5 days between restarts? Yeesh, I'm glad I don't pay this guy's electricity bills. Call me crazy, but I shut my machine down when I'm not using it (mostly because the awesome fan power would keep me awake).
As for windows, typically about 5+ tabs (I seriously saw FF 2.0 hit 700K of memory the other night when I opened about 20 tabs, wish I'd grabbed a screenshot) and around 4 or so windows, including IM stuff. I wish Windows had a feature like Fedora's multiple desktop stuff with the 4 thumbnails, as this would help me split stuff up better since half my taskbar is taken up with quick launch shortcuts or status bar icons I need on display.
Half-Life 2, surely a game most/.ers can agree was (one of?) the best in recent years, takes up only a few gigabytes on disk. Its graphics still look better than anything I've seen a console render, and its gameplay is a thousand times better than most games that rely on flashy FMV sequences to tell the story. What developers should be focusing on is not how many flashy videos that are not interactive they can cram onto a disc, but how good a game they can create with these wider limitations. If I wanted to see high-quality computer generated movies I'd watch Star Wars.
Man, I never thought I'd hear someone refer to F.E.A.R. as "comfort[ing]". That said, I'd include Doom 3 on my list just because I don't have to think too much, but it's cheap thrills and looks pretty. Kinda like a hooker really, just without the STDs.
a) I see nothing from the ads, they pay our hosting. We make no profit, we don't pay staff to write. b) Our ads are only by record labels whose bands we feature, the point being that our audience is likely to care about the records being advertised. I couldn't care any less about Warner Bros latest movie when I'm trying to read my friend's blog, for example. c) We've had ads for quite a while now and weren't bought out by a larger company to implement them (our hosting needs just became higher).
I agree, they owe me nothing. My point was merely that the content of the site is a little more sensitive, so people feel more harshly about it when they see it taken over with new ads/"sponsorship" than they would at Myspace, for example.
I'm a long-term user of Livejournal and the whole thing, on paper at least, reads pretty badly. Little company with nice OSS policies get bought by a bigger group, suddenly start introducing ads on the site (I don't care if they're only viewed by people who opt-in, they're still there) and introducing crap like corporate sponsoring, like pages for movies where you can watch trailers. I know sites like YouTube and Myspace do all the corporate tie-in crap, with smarter companies doing the whole viral marketing method to take advantage, but those sites are both new and had ads from the start. LJ is a little more pure, and since it's founded around people posting their lives and emotions and feelings, it cheapens the overall site experience when stuff like this is added in a way that's not the same as Myspace having ads. When half the members of your site are just random guys looking to score, it doesn't have the same impact when everyone is advertising.
I'm one year into a BA English degree and definitely found this post interesting. At the start of our Medieval Literature module, we looked at a clip from a TV show where Eddie Izzard learned some Old English, then went to an area of Belgium where they still spoke Fresian, and was able to buy a cow from an old farmer by asking him in old English if he could purchase it. The two languages are very similar (albeit widely unspoken) so he was able to do so - OE definitely has closer links with that area of Europe, linguistically, than with England itself.
We also looked at a little of Tolkien's essay on Beowulf. He's by no means the only person to make a good translation (Seamus Heaney did one, as I recall) but he did do a fair bit to bring it back. One of our lecturers compared some excerpts from Beowulf with parts of LOTR and the influence there is undeniable.
You could just set your sound device as your recording device in Windows Sound Mixer or whatever its called and then record from there, much simpler. I've captured live streams like this.
I say just put the podcasts up, no validation or security, free for all.
As my lecturers constantly tell us, downloading presentation slides (or really, any media with the lecture contents) isn't a substitute for actually coming along and taking notes and asking questions. If the lazy students think by sitting at home and downloading a podcast, they can get the same level of education as attending classes, let's see how it works out for them at exam time. You can give a man a weapon but you can't make him use it (in this case on himself).
What's with Microsoft naming their products with such generic names? Are they hoping that, like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc, the product names will become synonyms for their function? Just another brick in the wall of antitrust.
And now, I envision those same people, sitting around with wireless mp3 (not) players, sharing each other's music wirelessly, because they can! That's not how it works for the general population. The distance to which these devices can communicate as peers limits their usefulness as social devices, i.e., the people are all going to be in the same room! I.E., they can plug their iPods into the stereo. And, at the same time will be able to talk to each other.
Hmm, I see what you're saying but the layman doesn't know HOW to plug his iPod into a hifi, and probably wouldn't know what additional hardware was required to do so. People like to be made to feel stupid. Look at Windows XP: the Fisher-Price layout, helpful hints and dialogues with patronisingly obvious wording, bold colours and big stupid buttons. It's made for non-techies who just want to do simple tasks with the minimum of technical effort. Most iPod users would happily pay for a feature that let them share music wirelessly rather than buy a cheap adapter and plug into a hifi they can all listen to. We've seen the same logic over and over again in technology, this'll be no different (especially since we have the 'wireless' buzzword).
Re:Unfounded Criticism
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
Our troops aren't just fighting for Democracy, they're also fighting for stable economies & developed infrastructures. I don't think it looks bad if they have gadgets and bells and whistles along with them while they're at war. These are some of the things they're fighting for them and their children to keep.
I know this could open a whole can of worms, but: WTF? When have any of the Iraqi people (or even government) threatened the kids of America from losing their technology? That sounds suspiciously like Bush's tired line of "they hate our freedom". No, George. What "they" hate is the fact that your country arms their enemies then decides to act tactically using the excuse of war crimes that happened 20 years ago, only to send the country spiralling into civil war. When "invaders" from the US army show up with more advanced personal technology than anyone there has access to, it's completely rubbing their noses in the fact that their lives are worse, and completely furthering the stereotype of the rich ignorant Westerner.
While I fully agree with your points about soldiers having the rights to do whatever they want to in their free time, and this not hugely affecting the American side of the war, you can bet your bottom dollar that it's not making the people in Iraq happy, who, let us remember, have not made a single attack on American soil that could threaten the ability of US citizens using said technology.
That's true, which is why I say Myspace has the advantage since it enables "networking" in the "meeting new people" sense much more easily than Facebook does. However, as the posters above me have said, the site itself is horrible and doesn't do much to encourage tech-savvy users to stay with it.
With regards to the security; I am sceptical about Facebook; having heard some CIA link type stuff. On the other hand, Myspace seems much more underhanded (I don't trust News Corp for a second) and some of the stuff in their agreements for music uploading is pretty possessive. To be honest, anyone putting personal info online should already have decided the price they'll pay in privacy by uploading it; ignorance is not an excuse.
This is a lesson Myspace should learn. I use both sites, and here's why Facebook is better:
Actual networking facilities. I'm not sure what the creators of Myspace think "social networking" means, but it definitely _does not_ mean a small box saying "______ is in your extended network" on an area of the profile nobody looks at anyway. And what does that even mean? There's no links to see your "extended network". Facebook, on the other hand, shows you how someone else is linked to you (eg, which of their friends are listed as yours) and lets you narrow down networks by class and college, or graduation year.
Intelligent image manipulation. Facebook's gallery features allow you to upload a picture and then select an area of the image "containing" a person, which is then linked to that user's profile when the photo is viewed. On Myspace, you're lucky if the image itself loads.
Better relationship definitions. Facebook allows you to specify how you know someone, what classes you took, when you lived together, and even if you're a couple. You can then click links to see your "timeline", showing courses you took, who you took them with, when you lived with people and where, and other stuff. Myspace? "an unknown error has occured".
Not owned by News Corp....
This new API. I can't imagine Myspace opening up any of their information for this kind of thing. I was pleased but not surprised to see stuff about open source on Facebook's new developer section. I can't see Myspace ever embracing any of the OSS concepts.
What Myspace needs to do is realise that it has more users, more information about them, less specifically linked, so thus it has more potential. They have the ideas (on the School forums they have mostly-unused bulletin boards for craigslist-esque classifieds) but without the implementation, they just look like amateurs.
I really wish music companies would think before acting like dicks. If you could find me a band who MIND that kids out there are learning to play their songs from sites like OLGA, I'll be a surprised man. It's free publicity if anything, most bands/albums I like don't have tab books to purchase so I look online. It's hardly like these sites offer mp3s of the songs along with the chords, what's the issue? As far as I can see it'd encourage people to check out the rest of the band's music. In my personal development as a guitarist I use tab sites all the time to learn songs I like and it definitely isn't hurting the bands. It's just another way for the big corporations to harness a popular industry and either spoil it for everyone or try to make money off it. That Lennon quote comes to mind: "Music belongs to everyone; it's just publishers who think they own it" (or words to that effect).
... The only trouble is, such over active imaginations will find it difficult to think of a secure destination. Events of a hitherto unimaginable reach have rendered virtually every corner of the globe vulnerable. A sachet of sarin is located no one knows where, but is ready to be punctured when the signal is given. The banal, shopping bag left innocuously at the entrance to a metro station is eyed as a potential enemy, capable of devastation less dramatic but every bit as awesome as the sight of a plane hurtling down from the sky in a ball of flames.
Are the Mozilla guys this out of touch with the net community? Even Joe Schmoe knows Realplayer is a pain in the ass, let alone the community of developers who generally respect Mozilla. While it's good that Realplayer users can get access to better software, it's still a dodgy association; Real embody most of the things the Mozilla group are meant to represent the solution to.
Just curious, is anyone else in the Slashdot community really not that interested in web-based software? I find that pretty much any machine I use "on the go" has MS Office or similar installed, and when I need portability I prefer to just email myself my document(s), which as well as removing the reliance on a third party service I trust less than my mail provider, it also means I have a stored backup online if the worst happens. I really couldn't be less interested in doing office-type editing through my browser - am I alone in this?
Would Dracula merging with Frankenstein's Monster to take out, uh, Buffy, be a good idea? No, you'd just get an even uglier monster (especially compared to the sexy Goog- uh, Buffy) with a combination of skills that would seem to plug the others' holes (eg, Dracula's shapeshifting plus FM's zombieness) but really just leave it trying to focus on too many things at once (Blood? Electricity? Love?!). Plus as any geek knows, Buffy always wins.
Slashdot Mirror
Err when I say "700K" I use K as an abbreviation for thousand, not as a size measurement.
5 days between restarts? Yeesh, I'm glad I don't pay this guy's electricity bills. Call me crazy, but I shut my machine down when I'm not using it (mostly because the awesome fan power would keep me awake).
As for windows, typically about 5+ tabs (I seriously saw FF 2.0 hit 700K of memory the other night when I opened about 20 tabs, wish I'd grabbed a screenshot) and around 4 or so windows, including IM stuff. I wish Windows had a feature like Fedora's multiple desktop stuff with the 4 thumbnails, as this would help me split stuff up better since half my taskbar is taken up with quick launch shortcuts or status bar icons I need on display.
Big Mouth?
Half-Life 2, surely a game most /.ers can agree was (one of?) the best in recent years, takes up only a few gigabytes on disk. Its graphics still look better than anything I've seen a console render, and its gameplay is a thousand times better than most games that rely on flashy FMV sequences to tell the story. What developers should be focusing on is not how many flashy videos that are not interactive they can cram onto a disc, but how good a game they can create with these wider limitations. If I wanted to see high-quality computer generated movies I'd watch Star Wars.
Man, I never thought I'd hear someone refer to F.E.A.R. as "comfort[ing]". That said, I'd include Doom 3 on my list just because I don't have to think too much, but it's cheap thrills and looks pretty. Kinda like a hooker really, just without the STDs.
Sounds like they understand it pretty damn well, really..
With regards to my site:
a) I see nothing from the ads, they pay our hosting. We make no profit, we don't pay staff to write.
b) Our ads are only by record labels whose bands we feature, the point being that our audience is likely to care about the records being advertised. I couldn't care any less about Warner Bros latest movie when I'm trying to read my friend's blog, for example.
c) We've had ads for quite a while now and weren't bought out by a larger company to implement them (our hosting needs just became higher).
I agree, they owe me nothing. My point was merely that the content of the site is a little more sensitive, so people feel more harshly about it when they see it taken over with new ads/"sponsorship" than they would at Myspace, for example.
I'm a long-term user of Livejournal and the whole thing, on paper at least, reads pretty badly. Little company with nice OSS policies get bought by a bigger group, suddenly start introducing ads on the site (I don't care if they're only viewed by people who opt-in, they're still there) and introducing crap like corporate sponsoring, like pages for movies where you can watch trailers. I know sites like YouTube and Myspace do all the corporate tie-in crap, with smarter companies doing the whole viral marketing method to take advantage, but those sites are both new and had ads from the start. LJ is a little more pure, and since it's founded around people posting their lives and emotions and feelings, it cheapens the overall site experience when stuff like this is added in a way that's not the same as Myspace having ads. When half the members of your site are just random guys looking to score, it doesn't have the same impact when everyone is advertising.
I'm one year into a BA English degree and definitely found this post interesting. At the start of our Medieval Literature module, we looked at a clip from a TV show where Eddie Izzard learned some Old English, then went to an area of Belgium where they still spoke Fresian, and was able to buy a cow from an old farmer by asking him in old English if he could purchase it. The two languages are very similar (albeit widely unspoken) so he was able to do so - OE definitely has closer links with that area of Europe, linguistically, than with England itself.
We also looked at a little of Tolkien's essay on Beowulf. He's by no means the only person to make a good translation (Seamus Heaney did one, as I recall) but he did do a fair bit to bring it back. One of our lecturers compared some excerpts from Beowulf with parts of LOTR and the influence there is undeniable.
And The Kitty.
You could just set your sound device as your recording device in Windows Sound Mixer or whatever its called and then record from there, much simpler. I've captured live streams like this.
This one's not as painful on the eyes but if it's real, it's probably even worse:
http://www.superdesignstudio.com/
I say just put the podcasts up, no validation or security, free for all.
As my lecturers constantly tell us, downloading presentation slides (or really, any media with the lecture contents) isn't a substitute for actually coming along and taking notes and asking questions. If the lazy students think by sitting at home and downloading a podcast, they can get the same level of education as attending classes, let's see how it works out for them at exam time. You can give a man a weapon but you can't make him use it (in this case on himself).
What's with Microsoft naming their products with such generic names? Are they hoping that, like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc, the product names will become synonyms for their function? Just another brick in the wall of antitrust.
True, but how many of the typical iPod users (teenagers mostly) can you imagine doing this, simple as it is?
Hmm, I see what you're saying but the layman doesn't know HOW to plug his iPod into a hifi, and probably wouldn't know what additional hardware was required to do so. People like to be made to feel stupid. Look at Windows XP: the Fisher-Price layout, helpful hints and dialogues with patronisingly obvious wording, bold colours and big stupid buttons. It's made for non-techies who just want to do simple tasks with the minimum of technical effort. Most iPod users would happily pay for a feature that let them share music wirelessly rather than buy a cheap adapter and plug into a hifi they can all listen to. We've seen the same logic over and over again in technology, this'll be no different (especially since we have the 'wireless' buzzword).
I know this could open a whole can of worms, but: WTF? When have any of the Iraqi people (or even government) threatened the kids of America from losing their technology? That sounds suspiciously like Bush's tired line of "they hate our freedom". No, George. What "they" hate is the fact that your country arms their enemies then decides to act tactically using the excuse of war crimes that happened 20 years ago, only to send the country spiralling into civil war. When "invaders" from the US army show up with more advanced personal technology than anyone there has access to, it's completely rubbing their noses in the fact that their lives are worse, and completely furthering the stereotype of the rich ignorant Westerner.
While I fully agree with your points about soldiers having the rights to do whatever they want to in their free time, and this not hugely affecting the American side of the war, you can bet your bottom dollar that it's not making the people in Iraq happy, who, let us remember, have not made a single attack on American soil that could threaten the ability of US citizens using said technology.
That's true, which is why I say Myspace has the advantage since it enables "networking" in the "meeting new people" sense much more easily than Facebook does. However, as the posters above me have said, the site itself is horrible and doesn't do much to encourage tech-savvy users to stay with it.
With regards to the security; I am sceptical about Facebook; having heard some CIA link type stuff. On the other hand, Myspace seems much more underhanded (I don't trust News Corp for a second) and some of the stuff in their agreements for music uploading is pretty possessive. To be honest, anyone putting personal info online should already have decided the price they'll pay in privacy by uploading it; ignorance is not an excuse.
What Myspace needs to do is realise that it has more users, more information about them, less specifically linked, so thus it has more potential. They have the ideas (on the School forums they have mostly-unused bulletin boards for craigslist-esque classifieds) but without the implementation, they just look like amateurs.
I really wish music companies would think before acting like dicks. If you could find me a band who MIND that kids out there are learning to play their songs from sites like OLGA, I'll be a surprised man. It's free publicity if anything, most bands/albums I like don't have tab books to purchase so I look online. It's hardly like these sites offer mp3s of the songs along with the chords, what's the issue? As far as I can see it'd encourage people to check out the rest of the band's music. In my personal development as a guitarist I use tab sites all the time to learn songs I like and it definitely isn't hurting the bands. It's just another way for the big corporations to harness a popular industry and either spoil it for everyone or try to make money off it. That Lennon quote comes to mind: "Music belongs to everyone; it's just publishers who think they own it" (or words to that effect).
Are the Mozilla guys this out of touch with the net community? Even Joe Schmoe knows Realplayer is a pain in the ass, let alone the community of developers who generally respect Mozilla. While it's good that Realplayer users can get access to better software, it's still a dodgy association; Real embody most of the things the Mozilla group are meant to represent the solution to.
Just curious, is anyone else in the Slashdot community really not that interested in web-based software? I find that pretty much any machine I use "on the go" has MS Office or similar installed, and when I need portability I prefer to just email myself my document(s), which as well as removing the reliance on a third party service I trust less than my mail provider, it also means I have a stored backup online if the worst happens. I really couldn't be less interested in doing office-type editing through my browser - am I alone in this?
Would Dracula merging with Frankenstein's Monster to take out, uh, Buffy, be a good idea? No, you'd just get an even uglier monster (especially compared to the sexy Goog- uh, Buffy) with a combination of skills that would seem to plug the others' holes (eg, Dracula's shapeshifting plus FM's zombieness) but really just leave it trying to focus on too many things at once (Blood? Electricity? Love?!). Plus as any geek knows, Buffy always wins.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22JOSEPH+COTTON%22 +SEABREEZE&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr= yields your page as the second result.