Ditto if I'm driving in the car, although that doesn't really count because the iPod stays in the car when I park it.
I kind of treat my iPod as the ultimate "pull-out" stereo system.
I have the cheap stock radio/tape player in my car, and listen to the iPod through it. When I park in a downtown area, the iPod comes with me, leaving nothing but the cheap stock system and a little charger cable... which nobody's likely to break into a car for.
Of course, there might be added security in the fact that I drive a Crown Victoria, which means it looks an awful lot like an unmarked cop car at first glance.
And I've never understood you anti-convergence guys. Think about it - if you happened to want to listen to the radio, you'd now be carrying three gadgets instead of just the one. Throw in an organiser too, and you're really starting to take the piss.
If "convergence" means a phone/mp3/radio/camera/pda/gps device in which:
The phone doesn't connect reliably or sound good
The MP3 player runs down the battery in an hour
The radio barely tunes in broadcast towers from standing across the street
The PDA is clumsy and slow
The camera is extremely low-res with no flash
The GPS can be used to track my location by Big Brother...... I'm sorry, I'd rather put up with a dorky-looking Batman Utility Belt or one of those "man purse" hip bags, assuming I would ever want to carry all that stuff with me.
Personally I have a good phone in one front pocket of my jeans, and an iPod in one back pocket. I don't really need any of that other stuff with me, so why would I want a "convergence" type device which has them permanently built in?
FM Radio built into a flash media player? That at least I can kind of see making sense. I hate the radio, so it's not for me, but I could see where some people would prefer this gadget over the iPod Shuffle.
An MP3 player which takes pictures? Nah. I'm sure Apple is probably working on a camera enhancement for the iPod photo, but it seems like a foolish bolt-on idea to me.
Then again, like George Carlin once said about American commerce, "if nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck with buy it from you."
IIRC, he said that back in the 60's. Way ahead of his time, that guy.
I also thought so when I wrote it, but apparently not. So far the moderation is:
30% Informative 40% Overrated 20% Insightful
Not a single "Funny" mod, so clearly my comment was not nearly as hilarious as I thought at the time... but it appears to have been very useful information to some people, oddly enough.
Now I'm going to have to keep track of a 10cm molecular-width wire and find myself losing them like pencils as they fall out of my pocket.
Easy. The wire will be factory-sealed in a four-pound polymer housing about the same size and shape as a women's size 10 platform sandal.
The same plastics company who makes that stupid plastic "tower" for the mac Mini will start pre-fabing storage units to keep them on, but smart hackers will realize that they can do just as well with an ordinary shoe rack.
This kind of sounds like a cold-war Soviet press release.
"Yes, of course Comrade! Our new media-writing technology is vastly superior to that of the decadant Americans. It holds far more data, there's no dispute. Eh? You want to read the data you say? Well no... We are still working on reading device, but all the data is there, no doubt about it! Just look at it! Just by looking at it you can tell it is holding much more data! It's obvious! Another victory for the revolution! Rejoice!"
Look at that, the same people a year later, still making rosy projections for linux, but considerably less rosy, since OS X pulled away from Linux, and Linux was down to 1% by then.
OS X market share was almost triple that of Linux in 2004, and if sales of the mini are anything to go by, that gap is only going to widen.
It's very easy to find sources claiming that Linux will do this or that someday, and going back over the eight or nine years, there have always been some loudmouth know-it-alls claiming that the Linux desktop was going to rise and dominate... But year after year, it doesn't happen.
Linux was 2.8% in 2002, just behind Apple at 2.9%. It's growth has been exponential since then, in fact many argue it's the fastest growing desktop OS.
You misspelled "stagnant."
The fastest-growing desktop OS in the past three years has been:
(drum roll)
OS X.
A large portion of new OS X users (other than those "upgrading" from the previous Mac OS) since it came out have been, not newbies or Windows switchers, but former Linux users. That statistic includes me. My last remaining Linux box just went off-line about two months ago, and I don't miss it.
Just take a look at Slashdot five years ago, when it was a haven for the "Linux Uber Alles" mindset and compare it to today. Back then, even the editing staff considered the Mac to be nothing more than overpriced toys. Now, they drool over every minor new feature OS X brings to the UNIX desktop experience. It used to be several updates a week on the front page debating the relative merits between KDE and Gnome. Now you hardly see that stuff unless you browse over to "linux.slashdot.org."
The idea that they even need a linux.slashdot.org these days tells you all you need to know. It used to be that the hard-core Linux fanboy section of Slashdot was called "slashdot.org"!:)
Oh wait... UID 809063... You weren't reading Slashdot back then, were you? Well, ask your dad or something. The dream of a Linux desktop becoming mainstream was much more widely embraced then than it was now. Hell, even I thought it was likely to happen.
But on the other hand, this is the first I've heard of Ian Shanahan's, work. I'm glad to have seen their links to his two stories, because they were both terrific.
Not only that, but your state and municipal taxes are 100% for domestic spending, so really the percentage of your tax which is spent on defense is even lower than 18%.
On the other hand, you could count the VA and foreign aid as "defense" spending, which bloats it up to 22% of the budget, but that's still less than half of what the grandparent pinko post was saying.
I can't wait to hear all the predictions of how this is the end of Microsoft. Relax folks...
Ooo! Does this mean we can start calling Microsoft "beleagured"?
What fun! It's like FUD Karma!
"Hmmm... I suppose you could go with an Exchange Server, but I hear Google plans to come up with a new OS which will probably drive Microsoft out of business, and then what kind of support will you be left with? Let me show you some Open Source alternatives for your mail server which you know you can depend on..."
Ah, yes, I note the Keyspan IR Remote. The problem with this solution is that it sometimes misses a channel change. That is, it thinks it has changed the channel but it hasn't. The DVR has no way to know this has happened, so the wrong show gets recorded. Right?
I'm not sure what you are talking about.
With EyeTV on the Mac, recording is programmed in advance via web interface. If I'm recording manually, I would be able to see that I failed to change channels, so how could this be a problem?
Also, I've yet to have the Keyspan remote miss a channel change (or any other command) on me. Of course, I don't really use the dinky little controller it comes with, I use the Keyspan's sensor & software, but with the programmable remote which came with my Sony receiver. It puts out a much more powerful signal. Once my universal remote was programmed, the little Keyspan one went into a drawer, where it will probably stay for the forseeable future. That might have something to do with the better results I've enjoyed.
IN my case, I love TiVo's features, so the DirectTivo units are perfect. They never miss a show, and they are good enough in the UI to where I only curse at it once or twice per day.
I don't think I'm interested in a UI that is "good enough" that I "only curse at it once or twice per day." In fact, I would be appalled at something that bad.
If you don't want to support the blatant scum marketing, turn off the boob tube and go outside.
Yes I did. For a whole 20 minutes of the 1-hour show. I didn't even like any of the entertainers involved. It was fascinating to witness.
I didn't say it was evil, just that it was amazingly blatent. You seldom see naked corporate greed displayed in such an obvious fashion. That, in itself, is like a strange new form of art.
But something I should fight against? Nah. Naked corporate greed puts food on people's tables and money into my 401K. As long as people are willing to buy what they are selling, I say "good for them."
Oh, funniest part of all about this infomercial-disguised-as-a-special: They interrupted it to run ads, just as they would with any other show, and some of the ads were for Disney World and the Brittany Spears album.
Breaking into a commercial to run commercials. Brilliant!
If you are going to complain about lack of options, then there's also the hacked X-Box option and the Mac mini option.
Personally, I briefly considered going with a hacked X-Box Media Center, and settled on the mini, which (for me) has huge advantages over both Tivo and the MPC.
Equipment: Mac mini 1.42 w/802.11g and Bluetooth 1GB after-market RAM EyeTV 500 Apple Wireless Keyboard Kensington Wireless Mouse Keyspan IR Remote DVI cable M-Audio USB-TOSLINK digital sound pass-through
Total cost: about $1500
Results: DVD, 100% free HDTV signals with PVR features, both compressed & uncompressed music, World of Warcraft gaming, and web browsing, all on my HDTV screen from a single device.
And yep, the highest points of "drama" in the show involves explaining tactical quirks of the rules of the card came. I'm not sure which makes them more money, the show or the card sales.
But is this really all that different from having John Madden explain to audiences of Monday Night Football how a nickle defense is supposed to function, which in turn teaches the viewer how to play Madden Football more effectively on their Playstation or X-Box?
There are people (not me) who watch Yu-Gi-Oh for it's own entertainment value with zero interest in buying the game, just as there are a lot of people who watch MNF who don't play Madden.
As long as you are aware of what those rascals are up to, I don't see it as a huge deal... although the card game companies are slightly more alarming in that: 1. They are so naked and transparent about it. 2. They are mostly using these tactics to sell to children.
The color of Santa's outfit is never mentioned in that poem.
It describes "St. Nick" as a "Little old driver" and a "jolly old elf."
Here is how his clothing is described:
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
The poem was obviously the inspiration for the mamoth red-suited Santa which Coke used in their famous ad, but there's no doubt that the huge, black-booted, red-jacketed old man with reading spectacles which every Salvation Army bell-ringer and every "Get your picture taken with Santa" model pretends to be is a Coca-Cola Santa.
The most blatant display I'd ever seen along these lines was a few years ago. I was channel surfing when I hit something that I had to stop and behold:
A prime-time "special"...
Featuring Britney Spears and several other acts (who also happened to be on Disney-owned labels)...
With trailers of upcoming Disney-produced movies...
Filmed at Disney World...
On ABC.
Yup. The company ran an infomercial for their biggest theme park while pimping their pop stars and promoting their films, and tried to use it as a ratings draw for their network.
Speaking with "an air of authority" was not really my intention. That's the trouble with communicating via text with strangers. Inflection and expression is lost.
That said, I do hold a music degree and have spent a fair amount of time reading up on John Cage beyond the document I linked.
I simply chose that document because it was the first relatively informative one a brief Google search uncovered.
Really? I found it was a piece of cake to pop open, but a royal pain to get all those little metal springs to line up just right when closing it again.
The first time opening it took a minute or two to figure out, but I got plenty of practice after snapping it back together wrong three or four times, and now I can pop it open like a clam.
As a general rule, if you're seeing any paging, adding RAM will speed things up.
This is especially true when attempting to game with the Mac mini, as it sports a reliable-yet-sluggish Seagate 4200RPM drive.
Be warned: I've found that with WoW, Ironforge is a dog-slow town even on ultra-high-end gear, because the gods of Norrath, in their folly, put the auction house right next the bank and several other hot hubs of player activity, resulting in tricked out '1337 b0x3n being reduced to displaying "World of Warcraft: The Slide Show."
You could travel back in time from 2008 with the hottest gaming rig from that year, and still not get a steady frame-rate near the Ironforge bank at peak times.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto if I'm driving in the car, although that doesn't really count because the iPod stays in the car when I park it.
I kind of treat my iPod as the ultimate "pull-out" stereo system.
I have the cheap stock radio/tape player in my car, and listen to the iPod through it. When I park in a downtown area, the iPod comes with me, leaving nothing but the cheap stock system and a little charger cable... which nobody's likely to break into a car for.
Of course, there might be added security in the fact that I drive a Crown Victoria, which means it looks an awful lot like an unmarked cop car at first glance.
Obviously I don't mean "crap + crap == good", what kind of ridiculous straw-man argument is that?
... ah, screw it. I'll stop there. If you can even show me something that does those three things, you will have already proven me wrong.
The kind which recognizes the reality that multi-purpose devices almost never do all purposes well.
Prove me wrong. Show me a device which:
1. Plays MP3's with the ease, capacity, and battery life of an iPod
2. Takes pictures as well as a Sony CyberShot 5.1 MP
3. Has a good-quality GSM phone built in to it
4.
And I've never understood you anti-convergence guys. Think about it - if you happened to want to listen to the radio, you'd now be carrying three gadgets instead of just the one. Throw in an organiser too, and you're really starting to take the piss.
... I'm sorry, I'd rather put up with a dorky-looking Batman Utility Belt or one of those "man purse" hip bags, assuming I would ever want to carry all that stuff with me.
If "convergence" means a phone/mp3/radio/camera/pda/gps device in which:
The phone doesn't connect reliably or sound good
The MP3 player runs down the battery in an hour
The radio barely tunes in broadcast towers from standing across the street
The PDA is clumsy and slow
The camera is extremely low-res with no flash
The GPS can be used to track my location by Big Brother...
Personally I have a good phone in one front pocket of my jeans, and an iPod in one back pocket. I don't really need any of that other stuff with me, so why would I want a "convergence" type device which has them permanently built in?
FM Radio built into a flash media player? That at least I can kind of see making sense. I hate the radio, so it's not for me, but I could see where some people would prefer this gadget over the iPod Shuffle.
An MP3 player which takes pictures? Nah. I'm sure Apple is probably working on a camera enhancement for the iPod photo, but it seems like a foolish bolt-on idea to me.
Then again, like George Carlin once said about American commerce, "if nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck with buy it from you."
IIRC, he said that back in the 60's. Way ahead of his time, that guy.
Modded as iformative? thats at least +3 funny
I also thought so when I wrote it, but apparently not. So far the moderation is:
30% Informative
40% Overrated
20% Insightful
Not a single "Funny" mod, so clearly my comment was not nearly as hilarious as I thought at the time... but it appears to have been very useful information to some people, oddly enough.
Now I'm going to have to keep track of a 10cm molecular-width wire and find myself losing them like pencils as they fall out of my pocket.
Easy. The wire will be factory-sealed in a four-pound polymer housing about the same size and shape as a women's size 10 platform sandal.
The same plastics company who makes that stupid plastic "tower" for the mac Mini will start pre-fabing storage units to keep them on, but smart hackers will realize that they can do just as well with an ordinary shoe rack.
This kind of sounds like a cold-war Soviet press release.
"Yes, of course Comrade! Our new media-writing technology is vastly superior to that of the decadant Americans. It holds far more data, there's no dispute. Eh? You want to read the data you say? Well no... We are still working on reading device, but all the data is there, no doubt about it! Just look at it! Just by looking at it you can tell it is holding much more data! It's obvious! Another victory for the revolution! Rejoice!"
Oh, you want sources, do you?
How about this:
The same source, but more current
Look at that, the same people a year later, still making rosy projections for linux, but considerably less rosy, since OS X pulled away from Linux, and Linux was down to 1% by then.
OS X market share was almost triple that of Linux in 2004, and if sales of the mini are anything to go by, that gap is only going to widen.
It's very easy to find sources claiming that Linux will do this or that someday, and going back over the eight or nine years, there have always been some loudmouth know-it-alls claiming that the Linux desktop was going to rise and dominate... But year after year, it doesn't happen.
Linux was 2.8% in 2002, just behind Apple at 2.9%. It's growth has been exponential since then, in fact many argue it's the fastest growing desktop OS.
:)
You misspelled "stagnant."
The fastest-growing desktop OS in the past three years has been:
(drum roll)
OS X.
A large portion of new OS X users (other than those "upgrading" from the previous Mac OS) since it came out have been, not newbies or Windows switchers, but former Linux users. That statistic includes me. My last remaining Linux box just went off-line about two months ago, and I don't miss it.
Just take a look at Slashdot five years ago, when it was a haven for the "Linux Uber Alles" mindset and compare it to today. Back then, even the editing staff considered the Mac to be nothing more than overpriced toys. Now, they drool over every minor new feature OS X brings to the UNIX desktop experience. It used to be several updates a week on the front page debating the relative merits between KDE and Gnome. Now you hardly see that stuff unless you browse over to "linux.slashdot.org."
The idea that they even need a linux.slashdot.org these days tells you all you need to know. It used to be that the hard-core Linux fanboy section of Slashdot was called "slashdot.org"!
Oh wait... UID 809063... You weren't reading Slashdot back then, were you? Well, ask your dad or something. The dream of a Linux desktop becoming mainstream was much more widely embraced then than it was now. Hell, even I thought it was likely to happen.
Yeah, I hate lists like this too...
But on the other hand, this is the first I've heard of Ian Shanahan's, work. I'm glad to have seen their links to his two stories, because they were both terrific.
I'm sorry, what exactly did they do right?
;)
Like they said. Everything except for sales, design, manufacturing, and partnerships.
Not only that, but your state and municipal taxes are 100% for domestic spending, so really the percentage of your tax which is spent on defense is even lower than 18%.
On the other hand, you could count the VA and foreign aid as "defense" spending, which bloats it up to 22% of the budget, but that's still less than half of what the grandparent pinko post was saying.
I can't wait to hear all the predictions of how this is the end of Microsoft. Relax folks...
Ooo! Does this mean we can start calling Microsoft "beleagured"?
What fun! It's like FUD Karma!
"Hmmm... I suppose you could go with an Exchange Server, but I hear Google plans to come up with a new OS which will probably drive Microsoft out of business, and then what kind of support will you be left with? Let me show you some Open Source alternatives for your mail server which you know you can depend on..."
Ah, yes, I note the Keyspan IR Remote. The problem with this solution is that it sometimes misses a channel change. That is, it thinks it has changed the channel but it hasn't. The DVR has no way to know this has happened, so the wrong show gets recorded. Right?
I'm not sure what you are talking about.
With EyeTV on the Mac, recording is programmed in advance via web interface. If I'm recording manually, I would be able to see that I failed to change channels, so how could this be a problem?
Also, I've yet to have the Keyspan remote miss a channel change (or any other command) on me. Of course, I don't really use the dinky little controller it comes with, I use the Keyspan's sensor & software, but with the programmable remote which came with my Sony receiver. It puts out a much more powerful signal. Once my universal remote was programmed, the little Keyspan one went into a drawer, where it will probably stay for the forseeable future. That might have something to do with the better results I've enjoyed.
IN my case, I love TiVo's features, so the DirectTivo units are perfect. They never miss a show, and they are good enough in the UI to where I only curse at it once or twice per day.
I don't think I'm interested in a UI that is "good enough" that I "only curse at it once or twice per day." In fact, I would be appalled at something that bad.
You DID watch it.
If you don't want to support the blatant scum marketing, turn off the boob tube and go outside.
Yes I did. For a whole 20 minutes of the 1-hour show. I didn't even like any of the entertainers involved. It was fascinating to witness.
I didn't say it was evil, just that it was amazingly blatent. You seldom see naked corporate greed displayed in such an obvious fashion. That, in itself, is like a strange new form of art.
But something I should fight against? Nah. Naked corporate greed puts food on people's tables and money into my 401K. As long as people are willing to buy what they are selling, I say "good for them."
Oh, funniest part of all about this infomercial-disguised-as-a-special: They interrupted it to run ads, just as they would with any other show, and some of the ads were for Disney World and the Brittany Spears album.
Breaking into a commercial to run commercials. Brilliant!
If you are going to complain about lack of options, then there's also the hacked X-Box option and the Mac mini option.
Personally, I briefly considered going with a hacked X-Box Media Center, and settled on the mini, which (for me) has huge advantages over both Tivo and the MPC.
Equipment:
Mac mini 1.42 w/802.11g and Bluetooth
1GB after-market RAM
EyeTV 500
Apple Wireless Keyboard
Kensington Wireless Mouse
Keyspan IR Remote
DVI cable
M-Audio USB-TOSLINK digital sound pass-through
Total cost: about $1500
Results: DVD, 100% free HDTV signals with PVR features, both compressed & uncompressed music, World of Warcraft gaming, and web browsing, all on my HDTV screen from a single device.
IIRC, it's "Yu-Gi-Oh"
And yep, the highest points of "drama" in the show involves explaining tactical quirks of the rules of the card came. I'm not sure which makes them more money, the show or the card sales.
But is this really all that different from having John Madden explain to audiences of Monday Night Football how a nickle defense is supposed to function, which in turn teaches the viewer how to play Madden Football more effectively on their Playstation or X-Box?
There are people (not me) who watch Yu-Gi-Oh for it's own entertainment value with zero interest in buying the game, just as there are a lot of people who watch MNF who don't play Madden.
As long as you are aware of what those rascals are up to, I don't see it as a huge deal... although the card game companies are slightly more alarming in that: 1. They are so naked and transparent about it. 2. They are mostly using these tactics to sell to children.
The color of Santa's outfit is never mentioned in that poem.
It describes "St. Nick" as a "Little old driver" and a "jolly old elf."
Here is how his clothing is described:
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
The poem was obviously the inspiration for the mamoth red-suited Santa which Coke used in their famous ad, but there's no doubt that the huge, black-booted, red-jacketed old man with reading spectacles which every Salvation Army bell-ringer and every "Get your picture taken with Santa" model pretends to be is a Coca-Cola Santa.
I think it's just you noticing it more. As fun as it is to comment on, and laugh at how thinly-veiled it often is, this is really nothing new.
The chubby red-suited Santa Clause we all think is synonymous with the Christmas season was invented for Coca-Cola ads.
The most blatant display I'd ever seen along these lines was a few years ago. I was channel surfing when I hit something that I had to stop and behold:
A prime-time "special"...
Featuring Britney Spears and several other acts (who also happened to be on Disney-owned labels)...
With trailers of upcoming Disney-produced movies...
Filmed at Disney World...
On ABC.
Yup. The company ran an infomercial for their biggest theme park while pimping their pop stars and promoting their films, and tried to use it as a ratings draw for their network.
I was a little bit in awe.
Speaking with "an air of authority" was not really my intention. That's the trouble with communicating via text with strangers. Inflection and expression is lost.
That said, I do hold a music degree and have spent a fair amount of time reading up on John Cage beyond the document I linked.
I simply chose that document because it was the first relatively informative one a brief Google search uncovered.
*******END MOST AWESOME, CONTINEUE AT NORMAL RATE****
I gotta disagree. You stopped about two lines short of the ***EVEN MORE AWESOME*** section.
One word:
Stencils
Art is not hard to crank out fast. Ideas are. I'm far more impressed with Dilbert than Get Fuzzy.
Black and white are two perfectly good shades of gray. I think some people are too quick to discard them.
Really? I found it was a piece of cake to pop open, but a royal pain to get all those little metal springs to line up just right when closing it again.
The first time opening it took a minute or two to figure out, but I got plenty of practice after snapping it back together wrong three or four times, and now I can pop it open like a clam.
As a general rule, if you're seeing any paging, adding RAM will speed things up.
This is especially true when attempting to game with the Mac mini, as it sports a reliable-yet-sluggish Seagate 4200RPM drive.
Be warned: I've found that with WoW, Ironforge is a dog-slow town even on ultra-high-end gear, because the gods of Norrath, in their folly, put the auction house right next the bank and several other hot hubs of player activity, resulting in tricked out '1337 b0x3n being reduced to displaying "World of Warcraft: The Slide Show."
You could travel back in time from 2008 with the hottest gaming rig from that year, and still not get a steady frame-rate near the Ironforge bank at peak times.