I was surprised that even though it had an analogue tuning knob, it had a digital frequency display. Presumably LCDs and chips can be made so cheaply that a sliding plastic indicator actually involves a significant increase in the cost. I can believe that. Unfortunately, digital readouts on "traditional" analogue radios (i.e. genuine analogue dial and no presets) are horrid. I bought a cheap radio which happened to include one (not for the display, but because it included SW which most lack).
Sure, on models with electronic presets, the display is useful for setting it up correctly, and displaying the preset number. But for manual tuning, day-in, day-out, digital displays are ergonomically inferior to a plastic slider (despite the illusion of accuracy). Why? One guess is because you can't rely on "spatial memory then fine tune when you're almost there"; you have to watch the exact figures and remember the frequency. Another is because the display on my cheap radio faded completely whenever the batteries got even slightly flat, which was all the time because the thing was an unbelievable battery guzzler. (And then the aerial broke off on the inside due to the cheap construction....)
Probably won't surprise you to find out that this was an Asda (i.e. UK Wal-Mart subsidiary) house-branded model. I was really loathe to abandon it- not because of the price, it was cheap- but because I hate disposable electronics and landfills full of toxic crap. Still, I eventually replaced it with a Sony portable, which despite Sony's recent reputation is actually a great radio, and lasts 3 months on two AAs instead of one week on four. And it includes that all-important plastic slider.
That rings a bell now; I knew I'd looked up her name before, but I couldn't remember why. It *was* after reading about the origins Natalie Portman troll... and so your answer still doesn't explain who she is.
It doesn't matter HOW low your UID is if you don't remember that era. Ha ha... are you implying that my almost-600,000 ID *is* low? Relative to yours it may be (newbie!:-) ), but it's not really; this account dates back to mid-2002, a few months after I started reading Slashdot. According to this article, the troll had already mutated into the Natalie Portman form *and* become tediously cliched by the end of 2000.
A legitimate reason to lick Princess Leia If you're interested in pursuing this thoroughly unsavory (and pleasant) line of thought, China has already released stamps that not only smell like sweet-and-sour pork on the front, but actually *taste* like it on the back.
Since this is Slashdot, and we're discussing Star Wars, I think the USPS should do one of those with Natalie Portman, naked and... actually, naked is enough. And since they'd need to know what Natalie Portman (*cough*) tastes like, I'm willing to volunteer my services.
Ha ha... in Britain they really *do* get fussed about the living individuals rule (except for Her Majesty). There was apparently some fuss when a stamp was made commemorating Freddie Mercury of Queen (the band), and their drummer Roger Taylor (not dead) appeared in the background, even though he wasn't the main subject.
On the other hand maybe you could fiddle that case by saying he was a member of "the" Queen. Erm... then again, maybe not.
Besides, if he really cared about his music, he'd be using something other than a lossy format linked with hearing loss. These sorts of stories pop up all the time. If this threat was really worthy of taking seriously, I'm sure we'd have heard a lot more about it since it was first suggested in 2002.
Microsoft - Should get out of the operating systems business and start a chain of chicken finger restaurants. Get real. That is one HELL of a stupid suggestion.
Some idiot claims that a horrifically unfunny cliché needed to be repeated. Another person points out the falsity of that claim. The first post is marked +5 Funny; and the second, -1 off-topic.
Just think about that for a second. Nope, sorry, I'd much rather think about Natalie Portman, naked and petrified and covered in hot grits.;-P
(Incidentally, this article tells us that Natalie Portman comments on Slashdot are "getting old... This Natalie Portman nonsense has been going on for months; it's not funny anymore." Note that the date is Oct 24 *2000*).
People, turn off your computers. Go outside. Breathe real air. Have sex. Get girlfriends I turned off my computer, went outside, sniffed the air and had sex with some passing woman. Then the woman asked "Do I know you?" and we were arrested for public indecency.
ehh, there is that, and there will always be the former because while old geeks are becoming developers, programmers, sysadmins, enterpreneurs, webmasters, it staff somewhere, new generations are growing up in their mom's basement. Yes, but you assume that they'll all be using Slashdot, which isn't automatically the case. Digg seems to contain the worst adolescent tendencies of Slashdot, but squared, and it would be fair to assume that a number of this "new" audience are going there.
you are probably thinking that who are hanging out in slashdot are a bunch of long haired geeks in their mom's basement and half lit university labs. Actually, I've noticed that the Slashdot demographic seems to be changing (or rather, is staying the same but getting older). The jokes have slowly shifted from "not getting laid because I'm/you're a geek in Mom's basement" to "not getting laid because I'm/you're married"...
That may have worked for MySpace... but it didn't work out so well for Napster. That's because the "new" Napster is just another pay-download service (formerly known as Pressplay) which uses the original's branding, but has nothing else in common with it. Couple that with the fact that there was at least two-year gap between the spiritual demise of the original Napster service and its "relaunch".
By contrast, there were no obvious immediate changes when YouTube and MySpace were bought out; the underlying services remained the same, as did the branding, and there were no gaps in service.
It's like buying "cool" clothes. You may look "cool," but it still doesn't change the "uncool" way you act, so quickly people will realize how "uncool" you are. Except that the people using MySpace don't care how cool or uncool the parent company is, only how cool MySpace itself is; and it didn't exactly go down the pan when News Corp bought it, so that pretty much proves my point.
I wasn't aware that MySpace was "cool". I thought it was "lame". Well, to be fair I don't think that it's cool personally; I always thought that it was the fugly bastard offspring of 1001 Geocities pages from hell. But it's clearly cool amongst the people who matter (i.e. those who News Corp is hoping to make lots of money off).
Actually, I would really enjoy seeing the RIAA's member companies decide to all price their CDs at $35 a piece. Yeah, just try that, guys. Consider this; before Amazon and friends, and online music sharing took off, the main outlets for music in the UK were the Virgin Megastores and HMV.
Back then, Virgin used to carry a good selection of CDs. However, for some reason they charged *more* for back-catalogue CDs than those in the charts. Mid-price ones were £8-10 or so, full price single CDs were £13-15, slowly creeping up over time. And circa (IIRC) 2000/01, the typical price for many full-price CDs trickled past the £15 limit (i.e. £16+). Taking inflation into account, in today's money that's £18+ (at the *very* least) or US $36. WE HAD THE $35 CD!!!!!.
Virgin sell *some* stuff cheaper now, and you can bet your life that if it weren't for competition from Amazon and filesharing, they wouldn't have done that. They're still a ripoff for many things, and I still wouldn't waste my time checking their back-catalogue if it's not in a Sale. Fopp have tonnes of back-catalogue stuff for £5-7 (unlike HMV, they sell it cheaper than the chart CDs) and Amazon have a *much* wider selection and better prices than Virgin.
F*** those outstandingly mediocre stores; since they gave over much of their space to DVDs, they don't even have that great a selection outside the chart stuff. Urgh.
How is this a "troll"? Either we have some outstandingly stupid mods, or they're abusing the system because they personally disliked what I said. Hope those gits get theirs in metamoderation.:-)
Anyway, it wasn't meant as a troll. Fact of life; just because two things are biased, doesn't mean that one isn't more biased than the other. Saying that "everything is biased" is correct, but doesn't acknowledge the fact that there are degrees of bias.
The music industry used to be BUILT on the sales of singles. It really wasn't until the mid-to-late 80s that they started focusing on trying to sell entire albums. I remember that in the UK there was a lot of hype circa 1993/94 about the "death of the single". Then later they admitted that they were wrong, and that the change in formats from vinyl to CD was probably the cause. Ironic that things have come full circle.
Personally, I always hated CD singles. For one thing, the whole point of the CD format was convenience, that is, being able to easily play the tracks you wanted. Having to change the CD for each 3-minute single was a PITA.
Another thing was that they were generally *way* overpriced and far more expensive than 7" vinyl, or cassette singles. Sometimes you could get them for £2 the first week they were out. But after that they were usually £3 on a good day or £4(!) otherwise. What a ripoff- and that was mid-90s money, taking inflation into account that'll be something like £5.50 (US $11.00) in today's money!!! I often bought the cassette versions, simply because they were much cheaper, despite the CDs probably costing less to produce. Yeah, CD singles often included countless extra tracks; but they were almost always crap or remixes, or whatever.
And I also hated the racks of plasticky, identical and soulless slimline CD cases. With a few exceptions, I made high-quality MP3 transfers of the songs that I still wanted to listen to, and sold most of my CD singles. 7" singles had a tactile romance about them, and fitted into their era. CD singles just smacked of digital overpricing with the pointless physicality of one piece of plastic crap per song, something that now seems really dated just 10 years later. Good riddance.
Back on topic, personally, I'm not bothered about the albums that contain two great hit tracks and ten pieces of filler, but I think that the true "coherent" album will probably survive in some form. Of course, there is always the risk of missing great album tracks, which I'm sure that a lot of us wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
I guess I'll be the one to tell you. THere's a flat spot between each song, you can just pick the needle up and place it down in the flat spot to here the next song. Given that LPs were more favoured by "serious" music listeners, it's ironic that it was much harder to do the same thing with its supposedly more convenient pop-oriented rival, the audio cassette, since back in the 80s most tape decks didn't feature a "gap search" function.
Re:To advance, correct errors rather than drag it.
on
The Future of the PSP
·
· Score: 1
Sony should add either
1) a slim pop out keypad
2) a touch screen I thought that the PSP would have made a great multimedia device if Sony hadn't been (a) So obviously concerned about locking it down (keeps that nice licensed-game revenue stream coming in, and their movie/music divisions and other content providers happy), and (b) Not so intent (apparently) on artificially differentiating their products.
What do I mean? Well, I had Sony's Mylo in mind when you made your comment. When I first read about that overpriced WiFi gadget, it struck me that technically it wasn't really doing anything the PSP couldn't do, if Sony wanted it to. But I believe that Sony are either paranoid about the PSP being seen as neither fish nor fowl, too many things at once; gaming machine, multimedia device, communications platform... so we lost the third. Or (and this is possibly more likely) they wanted to artificially differentiate the market so that people bought both devices, or that the PSP didn't eat into the overpriced Mylo market.
Yeah, it would have needed a keyboard (or a touch screen), but they could have added that in the first place.
Anyway, I might have bought a PSP if they'd done that, but as it stands just now it's (for me) an overpriced toy. I also didn't like its "PS2 games on a handheld" vibe; I'm not interested in PS2. The DS's games appealed much more to me, and the touch screen is great, despite the console's far lesser technical power. However, all that having been said, I'd still say the DS was a poor choice for a portable multimedia unit.
First, there is no such thing as objective reporting. Everything is biased. Period. Of course; but there's bias and there's bias. Both "the earth is flat" and "the earth is a sphere" are wrong; but most people can see that one is more wrong than the other. Similarly, it's impossible to escape our biases completely, but the BBC (for example) is probably less biased than Fox News.
Sending these messages violate several points in gmail's Terms of Use and Program Policies. [..] Google would be well within their rights to terminate the accounts As I said elsewhere, Flixster themselves may also be open to legal action- if not "hacking" charges- because they aren't authorised to access these systems. If this was just one individual accessing another's account with permission, I don't see that it would be treated too seriously. But although Flixster weren't the ones who agreed to the TOSs, they are likely *more* aware of them than the account owners, simply because any normal business would have a lawyer look into that sort of thing first. (Or at least should have...)
In other words, Flixster are likely aware that their access is unauthorised; they can't reasonably use the defences of "but our users told us..." or "well, their giving them to us implies that they have permission".
The car is worth a lot more than that to me and a replacement locker key is perhaps 10 dollars. Remember that they also need to change the locks if you steal the keys.
If you give a website your password to your email account, you are to blame. If the company is hacking into your accounts to send out its viral invites...that's when the crap needs to hit the fan. The users are partly to blame for being stupid, but the use of the logos in the article's screenshots *could* reasonably be taken to imply Hotmail/AOL's endorsement. Even simply asking for an AOL/Hotmail password could lead some to assume that there's an association.
Yes, they shouldn't assume; but that's the way things normally work. Flickr asks for your Yahoo account, because they're associated, so this is the same thing? Wrong, of course.
But I think that this is a whole world of legal pain for Flixster. (Disclaimer, IANAL). For one thing, regardless of whether they think they have given "permission", what they are doing is probably against the Hotmail/AOL terms of service. That the account owners may have broken these by giving away the password does not entitle Flixster to access the accounts or exclude them from charges of unauthorised access.
And, as stated above, the use of logos may be considered misleading or indicative of some (nonexistent) endorsement, and if AOL/Hotmail can demonstrate that some users may have been given this impression (even simply by the lack of sufficient disclaimers on the same page), Flixster could be legally up to their necks in it.
Personally, I think they could be sued into oblivion.
In light of that, I suspect that the "UV" being emitted probably just made it into certain people's visible range... if most people couldn't see it, and if the colour was indeterminate, it is less likely that it was simply fluorescing dust.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, on models with electronic presets, the display is useful for setting it up correctly, and displaying the preset number. But for manual tuning, day-in, day-out, digital displays are ergonomically inferior to a plastic slider (despite the illusion of accuracy). Why? One guess is because you can't rely on "spatial memory then fine tune when you're almost there"; you have to watch the exact figures and remember the frequency. Another is because the display on my cheap radio faded completely whenever the batteries got even slightly flat, which was all the time because the thing was an unbelievable battery guzzler. (And then the aerial broke off on the inside due to the cheap construction....)
Probably won't surprise you to find out that this was an Asda (i.e. UK Wal-Mart subsidiary) house-branded model. I was really loathe to abandon it- not because of the price, it was cheap- but because I hate disposable electronics and landfills full of toxic crap. Still, I eventually replaced it with a Sony portable, which despite Sony's recent reputation is actually a great radio, and lasts 3 months on two AAs instead of one week on four. And it includes that all-important plastic slider.
Actually, I tried again and found out that she was (apparently) a columnist for Maximum Linux magazine, and that the troll originated on SegFault. So, she wasn't that famous...
It doesn't matter HOW low your UID is if you don't remember that era. Ha ha... are you implying that my almost-600,000 ID *is* low? Relative to yours it may be (newbie!
Since this is Slashdot, and we're discussing Star Wars, I think the USPS should do one of those with Natalie Portman, naked and... actually, naked is enough. And since they'd need to know what Natalie Portman (*cough*) tastes like, I'm willing to volunteer my services.
Ha ha... in Britain they really *do* get fussed about the living individuals rule (except for Her Majesty). There was apparently some fuss when a stamp was made commemorating Freddie Mercury of Queen (the band), and their drummer Roger Taylor (not dead) appeared in the background, even though he wasn't the main subject.
On the other hand maybe you could fiddle that case by saying he was a member of "the" Queen. Erm... then again, maybe not.
Excuse my ignorance, but *who* is Mae Ling Mak?!
Chickens don't have fingers.
(Incidentally, this article tells us that Natalie Portman comments on Slashdot are "getting old... This Natalie Portman nonsense has been going on for months; it's not funny anymore." Note that the date is Oct 24 *2000*). People, turn off your computers. Go outside. Breathe real air. Have sex. Get girlfriends I turned off my computer, went outside, sniffed the air and had sex with some passing woman. Then the woman asked "Do I know you?" and we were arrested for public indecency.
By contrast, there were no obvious immediate changes when YouTube and MySpace were bought out; the underlying services remained the same, as did the branding, and there were no gaps in service.
Slashdot headline:Can Large Corporations Buy "Cool?"
Answer: Yes, they bought MySpace.
That's it.
....but like them or not (and I don't), News Corporation own MySpace; and yes, they succeeded in buying "cool" there.
Back then, Virgin used to carry a good selection of CDs. However, for some reason they charged *more* for back-catalogue CDs than those in the charts. Mid-price ones were £8-10 or so, full price single CDs were £13-15, slowly creeping up over time. And circa (IIRC) 2000/01, the typical price for many full-price CDs trickled past the £15 limit (i.e. £16+). Taking inflation into account, in today's money that's £18+ (at the *very* least) or US $36. WE HAD THE $35 CD!!!!!.
Virgin sell *some* stuff cheaper now, and you can bet your life that if it weren't for competition from Amazon and filesharing, they wouldn't have done that. They're still a ripoff for many things, and I still wouldn't waste my time checking their back-catalogue if it's not in a Sale. Fopp have tonnes of back-catalogue stuff for £5-7 (unlike HMV, they sell it cheaper than the chart CDs) and Amazon have a *much* wider selection and better prices than Virgin.
F*** those outstandingly mediocre stores; since they gave over much of their space to DVDs, they don't even have that great a selection outside the chart stuff. Urgh.
How is this a "troll"? Either we have some outstandingly stupid mods, or they're abusing the system because they personally disliked what I said. Hope those gits get theirs in metamoderation. :-)
Anyway, it wasn't meant as a troll. Fact of life; just because two things are biased, doesn't mean that one isn't more biased than the other. Saying that "everything is biased" is correct, but doesn't acknowledge the fact that there are degrees of bias.
Personally, I always hated CD singles. For one thing, the whole point of the CD format was convenience, that is, being able to easily play the tracks you wanted. Having to change the CD for each 3-minute single was a PITA.
Another thing was that they were generally *way* overpriced and far more expensive than 7" vinyl, or cassette singles. Sometimes you could get them for £2 the first week they were out. But after that they were usually £3 on a good day or £4(!) otherwise. What a ripoff- and that was mid-90s money, taking inflation into account that'll be something like £5.50 (US $11.00) in today's money!!! I often bought the cassette versions, simply because they were much cheaper, despite the CDs probably costing less to produce. Yeah, CD singles often included countless extra tracks; but they were almost always crap or remixes, or whatever.
And I also hated the racks of plasticky, identical and soulless slimline CD cases. With a few exceptions, I made high-quality MP3 transfers of the songs that I still wanted to listen to, and sold most of my CD singles. 7" singles had a tactile romance about them, and fitted into their era. CD singles just smacked of digital overpricing with the pointless physicality of one piece of plastic crap per song, something that now seems really dated just 10 years later. Good riddance.
Back on topic, personally, I'm not bothered about the albums that contain two great hit tracks and ten pieces of filler, but I think that the true "coherent" album will probably survive in some form. Of course, there is always the risk of missing great album tracks, which I'm sure that a lot of us wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
What do I mean? Well, I had Sony's Mylo in mind when you made your comment. When I first read about that overpriced WiFi gadget, it struck me that technically it wasn't really doing anything the PSP couldn't do, if Sony wanted it to. But I believe that Sony are either paranoid about the PSP being seen as neither fish nor fowl, too many things at once; gaming machine, multimedia device, communications platform... so we lost the third. Or (and this is possibly more likely) they wanted to artificially differentiate the market so that people bought both devices, or that the PSP didn't eat into the overpriced Mylo market.
Yeah, it would have needed a keyboard (or a touch screen), but they could have added that in the first place.
Anyway, I might have bought a PSP if they'd done that, but as it stands just now it's (for me) an overpriced toy. I also didn't like its "PS2 games on a handheld" vibe; I'm not interested in PS2. The DS's games appealed much more to me, and the touch screen is great, despite the console's far lesser technical power. However, all that having been said, I'd still say the DS was a poor choice for a portable multimedia unit.
In other words, Flixster are likely aware that their access is unauthorised; they can't reasonably use the defences of "but our users told us..." or "well, their giving them to us implies that they have permission".
Yes, they shouldn't assume; but that's the way things normally work. Flickr asks for your Yahoo account, because they're associated, so this is the same thing? Wrong, of course.
But I think that this is a whole world of legal pain for Flixster. (Disclaimer, IANAL). For one thing, regardless of whether they think they have given "permission", what they are doing is probably against the Hotmail/AOL terms of service. That the account owners may have broken these by giving away the password does not entitle Flixster to access the accounts or exclude them from charges of unauthorised access.
And, as stated above, the use of logos may be considered misleading or indicative of some (nonexistent) endorsement, and if AOL/Hotmail can demonstrate that some users may have been given this impression (even simply by the lack of sufficient disclaimers on the same page), Flixster could be legally up to their necks in it.
Personally, I think they could be sued into oblivion.
In light of that, I suspect that the "UV" being emitted probably just made it into certain people's visible range... if most people couldn't see it, and if the colour was indeterminate, it is less likely that it was simply fluorescing dust.