Lani John Tupu (Captain Crais/Voice of Pilot) has played the character Sharky Garcia in the movie Liquid Bridge, also the character Chief Finau on the TV show Revelations.
Not to mention his standout performance in an advertisement for Panadol!
And I'm sure I've seen Claudia Black in another ad - for Oil Of Olay, or Metamucil, or something...
As someone already posted above: "We believe this is it. This is what consumers are going to want. We want to be big participant in changing consumers' attitude towards what music really is." - Zack Zalon, president of Virgin Digital.
Read that again.
What he's actually saying is: "This is what people want, and we're going to change them until they do."
It doesn't work with Republicans, it doesn't work with Democrats, it doesn't work with Communists, it doesn't work with heterosexuals, and it doesn't work with homosexuals. Funnily enough, it does work with children, where it's called education...
Oh, and remember... Programmers are users too. Advanced users, who can very well recognize an interface that is so dumbed down that it's useless for anyone above beginner level. Oh no... No no no no NO!
I'm having this very discussion with a UI designer friend of mine at the moment. To be very general, the problem with having programmers or advanced users play Survivor or Weakest Link with the UI is that there are so many things - choices, trains, options - that they insist are absolutely necessary to have in the top level of the UI that aren't.
As he says, look at iTunes on OS X (not Windows), or even Mozilla. Disregarding the different methods of achieving the goal, they share a lot of common features - useful stuff up front, more powerful features just underneath, and some real power stuff buried below but readily accessible (e.g. Applescript/powerful playlists in iTunes, about:config/user.js in Mozilla).
The end result? 80% of people just use the front layer, another 15% (the "power users") use the second layer, and the remaining 5% can access the bottom layer.
Simple,huh? But then you need a real UI expert to actually design the layers of the interface...
Yes, I know it's hard to grasp, but most people gamble for a little entertainment. Go to a casino, see a show, eat a good meal and play a few games.
And some of us thank you for it. Because we go to a casino, eat a good cheap meal and see a reasonable show - both subsidised by the gamblers - and keep our money in our wallets.
Yes, it's leeching. But who am I leeching off? The dumb bunny punters, or the casino? Well, both...
Matrix-inspired, huh? So it's loud, boring, and pretentious crap?
I figured it would suck, but I didn't for one moment think it would suck that much!
Please excuse me, I'm off to find someone to poke my eyes out and glue my ears shut before this trailer hits cinemas and TV screens in my part of the world...
(And yes, I "got" the Matrix philosophy. It's just that it was juvenile, badly presented, and pointless. Apart from the Ewok dance scene in the middle one...)
This is "terrorism" in the same way that break and enters whilst no-one is home are now called "home invasions", and stealing parked vacant cars is now called "carjacking" - just two examples from recent TV news in my home town.
"Terrorism is an act designed to throw fear (aka terror) into the mind of the public."
In these cases, it's pretty clear who is acting to cause fear in the mind of the public - and it isn't the perpetrators of the original acts...
Make sure your not right across the street from the CO. If you are you probably wouldn't want the DSL anyway because the signal would be too strong to sync up without you putting 90000 filters on the line going to the modem, doing a rain dance, and praying to some heathen gods of DSL.
Jeez Louise - what sort of fscked DSL do you have over there? Considering that at the moment I'm sitting in a telephone exchange, and not 5 minutes ago was plugged direct into a CMUX (DSLAM) downloading pr0n whilst talking to the customer on the same line...
You do know that both the CMUX and modem (should) auto-train their line levels, etc, don't you?
I would like to see Linux altered to handle this cleanly, by adding direct support for "app directories". Unlike OS/X, I think they should be named with no extension. The rules are simple: if the user tries to run "foo" and it is a directory, it tries to run "foo/foo" after first adding foo to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and after fixing up argv[0] to be the full expanded path to foo, and possibly other fixes for stupid Posix rules. This would get rid of 99% of the "install" headaches.
I've got an easier idea : Why not just give the directory name a special suffix - so instead of having to check if there is/isn't an executable of the same name inside, the system/launcher knows there is?
I humbly suggest that the suffix should be ".app";-)
Your "business" is a travesty of every artistic intention the authors of those works had. I don't believe that they (or their descendants) should be allowed to use the law to stop it happening, but you'd think that common courtesy and respect for their efforts would. Obviously not.
Why not use your own creative energies to do something original, rather than ripping off and defacing the work of those more talented than yourself?
Sorry, the Walt Disney discussion is two threads over that-a-way -->...
I've had two work mobiles. The first was an Ericsson (wish I could remember what model), about 8-9 years ago. Small, not tiny, not obviously ruggedised. First day I had it, before I got the leather slipcase, I fumbled and dropped it. As I was walking along. Right onto the tip of my steel-capped boot. Straight off my boot into the brick wall about 6' away. Undamaged, unmarked, survived for another 6 years.
Figured I'd never find another phone that rugged, but my current Siemens M30 is damned close. Only outward indication of ruggedness is the rubberised battery cover - the rest is normal plastic. But it regularly falls off the belt-clip as I get out of the van (my fault; it's a combination of where I wear it and the seat belt buckle pushing the release button) and drops from above waist height onto concrete/bitumen. No problems yet.
(OK, one minor problem. A couple of buttons are starting to wear the clearcoat off, because of my habit of storing it down the side of my laptop case at night...)
Note that neither of these phones were available in fluorescent colours (OK, so the Siemens comes in yellow or gray...) or compatible with Hello Kitty clip-on skins, which may be a problem for some;-)
Maybe you should be offended that it implies that "Western" cultures are full of people who are argumentitive, subversive and prone to waste time questioning decisions.
Aluminium wire has only ~ 2/3 the current capacity of equivalently-sized copper.
Transformer windings aren't perfectly stationary - they do vibrate (abeit only microscopically in a well-made transformer). Aluminium is much more brittle than copper.
Aluminium is an absolute bitch to join electrically and mechanically to anything else - it's extremely reactive, and tends to form a very good dielectric as it oxidises. For some examples, ask a boatbuilder / guttering expert, or look in your car engine in a few years...
But the biggest problem with these things? They're not isolated from the 110v / 240v mains supply.
Effectively the output is floating at mains potential, with the current only limited by the capacitive reactance + resistance. So, while the V between the + & - terminals may be 9V or whatever, the V from the output to earth is is basically the peak of the 110v / 240v mains - at 240V, that's nearly 340V!
Not to mention that *all* the components need to be rated to withstand this full mains V - generally they're not, because most capacitors (excepting poly & some ceramics) aren't, and the miniature metal-film or carbon-deposited resistors certainly aren't...
Of course, that's only at a very low current, further limited by the turn-on I of the zener - but, it's still there. 340V DC at a small handful of mA is still dangerous applied to the wrong places...
People used to talk out their differences and act reasonably. They didn't attack each other, except in extreme cases.
Oh yeah?
I remember watching a TV documentary series a while ago - I think it was French - about the evolution of man. In it, they tracked the rise of the ancestors of mankind up into Europe, where they encountered another branch - the Neanderthals.
They then went on to postulate that the 2 groups lived in relative harmony for several thousand years, with our forbears slowly and non-violently outcompeting the Neanderthals into oblivion.
And I thought "Bullshit! Given our actual recorded knowledge of history, not lame supposition, the likely truth was that we slaughtered their menfolk, raped their womenfolk, and ate their babies!"
Somebody else has already mentioned discharge V curves, endpoint voltages, etc.
But many years ago, 12V portable equpiment designed to run on replaceable batteries (e.g. test equipment, walkie-talkies, etc) usually had 10-cell holders. When used with 1.5V cells, two positions had dummy cells, or "fillers", giving 1.5 x 8 = 12V. When using rechargeables (in those days, NiCads), all 10 positions were used, giving 1.2 x 10 = 12V.
Just a bit of low-tech history you young'uns may not have known;-)
Been done. Look up "soft-start" circuits. Pretty common, in fact, particularly in industrial lighting. If it's big and/or high up it's bloody expensive to change bulbs, so they'd better last as long as possible...
IIRC, some upmarket vehicles use soft-start circuits on their headlights.
Ah yes, the "classic" Diamond cards - I guess you're talking about their old ISA, VLB & early PCI cards? Tseng Labs (and later S3) based, they seemed to pull some nasty hardware tricks with the reference designs to tweak a bit more speed out of them - then cover up the bugs with some of the crappiest drivers ever devised.
Funnily enough, if you just fell back & used the chipset reference drivers, the bugs were less obnoxious. And there were a few hacks around - Diamond seemed to pull most of their nasty tricks in the area of memory timings (defaults loaded from the board BIOS), so there were a few programs to set them back to something sane. I remember hacking some of these into the OS/2 drivers for one of these chipsets (W32?).
I just turned 'round from my desk, picked up an old Stealth32 box off the floor, and found it still had the card inside. I guess the reason it's still there is I couldn't bring myself to give it away, even to somebody I didn't like. Now I've touched it, I feel all dirty now...
The ISP I used to use did something like this to me. Once.
Totally out of the blue, without going anywhere near any of their hosted sites, I was redirected to a "user satisfaction" survey page.
First thing I did when it happened was to drop the connection. Second thing I did was to ring their accounts department and cancel my contract. Third thing I did was ring my CC company and block/dispute any further transactions from them.
The 'droid on the accounts desk couldn't understand why I was so pissed...
And to all those people out there who are saying "I won't buy another Belkin product until they reverse their decision, remove this from their firmware, and apologise!", I ask : Why would you buy another Belkin product ever? They've shown they're prepared to deliberately break their products for their own purposes. This time they were caught. Next time... who knows? Fox in charge of the henhouse, and all that...
No, I'll never buy another Belkin product again, ever. Period. Full stop. End of sentence. If they want to continue existing, let them rebuild their market from the ground up, because they deserve to totally lose their existing market.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
Y'see, this is where you get it wrong. You'd like to think there's an implicit agreement, or get people to believe there is. But there isn't...
You also haven't understood that your value and importance to your customers has been considerably reduced by the obnoxious tricks you and your bretheren perform in an attempt to ensure ads hit eyeballs. You're still blaming your customers for being pissed off with your actions and doing something about it, rather than blaming yourselves for pissing them off in the first place...
You say you can't survive without advertising? Fine. I'm not interested in propping you up. Die.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever try deleting Outlook Express on Windows? Do the following:
- Shut down OE
- Delete the OE directory from C:\Program Files
- Reboot
Jesus would be proud - it took him 3 days!Of course, in this case the "unwelcome background process" is Windows itself...
Not to mention his standout performance in an advertisement for Panadol!
And I'm sure I've seen Claudia Black in another ad - for Oil Of Olay, or Metamucil, or something...
As someone already posted above :
:
"We believe this is it. This is what consumers are going to want. We want to be big participant in changing consumers' attitude towards what music really is." - Zack Zalon, president of Virgin Digital.
Read that again.
What he's actually saying is
"This is what people want, and we're going to change them until they do."
It doesn't work with Republicans, it doesn't work with Democrats, it doesn't work with Communists, it doesn't work with heterosexuals, and it doesn't work with homosexuals. Funnily enough, it does work with children, where it's called education...
Wait until the ??AAs introduce the Control and Undermine New Technologies Act....
(Or maybe thats just an Australian term...?)
And some of us thank you for it. Because we go to a casino, eat a good cheap meal and see a reasonable show - both subsidised by the gamblers - and keep our money in our wallets.
Yes, it's leeching. But who am I leeching off? The dumb bunny punters, or the casino? Well, both...
Matrix-inspired, huh? So it's loud, boring, and pretentious crap?
I figured it would suck, but I didn't for one moment think it would suck that much!
Please excuse me, I'm off to find someone to poke my eyes out and glue my ears shut before this trailer hits cinemas and TV screens in my part of the world...
(And yes, I "got" the Matrix philosophy. It's just that it was juvenile, badly presented, and pointless. Apart from the Ewok dance scene in the middle one...)
Spot on.
This is "terrorism" in the same way that break and enters whilst no-one is home are now called "home invasions", and stealing parked vacant cars is now called "carjacking" - just two examples from recent TV news in my home town.
"Terrorism is an act designed to throw fear (aka terror) into the mind of the public."
In these cases, it's pretty clear who is acting to cause fear in the mind of the public - and it isn't the perpetrators of the original acts...
You do know that both the CMUX and modem (should) auto-train their line levels, etc, don't you?
I've got an easier idea : Why not just give the directory name a special suffix - so instead of having to check if there is/isn't an executable of the same name inside, the system/launcher knows there is?
I humbly suggest that the suffix should be ".app"
Sorry, the Walt Disney discussion is two threads over that-a-way -->...
I've had two work mobiles. The first was an Ericsson (wish I could remember what model), about 8-9 years ago. Small, not tiny, not obviously ruggedised. First day I had it, before I got the leather slipcase, I fumbled and dropped it. As I was walking along. Right onto the tip of my steel-capped boot. Straight off my boot into the brick wall about 6' away. Undamaged, unmarked, survived for another 6 years.
;-)
Figured I'd never find another phone that rugged, but my current Siemens M30 is damned close. Only outward indication of ruggedness is the rubberised battery cover - the rest is normal plastic. But it regularly falls off the belt-clip as I get out of the van (my fault; it's a combination of where I wear it and the seat belt buckle pushing the release button) and drops from above waist height onto concrete/bitumen. No problems yet.
(OK, one minor problem. A couple of buttons are starting to wear the clearcoat off, because of my habit of storing it down the side of my laptop case at night...)
Note that neither of these phones were available in fluorescent colours (OK, so the Siemens comes in yellow or gray...) or compatible with Hello Kitty clip-on skins, which may be a problem for some
Aluminium wire has only ~ 2/3 the current capacity of equivalently-sized copper.
Transformer windings aren't perfectly stationary - they do vibrate (abeit only microscopically in a well-made transformer). Aluminium is much more brittle than copper.
Aluminium is an absolute bitch to join electrically and mechanically to anything else - it's extremely reactive, and tends to form a very good dielectric as it oxidises. For some examples, ask a boatbuilder / guttering expert, or look in your car engine in a few years...
But the biggest problem with these things? They're not isolated from the 110v / 240v mains supply.
Effectively the output is floating at mains potential, with the current only limited by the capacitive reactance + resistance. So, while the V between the + & - terminals may be 9V or whatever, the V from the output to earth is is basically the peak of the 110v / 240v mains - at 240V, that's nearly 340V!
Not to mention that *all* the components need to be rated to withstand this full mains V - generally they're not, because most capacitors (excepting poly & some ceramics) aren't, and the miniature metal-film or carbon-deposited resistors certainly aren't...
Of course, that's only at a very low current, further limited by the turn-on I of the zener - but, it's still there. 340V DC at a small handful of mA is still dangerous applied to the wrong places...
I remember watching a TV documentary series a while ago - I think it was French - about the evolution of man. In it, they tracked the rise of the ancestors of mankind up into Europe, where they encountered another branch - the Neanderthals.
They then went on to postulate that the 2 groups lived in relative harmony for several thousand years, with our forbears slowly and non-violently outcompeting the Neanderthals into oblivion.
And I thought "Bullshit! Given our actual recorded knowledge of history, not lame supposition, the likely truth was that we slaughtered their menfolk, raped their womenfolk, and ate their babies!"
Such is the nature of mankind...
Slashdot : Ad code
Google : Navigation & form validation code
Amazon : Popup Ad code
1) make product that works
2) release
3) profit!!
1) make shitty product
2) release
3) when people work out it's shit, sell them v1.1
4) profit!!!
5) repeat
Fsckin' great... Strive for excellence by rewarding mediocrity...
Well, so far it's worked America in the Olympics, war, and democracy
Somebody else has already mentioned discharge V curves, endpoint voltages, etc.
;-)
But many years ago, 12V portable equpiment designed to run on replaceable batteries (e.g. test equipment, walkie-talkies, etc) usually had 10-cell holders. When used with 1.5V cells, two positions had dummy cells, or "fillers", giving 1.5 x 8 = 12V. When using rechargeables (in those days, NiCads), all 10 positions were used, giving 1.2 x 10 = 12V.
Just a bit of low-tech history you young'uns may not have known
Been done. Look up "soft-start" circuits. Pretty common, in fact, particularly in industrial lighting. If it's big and/or high up it's bloody expensive to change bulbs, so they'd better last as long as possible...
IIRC, some upmarket vehicles use soft-start circuits on their headlights.
<irony>Yeah, that's the global equivalent of that damned free speech thing somebody was defending upthread...</irony>
If the US can't tell the difference between a democracy and a plutocracy, well then I sure as hell don't want it controlling the Internet!
Ah yes, the "classic" Diamond cards - I guess you're talking about their old ISA, VLB & early PCI cards? Tseng Labs (and later S3) based, they seemed to pull some nasty hardware tricks with the reference designs to tweak a bit more speed out of them - then cover up the bugs with some of the crappiest drivers ever devised.
Funnily enough, if you just fell back & used the chipset reference drivers, the bugs were less obnoxious. And there were a few hacks around - Diamond seemed to pull most of their nasty tricks in the area of memory timings (defaults loaded from the board BIOS), so there were a few programs to set them back to something sane. I remember hacking some of these into the OS/2 drivers for one of these chipsets (W32?).
I just turned 'round from my desk, picked up an old Stealth32 box off the floor, and found it still had the card inside. I guess the reason it's still there is I couldn't bring myself to give it away, even to somebody I didn't like. Now I've touched it, I feel all dirty now...
The ISP I used to use did something like this to me. Once.
... who knows? Fox in charge of the henhouse, and all that...
Totally out of the blue, without going anywhere near any of their hosted sites, I was redirected to a "user satisfaction" survey page.
First thing I did when it happened was to drop the connection. Second thing I did was to ring their accounts department and cancel my contract. Third thing I did was ring my CC company and block/dispute any further transactions from them.
The 'droid on the accounts desk couldn't understand why I was so pissed...
And to all those people out there who are saying "I won't buy another Belkin product until they reverse their decision, remove this from their firmware, and apologise!", I ask : Why would you buy another Belkin product ever? They've shown they're prepared to deliberately break their products for their own purposes. This time they were caught. Next time
No, I'll never buy another Belkin product again, ever. Period. Full stop. End of sentence. If they want to continue existing, let them rebuild their market from the ground up, because they deserve to totally lose their existing market.
Y'see, this is where you get it wrong. You'd like to think there's an implicit agreement, or get people to believe there is. But there isn't...
You also haven't understood that your value and importance to your customers has been considerably reduced by the obnoxious tricks you and your bretheren perform in an attempt to ensure ads hit eyeballs. You're still blaming your customers for being pissed off with your actions and doing something about it, rather than blaming yourselves for pissing them off in the first place...
You say you can't survive without advertising? Fine. I'm not interested in propping you up. Die.