Sigh. Reduced to responding to ACs. I must really be bored.
Anyway, I hate hearing about those kind of things because they suck. It's stupid. Why the hell should any of us have to put up with that kind of crap? I've been told since I was in grade school that everyone is the same, and everyone should be treated equally, and now that I'm all grown up and it doesn't happen, I don't buy it. I'm not willing to lay my morals down and say, "Well, it happens all the time to everyone, so it's okay." It's NOT okay. It will never be okay. One day, I'll have children, and I'll want them to go out into the world and have lives better than mine, and one of the things that I'd like for them is that they never have to put up with any sort of discriminatory crap just for being people.
I'd hardly say that I'm hyper-sensitive to the issue, I'm merely AWARE that there IS an issue. All people should be judged on their merits, not their gender or race or sexual orientation or age or whatever. People are people, and they should be afforded exactly the the same courtesy no matter who they are.
Oh, I totally agree. Frankly, I know at least a couple PhDs that don't seem to know ANYTHING.
However, in this case, it's true. She's really quite a lot smarter than me, and she's quite a lot more knowlegable than me in several areas. (And I know more than her in other areas.) In the end, I feel she knows more than me because she's taken more classes than I have.
My point was merely that discriminating against her is foolish. She has the Master's, and she's a Computing Scientist too. If you're going to decide someone knows less, you're probably better off deciding that the person with the lower degree has accumulated less knowledge. After all, every person with a Master's also has a Bachelor's.
It's clear that more or less, you're an idiot. A sexist one at that. It would take too long to respond to the massive amount of drivel that you clearly spent a lot of time typing, but I will correct one particular point.
'Materialism' is a desire to have physical things - materials. 'Material' is derived from the latin 'materialis' (and the french 'materia') meaning 'stuff'. 'Mater' means 'mother'.
That's the problem with people like you. You never actually do your research, and are content to merely blather on mindlessly with no idea of what's actually going on.
For instance, did you know that in Korea, it's the general tendency for women to do better in mathematics, and men to do better on written exams? The notion that men are the ones that are good at math and are better with technology from a Biological standpoint is entirely conjecture with no good science to back it up, as yet.
Statistically, it's true that men are better with technology. That doesn't excuse exclusionary behaviour. It's also statistically more likely that as a male, you'll kill someone. Do you want the police pushing you around because you're so much more likely to commit a crime?
And you SHOULD be offended that the guy at Sears wants to talk to your SO. Why does he assume that she's the one spending time in the kitchen? Women work too, you know. Men spend time in the kitchen cooking these days. Why can't he approach the both of you? Why can't he just look at everyone as a person to be sold to - a potential customer? My money spends just as well in an appliance department as a woman's, and her money can buy computers just the same as mine.
In the end, statistics are no excuse for bad manners. Going with the statistics just enforces stereotypes that are stupid to have. Now that a woman has been treated badly by an asshead computer salesman, does it seem likely that she'll really want to go back and buy more?
And, if the salesman treats everyone as equally stupid, I can accept that as well. Both genders have a capacity for infinite stupidity in them. However, even if he assumes that I know nothing about computers, I expect him to be polite about it, at least. I expect no less for the women in my life. It's not that hard to treat everyone equally nicely (or poorly).
Don't get me wrong. I have a sense of humour, and I enjoy jokes about the stereotypes that are associated with men AND women, but I'm suprised at how unsympathetic most people posting here are.
When my girlfriend goes out and gets treated poorly at a computer or electronics store, it pisses both of us off. It's totally unreasonable. We both make a living as programmers, but she's the one with the Master's degree in CS, while I have a lowly Bachelor's. There's no reason to treat us differently. She knows as much as I do. (More, obviously, given our educational differences.)
I've never really understood how people can put up with widespread sexism. These women are our wives, daughters, mothers and sisters. When they get treated poorly, I get angry about it. Don't any of you care that if/when you get a girlfriend, some retarded drone that works a low-paying retail job in some warehouse store thinks that he's so much better than the person that you've decided is a worthwhile human being that you like to spend time with that he's going to insult her intelligence?
C'mon. Stop with the 'go make me a sammich, beyotch!' jokes. They're an insult to men and women alike.
From my producer who has also been a writer. (Apparently, Voltaire said it first.)
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If you keep striving for the last 5% to make it absolutely perfect, you often end up throwing away what's good enough. It's not necessary for everything to be absolutely perfect. It's nice to try, but more often than not, you end up working hard for very little, and it takes much, much longer to get there.
For instance, is Linux 'perfect'? No. Is it good? Absolutely. In fact, it's more than good enough for almost everyone. Very few people need perfection out of anything they have, and it's sort of unreasonable to expect it.
Moral of the story? Don't do a code rewrite unless it's actually necessary. Things will become worse far sooner than they'll become better.
5. The purpose of putting the Trash in the corner instead of the Dock is twofold. First, you want to have it in a consistent place so that you always know how to perform a common operation without a need for hunting as on the ever-shifting dock. This allows you to do it unconsciously without having to devote attention to it -- another good UI goal. Second, you want to use the corner because it's one of the easiest points on the screen to get to. You can't overshoot it easily since two edges of the screen act as a guide to direct your movement towards it.
You talk about the dock as if it's an undulating mass that never sits still; a squiggly line at the bottom or on the side of your screen that is impossible to aim at and impossible to pin down.
My dock is on the right side of my screen (a throwback to my NeXT days, I suppose). I DON'T hide it (I think being able to hide it is bad from a UI perspective - you can't know what you're aiming at if you can't see it. You may have a good idea of where the item is that you want, but you're always going to have to adjust your aim unless you get lucky. GUI elements that hide themselves dynamically are awful, IMO.) Yes, it takes up some space, but it's not a lot. It extends from the top of my screen to the bottom, and I use basically the whole thing. The trashcan is always in the bottom right corner of my screen. I have some magnification turned on, but it never interferes with my ability to aim at an item and click it.
A desktop trashcan has been one of my greatest annoyances. The NeXT recycle item was always in the same place, but also always visible. I work with my windows MAXIMIZED. I work with a lot of windows. Using a desktop trashcan means that I'm always having to clear my desktop off before I can get to it. Expose makes that easier, but still stupid. A trashcan should be on top of everything, at all times. It's used so often that nothing should get in its way. (Frankly, I hate using things on the desktop. If it weren't for Expose, I'd never see whatever image had been randomly selected for it.)
Frankly, I still long for the days of the NeXT dock. You picked the items that meant the most to you, and put them on there. You couldn't cover them up, they were always easy to get to and easy to understand. Iconify something, and it would put the icon at the bottom with a little black bar that showed the name of the window or file or whatever. I don't understand why we can't have that back. I know progress is nice, but I really feel that the NeXT dock was ideal in a number of ways. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
I find it interesting that people are complaining about Open/Save dialogues being attached to the document. Perhaps they could stand to be a little more transparent or something, I suppose, but I HATE floating dialogue boxes. Not a day goes by when I don't lose one using Windows, or it pops up while I'm doing something else, and iterrupts my work in a DIFFERENT application. Having dialogue boxes bound to the window that they belong to means I never have to search for one, and I never have one coming up while I do something else.
Perhaps there should be a way to make it easier to see the work you're doing underneath the dialogue with something to make it transparent for a few seconds, but I think the benefit of never losing one of those stupid panels far outweighs the minor benefit of seeing work that I'm saving (why would I do that, exactly?)
For what it's worth, I took my 192kbit OGGs and re-encoded them as 224kbit AAC files in iTunes. They still sound great. I've got a lot of space, and I didn't want to spend the time figuring out what would be an optimal recompression rate, but I bet you could do just as well with a lower bit rate.
Actually, a minor nitpick: the buying power of the Canadian dollar is actually HIGHER in many cases than that of the US dollar.
"What?" I hear you say. The thing is this: many things aren't sold by value, they're sold by pricepoint. That is, they're sold by how much the seller thinks they can convince people to pay. People like certain numbers for whatever reason, and don't like others. However, these pricepoints are just about the same in the US and Canada. I've seen CDs in the states that cost the same as in Canada, but in US dollars. Same with DVDs, and some commodity electronics. Often, the Canadian price seems higher, but works out to about the same thing.
The Canadian dollar has massive purchasing power, as long as you stay in Canada.
I pay about $45/month. That's for cable access. When I lived in a different part of town, getting 600kps down was pretty trivial, and I occasionally saw speeds touching 10MBit/s down. Where I am now, I 'only' get around 400kps down on a good day. I seem to be able to transfer about 80kps up.
I just got my first warning ever. I think the ISP was more worried that my connection had been hijacked than worried that I was using too much bandwidth. (64GB down and 24GB up in December.) I don't normally use that much, but I had a couple weeks vacation, so I was downloading more things during the day than I normally would.
They DO say that they want me to try to keep my use within reasonable limits. They never define numbers, though.
I'm not actually claiming it's massively superior. My wording is a bit clumsy, but all I'm trying to say is IF a massively superior product were being released, it would STILL have a hard time competing with the iPod at this point.
One of the things that Steve Jobs mentioned in his keynote yesterday before announcing the entirely overpriced iPod Mini is that about 60% of the market is flash players that cost up to $200. 31% of the market is iPods. Approximately 7% of the market is all other non-iPod hard-drive based MP3 players. Nobody knows what an iRiver is. Most people don't CARE what an iRiver is. The iPod name has mindshare right now, and it'll take a lot more than even a massively superior product to dethrone the iPod. If someone wants to make an iPod killer, they have to have iPod killing marketing. Right now, people are using the word 'iPod' like they use 'Xerox' or 'Kleenex', as in "I hear iRiver makes a pretty cool iPod."
It doesn't matter what it costs, either. The only people following non-iPod HD-based MP3 players are the people here on/.:P
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac fan. I have a G5, iSight and new iPod. I love OSX.
However, I don't see the logic of standing up on stage and talking about MP3 players that are in the $100 - $200 range, and then introducing a new MP3 player that ISN'T IN THE RANGE AT ALL. You can't target the $100 - $200 range without at least coming close to $200. People with only $100 to spend won't be able to come up with another $150, and people that have $200 to spend would do well to come up with just another $100.
Granted, the iPod mini is even smaller than before. I think if the rumours had been true and the player was 2GB at a price even as high as $150, they would sell more. Way more.
Oh well. At least GarageBand looked really cool. I'll buy it for my musician sister. She'll be thrilled to have that sort of thing on her powerbook.
Though it's been said by a bunch of people, I'll throw in my 2 cents.
I used to be a pro sysadmin. I worked my way through University being a junior sysadmin with my department - Computing Science. All day long I would fix dinky little problems and install software, etc. After that, I'd come home to my linux box and futz with that so that I could do something like watch a video. Sometimes I'd be up quite a lot of the evening doing sysadmin type things at home. Of course, I also had to maintain my partner's Windows/Linux box as well.
I got tired of it last year. I was spending my time in front of the computer fixing things, not using my machine. I'm a programmer now, but I still don't enjoy doing work when I come home (meaningless work, anyway. Programming at home isn't 'work'.) I still have a FreeBSD mailserver that I have to maintain, but it's one of those things that takes a few days to set up right and then requires little effort after that. My main machine is now a G5. It requires no work. It took me a while to figure out why over this holiday season I was sitting in front of my computer with nothing to do. It's because I had nothing to fix. The worst problem I've had since I got this machine was I briefly had a firewire problem when I did the firmware update. I rebooted the machine and it went away. By comparison, I recently installed WinXP pro on my partner's machine, and already the machine is giving me issues, with a drive only intermittently showing up in Windows. I think it's a driver issue with the on-board Promise Ultra ATA controller, but it's still ridiculous. The operating system had only been on the machine for an hour and I was already fighting with partition magic and windows to try and recognize the drive was there, and if they found it was there, to try and reformat it.
My partner covets my Mac. The next machine she buys will be a Mac, too.
Chiropractics is something that we looked at and rejected. Every chiropractor that we visited wanted to manipulate her neck, and none had the credentials that we were willing to trust ourselves to. Massage has done a great deal of good, and acupuncture worked a bit. Drugs alone are definitely not the answer. We try a great number of things before we finally fall back on the pain killers and migraine abortives.
It may be worth looking into for some people, though. As for myself, I'll never trust myself or my familry to 99.9% of the chiropractors out there. In the end, I just don't trust them, and find their methods crude and occasionally dangerous, though I've heard good reports from many people. Maybe I'll find one that I can trust one day.
Actually, what would lead me to believe Celebrex is a more potent drug is mostly that it's a prescription drug. Ibuprophen is, of course, available at convenience stores. Perhaps it's the dosages that are being given out? I know that Ibuprophen does less for my SOs headaches than Celebrex does. She's on Celebrex precisely because the more powerful painkillers gave her incredibly bad stomach problems.
There was a time when she was getting a migraine a day for one or two years. It's impossible to take painkillers (or even something like Amerge which is a migraine abortive, but leads to 'rebound' headaches) without some ill effects.
(Relief of muscle tension was actually what got her down to more reasonable numbers of migraines per year. She ended up with some neck and shoulder problems from being in a car accident, and the tension was causing normal 'trigger' headaches.)
Dehydration is something that causes sleepiness. Most people don't know it, but they're chronically dehydrated. When you feel a bit tired around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, it's not because you didn't get enough sleep, it's because you don't have enough fluid.
Most people have a cup of coffee in the morning. Caffeine is a mild diuretic, so most calculations that I've seen say to treat the beverage as having only half the amount of fluid in the cup, for hydration purposes. Sometime partway through the morning, you go have a pee and sit at your desk not drinking anything until you have another coffee a bit later. Net fluid intake? Half a coffee cup.
If you just have a glass of juice in the morning and drink something non-caffeinated during the day, several times, you'll feel more awake. If you can actually stick to 8 glasses a day, you'll definitely feel more awake. I can guarantee that at the very least, running to the bathroom every half hour to pee will keep you more awake than before.
Migraines tend to be a problem where the blood vessels in your head expand, causing extra pressure in your head. This is why many migraine sufferers have 'aura' or weird visual effects. The expanded blood vessels put pressure on the optic nerve.
Caffeine is a vaso-constrictor, meaning it makes your blood vessels contract. It's a common cure for mild migraines. I suppose you can consider it a painkiller in the sense that it works a bit like a mild anti-inflammatory. Other things that may help are ice on the side of the head that feels warmest (which is also fairly common with migraine - a feeling that one side of your head is extra warm.)
Anti-inflammatories are commonly prescribed to fight migraine. Ibuprophen works on mild ones, you'll see Celebrex and other more powerful ones prescribed as well. Asprin is also a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory that works for some people.
There are a lot of other migraine drugs out there, including a bunch of migraine abortives that work well, even on severe (ie. the kind that cause vomiting and extreme pain) migraines.
I'm not a doctor, but my SO has had migraines for years. As a result, I know a lot about symptoms and (temporary) cures.
Lastly, despite the fact that the tea has caffiene in it, does it really mean that you can't drink it anymore? I've cut all caffiene from my life, but I still enjoy the tea at the restaurant with no ill effect.
And, as I recall, the iTunes functionality to convert Oggs to AAC files once the plugin is installed works just fine.
I'm also (definitely!) no expert on this topic, but I've heard that the compression artifacts that Ogg and AAC introduce are somewhat orthogonal, so the loss of quality in converting an Ogg to an AAC file is supposedly fairly minimal. I certainly didn't notice anything when I made my 128kbit Oggs into 224kbit AACs.
Interestingly, it sounds like you make the argument against yourself, to some extent.
You're clearly good at working with hard-to-work-with hardware. Apple doesn't need to do anything to please you. You'll find a way yourself.
As for everyone else, you can't trust them to pump their own gas, let alone let them screw around inside their hardware. Most people can't build a PC from parts, so I'm unwilling to believe that they can modify an iPod - or would even care to. So why make the iPod more modifiable? What sense does it make to spend the extra money on it? The segment of the population that's 1) not as good with hardware as you seem to be and 2) really desperate to upgrade their iPod (or whatever) easily would seem to be vanishingly small.
It's probably worth mentioning that when Apple came out with the iPod, nobody thought that they could build such a small unit with so much storage that actually worked worth a hill of beans. We all know how that went.
If anyone can make a go of this, it's certainly Apple.
All of them. Those should be moderated into oblivion by permanent moderators only. The best use of temporary mod points is to push good comments up. Everything else is just a waste.
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Sigh. Reduced to responding to ACs. I must really be bored.
Anyway, I hate hearing about those kind of things because they suck. It's stupid. Why the hell should any of us have to put up with that kind of crap? I've been told since I was in grade school that everyone is the same, and everyone should be treated equally, and now that I'm all grown up and it doesn't happen, I don't buy it. I'm not willing to lay my morals down and say, "Well, it happens all the time to everyone, so it's okay." It's NOT okay. It will never be okay. One day, I'll have children, and I'll want them to go out into the world and have lives better than mine, and one of the things that I'd like for them is that they never have to put up with any sort of discriminatory crap just for being people.
I'd hardly say that I'm hyper-sensitive to the issue, I'm merely AWARE that there IS an issue. All people should be judged on their merits, not their gender or race or sexual orientation or age or whatever. People are people, and they should be afforded exactly the the same courtesy no matter who they are.
Oh, I totally agree. Frankly, I know at least a couple PhDs that don't seem to know ANYTHING.
However, in this case, it's true. She's really quite a lot smarter than me, and she's quite a lot more knowlegable than me in several areas. (And I know more than her in other areas.) In the end, I feel she knows more than me because she's taken more classes than I have.
My point was merely that discriminating against her is foolish. She has the Master's, and she's a Computing Scientist too. If you're going to decide someone knows less, you're probably better off deciding that the person with the lower degree has accumulated less knowledge. After all, every person with a Master's also has a Bachelor's.
It's clear that more or less, you're an idiot. A sexist one at that. It would take too long to respond to the massive amount of drivel that you clearly spent a lot of time typing, but I will correct one particular point.
'Materialism' is a desire to have physical things - materials. 'Material' is derived from the latin 'materialis' (and the french 'materia') meaning 'stuff'. 'Mater' means 'mother'.
That's the problem with people like you. You never actually do your research, and are content to merely blather on mindlessly with no idea of what's actually going on.
I'll leave you and your misogeny alone now.
Biological? What do you base that on?
For instance, did you know that in Korea, it's the general tendency for women to do better in mathematics, and men to do better on written exams? The notion that men are the ones that are good at math and are better with technology from a Biological standpoint is entirely conjecture with no good science to back it up, as yet.
Statistically, it's true that men are better with technology. That doesn't excuse exclusionary behaviour. It's also statistically more likely that as a male, you'll kill someone. Do you want the police pushing you around because you're so much more likely to commit a crime?
And you SHOULD be offended that the guy at Sears wants to talk to your SO. Why does he assume that she's the one spending time in the kitchen? Women work too, you know. Men spend time in the kitchen cooking these days. Why can't he approach the both of you? Why can't he just look at everyone as a person to be sold to - a potential customer? My money spends just as well in an appliance department as a woman's, and her money can buy computers just the same as mine.
In the end, statistics are no excuse for bad manners. Going with the statistics just enforces stereotypes that are stupid to have. Now that a woman has been treated badly by an asshead computer salesman, does it seem likely that she'll really want to go back and buy more?
And, if the salesman treats everyone as equally stupid, I can accept that as well. Both genders have a capacity for infinite stupidity in them. However, even if he assumes that I know nothing about computers, I expect him to be polite about it, at least. I expect no less for the women in my life. It's not that hard to treat everyone equally nicely (or poorly).
Holy moly is this place awfully sexist or what?
Don't get me wrong. I have a sense of humour, and I enjoy jokes about the stereotypes that are associated with men AND women, but I'm suprised at how unsympathetic most people posting here are.
When my girlfriend goes out and gets treated poorly at a computer or electronics store, it pisses both of us off. It's totally unreasonable. We both make a living as programmers, but she's the one with the Master's degree in CS, while I have a lowly Bachelor's. There's no reason to treat us differently. She knows as much as I do. (More, obviously, given our educational differences.)
I've never really understood how people can put up with widespread sexism. These women are our wives, daughters, mothers and sisters. When they get treated poorly, I get angry about it. Don't any of you care that if/when you get a girlfriend, some retarded drone that works a low-paying retail job in some warehouse store thinks that he's so much better than the person that you've decided is a worthwhile human being that you like to spend time with that he's going to insult her intelligence?
C'mon. Stop with the 'go make me a sammich, beyotch!' jokes. They're an insult to men and women alike.
From my producer who has also been a writer. (Apparently, Voltaire said it first.)
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If you keep striving for the last 5% to make it absolutely perfect, you often end up throwing away what's good enough. It's not necessary for everything to be absolutely perfect. It's nice to try, but more often than not, you end up working hard for very little, and it takes much, much longer to get there.
For instance, is Linux 'perfect'? No. Is it good? Absolutely. In fact, it's more than good enough for almost everyone. Very few people need perfection out of anything they have, and it's sort of unreasonable to expect it.
Moral of the story? Don't do a code rewrite unless it's actually necessary. Things will become worse far sooner than they'll become better.
5. The purpose of putting the Trash in the corner instead of the Dock is twofold. First, you want to have it in a consistent place so that you always know how to perform a common operation without a need for hunting as on the ever-shifting dock. This allows you to do it unconsciously without having to devote attention to it -- another good UI goal. Second, you want to use the corner because it's one of the easiest points on the screen to get to. You can't overshoot it easily since two edges of the screen act as a guide to direct your movement towards it.
You talk about the dock as if it's an undulating mass that never sits still; a squiggly line at the bottom or on the side of your screen that is impossible to aim at and impossible to pin down.
My dock is on the right side of my screen (a throwback to my NeXT days, I suppose). I DON'T hide it (I think being able to hide it is bad from a UI perspective - you can't know what you're aiming at if you can't see it. You may have a good idea of where the item is that you want, but you're always going to have to adjust your aim unless you get lucky. GUI elements that hide themselves dynamically are awful, IMO.) Yes, it takes up some space, but it's not a lot. It extends from the top of my screen to the bottom, and I use basically the whole thing. The trashcan is always in the bottom right corner of my screen. I have some magnification turned on, but it never interferes with my ability to aim at an item and click it.
A desktop trashcan has been one of my greatest annoyances. The NeXT recycle item was always in the same place, but also always visible. I work with my windows MAXIMIZED. I work with a lot of windows. Using a desktop trashcan means that I'm always having to clear my desktop off before I can get to it. Expose makes that easier, but still stupid. A trashcan should be on top of everything, at all times. It's used so often that nothing should get in its way. (Frankly, I hate using things on the desktop. If it weren't for Expose, I'd never see whatever image had been randomly selected for it.)
Frankly, I still long for the days of the NeXT dock. You picked the items that meant the most to you, and put them on there. You couldn't cover them up, they were always easy to get to and easy to understand. Iconify something, and it would put the icon at the bottom with a little black bar that showed the name of the window or file or whatever. I don't understand why we can't have that back. I know progress is nice, but I really feel that the NeXT dock was ideal in a number of ways. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
I find it interesting that people are complaining about Open/Save dialogues being attached to the document. Perhaps they could stand to be a little more transparent or something, I suppose, but I HATE floating dialogue boxes. Not a day goes by when I don't lose one using Windows, or it pops up while I'm doing something else, and iterrupts my work in a DIFFERENT application. Having dialogue boxes bound to the window that they belong to means I never have to search for one, and I never have one coming up while I do something else.
Perhaps there should be a way to make it easier to see the work you're doing underneath the dialogue with something to make it transparent for a few seconds, but I think the benefit of never losing one of those stupid panels far outweighs the minor benefit of seeing work that I'm saving (why would I do that, exactly?)
For what it's worth, I took my 192kbit OGGs and re-encoded them as 224kbit AAC files in iTunes. They still sound great. I've got a lot of space, and I didn't want to spend the time figuring out what would be an optimal recompression rate, but I bet you could do just as well with a lower bit rate.
Actually, a minor nitpick: the buying power of the Canadian dollar is actually HIGHER in many cases than that of the US dollar.
"What?" I hear you say. The thing is this: many things aren't sold by value, they're sold by pricepoint. That is, they're sold by how much the seller thinks they can convince people to pay. People like certain numbers for whatever reason, and don't like others. However, these pricepoints are just about the same in the US and Canada. I've seen CDs in the states that cost the same as in Canada, but in US dollars. Same with DVDs, and some commodity electronics. Often, the Canadian price seems higher, but works out to about the same thing.
The Canadian dollar has massive purchasing power, as long as you stay in Canada.
I pay about $45/month. That's for cable access. When I lived in a different part of town, getting 600kps down was pretty trivial, and I occasionally saw speeds touching 10MBit/s down. Where I am now, I 'only' get around 400kps down on a good day. I seem to be able to transfer about 80kps up.
I just got my first warning ever. I think the ISP was more worried that my connection had been hijacked than worried that I was using too much bandwidth. (64GB down and 24GB up in December.) I don't normally use that much, but I had a couple weeks vacation, so I was downloading more things during the day than I normally would.
They DO say that they want me to try to keep my use within reasonable limits. They never define numbers, though.
I'm not actually claiming it's massively superior. My wording is a bit clumsy, but all I'm trying to say is IF a massively superior product were being released, it would STILL have a hard time competing with the iPod at this point.
One of the things that Steve Jobs mentioned in his keynote yesterday before announcing the entirely overpriced iPod Mini is that about 60% of the market is flash players that cost up to $200. 31% of the market is iPods. Approximately 7% of the market is all other non-iPod hard-drive based MP3 players. Nobody knows what an iRiver is. Most people don't CARE what an iRiver is. The iPod name has mindshare right now, and it'll take a lot more than even a massively superior product to dethrone the iPod. If someone wants to make an iPod killer, they have to have iPod killing marketing. Right now, people are using the word 'iPod' like they use 'Xerox' or 'Kleenex', as in "I hear iRiver makes a pretty cool iPod."
/. :P
It doesn't matter what it costs, either. The only people following non-iPod HD-based MP3 players are the people here on
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac fan. I have a G5, iSight and new iPod. I love OSX.
However, I don't see the logic of standing up on stage and talking about MP3 players that are in the $100 - $200 range, and then introducing a new MP3 player that ISN'T IN THE RANGE AT ALL. You can't target the $100 - $200 range without at least coming close to $200. People with only $100 to spend won't be able to come up with another $150, and people that have $200 to spend would do well to come up with just another $100.
Granted, the iPod mini is even smaller than before. I think if the rumours had been true and the player was 2GB at a price even as high as $150, they would sell more. Way more.
Oh well. At least GarageBand looked really cool. I'll buy it for my musician sister. She'll be thrilled to have that sort of thing on her powerbook.
Though it's been said by a bunch of people, I'll throw in my 2 cents.
I used to be a pro sysadmin. I worked my way through University being a junior sysadmin with my department - Computing Science. All day long I would fix dinky little problems and install software, etc. After that, I'd come home to my linux box and futz with that so that I could do something like watch a video. Sometimes I'd be up quite a lot of the evening doing sysadmin type things at home. Of course, I also had to maintain my partner's Windows/Linux box as well.
I got tired of it last year. I was spending my time in front of the computer fixing things, not using my machine. I'm a programmer now, but I still don't enjoy doing work when I come home (meaningless work, anyway. Programming at home isn't 'work'.) I still have a FreeBSD mailserver that I have to maintain, but it's one of those things that takes a few days to set up right and then requires little effort after that. My main machine is now a G5. It requires no work. It took me a while to figure out why over this holiday season I was sitting in front of my computer with nothing to do. It's because I had nothing to fix. The worst problem I've had since I got this machine was I briefly had a firewire problem when I did the firmware update. I rebooted the machine and it went away. By comparison, I recently installed WinXP pro on my partner's machine, and already the machine is giving me issues, with a drive only intermittently showing up in Windows. I think it's a driver issue with the on-board Promise Ultra ATA controller, but it's still ridiculous. The operating system had only been on the machine for an hour and I was already fighting with partition magic and windows to try and recognize the drive was there, and if they found it was there, to try and reformat it.
My partner covets my Mac. The next machine she buys will be a Mac, too.
Okay, maybe I should have said that I've cut all regular caffeine use form my life. I don't have a daily cup of coffee or pop or anything. :)
Chiropractics is something that we looked at and rejected. Every chiropractor that we visited wanted to manipulate her neck, and none had the credentials that we were willing to trust ourselves to. Massage has done a great deal of good, and acupuncture worked a bit. Drugs alone are definitely not the answer. We try a great number of things before we finally fall back on the pain killers and migraine abortives.
It may be worth looking into for some people, though. As for myself, I'll never trust myself or my familry to 99.9% of the chiropractors out there. In the end, I just don't trust them, and find their methods crude and occasionally dangerous, though I've heard good reports from many people. Maybe I'll find one that I can trust one day.
Actually, what would lead me to believe Celebrex is a more potent drug is mostly that it's a prescription drug. Ibuprophen is, of course, available at convenience stores. Perhaps it's the dosages that are being given out? I know that Ibuprophen does less for my SOs headaches than Celebrex does. She's on Celebrex precisely because the more powerful painkillers gave her incredibly bad stomach problems.
There was a time when she was getting a migraine a day for one or two years. It's impossible to take painkillers (or even something like Amerge which is a migraine abortive, but leads to 'rebound' headaches) without some ill effects.
(Relief of muscle tension was actually what got her down to more reasonable numbers of migraines per year. She ended up with some neck and shoulder problems from being in a car accident, and the tension was causing normal 'trigger' headaches.)
Dehydration is something that causes sleepiness. Most people don't know it, but they're chronically dehydrated. When you feel a bit tired around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, it's not because you didn't get enough sleep, it's because you don't have enough fluid.
Most people have a cup of coffee in the morning. Caffeine is a mild diuretic, so most calculations that I've seen say to treat the beverage as having only half the amount of fluid in the cup, for hydration purposes. Sometime partway through the morning, you go have a pee and sit at your desk not drinking anything until you have another coffee a bit later. Net fluid intake? Half a coffee cup.
If you just have a glass of juice in the morning and drink something non-caffeinated during the day, several times, you'll feel more awake. If you can actually stick to 8 glasses a day, you'll definitely feel more awake. I can guarantee that at the very least, running to the bathroom every half hour to pee will keep you more awake than before.
Migraines tend to be a problem where the blood vessels in your head expand, causing extra pressure in your head. This is why many migraine sufferers have 'aura' or weird visual effects. The expanded blood vessels put pressure on the optic nerve.
Caffeine is a vaso-constrictor, meaning it makes your blood vessels contract. It's a common cure for mild migraines. I suppose you can consider it a painkiller in the sense that it works a bit like a mild anti-inflammatory. Other things that may help are ice on the side of the head that feels warmest (which is also fairly common with migraine - a feeling that one side of your head is extra warm.)
Anti-inflammatories are commonly prescribed to fight migraine. Ibuprophen works on mild ones, you'll see Celebrex and other more powerful ones prescribed as well. Asprin is also a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory that works for some people.
There are a lot of other migraine drugs out there, including a bunch of migraine abortives that work well, even on severe (ie. the kind that cause vomiting and extreme pain) migraines.
I'm not a doctor, but my SO has had migraines for years. As a result, I know a lot about symptoms and (temporary) cures.
Lastly, despite the fact that the tea has caffiene in it, does it really mean that you can't drink it anymore? I've cut all caffiene from my life, but I still enjoy the tea at the restaurant with no ill effect.
And, as I recall, the iTunes functionality to convert Oggs to AAC files once the plugin is installed works just fine.
I'm also (definitely!) no expert on this topic, but I've heard that the compression artifacts that Ogg and AAC introduce are somewhat orthogonal, so the loss of quality in converting an Ogg to an AAC file is supposedly fairly minimal. I certainly didn't notice anything when I made my 128kbit Oggs into 224kbit AACs.
Interestingly, it sounds like you make the argument against yourself, to some extent.
You're clearly good at working with hard-to-work-with hardware. Apple doesn't need to do anything to please you. You'll find a way yourself.
As for everyone else, you can't trust them to pump their own gas, let alone let them screw around inside their hardware. Most people can't build a PC from parts, so I'm unwilling to believe that they can modify an iPod - or would even care to. So why make the iPod more modifiable? What sense does it make to spend the extra money on it? The segment of the population that's 1) not as good with hardware as you seem to be and 2) really desperate to upgrade their iPod (or whatever) easily would seem to be vanishingly small.
It's probably worth mentioning that when Apple came out with the iPod, nobody thought that they could build such a small unit with so much storage that actually worked worth a hill of beans. We all know how that went.
If anyone can make a go of this, it's certainly Apple.
All of them. Those should be moderated into oblivion by permanent moderators only. The best use of temporary mod points is to push good comments up. Everything else is just a waste.