For one thing if your _1_ device is stolen or is droped in a pint of beer then, not only is your mp3 player gone, so is everything else!!
Well, yes, but you could equally well argue that one single device is far less likely to be stolen than any of the umpteen you'd otherwise be carrying around with you.
I believe the Ogg Vorbis format already supports bit-stripping, whereby you can downconvert a file to a lower bitrate without losing any quality (compared to encoding it at the lower rate from scratch).
But apart from a proof-of-concept, no-one's actually written a bit-stripping program yet.
The obvious conclusion is that, rightly or wrongly, not too many people are concerned about bit-stripping...
Oh, quite. But my point is this: bright colour screens and blazingly fast CPUs may be impressive, but I'm not convinced they're vital for actually getting work done; they need to be balanced with things like screen size, battery size and type, &c. For me, a machine that needed to visit a mains plug every 5 or 10 hours would be much, much less useful; a machine without a decent keyboard even less so. Colour and greater resolution are nice, but I'm perfectly happy to do without.
I know my 5mx is outdated in many ways, but I'm very happy to stick with it until I see something which looks like it'll be more useful -- and I haven't seen that yet.
Most Palms use Secure Digital cards, an alternative format that is obviously better suited towards the smaller form-factor (CF cards are big, SD cards are small)
CF cards may be a little larger, but they're quite capable of fitting into a small PDA. And they have a few major advantages: they come in larger capacities, they're much cheaper for any given capacity, they're the most common standard, and they don't have any DRM.
Umm, nobody uses AA batteries for any PDAs anymore. I imagine they just can't deliver enough power to a power hungry PDA (ARM cpus, big LCDs, etc etc).
That's news to this 'ere 5mx, which runs perfectly happily on a pair of AAs for 20-30 hours. And that's with a bigger LCD than any Palm-size thing, and an ARM CPU.
While I heartily agree with all the posters deploring the current state of English as she is typed, I think the problems are deeper than just spelling and grammar. While they are the most obvious problems -- the easiest to spot, criticise, and correct -- if people aren't thinking clearly, then no amount of elegant grammar and immaculate spelling will convert their muddled ideas into clear and direct text.
The author George Orwell wrote an article about this in 1945; I find it a very interesting read, and probably even more relevant today. (It seems remarkably prescient in many respects.) It's called Politics and the English Language, but don't let the title put you off: it's not about politics per se, just about how writers (mis)use English in various types of writing, political and otherwise.
It's online in many places, for example here and here. Well worth a read.
'Personal taste' is a tricky and variable thing, though.
In particular, enjoyment is very strongly influenced by familiarity -- we like something more if we've heard it before. We also like something more if we know the band, the genre, the tune, &c. In particular, album artwork, logos, the band image, history, press attention, peer interest all have an effect.
So 'personal taste' is only partly about the sound; it's also about all those other things. And it's exactly those things that unknown artists don't have!
(It's not a new problem, of course. Three or four centuries ago, it wasn't unknown for young, obscure composers to attribute their work to the stars of the day, in the hope of getting it better known.)
So I don't think that making everyone's music immediately accessible is likely to level the playing field completely. There will still be big names, people will still listen to stuff because everyone else is listening to it, and the quality of the music itself will still be only one factor amongst many:(
Oh, I dunno. Fictionwise seems to be making good money from selling multiformat books, which are available in (amongst others) Palm DOC format, which can be converted to/from plain text.
Their prices seem quite reasonable, and I've bought quite a bit from them.
Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide.
I don't think this need be a big issue at all.
With ebooks, you don't need to find your place again, because you won't have lost it! And in the reader app I use most, a simple scrollbar on the right of the screen provides a perfectly good visual indication of how far through the book I am. For navigation, there are bookmarks for jumping straight to any chapter, and for keeping track of any important points I want to; there's also text search.
Of course, not all ebook readers (especially dedicated-hardware ones) support all of these. But those are issues with particular implementations, not with ebooks per se.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
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Upbeat on E-books
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The #bookz channel on IRC has a very large collection of "warez" e-books
There's also a lot of stuff on the P2P networks (esp. Gnutella). Much of it is unproofed and/or badly-formatted, but there are some good texts there if you keep looking.
Re: I know this is an oft repeated point but
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Upbeat on E-books
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I'm with you on this one. My Psion 5mx has the equivalent of 300-400 books loaded up (mostly novels, with some short stories, reference works, &c), right there in my pocket at any time.
I read more now than I ever used to, because I don't have to think to carry a book with me -- they're all there ready. I don't have to faff around with bookmarks, and as you say, reading in bed is much more comfortable.
I know that some people have trouble reading text from a computer screen, but I really haven't found that to be an issue. And anyway, when I get caught up in a story, I'm not really aware of the medium.
Another advantage is that (for open formats, at least) I can edit the text as I see fit. I've tools for converting to British English spellings, fixing formatting issues, errors, &c, so that I have far more control over what I read than you could ever have with dead-tree editions. It's also handy to be able to copy and paste quotes, too.
And of course, there's the added advantage that a few MB of disk space can be much easier to find than space for another bookcase!
Interesting you should ask, as I was recently discussing this with some friends. (Probably all over 30, though in my case only just.)
They all still use joined-up (cursive) writing, as do most other people I know. I, on the other hand, haven't used it since I was at uni and found I had trouble reading my writing: I investigated various writing styles and types, and concluded that I could print (i.e write mostly not joined-up) pretty much as fast as I could write joined-up, and that the result was vastly easier to read; I also found that it was still pretty readable even at speeds where my old writing would have degraded to a meaningless scrawl.
(I also made a few other tweaks for readability, too, such as greatly reducing ascenders and descenders, and making the centre parts of letters larger, rounder, and closer together.)
My writing has been the same ever since; it's very readable, neat (according to people who've commented), and quite distinctive.
What I don't understand is why 'joined-up' writing has such prestige and respectability. Why do we force children to use cursive script (even, in some schools, taking off exam marks for printing), as if it's somehow better? Is it just that it's more difficult? ("We had to do it...") Or because printing is associated with young children? (Self-fulfilling prophecy...)
Ah, but your quote was complaining about a silly hypercorrection of a perfectly valid English construction. Whereas the earlier post was pointing out an actual error.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with pedantry if it's [sic] used properly.
In fact, it's probably worse here. Although our DD/MM/YY is relatively sane, if you see documents on the web you've often no way of telling if they're UK-style DD/MM/YY or US-style MM/DD/YY.
For a long while I used the first three letters of the month instead of its number where possible (and included the century), which makes things unambiguous, but it still doesn't sort properly.
So these days I use YYYY-MM-DD almost everywhere. It sorts properly, it's logical, it's unambiguous, it's neat, and it's aninternationalstandard (hint: the 'I' in 'ISO'...), so it should be acceptable everywhere they count years in the same way we do!
The only real issues with it are 1) it makes date intervals awkward, and 2) it's much longer than a simple D/Mmm for near dates. But you can't have everything*.
(* Coz if you did, it'd probably undergo gravitational collapse and end up as a black hole, and then you'd look a bit of a fool...)
IIRC, it was more deliberate than that. Yes, they were introducing long filenames which could include lower case and spaces, but their directory names were chosen with developers in mind, not just showing off to their users.
'Programs', while lower case, would still fit into the old 8+3 filename scheme. Old-style programs would show it as 'PROGRAMS', which wouldn't be much of a loss. However, 'Program files' doesn't fit, and programs stuck using the old-style filenames would show it as 'PROGRA~1', which is ugly.
And they deliberately chose that ugliness as a way of forcing, or at least encouraging, developers to port their programs to use long filenames.
(And Windows users have to live with that decision to this day.)
English, too, has a grammatical construction for hypothetical, uncertain, desired, or rhetorical actions, too: it's called the subjunctive mood -- but few people can be bothered to use it these days, and, were they to do so, it probably wouldn't be recognised anyway...
Re: Sheet music is already pirated
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TV Piracy is Next
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And most of it is crap. It's either dodgy scans of existing paper music (i.e. hard to read and/or massive files), stuff that's useless on its own (e.g. one instrument's part of a multi-instrument work), or stuff that's been typeset so badly you'd think the creator had never played anything from music.
...which (since you asked) is this: Don't think about what the machine's doing. Think about what the user's doing.
Of course, when you come to write the engine, the guts of your app, you need to think pretty hard what the machine's doing! But for the UI, you need to ignore most of that, and just think about the user: what are they trying to accomplish? What do they need to know to do it? How can you make it as easy as possible for them to do it? And so on.
So many bits of software clearly expect the user to have to learn how the guts of the software works, when that's rarely necessary. In the vast majority of cases, it's much better the other way around.
Maybe IE should do what CAB and iCab did (and maybe still do) -- display buddy HTML as best it can, but also show a sad-face icon when there are bugs. Web designers (and nosy folk) can click on the sad face to find out exactly what problems it's found. Seems a good way to balance the demands of users and web designers. Come to think of it, maybe Firefox should do that...
Right now my mailbox is being flooded with examples of the latest virus from people who have chosen (whether from inertia, ignorance, indifference, or outside influence) to use insecure software. They either don't know or don't care* about the effects on everyone else, and we all suffer as a result.
(* Not sure which case worries me more...)
If I had a PC, it'd be more than just an inconvenience, of course, but even in the relative safety of a different processor, OS, and software, and reasonable security precautions, it's still jolly annoying.
So no, in this case they're not the only ones suffering.
I think you're asking the wrong question. Why must we have a fixed line? Why must we always be able to say that this is a human, while that is not? In most cases, the distinction is perfectly obvious; where it's not, why isn't it enough to be able to say that something is slightly human, or another is mostly human?
It's just an artefact of our thought processes. Our brains work by classifying, labelling, categorising; and while that's an extremely useful way of working, we must be aware that it's only a tool and doesn't necessarily reflect the World Out There.
internal, natural drugs that mimic the "high" from a street drug
Isn't this entirely the wrong way around? Aren't street drugs popular because they mimic the natural high we get from pleasurable activities such as sex?
Anyway, all this babble about structural brain changes sounds scarily like engrams -- and we all know what that got used for...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, but you could equally well argue that one single device is far less likely to be stolen than any of the umpteen you'd otherwise be carrying around with you.
But apart from a proof-of-concept, no-one's actually written a bit-stripping program yet.
The obvious conclusion is that, rightly or wrongly, not too many people are concerned about bit-stripping...
I know my 5mx is outdated in many ways, but I'm very happy to stick with it until I see something which looks like it'll be more useful -- and I haven't seen that yet.
CF cards may be a little larger, but they're quite capable of fitting into a small PDA. And they have a few major advantages: they come in larger capacities, they're much cheaper for any given capacity, they're the most common standard, and they don't have any DRM.
That's news to this 'ere 5mx, which runs perfectly happily on a pair of AAs for 20-30 hours. And that's with a bigger LCD than any Palm-size thing, and an ARM CPU.
The author George Orwell wrote an article about this in 1945; I find it a very interesting read, and probably even more relevant today. (It seems remarkably prescient in many respects.) It's called Politics and the English Language, but don't let the title put you off: it's not about politics per se, just about how writers (mis)use English in various types of writing, political and otherwise.
It's online in many places, for example here and here. Well worth a read.
In particular, enjoyment is very strongly influenced by familiarity -- we like something more if we've heard it before. We also like something more if we know the band, the genre, the tune, &c. In particular, album artwork, logos, the band image, history, press attention, peer interest all have an effect.
So 'personal taste' is only partly about the sound; it's also about all those other things. And it's exactly those things that unknown artists don't have!
(It's not a new problem, of course. Three or four centuries ago, it wasn't unknown for young, obscure composers to attribute their work to the stars of the day, in the hope of getting it better known.)
So I don't think that making everyone's music immediately accessible is likely to level the playing field completely. There will still be big names, people will still listen to stuff because everyone else is listening to it, and the quality of the music itself will still be only one factor amongst many :(
Oh, I dunno. Fictionwise seems to be making good money from selling multiformat books, which are available in (amongst others) Palm DOC format, which can be converted to/from plain text.
Their prices seem quite reasonable, and I've bought quite a bit from them.
I don't think this need be a big issue at all.
With ebooks, you don't need to find your place again, because you won't have lost it! And in the reader app I use most, a simple scrollbar on the right of the screen provides a perfectly good visual indication of how far through the book I am. For navigation, there are bookmarks for jumping straight to any chapter, and for keeping track of any important points I want to; there's also text search.
Of course, not all ebook readers (especially dedicated-hardware ones) support all of these. But those are issues with particular implementations, not with ebooks per se.
There's also a lot of stuff on the P2P networks (esp. Gnutella). Much of it is unproofed and/or badly-formatted, but there are some good texts there if you keep looking.
I read more now than I ever used to, because I don't have to think to carry a book with me -- they're all there ready. I don't have to faff around with bookmarks, and as you say, reading in bed is much more comfortable.
I know that some people have trouble reading text from a computer screen, but I really haven't found that to be an issue. And anyway, when I get caught up in a story, I'm not really aware of the medium.
Another advantage is that (for open formats, at least) I can edit the text as I see fit. I've tools for converting to British English spellings, fixing formatting issues, errors, &c, so that I have far more control over what I read than you could ever have with dead-tree editions. It's also handy to be able to copy and paste quotes, too.
And of course, there's the added advantage that a few MB of disk space can be much easier to find than space for another bookcase!
They all still use joined-up (cursive) writing, as do most other people I know. I, on the other hand, haven't used it since I was at uni and found I had trouble reading my writing: I investigated various writing styles and types, and concluded that I could print (i.e write mostly not joined-up) pretty much as fast as I could write joined-up, and that the result was vastly easier to read; I also found that it was still pretty readable even at speeds where my old writing would have degraded to a meaningless scrawl.
(I also made a few other tweaks for readability, too, such as greatly reducing ascenders and descenders, and making the centre parts of letters larger, rounder, and closer together.)
My writing has been the same ever since; it's very readable, neat (according to people who've commented), and quite distinctive.
What I don't understand is why 'joined-up' writing has such prestige and respectability. Why do we force children to use cursive script (even, in some schools, taking off exam marks for printing), as if it's somehow better? Is it just that it's more difficult? ("We had to do it...") Or because printing is associated with young children? (Self-fulfilling prophecy...)
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with pedantry if it's [sic] used properly.
In fact, it's probably worse here. Although our DD/MM/YY is relatively sane, if you see documents on the web you've often no way of telling if they're UK-style DD/MM/YY or US-style MM/DD/YY.
For a long while I used the first three letters of the month instead of its number where possible (and included the century), which makes things unambiguous, but it still doesn't sort properly.
So these days I use YYYY-MM-DD almost everywhere. It sorts properly, it's logical, it's unambiguous, it's neat, and it's an international standard (hint: the 'I' in 'ISO'...), so it should be acceptable everywhere they count years in the same way we do!
The only real issues with it are 1) it makes date intervals awkward, and 2) it's much longer than a simple D/Mmm for near dates. But you can't have everything*.
(* Coz if you did, it'd probably undergo gravitational collapse and end up as a black hole, and then you'd look a bit of a fool...)
'Programs', while lower case, would still fit into the old 8+3 filename scheme. Old-style programs would show it as 'PROGRAMS', which wouldn't be much of a loss. However, 'Program files' doesn't fit, and programs stuck using the old-style filenames would show it as 'PROGRA~1', which is ugly.
And they deliberately chose that ugliness as a way of forcing, or at least encouraging, developers to port their programs to use long filenames.
(And Windows users have to live with that decision to this day.)
English, too, has a grammatical construction for hypothetical, uncertain, desired, or rhetorical actions, too: it's called the subjunctive mood -- but few people can be bothered to use it these days, and, were they to do so, it probably wouldn't be recognised anyway...
The best places to get sheet music for free are The Choral Public Domain Library, the Mutopia Project, Gutenberg Music, the Sheet Music Archive, and the Werner Icking Music Archive. And while we're at it, the best way to engrave (typeset) music is with Lilypond.
Of course, when you come to write the engine, the guts of your app, you need to think pretty hard what the machine's doing! But for the UI, you need to ignore most of that, and just think about the user: what are they trying to accomplish? What do they need to know to do it? How can you make it as easy as possible for them to do it? And so on.
So many bits of software clearly expect the user to have to learn how the guts of the software works, when that's rarely necessary. In the vast majority of cases, it's much better the other way around.
Personally, I prefer Poisoned. Multi-network, efficient, handles large numbers of searches and downloads well, &c. Also GPL.
Presumably, this is only possible if your (only) firewall is running on the same box as your BitTorrent app?
Maybe IE should do what CAB and iCab did (and maybe still do) -- display buddy HTML as best it can, but also show a sad-face icon when there are bugs. Web designers (and nosy folk) can click on the sad face to find out exactly what problems it's found. Seems a good way to balance the demands of users and web designers. Come to think of it, maybe Firefox should do that...
But that's okay, coz 89.4% of people don't believe them, anyway...
Right now my mailbox is being flooded with examples of the latest virus from people who have chosen (whether from inertia, ignorance, indifference, or outside influence) to use insecure software. They either don't know or don't care* about the effects on everyone else, and we all suffer as a result.
(* Not sure which case worries me more...)
If I had a PC, it'd be more than just an inconvenience, of course, but even in the relative safety of a different processor, OS, and software, and reasonable security precautions, it's still jolly annoying.
So no, in this case they're not the only ones suffering.
It's just an artefact of our thought processes. Our brains work by classifying, labelling, categorising; and while that's an extremely useful way of working, we must be aware that it's only a tool and doesn't necessarily reflect the World Out There.
Isn't this entirely the wrong way around? Aren't street drugs popular because they mimic the natural high we get from pleasurable activities such as sex?
Anyway, all this babble about structural brain changes sounds scarily like engrams -- and we all know what that got used for...
No, there's at least one other place you can buy AAC files online.
And of course, it can also play MP3 files, Audible files, WAVs, &c. There are many places you can buy MP3s online too. Hardly a lock-in.