It's run by a Hong Kong expatriate who's run Chinese restaurants in England, Scotland, and Australia, among other places. According to a newspaper article on display in the place, the curry dishes were his most popular dishes in England, "perhaps because it's so cold there."
Since I got my new cellphone, and I've been using it to send and receive AIM messages while at work, I notice that when it's transmitting or receiving data, I hear a rather loud pattern of noise over the telephone headsets I wear...and the people on the other end hear it too. (It also happens when the phone rings, but that may simply be due to the vibrator going off.) So I can believe that some sort of interference comes from them...
Except that the cellphone jammer works by broadcasting on cellphone frequences...so it would probably be just as interferential to the equipment as a cellphone, if not more so.
Heh. I've actually gotten trained to decline or let voicemail get calls...since I'm allowed to have my personal cell at work, but not to answer it. (I work customer service phone for a large, bankrupt LEC phone company, you see, so I can be on their phone but not mine.) So I can hear the vibrator go off against the desk, look at the screen, see who it's from...and then press the "decline" button so it goes right to my voicemail. The only annoying thing are people with no caller ID who don't leave voicemail...but then, if it's not important enough for them to leave a message, it probably wasn't important enough for me to need to talk to them anyway. And thus, I can treat my voicemail like you treat email: I can listen and reply when it's convenient for me.
The funny thing is, it's actually easier for me this way than it was with a landline. For the couple of years I had a landline (with no caller ID) and an answering machine, I never could remind myself, "Hey, you dope, let the machine get it and only pick up if it's someone you want to talk to." Briiing, and I'd grab the receiver...and sometimes end up wishing I hadn't.
And actually, yes, I do get "why don't you ever answer your phone?" usually from my parents. (Though I imagine I'll get that less now that I have a spiffy new cellphone that supports putting a timer on the profile, so even if I forget to turn the ringer back on, as I often did with the old one, it turns itself back on after I get off work.) But I've got them pretty well trained to communicate the really important stuff via email and let me call them if it's necessary that we talk.
Since when is your cellphone "always with you" anyway? You could have left it in your car or your other coat. And even if it is with you, you're under no obligation to get it, no matter what your "friends" think. There are places like my job where you can't answer it, movie theaters or restaurants where it would be impolite to answer it (or even let it ring in the first place, not that this stops some people), driving on the freeway where it might be dangerous to answer it (not that this stops those same people), or quiet time when you just plain don't feel like answering it. And guess what? That's your choice to make. If your friends can't understand that, then they probably aren't worth your friendship. And hey, a nice thing about today's cellphones is that you can actually send text messages to them that, like email, you can review and answer when you feel like it.
For me, the decision to upgrade to a cellphone came when I got cablemodem and stopped relying on dialup. I then realized that I could either spend $30 a month on a landline whose only purpose was now to take and make calls, or $35 a month on a cell with 200 minutes a month...which is more than I ever use most of the time anyway. So not only could I still take those calls, I could make them from anywhere. With subsequent spiffs like unlimited nights and weekends, free long distance, and limited web functions (such as a phone directory and AIM messaging) on the cell, the choice has become easier than ever.
Now I can get off work in the evening, go out to my car, pick up the take-out menu I keep in the passenger seat, place an order for sate beef or curry chicken at the excellent Chinese restaurant around the corner from my apartment, and have it ready for me by the time I get there. I can go to the movie theater early and reserve seats for The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition for my parents, who have to attend my niece's birthday party right before and want to leave that as late as possible...and when they get there, they can phone me from the payphone in the lobby to come out and give them their tickets. (And of course I'll turn it off during the movie itself.) If I have an emergency on the road, or otherwise think of an urgent call I need to make while I'm out of the apartment, I can make the call right then and there, without having to hunt for a payphone or fish in my
All this talk about "who owns the facts" just brought to mind a snatch of verse I heard the other day while watching Stop Making Sense...
Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them Facts are nothing on the face of things
You know, you don't have to do a DVD of your own to put in your own commentaries on films. The guy's site mentions he was inspired by Ebert's Dark City track--well, another idea Ebert had, and one that's even been covered by Slashdot in the distant past though I lack the time to dig up the URL for the story, is DVDTracks, a site that hosts do-it-yourself commentaries recorded as MP3s, meant to be downloaded and played simultaneously with the DVDs. I've even done one myself, for the Miyazaki movie Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, and it was great fun.
There's a lot of other great stuff there, too. Check it out.
Indeed. This is how the VCR's use for "time-shifting" was judged to be fair use in the Sony vs MPAA case, and the Rio MP3 player's use for "space-shifting" likewise in the Diamond vs RIAA case.
I've heard it used to be done with Walkmans...
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 1
...in San Francisco. Particularly for people who had Walkmans with two earphone jacks in them...I think they were made that way in early days.
In the vast majority of cases, online petitions don't do a dickie-bird. But there are some cases where, if there are enough people who are signing the petition and taking other action as well, sometimes you can get through to the powers that be.
Case in point: Disney's original plan to release Princess Mononoke with no Japanese audio track only lasted about as long as it took for the fans to mobilize and produce a flood of petitions, emails, letters, and so on to David Jessen, the VP overseeing the project. Before you could say "tatarigama," the DVD release date was magically dropped back four months, and the Japanese soundtrack was added at such an 11th hour that the only indication on the packaging that the original Japanese language track was included was a sticker on the cellophane wrap.
And then there was the DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Warner hadn't wanted to go to the trouble of producing a widescreen edition, reasoning that Charlie was a kiddie movie, and full-frame is more kiddie-movie-friendly. All the nostalgic movie buffs who wanted it in widescreen mobilized, and before you could say "Vermicious Knid," a widescreen edition was subsequently rushed out.
The thing is, in both those cases--and in the case of Farscape--the Internet activists didn't stop at online petitions. They made phone calls, they wrote letters (actual physical letters, not just email, though they sent email too), they collared executives at conventions, they did whatever else they could for publicity. An online petition is easy to ignore. Letters and phone calls are not so easy. And I don't know that I'd be so quick to call the Farscape campaign an unmitigated success, either--the goal of the 'scapers has always been for a whole new season, not just a 4-hour miniseries.
Now, if you want to hear some truly bad Dr. Who music, try to find the mp3s that are floating around of the album of songs inspired by and performed by cast members of Dr. Who. Some of them, like "The Earthlings" or "Dance of the Daleks" are decent Ventures-style instrumental rock (that have, nonetheless, little to do musically with pieces from Dr. Who). There are three or four different versions of the Dr. Who theme, including one over which Jon Pertwee reads a poem. And then there are the songs where a cast member of Dr. Who (TV series or movies) sings, which range from odd to awful...and then there's the song "Christmas with a Dalek," which is just fricking weird.
Richard E. Grant, rumored as the front-runner in the new Dr. Who series being developed by the producer of Queer as Folk. I wondered briefly whether his appearance in this meant he'd landed the role for certain, but a Dr. Who fan tells me that he'd been selected for this long before the new series was decided on.
(Amusing trivia note: Grant actually already has played the Doctor in live-action...for about thirty seconds, in the Comic Relief charity benefit spoof episode The Curse of Fatal Death.)
He didn't seem to be digesting in the karaoke add-on ending on the DVD.
Maybe the dragon finds that he's just too hard to stomach and spits him out. At any rate, he wasn't featured in the trailer, so it's presumably meant to be a surprise.
Or for that matter, maybe he voices the "ugly stepsister".
I couldn't find any price points listed on that website...it'd be nice to know just how much one would be paying for the convenience of no contract.
(I'm a bit doubtful about the usefulness of that 911 button. It looks like it would be easy for it to get pressed by accident. If I were the cellphone designers, I'd make it have to be held down for a couple of seconds, at least.)
So these people have been around since at least the beginning of 2003? And/. has only just reported on them?
I suppose this is the inverse of one of those "repeat story!" posts--a story that's been covered on Slashdot at least twice already and nobody remembers. There's this 1999 story on the patent being issued, and then this one from 2002 about reviewers discovering sample Hop-On disposable phones actually had the guts of a more expensive Nokia model in them because they hadn't actually tooled up their assembly lines yet.
So yes, they have been around a while...and yes, Slashdot's covered it.
The continually-more-immersive nature of console and computer gaming has also been taking its toll on the pencil-and-paper roleplaying game (viz D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, etc.) market. In various threads on forums like RPGnet's or gaming newsgroups, some game fans suggest that it's a lot easier to have a fun and immersive experience looking at pixels on the screen than it is to try to run a live game amid distractions ("Where's the cheetos!") and with other players who can detract from the fun of the experience ("I cast magic missile...at the darkness!"). Where RPGs used to sell in vast numbers, now the figures have declined to where a thousand copies sold is considered a smashing success. (CCGs may be partly to blame for that, but not anywhere near entirely.)
You have to admit, computer and console games have gotten a lot more involved over the years, be they single-player simulations or shoot-em-ups or team games, and they offer a heck of a lot more depth of play than in bygone days. And as a benefit over TV, they're more interactive and thus mentally stimulating. You feel like you're doing instead of just seeing.
And in terms of sales, I've seen articles about how computer games are threatening to eclipse even the movie industry...
Anyway, I kind of think the author of that article is onto something.
I don't really see how making a sound of the Big Bang is any different, or less valid, than what a musician like Dr. Fiorella Terenzi does in turning cosmic radiation into musical compositions. Sure, you couldn't have "heard" it in the same sense that we do...but it still produced vibrations and emissions of a sort that we can hear if you translate them properly. You might as well complain that X-ray or ultrasound images aren't valid because the human eye doesn't work in those frequencies.
If you have a Palm, you don't want to bother with Mobipocket for Baen's books. It sucks. Instead, just download the HTML version, get iSilo, and point the iSilo converter program at the *toc*.htm file with a link depth of 1. Converts quite nicely and very easy to read, too.
Limiting myself to titles available in the no-cost Free Library, here's a few of my faves.
Anything by Eric Flint, especially 1632 and the Bellisarius series (of which An Oblique Approach is the first book). These works actually sort of straddle the border between fantasy and SF, as they're more in the "alternate-history" genre, but they're very good. Mother of Demons is an unusual work using elements often seen in fantasy in a science-fictional setting.
Anything by David Weber. Although most of it is SF, the books Oath of Swords and its sequel The War God's Own are excellent fantasy adventures following a barbarian reluctantly called to be the mortal champion of a god. March Upcountry is another SF story with fantasy elements involving a young prince and a contingent of space marines shipwrecked on the back-side of a savage, primitive world and needing to fight their way around to the other side to get off of it.
Rick Cook's Wizardry series of which the first couple of books are free. What happens when a hotshot computer programmer is plucked out of our world and dumped in a realm where magic works? The bad guys have no idea what they're in for, that's what.
Heck, just about any of the titles on that list, fantasy or SF, is a good read. Have fun with it!
Slashdot Mirror
It's run by a Hong Kong expatriate who's run Chinese restaurants in England, Scotland, and Australia, among other places. According to a newspaper article on display in the place, the curry dishes were his most popular dishes in England, "perhaps because it's so cold there."
Since I got my new cellphone, and I've been using it to send and receive AIM messages while at work, I notice that when it's transmitting or receiving data, I hear a rather loud pattern of noise over the telephone headsets I wear...and the people on the other end hear it too. (It also happens when the phone rings, but that may simply be due to the vibrator going off.) So I can believe that some sort of interference comes from them...
Except that the cellphone jammer works by broadcasting on cellphone frequences...so it would probably be just as interferential to the equipment as a cellphone, if not more so.
Heh. I've actually gotten trained to decline or let voicemail get calls...since I'm allowed to have my personal cell at work, but not to answer it. (I work customer service phone for a large, bankrupt LEC phone company, you see, so I can be on their phone but not mine.) So I can hear the vibrator go off against the desk, look at the screen, see who it's from...and then press the "decline" button so it goes right to my voicemail. The only annoying thing are people with no caller ID who don't leave voicemail...but then, if it's not important enough for them to leave a message, it probably wasn't important enough for me to need to talk to them anyway. And thus, I can treat my voicemail like you treat email: I can listen and reply when it's convenient for me.
The funny thing is, it's actually easier for me this way than it was with a landline. For the couple of years I had a landline (with no caller ID) and an answering machine, I never could remind myself, "Hey, you dope, let the machine get it and only pick up if it's someone you want to talk to." Briiing, and I'd grab the receiver...and sometimes end up wishing I hadn't.
And actually, yes, I do get "why don't you ever answer your phone?" usually from my parents. (Though I imagine I'll get that less now that I have a spiffy new cellphone that supports putting a timer on the profile, so even if I forget to turn the ringer back on, as I often did with the old one, it turns itself back on after I get off work.) But I've got them pretty well trained to communicate the really important stuff via email and let me call them if it's necessary that we talk.
Since when is your cellphone "always with you" anyway? You could have left it in your car or your other coat. And even if it is with you, you're under no obligation to get it, no matter what your "friends" think. There are places like my job where you can't answer it, movie theaters or restaurants where it would be impolite to answer it (or even let it ring in the first place, not that this stops some people), driving on the freeway where it might be dangerous to answer it (not that this stops those same people), or quiet time when you just plain don't feel like answering it. And guess what? That's your choice to make. If your friends can't understand that, then they probably aren't worth your friendship. And hey, a nice thing about today's cellphones is that you can actually send text messages to them that, like email, you can review and answer when you feel like it.
For me, the decision to upgrade to a cellphone came when I got cablemodem and stopped relying on dialup. I then realized that I could either spend $30 a month on a landline whose only purpose was now to take and make calls, or $35 a month on a cell with 200 minutes a month...which is more than I ever use most of the time anyway. So not only could I still take those calls, I could make them from anywhere. With subsequent spiffs like unlimited nights and weekends, free long distance, and limited web functions (such as a phone directory and AIM messaging) on the cell, the choice has become easier than ever.
Now I can get off work in the evening, go out to my car, pick up the take-out menu I keep in the passenger seat, place an order for sate beef or curry chicken at the excellent Chinese restaurant around the corner from my apartment, and have it ready for me by the time I get there. I can go to the movie theater early and reserve seats for The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition for my parents, who have to attend my niece's birthday party right before and want to leave that as late as possible...and when they get there, they can phone me from the payphone in the lobby to come out and give them their tickets. (And of course I'll turn it off during the movie itself.) If I have an emergency on the road, or otherwise think of an urgent call I need to make while I'm out of the apartment, I can make the call right then and there, without having to hunt for a payphone or fish in my
Uhm...I'll bite. Why do we want to read them on your website instead of at the Baen Free Library?
All this talk about "who owns the facts" just brought to mind a snatch of verse I heard the other day while watching Stop Making Sense...
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
--David Byrne/Talking Heads, "Crosseyed and Painless"
...that in granting Kurzweil a patent on software that composes poetry, the government has issued him a poetic license?
Or perhaps it's simply poetic justice that such a seemingly silly patent should be issued.
No matter how bad things were already, with the advent of digital poetry, I can't help but think that things have gotten a bit verse.
You know, you don't have to do a DVD of your own to put in your own commentaries on films. The guy's site mentions he was inspired by Ebert's Dark City track--well, another idea Ebert had, and one that's even been covered by Slashdot in the distant past though I lack the time to dig up the URL for the story, is DVDTracks, a site that hosts do-it-yourself commentaries recorded as MP3s, meant to be downloaded and played simultaneously with the DVDs. I've even done one myself, for the Miyazaki movie Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro , and it was great fun.
There's a lot of other great stuff there, too. Check it out.
Indeed. This is how the VCR's use for "time-shifting" was judged to be fair use in the Sony vs MPAA case, and the Rio MP3 player's use for "space-shifting" likewise in the Diamond vs RIAA case.
...in San Francisco. Particularly for people who had Walkmans with two earphone jacks in them...I think they were made that way in early days.
In the vast majority of cases, online petitions don't do a dickie-bird. But there are some cases where, if there are enough people who are signing the petition and taking other action as well, sometimes you can get through to the powers that be.
Case in point: Disney's original plan to release Princess Mononoke with no Japanese audio track only lasted about as long as it took for the fans to mobilize and produce a flood of petitions, emails, letters, and so on to David Jessen, the VP overseeing the project. Before you could say "tatarigama," the DVD release date was magically dropped back four months, and the Japanese soundtrack was added at such an 11th hour that the only indication on the packaging that the original Japanese language track was included was a sticker on the cellophane wrap.
And then there was the DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Warner hadn't wanted to go to the trouble of producing a widescreen edition, reasoning that Charlie was a kiddie movie, and full-frame is more kiddie-movie-friendly. All the nostalgic movie buffs who wanted it in widescreen mobilized, and before you could say "Vermicious Knid," a widescreen edition was subsequently rushed out.
The thing is, in both those cases--and in the case of Farscape--the Internet activists didn't stop at online petitions. They made phone calls, they wrote letters (actual physical letters, not just email, though they sent email too), they collared executives at conventions, they did whatever else they could for publicity. An online petition is easy to ignore. Letters and phone calls are not so easy. And I don't know that I'd be so quick to call the Farscape campaign an unmitigated success, either--the goal of the 'scapers has always been for a whole new season, not just a 4-hour miniseries.
...if they're still around long enough to do it, that means sooner or later they're going to be going up against Apple, too.
Why don't they just go ahead and sue "everybody else in the computer industry" while they're at it?
When they get to the stage of building multicellular organisms from scratch, would it count as a Beowulf cluster?
Now, if you want to hear some truly bad Dr. Who music, try to find the mp3s that are floating around of the album of songs inspired by and performed by cast members of Dr. Who. Some of them, like "The Earthlings" or "Dance of the Daleks" are decent Ventures-style instrumental rock (that have, nonetheless, little to do musically with pieces from Dr. Who). There are three or four different versions of the Dr. Who theme, including one over which Jon Pertwee reads a poem. And then there are the songs where a cast member of Dr. Who (TV series or movies) sings, which range from odd to awful...and then there's the song "Christmas with a Dalek," which is just fricking weird.
Richard E. Grant, rumored as the front-runner in the new Dr. Who series being developed by the producer of Queer as Folk. I wondered briefly whether his appearance in this meant he'd landed the role for certain, but a Dr. Who fan tells me that he'd been selected for this long before the new series was decided on.
.)
(Amusing trivia note: Grant actually already has played the Doctor in live-action...for about thirty seconds, in the Comic Relief charity benefit spoof episode The Curse of Fatal Death
He didn't seem to be digesting in the karaoke add-on ending on the DVD.
Maybe the dragon finds that he's just too hard to stomach and spits him out. At any rate, he wasn't featured in the trailer, so it's presumably meant to be a surprise.
Or for that matter, maybe he voices the "ugly stepsister".
I couldn't find any price points listed on that website...it'd be nice to know just how much one would be paying for the convenience of no contract.
(I'm a bit doubtful about the usefulness of that 911 button. It looks like it would be easy for it to get pressed by accident. If I were the cellphone designers, I'd make it have to be held down for a couple of seconds, at least.)
So these people have been around since at least the beginning of 2003? And /. has only just reported on them?
I suppose this is the inverse of one of those "repeat story!" posts--a story that's been covered on Slashdot at least twice already and nobody remembers. There's this 1999 story on the patent being issued, and then this one from 2002 about reviewers discovering sample Hop-On disposable phones actually had the guts of a more expensive Nokia model in them because they hadn't actually tooled up their assembly lines yet.
So yes, they have been around a while...and yes, Slashdot's covered it.
The continually-more-immersive nature of console and computer gaming has also been taking its toll on the pencil-and-paper roleplaying game (viz D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, etc.) market. In various threads on forums like RPGnet's or gaming newsgroups, some game fans suggest that it's a lot easier to have a fun and immersive experience looking at pixels on the screen than it is to try to run a live game amid distractions ("Where's the cheetos!") and with other players who can detract from the fun of the experience ("I cast magic missile...at the darkness!"). Where RPGs used to sell in vast numbers, now the figures have declined to where a thousand copies sold is considered a smashing success. (CCGs may be partly to blame for that, but not anywhere near entirely.)
You have to admit, computer and console games have gotten a lot more involved over the years, be they single-player simulations or shoot-em-ups or team games, and they offer a heck of a lot more depth of play than in bygone days. And as a benefit over TV, they're more interactive and thus mentally stimulating. You feel like you're doing instead of just seeing.
And in terms of sales, I've seen articles about how computer games are threatening to eclipse even the movie industry...
Anyway, I kind of think the author of that article is onto something.
I don't really see how making a sound of the Big Bang is any different, or less valid, than what a musician like Dr. Fiorella Terenzi does in turning cosmic radiation into musical compositions. Sure, you couldn't have "heard" it in the same sense that we do...but it still produced vibrations and emissions of a sort that we can hear if you translate them properly. You might as well complain that X-ray or ultrasound images aren't valid because the human eye doesn't work in those frequencies.
I guess it just didn't know the words.
I'm glad I went ahead and put my cellphone number on the Do Not Call list when I signed up. Sometimes foresight really does pay off.
On a similar subject, folks might find today (Tuesday)'s Sluggy Freelance amusing...
If you have a Palm, you don't want to bother with Mobipocket for Baen's books. It sucks. Instead, just download the HTML version, get iSilo, and point the iSilo converter program at the *toc*.htm file with a link depth of 1. Converts quite nicely and very easy to read, too.
Sure!
Limiting myself to titles available in the no-cost Free Library, here's a few of my faves.
Anything by Eric Flint, especially 1632 and the Bellisarius series (of which An Oblique Approach is the first book). These works actually sort of straddle the border between fantasy and SF, as they're more in the "alternate-history" genre, but they're very good. Mother of Demons is an unusual work using elements often seen in fantasy in a science-fictional setting.
Anything by David Weber. Although most of it is SF, the books Oath of Swords and its sequel The War God's Own are excellent fantasy adventures following a barbarian reluctantly called to be the mortal champion of a god. March Upcountry is another SF story with fantasy elements involving a young prince and a contingent of space marines shipwrecked on the back-side of a savage, primitive world and needing to fight their way around to the other side to get off of it.
Rick Cook's Wizardry series of which the first couple of books are free. What happens when a hotshot computer programmer is plucked out of our world and dumped in a realm where magic works? The bad guys have no idea what they're in for, that's what.
Heck, just about any of the titles on that list, fantasy or SF, is a good read. Have fun with it!
Found on the Yahoogroups ebook mailing list...there are other articles that suggest ebooks might not be quite as dead as is thought.