I don't think their claim really is without merit. Allofmp3 is still basically stealing, so that's out. Of course you can put ANY mp3 on your iPod, but that's sort of required for any device claiming to be an "mp3 player" then isn't it (I'm looking at you Sony)? So that's not really special.
Now, it used to be that iTunes *was* the only legitimate music store that iPod users could buy music from. The RealPlayer music store was an option for Windows iPod users for a while, as they used some kind of workaround the iPod DRM to load their music on there, but I'm sure that's been prevented now as Apple vigorously protects its lock-in strategy (and wasn't an option for Mac ipod users anyway).
hymn *was* an option for iTunes users to rip the DRM out, but as of iTunes 4.7 it isn't anymore. As yet another case of DRM keeping you from doing with your own property as you wish (technically licensed, but whatever), hymn doesn't work with iTunes 4.7x so you can no longer get at the unprotected AAC anymore.
Take a good look at the Rio Carbon if you're going for the mini MP3 player market. 5GB Seagate HD, and it'll work just as well as the Creative will. It will also differ from the iPod in the same important ways (eg AAC and ITMS), but the user interface is top notch as is the controls (on par with the iPod I'd say; a scroll wheel works much better than a touch strip or whatever creative is using nowadays).
Uh, what? Middle clicking has been on by default in Firefox for a long time. In fact, that was one of the things that aggravated me about the Mozilla suite for a while. By default, at least back in the 1.3 days, the tabs were set to not load in the background, not work with middle click, and not work with CTRL-Enter. Firefox has all of those set on by default. And actually, I just checked, and Mozilla 1.7.3 still has those options turned off by default.
By sticking with the suite, you're missing out on all that Firefox has to offer. Extensions kick ass, being able to customize your toolbar easily is great. Firefox has features like the infobar clone, the new plugin installer (makes installing stuff like Flash much easier than before). Even more importantly, Thunderbird has stuff like turning off web images by default, with a handy dandy button to turn them back on (kills web bugs dead), RSS news feeder, etc.
Individually these features are perhaps not huge, but in a single package they add up to a compelling product, even if you're using Mozilla suite.
That being said, you of course still have the kickass Gecko engine with the suite (and with 1.7.5, the point of this release was to ensure compatibility with Firefox and Thunderbird, as the Gecko release is the same in all 3 now) and popup blocking and such, which provides about 90% of the reason to not use IE anyway.
Nightly builds are currently suffering from some instability after the recent branch merge (lots of features only lived on the branch until now, and only recently became available on the trunk, like extension/theme manager and find bar). If you're a happy 1.0.0 user, it might be advisable to stick with that for a while until the nightlies stabalize a bit more. A list of important bugs and fixes can be found here
As a Mac user, you probably should anyway, especially since IE/Mac is dead in the water and will never ever be updated again, period.
That's about as a good a reason to switch to something else as any. Nevermind the fact that every other browser on Mac OSX is far better anyway. It's not like IE/Mac always displays pages written for IE/Win perfectly anyway; the engines were completely different to begin with.
They'd leverage their huge media empire and undercut their competitors. After all, Sony is the only other competitor that has their own media empire, and they're not really doing much with it (other than pushing their stupid ATRAC3 format). I imagine AOL would get a nice foothold in the industry if they managed to sell all Warner Music songs at, say, 80c each instead of the standard 99c. This might end up triggering a price war between everyone.
Though, now that I'm looking, I can't find any actual listing of Warner Music Group being affiliated with Time Warner at all. I assume it'd be a subcompany of Warner Bros., but it doesn't appear to be so, at least going by the timewarner.com site.
All Palms with the Universal Connector support RS232 (up to Tungsten T3).
The Tungsten T5 now appears as a USB storage drive when connected to the computer.
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)
The T3 and T5 both let you drop the virtual grafitti space to let you use the entire screen in either portrait or landscape mode.
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). You'll be happy to know that PalmOne keeps a close eye on battery life on all their products though; it's just one of their design requirements.
Blame Xerox (http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47363,0 0.html). They're the reasons they switched to Graffiti 2 to begin with.
Although PalmSource did end up winning in the end, they decided to stick with it because they claim it's easier on users. (http://ir.thomsonfn.com/InvestorRelations/PubNews Story.aspx?partner=5150&product=IR&storyid=114652) . So, in the end it's PalmSource's fault, but Xerox started it all:)
XBOX2 (or XBOX Next): IBM CPU, ATi GPU Future Nintendos: IBM CPU(?), ATi GPU PS3: IBM/Sony CPU, Sony/nvidia GPU
Also keep in mind that this time, Microsoft is trying to get the first-mover advantage, something that the PS2 had and enjoyed quite a bit of success from.
Copy protection ineffectual? Sure, it's obviously already been cracked. However, it's effectual in other ways, such as was seen before the official release when they were able to keep a tightlid lock on the distribution of leaked copies beforehand. It's also effective in that if I want to buy a copy of HL2 and am too lazy to go to the store, all I need to do is go through Steam, buy it and download it there with little to no wait. But that's not important.
You say that Steam has made it impossible for many people to play the game? Who, and how, I ask? The requirement of an internet connection is clearly stated on the box, and honestly, how many people don't have internet connections nowadays? If you have dialup, the sad state of affairs is that downloading updates is going to take a while, whether through steam or in the standard.EXE updater, but it'll work. Of course, you won't be able to download *all* of HL2 through Steam, but that's why there's the retail pack.
Won't have an internet connection for a while? That's why there's offline mode, and it keeps your Steam login ticket for 30 days, which is more than enough for almost any occasion.
Steam may take long to start up, but it's also a big game anyway. Get up, drink some water while it starts up.
I have yet to hear of a widespread significant instance where Steam caused the game to be unplayable for many people. If you disagree with the game or their strategy and refuse to buy it, good for you, I respect that (and hope you aren't pirating it either).
Stellar game, wonderfully executed, and almost perfect in playability. You can tell that they cared and spent a lot of time on this game, cause it shows.
I docked my personal rating by.5 because of Steam. While it's a pretty good system overall (msging other people within the game using Friends is pretty cool, as is following them from server to server with the same client), it obviously had its growing pains on opening day. However, as far as I can tell, the flood of people from then is gone now, as Steam's bandwidth usage is well under its maximum capacity now (http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html), so trying the game now should pose no problem for anybody.
My big problem is that the retail version has a CD check everytime you try to start it up. This is incredibly stupid, because not only has my CD key already been verified, people who bought it off of Steam don't have to go through this unnecessary step.
Is this a widespread thing (as in, all Best Buys), or is it just relegated to a couple rogue ones? Because if it's all BestBuys, well damn, I'd better head down there right now:)
While this is bad news for Palm, it's not so bad in that this really just reflects their current strategy: stay in the PDA business, but don't break the bank on it. They believe convergent devices are a huge part of their future (they're already selling 2 different treo models, and are definitely going to continue making more), and who's to blame them? Nowadays, I don't want to carry two devices when I can only carry one. If bluetooth had taken off more in US cellphones (thank you very much Verizon) then we might be seeing a different picture, but as it is, the PDA market is considered dead and/or stagnant.
"A decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude," Mr. Kort said. "The company is pouring the vast majority of its resources into its smartphone business. A reduction in the number of PDA models palmOne offers is expected in 2005."
Most certainly bad for Palm, but not quite a deathknell. Another two aspects of trickery in this report: this only includes numbers of units *shipped,* not numbers of units *sold.* There is indeed a difference. I'm sure that PalmOne sold less devices in this quarter, but I'm pretty sure these numbers don't include much in the way of the new T5 (meaning it's likely people were still waiting to see what new stuff Palm would have) and who's to say that there isn't a backlog of iPaqs sitting in some warehouse somewhere, waiting to be sold?
Link to another article with the same numbers: http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=72 98
Someone should have informed you of the product Documents to Go, widely regarded as better integrating with Office products than, well, Office.
For instance, Pocket Word tends to screw up formatted tables, inline images, formatting, the like, while Docs to Go has repeatably demonstrated in the past that their product does not. Sames goes for things like Pocket Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Walt Mossberg had a great article on this a while ago. What's more, DTG practically comes with every Palm product nowadays.
While this may have changed in the most recent future (last I heard "Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003" still had this problem), I doubt 2005 greatly changed it. Now of course, perception is everything, and one might *think* PocketPCs would be better with office, but as we know perception is not always in line with reality.
RealPlayer 10 to the rescue! Since it's based on Helix, it's got an Open Source brother (think Netscape 6/7 vs. Mozilla suite). On Linux, it's completely unrelated to its Windows cousin other than name, and supporting the Real formats. Installer comes with a handy dandy Mozilla plugin, and supports RealAudio/Video 7-10 I believe, as well as a lot of the free/open formats (ogg being the notable one).
Of course, you're still up shit creek if it's Windows Media.
This is *not* ATI's first attempt at an AMD chipset. Their first attempt was quite a while ago, the Radeon IGP 320 and 320M (similar Intel version was the 340). IIRC, the 320 was targeted at desktops, but never really ever took off. The 320M/340M, however, did reasonably well I think. At least I saw it appear in quite a few Hpaq laptops, and considering that those gave you similar performance to a Radeon 7000 it was great relative to other integrated graphics at the time (which isn't saying much, but if you're buying a budget system it's worth it). However, those early chipsets weren't incredibly good at being chipsets; they were merely passable.
The great thing about these chipsets are that they deliver adequate true DX9-performance (nforce2 IGPs were basically GF2MXs, or DX7 grade) whilst being really good chipsets at the same time. I expect the selling point of these will be to OEMs for systems without graphics cards to cut on costs, but still deliver enough performance to play the Sims and the occasional FPS at low settings.
Because you would be bitching a lot more if you upgraded your browser, an extension wasn't known to be compatible and managed to screw things up. In this instance, you would be crying all over the internet "Firefox 1.1 is BUGGY! DON'T USE IT." And if not "you" you, then consider the other people out on the internet, the non/. readers who aren't quite so adept at what's going on.
Back in the days of Phoenix/Firebird/Ffx 0.8, this was certainly a good possibility, as many extensions did break from release to release. This system now ensures they don't have an opportunity to, though it does leave you with some inconvenience at the bleeding edge of release. Have faith, wait a week or two, and your extension will be updated by the author.
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I don't think their claim really is without merit. Allofmp3 is still basically stealing, so that's out. Of course you can put ANY mp3 on your iPod, but that's sort of required for any device claiming to be an "mp3 player" then isn't it (I'm looking at you Sony)? So that's not really special.
Now, it used to be that iTunes *was* the only legitimate music store that iPod users could buy music from. The RealPlayer music store was an option for Windows iPod users for a while, as they used some kind of workaround the iPod DRM to load their music on there, but I'm sure that's been prevented now as Apple vigorously protects its lock-in strategy (and wasn't an option for Mac ipod users anyway).
hymn *was* an option for iTunes users to rip the DRM out, but as of iTunes 4.7 it isn't anymore. As yet another case of DRM keeping you from doing with your own property as you wish (technically licensed, but whatever), hymn doesn't work with iTunes 4.7x so you can no longer get at the unprotected AAC anymore.
Take a good look at the Rio Carbon if you're going for the mini MP3 player market. 5GB Seagate HD, and it'll work just as well as the Creative will. It will also differ from the iPod in the same important ways (eg AAC and ITMS), but the user interface is top notch as is the controls (on par with the iPod I'd say; a scroll wheel works much better than a touch strip or whatever creative is using nowadays).
Bad, bad freshman! Divulging trade secrets like that!
Now you have to suffer the wrath of Apple's newest product, iHazing!
(yes, this was a joke attempt)
Then it might interest you to know that SP2 fixes this. The yellow bar you're talking about was actually a feature lifted from IE6SP2.
However, just as in Firefox, you can temporarily allow the Activex thing to install, so it's nearly your own fault if you let your guard down.
Uh, what? Middle clicking has been on by default in Firefox for a long time. In fact, that was one of the things that aggravated me about the Mozilla suite for a while. By default, at least back in the 1.3 days, the tabs were set to not load in the background, not work with middle click, and not work with CTRL-Enter. Firefox has all of those set on by default. And actually, I just checked, and Mozilla 1.7.3 still has those options turned off by default.
By sticking with the suite, you're missing out on all that Firefox has to offer. Extensions kick ass, being able to customize your toolbar easily is great. Firefox has features like the infobar clone, the new plugin installer (makes installing stuff like Flash much easier than before). Even more importantly, Thunderbird has stuff like turning off web images by default, with a handy dandy button to turn them back on (kills web bugs dead), RSS news feeder, etc.
Individually these features are perhaps not huge, but in a single package they add up to a compelling product, even if you're using Mozilla suite.
That being said, you of course still have the kickass Gecko engine with the suite (and with 1.7.5, the point of this release was to ensure compatibility with Firefox and Thunderbird, as the Gecko release is the same in all 3 now) and popup blocking and such, which provides about 90% of the reason to not use IE anyway.
Seeing as how Yahoo owns Overture, which owns AltaVista, I think it's pretty easy to see where this new video search comes from. :)
mmplayer, great for playing multimedia video files without having to convert them into Kinoma.
File size limitations in Memo Pad were fixed from the Tungsten T3/Zire72 on.
Nightly builds are currently suffering from some instability after the recent branch merge (lots of features only lived on the branch until now, and only recently became available on the trunk, like extension/theme manager and find bar). If you're a happy 1.0.0 user, it might be advisable to stick with that for a while until the nightlies stabalize a bit more. A list of important bugs and fixes can be found here
As a Mac user, you probably should anyway, especially since IE/Mac is dead in the water and will never ever be updated again, period.
That's about as a good a reason to switch to something else as any. Nevermind the fact that every other browser on Mac OSX is far better anyway. It's not like IE/Mac always displays pages written for IE/Win perfectly anyway; the engines were completely different to begin with.
They'd leverage their huge media empire and undercut their competitors. After all, Sony is the only other competitor that has their own media empire, and they're not really doing much with it (other than pushing their stupid ATRAC3 format). I imagine AOL would get a nice foothold in the industry if they managed to sell all Warner Music songs at, say, 80c each instead of the standard 99c. This might end up triggering a price war between everyone.
Though, now that I'm looking, I can't find any actual listing of Warner Music Group being affiliated with Time Warner at all. I assume it'd be a subcompany of Warner Bros., but it doesn't appear to be so, at least going by the timewarner.com site.
All Palms with the Universal Connector support RS232 (up to Tungsten T3).
The Tungsten T5 now appears as a USB storage drive when connected to the computer.
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)
The T3 and T5 both let you drop the virtual grafitti space to let you use the entire screen in either portrait or landscape mode.
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). You'll be happy to know that PalmOne keeps a close eye on battery life on all their products though; it's just one of their design requirements.
Blame Xerox (http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47363,0 0.html). They're the reasons they switched to Graffiti 2 to begin with.
s Story.aspx?partner=5150&product=IR&storyid=114652) . So, in the end it's PalmSource's fault, but Xerox started it all :)
Although PalmSource did end up winning in the end, they decided to stick with it because they claim it's easier on users. (http://ir.thomsonfn.com/InvestorRelations/PubNew
XBOX2 (or XBOX Next): IBM CPU, ATi GPU
Future Nintendos: IBM CPU(?), ATi GPU
PS3: IBM/Sony CPU, Sony/nvidia GPU
Also keep in mind that this time, Microsoft is trying to get the first-mover advantage, something that the PS2 had and enjoyed quite a bit of success from.
Copy protection ineffectual? Sure, it's obviously already been cracked. However, it's effectual in other ways, such as was seen before the official release when they were able to keep a tightlid lock on the distribution of leaked copies beforehand. It's also effective in that if I want to buy a copy of HL2 and am too lazy to go to the store, all I need to do is go through Steam, buy it and download it there with little to no wait. But that's not important.
.EXE updater, but it'll work. Of course, you won't be able to download *all* of HL2 through Steam, but that's why there's the retail pack.
You say that Steam has made it impossible for many people to play the game? Who, and how, I ask? The requirement of an internet connection is clearly stated on the box, and honestly, how many people don't have internet connections nowadays? If you have dialup, the sad state of affairs is that downloading updates is going to take a while, whether through steam or in the standard
Won't have an internet connection for a while? That's why there's offline mode, and it keeps your Steam login ticket for 30 days, which is more than enough for almost any occasion.
Steam may take long to start up, but it's also a big game anyway. Get up, drink some water while it starts up.
I have yet to hear of a widespread significant instance where Steam caused the game to be unplayable for many people. If you disagree with the game or their strategy and refuse to buy it, good for you, I respect that (and hope you aren't pirating it either).
Stellar game, wonderfully executed, and almost perfect in playability. You can tell that they cared and spent a lot of time on this game, cause it shows.
.5 because of Steam. While it's a pretty good system overall (msging other people within the game using Friends is pretty cool, as is following them from server to server with the same client), it obviously had its growing pains on opening day. However, as far as I can tell, the flood of people from then is gone now, as Steam's bandwidth usage is well under its maximum capacity now (http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html), so trying the game now should pose no problem for anybody.
I docked my personal rating by
My big problem is that the retail version has a CD check everytime you try to start it up. This is incredibly stupid, because not only has my CD key already been verified, people who bought it off of Steam don't have to go through this unnecessary step.
Is this a widespread thing (as in, all Best Buys), or is it just relegated to a couple rogue ones? Because if it's all BestBuys, well damn, I'd better head down there right now :)
While this is bad news for Palm, it's not so bad in that this really just reflects their current strategy: stay in the PDA business, but don't break the bank on it. They believe convergent devices are a huge part of their future (they're already selling 2 different treo models, and are definitely going to continue making more), and who's to blame them? Nowadays, I don't want to carry two devices when I can only carry one. If bluetooth had taken off more in US cellphones (thank you very much Verizon) then we might be seeing a different picture, but as it is, the PDA market is considered dead and/or stagnant.
2 98
"A decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude," Mr. Kort said. "The company is pouring the vast majority of its resources into its smartphone business. A reduction in the number of PDA models palmOne offers is expected in 2005."
Most certainly bad for Palm, but not quite a deathknell. Another two aspects of trickery in this report: this only includes numbers of units *shipped,* not numbers of units *sold.* There is indeed a difference. I'm sure that PalmOne sold less devices in this quarter, but I'm pretty sure these numbers don't include much in the way of the new T5 (meaning it's likely people were still waiting to see what new stuff Palm would have) and who's to say that there isn't a backlog of iPaqs sitting in some warehouse somewhere, waiting to be sold?
Link to another article with the same numbers: http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=7
For instance, Pocket Word tends to screw up formatted tables, inline images, formatting, the like, while Docs to Go has repeatably demonstrated in the past that their product does not. Sames goes for things like Pocket Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Walt Mossberg had a great article on this a while ago. What's more, DTG practically comes with every Palm product nowadays.
While this may have changed in the most recent future (last I heard "Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003" still had this problem), I doubt 2005 greatly changed it. Now of course, perception is everything, and one might *think* PocketPCs would be better with office, but as we know perception is not always in line with reality.
RealPlayer 10 to the rescue! Since it's based on Helix, it's got an Open Source brother (think Netscape 6/7 vs. Mozilla suite). On Linux, it's completely unrelated to its Windows cousin other than name, and supporting the Real formats. Installer comes with a handy dandy Mozilla plugin, and supports RealAudio/Video 7-10 I believe, as well as a lot of the free/open formats (ogg being the notable one).
Of course, you're still up shit creek if it's Windows Media.
This is *not* ATI's first attempt at an AMD chipset. Their first attempt was quite a while ago, the Radeon IGP 320 and 320M (similar Intel version was the 340). IIRC, the 320 was targeted at desktops, but never really ever took off. The 320M/340M, however, did reasonably well I think. At least I saw it appear in quite a few Hpaq laptops, and considering that those gave you similar performance to a Radeon 7000 it was great relative to other integrated graphics at the time (which isn't saying much, but if you're buying a budget system it's worth it). However, those early chipsets weren't incredibly good at being chipsets; they were merely passable.
The great thing about these chipsets are that they deliver adequate true DX9-performance (nforce2 IGPs were basically GF2MXs, or DX7 grade) whilst being really good chipsets at the same time. I expect the selling point of these will be to OEMs for systems without graphics cards to cut on costs, but still deliver enough performance to play the Sims and the occasional FPS at low settings.
(nelson laugh)
Ha-ha!
of course, if it were anyone else, this would suck. However, I consider this to be "just desserts"
Netscape 7.2 is basically Mozilla 1.7(.1?) with AOL addons and ads.
Because you would be bitching a lot more if you upgraded your browser, an extension wasn't known to be compatible and managed to screw things up. In this instance, you would be crying all over the internet "Firefox 1.1 is BUGGY! DON'T USE IT." And if not "you" you, then consider the other people out on the internet, the non /. readers who aren't quite so adept at what's going on.
Back in the days of Phoenix/Firebird/Ffx 0.8, this was certainly a good possibility, as many extensions did break from release to release. This system now ensures they don't have an opportunity to, though it does leave you with some inconvenience at the bleeding edge of release. Have faith, wait a week or two, and your extension will be updated by the author.