At present, Apple won't license their "MagSafe" connector to anyone.
Indeed. But from my experience, there are times when life might be easier without it. Yes, it does prevent breaking things if you yank too hard on the cable, and that's cool. But unless it (and the socket) is quite new, it doesn't always make a good connection. And as time goes by, the magnetism loses some of its mojo and the plug develops an annoying tendency to fall off the computer if you so much as look at it sideways.
On balance, I think I preferred the physical plugs Apple used with their iBooks.
But there are a couple of little things Apple did get right with both models: the fold-out "arms" on the transformer for stowing the cable neatly, and the orange/green light on the plug that tells us at a glance whether or not the battery is charged. These features are so simple and obvious, they should be commonplace.
24 users is less a study, and more a reason to declare "further research needed"
This is true. It falls 1 short of the required 25 samples to satisfy central limits on the normal distribution.
And even that falls far short of a useful comparison and analysis. We can't draw any conclusions other than our own anecdotal impressions. From my experience, well-presented text on paper is vastly preferable to the "best" digital impressions. But I am perfectly happy to admit that that subjective viewpoint may not be shared by others.
I am not in principle against e-books, but where I make a distinction is when a text is likely to be subjected to re-reading. For instance (and yes, I am taking the piss here), a business management text isn't worth committing to print, since its content will have no value beyond three months after publication (if then).
If he makes his money from people staging his musicals, then likely he won't make much money because there will never be sufficient numbers of musicals happening.
If you take the trouble to RTFA, he tells us how he makes money out of his work. And no, I'm not going to spell it out for you. Go look for yourself - the article is well enough written, so there's no excuse not to read it.
I wonder in how many countries outside the US these prepaid cards are available as you describe. I've never seen them available in supermarkets in the UK, Europe or here in Australia.
Though most of the regular banks offer some sort of Visa or Mastercard debit card...
So either the price is too high and people like him are suffering (Ha!) because of people who are downloading it, or the price is right and this guy has no reason to complain.
This Brown guy did not say at any point in the article (which, I might add, is well worth the read) that he was starving. He was simply asking nicely for people not to share his music illegally.
$3.99 for a piece of sheet music that one can re-use indefinitely doesn't seem like an outrageous charge to me. I don't think he's being unreasonable in asking people to respect the law, if not somple decency: if you like a work enough to want to perform it, it's reasonable to ask you to pay a small amount for a legit copy of the sheet music.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. You would still be legally liable for royalty payments to the songwriter, which get taken from your sales of performance tickets. That's a wholly different issue to the distribution of replica copies of sheet music.
The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
...Which is exactly what the article is about. From the teenager's perspective, she's grown up in an environment where virtually all content is available at the click of a mouse, without having so strain a single neuron in consideration of the implications of that.
And it is easy to sympathise with her point of view as a teenager without a credit card and without family supportive of her theatre. But nonetheless, the composer has a perfectly valid point - in fact, several.
One area where he could have made his case a bit better is that the teenager was apparently offering his work for "trade" (whatever that might mean), which actually does not fit quite so conveniently with the image of a struggling artist in need of sheet music.
Any optical assessment is based on the subjective evaluation of the assessee. Which, I guess, is why I (a scientist accustomed to giving accurate observations) tend to get better results with my optometrist than my mother-in-law who typically gives very woolly observations, and consequently ends up with prescriptions that leave her legally blind.
There's at least two sides to that: (1) the glasses mentioned in your link have limited application where the wearer has comparatively complex issues such as astigmatism, and (2) many glasses donation programs have been shut down. I recently attempted to offload a few pairs of old-prescription glasses here in Western Australia, only to be informed that such programs were now regarded as counter-productive at best. As a result, they ended up in the bin. I can actually understand the reasoning behind this, but it is a bit disappointing to have to thus discard something that had obvious value.
While the traveler is in China it's probably not a good idea to risk legal issues with the Chinese government.
This is a good point. Most of us in the so-called "Western World" tend to presume a degree of transparency in legal processes. This does not occur in China, and if you are even arrested, you can pretty much assume that you will be found guilty of whatever charges are brought against you.
Exactly. Nice simple solution. The only drawback might be if you want to pull lots of video feeds, but I doubt if China is going to much trouble to block YouTube.
I can also see lots of latency happening with VOIP, but again, I doubt if that's what the Great Firewall is blocking.
It isn't the general population causing the VPN problems we have with people travelling in China...
No. It's the fact that some people are cheapskates. Anyone can subscribe to an offshore VPN for less than US$10/month. Given that the OP is only in China for a few weeks, I don't see what he's whining about. After all, he will probably have to spend that amount on a power adaptor for his laptop.
ask the manufacturer to produce more reasonable software that splits those 80GB files into a number of smaller ones that most filesystems can manage.
In my case, I use HFS+ on my external HDDs. Linux has supported it for some time, and I have had no problems with it. UFS has only recently become supported as -rw in Linux, and as such should (IMO) should be treated with some caution.
I avoid any of the FATs or NTFS because I don't like the way they fuck up *nix permissions.
Any Linux install disc will do. Lots of my friends swear by Knoppix or various other liveCDs, but I just use an old Slackware install disc that is usually somewhere near the top of the pile. My own Arch Linux disc hasn't been used for years (the rolling-release thingy makes installation a once-in-a-lifetime event), so it's close to the bottom of the heap.
Sort of (but not quite) off-topic:
Why, oh why do these idiots have to spread such a small article over two pages? I can't think of a single valid reason to do so (unless pissing off your readers is valid).
It is this spyware aspect of Chrome that bothers me most. OK, it is reasonably snappy (but so is FF if you don't overload it), and the UI is OK if you happen to like it. (I'm not a huge fan, but I'm quite happy to admit that's just me.)
But the handful of extensions that I find most useful with FF are exactly those that Google has no commercial interest in permitting to function, so I'll leave Chrome to those who like it.
Memory use isn't an issue at all: none of my machines are that powerful by today's standards, but I NEVER have problems with Firefox swamping my RAM. I would contend that anyone who finds that it does so should take a good look at how they are using it. Think of it like this (and no, I will NOT use a car analogy):
If you work a power-tool really hard, you have to allow intervals where you let it cool down and you take time to sharpen the cutting edges. Similarly, it makes sense to close your browser (or any non-trivial program for that matter) occasionally and allow the OS to do its garbage collection as best it can.
I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.
Same here. Firefox has reached a maturity that offers excellent functionality in its basic form. A few well-chosen extensions enhance the experience (in my case, Adblock, Flashblock, BetterPrivacy, New Tab Homepage, Pearl Crescent Page Saver and Torbutton), but those who install hundreds of extensions and then whine about how "bloated" Firefox is need to go take a cold shower.
Taking the time to set up a solid browser of your choice to do just what you need it to, and no more, is a path to contentment. Back in the day, while Phoenix (as it was then) was in its infancy, I didn't give it any thought, since the old Mozilla browser was a far superior product if you took just a little time to build a browser-only standalone version with just the right options to run well on your system. I never needed the kitchensink, mail client, website editor and who knows what else was freighted in with the default package.
Why would we? That's what flashblock is for. Flash is so ubiquitous and typically so devoid of content, there is little to choose between current-day websites populated with shiny widgets and the horrible flashing.gif ads that we saw all too much of a few years ago.
I'm not saying that Flash is universally bad or unwholesome (though actually it mostly is), but it hogs bandwidth and mindspace completely unnecessarily. Easier to tune it out; Flashblock lets you decide which bits of content might be worth seeing.
That said, I think too much is being made of this crash issue. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and I have rarely experienced a browser crash. If you're working it so hard that it swallows up all the RAM on your system, you only have yourself to blame.
It doesn't actually cost you anything to close your browser once in a while, and let your computer clear its decks.
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At present, Apple won't license their "MagSafe" connector to anyone.
Indeed. But from my experience, there are times when life might be easier without it. Yes, it does prevent breaking things if you yank too hard on the cable, and that's cool. But unless it (and the socket) is quite new, it doesn't always make a good connection. And as time goes by, the magnetism loses some of its mojo and the plug develops an annoying tendency to fall off the computer if you so much as look at it sideways.
On balance, I think I preferred the physical plugs Apple used with their iBooks.
But there are a couple of little things Apple did get right with both models: the fold-out "arms" on the transformer for stowing the cable neatly, and the orange/green light on the plug that tells us at a glance whether or not the battery is charged. These features are so simple and obvious, they should be commonplace.
Has anyone done any comparative study on how long balloons stay inflated with hydrogen vs. helium? I can imagine there might be quite a difference.
Books should be read carefully and slowly. What's the rush?
Since I've already posted in this thread, I can't mod you up, Mr. A.C., but you're 100% correct.
24 users is less a study, and more a reason to declare "further research needed"
This is true. It falls 1 short of the required 25 samples to satisfy central limits on the normal distribution.
And even that falls far short of a useful comparison and analysis. We can't draw any conclusions other than our own anecdotal impressions. From my experience, well-presented text on paper is vastly preferable to the "best" digital impressions. But I am perfectly happy to admit that that subjective viewpoint may not be shared by others.
I am not in principle against e-books, but where I make a distinction is when a text is likely to be subjected to re-reading. For instance (and yes, I am taking the piss here), a business management text isn't worth committing to print, since its content will have no value beyond three months after publication (if then).
If he makes his money from people staging his musicals, then likely he won't make much money because there will never be sufficient numbers of musicals happening.
If you take the trouble to RTFA, he tells us how he makes money out of his work. And no, I'm not going to spell it out for you. Go look for yourself - the article is well enough written, so there's no excuse not to read it.
I wonder in how many countries outside the US these prepaid cards are available as you describe. I've never seen them available in supermarkets in the UK, Europe or here in Australia.
Though most of the regular banks offer some sort of Visa or Mastercard debit card...
So either the price is too high and people like him are suffering (Ha!) because of people who are downloading it, or the price is right and this guy has no reason to complain.
This Brown guy did not say at any point in the article (which, I might add, is well worth the read) that he was starving. He was simply asking nicely for people not to share his music illegally.
$3.99 for a piece of sheet music that one can re-use indefinitely doesn't seem like an outrageous charge to me. I don't think he's being unreasonable in asking people to respect the law, if not somple decency: if you like a work enough to want to perform it, it's reasonable to ask you to pay a small amount for a legit copy of the sheet music.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. You would still be legally liable for royalty payments to the songwriter, which get taken from your sales of performance tickets. That's a wholly different issue to the distribution of replica copies of sheet music.
The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
...Which is exactly what the article is about. From the teenager's perspective, she's grown up in an environment where virtually all content is available at the click of a mouse, without having so strain a single neuron in consideration of the implications of that.
And it is easy to sympathise with her point of view as a teenager without a credit card and without family supportive of her theatre. But nonetheless, the composer has a perfectly valid point - in fact, several.
One area where he could have made his case a bit better is that the teenager was apparently offering his work for "trade" (whatever that might mean), which actually does not fit quite so conveniently with the image of a struggling artist in need of sheet music.
Any optical assessment is based on the subjective evaluation of the assessee. Which, I guess, is why I (a scientist accustomed to giving accurate observations) tend to get better results with my optometrist than my mother-in-law who typically gives very woolly observations, and consequently ends up with prescriptions that leave her legally blind.
I know a couple of people who actually drive cars wearing those damn things. Scary.
No need for the donated used glasses...
There's at least two sides to that:
(1) the glasses mentioned in your link have limited application where the wearer has comparatively complex issues such as astigmatism, and
(2) many glasses donation programs have been shut down. I recently attempted to offload a few pairs of old-prescription glasses here in Western Australia, only to be informed that such programs were now regarded as counter-productive at best. As a result, they ended up in the bin. I can actually understand the reasoning behind this, but it is a bit disappointing to have to thus discard something that had obvious value.
While the traveler is in China it's probably not a good idea to risk legal issues with the Chinese government.
This is a good point. Most of us in the so-called "Western World" tend to presume a degree of transparency in legal processes. This does not occur in China, and if you are even arrested, you can pretty much assume that you will be found guilty of whatever charges are brought against you.
But should be enough for basic browsing.
Exactly. Nice simple solution. The only drawback might be if you want to pull lots of video feeds, but I doubt if China is going to much trouble to block YouTube.
I can also see lots of latency happening with VOIP, but again, I doubt if that's what the Great Firewall is blocking.
It isn't the general population causing the VPN problems we have with people travelling in China...
No. It's the fact that some people are cheapskates. Anyone can subscribe to an offshore VPN for less than US$10/month. Given that the OP is only in China for a few weeks, I don't see what he's whining about. After all, he will probably have to spend that amount on a power adaptor for his laptop.
ask the manufacturer to produce more reasonable software that splits those 80GB files into a number of smaller ones that most filesystems can manage.
In my case, I use HFS+ on my external HDDs. Linux has supported it for some time, and I have had no problems with it. UFS has only recently become supported as -rw in Linux, and as such should (IMO) should be treated with some caution.
I avoid any of the FATs or NTFS because I don't like the way they fuck up *nix permissions.
...and that anything you type must be preceded with "sudo ".
You can get around that by typing "sudo su".
If you like him, you might also like William Shakespeare.
Any Linux install disc will do. Lots of my friends swear by Knoppix or various other liveCDs, but I just use an old Slackware install disc that is usually somewhere near the top of the pile. My own Arch Linux disc hasn't been used for years (the rolling-release thingy makes installation a once-in-a-lifetime event), so it's close to the bottom of the heap.
Sort of (but not quite) off-topic:
Why, oh why do these idiots have to spread such a small article over two pages? I can't think of a single valid reason to do so (unless pissing off your readers is valid).
Sometimes you're not sure if the troll is a troll, or just a misguided conservative.
;-)
Well, if it helps, the two are usually the same, and conservatives are always misguided.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of using soda-cans as a heat-sink - though obviously, I can see why that would work.
:-D
Only thing is, I don't keep soda-cans. Guess beer will do...
It is this spyware aspect of Chrome that bothers me most. OK, it is reasonably snappy (but so is FF if you don't overload it), and the UI is OK if you happen to like it. (I'm not a huge fan, but I'm quite happy to admit that's just me.)
But the handful of extensions that I find most useful with FF are exactly those that Google has no commercial interest in permitting to function, so I'll leave Chrome to those who like it. Memory use isn't an issue at all: none of my machines are that powerful by today's standards, but I NEVER have problems with Firefox swamping my RAM. I would contend that anyone who finds that it does so should take a good look at how they are using it. Think of it like this (and no, I will NOT use a car analogy):
If you work a power-tool really hard, you have to allow intervals where you let it cool down and you take time to sharpen the cutting edges. Similarly, it makes sense to close your browser (or any non-trivial program for that matter) occasionally and allow the OS to do its garbage collection as best it can.
I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.
Same here. Firefox has reached a maturity that offers excellent functionality in its basic form. A few well-chosen extensions enhance the experience (in my case, Adblock, Flashblock, BetterPrivacy, New Tab Homepage, Pearl Crescent Page Saver and Torbutton), but those who install hundreds of extensions and then whine about how "bloated" Firefox is need to go take a cold shower.
Taking the time to set up a solid browser of your choice to do just what you need it to, and no more, is a path to contentment. Back in the day, while Phoenix (as it was then) was in its infancy, I didn't give it any thought, since the old Mozilla browser was a far superior product if you took just a little time to build a browser-only standalone version with just the right options to run well on your system. I never needed the kitchensink, mail client, website editor and who knows what else was freighted in with the default package.
Do you open flash heavy sites?
.gif ads that we saw all too much of a few years ago.
Why would we? That's what flashblock is for. Flash is so ubiquitous and typically so devoid of content, there is little to choose between current-day websites populated with shiny widgets and the horrible flashing
I'm not saying that Flash is universally bad or unwholesome (though actually it mostly is), but it hogs bandwidth and mindspace completely unnecessarily. Easier to tune it out; Flashblock lets you decide which bits of content might be worth seeing.
That said, I think too much is being made of this crash issue. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix, and I have rarely experienced a browser crash. If you're working it so hard that it swallows up all the RAM on your system, you only have yourself to blame.
It doesn't actually cost you anything to close your browser once in a while, and let your computer clear its decks.
...you. may loose calls.
...and your grammatical and spelling accuracy may be attenuated.