It's an Apple product - the components generally aren't user replacable, so throwing it out the window and buying a new one is your best bet if it breaks.
Analyzing fiction involves finding deeper meaning or hidden clues in what you're presented with, not trying to extrapolate facts out of a very bare framework of events. Given enough knowledge of Half-Life 1, it's easy to come up with a rough timeline of events, but none of the details are presented to you and you can't know for certain unless you look them up. If every novel presented its plot in the same manner that Half-Life 2 does, no work of fiction would be longer than 100 pages. Sparsity of detail a good plot does not make. Let me ask you this: if you were so confident that you'd figured out all the details, why did you go read the exposés?
The Half-Life series does have a pretty interesting plot, but absolutely none of this plot is presented to the player in Half-Life 2. I hardly think it's fair to say that the game had a "good plot" when it's impossible to know what that plot is without seeking external sources of information.
Did you try turning your computer off at night? Seriously, it's good for environment and unless you're running a server there's no reason to leave it on all night.
I don't see why that's an unreasonable assumption. Why waste money on a kickass case if you don't have the hardware to back it up? That would be the ultimate form of ricing.
Hm, I guess maybe my experience was a bit skewed since I didn't spend enough time there to actually have to pay rent... and a lot of the food I ate was either in restauarants or fast food. (I must admit that I resorted to McDonalds a few times.)
PG is nice. The weather is quite pleasant, especially for this time of year. There's been a lot of development in the college heights area in the last few years.
An hour and a half from downtown Tokyo, or an hour and a half from the outskirts? I did find Japan quite expensive relative to Prince George (where I live) when I went there, although I wasn't there over a long period of time. Actually, electronics were cheaper but basic living requirements such as food seemed much more expensive.
Re:$600 overpriced console vs. Xbox 360 *with* Hal
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
·
· Score: 1
Halo 3 won't be out in time for the PS3 launch. Bill Gates claimed it would be a while back, but that was a completely unrealistic deadline for Bungie.
I named my favorite programs for each task, you don't have to use all of them. Still, all of them come with most distributions, such as the excellent Mepis [mepis.org], which runs from CD and can walk you through a GUI install in 20 minutes or so. The braver could take the hour or two to install Debian proper and get those things they like best. Dependency resolution is only difficult when you use non free or legally suppressed software like DeCSS to watch DVDs.
Those tools are fairly common, but it doesn't mean that organizing your music won't take a lot of work. Take Fedora, for example - none of the bundled software can play MP3s, and as a result any music software (ie Amarok) which relies on bundled libraries won't be able to play MP3s without bothersome updates. Not to mention package conflicts... those are a huge headache. Obviously it depends on the distribution, but often it's going to be more trouble than it's worth to the user.
Anyway, even if you don't have to install those tools, you've still got to use several seperate apps to do something that really should be one single task. One app to rip, one app to organize/play, one app to burn... it's annoying. iTunes can do all of those things by itself, and I think the vast majority of computer users, tech saavy or not, will put up with iTunes' shortcomings in exchange for the convenience it offers over the methods you've listed.
I agree with you that the lack of endorsement by any major hardware vendors is a big problem. But it's not the only one...
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
Amarok needs a hell of a lot of work. The only thing I managed to get it to do was freeze. When I tried to add the ~1000 songs I have on my computer, it quickly ate up all my memory and then stopped doing much of anything, slowing the rest of the system down to the point that I had to do a hard reboot.
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are a number of ways around this. You're right, it's annoying for the average user, but not so annoying that it offsets all the benefits of iPod + iTunes.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Even so, every other player on the market lacks something compared to the iPod, be it style, features, capacity, ease of use, etc. The iPod is quite well rounded. By the way, it's "du jour."
* Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that. * Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device. * Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources. * Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task. This is one of the main reasons that Linux as a whole has very little share of the desktop market - lack of integration. Everything in Linux relies on something else, and while that's more efficient for servers, it's just a huge pain in the ass for home users.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
To all the people who are commenting on how this is "just another example of liberal censorship" and how "conservatives and libertarians would never do something like this" and how "omg canada sux0rz teh big one lawl" - you do realize that we've been under a conservative minority government since the sixth of February?
Keyboard > microphone (purely in terms of chatting; for control)?
I'd beg to differ. The only genre I can think of where a keyboard is more desirable for chatting would be MMOs, and those are already more or less PC-only.
Huh, that's interesting. I wish I had the cash to do a bit of experimenting with this. Canada is generally more liberal than the United States, but I am a bit surprised that this doesn't seem to happen here at the same stores it does there. At the EB here, anyone is pretty much free to buy whatever they want. I don't think they'd sell an M-rated game to a 12 year old, but other than that it's not a big deal. It's strange, though, because I would've assumed that the corporate policy would be the same in both countries.
Futureshop, however (a Canadian-founded electronics retailer now owned by Best Buy - and with service to match) does have a big fat sign on the checkout counter stating that they do not sell M rated games to minors and that ID may be required.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't know if I like the "UI permissions" - how can you possibly learn new ways of doing things if you're restricted from doing things in new ways? Certainly some users would benefit from not being able to screw things up, but I think such a system would encourage ignorance in people who might otherwise learn something.
I wonder if that's even theoretically possible, though. I mean, humans can't really find those things out on their own until they have some base information to work with. No two year old realizes that climbing out of a highrise window will make his life very short indeed. Even humans require some experience and teaching before they're able to start figuring things out on their own.
For the record, Buddha never claimed to have created the universe or anything like that. He was a regular human being, albeit one who became enlightened. Of course, the ID crowd would STILL go nuts if someone said that Buddha created the universe, seeing as they don't tend to know much about other religions.
Eh, I vote for His Noodliness, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yarr!
Uh, what? You say you have an engine that "generates" power without using any? If so, I think you're going to become very famous very fast. Conservation of energy, anyone?
In other news, Google has announced that they are planning to have a service for each word in the English dictionary by mid 2007. Google Myxomatosis is on its way!
Okay, the word "generally" may have been a bit overzealous, but I think your anecdote represents a fairly unusual case. The vast majority of anti-homosexual sentiment certainly does not come from athiests. Christianity is hardly the only religion to blame, but it certainly contributes to the problem.
Yes, but everyone already knows that Christians generally hate gays and lesbians. I think they're hoping that he'll realize how stupid some of the arguments are... or something along those lines. Don't think it's the punishment I would have picked, but it's certainly not the kind of job I'd want to be doing anyway.
I don't know if what he's saying is true. I don't know of any evidence to back it up, but it does sound feasible.
Regardless, you must be nuts if you don't already think there's something wrong with the school system. The only valuable part of high school (for example) is learning how to interact with people of all sorts - nice people, assholes, idiots, members of the opposite sex, etc. That's a very important skill, and high school does do a pretty good job of teaching that. But the rest of it is shit. Cramming 30+ kids into a classroom for hours on end with a teacher who doesn't necessarily know the material they're supposed to be teaching (let alone effective teaching methods) is absolutely not the best way to teach kids. It is a waste of time. A huge waste of time. I don't have all the solutions, but I do know that there must be better ways to teach than the school system most countries have right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an Apple product - the components generally aren't user replacable, so throwing it out the window and buying a new one is your best bet if it breaks.
(For the record, I own an iPod myself.)
Analyzing fiction involves finding deeper meaning or hidden clues in what you're presented with, not trying to extrapolate facts out of a very bare framework of events. Given enough knowledge of Half-Life 1, it's easy to come up with a rough timeline of events, but none of the details are presented to you and you can't know for certain unless you look them up. If every novel presented its plot in the same manner that Half-Life 2 does, no work of fiction would be longer than 100 pages. Sparsity of detail a good plot does not make. Let me ask you this: if you were so confident that you'd figured out all the details, why did you go read the exposés?
The Half-Life series does have a pretty interesting plot, but absolutely none of this plot is presented to the player in Half-Life 2. I hardly think it's fair to say that the game had a "good plot" when it's impossible to know what that plot is without seeking external sources of information.
Did you try turning your computer off at night? Seriously, it's good for environment and unless you're running a server there's no reason to leave it on all night.
I don't see why that's an unreasonable assumption. Why waste money on a kickass case if you don't have the hardware to back it up? That would be the ultimate form of ricing.
Hm, I guess maybe my experience was a bit skewed since I didn't spend enough time there to actually have to pay rent... and a lot of the food I ate was either in restauarants or fast food. (I must admit that I resorted to McDonalds a few times.) PG is nice. The weather is quite pleasant, especially for this time of year. There's been a lot of development in the college heights area in the last few years.
An hour and a half from downtown Tokyo, or an hour and a half from the outskirts? I did find Japan quite expensive relative to Prince George (where I live) when I went there, although I wasn't there over a long period of time. Actually, electronics were cheaper but basic living requirements such as food seemed much more expensive.
Halo 3 won't be out in time for the PS3 launch. Bill Gates claimed it would be a while back, but that was a completely unrealistic deadline for Bungie.
I named my favorite programs for each task, you don't have to use all of them. Still, all of them come with most distributions, such as the excellent Mepis [mepis.org], which runs from CD and can walk you through a GUI install in 20 minutes or so. The braver could take the hour or two to install Debian proper and get those things they like best. Dependency resolution is only difficult when you use non free or legally suppressed software like DeCSS to watch DVDs. Those tools are fairly common, but it doesn't mean that organizing your music won't take a lot of work. Take Fedora, for example - none of the bundled software can play MP3s, and as a result any music software (ie Amarok) which relies on bundled libraries won't be able to play MP3s without bothersome updates. Not to mention package conflicts... those are a huge headache. Obviously it depends on the distribution, but often it's going to be more trouble than it's worth to the user. Anyway, even if you don't have to install those tools, you've still got to use several seperate apps to do something that really should be one single task. One app to rip, one app to organize/play, one app to burn... it's annoying. iTunes can do all of those things by itself, and I think the vast majority of computer users, tech saavy or not, will put up with iTunes' shortcomings in exchange for the convenience it offers over the methods you've listed. I agree with you that the lack of endorsement by any major hardware vendors is a big problem. But it's not the only one...
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
Amarok needs a hell of a lot of work. The only thing I managed to get it to do was freeze. When I tried to add the ~1000 songs I have on my computer, it quickly ate up all my memory and then stopped doing much of anything, slowing the rest of the system down to the point that I had to do a hard reboot.
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are a number of ways around this. You're right, it's annoying for the average user, but not so annoying that it offsets all the benefits of iPod + iTunes.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Even so, every other player on the market lacks something compared to the iPod, be it style, features, capacity, ease of use, etc. The iPod is quite well rounded. By the way, it's "du jour."
* Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that.
* Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device.
* Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources.
* Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task. This is one of the main reasons that Linux as a whole has very little share of the desktop market - lack of integration. Everything in Linux relies on something else, and while that's more efficient for servers, it's just a huge pain in the ass for home users.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
To all the people who are commenting on how this is "just another example of liberal censorship" and how "conservatives and libertarians would never do something like this" and how "omg canada sux0rz teh big one lawl" - you do realize that we've been under a conservative minority government since the sixth of February?
What makes you think you're cybering with women? :P
Meant to say "purely in terms of chatting, not for control." That's what I get for not hitting the preview button.
Keyboard > microphone (purely in terms of chatting; for control)?
I'd beg to differ. The only genre I can think of where a keyboard is more desirable for chatting would be MMOs, and those are already more or less PC-only.
Huh, that's interesting. I wish I had the cash to do a bit of experimenting with this. Canada is generally more liberal than the United States, but I am a bit surprised that this doesn't seem to happen here at the same stores it does there. At the EB here, anyone is pretty much free to buy whatever they want. I don't think they'd sell an M-rated game to a 12 year old, but other than that it's not a big deal. It's strange, though, because I would've assumed that the corporate policy would be the same in both countries.
Futureshop, however (a Canadian-founded electronics retailer now owned by Best Buy - and with service to match) does have a big fat sign on the checkout counter stating that they do not sell M rated games to minors and that ID may be required.
Where do you live? I've never seen this in Canada. There are some stores here with such policies, but EB isn't one of them.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't know if I like the "UI permissions" - how can you possibly learn new ways of doing things if you're restricted from doing things in new ways? Certainly some users would benefit from not being able to screw things up, but I think such a system would encourage ignorance in people who might otherwise learn something.
...who thinks this would be a pain in the ass to debug?
I wonder if that's even theoretically possible, though. I mean, humans can't really find those things out on their own until they have some base information to work with. No two year old realizes that climbing out of a highrise window will make his life very short indeed. Even humans require some experience and teaching before they're able to start figuring things out on their own.
For the record, Buddha never claimed to have created the universe or anything like that. He was a regular human being, albeit one who became enlightened. Of course, the ID crowd would STILL go nuts if someone said that Buddha created the universe, seeing as they don't tend to know much about other religions.
Eh, I vote for His Noodliness, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yarr!
Uh, what? You say you have an engine that "generates" power without using any? If so, I think you're going to become very famous very fast. Conservation of energy, anyone?
In other news, Google has announced that they are planning to have a service for each word in the English dictionary by mid 2007. Google Myxomatosis is on its way!
Okay, the word "generally" may have been a bit overzealous, but I think your anecdote represents a fairly unusual case. The vast majority of anti-homosexual sentiment certainly does not come from athiests. Christianity is hardly the only religion to blame, but it certainly contributes to the problem.
Yes, but everyone already knows that Christians generally hate gays and lesbians. I think they're hoping that he'll realize how stupid some of the arguments are... or something along those lines. Don't think it's the punishment I would have picked, but it's certainly not the kind of job I'd want to be doing anyway.
I don't know if what he's saying is true. I don't know of any evidence to back it up, but it does sound feasible.
Regardless, you must be nuts if you don't already think there's something wrong with the school system. The only valuable part of high school (for example) is learning how to interact with people of all sorts - nice people, assholes, idiots, members of the opposite sex, etc. That's a very important skill, and high school does do a pretty good job of teaching that. But the rest of it is shit. Cramming 30+ kids into a classroom for hours on end with a teacher who doesn't necessarily know the material they're supposed to be teaching (let alone effective teaching methods) is absolutely not the best way to teach kids. It is a waste of time. A huge waste of time. I don't have all the solutions, but I do know that there must be better ways to teach than the school system most countries have right now.