I actually don't feel that much weakness with Mac gaming (other than the occasional Half-Life 2 class game), then again, I play a lot of WoW and Desert Combat, both of which are excellent and fun games (the latter actually a high-quality mod of Battlefield 1942) with lots of replayability, so I suppose that's all I need.
I was very frustrated at the incidents you cite, though. The Halo one was just awful.
I quit my job a couple of weeks ago to try my hand at full-time Rails development (I was stuck in corporate ASP/SQL Server land for too long, with a nagging love for OS X...). I have found that #rubyonrails on freenet is "OK" for the most part, and I've already been able to help others on it as I slowly assimilate all of Ruby and Rails. I found an awesome chat client called Colloquy and I'm pretty much always on the channel lately.
It would obviously benefit the consumers as well as us who work in this industry if everyone small- and medium-sized wasn't afraid to go near the 900lb. gorilla in the room for fear it will sneeze out a legal document. Microsoft has successfully established itself as the "safe" choice both for corporations as well as uninformed consumers. Microsoft is after all the new IBM, and they are seemingly too big for even a coalition of competitors to gang up against.
Did something go wrong along the way?
Part of the problem is you guys. Yes, you. YOU have not fought management enough on their mindless devotion to Microsoft BizTalk, Outlook and Exchange Server. YOU have not spent enough weekends building a kickass app using open-source tools that you could use to prove your faith to management or the client or both. YOU have failed to convince your Windows-using friends to try anything else, even though they still go to you for Windows assistance. YOU know how hard it is for them to get past that mental block, so go ahead and put your money where your mouth (and heart) is and lend them a used or rebuilt machine for a while. YOU, the army of independent thinkers, of underdog fans, of any thought or decision that looks too lemming-like, you PHB despisers and abhorrers of the status quo... need to not only hold your ground, but advance! (Disclaimer: I'm not just all talk- I just quit my decent-paying, Microsoft-technology-focused and totally-time-consuming salaried-worker-abusing Big 4 consulting job so I could focus on mastering some open-source technologies that the corporate world has not gotten a whiff of yet, and to try my hand at building great stuff with it... and I already have a paying project...)
Could someone post some techniques to record changes to database records that don't involve a lot of overhead yet allow one to revisit any prior state of the data?
I suppose this sort of duplicates the functions of a transaction log but I don't know if a transaction log is queryable.
The reason why I ask is that I suppose it might have been useful in this case (as long as the law enforces audit logging)
I know this is about PHP but as a long-time web developer, I'm sure a lot of other web devs will be reading this, so here are my observations on RoR.
I've started my first small-scale Ruby on Rails project, having done work in the past in ASP,.NET and PHP. Here are some thoughts.
1) RoR may be highly buzz-worthy but it is certainly NOT a panacea. It has a definite and slightly steep learning curve, especially if you are also new to Ruby and/or OOP and/or MVC (I am sort of but not completely new to all of these). You will still have to do the work of developing your application- you just won't have to do the "stupid" kind of work that much (repeating code in views, bubbling new database fields through umpteen app tiers to the surface of your app, hand-validating everything, building a mechanism to bubble errors or notifications to the surface, etc. etc.)
That said...
2) I can see that if I can get past the little syntactic things that are currently tripping me up, a lot of the RoR technology (and all the assistance its framework provides, once you get to know it... again, that takes time) helps to make web development a breeze.
3) MVC certainly seems like a pattern to seriously consider for anything other than a small web app. Mixing code in the presentation layer is not the way to go if you want easy unit testing, separation of view from code (so your graphic designers can go in and do their thing separately), arbitrary mixing of controller code with different views, etc.
4) Ruby itself is a pretty great language to code in and highly readable. It has a few quirks (doesn't every language?) but if you are aware of them then they won't get in your way. Some of the things I like about it were apparently "borrowed" from Perl (as I never really got that into Perl). If you are not a static-typing purist, I'd say check it out on its own.
5) Installing some Ruby/Rails components that depend on each other is not at ALL as painless as it should be on OS X. For example, I'm currently having issues with RMagick and GraphicsMagick even though I followed a guide I found online, to the letter. I think the darwinports, fink, and rubygems people should get together and work some shit out, as all the different default paths these packaging/deployment tools install their stuff to causes mutual interdependencies to sometimes fail. I've also seen some MySQL issues that will require good troubleshooting to resolve, for some people- some of it is based on incompatibilities with GCC 4.0, or between the password hashes of different MySQL versions, or... Basically, this is all stuff that as a Rails scripter (as opposed to a C++ programmer) you wouldn't want to focus too much time on. If you want to know what I'm talking about just google "rmagick 'os x'" or "mysql rails 'os x'" and read up. That said, if you can get a good host with good Ruby/Rails support, you might not need to worry about such things... Unless you want to develop locally on that shiny Powerbook (grrrr). You better be a good troubleshooter, as Google won't get you out of EVERY bind!
6) The people on the #rubyonrails IRC channel on freenode are generally helpful, but not at all hours of the day. It also helps if you put up small PayPal rewards to get someone to help you over those time-sensitive humps;)
7) Managers at big corporations (such as my employer) who have been out of direct touch with technology for a while will only tend to recommend the "usual big stuff"- in this case Java/EJB/Oracle, or.NET. I suppose this falls under the "Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM" paradigm, but the si
A pretty neat Ruby code editor on OS X is TextMate. Some powerful stuff in there if you lie somewhere between the vi/emacs camp and the notepad/bbedit camp...
Best webcam on the market for the money, I have yet to feel like I've been suckered at all... it also magnetically attaches to my flatscreen which is pretty 1337.
awhile back all my younger friends started bugging me to get a myspace profile. I took one look at the site, first thought was "crap design" (I'm a web/db dev), second thought was "superficial", closed window. I was just appalled at how bad it looked (despite still visiting Slashdot every day... hehe)
All I can surmise is that the person who designed this worm is far more clever than any of the people who designed MySpace.
It's called HandBrake and it works awfully well, actually. I'm ripping most of my DVD collection with it just for convenience. H.264 encoding is slow, but it works, and you can pick any destination rez you want... it has a very nice interface. I can't wait to try some of its output on one of these iPods...
In this case no, because the default user-alert system ALSO repeatedly bounces the Dock icon for notification/attention until you click on it. Such as when you get an iChat message. I first noticed this when I was playing a game and things suddenly got extreeeemely slow and laggy. Quit, and voila, there was an icon bouncing forever until I clicked on it... Next time you get one of these, check Top, you might be surprised.
If you bother to observe the commandline util "top" (or Activity Viewer or whatever) while that icon is bouncing, you will see a distressingly high use of CPU.
I installed a util to stop it and instead replace it with a flashing arrow indicator, which allowed me to keep playing a fullscreen game without quitting to answer an IM =/
(the inability of some Mac games to minimize/windowize is left as another heated discussion... thank god WoW does)
Slightly OT- Is there a good resource online to compare the different open-source licenses available (GPL, BSD, etc.)? I'm googling a lot of FAQ's about each license in particular but I can't seem to find a comparison. I do know that the GPL ensures that derivative works will stay free, but other than that I feel pretty license-clueless.
Distribute it on the darknet with MTA credit. For ease of my own downloading, please include in its name "MTA NYC Subway Map". What is someone going to do, reverse-engineer it and make a different map saying the same thing?
Tell MTA to STFU because all these maps do is encourage people to use mass transit.
1) What the heck are you doing with a cellphone in your back pocket?
2) I gave up the clamshell design after I went through two Motorola StarTAC's in a year (admittedly a few years ago) that had connection issues at the joint between the halves. I now prefer a solid state design, which is why I now have...
3)...a Nokia 6600 through T-Mobile. Fits fine in a FRONT pocket, is a GSM phone so it's got a chip with your data inside, and it's got Bluetooth so it syncs with my Mac at home. Data is safe!
4) Clamshell design is much easier to break than a non-clamshell design when it's open. I think you're forgetting that. Unfold one, accidentally sit on it or drop it and then get back to me. I've dropped and sat on my 6600 a bunch of times, still rugged as heck.
5) The 6600's camera sucks hard. But it's more than made up for by the neat apps you can get for SymbianOS which drives the phone (such as the Opera web browser).
I entered Cornell as a physics major, thinking I was hot sh** because I had the high-school physics lab named after me (the teach promised that to anyone who got a 5 on the AP and 100 on the NY State Regents exams). I also planned to take a lot of CS.
I proceeded to get butt-raped by Calc 192, "Calculus for Engineers," as a first-semester freshman class.
Twice.
I don't think it was as much the fact that I could not understand the material in the allotted time- curiously, I got most of the bonus questions (which tested actual understanding) right on the prelims, but not the bulk of the actual test- I think it was the fact that I had no prior experience at the kind of discipline it took to plow through 6-hour problem sets on a biweekly basis (the kinds of problem types which, of course, made up the bulk of the actual test).
Regardless, that class was a requirement for both a Physics major as well as a CS major... My ego was so shot that I told Cornell I'd leave for a while, and they said OK, I could return within 5 years. I ended up joining the USAF and living in California for 4 years, which both bought me time to consider a bit more what I really wanted to do as well as allowed me to mature a bit more as I was a bit of a late bloomer (wow! girls!)
I returned as a Psych major taking a lot of CS courses as electives, did quite well for myself, except that my earlier experience totally humiliated my cumulative GPA. I joined a fraternity (don't scoff... they were actually mostly engineers and alpha geeks and a lot of them are currently entrepreneurs) and I actually had time to party, both of which provide their own set of underrated educations and opportunities.
My first job was the only one I could find at a good company where they didn't ask me what my GPA was... thank God. They could also tell that I was genuinely interested in their product, which by the way goes over extremely well in interviews.
I am now a web/DB developer with a love for good UI design, good architecture, and pretty code. I do work for a consulting firm, however;)
I don't know about you guys, but if you're a hacker you tend to casually stroll around senseless restrictions such as this with a bit of code or encryption.
I could never live in China and I can barely live in the U.S. Rejection and questioning of authority, control, and the status quo has been a driving force in my life for a long time.
I got a 1GB iPod Shuffle when I was in the market for a 1GB USB drive and realized I could essentially get an Apple-quality music player for free for approx. the same cost.
I happen to also have gotten these in-ear headphones (Sony MDR-EX71SL) recently. They have amazing sound, are very comfortable, and have an unusual cord design (junction about 18 inches from the ear), which at first annoyed me, but has since become a godsend: I can now stick the Shuffle in a business-casual shirt pocket using only the short portion of the cord (leaving the extension at home, in my briefcase or wherever). This setup is awesome as it's almost no weight, no cords in your way, just sound coming into your ears completely without hassle. I also got a strap for my arm for when I run and the short portion of the fontopid is the perfect length for that too.
So I strongly recommend this combo if you're interested in a Nano. You won't really miss the screen that much as long as you are intelligent about the playlist you set up to sync with the Shuffle...
1) save up 2) introspect your motives well, take a deep breath and then 3) find the balls to jump ship
I feel so repressed at my current job that I am starting to get weird stress-related medical problems (diverticulitis? trench mouth? wtf?)
One tends to get into a position in a company where the things you would like to be doing and the things they can find for you to do are just too far apart.
I'm just a grand from my savings goal and then it's sayonara, whether I find another employer or not (I'm interviewing, but part of me wants to freelance/contract for a bit)... my employer owns all my intellectual output and I have so many ideas I've been waiting to build...
I tried both Skype and GizmoProject. With GP you MUST use a headset. Meanwhile, I could talk to someone with Skype using my existing iSight cam's built-in mic and my comp speakers. No issues with feedback whatsoever. This alone was worth a lot, in my opinion, as much as I am a fan of GizmoProject and SIP. And the average consumer (of which you and I are not) is not going to care about standards compliance (witness AIM, etc.)
I've used PayPal for years now with no issues, and I do like their clean site design. I think that you can take almost any company and create a thatcompanysucks.com site and populate it with true content, as no company is perfect.
I've also used eBay for some time, and their site is pretty badly designed (weird session management, searching for completed items is wacky, etc.) But... I still use 'em.
I recently ran out of space on my two internal 250 SATA's (I use one to back up the other on a schedule) so I bought two of these with the SATA sled, put the two internal 250's there and installed two of these 500's internally. Perceptions:
1) Whoa. We have space, sir! And lots of it! 2) Slightly, yet noticeably, faster. 3) Seems quieter than the 250's. 4) Installation is a BREEZE on the G5... and quite ingenious as usual for Apple. Their internal hardware design is a joy to work on. 5) The G5 already has a fan pointing at the internal drive bay, so no additional cooling was necessary 6) The 250's happily run in the TrayDock enclosures (they don't have fans, but their all-metal design does conduct heat away well) and I can swap them out after an unmount, live, very easily 7) Did I mention I have almost a terabyte of backed-up storage now, for home use. mmmm, massive media::cough:: pr0n::cough:: library... 8) OK, I can only afford this because I am not getting laid lately. Hence no money going to women. So quitcherbitchin' if you're gettin' some. I'd upgrade to some a THAT, given the choice.;)
Disclaimer: I've been an Apple fanboy and using Macs consistently since December '84. And also reading about them for all of that time. (I've put my favorite Apple quote below.)
There was a time, not too long ago, perhaps ending in the mid- to late-90's around the time the iMac came out, when Mossberg was relentlessly ANTI-apple. In fact, as I recall, his name was pretty much synonymous with "Apple-basher" in the "beleaguered" Mac community (God, we hated that word...). Perhaps not many people, period, around the time of the Gil Amelio era were pro-Apple (I was a holdout... and proud of it), but Mossberg was quite visible as he was sort of the tech mouthpiece of corporate America.
And then... I'm fairly certain someone at Apple courted this guy. Hard.
Ever since then (and perhaps because of Apple's string of hits, starting with the iMac), Mossberg has been a fanboy. Of course, it's been easy, lately...
(my favorite quote about Apple follows...) "One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy." -Jean-Louis Gassée, Former Apple Computer, Inc. Executive
Slashdot Mirror
PCSX
Works well, last time I checked...
I actually don't feel that much weakness with Mac gaming (other than the occasional Half-Life 2 class game), then again, I play a lot of WoW and Desert Combat, both of which are excellent and fun games (the latter actually a high-quality mod of Battlefield 1942) with lots of replayability, so I suppose that's all I need.
I was very frustrated at the incidents you cite, though. The Halo one was just awful.
I quit my job a couple of weeks ago to try my hand at full-time Rails development (I was stuck in corporate ASP/SQL Server land for too long, with a nagging love for OS X...). I have found that #rubyonrails on freenet is "OK" for the most part, and I've already been able to help others on it as I slowly assimilate all of Ruby and Rails. I found an awesome chat client called Colloquy and I'm pretty much always on the channel lately.
It would obviously benefit the consumers as well as us who work in this industry if everyone small- and medium-sized wasn't afraid to go near the 900lb. gorilla in the room for fear it will sneeze out a legal document. Microsoft has successfully established itself as the "safe" choice both for corporations as well as uninformed consumers. Microsoft is after all the new IBM, and they are seemingly too big for even a coalition of competitors to gang up against.
Did something go wrong along the way?
Part of the problem is you guys. Yes, you. YOU have not fought management enough on their mindless devotion to Microsoft BizTalk, Outlook and Exchange Server. YOU have not spent enough weekends building a kickass app using open-source tools that you could use to prove your faith to management or the client or both. YOU have failed to convince your Windows-using friends to try anything else, even though they still go to you for Windows assistance. YOU know how hard it is for them to get past that mental block, so go ahead and put your money where your mouth (and heart) is and lend them a used or rebuilt machine for a while. YOU, the army of independent thinkers, of underdog fans, of any thought or decision that looks too lemming-like, you PHB despisers and abhorrers of the status quo... need to not only hold your ground, but advance! (Disclaimer: I'm not just all talk- I just quit my decent-paying, Microsoft-technology-focused and totally-time-consuming salaried-worker-abusing Big 4 consulting job so I could focus on mastering some open-source technologies that the corporate world has not gotten a whiff of yet, and to try my hand at building great stuff with it... and I already have a paying project...)
Could someone post some techniques to record changes to database records that don't involve a lot of overhead yet allow one to revisit any prior state of the data?
I suppose this sort of duplicates the functions of a transaction log but I don't know if a transaction log is queryable.
The reason why I ask is that I suppose it might have been useful in this case (as long as the law enforces audit logging)
I know this is about PHP but as a long-time web developer, I'm sure a lot of other web devs will be reading this, so here are my observations on RoR.
.NET and PHP. Here are some thoughts.
;)
.NET. I suppose this falls under the "Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM" paradigm, but the si
I've started my first small-scale Ruby on Rails project, having done work in the past in ASP,
1) RoR may be highly buzz-worthy but it is certainly NOT a panacea. It has a definite and slightly steep learning curve, especially if you are also new to Ruby and/or OOP and/or MVC (I am sort of but not completely new to all of these). You will still have to do the work of developing your application- you just won't have to do the "stupid" kind of work that much (repeating code in views, bubbling new database fields through umpteen app tiers to the surface of your app, hand-validating everything, building a mechanism to bubble errors or notifications to the surface, etc. etc.)
That said...
2) I can see that if I can get past the little syntactic things that are currently tripping me up, a lot of the RoR technology (and all the assistance its framework provides, once you get to know it... again, that takes time) helps to make web development a breeze.
3) MVC certainly seems like a pattern to seriously consider for anything other than a small web app. Mixing code in the presentation layer is not the way to go if you want easy unit testing, separation of view from code (so your graphic designers can go in and do their thing separately), arbitrary mixing of controller code with different views, etc.
4) Ruby itself is a pretty great language to code in and highly readable. It has a few quirks (doesn't every language?) but if you are aware of them then they won't get in your way. Some of the things I like about it were apparently "borrowed" from Perl (as I never really got that into Perl). If you are not a static-typing purist, I'd say check it out on its own.
5) Installing some Ruby/Rails components that depend on each other is not at ALL as painless as it should be on OS X. For example, I'm currently having issues with RMagick and GraphicsMagick even though I followed a guide I found online, to the letter. I think the darwinports, fink, and rubygems people should get together and work some shit out, as all the different default paths these packaging/deployment tools install their stuff to causes mutual interdependencies to sometimes fail. I've also seen some MySQL issues that will require good troubleshooting to resolve, for some people- some of it is based on incompatibilities with GCC 4.0, or between the password hashes of different MySQL versions, or... Basically, this is all stuff that as a Rails scripter (as opposed to a C++ programmer) you wouldn't want to focus too much time on. If you want to know what I'm talking about just google "rmagick 'os x'" or "mysql rails 'os x'" and read up. That said, if you can get a good host with good Ruby/Rails support, you might not need to worry about such things... Unless you want to develop locally on that shiny Powerbook (grrrr). You better be a good troubleshooter, as Google won't get you out of EVERY bind!
6) The people on the #rubyonrails IRC channel on freenode are generally helpful, but not at all hours of the day. It also helps if you put up small PayPal rewards to get someone to help you over those time-sensitive humps
7) Managers at big corporations (such as my employer) who have been out of direct touch with technology for a while will only tend to recommend the "usual big stuff"- in this case Java/EJB/Oracle, or
A pretty neat Ruby code editor on OS X is TextMate. Some powerful stuff in there if you lie somewhere between the vi/emacs camp and the notepad/bbedit camp...
Best webcam on the market for the money, I have yet to feel like I've been suckered at all... it also magnetically attaches to my flatscreen which is pretty 1337.
that is the ugliest hack I've ever heard of. I might as well point my iSight at my PSP and display it on my flatscreen. unbelievable...
awhile back all my younger friends started bugging me to get a myspace profile. I took one look at the site, first thought was "crap design" (I'm a web/db dev), second thought was "superficial", closed window. I was just appalled at how bad it looked (despite still visiting Slashdot every day... hehe)
All I can surmise is that the person who designed this worm is far more clever than any of the people who designed MySpace.
I still don't have a profile on it...
It's called HandBrake and it works awfully well, actually. I'm ripping most of my DVD collection with it just for convenience. H.264 encoding is slow, but it works, and you can pick any destination rez you want... it has a very nice interface. I can't wait to try some of its output on one of these iPods...
In this case no, because the default user-alert system ALSO repeatedly bounces the Dock icon for notification/attention until you click on it. Such as when you get an iChat message. I first noticed this when I was playing a game and things suddenly got extreeeemely slow and laggy. Quit, and voila, there was an icon bouncing forever until I clicked on it... Next time you get one of these, check Top, you might be surprised.
If you bother to observe the commandline util "top" (or Activity Viewer or whatever) while that icon is bouncing, you will see a distressingly high use of CPU.
I installed a util to stop it and instead replace it with a flashing arrow indicator, which allowed me to keep playing a fullscreen game without quitting to answer an IM =/
(the inability of some Mac games to minimize/windowize is left as another heated discussion... thank god WoW does)
Slightly OT- Is there a good resource online to compare the different open-source licenses available (GPL, BSD, etc.)? I'm googling a lot of FAQ's about each license in particular but I can't seem to find a comparison. I do know that the GPL ensures that derivative works will stay free, but other than that I feel pretty license-clueless.
Distribute it on the darknet with MTA credit. For ease of my own downloading, please include in its name "MTA NYC Subway Map". What is someone going to do, reverse-engineer it and make a different map saying the same thing?
Tell MTA to STFU because all these maps do is encourage people to use mass transit.
This guy, Bram Cohen, followed his urge to hack. For a while now he's been living off donations for his work. And now this windfall.
This is inspiring!
1) What the heck are you doing with a cellphone in your back pocket?
...a Nokia 6600 through T-Mobile. Fits fine in a FRONT pocket, is a GSM phone so it's got a chip with your data inside, and it's got Bluetooth so it syncs with my Mac at home. Data is safe!
2) I gave up the clamshell design after I went through two Motorola StarTAC's in a year (admittedly a few years ago) that had connection issues at the joint between the halves. I now prefer a solid state design, which is why I now have...
3)
4) Clamshell design is much easier to break than a non-clamshell design when it's open. I think you're forgetting that. Unfold one, accidentally sit on it or drop it and then get back to me. I've dropped and sat on my 6600 a bunch of times, still rugged as heck.
5) The 6600's camera sucks hard. But it's more than made up for by the neat apps you can get for SymbianOS which drives the phone (such as the Opera web browser).
In other news, a formula 1 race car was returned to the dealer yesterday by Grandma Langsam because it was "too fast around turns".
The right tools in the wrong hands will always lead to crap like this. There is no new information in this article.
I entered Cornell as a physics major, thinking I was hot sh** because I had the high-school physics lab named after me (the teach promised that to anyone who got a 5 on the AP and 100 on the NY State Regents exams). I also planned to take a lot of CS.
;)
I proceeded to get butt-raped by Calc 192, "Calculus for Engineers," as a first-semester freshman class.
Twice.
I don't think it was as much the fact that I could not understand the material in the allotted time- curiously, I got most of the bonus questions (which tested actual understanding) right on the prelims, but not the bulk of the actual test- I think it was the fact that I had no prior experience at the kind of discipline it took to plow through 6-hour problem sets on a biweekly basis (the kinds of problem types which, of course, made up the bulk of the actual test).
Regardless, that class was a requirement for both a Physics major as well as a CS major... My ego was so shot that I told Cornell I'd leave for a while, and they said OK, I could return within 5 years. I ended up joining the USAF and living in California for 4 years, which both bought me time to consider a bit more what I really wanted to do as well as allowed me to mature a bit more as I was a bit of a late bloomer (wow! girls!)
I returned as a Psych major taking a lot of CS courses as electives, did quite well for myself, except that my earlier experience totally humiliated my cumulative GPA. I joined a fraternity (don't scoff... they were actually mostly engineers and alpha geeks and a lot of them are currently entrepreneurs) and I actually had time to party, both of which provide their own set of underrated educations and opportunities.
My first job was the only one I could find at a good company where they didn't ask me what my GPA was... thank God. They could also tell that I was genuinely interested in their product, which by the way goes over extremely well in interviews.
I am now a web/DB developer with a love for good UI design, good architecture, and pretty code. I do work for a consulting firm, however
I don't know about you guys, but if you're a hacker you tend to casually stroll around senseless restrictions such as this with a bit of code or encryption.
I could never live in China and I can barely live in the U.S. Rejection and questioning of authority, control, and the status quo has been a driving force in my life for a long time.
I got a 1GB iPod Shuffle when I was in the market for a 1GB USB drive and realized I could essentially get an Apple-quality music player for free for approx. the same cost.
I happen to also have gotten these in-ear headphones (Sony MDR-EX71SL) recently. They have amazing sound, are very comfortable, and have an unusual cord design (junction about 18 inches from the ear), which at first annoyed me, but has since become a godsend: I can now stick the Shuffle in a business-casual shirt pocket using only the short portion of the cord (leaving the extension at home, in my briefcase or wherever). This setup is awesome as it's almost no weight, no cords in your way, just sound coming into your ears completely without hassle. I also got a strap for my arm for when I run and the short portion of the fontopid is the perfect length for that too.
So I strongly recommend this combo if you're interested in a Nano. You won't really miss the screen that much as long as you are intelligent about the playlist you set up to sync with the Shuffle...
Option-arrow will skip over words in Cocoa apps. (Doesn't seem to work in Terminal, which sounds like it's where you live, though.)
The control key generally does nothing in OS X due to Mac historical reasons (early Mac keyboards never even had a ctrl key, function keys, etc.)
1) save up
2) introspect your motives well, take a deep breath and then
3) find the balls to jump ship
I feel so repressed at my current job that I am starting to get weird stress-related medical problems (diverticulitis? trench mouth? wtf?)
One tends to get into a position in a company where the things you would like to be doing and the things they can find for you to do are just too far apart.
I'm just a grand from my savings goal and then it's sayonara, whether I find another employer or not (I'm interviewing, but part of me wants to freelance/contract for a bit)... my employer owns all my intellectual output and I have so many ideas I've been waiting to build...
I tried both Skype and GizmoProject.
With GP you MUST use a headset. Meanwhile, I could talk to someone with Skype using my existing iSight cam's built-in mic and my comp speakers. No issues with feedback whatsoever. This alone was worth a lot, in my opinion, as much as I am a fan of GizmoProject and SIP. And the average consumer (of which you and I are not) is not going to care about standards compliance (witness AIM, etc.)
I've used PayPal for years now with no issues, and I do like their clean site design. I think that you can take almost any company and create a thatcompanysucks.com site and populate it with true content, as no company is perfect.
I've also used eBay for some time, and their site is pretty badly designed (weird session management, searching for completed items is wacky, etc.) But... I still use 'em.
I recently ran out of space on my two internal 250 SATA's (I use one to back up the other on a schedule) so I bought two of these with the SATA sled, put the two internal 250's there and installed two of these 500's internally. Perceptions:
::cough:: pr0n ::cough:: library... ;)
1) Whoa. We have space, sir! And lots of it!
2) Slightly, yet noticeably, faster.
3) Seems quieter than the 250's.
4) Installation is a BREEZE on the G5... and quite ingenious as usual for Apple. Their internal hardware design is a joy to work on.
5) The G5 already has a fan pointing at the internal drive bay, so no additional cooling was necessary
6) The 250's happily run in the TrayDock enclosures (they don't have fans, but their all-metal design does conduct heat away well) and I can swap them out after an unmount, live, very easily
7) Did I mention I have almost a terabyte of backed-up storage now, for home use. mmmm, massive media
8) OK, I can only afford this because I am not getting laid lately. Hence no money going to women. So quitcherbitchin' if you're gettin' some. I'd upgrade to some a THAT, given the choice.
Mossberg was an Apple coup.
Disclaimer: I've been an Apple fanboy and using Macs consistently since December '84. And also reading about them for all of that time. (I've put my favorite Apple quote below.)
There was a time, not too long ago, perhaps ending in the mid- to late-90's around the time the iMac came out, when Mossberg was relentlessly ANTI-apple. In fact, as I recall, his name was pretty much synonymous with "Apple-basher" in the "beleaguered" Mac community (God, we hated that word...). Perhaps not many people, period, around the time of the Gil Amelio era were pro-Apple (I was a holdout... and proud of it), but Mossberg was quite visible as he was sort of the tech mouthpiece of corporate America.
And then... I'm fairly certain someone at Apple courted this guy. Hard.
Ever since then (and perhaps because of Apple's string of hits, starting with the iMac), Mossberg has been a fanboy. Of course, it's been easy, lately...
(my favorite quote about Apple follows...)
"One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy."
-Jean-Louis Gassée, Former Apple Computer, Inc. Executive