Arnold may be getting old, but he's definitely not *too* old. Besides, who else is going to play the Terminator besides him?
James Cameron is apparently not in the running for this film, though. Pity.
The plot, which is so obvious everyone's been talking about it since T2, takes place in the future that both T1 and T2 were always talking about. So we're not trying to improve on those movies; we're trying to round them out and answer once and for all whether or not John Conner's future is going to take place.
Besdies, a remote control car starter just sounds like a *really* bad idea. No benefit, all kinds of possible security breaches. You want to make your car easier to steal for no good reason?
Well, the usual reasons include: You want to warm your car up on a cold morning before you get into it. You want to air-condition your car cooler on a hot day before you get into it. You want to know where your car is in a crowded shopping mall parking lot.
These remote-starter devices have been around for many many years for good reasons, you know.
If you want to protect your car from being started without a key, you need to make sure the key is physically there. Hence, no remote-starting. The way around this would seem to be buying the car with a remote-starter and anti-theft, or else buying one without both and then installing technology to do both.
I don't see why this means "hacking your car" is a thing of the past. It just means you need an anti-theft device that's more compatible.
Great -- someone's finally figured out that they can create a Trojan horse that not only digs a back door into your system, but silently kills off the guards at the front as well.
Next thing we know they'll be rewriting Microsoft's system auto-updater to download even more viral code into your system. Won't that be nice?
Neither service will allow users to transfer songs to portable devices or to CDs -- both considered essential features by many online music fans.
This is the problem in a nutshell -- not the fact that I lose the songs if I end my subscription, but the fact that I can't back them up, take them with me, or burn them to CDs. Sure I listen to music on my computer, but I'm never bound to it. I can carry it away on CD or upload it to another machine at any time.
If this service allowed me to download music to my home entertainment system and archive the songs on it, then this might be marketable. At least that way the music is located someplace where I or others will listen to it most. But this is a failure waiting to happen. If it was free, I'd accept the restrictions on portability. For $10 a month, nobody will.
Move the "Search" field from the bottom of the (very long) home page to somewhere near the top. Search, either as a form field or a hyperlink, should be immediately visible upon every page load.
There's too many navigation links on the top-left: "faq code awards privacy journals" etc. etc. Trim it down to 6-8 links that users can scan quickly, or else subgroup them into similar chunks. I still have to search for the "submit story" link in the middle of that morass every time I want to send something in. I'm sure that "submit story", "topics", "preferences" and "faq" are far and away the most-used links in the entire navigation; they should be highlighted or set apart specially.
"Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing. Color should be used consistently the same or consistently different.
And let you think I have nothing positive to say:
The division of content on the home page is bold, bright, and obvious. The use of icons with mouseover-able ALT text to indicate what topic each story belongs to is obvious by now, but very helpful and not as widely used as perhaps it should be. External content is clustered tightly but clearly on the right; navigation is clustered on the left.
The use of five icons at the top of the homepage to indicate the five most recently updated topics is a good move, driving curious clickers to the "hot topics" of the moment.
Comments are easy to sort, easy to scan, and easy to rearrange from the top of every story page. I almost never change my preferences for comments, but I never had trouble doing so when I wanted to.
Ad banners are Evil in general, but Slashdot's remain small, relevant and non-popuppy. We Love It(tm); may this never change.
Except you can't sync the iPod's playlists to more than one Mac. (However, you can copy it manually, which is more than these other players seem to be doing.)
The article claims that the desktop metaphor was designed for the age when computers consisted of no hard drive and only a floppy drive to run the system. I can't see how this is really true. Apple's Macintosh, from the very beginning, allowed folders to be nested inside folders, allowing an infinite amount of scalability -- something that Windows 3.1 didn't offer at the time. It's clear that the Mac OS was intended to scale to large numbers of files and folders, and allowed the user to customize how they wanted things organized. It worked well, and still works, because many many people are STILL coming to computers from a non-computing environment, and need that kind of simple familiarity.
Of the options listed in the article, Scopeware is the only one that looks remotely intuitive to me -- and that's only because it's basically a search engine for your computer. Call it a diary metaphor all you like, but it's basically a combination of two things: the "Recent Documents" history that my browser uses, and a database-driven search engine that indexes every document as I create or modify it. Sounds a lot like my web browser to me. Nothing too revolutionary there, it seems to me.
And, as other/.ers have pointed out, I munged two of the other book titles./me promises to double-check his facts better before submitting a review next time.
...there's one illustration featuring a rather attractive topless Egyptian goddess, and another depicting Death's horse as discretely but clearly anatomically correct. Perhaps those were "cleaned up" in the American version, or perhaps British children aren't quite as Puritanical. But I doubt Pratchett has ever written Discworld books with a children's audience in mind.
For a different perspective...
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...take a look at C|Net's review of Microsoft's strategies with the Xbox. Bottom line of their article is that Microsoft has had to put on a completely different face to court developers for their game console, switching from monopolistic tyrant to play-nice we-want-to-help-you-succeed hardware investor. According to the quotes cited, it's worked, too. So far.
...of having a virtual keyboard for a Palm handheld computer, if you can't hold the keyboard while you're using it?
Another cute idea, but I can't see it taking off. Either the popular folding keyboards or some modified Graffiti-ish entry system like Fitaly seem to work much more "handily."
The review/preview makes a big deal about how most laptop DVD players drain the batteries before the movie is entirely over, or very shortly after. Using a dedicated graphics chip to render the animation should improve the battery life by quite a bit.
...because Microsoft is implicitly saying that it's okay to enable Active Scripting on Microsoft sites because you can trust them. Despite the fact that they're the ones who gave you this security vulnerability in the first place.
Even better example, which I somehow forgot in my first post: The Matrix trailer. You can still find it at www.whatisthematrix.com, although it's kind of buried. It gives lots of clips from the movie, but succeeds terrifically in two ways: first, it gives away absolutely NOTHING about the movie plot. Second, it shows a lot of the eye candy from the movie while still saving lots of equally-good eye candy for the people who buy tickets.
Not quite as minimal as the Alien trailer you cited, but just as effective. At least for me.
they do it so that when PVR'd copies of programs show up online, it's easier for them to claim ownership.
You may not have noticed, but the corner logos have been there for literally years before PVRs became popular. And are they really that common online? Even a twenty-minute sitcom would take me so long to download via broadband, it's more worth my while to wait for the rerun.
The logos are for brand awareness, pure and simple. When there are 500 channels via cable for people to choose from, NBC needs to do *something* to make theirs stand out.
"Fifty-seven channels and nothing on." Nowadays, thanks to cable and digital satellite TV, it's more like five hundred seventy. Each channel needs to somehow distinguish itself from the others, and with syndication further muddying the waters, it's getting harder and harder.
Hence the corner logos. They're more brightly-colored these days because the networks keep weaving American flags into them post-9/11, but usually they're monochromatic and very subdued. They sit in the corner, out of the way and not interfering in the program, giving everyone a ready reminder of whose network they're watching so that they can find it again in a sea of dozens or hundreds of cable channels.
As for the complaints: is anyone really complaining about them? As I said, they're subtle and subdued, and nearly all channels have acknowledged that they're better off not animating them on a constant basis. The only people who have cause to be annoyed about them, as near as I can tell, are the people who tape shows or movies and archive them for posterity -- something the networks don't like you doing anyways, since if you're using a VCR then you're not watching the commercials those networks rely on.
There's no nationwide American movement to remove these logos because there's no real need to remove them. They provide brand awareness for the networks, they don't interfere with the program, and they're not nearly as obnoxious as, say an X-10 popup ad or the flashing ThinkGeek banners I'm forced to stare at right now.
...not *all* trailers spoil the entire plot for a movie. But some do. And in my experience, the ones that do that do so because they had to scrounge the entire film in order to find enough interesting, amazing, or funny bits to make a trailer. Once you've seen the trailer, you've seen all the bits worth watching. (Commercials for sitcoms work much the same way.)
Case in point: Disney threw in a trailer for their theatrical sequel to "Peter Pan," cleverly entitled "Return to Neverland." It involves Wendy's daughter and the entire Neverland cast of the original movie, and apparently some Wacky Adventures. Based on that (and, admittedly, my previous experience with non-Pixar Disney sequels), I now know everything I need to know about this movie. My wife and daughter can go see it themselves in February; I know for a fact I won't be missing anything.
If they don't provide an entire plot to you, then you're probably safe going to see it. There will be enough surprises to make it worth your $7.50. Otherwise, take a pass and wait for the Rotten Tomatoes rating to come in.
A new software package, dubbed "Fizt" (or something similar, I can't find the news article I read Friday) , was created by Pixar for this movie. It generated the fur on Sully, as well as the t-shirt on Boo, as a product of the wind, lighting, and motion in the animated environment automatically. This allowed the animators to concentrate on the animations of the characters themselves, and let the software automatically save them literally weeks at a shot.
"Fizt" actually appears on one of the buttons used to control the closet doors in the factory. Cute touch.
Re:First Airport, now this...
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs.
True, but it's a little weird to see that the OS for this device isn't actually Apple's, but a third party's. Seems like the only thing Apple really contributed to it was the design and, of course, the iTunes 2 integration.
But hey, it looks like a Mac product and works like a Mac product. Who really cares who actually designed the guts?
Now if only they'd open-source the OS so that we could build our own....
Everyone knows that the first CD players and DVD players cost nearly $1000 or more when they first came out. They come down when they become more popular, the manufacturing process becomes more standardized, and the demand is high enough to justify it.
As for your $300 CD jukebox, check out the specs on this toy -- internet connectivity, TV display, HomePNA broadcasting, and of course, a larger hard drive. Feature-wise, there's no comparison.
Kenwood released a similar device not too long ago: the Entre entertainment hub. Yeah, it's about twice as expensive, but it's targetted at audiophiles and offers additional features to boot: a graphical user interface that displays on your television, indexing and control of Kenwood's 400-disc DVD/CD player, Internet radio, and homePNA support so you can send audio anywhere else in your house.
Slashdot Mirror
Arnold may be getting old, but he's definitely not *too* old. Besides, who else is going to play the Terminator besides him?
James Cameron is apparently not in the running for this film, though. Pity.
The plot, which is so obvious everyone's been talking about it since T2, takes place in the future that both T1 and T2 were always talking about. So we're not trying to improve on those movies; we're trying to round them out and answer once and for all whether or not John Conner's future is going to take place.
Besdies, a remote control car starter just sounds like a *really* bad idea. No benefit, all kinds of possible security breaches. You want to make your car easier to steal for no good reason?
Well, the usual reasons include: You want to warm your car up on a cold morning before you get into it. You want to air-condition your car cooler on a hot day before you get into it. You want to know where your car is in a crowded shopping mall parking lot.
These remote-starter devices have been around for many many years for good reasons, you know.
If you want to protect your car from being started without a key, you need to make sure the key is physically there. Hence, no remote-starting. The way around this would seem to be buying the car with a remote-starter and anti-theft, or else buying one without both and then installing technology to do both.
I don't see why this means "hacking your car" is a thing of the past. It just means you need an anti-theft device that's more compatible.
Great -- someone's finally figured out that they can create a Trojan horse that not only digs a back door into your system, but silently kills off the guards at the front as well.
Next thing we know they'll be rewriting Microsoft's system auto-updater to download even more viral code into your system. Won't that be nice?
Neither service will allow users to transfer songs to portable devices or to CDs -- both considered essential features by many online music fans.
This is the problem in a nutshell -- not the fact that I lose the songs if I end my subscription, but the fact that I can't back them up, take them with me, or burn them to CDs. Sure I listen to music on my computer, but I'm never bound to it. I can carry it away on CD or upload it to another machine at any time.
If this service allowed me to download music to my home entertainment system and archive the songs on it, then this might be marketable. At least that way the music is located someplace where I or others will listen to it most. But this is a failure waiting to happen. If it was free, I'd accept the restrictions on portability. For $10 a month, nobody will.
- "Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing. Color should be used consistently the same or consistently different.
And let you think I have nothing positive to say:Except you can't sync the iPod's playlists to more than one Mac. (However, you can copy it manually, which is more than these other players seem to be doing.)
It seems yesterday's article on next-generation user interfaces might be closely tied to this one.
The article claims that the desktop metaphor was designed for the age when computers consisted of no hard drive and only a floppy drive to run the system. I can't see how this is really true. Apple's Macintosh, from the very beginning, allowed folders to be nested inside folders, allowing an infinite amount of scalability -- something that Windows 3.1 didn't offer at the time. It's clear that the Mac OS was intended to scale to large numbers of files and folders, and allowed the user to customize how they wanted things organized. It worked well, and still works, because many many people are STILL coming to computers from a non-computing environment, and need that kind of simple familiarity.
Of the options listed in the article, Scopeware is the only one that looks remotely intuitive to me -- and that's only because it's basically a search engine for your computer. Call it a diary metaphor all you like, but it's basically a combination of two things: the "Recent Documents" history that my browser uses, and a database-driven search engine that indexes every document as I create or modify it. Sounds a lot like my web browser to me. Nothing too revolutionary there, it seems to me.
And, as other /.ers have pointed out, I munged two of the other book titles. /me promises to double-check his facts better before submitting a review next time.
...there's one illustration featuring a rather attractive topless Egyptian goddess, and another depicting Death's horse as discretely but clearly anatomically correct. Perhaps those were "cleaned up" in the American version, or perhaps British children aren't quite as Puritanical. But I doubt Pratchett has ever written Discworld books with a children's audience in mind.
...take a look at C|Net's review of Microsoft's strategies with the Xbox. Bottom line of their article is that Microsoft has had to put on a completely different face to court developers for their game console, switching from monopolistic tyrant to play-nice we-want-to-help-you-succeed hardware investor. According to the quotes cited, it's worked, too. So far.
...of having a virtual keyboard for a Palm handheld computer, if you can't hold the keyboard while you're using it?
Another cute idea, but I can't see it taking off. Either the popular folding keyboards or some modified Graffiti-ish entry system like Fitaly seem to work much more "handily."
The review/preview makes a big deal about how most laptop DVD players drain the batteries before the movie is entirely over, or very shortly after. Using a dedicated graphics chip to render the animation should improve the battery life by quite a bit.
...because Microsoft is implicitly saying that it's okay to enable Active Scripting on Microsoft sites because you can trust them. Despite the fact that they're the ones who gave you this security vulnerability in the first place.
Even better example, which I somehow forgot in my first post: The Matrix trailer. You can still find it at www.whatisthematrix.com, although it's kind of buried. It gives lots of clips from the movie, but succeeds terrifically in two ways: first, it gives away absolutely NOTHING about the movie plot. Second, it shows a lot of the eye candy from the movie while still saving lots of equally-good eye candy for the people who buy tickets.
Not quite as minimal as the Alien trailer you cited, but just as effective. At least for me.
Thanks, I knew I'd heard that rant in the past. I hadn't recalled exactly where. Doesn't surprise me some other Slashdotter would. :-)
they do it so that when PVR'd copies of programs show up online, it's easier for them to claim ownership.
You may not have noticed, but the corner logos have been there for literally years before PVRs became popular. And are they really that common online? Even a twenty-minute sitcom would take me so long to download via broadband, it's more worth my while to wait for the rerun.
The logos are for brand awareness, pure and simple. When there are 500 channels via cable for people to choose from, NBC needs to do *something* to make theirs stand out.
"Fifty-seven channels and nothing on." Nowadays, thanks to cable and digital satellite TV, it's more like five hundred seventy. Each channel needs to somehow distinguish itself from the others, and with syndication further muddying the waters, it's getting harder and harder.
Hence the corner logos. They're more brightly-colored these days because the networks keep weaving American flags into them post-9/11, but usually they're monochromatic and very subdued. They sit in the corner, out of the way and not interfering in the program, giving everyone a ready reminder of whose network they're watching so that they can find it again in a sea of dozens or hundreds of cable channels.
As for the complaints: is anyone really complaining about them? As I said, they're subtle and subdued, and nearly all channels have acknowledged that they're better off not animating them on a constant basis. The only people who have cause to be annoyed about them, as near as I can tell, are the people who tape shows or movies and archive them for posterity -- something the networks don't like you doing anyways, since if you're using a VCR then you're not watching the commercials those networks rely on.
There's no nationwide American movement to remove these logos because there's no real need to remove them. They provide brand awareness for the networks, they don't interfere with the program, and they're not nearly as obnoxious as, say an X-10 popup ad or the flashing ThinkGeek banners I'm forced to stare at right now.
...not *all* trailers spoil the entire plot for a movie. But some do. And in my experience, the ones that do that do so because they had to scrounge the entire film in order to find enough interesting, amazing, or funny bits to make a trailer. Once you've seen the trailer, you've seen all the bits worth watching. (Commercials for sitcoms work much the same way.)
Case in point: Disney threw in a trailer for their theatrical sequel to "Peter Pan," cleverly entitled "Return to Neverland." It involves Wendy's daughter and the entire Neverland cast of the original movie, and apparently some Wacky Adventures. Based on that (and, admittedly, my previous experience with non-Pixar Disney sequels), I now know everything I need to know about this movie. My wife and daughter can go see it themselves in February; I know for a fact I won't be missing anything.
If they don't provide an entire plot to you, then you're probably safe going to see it. There will be enough surprises to make it worth your $7.50. Otherwise, take a pass and wait for the Rotten Tomatoes rating to come in.
A new software package, dubbed "Fizt" (or something similar, I can't find the news article I read Friday) , was created by Pixar for this movie. It generated the fur on Sully, as well as the t-shirt on Boo, as a product of the wind, lighting, and motion in the animated environment automatically. This allowed the animators to concentrate on the animations of the characters themselves, and let the software automatically save them literally weeks at a shot.
"Fizt" actually appears on one of the buttons used to control the closet doors in the factory. Cute touch.
I'm *glad* Apple doesn't restrict itself to only in-house designs.
True, but it's a little weird to see that the OS for this device isn't actually Apple's, but a third party's. Seems like the only thing Apple really contributed to it was the design and, of course, the iTunes 2 integration.
But hey, it looks like a Mac product and works like a Mac product. Who really cares who actually designed the guts?
Now if only they'd open-source the OS so that we could build our own....
...is your MP3-recording PC really that much more attractive as a living room appliance?
Everyone knows that the first CD players and DVD players cost nearly $1000 or more when they first came out. They come down when they become more popular, the manufacturing process becomes more standardized, and the demand is high enough to justify it.
As for your $300 CD jukebox, check out the specs on this toy -- internet connectivity, TV display, HomePNA broadcasting, and of course, a larger hard drive. Feature-wise, there's no comparison.
Kenwood released a similar device not too long ago: the Entre entertainment hub. Yeah, it's about twice as expensive, but it's targetted at audiophiles and offers additional features to boot: a graphical user interface that displays on your television, indexing and control of Kenwood's 400-disc DVD/CD player, Internet radio, and homePNA support so you can send audio anywhere else in your house.