Tavern on the Meta

What do Blu-Ray players cost these days? Much cheaper than a low-end laptop with a BRDVD drive or a PS3, both of which you could put under a TV and do more?

The Unhandled Exception

I'm comparing $99, $120 and $150 players

So, yes :-)

Dan Grossman

Just don't buy two :p

The Unhandled Exception

But that will make the quality twice as good!

Tim Stone

3:05 AM

"It's like doubling up on your graphics cards!"

Dan Grossman

But... my laptop DOES have two graphics chipsets...

Tim Stone

Don't forget to buy that $400 HDMI cable from BestBuy

The Unhandled Exception

@TimStone They tried to sell me on an $80 cable rather than the $30 one I chose

Dan Grossman

9.6 foot HDMI cable on Amazon.com: $8. 10 foot HDMI cable at Wal-mart: $59.99

Pekka

I have to share another Hyperdrive clip before I go back to work

►

If you're a general Star Trek/TNG/Enterprise fan, you'll laugh out loud. At least I did

drachenstern

3:08 AM

yum pizza

Tim Stone

YouTube opted to show me an advertisement at the beginning of that video for the Chevy Volt, ending with the slogan "Chevy Runs Deep"

Yi Jiang

It's snowing! Well, actually its sleet, but that doesn't sound half as fun as snow

Dan Grossman

I wanted to drive-through somewhere to get food, but my car's windows are frozen shut.

I went back inside and microwaved food.

The Unhandled Exception

haha

Dan Grossman

it won't rise above the freezing point again until wednesday, and then by only one degree...

Yi Jiang

3:10 AM

Also, scream "it's sleeting!" in this room, and you'll be asked "you got skeeted by who?"

The Unhandled Exception

@YiJiang HAHA

Tim Stone

@YiJiang There are so many things wrong with that sentence.

Pekka

hehehe! All right, I have to be off. Night everyone!

The Unhandled Exception

Take care @Pekka!

Tim Stone

G'night, happy working.

Dan Grossman

3:13 AM

WTB hot chocolate k-cups for my keurig

Tim Stone

I should get on that myself... brings up Eclipse

The Unhandled Exception

LOL

Well since all the cool kids are leaving I might as well too

Have a nice night everyone

Tim Stone

If you want to call me turning my head slightly to the left leaving, sure ;)

G'night!

drachenstern

but but but I just got here!!!

Rebecca Chernoff

@drachenstern, yes, that's the cue to leave. q:

drachenstern

3:16 AM

@RebeccaChernoff burn ... ouch

I see how loved I am ...

goes to play with the odata dumps

Tyler Chacha

Hello

Dan Grossman

:shivers:

drachenstern

Woohoo I'm in the higher than top 1% of all SO users (big accomplishment? Doubt it)

Dan Grossman

My TonidoPlugs shipped, yayyyy.

drachenstern

yay

Dan Grossman

3:23 AM

@drachenstern That's cool, how do you quantify that?

sort a reputation dump?

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman The SE data dump, of course

drachenstern

because there are 3901 users with more than 3035 rep

there are 400k users

Yi Jiang

But 99% of the users have 1 rep, so...

drachenstern

:p

Dan Grossman

hmm

drachenstern

3:24 AM

and yer point? ;)

Dan Grossman

400,000 people actually logged in?

I expected less

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman No, there are also unregistered accounts

drachenstern

416836 users with 1 or more rep

Dan Grossman

How do you have an account if you're unregistered?

Yi Jiang

Unregistered users also get accounts, tracked through their cookies

drachenstern

3:25 AM

197989 with 2 or more

Dan Grossman

hrm

that seems like a bad idea

drachenstern

@DanGrossman google-anon posters

39628 with 150 or more rep

Dan Grossman

every time I clear my cookies SO pretends a new account is registered?

drachenstern

all this data assumes from the last data dump, but trends tend to hold steady

@DanGrossman no no no

users from google can ask a question without registering, sorta ... ever seen those userXXXXXXX askers?

Dan Grossman

Yeah... but... if it creates a new userXXXXXXXX account for every person on the site without a cookie, then it's creating one each time a single person clears their cookies

drachenstern

3:27 AM

@DanGrossman if they ask a question

but yes

Dan Grossman

that's more reasonable, at least

drachenstern

go clear your cookies and post a question

wait I have 47 accepted answers? hmmm

Dan Grossman

4:15 AM

I'm on like day 9 of convincing myself to commit to Amazon RDS. I already moved a large database there, I just haven't committed the $1820 for a one year instance reservation.

drachenstern

@DanGrossman then you're not going to do it

Dan Grossman

Maybe.

drachenstern

@DanGrossman either you have decided to commit to it or you're always going to be considering it ... I say give it up and don't commit

Dan Grossman

But... I don't have a good alternative :(

drachenstern

but, you don't want this alternative

Tim Stone

4:22 AM

I think you should commit, and then let us know if you decide it was worth it ;)

Dan Grossman

I'm waiting for RDS to create another database server from a backup snapshot, so I cay verify the snapshot features actually work as advertised.

drachenstern

@TimStone you scourge you

Dan Grossman

$1,820 + $0.368 /hour = $5043 per year
			$420 per month
+$50  per month for data transfer
+$100 per month for data storage

Total cost of RDS deployment: $6843 per year
			      $570.25 per month

Tim Stone

@drachenstern ;)

Dan Grossman

if only I had more paying users... something I haven't worked on in a few years

well... the snapshot restoration worked

drachenstern

4:27 AM

3

Q: Found this script on client machine. What does it do?

WARNING, this code might be malicious. Be careful about executing it. (see revision history for this; note the above very carefully)

vbscript wscript cscript

I think that question should be deleted. A virus post on SO in cscript is rather a bad thing to keep around ...

I know @MarcGravell has already seen it once (see the edits) but I really think it's bad form to leave it on the site

should I whip out an MSO on that and see what the community thinks?

or am I off base?

Dan Grossman

what is the harm?

drachenstern

that somebody will execute the code and not understand it? You may counter: "they would have to look up the code and jump through hoops" to which I respond "people are idiots. Protect me from myself." and "let's set a precedent."

0

Q: How to Search a file in remote system by file name using WMI in C#?

hey, i want to know how to search a file in remote system by it's filename using WMI technology.. Uisng C#..

c#

somebody wanna spin the WOM?

Nick T

@drachenstern That, or it's not like we should make it any easier for someone to get some malicious code?

I dunno, maybe that's too overprotective

Eh, people are really suspicious with questions like "how do I make my process unkillable" or "how do I hide it from the task manager"

Not sure which is more awesome, Stuxnet or SQL slammer

drachenstern

0

Q: Should "virus source" questions be deleted outright?

In regards to this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4174865 What, if anything, should be done with questions which post source-code that are really virii? Should the user account be deleted as well? I'm all for studying virii, but there's a bit of active discussion when one is studying ...

discussion

alrighty then, damage done for tonight. 60+ authors reminded "accept your answer" and MSO question posted. Not sure I can get more people annoyed at me without serious trying, and I'm tired. Night ya'll

Dan Grossman

g'nite drach

Nick T

4:41 AM

nn

what is it, send-teh-codez or gimme-teh-codez?

Dan Grossman

There are more Google results for "give me the codes"

Reno

5:00 AM

this is all very intresting

Dan Grossman

Reno?

Dan Grossman

5:35 AM

0

Q: Free RTMP audio player

Does anyone know any free RTMP audio player? I could find several video players, but not for audio.

audio audio-streaming rtmp

off-topic :|

Dan Grossman

5:50 AM

oh god

please no

My original WoW guild, where I played for 5 years, is getting back together, on our original server with our original name...

The temptation to play the game again is so strong

Jin

@dan be strong...

2

Dan Grossman

yeahhhhhh

Jin

i miss WoW a lot too... i don't miss the game, but i do miss the people i played with

in fact, going to a guildie's wedding in a week. They met through wow too.

Tyler Chacha

HELLO!!!!

Dan Grossman

Hi Tyler

Dan Grossman

7:11 AM

:looks around:

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman :waves: Here! Here!

Dan Grossman

'sup

I just wrote a "close account" button for one of my sites... considering sending a mail to users that haven't logged in for several months asking them to, and deleting those that don't...

Yi Jiang

7:27 AM

How does a 1.4k rep user not know how to post images, or where to ask questions about SO? /facepalm

0

Q: How to post a picture in S.O.?

Hi experts, I'd like to accompany my question with pictures, how to do that? Thanks.

stackoverflow

smwikipedia

1.4k 1 21

c# .net c++ c windows com operating-system

Tim Stone

Why do most of their questions start with the word "Question"?

Yi Jiang

@TimStone I'm going to start most of my answers with "answer", then :P

Tim Stone

I haven't figured out how yet, but because of their username I'm assigning Jimmy Wales the blame on this one.

@YiJiang Don't forget to start your comments with "Comment" too :P

Yi Jiang

@TimStone Chat Message: Right, of course

radp

> You've earned the "Taxonomist" badge for global-inbox. See your profile

\o/

Tim Stone

7:32 AM

Hooray!

radp

Taxonomist is the badge I've always been wanting to earn.

Yi Jiang

Chat message: @TimStone He also seems to favorite every one of his questions :P

Chat message: @radp Congratulations!

Chat message: @MarcGravell Hello!

Tim Stone

@YiJiang I don't understand. shakes head

Marc Gravell

hey hey all

Tim Stone

'Ello

Yi Jiang

7:39 AM

Chat message: @MarcGravell Hey!

Chat message: I'm sticking the phrase 'Chat message' in front of all my chat messages in case anyone forgets they are chat messages.

Marc Gravell

@YiJiang Reply: that is silly

Tim Stone

-15

A: How to get at the database schema of a hidden DB?

What I do not understand is, how come your customer, and you as their technician, are unaware of the fact that the Sybase ASA database is Embedded in the PattersonEagleSoft product. As such: your customer is limited to the access levels granted, pursuant to the fee they paid PE have a legal ri...

Yi Jiang

Quote: "OK, I had syphilis, but we all ate well in Pompeii, rich and poor" Why would this appear on the BBC?

Tim Stone

Wow, it got down to -15, heh.

radp

@YiJiang Chat action: Raise of eyebrow

Yi Jiang

7:53 AM

@radp rchernism: q:

Dan Grossman

8:16 AM

> GoDaddy is offering Domain Name Registration (new domains only) for $1 for 1 year with code Holiday99.

Benjol

@TimStone there's a question on meta about that answer

Tim Stone

@Benjol Yeah, heh.

radp

Nov 2 at 12:40, by Aiden Bell

Jin

i'm wearing an Area51 shirt now. /flex

Yi Jiang

Sigh... bbc.com/travel/feature/20101209-a-perfect-day-in-singapore

radp

8:23 AM

@YiJiang Homesick?

Yi Jiang

The subway system is called MRT, not MTR! MTR is Hong Kong's subway system

Jin

@YiJiang where are you now?

radp

(or, more accurately, internetsick?)

Yi Jiang

@radp Sighing at how bad their written

Yi Jiang, Nanjing, China

9.9k 2 9 24

jquery css javascript html jquery-ui php html5

radp

@YiJiang Well at least now you're in a supported location

Jin

8:25 AM

i hope the food is good..

Yi Jiang

@radp You have a funny definition of supported, where YouTube, Blogger, etc. are blocked

Jin

@YiJiang I don't recall Jiangsu province being known for its cuisines.

Dan Grossman

That shirt is awesome. Are they for sale?

Yi Jiang

@Jin It's not bad. At least it isn't Sichuan

I can't eat spicy food

Dan Grossman

@radp Have you rewritten the CSS, rewritten the JS, merged image browser views and SSL?

Benjol

8:32 AM

So, @Jin, what have you got in the pipes?

Yi Jiang

14

Q: Site Design, round 2

First, I want to thank you for your valuable feedback for the first design concept. Programmers.SE is a site about people and conceptual design more than coding. The old design simply did not reflect that; so it failed. I talked to Jeff about this, and he agrees that Programmers.se is much diffe...

discussion featured design

Dan Grossman

woo, my whiteboard comment made an impact

I like it more than the last one

Benjol

8:49 AM

@Jin, I like. Though I preferred the text } out of scope {

Dan Grossman

} Programmers { looks like a syntax error

Benjol

@DanGrossman, yeah, I had to really concentrate to type it :)

And that's why Out of Scope makes more sense in the context

Dan Grossman

I think it might bug me if I had to look at it every day

Jin

i also like /* programmers */

Dan Grossman

even (Programmers) could be interpreted as lisp-like

#Programmers?

Benjol

8:52 AM

I like the use of House font too :)

Jin

@Benjol that was jeff's idea

he's had a lot of input on this design

Yi Jiang

Hehe, yeah. Can't believe someone made a font out of his handwriting :P

Dan Grossman

o_O

Benjol

And three screens too, gotta show that to my boss ;)

radp

You even threw some rotation in it!

Yi Jiang

8:56 AM

@Jin Just curious, are you restricted to using Google Font Directory's fonts? Can't you self host the @font-face files?

radp

@YiJiang http://sstatic.net/gaming/img/pf_tempesta_seven-webfont.ttf

Yi Jiang

Yannone is a little bit too condensed

Jin

@YiJiang we can and we have. there aren't too many suitable choices unless we use font hosting companies like Typekit.

a lot of free fonts out there don't have a complete glyph.

Benjol

I wonder whether the whiteboard would look better with sides...

Jin

@Benjol i thought about it, but it'd look weird for people with lower resolution.

also it'd look too boxy

Dan Grossman

9:05 AM

I am a fan of the whiteboard background

I hope the question titles/text are in astandard font though, custom narrow fonts are hard to read

and custom fonts always end up doing weird things on some systems... too many websites using typekit look horrible in chrome for me, text is hard to read

Jin

@DanGrossman body text will be a standard one. I'll see how the Question title font works out.

@DanGrossman yeah that's why I'd only use font-face for header text, never for body

Dan Grossman

some day browsers will have better built-in support for fonts

Jin

@dan it has more to do with OS font rendering though

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman They already do, surely @font-face is simple enough?

Jin

all fonts look great in OSX, but Windows render a lot of them poorly

Dan Grossman

9:08 AM

@YiJiang It never looks like if I use the font in Photoshop or Word though

in the browser I end up with things that are hard to read

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman Firefox has pretty poor font rendering on Windows - even poorer than ClearType would normally

Dan Grossman

for example lostworldsfairs.com/moon

Yi Jiang

Hopefully with DirectWrite in Firefox 4 this would be better

Dan Grossman

in Chrome, the "A World's Fair On The Earth's" text is so thin it looks jagged and almost disconnected along the letters

the rest is readable but weird kerning and aliasing

Yi Jiang

The Google Map-esq markers are almost unreadable on Firefox

Dan Grossman

9:10 AM

yeah

Yi Jiang

I think it might be because to cut down size @font-face files lack the correct hinting information?

Jin

Yi Jiang

@Jin How 'bout those markers?

Dan Grossman

that looks totally different from mine

Jin

@DanGrossman because OSX rendering > Windows

Dan Grossman

9:12 AM

Jin

it should look fine in IE9 though

Dan Grossman

Well, something to keep in mind for programmers. :p

Most of us don't have the pleasure of OS X font rendering

Jin

@DanGrossman oh i know. Jeff makes sure that I know...

Dan Grossman

I would love to have it in the browser alone, if it'd leave the rest of my OS alone

Jin

i have a PC desktop and laptop I test the CSS on

@dan you can use Win Safari. although it's not quite the same

Dan Grossman

9:14 AM

not worth the downsides of safari

letteringjs.com

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman Mmmmhmmm... that certainly made be sit up and look

Dan Grossman

9:27 AM

Hrm, I don't like when I get a hit to my website with the user-agent "Java/1.6.0_15". Someone's writing a scraper.

radp

10:13 AM

0

A: Feedback Request: New Timeline Question View

One can sketch up... not sure how it would work in practice, however. There'll probably going to be a need to collapse moments of inactivity.

Yi Jiang

radp

@YiJiang aww, I've corrected that error :(

Yi Jiang

@radp ? I was just mirroring the image with imgur because dropbox is blocked

radp

@YiJiang Oh, no worries.

I changed "as you scroll up" → "as you scroll down"

Anyway, I suspect Jeff didn't say it looked hard to implement because of all the heights and highlighting and details and stuff, but because I put the timeline under the /questions route.

Yi Jiang

@radp Erm... erm...

radp

10:28 AM

@YiJiang It was tongue in cheek =_=

Yi Jiang

@radp Ah! Right! A joke! What an exotic and rare curiosity! You could have warned me beforehand with a giant bold "THIS IS A JOKE" sign to prevent this sort of thing next time.

radp

@YiJiang Oh, I used to, but it didn't seem to make a difference

Sep 22 at 22:30, by badp

↑↑↑↑ WARNING ↑↑↑↑ JOKE ↑↑↑↑ WARNING ↑↑↑↑ JOKE ↑↑↑↑ WARNING ↑↑↑↑

Dan Grossman

Having my bank website accidentally show my checking account balance at $0 was a little scary.

Banks should really not let that happen.

radp

10:58 AM

b3ta.com/challenge/assange/popular

Dan Grossman

11:38 AM

WTF! NO!

On TV right now on my local morning news... "Important security measures for online shopping: Web Address starts with SHTTP or HTTPS"... SHTTP?!

radp

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP) is a little-used alternative to the HTTPS URI scheme for encrypting web communications carried over HTTP. S-HTTP is defined in RFC 2660. Web browsers typically use HTTP to communicate with web servers, sending and receiving information without encrypting it. For sensitive transactions, such as Internet e-commerce or online access to financial accounts, the browser and server must encrypt this information. HTTPS and S-HTTP were both defined in the mid-1990s to address this need. Netscape and Microsoft supported HTTPS rather than S-HTTP, leadi...

?

Yi Jiang

@radp Given that it's not used since the first browser wars, I think chances are it's the news channel's fault

Dan Grossman

I think they couldn't remember whether it was "https://" or "shttp://" since nobody working in the newsroom is under the age of 40 :/

radp

@YiJiang Well I recalled SHTTP existed somehow, I'm glad to see I wasn't entirely too wrong :)

Obviously incompetence is a safer bet.

Yi Jiang

Because what every evil overlord needs is some free beer

Pekka

12:19 PM

@Jin where's that from?

(My reply is pointing to the Moon 2040 image)

Dan Grossman

@Pekka lostworldsfairs.com/moon

Pekka

Dan cheers. Yummy design

oh and even HTML based text, wow

Dan Grossman

that whole site is a demo of web fonts in IE9, or so it says

Pekka

Yeah, really really nice

balpha

12:47 PM

Random quiz: Guess which two of the graduated SE 2.0 sites (not counting metas) have the most similar style sheets.

Yi Jiang

@balpha Tex and English

balpha

fourth place

Here's the top ten; higher number means more similar. Metrics are of course scientifically proven:

92.7 cstheory tex
92.3 webapps webmasters
88.1 math stats
87.6 english tex
87.2 cstheory english
86.3 stats tex
85.9 cstheory stats
84.7 math webmasters
83.3 math tex
83.0 gamedev webmasters

Yi Jiang

@balpha You're doing it to make sure @Jin's actually doing work and not lazing off? :P

balpha

I'm working on removing all the redundancy out of the style sheets, now that we use LESS. So those statistics are actually meaningful :)

Dan Grossman