...iTunes Music Store, but with available (though not mandatory) Apple Lossless downloads, perhaps for $1.49. The advantage of Apple Lossless is quite simple: iPod support so people will want to buy and I imagine it'd be easier to DRM than FLAC would, a necessity if you want major labels or even many independents. Also iTunes compatability = AirTunes compatability = stream to your Hi-Fi over Wi-Fi to an AirPort Express, if you have a better stereo system than your computer's card and speakers.
Or failing that, some sort of DRMed FLAC or something for PC-based listening. But in an ideal situation perhaps the individual record labels would have the option of not requiring any DRM on the music.
I keep a Western Electric Model 500 (black with the older-style metal dial) on my desk right next to my more high tech stuff...PDA, iBook, iPod, cell phone. Beyond the obvious decorative contrast and creative anachronism, the thing doesn't fall off the damn desk, and I can actually hear people.
Firefox, MSIE, and Safari already have integrated Gmail clients -- the browsers themselves. A notifier and mailto handler might be nice, too, but that can be handled equally well with a plug-in.
My sister runs some software that isn't SP2 compatible, and there's all the rumors about it nuking people's installations and whatnot. I'm waiting a month or two at least.
I've never liked using a pad designed for TouchTone signaling to enter text. QWERTY may have been designed for typewriters but at least it was designed for entering text, not generating DTMF sounds for the phone company. The TouchTone keypad's design was made for telephone dialing and it's enough of a painful stretch to use it for menu systems -- if you are cursed with a Trimline. cellular with no headset attached, or oher keypad-on-the-cheek phone you have to take it away from your ear to push the next button, but that's more a failure of the design of many telephones than any problem with the keypad design or with DTMF. As for text entry, it's slow, aggravating, and painful; I would be more apt to pay a dime for an SMS if it were easier to enter -- so I'd pretty much need a keyboard-equipped Blackberry or Treo to be able to take up that expensive habit.
No, iTunes just has built-in links to diamonds in the rough like Radio Margaritaville, the 'net stream that has all the Buffett concerts -- I'm listening to a rerun right now -- and some public stations &c.
There won't be any scholarships coming out of student tech fees. They're funneled into the IT department and after they put junk in the labs and make the faculty fetch their e-mail on garbage (as in 3-year-old or so lab surplus when they get their hands on it, and they keep it for God knows how long), there's a surplus. They spend it on perks for themselves (Altiris servers so they don't have to go around with a LaCie drive and a Knoppix disk, or expensive Windows server software so they don't have to learn how to use Linux) or on occasion students and employees.
This is coming from the same people, no doubt, who will make their students read the management or self-help book du jour (be it Peopleware, Who Moved My Cheese, one of the many Extreme Programming books, or what have you) rather than teaching them how to faithfully execute the development process in the CS classes. If all people know is group management and stuff like that they aren't marketable. I don't know for certain, but I imagine that in India they mostly train people how to DO THEIR JOB, not a bunch of fad management that'll be passé in a year.
a full-color display with good resolution, a DVD player, a VGA output, X11, SSH, Unix, WiFi, a fullsize keyboard, a replaceable battery, Lotus Notes friendliness, a web browser that works, USB, and Microsoft Word. Wouldn't mind some 3D games either, and I'd like it to be made by Apple -- hey, the Newton was cool and the iPod is amazing.
Problem is, you can't carry an iBook, or indeed any other laptop, in your pocket all the time and whip it out on the fly to schedule an appointment so you don't forget it. PDAs should be PDAs, as laptops should be laptops. You don't use a telephone for a home theater system -- it'd sound lousy and would be mono to boot, though it'd also serve to place telephone calls. The right tool should be used for the job, and while Windows XP, Red Hat Linux, Mac OS X, or similar systems are great for watching DVDs, playing games, or using complicated proprietary mail systems, these operating systems are not the ones you want to use for a PDA; you use Palm, RIM, Symbian, or WinCE.
And moreover, the PDAs must not become overgrown lest they become overpriced, undervalued distotions of both PDAs and laptop computers. You could probably make a handheld device with all the features I listed above, but it'd be horrid value compared to just getting a great laptop and a good PDA. I've read that OQO will be $2000 and will run XP, which wasn't designed for use on a device that is so small to be useful primarily only as an organizer. No miniaturized laptop computer, even if it's as small as the OQO, will ever be able to compete in value and usability with a real PDA -- imagine having to run the monthly-odd MS or Apple software updates on your palm pilot as well as your regular computer(s) -- and make no mistake, OQO and similar cannot stand alone efficiently.
About the time they dump the 500 set for the telecom icon, the magnetic tape for storage, and the first-gen iPod for them all. And I think there are a few other anachronisms in the/. icon system...some intentional, some not.
Much agreed. Though the pen-and-paper nazis always like to come around for these posts and get some karma, you really just can't beat a cheap laptop -- I'd suggest a 12" iBook, which is pretty well built and yet still small and relatively inexpensive, particularly at student rate. You can't make a bunch of free copies of paper notes unless you are willing to mess with a scanner, and given the sorry state of OCR you'll just wind up with bulky jpegs, whereas the guy next to you using the laptop can upload his notes to this server and that server and make a dump to a Firewire drive.
...don't break the law. There is little legal happening on Direct Connect hubs, as opposed (for example) to BitTorrent) so I would suggest not operating one unless you want to be at least investigated. It sounds like these hubs were pretty large-scale copyright infringement racket. This wasn't someone e-mailing a ripped MP3 to a friend; this frankly sounds like organized crime to me.
Well, to the reductionist mind (read: "what's inside the head of many MBAs who can't quite understand their lawyers") there is no copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret: there is only intellectual property. Nevermind that this is actually a category the lawyers use to keep stuff straight -- to the confused, though, it implies that the types of law contained therein have more in common than they actually do, and more in common with real estate or other physical property than it does.
The adapter goes with many of the other rather quaint icons -- the wheelbarrow for databases (what the?), the dial telephone for communication, the blackboard for education, the megaphone for announcements, and so forth. I think the last time a communication post was about old phones was the time Bell System Memorial got slashdotted (most communication posts aren't about telephones at all!), and the only Blackboard that gets/. coverage is the kind that universities use vigorously when they like malfunctioning technology more than happy, well-educated students. I don't think a database post has ever involved gardening. And the adapters are a hack of sorts -- they can be useful, but in many cases they are unreliable and dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
...iTunes Music Store, but with available (though not mandatory) Apple Lossless downloads, perhaps for $1.49. The advantage of Apple Lossless is quite simple: iPod support so people will want to buy and I imagine it'd be easier to DRM than FLAC would, a necessity if you want major labels or even many independents. Also iTunes compatability = AirTunes compatability = stream to your Hi-Fi over Wi-Fi to an AirPort Express, if you have a better stereo system than your computer's card and speakers.
Or failing that, some sort of DRMed FLAC or something for PC-based listening. But in an ideal situation perhaps the individual record labels would have the option of not requiring any DRM on the music.
Well, it gets tough being stuck between Iraq and a hard place.
I keep a Western Electric Model 500 (black with the older-style metal dial) on my desk right next to my more high tech stuff...PDA, iBook, iPod, cell phone. Beyond the obvious decorative contrast and creative anachronism, the thing doesn't fall off the damn desk, and I can actually hear people.
Firefox, MSIE, and Safari already have integrated Gmail clients -- the browsers themselves. A notifier and mailto handler might be nice, too, but that can be handled equally well with a plug-in.
Even better, 'Winnie Ille Pu." Latin is a geeky pursuit, no?
Well, when you've just moved into a new residence, getting your LAN working is right up there with plugging in the TV and the phone.
I think the "p2p update for Windows" is otherwise known as the "Fedora DVD torrent," but that's just my personal opinion ;p
My sister runs some software that isn't SP2 compatible, and there's all the rumors about it nuking people's installations and whatnot. I'm waiting a month or two at least.
Well, some of us aren't courageous enoguh to put on SP2.
I would -- I'm boycotting SP2.
Yet none are quite as efficient at headache inducement as Slowtus "log in 3 times if you're on webmail" Notes.
I've never liked using a pad designed for TouchTone signaling to enter text. QWERTY may have been designed for typewriters but at least it was designed for entering text, not generating DTMF sounds for the phone company. The TouchTone keypad's design was made for telephone dialing and it's enough of a painful stretch to use it for menu systems -- if you are cursed with a Trimline. cellular with no headset attached, or oher keypad-on-the-cheek phone you have to take it away from your ear to push the next button, but that's more a failure of the design of many telephones than any problem with the keypad design or with DTMF. As for text entry, it's slow, aggravating, and painful; I would be more apt to pay a dime for an SMS if it were easier to enter -- so I'd pretty much need a keyboard-equipped Blackberry or Treo to be able to take up that expensive habit.
Lotus is still using databases for mail servers. And clients. And headache-inducers, for that matter.
A Chyron character generator is probably the best way to superimpose text in real time.
No, iTunes just has built-in links to diamonds in the rough like Radio Margaritaville, the 'net stream that has all the Buffett concerts -- I'm listening to a rerun right now -- and some public stations &c.
There won't be any scholarships coming out of student tech fees. They're funneled into the IT department and after they put junk in the labs and make the faculty fetch their e-mail on garbage (as in 3-year-old or so lab surplus when they get their hands on it, and they keep it for God knows how long), there's a surplus. They spend it on perks for themselves (Altiris servers so they don't have to go around with a LaCie drive and a Knoppix disk, or expensive Windows server software so they don't have to learn how to use Linux) or on occasion students and employees.
This is coming from the same people, no doubt, who will make their students read the management or self-help book du jour (be it Peopleware, Who Moved My Cheese, one of the many Extreme Programming books, or what have you) rather than teaching them how to faithfully execute the development process in the CS classes. If all people know is group management and stuff like that they aren't marketable. I don't know for certain, but I imagine that in India they mostly train people how to DO THEIR JOB, not a bunch of fad management that'll be passé in a year.
a full-color display with good resolution, a DVD player, a VGA output, X11, SSH, Unix, WiFi, a fullsize keyboard, a replaceable battery, Lotus Notes friendliness, a web browser that works, USB, and Microsoft Word. Wouldn't mind some 3D games either, and I'd like it to be made by Apple -- hey, the Newton was cool and the iPod is amazing.
Problem is, you can't carry an iBook, or indeed any other laptop, in your pocket all the time and whip it out on the fly to schedule an appointment so you don't forget it. PDAs should be PDAs, as laptops should be laptops. You don't use a telephone for a home theater system -- it'd sound lousy and would be mono to boot, though it'd also serve to place telephone calls. The right tool should be used for the job, and while Windows XP, Red Hat Linux, Mac OS X, or similar systems are great for watching DVDs, playing games, or using complicated proprietary mail systems, these operating systems are not the ones you want to use for a PDA; you use Palm, RIM, Symbian, or WinCE.
And moreover, the PDAs must not become overgrown lest they become overpriced, undervalued distotions of both PDAs and laptop computers. You could probably make a handheld device with all the features I listed above, but it'd be horrid value compared to just getting a great laptop and a good PDA. I've read that OQO will be $2000 and will run XP, which wasn't designed for use on a device that is so small to be useful primarily only as an organizer. No miniaturized laptop computer, even if it's as small as the OQO, will ever be able to compete in value and usability with a real PDA -- imagine having to run the monthly-odd MS or Apple software updates on your palm pilot as well as your regular computer(s) -- and make no mistake, OQO and similar cannot stand alone efficiently.
About the time they dump the 500 set for the telecom icon, the magnetic tape for storage, and the first-gen iPod for them all. And I think there are a few other anachronisms in the /. icon system...some intentional, some not.
Much agreed. Though the pen-and-paper nazis always like to come around for these posts and get some karma, you really just can't beat a cheap laptop -- I'd suggest a 12" iBook, which is pretty well built and yet still small and relatively inexpensive, particularly at student rate. You can't make a bunch of free copies of paper notes unless you are willing to mess with a scanner, and given the sorry state of OCR you'll just wind up with bulky jpegs, whereas the guy next to you using the laptop can upload his notes to this server and that server and make a dump to a Firewire drive.
...don't break the law. There is little legal happening on Direct Connect hubs, as opposed (for example) to BitTorrent) so I would suggest not operating one unless you want to be at least investigated. It sounds like these hubs were pretty large-scale copyright infringement racket. This wasn't someone e-mailing a ripped MP3 to a friend; this frankly sounds like organized crime to me.
Well, to the reductionist mind (read: "what's inside the head of many MBAs who can't quite understand their lawyers") there is no copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret: there is only intellectual property. Nevermind that this is actually a category the lawyers use to keep stuff straight -- to the confused, though, it implies that the types of law contained therein have more in common than they actually do, and more in common with real estate or other physical property than it does.
I said quaint, not obsolete.
The adapter goes with many of the other rather quaint icons -- the wheelbarrow for databases (what the?), the dial telephone for communication, the blackboard for education, the megaphone for announcements, and so forth. I think the last time a communication post was about old phones was the time Bell System Memorial got slashdotted (most communication posts aren't about telephones at all!), and the only Blackboard that gets /. coverage is the kind that universities use vigorously when they like malfunctioning technology more than happy, well-educated students. I don't think a database post has ever involved gardening. And the adapters are a hack of sorts -- they can be useful, but in many cases they are unreliable and dangerous.
That's okay -- Even B is faster than the Internet usually is. Main advantage of faster networks is for internal business