One of the beautiful things about capitalism and a "free market" is that it often provides choice for consumers. Personally, I love having my PDA integrated with my mobile phone (Samsung SPH-i500). Before this I had a Kyocera 6035. On the other hand, I keep my iPod and Nikon D70 camera separate because both of those do a much better job separate than they do integrated with my little phone.
However, there are other people who don't care much about optical quality in their cameras, or audio fidelity in their music, or this or that. Personally, I don't care about the ability to watch mpegs on my PDA, or many other features. I mostly want to keep phone numbers and addresses, and my schedule, plus a few other apps as they come up, like the Bible and a web browser. Why would I want to carry around a separate device just to do that?
Anyway, my point is that there is a wide variety of devices out there for a reason: because there is a wide variety of people using them.
P.S. As I'm writing this, there's a teenage girl at the table next to me snapping a picture of her friend with her phone. Her friend is listening to music on her flash-based mp3 player. Artificially-created or not, there is clearly a market for mobile phone cameras, so good for the people who use them and good for the manufacturers who make them. Now if I could just get a CDMA/AMPS/Bluetooth/Palm phone......
How about somewhere where you don't have ready access to electricity? For instance, my wife is currently in Sudan and can't just go home at night and plug in her iPod, digital camera, etc. since her "home" right now is a mud hut. It's understantable that battery life isn't that important to YOU but it is important to many others.
I'm a mac fanboy with my Powerbook and 30GB iPod, and have about 23GB of music I ripped from my own CDs. Much as I'd LIKE to purchase music from iTMS, I haven't been able to bring myself to do so yet. I'm just not willing to spend $10 on lower-quality, DRM-cripped MP3s when I can spend the same or less (or sometimes a little more) and actually get the CD from eBay, Amazon (used) or the local used CD store. Well, you say, what about those hard-to-find CDs that aren't in any of the other locations? They're unlikely (note that I didn't say impossible) to get on iTMS either.
With the current contest going on with iTMS, I almost psyched myself out to buy some of Natacha Atlas' music. That is, until I realized I could buy the CDs used for less than $10. from Amazon and eBay anyway. So I have a CD coming from eBay (so far at least; please don't outbid me, haha). I then tried to pick up Hiphopkhasene from Solomon & Socalled since it's almost impossible to find, and sure enough it wasn't on iTMS either. So I actually paid $22 or so for it including shipping, the first new CD I've purchased in, well, a long time.
When iTMS offers me sound quality as good as, or better than, a CD, and downloadable album art and liner notes in some sort of cool proprietary Apple iTunes format, then I'll start buying. Until then, having the source material that I can compress as much (or as little) as I want is a better solution for me.
It may not be a UNIVERSAL remote, but for those of us with Apple computers and bluetooth phones, Salling Clicker lets us use our phones as a display and a remote. Works great!
As I mentioned here, If you get Salling Clicker and a Bluetooth-enabled phone or Palm PDA, you're SET. Salling Clicker is a very very cool program that turns your phone or PDA into a very full-featured remote for your Mac. Then you'll have a "one handed" remote with an LCD display that you CAN put in your pocket. Check it out.
First of all, let me say that if this thing will get me "better reception in the bedroom" then I'm all for it:-)
Second, your point about Salling Clicker is very important. For those who don't know what this application is, it turns any bluetooth-enabled Palm PDA and many bluetooth phones into a remote for your computer. It's only $20 and IT ROCKS. With a bluetooth PDA, you have a little picture of the artwork of the CD currently playing on iTunes - you can change the volume, stop, pause, fast forward, rewind, skip songs, etc. Just like a "real remote".
This make sense to me, for sure. I know that I've stopped buying music now that I can listen to my favorite songs in 12 second bursts whenever I get a phone call. Listening to "polyphonic" music on my awesome cell phone has totally replaced hearing the whole song I want, when I want, on my home stereo.
That's fine, although orthogonal to my point. I wasn't saying that a degree would help you do your job better (although I think generally it does), but that it would make an senior management job easier to GET.
There's an exception to almost every rule, but in general I think you'd have to agree that HAVING a degree is better than NOT having a degree. For instance, I have a degree in Civil Engineering and 8 years of internet development experience. I'm better off than if I just had the experience. I also feel that I'm better off than having 12 years of experience and no degree.
It depends on what you want to do with your life. Sure, Bill Gates is an obvious exception, but how many senior executives do you see who don't have degrees? Most have at least a Masters. If you expect to be hired some day as a CTO/VP, or try to get funding for your own project, you'll find the doors open for you a lot better if you have a degree. If you want to keep programming for the rest of your life, which is fine and noble, then yes probably the importance of having a degree fades with time.
...law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States...
Since when did the United States supercede mere "country" status? I guess, although, we may play occasionally with the other countries, we still don't want to be associated with them.
I seem to get 0-2 bars less of signal strength on average than I did before the update. For instance, now I don't get any signal out on the patio when I easily did before. I'd think this was likely coincidence except others on this MacRumors thread have noticed the same thing.
I guess the fact that Qualcomm makes the chip that goes in every (?) CDMA phone and holds the basic patents on CDMA technology doesn't make them a major player in mobile phone standards?
The iTrip is a convenient little piece of equipment, but have you ever critically listened to FM-quality music vs. a CD of the same song? Haven't you noticed how the FM is noticably more muffled, with especially the high notes clipped?
A human with good hearing (i.e. a child) can often hear notes between 20Hz and 20kHz. CDs reproduce sounds in this same range. A well-encoded mp3 has a low-pass filter around 19.3Hz and can more or less reproduce sounds above 16kHz which is more than most of us can likely distinguish, especially with the average stereo.
FM radio, on the other hand, only broadcasts between 50Hz and 15kHz. Despite those fuzzy bass-thumping sounds you hear from the lowered Honda Civic beside you at the stop light (or perhaps that's you), with FM radio you lose the true lows, and you lose the true highs. Everything else in between is also lower quality.
The iTrip is a very convenient device for transmitting your mp3s, but don't confuse it with a "real" solution of hard-wiring your mp3 player into your stereo. I guess if you encode all your mp3s at 128kpbs or lower using Windows Media Player, it won't really matter to you, but if you value sound quality you'll probably soon want something better.
You don't have to WIPE OS X to run YDL. You can keep them both on separate partitions. A friend of mine bought a 15" powerbook from a company (can't remember the name) that ships the powerbooks with both preinstalled. He was a hardcore Linux guy before switching to Mac so he wanted the safety net of Linux in case OS X didn't work out for him. He rarely if ever boots into YDL though. Mostly I think because OS X "just works" as opposed to YDL which doesn't support his airport card, etc.
My understanding also is that you can run OS X apps from YDL, or was it vice versa. If I could run KDE from OS X on a YDL partition I'd do that with my powerbook (if I had more than a 30GB drive). As it is I use KDE a lot via X from my linux server. It works but a local solution would likely be faster.
Actually it's more than a little simplistic to think that any three sentence comment can in any adequate way explain the AIDS/HIV pandemic.
How much time have you spent in Africa? How many people do you know who have died of HIV related illnesses who would be still alive "if they'd only had a condom?"
My first response after reading the/. blurb was to ask what kind of CEO would decide to pay off SCO without understanding the issues. I figured they deserved whatever they got.
Then I decided that everybody makes mistakes and this CEO is a remarkably candid and honest person for publicly admitting his mistake.
THEN, I started reading the article, and came across this quote:
Though Marsh admitted that EV1 has lost some hosting business since the deal, he said it is not out of line with the number of sites EV1 loses in a typical month.
HELLO?!?!?! What kind of comment is that to make in an interview? "Well, we lose a lot of sites every month and this isn't any worse than usual". Hmm, interesting.
THEN, I thought he'd redeemend himself with the next paragraph:
On March 25, Internet research company Netcraft Ltd.'s Sites on the Move section reported that EV1 had lost 1,080 Web sites in the previous 30 days, but according to Marsh, a loss of 800 to 1,300 sites per month was normal for EV1. Because of new business, EV1 had experienced a net gain of more than 3,300 sites during the same period, he added.
OK so that's a lot of churn, but it's still net growth. I can see his point, I guess.
Of course, his next sentence was "We churn a lot of sites." What this guy needs is a PR consultant. I don't think going on record saying you have a lot of churn is the right way to "spin" things. Of course, the more important question is, why so much churn? It depends on their total numbers to see what kind of a percentage basis this is, but it seems disturbingly high in absolute number terms. It's something I'd consider before hosting my site there, anyway.
Here's my solution for sunny Los Angeles where I'm currently living: motorcycles.
LA has huge urban sprawl and a fairly inept mass transit system. It's there, but unless you can take a Metrolink train, using the system will take you a LONG time.
So here's my plan: turn one lane of all the major freeways into a motorcycle-only lane. It doesn't have to be wide enough for a vehicle. Then require people to take a stringent safety test before being allowed to use the lane, and offer tax breaks or some other financial incentive for qualified users. I know in this litigious country this idea will never fly but hey I can dream.
www.sixdegrees.com was doing this back in 1997 or earlier. I worked on a HDML (think WAP 0.1) version of their site back in the day. The idea was if you had an HDML-compliant device like a Palm VII, you could go into a bar and meet somebody. If you got their name, you could sneak away and see if you knew anybody who knew them, then use that information to get into their pants. Well, I guess there were other uses for a mobile version too. Pretty geeky, nonetheless...
Anyway, they burned through their funding and basically went defunct and we're gone for a couple years. Now apparently they're relaunching. It must suck to have the "next big thing" but to be 7 years too early with it.
This certainly worked for me. We bought a 5GB iPod for my wife, and kept saying how nice it would be to have an Mac to work it with. Now I'm typing this on a 12" Powerbook, with a 30GB iPod in the bag. I love this powerbook and Mac OS X so much that I've convinced 2 other people to go out and buy 15" powerbooks.
So all I an say is that this strategy worked for me!
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You might say that this is very "lurgciting" news...
Darn, that means that if I bought a house in London tomorrow, I'd only get to keep it until I was 130...
However, there are other people who don't care much about optical quality in their cameras, or audio fidelity in their music, or this or that. Personally, I don't care about the ability to watch mpegs on my PDA, or many other features. I mostly want to keep phone numbers and addresses, and my schedule, plus a few other apps as they come up, like the Bible and a web browser. Why would I want to carry around a separate device just to do that?
Anyway, my point is that there is a wide variety of devices out there for a reason: because there is a wide variety of people using them.
P.S. As I'm writing this, there's a teenage girl at the table next to me snapping a picture of her friend with her phone. Her friend is listening to music on her flash-based mp3 player. Artificially-created or not, there is clearly a market for mobile phone cameras, so good for the people who use them and good for the manufacturers who make them. Now if I could just get a CDMA/AMPS/Bluetooth/Palm phone......
How exactly DOES one twaddle a turnip?
How about somewhere where you don't have ready access to electricity? For instance, my wife is currently in Sudan and can't just go home at night and plug in her iPod, digital camera, etc. since her "home" right now is a mud hut. It's understantable that battery life isn't that important to YOU but it is important to many others.
mp3/aac/whatever. The point is, I haven't bought any.
With the current contest going on with iTMS, I almost psyched myself out to buy some of Natacha Atlas' music. That is, until I realized I could buy the CDs used for less than $10. from Amazon and eBay anyway. So I have a CD coming from eBay (so far at least; please don't outbid me, haha). I then tried to pick up Hiphopkhasene from Solomon & Socalled since it's almost impossible to find, and sure enough it wasn't on iTMS either. So I actually paid $22 or so for it including shipping, the first new CD I've purchased in, well, a long time.
When iTMS offers me sound quality as good as, or better than, a CD, and downloadable album art and liner notes in some sort of cool proprietary Apple iTunes format, then I'll start buying. Until then, having the source material that I can compress as much (or as little) as I want is a better solution for me.
It may not be a UNIVERSAL remote, but for those of us with Apple computers and bluetooth phones, Salling Clicker lets us use our phones as a display and a remote. Works great!
As I mentioned here, If you get Salling Clicker and a Bluetooth-enabled phone or Palm PDA, you're SET. Salling Clicker is a very very cool program that turns your phone or PDA into a very full-featured remote for your Mac. Then you'll have a "one handed" remote with an LCD display that you CAN put in your pocket. Check it out.
Second, your point about Salling Clicker is very important. For those who don't know what this application is, it turns any bluetooth-enabled Palm PDA and many bluetooth phones into a remote for your computer. It's only $20 and IT ROCKS. With a bluetooth PDA, you have a little picture of the artwork of the CD currently playing on iTunes - you can change the volume, stop, pause, fast forward, rewind, skip songs, etc. Just like a "real remote".
Very Very Cool.
RIAA == idiots
That's fine, although orthogonal to my point. I wasn't saying that a degree would help you do your job better (although I think generally it does), but that it would make an senior management job easier to GET.
It depends on what you want to do with your life. Sure, Bill Gates is an obvious exception, but how many senior executives do you see who don't have degrees? Most have at least a Masters. If you expect to be hired some day as a CTO/VP, or try to get funding for your own project, you'll find the doors open for you a lot better if you have a degree. If you want to keep programming for the rest of your life, which is fine and noble, then yes probably the importance of having a degree fades with time.
Since when did the United States supercede mere "country" status? I guess, although, we may play occasionally with the other countries, we still don't want to be associated with them.
See my other comment here on this thread. I used to have service out on the balcony and now I don't. It's quite a dramatic difference, really.
I seem to get 0-2 bars less of signal strength on average than I did before the update. For instance, now I don't get any signal out on the patio when I easily did before. I'd think this was likely coincidence except others on this MacRumors thread have noticed the same thing.
If I'm wrong, let me know...
A human with good hearing (i.e. a child) can often hear notes between 20Hz and 20kHz. CDs reproduce sounds in this same range. A well-encoded mp3 has a low-pass filter around 19.3Hz and can more or less reproduce sounds above 16kHz which is more than most of us can likely distinguish, especially with the average stereo.
FM radio, on the other hand, only broadcasts between 50Hz and 15kHz. Despite those fuzzy bass-thumping sounds you hear from the lowered Honda Civic beside you at the stop light (or perhaps that's you), with FM radio you lose the true lows, and you lose the true highs. Everything else in between is also lower quality.
The iTrip is a very convenient device for transmitting your mp3s, but don't confuse it with a "real" solution of hard-wiring your mp3 player into your stereo. I guess if you encode all your mp3s at 128kpbs or lower using Windows Media Player, it won't really matter to you, but if you value sound quality you'll probably soon want something better.
My understanding also is that you can run OS X apps from YDL, or was it vice versa. If I could run KDE from OS X on a YDL partition I'd do that with my powerbook (if I had more than a 30GB drive). As it is I use KDE a lot via X from my linux server. It works but a local solution would likely be faster.
How much time have you spent in Africa? How many people do you know who have died of HIV related illnesses who would be still alive "if they'd only had a condom?"
Then I decided that everybody makes mistakes and this CEO is a remarkably candid and honest person for publicly admitting his mistake.
THEN, I started reading the article, and came across this quote:
HELLO?!?!?! What kind of comment is that to make in an interview? "Well, we lose a lot of sites every month and this isn't any worse than usual". Hmm, interesting.THEN, I thought he'd redeemend himself with the next paragraph:
OK so that's a lot of churn, but it's still net growth. I can see his point, I guess.Of course, his next sentence was "We churn a lot of sites." What this guy needs is a PR consultant. I don't think going on record saying you have a lot of churn is the right way to "spin" things. Of course, the more important question is, why so much churn? It depends on their total numbers to see what kind of a percentage basis this is, but it seems disturbingly high in absolute number terms. It's something I'd consider before hosting my site there, anyway.
LA has huge urban sprawl and a fairly inept mass transit system. It's there, but unless you can take a Metrolink train, using the system will take you a LONG time.
So here's my plan: turn one lane of all the major freeways into a motorcycle-only lane. It doesn't have to be wide enough for a vehicle. Then require people to take a stringent safety test before being allowed to use the lane, and offer tax breaks or some other financial incentive for qualified users. I know in this litigious country this idea will never fly but hey I can dream.
Anyway, they burned through their funding and basically went defunct and we're gone for a couple years. Now apparently they're relaunching. It must suck to have the "next big thing" but to be 7 years too early with it.
So all I an say is that this strategy worked for me!