No offense to a fellow introvert, but if you really want to get more done, stop patting yourself on the back long enough to work. For being an introvert, that's a whole lot of text all about you, and how great you are. This simply does not work when you are working with a group of people on a group project. Even if you know how to solve a problem, you're probably still going to need help implementing the solution, and for that you're going to have to take a deep breath and explain. Don't be surprised if the rest of the group has their own solutions, or questions your judgement. Your way is one way of many, and your thinking that you're already "past that point and beyond" is what annoys people.
As a Slashdot tagline once said: In theory, everything works in practice. In practice, it never does.
I can't say I quite follow Google's logic here. Google is already doing enough things "on their dime", without paying for searchers to call advertisers. What are they, a phone company now? I can only think of a few reasons you'd want to call an advertiser, and any decent company will typically have a 1-800 number. Even if they don't, unlimited long distance either through your local phone company or your mobile carrier is pretty common.
Furthermore, this is going to cost the companies regardless. Sure, they want people to call them up and say "Advertise to me!", and this may make Google an even more attractive place to put an ad... but somebody has to man the phones. I don't think you want to call up such a number only to get a pre-recorded message. A private "click to email" where google blocks your address would have made a lot more sense to me.
About the only real use I can think of is small time advertisers, think auctions...
Anti-virus, yes. I see how you should pay yearly for continual virus definitions and things like that. It's constantly being changed and upgraded, and that takes work. But on the other side of that, your anti-virus shouldn't just stop working alltogether if you don't pay for the nth year.
I use AntiVir (PersonalEdition Classic - http://www.free-av.com/ and it doesn't cost me a thing.
While it's not may not quite match the most expensive software, it beats paying a yearly fee.
I've yet to try it, but I've heard you can also use the stylus to direct the attacks of familiars. I'm just glad someone finally brought up how clunky it is to whip out a stylus after a long boss fight... at least the doors give one a cue to have it on hand, unlike the random ice blocks. I usually just leave it in the holder, but click it up a notch. (Picture drawing a katana.)
A lot of games are requiring odd mixed use of the touchscreens these days, and I'm still iffy on using both controls. Metroid Prime, for example, expects you to tilt the table while using the shoulder pads. Why not just use the A/B/X/Y buttons? Jump Superstars wants you to use the touchscreen in mid battle to switch chars and launch tag combos, which makes more sense in some ways, but leaves you with thumbprints. Switching chars could have been done via the L/R buttons, and block is also handled via down.
Simple solution, get one of the home versions. It's out for everything from PS2, Xbox, even the PC with an adapter and Stepmania. I've got a homemade hard pad from a cheap $5 softpad off ebay, some cheap board, and a bit of floor covering stapled over it.
And DDR master is quite some boasting, watch a competition sometime.
Re:15 years too many?
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 4, Informative
4. Required to register to even *look* at the discussions.
IMDB has what I consider to be one of the worst "discussions" on the web today. Perhaps this has gotten better since they started requiring registration, but I'm highly doubtful. The funny thing about the IMDB boards was that you could pick pretty much any thread from any movie, and within 3-5 posts it would degrade into a total flamewar. And not just a debate of the movie, or any topic, mind you... just an all out mindless flame war.
ou don't need any kind of encryption scheme at all. Take the social security card out of your wallet and look at it. It isn't encrypted, is it?
How about we reverse this and wonder why our credit cards and other valuable information AREN'T more secure, so that life wouldn't suck so bad when you lose your wallet/purse. Thankfully, some companies are starting to wise up, but many things are still way too vulnerable.
That may be good for nightly testers, but it's a horrible idea for regular users. Something as important as the web browser should be consistent with all the other installed software on the system; randomly updating it just because a new version is out is not a good idea.
>302721 - Implement update service channels (e.g. "nightly trunk", "nightly branch", "betas and releases", "releases only").
Go to about:config, filter for app.update.channel and you'll see your currently selected update group. 1.5b is, appropriately enough, in the beta group. I'm using nightly branch builds, and so in the nighly updates. Regular users using regular releases will continue with the regular update service, as before.
That may be good for nightly testers, but it's a horrible idea for regular users. Something as important as the web browser should be consistent with all the other installed software on the system; randomly updating it just because a new version is out is not a good idea.
I believe this is a misunderstanding, I hope. The nightly update check is only, as far as I know, on the nightly branch / trunk builds... and so nightly testers are the only ones who will be doing the updating. Even for them, it's a one click thing to turn off, and it asks nicely when it's ready.
Yes, nightly updating for the average Joe would be a disaster... although these "new" features are available long before the public / preview / beta builds, and even longer on the trunk builds, they aren't without hiccups, regressions, and bugs.
I've been using the nightly branch builds for some time now, and no... I've seen no apparent fix for the memory leak. I mean, maybe a few holes have been plugged... but it still takes more memory than one would expect. On the other hand, I don't remember them claiming it fixed.
The best feature for me is the new automatic nightly version system using Firefox's update system. No more manually downloading, unraring, and changing folder names... just a few clicks and I'm done. A very big plus, for nightly users.
And since 1.5a may break a whole lot of extensions, I recommend Nightly Tester Tools, which can force an extention to work. You may also try going into about:config (type that in the URL bar) and manually making the entery:
app.extensions.version
Then setting this to a value of 1.0+. Can cause other problems though, so I'd go with Nightly Tester Tools first. Lastly, you could simply open the extension with an unzip util and modify the install.rdf, perhaps the most time consuming but failsafe method.
I think nobody wants to BUY anything for a penny, either. Or -- they don't want to make hundreds of tiny purchases.
Quite, but I'd be far, far more willing to make voluntary micro-donations on a regular basis (per good comic, per software version) rather than micro-payments.
Something that can get the darn ads off the Internet would be great!
Already been done. Firefox and Adblock will solve all your problems. If you're really worried about the sites no longer getting ad money, simply set it to hide the banners rather than block them. You probably weren't going to click them anyway -- and you can whitelist a site or turn it off with a simple keypress.
As for micropayments, I'd love them... (Google?! Let us hope.) but, personally I see the internet tip jar exploding faster than required payments. I'd gladly pay a web comic like Penny-Arcade.com or VGCats.com $0.01 per comic I found funny, on a regular basis. I'd also gladly donate small amounts to various software, per version!
The trouble with charging any fee per view / download, even only $0.01, is that it seems to me it would greatly hurt the spread of that product. Perhaps if one could view all but the newest comic with no fee, and download old versions or the new version after x days with no fee... but I'd still prefer a voluntary tip.
>What's the superior but less sucessful product in the doll-house space?
Sim vs FPS/RPG/ETC is not a direct comparison, fair enough, but nether is a DS vs a PSP. They target different audiences completely, when you get right down to it. When looking at pure sales figures though, as the original poster was jesting over, popularity rarely defines superiority.
As for the sim market, I'd take good old Simcity 3000 any day. (Simcity if you're die hard oldschool, or Sim City 4 if you prefer.)
Free wifi isn't going to kill AOL by a long shot, sadly. The grandmothers and computer newbies who think AOL IS the Internet will still continue to think this, even if the highly unlikely chance they figure out what WIFI is and how to access it. And remember AOL protects you from nasty spam and viruses out there on the intarwebs!.
Keep in mind what you were missing, you haven't been missing for very long. Hello World was only a few months back, and the software has been in a steady but swift climb upward since. You're in at a good time, when the software is largely advanced enough to be usuable, but still in the exciting early stages.
Except I'm quite sure he's not Japanese, the team is Spanish I believe. He's probably talking about the useless.bat memory stick reader trick that came out.
I hate to say it, but TWIT always has been and probably always will be a week late on everything they talk about. I remember Leo ranting in some of the early eps about how BitTorrent is flawed in ways that it's not, (he doesn't understand the concept it would seem), and also ranting that a phone of his couldn't be customized, which it certainly could easily enough.
[i]I bought a PSP on launch day, and have also bought a number of games for it (Lumines, Wipeout Pure, Twisted Metal Head On, NBA Street Showdown, MVP Baseball, Untold Legends and Hot Shots Golf).
But it seems like the PSP's subsequent lineup has been pretty thin. Hot Shots Golf and MVP Baseball are the only two games I've bought recently (and Hot Shots is excellent), and there honestly isn't a ton of stuff on the horizon. The GTA game is looking pretty good (although I still wonder about battery life while playing it), and the Coded Arms and Ghost in the Shell games look pretty good for handheld FPS's. And GT4 looks good if it ever comes out. But really, beyond that, there isn't a whole lot that is getting me excited about the PSP's future.
The PSP needs to have more interesting games as well.....[/i]
You really need to have some patience. Games take TIME to make... the DS has a great upcoming lineup because it's been out longer, they didn't launch at the same time or anything. The PSP's large launch lineup didn't just poof out of thin air, and you can hardly expect after a launch of that size to be picking up new titles every 2 weeks.
Seriously, I don't know how you went through that many games that quickly. I'm still working my way through RR, Wipeout Pure, Hot Shots, Lumines, and NFS, plus I've tried Twisted Metal and Darkstalkers.
You yourself list what I would call several upcoming games that look very interesting. I'd add in Street Fighter Alpha, Guilty Gear, and Lemmings. But honestly, how many titles do you seriously expect these guys to crank out for a brand new system? Were you really picking up GBA games this quickly, a system with a huge developer base?
You seem to confuse "There's nothing I want this week." with "There's nothing in the PSP's future." Do you honestly think they've announced every game the PSP is going to see for the next year or so?
The PSP has a dreadfully small amount of games for it
You can't be serious. It had one of the best launch lineups I've seen since the Dreamcast, and there's plenty coming this fall. Obviously there are several reasons why Sony has the firmware locked down. The DS wasn't wide open either.
I can't name anyone who still has, much less plays, the vast of the Gameboy's library. Having the ability to play old titles looks ok on paper, but I for one buy my systems to play new games.
PS2NFO: Basically here's a little behind-the-scene "what happened"... the GODS @ PDX gave the WipeOut (USA) release guy their dumper to do the dump as being Euro-based they didn't have access to any USA titles, and unfortunately he leaked it to a friend who (with or without his permission) did the other dumps under Dynarox to gain access to the benefits intended only for REAL sceners.
This does not mean Dynarox is a bunch of nobodies, nor should you assume they're the only ones working on it. There's several, as Team Xecuter recently mentioned:
"We are giving support and advice to other underground teams as well as receiving help ourelves - its an excellent "group" effort without anyone actually knowing about who or what is involved."
Note that like many Slashdotters, I'm waiting on homebrew. But like I said in the other post, these two things will go hand and hand.
They left out NES, TG16 / PC Engine, and the fact that so far, it's only 1.0. They also didn't mention that there's an up and coming emulator called PSPE that can run PSP some homebrew on your PC. No, it can't run PSP games... but it's interesting for devs and just playing around in general, and rather nice to have this early on.
As much as I support PSP homebrew and emulation, it's premature to say it's "the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles". Many of these emus work at good speed, and many have sound, but it's still very early in the game. This is just ASKING for flames from the DS and GBA fans, not to mention the POCKET PC which can play everything from the Atari, NES, SNES, TG16, Amiga, C64, and etc including SONY PLAYSTATION.
As for when us 1.5 folks will see homebrew... "soon", if you believe the rumors Several teams are hard at work on it, and the team Dynarox recently announced "In a really near future, a loader will be released to make games work via the memory card.", so far, no reason has been given to disbelieve them. This loader will probably be in the form of a bios replacement.
And to answer all the silly questions that are bound to pop up: No, you can't do anything right now. No, you can't downgrade your firmware by any currently known methods. And yes, odds are that "backups" and "emulation" will go hand and hand when this is finally cracked. -- No, this did not kill the Dreamcast, and No, it won't kill the PSP either. -- Proof: It's easy as heck to convert video from your DVDs to MP4 and store on a memory card, but UMD Videos are already a commerical success.
It's not like all these changes just spring up overnight. Use nightly (or hourly) trunk builds and you'll be up to date long before these releases or preview releases. I fully understand there's a reason for these sorts of dev previews, but the real testers and developers have been using these features and fixes for quite a long time now.
Trunk builds are quite nice for even the regular user, so long as you're willing to put up with a few issues from time to time. The tradeoff for bug fixes and new features is well worth it, if you know what you're doing. If a really big bug comes along, just use an older build for a week or so. You extensions will usually be A-OK from build to build, but if something breaks them odds are you would have had to version-bump or reinstall them anyway on the next release. Give it a shot. It was fun using livemarks and find as you type before the release, and it's fun using things like fast back and the improved rendering before every else.
Slashdot Mirror
No offense to a fellow introvert, but if you really want to get more done, stop patting yourself on the back long enough to work. For being an introvert, that's a whole lot of text all about you, and how great you are. This simply does not work when you are working with a group of people on a group project. Even if you know how to solve a problem, you're probably still going to need help implementing the solution, and for that you're going to have to take a deep breath and explain. Don't be surprised if the rest of the group has their own solutions, or questions your judgement. Your way is one way of many, and your thinking that you're already "past that point and beyond" is what annoys people.
As a Slashdot tagline once said:
In theory, everything works in practice. In practice, it never does.
I can't say I quite follow Google's logic here. Google is already doing enough things "on their dime", without paying for searchers to call advertisers. What are they, a phone company now? I can only think of a few reasons you'd want to call an advertiser, and any decent company will typically have a 1-800 number. Even if they don't, unlimited long distance either through your local phone company or your mobile carrier is pretty common.
Furthermore, this is going to cost the companies regardless. Sure, they want people to call them up and say "Advertise to me!", and this may make Google an even more attractive place to put an ad... but somebody has to man the phones. I don't think you want to call up such a number only to get a pre-recorded message. A private "click to email" where google blocks your address would have made a lot more sense to me.
About the only real use I can think of is small time advertisers, think auctions...
Anti-virus, yes. I see how you should pay yearly for continual virus definitions and things like that. It's constantly being changed and upgraded, and that takes work. But on the other side of that, your anti-virus shouldn't just stop working alltogether if you don't pay for the nth year.
I use AntiVir (PersonalEdition Classic - http://www.free-av.com/ and it doesn't cost me a thing.
While it's not may not quite match the most expensive software, it beats paying a yearly fee.
I've yet to try it, but I've heard you can also use the stylus to direct the attacks of familiars. I'm just glad someone finally brought up how clunky it is to whip out a stylus after a long boss fight... at least the doors give one a cue to have it on hand, unlike the random ice blocks. I usually just leave it in the holder, but click it up a notch. (Picture drawing a katana.)
A lot of games are requiring odd mixed use of the touchscreens these days, and I'm still iffy on using both controls. Metroid Prime, for example, expects you to tilt the table while using the shoulder pads. Why not just use the A/B/X/Y buttons? Jump Superstars wants you to use the touchscreen in mid battle to switch chars and launch tag combos, which makes more sense in some ways, but leaves you with thumbprints. Switching chars could have been done via the L/R buttons, and block is also handled via down.
It's intereresting, though.
Simple solution, get one of the home versions. It's out for everything from PS2, Xbox, even the PC with an adapter and Stepmania. I've got a homemade hard pad from a cheap $5 softpad off ebay, some cheap board, and a bit of floor covering stapled over it.
And DDR master is quite some boasting, watch a competition sometime.
4. Required to register to even *look* at the discussions.
IMDB has what I consider to be one of the worst "discussions" on the web today. Perhaps this has gotten better since they started requiring registration, but I'm highly doubtful. The funny thing about the IMDB boards was that you could pick pretty much any thread from any movie, and within 3-5 posts it would degrade into a total flamewar. And not just a debate of the movie, or any topic, mind you... just an all out mindless flame war.
It was comic in its uselessness.
ou don't need any kind of encryption scheme at all. Take the social security card out of your wallet and look at it. It isn't encrypted, is it?
How about we reverse this and wonder why our credit cards and other valuable information AREN'T more secure, so that life wouldn't suck so bad when you lose your wallet/purse. Thankfully, some companies are starting to wise up, but many things are still way too vulnerable.
Great! Now I can assasinate people while listening to the Kill Bill soundtrack!
I've always wanted my own theme music...
That may be good for nightly testers, but it's a horrible idea for regular users. Something as important as the web browser should be consistent with all the other installed software on the system; randomly updating it just because a new version is out is not a good idea.
Here we go, from The Unofficial 1.5 Beta 1 Changelog.
(Great resouce, should have been with this story.)
>302721 - Implement update service channels (e.g. "nightly trunk", "nightly branch", "betas and releases", "releases only").
Go to about:config, filter for app.update.channel and you'll see your currently selected update group. 1.5b is, appropriately enough, in the beta group. I'm using nightly branch builds, and so in the nighly updates. Regular users using regular releases will continue with the regular update service, as before.
That may be good for nightly testers, but it's a horrible idea for regular users. Something as important as the web browser should be consistent with all the other installed software on the system; randomly updating it just because a new version is out is not a good idea.
I believe this is a misunderstanding, I hope. The nightly update check is only, as far as I know, on the nightly branch / trunk builds... and so nightly testers are the only ones who will be doing the updating. Even for them, it's a one click thing to turn off, and it asks nicely when it's ready.
Yes, nightly updating for the average Joe would be a disaster... although these "new" features are available long before the public / preview / beta builds, and even longer on the trunk builds, they aren't without hiccups, regressions, and bugs.
I've been using the nightly branch builds for some time now, and no... I've seen no apparent fix for the memory leak. I mean, maybe a few holes have been plugged... but it still takes more memory than one would expect. On the other hand, I don't remember them claiming it fixed.
The best feature for me is the new automatic nightly version system using Firefox's update system. No more manually downloading, unraring, and changing folder names... just a few clicks and I'm done. A very big plus, for nightly users.
And since 1.5a may break a whole lot of extensions, I recommend Nightly Tester Tools, which can force an extention to work. You may also try going into about:config (type that in the URL bar) and manually making the entery:
app.extensions.version
Then setting this to a value of 1.0+. Can cause other problems though, so I'd go with Nightly Tester Tools first. Lastly, you could simply open the extension with an unzip util and modify the install.rdf, perhaps the most time consuming but failsafe method.
If you're going to mention AOL and n00bs, you may want to avoid the use of "ppl".
people. It's three more characters, saving a mere 9 keystrokes out of the nearly 400 you already used to type that post.
I think nobody wants to BUY anything for a penny, either. Or -- they don't want to make hundreds of tiny purchases.
Quite, but I'd be far, far more willing to make voluntary micro-donations on a regular basis (per good comic, per software version) rather than micro-payments.
Something that can get the darn ads off the Internet would be great!
Already been done. Firefox and Adblock will solve all your problems. If you're really worried about the sites no longer getting ad money, simply set it to hide the banners rather than block them. You probably weren't going to click them anyway -- and you can whitelist a site or turn it off with a simple keypress.
As for micropayments, I'd love them... (Google?! Let us hope.) but, personally I see the internet tip jar exploding faster than required payments. I'd gladly pay a web comic like Penny-Arcade.com or VGCats.com $0.01 per comic I found funny, on a regular basis. I'd also gladly donate small amounts to various software, per version!
The trouble with charging any fee per view / download, even only $0.01, is that it seems to me it would greatly hurt the spread of that product. Perhaps if one could view all but the newest comic with no fee, and download old versions or the new version after x days with no fee... but I'd still prefer a voluntary tip.
>What's the superior but less sucessful product in the doll-house space? Sim vs FPS/RPG/ETC is not a direct comparison, fair enough, but nether is a DS vs a PSP. They target different audiences completely, when you get right down to it. When looking at pure sales figures though, as the original poster was jesting over, popularity rarely defines superiority.
As for the sim market, I'd take good old Simcity 3000 any day. (Simcity if you're die hard oldschool, or Sim City 4 if you prefer.)
People don't always buy the superior product over a more popular, but lesser one.
See, for example, the continued success of The Sims and it's many, many expansions over far better games.
Free wifi isn't going to kill AOL by a long shot, sadly. The grandmothers and computer newbies who think AOL IS the Internet will still continue to think this, even if the highly unlikely chance they figure out what WIFI is and how to access it. And remember AOL protects you from nasty spam and viruses out there on the intarwebs!.
What would kill AOL? Easy... T$$#!!NO CARRIER.
Keep in mind what you were missing, you haven't been missing for very long. Hello World was only a few months back, and the software has been in a steady but swift climb upward since. You're in at a good time, when the software is largely advanced enough to be usuable, but still in the exciting early stages.
Except I'm quite sure he's not Japanese, the team is Spanish I believe. He's probably talking about the useless .bat memory stick reader trick that came out.
I hate to say it, but TWIT always has been and probably always will be a week late on everything they talk about. I remember Leo ranting in some of the early eps about how BitTorrent is flawed in ways that it's not, (he doesn't understand the concept it would seem), and also ranting that a phone of his couldn't be customized, which it certainly could easily enough.
[i]I bought a PSP on launch day, and have also bought a number of games for it (Lumines, Wipeout Pure, Twisted Metal Head On, NBA Street Showdown, MVP Baseball, Untold Legends and Hot Shots Golf).
But it seems like the PSP's subsequent lineup has been pretty thin. Hot Shots Golf and MVP Baseball are the only two games I've bought recently (and Hot Shots is excellent), and there honestly isn't a ton of stuff on the horizon. The GTA game is looking pretty good (although I still wonder about battery life while playing it), and the Coded Arms and Ghost in the Shell games look pretty good for handheld FPS's. And GT4 looks good if it ever comes out. But really, beyond that, there isn't a whole lot that is getting me excited about the PSP's future.
The PSP needs to have more interesting games as well.....[/i] You really need to have some patience. Games take TIME to make... the DS has a great upcoming lineup because it's been out longer, they didn't launch at the same time or anything. The PSP's large launch lineup didn't just poof out of thin air, and you can hardly expect after a launch of that size to be picking up new titles every 2 weeks.
Seriously, I don't know how you went through that many games that quickly. I'm still working my way through RR, Wipeout Pure, Hot Shots, Lumines, and NFS, plus I've tried Twisted Metal and Darkstalkers.
You yourself list what I would call several upcoming games that look very interesting. I'd add in Street Fighter Alpha, Guilty Gear, and Lemmings. But honestly, how many titles do you seriously expect these guys to crank out for a brand new system? Were you really picking up GBA games this quickly, a system with a huge developer base?
You seem to confuse "There's nothing I want this week." with "There's nothing in the PSP's future." Do you honestly think they've announced every game the PSP is going to see for the next year or so?
The PSP has a dreadfully small amount of games for it
You can't be serious. It had one of the best launch lineups I've seen since the Dreamcast, and there's plenty coming this fall. Obviously there are several reasons why Sony has the firmware locked down. The DS wasn't wide open either.
I can't name anyone who still has, much less plays, the vast of the Gameboy's library. Having the ability to play old titles looks ok on paper, but I for one buy my systems to play new games.
These anonymous readers somehow always fail to mention it still ain't going to run on 1.5 - 1.5.2 yet.
Paradogs? The name is Paradox, far as I know.
PS2NFO:
Basically here's a little behind-the-scene "what happened"... the GODS @ PDX gave the WipeOut (USA) release guy their dumper to do the dump as being Euro-based they didn't have access to any USA titles, and unfortunately he leaked it to a friend who (with or without his permission) did the other dumps under Dynarox to gain access to the benefits intended only for REAL sceners.
This does not mean Dynarox is a bunch of nobodies, nor should you assume they're the only ones working on it. There's several, as Team Xecuter recently mentioned:
"We are giving support and advice to other underground teams as well as receiving help ourelves - its an excellent "group" effort without anyone actually knowing about who or what is involved."
Note that like many Slashdotters, I'm waiting on homebrew. But like I said in the other post, these two things will go hand and hand.
They left out NES, TG16 / PC Engine, and the fact that so far, it's only 1.0. They also didn't mention that there's an up and coming emulator called PSPE that can run PSP some homebrew on your PC. No, it can't run PSP games... but it's interesting for devs and just playing around in general, and rather nice to have this early on.
As much as I support PSP homebrew and emulation, it's premature to say it's "the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles". Many of these emus work at good speed, and many have sound, but it's still very early in the game. This is just ASKING for flames from the DS and GBA fans, not to mention the POCKET PC which can play everything from the Atari, NES, SNES, TG16, Amiga, C64, and etc including SONY PLAYSTATION.
As for when us 1.5 folks will see homebrew... "soon", if you believe the rumors Several teams are hard at work on it, and the team Dynarox recently announced "In a really near future, a loader will be released to make games work via the memory card.", so far, no reason has been given to disbelieve them. This loader will probably be in the form of a bios replacement.
And to answer all the silly questions that are bound to pop up: No, you can't do anything right now. No, you can't downgrade your firmware by any currently known methods. And yes, odds are that "backups" and "emulation" will go hand and hand when this is finally cracked. -- No, this did not kill the Dreamcast, and No, it won't kill the PSP either. -- Proof: It's easy as heck to convert video from your DVDs to MP4 and store on a memory card, but UMD Videos are already a commerical success.
It's not like all these changes just spring up overnight. Use nightly (or hourly) trunk builds and you'll be up to date long before these releases or preview releases. I fully understand there's a reason for these sorts of dev previews, but the real testers and developers have been using these features and fixes for quite a long time now.
g htly/ - Nightly builds
t - Latest bug fixes
Trunk builds are quite nice for even the regular user, so long as you're willing to put up with a few issues from time to time. The tradeoff for bug fixes and new features is well worth it, if you know what you're doing. If a really big bug comes along, just use an older build for a week or so. You extensions will usually be A-OK from build to build, but if something breaks them odds are you would have had to version-bump or reinstall them anyway on the next release. Give it a shot. It was fun using livemarks and find as you type before the release, and it's fun using things like fast back and the improved rendering before every else.
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ - Not updated much anymore, but still a decent resource.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/ni
http://bonsaibugs.org/pyblosxom.cgi/firefox/lates