1,221 karma · joined May 6, 2012
I liked how Opera used to be a silo for a whole bunch of features. When you closed it the rest closed as well. Was a great way to turn off work.
Now we have ANOTHER fairly generic stand alone email client. ANOTHER fairly generic webkit browser. If it wasn't branded with an Opera logo would anyone really give a shit?
Conventional warfare.. you cannot send in nukes before your troops to soften up the enemy. Assuming you lose an invasion you cannot send them in after you pull your troops out.
You cannot use them for precision strikes.
You cannot use them over your own country should it get invaded.
Apparently they are a deterrent from getting nuked yourself. Are they though? Nukes blow up civilians. Civilians do not press the big red button. Crack pot lunatics do from some deep underground bunker. Would you really launch a counter-strike killing potentially millions of civilians. I wouldn't. You don't answer genocide with genocide.
The only use I can see is a small tactical nuke which could be used to blow up an enemy fleet at sea. Even then, launching the nuke in way that it wouldn't get intercepted I guess would be difficult. The implications for such a use would also be pretty profound.
In the UK the Government want to / will renew trident. The UK nuke system. I don't really understand why. The cost is in the billions. The weapon is unsafe, as well as expensive to protect and maintain.
I don't know what the current state of the UN is right now is but it seems to me a better solution would be to give the UN 50 nukes or whatever. The UN then becomes the deterrent. Pass a resolution. 'Those who use Nuclear weapons will be counter-nuked.' Other nations can then give them up.
The only danger with nukes is that only one country has them. They can then threaten others 'Do as I say or be obliterated.' Realistically though so many countries know how to make nukes I can't imagine it would take too long to rearm in this scenario.
I am sure the Government would say that the company is with holding data essential to counter-terrorism. With a bit of Government spin I don't see how the tech company could come off positively from making such a stand.
Far better than past attempts by Yahoo, Google, Aqui-hires who shutter a product and leave it to clients to figure out how to get their data out.
So.. I would create 3 groups. Family, Friends, Acquaintances.
Family + Friends status's would always appear. Acquaintances status updates would require 5 likes by other people before they appeared in my stream.
All likes from Acquaintances and Friends would be hidden.
All app invites from Acquaintances would be hidden.
As for companies I like / follow. Individual controls for each would be great.
I hardly use Facebook because of the noise. I only have < 60 friends on Facebook and < 10 likes. I can't imagine what it gets like with hundreds of friends. My idea probably wouldn't scale. Would be neat though. Would actually get me using Facebook.
I don't see what was wrong with what happened. In the beginning it was fun. Then there was pressure to get the game out so the mood changed a little. He got demotivated and quit. Perhaps I missed something.
I always thought the selling point was the e-mail /rss / irc etc. The things Opera came bundled with. I am sure these will still be available via extensions but then again I don't see the point of Opera now. It is now the same as Chrome.
Each browser has its own selling point. I feel that Opera has lost its by stripping out email and providing no news on other features. I always interpreted these features as the differentiators, the soul of the Opera browser. Opera users were people who embraced these things. Opera used to ship with a built in bittorrent support.. how sweet was that!?
I moved away from Opera when I used IRC and bittorrent far less. I also realized I could test less if I built a site testing as I go in a popular browser rather than a fringe one.
I probably could have done everything I did in Opera using extentions in another browser but Opera just did it out of the box. Its features had consistency and were easy to access. The reason I would choose Opera is because of what it used to be packaged with.
In it's current form it is an alternative version of Chrome.. I guess I could develop in it and have Chrome covered but realistically it would be simpler to just use Chrome. I just don't get it.
Now mail has been shunted into its own product. I don't see widgets. It really looks and feels like a skin for Chrome and nothing more which makes me wonder what the point is. If I want Chrome I will use Chrome.
OK, this is a preview but the news doesn't suggest any of these old features are coming across.
The problem with guys site is it isn't optimised for getting purchases. Too much is going on. The user isn't guided through the software or pushed to take a trial or purchase. Instead the visitor is hit by everything at once, doesn't know where to look and is somewhat overwhelmed by stuff.
You don't need to be a graphics designer to make a successful site. Good content and a clear call to action is the important thing. Beautiful design on top is just gravy.
Costs are going up which means increased competition. Increased competition will mean your ads are running against more competitors. Reason for fall in click-throughs could be under-optimized ad's losing out to competition's ads.
As for conversions. Looking at the table plan site I feel overwhelmed. If this is where the ad's are taking users I think it is fairly obvious why sales are dropping off.
I don't think Adwords can be blamed for the profitability of a product.
This isn't to say Adwords isn't declining in value for site owners. To make this claim though you would need information from lots of sectors from lots of site owners.
Say you have..
<div>
In any other tools you can double click it and press tab to add an attribute. Most have a right click option to edit as well. With firefox this simple task isn't possible. So adding a class to the above element requires you to at least add class="" to the element...
I don't want a situation where someone stumbles onto an old post or where I played devil's advocate and I lose out as a result.
I was on a site buying icons the other day and it occurred to me. There is no way for me to know for sure if this icon I am buying is being sold by the original author. Sure.. I have proof of purchase but if the guy is reselling without permission I have no idea where it leaves me.
Which brings us back to this. Photos from an image bank were apparently used. Well.. anyone can be at fault for putting the images in. Naive intern is just as likely as some rip-off merchant.
I disagree with what the Anti-Piracy people do but I sympathize if they had nothing to do this and were let down by designers / rogue image reseller.
It should also be noted standards compliant !== work everywhere.
Its a terrible story. Can he not submit take down notices to individual websites?
When you retire what do you do? Take up painting? If you retire young a lot of your friends will still be working.
The OP talks about living off 30% earnings if he retires at 33. Downgrading your life style is fine but surely you would be spending more on activities to keep yourself busy?
Currently I cannot see myself completely retiring. I like the idea of optional employment. Choosing to work part time for the challenge the work brings rather than the money. I look forward to that day.
I currently dread the idea of full retirement.
I turned on the tap and a friend lit it. Queue a rather cool jet of flame in the middle of the room. Teacher I guess saw the glow coming from the room. Turned it off.
Received bollocking like none other and a 2 day suspension to underline the seriousness of this.
Notably we were not accused of either arson or trying to blow up the school. Youthful - unacceptable - misadventure.
As usual there aren't any facts on what this girl was doing. On the surface though it seems expulsion and criminal action is way over the top.
I stopped buying games when I realized I don't actually play the games I buy. Some are still in their cellophane wrapper.. I recently signed up to Playstation+. Surprised I didn't do it sooner. £40 a year. Access to 10+ games a month to download and keep while subscription is active. Not going to buy another game for a long while.
By promoting reporting now a lot of the abuse has turned into threatening to report each other. Where before new players would be called shit. Now they are threatened for being bad. There is actually a report option for reporting a new player.. this makes many new players give up because they feel it is against the rules to have no idea what they are doing.
The Tribunal while a nice idea doesn't work. Riot's implementation has a rating system where judges are ranked based on their accuracy. That means many people punish based on what they think other people are doing instead of making their own decision. On each case there is no requirement to spend a specific time looking at it. No requirement to read all the text. I know people who punish every case without reading and run at 90% accuracy on the league table.
Another issue with the tribunal is that it punishes for almost anything. If you say GG after 9 minutes... its punishable. If end the game saying gg easy... its punishable. Combine this with the fact that enemies can report you without specifying a reason means a percentage of players who get punished shouldn't be in the tribunal to begin with. Combine this with terrible support... getting unpunished means going on Reddit and hoping a Riot employee spots it..
At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to report. At worst they have failed completely.
The two main flash points are before you can play ranked games and have a new account. The second one is in champion select...
If you are banned you make a new account. If you want a second account you make a new account. This means the game for new players is incredibly toxic. About 50% of new players are people on smurf's or banned players leveling. This leads to a lot of frustration when you have a 20 death ally on your team. There are a bunch of things they could do.
1. Add a tip pointing out a mute button exists... It took me 80 games of randomly being shit on before someone told me about the mute button. If someone starts to spout abuse I just click the ignore button. Problem sorted.
2. They could give headstart smurf accounts to people who tick an option saying they are experienced players. This would help noobie players play against each other and have a soft intro to the game.
3. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea of what they are doing.
4. They could make the early climb on new accounts start versus bots to force people to actually get a feel for the game before throwing them into PvP
All 4 solutions would ease the problem new users are facing.
Another issue is in games where 2 or more people want to play the same position while picking champions. A lot of people say 'mid or feed'. They want the mid position. If they don't get it they will repeatedly let the enemy kill them in game...
Simple solutions...
1. Implement a dice in champion select to allow people to roll for the same position.
2. Simply add a line of text when people enter champion select that position is given in order. If you are first pick you have first pick of position. It is up to you if you want to give it up.
There isn't a single tip that says "if you ally is having a hard time in lane, consider aiding them rather than criticizing them."
The attitude of league at the moment is "if you playing bad you are spoiling my game and I will abuse / threaten to report you for it."
When you actually take the effort to communicate with your team and your team actually aids weaker players the mood in games greatly improves. The trouble is that Riot provides little guidance on doing this.
For all their research the implementations based on the research sucks.
If that is a WMD then what classification do we give the bombs that level buildings that have frequently been used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan?
The most troubling thing I find about the prosecution is how they listed damaging interstate trade, presumably to keep the death sentence open. Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the bombings is how two people apparently so disorganized successfully carried out a double bombing..
Beyond using Twitter for authentication I don't see why you would want to risk anything else on the Twitter API.
The past couple of weeks has shown how easily the bitcoin market can be manipulated. People used to do this with shares. Buy up all the shares to push the price up. Then get out with a profit crashing the value of the share.
I don't think this is any different. I wouldn't be surprised if a handful of parties were responsible for the explosion in bitcoin value.
You could point to the Cyprus banking crisis perhaps as a reason for an increase in value but realistically Bitcoin is just one major hack away from being worthless again... Its like keeping your gold on a wooden shelf above a lava pit.. why anyone would put long term savings into Bitcoin right now is beyond me.
My parents who have a fairly large sum of money hired a decent accountant to mitigate a large portion of the risk. Spreading their money between a fairly large number of bank accounts.
You then look at when Iceland banks failed. Lots of people lost money.
The Cyprus banking sector size was ridiculous. It was 7x Cyprus GDP. If the sector failed it was fairly obvious Cyprus would be unable to save it. You have no idea what the terms would be of a bailout or if a small country like Cyprus would get one..
So back to my main point. Get a decent accountant. Understand where your money is going.
I used to have a hard time getting away from work. Now I don't check emails and I avoid programming on the weekend. If the servers melt someone will phone me. I used to find checking emails was stressful. Someone would report a small issue and the little thing would nag at me to fix it. I found it hard to relax.
One weekend I assumed the world wasn't going to end, I assumed my help wouldn't be required. I kept my phone with me. Been enjoying completely work free weekends ever since.
A rewrite would probably benefit the performance and abilities of Wordpress but it would be at the cost of ALL the themes and plugins. The platform would start again from scratch. I don't follow Wordpress too closely but I haven't heard of any one talking about - or having the energy for - such a rewrite.
Would Automattic even allow such a rewrite to go through? It would be a horrible transition for Wordpress.com.
As for alternatives... There are a number of good CMS with a well designed, easy to use admin panel. They aren't popular though, plugins are scarce and support is uncertain. This often makes Wordpress the best choice by default. Which is kinda sad.
The demo video shows an extreme bleed. Like a artery has been cut or something. Sure, you seal the blood in but wouldn't you still bleed out internally?
Like if you cut your femoral and gel up your leg. Would you survive for any length of time?