Ummm.. Android owning 56% of the smartphone market appears to be at least "approaching" the "getting their clock cleaned" - and a large percentage of that happened remarkably recently.
I think my review could answer some of your questions... offering a more compare/contrast with the Kindle 2.
http://monroeworld.com/reviews/review.php?id=15
In short, if PDF is your biggest draw - I would wait for some firmware updates before making the jump.
I'm in close quarters with several GameStop managers. They are ALL jonesing for the Wii, consider the PS3 nearly insignificant and cite that Wii has generated some of the most demand they've seen. Remember, these guys have been to the recent shows - they've played all the platforms (and not for 30 seconds at a Nintendo Fusion Tour). What does that say? I dunno - but my money is on Wii.
Don't you worry A THING about RPGs on the Wii. Square-Enix is so far in the closet with Nintendo (some of the Top 10 Nintendo DS titles are the breathtaking games from Square-Enix). I have NO doubts that they are hard at work on Wii titles.
That being said, if you don't have a DS yet and are into RPGs, you might want to consider picking one up. FFIII is unreal.
I work for a state government agency, and we have blocked the automatic deployment of IE7 because we've found TONS of our applications that break under it.
It isn't just bullshit - IE7 breaks stuff. We haven't determined why yet, but we can't have mass deployment until we completely understand the dynamics of it.
First off, Microsoft stole fizzy lifting drinks from EVERYONE - and I mean EVERYONE.
I'm not through it all, but here are some high points I've noticed.
1) They stole the nice compact design from Opera. No more gaudy, useless toolbars and worthless buttons. I don't like the implementation, but I treasure vertical real estate. 2) They allow your own default search engine when typing in the URL bar (nothing nearly as cool as Opera where you can make MULTIPLE searches with key words like "g coleco" to seach Google or "e wildfire" to search ebay). If you want to use anything other than Live to search, you'll jump through hoops. They did steal the search drop down tho. 3) Tabbed browsing of course. Theft on a grand scale. I haven't figured out how to move it to the BOTTOM of the window - I HATE tabs on top. Always have. Thank God Opera is ultra-configurable. 4) Zoom. Holy sh*t... someone FINALLY stole Zoom. Yes, JUST like Opera, you can now ZOOM the screen (something I cannot live without - one of the MANY reasons I don't like Firefox) in real time which means no more corrupted, unreadable pages when you try to make things bigger.
Obviously, I haven't had time to play around much, but I'll be back to post my findings.
I'm wagering opening 10 tabs with plugins grinds this baby to a halt
Oh, and BTW.. Thanks for nothing MS... Thanks for STILL disallowing any non-MS program from being the VIEW SOURCE editor. Every occur to you that nobody likes Notepad?
IE7 doesn't disappoint the MS disliker in me...
First off, I opened about 25 sites - many with Flash and media on it (youTube, etc). Check the ol' resources... 240MB of RAM used. Opened the exact same sites in Opera... 130MB. Wow!
The ZOOM mode corrupts quite frequently, so it's still no match for Opera's zoom. Ended up with some DAMN distorted stuff.
I gotta say I really dislike the "too many tabs" navigation system - of course, I could just be used to Operas. They stole fizzy lifting drinks and used CTRL-TAB to cycle tabs, but unlike Opera, they actually jump between them instead of giving you the nice list. The chose INSTEAD to make a new button on the tab bar to do that and once the tabs reach a certain size, you get SCROLL ARROWS (!!!) to get to the other tabs! Wow! I guess no one at MS QA actually opens more than like 5 tabs at a time.
No MDI interface either. Firefox doesn't have it either so I guess they figured they could do without. Frankly, I'm in an MDI interface MOST of the time as I'm a multitasking kinda dude.
Much like Firefox, the browser is featureless out of the box. They expect you to put in "add ons" to get real functionality - which I'm sure will raise the possibilities of memory leaks (cough Firefox) and security issues with third party stuff. At least now you have the option of MOUSE GESTURES with an add on. I can't WAIT to see the chaos that ensues.
Well, I can at least say this much... IE is now BEARABLE if you're forced to use it at work. It ain't no Firefox, and it sure the hell ain't Opera.
This isn't the cause of any Sony stock plunges. They have been tying the noose for a year now with overpriced high tech gadgets they ASSUMED the public want. $250 for a handheld? $600 for a console? $400 for a portable internet device? Reliance on overpriced, proprietary storage media?
I love my PS2 - but I'm going Wii this time around. Poly and texture count doesn't impress me anymore. Games could be fun at 160x120x2 resolution. The Cube had plenty of horsepower for graphics (Resident Evil 4 was enough to sell me a Cube); the problem wasn't with the hardware. The Wii can provide - and hopefully produce the sort of games I want to play.
9 out of 10 pedophile predators prefer hanging out where there tens of thousands of underaged kids instead of a church... film at 11.
9 out of 10 spammers prefer large bodies of largely ignorant masses that will do exactly what they are told to do; that don't have a clue and don't want one... film at 11.
Say... does anyone remember like.. 5 years ago... if you met someone online and established any sort of a relationship with them, you were considered a freak?
This just in... people are fickle, bandwagoning idiots... Film at 11.
What happened to wanting to ACTUALLY be around people? The teen-faux-angsters are DYING to be seen, heard and listened to - yet they choose the WORST POSSIBLE medium to do it.
This shouldn't be rewarded. It should be punished. For anyone over the age of 12, do you recall what REAL socializing used to be? You and your buddies would kick it at one of your houses on the weekend, crammed around the Colecovision, playing TOGETHER, waiting for SNL to come on so you could fall asleep during the musical number? Remember what it was like to actually talk smack without having a headset on? Still know those people? Are they still your friends? What's the longest friendship you've had? I'm 37, and I have a friend of 24 years. Wonder what the average "friendship" expectancy is over MySpace? Doesn't matter - there are 18 million other people dying to bump their friend count by adding you.
Just as with everything else, this generation has created YET ANOTHER disposable product; friendship. MySpace and it's ilk have CHEAPENED friendship and turned it into another mass-market, easily tossed commodity with zero expectations of longetivity or nostalgia value. "Something given has no value" and the most valuable items come through rarity, hard work and sacrifice. How many REAL relationships can one person expect to maintain with any sort of value? What rarity, sacrifice or hard work does it take to "make friends" at MySpace? What REAL value do you take away from it later in life? MySpace is the little bird tattoo on your boob that sounds like a good idea when you're too dumb to realize in 20 years, your sagging breasts will turn that bird into something out of an H.R. Geiger. "Gee, I had 367 friends on MySpace when I was 13, now that I'm 20, I have no friends to hang out with on Saturday night".
I swear to Christ I'm going to make black T-Shirts that bare the phrase 'I'm stalking your daughter on MySpace' and wear them around. Or maybe 'I'm the dude your daughter met on MySpace'. I'm certainly no prize to look at - old, fat, receeding hair line. Maybe these shirts will wake some parents up and they will start doing a little parenting and keep their teens off these obvious "stalker centrals". Don't give me any crap about how you're just as likely to meet a stalker at a bar as you will on MySpace. I can't believe anyone can believe such tripe. It is a simple matter of numbers and audience. Where do pedophiles hang out? They ain't hanging out at bars. Or singles clubs. They are sitting outside your daughter's high school RIGHT NOW. If you're car shopping, you don't go to Wal-mart, right? And if you were going car shopping, do you go to the little local lot in the middle of nowhere where they have 10-20 cars in stock, or do you cruise the "auto mile" where there are THOUSANDS of cars of every make and model waiting to be test driven? If *I* wanted to stalk underage girls, MySpace would be my FIRST stop (and guess what - my ONLY stop... the veritable Wal-mart Super Store for the sexually demented). Gee, difficult math.
Danger aside, I'm disgusted by disposability. Music, film, video games - and now friends - have all been demoted to the shortest half-life possible. I weep for the future.
As someone that posts a LOT of videos to youTube, Google Video, and Veoh - I just GOTTA chime in on this.
First, I can't believe no one has mentioned Veoh.com yet and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Second, as an AVID user of these services, I should explain what I need in this sort of service:
1) Immediate access to my uploads. When 100% hits, I need to be able to shoot someone the URL to the file and they need to be able to get it (AFAIK, only Veoh allows immediate downloading of the file). 2) Easy batch uploading. Google and Veoh both have upload tools - but Veoh is the only one that seems to do it right. I haven't seen a web-based uploader that will allow me to queue and upload. 3) Private, key-based videos. Jesus man.. My grandma can't figure out how to sign up, add me to her friend list, request ME to add her to my friend list -- all to see a 30 second clip of our family BBQ last week. I need to be able to send family and friends a 'no-member password' in a link to let them view that private video. So far, this is a feature NO ONE (AFAIK) has. 4) HQ video. I shoot Nintendo DS videos. It's hard enough to see without the "LQ filter to Flash" conversion. Veoh (granted through a win32) allows the viewer to download the FULL quality video so they see it as I intended them to. Both youTube and Google Video really butcher videos; even ones from an HQ source upload. 5) Larger, Longer Videos - I'm the consumer; I don't care about your storage and bandwidth problems:) I just know when I have a 10:15 video or a 5 minute HQ video that's 110MB, youTube tells me to piss off. Another reason to like Veoh - enjoy upping as long or as big of files as you like.
No I don't work for Veoh. I just know they are the closest thing to meeting my needs as there is out there.
As for Soapbox - please. I have ZER0 love for MS (a well-documented, often lamented fact) and I'll admit it. However, I KNOW it is NOT just me in thinking that their subtle "wait for someone else to make a hit, then steal it, rebrand it, and give it away for free" business model has gone from "subtle" to "downright obvious". It is like they don't even care anymore that we KNOW and that they KNOW that we know. Has Microsoft gotten THAT big or have we as a society just become so ignorant and complacent that we don't give a rat's ass anymore? Those that do know cry to deaf ears. Those that don't could care less as long as it's free and hand-fed to them.
Everything MS does these days appears haphazard and 'knee-jerk' at best. "Uh oh... someone figured out MSN Search sucks and Google is making money. We better respond with Live. What? iTunes is selling more tracks than Wal-mart and the other whores that are paying us big bucks to cripple content? We better respond with our own player that is locked to OUR service. What? Video Sharing? Bob, why didn't you think of that first? We better respond by knocking off our system with our nearest competitor!"...
When I discovered these weren't anamorphic, I had a crap attack just like the rest of you (btw, $48 at Fry's Electronics this week for all three - not THAT bad of a deal).
But, I expected nothing else, honestly - with Lucas basically saying he had ZERO interest in releasing these at all. I expected mono, pan & scan (or matted 1.85:1) or worse.
I watched Star Wars front to back yesterday after picking them up.
The sound suffers a bit after being exposed to all the new remastered stuff, but it's better than I thought it would be. It's nice to hear things in their original glory.
The video is indeed 2.35:1 non-anamorphic widescreen and the quality on my Toshiba second gen plasma suffered because of it. I have a feeling on a non-next gen TV, the quality would be perceived a lot better. Quite acceptable considering the alternatives (the bootleg laserdisc to DVD which I have seen all versions as well).
Fact is - watching Han shoot first made it all worth it. I know that sounds petty and sad, but I've been without that classic scene for so long, I actually paused everything I was doing while I watched it and simply sat transfixed watching Han blast Greedo. I bathed in the glory that was the landspeeder and lightsaber "poor"effects - THAT'S how I remember Star Wars, folks. Nostalgia DESERVES to be preserved and this might just be it.
This is one case where I'm going to just be happy we got them AT ALL.
Despite that I have to mask as Mozilla in Opera to use it, Writely.com has become my word processor. So many people need NOTHING more than this - and it is free, easy to use and exports to many formats (HTML, Doc, PDF). Plus, I can use collaboration - also for free - without needing some bloated Sharepoint server or similar to do so.
Who needs a ribbon?
I bought my wife the e250 model, and I gotta say - overall, it is one nice, durable tight little unit. No problems, easy interface, brain dead easy usage, converted both MPG and AVI (various codecs) to the unit flawlessly without sync loss.
The microSD expansion is a real bonus too.
Morning Musume for me please...
Seriously, I'm an archiver of media - I am not part of the disposable generation. Music videos helped define my generation (back when videos were quality productions - like Thriller) and I'd like to have them on a disc somewhere that I can watch when and how I like. Sure, you can download YouTube videos - but they are horrible quality to start with.
What I want are music videos in an HQ format (I'll take Xvid) - and I'm willing to pay for them a la cart. If you're going to DRM them, don't bother.
Forget that I run a DS podcast for a minute... I'm not interesting in a verbal bashfest. What I AM interested in doing is helping people understand why the PSP was doomed from the get go.
In fact, it is so blatently obvious, I can't figure out why someone didn't figure this out LONG before the project ever got greenlit.
Portable gaming. What is it? It is gaming you TAKE WITH YOU. And... why do we WANT to take games with us? To fill in the gaps of time we have free during our regular day, since most of us have jobs, families and responsibilities. Now, assuming that the people WITHOUT lives are sitting in their mother's basement, with their Xbox blazing and an RJ45 plug up their asses - they are obviously not the target audience for portable gaming.
Portable gaming is for "filler-gaming" - filling in free time; commuting on the bus, waiting for the movie to start, sitting at the doctor's office, throwing down on the toilet - you get the idea. Twitch gaming is another name for portable gaming, really.
Now, let's look at the PSP, designed and content fed in the EXACT opposite manner in which it should be.
1) Poor battery life. There is a reason that the B&W crappy as hell looking Gameboy kicked the crap of the Atari Lynx; it ran 10x longer on a third the batteries. Forget that the Lynx had a near perfect port of Road Blasters, Joust, Xybots and other great games. If you can only play them for 3 hours on 6xAA batteries, you lose the 'handheld war'. Nintendo smartly build the capabilities of their handhelds to ensure maximum on-the-go time.
2) Sponsoring a non-condusive, over-priced, fragile closed format; UMD. Every time I see the term "UMD", I instantly think "WTF?". They can cost up to double the price of DVDs (you know, the movies you ALREADY HAVE in you collection). They don't hold as much, you can't write to them, the mechanical power required to spin a disc (IN A PORTABLE NO LESS) makes no sense, and the list pretty much goes on and on from there. I say non-condusive because MOVIES violate the concept of a portable gaming device (in so many ways it isn't even funny). Twitch gamers have 15-30 minutes to game (above mentioned commuting, waiting in lines, etc) - a 90 minute content block makes no sense. The LEAST that Sony should have done was declare the UMD format for twitch style content - 22 minute sitcoms and goofy MTV reality shows (seemingly their target audience anwyay). Sell episodes of Friends, American Idol, and Simpsons. Make it HELLA affordable - for God Sake's, Google is about to offer this content for FREE with basic advertising support. I shouldn't be paying $29 for 3 episodes of Survivor. Let's go ahead and invoke the 6+ minute load time video while we're here. I can be playing Mario Kart before the first boot screen of half the PSP games I've seen. Console kiddies are used to god unforsaken load times (been there - hey, Beachhead II, Commodore 64, tape version, 22 minutes to load). When I'm on the go - I want it NOW.
3) Portable gaming ain't console gaming. Look, man. Maybe you have 5 hours to tromp through a dungeon every day - I don't. Most of the people that do portable gaming don't. That's why they HAVE portable gaming, dammit - because console gaming doesn't fit their lifestyles. Why do you think there are 500+ 'portable pocket sudoku' games on the walls of Target, but strangely no stand alone pocket version of Final Fantasy? People can play a game of Sudoku in 10 minutes; you aren't even through the first goddamn CUT SCENE in FF in the 10 minutes. I'm willing to put up with a HELLUVA lot at home when gaming. I'm NOT willing to put up with it when I'm trying to block out some screaming kid at the clinic with a little Electroplankton time.
4) Lack of innovation. Great, you can play GTA on the go. Been there, done that. In fact, looking at the list of PSP games (old, new, and forthcoming) I'm seeing basically the same thing I've seen on consoles for the past couple ye
Hey, neighbor... I live in Glendale, AZ and I assure everyone that the streets are LOADED with Mormon missionaries on bikes just as this guy says.
Now, my problem with this crap is when privately-owned-yet-public-facilities like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and apparently Wal-mart (I don't buy movies from Wal-mart; full screen can kiss my ass) start removing my ability to choose. It is one thing for Blockbuster not to carry "unrated" versions (one of the reasons I stopped going to Blockbuster to begin with) - but to carry the SANITIZED flicks (well-marked or not) instead of the actual versions (or carrying both with more copies of the sanitized version than the other) is just plain wrong to me.
Is it their right to do so? I suppose so. Then again, if you want to get technical, it's Lucas' right to alter every edition of Star Wars and never let the originals out, right?
I like to akin this to celebrity-ism. When you become a famous celebrity or well-known to the public, you lose some of your rights. As a public figure, you can be lampooned, ridiculed, and in many cases those looking to expose you for profit are protected. When you become a celebrity, you lose some of your rights - and every single one of them know this going in.
When you become Wal-mart, Lucas, or Blockbuster - you should also lose some of your rights because you have that much influence on the public. If and when a company controls 40%+ of sales in a town, they have an obligation to serve the public trust. Before you say "censorship serves the public trust", I want to point out that no one came and surveyed me to ask me if I wanted sanitized CDs in my local Wal-mart before they built it. No one polled me and said "would carrying unrated movies cause you problems?" Censorship is almost ALWAYS catering to the needs of the FEW, not the needs of the MANY as I feel they should do. Look at the FCC as a prime example.
Of course, Wal-mart WAS willing to call me at 8pm at night and ask me to come support the building of a new store in my community. I told them there were enough Wal-marts per capita in this town, and they could go and fornicate themselves:)
It isn't Wal-mart's job to protect the people and perform real-time censorship. It should be up to the people to take care of themselves and their children.
These aren't exacty revolutionary ideas. Opera's M2 mail client and Ritlab's The Bat! are both incredibly powerful and configurable tools. If you like Gmail, I swear 3/4 of it was taken from M2. The Bat! features everything that power users need; tabbed search filter, incredibly powerful filtering (I've yet to see it's equal), virtual folders and the list goes on and on.
Functionality exists NOW to do the deed. What IS lacking is the ability for people to embrace technology, think outside the box, understand that what comes installed for free on your computer isn't necessarily the best tool for the job and use a little bit of intelligence and ingenuity instead of treating computers and software like simple tools like hammers and screwdrivers.
I'm echoing a couple of other folks here, but I wanted to chime in myself with a little story to illustrate.
If you really care about safety, get an education. A good A/V program and firewall are a good start - but to believe for one second that any amount of software can protect you is just being naive. The best A/V and anti-spyware cannot DO everything and as a bonus, they are only as good as the person that updates them (or the person responsible for the update). What's worse, is thanks to the media, most of these tools incorrectly identify "thousands of infections" (fear only works through numbers - if a product finds ONE legitimate malware, it CAN'T be as good as one that finds THOUSANDS, RIGHT????) by identifying cookies for Pete's sake.
The fact remains that a little education, and a bit of lifestyle change goes a LONG way. Drop IE (I'm an Opera user - yes, I know I know - let the Firefox arrows fly). Drop the Outlook evilness (again, I'll buck the trend - I use The Bat! and I love it). If you don't want the hole in the roof to get bigger, don't leave the little hole in disrepair, right?
Fact of the matter is, I've managed to be malware and virus free for going on 10 years now by simple education. I don't even use a firewall or realtime A/V OR spyware tools. I do a 'system level' A/V test on boot up, keep my A/V defs up to date - and I let Windows Firewall run. A couple of times a year, I'll get the "flavor of the month" anti-malware package, spyware package and run it just to ensure I'm clean. Then I promptly uninstall it.
I've educated my wife and children about internet security. On their boxes, the A/V runs resident. My wife uses Internet Explorer because of some very poorly written sites she must visit. I got my kid on Opera. Zero infections.
In fact, education works so well - I have a story to tell about it.
A family friend and her kid came over to visit - all their stuff was in storage (getting ready to move) and they needed some computer time on the 'net to do some homework, check email, etc. No problem - terminals all over the house - pick one and go. The kid got on my wife's computer.
Within FIVE MINUTES, the computer was infected. To this day, I don't know what she did - but it was LOADED with crap. The other terminals were off aside from mine - and I saw the infection try to hit my box, disabled sharing to my wife's computer, and ran in to stop what was going on.
Five minutes, folks. That's all it took a squeaky clean system to become unbelievably infected. I can only imagine what their own computers look like. Took me HOURS to get it cleaned off (as I said - software can only do so much - if you don't get EVERYTHING before the next reboot, it all comes back - enjoy!).
I'm sure everyone has a story like this. "I had a family member that was infected DAILY with tons of crap, changed them to Opera|Firefox|whatever and The Bat|Thunderbird|whatever and I've never had another call from them". You just can't argue with success stories like that. Sure, if you changed them to OSX or Redhat, you might have the same success story. But in this case, they didn't lose anything they used everyday (except that crappy browser and horrible email client), they learned a valuable lesson - and in many cases, come back to tell you how much BETTER the browser/client is than the horrible crap they were using (Opera's screen zooming alone makes it completely indispensible for people at super high resolutions - I'm at 180% as I write this).
Until people understand the nature of evil, they cannot hope to combat it. You can install multiple A/V tools, spyware killers, the whole lot (and incorrectly feel safe about it - making you even MORE susceptible to attack) or you can get a little education, make a couple of small changes and really protect yourself.
As Smokey the Bear says|said: "Only YOU..."
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm .. Android owning 56% of the smartphone market appears to be at least "approaching" the "getting their clock cleaned" - and a large percentage of that happened remarkably recently.
It's called DIRECTORY OPUS. Look it up, steal it or buy it - and your problems would have been solved a decade ago.
I think my review could answer some of your questions ... offering a more compare/contrast with the Kindle 2.
http://monroeworld.com/reviews/review.php?id=15
In short, if PDF is your biggest draw - I would wait for some firmware updates before making the jump.
I'm in close quarters with several GameStop managers. They are ALL jonesing for the Wii, consider the PS3 nearly insignificant and cite that Wii has generated some of the most demand they've seen. Remember, these guys have been to the recent shows - they've played all the platforms (and not for 30 seconds at a Nintendo Fusion Tour). What does that say? I dunno - but my money is on Wii. Don't you worry A THING about RPGs on the Wii. Square-Enix is so far in the closet with Nintendo (some of the Top 10 Nintendo DS titles are the breathtaking games from Square-Enix). I have NO doubts that they are hard at work on Wii titles. That being said, if you don't have a DS yet and are into RPGs, you might want to consider picking one up. FFIII is unreal.
I work for a state government agency, and we have blocked the automatic deployment of IE7 because we've found TONS of our applications that break under it. It isn't just bullshit - IE7 breaks stuff. We haven't determined why yet, but we can't have mass deployment until we completely understand the dynamics of it.
They should have sent the cake to Team Opera then. Credit where credit is due.
No, we'd all be using Opera as we should be :)
So, since I had some slow time, I installed it.
... someone FINALLY stole Zoom. Yes, JUST like Opera, you can now ZOOM the screen (something I cannot live without - one of the MANY reasons I don't like Firefox) in real time which means no more corrupted, unreadable pages when you try to make things bigger.
.. Thanks for nothing MS ... Thanks for STILL disallowing any non-MS program from being the VIEW SOURCE editor. Every occur to you that nobody likes Notepad?
...
... 240MB of RAM used. Opened the exact same sites in Opera ... 130MB. Wow!
... IE is now BEARABLE if you're forced to use it at work. It ain't no Firefox, and it sure the hell ain't Opera.
First off, Microsoft stole fizzy lifting drinks from EVERYONE - and I mean EVERYONE.
I'm not through it all, but here are some high points I've noticed.
1) They stole the nice compact design from Opera. No more gaudy, useless toolbars and worthless buttons. I don't like the implementation, but I treasure vertical real estate.
2) They allow your own default search engine when typing in the URL bar (nothing nearly as cool as Opera where you can make MULTIPLE searches with key words like "g coleco" to seach Google or "e wildfire" to search ebay). If you want to use anything other than Live to search, you'll jump through hoops. They did steal the search drop down tho.
3) Tabbed browsing of course. Theft on a grand scale. I haven't figured out how to move it to the BOTTOM of the window - I HATE tabs on top. Always have. Thank God Opera is ultra-configurable.
4) Zoom. Holy sh*t
Obviously, I haven't had time to play around much, but I'll be back to post my findings.
I'm wagering opening 10 tabs with plugins grinds this baby to a halt
Oh, and BTW
IE7 doesn't disappoint the MS disliker in me
First off, I opened about 25 sites - many with Flash and media on it (youTube, etc). Check the ol' resources
The ZOOM mode corrupts quite frequently, so it's still no match for Opera's zoom. Ended up with some DAMN distorted stuff.
I gotta say I really dislike the "too many tabs" navigation system - of course, I could just be used to Operas. They stole fizzy lifting drinks and used CTRL-TAB to cycle tabs, but unlike Opera, they actually jump between them instead of giving you the nice list. The chose INSTEAD to make a new button on the tab bar to do that and once the tabs reach a certain size, you get SCROLL ARROWS (!!!) to get to the other tabs! Wow! I guess no one at MS QA actually opens more than like 5 tabs at a time.
No MDI interface either. Firefox doesn't have it either so I guess they figured they could do without. Frankly, I'm in an MDI interface MOST of the time as I'm a multitasking kinda dude.
Much like Firefox, the browser is featureless out of the box. They expect you to put in "add ons" to get real functionality - which I'm sure will raise the possibilities of memory leaks (cough Firefox) and security issues with third party stuff. At least now you have the option of MOUSE GESTURES with an add on. I can't WAIT to see the chaos that ensues.
Well, I can at least say this much
Welcome to the 90's, Internet Explorer.
Damn, I just spit soda everywhere....
This isn't the cause of any Sony stock plunges. They have been tying the noose for a year now with overpriced high tech gadgets they ASSUMED the public want. $250 for a handheld? $600 for a console? $400 for a portable internet device? Reliance on overpriced, proprietary storage media?
I love my PS2 - but I'm going Wii this time around. Poly and texture count doesn't impress me anymore. Games could be fun at 160x120x2 resolution. The Cube had plenty of horsepower for graphics (Resident Evil 4 was enough to sell me a Cube); the problem wasn't with the hardware. The Wii can provide - and hopefully produce the sort of games I want to play.
9 out of 10 pedophile predators prefer hanging out where there tens of thousands of underaged kids instead of a church ... film at 11.
... film at 11.
... does anyone remember like .. 5 years ago ... if you met someone online and established any sort of a relationship with them, you were considered a freak?
... people are fickle, bandwagoning idiots ... Film at 11.
9 out of 10 spammers prefer large bodies of largely ignorant masses that will do exactly what they are told to do; that don't have a clue and don't want one
Say
This just in
What happened to wanting to ACTUALLY be around people? The teen-faux-angsters are DYING to be seen, heard and listened to - yet they choose the WORST POSSIBLE medium to do it.
... the veritable Wal-mart Super Store for the sexually demented). Gee, difficult math.
This shouldn't be rewarded. It should be punished. For anyone over the age of 12, do you recall what REAL socializing used to be? You and your buddies would kick it at one of your houses on the weekend, crammed around the Colecovision, playing TOGETHER, waiting for SNL to come on so you could fall asleep during the musical number? Remember what it was like to actually talk smack without having a headset on? Still know those people? Are they still your friends? What's the longest friendship you've had? I'm 37, and I have a friend of 24 years. Wonder what the average "friendship" expectancy is over MySpace? Doesn't matter - there are 18 million other people dying to bump their friend count by adding you.
Just as with everything else, this generation has created YET ANOTHER disposable product; friendship. MySpace and it's ilk have CHEAPENED friendship and turned it into another mass-market, easily tossed commodity with zero expectations of longetivity or nostalgia value. "Something given has no value" and the most valuable items come through rarity, hard work and sacrifice. How many REAL relationships can one person expect to maintain with any sort of value? What rarity, sacrifice or hard work does it take to "make friends" at MySpace? What REAL value do you take away from it later in life? MySpace is the little bird tattoo on your boob that sounds like a good idea when you're too dumb to realize in 20 years, your sagging breasts will turn that bird into something out of an H.R. Geiger. "Gee, I had 367 friends on MySpace when I was 13, now that I'm 20, I have no friends to hang out with on Saturday night".
I swear to Christ I'm going to make black T-Shirts that bare the phrase 'I'm stalking your daughter on MySpace' and wear them around. Or maybe 'I'm the dude your daughter met on MySpace'. I'm certainly no prize to look at - old, fat, receeding hair line. Maybe these shirts will wake some parents up and they will start doing a little parenting and keep their teens off these obvious "stalker centrals". Don't give me any crap about how you're just as likely to meet a stalker at a bar as you will on MySpace. I can't believe anyone can believe such tripe. It is a simple matter of numbers and audience. Where do pedophiles hang out? They ain't hanging out at bars. Or singles clubs. They are sitting outside your daughter's high school RIGHT NOW. If you're car shopping, you don't go to Wal-mart, right? And if you were going car shopping, do you go to the little local lot in the middle of nowhere where they have 10-20 cars in stock, or do you cruise the "auto mile" where there are THOUSANDS of cars of every make and model waiting to be test driven? If *I* wanted to stalk underage girls, MySpace would be my FIRST stop (and guess what - my ONLY stop
Danger aside, I'm disgusted by disposability. Music, film, video games - and now friends - have all been demoted to the shortest half-life possible. I weep for the future.
As someone that posts a LOT of videos to youTube, Google Video, and Veoh - I just GOTTA chime in on this.
.. My grandma can't figure out how to sign up, add me to her friend list, request ME to add her to my friend list -- all to see a 30 second clip of our family BBQ last week. I need to be able to send family and friends a 'no-member password' in a link to let them view that private video. So far, this is a feature NO ONE (AFAIK) has. :) I just know when I have a 10:15 video or a 5 minute HQ video that's 110MB, youTube tells me to piss off. Another reason to like Veoh - enjoy upping as long or as big of files as you like.
... someone figured out MSN Search sucks and Google is making money. We better respond with Live. What? iTunes is selling more tracks than Wal-mart and the other whores that are paying us big bucks to cripple content? We better respond with our own player that is locked to OUR service. What? Video Sharing? Bob, why didn't you think of that first? We better respond by knocking off our system with our nearest competitor!" ...
... fear."
First, I can't believe no one has mentioned Veoh.com yet and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Second, as an AVID user of these services, I should explain what I need in this sort of service:
1) Immediate access to my uploads. When 100% hits, I need to be able to shoot someone the URL to the file and they need to be able to get it (AFAIK, only Veoh allows immediate downloading of the file).
2) Easy batch uploading. Google and Veoh both have upload tools - but Veoh is the only one that seems to do it right. I haven't seen a web-based uploader that will allow me to queue and upload.
3) Private, key-based videos. Jesus man
4) HQ video. I shoot Nintendo DS videos. It's hard enough to see without the "LQ filter to Flash" conversion. Veoh (granted through a win32) allows the viewer to download the FULL quality video so they see it as I intended them to. Both youTube and Google Video really butcher videos; even ones from an HQ source upload.
5) Larger, Longer Videos - I'm the consumer; I don't care about your storage and bandwidth problems
No I don't work for Veoh. I just know they are the closest thing to meeting my needs as there is out there.
As for Soapbox - please. I have ZER0 love for MS (a well-documented, often lamented fact) and I'll admit it. However, I KNOW it is NOT just me in thinking that their subtle "wait for someone else to make a hit, then steal it, rebrand it, and give it away for free" business model has gone from "subtle" to "downright obvious". It is like they don't even care anymore that we KNOW and that they KNOW that we know. Has Microsoft gotten THAT big or have we as a society just become so ignorant and complacent that we don't give a rat's ass anymore? Those that do know cry to deaf ears. Those that don't could care less as long as it's free and hand-fed to them.
Everything MS does these days appears haphazard and 'knee-jerk' at best. "Uh oh
"You smell that, Rabbit?"
"Yeah
When I discovered these weren't anamorphic, I had a crap attack just like the rest of you (btw, $48 at Fry's Electronics this week for all three - not THAT bad of a deal). But, I expected nothing else, honestly - with Lucas basically saying he had ZERO interest in releasing these at all. I expected mono, pan & scan (or matted 1.85:1) or worse. I watched Star Wars front to back yesterday after picking them up. The sound suffers a bit after being exposed to all the new remastered stuff, but it's better than I thought it would be. It's nice to hear things in their original glory. The video is indeed 2.35:1 non-anamorphic widescreen and the quality on my Toshiba second gen plasma suffered because of it. I have a feeling on a non-next gen TV, the quality would be perceived a lot better. Quite acceptable considering the alternatives (the bootleg laserdisc to DVD which I have seen all versions as well). Fact is - watching Han shoot first made it all worth it. I know that sounds petty and sad, but I've been without that classic scene for so long, I actually paused everything I was doing while I watched it and simply sat transfixed watching Han blast Greedo. I bathed in the glory that was the landspeeder and lightsaber "poor"effects - THAT'S how I remember Star Wars, folks. Nostalgia DESERVES to be preserved and this might just be it. This is one case where I'm going to just be happy we got them AT ALL.
Despite that I have to mask as Mozilla in Opera to use it, Writely.com has become my word processor. So many people need NOTHING more than this - and it is free, easy to use and exports to many formats (HTML, Doc, PDF). Plus, I can use collaboration - also for free - without needing some bloated Sharepoint server or similar to do so. Who needs a ribbon?
I bought my wife the e250 model, and I gotta say - overall, it is one nice, durable tight little unit. No problems, easy interface, brain dead easy usage, converted both MPG and AVI (various codecs) to the unit flawlessly without sync loss. The microSD expansion is a real bonus too.
Morning Musume for me please ...
Seriously, I'm an archiver of media - I am not part of the disposable generation. Music videos helped define my generation (back when videos were quality productions - like Thriller) and I'd like to have them on a disc somewhere that I can watch when and how I like. Sure, you can download YouTube videos - but they are horrible quality to start with.
What I want are music videos in an HQ format (I'll take Xvid) - and I'm willing to pay for them a la cart. If you're going to DRM them, don't bother.
Forget that I run a DS podcast for a minute ... I'm not interesting in a verbal bashfest. What I AM interested in doing is helping people understand why the PSP was doomed from the get go.
... why do we WANT to take games with us? To fill in the gaps of time we have free during our regular day, since most of us have jobs, families and responsibilities. Now, assuming that the people WITHOUT lives are sitting in their mother's basement, with their Xbox blazing and an RJ45 plug up their asses - they are obviously not the target audience for portable gaming.
In fact, it is so blatently obvious, I can't figure out why someone didn't figure this out LONG before the project ever got greenlit.
Portable gaming. What is it? It is gaming you TAKE WITH YOU. And
Portable gaming is for "filler-gaming" - filling in free time; commuting on the bus, waiting for the movie to start, sitting at the doctor's office, throwing down on the toilet - you get the idea. Twitch gaming is another name for portable gaming, really.
Now, let's look at the PSP, designed and content fed in the EXACT opposite manner in which it should be.
1) Poor battery life. There is a reason that the B&W crappy as hell looking Gameboy kicked the crap of the Atari Lynx; it ran 10x longer on a third the batteries. Forget that the Lynx had a near perfect port of Road Blasters, Joust, Xybots and other great games. If you can only play them for 3 hours on 6xAA batteries, you lose the 'handheld war'. Nintendo smartly build the capabilities of their handhelds to ensure maximum on-the-go time.
2) Sponsoring a non-condusive, over-priced, fragile closed format; UMD. Every time I see the term "UMD", I instantly think "WTF?". They can cost up to double the price of DVDs (you know, the movies you ALREADY HAVE in you collection). They don't hold as much, you can't write to them, the mechanical power required to spin a disc (IN A PORTABLE NO LESS) makes no sense, and the list pretty much goes on and on from there. I say non-condusive because MOVIES violate the concept of a portable gaming device (in so many ways it isn't even funny). Twitch gamers have 15-30 minutes to game (above mentioned commuting, waiting in lines, etc) - a 90 minute content block makes no sense. The LEAST that Sony should have done was declare the UMD format for twitch style content - 22 minute sitcoms and goofy MTV reality shows (seemingly their target audience anwyay). Sell episodes of Friends, American Idol, and Simpsons. Make it HELLA affordable - for God Sake's, Google is about to offer this content for FREE with basic advertising support. I shouldn't be paying $29 for 3 episodes of Survivor. Let's go ahead and invoke the 6+ minute load time video while we're here. I can be playing Mario Kart before the first boot screen of half the PSP games I've seen. Console kiddies are used to god unforsaken load times (been there - hey, Beachhead II, Commodore 64, tape version, 22 minutes to load). When I'm on the go - I want it NOW.
3) Portable gaming ain't console gaming. Look, man. Maybe you have 5 hours to tromp through a dungeon every day - I don't. Most of the people that do portable gaming don't. That's why they HAVE portable gaming, dammit - because console gaming doesn't fit their lifestyles. Why do you think there are 500+ 'portable pocket sudoku' games on the walls of Target, but strangely no stand alone pocket version of Final Fantasy? People can play a game of Sudoku in 10 minutes; you aren't even through the first goddamn CUT SCENE in FF in the 10 minutes. I'm willing to put up with a HELLUVA lot at home when gaming. I'm NOT willing to put up with it when I'm trying to block out some screaming kid at the clinic with a little Electroplankton time.
4) Lack of innovation. Great, you can play GTA on the go. Been there, done that. In fact, looking at the list of PSP games (old, new, and forthcoming) I'm seeing basically the same thing I've seen on consoles for the past couple ye
Hey, neighbor ... I live in Glendale, AZ and I assure everyone that the streets are LOADED with Mormon missionaries on bikes just as this guy says.
:)
Now, my problem with this crap is when privately-owned-yet-public-facilities like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and apparently Wal-mart (I don't buy movies from Wal-mart; full screen can kiss my ass) start removing my ability to choose. It is one thing for Blockbuster not to carry "unrated" versions (one of the reasons I stopped going to Blockbuster to begin with) - but to carry the SANITIZED flicks (well-marked or not) instead of the actual versions (or carrying both with more copies of the sanitized version than the other) is just plain wrong to me.
Is it their right to do so? I suppose so. Then again, if you want to get technical, it's Lucas' right to alter every edition of Star Wars and never let the originals out, right?
I like to akin this to celebrity-ism. When you become a famous celebrity or well-known to the public, you lose some of your rights. As a public figure, you can be lampooned, ridiculed, and in many cases those looking to expose you for profit are protected. When you become a celebrity, you lose some of your rights - and every single one of them know this going in.
When you become Wal-mart, Lucas, or Blockbuster - you should also lose some of your rights because you have that much influence on the public. If and when a company controls 40%+ of sales in a town, they have an obligation to serve the public trust. Before you say "censorship serves the public trust", I want to point out that no one came and surveyed me to ask me if I wanted sanitized CDs in my local Wal-mart before they built it. No one polled me and said "would carrying unrated movies cause you problems?" Censorship is almost ALWAYS catering to the needs of the FEW, not the needs of the MANY as I feel they should do. Look at the FCC as a prime example.
Of course, Wal-mart WAS willing to call me at 8pm at night and ask me to come support the building of a new store in my community. I told them there were enough Wal-marts per capita in this town, and they could go and fornicate themselves
It isn't Wal-mart's job to protect the people and perform real-time censorship. It should be up to the people to take care of themselves and their children.
These aren't exacty revolutionary ideas. Opera's M2 mail client and Ritlab's The Bat! are both incredibly powerful and configurable tools. If you like Gmail, I swear 3/4 of it was taken from M2. The Bat! features everything that power users need; tabbed search filter, incredibly powerful filtering (I've yet to see it's equal), virtual folders and the list goes on and on. Functionality exists NOW to do the deed. What IS lacking is the ability for people to embrace technology, think outside the box, understand that what comes installed for free on your computer isn't necessarily the best tool for the job and use a little bit of intelligence and ingenuity instead of treating computers and software like simple tools like hammers and screwdrivers.
I'm echoing a couple of other folks here, but I wanted to chime in myself with a little story to illustrate. If you really care about safety, get an education. A good A/V program and firewall are a good start - but to believe for one second that any amount of software can protect you is just being naive. The best A/V and anti-spyware cannot DO everything and as a bonus, they are only as good as the person that updates them (or the person responsible for the update). What's worse, is thanks to the media, most of these tools incorrectly identify "thousands of infections" (fear only works through numbers - if a product finds ONE legitimate malware, it CAN'T be as good as one that finds THOUSANDS, RIGHT????) by identifying cookies for Pete's sake. The fact remains that a little education, and a bit of lifestyle change goes a LONG way. Drop IE (I'm an Opera user - yes, I know I know - let the Firefox arrows fly). Drop the Outlook evilness (again, I'll buck the trend - I use The Bat! and I love it). If you don't want the hole in the roof to get bigger, don't leave the little hole in disrepair, right? Fact of the matter is, I've managed to be malware and virus free for going on 10 years now by simple education. I don't even use a firewall or realtime A/V OR spyware tools. I do a 'system level' A/V test on boot up, keep my A/V defs up to date - and I let Windows Firewall run. A couple of times a year, I'll get the "flavor of the month" anti-malware package, spyware package and run it just to ensure I'm clean. Then I promptly uninstall it. I've educated my wife and children about internet security. On their boxes, the A/V runs resident. My wife uses Internet Explorer because of some very poorly written sites she must visit. I got my kid on Opera. Zero infections. In fact, education works so well - I have a story to tell about it. A family friend and her kid came over to visit - all their stuff was in storage (getting ready to move) and they needed some computer time on the 'net to do some homework, check email, etc. No problem - terminals all over the house - pick one and go. The kid got on my wife's computer. Within FIVE MINUTES, the computer was infected. To this day, I don't know what she did - but it was LOADED with crap. The other terminals were off aside from mine - and I saw the infection try to hit my box, disabled sharing to my wife's computer, and ran in to stop what was going on. Five minutes, folks. That's all it took a squeaky clean system to become unbelievably infected. I can only imagine what their own computers look like. Took me HOURS to get it cleaned off (as I said - software can only do so much - if you don't get EVERYTHING before the next reboot, it all comes back - enjoy!). I'm sure everyone has a story like this. "I had a family member that was infected DAILY with tons of crap, changed them to Opera|Firefox|whatever and The Bat|Thunderbird|whatever and I've never had another call from them". You just can't argue with success stories like that. Sure, if you changed them to OSX or Redhat, you might have the same success story. But in this case, they didn't lose anything they used everyday (except that crappy browser and horrible email client), they learned a valuable lesson - and in many cases, come back to tell you how much BETTER the browser/client is than the horrible crap they were using (Opera's screen zooming alone makes it completely indispensible for people at super high resolutions - I'm at 180% as I write this). Until people understand the nature of evil, they cannot hope to combat it. You can install multiple A/V tools, spyware killers, the whole lot (and incorrectly feel safe about it - making you even MORE susceptible to attack) or you can get a little education, make a couple of small changes and really protect yourself. As Smokey the Bear says|said: "Only YOU ..."
FamilyGuyFiles.com was doing these in 2003 ... old news. :)