Neat but in all honesty I'm waiting for the Microsoft efforts.
Yes, I know that will rile up the majority of/. readers but I'm a PHB who relies almost extensivily on Microsoft products (Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Powerpoint).
I was full synchronisation between my PDA and Outlook. I currently have a Palm Pilot but as nice and small as it is, it's not quite what I want (what do I want? Portable Outlook without the email).
Phone and PDA convergence is very nice and well but if you're not careful you'll end up with a mediocre PDA and a mediocre phone. Granted, its going to take them a while to get this sorted but something like an iPAQ with a bluetooth and GPRS enabled 8210 would suit me (and a lot of other PHB's) down to the ground for the time being.
So yes, I'm sorry but I'll be waiting to see what Microsofts efforts are like. Yes, they're a monopolistic company with dodgy business practises but I need something that helps me work and, as much as I hate to say it, they could be the only ones that help me do that...
On a side note, I'm desperately looking for people who can host a public avantslash site in non-UK locations. If you can help, please let me know at the email address on the URL above.
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 2
Apple didn't create the iPod to sell iPods. They created it to sell Macs.
Maybe so, but the majority of people who will want one of these things will already have a perfectly good computer with their favourite operating system installed.
However nice the iPod is, Apple are severly delluding themselves if they thing that people are going to purchase an iMac because of the iPod.
Some people might, but I cannot see droves of people throwing away their P3's in favour of an iMac.
The biggest problem I have with Open Source software is that there is this myth that because something is open, anyone can fix bugs and contribute updates.
Well yes they can. But the problem stems from the lead time required to get the know the project, how it works, what does what and how different functions interact with each other.
Some examples. One of the companies I used to work for (a large IT consultancy company) I worked on a telemetry project. For every person who joined that project, there was a lead time of about three months for them to get used to, understand and know how the system works.
Okay, so that was one massive project and with people working full time on it, but Mozilla and other open source projects aren't exactly small either.
Another example. I wrote a GPL perl script called AvantSlash to take the content of Slashdot and process it for handhelds (since Slashdot's own isn't very good). Unfortunately due to a bug and an overdependence on AvantGo's caching, it accidenly spammed the slashdot site and got its IP barred. (This was in the 1.x thread, v2.0 doesn't suffer this problem).
A comment by Jamie a couple of days ago mentioned why it was banned and suggested that I contribute to slashcode.
Whilst this, in theory, is a great idea, as it would seem to be common with open source coders he unfortunately forgot that there would be several months of lead time whilst I learn how the code works, what does what and why and then, once I knew the system well, actually apply a well written patch.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source and the stuff it produces and I have a lot of respect for anyone who spends their time doing such stuff.
However, I'm just pointing out that there is a common myth amongst people in massive open source projects that people can just download, install and then immediately start dipping into the code and producing patches without having to go through the whole learning process.
So, back to Mozilla. Anything which speeds up this lead time has got to be a good thing and will have the added advantage of getting more people interested in the whole project.
Sorry but does Apple really seriously think they can effectivily market this sexy player when, according to the FAQ, it will only work with an iMac?
Well, i'm disappointed. If it wasn't Mac only, then they'd have a highly desirable product, instead they have a very nice but no use to the majority of the people product.
Argh. Maybe Sony will see the light and allow this to play MP3's. When the 1 gig Sony Memory Stick comes out this would be a very sweet albeit expensive player. But Sony being Sony means that won't happen.
So, I'm sorry Apple, but i'm going to predict this is going to be a flop. You've limited your potential market to those people that own a Mac. Based on my (admitidally limited) survey of the office, that means about one person in fourty.
Several Toys R Us employees did not know what went wrong with the Xbox demo unit that now carried a "Out of Order" sign. The store received their unit on Tuesday. The in-store demo units are believed to be actual finalized hardware that consumers will see at launch.
(emphasis mine)
I'd like to see this confirmed first. However whichever way you look at it, it is pretty damn silly to have either a beta box or a buggy game running in shops.
I don't think it would be unfair to suggest that the one that does finally go into retail won't be as bad as this.
AvantSlash apparently crawls the site in a very unfriendly manner and its server (or the public one that we know about anyway got itself IP-banned for that. We tolerate robots as long as they're nice, gentle robots.
We're always interested in making our site more readable on different platforms. There's some good criticisms in the above comment. We need the suggestions to be more specific if we're going to address the issue.
Hi,
I looked into this. I think that part of the problem was because the older version (1.4 and
less) didn't use cache-control properly to ensure that pages weren't crawled when they were already pretty fresh.
v2.0 solves this problem and is rewritten from scratch. Although the owner
of the site hasn't updated the code despite repeated efforts to contact
him.
However, if you're talking about the way pages are pulled then this is not down to Avantslash. It simply takes a request for a/. url, grabs it, reformats it and then sends it back to Avantgo. The actual decision of what pages to visit is down to Avantgo and not Avantslash.
Finally, whilst I'm an advocate of open source I don't have the skills or the understanding to just be able to sit down and hack out a patch to fix the multitude of problems with the palm version of slashdot.
If I had a couple of months of free time to sit down, install the code, set up a bunch of test pages, figure out how it works and then generate a patch then I would, however things like job, beer and women tend to stop that
sort of thing!
Don't get me wrong, open source is great. But the myth that on massive projects people can just dip in and submit a bunch of changes without knowing how the code works, is just that.
Avantslash - a plug
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well since this seems to be the best place to plug it, I'm going to do so with AvantSlash.
AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on
your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.
You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find
that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty
quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at
http://www.slashdot.org/palm
but it has a number of problems.
Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on
kuro5hin:
First of all, this is a
great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and
here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site.
However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of
small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a
bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real
pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection,
but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC
or an offline browser.
Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's
boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some
funny trolls and flamewars!
Finally, using/. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too
many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the
advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the
comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune"
sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be
gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it
fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.
Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes
the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and
doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's
readable.
Microsoft met members of the IT directors' forum Elite and user groups Imis and Socitm - the local authority IT directors' organisation - on 17 September, and told them it would continue dialogue on the licensing issue.
Neil Holloway, Microsoft's UK managing director, told IT directors he could make no changes to the new licensing proposals without specific permission from the company's US headquarters.
Less than a week later, a letter sent to Elite, Imis and Socitm by Microsoft made it plain that the company would not contemplate any changes.
As I've said before I confidently predict that if this trouble keeps up (and it will), DSL providers will just start enforcing a blanket ban of all ports less than 1024.
Yes it sucks, yes it's unfair and yes you'll probably have to pay fixe times your normal price to have it enabled but it'll deter those people who have no need to run a web server (ie. those who don't realise they're even running a web server) and will make the DSL providers life a little easier.
So what? So what if it says you can't say nasty things about Microsoft? So what if it says that when you use it you have to utter a praise to Bill Gates before you start? So what if it says you must not use it to provide a platform for free software?
Whenever someone bitches about the GPL and how it doesn't allow companies to take the code and use it in their own propriatory products they're almost deafened by the chant of people shouting "if you don't like the licence, don't use the code"
Same here. Quite frankly I think they can pretty much put whatever they want in it (provided its legal). If I don't like what they want me to agree to, then i won't use it.
The ISP's are in an interesting situation. As far as I can see it, they have several options for now and the future:
Turn off any infected machine
Prevent port 80 access for everyone
Ignore it
1 is possible but it going to be a fair bit of work, 2 is going to peeve off a number of people but will solve the problem and 3 will just allow their whole network to grind to a halt.
Don't know about everyone else but if this keeps up (with this virus and the 100 just around the door) we won't see many ISP's allowing web servers to run at all, ever.
(As a subnote, my bosses cable modem company, NTL, specifically forbid running a server on your own machines - although, as yet, they don't activily police it)
The end result of that was the mother-#$! Office Paperclip that popped up whenever you typed the words, "Dear John".
Actually the original algorithm was very very smart. Unfortunately it was considered too smart because it would hardly ever pop up and the market folks couldn't figure out how to sell something that would only pop up when you got really really stuck.
So they dumbed it down a lot and added triggering on certain text patterns and you have the paperclip as it stands. More likely to pop up, but more annoying.
Retro gaming takes off
on
MAME on X-Box
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not so long ago I posted this to alt.games.video.box.
I felt that the XBox could be a perfect medium for retro gaming because since it is based around the Windows PC it would be easier to port emulators across to it.
Imagine the possibilities, you could have MAME, Magic Engine, possibly even Amiga emulators running on a console which can sit plugged into your lounge TV.
However this could all be scuppered if Microsofts licence prevents this sort of thing, or the XBox won't read CDR's.
Personally I'm not a big games fan but if I can run Amiga, PC Engine and MAME games under it then I would be very very happy.
What do others think? Will we see a resurgence of retro gaming should there be no problems with unofficial porting of applications?
Windows is one of the worst window manager in existence. It doesn't do one thing and do it well, it doesn't have any shining features whatsoever. NOT ONE.
Errr, you've not really used Windows at all really have you? Windows is one of the best window managers out there. Its clean, easy to understand and completely consistent through out.
But thats not really a surprise. Microsoft spends thousands every year with useability tests and studies. They gain feedback on their GUI from a massive number of computer literate and illiterate people alike.
In fact, its so good and so consistent and so easy to use that much of the stuff in KDE, GNOME or whatever have been directly copied or influenced by Windows GUI.
Unless i've read this totally wrongly, its not really a PDF virus - more a VB(S) virus embedded in a PDF file.
If that is the case, then practically any program that can embedd other files is suddenly going to be flagged as having a virus, when in reality, its just the same old software (VB and VBS) causing the same old problems (reading outlook email addresses and so forth)...
As an unrelated side note...The only innovation in Windows since the 3.x series was the task bar. Until Microsoft moves to something more intuative than what's fundamentally program manager poping up when you hit the start button, Windows will not get any easier.
Thats a little harsh considering pretty much every feature and look and feel of Free software comes copied directly from the Microsoft version.
Personally I think both areas have been innovating, however the amounts vary depending on your definition of "innovation".
But most users do not want the system to lie to them about a file's name, causing them to think it's NOT an executable file when it in fact is.
Just a tad harsh. All windows is doing is hiding the ending of known filetypes (as set up in its configuration) because... people asked for that option.
Microsoft have given the people what they want, its hardly their fault that after it has been enabled, the users promptly go and forget that they've enabled it.
Not forgetting that they don't seem to spot that the icon is completely wrong.
If anyone is going to advocate Linux I seriously recommend reading the Linux advocacy how-to. It has some very important points.
My biggest personal gripe is how people spell Microsoft. Its M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t, not Micro$oft, MicroShaft, Micro~1 and the one-hundred and one other variations.
You wouldn't like it if people started calling Linux, GPOO/Linsux. It looks childish, immature, stupid and above all it drops your own personal credibility and the credibility of what you're trying to advocate below the ground.
This won't unfortunately work with IE and Windows unless you are running a web server.
If you don't have a web server then the webpage appears and then as soon as it tries to get the advert you get a full page error from IE saying that the site is unavailable.
Okay, I'm sure this has been asked before but I can't seem to find it and i think it's a fairly important point.
One thing that people seem to be unhappy about is the fact that Gracenote charge for the information. Now I can understand from the perspective of the people that entered the data that this sucks. But looking at it from Gracenotes point of view (and *ignoring the making money angle* for the moment) why shouldn't they charge to keep the service running?
I'm not trolling (honest guv) but trying to understand one thing. That is that hosting a huge database that millions (or a hell of a lot, I don't have the stats) costs.
When I mean costs I mean:
Costs of all hardware and software upgrades (a new HD isn't cheap)
Bandwidth costs (all those people requesting uses it)
Server maintenance costs (someone has to look after the thing)
and so on.
I know that we (as the the community) provided the data for free but as much as we'd like it still costs to host something and whilst it would be nice for Gracenote to do it for free, they themselves will incurr costs that will have to be paid for by someone.
What are peoples opinions on this?
As a subnote - if Gracenote are charging any more than the costs for the above (ie. making a profit) then shoot them all. That just plain sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I know that will rile up the majority of /. readers but I'm a PHB who relies almost extensivily on Microsoft products (Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Powerpoint).
I was full synchronisation between my PDA and Outlook. I currently have a Palm Pilot but as nice and small as it is, it's not quite what I want (what do I want? Portable Outlook without the email).
Phone and PDA convergence is very nice and well but if you're not careful you'll end up with a mediocre PDA and a mediocre phone. Granted, its going to take them a while to get this sorted but something like an iPAQ with a bluetooth and GPRS enabled 8210 would suit me (and a lot of other PHB's) down to the ground for the time being.
So yes, I'm sorry but I'll be waiting to see what Microsofts efforts are like. Yes, they're a monopolistic company with dodgy business practises but I need something that helps me work and, as much as I hate to say it, they could be the only ones that help me do that ...
Suddenly Star Trek Generations would be worth watching :)
There are alternatives - check them out at http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslash.
On a side note, I'm desperately looking for people who can host a public avantslash site in non-UK locations. If you can help, please let me know at the email address on the URL above.
Maybe so, but the majority of people who will want one of these things will already have a perfectly good computer with their favourite operating system installed.
However nice the iPod is, Apple are severly delluding themselves if they thing that people are going to purchase an iMac because of the iPod.
Some people might, but I cannot see droves of people throwing away their P3's in favour of an iMac.
The biggest problem I have with Open Source software is that there is this myth that because something is open, anyone can fix bugs and contribute updates.
Well yes they can. But the problem stems from the lead time required to get the know the project, how it works, what does what and how different functions interact with each other.
Some examples. One of the companies I used to work for (a large IT consultancy company) I worked on a telemetry project. For every person who joined that project, there was a lead time of about three months for them to get used to, understand and know how the system works.
Okay, so that was one massive project and with people working full time on it, but Mozilla and other open source projects aren't exactly small either.
Another example. I wrote a GPL perl script called AvantSlash to take the content of Slashdot and process it for handhelds (since Slashdot's own isn't very good). Unfortunately due to a bug and an overdependence on AvantGo's caching, it accidenly spammed the slashdot site and got its IP barred. (This was in the 1.x thread, v2.0 doesn't suffer this problem).
A comment by Jamie a couple of days ago mentioned why it was banned and suggested that I contribute to slashcode.
Whilst this, in theory, is a great idea, as it would seem to be common with open source coders he unfortunately forgot that there would be several months of lead time whilst I learn how the code works, what does what and why and then, once I knew the system well, actually apply a well written patch.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source and the stuff it produces and I have a lot of respect for anyone who spends their time doing such stuff.
However, I'm just pointing out that there is a common myth amongst people in massive open source projects that people can just download, install and then immediately start dipping into the code and producing patches without having to go through the whole learning process.
So, back to Mozilla. Anything which speeds up this lead time has got to be a good thing and will have the added advantage of getting more people interested in the whole project.
So what? Americans have been editing the English language for centuries now! :)
Well, i'm disappointed. If it wasn't Mac only, then they'd have a highly desirable product, instead they have a very nice but no use to the majority of the people product.
Argh. Maybe Sony will see the light and allow this to play MP3's. When the 1 gig Sony Memory Stick comes out this would be a very sweet albeit expensive player. But Sony being Sony means that won't happen.
So, I'm sorry Apple, but i'm going to predict this is going to be a flop. You've limited your potential market to those people that own a Mac. Based on my (admitidally limited) survey of the office, that means about one person in fourty.
(emphasis mine)
I'd like to see this confirmed first. However whichever way you look at it, it is pretty damn silly to have either a beta box or a buggy game running in shops.
I don't think it would be unfair to suggest that the one that does finally go into retail won't be as bad as this.
Hi, I looked into this. I think that part of the problem was because the older version (1.4 and less) didn't use cache-control properly to ensure that pages weren't crawled when they were already pretty fresh.
v2.0 solves this problem and is rewritten from scratch. Although the owner of the site hasn't updated the code despite repeated efforts to contact him.
However, if you're talking about the way pages are pulled then this is not down to Avantslash. It simply takes a request for a /. url, grabs it, reformats it and then sends it back to Avantgo. The actual decision of what pages to visit is down to Avantgo and not Avantslash.
Finally, whilst I'm an advocate of open source I don't have the skills or the understanding to just be able to sit down and hack out a patch to fix the multitude of problems with the palm version of slashdot.
If I had a couple of months of free time to sit down, install the code, set up a bunch of test pages, figure out how it works and then generate a patch then I would, however things like job, beer and women tend to stop that sort of thing!
Don't get me wrong, open source is great. But the myth that on massive projects people can just dip in and submit a bunch of changes without knowing how the code works, is just that.
AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.
You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:
First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.
/. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too
many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the
advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the
comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune"
sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be
gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it
fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.
If you're interesting in downloading avantslash or can provide a public URL for others to use, please check out http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslashAdditionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!
Finally, using
Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.
Thanks for listening.
Neil Holloway, Microsoft's UK managing director, told IT directors he could make no changes to the new licensing proposals without specific permission from the company's US headquarters.
Less than a week later, a letter sent to Elite, Imis and Socitm by Microsoft made it plain that the company would not contemplate any changes.
Yes it sucks, yes it's unfair and yes you'll probably have to pay fixe times your normal price to have it enabled but it'll deter those people who have no need to run a web server (ie. those who don't realise they're even running a web server) and will make the DSL providers life a little easier.
You'll see.
So what? So what if it says you can't say nasty things about Microsoft? So what if it says that when you use it you have to utter a praise to Bill Gates before you start? So what if it says you must not use it to provide a platform for free software?
Whenever someone bitches about the GPL and how it doesn't allow companies to take the code and use it in their own propriatory products they're almost deafened by the chant of people shouting "if you don't like the licence, don't use the code"
Same here. Quite frankly I think they can pretty much put whatever they want in it (provided its legal). If I don't like what they want me to agree to, then i won't use it.
- Turn off any infected machine
- Prevent port 80 access for everyone
- Ignore it
1 is possible but it going to be a fair bit of work, 2 is going to peeve off a number of people but will solve the problem and 3 will just allow their whole network to grind to a halt.Don't know about everyone else but if this keeps up (with this virus and the 100 just around the door) we won't see many ISP's allowing web servers to run at all, ever.
(As a subnote, my bosses cable modem company, NTL, specifically forbid running a server on your own machines - although, as yet, they don't activily police it)
Actually the original algorithm was very very smart. Unfortunately it was considered too smart because it would hardly ever pop up and the market folks couldn't figure out how to sell something that would only pop up when you got really really stuck.
So they dumbed it down a lot and added triggering on certain text patterns and you have the paperclip as it stands. More likely to pop up, but more annoying.
I felt that the XBox could be a perfect medium for retro gaming because since it is based around the Windows PC it would be easier to port emulators across to it.
Imagine the possibilities, you could have MAME, Magic Engine, possibly even Amiga emulators running on a console which can sit plugged into your lounge TV.
However this could all be scuppered if Microsofts licence prevents this sort of thing, or the XBox won't read CDR's.
Personally I'm not a big games fan but if I can run Amiga, PC Engine and MAME games under it then I would be very very happy.
What do others think? Will we see a resurgence of retro gaming should there be no problems with unofficial porting of applications?
Errr, you've not really used Windows at all really have you? Windows is one of the best window managers out there. Its clean, easy to understand and completely consistent through out.
But thats not really a surprise. Microsoft spends thousands every year with useability tests and studies. They gain feedback on their GUI from a massive number of computer literate and illiterate people alike.
In fact, its so good and so consistent and so easy to use that much of the stuff in KDE, GNOME or whatever have been directly copied or influenced by Windows GUI.
If that is the case, then practically any program that can embedd other files is suddenly going to be flagged as having a virus, when in reality, its just the same old software (VB and VBS) causing the same old problems (reading outlook email addresses and so forth) ...
Or am I missing something?
Now after they've finished, there will be nothing left!
What an accolade! :o)
--
Thats a little harsh considering pretty much every feature and look and feel of Free software comes copied directly from the Microsoft version.
Personally I think both areas have been innovating, however the amounts vary depending on your definition of "innovation".
--
Just a tad harsh. All windows is doing is hiding the ending of known filetypes (as set up in its configuration) because ... people asked for that option.
Microsoft have given the people what they want, its hardly their fault that after it has been enabled, the users promptly go and forget that they've enabled it.
Not forgetting that they don't seem to spot that the icon is completely wrong.
--
My biggest personal gripe is how people spell Microsoft. Its M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t, not Micro$oft, MicroShaft, Micro~1 and the one-hundred and one other variations.
You wouldn't like it if people started calling Linux, GPOO/Linsux. It looks childish, immature, stupid and above all it drops your own personal credibility and the credibility of what you're trying to advocate below the ground.
Just don't do it.
--
If you don't have a web server then the webpage appears and then as soon as it tries to get the advert you get a full page error from IE saying that the site is unavailable.
Just FYI.
--
One thing that people seem to be unhappy about is the fact that Gracenote charge for the information. Now I can understand from the perspective of the people that entered the data that this sucks. But looking at it from Gracenotes point of view (and *ignoring the making money angle* for the moment) why shouldn't they charge to keep the service running?
I'm not trolling (honest guv) but trying to understand one thing. That is that hosting a huge database that millions (or a hell of a lot, I don't have the stats) costs.
When I mean costs I mean:
- Costs of all hardware and software upgrades (a new HD isn't cheap)
- Bandwidth costs (all those people requesting uses it)
- Server maintenance costs (someone has to look after the thing)
and so on.I know that we (as the the community) provided the data for free but as much as we'd like it still costs to host something and whilst it would be nice for Gracenote to do it for free, they themselves will incurr costs that will have to be paid for by someone.
What are peoples opinions on this?
As a subnote - if Gracenote are charging any more than the costs for the above (ie. making a profit) then shoot them all. That just plain sucks.
--
Or if you're a Palm owning Gameboy fan then try Liberty or PalmBoy (free).
There is also a GBA emulator for the PocketPC apparantly. Although I've not tested it and there was a rumour of one of the GBA emulators being a hoax.
Biggest problems are that:
- Battery life in a pocketpc is low enough as it is without having a game hammer it even more
- You can't press two buttons at the same time with an iPAQ, possibly others too
At the end of the day its not perfect, if you want perfect, buy a portable, but for a bit of fun then it's reasonable.--