(MS) now endorse a 3rd-party plugin for Mac called Flip4Mac that makes a QuickTime wrapper for Windows Media content. It works.. ok.
They probably sponsor Flip4Mac to distribute it (it's not a QT wrapper, it's a codec) for free. However, Flip4Mac does not support all Windows Media content. Specifically, no protected content at all, and very spotty performance on high-bandwidth video. Furthermore, Flip4Mac is an even worse resource hog than WMP for Mac OS X was.
A couple of notes, before going over to Steve Punter's Cell Phone Page where reviews are for serious phones, and thorough.
the two bands that matter in the U S of A are 850 and 1900 for Cingular, while T-Mobile has only 1900 (weird regulations), and almos everywhere else in the world GSM is the main cellphone system with 900 and 1800 bands.
phones do have quite different signal reception qualities. In my personal experience a Motorola P280 still remains possibly the best and a Sony Ericsson t68 probably the worst for 1900-only reception.
Quad bands such as Motorola v400, various v5xx do quite well, albeit good old 900-only Startacs still remain in fond memories...
You pay to receive normal calls? Not video or anything special? Where are you, the US?!
Most likely. Of all the countries in the world, very few others charge cellphone users to receive a call. Crazy, I know... and what's even more weird is that users will try to explain to you that this is nothing to complain about... next thing you know, they'll be paying to receive commercial-ridden satellite TV channels. Oh, wait...
After lots of pbooks (let's see, 140, 190, 2400, wallstreet, pismo, tibook, ibook... ok the last one is not technically a pbook) only one had to be replaced because of failure. Moral of this story:
a pbook may sustain drops onto the pavement, even when turned on and running, with only minor scratches and bumps on its surface. All working fine...
something dropped onto it may prove fatal, even if it's not too heavy, if it hits in the wrong place (hint: on the LCD or over the place where the hard disk is located)
FWIW, it was out of warranty and applecare, not that it would have helped. But of course, YMMV, AFAIK and IMHO.
And especially, DTTAH!
Here, the thinking is that it is a convenience to ME that I can be away from a land line and people can still reach me. If you don't want to talk to the person, don't answer and you don't get charged anything.
But the same logic could be applied to long-distance calls: it's a convenience to ME that I can be geographically distant from someone and they can still reach me... somehow it does not sound convincing either way.
There's also the factor that there's no way to tell if a phone number is a mobile
This is a main point which I must concede. However, AFAIK in places where the caller always pays for the call, you can prefix a special number in advance and the phone company's automatic service informs you of the rate you'll be paying for the call - or something like that.
Besides, I'm never going to return a call made from a mobile if I have to pay the airtime.
I'm not sure I understand this one. How would that happen?
So what's the problem if you pay for incoming calls, but pay almost nothing monthly or pay fixed sum every month and have incoming calls for free?
The problem is when you have no choice and you have to pay incoming calls no matter what: they lock you in for 1 or 2 years (big penalty if you decide to terminate the contract early) and you every single one of them charges you for incoming calls.
And I still haven't found a place where you have to pay for incoming long distance, as a comparison. Why people put up and do so with mobile phones... well, there's no choice: that's how "free market" with mobile phone providers works in N.A.
calling a normal phone line has the same cost as calling a U.S. phone, but calling a Japanese mobile costs almost $0.14 USD per minute
This is likely for the same reason why calling a mobile phone most anywhere in the world (except in Norht America and 1-2 other countries) costs more than calling a landline:
In Norht America, every mobile phone user is charged for every incoming call's airtime, an unimaginable concept most everywhere else (imagine having to pay for incoming long-distance calls to your home phone number, for example...)
Everywhere else, the caller pays, just like for long distance. So when you call a mobile phone in Japan, you're probably simply paying for the receiving end's airtime cost to which they incur because of your calling them.
iChat AV video chats work OK about half the time if you are talking to a Mac user
One must therefore assume that the other half of the time, it works perfectly well for you (just like for everyone I know who uses iChat AV).
doesn't work worth a damn if you want to do video chat with a windows user
Maybe you ought to tell those windows users that by using AIM on their machines, it'll work quite allright with iChat AV on your end.
If you choose h.264 over MPEG-4, encoding & decoding HW requirements will be higher.
For playback, any system can play it back well:
Consider how many Windows users have iTunes installed nowadays, which means Quicktime 6 or 7 and MPEG-4 playback capabilities already installed.
Realplayer (newer versions) play back MPEG-4 streams fine, VLC likewise.
All in all, the average Windows user will have no problem in playing back your streams.
Mac users will have it even easier with Quicktime always preinstalled,
and Linux &c. will be able to use either VLC or Realplayer anyway.
Use cross-platform solutions which work well on all client platforms, unlike WMV: even the latest - nowadays quite obsolete - Windows Media Player on Mac OS X rates very poorly in terms of performance, and at the same bitrate (e.g. 300k) its drop rate and quality are much worse compared to any competitor product.
Tim Berners-Lee indeed wrote the first browser. The Web, URLs, HTML and HTTP have all been invented at CERN, by Tim Berners-Lee and others. See for example:
Therefore, following the logic shown by the above author when saying We *did* invent the damned thing... it is ours, there's no good reason to give it away! CERN should not have 'given away' control over WWW right? Perhaps they ought to have patented the whole thing and prevent others from using it freely?
I am actually curious to see what yet another narrow-minded, self-serving isolationism will do to further the widening drift between the world and a certain country.
It may be so obvious to be ignored, but the majority of TV audience in the U S of A is already paying for TV shows (cable or satellite monthly fees), *and* getting commercials on top of that. Paying twice for the same show, and still not owning a commercial-free copy of it.
Typical example of a so-called free market competition where for consumers, it's a lose-lose situation (hopefully commercials won't start appearing in iTunes-purchased TV shows as well, as they appeared on cable TV...)
Pause your rage about this for a moment to compare this situation to satellite TV from Astra, Hotbird & co. where tons of commercial channels from EU, Middle East, North Africa &c. are available for free... albeit with commercials.
Well, I bought a Mac Plus at educational discount as soon as the prices went down (equivalent to about $500-600 at today's value I guess) because of SE's and II's introduction in 1987. That was almost 20 years ago, now that I think of it.
True, the Plus did not have an internal hard drive... originally. It came with 1MB RAM and one internal 800k floppy. But... I installed an INTERNAL 20MB 5.25" ST-225N Seagate hard drive into it, by mounting it diagonally to the CRT, and soldering the SCSI connections directly to the motherboard. It was great!
Performance-wise it was OK (my previous machine was an Atari ST), but the thing had a great GUI for its OS, and with Lightspeed Pascal graphics was easily accessible.
When I think about those years, I stop even considering complaining about my PBG4 not being fast enough:-)
uhm, sorry, I meant -AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?- 'local' as in 'it only exists (officially accepted) in the US'.
Or does it still exist elsewhere nowadays?
Teachers are not experts; they spend a lot of time learning "how to teach" from people who wouldn't know science if it bit them in the ass, and little more than the bare minimum learning the subjects they are supposed to teach. To be "experts", I'd expect they'd need to progress at least 20-30 college credits beyond anything they would need to teach high school, and that is way more than required.
OK, in that case I must add to my original list:
require high-school teachers to have at least an undergraduate degree in the topic they want to teach (e.g. a math teacher would be required to have a BA/BS in math, a physics teacher an equivalent in physics, etc) - like they do in most other countries.
And after that:
don't homeschool
BTW, AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?
You raise some very interesting points (especially for people who may have experienced schooling in other countries but not here). Good comments.
However, somehow your message's title:
Fuck you
and your closing remark:
You, sir, need to stop telling other perfectly competent people how to raise their children.
don't seem to speak well for how much one can learn civilized social interaction and decent manners in homeschooling. Or maybe you advocate homeschooling, but didn't experience it yourself?
make it compulsory to learn a foreign language (starting early enough), and keep it for at least 7-8 years.
It may not help much with the other school subject, but it'll certainly give us people who are less ignorant about the rest of the world, because they can educate themselves, once they become adults, about other points of view...
then:
don't rely on technology
be fair but strict
don't homeschool (no parent can possibly become an expert on a multitude of topics, not to mention the social isolation of homeschooling)
don't allow pupils to drop basics
parents should follow their kids' school-related activites consistently and work with teachers on educating children...
The 2nd version of Newton's Print Recognizer, featured in Newton OS 2.x (from the Newton 130 on, I think) was a vast improvement, as it has been metioned before here and elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably sponsor Flip4Mac to distribute it (it's not a QT wrapper, it's a codec) for free. However, Flip4Mac does not support all Windows Media content. Specifically, no protected content at all, and very spotty performance on high-bandwidth video. Furthermore, Flip4Mac is an even worse resource hog than WMP for Mac OS X was.
Most likely. Of all the countries in the world, very few others charge cellphone users to receive a call. Crazy, I know... and what's even more weird is that users will try to explain to you that this is nothing to complain about... next thing you know, they'll be paying to receive commercial-ridden satellite TV channels. Oh, wait...
-
a pbook may sustain drops onto the pavement, even when turned on and running, with only minor scratches and bumps on its surface. All working fine...
-
something dropped onto it may prove fatal, even if it's not too heavy, if it hits in the wrong place (hint: on the LCD or over the place where the hard disk is located)
FWIW, it was out of warranty and applecare, not that it would have helped. But of course, YMMV, AFAIK and IMHO. And especially, DTTAH!But the same logic could be applied to long-distance calls: it's a convenience to ME that I can be geographically distant from someone and they can still reach me... somehow it does not sound convincing either way.
There's also the factor that there's no way to tell if a phone number is a mobile
This is a main point which I must concede. However, AFAIK in places where the caller always pays for the call, you can prefix a special number in advance and the phone company's automatic service informs you of the rate you'll be paying for the call - or something like that.
Besides, I'm never going to return a call made from a mobile if I have to pay the airtime.
I'm not sure I understand this one. How would that happen?
The problem is when you have no choice and you have to pay incoming calls no matter what: they lock you in for 1 or 2 years (big penalty if you decide to terminate the contract early) and you every single one of them charges you for incoming calls.
And I still haven't found a place where you have to pay for incoming long distance, as a comparison. Why people put up and do so with mobile phones... well, there's no choice: that's how "free market" with mobile phone providers works in N.A.
This is likely for the same reason why calling a mobile phone most anywhere in the world (except in Norht America and 1-2 other countries) costs more than calling a landline:
In Norht America, every mobile phone user is charged for every incoming call's airtime, an unimaginable concept most everywhere else (imagine having to pay for incoming long-distance calls to your home phone number, for example...)
Everywhere else, the caller pays, just like for long distance. So when you call a mobile phone in Japan, you're probably simply paying for the receiving end's airtime cost to which they incur because of your calling them.
One must therefore assume that the other half of the time, it works perfectly well for you (just like for everyone I know who uses iChat AV).
doesn't work worth a damn if you want to do video chat with a windows user
Maybe you ought to tell those windows users that by using AIM on their machines, it'll work quite allright with iChat AV on your end.
more like a tie between either one of Ep.I - Ep.II - Ep.III ...
It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot or information the feature itself blocked by their Cisco-backed filter?
- Quicktime Broadcaster on any recent G4 or G5, using Firewire for video input and an external USB audio interface
- Darwin Streaming Server on a separate machine (a dual G4 will do just fine)
- online tutorials for quite easy setup
If you choose h.264 over MPEG-4, encoding & decoding HW requirements will be higher. For playback, any system can play it back well:Consider how many Windows users have iTunes installed nowadays, which means Quicktime 6 or 7 and MPEG-4 playback capabilities already installed.
Realplayer (newer versions) play back MPEG-4 streams fine, VLC likewise.
All in all, the average Windows user will have no problem in playing back your streams.
Mac users will have it even easier with Quicktime always preinstalled,
and Linux &c. will be able to use either VLC or Realplayer anyway.
Use cross-platform solutions which work well on all client platforms, unlike WMV: even the latest - nowadays quite obsolete - Windows Media Player on Mac OS X rates very poorly in terms of performance, and at the same bitrate (e.g. 300k) its drop rate and quality are much worse compared to any competitor product.
Therefore, following the logic shown by the above author when saying We *did* invent the damned thing... it is ours, there's no good reason to give it away! CERN should not have 'given away' control over WWW right?
Perhaps they ought to have patented the whole thing and prevent others from using it freely?
What about telephone? Who maintains world-wide numbering?
I am actually curious to see what yet another narrow-minded, self-serving isolationism will do to further the widening drift between the world and a certain country.
OK, so let's follow your logic this way:
It seems that we have a deal.
Typical example of a so-called free market competition where for consumers, it's a lose-lose situation (hopefully commercials won't start appearing in iTunes-purchased TV shows as well, as they appeared on cable TV...)
Pause your rage about this for a moment to compare this situation to satellite TV from Astra, Hotbird & co. where tons of commercial channels from EU, Middle East, North Africa &c. are available for free... albeit with commercials.
That was almost 20 years ago, now that I think of it.
True, the Plus did not have an internal hard drive... originally. It came with 1MB RAM and one internal 800k floppy. But... I installed an INTERNAL 20MB 5.25" ST-225N Seagate hard drive into it, by mounting it diagonally to the CRT, and soldering the SCSI connections directly to the motherboard. It was great!
Performance-wise it was OK (my previous machine was an Atari ST), but the thing had a great GUI for its OS, and with Lightspeed Pascal graphics was easily accessible.
When I think about those years, I stop even considering complaining about my PBG4 not being fast enough :-)
Well, it is sort of the default state of affairs.
uhm, sorry, I meant -AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?- 'local' as in 'it only exists (officially accepted) in the US'.
Or does it still exist elsewhere nowadays?
OK, in that case I must add to my original list:
- require high-school teachers to have at least an undergraduate degree in the topic they want to teach (e.g. a math teacher would be required to have a BA/BS in math, a physics teacher an equivalent in physics, etc) - like they do in most other countries.
- don't homeschool
BTW, AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?And after that:
However, somehow your message's title:
Fuck you
and your closing remark:
You, sir, need to stop telling other perfectly competent people how to raise their children.
don't seem to speak well for how much one can learn civilized social interaction and decent manners in homeschooling.
Or maybe you advocate homeschooling, but didn't experience it yourself?
It may not help much with the other school subject, but it'll certainly give us people who are less ignorant about the rest of the world, because they can educate themselves, once they become adults, about other points of view...
then:
Larry Yaeger was the tech lead on Newton print recognition 2.0. for more info about him, check this other post.
What has not been metioned (osnews is down at the moment so I can't verify it there) is that unlike the first generation software, the second generation recognition engine (now alive as Inkwell in Mac OS X) was developed in-house at Apple, in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG)
Apple-Newton Handwriting Recognition's lead was Larry Yaeger (who worked with Alan Kay at Apple) and is now at Indiana University where he's back at Artificial Life research.
To Starbucks? Following the uneducated masses?
Me, I'll stick to Illy.
why? are you serious?
Might you be able to recommend a good book (or journal) on sleep for a scientifically literate non-specialist?
- boycott
- lost next elections for whichever party drafted (& approved such idiotic law
- Netherlanders who want to purchase an MP3 player being helped by people outside of their country, gray import etc.
any other measures?