If you want small and don't mind a tiny (128x128) screen, Nokia 6800s and 6820s are very tiny. The 6820 is the smaller and newer of the two and has bluetooth and a mediocre 352x288 camera and I like the keyboard on the 6800 a lot more--the keys on it are a bit larger and are physically separated, unlike the 6820.
However, you'll probably want something with a much larger screen. 128x128 isn't good for much more than things like 'service apache restart.' But it's tiny. To use, say, vi, you really do need something more like a Palm-ish smart phone.
"Chrome20 is by no means going to take on the high-end cards, instead looking to provide good performance for your more average user."
Average users don't tend to replace their cards very often. If they do, they'll go with a 6-month-old card from a major player, not a formerly-OK company that basically seems to be saying "Look at us! We're as good as anything else! w00t!"* And until computers run on $3/gallon gasoline, I don't think "lower power consumption" is going to move a lot of cards.
As for "better performance" when it comes to HDTV... huh? Lots of rigs today can play HD video just fine, and unlike games, video does not benefit much from an ability to show more FPS--once you get past 30, you're pretty much done. Besides, video playback--a series of raster images--has not been much of a problem for years now. It's rendering polygons that's hard.
Sorry, S3, but I don't think this will do much for you.
* except for the fact that it's not actually shipping yet, and those other cards have had drivers out for years, and games are already optimized for them, and...
And I'm guessing it will continue to lose sales to those who CARE about gapless playback. Everyone, HELP!
(Note: I own an iPod anyway. I just stew silently about the lack of gapless playback. Eh, CD players have only had this feature for 20 years, maybe it's just that no one at Apple has heard of it yet.)
The Flash... Dan Aykroyd The Hulk... John Belushi Antman... Garrett Morris
[Doorbell rings, the Flash moves to answer it.]
The Flash: I'll get it, Lois. [opens door, grunts and crouches as if putting his arm around someone] Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl! [laughs] Come on right in! [Spider-Man, looking rather thin, enters and shakes hands with Flash] Hey, Spider-Man! All right... [Antman, wearing a helmet with antennae, enters and shakes hands, but the Flash doesn't recognize him] Ah... Excuse me, I'm not sure if I remember your name. I'm really bad with names, you know.
Antman: [high-pitched voice] You don't remember me? We met several times. I is Antman. A-N-T-M-A-N.
The Flash: Oh, right, right.
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: Uh, Antman.
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: What are your super powers again? You - you - you talk to the ants, is that it?
Antman: Well, partly. But, mainly, I shrink myself down to the size of an ant while retaining my full human strength.
The Flash: Really?
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: [sarcastic] Oooh, that's really impressive. Size of an ant with human strength. You must be able to clean house on those other ants, huh? [chuckles] Hey! Hey, Hulk! Hey, check this guy out.
[The Hulk joins them. He and the Flash can barely keep from laughing at poor Antman and can't help chortling in-between their heavily sarcastic remarks:]
>> I laugh every time I see a PowerBook user go for the Apple menu with their trackpad and VWOOP!... Real timesaver, that.
> What happens when you mouse into any of the corners of the main display is configurable, including doing _nothing_. So if you find it a problem for you (or others) don't configure the corner response that way.
I know. But all my friends, new to Macs, get PBs and turn on every feature. It's not undo-able, just makes me laugh.
Not sure why you went on about the Apple menu. I know what it does, I was just making little a joke about how much more it used to be used (i.e., in every previous version of the OS, before the Dock existed.) The Dock prefs are accessible from the dock itself, there are keyboard shortcuts for logging out, shutting down, sleep, restart, and force quit; and the rest of the items I rarely use.
As for the clock: it and the Apple menu are what are in the top corners (well, in 10.3, anyway.) So that's why I was talking about it. And again, my point: there is already a reason to move the mouse into the top-right corner--to see the date--so setting that corner to do something will lead to similar problems as when you set the top-left corner to do something and then go for the Apple menu.
>> I hear 10.4 makes the corners clickable for the Apple menu and Sporlight.
> Don't folks read posts all the way?
Actually, I do. And then I read replies to your post before replying myself, then forgot who had mentioned what by the time I was writing.
And yes, I have left feedback. So have millions of others. And Apple won't listen, anyway. Why is there still no gapless playback on the iPod? I'm sure they've only had about a bazillion requests for that. I doubt my clock-date request is at the top of the pile.
Ah yes, the top left and right corners: a mere 10 pixels away (yes, I measured) from two buttons you may want to use: apple menu in the top left, and clock, username, or whatever you put up there in the top right. I laugh every time I see a PowerBook user go for the Apple menu with their trackpad and VWOOP! all their windows slide around. So they go up there, then back so things were as they were, then back again slowly. Real timesaver, that.
Oh well, the Apple menu has been mostly worthless for four years now anyway. And who ever clicks on the time, anyway? Oh, that's right: EVERYONE, since you can't (without a hack) show the DATE up there. (Dear Apple: I generally know what day of the week it since, since job and school both operate on a standard M-F week. What freaking DATE is it?!?!? How hard would it be to add one more checkbox to the list in the date/time prefs?)
I hear 10.4 makes the corners clickable for the Apple menu and Sporlight. It's also worth nothing that XP (finally!) lets you activate the Start menu with the bottom-left-corner pixel, and Windows since '95 has let you close a maximized window with a click in the absolute top-right corner.
The DBAs I worked with always told me "Postgres is better". But I tried it a good few years ago, couldn't install it, it didn't "just work", and I was not that good with Linux at the time, so I just moved on to the next thing - MySQL
Funny, I had the exact opposite experience. Postgres was the *only* database included with RH7 and all I had to do was check the box marked 'database server' during installation and it was there. A complete install included apache and php that would talk to it so that's what I used to start learning database-backed web apps a few years ago. No problems at all. A friend wrote a great tutorial on getting started--first with using PG at the command line, then going into PHP--and along with some SQL writings from Phil Greenspun I was all set.
It took many many tries, though, to get MySQL up and running, in that environment and many others. Usually some package didn't want to work because it wasn't quite 'free-as-in-free' enough. And that continues today: I just discovered that to get PHP with MySQL support with 'apt-get' on Ubuntu, you have to change where you get your packages from. I didn't start using MySQL until I started installing it on Windows (where PG, at the time, wouldn't run without Cygwin, and who the hell wants to do all that) and OS X (where Marc L. maintains a click-and-it-works package.)
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
The problem is not an inability to ship pennies. The problem is that users don't want micropayments and they never will. (Where 'micro' is in the penny/nickel/dime neighborhood.) "...micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?
"Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
"But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
"For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free."
Why do people keep building villages next to volcanos, museums with important artifacts in large cities, data centers in flood plains, major network hubs in cities.
A plane is flying over Arizona and at the pilot comes on the PA informing people that they can look out the window and see Meteor Crater. The pilot starts rattling off facts--that it's a mile in diameter, 500 feet deep, was caused by a 300,000-ton rock moving at 28,000 miles per hour... and a passenger says "Yeah, and it just missed the highway, too!"
You know, with just the tiniest bit of effort, it would be SO easy for you not to suck out loud. - take two seconds to see if a story has been posted before. sounds hard, but I hear computers can do amazing things these days. - proofread submissions. you're allowed to change them. you know, like an editor. - don't put an obnoxious slant on every little thing. more reporting, less commentary. if you have something to say, I hear slashdot allows comments nowadays. (comments, commentary... hmm. note to self, investigate possible connection.) - cache. for fuck's sake, it's not funny anymore. if you don't want to put yourselves at risk, use coral or a similar service. They exist for a reason. - contact small sites. which would you rather do: "scoop" other sites by an hour and reduce the server to molten rubble after 15 minutes, or contact the admin ahead of time and post the story two hours later? this is what separates responsible adults from behaviorally-challenged fuckwads. - and once you've earned some credibility back, - ??? - Profit! Until then, I refuse to pay to subscribe until you behave like a responsible outfit. one you quit behaving like retarded woms, I'll happily subscribe, knowing that you're a great source of links to interesting stories that I *didn't* see two days ago on the same site.
Like democracy, it's not perfect, but it's the best we've seen so far.
>No real power button is a poor idea if there is a slight chance that the OS might hang, which is the case.
Agreed, but mine has hung only a couple times in 2 years. My last three car stereos have also had "press and hold a button to turn off" 'functionality' and I hate it there, too. OTOH, I love that it comes on when I unlock it.
>The fonts are too big and don't allow to see most of the song's title
Depends. Since I no longer name my songs artist_name_-_album_name_-_song_name it's not a problem for me.
>There's no way to fast seek a song in a 4000+ list, you will have to accelerate the scrolling and will overshoot.
I had trouble getting used to non-constant-speed mice at first. You might overshoot, but practice makes you better (or did me, at least), and again, it's better than others. Even with overshooting, I can get from Abba to Queen faster than with any other player. Which would you rather do, assuming "get to it in 5 seconds on the first try" isn't a choice: 15 seconds of "scroll, overshoot, back, oops too far, forward, here we are" or two minutes of "scroll 5 names, scroll 5 names, scroll 5 names..." To be honest, I can usually nail a song pretty quickly. Also, I don't often page through my list of songs. I usually hit an artist/album or playlist.
>If I select an "Artist" for which no songs are marked as being in an "Album", I should not have to select "All"
Agreed, but that really is a minor quibble. I didn't say 'perfect,' I said 'great.' I'm sure there are little things not to like about Ferraris, too, that Ford gets right. Of course it's not perfect for everyone. It also lacks gapless playback, an FM tuner, and a million other things. But why do they have 80%+ of the market, and why did I buy one? Partly because of the trendiness, but mostly because it really is easier to use than others, and Just Works (tm).
And when I said UI, I didn't mean the software as much as their one great innovation--the scroll-forever wheel. Paging through lists on any other player is pretty painful. Being able to go and go and go with one continuous motion is great. You don't have to go full-speed all the time. Slow down a bit and it becomes much easier.
Ah, yes, of course. The age-old "Linux is easy--all you have to do is type..." response. Once, my dad sent me a copy of an NT4 120-day eval CD. He wrote the key wrong and I couldn't install. I asked him to email the key and he did, with a note at the bottom saying "If this doesn't work either, try other letters and numbers."
In all seriousness, thanks for the tip. I'll try it out as soon as I can. But yes, that *is* hard to find--you can wear your fingers down to nubs searching for 'php mysql' and related things before you find the one answer that works among the zillions of pages.
...describe a scheme that will work and allow all people involved to be making the same amount of money they're making now (not an unreasonable stipulation, I think). [emphasis added]
Actually, it is unreasonable. No offense, but that line of reasoning is holding society back, and that's not and exaggeration or hyperbole. Times change, technology improves. People used to get ice delivered. A whole industry existed of people carving ice out of lakes in the North and delivering it to people elsewhere, keeping it in great rooms filled with sawdust to keep it from melting, etc etc etc. Then, electronic refrigeration was invented and became cheap enough for everyone to have a magical electric box in their kitchen to keep things cool.
If time were shifted a few decades, we'd have "Ice Rights Management" today and you'd have two choices: 1) pay for big blocks of messy, melting ice to be brought to your door; drag these heavy, unwieldy blocks into a special box, where they would have to be replaced once they melted, or 2) pay $10/month in electricity to run your fridge and $290/month to the cartels to keep things "fair" for the poor ice workers.
How much better is the world now that we have healthy, non-spoiled food and extra money at the end of the month? How much better would the world be if we had full, unrestricted access to all the great creative works of humankind?
I love Stephen King's books and Jim Carrey's movies. But do they really deserve $millions per year while the people who serve you food and teach your kids and fix your car and house get by on $20-40k? Sure, he's talented, but so are the guys who write the code for GE that runs ultrasound machines, EKGs, air traffic control systems, direct-deposit software so you don't have to spend two lunch hours per month waiting in line at the bank, etc etc etc.
No, I'm not a communist. If you can make a lot of money doing easy work, great. But just because you reach that point, doesn't mean you are automatically entitled to that kind of income forever. The people who want to prop up these insane schemes are the true anti-capitalists: rather than letting the market decide what something is worth, they want to enact laws to keep their goods at an artificial high.
From TFA: Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.
Which is hysterical. Apple hyped the hell out of that announcement, and afterwards, everyone was just saying "An MP3 player? That's it? There's tons already" at best and "No wireless, smaller than a Nomad. Lame" [slashdot.org] at worst. No one realized that one key feature--a great UI--would set it apart and allow Apple to dominate the industry. Who would have thought at the time that it would re-define Apple as much as the iMac did 3 years earlier?
So, this new announcement is only half of the story. The other half is the effect it will have on (((whatever))) over the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, the patch is here: http://www.mozilla.org/patch-to-fix-the-problem-wi th-firefox-where-long-URLs-with-lots-of-hypohens-c an-cause-bad-things-to-happen-like-the-browser-wil l-crash-and-stuff.html
So the Adobe SVG plugin, which works fine in IE/Win and FF/Mac, will no longer be needed, which is great, since it crashes FF/Win! w00t!
If you want small and don't mind a tiny (128x128) screen, Nokia 6800s and 6820s are very tiny. The 6820 is the smaller and newer of the two and has bluetooth and a mediocre 352x288 camera and I like the keyboard on the 6800 a lot more--the keys on it are a bit larger and are physically separated, unlike the 6820.
However, you'll probably want something with a much larger screen. 128x128 isn't good for much more than things like 'service apache restart.' But it's tiny. To use, say, vi, you really do need something more like a Palm-ish smart phone.
Sweet! "Graphical Display of Data!" I can *totally* use that! :-)
"Chrome20 is by no means going to take on the high-end cards, instead looking to provide good performance for your more average user."
Average users don't tend to replace their cards very often. If they do, they'll go with a 6-month-old card from a major player, not a formerly-OK company that basically seems to be saying "Look at us! We're as good as anything else! w00t!"* And until computers run on $3/gallon gasoline, I don't think "lower power consumption" is going to move a lot of cards.
As for "better performance" when it comes to HDTV... huh? Lots of rigs today can play HD video just fine, and unlike games, video does not benefit much from an ability to show more FPS--once you get past 30, you're pretty much done. Besides, video playback--a series of raster images--has not been much of a problem for years now. It's rendering polygons that's hard.
Sorry, S3, but I don't think this will do much for you.
* except for the fact that it's not actually shipping yet, and those other cards have had drivers out for years, and games are already optimized for them, and...
Here's the latest iPod non-killer. (Story here.)
And I'm guessing it will continue to lose sales to those who CARE about gapless playback. Everyone, HELP!
(Note: I own an iPod anyway. I just stew silently about the lack of gapless playback. Eh, CD players have only had this feature for 20 years, maybe it's just that no one at Apple has heard of it yet.)
from SNL, The Early Years: Superman's Party
... Dan Aykroyd ... John Belushi ... Garrett Morris
The Flash
The Hulk
Antman
[Doorbell rings, the Flash moves to answer it.]
The Flash: I'll get it, Lois. [opens door, grunts and crouches as if putting his arm around someone] Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl! [laughs] Come on right in! [Spider-Man, looking rather thin, enters and shakes hands with Flash] Hey, Spider-Man! All right... [Antman, wearing a helmet with antennae, enters and shakes hands, but the Flash doesn't recognize him] Ah... Excuse me, I'm not sure if I remember your name. I'm really bad with names, you know.
Antman: [high-pitched voice] You don't remember me? We met several times. I is Antman. A-N-T-M-A-N.
The Flash: Oh, right, right.
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: Uh, Antman.
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: What are your super powers again? You - you - you talk to the ants, is that it?
Antman: Well, partly. But, mainly, I shrink myself down to the size of an ant while retaining my full human strength.
The Flash: Really?
Antman: Yeah.
The Flash: [sarcastic] Oooh, that's really impressive. Size of an ant with human strength. You must be able to clean house on those other ants, huh? [chuckles] Hey! Hey, Hulk! Hey, check this guy out.
[The Hulk joins them. He and the Flash can barely keep from laughing at poor Antman and can't help chortling in-between their heavily sarcastic remarks:]
The Hulk: Ooooh!
The Flash: He's got the strength of a human!
>> I laugh every time I see a PowerBook user go for the Apple menu with their trackpad and VWOOP! ... Real timesaver, that.
> What happens when you mouse into any of the corners of the main display is configurable, including doing _nothing_. So if you find it a problem for you (or others) don't configure the corner response that way.
I know. But all my friends, new to Macs, get PBs and turn on every feature. It's not undo-able, just makes me laugh.
Not sure why you went on about the Apple menu. I know what it does, I was just making little a joke about how much more it used to be used (i.e., in every previous version of the OS, before the Dock existed.) The Dock prefs are accessible from the dock itself, there are keyboard shortcuts for logging out, shutting down, sleep, restart, and force quit; and the rest of the items I rarely use.
As for the clock: it and the Apple menu are what are in the top corners (well, in 10.3, anyway.) So that's why I was talking about it. And again, my point: there is already a reason to move the mouse into the top-right corner--to see the date--so setting that corner to do something will lead to similar problems as when you set the top-left corner to do something and then go for the Apple menu.
>> I hear 10.4 makes the corners clickable for the Apple menu and Sporlight.
> Don't folks read posts all the way?
Actually, I do. And then I read replies to your post before replying myself, then forgot who had mentioned what by the time I was writing.
And yes, I have left feedback. So have millions of others. And Apple won't listen, anyway. Why is there still no gapless playback on the iPod? I'm sure they've only had about a bazillion requests for that. I doubt my clock-date request is at the top of the pile.
Ah yes, the top left and right corners: a mere 10 pixels away (yes, I measured) from two buttons you may want to use: apple menu in the top left, and clock, username, or whatever you put up there in the top right. I laugh every time I see a PowerBook user go for the Apple menu with their trackpad and VWOOP! all their windows slide around. So they go up there, then back so things were as they were, then back again slowly. Real timesaver, that.
Oh well, the Apple menu has been mostly worthless for four years now anyway. And who ever clicks on the time, anyway? Oh, that's right: EVERYONE, since you can't (without a hack) show the DATE up there. (Dear Apple: I generally know what day of the week it since, since job and school both operate on a standard M-F week. What freaking DATE is it?!?!? How hard would it be to add one more checkbox to the list in the date/time prefs?)
I hear 10.4 makes the corners clickable for the Apple menu and Sporlight. It's also worth nothing that XP (finally!) lets you activate the Start menu with the bottom-left-corner pixel, and Windows since '95 has let you close a maximized window with a click in the absolute top-right corner.
Yeah, it's really easy. Use an apostrophe when you want to show possession: Bob's, Sam's, It's.
Oh, wait, I followed the wrong rule in my "proof."
At least the whole "I before E" thing has a little rhyme that usually works.
No WML. Less styles than CSS Zen Garden. Lame.
The DBAs I worked with always told me "Postgres is better". But I tried it a good few years ago, couldn't install it, it didn't "just work", and I was not that good with Linux at the time, so I just moved on to the next thing - MySQL
Funny, I had the exact opposite experience. Postgres was the *only* database included with RH7 and all I had to do was check the box marked 'database server' during installation and it was there. A complete install included apache and php that would talk to it so that's what I used to start learning database-backed web apps a few years ago. No problems at all. A friend wrote a great tutorial on getting started--first with using PG at the command line, then going into PHP--and along with some SQL writings from Phil Greenspun I was all set.
It took many many tries, though, to get MySQL up and running, in that environment and many others. Usually some package didn't want to work because it wasn't quite 'free-as-in-free' enough. And that continues today: I just discovered that to get PHP with MySQL support with 'apt-get' on Ubuntu, you have to change where you get your packages from. I didn't start using MySQL until I started installing it on Windows (where PG, at the time, wouldn't run without Cygwin, and who the hell wants to do all that) and OS X (where Marc L. maintains a click-and-it-works package.)
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
The problem is not an inability to ship pennies. The problem is that users don't want micropayments and they never will. (Where 'micro' is in the penny/nickel/dime neighborhood.)
"...micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?
"Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
"But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
"For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free."
Bonus article here.
root@gx150:/root # apt-get install php4-mysql
E: Couldn't find package php4-mysql
root@gx150:/root #
Yeah. You're right. I suck.
Why do people keep building villages next to volcanos, museums with important artifacts in large cities, data centers in flood plains, major network hubs in cities.
A plane is flying over Arizona and at the pilot comes on the PA informing people that they can look out the window and see Meteor Crater. The pilot starts rattling off facts--that it's a mile in diameter, 500 feet deep, was caused by a 300,000-ton rock moving at 28,000 miles per hour... and a passenger says "Yeah, and it just missed the highway, too!"
this guy.
Google's been in print for years!
You know, with just the tiniest bit of effort, it would be SO easy for you not to suck out loud.
- take two seconds to see if a story has been posted before. sounds hard, but I hear computers can do amazing things these days.
- proofread submissions. you're allowed to change them. you know, like an editor.
- don't put an obnoxious slant on every little thing. more reporting, less commentary. if you have something to say, I hear slashdot allows comments nowadays. (comments, commentary... hmm. note to self, investigate possible connection.)
- cache. for fuck's sake, it's not funny anymore. if you don't want to put yourselves at risk, use coral or a similar service. They exist for a reason.
- contact small sites. which would you rather do: "scoop" other sites by an hour and reduce the server to molten rubble after 15 minutes, or contact the admin ahead of time and post the story two hours later? this is what separates responsible adults from behaviorally-challenged fuckwads.
- and once you've earned some credibility back,
- ???
- Profit! Until then, I refuse to pay to subscribe until you behave like a responsible outfit. one you quit behaving like retarded woms, I'll happily subscribe, knowing that you're a great source of links to interesting stories that I *didn't* see two days ago on the same site.
...the mayor of Biloxi said "This is our tsunami." WTF?!? I know there's lots of lost property, but 56 lives versus 200,000-plus? Hell, there were a thousand times more known dead in the first two days after last year's tsunami. I think he just won the Lifetime Insensetive Clod award. Or maybe he meant to say "This is our tsunami, except with 4,000 times* less loss of life since we had days of warning."
* do the math, that's not an exaggeration.
>It's not such a great UI.
Like democracy, it's not perfect, but it's the best we've seen so far.
>No real power button is a poor idea if there is a slight chance that the OS might hang, which is the case.
Agreed, but mine has hung only a couple times in 2 years. My last three car stereos have also had "press and hold a button to turn off" 'functionality' and I hate it there, too. OTOH, I love that it comes on when I unlock it.
>The fonts are too big and don't allow to see most of the song's title
Depends. Since I no longer name my songs artist_name_-_album_name_-_song_name it's not a problem for me.
>There's no way to fast seek a song in a 4000+ list, you will have to accelerate the scrolling and will overshoot.
I had trouble getting used to non-constant-speed mice at first. You might overshoot, but practice makes you better (or did me, at least), and again, it's better than others. Even with overshooting, I can get from Abba to Queen faster than with any other player. Which would you rather do, assuming "get to it in 5 seconds on the first try" isn't a choice: 15 seconds of "scroll, overshoot, back, oops too far, forward, here we are" or two minutes of "scroll 5 names, scroll 5 names, scroll 5 names..." To be honest, I can usually nail a song pretty quickly. Also, I don't often page through my list of songs. I usually hit an artist/album or playlist.
>If I select an "Artist" for which no songs are marked as being in an "Album", I should not have to select "All"
Agreed, but that really is a minor quibble. I didn't say 'perfect,' I said 'great.' I'm sure there are little things not to like about Ferraris, too, that Ford gets right. Of course it's not perfect for everyone. It also lacks gapless playback, an FM tuner, and a million other things. But why do they have 80%+ of the market, and why did I buy one? Partly because of the trendiness, but mostly because it really is easier to use than others, and Just Works (tm).
And when I said UI, I didn't mean the software as much as their one great innovation--the scroll-forever wheel. Paging through lists on any other player is pretty painful. Being able to go and go and go with one continuous motion is great. You don't have to go full-speed all the time. Slow down a bit and it becomes much easier.
Ah, yes, of course. The age-old "Linux is easy--all you have to do is type..." response. Once, my dad sent me a copy of an NT4 120-day eval CD. He wrote the key wrong and I couldn't install. I asked him to email the key and he did, with a note at the bottom saying "If this doesn't work either, try other letters and numbers."
In all seriousness, thanks for the tip. I'll try it out as soon as I can. But yes, that *is* hard to find--you can wear your fingers down to nubs searching for 'php mysql' and related things before you find the one answer that works among the zillions of pages.
...describe a scheme that will work and allow all people involved to be making the same amount of money they're making now (not an unreasonable stipulation, I think). [emphasis added]
Actually, it is unreasonable. No offense, but that line of reasoning is holding society back, and that's not and exaggeration or hyperbole. Times change, technology improves. People used to get ice delivered. A whole industry existed of people carving ice out of lakes in the North and delivering it to people elsewhere, keeping it in great rooms filled with sawdust to keep it from melting, etc etc etc. Then, electronic refrigeration was invented and became cheap enough for everyone to have a magical electric box in their kitchen to keep things cool.
If time were shifted a few decades, we'd have "Ice Rights Management" today and you'd have two choices: 1) pay for big blocks of messy, melting ice to be brought to your door; drag these heavy, unwieldy blocks into a special box, where they would have to be replaced once they melted, or 2) pay $10/month in electricity to run your fridge and $290/month to the cartels to keep things "fair" for the poor ice workers.
How much better is the world now that we have healthy, non-spoiled food and extra money at the end of the month? How much better would the world be if we had full, unrestricted access to all the great creative works of humankind?
I love Stephen King's books and Jim Carrey's movies. But do they really deserve $millions per year while the people who serve you food and teach your kids and fix your car and house get by on $20-40k? Sure, he's talented, but so are the guys who write the code for GE that runs ultrasound machines, EKGs, air traffic control systems, direct-deposit software so you don't have to spend two lunch hours per month waiting in line at the bank, etc etc etc.
No, I'm not a communist. If you can make a lot of money doing easy work, great. But just because you reach that point, doesn't mean you are automatically entitled to that kind of income forever. The people who want to prop up these insane schemes are the true anti-capitalists: rather than letting the market decide what something is worth, they want to enact laws to keep their goods at an artificial high.
As I said on Macslash,
From TFA: Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.
Which is hysterical. Apple hyped the hell out of that announcement, and afterwards, everyone was just saying "An MP3 player? That's it? There's tons already" at best and "No wireless, smaller than a Nomad. Lame" [slashdot.org] at worst. No one realized that one key feature--a great UI--would set it apart and allow Apple to dominate the industry. Who would have thought at the time that it would re-define Apple as much as the iMac did 3 years earlier?
So, this new announcement is only half of the story. The other half is the effect it will have on (((whatever))) over the next few years.
More info on early WinFS development is available here.