Seriously, I am leaving!
Ok, its not entriely because of these sorts of issues but I cant help but feel helped along by this kind of crap. Being photographed in public has become part of life in the Uk and many other countries. You can walk down the street and be on camera dozens of times. But I have always seen this as something on the protective side, as they arent tracking me. If I were to be mugged or even killed these cameras would be valuable to me, and the police. But if they were to do face recognition whilst I am walking around, this is another thing altogether! This is really no different. People spend large percentage of thier lives driving around. Now they can know where you are for this entire percentage of you life. This scares me alot. No, this scares me, ALOT!
Im movong to NZ next week. This will never happen over there as the governement just does not have enough money. At last, the smaller country with smaller populations offers huge advantages to the bigger, richer more populated countries. I aint coming back.
The ability to unzip large groups of ZIP files in one action would be a lovely addition!!! I just use winrar anyway as, although it can be alot more ugly, the methods it uses are much more elegant. My 2c...
Fair enough on all counts. Getting suckered into buying something can be a bit tough as in many shops its difficult to fully test out the unit. In the end it didnt cost me a dime so I dont really care. Unpluging the headphone, whilst functional, is a daft workaround. Only one word of advice, plug in some ordinary everyday alternative headphones. You WILL notice a big difference. If your current headphones wear out you will have to buy some genuine ipod replacements for it to sound any good. Either that or 3 party replacements that are "tuned with an extended bottom end specifically for use with the ipod" which I have genuinely seen for sale. I just compare it with my old sony netmd minidisk player. Although its a crappy format and uses crappy attrac encoding, its sounds incredible - with any decent quality headphones. The same headphones in an iPod? yeach!
Its no biggie, just making an observation. If it suits you then great. I just dont think they are worth the hype that they have developed when they could be so much better.
Althought the IPOD mini is selling some serious volume, and everyone seems to either want one or have one, I was very much unimpressed. The more I talk about this with people the more people I find agree with me. I was unimpressed to the point where I got rid of mine and dont intend to get another.
The ipod has two large flaws in its design which I simply cant overlook:
1) If you are listening to music whilst surfing through the various menus you cant turn the damn thing down! If im looking through the menus and someone gets my attention turning the damn thing down is a real hassle. What the hell is wrong with a dedicated volume control?
2) The sounds quality of the IPOD mini is absolutely appauling! The earbuds that come with the ipod are biased to make up for the fact that the unit has a terible frequency response. If you try some other (high quality and expnsive) earbuds with the ipod the sounds is attrocious and is really unlistenable.
While this unit has many exceptional features I will be spnding my money on a more worthwhile and less hyped product.
Yeah, but isnt that why horror movies get so boring? I dont know about you but I can watch about horror movie a year and all the others are the same and dont give me any sense of fulfilment or pleasure. Doom3 has done no better. I bought the game as soon as it came out like everyone else and all the HL2 release date has done is to give me a date by which I MUST finish doom3, or it will gather [more] dust and never get touched again.
There is no denying that D3 was fundamentally boring, whatever spin you put on it. I certainly hope that HL2 fills the gap that D3 left gaping wide open.
I had never heard of this thing until an hour ago but its a brilliant piece of kit indeed. In one hour I replaced all the crappy hardware KVM's on all the traders machines at my work and they are happy as hell.
"The Walkman, and now the iPod, is the perfect mobile acoustic environment. It's better than listening to the stereo in a car...."
This is plain and simple rubbish. I would rather listen to music in the car any day rather than some personal audio device. "Better" should be relaced with "more flexible" and then this would read true.
Music is about interaction. The most enjoyable moments when listening to music are usually the times when you are alone with it. Body movements come out easily as a reaction to your enjoyment. This can be done in the car but if you are doing it on the train most people are just going to look at you real funny (and perhaps point and laugh). The car also offers decent audio quality where you can feel the music rather than simply hear it.
Even though an ipod like device certainly makes my comute and other mindless boring moments far more enjoyable, its is far from my most enjoyable moments listening to music. I usually get home and put the same song I was listening to on the my 'real' stereo. Only then can I really enjoy it.
StarTrek TNG was a killer pinball. Not too many pinballs had dual playflield cannons and a video-mode that was truely playable rather than just a gimmick.
Certainly not on my 6210! Off by default.
I bet people who leave this feature on will equally complain of how little battery life they get. Deserve what they get really.
It seems a pretty stupic move from Microsoft to NOT have the information removed tho. If they simply requested it to be removed, give him a stern talking too and get on with life, very few people would have been the wiser.
Now however, half the geek world and anyone else who cares to take a look sometime in the future can look all they like. It has now become wide public knowledge. NDA or not the knowledge (no matter how useless) is now widely public. How NOT to manage the situtation....
This is all a lesson in working for a large corperation and really has little to do with microsoft or the computer industry. But its should be in Microsofts interest to keep this to a minimum, publicly speaking.
I think the key is to give people choice. I know if I was presented with downloading ONLY 128k MP3's I would probably flag it, no matter how inexpensive. I want to be able to choice my own format (OGG, MP3, whatever) and ALSO at the bitrate I want.
For me vari-bitrate is where its at. Its a decent compromise on most factors. I cant understand why more people dont use this.
I say, leave them off. Seems fairly obvious to me. The amount of noise the things generate on audio lines is incredible, which is really just induced voltage on a signal path. Imagine how that must effect data lines as well. I suppose as the palm and cellphone continue to become more and more the same thing the situation will become more and more difficult. But until that day happens, its nice to have a break from the things.
The major beef that I have with the airline companies is when they tell me to turn all my other electrical devices off as well. "Turn my Gameboy off??! You must be joking?" But I kid you not I have been asked to turn my gameboy off in mid-flight. Come on, lets get real here. A gameboy aint going to bring a plan down. But some airlines insist on a zero-tolerance approach.
The thing that seems to be missed most in these discussions is loosing and regaining your purchased material. When I buy my music I buy a LICENSE to listen to that music. Lets face it, the cd cost a couple of bucks, where does the rest of the money go. The pysical media cost next to nothing.
I was unlucky enough to have almost my entire cd collection stolen (yeah no insurance but there u go) and I'll put it straight: There is no way in hell that im going to fork out the hundreds of dollars to get them back again. I have already paid for my license to listen to the material I purchased a long time earlier. I am merely regaining the physical media to execute that license.
I cant understand why so may people still encode in plain old 128k. Sure, it sounds ok, but thats about it. So much of it also sounds totally crap!! Whereas variable bitrate encoding set to decent quality gives a great compromise between file size and sound quality. Yet a hell of alot of people just dont do it!?
I have some decent home studio equipment and I have encoded my entire CD collection. I cant tell between CD and MP3 at High quality vari-bit and the space on my drives is perfectly ok. Some of my old crappy CD's that used to skip and glitch now sound excellent!!
The biggest thing people miss? Great quality stereo gear + crappy sound card = crappy sound. Do yourself a favour and buy a really good quality sound card. Perferably muso quality (ie NOT sound blaster) Bingo, everything sounds great.
Oh, and the terms "quality" and "FM radio" dont mix. FM is concvenience and the net makes that very cocvenient.
Anyway, back to doing sod all at work....
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I am leaving!
Ok, its not entriely because of these sorts of issues but I cant help but feel helped along by this kind of crap. Being photographed in public has become part of life in the Uk and many other countries. You can walk down the street and be on camera dozens of times. But I have always seen this as something on the protective side, as they arent tracking me. If I were to be mugged or even killed these cameras would be valuable to me, and the police. But if they were to do face recognition whilst I am walking around, this is another thing altogether! This is really no different. People spend large percentage of thier lives driving around. Now they can know where you are for this entire percentage of you life. This scares me alot.
No, this scares me, ALOT!
Im movong to NZ next week. This will never happen over there as the governement just does not have enough money. At last, the smaller country with smaller populations offers huge advantages to the bigger, richer more populated countries. I aint coming back.
The ability to unzip large groups of ZIP files in one action would be a lovely addition!!! I just use winrar anyway as, although it can be alot more ugly, the methods it uses are much more elegant. My 2c...
Fair enough on all counts. Getting suckered into buying something can be a bit tough as in many shops its difficult to fully test out the unit. In the end it didnt cost me a dime so I dont really care. Unpluging the headphone, whilst functional, is a daft workaround. Only one word of advice, plug in some ordinary everyday alternative headphones. You WILL notice a big difference. If your current headphones wear out you will have to buy some genuine ipod replacements for it to sound any good. Either that or 3 party replacements that are "tuned with an extended bottom end specifically for use with the ipod" which I have genuinely seen for sale. I just compare it with my old sony netmd minidisk player. Although its a crappy format and uses crappy attrac encoding, its sounds incredible - with any decent quality headphones. The same headphones in an iPod? yeach!
Its no biggie, just making an observation. If it suits you then great. I just dont think they are worth the hype that they have developed when they could be so much better.
Althought the IPOD mini is selling some serious volume, and everyone seems to either want one or have one, I was very much unimpressed. The more I talk about this with people the more people I find agree with me. I was unimpressed to the point where I got rid of mine and dont intend to get another.
:-)
The ipod has two large flaws in its design which I simply cant overlook:
1) If you are listening to music whilst surfing through the various menus you cant turn the damn thing down! If im looking through the menus and someone gets my attention turning the damn thing down is a real hassle. What the hell is wrong with a dedicated volume control?
2) The sounds quality of the IPOD mini is absolutely appauling! The earbuds that come with the ipod are biased to make up for the fact that the unit has a terible frequency response. If you try some other (high quality and expnsive) earbuds with the ipod the sounds is attrocious and is really unlistenable.
While this unit has many exceptional features I will be spnding my money on a more worthwhile and less hyped product.
There, its done. Rant over.
Yeah, but isnt that why horror movies get so boring? I dont know about you but I can watch about horror movie a year and all the others are the same and dont give me any sense of fulfilment or pleasure. Doom3 has done no better. I bought the game as soon as it came out like everyone else and all the HL2 release date has done is to give me a date by which I MUST finish doom3, or it will gather [more] dust and never get touched again.
There is no denying that D3 was fundamentally boring, whatever spin you put on it. I certainly hope that HL2 fills the gap that D3 left gaping wide open.
Sorry about the "i agree" post, but.....
I agree!
I had never heard of this thing until an hour ago but its a brilliant piece of kit indeed. In one hour I replaced all the crappy hardware KVM's on all the traders machines at my work and they are happy as hell.
Well done to the author.
male connector: "was it good for you?"
Female connector: "Electric!"
Yes, I know. Corny joke.
This is plain and simple rubbish. I would rather listen to music in the car any day rather than some personal audio device. "Better" should be relaced with "more flexible" and then this would read true.
Music is about interaction. The most enjoyable moments when listening to music are usually the times when you are alone with it. Body movements come out easily as a reaction to your enjoyment. This can be done in the car but if you are doing it on the train most people are just going to look at you real funny (and perhaps point and laugh). The car also offers decent audio quality where you can feel the music rather than simply hear it.
Even though an ipod like device certainly makes my comute and other mindless boring moments far more enjoyable, its is far from my most enjoyable moments listening to music. I usually get home and put the same song I was listening to on the my 'real' stereo. Only then can I really enjoy it.
StarTrek TNG was a killer pinball. Not too many pinballs had dual playflield cannons and a video-mode that was truely playable rather than just a gimmick.
Boob tube? If only! I could spend ALOT more time in front of this boob tube!
Certainly not on my 6210! Off by default.
I bet people who leave this feature on will equally complain of how little battery life they get. Deserve what they get really.
Now however, half the geek world and anyone else who cares to take a look sometime in the future can look all they like. It has now become wide public knowledge. NDA or not the knowledge (no matter how useless) is now widely public. How NOT to manage the situtation....
This is all a lesson in working for a large corperation and really has little to do with microsoft or the computer industry. But its should be in Microsofts interest to keep this to a minimum, publicly speaking.
Quality is important!!
I think the key is to give people choice. I know if I was presented with downloading ONLY 128k MP3's I would probably flag it, no matter how inexpensive. I want to be able to choice my own format (OGG, MP3, whatever) and ALSO at the bitrate I want.
For me vari-bitrate is where its at. Its a decent compromise on most factors. I cant understand why more people dont use this.
The major beef that I have with the airline companies is when they tell me to turn all my other electrical devices off as well.
"Turn my Gameboy off??! You must be joking?" But I kid you not I have been asked to turn my gameboy off in mid-flight. Come on, lets get real here. A gameboy aint going to bring a plan down. But some airlines insist on a zero-tolerance approach.
The thing that seems to be missed most in these discussions is loosing and regaining your purchased material. When I buy my music I buy a LICENSE to listen to that music. Lets face it, the cd cost a couple of bucks, where does the rest of the money go. The pysical media cost next to nothing.
I was unlucky enough to have almost my entire cd collection stolen (yeah no insurance but there u go) and I'll put it straight: There is no way in hell that im going to fork out the hundreds of dollars to get them back again. I have already paid for my license to listen to the material I purchased a long time earlier. I am merely regaining the physical media to execute that license.
But that makes me a criminal? Well, bring it on!
I cant understand why so may people still encode in plain old 128k. Sure, it sounds ok, but thats about it. So much of it also sounds totally crap!! Whereas variable bitrate encoding set to decent quality gives a great compromise between file size and sound quality. Yet a hell of alot of people just dont do it!? I have some decent home studio equipment and I have encoded my entire CD collection. I cant tell between CD and MP3 at High quality vari-bit and the space on my drives is perfectly ok. Some of my old crappy CD's that used to skip and glitch now sound excellent!! The biggest thing people miss? Great quality stereo gear + crappy sound card = crappy sound. Do yourself a favour and buy a really good quality sound card. Perferably muso quality (ie NOT sound blaster) Bingo, everything sounds great. Oh, and the terms "quality" and "FM radio" dont mix. FM is concvenience and the net makes that very cocvenient. Anyway, back to doing sod all at work....