As the owner of a Nextel phone, and someone who hates receving PTT calls, I agree. Ironically, PTT calls can (on most phones, anyway) be handled in the same way as normal calls: without the speakerphone function. Nobody bothers to set it up that way, is all.
"Oh, come on, please. Who really has more than 4 gigs of music?"
"Uh, me, and any of my friends who listen to mp3s."
"Well, you're all egotistical freaks with abnormally large music collections!"
It's like this: the mp3 landscape is changing rapidly. As much as it's become hackneyed to say it, iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS have had an explosive effect on digital music. Heck, without either of the other two items, iTunes alone is among the most intuitive and easy mp3 ripping software currently available, if it doesn't actually have the top spot. Once people with laptops discover how easy it is to rip mp3s, they all have the same reaction: to sit down with a big stack of their CDs, and rip the whole thing to mp3.
But, just for the sake of argument, let's look at some numbers. I have 2140 songs currently ripped to mp3, for a total of 10.26 gigs. Let's round the numbers down a bit, and say that averages to 4.5 megs per song.
Assuming a dozen songs per album (pretty safe, if my collection is any indication), you're looking at less than 75 albums ripped before running out of space. 75 albums is nice, but it doesn't come close to the collections of anyone I know. So, in other words. 4 gigs is easily enough to store your favorite stuff... but for most people, it's not going to work for everything.
I'll volunteer to provide a good home for one of those spare G5s. I know, it's a selfless act, but what can I say? I can't just stand idly by while distributed supercomputer nodes go homeless.
Most schools have a similar setup for incoming students on wired networks... and this company is claiming their patent is not specific to wireless.
Funny you should mention that. I'm an employee of a state system of higher education (I leave figuring out which one as an exercise for the reader). Several of the schools that I deal with in the system are using Bluesocket boxes which would almost certainly be considered infringing devices. It will be interesting to see if Nomadix only approaches other vendors, or if they use the SCO tactic and go straight to consumers.
No: his wife asks the question several times, which rather leads one to believe that he never answers her.
Come to think of it, the entire article could be summed up thusly:
"A friend of mine had Tivo, which I decided I wanted, but I didn't want to shell out $600 for the whole nine yards. So first I went with a cheap option which didn't work. Then I went with a cheaper option which also didn't work. Then I went with a more expensive option which worked, but badly. Finally, I tried something which worked, and although I spent $800 on it, it at least does some things that the Tivo doesn't, so I don't have to feel like a complete tool for not just buying a Tivo in the first place like my wife asked me to."
The grandparent post is correct, up to a point. Although you can obviously change the desktop background image, the colors of interface elements (the brushed-metal apperance of Safari or iTunes, or the plain white of most other applications like Mail.app), along with other UI chrome (like the color of hilited buttons) is not available for change by the user.
Of course, using a basic install of WinXP, it's not particularly changeable either, barring downloading third party tools.
Here's another idea: a config file in which you enable six things out of those 400, and leave the rest turned off.
Shockingly, it's pretty easy to do that in Apache. Anything that doesn't look immediately neccessary in a LoadModule command gets commented out.
On one of my servers, the httpd.conf file is 277 lines long, a fairly daunting number. If you grep for lines starting with an alphanumeric character (which lets out comments and whitespace), you're down to 48 lines, hardly a scary number at all.
My lunch was more flavorful than the hour and a half of garage band and Office 2004. We get it - make your own music - cool. I buy music, I don't make it. Move on. MOVE ON!!!
Two responses come to mind immediately.
The first is that according to Apple's research, half of the households in the country have at least one person who is an active musician in them. That's a pretty huge potential market segment. I realize that you're not among them, but you should at least appreciate that the number of people who were thrilled by this demo is far from insiginifigant. Half my office (geeks and muscians both) sat watching with mouths open. Drooling. Unattractively. It wasn't pretty.
Two, and on a more philosophical note: how sad is it that the first thing you thought to say wasn't "I listen to music, I don't make it," but rather "I buy music." The commodification of music is sad enough as it is, but what's worse is to hear it described as if it's as transient and ordinary as a box of chicken McNuggets.
Only on Slashdot could you find someone who says, "Frankly, my comments about both Windows and Linux are professional opinions. People pay me for those," followed by a bulleted list of exactly the things Microsoft had asked for. For free.
In the IT industry, Microsoft was by far the largest corporate donor to political campaigns during the 2002 election cycle, and so far it looks like that trend will continue for the 2004 elections. You can get a breakdown of their various contributions on the same site, but the long and short of it is that they gave a bit more to Republicans than Democrats during the last election cycle, and are so far pretty much even this cycle.
Claiming that corporate involvement in Iraq is going to lead to the destabilization of the country is probably a lot of hand-wringing. However, that doesn't mean it's not worthy of scrutiny.
(Incidentally: if any of you still wonder why Microsoft always seemed to get away with it every time they get slapped with an anti-trust suit, the above links should prove instructive.)
"I thought the recording industry said that this business model wouldn't work, that people won't pay for what they can download for free?" So, there you go.
You can still make the argument that the business model doesn't work. After all, iTMS is easily the most successful of the online music stores, and it only manages to break even. Sales from the store are viewed by the company largely as a means of driving sales of iPods.
Until someone starts, as the kids say these days, "making the mad skrilla," by selling music, the assertion that the business model is really working has to be taken with a grain of salt: when only the best in the business can break even, the business model needs a serious look.
(Why I like iTMS: when my wife told me she wanted me to buy her a Christina Aguilara song, I didn't have to do the walk-of-shame at the record store, or buy a whole album of her stuff. Bought it, burned it, shuddered and tried to suppress the memory.)
"Considering his typical tendency to use high-quality, large-format cameras and his desire that it be handy and convenient, I suspect he would be attracted to our D100, for its size and versatility and overall digital image quality.
And while waiting for the perfect shot, he'd enjoy an cool, refreshing Coca-Cola(tm)!
...So I am by no means a Windows apologist or Microsoft partisan. I began my computing career as a Mac patriot, in fact. I used a Mac SE/30 with PageMaker version 1.2 and laughed at the lowly IBM PS/2, which could just hobble along on the subpar Windows 3.0... But even back then, I had this gnawing suspicion that 18-month software development cycles could somehow hurt the platform. Before the tide really turned, however, I switched to PCs. I had joined PC Magazine, and the editorial staff used them......
Please, please, tell me that he's not trying to convince us of his "Apple cred" by noting that the last time he used a Mac in a serious capacity was ten years ago?
I learned on my mother in law's old Nikkormat FT2. Manual everything, with a built in light meter. Two lenses, both fixed - one 50mm macro, and a 200mm.
The manual everything forces you to think about the relationship between light, apeture size and shutter speed, which is the most important thing to learn. The fixed-length lenses force you to learn composition (the second most important thing) without the assistance of zoom.
And unless you're going to develop yourself (may or not be an option for you), be prepared to shell out a bunch of money getting film developed. It's a bitch, but it can't be helped.
Slashdot Mirror
As the owner of a Nextel phone, and someone who hates receving PTT calls, I agree. Ironically, PTT calls can (on most phones, anyway) be handled in the same way as normal calls: without the speakerphone function. Nobody bothers to set it up that way, is all.
See also, Yellow Dog Linux.
(cribbed from a former post of mine elsewhere)
So, haikus have a
fixed subject -- not nature? Then
it's a senryu.
In your defense, though,
the five-seven-five rule does
seem to be bogus.
Therefore, much extra
effort spent here to make me
look smart was wasted.
Damn.
"Oh, come on, please. Who really has more than 4 gigs of music?"
"Uh, me, and any of my friends who listen to mp3s."
"Well, you're all egotistical freaks with abnormally large music collections!"
It's like this: the mp3 landscape is changing rapidly. As much as it's become hackneyed to say it, iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS have had an explosive effect on digital music. Heck, without either of the other two items, iTunes alone is among the most intuitive and easy mp3 ripping software currently available, if it doesn't actually have the top spot. Once people with laptops discover how easy it is to rip mp3s, they all have the same reaction: to sit down with a big stack of their CDs, and rip the whole thing to mp3.
But, just for the sake of argument, let's look at some numbers. I have 2140 songs currently ripped to mp3, for a total of 10.26 gigs. Let's round the numbers down a bit, and say that averages to 4.5 megs per song.
Assuming a dozen songs per album (pretty safe, if my collection is any indication), you're looking at less than 75 albums ripped before running out of space. 75 albums is nice, but it doesn't come close to the collections of anyone I know. So, in other words. 4 gigs is easily enough to store your favorite stuff... but for most people, it's not going to work for everything.
I'll volunteer to provide a good home for one of those spare G5s. I know, it's a selfless act, but what can I say? I can't just stand idly by while distributed supercomputer nodes go homeless.
Funny you should mention that. I'm an employee of a state system of higher education (I leave figuring out which one as an exercise for the reader). Several of the schools that I deal with in the system are using Bluesocket boxes which would almost certainly be considered infringing devices. It will be interesting to see if Nomadix only approaches other vendors, or if they use the SCO tactic and go straight to consumers.
No: his wife asks the question several times, which rather leads one to believe that he never answers her.
Come to think of it, the entire article could be summed up thusly:
"A friend of mine had Tivo, which I decided I wanted, but I didn't want to shell out $600 for the whole nine yards. So first I went with a cheap option which didn't work. Then I went with a cheaper option which also didn't work. Then I went with a more expensive option which worked, but badly. Finally, I tried something which worked, and although I spent $800 on it, it at least does some things that the Tivo doesn't, so I don't have to feel like a complete tool for not just buying a Tivo in the first place like my wife asked me to."
The grandparent post is correct, up to a point. Although you can obviously change the desktop background image, the colors of interface elements (the brushed-metal apperance of Safari or iTunes, or the plain white of most other applications like Mail.app), along with other UI chrome (like the color of hilited buttons) is not available for change by the user.
Of course, using a basic install of WinXP, it's not particularly changeable either, barring downloading third party tools.
Just so folks know: Microsoft donated to Republicans and Democrats pretty close to equally. You can check precise numbers at Open Secrets.
Shouldn't that be, "STRAIGHT FROM 2443's HEADLINES"?
Great Scott!
Your conf file is larger than most of the documents I serve up!
Here's another idea: a config file in which you enable six things out of those 400, and leave the rest turned off.
Shockingly, it's pretty easy to do that in Apache. Anything that doesn't look immediately neccessary in a LoadModule command gets commented out.
On one of my servers, the httpd.conf file is 277 lines long, a fairly daunting number. If you grep for lines starting with an alphanumeric character (which lets out comments and whitespace), you're down to 48 lines, hardly a scary number at all.
Are you kidding? Fark would disappear!
Funny. I'm always nunya@bidnez.com.
Two responses come to mind immediately.
The first is that according to Apple's research, half of the households in the country have at least one person who is an active musician in them. That's a pretty huge potential market segment. I realize that you're not among them, but you should at least appreciate that the number of people who were thrilled by this demo is far from insiginifigant. Half my office (geeks and muscians both) sat watching with mouths open. Drooling. Unattractively. It wasn't pretty.
Two, and on a more philosophical note: how sad is it that the first thing you thought to say wasn't "I listen to music, I don't make it," but rather "I buy music." The commodification of music is sad enough as it is, but what's worse is to hear it described as if it's as transient and ordinary as a box of chicken McNuggets.
If you don't make music yourself... why not?
Only on Slashdot could you find someone who says, "Frankly, my comments about both Windows and Linux are professional opinions. People pay me for those," followed by a bulleted list of exactly the things Microsoft had asked for. For free.
Funny - but believe it or not, iPods don't have power buttons.
In the IT industry, Microsoft was by far the largest corporate donor to political campaigns during the 2002 election cycle, and so far it looks like that trend will continue for the 2004 elections. You can get a breakdown of their various contributions on the same site, but the long and short of it is that they gave a bit more to Republicans than Democrats during the last election cycle, and are so far pretty much even this cycle.
Claiming that corporate involvement in Iraq is going to lead to the destabilization of the country is probably a lot of hand-wringing. However, that doesn't mean it's not worthy of scrutiny.
(Incidentally: if any of you still wonder why Microsoft always seemed to get away with it every time they get slapped with an anti-trust suit, the above links should prove instructive.)
You can still make the argument that the business model doesn't work. After all, iTMS is easily the most successful of the online music stores, and it only manages to break even. Sales from the store are viewed by the company largely as a means of driving sales of iPods.
Until someone starts, as the kids say these days, "making the mad skrilla," by selling music, the assertion that the business model is really working has to be taken with a grain of salt: when only the best in the business can break even, the business model needs a serious look.
(Why I like iTMS: when my wife told me she wanted me to buy her a Christina Aguilara song, I didn't have to do the walk-of-shame at the record store, or buy a whole album of her stuff. Bought it, burned it, shuddered and tried to suppress the memory.)
"At great length?"
And while waiting for the perfect shot, he'd enjoy an cool, refreshing Coca-Cola(tm)!
Give me a break, people. This was a puff piece.
Anyone notice this?
Please, please, tell me that he's not trying to convince us of his "Apple cred" by noting that the last time he used a Mac in a serious capacity was ten years ago?
I learned on my mother in law's old Nikkormat FT2. Manual everything, with a built in light meter. Two lenses, both fixed - one 50mm macro, and a 200mm.
The manual everything forces you to think about the relationship between light, apeture size and shutter speed, which is the most important thing to learn. The fixed-length lenses force you to learn composition (the second most important thing) without the assistance of zoom.
And unless you're going to develop yourself (may or not be an option for you), be prepared to shell out a bunch of money getting film developed. It's a bitch, but it can't be helped.
...The Frickcam!
Ah, Miss Frickell, when will you once again grace us with your visage?
Hey, don't blame Metcalfe for updating an old classic.
Glen Larson is a Mormon.