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Slashdot's Disagree Mail 126

Usually persistence is an admirable quality. There comes a time however when you reach that fine line between endeavoring to persevere, and drunk dialing your ex-girlfriend. The mail this week is from people who don't know when to say when. You have to admire their determination and feel a little bit bad that they don't have anything else to do. Read below to see how many times someone can click send in a day.

Comment I like Opera (Score 5, Informative) 128

If you haven't tried Opera, I highly recommend you give it a spin. It's a great browser and it's worth using for regular browsing; even better than Firefox, in my opinion. Firefox's extensions still give it the edge for web development, but Opera is quite close. Here are my favorite features Opera has over Firefox:
A sexy default look. I think Opera generally looks much sleeker, and the smooth-scrolling is worlds better (parabolic instead of linear, I think). It's a tiny aesthetic change that makes a big difference in ease of use (I don't lose my place) and feel of the app.
Speed dial. You've got your top nine right there in front of you.
The Wand. It's a huge time-saver if you have multiple logins for a site. Just click the username you need to use, and Opera submits the form with the creds you picked. It's faster and less clunky than the dropdown that Firefox uses.
The Trash bin. It lets you pick any recently closed page; you don't have to Ctrl-Shift-T through all the tabs you just closed to find the right one.
Quick search. Firefox has inline search too, but Opera simultaneously highlights *all* occurrences of the search text as you type.
And finally...
Dragonfly, the Opera javascript debugger. This baby is impressive. It's much easier to use than Venkman and rivals Firebug. The script window lets you pick any loaded script (inline scripts have their own entry!). The DOM tab (which is less spastic than Firebug's) lets you inspect all of your elements in folding-tree style. The Styles pane with then show you the explicit and computed styles on the element. Fantastic.
So give Opera a try. You might find a thing or three that you like.
Media

Submission + - Blu-ray, HDDVD Target of EU Antitrust Probe (wsj.com)

rfunches writes: "The Wall Street Journal reports that EU antitrust regulators are turning up the heat on the Blu-ray and HD-DVD format consortiums as the European Commission demanded evidence of Hollywood studios' "communications and agreements on the new generation of DVD formats." From the article:

The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.
The article points out that all of the major Hollywood studios except Universal are backing Blu-ray; Universal is backing HD-DVD. It also notes that while one industry watcher believes the first format to have an installed base of two million homes will come out on top, there were millions of Betamax units already sold when VHS won out in the format wars of the 80's."

Google

Submission + - Google acquires GrandCentral (grandcentral.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google has aquired GrandCentral (http://www.grandcentral.com), a phone service that allows users to link multiple phones to a single local number and manage those phones on the web.

With the aquisition, the service is now available only by invitation during a continued beta period. Current subscribers have been allotted a limited number of invitations. During the invitation only period, users can ask to reserve a phone number to use with the service when it goes public.

In the past, users were allowed to upload MP3 files to use as "ringback" tones with the service. As of now, users may no longer upload files and are limited to a gallery of licensed sounds provided by GrandCentral.

XBox (Games)

Submission + - Retailers Estimate Xbox 360 Failure Rate as 33% (adam.ne.jp)

News for nerds writes: "Dailytech reveals that EB Games held conference calls for its Canadian stores informing them of the new policy changes and revealing alarming failure rates of the Xbox 360. "The real numbers were between 30 to 33 percent," said former EB Games employee. An anonymous Best Buy customer service department manager said that failure rates for the console were "between a quarter to a third" of all units sold."
Programming

Submission + - Subversion 1.4.4 released (collab.net)

odiug writes: "One of the Subversion committers blogs about the release of Subversion 1.4.4, which happened last Friday. This release includes a couple of bugfixes and a low-risk security issue. The Subversion 1.5 release, which will include Merge Tracking, is still on track."
Software

Submission + - 16GB USB Stick - what should go on it?

Unicorn Setu writes: I've seen that past item asking for suggestions for the best software to put on a 256Mb USB stick — and they were all well and good. Now I've just been given a 16Gb USB stick! 16 Gb in my pocket! I feel like I'm back in the 1980's when I got a 10Mb Hard Disk and couldn't think how I would ever fill it! So, apart from a good selection of music and family pictures, what suggestions do the slashdot crowd have for a selection of applications, preferably PC and Mac accessible, must not require installation, (as our work PCs are locked down), to make office life easier. Should I partition it? (maybe into 4.7Gb chunks?) I need your thoughts about about to spend my storage inheritance.
The Internet

Submission + - IPTV: 10 Steps to a towering YouTube channel (iptv-wireless.com)

iptv-guru writes: "For now, Youtube is the broadest medium for creating community and getting your message across. The rate at which Youtube is growing, if your content is in the top 100 HONORS category, you are sitting on a golden mountain of subscribers. http://iptv-wireless.com/ discusses the top 10 techniques for rapidly conquoring youtube and driving massive traffic to your website / message / business."

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