Unfortunately, your scenario is spot on. Unfortunate because my technophobe mother saw my iPod, saw how she could use it and wangled me into buying her one.
If my mother could not only see a use for an iPod, but could quickly figure out how to use it, it's a pretty clear indicator that you've got something right.
Not everyone wants all the bells and whistles. They have no idea if they ever use all the functionality that they've just paid for and a lot of combo devices scare the less technically adept people off.
Apple's decision to make an MP3 player without all the extras has made it simple to use and also created a huge market in add-ons. If you need an FM transmitter, it's available; if you need a remote; it's available. All in a wide price range.
I suppose I should have known that any movie using a dodgy fright break gimmick for promotion would be inherently bad.
For those scratching their heads, Blood Moon was an appalling bad Australian horror movie made about fifteen years back. It was seriously lacking in plot, characterisation and horror, but it did have a high cheese content.
It's noticable that this forgetable piece of shite has been overlooked by everyone. It was never released on video, never shown on television and even IMDB doesn't list it. So there's a good chance no one else will never have to suffer sitting though it.
So the lesson learned was that if they offer to give you your money back at a set point in the film, take it and run, it isn't going to get any better.
I think this one should have stayed in RC for a while longer.
The pre-installed Windows theme is hideous. Yeah, you can change it, just stay away from Phoenity it isn't 0.9 ready yet and does evil things to the toolbars that necessitated blowing away my profile to fix.
Not impressed that Mozilla have been screwing around with presentation again, as the horizontal rules on my site have gone screwy.
I have floating menu boxes. Any horizontal rules appearing beside the menu boxes are truncated to the appropriate length. Instead of sitting with the content beside the floating boxes, the horizontal rules now centre and float partially under the menu boxes.
The only solution I've found so far that works is the manually add "align=left" to every <hr> on the site. I'd like to avoid this.
I would be delierously happy if anyone could offer a solution to this problem.
The inventor of the bouncing bomb, from the movie The Dambusters for those with no sense of hostory, was Dr Barnes Wallis. His idea was based on the stories of ship bouncing cannonballs across the water.
I scored a weird looking bottle from my sister, who still has no concept that the wishlist I keep sending might be of stuff I actually want.
It's shaped like a Ken doll torso, complete with little glass mound and filled with blue vodka. While I'm all for dismembered glassware, the contents look way too much like shampoo. So instead of the amusing gift she was aiming for, she hit cheap and tacky looking instead.
The Internet company targeted by the music industry over alleged copyright breaches, ComCen, has denied it hosted any copyright-infringing MP3 files on its servers and claims the Web site cited in the civil action brought against it acted only as a search engine.
I have seen this before, but it was on a 747 and it was large enough to render the plane leaving the contrail invisible.
All it needed was a regularly scheduled flight using the same runway, thank you Sydney Airport, and the sun to be in the correct position to create the spectacular glowing contrail effect. I got to see it for several days running, before the morning sun shifted enough to stop the effect being visible from my location.
As a gimmick it's relatively harmless. You lose the winning can or throw it away and somebody else finds it they're the winner. Although what a sewer rat is going to do with a widescreen plasma television I don't know.
It only becomes a problem when the item is linked directly to the purchaser, possibly via a credit card transaction. Or the government suddenly decides that the product is a danger to society and use the GPS information to track down product and take it from you.
Worth having a look at Bootleg, a very clever kids program from the Beeb, to see what happens when chocolate is declared illegal.
I have a heap of browsers I use for testing web pages, but tend to use Thunderbird at the moment. So Microsoft demanding that I use Internet Explorer to download their bug fixes is an annoyance rather than a major hassle.
Mine main peeve is that Microsoft are so lazy that they refuse to write standards compliant code. In the real world this would be the scenario, but I'm too much of a cynic and tend to think it's a forced coersion technique.
Of more interest is the helpful suggestion page you see when you dare to use another browser, you get an option to download their shiny IE browser. My question is, what do they plan to do when they move to their option of IE being an OS only toy and no longer being freely available? Sounds a little like painting yourself into a corner.
It's worth noting that the fish wrap this article appeared in a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man whose publications are not known for their in-depth reporting skills. The Sun is only slightly more fact based than, that bastion of journalistic integrity, the Weekly World News.
Think how cool it would be for the individual though. You could instantaneously inventory your belongings. Lost your keys... just whistle up the RFID embedded in your keychain.
Nice useful example, but I'm reminded of those old keyrings that supposedly beeped their location when you whistled. My friend's mother could only get it to work when calling her daughter's name. Amusing for the outsider, but annoying for the daughter. I can see much the same bugs multiplied by the RFID in your keyring and your socks and your beer...
Keyboard condoms... weird, but have their place
on
Clammy Modding
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you send them a photocopy of your keyboard, most companies will produce a reasonable keyboard skin for you.
It's still very much a love it or hate it thing... you have to weigh up whether the weird rubbery texture and lack of key feel is worth ignoring to keep crap out of your keyboard. But if you're really jittery with your first caffiene source in the morning, it may be a cheaper option than constantly replacing fried keyboards.
It's not only plastic that is made from corn, so is fibre and from that fabric.
Cargill Dow is one of several companies creating a corn fibre trademarked as Ingeo. I haven't yet seen the fibre, but I'll be getting a sample in a week or so.
A similar product is Soy Silk (another trademarked term) which is a fibre created as a soy processing by-product. The hype claims that it is a silk substitute. Reality proves otherwise.
It does have a very silk-like sheen, has a pleasing natural colour, is very soft and demands to be fondled in it's fibrous form. It lacks the static nature of silk (a plus) but doesn't take colour as well (a minus). It also has a much shorter staple that silk, requiring that it be spun like cotton rather than true silk.
Do these guys have a motto?
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
United Nuclear: where you can purchase all the parts and plans that will have you well on your way to becoming an embarrassing headline in your local paper.
I have to wonder if George Gobel is a regular customer.
Bad parenting wasn't the only thing that caused Columbine.
An endemic problem of systematic abuse was allowed, even encouraged, at the school for decades.
The high population of evangelical christians at the school felt it was their god-given right to both physically and verbally assault anybody who wasn't a mindless clone. The school authorities allowed this to continue and eventually somebody snapped.
You kick a dog long enough, don't be surprised if you get bitten.
if you load an external stylesheet using the @import command, NN4 doesn't know what you're on about and ignores the stylesheet altogether.
A very handy hack for dealing with NN4, but don't forget that it works on all level 4 browsers.
Also worth remembering that NN4 can deal with some CSS, so use it and have a gracefully degrading web page that doesn't lock out the people who are stuck with crappy browsers.
Ian Gilfillan, the South Australian Democrat, who introduced a bill to amend state software procurement policies, says he expects to know the fate of the bill by the end of July this year.
The code requires carriers and service providers to only send bulk SMS messages to users who have "opted in", and to allow them to "opt out" of receiving the messages.
However the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), which had participated in developing the code, has challenged the ACA's assertion.
Carriers won't be required to ensure consumers have "opted-in" to receive short-message-service (SMS) marketing under a new communications industry code released last week according to the ADMA.
Glass is easily recyclable though. You can crush it up into course particals and use it as aggregate in concrete and asphalt paving, or just melt it down and make new things out of it.
This wasn't always the way, but the CSIRO has been doing some research into using waste glass as not only aggregate in concrete, but as a sand substitute as well, and green lighted its use.
The ABCreports that anti-World Trade Organisation activists say they have been vindicated by an official investigation into two protest web sites.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority has given the Melbourne Indymedia and S11 sites the all-clear after complaints they were inciting violence against police.
Slashdot Mirror
Try developing on it and the freezing kicks in every 4 or 5 minutes. Not a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, your scenario is spot on. Unfortunate because my technophobe mother saw my iPod, saw how she could use it and wangled me into buying her one.
If my mother could not only see a use for an iPod, but could quickly figure out how to use it, it's a pretty clear indicator that you've got something right.
Not everyone wants all the bells and whistles. They have no idea if they ever use all the functionality that they've just paid for and a lot of combo devices scare the less technically adept people off.
Apple's decision to make an MP3 player without all the extras has made it simple to use and also created a huge market in add-ons. If you need an FM transmitter, it's available; if you need a remote; it's available. All in a wide price range.
I suppose I should have known that any movie using a dodgy fright break gimmick for promotion would be inherently bad.
For those scratching their heads, Blood Moon was an appalling bad Australian horror movie made about fifteen years back. It was seriously lacking in plot, characterisation and horror, but it did have a high cheese content.
It's noticable that this forgetable piece of shite has been overlooked by everyone. It was never released on video, never shown on television and even IMDB doesn't list it. So there's a good chance no one else will never have to suffer sitting though it.
So the lesson learned was that if they offer to give you your money back at a set point in the film, take it and run, it isn't going to get any better.
I think this one should have stayed in RC for a while longer.
The pre-installed Windows theme is hideous. Yeah, you can change it, just stay away from Phoenity it isn't 0.9 ready yet and does evil things to the toolbars that necessitated blowing away my profile to fix.
Not impressed that Mozilla have been screwing around with presentation again, as the horizontal rules on my site have gone screwy.
I have floating menu boxes. Any horizontal rules appearing beside the menu boxes are truncated to the appropriate length. Instead of sitting with the content beside the floating boxes, the horizontal rules now centre and float partially under the menu boxes.
The only solution I've found so far that works is the manually add "align=left" to every <hr> on the site. I'd like to avoid this.
I would be delierously happy if anyone could offer a solution to this problem.
The inventor of the bouncing bomb, from the movie The Dambusters for those with no sense of hostory, was Dr Barnes Wallis. His idea was based on the stories of ship bouncing cannonballs across the water.
I scored a weird looking bottle from my sister, who still has no concept that the wishlist I keep sending might be of stuff I actually want.
It's shaped like a Ken doll torso, complete with little glass mound and filled with blue vodka. While I'm all for dismembered glassware, the contents look way too much like shampoo. So instead of the amusing gift she was aiming for, she hit cheap and tacky looking instead.
ConCen are claiming that the site was a search engine and no music was actually hosted on their servers:
I have seen this before, but it was on a 747 and it was large enough to render the plane leaving the contrail invisible.
All it needed was a regularly scheduled flight using the same runway, thank you Sydney Airport, and the sun to be in the correct position to create the spectacular glowing contrail effect. I got to see it for several days running, before the morning sun shifted enough to stop the effect being visible from my location.
As a gimmick it's relatively harmless. You lose the winning can or throw it away and somebody else finds it they're the winner. Although what a sewer rat is going to do with a widescreen plasma television I don't know.
It only becomes a problem when the item is linked directly to the purchaser, possibly via a credit card transaction. Or the government suddenly decides that the product is a danger to society and use the GPS information to track down product and take it from you.
Worth having a look at Bootleg, a very clever kids program from the Beeb, to see what happens when chocolate is declared illegal.
I have a heap of browsers I use for testing web pages, but tend to use Thunderbird at the moment. So Microsoft demanding that I use Internet Explorer to download their bug fixes is an annoyance rather than a major hassle.
Mine main peeve is that Microsoft are so lazy that they refuse to write standards compliant code. In the real world this would be the scenario, but I'm too much of a cynic and tend to think it's a forced coersion technique.
Of more interest is the helpful suggestion page you see when you dare to use another browser, you get an option to download their shiny IE browser. My question is, what do they plan to do when they move to their option of IE being an OS only toy and no longer being freely available? Sounds a little like painting yourself into a corner.
It's worth noting that the fish wrap this article appeared in a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man whose publications are not known for their in-depth reporting skills. The Sun is only slightly more fact based than, that bastion of journalistic integrity, the Weekly World News .
Think how cool it would be for the individual though. You could instantaneously inventory your belongings. Lost your keys... just whistle up the RFID embedded in your keychain.
Nice useful example, but I'm reminded of those old keyrings that supposedly beeped their location when you whistled. My friend's mother could only get it to work when calling her daughter's name. Amusing for the outsider, but annoying for the daughter. I can see much the same bugs multiplied by the RFID in your keyring and your socks and your beer...
If you send them a photocopy of your keyboard, most companies will produce a reasonable keyboard skin for you.
It's still very much a love it or hate it thing... you have to weigh up whether the weird rubbery texture and lack of key feel is worth ignoring to keep crap out of your keyboard. But if you're really jittery with your first caffiene source in the morning, it may be a cheaper option than constantly replacing fried keyboards.
It's not only plastic that is made from corn, so is fibre and from that fabric.
Cargill Dow is one of several companies creating a corn fibre trademarked as Ingeo. I haven't yet seen the fibre, but I'll be getting a sample in a week or so.
A similar product is Soy Silk (another trademarked term) which is a fibre created as a soy processing by-product. The hype claims that it is a silk substitute. Reality proves otherwise.
It does have a very silk-like sheen, has a pleasing natural colour, is very soft and demands to be fondled in it's fibrous form. It lacks the static nature of silk (a plus) but doesn't take colour as well (a minus). It also has a much shorter staple that silk, requiring that it be spun like cotton rather than true silk.
United Nuclear: where you can purchase all the parts and plans that will have you well on your way to becoming an embarrassing headline in your local paper.
I have to wonder if George Gobel is a regular customer.
Bad parenting wasn't the only thing that caused Columbine.
An endemic problem of systematic abuse was allowed, even encouraged, at the school for decades.
The high population of evangelical christians at the school felt it was their god-given right to both physically and verbally assault anybody who wasn't a mindless clone. The school authorities allowed this to continue and eventually somebody snapped.
You kick a dog long enough, don't be surprised if you get bitten.
During the time of William Shakespeare, the same whinging moral moronity groups were condemning the theatre for spread of evil in society.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The sooner idiots learn to take responsibility for their own actions the better.
if you load an external stylesheet using the @import command, NN4 doesn't know what you're on about and ignores the stylesheet altogether.
A very handy hack for dealing with NN4, but don't forget that it works on all level 4 browsers.
Also worth remembering that NN4 can deal with some CSS, so use it and have a gracefully degrading web page that doesn't lock out the people who are stuck with crappy browsers.
For those interested, the Gibson Labs Magic site is: www.gibsonmagic.com
And the specification is: www.gibsonmagic.com/specification.html
Ian Gilfillan, the South Australian Democrat, who introduced a bill to amend state software procurement policies, says he expects to know the fate of the bill by the end of July this year.
The code requires carriers and service providers to only send bulk SMS messages to users who have "opted in", and to allow them to "opt out" of receiving the messages.
From ZDnet Australia:
However the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), which had participated in developing the code, has challenged the ACA's assertion.
Carriers won't be required to ensure consumers have "opted-in" to receive short-message-service (SMS) marketing under a new communications industry code released last week according to the ADMA.
Glass is easily recyclable though. You can crush it up into course particals and use it as aggregate in concrete and asphalt paving, or just melt it down and make new things out of it.
This wasn't always the way, but the CSIRO has been doing some research into using waste glass as not only aggregate in concrete, but as a sand substitute as well, and green lighted its use.
I do not see green slime oozing out of the drive bay...
Shouldn't that be corrosive green slime that eats through the floor and startles the residents of the apartment below?
And it's not available on DVD either.
"That's for the milkbones."
The ABC reports that anti-World Trade Organisation activists say they have been vindicated by an official investigation into two protest web sites.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority has given the Melbourne Indymedia and S11 sites the all-clear after complaints they were inciting violence against police.