Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place? They have arguably the best MP3 player in the industry
Because in less than a year, Apple's seen the iPod become so successful that Windows and Linux developers are creating their own solutions--some of them complete with FireWire cards--to do Apple's job *for* them.
Besides, fully half the reason the iPod is as big a hit with Mac users as it is is the integration with iTunes: create your MP3 playlists, organize your collection, and it will be automatically synchronized with your iPod when you request it. iTunes isn't just Apple's MP3 jukebox, its their "driver" software for iTunes. Creating a marketable Windows/Linux solution would require them to achieve the same level of integration with one or all of those platforms' MP3 packages. Why take the time to do that, when someone else is clearly willing to do the job for them?
Personally, and somewhat pettily, I think Windows users deserve to know how it feels to have a peripheral with no built-in support for their platform for a change. For years, Mac users have had to spend extra money to read files, access networks, sync PDAs, download digital photos, scan from scanners, and print to printers designed for the other 95% of the computing world. I'm reasonably certain there's not a single other MP3 portable on the market that sports full Mac OS synchronization. If Windows users have to wait a little while to use a gadget Apple designed that they want, then I consider that poetic justice.
Why not just get a tutor? It would definitely be less expensive than actually going to school again.
With all due respect, a tutor (at least, a reputable one) is invariably the most expensive way to get up to speed on a given school subject. One-on-one is easier, more effective, and therefore correspondingly more expensive than one-on-a-couple-dozen (classroom), one-on-a-few-hundred (lecture), or one-on-a-few-thousand (textbook).
They could change a small country that is dying off due to starvation or lack of water but what do they spend their money on. Balloons.
And you could sell your PC and give the money to the Peace Corps to buy a few dozen more bags of grain, but what do you spend it on? Asinine Slashdot posts.
Wealth is relative. You're ridiculously rich compared to the starving children you mention, and somehow I doubt you're lifting a finger to do much of anything about it. What you really mean is that you want him to spend his fabulous wealth on you and what you want, isn't it? Give all his money to the poor so you don't have to feel like you have to?
...the companies say that in the subscriber agreements of major cable Internet providers, there are prohibitions on the use of private corporate networks that allow employees to work from home; restrictions on adding hardware such as servers and game boxes to the networks; and clauses that reserve the right to restrict access to certain bandwidth-intensive sites, such as those for online gambling.
... the High Tech Broadband Coalition, also wants the FCC to ensure that cable companies don't unilaterally prohibit any type of Internet use. A separate filing by Amazon.com takes the same view.
The cable industry supports the FCC's deregulatory effort and has been moving toward a system of tiered pricing for services that require faster connection speeds, such as access to corporate networks and graphics-intensive gambling.
To summarize: The corporate group wants cable internet providers to move away from restricting how customers use their bandwidth, and instead only restrict how much. To summarize of the summary: Big Brother bad, bandwidth caps good.
And this is all quite good and reasonable. Why should my internet provider be concerned with whether or not I'm operating a server on my modem? Or playing games? Or visiting gambling or *cough* porn sites all night long? Or working from home all day? It shouldn't matter what I'm doing with my bandwidth, and it's unfair to restrict what I do with it in the contract.
But it's entirely reasonable and acceptable to charge me more if I use a high volume of bandwidth. My web hosting provider charges me a different amount per month if I exceed a certain amount of traffic; my cable internet provider can and should do the same.
This deserves our support, Slashdotters. Read carefully.
Microsoft has to be realizing that it's better to let rampant piracy of their products continue
I'm amused by what must be the Chinese mentality: Share and redistribute Western OS software legally through the GPL, or illegally through piracy? Whatever, the government won't do anything anyways.
I mean, what's the point of MS giving them oodles of free software, when they'd copy it for free anyways? It's not like there's even a guilty conscience in their culture about it.
Netscape 4 has always had a feature where if you don't close a table cell or row before opening another one, it assumes it's still in the old cell or row. Microsoft decided at around the same time that when a new table cell or row starts, the old one is implicitly closed (unless you've explicitly started a new, nested table, of course).
Now Mozilla and Opera mimic IE's behavior, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. After all, it's always been the case that if you don't close a paragraph before starting a new one, the old one is implicitly closed. And how can you start a new table row unless you end the old one?
So the feature of NS4, which formerly enforced the closure of table tags in a nice programmer sort of way, is now more like a bug, which can completely scramble my (and others') HTML page layouts which had been developed and tested on IE or Moz and only tested near the end at the less-used NS4.
The more I use Moz, the more I hate that browser... and the fact that I seem to be the only employee who knows Netscape has a new version out these days.
According to the U.S. Mint catalog, golden dollars are still being produced every year. (Had me fooled. I honestly haven't seen one in a store since 2000.)
I'm still waiting for golden dollars to reappear
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 2
Yeah, remember those things? The Sacajawea dollar coins that were supposed to be in use everywhere by now, except that people kept pulling magpies and stashing them away in socks without ever actually spending them, just like the Susan B. Anthony dollars before them.
Americans may or may not have noticed that the $1 bill is the only one that hasn't been redesigned with the larger off-center portraits, and it never will. It wasn't "officially" planned that the dollar coin would replace the dollar bill, but clearly that was the hope.
I want them back, and I want them everywhere. I want to be able to stick them into soda machines instead of having to carry around four times as many heavy quarters. I want them worse than I want to be able to tell my paper bills apart by glancing at the color, because dammit, they're so convenient. But the Mint seems to refuse to produce any more, and nobody but me wants to spend the ones they get at the Post Office.
Sadly, the Mint seems slow to respond to new ideas. Much like the rest of any given federal government, I suppose.
Re:Ultra wideband to transmit 100 mbs wirelessly
on
New Wireless Technologies
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I mean, only ten feet? Why not just use a cable at that point?
Synchronizing your high-capacity portable MP3 player or digital camera without having to buy a USB hub, for two. Bluetooth is one thing, but being able to move that much data in mere seconds has a real appeal.
Worst yet, it's going to really confuse the people that can't afford to get confused when buying a computer because all they can afford is the cheap models.
Yes, I agree. Far far better to offer customers no choice in the OS whatsoever, perpetuating the illusion that Windows is and always will be the only real choice for running PC software.
C'mon, is it that hard to understand? You buy a PC that tells you up-front it DOES NOT HAVE WINDOWS INSTALLED. Instead, you're getting Linux and all the free software you need to surf the net, read your email, and write your Christmas newsletters. If the customer complains that their WINDOWS software doesn't run on a NON-WINDOWS computer, then their "loyal customers" can just plunk down an extra $200 for WinXP and remember to read the package next time.
I mean, come on... when was the last time someone just walked into Wal-Mart(.com) and plunked down several hundred dollars on a computer without doing a little comparison shopping?
It can plug into the pc card slot on your laptop. Pretty nifty, eh?
Not if I own a desktop, it's not. That's what the USB2 connector is for, right? So I can download songs from my computer to the portable? So who cares if I can move the drive from my computer to the player, if I can connect using a cord (and recharge the battery at the same time) already?
Apple should put more concetration on open standards then making hardware that is incompatible for the reason "just because"
Apple's iPod hardware is entirely compatible. It's just a hard drive, with MP3 data stored in a particular sort of file tree. It's the software that Windows and Linux need to access it, and Apple hasn't bothered making that for the simple reason that they're not in the business of making PC products.
XPlay and EphPod both work, separately or together, to bridge the iPod/PC gap just as iTunes already does for Macs. And they do so with Apple's blessing, because Apple already knows that being able to sell iPods to PC users would be a good business decision -- but using iPods to help sell iBooks and iMacs is, from their end, an even better one.
You've got 5GB of songs. An average 128-kbps MP3 file takes up, say, 5MB of space. That means you've got room for about a thousand songs on one drive. That's a thousand songs. Approximately the size of my entire music collection, including the ones I hate.
So, aside from swapping your entire music collection with a buddy -- why in the world would you care if you can take the drive out and replace it?
First, Toshiba isn't the first to sell an "iPod competitor". We've already seen the Treo 10("...which is similar in appearance and function to the iPod...") and Nomad hit the market, with similar press responses.
Second, the iPod has a lot more going for it than 5/10 GB and a FireWire connection. That thumbwheel on the front makes it insanely easy to navigate through the music stored on it (you just spiiiiiiin and click, versus click-and-click-and-click-and-click-and...). Instant sync with iTunes means that you can organize playlists on your desktop with a full-size keyboard and download them perfectly into your portable. If you've never held one, you'd be amazed how small and light it is.
Bottom line: Apple's not the only high-capacity MP3 player on the market, and they know it, but they can sell theirs for higher prices because (a) they're selling to Mac loyalists and (b) they've got ease-of-use down to a science, to a degree almost no other company can match. Believe me, they're far from running scared.
Re:Winner: most boring use of "P2P"
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P2P Roaming Chat
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think you underestimate the effort that has to go into laying out even simplistic protocols for a server and a single client to chatter with each other. Much less creating one that's scalable and avoids looking like alphabet soup.
If this were "scalable," the developer wouldn't require users to register by email before downloading.
I have no argument with the amount of effort involved for the developer. My point is that it's not really that useful. Active Worlds already does this, in 3D and with better potential; The Palace has provided graphical avatar-based chat for quite some time now without the P2P aspect.
So it's neither scalable, nor novel, nor revolutionary. I'll pat the developer on the back for coming up with it on his own, but I'll not download it myself nor recommend it to my friends when other long-time applications already do the same job, and better. If someone wants to make a MMO game out of it, they'd be better off starting with one of those other apps instead.
Winner: most boring use of "P2P"
on
P2P Roaming Chat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Now you should walk completely off the edge of your own land. There will be a pause, and then, like magic, the Master Server will send you off to your next destination. And hooray, all of a sudden you're on your friend's land, served all the way from the other side of the world!
So, it's kind of like EverQuest, except you get to make your own ugly little piece of real estate and there's no actual conflict.
Yeah, it's technically peer-to-peer because your land is stored on your own client instead of a central server. But calling it a "Napster-style network" is shamelessly self-promoting, since there's nothing useful for you to share. It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
Let me know when the next release comes out, with the power to take over adjacent pieces of "geography" and form a collaborative village or army or something.
...on Win2K, until I uninstalled Mozilla *and* the Java engine and reinstalled both through the Mozilla installer. Now it all works fine.
Mozilla itself recommends you uninstall the last version, rather than installing on top of it. They don't mention that it's probably a good idea to uninstall the Java engine as well.
9. Little Boba Fett is so accustomed to seeing his dad's face only behind his cool helmet that it just wouldn't occur to him to lift the visor or remove the helmet to look at his poor dead dad's decapitated visage (try saying that three times fast!).
The deleted scene actually continued as follows:
Alas, poor Jango! I knew him, C-3PO: a hunter
of infinite skill, of most excellent gadgets: he hath flown me in Slave-I a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my stomach turns at it. Here hung those lips that kissed good-night I know not how oft. Where be your grapples now? your blasters? your blades? your flying rocket pack, that was wont to set the grass nearby on fire? Not one now, to kill the cruel Jedi? quite heart-fallen? Now get you to my father's spaceship, and once there, let me paint his armor red, and bounty hunter become; make them laugh at that.
It's possible that the hard drive inside the iPod itself has limitations as far as transfer speed. The cost of moving data between different filesystems might also have an impact, as you suggested.
Personally, I think this is a great idea, it keeps kids off of the streets and their parents know where they are. What do you think?
Here in Peoria, IL, we had a dance club for teens called Revelations -- up until last year. The name isn't suggestive; the owners were Christians and their motive in providing the club was exactly that. Dancing, peers, and no alcohol even available. But the community had concerns about adults being allowed in and dancing with teens, as well as the subtle nuances of curfew violations for different age brackets.
Eventually the place closed, although this year a different group of Christians -- teenagers, this time -- organized a replacement called Club Saturn. It takes place in a building on the riverfront intended for private group meetings once a month, charges admission to cover the cost of renting the place, and has plenty of chaperones on duty to make sure the dancing isn't too lewd and that nothing unconscionable happens on location. Curfews are enforced.
Nevertheless, the city had a bone to pick with them, too -- this time about the money issue. It seems to be cleared up, at least for now, and Club Saturn continues.
However, it makes me wonder if there's a general stigma about teens in this city having any kind of publicly-advertised party. I'm not even sure it's parents of the kids involved that are concerned; it's probably parents and adults without interested kids who make the noise. Then again, that's just the way people are.
My point here is that if you want to have a LAN-party club at a high school, you'll probably have to observe a few rules:
No "until the wee hours" business, not even on Fridays when there's no homework to worry about. You'll almost certainly have to observe curfews where teenagers are concerned.
Pick any games you like, bloody or otherwise -- as long as they're not rated M-17. Turn on the "no gore" controls for the sake of the parents. Advertise that you're doing this.
Encourage the kids to form a club for this sort of thing, and hand management and promotion of it over to them next year if it's a hit. Let them nominate games they'd like to play. If they can bring their own copies of the game, so much the better. You'll have per-copy licensing issues, obviously, and you'll have a tough time explaining twenty $50-copies of Civ III to the school board.
Free pizza and pop. Duh.
Allow and even encourage parents to drop by and see what games are being played. All the posters and reassurances in the world won't substitute for letting parents see what's going on themselves. And how could the kids object? They'll be engrossed in the screen all the time, anyways. Make this a policy for every meeting, student-run or not.
Keep a sign-in sheet for kids, and require student IDs to be shown (for proof, and so that kids don't bring random friends to school labs). Police the game room and keep "trouble" students from coming back.
Don't forget to set things up so you can wipe the computers clean afterwards and reinstall a Ghost of all the software when you're done. (Hopefully the lab does this anyways.) Do not, ever, trust those kids not to put sneaky crap on the machines.
The best way to avoid any "Columbine" concerns is to keep it open to parents, monitored by adults, and free of profanity and virtual blood. You'll probably still catch flak, but at least you'll be able to deflect it.
women love these things because of all the colorful, creative things can do with them. Its the needlepoint of the new century.
Scrapbooking is the new needlepoint -- both of them are relatively inexpensive and rely more on creativity with inexpensive items than vice versa. Martha Stewart wouldn't be caught dead sending out inkjet cards when she could make them by hand instead.:-)
Once they get the diamond on the finger, they own your bank account. So it doesn't matter if she buys it or I do, I still will pay for it in the end.
I didn't get a joint bank account until after the marriage was legal. Not that I had to; my parents never did get joint bank accounts, preferring to keep their respective paychecks separate. (They remain married some forty years later without any major financial problems at all.) So, wrong on both counts.
Plus $100 is a cheaper than a marriage counselor.
I merely suggest you assert yourself before she inkjets you out of house and home. Letting her spend your money willy-nilly is a bad precedent for your future life together.
Many (not all) of us *do* want general freedom to modify the original films in this manner.
We also want to have the choice of retaining the film in its original presentation.
Lucas seems bent on changing the "Star Wars" movies a bit more with every major release so that the only way to get the original films may one day be to buy the VHS copies on eBay somewhere.
Pfah to that. Not *everyone* wants to see the films "enhanced" with new footage, and I'd like to have the choice of not seeing it when I watch the film.
I can tolerate this on the condition that Lucas allows viewers to see the DVD in one of two ways: the original, unadulterated version and the "special/flashback" edition. As long as I have a choice about skipping the retconned scenes, I'll not complain.
Every month I end up having to head over to Staples and plop down nearly 100 bucks for a black & white and color cartridges. My fiancée goes through them fast on our HP 970cse ($299 when I bought it) making stupid cards for her friends.
May I suggest asking *her* to buy the next batch of paper and ink, since she's apparently using far more of it than you are?
You could do it politely, explaining you're short on cash without directly mentioning the reason why. Or just explain that it's "her turn" to buy the replacables. Then ask her to stop using high-quality mode, whenever it's at all possible.
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Why the heck didn't Apple come out with a Windows version in the first place? They have arguably the best MP3 player in the industry
Because in less than a year, Apple's seen the iPod become so successful that Windows and Linux developers are creating their own solutions--some of them complete with FireWire cards--to do Apple's job *for* them.
Besides, fully half the reason the iPod is as big a hit with Mac users as it is is the integration with iTunes: create your MP3 playlists, organize your collection, and it will be automatically synchronized with your iPod when you request it. iTunes isn't just Apple's MP3 jukebox, its their "driver" software for iTunes. Creating a marketable Windows/Linux solution would require them to achieve the same level of integration with one or all of those platforms' MP3 packages. Why take the time to do that, when someone else is clearly willing to do the job for them?
Personally, and somewhat pettily, I think Windows users deserve to know how it feels to have a peripheral with no built-in support for their platform for a change. For years, Mac users have had to spend extra money to read files, access networks, sync PDAs, download digital photos, scan from scanners, and print to printers designed for the other 95% of the computing world. I'm reasonably certain there's not a single other MP3 portable on the market that sports full Mac OS synchronization. If Windows users have to wait a little while to use a gadget Apple designed that they want, then I consider that poetic justice.
Why not just get a tutor? It would definitely be less expensive than actually going to school again.
With all due respect, a tutor (at least, a reputable one) is invariably the most expensive way to get up to speed on a given school subject. One-on-one is easier, more effective, and therefore correspondingly more expensive than one-on-a-couple-dozen (classroom), one-on-a-few-hundred (lecture), or one-on-a-few-thousand (textbook).
They could change a small country that is dying off due to starvation or lack of water but what do they spend their money on. Balloons.
And you could sell your PC and give the money to the Peace Corps to buy a few dozen more bags of grain, but what do you spend it on? Asinine Slashdot posts.
Wealth is relative. You're ridiculously rich compared to the starving children you mention, and somehow I doubt you're lifting a finger to do much of anything about it. What you really mean is that you want him to spend his fabulous wealth on you and what you want, isn't it? Give all his money to the poor so you don't have to feel like you have to?
...the companies say that in the subscriber agreements of major cable Internet providers, there are prohibitions on the use of private corporate networks that allow employees to work from home; restrictions on adding hardware such as servers and game boxes to the networks; and clauses that reserve the right to restrict access to certain bandwidth-intensive sites, such as those for online gambling.
... the High Tech Broadband Coalition, also wants the FCC to ensure that cable companies don't unilaterally prohibit any type of Internet use. A separate filing by Amazon.com takes the same view.
The cable industry supports the FCC's deregulatory effort and has been moving toward a system of tiered pricing for services that require faster connection speeds, such as access to corporate networks and graphics-intensive gambling.
To summarize: The corporate group wants cable internet providers to move away from restricting how customers use their bandwidth, and instead only restrict how much. To summarize of the summary: Big Brother bad, bandwidth caps good.
And this is all quite good and reasonable. Why should my internet provider be concerned with whether or not I'm operating a server on my modem? Or playing games? Or visiting gambling or *cough* porn sites all night long? Or working from home all day? It shouldn't matter what I'm doing with my bandwidth, and it's unfair to restrict what I do with it in the contract.
But it's entirely reasonable and acceptable to charge me more if I use a high volume of bandwidth. My web hosting provider charges me a different amount per month if I exceed a certain amount of traffic; my cable internet provider can and should do the same.
This deserves our support, Slashdotters. Read carefully.
Microsoft has to be realizing that it's better to let rampant piracy of their products continue
I'm amused by what must be the Chinese mentality: Share and redistribute Western OS software legally through the GPL, or illegally through piracy? Whatever, the government won't do anything anyways.
I mean, what's the point of MS giving them oodles of free software, when they'd copy it for free anyways? It's not like there's even a guilty conscience in their culture about it.
Netscape 4 has always had a feature where if you don't close a table cell or row before opening another one, it assumes it's still in the old cell or row. Microsoft decided at around the same time that when a new table cell or row starts, the old one is implicitly closed (unless you've explicitly started a new, nested table, of course).
Now Mozilla and Opera mimic IE's behavior, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. After all, it's always been the case that if you don't close a paragraph before starting a new one, the old one is implicitly closed. And how can you start a new table row unless you end the old one?
So the feature of NS4, which formerly enforced the closure of table tags in a nice programmer sort of way, is now more like a bug, which can completely scramble my (and others') HTML page layouts which had been developed and tested on IE or Moz and only tested near the end at the less-used NS4.
The more I use Moz, the more I hate that browser... and the fact that I seem to be the only employee who knows Netscape has a new version out these days.
According to the U.S. Mint catalog, golden dollars are still being produced every year. (Had me fooled. I honestly haven't seen one in a store since 2000.)
Yeah, remember those things? The
Sacajawea dollar coins that were supposed to be in use everywhere by now, except that people kept pulling magpies and stashing them away in socks without ever actually spending them, just like the Susan B. Anthony dollars before them.
Americans may or may not have noticed that the $1 bill is the only one that hasn't been redesigned with the larger off-center portraits, and it never will. It wasn't "officially" planned that the dollar coin would replace the dollar bill, but clearly that was the hope.
I want them back, and I want them everywhere. I want to be able to stick them into soda machines instead of having to carry around four times as many heavy quarters. I want them worse than I want to be able to tell my paper bills apart by glancing at the color, because dammit, they're so convenient. But the Mint seems to refuse to produce any more, and nobody but me wants to spend the ones they get at the Post Office.
Sadly, the Mint seems slow to respond to new ideas. Much like the rest of any given federal government, I suppose.
I mean, only ten feet? Why not just use a cable at that point?
Synchronizing your high-capacity portable MP3 player or digital camera without having to buy a USB hub, for two. Bluetooth is one thing, but being able to move that much data in mere seconds has a real appeal.
Worst yet, it's going to really confuse the people that can't afford to get confused when buying a computer because all they can afford is the cheap models.
Yes, I agree. Far far better to offer customers no choice in the OS whatsoever, perpetuating the illusion that Windows is and always will be the only real choice for running PC software.
C'mon, is it that hard to understand? You buy a PC that tells you up-front it DOES NOT HAVE WINDOWS INSTALLED. Instead, you're getting Linux and all the free software you need to surf the net, read your email, and write your Christmas newsletters. If the customer complains that their WINDOWS software doesn't run on a NON-WINDOWS computer, then their "loyal customers" can just plunk down an extra $200 for WinXP and remember to read the package next time.
I mean, come on... when was the last time someone just walked into Wal-Mart(.com) and plunked down several hundred dollars on a computer without doing a little comparison shopping?
It can plug into the pc card slot on your laptop. Pretty nifty, eh?
Not if I own a desktop, it's not. That's what the USB2 connector is for, right? So I can download songs from my computer to the portable? So who cares if I can move the drive from my computer to the player, if I can connect using a cord (and recharge the battery at the same time) already?
Apple should put more concetration on open standards then making hardware that is incompatible for the reason "just because"
Apple's iPod hardware is entirely compatible. It's just a hard drive, with MP3 data stored in a particular sort of file tree. It's the software that Windows and Linux need to access it, and Apple hasn't bothered making that for the simple reason that they're not in the business of making PC products.
XPlay and EphPod both work, separately or together, to bridge the iPod/PC gap just as iTunes already does for Macs. And they do so with Apple's blessing, because Apple already knows that being able to sell iPods to PC users would be a good business decision -- but using iPods to help sell iBooks and iMacs is, from their end, an even better one.
You've got 5GB of songs. An average 128-kbps MP3 file takes up, say, 5MB of space. That means you've got room for about a thousand songs on one drive. That's a thousand songs. Approximately the size of my entire music collection, including the ones I hate.
So, aside from swapping your entire music collection with a buddy -- why in the world would you care if you can take the drive out and replace it?
First, Toshiba isn't the first to sell an "iPod competitor". We've already seen the Treo 10 ("...which is similar in appearance and function to the iPod...") and Nomad hit the market, with similar press responses.
Second, the iPod has a lot more going for it than 5/10 GB and a FireWire connection. That thumbwheel on the front makes it insanely easy to navigate through the music stored on it (you just spiiiiiiin and click, versus click-and-click-and-click-and-click-and...). Instant sync with iTunes means that you can organize playlists on your desktop with a full-size keyboard and download them perfectly into your portable. If you've never held one, you'd be amazed how small and light it is.
Bottom line: Apple's not the only high-capacity MP3 player on the market, and they know it, but they can sell theirs for higher prices because (a) they're selling to Mac loyalists and (b) they've got ease-of-use down to a science, to a degree almost no other company can match. Believe me, they're far from running scared.
I think you underestimate the effort that has to go into laying out even simplistic protocols for a server and a single client to chatter with each other. Much less creating one that's scalable and avoids looking like alphabet soup.
If this were "scalable," the developer wouldn't require users to register by email before downloading.
I have no argument with the amount of effort involved for the developer. My point is that it's not really that useful. Active Worlds already does this, in 3D and with better potential; The Palace has provided graphical avatar-based chat for quite some time now without the P2P aspect.
So it's neither scalable, nor novel, nor revolutionary. I'll pat the developer on the back for coming up with it on his own, but I'll not download it myself nor recommend it to my friends when other long-time applications already do the same job, and better. If someone wants to make a MMO game out of it, they'd be better off starting with one of those other apps instead.
Now you should walk completely off the edge of your own land. There will be a pause, and then, like magic, the Master Server will send you off to your next destination. And hooray, all of a sudden you're on your friend's land, served all the way from the other side of the world!
So, it's kind of like EverQuest, except you get to make your own ugly little piece of real estate and there's no actual conflict.
Yeah, it's technically peer-to-peer because your land is stored on your own client instead of a central server. But calling it a "Napster-style network" is shamelessly self-promoting, since there's nothing useful for you to share. It's instant messaging with ugly graphics.
Let me know when the next release comes out, with the power to take over adjacent pieces of "geography" and form a collaborative village or army or something.
...on Win2K, until I uninstalled Mozilla *and* the Java engine and reinstalled both through the Mozilla installer. Now it all works fine.
Mozilla itself recommends you uninstall the last version, rather than installing on top of it. They don't mention that it's probably a good idea to uninstall the Java engine as well.
The deleted scene actually continued as follows:
It's possible that the hard drive inside the iPod itself has limitations as far as transfer speed. The cost of moving data between different filesystems might also have an impact, as you suggested.
Here in Peoria, IL, we had a dance club for teens called Revelations -- up until last year. The name isn't suggestive; the owners were Christians and their motive in providing the club was exactly that. Dancing, peers, and no alcohol even available. But the community had concerns about adults being allowed in and dancing with teens, as well as the subtle nuances of curfew violations for different age brackets.
Eventually the place closed, although this year a different group of Christians -- teenagers, this time -- organized a replacement called Club Saturn. It takes place in a building on the riverfront intended for private group meetings once a month, charges admission to cover the cost of renting the place, and has plenty of chaperones on duty to make sure the dancing isn't too lewd and that nothing unconscionable happens on location. Curfews are enforced.
Nevertheless, the city had a bone to pick with them, too -- this time about the money issue. It seems to be cleared up, at least for now, and Club Saturn continues.
However, it makes me wonder if there's a general stigma about teens in this city having any kind of publicly-advertised party. I'm not even sure it's parents of the kids involved that are concerned; it's probably parents and adults without interested kids who make the noise. Then again, that's just the way people are.
My point here is that if you want to have a LAN-party club at a high school, you'll probably have to observe a few rules:
The best way to avoid any "Columbine" concerns is to keep it open to parents, monitored by adults, and free of profanity and virtual blood. You'll probably still catch flak, but at least you'll be able to deflect it.
women love these things because of all the colorful, creative things can do with them. Its the needlepoint of the new century.
:-)
Scrapbooking is the new needlepoint -- both of them are relatively inexpensive and rely more on creativity with inexpensive items than vice versa. Martha Stewart wouldn't be caught dead sending out inkjet cards when she could make them by hand instead.
I assume you have never been married.
I have. Technically, you haven't.
Once they get the diamond on the finger, they own your bank account. So it doesn't matter if she buys it or I do, I still will pay for it in the end.
I didn't get a joint bank account until after the marriage was legal. Not that I had to; my parents never did get joint bank accounts, preferring to keep their respective paychecks separate. (They remain married some forty years later without any major financial problems at all.) So, wrong on both counts.
Plus $100 is a cheaper than a marriage counselor.
I merely suggest you assert yourself before she inkjets you out of house and home. Letting her spend your money willy-nilly is a bad precedent for your future life together.
Best of luck --
Many (not all) of us *do* want general freedom to modify the original films in this manner.
We also want to have the choice of retaining the film in its original presentation.
Lucas seems bent on changing the "Star Wars" movies a bit more with every major release so that the only way to get the original films may one day be to buy the VHS copies on eBay somewhere.
Pfah to that. Not *everyone* wants to see the films "enhanced" with new footage, and I'd like to have the choice of not seeing it when I watch the film.
I can tolerate this on the condition that Lucas allows viewers to see the DVD in one of two ways: the original, unadulterated version and the "special/flashback" edition. As long as I have a choice about skipping the retconned scenes, I'll not complain.
Every month I end up having to head over to Staples and plop down nearly 100 bucks for a black & white and color cartridges. My fiancée goes through them fast on our HP 970cse ($299 when I bought it) making stupid cards for her friends.
May I suggest asking *her* to buy the next batch of paper and ink, since she's apparently using far more of it than you are?
You could do it politely, explaining you're short on cash without directly mentioning the reason why. Or just explain that it's "her turn" to buy the replacables. Then ask her to stop using high-quality mode, whenever it's at all possible.