Don't underestimate the utility factor.. A very long time ago I worked for a hardware store. After business hours, the policy was to not answer the phone..
But when the damn thing wouldn't stop ringing, I'd use another line, ring the pizza place, and conference the lines when the pizza place picked up.
Half the time the person trying to call us ordered a pizza. The other half the time, whomever calling us took out their rage on the poor pizza guy and demanded to know the number to the hardware store.
And you'd hear "Sorry, Sir/Ma'am. Xxxx Hardware closed at 7. This is Domino's. Would you like to order our new Garlic Cheese Bread?'
For a little while, Cedega and the WoW graphics options dialog weren't playing nice with each other. Every time you saved graphics options, WoW would crash, and your changes weren't saved.
So I figure what the hell, I'll drop Blizzard support an email and ask them for a list of keys for Config.WTF. A couple days go by with no response. I figured I scared them by saying up front that I used Cedega to play WoW.
Nope. Get a nice response four days later, 'Greetings! We don't have a documented list, you're not supposed to touch those. But here's my cheat sheet. Have fun!'
Like New Zealand. Where a $200 USD SNES would indeed have sold for $400 NZD. (Based on US launch price of Wii at $249.99 before taxes and $499 NZD launch price after taxes.)
They probably just didn't play it. They organize a huge convention once a year, manage a charity, write a comic strip, and what with five different console and portable platforms out on top of the PC, they were probably just doing other things.
I rather enjoy my PSP for video, even if the horrible UMD format is gone.
It's killer easy to pop whatever I am currently watching on a memory stick, no matter if it's fansubbed anime, from a DVD, or something I missed on TV the night before. Even in Linux or Mac OS. Windows folks have it even easier.
And if I get bored with whatever I happen to have on it, I can always pop in a game, or browse the web, or listen to some music.
I have always wondered what sort of chance there was of a nuclear detonation when it impacted the ocean bottom and what effect it would have had...
Almost no chance of nuclear explosion. There simply isn't enough fissionable in a bomb to go up unless you set it off in one specific way, requiring timers to set off a series of chain detonators at exactly the right time, sensors to tell the timers when that time is, an altimiter to determine the bomb is at target height and charged batteries to power the whole rig.
Sure, they'll blow up. But we're talking 300lbs of TNT boom, spraying radioactive all over the place.
But say a warhead did go off. We're talking something on the order of a megaton. Odds are there would have been a small surface swell, the wreckage at the bottom would have been blown to pieces, but I doubt that the ship at the surface would have even been damaged by the event. The US did undersea tests to figure out how to use nukes against boats and subs; The effective range wasn't all that great.
How long before SCO files a third amended counterbrief to IBM's second interrogary motion for relief claiming new evidence of infringement after one of their marketing boys tries 'Linux Santa Cruz Operation' after reading about Google Code in the WSJ?
can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content.
True. But that's probably not what's happening here.
It was probably an overzealous formatting filter. Y'know, feed the thing ':)', get a smiley graphic, feed the thing &132/0000FF and get blue text, feed it some HTML and get something resembling the HTML. That stuff needs to be sanity checked, and dumped if it makes no sense.
They also probably don't want people embedding things like media streams, Flash objects, etc in their messages. Y'know, things that could potentially serve as a infection vector. If you used a standard HTML rendering widget as your base, you're screwed the instant some jerk coupling a image metadata exploit with IM by wrapping it in a couple tables and an embed.
Somewhere along the line one of their formatting filters decided that some YouTube URLs looked funny enough to get dumped. There are probably other sites with the same silent drop problem.
Go to your local CompuCrapUSA store. Buy their cheapest $15 BT dongle. If your media center PC is Linux based, grab the $20 D-Link DBT-120 instead.
Browse over to their Apple section. Grab a Apple Pro Wireless keyboard. $59.99 last I looked. Competitive in price with everyone elses BT keyboards, and you can run them through the dishwasher safely after someone spills their beer.
Now that you're half done, go over to the laptop section. Grab one of the $20 Kensington BT mice made for laptops. If you want a real mouse, Microsoft sells at least one in the $40 range. If you want to match the keyboard, go back to the Apple section and grab a wireless MightyMouse. They're freaking pricey at $70, but I love 'em to death. 5 buttons, 360 degree scroll, not too hard to clean.
You also might look into alternatives. Lots of cell-phones talk BT HID these days; My two year old Sony Ericsson does HID over BT, and you can write your own HID profiles in simple XML for it and most other Sony BT capable phones. Some Nokia phones do, and Motorola's newer smartphones do.
I use my phone to flip channels in TvTime, fast-forward in MPlayer, and control my XMMS playlist with some custom profiles I hacked up in about 20 minutes.
whore'? I think you need to hold either the higher moral or economic ground to make that kind of statement. I 'whored' myself out to former employers for considerably less.:-(
Well, it would be nice to have either, or preferably both, but alas, I also sell my soul by the slice for far less money than he made out of that gig, and am gifted with not only a foul mouth but a certain ethical flexibility that would have one believing I had been elected to public office.
I have no defense for what I said about Mr. Shatner, and I apologize. I was attempting humor and it miserably failed. However, my insult about politicians, from this comment, stands.
Sidenote: If he had sold at the low point of Priceline's stock, he could have probably made more money collecting cans and scrap metal on the streets of Detroit in the same time period.
Well, considering Shatner is Priceline's whore for about $6 million, my bet is you could own him lock, stock, and toupee for about ten.
He became spokesman for a one time payment of 125K shares in the company. He sold off 35K @ $90, or $3.15 million, and has 90K outstanding @ the potential price today of 38.50, or $3.47 million.
What would be really interesting would be testing this I-Tech keyboard on you, compared to a membrane keyboard. If I had an extra, I'd send it to you:).
I've actually used one for a short amount of time, and thought about buying one earlier this month. Typing on it was fine.
Why I didn't boils down to issues completly non-related to the fact I'd have to type on a flat surface. It was physically larger than any portable keyboard I had used in terms of depth, and would not be something I could stick in a back pocket and have survive as I currently do with a plain old Palm Universal. It doesn't work well at all on the rough surfaces I have at work. And the important one.. My PalmOS device, a TX, won't cope with more than one BT device at a time, so I would be chained to WiFi availability despite the lovely unlimited tethering plan on my cellphone.
I learned to "type" on an Atari 400 membrane keyboard
I know your pain. I owned one of those as my first non-kit machine. Great bug-free BASIC, Star Raiders on cartridge, lots of dubbed games with Cyndi Lauper at the end of the data. I still hear the Atari 'click' and cringe.
But I wonder whether you're going to be better at giving up tactile feedback than someone like me, who's used to getting it all the time. Not just typing, but always using my hands that way. If I gave up all manual sensation, I'd connect differently to the world. I might not have the focus to compensate with hearing enough for the loss of the finger feelings.
It's really not that big a deal. Once the learning curve has worn off, there is no real focus required. And the way you experence the world is largely faked by your brain anyway. Mine is wired up to expect the sensation, just like yours.
I'll bump something on the stove, think it's hot enough to hurt me, say 'Ouch!', and jerk away like a normal person, complete with adrenaline response. (Even if the pan is actually cold. I've turned on the wrong burner more than once and done that).
That's not to say I feel actual heat or pain when I do something dumb. I just think I do for that brief instant. I do stupid things like handle hot spark plugs and car mufflers with no more pain than if they were cold. I'll pick up a bottle of beer and only realize it wasn't a twist-off when I feel the blood running down my arm.
Also, you are still getting the proprioceptive feedback of the 3D space of the real keyboards. I'd be really curious to see how you fared with this actual flat projection keyboard. And it's cool enough that I'll probably eventually find out for myself, despite my reservations.
I've had to use a lot of flat-panel keyboards over the years. Remember the Atari 400? They still use keyboards like that all over the embedded and robotics spaces, because they're completly waterproof and impossible to kill. Those are no more difficult for me to use than the Apple Pro I'm using now. The issue with proprioreceptive feedback is cheated away by sitting my wrists on the edge of the keyboard at an angle a bit sharper than usual. The motions and muscles used are virtually unchanged from the normal keyboard I am expecting that way.
Tactile feedback isn't required. You'll get used to not having it in no time. I got burned a decade ago, I have reduced sensitivity in my hands as a result. I still 'touch type' just fine, albeit 20wpm slower than before.
True, I look at the keys once in a while when I first start typing, or I'm transferring a hand from the mouse to the keys, but aside from that, you don't actually require feeling them to type.
I tend to rely on the sound the keys make when they're depressed as substitute. If I've mistyped something, I get the immediate on-screen feedback of 'move left hand 1/2 inch right and tap backspace a couple times, you got EW instead of R'. And it works fine.
I can't type with headphones in, or earplugs, or in a noisy shop, so if I ever go deaf, I'm probably screwed.
The Chocolate sucks as a phone, fails as a music player, and it's from LG to boot.
So your options are.
1. Jog without a cellphone. Cost zero. 2. Buy a new cell that plays music but lose all your itms tracks. Cost $1400+
Why not just buy a Shuffle for jogging? You'll be able to carry your cell, and at a hundred bucks, it's the cheapest way to go since you've locked yourself into iTunes.
While it's probably more expensive to buy an XBox 360 than a real 360 these days, you could buy fifteen or twenty XBoxes for the price of just packaging and shipping the damn thing.
Hmm? Yup, 'e' instead of 'a', now that you mention it. Doesn't really bother me, an early AM post to Slashdot is not something I would even bother to spell-check, even if this damn Palm browser did it.
Just take as an example of how hard it is to train people to not look like idiots.
It's for consistancy. Say you're entering a string into billing.
You could get
'Cisco model X12R1234-J router with cabling.' 'CISCO MODEL X12R1234-J ROUTER WITH CABLING' 'cisco model X12R1234-J router with cabling' 'Cisco Model X12R1234-J Router With Cabling.'
or any variation therof. Mixed capitilizations and (and inconsistant punctuation) make you look like an idiot, and training people to not look like idiots is harder than it sounds.
The real black hats want it to be widely deployed before they start exploiting it.
Exactly.
All they'll garner from this attempt are Grey hats looking for a job that will sell out their friends for a management title and the blackies too stupid to assume Microsoft will never fix it, but smart enough to realize it certainly won't be before release.
So a huge influx of cross-platform, release day ready viruses.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't underestimate the utility factor.. A very long time ago I worked for a hardware store. After business hours, the policy was to not answer the phone..
But when the damn thing wouldn't stop ringing, I'd use another line, ring the pizza place, and conference the lines when the pizza place picked up.
Half the time the person trying to call us ordered a pizza. The other half the time, whomever calling us took out their rage on the poor pizza guy and demanded to know the number to the hardware store.
And you'd hear "Sorry, Sir/Ma'am. Xxxx Hardware closed at 7. This is Domino's. Would you like to order our new Garlic Cheese Bread?'
Half of the enraged still ordered pizza.
Blizzard has been pretty decent to me.
For a little while, Cedega and the WoW graphics options dialog weren't playing nice with each other. Every time you saved graphics options, WoW would crash, and your changes weren't saved.
So I figure what the hell, I'll drop Blizzard support an email and ask them for a list of keys for Config.WTF. A couple days go by with no response. I figured I scared them by saying up front that I used Cedega to play WoW.
Nope. Get a nice response four days later, 'Greetings! We don't have a documented list, you're not supposed to touch those. But here's my cheat sheet. Have fun!'
unless, of course, you have a good reason for thinking that the post referencing $400 meant NZ$, AU$, CA$ or some other currency
I had two very good reasons to think so, which obviously you glossed over in your hurry to flame.
1. The prices quoted were far too high to be in USD.
And the important one, in bold so you notice it.
2. The user has a Canadian email address.
See it? Right there, at the top of his post, under his user name. Can't miss it. Wait. You did.
Other countries use the 'dollar' too.
Like New Zealand. Where a $200 USD SNES would indeed have sold for $400 NZD. (Based on US launch price of Wii at $249.99 before taxes and $499 NZD launch price after taxes.)
They probably just didn't play it. They organize a huge convention once a year, manage a charity, write a comic strip, and what with five different console and portable platforms out on top of the PC, they were probably just doing other things.
Think about it this way.
For $15 a month you can transfer all the music you like to your phone.
Or:
For $50 a month you can transfer all the data, including music, to your phone.
It's a hell of a good deal if all you're doing is snagging music with your data plan.
Warren Ellis is writing an animated movie version.
When asked about the live action one, he said:
"No connection, no effect at all."
I rather enjoy my PSP for video, even if the horrible UMD format is gone.
It's killer easy to pop whatever I am currently watching on a memory stick, no matter if it's fansubbed anime, from a DVD, or something I missed on TV the night before. Even in Linux or Mac OS. Windows folks have it even easier.
And if I get bored with whatever I happen to have on it, I can always pop in a game, or browse the web, or listen to some music.
It's not just for watching overpriced UMD movies.
I have always wondered what sort of chance there was of a nuclear detonation when it impacted the ocean bottom and what effect it would have had...
Almost no chance of nuclear explosion. There simply isn't enough fissionable in a bomb to go up unless you set it off in one specific way, requiring timers to set off a series of chain detonators at exactly the right time, sensors to tell the timers when that time is, an altimiter to determine the bomb is at target height and charged batteries to power the whole rig.
Sure, they'll blow up. But we're talking 300lbs of TNT boom, spraying radioactive all over the place.
But say a warhead did go off. We're talking something on the order of a megaton. Odds are there would have been a small surface swell, the wreckage at the bottom would have been blown to pieces, but I doubt that the ship at the surface would have even been damaged by the event. The US did undersea tests to figure out how to use nukes against boats and subs; The effective range wasn't all that great.
How long before SCO files a third amended counterbrief to IBM's second interrogary motion for relief claiming new evidence of infringement after one of their marketing boys tries 'Linux Santa Cruz Operation' after reading about Google Code in the WSJ?
can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content.
True. But that's probably not what's happening here.
It was probably an overzealous formatting filter. Y'know, feed the thing ':)', get a smiley graphic, feed the thing &132/0000FF and get blue text, feed it some HTML and get something resembling the HTML. That stuff needs to be sanity checked, and dumped if it makes no sense.
They also probably don't want people embedding things like media streams, Flash objects, etc in their messages. Y'know, things that could potentially serve as a infection vector. If you used a standard HTML rendering widget as your base, you're screwed the instant some jerk coupling a image metadata exploit with IM by wrapping it in a couple tables and an embed.
Somewhere along the line one of their formatting filters decided that some YouTube URLs looked funny enough to get dumped. There are probably other sites with the same silent drop problem.
Bluetooth!
Go to your local CompuCrapUSA store. Buy their cheapest $15 BT dongle. If your media center PC is Linux based, grab the $20 D-Link DBT-120 instead.
Browse over to their Apple section. Grab a Apple Pro Wireless keyboard. $59.99 last I looked. Competitive in price with everyone elses BT keyboards, and you can run them through the dishwasher safely after someone spills their beer.
Now that you're half done, go over to the laptop section. Grab one of the $20 Kensington BT mice made for laptops. If you want a real mouse, Microsoft sells at least one in the $40 range. If you want to match the keyboard, go back to the Apple section and grab a wireless MightyMouse. They're freaking pricey at $70, but I love 'em to death. 5 buttons, 360 degree scroll, not too hard to clean.
You also might look into alternatives. Lots of cell-phones talk BT HID these days; My two year old Sony Ericsson does HID over BT, and you can write your own HID profiles in simple XML for it and most other Sony BT capable phones. Some Nokia phones do, and Motorola's newer smartphones do.
I use my phone to flip channels in TvTime, fast-forward in MPlayer, and control my XMMS playlist with some custom profiles I hacked up in about 20 minutes.
whore'? I think you need to hold either the higher moral or economic ground to make that kind of statement. I 'whored' myself out to former employers for considerably less. :-(
Well, it would be nice to have either, or preferably both, but alas, I also sell my soul by the slice for far less money than he made out of that gig, and am gifted with not only a foul mouth but a certain ethical flexibility that would have one believing I had been elected to public office.
I have no defense for what I said about Mr. Shatner, and I apologize. I was attempting humor and it miserably failed. However, my insult about politicians, from this comment, stands.
Sidenote: If he had sold at the low point of Priceline's stock, he could have probably made more money collecting cans and scrap metal on the streets of Detroit in the same time period.
Well, considering Shatner is Priceline's whore for about $6 million, my bet is you could own him lock, stock, and toupee for about ten.
He became spokesman for a one time payment of 125K shares in the company. He sold off 35K @ $90, or $3.15 million, and has 90K outstanding @ the potential price today of 38.50, or $3.47 million.
What would be really interesting would be testing this I-Tech keyboard on you, compared to a membrane keyboard. If I had an extra, I'd send it to you :).
I've actually used one for a short amount of time, and thought about buying one earlier this month. Typing on it was fine.
Why I didn't boils down to issues completly non-related to the fact I'd have to type on a flat surface. It was physically larger than any portable keyboard I had used in terms of depth, and would not be something I could stick in a back pocket and have survive as I currently do with a plain old Palm Universal. It doesn't work well at all on the rough surfaces I have at work. And the important one.. My PalmOS device, a TX, won't cope with more than one BT device at a time, so I would be chained to WiFi availability despite the lovely unlimited tethering plan on my cellphone.
I learned to "type" on an Atari 400 membrane keyboard
I know your pain. I owned one of those as my first non-kit machine. Great bug-free BASIC, Star Raiders on cartridge, lots of dubbed games with Cyndi Lauper at the end of the data. I still hear the Atari 'click' and cringe.
But I wonder whether you're going to be better at giving up tactile feedback than someone like me, who's used to getting it all the time. Not just typing, but always using my hands that way. If I gave up all manual sensation, I'd connect differently to the world. I might not have the focus to compensate with hearing enough for the loss of the finger feelings.
It's really not that big a deal. Once the learning curve has worn off, there is no real focus required. And the way you experence the world is largely faked by your brain anyway. Mine is wired up to expect the sensation, just like yours.
I'll bump something on the stove, think it's hot enough to hurt me, say 'Ouch!', and jerk away like a normal person, complete with adrenaline response. (Even if the pan is actually cold. I've turned on the wrong burner more than once and done that).
That's not to say I feel actual heat or pain when I do something dumb. I just think I do for that brief instant. I do stupid things like handle hot spark plugs and car mufflers with no more pain than if they were cold. I'll pick up a bottle of beer and only realize it wasn't a twist-off when I feel the blood running down my arm.
Also, you are still getting the proprioceptive feedback of the 3D space of the real keyboards. I'd be really curious to see how you fared with this actual flat projection keyboard. And it's cool enough that I'll probably eventually find out for myself, despite my reservations.
I've had to use a lot of flat-panel keyboards over the years. Remember the Atari 400? They still use keyboards like that all over the embedded and robotics spaces, because they're completly waterproof and impossible to kill. Those are no more difficult for me to use than the Apple Pro I'm using now. The issue with proprioreceptive feedback is cheated away by sitting my wrists on the edge of the keyboard at an angle a bit sharper than usual. The motions and muscles used are virtually unchanged from the normal keyboard I am expecting that way.
Tactile feedback isn't required. You'll get used to not having it in no time. I got burned a decade ago, I have reduced sensitivity in my hands as a result. I still 'touch type' just fine, albeit 20wpm slower than before.
True, I look at the keys once in a while when I first start typing, or I'm transferring a hand from the mouse to the keys, but aside from that, you don't actually require feeling them to type.
I tend to rely on the sound the keys make when they're depressed as substitute. If I've mistyped something, I get the immediate on-screen feedback of 'move left hand 1/2 inch right and tap backspace a couple times, you got EW instead of R'. And it works fine.
I can't type with headphones in, or earplugs, or in a noisy shop, so if I ever go deaf, I'm probably screwed.
Gutenberg already uses OCR. Has for a decade at least.
The Chocolate sucks as a phone, fails as a music player, and it's from LG to boot.
So your options are.
1. Jog without a cellphone. Cost zero.
2. Buy a new cell that plays music but lose all your itms tracks. Cost $1400+
Why not just buy a Shuffle for jogging? You'll be able to carry your cell, and at a hundred bucks, it's the cheapest way to go since you've locked yourself into iTunes.
While it's probably more expensive to buy an XBox 360 than a real 360 these days, you could buy fifteen or twenty XBoxes for the price of just packaging and shipping the damn thing.
Hmm? Yup, 'e' instead of 'a', now that you mention it. Doesn't really bother me, an early AM post to Slashdot is not something I would even bother to spell-check, even if this damn Palm browser did it.
Just take as an example of how hard it is to train people to not look like idiots.
It's for consistancy. Say you're entering a string into billing.
You could get
'Cisco model X12R1234-J router with cabling.'
'CISCO MODEL X12R1234-J ROUTER WITH CABLING'
'cisco model X12R1234-J router with cabling'
'Cisco Model X12R1234-J Router With Cabling.'
or any variation therof. Mixed capitilizations and (and inconsistant punctuation) make you look like an idiot, and training people to not look like idiots is harder than it sounds.
[AOL]: Level 60 Undead Rogue - Hawke's Mom's Backyard
:)
I always figured AOL for a Tauren myself. Big, slow-moving, funny looking, and not a whole lot of INT.
That's what the card reader on the front is for. It just takes standard media types and not some proprietary Sony cartridge.
The real black hats want it to be widely deployed before they start exploiting it.
:/
Exactly.
All they'll garner from this attempt are Grey hats looking for a job that will sell out their friends for a management title and the blackies too stupid to assume Microsoft will never fix it, but smart enough to realize it certainly won't be before release.
So a huge influx of cross-platform, release day ready viruses.
Go Microsoft.