Not really, because they still have to drive all over town collecting the mail. Picking up the mail from the mail box is probably a minimal park of the time taken, whereas driving all over town is probably the hard part. I guess you could save some time by not having to stop so often, but my point still stands. There is currently 1 mail box that I know of within a 10 minute walk of my apartment. I would use the mail a whole lot less if I had to walk 30 minutes to the mail box.
OK, i Didn't RTFA. But here's my question. Does after 3 years the device still have the ability to show the next page. I understand that it only needs power to change the content on the screen. So if I change the page now, and take out the battery, then it should still show the same content 10 years later. However, because I've taken out the battery, I am unable to change the page. This is my problem. It says I can read 16 books. That's probably the number of books I would read in a year. So either I'm ending up with a non-rechargable battery, which doesn't have much leakage, or I end up with a rechargable battery, which would probably drain itself, even sitting on the shelf outside the unit in a month.
I thought XM was a good idea, until I heard that the sound quality was about that of a 96 Kbps MP3. I guess it's better than regular radio, which has about the same quality, with less channels and more commercials, but I thought it would be nice to have half the channels, with "CD Quality" sound. This is especially true, since they sell home stereo components that are supposed to interface with your good equipment. Who wants to listen to bad quality music on their home stereo?
You'll notice that they tell you that you can't play AAC protected content in your non-iPod device. It says you can copy the AAC content to a CD and play it in your CD player, but doesn't tell you that you can rerip to MP3 to actually play it in the other devices. It also says that if you want to play ripped CDs in your non-iPod, which doesn not support AAC, then you can encode the AAC files to MP3 (Ugh.. double encoding, great quality). Why not just rip them to MP3 in the first place so they will play in iPod, and any other portable player in the world. So it seems as though the grandparent is correct. You can use any player, but using the iPod is the only real option with iTunes, unless you want to burn and rerip as MP3, all the music you download.
How many stereo/music devices were white before the iPod came out? Everything was black or silver. There was very little white, and there still is very little white. I think offering a different colour that nobody else offered is what made the iPod stand out in the first place. Those white earbuds are there to show everyone you have an iPod. Some people even fake it and use the iPod headphones on other players, just to make it look like they have an iPod. I'm betting that they aren't using those head phones for their superior sound quality.
I think they should do that with the public elevators too. Maybe they could give the disabled, old, or people with babies (think strollers) a smartcard to operate them. Most of the ones in Ottawa (especially in the public transit terminals) smell a lot like urinals (that haven't been cleaned). We recently had a baby, and I've started to really hate using those elevators. It's a close call between carrying the stroller up 30 ft of stairs, and standing in the pee soaked elevator for 20 seconds to get to the next floor. As an asside, I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked replacing the tile floors in those elevators one summer. Worst Job Evah!!
I don't lift weights or work out, other than riding my bike to work in the summer. However, the BMI also says i'm overweight. I'm not, and I don't think most people would say I was if they looked at me, but for some reason, I'm unusually dense. I sink when I go in the water. For no apparent reason. If I inhale a lot of air, I will float, but for the most part I sink, and if I exhale most of my air, I sink like a rock. I always did bad in swimming lessons because I couldn't swim the long distances required. I was in much better shape than some of the truly overweight people, yet they passed easily because they were so bouyant. So, not only does the BMI not account for differences in muscle vs. fat, it doesn't account for any differences in density. I'm unsure why i'm more dense, maybe I just have dense bones. Never had a cavity, and never broken a bone, despite being in many situations in which people with weak bones would have.
Re:We've heard this before...
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I kept on trying to remind myself to switch it from html to plain text before I hit send, but alas, I clicked send, and all my formatting was gone. Here's an option I want. HTML formatting, but replace my carriage returns with , so I can still use HTML, but I don't have to enter every time I want to leave a new line.
I find this to be the worst point. They find that people aren't using the mail service, so they make it even hard to use by removing the post boxes. Moves like this will only lead to the demise of the postal system. Instead of making it harder to mail stuff, they should make it more appealing. It's not like it costs them any money to have a box sitting on the street. It doesn't really matter if the box is only a quarter full. I'd rather have that, then have the box 75% full and have to go 3 times the distance to get to one.
Canada Post has little kiosks everywhere. Mostly in pharmacies. It's kind of a waste of money for them to pay for something that's exclusively a post office. Yet most businesses with a little extra space would love to make a little extra money selling boxes, envenlopes, stamps, and having a garaunteed way of getting people to walk all the way to the back of the store, so they may end up buying something else. Plus it's good for people to be able to pick up packages close to home instead of having to go all the way to the main post office.
From what I remember reading, it supports txt, UnDRM'd PDF, DOC, and a few other formats along with whatever DRM format it also supports.
Re:Magazines and the Web
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unfortunately, we won't replace the text book until our professors stop telling us that we have to do questions 1 through 47 on page 394 of the book that comes out with a new edition every other year. I know a few people who bought very few textbooks in university. Many courses are easy to get through without them. Some courses it's impossible without it. Making that decision is quite hard. I know my professors often told us which ones we would need, and which we could do without. Although some of my professors said, "this book is extremely good, and it costs $150, so I'm not going to base the course on it, so don't buy it if you don't have the money, or buy it later after you graduate and have a job".
Re:We've heard this before...
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here we go
Pocket Knife -> Leatherman/Multitool
Pencil -> PDA with note pad
The Match -> Lighter (I don't know anyone who regularly uses matches over a lighter
Internal Combustion Engine -> Hybrid engine cars. (Yeah I know there's still an Internal Combustion Engine)
Corrective Lenses -> Laser Eye Surgery
Transpaent glass windows -> What, you wnat them replaced with opaque brick?
Tumbler locks -> Many locks are now electrical and based on RFIDs.
Zippers -> Buttons work so much better, I hate how zippers always fall down, If you want a constant barrier use velcro.
Analog clocks -> Digital clocks
Shoes with laces -> Velcro, or shoes with elastics so there's not tightening required.
Anyway, although i know that none (save for the lighter) has come close to replacing the others, There are alternatives, and I believe that in the future, many of these things will be replaced, once the cost comes down. If it's $200 every couple of years for glasses, and laser eye surgery only costs $500, doesn't have to be redone, and is risk free, then I think may people will opt for that instead of glasses. If you still think glasses look good, well then get laser surgery and wear window glasses.
Well, maybe not a rootkit, but after using SonicStage for my MiniDisc player, I'd have to say that I don't expect anything good from Sony. How they could release a piece of software that bad, and expect to have repeat customers and good reviews is beyond me. When I bought my iPod, I asked what other MP3 players they had. The guy said they had Sony players, and then pointed to the shelf filled with open box Sony players. He very much didn't recommend them.
I realize that you are trying to be funny, but I think the point is to show you how many books you could read on a single charge. Some poster above you pointed out that the advantage of paper is that you don't need electricity. This kind of information shows that you don't really have to worry about electricity, since you could read 16 good sized novels before having to charge the thing. Although I think that's a little unbelievable. My Cell phone battery will die after a month even if I don't have it turned on. Most rechargable batteries have some kind of leakage. I hate my digital camera, because almost every time i pick it up the battery is dead, even if last time I used it it was fully charged.
I'm not the one referring to adware, trialversions and spyware-laden as freeware. It's the publishers and distributors of the software. For me, the term freeware has lost all meaning. It's really too bad for people who do release true freeware. There are sites that distribute true freeware. For me those sites happen to be Sourceforge and Freshmeat, and the software happens to be open source as well. Any other site that i've seen offereing "Freeware" usually just offers adware/trialware/spyware, and has very little quality freeware. I'm not sure how many publishers/programmers there are of non-open source freeware, but maybe they should open their own site so people have a good reliable way of finding their work.
I'm confusing freeware with adware and trial versions because people often try to pawn off adware and trial versions, or software that installs 10 other things I didn't want as "freeware". The point is, is that there's no easy way to find free software that isn't adware/trial. You can go to download.com and search, and sometimes stuff says it's freeware, but when you install it, you quickly find out it is not. Looking on SourceForge and FreshMeat I find is the only reliable way to find good free software. Searching in the general internet, looking for free software that isn't open source, is like finding a needle in a haystack. There are some gems like Winamp and CDBurnerXP, but the majority of stuff that people try to pawn off as "freeware" is anything but.
I don't think anything that i've seen really has the power to kill the iPod, or even in any way harm the iPod. Sure SanDisk has an 8 GB model. But I just checked the Apple site, and they have an 8GB model for the same price as sandisk. The Zune does look kind of interesting. It has a nice price point for the features, but I don't really see it being an iPod killer. Where do you buy videos to play on it? Nobody knows, but everybody knows you can buy videos for the iPod from iTunes. Same goes for songs. Although it's nice to see a couple of real competitors, I don't think either of these will take top spot.
I find that although that argument sounds right, it isn't really. I find that most freeware is often very bad, and usually contains some sort of ads or stupid restrictions that stop me from getting a quality piece of software. Sure there's some good free software like WinAmp (used to be good, haven't used it in years since switching to Linux, Aramok rules) but for the most stuff, the majority of free, non open source software you find on the internet is terrible. I know that when I download something that's GPL, that at least all the features that are supposed to be there are there, and that I don't have to pay for additional features. I know that there will be no ads, and that the program will not expire on me. I'm sure there are a few pieces of GPL software that don't follow this model, but for the most part, I know that when I download GPL/Open source software, that I am getting the full program, without any crap. This is why when i'm looking for a free tool, I always go Open Source first, because I know that means there will be no crap that comes along with most of the other "freeware".
I really think that had the internet been created by a corporation, or under a different political climate, that it would not be what we have today. Most things are build on a trust network, and anybody is able to do just about anything. Anybody can send an email to anybody, and you can also forge the email, and pretend it is from anybody. There's a lot of freedom on the internet. That gives it lots of power, but that also means that some people will use it for evil. Frankly I'm glad that the internet isn't bolted down to try to stop people doing things that others think they shouldn't. It means that those of use who are doing legitimate things have a much easier time doing it.
But would you be continually be watching a screen just incase something happened? If your building catches on fire you'll probably find out faster because you'll hear the actual fire alarm. If it's the building next to yours, you're probably more likely to hear the sirens and look out the then you are to actually be online looking at a screen to find the information faster. I realize that it's nice to be able to know about things as soon as they happen, but unless you plan on watching the thing all day, I don't think it will really help that much.
When exactly can we define speed, and efficiency as being perfect. Is there a mathematical algorithm for proving the program is as efficient as possible? I mean we could always go to the assembly code and tweak it a bit more. I mean if it never crashes we could call it stable enough, but trying to perfect speed is impossible, because I'm sure there's someone who will be complaining that it doesn't run blazing fast on a 486.
Well technically in Canada there are no "National" elections either. Not even at the provincial level. Each person votes for someone in their riding. Whoever gets the most votes in the riding gets a seat in parliament. There are 308 seats for the entire country. Whichever party gets the most seats is "in power" although if they don't have the majority of the seats, they don't really have the power, as other parties can team up against them to over power them when voting on different issues. Who ever is the leader of the party in power is the Prime Minister.
I'd like a completely revamped history feature. I always turn the history off, because I find that I can't find what I want anyway, and it only serves to incriminate me:). Anyway, what I want, is for the history to be shown in the way you navigated to the page. So to find a page you visited, you go to google search "search term"->page 2 -> (New Tab) Page I was trying to find. This would make it a lot better, as I can usually remember what I was searching for, but not the title of the page I found. This is especially true, since most pages don't have relevant titles to what the actual content is. It would also be nice if it would (optionally) keep a copy of all the text in a page so I could search that text to find what I wanted.
I find this is a major problem too. My brother would try to get me interested in Magic, but I never liked it because he gave me the cards that were left over after he created his deck. Needless to say, he always won. I also find these games hard to start out with because you have to spend so much time trying to remember what all the cards do. If they guy you're playing agains has 10 cards layed out, you can't just take a quick glance and figure out your current situation. With a game like chess, you can at least tell if you're in big trouble by taking a quick look at the board.
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Not really, because they still have to drive all over town collecting the mail. Picking up the mail from the mail box is probably a minimal park of the time taken, whereas driving all over town is probably the hard part. I guess you could save some time by not having to stop so often, but my point still stands. There is currently 1 mail box that I know of within a 10 minute walk of my apartment. I would use the mail a whole lot less if I had to walk 30 minutes to the mail box.
OK, i Didn't RTFA. But here's my question. Does after 3 years the device still have the ability to show the next page. I understand that it only needs power to change the content on the screen. So if I change the page now, and take out the battery, then it should still show the same content 10 years later. However, because I've taken out the battery, I am unable to change the page. This is my problem. It says I can read 16 books. That's probably the number of books I would read in a year. So either I'm ending up with a non-rechargable battery, which doesn't have much leakage, or I end up with a rechargable battery, which would probably drain itself, even sitting on the shelf outside the unit in a month.
I thought XM was a good idea, until I heard that the sound quality was about that of a 96 Kbps MP3. I guess it's better than regular radio, which has about the same quality, with less channels and more commercials, but I thought it would be nice to have half the channels, with "CD Quality" sound. This is especially true, since they sell home stereo components that are supposed to interface with your good equipment. Who wants to listen to bad quality music on their home stereo?
You'll notice that they tell you that you can't play AAC protected content in your non-iPod device. It says you can copy the AAC content to a CD and play it in your CD player, but doesn't tell you that you can rerip to MP3 to actually play it in the other devices. It also says that if you want to play ripped CDs in your non-iPod, which doesn not support AAC, then you can encode the AAC files to MP3 (Ugh.. double encoding, great quality). Why not just rip them to MP3 in the first place so they will play in iPod, and any other portable player in the world. So it seems as though the grandparent is correct. You can use any player, but using the iPod is the only real option with iTunes, unless you want to burn and rerip as MP3, all the music you download.
How many stereo/music devices were white before the iPod came out? Everything was black or silver. There was very little white, and there still is very little white. I think offering a different colour that nobody else offered is what made the iPod stand out in the first place. Those white earbuds are there to show everyone you have an iPod. Some people even fake it and use the iPod headphones on other players, just to make it look like they have an iPod. I'm betting that they aren't using those head phones for their superior sound quality.
I think they should do that with the public elevators too. Maybe they could give the disabled, old, or people with babies (think strollers) a smartcard to operate them. Most of the ones in Ottawa (especially in the public transit terminals) smell a lot like urinals (that haven't been cleaned). We recently had a baby, and I've started to really hate using those elevators. It's a close call between carrying the stroller up 30 ft of stairs, and standing in the pee soaked elevator for 20 seconds to get to the next floor. As an asside, I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked replacing the tile floors in those elevators one summer. Worst Job Evah!!
I don't lift weights or work out, other than riding my bike to work in the summer. However, the BMI also says i'm overweight. I'm not, and I don't think most people would say I was if they looked at me, but for some reason, I'm unusually dense. I sink when I go in the water. For no apparent reason. If I inhale a lot of air, I will float, but for the most part I sink, and if I exhale most of my air, I sink like a rock. I always did bad in swimming lessons because I couldn't swim the long distances required. I was in much better shape than some of the truly overweight people, yet they passed easily because they were so bouyant. So, not only does the BMI not account for differences in muscle vs. fat, it doesn't account for any differences in density. I'm unsure why i'm more dense, maybe I just have dense bones. Never had a cavity, and never broken a bone, despite being in many situations in which people with weak bones would have.
I kept on trying to remind myself to switch it from html to plain text before I hit send, but alas, I clicked send, and all my formatting was gone. Here's an option I want. HTML formatting, but replace my carriage returns with
, so I can still use HTML, but I don't have to enter
every time I want to leave a new line.
I find this to be the worst point. They find that people aren't using the mail service, so they make it even hard to use by removing the post boxes. Moves like this will only lead to the demise of the postal system. Instead of making it harder to mail stuff, they should make it more appealing. It's not like it costs them any money to have a box sitting on the street. It doesn't really matter if the box is only a quarter full. I'd rather have that, then have the box 75% full and have to go 3 times the distance to get to one.
Canada Post has little kiosks everywhere. Mostly in pharmacies. It's kind of a waste of money for them to pay for something that's exclusively a post office. Yet most businesses with a little extra space would love to make a little extra money selling boxes, envenlopes, stamps, and having a garaunteed way of getting people to walk all the way to the back of the store, so they may end up buying something else. Plus it's good for people to be able to pick up packages close to home instead of having to go all the way to the main post office.
From what I remember reading, it supports txt, UnDRM'd PDF, DOC, and a few other formats along with whatever DRM format it also supports.
Unfortunately, we won't replace the text book until our professors stop telling us that we have to do questions 1 through 47 on page 394 of the book that comes out with a new edition every other year. I know a few people who bought very few textbooks in university. Many courses are easy to get through without them. Some courses it's impossible without it. Making that decision is quite hard. I know my professors often told us which ones we would need, and which we could do without. Although some of my professors said, "this book is extremely good, and it costs $150, so I'm not going to base the course on it, so don't buy it if you don't have the money, or buy it later after you graduate and have a job".
Here we go Pocket Knife -> Leatherman/Multitool Pencil -> PDA with note pad The Match -> Lighter (I don't know anyone who regularly uses matches over a lighter Internal Combustion Engine -> Hybrid engine cars. (Yeah I know there's still an Internal Combustion Engine) Corrective Lenses -> Laser Eye Surgery Transpaent glass windows -> What, you wnat them replaced with opaque brick? Tumbler locks -> Many locks are now electrical and based on RFIDs. Zippers -> Buttons work so much better, I hate how zippers always fall down, If you want a constant barrier use velcro. Analog clocks -> Digital clocks Shoes with laces -> Velcro, or shoes with elastics so there's not tightening required. Anyway, although i know that none (save for the lighter) has come close to replacing the others, There are alternatives, and I believe that in the future, many of these things will be replaced, once the cost comes down. If it's $200 every couple of years for glasses, and laser eye surgery only costs $500, doesn't have to be redone, and is risk free, then I think may people will opt for that instead of glasses. If you still think glasses look good, well then get laser surgery and wear window glasses.
Well, maybe not a rootkit, but after using SonicStage for my MiniDisc player, I'd have to say that I don't expect anything good from Sony. How they could release a piece of software that bad, and expect to have repeat customers and good reviews is beyond me. When I bought my iPod, I asked what other MP3 players they had. The guy said they had Sony players, and then pointed to the shelf filled with open box Sony players. He very much didn't recommend them.
I realize that you are trying to be funny, but I think the point is to show you how many books you could read on a single charge. Some poster above you pointed out that the advantage of paper is that you don't need electricity. This kind of information shows that you don't really have to worry about electricity, since you could read 16 good sized novels before having to charge the thing. Although I think that's a little unbelievable. My Cell phone battery will die after a month even if I don't have it turned on. Most rechargable batteries have some kind of leakage. I hate my digital camera, because almost every time i pick it up the battery is dead, even if last time I used it it was fully charged.
I'm not the one referring to adware, trialversions and spyware-laden as freeware. It's the publishers and distributors of the software. For me, the term freeware has lost all meaning. It's really too bad for people who do release true freeware. There are sites that distribute true freeware. For me those sites happen to be Sourceforge and Freshmeat, and the software happens to be open source as well. Any other site that i've seen offereing "Freeware" usually just offers adware/trialware/spyware, and has very little quality freeware. I'm not sure how many publishers/programmers there are of non-open source freeware, but maybe they should open their own site so people have a good reliable way of finding their work.
I'm confusing freeware with adware and trial versions because people often try to pawn off adware and trial versions, or software that installs 10 other things I didn't want as "freeware". The point is, is that there's no easy way to find free software that isn't adware/trial. You can go to download.com and search, and sometimes stuff says it's freeware, but when you install it, you quickly find out it is not. Looking on SourceForge and FreshMeat I find is the only reliable way to find good free software. Searching in the general internet, looking for free software that isn't open source, is like finding a needle in a haystack. There are some gems like Winamp and CDBurnerXP, but the majority of stuff that people try to pawn off as "freeware" is anything but.
I don't think anything that i've seen really has the power to kill the iPod, or even in any way harm the iPod. Sure SanDisk has an 8 GB model. But I just checked the Apple site, and they have an 8GB model for the same price as sandisk. The Zune does look kind of interesting. It has a nice price point for the features, but I don't really see it being an iPod killer. Where do you buy videos to play on it? Nobody knows, but everybody knows you can buy videos for the iPod from iTunes. Same goes for songs. Although it's nice to see a couple of real competitors, I don't think either of these will take top spot.
I find that although that argument sounds right, it isn't really. I find that most freeware is often very bad, and usually contains some sort of ads or stupid restrictions that stop me from getting a quality piece of software. Sure there's some good free software like WinAmp (used to be good, haven't used it in years since switching to Linux, Aramok rules) but for the most stuff, the majority of free, non open source software you find on the internet is terrible. I know that when I download something that's GPL, that at least all the features that are supposed to be there are there, and that I don't have to pay for additional features. I know that there will be no ads, and that the program will not expire on me. I'm sure there are a few pieces of GPL software that don't follow this model, but for the most part, I know that when I download GPL/Open source software, that I am getting the full program, without any crap. This is why when i'm looking for a free tool, I always go Open Source first, because I know that means there will be no crap that comes along with most of the other "freeware".
I really think that had the internet been created by a corporation, or under a different political climate, that it would not be what we have today. Most things are build on a trust network, and anybody is able to do just about anything. Anybody can send an email to anybody, and you can also forge the email, and pretend it is from anybody. There's a lot of freedom on the internet. That gives it lots of power, but that also means that some people will use it for evil. Frankly I'm glad that the internet isn't bolted down to try to stop people doing things that others think they shouldn't. It means that those of use who are doing legitimate things have a much easier time doing it.
But would you be continually be watching a screen just incase something happened? If your building catches on fire you'll probably find out faster because you'll hear the actual fire alarm. If it's the building next to yours, you're probably more likely to hear the sirens and look out the then you are to actually be online looking at a screen to find the information faster. I realize that it's nice to be able to know about things as soon as they happen, but unless you plan on watching the thing all day, I don't think it will really help that much.
When exactly can we define speed, and efficiency as being perfect. Is there a mathematical algorithm for proving the program is as efficient as possible? I mean we could always go to the assembly code and tweak it a bit more. I mean if it never crashes we could call it stable enough, but trying to perfect speed is impossible, because I'm sure there's someone who will be complaining that it doesn't run blazing fast on a 486.
Well technically in Canada there are no "National" elections either. Not even at the provincial level. Each person votes for someone in their riding. Whoever gets the most votes in the riding gets a seat in parliament. There are 308 seats for the entire country. Whichever party gets the most seats is "in power" although if they don't have the majority of the seats, they don't really have the power, as other parties can team up against them to over power them when voting on different issues. Who ever is the leader of the party in power is the Prime Minister.
I'd like a completely revamped history feature. I always turn the history off, because I find that I can't find what I want anyway, and it only serves to incriminate me :). Anyway, what I want, is for the history to be shown in the way you navigated to the page. So to find a page you visited, you go to google search "search term"->page 2 -> (New Tab) Page I was trying to find. This would make it a lot better, as I can usually remember what I was searching for, but not the title of the page I found. This is especially true, since most pages don't have relevant titles to what the actual content is. It would also be nice if it would (optionally) keep a copy of all the text in a page so I could search that text to find what I wanted.
I find this is a major problem too. My brother would try to get me interested in Magic, but I never liked it because he gave me the cards that were left over after he created his deck. Needless to say, he always won. I also find these games hard to start out with because you have to spend so much time trying to remember what all the cards do. If they guy you're playing agains has 10 cards layed out, you can't just take a quick glance and figure out your current situation. With a game like chess, you can at least tell if you're in big trouble by taking a quick look at the board.