When a popular web site links to another web site, the link target gets a lot of hits.
Slashdot is one example of this. Fark is another. SomethingAwful's Awful Links of the Day are another. Netscape's "What's Cool" is one of the first. I don't see what the big deal is. Google could start soliciting payments to link more sites -- oh wait, as a company that makes nearly all its money from advertising, that's what Google always does!
My brother played the beta. When you're in the field it's about as boring as you imagine it'd be, except the outfield chatter is replaced with "wtg lol" and there are about 700 fielding errors on any play. It's like watching Little League play with adults.
For an approximation, join a weekend softball league that brings a keg to every game.:)
A few laser printers are now $100. Dell claims it introduced the "first" such printer, but now Samsung and HP have $100 lasers. Yes they come with starter cartridges, but a $70 cartridge will last you a very long time.
My Samsung ML-1710 cost me something like $150 and I've bought one $80 cartridge for it in the past 2+ years. I never have to worry about ink drying out or chips claiming to have expired.
What amused me was how in 2002-2003, there was a sudden boom in books written by folks who lived through the dot-bomb days. Many of these books were not well-written, and as such bombed in the retail space. You can pick them up for pennies on the dollar at "outlet" book stores.
Meanwhile, now we have a boom of stories about the impending second dot-com boom and/or real-estate bust...
What kind of a company would put out a $200 game console running Windows? The Microsoft tax would contitute nearly 50% of the console's cost. Any company unwise enough to try that deserves to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
Seriously, what the hell are [C|Net/ZDNet] actually good for? Biased reviews, news available elsewhere, and alleged 'gurus' writing columns that are either blindingly obvious or hilariously incorrect.
That's big talk coming from a man posting to Slashdot of all sites.
Re:$600 to listen to a song over a 10 year period.
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
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· Score: 1
I like electronic music. I don't know of a single radio station that plays it around the clock, certainly not commercial-free. It's not hard to unleash StreamRipper on a DI station here and there, but satellite radio has several channels I like. If I traveled frequently enough to exhaust my iPod's feeble little 8-hour battery, I might subscribe.
What if people like '50s music, or samba music, or liberal political commentary, or conservative political commentary, or Major League Baseball, and want to listen to their genre of choice on long road trips? Are they "fools"?
Good post, though. You implied that public radio is the only kind of broadcast audio worth listening to, and I've taken that bait.
Re:$600 to listen to a song over a 10 year period.
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
·
· Score: 1
Right, but the whole idea is that you can create your own radio station: you can download thousands of songs that you might like and buy only those that you want to keep.
People subscribe to satellite radio for $13/month, so I don't see what's so far-fetched about $5/month for even more music selections. Sure, you don't "own" the music (inasmuch as it's desirable to own DRMed 128kbps copies of music) but you do get to enjoy as much as you like for a reasonable price.
Re:$600 to listen to a song over a 10 year period.
on
iTMS Launches in Japan
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
And now the other extreme statistic:
If I want to rent a million songs from Yahoo and play any 10,000 of them on my portable device: $600 for 10 years.
If I want to buy a million songs from iTunes to load any 10,000 of them on my portable device: $990,000 for 10 years.
The last time I went to Newegg, they had a big red disclaimer above reviews saying something like "Don't base your purchasing decision solely on these reviews." At least they're being honest about random reviews not being a good sign.
I once sold a broken PS2 for about $90 on eBay. I advertised it as such and it sold anyway. I bought a brand-new PS2 for $150 which included another controller, effectively making the replacement console cost about $30.
However, eBay scares off a lot of people. You have to photograph your item, list it, and follow through with the payment and shipping process all on your own time. By contrast, bringing your PS2 to a game store takes virtually no time at all and you get your (smaller amount of) money immediately. There are businesses that sell your stuff on eBay by doing all the hard stuff for you, but a game console isn't valuable enough to make up for their fees.
Because around the time IE 5 came out, it was 1998/99 and a lot of folks were still using Netscape 4. Mozilla was still an ugly bloated browser at that time and few people used it; Firefox hadn't been started under any name.
Honestly, it hasn't been until the last couple of years that Mozilla was even worth recommending to computer laypersons that don't understand what "milestone builds" or "nightly builds" are. Even now, what with the 1.0.4/1.0.5/1.0.6/no-more-1.1 debacle, Firefox is still struggling to stabilize.
In iTunes, opt to play a song next in the Party Shuffle without using a contextual menu.
In iCal, try mailing an event to people without using a context menu.
In Safari, try performing any action on a link other than "follow this link" with one mouse button and no context menus. Try the same thing with images.
These are just three of the many features with which Apple has conveniently ignored its own mantra of "Nothing should be accessible only in a context menu."
The audio feedback built into Mighty Mouse provides an aural sensation that responds to your movements. A tiny speaker inside Mighty Mouse produces button-clicking and Scroll Ball-rolling sound effects.
Just one, according to this screen shot. However, this is an Apple product, so I'm sure there will be all sorts of $20 shareware products to "hack" the mouse.
If you execute a specific elisp file at a key time, emacs displays a very graphic mini-game involving Richard Stallman. As a responsible parent, I want to make sure that this sort of thing isn't seen by my children when I'm not watching them.
It's a movie player*. How the hell is $30 "not that bad" for a movie player? VLC and Mplayer put out products that can do full-screen for less than $30.
It's also a $30 upgrade on top of Tiger, already a $130 upgrade. Talk about being kicked when you're down.
* It's also a framework blah blah HD blah blah H.263, 4, whatever, but that doesn't matter to folks like me who just want to watch video clips.
Now show me how Apple has behaved any less assholistically.
About the only thing on your list Apple isn't guilty of is "Assumption that I'm a thief and making me jump through hoops instead of just letting me work." Mac OS X isn't validated for copy protection reasons, but if it hits the x86 space without DRM (as some Apple zealots have opined) then I'm sure it will be activated.
"Refusing to let me uninstall apps I don't want." Microsoft foists IE on you, like it or not; Apple foists Safari/WebKit and QuickTime on you. That would be fine if Safari weren't buggy and prone to security holes (albeit never-exploited holes) and QuickTime weren't $30 nagware.
"Refusing to abide by ratified W3C standards blah blah blah" Safari has layout quirks, as do IE and Firefox.
"Constantly trying to foist needless upgrades on people that aren't necessary and just result in more headaches for me in tech support, like item 1 above does." You must be joking if you think Apple is innocent of this.
"Actively interfering with my ability to choose what OS I might want to use on a computer that I buy on the rare cases I might want to buy a whole new PC from some big company." Ever try to buy a Mac, with first-party support, running anything but Mac OS X?
"Actively (in the past) interfering with competitors' software that they decide they don't like and then not coming up with a satisfactory excuse for why." Just ask their "competitors" who have been deprived of income from their $25 utility programs that Apple incorporated into the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
When a popular web site links to another web site, the link target gets a lot of hits.
Slashdot is one example of this. Fark is another. SomethingAwful's Awful Links of the Day are another. Netscape's "What's Cool" is one of the first. I don't see what the big deal is. Google could start soliciting payments to link more sites -- oh wait, as a company that makes nearly all its money from advertising, that's what Google always does!
My brother played the beta. When you're in the field it's about as boring as you imagine it'd be, except the outfield chatter is replaced with "wtg lol" and there are about 700 fielding errors on any play. It's like watching Little League play with adults.
:)
For an approximation, join a weekend softball league that brings a keg to every game.
A few laser printers are now $100. Dell claims it introduced the "first" such printer, but now Samsung and HP have $100 lasers. Yes they come with starter cartridges, but a $70 cartridge will last you a very long time.
My Samsung ML-1710 cost me something like $150 and I've bought one $80 cartridge for it in the past 2+ years. I never have to worry about ink drying out or chips claiming to have expired.
What amused me was how in 2002-2003, there was a sudden boom in books written by folks who lived through the dot-bomb days. Many of these books were not well-written, and as such bombed in the retail space. You can pick them up for pennies on the dollar at "outlet" book stores.
Meanwhile, now we have a boom of stories about the impending second dot-com boom and/or real-estate bust...
What kind of a company would put out a $200 game console running Windows? The Microsoft tax would contitute nearly 50% of the console's cost. Any company unwise enough to try that deserves to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
k sorry.
I've been a Slashdot member for over 6 years so 1800+ posts isn't that high.
"Active" journal? My last posts were May 17th, 2005, June 27th, 2003, and April 22nd, 2002.
Yahoo! bought Inktomi a while ago. That might explain why Inktomi's name disappeared from all search engines, including Yahoo!'s.
Seriously, what the hell are [C|Net/ZDNet] actually good for? Biased reviews, news available elsewhere, and alleged 'gurus' writing columns that are either blindingly obvious or hilariously incorrect.
That's big talk coming from a man posting to Slashdot of all sites.
I like electronic music. I don't know of a single radio station that plays it around the clock, certainly not commercial-free. It's not hard to unleash StreamRipper on a DI station here and there, but satellite radio has several channels I like. If I traveled frequently enough to exhaust my iPod's feeble little 8-hour battery, I might subscribe.
What if people like '50s music, or samba music, or liberal political commentary, or conservative political commentary, or Major League Baseball, and want to listen to their genre of choice on long road trips? Are they "fools"?
Good post, though. You implied that public radio is the only kind of broadcast audio worth listening to, and I've taken that bait.
Right, but the whole idea is that you can create your own radio station: you can download thousands of songs that you might like and buy only those that you want to keep.
People subscribe to satellite radio for $13/month, so I don't see what's so far-fetched about $5/month for even more music selections. Sure, you don't "own" the music (inasmuch as it's desirable to own DRMed 128kbps copies of music) but you do get to enjoy as much as you like for a reasonable price.
And now the other extreme statistic:
If I want to rent a million songs from Yahoo and play any 10,000 of them on my portable device: $600 for 10 years.
If I want to buy a million songs from iTunes to load any 10,000 of them on my portable device: $990,000 for 10 years.
The last time I went to Newegg, they had a big red disclaimer above reviews saying something like "Don't base your purchasing decision solely on these reviews." At least they're being honest about random reviews not being a good sign.
I once sold a broken PS2 for about $90 on eBay. I advertised it as such and it sold anyway. I bought a brand-new PS2 for $150 which included another controller, effectively making the replacement console cost about $30.
However, eBay scares off a lot of people. You have to photograph your item, list it, and follow through with the payment and shipping process all on your own time. By contrast, bringing your PS2 to a game store takes virtually no time at all and you get your (smaller amount of) money immediately. There are businesses that sell your stuff on eBay by doing all the hard stuff for you, but a game console isn't valuable enough to make up for their fees.
Nobody uses Office DRM unless they're willing to shell out thousands of dollars for an "Information Rights" server.
Because around the time IE 5 came out, it was 1998/99 and a lot of folks were still using Netscape 4. Mozilla was still an ugly bloated browser at that time and few people used it; Firefox hadn't been started under any name.
Honestly, it hasn't been until the last couple of years that Mozilla was even worth recommending to computer laypersons that don't understand what "milestone builds" or "nightly builds" are. Even now, what with the 1.0.4/1.0.5/1.0.6/no-more-1.1 debacle, Firefox is still struggling to stabilize.
In iTunes, opt to play a song next in the Party Shuffle without using a contextual menu.
In iCal, try mailing an event to people without using a context menu.
In Safari, try performing any action on a link other than "follow this link" with one mouse button and no context menus. Try the same thing with images.
These are just three of the many features with which Apple has conveniently ignored its own mantra of "Nothing should be accessible only in a context menu."
http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/design.html
The audio feedback built into Mighty Mouse provides an aural sensation that responds to your movements. A tiny speaker inside Mighty Mouse produces button-clicking and Scroll Ball-rolling sound effects.
So is every Apple USB mouse released in the past -- even the original hockey puck. For $50 you can buy far better PC gaming mice though.
Just one, according to this screen shot. However, this is an Apple product, so I'm sure there will be all sorts of $20 shareware products to "hack" the mouse.
That's not tactile feedback. I wouldn't use a membrane keyboard that emitted "click" sounds any more than I'd use a mouse that did.
I'd like to give this a try in person, but if there are no real buttons (like my iPod 3G) then I'm not sold on it.
If you execute a specific elisp file at a key time, emacs displays a very graphic mini-game involving Richard Stallman. As a responsible parent, I want to make sure that this sort of thing isn't seen by my children when I'm not watching them.
I applaud this rating system and wish it well.
They sold both sabers this year. The '1980' reference was to when the movie was released, not when the prop was sold.
It's a movie player*. How the hell is $30 "not that bad" for a movie player? VLC and Mplayer put out products that can do full-screen for less than $30.
It's also a $30 upgrade on top of Tiger, already a $130 upgrade. Talk about being kicked when you're down.
* It's also a framework blah blah HD blah blah H.263, 4, whatever, but that doesn't matter to folks like me who just want to watch video clips.
Great list.
Now show me how Apple has behaved any less assholistically.
About the only thing on your list Apple isn't guilty of is "Assumption that I'm a thief and making me jump through hoops instead of just letting me work." Mac OS X isn't validated for copy protection reasons, but if it hits the x86 space without DRM (as some Apple zealots have opined) then I'm sure it will be activated.
"Refusing to let me uninstall apps I don't want." Microsoft foists IE on you, like it or not; Apple foists Safari/WebKit and QuickTime on you. That would be fine if Safari weren't buggy and prone to security holes (albeit never-exploited holes) and QuickTime weren't $30 nagware.
"Refusing to abide by ratified W3C standards blah blah blah" Safari has layout quirks, as do IE and Firefox.
"Constantly trying to foist needless upgrades on people that aren't necessary and just result in more headaches for me in tech support, like item 1 above does." You must be joking if you think Apple is innocent of this.
"Actively interfering with my ability to choose what OS I might want to use on a computer that I buy on the rare cases I might want to buy a whole new PC from some big company." Ever try to buy a Mac, with first-party support, running anything but Mac OS X?
"Actively (in the past) interfering with competitors' software that they decide they don't like and then not coming up with a satisfactory excuse for why." Just ask their "competitors" who have been deprived of income from their $25 utility programs that Apple incorporated into the OS.
"Stupid and frivolous lawsuits." DMCA
I'm going to leave off the extra legal blathering since neither you nor I know anything about the law.