Just like vinyl, which has been on the wane for decades, cassettes aren't going anywhere anytime soon...
Sure they're not the most high fidelity or durable or anything, but when it comes to just throwing down a quick recording of something, they're perfect, and the sheer number of cars and people with tape players and whatnot guarantees that there will always be a market for them..
and heck, 900,000 units ain't bad...
don't throw out your tape deck yet, that's for sure!
what I tend to wonder about is whether the government had to send notice to the Russians and various other people so their missile launch detection systems didn't go off and think they were under attack:D
ah but the thing is, humans aren't (all) cattle.. if you PISS OFF the product enough that the product stops paying attention, you're going to alienate the customer in the long run. It just takes a bit longer for the effect to sink in.
Almost everything in OSX is really nice, but why the F**K did they take all the applications out of the apple menu and stuff them into that weird panel buried in the "go" menu in the finder? Once you know it's there I guess it's alright, but I just don't understand what apple was thinking when they got rid of the nice old apple menu (that microsoft freaking copied from them too, that's gotta say SOMETHING) and made it harder to find things..
Is there actually a Good Reason for them to have done this? Or did they just decide to change things for the sake of changing things and in this case they fucked up a good feature? I'm not trying to troll or anything, honest, I'd just really like to know why they did that.
oh god i wish i had mod points right now; you've brought up such a hugely important point for modern vacuum tubes.
A solid-state radio transmitter with any even remotely usable power would be infinitely less reliable, more expensive, hotter, and just more COMPLICATED than a radio transmitter using one large vacuum tubes.
Silicon just cannot handle the power requirements that a large transmitter or other high-power system needs.
Vacuum Tubes are NOT going away anytime soon, that's for sure!
There are limits to free speech though, when it interferes with other laws- hate speech, libel, slander, not shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater...
so, cybersquatting is obviously a court-defined no-no, and just because it happens to be for political rather than (on the surface at least) economic motives, doesn't make it any more 'right'
However, back to what you said- Often the stuff on e-bay is available for about the same price locally. So when it comes to dishing out a few hundred bucks, you have to really ask yourself- would you rather buy from someone who you can go kick the crap out of if necessary, or from basically an anonymous seller? No, you won't find me dropping big bucks on e-bay either.
You can't forget about those occasions when you see someone buy something used for *significantly more* than they could have bought it new in an actual store. . I've seen that happen often enough to always look around for prices before I even consider bidding on something, lest I be out a bunch of extra money and not even get a warranty...
yeah but everyone knows that the "Car to Johnson" relationship is *inverse*, so the guy with the crappy car probably has a monster Johnson, cuz he knows that all he needs to do is wear some tightish pants to do all the picking up he'd ever need to do. Consequently, he can get away with a poo-ass car.
It's the people with the ridiculously large and expensive cars who need to worry about THEIR Johnsons, and have to, well, 'compensate' as it were.
curved corners are all well and good until you try to push your desk, bookshelf, bed or other boxy piece of furniture into the corner of your room... not all pieces of furniture (especially a bookshelf, for example) can have curvey edges in them, and you do limit your options to some extent...
curvey edges wouldn't do well on the floor/wall boundaries either, for the same reasons....
The same patch was sent out again via the Windows update service on Tuesday night. The company is still investigating why and how the patch was reissued.
So, they have a reason for it to be released, but they don't actually know why or how it got released... so... maybe 'they haven't got a clue' is a bit of overstatement, but they certainly don't have the whole clue.
Another potential innovation that they could do is start making advertisements that don't suck...
BMW's series of short films were essentially just big advertisements, but they were awesome. Complete night and day difference from the standard car commercial which tells you nothing about the car other than the fact that professional drivers on closed courses can go around corners fast, and occasionally that you can fit more cargo into it than any other car 'in it's class'..
And then there's that fucking 'baby baby' cd commercial which i'm sure many of the american readers are familiar with, which is probably the most infuriating commercial ever and that (honest, no bullshit) everybody I know turns off when it comes on... This is an example of a 'bad' commercial, which given time could completely destroy the advertising market.
So, the way I see it, I would actually be less concerned about having to watch large commercial blocks if the commercials were actually GOOD, like the BMW ones, or the new subway one with jared screaming about falling out of airplanes, and so on. Of course, I would much rather have to deal with fewer ads, but I'd be less likely to complain if the advertisers actually put some real creativity into their advertisements rather than the shitpiles they foist upon us now.
Making good ads, ads which you'd actually WANT to see again, now that would be innovative. You don't even need new technology for that.
Pessimistic outcome: MPAA Wins, small movie houses crushed by debt, MPAA Declares screener ban a 'non-issue' cuz no one left cares. Piracy rates remain unchanged.
Optimistic but still Pessimistic ouctome: The small movie houses win by throwing the 'discrimination' tag around, thus hiding the real issues under a miasma of political correctness (a very thick and murky miasma at that). Piracy rates still remain unchanged.
Really optimisitic outcome: Small movie houses win, screener ban repealed, MPAA gets 'a clue', Valenti discovers the way out of his own ass after years of deep internal struggle (ha). Piracy rates remain unchanged, slashdot loses issue to complain about (soon to be replaced, heh)
Seriously though, I think this is a very good thing to be happening, the lawsuit that is. I hadn't even thought of these small movies losing financing because of lack of award potential, but now that they mention it, it seems blindingly obvious. This is certainly not a frivolous lawsuit, and very refreshingly so.
Mapquest, while exceedingly useful, hasn't exactly been the most reliable site ever in my experience...
First off, it seems to go through phases of believing that my street exists, sometimes it's there, and sometimes it doesn't know it exists.
It's directions for going around many cities can be difficult to follow because you could drive right past a street and never even see it, or suddenly the road that you're looking for doesn't actually exist in real life, or the directions suddenly lose all bearing on reality..
And, just this weekend, I used it to get directions to a store nearish to my house, and in the directions were turns onto roads that I hadn't ever seen before, and in fact, had i looked for them I would have gotten lost because, judging by two lefts, I would have been going completely the wrong direction.
So, in my and my family's experience, we've had about a 30% failure rate on MapQuest... I should qualify this by saying that we've never gotten hopelessly lost as a result; paying attention to road markings and looking at the two little maps it gives you in 'print' mode has always been enough to get us there eventually... but we've learned never to put full trust into the directions!
One thing that it could *really* use would be, if you're on a city street for example, a way for it to say "continue on this road past 3 traffic lights".... rather than "distance: 0.48 miles". That would be such a huge improvement.
Bah! how are you supposed to prove that? if the information was supressed, THEY are not gonna tell you that they surpressed something.. It't surpressed, and so we remain blissfully ignorant!
I think your confidence in America is rather unfounded, or at least a bit naive. The other replies to your post make that pretty clear as well; i just had to point out the hilarity of your one particular phrase.
If someone really feels like they want to 'have a friend in Jesus', why would they want to connect themself to someone pretending to be Jesus?
In any case, on further consideration, the 'hubbing' aspects of some of these features is somewhat interesting, but if i'm not mistaken, friendster allows you to search via keywords, so if you want to associate yourself with Jesus, just put Jesus as one of your keywords and use it that way, rather than just connecting yourself to some user who decides 'hey, look at me, I'm Jesus, wouldn't it be great if i made a Jesus account? That way me and the other fifty people pretending to be Jesus can feel special'
So, what I'm basically saying is that there are ways for people on friendster to associate themselves with groups and topics without having to violate any rules or corrupt the "real people who actually exist"-ness of the website.
You have a point, but you're also missing the point just a little bit..
It's more than just people not posting their real name, it's people who aren't even TRYING to be "people"... Instead it's people who (literally) use an abstract idea and then add lists of thousands of people to their friend lists.
The problem is that this completley opposes the entire purpose of the website. The point of friendster is that if you find someone who is linked to one of your friends, and you think that you might want to meet them, you can be sure that they're a real person.. But, now, all these Fakesters come along and suddenly you have no idea who is a real person or not; all these 'people' that you're connected are in fact just random people who probably have no idea who they are anymore. Now all of a sudden the promise of knowing that you might be able to meet these real people is gone, and at that point why would you even bother going to the site, much less pay money for it?
If these fakesters are allowed to spread, friendster will end up being full of 'networks' of completely artificial individuals, and all the real people will leave because they can't FIND any real people. Eventually these fakesters will get bored; there's only so long that you can be "Pure Evil", and everyone disappears, and the site collapses.
Reading through the article I realize that these fakesters are making a huge fuss bout 'free speech' and 'censorship', using all the latest buzzwords and ideas, when in fact they are BREAKING THE RULES of the website. Friendster and it's ceo are COMPLETLEY justfied in what they are doing; they are trying to protect Friendster for the "real" people, and they are simply enforcing the rules which these fakesters are not exempt from. While I admit that they're being a bit heavy-handed about it, I see NO legitimate reason AT ALL for these fakesters to be pissed off because someone called them on the fact that they are *breaking the rules* and completely destroying the purpose of the website, which WILL eventually bring about it's destruction (who's gonna pay to add a bunch of 'jesus' and 'evil' and 'death' figured to their list?!). It's NOT a free speech issue; it's an issue of people breaking the rules in a way which they find amusing but will eventually destroy the entire system.
The fakester interviewed in the article also mentions how they're "honest about being fake", as compared to these "really fake" people who like Adam Sandler. This argument is also complete bullshit; Plenty of people in real life are 'fake' and try to be something they're not; their lifestyle is to conform, and they end up dating and finding other people who follow the same conformity lifestyle... These are *REAL* people, following a specific lifestyle. These fakesters who are admitting flouting the rules have no right at all to make judgements about people whom they consider "fake"; they are the ones who are being honest, not the fakesters.
So, to summarize; these fakesters are breaking the rules of the WEB SITE (not newspaper, not media outlet, not government agency, merely a dating website), and are using all the latest loaded terms to try and get people outraged about the fact that the website is merely enforcing it's rules. Friendster is there so you can meet people, not find nouns linked to thousands of other nouns. No one's gonna pay to link to nouns. Frienster is merely protecting itself, and looking out for the interests of it's target REAL audience, albiet in a fairly heavy handed way.
I guess it just goes to show you how screaming 'free speech' is all that it takes to get a crowd of people to ignore blatant violations of policy and actions which will result in the destruction of the entire medium anyway.
Re:Everyone has missed the obvious joke!
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
only obvious to the editor of the once great 'diamond in the rough' basix fanzine i think, mr. cooper... you know what i'm talking about
That's a completely different situation though... Home Depot is a retail company, SCO is.. ehm, something else.
The merchandise that home depot has is merely kept in order to be sold off, it's not "owned" by the company. As a shareholder, therefore, you do not have the right to just go and take merchandise, but you do have the right to go in to a shareholders meeting and tell them what you think the company should do to improve their sales of merchandise.
With SCO, you have more of a chance of being able to get away with saying that you're a part owner of the IP, because the intellectual property is OWNED by the company, and hence the shareholders do too...
But of course it's not worth trying to figure that one out because buying SCO stock now would be completely retarded, and buying it so you didn't have to pay the BS licensing fees is doubly retarded.
so, in the end, does it even matter? who knows....
I own a ti-85 and a ti-86.... Both of them have lots of nice features, but I generally prefer the 86 simply because the 'basic'-alike programming language is a lot less rigid; variable names can be many characters long, you can type in commands letter-by-letter rather than having to go through menus, etc etc... The menus in general are a lot nicer than the 85 too. Overall it's quite a nice little device. I only wish the 86 supported all the statistics functions that the 85 has (which is why i had to buy an 85 in the first place).
Yeah but standards wars usually finish eventually. Beta vs VHS has an obvious winner, the 56k modem wars eventually ended up with a dominant power, dvd and burnable dvd's are still up in the air a bit but as recent articles show us, things appear to be moving towards a winner too..
So, while it may take a while, a standards war will eventually resolve, or at least settle into a number of camps large enough that the user base for each will be significant...
plus, what's wrong with a bit of friendly (hah) competition?
Slashdot Mirror
and yet it's still way more awesome and fascinating than where we live now...
:D
how sad is that?
i always wanted to be one of those gargoyles with all the scanner equipment..
Just like vinyl, which has been on the wane for decades, cassettes aren't going anywhere anytime soon...
Sure they're not the most high fidelity or durable or anything, but when it comes to just throwing down a quick recording of something, they're perfect, and the sheer number of cars and people with tape players and whatnot guarantees that there will always be a market for them..
and heck, 900,000 units ain't bad...
don't throw out your tape deck yet, that's for sure!
I didn't until you pointed it out, and now I'm having a difficult time reading it as anything else BUT hotsperm.
:D
damn you
what I tend to wonder about is whether the government had to send notice to the Russians and various other people so their missile launch detection systems didn't go off and think they were under attack :D
hah that's awful but fucking hilarious anyway :D
ah but the thing is, humans aren't (all) cattle.. if you PISS OFF the product enough that the product stops paying attention, you're going to alienate the customer in the long run. It just takes a bit longer for the effect to sink in.
OS X *almost* gets it ...
Almost everything in OSX is really nice, but why the F**K did they take all the applications out of the apple menu and stuff them into that weird panel buried in the "go" menu in the finder? Once you know it's there I guess it's alright, but I just don't understand what apple was thinking when they got rid of the nice old apple menu (that microsoft freaking copied from them too, that's gotta say SOMETHING) and made it harder to find things..
Is there actually a Good Reason for them to have done this? Or did they just decide to change things for the sake of changing things and in this case they fucked up a good feature? I'm not trying to troll or anything, honest, I'd just really like to know why they did that.
And is there any way to fix it?
oh god i wish i had mod points right now; you've brought up such a hugely important point for modern vacuum tubes.
A solid-state radio transmitter with any even remotely usable power would be infinitely less reliable, more expensive, hotter, and just more COMPLICATED than a radio transmitter using one large vacuum tubes.
Silicon just cannot handle the power requirements that a large transmitter or other high-power system needs.
Vacuum Tubes are NOT going away anytime soon, that's for sure!
There are limits to free speech though, when it interferes with other laws- hate speech, libel, slander, not shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater...
so, cybersquatting is obviously a court-defined no-no, and just because it happens to be for political rather than (on the surface at least) economic motives, doesn't make it any more 'right'
you speak of the scene as if it was past tense ... i think you'll find that you are wrong!!
:D
the scene is still going quite strong!
However, back to what you said- Often the stuff on e-bay is available for about the same price locally. So when it comes to dishing out a few hundred bucks, you have to really ask yourself- would you rather buy from someone who you can go kick the crap out of if necessary, or from basically an anonymous seller? No, you won't find me dropping big bucks on e-bay either. You can't forget about those occasions when you see someone buy something used for *significantly more* than they could have bought it new in an actual store. . I've seen that happen often enough to always look around for prices before I even consider bidding on something, lest I be out a bunch of extra money and not even get a warranty...
yeah but everyone knows that the "Car to Johnson" relationship is *inverse*, so the guy with the crappy car probably has a monster Johnson, cuz he knows that all he needs to do is wear some tightish pants to do all the picking up he'd ever need to do. Consequently, he can get away with a poo-ass car.
It's the people with the ridiculously large and expensive cars who need to worry about THEIR Johnsons, and have to, well, 'compensate' as it were.
Just an observation.
curved corners are all well and good until you try to push your desk, bookshelf, bed or other boxy piece of furniture into the corner of your room... not all pieces of furniture (especially a bookshelf, for example) can have curvey edges in them, and you do limit your options to some extent ...
curvey edges wouldn't do well on the floor/wall boundaries either, for the same reasons....
curves are nice but they're not always practical.
don't you mean:
hapless techno-weenies?
bwahahah
if you read the WHOLE article you find this:
The same patch was sent out again via the Windows update service on Tuesday night. The company is still investigating why and how the patch was reissued.
So, they have a reason for it to be released, but they don't actually know why or how it got released... so... maybe 'they haven't got a clue' is a bit of overstatement, but they certainly don't have the whole clue.
Another potential innovation that they could do is start making advertisements that don't suck...
BMW's series of short films were essentially just big advertisements, but they were awesome. Complete night and day difference from the standard car commercial which tells you nothing about the car other than the fact that professional drivers on closed courses can go around corners fast, and occasionally that you can fit more cargo into it than any other car 'in it's class'..
And then there's that fucking 'baby baby' cd commercial which i'm sure many of the american readers are familiar with, which is probably the most infuriating commercial ever and that (honest, no bullshit) everybody I know turns off when it comes on... This is an example of a 'bad' commercial, which given time could completely destroy the advertising market.
So, the way I see it, I would actually be less concerned about having to watch large commercial blocks if the commercials were actually GOOD, like the BMW ones, or the new subway one with jared screaming about falling out of airplanes, and so on. Of course, I would much rather have to deal with fewer ads, but I'd be less likely to complain if the advertisers actually put some real creativity into their advertisements rather than the shitpiles they foist upon us now.
Making good ads, ads which you'd actually WANT to see again, now that would be innovative. You don't even need new technology for that.
rant finished.
Pessimistic outcome:
MPAA Wins, small movie houses crushed by debt, MPAA Declares screener ban a 'non-issue' cuz no one left cares. Piracy rates remain unchanged.
Optimistic but still Pessimistic ouctome:
The small movie houses win by throwing the 'discrimination' tag around, thus hiding the real issues under a miasma of political correctness (a very thick and murky miasma at that). Piracy rates still remain unchanged.
Really optimisitic outcome:
Small movie houses win, screener ban repealed, MPAA gets 'a clue', Valenti discovers the way out of his own ass after years of deep internal struggle (ha). Piracy rates remain unchanged, slashdot loses issue to complain about (soon to be replaced, heh)
Seriously though, I think this is a very good thing to be happening, the lawsuit that is. I hadn't even thought of these small movies losing financing because of lack of award potential, but now that they mention it, it seems blindingly obvious. This is certainly not a frivolous lawsuit, and very refreshingly so.
I say, best of luck, small movie houses!
Mapquest, while exceedingly useful, hasn't exactly been the most reliable site ever in my experience...
.... rather than "distance: 0.48 miles". That would be such a huge improvement.
First off, it seems to go through phases of believing that my street exists, sometimes it's there, and sometimes it doesn't know it exists.
It's directions for going around many cities can be difficult to follow because you could drive right past a street and never even see it, or suddenly the road that you're looking for doesn't actually exist in real life, or the directions suddenly lose all bearing on reality..
And, just this weekend, I used it to get directions to a store nearish to my house, and in the directions were turns onto roads that I hadn't ever seen before, and in fact, had i looked for them I would have gotten lost because, judging by two lefts, I would have been going completely the wrong direction.
So, in my and my family's experience, we've had about a 30% failure rate on MapQuest... I should qualify this by saying that we've never gotten hopelessly lost as a result; paying attention to road markings and looking at the two little maps it gives you in 'print' mode has always been enough to get us there eventually... but we've learned never to put full trust into the directions!
One thing that it could *really* use would be, if you're on a city street for example, a way for it to say "continue on this road past 3 traffic lights"
anyway, that's just my experience...
"Surpression of information is impossible"
Bah! how are you supposed to prove that? if the information was supressed, THEY are not gonna tell you that they surpressed something.. It't surpressed, and so we remain blissfully ignorant!
I think your confidence in America is rather unfounded, or at least a bit naive. The other replies to your post make that pretty clear as well; i just had to point out the hilarity of your one particular phrase.
If someone really feels like they want to 'have a friend in Jesus', why would they want to connect themself to someone pretending to be Jesus?
In any case, on further consideration, the 'hubbing' aspects of some of these features is somewhat interesting, but if i'm not mistaken, friendster allows you to search via keywords, so if you want to associate yourself with Jesus, just put Jesus as one of your keywords and use it that way, rather than just connecting yourself to some user who decides 'hey, look at me, I'm Jesus, wouldn't it be great if i made a Jesus account? That way me and the other fifty people pretending to be Jesus can feel special'
So, what I'm basically saying is that there are ways for people on friendster to associate themselves with groups and topics without having to violate any rules or corrupt the "real people who actually exist"-ness of the website.
You have a point, but you're also missing the point just a little bit..
It's more than just people not posting their real name, it's people who aren't even TRYING to be "people"... Instead it's people who (literally) use an abstract idea and then add lists of thousands of people to their friend lists.
The problem is that this completley opposes the entire purpose of the website. The point of friendster is that if you find someone who is linked to one of your friends, and you think that you might want to meet them, you can be sure that they're a real person.. But, now, all these Fakesters come along and suddenly you have no idea who is a real person or not; all these 'people' that you're connected are in fact just random people who probably have no idea who they are anymore. Now all of a sudden the promise of knowing that you might be able to meet these real people is gone, and at that point why would you even bother going to the site, much less pay money for it?
If these fakesters are allowed to spread, friendster will end up being full of 'networks' of completely artificial individuals, and all the real people will leave because they can't FIND any real people. Eventually these fakesters will get bored; there's only so long that you can be "Pure Evil", and everyone disappears, and the site collapses.
Reading through the article I realize that these fakesters are making a huge fuss bout 'free speech' and 'censorship', using all the latest buzzwords and ideas, when in fact they are BREAKING THE RULES of the website. Friendster and it's ceo are COMPLETLEY justfied in what they are doing; they are trying to protect Friendster for the "real" people, and they are simply enforcing the rules which these fakesters are not exempt from. While I admit that they're being a bit heavy-handed about it, I see NO legitimate reason AT ALL for these fakesters to be pissed off because someone called them on the fact that they are *breaking the rules* and completely destroying the purpose of the website, which WILL eventually bring about it's destruction (who's gonna pay to add a bunch of 'jesus' and 'evil' and 'death' figured to their list?!). It's NOT a free speech issue; it's an issue of people breaking the rules in a way which they find amusing but will eventually destroy the entire system.
The fakester interviewed in the article also mentions how they're "honest about being fake", as compared to these "really fake" people who like Adam Sandler. This argument is also complete bullshit; Plenty of people in real life are 'fake' and try to be something they're not; their lifestyle is to conform, and they end up dating and finding other people who follow the same conformity lifestyle... These are *REAL* people, following a specific lifestyle. These fakesters who are admitting flouting the rules have no right at all to make judgements about people whom they consider "fake"; they are the ones who are being honest, not the fakesters.
So, to summarize; these fakesters are breaking the rules of the WEB SITE (not newspaper, not media outlet, not government agency, merely a dating website), and are using all the latest loaded terms to try and get people outraged about the fact that the website is merely enforcing it's rules. Friendster is there so you can meet people, not find nouns linked to thousands of other nouns. No one's gonna pay to link to nouns. Frienster is merely protecting itself, and looking out for the interests of it's target REAL audience, albiet in a fairly heavy handed way.
I guess it just goes to show you how screaming 'free speech' is all that it takes to get a crowd of people to ignore blatant violations of policy and actions which will result in the destruction of the entire medium anyway.
only obvious to the editor of the once great 'diamond in the rough' basix fanzine i think, mr. cooper... you know what i'm talking about
That's a completely different situation though ... Home Depot is a retail company, SCO is .. ehm, something else.
...
....
The merchandise that home depot has is merely kept in order to be sold off, it's not "owned" by the company. As a shareholder, therefore, you do not have the right to just go and take merchandise, but you do have the right to go in to a shareholders meeting and tell them what you think the company should do to improve their sales of merchandise.
With SCO, you have more of a chance of being able to get away with saying that you're a part owner of the IP, because the intellectual property is OWNED by the company, and hence the shareholders do too
But of course it's not worth trying to figure that one out because buying SCO stock now would be completely retarded, and buying it so you didn't have to pay the BS licensing fees is doubly retarded.
so, in the end, does it even matter? who knows
I own a ti-85 and a ti-86. ... Both of them have lots of nice features, but I generally prefer the 86 simply because the 'basic'-alike programming language is a lot less rigid; variable names can be many characters long, you can type in commands letter-by-letter rather than having to go through menus, etc etc. .. The menus in general are a lot nicer than the 85 too. Overall it's quite a nice little device. I only wish the 86 supported all the statistics functions that the 85 has (which is why i had to buy an 85 in the first place).
Yeah but standards wars usually finish eventually. Beta vs VHS has an obvious winner, the 56k modem wars eventually ended up with a dominant power, dvd and burnable dvd's are still up in the air a bit but as recent articles show us, things appear to be moving towards a winner too..
...
So, while it may take a while, a standards war will eventually resolve, or at least settle into a number of camps large enough that the user base for each will be significant
plus, what's wrong with a bit of friendly (hah) competition?