I really don't like Foxtel's setup. Their interface is so incredibly counter-intuitive that you can't even do basic channel surfing comfortably. Channel surfing was one of the important abilities of cable, enabling you to go skim content easily, sampling things that you haven't come across, or stumbling across breaking news.
Foxtel's cable interface requires you to go through so many steps just to start viewing a single channel. And it requires you to repeat all those steps from scratch just to go to another channel. You keep having to find one by scrolling through a text menu of them, from the beginning of the list each time. It's a couch potato's nightmare. What ends up happening is you find yourself sticking to only a few channels, and watching only shows you're already familiar with.
The remote is poorly designed and unnecessarily complicated, just like the interface. And you have to pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for the IQ, which according to the terms of agreement, you don't even own and is considered Foxtel's property, if I recall correctly. It records and makes you watch the ads too. Every time they upgrade the cable box, it becomes less usable and your monthly bill becomes larger.
I'd love to be able to design an interface for them. They have all the hardware in place, so it's only a matter of a software upgrade, which happens through the set-top boxes themselves. Even their remotes can be applied in a much better fashion with the proper interface. There's so much potential to their infrastructure that they're simply not addressing.
The day when I can download my latest episodes of SG1 or my girlfriends O.C for $1.99 rather than wait 6-9months for it to come on TV in the UK is the day that I stop using eMule!
I doubt that you will be able to do that, even with TV shows available on iTMS. I think that TV shows are still going to follow regional distribution and will only be released in a country's iTMS after it is aired in that country, even if it is already available in the iTMS of another country. The TV shows are only available in the US iTMS at the moment, and not in the UK iTMS. Even when the other countries get TV shows in their iTMS, they may still not be as up-to-date as the US store.
I think one of the reasons the record companies have co-operated so well with the iTMS is because it preserves the regional distribution business model their industry is based on, which just so happens to be the same model for the film and television industries. And if you think about it, the iTMS regional distribution method somewhat resembles DVD region coding, so it most likely will be used in the same manner.
I'd love to see a development company sue Mr. Thompson
I believe that is why he is calling it a satire. Anything said, or put in print that can result in legal repercussions such as slander or libel can be dismissed from court using an argument that it was part of satire. He's not just telling you "oh it was just a joke". He's actually prepared his legal defence for weaselling his way out of paying money to charity.
I am writing to acquire your assistance in recovering significant assets I have acquired from monopolistic business practices. Due to a recent antitrust lawsuit settlement, the funds are being held up by a bunch of government lawyers.
I am willing to pay you $50 million dollars to help me liberate these assets, please provide your banking information so I can wire you the funds.
I recall seeing an interesting BBC documentary called Human Instinct by Professor Robert Winston that explored the science behind attraction. There were heaps of interesting things they uncovered in the research studies he reported on.
They used morphing to create faces and had people rate the attractiveness of these faces. One experiment used faces that were morphed from female faces to male faces. They found that women tended to be more attracted to male faces that exhibited less masculine features generally. But ovulating women found male faces with more masculine features attractive. They also found that people tended to be more attracted to faces that have some similarities to their own. They did this by morphing a little bit of a test subject's face into some of the samples.
Another interesting test had to do with immune systems and scents. In their studies, they found that people with more different immune systems were more attracted to each other. In the example for the documentary, they tested five (or six- I forget) female subjects for certain immune system markers. They rated them from those that had markers more closely resembling Prof. Winston's own immune system to those that were more different. They then had these women sleep in shirts (over a span of nights, I think) so the shirts would smell. These shirts were placed in sealed jars. In the demonstration, Prof. Winston had to smell each jar and rate them from best to worst. Sure enough, the pattern in which he arranged them exactly matched the pattern of how his immune system compared to that of the shirt's owner.
Just like svg is the rave for icons so is a 32bit enviroment for images.
All I know about SVG is that it's an open standard alternative to Flash that is supposed to eventually become popular for web sites once all the browsers support it. I haven't heard of it being used for anything else. How is it being used for icons? Is there a window manager that uses it or is it being used as a file type in graphics editing?
Re:What I want to know: Can I paint circles in it?
on
First Look at GIMP 2.4
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· Score: 1
What about making a circle or oval with the point you click on first being the centre, dragging out the radius? Is there a trick for doing that? I'm new to GIMP, and for some reason I can't access the documentation in the program.
In my experience, more appliactions are coming out for Mac and OS X than are being cancelled.
I've been under the impression that fewer applications are coming out from major third-party companies, but more are coming from Apple themselves. Companies that I've seen drop the Macintosh platform since OS X include Visioneer, Intuit, and now Palm. Quicken and QuickBooks are only available for OS X in the US officially, and the OS X version of Quicken lacks the full features of the Windows version, I believe. Shareware seems to be thriving, though, and not just Unix ports.
In the MP3 zip file you can download directly from the site, the MP3s have a bitrate of around 160 kbps (VBR). The BitTorrent download zip file contains MP3s of around 230 kbps (VBR).
The Internet was created in the U.S. of A and so I think control over it and the domain servers should stay in the U.S. of A. Now, it is a World Wide Web, but why should the US have to give up control to the U.N.?
The World Wide Web part of the Internet was actually invented in Europe at CERN (located on the border between France and Switzerland), by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (from Britian) along with Robert Cailliau (from Belgium).
I believe Sony helped to establish the 3.5" floppy disk standard. That sounds like the most successful standard they brought about. They convinced Apple to use it for the Macintosh in 1984, which made it the successor to the 5.25" floppy.
To me, the interesting thing about this is that it's newsworthy enough to publish on TheAge.com
It isn't exactly a publication with IT personnel as a target demographic either, but rather laymen in the general population. Perhaps the $100 Million marketing campaign has already begun.
Because of the distinct lack of expected damage from the first two car drops, we sped up to 50mph and launched the nano on an impressive slide and tumble that, again, really only scratched the surface:
"Not doing anything remotely bad to it- just the kinds of things that 'respectful' users do", huh?
My bet is that steve jobs could kill a baby with an ibook, and they'd defend him.
Current iBooks are equipped with Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor to instantly stop hard drive motion and protect data upon impact, so at least your data will be safe.
Slashdot Mirror
There's Foxtel's new offering, the iQ.
I really don't like Foxtel's setup. Their interface is so incredibly counter-intuitive that you can't even do basic channel surfing comfortably. Channel surfing was one of the important abilities of cable, enabling you to go skim content easily, sampling things that you haven't come across, or stumbling across breaking news.
Foxtel's cable interface requires you to go through so many steps just to start viewing a single channel. And it requires you to repeat all those steps from scratch just to go to another channel. You keep having to find one by scrolling through a text menu of them, from the beginning of the list each time. It's a couch potato's nightmare. What ends up happening is you find yourself sticking to only a few channels, and watching only shows you're already familiar with.
The remote is poorly designed and unnecessarily complicated, just like the interface. And you have to pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for the IQ, which according to the terms of agreement, you don't even own and is considered Foxtel's property, if I recall correctly. It records and makes you watch the ads too. Every time they upgrade the cable box, it becomes less usable and your monthly bill becomes larger.
I'd love to be able to design an interface for them. They have all the hardware in place, so it's only a matter of a software upgrade, which happens through the set-top boxes themselves. Even their remotes can be applied in a much better fashion with the proper interface. There's so much potential to their infrastructure that they're simply not addressing.
The day when I can download my latest episodes of SG1 or my girlfriends O.C for $1.99 rather than wait 6-9months for it to come on TV in the UK is the day that I stop using eMule!
I doubt that you will be able to do that, even with TV shows available on iTMS. I think that TV shows are still going to follow regional distribution and will only be released in a country's iTMS after it is aired in that country, even if it is already available in the iTMS of another country. The TV shows are only available in the US iTMS at the moment, and not in the UK iTMS. Even when the other countries get TV shows in their iTMS, they may still not be as up-to-date as the US store.
I think one of the reasons the record companies have co-operated so well with the iTMS is because it preserves the regional distribution business model their industry is based on, which just so happens to be the same model for the film and television industries. And if you think about it, the iTMS regional distribution method somewhat resembles DVD region coding, so it most likely will be used in the same manner.
Anything on Forth? I heard of a language module for BBEdit a while back. Just curious because of this article that came out some time ago .
I'd love to see a development company sue Mr. Thompson
I believe that is why he is calling it a satire. Anything said, or put in print that can result in legal repercussions such as slander or libel can be dismissed from court using an argument that it was part of satire. He's not just telling you "oh it was just a joke". He's actually prepared his legal defence for weaselling his way out of paying money to charity.
Have a look at this then. The ending is really cool.
I don't remember how or why (I can't find the paper/study I read about.)
(Insert joke here)
I am writing to acquire your assistance in recovering significant assets I have acquired from monopolistic business practices. Due to a recent antitrust lawsuit settlement, the funds are being held up by a bunch of government lawyers.
I am willing to pay you $50 million dollars to help me liberate these assets, please provide your banking information so I can wire you the funds.
Sincerely, Bill Gates
I recall seeing an interesting BBC documentary called Human Instinct by Professor Robert Winston that explored the science behind attraction. There were heaps of interesting things they uncovered in the research studies he reported on.
They used morphing to create faces and had people rate the attractiveness of these faces. One experiment used faces that were morphed from female faces to male faces. They found that women tended to be more attracted to male faces that exhibited less masculine features generally. But ovulating women found male faces with more masculine features attractive. They also found that people tended to be more attracted to faces that have some similarities to their own. They did this by morphing a little bit of a test subject's face into some of the samples.
Another interesting test had to do with immune systems and scents. In their studies, they found that people with more different immune systems were more attracted to each other. In the example for the documentary, they tested five (or six- I forget) female subjects for certain immune system markers. They rated them from those that had markers more closely resembling Prof. Winston's own immune system to those that were more different. They then had these women sleep in shirts (over a span of nights, I think) so the shirts would smell. These shirts were placed in sealed jars. In the demonstration, Prof. Winston had to smell each jar and rate them from best to worst. Sure enough, the pattern in which he arranged them exactly matched the pattern of how his immune system compared to that of the shirt's owner.
News for Nerds. Stuff that isn't Dark Matter.
Dankashen.
Just like svg is the rave for icons so is a 32bit enviroment for images.
All I know about SVG is that it's an open standard alternative to Flash that is supposed to eventually become popular for web sites once all the browsers support it. I haven't heard of it being used for anything else. How is it being used for icons? Is there a window manager that uses it or is it being used as a file type in graphics editing?
What about making a circle or oval with the point you click on first being the centre, dragging out the radius? Is there a trick for doing that? I'm new to GIMP, and for some reason I can't access the documentation in the program.
Where's the nearest surgeon?
You don't need a surgeon. Just lube. And make sure your Mini is in a protective case.
In my experience, more appliactions are coming out for Mac and OS X than are being cancelled.
I've been under the impression that fewer applications are coming out from major third-party companies, but more are coming from Apple themselves. Companies that I've seen drop the Macintosh platform since OS X include Visioneer, Intuit, and now Palm. Quicken and QuickBooks are only available for OS X in the US officially, and the OS X version of Quicken lacks the full features of the Windows version, I believe. Shareware seems to be thriving, though, and not just Unix ports.
In the MP3 zip file you can download directly from the site, the MP3s have a bitrate of around 160 kbps (VBR). The BitTorrent download zip file contains MP3s of around 230 kbps (VBR).
I just downloaded the album and noticed it uses VBR. What are the advantages and drawbacks of VBR? And what about AAC?
The Internet was created in the U.S. of A and so I think control over it and the domain servers should stay in the U.S. of A. Now, it is a World Wide Web, but why should the US have to give up control to the U.N.?
The World Wide Web part of the Internet was actually invented in Europe at CERN (located on the border between France and Switzerland), by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (from Britian) along with Robert Cailliau (from Belgium).
The most successful thing Sony ever did was XM
I believe Sony helped to establish the 3.5" floppy disk standard. That sounds like the most successful standard they brought about. They convinced Apple to use it for the Macintosh in 1984, which made it the successor to the 5.25" floppy.
O'Reilly books cannot be downloaded through Safari. They are HTML only, page by page.
I thought there was an option for downloading chapters for offline viewing in PDF format.
Check out what happens when you go all the way to maximum zoom in that thing... the moon is made of cheese!
Odd that the Windows terminology for the blue screen of death now seems to be the standard term for a computer crashing.
It also makes for a cheeky T-Shirt as well. I couldn't resist and actually bought one.
To me, the interesting thing about this is that it's newsworthy enough to publish on TheAge.com
It isn't exactly a publication with IT personnel as a target demographic either, but rather laymen in the general population. Perhaps the $100 Million marketing campaign has already begun.
Time to patent the clickwheel retainer.
From your write-up...
"Not doing anything remotely bad to it- just the kinds of things that 'respectful' users do", huh?My bet is that steve jobs could kill a baby with an ibook, and they'd defend him.
Current iBooks are equipped with Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor to instantly stop hard drive motion and protect data upon impact, so at least your data will be safe.