HN user
In 15+ years of building and maintaining SWIFT-connected systems that run SWIFT-provided software, I’ve never encountered a situation where a SWIFT message has “just disappeared”.
SWIFT charges pennies (well, eurocents) per message. The fees you’re referring to are imposed by the institutions on either end of the transaction.
CD ripping. Initial audio pass in an older version of EAC, which hands off to the scripts. Those validate the audio against the AccurateRip + CUETools databases and file the rip appropriately if there's a failure (e.g. "might be a different pressing" vs. "few enough bad samples to be repairable" vs. "completely aborted the rip", etc.). Then a second pass on the disc to extract subcode data and embed any TOC/subcode differences as comments in the cuesheet. Then, based on that, automatically generate a de-emphasized version for discs with the PRE flag set anywhere, then extract additional metadata (full release date, disc number, featured artists) from the title data I manually entered in EAC, compress to FLAC, embed the cuesheet, transcode .m4a copies, and file.
Automatically adding sort-artist fields to the cuesheet/.m4a files is next (I have a good source in the software that I use for cataloging the collection). I also need to write something that backports changes made to the tags in the .m4a files to the original cuesheet...
There are already a lot of completed "presale" sales on eBay for $125-$189.
Oh, the havoc you could wreak with control of the .corn TLD!
The pro-open-plan side is armed with hard numbers; cost-per-employee for one buildout vs. another is easy to measure up front. The anti-open-plan side has no way of generating the equivalent numbers for lost productivity and even their best attempts at estimating them (relying on studies, etc.) are vulnerable to being dismissed as "just guessing". Hard numbers win over soft numbers.
Uh, no. Bit-perfect ripping is trivial and routine, and tools like the AccurateRip DB (which has checksums for around three million different titles you can use to verify the checksums on your own rips) and the CUEtools database (which has recovery records you can use to correct bit errors on your own rips) prove it. I routinely get bit-accurate single-pass high-speed rips--no "paranoid" settings or re-reads--of discs dating back thirty years or more, and so do hundreds of thousands of other people. If you get different checksums on successive rips of the same CD, either the disc is damaged or the drive you're using is failing.
I saw this implemented at (I think) Times Square Tower a few years back. It had you enter your floor at a podium in the main lobby on the way to the elevators, and it worked beautifully. 49 floors and not once did I have to wait more than ten or 15 seconds for an elevator.
Then they retrofitted a similar system back at my corp HQ. It had you enter your floor on a screen on the wall right in the middle of the elevator lobby and it was (and is) kind of a pain in the ass...because when there's a crush of people waiting for the elevators, you can't get to the screen to enter your floor. When it was just the "up" and "down" buttons in the same location, the odds were pretty good that someone in the crush had already pushed the button you need, but...
EFF is a 501 (c) (3). If EFF can advocate, so can Wikipedia.
Amazon is already working with 7-11 to provide this service.
You can't? What's this screenshot showing, then?
(That's a serious question, BTW. I would check it myself but I can't upgrade to iOS5 until I figure out how to get Windows DEP to stop killing iTunes 10.5 every time I launch it.)
The search bar is ridiculously large, especially given how rarely I suspect most folks actually run searches against their calendar. I'm sure some people are doing it constantly but if I've even done it once I'd be surprised.
There's an awful lot of unused horizontal space in that black bar. Seems like a good location for a search box.
Zork was an adaptation of DUNGEON, not Adventure. (Or DUNGEO, as it was called on our PDP-11/34a in high school. Still have my maps!)
Agreed re: community size and Usenet's inability to scale to it (see: http://www.studio-nibble.com/lazlo/images/wiredquote.jpg). My lament is strictly about the tools used to interact with that community.
Most web discussion boards are just GUI on top of a message store, and the reading/posting pieces of NNTP are a stable, standardized API for interacting with just such a message store. If every VBulletin instance also exposed an NNTP interface to its message content, I think it would be a huge step forward for discussion-board usability. (Well, once the NNTP-client world woke back up again. Are there even any actively-developed NNTP clients left that aren't focused on guzzling pirated media from the .binaries. groups?)
Unless you've actually used a decent newsreader like trn, It's difficult to appreciate just how much we've given up by moving most online discussions to the web. Loss of threaded discussions isn't the worst of it -- many of the web-based discussion boards I frequent don't even properly track which messages you've actually read, using a vague "last time you visited" heuristic instead.
I miss being able to catch up on all my discussion topics using almost nothing except the space bar.
That's a huge assumption that I doubt very much will survive the EULA you'd need to agree to in order to use iTunes Match. It seems unlikely that the labels have licensed Apple to run the world's biggest pirated-music-laundering service.
Instapaper also works from any browser on any platform. I don't see that happening with Reading list anytime soon.
The vast majority of the articles I add to Instapaper, I add from Firefox on my desktop at work. And virtually all the articles I read in Instapaper, I read when I'm off-network completely (I have an iPod touch). I don't think Marco has much to worry about yet.
People have actually paid me to do editing (the fools!), and I know the standard proofreading marks backwards and forwards, but I still didn't read the graphic on the key as "delete". I might have been able to suss it out if you told me it was supposed to represent an editing mark but looking at it absolutely cold? No way.
The person who designed the keycap probably had to cobble it together from a set of standard characters/symbols. If they'd used a more freehand representation, like the one shown on the 6110344 layout further down the page, it would have been immediately obvious.
Is the name Hype not admission enough?
and, as I understand the overall issue to be, the concern is that DropBox may at some point "hand over your files" to (I assume) The Feds -- should they come knocking?
No, the concern is that Dropbox led people to believe that by use of encryption, Dropbox was preventing user files from being accessible to anyone except that user, which isn't actually true, and that Dropbox gained unearned competitive advantage because of that untruth.
Technically-savvy users who know (or more to the point, care) how Dropbox works behind the scenes may be able to figure out that user files had to be accessible to Dropbox (the "but how could they de-dupe files?" argument). Bully for them, but the fact that some people understand why an advertising claim is misleading doesn't make it okay for that claim to be misleading in the first place.
There aren't many better ways to ID people who've downloaded music illegally than to have them upload copies of those music files to a central location where they can be easily analyzed. Hell, I'd love a chance to run stats on that dataset and I don't even have any skin in the game. Some things you could look for:
- Files with the names of known release crews hidden away in an ID3V1 comment somewhere;
- Files uploaded by multiple people with identical incorrect (misspelled arists/titles) or unique (rip logs, comments, ratings) metadata;
- Files with timestamps earlier than the title's official street date (assuming the dedicated upload client preserves those dates);
- Multiple uploads of files with bit-for-bit identical audio content that doesn't correspond exactly to any official digital release (like identical MP3 encodes of a non-perfect CD rip, or identical versions of anything sourced from vinyl or cassette -- like a lot of the stuff on boutigue MP3 blogs);
- Files with audio data identical to anything ever subject to an official takedown notice, or downloaded by the RIAA from BitTorrent, Usenet or a Megaupload-type file sharing site.
Any given release will only have been distributed in a handful of legitimate digital versions -- basically the CD release(s) and any licensed digital download services. Any file uploaded to an online music locker that doesn't match those legit sources will be suspect, and any of those files what are uploaded to Google in bit-for-bit identical versions by multiple people will be a huge red STOLEN flag.
I have very little illegally-downloaded music relative to the size of my entire collection, but I still wouldn't go anywhere near a service like this. The data extractable from the audio files people upload would significantly reduce the effort needed for the record companies to go after even small-time downloaders. That's never really been feasible before.
If companies can have cultures then they can also have ethics, as the two are closely related.
I would look at it this way: say you've started a new job. You've been told that you're expected to behave "professionally", but not given any specific guidance as to what that means in this company. You're seated at the head of a large table in a conference room, with a mixed audience of people who work for the company. You don't know who any of them are or what they do -- they could plausibly be anyone from mailroom people to senior executives. You're asked to introduce yourself.
Under these circumstances would you, with no prompting from your audience, consider it "professional" to start talking about your interest in strip clubs?
There are very few professional settings where expressions of sexuality are seen as normal and fun. That's what "unprofessional" means.
Yup. You get the behavior you incent, and my impression is that the incentives to play politics at Microsoft are far more pervasive nowadays than the incentives to build good product. In fact, one of the biggest incentives to build good product seems to be the additional leverage it gives you politically...
My first guess at an explanation would be that the camera is actually a self-contained little image/video engine that's "running" (i.e., capturing images internally) anytime the phone is powered up, and that under certain circumstances tickled by FaceTime, polling the camera engine results in a cached frame getting kicked out of a camera-internal buffer.
Mind you, that's based on absolutely no actual understanding of the hardware, software or APIs involved.
Yes you could. There may have been a centralized "store" at some point, but I don't remember it. Palm OS let you install arbitrary executables, so you didn't need one.
This is fine as long as you actually understand what it is you're working around, why it's there, and what the consequences are of working around it. What looks like bureaucracy to a technologist may well be there for a very good business reason.
Sometimes there's a tree across the road simply because a tree fell across the road. But other times there's a tree across the road to keep you from plummeting into the ravine where the washed-out bridge used to be.
Possibly relevant: http://geniusnow.com/2011/03/15/the-strange-case-of-josef-oe...