the way our existing service here works (and has worked for years - very handy in pub quizzes) is that you phone a free number for 20 seconds, hang up, and you get a text back within a minute with artist and track. it's text that costs you. if the track isn't recognised, you get a text back saying sorry, but it doesn't cost you anything.
in other news - Americans scienctists struggle to understand why British technology that can record television and skip adverts failed to work on FOX when it worked fine on BBC.
It's true, you can't predict specific developments in the future with any kind of accuracy, or by now crime would be wiped out, the motor car would be obsolete and the rainforest would all be gone. And computers would only be owned by the 10 richest Kings of Europe.
Real development comes unexpectedly - the spectactular rise of the internet etc
That said, Asimov's fictional science of physchohistory comes across are more plausible. As in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. So the actions of individuals make little difference on the progress of society. People behave erractically, but their overall movement can be predicted.
My other thing to say is a quote from The Mighty Boosh - reminding me in of Futurama. Vince: I think I might have my hair frozen - let future generations know what's possible Howard: (something along the lines of) They're going to preserve my head and parade me around at times of special ocassion and ask me for my wisdom. Vince: Hey, can't they preserve all of you? Howard: No. It's not like that in the future. Just heads.
To summarise the summary - that prediction is a load of shit.
I seriously doubt the skills of this researcher if they can suggest that "Britain is in harmony with Europe" after we received only 4 points in the competition (median was around 60), narrowly escaping last place.
That said, 4 points is a record score for us since the invasion of Iraq. I hate to think how America would score if they entered. You might say, Matt, the USA will never be in the Eurovision song contest they're not in Europe. Well, can I just say neither is Israel.
Personally, I was dissapointed the freestyle Ukrainian rap didn't do better.
So Mr Researcher you're wrong. Europe hates us. Maybe the heading was ironic. I'm stupid. Rtfa.
balky
1. Given to stopping and refusing to go on: a balky horse; a balky client.
2. Difficult to operate or start: a balky switch; a balky engine.
sounds to me just a little like NASA's shuttle program. given the Soyuz capsule is as ever the lifeline of the ISS, NASA can afford to slip deadlines, but they owe russia bigtime for keeping peeps up in space alive for the last year. yes NASA have shown they can spray pink putty around for the press, but few of the internal targets for encouraging engineers to voice safety concerns have been met. tiles aren't a problem. beauracry is.
are there any figures on the cost of one-off soyuz missions compared to the 'reusable' shuttles? i heard NASA plan to retire them once ISS complete to work on new crazy thing needed for Bush's return to moon and go to mars plans. sounding like another step backwards to me.
woo, our IT syllabus at school covers - know the names and function of internal components - how to use windows xp - how to use microsoft office - name another operating system (windows 98) - how to create a webpage. in microsoft word. - nothing on any languages.
explain how an email is sent. don't mention pop3 and smtp servers. the answer is outlook.
most my IT class can't distinguish between the internet and the web. however i get them back by doing my resarch on the 'internet' (talk to other CS players) and laughing when they say the internet is broken whenever internet explorer crashes.
the only fun to be had on our school computers is booting into knoppix and trying to connect to the network.
i shall now famously proclaim that the number of firefox users will double every x years. this will go down in every source, but this original comment will be lost. then, every other week, ppl can say that matt's law is slowing, but it won't because everytime mozilla release a new version, everyone will redownload firefox doubling the count. save the html now to this page and you can sell it on ebay in 20 years.
no seriously, i wopn't be staying for that long. because i want a browser that listens to its users, rather than writes a program aimed at a completely different audience.
>quantify that. Hum. I guess the stylesheet switcher is one of the best examples. They took it out post 0.9 (along with the Javascript console, work offline and view source (yes, they really did)). We fought back, on BugZilla "re-instate sytlesheet switcher UI" received hundreds of votes. The Mozilla team did listen, and put the UI back in for the 1.0 pre-release, marking the bug as resolved. And yet, in the builds day before 1.0 final, they pulled it out again, but this time got away with it, because everyone was too hyped up in the marketing. Today that bug is still marked resolved, but there's yet to be any development on fixing the few bugs with the UI, and re-instating it is not mentioned in the roadmap.
The other example is the age-old single window mode bug. Back then we all used TBE (since now banned from polite society), but hundreds of ppl voted for an integrated single-window mode in Mozilla/Firefox. What did we get? A couple of hidden, very buggy prefs. Resolved? No. A quick bodge to clear a bug blocking a hugely anticipated release. Now a lot of us use your extension - we say thanks:)
What I think we should be seeing is more custom builds, with better default prefs and some handy patches.
>themes not sure I mentioned them, but yes cutemenus makes Firefox a lot prettier, and more importantly icons are much quicker than reading text.
>linux,rpms go to opera.com and you can download.rpm.debs etc for more distributions than I can name. I'm in fc3, I went to download it just because the guy swimming the Atlantic impressed me, and then was struck when I had a package to myself. Now Firefox, only provide a win32 install, zip, mac and source builds. Internationalisation takes months. Not great.
>on google owning Firefox. This year's April fools joke wasn't funny. Google are our new overlords. To quote http://steelgryphon.com/blog/index.php?p=37 "Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews. And I'm on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I'm the only person who cares enough to make it an issue... Things I've raised in relatively private contexts have gone unanswered" That was taken off the official Mozilla feedhouse. I guess they, like Google, can't hack ppl talking about them. A free/open development process? Doesn't sound like one.
Remember the fresh madness of blind feature destruction before Firefox 1.0 as the Mozilla team tried to relaunch their geeky browser for use by the average windows/IE user?
They took out the Javascript console, the stylesheet switcher, and even view source in some trunk builds. There was a huge uproar at this betrayal. Ditching the needs of the majority of the current userbase, loyal geeks, to make Firefox 'easier' for new users switching from IE. Petitions with hundreds of names were signed, and eventually, some of these were put back in.
We won some features back, but not at all. Many compromises were made, with features such as "find as you type" disabled by default (despite later winning browser feature of the year (even more impressive since it's not at all new)). These appalling default options make Firefox a pain to reconfigure a new profile from scratch. They don't make it easier for anybody. The navigation bar comes with giant icons, links are all underlined, and extensions are now a mission to install unless it's from update.mozilla.org And extensions are needed just to restore expected functionality - proper (XUL) error pages, a full tree in the add bookmark menu, copy image to clipboard, resumable downloads.
We need a Firefox forwards not back campaign. Firefox is in danger of becoming a dumbed down browser for Windows/IE users and perhaps no better (default prefs / no extensions) come IE 7. The Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) remained safe for geeks, but now it's discontinued and they don't even provide.rpm's for Firefox.
We need a community fork of Firefox where the voice of the user is valued above media attention. Else we rely on the last remaining working Firefox developer not owned by Google to save us all.
multi-messenger client for windows trillian has supported the mac rendezvous protocol since version 3 - which automatically detects other local machines, and allows you to send them instant messages over your LAN. yes, instant messages, not seconds of delay (MSN).
> Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware. True. The questions is when those guys sold their program to an evil corp, did they know what they were doing? How for so many ppl, Kazaa would be their first ugly encounter with spyware?
Would they do it again? Write a good app, build up a userbase, and then sell their users computers to be sacrifed to the Great Media Desktop?
I don't trust Skype yet. There are two equally bad scenarios. It is sold off to the spyware giants, or a virus infects the windows clients and users phone a premium rate number.
most internet explorers think that blue E on their desktop is the 'internet'. they think the words 'internet' and 'web' describe the same thing - hence "i'm playing hl2 over the web" or "the internet is broken". as i said in another post to use techonology without an understanding of it is dangerous.
but more importantly than this, learning to use an alternative piece of software is like learning a second language. it helps you with the first, and it helps you with others. wizards with microsoft word get stumped when faced even with an older version, let alone koffice. if you learn to use openoffice on windows, you'll be able to pick up the next office suite you try quicker.
i never understood english grammar, until i learnt some french grammar - now i can use qui/que corrently in french i can use who/whom in english. now i'm familiar with fc3, i can get by in other linux distros.
during the fc3, i was prompted for a root password. i turned to my brother said, "this needs to be secure, right?". "no," he replied, "it needs to be quick. you're going to type it many times a day".
i just loved the gpg keys manager which asked for a passphrase using both punctuation and numbers "somewhat reminescent of 'leetspeak'"
in a language as understood as HTML, comments are pointless. computer-generated HTML is also very nice. though the source may view source, if you want to decode it. perl::HTML makes it so easy to extract information from the perl-generated bbc website.
my fave comment in php is from blog-system Wordpress "if you delete this line, the sky will fall on your head"
features such as logging and tabbed conversations. cutting edge innovations? ha! i think not. maybe they should call it agaim or something. now they're taking stuff back.
looking at http://images.betanews.com/betanews/articles/11144 80209/triton.png screenshot they are quite clearly trying to replicate MSN 6 to 'please' users. same ugly style. expect similar bloat.
this is a 'trashcan' computer as you'd probably call it across the atlantic. made from 2-5 year old components, that windows users had decided were too slow for them, i put fc3 on it, which runs non-3d applications well at a more than satisfactory speed.
the 20 quid was for a cd-drive and an MS optical 5 button mouse. hey - they make ok hardware:p
i'm just downloading opera for fc3 this moment. very impressed by range of distros for which packages are avaliable.
mozilla don't provide any binary packages for firefox. visitors to getfirefox.com are assumed to be windows/IE users, and all their marketing has been aimed at them.
now mozilla suite (seamonkey) development has stopped, it does seem they are abandoning the strategies that got them where they are now. seems a bit of an animal farm situation to me.
they've taken some of their competitors highly successful ideas and are implementing them into their own product. as 'freelock' comments in said article - "Windows isn't ready for the desktop yet. Maybe with Longhorn..."
findhash.com - working with over ten thousand dealers across 500 cities, we can guarantee you're never further than 500m from your next toke.
NEW - text 555 GANGE from within any major urbaninsation, and within minutes you'll receive a reply with directions to your nearest shady back-alley/public toilet. show proof of use of our service and receive an extra 1/8 free. selected peddlars only.
i love you fedora! the windows firefox installer is the second worst i have ever seen (after one which spoke to me). why do mozilla refuse to use nsis? it creates icons in the wrong places regardless of what you say, attempts to install to a temp directory, and reinstalls all their default searchplugins.
Slashdot Mirror
the way our existing service here works (and has worked for years - very handy in pub quizzes) is that you phone a free number for 20 seconds, hang up, and you get a text back within a minute with artist and track. it's text that costs you. if the track isn't recognised, you get a text back saying sorry, but it doesn't cost you anything.
in other news - Americans scienctists struggle to understand why British technology that can record television and skip adverts failed to work on FOX when it worked fine on BBC.
It's true, you can't predict specific developments in the future with any kind of accuracy, or by now crime would be wiped out, the motor car would be obsolete and the rainforest would all be gone. And computers would only be owned by the 10 richest Kings of Europe.
o nal)
Real development comes unexpectedly - the spectactular rise of the internet etc
That said, Asimov's fictional science of physchohistory comes across are more plausible. As in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. So the actions of individuals make little difference on the progress of society. People behave erractically, but their overall movement can be predicted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(ficti
My other thing to say is a quote from The Mighty Boosh - reminding me in of Futurama.
Vince: I think I might have my hair frozen - let future generations know what's possible
Howard: (something along the lines of) They're going to preserve my head and parade me around at times of special ocassion and ask me for my wisdom.
Vince: Hey, can't they preserve all of you?
Howard: No. It's not like that in the future. Just heads.
To summarise the summary - that prediction is a load of shit.
I seriously doubt the skills of this researcher if they can suggest that "Britain is in harmony with Europe" after we received only 4 points in the competition (median was around 60), narrowly escaping last place.
That said, 4 points is a record score for us since the invasion of Iraq. I hate to think how America would score if they entered. You might say, Matt, the USA will never be in the Eurovision song contest they're not in Europe. Well, can I just say neither is Israel.
Personally, I was dissapointed the freestyle Ukrainian rap didn't do better.
So Mr Researcher you're wrong. Europe hates us. Maybe the heading was ironic. I'm stupid. Rtfa.
balky
1. Given to stopping and refusing to go on: a balky horse; a balky client.
2. Difficult to operate or start: a balky switch; a balky engine.
sounds to me just a little like NASA's shuttle program. given the Soyuz capsule is as ever the lifeline of the ISS, NASA can afford to slip deadlines, but they owe russia bigtime for keeping peeps up in space alive for the last year. yes NASA have shown they can spray pink putty around for the press, but few of the internal targets for encouraging engineers to voice safety concerns have been met. tiles aren't a problem. beauracry is.
are there any figures on the cost of one-off soyuz missions compared to the 'reusable' shuttles? i heard NASA plan to retire them once ISS complete to work on new crazy thing needed for Bush's return to moon and go to mars plans. sounding like another step backwards to me.
woo, our IT syllabus at school covers
- know the names and function of internal components
- how to use windows xp
- how to use microsoft office
- name another operating system (windows 98)
- how to create a webpage. in microsoft word.
- nothing on any languages.
explain how an email is sent. don't mention pop3 and smtp servers. the answer is outlook.
most my IT class can't distinguish between the internet and the web. however i get them back by doing my resarch on the 'internet' (talk to other CS players) and laughing when they say the internet is broken whenever internet explorer crashes.
the only fun to be had on our school computers is booting into knoppix and trying to connect to the network.
i shall now famously proclaim that the number of firefox users will double every x years. this will go down in every source, but this original comment will be lost. then, every other week, ppl can say that matt's law is slowing, but it won't because everytime mozilla release a new version, everyone will redownload firefox doubling the count. save the html now to this page and you can sell it on ebay in 20 years.
no seriously, i wopn't be staying for that long. because i want a browser that listens to its users, rather than writes a program aimed at a completely different audience.
when will Gates realise i don't want an all-in-one portable electronic device. something that is a rubbish phone and a rubbish mp3 player.
toaster telephones - they suck. different to dial, and make for bad bagels.
>quantify that.
:)
.rpm .debs etc for more distributions than I can name. I'm in fc3, I went to download it just because the guy swimming the Atlantic impressed me, and then was struck when I had a package to myself. Now Firefox, only provide a win32 install, zip, mac and source builds. Internationalisation takes months. Not great.
Hum. I guess the stylesheet switcher is one of the best examples. They took it out post 0.9 (along with the Javascript console, work offline and view source (yes, they really did)). We fought back, on BugZilla "re-instate sytlesheet switcher UI" received hundreds of votes. The Mozilla team did listen, and put the UI back in for the 1.0 pre-release, marking the bug as resolved. And yet, in the builds day before 1.0 final, they pulled it out again, but this time got away with it, because everyone was too hyped up in the marketing. Today that bug is still marked resolved, but there's yet to be any development on fixing the few bugs with the UI, and re-instating it is not mentioned in the roadmap.
The other example is the age-old single window mode bug. Back then we all used TBE (since now banned from polite society), but hundreds of ppl voted for an integrated single-window mode in Mozilla/Firefox. What did we get? A couple of hidden, very buggy prefs. Resolved? No. A quick bodge to clear a bug blocking a hugely anticipated release. Now a lot of us use your extension - we say thanks
What I think we should be seeing is more custom builds, with better default prefs and some handy patches.
>themes
not sure I mentioned them, but yes cutemenus makes Firefox a lot prettier, and more importantly icons are much quicker than reading text.
>linux,rpms
go to opera.com and you can download
>on google owning Firefox.
This year's April fools joke wasn't funny. Google are our new overlords. To quote http://steelgryphon.com/blog/index.php?p=37
"Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews. And I'm on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I'm the only person who cares enough to make it an issue... Things I've raised in relatively private contexts have gone unanswered"
That was taken off the official Mozilla feedhouse. I guess they, like Google, can't hack ppl talking about them. A free/open development process? Doesn't sound like one.
Remember the fresh madness of blind feature destruction before Firefox 1.0 as the Mozilla team tried to relaunch their geeky browser for use by the average windows/IE user?
/ 08/24/513-is-firefox-going-nuts-or-what
.rpm's for Firefox.
They took out the Javascript console, the stylesheet switcher, and even view source in some trunk builds. There was a huge uproar at this betrayal. Ditching the needs of the majority of the current userbase, loyal geeks, to make Firefox 'easier' for new users switching from IE. Petitions with hundreds of names were signed, and eventually, some of these were put back in.
We won some features back, but not at all. Many compromises were made, with features such as "find as you type" disabled by default (despite later winning browser feature of the year (even more impressive since it's not at all new)). These appalling default options make Firefox a pain to reconfigure a new profile from scratch. They don't make it easier for anybody. The navigation bar comes with giant icons, links are all underlined, and extensions are now a mission to install unless it's from update.mozilla.org And extensions are needed just to restore expected functionality - proper (XUL) error pages, a full tree in the add bookmark menu, copy image to clipboard, resumable downloads.
An old post, commenting on the fall of Firefox.
http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2004
We need a Firefox forwards not back campaign. Firefox is in danger of becoming a dumbed down browser for Windows/IE users and perhaps no better (default prefs / no extensions) come IE 7. The Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) remained safe for geeks, but now it's discontinued and they don't even provide
We need a community fork of Firefox where the voice of the user is valued above media attention. Else we rely on the last remaining working Firefox developer not owned by Google to save us all.
multi-messenger client for windows trillian has supported the mac rendezvous protocol since version 3 - which automatically detects other local machines, and allows you to send them instant messages over your LAN. yes, instant messages, not seconds of delay (MSN).
> Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware.
True. The questions is when those guys sold their program to an evil corp, did they know what they were doing? How for so many ppl, Kazaa would be their first ugly encounter with spyware?
Would they do it again? Write a good app, build up a userbase, and then sell their users computers to be sacrifed to the Great Media Desktop?
I don't trust Skype yet. There are two equally bad scenarios. It is sold off to the spyware giants, or a virus infects the windows clients and users phone a premium rate number.
Read the Wikipedia article, and you'd be worried too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
most internet explorers think that blue E on their desktop is the 'internet'. they think the words 'internet' and 'web' describe the same thing - hence "i'm playing hl2 over the web" or "the internet is broken". as i said in another post to use techonology without an understanding of it is dangerous.
but more importantly than this, learning to use an alternative piece of software is like learning a second language. it helps you with the first, and it helps you with others. wizards with microsoft word get stumped when faced even with an older version, let alone koffice. if you learn to use openoffice on windows, you'll be able to pick up the next office suite you try quicker.
i never understood english grammar, until i learnt some french grammar - now i can use qui/que corrently in french i can use who/whom in english. now i'm familiar with fc3, i can get by in other linux distros.
but what to do with so much power?
encode video?
during the fc3, i was prompted for a root password. i turned to my brother said, "this needs to be secure, right?". "no," he replied, "it needs to be quick. you're going to type it many times a day".
i just loved the gpg keys manager which asked for a passphrase using both punctuation and numbers "somewhat reminescent of 'leetspeak'"
in a language as understood as HTML, comments are pointless. computer-generated HTML is also very nice. though the source may view source, if you want to decode it. perl::HTML makes it so easy to extract information from the perl-generated bbc website.
my fave comment in php is from blog-system Wordpress
"if you delete this line, the sky will fall on your head"
"Web Sites Are On The Rise". how can we stop them?
hey at least they didn't call them I.N.T.E.R.N.E.T. sites or something stupid.
features such as logging and tabbed conversations. cutting edge innovations? ha! i think not. maybe they should call it agaim or something. now they're taking stuff back.
4 80209/triton.png screenshot they are quite clearly trying to replicate MSN 6 to 'please' users. same ugly style. expect similar bloat.
looking at http://images.betanews.com/betanews/articles/1114
this is a 'trashcan' computer as you'd probably call it across the atlantic. made from 2-5 year old components, that windows users had decided were too slow for them, i put fc3 on it, which runs non-3d applications well at a more than satisfactory speed.
:p
the 20 quid was for a cd-drive and an MS optical 5 button mouse. hey - they make ok hardware
Excuse me, but was that supposed to mean something?
Looks like the MIT geeks whose script randomly generated computer science papers are posting content onto Wikipedia. Is nowhere safe?
i'm just downloading opera for fc3 this moment. very impressed by range of distros for which packages are avaliable.
mozilla don't provide any binary packages for firefox. visitors to getfirefox.com are assumed to be windows/IE users, and all their marketing has been aimed at them.
now mozilla suite (seamonkey) development has stopped, it does seem they are abandoning the strategies that got them where they are now. seems a bit of an animal farm situation to me.
a tom morello quote to match your sig
"The only bad "f-word" is FCC."
they've taken some of their competitors highly successful ideas and are implementing them into their own product. as 'freelock' comments in said article - "Windows isn't ready for the desktop yet. Maybe with Longhorn..."
findhash.com - working with over ten thousand dealers across 500 cities, we can guarantee you're never further than 500m from your next toke.
NEW - text 555 GANGE from within any major urbaninsation, and within minutes you'll receive a reply with directions to your nearest shady back-alley/public toilet. show proof of use of our service and receive an extra 1/8 free. selected peddlars only.
remember kids, smoke local produce.
i copied my profile folder from my old windows computer to this linux box. saved me hours.
yum update firefox. love it.