The Dreamcast didn't fail because of the controller. It failed after Sega rapidly put out Sega CD, the 32X followed quickly by the Saturn....Time will tell.
I find an eerie parallel with Memory Alpha's content I read just about an hour ago tonight. It's about the fall of Star Trek from Rick Berman:
I again asked them for a little breathing room, that maybe it wasn't a good idea to slap a new show on the air in what was going to be the third season of Deep Space Nine
...
With the end of Voyager's seventh season, Berman was once again approached to create a new series - one to air in the fall of 2001, mere months after the final broadcast of Voyager.
I'd go a step further, I hate PAGES in an ereader.
Project Gutenberg html format for one long continuously scrollable panel of text on a touch-screen reader seems better to me.
Yes! A major concept behind the original hypertext used to be that text must not be bound by confines of words on an immobile, fixed-size page, and that things could link to other things. For the time we truly had that before images and broadband exploded, websites focused more on pages without height limit, with heavy crossreferencing such as you see in wikis (wikipedia and tvtropes come to mind). In a time before today's mandatory image distractions, ads, and layouts that don't use percentages, we used to have a major joy. Today, they've coined the term "content river" that alludes to how there must be land around the actual meat and potatoes, even if there's nothing in that land (YET --the point is a potential to insert ads on the sides and to flow content dynamically into dozens of paginated sequential links)
Gone is the fact that text was meant to expand to your window's size like water distributes itself to fit its container. Sometimes it was fun seeing how much text changed if you increased the font size leaving the windows the same size, and so on. Then, a horrible thing happened: tables and frames. Suddenly, readers lost the ability to command how the pages looked, and were at the mercy of the content producer. And that is when we began the slippery road to things like perfectly-placed image panes that are mandatory to serve ads. The issue is that webpage designers do not ever consider to let text flow freely. They must trap it at 50% width or less. That was before widescreens too. It should always be the user's choice, at least on reading-heavy content.
But that's a digression that doesn't handle e-readers well. The ad-supported web created brain damage that places limits on what programmers can give us. eBooks paginate dynamically, but it would be better if they did not. They are incredibly slow on smartphones, and we have the fact that unlike a real book, pagination systems that say "page 234 of 2345" due to your lilliputian screen size, where clicking on "larger text" will change the numbers over again, then the metaphors of pages are mostly wasted.
I used to be one in '98 back when it was a way to let your Mac emulate Windows world under MacOS 8.
Its maker, Connectix never implemented USB support. MS didn't much care either after buying and rebranding it, several versions later.
Once we realized that VM's are the easy way to test multiple distros in a short time*, thanks to the KDE / Ubuntu GUI crazy-fest, VirtualBox provided the desired USB support.
I tried installing VPC2007 (or 2008?) recently and had trouble on my Windows 7 setup, and google searches reported that even MS doesn't support 64 bit setups. Given how universal 64 bit processors have been for ages, I realized it was time to abandon that sinking ship. I think there's NO newer version of the product, sort-of like IE5 and IE6 were left to rot.
* VM's are wonderful distro test-beds. No rebooting, no CD burning thanks to ISO emulation (not a feature in MS VPC, by the way), you can freeze and thaw if you're not done testing. You can also use rebooing and RAM allocations to see how little RAM the OS works can take. Depending on your setup, you can load several side-by-side and look at relative performance of desktop environments. You'll still need to reboot with a Live CD or Live USB to test the ever shifty Wifi and Video acceleration support, though. Push comes to shove? Just keep the distro in a VM forever.
Doesn't iTunes come pre-installed on both MacOS and iOS?
This is tangential, but OS 8.6 (ca. 1998) is the last MacOS version I recall that lacked iTunes out of the box, because iTunes and iPods (separately came out in 2001) did not exist yet. The date for iTunes coincides with OS 9.1's January release.
GP mentioned Winamp. Mac users like I used to be had just Quicktime, and independent players were almost not sought for... "MacAmp" was garbage... I am disgusted to have just learned that this ported namesake was actually made by Nullsoft people. It was renamed Macast later to avoid brand polution that would tarnish their Windows version.
The whole reason for Winamp's mainstream success was nonexistent on the Mac IIRC: SKINS! for the not-so-mainstream, it was its format plugins; PC Plugins that were never Mac-ready, though. This means that gamers like me who enjoy alternative audio formats had a windows-only fix. You had to wait for individual developers* to randomly take a liking to both the MacOS, also to reverse engineering, then also to the one format you needed emulated, like.NSF. If your stuff was only available in another sound emulation format, you were out of luck. Finally, the devs had the hurdle of being forced to build a GUI for it. Considering that mainstream Windows and Linux geeks were not really into MacOS till years after 10.x came out, and that they tended to rely on toolkits that were not Mac-ready in those dark days of the late nineties, and that there was no command line to wire up a quick and dirty a sound-only solution with command line switches, things were pretty bleak.
I'm going to give Winamp a whirl on this PC now. I've been playing plain old Overclocked MP3s for ages, and had forgotten all about the skins for years. I probably have the skin files I loved somewhere in my decade-old backups.
* I think this developer I linked actually was Mac-only and ported to Windows about a decade later. Probably thanks to MacOS-X's newly cross-platform tools like GCC.
potentially running in the background, which would consume both CPU and networking bandwidth. For mobile devices [...]
...AND putting you on pause there to add that these lead to battery consumption. It is just unfair that all smartphones soon reach a point where battery must be replaced, before contracts run off. You can either pay to be ripped off with batteries that cost up to 1/2 the price of your by-then-devalued purchase. You can also suck it up and just lug a charger everywhere. The latter won't help if you must switch on the 3G or Wifi for 20 minutes, given that everything backgrounded decides to catch up to whatever you missed while on 2G or Airplane mode.
Eventually you just break your contract / pay full price for a new phone or switch providers for a deal. Either way, those background apps cannot be turned off without uninstalling or rooting... or fremium apps that muck around with settings that should be user-accessible. Hate that this is bleeding into desktop land now
The problem with 127.0.0.1 isn't that it it's slower. The problem with it is that it's a valid IP address, usually for a local web server. If there is a server listening, it will process the request.
I used to host a local webserver only for home stuff. It was neat to see embedded "Page not found" messages several times per page proving how effective it was all over the web. I was bothered withaccess logs that came with it, showing/weirdfolderpat/filenamewithunderscorecommasandadsentinels
Easily resolved: Replace the 127.0.0.1 number with 0.0.0.0
Yes, this is an absolute pain for games. Then again, laptops shouldn't be used for games;). The problem is that in my case the laptop was the main computer for several years.
Like someone said about leaking tablet resolution "improvements" back into the PC world, fullsize keyboards have been playing with stupid layout ideas and removing keys for a decade. Geeky Mac switchers must have a rite of passage with a google search when first trying to printscreen, especially while running Windows. HP keyboards move Insert / Home / End / Page up and Page down. Laptop or not, playing with our non-querty row is a problem for flight simulators MMO's and simple emulators. My laptop vertically lists Delete / Home / Pg-up / Pg-dn/ End in the last row, which is a pain for web browsing without some head lamp on.
The industry ran out of new cool things to design to differentiate product. They can't reinvent the modern equivalent of "they're all plain ol' beige, so let's ship it in black!". Now they bring chiclet keyboards and tons of incompatible layouts.
Someone here yesterday wanted death on whoever decided that for Android's software keyboards (virtually non-optional) ENTER should sit right above BACKSPACE... presumably from logins or webforms getting posted "early" EXACTLY as we've located an error that needs backspacing to fix.
Android's been out for four or five years and hasn't generated anywhere close to comparable revenues to Apple. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Dates! Released june 2007 the iphone fits that date description. Android, OTOH turned *exactly* 4 years a few days ago on Oct 22nd Unsubsidized prices are only starting to make it affordable for entry level prepaid markets, a death blow against nokia because of the feature / price ratios sought by the masses. Just you wait. People don't like phones without touchscreens and with horrible feature-phone GUIs anymore because Android can be had for $90 without contract. In first world lands, Android is the death by 1000 paper cuts to feature phones and iPhones.
Broadly speaking, Android hardware and features is to iPhones what Linux Wintels are to Sun Unix Boxes. Matter of fact, try and find true bluetooth support on an iPad and see where the Apple mentality is failing. I found you can't share files via BT with an iPad owner without jailbreaking. In the android world, BT allows small phone shops to cheaply do the magic address book transfers when you upgrade to a newer Android phone from an older one. It seems pro equipment / software and sync cables cost them money and training.
Apple may be profitable, but at some point wallets win out. Android
You also can't edit files directly using MTP; you must edit it locally then re-upload in its entirety back to the device.
Had not thought of the merits of MTP but this part of your post reminded me of my issues. I've had to google the real USB-mode hardware trigger for my older MP3 player (Sansa c200) to enjoy my files from the PC. The default is MTP mode.
IIRC the device loads two separate containers in Windows and I have to memorize which is my SD and which is the MTP system. I think Ubuntu circa 2010 was unable to load its MTP and I had no idea what was going on, so I gave up listening to music under linux. I find the abstraction too opaque. I just expect no more than a filesystem, so things like this rub me the wrong way. I never got any music iToys because the forced iTunes middleman-ship for file transfers also robs me of simplicity.
More exactly than autocorrect, that is an ANDROID user's "SWYPO."
We just have to see any qwerty keyboard and slide an index finger over the letters in "t.h.r.u". Now look at how "E->R" and "Y->U" are key-transposed alternatives in the guessing tree for the letters of "thru". This happens with Swype all the time, and is annoyingly easy to overlook. Sometimes the only way to fix the AI is to wipe all the data it got on you, via the Settings \ Applications manager interface where you can uninstall the apps: there's a clear data option I use shortly after the app makes more misses than hits.
I also hate it when it just types out nonsense letters that are no part of any word, when clearly it should just error or something. I'm a Froyo user, if that helps any. Our 4.0 Galaxy Tablet doesn't show the Swype app via the app market, but there's some option in the keyboard config to turn swyping on.
Hmm, I wonder what kind of storm watch apps there are out there, even customized to one-shot track just one storm...
Damnit, I just used a computer analogy in a story about cars....somehow, that just...feels....wrong.....
<HCBAILLY voice>A COMPUTER analogy? What a COOOn-cept! Soo, true, what is going to make my head hurt is that... it's like they're interchangeable! The funny thing is that too much slashdot has made analogies seem like they're one-way. Thanks for adding a bit of anti-braindeadedness here.
What is this, missing initial letter day? Just had the exact same thing in another summary.
That is an error due to copy-and-paste oversignts: A sentence boundary like the "I" is easy to miss with the mouse, especially if it is a period or an I. On my smartphone's touch screen, selecting a block of text to copy is a huge pain. Must start over until the right start AND end are selected.
I hope that got resolved in newer versions of Android, but my provider won't update mine anyway. Gone out the window are "intuitive" desktop tricks like selection-pushing a page up and down when your "cursor" signals that the desired text continues past the screen's boundaries.
If a long lost friend gives you a call right now after 15 years of NOT trying to reach you, it is creepy because he founds you in the moderate obscurity of a phonebook. Compare to a personal visit from a neighbor who suddenly knocks on your door after years of being invisible to you --this is really creepy in US suburbs where you never see people on the streets. In both cases, expect the worst and try to figure out their intentions.
Since websites allow people to join whenever they feel like joining, you cannot expect the network effect to immediately push all your would-be callers to reach out to you at joining time. THEN, it seems Facebook has unwritten protocol about relaxing the creep factor mentioned above. You have the choice to reject long lost friends who are trying to reconnect, if that's not your cup of tea for certain people.
Now, here is the issue: in the pre-facebook world, you were limited by phonebook availability for your location, as well as the fact that many people's names are initialed rather than printed wholly, so there is a LOT of guessing even if your name is unique. Online phone and email lookup tools did not solve the problem, once they took these listings online. Also, some places ask you to pay money to provide a phone listing anyway, which again veers into the creepy / stalker-ish side of the matter again.
Voluntary registries like classmates.com just do not have the appeal and critical mass or trust that Facebook acquired. Even in the myspace days, aliases were common and I'm sure non-technical people did not expect to be bothered with searching. Facebook changed the expectation. You and I refuse to join, but it is a pain that unlike 20 years ago, non-members can verify that so-and-so is a member via the public search tool, but that there is zero way to leave a quick "hey, dude, I remember something funny you said once, and wanted a quick one-time ring to let you know you were sooo right. hope your life turned out OK."
To be able to even do that, even if you don't really care to continue communicating with the person, we're forced to deal with 1) privacy issues 2) the expectation of a non-transient re-connect. The cat is out of the bag, so where does the friendship go from here.
I am now contemplating sharing pictures of an event I went to, since recording CDR's with 100 photos is no longer considered good form. Facebook, Picasa (or whatever google offers that won't require joining Plus) and Flickr seem to fill that hole nicely, but I would just love to host my own site and email people an access password.
2 hours after your post and the books link has been blocked due to some view counter limit. This is one of the reasons I distrust Google. Thanks for the Avro wikipedia link, though.
Did I piss off a moderator, or did a bunch of people come along later that legitimately thought it was flamebait? I know that it was a bit vulgar and all, but...
Not sure. I don't know if/. applies an weighted average or ONLY the latest moderation type to the label. The latter would be unfair but it seems to be what happens here happened. If so, mods had a herd-mentality-type chain reaction to a single adverse mod "changing" Funny to "Flamebait" for your comment. After all, highly rated comments tend to bring more eyeballs and weird whiplash than just +2 mods I tend to get.
While we are on topic, have you ever done a double take when you see the moderation label AFTER reading a comment that felt tasteless? a lot of WHOOSHing comments happen before anyone has mod-HINTED that the comments are supposed to be funny. Knowing the "intended" funny mod totally changes the tone of the poster as if by magic:)
Not so fast! You have to explicitly sign up for G+ to use it, just like with Google Latitude's location sharing. Otherwise you're not searchable and they just consider you a non-member and keep urging you on here and there. I've never liked the model of joining a free service to increase visualization of details that are free anyway, especially within an account I already signed up for. You must sign up before you are able to replies to public profiles' posts, I believe, but I won't risk joining just to find out.
Hotmail and Yahoo prevent you from being a "member" of their tacked-on "social network" features until you fill out at a number of Personal details to "activate" your profile. They have really not even been mentioned in the social network world. The point is that an email address does not get you in a network. If I recall correctly Google Buzz was auto-join, which was a huge problem because everyone inadvertently shared relationship "priority" details in their profiles without meaning to even join. I may recall wrong. But autojoining and account-walled joining are both bad ends of the spectrum.
There must be some steady progression to that level of tightness by even those who pretend there is nobody else in the room trying to be social with them. Sadly, we must infer that it starts at the commonly cheerful, talk-friendly childhoods we start in, and develop to the attitude shown.
And then there are those people at work who refuse to say hello and goodbye even if you initiate them yourself. You just look behind and they're gone, like they're ghosts materializing at their chair to meet some money quota. And I'm not talking about jaded retirement-ripe, family-tied humans either. They just don't believe people exist outside of meeting their own daily communication *needs* and nutrition. Signs of the times.
That may be as ineffective as the antivirus software trials that you see in new computers. You'll notice that most people have expired software with their machine and they do not care . This is free which is a major push and I don't think that they're going to do that much with a subscription based system that is not going to offer them any protection like an antivirus does
I THINK I remember dealing with a brand new XP machine with Works preinstalled from Dell
You remember right but it goes back even further. My first HP machine had a copy of Microsoft works. This was back when windows 98 was new and computers would cost $999. Back in those days people began to believe that they needed to get a quality word processor for the price of the machine. At least we began to get computers that included something to use if you were in school, but it was fairly sad when you actually went through with installing Windows full version from scratch in some other computer and finding that all you had was notepad and wordpad. Even today I have mixed feelings when I receive some crippled word processor in a new machine
People just fade out of systems when something better comes along. I think the majority of those that actively delete their profiles on their way out do have things that they do not want misused. You may ascribe that to being slashdot geeks who wised up, or to having had trouble that showed them real life drama follows facebook activity or whatever. But it takes a pretty strong force stopping the inertia of convenience and addiction they are enjoying there. Even closing my slashdot account and being prevented from seeing all AC posts, headlines and everything else sure would pose a big roadblock against official closure in my part.
It is not like myspace died because people woke up smart one day and explicitly shunned themselves from it. You can still look up their accounts on google. Same for friendster and other dead precursors.
People just do not understand hearing graphs. My family has cases that challenge audiologists showing noticeable issues despite no loss, or a DSP device that the user never got used to (probably because it down shifted sounds whose frequency is expected to be higher and the mind had to grow used to a substitute for plosive consonants). It is like learning to see all over again by substituting black input with white. There was an article about an experiment with sunglasses to do just that and how the subject never got used to the white shadows.
That said, neurological loss may play a role but we never have convinced any doctor to do head scans or run tests. Try the Truetone app and show people that the volume difference they hear as you go from 300 to 13000 hz is not actually the phone so much as their ear. Then tell them that when your ear moves from beeps to processing the minute differences between. FFFF VVVV, SSSS SHHH and JJJJ, PP and BB, MMM and NNN and tons ofother voiced and voiceless soiund pairs the mind parse trees work overtime to figure out how to interpret the reduced. Range of input. It is like using a dumb phone 9 key pad to try and input all 26 alphabet letters, with the catch that unlike cellphone input conventions, you get only one key press and I have to guess if 9 is W,X,Y or Z. Sorry, typing in a smartphone by the way.
And force yourself to look at people's face because we all use lipreading to an unconsciously high extent. Cheers.
It sounded as if you said workplace rather than some other scientific environment the summary seems to imply... therefore I'm thinking you refer to outsourcing potential rather than scientific prowess.
While that is tangential to the main discussion, I'll add that it's safe to say India's skilled worker training is a product of their MUCH wider pool of ENGLISH speakers (they can easily interact with us in the modern English-speaking consumer world).
China's masses are different in that they just can't compete with India's advantage. But they are very good at mass production contracts, and you only need one tongue for those --the salesman's. Everyone else can just work, but there little innovation to be found in an assembly line.
I looked around for Linux printers, but realized nothing out there fit the small space that my currently uncooperative Lexmark takes up. I was facing the same rarity issue as those seeking 14 inch 4:3 LCDs. Single function color inkjets are going extinct, and my space fits were a dubious Canon Mobile an HP 100 Mobile I had vaguely seen online at some point. one. Paid $300 for the HP and my old jam-loving Linux-hating clunker will get canned when it runs out of ink.
I still do not understand why HP keeps Linux support hidden from us savvy shoppers, despite supporting MacOS X and including a whole addendum sheet about some post-print MacOS 10.7 gotcha inside the box. I was forced to use my smartphone to google the Linux support bit at the store before approving my purchase --salesperson had no clue because their stickers and even site has no clue, of course. Confirmation came straight out of the HP site in a google search, even. What gives? That's just like the nice surprise of IPv6 support in my 2009 high-end home router... maybe they don't want to cut into their own business-tier profits? But HP OfficeJets are supposedly already in the business tier.
Gnome 3 and Unity had turned me off, so I froze Ubuntu at 2010 versions until the laptop died this year. I thought I'd just keep linux in VM's forever in the new one, so my newfound Linux support allows me to give Linux another chance as a main OS in a dual-boot setup. Pro-tip: Skip HP's urge to install their printer utilities by skipping autorun and manually using the Windows Add Printer wizard. I think the utils make sense only if you want new-fangled e-mail printing, or if you need control of scanner and fax features after buying some 20"x10" desk hog whose special features are best left for your office. My Oracle VM had no trouble letting Mint find and use the printer with no fuss.
For home users, you have to wonder if they're just being cheap. If they can't fork out for an OS upgrade once a decade, how else will they be like on the consumer side?
Home users do not differentiate an OS from their TANGIBLE hardware enough to care to upgrade it separately from their ancient machines; they just settle for whatever new one pops up with a new purchase. The fact is you rarely see noob users looking for an OS to buy in a software store anyway. Part of the issue is that OS's are *not* sold on TV --think of the I'm a Mac ads aimed at selling new machines and the Droid campaign, at selling NEW cell subscriptions. The few that upgrade the ancient Windows machines I mentioned up top see OS versions as akin to over-the-air IOS upgrades, and won't feel the need to pay a cent for change. They'll pirate only half-aware that the are supposed to go to a computer store.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dreamcast didn't fail because of the controller. It failed after Sega rapidly put out Sega CD, the 32X followed quickly by the Saturn. ...Time will tell.
I find an eerie parallel with Memory Alpha's content I read just about an hour ago tonight. It's about the fall of Star Trek from Rick Berman:
I'd go a step further, I hate PAGES in an ereader.
Project Gutenberg html format for one long continuously scrollable panel of text on a touch-screen reader seems better to me.
Yes!
A major concept behind the original hypertext used to be that text must not be bound by confines of words on an immobile, fixed-size page, and that things could link to other things. For the time we truly had that before images and broadband exploded, websites focused more on pages without height limit, with heavy crossreferencing such as you see in wikis (wikipedia and tvtropes come to mind). In a time before today's mandatory image distractions, ads, and layouts that don't use percentages, we used to have a major joy. Today, they've coined the term "content river" that alludes to how there must be land around the actual meat and potatoes, even if there's nothing in that land (YET --the point is a potential to insert ads on the sides and to flow content dynamically into dozens of paginated sequential links)
Gone is the fact that text was meant to expand to your window's size like water distributes itself to fit its container. Sometimes it was fun seeing how much text changed if you increased the font size leaving the windows the same size, and so on. Then, a horrible thing happened: tables and frames. Suddenly, readers lost the ability to command how the pages looked, and were at the mercy of the content producer. And that is when we began the slippery road to things like perfectly-placed image panes that are mandatory to serve ads. The issue is that webpage designers do not ever consider to let text flow freely. They must trap it at 50% width or less. That was before widescreens too. It should always be the user's choice, at least on reading-heavy content.
But that's a digression that doesn't handle e-readers well. The ad-supported web created brain damage that places limits on what programmers can give us. eBooks paginate dynamically, but it would be better if they did not. They are incredibly slow on smartphones, and we have the fact that unlike a real book, pagination systems that say "page 234 of 2345" due to your lilliputian screen size, where clicking on "larger text" will change the numbers over again, then the metaphors of pages are mostly wasted.
I used to be one in '98 back when it was a way to let your Mac emulate Windows world under MacOS 8.
Its maker, Connectix never implemented USB support. MS didn't much care either after buying and rebranding it, several versions later.
Once we realized that VM's are the easy way to test multiple distros in a short time*, thanks to the KDE / Ubuntu GUI crazy-fest, VirtualBox provided the desired USB support.
I tried installing VPC2007 (or 2008?) recently and had trouble on my Windows 7 setup, and google searches reported that even MS doesn't support 64 bit setups. Given how universal 64 bit processors have been for ages, I realized it was time to abandon that sinking ship. I think there's NO newer version of the product, sort-of like IE5 and IE6 were left to rot.
* VM's are wonderful distro test-beds. No rebooting, no CD burning thanks to ISO emulation (not a feature in MS VPC, by the way), you can freeze and thaw if you're not done testing. You can also use rebooing and RAM allocations to see how little RAM the OS works can take. Depending on your setup, you can load several side-by-side and look at relative performance of desktop environments. You'll still need to reboot with a Live CD or Live USB to test the ever shifty Wifi and Video acceleration support, though. Push comes to shove? Just keep the distro in a VM forever.
Doesn't iTunes come pre-installed on both MacOS and iOS?
This is tangential, but OS 8.6 (ca. 1998) is the last MacOS version I recall that lacked iTunes out of the box, because iTunes and iPods (separately came out in 2001) did not exist yet. The date for iTunes coincides with OS 9.1's January release.
GP mentioned Winamp. Mac users like I used to be had just Quicktime, and independent players were almost not sought for... "MacAmp" was garbage... I am disgusted to have just learned that this ported namesake was actually made by Nullsoft people. It was renamed Macast later to avoid brand polution that would tarnish their Windows version.
The whole reason for Winamp's mainstream success was nonexistent on the Mac IIRC: SKINS! for the not-so-mainstream, it was its format plugins; PC Plugins that were never Mac-ready, though. This means that gamers like me who enjoy alternative audio formats had a windows-only fix. You had to wait for individual developers* to randomly take a liking to both the MacOS, also to reverse engineering, then also to the one format you needed emulated, like .NSF. If your stuff was only available in another sound emulation format, you were out of luck. Finally, the devs had the hurdle of being forced to build a GUI for it. Considering that mainstream Windows and Linux geeks were not really into MacOS till years after 10.x came out, and that they tended to rely on toolkits that were not Mac-ready in those dark days of the late nineties, and that there was no command line to wire up a quick and dirty a sound-only solution with command line switches, things were pretty bleak.
I'm going to give Winamp a whirl on this PC now. I've been playing plain old Overclocked MP3s for ages, and had forgotten all about the skins for years. I probably have the skin files I loved somewhere in my decade-old backups.
* I think this developer I linked actually was Mac-only and ported to Windows about a decade later. Probably thanks to MacOS-X's newly cross-platform tools like GCC.
Eventually you just break your contract / pay full price for a new phone or switch providers for a deal. Either way, those background apps cannot be turned off without uninstalling or rooting... or fremium apps that muck around with settings that should be user-accessible. Hate that this is bleeding into desktop land now
The problem with 127.0.0.1 isn't that it it's slower. The problem with it is that it's a valid IP address, usually for a local web server. If there is a server listening, it will process the request.
I used to host a local webserver only for home stuff. It was neat to see embedded "Page not found" messages several times per page proving how effective it was all over the web. I was bothered withaccess logs that came with it, showing /weirdfolderpat/filenamewithunderscorecommasandadsentinels
Easily resolved:
Replace the 127.0.0.1 number with 0.0.0.0
Yes, this is an absolute pain for games. Then again, laptops shouldn't be used for games ;). The problem is that in my case the laptop was the main computer for several years.
Like someone said about leaking tablet resolution "improvements" back into the PC world, fullsize keyboards have been playing with stupid layout ideas and removing keys for a decade. Geeky Mac switchers must have a rite of passage with a google search when first trying to printscreen, especially while running Windows. HP keyboards move Insert / Home / End / Page up and Page down. Laptop or not, playing with our non-querty row is a problem for flight simulators MMO's and simple emulators. My laptop vertically lists Delete / Home / Pg-up / Pg-dn/ End in the last row, which is a pain for web browsing without some head lamp on.
The industry ran out of new cool things to design to differentiate product. They can't reinvent the modern equivalent of "they're all plain ol' beige, so let's ship it in black!". Now they bring chiclet keyboards and tons of incompatible layouts.
Someone here yesterday wanted death on whoever decided that for Android's software keyboards (virtually non-optional) ENTER should sit right above BACKSPACE... presumably from logins or webforms getting posted "early" EXACTLY as we've located an error that needs backspacing to fix.
Android's been out for four or five years and hasn't generated anywhere close to comparable revenues to Apple. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Dates! Released june 2007 the iphone fits that date description.
Android, OTOH turned *exactly* 4 years a few days ago on Oct 22nd Unsubsidized prices are only starting to make it affordable for entry level prepaid markets, a death blow against nokia because of the feature / price ratios sought by the masses. Just you wait. People don't like phones without touchscreens and with horrible feature-phone GUIs anymore because Android can be had for $90 without contract. In first world lands, Android is the death by 1000 paper cuts to feature phones and iPhones.
Broadly speaking, Android hardware and features is to iPhones what Linux Wintels are to Sun Unix Boxes.
Matter of fact, try and find true bluetooth support on an iPad and see where the Apple mentality is failing. I found you can't share files via BT with an iPad owner without jailbreaking. In the android world, BT allows small phone shops to cheaply do the magic address book transfers when you upgrade to a newer Android phone from an older one. It seems pro equipment / software and sync cables cost them money and training.
Apple may be profitable, but at some point wallets win out. Android
You also can't edit files directly using MTP; you must edit it locally then re-upload in its entirety back to the device.
Had not thought of the merits of MTP but this part of your post reminded me of my issues. I've had to google the real USB-mode hardware trigger for my older MP3 player (Sansa c200) to enjoy my files from the PC. The default is MTP mode.
IIRC the device loads two separate containers in Windows and I have to memorize which is my SD and which is the MTP system. I think Ubuntu circa 2010 was unable to load its MTP and I had no idea what was going on, so I gave up listening to music under linux. I find the abstraction too opaque. I just expect no more than a filesystem, so things like this rub me the wrong way. I never got any music iToys because the forced iTunes middleman-ship for file transfers also robs me of simplicity.
More exactly than autocorrect, that is an ANDROID user's "SWYPO."
We just have to see any qwerty keyboard and slide an index finger over the letters in "t.h.r.u". Now look at how "E->R" and "Y->U" are key-transposed alternatives in the guessing tree for the letters of "thru".
This happens with Swype all the time, and is annoyingly easy to overlook. Sometimes the only way to fix the AI is to wipe all the data it got on you, via the Settings \ Applications manager interface where you can uninstall the apps: there's a clear data option I use shortly after the app makes more misses than hits.
I also hate it when it just types out nonsense letters that are no part of any word, when clearly it should just error or something. I'm a Froyo user, if that helps any. Our 4.0 Galaxy Tablet doesn't show the Swype app via the app market, but there's some option in the keyboard config to turn swyping on.
Hmm, I wonder what kind of storm watch apps there are out there, even customized to one-shot track just one storm...
If you patent that poke I won't be able to write zeros to my cassette tape.
Can I patent writing ones?
Checkmate!
Damnit, I just used a computer analogy in a story about cars....somehow, that just...feels....wrong.....
<HCBAILLY voice>A COMPUTER analogy? What a COOOn-cept! ... it's like they're interchangeable! The funny thing is that too much slashdot has made analogies seem like they're one-way. Thanks for adding a bit of anti-braindeadedness here.
Soo, true, what is going to make my head hurt is that
"'f the Court approves the settlements
What is this, missing initial letter day? Just had the exact same thing in another summary.
That is an error due to copy-and-paste oversignts: A sentence boundary like the "I" is easy to miss with the mouse, especially if it is a period or an I. On my smartphone's touch screen, selecting a block of text to copy is a huge pain. Must start over until the right start AND end are selected.
I hope that got resolved in newer versions of Android, but my provider won't update mine anyway. Gone out the window are "intuitive" desktop tricks like selection-pushing a page up and down when your "cursor" signals that the desired text continues past the screen's boundaries.
If a long lost friend gives you a call right now after 15 years of NOT trying to reach you, it is creepy because he founds you in the moderate obscurity of a phonebook. Compare to a personal visit from a neighbor who suddenly knocks on your door after years of being invisible to you --this is really creepy in US suburbs where you never see people on the streets. In both cases, expect the worst and try to figure out their intentions.
Since websites allow people to join whenever they feel like joining, you cannot expect the network effect to immediately push all your would-be callers to reach out to you at joining time. THEN, it seems Facebook has unwritten protocol about relaxing the creep factor mentioned above. You have the choice to reject long lost friends who are trying to reconnect, if that's not your cup of tea for certain people.
Now, here is the issue: in the pre-facebook world, you were limited by phonebook availability for your location, as well as the fact that many people's names are initialed rather than printed wholly, so there is a LOT of guessing even if your name is unique. Online phone and email lookup tools did not solve the problem, once they took these listings online. Also, some places ask you to pay money to provide a phone listing anyway, which again veers into the creepy / stalker-ish side of the matter again.
Voluntary registries like classmates.com just do not have the appeal and critical mass or trust that Facebook acquired. Even in the myspace days, aliases were common and I'm sure non-technical people did not expect to be bothered with searching.
Facebook changed the expectation. You and I refuse to join, but it is a pain that unlike 20 years ago, non-members can verify that so-and-so is a member via the public search tool, but that there is zero way to leave a quick "hey, dude, I remember something funny you said once, and wanted a quick one-time ring to let you know you were sooo right. hope your life turned out OK."
To be able to even do that, even if you don't really care to continue communicating with the person, we're forced to deal with
1) privacy issues
2) the expectation of a non-transient re-connect. The cat is out of the bag, so where does the friendship go from here.
I am now contemplating sharing pictures of an event I went to, since recording CDR's with 100 photos is no longer considered good form. Facebook, Picasa (or whatever google offers that won't require joining Plus) and Flickr seem to fill that hole nicely, but I would just love to host my own site and email people an access password.
2 hours after your post and the books link has been blocked due to some view counter limit. This is one of the reasons I distrust Google.
Thanks for the Avro wikipedia link, though.
Did I piss off a moderator, or did a bunch of people come along later that legitimately thought it was flamebait? I know that it was a bit vulgar and all, but ...
Not sure. I don't know if /. applies an weighted average or ONLY the latest moderation type to the label. The latter would be unfair but it seems to be what happens here happened. If so, mods had a herd-mentality-type chain reaction to a single adverse mod "changing" Funny to "Flamebait" for your comment. After all, highly rated comments tend to bring more eyeballs and weird whiplash than just +2 mods I tend to get.
While we are on topic, have you ever done a double take when you see the moderation label AFTER reading a comment that felt tasteless? a lot of WHOOSHing comments happen before anyone has mod-HINTED that the comments are supposed to be funny. Knowing the "intended" funny mod totally changes the tone of the poster as if by magic :)
Since everyone with a gmail address is on g+...
Not so fast! You have to explicitly sign up for G+ to use it, just like with Google Latitude's location sharing. Otherwise you're not searchable and they just consider you a non-member and keep urging you on here and there. I've never liked the model of joining a free service to increase visualization of details that are free anyway, especially within an account I already signed up for. You must sign up before you are able to replies to public profiles' posts, I believe, but I won't risk joining just to find out.
Hotmail and Yahoo prevent you from being a "member" of their tacked-on "social network" features until you fill out at a number of Personal details to "activate" your profile. They have really not even been mentioned in the social network world. The point is that an email address does not get you in a network. If I recall correctly Google Buzz was auto-join, which was a huge problem because everyone inadvertently shared relationship "priority" details in their profiles without meaning to even join. I may recall wrong. But autojoining and account-walled joining are both bad ends of the spectrum.
There must be some steady progression to that level of tightness by even those who pretend there is nobody else in the room trying to be social with them. Sadly, we must infer that it starts at the commonly cheerful, talk-friendly childhoods we start in, and develop to the attitude shown.
And then there are those people at work who refuse to say hello and goodbye even if you initiate them yourself. You just look behind and they're gone, like they're ghosts materializing at their chair to meet some money quota. And I'm not talking about jaded retirement-ripe, family-tied humans either. They just don't believe people exist outside of meeting their own daily communication *needs* and nutrition. Signs of the times.
That may be as ineffective as the antivirus software trials that you see in new computers. You'll notice that most people have expired software with their machine and they do not care . This is free which is a major push and I don't think that they're going to do that much with a subscription based system that is not going to offer them any protection like an antivirus does
I THINK I remember dealing with a brand new XP machine with Works preinstalled from Dell
You remember right but it goes back even further. My first HP machine had a copy of Microsoft works. This was back when windows 98 was new and computers would cost $999. Back in those days people began to believe that they needed to get a quality word processor for the price of the machine. At least we began to get computers that included something to use if you were in school, but it was fairly sad when you actually went through with installing Windows full version from scratch in some other computer and finding that all you had was notepad and wordpad. Even today I have mixed feelings when I receive some crippled word processor in a new machine
People just fade out of systems when something better comes along. I think the majority of those that actively delete their profiles on their way out do have things that they do not want misused. You may ascribe that to being slashdot geeks who wised up, or to having had trouble that showed them real life drama follows facebook activity or whatever. But it takes a pretty strong force stopping the inertia of convenience and addiction they are enjoying there. Even closing my slashdot account and being prevented from seeing all AC posts, headlines and everything else sure would pose a big roadblock against official closure in my part.
It is not like myspace died because people woke up smart one day and explicitly shunned themselves from it. You can still look up their accounts on google. Same for friendster and other dead precursors.
People just do not understand hearing graphs. My family has cases that challenge audiologists showing noticeable issues despite no loss, or a DSP device that the user never got used to (probably because it down shifted sounds whose frequency is expected to be higher and the mind had to grow used to a substitute for plosive consonants). It is like learning to see all over again by substituting black input with white. There was an article about an experiment with sunglasses to do just that and how the subject never got used to the white shadows.
That said, neurological loss may play a role but we never have convinced any doctor to do head scans or run tests. Try the Truetone app and show people that the volume difference they hear as you go from 300 to 13000 hz is not actually the phone so much as their ear. Then tell them that when your ear moves from beeps to processing the minute differences between. FFFF VVVV, SSSS SHHH and JJJJ, PP and BB, MMM and NNN and tons ofother voiced and voiceless soiund pairs the mind parse trees work overtime to figure out how to interpret the reduced. Range of input. It is like using a dumb phone 9 key pad to try and input all 26 alphabet letters, with the catch that unlike cellphone input conventions, you get only one key press and I have to guess if 9 is W,X,Y or Z. Sorry, typing in a smartphone by the way.
And force yourself to look at people's face because we all use lipreading to an unconsciously high extent. Cheers.
It sounded as if you said workplace rather than some other scientific environment the summary seems to imply... therefore I'm thinking you refer to outsourcing potential rather than scientific prowess.
While that is tangential to the main discussion, I'll add that it's safe to say India's skilled worker training is a product of their MUCH wider pool of ENGLISH speakers (they can easily interact with us in the modern English-speaking consumer world).
China's masses are different in that they just can't compete with India's advantage. But they are very good at mass production contracts, and you only need one tongue for those --the salesman's. Everyone else can just work, but there little innovation to be found in an assembly line.
I looked around for Linux printers, but realized nothing out there fit the small space that my currently uncooperative Lexmark takes up. I was facing the same rarity issue as those seeking 14 inch 4:3 LCDs. Single function color inkjets are going extinct, and my space fits were a dubious Canon Mobile an HP 100 Mobile I had vaguely seen online at some point. one. Paid $300 for the HP and my old jam-loving Linux-hating clunker will get canned when it runs out of ink.
I still do not understand why HP keeps Linux support hidden from us savvy shoppers, despite supporting MacOS X and including a whole addendum sheet about some post-print MacOS 10.7 gotcha inside the box. I was forced to use my smartphone to google the Linux support bit at the store before approving my purchase --salesperson had no clue because their stickers and even site has no clue, of course. Confirmation came straight out of the HP site in a google search, even. What gives? That's just like the nice surprise of IPv6 support in my 2009 high-end home router... maybe they don't want to cut into their own business-tier profits? But HP OfficeJets are supposedly already in the business tier.
Gnome 3 and Unity had turned me off, so I froze Ubuntu at 2010 versions until the laptop died this year. I thought I'd just keep linux in VM's forever in the new one, so my newfound Linux support allows me to give Linux another chance as a main OS in a dual-boot setup.
Pro-tip: Skip HP's urge to install their printer utilities by skipping autorun and manually using the Windows Add Printer wizard. I think the utils make sense only if you want new-fangled e-mail printing, or if you need control of scanner and fax features after buying some 20"x10" desk hog whose special features are best left for your office. My Oracle VM had no trouble letting Mint find and use the printer with no fuss.
For home users, you have to wonder if they're just being cheap. If they can't fork out for an OS upgrade once a decade, how else will they be like on the consumer side?
Home users do not differentiate an OS from their TANGIBLE hardware enough to care to upgrade it separately from their ancient machines; they just settle for whatever new one pops up with a new purchase. The fact is you rarely see noob users looking for an OS to buy in a software store anyway. Part of the issue is that OS's are *not* sold on TV --think of the I'm a Mac ads aimed at selling new machines and the Droid campaign, at selling NEW cell subscriptions. The few that upgrade the ancient Windows machines I mentioned up top see OS versions as akin to over-the-air IOS upgrades, and won't feel the need to pay a cent for change. They'll pirate only half-aware that the are supposed to go to a computer store.