We are both correct. Static friction is greater than dynamic friction. That is why preventing the wheels from slipping *at all* (threshold braking) is more effective than letting them slip (slamming the brakes). ABS does something in between. It alternately slams and releases the brakes. This allows the wheel to spin a little in between (and hopefully regain static friction), which also lets you steer, since the wheels must be turning to have any effect. When it slams the brakes again, it does have the effect of slowing the car, until the static friction is broken and the wheel locks, then it repeats the process.
My statements were based on my (frequent) observation that I can bring my car to a stop much more quickly in the snow by easing up a little on the brake, and not letting the wheels slip (and ABS activate). On rainy or dry pavement, this is much more difficult (and requires greater speed and braking force), this is where ABS (or professional race car drivers) is useful, in snow, if you know what you are doing, you are much better off without it.
I have a 94 Acura Integra with ABS. Incidentally, I got stuck in my parking space this morning because the slush froze up around my wheel last night. Most likely a 4WD would have gotten me out of there much quicker... but I digress.
I live in Rochester, NY currently--the snowiest city in North America, according to some. So I have a lot of experience driving in snow, and most people around here do to.
Regarding ABS or pulsing the brakes. ABS is nice when you are in a panic situation, and slam on your brakes because you aren't thinking about what you should really do. They keep your wheels from entirely locking, so you might actually be able to steer a little bit as you slide. They don't really stop you faster than other methods, but they may allow you to steer away from your previous destination, something you could never do if your wheels are completely locked. Personally, I find my brakes are much more effective at stopping me quickly if I use "threshold braking" that is, I hold the breaks in just a little bit less than what would cause a lock (and the ABS to activate in my car). You can feel the car slide as the wheels lock even in a car without ABS, back off just a little from there and you have threshold braking.
If I need to steer while braking, even though ABS helps, it is generally better to let off the brake almost entirely. Particularly in snow, it takes a little bit of time for the wheels to actually start moving in the proper direction, and until they do, they are pretty much worthless at steering you.
Anyway, threshold braking is more effective than pulsing, at least in terms of total distance required to stop. Pulsing is good to allow you to steer for the time when your foot is off the brake. The speed of the pulse isn't important, just let off a bit when you need to steer, then apply the brake again.
No, not *all* of the money is handed over to the record companies, it is not *profitable*, which is different. That means that their hosting/development/advertising costs eat up more than the remaining share, after the record companies get theirs.
As apple sells more and more music, they are approaching profitability, because the cost of development is spread out more. Whether that will ever be enough to actually be truly profitable is another question all together
There are at least two versions of the white brick adaptor. I have a new 1.25 15" and I have a later version than my girlfriend's 800 TiBook 15". They look the same, but on closer inspection, the cord connection is a little different the new one has a stronger rubber connection, the old one had a rounded surface so the cord wouldn't rub. This is hard to explain, you'd probably need to see both to understand what I am talking about. Also, the new version seems to carry a ground connection through the heavy duty cable (the pin on the removable plug is now metal). Also, the power rating of the new version is slightly higher, and it is a tad heavier.
My favorite feature of this adaptor design is clearly the removable extension cable. When I am making day trips to school or whatever, I don't bother to carry the cable. Only on longer trips or specific occasions do I even need to carry the (bulky) heavy duty cable. Most other adaptors I've seen for Dell or other notebooks are much larger to begin with, but also require the heavy duty power cable to be carried along with it.
Well certainly you have your opinion, and others have theirs.
I have the exact opposite opinion, I've been using KDE (on SuSE) as my desktop for over 3 years now. I've been very pleased at the evolution of KDE over the years. But I have to be realistic, it is still not as clean or consistent as OS X, or to a lesser extend, Windows. There are many aspects of system maintenance and configuration that are still far behind on a linux machine. The user interface has much improved in recent years, however, I still find many of the standard K apps to be inferior to their counterparts on other operating systems.
I recently (2 months ago) purchased my first ever Mac. It is now my primary machine, and I'm not looking back at all. I use the machine for all of the tasks I used my linux machine for, and more.
I agree that eye candy does not a user interface make, however, consistency in UI elements, and accessibility of configuration options *does*. And in those areas, KDE and Linux in general still falls short.
For what it is worth, I do keep my Linux box around, although I use it much less frequently. I also was quick to delete all Microsoft software off of my new Mac (Internet Explorer and Outlook).
I'm not particularly upset at having to pay $100 a year for the privilege of using such a high-quality operating system. As a software developer, I believe in paying for software I use, so I pay for SuSE updates every year or so anyway.
Well, they could have done that (written an HFS driver). But with the newer iPods (2nd and 3rd gen) designed to support Windows, they neatly side-skirted the issue by just making them use FAT. Seems like an elegant enough solution to me. And it doesn't make life any harder for those who buy iPods for use with windows, on first use, it formats automatically, then use as normal.
IF Apple had chosen to implement an HFS driver for windows, people would be able to use older 5GB iPods with Windows as a *bonus*. However, such iPods were never intended to work in this mode, so I see no reason why Apple is too blame that this doesn't work with the new iTunes software. No one ever should have expected it to.
I wonder if Apple will "fix" this to prevent this kind of abuse, by limiting the streaming speed to some ratio of the file speed. This could be done on the server side it seems. I think it is likely if RIAA starts making noise about this. As long as Apple doesn't capitulate and remove the sharing features entirely, I'm okay with it.
I love to be able to sit on campus in the afternoon while doing homework and listen to music off of someone's computer. But I'm not interested in stealing it. I just bought 3 CDs based on first hearing them on someone's iTunes share.
Furthermore, if you put up a Kazaa share or a Windows file share or an FTP server full of MP3s, I can grab music just as quick as my bandwidth and your bandwidth will allow. With MyTunes, at best I can grab music from your iTunes share as fast as I can listen too it.
It would take someone 9 days to copy all of the songs out of my iTunes library. This further separates iTunes music sharing from file-sharing services.
I'm not familiar with the F11 feature in WindowMaker. However, I can say that it took me about a day of using Expose to realize that I can never go back. Thus, if any other OS developer wants my money ever they better have an expose-ish feature.
I explained expose to a friend of mine, and he couldn't understand out why it was better than ALT-TAB. Several reasons: first, it is a single click, not cycling through a list of windows, as with ALT-TAB. O(1) instead of O(n). Second, Expose shows you your currently open *documents*, rather than applications, and it doesn't show ones that you might have minimized or hidden. Thus it shows you what you are working on right now, not applications that might be running but aren't in active use.
I also use Expose (F11) to access the desktop (similar to minimize all). The difference is, it isn't minimizing, it is just moving them out of the way so I can access my desktop, maybe drag some files to Finder (You can open other documents/applications while Expose has moved the windows off to the side). It is also easy to restore, just click anywhere around the edge of the screen and everything zooms back to normal (or click F11 again obviously). The most important thing to remember is, you aren't minimizing (or hiding) these windows, so restoring has no effect on windows that you might already have minimized or hidden.
I've used linux as my only desktop operating systems for several years, multiple desktops were my primary way of managing multiple open applications and documents for several different tasks simultaneously. Since upgrading my weeks old mac to Panther not quite a month ago, I have totally changed the way I work, now using minimization, hiding, and expose to effectively manage my tasks. I find the new methods of doing things easier and more efficient then before (after the initial adjustment). Like I said, I couldn't imagine going back.
Not that there aren't any improvements to be made (I just can't think of any, but I'm sure someone eventually will). I have to agree that Expose is one of the most significant recent developments in windowed GUIs. Don't knock it until you've spent enough time with it to get used to it.
-Spyky
Re:Not the right product for Linux
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
The effort of porting the VCL to another platform is certainly not impossible, x86 assembly or not and I wasn't suggesting that it was. However, as you point out, it is copyrighted. This means that only Borland will be able to undertake such a porting effort, and after the market failure of Kylix, they will likely be reluctant to do so.
I realize that non-x86 Linux is a fairly small market. However, as a developer, if I'm going to chose to develop an application for linux, one of the reasons I'm going to choose linux is because of its portability. I would like my application to run on as many machines as possible. Although x86 is the most popular platform for linux currently, this is due to economics, if other cheaper desktop processors were available, such a machine would quickly become a popular choice for a linux machine. If I choose something like Kylix for development, my application will stuck on x86 linux until Borland can port the VCL.
-Spyky
Re:Not the right product for Linux
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
I was referring specifically to the type of applications that would be developed on a RAD platform (Delphi/Kylix). These apps are heavily targeted to Windows/x86.
Admittedly there is a lot of money in the areas you mentioned (networking, databases, etc...) Those types of applications are not going to be developed in a RAD environment. Additionally those types of applications demand platform portability that is generally much less important on a desktop environment. This is of course, one of the reasons why Kylix/Delphi would not be a good choice for such applications.
So yes, I agree with your point, I should have been more clear when making my original statement to specify the domain of desktop application development.
-Spyky
Not the right product for Linux
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've done some commercial development work in Delphi. It's a great environment in Windows. It's easier and faster to write than C++, it runs faster than Visual Basic or Java, and it compiles ridiculously fast. Hundreds of thousands of lines a second! Coming from C++ that is amazing, and the execution speed is pretty comparable to C/C++. It nicely wraps the Windows API and UI development is very easy.
Unfortunately, Delphi is a marginal product on Windows (for various reasons), and Windows is the platform most software development efforts target. Move it to Linux, even if you can capture the same percentage of the development market on Linux, you now have a marginal product on a marginal operating system. Not gonna work.
An additional problem is: Linux runs on a myriad of platforms, x86, PowerPC, unix workstations, you name it. Kylix/Delphi work on x86 ONLY, so although code will be portable between windows and linux, it will never be portable to any other platform. This is a problem that would be very difficult to fix, if you look at the VCL much of it is written in x86 assembler, it will take a long time, and require much effort to port it to another platform. This portability problem further reduces the market share that Kylix could ever achieve.
And then there is the problem of price, enough other people have pointed this out, so I won't repeat them. But yeah, expensive.
Actually, if I recall correctly the Blue Gene processor is a heavily modified processor designed around the POWER4 core with some very interesting caching architecture and a backplane designed to hold massive numbers of processors. The POWER4 core is of course very similar to the 970, some of the design elements of the POWER4 made their way into the commodity 970 (aka g5).
This architecture with updates to the POWER6 core will take them to the final Blue Gene with a goal of 1 petaflop.
I get up to 3:30 on my 1.25 15" (bluetooth off, airport on and active, automatic speed setting, turn off hard drive when possible). Two things I can think of. One time I left a CD in my drive when I went to school. It would randomly spin it up for no reason, that ate battery life pretty hard. Another is, I generally turn down my brightness to about 4 bars when I'm on battery. In most environments this is fine, and it really helps battery life a lot. I think I would be seeing much closer to 2:30 if I ran at higher brightness.
My usage profile in these battery only sessions are pretty light, mostly coding in vi, so I have a bunch of terminals, occasional heavy compiling, but not for long, and maybe iTunes or surfing with Safari.
I'm not astoundingly impressed with battery life on this machine. I think they ought to have put a slightly larger battery in. I'm curious to see what my dad's new 933 g4 iBook will do (it's on order). Those things have a larger battery, and should draw less power.
I've been reading some other posts, and I think I figured out why everyone thinks this is funny. I guess that is what happens when you take time off from reading Slashdot. You don't know what the latest trolls are, last I heard, we were in Soviet Russia or something.
Well, I haven't had my iPod for that long, and I wouldn't consider myself a rabid iPod fan. I think it's a nice player. I wish I would get a bit more use out of it after spending so much money on it. I guess it was a fairly frivolous expenditure.
Anyway, to make a long story short, there is clearly something wrong with your setup. I have no such delay when copying files to the iPod. Yes, music doesn't play while copying, but since it happens in a few seconds for any reasonable size file, i never figured it was much of a problem. 22 minutes! I can fill the entire hard drive in far less time than that.
Anyway, you didn't give enough information to actually diagnose the problem. You didn't say if this was a PC or Mac you were copying from, if PC, were you using firewire or USB 2.0. if USB, does the PC actually support 2.0 speeds? If you were copying over slow USB, it would take a lot longer (but probably not that long). For reference, I'm using a Mac, and I've never had these problems, maybe the PC software to communicate with the iPod has problems?
As far as iPods not running faster than other players. I guess I don't understand. What does a faster player do faster? I've never had a delay while operating the iPod such as scrolling through a list of 3000 songs or viewing large playlists. There is a brief queuing delay when selecting a new song to play, but that is going to be a problem with any hard drive based player, since it actually has to spin up the hard drive and buffer the newly selected song. Flash based players obviously don't have this effect.
The reasons why I like the iPod: size, intuitive interface, and storage space (the last being why flash based players aren't for me).
Hmm, that's interesting, I tried to figure out how to do it when I first got the computer (3 weeks ago) and I came across some sites that described the procedure, but I couldn't get it to work, so I gave up. But thanks for the info, not that I need it, because it just works now.
I have the Acme bag for my 15" AlBook. I like it a lot, the handle is extremely comfortable (it is very high quality leather, unlike most cheap "leather" used in other products) and it is very soft. It is rounded into a tube shape at the handle, so it won't cut into your hands at all. The pocket is very very small. You can fit the Apple power adapter in there, but it is a tight fit. A small mouse like the Apple one will fit, but that is definitely the limit. If you really want to use it to regularly carry the power adaptor and the mouse, I'd look for something bigger. If you only occasionally take your mouse with you (like myself) this is a fantastic bag. Generally if I'm going somewhere that I will need the power adapter I am taking a bigger bag anyway and put the Acme bag inside the other.
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We are both correct. Static friction is greater than dynamic friction. That is why preventing the wheels from slipping *at all* (threshold braking) is more effective than letting them slip (slamming the brakes). ABS does something in between. It alternately slams and releases the brakes. This allows the wheel to spin a little in between (and hopefully regain static friction), which also lets you steer, since the wheels must be turning to have any effect. When it slams the brakes again, it does have the effect of slowing the car, until the static friction is broken and the wheel locks, then it repeats the process.
My statements were based on my (frequent) observation that I can bring my car to a stop much more quickly in the snow by easing up a little on the brake, and not letting the wheels slip (and ABS activate). On rainy or dry pavement, this is much more difficult (and requires greater speed and braking force), this is where ABS (or professional race car drivers) is useful, in snow, if you know what you are doing, you are much better off without it.
-Spyky
I have a 94 Acura Integra with ABS. Incidentally, I got stuck in my parking space this morning because the slush froze up around my wheel last night. Most likely a 4WD would have gotten me out of there much quicker... but I digress.
I live in Rochester, NY currently--the snowiest city in North America, according to some. So I have a lot of experience driving in snow, and most people around here do to.
Regarding ABS or pulsing the brakes. ABS is nice when you are in a panic situation, and slam on your brakes because you aren't thinking about what you should really do. They keep your wheels from entirely locking, so you might actually be able to steer a little bit as you slide. They don't really stop you faster than other methods, but they may allow you to steer away from your previous destination, something you could never do if your wheels are completely locked. Personally, I find my brakes are much more effective at stopping me quickly if I use "threshold braking" that is, I hold the breaks in just a little bit less than what would cause a lock (and the ABS to activate in my car). You can feel the car slide as the wheels lock even in a car without ABS, back off just a little from there and you have threshold braking.
If I need to steer while braking, even though ABS helps, it is generally better to let off the brake almost entirely. Particularly in snow, it takes a little bit of time for the wheels to actually start moving in the proper direction, and until they do, they are pretty much worthless at steering you.
Anyway, threshold braking is more effective than pulsing, at least in terms of total distance required to stop. Pulsing is good to allow you to steer for the time when your foot is off the brake. The speed of the pulse isn't important, just let off a bit when you need to steer, then apply the brake again.
-Spyky
No, not *all* of the money is handed over to the record companies, it is not *profitable*, which is different. That means that their hosting/development/advertising costs eat up more than the remaining share, after the record companies get theirs.
As apple sells more and more music, they are approaching profitability, because the cost of development is spread out more. Whether that will ever be enough to actually be truly profitable is another question all together
-Spyky
Also, this deal is announced for this summer. By then the iTunes Music Store may be international.
-Spyky
There are at least two versions of the white brick adaptor. I have a new 1.25 15" and I have a later version than my girlfriend's 800 TiBook 15". They look the same, but on closer inspection, the cord connection is a little different the new one has a stronger rubber connection, the old one had a rounded surface so the cord wouldn't rub. This is hard to explain, you'd probably need to see both to understand what I am talking about. Also, the new version seems to carry a ground connection through the heavy duty cable (the pin on the removable plug is now metal). Also, the power rating of the new version is slightly higher, and it is a tad heavier.
My favorite feature of this adaptor design is clearly the removable extension cable. When I am making day trips to school or whatever, I don't bother to carry the cable. Only on longer trips or specific occasions do I even need to carry the (bulky) heavy duty cable. Most other adaptors I've seen for Dell or other notebooks are much larger to begin with, but also require the heavy duty power cable to be carried along with it.
-Spyky
How is the playlist from selection new? It was in 4.1 too, I don't see any difference.
I'm not sure I really understand what the Grouping category is intended for, but it could be used to do some nice things with Smart Playlists.
-Spyky
I dunno, I deleted it :-)
Well certainly you have your opinion, and others have theirs.
I have the exact opposite opinion, I've been using KDE (on SuSE) as my desktop for over 3 years now. I've been very pleased at the evolution of KDE over the years. But I have to be realistic, it is still not as clean or consistent as OS X, or to a lesser extend, Windows. There are many aspects of system maintenance and configuration that are still far behind on a linux machine. The user interface has much improved in recent years, however, I still find many of the standard K apps to be inferior to their counterparts on other operating systems.
I recently (2 months ago) purchased my first ever Mac. It is now my primary machine, and I'm not looking back at all. I use the machine for all of the tasks I used my linux machine for, and more.
I agree that eye candy does not a user interface make, however, consistency in UI elements, and accessibility of configuration options *does*. And in those areas, KDE and Linux in general still falls short.
For what it is worth, I do keep my Linux box around, although I use it much less frequently. I also was quick to delete all Microsoft software off of my new Mac (Internet Explorer and Outlook).
I'm not particularly upset at having to pay $100 a year for the privilege of using such a high-quality operating system. As a software developer, I believe in paying for software I use, so I pay for SuSE updates every year or so anyway.
-Spyky
Ahh, but he got it wrong, mine is a TI-86!
-Spyky
Well, they could have done that (written an HFS driver). But with the newer iPods (2nd and 3rd gen) designed to support Windows, they neatly side-skirted the issue by just making them use FAT. Seems like an elegant enough solution to me. And it doesn't make life any harder for those who buy iPods for use with windows, on first use, it formats automatically, then use as normal.
IF Apple had chosen to implement an HFS driver for windows, people would be able to use older 5GB iPods with Windows as a *bonus*. However, such iPods were never intended to work in this mode, so I see no reason why Apple is too blame that this doesn't work with the new iTunes software. No one ever should have expected it to.
-Spyky
Hmmm, that is interesting.
I wonder if Apple will "fix" this to prevent this kind of abuse, by limiting the streaming speed to some ratio of the file speed. This could be done on the server side it seems. I think it is likely if RIAA starts making noise about this. As long as Apple doesn't capitulate and remove the sharing features entirely, I'm okay with it.
I love to be able to sit on campus in the afternoon while doing homework and listen to music off of someone's computer. But I'm not interested in stealing it. I just bought 3 CDs based on first hearing them on someone's iTunes share.
-Spyky
Furthermore, if you put up a Kazaa share or a Windows file share or an FTP server full of MP3s, I can grab music just as quick as my bandwidth and your bandwidth will allow. With MyTunes, at best I can grab music from your iTunes share as fast as I can listen too it.
It would take someone 9 days to copy all of the songs out of my iTunes library. This further separates iTunes music sharing from file-sharing services.
-Spyky
Use fink, it took me 30 seconds to install. (well, more to download, but you get the idea).
I've done it on Jaguar and Panther.
-Spyky
I'm not familiar with the F11 feature in WindowMaker. However, I can say that it took me about a day of using Expose to realize that I can never go back. Thus, if any other OS developer wants my money ever they better have an expose-ish feature.
I explained expose to a friend of mine, and he couldn't understand out why it was better than ALT-TAB. Several reasons: first, it is a single click, not cycling through a list of windows, as with ALT-TAB. O(1) instead of O(n). Second, Expose shows you your currently open *documents*, rather than applications, and it doesn't show ones that you might have minimized or hidden. Thus it shows you what you are working on right now, not applications that might be running but aren't in active use.
I also use Expose (F11) to access the desktop (similar to minimize all). The difference is, it isn't minimizing, it is just moving them out of the way so I can access my desktop, maybe drag some files to Finder (You can open other documents/applications while Expose has moved the windows off to the side). It is also easy to restore, just click anywhere around the edge of the screen and everything zooms back to normal (or click F11 again obviously). The most important thing to remember is, you aren't minimizing (or hiding) these windows, so restoring has no effect on windows that you might already have minimized or hidden.
I've used linux as my only desktop operating systems for several years, multiple desktops were my primary way of managing multiple open applications and documents for several different tasks simultaneously. Since upgrading my weeks old mac to Panther not quite a month ago, I have totally changed the way I work, now using minimization, hiding, and expose to effectively manage my tasks. I find the new methods of doing things easier and more efficient then before (after the initial adjustment). Like I said, I couldn't imagine going back.
Not that there aren't any improvements to be made (I just can't think of any, but I'm sure someone eventually will). I have to agree that Expose is one of the most significant recent developments in windowed GUIs. Don't knock it until you've spent enough time with it to get used to it.
-Spyky
The effort of porting the VCL to another platform is certainly not impossible, x86 assembly or not and I wasn't suggesting that it was. However, as you point out, it is copyrighted. This means that only Borland will be able to undertake such a porting effort, and after the market failure of Kylix, they will likely be reluctant to do so.
I realize that non-x86 Linux is a fairly small market. However, as a developer, if I'm going to chose to develop an application for linux, one of the reasons I'm going to choose linux is because of its portability. I would like my application to run on as many machines as possible. Although x86 is the most popular platform for linux currently, this is due to economics, if other cheaper desktop processors were available, such a machine would quickly become a popular choice for a linux machine. If I choose something like Kylix for development, my application will stuck on x86 linux until Borland can port the VCL.
-Spyky
I was referring specifically to the type of applications that would be developed on a RAD platform (Delphi/Kylix). These apps are heavily targeted to Windows/x86.
Admittedly there is a lot of money in the areas you mentioned (networking, databases, etc...) Those types of applications are not going to be developed in a RAD environment. Additionally those types of applications demand platform portability that is generally much less important on a desktop environment. This is of course, one of the reasons why Kylix/Delphi would not be a good choice for such applications.
So yes, I agree with your point, I should have been more clear when making my original statement to specify the domain of desktop application development.
-Spyky
I've done some commercial development work in Delphi. It's a great environment in Windows. It's easier and faster to write than C++, it runs faster than Visual Basic or Java, and it compiles ridiculously fast. Hundreds of thousands of lines a second! Coming from C++ that is amazing, and the execution speed is pretty comparable to C/C++. It nicely wraps the Windows API and UI development is very easy.
Unfortunately, Delphi is a marginal product on Windows (for various reasons), and Windows is the platform most software development efforts target. Move it to Linux, even if you can capture the same percentage of the development market on Linux, you now have a marginal product on a marginal operating system. Not gonna work.
An additional problem is: Linux runs on a myriad of platforms, x86, PowerPC, unix workstations, you name it. Kylix/Delphi work on x86 ONLY, so although code will be portable between windows and linux, it will never be portable to any other platform. This is a problem that would be very difficult to fix, if you look at the VCL much of it is written in x86 assembler, it will take a long time, and require much effort to port it to another platform. This portability problem further reduces the market share that Kylix could ever achieve.
And then there is the problem of price, enough other people have pointed this out, so I won't repeat them. But yeah, expensive.
Just my 2 cents.
-Spyky
Actually, if I recall correctly the Blue Gene processor is a heavily modified processor designed around the POWER4 core with some very interesting caching architecture and a backplane designed to hold massive numbers of processors. The POWER4 core is of course very similar to the 970, some of the design elements of the POWER4 made their way into the commodity 970 (aka g5).
This architecture with updates to the POWER6 core will take them to the final Blue Gene with a goal of 1 petaflop.
-Spyky
I get up to 3:30 on my 1.25 15" (bluetooth off, airport on and active, automatic speed setting, turn off hard drive when possible). Two things I can think of. One time I left a CD in my drive when I went to school. It would randomly spin it up for no reason, that ate battery life pretty hard. Another is, I generally turn down my brightness to about 4 bars when I'm on battery. In most environments this is fine, and it really helps battery life a lot. I think I would be seeing much closer to 2:30 if I ran at higher brightness.
My usage profile in these battery only sessions are pretty light, mostly coding in vi, so I have a bunch of terminals, occasional heavy compiling, but not for long, and maybe iTunes or surfing with Safari.
I'm not astoundingly impressed with battery life on this machine. I think they ought to have put a slightly larger battery in. I'm curious to see what my dad's new 933 g4 iBook will do (it's on order). Those things have a larger battery, and should draw less power.
-Spyky
Did i just fall for a troll?
I've been reading some other posts, and I think I figured out why everyone thinks this is funny. I guess that is what happens when you take time off from reading Slashdot. You don't know what the latest trolls are, last I heard, we were in Soviet Russia or something.
-Spyky
Well, I haven't had my iPod for that long, and I wouldn't consider myself a rabid iPod fan. I think it's a nice player. I wish I would get a bit more use out of it after spending so much money on it. I guess it was a fairly frivolous expenditure.
Anyway, to make a long story short, there is clearly something wrong with your setup. I have no such delay when copying files to the iPod. Yes, music doesn't play while copying, but since it happens in a few seconds for any reasonable size file, i never figured it was much of a problem. 22 minutes! I can fill the entire hard drive in far less time than that.
Anyway, you didn't give enough information to actually diagnose the problem. You didn't say if this was a PC or Mac you were copying from, if PC, were you using firewire or USB 2.0. if USB, does the PC actually support 2.0 speeds? If you were copying over slow USB, it would take a lot longer (but probably not that long). For reference, I'm using a Mac, and I've never had these problems, maybe the PC software to communicate with the iPod has problems?
As far as iPods not running faster than other players. I guess I don't understand. What does a faster player do faster? I've never had a delay while operating the iPod such as scrolling through a list of 3000 songs or viewing large playlists. There is a brief queuing delay when selecting a new song to play, but that is going to be a problem with any hard drive based player, since it actually has to spin up the hard drive and buffer the newly selected song. Flash based players obviously don't have this effect.
The reasons why I like the iPod: size, intuitive interface, and storage space (the last being why flash based players aren't for me).
-Spyky
Hmm, that's interesting, I tried to figure out how to do it when I first got the computer (3 weeks ago) and I came across some sites that described the procedure, but I couldn't get it to work, so I gave up. But thanks for the info, not that I need it, because it just works now.
-Spyky
I have the Acme bag for my 15" AlBook. I like it a lot, the handle is extremely comfortable (it is very high quality leather, unlike most cheap "leather" used in other products) and it is very soft. It is rounded into a tube shape at the handle, so it won't cut into your hands at all. The pocket is very very small. You can fit the Apple power adapter in there, but it is a tight fit. A small mouse like the Apple one will fit, but that is definitely the limit. If you really want to use it to regularly carry the power adaptor and the mouse, I'd look for something bigger. If you only occasionally take your mouse with you (like myself) this is a fantastic bag. Generally if I'm going somewhere that I will need the power adapter I am taking a bigger bag anyway and put the Acme bag inside the other.
-Spyky
I have a 15" AlBook, and I just put Panther on it. I didn't do a fresh install, but I plan to when I get a chance to back up.
No, it doesn't come with AppleWorks or anything else that isn't on the Panther CD. No need to back anything up when you get it.
-Spyky
emacs? bah (ducks and runs)
Anyway, I love the fact that the terminal app now has color support! Syntax highlighting in vi. WOOHOO!
I used to use xterms for that, but using the Terminal App is nicer (transparency too).
-Spyky