True, true... you could probably do a lot or even all of it with Java. But my point is that Miguel doesn't want to. He thinks Sun has failed to listen to the market as far as language features, changes to the VM, etc. While Microsoft, on the other hand, has developed what is essentially a Java competitor, only they've taken the opportunity to learn from all of Sun's mistakes or shortcomings. (Plus,.Net does some things that Java will never do, like multiple language support in the VM.)
So here's Ximian, now part of Novell, pouring a significant amount of resources into developing tools that will make building complex desktop applications easier on Linux -- and they're not doing it with Java. I think that's significant, or at least Sun should see it as being significant.
Because meanwhile, here's Sun promoting what's essentially a Linux distribution for the desktop, only they're branding it "Java." It's not the Sun Linux Desktop, it's the Java Desktop. One is led to ask: Is that supposed to be some kind of hint? What are we led to infer about Sun's Linux position, based on that? For a company that's suddenly all about promoting Linux on the desktop, just what has Sun done for the Linux desktop application developer lately? What do they intend to do?
I guess it all comes down to Sun's perpetually half-assed Linux strategy. Do they have a Linux strategy, or don't they? Is Linux on the desktop important or isn't it? They can call their Linux desktop "Java" all they want, but at the end of the day, if the best tools for developing desktop applications for Linux are going to come from Mono... well, good luck, Sun.
So that's why open-sourcing Java could be a good move for them. Even if it doesn't really change anything much about the way Java works in the real world, at least it could send some sort of message to the growing community of developers who are interested in Linux -- and open source in general -- that Sun is finally ready to either shit or get off the pot.
As far as the WinForms stuff, Miguel doesn't really advocate that approach over any other. Mono is developing the more Linux-oriented stack precisely to suit the people who have no interest in WinForms development. But, for obvious reasons, a lot of the developers working on Mono are Windows developers. And a lot of the real-world code written in C#, for the foreseeable future, is going to be written on Windows, and a lot of those developers are going to use the tools available to them, including WinForms. So supporting that style of development with Mono is a good thing, as far as growing the installed base of Mono-compatible developers. But even if, at some point in the future, it became problematic, infeasible, or even impossible for Mono to keep up with what Microsoft is doing with.Net, Ximian would still continue to use Mono and the core.Net framework to do their development. They just wouldn't use WinForms (or whatever its successor might be).
I think -- and I'm really serious -- Sun should probably be looking at open sourcing Java as a response to Mono, if for no other reason.
Miguel and Ximian took a look at Java and decided it didn't suit their needs, as far as developing rich desktop applications for Linux (e.g. Evolution). So rather than use Java, they decided it was actually better to implement the.Net environment themselves, from scratch. To me, that sounds like a fairly heavy indictment, and one that Sun should be looking into, if they're smart.
Now you've got Mono humming right along, with the developers busy implementing two distinct stacks: One that's a Microsoft compatibility layer, for using all the stuff you might have written with Visual Studio, and another that's more Linux-oriented, with GNOME and GTK bindings, Linux printing architecture support, and so on -- the kind of things that people hope would come of an open-sourced Java.
If Sun doesn't care about this, they've got more problems than I realized.
What they don't seem to understand is that the cost of it has nothing to do with its success, nor is it the principal reason it is a threat to Microsoft.
Uh... is this comment meant to be serious? So nobody is using MySQL instead of SQL Server because they don't have to pay for MySQL? Nobody is using GCC instead of Watcom C because they don't have to pay for GCC? Nobody is using JBoss instead of WebSphere because they don't have to pay for JBoss? Nobody, anywhere?
It sucks that pirates use stuff to copy their overpriced pieces of round plastic... but I have the right to play a DVD in linux
Not really... just like you don't have the right to buy a DVD, put up a screen in your garage and charge people $9 a pop to watch it. DVD movies are sold to you under license, much like software (and that includes GPL software).
Well, the argument Valenti espouses, which is admittedly both labyrinthine and specious at best, is that by decoding an encrypted data source (a DVD) you are creating a derivative work, which is a violation of copyright law -- which still applies to you if you live in a Berne Convention country. This idea becomes the basis of the U.S.'s DMCA, which specifically states that the act of "circumventing a protection scheme" is itself criminal. But even before the DMCA, his position was the same.
In other words, I think that in Valenti's case, attacking the DMCA is a red herring. Valenti so fundamentally believes that you shouldn't even be touching his bitstream unless he says you can do so, on a case by case, instance by instance basis, that any problems or contradictions raised by the DMCA are even a secondary concern. Don't like the DMCA? Don't worry, we'll fix it next year -- but his fundamental beliefs remain the same. Valenti's intepretation of copyright law is comparable to [American evangelical preacher] Billy Graham's interpretation of the Bible. It has very little to do with what the majority believes, but has vast influence throughout policy-making circles.
That's how we should be attacking Jack Valenti. He is an extremist fundamentalist, on the Jerry Falwell/Elijah Muhammed/Osama bin Laden level. He believes in a certain doctrine, almost to the exclusion of all others. I believe that, were you to engage Jack Valenti in a conversation about any moral or ethical issue other than copyright, his beliefs on intellectual property would actually inform his argument on ethics and morality, and not the other way around.
Unfortunately, he talks a pretty good game and has a lot of money backing him, which makes it difficult for many influential people to see how dangerous his reactionary dogma really is.
There are no licensed DVD players for Linux because no one wants to (or needs to, or would) pay for one. End of story.
And how, exactly, does that argument help Linux's position in any way? You're basically sending the message to the public that the Linux community is a bunch of scofflaws who, given a free product that flouts the law, would never dream of paying for a legal, licensed product... and that this fact is so widely known that nobody has even bothered to start a business to test the theory.
Just because a language wasn't designed with certain features in mind doesn't mean they haven't been made available for you to use. Take C, for example. The C language doesn't even let you print to the terminal without external libraries.
Similarly, if you look at the PEAR project site, you'll see no less than four database abstraction layers. PEAR DB is mature, widely used, and actually ships with the core PHP distribution these days. If you don't use it, that's your own affair.
I talk to quite a few US people and few of them seem to "get" the EU. The german are german, the french french and so on. We're not becoming "europeans" the way you are "americans".
I swear I don't mean the following comment as flamebait! But... most Americans already see you as "Europeans," the same way they are "Americans." Witness the term "Euro-trash," for instance. What does that mean, exactly? Italian? French? German? Answer: All of the above. The difference is that now they think you're ganging up on them.
On the original Mac OS, unlike MS-DOS, file associations were not determined by a three-letter extension. They were identified by metadata stored in each file's resource fork.
The metadata was classified into two parts: Type and Creator. The Type was what you think it would be: text file, MP3 file, etc. The Creator was the specific program that made the file. So when you double-clicked on JPEGs you last saved in Photoshop, the OS would open Photoshop when you double clicked on them.
Therefore, since Type had a specific meaning in Mac OS already, they needed a different word to indicate (in a user-friendly way) what kind of document you were looking at in the Finder. They chose "Kind." When it came time to port iTunes to Windows, they kept the same nomenclature.
Personally, I don't think "Kind" is half as lame as Microsoft deciding its users were too dumb to know what "Applications" were, and storing your software under a directory called "Program Files."
My problem with the iRiver is that you can't browse the contents by the ID3 tag content - only filenames.
This was an issue I had with it at first, but decided it was actually a non-issue.
To explain to everybody else: The iRiver comes with software that scans the portable's drive and builds a database from your ID3 tags. You can then flip an option in the iRiver's menus and it will let you browse by the contents of this database, rather than by filenames.
There are a couple of problems with this, though. First, the software is Windows-only. Second, it only supports MP3s, even though the device itself understands OGG comments. Third, it's buggy. Apparently there are unnatural limits on the length of the filenames and the paths to the filenames.
Then I discovered that there are, in fact, a couple of projects either ready or in the works to build iRiver database software for other platforms:
iRipDB is the oldest. It's written in C, and compiles on Linux. The easiest way to get it to compile on BSD or Mac OS X is to track down JFTW, which implements the missing routines needed to walk a filesystem. You'll also need the appropriate third-party libraries for OGG and ID3 support (unlike the supplied software, it handles both). It doesn't seem to have the filename/path limitations of the supplied software. It's command-line only and a little clunky, but thankfully the author has also supplied documentation for the database file format, so you can use this as a basis to write our own software in some other language, if you choose.
This guy seems to have taken that spec and written something in Python, which requires the appropriate ID3 and OGG libraries for Python. I don't do much mucking around with Python myself, so having got the C version working I didn't bother with this one, though it might be superior.
ihptool is another utility, written -- mysteriously enough -- in C#. Haven't looked at this one much.
iFish wants to do it in Java, which sounds like a good, cross-platform idea, and he claims things like fast database updates that only write the changes; but so far hasn't released anything.
But in the end, after playing with this stuff for several days, I realized it was sort of a moot point. The only ID3 tags the iRiver database understands are artist, album, song, and genre. Most MP3s are named after the song anyway. How hard is it to then group them by album and artist? If you put them in folders calld "Artist-Albumname," you even save yourself a few clicks of that weird iRiver joystick. If you want to be super anal, you can even lump the artist folders under genre folders. In the end, the navigation is about the same.
I'm told the iRiver can do searches on the whole database, which might be handy. But I quickly realized that the main reason it would be handy was because ID3 tags are often corrupted. If you have albums by "Police" and "The Police," they'll show up in two totally different areas of the ID3 navigation. Not so if you manually threw them both into the same directory in the filesystem. There's no way to manually modify ID3 tags with the device; anytime you spot errors, you'll have to go back to the PC, update the tags, and rebuild the database.
In the end, I decided it was much more efficient, and much more forgiving of weird tags on downloaded MP3s, if I just managed the organization of the thing myself, using old fashioned files and folders.
P.S. And if that post doesn't earn a +1 Informative, I don't know what does!
Ditto, the Karma. In the interest of competing directly with Apple, these manufacturers have likewise chosen compactness over battery replacability. Fortunately, both the Karma and the iRiver line have superior batteries to the ones in the current iPods. Myself, I suspect something cooler will come along by the time the runtime of these batteries has halved; for instance, a fully-functioning PDA/phone with an internal hard drive.
It doesn't feel particularly like leather to me -- not quality leather anyway -- but everything I've read says it's leather. It is, however, a pretty nice case. It gives you access to all the buttons and even the AC power and sync jacks.
It's still brand new to me, so I haven't really fiddled around with recording yet, but as far as I can tell the answer is: No. The UI while recording is... not informative, to say the least. When I was reading about it online, somebody suggested that you'd probably want some kind of external mic preamp with a stereo mic. Oh, also, it comes with an internal microphone and a little plastic mic to plug into the external input, but both are mono. It supports stereo mics; you just need to supply one yourself.
And finally, there's apparently a (bug? feature? limitation?) where it will only record for about 90 minutes before forcing you to start over with a new file. That means it lets you record up to around 800MB in WAV format, and something like 200MB in MP3 -- I forget the actual numbers, but if you search Google you might find them. No idea why it was designed this way. I've not heard any indications yet that this might be fixed in future releases, but it's possible I suppose.
My iRiver IHP-120 holds 20GB, connects via USB 2.0, mounts as a filesystem and lets you organize your MP3s using the filesystem (unlike the Karma, which wants you to use its software), plays OGG, gets 12-14hrs battery life, is just a hair larger than the iPod and the same weight. Plus it has an FM tuner for those days you want to listen to NPR, and it records -- either to MP3 on the fly, or to 44KHz uncompressed WAV. And it has optical in and out.
Choosing between it and the Karma was tough for me, but I decided the iRiver had cooler features and was just a hair more open; not to mention that iRiver has a good track record for upgrades. They've publicly announced fixes for some problems with shuffle and playlist creation that should arrive in May, and by June the IHP series should have gapless playback like the Karma.
You make it sound as though IT people all colluded at some secret meeting to fix their rates unnaturally high. Admittedly, a lot of unworthy people are out there earning big fees. But that's not the same as saying the market hasn't set the rates.
Here in San Franciscio -- where I choose to live precisely because it affords me opportunities in my chosen field -- that $1000/month would leave me exactly $75 for food and bus fare each month, after rent. And that's assuming I'm going to dodge my taxes.
I earn considerably more than $1000/month and, as another poster suggested, I still can't afford to buy a home. Not even in nearby markets, unless by "nearby" I mean a 2-hour commute.
I don't really get most of the anti-Drudge bias out there. Why does everyone always want to dismiss his site so quickly? Yeah, sometimes he posts stories that aren't covered elsewhere, but those usually seem based on hearsay from "a source" and can generally be lumped into the category of gossip.
Everything else he posts -- meaning the vast majority -- is just his own headline linked to a story from a major news-gathering organization. Why does everyone want to knock Drudge for "not being a real journalist," or whatever, when most of "his" stuff comes from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.? Yeah, he likes to put a spin on things, but it's done in a pretty innocuous way, IMHO.
We've all dealt with them before, they are usually intelligent people but have no expertise or experience in the task they are being paid to complete.
Yet again and again, despite all their failings, they are being hired by big corporations for major projects.
I'd like to know why.
I can think of one legitimate (if sad) reason: All too often, companies bring in consultants because it would be absolutely impossible to get anything done any other way. Their own corporate cultures are so rife with political infighting, bureacracy, and years of inertia driving legacy processes that no decisions can be made and no actions can be taken, except one: Bring in the consultants.
Then begins the months of meetings that turn into screaming matches once the emasculated junior management at the company have a scapegoat (the consultants) upon whom to lay the blame for their own impotence. Eventually the consultants figure out who's got the most signing authority for their checks and they start telling those people what they want to hear.
So you can only really half blame the consultants. Every few years they come up with a new little portfolio of tricks to flash around (outsourcing, for example), but your corporate execs still have to sign off on all this stuff. When a company goes down the tubes, you really can't blame anybody but its own senior management.
It is the musicians themselves that have killed the album. When they record a CD with a few interesting songs, a couple of OK songs, and a bunch of filler, nobody values the album format.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's chant it out, one more time.
Because after all, before ClearChannel nobody ever had a favorite song, did they? And every Beatles album was all hits from start to finish, because back in my day we knew how to make us some musicians, by gum, not like these young punks today.
I really agree with this. For example, there are a few software programs that I use and would like to recommend to people, but then I remember the long text based config file, or other small things that prevent the naive user from getting software working properly.
Sounds like somebody should come up with a generic configurator program for open source packages. You hear a lot of "under the hood" references when it comes to Linux. Sounds like what we need is a "wrench."
A wrench is a tool, plain and simple. You could have a brand-new engine from a vehicle you've never seen before, and you know that if you want to open it up, you'll probably need a wrench. This program would work the same way.
I'm thinking along the lines of a widget-based GUI tool designed to manipulate text files. Each new application, when you run the install script, would install a "plug-in" into a directory under/etc. These would basically be files (XML?) that describe each application's configuration options. The "wrench" would then map these into standardized windows, with pull-down boxes where multiple options exist, checkboxes for Boolean flags, etc.
In an ideal world, plug-in writers could also organize those options into meaningful series of screens/tabs, so the UI was even more intuitive. But not too much, mind you! The idea isn't to create entire HTML-based interfaces full of graphics etc., where every one looks totally different. The idea is to stay as generic as possible, so that using the tool feels totally familiar after the first few times you do it. Like hand tools in your garage.
Noob installs software. Noob sees message saying, "Thank you, that was successful." Now what? Noob has half a clue enough to figure he probably needs to configure some options that software. How does he do that? Of course, he runs GConfigure, and voila! There's the application he just installed, in that little hierarchical list on the left. Click here, click there, point it to the right drives/directories/database instance, press the Start button, and away we go.
Re:Handed out free at last year's WWDC
on
Cocoa in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
(I have to question how smart it can be to hand out a book for free to such a large portion of your target population).
O'Reilly has never been all that stingy with the freebies. It's possible that:
The cost of the book was partially subsidized by your WWDC '03 enrollment fees
O'Reilly wants to build mindshare among what remains a relatively new audience for them (Mac developers)
In the long term, O'Reilly expects a significant portion of its business to come from the Safari service, rather than dead-tree editions.
The G speeds are quite nice - even though 802.11b's theoretical speed is higher than my DSL bandwidth, it's actual performance was quite dissapointing.
Heh. You know, it wasn't so long ago that pretty much nobody's LAN had more bandwidth than 10Mbit...
Slashdot Mirror
True, true ... you could probably do a lot or even all of it with Java. But my point is that Miguel doesn't want to. He thinks Sun has failed to listen to the market as far as language features, changes to the VM, etc. While Microsoft, on the other hand, has developed what is essentially a Java competitor, only they've taken the opportunity to learn from all of Sun's mistakes or shortcomings. (Plus, .Net does some things that Java will never do, like multiple language support in the VM.)
.Net, Ximian would still continue to use Mono and the core .Net framework to do their development. They just wouldn't use WinForms (or whatever its successor might be).
So here's Ximian, now part of Novell, pouring a significant amount of resources into developing tools that will make building complex desktop applications easier on Linux -- and they're not doing it with Java. I think that's significant, or at least Sun should see it as being significant.
Because meanwhile, here's Sun promoting what's essentially a Linux distribution for the desktop, only they're branding it "Java." It's not the Sun Linux Desktop, it's the Java Desktop. One is led to ask: Is that supposed to be some kind of hint? What are we led to infer about Sun's Linux position, based on that? For a company that's suddenly all about promoting Linux on the desktop, just what has Sun done for the Linux desktop application developer lately? What do they intend to do?
I guess it all comes down to Sun's perpetually half-assed Linux strategy. Do they have a Linux strategy, or don't they? Is Linux on the desktop important or isn't it? They can call their Linux desktop "Java" all they want, but at the end of the day, if the best tools for developing desktop applications for Linux are going to come from Mono... well, good luck, Sun.
So that's why open-sourcing Java could be a good move for them. Even if it doesn't really change anything much about the way Java works in the real world, at least it could send some sort of message to the growing community of developers who are interested in Linux -- and open source in general -- that Sun is finally ready to either shit or get off the pot.
As far as the WinForms stuff, Miguel doesn't really advocate that approach over any other. Mono is developing the more Linux-oriented stack precisely to suit the people who have no interest in WinForms development. But, for obvious reasons, a lot of the developers working on Mono are Windows developers. And a lot of the real-world code written in C#, for the foreseeable future, is going to be written on Windows, and a lot of those developers are going to use the tools available to them, including WinForms. So supporting that style of development with Mono is a good thing, as far as growing the installed base of Mono-compatible developers. But even if, at some point in the future, it became problematic, infeasible, or even impossible for Mono to keep up with what Microsoft is doing with
I think -- and I'm really serious -- Sun should probably be looking at open sourcing Java as a response to Mono, if for no other reason.
.Net environment themselves, from scratch. To me, that sounds like a fairly heavy indictment, and one that Sun should be looking into, if they're smart.
Miguel and Ximian took a look at Java and decided it didn't suit their needs, as far as developing rich desktop applications for Linux (e.g. Evolution). So rather than use Java, they decided it was actually better to implement the
Now you've got Mono humming right along, with the developers busy implementing two distinct stacks: One that's a Microsoft compatibility layer, for using all the stuff you might have written with Visual Studio, and another that's more Linux-oriented, with GNOME and GTK bindings, Linux printing architecture support, and so on -- the kind of things that people hope would come of an open-sourced Java.
If Sun doesn't care about this, they've got more problems than I realized.
Pull the other one.
Not really
Well, the argument Valenti espouses, which is admittedly both labyrinthine and specious at best, is that by decoding an encrypted data source (a DVD) you are creating a derivative work, which is a violation of copyright law -- which still applies to you if you live in a Berne Convention country. This idea becomes the basis of the U.S.'s DMCA, which specifically states that the act of "circumventing a protection scheme" is itself criminal. But even before the DMCA, his position was the same.
In other words, I think that in Valenti's case, attacking the DMCA is a red herring. Valenti so fundamentally believes that you shouldn't even be touching his bitstream unless he says you can do so, on a case by case, instance by instance basis, that any problems or contradictions raised by the DMCA are even a secondary concern. Don't like the DMCA? Don't worry, we'll fix it next year -- but his fundamental beliefs remain the same. Valenti's intepretation of copyright law is comparable to [American evangelical preacher] Billy Graham's interpretation of the Bible. It has very little to do with what the majority believes, but has vast influence throughout policy-making circles.
That's how we should be attacking Jack Valenti. He is an extremist fundamentalist, on the Jerry Falwell/Elijah Muhammed/Osama bin Laden level. He believes in a certain doctrine, almost to the exclusion of all others. I believe that, were you to engage Jack Valenti in a conversation about any moral or ethical issue other than copyright, his beliefs on intellectual property would actually inform his argument on ethics and morality, and not the other way around.
Unfortunately, he talks a pretty good game and has a lot of money backing him, which makes it difficult for many influential people to see how dangerous his reactionary dogma really is.
Man, that would have been a great argument. It would have really made Valenti look like a fool ... if he was right, that is...
Just because a language wasn't designed with certain features in mind doesn't mean they haven't been made available for you to use. Take C, for example. The C language doesn't even let you print to the terminal without external libraries.
Similarly, if you look at the PEAR project site, you'll see no less than four database abstraction layers. PEAR DB is mature, widely used, and actually ships with the core PHP distribution these days. If you don't use it, that's your own affair.
Oh man, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to come up with a study to back that one up.
Do you want a serious answer?
On the original Mac OS, unlike MS-DOS, file associations were not determined by a three-letter extension. They were identified by metadata stored in each file's resource fork.
The metadata was classified into two parts: Type and Creator. The Type was what you think it would be: text file, MP3 file, etc. The Creator was the specific program that made the file. So when you double-clicked on JPEGs you last saved in Photoshop, the OS would open Photoshop when you double clicked on them.
Therefore, since Type had a specific meaning in Mac OS already, they needed a different word to indicate (in a user-friendly way) what kind of document you were looking at in the Finder. They chose "Kind." When it came time to port iTunes to Windows, they kept the same nomenclature.
Personally, I don't think "Kind" is half as lame as Microsoft deciding its users were too dumb to know what "Applications" were, and storing your software under a directory called "Program Files."
To explain to everybody else: The iRiver comes with software that scans the portable's drive and builds a database from your ID3 tags. You can then flip an option in the iRiver's menus and it will let you browse by the contents of this database, rather than by filenames.
There are a couple of problems with this, though. First, the software is Windows-only. Second, it only supports MP3s, even though the device itself understands OGG comments. Third, it's buggy. Apparently there are unnatural limits on the length of the filenames and the paths to the filenames.
Then I discovered that there are, in fact, a couple of projects either ready or in the works to build iRiver database software for other platforms:
- iRipDB is the oldest. It's written in C, and compiles on Linux. The easiest way to get it to compile on BSD or Mac OS X is to track down JFTW, which implements the missing routines needed to walk a filesystem. You'll also need the appropriate third-party libraries for OGG and ID3 support (unlike the supplied software, it handles both). It doesn't seem to have the filename/path limitations of the supplied software. It's command-line only and a little clunky, but thankfully the author has also supplied documentation for the database file format, so you can use this as a basis to write our own software in some other language, if you choose.
- This guy seems to have taken that spec and written something in Python, which requires the appropriate ID3 and OGG libraries for Python. I don't do much mucking around with Python myself, so having got the C version working I didn't bother with this one, though it might be superior.
- ihptool is another utility, written -- mysteriously enough -- in C#. Haven't looked at this one much.
- iFish wants to do it in Java, which sounds like a good, cross-platform idea, and he claims things like fast database updates that only write the changes; but so far hasn't released anything.
But in the end, after playing with this stuff for several days, I realized it was sort of a moot point. The only ID3 tags the iRiver database understands are artist, album, song, and genre. Most MP3s are named after the song anyway. How hard is it to then group them by album and artist? If you put them in folders calld "Artist-Albumname," you even save yourself a few clicks of that weird iRiver joystick. If you want to be super anal, you can even lump the artist folders under genre folders. In the end, the navigation is about the same.I'm told the iRiver can do searches on the whole database, which might be handy. But I quickly realized that the main reason it would be handy was because ID3 tags are often corrupted. If you have albums by "Police" and "The Police," they'll show up in two totally different areas of the ID3 navigation. Not so if you manually threw them both into the same directory in the filesystem. There's no way to manually modify ID3 tags with the device; anytime you spot errors, you'll have to go back to the PC, update the tags, and rebuild the database.
In the end, I decided it was much more efficient, and much more forgiving of weird tags on downloaded MP3s, if I just managed the organization of the thing myself, using old fashioned files and folders.
P.S. And if that post doesn't earn a +1 Informative, I don't know what does!
Ditto, the Karma. In the interest of competing directly with Apple, these manufacturers have likewise chosen compactness over battery replacability. Fortunately, both the Karma and the iRiver line have superior batteries to the ones in the current iPods. Myself, I suspect something cooler will come along by the time the runtime of these batteries has halved; for instance, a fully-functioning PDA/phone with an internal hard drive.
It doesn't feel particularly like leather to me -- not quality leather anyway -- but everything I've read says it's leather. It is, however, a pretty nice case. It gives you access to all the buttons and even the AC power and sync jacks.
It's still brand new to me, so I haven't really fiddled around with recording yet, but as far as I can tell the answer is: No. The UI while recording is ... not informative, to say the least. When I was reading about it online, somebody suggested that you'd probably want some kind of external mic preamp with a stereo mic. Oh, also, it comes with an internal microphone and a little plastic mic to plug into the external input, but both are mono. It supports stereo mics; you just need to supply one yourself.
And finally, there's apparently a (bug? feature? limitation?) where it will only record for about 90 minutes before forcing you to start over with a new file. That means it lets you record up to around 800MB in WAV format, and something like 200MB in MP3 -- I forget the actual numbers, but if you search Google you might find them. No idea why it was designed this way. I've not heard any indications yet that this might be fixed in future releases, but it's possible I suppose.
Choosing between it and the Karma was tough for me, but I decided the iRiver had cooler features and was just a hair more open; not to mention that iRiver has a good track record for upgrades. They've publicly announced fixes for some problems with shuffle and playlist creation that should arrive in May, and by June the IHP series should have gapless playback like the Karma.
You make it sound as though IT people all colluded at some secret meeting to fix their rates unnaturally high. Admittedly, a lot of unworthy people are out there earning big fees. But that's not the same as saying the market hasn't set the rates.
Here in San Franciscio -- where I choose to live precisely because it affords me opportunities in my chosen field -- that $1000/month would leave me exactly $75 for food and bus fare each month, after rent. And that's assuming I'm going to dodge my taxes.
I earn considerably more than $1000/month and, as another poster suggested, I still can't afford to buy a home. Not even in nearby markets, unless by "nearby" I mean a 2-hour commute.
I don't really get most of the anti-Drudge bias out there. Why does everyone always want to dismiss his site so quickly? Yeah, sometimes he posts stories that aren't covered elsewhere, but those usually seem based on hearsay from "a source" and can generally be lumped into the category of gossip.
Everything else he posts -- meaning the vast majority -- is just his own headline linked to a story from a major news-gathering organization. Why does everyone want to knock Drudge for "not being a real journalist," or whatever, when most of "his" stuff comes from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.? Yeah, he likes to put a spin on things, but it's done in a pretty innocuous way, IMHO.
Then begins the months of meetings that turn into screaming matches once the emasculated junior management at the company have a scapegoat (the consultants) upon whom to lay the blame for their own impotence. Eventually the consultants figure out who's got the most signing authority for their checks and they start telling those people what they want to hear.
So you can only really half blame the consultants. Every few years they come up with a new little portfolio of tricks to flash around (outsourcing, for example), but your corporate execs still have to sign off on all this stuff. When a company goes down the tubes, you really can't blame anybody but its own senior management.
Yeah, the corporate world sucks, don't it?
Because after all, before ClearChannel nobody ever had a favorite song, did they? And every Beatles album was all hits from start to finish, because back in my day we knew how to make us some musicians, by gum, not like these young punks today.
A wrench is a tool, plain and simple. You could have a brand-new engine from a vehicle you've never seen before, and you know that if you want to open it up, you'll probably need a wrench. This program would work the same way.
I'm thinking along the lines of a widget-based GUI tool designed to manipulate text files. Each new application, when you run the install script, would install a "plug-in" into a directory under /etc. These would basically be files (XML?) that describe each application's configuration options. The "wrench" would then map these into standardized windows, with pull-down boxes where multiple options exist, checkboxes for Boolean flags, etc.
In an ideal world, plug-in writers could also organize those options into meaningful series of screens/tabs, so the UI was even more intuitive. But not too much, mind you! The idea isn't to create entire HTML-based interfaces full of graphics etc., where every one looks totally different. The idea is to stay as generic as possible, so that using the tool feels totally familiar after the first few times you do it. Like hand tools in your garage.
Noob installs software. Noob sees message saying, "Thank you, that was successful." Now what? Noob has half a clue enough to figure he probably needs to configure some options that software. How does he do that? Of course, he runs GConfigure, and voila! There's the application he just installed, in that little hierarchical list on the left. Click here, click there, point it to the right drives/directories/database instance, press the Start button, and away we go.