...not only in the posts I read here, but also in Japan where last time I went there, I was surprised when someone told his friend who was contemplating buying a VAIO: "Sony wa hidoi!" which translates roughly by "Sony, what a piece of crap!"
I used to own a VAIO Z505 and loved it, then I got a VAIO R505 and couldn't figure out why Sony had made the fan constantly working WITH a variable speed. Had it been rotating at a constant speed, it would have been ok, but the change in speed got on my nerves. The keyboard was soso and the finish kinda cheap (wasup with all the plastic crap around), I returned the unit (and shelved a 10% restocking fee, bastards!) I also wasn't very pleased when I got a picturebook with WindowsMe to find out that there web site didn't have the drivers if I wanted to update to Windows2K. This one was also returned before the end of month. With Thinkpads and Dells, I never was disappointed, but Sony, I am afraid that something wrong will happen again. Beside, Sony are not doing the right thing for people to like them (DMCA, MPAA, RIAA, etc...) so Star Wars Galaxy, I won't buy, Everquest: I stopped playing since they got bought. I don't even watch their movies and dvds, and boycotted buying their CDs. Why is/. advertising their crap is beyond me.
There are still a few things missing from Linux to make it truly popular as a Desktop machine: - Multimedia playback and recording support. Hard to count how many times I've read a comment asking for Apple to port QuickTime for Linux. - Low kernel latency for music professional: 2.5 is definitely promising here. OS X is really impressive with average latency under 2/4 ms. - Better support for printers/scanners/cameras. It's a chicken&egg problem. It will happen when Linux is popular as a desktop platform because people will realize that they can sell more of their stuff if they support it. - Customer support: It drills down to getting IRC working and posting questions that you can get answered by others in 2 mins 24/7. However, to get to that point, you already know enough to find the answers yourself. Google is usually working ok, but you probably need another box if your problem is howto connect to internet. - Reputation: lots of people shy away from Linux because they fear that it's too complicated. One answer for them: use Mandrake or Redhat and things will probably be smoother than you think. Move to something else like debian when you feel confortable if you ever need to do that. - Newest hardware support: For the exception of rare cases, Linux lags the support of new systems. You better make sure that when you buy your system, someone has already put up a page that details the gotchas on the machine you are getting. If there is not and you are really crazy about this system, then why don't you put a page with your experience installing Linux on it. - Fonts: that's a major pain because it's not that obvious. Also MS has a clear advantage with the use of ClearText in IE (and other viewers.) - Web support: it's unfortunate but pretty much all web sites are designed with IE in mind. There are some sites that are not even letting me enter with Mozilla. Plugin support doesn't work for some of them. It's a pain to have to reboot to do banking online or trade stock. - UI: until before KDE 3, it was true, but now it's pretty much solved. KDE is a better Windows (I hate WinXP Jimboree LnF). - APM: It took me a little while to figure out on how to give my laptop as much battery life under Linux as under Windoz. Tweeking all these cron and initrc files was not what I would call obvious and intuitive. But I got help from lots of folks on IRC, so it was fun and rewarding to get there. - Major apps: I miss a few apps that I used to run (mostly Adobe stuff.) But the price the companies were charging for upgrades wasn't realistic in the long run anyway. - Upgrades and new kernel: It's not obvious to find out when is a good time to upgrade and why you should or not (unless it's on a server and the reason is security.) It's also really easy to break the system and find that is really hard to get back to where it used to work. For that reason, a distro like RH or Mandrake is really appropriate.
MacOSRumors is even worse. There you can read the kind of articles you got to wonder if they were written as to make you laught about the Mac platform and people who use it or not. What's funny with all these rumor mill sites is being able to use google caches and search back in time prior to major announcements. Now you know that you read predictions even further away from the truth than when Bill Gates opens his mouth on how he sees the future two years ahead.
You can see the trailer for T3 on the web these days (sorry Quicktime required.) The IMDB (www.imdb.com) entry for T3 lists the links to the trailer It doesn't show much but the look and feel are the same patented ones that were developed in T2. Arnie will probably look a bit tired in that one. One rumor has it that they had to digitally remove the walker he is using in some scenes;-)
I, for one, couldn't care less about what Apple is trafficating with the press badges and who's going to get the scoop of what's cooking in Cupertino. For some time, I just gave up on the rumors of what's happening on the platform. It's not that I don't like the Mac. I own an entry level iBook. But I'm getting tired for lake of interesting software (games), slow overpriced systems, and inability to deliver when new stuff is announced (3 months later and sometimes with features that get removed.) Last time I visited an Apple store, I almost ran away: I am scared of hospitals and was almost terrify about the look of their clinical displays. One goes to wonder why the sales people are not dressed in white blouse. The fact that Apple is secretive about stuff is no news to the community. After all, Steve was very unhappy about the latest coup with the iMac and looks at what's happening to his buddy Scott from Sun when the whole speech was online one week before he gave it to the Linux keynotes. This is not really good PR. But this is also a double sledge hammer. When the ipod came out, no third party accessories were available for the little device because Apple didn't want anybody to know about it. It takes time to manufacture stuff when you are a little shop and you want to make good margins. This is also somewhat killing the inventive side of addon shops. When the mac color scheme switched from Flowerpower to white, all the 3rd party ended up having tons of accessories that looked totally out of place on the pasteurised looking device. You can even still find blueberry and lime usb ports in some shops. Yuk! Plus, it's not like it's gonna big and change the world (like the last time they said that, this was when they introduced the ipod.) If the g5 was out, we would have Mot and IBM all bragging about it just to slam back Intel and AMD way before it makes it to the mac platform because prices would be still too high for Apple to make the type of fantastic margin they can achieve with G3 and G4 (chips that are solely used in network gear beside them). So maybe another gizmo that works only on the mac platform (for sure) or a software bundled with the machine that competes (and kills) another group of developers all together. Imagine if Apple had as much market share as Microsoft. That would be called anti competitive and Jobs would be the tyran. But wait, it's obviously time to ship 10.2 (aka Jaguar) a year and half after the original OS, and finally come up with something that was on the specs announced at the 10.0 release. The only trouble is that it won't work well on system that were bought last quarter. Insanitely great marketing folks! Thanks to the community I happily run Linux on my 2001 iBook. No need for rumors to do that, let me tell ya.
And of course, no keyboard is complete without the Windows "system keys"...
You are kidding right? One thing I love about my thinkpad keyboard (beside the fact that it's has a nice touch) is the fact that IBM doesn't put these stupid Windows keys on the keyboard.
Let see: - Huget firewall=FBI carnivore. - Control of entertainment media=Disney and its senator minions. - Ran by one party dictatorship=Bush administration. - Minimum human rights=DMCA and other bills against terrorism. - 60% of the country empoverished=lots of workers from other countries are under minimum wages.
For one minute, I thought that you were referring to the US. Phew! I'm glad that you were talking about China.
Terminator 2 didn't reallty suck neither... Original plot, killer effects, even better acting, plenty of lines to remember (Hasta la vista baby, I'll be back). That was a dream sequel compare to others.
I see this as an opportunity for people who haven't heard about the original novel/movie to watch it and judge for themselves afterward. It will also bring the first adaptation into the media spot, then remastered and re-released for DVDs. I am not being too pessimistic here by assuming that people who like old fart Hollywood style jokes wouldn't have bothered seeing the original play anyway, which is why I refrain complaining about Hollywood stomping and destroying every possible piece of achievement from the past. Thanks to George "worse director ever" Lucas and others (Spielberg who is the little fav guy of Wired lately), Kurosawa's movies are now available in Criterion DVDs. Hollywood is a terrific marketing machine. The idea is keeping your brain at a resonnable distance from its grinders. Like avoiding fast food, because ads fly in your face every day, it requires extra strenght, I agree, but the reward is up to the challenge.
PPA, the girl next door (who has proudly been watching Solaris on 4 different continents and has never eat a big mac.)
I spent already a couple of times registring my legit copy of MS Word 2002 talking to MS droids on the phone to get a new activation key. The people were nice and all was done smoothly (for the exception of spelling 2 numbers of 50 digits each on the phone which took 10 minutes each time) but the pain it takes just to be able to reinstall a software I pay for is just one last drop I can think would move people to Open Source. It's this feeling of making me look like a thief begging for a new key that tells me that MS is not making it easy for people to stick with their products. Not to mention the time you have to waste each time just to be "granted" the right to you MS products.
The pc card is definitely a win on the system. Lots of time I've talked to people who would buy the Apple iPod if it could mount on a PC WITHOUT a 3rd party vendor util software. What were they thinking in Cupertino when they decided the format of the drive should be HFS? Even Linux doesn't have HFS support in the kernel. vfat would have been so much interoperable.
Isn't the size of the handle a little smaller. These seems to be children toys, good replicas but with smaller proportions than the real prop ones. What do you say?
When slashdot starts picking stories it already scavenged from thereg, linuxtoday, or arstechnica and posted this week already, that means the world is running at slow speed on a sunny Saturday like this one.
An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the service.
The most likely cause of this problem is that the service is not currently running. You can use the 'Services' Control Panel to verify that the service is running and to restart it if necessary.
Windows NT error number 2 occurred.
I don't have a Services CP. I run Linux. Running NT on a server at its own risks...
What bothers me with these sub laptops with tiny keyboards and screen sizes is the OS they try to run: Windows XP. The input manager in this OS is not appropriate to use such little cursor devices. The screen is way too small to do anything very seriously. On the other hand, WinCE (at least the UI, not the kernel) or better Linux Familiar (www.handhelds.org) would look way more appropriate. Why bother with XP?
It did help. This card effectively doesnt' provide power for the device. Therefore, after getting a power supply for the disk, I got it to work. I considere this card a lame firewire interface. It should at least provide minimum power for slim HD (in this case, a firefly from VST) A shame also that even the new IBM thinkpads don't come with firewire as standard. What are they waiting for?
Explain to me how a company with programmers on its payrool, and that supports open source can protect itself against code/ideas thieves if they don't patent their ideas? I just try really hard to understand what is the right balance between using open source to free users from proprietary software and still being able to have some ways of making a buck or two by protecting ideas. Very curious about you guys's answers.
I bought an IBM cardbus 1394 and try to connect either an iPod, a Firewire disk to it, under win2K or XP, the card shows in the network interfaces but not as a media device controller. Can someone tell me what's going on?
I'd love to see that happening to use with my PDA. Squeezing the toy would roduces electricity by recycling the wind going thru the whistle using a tiny dynamo. A recharging battery would be located in the toy. The gesture would feel more natural I think. Squeak it!;-)
The appendix listing open source licenses is missing one obvious license: the Microsoft Shared Source License (SSL)(www.microsoft.com/licensing/sharedsource/def ault.asp) under which you can download stuff like the Java killer ( aka.NET) open source project.
Wondering if this is not considered an Open Source license enough after all, even with all the fuss that Microsoft made about it...
Microsoft is just playing the game they want here, one day supporting Open source, the other day, bitching about it. Make up your mind, MSFT!
I really enjoy buying on the internet. Regarding used (and sometimes new) books, here is what I discovered: - I get a lot out of the reviews posted by other buyers. But this requires to be vigilant about the posts (the wolfram book is one example where people posted negative reviews one day after the publication, even if the book is 1000 pages.) - Some people will just lie about the quality of the books they sell just to make more profit. Shop to places with good credibility and don't be surprised to pay a little bit more to get a nicer copy. - Some sellers are charging up to the nose for books that are out of print. Use google extensively to find your copy for cheaper (half is not always the best place, amazon zshop is also very good.) - Shipping cost is not negligible. Even using media mail, it will be higher than to pay for sales tax. And media mail is slow and doesn't let you insure your packages. - Shipping delays are sometimes what makes me go to Borders or BN (the latter which I try to avoid) and get my copy there. Then I order online for cheaper, then I have one month to return my copy to the bricks+cement merchant. You've got to do what you have to do. Not my fault if the "real" stores don't compete aggressively with online prices. - I still like to go to some dusty used bookstores and browse thru the huge selection, because I support moms&pops businesses and it's really enjoyable to find that rare copy of something I would never have thought buying online (e.g. D&D first ed. monster manual that I bought last weekend.)
I kinda agree with you here. It could even had been done as a monumental animated gif, a QT movie or a Real video.
What's cool about using Java is that unless you are on vanilla XP (without downloading Sun VM), you are able to see the video on many platforms (GIF is non-free too.)
So far, I bought half a dozen models and nothing seems to work well for me. - PalmOS: forget it. I can not learn graffiti. the screen is too small, the system is obviously for geeks. No wireless, why do I need a cell phone + this thing. - PocketPC: sweet screen, nice apps, but battery last for half a day and it's too heavy, too bulky. No wireless integrated. Too expensive. - Sony picture book: almost great, but too big and keyboard is not practical. Almost all the cons of a PDA and a laptop together. - My Cell phone (Nokia): it does the job. Appointment, phone directory, voice recognition (to call my friends), decent battery. wireless. Strongly build (fell many times, still works)
Why would I need a pda, when I get so much more out of a cell phone that cost only $29 a month. And if I need to play games, I still can get a GBA (but not carry it all the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
...not only in the posts I read here, but also in Japan where last time I went there, I was surprised when someone told his friend who was contemplating buying a VAIO: "Sony wa hidoi!" which translates roughly by "Sony, what a piece of crap!"
/. advertising their crap is beyond me.
I used to own a VAIO Z505 and loved it, then I got a VAIO R505 and couldn't figure out why Sony had made the fan constantly working WITH a variable speed. Had it been rotating at a constant speed, it would have been ok, but the change in speed got on my nerves. The keyboard was soso and the finish kinda cheap (wasup with all the plastic crap around), I returned the unit (and shelved a 10% restocking fee, bastards!)
I also wasn't very pleased when I got a picturebook with WindowsMe to find out that there web site didn't have the drivers if I wanted to update to Windows2K. This one was also returned before the end of month.
With Thinkpads and Dells, I never was disappointed, but Sony, I am afraid that something wrong will happen again. Beside, Sony are not doing the right thing for people to like them (DMCA, MPAA, RIAA, etc...) so Star Wars Galaxy, I won't buy, Everquest: I stopped playing since they got bought. I don't even watch their movies and dvds, and boycotted buying their CDs. Why is
PPA, the girl next door
There are still a few things missing from Linux to make it truly popular as a Desktop machine:
- Multimedia playback and recording support. Hard to count how many times I've read a comment asking for Apple to port QuickTime for Linux.
- Low kernel latency for music professional: 2.5 is definitely promising here. OS X is really impressive with average latency under 2/4 ms.
- Better support for printers/scanners/cameras. It's a chicken&egg problem. It will happen when Linux is popular as a desktop platform because people will realize that they can sell more of their stuff if they support it.
- Customer support: It drills down to getting IRC working and posting questions that you can get answered by others in 2 mins 24/7. However, to get to that point, you already know enough to find the answers yourself. Google is usually working ok, but you probably need another box if your problem is howto connect to internet.
- Reputation: lots of people shy away from Linux because they fear that it's too complicated. One answer for them: use Mandrake or Redhat and things will probably be smoother than you think. Move to something else like debian when you feel confortable if you ever need to do that.
- Newest hardware support: For the exception of rare cases, Linux lags the support of new systems. You better make sure that when you buy your system, someone has already put up a page that details the gotchas on the machine you are getting. If there is not and you are really crazy about this system, then why don't you put a page with your experience installing Linux on it.
- Fonts: that's a major pain because it's not that obvious. Also MS has a clear advantage with the use of ClearText in IE (and other viewers.)
- Web support: it's unfortunate but pretty much all web sites are designed with IE in mind. There are some sites that are not even letting me enter with Mozilla. Plugin support doesn't work for some of them. It's a pain to have to reboot to do banking online or trade stock.
- UI: until before KDE 3, it was true, but now it's pretty much solved. KDE is a better Windows (I hate WinXP Jimboree LnF).
- APM: It took me a little while to figure out on how to give my laptop as much battery life under Linux as under Windoz. Tweeking all these cron and initrc files was not what I would call obvious and intuitive. But I got help from lots of folks on IRC, so it was fun and rewarding to get there.
- Major apps: I miss a few apps that I used to run (mostly Adobe stuff.) But the price the companies were charging for upgrades wasn't realistic in the long run anyway.
- Upgrades and new kernel: It's not obvious to find out when is a good time to upgrade and why you should or not (unless it's on a server and the reason is security.) It's also really easy to break the system and find that is really hard to get back to where it used to work. For that reason, a distro like RH or Mandrake is really appropriate.
PPA, the girl next door.
MacOSRumors is even worse. There you can read the kind of articles you got to wonder if they were written as to make you laught about the Mac platform and people who use it or not.
What's funny with all these rumor mill sites is being able to use google caches and search back in time prior to major announcements. Now you know that you read predictions even further away from the truth than when Bill Gates opens his mouth on how he sees the future two years ahead.
PPA, the girl next door.
Thanks for the link. So that's is the reason...
PPA, the girl next door.
You can see the trailer for T3 on the web these days (sorry Quicktime required.) The IMDB (www.imdb.com) entry for T3 lists the links to the trailer It doesn't show much but the look and feel are the same patented ones that were developed in T2. Arnie will probably look a bit tired in that one. One rumor has it that they had to digitally remove the walker he is using in some scenes ;-)
PPA, the girl next door.
I, for one, couldn't care less about what Apple is trafficating with the press badges and who's going to get the scoop of what's cooking in Cupertino. For some time, I just gave up on the rumors of what's happening on the platform. It's not that I don't like the Mac. I own an entry level iBook. But I'm getting tired for lake of interesting software (games), slow overpriced systems, and inability to deliver when new stuff is announced (3 months later and sometimes with features that get removed.) Last time I visited an Apple store, I almost ran away: I am scared of hospitals and was almost terrify about the look of their clinical displays. One goes to wonder why the sales people are not dressed in white blouse.
The fact that Apple is secretive about stuff is no news to the community. After all, Steve was very unhappy about the latest coup with the iMac and looks at what's happening to his buddy Scott from Sun when the whole speech was online one week before he gave it to the Linux keynotes. This is not really good PR. But this is also a double sledge hammer. When the ipod came out, no third party accessories were available for the little device because Apple didn't want anybody to know about it. It takes time to manufacture stuff when you are a little shop and you want to make good margins. This is also somewhat killing the inventive side of addon shops. When the mac color scheme switched from Flowerpower to white, all the 3rd party ended up having tons of accessories that looked totally out of place on the pasteurised looking device. You can even still find blueberry and lime usb ports in some shops. Yuk!
Plus, it's not like it's gonna big and change the world (like the last time they said that, this was when they introduced the ipod.) If the g5 was out, we would have Mot and IBM all bragging about it just to slam back Intel and AMD way before it makes it to the mac platform because prices would be still too high for Apple to make the type of fantastic margin they can achieve with G3 and G4 (chips that are solely used in network gear beside them). So maybe another gizmo that works only on the mac platform (for sure) or a software bundled with the machine that competes (and kills) another group of developers all together. Imagine if Apple had as much market share as Microsoft. That would be called anti competitive and Jobs would be the tyran. But wait, it's obviously time to ship 10.2 (aka Jaguar) a year and half after the original OS, and finally come up with something that was on the specs announced at the 10.0 release. The only trouble is that it won't work well on system that were bought last quarter. Insanitely great marketing folks! Thanks to the community I happily run Linux on my 2001 iBook. No need for rumors to do that, let me tell ya.
PPA, the girl next door.
--
And of course, no keyboard is complete without the Windows "system keys"...
You are kidding right? One thing I love about my thinkpad keyboard (beside the fact that it's has a nice touch) is the fact that IBM doesn't put these stupid Windows keys on the keyboard.
PPA, the girl next door.
Let see:
- Huget firewall=FBI carnivore.
- Control of entertainment media=Disney and its senator minions.
- Ran by one party dictatorship=Bush administration.
- Minimum human rights=DMCA and other bills against terrorism.
- 60% of the country empoverished=lots of workers from other countries are under minimum wages.
For one minute, I thought that you were referring to the US. Phew! I'm glad that you were talking about China.
PPA, the girl next door.
Terminator 2 didn't reallty suck neither... Original plot, killer effects, even better acting, plenty of lines to remember (Hasta la vista baby, I'll be back). That was a dream sequel compare to others.
PPA, the girl next door.
I see this as an opportunity for people who haven't heard about the original novel/movie to watch it and judge for themselves afterward. It will also bring the first adaptation into the media spot, then remastered and re-released for DVDs. I am not being too pessimistic here by assuming that people who like old fart Hollywood style jokes wouldn't have bothered seeing the original play anyway, which is why I refrain complaining about Hollywood stomping and destroying every possible piece of achievement from the past. Thanks to George "worse director ever" Lucas and others (Spielberg who is the little fav guy of Wired lately), Kurosawa's movies are now available in Criterion DVDs. Hollywood is a terrific marketing machine. The idea is keeping your brain at a resonnable distance from its grinders. Like avoiding fast food, because ads fly in your face every day, it requires extra strenght, I agree, but the reward is up to the challenge.
PPA, the girl next door (who has proudly been watching Solaris on 4 different continents and has never eat a big mac.)
I spent already a couple of times registring my legit copy of MS Word 2002 talking to MS droids on the phone to get a new activation key. The people were nice and all was done smoothly (for the exception of spelling 2 numbers of 50 digits each on the phone which took 10 minutes each time) but the pain it takes just to be able to reinstall a software I pay for is just one last drop I can think would move people to Open Source. It's this feeling of making me look like a thief begging for a new key that tells me that MS is not making it easy for people to stick with their products. Not to mention the time you have to waste each time just to be "granted" the right to you MS products.
PPA, the girl next door.
The pc card is definitely a win on the system. Lots of time I've talked to people who would buy the Apple iPod if it could mount on a PC WITHOUT a 3rd party vendor util software. What were they thinking in Cupertino when they decided the format of the drive should be HFS? Even Linux doesn't have HFS support in the kernel. vfat would have been so much interoperable.
PPA, the girl next door.
Isn't the size of the handle a little smaller. These seems to be children toys, good replicas but with smaller proportions than the real prop ones. What do you say?
PPA, the girl next door.
Geez! You got + karma out for just posting my bio and asking a quest on my sig.
;-))
That's total copyright infrigement.
PPA, the girl next door.
When slashdot starts picking stories it already scavenged from thereg, linuxtoday, or arstechnica and posted this week already, that means the world is running at slow speed on a sunny Saturday like this one.
PPA, the girl next door
uh oh... planetgamecube.com just /.'ed:
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the service.
The most likely cause of this problem is that the service is not currently running. You can use the 'Services' Control Panel to verify that the service is running and to restart it if necessary.
Windows NT error number 2 occurred.
I don't have a Services CP. I run Linux. Running NT on a server at its own risks...
PPA, the girl next door.
What bothers me with these sub laptops with tiny keyboards and screen sizes is the OS they try to run: Windows XP. The input manager in this OS is not appropriate to use such little cursor devices. The screen is way too small to do anything very seriously. On the other hand, WinCE (at least the UI, not the kernel) or better Linux Familiar (www.handhelds.org) would look way more appropriate. Why bother with XP?
PPA, the girl next door.
It did help. This card effectively doesnt' provide power for the device. Therefore, after getting a power supply for the disk, I got it to work. I considere this card a lame firewire interface. It should at least provide minimum power for slim HD (in this case, a firefly from VST)
A shame also that even the new IBM thinkpads don't come with firewire as standard. What are they waiting for?
PPA, the girl next door.
Explain to me how a company with programmers on its payrool, and that supports open source can protect itself against code/ideas thieves if they don't patent their ideas? I just try really hard to understand what is the right balance between using open source to free users from proprietary software and still being able to have some ways of making a buck or two by protecting ideas. Very curious about you guys's answers.
PPA, the girl next door.
I bought an IBM cardbus 1394 and try to connect either an iPod, a Firewire disk to it, under win2K or XP, the card shows in the network interfaces but not as a media device controller. Can someone tell me what's going on?
Thanks in advance,
PPA, the girl next door.
I'd love to see that happening to use with my PDA. Squeezing the toy would roduces electricity by recycling the wind going thru the whistle using a tiny dynamo. A recharging battery would be located in the toy. The gesture would feel more natural I think. Squeak it! ;-)
PPA, the girl next door.
The appendix listing open source licenses is missing one obvious license: the Microsoft Shared Source License (SSL)(www.microsoft.com/licensing/sharedsource/def ault.asp) under which you can download stuff like the Java killer ( aka .NET) open source project.
Wondering if this is not considered an Open Source license enough after all, even with all the fuss that Microsoft made about it...
Microsoft is just playing the game they want here, one day supporting Open source, the other day, bitching about it. Make up your mind, MSFT!
PPA, the girl next door.
I really enjoy buying on the internet. Regarding used (and sometimes new) books, here is what I discovered:
- I get a lot out of the reviews posted by other buyers. But this requires to be vigilant about the posts (the wolfram book is one example where people posted negative reviews one day after the publication, even if the book is 1000 pages.)
- Some people will just lie about the quality of the books they sell just to make more profit. Shop to places with good credibility and don't be surprised to pay a little bit more to get a nicer copy.
- Some sellers are charging up to the nose for books that are out of print. Use google extensively to find your copy for cheaper (half is not always the best place, amazon zshop is also very good.)
- Shipping cost is not negligible. Even using media mail, it will be higher than to pay for sales tax. And media mail is slow and doesn't let you insure your packages.
- Shipping delays are sometimes what makes me go to Borders or BN (the latter which I try to avoid) and get my copy there. Then I order online for cheaper, then I have one month to return my copy to the bricks+cement merchant. You've got to do what you have to do. Not my fault if the "real" stores don't compete aggressively with online prices.
- I still like to go to some dusty used bookstores and browse thru the huge selection, because I support moms&pops businesses and it's really enjoyable to find that rare copy of something I would never have thought buying online (e.g. D&D first ed. monster manual that I bought last weekend.)
PPA, the girl next door.
I kinda agree with you here. It could even had been done as a monumental animated gif, a QT movie or a Real video.
What's cool about using Java is that unless you are on vanilla XP (without downloading Sun VM), you are able to see the video on many platforms (GIF is non-free too.)
PPA, the girl next door.
So far, I bought half a dozen models and nothing seems to work well for me.
- PalmOS: forget it. I can not learn graffiti. the screen is too small, the system is obviously for geeks. No wireless, why do I need a cell phone + this thing.
- PocketPC: sweet screen, nice apps, but battery last for half a day and it's too heavy, too bulky. No wireless integrated. Too expensive.
- Sony picture book: almost great, but too big and keyboard is not practical. Almost all the cons of a PDA and a laptop together.
- My Cell phone (Nokia): it does the job. Appointment, phone directory, voice recognition (to call my friends), decent battery. wireless. Strongly build (fell many times, still works)
Why would I need a pda, when I get so much more out of a cell phone that cost only $29 a month. And if I need to play games, I still can get a GBA (but not carry it all the time.)
PPA, the girl next door.