Sorry, I know very little about iTunes - is there a system like Amazon/NetFlix/Launch where you can rate how much you like/dislike a song/album/band/genre and then have it recommend more for you?
It seems it would do well here - but with a quick glance over the site, I don't see that they have anything like that.
I live in Bermuda, and Apple won't ship it to me. I have to go through a reseller here, and that would make my $2800 15" AlumBook jump to a $5K purchase. Instead I bought it from them and had it shipped to a NYC address and then that will come to me in early November. Technically not "legal" but I'm not exactly exporting arms or anything. There is a 33% duty on computer products here, so I will still have to pay that when it comes into the country, but it will be cheaper this way.
Software doesn't have the duty applied to it, but the stores still mark it up as if it does have the duty. I would *love* to be able to get the cheap upgrade, but I'm guessing I can't.
Maybe I can go to the site before I actually have the laptop here in person and then have the new OS shipped to the address so that when they come in early November I can have them both at the same time. Especially if I am going to have to do a clean install, that way it doesn't matter since I have nothing to lose.
I just bought a new 15" Alum PowerBook and it has shipped! I'm a new Switcher - giving it a shot.
I don't live in the States though, so I'm guessing that I'm out of luck for the discounted price on Panther - it is already taking me until early November just to get the laptop since Apple apparently doesn't like Bermuda or something.
Oh well - I really want to use Xcode, otherwise I would hold off for a bit on upgrading I guess - not out of anything more than just the fact that it is hard to get stuff here.
my first exposure
on
Silicon Artwork
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· Score: 2, Informative
When my dad was getting his PhD at VA Tech (he finished up in '91 or '92 I think), one of the guys in his lab group was Bill Bender. I don't recall exactly what his field of expertise was, but I think it involved lasers. And apparently also making his own circuits. He had a maginified pic of one up at his desk and his "signature" mark on them was a bicycle. He was big into triathlons, so the bike was a reference to that I suppose.
IIRC, one of my favorite books, Acts of the Apostles also references the concept that there is usually some sort of artwork on chips, put there by the designers.
already? but I hadn't even gotten to it yet?
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
My new Apple Al PowerBook just shipped today, just in time for its Bluetooth to be dead, kaput, no longer a viable solution? Bluetooh, I hardly knew yee... thee? thou?
I haven't bought a technical book since I have moved out of the States - O'Reilly's Safari has been nice for that. I can still have access to their books.
I haven't looked to see if this new one is on there yet - I have the old version of it in paperback form as I do with pretty much all the other O'Reilly Perl books.
At work we are all Windows. At home I have a Windows laptop - but it is dying (hardware).
I have had enough annoyances with Windows, and Mac has made enough improvements that I'm giving Mac a shot because I have heard the PowerBook hardware is good. If it doesn't work out, I can always put Linux on it.
I haven't run Mozilla or Firebird on Linux, so perhaps there it is really fast - but I have run it on WinXP and IE is TONS faster at absolutely everything, as well as consuming less processor and RAM than the other two.
The last time I used Office was today, on XP. It was everything I wanted. The last time I used StarOffice was in 1998 - it was god awful and lacking in everything - it was to Office as WordPad is to Office. I would assume that StarOffice has come a long way since then - but I haven't used it.
It seems to me that many people that make the sweeping generalizations haven't used the lessor side of the arguement in a long time - so they are comparing their old experiences with their new ones - I would hope that a newer version of a product with that much more time in development would be better than an older product.
I just read that Rob Limo article and basically he is whining that it is different than what he is used to. Big deal - anyone switching experiences this. He complains about things that can be changed easily in the control panels - much like Linux, there are multiple ways to do things. Then he complains that his commericial OS has commerical software that requires money to use. Right.
I have used Linux since 1996 and back then I had more free time and enjoyed toying with things and then feeling that I was somehow better than others that hadn't figured out how to do the same thing. Since then, I now do things on my computer that actually matter to other people that give me money - meaning I'm less concerned about knowing what is going on and I simply want to be able to do something quickly and easily and be done with it. Linux has areas where this is possible - but for day to day things for me, Windows is setup more easily for that (banging out a resume and sending that via e-mail, ftping 50 files via a GUI, checking 5 different e-mail accounts with a GUI and then sending attachments out, ssh into a server, remote desktop into another, etc). All things that I very much *can* do on Linux, but I can personally do more easily and quickly with less headaches on Windows.
On a side note, I have had a number of Linux servers in my apartment running in a cluster for distributed analysis comoputing - I had to shut that down and sell it when I moved here (Bermuda) since the cost of computing is much higher here. I have retained my Windows laptop (HP) and it is now dying. I use it to program on and ssh into my servers in the States (which run FreeBSD). I have decided to get a new laptop - I ordered a new Aluminum 15" PowerBook which I should have by early November. I have long hated Macs, but they have since moved away from the things I don't like and closer to the things I do like (FreeBSD).
In the end, I don't expect to love the thing the first week or even month that I use it. The menus will be slightly different, and it will do things that I won't initially know where the control panels are for it - but I'm not going to write it off and immediately put YellowDog Linux on it. I'm going to give it a shot for about a year - if I still can't stand it, then I'll go Linux on it. I'm interested in the supposed reliability of the PowerBook hardware and therefore I have the option of another OS.
I find it amusing when people make the switch to any platform and immediately hate it - duh - it is change. Humans are resistant to change by nature.
I am buying an AlumBook this week since my laptop has died. I've long been a Windows user - but I'm going to give the PowerBook a shot to see if it is as durable as people say.
I started reading up on Panther and was very pleased with Xcode - good looking stuff there.
I can either remember an actual fact in detail, or I can instead remember a pointer to where to find the detail in said info.
I am a very poor speller, Google/Dictionary.com combined are my saviors.
Sites that I use all the time (approaching 50 times a day) for my knowledge base: 1) Google - both regular web pages and the newsgroup archives 2) everything2.com 3) snopes.com
I'm assuming that "A9" gets its name the same way that "i19n" does. Amazon.com has 9 characters after the A, so you can replace them with the assumed 9 characters in the compressed form of just 9 since it is a well known name to us.
If that is the case, are they going to have an "a9.com" site? If so, then that is like saying "ATM Machine" - and I hate when people do that.
This should be referred to the Department of Redundancies Department.
The two owners of this company need their gadgets in order to... well, I would assume impress others or something since they barely know how to actually use them.
One guy has the Nokia 6800 and it is pretty cool. Fortunately, it is new enough that he is still trying to figure it out and doesn't ask me about it.
The other guy has a Treo (I think the 270, but I'm not certain on that). He was using it with an ACT! database of contacts and calendar, but that kept crashing it and it was starting to get annoying on his desktop too (apparently ACT! has an odd way of building its database and after it gets really big, it starts behaving poorly). So we converted him over to use the Palm Desktop stuff - he liked that. But then he decided that he wants to use Outlook - this made sense since his secretary could then track a lot of his stuff as well in the calendar.
Unfortunately the syncing of the Treo is proving too complicated for him (getting duplicates and the like), and so this is meaning he is calling me in more and more to sit and try to figure out what the hell it is he is trying to do.
He told me that he wants something that he can just press a button and BOOM, it works. I told him that was exactly what I wanted too.
The past two days had a ton of them - with that was the original email coming in, then the message sent to the user, the admin, and three other backup/side admins notifying that there was a virus. Then the pop-ups on two server consoles.
It was getting annoying - you would think that I would just disable all that notification except the admin... but you'd be wrong.
That is all just on our Exchange server though, no outside bandwidth.
Not sure if it is related or not, but I'm seen my spam count drop by about 40 a day starting sometime last week. I had attributed it to the power outage, the viruses, and the worms - but perhaps it was this... or some combination thereof.
In my first job straight out of college, it was my first time working in a group of programmers with source control and the like. I was running into issues that variable names that I was deciding on for my code were occasionally conflicting with reserved words or other people's variables and such (obviously later fixed with a better coding standard that we all had to follow... as I recall, the group in India at the time still ignored it).
As a result, I wrote pretty much all of my code using swears. My coworkers found it hilarious when I had to give demonstrations of it to groups, or show women in the office how it works. eg: "fuckMeInTheGoatAss gets passed two variables, here you can see it is taking iShitEater and sCockSmoker - it will return a string, which will then get passed on to easySlut...."
After I left the company, I heard the fellow that took over my code found it both amusing and annoying. Anytime I can annoy someone, then I consider my life just that much more fufilling.
I have finally had to resort to something that scans post download - so I finally have to resort to the pop3 scanner of sorts.
I currently have at least 5 or so e-mail addresses, all of which just funnel down into a single address at this point. But I am starting up an online company and need to add at least 10 more addresses (info@companyname.com, sales@companyname.com, etc). I currently get just over 100 spams a day, and I am fine with that - I set the filters to be pretty restrictive and if I miss mail, no big deal. I have a small enough list of people that contact me that I add them to the whitelist and then *most* new people contacting me get through assuming what they are talking about is sufficiently non-spammy.
I am using SpamAssassin 2.60 and it is working well for me. I have tweaked the settings for my uses.
But since my company will have these web facing e-mails, and I really can't miss any of them since they are existing or potential new clients, I have to lessen the strictness of my spam filter. As a result, the 1-5 e-mails that sneak through each week is going to increase just with the less strict settings, as well as with the increase of new addresses available and coming in.
What I like so much about SpamAssassin is that it runs on the server and therefore it yanks out the spam and I don't need to download it over my connection. It was fine while I was in the States and had a cheap and fast connection to the net. But now that I am on a variety of connections and speeds, having to download 100 messages that are spam and THEN have them filtered out to find out that I just downloaded something, taking up bandwidth and time for naught, is really annoying. I would say that well over 90% of my mail right now is spam - so getting rid of that before I download it is key.
That said, I know now that things are going to get through, so I need a client side pop3 filter.
I liked the idea of Cloudmark's SpamNet and so I've been giving that a shot. It is free for a month and it is easy to install. I have been using it now for a few days - maybe a week at most.
I can't say that I have been particularly impressed with it. Of the 10 or so e-mails that get through each week (the filter is less strict now), it grabs 5-8 of them. I of course would love for it to pick up on all of them.
That said, it is integrated well with Outlook, is easy to use, and the service is cheap once I have to pay for it ($4 a month I think).
I know there are totally free options out there, and I will very likely look into them at some point soon before committing to paying for SpamNet, but the ease of installation and usage is key to me.
I used to love the "fun" of toying with something and getting it to work. I liked it if it was annoying or challenging - I had time to do it and it made me feel like part of a group that knew what they were doing, and we were better than the slobs that couldn't get it working. But now I'm very busy and actually do things with my time that make money - and my free time is getting increasingly sparse. As a result, I just want things that work straight out of the box and always work.
Looks like they were fufilling orders for awhile. And then aren't more currently now.
And it looks like they probably use paypal - which I find interesting since PayPal is 1) notoriously Nazis about what they will allow, and 2) notorious for taking your money by locking up the account once it either goes "too high" or grows "too fast"
I know how to get a domain name with false info - no biggie.
I know how to get/use a PO Box with a different or not real name - no biggie.
I know places that will colocate or rent out a server and they won't ask questions about what goes on via the net connection - as long as you pay their higher rates.
So we have the server, we have the address, we have the, and we have a domain name.
Anyone can make up something to sell - fine.
But then you have to be able to take in the credit card info, process it, have that money go into a bank that allows that sort of thing and then keep that money. That requires a bank account, which now post 9/11 requires a lot of hassle and proof of id to setup - let's assume they set that up prior to 9/11. But no credit card processing system I can think of (And more importantly the merchant account that puts it into the bank) will allow you to do something like this. It would keep/block your funds if it even let you set it up in the first place.
I'm truly curious how these guys are getting CC processing if they aren't actually delivering the product that they are advertising.
Even if they are just trying to say "we are back ordered, just wait" and using that to get more money and then eventually taking the money out of the account and just fleeing to the Virgin Islands.... Even then - a bank won't let you take out $300K+ and just leave with it - there is a lot of paperwork involved there...
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[i]What's happening up there in Red Sox Nation?[/i]
If you are asking me that, I only know from TV - I live in Bermuda now. I do hope that they make it - was hoping the Cubs would make it.
Sorry, I know very little about iTunes - is there a system like Amazon/NetFlix/Launch where you can rate how much you like/dislike a song/album/band/genre and then have it recommend more for you?
It seems it would do well here - but with a quick glance over the site, I don't see that they have anything like that.
Oh I wish this would work for me.
I live in Bermuda, and Apple won't ship it to me. I have to go through a reseller here, and that would make my $2800 15" AlumBook jump to a $5K purchase. Instead I bought it from them and had it shipped to a NYC address and then that will come to me in early November. Technically not "legal" but I'm not exactly exporting arms or anything.
There is a 33% duty on computer products here, so I will still have to pay that when it comes into the country, but it will be cheaper this way.
Software doesn't have the duty applied to it, but the stores still mark it up as if it does have the duty.
I would *love* to be able to get the cheap upgrade, but I'm guessing I can't.
Maybe I can go to the site before I actually have the laptop here in person and then have the new OS shipped to the address so that when they come in early November I can have them both at the same time.
Especially if I am going to have to do a clean install, that way it doesn't matter since I have nothing to lose.
I just bought a new 15" Alum PowerBook and it has shipped! I'm a new Switcher - giving it a shot.
I don't live in the States though, so I'm guessing that I'm out of luck for the discounted price on Panther - it is already taking me until early November just to get the laptop since Apple apparently doesn't like Bermuda or something.
Oh well - I really want to use Xcode, otherwise I would hold off for a bit on upgrading I guess - not out of anything more than just the fact that it is hard to get stuff here.
When my dad was getting his PhD at VA Tech (he finished up in '91 or '92 I think), one of the guys in his lab group was Bill Bender. I don't recall exactly what his field of expertise was, but I think it involved lasers. And apparently also making his own circuits. He had a maginified pic of one up at his desk and his "signature" mark on them was a bicycle. He was big into triathlons, so the bike was a reference to that I suppose.
IIRC, one of my favorite books, Acts of the Apostles also references the concept that there is usually some sort of artwork on chips, put there by the designers.
My new Apple Al PowerBook just shipped today, just in time for its Bluetooth to be dead, kaput, no longer a viable solution?
Bluetooh, I hardly knew yee... thee? thou?
I haven't bought a technical book since I have moved out of the States - O'Reilly's Safari has been nice for that. I can still have access to their books.
I haven't looked to see if this new one is on there yet - I have the old version of it in paperback form as I do with pretty much all the other O'Reilly Perl books.
At work we are all Windows. At home I have a Windows laptop - but it is dying (hardware).
I have had enough annoyances with Windows, and Mac has made enough improvements that I'm giving Mac a shot because I have heard the PowerBook hardware is good.
If it doesn't work out, I can always put Linux on it.
I haven't run Mozilla or Firebird on Linux, so perhaps there it is really fast - but I have run it on WinXP and IE is TONS faster at absolutely everything, as well as consuming less processor and RAM than the other two.
The last time I used Office was today, on XP. It was everything I wanted.
The last time I used StarOffice was in 1998 - it was god awful and lacking in everything - it was to Office as WordPad is to Office.
I would assume that StarOffice has come a long way since then - but I haven't used it.
It seems to me that many people that make the sweeping generalizations haven't used the lessor side of the arguement in a long time - so they are comparing their old experiences with their new ones - I would hope that a newer version of a product with that much more time in development would be better than an older product.
I just read that Rob Limo article and basically he is whining that it is different than what he is used to. Big deal - anyone switching experiences this. He complains about things that can be changed easily in the control panels - much like Linux, there are multiple ways to do things.
Then he complains that his commericial OS has commerical software that requires money to use. Right.
I have used Linux since 1996 and back then I had more free time and enjoyed toying with things and then feeling that I was somehow better than others that hadn't figured out how to do the same thing.
Since then, I now do things on my computer that actually matter to other people that give me money - meaning I'm less concerned about knowing what is going on and I simply want to be able to do something quickly and easily and be done with it.
Linux has areas where this is possible - but for day to day things for me, Windows is setup more easily for that (banging out a resume and sending that via e-mail, ftping 50 files via a GUI, checking 5 different e-mail accounts with a GUI and then sending attachments out, ssh into a server, remote desktop into another, etc).
All things that I very much *can* do on Linux, but I can personally do more easily and quickly with less headaches on Windows.
On a side note, I have had a number of Linux servers in my apartment running in a cluster for distributed analysis comoputing - I had to shut that down and sell it when I moved here (Bermuda) since the cost of computing is much higher here.
I have retained my Windows laptop (HP) and it is now dying. I use it to program on and ssh into my servers in the States (which run FreeBSD).
I have decided to get a new laptop - I ordered a new Aluminum 15" PowerBook which I should have by early November.
I have long hated Macs, but they have since moved away from the things I don't like and closer to the things I do like (FreeBSD).
In the end, I don't expect to love the thing the first week or even month that I use it. The menus will be slightly different, and it will do things that I won't initially know where the control panels are for it - but I'm not going to write it off and immediately put YellowDog Linux on it.
I'm going to give it a shot for about a year - if I still can't stand it, then I'll go Linux on it.
I'm interested in the supposed reliability of the PowerBook hardware and therefore I have the option of another OS.
I find it amusing when people make the switch to any platform and immediately hate it - duh - it is change. Humans are resistant to change by nature.
I am buying an AlumBook this week since my laptop has died. I've long been a Windows user - but I'm going to give the PowerBook a shot to see if it is as durable as people say.
I started reading up on Panther and was very pleased with Xcode - good looking stuff there.
He is blaming security holes on the fact that programs are written in C?
Retarded.
You can leave gaping holes in things while using Java (what he keeps using as the cure all), and you can write secure things in C.
It is not the fault of the language, it is the fault of the program design and/or implementation if there is a security hole in it.
I can either remember an actual fact in detail, or I can instead remember a pointer to where to find the detail in said info.
I am a very poor speller, Google/Dictionary.com combined are my saviors.
Sites that I use all the time (approaching 50 times a day) for my knowledge base:
1) Google - both regular web pages and the newsgroup archives
2) everything2.com
3) snopes.com
I'm assuming that "A9" gets its name the same way that "i19n" does.
Amazon.com has 9 characters after the A, so you can replace them with the assumed 9 characters in the compressed form of just 9 since it is a well known name to us.
If that is the case, are they going to have an "a9.com" site? If so, then that is like saying "ATM Machine" - and I hate when people do that.
This should be referred to the Department of Redundancies Department.
The two owners of this company need their gadgets in order to... well, I would assume impress others or something since they barely know how to actually use them.
One guy has the Nokia 6800 and it is pretty cool. Fortunately, it is new enough that he is still trying to figure it out and doesn't ask me about it.
The other guy has a Treo (I think the 270, but I'm not certain on that). He was using it with an ACT! database of contacts and calendar, but that kept crashing it and it was starting to get annoying on his desktop too (apparently ACT! has an odd way of building its database and after it gets really big, it starts behaving poorly).
So we converted him over to use the Palm Desktop stuff - he liked that.
But then he decided that he wants to use Outlook - this made sense since his secretary could then track a lot of his stuff as well in the calendar.
Unfortunately the syncing of the Treo is proving too complicated for him (getting duplicates and the like), and so this is meaning he is calling me in more and more to sit and try to figure out what the hell it is he is trying to do.
He told me that he wants something that he can just press a button and BOOM, it works.
I told him that was exactly what I wanted too.
The past two days had a ton of them - with that was the original email coming in, then the message sent to the user, the admin, and three other backup/side admins notifying that there was a virus. Then the pop-ups on two server consoles.
It was getting annoying - you would think that I would just disable all that notification except the admin... but you'd be wrong.
That is all just on our Exchange server though, no outside bandwidth.
Not sure if it is related or not, but I'm seen my spam count drop by about 40 a day starting sometime last week.
I had attributed it to the power outage, the viruses, and the worms - but perhaps it was this... or some combination thereof.
Yeah, my comments are now where I trend towards gangsta talk and the swearing.
:)
My variables are all pretty tame and sensible now - but they were fun back in the day
1) I said that missing an e-mail now is a big deal
2) future clients are unknowns - existing clients are on the whitelist
I assure you I wasn't fired or laid off.
Also, our clients never saw the code, they saw the end results of it since it was an ASP (in the sense of application service provider) system.
In my first job straight out of college, it was my first time working in a group of programmers with source control and the like.
I was running into issues that variable names that I was deciding on for my code were occasionally conflicting with reserved words or other people's variables and such (obviously later fixed with a better coding standard that we all had to follow... as I recall, the group in India at the time still ignored it).
As a result, I wrote pretty much all of my code using swears.
My coworkers found it hilarious when I had to give demonstrations of it to groups, or show women in the office how it works.
eg: "fuckMeInTheGoatAss gets passed two variables, here you can see it is taking iShitEater and sCockSmoker - it will return a string, which will then get passed on to easySlut...."
After I left the company, I heard the fellow that took over my code found it both amusing and annoying.
Anytime I can annoy someone, then I consider my life just that much more fufilling.
I have finally had to resort to something that scans post download - so I finally have to resort to the pop3 scanner of sorts.
I currently have at least 5 or so e-mail addresses, all of which just funnel down into a single address at this point.
But I am starting up an online company and need to add at least 10 more addresses (info@companyname.com, sales@companyname.com, etc).
I currently get just over 100 spams a day, and I am fine with that - I set the filters to be pretty restrictive and if I miss mail, no big deal. I have a small enough list of people that contact me that I add them to the whitelist and then *most* new people contacting me get through assuming what they are talking about is sufficiently non-spammy.
I am using SpamAssassin 2.60 and it is working well for me. I have tweaked the settings for my uses.
But since my company will have these web facing e-mails, and I really can't miss any of them since they are existing or potential new clients, I have to lessen the strictness of my spam filter.
As a result, the 1-5 e-mails that sneak through each week is going to increase just with the less strict settings, as well as with the increase of new addresses available and coming in.
What I like so much about SpamAssassin is that it runs on the server and therefore it yanks out the spam and I don't need to download it over my connection. It was fine while I was in the States and had a cheap and fast connection to the net.
But now that I am on a variety of connections and speeds, having to download 100 messages that are spam and THEN have them filtered out to find out that I just downloaded something, taking up bandwidth and time for naught, is really annoying.
I would say that well over 90% of my mail right now is spam - so getting rid of that before I download it is key.
That said, I know now that things are going to get through, so I need a client side pop3 filter.
I liked the idea of Cloudmark's SpamNet and so I've been giving that a shot. It is free for a month and it is easy to install.
I have been using it now for a few days - maybe a week at most.
I can't say that I have been particularly impressed with it. Of the 10 or so e-mails that get through each week (the filter is less strict now), it grabs 5-8 of them.
I of course would love for it to pick up on all of them.
That said, it is integrated well with Outlook, is easy to use, and the service is cheap once I have to pay for it ($4 a month I think).
I know there are totally free options out there, and I will very likely look into them at some point soon before committing to paying for SpamNet, but the ease of installation and usage is key to me.
I used to love the "fun" of toying with something and getting it to work. I liked it if it was annoying or challenging - I had time to do it and it made me feel like part of a group that knew what they were doing, and we were better than the slobs that couldn't get it working.
But now I'm very busy and actually do things with my time that make money - and my free time is getting increasingly sparse.
As a result, I just want things that work straight out of the box and always work.
I don't know - I'm torn between "The Will of God" or "The Work of the Devil".
But saying it is magic is silly, and any other explanation goes flying in the face of all that is Holy.
I didn't read the last little bit.
Looks like they were fufilling orders for awhile.
And then aren't more currently now.
And it looks like they probably use paypal - which I find interesting since PayPal is 1) notoriously Nazis about what they will allow, and 2) notorious for taking your money by locking up the account once it either goes "too high" or grows "too fast"
I know how to get a domain name with false info - no biggie.
I know how to get/use a PO Box with a different or not real name - no biggie.
I know places that will colocate or rent out a server and they won't ask questions about what goes on via the net connection - as long as you pay their higher rates.
So we have the server, we have the address, we have the, and we have a domain name.
Anyone can make up something to sell - fine.
But then you have to be able to take in the credit card info, process it, have that money go into a bank that allows that sort of thing and then keep that money.
That requires a bank account, which now post 9/11 requires a lot of hassle and proof of id to setup - let's assume they set that up prior to 9/11.
But no credit card processing system I can think of (And more importantly the merchant account that puts it into the bank) will allow you to do something like this.
It would keep/block your funds if it even let you set it up in the first place.
I'm truly curious how these guys are getting CC processing if they aren't actually delivering the product that they are advertising.
Even if they are just trying to say "we are back ordered, just wait" and using that to get more money and then eventually taking the money out of the account and just fleeing to the Virgin Islands.... Even then - a bank won't let you take out $300K+ and just leave with it - there is a lot of paperwork involved there...
I'm really curious on this one.