In my experience, I've found that the media I enjoy most have extremely deep worlds. For instance, I ignored the first few episodes of The Simpsons, since I figured it was a cartoon, and not really meant for mature college students like myself (at the time).
And, in truth, the first season of that series isn't very deep. Once you get into the later seasons, however, you start to get peripheral characters that flesh out the world very nicely. I'm thinking specifically of characters like Comic Book Guy, Apu, and Mayor Quimby. Minor characters all, but it makes the world of the Simpsons seem a little more believable.
The Harry Potter series does much the same thing. In the first book, you travel with Harry to see his new world. It's pretty simple, but gets fleshed out amazingly in the later books. I think that's what makes it worthwhile, even for adults.
Just pick up the first one, and if you can put it down after the first 100 pages, I'll be quite surprised.
--joke--
And yes, you are the only person who hasn't read them.
--/joke--
Yes, I COULD use a static DNS server, but it's not something I care to deal with or apply a DIY approach to.
Just as an FYI, RR doesn't use static DNS, but dynamic on their side, so maybe that's part of it. Personally, you start talking networking, and I'm already asleep.
Sorry, I don't have the physics/ee chops to seriously think about this, but couldn't you combine this watch with the kinetic battery seen in some watches, so maybe you can extend the life?
The problem I've seen in our local area (Austin, TX) is that their DNS seems to drop every so often. They're not long outages, just 5 minutes or so, but when you're expecting a 24/7 connection, it's a little surprising.
I, personally, have not noticed a slowdown during peak hours, and I'm in a neighborhood where it should matter.
If you're trying to decide on whether to go DSL or not, consider that RR (at least around me) won't do static IP (not even one). There are some vague workarounds that'll let me ID and use my IP for something that talks to the outside world, but that's not really the route I want to take.
We thought about doing something like this, but found that CVS was overkill for our purposes. We didn't get past the stage where we determined that we didn't actually NEED every old version of our files, just something backed up so we could fall back if we needed to.
So we set up a staging server to which the developers have access, and only the sysadmins have access to the functions to move over files to production. This allows us to keep development separate from production, in addition to providing two sets of backups (one prod, one dev).
The next stage of this is to set up a box with lots of HD space, so we can keep "hot" backups of the html back through the days. We figured out that the backups for the various web servers would come to something like 9GB/wk. The boxes we eventually went with are attached to NAS boxes with 240GB each (mirrored, so functionally 120GB, which lets us keep roughly 3 months of backups on a hard drive, as opposed to tape.
Note that you could easily set up a *nix box with 300GB of space relatively cheaply. The processor and memory requirements are going to be practically nil, so we figured that it would be about $1200 for the box. This is beige boxed, which my boss threw out since we couldn't get HW support, so our system cost significantly more.
When we need to restore older files, we can just load up the old tar.gz, copy the files as needed, and we're outta there. No worries about tape drive screwups, and so on.
In the business literature, there are any number of cases where a company files for bankruptcy, and then finds that banks (or whatever) are MORE willing to lend them money.
The deal is that the "bankrupt" company restructures its current debt, creating a situation where it can take on more debt. Of course, the new debt will be more expensive (higher interest).
Usually, the debts are worked out s.t. the individual payments are less, but over a longer period. What ch. 11 does is force the creditors to rework the loans that are already outstanding.
Well, I believe you're wrong. Admittedly, future plans can't be valued $1=$1 with current earnings, but initial investors in, say, Amazon, accepted losses with good humor, expecting that the first to market advantage would eventually lead to a preferred market position.
After three years, and no real signs of profitability, I'd suggest that many people viewed it as a failure of execution, and pulled out on that basis. The dotbombs, for the most part, had nothing BUT long term plans, and couldn't make their short-term goals work out. Hence, they got punished. Hard.
One analysis is that the quarterly earnings aren't pulled out of the sky, but are, in fact, negotiated with the analysts over time. You can reposition those numbers as you need to (earnings warnings, etc.), and so long as a company isn't delivering any surprises, they should be OK. The problem lies when the market is surprised by a number, it tends to overreact.
This assumes, of course, that all the stockholders (in aggregate) care about is the results in the current quarter.
The dotbomb's stock prices were based largely upon speculation. You can't tell me that, a dotcom with P/E ratios in the thousands had stock prices based on the latest quarter's earnings. In these cases, during the "boom," shareholders (again in aggregate) were willing to forego current income in exchange for potential future market dominance.
It's a double-edged sword. If you have a killer plan, but can't get anything going in the near term, why should I invest my money with you? Similarly, if you've got your current market covered, but have no plans for growth in the future, why should anyone new invest?
In the latter case, what happens when your current market disappears (and it will)? You've got no company, and my stock is worth zilch.
A viable company has to have both a current value proposition, and a speculative function operating simultaneously, and the market will reward both.
Obviously, the answer here, for the majority of users is "No, it's not worth it."
Having said that, a six second difference compiling a kernel may well be worth it for a firm that does kernel-sized complies frequently. Say you're paying a developer who does such stuff $2K/week, and this thing saves six seconds five times a day. Suddenly, you're talking about 2.5 minutes per week, which works out to $2/week.
So, 16.5 weeks later, the high end processor pays for itself. Just a thought.
The thing comes in a kiosk mode, where you can walk into any 7-11, browse in a webesque interface, pay with a credit card, and walk out with your book and a Slurpee.
More importantly, you could shop and purchase any book in any language from anywhere, and come away with a uniform product. Think of the development possibilities in Africa, or traveling in Russia and running out of books to read on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Will book publishers still make too many copies of [Stephen King/Robert Ludlum/Garfield]? Of course, because they sell to the mass market, but if I WANT a copy of "Steal This Book" in Japanese, I could get it with this machine.
Of course, it'll never happen, since printing the book will take too long, and you're eliminating an entire supply chain of bookmakers, but it's a nice idea.
And I can see where a lot of the comments are coming from. I just graduated from University of Texas' Option II program (a top ten weekend program regarded by some as the toughest around), and it has completely changed my view on coding and technology in general.
The fact is that while much of the dotcom disaster was caused by MBA/management types, the technical community has a tough time dealing with the business issues involved in actually running a business. While I often applaud the "scratch an itch" kind of development that seems to be coming out, techies generally don't know how to market their solution, manage the growth of their organization, and make money doing so.
Now, does a techie need to have, say, Cost Accounting, or Business Stats? Probably not, but if you want a fuller vision of the organization as a whole, rather than just the techie piece, then you'll do well with an MBA. If you truly love coding, the MBA probably isn't for you. If you're all about closing the door, putting on some tunes, hacking, and you're happy with that, forget about it.
Over the last couple of years, however, I've developed the opinion that the technology is just the start of the business. With the IP environment that exists, and the inability of companies to defend their competitive advantages, it's difficult to make a case where the best technology wins out. To wit, a company with a solely technical advantage will lose out to a company with a business structure more suited to the market (see OS/2 v. Windows, Netscape v. IE, Notes v. anything). There's a pretty good article on this by Porter in a recent Harvard Business Review. (Strategy and the Internet, March 2001).
If THAT's more what you're interested in, I suspect the MBA will serve you well.
I've done a paper on e-startup businesses, although I know nothing about the Australian ISP market.
To be honest, you've got a really tricky business proposition here. One big problem you're going to have is how to differentiate your ISP over all the others, while maintaining a cost competitive profile.
Just starting out, you've got a substantial scale problem, in that AOL, or whoever serves such a purpose in Australia has you beat on infrastructure, period. Their help desk/bandwidth/server structure will be bigger than yours, and more extensible. Note that I'll use AOL as a proxy for "the large Aussie ISP" from here on out.
Similarly, I suspect there's nothing you can do that AOL can't emulate, imitate, or outright steal. Even worse, your lawyers are going to pale in comparison to the amount of work AOL's lawyers can throw at them, so even if you catch them, it's possible that AOL will just keep it in court forever while you spend money and (more importantly) personal bandwidth on the lawsuits.
To be blunt, I can see why one might want to do this from a technological standpoint, but that's completely different from attacking it as a business.
A couple of ideas:
1) Do a target market survey. Whom, exactly, do you want to serve? What are the implications of that market? My guess is that you can't compete with the AOL in getting newbies to sign up, but maybe there's a anonymity thing you can pursue among established internet users, which changes the demands upon your infrastructure completely.
2) Look for whitespace in the big ISP's offerings. An example would be examining closely what the big guy doesn't do, and attempting to fill that niche. An example would be web hosting, static IPs, etc. I have this problem with the cable ISP we use right now, in that I can't put my IP address in DNS.
Some other poster had a neat idea about small town internet access. What about extending that to nursing homes, community centers, etc.? You can go in, have control over the hardware, and maybe teach a class once a week to add value to the users.
3) Keep your business model flexible. There was an interview with Bill Hewlett about how, in the early days of HP, they did all sorts of stuff with the laser technology they had expertise with. They did a home security thing, a bowling lane foul indicator, and tons of other junk. No longer term strategy, just stuff to pay the bills. In that case, they had a hammer, and tried numerous nails to see if any of them would become absurdly profitable. In the meantime, their nascent company stayed solvent, which is nontrivial.
4) Get business people involved early. What is the problem that you are trying to solve for your users, and can you make money doing so? I suspect that doing a large scale ISP is untenable, considering the competition, so how do you get a niche? How do you keep the customers you sign up?
To summarize, know the people you want to serve, the pain you want to solve for them, and get cash flow before worrying about profit.
--joke--
Other than that, it's just a matter of execution.
--joke--
As mentioned, you don't need the tivoNET to do what you want. I haven't done it, but I understand that you can hack the dialup so it uses a serial connection and rSync.
You do, however, have to get a bash prompt off the TiVo, which isn't rocket science.
For more info on this and other TiVo hacks, check out the BBS at TiVo Underground.
Good reading, and it'll also let you know how to add a second hard drive to your TiVo.
"The article quoted an official saying that human subjects had been exposed to the beams more than 6,000 times under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, military researchers had completed a study, which has not been released, on the long-term health effects of exposure."
Select quip from the following:
a) Makes the Kool-Aid test seem positively benign.
b) "You know, it didn't REALLY bug me until #3,500 or so."
c) "Hey, this wasn't in the recruitment commercials!"
I actually thought the same thing some time ago, in that I figured there had to be some relatively simple scheme that would beat "hit on 16, stay on 17."
So, I wrote a quick program to run through all the possibilities of hit%. I had 0, 50%, and 100% hits at all the points where choices needed to be made (12-20, since you'd always hit on 11, and never on 21).
Ran the program, and it turns out that you get stuck by the way casinos handle player busts. If you bust, the dealer gets your cash, irrespective of whether he busts or not. The dealer's algorithm busts about 33% of the time.
The "winningest" solution was: the instant you get to a number where you have to make a choice, you're best off staying (yes, even on 12). That way, you win something like 8% of the time, and you get all the dealer's busts, for a grand total in the 44% win range. If you tried to maximize your score beyond that, you busted too often, which are automatic losses.
Given that result, I stopped researching it. There are some significant holes here (no doubling down or splitting of hands, no card counting, purely random deck, no attention paid to the dealer's up card, the 0-50-100 split of options leaves a lot to be desired), but I think it's close enough for a first pass.
RAVE ON! Easily the best investment I've made recently. I've got a Targus keyboard hooked up to a handSpring Visor, which does the job tremendously. Two or three gotchas exist:
1) The memo pad only goes up to 4K characters. That's probably OK for most 1.5 hr classes, but it's WAY too small for longer ones. There are a number of different "notepad replacement/word processors for Palm" out there that will let you ramble on to your heart's content.
2) If you're carpal tunneled, these will aggravate that. The keyboard is not split (at least on the Targus), and the keys are at the desk level. I got a cheap, foam wrist rest, cut it down to size, and it works fine.
3) I don't know what you're studying, but if you've got lots of things in equations or diagrams, forget it. Use a notebook. Text only need apply here.
I own an Apen 600A (I think), and it's great for shuffling through tons of tunes randomly, but if you're not thinking about doing an MP3 server for your stereo, it would be difficult to figure out how to play, say, Radiohead's "Kid A" instead of "The Bends", since they show up as RADIOH~1 and RADIOH~2.
Or something like that. You could, of course, nest the album names within the RADIOHEAD directory, but then you've got a problem when you copy those directories directly to something else. Your memory could be less clouded than mine, and able to recall EVERY album name you've ever heard, but...
I'm suspicious of revolvers. If you have carpet, they can have problems turning, and I always underestimate the space they need to actually revolve. They need space between them and the wall, as well, so they're not the most stable things in existance.
Tried your second solution once, but it nearly drove me insane. Couldn't keep track of what was "cached" and what wasn't, so trying to find a specific disk was a nightmare. That solutions also takes twice the alphabetizing as well.
Fact is, you can get (virtually) the same functionality from MyMailStation. My Grandmother has one, loves it, and we now correspond a couple of times a week.
From IO's point of view, it's the same thing without the useless web browser, at a price point of $100, which they can't match.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing it's somewhere in the $1000 range, since I just recently put together louder, but similarly outfitted boxes for my home.
Seems like a lot of cash to get rid of fan hum...
In my experience, I've found that the media I enjoy most have extremely deep worlds. For instance, I ignored the first few episodes of The Simpsons, since I figured it was a cartoon, and not really meant for mature college students like myself (at the time).
And, in truth, the first season of that series isn't very deep. Once you get into the later seasons, however, you start to get peripheral characters that flesh out the world very nicely. I'm thinking specifically of characters like Comic Book Guy, Apu, and Mayor Quimby. Minor characters all, but it makes the world of the Simpsons seem a little more believable.
The Harry Potter series does much the same thing. In the first book, you travel with Harry to see his new world. It's pretty simple, but gets fleshed out amazingly in the later books. I think that's what makes it worthwhile, even for adults.
Just pick up the first one, and if you can put it down after the first 100 pages, I'll be quite surprised.
--joke--
And yes, you are the only person who hasn't read them.
--/joke--
Yes, I COULD use a static DNS server, but it's not something I care to deal with or apply a DIY approach to.
Just as an FYI, RR doesn't use static DNS, but dynamic on their side, so maybe that's part of it. Personally, you start talking networking, and I'm already asleep.
Sorry, I don't have the physics/ee chops to seriously think about this, but couldn't you combine this watch with the kinetic battery seen in some watches, so maybe you can extend the life?
Or am I missing something?
The problem I've seen in our local area (Austin, TX) is that their DNS seems to drop every so often. They're not long outages, just 5 minutes or so, but when you're expecting a 24/7 connection, it's a little surprising.
I, personally, have not noticed a slowdown during peak hours, and I'm in a neighborhood where it should matter.
If you're trying to decide on whether to go DSL or not, consider that RR (at least around me) won't do static IP (not even one). There are some vague workarounds that'll let me ID and use my IP for something that talks to the outside world, but that's not really the route I want to take.
We thought about doing something like this, but found that CVS was overkill for our purposes. We didn't get past the stage where we determined that we didn't actually NEED every old version of our files, just something backed up so we could fall back if we needed to.
So we set up a staging server to which the developers have access, and only the sysadmins have access to the functions to move over files to production. This allows us to keep development separate from production, in addition to providing two sets of backups (one prod, one dev).
The next stage of this is to set up a box with lots of HD space, so we can keep "hot" backups of the html back through the days. We figured out that the backups for the various web servers would come to something like 9GB/wk. The boxes we eventually went with are attached to NAS boxes with 240GB each (mirrored, so functionally 120GB, which lets us keep roughly 3 months of backups on a hard drive, as opposed to tape.
Note that you could easily set up a *nix box with 300GB of space relatively cheaply. The processor and memory requirements are going to be practically nil, so we figured that it would be about $1200 for the box. This is beige boxed, which my boss threw out since we couldn't get HW support, so our system cost significantly more.
When we need to restore older files, we can just load up the old tar.gz, copy the files as needed, and we're outta there. No worries about tape drive screwups, and so on.
Hope this helps.
In the business literature, there are any number of cases where a company files for bankruptcy, and then finds that banks (or whatever) are MORE willing to lend them money.
The deal is that the "bankrupt" company restructures its current debt, creating a situation where it can take on more debt. Of course, the new debt will be more expensive (higher interest).
Usually, the debts are worked out s.t. the individual payments are less, but over a longer period. What ch. 11 does is force the creditors to rework the loans that are already outstanding.
just a thought.
Well, I believe you're wrong. Admittedly, future plans can't be valued $1=$1 with current earnings, but initial investors in, say, Amazon, accepted losses with good humor, expecting that the first to market advantage would eventually lead to a preferred market position.
After three years, and no real signs of profitability, I'd suggest that many people viewed it as a failure of execution, and pulled out on that basis. The dotbombs, for the most part, had nothing BUT long term plans, and couldn't make their short-term goals work out. Hence, they got punished. Hard.
One analysis is that the quarterly earnings aren't pulled out of the sky, but are, in fact, negotiated with the analysts over time. You can reposition those numbers as you need to (earnings warnings, etc.), and so long as a company isn't delivering any surprises, they should be OK. The problem lies when the market is surprised by a number, it tends to overreact.
This assumes, of course, that all the stockholders (in aggregate) care about is the results in the current quarter.
The dotbomb's stock prices were based largely upon speculation. You can't tell me that, a dotcom with P/E ratios in the thousands had stock prices based on the latest quarter's earnings. In these cases, during the "boom," shareholders (again in aggregate) were willing to forego current income in exchange for potential future market dominance.
It's a double-edged sword. If you have a killer plan, but can't get anything going in the near term, why should I invest my money with you? Similarly, if you've got your current market covered, but have no plans for growth in the future, why should anyone new invest?
In the latter case, what happens when your current market disappears (and it will)? You've got no company, and my stock is worth zilch.
A viable company has to have both a current value proposition, and a speculative function operating simultaneously, and the market will reward both.
Obviously, the answer here, for the majority of users is "No, it's not worth it."
Having said that, a six second difference compiling a kernel may well be worth it for a firm that does kernel-sized complies frequently. Say you're paying a developer who does such stuff $2K/week, and this thing saves six seconds five times a day. Suddenly, you're talking about 2.5 minutes per week, which works out to $2/week.
So, 16.5 weeks later, the high end processor pays for itself. Just a thought.
The thing comes in a kiosk mode, where you can walk into any 7-11, browse in a webesque interface, pay with a credit card, and walk out with your book and a Slurpee.
More importantly, you could shop and purchase any book in any language from anywhere, and come away with a uniform product. Think of the development possibilities in Africa, or traveling in Russia and running out of books to read on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Will book publishers still make too many copies of [Stephen King/Robert Ludlum/Garfield]? Of course, because they sell to the mass market, but if I WANT a copy of "Steal This Book" in Japanese, I could get it with this machine.
Of course, it'll never happen, since printing the book will take too long, and you're eliminating an entire supply chain of bookmakers, but it's a nice idea.
Some wag will make their message
"All your base are belong to us."
and start an intergalactic incident. Just fantastic.
And I can see where a lot of the comments are coming from. I just graduated from University of Texas' Option II program (a top ten weekend program regarded by some as the toughest around), and it has completely changed my view on coding and technology in general.
The fact is that while much of the dotcom disaster was caused by MBA/management types, the technical community has a tough time dealing with the business issues involved in actually running a business. While I often applaud the "scratch an itch" kind of development that seems to be coming out, techies generally don't know how to market their solution, manage the growth of their organization, and make money doing so.
Now, does a techie need to have, say, Cost Accounting, or Business Stats? Probably not, but if you want a fuller vision of the organization as a whole, rather than just the techie piece, then you'll do well with an MBA. If you truly love coding, the MBA probably isn't for you. If you're all about closing the door, putting on some tunes, hacking, and you're happy with that, forget about it.
Over the last couple of years, however, I've developed the opinion that the technology is just the start of the business. With the IP environment that exists, and the inability of companies to defend their competitive advantages, it's difficult to make a case where the best technology wins out. To wit, a company with a solely technical advantage will lose out to a company with a business structure more suited to the market (see OS/2 v. Windows, Netscape v. IE, Notes v. anything). There's a pretty good article on this by Porter in a recent Harvard Business Review. (Strategy and the Internet, March 2001).
If THAT's more what you're interested in, I suspect the MBA will serve you well.
Good luck.
mckwant.
I've done a paper on e-startup businesses, although I know nothing about the Australian ISP market.
To be honest, you've got a really tricky business proposition here. One big problem you're going to have is how to differentiate your ISP over all the others, while maintaining a cost competitive profile.
Just starting out, you've got a substantial scale problem, in that AOL, or whoever serves such a purpose in Australia has you beat on infrastructure, period. Their help desk/bandwidth/server structure will be bigger than yours, and more extensible. Note that I'll use AOL as a proxy for "the large Aussie ISP" from here on out.
Similarly, I suspect there's nothing you can do that AOL can't emulate, imitate, or outright steal. Even worse, your lawyers are going to pale in comparison to the amount of work AOL's lawyers can throw at them, so even if you catch them, it's possible that AOL will just keep it in court forever while you spend money and (more importantly) personal bandwidth on the lawsuits.
To be blunt, I can see why one might want to do this from a technological standpoint, but that's completely different from attacking it as a business.
A couple of ideas:
1) Do a target market survey. Whom, exactly, do you want to serve? What are the implications of that market? My guess is that you can't compete with the AOL in getting newbies to sign up, but maybe there's a anonymity thing you can pursue among established internet users, which changes the demands upon your infrastructure completely.
2) Look for whitespace in the big ISP's offerings. An example would be examining closely what the big guy doesn't do, and attempting to fill that niche. An example would be web hosting, static IPs, etc. I have this problem with the cable ISP we use right now, in that I can't put my IP address in DNS.
Some other poster had a neat idea about small town internet access. What about extending that to nursing homes, community centers, etc.? You can go in, have control over the hardware, and maybe teach a class once a week to add value to the users.
3) Keep your business model flexible. There was an interview with Bill Hewlett about how, in the early days of HP, they did all sorts of stuff with the laser technology they had expertise with. They did a home security thing, a bowling lane foul indicator, and tons of other junk. No longer term strategy, just stuff to pay the bills. In that case, they had a hammer, and tried numerous nails to see if any of them would become absurdly profitable. In the meantime, their nascent company stayed solvent, which is nontrivial.
4) Get business people involved early. What is the problem that you are trying to solve for your users, and can you make money doing so? I suspect that doing a large scale ISP is untenable, considering the competition, so how do you get a niche? How do you keep the customers you sign up?
To summarize, know the people you want to serve, the pain you want to solve for them, and get cash flow before worrying about profit.
--joke--
Other than that, it's just a matter of execution.
--joke--
Good luck.
As mentioned, you don't need the tivoNET to do what you want. I haven't done it, but I understand that you can hack the dialup so it uses a serial connection and rSync.
You do, however, have to get a bash prompt off the TiVo, which isn't rocket science.
For more info on this and other TiVo hacks, check out the BBS at TiVo Underground.
Good reading, and it'll also let you know how to add a second hard drive to your TiVo.
$1 ~= 120.5 Yen, so
55,000 yen ~= $456.43
From the article:
"The article quoted an official saying that human subjects had been exposed to the beams more than 6,000 times under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, military researchers had completed a study, which has not been released, on the long-term health effects of exposure."
Select quip from the following:
a) Makes the Kool-Aid test seem positively benign.
b) "You know, it didn't REALLY bug me until #3,500 or so."
c) "Hey, this wasn't in the recruitment commercials!"
Ohh, subjects. Sorry.
I actually thought the same thing some time ago, in that I figured there had to be some relatively simple scheme that would beat "hit on 16, stay on 17."
So, I wrote a quick program to run through all the possibilities of hit%. I had 0, 50%, and 100% hits at all the points where choices needed to be made (12-20, since you'd always hit on 11, and never on 21).
Ran the program, and it turns out that you get stuck by the way casinos handle player busts. If you bust, the dealer gets your cash, irrespective of whether he busts or not. The dealer's algorithm busts about 33% of the time.
The "winningest" solution was: the instant you get to a number where you have to make a choice, you're best off staying (yes, even on 12). That way, you win something like 8% of the time, and you get all the dealer's busts, for a grand total in the 44% win range. If you tried to maximize your score beyond that, you busted too often, which are automatic losses.
Given that result, I stopped researching it. There are some significant holes here (no doubling down or splitting of hands, no card counting, purely random deck, no attention paid to the dealer's up card, the 0-50-100 split of options leaves a lot to be desired), but I think it's close enough for a first pass.
mckwant.
RAVE ON! Easily the best investment I've made recently. I've got a Targus keyboard hooked up to a handSpring Visor, which does the job tremendously. Two or three gotchas exist:
1) The memo pad only goes up to 4K characters. That's probably OK for most 1.5 hr classes, but it's WAY too small for longer ones. There are a number of different "notepad replacement/word processors for Palm" out there that will let you ramble on to your heart's content.
2) If you're carpal tunneled, these will aggravate that. The keyboard is not split (at least on the Targus), and the keys are at the desk level. I got a cheap, foam wrist rest, cut it down to size, and it works fine.
3) I don't know what you're studying, but if you've got lots of things in equations or diagrams, forget it. Use a notebook. Text only need apply here.
Other than that, it's beautiful.
> By the way, I was stunned to find that Jethro Tull is still putting out new stuff.
Yeah, think how Metallica felt.
I own an Apen 600A (I think), and it's great for shuffling through tons of tunes randomly, but if you're not thinking about doing an MP3 server for your stereo, it would be difficult to figure out how to play, say, Radiohead's "Kid A" instead of "The Bends", since they show up as RADIOH~1 and RADIOH~2.
Or something like that. You could, of course, nest the album names within the RADIOHEAD directory, but then you've got a problem when you copy those directories directly to something else. Your memory could be less clouded than mine, and able to recall EVERY album name you've ever heard, but...
I'm suspicious of revolvers. If you have carpet, they can have problems turning, and I always underestimate the space they need to actually revolve. They need space between them and the wall, as well, so they're not the most stable things in existance.
Just a thought.
mckwant
What do you think STARTED this whole mess?
thanks.
mckwant
Tried your second solution once, but it nearly drove me insane. Couldn't keep track of what was "cached" and what wasn't, so trying to find a specific disk was a nightmare. That solutions also takes twice the alphabetizing as well.
Fact is, you can get (virtually) the same functionality from MyMailStation. My Grandmother has one, loves it, and we now correspond a couple of times a week.
From IO's point of view, it's the same thing without the useless web browser, at a price point of $100, which they can't match.
Game Over, Man.