I seem to recall that he did NOT have a monitor at his workstation providing a video feed of the launch. Which is why the "OH WOW SO HEARTLESS AND COLD" thing doesn't really hold water. Dude was looking at the raw data feed and didn't have anything else to go on.
I think you haven't given their keyboards a chance. As far as I'm concerned, the Apple keyboard is the best keyboard on the market. My typing speed increased by ten words per minute after I got used to it. They do take a while to get used to because the flat keytops don't center your fingers for you like concave keys do, but I think that in the long term this leads to more accurate typing.
Their mice, on the other hand, are terrible.
A million times this.
The current Apple keyboard looks like it would be a throwback to the shitty keyboards of the early '80s. I avoided using one for years, preferring loud, clicky keyboards that inherited the legacy of the Type M. Then I got a Macbook and had no choice in the matter. Turns out I was wrong all this time.
The flat Apple keyboard is the best I've ever used, and I can't explain why. It does do wonders for your typing speed, and doesn't lead to wrist strain as easily as more traditional keyboards. I've got major arthritis thanks to a bad injury, and it doesn't get aggrivated as easily as it once did.
The only drawback is that Apple refuses to produce a wireless keyboard with a number pad. Thankfully, those of us who want to stick with wired models don't have to deal with that nonsense.
I found a much less expensive place to buy legit music from. Singles only 15 cents and most expensive album I have ever purchased was under $3 and it was a double. soundike.com They may not have as extensive a collection but for the price!! Before passing judgment check them out. Its a Russian site but the tunes are legal and in 3 years I have NEVER had them screw me or cheat me out of my money or my identity.
From what I've heard, the Russian sites usually pocket 100% of the revenue. Which is worse than simply pirating the tracks.
I remember being able to add a class schedule to my profile, and then being able to look up other people in my class on Facebook. It seems this feature is now gone, or perhaps it's just unavailable to me since I'm no longer enrolled in school.
They decided to make it an application, not an integrated part of Facebook. Which was beyond stupid, as it required everyone in your classes to use the same courses application. And there seemed to be about a dozen or more.
Status updates are effectively gone. They are no longer stuck to the top of your profile and get buried in your own news feed. Sure, they still show up in the main news feed where it may or may not be seen thanks to the amount of info being dumped on the page, but it seems pretty nonsensical to have someone go to your profile and not be able to see your status at a glance.
As for photos, let me break this down.
When...
...I go to the profile of a person I'm not friends with on FB and discover the entire thing is locked down. I cannot see anything at all beyond their profile photo.
...I click on "Photos" and get a blank page with the "LOL, you don't have permission to see any of the photos this user has uploaded" message.
...I cannot see anything in the album my friend is tagged in except for the photos they're tagged in.
Then I'm going to assume that yes, Facebook has allowed me limited access to private data that I should not have access to. If someone I'm not friends with sets an album privacy to "Friends of Friends" then I can cycle through the entire album. This is a security breach.
This explains bizarre feature regressions
on
How Facebook Ships Code
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I know they're always looking to "streamline" Facebook, but sometimes really obviously good features vanish without explanation and leave users scratching their heads. These decisions would make more sense if you could see some way that FB was making life easier for advertisers or something, but often, the feature regressions are just nonsensical to the extreme.
A few:
- Facebook got rid of statuses. The one e-crack feature they're best known for. Gone with the new profile. Now they're just wall posts to yourself that quickly fall down the page. *facepalm*
- Photos are now uploaded in descending order. It used to be that a group of images would be uploaded like this: beachtrip-1.jpg, beachtrip-2.jpg... and so on. Now it reverses the order of an uploaded album. The last photos taken are displayed first. Posting vacation pics? Well your friends get to see the day you left and work their way back to the day you arrived.
- The "Reverse Photo Order" option was removed when the above "feature" was introduced. You can drag around photos to manually reorder them, but every photo that you mouse-over jumps out of the way and moves to different rows. It's a UI disaster.
- A few months ago I started seeing tagged photos of friends despite the fact they were in private albums of people I'm not friends with who also happen to have locked-down profiles where you can't see anything at all unless you add them.
You can do D-76 processing in your bathroom with strong coffee, and the right off-the-shelf equipment.
You can do C-41 processing in your basement with the right chemicals and off-the-shelf equipment.
K-14 is another beast entirely and demands all kind of proprietary chems that you simply cannot find because they no longer exist. Even if you had the chemicals, you wouldn't have the equipment process the images properly.
What really needed to happen here was another instance of someone pulling together The Impossible Project which (thanks to a chance meeting at a bar) salvaged the last Polaroid processing equipment riiiiiiight before it was to be scrapped, and then reverse-engineered the chemicals needed to produce and develop the film.
(Note: I don't have any financial stake in their success, but I have to say the staff at the IP are amazing, and some of the nicest bunch of people I've dealt with in the photo world. Please give them your business.)
I've read a lot of comments about how it's "dangerous" to report this sort of thing. I'm gonna need to see some proof of that. A news story would be helpful.
The law contains a safe harbor provision. "Promptly reporting in good faith to law enforcement" is an affirmative defense. I seem to recall from the recent Wikipedia admin drama that there is another statute somewhere stating that it is illegal NOT to report it as well.
If someone can link to an article describing someone being arrested for reporting something, please post it. According to the Cyber Tip line, their site alone has received over 835,000 reports of illegal porn. I highly doubt those people are going to prison for it. If they were, nobody would report it.
I came across this book around 1993 / 1994. It was a thing of beauty - pretty much the entire history of personal computing up until that point. It didn't just contain flashy articles sure to bring in the mass market readers, but pieces that provided an amazing amount of perspective on the progression of hardware and software. I seem to recall stories on exciting new 20MB hard drives, (failed) networking standards, processor development, along with the usual "Launch of the Mac", "Launch of the IBM PC" and previews of the sure-to-be-amazing PCjr. My only gripe was that the collection of old computer ads were pretty much illegible photocopies.
I am curious why the army didn't develop their own smartphone. Probably hardened and weighting three time an iPhone, and probably with a funky acronym as a name.
You forgot the part where each one costs $45,000 and is really just a hardened Atari Portfolio with WiFi.
It really sucks, and is not getting much better anytime soon. New consoles are very expensive, and a $150 - $200 controller + game combo is a much easier investment than $400 + games + misc crap you end up buying with a new console (e.x: they rarely come with the cables you want). Don't forget that retailers love to throw mandatory bundles at early adopters. So a new console can easily cost between $500 - $600 after all is said and done.
Then you've got to consider the economics of the hardware itself. Both the 360 and PS3 took a while to become anything but money sinks. A lot longer than many expected (more so in the case of the 360). While the original Xbox was surprisingly solid and well-designed, if bulky, the 360 was rushed through development. It was released with a lot of stupid, stupid, stupid design flaws that took forever to deal with. Apparently the key people that made the good decisions in '99 - '01 weren't around to prevent the money-losing disaster that was the 360. (Side note: The lack of a standard hard drive was to me, the first sign that Redmond had bungled the project on the managerial level, and bad things were on the horizon)
The PS3 was designed to get Blu-Ray into your living room, and consequently, the initial cost was absolutely absurd. Sony's response amounted to "Deal with it. You'll pay it."
People largely didn't. It took a while for the platform to pick up steam.
The Cell processor didn't become the industry-changing force Sony hoped. Sure, IBM uses it for some stuff, but the development costs weren't amortized over multiple platforms to the degree Sony had imagined. It was supposed to show up in all sorts of consumer electronics, but that never happened. They even offered the chip to Apple when it was getting ready to ditch the PowerPC, and Steve Jobs turned them down for technical reasons.
By now the Xbox 360 hardware has been stabilized - the bugs finally squashed. The 360 and PS3 have been value-engineered to be much cheaper to build. Both Sony and Microsoft are finally able to make the kind of money they were hoping to rake in a long time ago. While new consoles are undoubtably under development, Microsoft and Sony's investors are probably not interested in them losing tons more on another launch in a crappy economy.
When anyone announces their next-generation console, the scramble is on. Interesting that no one seems interested yet.
There are two reasons.
The economy really sucks. New consoles are very expensive, and a $150 - $200 controller + game combo is a much easier investment than $400 + games + misc crap you end up buying with a new console (e.x: they rarely come with the cables you want). Don't forget that retailers love to throw mandatory bundles at early adopters. So a new console can easily cost between $500 - $600 after all is said and done.
Then you've got to consider the economics of the hardware itself. Both the 360 and PS3 took a while to become anything but money sinks. While the original Xbox was surprisingly solid and well-designed, if bulky, the 360 was rushed through development. It was released with a lot of stupid, stupid, stupid design flaws that took forever to deal with. Apparently the key people that made the good decisions in '98 / '99 weren't around to prevent the money-losing disaster that was the 360. (Side note: The lack of a standard hard drive was to me, the first sign that Redmond had bungled the project on the managerial level, and bad things were on the horizon)
The PS3 was designed to get Blu-Ray into your living room, and the initial cost was absolutely absurd. Sony's response amounted to "Deal with it. You'll pay it."
People largely didn't.
The Cell processor didn't become the industry-changing force Sony hoped. Sure, IBM uses it for some stuff, but the development costs weren't amortized over multiple platforms to the degree Sony had imagined. (They offered the chip to Apple when it was getting ready to ditch the PowerPC, and Steve Jobs turned them down for technical reasons.) The Cell was supposed to show up in all sorts of consumer electronics, but that never happened.
So they lost money too. A lot of it.
By now the Xbox 360 hardware has been stabilized - the bugs squashed. The 360 and PS3 have been value-engineered to be much cheaper to build. Both Sony and Microsoft are finally able to make the kind of money they were hoping to rake in a long time ago. While new consoles are undoubtably under development, Microsoft and Sony's investors are probably not interested in them losing tons more on another launch in a crappy economy.
Home internet connections long ago went from being a pipe you could do whatever (non-network-abusive) things you wanted to with, to a pipe you're expected to use to read your email hosted somewhere else and watch Netflix.
I don't think Comcast wants you to watch Netflix either. That actually uses bandwidth.
I'm surprised they haven't come down on people for leaving their mail programs open all day./halfjoking
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
I seem to recall that he did NOT have a monitor at his workstation providing a video feed of the launch. Which is why the "OH WOW SO HEARTLESS AND COLD" thing doesn't really hold water. Dude was looking at the raw data feed and didn't have anything else to go on.
I can buy this, and then brag to the other cults that it's SO much better than THEIR end of the world refuges.
I think you haven't given their keyboards a chance. As far as I'm concerned, the Apple keyboard is the best keyboard on the market. My typing speed increased by ten words per minute after I got used to it. They do take a while to get used to because the flat keytops don't center your fingers for you like concave keys do, but I think that in the long term this leads to more accurate typing.
Their mice, on the other hand, are terrible.
A million times this.
The current Apple keyboard looks like it would be a throwback to the shitty keyboards of the early '80s. I avoided using one for years, preferring loud, clicky keyboards that inherited the legacy of the Type M. Then I got a Macbook and had no choice in the matter. Turns out I was wrong all this time.
The flat Apple keyboard is the best I've ever used, and I can't explain why. It does do wonders for your typing speed, and doesn't lead to wrist strain as easily as more traditional keyboards. I've got major arthritis thanks to a bad injury, and it doesn't get aggrivated as easily as it once did.
The only drawback is that Apple refuses to produce a wireless keyboard with a number pad. Thankfully, those of us who want to stick with wired models don't have to deal with that nonsense.
And yes, Apple's mice suck. Badly.
I found a much less expensive place to buy legit music from. Singles only 15 cents and most expensive album I have ever purchased was under $3 and it was a double. soundike.com
They may not have as extensive a collection but for the price!! Before passing judgment check them out. Its a Russian site but the tunes are legal and in 3 years I have NEVER had them screw me or cheat me out of my money or my identity.
From what I've heard, the Russian sites usually pocket 100% of the revenue. Which is worse than simply pirating the tracks.
They didn't release it under the GPL.
I remember being able to add a class schedule to my profile, and then being able to look up other people in my class on Facebook. It seems this feature is now gone, or perhaps it's just unavailable to me since I'm no longer enrolled in school.
They decided to make it an application, not an integrated part of Facebook. Which was beyond stupid, as it required everyone in your classes to use the same courses application. And there seemed to be about a dozen or more.
Status updates are effectively gone. They are no longer stuck to the top of your profile and get buried in your own news feed. Sure, they still show up in the main news feed where it may or may not be seen thanks to the amount of info being dumped on the page, but it seems pretty nonsensical to have someone go to your profile and not be able to see your status at a glance.
As for photos, let me break this down.
When...
Then I'm going to assume that yes, Facebook has allowed me limited access to private data that I should not have access to. If someone I'm not friends with sets an album privacy to "Friends of Friends" then I can cycle through the entire album. This is a security breach.
I know they're always looking to "streamline" Facebook, but sometimes really obviously good features vanish without explanation and leave users scratching their heads. These decisions would make more sense if you could see some way that FB was making life easier for advertisers or something, but often, the feature regressions are just nonsensical to the extreme.
A few:
- Facebook got rid of statuses. The one e-crack feature they're best known for. Gone with the new profile. Now they're just wall posts to yourself that quickly fall down the page. *facepalm*
- Photos are now uploaded in descending order. It used to be that a group of images would be uploaded like this: beachtrip-1.jpg, beachtrip-2.jpg... and so on. Now it reverses the order of an uploaded album. The last photos taken are displayed first. Posting vacation pics? Well your friends get to see the day you left and work their way back to the day you arrived.
- The "Reverse Photo Order" option was removed when the above "feature" was introduced. You can drag around photos to manually reorder them, but every photo that you mouse-over jumps out of the way and moves to different rows. It's a UI disaster.
- A few months ago I started seeing tagged photos of friends despite the fact they were in private albums of people I'm not friends with who also happen to have locked-down profiles where you can't see anything at all unless you add them.
The 10th Birthday of Wikipedia
- Introduction
- History of Wikipedia
- In Animé
- In Manga
- In Graphic Novels
- In Western Animation
- External Links
Anybody have a blurry, grainy cell phone camera to take a shot of the main page?
D-76 is a developer, not a process.
LOL yes. I was collapsing from a lack of sleep when I wrote that. ;)
...thus the need for strong coffee?
Yes, apparently my subconscious can access my Slashdot account now.
D-76 is a developer, not a process.
LOL yes. I was collapsing from a lack of sleep when I wrote that. ;)
You can do D-76 processing in your bathroom with strong coffee, and the right off-the-shelf equipment.
You can do C-41 processing in your basement with the right chemicals and off-the-shelf equipment.
K-14 is another beast entirely and demands all kind of proprietary chems that you simply cannot find because they no longer exist. Even if you had the chemicals, you wouldn't have the equipment process the images properly.
What really needed to happen here was another instance of someone pulling together The Impossible Project which (thanks to a chance meeting at a bar) salvaged the last Polaroid processing equipment riiiiiiight before it was to be scrapped, and then reverse-engineered the chemicals needed to produce and develop the film.
(Note: I don't have any financial stake in their success, but I have to say the staff at the IP are amazing, and some of the nicest bunch of people I've dealt with in the photo world. Please give them your business.)
...the Germans retaliated by asserting a trademark on the term "kindergarten", and claimed back roaylties and damages from the whole world.
I've read a lot of comments about how it's "dangerous" to report this sort of thing. I'm gonna need to see some proof of that. A news story would be helpful.
The law contains a safe harbor provision. "Promptly reporting in good faith to law enforcement" is an affirmative defense. I seem to recall from the recent Wikipedia admin drama that there is another statute somewhere stating that it is illegal NOT to report it as well.
If someone can link to an article describing someone being arrested for reporting something, please post it. According to the Cyber Tip line, their site alone has received over 835,000 reports of illegal porn. I highly doubt those people are going to prison for it. If they were, nobody would report it.
I came across this book around 1993 / 1994. It was a thing of beauty - pretty much the entire history of personal computing up until that point. It didn't just contain flashy articles sure to bring in the mass market readers, but pieces that provided an amazing amount of perspective on the progression of hardware and software. I seem to recall stories on exciting new 20MB hard drives, (failed) networking standards, processor development, along with the usual "Launch of the Mac", "Launch of the IBM PC" and previews of the sure-to-be-amazing PCjr. My only gripe was that the collection of old computer ads were pretty much illegible photocopies.
I am curious why the army didn't develop their own smartphone. Probably hardened and weighting three time an iPhone, and probably with a funky acronym as a name.
You forgot the part where each one costs $45,000 and is really just a hardened Atari Portfolio with WiFi.
Does that mean the game is now a cutscene streamed from a server instead of a disc?
*ducks*
Hiring a PI to stake out a funeral is probably the scummiest thing I've heard of in a while. There really is no fucking excuse for that.
"We had better fire Jones! He used one of his three sick days this year to go to his aunt's funeral! What a terrible employee!"
I don't want to see any of you heartless punks turning in Bubbles.
It really sucks, and is not getting much better anytime soon. New consoles are very expensive, and a $150 - $200 controller + game combo is a much easier investment than $400 + games + misc crap you end up buying with a new console (e.x: they rarely come with the cables you want). Don't forget that retailers love to throw mandatory bundles at early adopters. So a new console can easily cost between $500 - $600 after all is said and done.
Then you've got to consider the economics of the hardware itself. Both the 360 and PS3 took a while to become anything but money sinks. A lot longer than many expected (more so in the case of the 360). While the original Xbox was surprisingly solid and well-designed, if bulky, the 360 was rushed through development. It was released with a lot of stupid, stupid, stupid design flaws that took forever to deal with. Apparently the key people that made the good decisions in '99 - '01 weren't around to prevent the money-losing disaster that was the 360. (Side note: The lack of a standard hard drive was to me, the first sign that Redmond had bungled the project on the managerial level, and bad things were on the horizon)
The PS3 was designed to get Blu-Ray into your living room, and consequently, the initial cost was absolutely absurd. Sony's response amounted to "Deal with it. You'll pay it."
People largely didn't. It took a while for the platform to pick up steam.
The Cell processor didn't become the industry-changing force Sony hoped. Sure, IBM uses it for some stuff, but the development costs weren't amortized over multiple platforms to the degree Sony had imagined. It was supposed to show up in all sorts of consumer electronics, but that never happened. They even offered the chip to Apple when it was getting ready to ditch the PowerPC, and Steve Jobs turned them down for technical reasons.
By now the Xbox 360 hardware has been stabilized - the bugs finally squashed. The 360 and PS3 have been value-engineered to be much cheaper to build. Both Sony and Microsoft are finally able to make the kind of money they were hoping to rake in a long time ago. While new consoles are undoubtably under development, Microsoft and Sony's investors are probably not interested in them losing tons more on another launch in a crappy economy.
"This isn't gonna stop until Pictionary bans the word 'windmill.' "
When anyone announces their next-generation console, the scramble is on. Interesting that no one seems interested yet.
There are two reasons.
The economy really sucks. New consoles are very expensive, and a $150 - $200 controller + game combo is a much easier investment than $400 + games + misc crap you end up buying with a new console (e.x: they rarely come with the cables you want). Don't forget that retailers love to throw mandatory bundles at early adopters. So a new console can easily cost between $500 - $600 after all is said and done.
Then you've got to consider the economics of the hardware itself. Both the 360 and PS3 took a while to become anything but money sinks. While the original Xbox was surprisingly solid and well-designed, if bulky, the 360 was rushed through development. It was released with a lot of stupid, stupid, stupid design flaws that took forever to deal with. Apparently the key people that made the good decisions in '98 / '99 weren't around to prevent the money-losing disaster that was the 360. (Side note: The lack of a standard hard drive was to me, the first sign that Redmond had bungled the project on the managerial level, and bad things were on the horizon)
The PS3 was designed to get Blu-Ray into your living room, and the initial cost was absolutely absurd. Sony's response amounted to "Deal with it. You'll pay it."
People largely didn't.
The Cell processor didn't become the industry-changing force Sony hoped. Sure, IBM uses it for some stuff, but the development costs weren't amortized over multiple platforms to the degree Sony had imagined. (They offered the chip to Apple when it was getting ready to ditch the PowerPC, and Steve Jobs turned them down for technical reasons.) The Cell was supposed to show up in all sorts of consumer electronics, but that never happened.
So they lost money too. A lot of it.
By now the Xbox 360 hardware has been stabilized - the bugs squashed. The 360 and PS3 have been value-engineered to be much cheaper to build. Both Sony and Microsoft are finally able to make the kind of money they were hoping to rake in a long time ago. While new consoles are undoubtably under development, Microsoft and Sony's investors are probably not interested in them losing tons more on another launch in a crappy economy.
Wow, people actually took my comment seriously...
It makes me really wish that I knew enough math for the program to have any use.
I once tried to apologize to the developers for pirating Mathematica. The just laughed at me and said that was impossible. :(
I don't think Comcast wants you to watch Netflix either. That actually uses bandwidth.
I'm surprised they haven't come down on people for leaving their mail programs open all day. /halfjoking