Winamp's queue management was great. Let's say you're at a party, and the host has the music playing at random on Winamp. A guest could play their song next, jump straight to their song, or politely tell the software to put their song in a queue. The guest's song(s) would play, then Winamp would go back to playing random track from the playlist. Hell, even if you *weren't* at a party, you could tell winamp to play that earworm that had been bugging you, then go back to normal ambient music.

It sounds simple, but none of the other music players of the era could do it. The visualisations were nice too, as others have noted.

If I was still using Windows I'd still be using Winamp.

This would be simple to fake for a demonstration. This guy doesn't sound like he's any kind of engineer: "these electric motors apparently have an inbuilt safety system that if it thinks it's overheating, it shuts down."

So you could probably just put a little RF remote in a modified ebike, and even if you opened the bike for inspection during the demo it probably wouldn't be noticed. Or you coud modify an ebike's firmware to accept a remote shutdown, then there would be NO physical evidence of tampering.

OK, let's be really generous. Say that some ebikes really DO have a temperature sensor that can be spoofed to shut the bike down. Is every sensor going to use identical technology? Hell no. Some will use a thermistor, some will use a semiconductor, some will interpolate the temperature from some other parameter being measured by the controller. No way could you reliably fool ALL of them, especially without causing massive RF interference. I just can't see how such a device would be effective on any more than a handful of ebikes, especially the uncertified far-eastern imports favoured by petty crooks.

It's in the title that this is for UK cops. They are renowned for *not* carrying guns.

The problem is that so many of the "little forums" have been abandoned for facebook groups or discord. So now it's not a nice little forum, you have to accept all the social media baggage and get a facebook account in order to participate. The facebook and discord groups are also impossible to to search, so if you're looking for some info that was posted a while ago about an obscure car, or old computer, or how to do an obscure sewing task, you're out of luck.

I like messing about with old Amiga computers. There is certain hardware made recently by the community that sounds really cool, but I simply can't be bothered try and wade through all the bullshit on discord to learn more. I'd go out in the shed and tinker with my old car instead, but that forum has died and migrated to facebook. This is not necessarily a complaint - it means that I'm far more likely to go out for some exercise instead - merely an observation.

I know that "change" happens, and I accept that. But I don't think "social media" has led to improvement in our online lives, and I don't think it's as easy as it used to be to "follow your interests" online.

Why are people so outraged when there's human shit on the sidewalk? Dogs do it all the time, and it's regarded as a minor nuisance, not a cataclysm.

I'm not American but I assume their humans have more rights than their dogs. So why is there a conversation about shooting people for shitting on a sidewalk? Do we shoot dogs for doing it? (Note that I'm not entirely against the latter)

It used to be a place where you could see a question similar to the problem you were trying solve, read a conversation as some people narrowed down the scope of the problem, then proposed a few ways to solve it. Now it all seems to be pedantry and gatekeeping and petty objections that contribute nothing.

From reading the comments here on Slashdot, it sounds like Stackoverflow is archived at archive.org. I guess I'll just start looking there instead.

I didn't think Sam Altman was a real person. Partly the name, "alt-man" and partly his uncanny-valley face. The dude looks like he was hallucinated by an AI.

Now, I know we shouldn't judge people by their appearances. I am judging him (if he is a real person) by what he does. He does bad things and this iris scanning is one of them.

This is what happened in the bad old days when I used to work in tech support. We were ranked based on how quickly we "solved" problems. This created an incentive to say "reset your firewall" then hang up. If the customer didn't give up in disgust, it would also generate more calls for us to "solve."

It was a fucking joke, I once got chewed out by a manager for taking too much time to walk an elderly customer through a procedure step-by-step There were no other calls in the queue, so if I hadn't been actually trying to help the guy, I'd have been sitting on my arse wasting company time. But hey, you gotta have metrics, even stupid counterproductive ones.

Damn straight. If Stack Overflow cached linked sites so that future users could still access the answers, that would be great. I wonder if anyone at StackOverflow reads Slashdot?

Thank you. I've basically given up reading political commentary online because most people rant on and on about "communism" or "fascism" when what they are really talking about is authoritarianism.

Further to that, anyone who is advocating to weaken the democratic process in order to "prevent the rise of fascism/communism" [depending on which -ism they hate in that conversation] then they are not interested in fixing any purported problem, just installing their own flavour of authoritarianism.

Any chance you kept a copy? I would totally type that in and run it, just like I used to back in the day. Don't worry, I'll hit somebody else up to print it out on tractor-feed paper for me :-)

I wonder if there would be a sideline for this ship as an "energy tanker," taking charged batteries from areas with cheap power to areas with expensive power, or offloading these battery containers to islands, mine sites or other areas not connected to the grid?

You can probably see that I have no idea of the extent of the electricity grid in China or its offshore areas. But if there are places nearby that currently run diesel generators 24/7, dropping off a few shipping containers full of charged-up batteries every few weeks might make sense.

This kind of greenwashing is terrible. It lulls the consumer into a false sense of security that "something is being done" and therefore they don't need to change any aspect of their lifestyle or purchasing habits.

Thanks for the tip. I'd seen Rochester listed as a supplier on Digikey's website, now it makes sense if they are an aggregator of EOL hardware.

This, a thousand times this. During covid, my local government used to post their press releases to facebook instead of their own website. The videos were publicly accessible without a facebook account, but still, it seemed stupid to use facebook instead of their own infrastructure