Obama to scrap moon?
WHAT?!
Oh, you've gone for the 'Americanized' comma in the headline.
Please make it stop.
226 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2009
Copyright infringement? Hard to say, but I'd still be delighted if they were banned.
"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!""
Again, I have no problems with the above being declared illegal / punishable by death.
The main problem with the 'transition tool' - a.k.a the screen which says "Update your privacy settings" - is that by default, there are NO privacy settings applied! See the screenshot below, which shows that all of the settings are defaulted to 'Share with everyone', as opposed to 'Old settings':
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/375/transition.png
Which means that anyone who just clicks through it (or assumes that the default configuration will leave their privacy unchanged) suddenly finds they're sharing their teddy bears with the world. Zuckerberg, despite his protestations, is clearly a very public victim of this.
For a company who have so fundamentally failed to get a grasp on privacy, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that they missed something as fundamental as defaulting to the user's old settings, rather than defaulting to revealing everything to the world.
@Rob Kendrick:
Expensive, compared to what? Downloading albums illegally? Sure.
If, on the other hand, you want to listen to a whole host of new-release albums without having to shell out £7 a time to find out if they're any good, it makes its money back every single week.
Ironically, your TV license example is a good idea of exactly why Spotify works. How much TV would people actually watch if you had to pay per programme that you wanted to watch? Sure, there'd be some (infrequent TV watchers) who might find it beneficial ("£10 a month to watch TV? Bugger off") but an all-encompassing licence to watch everything on terrestrial telly is much preferable, shirley?
But, to bring the post back to its beginning, it's pretty hard to convince people to switch to a subscription model when they're already used to ripping all their music for free.
(inevitable duplicate post)
Is the Xbox 300 some kind of 360-lite which I haven't heard about?
This is just Microsoft covering its own back, I suppose (and it's not as if they're the first company to take such a stance - see also: Apple's previous Adults-Only rating of dictionary apps). Although from my experience, people fall into one of two camps on this: (1) indignant Mail readers vomiting their disgust about something they're never going to use, or (2) people who just don't care.
Yesterday in Game I saw a kid who must've been about 10 years old, getting his mum to preorder the (18-rated) COD:MW2 for him (which she did), before demanding that she pick it up at tonight's midnight launch. With this sort of thing being rife, it's a wonder that Microsoft even bothers with this sort of initiative.
This smacks of revolution for revolution's sake. Hiding the menubar seems an arbitrary decision at best... they've tried to disguise this by bunging all of the main options onto the 'Tools' menu: https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:Fx-3.7-Tools-Menu-Phase-01.png
'NEW WINDOW' IS NOT A TOOL.
'EXIT' IS NOT A TOOL.
I could go on.
Some of the stuff on that wiki is really frightening: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Menu_cleanup
They're justifying removing menu shortcuts such as Reload, Close Window, Close Tab, or Delete(!), based on the fact that they're "already in the UI". Well yeah, sure, assuming we're all a species of super-users, but there's plenty of people out there who use those menus, particularly for accessibility.
So, time to find a new lightweight browser which focuses on usability and a small footprint, rather than bunging in gimimcky new features... hang on, isn't this why I switched to Firefox in the first place?!
"This revealed login details for the database behind the site."
Actually, it revealed login details for the database behind *a* site. Not this one. It was a result of exporting/importing blog entries from a previous CMS, and the details would never have allowed access to this new system.
Nice to see Mr Thinks doing good rather than evil though.
The mental £100 barrier? It's all about how you phrase it. El Reg have shamefully gone for the expensive-sounding tactic (hey, why not point out that it's £600 for five years?)
Phrase it a different way. 30p a day to listen to pretty much anything you want (save for the notable exceptions that Michael posted above). Sounds rather more palatable now, doesn't it?
Spotify's service isn't really comparable to last.fm's. Both have their benefits. In Last.fm's case, their offering is more like Pandora; you can stream genre-specific "radio stations", but there's no on-demand listening. Even if you subscribe (pay) to Last.fm - which gives you access to custom playlists etc - you can still only listen to these playlists on shuffle, and there are some very limiting restrictions (each playlist must contain at least 45 tracks by at least 15 different artists).
Spotify is much more about freeing the music; listen to what you want, when you want (and now - where you want!). Sure, £120pa sounds like a scary figure when you start banding it around in headlines, but for instant (legal) access to exactly what you want to hear, it's a small price to pay.
(full disclosure: I'm a subscriber @ Last.fm, AND a subscriber @ Spotify)
Yes, it's annoying that (by default) if you want to press F1, then you have to press Fn-F1. There's a simple switch in the bios to change this though: Advanced -> Function Key Behavior -> Function Key First
I've had the machine for about a month, and it's a solid performer. Games-wise, it might not be bleeding edge, but it's pretty damn competent. (I can easily play Left 4 Dead with the graphics ramped up to the max; the missus can play The Sims 3 without moaning that she can't make out her characters blinking or something like that)
The only small issue for me is keyboard flex - it's noticeable, if not particularly restrictive.
Something doesn't schmell right here. He claims he didn't know the two guys who mugged him? Then why (if you follow the Google car along the entire length of the road) was he cycling merrily alongside them for close to 2 minutes (assuming a 20kph speed limit)?
Still, great to see Big Brother finally scoring a kill (or a wrist-slapping at least). Now we just need the service to become real-time, and we'll all be totally safe.