sam_in_nyc

http://www.freestylemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/brai...

What I think stands out the most is the super easy access to the trailers. I would come to your site just to see what movies are coming out and watch the trailers. The other sites that offer trailers, at the moment, are barely worth going to because of how much spam they have everywhere.

As far as my first impression: I was confused at first, until I saw the top tagline. The google text ads at the top were very disorienting. It looks like navigation, and immediately causes me to question the legitimacy of the website. I basically ignored the slideshow thing, I'm not sure why.

Scrolling down I notice names of movies coming out. Ok, and so what? Further down I see ratings. Ok, I get it. I think you should put popular movies with ratings first. (Perhaps take the top 10 grossing movies, and only use those that are at least a week old... odds are everyone has heard of these) Just seeing a movie name with a screenshot was confusing at first.

When I watched a trailer I was pleased at the trailer quality and speed at which it started. Now, where do I vote? I have no idea. I can become a fan or follow you on Twitter, but where the hell do I vote? Do I have to sign up? There's no login anywhere... Eventually, after two or three trailers, I read that text that said I need to login with FB or Twitter to vote. You should make that text stand out, for sure. I just assumed that it was the standard "share on Facebook and Twitter" thing that I see elsewhere.

Finally, were I to commit to your site and actually want to browse around (which I have), I would expect more content and more means to sort it. What are the highest/lowest/most voted movies? That definitely needs to be there.

That's all for now... sorry about the disorganization in my post. Best of luck.

So your questions, does PHP really need all the added complexity of this?

That doesn't matter. If you don't need it, don't use it.

Does it really help solve the problem, or did you just add a new maintenance nightmare?

This question is a false dichotomy. First, it wasn't trying to solve any other problem then getting traits to work. So yeah, it solved that problem. Second, new code always adds new maintenance concerns. Whether or not it's a nightmare depends on the quality of code, which seems to be above par in this case.

As Nycto pointed out in this thread, there is a "Traits" patch which seems preferable to this code. It's likely that OP didn't realize it existed and did reinvent the wheel. But still, in terms of an exercise in PHP, I found it quite cool.

The trick to this is to gather all the items not bordering the line, then get in line and shop while you advance in line.

It took awhile to sink in that the prisoners could use their own memory, instead. Randomly line up, and have each prisoner memorize all prisoners' numbers in line. Then, agree on the numbering structure of the boxes in the room (eg: left to right = 0 to 100).

This fails if the warden is allowed to shuffle the boxes before each prisoner selects (not likely). It also fails if the room were rotationally symmetric, and each prisoner was brought in from one of two entrances. This way he would be unable to identify the "left" end of the line of boxes. (Much more likely, were I warden).

As far as what satisfaction I gain from it... I suppose I find it to be a sort of rebellious act. Also, I did not get accepted into Carnegie Mellon.

A million thanks to the jQuery team.

I'm not meaning to put you down, but I just don't understand this validation craze -- beyond the fact that you can say "it validates, does yours?" It seems as though it is some sort of psychological/sociological game... and I was hoping us developers were beyond that sort of thing.

I would be more impressed if there were a validation that said: "This actually looks like it should in X, Y, and Z browsers."

Or, is it the frequency that you think should be banned?

First off, high frequency traders are making their money off of how quickly they react to the market conditions. The quicker they react, the more money they make. In this sense, if they trade at high enough volume, it's worth paying more for a lower latency. This is, of course, assuming they are good at what they do. If they are bad at what they do, a lower latency wouldn't harm.

Second, they are in a competitive environment. If they want to make money off of obvious arbitrages that their competitors are likely engaged in as well (very likely in the forex market), they need to react first.

I assume that physical proximity reduces latency in ways other than the time it takes for photons to travel through fiber optic cable, for example router hops.

>> On: Trading success based on latency

In Forex (the currency exchange), there are sometimes very obvious arbitrage opportunities. You can take your Dollar, and trade it into Euros. Then, go from Euros to Yen. Then, go from Yen back to Dollar -- and end up with more dollars than you started with! Of course, after a certain amount of money flows through, the market will adjust itself and the arbitrage will vanish.

Being the first to react to this arbitrage allows you to realize and profit from the arbitrage before anybody else does.

The article does not explain what the high frequency traders, specifically, are doing. But it is by no means necessarily evil. All they are doing is two things: they get their trades into the system quickly, and they get current market conditions quickly.

If there is anything that you should quarrel about, it is that their system is automated. But, still, at the end of the day they're the ones holding the bag. If they blow up, they're going to pay for it.

If they start packaging their complicated and automated trading algorithm as a "bond" and get it AAA rated, and then start selling it to pension funds, then you've got a reason to be pissed.

As a trivial side-note: When encountered with a ReCAPTCHA, I'll fill out one of the words and put in gibberish (or other text) for the other. For some reason I find it satisfying to "pull a fast one" on any captcha service.

It's like saying that letters are mostly whitespace.

These people are using the website with no warranty. It says so in the Terms of Service. Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, etc, guarantee nothing about the security of their website, and whether or not their technology even works correctly. Even if they did say in their warranty: "Your information is guaranteed to be secure," does that magically make it illegal to make a worm?

Two: "What defines the line between legal and not?" The answer, ultimately, is judges and juries. These people have a wide range of discretion and are often surprisingly reasonable. (Although certainly not always. And they cost a lot to convince, and they can be randomly unreasonable, which is why there are a lot of jury-trial horror stories and why lawyers prefer to avoid jury trials whenever possible.)

If I leave a loaded gun lying around and you pick it up and shoot me dead, the legality of your action is going to depend crucially on what you can make the prosecutor and the jury believe. If you convince them that you did it by accident -- that you were honestly just playing around with the gun on the assumption that nobody would be dumb enough to leave a loaded gun around -- you might be found innocent. If you had a documented motive for killing me, or were arguing with me at the time in front of witnesses, or if there were no witnesses... well, good luck.

Good points. Especially the loaded gun thing.

But in the Myspace example -- what harm was done to Myspace that warranted any punishment? Is it because they're such a successful website, that it matters more? I mean, let's say the kid made this worm for a site with like 1,000 users... is it any less of a crime? And why is it not Myspace's fault for not securing the website?

Another thing I'm confused about... how responsible do the website owners have to be? Let's say they allow javascript in profiles. The worm was nothing more than javascript.. I'd argue that somebody was just getting creative with their profile! If they made an endless loop of alerts, is that a "virus" because in most browsers (ridiculously) you have to force quit them?

And, finally, how in the world does any of this technology stuff get explained to the people making the decisions, eg, the judge and jury. It seems it's nearly impossible for it to be adequately explained to them to the point of them understanding enough to make a fair judgment.

For example, what if Myspace only allowed a 1 digit password on your account. Is it still illegal to "hack" your account, or is it Myspace's fault?

I'm not talking about stealing a car. That would be hijacking or shutting down the entire website.

If you want to go the "car analogy" route, then put a whiteboard on your car, and claim it's illegal when somebody comes along and writes on the whiteboard. This is still a pretty crappy analogy.

The best analogy would be making something intended for one purpose, but somebody uses it for another purpose. Then, since it's bad for business, you sue the person who used the item as not intended. It just seems ridiculously unfair.

I'm talking about things like Web 2.0 profiles. The TOS on these things are that the entire use of the website is without warranty... yet if somebody comes along and makes a worm on these sites, a worm which harms nothing other than these warrantless profile pages, that's illegal?

Another example: Let's say Myspace said: "Feel free to use Javascript in your profile." Would it be OK to make the worm? It's just javascript, after all.