Recent Posts

9376

Living Room / Re: New Supercomputer Accomplishes What Other Supercomputers Can't

« Last post by Renegade on October 18, 2010, 08:15 PM »

It sort of reminds me of the computer "Ira" from the old Wonder Woman series.

-kyrathaba (October 18, 2010, 06:47 PM)

Hahahaha~! Yeah, it does!

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Living Room / Re: build/upgrade or buy/build a new one?

« Last post by Renegade on October 18, 2010, 02:03 AM »

I made the mistake of not getting solid state drives in my new box. I should have, at least for the system drive. But, they are very expensive.

I suppose you *could* just stick a new drive in your box now and install a fresh OS then migrate over. That's the cheap way to make a new box fast & still keep your old data. A SSD is very fast, and will stay fast. Just an idea anyways.

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Living Room / Re: Firefox Stability Issues

« Last post by Renegade on October 17, 2010, 10:32 AM »

I don't use toolbars and extension in FF as I've had problems with them before. I have some, but they are disabled. Still, FF is acting up on me again all of a sudden. It's died 2x today. Just bizarre. Good for a week or two, then just won't play nice. I can't see any reason for it.

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Living Room / Re: Make an original joke or riddle

« Last post by Renegade on October 17, 2010, 01:40 AM »

Ok, this link should work directly.

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Living Room / Re: Make an original joke or riddle

« Last post by Renegade on October 17, 2010, 01:39 AM »

Ok, got another one, but it's kind of NSFW, so I'll just give a link. It's my current Facebook status, and a true story. (Background information: English is my wife's second language.)

It's kind of like those jokes that you read in Reader's Digest, but NSFW. I nearly peed myself laughing!

-Renegade (October 17, 2010, 01:04 AM)

Might be good to mention that you have to be his friend to see this...mearly clicking the link just shows you basic profile info...


Added you btw lol

-Stephen66515 (October 17, 2010, 01:32 AM)

Click the wall link. You'll be able to see it then. FB I guess goes to INFO by default.

Your friends request hasn't come through yet. It's slow very often.

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Living Room / Re: Postcard to our past selves.

« Last post by Renegade on October 17, 2010, 01:34 AM »

I'd be giving myself advice like buy Microsoft in 1980, sell in 2003, buy Google when it opens, sell it at $400 or so, remember that as long as you're under 12, you cannot be charged with any criminal offenses, so rob those banks while you can... :p

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Living Room / Re: Make an original joke or riddle

« Last post by Renegade on October 17, 2010, 01:04 AM »

Ok, got another one, but it's kind of NSFW, so I'll just give a link. It's my current Facebook status, and a true story. (Background information: English is my wife's second language.)

It's kind of like those jokes that you read in Reader's Digest, but NSFW. I nearly peed myself laughing!

9383

Living Room / Re: PDAdb.net's PDA Chooser

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 10:43 PM »

Sweet Jesus! The number of options are immense! And...

The PDAchooser is the simplified variant of PDAmaster and it is optimzed for quick and efficient device searching.

That's the SIMPLE version?

Yikes... Looking at PDAmaster... It's SCARY~!

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Living Room / Re: Make an original joke or riddle

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 09:13 PM »

I have no idea whether or not this will work. But let's see...

The joke below requires you to be fast and click fast. Don't pause. Just do. Read, answer, then click to proceed. Got it?

(I can't put spoilers inside spoilers, so just go in order...)

**************

Question 1

What do dogs eat?

Answer 1

Dog food.

Question 2

What do cats eat?

Answer 2

Cat food.

Question 3

What chickens eat?

Answer 3

Did you say "chicken food" or did you correctly answer "chicken feed"?

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Living Room / Re: Make an original joke or riddle

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 08:55 PM »

Where are you if where you were is where you are and where you'll be?

-CodeTRUCKER (October 16, 2010, 08:29 PM)

I was thinking the answer would be:

Spoiler

Here. As in the transcendental "here". It's where you were, it's where you are, and it's where you will be.

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 08:51 PM »

Erm, 3000/month is more than possible

My current mobile plan offers me 3000 SMS per month...i usually breach this limit

-Stephen66515 (October 15, 2010, 11:46 PM)

I pay 7 cent per day (opt-in) to get SMS package that allows a maximum of 100000 SMS sent per day. Receiving SMS is free. Very cheap. 

-erikts (October 16, 2010, 07:11 PM)

WOW~! That's like a spammers dream!

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 06:40 PM »

I am 100% positive, I receive read and received reports for all the SMS that I send.

Some phones do not respond to the "Read Report" request, but all of them send back the received report. (Helpful for knowing if the end-user has thier phone on, and how long the message took to reach its destination)

-Stephen66515 (October 16, 2010, 06:36 PM)

That makes sense.

The length to reach the recipient is also something I've noticed. I've had SMS messages (to and from) delayed by minutes, hours, and more.

But is the "Received Report" based on the carrier receiving it (server) or the person's phone receiving it (client)? For email, it's the server.

9388

Living Room / Re: Request: Facebook Sharing

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 06:35 PM »

i think we used to have a button for this.. seems like it would be worth an experiment adding it back, at least for a short time -- something really low key and not at all in your face.

-mouser (October 16, 2010, 06:21 AM)

I would want it right beside the "Quote" link text. You could then FB directly to a specific post. But, that's definitely more "in your face".

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 06:33 PM »

Also, there is a way to know they have received and read your SMS.

Delivery Reports and Read Reports have been available in the settings menu in the SMS section of most phones for quite some years

-Stephen66515 (October 16, 2010, 03:03 PM)

Odd. I've never seen that. Are you sure? The privacy implications are just, well, I'll leave it at that.

9390

Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 10:36 AM »

One of my problems with texting is the single ring. The phone beeps once, then that's it. If you're in a subway, or on a busy street, you're not going to hear it. Unless you are already an addict, you're unlikely to see the SMS for some time.

To me, that does not count as communication in the immediate sense. SMSing to drop by the store on the way home is kind of pointless if you have music on and can't hear it.

It just seems like a very poor form of communication to me. Email is better, although less reliable for guaranteed delivery. If you can check email on your phone (or the person you're sending a message to), there's not much difference with respect to urgency/notification.

I think the core problem is confirming receipt and confirming the 'read'. If you phone someone and talk to them, then you KNOW they got the message. If you SMS or email, you can't confirm receipt.

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Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 09:19 AM »

If you're a solipsist, the world ends when you do. 

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 09:05 AM »

Wow! That Swype looks really cool! I could totally use that. I used to use handwriting recognition on my Palm III a long time ago, and it was good. Fast is good. Slow is no.

9393

Living Room / Re: Most important aspect of Info Keeping

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 09:01 AM »

Many years ago I started writing a web app but had to abandon it. I did stress tests and it failed badly. I simply didn't know what I know now. It was a typical CRUD app, like most web apps.

But building from scratch? WOW! I'd never attempt that in a million years. It's simply far too difficult.

Search is a very difficult thing to do well. RDBMSs make it easy if you're using one. But still, you need to work to get it done right. Search from scratch? That's BALLS! BIG BALLS! Like AC/DC Big Balls! The biggest balls of all!

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 08:30 AM »

Wow

My current mobile plan offers me 3000 SMS per month...i usually breach this limit

-Stephen66515 (October 15, 2010, 11:46 PM)

3000?  per month?

Bl**dy 'ell!

If I had 3000 free SMS messages it would take me approximately 250 years to use them all - I'm not kidding, more than 1/month is a veritable indulgence.

My mobile is for mainly two things:
1) to receive calls;
2) it's got an alarm clock.

-4wd (October 16, 2010, 07:34 AM)

I *could* use 3,000 SMS pretty fast actually. Think, viagra... Hahahah~! I'd like to see an unlimited SMS plan. Just use it and spam 24/7~! Hahahah~! That would be FUN~!

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Living Room / Re: Request: Facebook Sharing

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 12:35 AM »

+1 for that.

There are numerous times when I'd like to post a DC thread to FB. It's a regular occurrence, or non-occurrence as the case may be.

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 16, 2010, 12:33 AM »

<cynicism mode="on" />

When I think of texting, I think of using the stupidest input device for human language ever devised, and even stupider in light of the telegraph, which was invented in the common sense in 1837 (Samuel Morse's version). From 1 button to 10 (11, 1 to send) buttons in well over 150 years is pretty pathetic. They had an excuse in 1837. There's no excuse now.

So, I would discount MSN/IRC/Skype and all the rest where you have a real keyboard. And no, I would not count anything that requires you to limit the use of your digits to 1 per hand as a "keyboard".

And no... I will not be satisfied with SMS as something that I could actually use until it enters the realm of sane usability. (I'm actually working on seeing if I can get that done. I'm looking at trying some speech recognition stuff on mobile devices. STT or SR.)


Though I must admit that I am shocked at hearing that you go over the 3,000 limit. I just can't imagine having the patience to do it.

I guess it all just boils down to most people having a LOT more patience than I do.

But like WTF do people text that much about? Seriously. I just don't have that much to say I suppose.

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 15, 2010, 09:07 PM »

It would be nice to know the Z score to figure out what the freaks at 7 standard deviations away from the mean are doing. 20k?

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Living Room / Re: Most important aspect of Info Keeping

« Last post by Renegade on October 15, 2010, 08:15 PM »

FINALLY~! Someone else sees this!!!!

AGREED 1,000%~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Did I mention that I agree?

Well... Here's goes a quick explanation...

Developers are fundamentally lazy.

Most data is stored in relational databases, and getting it out requires writing more than 1 SQL statement. Also, if you want to actually be able to filter results and get some specific results, you need to design the database properly, which is beyond the capabilities of most developers. No. Really. I mean that.

You can't just start JOINing tables all willy-nilly all over the place. You need to design the database according to how you will pull data out of it. Further, you need to put indexes on things to speed up data retrieval. You also need to actually THINK about what the data is and type it accordingly instead of just throwing it into an INTEGER or VARCHAR(50) field. You need to know the kinds of ways that you'll pull data out, and plan for things like multiple SELECTs instead of 1 massive JOIN. This brings up memory issues and caching issues. etc. etc. etc. The larger the database, the more problematic this is. Also, the more dynamic the database is (you are inserting records and deleting records often), the more problematic this is.

All of that requires a LOT of work for larger or more complex databases.

SUMMARY: Most developers are too lazy to do that, lack the skills to do it, or are under massive pressure to "get it done", and do not have the time to do it properly.



I think this goes double for web development. There seems to be far less competence when I consistently see places that they are not doing any kind of sensible error checking. (e.g. How difficult is it to remove spaces from a phone number or credit card number instead of making the user do it?) Also, the attitude towards web pages is that they are a commodity, and are undervalued. So, you end up with good developers that have mildly retarded managers and customers demanding insane schedules that border on irresponsible. How can you possibly deliver a truly great product when you view it as a commodity? A potato is a potato, so who cares?

I believe that this is partial fallout from the business mindset that we have today, which is basically, "bleed every *&%^% penny you possibly can out of everywhere and *&^% everything else as long as we make $#!+-loads of money", or something like that.

Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick 2. Web development is almost always the latter 2. After all, the web is just a "commodity".

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Living Room / Re: Texting on the rise

« Last post by Renegade on October 15, 2010, 07:40 PM »

I find that very hard to believe.

That boils down to:

3,339 / month
111 / day

Given 16 waking hours per day, let's figure "untextable" hours:
Shower: 20 minutes
Classroom time: 5 hours
Hmmm... Drawing a bit of a blank here... Help me out.

So, 5.33 hours of "downtime"...

10.67 hours of "uptime", so...

10.4 / hour on school days
1 / 5.8 minutes

Or on non-school days:

6.9 / hour
1 / 8.65 minutes

That seems very far from believable to me.

AVERAGE. The AVERAGE teenager? What does that say about those that text a lot, and high statistical outliers?

There's got to be something wrong there.

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Living Room / Filming Car Chases...

« Last post by Renegade on October 14, 2010, 11:20 PM »

So, this guy goes for a job interview:

Last year I interviewed for a TV job, and they asked me if I had ever directed or shot car chases.  I said yes, went home, shot this, and sent it back to them.
I didn't get the job.

http://vimeo.com/9412958