For me, that's the issue here: the Napster model is more like a premium radio subscription, and is best suited for browsing, sampling, trying this and that. You get access to stuff, but you don't keep it. If Napster closes shop, then the access is gone as well. You are dependant on the provider being accessible.
The iTunes Music Store model is more like a physical music store, where you only need to contact once and then it's yours. If iTMS goes tits-up tomorrow, you still have your music (albiet limited to the original "media" of the authorised computers and the iPod). As long as the media works, you can go back and listen to the music (ever dug out old records from your school days? It can be a trip sometimes).
The other difference is that the Napster model is aiming for customers who want to download music first and filter after the transaction. With the iTMS, you tend to know what you're looking for when you enter. Even though the songs cost only 99 cents, an average human will hesitate before paying. Therefore you tend to be more choosy about which songs you download.
I personally prefer the iTunes model. It gives me more of a sense of control, and it also cuts down on downloads overall (I prefer the "do I need this" moment to happen before, not after downloading. I prefer anything that means less bloat, period. But that's a discussion for a nother time.)
Well, in more traditional media forms this person is called the "editor". You could say he is the one who gets to mod stories up or down, send them back to be rewritten and toss out the garbage before it gets published.
Some (but not all) blogs have editors. Slashdot has its editors as a front gate (simple accept/deny), as well as moderators to police the comments (and metamoderators to police the moderators). Atrios' Eshaton has no such editor, and even the comments are rarely policed.
I guess the biggest problem is that before the internet, the const of entry (printing press, broadcast studio) was high enough to ensure that a certain level of professionalism was present--otherwise the audience would refuse to pay/read/watch, and that high investment becomes a millstone. Websites don't have that finaicial risk, meaning less incentive to be professional.
Fact: Firewire is only available in PowerMac and two models of Powerbook (15" and 17"). It is not available in the rest of Apple's products (iBook, iMac, eMac, Mini, iPod, peripherals (e.g. iSight), and software, obviously).
If you mean FireWire 800, then the statement is correct. All of the products you mention are FireWire 400.
I know, it was prabably just a typo, but I thought I'd point this out before some clueless jerk jumps to conclusions...
Only a tiny minority has ever claimed that it is American foreign policy that is driving the terrorists. The problem here is that there is a similar claim that current American foreign policy only makes the situation worse by increasing sympathy for terrorists. Without that sympathy, the terrorists would have less resources and less places to hide.
It's a common mistake, one that pundits often foster. After all, Rush and his cronies want us to believe that "liberal" is a dirty word, and that Democrats are all evil commies who eat aborted fetuses...
Well, I like playing Frag (more specifically, Frag Deadlands and Frag PVP), and it is a pretty fun game. You just have to be able to enjoy being loud and fast. Spending a lot of time planning your next move just ruins the spirit.
Earlier versions of Frag weren't as fun, since you had to cut the counter sheet yourself with scissors or a hobby knife. IIRC later printings had perforated counter sheets...
Part of what has contantly hurt Apple's sales percentages is the fact that Apples have a longer usage lifespan. The Mac mini can put a dent in this by its lack of upgradeability, at least for a short time.
The other thing to consider when comparing the Mac mini to other computers is the incredibly small form factor. A few days ago the Slashdot crowd tried (and failed) to find a Windows-compatible PC of the same size, performance and price.
This is a computer designed to complement the existing home PC (KVM switch required) and gradually assume the existing PC's tasks. Thus the lack of keyboard, monitor and other gizmos. If you want those, then you're supposed to buy an iMac G5 or an iBook.
"Fair Use" as I use it is well-defined by German law (since I'm currently living in Germany, that's what applies in my case). The term refers to an old case of piracy in the mix tape days, where the defendant was found innocent of piracy. There's also the matter of the famous Sony Betamax case in the States establishing the principles of Fair Use.
"Fair use" often means usage not intended for personal gain, and allows people to share copies of music with their friends. If I burn a copy of a CD I own, that's fair use. It's also allowed to transfer old vinyl records to CD's or other digital formats. The only recent restriction is a DCMA-like restriction on circumventing copy-protection schemes.
Legally, I don't "steal" music. It wasn't stealing when I was a kid and taped radio shows, so why should a change in format change the rules? And please, don't bring that old canard about "perfect copies", as that's not what people are interested in.
Almost all of my MP3 music is either ripped from my own personal CD's or from CD's belonging to my friends -- real-life, face-to-face friends. According to most standards, that falls under "fair use".
I do have other MP3 files, but those were released by the author. At least, I trust that sites like Salon.com actually have the rights to distrubute the music they publish online. There's so much music being distributed free by the musicians as samples that I suspect that that is what the recording industry is afraid of: the short-circuiting of their promo campaigns.
I honestly don't know anybody in my circle of acquaintances who "pirates" music. Most of the "pirated" music falls under format-shifting and fair-use copying not unlike the old days of making tapes of friends' records.
I suspect that database and spreadsheets are things Apple sees as "not used" by about hapf of the potential iWork audience. Everybody writes letters, but how many use the spreadsheet program?
Instead, I think Apple will refer these customers to FileMaker, I personally find works fine as an Excel replacement. All of my spreadsheet needs are elegantly filled, and if I want I can slap a graphical mask on it.
Besides, Apple wants other companies to write the software for the Mac so they can concentrate on making hardware. Maybe the spreadsheet hole is one they left open on purpose to encourage third-party solutions. (I can see the ad copy now: "the spreadsheet solution that seamlessly fits together with iWork!")
I think iWork is intended to play the same relation to full-fledged office suites that iPhoto plays with Photoshop: a low-cost alternative that meets basic needs well, for those customers who don't need all the tools the high-end programs offer.
Why not look at the more logical reason, namely that Apple is reluctant to eat into FileMaker's sales? After all, it's in a bind when it comes to swallowing FileMaker whole, since it still is pretty popular in the Windows world. They may not be able to get away with calling it Apple iFile yet.
My personal wish would be for the next generation of FileMaker to be the enterprise's iTunes: a package that looks great on Windows, integrates better with PHP and mySQL than Access, etc. and then suggest that it works seamlessly with iWork on the Mac.
What I suspect is that Apple has programmers donating to the Open Office port to Cocoa and Aqua, ensuring that it meets the Apple HIG. Or maybe a port of other KDE programs based on their Safari experience, in the hopes that KDE may start eating into Windows XP...
Apple does a lot more double-checking to see if a volume is still in use before it dismounts. It's part of the original Macintosh philosophy, why the old floppy drives didn't have eject buttons (or more precisely, hid them so that you needed a bent paper clip).
The Macintosh sometimes refuses to eject a CD if there is a file open from it. The problem, though, is that sometimes it just reuses to eject the CD without comment, and I get the impression that it didn't recognise that I pressed the key.
Oftentimes the file that I have open is a disk image, meaning I have to "eject" the virtual disk before I can pop the real-world one out of the drive.
It's a minor annoyance, but I consider it less of an annoyance than ejecting the CD and having other operations fail because they were still accessing the disk when it was open (which I accidently do on my Win2000 macine at work). It was part of why the original Mac hid the eject button of their floppy drive behind the paper-clip hole. Heck, if Apple could they would put clamps on USB sticks to keep them from being pulled unless you dismounted them first.
I use Flash and Director as well, finding both to be good tools for making multimedia projects. Flash, however, is just recently arrived at the point where you can use it for "application development" and not just components, and Director is IMNSHO suffering from both shrinking support from Macromedia and a QuarkXPress-like syndrome of considering itself irreplaceable. One other thing that hurts them (perception-wise) is the way Macromedia has been pushing their products as ways to replace PowerPoint, and nobody in his right mind considers PowerPoint an application development tool.
I think the other problem that affects these two is what I call the "90% achievable" syndrome: often you can get 90% of what you wanted to achieve pretty easily, but the last 10% often threatens to be either unreachable or budget-breaking. However, iShell and some of the other multimedia solutions on the list suffer just as badly, if not worse.
Actually, the main difference is that GUI interfaces are best for graphical/spatial uses and CLI is best for textual uses. That's why you rarely find a CLI version of Photoshop or QuarkXPress.
If you imagine moving files as a visual act, then the GUI is better suited - you don't have to translate your thoughts into language. If, on the other hand, you know what you want to "tell" the machine, then a CLI is better. It's all a matter of the job at hand and individual preferences.
So yes, in some jobs the GUI is as clumsy as pointing to a menu in a foreign land, but sometimes the CLI makes me feel like I'm saying "now pick up that, now what was that called again, widget and turn it 90 degrees to the left, then add a new thingy on the left side."
Both have thair purposes, and neither is completely better than the other one.
The problem with The Polar Express is that it's trying to imitate the painting style of the original children's book. It had these rich goache and pastel illustrations that reminded me of Norman Rockwell and other "photorealistic" paintings.
It was a valiant attempt to imitate Chris Van Allsburg's style, but it falls short. A pity, actually.
I'm not sure you understood me. There has been a shift in attitudes, one that has happened at a creeping pace. It's noticeable to me because I have yearlong spurts between my visits. You don't notice it just like you don't notice the movement of the hour hand on a clock.
What I wrote was based on my visits "back home", and how the paranoia and anxiety is creeping up. I also notice five thousand arrests under the "antiterrorism" laws without a single conviction. I notice the way fellow passengers were handled as potential criminals because of their skin color or because they wore Bush-critical buttons.
There is a lot that reminds me of Franco's Spain, or Pinochet's Argentina.
Hey, I'm an American living overseas, and the way Bush has changed America since my last visit scares the shit out of me. You may not have noticed it, but a certain fascist tinge really has crept into American life, with the flag as the rally symbol.
I'm staying overseas. Bush and his cronies are truly monsters.
If you follow Corey Doctorow's excellent address to Microsoft on DRM (sorry, no link since I've forgotten where other than boingboing.net you can find it), he points out the legal fight the sheet music industry got into when they tried to get piano players banned. By the time Edison came around, I think the dust had already settled, and the royalties question was probably justextended to the new devices.
Copyright is at least as old as Gutenberg, where the Old Guard tries to get the Prince to ban the new media.
Never forget, Karl Rove was a student of Lee Atwater, the inventor of "ratfuck" dirty politics. One of the trick that Mr. Rove has used again, again and again is to plant a bug or fake a burglary to smear the opponent of his client.
Besides, this doesn't sound like the Democrats' style. They also remember how Watergate began, and have almost always been on the receiving end. Hell, we even have the attempt to hack candidate Ginny Schrader's computers, as well as the DSCCC computer break-in, the Senate computer snooping, the attempt to hijack Senator Clinton's web site . . . the list goes on and on.
Considering the current polling, pretending that somebody stole stuff from a state campaign headquarters may seem to Mr. Rove to be an acceptable risk, and one that unfortunately fits his modus operandi all too well.
Micheal Moore had to walk a thin line concerning net distribution of the movie. If he had openly endorsed it, it would have been disqualified from the Academy Awards. By merely tolerating it, he was able to keep the Oscar hopes alive.
Granted, the Oscar may not seem like much, but it is important to the producers and the financial backers.
the little fellows with their 9" monitors even had torx screws to prevent tampering. Why? Well, mainly because of the CRT capacitor, and the fact that it had the potential to deliver a fatal shock. Those things really were dangerous back then.
Apple has been moving away from this policy, even designing things like the RAM and AirPort slots on my PowerBook for easy access. The towers and desktops have always been relatively easy to open (my old 8500, f'rex), and the thin little book pointed out how to install more RAM. Still, Apple warns that a lot of the other stuff is off limits (basically anything that was soldered or otherwise can't simply be unplugged).
So Apple (and most other manufacturers) make those scary warranty claims mostly to protect themselves from getting sued by owners that either a) zapped themselves or b) fiddled with parts that were squooshed into rilly tight cases, and never seem to fit right when you put it back together.
What is really, really sad is that I personally found the second series much more entertaining than the way the book continued the series. I loved Lintilla, the abandoned space freighter and Arthur just abandoning Ford, Zaphod and Zarniwoop on that rock.
Like DNA once wrote, it was ironic that the first radio series had such a definite ending designed to prevent a sequel, and that the open end of the sequel was never developed in a sequel.
The radio series should have maintained its seperate timeline/story. I always saw the four incarnations (radio, tv, book and Infocom) as seperate stories with unique timelines. They were seperate branches, each telling its own story.
Unfortunately, it seems nobody at the BBC has the imagination or the courage to develop the series from the original ending, possibly due to a fear of pedantic fans. It reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke writing 2010 as a sequel to the movie, throwing out the alternative setting from the novel version--but at least he explained himself, and the change was minimal.
I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but consider this praise for the concept.
There are two reasons why this is a good idea:
1. The news that the kids themselves generate needs an incentive to be generated. It gives the kids an audience for works they themselves created, and encourages further efforts (and learning in the process).
2. The audience isn't passive. The shows encourage discussions and recruit new members. By utilising preexisting technology (using the LAN instead of installing a cable feed), the goal is to create a system the kids can use themselves.
I haven't used an iPod with Windows, and I also haven't looked too closely at how the thing works in Windows. I just wanted to caveat that my Mac experiences aren't guaranteed on Windows.
Considering the job desired (sneakernet file transfer, external storage), I wouldn't be so quick to suggest the iPod except for Mac environments. The music fonction is the main purpose for the thing, and the reason for the higher price (compared to normal media)
On the Mac side, you have really easy access to the iPod as a hard drive, including the ability to boot from the iPod. That makes the thing pretty nifty right there, but there's also the FireWire transfer rates and other niceties that let you know that Apple intended it to work with its own hardware first.
The biggest factor to consider is taking the music player to work. Some Information Denial departments frown on hard drives but allow PDAs and MP3 players. Maybe getting an iPod or a competitor with the same "access as a drive" function might be worthwhile...
Slashdot Mirror
For me, that's the issue here: the Napster model is more like a premium radio subscription, and is best suited for browsing, sampling, trying this and that. You get access to stuff, but you don't keep it. If Napster closes shop, then the access is gone as well. You are dependant on the provider being accessible.
The iTunes Music Store model is more like a physical music store, where you only need to contact once and then it's yours. If iTMS goes tits-up tomorrow, you still have your music (albiet limited to the original "media" of the authorised computers and the iPod). As long as the media works, you can go back and listen to the music (ever dug out old records from your school days? It can be a trip sometimes).
The other difference is that the Napster model is aiming for customers who want to download music first and filter after the transaction. With the iTMS, you tend to know what you're looking for when you enter. Even though the songs cost only 99 cents, an average human will hesitate before paying. Therefore you tend to be more choosy about which songs you download.
I personally prefer the iTunes model. It gives me more of a sense of control, and it also cuts down on downloads overall (I prefer the "do I need this" moment to happen before, not after downloading. I prefer anything that means less bloat, period. But that's a discussion for a nother time.)
Well, in more traditional media forms this person is called the "editor". You could say he is the one who gets to mod stories up or down, send them back to be rewritten and toss out the garbage before it gets published.
Some (but not all) blogs have editors. Slashdot has its editors as a front gate (simple accept/deny), as well as moderators to police the comments (and metamoderators to police the moderators). Atrios' Eshaton has no such editor, and even the comments are rarely policed.
I guess the biggest problem is that before the internet, the const of entry (printing press, broadcast studio) was high enough to ensure that a certain level of professionalism was present--otherwise the audience would refuse to pay/read/watch, and that high investment becomes a millstone. Websites don't have that finaicial risk, meaning less incentive to be professional.
Fact: Firewire is only available in PowerMac and two models of Powerbook (15" and 17"). It is not available in the rest of Apple's products (iBook, iMac, eMac, Mini, iPod, peripherals (e.g. iSight), and software, obviously).
If you mean FireWire 800, then the statement is correct. All of the products you mention are FireWire 400.
I know, it was prabably just a typo, but I thought I'd point this out before some clueless jerk jumps to conclusions...
Just a clarification.
Only a tiny minority has ever claimed that it is American foreign policy that is driving the terrorists. The problem here is that there is a similar claim that current American foreign policy only makes the situation worse by increasing sympathy for terrorists. Without that sympathy, the terrorists would have less resources and less places to hide.
It's a common mistake, one that pundits often foster. After all, Rush and his cronies want us to believe that "liberal" is a dirty word, and that Democrats are all evil commies who eat aborted fetuses...
Well, I like playing Frag (more specifically, Frag Deadlands and Frag PVP), and it is a pretty fun game. You just have to be able to enjoy being loud and fast. Spending a lot of time planning your next move just ruins the spirit.
Earlier versions of Frag weren't as fun, since you had to cut the counter sheet yourself with scissors or a hobby knife. IIRC later printings had perforated counter sheets...
Part of what has contantly hurt Apple's sales percentages is the fact that Apples have a longer usage lifespan. The Mac mini can put a dent in this by its lack of upgradeability, at least for a short time.
The other thing to consider when comparing the Mac mini to other computers is the incredibly small form factor. A few days ago the Slashdot crowd tried (and failed) to find a Windows-compatible PC of the same size, performance and price.
This is a computer designed to complement the existing home PC (KVM switch required) and gradually assume the existing PC's tasks. Thus the lack of keyboard, monitor and other gizmos. If you want those, then you're supposed to buy an iMac G5 or an iBook.
"Fair Use" as I use it is well-defined by German law (since I'm currently living in Germany, that's what applies in my case). The term refers to an old case of piracy in the mix tape days, where the defendant was found innocent of piracy. There's also the matter of the famous Sony Betamax case in the States establishing the principles of Fair Use.
"Fair use" often means usage not intended for personal gain, and allows people to share copies of music with their friends. If I burn a copy of a CD I own, that's fair use. It's also allowed to transfer old vinyl records to CD's or other digital formats. The only recent restriction is a DCMA-like restriction on circumventing copy-protection schemes.
Legally, I don't "steal" music. It wasn't stealing when I was a kid and taped radio shows, so why should a change in format change the rules? And please, don't bring that old canard about "perfect copies", as that's not what people are interested in.
Almost all of my MP3 music is either ripped from my own personal CD's or from CD's belonging to my friends -- real-life, face-to-face friends. According to most standards, that falls under "fair use".
I do have other MP3 files, but those were released by the author. At least, I trust that sites like Salon.com actually have the rights to distrubute the music they publish online. There's so much music being distributed free by the musicians as samples that I suspect that that is what the recording industry is afraid of: the short-circuiting of their promo campaigns.
I honestly don't know anybody in my circle of acquaintances who "pirates" music. Most of the "pirated" music falls under format-shifting and fair-use copying not unlike the old days of making tapes of friends' records.
I suspect that database and spreadsheets are things Apple sees as "not used" by about hapf of the potential iWork audience. Everybody writes letters, but how many use the spreadsheet program?
Instead, I think Apple will refer these customers to FileMaker, I personally find works fine as an Excel replacement. All of my spreadsheet needs are elegantly filled, and if I want I can slap a graphical mask on it.
Besides, Apple wants other companies to write the software for the Mac so they can concentrate on making hardware. Maybe the spreadsheet hole is one they left open on purpose to encourage third-party solutions. (I can see the ad copy now: "the spreadsheet solution that seamlessly fits together with iWork!")
I think iWork is intended to play the same relation to full-fledged office suites that iPhoto plays with Photoshop: a low-cost alternative that meets basic needs well, for those customers who don't need all the tools the high-end programs offer.
Why not look at the more logical reason, namely that Apple is reluctant to eat into FileMaker's sales? After all, it's in a bind when it comes to swallowing FileMaker whole, since it still is pretty popular in the Windows world. They may not be able to get away with calling it Apple iFile yet.
My personal wish would be for the next generation of FileMaker to be the enterprise's iTunes: a package that looks great on Windows, integrates better with PHP and mySQL than Access, etc. and then suggest that it works seamlessly with iWork on the Mac.
What I suspect is that Apple has programmers donating to the Open Office port to Cocoa and Aqua, ensuring that it meets the Apple HIG. Or maybe a port of other KDE programs based on their Safari experience, in the hopes that KDE may start eating into Windows XP...
Apple does a lot more double-checking to see if a volume is still in use before it dismounts. It's part of the original Macintosh philosophy, why the old floppy drives didn't have eject buttons (or more precisely, hid them so that you needed a bent paper clip).
The Macintosh sometimes refuses to eject a CD if there is a file open from it. The problem, though, is that sometimes it just reuses to eject the CD without comment, and I get the impression that it didn't recognise that I pressed the key.
Oftentimes the file that I have open is a disk image, meaning I have to "eject" the virtual disk before I can pop the real-world one out of the drive.
It's a minor annoyance, but I consider it less of an annoyance than ejecting the CD and having other operations fail because they were still accessing the disk when it was open (which I accidently do on my Win2000 macine at work). It was part of why the original Mac hid the eject button of their floppy drive behind the paper-clip hole. Heck, if Apple could they would put clamps on USB sticks to keep them from being pulled unless you dismounted them first.
I use Flash and Director as well, finding both to be good tools for making multimedia projects. Flash, however, is just recently arrived at the point where you can use it for "application development" and not just components, and Director is IMNSHO suffering from both shrinking support from Macromedia and a QuarkXPress-like syndrome of considering itself irreplaceable. One other thing that hurts them (perception-wise) is the way Macromedia has been pushing their products as ways to replace PowerPoint, and nobody in his right mind considers PowerPoint an application development tool.
I think the other problem that affects these two is what I call the "90% achievable" syndrome: often you can get 90% of what you wanted to achieve pretty easily, but the last 10% often threatens to be either unreachable or budget-breaking. However, iShell and some of the other multimedia solutions on the list suffer just as badly, if not worse.
Actually, the main difference is that GUI interfaces are best for graphical/spatial uses and CLI is best for textual uses. That's why you rarely find a CLI version of Photoshop or QuarkXPress.
If you imagine moving files as a visual act, then the GUI is better suited - you don't have to translate your thoughts into language. If, on the other hand, you know what you want to "tell" the machine, then a CLI is better. It's all a matter of the job at hand and individual preferences.
So yes, in some jobs the GUI is as clumsy as pointing to a menu in a foreign land, but sometimes the CLI makes me feel like I'm saying "now pick up that, now what was that called again, widget and turn it 90 degrees to the left, then add a new thingy on the left side."
Both have thair purposes, and neither is completely better than the other one.
The problem with The Polar Express is that it's trying to imitate the painting style of the original children's book. It had these rich goache and pastel illustrations that reminded me of Norman Rockwell and other "photorealistic" paintings.
It was a valiant attempt to imitate Chris Van Allsburg's style, but it falls short. A pity, actually.
I'm not sure you understood me. There has been a shift in attitudes, one that has happened at a creeping pace. It's noticeable to me because I have yearlong spurts between my visits. You don't notice it just like you don't notice the movement of the hour hand on a clock.
What I wrote was based on my visits "back home", and how the paranoia and anxiety is creeping up. I also notice five thousand arrests under the "antiterrorism" laws without a single conviction. I notice the way fellow passengers were handled as potential criminals because of their skin color or because they wore Bush-critical buttons.
There is a lot that reminds me of Franco's Spain, or Pinochet's Argentina.
Hey, I'm an American living overseas, and the way Bush has changed America since my last visit scares the shit out of me. You may not have noticed it, but a certain fascist tinge really has crept into American life, with the flag as the rally symbol.
I'm staying overseas. Bush and his cronies are truly monsters.
If you follow Corey Doctorow's excellent address to Microsoft on DRM (sorry, no link since I've forgotten where other than boingboing.net you can find it), he points out the legal fight the sheet music industry got into when they tried to get piano players banned. By the time Edison came around, I think the dust had already settled, and the royalties question was probably justextended to the new devices.
Copyright is at least as old as Gutenberg, where the Old Guard tries to get the Prince to ban the new media.
Never forget, Karl Rove was a student of Lee Atwater, the inventor of "ratfuck" dirty politics. One of the trick that Mr. Rove has used again, again and again is to plant a bug or fake a burglary to smear the opponent of his client.
Besides, this doesn't sound like the Democrats' style. They also remember how Watergate began, and have almost always been on the receiving end. Hell, we even have the attempt to hack candidate Ginny Schrader's computers, as well as the DSCCC computer break-in, the Senate computer snooping, the attempt to hijack Senator Clinton's web site . . . the list goes on and on.
Considering the current polling, pretending that somebody stole stuff from a state campaign headquarters may seem to Mr. Rove to be an acceptable risk, and one that unfortunately fits his modus operandi all too well.
Micheal Moore had to walk a thin line concerning net distribution of the movie. If he had openly endorsed it, it would have been disqualified from the Academy Awards. By merely tolerating it, he was able to keep the Oscar hopes alive.
Granted, the Oscar may not seem like much, but it is important to the producers and the financial backers.
the little fellows with their 9" monitors even had torx screws to prevent tampering. Why? Well, mainly because of the CRT capacitor, and the fact that it had the potential to deliver a fatal shock. Those things really were dangerous back then.
Apple has been moving away from this policy, even designing things like the RAM and AirPort slots on my PowerBook for easy access. The towers and desktops have always been relatively easy to open (my old 8500, f'rex), and the thin little book pointed out how to install more RAM. Still, Apple warns that a lot of the other stuff is off limits (basically anything that was soldered or otherwise can't simply be unplugged).
So Apple (and most other manufacturers) make those scary warranty claims mostly to protect themselves from getting sued by owners that either a) zapped themselves or b) fiddled with parts that were squooshed into rilly tight cases, and never seem to fit right when you put it back together.
What is really, really sad is that I personally found the second series much more entertaining than the way the book continued the series. I loved Lintilla, the abandoned space freighter and Arthur just abandoning Ford, Zaphod and Zarniwoop on that rock.
Like DNA once wrote, it was ironic that the first radio series had such a definite ending designed to prevent a sequel, and that the open end of the sequel was never developed in a sequel.
The radio series should have maintained its seperate timeline/story. I always saw the four incarnations (radio, tv, book and Infocom) as seperate stories with unique timelines. They were seperate branches, each telling its own story.
Unfortunately, it seems nobody at the BBC has the imagination or the courage to develop the series from the original ending, possibly due to a fear of pedantic fans. It reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke writing 2010 as a sequel to the movie, throwing out the alternative setting from the novel version--but at least he explained himself, and the change was minimal.
I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but consider this praise for the concept.
There are two reasons why this is a good idea:
1. The news that the kids themselves generate needs an incentive to be generated. It gives the kids an audience for works they themselves created, and encourages further efforts (and learning in the process).
2. The audience isn't passive. The shows encourage discussions and recruit new members. By utilising preexisting technology (using the LAN instead of installing a cable feed), the goal is to create a system the kids can use themselves.
I haven't used an iPod with Windows, and I also haven't looked too closely at how the thing works in Windows. I just wanted to caveat that my Mac experiences aren't guaranteed on Windows.
I apologise for the fuzziness.
Considering the job desired (sneakernet file transfer, external storage), I wouldn't be so quick to suggest the iPod except for Mac environments. The music fonction is the main purpose for the thing, and the reason for the higher price (compared to normal media)
On the Mac side, you have really easy access to the iPod as a hard drive, including the ability to boot from the iPod. That makes the thing pretty nifty right there, but there's also the FireWire transfer rates and other niceties that let you know that Apple intended it to work with its own hardware first.
The biggest factor to consider is taking the music player to work. Some Information Denial departments frown on hard drives but allow PDAs and MP3 players. Maybe getting an iPod or a competitor with the same "access as a drive" function might be worthwhile...