, quality control sucks, and it flakes out too often. I can’t even begin to count the hours I spent in high school and college screwing around with my (or my friends’) PC hardware, trying to get custom hardware combinations to work properly together. And just try to find a PC case that looks decent and is comfortable to work in.
The software world is much more divided. The quality of OS X, and its third-party software, absolutely blows away anything on Windows. The difference is huge.
Mac software follows design principles that you rarely see in Windows:
Incredible attention to detail
Simple, clean interfaces
Justified, focused feature design (no “kitchen sink” apps)
Respect for the user’s time (no stealing focus, no unnecessary prompting)
Respect for the user’s intelligence (no “we’re protecting you from this choice”)
High quality (if it says it will do this and work this way, it will)
These principles are everywhere: from OS X itself and Apple’s other applications to the third-party shareware and freeware communities.
The attention to detail is particularly amazing. I recently tried a Windows Smartphone, and it was clear that nobody at Microsoft had ever actually used one of these. Apple hardware and software engineers will take great pains to ensure that a screw is centered or a form field positions the cursor to require the least user effort.
Admittedly, I haven’t used a Mac for more than about 10 minutes in as many years, but I’m failing to see what a Mac can bring me that I can’t accomplish for half the cost with an equivalent PC, and Ubuntu or the Linux distribution of your choice?
Cost isn’t as ridiculous as many people assume. Most Apple machines are very competitively priced with similarly specced PCs. But Apple’s specs only match the high end of most manufacturers’ lineups.
The Mac Pro ($2800) is very reasonably priced for an 8-core Xeon workstation. The MacBook ($1100) is very reasonably priced for a midrange consumer notebook.
It’s not that Apple machines are expensive — they just don’t have a low end.
I get (from what I can tell) just as bulletproof a machine, on great hardware (I use a ThinkPad), without the Apple tax, and with 90% of the eye candy thanks to Compiz Fusion. What makes a Mac so much better?
You can put visual effect layers on top of Windows or Linux, but it’s just painting a turd. Instead of ordinary frustration and time-wasting, you get pretty frustration and time-wasting. (And that’s subjective — personally, I find Vista’s Aero and the Linux “eye candy” add-ons to be garish, ugly, tacky, and completely missing the point.)
We don’t use Macs and Mac software because of the eye candy. We use them because of the design. Design and eye candy are very different — design is a combination of how it looks, what it does (and doesn’t do), and how it works.
Use a Mac for 6 months, and you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.
The Prius might be the most perfect white product ever. It’s expensive, gives the idea that you are helping the environment, and requires no commitment/changes other than money.
They’re trying to overthink things and figure out how to manipulate users, rather than sitting back and saying “how can we build something cool that people like that doesn’t suck the way existing phones do?”
This got me thinking: What if the U.S. banned first-person shooters? Sure, freedom and all of that. But there would be an upside: it would force more creativity by game developers.
What if the movie industry banned sequels for the next 5 years?
There’s a sort of Gresham’s Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.
Dear David Watanabe (for whom I cannot find a direct email address),
I’m a huge fan of your NewsFire RSS client, as discussed here, here, and here. I even got a second NewsFire license in a MacZot bundle. For an application that served me so well for so long, it has proved to be a far higher value than the nominal price you charge for it.
But recently, I became a two-Mac user for the first time, and if I want to use NewsFire as my RSS reader on both, it has no way to synchronize my feeds and “read/unread” item status. NetNewsWire offers this, and having just made their software free, I switched to it a few weeks ago solely for the synchronization feature.
But NetNewsWire is completely inferior to your excellent NewsFire. I don’t know why the vocal Mac community is so fond of NNW — maybe they’re still thinking like Windows users. NNW sucks. You know this, too, which is probably why NewsFire exists and is so good. And web-based RSS readers can’t even compare.
Maybe you’re discouraged because NewsFire isn’t the dominant RSS reader. I hope not, because Apple isn’t the dominant computer manufacturer either, and they still find it worthwhile to produce high-quality products for the people who value quality and great design.
Please develop and release an update to NewsFire that synchronizes between multiple computers.
I didn’t want to link to this and give him any traffic, but I just had to share. If you want to look at it, you should probably hurry up before he’s banned from AdSense for life (losing all unpaid earnings) and ThePlanet terminates his hosting. Ripping me off is generally not recommended. :)
I’m having a hard time saturating my new Mac Pro’s eight CPU cores.
DVD-to-MPEG4/H.264: Handbrake’s MPEG-4 mode lets a few of the cores get up to about 20% use. Encoding to H.264 makes a few cores hit about 40%. As far as I can tell, this is limited by the DVD drive’s read speed.
Video transcoding: Nope. Quicktime’s H.264 export makes all of the cores hit 25% or so. VisualHub (ffmpeg front-end) converting WMV to H.264 only uses 1-2 cores at best, and even then, they aren’t exceeding 30%. I can’t tell what the limit is here — the hard drives aren’t being constantly accessed, so maybe it’s an inefficient codec or some more obscure bottleneck (like RAM access times).
Supreme Commander on high-everything: Not even close. Maxes out 2 cores. The others remain almost entirely untouched.
But there was one thing that could do it:
.Mac iDisk offline sync: Tell .Mac to maintain an offline copy of your iDisk, and the FileSync process will consume 100% of all eight CPU cores until you forcibly kill it.
I knew synchronization was a tricky problem, but it can’t be that difficult.
I’ve received a surprisingly high number of forgot-password emails for Instapaper, a service that doesn’t require passwords, and won’t even let you set one until after you’ve registered.
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
The Wikileaks.org injunction is ex-parte, engages in prior restraint and is clearly unconstitutional. It was granted on Thursday afternoon by [U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California], Bush appointee and former prosecutor.
Great job, Judge White, for handing an unconstitutional victory to a money-launderer.
As far as I can tell, Apple only ever sold one of these… to Next New Networks (more specifically, Emil). It’s pretty, but prohibitively expensive for nearly anyone — even server buyers.
I hadn’t thought of the commenter/viewer ratio. I suppose if you have a constant string of people walking through your living room it’s only a matter of time before somebody decides to take a dump there.
Has anyone heard what Microsoft’s plans for Xbox are now that the HD DVD format is dead? I imagine that they’ll fire up a Blueray version of that add-on, but I haven’t seen any info.
I wouldn’t think so, I believe they will focus more on their digital downloads business. think of the hd-dvd as a way of holding ground against sony’s ps3.
There’s a third option: they could make a premium Xbox 360 with an internal Blu-Ray drive in place of the DVD-ROM, then sell it at price parity with the PS3.
With their recent CPU and GPU die-shrinks, they’re saving a bunch of money on the components. There’s plenty of room to toss in a basic Blu-Ray mechanism.
But here’s where Blu-Ray’s victory is a problem: Sony owns it, and is the sole licensor for the format. If Sony decides not to license the playback ability to Microsoft, a Blu-Ray 360 can’t happen.
If that happened in a healthy antitrust environment, Microsoft could sue Sony for anticompetitive behavior (pot… kettle…). But nobody in the current DoJ would go after monopolies with any real effort.
Who knew New Yorkers would get so excited about punctuation? This dude’s been getting lots of praise for the appropriate use of a semicolon on a subway poster that reads, “Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.” Grammar experts have been calling his semicolon use “lovely,” “impeccable,” and “a burgeoning of punctual literacy in unlikely places.” No word on whether the speaker said that with a straight face.
PS. If you’re looking for a really geeky laugh, scroll down to the bottom of the article, where the Times corrects its improper grammar in an earlier version of the article. (Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location, NYT)
We’ll probably end up borrowing this $150 billion from the Chinese. And when we get those rebate checks, most people are going to go out and buy stuff that’s been imported from China. I have to wonder whose economy is going to be stimulated the most by the package.
This $50 refurbished iPod Shuffle just took down my new Mac Pro for an hour.
The Shuffle started acting funny the other day while docked: it wouldn’t eject or re-mount, while Finder and iTunes gave strange error messages for it. I quickly forgot, since I hardly ever use it.
Tonight I powered down my Mac Pro to move some wires, and when I turned it back on, it wouldn’t get past the gray boot screen. It was pretty clearly an issue with boot devices. After an hour of troubleshooting, including the futile removal of all 4 hard drives and my extra RAM, I finally remembered that there was this little Shuffle docked to it from my desk.
The Shuffle, a USB mass-storage device, would have been questioned by the computer during boot. Here’s how that went:
Mac Pro: Hey, USB devices out there! Are any of you bootable? Keyboard: No. Mouse: No. Monitor hub: No. Epson thing: No, but let me make some unnecessary noises because I’m an Epson thing. Scanner: No. iPod Shuffle: …ugh… what? Oh! I think… wait… just… a… minute…
The timeout expires in about a minute.
Mac Pro: Shuffle?… ok, I’ll have to move on in a second— iPod Shuffle: No! Wait! I… er… uh…
Another minute.
iPod Shuffle: Oh, I think I am bootable after all. Shit, hold on… Where did I put my keys?… aw man… I have no idea what’s going on…
A lot of times customers and potential customers come to me and say, “FogBUGZ (or CityDesk) is almost perfect for my needs. But I need a salad spinner. When are you going to have a salad spinner? Will the next release have a salad spinner?” To these people I have to say, “I don’t know. We might, or we might not. If you really can’t live without a salad spinner, I’m afraid you’ll have to go somewhere else.”
From the archives. Joel’s very good at timeless software writing.
What makes metadata meta-data is that it’s not strictly necessary. If I have a dog with some pedigree paperwork, and I lose the paperwork, I still have a perfectly valid dog.
Those are counts of the bills that both senators have introduced. Obama’s count is in two years as a senator. Hillary’s is in six. And, honestly, most of the ones that she has introduced are just weak, honoring someone or the other, declaring a month/day for “______ awareness,” and naming unnamed courthouses and post offices.
If you like RTS games (the kind where you build big armies and attack each other, like Starcraft if it didn’t suck), you need to play Supreme Commander. Even if it means buying a new computer to run it. (And unless you have a really good modern gaming computer, it probably does.)
This is one of those games, like its predecessor (Total Annihilation) and SimCity 4, that will be much more popular a few years after its release when a reasonable amount of people can actually run it. SupCom was released a year ago already, so we’re getting there. It’s also coming out on Xbox 360 next month, but being an RTS, it will probably suck on consoles.
As I discover awesome things about it, I’ll probably post them here. I’m only a few missions in, and I’m already blown away. There are far too many reasons to list here, but here’s a subset:
Zoom
You can zoom smoothly, using the scroll wheel, from an almost-first-person level all the way out to the world map. I find that this replaces panning for me - I zoom out, move the mouse to my destination, and zoom back in.
Micromanagement
You can queue up build orders infinitely. This applies to both factories and structure-building vehicles.
Unit and group orders (move, attack, etc.) can be queued up infinitely.
You can give factories a repeating build loop, such as “2 tanks, 1 anti-air vehicle, 1 missile truck”, and never think about it again.
Resources are accumulated at a constant rate (metal is mined from things that sit on metal patches, energy comes from power plants). There are no resource-gathering vehicles, and the resources are never depleted. You can focus on your armies instead of your stupid ore trucks.
Transports
This was the big surprise to me this week. In most RTSes, maps with water-separated land-masses become huge air battles because it’s prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to transport land units across the water.
Here’s how you solve this problem in SupCom:
Build a handful of cheap transport planes. They hold 6 units each.
Select your tanks and the planes.
Click where you want them to go.
That’s it. The transports will share the load and will automatically pick up the tanks and drop them at the destination.
Like most of SupCom’s mechanics, this works the same way whether you’re operating on 3 units or 300.
I just played a complex mission on an island map, and the only planes I built were the transports. Instead of becoming massive plane battles, a real island assault is actually possible: use ships to clear a spot on the beach, then drop a bunch of tanks there and conduct a land assault. It’s a lot more fun that way.
The game is balanced to encourage this, too - the planes are weak and anti-air guns are cheap.
I don’t understand why any serious RTS players tolerate Blizzard’s simplistic, unbalanced, micromanagement-heavy games. Total Annihilation was far better in 1997, and Supreme Commander is far better now. Blizzard games are the Windows PCs of the RTS world, and Supreme Commander is the Mac Pro.
Why do the guys behind this stuff continually put on a big, glitzy show and then disappear? […] Well, in my opinion, age. The two most prominent members of the Delicious Generation are Phil Ryu, organizer extraordinaire, and Austin Sarner, the developer of AppZapper, Disco, and Cookbook. They’re both 19 […]. Now, I’ve got nothing against 19-year-old developers. Hell, I’m one of them. But I do know all-too-well the demon that’s plagued me for years: Application-ADD.
I’m not willing to be as nice about Phill Ryu. After hearing his interview on MacBreak Weekly, he’s definitely a douche. All of his projects are baseless hype that don’t produce any positive results for anyone else while he makes a killing.
Software development is not a good industry for the impatient.
When people pay for software, they’re entitled to a working product. In reality, all software has bugs, and it’s never finished. There’s an understanding between users and developers that the software will be updated for a reasonable time in the future to fix those bugs — if it never was, nobody would ever buy software.
Desktop software is a dying breed. The remaining market for it (that can’t be done well with web apps) demands high-quality, polished, maintained software — not one-off fluff apps that don’t give any value to their users.
It’s not 100% of all cores, but it’s close enough.
This is ripping a DVD with the new version of HandBrake to the AppleTV H.264 preset.
It’s worth noting that even with the CPUs at full usage for sustained periods like this, the fans aren’t spinning up to full speed. I don’t detect any difference at all. A real test didn’t, either. The Mac Pro is encoding video about many times faster than my 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook in almost complete silence (certainly not noticeable above ambient room noise).
I got a DVD from the library. I want to watch it on my laptop, which has a broken DVD drive. If I rip the DVD on the desktop, share the resulting AVI over the home wireless network, and watch the DVD on my laptop, and delete the files immediately after watching them have I broken any U.S. copyright laws? Does it matter if I don’t get around to watching the movie until after I return the DVD to the library?
You’ve violated the DMCA by ripping the DVD. The DMCA prohibits the circumvention of encryption schemes used for copy protection, and the ripper is circumventing CSS.
As for the library-returning thing… I’m sure it’s violating some provision of copyright law somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly how. It may not be relevant — you had to make a copy in order to retain the content after you returned the media to the library, and the act of making the copy is the violation.
Fair use typically allows copying for a few purposes, including backup. But when ownership of the original expires or is transferred, all copies must be destroyed or given to the new owner.
This strip’s been up for 800 seconds and it’s already the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet. It turns out everyone and their mother has a fruit opinion, and every one of those opinions is now in my inbox.
For our latest mission, three agents entered a Starbucks one by one with their own giant desktop computer and CRT monitor. They bought coffee and worked at their computers as if they were laptops.
Their post also has a behind-the-scenes video. (thanks Dalas)
ICANN allows a 5-day refund period for registered domains. Anyone can buy a domain, hold it for 5 days, and return it for a total cost of $0.
This policy has been used by legitimate people approximately 0 times, since buying a domain at a well-priced registrar costs about $8 per year (Network Solutions charges $35/year), and you generally don’t buy a domain accidentally.
Meanwhile, it has been used by spammers constantly. One common technique is to automatically register a bunch of random words and misspellings, or recently expired domains, and put ads on each one. During the 5-day refund period, see which domains get enough traffic (mostly from mistyped URLs or old links) to generate more ad profit than their registration cost. Keep those, and get refunds on the under-performers. It’s automated, profitable domain squatting. (This is why all of the good names are taken.)
The other scam is perpetrated by Network Solutions. Here’s how this works:
Someone considers buying a domain, so they do a bunch of searches on Network Solutions’ website to see what’s available.
Network Solutions immediately buys anything that anyone searches for.
When the searcher decides on a name to buy, they try to buy it at a cheaper registrar, but can’t, because Network Solutions owns it already. Network Solutions displays a big page that deceptively convinces users that the only way to get it is to pay their exhorbitant fees. (There’s no mention of the 5-day window, of course.)
After 5 days, Network Solutions returns unclaimed domains for a refund.
You can test it yourself:
Go to Network Solutions and search for a domain name that’s unlikely to be taken. Mine was networksolutionsdomainscam.com. Sure enough, it’s available!
Go to GoDaddy a few seconds later and search for the same domain. Now it’s taken.
If you’re a geek, run a whois on the domain. Network Solutions owns it, and there’s a big message in the whois info saying “This Domain is Available - Register it Now at www.NetworkSolutions.com”.
It’s a scam, plain and simple. It’s certainly fraudulent and deceptive, and absolutely nobody in the web business will take pity on Network Solutions for this.
We already know they used an unsigned int, otherwise there would have been a crazy press release a few years ago like “Apple announces iTunes has sold over -2,147,483,648 songs”.
I see little value in drawing attention to something that I do not like. Attention, in the form of links or posts, is extremely valuable on the web; I intend to lavish it on what is good and deny it to what is bad.
Note the wording of the invitation. It does not say that the SDK will be released on March 6.
The “exciting new enterprise features” could be interesting. Some guesses:
Exchange push support: Huge, but unlikely.
Over-the-air calendar sync: Huge. Possible.
Security crap: Various enterprise-desired security features like memory encryption, over-the-air deactivation upon theft, etc. Boring. Possible, but unlikely.
Am I the only one encountering some sort of nightmare Twitter security meltdown where it’s logging me into random people’s accounts with unfettered access to their settings and private information?
Sounds like wrongly implemented caching, possibly with a reverse-proxy.
By Michael Bloomberg, in an op-ed for the New York Times:
I believe that an independent approach to these issues is essential to governing our nation — and that an independent can win the presidency. I listened carefully to those who encouraged me to run, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for president. I have watched this campaign unfold, and I am hopeful that the current campaigns can rise to the challenge by offering truly independent leadership. The most productive role that I can serve is to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate.
The usual explanation for why humans have certain preferences in mates is because the preferred traits signal good health, and that is an advantage for baby-making. But what if those preferences are just coincidences? For example, I have clear preferences for some types of automobile designs, but I don’t want to hump those cars and produce tricycles.
Long after the general drove off, we remained astonished that he was so cut off from the experience of the troops. Did he actually think we were exhausted because it never occurred to us to sleep in the back of our chauffeured cars?
The entire article is a good quote, but that looked bad here, so you’ll just have to go over there to read it.
Find a problem that’s not solved and try to solve it in a way that’s profitable. Don’t be influenced by what people have been doing so far in that area and don’t be afraid to try new things that may seem crazy compared to the status quo. That’s when innovation happens.
Starbucks’ greatest accomplishment was convincing most people that they liked coffee by including it in, effectively, milkshakes. You can add sugar and dairy to anything and people will like it.
In popular thought, they’ve changed the meaning of “coffee”. People who have never had real coffee now think they like it.
And when those people go into a real coffeeshop and order real coffee, they think it’s bad because it’s not full of sucralose and it comes in a cup-size with an English name.
We’re thinking of buying a co-op apartment. We’ve never bought real estate before. Anyone have any advice? Things we should look out for? Questions we should ask?
Please let me know by email: me@marco.org.
I wasn’t very good at picking my first apartment, but got much better for the second time. We’re hoping to avoid the pitfalls of picking our first co-op (or even the pitfall of buying one, if this is a terrible idea for some reason we haven’t thought of yet).
…If New York City were its own state, it would be the most energy-efficient state in the union; most Manhattanites not only walk or take public transit to get around, they unintentionally share heat with their upstairs neighbors.
I thought she was trying to paint Obama as all sugary fluff and no substance. When you go to Obama’s website you can learn about his detailed policy proposals. Clinton’s website? Snickerdoodles!
Hillary Clinton is resorting to what an aide described as the “kitchen sink” strategy. They’re throwing out everything they have. Apparently that include “Vote for Hillary if you like snickerdoodles!”
Software companies are sometimes accused of letting the users debug their software. And that is just what I’m advocating. For Web-based software it’s actually a good plan, because the bugs are fewer and transient. When you release software gradually you get far fewer bugs to start with. And when you can reproduce errors and release changes instantly, you can find and fix most bugs as soon as they appear. We never had enough bugs at any one time to bother with a formal bug-tracking system.
“Senator Clinton had her red phone moment. She had it in 2002,” Mr. Plouffe said. “It was on the Iraq war – she and John McCain and George Bush all gave the wrong answer.”
