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I've managed to rip my entire (along with a few samplings from buddies, but don't tell the RIAA) music collection of about 300ish albums. It's much less time consuming than you apparently think.

Cdex or EAC are the two apps I'm most familiar with (stay away from MusicMatch, it's bloated beyond belief) and I'm sure someone else can offer even more options. Both of these programs will rip/encode (into FLAC, LAME MP3, or Ogg Vorbis)/tag in a single click of the mouse. As long as you've got a web connection they'll look up the tag information via CDDB and even set up your ripped files into a directory structure (artist/album/ or year/artist/album or ... well.. pretty much anything) to keep all those MP3's organized. Heck, even if that fails there are programs like The Godfather that can help you mass edit and identify those tags you forgot to get the first time..

I don't know if it's any harder to transfer these files to an iPod than the AAC's you get off iTunes, but I haven't heard any complaints about it so I'm sure it's intuitive enough. Personally, I prefer my Rio Karma for its vorbis/flac support as well as gapless playback (even on MP3's, which don't natively support gapless playback).

Heck, most players (not my Karma, but I digress) are recognized as external USB hard drives (via MSC, so they should even work on Linux) nowadays. All you have to do is drag and drop your MP3's onto the disk (possibly a specific directory, but still no big deal).

Anyway, I'm rambling.. Bottom line is, ripping your CD collection is terribly easy, and with hard drive prices what they are, you really have no reason NOT to back up your collection (FLAC is best for archiving purposes, once again keeping in mind that storage is dirt cheap these days).

Ask and you shall Recieve
Ok OK making your PC into an 'Internet Kiosk' where noone can modify files system is a bit harsh.. And i'm not 100% sure if it would block a babie theme from being installed on IE, but it's shareware, and the other leading competitor is payware and simply restores the computer to a 'clean' slate at every reboot.

This might help a little. I haven't tried it, so no promises.

This plugin is supposed to work well, but I've never used it personally
http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/10/3/3/10-3-3- 395.shtml

It sounds like you have little idea who the author is, or you wouldn't make such a statement. Michal Zalewski is a well-respected security researcher, with impeccable credentials, and no particular love for Microsoft, who's made an undeniably valuable contribution in many areas of IT security.

While he generally seems to work on Unix-like systems, he has also published work on M$ software security problems - e.g. http://www.bindview.com/Support/RAZOR/Advisories/2 001/adv_mstelnet.cfm
http://news.softpedia.com/news/2/2004/April/7797.s html
http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/bugtraq/2000/ 06/msg00066.html

A quick google will repay your time.

Give the guy some credit - it seems he's uncovered a surprising lack of robustness in non-IE browsers - and admittedly an even more surprising degree of resilience in IE's handling of the HTML tag soup he played with ... strange but apparently true :-)

applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows,
In what alternate reality? Windows, in particular, is completely schizo. You've got so many toolkits:

Office XP toolkit. Note the lack of Luna-style buttons.
The Visio toolkit. Note the freaky blue gradient toolbars.
The .NET toolkit. Note the flat buttons and .NET combobox.
Windows Media Player 10 theme.
And here's Luna. Note the distinctive Luna-style buttons and tabbar.

Now, this doesn't count any non-Microsoft apps! Yes, all this schizo-osity is from a single company! Throw iTunes in there, or ephpod, or musicmatch, or AOL (all common apps), and you get even more schizo-osity. Just having GTK+ and Qt is looking pretty good right now, isn't it?

I tell ya, I love my MX500 / MX700, but the drivers suck. No app-specific settings. No modifier key maps (heaven forbid I might want to use a button to drag around in Photoshop). I could go on. Microsoft's IntelliMouse drivers have covered all this crap for years.

Apparently if I buy the MX510 I can get app specific drivers. Nice sales work, Logitech.

They fix some things with the Advanced utility, but why isn't it rolled into the main MouseWare driver set? FWIW, this is in Windows. Yeah, I said it! Until I can get SolidWorks on my Mac I've gotta use Windows!

Personally, I think MOH:AA is a piece of shit. Someone gave me the windows version, so I played through it. Of course, it's pretty much non-stop mindless action (kill soldier, retrieve ammunition, get healthpack, repeat).

1) No replay value. At all. Quake had replay value because it had secrets, and went so fast you could complete an entire episode in fifteen minutes, and it had that nice "shooting-shooting" game feel to it. AA moves slow enough to be a "thinking-shooting" game, but there is hardly enough strategy to warrant it's placement in such a catagory. There is one very difficult, strategical level, where you have to clear an area of snipers, without getting your guys killed, and that is about as strategical as it gets.

2) Very little multiplayer value. I started a server just with myself~and couldn't complete objectives! SucK! Granted, I don't actually have friends, so I couldn't test MP in a "real world env".

3) There isn't even pretty graphics to redeem itself: it is the Q3 engine. Although the manual claims that WWII battle gear was so thick that it obstructed blood from seeping out of wounds (only partially believable), you can shoot someone in their fucking head and no blood, whatsoever. Realism, my ass, they're just whoring for their ESRB "T" rating.

In short: Why port this game, of all games, to linux? Why not soldat, as was done with the succulent frabs?

Oh yeah..it's closed source..I forgot..

These documents are proof just like the iraqi documents found that show that Russia was training iraqi's in the art of "acoustic surveillance"?

Those documents that are from Russians and given to Iraqi's but are written in "English"?

Documents found in "Mukhabarat", same place as your supplied proof?

Those kind of documents?

Mirrors of the 10.5meg patch are here, here, and here

I think you've proved my point. You have not spent your time listing comparisons where OS 9 is "better in some respects", you have spent your time "bashing" OS X. (And no, you did not mis-state it, you have been bashing.)

Again, you said: "Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently." That statement allows me to bash OS X and ask you to make a good case that this is not a mistake, but a different way of working (or you can claim that the problem doesn't exist in OS X). Lambasting me for taking this approach is dishonest, because you (basically) asked for it.

I've tried to give several examples to make things concrete, but I don't remember anywhere you've unequivicaly admitted that even a single one was valid.

I've said that interleaving windows is more natural for a document-centric philosophy. That means that I agree with you that OS X is operating differently in that case. So there I agreed with you that this is not a mistake. However, you were so focused on bashing OS 9 for moving all windows of the application to the front, that you failed to notice this.

I've also agreed with you that the application menu is an improvement, not a mistake. The fact that I also pointed out that the implementation is somewhat flawed might have caused you to gloss over this point.

I still disagree that a do-it-all dock is a conceptual improvement, because I don't believe that one widget can provide all that functionality. I also don't believe that the OS X Finder is a conceptual improvement, if only because there is no real philosophy behind it. OS 9 did not make these mistakes, because:
- different widgets were provided (you may think that the OS 9 widgets suck, but then we are talking about implementation, not about the OS's operating differently)
- the OS 9 Finder effectively provided a spatial file management environment (which you may dislike, but that's simply because you don't like the concept, not because of 'mistakes').

Here you're saying "some", but again, you've argued as if you mean "all". My "most" and your "some" can co-exist quite nicely, you know. Those two phrases for quantity are not mutually exclusive.

That is true and I would not have responded in this way if your tone was different. However, your original post showed no consideration whatsoever for some of the serious issues that do exist. That might also have to do with the oft-repeated mantra by OS X zealots that complaints about OS X are all due to inflexibility, which irritates me mightily. In my eyes, your original post was in the same vein.

I'm still considering whether you or I are to blame for this perception. Probably both. Next time I will try not to jump the gun too easily, but you might want to also consider a less hostile writing style.

This is revisionist history at its worst (best?). MacOS was document-centric from the start. That was the major difference from DOS and its other predecessors: you didn't invoke a program with a document as an argument, you opened a document and magically the correct application ran so you could manipulate it.

Then please explain to me why the application's menu bar is not attached to the document. That is the only sensible place for a purely document-centric OS. A lot of software on Windows has got the application menu inside the document window. Closing the document means closing the application. On the Mac, closing the last document usually does not close the application. Even if it would, the interface does not make it clear (where it is very clear in the screenshot I provided).

Another example of application-centric design is that you first start an application and then create a document. A document-centric OS would allow you to create a document independent of an application, for instance in the Finder by using a conte

Cant you get something like a vrtual drive and then rip all of the DVD's to ISO and then drag and drop them to something like PowerDVD, I guess that's not automated enough - but I can imagine tht there has to be a DVD player virtual Drive combo system out there.

I set up a p133 laptop with 32mb ram and it runs windows 98 + winamp2 + aac plugin (I think it was this one) + browseamp. It plays 192kbps AAC files, and all MP3 great. Files get to the machine over mounted network drives, phsyically located on my file server.

I can then log in using my laptop (wifi, also a source of some files) over http and control all aspecs of winamp, including browsing the network shares. I can also VNC in =] Just a note, my network is 11g, and I have not tested it on 11b.

It works wonderfully, though, sometimes the AACs skip when I VNC in, so a faster CPU / more RAM would be great.

Background: I've used single CPU systems, HT systems, and SMP systems. I've taken courses on OS design and even in the process of writing my own. I'm quite familiar with the 80x86 32-bit instruction set and aware of the new 64-bit design as planned by AMD.

My $0.02 (this GREATLY SIMPLIFIED)

In the beginning there were CPUs. And CPUs were good.
Soon we realized the limitations and said.. Hey! Why not add another CPU and SMP was born.

SMP was good as well, however the additional cost was something of a deterrent for all but the power-users (and commercial applications of course).

Then Intel tried to develop a middle-ground, HyperThreading. It was a decent idea, however did not work quite as well as originally expected. AMD does not use it for a reason

From my experience I see HT as a hack developed by Intel, trying to duplicate true SMP. Might work sometimes and in certain environments but it's been show to actually slow execution in some situations (cache thrashing). In addition, SMP systems have much better responsiveness than HT ones under a high CPU load.

Which is why AMD is working on multi-core CPUs. This is the *correct* way (at least in my opinion) to tackle the problem, asides from getting true multiple CPUs. More can be read about it here. This combined with the new 64-bit instruction set (read more about that at the above link) will truly create a new era of CPUs.

Softpedia Link with 4 mirrors Yes yes karma whorin.... but hey its got winamp5 with working link :) I beat the slashdot people to checking links... what a feat... maybe I should dupe this post to be just like them.

If there was a mod for uninformative then I'd be about to get it, because I have no idea what's going to happen over the next 10 years in this regard. What is clear from VoIP is that the government has just lost it's ability to trace / bug calls easily. VoIP is not complicated or a secret protocol, and if it were it could be duplicated easily. Any attempt to control it via limiting software will fail unless they make Windoows mandatory (wouldn't be surprised ;). That leaves monitoring internet traffic in detail.

Of course the government could try that (going to be even more of a technical nightmare with wireless P2P), but they can't even justify it with the old "Government is your friend and only bad guys would oppose it" shtick because they will not be the only ones with access to this technology. Look at this. A stalkers best friend.

Nope, no idea what's going to happen in the next ten years but it seems like the Privacy Warriors have just got some new weapons. This is an interesting time to live. What happens in the next decade will shape things to come long after.

JERUSALEM (UPI) -- A survey by Symantec says Middle Eastern countries comprised six of the top 10 bases for Internet attacks, it was reported Monday.

In the first half of 2003, the top offenders included Israel as well as Iran, Egypt, Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, WorldTribune.com said.

Symantec ranked the threats according to the size of a country's Internet population base. Israel was cited as the biggest source of Web-based attacks with an Internet user base of more than 1 million, Middle East Newsline reported.

About 80 percent of all attacks originated from systems located in 10 countries.

"The Internet is a great leveler and the issue of Web security in the Middle East is no different from any other part of the world," Kevin Isaac, regional director at Symantec, said.

"Wherever there is high bandwidth availability and a proliferation of the Internet, the chances of breaches taking place are high."

Media Player Classic lets you play any video file in Windows. This appears to be the site, but it's under construction, so here is an alternate source. The interface seeks to emulate MS Media Player version 6.4, before it went crazy. When encountering a codec it doesn't know, it queries a site to install it.