I'm amazed by the proportion of luddites coming out of the woodwork, scared of making their bill payments online. I thought this was slashdot, not elderlyfolkafraidoftheinternetdot
The impression I get is that you're wrong- it's not that people here are afraid of doing such things online. It's that they're rightly sceptical of using systems that- despite supposedly being more convenient- give the companies more control over, and potential to make mistakes with, our money, when such systems don't appear to be reliable or trustworthy enough not to make such automated mistakes that could cause major inconvenience when they do happen.
In other words, if a company hasn't got its shit together and you don't have any simple way of reversing any mistakes and forcing the onus of their mistakes back onto *them*, then you'd be an idiot to grant such a system carte blanche to mess about with your finances.
I use my Bank's automated bill payment system. I lose some small degree of control, but in fact that is indeed the entire point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas?
No, it's not. The point is to automate all the tedious crap that you would normally do anyway. There's no reason that this should involve loss of control if they give you the opportunity to change this or revert to doing it manually at any point.
What's the potential cost to you of your landlord accidentally withdrawing 10x rent even once?
Very little - it'd just mean I don't have to worry about rent for most of the next year. That'd be quite nice.
Nice for you that you've got enough liquid capital sloshing about that this wouldn't be a problem. Though since it was implicit in the original poster's comment that this *would* be a problem for most people, your answer missed the point- intentionally, I assume, so that you could make a smartass answer that was both smug and pat.
Anyway, if you're that well off, it'd probably make more financial sense to simply buy the place you're staying in.
No, you are just most likely American. The problem for you guys is as a customer you have next to no rights, very limited warranties removes the need to make proper products.
In EU however, most places now require 2 year warranty, that means all the good hardware is being shipped here because they don't want to be stuck with a customers problem 1,5 years down the road.
Absolutely; and if you live within the EU, this- along with the fact that most displayed US prices don't include sales tax (AKA VAT) which is added on- is something to bear in mind the next time you're feeling sore about the difference in cost between the UK (or whatever) and the US.
Although it's arguable that these two issues don't cover the complete difference, the gulf does look much less vast when you take it into account.
I remember reading something not entirely dissimilar in Robert X Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds". Might or might not be apocryphal; I don't have the book to hand.
Apparently Intel (IIRC) were having problems. The amount of defective parts they were getting was going through the roof, and they were pulling their hair out trying to get to the root of the problem.
Finally they traced it down to the guy responsible for receiving the deliveries of the silicon wafers. Apparently he was taking out the wafers and putting them down in his desk- quite dusty and very definitely *not* up to clean room standards!- to make sure Intel was getting what they'd paid for.
Isn't that the whole problem with Java in a nutshell? I like the language OK, but all the framework stuff bolted on to it, combined with "deprecated"-this and "deprecated"-that, really cause a geometric explosion in what one needs to understand and/or support in that environment.
"My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey."
There was a time before there were adverts all over the web, I'm sure it will work just as well as it used to.
Yes, we all remember the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, but although I'll happily agree that there have been many negative changes since then, would you want to go back now?
A lot of it was cool at the time, but it was all new back then. Remember how people used to keep "useful" and/or "cool" lists of useful general-purpose links on their home pages? This wasn't laughable at the time only because there were relatively few major sites. (I bet the coffee pot was among them!)
Fun times... but you wouldn't (or shouldn't) go back given the choice because having got used to the massive amounts of information on the modern web, and the novelty having worn off, it would seem quaint, basic and.... empty. So I'm afraid the time before there were adverts all over the web is no longer an attractive alternative as you imply.
And the important question is whether the modern web would- and could- exist in its current form without advertising. I don't think it would go back to 1995 levels, but I think we'd lose a lot (not all of it bad admittedly) unless we found an alternative funding model.
We'll just have sites that people want,
Assuming that people are willing to provide the content for free and/or people are willing to donate the costs to keep them running.
All of the games look like cheezy anime. I am not impressed or amused. This just looks like another hand held disappointment.
If it's meant to be like the GP2X and GP32 (of which some misguided person made the same criticism), then you're missing the point. Those were primarily meant for those seeking a more open, hackable handheld that can run emulators and all sorts of other things. They're not really competing with the DS or PSP, which would be better choices if you just want to play games- or at least the kind of mainstream games that Nintendo and/or Sony want you to play.
This is the UK. Grandma and Gramps are probably, what, 32? 33?
Seriously, I don't want to come across as humourless or offended, because I'm more surprised than anything. I'm aware of the "bad teeth" and "everyone speaks with cut glass voices and has a butler and is frightfully repressed, yadda yadda" stereotypes the Americans have of the British, but are underage pregnancies seen as a British thing? New one on me!
(Trying to figure out if you're over-extrapolating modern reports of "chavs" on council estates or thinking of some Victorian-era cliche...)
12 MB is an issue? I spend 1000 MB on Star Wars: Episode II, and that's a shitty movie.
I'd have thought it was obvious (as others have already pointed out) that the guy's issue was that a closed-source app that size could contain countless undocumented backdoors and other subterfuges. Whether this is actually the case or a good argument is beside the point.
The problem with a touch screen on a remote control, although it looks very cool, is that it's just not very usable. Most interaction with a remote (after the first week or two) is carried out without even looking at it. The locations of the buttons are mostly memorised, but you still need to feel where the buttons are in order to press them accurately.
Bingo. Looking at all those expensive touch screen/panel remote controls, my gut reaction is that the people buying them are gadget freaks who like them because they look cool. I found the remote control on my old digibox annoying enough because there were too many stupid little identically-shaped and laid-out buttons when navigating in the dark. I imagine that having to look down at the remote every time you wanted to select something would get annoying very quickly.
You only used "Smart userbase" to suck up to the moderators. Admit it.
Trust me on this. For various reasons I stopped using Slashdot altogether for almost a year (2006 IIRC). During that time I started using Digg- which back then had been hyped as the best thing since sliced bread, the poster-boy of Web 2.0, and was being talked about essentially as a next-generation, improved Slashdot.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that now, but that's how it was seen then. Anyway, I eventually stopped using Digg and moved back to Slashdot because I got sick of the moron-level discussions and popularity-contest, attention-grabbing crap stories. Even during the few months that I used it, the quality of both seemed to go down significantly, and it was nowhere as good as it had been hyped even when I started. Perhaps the rot had already set in by then, but if you want a riposte to that "wisdom of crowds" bullshit, the kneejerk, cliquish, sheeplike, bovine-level groupthink, stupidity of the Digg userbase is perfect.
There was a really good article on Kuro5hin about it, but it seems to have disappeared.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I came back to Slashdot, the comments *genuinely* seemed like they'd been written by- if not geniuses- then certainly vastly more intelligent people. And if you're thinking that this was in comparison with Digg, which would make anything look good- that's the point. Once the novelty had worn off, the usual factors started to irritate me again, but trust me when I say that compared to Digg, Slashdot users *are* fucking geniuses.
Things weren't all that backwards in the 1980s - in 1984 or 1985 I was certainly able to access online news at university (via some enterprising person's Ceefax server at another university).
That's pretty cool (or at least would have been at the time), but it doesn't really demonstrate newspapers'- or even the BBC's foresight- just some clever dude taking Ceefax (the BBC's Teletext service) and connecting it to the Internet (or whatever).
OTOH, you could say that about a lot of things, and it probably could *never* have been that influential simply because there weren't that many people online in *any* form at that time and the person responsible wouldn't have been actually "marketing" this service to them as such. But it's still a nice idea.
BTW, apparently Teletext never took off in the US, which seems strange. Wonder if it would have affected the tone of this article if it had been written in the UK?
To be truly fair, that's because 'golden age' Atari failed and split in 1984, allowing the brand and properties to end up in other hands, who could make them viable.
It's true that the company split in 1984- Warners wanted to sell off the suddenly loss-making company, but Jack Tramiel (who had just left Commodore) only wanted the home/computer division (Atari Corp.), not the coinops (Atari Games).
Still, it's hard to say that the "real" Atari died there. Both the successor companies were still essentially descendants and continuations of their respective Atari divisions (Atari Games perhaps moreso), and they continued to operate like that for well over a decade. Atari Corp died a slow death from the early 1990s onwards and merged ignominiously with a third-rate hard drive manufacturer in 1996, which was basically the end for them. The "other" Atari Games was sold to Midway who merged it into their company then eventually left the arcade market in 2001. Certainly, *that* was when the final remnants of the original business ceased to exist as anything more than a brand.
The current "Atari" is- as others have already mentioned- essentially just Infogrames after they bought the rights to the name, and it has no real connection with (any of) the original Atari(s) beyond operating in the same field of business.
...this monumental event, Microsoft replace Vista's system sounds with "slap bass" versions, including a brief but annoyingly noodling intermission that plays every time you select a different window.
Meanwhile, Vista adoption falls through the floor.
a poorly recorded mp3 can actually damage hearing at high volume due to the "missing" audio data. you can actually see the missing sound on a good EQ, which forms an incomplete 'compressed' waveform, which your hearing is unable to deal with at high pressure (70+DB).
I remeber the big CDs, they looked like vinyls, but digital.
Huh? To the best of my knowledge there have *never* been any commercially marketed CDs larger than the standard 12cm ones! (The obvious disadvantage being that they wouldn't fit in an ordinary CD player). The only other CD size I know of is the "mini" 3-inch/8cm one.
Perhaps you're thinking of the LaserDisc video format which actually predates the CD? They came in a variety of sizes, the largest of which was the same size as a vinyl LP, but looked not unlike a giant CD. Some later ones included digital sound, but the video itself was always analogue, albeit at better quality then video cassettes.
since I am only 26, I have to ask, is there anything before CD's?
Uh, seriously? If you were listening to and buying music at the age of (say) 7 onwards, that'd have been the late 1980s.
CD players back then were falling in price quite fast, but they still weren't that cheap compared to what they are today. Even in my early teens I went for the cheapass hifi without the CD player (£100 vs. £200, more like £175 (US$325) vs. £350 (US$650) in today's money). Perhaps your family was well off, but...
You only bought original music, and never copied anything off your friends? Although the CD-R spec was defined in 1988, I'll happily bet that *any* burners at that time would have been mindbogglingly expensive- they didn't get affordable until the late 1990s. In the meantime, most of us used cassettes. Neither you nor your friends used them?
I can quite believe someone your age not having used vinyl (except as a curiosity or something slightly archaic), but never to have used cassettes? That's surprising.
I swear, Your Honour, she's a 9000 year old space alien with the appearance of a 12 year old human female!
Said it before, and I'll say it again. If all those "18 year olds" that dodgy anime fans mastu... er, get excited over came to life unchanged, they'd look pretty much like this (SFW, unless you'd have a hard time explaining your interest in kids' TV to your boss).
18, my arse. You sick fucks!
Then again, I suspect that rather than feeling shame at this realisation, half the lolita anime nerds would be trying to figure out whether they could book a two-week vacation in LazyTown.:-/
Actually the comment on painters is they approximate skin color and lighting values and even very realistic masters aren't mistaken for photographs.
I've seen some *very* good paintings that might be mistaken for photographs at a glance. Or maybe they wouldn't; the problem is that I already knew that they were paintings.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed by the proportion of luddites coming out of the woodwork, scared of making their bill payments online. I thought this was slashdot, not elderlyfolkafraidoftheinternetdot
The impression I get is that you're wrong- it's not that people here are afraid of doing such things online. It's that they're rightly sceptical of using systems that- despite supposedly being more convenient- give the companies more control over, and potential to make mistakes with, our money, when such systems don't appear to be reliable or trustworthy enough not to make such automated mistakes that could cause major inconvenience when they do happen.
In other words, if a company hasn't got its shit together and you don't have any simple way of reversing any mistakes and forcing the onus of their mistakes back onto *them*, then you'd be an idiot to grant such a system carte blanche to mess about with your finances.
I use my Bank's automated bill payment system. I lose some small degree of control, but in fact that is indeed the entire point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas?
No, it's not. The point is to automate all the tedious crap that you would normally do anyway. There's no reason that this should involve loss of control if they give you the opportunity to change this or revert to doing it manually at any point.
What's the potential cost to you of your landlord accidentally withdrawing 10x rent even once?
Very little - it'd just mean I don't have to worry about rent for most of the next year. That'd be quite nice.
Nice for you that you've got enough liquid capital sloshing about that this wouldn't be a problem. Though since it was implicit in the original poster's comment that this *would* be a problem for most people, your answer missed the point- intentionally, I assume, so that you could make a smartass answer that was both smug and pat.
Anyway, if you're that well off, it'd probably make more financial sense to simply buy the place you're staying in.
No, you are just most likely American. The problem for you guys is as a customer you have next to no rights, very limited warranties removes the need to make proper products. In EU however, most places now require 2 year warranty, that means all the good hardware is being shipped here because they don't want to be stuck with a customers problem 1,5 years down the road.
Absolutely; and if you live within the EU, this- along with the fact that most displayed US prices don't include sales tax (AKA VAT) which is added on- is something to bear in mind the next time you're feeling sore about the difference in cost between the UK (or whatever) and the US.
Although it's arguable that these two issues don't cover the complete difference, the gulf does look much less vast when you take it into account.
I remember reading something not entirely dissimilar in Robert X Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds". Might or might not be apocryphal; I don't have the book to hand. Apparently Intel (IIRC) were having problems. The amount of defective parts they were getting was going through the roof, and they were pulling their hair out trying to get to the root of the problem.
Finally they traced it down to the guy responsible for receiving the deliveries of the silicon wafers. Apparently he was taking out the wafers and putting them down in his desk- quite dusty and very definitely *not* up to clean room standards!- to make sure Intel was getting what they'd paid for.
Well, of course you wouldn't hold my breath, only I can do that.
Darth Vader finds your lack of faith disturbing.
Idaho
Was she attractive?
Isn't that the whole problem with Java in a nutshell? I like the language OK, but all the framework stuff bolted on to it, combined with "deprecated"-this and "deprecated"-that, really cause a geometric explosion in what one needs to understand and/or support in that environment.
Classic comment on Java (specifically, I assume, J2EE...):-
"My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey."
There was a time before there were adverts all over the web, I'm sure it will work just as well as it used to.
Yes, we all remember the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, but although I'll happily agree that there have been many negative changes since then, would you want to go back now?
A lot of it was cool at the time, but it was all new back then. Remember how people used to keep "useful" and/or "cool" lists of useful general-purpose links on their home pages? This wasn't laughable at the time only because there were relatively few major sites. (I bet the coffee pot was among them!)
Fun times... but you wouldn't (or shouldn't) go back given the choice because having got used to the massive amounts of information on the modern web, and the novelty having worn off, it would seem quaint, basic and.... empty. So I'm afraid the time before there were adverts all over the web is no longer an attractive alternative as you imply.
And the important question is whether the modern web would- and could- exist in its current form without advertising. I don't think it would go back to 1995 levels, but I think we'd lose a lot (not all of it bad admittedly) unless we found an alternative funding model.
We'll just have sites that people want,
Assuming that people are willing to provide the content for free and/or people are willing to donate the costs to keep them running.
And shortly after inserted into the dreaded 'just friends' category.
Right, they will treat you like a girlfriend if you act like one.
Does this work with lesbians? :)
All of the games look like cheezy anime. I am not impressed or amused. This just looks like another hand held disappointment.
If it's meant to be like the GP2X and GP32 (of which some misguided person made the same criticism), then you're missing the point. Those were primarily meant for those seeking a more open, hackable handheld that can run emulators and all sorts of other things. They're not really competing with the DS or PSP, which would be better choices if you just want to play games- or at least the kind of mainstream games that Nintendo and/or Sony want you to play.
Zester is a grater. Cheese, chocolate, etc..
That too... but I thought the primary purpose of a zester was to, well, get the zest off citrus fruits.
This is the UK. Grandma and Gramps are probably, what, 32? 33?
Seriously, I don't want to come across as humourless or offended, because I'm more surprised than anything. I'm aware of the "bad teeth" and "everyone speaks with cut glass voices and has a butler and is frightfully repressed, yadda yadda" stereotypes the Americans have of the British, but are underage pregnancies seen as a British thing? New one on me!
(Trying to figure out if you're over-extrapolating modern reports of "chavs" on council estates or thinking of some Victorian-era cliche...)
12 MB is an issue? I spend 1000 MB on Star Wars: Episode II, and that's a shitty movie.
I'd have thought it was obvious (as others have already pointed out) that the guy's issue was that a closed-source app that size could contain countless undocumented backdoors and other subterfuges. Whether this is actually the case or a good argument is beside the point.
The problem with a touch screen on a remote control, although it looks very cool, is that it's just not very usable. Most interaction with a remote (after the first week or two) is carried out without even looking at it. The locations of the buttons are mostly memorised, but you still need to feel where the buttons are in order to press them accurately.
Bingo. Looking at all those expensive touch screen/panel remote controls, my gut reaction is that the people buying them are gadget freaks who like them because they look cool. I found the remote control on my old digibox annoying enough because there were too many stupid little identically-shaped and laid-out buttons when navigating in the dark. I imagine that having to look down at the remote every time you wanted to select something would get annoying very quickly.
Owning a mac will make you gay. If you install linux, you'll never get laid again, but at least you won't have burly men raping your ass.
Installing Windows won't make you gay, but you'll have the burly man in charge of MS raping your ass anyway.
You only used "Smart userbase" to suck up to the moderators. Admit it.
Trust me on this. For various reasons I stopped using Slashdot altogether for almost a year (2006 IIRC). During that time I started using Digg- which back then had been hyped as the best thing since sliced bread, the poster-boy of Web 2.0, and was being talked about essentially as a next-generation, improved Slashdot.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that now, but that's how it was seen then. Anyway, I eventually stopped using Digg and moved back to Slashdot because I got sick of the moron-level discussions and popularity-contest, attention-grabbing crap stories. Even during the few months that I used it, the quality of both seemed to go down significantly, and it was nowhere as good as it had been hyped even when I started. Perhaps the rot had already set in by then, but if you want a riposte to that "wisdom of crowds" bullshit, the kneejerk, cliquish, sheeplike, bovine-level groupthink, stupidity of the Digg userbase is perfect.
There was a really good article on Kuro5hin about it, but it seems to have disappeared.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, when I came back to Slashdot, the comments *genuinely* seemed like they'd been written by- if not geniuses- then certainly vastly more intelligent people. And if you're thinking that this was in comparison with Digg, which would make anything look good- that's the point. Once the novelty had worn off, the usual factors started to irritate me again, but trust me when I say that compared to Digg, Slashdot users *are* fucking geniuses.
Things weren't all that backwards in the 1980s - in 1984 or 1985 I was certainly able to access online news at university (via some enterprising person's Ceefax server at another university).
That's pretty cool (or at least would have been at the time), but it doesn't really demonstrate newspapers'- or even the BBC's foresight- just some clever dude taking Ceefax (the BBC's Teletext service) and connecting it to the Internet (or whatever).
OTOH, you could say that about a lot of things, and it probably could *never* have been that influential simply because there weren't that many people online in *any* form at that time and the person responsible wouldn't have been actually "marketing" this service to them as such. But it's still a nice idea.
BTW, apparently Teletext never took off in the US, which seems strange. Wonder if it would have affected the tone of this article if it had been written in the UK?
To be truly fair, that's because 'golden age' Atari failed and split in 1984, allowing the brand and properties to end up in other hands, who could make them viable.
It's true that the company split in 1984- Warners wanted to sell off the suddenly loss-making company, but Jack Tramiel (who had just left Commodore) only wanted the home/computer division (Atari Corp.), not the coinops (Atari Games).
Still, it's hard to say that the "real" Atari died there. Both the successor companies were still essentially descendants and continuations of their respective Atari divisions (Atari Games perhaps moreso), and they continued to operate like that for well over a decade. Atari Corp died a slow death from the early 1990s onwards and merged ignominiously with a third-rate hard drive manufacturer in 1996, which was basically the end for them. The "other" Atari Games was sold to Midway who merged it into their company then eventually left the arcade market in 2001. Certainly, *that* was when the final remnants of the original business ceased to exist as anything more than a brand.
The current "Atari" is- as others have already mentioned- essentially just Infogrames after they bought the rights to the name, and it has no real connection with (any of) the original Atari(s) beyond operating in the same field of business.
...this monumental event, Microsoft replace Vista's system sounds with "slap bass" versions, including a brief but annoyingly noodling intermission that plays every time you select a different window.
Meanwhile, Vista adoption falls through the floor.
a poorly recorded mp3 can actually damage hearing at high volume due to the "missing" audio data. you can actually see the missing sound on a good EQ, which forms an incomplete 'compressed' waveform, which your hearing is unable to deal with at high pressure (70+DB).
[citation needed]
I remeber the big CDs, they looked like vinyls, but digital.
Huh? To the best of my knowledge there have *never* been any commercially marketed CDs larger than the standard 12cm ones! (The obvious disadvantage being that they wouldn't fit in an ordinary CD player). The only other CD size I know of is the "mini" 3-inch/8cm one.
Perhaps you're thinking of the LaserDisc video format which actually predates the CD? They came in a variety of sizes, the largest of which was the same size as a vinyl LP, but looked not unlike a giant CD. Some later ones included digital sound, but the video itself was always analogue, albeit at better quality then video cassettes.
since I am only 26, I have to ask, is there anything before CD's?
Uh, seriously? If you were listening to and buying music at the age of (say) 7 onwards, that'd have been the late 1980s.
CD players back then were falling in price quite fast, but they still weren't that cheap compared to what they are today. Even in my early teens I went for the cheapass hifi without the CD player (£100 vs. £200, more like £175 (US$325) vs. £350 (US$650) in today's money). Perhaps your family was well off, but...
You only bought original music, and never copied anything off your friends? Although the CD-R spec was defined in 1988, I'll happily bet that *any* burners at that time would have been mindbogglingly expensive- they didn't get affordable until the late 1990s. In the meantime, most of us used cassettes. Neither you nor your friends used them?
I can quite believe someone your age not having used vinyl (except as a curiosity or something slightly archaic), but never to have used cassettes? That's surprising.
I swear, Your Honour, she's a 9000 year old space alien with the appearance of a 12 year old human female!
Said it before, and I'll say it again. If all those "18 year olds" that dodgy anime fans mastu... er, get excited over came to life unchanged, they'd look pretty much like this (SFW, unless you'd have a hard time explaining your interest in kids' TV to your boss).
:-/
18, my arse. You sick fucks!
Then again, I suspect that rather than feeling shame at this realisation, half the lolita anime nerds would be trying to figure out whether they could book a two-week vacation in LazyTown.
Actually the comment on painters is they approximate skin color and lighting values and even very realistic masters aren't mistaken for photographs.
I've seen some *very* good paintings that might be mistaken for photographs at a glance. Or maybe they wouldn't; the problem is that I already knew that they were paintings.