Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't even on the iTunes list at all because (oh, the horror) they might play material that is not properly licensed because of copyright issues.
I really don't see this as being reasonable.
First, you have to understand that listing podcasts that play unlicenced media will reflect badly on Apple. You might not have an issue, but providing listings to illegal media is probably going to cause problems. The iTunes software will still let you subscribe to those shows, though I still use iPodder because iTunes collected podcasts don't get into my "recently added" smart playlists for continuous playback.
Also, there is so much GOOD "pod-safe" music that there is absolutely no excuse to play it instead of the "corporate overproduced junk" music.
I do understand the main point though. While internet audio shows are nothing new, look to Slashdot's Geeks in Space, circa seven years ago.
What makes "podcast" new is that there are now several easy to use programs that will automatically grab the latest audio shows that you listen to and automatically put it in your media player, and even automatically put them on your portable media player.
The old means of audio show distribution was more like standard TV distribution, it is there but you have to get it, automatically fetching subscribed shows makes it much more like Tivo.
I understand this automatic fetching really isn't that new either, there was a technology called "push". I'll admit I rejected push at the time, but I think it was because it was dreamt up by commercial interests, it looked to me to be loss of control. Maybe push as it was defined back then was bad, the best I can say that I didn't understand the basic idea until podcasts came about.
Now it looks like commercial interests might be pushing out the independents.
I use the scroll wheel as a middle button AND a scroll wheel. I resisted it, and took a little while to get used to, but I don't like using pure three button mice any more. I've found scrolling to be a necessity because it is a lot more efficient to just roll the wheel than it is to cursor over to the scroll bar, drag, then re-cursor to the part of the screen I wanted to be in the first place.
I have one computer with a three button mouse made in '97, I think, a Logitech with the D|I|G|I|T|A|L label on the bottom.
I was surprised by the selling price of Slashdot. While I agreed that a lot of work went into making Slashdot what it was, it was a lot of money for what is basically just a web site. I really didn't understand why there was such a frenzy with the dot-com era. For some reason, few people of influence questioned the absurdity of the situation. Alan Greenspan did question it with his "irrational exhuberance" remark, people seemed to brush him off. Mr. Greenspan was the wise one here, and those that invested during the frenzy were the fools.
In a way, it still continues with Google and its rediculously heavy price to earnings ratio. Google is probably a solid company but the price is simply outlandish.
Eh. I don't understand the obsession that some have with the clicky keyboards. I found one in my closet and it really doesn't seem to be special, on top of having the old AT / DIN-5 connector.
One argument I've seen is that the membrane switches don't have a correlation between the "feel" of a button press and an actual electrical contact. I get perfect tactile feedback with my Natural Elite keyboard. I've never had it give me false feedback, if the button feels like it "clicked", it actually made contact, if it doesn't feel like it clicked, no contact was made.
The noise they make and the fact that they aren't available in USB form seems to be a serious drawbacks too.
...method available. According to my math, a single miniDV tape can record nearly 12GB, so obviously affordable solid-state video capture and storage is out for a good while yet.
The actual demand for portable tapeless recording of any kind is still pretty low. The demand is low enough that only the people that absolutely must have it have to pay a lot because it requires a specialized device that would hook to the Firewire or other port on the camera.
I think OpenGL is a great graphics API, I was impressed how easy it is to program for. I made some a neat little applet that lets me rotate an object and move around it, it read in AutoCAD DXF files, and it didn't seem hard to do these things.
I have not tried DirectX, but my understanding is that DirectX provides an API that has much better sound and input device support. I don't think there is a good cross-platform standard for handling that, short of maybe SDL.
I am usually OK with self serve gas, but pumping gas is a very small number of operations. I am not happy with self-serve checkout because the machines are designed to work with dumb, inexperienced people and in my experience, a poorly calibrated scanner. Even with good scanner, my experience is better with using actual check-out people is that they ring through a stack of items without the hinderance of the unresponsive and demanding computer, maybe at twice the speed. What it tells me is that stores are too cheap to hire minimum wage workers, and those stores are willing to stick me with an expensive garbage machine to save themselves a few bucks at my expense in time and frustration. I would much rather they hire more cashiers and other service people, not less.
Currently, ATMs aren't about shortening lines but getting cash at convenience, putting machines in where there isn't space to put a mini-branch, and for customers to get their money at any hour.
Banks did try getting ATMs to reduce the amount of manpower needed to run the bank, but as it turns out, the number of bank tellers has not decreased, and ATMs are very expensive to maintain. Bankers basically bought them just to save themselves money, but thankfully that backfired.
I am curious how cheaper lithium batteries will make electric cars sufficiently competitive. For one, the batteries would still have to be completely replaced every three or so years and will still be very heavy. Even hybrids are a boondoggle compared to diesel engines. The EPA mileage rating system seems to give the current hybrids an undeservedly high mileage rating.
Remove the capability of the command line for home users, but leave a buggy and insecure shell for servers where hackers can have lots of fun messing up enterprise level websites!
Just as well. Enterprise level web sites running on Windows sounds sooo wrong.
Ya know, I was deeply affected by the events of 9/11.
Yes, it was a horrible circumstance, but I wonder how soon the laggards will quit obessing about it. Moving on isn't the same as pretending it never happened, I am just saying that there is a time for grieving, and there is a time to move on with life.
I do agree on your points of the knee-jerk reactions.
I don't know how this really deals with Hugo. I don't read much SF, so I am out of the loop.
Like what happened in Philly, maybe a building gets burned down as well.
Was that the case that they allowed the building to burn and prevented firemen from putting the fire out? My understanding was that people died in that fire. That made me mad, and if it is true that people died because of that, I'd call that police department a den of murderers.
I haven't looked at the EU law, but I think the key issue is promotion.
My understanding with the Grokster case is that Grokster opened themselves up to trouble because they promoted it as tool to help trade illegally shared files, which "incitement" was almost an accurate term for it, the way it was promoted.
Mozilla does not promote Firefox, Mozilla Suite, etc. as a tool to break the law, which is a key difference, even if Firefox could be used to do so. Firefox could be used as a means to trade child porn, but because Mozilla Foundation doesn't promote it as such, they can't be held liable.
Why not use a wired print server attached to the switch on the access point?
Given the limited spectrum and bandwidth for wireless networking, as well as the fact that you are broadcasting, I think it is best to use wired networking for any device that isn't mobile. That gives both higher bandwidth to the stationary devices, and potentially frees up bandwidth to the wireless devices.
"most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"
This guy really must not like open source developers.
He also must really like unfounded and unsupported accusations.
While it's not iron-clad, my argument for Windows being insecure
Some people say that Windows is attacked more because of its market share, trying to say that Windows isn't necessarily easy to exploit. The installed base part is true to an extent, but that doesn't explain why Windows for Itanium was found to be easy to exploit, and that has a tiny installed base.
It's just unbelievable that someone would acutually write something like this, though it is even harder to believe that someone will actually publish it (or post a story about it on/. for that matter).
Slashdot republishes (or really, links to) published trolls. For example, any time John Dvorak publishes something asinine, Taco and his co-editors gladly republish the trolling.
I agree that this stuff shouldn't be published by respectable sites, but maybe that means that CoolTechZone and Slashdot aren't respectable sites.
Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to say without actually trying it.
What this means for me is that it looks interesting enough that I will try it out in the store. If this were $20-$30 I'd buy it without question, but $50 means I'll give it some scrutiny. If the scroll point/wheel is what I think it is, and the overall thing feels right, then I will buy. The two-way scroll wheels seemed kind of nifty, but this seems more functional than the competitor's.
Adding a microdrive is going to add $200 to the price. Things like the Life Drive seem kind of nifty, but there are several new laptops available at that price.
There was one time I had to recompile the program "Books" for Mac OS because at the bottom every page in its save-as-HTML output that said "if this page doesn't render right, upgrade your browser". I didn't think the output pages did anything special to warrant that kind of thing.
On the other hand, it showed how easy it was to modify and recompile an app that was written for XCode, it took a minute or so to find that part of the code, remove it and a minute to recompile.
And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%!
The number of HD sets in the US is about 10 million or so. Using the "worldwide" numbers is kind of misleading, as I suspect that it includes a few billion people that might have access to a TV but won't be able to buy a game console even if they wanted one.
FRIGGIN' COMPAQ, MAKERS OF THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTERS SINCE PACKARD BELL
While the consumer models generally sucked, the business models were great for me.
The Compaqs I own are the most reliable x86 computers I have ever owned. Most of the desktops were Xeon based workstations that I bought used, the remainder were ATX-based Deskpros that perform very well, no problems there. Apart from one from a failing hard drive, and one piece of bad third party memory, I never got a BSOD or instability when running Windows. The Compaq servers I bought haven't given me any trouble at all.
The journaling helps in case a file gets corrupted. So long as you keep backups, it isn't all that necessary, but I think journalling can save time fixing the file, at the expense of a little bit of capacity.
I think now, if you install an iPod using a PC, it defaults to FAT32 because there isn't a free or included HFS+ driver for Windows. On a Mac, I think you get the choice of FAT32 or HFS+, I am not sure. The manual claimed that to use iPod with a Mac, it has to be HFS+, but I managed to sync a FAT32 iPod to Mac as the default system.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't even on the iTunes list at all because (oh, the horror) they might play material that is not properly licensed because of copyright issues.
I really don't see this as being reasonable.
First, you have to understand that listing podcasts that play unlicenced media will reflect badly on Apple. You might not have an issue, but providing listings to illegal media is probably going to cause problems. The iTunes software will still let you subscribe to those shows, though I still use iPodder because iTunes collected podcasts don't get into my "recently added" smart playlists for continuous playback.
Also, there is so much GOOD "pod-safe" music that there is absolutely no excuse to play it instead of the "corporate overproduced junk" music.
I do understand the main point though. While internet audio shows are nothing new, look to Slashdot's Geeks in Space, circa seven years ago.
What makes "podcast" new is that there are now several easy to use programs that will automatically grab the latest audio shows that you listen to and automatically put it in your media player, and even automatically put them on your portable media player.
The old means of audio show distribution was more like standard TV distribution, it is there but you have to get it, automatically fetching subscribed shows makes it much more like Tivo.
I understand this automatic fetching really isn't that new either, there was a technology called "push". I'll admit I rejected push at the time, but I think it was because it was dreamt up by commercial interests, it looked to me to be loss of control. Maybe push as it was defined back then was bad, the best I can say that I didn't understand the basic idea until podcasts came about.
Now it looks like commercial interests might be pushing out the independents.
I use the scroll wheel as a middle button AND a scroll wheel. I resisted it, and took a little while to get used to, but I don't like using pure three button mice any more. I've found scrolling to be a necessity because it is a lot more efficient to just roll the wheel than it is to cursor over to the scroll bar, drag, then re-cursor to the part of the screen I wanted to be in the first place.
I have one computer with a three button mouse made in '97, I think, a Logitech with the D|I|G|I|T|A|L label on the bottom.
I was surprised by the selling price of Slashdot. While I agreed that a lot of work went into making Slashdot what it was, it was a lot of money for what is basically just a web site. I really didn't understand why there was such a frenzy with the dot-com era. For some reason, few people of influence questioned the absurdity of the situation. Alan Greenspan did question it with his "irrational exhuberance" remark, people seemed to brush him off. Mr. Greenspan was the wise one here, and those that invested during the frenzy were the fools.
In a way, it still continues with Google and its rediculously heavy price to earnings ratio. Google is probably a solid company but the price is simply outlandish.
Eh. I don't understand the obsession that some have with the clicky keyboards. I found one in my closet and it really doesn't seem to be special, on top of having the old AT / DIN-5 connector.
One argument I've seen is that the membrane switches don't have a correlation between the "feel" of a button press and an actual electrical contact. I get perfect tactile feedback with my Natural Elite keyboard. I've never had it give me false feedback, if the button feels like it "clicked", it actually made contact, if it doesn't feel like it clicked, no contact was made.
The noise they make and the fact that they aren't available in USB form seems to be a serious drawbacks too.
...method available. According to my math, a single miniDV tape can record nearly 12GB, so obviously affordable solid-state video capture and storage is out for a good while yet.
The actual demand for portable tapeless recording of any kind is still pretty low. The demand is low enough that only the people that absolutely must have it have to pay a lot because it requires a specialized device that would hook to the Firewire or other port on the camera.
I think OpenGL is a great graphics API, I was impressed how easy it is to program for. I made some a neat little applet that lets me rotate an object and move around it, it read in AutoCAD DXF files, and it didn't seem hard to do these things.
I have not tried DirectX, but my understanding is that DirectX provides an API that has much better sound and input device support. I don't think there is a good cross-platform standard for handling that, short of maybe SDL.
Aren't they wasting money trying to interoperate with Linux now? It would be two major conflicts.
I am usually OK with self serve gas, but pumping gas is a very small number of operations. I am not happy with self-serve checkout because the machines are designed to work with dumb, inexperienced people and in my experience, a poorly calibrated scanner. Even with good scanner, my experience is better with using actual check-out people is that they ring through a stack of items without the hinderance of the unresponsive and demanding computer, maybe at twice the speed. What it tells me is that stores are too cheap to hire minimum wage workers, and those stores are willing to stick me with an expensive garbage machine to save themselves a few bucks at my expense in time and frustration. I would much rather they hire more cashiers and other service people, not less.
Currently, ATMs aren't about shortening lines but getting cash at convenience, putting machines in where there isn't space to put a mini-branch, and for customers to get their money at any hour.
Banks did try getting ATMs to reduce the amount of manpower needed to run the bank, but as it turns out, the number of bank tellers has not decreased, and ATMs are very expensive to maintain. Bankers basically bought them just to save themselves money, but thankfully that backfired.
I am curious how cheaper lithium batteries will make electric cars sufficiently competitive. For one, the batteries would still have to be completely replaced every three or so years and will still be very heavy. Even hybrids are a boondoggle compared to diesel engines. The EPA mileage rating system seems to give the current hybrids an undeservedly high mileage rating.
Remove the capability of the command line for home users, but leave a buggy and insecure shell for servers where hackers can have lots of fun messing up enterprise level websites!
Just as well. Enterprise level web sites running on Windows sounds sooo wrong.
Ya know, I was deeply affected by the events of 9/11.
Yes, it was a horrible circumstance, but I wonder how soon the laggards will quit obessing about it. Moving on isn't the same as pretending it never happened, I am just saying that there is a time for grieving, and there is a time to move on with life.
I do agree on your points of the knee-jerk reactions.
I don't know how this really deals with Hugo. I don't read much SF, so I am out of the loop.
Like what happened in Philly, maybe a building gets burned down as well.
Was that the case that they allowed the building to burn and prevented firemen from putting the fire out? My understanding was that people died in that fire. That made me mad, and if it is true that people died because of that, I'd call that police department a den of murderers.
I haven't looked at the EU law, but I think the key issue is promotion.
My understanding with the Grokster case is that Grokster opened themselves up to trouble because they promoted it as tool to help trade illegally shared files, which "incitement" was almost an accurate term for it, the way it was promoted.
Mozilla does not promote Firefox, Mozilla Suite, etc. as a tool to break the law, which is a key difference, even if Firefox could be used to do so. Firefox could be used as a means to trade child porn, but because Mozilla Foundation doesn't promote it as such, they can't be held liable.
Why not use a wired print server attached to the switch on the access point?
Given the limited spectrum and bandwidth for wireless networking, as well as the fact that you are broadcasting, I think it is best to use wired networking for any device that isn't mobile. That gives both higher bandwidth to the stationary devices, and potentially frees up bandwidth to the wireless devices.
"most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"
This guy really must not like open source developers.
He also must really like unfounded and unsupported accusations.
While it's not iron-clad, my argument for Windows being insecure
Some people say that Windows is attacked more because of its market share, trying to say that Windows isn't necessarily easy to exploit. The installed base part is true to an extent, but that doesn't explain why Windows for Itanium was found to be easy to exploit, and that has a tiny installed base.
It's just unbelievable that someone would acutually write something like this, though it is even harder to believe that someone will actually publish it (or post a story about it on /. for that matter).
Slashdot republishes (or really, links to) published trolls. For example, any time John Dvorak publishes something asinine, Taco and his co-editors gladly republish the trolling.
I agree that this stuff shouldn't be published by respectable sites, but maybe that means that CoolTechZone and Slashdot aren't respectable sites.
i would rather deal with that than needlessly waste batteries.
I've heard of these batteries that allow the user to recharge them. I have a Logitech wireless mouse that has a dock that recharges the mouse.
Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to say without actually trying it.
What this means for me is that it looks interesting enough that I will try it out in the store. If this were $20-$30 I'd buy it without question, but $50 means I'll give it some scrutiny. If the scroll point/wheel is what I think it is, and the overall thing feels right, then I will buy. The two-way scroll wheels seemed kind of nifty, but this seems more functional than the competitor's.
Adding a microdrive is going to add $200 to the price. Things like the Life Drive seem kind of nifty, but there are several new laptops available at that price.
I agree.
There was one time I had to recompile the program "Books" for Mac OS because at the bottom every page in its save-as-HTML output that said "if this page doesn't render right, upgrade your browser". I didn't think the output pages did anything special to warrant that kind of thing.
On the other hand, it showed how easy it was to modify and recompile an app that was written for XCode, it took a minute or so to find that part of the code, remove it and a minute to recompile.
Shoulda rolled a household server
I really haven't seen a server of any kind that was able to roll, with those pesky square corners and all.
And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%!
The number of HD sets in the US is about 10 million or so. Using the "worldwide" numbers is kind of misleading, as I suspect that it includes a few billion people that might have access to a TV but won't be able to buy a game console even if they wanted one.
FRIGGIN' COMPAQ, MAKERS OF THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTERS SINCE PACKARD BELL
While the consumer models generally sucked, the business models were great for me.
The Compaqs I own are the most reliable x86 computers I have ever owned. Most of the desktops were Xeon based workstations that I bought used, the remainder were ATX-based Deskpros that perform very well, no problems there. Apart from one from a failing hard drive, and one piece of bad third party memory, I never got a BSOD or instability when running Windows. The Compaq servers I bought haven't given me any trouble at all.
Let me clarify.
The journaling helps in case a file gets corrupted. So long as you keep backups, it isn't all that necessary, but I think journalling can save time fixing the file, at the expense of a little bit of capacity.
I think now, if you install an iPod using a PC, it defaults to FAT32 because there isn't a free or included HFS+ driver for Windows. On a Mac, I think you get the choice of FAT32 or HFS+, I am not sure. The manual claimed that to use iPod with a Mac, it has to be HFS+, but I managed to sync a FAT32 iPod to Mac as the default system.