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There is plenty of good, ad free content on Internet radio stations. I wrote an Internet Radio Recorder for Mac, and I am sure you can easily find options for Windows and Linux. There are also lots of free music and talk podcasts on iTunes. Why pay a monthly subscription fee for something you will only use once in a while? How many talk shows you are going to listen to anyway?

How can we complain about known evil companies if slashdot resorts to unclosable popups that obscure the content? Screenshot in Safari

Your insides must be running Windows. Have a care not have your security breached through any holes.

Seriously, there are better ways to launch a program than navigating huge hierarchical menus, praying your mouse doesn't wobble and lose couple of levels. Windows 95, NextStep and MacOSX each introduced serious improvements in usability of computers, but why stop innovation there and just rip off old ideas?

I wrote a little program for Mac that I think is easier to use than either Start menu or Dock. Not a rocket science or even a new idea, but I am not the one with billions for research. I am sure modern processing power, new technologies and research can yield interfaces that don't look anything like Xerox PARC and are dramatically more productive. Keyboards with dynamically changing LED key labels? Fuzzy logic to recognize faster, inexact user commands? Some hybrid of UI and command line to let user see information from many programs in a small space? I don't know, but Sun and Microsoft should find out.

With 40GB of storage, there is not much incentive to shell out for music you can not keep. And there are plenty of solutions to record both regular and web radio, including mine. Maybe Napster will still fall for this kind of thing judging by their superbowl ads

I have a powerbook (duh, see sig) and whilst OS X is pretty tolerable the thing that makes it useless to me is the fact that you have to buy every little damn thing for it. $20 for focus follows mouse, $15 for a decent trackpd driver, $10 for that, $25 for something else. It's a never ending trail of money.

Don't you go to grocery store every week and buy tomatoes, eggs, cereal for total price of several software utilities you mentioned? Then what is exactly is your problem with buying software? Eventually you will get everything you reasonably need and will not even have to re-buy them every week.

Let's say Apple opens iMac Software Store that solves all the inconvenience you complain about. You can browse hundreds of programs - games, apps, system tools - and install 30 day evaluation copies. Then if you like a program, you have one-click option in its menu to purchase it and burn a DRM-free installation CD if you want a backup. Will you still complain?

Of course one problem is that US software prices are too high for 3rd world and often US users. Well, the solution here is to buy from your neighborhood startup rather than Microsoft.

I write GPLed software for OSX and so do many other people. Just browse VersionTracker. But I don't understand your fundamental objection to ever paying for software - even if you can afford it and it doesn't have any obnoxious DRM.

is someone going to pre-record some radio talk shows and put it into iPod pretending that it's doing radio too?

Uhm... Actually I already do that every day (face turns red)

That's why I intend to keep writting Apple-only software until Microsoft makes Windows pleasent to develop for. Their slogan should be "We put F in MFC".

I put a copy of Beaneath the Steel Sky manual on my web site. The useful summary is "try to right click objects" which wasn't obvious on my Mac. The game looks fantastic.

I'll post results when the encoding finishes.

I doubt they use encryption for performance reasons and also because all stereos will have the same key, found somewhere in the software upgrade image. Just capture and exactly replay any pages coming from the server, until you find an audio/mpeg reponse. At this point substitute your own stream or concatenated files in the playlist.

I wrote a jukebox for their previous stereo (i1000). I wonder if it still works with the new one. Can anyone check here and tell me your experience. If it works you can play your own stations.

Well I know I'll get modded down, but I do want to alert other people to something that they may find of interest. Basically, if you submit a story and it gets rejected, you will loose your moderator points, if you had any at that time. I don't know if it's a one time thing or you will never get a chance to moderate again.
Basically, I wrote some program to serve music to an Internet Stereo and thought that it might or might not be of interest to slashdot. (Ok! I am not trying to promote myself here. Only click on this link if you want to see if I really did something unreasonable). So I just decided to let the maintainers decide and submitted a story. It happened that it was rejected and I lost the moderator points that I had at that time, before they were supposed to expire.
I am not saying mod points is something to be taken seriously. Actually I had trouble finding comments that were not already modded fairly. I am just worried that whoever is reviewing the stories is showing a childish/313313 attitude. This is a private site and I guess CmdrTaco and friends can do whatever they want. But I can not imagine anyone publishing news who doesn't want to keep at least some editorial integrity. Meaning that people do not get penalized just for submitting a story.
I guess I don't care that much about being able to moderate. But if you do, you might want to submit your stories as Anonymous Coward or from an alternative account. There is also an off-chance that someone working for slashot will reply to this message and explain their rationale.

Silicone spray helps those cubes go round and round. Check out the winner of the Swedish world championship and his speed cubing site complete with java 3d cube solution applets!

The main site seems to be getting slow, so here is a mirror of the BSOD.