I just registered my complaint, and explained the scenarios where this is useful to me (searching on information about older products since otherwise, posts about the latest version tend to dominate), and indicating that the scenario applied to a significant part of my Google Groups use.
I'd suggest other people posting complaints also use clear examples of why the feature remains so relevant.
The battery exchange idea is interesting, but its not without its complications.
1. You need standards for battery sizes if this scheme is going to be useful.
2. Batteries are heavy, so you are probably going to need automation in order to make a batter swap as quick and pain free as filling a car. For the automation to work, you are going to need additional standards for placement and/or discovery of the batter compartment, etc.
3. Batteries are expensive, much more so than a ~30 steel propane tank. I think a typical hybird has a few grand worth of batteries in it. Presumably a battery-only vehicle would need even more. This is capital that needs to be invested and paid for (interest payments + reasonable financial return + depreciation as the batteries wear outh).
4. You are talking about building yet another transportation fueling infrastructure with all the expense of that (beyond the cost of batteries mentioned above). One advantage of hybrids is that they use the existing infrastructure for powering gasoline powered vehicles. One of the disadvantages of fuel-cell powered vehicles is that they too need extensive new infrastructure. I'm not convinced that it would be better to build a battery-exchange infrastructure over a hydrogen-fuel infrastructure.
But Bush has been completely incompetent in his handling of Iraq. His incompetence has basically handed it to the insurgents (including terrorists like Al Zarqawi who he failed to neutralize). His incompetence has left this country weakened beyond measure, unable to act alone on issues like Iran, North Korea, and others, and at a severe disadvantage when trying to attract international help.
So iTunes just assumes that you don't want to be burdened by a bunch of DRM crap when encoding your own CDs. Microsoft isn't really sure what you want, so they are going to default to activating the DRM crap and make you read a damn popup which you may or may not pay any attention to because what you really want to do is use the damn program you just installed.
Did you notice the size of the GDS download for windows? It's under half a MB including the installer code. I find it hard to imagine that it wouldn't be at least 2-3x that size if they'd used some sort of abstraction layer. Size is important. The bigger the download, the worse the user experience of downloading.
I'd guess that Google probably has VERY good stats on what OSs Google users are using.
They also probably realize that among the influencers in chattering classes (bloggers, journalists, etc), Macs enjoy a higher than average marketshare.
Note, AAC isn't an apple proprietary compression format. iTMS wraps AAC in a DRM format that, at least to date, is apple proprietary.
Apple supports unDRMed AAC and in fact, has no way for users to created DRMed AAC. Contrast this to Microsoft. Their media player defaults to ripping stuff in DRMed WMA so that ignorant users can't share stuff from CDs they bought with their freinds.
How many windows apps use IE as a browser control?
An assload, that's how many. There are at least 3 alternabrowsers based on IE, I doubt that any of them have more than two developers. Most every windows based RSS aggregator i've used uses the IE control.
Why is this the case?
I don't know first hand, but I hear its because its an easy thing to do. I've heard from a few people that mozilla is a pain to embed. Its a shame, too.
You're partially correct. The Dell 2001FP contains a LG.Philips LM201U04 panel. The rest of the monitor is Dell designed; although not Dell built. I don't know that I'd say it was Dell-designed. They probably came up with a specification (including target price) and either farmed it out to a design house to design an implementation, or left it to their manufacturing partners to come up with a design that met the spec.
Nope, they've created the 21st century equivalent of a global radio network where each user can decide the programming line-up for themselves, or defer to the judgement of others, rather being limited to the programming decisions of the program directors at a few national or regional media companies.
Adam curry still owes me a t shirt for helping him get eudora working to retrieve mail from his pop-less shell account. Somehow, after a decade, I don't think I'm getting it.
I'll need to try iPodder. Maybe that'll made up for the lingering sense of betrayal.
Nowhere near "all of our troops" are in Iraq. We've got about 125,000 troops in Iraq. That includes Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, and significant numbers of National Guard troops.
Nowhere near all of our troops may be committed to Iraq, but one has to wonder, how many more people could we mobilize for a land war? If we had more people available, wouldn't it make sense to send them to Iraq to give them combat experience and either increase troop strength, or alleviate the fatigue and raise the morale of the troops already there.
As for you seoul scenario. Annihilation amounts to the death of nearly every soul in Seoul. Its hard to imagine that a couple of hours or even a couple of days of artillary fire could acheive such an outcome. Even a fission bomb would be unlikely to acheive such devastation.
But is a manhunt what is really called for in Afghanistan?
The country is sliding back into the condition it was in before we invaded. Warlords control huge peices of territory, the Taliban are resurgent. It'll be another breeding ground for extremists and summer camp for terrorists they way things are going now.
Besides, you math is off. 17,900 is appearantly to few people for a manhunt in Afghanistan, given that Bin Ladin has evaded capture.
134,000 troops isn't enough to overthrow invade an established country, overtrow its government and occupy a resisting population. It wasn't enough to round up loyalists on our way to overthrowing the government, and it wasn't enough to properly secure arms depots, which is part of the reason it isn't enough to occupy a resisting population -- The average # of American soldiers killed per day is climbing, and has been since the transfer of power at the end of june; at the same time the US is rushing to turn security responsibility for more and more territory over to Iraqi forces. In other words, people are dying faster defending less territory.
Whether or not the university has the right to prohibit the use of APs connected to other ISPs is an interesting issue.
More interesting is that WiFi technology isn't scaling. Here we have a real world situation where the density of devices operating in unlicensed spectrum is so great as to cause a significant degredation in utility to the extent that the uni is trying to impose its own regulations.
Why do people insist on calling these cameras disposable?
The business model is basically to rent them out for a rather steep $20, which gets you use of the camera until you fill the on-board memory and then a CD with your images after.
My guess is that the retailers have a minimal markup on the camera with the expectation that they will make their money doing digital prints.
The manufacturer makes their money by being able to rent the same camera multiple times.
Certainly some of the cameras will be "lost" to hackers, but this is a cost of doing business and is probably far cheaper than creating and inforcing some sort of deposit mechanism since, for the average user, the "deposit" is the precious memories stored on the camera that they can only get back by returning the camera.
If "hacking" of the cameras become widespread, then one can expect that the company will either take action or go out of business.
If they take action, there will no doubt be much grousing among the slashdot community, but really, what right does a parasite have to complain when the host its bleeding dry seems to extingish it? Better to keep a low profile.
I apologize if you think I'm a sexist or a racist... but if you do, you apparently need to re-read my post.
Somehow I doubt that apology is sincere. In anycase, I have reread your post.
I keep coming back to your second to last paragraph in which you justify the meanings behind your use of the words bitch and nigger by charactarizing all women and a majority of black people according to broad and extremely negative stereotypes.
Dude, I've no doubt that bitch means that to you and a bunch of your freinds, but you are fooling yourself if you think the average woman is going to have the same understanding of your "nuanced" use of the word that you do.
Even so, I think you are fooling yourself yourself by downplaying the the fact that calling a man a "bitch" is an insult in part because of the insinuation that he is somehow like a woman. Now why would a woman be offended by that?
So, words are harmless, but their meanings arent? How on earth do you divorce the two? Doing so would seem to negate the value of language.
Granted, some words have ambigious meanings, expecially in different contexts. But then why would you use a word with a very personal meaning around someone who isn't in on the secret? It would seem to me that you are re-inforcing your separateness from them.
So, the author's point holds: don't use the word bitch around women in your CS department that you don't know well because its going to drive a wedge between you and them, both because you are using it as a "secret handshake" and because the more broadly accepted meaning is an insult against women.
No complaining about them taking it the wrong way when you haven't done anything to include them and bring them into your shared context, so you and they have a shared understanding of the "right way".
So, either Katie T. is being an unsavory human being in allowing her lawyer to harrass and bully Katie J.
Or: Katie T. has just given her lawyer broad agency to pursue her interests. If so, then I'd say that the lawyer is failing to serve her clients interests in inviting all this bad publicity.
And/Or: Katie T's lawyer is basically latched on to Katie T. and is exploiting her for her own gain, little different than the pedo who exploited her in the first place.
Either way, the attorney should be fired, or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I just registered my complaint, and explained the scenarios where this is useful to me (searching on information about older products since otherwise, posts about the latest version tend to dominate), and indicating that the scenario applied to a significant part of my Google Groups use.
I'd suggest other people posting complaints also use clear examples of why the feature remains so relevant.
The battery exchange idea is interesting, but its not without its complications.
1. You need standards for battery sizes if this scheme is going to be useful.
2. Batteries are heavy, so you are probably going to need automation in order to make a batter swap as quick and pain free as filling a car. For the automation to work, you are going to need additional standards for placement and/or discovery of the batter compartment, etc.
3. Batteries are expensive, much more so than a ~30 steel propane tank. I think a typical hybird has a few grand worth of batteries in it. Presumably a battery-only vehicle would need even more. This is capital that needs to be invested and paid for (interest payments + reasonable financial return + depreciation as the batteries wear outh).
4. You are talking about building yet another transportation fueling infrastructure with all the expense of that (beyond the cost of batteries mentioned above). One advantage of hybrids is that they use the existing infrastructure for powering gasoline powered vehicles. One of the disadvantages of fuel-cell powered vehicles is that they too need extensive new infrastructure. I'm not convinced that it would be better to build a battery-exchange infrastructure over a hydrogen-fuel infrastructure.
But Bush has been completely incompetent in his handling of Iraq. His incompetence has basically handed it to the insurgents (including terrorists like Al Zarqawi who he failed to neutralize). His incompetence has left this country weakened beyond measure, unable to act alone on issues like Iran, North Korea, and others, and at a severe disadvantage when trying to attract international help.
So iTunes just assumes that you don't want to be burdened by a bunch of DRM crap when encoding your own CDs. Microsoft isn't really sure what you want, so they are going to default to activating the DRM crap and make you read a damn popup which you may or may not pay any attention to because what you really want to do is use the damn program you just installed.
A big improvement.
Did you notice the size of the GDS download for windows? It's under half a MB including the installer code. I find it hard to imagine that it wouldn't be at least 2-3x that size if they'd used some sort of abstraction layer. Size is important. The bigger the download, the worse the user experience of downloading.
I'd guess that Google probably has VERY good stats on what OSs Google users are using.
They also probably realize that among the influencers in chattering classes (bloggers, journalists, etc), Macs enjoy a higher than average marketshare.
Note,
AAC isn't an apple proprietary compression format. iTMS wraps AAC in a DRM format that, at least to date, is apple proprietary.
Apple supports unDRMed AAC and in fact, has no way for users to created DRMed AAC. Contrast this to Microsoft. Their media player defaults to ripping stuff in DRMed WMA so that ignorant users can't share stuff from CDs they bought with their freinds.
Yeah, but a lot of geeks are blind to the obvious when it comes to women.
I know I was, girls practically had to club me before I realized they were interested.
How many windows apps use IE as a browser control?
An assload, that's how many. There are at least 3 alternabrowsers based on IE, I doubt that any of them have more than two developers. Most every windows based RSS aggregator i've used uses the IE control.
Why is this the case?
I don't know first hand, but I hear its because its an easy thing to do. I've heard from a few people that mozilla is a pain to embed. Its a shame, too.
You're partially correct. The Dell 2001FP contains a LG.Philips LM201U04 panel. The rest of the monitor is Dell designed; although not Dell built.
I don't know that I'd say it was Dell-designed. They probably came up with a specification (including target price) and either farmed it out to a design house to design an implementation, or left it to their manufacturing partners to come up with a design that met the spec.
Nope, they've created the 21st century equivalent of a global radio network where each user can decide the programming line-up for themselves, or defer to the judgement of others, rather being limited to the programming decisions of the program directors at a few national or regional media companies.
Adam curry still owes me a t shirt for helping him get eudora working to retrieve mail from his pop-less shell account. Somehow, after a decade, I don't think I'm getting it.
I'll need to try iPodder. Maybe that'll made up for the lingering sense of betrayal.
Responding to the post, not the article:
Portability has been an important feature of audio formats for years.
1. 45 RPM records. Relatively durable with a hole big enough to stick a thumb through for ease of carrying.
2. 8-track and casette tapes. Made car and portable audio practical.
Nowhere near "all of our troops" are in Iraq. We've got about 125,000 troops in Iraq. That includes Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, and significant numbers of National Guard troops.
Nowhere near all of our troops may be committed to Iraq, but one has to wonder, how many more people could we mobilize for a land war? If we had more people available, wouldn't it make sense to send them to Iraq to give them combat experience and either increase troop strength, or alleviate the fatigue and raise the morale of the troops already there.
As for you seoul scenario. Annihilation amounts to the death of nearly every soul in Seoul. Its hard to imagine that a couple of hours or even a couple of days of artillary fire could acheive such an outcome. Even a fission bomb would be unlikely to acheive such devastation.
But is a manhunt what is really called for in Afghanistan?
The country is sliding back into the condition it was in before we invaded. Warlords control huge peices of territory, the Taliban are resurgent. It'll be another breeding ground for extremists and summer camp for terrorists they way things are going now.
Besides, you math is off. 17,900 is appearantly to few people for a manhunt in Afghanistan, given that Bin Ladin has evaded capture.
134,000 troops isn't enough to overthrow invade an established country, overtrow its government and occupy a resisting population. It wasn't enough to round up loyalists on our way to overthrowing the government, and it wasn't enough to properly secure arms depots, which is part of the reason it isn't enough to occupy a resisting population -- The average # of American soldiers killed per day is climbing, and has been since the transfer of power at the end of june; at the same time the US is rushing to turn security responsibility for more and more territory over to Iraqi forces. In other words, people are dying faster defending less territory.
Whether or not the university has the right to prohibit the use of APs connected to other ISPs is an interesting issue.
More interesting is that WiFi technology isn't scaling. Here we have a real world situation where the density of devices operating in unlicensed spectrum is so great as to cause a significant degredation in utility to the extent that the uni is trying to impose its own regulations.
I agree from a positioning/marketing point of view. But I think a front page post should make the distinction clear.
should be "seeks to extinguish it"
shoulda used preview
Why do people insist on calling these cameras disposable?
The business model is basically to rent them out for a rather steep $20, which gets you use of the camera until you fill the on-board memory and then a CD with your images after.
My guess is that the retailers have a minimal markup on the camera with the expectation that they will make their money doing digital prints.
The manufacturer makes their money by being able to rent the same camera multiple times.
Certainly some of the cameras will be "lost" to hackers, but this is a cost of doing business and is probably far cheaper than creating and inforcing some sort of deposit mechanism since, for the average user, the "deposit" is the precious memories stored on the camera that they can only get back by returning the camera.
If "hacking" of the cameras become widespread, then one can expect that the company will either take action or go out of business.
If they take action, there will no doubt be much grousing among the slashdot community, but really, what right does a parasite have to complain when the host its bleeding dry seems to extingish it? Better to keep a low profile.
I apologize if you think I'm a sexist or a racist... but if you do, you apparently need to re-read my post.
Somehow I doubt that apology is sincere. In anycase, I have reread your post.
I keep coming back to your second to last paragraph in which you justify the meanings behind your use of the words bitch and nigger by charactarizing all women and a majority of black people according to broad and extremely negative stereotypes.
But you aren't a racist.
Dude, I've no doubt that bitch means that to you and a bunch of your freinds, but you are fooling yourself if you think the average woman is going to have the same understanding of your "nuanced" use of the word that you do.
Even so, I think you are fooling yourself yourself by downplaying the the fact that calling a man a "bitch" is an insult in part because of the insinuation that he is somehow like a woman. Now why would a woman be offended by that?
So, words are harmless, but their meanings arent? How on earth do you divorce the two? Doing so would seem to negate the value of language.
Granted, some words have ambigious meanings, expecially in different contexts. But then why would you use a word with a very personal meaning around someone who isn't in on the secret? It would seem to me that you are re-inforcing your separateness from them.
So, the author's point holds: don't use the word bitch around women in your CS department that you don't know well because its going to drive a wedge between you and them, both because you are using it as a "secret handshake" and because the more broadly accepted meaning is an insult against women.
No complaining about them taking it the wrong way when you haven't done anything to include them and bring them into your shared context, so you and they have a shared understanding of the "right way".
So, either Katie T. is being an unsavory human being in allowing her lawyer to harrass and bully Katie J.
Or: Katie T. has just given her lawyer broad agency to pursue her interests. If so, then I'd say that the lawyer is failing to serve her clients interests in inviting all this bad publicity.
And/Or: Katie T's lawyer is basically latched on to Katie T. and is exploiting her for her own gain, little different than the pedo who exploited her in the first place.
Either way, the attorney should be fired, or worse.
This whole controversy sounds like something drummed up by one of Coca Cola's PR flacks to promote their summer promotional campaign.
I feel icky.
Why, exactly, does this make you sigh?