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Comment Re:autoplay sucks anyway (Score 1) 108

If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit

Doesn't it? I don't have flash installed so it doesn't happen to me, but I seem to remember it beginning to occur recently if I visited slashdot with chrome

Is it the ads? ...

Yes, it is. I just had audio suddenly come blasting out of my speakers. I hunted down the tab where I had the Slashdot homepage open and closed it, and the sound went away. I really can't afford to have stupid video ads sucking the bandwidth away from my VoIP when someone might call me, or weird audio coming out of the blue when I am on the phone with a client, so I guess I just won't be coming here much anymore.

Submission + - Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For An Answer

RevWaldo writes: The Verge and other sources post how AOL's Ryan Block ultimately succeeded in cancelling his Comcast account over the phone, but not before the customer service representative pressed him for eight solid minutes (audio) to explain his reasoning for leaving "the number one provider of TV and internet service in the country" in a manner that would cause a character in Glengarry Glen Ross to blanch. Comcast has as of now issued an apology.

Comment Re:The important take-away is.... (Score 1) 258

I suspect you are right, which is why I wrote "Google can" rather than "Google does," but Google may have incentive to sell service at a loss to improve the experience of their Youtube users (thus making Youtube more profitable due to more usage) or so they can mine the traffic data. In any event, having a price from a pure ISP avoids that whole issue.

Comment The important take-away is.... (Score 5, Insightful) 258

So, what we learn is that ISPs believe they can build a gigabit infrastructure and make a profit charging only $65/month for service without having to subsidize it with an ad business (like Google can). That's a very nice measure of just how much the rest of us are getting screwed by our ISPs.

Comment Re:The commits are funny into themselves. (Score 2) 379

I'm wondering what is supposed to be mysterious about that code. The "/* increment */" comment seems to apply to the code inside the loop, not what is being done to the i variable, so I don't think that's it. Is it because the loop goes from 7 down to 0 instead of the other way around? I remember reading a programming book back in the 80's that advocated doing that for better speed since the assembly code generated to compare to 0 was faster than comparing to some other integer (which seems to no longer be the case, and I suspect could even cause cache misses for a bigger loop, although I don't know enough about how CPUs fill the cache to know for sure).

Comment Re:Wake me up when any flavor of OO has outline mo (Score 1) 285

Yes, XMind allows you to grab any node and drag it (with the hierarchy under it intact) into any other part of the hierarchy. That was one of my requirements, which a few other mind mapping tools I tested didn't seem to support (or, at least, I couldn't find a way to do it with other tools with just a few minutes of poking around). You can also collapse/expand any node.

Comment Re:Not even much money (Score 1) 423

Good point. I looked at the Q4 table and thought the original poster got "couple billion per year" by multiplying the revenue by four. I didn't scroll down, so I didn't see that there was a full-year table available showing that they are profitable (but not justifying the "couple billion" number). Thanks for the correction.

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