This requires Windows.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 4:38 PM on July 23, 2008

The Google search results page has looked like this for most of a month, under my account. I didn't realize this was news. I haven't made extensive use of the features other than to remove useless results; you could do that before in any case.

I've yet to see a single edit or comment by any other user on the collaborative interface. I've been assuming everyone else found the feature as stupid and pointless as I did, but I guess it turns out that most people aren't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:58 AM on July 23, 2008

"Wait until the government spies get their hands on this. Privacy will no longer [be] an assumption."

It's a radio receiver. It's not a radio transmitter. How exactly does a radio receiver invade your privacy?
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 3:11 PM on July 9, 2008

Looking at the pictures it appears someone misguidedly thought they'd be displayed full-frame. And as we all know, Fox News is among those 4:3 aspect ratio channels that's almost exclusively displayed on 16:9 aspect ratio televisions that are permanently stuck in PanoStretch Distort-O-Vision mode. So perhaps the whole thing is just an innocent case of someone trying to counteract the Behind The Bar Television Effect!
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 1:03 PM on July 3, 2008

Actually, this video explains exactly why tiered support exists. Clueless kids who answer the phone and do whatever the sales dude says to do should not have root. Ever. They should have the power to pick up the phone and ask someone who knows what they're doing to help.

But yeah, I agree the details are entirely too true to life.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 2:19 PM on June 24, 2008

"OK, so raise your hand if a) you are a sysadmin and b) nobody, I mean nobody in the company has the authority to make a pissed-off phone call and request you reboot a system immediately."

That'd be me. I'm one of three people with administrative access to production devices, one of whom I report to but he's actually even more cantankerous than I am and trusts my judgement more than everyone else's. The decision to reboot any box pretty... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:35 AM on June 25, 2008

Serious question: why are about a third of all YouTube videos in the wrong aspect ratio? Do people really tell themselves "Hey this looks like shit, I'm going to post it?"

Is it an artifact of YouTube's conversion tools not dealing with anamorphic inputs or something? I don't know enough about digital video to make a decent guess, but man oh man is it annoying to look at.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:55 PM on June 24, 2008

See also: SWTSG
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 10:17 AM on June 22, 2008

"A real woman would still be sexier, right? riiiight??"

Infinitely more so. But good luck finding one of THOSE around here! Motion pictures of robots are a lot less scarce.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:05 PM on June 11, 2008

That was fun, but I found it was too easy to beat the simple goals the game laid out based on the values I chose. All I had to do was gut the Pentagon and take an axe to the Social Security money I'll never see anyway, and then I had more than enough cash to take every card that had a positive effect on the environment, education, and energy independence with enough left over to fund single-payer health care. Basically I just picked every card that reflected my personal values and suddenly the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:14 PM on June 9, 2008

"Erm, thanks for submitting something that's been all over digg, reddit, delicious, and so on for the entire day."

First I've heard of it, so thanks indeed. (People actually wade through the crap on Digg and Reddit?)
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:29 PM on June 8, 2008

"If I can get my gmail in elm... well I don't know what I'd do."

Elm Millennium Edition has POP and IMAP support. Or you could just use regular Elm and fetchmail, which is how people did POP in the olden days anyway.

"I honestly don't see the point in command-line access via HTML"

Yeah. I was hoping there'd be a source tarball of an actually useful utility, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:57 PM on June 2, 2008

LOADING
READY.
LIST


0              GOOGLE/64
11 "AHAJOKES.COM    " PRG
7  "DREAMHAVEN.ORG  " PRG
42 "COMEDY-ZONE.NET " PRG
585 BLOCKS FREE.
READY.

posted to MetaFilter by majick at 10:16 PM on June 2, 2008

I've never heard of the term "slug" being used for casual carpooling, but yeah, it's a decent way to get across the bridge for nothing. I've done it although I don't choose it as my preferred method of transportation.

I don't know where that "etiquette" link came from, but it seems to have been written by someone angry and uptight. Casual carpooling is pretty straightforward: hang around for your ride, get in, wait quietly until you get to Fremont,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 2:19 PM on May 22, 2008

I made a spinny globe covered in bacon. That alone redeems any UI badness I had to endure.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:18 AM on May 22, 2008

I sprung for it this morning, battled my way through the download, hammered the authentication server five or six times, and got to play it for a short while. I like the game and absolutely loathe the combat system. There's way too much "click on this small button with a fist on it, then go way across the screen and click on something else." So of course I fumble it about a quarter of the time which results in a robot peeing on a party member. Oh and to execute certain attacks, you... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 4:33 PM on May 21, 2008

"So first, the mistakes - "

Were there more mistakes after that? Since the first two things shown were utterly wrong I just smacked the back button. Does it get stupider and wronger? Or is this some kind of irony that I'm just lacking appreciation for?
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:04 PM on May 14, 2008

I'm all in favor of advances in motorcycle technology, but do they all have to be squid bikes? Bleh.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:51 PM on May 14, 2008

"It would be more effective if they used oh, I don't know, say numbers that actually approximated anything?"

That's the flaw of this thing: It allows any subliterate clown to garbage up the database with silly "products," crappy grammar and bogus values and all. I think the message -- the sheer enormity of a few trillion bucks -- would get across more clearly if the user-defined products were culled. As it stands now, the thing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 3:08 PM on May 10, 2008

I failed on the first note because I don't know anything about playing a piano. I might have been able to squeak by if the game played as advertised ("Name that note" and "test your pitch recognition") but instead it seems to be about pushing piano keys, which is a skill I lack utterly.

Ah well. You piano people have fun! Let me know if you beat the end boss!
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 10:36 PM on May 1, 2008

"Wow, I can't believe the people saying they can't use a piano keyboard"

What's so surprising about that? A piano isn't the only device used to create music, and plenty of people don't own them or have no exposure to them.

I learned what little I know about music, pitch, and harmony by writing to SID 6581 registers to define waveforms and envelopes, and later from playing with ProTracker. Neither one of those things... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 1:59 PM on May 2, 2008

His premise seems to be that we're starting to see a shift away from pure mindless broadcast, and that's clear enough. However he undermines his point later on:

Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever.... "She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 6:25 AM on April 27, 2008

"With the talents of:
[...various people blah blah...]
Frank Oznowicz"

So Henson and Oz worked together from the start, it seems. Awesome!
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:07 PM on March 24, 2008

Actually, this is pretty hilarious if you've ever tried to sell something on Craigslist. The vast majority of responses are from complete and utter morons who apparently barely comprehend your posting no matter how thorough it was, and who want to ask a bunch of irrelevant questions.

Is it subtle prose? No. But it's a fair-middling quality rant about a single specific thing that deserves a bit of venting over.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:03 PM on February 13, 2008

" the outage began at 3:20 ET and affected all carriers, but not necessarily all BlackBerry users"

That sounds like a classic RIM gateway outage. Customers with their own gateways were probably the ones unaffected.

RIM's gateways had multi-hour outages regularly when I was a customer -- which was somewhat before the devices were widely available to consumers, when the underlying network was the old Mobitex... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 4:05 PM on February 11, 2008

(Note that a gateway isn't the same thing as a BES.)
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 4:05 PM on February 11, 2008

"... viewers will be given a glimpse of their personalities prior to the actual competish."

Competish? Seriously? Someone wrote that for publication?
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 10:05 PM on December 5, 2007

The LeMons rulebook is great!

6.3: Why Am I Upside-Down? Rule: You're upside-down because you have no business being out on a racetrack. Any driver who puts a car on its roof is out for the rest of the season, beginning immediately.

posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:08 AM on December 1, 2007

Interesting photography up to a point, but the text? Full of baloney.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 3:21 PM on November 30, 2007

"I'm not sure what the long-term implications are for releasing this code into the public domain."

Presumably someone who still thinks qmail is decent will decide to adopt it and create a semi-official distribution which contains the various patches (repeatedly rejected by djb) to make it useful. Meanwhile Exim will continue to take over as the world's one true MTA and qmail will remain obscure.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 1:49 PM on November 30, 2007

The problem I've found is that people post negative reviews for the dumbest reasons: shipping problems, they ordered the wrong thing, their spouse bought it over their objections, they don't understand how to use it or why they bought it. Where once I sought to scry useful detail from the negative reviews of a product, I now have elected to treat them as noise.

"Buy it Anyway" is an entertaining turn of phrase, but other than that I'm having trouble extracting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 12:45 PM on November 30, 2007

Single cheek haiku
not so terribly awesome
but better than none.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 5:35 PM on November 29, 2007

"Surely if one of the major credit bureaus has been compromised there will be hell to pay."

Credit bureaus have been repeatedly compromised since the 1980s. Even in those days there used to be entire BBSes devoted to the subject of trading accounts on their systems of record and typed-in data recovered from bank and credit bureau dumpsters. I'd be astonished if such a thing ceased to exist in this age of easily compromised customer... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:51 PM on November 28, 2007

This is perfect. Recently laser.narr.as went down (then up, then down again for good it seems) and this seems like an acceptable replacement.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:40 PM on November 28, 2007

Hm. The comic is lame, but as far as I can tell it's being massively and widely misread. It's the morons who rub their puds over a picture of the game designer while fantasizing her sexual performance -- all while she just wants to talk about the game she worked on -- who are being lampooned. Maybe the so-called subtlety of goon humor doesn't play well in Peoria.

Admittedly it's pretty tasteless to depict this woman that way, especially considering how unnecessary it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:31 AM on November 20, 2007

" I'd agree that your interpretation is at least colorable if the first panel didn't show Raymond unable even to pronounce the word "creative," which is clearly intended to suggest that she's just a pretty face who lacks any skills. "

No. It's the Old Man Murray crate joke. Because it's a crate game. Sorry you don't get that, because it does lead to the uncharitable interpretation you concluded with if you don't know the crate joke.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:07 AM on November 20, 2007

"Come on, you're doing waaaay too much work to navigate around the fact that the comic openly degrades and insults Raymond."

No. I admit pretty freely that not only is the comic not very good, fails to make the point it wants to, and is also gratuitously illustrated in a way that detracts from the point in the first place. I did so with my very first comment about the comic. I agree the comic as written requires far too much gymnastics on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:46 AM on November 20, 2007

Die, undead zombie thread. Die.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 8:55 PM on November 23, 2007

One of the gifts I'm planning on giving this year is a multi-terabyte disk array (shh, don't tell!). What am I supposed to do, beaver the thing out of a log with my teeth? Handmade stuff is all well and good, and it can be very personal where very personal gifts are welcome, but let's face it. A vast majority of it is crufty-crafty crap that's going to sit on a shelf until the next time you move. I prefer to give people things they want, need, and care about.

I don't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 5:02 PM on November 23, 2007

"Yahtzee is the best thing that has happened to gaming journalism in ages."

I can't understand a thing that dude is saying. It's like listening to a horse auction. He might be saying something insightful or funny, but it's impossible to tell.

"Some Punctuation: The Art of Theft"

I can't understand a thing that dude is saying. It's like listening to a horse auction.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 11:43 AM on November 23, 2007

Actually, "Prosciutto-wrapped peaches" sounds pretty tasty, although not quite as tasty as prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe. Thanks for the linkdump, though!
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 1:43 PM on November 22, 2007

Fascinating process. Hideous product.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 12:55 PM on November 22, 2007

" TSA wants to suggest ways that people can help the lines move more quickly."

I'd like to suggest a way the TSA can help the lines move more quickly, too: ENGAGE IN LESS SECURITY THEATER.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:52 AM on November 20, 2007

"How many more times can we mention "security theater" in this thread?"

At least once for each person going through the security checkpoint. Security theater deserves repeated mention because, let's not mince words, it is the root cause of the problem in question. Poorly packed luggage is neither a security threat nor a reason for security screening to be time consuming. Freaking the fuck out about people's shoes is a reason for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 9:59 AM on November 20, 2007

I would like to subscribe to your hoboes.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:23 AM on November 6, 2007

I would like to subscribe to your CDROM.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:24 AM on November 6, 2007

I would not like to subscribe to your health food newsletter.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:25 AM on November 6, 2007

Pants.

To which I will not subscribe.
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:26 AM on November 6, 2007

Oh, by the way, our spammer friend is reading and responding to "mefi mail." Isn't that terribly amusing in a manner which I heartily do not encourage any readers to abuse?
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:28 AM on November 6, 2007

Was that a metaphorical walk that excels in its walking capacity? Or a literal walk?
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 7:32 AM on November 6, 2007