It's tempting, as someone who considers themselves a geek, to think you absolutely need the best tools at all times. But you're not proving the Riemann hypothesis or engineering Ferraris right now, you're learning basic high school chemistry (and, possibly in a few years, calculus and other undergrad-level math). Despite most of Slashdot's love affair with vintage HPs, there's nothing inherently desirable about having a calculator that works differently from everyone else's. You want something simple, a calculator that will allow you to focus on underlying concepts instead of worrying about how to use your calculator. TI-89s are great for some purposes, but they make terrible learning calculators. They're pretty complicated, and it's much too tempting to try to use the calculator as a crutch when you don't know how to solve a problem by hand.
For almost anything you might need to do, a TI-83 would be more than fine. You can find them used for quite cheap. The interface is extremely intuitive - type in a statement and hit enter. Every single textbook ever written explains things in terms of the TI-83 interface, and every teacher knows how to use them. You could upgrade to a TI-83+ if you want better games, or a TI-86 for a few extra built-in capabilities, but it's not necessary. You can learn everything you need to learn just as well, and probably better, with a TI-83.
However - under no circumstances should you buy a new TI calculator, especially the 84 or the "silver" or "titanium" edition of anything. They're ripoffs.
Not using CFLs just because they don't put off as much heat as incandescents is a little like using your oven more to help heat your house (inefficient and expensive). Furnaces are made to heat and light bulbs are made to produce light.
Where do you think the wasted energy in an incandescent goes, if not heat?
If you don't like iPods, that's your decision. But batteries and hard drives are third-party components that will probably fail about equally across all MP3 players, so you can't really attribute your problems to specific deficiencies in the iPod design.
I'm not a Christian, or religious at all, and I fully acknowledge that the Bible advocates all kinds of nasty stuff. The purpose of my original comment was to argue that Scientology is no worse, and possibly better, than other religions as far as killing nonbelievers goes. I used Islam as an example, because it's one of the worst. A command for the Israelites to destroy a specific historical nation is qualitatively different from a command for all Muslims to destroy all nonbelievers everywhere.
Obviously some interpretations of the Bible have led to violence, but some don't. The Bible as a human work is much more subject to interpretation than the Qur'an, which is in its Arabic form taken as the literal, eternal word of God. Commands and laws in the Qur'an can't just be explained away with "well, that was a long time ago, we know better now" in the same way that Biblical laws can.
In context: "When Yahweh your God shall bring you into the land where you go to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before you, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than you;
2 and when Yahweh your God shall deliver them up before you, and you shall strike them; then you shall utterly destroy them: you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them;"
Now I'm not a Bible scholar, but it seems to me that it's referring to a specific group of nations occupying a specific piece of land, and not to unbelievers generally.
Anyway, my original comment never said anything about the Bible, so I'm not sure why you think this is even relevant.
Not to defend Scientology, but I've never heard of them harming nonmembers, just ex-members. Contrast this to Islam, where a literal interpretation of the Qur'an pretty much undeniably supports killing nonbelievers.
No, it's not. Reencoding, even with the same codec, causes a loss of quality. The loss is minor in a single generation, but it adds up. If you want to test this yourself, take an MP3 and reencode it ten times - it will sound significantly worse.
The point isn't to stop people who know what they're doing. Smart kids can reset BIOS and administrator passwords, boot from LiveCDs, and basically do whatever they want, and there's no way to stop that (except to supervise their usage, or just make sure they have no incentive to fuck with the system). No machine is secure given physical access. All you can hope for is to keep kids who don't know what they're doing from screwing up the computers with viruses and useless crud, and DeepFreeze should work fine for that.
I have no idea what goes into good running shoes, but I'll bet it's a lot more than $10 of materials and labor. Nike doesn't have a monopoly, and if they were making substancial excess profit, someone else would step in and undercut them. After all, if it only takes $10 to make a good pair of shoes, you could make your own and sell them for $30 and rake in the cash.
In the first case, Apple's official stance is that you should have kept a backup.
My iPod is the backup. All my songs are on my iPod, and I can restore them to my computer if needed. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with that, no matter what the RIAA would like you to believe.
1. If that's what you really want, then I agree, the iPod doesn't do it. But I fail to understand why someone would want to manually organize their music library instead of letting the computer do it - automating menial tasks is what computers are for. You're not forced to use iTunes, either; there are plenty of other iPod-compatible programs.
3. No player plays every format. The iPod supports as many formats as any other player, it just happens that Vorbis isn't one of them. If you can hear a difference between 160kbit Vorbis and 160kbit VBR AAC, then maybe the iPod isn't for you.
4. I do have a really cheap cell phone, but I've dropped my 3G iPod quite a few times and it still works quite normally. The only reason why a phone would be tougher than an iPod is the lack of a hard drive; HDs are inherently vulnerable to damage if dropped while spinning. There's nothing that can really be done about that, except waiting for advances in flash memory.
5. Depends what you want from an MP3 player, I guess. I like the idea of having my entire music library accessible, and it's not technically feasible at the moment to put that much storage in a phone (and keep it small).
The feature couldn't exist? Bullshit. Computers have had unrestricted "copy" functions for years, even over wireless networks. There's nothing illegal or immoral about creating a player able to wirelessly send unrestricted music files. It might harm MS's relationship with the RIAA, but that's their problem. Other manufacturers can and hopefully will implement DRM-free wireless systems.
Unfortunately people driving hybrid cars usually convince themselves they're not part of the problem, even when they just bought a brand new car that required enormous amounts of energy and quite a few toxic chemicals to produce, and will require more energy and release more chemicals when the eight-year battery packs die and have to be disposed of.
Unwanted and unwelcome physical contact? Last time I checked most kids were looking for any excuse for physicl contact we could find.
The major flaw with the Zune (apart from the incredibly stupid DRM) is the need for a critical mass. If everyone I know uses an iPod, my Zune's wireless features are going to be completely useless. So I have no reason to buy one until my friends buy them - it's a catch-22.
It does show up as a drive letter, if you enable disk use. You can't copy songs directly that way, but you can use any number of non-iTunes programs (including GPLd packages like gtkpod) to transfer songs to and from your iPod.
Check.
Upgradability... check. Support for a wide range of formats... check. No Vorbis (in the official firmware), but AAC, which is just as good except from a hardcore idealogical standpoint.
My iPod is far tougher than my cell phone.
Cell phones make bad MP3 players; there's an inevitable storage<->size tradeoff. But if you're satisfied with small storage space, then pretty much every new phone will play music, including the Motorola ROKR, SLVR, and RAZR with iTunes.
The reason both of these things is true is that, in importing your "Music" folder back into iTunes, all iTunes did was dig into the media files and drag out the original internal tags (ID3 or equivalent) and arrange them by those attributes (Artist, Genre, Title, Album, etc.). Moderately useful, but if you want to actually, say, go into your music library and drag the files onto an mp3 CD compilation you're making for your car, you can't do it outside of iTunes anymore. And more to the point, you can't really manage those files very easily without iTunes (or some other library manager) because of the obfuscated file names. The ID3 tags is all you can manage them by, whereas once you could have done it by file name.
If you have "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" checked, than iTunes will indeed rename and sort your files into an Artist/Album/Song.mp3 structure. If that isn't good enough, there are plenty of third-party tools that will rename MP3s based on ID3 tags in any possible fashion you could want.
On a technical level, there's nothing special about the iPod. What makes it great is the iTunes/iPod integration and the click wheel interface. Neither of those can be easily duplicated.
The counterargument: Kids look at a DAP and say, "Oooooh, shiny features!" Adults realize that all they need is something small and simple that plays music without any fuss. I'm not saying the iPod is the perfect embodiment of that ideal, but it's IMHO closer than anything else on the market.
Yes, and thank God we've moved on. Foley had personal issues, and he abused his power, but a few sexual IMs are nothing compared to the massive issues facing this country. If the Republicans are going to get voted out of office (and I hope they are), it shouldn't be for an isolated sex scandal, it should be for fucking up the world on a massive scale.
Says who? Most of the people I know who play games also do sports, for similar reasons. And besides, the Wii isn't exactly going to require Olympic levels of athleticism.
Slashdot Mirror
For almost anything you might need to do, a TI-83 would be more than fine. You can find them used for quite cheap. The interface is extremely intuitive - type in a statement and hit enter. Every single textbook ever written explains things in terms of the TI-83 interface, and every teacher knows how to use them. You could upgrade to a TI-83+ if you want better games, or a TI-86 for a few extra built-in capabilities, but it's not necessary. You can learn everything you need to learn just as well, and probably better, with a TI-83.
However - under no circumstances should you buy a new TI calculator, especially the 84 or the "silver" or "titanium" edition of anything. They're ripoffs.
Minis overpriced? They're not too cheap, but they're also one of the best-driving compact cars you can buy.
Where do you think the wasted energy in an incandescent goes, if not heat?
If you don't like iPods, that's your decision. But batteries and hard drives are third-party components that will probably fail about equally across all MP3 players, so you can't really attribute your problems to specific deficiencies in the iPod design.
You fail it. Apple says the 80GB iPod can hold 100 hours of video.
At this point there are plenty of very good software emulators for the PS1; I'm sure Sony wouldn't have much trouble making things work.
The manager could have given him a credit card, and just called to have it canceled if anything happened.
Obviously some interpretations of the Bible have led to violence, but some don't. The Bible as a human work is much more subject to interpretation than the Qur'an, which is in its Arabic form taken as the literal, eternal word of God. Commands and laws in the Qur'an can't just be explained away with "well, that was a long time ago, we know better now" in the same way that Biblical laws can.
2 and when Yahweh your God shall deliver them up before you, and you shall strike them; then you shall utterly destroy them: you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them;"
Now I'm not a Bible scholar, but it seems to me that it's referring to a specific group of nations occupying a specific piece of land, and not to unbelievers generally.
Anyway, my original comment never said anything about the Bible, so I'm not sure why you think this is even relevant.
Not to defend Scientology, but I've never heard of them harming nonmembers, just ex-members. Contrast this to Islam, where a literal interpretation of the Qur'an pretty much undeniably supports killing nonbelievers.
No, it's not. Reencoding, even with the same codec, causes a loss of quality. The loss is minor in a single generation, but it adds up. If you want to test this yourself, take an MP3 and reencode it ten times - it will sound significantly worse.
The point isn't to stop people who know what they're doing. Smart kids can reset BIOS and administrator passwords, boot from LiveCDs, and basically do whatever they want, and there's no way to stop that (except to supervise their usage, or just make sure they have no incentive to fuck with the system). No machine is secure given physical access. All you can hope for is to keep kids who don't know what they're doing from screwing up the computers with viruses and useless crud, and DeepFreeze should work fine for that.
I have no idea what goes into good running shoes, but I'll bet it's a lot more than $10 of materials and labor. Nike doesn't have a monopoly, and if they were making substancial excess profit, someone else would step in and undercut them. After all, if it only takes $10 to make a good pair of shoes, you could make your own and sell them for $30 and rake in the cash.
Nope. FF2 has a setting allowing you to install incompatible extensions without the NTT.
My iPod is the backup. All my songs are on my iPod, and I can restore them to my computer if needed. There's nothing legally or morally wrong with that, no matter what the RIAA would like you to believe.
3. No player plays every format. The iPod supports as many formats as any other player, it just happens that Vorbis isn't one of them. If you can hear a difference between 160kbit Vorbis and 160kbit VBR AAC, then maybe the iPod isn't for you.
4. I do have a really cheap cell phone, but I've dropped my 3G iPod quite a few times and it still works quite normally. The only reason why a phone would be tougher than an iPod is the lack of a hard drive; HDs are inherently vulnerable to damage if dropped while spinning. There's nothing that can really be done about that, except waiting for advances in flash memory.
5. Depends what you want from an MP3 player, I guess. I like the idea of having my entire music library accessible, and it's not technically feasible at the moment to put that much storage in a phone (and keep it small).
Go back to your Machole.
Thanks, but I've never owned a Mac.
The feature couldn't exist? Bullshit. Computers have had unrestricted "copy" functions for years, even over wireless networks. There's nothing illegal or immoral about creating a player able to wirelessly send unrestricted music files. It might harm MS's relationship with the RIAA, but that's their problem. Other manufacturers can and hopefully will implement DRM-free wireless systems.
Unfortunately people driving hybrid cars usually convince themselves they're not part of the problem, even when they just bought a brand new car that required enormous amounts of energy and quite a few toxic chemicals to produce, and will require more energy and release more chemicals when the eight-year battery packs die and have to be disposed of.
The major flaw with the Zune (apart from the incredibly stupid DRM) is the need for a critical mass. If everyone I know uses an iPod, my Zune's wireless features are going to be completely useless. So I have no reason to buy one until my friends buy them - it's a catch-22.
If you have "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" checked, than iTunes will indeed rename and sort your files into an Artist/Album/Song.mp3 structure. If that isn't good enough, there are plenty of third-party tools that will rename MP3s based on ID3 tags in any possible fashion you could want.
On a technical level, there's nothing special about the iPod. What makes it great is the iTunes/iPod integration and the click wheel interface. Neither of those can be easily duplicated.
The counterargument: Kids look at a DAP and say, "Oooooh, shiny features!" Adults realize that all they need is something small and simple that plays music without any fuss. I'm not saying the iPod is the perfect embodiment of that ideal, but it's IMHO closer than anything else on the market.
Yes, and thank God we've moved on. Foley had personal issues, and he abused his power, but a few sexual IMs are nothing compared to the massive issues facing this country. If the Republicans are going to get voted out of office (and I hope they are), it shouldn't be for an isolated sex scandal, it should be for fucking up the world on a massive scale.
Says who? Most of the people I know who play games also do sports, for similar reasons. And besides, the Wii isn't exactly going to require Olympic levels of athleticism.