But how many Instagram users are NOT already on Facebook?
*raises hand*
Well, at least I used to be an Instagram user. Just got it when they debuted it for Android. Since I can't fucking stand Facebook, I guess that means I'm now done with Instagram, since even if they do keep it as a stand alone product, they'll probably require a Facebook account.
/sigh...
Any recommendations anyone have for a good free Android alternative for something to take quick snapshots, apply a basic filter, and share them with people? Tried Vignette and Retro Camera and they both sucked compared to Instagram.
It still remains the only movie I've ever been to the cinema to see twice (as I believe is the case for quite a number of people).
My sister-in-law worked in a movie theater the year that came out and estimates she's seen it about 28 times. I asked her if she'd like to see it again, and she agreed, provided I "clawed [her] fucking eyes out first". I took that to mean no.
I wish theaters would re-show good movies now and then.
Me, too. There is a local theater here that features older films on special occasions, but that's mainly campy stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show or holiday related, I actually went there for a double feature of The Exorcist and The Crow a few years back on Halloween night.
I know that most movies wouldn't really make enough on a second showing to justify the expense, but I bet something like, say, the Indiana Jones trilogy (I keep hearing vicious rumors about a mysterious 4th one where Indy survives a nuclear blast in a fridge but they'd never do something that stupid, am I right?), or the Alien films, the first couple Terminators, etc...I bet those would make money.
Of course, knowing Hollywood, they'd probably insist on making them all 3D and ruining them because Hollywood fucking sucks.
I agree. The Star Trek universe is one I would love to visit. The Galactica universe, not so much. Not that I didn't enjoy them both, but really, Galactica is fucking depressing at all times.
The reason businesses are complaining is sunk cost. They spend money developing things using the Google Maps APIs, believing that they were free, and now they're not.
Isn't that always a risk when choosing to utilize and integrate a free service into your business, though? I admit, I don't own a business, but it seems like something that would be a factor in deciding what software I would use.
I suppose I can't fault commercial users for assuming the Maps API would be free to use forever and being irritated about the fact that they now have to decide whether to pay them or move to an alternative, but I can't fault Google for doing this any more than I can legitimately fault any other business. News organizations (especially print) have been slamming paywalls down, as well. People adapt.
Yeah, that article reeks of FUD. I can't imagine a terrorist would sit here and fuck around with an Xbox or PS3 when they can spend $10 American and get a piece of shit prepaid dumbphone to communicate with their terrorist friends.
I think stupid people just see terrorists around every corner. They're the "commies" of the 21st century; convenient bogeymen to sell more papers and drive more hits to your ads.
They are the company most known for giving away stuff for free to gain market share
Perhaps now they feel they've captured a significant enough portion of the market and decided to start capitalizing on it? That would be my (admittedly uninformed) guess. I can't even tell you the last time I got a link or saw an embedded map that was of the Yahoo or Bing variety.
I mean, it was great while it lasted, but things change; there wouldn't be nearly as many people angry about this if it wasn't beneficial to them to be using it in the first place, and Google wants a cut now that everybody and their sister uses Maps (not to mention almost every smart phone out there, in the US anyway). It may reek of the drug dealer giving the first hit for free, I won't deny that, but the concept of giving a service away for free or greatly reduced price is nothing new. Google didn't invent this concept, and if we're going to take issue with them for it, then I'd suppose we'd better take issue with pretty much every business on the planet...
Not necessarily, you can buy XBL time cards for cash, also...that's what I do, I refuse to give them my CC#. Ditto with PSN (you've got to be insane to trust them with your CC#, after all that bullshit last year.
As long as there is an alternative to using my CC#, I'm going to choose that. When they get rid of that ability, I stop spending money with them. It wouldn't really bother me much, anyway, to be honest; 99% of my gaming is on PC these days.
Yeah that's what I'm wondering. What useful information could be gleaned from a game console? Do they think that the terrorists are using Xbox Live and PSN to communicate now or what? How would that be any more beneficial than the plethora of pre-paid cell phones out there that cost next to nothing and can be tossed regularly?
Oh, I know exactly who Google's "customers" are, and it's obviously not the small business owners complaining about having to pay for commercial uses of Google's Maps API, is it?
Well, I suppose that small business will move on to one of those cheap or free alternatives, won't they?
Google Maps is obviously more than just a map, and the fact that commercial users are so pissed off about the fact that it costs money now proves that there is substantial value in integrating Google Maps, value that they were getting gratis, otherwise they would just say "fuck it" and move on to something else without all the bitching.
It's not like this is the first time that a commercial user has had to pay for something a private user got for free. Google's a business, too, and I'm sure that it costs them a fortune to maintain and update Maps. Maybe not $10,000 per year, per commercial license, but then again, there's a story right here on Slashdot about how Apple makes $575 per handset sold to Google's $2, and there are plenty of people that see no issue with that, so I don't understand the complaining here.
Well, unless it's another one of those "Apple deserves to make money hand over fist, but no one else!!" opinions, but I don't bother arguing with those people because they're retarded.
Last time I checked, maps is still free for people to use, they're just charging for commercial use, but that makes perfect sense. If you're a business, I can't see why you'd be complaining about having to pay a little something that makes it easier for your customers to find you. Nobody is forcing you to use Maps. Go ahead and switch if the expense is too much for you. As TFS states, there are other alternatives.
I have tried, but there was little improvement. This community is mainly young professionals, and I'd bet every single occupied unit is pumping out either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz or both, if they're rocking a dual-band router (which many must be, as I see many of the same SSID's on both bands). There are about 6 buildings here clustered around a central courtyard, each building has ~50 units, and the buildings are maybe 100' apart.
It doesn't even matter anyway, because most devices are still 2.4 GHz and likely will be for a while. I've gone hard-lined here in my house, but I still have a ton of devices than need wifi on the 2.4 GHz band, laptops, netbooks, tablets, our phones. I don't know why the hell it's taking so long for 5 GHz to catch on, or if device manufacturers just get a deal on the old shit or what, but it's obvious there needs to be some sort of protocol or regulation built in to these devices to teach them how to play nice together, even though they are on different networks. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to program them to communicate and cooperate to ensure good QoS on their respective LANs.
I was surprised as well, although to be fair I know a few people that made the leap and cut their terrestrial internet completely, doing everything via their mobile networks (they're uncapped, obviously; I'm sure if they get hit with the 2GB caps they'll be back to cable/dsl).
So the ~58% without wifi may not all be using old tech or anything, although I'm sure most are...
In my apartment, there are literally 30+ networks within range at all times, and to make matter worse, they channel surf up and down the band constantly. It didn't matter what channel you picked, if it was clear enough to be attractive, within a few minutes there would be a handful of other networks camped on top of yours as they constantly searched for clean channels.
I ended up having to go completely hard-lined because I couldn't even pull down 5 meg on a wireless-N connection 15 feet from the router, so now I've got wires across my ceilings and around doorways and shit all over my apartment, but at least I can pull down the 30 meg service I'm paying for. I just did a quick search with the Wifi scanner app on my phone just now and there are 12 networks parked on channel 5, 7 on channel 7, and the rest are just sitting here chasing each other up the band as I watch in real-time.
There needs to be a better way for routers to communicate with each other when they are within interference range and negotiate channel assignments because it's only going to get worse as more phones and shit come out with built in hotspots of their own, not to mention automobiles out in front of the damn building as well competing for spectrum.
I find it very odd that even here on/. that you get modded down for criticizing Obama's evolving dictatorial powers
Well, I don't ever get mod points, but I can tell you why I've begun to just tune those people out now: Because, more often than not, they follow up all that with defense or justification of the stupid Tea Party war on abortion, birth control, or sex-ed, how they shouldn't have to pay for the poor to get medical treatment, or how public schools are full of "liberal indoctrination", or college kids are all "entitled" and all sorts of other ultra-conservative nonsense.
Obama pisses me off in a lot of ways, and I'd be happy to discuss his shortcomings, but I refuse to do so if it's just to steer the conversation towards how the other side is better in some twisted way, and most of the time, that is exactly what happens. If someone wants to talk to me about how government is completely fucked up, from top to bottom, left and right? Fine, let's dish. If they want to try and spin it like Obama is some evil genius trying to "turn 'murika soshulist" and they automatically get ignored.
This isn't a Republican/Democrat problem. This is a problem with the whole fucking thing, across all three branches of government. The cult of Obama you complain about has just as large a cult on the other side, the cult of "everything wrong is Obama's fault"...and both cults are retarded.
I tried teaching my mom but I think it's just too far removed from her comfort zone to do unsupervised. Instead, I just get emails every few days asking me to get the newest episodes for her, but I don't mind. She's good at getting the episode names and everything, at least.
She was a pro at Napster and Kazaa and such back in the day, but I think torrents are just too complicated.
When I was in school, if they caught you playing with anything, be it a Gameboy, a Tiger Electronics handheld, or even listening to music on a walkman, they took it from you. Even on the fucking bus on your way to school, they took it from you and made you wait until the end of the fucking year to get it back. One kid had his TI-82 taken away for playing Tetris on it, and his mother had to go to the school board to get it back so he could use it for math; I probably gave the faculty of my high school about 8 walkmans over the course of my high school career. The only way we could possibly game during the school day was to surreptitiously install games on our computer lab PC's, and that only worked because the faculty was pretty much clueless when it came to computers (I had to bring my own copy of Windows 3.11 and update many of their computers myself, and I was certainly no David Lightman).
Standards must be very lax as far as that shit goes, today, though. I see kids as young as grade school age carrying around iPhones these days, and I can't imagine very many parents would take the same "then you shouldn't have brought it to school, asshole!" attitude my own parents did when their kid's cell phones get taken away.
Well, that's the price of those consoles now. I bought an Xbox 360 when the Elites launched, so I paid $549 for it. My PS3 was $300 (I waited a while on that), but I believe launch was between $499 and $599 for that, also. The Wii at launch was like $249, I believe, but based on it's hardware that was the price point it really belonged at (and greatly contributed to it's rousing success, I'm sure).
But still, I get your point, a console is definitely a cheaper alternative to a PC, but I don't think it's as cheap an alternative as it used to be. The "enthusiast gamer" descriptor is obviously very subjective, but I know people that "game" on $300 laptops. I don't think the appeal in consoles these days is there cheaper cost so much as their plug-and-play functionality. Unfortunately (for those of us that still build our own gaming rigs), that mentality is spilling over into the PC game market, which is why so many PC games are console ports, although I suppose I shouldn't really complain, as I'm still viably using a computer I built 4 years ago to play new games to this day at what I would consider console-equivalent (if not a little better) graphics settings. I admit I may be just as hazy in my own reckoning here as people are on console/game pricing, but I remember having to upgrade a hell of a lot more often than I do these days, especially graphics cards, which was a yearly expense for me between the late 90's to about the mid 2000's.
Then again, maybe it's more that I just "don't care" enough to buy the latest and greatest anymore. Either way, I really don't think we have it any worse these days than we used to, I think we're just hazy on how bad things used to be back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
But how many Instagram users are NOT already on Facebook?
*raises hand*
Well, at least I used to be an Instagram user. Just got it when they debuted it for Android. Since I can't fucking stand Facebook, I guess that means I'm now done with Instagram, since even if they do keep it as a stand alone product, they'll probably require a Facebook account.
/sigh...
Any recommendations anyone have for a good free Android alternative for something to take quick snapshots, apply a basic filter, and share them with people? Tried Vignette and Retro Camera and they both sucked compared to Instagram.
It still remains the only movie I've ever been to the cinema to see twice (as I believe is the case for quite a number of people).
My sister-in-law worked in a movie theater the year that came out and estimates she's seen it about 28 times. I asked her if she'd like to see it again, and she agreed, provided I "clawed [her] fucking eyes out first". I took that to mean no.
I wish theaters would re-show good movies now and then.
Me, too. There is a local theater here that features older films on special occasions, but that's mainly campy stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show or holiday related, I actually went there for a double feature of The Exorcist and The Crow a few years back on Halloween night.
I know that most movies wouldn't really make enough on a second showing to justify the expense, but I bet something like, say, the Indiana Jones trilogy (I keep hearing vicious rumors about a mysterious 4th one where Indy survives a nuclear blast in a fridge but they'd never do something that stupid, am I right?), or the Alien films, the first couple Terminators, etc...I bet those would make money.
Of course, knowing Hollywood, they'd probably insist on making them all 3D and ruining them because Hollywood fucking sucks.
Oh man, Titanic: Episode 1?! Who's gonna play Jar Jar? Excited!!
I agree. The Star Trek universe is one I would love to visit. The Galactica universe, not so much. Not that I didn't enjoy them both, but really, Galactica is fucking depressing at all times.
The reason businesses are complaining is sunk cost. They spend money developing things using the Google Maps APIs, believing that they were free, and now they're not.
Isn't that always a risk when choosing to utilize and integrate a free service into your business, though? I admit, I don't own a business, but it seems like something that would be a factor in deciding what software I would use.
I suppose I can't fault commercial users for assuming the Maps API would be free to use forever and being irritated about the fact that they now have to decide whether to pay them or move to an alternative, but I can't fault Google for doing this any more than I can legitimately fault any other business. News organizations (especially print) have been slamming paywalls down, as well. People adapt.
Yeah, that article reeks of FUD. I can't imagine a terrorist would sit here and fuck around with an Xbox or PS3 when they can spend $10 American and get a piece of shit prepaid dumbphone to communicate with their terrorist friends.
I think stupid people just see terrorists around every corner. They're the "commies" of the 21st century; convenient bogeymen to sell more papers and drive more hits to your ads.
They are the company most known for giving away stuff for free to gain market share
Perhaps now they feel they've captured a significant enough portion of the market and decided to start capitalizing on it? That would be my (admittedly uninformed) guess. I can't even tell you the last time I got a link or saw an embedded map that was of the Yahoo or Bing variety.
I mean, it was great while it lasted, but things change; there wouldn't be nearly as many people angry about this if it wasn't beneficial to them to be using it in the first place, and Google wants a cut now that everybody and their sister uses Maps (not to mention almost every smart phone out there, in the US anyway). It may reek of the drug dealer giving the first hit for free, I won't deny that, but the concept of giving a service away for free or greatly reduced price is nothing new. Google didn't invent this concept, and if we're going to take issue with them for it, then I'd suppose we'd better take issue with pretty much every business on the planet...
Not necessarily, you can buy XBL time cards for cash, also...that's what I do, I refuse to give them my CC#. Ditto with PSN (you've got to be insane to trust them with your CC#, after all that bullshit last year.
As long as there is an alternative to using my CC#, I'm going to choose that. When they get rid of that ability, I stop spending money with them. It wouldn't really bother me much, anyway, to be honest; 99% of my gaming is on PC these days.
I guess I'd better hide my copy of Custer's Revenge, otherwise I could be on a one way ticket to Gitmo...
Yeah that's what I'm wondering. What useful information could be gleaned from a game console? Do they think that the terrorists are using Xbox Live and PSN to communicate now or what? How would that be any more beneficial than the plethora of pre-paid cell phones out there that cost next to nothing and can be tossed regularly?
Oh, I know exactly who Google's "customers" are, and it's obviously not the small business owners complaining about having to pay for commercial uses of Google's Maps API, is it?
Well, I suppose that small business will move on to one of those cheap or free alternatives, won't they?
Google Maps is obviously more than just a map, and the fact that commercial users are so pissed off about the fact that it costs money now proves that there is substantial value in integrating Google Maps, value that they were getting gratis, otherwise they would just say "fuck it" and move on to something else without all the bitching.
It's not like this is the first time that a commercial user has had to pay for something a private user got for free. Google's a business, too, and I'm sure that it costs them a fortune to maintain and update Maps. Maybe not $10,000 per year, per commercial license, but then again, there's a story right here on Slashdot about how Apple makes $575 per handset sold to Google's $2, and there are plenty of people that see no issue with that, so I don't understand the complaining here.
Well, unless it's another one of those "Apple deserves to make money hand over fist, but no one else!!" opinions, but I don't bother arguing with those people because they're retarded.
Last time I checked, maps is still free for people to use, they're just charging for commercial use, but that makes perfect sense. If you're a business, I can't see why you'd be complaining about having to pay a little something that makes it easier for your customers to find you. Nobody is forcing you to use Maps. Go ahead and switch if the expense is too much for you. As TFS states, there are other alternatives.
Hooray for the free market!
I have tried, but there was little improvement. This community is mainly young professionals, and I'd bet every single occupied unit is pumping out either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz or both, if they're rocking a dual-band router (which many must be, as I see many of the same SSID's on both bands). There are about 6 buildings here clustered around a central courtyard, each building has ~50 units, and the buildings are maybe 100' apart.
It doesn't even matter anyway, because most devices are still 2.4 GHz and likely will be for a while. I've gone hard-lined here in my house, but I still have a ton of devices than need wifi on the 2.4 GHz band, laptops, netbooks, tablets, our phones. I don't know why the hell it's taking so long for 5 GHz to catch on, or if device manufacturers just get a deal on the old shit or what, but it's obvious there needs to be some sort of protocol or regulation built in to these devices to teach them how to play nice together, even though they are on different networks. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to program them to communicate and cooperate to ensure good QoS on their respective LANs.
I was surprised as well, although to be fair I know a few people that made the leap and cut their terrestrial internet completely, doing everything via their mobile networks (they're uncapped, obviously; I'm sure if they get hit with the 2GB caps they'll be back to cable/dsl).
So the ~58% without wifi may not all be using old tech or anything, although I'm sure most are...
I wish I had mod points for you, I really do...
In my apartment, there are literally 30+ networks within range at all times, and to make matter worse, they channel surf up and down the band constantly. It didn't matter what channel you picked, if it was clear enough to be attractive, within a few minutes there would be a handful of other networks camped on top of yours as they constantly searched for clean channels.
I ended up having to go completely hard-lined because I couldn't even pull down 5 meg on a wireless-N connection 15 feet from the router, so now I've got wires across my ceilings and around doorways and shit all over my apartment, but at least I can pull down the 30 meg service I'm paying for. I just did a quick search with the Wifi scanner app on my phone just now and there are 12 networks parked on channel 5, 7 on channel 7, and the rest are just sitting here chasing each other up the band as I watch in real-time.
There needs to be a better way for routers to communicate with each other when they are within interference range and negotiate channel assignments because it's only going to get worse as more phones and shit come out with built in hotspots of their own, not to mention automobiles out in front of the damn building as well competing for spectrum.
Never met a Marshall amp I didn't like. Met many I couldn't afford, but none that I didn't like.
Go for it! I mean, do we really need to regulate job titles now? If so, resumes are about to get a lot less colorful...
"I'm givin' ya all she's got, Cap'n!! She cannae take any more punishment!!!"
- Tim Cook
I find it very odd that even here on /. that you get modded down for criticizing Obama's evolving dictatorial powers
Well, I don't ever get mod points, but I can tell you why I've begun to just tune those people out now: Because, more often than not, they follow up all that with defense or justification of the stupid Tea Party war on abortion, birth control, or sex-ed, how they shouldn't have to pay for the poor to get medical treatment, or how public schools are full of "liberal indoctrination", or college kids are all "entitled" and all sorts of other ultra-conservative nonsense.
Obama pisses me off in a lot of ways, and I'd be happy to discuss his shortcomings, but I refuse to do so if it's just to steer the conversation towards how the other side is better in some twisted way, and most of the time, that is exactly what happens. If someone wants to talk to me about how government is completely fucked up, from top to bottom, left and right? Fine, let's dish. If they want to try and spin it like Obama is some evil genius trying to "turn 'murika soshulist" and they automatically get ignored.
This isn't a Republican/Democrat problem. This is a problem with the whole fucking thing, across all three branches of government. The cult of Obama you complain about has just as large a cult on the other side, the cult of "everything wrong is Obama's fault"...and both cults are retarded.
My mom learned to use bittorrent to get new shows
I tried teaching my mom but I think it's just too far removed from her comfort zone to do unsupervised. Instead, I just get emails every few days asking me to get the newest episodes for her, but I don't mind. She's good at getting the episode names and everything, at least.
She was a pro at Napster and Kazaa and such back in the day, but I think torrents are just too complicated.
Brilliant.
When I was in school, if they caught you playing with anything, be it a Gameboy, a Tiger Electronics handheld, or even listening to music on a walkman, they took it from you. Even on the fucking bus on your way to school, they took it from you and made you wait until the end of the fucking year to get it back. One kid had his TI-82 taken away for playing Tetris on it, and his mother had to go to the school board to get it back so he could use it for math; I probably gave the faculty of my high school about 8 walkmans over the course of my high school career. The only way we could possibly game during the school day was to surreptitiously install games on our computer lab PC's, and that only worked because the faculty was pretty much clueless when it came to computers (I had to bring my own copy of Windows 3.11 and update many of their computers myself, and I was certainly no David Lightman).
Standards must be very lax as far as that shit goes, today, though. I see kids as young as grade school age carrying around iPhones these days, and I can't imagine very many parents would take the same "then you shouldn't have brought it to school, asshole!" attitude my own parents did when their kid's cell phones get taken away.
Well, that's the price of those consoles now. I bought an Xbox 360 when the Elites launched, so I paid $549 for it. My PS3 was $300 (I waited a while on that), but I believe launch was between $499 and $599 for that, also. The Wii at launch was like $249, I believe, but based on it's hardware that was the price point it really belonged at (and greatly contributed to it's rousing success, I'm sure).
But still, I get your point, a console is definitely a cheaper alternative to a PC, but I don't think it's as cheap an alternative as it used to be. The "enthusiast gamer" descriptor is obviously very subjective, but I know people that "game" on $300 laptops. I don't think the appeal in consoles these days is there cheaper cost so much as their plug-and-play functionality. Unfortunately (for those of us that still build our own gaming rigs), that mentality is spilling over into the PC game market, which is why so many PC games are console ports, although I suppose I shouldn't really complain, as I'm still viably using a computer I built 4 years ago to play new games to this day at what I would consider console-equivalent (if not a little better) graphics settings. I admit I may be just as hazy in my own reckoning here as people are on console/game pricing, but I remember having to upgrade a hell of a lot more often than I do these days, especially graphics cards, which was a yearly expense for me between the late 90's to about the mid 2000's.
Then again, maybe it's more that I just "don't care" enough to buy the latest and greatest anymore. Either way, I really don't think we have it any worse these days than we used to, I think we're just hazy on how bad things used to be back in the day.