You can't "make" someone interested in things, just encourage them when they show interest. Anyone looking for quick gratification is not going to stick with programming -- it just takes too much time and attention to detail for most people to tolerate.
Very true. However, surely exposing more people to it will let many more people get into it that would get into it otherwise, no?
When I was a kid I had no idea how games and other computer software was made. In fact I didn't even care. It's not that I couldn't figure out how it was made, it just never even crossed my mind. So typing in that first BASIC program was a bit of an epiphany- "wait, I can make my OWN stuff on here?"
Most people never even think about where software comes from. What I think is important is that first moment where the lightswitch goes on a people realized THEY can make computers do cool stuff too. Of course you can't make anybody be a programmer, but the more people who see how fun programming can be, the more people who will discover it....
And to really interest kids...how easy is it to put a biggish dot on screen and move it around? Once you've got that, plus maybe some kbd or controller input, you've given a kid all he or she needs to really have some fun tooling around.
Excellent point, I agree 100%!
I've always thought games are what get most kids interested in computers. No five year-olds want to code the next SQL database server, but they'd love to make the next Mario game. That's what got ME into the business/hobby, anyway!:P
I would imagine that the parent would download and install the software for the child. Granted when I was a kid I had to figure it out for myself. But when/if I have a child I'll set an environment up for him/her if he/she expresses an interest in programming.
You and I would do that, sure. Would the other 99.9% of parents in the world, the ones outside our "hardcore computer user" demographic do the same? Nope!
Booting into BASIC was a godsend for budding programmers. I really wonder what the lack of that will lead to. (And blah blah blah "BASIC considered harmful"...I think the non-line-numbered versions are fine.)
I wouldn't even mind the line-numbered versions. Obviously structered programming languages are far superior in every way, but I think anything that gets them into programming is cool! The kids that are into it will soon seek out more powerful languages anyway.
It's almost like... I don't have two craps about how crappy or uncrappy the language is, I just care about how easy "hello world" is. Ya know? Does that make sense? I want minimum entry barrier to a "hello world" program as my #1 critera for this mythical programming feature because if kids find it fun, they'll discover the rest on their own... but the crucial step is getting them to try it in the first place! Just IMHO.:)
Ideally I'd like to see Microsoft provide a really stripped-down of Visual Basic free with the OS. And it should be installed by default, and placed prominently on the Start Menu.
This would provide something simple for kids (or newbies of all ages) to start playing around with. I think this would increase the number of kids getting into coding overall... which would help Microsoft as kids would be learning Windows programming early, and with more kids overall discovering coding you'd have more total kids "graduating" to more advanced stuff like real programming languages and alternative OS's like Linux, etc.
It would be a win/win situation for the advancement of programming, IMHO. Perhaps not a win for ME, though, as I'll have more kids competing for my coding job in the future. That problem is tough enough already.:P
IMHO, I think that kids who want to program will learn to program. I mean, the kids who learned everything about their computer 10 years ago didn't do it because the tools were there. The computer was something that interested them and they soaked up all they could when they could. The same is still true.
But how do kids get their interest sparked in the first place? Nothing beats booting up a computer and having a BASIC prompt staring you in the face, daring you to type in your first "10 PRINT 'I AM COOL' / 20 GOTO 10"-type program.
I always loved computers but who knows if my interest in coding ever would have been sparked if it hadn't been that easy to get started by farting around and making funny little programs like that.
Why the heck should a kid who's never coded before download a bunch of incredibly obscure (to THEM, not US) crap like Cygwin, etc just to pursue some totally unknown hobby? Some kids will still make this leap of course, but it's going to be LESS people than it would have been had there been a fun, built-in-to-the-OS, totally obvious, free way for kids to get started like you had in the 80's.
I believe it was dropped even more recently than that- in the past couple of days or so! I tried to dig up the link for you, but the Mozillazine.org forums are down. There was some disucssion in the Firebird forum by some of (I believe) project maintainers.
They mentioned that the MNG library was bigger than all other image libraries combined. They also seemed to indicate that it could be re-included if the size were reduced or if MNG became more widely-used. Again, seemed silly to me... I supported bloat reduction... but how can MNG become more widely-used if browsers don't support it?
This is such a sore point for me. To me the main raison d'etre for PNG's is that alpha transparency instead of the single-bit transparency that GIF's offer.
However, IE for Windows supports it *horribly*. If you want to use the alpha transparency feature of PNG's, you've got to jump through a lot of crappy, nonsensical IE-only hoops.
Here is a rather funny page (since the author's disbelief and anger at IE's horrible behavior is palpable) which does a good job of explaining the issue, and supplying a few workarounds.
It's a shame that IE is so crappy in this regard (and plenty of others, but that's another discussion)... there's no good reason for it. Apparently IE for Mac supports them just fine, btw... so it's not like Microsoft has some official PNG-hating policy, they just simply got sloppy with IE/Win. Another good example why too much share in a given market (in this case, web browsers for Windows) is a bad thing for competition. Why should they bother improving or fixing IE/Win? What's in it for them?
I don't know about other browsers, but MNG support has been dropped from Mozilla in recent builds. Apparently the MNG library was quite large (apparently just a few hundred k, though...), and rarely-used, so it was dropped as part of a bloat-reduction effort. Can't say I agree with them. More discussion can be found over at the mozillazine.org forums.
That's an interesting idea. I can think of a better way to do it, though. One problem with LCD's is the viewing angle. Viewing angles are getting better all the time, but at normal viewing distance some of those 2x2 monitors would look like crud. Also, usually the wall is a little too far away from the edge of your desk where you sit... you usually want those screens about, what... 15 inches from the end of your nose? One more thing... it's a lot easier to swivel your head left/right than up/down... you'd get tired of looking at the upper two screens in the 2x2 grid real quickly.
Probably the most "ideal" multi-monitor arrangement is to have them side-by side right on your desk! This way you can angle them into sort of a shallow u-shape and tilt them upwards a bit so you're getting ideal viewing angle!
If you want to get fancy, get some VESA mounting arms for your monitors so they're floating above your desk and can be easily rearranged at will.:P
Ahahaha.. like either of us can afford this! I should stop thinking about this now... although I have two 18.1" LCD's side-by-side already... I shouldn't complain! (still paying off the credit cards though...):P
Just like when every employer requires you to sign away all intellectual property. You may sign freely, but in truth you have little choice.
Now, that's just not true. In my experience, and from what I've gathered from my general reading on the topic... 1) Many/most employers are willing to negotiate the terms of the contract, including intellectual property clauses. 2) While clauses like this are all too common, they're the far from "the rule" in my experience.
In my case... the clauses offered by my current employer basically said all IP created by me during the term of my employment were the property of my company. I asked it to be amended to simply say that all IP created by me during company working hours on company property/equipment was the property of the company. Also I had a clause inserted specifically stating that my website, Bootyproject.org, would remain my property.
They had no problem with that at all. Not all employers would be that flexible I'm sure, but to say a job-hunter has "little choice" is just not realistic.
I forget the specifics of the fable, but if she agreed to the contract out of her own free will and wasn't coerced in any way... then yes, it's the bitch's fault.:P
If you sign the contract, you're pretty much bound to it. I was faced with an employment contract like this at my current job. Thankfully I read the fine print, and thankfully my employer was flexible to edit those clauses out before I signed it. I certainly wouldn't have signed it otherwise.
But hey, if I'd signed a contract holding me to those sorts of terms, why shouldn't my employer be able to claim rights to everything I've done? I think it would be my fault for signing the contract, really....
I think this thing depends HIGHLY on how accurately it can place your ISP. At home my ISP is Speakeasy, so that would explain the US West Coast results I was getting since I *believe* Speakeasy is headquartered in the Pac NW.
Here at work (still in the Philly suburbs) it's giving me results from Illinois. I think it thinks I'm in Chicago, since that's where our ISP is headquarted.
In short this thing is utter rubbish in most cases... You think it would check my friggin' zipcode or something and make a slightly more intelligent stab at my location...
This is funny. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia too. Lafayette Hill. Trepia found people in Lancaster, then tokyo and Austria. But hey, people talking and complaining about Trepia finds me someone in my own backyard. Drop me an email mysterious one from the suburbs.
Or I could just move to Antarctica so that you'd show up on my Trepia buddy list!:P
Just my two cents: it's adding people from all over the world to my list. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia USA (on the East Coast for those not familiar with the US) and it's adding people to my list from Australia, Scandinavia, California.... etc.
Another interesting note: I've got a few machines on my LAN. Installed it on machine #1. Then I installed it on machine #2 with a new account, different name, but with identical location information. The copy of Trepia running on machine #2 instantly saw the user I created on machine #1, but the copy of Trepia running on machine #1 never saw the user on machine #2. Also, I sent a message from machine #2 to machine #1, and it *just simply did not go through at all*.
Hmmm, pretty lame. So it works pretty good for user #2 (hey, I'm turning on Trepia, who's around?) but not so good if you've already got it running and want to see who's popped into your area lately.... or if you *actually want to message somebody else*.
Then I shut down Trepia on machine #1 to see if it would detect the Trepia user on machine #2 upon relaunch. Well, it can't log into the Trepia server. I guess they're Slashdotted. I wonder if that has anything to do with the crappy quality of the users found, and the non-functional chat... or if it just plain sucks, period.
The thing I enjoy about case modding is that it's not a well-known thing. On the few occasions that I've met someone with a mod, I know I'm dealing with someone a little more serious about their computer than most people, who just use them as mail stations.
Haha, good way to look at it. I was kinda thinking, "well this computer is pretty important to me, it's not the most important thing in my life, but it's one of my favorite things and also how i make my living. do i really want to be represented by a dull gray box?"
Ah, well, maybe the fact that I'm an all brainy person with absolutely no talent for arts and crafts might influence my opinion a litte bit.:-)
Haha, nothing wrong with that. Myself I have always had some degree of artistic talent, but real experience painting or working with tools. Computer case modding and building props for cosplay (haha, dont laugh please!) have given me a chance to have fun cutting, sanding, and so on.:P
Re:Don't get it.
on
Alien Case Mod
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I never understood what people like about case-modding anyway.
I always said the same thing. Recently however, I got the bug to mod my case! I got tired of looking at that boring thing and felt like doing something creative with my hands (no jokes please!) as opposed to tapping on a keyboard all day.
Having completed the project, it was a lot of fun. Ridiculous and completely impractical? YES. Good Lord, yes. But it was a lot of fun. Sanding and painting the case, cafefully using masking tape to create the flame pattern design (that's right, flames- I was going to maximum sillyness), cutting the window port in the side, installing a light inside, and so on.
Definitely one of those things where it's more about the journey than the destination. Obviously my new-looking computer doesn't run any faster, but it was a lot of fun to do. And pretty cheap, too- $15-20 for paint, $15 for the window, $20 for the light and bulbs. But it was a lot of fun to do!! It looks great now in a ridiculous way, but it was more about the fun of doing it.
Also, I don't know if I'd directly compare it to car-modding. Car-modding is tons more expensive and seems to be geared more towards showing off to others since you're driving around in public all day. Some people show off their cases at LAN parties and shit, but mine just sits under my desk. It wasn't to show off... it was just for fun.:)
Except that the person, was an agent of Nullsoft - agents of commercial entities *are* legally capable of entering into an license agreement. This protects the 2nd party (in this case the public) from Businesses backing out of a 'deal' saying "this person didnt have the right to obligate us" - in fact, (s)he does.
That raises some interesting possibilities. What exactly is stopping, say... the janitor of Time-Warner getting drunk and selling me the entire company for $1?
Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery:P
Opera was my favorite browser, I used and paid for it up until 6.02 or so. Since then I converted to Mozilla for a brief while, and then to Phoenix/Firebird.
Directly comparing Firebird to Opera... Interface-wise they're very close, with tabs, mouse gestures, etc. Performance-wise, they're both very good, although I suspect that on slightly older hardware Opera would have the edge.
I think what I *didn't* like about Opera was the integration of mail, browser, kitchen sink, etc, into one package. Some people *like* that and it's fine, just personal preference. They did a great job cramming all that stuff into Opera while keeping size/performance nice, but... well, it's still crammed in. I like separate, simple programs.
Also Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird seemed to render pages better than Opera6. It was a combination, I think, of the Gecko engine handling quirky pages better, as well as having more complete standards support. Supposedly this has been improved in Opera 7, though I like Firebird so much I haven't even tried Opera 7.
I'm not going to make any claims that the Xbox graphics quality will match that of a good PC with a good video card as such claims would be false (though the next gen with 1080i might be close enough for jazz), but trying to argue that the price factor is comparable between Xbox and PC is never going to make it in the truth department.
It's not necessarily a $200 XBox versus a $1000 PC, though. For a lot of people it's a $200 XBox versus a new $200 video card for the PC they already own. Or even a $100 video card for the PC they already own! Most people already HAVE a computer...
In a competitive market, if you don't lower price in the face of lower costs, your competitor will - and you will lose market share and therefore, ultimately, have a lower profit.
This doesn't really apply for intangible things like music. If you're building widgets for $1000 and selling them for $2000, I can figure out how to make my widgets and sell them for $1500 and blow you away- at least until you make your price cut.
But with music, it's a little different. If stores are selling CD's for $18, of *course* I can make CD's in my home studio and sell them for $3. But who would buy them? People don't buy CD's based on technical features, they buy them because they're buying Madonna(tm) or Backstreet Boys(tm) or Metallica(tm). The music, the name, the image.
We can make our little $3 CD's but people aren't going to buy them in large (comparable to major-label) quantities unless we make genuinely cooler music AND spend a shitload of cash getting radio play and doing promotion. That's really where most of the money major labels spend goes and why CD's cost a lot.
Sure, they might (probably?) have an ungodly profit margin, but it's hard to tell. The point is that unlike a lot of products you can't simply compete with the major labels on "price" and "features" alone...
Most of the articles I've seen about these small form factor and/or silent PC's seem to focus on the noise factor for living room use, since the most obvious use of these boxes is as a mp3/DIVX media player.
Well, I think that focus is misguided. I have a ShuttleSV24, the first tiny PC that Shuttle made. It's great, but the power supply fan is really annoyingly loud (recent Shuttle mini-PC's apparently have made great strides in this area).
It doesn't matter though, because the system is asleep 99.99% of the time... it's set to sleep after 5-10 minutes of inactivity. I just tap the keyboard to bring it out of sleep when I want to use it, and it goes to sleep by itself when I'm done. Perfect! So the noise doesn't matter... it's more than drowned out by the mp3/DIVX's I'm playing even at low volumes.
Now, sound output in PC's serving in desktop/workstation roles... now THAT'S a worthy topic!
Thats an idea. Just wondered though it they have TV out as what I would like is to use the box as a DivX/MP3/Streaming box. Thats what I'm using my current box for.
FYI... most of the reviews I've seen of the C3 have said it's a bit slow for DIVX decoding, I'm not 100% sure, but be sure to look into that before you buy one for that purpose.
Seem the FPU on the C3 is really slow. Don't complain too much, though... cutting back on power-hungry and die-space-consuming stuff like kickass FPU's is how they make these things so small/quiet/cool in the first place.:P
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You can't "make" someone interested in things, just encourage them when they show interest. Anyone looking for quick gratification is not going to stick with programming -- it just takes too much time and attention to detail for most people to tolerate.
Very true. However, surely exposing more people to it will let many more people get into it that would get into it otherwise, no?
When I was a kid I had no idea how games and other computer software was made. In fact I didn't even care. It's not that I couldn't figure out how it was made, it just never even crossed my mind. So typing in that first BASIC program was a bit of an epiphany- "wait, I can make my OWN stuff on here?"
Most people never even think about where software comes from. What I think is important is that first moment where the lightswitch goes on a people realized THEY can make computers do cool stuff too. Of course you can't make anybody be a programmer, but the more people who see how fun programming can be, the more people who will discover it....
And to really interest kids...how easy is it to put a biggish dot on screen and move it around? Once you've got that, plus maybe some kbd or controller input, you've given a kid all he or she needs to really have some fun tooling around.
:P
Excellent point, I agree 100%!
I've always thought games are what get most kids interested in computers. No five year-olds want to code the next SQL database server, but they'd love to make the next Mario game. That's what got ME into the business/hobby, anyway!
I would imagine that the parent would download and install the software for the child. Granted when I was a kid I had to figure it out for myself. But when/if I have a child I'll set an environment up for him/her if he/she expresses an interest in programming.
You and I would do that, sure. Would the other 99.9% of parents in the world, the ones outside our "hardcore computer user" demographic do the same? Nope!
Booting into BASIC was a godsend for budding programmers. I really wonder what the lack of that will lead to. (And blah blah blah "BASIC considered harmful"...I think the non-line-numbered versions are fine.)
:)
I wouldn't even mind the line-numbered versions. Obviously structered programming languages are far superior in every way, but I think anything that gets them into programming is cool! The kids that are into it will soon seek out more powerful languages anyway.
It's almost like... I don't have two craps about how crappy or uncrappy the language is, I just care about how easy "hello world" is. Ya know? Does that make sense? I want minimum entry barrier to a "hello world" program as my #1 critera for this mythical programming feature because if kids find it fun, they'll discover the rest on their own... but the crucial step is getting them to try it in the first place! Just IMHO.
Ideally I'd like to see Microsoft provide a really stripped-down of Visual Basic free with the OS. And it should be installed by default, and placed prominently on the Start Menu.
:P
This would provide something simple for kids (or newbies of all ages) to start playing around with. I think this would increase the number of kids getting into coding overall... which would help Microsoft as kids would be learning Windows programming early, and with more kids overall discovering coding you'd have more total kids "graduating" to more advanced stuff like real programming languages and alternative OS's like Linux, etc.
It would be a win/win situation for the advancement of programming, IMHO. Perhaps not a win for ME, though, as I'll have more kids competing for my coding job in the future. That problem is tough enough already.
IMHO, I think that kids who want to program will learn to program. I mean, the kids who learned everything about their computer 10 years ago didn't do it because the tools were there. The computer was something that interested them and they soaked up all they could when they could. The same is still true.
But how do kids get their interest sparked in the first place? Nothing beats booting up a computer and having a BASIC prompt staring you in the face, daring you to type in your first "10 PRINT 'I AM COOL' / 20 GOTO 10"-type program.
I always loved computers but who knows if my interest in coding ever would have been sparked if it hadn't been that easy to get started by farting around and making funny little programs like that.
Why the heck should a kid who's never coded before download a bunch of incredibly obscure (to THEM, not US) crap like Cygwin, etc just to pursue some totally unknown hobby? Some kids will still make this leap of course, but it's going to be LESS people than it would have been had there been a fun, built-in-to-the-OS, totally obvious, free way for kids to get started like you had in the 80's.
I believe it was dropped even more recently than that- in the past couple of days or so! I tried to dig up the link for you, but the Mozillazine.org forums are down. There was some disucssion in the Firebird forum by some of (I believe) project maintainers.
They mentioned that the MNG library was bigger than all other image libraries combined. They also seemed to indicate that it could be re-included if the size were reduced or if MNG became more widely-used. Again, seemed silly to me... I supported bloat reduction... but how can MNG become more widely-used if browsers don't support it?
This is such a sore point for me. To me the main raison d'etre for PNG's is that alpha transparency instead of the single-bit transparency that GIF's offer.
However, IE for Windows supports it *horribly*. If you want to use the alpha transparency feature of PNG's, you've got to jump through a lot of crappy, nonsensical IE-only hoops.
Here is a rather funny page (since the author's disbelief and anger at IE's horrible behavior is palpable) which does a good job of explaining the issue, and supplying a few workarounds.
It's a shame that IE is so crappy in this regard (and plenty of others, but that's another discussion)... there's no good reason for it. Apparently IE for Mac supports them just fine, btw... so it's not like Microsoft has some official PNG-hating policy, they just simply got sloppy with IE/Win. Another good example why too much share in a given market (in this case, web browsers for Windows) is a bad thing for competition. Why should they bother improving or fixing IE/Win? What's in it for them?
I don't know about other browsers, but MNG support has been dropped from Mozilla in recent builds. Apparently the MNG library was quite large (apparently just a few hundred k, though...), and rarely-used, so it was dropped as part of a bloat-reduction effort. Can't say I agree with them. More discussion can be found over at the mozillazine.org forums.
That's an interesting idea. I can think of a better way to do it, though. One problem with LCD's is the viewing angle. Viewing angles are getting better all the time, but at normal viewing distance some of those 2x2 monitors would look like crud. Also, usually the wall is a little too far away from the edge of your desk where you sit... you usually want those screens about, what... 15 inches from the end of your nose? One more thing... it's a lot easier to swivel your head left/right than up/down... you'd get tired of looking at the upper two screens in the 2x2 grid real quickly.
:P
:P
Probably the most "ideal" multi-monitor arrangement is to have them side-by side right on your desk! This way you can angle them into sort of a shallow u-shape and tilt them upwards a bit so you're getting ideal viewing angle!
If you want to get fancy, get some VESA mounting arms for your monitors so they're floating above your desk and can be easily rearranged at will.
Ahahaha.. like either of us can afford this! I should stop thinking about this now... although I have two 18.1" LCD's side-by-side already... I shouldn't complain! (still paying off the credit cards though...)
Just like when every employer requires you to sign away all intellectual property. You may sign freely, but in truth you have little choice.
Now, that's just not true. In my experience, and from what I've gathered from my general reading on the topic... 1) Many/most employers are willing to negotiate the terms of the contract, including intellectual property clauses. 2) While clauses like this are all too common, they're the far from "the rule" in my experience.
In my case... the clauses offered by my current employer basically said all IP created by me during the term of my employment were the property of my company. I asked it to be amended to simply say that all IP created by me during company working hours on company property/equipment was the property of the company. Also I had a clause inserted specifically stating that my website, Bootyproject.org, would remain my property.
They had no problem with that at all. Not all employers would be that flexible I'm sure, but to say a job-hunter has "little choice" is just not realistic.
I forget the specifics of the fable, but if she agreed to the contract out of her own free will and wasn't coerced in any way... then yes, it's the bitch's fault. :P
If you sign the contract, you're pretty much bound to it. I was faced with an employment contract like this at my current job. Thankfully I read the fine print, and thankfully my employer was flexible to edit those clauses out before I signed it. I certainly wouldn't have signed it otherwise.
But hey, if I'd signed a contract holding me to those sorts of terms, why shouldn't my employer be able to claim rights to everything I've done? I think it would be my fault for signing the contract, really....
I think this thing depends HIGHLY on how accurately it can place your ISP. At home my ISP is Speakeasy, so that would explain the US West Coast results I was getting since I *believe* Speakeasy is headquartered in the Pac NW.
Here at work (still in the Philly suburbs) it's giving me results from Illinois. I think it thinks I'm in Chicago, since that's where our ISP is headquarted.
In short this thing is utter rubbish in most cases... You think it would check my friggin' zipcode or something and make a slightly more intelligent stab at my location...
This is funny. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia too. Lafayette Hill. Trepia found people in Lancaster, then tokyo and Austria. But hey, people talking and complaining about Trepia finds me someone in my own backyard. Drop me an email mysterious one from the suburbs.
:P
Or I could just move to Antarctica so that you'd show up on my Trepia buddy list!
Just my two cents: it's adding people from all over the world to my list. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia USA (on the East Coast for those not familiar with the US) and it's adding people to my list from Australia, Scandinavia, California.... etc.
Another interesting note: I've got a few machines on my LAN. Installed it on machine #1. Then I installed it on machine #2 with a new account, different name, but with identical location information. The copy of Trepia running on machine #2 instantly saw the user I created on machine #1, but the copy of Trepia running on machine #1 never saw the user on machine #2. Also, I sent a message from machine #2 to machine #1, and it *just simply did not go through at all*.
Hmmm, pretty lame. So it works pretty good for user #2 (hey, I'm turning on Trepia, who's around?) but not so good if you've already got it running and want to see who's popped into your area lately.... or if you *actually want to message somebody else*.
Then I shut down Trepia on machine #1 to see if it would detect the Trepia user on machine #2 upon relaunch. Well, it can't log into the Trepia server. I guess they're Slashdotted. I wonder if that has anything to do with the crappy quality of the users found, and the non-functional chat... or if it just plain sucks, period.
The thing I enjoy about case modding is that it's not a well-known thing. On the few occasions that I've met someone with a mod, I know I'm dealing with someone a little more serious about their computer than most people, who just use them as mail stations.
Haha, good way to look at it. I was kinda thinking, "well this computer is pretty important to me, it's not the most important thing in my life, but it's one of my favorite things and also how i make my living. do i really want to be represented by a dull gray box?"
Ah, well, maybe the fact that I'm an all brainy person with absolutely no talent for arts and crafts might influence my opinion a litte bit. :-)
:P
Haha, nothing wrong with that. Myself I have always had some degree of artistic talent, but real experience painting or working with tools. Computer case modding and building props for cosplay (haha, dont laugh please!) have given me a chance to have fun cutting, sanding, and so on.
I never understood what people like about case-modding anyway.
:)
I always said the same thing. Recently however, I got the bug to mod my case! I got tired of looking at that boring thing and felt like doing something creative with my hands (no jokes please!) as opposed to tapping on a keyboard all day.
Having completed the project, it was a lot of fun. Ridiculous and completely impractical? YES. Good Lord, yes. But it was a lot of fun. Sanding and painting the case, cafefully using masking tape to create the flame pattern design (that's right, flames- I was going to maximum sillyness), cutting the window port in the side, installing a light inside, and so on.
Definitely one of those things where it's more about the journey than the destination. Obviously my new-looking computer doesn't run any faster, but it was a lot of fun to do. And pretty cheap, too- $15-20 for paint, $15 for the window, $20 for the light and bulbs. But it was a lot of fun to do!! It looks great now in a ridiculous way, but it was more about the fun of doing it.
Also, I don't know if I'd directly compare it to car-modding. Car-modding is tons more expensive and seems to be geared more towards showing off to others since you're driving around in public all day. Some people show off their cases at LAN parties and shit, but mine just sits under my desk. It wasn't to show off... it was just for fun.
Except that the person, was an agent of Nullsoft - agents of commercial entities *are* legally capable of entering into an license agreement. This protects the 2nd party (in this case the public) from Businesses backing out of a 'deal' saying "this person didnt have the right to obligate us" - in fact, (s)he does.
That raises some interesting possibilities. What exactly is stopping, say... the janitor of Time-Warner getting drunk and selling me the entire company for $1?
Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery :P
Opera was my favorite browser, I used and paid for it up until 6.02 or so. Since then I converted to Mozilla for a brief while, and then to Phoenix/Firebird.
Directly comparing Firebird to Opera... Interface-wise they're very close, with tabs, mouse gestures, etc. Performance-wise, they're both very good, although I suspect that on slightly older hardware Opera would have the edge.
I think what I *didn't* like about Opera was the integration of mail, browser, kitchen sink, etc, into one package. Some people *like* that and it's fine, just personal preference. They did a great job cramming all that stuff into Opera while keeping size/performance nice, but... well, it's still crammed in. I like separate, simple programs.
Also Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird seemed to render pages better than Opera6. It was a combination, I think, of the Gecko engine handling quirky pages better, as well as having more complete standards support. Supposedly this has been improved in Opera 7, though I like Firebird so much I haven't even tried Opera 7.
I'm not going to make any claims that the Xbox graphics quality will match that of a good PC with a good video card as such claims would be false (though the next gen with 1080i might be close enough for jazz), but trying to argue that the price factor is comparable between Xbox and PC is never going to make it in the truth department.
It's not necessarily a $200 XBox versus a $1000 PC, though. For a lot of people it's a $200 XBox versus a new $200 video card for the PC they already own. Or even a $100 video card for the PC they already own! Most people already HAVE a computer...
In a competitive market, if you don't lower price in the face of lower costs, your competitor will - and you will lose market share and therefore, ultimately, have a lower profit.
This doesn't really apply for intangible things like music. If you're building widgets for $1000 and selling them for $2000, I can figure out how to make my widgets and sell them for $1500 and blow you away- at least until you make your price cut.
But with music, it's a little different. If stores are selling CD's for $18, of *course* I can make CD's in my home studio and sell them for $3. But who would buy them? People don't buy CD's based on technical features, they buy them because they're buying Madonna(tm) or Backstreet Boys(tm) or Metallica(tm). The music, the name, the image.
We can make our little $3 CD's but people aren't going to buy them in large (comparable to major-label) quantities unless we make genuinely cooler music AND spend a shitload of cash getting radio play and doing promotion. That's really where most of the money major labels spend goes and why CD's cost a lot.
Sure, they might (probably?) have an ungodly profit margin, but it's hard to tell. The point is that unlike a lot of products you can't simply compete with the major labels on "price" and "features" alone...
Most of the articles I've seen about these small form factor and/or silent PC's seem to focus on the noise factor for living room use, since the most obvious use of these boxes is as a mp3/DIVX media player.
Well, I think that focus is misguided. I have a ShuttleSV24, the first tiny PC that Shuttle made. It's great, but the power supply fan is really annoyingly loud (recent Shuttle mini-PC's apparently have made great strides in this area).
It doesn't matter though, because the system is asleep 99.99% of the time... it's set to sleep after 5-10 minutes of inactivity. I just tap the keyboard to bring it out of sleep when I want to use it, and it goes to sleep by itself when I'm done. Perfect! So the noise doesn't matter... it's more than drowned out by the mp3/DIVX's I'm playing even at low volumes.
Now, sound output in PC's serving in desktop/workstation roles... now THAT'S a worthy topic!
Thats an idea. Just wondered though it they have TV out as what I would like is to use the box as a DivX/MP3/Streaming box. Thats what I'm using my current box for.
:P
FYI... most of the reviews I've seen of the C3 have said it's a bit slow for DIVX decoding, I'm not 100% sure, but be sure to look into that before you buy one for that purpose.
Seem the FPU on the C3 is really slow. Don't complain too much, though... cutting back on power-hungry and die-space-consuming stuff like kickass FPU's is how they make these things so small/quiet/cool in the first place.