I'm not entirely sure, because I am too cheap to use SMS. But when I looked in to it a couple of years ago, you could have the phone company either block ALL SMS or NO SMS. I am also surprised this hasn't widely been used for griefing.
Hopefully, things are better today. But I'm still cheap, and I don't use SMS. My carrier actually increased prices recently.
The ClearPlay DVD player automagically censors movies for families. There is some kind of subscription service that tells your player what scenes to skip. Hidely-ho, neighborino! ClearPlay got their asses sued by Hollywood, but they seem to have prevailed, and they are still in business.
At the core, the ClearPlay case seems an awful lot like blocking web ads. Media is provided to you, and you decline to view part of it by using an automated third-party service.
(I wonder if ReplayTV would have won their auto-ad-skipping lawsuit if they hadn't settled?)
Who here has gotten a free year with a credit watchdog service due to your information having been leaked by some company you dealt with? (The letter I got actually said that my information was put at risk due to some kind of sloppy law enforcement access. WTF?)
I normally hate calling for more laws but there should be more severe penalties for this kind of error. Otherwise... it will keep happening.
I work in a somewhat high tech industry. Throughout my career, there haven't been a lot of women in my workplaces. No surprise.
All of them worked like anyone else. They all seemed to be treated just fine. And most of them were management, too... VPs on down to various sorts of middle management.
I've never seen the "glass ceiling." To the contrary, I've seen a disproportionate number of women handing out the orders, when compared to their population. I've never seen a low-ranked woman busting her ass 24 hours a day to be "taken seriously."
And changing the way the phone company works? Man, it's easier to change the way the government works. The People have scored some victories against the phone company over the years, but the ghost of Ma Bell is a scrapper.
Fortunately I recently became an old fart and stopped caring about what kind of phones I can get, as I am too busy keeping these modern Japanese superkids off my lawn.
Irrelevant. Until VHS rentals came along, and prices dropped, the biggest use for home video players was time shifting.
And the biggest use for cars is commuting. Doesn't prevent some people from racing them.
People weren't running out to buy movies until they started to hit the $20-$30 level, for a device they already had, because they used it to tape their favorite shows.
Most people weren't. But some people did wanted to own movies before that VHS price drop happened, and the market provided a product for them--the laserdisc player. If you wanted to own a stack of movies, laserdisc was cheaper than VHS.
History tends to dismiss laserdisc as a completely ridiculous product. It wasn't. It was definitely a niche product though, with a short window where it made sense. Every former laser fan is probably happy that technology and business models have changed for the better.
The bottom line is that it is an OK player with a few maddening quirks. The bigger screen is nice for videos, except the included Windows software for putting videos on the device is total ass. It can't handle AVIs! You'd think anything with a DirectShow filter would work, but they excluded AVIs deliberately. (There is a registry hack to let the software see.avi files and they convert fine. And you can buy 3rd party conversion software too, of course, or wrestle with Windows Media Encoder.)
Not adding podcast support for the early adopters, man, that seems like a slap in the face. Didn't Apple add podcast support to iTunes, making it available to all (?) iPods? And no Windows Media 11 integration, so even if you are all bought in to the Microsoft way of doing things, you have to run TWO giant unfriendly apps (Zune and WMP) instead of just one.
That all said, I am not planning on selling my brownie and buying an iPod, as the Zune works well enough.
2. Laserdisc - actually a very cool technology... prohibitively expensive.
I have to jump in every time there is a laserdisc thread. Fortunately as the years roll on, that is less and less.:)
LD players WERE a lot more than VHS. Starting at 2-3x as much, as I recall, up to as much as you wanted to pay. But the MEDIA was cheaper. Remember, there used to be a time when movies were not sold in grocery stores next to the tic-tacs. There used to be a time when purchasing Die Hard on VHS cost $100. The home sales market had not come about yet. If you wanted to buy a movie, you were paying the same price as the video store, and that was a lot.
And in this time, narrow though it may have been, if you liked movies, laserdisc was a good way to buy them. They were priced for sale to end users. My Die Hard laserdisc was $50 when the VHS was $100. Most of my lasers were less, $25-35. And, the video quality was MUCH better than VHS.
That all seems absurd now, of course. But this was a long time ago, when I walked to Ken Crane's laserdisc store in Orange County uphill through the snow. And when DVDs hit, most people dropped LD and for good reason--it was better in every way. The only reason to keep the LD player around is for media that didn't make the transition.
HEY, aren't HD-DVDs and BluRay movies starting at $25 now? How times change. Or not.
As if Windows Mobile doesn't have its own set of "shortcomings," like being a buggy pain in the ass. As an owner of several WM devices over the years, I have a real love/hate relationship with the things. "Oh sorry I didn't get your call, looks like the phone app crashed and I need to reboot... yeah, I should really remember to do that a couple times a day."
If Apple sees an opportunity to get the iPhone adopted by business, I'm sure they'll compromise on their no custom applications policy too, if that's what it takes.
That's what I came here to post about, the hidden cost of data service. I'm the kind of gadget obsessed person that the iPhone appeals to, but I am also cheap when it comes to monthly fees. (Heck, I am too cheap to pay a dime to send an SMS message.)
Until there is an inexpensive data plan, I won't be joining the iPhone mob. Hey, maybe Cingular will surprise us and launch a new plan... I'm not counting on it though.
Are we finally going to reach a point where only trusted addresses can email us?
I've seen spam more than double recently. I'm starting to think about a whitelist, but there needs to be an easy way to give your email address to new people without having to change a config file. Maybe a magic word in the subject, or something like that... It seems like this problem must have been solved by now.
The review seems to assume that you already know a lot about Zelda. I don't--I have never played one of the games. I get the idea that there is a lot of story here, ok, but what is the GAMEPLAY like? Is most of my time spent in combat or in puzzles? Is combat action, turn-based, or a hybrid? Do I have a party or do I work alone? First or third person view? Is there an hour of reading before the game actually starts, like in a lot of the Japanese RPGs I have looked at? How do I manage inventory? What's the save system like? What's the enemy AI like? Do I bust out with the magic or are my abilities mundane?
Saying it's a great game just isn't enough. If save points are few and far between, for example, that KILLS me and I can't play the game. Sorry, I have a short attention span. Let's go ride bikes!!
I'd love to demonstrate a crystal radio for these people. When I first built one as a kid it blew my mind when I realized there was enough invisible energy zipping around that you could convert it into something audible with no batteries.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you have said. Broadband sucks in the US and getting bigger intertron tubes is one of the few things I'd even like to pay taxes for. I'm practically waiting with a plate of cookies for the Verizon fiber truck to come to my street.
But in those countries with cheap ubiquitous super-fast broadband... what can they do that we can't? OK, hi-def TV streaming is possible with high speed. But is that actually a product they can purchase?
What are they doing with their fat pipes besides doing the same old stuff faster? I assume that it must enable new types of businesses, but besides video delivery I don't know what they are. I'm honestly curious about what I am missing besides a smaller broadband bill and faster torrenting.
That's absolutely true, you don't get the shallow DOF with a small-sensor camera. I was referring more to white balance etc. when I spoke of controls, but the aperture limitations are quite real as you point out. And I already admitted that ISO range is a big problem for small-sensor cameras.
I never said a P&S or "prosumer" would equal a dSLR... but there is a type of photographer that benefits from the prosumer feature set and it bugs me that the story these days is "dSLR or you're a sucker." It's not that simple and I think a lot of people would be better served by something like the Nikon 8800, Panny FZ30, Fuji S9000, etc.
(Like you said, lots of people will have both too. I'll fall into that camp soon, I can't live without ISO 1600 forever.)
dSLRs have MANY advantages as the article points out. But it glosses over the cost issue. Getting a dSLR with the same reach as a long-zoom "prosumer" camera can cost quite a bit.
Take for example the Nikon Coolpix 8800, or the Panasonic FZ30. They both have good glass: the 8800 has a zoom range of, in 35mm equivalence, 35-350mm. The Panasonic is 35-420mm. Both have optical image stabilization built in, and both can do macro photography too. You also get dSLR style complete manual control if you want it. (Lots of non-dSLRs have good controls, I think the article flops out a red herring there. You just have to do your homework.)
The 8800 isn't made anymore, but it was about $800-900 new, about as much as the original Nikon d70 with kit lens I think. The Panasonic must be on the way out, as it is now about $400. (It is speculated that these types of cameras are a lot less profitable than dSLRs and so are getting erased from the lineups. I dunno.)
So why would I have bought an 8800 instead of a d70? Easy. The cost of a Nikon LENS that can hit 300mm of zoom seems to be about $500--and it still won't let you do macro. When you buy that affordable dSLR kit camera, you aren't buying a complete solution... you are buying a starting point unless your only interests fall in that ~28-105mm range the kit lens covers.
I must grant that the dSLR is superior in many ways, particularly quality of the sensor. A bigger sensor is less prone to noise at high ISO, so your DSLR can shoot cleaner at 1600 than my 8800 can at 200. That is a big deal! But to take full advantage of that, you need to carry around a bag of lenses. (The article didn't mention battery life, another big win for DSLRs by the way.)
I'm not slamming dSLRs. No flames, please. I'm just saying that there is an argument for buying a camera that can do a good job on a little bit of everything, even if it isn't the BEST at any of it. Like any other complex gadget, do your homework--there are a lot of really good cameras available these days. And this is a complicated hobby so you won't get everything you need to know from one top-10 list article (or snarky forum post). Figure out what you want to shoot and the choice of camera will become more clear.
I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work.
The source code must remain closed to protect the voting machine company's intellectual property. There is serious, serious stuff going on in there--like adding one number to another number. You see? The numbers are DANCING in there.
If you think that kind of work should just be given away, well, go crunch your granola somewhere else, hippie.
However, I was unwilling to even explore my other options because I had trapped myself into a proprietary mindset- something even more dangerous than a proprietary format.
I used to work at Microsoft. I was a lowly orange badge contactor, but I was there for a couple of years alltogether--long enough to get a peek at the corporate culture. Maybe my area was special, but from what I saw the "proprietary mindset" applied to the people making those products too. I encountered many developers and IT guys who didn't seem to understand that there was a whole world of computers beyond Windows.
It's OK to use Windows. It's even OK to like Windows. But it seems like any computer professional should understand the rest of the ecosystem (eg Unix), at least in general terms. These guys just had a big blind spot though.
I have 600W of olde-fashioned Edison-style lights in my kitchen and I love the way it looks. Full spectrum though, I despise yellow bulbs.
Of course, unless I need all that light for working in there I keep it dimmer. I have dimmers all over the house and by default when I turn a light on it is well below full blast.
I have never cared for the way CF lights look. Can't put my finger on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure, because I am too cheap to use SMS. But when I looked in to it a couple of years ago, you could have the phone company either block ALL SMS or NO SMS. I am also surprised this hasn't widely been used for griefing.
Hopefully, things are better today. But I'm still cheap, and I don't use SMS. My carrier actually increased prices recently.
The future is now... in Korea anyway.
The ClearPlay DVD player automagically censors movies for families. There is some kind of subscription service that tells your player what scenes to skip. Hidely-ho, neighborino! ClearPlay got their asses sued by Hollywood, but they seem to have prevailed, and they are still in business.
http://www.clearplay.com/Press.aspx?pid=19
At the core, the ClearPlay case seems an awful lot like blocking web ads. Media is provided to you, and you decline to view part of it by using an automated third-party service.
(I wonder if ReplayTV would have won their auto-ad-skipping lawsuit if they hadn't settled?)
Who here has gotten a free year with a credit watchdog service due to your information having been leaked by some company you dealt with? (The letter I got actually said that my information was put at risk due to some kind of sloppy law enforcement access. WTF?)
I normally hate calling for more laws but there should be more severe penalties for this kind of error. Otherwise... it will keep happening.
I work in a somewhat high tech industry. Throughout my career, there haven't been a lot of women in my workplaces. No surprise.
All of them worked like anyone else. They all seemed to be treated just fine. And most of them were management, too... VPs on down to various sorts of middle management.
I've never seen the "glass ceiling." To the contrary, I've seen a disproportionate number of women handing out the orders, when compared to their population. I've never seen a low-ranked woman busting her ass 24 hours a day to be "taken seriously."
I realize this is an anecdote and not data.
And changing the way the phone company works? Man, it's easier to change the way the government works. The People have scored some victories against the phone company over the years, but the ghost of Ma Bell is a scrapper.
Fortunately I recently became an old fart and stopped caring about what kind of phones I can get, as I am too busy keeping these modern Japanese superkids off my lawn.
Irrelevant. Until VHS rentals came along, and prices dropped, the biggest use for home video players was time shifting.
And the biggest use for cars is commuting. Doesn't prevent some people from racing them.
People weren't running out to buy movies until they started to hit the $20-$30 level, for a device they already had, because they used it to tape their favorite shows.
Most people weren't. But some people did wanted to own movies before that VHS price drop happened, and the market provided a product for them--the laserdisc player. If you wanted to own a stack of movies, laserdisc was cheaper than VHS.
History tends to dismiss laserdisc as a completely ridiculous product. It wasn't. It was definitely a niche product though, with a short window where it made sense. Every former laser fan is probably happy that technology and business models have changed for the better.
Same here, got one as a gift. Too bad it's brown!
.avi files and they convert fine. And you can buy 3rd party conversion software too, of course, or wrestle with Windows Media Encoder.)
The bottom line is that it is an OK player with a few maddening quirks. The bigger screen is nice for videos, except the included Windows software for putting videos on the device is total ass. It can't handle AVIs! You'd think anything with a DirectShow filter would work, but they excluded AVIs deliberately. (There is a registry hack to let the software see
Not adding podcast support for the early adopters, man, that seems like a slap in the face. Didn't Apple add podcast support to iTunes, making it available to all (?) iPods? And no Windows Media 11 integration, so even if you are all bought in to the Microsoft way of doing things, you have to run TWO giant unfriendly apps (Zune and WMP) instead of just one.
That all said, I am not planning on selling my brownie and buying an iPod, as the Zune works well enough.
2. Laserdisc - actually a very cool technology ... prohibitively expensive.
:)
I have to jump in every time there is a laserdisc thread. Fortunately as the years roll on, that is less and less.
LD players WERE a lot more than VHS. Starting at 2-3x as much, as I recall, up to as much as you wanted to pay. But the MEDIA was cheaper. Remember, there used to be a time when movies were not sold in grocery stores next to the tic-tacs. There used to be a time when purchasing Die Hard on VHS cost $100. The home sales market had not come about yet. If you wanted to buy a movie, you were paying the same price as the video store, and that was a lot.
And in this time, narrow though it may have been, if you liked movies, laserdisc was a good way to buy them. They were priced for sale to end users. My Die Hard laserdisc was $50 when the VHS was $100. Most of my lasers were less, $25-35. And, the video quality was MUCH better than VHS.
That all seems absurd now, of course. But this was a long time ago, when I walked to Ken Crane's laserdisc store in Orange County uphill through the snow. And when DVDs hit, most people dropped LD and for good reason--it was better in every way. The only reason to keep the LD player around is for media that didn't make the transition.
HEY, aren't HD-DVDs and BluRay movies starting at $25 now? How times change. Or not.
I believe that the decay of large amounts of algae consumes oxygen faster than it can be replaced, so the original poster was sort of right.
The toxins you mention are of course important too.
As if Windows Mobile doesn't have its own set of "shortcomings," like being a buggy pain in the ass. As an owner of several WM devices over the years, I have a real love/hate relationship with the things. "Oh sorry I didn't get your call, looks like the phone app crashed and I need to reboot... yeah, I should really remember to do that a couple times a day."
If Apple sees an opportunity to get the iPhone adopted by business, I'm sure they'll compromise on their no custom applications policy too, if that's what it takes.
Go Apple, competition is good.
Agreed. I liked it so much I even flogged it on my web site. Primer is a great film.
1 2015820
Review:
http://wrongcrowd.com/article.php?story=200504260
Note too that copying and taking are not the same thing, which is why we have different words for them.
Times are changing. Today I copied someone else's lunch from the fridge at work.
That's what I came here to post about, the hidden cost of data service. I'm the kind of gadget obsessed person that the iPhone appeals to, but I am also cheap when it comes to monthly fees. (Heck, I am too cheap to pay a dime to send an SMS message.)
Until there is an inexpensive data plan, I won't be joining the iPhone mob. Hey, maybe Cingular will surprise us and launch a new plan... I'm not counting on it though.
I was really hoping the solution would involve a video camera aimed at a monitor.
Are we finally going to reach a point where only trusted addresses can email us?
I've seen spam more than double recently. I'm starting to think about a whitelist, but there needs to be an easy way to give your email address to new people without having to change a config file. Maybe a magic word in the subject, or something like that... It seems like this problem must have been solved by now.
The review seems to assume that you already know a lot about Zelda. I don't--I have never played one of the games. I get the idea that there is a lot of story here, ok, but what is the GAMEPLAY like? Is most of my time spent in combat or in puzzles? Is combat action, turn-based, or a hybrid? Do I have a party or do I work alone? First or third person view? Is there an hour of reading before the game actually starts, like in a lot of the Japanese RPGs I have looked at? How do I manage inventory? What's the save system like? What's the enemy AI like? Do I bust out with the magic or are my abilities mundane?
Saying it's a great game just isn't enough. If save points are few and far between, for example, that KILLS me and I can't play the game. Sorry, I have a short attention span. Let's go ride bikes!!
I'd love to demonstrate a crystal radio for these people. When I first built one as a kid it blew my mind when I realized there was enough invisible energy zipping around that you could convert it into something audible with no batteries.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you have said. Broadband sucks in the US and getting bigger intertron tubes is one of the few things I'd even like to pay taxes for. I'm practically waiting with a plate of cookies for the Verizon fiber truck to come to my street.
But in those countries with cheap ubiquitous super-fast broadband... what can they do that we can't? OK, hi-def TV streaming is possible with high speed. But is that actually a product they can purchase?
What are they doing with their fat pipes besides doing the same old stuff faster? I assume that it must enable new types of businesses, but besides video delivery I don't know what they are. I'm honestly curious about what I am missing besides a smaller broadband bill and faster torrenting.
That's absolutely true, you don't get the shallow DOF with a small-sensor camera. I was referring more to white balance etc. when I spoke of controls, but the aperture limitations are quite real as you point out. And I already admitted that ISO range is a big problem for small-sensor cameras.
I never said a P&S or "prosumer" would equal a dSLR... but there is a type of photographer that benefits from the prosumer feature set and it bugs me that the story these days is "dSLR or you're a sucker." It's not that simple and I think a lot of people would be better served by something like the Nikon 8800, Panny FZ30, Fuji S9000, etc.
(Like you said, lots of people will have both too. I'll fall into that camp soon, I can't live without ISO 1600 forever.)
That is true but those inexpensive lenses don't have image stabilization.
dSLRs have MANY advantages as the article points out. But it glosses over the cost issue. Getting a dSLR with the same reach as a long-zoom "prosumer" camera can cost quite a bit.
Take for example the Nikon Coolpix 8800, or the Panasonic FZ30. They both have good glass: the 8800 has a zoom range of, in 35mm equivalence, 35-350mm. The Panasonic is 35-420mm. Both have optical image stabilization built in, and both can do macro photography too. You also get dSLR style complete manual control if you want it. (Lots of non-dSLRs have good controls, I think the article flops out a red herring there. You just have to do your homework.)
The 8800 isn't made anymore, but it was about $800-900 new, about as much as the original Nikon d70 with kit lens I think. The Panasonic must be on the way out, as it is now about $400. (It is speculated that these types of cameras are a lot less profitable than dSLRs and so are getting erased from the lineups. I dunno.)
So why would I have bought an 8800 instead of a d70? Easy. The cost of a Nikon LENS that can hit 300mm of zoom seems to be about $500--and it still won't let you do macro. When you buy that affordable dSLR kit camera, you aren't buying a complete solution... you are buying a starting point unless your only interests fall in that ~28-105mm range the kit lens covers.
I must grant that the dSLR is superior in many ways, particularly quality of the sensor. A bigger sensor is less prone to noise at high ISO, so your DSLR can shoot cleaner at 1600 than my 8800 can at 200. That is a big deal! But to take full advantage of that, you need to carry around a bag of lenses. (The article didn't mention battery life, another big win for DSLRs by the way.)
I'm not slamming dSLRs. No flames, please. I'm just saying that there is an argument for buying a camera that can do a good job on a little bit of everything, even if it isn't the BEST at any of it. Like any other complex gadget, do your homework--there are a lot of really good cameras available these days. And this is a complicated hobby so you won't get everything you need to know from one top-10 list article (or snarky forum post). Figure out what you want to shoot and the choice of camera will become more clear.
ok, here come the haters, I know it...
I don't understand why an open voting system wouldn't work.
The source code must remain closed to protect the voting machine company's intellectual property. There is serious, serious stuff going on in there--like adding one number to another number. You see? The numbers are DANCING in there.
If you think that kind of work should just be given away, well, go crunch your granola somewhere else, hippie.
However, I was unwilling to even explore my other options because I had trapped myself into a proprietary mindset- something even more dangerous than a proprietary format.
I used to work at Microsoft. I was a lowly orange badge contactor, but I was there for a couple of years alltogether--long enough to get a peek at the corporate culture. Maybe my area was special, but from what I saw the "proprietary mindset" applied to the people making those products too. I encountered many developers and IT guys who didn't seem to understand that there was a whole world of computers beyond Windows.
It's OK to use Windows. It's even OK to like Windows. But it seems like any computer professional should understand the rest of the ecosystem (eg Unix), at least in general terms. These guys just had a big blind spot though.
What a strange place.
I have 600W of olde-fashioned Edison-style lights in my kitchen and I love the way it looks. Full spectrum though, I despise yellow bulbs.
Of course, unless I need all that light for working in there I keep it dimmer. I have dimmers all over the house and by default when I turn a light on it is well below full blast.
I have never cared for the way CF lights look. Can't put my finger on it.
nuch!