Reminds me of the Crown electric fork trucks I use at work. They all have accelerometers installed, and the slightest bump will disable the motor.
The trouble is, the motor is used to slow the machine (by "plugging"), and it also drives the power assist for the steering. You don't want to be driving at 10MPH in a 4-ton vehicle in a small warehouse and suddenly hit a crack in the pavement, causing both the steering and decelerator to die on you. Yes, the machines have brakes, but they are activated by lifting your feet off the floorboard. Try stopping a huge machine by standing on one foot in a moment of panic because you can't steer. It's happened to me more than once.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this is all required by some government safety mandate.
Perhaps it should be, "Time For Voice-Mail to Get an Interface Overhaul".
Serious geeks may not have a problem, but not everyone wants to buy the latest phones or use a netbook to check phone messages. I know people who use phones all day but still can't switch inputs between satellite and their DVD player.
Chrome treats you like an idiot. You can't configure the interface and anything more than the bare essentials is buried under a complex cascade of menus. I also hate how all the status messages are treated like pop-ups. Don't obscure the content, please.
It's just another slick-looking "you don't need to know" applications. That's hardly good interface design, unless the product is designed from the ground up just for marketing.
Testing my code in Chrome is a PITA. I hope the Iron developers start making some improvements to the interface, rather than just ripping out all the controversial stuff.
...and the pseudo-3D engine looked bad compared to Quake's actual 3D...
It also had more colors than just brown, which is incredibly rare even by today's standards. Duke3D was still stuck in the 2D pixel era, and I think that made the graphics more interesting than any of the sludgy, "realistic" experiments that have plagued FPS games to this day.
My favorite part was modifying the Duke3D game config file. It's quite satisfying to hack the game so when you blow up a humanoid enemy with a rocket launcher, 15 legs spray all over the place. Good times!
It is allowing fans to freely share and promote artists.
Provided the content being credited correctly, which is the other purpose of copyright. Sure, the stuff that already blares on the radio and TV 24/7 is going to credited correctly in the end, because people search for the content by name and artist, and there's enough volume to ensure that at least somebody gets it right. What about all that stuff from the little guys spread as "unknown"? You only need one mis-credited title to cause a lot of headaches for a long time.
Some fans they are if they can't even spell the artists' names correctly.
True, but any OS is fully replaceable. I only care about my Home folder and everywhere else I keep my personal files, because I can't make backups every day, down to the second.
Linux doesn't have as many gaping holes as Windows, but it doesn't really fix the problem of commercial companies trying to overtake my computer as if they owned it. Very few OSes do, actually.
That is a distinction without a difference. If you need those drivers to run Vista on your PC, then Vista has a problem.
No, the PC manufacturer has a problem. They're the ones who chose the parts and the drivers.
Users should not have to care who writes the drivers, unless you have some esoteric and unusual hardware in your PC.
Quality of the drivers is largely how hardware is judged esoteric and unusual, and brand names are made or broken (that includes the brand of PC, not just the companies that make jelly bean parts). Blaming Vista because a laptop manufacturer chose a cheap, buggy part or preloaded the machine with a 3MB keyboard driver isn't realistic, no matter how common these problems may be.
Don't tell me that the various reverse-engineered drivers for Linux are any better. When a Linux driver crashes, should people blame Linux or the distro and not the specific driver causing the issue? When I ask that question, I get a lot of people telling me "no". Of course, that's because Linux people are expected to care about who writes the driver. They aren't dumb Windows people who are trained from day one to blame Microsoft for everything because it's convenient.
Yes, users shouldn't have to care. But, they do. Blaming Microsoft just lets PC manufacturers continue using crappy parts year after year, making it more and more difficult for people like me to buy something that actually works unless I build it myself.
Thank goodness I don't need a laptop... yet. The last time I had to fix a laptop, I needed to download a sound driver, and I could only get it bundled within a complete driver package... which didn't work. Did I blame XP? No, I blamed HP.
I have a photocopier at work with a 4x5" touch screen interface, and it works perfectly every time, all the time. Remarkable, when you consider that there are tons of tightly-packed virtual buttons, each of which is usually a quarter inch tall.
Part of that is likely to do with OSX but the other part has just as much to do with the fact that Macs are NEVER sold under powered.
You never bought a PPC Mini, did you? It was dog slow until you pumped a lot more memory into it. I think the machine was 8 times faster after upgrading from 256MB to 1GB. No wonder Apple jacked up the price by $100 once they found out it sold well.
As for fit and finish, I had a HELL of a time getting the damn thing open so I could swap out the memory. If PCs use screws and Apple uses plastic tabs that grip like vices, well, I vote that the PC has a serious advantage, here. Thank goodness I never use my Mac, because I don't even want to know what it's like to upgrade the hard drive.
Most security is application-based, so if you download cheap software at random, you'll be in trouble no matter what OS you use.
Wake me when an OS can quarantine an application to its own PWD, config, and temp folders with just one click. I can't believe it's not standard practice for OSes to offer that feature these days.
One thing I've come across on a lot of modules recently is that they won't run at SPD unless they are over-volted. So, just running the memory at SPD and replacing your power supply won't work. I've always wondered how accurate the voltage readings are on motherboards.
Raising the voltage by a tenth fixes most problems people are having with new memory (assuming the BIOS lets me do that, of course).
You're in luck! There will never be a lack of squishy keyboards.
Too much of the high-end market is reserved for gamers, and even that is dominated by $100 hunks of creaky plastic that sport racing stripes. Hell, just finding an LCD display without a cheap TN panel is a major chore.
I think the reason it is simplistic is because the issue is simplistic: run an online service paid for by advertising to your users and you are not likely to be profitable, end of story.
Exactly. It's interesting that the OP is asking if there are alternatives to Last.fm. Why is this? Aren't there enough competitors out there offering streamed music that are halfway decent so they can be easily found through Google?
Sites that are supported through advertising revenue alone are very few in number, and only the biggest ones tend to survive for long. Obviously, this is not a terribly profitable model for the majority of people trying to establish an online service.
I've also noticed that the number of companies offering free web hosting has dropped considerably over the last 5 years. Blogs and many CMSes can be hosted on a free shared server, so the disappearance of old-fashioned web sites is not the cause.
Updating to Firefox 3 caused my Firefox 2 profile to be updated for the new browser. When I uninstalled Firefox 3 to revert to the old version, Firefox 2 tried to load the old profile, and refused to start (it crashed). The only way I was able to fix it was to go into the hidden application data folder and wipe out my Firefox profile. Most "normal" people wouldn't know how to do that. Don't even get me started about the extensions. You may not have had a problem, but I had to deal with a lot of crashes and lock-ups. I was not happy. That was several weeks after Firefox Download Day.
I tried to find a way to have multiple installs of Firefox, but each version tried to share the same profile. Running Firefox 3 and 3.1 side-by-side may not cause an issue, but you can't do that with 2 and 3. In fact, you should never share configuration data with multiple versions, even if it appears to work. It's just a bad thing to do.
I say this every time I consider replacing my CRT with an LCD. I do sensitive color work, and I have still yet to see an expensive LCD that beats my 7-year-old tube.
Damn the flood of cheap, crappy TN-based LCDs crowding the market. I don't care about LCD price fixing -- I care about not being able to find a large, new CRT anywhere. Almost all CRTs you try to buy online are refurbished rather than NOS. The sellers often forget to write that in the product description.
Nowadays, when I finish a track, the wav doesn't sound right until I encode it to mp3. The mp3 sounds better to me.
Would that be due to the filter that reduces noise to make the MP3 compress better, or the compression itself? I like bright music, so I generally don't like MP3s, but when you have some audio with bass, the sound does change a lot after encoding. I admit that sometime bass does sound better.
Of course, that's something you could change in the source WAV file, too. So, that could be considered a mastering issue as much as an encoding issue.
I'm still amazed that so many millions of people got Firefox 3 on day one without so much as a second thought, and the developers treated it like a damned contest. I don't care how long the beta testing period was, or that it's FOSS. You never get a new major version on day one unless you can afford the risk.
A beginner also doesn't know what to do when setup.exe pops up a dialog box saying 'Installshield Error: -51'.
Look for another product that doesn't use Installshield.
Hey, Linux people are always saying they have compliments for practically any app on Windows, so why can't every Windows app have at least one other competitor?
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the Crown electric fork trucks I use at work. They all have accelerometers installed, and the slightest bump will disable the motor.
The trouble is, the motor is used to slow the machine (by "plugging"), and it also drives the power assist for the steering. You don't want to be driving at 10MPH in a 4-ton vehicle in a small warehouse and suddenly hit a crack in the pavement, causing both the steering and decelerator to die on you. Yes, the machines have brakes, but they are activated by lifting your feet off the floorboard. Try stopping a huge machine by standing on one foot in a moment of panic because you can't steer. It's happened to me more than once.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this is all required by some government safety mandate.
Perhaps it should be, "Time For Voice-Mail to Get an Interface Overhaul".
Serious geeks may not have a problem, but not everyone wants to buy the latest phones or use a netbook to check phone messages. I know people who use phones all day but still can't switch inputs between satellite and their DVD player.
Chrome treats you like an idiot. You can't configure the interface and anything more than the bare essentials is buried under a complex cascade of menus. I also hate how all the status messages are treated like pop-ups. Don't obscure the content, please.
It's just another slick-looking "you don't need to know" applications. That's hardly good interface design, unless the product is designed from the ground up just for marketing.
Testing my code in Chrome is a PITA. I hope the Iron developers start making some improvements to the interface, rather than just ripping out all the controversial stuff.
...and the pseudo-3D engine looked bad compared to Quake's actual 3D...
It also had more colors than just brown, which is incredibly rare even by today's standards. Duke3D was still stuck in the 2D pixel era, and I think that made the graphics more interesting than any of the sludgy, "realistic" experiments that have plagued FPS games to this day.
My favorite part was modifying the Duke3D game config file. It's quite satisfying to hack the game so when you blow up a humanoid enemy with a rocket launcher, 15 legs spray all over the place. Good times!
Heck, farmers were paid to grow grass.
It is allowing fans to freely share and promote artists.
Provided the content being credited correctly, which is the other purpose of copyright. Sure, the stuff that already blares on the radio and TV 24/7 is going to credited correctly in the end, because people search for the content by name and artist, and there's enough volume to ensure that at least somebody gets it right. What about all that stuff from the little guys spread as "unknown"? You only need one mis-credited title to cause a lot of headaches for a long time.
Some fans they are if they can't even spell the artists' names correctly.
It harldy matetrs. The mind dosen't actlualy raed most of the letetrs, anyawy.
True, but any OS is fully replaceable. I only care about my Home folder and everywhere else I keep my personal files, because I can't make backups every day, down to the second.
Linux doesn't have as many gaping holes as Windows, but it doesn't really fix the problem of commercial companies trying to overtake my computer as if they owned it. Very few OSes do, actually.
That is a distinction without a difference. If you need those drivers to run Vista on your PC, then Vista has a problem.
No, the PC manufacturer has a problem. They're the ones who chose the parts and the drivers.
Users should not have to care who writes the drivers, unless you have some esoteric and unusual hardware in your PC.
Quality of the drivers is largely how hardware is judged esoteric and unusual, and brand names are made or broken (that includes the brand of PC, not just the companies that make jelly bean parts). Blaming Vista because a laptop manufacturer chose a cheap, buggy part or preloaded the machine with a 3MB keyboard driver isn't realistic, no matter how common these problems may be.
Don't tell me that the various reverse-engineered drivers for Linux are any better. When a Linux driver crashes, should people blame Linux or the distro and not the specific driver causing the issue? When I ask that question, I get a lot of people telling me "no". Of course, that's because Linux people are expected to care about who writes the driver. They aren't dumb Windows people who are trained from day one to blame Microsoft for everything because it's convenient.
Yes, users shouldn't have to care. But, they do. Blaming Microsoft just lets PC manufacturers continue using crappy parts year after year, making it more and more difficult for people like me to buy something that actually works unless I build it myself.
Thank goodness I don't need a laptop... yet. The last time I had to fix a laptop, I needed to download a sound driver, and I could only get it bundled within a complete driver package... which didn't work. Did I blame XP? No, I blamed HP.
I have a photocopier at work with a 4x5" touch screen interface, and it works perfectly every time, all the time. Remarkable, when you consider that there are tons of tightly-packed virtual buttons, each of which is usually a quarter inch tall.
Antarctica has one of every time zone. Does that count for something?
Part of that is likely to do with OSX but the other part has just as much to do with the fact that Macs are NEVER sold under powered.
You never bought a PPC Mini, did you? It was dog slow until you pumped a lot more memory into it. I think the machine was 8 times faster after upgrading from 256MB to 1GB. No wonder Apple jacked up the price by $100 once they found out it sold well.
As for fit and finish, I had a HELL of a time getting the damn thing open so I could swap out the memory. If PCs use screws and Apple uses plastic tabs that grip like vices, well, I vote that the PC has a serious advantage, here. Thank goodness I never use my Mac, because I don't even want to know what it's like to upgrade the hard drive.
Most security is application-based, so if you download cheap software at random, you'll be in trouble no matter what OS you use.
Wake me when an OS can quarantine an application to its own PWD, config, and temp folders with just one click. I can't believe it's not standard practice for OSes to offer that feature these days.
One thing I've come across on a lot of modules recently is that they won't run at SPD unless they are over-volted. So, just running the memory at SPD and replacing your power supply won't work. I've always wondered how accurate the voltage readings are on motherboards.
Raising the voltage by a tenth fixes most problems people are having with new memory (assuming the BIOS lets me do that, of course).
Meanwhile, aren't some people wrapping their WiFi antennas with tin foil to boost reception?
The car itself looks nice on the outside, but my first thought about the interior was, "the center console makes BMW's iDrive look good."
The irony is that we just had a /. article about tactile feedback in keyboards.
You're in luck! There will never be a lack of squishy keyboards.
Too much of the high-end market is reserved for gamers, and even that is dominated by $100 hunks of creaky plastic that sport racing stripes. Hell, just finding an LCD display without a cheap TN panel is a major chore.
I think the reason it is simplistic is because the issue is simplistic: run an online service paid for by advertising to your users and you are not likely to be profitable, end of story.
Exactly. It's interesting that the OP is asking if there are alternatives to Last.fm. Why is this? Aren't there enough competitors out there offering streamed music that are halfway decent so they can be easily found through Google?
Sites that are supported through advertising revenue alone are very few in number, and only the biggest ones tend to survive for long. Obviously, this is not a terribly profitable model for the majority of people trying to establish an online service.
I've also noticed that the number of companies offering free web hosting has dropped considerably over the last 5 years. Blogs and many CMSes can be hosted on a free shared server, so the disappearance of old-fashioned web sites is not the cause.
Wrong.
Updating to Firefox 3 caused my Firefox 2 profile to be updated for the new browser. When I uninstalled Firefox 3 to revert to the old version, Firefox 2 tried to load the old profile, and refused to start (it crashed). The only way I was able to fix it was to go into the hidden application data folder and wipe out my Firefox profile. Most "normal" people wouldn't know how to do that. Don't even get me started about the extensions. You may not have had a problem, but I had to deal with a lot of crashes and lock-ups. I was not happy. That was several weeks after Firefox Download Day.
I tried to find a way to have multiple installs of Firefox, but each version tried to share the same profile. Running Firefox 3 and 3.1 side-by-side may not cause an issue, but you can't do that with 2 and 3. In fact, you should never share configuration data with multiple versions, even if it appears to work. It's just a bad thing to do.
I say this every time I consider replacing my CRT with an LCD. I do sensitive color work, and I have still yet to see an expensive LCD that beats my 7-year-old tube.
Damn the flood of cheap, crappy TN-based LCDs crowding the market. I don't care about LCD price fixing -- I care about not being able to find a large, new CRT anywhere. Almost all CRTs you try to buy online are refurbished rather than NOS. The sellers often forget to write that in the product description.
Nowadays, when I finish a track, the wav doesn't sound right until I encode it to mp3. The mp3 sounds better to me.
Would that be due to the filter that reduces noise to make the MP3 compress better, or the compression itself? I like bright music, so I generally don't like MP3s, but when you have some audio with bass, the sound does change a lot after encoding. I admit that sometime bass does sound better.
Of course, that's something you could change in the source WAV file, too. So, that could be considered a mastering issue as much as an encoding issue.
Everything is a file
Don't tell that to a Plan9/Inferno user. ;)
UNIX is good, but it's still old.
I don't see any reason why ActiveX apps couldn't be sandboxed like anything else.
What's to say ActiveX has to follow all the rules and won't be given a Free Pass? It doesn't take much to bore a hole in an application.
I agree fully.
I'm still amazed that so many millions of people got Firefox 3 on day one without so much as a second thought, and the developers treated it like a damned contest. I don't care how long the beta testing period was, or that it's FOSS. You never get a new major version on day one unless you can afford the risk.
A beginner also doesn't know what to do when setup.exe pops up a dialog box saying 'Installshield Error: -51'.
Look for another product that doesn't use Installshield.
Hey, Linux people are always saying they have compliments for practically any app on Windows, so why can't every Windows app have at least one other competitor?