If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then
YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Yeah, because every time I turn on my device I really want to wait while it scans the ID3 information from 40 GB of MP3 files before it can display a menu of available tracks... that kind of logic worked great in the days of 128 MB flash players, but doesn't keep up with current tech very well...
I recall reading a few years ago that eBay was a source of something like 75% of all complaints about online fraud. Just yesterday I saw an item for sale by a guy with a positive rating of something like 24,000. Unless he's selling 6 items a day for the last 10 years, I see nothing has changed.
Oh, you must mean the new ebay feature where they let you create your own random feedback number?/rolls eyes...
There are plenty of people/businesses on ebay that have legitimate high feedback numbers - a 24,000 isn't even "high" by most standards any more. I regularly buy small items like cell phone chargers, USB cables, etc. from vendors with hundreds of items for sale at any given time and a vast majority have very high feedback numbers.
Yes, there are plenty of scammers out there, but I'd be willing to bet that if you sat down and went through the stack of "ebay fraud" reports you would find that a significant portion fall into the:
"I was too busy to read the fine print in the auction and didn't realize that I would have to pay a high price for shipping & handling *and* be charged for insurance whether I want to pay for it or not!",
another large percentage will fall into the "I bought this item that was clearly labeled with 'As-Is' and it's broken and they won't refund my money",
and yet another percentage fall into the "The auction promised to send me 1 lb of un-searched rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc. and all I got was a 1 lb bag of crap with no valuable rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc.",
another small group will be of the "I paid for this item the day before Christmas and paid extra for overnight shipping, and now it's Christmas Day and where is my box? I was robbed!"
and so on, and then the last 35-45% of complaints actually work out to intentional scams where someone "sold" something and never delivered, or sold something like "X-Box 360 Box (with no contents)" or "BIG PICTURE of TELEVISION!" or something similar. I have no qualms about shopping on ebay, but I make it a point to check feedback numbers, length of membership, etc. and even if those numbers look good, I intentionally avoid any auction that is too good to be true, although that did end up with me missing out on a steal of a deal on a dual-core server that was listed with a starting bid of $0.99 and a Buy It Now of $0.99 instead of the $499.00 it was supposed to be...
As an ex-BestBuy employee I know a little about the fraud that goes on in that store. During the brief holiday season that I worked there, Packard Bell had a promotion (if that gives you any idea how long ago this was) that you would receive a free OEM-bagged Sound Blaster card with the purchase of every system. We had a case of 100 Sound Blaster cards behind the counter that disappeared overnight.
One of the employees discovered that when you climb the ladder up to the stock area up above the shelves, there are no security cameras to keep an eye on you, so here's what you do... Get a case of printer paper and carefully slip the plastic bands off that hold the box shut. Remove the reams of paper inside and place them on the shelf for sale. Tear open hard drive boxes, sound card boxes, software packages, anything you want and toss the remnants around and pack the contents inside the now empty printer paper box until it's completely full, then replace the lid and plastic bands and carry the box down the ladder and put the box full of "paper" on the back of the shelf behind several boxes that really contain paper. Come to the store on your next day off and pull your box of "paper" from the back of the shelf and pay $19.99 for it and walk out of the store with several hundred dollars worth of gear. You got the BestBuy!
This stupid employee came over to visit my brother and told him (in front of me) how he managed to get away with it and just assumed (incorrectly) that I wouldn't mention it to my manager or the store manager the next day. The store manager told me that they suspected him but didn't know how he was doing it and after hearing how they confronted him and told him that they were giving him one last chance to return the stolen items or they would call the police. His reply was something to the effect of "go ahead, if you had any evidence you would have already called the police." And then they kept him employed!!! They did not fire him!!! He quit on his own a few weeks later when he realized that he was under constant supervision and wouldn't have an opportunity to steal again.
I heard it while I was in the Army, although I actually heard it from a Navy Master Chief, some time between 1985 and 1987. We both worked part time at a local computer store while off duty.
Now, they're a shambling zombie force that sucks the life out of anything they touch, and causes their newly assimilated zombie-children to spew foul darkness onto the marketplace.
I tend to think of EA more like "The Borg" - they are out to assimilate every other game company, suck the individuality out of them and turn them into themselves - lifeless automatons.
When you wish upon a falling star your dreams can come true. Unless it's really an asteroid hurtling towards Earth that will destroy all life as we know it - then you're pretty much screwed - unless you actually wished for death by asteroid.
But we've seen the Falcon take off and noone is going to believe it's aerodynamic, either. You can make anything fly if you apply enough thrust in one direction, but in order to be aerodynamic it needs to be able to stay up on it's own once you turn the thrust off... at least for a little while... and longer than 32 feet per second squared...
Yes, and if you read the reports/articles you'll find that the numbers only refer to "out of box" setups - in 2007 they disable the rulers bar by default in Word and it's enabled by default in previous versions - so if you compare "out of box" screen real estate then maybe it's accurate - but that stops being so once you turn back on the necessary bars that they turned off, you discover you can't reduce the size of the "ribbon" and so you end up with less screen real-estate.
It's especially noticeable on a small monitor with a fixed *low* resolution.
A) I have a 15" LCD monitor - it's top resolution is 1024x768, it's not a corporate policy that locks screen resolution, it's cheap bean counters who think that 15" is big enough for anyone (and it was for previous versions of Office).
I don't use keyboard shortcuts - I use the keyboard to access menu functions (i.e., Alt-F-V for File > Print Preview) which have worked for version after version, and now suddenly Alt-F-V is File > Convert Document, so I'm having to relearn all of the menu shortcuts. I'm an extremely experienced Office user, I've used it for years, since the Windows 3.1, and I've never seen a version that was drastically different than a previous version. I don't know who is a big fan of having so many toolbar icons at the top of the screen, but it sure isn't me.
One would think that, but one would be sadly surprised to find that when it's clicked you're told that Outlook will need to download an optional component from the Microsoft website and then restart in order to finish the installation - and we're not allowed to "download" or "install" software.
I just started a new job for a non-IT company and the standard issue monitor is a 15" Dell LCD locked at a max of 1024x768 resolution.
To make matters worse, they were recently upgraded to Office 2007.
At such a *low* resolution, with all the fancy eye-candy they have added, there is a little tiny window in the center of the monitor where I can actually see what I'm working on. There is so much wasted space (i.e., a 1/4" bar that says "Click here to enable Instant Search") that there is hardly any room to get any work done. It almost feels like I'm trying to view a document on a PocketPC or something...
To make matters worse, I'm a touch typist and seldom use the mouse for something like Print Preview (Alt-F-V in the past) and now when I try to do that, it pops up a dialog telling me that I'm about to Convert my document instead of Preview it. Thanks, Microsoft, thanks a lot!
I have a fancy Caller ID box that does the same thing. In addition to Caller ID and a phone directory, it has two additional lists - a Pager list and a Block list. Numbers you add to the Pager list will cause the box to dial your pager when you receive a call, and the Block list will pick up, wait a half second and then hang up - the phone does ring the one time which is still a bit annoying, but if you make it a point to wait for a second ring then you know that it's not one of the phone numbers you have blocked.
I personally love how various translations can give you completely different interpretations, as well.
For example, if you quote Psalms 22:21 from the King James Version you get "Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns." and then someone somewhere along the line realizes that there were no unicorns, so to keep the "truth" "truthful" they translated it a little differently in the New International Version "Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen."
So, if we believe the King James Version, then there were unicorns in biblical times, and since we are reasonably certain there were no unicorns, we'll just sweep that under the rug and change them into 'wild oxen'... that way people will continue to believe the bible is factual and will keep coming to Sunday services and tithing...
You need to remove the trailing / on that URL for it to point to the right video...
And now I must wait patiently because the Slashdot filter doesn't account for the fact that I can type a single line of text in a very short period of time.../sigh
You're overlooking one basic yet very important fact - HE CALLED THE POLICE! What kind of a country is it where *victims* are responsible for properly identifying themselves to the police, and that failure to do so results in their own arrest?
Where I live they were looking at implementing a new law that basically stated "if you're an illegal immigrant and you are arrested, you will be deported" and the immigrant community FREAKED THE F*#$ OUT because their community spokespersons translated that as "if you are illegal and you speak to a cop, then you will be deported" and they were afraid that they would suddenly become open targets for rape, muggings, etc. and that they wouldn't be able to report it to the police or they would be deported.
Well, apparently in Brooklyn, OH if you don't have a valid driver's license, or choose not to show it, when you report a crime, you can be arrested and charged. Maybe now they'll deport him, too?
That's because nerds like to use technology just for the sake of technology - it doesn't matter if it makes your life easier or not, it's all about using it because "you can".
At a previous job, I was full time and was working with several contractors. I asked one of the contractors to e-mail me a document that I needed and he said "no, I'll setup an FTP server on my machine and you can login and download it" and he then spent the next two hours fiddle-farting around with trying to setup and run an FTP server on a secure corporate network on PCs on which you couldn't really install much as you weren't allowed Admin privileges. Did I mention that I sat less than 20 feet away from him?
After allowing him to waste two hours of time, I told him that in the future when someone asks you to do something, it doesn't matter if there is a "cooler" or "more nerdy" way of doing it, you do it in the fastest and most convenient way possible. Needless to say, when it came time to start cutting contractors loose, he was one of the first ones to go.
And almost every one of those "mouse pads" had a fabric surface that, get this, collected dead skins cells, dust, food crumbs, etc. and transferred them into the moving parts of the mouse and built up residual crud around the "feet" of the mouse (those little slippery plastic dots on the bottom of the mouse that it slides around on).
There were very few mouse pads that were actually good for your mouse, and often times you were better off using a flat, smooth, clean surface of your desk.
I think it was 3M that made a mouse pad that was paper thin, had one of those "tacky but not sticky" backs and a very finely textured surface that was perfect for use with a traditional "ball mouse" and the printed pattern even made it suitable for use with an optical mouse... too bad they didn't catch on with more people...
There are free utilities out there PodPlayer is one that I often use - it allows you to copy all of your MP3 files off of your iPod onto another PC and it renames the files back to their original names in the process. It also allows you to play the files off of the iPod through the PC.
The program is an executable that doesn't require installation so you can keep it on the iPod and run it directly from there.
Actually they only need a few mL of liquid, but they need to measure your total daily output so they can multiply the values from the amount tested by the total volume collected - i.e., if your urine calcium value is 3 mg/dL, they need to multiply that by your total daily void to determine exactly how much calcium you output.
I'm sure the odds are staggeringly against, but...
Out of the last 22 times I've flown, I've been tagged for some sort of additional searches, whether it was rubbing the little cotton pad on my carry-on bag to check for explosive residue or for the "hands against the wall and spread 'em" pat down routine.
One time on an overnight business trip to Charlottesville, Virginia I just had the one carry-on bag and no checked luggage. After passing through the metal detector a young female security person asked if she could go through my bag as she was unzipping it. I told her if she wanted to root around in my dirty underwear she was my guest. She didn't get the zipper all the way undone before I finished speaking and she turned around and zipped it right back up without looking inside and slid it back across the table to me.
In a Fantasy environment it's easy to say "You don't have the required years of training and spellcasting experience to be able to whip out a fireball capable of 24d6 damage".
In a realistic Sci-fi environment it's difficult to say "You don't have the required years of training and marksmanship to be able to wield a high damage laser pistol, you get a different kind of pistol capable of only doing 2d4 damage."
Slashdot Mirror
If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Yeah, because every time I turn on my device I really want to wait while it scans the ID3 information from 40 GB of MP3 files before it can display a menu of available tracks... that kind of logic worked great in the days of 128 MB flash players, but doesn't keep up with current tech very well...
I recall reading a few years ago that eBay was a source of something like 75% of all complaints about online fraud. Just yesterday I saw an item for sale by a guy with a positive rating of something like 24,000. Unless he's selling 6 items a day for the last 10 years, I see nothing has changed.
/rolls eyes...
Oh, you must mean the new ebay feature where they let you create your own random feedback number?
There are plenty of people/businesses on ebay that have legitimate high feedback numbers - a 24,000 isn't even "high" by most standards any more. I regularly buy small items like cell phone chargers, USB cables, etc. from vendors with hundreds of items for sale at any given time and a vast majority have very high feedback numbers.
Yes, there are plenty of scammers out there, but I'd be willing to bet that if you sat down and went through the stack of "ebay fraud" reports you would find that a significant portion fall into the:
"I was too busy to read the fine print in the auction and didn't realize that I would have to pay a high price for shipping & handling *and* be charged for insurance whether I want to pay for it or not!",
another large percentage will fall into the "I bought this item that was clearly labeled with 'As-Is' and it's broken and they won't refund my money",
and yet another percentage fall into the "The auction promised to send me 1 lb of un-searched rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc. and all I got was a 1 lb bag of crap with no valuable rubies/emeralds/antique coins/etc.",
another small group will be of the "I paid for this item the day before Christmas and paid extra for overnight shipping, and now it's Christmas Day and where is my box? I was robbed!"
and so on, and then the last 35-45% of complaints actually work out to intentional scams where someone "sold" something and never delivered, or sold something like "X-Box 360 Box (with no contents)" or "BIG PICTURE of TELEVISION!" or something similar. I have no qualms about shopping on ebay, but I make it a point to check feedback numbers, length of membership, etc. and even if those numbers look good, I intentionally avoid any auction that is too good to be true, although that did end up with me missing out on a steal of a deal on a dual-core server that was listed with a starting bid of $0.99 and a Buy It Now of $0.99 instead of the $499.00 it was supposed to be...
As an ex-BestBuy employee I know a little about the fraud that goes on in that store. During the brief holiday season that I worked there, Packard Bell had a promotion (if that gives you any idea how long ago this was) that you would receive a free OEM-bagged Sound Blaster card with the purchase of every system. We had a case of 100 Sound Blaster cards behind the counter that disappeared overnight.
One of the employees discovered that when you climb the ladder up to the stock area up above the shelves, there are no security cameras to keep an eye on you, so here's what you do... Get a case of printer paper and carefully slip the plastic bands off that hold the box shut. Remove the reams of paper inside and place them on the shelf for sale. Tear open hard drive boxes, sound card boxes, software packages, anything you want and toss the remnants around and pack the contents inside the now empty printer paper box until it's completely full, then replace the lid and plastic bands and carry the box down the ladder and put the box full of "paper" on the back of the shelf behind several boxes that really contain paper. Come to the store on your next day off and pull your box of "paper" from the back of the shelf and pay $19.99 for it and walk out of the store with several hundred dollars worth of gear. You got the BestBuy!
This stupid employee came over to visit my brother and told him (in front of me) how he managed to get away with it and just assumed (incorrectly) that I wouldn't mention it to my manager or the store manager the next day. The store manager told me that they suspected him but didn't know how he was doing it and after hearing how they confronted him and told him that they were giving him one last chance to return the stolen items or they would call the police. His reply was something to the effect of "go ahead, if you had any evidence you would have already called the police." And then they kept him employed!!! They did not fire him!!! He quit on his own a few weeks later when he realized that he was under constant supervision and wouldn't have an opportunity to steal again.
I heard it while I was in the Army, although I actually heard it from a Navy Master Chief, some time between 1985 and 1987. We both worked part time at a local computer store while off duty.
You forgot:
BOHICA
Bend Over Here It Comes Again
Now, they're a shambling zombie force that sucks the life out of anything they touch, and causes their newly assimilated zombie-children to spew foul darkness onto the marketplace.
I tend to think of EA more like "The Borg" - they are out to assimilate every other game company, suck the individuality out of them and turn them into themselves - lifeless automatons.
When you wish upon a falling star your dreams can come true. Unless it's really an asteroid hurtling towards Earth that will destroy all life as we know it - then you're pretty much screwed - unless you actually wished for death by asteroid.
But we've seen the Falcon take off and noone is going to believe it's aerodynamic, either.
You can make anything fly if you apply enough thrust in one direction, but in order to be aerodynamic it needs to be able to stay up on it's own once you turn the thrust off... at least for a little while... and longer than 32 feet per second squared...
We get the hand-me-downs from the more "important" offices - I'm sure they're all sporting dual 19 or 20 inch monitors by now...
Yes, and if you read the reports/articles you'll find that the numbers only refer to "out of box" setups - in 2007 they disable the rulers bar by default in Word and it's enabled by default in previous versions - so if you compare "out of box" screen real estate then maybe it's accurate - but that stops being so once you turn back on the necessary bars that they turned off, you discover you can't reduce the size of the "ribbon" and so you end up with less screen real-estate. It's especially noticeable on a small monitor with a fixed *low* resolution.
Thanks. For nothing, I mean.
A) I have a 15" LCD monitor - it's top resolution is 1024x768, it's not a corporate policy that locks screen resolution, it's cheap bean counters who think that 15" is big enough for anyone (and it was for previous versions of Office).
I don't use keyboard shortcuts - I use the keyboard to access menu functions (i.e., Alt-F-V for File > Print Preview) which have worked for version after version, and now suddenly Alt-F-V is File > Convert Document, so I'm having to relearn all of the menu shortcuts. I'm an extremely experienced Office user, I've used it for years, since the Windows 3.1, and I've never seen a version that was drastically different than a previous version. I don't know who is a big fan of having so many toolbar icons at the top of the screen, but it sure isn't me.
One would think that, but one would be sadly surprised to find that when it's clicked you're told that Outlook will need to download an optional component from the Microsoft website and then restart in order to finish the installation - and we're not allowed to "download" or "install" software.
I just started a new job for a non-IT company and the standard issue monitor is a 15" Dell LCD locked at a max of 1024x768 resolution.
To make matters worse, they were recently upgraded to Office 2007.
At such a *low* resolution, with all the fancy eye-candy they have added, there is a little tiny window in the center of the monitor where I can actually see what I'm working on. There is so much wasted space (i.e., a 1/4" bar that says "Click here to enable Instant Search") that there is hardly any room to get any work done. It almost feels like I'm trying to view a document on a PocketPC or something... To make matters worse, I'm a touch typist and seldom use the mouse for something like Print Preview (Alt-F-V in the past) and now when I try to do that, it pops up a dialog telling me that I'm about to Convert my document instead of Preview it. Thanks, Microsoft, thanks a lot!
I have a fancy Caller ID box that does the same thing. In addition to Caller ID and a phone directory, it has two additional lists - a Pager list and a Block list. Numbers you add to the Pager list will cause the box to dial your pager when you receive a call, and the Block list will pick up, wait a half second and then hang up - the phone does ring the one time which is still a bit annoying, but if you make it a point to wait for a second ring then you know that it's not one of the phone numbers you have blocked.
I personally love how various translations can give you completely different interpretations, as well.
For example, if you quote Psalms 22:21 from the King James Version you get " Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns. " and then someone somewhere along the line realizes that there were no unicorns, so to keep the "truth" "truthful" they translated it a little differently in the New International Version " Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. "
So, if we believe the King James Version, then there were unicorns in biblical times, and since we are reasonably certain there were no unicorns, we'll just sweep that under the rug and change them into 'wild oxen'... that way people will continue to believe the bible is factual and will keep coming to Sunday services and tithing...
You need to remove the trailing / on that URL for it to point to the right video...
/sigh
And now I must wait patiently because the Slashdot filter doesn't account for the fact that I can type a single line of text in a very short period of time...
You're overlooking one basic yet very important fact - HE CALLED THE POLICE! What kind of a country is it where *victims* are responsible for properly identifying themselves to the police, and that failure to do so results in their own arrest?
Where I live they were looking at implementing a new law that basically stated "if you're an illegal immigrant and you are arrested, you will be deported" and the immigrant community FREAKED THE F*#$ OUT because their community spokespersons translated that as "if you are illegal and you speak to a cop, then you will be deported" and they were afraid that they would suddenly become open targets for rape, muggings, etc. and that they wouldn't be able to report it to the police or they would be deported.
Well, apparently in Brooklyn, OH if you don't have a valid driver's license, or choose not to show it, when you report a crime, you can be arrested and charged. Maybe now they'll deport him, too?
That's because nerds like to use technology just for the sake of technology - it doesn't matter if it makes your life easier or not, it's all about using it because "you can".
At a previous job, I was full time and was working with several contractors. I asked one of the contractors to e-mail me a document that I needed and he said "no, I'll setup an FTP server on my machine and you can login and download it" and he then spent the next two hours fiddle-farting around with trying to setup and run an FTP server on a secure corporate network on PCs on which you couldn't really install much as you weren't allowed Admin privileges. Did I mention that I sat less than 20 feet away from him?
After allowing him to waste two hours of time, I told him that in the future when someone asks you to do something, it doesn't matter if there is a "cooler" or "more nerdy" way of doing it, you do it in the fastest and most convenient way possible. Needless to say, when it came time to start cutting contractors loose, he was one of the first ones to go.
You can also search ebay for 'tPhone' and find them for sale there.
And almost every one of those "mouse pads" had a fabric surface that, get this, collected dead skins cells, dust, food crumbs, etc. and transferred them into the moving parts of the mouse and built up residual crud around the "feet" of the mouse (those little slippery plastic dots on the bottom of the mouse that it slides around on).
There were very few mouse pads that were actually good for your mouse, and often times you were better off using a flat, smooth, clean surface of your desk.
I think it was 3M that made a mouse pad that was paper thin, had one of those "tacky but not sticky" backs and a very finely textured surface that was perfect for use with a traditional "ball mouse" and the printed pattern even made it suitable for use with an optical mouse... too bad they didn't catch on with more people...
There are free utilities out there PodPlayer is one that I often use - it allows you to copy all of your MP3 files off of your iPod onto another PC and it renames the files back to their original names in the process. It also allows you to play the files off of the iPod through the PC. The program is an executable that doesn't require installation so you can keep it on the iPod and run it directly from there.
Actually they only need a few mL of liquid, but they need to measure your total daily output so they can multiply the values from the amount tested by the total volume collected - i.e., if your urine calcium value is 3 mg/dL, they need to multiply that by your total daily void to determine exactly how much calcium you output.
doh... that should have read "out of the last 22 times, I've been tagged 21 of those times"... too much blood in my caffiene system...
I'm sure the odds are staggeringly against, but...
Out of the last 22 times I've flown, I've been tagged for some sort of additional searches, whether it was rubbing the little cotton pad on my carry-on bag to check for explosive residue or for the "hands against the wall and spread 'em" pat down routine.
One time on an overnight business trip to Charlottesville, Virginia I just had the one carry-on bag and no checked luggage. After passing through the metal detector a young female security person asked if she could go through my bag as she was unzipping it. I told her if she wanted to root around in my dirty underwear she was my guest. She didn't get the zipper all the way undone before I finished speaking and she turned around and zipped it right back up without looking inside and slid it back across the table to me.
In a Fantasy environment it's easy to say "You don't have the required years of training and spellcasting experience to be able to whip out a fireball capable of 24d6 damage".
In a realistic Sci-fi environment it's difficult to say "You don't have the required years of training and marksmanship to be able to wield a high damage laser pistol, you get a different kind of pistol capable of only doing 2d4 damage."