Apple has been so disappointing as they have repeated Sony's mistake about obsessively locking down their products. The iPod on its own is a great product. The software support for it is horrible and Apple has made it incredibly difficult to use anything but iTunes to manipulate the music stored on MY FREAKIN DEVICE. iTunes does not offer the features and abilities I want and I have always found it to be unstable on every system I have put it on.
Have you used iTunes? Have you used Sonic Stage? I have used both, and in comparison with Sonic Stage's depths of hell, iTunes is blissful heaven filled with nubile servants.
However, my opinion is but an anecdotal contradiction to your anecdotal evidence. Meh.
Try Privoxy. A non-customised installation will kill most ads for about three minutes of work. If you then read some of the config info, creating custom filters is a cakewalk and voilà, you have an ad free Chrome.
...Telstra knows the other carriers cant get credit to actually build the damn thing without the government backing it.
I have a suggestion: how about we get the government to undertake a RFP process, so that the successful tenderer could take advantage of $4.7bn of government backing.
Consider that the competitor may (yeah, I know, work with me) be able to provide a tender for a FTTH solution, as opposed to the rather short-sighted FTTN solutions bandied about. (Axia has been talking about FTTH for their bid.)
Suddenly there's no issue with Telstra - the whole legacy copper network is leapfrogged. Competition on pricing and/or quotas rages. Australia is future-proofed and Telstra has to come up with another (distinguishable) technology to stay in the game.
I realise this is not an overnight solution, but we should all be thinking further than ten years into the future. I am very hopeful that FTTH becomes a reality with the new Australian NBN, and now that Telstra is out, it's just that little bit more likely...
Re:Every time I read an article like this
on
OS X On the MSI Wind
·
· Score: 1, Funny
simultaneously the source of their greatest strength and greatest weakness
I have the sudden urge to say "Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly... I have no idea what I'm talking about."
Now you can't fully uninstall QuickTime as some of the basic libraries of QuickTime are used in their Quartz rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another movie player.
Careful, your argument could come back to bite:
Now you can't fully uninstall Internet Explorer as some of the basic libraries of Internet Explorer are used in their operating system rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another web browser.
I thought of RoundCube the instant I saw this article.
I've just installed Round Cube 0.1-RC2 on my webserver to get reliable access to my non-work email. Apart from the dubious 0.1 version number (way to instil confidence in the end users: call an otherwise stable first release 1.0!) it is significantly more reliable than beta1 and even more crisply polished than before.
SquirrelMail and Horde are mature, yes, but they seem to bloat. I just want a lightweight, well-designed web access system so I don't have to use mail2web.com. Keep up the good work RoundCube!
>> Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music?
> I thought this should be obvious: people like music, so they buy music. But they don't like CDs, so they don't by them. Most people I know have a CD player somewhere, but it is collecting a layer of dust. They listen to music on the iPod, the mobile phone and the computer.
I heartily agree with this statement. I recently downloaded an album (a decent -preset fast standard VBR MP3 rip, located with mininova) and I like it a lot. I would love to be able to buy this album online in the same or similar format - as always, the artist deserves remuneration for their work. However, the only format available for purchase online is AAC on iTunes. I don't have iTunes installed and I don't want to install it, I don't want DRM and I don't want to have to transcode lossy to lossy (my Sony MP3 player is great, but it doesn't play AAC).
So I'm stuck - I don't really need the CD (which would cost me about $22) but buying the album on iTunes (for $9.99) gets me an undesirable media type. Thus the only reason I would buy the album online would be to get some cash to the artist, essentially in appreciation. If I did this by buying the iTunes version, though, I'd still be using unlicenced media (the MP3s). On top of all that it is still not lawful to transcode a CD to another format here in Australia, so I simply cannot win.
Clearly the music distribution industry needs to do better to provide a simple and effective way to get music licenced (read: paid for), optionally converted from WAV/CDDA into the format I want (if not FLAC), and into my possession.
There is an alternative viewpoint, and quite a timely one for me.
I had about 100 photos developed at a local photo place (Fuji, I think). They were all digital, and they were developed using the Fuji do-it-in-an-hour processing machine. I got them back and was instantly displeased, believing that my camera had given all the photos a blue-grey colour cast.
Well, after getting my Canon iP4300 and printing my first few photos on glossy photo paper, I was (perhaps unreasonably) shocked to discover that the print looked amazing and there was no objectionable colour cast. Clearly the Fuji processor was not calibrated correctly, and clearly the people operating the shop didn't give a rats. I appreciate the immediacy and fine control I have over the output when I print photos at home.
That's not to say it's cost effective - far from it. If I have a large number of prints to make, I'll take a CD down to Big W and have them Agfa processed for $0.buggerall each. However, if I've just taken a really nice photo of a friend and me at home, they're more likely to want to take it away in their hand and stick it on their fridge than copy it onto their USB stick and forget about it. The former might be half the price, but it's also half the immediately-nostalgic value.
Parent deserves to be modded all the way up. My first home espresso machine was/is a Carezza, and I've had it for more than two years now - still going strong.
I should add, however, that you can get great espresso from just about any home machine, but ONLY with freshly ground beans. And I don't mean freshly ground at Starbucks/Gloria Jeans/etc last Monday. You need a good burr grinder at home and you need to grind only the beans you need for each cup. My grinder is a Rancilio Rocky, which is worth about twice as much as the Carezza. But it's worth it.
For grinder options, consider Rancilio Rocky, Nemox/Imat Lux, Sunbeam EM0480 or, as a last resort, DeLonghi KG100 (also sold by Starbucks as the Solis 166).
I wonder how many "Slashdotters (who are likely also to be programmers are driven to the edge of insanity by our honourable editors' failure to close their punctuation...
I understand the principle of entering the highest price you're willing to pay, but if I bid $11.57 and am sniped for $12.05, I'm ticked off. I would have paid $12.05 - I might have even paid $15.23. The trouble with this situation is a competition between my desire to get the best value for money versus the desire to have the product.
Now, my desire to have the product may be quite measured and rational. However, for example, the bidder who snipes me at the last possible moment for an extra 50c is takes advantage of the fact that I declared my hand early. If the price of the auction before I bid was $5.00, in effect I raised the price by $7 and established a new market value for that item at that time, only to get outbid. However, if I withhold my bid until the last seconds, but still bid $11.57, the sniper may have bid $5.50 and I may beat that bid at $6.00. By sniping in this contrived example, I would have saved $5 and won, rather than losing at a higher price by 50c.
Of course, if my snipe fails, I lose by 50c (as before), but this example is predicated on the idea that sniping has now become an eBay fact of life. Indeed, I will continue to snipe all my prospective purchases on eBay, using my highest offer as the snipe value. That way if I win the item I am satisfied that I didn't get screwed over by a trivially incremental amount, and if I lose, well, I didn't want to pay that much anyway.
Parent is right - I've got the converse situation. My Canon IXUS 50 is a great little camera with a rugged metal body and a decent control set. I can even do some manual tricks with it. However, it's got the tiny lens and tiny CCD, and consequently there's only so much you can achieve with it.
Still, the sheer ability to drop my camera in my pocket without bothering to think about its weight or inconvenience has meant that I have had my camera on hand to take some very memorable and artistic shots, with just a little patience. I intend to buy a DSLR (Nikon's new offerings are attractive - D80?) but purchasing a point-and-shoot digicam first is a Very Good Idea.
It comes down to what you want, or need, to achieve. My opinion? Take whatever camera you have wherever you go, and keep taking photos. I don't care if it's a mobile phone camera or a Hasselblad, just be creative and get used to setting up your shots. Photography isn't so much about the tool as it is about the photographer.
Slashdot Mirror
Next up: Slashdot changes its name to /.
Oh, right.
[citation needed]
Surely the refutation is no more helpful to the reader if it's just your word against GP's...? :)
Apple has been so disappointing as they have repeated Sony's mistake about obsessively locking down their products. The iPod on its own is a great product. The software support for it is horrible and Apple has made it incredibly difficult to use anything but iTunes to manipulate the music stored on MY FREAKIN DEVICE. iTunes does not offer the features and abilities I want and I have always found it to be unstable on every system I have put it on.
Have you used iTunes? Have you used Sonic Stage? I have used both, and in comparison with Sonic Stage's depths of hell, iTunes is blissful heaven filled with nubile servants.
However, my opinion is but an anecdotal contradiction to your anecdotal evidence. Meh.
[Citation needed]
I'm good.
Try Privoxy. A non-customised installation will kill most ads for about three minutes of work. If you then read some of the config info, creating custom filters is a cakewalk and voilà, you have an ad free Chrome.
Helped me, hope it helps you...
...Telstra knows the other carriers cant get credit to actually build the damn thing without the government backing it.
I have a suggestion: how about we get the government to undertake a RFP process, so that the successful tenderer could take advantage of $4.7bn of government backing.
Oh, right...
I beg to differ.
Consider that the competitor may (yeah, I know, work with me) be able to provide a tender for a FTTH solution, as opposed to the rather short-sighted FTTN solutions bandied about. (Axia has been talking about FTTH for their bid.)
Suddenly there's no issue with Telstra - the whole legacy copper network is leapfrogged. Competition on pricing and/or quotas rages. Australia is future-proofed and Telstra has to come up with another (distinguishable) technology to stay in the game.
I realise this is not an overnight solution, but we should all be thinking further than ten years into the future. I am very hopeful that FTTH becomes a reality with the new Australian NBN, and now that Telstra is out, it's just that little bit more likely...
simultaneously the source of their greatest strength and greatest weakness
I have the sudden urge to say "Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly... I have no idea what I'm talking about."
Now you can't fully uninstall QuickTime as some of the basic libraries of QuickTime are used in their Quartz rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another movie player.
Careful, your argument could come back to bite:
Now you can't fully uninstall Internet Explorer as some of the basic libraries of Internet Explorer are used in their operating system rendering engine. But nothing stops you from using another web browser.
"Complimentary"?
Other Human Interaction: Hi there Internet...
Internet: Wow, you're certainly looking great today, Other Human Interaction!
Parent is on topic, accidentally modded offtopic by randomly double clicking on the page. Happened to hit the mod field...
The first rule of Usenet: don't talk about Usenet.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it.
I thought of RoundCube the instant I saw this article.
I've just installed Round Cube 0.1-RC2 on my webserver to get reliable access to my non-work email. Apart from the dubious 0.1 version number (way to instil confidence in the end users: call an otherwise stable first release 1.0!) it is significantly more reliable than beta1 and even more crisply polished than before.
SquirrelMail and Horde are mature, yes, but they seem to bloat. I just want a lightweight, well-designed web access system so I don't have to use mail2web.com. Keep up the good work RoundCube!
Using the summary's units, 220 million pages of text is approximately 0.05 LoC.
HTH, tux0r
>> Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music?
> I thought this should be obvious: people like music, so they buy music. But they don't like CDs, so they don't by them. Most people I know have a CD player somewhere, but it is collecting a layer of dust. They listen to music on the iPod, the mobile phone and the computer.
I heartily agree with this statement. I recently downloaded an album (a decent -preset fast standard VBR MP3 rip, located with mininova) and I like it a lot. I would love to be able to buy this album online in the same or similar format - as always, the artist deserves remuneration for their work. However, the only format available for purchase online is AAC on iTunes. I don't have iTunes installed and I don't want to install it, I don't want DRM and I don't want to have to transcode lossy to lossy (my Sony MP3 player is great, but it doesn't play AAC).
So I'm stuck - I don't really need the CD (which would cost me about $22) but buying the album on iTunes (for $9.99) gets me an undesirable media type. Thus the only reason I would buy the album online would be to get some cash to the artist, essentially in appreciation. If I did this by buying the iTunes version, though, I'd still be using unlicenced media (the MP3s). On top of all that it is still not lawful to transcode a CD to another format here in Australia, so I simply cannot win.
Clearly the music distribution industry needs to do better to provide a simple and effective way to get music licenced (read: paid for), optionally converted from WAV/CDDA into the format I want (if not FLAC), and into my possession.
Where's the +1 Absolutely Frickin' Hilarious? Funny stuff...
- M
There is an alternative viewpoint, and quite a timely one for me.
I had about 100 photos developed at a local photo place (Fuji, I think). They were all digital, and they were developed using the Fuji do-it-in-an-hour processing machine. I got them back and was instantly displeased, believing that my camera had given all the photos a blue-grey colour cast.
Well, after getting my Canon iP4300 and printing my first few photos on glossy photo paper, I was (perhaps unreasonably) shocked to discover that the print looked amazing and there was no objectionable colour cast. Clearly the Fuji processor was not calibrated correctly, and clearly the people operating the shop didn't give a rats. I appreciate the immediacy and fine control I have over the output when I print photos at home.
That's not to say it's cost effective - far from it. If I have a large number of prints to make, I'll take a CD down to Big W and have them Agfa processed for $0.buggerall each. However, if I've just taken a really nice photo of a friend and me at home, they're more likely to want to take it away in their hand and stick it on their fridge than copy it onto their USB stick and forget about it. The former might be half the price, but it's also half the immediately-nostalgic value.
- slicer127
Parent deserves to be modded all the way up. My first home espresso machine was/is a Carezza, and I've had it for more than two years now - still going strong.
I should add, however, that you can get great espresso from just about any home machine, but ONLY with freshly ground beans. And I don't mean freshly ground at Starbucks/Gloria Jeans/etc last Monday. You need a good burr grinder at home and you need to grind only the beans you need for each cup. My grinder is a Rancilio Rocky, which is worth about twice as much as the Carezza. But it's worth it.
For grinder options, consider Rancilio Rocky, Nemox/Imat Lux, Sunbeam EM0480 or, as a last resort, DeLonghi KG100 (also sold by Starbucks as the Solis 166).
I wonder how many "Slashdotters (who are likely also to be programmers are driven to the edge of insanity by our honourable editors' failure to close their punctuation...
Just great. An International Foundation for Online Responsibility, Now In Control of All The Erotica.
IFORNICATE.
(Karma to burn!)
I understand the principle of entering the highest price you're willing to pay, but if I bid $11.57 and am sniped for $12.05, I'm ticked off. I would have paid $12.05 - I might have even paid $15.23. The trouble with this situation is a competition between my desire to get the best value for money versus the desire to have the product.
Now, my desire to have the product may be quite measured and rational. However, for example, the bidder who snipes me at the last possible moment for an extra 50c is takes advantage of the fact that I declared my hand early. If the price of the auction before I bid was $5.00, in effect I raised the price by $7 and established a new market value for that item at that time, only to get outbid. However, if I withhold my bid until the last seconds, but still bid $11.57, the sniper may have bid $5.50 and I may beat that bid at $6.00. By sniping in this contrived example, I would have saved $5 and won, rather than losing at a higher price by 50c.
Of course, if my snipe fails, I lose by 50c (as before), but this example is predicated on the idea that sniping has now become an eBay fact of life. Indeed, I will continue to snipe all my prospective purchases on eBay, using my highest offer as the snipe value. That way if I win the item I am satisfied that I didn't get screwed over by a trivially incremental amount, and if I lose, well, I didn't want to pay that much anyway.
Ironically, your post reads much better than most of the native English speakers' hereabouts...
Parent is right - I've got the converse situation. My Canon IXUS 50 is a great little camera with a rugged metal body and a decent control set. I can even do some manual tricks with it. However, it's got the tiny lens and tiny CCD, and consequently there's only so much you can achieve with it.
Still, the sheer ability to drop my camera in my pocket without bothering to think about its weight or inconvenience has meant that I have had my camera on hand to take some very memorable and artistic shots, with just a little patience. I intend to buy a DSLR (Nikon's new offerings are attractive - D80?) but purchasing a point-and-shoot digicam first is a Very Good Idea.
It comes down to what you want, or need, to achieve. My opinion? Take whatever camera you have wherever you go, and keep taking photos. I don't care if it's a mobile phone camera or a Hasselblad, just be creative and get used to setting up your shots. Photography isn't so much about the tool as it is about the photographer.