Macs are very cool for playing World of Warcraft, but for getting real work done, give me any decent Linux distro with KDE and XEmacs
I won't take issue with your point about KDE - different strokes and all that - but I always find it a bit hard to comprehend the attraction of XEmacs. I am a big fan of (the basic GNU) Emacs, because it's so easy to edit with a nice blank screen rather than all having those superfluous menubars and whatnot cluttering up the workspace. (My perspective is of one who remembers when Emacs was a bunch of macros for TECO, so I never got into the habit of using a menubar.) And now that GNU Emacs can render fonts nicely in X11, XEmacs has become even more otiose.
Fine and dandy. Now, SteveO, go and make us a 13" Mac Book Pro (with the firewire).
I can't say I miss Firewire. Back in the days when I used to use gtkpod to manage content on my old iPod Mini with my Linux box, I found I had to use firewire for it to be reliable. I suspect the USB on my motherboard was flaky, since I got random disconnects for no reason.
With my newer boxes, I have had no problem with this, and since newer iPods don't support firewire, it isn't useful for me any more.
The Linux backend is all but invisible and likely just as locked down as the Linux installs on other embedded devices.
This is something I find very tiring about mobile phones. They all want to force you into using their proprietary, usually Windows-only, kludgy and buggy computer interfaces, and make it as hard as possible to replace branding on devices one has paid cash for.
Fortunately in my case (I use a Motorola Razr2 V9) I can just pull the micro-SD card to transfer material back and forth, having spent some time when I first got the machine getting rid of the Telstra branding. Since then, I have mostly left it alone.
Trouble is, all these shenanigans limit the usefulness of the device, which is why I still pretty much only use it to make phone calls and text messages, both of which could be done by a much more basic phone.
Given the past history with personal information being lost in the UK, I hope they encrypt the database so that if it does get lost then it won't be readable.
I was going to say that given recent history with personal information being lost in the UK, the data might be more secure if they published it on a 50-foot-high electronic billboard in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
Oh for goodness sake! The USA has been involved in this stuff for years... The West's e-mail traffic has been monitored and put into databases since ARPA-NET and IBM Mainframes in the 1970s.
Sure that's been done, but not on a scale where every man, woman and child's messages and mobile phones are tapped across an entire nation.
Seems to me the best way round it would be if everybody included a selection of buzzwords in every message, like "kill infidel holy jihad allah akbar" and so forth. That database would quickly become the most expensive pile of useless crap ever built.
I call that democracy at work. Or anarchy, at least.
I've never tried Crossover, but I have played with Wine occasionally. Trouble is, I always come away with the feeling that if I have to run an ugly kludge to use an ugly Windows program, I would rather just do without, thank you very much.
Which is where Google might have dropped the ball (if they cared). If Google really wanted acceptance of Chrome by the geek community, they needed to release Linux and Mac versions at the same time, rather than leave it as an afterthought. They don't have the excuse of a lack of resources, so one can only assume we're not a priority.
It's their call, but they won't get geeks promoting it the way Mozilla did with Firefox.
The ringing in your ears does not fucking stop. Ever.
That is not true. I suffer from tinnitus, and there are definitely times when it does stop. Just as there are times when it is quite uncomfortable.
Incidentally, I have never been a particular fan of subjecting my eardrums to excessively loud noises, so I have my doubts as to whether this is relevant in the context of mp3 player use.
I love my old Grado RS-1 cans - with the right amp, they give you about as accurate sound rendering as you are ever likely to hear. But they are totally hopeless with my iPod. The internal amp just doesn't drive them very well at all.
For that, I am more or less content (with some reservations) with comparatively inexpensive Sennheiser in-ear phones. Given that these are good enough to bring out deficiencies in (mp3) recordings encoded at 192kbps, there is little point in using sophisticated cans in this context. I don't want to re-encode everything in a lossless format because I don't want to lose the storage capacity, and the perceived gain in quality just doesn't add up given the (noisy) situations where I am using the machine.
Your real objection is that you can't be alone with yourself for an extended time. You need something to drown that out.
That might be an issue for some, but in my case I'm something of a loner, and have no problem (in fact a certain preference for) my own company.
But when I'm riding my bike for 20 km to and from my university, I like to be able to zone out with the music; 99% of my route is cycle-path, so there's no danger from cars or trucks, but there is a LOT of noise from a major parallel traffic route. So there is an argument for using earphones that isolate you from ambient noise.
I haven't spent enough time in 2007 or 2008 to really comment well, but 2004 on the Mac is a pretty nicely done Mac application.
Agreed. I have Office 2004 on my Mac laptop, and it's OK. Though in practice, I usually use NeoOffice, since I actually prefer it.
No, I was talking about Office 2007 (haven't tried 2008), which I hate, loathe and despise. MS seems to have gone out of their way to break the interface to force everybody into a new learning curve. Which, in my opinion, is a good bonus point for OOo/NeoOffice, since anyone with a reasonable grip on earlier versions of Word (or even WordPerfect) shouldn't have any difficulty with the OSS project.
And as long as that is the case, that is also the conversation we should be having -- not whether it's "pretty".
Indeed. And since we've seen so many posts whining that OOo is a heap of shit because it has "...fewer features and is generally lacking in more areas than it has strengths", I would like these posters to actually justify their argument with a proper list - bearing in mind that most shortcomings have been overcome by 3rd-party macros or add-ins. The only really important feature missing as far as I'm concerned, is a decent bibliographic facility. And in my experience, EndNote's offering is none too reliable in the Windows world.
As far as the interface is concerned, I don't really see what the problem is. If you are running a Linux box, OOo follows along with whatever GTK+ theme you use, so you just pick one you like. The Mac NeoOffice version fits in comfortably enough without scorching retinas. After all, the damn thing IS only supposed to be an office suite. If the interface is so stunning that it has you quivering in your chair with serial orgasms, it is failing at its primary purpose. I certainly wouldn't hold up Office2007 as a paragon of UI splendour. Most people I know think it's the most misbegotten, counterintuitive, spastic piece of excreta ever spawned. At least OOo's interface is reasonably intuitive.
...implement a +1 Agree -1 Disagree options for mods and then not let that moderation affect the overall score of the post....Those who use it should be penalized in their karma score, as the guidelines of moderation clearly state that they should not moderate for Agree/Disagree.
The first part of that would be a brilliant idea.
"Hey, Slashcode, look at this!"
Trouble is, the second part is why the won't work, because nobody is going to take a karma hit for moderating.
(Oh, and I'm forgetting that there is no +1 Agree and -1 Disagree. Bummer.)
One could be forgiven for not noticing, given how many moderators seem to be using the system to push their own agendas at the moment. For a long time it all worked well, but the abuses aren't getting picked up by metamoderation any more. We're almost at the point where we might as well have a bot to filter out all the FP and GNAA trolls and have no other moderation at all.
In addition, converting their designs and manufacturing process will to meet this requirement will cost Apple dearly.
Possibly, but they've had plenty of time to think of that. It was their decision to screw the customer instead by enclosing batteries in a hard-to-open case. Trouble is, although TFA mentions items being "banned", I find it hard to believe EU (or any other) authorities will have the balls to stand up to Apple.
I'm sorry, but I would have to consider that part of iTunes/Apples idiosyncratic need to force itself upon customers. Just like they forced users to install they're crappy safari and then apologized for it later.
I'm sorry, but I would have to consider that part of Microsoft's idiosyncratic need to force itself upon customers. Just like they forced users to install their crappy Internet Explorer and never bothered apologising.
It's expensive as hell in terms of the capacity and featureset you get compared to other players.
I did say "in Australia". Many of us don't care to shop online for something that small, stealable and expensive. So I stand by my point, as it is demonstrably true here.
When I got my first iPod, I used gtkpod to manage its content. It worked perfectly well, and I have no reason not to believe that it still does. I now have a Mac as well as my Linux box, and so I just use iTunes, even though I don't have to. The issues mentioned by the GP seem to refer to Microsoft's horrible interface more than anything, and his charge of "malware" would be better directed at Windows than iTunes.
Yeah. But it's not an apple i-pod. And that is essentially what sells an i-pod.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. If anyone other than Apple had come up with such a sleek design and neat interface, it would quite probably have done just as well. I have no quarrel with the SanDisk device mentioned by the GP, but micro-SD cards tend to hold a maximum of only 8GB (last time I looked) and the interface is IMHO only OK if you've never had better.The iPod is just a really well-thought-out product in its own right. It does (pretty much) only one thing and does it well.
Which is why, although I love my iPods, I am not considering buying an iPhone. The latter just doesn't have the storage capacity I (now) find I need, I don't need all those bells and whistles and shiny things, and I do not want any gadget that has to be charged every day, especially if the battery is non-removable.
Well my iPod already died, so he was spot on with that one. The proprietary battery lasted about a year, and it would cost about as much as a new iPod to replace it.
The battery in my old iPod Mini gave me several good years of hard use, but is now defunct. I have now relegated that machine to the car, where it remains permamently plugged into a RoadTrip FM transmitter. Figure if anyone steals it, it won't be worth a cent at any hock shop.
This gave me the "excuse" to go and treat myself to a 160GB iPod Classic, which meets my storage needs better. Say what you will (and I think Woz is wrong about this) the iPod does offer pretty much the best bang for your buck in terms of capacity, at least here in Australia, and while there's a market for portable music players, I see no reason why the iPod should die any time soon.
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Macs are very cool for playing World of Warcraft, but for getting real work done, give me any decent Linux distro with KDE and XEmacs
I won't take issue with your point about KDE - different strokes and all that - but I always find it a bit hard to comprehend the attraction of XEmacs. I am a big fan of (the basic GNU) Emacs, because it's so easy to edit with a nice blank screen rather than all having those superfluous menubars and whatnot cluttering up the workspace. (My perspective is of one who remembers when Emacs was a bunch of macros for TECO, so I never got into the habit of using a menubar.) And now that GNU Emacs can render fonts nicely in X11, XEmacs has become even more otiose.
File, edit, help have always been in the same spot.
Unless, of course, you count Office 2007. Confused the hell out of me for a while when I first saw that.
Fine and dandy. Now, SteveO, go and make us a 13" Mac Book Pro (with the firewire).
I can't say I miss Firewire. Back in the days when I used to use gtkpod to manage content on my old iPod Mini with my Linux box, I found I had to use firewire for it to be reliable. I suspect the USB on my motherboard was flaky, since I got random disconnects for no reason.
With my newer boxes, I have had no problem with this, and since newer iPods don't support firewire, it isn't useful for me any more.
The Linux backend is all but invisible and likely just as locked down as the Linux installs on other embedded devices.
This is something I find very tiring about mobile phones. They all want to force you into using their proprietary, usually Windows-only, kludgy and buggy computer interfaces, and make it as hard as possible to replace branding on devices one has paid cash for.
Fortunately in my case (I use a Motorola Razr2 V9) I can just pull the micro-SD card to transfer material back and forth, having spent some time when I first got the machine getting rid of the Telstra branding. Since then, I have mostly left it alone.
Trouble is, all these shenanigans limit the usefulness of the device, which is why I still pretty much only use it to make phone calls and text messages, both of which could be done by a much more basic phone.
Given the past history with personal information being lost in the UK, I hope they encrypt the database so that if it does get lost then it won't be readable.
I was going to say that given recent history with personal information being lost in the UK, the data might be more secure if they published it on a 50-foot-high electronic billboard in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
According to the linked article, the program will only log traffic information, not message content.
If you believe that, you'll believe anything.
Hey, have you heard about the failure of this year's Vegemite harvest down here in Australia? We had a plague of drop-bears, they scoffed the lot...
Never mind the fact that that much data is going to be an interesting storage problem, never mind search problem.
And don't even get started on the security problem, given the UK Government's abysmal record on handling confidential data.
remember, remember, the fifth of November...
;-)
Ah yes, the only man with any integrity ever to enter the Houses of Parliament...
Oh for goodness sake! The USA has been involved in this stuff for years ... The West's e-mail traffic has been monitored and put into databases since ARPA-NET and IBM Mainframes in the 1970s.
Sure that's been done, but not on a scale where every man, woman and child's messages and mobile phones are tapped across an entire nation.
Seems to me the best way round it would be if everybody included a selection of buzzwords in every message, like "kill infidel holy jihad allah akbar" and so forth. That database would quickly become the most expensive pile of useless crap ever built.
I call that democracy at work. Or anarchy, at least.
I've never tried Crossover, but I have played with Wine occasionally. Trouble is, I always come away with the feeling that if I have to run an ugly kludge to use an ugly Windows program, I would rather just do without, thank you very much.
Which is where Google might have dropped the ball (if they cared). If Google really wanted acceptance of Chrome by the geek community, they needed to release Linux and Mac versions at the same time, rather than leave it as an afterthought. They don't have the excuse of a lack of resources, so one can only assume we're not a priority.
It's their call, but they won't get geeks promoting it the way Mozilla did with Firefox.
What insurance? And as I said, it's safe enough under the conditions I mentioned.
The ringing in your ears does not fucking stop. Ever.
That is not true. I suffer from tinnitus, and there are definitely times when it does stop. Just as there are times when it is quite uncomfortable.
Incidentally, I have never been a particular fan of subjecting my eardrums to excessively loud noises, so I have my doubts as to whether this is relevant in the context of mp3 player use.
I love my old Grado RS-1 cans - with the right amp, they give you about as accurate sound rendering as you are ever likely to hear. But they are totally hopeless with my iPod. The internal amp just doesn't drive them very well at all.
For that, I am more or less content (with some reservations) with comparatively inexpensive Sennheiser in-ear phones. Given that these are good enough to bring out deficiencies in (mp3) recordings encoded at 192kbps, there is little point in using sophisticated cans in this context. I don't want to re-encode everything in a lossless format because I don't want to lose the storage capacity, and the perceived gain in quality just doesn't add up given the (noisy) situations where I am using the machine.
Your real objection is that you can't be alone with yourself for an extended time. You need something to drown that out.
That might be an issue for some, but in my case I'm something of a loner, and have no problem (in fact a certain preference for) my own company.
But when I'm riding my bike for 20 km to and from my university, I like to be able to zone out with the music; 99% of my route is cycle-path, so there's no danger from cars or trucks, but there is a LOT of noise from a major parallel traffic route. So there is an argument for using earphones that isolate you from ambient noise.
I haven't spent enough time in 2007 or 2008 to really comment well, but 2004 on the Mac is a pretty nicely done Mac application.
Agreed. I have Office 2004 on my Mac laptop, and it's OK. Though in practice, I usually use NeoOffice, since I actually prefer it.
No, I was talking about Office 2007 (haven't tried 2008), which I hate, loathe and despise. MS seems to have gone out of their way to break the interface to force everybody into a new learning curve. Which, in my opinion, is a good bonus point for OOo/NeoOffice, since anyone with a reasonable grip on earlier versions of Word (or even WordPerfect) shouldn't have any difficulty with the OSS project.
And as long as that is the case, that is also the conversation we should be having -- not whether it's "pretty".
Indeed. And since we've seen so many posts whining that OOo is a heap of shit because it has "...fewer features and is generally lacking in more areas than it has strengths", I would like these posters to actually justify their argument with a proper list - bearing in mind that most shortcomings have been overcome by 3rd-party macros or add-ins. The only really important feature missing as far as I'm concerned, is a decent bibliographic facility. And in my experience, EndNote's offering is none too reliable in the Windows world.
As far as the interface is concerned, I don't really see what the problem is. If you are running a Linux box, OOo follows along with whatever GTK+ theme you use, so you just pick one you like. The Mac NeoOffice version fits in comfortably enough without scorching retinas. After all, the damn thing IS only supposed to be an office suite. If the interface is so stunning that it has you quivering in your chair with serial orgasms, it is failing at its primary purpose. I certainly wouldn't hold up Office2007 as a paragon of UI splendour. Most people I know think it's the most misbegotten, counterintuitive, spastic piece of excreta ever spawned. At least OOo's interface is reasonably intuitive.
...implement a +1 Agree -1 Disagree options for mods and then not let that moderation affect the overall score of the post. ...Those who use it should be penalized in their karma score, as the guidelines of moderation clearly state that they should not moderate for Agree/Disagree.
The first part of that would be a brilliant idea.
"Hey, Slashcode, look at this!"
Trouble is, the second part is why the won't work, because nobody is going to take a karma hit for moderating.
(Oh, and I'm forgetting that there is no +1 Agree and -1 Disagree. Bummer.)
One could be forgiven for not noticing, given how many moderators seem to be using the system to push their own agendas at the moment. For a long time it all worked well, but the abuses aren't getting picked up by metamoderation any more. We're almost at the point where we might as well have a bot to filter out all the FP and GNAA trolls and have no other moderation at all.
one of the most famous songs from the most famous band in US history.
Nitpicking here, but Imagine was a solo effort, not a Beatles song.
And to nitpick further, both Lennon and the Beatles were British, not American.
In addition, converting their designs and manufacturing process will to meet this requirement will cost Apple dearly.
Possibly, but they've had plenty of time to think of that. It was their decision to screw the customer instead by enclosing batteries in a hard-to-open case. Trouble is, although TFA mentions items being "banned", I find it hard to believe EU (or any other) authorities will have the balls to stand up to Apple.
I'm sorry, but I would have to consider that part of iTunes/Apples idiosyncratic need to force itself upon customers. Just like they forced users to install they're crappy safari and then apologized for it later.
I'm sorry, but I would have to consider that part of Microsoft's idiosyncratic need to force itself upon customers. Just like they forced users to install their crappy Internet Explorer and never bothered apologising.
It's expensive as hell in terms of the capacity and featureset you get compared to other players.
I did say "in Australia". Many of us don't care to shop online for something that small, stealable and expensive. So I stand by my point, as it is demonstrably true here.
When I got my first iPod, I used gtkpod to manage its content. It worked perfectly well, and I have no reason not to believe that it still does. I now have a Mac as well as my Linux box, and so I just use iTunes, even though I don't have to. The issues mentioned by the GP seem to refer to Microsoft's horrible interface more than anything, and his charge of "malware" would be better directed at Windows than iTunes.
Yeah. But it's not an apple i-pod. And that is essentially what sells an i-pod.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. If anyone other than Apple had come up with such a sleek design and neat interface, it would quite probably have done just as well. I have no quarrel with the SanDisk device mentioned by the GP, but micro-SD cards tend to hold a maximum of only 8GB (last time I looked) and the interface is IMHO only OK if you've never had better.The iPod is just a really well-thought-out product in its own right. It does (pretty much) only one thing and does it well.
Which is why, although I love my iPods, I am not considering buying an iPhone. The latter just doesn't have the storage capacity I (now) find I need, I don't need all those bells and whistles and shiny things, and I do not want any gadget that has to be charged every day, especially if the battery is non-removable.
Well my iPod already died, so he was spot on with that one. The proprietary battery lasted about a year, and it would cost about as much as a new iPod to replace it.
The battery in my old iPod Mini gave me several good years of hard use, but is now defunct. I have now relegated that machine to the car, where it remains permamently plugged into a RoadTrip FM transmitter. Figure if anyone steals it, it won't be worth a cent at any hock shop.
This gave me the "excuse" to go and treat myself to a 160GB iPod Classic, which meets my storage needs better. Say what you will (and I think Woz is wrong about this) the iPod does offer pretty much the best bang for your buck in terms of capacity, at least here in Australia, and while there's a market for portable music players, I see no reason why the iPod should die any time soon.