Wow, you're right. Why didn't I think of that? Please, please, write a book about how to be a man. I'll buy three copies from you since it's likely that you have such a rich and rewarding life. Boy am I glad you posted that. Thanks so much.
Why I'm shopping for something other than an iPod
on
Will the iPod Ever Die?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I sent the following as a letter to Apple and the Better Business Bureau to see if anything can be done. If anything kills the iPod and I don't see that happening, it will be that a lot of them die early deaths.
My wife doesn't want me to buy another iPod now
I didn't know where else to send this so I sent it here. If this isn't the right place, please let me know where I should send it. Thank you.
My iPod Mini (4GB) died three months after I bought it. I brought it in to my local Apple store and they replaced it with another Mini. Seven months after that, another problem (this time with the battery) occurred. I was told to buy an external power adapter to solve the problem and that seemed to work though I had hoped to just charge the thing with my computer. Oh well. Then, literally one day after the warranty ran out, the unit began locking up, skipping, and having all sorts of problems transferring music. Bad sectors on the hard drive. Bummer. I brought it into my Apple store (Carousel Center, Syracuse, NY) and they tried their best to fix it, but it's dead.
Here's my problem: I want an iPod but my wife sees no reason for us to spend another $200 on an Apple product when our $200 last time bought us more trouble and less satisfaction than we ever could have imagined. So, for the moment, I'm stuck without an iPod, with a wife who is looking at every other MP3 player on the market, and profound disappointment with a product that worked for less than 365 days.
So what do I do? And what can you do? I would very much like to know. And so would my wife.
Do I watch Fox and Friends? No, of course not. I'd rather go through airport security on my way from the bedroom to the bathroom each day.
Here's the real deal when it comes to free speech: I would fight for the right of the absolutely vapid Fox and Friends people to say the nonsense that they spout because the first amendment requires it. Bush and Friends don't understand that at all. They fight every day to limit the freedoms of anyone who disagrees with them.
The Bush administration has done more than any other presidency to limit the freedom of Americans and those visiting the US. They received a carte blanche (sp?) from the Congress (yes, both Democrats and Republicans) and they have used it with reckless abandon. It will be interesting to see if a future administration will have the decency and intelligence to roll back the disasters of these years. I'm concerned that we won't see anyone like that in the White House for a very long time.
This post keeps getting modded down even though it's rational, well thought out, and well written. Just because I see things differently today doesn't mean I don't want to hear opposition. Here is the post in its entirety:
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynical, and Slashdotters hate being reminded of these things, but your daughters are in awe because they don't know that:
* It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running of which $3BN is political pork [usatoday.com], and a fair bit goes towards research which is primarily for the purposes of weapons and has nothing to do with the "quest for knowledge".
* The ISS, which this mission supports, is falling apart after just a few years in space. It was supposed to last JUST 10 years after final assembly, and it hasn't even been fully assembled. Failures have ranged from oxygen generators to basic handtools to attitude correction gyros. The price tag was $100BN; that money largely went to our nation's (and other nation's) defense contractors, which build the majority of the hardware NASA uses.
* The "smoke" from the solid rocket engines contains huge amounts of hydrochloric acid [bbc.co.uk].
* One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food, and the government currently spends slightly more than NASA's budget to feed 7 million children a year a decent lunch. [usda.gov] Let's not even get started about basic supply and book shortages. We're supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, but we can't but enough [food in the stomachs / textbooks in the hands] of our children so that they can recieve a sufficient education to support themselves later in life, instead of ending up working at Walmart for minimum wage.
Personally, I don't find any thrill in NASA's "exploration", which seems to consist mostly of "let's see what _______ does in space" and the nation's military and scientific elite (yes, military- many of the people you see up there are military officers) playing. There is no "daring" (save the small chance their shuttle will be destroyed) and they're not touching any stars. -- Detecting whether a interviewee has MacOS experience prior to OS X: yell "Frog blast the vent core!" If they run, yes.
Whoever modded this reply as a troll is way off base. I admitted that my post was the sunny side of the street. This is the other side and we need to keep both of them in mind.
Reminds me of current United States politics, the you're with us or you're against us philosophy. What we need is civil discourse and SuperBanana's post is just that.
Actually, they don't think of it as a toy so much as a space ship. Some magical device like out of a cartoon.
My older daughter asked, "are there people on there?" I told her that there were. She said, "it must be cool to ride on a space ship." Yeah, I told her, I imagine it is. "I hope I get to go on that ride someday." I remember hoping the same thing. I hope that she gets the chance without having to come up with the current price of a ticket.
My naive answer for the day as to why the government should pay for this sort of thing is that the job of government is to lead. Sometimes leadership requires that we inspire people. The manned space program, even with all its faults, inspires people.
I just sat at my laptop watching NASA TV (we don't have cable) with my four-year-old and two-year-old explaining as much of the activity as I knew. They got excited and kept gushing "wow!" just at the sight of the shuttle on the pad. When it lifted off, they were both quiet, eyes wide and mouths open. I caught myself with my own mouth open both at the wonder of us going into space and the equally powerful wonder of watching my daughters get this excited about it.
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
The point is not that Google and Apple will bring down Microsoft. The writing is on the wall (it's actually been there for years, but broadband and a combination of other factors now make things much more plausible). Services are moving to the web and by services I mean applications like those found in Office. It is no longer making as much of a difference what platform (Windows/Linux/Mac OS) that a person runs because the things that the average users (and a lot of business users) need are going to run in Firefox/IE/Safari/Opera/et. al.
Microsoft isn't going to go away, it's going to change. Did IBM go away? Microsoft is too big, they do too many things to go away and the goal of Google and Apple can't be to take over their market. Instead, the idea is to reinvent the market, to set a new paradigm for things the way that the iPod did for music and Google did for search.
I repeat, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. That's part of their problem, but it's also a fact that they won't disappear.
"Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the US as Bush has?"
In a word: No.
And the person who modded you as a troll has not done any thinking on this. That we have to wait until 2008 to make a change is frightening and, by then, it may be too late.
I think that LaTeX would be fine if I wanted to take the time to learn another formatting language. Back when I was at Clarkson University (before failing out, alas) I used something called Galahad which was a text editor on which users could apply formatting if they new all of the dot-A commands (.a ll=something or other and so on). I used to know most of those commands. I don't anymore.
I've been using Gmail as a kind of portable text editor that keeps track of all my files online and it's good, but these apps are better. Maybe LaTeX and ftp would do the same thing, but why wouldn't I and most average users use these online apps instead?
All I'm saying is that these things are going to appeal to a lot of people especially those who see that Dell now charges an additional amount to get Office instead of just tucking that price into the price of the machine.
but the fact of the matter is that if I had a truly portable, cross-platform office program even with limited functionality, it would make my life easier. I'm using Writely now and so far like it. I want to be able to write (that's what I do) and not have to worry too much about installs and upgrades and the like. The fact that writely saves in ODF format is great.
Put it this way: I've been thinking about getting a MacBook but haven't wanted to run NeoOffice on it while running OpenOffice everywhere else. Beyond that, OpenOffice is a beast that can do most anything even when 95% of what I do is type plain text with minor formatting. Having the option of Writely that works in Firefox which, in turn, works on everything, is a bonus for me and opens up all sorts of options.
All that said, I know that there will be times when the network will be down. I'll have other options. But as the network reliability has increased I worry less and less about this sort of thing.
Say what you want about this or that other solution or about the redundancy of this, but couple it with Gmail and it's something on the order of a killer-app.
I teach out of town usually, but am in my local high school to teach summer school. They do not have Firefox anywhere on their computers. Bummer. On our school computers we use nothing but. That's mostly because I get to choose which way we go at my school.
I know that there is Neo Office and that's all well and good, but I want to run the same Office software on all my machines. When OpenOffice goes native for OS X, I'll buy a Mac. Probably that day.
I'm providing a new service called WikiSecurity. If a national broadcast personality declares on a taped broadcast that he or she is going to break into your home, we promise to clean up after they have gone and return your home to its original condition, lock the door against this national celebrity, and ask Slashdot to tell everyone how secure we have made you feel. Contact us now at the website below.
My old laptop is aging and I want something new. The Macbooks look good, feel good, seem to be so much more secure, and, in general, have only one drawback which is price. That's a one-time thing and I'm at the point where I'm ready to suck it up and spend it. This after twenty years of PC use. I can't be the only one drooling over these things.
More than that, the next iteration of OSX promises to be more efficient while Vista is likely to be far less effecient, need way more resources, and still suffer the same fates as my previous Windows machines.
Beyond all that, have you seen the Mac stuff? It's so cool looking!
I live in Central New York State and do so in part because I've seen Providence, Boston, Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale and other cities who have started to or completely given themselves over to a world of pavement and multilane roads. There's a moment in Bill Bryson's _A Walk in the Woods_ when he tries to walk back to his motel room from having gone shopping. It's the most dangerous time in the whole book because our cities have given themselves over to traffic.
A few months ago, there was a great piece in _Wired_ about a traffic designer who makes it necessary for traffic to slow down to understand what's going on. I like that idea. Five blocks from my house the state is widening a road to four lanes (two each way) and I wish they would narrow it instead. Oh well.
But that doesn't mean that it's useless. The NY Times was supposedly dead as well. I still read that. Radio has been dead forever, but here I am listening to NPR almost every waking hour. I seem to remember that the paperless office was right around the corner too. Oh well. Ho hum.
All that said, I can actually imagine that Linus is happy with what was written about him. It reflects pretty well on the strength of the open source model.
wouldn't this make a fantastic project for science departments in universities? It seems like it would be a great connection for some venture capitalist and NASA to create several design centers that would share all information and create a plan that would have as its goal to be inexpensive, creative, and efficient. It's probably a pipe-dream, but it would be an incredible way to invigorate science work in this country at all levels, to engage funding in educational institutions, and likely earn an incredible profit down the road.
...that someone had set up a powerful magnet system in the door to the servers so that if they were removed, the drives were turned to soup. Someone here is bound to know if such a thing would work, would do any good, or is even possible. I was just curious.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you're right. Why didn't I think of that? Please, please, write a book about how to be a man. I'll buy three copies from you since it's likely that you have such a rich and rewarding life. Boy am I glad you posted that. Thanks so much.
Do I watch Fox and Friends? No, of course not. I'd rather go through airport security on my way from the bedroom to the bathroom each day.
Here's the real deal when it comes to free speech: I would fight for the right of the absolutely vapid Fox and Friends people to say the nonsense that they spout because the first amendment requires it. Bush and Friends don't understand that at all. They fight every day to limit the freedoms of anyone who disagrees with them.
The Bush administration has done more than any other presidency to limit the freedom of Americans and those visiting the US. They received a carte blanche (sp?) from the Congress (yes, both Democrats and Republicans) and they have used it with reckless abandon. It will be interesting to see if a future administration will have the decency and intelligence to roll back the disasters of these years. I'm concerned that we won't see anyone like that in the White House for a very long time.
Oh well. That was depressing.
Attach two solid rocket boosters to that slice of cake, light it up, and THEN see how much they're amazed.
This post keeps getting modded down even though it's rational, well thought out, and well written. Just because I see things differently today doesn't mean I don't want to hear opposition. Here is the post in its entirety:
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynical, and Slashdotters hate being reminded of these things, but your daughters are in awe because they don't know that:
* It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running of which $3BN is political pork [usatoday.com], and a fair bit goes towards research which is primarily for the purposes of weapons and has nothing to do with the "quest for knowledge".
* The ISS, which this mission supports, is falling apart after just a few years in space. It was supposed to last JUST 10 years after final assembly, and it hasn't even been fully assembled. Failures have ranged from oxygen generators to basic handtools to attitude correction gyros. The price tag was $100BN; that money largely went to our nation's (and other nation's) defense contractors, which build the majority of the hardware NASA uses.
* The "smoke" from the solid rocket engines contains huge amounts of hydrochloric acid [bbc.co.uk].
* One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food, and the government currently spends slightly more than NASA's budget to feed 7 million children a year a decent lunch. [usda.gov] Let's not even get started about basic supply and book shortages. We're supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, but we can't but enough [food in the stomachs / textbooks in the hands] of our children so that they can recieve a sufficient education to support themselves later in life, instead of ending up working at Walmart for minimum wage.
Personally, I don't find any thrill in NASA's "exploration", which seems to consist mostly of "let's see what _______ does in space" and the nation's military and scientific elite (yes, military- many of the people you see up there are military officers) playing. There is no "daring" (save the small chance their shuttle will be destroyed) and they're not touching any stars.
--
Detecting whether a interviewee has MacOS experience prior to OS X: yell "Frog blast the vent core!" If they run, yes.
Whoever modded this reply as a troll is way off base. I admitted that my post was the sunny side of the street. This is the other side and we need to keep both of them in mind.
Reminds me of current United States politics, the you're with us or you're against us philosophy. What we need is civil discourse and SuperBanana's post is just that.
Mod it up.
Actually, they don't think of it as a toy so much as a space ship. Some magical device like out of a cartoon.
My older daughter asked, "are there people on there?" I told her that there were. She said, "it must be cool to ride on a space ship." Yeah, I told her, I imagine it is. "I hope I get to go on that ride someday." I remember hoping the same thing. I hope that she gets the chance without having to come up with the current price of a ticket.
My naive answer for the day as to why the government should pay for this sort of thing is that the job of government is to lead. Sometimes leadership requires that we inspire people. The manned space program, even with all its faults, inspires people.
I just sat at my laptop watching NASA TV (we don't have cable) with my four-year-old and two-year-old explaining as much of the activity as I knew. They got excited and kept gushing "wow!" just at the sight of the shuttle on the pad. When it lifted off, they were both quiet, eyes wide and mouths open. I caught myself with my own mouth open both at the wonder of us going into space and the equally powerful wonder of watching my daughters get this excited about it.
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
I can't wait to see what we do next.
Thank you. I've got some reading to do on this.
They refer to MPL in the message and I wondered if that's that Mozilla license and if that is really incompatible with the FSF.
The point is not that Google and Apple will bring down Microsoft. The writing is on the wall (it's actually been there for years, but broadband and a combination of other factors now make things much more plausible). Services are moving to the web and by services I mean applications like those found in Office. It is no longer making as much of a difference what platform (Windows/Linux/Mac OS) that a person runs because the things that the average users (and a lot of business users) need are going to run in Firefox/IE/Safari/Opera/et. al.
Microsoft isn't going to go away, it's going to change. Did IBM go away? Microsoft is too big, they do too many things to go away and the goal of Google and Apple can't be to take over their market. Instead, the idea is to reinvent the market, to set a new paradigm for things the way that the iPod did for music and Google did for search.
I repeat, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. That's part of their problem, but it's also a fact that they won't disappear.
"Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the US as Bush has?"
In a word: No.
And the person who modded you as a troll has not done any thinking on this. That we have to wait until 2008 to make a change is frightening and, by then, it may be too late.
I think that LaTeX would be fine if I wanted to take the time to learn another formatting language. Back when I was at Clarkson University (before failing out, alas) I used something called Galahad which was a text editor on which users could apply formatting if they new all of the dot-A commands (.a ll=something or other and so on). I used to know most of those commands. I don't anymore.
I've been using Gmail as a kind of portable text editor that keeps track of all my files online and it's good, but these apps are better. Maybe LaTeX and ftp would do the same thing, but why wouldn't I and most average users use these online apps instead?
All I'm saying is that these things are going to appeal to a lot of people especially those who see that Dell now charges an additional amount to get Office instead of just tucking that price into the price of the machine.
but the fact of the matter is that if I had a truly portable, cross-platform office program even with limited functionality, it would make my life easier. I'm using Writely now and so far like it. I want to be able to write (that's what I do) and not have to worry too much about installs and upgrades and the like. The fact that writely saves in ODF format is great.
Put it this way: I've been thinking about getting a MacBook but haven't wanted to run NeoOffice on it while running OpenOffice everywhere else. Beyond that, OpenOffice is a beast that can do most anything even when 95% of what I do is type plain text with minor formatting. Having the option of Writely that works in Firefox which, in turn, works on everything, is a bonus for me and opens up all sorts of options.
All that said, I know that there will be times when the network will be down. I'll have other options. But as the network reliability has increased I worry less and less about this sort of thing.
Say what you want about this or that other solution or about the redundancy of this, but couple it with Gmail and it's something on the order of a killer-app.
I teach out of town usually, but am in my local high school to teach summer school. They do not have Firefox anywhere on their computers. Bummer. On our school computers we use nothing but. That's mostly because I get to choose which way we go at my school.
I know that there is Neo Office and that's all well and good, but I want to run the same Office software on all my machines. When OpenOffice goes native for OS X, I'll buy a Mac. Probably that day.
I'm providing a new service called WikiSecurity. If a national broadcast personality declares on a taped broadcast that he or she is going to break into your home, we promise to clean up after they have gone and return your home to its original condition, lock the door against this national celebrity, and ask Slashdot to tell everyone how secure we have made you feel. Contact us now at the website below.
Ubuntu replace Red Hat? That would be like people writing Baloney to mean Balogna. It's just never going to happen.
My old laptop is aging and I want something new. The Macbooks look good, feel good, seem to be so much more secure, and, in general, have only one drawback which is price. That's a one-time thing and I'm at the point where I'm ready to suck it up and spend it. This after twenty years of PC use. I can't be the only one drooling over these things.
More than that, the next iteration of OSX promises to be more efficient while Vista is likely to be far less effecient, need way more resources, and still suffer the same fates as my previous Windows machines.
Beyond all that, have you seen the Mac stuff? It's so cool looking!
There are only a half dozen comments or so and the site is already down. Bummer.
I live in Central New York State and do so in part because I've seen Providence, Boston, Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale and other cities who have started to or completely given themselves over to a world of pavement and multilane roads. There's a moment in Bill Bryson's _A Walk in the Woods_ when he tries to walk back to his motel room from having gone shopping. It's the most dangerous time in the whole book because our cities have given themselves over to traffic.
A few months ago, there was a great piece in _Wired_ about a traffic designer who makes it necessary for traffic to slow down to understand what's going on. I like that idea. Five blocks from my house the state is widening a road to four lanes (two each way) and I wish they would narrow it instead. Oh well.
But that doesn't mean that it's useless. The NY Times was supposedly dead as well. I still read that. Radio has been dead forever, but here I am listening to NPR almost every waking hour. I seem to remember that the paperless office was right around the corner too. Oh well. Ho hum.
All that said, I can actually imagine that Linus is happy with what was written about him. It reflects pretty well on the strength of the open source model.
wouldn't this make a fantastic project for science departments in universities? It seems like it would be a great connection for some venture capitalist and NASA to create several design centers that would share all information and create a plan that would have as its goal to be inexpensive, creative, and efficient. It's probably a pipe-dream, but it would be an incredible way to invigorate science work in this country at all levels, to engage funding in educational institutions, and likely earn an incredible profit down the road.
...that someone had set up a powerful magnet system in the door to the servers so that if they were removed, the drives were turned to soup. Someone here is bound to know if such a thing would work, would do any good, or is even possible. I was just curious.