POP3 with leaving mail on the server is a barely usable kludge. It sucks especially when you have to check from all sorts of places. IMAP is so much more flexible - you can use it LIKE a local client, but you're not forced to. You can also use it remotely, through a web mail gateway (squirrelmail is excellent if you host your own), you can use a terminal client (ie mutt), you can use a nice client like the mac Mail.app. Everything you do across any client is reflected on all the other clients. Gmail has nice search capabilities, but so does mutt, grep, and the Mail.app 2.0 spotlight feature. This doesn't even take into account the awesomeness of having shell access to your mail server to be able to use everything from procmail to clamav to amavis.
For most people, webmail is alright. For email jockeys, it really isn't. I'd venture to say that POP3 is even worse than just using straight webmail.
Uh, it's about portability, which encompasses more than just raw weight. Try opening that monster on a plane, even in business class (don't even bother in coach). Try picking it up and out of your bag for a quick note jot when you have a few minutes between meetings while you're waiting for a coworker in a lobby. Try placing it on a tiny round coffee shop table or lunch bar. Try pulling this thing out when you're running statistics in the lower hull of a huge tanker and your only "desk" is a steam pipe.
I don't know about you, but where I use my laptop is never an ideal space - the smaller the machine, the better. If none of these things are problems for you, more power to you, but this thing is treading "desktop replacement" territory, NOT portable machine. Your experience may be with using a "laptop" mostly at a desk, or just bringing one to and from work. My experience (and most road warriors I know) are lucky if we have something as ideal as a desk to use.
While I am not a fan of software required to use something like a media player, the convenience and ease of use of using iTunes is so dramatic when paired with an iPod, that "dragging and dropping" appears quaint in comparison.
Have a new music track? Drop your iPod into the dock (or insert the cable) and it's in. Shuffled around some playlists? Already done on your iPod. Edited a SmartList to only include tracks imported between August 2002 and January 2004 beginning with the letter "I" and under two minutes long? Same deal. Bought some CDs? Insert into computer, rip, and plug in iPod. Killed that track that reminds you of the car accident you were in because you talked to your ex-gf while cruising through a red light? Auto deleted from the iPod.
The iPod is meant to be iTunes carried around. Other companies take it the exact opposite approach: that's the problem with other players - they are portables with software hacked on top of them (or lack thereof, as in drag and drop files). Showing up as a portable drive is convenient for various file operations such as backups and file transfers (and yes, the iPod does this). It is not nearly a good enough solution for anyone who has a large collection of music to manage and doesn't want to deal with actually organizing it. That's what computers and software are good at - let them do it.
No they won't. They'll still go to their local record store and maintain the probably years-long relationship they've had with the folks running the store. They'll buy the CD or vinyl, rip it, and store the originals somewhere immaculate. Don't you know anything about real music freaks? The idea of not owning a track is abhorrent to them, and lossless compression is the devil only to be tolerated on low end equipment such as an iPod (and even then, there's always Apple Lossless).
I'm just curious as to how many people do the 'roll your own' route and use an old box like a P2 or K6-2 or something, put two $10 ethernet adapters in there, and use iptables with QOS to do almost the same thing? Now I realize that that is much more involved, and there is definite worth in purchasing a consumer level "router" and dropping it into place (not to mention the actual learning curve involved in setting up your own router), but I find it's given me so much flexibility (and it rarely runs into weird firmware problems, random freezes, and the amount of connections it can hold have never been a problem - this with seven PC's, running and seeding torrents) that I'm surprised when people get excited about routers like this, especially on slashdot.
Note that with that many torrents running, QOS is very important, and I seem to have it down pretty well - we've had four people playing online with the previous mentioned torrents running, and our pings still hold steady in the 30-70 range (yes, we have a nice set of data lines, but QOS is still important at keeping the torrents under control ).
And where do you propose the original files to encode to come from? A lossy file downloaded from iTunes? A lossy MP3 you downloaded off a P2P network? Or the non-lossy CD you purchased?
Or you could read it as "it didn't appeal just to super elitist geeks who think things sound intelligent when really they're just after the big explosions". These people who I got to watch DS9 aren't the type to watch Friends; these are the people that would actually turn OFF the TV to listen to "This American Life".
DS9 "had its moments"? I'm hardly a ST fan, but man, that series blew everything else out of the water. It had everything people here have been clamoring about: deep (very deep) character development, HUGE plot arc, a different view of pristine Starfleet, and some especially well written episodes. It made TNG look almost quaint at times, what with its 'run into problem of the week while running around for no particular reason'.
The true test? I could actually get other people who wouldn't touch ST with a ten foot pole to actually LIKE watching DS9. Why? Because underneath, it was a truly character driven ensemble cast, with so many shades of gray that people were never clearly good and never clearly bad throughout the whole series.
There is tons of stuff there that most people don't bother to look for because they don't like the film or think reading anything into it is a waste of time.
Nor does it make it a good film. Clumsiness is still clumsiness, even if it's subtle. Colors? That's his idea of subtle nuances? That's something a 6 year old does in drawings. Try a Kurosawa film sometime (Ran, for example), or even something as mainstream as The Ice Storm for true use of subtlety. Those examples you listed are so hackneyed and cliched that it's painful.
Really? Well, um, maybe you should've done some research before buying into the format. Because I know that when I was transferring music digitally on and off the discs, the iPod was still five years down the line, and nothing was comparable. I won't even get into how different the two beasts are, but suffice to say, caveat emptor.
Now I love my iPod and I no longer have a reason to buy MD devices (I don't do nearly as much recording anymore), but anyone doing even CURSORY comparisons of the two types of devices should be able to pull apart which one they should purchase.
Any K6 can use SDRAM, ie anything a Pentium 3 can use, so can a K6-2. It may be limited to a 66 or 100 mhz fsb, but that doesn't mean a standard PC133 stick won't work perfectly in it. I still use a K6-2/300 as a very decent file server - 3 simulataneous users pulling / putting files on it + serving media files from a raid array (the regular linux software kernel one!) works fine.
Don't be such a luddite. Just because you see an example of stupidity and ineffectual use doesn't mean the rest of us can't figure out how to use our technology in an efficient way.
My phone is hooked up via bluetooth to my headset, pda, and laptop. Depending on where I am at any one time, incoming calls are routed to the headset (if I want), show up on the screen with the matching profile plucked from the laptop's address book (if I want), or SMS's are sent back and forth between the PDA or laptop (if I want), and email arrivals are announced from various IMAP servers as well as downloaded if neccessary (if I want).
Did you catch the magic phrase in that previous paragraph? Let me iterate if it's not clear: IF I WANT. The option is there. It isn't always on, because sometimes, it's completely useless. Other times, it's completely invaluable... and the ease at switching between working modes is literally one button. Oh wait, if I have to interface it with my PDA or laptop, I have to lift up the laptop cover or turn on the PDA.
It still acts very well as a phone. None of the features interfere with the added options (and if they did, I'd sure as hell return the phone right away). Find a phone that does the basic well. If you want more, seek those options out. If those further options diminish the quality of the basic functions, you made a bad choice. How hard is that for you folks to understand?
Actually, you can use daemon tools to achieve a similar mode of operation on a PC. While it's not integrated into the system, the creators of the program made if *exactly* for this situation, and it makes things easier even if companies integrate obnoxious anti-cd duplication protection schemes (RPMS, etc). I like the mac's simplicity, but since I hardly play games on my powerbook, I'm not quite sure how well it works with games/without the CD (apparently quite well). Anyway, I recommend d-tools if you like to horde huge libraries of CDs on a file server on your network (including games).
Hmm. Basically all your refutes come from a completely uneducated source - namely, your lack of knowledge regarding much beyond the basics of iTunes operation. I don't consider iTunes to be a panacea, but it's definitely more flexible than the way you're portraying it.
Actually, I'd refute every single one of your points, but the grandparent did just that and received a reply that addressed none of them. For example, the samba/http/ftp/slimserver comment is incredibly ludicrous, and epitomizes exactly how much you DON'T know about iTunes. IOW, you've descended (or always have been) into trolldom.
Anytime an idiot prefaces their post with that, they really are saying, "This goes against what the typical slashdot reaction is, so watch me karma whore the sympathy mod!"
Oh man, your Logitechs may sound decent, but to compare it to a Bose CD/Radio just threw all credibility you have out the window. Bose systems are good for one thing: wheeling in suckers.
Re:I love photography but photoblogs bore me.
on
Photoblog Revolution
·
· Score: 1
Whoa. You have a serious lack of creativity. Do you think professional photographers run out to fabulously interesting locales everytime they need a good photo? Well, sometimes. But the best examples of photography are just as often a new take on the supremely common.
While I understand that your point is mostly referring to the fact that most photo blogs are quite boring, that has nothing to do with the fact that they shoot everyday things. Exotic locale doesn't equal interesting photos, and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
NYC and Boston are about the only real public transit systems that sorta work in the US that I know of.
Uh, CHICAGO? And San Fran?
POP3 with leaving mail on the server is a barely usable kludge. It sucks especially when you have to check from all sorts of places. IMAP is so much more flexible - you can use it LIKE a local client, but you're not forced to. You can also use it remotely, through a web mail gateway (squirrelmail is excellent if you host your own), you can use a terminal client (ie mutt), you can use a nice client like the mac Mail.app. Everything you do across any client is reflected on all the other clients. Gmail has nice search capabilities, but so does mutt, grep, and the Mail.app 2.0 spotlight feature. This doesn't even take into account the awesomeness of having shell access to your mail server to be able to use everything from procmail to clamav to amavis.
For most people, webmail is alright. For email jockeys, it really isn't. I'd venture to say that POP3 is even worse than just using straight webmail.
Uh, it's about portability, which encompasses more than just raw weight. Try opening that monster on a plane, even in business class (don't even bother in coach). Try picking it up and out of your bag for a quick note jot when you have a few minutes between meetings while you're waiting for a coworker in a lobby. Try placing it on a tiny round coffee shop table or lunch bar. Try pulling this thing out when you're running statistics in the lower hull of a huge tanker and your only "desk" is a steam pipe.
I don't know about you, but where I use my laptop is never an ideal space - the smaller the machine, the better. If none of these things are problems for you, more power to you, but this thing is treading "desktop replacement" territory, NOT portable machine. Your experience may be with using a "laptop" mostly at a desk, or just bringing one to and from work. My experience (and most road warriors I know) are lucky if we have something as ideal as a desk to use.
While I am not a fan of software required to use something like a media player, the convenience and ease of use of using iTunes is so dramatic when paired with an iPod, that "dragging and dropping" appears quaint in comparison.
Have a new music track? Drop your iPod into the dock (or insert the cable) and it's in. Shuffled around some playlists? Already done on your iPod. Edited a SmartList to only include tracks imported between August 2002 and January 2004 beginning with the letter "I" and under two minutes long? Same deal. Bought some CDs? Insert into computer, rip, and plug in iPod. Killed that track that reminds you of the car accident you were in because you talked to your ex-gf while cruising through a red light? Auto deleted from the iPod.
The iPod is meant to be iTunes carried around. Other companies take it the exact opposite approach: that's the problem with other players - they are portables with software hacked on top of them (or lack thereof, as in drag and drop files). Showing up as a portable drive is convenient for various file operations such as backups and file transfers (and yes, the iPod does this). It is not nearly a good enough solution for anyone who has a large collection of music to manage and doesn't want to deal with actually organizing it. That's what computers and software are good at - let them do it.
Run JHymn on all your freshly downloaded tracks from the iTMS. Presto - no DRM.
The power music consumers will use allofmp3.
No they won't. They'll still go to their local record store and maintain the probably years-long relationship they've had with the folks running the store. They'll buy the CD or vinyl, rip it, and store the originals somewhere immaculate. Don't you know anything about real music freaks? The idea of not owning a track is abhorrent to them, and lossless compression is the devil only to be tolerated on low end equipment such as an iPod (and even then, there's always Apple Lossless).
I heard that the server version will... and that the new iChat was rumored to have support as well, but I haven't heard anything yet...?
I'm just curious as to how many people do the 'roll your own' route and use an old box like a P2 or K6-2 or something, put two $10 ethernet adapters in there, and use iptables with QOS to do almost the same thing? Now I realize that that is much more involved, and there is definite worth in purchasing a consumer level "router" and dropping it into place (not to mention the actual learning curve involved in setting up your own router), but I find it's given me so much flexibility (and it rarely runs into weird firmware problems, random freezes, and the amount of connections it can hold have never been a problem - this with seven PC's, running and seeding torrents) that I'm surprised when people get excited about routers like this, especially on slashdot.
Note that with that many torrents running, QOS is very important, and I seem to have it down pretty well - we've had four people playing online with the previous mentioned torrents running, and our pings still hold steady in the 30-70 range (yes, we have a nice set of data lines, but QOS is still important at keeping the torrents under control ).
The gigabit ports are nice, of course.
And where do you propose the original files to encode to come from? A lossy file downloaded from iTunes? A lossy MP3 you downloaded off a P2P network? Or the non-lossy CD you purchased?
As everyone else has noted, it's probably symmetric. Your cable service is not even close.
He probably has a symmetric connection. Clearly, the ones you listed are not.
2. WiFi instead of IrDA. Come on, what were they thinking? IrDA sucks, WiFi has so much more going for it. IMHO that was a poor choice.
Am I missing something here? On the second page of the article, it clearly lists WiFi as an addition, as well as how to disable it when not in use.
Another post was right on though... Bluetooth would've probably been the better choice.
Or you could read it as "it didn't appeal just to super elitist geeks who think things sound intelligent when really they're just after the big explosions". These people who I got to watch DS9 aren't the type to watch Friends; these are the people that would actually turn OFF the TV to listen to "This American Life".
Go generalize elsewhere, troll.
DS9 "had its moments"? I'm hardly a ST fan, but man, that series blew everything else out of the water. It had everything people here have been clamoring about: deep (very deep) character development, HUGE plot arc, a different view of pristine Starfleet, and some especially well written episodes. It made TNG look almost quaint at times, what with its 'run into problem of the week while running around for no particular reason'.
The true test? I could actually get other people who wouldn't touch ST with a ten foot pole to actually LIKE watching DS9. Why? Because underneath, it was a truly character driven ensemble cast, with so many shades of gray that people were never clearly good and never clearly bad throughout the whole series.
There is tons of stuff there that most people don't bother to look for because they don't like the film or think reading anything into it is a waste of time.
Nor does it make it a good film. Clumsiness is still clumsiness, even if it's subtle. Colors? That's his idea of subtle nuances? That's something a 6 year old does in drawings. Try a Kurosawa film sometime (Ran, for example), or even something as mainstream as The Ice Storm for true use of subtlety. Those examples you listed are so hackneyed and cliched that it's painful.
Really? Well, um, maybe you should've done some research before buying into the format. Because I know that when I was transferring music digitally on and off the discs, the iPod was still five years down the line, and nothing was comparable. I won't even get into how different the two beasts are, but suffice to say, caveat emptor.
Now I love my iPod and I no longer have a reason to buy MD devices (I don't do nearly as much recording anymore), but anyone doing even CURSORY comparisons of the two types of devices should be able to pull apart which one they should purchase.
Any K6 can use SDRAM, ie anything a Pentium 3 can use, so can a K6-2. It may be limited to a 66 or 100 mhz fsb, but that doesn't mean a standard PC133 stick won't work perfectly in it. I still use a K6-2/300 as a very decent file server - 3 simulataneous users pulling / putting files on it + serving media files from a raid array (the regular linux software kernel one!) works fine.
Don't be such a luddite. Just because you see an example of stupidity and ineffectual use doesn't mean the rest of us can't figure out how to use our technology in an efficient way.
My phone is hooked up via bluetooth to my headset, pda, and laptop. Depending on where I am at any one time, incoming calls are routed to the headset (if I want), show up on the screen with the matching profile plucked from the laptop's address book (if I want), or SMS's are sent back and forth between the PDA or laptop (if I want), and email arrivals are announced from various IMAP servers as well as downloaded if neccessary (if I want).
Did you catch the magic phrase in that previous paragraph? Let me iterate if it's not clear: IF I WANT. The option is there. It isn't always on, because sometimes, it's completely useless. Other times, it's completely invaluable... and the ease at switching between working modes is literally one button. Oh wait, if I have to interface it with my PDA or laptop, I have to lift up the laptop cover or turn on the PDA.
It still acts very well as a phone. None of the features interfere with the added options (and if they did, I'd sure as hell return the phone right away). Find a phone that does the basic well. If you want more, seek those options out. If those further options diminish the quality of the basic functions, you made a bad choice. How hard is that for you folks to understand?
Actually, you can use daemon tools to achieve a similar mode of operation on a PC. While it's not integrated into the system, the creators of the program made if *exactly* for this situation, and it makes things easier even if companies integrate obnoxious anti-cd duplication protection schemes (RPMS, etc). I like the mac's simplicity, but since I hardly play games on my powerbook, I'm not quite sure how well it works with games/without the CD (apparently quite well). Anyway, I recommend d-tools if you like to horde huge libraries of CDs on a file server on your network (including games).
Uh... clearly over your head.
Hmm. Basically all your refutes come from a completely uneducated source - namely, your lack of knowledge regarding much beyond the basics of iTunes operation. I don't consider iTunes to be a panacea, but it's definitely more flexible than the way you're portraying it.
Actually, I'd refute every single one of your points, but the grandparent did just that and received a reply that addressed none of them. For example, the samba/http/ftp/slimserver comment is incredibly ludicrous, and epitomizes exactly how much you DON'T know about iTunes. IOW, you've descended (or always have been) into trolldom.
I was just thinking that :P
Of course, people here obviously take themselves too seriously, as evidenced by the mod on that post.
Alright, here goes my karma...
Anytime an idiot prefaces their post with that, they really are saying, "This goes against what the typical slashdot reaction is, so watch me karma whore the sympathy mod!"
Oh man, your Logitechs may sound decent, but to compare it to a Bose CD/Radio just threw all credibility you have out the window. Bose systems are good for one thing: wheeling in suckers.
Whoa. You have a serious lack of creativity. Do you think professional photographers run out to fabulously interesting locales everytime they need a good photo? Well, sometimes. But the best examples of photography are just as often a new take on the supremely common.
While I understand that your point is mostly referring to the fact that most photo blogs are quite boring, that has nothing to do with the fact that they shoot everyday things. Exotic locale doesn't equal interesting photos, and vice versa.