Many of us just see a Woman, and nothing more, if you catch my drift. I think it's cool that she is into tech stuff (not enough females are, I feel). It's even more cool that she put up with having to solder the wiring for 8 LCD's.. =]
So much for me moderating anything in this thread.. =]
I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. iTunes is an entire solution. The same songs I can buy from the store, I can play on 5 Macs, sync to my iPod and listen to throughout my household with AirTunes. I cannot do this with Real's software.
I can't say much for Real, but with MSFT's Music Store, the music I download is encoded in 160kb/ps WMA (would it have been anything else?), I can burn a playlist up to 7 times, play the music on up to 5 Windows PC's, and copy the music to a list of 70+ portables an unlimited amount of times*. 'Course, I don't know if WMP or the MSN Music store is available for the mac. If not, this is probably moot, but it does tie into the 'user experience' and 'total solution' part you ranted on about reguarding iTunes. Apple is not the ONLY company that pays attention to it's customers. MS, by far, isn't the best, but they have done a VERY good job with music.msn.com.
Once it has my billing info, I click 'buy', 'confirm', and in the background, the song is transfering (for the three songs I've bought so far, it only took a minute or two on my 384kb/s downstream to download the songs). I must say I'm quite impressed so far.
*(Source - music.msn.com, click on the 'learn more' link at the top of the page).
The rest of what I wanted to say I won't even bother quoting from your entry.
It is all nice and well that you were so easily able to just 'switch' over and all was right in your world. That simply isn't the case for quite a few of us.
Example 1: At work we use a service program from TigerPaw software. There simply is no version for the Apple offerings.
Example 2: Asheron's Call/City of Heros. I dont' play the former any longer, but neither (as of this writing) are available for any Apple product, no matter how much I spend. Yea, I could play it in a VM on OSX, but it would never perform how it would nativly.
I could go on, but this entry to this thread is already too large. The same reason I cannot just switch to another platform (Apple or not) is the same reason Real won't make their store work for Linux or Apple. It's a Catch22. The store doesn't exsit becasue they believe the userbase doesn't exist. The userbase doesn't exist because the things people would like to do on (insert platform here) don't exist.
Wish companies would realise that one of these days.
I don't see why this was moderated Insightful, as it's not. You've obviously never attempted to boot from a USB dongle/floppy/hard disk/cdrom/(insert other device here). The BIOS provides the needed inner-workings to make the device show up to the operating system. My 'keychain' USB memory stick appeared as drive A: to the system when it booted from it. I also have a USB CD-RW that I installed Gentoo onto my externally disk-less server (only an internal IDE-HDD is in the machine now). I've also booted from USB 2.0 HDD's, though it seemed slower than an internal HDD.
I feel my post should have been the insightful one. Yours should have remained un-modified. Obviously there are people here with mod points that have also never booted from a USB device and want to make sure your mis-information gets spread further.
We have had several mainboards here that can boot from USB disks of all sorts (including those "Keychain" USB devices). Machspeed, ECS, and AOpen to name the few that we use. I hardly doubt this is limited to these vendors.
Matter of fact, untill I broke the keychain, I had a 64mb that I had setup to be a bootable NAV scanner. With as much as 2000/XP are getting around it hasn't been as much use twords the end of it's life than it used to be, but while it worked, it was MUCH faster than the 7 or so floppies that the NAV disk set was and still abit faster than a CD (plus, it couldn't be scratched like a CD). One too many drops from my hand to the floor killed it, though.. =[
I just went to www.icq.com and searched for my number -- 12789908. It's still there! =] I even updated it's profile, though I won't use ICQ anymore. The reason I stopped was because of all the "hot girls here" and other messages I'm not interested in.. (Now, if it said "Hot guys here", well.. errr.. ne'er mind...)
Anyway.. I use Yahoo! to talk with a couple friends that hate anything MS, and MSN Messenger for every member of my family, a couple co-workers, and some friends.. =]
The VoIP companies are not 'useless' now, and will not be in the future. There are too many people on this earth that do not know what hardware they need, how to configure it, or even how to set it up. The world will always be like that. If they can't go to a company, buy a 'box', and simply plug it into their internet connection, they won't use it. This is where a company like Vonage comes in. Unless the telephone companies start offering a service *exactly* like what Vonage is doing (and I've seen some trends like this - talking with my dad, he's got unlimited LD and local service for far cheaper than I remember ever having back when I had a landline phone), Vonage will be around for quite some time. Phone companies make too much money on POTS service. I can see them pricing companies like Vonage out of business, but only for as long as it takes to do so. Once all the VoIP providers are gone, there is nothing stoping the phone companies from raising their prices back to the levels they once were.. Some other VoIP company starts up when the phone companies raise rates? Phone companies just lower rates again. It will take some regulation to stop them from doing so, and I don't see that happening any time soon either.. =]
I never said it was appropriate for the target audience. I said it had very easy updating capabilities. I believe the requirement was to just update, for example, KDE, without having to manually update all the dep's and the like. Portage does this. With a nice GUI, it'd be even nicer. =]
Gentoo has all of this, minus the GUI. There is (was?) Kportage, but I haven't used it in a while. It would be nice to see a "Gentoo Update" (like Windows Update), but I don't have the programming know-how to make one.. Mayhapps someone will see this message and get started?
I think I've gotten rather tired of people calling these plans "worthless". They are far from worthless (at least at the time when I had gotten mine).
I'll grant you that you are pretty safe to not get them on certian items -- like a TV, or a 'fridge. Those things, in general don't break often enough for those plans to be worth anything more than peace of mind.
Some examples:
I bought a 10" powered JBL sub. Should have done some research on the product before-hand, but that was my fault; turns out the AMP in them has a flaw and it blows, even under light usage, and requires repair. Mine required it 4 times (once a year for the 4 year plan). Beyond the $19.99 cost of the PSP, I didn't pay one dime for repairs. Each time, they simply replaced the AMP (I checked - no burn marks where a CAP had blown and scorched the board pretty bad). Since the PSP has run out, it has blown again, but now I have it hooked up to an external AMP and have had no problems since. I did buy this item used, but if you do a bit of research online, even people who bought new ones were having the same problem. TONS of money saved over a $19.99 PSP.
I bought a brand new Toshiba 6 head HI-FI VCR. People in the area I lived were charging upwords of $50 for regular cleanings. Cleanings (once per year, if I remember correctly) were included with the PSP. I don't remember the cost of that PSP (it was like, $30 or somewhere around there for a 4 year coverage). Lets see, $50X4 is $200. So I got $200 worth of cleanings (and they ended up having to replace some belts as well -- even more saved) for something like $30 or $40. Still think the PSP's are worthless?
This didn't happen to me, but a guy I was standing in line next to while having my 10" powered sub taken care of(from above, for those who aren't following). He had bought some sort of car speaker (it was a sub.. something like an 8" or 10".. I forget). Anyway, he had a STACK of receipts where he had returned the sub, blown, numerous times. He had blown it. He admitted it. They kept replacing it because the PSP specifically stated blown speakers were covered.
Now, admittedly, I moved to an area that does not have a Best Buy within a 4 hour drive (closest to me is the one in Omaha, NE). It's been since April of '99 that I have lived close enough to buy anything that could use a PSP. In that time span, they could have changed some of the wording. But, at least the PSP's I purchased, they were far from 'worthless'.
This tactic sounds soo familiar.. Where did I hear that again?.. Umm....
OH YEA.. It was when they claimed their 'smoking gun' with the millions of lines of code they discovered that were exact copies with the headers changed/removed.
Now, remind me again what happend with all that?.. Oh yea.. they went to court and had NOTHING.
I now firmly believe that Darl and his cronies are sitting in his office each week betting on wether Darl can inflate the stock price or not for a given time period. I can think of no other explination...
Why, they did! It's called an "Oven Mit". You can get them at just about any 'general merchandise' store (Wal*Mart, K-Mart, Target, and many, many other places).
I watched an episode of Pulse. There is no way on this green/blue earth that it can give X-Play a run for it's money. The hosts were un-interesting to the point I wanted to change the channel several times. They also sounded too scripted. It was just sad to watch them try to crack the jokes that were on the teleprompter for them to read. I may not like Sessler very much (assuming I even spelled his name correctly), but he and his co-host at least seem to have some chemistry together. The fact that they don't sound like they are just reading everything off of the teleprompter like puppets makes the show FAR better.
Plus, looking at the sets for the various G4 shows that I have managed to catch so far, they look second (or even third) rate compared to the TechTV sets. Also, for some reason the picture quality wasn't as good. Possibly cameras that aren't as good as TechTV's? I dunno..
I rarely watched TechTV. What I did watch was The Screensavers. It started out interesting and Kate and Leo had me yelling at them all the time when they would give someone bad advice or wrong answers! When Kate got replaced with Pat, I still watched as it kept me interested. Now that it's Pat and Kevin, no matter how cute Kevin (OH, and FooFoo, and Josh) are, the content just changed to crap I wasn't interested in. It's been a long while since I've *wanted* to watch that show. I'll tune in here and there now that Comcast owns it to see what happens to the content, but if it doesn't improve, I'll not be watching ANY of that channel...
Guess I've gotten away from myself.. Oh well../rant off
This wouldn't be any different than me walking up to your house in the middle of the night and hooking a small recorder right up to your phone line. Just because you aren't sharing your landline doesn't mean you are automatically any more safe from people listening to your conversation.
On a side note, I don't even half to go onto your property. If I were that dedicated, I could get a fake phone truck, a little orange vest, and just break right into the junction boxes on the sides of the road and listen into any number of phone conversations -- including yours.
Is that any more likely to happen than someone listening to your conversation through the means you suggest? Probably not. It can still happen, though.
The userbase doesn't want/need the SP. OH! Wait! That's right.. What userbase?
Granted, I'm sure there is something MS has done, at least in part, to kill off those other platforms, but I'm sure the insanely high price for the hardware (at the time) didn't help matters any.
...what day it's on. I'll watch it regardless. If I can't be there to watch it, I'll set my PVR500 to record it so I can watch it later.
I thought the series started off a bit slow at first, but with the last few episodes, even though I know Earth will be saved and the evil dooers trying to reconfigure space will be defeated, I still find it interesting.
I think they should put FireFly back on the air either right before or right after Enterprise. That would be cool.. =]
Well, the messages would be lost. If Google adds the file/photo/other items I mentioned, the rest could be moved over. Sure, it'd take a while, but it could happen.
The Yahoo!Group could stay up, just be set so that people can't post any new messages, and the welcome text could contain a link to the new Google Group. This way, the backlog of messages could still be around for those who want them.
Of course, none of this matters if Google doesn't give more storage space than Yahoo does anyway. If it was the same amount, or even less, there would litterly be no reason to switch OTHER than with Google, you more than likely will not have those stupid full-page ads along-side the REGULAR ads on the right-hand side of the page between every other message. THAT, alone, would get me to switch.. =]
While I haven't read every single reply to this article, I do have some problems with Google Groups in it's current incarnation.
Basically, the problem when comparing it to Yahoo!Groups are missing:
1) File storage 2) Photo storage 3) Calendar 4) Database 5) Chat (local to the group) 6) Polls
I know it's still in beta, and will likely have much of this added. But, as I said, right now there is no way Google Groups can be compared to Yahoo!Groups.
For those that care, I did start a Google group (to see what features were available) "justatest".
Lets see how many we can get to join it! =] eheheheh..
You may be getting rid of the alternator and starter in the current versions that are on cars now, but you still need both to 1) recharge the batteries and 2) start the gas motor when you are not running on electric power only.
Slashdot Mirror
The story
at linuxworld
was very
difficult
to read
all the
way
through.
What
were
they
thinking?
That's what /. is for! reading about girls....
cause that's as close as we're gonna get!
Many of us just see a Woman, and nothing more, if you catch my drift. I think it's cool that she is into tech stuff (not enough females are, I feel). It's even more cool that she put up with having to solder the wiring for 8 LCD's.. =]
So much for me moderating anything in this thread.. =]
I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. iTunes is an entire solution. The same songs I can buy from the store, I can play on 5 Macs, sync to my iPod and listen to throughout my household with AirTunes. I cannot do this with Real's software.
I can't say much for Real, but with MSFT's Music Store, the music I download is encoded in 160kb/ps WMA (would it have been anything else?), I can burn a playlist up to 7 times, play the music on up to 5 Windows PC's, and copy the music to a list of 70+ portables an unlimited amount of times*. 'Course, I don't know if WMP or the MSN Music store is available for the mac. If not, this is probably moot, but it does tie into the 'user experience' and 'total solution' part you ranted on about reguarding iTunes. Apple is not the ONLY company that pays attention to it's customers. MS, by far, isn't the best, but they have done a VERY good job with music.msn.com.
Once it has my billing info, I click 'buy', 'confirm', and in the background, the song is transfering (for the three songs I've bought so far, it only took a minute or two on my 384kb/s downstream to download the songs). I must say I'm quite impressed so far.
*(Source - music.msn.com, click on the 'learn more' link at the top of the page).
The rest of what I wanted to say I won't even bother quoting from your entry.
It is all nice and well that you were so easily able to just 'switch' over and all was right in your world. That simply isn't the case for quite a few of us.
Example 1: At work we use a service program from TigerPaw software. There simply is no version for the Apple offerings.
Example 2: Asheron's Call/City of Heros. I dont' play the former any longer, but neither (as of this writing) are available for any Apple product, no matter how much I spend. Yea, I could play it in a VM on OSX, but it would never perform how it would nativly.
I could go on, but this entry to this thread is already too large. The same reason I cannot just switch to another platform (Apple or not) is the same reason Real won't make their store work for Linux or Apple. It's a Catch22. The store doesn't exsit becasue they believe the userbase doesn't exist. The userbase doesn't exist because the things people would like to do on (insert platform here) don't exist.
Wish companies would realise that one of these days.
You know what ALSA does, but claim that you need to recompile the kernel when updating the X server ? My troll sense is tinkling...
I'll go get you a mop, then. =]
I don't see why this was moderated Insightful, as it's not. You've obviously never attempted to boot from a USB dongle/floppy/hard disk/cdrom/(insert other device here). The BIOS provides the needed inner-workings to make the device show up to the operating system. My 'keychain' USB memory stick appeared as drive A: to the system when it booted from it. I also have a USB CD-RW that I installed Gentoo onto my externally disk-less server (only an internal IDE-HDD is in the machine now). I've also booted from USB 2.0 HDD's, though it seemed slower than an internal HDD.
I feel my post should have been the insightful one. Yours should have remained un-modified. Obviously there are people here with mod points that have also never booted from a USB device and want to make sure your mis-information gets spread further.
We have had several mainboards here that can boot from USB disks of all sorts (including those "Keychain" USB devices). Machspeed, ECS, and AOpen to name the few that we use. I hardly doubt this is limited to these vendors.
Matter of fact, untill I broke the keychain, I had a 64mb that I had setup to be a bootable NAV scanner. With as much as 2000/XP are getting around it hasn't been as much use twords the end of it's life than it used to be, but while it worked, it was MUCH faster than the 7 or so floppies that the NAV disk set was and still abit faster than a CD (plus, it couldn't be scratched like a CD). One too many drops from my hand to the floor killed it, though.. =[
I just went to www.icq.com and searched for my number -- 12789908. It's still there! =] I even updated it's profile, though I won't use ICQ anymore. The reason I stopped was because of all the "hot girls here" and other messages I'm not interested in.. (Now, if it said "Hot guys here", well.. errr.. ne'er mind...)
Anyway.. I use Yahoo! to talk with a couple friends that hate anything MS, and MSN Messenger for every member of my family, a couple co-workers, and some friends.. =]
The VoIP companies are not 'useless' now, and will not be in the future. There are too many people on this earth that do not know what hardware they need, how to configure it, or even how to set it up. The world will always be like that. If they can't go to a company, buy a 'box', and simply plug it into their internet connection, they won't use it. This is where a company like Vonage comes in. Unless the telephone companies start offering a service *exactly* like what Vonage is doing (and I've seen some trends like this - talking with my dad, he's got unlimited LD and local service for far cheaper than I remember ever having back when I had a landline phone), Vonage will be around for quite some time. Phone companies make too much money on POTS service. I can see them pricing companies like Vonage out of business, but only for as long as it takes to do so. Once all the VoIP providers are gone, there is nothing stoping the phone companies from raising their prices back to the levels they once were.. Some other VoIP company starts up when the phone companies raise rates? Phone companies just lower rates again. It will take some regulation to stop them from doing so, and I don't see that happening any time soon either.. =]
I never said it was appropriate for the target audience. I said it had very easy updating capabilities. I believe the requirement was to just update, for example, KDE, without having to manually update all the dep's and the like. Portage does this. With a nice GUI, it'd be even nicer. =]
Gentoo has all of this, minus the GUI. There is (was?) Kportage, but I haven't used it in a while. It would be nice to see a "Gentoo Update" (like Windows Update), but I don't have the programming know-how to make one.. Mayhapps someone will see this message and get started?
=]
Mike
I think I've gotten rather tired of people calling these plans "worthless". They are far from worthless (at least at the time when I had gotten mine).
I'll grant you that you are pretty safe to not get them on certian items -- like a TV, or a 'fridge. Those things, in general don't break often enough for those plans to be worth anything more than peace of mind.
Some examples:
I bought a 10" powered JBL sub. Should have done some research on the product before-hand, but that was my fault; turns out the AMP in them has a flaw and it blows, even under light usage, and requires repair. Mine required it 4 times (once a year for the 4 year plan). Beyond the $19.99 cost of the PSP, I didn't pay one dime for repairs. Each time, they simply replaced the AMP (I checked - no burn marks where a CAP had blown and scorched the board pretty bad). Since the PSP has run out, it has blown again, but now I have it hooked up to an external AMP and have had no problems since. I did buy this item used, but if you do a bit of research online, even people who bought new ones were having the same problem. TONS of money saved over a $19.99 PSP.
I bought a brand new Toshiba 6 head HI-FI VCR. People in the area I lived were charging upwords of $50 for regular cleanings. Cleanings (once per year, if I remember correctly) were included with the PSP. I don't remember the cost of that PSP (it was like, $30 or somewhere around there for a 4 year coverage). Lets see, $50X4 is $200. So I got $200 worth of cleanings (and they ended up having to replace some belts as well -- even more saved) for something like $30 or $40. Still think the PSP's are worthless?
This didn't happen to me, but a guy I was standing in line next to while having my 10" powered sub taken care of(from above, for those who aren't following). He had bought some sort of car speaker (it was a sub.. something like an 8" or 10".. I forget). Anyway, he had a STACK of receipts where he had returned the sub, blown, numerous times. He had blown it. He admitted it. They kept replacing it because the PSP specifically stated blown speakers were covered.
Now, admittedly, I moved to an area that does not have a Best Buy within a 4 hour drive (closest to me is the one in Omaha, NE). It's been since April of '99 that I have lived close enough to buy anything that could use a PSP. In that time span, they could have changed some of the wording. But, at least the PSP's I purchased, they were far from 'worthless'.
Now, commence the Best Buy bashing.. =]
I've installed something that it won't come off (like Gator).
I think you misspelled VX2.(insert any of a dozen subnames). There are also several others.
I don't know what version of Gator you had, but I've *never* had a problem getting rid of it. VX2.(whatever), however, is a different story..
Especially on a WinXP machine..
This tactic sounds soo familiar.. Where did I hear that again? .. Umm....
.. Oh yea.. they went to court and had NOTHING.
OH YEA.. It was when they claimed their 'smoking gun' with the millions of lines of code they discovered that were exact copies with the headers changed/removed.
Now, remind me again what happend with all that?
I now firmly believe that Darl and his cronies are sitting in his office each week betting on wether Darl can inflate the stock price or not for a given time period. I can think of no other explination...
No, because the horrible memory of Clippy is forever etched into my memory, at least until someone invents a selective memory-erasing technique.
:)
I'll go get my hammer..
Why, they did! It's called an "Oven Mit". You can get them at just about any 'general merchandise' store (Wal*Mart, K-Mart, Target, and many, many other places).
Geez...
Other than the water pump and a pair of fans to cool the radiator (assumong they are needed)
I watched an episode of Pulse. There is no way on this green/blue earth that it can give X-Play a run for it's money. The hosts were un-interesting to the point I wanted to change the channel several times. They also sounded too scripted. It was just sad to watch them try to crack the jokes that were on the teleprompter for them to read. I may not like Sessler very much (assuming I even spelled his name correctly), but he and his co-host at least seem to have some chemistry together. The fact that they don't sound like they are just reading everything off of the teleprompter like puppets makes the show FAR better.
/rant off
Plus, looking at the sets for the various G4 shows that I have managed to catch so far, they look second (or even third) rate compared to the TechTV sets. Also, for some reason the picture quality wasn't as good. Possibly cameras that aren't as good as TechTV's? I dunno..
I rarely watched TechTV. What I did watch was The Screensavers. It started out interesting and Kate and Leo had me yelling at them all the time when they would give someone bad advice or wrong answers! When Kate got replaced with Pat, I still watched as it kept me interested. Now that it's Pat and Kevin, no matter how cute Kevin (OH, and FooFoo, and Josh) are, the content just changed to crap I wasn't interested in. It's been a long while since I've *wanted* to watch that show. I'll tune in here and there now that Comcast owns it to see what happens to the content, but if it doesn't improve, I'll not be watching ANY of that channel...
Guess I've gotten away from myself.. Oh well..
This wouldn't be any different than me walking up to your house in the middle of the night and hooking a small recorder right up to your phone line. Just because you aren't sharing your landline doesn't mean you are automatically any more safe from people listening to your conversation.
On a side note, I don't even half to go onto your property. If I were that dedicated, I could get a fake phone truck, a little orange vest, and just break right into the junction boxes on the sides of the road and listen into any number of phone conversations -- including yours.
Is that any more likely to happen than someone listening to your conversation through the means you suggest? Probably not. It can still happen, though.
The userbase doesn't want/need the SP. OH! Wait! That's right.. What userbase?
Granted, I'm sure there is something MS has done, at least in part, to kill off those other platforms, but I'm sure the insanely high price for the hardware (at the time) didn't help matters any.
...what day it's on. I'll watch it regardless. If I can't be there to watch it, I'll set my PVR500 to record it so I can watch it later.
I thought the series started off a bit slow at first, but with the last few episodes, even though I know Earth will be saved and the evil dooers trying to reconfigure space will be defeated, I still find it interesting.
I think they should put FireFly back on the air either right before or right after Enterprise. That would be cool.. =]
Well, the messages would be lost. If Google adds the file/photo/other items I mentioned, the rest could be moved over. Sure, it'd take a while, but it could happen.
The Yahoo!Group could stay up, just be set so that people can't post any new messages, and the welcome text could contain a link to the new Google Group. This way, the backlog of messages could still be around for those who want them.
Of course, none of this matters if Google doesn't give more storage space than Yahoo does anyway. If it was the same amount, or even less, there would litterly be no reason to switch OTHER than with Google, you more than likely will not have those stupid full-page ads along-side the REGULAR ads on the right-hand side of the page between every other message. THAT, alone, would get me to switch.. =]
While I haven't read every single reply to this article, I do have some problems with Google Groups in it's current incarnation.
Basically, the problem when comparing it to Yahoo!Groups are missing:
1) File storage
2) Photo storage
3) Calendar
4) Database
5) Chat (local to the group)
6) Polls
I know it's still in beta, and will likely have much of this added. But, as I said, right now there is no way Google Groups can be compared to Yahoo!Groups.
For those that care, I did start a Google group (to see what features were available) "justatest".
Lets see how many we can get to join it! =] eheheheh..
You may be getting rid of the alternator and starter in the current versions that are on cars now, but you still need both to 1) recharge the batteries and 2) start the gas motor when you are not running on electric power only.
Silly poster!
That's why you create a white list of sites they are allowed to visit, instead of blocking what they can't.
I know this won't work in every situation, but there have been multiple examples posted in this thread alone where this is a perfect idea.
That may be, but a proxy filter will. If they can't access the sites that have the crap, there will be no crap.