Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
In response to your.sig, it has been COMMONPLACE for DECADES to NOT use two spaces after a period when using proportional fonts. It's not just the Internet. Look at books, magazines, or anything published anywhere. Sorry you were taught to type on a typewriter and never got over it, but that's how it is.
Technically, it's a matter of style and there's no truly wrong answer, but the vast majority of the world uses one space after a period. Also, there are very good reasons not to use two spaces: "With two spaces, there is 'more' space to play with, and if space is added (which is most often the case) the results are white spots, and in some cases "rivers" of blank spots in the body of text. This makes the body both unattractive as a visual element, and distracting to read."
So find another outlet for your indignation. You're as close to wrong as you can get, and freaking out so flagrantly about something so easily researched just makes you look like an ass.
I'll go to my grave not understanding slashdot mods. The parent got a +5, insightful. I replied to a couple of his points and get nicked a point for being offtopic. If it's not a fabulous post and not worth modding up, fine, but offtopic? Yes, I'm talking about the iPod touch, but everything I say about it relates to the Nokia being discussed. WTF???
Good points, but the most important thing to remember is that everyone has different needs. You've gone through 3 phones in 8 months? I've had 5 phones in 10 years.
I need decent battery life, of course, but I wouldn't say "LONG" is a requirement. The iPhone's screen is fine, and since it's usually off, power isn't a problem. Size was one of my main concerns, but looks are deceiving--the iPhone is just a shade bigger (1/2" wider and taller, and 1/4" thinner) than my old Nokia 6820 (which was smaller than the 6800 it replaced) and it's not a problem for me.
The iPhone lacks "serious" Internet tools (IRC, SSH, VNC, etc) but most people don't use those. The lack of Flash sucks if you like Flash, but I haven't missed it a bit. Media playback is great, assuming the media you want to see/hear is in a codec it supports. The lack of GPS (or even cell-tower-based positioning) kinda bites, but that aside, the google maps app is great.
All that said, my original point is that everyone has different needs, and for most people, the iPhone or iPod touch is good enough. Maybe 50% of people looking for a web tablet would buy one--but a) not many people buy web tablets and b) lots of people will buy iPhones/iPods for their other capabilities. My opinion is that web tablet buyers are a small, extra-geeky subset of PDA buyers--which is to say, a very small market. A market that geeky admins very much want to see filled, but a small market nonetheless. So my answer to the question in the summary--"Will this prove any more successful than the two previous iterations of this offering?"--is "probably not." Well, technically, the question is will it be more successful than the previous versions, but "will it be a success?"--I doubt it.
1) check the link in my.sig for a possible streaming solution. (Actually, in case someone reads this in the future and I change my.sig, here it is: http://pixelcity.com/iphone-streaming-music/ ) Not sure what your UPnP requirement is, but if you want to listen to music outside your house (i.e., outside your network), all you need to do is open port 80. It's not a perfect solution--believe me, I'd *love* to have a native music player that let me listen to playlists, etc., rather clicking on one song at a time*--but it comes in handy for me when I feel like listening to a song I don't have on my iPod. (Now that I have that system, I actually have very little music on my phone--I use what little space I have for movies.)
2) Actaully, the iPod touch comes in 8 and 16 GB flavors. It's the iPhone that is (was) 4 GB and 8 GB.
* limited playlist support coming in November, thanks to an incredibly crude workaround I thought of.:-)
The iPhone has a 320×480 resolution screen. The 810 has 800x480. Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably, so the iPhone is not even a contender.
Which is why the iPhone pretends to be a 960px-wide screen and shrinks content, which you can then zoom in on and pan around. It's not an ideal solution--and one that would have never been needed if people would have designed web pages like they were meant to be designed, instead of leading us to the current situation where "Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably"--but it works pretty well.
And I like that it's not a phone, it means you're not locked into anything.
Which is why God^H^H^HSteve Jobs introduced the iPod touch. Which, by the way, is $200 less than this Nokia.
I'm not saying the iPod touch is better in every way than this Nokia. But it is in fact a quite decent web tablet, and if you don't need the features (removable storage, camera) of this Nokia, it's definitely worth looking at.
In 2008/2009, the dominant web tablet will be... the iPod touch.* Specifically, once it has been revved once or twice and you can get first-gen units for $100-150. At that point, buying one just for the Internet capabilities will be common. The iPod and iPhone are being sold as music players and phones, respectively, and that's why people will buy them en masse today, but sometime soon we'll turn around and realize that we've all got these great web tablets in our hands and that's when things will get fun. No one is rushing out to buy expensive, (mostly) single-purpose web tablets today--but people are rushing out to buy music players and phones that happen to have browsers.
One neat thing that will happen is early-adopters will start to do more cool home-automation stuff. Once all the devices in your home have built-in web-based control panels, every iPhone and iPod touch will become the ultimate universal remote. I'm not saying I'll pick it up every time I want to change the channel, but there are lots of other cool things I have in mind--lighting, security, etc. I'm in the midst of hooking up a security camera system at home that will feed into a Mac mini which will serve out the cameras' pictures like a webcam--so with my iPhone, I'll be able to check on my house at any time from anywhere. I'm hardly the first person to do this, but the main reason I am doing it is because I now have with me a small device that I can see the pics with at any time--at work, on the road, on vacation, with or without WiFi access.
* note to Nokia fans,anyone who thinks a 320x480 screen is too small, and anyone else who doesn't like the iPhone--I'm not saying it'll be the best web tablet, just the most common. My personal belief is that the iPhone's shrink-zoom-pan mode of web browsing is an inelegant workaround and I'd love more pixels. That said, it does do the job OK. And when looking at sites optimized for the small screen, it's great to have a device that is so physically small.
"...My first, last, and hopefully only ever COMDEX was in Las Vegas... We had a crazy booth. It was absolutely huge, with bean bags..."
I remember in the movie Revolution OS there was an interview with one of the Slashdot crew, at a tradeshow, in a beanbag chair... was that the same tradeshow? Which staffer was it?
...changing line numbers could unleash a horde of broken GOTO statements.
It's been a long time, but didn't RENUM change line number references, in addition to line numbers?
[later] OK, I just remembered that I have DOSBOX and an ancient copy of GWBASIC on my Mac so I fired them up and did a little test. (Yes, I should be working.) RENUM changed
1 print "hi" 2 goto 3 3 end
to
10 print "hi" 20 goto 30 30 end
RENUM is great, though it might have led to bad habits--write code first, add error-checking (a dozen lines between 40 and 50) later.:-)
BTW, we had both BASIC and LOGO in elementary school and I loved them both. Even into college, back before I knew any other tools, I would still ocasionally do things in BASIC like figure out how long it would take to pay off a credit card (and what the total amount paid would be) with a balance of $X, an interest rate of $Y, and a monthly payment of $Z. In fact, I think everyone should have to write a little program like that, both to learn a bit of programming and logic, and to see how screwed you can get if you let your debt get out of control.
And the iPod wasn't the first portable digital music player, either. What makes Apple's implementation kick ass is the fact that anyone can use it without having to read a manual. To make it start working, plug in a drive and check one box in System Prefs. To use it to retrieve a deleted file, just go to where the file should be, go back in time, find it, and click 'restore.' Making things easy to use and just work was Apple's original claim to fame and they're once again very strong in that area.
And of course, "automatic backups" are not a new concept in the first place, so there's no need to get into a pissing match about who had the first implementation. What matters is who got to market first with a good implementation. Once again, the winner is Apple.
Yeah, it really struck me as funny that Apple would link right to Wikpedia. Do you really want to look up 'rhomboid' and find out that ERIC LOVES COCK?
So why are they selling tracks at $0.89? To drive people away from the iTunes Store, knock it off its pedestal as the dominant online music retailer, and then jack up the prices once that has occurred...
Right there is the flaw in your argument. Say I buy a bunch of unrestricted MP3s from Amazon for $0.89, and then Amazon jacks up the price to $50.00 per track. What happens to me? Nothing! I've still got my MP3s. They still play. I don't have to send Amazon any more money. If Amazon jacks up the price, I'll go back to buying $0.99 iTMS tracks. No big deal. Amazon still has to compete.
Amazon is the best thing that ever happened to the iTMS. Now we've got honest-to-God competition! If Amazon lowers their prices, iTunes has to do the same to stay competitive. If Amazon raises THEIR prices, they lose business.
That's the whole point of and appeal of "no DRM." Buying non-DRMed tracks, I'm not in the same boat as the people who bought songs protected (restricted) with Microsoft's PlaysForSure technology only to find that they don't work on Microsoft's Zune. I'm not in the same boat as the people who bought tracks from Virgin and am now being told the only way I can keep listening to them is to burn them to CD and re-rip them. Amazon could triple their prices or go out of business tomorrow--the tracks I bought from them (I started buying the first week they were out) will NEVER GO BAD. There is NO WAY that Amazon can "screw me in the end."
What I am suggesting, and what I have done, is to put a moratorium on my online music purchases until things settle down a bit...
You've got it completely backwards. Unless you're hoping that the price of music drops, now is the time to buy! Buy all the DRM-less tracks from Amazon and Apple that you can afford* before they form a cartel, raise their prices, and bring back DRM. Buying non-DRMed music NOW will show them that selling non-DRM tracks is a good thing, and maybe, just maybe, things will stay good. Do you dislike DRM? There are now two major sources of non-DRMed music. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET! IT'S THE ONLY THING THEY UNDERSTAND!
Then, once that settles down, we can work towards dissolving the labels and getting more money to the artists. But that's a fight for another day.:-)
I looked at browsers for my Axim last year and concluded that they all mostly suck. Sadly, Minimo was the worst of the three I tried. (Others were MSIE & Opera.) It didn't run too great, didn't render pages too great (on my 640x480 screen, some elements were tiny, some were huge), it ran slow, and slowed down the whole PDA after it had been launched, even when not in use. Resetting the PDA was the only fix. I look forward to seeing what they come up with. Maybe they'll even address my biggest gripe--no browser on a PDA (that I've seen) really works like a desktop browser--I can't save pages, images, linked files, etc. My Axim is better in every way (more CPU, more RAM, more storage) than the Dell with Win95 and Netscape 3 that I had a decade ago but is still less capable in so many ways.
(Slightly OT) The zoom-in-zoom-out method of Safari on the iPhone works OK but it is, in fact, an inelegant workaround to make up for the fact that most web pages aren't designed the way web pages were designed to be designed--to let the content flow and resize based on the user's environment. Zooming works OK if your site is cut up into pieces with tables or DIVs but it really sucks for totally unstyled sites. I'd really rather just have a powerful, flexible browser.
100 comments so far and no one has commented on the built-in pun "Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front..."?:-) One of the things I love about my Mac mini is how quiet it is. Bring on the silent drives!
In other news, I still want a small laptop (preferably Mac) with a 10" screen, no optical or hard drive, and ~10 GB of solid-state storage. Maybe a low-power wireless card that only does 802.11b. Should weigh 2-3 pounds and run for 12-16 hours on a charge.
... crap like this just might upset enough people that change happens. Waiting two minutes to watch a movie on a $600 PS3 is ridiculous by anyone's standards, and I'm sure it will continue to get worse. Things might, just possibly, get bad enough that the MAFIAA throttles back a bit.
On the other hand, two decades of DOS and Windows have taught most of the world that crashes, freezes, and data loss are just how computers work--when in reality, a properly-designed system will rarely crash OR lose data--and having one core on a 2-way system dedicated anti-everything software is normal, so who knows what the hell we'll see in the future. Maybe one day we'll be telling our kids how fucking GREAT it was to only have to wait through a few moments of unskippable warnings, trailers, and menus on SD-DVDs.
IANARS, but I have to agree with his assessment. As he says, an Impala is not rocket-shaped. It's so un-aerodynamic that there would just be incredible amounts of turbulence all around, so sooner or later (probably sooner) gravity would win out, it would point downward, and it would be (ahem) all downhill from there. It might spiral some, too, but it wouldn't go up, and it wouldn't even go level for any reasonable amount of time. Make a paper airplane that's very short (front-to-back) and nose-heavy to see what happens. Like this one but even shorter. That's about how a 4,000-pound craft with no wings and a low (for a rocket) length:girth ratio would work.
In other words, there's a reason they put rocket engines into rocket-shaped things. Ever get a model rocket engine, hook up the igniter, and launch it all by itself? Me neither. That's why I've still got two eyes.
I wasn't thinking of too much detail, and I don't even care if the owners of those UIDs still log in or not, I'd just like to see the dates that 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100k, 200k, 300k, etc etc etc. were registered. And maybe if there was a surge just before 1,000,000 as people set up new accounts trying to get 999,999 or 1,000,000.:-)
Yeah, everyone knows they should have used some JATOs and an Impala.
(No, that's not a link to the joke--it's a link to the (very long, very good) story behind the joke. It's absolutely true... maybe. Regardless, it's a great read. If it's fake, it was written by someone good... always reminded me a bit of how Stephen King writes when he's not writing horror. Anyone know for sure?)
Since Google Desktop works by running its own little webserver, can you install Google Desktop on a server and access it by visiting http://server.ip.address:4664/ ? (I'm at work and my only Windows box has its firewall options set by group policy.)
Same with me. I finally registered because pages at the default threshold grew to over 250k (which took ages to come in at 33.6) so I made an account so I could set my default threshold higher. I was probably here 6-12 months before that happened. I wish they would publish a table showing the relationship between UID and date registered.
I hung around for ages without signing up, either. I finally signed up, not because I wanted to say something, but because you had to sign in to set a comment threshold, and once the pages started consistently hitting 250k at the default setting they were all taking waaaay too long to download at 33.6.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
.sig, it has been COMMONPLACE for DECADES to NOT use two spaces after a period when using proportional fonts. It's not just the Internet. Look at books, magazines, or anything published anywhere. Sorry you were taught to type on a typewriter and never got over it, but that's how it is.
In response to your
http://www.google.com/search?q=two+spaces+after+a+period
Technically, it's a matter of style and there's no truly wrong answer, but the vast majority of the world uses one space after a period. Also, there are very good reasons not to use two spaces: "With two spaces, there is 'more' space to play with, and if space is added (which is most often the case) the results are white spots, and in some cases "rivers" of blank spots in the body of text. This makes the body both unattractive as a visual element, and distracting to read."
So find another outlet for your indignation. You're as close to wrong as you can get, and freaking out so flagrantly about something so easily researched just makes you look like an ass.
I'll go to my grave not understanding slashdot mods. The parent got a +5, insightful. I replied to a couple of his points and get nicked a point for being offtopic. If it's not a fabulous post and not worth modding up, fine, but offtopic? Yes, I'm talking about the iPod touch, but everything I say about it relates to the Nokia being discussed. WTF???
Good points, but the most important thing to remember is that everyone has different needs. You've gone through 3 phones in 8 months? I've had 5 phones in 10 years.
I need decent battery life, of course, but I wouldn't say "LONG" is a requirement. The iPhone's screen is fine, and since it's usually off, power isn't a problem. Size was one of my main concerns, but looks are deceiving--the iPhone is just a shade bigger (1/2" wider and taller, and 1/4" thinner) than my old Nokia 6820 (which was smaller than the 6800 it replaced) and it's not a problem for me.
The iPhone lacks "serious" Internet tools (IRC, SSH, VNC, etc) but most people don't use those. The lack of Flash sucks if you like Flash, but I haven't missed it a bit. Media playback is great, assuming the media you want to see/hear is in a codec it supports. The lack of GPS (or even cell-tower-based positioning) kinda bites, but that aside, the google maps app is great.
All that said, my original point is that everyone has different needs, and for most people, the iPhone or iPod touch is good enough. Maybe 50% of people looking for a web tablet would buy one--but a) not many people buy web tablets and b) lots of people will buy iPhones/iPods for their other capabilities. My opinion is that web tablet buyers are a small, extra-geeky subset of PDA buyers--which is to say, a very small market. A market that geeky admins very much want to see filled, but a small market nonetheless. So my answer to the question in the summary--"Will this prove any more successful than the two previous iterations of this offering?"--is "probably not." Well, technically, the question is will it be more successful than the previous versions, but "will it be a success?"--I doubt it.
Two little things--
.sig for a possible streaming solution. (Actually, in case someone reads this in the future and I change my .sig, here it is: http://pixelcity.com/iphone-streaming-music/ ) Not sure what your UPnP requirement is, but if you want to listen to music outside your house (i.e., outside your network), all you need to do is open port 80. It's not a perfect solution--believe me, I'd *love* to have a native music player that let me listen to playlists, etc., rather clicking on one song at a time*--but it comes in handy for me when I feel like listening to a song I don't have on my iPod. (Now that I have that system, I actually have very little music on my phone--I use what little space I have for movies.)
:-)
1) check the link in my
2) Actaully, the iPod touch comes in 8 and 16 GB flavors. It's the iPhone that is (was) 4 GB and 8 GB.
* limited playlist support coming in November, thanks to an incredibly crude workaround I thought of.
The iPhone has a 320×480 resolution screen. The 810 has 800x480. Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably, so the iPhone is not even a contender.
Which is why the iPhone pretends to be a 960px-wide screen and shrinks content, which you can then zoom in on and pan around. It's not an ideal solution--and one that would have never been needed if people would have designed web pages like they were meant to be designed, instead of leading us to the current situation where "Anything less than 800 wide is not enough resolution to surf normal pages comfortably"--but it works pretty well.
And I like that it's not a phone, it means you're not locked into anything.
Which is why God^H^H^HSteve Jobs introduced the iPod touch. Which, by the way, is $200 less than this Nokia.
I'm not saying the iPod touch is better in every way than this Nokia. But it is in fact a quite decent web tablet, and if you don't need the features (removable storage, camera) of this Nokia, it's definitely worth looking at.
In 2008/2009, the dominant web tablet will be... the iPod touch.* Specifically, once it has been revved once or twice and you can get first-gen units for $100-150. At that point, buying one just for the Internet capabilities will be common. The iPod and iPhone are being sold as music players and phones, respectively, and that's why people will buy them en masse today, but sometime soon we'll turn around and realize that we've all got these great web tablets in our hands and that's when things will get fun. No one is rushing out to buy expensive, (mostly) single-purpose web tablets today--but people are rushing out to buy music players and phones that happen to have browsers.
One neat thing that will happen is early-adopters will start to do more cool home-automation stuff. Once all the devices in your home have built-in web-based control panels, every iPhone and iPod touch will become the ultimate universal remote. I'm not saying I'll pick it up every time I want to change the channel, but there are lots of other cool things I have in mind--lighting, security, etc. I'm in the midst of hooking up a security camera system at home that will feed into a Mac mini which will serve out the cameras' pictures like a webcam--so with my iPhone, I'll be able to check on my house at any time from anywhere. I'm hardly the first person to do this, but the main reason I am doing it is because I now have with me a small device that I can see the pics with at any time--at work, on the road, on vacation, with or without WiFi access.
* note to Nokia fans,anyone who thinks a 320x480 screen is too small, and anyone else who doesn't like the iPhone--I'm not saying it'll be the best web tablet, just the most common. My personal belief is that the iPhone's shrink-zoom-pan mode of web browsing is an inelegant workaround and I'd love more pixels. That said, it does do the job OK. And when looking at sites optimized for the small screen, it's great to have a device that is so physically small.
"...My first, last, and hopefully only ever COMDEX was in Las Vegas... We had a crazy booth. It was absolutely huge, with bean bags..."
I remember in the movie Revolution OS there was an interview with one of the Slashdot crew, at a tradeshow, in a beanbag chair... was that the same tradeshow? Which staffer was it?
Sadly, that company's history ended badly; one of the partners was billing the clients directly and ran off with the money...
... :-)
He would probably be pretty easy to find -- I bet he went FD 10 RT 90
It's been a long time, but didn't RENUM change line number references, in addition to line numbers?
[later] OK, I just remembered that I have DOSBOX and an ancient copy of GWBASIC on my Mac so I fired them up and did a little test. (Yes, I should be working.) RENUM changed to RENUM is great, though it might have led to bad habits--write code first, add error-checking (a dozen lines between 40 and 50) later.
BTW, we had both BASIC and LOGO in elementary school and I loved them both. Even into college, back before I knew any other tools, I would still ocasionally do things in BASIC like figure out how long it would take to pay off a credit card (and what the total amount paid would be) with a balance of $X, an interest rate of $Y, and a monthly payment of $Z. In fact, I think everyone should have to write a little program like that, both to learn a bit of programming and logic, and to see how screwed you can get if you let your debt get out of control.
And the iPod wasn't the first portable digital music player, either. What makes Apple's implementation kick ass is the fact that anyone can use it without having to read a manual. To make it start working, plug in a drive and check one box in System Prefs. To use it to retrieve a deleted file, just go to where the file should be, go back in time, find it, and click 'restore.' Making things easy to use and just work was Apple's original claim to fame and they're once again very strong in that area.
And of course, "automatic backups" are not a new concept in the first place, so there's no need to get into a pissing match about who had the first implementation. What matters is who got to market first with a good implementation. Once again, the winner is Apple.
Yeah, it really struck me as funny that Apple would link right to Wikpedia. Do you really want to look up 'rhomboid' and find out that ERIC LOVES COCK?
So why are they selling tracks at $0.89? To drive people away from the iTunes Store, knock it off its pedestal as the dominant online music retailer, and then jack up the prices once that has occurred...
:-)
Right there is the flaw in your argument. Say I buy a bunch of unrestricted MP3s from Amazon for $0.89, and then Amazon jacks up the price to $50.00 per track. What happens to me? Nothing! I've still got my MP3s. They still play. I don't have to send Amazon any more money. If Amazon jacks up the price, I'll go back to buying $0.99 iTMS tracks. No big deal. Amazon still has to compete.
Amazon is the best thing that ever happened to the iTMS. Now we've got honest-to-God competition! If Amazon lowers their prices, iTunes has to do the same to stay competitive. If Amazon raises THEIR prices, they lose business.
That's the whole point of and appeal of "no DRM." Buying non-DRMed tracks, I'm not in the same boat as the people who bought songs protected (restricted) with Microsoft's PlaysForSure technology only to find that they don't work on Microsoft's Zune. I'm not in the same boat as the people who bought tracks from Virgin and am now being told the only way I can keep listening to them is to burn them to CD and re-rip them. Amazon could triple their prices or go out of business tomorrow--the tracks I bought from them (I started buying the first week they were out) will NEVER GO BAD. There is NO WAY that Amazon can "screw me in the end."
What I am suggesting, and what I have done, is to put a moratorium on my online music purchases until things settle down a bit...
You've got it completely backwards. Unless you're hoping that the price of music drops, now is the time to buy! Buy all the DRM-less tracks from Amazon and Apple that you can afford* before they form a cartel, raise their prices, and bring back DRM. Buying non-DRMed music NOW will show them that selling non-DRM tracks is a good thing, and maybe, just maybe, things will stay good. Do you dislike DRM? There are now two major sources of non-DRMed music. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET! IT'S THE ONLY THING THEY UNDERSTAND!
Then, once that settles down, we can work towards dissolving the labels and getting more money to the artists. But that's a fight for another day.
Your URL plugged in the story...
Well, if anyone needs something "plugged in", it's him.
Maybe it uses an integrated video chipset that shares the main memory. D'oh!
:-)
In that case, the best advice would be "Go into the BIOS and dial it down to 1MB."
I looked at browsers for my Axim last year and concluded that they all mostly suck. Sadly, Minimo was the worst of the three I tried. (Others were MSIE & Opera.) It didn't run too great, didn't render pages too great (on my 640x480 screen, some elements were tiny, some were huge), it ran slow, and slowed down the whole PDA after it had been launched, even when not in use. Resetting the PDA was the only fix. I look forward to seeing what they come up with. Maybe they'll even address my biggest gripe--no browser on a PDA (that I've seen) really works like a desktop browser--I can't save pages, images, linked files, etc. My Axim is better in every way (more CPU, more RAM, more storage) than the Dell with Win95 and Netscape 3 that I had a decade ago but is still less capable in so many ways.
(Slightly OT) The zoom-in-zoom-out method of Safari on the iPhone works OK but it is, in fact, an inelegant workaround to make up for the fact that most web pages aren't designed the way web pages were designed to be designed--to let the content flow and resize based on the user's environment. Zooming works OK if your site is cut up into pieces with tables or DIVs but it really sucks for totally unstyled sites. I'd really rather just have a powerful, flexible browser.
100 comments so far and no one has commented on the built-in pun "Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front..."? :-) One of the things I love about my Mac mini is how quiet it is. Bring on the silent drives!
In other news, I still want a small laptop (preferably Mac) with a 10" screen, no optical or hard drive, and ~10 GB of solid-state storage. Maybe a low-power wireless card that only does 802.11b. Should weigh 2-3 pounds and run for 12-16 hours on a charge.
... crap like this just might upset enough people that change happens. Waiting two minutes to watch a movie on a $600 PS3 is ridiculous by anyone's standards, and I'm sure it will continue to get worse. Things might, just possibly, get bad enough that the MAFIAA throttles back a bit.
On the other hand, two decades of DOS and Windows have taught most of the world that crashes, freezes, and data loss are just how computers work--when in reality, a properly-designed system will rarely crash OR lose data--and having one core on a 2-way system dedicated anti-everything software is normal, so who knows what the hell we'll see in the future. Maybe one day we'll be telling our kids how fucking GREAT it was to only have to wait through a few moments of unskippable warnings, trailers, and menus on SD-DVDs.
...the new Mexifornian economy is strong...
Funny post, but it's actually the case that if California were a country, it would have one of the highest GDP/GNPs in the world.
http://www.google.com/search?q=california+gnp
http://www.google.com/search?q=california+gdp
It also means if you suspect your passenger has died en route to the hospital, you must merge back into the general lanes.
Thank you for the funniest post I've seen on Slashdot in months.
IANARS, but I have to agree with his assessment. As he says, an Impala is not rocket-shaped. It's so un-aerodynamic that there would just be incredible amounts of turbulence all around, so sooner or later (probably sooner) gravity would win out, it would point downward, and it would be (ahem) all downhill from there. It might spiral some, too, but it wouldn't go up, and it wouldn't even go level for any reasonable amount of time. Make a paper airplane that's very short (front-to-back) and nose-heavy to see what happens. Like this one but even shorter. That's about how a 4,000-pound craft with no wings and a low (for a rocket) length:girth ratio would work.
In other words, there's a reason they put rocket engines into rocket-shaped things. Ever get a model rocket engine, hook up the igniter, and launch it all by itself? Me neither. That's why I've still got two eyes.
I wasn't thinking of too much detail, and I don't even care if the owners of those UIDs still log in or not, I'd just like to see the dates that 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100k, 200k, 300k, etc etc etc. were registered. And maybe if there was a surge just before 1,000,000 as people set up new accounts trying to get 999,999 or 1,000,000. :-)
Yeah, everyone knows they should have used some JATOs and an Impala.
(No, that's not a link to the joke--it's a link to the (very long, very good) story behind the joke. It's absolutely true... maybe. Regardless, it's a great read. If it's fake, it was written by someone good... always reminded me a bit of how Stephen King writes when he's not writing horror. Anyone know for sure?)
Since Google Desktop works by running its own little webserver, can you install Google Desktop on a server and access it by visiting http://server.ip.address:4664/ ? (I'm at work and my only Windows box has its firewall options set by group policy.)
Same with me. I finally registered because pages at the default threshold grew to over 250k (which took ages to come in at 33.6) so I made an account so I could set my default threshold higher. I was probably here 6-12 months before that happened. I wish they would publish a table showing the relationship between UID and date registered.
I hung around for ages without signing up, either. I finally signed up, not because I wanted to say something, but because you had to sign in to set a comment threshold, and once the pages started consistently hitting 250k at the default setting they were all taking waaaay too long to download at 33.6.