I don't know why pinball died. It's so much fun! It's physical and noisy and just *cool*.
Video games seem to sterile by comparison. An acquaintance collects and maintains old electromechanical pinball tables... Has about 20 of them in perfect operating condition. Tons of fun...
In my experience, the 3G network where I live (South Florida) is utter shite compared to Sprint and Verizon's EVDO RevA networks.
EVDO cards almost feel like local Internet connections, and are fast as hell. With my laptop I can fire up Google Earth and use it almost as well as I can on a DSL or cable modem. File transfers are fast, and coverage (in a moving vehicle) is excellent. This is on both Sprint and Verizon, though I go with Sprint because they don't whine about transfer limits.
Meanwhile, AT&T's 3G network is slow as hell and unreliable. It drops to EDGE frequently, which is even slower.
EDGE/3G was clearly the wrong technology choice, at least for here. I don't know if 3G coverage and performance is better elsewhere in the world, but in my stomping grounds, CDMA/EVDO rules the pack. It's why I don't have an iPhone, really.
Just because someone can legally do something doesn't mean they should.
Why NOT combine shipping on multiple items? It doesn't cost any more to pack five widgets in the same box you'd pack one, and for small items the additional actual shipping cost is minimal.
The fact that a seller doesn't combine shipping is deceitful. The auction ends at a nice low price, then they smack you down on shipping. It may be legal, but it's not right. Neutral feedback to warn people about their practices is perfectly justified.
This one doesn't hurt me, since I like iTunes. But it's an understandable gripe.
2) Doesn't work with Linux.
I'm sure it will soon. The original iPod didn't work with Linux when it came out and it did shortly after.
3) Is laden with DRM.
Only if you copy DRMed tracks to it. It handles normal MP3s just fine.
4) Doesn't support popular codecs like OGG.
OGG is a popular codec? How come I hardly ever see music encoded in it? How come I have only two ogg files total, which I easily transcoded to MP3 to play on my iPod? If you encoded all your music in a non-well-supported format, that's your problem.
5) ONLY supports iTunes Music Store and not other, cheaper services.
Works fine with Amazon MP3, which is cheaper AND has no DRM. Whee!
6) Doesn't allow simple drag-and-drop access to copy music.
Yes it does. Just set it to not sync automatically and you can drag songs to it from your Library no problem.
7) Software is locked down on the device.
Dev kit is coming soon. Plus it's been cracked anyway.
8) Non-removable storage.
I'll give you this point. An SD card slot would be nice.
9) Non-removable battery.
Li-Ion batteries last a good long time. By the time the battery needs changing I'm sure there will be plenty of third party, inexpensive replacements remaining, all with websites describing the procedure in detail.
10) Costs $500, much more than cheaper, more open-devices do.
I'll give you this point too. This really is a shiny toy for those who can afford it. But shiny is good!:)
Telcos are hesitant to lower prices because their competitors would immediately follow to keep them from gaining market share, which would mean everyone will make less money.
So price reductions come slowly, and rarely.
It's the reason why I can talk to someone in Buffalo, NY for as long as I want and not pay extra, whereas calling Hamilton, ON, a few dozen miles north, costs 30 cents a minute.
If customers are used to paying extra for "international long distance", why rock the boat? Wait until your competitors do. It only makes $en$e.
At first, yes. But when you count in the time required to actually burn the discs, find the right disc when you need a particular piece of data, and the space lost because your data doesn't divide evenly into 4.7GB chunks, it comes out to be more expensive.
Re:KDE is important for Trolltech and Qt
on
Nokia Buys Trolltech
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't trust Nokia. They bought PDAapps (the company that made Verichat) just to promptly kill the product. No explanation, no way for current users to keep using it. Just... dead.
The computer lab I used in high school had one of these. The teacher wouldn't turn it on until she was done lecturing, so that students would pay attention and not goof off with the computers. At the end of the class she would yell "save your work! Shutdown in one minute!" and hit the switch cutting everything off.
It was neat; it used a big contactor box on the wall and made a loud *CLUNK* when the switch was flipped. Of course, disk writes and such weren't an issue; these were all diskless workstations that booted from a Novell Netware server, circa 1994-95.
Oh yeah, 486SLCs were SLOW, maybe half the speed of "real" 486s at the same speed. Gods, those machines sucked.
Interesting. I've found machines that are switched off and on often have higher rates of HD failure than systems left on all the time. My sample size isn't that big, but this is the overall trend I've seen.
The typical explanation is having to park and unpark the heads causes wear and tear whenever the heads touch down on the surface. However, this may not be true anymore, given that modern hard drives actually park the heads on a ramp off the platter when shut down, eliminating this source of wear.
The only place I have hard drives spin down when idle is on laptops, to preserve power. All my desktops and servers have drives spinning 24/7. I wonder if it may be time to change that.
It's kind of ironic that piracy and open source will end up being what preserves content for future generations.
What's more likely to be playable in 400 years? A Blu-ray disc of Star Wars with copy protection, or a pirated h.264 file of the same movie, when the source for the h.264 codec is available?
>The pilots certainly do need access to some of the cabin systems, for the seatbelt sign, for example.
Why does there have to be a "network" for this at all? What happened to a simple *switch*, *light bulbs*, and wires to connect them to the battery? It's reliable, works well, and cheap. And you don't have to worry about passengers hacking the jet through the seatbelt light.
Why are companies so obsessed with making things needlessly complicated these days? I'm a geek, and love computers. But there are some things that are so simple, you don't need a computer to make them work. The seatbelt light on a plane is one of these things. Snap switch. Light bulbs. Power source. Wires. DONE. End of story.
I was a heavy linux desktop user from 1996 to around 2006. I got my first Mac, a Powerbook G4, in 2003, but it was lacking in speed compared to the Linux systems I was using at the time. It was primarily a bang-around portable that I used when I wasn't around my linux desktops. Laptops in general were slow back then, though, so it wasn't really the Powerbook's fault.
Then I got my Macbook Pro in 2006. Suddenly my laptop was faster than any other machine I had, and I started using it as my primary machine. My linux box at home got relegated to server duty, and I found myself plugging my monitor into the Macbook Pro to do all my stuff. It was fast, stable, and could run all the UNIX applications I was used to with minimal hassle.
Since then I've acquired a Mac Pro and am completely on Mac for desktop. As much as I love Linux, you can't beat the stability and multimedia architecture that Mac OS X has to offer.
I mean, may Linux distros still have a hard time dealing with two applications trying to play sound at the same time. That's just sad and incredibly annoying.
I seriously feel like slaughtering whoever came up with the "X" designation for optical drive speed.
"1X" means a different bit rate for CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Compact Flash cards, and so on! It is such a confusing metric that it's a wonder it was adopted so universally.
Can't we just measure optical drives in megabytes/sec? This would make so much more sense...
>the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming.
Allow me to teach you about the laws of thermodynamics.
You may be converting the sunlight into electricity instead of heat directly, but unfortunately when that electricity is used, it eventually will become heat.
It doesn't matter what you use the power for. Run a fan? The moving air will eventually slow down via friction and turn into heat. Run a light bulb? The light is eventually absorbed by surfaces which warm up, becoming heat. Run a computer? Every single watt you put in becomes heat.
This is the way life is, and there's no way around it.:)
In most places, electrical energy costs a HELL of a lot more per watt-hour than other sources like natural gas, oil, propane, and so on.
So unless you heat your home with electricity, which practically no one north of Florida does unless they have VERY cheap electrical power, you'll still be paying more by running computers.
The new earbuds are an improvement over the older ones, but they slip out of your ears unless you get foam covers for them.
In any case, earbuds are easily replaceable, and if you buy an nice high end set, you'll have great sound quality.
The earbuds that typically come with ALL MP3s players suck; typically. It's always best to upgrade them if you're anywhere near an audiophile. And of course, you have to use lossless compression because if you're an audiophile, MP3s suck. Not to mention you have to listen in a soundproofed baffled room, and you have to have not flown on an aircraft recently so your ears haven't been subjected to pressure changes.
Heh, I'm going too far. In any case, default earbuds suck. Buy better ones.:)
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I second that.
I don't know why pinball died. It's so much fun! It's physical and noisy and just *cool*.
Video games seem to sterile by comparison. An acquaintance collects and maintains old electromechanical pinball tables... Has about 20 of them in perfect operating condition. Tons of fun...
Bring back pinball, damnit.
In my experience, the 3G network where I live (South Florida) is utter shite compared to Sprint and Verizon's EVDO RevA networks.
EVDO cards almost feel like local Internet connections, and are fast as hell. With my laptop I can fire up Google Earth and use it almost as well as I can on a DSL or cable modem. File transfers are fast, and coverage (in a moving vehicle) is excellent. This is on both Sprint and Verizon, though I go with Sprint because they don't whine about transfer limits.
Meanwhile, AT&T's 3G network is slow as hell and unreliable. It drops to EDGE frequently, which is even slower.
EDGE/3G was clearly the wrong technology choice, at least for here. I don't know if 3G coverage and performance is better elsewhere in the world, but in my stomping grounds, CDMA/EVDO rules the pack. It's why I don't have an iPhone, really.
Just because someone can legally do something doesn't mean they should.
Why NOT combine shipping on multiple items? It doesn't cost any more to pack five widgets in the same box you'd pack one, and for small items the additional actual shipping cost is minimal.
The fact that a seller doesn't combine shipping is deceitful. The auction ends at a nice low price, then they smack you down on shipping. It may be legal, but it's not right. Neutral feedback to warn people about their practices is perfectly justified.
1) Requires iTunes.
:)
This one doesn't hurt me, since I like iTunes. But it's an understandable gripe.
2) Doesn't work with Linux.
I'm sure it will soon. The original iPod didn't work with Linux when it came out and it did shortly after.
3) Is laden with DRM.
Only if you copy DRMed tracks to it. It handles normal MP3s just fine.
4) Doesn't support popular codecs like OGG.
OGG is a popular codec? How come I hardly ever see music encoded in it? How come I have only two ogg files total, which I easily transcoded to MP3 to play on my iPod? If you encoded all your music in a non-well-supported format, that's your problem.
5) ONLY supports iTunes Music Store and not other, cheaper services.
Works fine with Amazon MP3, which is cheaper AND has no DRM. Whee!
6) Doesn't allow simple drag-and-drop access to copy music.
Yes it does. Just set it to not sync automatically and you can drag songs to it from your Library no problem.
7) Software is locked down on the device.
Dev kit is coming soon. Plus it's been cracked anyway.
8) Non-removable storage.
I'll give you this point. An SD card slot would be nice.
9) Non-removable battery.
Li-Ion batteries last a good long time. By the time the battery needs changing I'm sure there will be plenty of third party, inexpensive replacements remaining, all with websites describing the procedure in detail.
10) Costs $500, much more than cheaper, more open-devices do.
I'll give you this point too. This really is a shiny toy for those who can afford it. But shiny is good!
It's all about inertia.
Telcos are hesitant to lower prices because their competitors would immediately follow to keep them from gaining market share, which would mean everyone will make less money.
So price reductions come slowly, and rarely.
It's the reason why I can talk to someone in Buffalo, NY for as long as I want and not pay extra, whereas calling Hamilton, ON, a few dozen miles north, costs 30 cents a minute.
If customers are used to paying extra for "international long distance", why rock the boat? Wait until your competitors do. It only makes $en$e.
At first, yes. But when you count in the time required to actually burn the discs, find the right disc when you need a particular piece of data, and the space lost because your data doesn't divide evenly into 4.7GB chunks, it comes out to be more expensive.
I don't trust Nokia. They bought PDAapps (the company that made Verichat) just to promptly kill the product. No explanation, no way for current users to keep using it. Just... dead.
Any company that does this is one to be feared.
>Blu-Ray at this point is simply too expensive to be any good for backups
Just wait a little longer. If history teaches us anything, it's that tech never stays expensive for long.
And consider hard drives for backups. Less expensive per gig, faster, and more versatile.
The computer lab I used in high school had one of these. The teacher wouldn't turn it on until she was done lecturing, so that students would pay attention and not goof off with the computers. At the end of the class she would yell "save your work! Shutdown in one minute!" and hit the switch cutting everything off.
It was neat; it used a big contactor box on the wall and made a loud *CLUNK* when the switch was flipped. Of course, disk writes and such weren't an issue; these were all diskless workstations that booted from a Novell Netware server, circa 1994-95.
Oh yeah, 486SLCs were SLOW, maybe half the speed of "real" 486s at the same speed. Gods, those machines sucked.
Interesting. I've found machines that are switched off and on often have higher rates of HD failure than systems left on all the time. My sample size isn't that big, but this is the overall trend I've seen.
The typical explanation is having to park and unpark the heads causes wear and tear whenever the heads touch down on the surface. However, this may not be true anymore, given that modern hard drives actually park the heads on a ramp off the platter when shut down, eliminating this source of wear.
The only place I have hard drives spin down when idle is on laptops, to preserve power. All my desktops and servers have drives spinning 24/7. I wonder if it may be time to change that.
It's kind of ironic that piracy and open source will end up being what preserves content for future generations.
What's more likely to be playable in 400 years? A Blu-ray disc of Star Wars with copy protection, or a pirated h.264 file of the same movie, when the source for the h.264 codec is available?
Gee, I wonder.
>The pilots certainly do need access to some of the cabin systems, for the seatbelt sign, for example.
Why does there have to be a "network" for this at all? What happened to a simple *switch*, *light bulbs*, and wires to connect them to the battery? It's reliable, works well, and cheap. And you don't have to worry about passengers hacking the jet through the seatbelt light.
Why are companies so obsessed with making things needlessly complicated these days? I'm a geek, and love computers. But there are some things that are so simple, you don't need a computer to make them work. The seatbelt light on a plane is one of these things. Snap switch. Light bulbs. Power source. Wires. DONE. End of story.
I was a heavy linux desktop user from 1996 to around 2006. I got my first Mac, a Powerbook G4, in 2003, but it was lacking in speed compared to the Linux systems I was using at the time. It was primarily a bang-around portable that I used when I wasn't around my linux desktops. Laptops in general were slow back then, though, so it wasn't really the Powerbook's fault.
Then I got my Macbook Pro in 2006. Suddenly my laptop was faster than any other machine I had, and I started using it as my primary machine. My linux box at home got relegated to server duty, and I found myself plugging my monitor into the Macbook Pro to do all my stuff. It was fast, stable, and could run all the UNIX applications I was used to with minimal hassle.
Since then I've acquired a Mac Pro and am completely on Mac for desktop. As much as I love Linux, you can't beat the stability and multimedia architecture that Mac OS X has to offer.
I mean, may Linux distros still have a hard time dealing with two applications trying to play sound at the same time. That's just sad and incredibly annoying.
I seriously feel like slaughtering whoever came up with the "X" designation for optical drive speed.
"1X" means a different bit rate for CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Compact Flash cards, and so on! It is such a confusing metric that it's a wonder it was adopted so universally.
Can't we just measure optical drives in megabytes/sec? This would make so much more sense...
>I already work (at least) a few unpaid hours every week - Why the hell would I do more?
Time on a plane is dead time. There's nothing else to do; you might as well be productive. Why?
Because chances are the time you spent working on the plane can be spent actually having fun in the city of your destination.
I'd rather spend three hours on the plane getting work done, then not have to do that work upon arrival and be able to spend a night out on the town.
But then, that's my theory. My job (sysadmin) doesn't involve traveling so all my travel is leisure.
>the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming.
:)
Allow me to teach you about the laws of thermodynamics.
You may be converting the sunlight into electricity instead of heat directly, but unfortunately when that electricity is used, it eventually will become heat.
It doesn't matter what you use the power for. Run a fan? The moving air will eventually slow down via friction and turn into heat. Run a light bulb? The light is eventually absorbed by surfaces which warm up, becoming heat. Run a computer? Every single watt you put in becomes heat.
This is the way life is, and there's no way around it.
Don't the printers come with USB cables? Why would anyone buy them?
That was my first thought. I never thought *DELL* would ever make a Macbook Pro look affordable in comparison!
Mr. trouble never hangs around,
:)
when he hears this Mighty sound,
Here I come to save the day!
That means that Mighty Mouse is on the way!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
This only applies if you use electric heating.
In most places, electrical energy costs a HELL of a lot more per watt-hour than other sources like natural gas, oil, propane, and so on.
So unless you heat your home with electricity, which practically no one north of Florida does unless they have VERY cheap electrical power, you'll still be paying more by running computers.
Yeah, he definitely used old parts. Look at the date codes on the chips.. 84, 85, 88, 89, etc... :)
:)
Nice way to give those old relics some new life
Is anyone surprised?
It's time to move on, people.
Every last one of you better be at the f**king polls next year.
I know.. I am...
I'm sorry, I can't help having low intelligence. You insensitive clod!
So why not release the music in iTunes Plus? More money per song, and the customer gets a better product.
:)
OH WAIT! NO! That would make too much SENSE! Nevermind. I'll shut up now.
The new earbuds are an improvement over the older ones, but they slip out of your ears unless you get foam covers for them.
:)
In any case, earbuds are easily replaceable, and if you buy an nice high end set, you'll have great sound quality.
The earbuds that typically come with ALL MP3s players suck; typically. It's always best to upgrade them if you're anywhere near an audiophile. And of course, you have to use lossless compression because if you're an audiophile, MP3s suck. Not to mention you have to listen in a soundproofed baffled room, and you have to have not flown on an aircraft recently so your ears haven't been subjected to pressure changes.
Heh, I'm going too far. In any case, default earbuds suck. Buy better ones.