Xander Robar › Comments

"submitted by reddit to blog." - Xander Robar

"Wow, calm down there buddy. The article was just trying to have a bit of fun. So was arschgaudi. You don't need to take everything so seriously. It's really easy to say "Just be careful, you'll never drop it if you're careful", but that's just not a good assumption. Accidents happen, whether you're being careless or anally careful. Especially with something like the iPad that will always be in your hands there's a much bigger risk of dropping it." - Xander Robar

"@BarrettAnderson Toronto has the right of way laws. A bus merging into traffic must be given right of ways, cars can't just keep passing the bus anymore. If a cop see you shoot by a bus trying to merge, you'll get a ticket. That's a fairly recent law though, no more than a few years. I live just North of Toronto now and they are building dedicated bus lanes all over the place here. It's a big undertaking, as the places the lanes are needed most are the highest trafficked areas (so you can't just steal a lane and convert it). The city has bought many kilometers of storefront space, and is paying to move buildings back to make space for an extra two lanes in the busiest areas. The extra two lanes are only accessible to the bus rapid transit system, and emergency vehicles. It's expensive, but unfortunately public transit wasn't a part of the original city plan and now we're paying for it. It's also cheaper than building a subway that covers the same length, so overall it's not that bad a..." - Xander Robar

""...you are better off offering two links". That's a nightmare for customer service. You can't ever trust a consumer to figure something out for themselves. You, a technically savvy person, sees two links, one that says "Flash" and one that says "HTML5", and you know which one to click on. But Grandma Betty clicks on something to play a video, her iPad tells her it doesn't support Flash, and she gives up, assuming she can't play the video at all. Double encoding or not, Brightcove's business is getting their customer's videos to their customer's audience. Brightcove can't force you or your customers to a particular platform, so in my opinion they're pretty smart for making a solution that "just works" no matter which device or platform I choose to view it on." - Xander Robar

"I've always thought the same thing. If there was a real danger to a national communications network, or a real danger that the jet's instruments would malfunction should a cell phone be used, there's no way they would let them on the flight to start with. Anything that COULD be used to bring down a flight is removed from your person by security checks. Until they force me to turn off my phone and put it in my checked baggage, I'm not buying that they're an actual risk to safety." - Xander Robar

"You also don't have something covering one of your ears. Start talking to someone and then plug one of your ears. The instinctive reaction is to speak louder so that you can hear yourself." - Xander Robar

"Do you think the reason that performance problems for Flash haven't been solved is because nobody at Apple knows how to get in touch with Adobe? All it would take to fix the problems would be a joint dev team, and a few cases of Mountain Dew to keep the hackers happy. The performance issues are still present because neither side sees a benefit to fixing them. Jobs doesn't want to support Adobe, and probably has a much bigger, behind-the-scenes reason for placing his chips on HTML5 & H264. It wouldn't make any financial sense for Adobe to spend a ton of development cash for what amounts to 10% of the desktop market. Especially when you consider that in return for that investment, Apple is going to shut them out of their mobile device and tablet divisions, there's no reason for them to spend the money. So would the performance problems still exist if Apple "fixed their browsers to work with Flash"? Sure. Same would be true if Adobe did it. But performance issues aren't the reasons Flash..." - Xander Robar

"Do you go to magic shows and tell all the kids how the tricks are done? And then show up at the mall at Christmas and tell the kids the guy in the red suit is just an under-paid drunk 'cause Santa doesn't actually exist? Way to ruin the magic." - Xander Robar

"Sounds like a good way to destroy the natural landscape very quickly." - Xander Robar

"Wow, someone's bitter today. How do you know it would "work just as well"? Have you tried it? I have. Didn't have a good experience. Hardware video acceleration didn't work at all, sound didn't work. It took me almost a week to get my hardware working at all, let alone to a usable state. Two different Dells I've tried Ubuntu on had major hardware problems. Dell is making a really good effort here. If you don't think that effort is worth your time, then just don't buy from them. Your comments sound like they're coming from someone who was frustrated by the mic problem you mentioned. I'm sure it was frustrating, but it doesn't mean Dell doesn't test. Testing is a HUGE process. Maybe it worked for them in the lab. Who knows? Also, Dell just seems to suck at mics in general (even on Windows, which you seem to think they test better than Linux): http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb... ..." - Xander Robar

"It takes a long time to certify an OS against a full line up of hardware and all the different options/configurations that could exist. It may be outdated, but at least you know there will be drivers available to work with the hardware you buy. Plus, the OS is free. If you want to upgrade, go for it. Dell won't stop you." - Xander Robar

"@Dauntless1 It's in nearly every damn city in your country. Just because you don't have fiber to the curb doesn't mean there isn't fiber there. There's fiber backbones nearly everywhere. There's often fiber to the nodes at neighborhood or street level. The telcos never promised fiber to the curb for every household in America, they promised to improve reach via fiber. They did that. Now don't get me wrong. Was that misleading? Sure it was. I never said I supported the telcos, or them getting more money. I was simply replying to the OP and stating that these guys aren't in need of stimulus. But it's free money, so they're going to take it." - Xander Robar

"@Dauntless1 It's in nearly every damn city in your country. Just because you don't have fiber to the curb doesn't mean there isn't fiber there. There's fiber backbones nearly everywhere. There's often fiber to the nodes at neighborhood or street level. The telcos never promised fiber to the curb for every household in America, they promised to improve reach via fiber. They did that. Now don't get me wrong. Was that misleading? Sure it was. I never said I supported the telcos, or them getting more money. I was simply replying to the OP and stating that these guys aren't in need of stimulus. But it's free money, so they're going to take it." - Xander Robar

"It's not that they *need* a stimulus. The ISPs aren't willing to pay for pipes to Middle Of Nowheresville because for the millions they put in, they get a handful of customers paying $50/month. That's a hell of a long time before you see return on your investment. Now in most cases the answer for a private company would be "Too bad. You can build there when it makes financial sense to do so.". But now the FCC comes along and says everyone in the country has a right to broadband, we need to get broadband to the rural areas, etc. So, being offered a build out to rural areas free of charge every telco throws their hat into the ring. Why not? If you don't have to spend money to make money, you're in the right business." - Xander Robar

"You ARE missing something. You've been following Linux for 14 years, but never got around to learning "./configure; make; make install" to install something from source? Granted, that may not be as easy as double clicking a file, but if you can get as far as extracting a tarball, you can compile the source. That aside, it sounds like you haven't tried any of the popular distros over the past 4 - 5 years or so. Ubuntu has the Synaptic GUI on top of Apt. Installing a software package is as simple as placing a checkmark next to it and clicking "apply". All dependencies are handled for you. Fedora has similar package management for their RPM management." - Xander Robar

"Nobody said it's OK to search for a keyword and then follow everyone who mentions it. This is also very aggressive behavior, and doesn't help you, the people you follow, or the community in general. Once I said something like, "Watching Superman Returns". I instantly had 300 additional followers. The next day they had all dropped off. As it turns out, they were only interested in the comic book side of Superman, so the fact that they followed without context was a big waste of everyone's time. An application that follows based on keywords is simply following without any context. It IS aggressive behaviour, and it's annoying. Twitter has the right to ask you to stop doing things that annoy their users. Besides all of that, you ARE using their trademark and they definitely have a right to ask you to stop profiting from it, regardless of any other circumstances." - Xander Robar

"The accompanying text explains that that's exactly what he did. He didn't make it a secret." - Xander Robar

How to unlock and flash the HTC Touch Diamond with a cooked ROM (MightyROM, Juicy's ROM, etc.) - Xander Robar

How to unlock and flash the HTC Touch Diamond with a cooked ROM (MightyROM, Juicy's ROM, etc.) - Xander Robar

"Can anyone provide a reason why content providers are turning this off? It's not like Digg actually "steals" traffic from them. The content provider can monetize the same number of page views (more, arguably, if people start using Digg as an URL shortener in place of other services like Bit.ly). I get being a user and bitching that it's annoying, and you want it to be turned off by default, etc. But as a content provider, what do you gain by doing this? Whether you think the users Digg sends your way are mindless or not, it's still a very large amount of traffic that can be be turned into dollars. You don't lose page views with the Diggbar enabled. Can someone shed some light on this?" - Xander Robar

"How is it that you feel the content provider DOESN'T get any traffic here? If I put up a framed site where google.com is one of the frames, Google still has to serve that traffic. Google still has the same stats." - Xander Robar

"@koft3 You mean the company that provides a free service to you wants to find a way to keep people on their site and monetize those page views? *gasp* Get over it. You have to login to disable it ONCE. If you're clearing your cookies every time you close your browser, that's your problem. Set your browser to the default "less annoying behavior" and allow yourself to stay logged in so that your preferences carry across browser sessions. You write as if you speak for everyone, but a lot of people don't feel it's annoying. I like the DiggBar quite a bit. I used to open the comments page and the article for every story on Digg I was interested in. Now I just open the one link. Sharing stories is easier with the pre-shortened link. It may not be convenient for you, but bitching and complaining about how inconvenient it is seems like a big stretch. It takes up an inch of screen real estate. Does it really affect you that much?" - Xander Robar

"You've spammed this to me three times. Enough. Buried." - Xander Robar

"Sure it LOOKS fine. But it used to be a two story house." - Xander Robar

"Cineplex Odeon theaters around here (Toronto) have done that. The price is, in fact, double for most menu items. This has done nothing to save the theaters... They're still hurting." - Xander Robar

"Agreed. Theaters do whatever they can to save on cost. Do I want the 15 year old high school drop out making my rainbow roll? No thank you. Some of the sushi places around here don't even do the stuff justice, and sushi is *all they do*. I can only imagine the tremendous slide in quality control movie theater sushi would have." - Xander Robar

"This is really one of those numbers that looks outlandish until you break it down. Saying you spend $1000/month on tea sounds crazy, but if that's spread out across 75 people it's less than $2/day per person. I'll bet it's one of the niceties that keeps employees happy, and it's a nice boost to the culture that Digg wants to have in the workplace." - Xander Robar

"Why do you hate tea so much?" - Xander Robar

"What kind of "study" is that? They're claiming that extremely hot tea can cause throat cancer. Did they test extremely hot coffee? How about extremely hot water on it's own? That really didn't seem to prove anything other than the rather self evident, "burning your throat is bad for you"." - Xander Robar

"Who's to say these aren't recyclable? It's probably just all shaped and colored plastic." - Xander Robar