Posts about the unnecessary features in new phones come up every time, and there's no reason for you to complain - It's not like you _can't_ buy a phone that does what you want. The Nokia 8910 supports nested phonebooks, has no camera, a black and white screen, bluetooth, very long battery life and a nice tough titanium casing.
I say it every time these topics come up: Basic model phones don't get news articles because they aren't interesting, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
The first thing that springs to mind is inflation. No raise is the equivalent of a pay cut, taking into account the fact that your salary buys less as time goes on.
It'd probably work best if you did that with some uber-cutesy Disney movie or something similar. Same as how red queen in Resident Evil is all the more creepy because she sounds like a little girl.
UV lights are also good. Anything drinkable that glows is very cool, and extra geek points are achieved if you can drink said glowing liquid from a conical flask or a test tube. Even without the UV, Aftershock (preferably green) in a conical flask looks very mad scientisty. The markings on the flask let you see how many shots go in there too.
Dry ice rocks, you can do all kinds of mad scientist effects with that stuff. A cool one is to put some pH indicator in water and then add the dry ice - lots of bubbles, thick white smoke rolling down the sides and the liquid changes colour as it becomes acidic. Lots of flash from a very simple reaction. You might need to do some creative googling to find sources of dry ice, but last time I was looking it was fairly cheap; in the region of £15 for 10kg of pellets.
The scammers are making decisions that will benefit them while damaging the lives of people who lack the intelligence or information necessary to avoid having their money taken from them.
Now replace the word 'scammer' with the word 'corporation', or even 'politician'. Those new sentences might not always hold true, but you can't tell me you'd be suprised to read either of them and hear that the end result was a resignation or a slap on the wrist.
Re:need more info, just for curiosity's sake
on
Broadband from Airships
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· Score: 3, Informative
To give a very basic idea of what constitutes a 'handful', Wikipedia says the UK has an area of 244,820 km^2. That means that you're talking around 25 or around 100 airships (depending on whether the quoted coverage was diameter or radius), allowing for a little overlap. Assuming the former, it could be a pretty good idea - infrastructure upgrades don't cost too much when there's no cable to lay and only 25 or so units to update. Only being 24km up also means you avoid the nasty ping times you get with satellite.
Here's the brief email conversation I just had with him. My messages were short, and I fully admit they could have been more crafted or articulate, but I asked what I wanted to ask to satisfy my own curiosity while remaining polite. I tried to put forward direct questions in the hope of direct answers. It appears I will not be having any further contact with him:
Mr. Thompson,
I have a single, simple question to ask, and I would appreciate if you would take the time to answer; how do you justify your position of moral superiority in the debate on violence in computer games when you bear in mind that Penny Arcade, some of the most vocal proponents of the industry you are against, paid the promised $10,000 to charity in your name when you refused to do so?
Yours,
Greg Tebbutt
The answer is a) I never refused to do so, b) I haven't heard from Paul
Eibeler to what charity he wants me to send the money, and c) the terms of
the proposal have not been met. I never said I was kidding about the offer.
They made that up.
The item at Penny Arcade about this is false and defamatory and it is
actionable. I told them to take it down or else.
You got any more stupid questions?
Thank you for your quick reply. Although this may be considered a "stupid question", I would like to clarify the point: will you outline where the modification at http://hellfish.gtajunkies.com/Jt.html falls short of your expectations, and commit to donate the money when the shortfalls are altered? If you are not willing to do so, would you please explain your reasons?
Greg Tebbutt
I did. No te I have have not heard from Mr. Eibeler. That makes two sets
of stupid questions. In this game, two strikes and you're out. Don't
bother me further
I do not intend to 'bother you' with this reply, and as you evidently do not wish to debate I will not continue this conversation further, however for the sake of completeness it would be helpful if you could direct me to where I can find the correct version of the comments that I appear to have missed on the subject of the 'hellfish' GTA modification. I ask in order that there is a fair representation of your feelings on the issue if I post a transcript of this conversation online.
I told you not to bother me again. you're obviously impaired
Bold and italics mine, used for clarifying who said what.
I'm honestly not sure if he means that he did commit to donate the money, or that he did give reasons why he won't. I'm also not clear on why he says that he hasn't been contacted WRT which charity to pay, then says that the terms of the proposal weren't met (and therefore implies he won't pay until they have been).
Hate to reply to myself, but I went looking for an email address and while there isn't one directly on his website, the whois listing gives the address "greytop@comcast.net", which doesn't bounce. I'll post the conversation if I get a reply.
I'm a Mac guy myself, hence the mention of Handbrake's one-step ripping, but engadget has a guide for using DVDx (open source) on Windows. Haven't used it myself but it appears to do the job. Incidentally, I've noticed that ffmpegX has been updated since I last used it, but it still looks can't read DVDs directly so you'd have to rip them first.
I may be missing something here, but I thought that you could copy DVD content without violating the DMCA assuming you had a licensed CSS key (or however it works) which Apple must already have for their DVD app. Doesn't that mean they wouldn't be 'breaking' the encryption if they were to dump the video to a reencoder rather than to the monitor?
Alternatively, there's always HandBrake. Put the DVD in, choose H.264, ~400Kbps and resize horizontally to 320. That's literally all it takes, legal issues aside.
And what's wrong with password auth on phones anyway? If the phone's stolen then it's out of your possession - you lose, whether the theif can use it or not. I'm sure the amount they can run up in calls before you block it (assuming your provider even holds you accountable, which AFAIK most don't) is trivial compared to the cost of the phone you just lost.
Unfortunate, but that's the exact opposite to my experience. I've had 2 G5 towers that both work 100% perfectly and I'm typing on the current one now. The 23" cinema display it's hooked into doesn't have a single dead pixel (and out of almost 2.5million pixels that ain't bad). My iPod mini survived as much throwing around in my pocket as I could do, and I intend to eBay it and get a Nano this week. The only problem I've ever had was with the power supply in a G4 iMac, a problem which Apple quickly dealt with by sending me a new one to install myself the next day.
Which is why you want to grab that stream rather than digitising and recompressing an analogue conversion of it, as you would have to do with a MythTV box. Same reason I don't use one myself - the Sky TV (the only UK satellite provider) signal can't be decoded by any unauthorised hardware, and Sky refuse to release a separate access module even if you do pay for their box, which means no way to get the digital stream into homebrew hardware and therefore very little benefits overall, since the Myth box needs to be hooked into the Sky decoder box, the quality is lowered and the recordings are still subject to whatever the box feels like doing.
I don't see why these comments always come up. There are plenty of "dumb" phones. Nokia 1100, as mentioned above, would be my preference to meet your criteria, although the 8910 (NOT the 8910i, that i makes alot of difference) does have your requested titanium alloy casing it's got bluetooth too, but you can always (gasp) switch it off. Alternatively buy any of the older models (3310, 3410, Ericsson T28, Siemens A50 etc.) from eBay with a new battery.
Basic phones don't get./ stories because there's already plenty to choose from any (suprisingly enough) they don't compete on features like smartphones do. If you want one, buy one.
If you really do need it for emergencies only, why not just buy a Pay as You Go SIM card and put it in your existing phone? Sure, calls are a rip compared to contract, but for occasional use it shouldn't matter. If you can't just get SIMs over there (I can't see why you couldn't, but I don't really know the US market) then just buy a cheap PAYG phone package and sell either your existing phone or the new one, whichever is worth more, or work out a contract plan where you can get a high value phone, sell it and use your old one. If you play your cards right you can sometimes even make a profit.
It's pretty simple really, people are uninformed/dumb/lazy and therefore don't bother to get their phone unlocked, so the carriers keep making money on them. It costs little to nothing for the carriers to implement the lock so it makes business sense for them to do it, even if it does piss of paying customers. As for "shady people" and "$40", this might be helpful to all you Nokia owners (I know they aren't as popular over there as they are here, but it's a start).
I wouldn't say that we have particularly bad free speech issues here in England - I'm not aware of any laws that prevent me from saying things here in the UK that you couldn't where you are (US?). What we do have is very little protection against unreasonable policing. Basically I can say what I like without too much fear, but if I start doing things that fall under some very vague criteria and make the cops suspicious they can stop me, search me, search my house, hold me for 14 days without charge under terror laws, shoot me in the head a few times and then try to cover it up and obstruct the investigation...
Note that I do not intend this as an insult to the many police officers that do their job well. What worries me is that there is so little protection against those who don't.
Re:I know it's covered in the FAQ, but still...
on
Serenity Opens Today
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· Score: 1
Grab the DVDs second hand. You get the enjoyment of owning them without a penny of the sale going to MPAA members.
It's worth mentioning that it's RAID0, which is considerably less safe for your data than no RAID at all, since if any drive fails you lose everything, not just the contents of that drive. For ~$1000 I'd be suprised if you couldn't build your own 1TB Linux RAID5 box, but I may be wrong.
As an overview of the company, I'd agree with what you say, but only because there's so much crap coming from them that it cancels out the good things that they do make.
It doesn't suprise me to hear in the summary that Sony's units don't communicate properly. On the one hand you've got the beautiful but expensive Vaio notebooks, complete with LCDs that put nearly anything else I've seen to shame (even my beloved Apple cinema display). Then there's the PS2 and the Sony Ericsson phones - solid, well designed products that do their job well, although admittedly without any 'wow' factor. Then you slide down into poorly supported MiniDisc players, cheap and nasty camcorders, godawful excuses for MP3 players which refuse to play MP3 files, and simple commodity products like DVD players and digital TV recievers that they think people will pay twice the going rate for because they have a shiny logo. Look at one of their product families and then another and you might as well be looking at another company.
Validator seems to work fine here. Looks like there are only a few errors (and a font tag, ewww), and they seem to be clustered in the freshmeat.com box.
Slashdot Mirror
Posts about the unnecessary features in new phones come up every time, and there's no reason for you to complain - It's not like you _can't_ buy a phone that does what you want. The Nokia 8910 supports nested phonebooks, has no camera, a black and white screen, bluetooth, very long battery life and a nice tough titanium casing.
I say it every time these topics come up: Basic model phones don't get news articles because they aren't interesting, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Authorities have also released a security camera image of the current primary suspect.
The first thing that springs to mind is inflation. No raise is the equivalent of a pay cut, taking into account the fact that your salary buys less as time goes on.
It'd probably work best if you did that with some uber-cutesy Disney movie or something similar. Same as how red queen in Resident Evil is all the more creepy because she sounds like a little girl.
UV lights are also good. Anything drinkable that glows is very cool, and extra geek points are achieved if you can drink said glowing liquid from a conical flask or a test tube. Even without the UV, Aftershock (preferably green) in a conical flask looks very mad scientisty. The markings on the flask let you see how many shots go in there too.
Dry ice rocks, you can do all kinds of mad scientist effects with that stuff. A cool one is to put some pH indicator in water and then add the dry ice - lots of bubbles, thick white smoke rolling down the sides and the liquid changes colour as it becomes acidic. Lots of flash from a very simple reaction. You might need to do some creative googling to find sources of dry ice, but last time I was looking it was fairly cheap; in the region of £15 for 10kg of pellets.
The scammers are making decisions that will benefit them while damaging the lives of people who lack the intelligence or information necessary to avoid having their money taken from them.
Now replace the word 'scammer' with the word 'corporation', or even 'politician'. Those new sentences might not always hold true, but you can't tell me you'd be suprised to read either of them and hear that the end result was a resignation or a slap on the wrist.
To give a very basic idea of what constitutes a 'handful', Wikipedia says the UK has an area of 244,820 km^2. That means that you're talking around 25 or around 100 airships (depending on whether the quoted coverage was diameter or radius), allowing for a little overlap. Assuming the former, it could be a pretty good idea - infrastructure upgrades don't cost too much when there's no cable to lay and only 25 or so units to update. Only being 24km up also means you avoid the nasty ping times you get with satellite.
I'm honestly not sure if he means that he did commit to donate the money, or that he did give reasons why he won't. I'm also not clear on why he says that he hasn't been contacted WRT which charity to pay, then says that the terms of the proposal weren't met (and therefore implies he won't pay until they have been).
Hate to reply to myself, but I went looking for an email address and while there isn't one directly on his website, the whois listing gives the address "greytop@comcast.net", which doesn't bounce. I'll post the conversation if I get a reply.
I wrote him an email, but that address bounces. Any other info?
Everyone's heard of MI5 and MI6, so nobody bothers to ask where 1-4 went.
I'm a Mac guy myself, hence the mention of Handbrake's one-step ripping, but engadget has a guide for using DVDx (open source) on Windows. Haven't used it myself but it appears to do the job. Incidentally, I've noticed that ffmpegX has been updated since I last used it, but it still looks can't read DVDs directly so you'd have to rip them first.
I may be missing something here, but I thought that you could copy DVD content without violating the DMCA assuming you had a licensed CSS key (or however it works) which Apple must already have for their DVD app. Doesn't that mean they wouldn't be 'breaking' the encryption if they were to dump the video to a reencoder rather than to the monitor?
Alternatively, there's always HandBrake. Put the DVD in, choose H.264, ~400Kbps and resize horizontally to 320. That's literally all it takes, legal issues aside.
And what's wrong with password auth on phones anyway? If the phone's stolen then it's out of your possession - you lose, whether the theif can use it or not. I'm sure the amount they can run up in calls before you block it (assuming your provider even holds you accountable, which AFAIK most don't) is trivial compared to the cost of the phone you just lost.
Unfortunate, but that's the exact opposite to my experience. I've had 2 G5 towers that both work 100% perfectly and I'm typing on the current one now. The 23" cinema display it's hooked into doesn't have a single dead pixel (and out of almost 2.5million pixels that ain't bad). My iPod mini survived as much throwing around in my pocket as I could do, and I intend to eBay it and get a Nano this week. The only problem I've ever had was with the power supply in a G4 iMac, a problem which Apple quickly dealt with by sending me a new one to install myself the next day.
Which is why you want to grab that stream rather than digitising and recompressing an analogue conversion of it, as you would have to do with a MythTV box. Same reason I don't use one myself - the Sky TV (the only UK satellite provider) signal can't be decoded by any unauthorised hardware, and Sky refuse to release a separate access module even if you do pay for their box, which means no way to get the digital stream into homebrew hardware and therefore very little benefits overall, since the Myth box needs to be hooked into the Sky decoder box, the quality is lowered and the recordings are still subject to whatever the box feels like doing.
I don't see why these comments always come up. There are plenty of "dumb" phones. Nokia 1100, as mentioned above, would be my preference to meet your criteria, although the 8910 (NOT the 8910i, that i makes alot of difference) does have your requested titanium alloy casing it's got bluetooth too, but you can always (gasp) switch it off. Alternatively buy any of the older models (3310, 3410, Ericsson T28, Siemens A50 etc.) from eBay with a new battery.
./ stories because there's already plenty to choose from any (suprisingly enough) they don't compete on features like smartphones do. If you want one, buy one.
Basic phones don't get
If you really do need it for emergencies only, why not just buy a Pay as You Go SIM card and put it in your existing phone? Sure, calls are a rip compared to contract, but for occasional use it shouldn't matter. If you can't just get SIMs over there (I can't see why you couldn't, but I don't really know the US market) then just buy a cheap PAYG phone package and sell either your existing phone or the new one, whichever is worth more, or work out a contract plan where you can get a high value phone, sell it and use your old one. If you play your cards right you can sometimes even make a profit.
It's pretty simple really, people are uninformed/dumb/lazy and therefore don't bother to get their phone unlocked, so the carriers keep making money on them. It costs little to nothing for the carriers to implement the lock so it makes business sense for them to do it, even if it does piss of paying customers. As for "shady people" and "$40", this might be helpful to all you Nokia owners (I know they aren't as popular over there as they are here, but it's a start).
I wouldn't say that we have particularly bad free speech issues here in England - I'm not aware of any laws that prevent me from saying things here in the UK that you couldn't where you are (US?). What we do have is very little protection against unreasonable policing. Basically I can say what I like without too much fear, but if I start doing things that fall under some very vague criteria and make the cops suspicious they can stop me, search me, search my house, hold me for 14 days without charge under terror laws, shoot me in the head a few times and then try to cover it up and obstruct the investigation...
Note that I do not intend this as an insult to the many police officers that do their job well. What worries me is that there is so little protection against those who don't.
Grab the DVDs second hand. You get the enjoyment of owning them without a penny of the sale going to MPAA members.
It's worth mentioning that it's RAID0, which is considerably less safe for your data than no RAID at all, since if any drive fails you lose everything, not just the contents of that drive. For ~$1000 I'd be suprised if you couldn't build your own 1TB Linux RAID5 box, but I may be wrong.
As an overview of the company, I'd agree with what you say, but only because there's so much crap coming from them that it cancels out the good things that they do make.
It doesn't suprise me to hear in the summary that Sony's units don't communicate properly. On the one hand you've got the beautiful but expensive Vaio notebooks, complete with LCDs that put nearly anything else I've seen to shame (even my beloved Apple cinema display). Then there's the PS2 and the Sony Ericsson phones - solid, well designed products that do their job well, although admittedly without any 'wow' factor. Then you slide down into poorly supported MiniDisc players, cheap and nasty camcorders, godawful excuses for MP3 players which refuse to play MP3 files, and simple commodity products like DVD players and digital TV recievers that they think people will pay twice the going rate for because they have a shiny logo. Look at one of their product families and then another and you might as well be looking at another company.
Validator seems to work fine here. Looks like there are only a few errors (and a font tag, ewww), and they seem to be clustered in the freshmeat.com box.
Am I the only one who has this image of mutual annihilation in a blinding flash of light when Richard Stallman walks into the MS campus?