Yes, and I'm also aware that "don't bitch about the way the interface has looked for the last six months, it may well change completely even though the devs show absolutely no sign of doing so" has been the default excuse to anyone who expresses concern that their beloved music player is about to turn into the bastard offspring of iTunes and WMP, rather than maintaining its own identity.
All I'm doing is expressing concern about it now, before it's released. Should I wait until it's complete before I bitch about it so I can get the "...but it's finished now, why didn't you say anything when we were still developing it?" excuse? What about the functionality that I know has already been dropped?
I think the mistake you make is in using "share files" - people I've known have always shared books, LP's, mix tapes, CD's, the works - computers have merely made it easier and cheaper for them. To most of them there's no difference between borrowing an album and making a copy of it because, from their perspective, there is no difference - they're getting to experience something they probably wouldn't have bought anyway for zero appreciable cost. They haven't seen it as "wrong" or as "theft" since their dad borrowed his neighbours mix tape to lisen to on that family holiday they went on when they were 6. It just seems to be a natural thing people do, and legislating harshly against human nature generally results in ugliness.
In summary, you're completely right and we're probably both preaching to the choir, but alot of people seem to think that it's computers and the internet that are the root causes of the "piracy problem" when, as ever, it's people that are the problem.
Hmm, I sense you might not be so pleased with amarok 2; its interface is a huge step backwards IMHO, and too much like iTunes for my liking. Apparently they've also done away with support for having a massive current playlist, which completely ruins the way I've grown accustomed to listening to music. Nice to have the developers call you "stupid"...
Re:Configurable?
on
KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 4, Interesting
KDE without configuration options? What's to differentiate it from GNOME?!
Yes, I am only joking. But there's no way I'm shifting to KDE4 until it has at least the level of beautiful tweakery that by beloved KDE3 has. When I tried out one of the RC's (more deserving of the "alpha" moniker if you ask me), I too was similarly astounded at the lack of options for even changing basic things like the colour of the panel (I tend to keep my desktop in neutral, low-contrast colours and the big'n'shiny'n'curvy look of the default KDE4 is about as appealing to me as regurgitating a whole lobster).
I'll also reiterate my stance on widgets - No. Fucking. Way. Why should I minimise every app I have just to be able to see an OpenGL clock or something useless? If it deserves to be treated as an app, then treat it as an app rather than desktop eye candy and give it a taskbar slot or a system tray icon. My desktop is visible for all of every three seconds every time I log in, otherwise it's covered with whatever app(s) I'm using at the time - I don't see the point in using your desktop as anything other than a workspace, your filesystem is where the eye candy (applications and files) lives.
I find Kickoff awkward; Lancelot IMHO is a much nicer K-menu replacement. I'd still like there to be an option for there to be a simple ye olde style menu as well.
Hah, out intranet is full of these aforementioned crappy ASP apps that refuse to work in anything other than IE4-6, with the result that all of the IT stuff now use FF for 95% of their browsing and 5% for the stuff that requires working on the intranet. Users who are aware of the existence of better browsers and are denied access to FF or Opera are routinely incensed.
Presumably you mean SPNEGO? It's designed as a sort of extension to NTLM auth (using Kerberos instead) and is quite common inside MS shops using AD and almost any using SharePoint.
FF has a fix for it though, in about:config filter for NTLM and look for "network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris" - enter the base URL for your intranet servers and/or proxies (e.g. for https://intranet/ you'd just add "intranet") and the problem should go away. Wish Opera supported SPNEGO though:(
Hope I'm not barkin gup the wrong tree, not found any auth methods that FF couldn't handle without some finagling.
Well, it's marginally less odious than what I call Apple's price fixing (i.e. differential pricing across the EU with enforced regional barriers - this is exactly the sort of thing the EU was designed to stop, barring local taxing laws).
I've seen a fair few albums available as MP3's on amazon.com that I'd have loved to have bought on impulse (which is how I buy most of my music these days, usually going by samples/recommendations from LastFM or friends IMing me tracks) and haven't been able to, and I still haven't run into a download store I'm entirely happy with.
Sure, there are still plenty of other music stores out there selling DRM free stuff, but;
7digital: Large selection, most tracks have a choice of MP3 or AAC and some FLAC. Bad is you can't download whole albums at once, you have to download each track individually (cue lots of frustration when I bought nine albums at once, resulting in about 90 individual track downloads - stupid idea guys, give me a fucking zip file) plus not very helpful tech support - told them of clicks and pops in three of the tracks I downloaded (all from the same album) and was told to give the exact times of every click and pop (there must be about four hundred all told) - asking them to "just listen to it" isn't an option it seems.
Bleep: Large selection, somewhat limited in genre (mainly electronica) but thankfully most of my favourite artists are there. High quality MP3 and occasionally FLAC downloads.
Tunetribe: Large selection, but most only available in WMA even when it's available in MP3 at other download stores. Probably has the nicest interface IMHO, plus pulls artist context info from LastFM There's also plenty of the more prolific indie labels (4AD, damaged goods) who run their own mini-download stores, selling just own-label stuff so not a great selection but brilliant for grabbing back catalogue stuff.
ITMS is iTunes only, an app I find so teeth-grindingly annoying to use (esp. compared to amarok which, praise be, is about to junk their lovely interace for a badly done iTunes ripoff with pig-ugly rounded everythings) that my doctor has banned me from going anywhere near a computer with it installed for the good of my health.
I guess it's understandable that there'd be some delay in working out deals with the legal entities on this side of the pond since some of them will be different from the US counterparts, but still not a peep out of it so I'm guessing the US is being used as a litmus for everyone else first...? Or perhaps they think Europeans are more likely to commit MP3crime?
Chances are I'll be equally annoyed with the Amazon service anyway;)
With you there, mostly. I work in an MS shop (although luckily I get to spend most of my time on ESX), and all of the pro-MS techies use FF, more than IE (although I wouldn't be surprised if that changes when we upgrade to IE7) because, well, it's a pretty good browser (sublime compared to IE6). I've had people freak out at me cos I'm an Opera user (I find FF incredibly slow and clunky by comparison). Lots of the IT staff have no problems with the users running FF - in fact, many of them wish it was installed by default as it's a very handy troubleshooting tool when users are having problems with their browser (can't begin to count the number of times IE has refused to let a user to log into a webapp whereas it worked just fine in FF).
However, as you say there's no easy way to push it out. FrontMotion do an MSI-enabled version, but last time I looked it didn't provide GPO settings for things like proxies/WPAD, default extensions to install/ban (yeah, this is the kinda stuff mgmnt insists on for users), disabling automatic updates, all the usual customisation gumpf. Mozilla, if you can bring yourselves to create a mass-management system into FF (even if it's just windows only for now) I can guarantee you 1500 new installs overnight. Having to support users who've run into yet another of IE6's bazillion gotchas really makes my balls ache.
Does anyone know if Waugh's original measurement was corrected for the fact that Everest's height isn't fixed? The Indian plate is sltill ploughing into the bottom of China (for those three of you on/. who don't know, Everest and the Himalayas, and indeed the entire Tibetean plateau were created by India going "thwack" into south east asia and squishing an ocean, Tethys, into a colossal mountain range). The height of Everest above mean sea level could easily vary by 50ft over 100 years.
1) Take it to a shop owned by $YOUR_CARRIER. Non-dodge, and they will unlock it for you for a small fee, usually a tenner IME. AFAICR they're legally obliged to unlock the phone on request. 2) Take it to one of the dodgy shops who'll do it for a fiver right in front of you 3) Grab the software off the net - free (unless you need to buy a data cable to do it) 4) Use one of the net services that uses your IMEI number to unlock (you can usually grab this by typing *#06# on your keypad) although they tend to be expensive IIRC
Personally, I stopped buying phones from carriers - I've been using my current self-bought phone (Nokia 6310i which cost me £300) for, I think, five years now. Saying "no" to the vodafone upgrade treadmill has earned me £300 in phone credits not to mention two drops in my monthly contract rate as well as contract perks (it's now cheaper for me to use my mobile than my landline, which is just there to provide ADSL now), and no unlocking to worry about when I want to pop off to Europe and get a local pre-pay SIM. True, I have an appalingly stone aged phone but it's got bluetooth, is usable as a GPRS modem for my laptop (although picked up a 3G SIM from Three that gives me 3GB data a month for £15 which I use with a modem that work was throwing out) but it's built like a tank and the original battery still lasts a week on a single charge.
You may begrudge them charging you to unlock your own phone, but remember that the price you paid for it is heavily subsidised, and surely if you're changing SIM's for the sake of saving money, £10-20 isn't much of a drop in the ocean is it?
Just calling it SuperSpeed USB is far too simple. In order to bring it to compliance, we'll need SuperHighSpeed USB (USB 1.1), SuperFastSpeed USB (USB 2.0) and SuperMegaSpeed USB eXtreeeeeem (USB 3.0). To make matters simpler, Firewire should also be renamed to SuperFastSpeed Un-universal Serial Bus (UUSB for short).
"After all, in this century (for the first time ever) as soon as something is "affixed in tangible form" copyright is granted. Everything on the internet save anything created before 1920 is copyrighted."
In the US, perhaps. Quite probable in fact.
But how do AT&T plan to account for information that's been released into the public domain by the copyright holder? How do they plan to ignore copyrighted data going over their backbone between endpoints where US copyright doesn't apply (aka "much of the rest of the world")? How do they cater for Joe Ipod mailing himself a song he ripped so that he can listen to it on his computer at work (I believe this is covered under fair use as long as it doesn't contravene the DMCA by holding down the shift key)?
That's even before P2P starts adding encryption at the protocol level, BT tracker access through TOR, private IPSec VPN's for P2P communities, pwned machines acting as warez zombies, even almost any protocol through SSH/SSL/TLS - all nearly undetectable without basically making encryption illegal (and the cat is already out of the bag on that one, what with every significant widely adopted encryption protocol having had its source in the wild for years). How long before some enterprising Lithuanian comes up with a steganographic protocol indistinguishable from a YouTube stream?
As with every similar move before it, it'll just make P2P traffic even more polymorphic whilst setting the foundation for coercion by mass surveillance, whoops, sorry, I meant thinking of the children.
Alot of the hostility over this comes from the fact that it was users who were experiencing the bugs, and users generally aren't developers. Alot of people, myself included, felt like it was next to impossible to submit bug reports because, according to http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/bugs I have to: Use a different version of the browser to the one I have installed (I can understand getting the user to compare their installed version with the latest version to see if it's been fixed or not but this makes no sense to me) Delete/move the profile I use (what if the bug is actually in the user profile or one of the extensions?) Determine whether the bug is part of firefox, toolkit or core (I barely understand the difference, so how is your average user going to know?) Write it all up, sit back and watch the bitchy infighting amongst the people in bugzilla
By setting the bar so high they essentially seem to be saying "we only want bug reports from developers who we can hopefully cajole into fixing it themselves". Reports of the myriad memory problems went unheeded because users weren't able to reproduce bugs "exactly" because they don't think like software developers.
I think if FF are really serious about getting decent bug reports, they should add something like a --debug-log switch that'll keep a track of each website the user has visited (even a simple "export by browser history for this session button" would work wonders) as well as a memory analysis of what each tab/thread or whatever is doing/using (no, I have no idea how FF is structured internally), giving a nice dump that can hopefully serve as a pointer to the devs as to where the major leaks/fragmentation were occurring. Should make the "complex" bugs considerably easier to track down, no?
I'm not trying to flame FF because generally they're doing a good job, but I'm certainly one of the people who's been hideously frustrated by the apparent attitudes of some of the developers. I understand that most of them are doing it for free and probably hate having to deal with users at the best of times but a little clarity and honesty can go a remarkably long way to appeasing your user base. More flies with honey than vinegar, that sort of thing. Don't make a user feel stupid when they can't do something, make them feel good when they can. If you can't be arsed, say so - I'd much rather hear that than someone saying "yeah, I'll get right on it" and then intentionally forgetting about it forever more.
Completely agree (FF becomes completely unusable on a C2D with 4GB RAM for about 90 seconds when it's loading my "recorded programs" page from apache/MythWeb), but I think it's a very, very difficult problem to fix. Alot of it's down to FF's UI being based largely on JavaScript, which is inherently single threaded. Take JavaScript/XUL out of the equations, and making extensions gets a whole lot harder. This is also one of the reasons why people, like myself, find heavily "interactive" features like mouse gestures extremely sluggish on FF compared to opera and konq.
Browsers that use the Gecko engine without XUL, like Epiphany, should be significantly better in this regard but I've not done my MythTV test with any of them.
In any case, I've been happily using opera since 2001. The new 9.5 beta also renders my MythTV page in about a quarter of the time it takes FF whilst still allowing me to use other tabs.
It's a right-click and click-to-block-a-URL ad blocker.
Since Opera's a commercial company and there's little support for third party add-ons, they'd probably be sued for "theft" if they had an inbuilt ad-blocker, especially with automated rulesets.
TBH, the generic content blocker is fine for me, but you can also revert to the older filter.ini behaviour (essentially a hosts file sorta thing) if you don't mind futzing about with config files.
Yeah, ad blocking isn't as streamlined as FF but I'd still rather use it than FF because of all the other problems FF has.
Most of my friends buy a landline for ADSL but never plug a phone into it. Almost everyone defaults to calling or texting someone on their mobile first, with landlines generally being used as a last resort. Paradoxically, it's often cheaper or the same price to call a mobile anyway, thanks to the plethora of "any network" free minutes. It's this sort of behaviour that's led to the huge adoption in the use of the term "land line" as well, as opposed to "phone line" which was common until mobiles got a foothold.
Not sure how that usage compares to most people in the US where you have to pay for your incoming calls though.
Missed Eastenders? I've never missed it in my life. They could cancel it and I'd be blissfully ignorant of the loss of my ability to peer into the lives of fictional characters whose vocabulary seems to consist of the words "bloody," "fancy a shag?" "pint" and "caaa!" (cockney for cow, I'm led to believe) but should you be of that bent, you can watch it online.
Nice troll. The fact that you claim to have a) never missed Eastenders and b) have not killed yourself from the sheer depressingly transparent ficticiousness of it all and c) have not noticed that there isn't a vocabulary at all, just the universal language of shouting that merely appears to sound like language show that you have clearly not watched it in enough detail!;)
As an aside, are there any other soaps that use wilful misunderstanding as such an indispensible plot device?
"So you went to see Mark today?" "Let's just say we had a little chat..." "You know he's in hospital, right? What did you say to him?" "Lets just say that I managed to convince him of a few... home truths" "You're not remotely concerned that he currently has a 10% chance of survival, and even then a 90% likelihood of permanent brain damage that'll make for some more weepy stories a few months down the line?" "Lets just say that me and Mark didn't really see eye to eye on alot of things" "Are you saying that you attacked him?" "Lets just say I wouldn't mind buying whoever did a pint" "OK, I'm arresting you for the assaullt of plot device #57.285" "What?! Leave it aht! What did I say?!"
Fucks sake, no-one in Eastenders ever speaks clearly, the entire point of the dialogue is to give everyone the wrong idea just so they can all have a hugely uneccassary fights about it a few weeks later. How anyone can watch such bilge I don't know - although I was hugely enamoured by Charlie Brooker's "Ricky's Luck" spoof spinoff (for the uninitiated, none of the things described are outside of the realms of possibility for an Eastenders character).
Disclaimer: I don't watch Eastenders, but live with someone who does.
Or even accept that trying to use "DRM" is rather daft after you have broadcast it in unencrypted near-DVD quality full PAL resolution MPEG2 that can be saved to disk with a £30 TV card.
There, fixed that for you;)
As a long time supporter of the BBC (or "TV tax" as most Americans like to call it), I'm not quite sure what the insistence on DRM is either. Auntie says their partners (NBC and CBC possibly) demand it for online content, but what pirate in his right mind will bother trying to strip the DRM from a crappily encoded low-res file when the broadcast version went out 7 days earlier, in a far more rippable format? I'm a heavy PVR user (MythTV), and the MPEG2-TS dumps it produces from the DVB-T TV cards are often indistinguisable from the DVD that gets released to the shops (as opposed to most of the commercial channels which don't use as high a bitrate/res as the Beeb).
It's not so much closing the barn door after the horse has bolted as wondering what sort of building you should put in that field where all the horses used to be.
To sum up: complete storm in a teacup. Someone obviously thought that video + internet = 0h teh n03s, pirates! and insisted on a WM DRM solution, without actually thinking through whether it'd do anything to stop serious copying of content.
They should have just gone with the streaming service since day one - heck, it's what they've been doing with radio for years. How much of my license fee has gone up in smoke via the great furnace of Microsoft licensing? Too much for me to not give a shit.
~90% of users are going to go with whatever browser they're given. Chances are they don't know what a browser is, and won't even know there are other pieces of software that do the same thing. I've met plenty of people using FF who just think it's a different place for the "internet" to live.
Most apps/sites (read: most = retarded) require IE. Most tech support lines require you to use IE (i.e. they'll hang up on you if you say you don't have it, telling you that only IE can be used to solve any problems hovering around ports 80 and 443). Therefore, for an OEM to provide tech support to their customers (a legal requirement) without incurring fees in altering their "help" systems to cater for "user does not have IE" or "user consents to use a different browser than officially mandated one" branches, the people with the purse strings generally see it as their xmas bonuses going up in smoke.
End result? IE is so entrenched it's a practical neccessity, whether it's made optional or not.
And this brings us to the second point, where Opera are right on the money: why is IE so entrenched? Because, for a time, you practically couldn't use chunks of the web without it, and it's pretty much still mandatory on intranets (yay for ActiveX) - ref. browser wars - because MS deliberately subverted the standards. They even tried the same thing with Opera, feeding it malformed stylesheets on MSN in order to make opera appear defective, resulting in the semi-famous B0rk! edition.
By forcing MS to produce a browser that follows the open, published standard (as opposed to the limited subset they do currently), all of a sudden we have a level playing field not only for browsers but for web devs as well. MS certainly has the technical nouse to produce a world class browser, but their strategy since Netscape died has been to keep it usable enough that people didn't puke up their own pelvises whilst using it, but make it no better than that. Heck, you think IE7 would have happened without FF? I doubt it. They choose not to because they have a vested interest in keeping as much of the net, and the web, using protocols or applications that they control, either in whole or in part because that makes controlling you, the product, that much easier. If everyone was going around using opera, or flashblock, or google apps, or Macs, we'd have plagues, cats and gods living together, mass hysteria and, dog forbid, drops in MS's mindshare and marketshare which can only leave the fortress gates open for commie pinkos like Linyos Torovoltos, making the problem even worse.
Thankfully, such a proposition has a chance, albeit slim, of happening in Europe - a fully CSS W3C-compliant IE would be a colossal boon for web devs, and ultimately users, the world over, probably eventually to MS's decline, since they'd be forced to compete on features rather that support for the semi-crippled IE-only interwebosphere. Apart from corporates of course, where IE will still rule the roost due to Active Directory (Opera! PLEASE support SPNEGO so those of us in MS shops don't have to chuck our creds in every five minutes! Firefox, PLEASE add MSI support and a GPO snap-in and I can guarantee you five hundred users tomorrow). Not sure it'd fly in America, cos what's good for MS is good for the US is good for the world, right?
Disclaimer: long time Opera fanboy, long time Brit with long time disdain for the US govs foreign and economical policies
Late reply, but what the hell. Quite lucky in the UK in that almost all terrestrial TV is now broadcast as OTA MPEG2, typically at full PAL resolution (25fps 720x576), making much of it near DVD quality via DVB-T - recording it is just dumping an MPEG2 stream from a tuner to a hard drive. Hence it generally makes more sense to record it off the air than to download a torrent, and it it helps bridge the gap between it first showing at it being released on DVD, and there's plenty of brilliant TV shows, particularly BBC4, that are never released on DVD.
Assuming you're from the US, I can heartily agree with your sentiments - most of the samples of your broadcast TV look terrible, whereas the people producing the torrents (I had a big thing for Adult Swim a few years back) were much superior in quality (presumably some cable channels are better quality than others? Almost everything I see of cable and satellite in the UK, even the HD stuff, is over-compressed, pixellated and artefact-ridden dross that looks especially bad on decent TV's, although most people have their shiny HDTV's set up all wrong and so it looks awful no matter what).
But the main reason I prefer to watch it on the way into work is so that, for "popular" shows like Top Gear I can do a bit of a water cooler thing, instead of having torrent-lag. Oddly enough, despite about 80% of my floor having PVR systems of some description, almost everyone watches shows like Top Gear live.
So you're willing to pay more for content that hasn't had expensive snake oil spent on it?
Not intending that as a jibe - guess it'd be quite nice to have a service/app that'd provide an optional 1-click "send to my MP3 player" or what have you for people who aren't inclined to transcode their own or download an iPod-ised version from TPB... but I think the DVD publishers are missing a trick by not including an already converted MP4 file on the DVD itself. It'd be low quality and therefore useless to most people but it'd certainly get people more used to watching stuff on their 2" screens;) As it is, DRM is just an excuse to con you out of using "content" you already own ('cept in the UK of course, where any format shifting is technically illegal).
My MP3 player (iAudio X5) supports MPEG4 stuff in an AVI if you transcode it right, and I dare say I might use it more if the screen was a little better. As a further aside, I've transcoded a few ephemeral TV shows recorded the night previously on my Myth box via a custom job so as to be able to watch them on the way into work. That's quite handy, and means I don't have to spend 30 minutes of my at-home time watching it.
...its been said a million times. Teach concepts and the ability to extend knowledge of those concepts into the real world. Don't teach specific applications.
Face it, when the slashdot faithful were in school we were taught on a different set of software than what we used at uni, and later in the workplace. Software changes on a year-by-year, month-by-month basis. Rote memorisation can get you far in, say, simple mathematics, but it doesn't extend so well into areas that change rapidly. Heck, I was brought up on ancient Acorn Archimedes machines that had approximately 0% penetration in the workplace but our teacher was bright enough to teach us what a windowing system was, what a hard drive did, how networks worked, how databases worked... no specific implementations, just concepts.
Current teaching, as I've experienced it, has fostered a generation of computer users who are stupefied if they come into contact with an application they've never used before. I've even seen people confused by using the same app in a slightly differnt setup (e.g. Office with customised toolbars). Such a mindset has further fostered the idea, IMHO, that people can't cope with being given a choice in using the best tool for the job since they'll be incapable of using anything that differs from the norm.
In answer to your query, if I was given the freedom to I'd like to show children an example of each popular variant of each subset of programs - here's one word processor, here's another one that does this thingy differently, here's a typesetting program that comes from an entirely different direction - all the while stressing the functionality they have in common and what differentiates them from one another. The same methodology can be extended to almost any app that has more than one example out in the wild databases, image manipulation programs, animation software, video software... here's a linear video editor, here's a non-linear video editor... pupils will learn how to spot what bits of apps do from being exposed to that functionality in other programs.
Disclaimer: I am opinionated and have never worked in a school environment. Can you tell?;)
Why didn't they list their graphics cards? Surely you can't have a hacking session with power metal blaring in the background and not have a wall of monitors showing alpha-blended hexagons, otherwise none of the hacks will work...?
I think this paper needs to be peer reviewed by Crash Override.
After reading the analysis of the "encryption", I'm utterly flabbergasted that they've been able to get away with it for so long - this sounds like something that hasn't been cracked purely by laziness, because with only 256 possible combinations you could practically decode it in real time in your head.
Any news on other manufacturers? I'm particularly concerned about Cherry (the only wireless keyboard I own, soon to be replaced with a bluetooth Logitech) for my HTPC.
P.S. for the nay-sayers - yes, I too have endless problems with the range of wireless keyboards but I dare say a proper antennae (as opposed to the tiny ones used in the standard receiver) you could probably get a clear signal from up to 10-15m away (25MHz = ~11.5m wavelength, no? ~5m aerial is easy enough to conceal). That's easily enough to snoop someone's keypresses from outside, even off-property.
As an aside, I'm aware that Bluetooth is an open standard, hence probably peer reviewed, hence probably having an association/encryption method that wasn't dreamt up by a crackhead. Can anyone here speak on its relative resilience in its current form, notwithstanding all of the vulns there've been in shoddy stack implementation?
I have to wonder though, why bother with a physical interface at all?
The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.
Very good point, but I'm not convinced I'd like to shake my phone to get an indication of power (not that the standard power meter is going anywhere I suppose) but I'd like a passive aural indicator - how about the phone altering the pitch of all of those poloyphonic ringtones as the charge diminishes? Normal ringtone for 100-30% charge, and then increase the pitch delta as charge drops from that. As soon as you get a call or a text, you can immediately hear something's "wrong" with your phone (consider the age-old comedy stalwharts of the broken alarm bell or the out of tune piano), and it'll have the useful side effect of actually improving a large percentage of ghastly ringtones;)
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Yes, and I'm also aware that "don't bitch about the way the interface has looked for the last six months, it may well change completely even though the devs show absolutely no sign of doing so" has been the default excuse to anyone who expresses concern that their beloved music player is about to turn into the bastard offspring of iTunes and WMP, rather than maintaining its own identity.
All I'm doing is expressing concern about it now, before it's released. Should I wait until it's complete before I bitch about it so I can get the "...but it's finished now, why didn't you say anything when we were still developing it?" excuse? What about the functionality that I know has already been dropped?
I think the mistake you make is in using "share files" - people I've known have always shared books, LP's, mix tapes, CD's, the works - computers have merely made it easier and cheaper for them. To most of them there's no difference between borrowing an album and making a copy of it because, from their perspective, there is no difference - they're getting to experience something they probably wouldn't have bought anyway for zero appreciable cost. They haven't seen it as "wrong" or as "theft" since their dad borrowed his neighbours mix tape to lisen to on that family holiday they went on when they were 6. It just seems to be a natural thing people do, and legislating harshly against human nature generally results in ugliness.
In summary, you're completely right and we're probably both preaching to the choir, but alot of people seem to think that it's computers and the internet that are the root causes of the "piracy problem" when, as ever, it's people that are the problem.
Hmm, I sense you might not be so pleased with amarok 2; its interface is a huge step backwards IMHO, and too much like iTunes for my liking. Apparently they've also done away with support for having a massive current playlist, which completely ruins the way I've grown accustomed to listening to music. Nice to have the developers call you "stupid"...
KDE without configuration options? What's to differentiate it from GNOME?!
Yes, I am only joking. But there's no way I'm shifting to KDE4 until it has at least the level of beautiful tweakery that by beloved KDE3 has. When I tried out one of the RC's (more deserving of the "alpha" moniker if you ask me), I too was similarly astounded at the lack of options for even changing basic things like the colour of the panel (I tend to keep my desktop in neutral, low-contrast colours and the big'n'shiny'n'curvy look of the default KDE4 is about as appealing to me as regurgitating a whole lobster).
I'll also reiterate my stance on widgets - No. Fucking. Way. Why should I minimise every app I have just to be able to see an OpenGL clock or something useless? If it deserves to be treated as an app, then treat it as an app rather than desktop eye candy and give it a taskbar slot or a system tray icon. My desktop is visible for all of every three seconds every time I log in, otherwise it's covered with whatever app(s) I'm using at the time - I don't see the point in using your desktop as anything other than a workspace, your filesystem is where the eye candy (applications and files) lives.
I find Kickoff awkward; Lancelot IMHO is a much nicer K-menu replacement. I'd still like there to be an option for there to be a simple ye olde style menu as well.
I must be a bit of a luddite or something...
Hah, out intranet is full of these aforementioned crappy ASP apps that refuse to work in anything other than IE4-6, with the result that all of the IT stuff now use FF for 95% of their browsing and 5% for the stuff that requires working on the intranet. Users who are aware of the existence of better browsers and are denied access to FF or Opera are routinely incensed.
Presumably you mean SPNEGO? It's designed as a sort of extension to NTLM auth (using Kerberos instead) and is quite common inside MS shops using AD and almost any using SharePoint.
:(
FF has a fix for it though, in about:config filter for NTLM and look for "network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris" - enter the base URL for your intranet servers and/or proxies (e.g. for https://intranet/ you'd just add "intranet") and the problem should go away. Wish Opera supported SPNEGO though
Hope I'm not barkin gup the wrong tree, not found any auth methods that FF couldn't handle without some finagling.
Well, it's marginally less odious than what I call Apple's price fixing (i.e. differential pricing across the EU with enforced regional barriers - this is exactly the sort of thing the EU was designed to stop, barring local taxing laws).
;)
I've seen a fair few albums available as MP3's on amazon.com that I'd have loved to have bought on impulse (which is how I buy most of my music these days, usually going by samples/recommendations from LastFM or friends IMing me tracks) and haven't been able to, and I still haven't run into a download store I'm entirely happy with.
Sure, there are still plenty of other music stores out there selling DRM free stuff, but;
7digital: Large selection, most tracks have a choice of MP3 or AAC and some FLAC. Bad is you can't download whole albums at once, you have to download each track individually (cue lots of frustration when I bought nine albums at once, resulting in about 90 individual track downloads - stupid idea guys, give me a fucking zip file) plus not very helpful tech support - told them of clicks and pops in three of the tracks I downloaded (all from the same album) and was told to give the exact times of every click and pop (there must be about four hundred all told) - asking them to "just listen to it" isn't an option it seems.
Bleep: Large selection, somewhat limited in genre (mainly electronica) but thankfully most of my favourite artists are there. High quality MP3 and occasionally FLAC downloads.
Tunetribe: Large selection, but most only available in WMA even when it's available in MP3 at other download stores. Probably has the nicest interface IMHO, plus pulls artist context info from LastFM
There's also plenty of the more prolific indie labels (4AD, damaged goods) who run their own mini-download stores, selling just own-label stuff so not a great selection but brilliant for grabbing back catalogue stuff.
ITMS is iTunes only, an app I find so teeth-grindingly annoying to use (esp. compared to amarok which, praise be, is about to junk their lovely interace for a badly done iTunes ripoff with pig-ugly rounded everythings) that my doctor has banned me from going anywhere near a computer with it installed for the good of my health.
I guess it's understandable that there'd be some delay in working out deals with the legal entities on this side of the pond since some of them will be different from the US counterparts, but still not a peep out of it so I'm guessing the US is being used as a litmus for everyone else first...? Or perhaps they think Europeans are more likely to commit MP3crime?
Chances are I'll be equally annoyed with the Amazon service anyway
With you there, mostly. I work in an MS shop (although luckily I get to spend most of my time on ESX), and all of the pro-MS techies use FF, more than IE (although I wouldn't be surprised if that changes when we upgrade to IE7) because, well, it's a pretty good browser (sublime compared to IE6). I've had people freak out at me cos I'm an Opera user (I find FF incredibly slow and clunky by comparison). Lots of the IT staff have no problems with the users running FF - in fact, many of them wish it was installed by default as it's a very handy troubleshooting tool when users are having problems with their browser (can't begin to count the number of times IE has refused to let a user to log into a webapp whereas it worked just fine in FF).
However, as you say there's no easy way to push it out. FrontMotion do an MSI-enabled version, but last time I looked it didn't provide GPO settings for things like proxies/WPAD, default extensions to install/ban (yeah, this is the kinda stuff mgmnt insists on for users), disabling automatic updates, all the usual customisation gumpf. Mozilla, if you can bring yourselves to create a mass-management system into FF (even if it's just windows only for now) I can guarantee you 1500 new installs overnight. Having to support users who've run into yet another of IE6's bazillion gotchas really makes my balls ache.
Does anyone know if Waugh's original measurement was corrected for the fact that Everest's height isn't fixed? The Indian plate is sltill ploughing into the bottom of China (for those three of you on /. who don't know, Everest and the Himalayas, and indeed the entire Tibetean plateau were created by India going "thwack" into south east asia and squishing an ocean, Tethys, into a colossal mountain range). The height of Everest above mean sea level could easily vary by 50ft over 100 years.
1) Take it to a shop owned by $YOUR_CARRIER. Non-dodge, and they will unlock it for you for a small fee, usually a tenner IME. AFAICR they're legally obliged to unlock the phone on request.
2) Take it to one of the dodgy shops who'll do it for a fiver right in front of you
3) Grab the software off the net - free (unless you need to buy a data cable to do it)
4) Use one of the net services that uses your IMEI number to unlock (you can usually grab this by typing *#06# on your keypad) although they tend to be expensive IIRC
Personally, I stopped buying phones from carriers - I've been using my current self-bought phone (Nokia 6310i which cost me £300) for, I think, five years now. Saying "no" to the vodafone upgrade treadmill has earned me £300 in phone credits not to mention two drops in my monthly contract rate as well as contract perks (it's now cheaper for me to use my mobile than my landline, which is just there to provide ADSL now), and no unlocking to worry about when I want to pop off to Europe and get a local pre-pay SIM. True, I have an appalingly stone aged phone but it's got bluetooth, is usable as a GPRS modem for my laptop (although picked up a 3G SIM from Three that gives me 3GB data a month for £15 which I use with a modem that work was throwing out) but it's built like a tank and the original battery still lasts a week on a single charge.
You may begrudge them charging you to unlock your own phone, but remember that the price you paid for it is heavily subsidised, and surely if you're changing SIM's for the sake of saving money, £10-20 isn't much of a drop in the ocean is it?
Just calling it SuperSpeed USB is far too simple. In order to bring it to compliance, we'll need SuperHighSpeed USB (USB 1.1), SuperFastSpeed USB (USB 2.0) and SuperMegaSpeed USB eXtreeeeeem (USB 3.0). To make matters simpler, Firewire should also be renamed to SuperFastSpeed Un-universal Serial Bus (UUSB for short).
"After all, in this century (for the first time ever) as soon as something is "affixed in tangible form" copyright is granted. Everything on the internet save anything created before 1920 is copyrighted."
In the US, perhaps. Quite probable in fact.
But how do AT&T plan to account for information that's been released into the public domain by the copyright holder? How do they plan to ignore copyrighted data going over their backbone between endpoints where US copyright doesn't apply (aka "much of the rest of the world")? How do they cater for Joe Ipod mailing himself a song he ripped so that he can listen to it on his computer at work (I believe this is covered under fair use as long as it doesn't contravene the DMCA by holding down the shift key)?
That's even before P2P starts adding encryption at the protocol level, BT tracker access through TOR, private IPSec VPN's for P2P communities, pwned machines acting as warez zombies, even almost any protocol through SSH/SSL/TLS - all nearly undetectable without basically making encryption illegal (and the cat is already out of the bag on that one, what with every significant widely adopted encryption protocol having had its source in the wild for years). How long before some enterprising Lithuanian comes up with a steganographic protocol indistinguishable from a YouTube stream?
As with every similar move before it, it'll just make P2P traffic even more polymorphic whilst setting the foundation for coercion by mass surveillance, whoops, sorry, I meant thinking of the children.
Alot of the hostility over this comes from the fact that it was users who were experiencing the bugs, and users generally aren't developers. Alot of people, myself included, felt like it was next to impossible to submit bug reports because, according to http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/bugs I have to:
Use a different version of the browser to the one I have installed (I can understand getting the user to compare their installed version with the latest version to see if it's been fixed or not but this makes no sense to me)
Delete/move the profile I use (what if the bug is actually in the user profile or one of the extensions?)
Determine whether the bug is part of firefox, toolkit or core (I barely understand the difference, so how is your average user going to know?)
Write it all up, sit back and watch the bitchy infighting amongst the people in bugzilla
By setting the bar so high they essentially seem to be saying "we only want bug reports from developers who we can hopefully cajole into fixing it themselves". Reports of the myriad memory problems went unheeded because users weren't able to reproduce bugs "exactly" because they don't think like software developers.
I think if FF are really serious about getting decent bug reports, they should add something like a --debug-log switch that'll keep a track of each website the user has visited (even a simple "export by browser history for this session button" would work wonders) as well as a memory analysis of what each tab/thread or whatever is doing/using (no, I have no idea how FF is structured internally), giving a nice dump that can hopefully serve as a pointer to the devs as to where the major leaks/fragmentation were occurring. Should make the "complex" bugs considerably easier to track down, no?
I'm not trying to flame FF because generally they're doing a good job, but I'm certainly one of the people who's been hideously frustrated by the apparent attitudes of some of the developers. I understand that most of them are doing it for free and probably hate having to deal with users at the best of times but a little clarity and honesty can go a remarkably long way to appeasing your user base. More flies with honey than vinegar, that sort of thing. Don't make a user feel stupid when they can't do something, make them feel good when they can. If you can't be arsed, say so - I'd much rather hear that than someone saying "yeah, I'll get right on it" and then intentionally forgetting about it forever more.
Completely agree (FF becomes completely unusable on a C2D with 4GB RAM for about 90 seconds when it's loading my "recorded programs" page from apache/MythWeb), but I think it's a very, very difficult problem to fix. Alot of it's down to FF's UI being based largely on JavaScript, which is inherently single threaded. Take JavaScript/XUL out of the equations, and making extensions gets a whole lot harder. This is also one of the reasons why people, like myself, find heavily "interactive" features like mouse gestures extremely sluggish on FF compared to opera and konq.
Browsers that use the Gecko engine without XUL, like Epiphany, should be significantly better in this regard but I've not done my MythTV test with any of them.
In any case, I've been happily using opera since 2001. The new 9.5 beta also renders my MythTV page in about a quarter of the time it takes FF whilst still allowing me to use other tabs.
It's a right-click and click-to-block-a-URL ad blocker.
Since Opera's a commercial company and there's little support for third party add-ons, they'd probably be sued for "theft" if they had an inbuilt ad-blocker, especially with automated rulesets.
TBH, the generic content blocker is fine for me, but you can also revert to the older filter.ini behaviour (essentially a hosts file sorta thing) if you don't mind futzing about with config files.
Yeah, ad blocking isn't as streamlined as FF but I'd still rather use it than FF because of all the other problems FF has.
Most of my friends buy a landline for ADSL but never plug a phone into it. Almost everyone defaults to calling or texting someone on their mobile first, with landlines generally being used as a last resort. Paradoxically, it's often cheaper or the same price to call a mobile anyway, thanks to the plethora of "any network" free minutes. It's this sort of behaviour that's led to the huge adoption in the use of the term "land line" as well, as opposed to "phone line" which was common until mobiles got a foothold.
Not sure how that usage compares to most people in the US where you have to pay for your incoming calls though.
Missed Eastenders? I've never missed it in my life. They could cancel it and I'd be blissfully ignorant of the loss of my ability to peer into the lives of fictional characters whose vocabulary seems to consist of the words "bloody," "fancy a shag?" "pint" and "caaa!" (cockney for cow, I'm led to believe) but should you be of that bent, you can watch it online.
;)
Nice troll. The fact that you claim to have a) never missed Eastenders and b) have not killed yourself from the sheer depressingly transparent ficticiousness of it all and c) have not noticed that there isn't a vocabulary at all, just the universal language of shouting that merely appears to sound like language show that you have clearly not watched it in enough detail!
As an aside, are there any other soaps that use wilful misunderstanding as such an indispensible plot device?
"So you went to see Mark today?"
"Let's just say we had a little chat..."
"You know he's in hospital, right? What did you say to him?"
"Lets just say that I managed to convince him of a few... home truths"
"You're not remotely concerned that he currently has a 10% chance of survival, and even then a 90% likelihood of permanent brain damage that'll make for some more weepy stories a few months down the line?"
"Lets just say that me and Mark didn't really see eye to eye on alot of things"
"Are you saying that you attacked him?"
"Lets just say I wouldn't mind buying whoever did a pint"
"OK, I'm arresting you for the assaullt of plot device #57.285"
"What?! Leave it aht! What did I say?!"
Fucks sake, no-one in Eastenders ever speaks clearly, the entire point of the dialogue is to give everyone the wrong idea just so they can all have a hugely uneccassary fights about it a few weeks later. How anyone can watch such bilge I don't know - although I was hugely enamoured by Charlie Brooker's "Ricky's Luck" spoof spinoff (for the uninitiated, none of the things described are outside of the realms of possibility for an Eastenders character).
Disclaimer: I don't watch Eastenders, but live with someone who does.
Or even accept that trying to use "DRM" is rather daft after you have broadcast it in unencrypted near-DVD quality full PAL resolution MPEG2 that can be saved to disk with a £30 TV card.
;)
There, fixed that for you
As a long time supporter of the BBC (or "TV tax" as most Americans like to call it), I'm not quite sure what the insistence on DRM is either. Auntie says their partners (NBC and CBC possibly) demand it for online content, but what pirate in his right mind will bother trying to strip the DRM from a crappily encoded low-res file when the broadcast version went out 7 days earlier, in a far more rippable format? I'm a heavy PVR user (MythTV), and the MPEG2-TS dumps it produces from the DVB-T TV cards are often indistinguisable from the DVD that gets released to the shops (as opposed to most of the commercial channels which don't use as high a bitrate/res as the Beeb).
It's not so much closing the barn door after the horse has bolted as wondering what sort of building you should put in that field where all the horses used to be.
To sum up: complete storm in a teacup. Someone obviously thought that video + internet = 0h teh n03s, pirates! and insisted on a WM DRM solution, without actually thinking through whether it'd do anything to stop serious copying of content.
They should have just gone with the streaming service since day one - heck, it's what they've been doing with radio for years. How much of my license fee has gone up in smoke via the great furnace of Microsoft licensing? Too much for me to not give a shit.
Chicken/egg.
~90% of users are going to go with whatever browser they're given. Chances are they don't know what a browser is, and won't even know there are other pieces of software that do the same thing. I've met plenty of people using FF who just think it's a different place for the "internet" to live.
Most apps/sites (read: most = retarded) require IE. Most tech support lines require you to use IE (i.e. they'll hang up on you if you say you don't have it, telling you that only IE can be used to solve any problems hovering around ports 80 and 443). Therefore, for an OEM to provide tech support to their customers (a legal requirement) without incurring fees in altering their "help" systems to cater for "user does not have IE" or "user consents to use a different browser than officially mandated one" branches, the people with the purse strings generally see it as their xmas bonuses going up in smoke.
End result? IE is so entrenched it's a practical neccessity, whether it's made optional or not.
And this brings us to the second point, where Opera are right on the money: why is IE so entrenched? Because, for a time, you practically couldn't use chunks of the web without it, and it's pretty much still mandatory on intranets (yay for ActiveX) - ref. browser wars - because MS deliberately subverted the standards. They even tried the same thing with Opera, feeding it malformed stylesheets on MSN in order to make opera appear defective, resulting in the semi-famous B0rk! edition.
By forcing MS to produce a browser that follows the open, published standard (as opposed to the limited subset they do currently), all of a sudden we have a level playing field not only for browsers but for web devs as well. MS certainly has the technical nouse to produce a world class browser, but their strategy since Netscape died has been to keep it usable enough that people didn't puke up their own pelvises whilst using it, but make it no better than that. Heck, you think IE7 would have happened without FF? I doubt it. They choose not to because they have a vested interest in keeping as much of the net, and the web, using protocols or applications that they control, either in whole or in part because that makes controlling you, the product, that much easier. If everyone was going around using opera, or flashblock, or google apps, or Macs, we'd have plagues, cats and gods living together, mass hysteria and, dog forbid, drops in MS's mindshare and marketshare which can only leave the fortress gates open for commie pinkos like Linyos Torovoltos, making the problem even worse.
Thankfully, such a proposition has a chance, albeit slim, of happening in Europe - a fully CSS W3C-compliant IE would be a colossal boon for web devs, and ultimately users, the world over, probably eventually to MS's decline, since they'd be forced to compete on features rather that support for the semi-crippled IE-only interwebosphere. Apart from corporates of course, where IE will still rule the roost due to Active Directory (Opera! PLEASE support SPNEGO so those of us in MS shops don't have to chuck our creds in every five minutes! Firefox, PLEASE add MSI support and a GPO snap-in and I can guarantee you five hundred users tomorrow). Not sure it'd fly in America, cos what's good for MS is good for the US is good for the world, right?
Disclaimer: long time Opera fanboy, long time Brit with long time disdain for the US govs foreign and economical policies
Late reply, but what the hell. Quite lucky in the UK in that almost all terrestrial TV is now broadcast as OTA MPEG2, typically at full PAL resolution (25fps 720x576), making much of it near DVD quality via DVB-T - recording it is just dumping an MPEG2 stream from a tuner to a hard drive. Hence it generally makes more sense to record it off the air than to download a torrent, and it it helps bridge the gap between it first showing at it being released on DVD, and there's plenty of brilliant TV shows, particularly BBC4, that are never released on DVD.
Assuming you're from the US, I can heartily agree with your sentiments - most of the samples of your broadcast TV look terrible, whereas the people producing the torrents (I had a big thing for Adult Swim a few years back) were much superior in quality (presumably some cable channels are better quality than others? Almost everything I see of cable and satellite in the UK, even the HD stuff, is over-compressed, pixellated and artefact-ridden dross that looks especially bad on decent TV's, although most people have their shiny HDTV's set up all wrong and so it looks awful no matter what).
But the main reason I prefer to watch it on the way into work is so that, for "popular" shows like Top Gear I can do a bit of a water cooler thing, instead of having torrent-lag. Oddly enough, despite about 80% of my floor having PVR systems of some description, almost everyone watches shows like Top Gear live.
So you're willing to pay more for content that hasn't had expensive snake oil spent on it?
;) As it is, DRM is just an excuse to con you out of using "content" you already own ('cept in the UK of course, where any format shifting is technically illegal).
Not intending that as a jibe - guess it'd be quite nice to have a service/app that'd provide an optional 1-click "send to my MP3 player" or what have you for people who aren't inclined to transcode their own or download an iPod-ised version from TPB... but I think the DVD publishers are missing a trick by not including an already converted MP4 file on the DVD itself. It'd be low quality and therefore useless to most people but it'd certainly get people more used to watching stuff on their 2" screens
My MP3 player (iAudio X5) supports MPEG4 stuff in an AVI if you transcode it right, and I dare say I might use it more if the screen was a little better. As a further aside, I've transcoded a few ephemeral TV shows recorded the night previously on my Myth box via a custom job so as to be able to watch them on the way into work. That's quite handy, and means I don't have to spend 30 minutes of my at-home time watching it.
...its been said a million times. Teach concepts and the ability to extend knowledge of those concepts into the real world. Don't teach specific applications.
;)
Face it, when the slashdot faithful were in school we were taught on a different set of software than what we used at uni, and later in the workplace. Software changes on a year-by-year, month-by-month basis. Rote memorisation can get you far in, say, simple mathematics, but it doesn't extend so well into areas that change rapidly. Heck, I was brought up on ancient Acorn Archimedes machines that had approximately 0% penetration in the workplace but our teacher was bright enough to teach us what a windowing system was, what a hard drive did, how networks worked, how databases worked... no specific implementations, just concepts.
Current teaching, as I've experienced it, has fostered a generation of computer users who are stupefied if they come into contact with an application they've never used before. I've even seen people confused by using the same app in a slightly differnt setup (e.g. Office with customised toolbars). Such a mindset has further fostered the idea, IMHO, that people can't cope with being given a choice in using the best tool for the job since they'll be incapable of using anything that differs from the norm.
In answer to your query, if I was given the freedom to I'd like to show children an example of each popular variant of each subset of programs - here's one word processor, here's another one that does this thingy differently, here's a typesetting program that comes from an entirely different direction - all the while stressing the functionality they have in common and what differentiates them from one another. The same methodology can be extended to almost any app that has more than one example out in the wild databases, image manipulation programs, animation software, video software... here's a linear video editor, here's a non-linear video editor... pupils will learn how to spot what bits of apps do from being exposed to that functionality in other programs.
Disclaimer: I am opinionated and have never worked in a school environment. Can you tell?
Why didn't they list their graphics cards? Surely you can't have a hacking session with power metal blaring in the background and not have a wall of monitors showing alpha-blended hexagons, otherwise none of the hacks will work...?
I think this paper needs to be peer reviewed by Crash Override.
After reading the analysis of the "encryption", I'm utterly flabbergasted that they've been able to get away with it for so long - this sounds like something that hasn't been cracked purely by laziness, because with only 256 possible combinations you could practically decode it in real time in your head.
Any news on other manufacturers? I'm particularly concerned about Cherry (the only wireless keyboard I own, soon to be replaced with a bluetooth Logitech) for my HTPC.
P.S. for the nay-sayers - yes, I too have endless problems with the range of wireless keyboards but I dare say a proper antennae (as opposed to the tiny ones used in the standard receiver) you could probably get a clear signal from up to 10-15m away (25MHz = ~11.5m wavelength, no? ~5m aerial is easy enough to conceal). That's easily enough to snoop someone's keypresses from outside, even off-property.
As an aside, I'm aware that Bluetooth is an open standard, hence probably peer reviewed, hence probably having an association/encryption method that wasn't dreamt up by a crackhead. Can anyone here speak on its relative resilience in its current form, notwithstanding all of the vulns there've been in shoddy stack implementation?
I have to wonder though, why bother with a physical interface at all?
;)
The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.
Very good point, but I'm not convinced I'd like to shake my phone to get an indication of power (not that the standard power meter is going anywhere I suppose) but I'd like a passive aural indicator - how about the phone altering the pitch of all of those poloyphonic ringtones as the charge diminishes? Normal ringtone for 100-30% charge, and then increase the pitch delta as charge drops from that. As soon as you get a call or a text, you can immediately hear something's "wrong" with your phone (consider the age-old comedy stalwharts of the broken alarm bell or the out of tune piano), and it'll have the useful side effect of actually improving a large percentage of ghastly ringtones