With everyone raving so much about iTunes being the "best app ever" for Windows users, it's been hard for me to see what the advantage is. I mean, iTunes is easy to use and nice and all, but it's hardly fundamentally different from a variety of services out there.
I downloaded the application the first day it came out, and so far liked it, but come on, there's nothing super-duper-extra-spectacular about it. Furthermore, there are some minor technical and technological problems that I've experienced.
1) Selection of radio genres is not that great. If all you wanted was to listen to some high-quality Internet radio, the genres and bitrates are okay, but MusicMatch and Live365 seem to be better.
2) Some radios are just silent. Listed in the app, some radios just don't have any music on the air.
3) All downloaded music is in AAC format. Great if you have iPod. Sucks for like 99% of the music players outthere that support MP3 and WMA. Yeah, there's always a way of burning a disk, then ripping that into MP3, but that's a hassle.
Other than that iTunes seems to be a nice app to have around for a music lover, but come on, it's just one of many. With Napster and Microsoft getting into the arena the competition will be heated.
The least painful way to accomplish what you're describing is to hire a CEO. Maybe a COO as well, but for a small company under 50 people it doesn't make sense to have a separate COO.
Whose money is the company built on? If you have any venture capital investment, the capitalist might have a CEO handy. I am not saying that it's the best option, but sounds like your company is ripe for professional management, even one brought in from the outside.
If you don't have venture capital, network with friends for someone who has an MBA, general understanding of software business, and demonstrates himself as energetic and committed person. Business majors are currently suffering from low employment rates, too, so finding someone you can work with for a decent pay should be a valid option.
Okay, I will have to assume you are not an employee of Cypress Semiconductor, trying to create a "buzz" on the Internet about the new product family. Cypress Semiconductor created such technology and currently touts it under WirelessUSB brand. Granted, I don't think there's a consumer device using WirelessUSB just yet, but Cypress is currently selling the chips and chipsets to the OEMs. The prices are quite good, by the way, if you're involved with embedded devices or home automation products.
The WirelessUSB specs from Cypress Web site - "..The wireless connectivity is transparent to the designer at the operating system level (no drivers needed), as the WirelessUSB system acts as a USB HID class device..."
That would be Tools->Edit BlackICE Settings, then Firewall tab and level of protection (Paranoid, Nervous, Cautious, Trusting). Defaults to Trusting:-)
Yes, the book is a hog, and there's a whole lot of irrelevant (to an experienced developer) stuff, like the origins of computers and what not. But the book is excellent for self-learning types willing to study home without attending lectures or going to school. Any time someone asks me for a book to learn programming on their own, and they have never programmed before, I recommend D&D.
If you have been minimally exposed to programming, Deitel is a waste, might pick up OReilly or something similar.
I've taught Java for a year (undergraduate level though) when I was getting Master's degree, and have assembled a collection of books that publishers sent for evaluation. I think the one you would be pleased with is Object-Oriented Problem Solving with Java.
It's not a book about programming and hence it received one star on Amazon from people who bought it trying to learn Java from scratch while they would have been better served by Deitel&Deitel or Lewis&Loftus.
Chapter 1, for example, goes through "Designing good programs" and "Software life cycle", in Chapter 13 there is a whole section dedicated to threads, not just pure code samples to copy and paste, but discussion targeted towards high-level concepts.
Disclaimer: I have not used the book for any of my classes, just merely browsed it in my spare time.
I totally agree with you, the issue of uploading is shady. Well, technically term 'uploading' is not appropriate, 'sharing' is what they use in subpoenas and court documents.
Your statement above describes a case, where sharing a file is accidental, or non-intentional. The goal of RIAA in court is to show that you were distributing the music intentionally. As long as the files appear in the 'My Shared Folder' out of nowhere, you are cool.
However, that very thing is very unprobable, since every sharing application you install on your machine asks you to specify the folder you want to share. If you have the files, for which you do not have the distribution rights, I'd say it's 90% guarantee that the court will deem your behavior as willful attempt to break the law. If all you have in your shared folder is Linux distros, and creative works explicitly licensed to be distributed freely (I mentioned that above, Creative Commons license, or whatever) you're fine.
However, you will have a tough time proving in court that the copyrighted files appeared in that shared folder without your permission. The issue is not even copyright as much, it's that you don't have distribution rights, and that's what violates the current law, and that's where music companies can catch you.
According to the US Copyright Law (the case might be different if your home country is not US), everything is copyrighted, unless otherwise specified. Unless you see an explicit message that something is to be distributed under specific license (GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, etc.), assume it to be copyrighted with the author or dostributor owning the rights. Period.
I am not saying Copyright Law is great, I just state what it says. If you assume different things, that might not hold up in court.
We should really charge you $150,000 per song you have downloaded.
Ok, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think anyone has been charged with a RIAA lawsuit on dowloading alone. Downloading digital music might be a legal activity under so many circumstances (you have a legal CD, the file is not copyrigthed, etc.)
All of the RIAA lawsuits in the US are targeted towards file sharers, not downloaders, but uploaders, if you will.
Why? Simple as it is, the companies belonging to RIAA are the sole entities allowed to distribute and license distribution of their music. The label has indeed a shallow argument if it tries to sue anyone for downloading, but sharing music with others is violation of this exact premise, and the law is clearly on RIAA's side in any country where the property laws are upheld.
Since you're looking for a more or less generalized database of human knowledge. Even a categorized database of computer knowledge would be extremely broad and informative.
The modest solution with modern-day technology is still quite basic: 1) Create an HTML page describing your experience. 2) Use keywords and clear title so that people will find you. 3) Submit to Google. 4) Submit to some sites that cover the topics specific to your case. Most of the online publications will gladly accept free content, if it matches their topic.
U.S. cyber investigators arrested a Minnesota teenager today who the FBI said has admitted unleashing one version of a damaging virus-like infection weeks ago on the Internet.
A court official identified the teenager as Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minn., known online as "teekid." A U.S. official in Washington also confirmed an arrest was made early today.
I don't usually participate in organized Microsoft-bashing, but does anyone else get the impression that MSN Web Products team is a quiet saboteur, that tries to produce extremely unusable products? Perhaps your experience is more successful. While generally used to Microsoft office products and having Win 2k as OS of choice on my home machine, I abhor MSN products and try to avoid them whenever I can.
Passport. I use Passport to log on to a bunch of sites, and since I registered for it, I generally choose the Passport log in on such sites as uBid.com and others which provide an option. Passport itself has some issues with recognizing cookies on my machine.
When I go to a site, even Microsoft-owned MSDN site, the Sign In icon in there, but after a click it doesn't sign me in, which is quite annoying, since you get no error messages, and nothing to tell you that you haven't been successfully signed on. You have to choose Sign Out, then go back to Sign In, then repeat this procedure in case the passport cookie still doesn't work. Usability my ass.
Another interesting tidbit of information - Microsoft requires an @msn.com or @hotmail.com for Passport log-in, which is fine, they need you to authenticate on their server to prove the Passport identity. For those of us who are not MSN subscribers for dial-up or broadband, @hotmail.com is the only option. Which is fine as well - I went to hotmail.com, registered an account, never used it, except for logging in to Passport. Except one thing - your account with Hotmail expires if you don't use it for 90 days. Well, I am not using it at all, I just an address to sign-on to Passport, and every once in a while (every 3 months, as you can guess), there's that happy horseshit with (1) signing on to a Passport site, (2) getting a message your e-mail is not validf, (3) re-activating your Hotmail account, which you don't use and never plan to use, (4) signing in to Passport getting perhaps an error or two about insuccessful logons.
MSN Messenger 6. Pretty interface, colorful pictures, what more can a regular Joe User want for communicating with a friend on the other side of the country? For us, techies, it's SIP support and excellent ability for MSN Messenger to bypass firewalls and corporate security stuff.
However, with that many pretty buttons telling you to check the stock valuation, current weather and news, one cannot resist doing exactly that. However, all of it seems to be broken for me, I get some weird stocks, some weird weather and some unrelated news, even though I am subscribed with the passport ID that should be recognized by MoneyCentral, MSNBC and others in MSN network. Somehow the first time I sign in to Yahoo Messenger, everything there is just right, maybe it's just me not being able to figure out how to customize the settings for Messenger.
MSN.com Everyone that left that URL as starting page for IE after going through an install, raise your hand. [..sound of crickets..] Yeah, that's what I thought. Just ads, nothing useful, maybe an occasional MSNBC article headline that might be interesting.
Ok, rant is over, but it's really no wonder MSN is a money-losing operation. Always has been and probably will be for a while.
If I recall correctly, the local carrier for the Northwest United States, Qwest, has been opening their lines to competitors willing to provide DSL service. Qwest then would sign them up as re-sellers of the service, and after that the "Screw Your Friends(r)" program would take place.
First, Qwest would charge the competitive ISP a sign-up charge for each customer, so basically when signing up for DSL service, you would have the option of (a) monthly payment + sign up fee from an ISP or (b) the same monthly payment and no sign up fee from Qwest.
Second, the phone lines are opened to competitors, but they are still owned by the phone company. Meaning that whenever your DSL goes down, if you've signed up with an independent ISP, your support would be pretty much useless. "Ehh, yeah, it shows the service as down, but it's Qwest problem, we can't do anything with it, it's not our server". Meaning the only time the tech support would be really helpful is when their server goes down and they are actually in control. Hardly an incentive.
Perhaps a better solution is building dark fiber on government money and then having counties charge any phone company lease access fees. But government historically has been inefficient on managing any kind of infrastructure, just look at its state in the former Soviet Union countries.
There are differences between the full re-install process on PC and Zaurus, but to answer your question - yes. You will have to build your own image on PC first, check http://docs.zaurus.com/ for more details, then have the zImage and the filesystem in place, after which you "reflash" your Zaurus with the help of a CompactFlash card and a certin key combination. Everything in the image is pre-compiled on PC (gotta make sure you're compiling for ARM target) and then packed into the image.
If you screw up your Zaurus badly, Sharp and OpenZaurus provide ready-to-go images. Sharp's is the official image that you get when you buy your Zaurus. Any data you created yourself would be lost after reflash, unless backed up.
You need international stickers that you can put on your own keyboard. For Windows you need Keyboard Layout Manager to set up your own layouts from whatever alphabets you have on your machine. For Linux I think there's XMaps, but I might be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
With everyone raving so much about iTunes being the "best app ever" for Windows users, it's been hard for me to see what the advantage is. I mean, iTunes is easy to use and nice and all, but it's hardly fundamentally different from a variety of services out there.
I downloaded the application the first day it came out, and so far liked it, but come on, there's nothing super-duper-extra-spectacular about it. Furthermore, there are some minor technical and technological problems that I've experienced.
1) Selection of radio genres is not that great. If all you wanted was to listen to some high-quality Internet radio, the genres and bitrates are okay, but MusicMatch and Live365 seem to be better.
2) Some radios are just silent. Listed in the app, some radios just don't have any music on the air.
3) All downloaded music is in AAC format. Great if you have iPod. Sucks for like 99% of the music players outthere that support MP3 and WMA. Yeah, there's always a way of burning a disk, then ripping that into MP3, but that's a hassle.
Other than that iTunes seems to be a nice app to have around for a music lover, but come on, it's just one of many. With Napster and Microsoft getting into the arena the competition will be heated.
I would surely trust this guy with his opinions on operating systems market. After all, he has five published books.
Damn, the last browser with good VTP support.
This guy got screwed over, yet again.
I think he mean this, definitely not this.
The least painful way to accomplish what you're describing is to hire a CEO. Maybe a COO as well, but for a small company under 50 people it doesn't make sense to have a separate COO.
Whose money is the company built on? If you have any venture capital investment, the capitalist might have a CEO handy. I am not saying that it's the best option, but sounds like your company is ripe for professional management, even one brought in from the outside.
If you don't have venture capital, network with friends for someone who has an MBA, general understanding of software business, and demonstrates himself as energetic and committed person. Business majors are currently suffering from low employment rates, too, so finding someone you can work with for a decent pay should be a valid option.
Okay, I will have to assume you are not an employee of Cypress Semiconductor, trying to create a "buzz" on the Internet about the new product family. Cypress Semiconductor created such technology and currently touts it under WirelessUSB brand. Granted, I don't think there's a consumer device using WirelessUSB just yet, but Cypress is currently selling the chips and chipsets to the OEMs. The prices are quite good, by the way, if you're involved with embedded devices or home automation products.
The WirelessUSB specs from Cypress Web site - "..The wireless connectivity is transparent to the designer at the operating system level (no drivers needed), as the WirelessUSB system acts as a USB HID class device..."
ZDNet on WirelessUSB
Naturally, Google
Yeah, my bad, the word 'reviewed' just slipped in, since I was linking to a magazine site. Should've been 'reproduced a glamorous press release'.
That would be Tools->Edit BlackICE Settings, then Firewall tab and level of protection (Paranoid, Nervous, Cautious, Trusting). Defaults to Trusting :-)
No real response, no ability to block it in the future, just simple monitoring.
Right Click on the intruder's name -> Block Intruder -> For Hour/For Day/For Month/Forever.
The same for Trust Intruder.
You were too smart for Deitel & Deitel:-)
Yes, the book is a hog, and there's a whole lot of irrelevant (to an experienced developer) stuff, like the origins of computers and what not. But the book is excellent for self-learning types willing to study home without attending lectures or going to school. Any time someone asks me for a book to learn programming on their own, and they have never programmed before, I recommend D&D.
If you have been minimally exposed to programming, Deitel is a waste, might pick up OReilly or something similar.
I've taught Java for a year (undergraduate level though) when I was getting Master's degree, and have assembled a collection of books that publishers sent for evaluation. I think the one you would be pleased with is Object-Oriented Problem Solving with Java.
It's not a book about programming and hence it received one star on Amazon from people who bought it trying to learn Java from scratch while they would have been better served by Deitel&Deitel or Lewis&Loftus.
Chapter 1, for example, goes through "Designing good programs" and "Software life cycle", in Chapter 13 there is a whole section dedicated to threads, not just pure code samples to copy and paste, but discussion targeted towards high-level concepts.
Disclaimer: I have not used the book for any of my classes, just merely browsed it in my spare time.
I totally agree with you, the issue of uploading is shady. Well, technically term 'uploading' is not appropriate, 'sharing' is what they use in subpoenas and court documents.
Your statement above describes a case, where sharing a file is accidental, or non-intentional. The goal of RIAA in court is to show that you were distributing the music intentionally. As long as the files appear in the 'My Shared Folder' out of nowhere, you are cool.
However, that very thing is very unprobable, since every sharing application you install on your machine asks you to specify the folder you want to share. If you have the files, for which you do not have the distribution rights, I'd say it's 90% guarantee that the court will deem your behavior as willful attempt to break the law. If all you have in your shared folder is Linux distros, and creative works explicitly licensed to be distributed freely (I mentioned that above, Creative Commons license, or whatever) you're fine.
However, you will have a tough time proving in court that the copyrighted files appeared in that shared folder without your permission. The issue is not even copyright as much, it's that you don't have distribution rights, and that's what violates the current law, and that's where music companies can catch you.
According to the US Copyright Law (the case might be different if your home country is not US), everything is copyrighted, unless otherwise specified. Unless you see an explicit message that something is to be distributed under specific license (GPL, BSD, Creative Commons, etc.), assume it to be copyrighted with the author or dostributor owning the rights. Period.
I am not saying Copyright Law is great, I just state what it says. If you assume different things, that might not hold up in court.
We should really charge you $150,000 per song you have downloaded.
Ok, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think anyone has been charged with a RIAA lawsuit on dowloading alone. Downloading digital music might be a legal activity under so many circumstances (you have a legal CD, the file is not copyrigthed, etc.)
All of the RIAA lawsuits in the US are targeted towards file sharers, not downloaders, but uploaders, if you will.
Why? Simple as it is, the companies belonging to RIAA are the sole entities allowed to distribute and license distribution of their music. The label has indeed a shallow argument if it tries to sue anyone for downloading, but sharing music with others is violation of this exact premise, and the law is clearly on RIAA's side in any country where the property laws are upheld.
Since you're looking for a more or less generalized database of human knowledge. Even a categorized database of computer knowledge would be extremely broad and informative.
The modest solution with modern-day technology is still quite basic:
1) Create an HTML page describing your experience.
2) Use keywords and clear title so that people will find you.
3) Submit to Google.
4) Submit to some sites that cover the topics specific to your case. Most of the online publications will gladly accept free content, if it matches their topic.
Seattle Times
U.S. cyber investigators arrested a Minnesota teenager today who the FBI said has admitted unleashing one version of a damaging virus-like infection weeks ago on the Internet.
A court official identified the teenager as Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minn., known online as "teekid." A U.S. official in Washington also confirmed an arrest was made early today.
Not PDF, but online in html.
The Ice Age scenes were quite spectacular. This one is definitely the imagination of the director.
Anyone knows which fonts they are using on this screenshot for This Computer, Documents and other headings under the icons?
I don't usually participate in organized Microsoft-bashing, but does anyone else get the impression that MSN Web Products team is a quiet saboteur, that tries to produce extremely unusable products? Perhaps your experience is more successful. While generally used to Microsoft office products and having Win 2k as OS of choice on my home machine, I abhor MSN products and try to avoid them whenever I can.
Passport. I use Passport to log on to a bunch of sites, and since I registered for it, I generally choose the Passport log in on such sites as uBid.com and others which provide an option. Passport itself has some issues with recognizing cookies on my machine.
When I go to a site, even Microsoft-owned MSDN site, the Sign In icon in there, but after a click it doesn't sign me in, which is quite annoying, since you get no error messages, and nothing to tell you that you haven't been successfully signed on. You have to choose Sign Out, then go back to Sign In, then repeat this procedure in case the passport cookie still doesn't work. Usability my ass.
Another interesting tidbit of information - Microsoft requires an @msn.com or @hotmail.com for Passport log-in, which is fine, they need you to authenticate on their server to prove the Passport identity. For those of us who are not MSN subscribers for dial-up or broadband, @hotmail.com is the only option. Which is fine as well - I went to hotmail.com, registered an account, never used it, except for logging in to Passport. Except one thing - your account with Hotmail expires if you don't use it for 90 days. Well, I am not using it at all, I just an address to sign-on to Passport, and every once in a while (every 3 months, as you can guess), there's that happy horseshit with (1) signing on to a Passport site, (2) getting a message your e-mail is not validf, (3) re-activating your Hotmail account, which you don't use and never plan to use, (4) signing in to Passport getting perhaps an error or two about insuccessful logons.
MSN Messenger 6. Pretty interface, colorful pictures, what more can a regular Joe User want for communicating with a friend on the other side of the country? For us, techies, it's SIP support and excellent ability for MSN Messenger to bypass firewalls and corporate security stuff.
However, with that many pretty buttons telling you to check the stock valuation, current weather and news, one cannot resist doing exactly that. However, all of it seems to be broken for me, I get some weird stocks, some weird weather and some unrelated news, even though I am subscribed with the passport ID that should be recognized by MoneyCentral, MSNBC and others in MSN network. Somehow the first time I sign in to Yahoo Messenger, everything there is just right, maybe it's just me not being able to figure out how to customize the settings for Messenger.
MSN.com Everyone that left that URL as starting page for IE after going through an install, raise your hand. [..sound of crickets..] Yeah, that's what I thought. Just ads, nothing useful, maybe an occasional MSNBC article headline that might be interesting.
Ok, rant is over, but it's really no wonder MSN is a money-losing operation. Always has been and probably will be for a while.
If I recall correctly, the local carrier for the Northwest United States, Qwest, has been opening their lines to competitors willing to provide DSL service. Qwest then would sign them up as re-sellers of the service, and after that the "Screw Your Friends(r)" program would take place.
First, Qwest would charge the competitive ISP a sign-up charge for each customer, so basically when signing up for DSL service, you would have the option of (a) monthly payment + sign up fee from an ISP or (b) the same monthly payment and no sign up fee from Qwest.
Second, the phone lines are opened to competitors, but they are still owned by the phone company. Meaning that whenever your DSL goes down, if you've signed up with an independent ISP, your support would be pretty much useless. "Ehh, yeah, it shows the service as down, but it's Qwest problem, we can't do anything with it, it's not our server". Meaning the only time the tech support would be really helpful is when their server goes down and they are actually in control. Hardly an incentive.
Perhaps a better solution is building dark fiber on government money and then having counties charge any phone company lease access fees. But government historically has been inefficient on managing any kind of infrastructure, just look at its state in the former Soviet Union countries.
There are differences between the full re-install process on PC and Zaurus, but to answer your question - yes. You will have to build your own image on PC first, check http://docs.zaurus.com/ for more details, then have the zImage and the filesystem in place, after which you "reflash" your Zaurus with the help of a CompactFlash card and a certin key combination. Everything in the image is pre-compiled on PC (gotta make sure you're compiling for ARM target) and then packed into the image.
If you screw up your Zaurus badly, Sharp and OpenZaurus provide ready-to-go images. Sharp's is the official image that you get when you buy your Zaurus. Any data you created yourself would be lost after reflash, unless backed up.
You need international stickers that you can put on your own keyboard. For Windows you need Keyboard Layout Manager to set up your own layouts from whatever alphabets you have on your machine. For Linux I think there's XMaps, but I might be wrong.
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