Check out The Signal in its wide release in February. I caught it at DragonCon and it was pretty enjoyable. I won't spoil it for you, but a cell phone would not exactly be a life-line for these characters.
It's even worse than you'd imagined. On the top left is a video of some idiot babbling unintelligibly about some device no one uses; on the top right is some live chat thing with yet more idiots babbling about each other's blogs and periodically spamming about OEM software. On the bottom left is some contemptible list of blogs, each worse than the last. The bottom right is my favorite part of the site; it shows a blank white rectangle.
Portal has levels because the Enrichment Center's testing environment has levels. If anything, Portal is a satire of this phenomenon, presenting the absurdity of slicing up an adventure into neat chunks by putting the player in the position of a real person progressing through such a system.
Put you money where your mouth is, Eddie boy. If these lawsuits offend you as you claim, dissolve your membership in the conspiracy that organizes them. As long as you're still a member of the RIAA, and as long as the lawsuits keep coming, your comments are just as dishonest as your corrput business model.
So please... don't beat me with both fists while apologizing between blows. The beating still hurts and your "apology" just adds insult to injury.
What, is this article a joke? I hear no such sound when I call 1-800-GOOG-411. I even went through a complete (and unfortunately fruitless) search for a Mongolian barbecue in Atlanta.
You're kidding, right? GIMPshop is just the standard GIMP UI, with the useless albatross of a plain grey MDI window bolted on to make it as annoying as Photoshop. Maybe I am just out of touch with how bad window management is on the commercial desktops, but stuffing everything into a single container window with only one taskbar entry ranks pretty high on the list of "ways an image editor could unnecessarily annoy me".
"Defective by design" is not typically used to refer to "any defective technology, har har", except by a few folks here on Slashdot. "Defective by Design" is a campaign of the FSF, referring specifically devices or software that are deliberately crippled with DRM. see defectivebydesign.org.
'The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead's actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy.'"
Translation:
Please, pretty please, please come back. EMI loves you. EMI is your friend. We miss you guys! Just another little contract, one short one! Please? Just sign it? Please? Pretty please?
They're not 256kbps CBR mp3s. They look like -V0 or -V1 files, based on the bitrate, but are definitely joint-stereo VBR files encoded using LAME 3.97. Run it through strings to see for yourself. There are a lot more devices that support MP3 than AAC (don't just think about pocket jukeboxes here -- think of stuff that plays MP3 CDs and DVDs). 89 cents for a high-bitrate LAME VBR MP3 is without doubt a better choice than an AAC at a slightly lower bitrate for $1.39.
The cost to record an album continues to fall. In 2007, it is more of an investment of time than of money; most musicians today can make quality recordings at home with only a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment.
Granted, you will get an appreciably more pristine sound from a big-bucks studio with a top-notch technician and the finest gear, but the cost of entry tends to be "sign this recording contract so we own your soul for 20 years and let us master all of your work to -4dB RMS."
here, go read these lovely tales from the Windows Compatibility Team. when you're done, come back and try to tell us with a straight face that windows' backward compatibility is anything more than an overflowing toilet of misguided kludges.
Do people really only tend to like a handful of songs from an album? This ball gets kicked around quite a bit here, but I have to say I honestly have no idea what people are referring to. I can only think of cases where I've liked most or all of an album, or disliked everything from beginning to end.
I'd like to live in a fantasy world where I'm simply entitled by default to ad revenue, and I only have to deal with insidious "users of web ad-blocking technology" who are "actively denying" me my solid gold razor scooter. Fortunately for users, in the real world, a webmaster has to earn ad revenue by finding content that users want and ads they are willing to accept -- not by taking it for granted that they will just gaze longingly into the CRT clicking on everything that swirls.
For a long time, advertisers were able to support a huge number of frivolous web sites, partly because they could bombard the user with page after page of obnoxious flashing garbage for which no technical countermeasures existed. The collapse of the dot-com bubble eliminated the most unviable popup-pushers, and the rest are beginning to get the message. Popup blockers are normal mainstream software, and Google has had significant success selling all-text advertisements.
The website owners seem to think that we've pushed back hard enough, and should just deal with the sea of repellant Flash banners they want to drown us in. I guess those website owners are wrong, because clearly there are plenty of people who are not willing to tolerate the barrage of useless ads. We'll find a balance eventually, somewhere in between no ads at all and the websites whose masters believe they are entitled to a tithe every time their server sends a 200 status.
No, no, you got it backwards. The labels pay the radio stations to play the songs, not the other way round. It's called payola, and at the moment they are using middlemen called "independent promoters" to transfer cash to the radio stations.
When copyrights last for 20 years or more, you don't get more works in exchange for giving up that right. You get an international cartel that doesn't need to produce more works, because it can simply squat on its pile of shit and sue people for walking by to smell it.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out The Signal in its wide release in February. I caught it at DragonCon and it was pretty enjoyable. I won't spoil it for you, but a cell phone would not exactly be a life-line for these characters.
It's even worse than you'd imagined. On the top left is a video of some idiot babbling unintelligibly about some device no one uses; on the top right is some live chat thing with yet more idiots babbling about each other's blogs and periodically spamming about OEM software. On the bottom left is some contemptible list of blogs, each worse than the last. The bottom right is my favorite part of the site; it shows a blank white rectangle.
Radio-activity.
Discovered by Madame Curie.
Radio-activity.
Not as harmful as believed.
Portal has levels because the Enrichment Center's testing environment has levels. If anything, Portal is a satire of this phenomenon, presenting the absurdity of slicing up an adventure into neat chunks by putting the player in the position of a real person progressing through such a system.
Put you money where your mouth is, Eddie boy. If these lawsuits offend you as you claim, dissolve your membership in the conspiracy that organizes them. As long as you're still a member of the RIAA, and as long as the lawsuits keep coming, your comments are just as dishonest as your corrput business model.
So please... don't beat me with both fists while apologizing between blows. The beating still hurts and your "apology" just adds insult to injury.
That was actually its top entry, but there's something about that place that's just.... wrong.
What, is this article a joke? I hear no such sound when I call 1-800-GOOG-411. I even went through a complete (and unfortunately fruitless) search for a Mongolian barbecue in Atlanta.
You're kidding, right? GIMPshop is just the standard GIMP UI, with the useless albatross of a plain grey MDI window bolted on to make it as annoying as Photoshop. Maybe I am just out of touch with how bad window management is on the commercial desktops, but stuffing everything into a single container window with only one taskbar entry ranks pretty high on the list of "ways an image editor could unnecessarily annoy me".
I'll be the first in line to criticize Apple's DRM, but by no stretch of the imagination does this firewall have anything to do with that.
"Defective by design" is not typically used to refer to "any defective technology, har har", except by a few folks here on Slashdot. "Defective by Design" is a campaign of the FSF, referring specifically devices or software that are deliberately crippled with DRM. see defectivebydesign.org.
have you considered writing this as an extension to auto-apt?
definately, check out this great steve vai shred video
(the two files I've inspected myself, by the way, averaged 279 kbps and 280kbps.)
They're not 256kbps CBR mp3s. They look like -V0 or -V1 files, based on the bitrate, but are definitely joint-stereo VBR files encoded using LAME 3.97. Run it through strings to see for yourself. There are a lot more devices that support MP3 than AAC (don't just think about pocket jukeboxes here -- think of stuff that plays MP3 CDs and DVDs). 89 cents for a high-bitrate LAME VBR MP3 is without doubt a better choice than an AAC at a slightly lower bitrate for $1.39.
The cost to record an album continues to fall. In 2007, it is more of an investment of time than of money; most musicians today can make quality recordings at home with only a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment.
Granted, you will get an appreciably more pristine sound from a big-bucks studio with a top-notch technician and the finest gear, but the cost of entry tends to be "sign this recording contract so we own your soul for 20 years and let us master all of your work to -4dB RMS."
Just a fancy name for Interscope.
here, go read these lovely tales from the Windows Compatibility Team. when you're done, come back and try to tell us with a straight face that windows' backward compatibility is anything more than an overflowing toilet of misguided kludges.
"It looks like you've plugged your Ipod into someone else's computer. Would you like me to delete all your music? Cancel / OK"
Of course, I'm paraphrasing, but that dialog box is obviously not the product of a designer who has a basic clue about usability.
Do people really only tend to like a handful of songs from an album? This ball gets kicked around quite a bit here, but I have to say I honestly have no idea what people are referring to. I can only think of cases where I've liked most or all of an album, or disliked everything from beginning to end.
I'd like to live in a fantasy world where I'm simply entitled by default to ad revenue, and I only have to deal with insidious "users of web ad-blocking technology" who are "actively denying" me my solid gold razor scooter. Fortunately for users, in the real world, a webmaster has to earn ad revenue by finding content that users want and ads they are willing to accept -- not by taking it for granted that they will just gaze longingly into the CRT clicking on everything that swirls.
For a long time, advertisers were able to support a huge number of frivolous web sites, partly because they could bombard the user with page after page of obnoxious flashing garbage for which no technical countermeasures existed. The collapse of the dot-com bubble eliminated the most unviable popup-pushers, and the rest are beginning to get the message. Popup blockers are normal mainstream software, and Google has had significant success selling all-text advertisements.
The website owners seem to think that we've pushed back hard enough, and should just deal with the sea of repellant Flash banners they want to drown us in. I guess those website owners are wrong, because clearly there are plenty of people who are not willing to tolerate the barrage of useless ads. We'll find a balance eventually, somewhere in between no ads at all and the websites whose masters believe they are entitled to a tithe every time their server sends a 200 status.
It's now easier to obtain the name matching the IP address of a suspected copyright infringer than it is for a suspected terrorist?
Our priorities in this country fill me with amazement and despair.
No, no, you got it backwards. The labels pay the radio stations to play the songs, not the other way round. It's called payola, and at the moment they are using middlemen called "independent promoters" to transfer cash to the radio stations.
When copyrights last for 20 years or more, you don't get more works in exchange for giving up that right. You get an international cartel that doesn't need to produce more works, because it can simply squat on its pile of shit and sue people for walking by to smell it.
Nope, there are only four major record labels left. Universal absorbed PolyGram in the late 90's.