I used to be a minidisc guy - before they were made obsolete by HDD mp3 players, every one of the "advantages" this guy points to are in his imagination.
Durability: My primary HDD mp3 player is nearly 5 years old and has survived drops far nastier than what it took to destroy one of my minidisc players.
Unlimited storage space: Bollocks. By the time I was carrying 30 discs with me (because I didn't know ahead of time what mood I'd be in), the MD had become a bulky storage disaster not worthy of the term "portable". The only truely unlimited storage space is a HDD player that is twice the capacity of all the music you have ever wanted to listen too. Want to change music while cycling? Get off your bike, open your backpack, sort through a stack of discs, pull the MD player out of your pocket, swap the discs, put everything back, get going again. No thank you. MD, like reel-to-reel, is thankfully behind me now.
Recording capability: Is this guy on crack?! Even five years ago (before the ipod existed) HDD Mp3 players were better at recording than sony minidiscs, because sony was adament that there be no digital output on their (consumer) minidisc recorders, because according to sony, sony customers are thieves. Eventually, in the face of mounting losses, sony reconsidered, but they had already written themselves out of being a serious contender by that point. We moved on, we left sony behind.
Battery life: I have one of the 30-hours-on-one-AA minidisc players he's talking about. It would be nice if it worked, but much of the time it doesn't because of the low power - half the time it can't spin a disc up to speed, especially if you jostle it. Screw that. The 14 hours of a HDD player is enough for me - that's about one recharge a week, since I used them every day.
And frankly, I got really sick of Sony screwing me over every chance they got. Sony can go to hell with their proprietary crap and price-gouging accessories and nutty DRM. Now I have an mp3 player with an open source firmware, hardware features that make a mockery of the ipod, and fully upgradeable storage.
There is only one advantage to the MD over mp3 players, and it is this:
If you are so inclined, you can make your own album and disc art for each minidisc.
In every other respect, MD is roadkill to the vastly superior mp3 player. Hi-MD is too little too late - sony screwed us over on the MD, and we're not going back to the bad old days.
I did. You gave no indication that you had no need of homeschooling networks and support systems to give your kids wider social interaction while most kids are off limits at school.
Ignoring the stupider barbs, your added info makes it sound like you're far from the surefire disaster of many homeschoolers, and perhaps a little likely to do well than your initial post suggested (though it also makes you sound blaise about some real problems; "It'll never happen to me" sort of thing, but that's your and your kid's business, not mine.)
No, none of the homeschooled people I know were based on principles of faith, it was parental dissatisfaction with public schools. All of them seem worse off. There will always be exceptions, and I genuinely hope your kids do well (it sounds like they're better off than most).
Judging from the homeschoolers I've met and love, it's a f*cking evil thing to do to children.
1. Crippling of social development. It is an understatement to say that the regular social activities of homsechooling just don't cut it. Like it or not, a socially crippled person is just as screwed in society as an educationally crippled one, if not moreso. Being social creatures, this stuff also screws with happiness and feelings of self-worth.
2. Nutcases. Many, if not most homeschoolers are homeschooled because by brainwashing religious nutcase parents. This means that most homeschool-support programs and activities in your area will make a mockery of your worries that your kids might be among sheeple at school.
3. Networking. Lifelong friends are made during school years. Homeschoolers I know have a vastly smaller pool of friends and acquaintances than schoolkids, and those friends are often of a lesser quality - selected by necessity simply for being of similar age, rather than for good character or complementary personality. Schoolkids get to select their friends from a pool of hundreds or thousands they can spend time with with nearly every day. With big enough social circles, friends beget friends and are gateways to yet more social circles. Having too few on the other hand can result in dwindling circles, as people leave/move faster than the rate of crossover into new circles. Obviously, this will depend on how social and outgoing a person is.
4. Inevitablity. Assuming you want the kids to go to university, they're going to have to sit highschool exams (or whatever the institution requires), so they have the learn the public school curriculam anyway.
5. Life. To do a serious job of educating your kids, you will have to sacrifice years that you could be working, or developing yourself as a person, or doing all those things that you're still young enough to be able to do. That's a very real, and very high price, for a gamble - there is no guarentee that your efforts will result in better adjusted kids, but you will absolutely lose a huge chunk of your life. (You're presumably not so naive as to think spending most of each day with your kids is going to be nothing but bonding moments:-)
I don't know what the solution is, but the results of homeschooling that I see make the flaws of average public schools seem the lesser evil by far. My personal (and inexperienced) thoughts would be some kind of dual-education - putting kids in a good mixed-gender school, and teaching them you own curriculum for an hour a day (perhaps at expense of route-work non-educational homework rather than cutting into their own time). It's a difficult problem. The only real solution seems to be to move to another country and put the kids in school there, but then you can't move back without inflicting #3...
Wireless intergration would seem to be better for some people than plugging in, so wireless as-well-as (rather than instead-of) plug-in would be cool...
I have a great old pocket hdd mp3 player that predates the ipod, but among the numerious useful features it has that ipods are still shunning (DRM being all the rage nowadays) is a good old digital input and output, which allows you to plug it into a surround-sound system, and let that system do the final DAC/analgue amp stage, since the analogue sound componentry in any pocket mp3 player is pretty crap compared to most modern entertainment systems simply by the necessity of making the analogue stage fit into the most minimal space possible.
So... wireless+docking port, both using digital sound output where availible, but analogue where not, and recharging on the dock. Mmmmm, feature-creep...:-)
The real advantage to DIY is that no-one ever makes a device with exactly all of the features you actually want, and none of the "features" that you don't want. Custom hardware rocks.
Can you fit an Archos Jukebox into your pocket? I'm not talking about large puffy cargo-pants pockets, I'm talking about tight-jeans pants pockets.
I'm over 6 foot, weigh about 135 (ie tall and THIN), typically wear TIGHT jeans, and not only does the archos fit in easily, it not often even noticable that there is anything in the pocket.
But that doesn't mean smaller wouldn't be better, it's just that there currently isn't anything smaller that offers equivalent functionaliy in the areas that are important to me.
My question is - why on earth do people buy Creative Nomads?!?
What does the Archos Jukebox do that the iPod doesn't, besides being large?
1) It has a digital output for my home theatre system. 2) It records in real time. Recording from either a) its internal mic, b) analogue line-in/external mic, or c) digital input. 3) It offers many times the storage, and is upgradable. (Mine is 30gig, others have more). 10 gig is simply insufficient for many people's purposes. 4) It costs less. 5) It works in the field - you can take it camping, etc, because you can carry spare batteries for it if you're not going to have access to a powersource to recharge it. 6) Mac AND PC support.
It's as ugly as the ipod though (but I'm going to case-mod mine and fix that).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a year or two when the ipod (or its descendants) gets decent capacity and more features, that I'll buy one. The ipod is good, it's just not suited to me. Not yet, anyway.
Even today, a typical solar energy plant can't produce enough energy from the cells it makes to sustain production of more cells. I find that pretty damn chilling.
What are you talking about? Nearly 10 years ago, the energy it took to make a solar cell was a fraction of the energy it could produce over it's lifetime. Solar cell tech has come a long way since then, both in higher energy output and more efficient manufacture.
I suspect that either your information is waaaaay outdated, or perhaps more likely (as you say "even today"), you've been mislead a little. In a sense, a literalist could defend your sentence as true, even though it doesn't mean what you think it means - it's not chilling at all - solar cells produce a low but long-term energy output. To create them requires a higher but very short-term energy input. The energy gained is GREATER than the energy invested, but that investment is returned over a longer time. Thus you can run your solar cell plant off the cells it makes, but you're going to have to store the energy produced over a long time before you can rip through it in a short time to make more cells. Since it's more efficient to run the plant constantly for one year, than to run it once a month for 30 years, you could say that it is ripping through energy faster than the cells it produces are creating it, conveniently overlooking the fact that 10 years after the plant closes, solar cells it produced will still be happily providing power in remote outposts and the like, and that the net gain in energy is a... net gain.
Re:THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT YOU WANKERS
on
Case Tweaking
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· Score: 1
this really pisses me off - this guy makes a valid and intelligent comment and its obiously flamebait, what did he forget to praise linus
Everyone knows that anything even remotely touching on mac vs pc is a sensitive issue for some moro... er people. Therefore, if you have a valid point to make, you make it tactfully.
Not only did he seem to fail here, one gets the impression he didn't really try at all (which on a delicate matter like this is flamebait, regardless of how insightful his point or question might be).
For example, in order to make the point that a G4 case contains some seriously nice hardware, he didn't say "a state-of-the-art PowerPC 7400 that rocks the socks off even the more intensive PS filters", he instead leapt at the opportunity to claim that the 7400 blows away the best pentiums - something that so many people consider an outright lie (apparently resulting from an idiotic benchmark from a faulty photoshop port) that it is hard to see how he could have intended it to be taken lying down by said people. Valid point or not, that's flamebait.
He could have made his point without trumpeting the battlecry of an irrelevant, ongoing, seething flamewar. He choose not to. He was moderated down for this. Everything is exactly as it should be.
If we want light instead of heat in these forums (ha!), then it's a GOOD thing to have moderators who can distinguish between a person making a good point, and a person making a good point in a needlessly inflamatory manner.
Sure, you might argue that I'm overstating how inflamitory his post was. Technically, you'd be right. The thing to consider however is that in this real world, we get loosers who are so stupidly oversensitive about these "issues" that you do have to tread carefully to keep the discussion from denegrating to heat. If all it costs to do this is a few points of Kharma, I'd say that's a great solution:-)
I'm not advocating tact for tact's sake or some other kind of censorship-like sounding concept, I'm pointing to a known cause-and-effect, and saying that tact is sometimes a "necessary evil" that must be taken into account to ensure meaningful dialogue. If other people here agree with me, then it will show in the moderation.
Of course, the moderators might simply be acting out of spite or whatever, but let's be optimistic for a change:-)
Re:Why can't we just get along?
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 1
To understand the appeal of Macs, you must use one for a while (at least a couple of months), then go back to a windows box.
Sorry, no. It's definitely a personal preference thing. I'm the opposite - I used macs for years, moved to (an old) pc for a few months, got the hang of it, came back to macs (much more powerful than the PC too) and was shocked at how clunky they felt, how poorly designed the menu system and interface was, etc etc.
HOLD THE FLAMES and let me explain. I am NOT saying the mac interface is inferior, I am saying that for my interactions it was. As is obvious from what you wrote, some people have exactly the opposite experience.
My point, therefore, is that anyone saying "XYZ is the better one" is simply wrong. Different people find different things intuitive. Different people work in different ways, thus they work most efficiently with different processes, methods, and styles.
I happen to think that this should be bloody obvious, but apparently it isn't.
Just because platform Y suits your workhabits and concepts far better than Z does NOT mean that Z is worse and somehow no-one has realised. It means variety is good. What works for you might seriously grate on someone else. Accept this. Don't try to devise strange scenarios whereby pc users are simply ignorant of macs - sure, lots are. Many aren't. I'm not, and from experience I find the pc suits me far better than the mac.
Different strokes for different folks.
(Surely this must be obvious?!?!)
Apple does have a serious advantage in that they're able to make their own cases, thus can make them look good, (though speaking as a designer, I think they have mixed results - failing as spectacularly in some places as they succeed elsewhere). But as it happens, I'm more inclined towards building my own case to my own aesthetic principles (which is slightly easier to do in the pc world), so it turns out that there is a happy ending for me after all:-)
Almost forgot - while only a guide, this is a very good guide to getting a job in the industry, it covers more than just programming options, and is written by people who know what they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Hasn't this "clone attack" been happening for years, from the likes of Sony, Creative, Archos, and others?
:)
Creative and Archos were making HDD mp3 players long before Apple. Apple brought mainstream appeal to their clone, and the rest is history
Cell phone companies are 10 times worse than Apple or MSFT when it comes to vendor lock-in
:)
You're confusing "cell phone companies" with "American cell phone companies". There is a big difference
I used to be a minidisc guy - before they were made obsolete by HDD mp3 players, every one of the "advantages" this guy points to are in his imagination.
Durability: My primary HDD mp3 player is nearly 5 years old and has survived drops far nastier than what it took to destroy one of my minidisc players.
Unlimited storage space: Bollocks. By the time I was carrying 30 discs with me (because I didn't know ahead of time what mood I'd be in), the MD had become a bulky storage disaster not worthy of the term "portable". The only truely unlimited storage space is a HDD player that is twice the capacity of all the music you have ever wanted to listen too. Want to change music while cycling? Get off your bike, open your backpack, sort through a stack of discs, pull the MD player out of your pocket, swap the discs, put everything back, get going again. No thank you. MD, like reel-to-reel, is thankfully behind me now.
Recording capability: Is this guy on crack?! Even five years ago (before the ipod existed) HDD Mp3 players were better at recording than sony minidiscs, because sony was adament that there be no digital output on their (consumer) minidisc recorders, because according to sony, sony customers are thieves. Eventually, in the face of mounting losses, sony reconsidered, but they had already written themselves out of being a serious contender by that point. We moved on, we left sony behind.
Battery life: I have one of the 30-hours-on-one-AA minidisc players he's talking about. It would be nice if it worked, but much of the time it doesn't because of the low power - half the time it can't spin a disc up to speed, especially if you jostle it. Screw that. The 14 hours of a HDD player is enough for me - that's about one recharge a week, since I used them every day.
And frankly, I got really sick of Sony screwing me over every chance they got. Sony can go to hell with their proprietary crap and price-gouging accessories and nutty DRM. Now I have an mp3 player with an open source firmware, hardware features that make a mockery of the ipod, and fully upgradeable storage.
There is only one advantage to the MD over mp3 players, and it is this:
If you are so inclined, you can make your own album and disc art for each minidisc.
In every other respect, MD is roadkill to the vastly superior mp3 player. Hi-MD is too little too late - sony screwed us over on the MD, and we're not going back to the bad old days.
You didn't really read my post, did you?
I did. You gave no indication that you had no need of homeschooling networks and support systems to give your kids wider social interaction while most kids are off limits at school.
Ignoring the stupider barbs, your added info makes it sound like you're far from the surefire disaster of many homeschoolers, and perhaps a little likely to do well than your initial post suggested (though it also makes you sound blaise about some real problems; "It'll never happen to me" sort of thing, but that's your and your kid's business, not mine.)
No, none of the homeschooled people I know were based on principles of faith, it was parental dissatisfaction with public schools. All of them seem worse off. There will always be exceptions, and I genuinely hope your kids do well (it sounds like they're better off than most).
Judging from the homeschoolers I've met and love, it's a f*cking evil thing to do to children.
:-)
1. Crippling of social development. It is an understatement to say that the regular social activities of homsechooling just don't cut it. Like it or not, a socially crippled person is just as screwed in society as an educationally crippled one, if not moreso. Being social creatures, this stuff also screws with happiness and feelings of self-worth.
2. Nutcases. Many, if not most homeschoolers are homeschooled because by brainwashing religious nutcase parents. This means that most homeschool-support programs and activities in your area will make a mockery of your worries that your kids might be among sheeple at school.
3. Networking. Lifelong friends are made during school years. Homeschoolers I know have a vastly smaller pool of friends and acquaintances than schoolkids, and those friends are often of a lesser quality - selected by necessity simply for being of similar age, rather than for good character or complementary personality. Schoolkids get to select their friends from a pool of hundreds or thousands they can spend time with with nearly every day. With big enough social circles, friends beget friends and are gateways to yet more social circles. Having too few on the other hand can result in dwindling circles, as people leave/move faster than the rate of crossover into new circles. Obviously, this will depend on how social and outgoing a person is.
4. Inevitablity. Assuming you want the kids to go to university, they're going to have to sit highschool exams (or whatever the institution requires), so they have the learn the public school curriculam anyway.
5. Life. To do a serious job of educating your kids, you will have to sacrifice years that you could be working, or developing yourself as a person, or doing all those things that you're still young enough to be able to do. That's a very real, and very high price, for a gamble - there is no guarentee that your efforts will result in better adjusted kids, but you will absolutely lose a huge chunk of your life. (You're presumably not so naive as to think spending most of each day with your kids is going to be nothing but bonding moments
I don't know what the solution is, but the results of homeschooling that I see make the flaws of average public schools seem the lesser evil by far. My personal (and inexperienced) thoughts would be some kind of dual-education - putting kids in a good mixed-gender school, and teaching them you own curriculum for an hour a day (perhaps at expense of route-work non-educational homework rather than cutting into their own time). It's a difficult problem. The only real solution seems to be to move to another country and put the kids in school there, but then you can't move back without inflicting #3...
Wireless intergration would seem to be better for some people than plugging in, so wireless as-well-as (rather than instead-of) plug-in would be cool...
:-)
I have a great old pocket hdd mp3 player that predates the ipod, but among the numerious useful features it has that ipods are still shunning (DRM being all the rage nowadays) is a good old digital input and output, which allows you to plug it into a surround-sound system, and let that system do the final DAC/analgue amp stage, since the analogue sound componentry in any pocket mp3 player is pretty crap compared to most modern entertainment systems simply by the necessity of making the analogue stage fit into the most minimal space possible.
So... wireless+docking port, both using digital sound output where availible, but analogue where not, and recharging on the dock.
Mmmmm, feature-creep...
The real advantage to DIY is that no-one ever makes a device with exactly all of the features you actually want, and none of the "features" that you don't want. Custom hardware rocks.
Can you fit an Archos Jukebox into your pocket? I'm not talking about large puffy cargo-pants pockets, I'm talking about tight-jeans pants pockets.
I'm over 6 foot, weigh about 135 (ie tall and THIN), typically wear TIGHT jeans, and not only does the archos fit in easily, it not often even noticable that there is anything in the pocket.
But that doesn't mean smaller wouldn't be better, it's just that there currently isn't anything smaller that offers equivalent functionaliy in the areas that are important to me.
My question is - why on earth do people buy Creative Nomads?!?
:-)
What does the Archos Jukebox do that the iPod doesn't, besides being large?
1) It has a digital output for my home theatre system.
2) It records in real time. Recording from either a) its internal mic, b) analogue line-in/external mic, or c) digital input.
3) It offers many times the storage, and is upgradable. (Mine is 30gig, others have more). 10 gig is simply insufficient for many people's purposes.
4) It costs less.
5) It works in the field - you can take it camping, etc, because you can carry spare batteries for it if you're not going to have access to a powersource to recharge it.
6) Mac AND PC support.
It's as ugly as the ipod though (but I'm going to case-mod mine and fix that).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a year or two when the ipod (or its descendants) gets decent capacity and more features, that I'll buy one. The ipod is good, it's just not suited to me. Not yet, anyway.
Even today, a typical solar energy plant can't produce enough energy from the cells it makes to sustain production of more cells. I find that pretty damn chilling.
What are you talking about? Nearly 10 years ago, the energy it took to make a solar cell was a fraction of the energy it could produce over it's lifetime. Solar cell tech has come a long way since then, both in higher energy output and more efficient manufacture.
I suspect that either your information is waaaaay outdated, or perhaps more likely (as you say "even today"), you've been mislead a little. In a sense, a literalist could defend your sentence as true, even though it doesn't mean what you think it means - it's not chilling at all - solar cells produce a low but long-term energy output. To create them requires a higher but very short-term energy input. The energy gained is GREATER than the energy invested, but that investment is returned over a longer time. Thus you can run your solar cell plant off the cells it makes, but you're going to have to store the energy produced over a long time before you can rip through it in a short time to make more cells. Since it's more efficient to run the plant constantly for one year, than to run it once a month for 30 years, you could say that it is ripping through energy faster than the cells it produces are creating it, conveniently overlooking the fact that 10 years after the plant closes, solar cells it produced will still be happily providing power in remote outposts and the like, and that the net gain in energy is a... net gain.
this really pisses me off - this guy makes a valid and intelligent comment and its obiously flamebait, what did he forget to praise linus
:-)
:-)
Everyone knows that anything even remotely touching on mac vs pc is a sensitive issue for some moro... er people. Therefore, if you have a valid point to make, you make it tactfully.
Not only did he seem to fail here, one gets the impression he didn't really try at all (which on a delicate matter like this is flamebait, regardless of how insightful his point or question might be).
For example, in order to make the point that a G4 case contains some seriously nice hardware, he didn't say "a state-of-the-art PowerPC 7400 that rocks the socks off even the more intensive PS filters", he instead leapt at the opportunity to claim that the 7400 blows away the best pentiums - something that so many people consider an outright lie (apparently resulting from an idiotic benchmark from a faulty photoshop port) that it is hard to see how he could have intended it to be taken lying down by said people. Valid point or not, that's flamebait.
He could have made his point without trumpeting the battlecry of an irrelevant, ongoing, seething flamewar. He choose not to. He was moderated down for this. Everything is exactly as it should be.
If we want light instead of heat in these forums (ha!), then it's a GOOD thing to have moderators who can distinguish between a person making a good point, and a person making a good point in a needlessly inflamatory manner.
Sure, you might argue that I'm overstating how inflamitory his post was. Technically, you'd be right. The thing to consider however is that in this real world, we get loosers who are so stupidly oversensitive about these "issues" that you do have to tread carefully to keep the discussion from denegrating to heat. If all it costs to do this is a few points of Kharma, I'd say that's a great solution
I'm not advocating tact for tact's sake or some other kind of censorship-like sounding concept, I'm pointing to a known cause-and-effect, and saying that tact is sometimes a "necessary evil" that must be taken into account to ensure meaningful dialogue. If other people here agree with me, then it will show in the moderation.
Of course, the moderators might simply be acting out of spite or whatever, but let's be optimistic for a change
To understand the appeal of Macs, you must use one for a while (at least a couple of months), then go back to a windows box.
:-)
Sorry, no. It's definitely a personal preference thing. I'm the opposite - I used macs for years, moved to (an old) pc for a few months, got the hang of it, came back to macs (much more powerful than the PC too) and was shocked at how clunky they felt, how poorly designed the menu system and interface was, etc etc.
HOLD THE FLAMES and let me explain. I am NOT saying the mac interface is inferior, I am saying that for my interactions it was. As is obvious from what you wrote, some people have exactly the opposite experience.
My point, therefore, is that anyone saying "XYZ is the better one" is simply wrong. Different people find different things intuitive. Different people work in different ways, thus they work most efficiently with different processes, methods, and styles.
I happen to think that this should be bloody obvious, but apparently it isn't.
Just because platform Y suits your workhabits and concepts far better than Z does NOT mean that Z is worse and somehow no-one has realised. It means variety is good. What works for you might seriously grate on someone else. Accept this. Don't try to devise strange scenarios whereby pc users are simply ignorant of macs - sure, lots are. Many aren't. I'm not, and from experience I find the pc suits me far better than the mac.
Different strokes for different folks.
(Surely this must be obvious?!?!)
Apple does have a serious advantage in that they're able to make their own cases, thus can make them look good, (though speaking as a designer, I think they have mixed results - failing as spectacularly in some places as they succeed elsewhere). But as it happens, I'm more inclined towards building my own case to my own aesthetic principles (which is slightly easier to do in the pc world), so it turns out that there is a happy ending for me after all
Almost forgot - while only a guide, this is a very good guide to getting a job in the industry, it covers more than just programming options, and is written by people who know what they're talking about.
Getting A Job In The Game Development Industry