I was thinking the same thing, but couldn't get info on whether the old keyboard could use the new base station. So, you tried doing it and it didn't work?
Let's talk keyboards here. I have a wireless keyboard. I think it's great. If the only difference between a wireless keyboard and a wired keyboard is the cord, then you have to ask yourself, why do you want the one with a cord? Even if it's only one less cord in your home, if there aren't any other drawbacks, isn't that a worthwhile thing?
Of course, there are drawbacks:
The big one is lack of LEDs on the keyboard - they live on the base station. You can teach yourself to look at the base station all the time, but given a choice between LEDs and going cordless, most people go LEDs.
Cost - wireless keyboards cost a whole lot more. Given a choice between cheap and going cordless, most people go cheap.
Batteries, although this isn't a huge deal, since a pair of AA batteries typically lasts me several months to a year. But even for this small cost, given a choice between not buying/recharging batteries and going cordless...
If you can live with these limitations (and a lot of people can), a cordless keyboard offers just that - one less cord. Most people have a huge spaghetti-like morass of cords behind their computers. One less cord won't make a huge difference... but if all peripherals did the "one less cord" thing, we'd cut out a whole lot of clutter. Worthwhile to me.
I'd like to know when we'll get VoIP calls that sound better than the 8KHz crap we've been getting since the original days of the telephone. I think it would be great to talk at 32KHz or 44.1KHz in high fidelity - the benefits may be subtle, but once you get used to it, it'd be much more lifelike and you probably couldn't go back.
The technology is certainly there, even 64Kbit MP3 would sound good, not to mention the more advanced stuff out there. The bandwidth is there (hell, it uses about the same as your standard video-conference, and has the same quality-of-service requirements).
The only thing I can think that's stopping it is the same thing as HD video-conferencing: people think that our current system is "good enough" and never being exposed to anything better. Or thinking that it should be perfected before trying to go further.
I would love it if some company were to start selling high-dollar jewelry made exclusively with man-made gems. Call them "artisan crafted" stones or something.
Back in the day, the only way to get pearls was to find them in the wild. So you'd get people diving around the place, digging up oysters to get at the pearls. Then someone had the bright idea of farming pearls. Great idea! We can make as many pearls as we like, we can guarantee their quality, etc.
Now, the status quo didn't like this, tried to get it banned, etc. etc. But the point of this post (yeah, we're getting there!) is that the pearl farmers managed to find a name for their "artificial" goods that sounded appealing: cultured pearls. People liked the name and they liked the idea, and the rest is history.
Cultured diamonds, anyone?
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
Obviously the developers of KHTML don't agree with you.
If they did they would not have used the LGPL.
I don't know why you chose to respond to my post, since I did not state an opinion, just some facts as I see them. (My opinion is actually quite similar to yours, which is why it looks to me like you're putting words in my mouth.)
The argument is whether Apple should do the bare legal minimum required by the LGPL, whether they should do more to be in the spirit of the licence, and whether they're already doing more to be in the spirit of the licence.
You have a particular stance, other people have different stances, none are conclusively right. That's Slashdot for you.
Using 'PTunes' on my treo 600, I already bring 12 albums of music around and play them using an SD card... And I can play them on my desktop also if I want. As SD and other media get cheaper, this will get easier and easier. I also can listen to shoutcast streams. All that on a tiny little OS like Palm. Why should I worry about Windows on my handheld device when Palm works and will boot up in seconds.
The Treo is a great device to converge your PDA and mobile phone. Easy calling. Easy address book. Good trade-off between size and usability, isn't a brick. And it's getting better.
However, it's got some way to go to converge your smartphone and MP3 player. Pocket Tunes is a capable player, but I never found an easy way to compress my playlists and transfer them to the smartphone. It came down to: select the songs I wanted, compress the large ones by hand, copy to SD card reader, set up a new playlist in Pocket Tunes. Also, the user interface requires a fair amount of tapping, which isn't great if your smartphone is in a case. All in all, I found it a lot more trouble than it was worth, and so hardly ever did it.
Rather than try to fix this, I took the path of least resistance - and bought an iPod shuffle.
1. A PDA with a HARD DRIVE. Enough of this 'when your battery runs down, you lose everything' crap. That's the sort of thing I'd expect out of a cheap calculator watch, not something I pay hundreds of dollars for. Why should I have to sync daily to avoid losing data?
Nobody's made this point yet, so I may as well:
The Treo 650 puts all its data in non-volatile flash memory; since it's got a replacable battery, that's basically a requirement. There are drawbacks, well-documented: records that were 32 bytes now take 512 bytes, so you can't load up as much data as you think. But it was designed this way for exactly the reason you want: to survive when the battery is out. (The Tungsten T5 and E2 also do this.)
Disclaimer: I carry both a Treo 650 and an iPod shuffle.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
That's funny I heard the acid test patches were broken up into small chunks and had comments specifically for the KDE team telling them what applied to what as far as the codebase was still the same. I also heard that the lead Apple developer was soliciting suggestions for how they could make things easier, in fact it is still up on his blog. They can't release the bug reports, nor the versioning system, but Apple is certainly trying to be a good neighbor on this one.
From what I've seen, the Acid2 patches were a special case, spun out on their own. There's still a huge chunk of undocumented patch code that gets sent back to KHTML; Acid2 is but a small part of that. I'd imagine that if all the patches were documented like Acid2, there would be little to complain about.
And David Hyatt isn't the lead WebCore developer (the last time I heard), although he's certainly the most visible. I can't imagine that he speaks officially for anybody but himself.
Bullshit. WebCore is an open source web engine and there are even several new open source browsers based upon it as well as at least one other proprietary one (Omniweb which I'm using now). There is nothing wrong with closed source applications using open source ones. It violates neither the law nor the spirit of open source.
Whilst that's neither against the law nor spirit of open source, it's very much against the spirit of free software (which, in a nutshell, says that closed-source software is a blight upon society).
OK, so it's a free software vs open source debate again. You're free to pick a side, but realise that there are a lot of people who will disagree with the concept of closed-source software.
Is this really the only site where iPod users can legally download songs? It's a shame that the mass media can get away with spouting complete falacies such as this:(
This is Australia.
To cut a long story short, we don't have the fair use rights that other countries have. It's (technically) illegal to rip a CD to the computer, for instance. You can put digital music files that you already own or have rights to on your iPod, but apart from that, there are actually very few legal uses for an iPod in Australia...
That's the short version, this is Slashdot, so I'm sure that people will reply at length on this subject!
Most people listen to MP3 files though headphones or in a car. The quality of the sound though headphones is so bad that it doesn't really matter if it's only 128K - you're never going to tell the difference anyway. Especially if you don't upgrade from the crappy white headphones that came with your iPod.
Damn right. Consider the following:
the difference in sound quality between 128Kbit AAC and 320Kbit Ogg Vorbis
the difference in sound quality between your current crappy earbuds and (for instance) anything made by Etymotic
the difference in sound quality between your current crappy sound card and (for instance) an external box with much less noise
the difference when listening to music between sitting near a humming PC and sitting in silence
etc. etc. etc.
Most people focus on the first point. And yeah, it's a good point. But there are all these other things you can do to make your music sound better.
That's assuming that demand is inelastic. But given the number of alternatives to iTunes, albeit crappy ones, this is not the case.
Yeah. That's why, in the very next sentence, I wrote "Now, the actual issue isn't this simple in real life, of course."
Seriously, I could go on and on about the economics of the situation, and pick apart everything I said above, and talk dry theory. But why bother? I made my point.
You cut out the middleman and a whole lot of manufacturing -, distribution and logistics in the process and I - as the consumer - want at least a part of that savings reflected on the price.
Whilst you can want that, there's no reason for you to get it.
The cost of production has little to do with the price of the songs. The price is simply the highest amount that consumers will let Apple get away with. Although they could lower their prices and therefore sell more songs, if you add it up, they wouldn't make more money this way.
Now, the actual issue isn't this simple in real life, of course. Also, Apple only makes a tiny amount of money from music sales (at the moment, the store is only there to make iPods more attractive). But it's useful to remember, in the real world, we have real world economics.
It seems to me that everyone else can pick up a few basic software engineering practices to tighten up the quality of their spreadsheets. Things like:
Code reviews - give your spreadsheet to a buddy to check over. Have him or her review all the calculations. If you haven't explained them well enough, add comments.
Change control - if you update your spreadsheet, keep old versions around and make a note of what you change. Find all numbers that total up different in this new version and explain why.
Etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying that we should treat everyone else like programmers, or spreadsheets like programs. But a few simple practices like that and your PHB gets to claim that he personally saved the company $10B (and fixed the Internet).
Re:The Washing Machine Test - PQI Intelligent Stic
on
USB Flash Drive Round-up
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unlike probably everyone else here, I've had my PQI Intelligent Stick for quite a long time - almost 3 years now (it's the purple USB 1.1 model, 128MB).
In my opinion, the form factor is brilliant, and being able to keep it in your wallet is indispensable. It will literally always be near you, you don't ever think about it, unlike having to pick up and check the charge on your mobile phone, MP3 player, etc.
However, due to having it with you all the time, and its small form factor, I reckon it's more suscepible to knocks, hits, etc., which cause data errors. (Although mine has never been through the wash - it stays in my wallet.) I got around these errors the cheap and easy way: by making multiple copies of important files on the disk.
So, all you folks who have a shiny new I-Stick, treat it carefully and it'll stay good for a long time.
Whether I want to play it or not is a moot point, because the Steam authentication servers have to give me permission either way.
Wait, how does this work? If you do not want to play it, you will never launch the game, and the Steam authentication servers won't ever know it. They only (try to) authenticate you if you want to play and start the game. It seems to me that whether you want to play it or not is a very relevant point.
Personally, I'm hanging out for someone to find a way to only retrieve the top 50% of articles by relevance/importance/popularity and put that on a 256MB or even 128MB database, so that mere mortals can also have Wikipedia on our Palms.
Meanwhile, h2g2, the official Guide project, was contemplating a mobile version, but broadcasting regulations meant that the BBC couldn't follow through on it.
I dunno about e-book reading, but small screens are perfect for newspapers.
Think about it: newspapers (printed ones) have narrow columns and short paragraphs. All the important info is at the top of the story. That's the perfect thing to be reading on your cell phone. In fact, that's what I do on my Treo... the first thing I do every morning is sync a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald.
I reckon that a forward-looking newspaper could sell versions of their newspapers especially for cell phones. However, it would require a lot more foresight than I've ever seen from a big media company.
Yeah, but you are not hurting the quality of the music by making it portable. Music in most all cases is only stereo, so if you buy a good pair of headphones there is no reason you have to take a hit on quality.
Most people don't have good headphones. Most MP3 players, portable radios, etc. come with terrible headphones, and most people don't bother upgrading.
Guess what, it doesn't matter.
I bet that people would rate the mobility and the my-favourite-music-on-tap factor as higher than sound quality. It's why people play Java games on their phone rather than Doom 3 on their desktop. In fact, it's why the GameBoys (and, to close the loop, the PSPs) of the world exist. Now Slashdot has audiophiles, and yes, I have a very nice set of $99 Audio-Technica headphones. But it's what I said before: quality doesn't have to be the top priority.
If you can, get a PDA with a 640x480 screen. If you can, get some video running on it. See for yourself. It's nice.
However, I find it hard to believe that portable television and movies will ever be as big as the iPod.
Just one point: when the iPod came out, we all found it hard to believe that it would be as big as anything. But as we know, five short years later, it is. It literally taught us a new way of listening to our music (i.e. your entire library at any time). That's the joys of disruptive technology, you never know if something's going to take off big or not.
So, the PSP could be the next generation of gaming bliss. Or it could be mobile video bliss. Or something else entirely. Ain't the future grand.
Shows a whole bunch of careers, and has ratings for them. Achievement, working conditions, recognition, rated on a 1-10 scale. You can find out stimulatin' stuff, like how boilermakers have average working conditions, whilst how lawyers find themselves in ethically challenging situations all the time...
Glibness aside, it's a really good way of comparing IT against all the other jobs out there that you could be doing, like childcare, or accountants, or being in the military. IT actually stacks up pretty well.
Actually, I bet that a lot of people do (or will).
It's like audio. Back in the day, we had huge hi-fi systems, speakers, amps, the whole lot for the ultimate enjoyment of music. But then the industry brought out a whole bunch of miniature radios and players, culminating in the Sony Walkman (and OK, the iPod) and people found a whole new way to enjoy music: on the move, outside, inside, wherever they felt like it.
Now substitute "huge hi-fi systems" with "home theatre systems" and "Sony Walkman" with "Sony PSP"...
One of my friends has a Dell Axim (that's a Pocket PC) with a 640x480 screen, and DivX playing software. It's awesome, you can watch ripped TV shows literally where you like, on the bus, in the park outside, etc. etc., and the quality is brilliant. I could get used to that. (Not that I advocate ripping TV shows.)
Just to remind people what the current behaviour is. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll get corrected posthaste, we all love Slashdot.)
1. The uninstaller removes all Firefox-related files. 2. The uninstaller checks the Firefox directory for extra files, and offers to remove them. These files could be search plugins, extensions, etc. 3. The user clicks "Yeah, go on" and the uninstaller removes those files. The problem is when the Firefox directory is "C:\".
People saying "The uninstaller should keep a list of all installed files and just remove those, rather than wiping out the directory" are missing the point. See steps 1 and 2, above.
People saying "The uninstaller should not even offer steps 2 and 3 because people are stupid" may have a point. The down side is, all your search plugins and extensions stay behind, potentially screwing up your next Firefox install. (I know your profile sticks around regardless and will pollute your next install more.) And, as Mitchell pointed out, this is only a problem for the silliest 15 people out of the millions of Firefox users served.
But yeah. More intelligence in the uninstaller is always better, cos wiping a hard drive should never never never happen. (Or use a Mac; uninstalling consists of dragging Firefox.app to the Trash.)
Re:Believe it or not, Apple's DRM doesn't bother m
on
iTunes DRM Hole Closed
·
· Score: 1
What I'd like to see is iTunes to have a 'compress when copying to portable' option, and then have Apple sell lossless.
As has been mentioned, the iPod shuffle has this feature. The "problem" is that even for a 512MB or 1GB iPod shuffle, it takes a while. Perhaps 30 minutes to fill up your 1GB shuffle. Now, the other iPods aren't based on a wipe-it-all-and-re-upload-everything philosophy, but still, recompressing your music library to fill your 60GB iPod has gotta take a while.
Erm, I'm not sure if I have this 100% correct, but it should be close enough: Isn't the compression on DVDs the same as the compression on SDTV? (MPEG-2 at approx 10Mbit.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the same thing, but couldn't get info on whether the old keyboard could use the new base station. So, you tried doing it and it didn't work?
Let's talk keyboards here. I have a wireless keyboard. I think it's great. If the only difference between a wireless keyboard and a wired keyboard is the cord, then you have to ask yourself, why do you want the one with a cord? Even if it's only one less cord in your home, if there aren't any other drawbacks, isn't that a worthwhile thing?
Of course, there are drawbacks:
The big one is lack of LEDs on the keyboard - they live on the base station. You can teach yourself to look at the base station all the time, but given a choice between LEDs and going cordless, most people go LEDs.
Cost - wireless keyboards cost a whole lot more. Given a choice between cheap and going cordless, most people go cheap.
Batteries, although this isn't a huge deal, since a pair of AA batteries typically lasts me several months to a year. But even for this small cost, given a choice between not buying/recharging batteries and going cordless...
If you can live with these limitations (and a lot of people can), a cordless keyboard offers just that - one less cord. Most people have a huge spaghetti-like morass of cords behind their computers. One less cord won't make a huge difference... but if all peripherals did the "one less cord" thing, we'd cut out a whole lot of clutter. Worthwhile to me.
I'd like to know when we'll get VoIP calls that sound better than the 8KHz crap we've been getting since the original days of the telephone. I think it would be great to talk at 32KHz or 44.1KHz in high fidelity - the benefits may be subtle, but once you get used to it, it'd be much more lifelike and you probably couldn't go back.
The technology is certainly there, even 64Kbit MP3 would sound good, not to mention the more advanced stuff out there. The bandwidth is there (hell, it uses about the same as your standard video-conference, and has the same quality-of-service requirements).
The only thing I can think that's stopping it is the same thing as HD video-conferencing: people think that our current system is "good enough" and never being exposed to anything better. Or thinking that it should be perfected before trying to go further.
I would love it if some company were to start selling high-dollar jewelry made exclusively with man-made gems. Call them "artisan crafted" stones or something.
Back in the day, the only way to get pearls was to find them in the wild. So you'd get people diving around the place, digging up oysters to get at the pearls. Then someone had the bright idea of farming pearls. Great idea! We can make as many pearls as we like, we can guarantee their quality, etc.
Now, the status quo didn't like this, tried to get it banned, etc. etc. But the point of this post (yeah, we're getting there!) is that the pearl farmers managed to find a name for their "artificial" goods that sounded appealing: cultured pearls. People liked the name and they liked the idea, and the rest is history.
Cultured diamonds, anyone?
Obviously the developers of KHTML don't agree with you.
If they did they would not have used the LGPL.
I don't know why you chose to respond to my post, since I did not state an opinion, just some facts as I see them. (My opinion is actually quite similar to yours, which is why it looks to me like you're putting words in my mouth.)
The argument is whether Apple should do the bare legal minimum required by the LGPL, whether they should do more to be in the spirit of the licence, and whether they're already doing more to be in the spirit of the licence.
You have a particular stance, other people have different stances, none are conclusively right. That's Slashdot for you.
Using 'PTunes' on my treo 600, I already bring 12 albums of music around and play them using an SD card... And I can play them on my desktop also if I want. As SD and other media get cheaper, this will get easier and easier. I also can listen to shoutcast streams. All that on a tiny little OS like Palm. Why should I worry about Windows on my handheld device when Palm works and will boot up in seconds.
The Treo is a great device to converge your PDA and mobile phone. Easy calling. Easy address book. Good trade-off between size and usability, isn't a brick. And it's getting better.
However, it's got some way to go to converge your smartphone and MP3 player. Pocket Tunes is a capable player, but I never found an easy way to compress my playlists and transfer them to the smartphone. It came down to: select the songs I wanted, compress the large ones by hand, copy to SD card reader, set up a new playlist in Pocket Tunes. Also, the user interface requires a fair amount of tapping, which isn't great if your smartphone is in a case. All in all, I found it a lot more trouble than it was worth, and so hardly ever did it.
Rather than try to fix this, I took the path of least resistance - and bought an iPod shuffle.
1. A PDA with a HARD DRIVE. Enough of this 'when your battery runs down, you lose everything' crap. That's the sort of thing I'd expect out of a cheap calculator watch, not something I pay hundreds of dollars for. Why should I have to sync daily to avoid losing data?
Nobody's made this point yet, so I may as well:
The Treo 650 puts all its data in non-volatile flash memory; since it's got a replacable battery, that's basically a requirement. There are drawbacks, well-documented: records that were 32 bytes now take 512 bytes, so you can't load up as much data as you think. But it was designed this way for exactly the reason you want: to survive when the battery is out. (The Tungsten T5 and E2 also do this.)
Disclaimer: I carry both a Treo 650 and an iPod shuffle.
That's funny I heard the acid test patches were broken up into small chunks and had comments specifically for the KDE team telling them what applied to what as far as the codebase was still the same. I also heard that the lead Apple developer was soliciting suggestions for how they could make things easier, in fact it is still up on his blog. They can't release the bug reports, nor the versioning system, but Apple is certainly trying to be a good neighbor on this one.
From what I've seen, the Acid2 patches were a special case, spun out on their own. There's still a huge chunk of undocumented patch code that gets sent back to KHTML; Acid2 is but a small part of that. I'd imagine that if all the patches were documented like Acid2, there would be little to complain about.
And David Hyatt isn't the lead WebCore developer (the last time I heard), although he's certainly the most visible. I can't imagine that he speaks officially for anybody but himself.
Bullshit. WebCore is an open source web engine and there are even several new open source browsers based upon it as well as at least one other proprietary one (Omniweb which I'm using now). There is nothing wrong with closed source applications using open source ones. It violates neither the law nor the spirit of open source.
Whilst that's neither against the law nor spirit of open source, it's very much against the spirit of free software (which, in a nutshell, says that closed-source software is a blight upon society).
OK, so it's a free software vs open source debate again. You're free to pick a side, but realise that there are a lot of people who will disagree with the concept of closed-source software.
Is this really the only site where iPod users can legally download songs? It's a shame that the mass media can get away with spouting complete falacies such as this :(
This is Australia.
To cut a long story short, we don't have the fair use rights that other countries have. It's (technically) illegal to rip a CD to the computer, for instance. You can put digital music files that you already own or have rights to on your iPod, but apart from that, there are actually very few legal uses for an iPod in Australia...
That's the short version, this is Slashdot, so I'm sure that people will reply at length on this subject!
Damn right. Consider the following:
- the difference in sound quality between 128Kbit AAC and 320Kbit Ogg Vorbis
- the difference in sound quality between your current crappy earbuds and (for instance) anything made by Etymotic
- the difference in sound quality between your current crappy sound card and (for instance) an external box with much less noise
- the difference when listening to music between sitting near a humming PC and sitting in silence
- etc. etc. etc.
Most people focus on the first point. And yeah, it's a good point. But there are all these other things you can do to make your music sound better.That's assuming that demand is inelastic. But given the number of alternatives to iTunes, albeit crappy ones, this is not the case.
Yeah. That's why, in the very next sentence, I wrote "Now, the actual issue isn't this simple in real life, of course."
Seriously, I could go on and on about the economics of the situation, and pick apart everything I said above, and talk dry theory. But why bother? I made my point.
You cut out the middleman and a whole lot of manufacturing -, distribution and logistics in the process and I - as the consumer - want at least a part of that savings reflected on the price.
Whilst you can want that, there's no reason for you to get it.
The cost of production has little to do with the price of the songs. The price is simply the highest amount that consumers will let Apple get away with. Although they could lower their prices and therefore sell more songs, if you add it up, they wouldn't make more money this way.
Now, the actual issue isn't this simple in real life, of course. Also, Apple only makes a tiny amount of money from music sales (at the moment, the store is only there to make iPods more attractive). But it's useful to remember, in the real world, we have real world economics.
It seems to me that everyone else can pick up a few basic software engineering practices to tighten up the quality of their spreadsheets. Things like:
Code reviews - give your spreadsheet to a buddy to check over. Have him or her review all the calculations. If you haven't explained them well enough, add comments.
Change control - if you update your spreadsheet, keep old versions around and make a note of what you change. Find all numbers that total up different in this new version and explain why.
Etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying that we should treat everyone else like programmers, or spreadsheets like programs. But a few simple practices like that and your PHB gets to claim that he personally saved the company $10B (and fixed the Internet).
Unlike probably everyone else here, I've had my PQI Intelligent Stick for quite a long time - almost 3 years now (it's the purple USB 1.1 model, 128MB).
In my opinion, the form factor is brilliant, and being able to keep it in your wallet is indispensable. It will literally always be near you, you don't ever think about it, unlike having to pick up and check the charge on your mobile phone, MP3 player, etc.
However, due to having it with you all the time, and its small form factor, I reckon it's more suscepible to knocks, hits, etc., which cause data errors. (Although mine has never been through the wash - it stays in my wallet.) I got around these errors the cheap and easy way: by making multiple copies of important files on the disk.
So, all you folks who have a shiny new I-Stick, treat it carefully and it'll stay good for a long time.
Whether I want to play it or not is a moot point, because the Steam authentication servers have to give me permission either way.
Wait, how does this work? If you do not want to play it, you will never launch the game, and the Steam authentication servers won't ever know it. They only (try to) authenticate you if you want to play and start the game. It seems to me that whether you want to play it or not is a very relevant point.
There are already mobile versions that you can get for Palms and Pocket PCs. The database files are over 500MB, so you need an expansion card with that much room. Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_ database
Personally, I'm hanging out for someone to find a way to only retrieve the top 50% of articles by relevance/importance/popularity and put that on a 256MB or even 128MB database, so that mere mortals can also have Wikipedia on our Palms.
Meanwhile, h2g2, the official Guide project, was contemplating a mobile version, but broadcasting regulations meant that the BBC couldn't follow through on it.
And then the networks will turn around and scream at the government to help them stop their customers exercising freedom of choice.
In this case, "freedom of choice" being a euphemism for "downloading using BitTorrent"? (Keeping in mind what this discussion is about.)
I dunno about e-book reading, but small screens are perfect for newspapers.
Think about it: newspapers (printed ones) have narrow columns and short paragraphs. All the important info is at the top of the story. That's the perfect thing to be reading on your cell phone. In fact, that's what I do on my Treo... the first thing I do every morning is sync a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald.
I reckon that a forward-looking newspaper could sell versions of their newspapers especially for cell phones. However, it would require a lot more foresight than I've ever seen from a big media company.
Yeah, but you are not hurting the quality of the music by making it portable. Music in most all cases is only stereo, so if you buy a good pair of headphones there is no reason you have to take a hit on quality.
Most people don't have good headphones. Most MP3 players, portable radios, etc. come with terrible headphones, and most people don't bother upgrading.
Guess what, it doesn't matter.
I bet that people would rate the mobility and the my-favourite-music-on-tap factor as higher than sound quality. It's why people play Java games on their phone rather than Doom 3 on their desktop. In fact, it's why the GameBoys (and, to close the loop, the PSPs) of the world exist. Now Slashdot has audiophiles, and yes, I have a very nice set of $99 Audio-Technica headphones. But it's what I said before: quality doesn't have to be the top priority.
If you can, get a PDA with a 640x480 screen. If you can, get some video running on it. See for yourself. It's nice.
However, I find it hard to believe that portable television and movies will ever be as big as the iPod.
Just one point: when the iPod came out, we all found it hard to believe that it would be as big as anything. But as we know, five short years later, it is. It literally taught us a new way of listening to our music (i.e. your entire library at any time). That's the joys of disruptive technology, you never know if something's going to take off big or not.
So, the PSP could be the next generation of gaming bliss. Or it could be mobile video bliss. Or something else entirely. Ain't the future grand.
http://www.jobsearch.gov.au/JobExplorer/
Shows a whole bunch of careers, and has ratings for them. Achievement, working conditions, recognition, rated on a 1-10 scale. You can find out stimulatin' stuff, like how boilermakers have average working conditions, whilst how lawyers find themselves in ethically challenging situations all the time...
Glibness aside, it's a really good way of comparing IT against all the other jobs out there that you could be doing, like childcare, or accountants, or being in the military. IT actually stacks up pretty well.
Who wants to watch a movie on a 3" screen?
Actually, I bet that a lot of people do (or will).
It's like audio. Back in the day, we had huge hi-fi systems, speakers, amps, the whole lot for the ultimate enjoyment of music. But then the industry brought out a whole bunch of miniature radios and players, culminating in the Sony Walkman (and OK, the iPod) and people found a whole new way to enjoy music: on the move, outside, inside, wherever they felt like it.
Now substitute "huge hi-fi systems" with "home theatre systems" and "Sony Walkman" with "Sony PSP"...
One of my friends has a Dell Axim (that's a Pocket PC) with a 640x480 screen, and DivX playing software. It's awesome, you can watch ripped TV shows literally where you like, on the bus, in the park outside, etc. etc., and the quality is brilliant. I could get used to that. (Not that I advocate ripping TV shows.)
Just to remind people what the current behaviour is. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure I'll get corrected posthaste, we all love Slashdot.)
1. The uninstaller removes all Firefox-related files.
2. The uninstaller checks the Firefox directory for extra files, and offers to remove them. These files could be search plugins, extensions, etc.
3. The user clicks "Yeah, go on" and the uninstaller removes those files. The problem is when the Firefox directory is "C:\".
People saying "The uninstaller should keep a list of all installed files and just remove those, rather than wiping out the directory" are missing the point. See steps 1 and 2, above.
People saying "The uninstaller should not even offer steps 2 and 3 because people are stupid" may have a point. The down side is, all your search plugins and extensions stay behind, potentially screwing up your next Firefox install. (I know your profile sticks around regardless and will pollute your next install more.) And, as Mitchell pointed out, this is only a problem for the silliest 15 people out of the millions of Firefox users served.
But yeah. More intelligence in the uninstaller is always better, cos wiping a hard drive should never never never happen. (Or use a Mac; uninstalling consists of dragging Firefox.app to the Trash.)
What I'd like to see is iTunes to have a 'compress when copying to portable' option, and then have Apple sell lossless.
As has been mentioned, the iPod shuffle has this feature. The "problem" is that even for a 512MB or 1GB iPod shuffle, it takes a while. Perhaps 30 minutes to fill up your 1GB shuffle. Now, the other iPods aren't based on a wipe-it-all-and-re-upload-everything philosophy, but still, recompressing your music library to fill your 60GB iPod has gotta take a while.
Erm, I'm not sure if I have this 100% correct, but it should be close enough: Isn't the compression on DVDs the same as the compression on SDTV? (MPEG-2 at approx 10Mbit.)