Still not sure it's a good idea
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Would a larger screen on an iPod-sized device really make it any easier to watch video on it? No matter how you design things, it's a tiny tiny display.
Say you make it taller than it is wide and rotate it ninety degrees to view video. Then you're 2" tall, but still only about 2.7" wide, giving you a whopping 3.3" diagonal, up from 2.5" on the current iPod.
Video out support is good, but you're pushing that tiny hard drive pretty hard whether you're driving the iPod's screen or not. Apple would have to do some very impressive tricks with the battery life to make a video iPod practical.
From everything I've been reading, video support on the current iPod is just a firmware upgrade away. But I'm not convinced it's something users are going to be able to use well, even if it is just restricted to music videos.
Hopefully AppleInsider's barking up the wrong tree.
As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
"Useful"? I hate it when people use words like that in reference to the sciences. It's like they think every last penny of the national budget that's not being spent on Medicare or disaster recovery should be spent feeding the homeless.
How do you define "useful"? This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their entire charter is building giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit. They're science, which means $99 out of every $100 they spend goes toward what amounts to research and development of ideas nobody else can implement, and then working with them for a couple of decades to see what comes of them.
How can you gauge the "usefulness" of the Cold War space race in the 1950s and '60s? Yet that race eventually led to the technology and processes which, today, have placed hundreds of communications, weather, and astronomy satellites in orbit. Was any of that "useful" at the time? Heck no. We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
NASA's budget is on a shoestring as it is. Give them credit for doing what they do with as few dollars as it is. You never know when an investment will pay out until it does.
In my opinion, the RIAA should not be allowed to target young minors with lawsuits, especially since most cannot afford to purchase music as it is, let alone have a credit / debit card to use legal services.... So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
I think that was meant to read as: "Young minors who cannot afford to purchase music as it is certainly cannot be expected to finance a counter-lawsuit against the RIAA." In other words, the RIAA should save their letters for people who can afford to go to court, and give the impressionable preteens warnings about the illegality of their actions.
The other camp... too many Slashdotters, IMO... feel the need to flex their superior understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the internet and development and offer this gem: "AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. Nothing to see here".
It's not that AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. It's the fact that it's nothing more than that -- there's no AJAX development tools, no IDE, no solid definition of what it is or isn't. The definition of AJAX pretty much begins and ends with "JavaScript and DHTML plus server-side database-driven code".
AJAX is great, yes... but it's just a name, not a thing.
Right now, the iPod does its "one thing" very well: play music.
And play variable-speed audiobooks. And display photo slideshows. And display electronic calendars. And store contacts. And function as an alarm clock. And play solitaire. And store to-do lists and memos.
It doesn't do email yet, but I'm sure that's coming in the next firmware update.;-)
I ran tens of thousands of dollars of radio ads this year for my retail stores (focused on 10-22 year olds). Few people heard them. Why? Radio is dead or dying for most younger people.
Wrong. Few people heard them because most radio stations run commercials for what seems like 5-10 minutes at a stretch, so that they can advertise "50-minute non-stop music". They don't realize that most people, when they hit that eon-long commercial break, just switch to a different station with a similar format.
It's not like TV, where you'd end up missing half of a half-hour program--it's one self-contained four-minute song after another. (Talk radio and similar shows are the exception, natch, but you did specify 10-22 year olds.)
There's a station here in Chicago called NineFM. Tagline: "We play anything" -- they're one of a growing number of what I think of as "iPod Shuffle stations". What really distinguishes them, though, is that they have more but shorter commercial breaks -- usually three or four ads max -- which the listener is more willing to wait through. It's a win-win situation, ad-wise. Honestly, it's half the reason I listen to them almost all the time.
You always keep your keycards, and you always destroy them.
What for? If I return it to the desk, assume there's a possibility that desk clerk can read my personal data off of it. Why wouldn't that desk clerk just read it off the computer, or copy it when I give it at check-in?
Bah at your linking to the printable version of that story, which came up in a teeny-tiny font that (in IE) I couldn't resize. Linking to the main story webpage at http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39219186,00.htm would have been much easier to read on-screen, even if I did have to wait for the ads to load.
I Am A Math Student Teacher, and one of the classes I'm covering is trig analysis honors. They're just getting the hang of sines and cosines now, and learning about function graphs on the way toward inverse trig functions in the next week.
Glancing at the sample chapter, I see that this professor is "eliminating" sines and cosines by replacing them with "spreads", ratios inherent in the triangle. This is easy to do with triangles, but since geometric sines and cosines derive from ratios anyway, he's essentially just given them a new name.
He's eliminated the unit circle as an essential part of his trigonometry, but I can't think of any post-trig class that doesn't rely on the unit circle and trig functions in one way or another. In other words, rational trigonometry looks like a good way to learn trig and only trig without sines, cosines and angles -- but since you need those functions and angles in later courses anyway, why would you want to?
It hammered home its point, but quite clearly: whenever you offer money, or any other incentive, to people in exchange for something they would ordinarily do for free, they stop being interested in doing it for its own sake and instead focus on the reward.
This goes for universities and scientists as well as grade school children. By offering scientists millions of dollars in patent rights for something they were already doing just because they were good at it, they've made them lost focus on innovation and discovery.
(That's a mighty good book, by the way, because it covers not just schoolchildren, but how incentives and motivators in the corporate workplace often end up doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. Scott Adams would be proud.)
Most of Apple's components are exactly the same as PCs, except sell for more.
Respectfully disagree. I've got Macs that I've owned for five, ten years, maybe longer, and they work as well as they ever have. In contrast, it's pretty well-known that when you buy a $300-400 Windows-compatible PC from eMachines or Compaq, you're getting the cheapest possible components with the shortest possible warranty and the highest likelyhood of manufacturing defects.
When you buy a cheap PC, you often get a cheap PC. When you buy a Mac, you're paying for quality control and professional design. (Yeah, in fact, it does cost more to shape a piece of plastic differently if you're the only one doing it and you had to research the best possible way to shape it.)
As long as money exists, there are people who will prefer a cheaper computer to a more expensive one, even if it's less effective. This is why the iPod has "only" 75% marketshare instead of 95%, and why Apple computers could never have gotten the 90%+ marketshare Windows enjoys today.
So much for Death to the Industry
on
Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Compare and contrast this game (and several commentators' negative opinions on it) with this flashback about the death of creativity in the gaming industry. Comments of note:
"A great video game does something that nobody expects and totally expands views of what's possible in the genre."
"What makes a game fun is the pattern it forms in your mind as you do things and get rewards for them. Building a business around these patterns is tricky...."
"To say there's been no creativity in games of recent times is to admit that you haven't played any."
So, congrats to Nintendo for going out on a limb with a new type of game system and new types of games to play on it. They may not have a majority marketshare, but they've got imagination in spades.
You can bet we would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market..
I don't get it. How could you possibly have a monopoly and the most expensive product on the market?
I can't even imagine a world where consumers want expensive computers so badly, no retailer would risk offending Apple by selling cheaper non-Apple PCs. It defies logic.
But then it occurs to be that you could type the ALT+Numeric equivalent of your password characters, just to throw off the bad guys. You know, ALT+100 = "d", etc. Or, just bang the drum slowly when entering the password - loud, thumpy keystrokes. Or put the keyboard in your lap momentarily to alter the acoustic signature.
Or, just type in a random character or two and delete it right afterward. Or--this is a good way to confuse keystroke loggers too--type in part of your login, then part of your password, then delete a character or two of either field, and repeat until you're done.
Of course, it's often easier just to wear a tinfoil hat.
Not an option because...? because theylack the basic intelligence necessary to do something that others have been doing for more than 100 years?
Um, no. Where in the world did you get that interpretation?
It's because generating electricity means you need to build a turbine, or dam a river, or something along those lines along with having enough copper wire and other necessities to store, transfer, and transform the current. And there are plenty of places on this wide blue ball we call Earth where those things do not yet exist.
I'm asking if there's sane ways to just dump mp3s and AAC files onto the Nano and other recent iPods and make them play with minimal pain-in-the-assedness.
As far as I know, you can still (a) create a playlist or smart playlist of all the songs you want to have on your iPod, then (b) drag-and-drop all those songs onto the iPod icon in iTunes.
Better yet, set up Autofill in iTunes (this requires some actual thinking) to pre-shuffle some music every time your sync up. Apple's iTunes sync page covers it pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
Would a larger screen on an iPod-sized device really make it any easier to watch video on it? No matter how you design things, it's a tiny tiny display.
Say you make it taller than it is wide and rotate it ninety degrees to view video. Then you're 2" tall, but still only about 2.7" wide, giving you a whopping 3.3" diagonal, up from 2.5" on the current iPod.
Video out support is good, but you're pushing that tiny hard drive pretty hard whether you're driving the iPod's screen or not. Apple would have to do some very impressive tricks with the battery life to make a video iPod practical.
From everything I've been reading, video support on the current iPod is just a firmware upgrade away. But I'm not convinced it's something users are going to be able to use well, even if it is just restricted to music videos.
Hopefully AppleInsider's barking up the wrong tree.
Yes, I'd much rather be plowing fields daily and walking by foot in the snow to the store.
On the same day?
For what he thought was H20 Was H2S04
I'm a little behind on my l33t-speak, but... how do you pronounce "hzsoa"?
Anyone here actually like Windows? I'm not trolling, just want to know. If you do, what do you like about it?
Nine out of ten Slashdotters surveyed answered "a second mouse button."
You're very welcome, and thank you too.
As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
"Useful"? I hate it when people use words like that in reference to the sciences. It's like they think every last penny of the national budget that's not being spent on Medicare or disaster recovery should be spent feeding the homeless.
How do you define "useful"? This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their entire charter is building giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit. They're science, which means $99 out of every $100 they spend goes toward what amounts to research and development of ideas nobody else can implement, and then working with them for a couple of decades to see what comes of them.
How can you gauge the "usefulness" of the Cold War space race in the 1950s and '60s? Yet that race eventually led to the technology and processes which, today, have placed hundreds of communications, weather, and astronomy satellites in orbit. Was any of that "useful" at the time? Heck no. We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
NASA's budget is on a shoestring as it is. Give them credit for doing what they do with as few dollars as it is. You never know when an investment will pay out until it does.
In my opinion, the RIAA should not be allowed to target young minors with lawsuits, especially since most cannot afford to purchase music as it is, let alone have a credit / debit card to use legal services.... So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
I think that was meant to read as: "Young minors who cannot afford to purchase music as it is certainly cannot be expected to finance a counter-lawsuit against the RIAA." In other words, the RIAA should save their letters for people who can afford to go to court, and give the impressionable preteens warnings about the illegality of their actions.
The other camp... too many Slashdotters, IMO... feel the need to flex their superior understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the internet and development and offer this gem: "AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. Nothing to see here".
It's not that AJAX is just an assortment of pre-existing technologies. It's the fact that it's nothing more than that -- there's no AJAX development tools, no IDE, no solid definition of what it is or isn't. The definition of AJAX pretty much begins and ends with "JavaScript and DHTML plus server-side database-driven code".
AJAX is great, yes... but it's just a name, not a thing.
SpecOps Labs are offering $10,000 to a team who can build a Windows XP emulator in 15 days.
And what are our assets?
Your brains, his beowulf cluster, and my codebase.
That's it? Impossible. If I had a month to plan, maybe I could come up with something, but this?
Right now, the iPod does its "one thing" very well: play music.
;-)
And play variable-speed audiobooks. And display photo slideshows. And display electronic calendars. And store contacts. And function as an alarm clock. And play solitaire. And store to-do lists and memos.
It doesn't do email yet, but I'm sure that's coming in the next firmware update.
I ran tens of thousands of dollars of radio ads this year for my retail stores (focused on 10-22 year olds). Few people heard them. Why? Radio is dead or dying for most younger people.
Wrong. Few people heard them because most radio stations run commercials for what seems like 5-10 minutes at a stretch, so that they can advertise "50-minute non-stop music". They don't realize that most people, when they hit that eon-long commercial break, just switch to a different station with a similar format.
It's not like TV, where you'd end up missing half of a half-hour program--it's one self-contained four-minute song after another. (Talk radio and similar shows are the exception, natch, but you did specify 10-22 year olds.)
There's a station here in Chicago called NineFM. Tagline: "We play anything" -- they're one of a growing number of what I think of as "iPod Shuffle stations". What really distinguishes them, though, is that they have more but shorter commercial breaks -- usually three or four ads max -- which the listener is more willing to wait through. It's a win-win situation, ad-wise. Honestly, it's half the reason I listen to them almost all the time.
You always keep your keycards, and you always destroy them.
What for? If I return it to the desk, assume there's a possibility that desk clerk can read my personal data off of it. Why wouldn't that desk clerk just read it off the computer, or copy it when I give it at check-in?
Bah at your linking to the printable version of that story, which came up in a teeny-tiny font that (in IE) I couldn't resize. Linking to the main story webpage at http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39219186,00.htm would have been much easier to read on-screen, even if I did have to wait for the ads to load.
I Am A Math Student Teacher, and one of the classes I'm covering is trig analysis honors. They're just getting the hang of sines and cosines now, and learning about function graphs on the way toward inverse trig functions in the next week.
Glancing at the sample chapter, I see that this professor is "eliminating" sines and cosines by replacing them with "spreads", ratios inherent in the triangle. This is easy to do with triangles, but since geometric sines and cosines derive from ratios anyway, he's essentially just given them a new name.
He's eliminated the unit circle as an essential part of his trigonometry, but I can't think of any post-trig class that doesn't rely on the unit circle and trig functions in one way or another. In other words, rational trigonometry looks like a good way to learn trig and only trig without sines, cosines and angles -- but since you need those functions and angles in later courses anyway, why would you want to?
A while ago, I read "Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes" by Alfie Kohn as part of a class assignment.
It hammered home its point, but quite clearly: whenever you offer money, or any other incentive, to people in exchange for something they would ordinarily do for free, they stop being interested in doing it for its own sake and instead focus on the reward.
This goes for universities and scientists as well as grade school children. By offering scientists millions of dollars in patent rights for something they were already doing just because they were good at it, they've made them lost focus on innovation and discovery.
(That's a mighty good book, by the way, because it covers not just schoolchildren, but how incentives and motivators in the corporate workplace often end up doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. Scott Adams would be proud.)
- Because of the pervasive (mis?)conception that Linux requires a lot of geeky tweaking to get it to work.
- Because Linux on the desktop has been chasing Windows for years, feature-wise, and has yet to get ahead.
- Because they like to play games they can buy at Wal-Mart.
- Because they have to use Microsoft Office to be fully compatible with the
.doc files they get from work. - Because they haven't heard of it.
- Because Windows is already bundled on the PC they bought at Best Buy.
- Because they're used to Windows.
- Because they don't know the difference between GNOME and KDE, and honestly don't care.
Or something like that.Whenever he asks a technical question, he reminds me, "Simplify, but don't over-simplify."
I think he's paraphrasing Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Most of Apple's components are exactly the same as PCs, except sell for more.
Respectfully disagree. I've got Macs that I've owned for five, ten years, maybe longer, and they work as well as they ever have. In contrast, it's pretty well-known that when you buy a $300-400 Windows-compatible PC from eMachines or Compaq, you're getting the cheapest possible components with the shortest possible warranty and the highest likelyhood of manufacturing defects.
When you buy a cheap PC, you often get a cheap PC. When you buy a Mac, you're paying for quality control and professional design. (Yeah, in fact, it does cost more to shape a piece of plastic differently if you're the only one doing it and you had to research the best possible way to shape it.)
As long as money exists, there are people who will prefer a cheaper computer to a more expensive one, even if it's less effective. This is why the iPod has "only" 75% marketshare instead of 95%, and why Apple computers could never have gotten the 90%+ marketshare Windows enjoys today.
WTF is non-game games?
As near as I can tell, it's kind of like having tea and no tea.
You can bet we would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market..
I don't get it. How could you possibly have a monopoly and the most expensive product on the market?
I can't even imagine a world where consumers want expensive computers so badly, no retailer would risk offending Apple by selling cheaper non-Apple PCs. It defies logic.
Of course, it were a Microsoft product, the natural successor would be 'Gallery Super Uber Ultimate Edition'.
You sure you're not thinking of the "Street Fighter" series?
But then it occurs to be that you could type the ALT+Numeric equivalent of your password characters, just to throw off the bad guys. You know, ALT+100 = "d", etc. Or, just bang the drum slowly when entering the password - loud, thumpy keystrokes. Or put the keyboard in your lap momentarily to alter the acoustic signature.
Or, just type in a random character or two and delete it right afterward. Or--this is a good way to confuse keystroke loggers too--type in part of your login, then part of your password, then delete a character or two of either field, and repeat until you're done.
Of course, it's often easier just to wear a tinfoil hat.
Not an option because ...? because theylack the basic intelligence necessary to do something that others have been doing for more than 100 years?
Um, no. Where in the world did you get that interpretation?
It's because generating electricity means you need to build a turbine, or dam a river, or something along those lines along with having enough copper wire and other necessities to store, transfer, and transform the current. And there are plenty of places on this wide blue ball we call Earth where those things do not yet exist.
I'm asking if there's sane ways to just dump mp3s and AAC files onto the Nano and other recent iPods and make them play with minimal pain-in-the-assedness.
As far as I know, you can still (a) create a playlist or smart playlist of all the songs you want to have on your iPod, then (b) drag-and-drop all those songs onto the iPod icon in iTunes.
Better yet, set up Autofill in iTunes (this requires some actual thinking) to pre-shuffle some music every time your sync up. Apple's iTunes sync page covers it pretty well.