In 1917 250 tons of explosive gun powder, benzol, and gun cotton loaded on the French ship Mont-Blanc exploded and devastated the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The ship was carrying supplies to help the war effort over seas. A fire resulting from a collision with a Norwegian ship as the Mont-Blanc was leaving the harbor to join up with a convoy was triggered the blast 28 minutes after the minor collision.
The death toll rose to about 1,600 in a city with a population near 50,000. An explosion 5 times as powerful in a town 5 times smaller could conceivably wipe it off the face of the earth. 12,000 homes were damaged or destroyed not only by the blast, but also the fires that followed.
Couldn't stand em.
Made me sick. Well one day I decided to have one even though I didn't like em. Felt like I had wasted my money. Know what I did? I bought another one. After about 5 Big Macs I was startin' to dig it. Now I really like Big Macs.
I think you might have had something wrong with you long before you ever had the Big Mac. I mean you force fed yourself the culinary equivalent of raw sewage for God's sake!
Based entirely on my own experiences and those of my friends (how's that for sample size?) I'd bet that for every call the manufacturer receives some poor "computer geek" friend gets ten calls.
It'd be interesting to know how the unofficial support channels stack up against the real thing. I'd bet that neighborhood support would put everyone to shame: we do everything from replacing hardware faster than any mail-in service does to trouble-shoot VPN setups for our bosses and we don't (usually) fall back on the old tech support dismissal "That's a software problem: call Microsoft. Good-bye." Or in the case of a hardware issue "That's a hardware problem: Call IBM. Good-bye."
Something I forgot to add:
If the iPod Mini makes people say "Hey, the 15 GB iPod only costs $50 more and gets you almost 400% as much space - why get the small one?!" then Apple has just 'upsold' you to another (better) item. Apple doesn't care if you compare the cheapest iPod to a more costly one because in the end it will still be money in the bank.
You didn't think to compare to the Creative MuVo 2 or one of the Rio players - just another Apple product: that makes me think that the iPod mini is perfectly priced/marketed. If the only competition for the iPod mini is another iPod then what does Apple have to lose?
Miniaturization costs money: look at the prices we pay to have those tiny cellular phones compared to the communi-bricks from the late 80's. You're saving a half the weight, half the volume, getting a more "durable" (scratch resistant) outer body. If you had no interest in using more than 1gb of storage the iPod mini is a pretty good deal - even compared to the big ipod for a number of reasons, some examples may include:
1. The guys at my gym that want a smaller iPod to run with. The iPod mini is about half the size of the already small iPod.
2. People that have 4gb or less of music digitized or possibly people who will only ever want to listen to 1,000 songs before returning to their computers to change the list. Using iTunes it's only a half-dozen clicks to switch from "sync playlist x" to "sync songs in playlist x, y and z" - wait a few seconds and you're ready to go.
That's prefect for a lot of people who are used to selecting a couple of CDs in the morning for the commute to work. Buying an additional 11gb of space isn't a better deal for these people, it's a waste of $50!
3. People who just like "cute" or "blue". There are some people who see the iPod as a fashion accessory - $250 isn't a lot compared to a designer belt or purse.
4. People who just don't have $299 to spend on the "big boy" ipods but still want to be part of Apple's "digital lifestyle". The fact remains that the only portable player you can (easily) use your iTunes Music Store tunes with is made by Apple. Also, Apple has arguably one of the best interfaces for a portable MP3 player of this kind, and it's digital jukebox software has been well received too - some people are willing to sacrifice a few gigabytes of storage if they thing they will end up with a better overall user experience.
$50 may not seam like a lot to some of us, but for someone like my younger brother working part time at subway in high-school that's a fair size chunk of his monthly income. They may decide to purchase the 'best quality' by whatever measure they use - rather than the highest specifications.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has no authority to prevent VeriSign from rolling out a search engine for users who mistype Internet addressees, VeriSign said, as well as another feature that allows users to sign up for a waiting list for desirable domain names.
Hey Verisign: We don't care if you want to make a search engine for miss-spelled domains, nor do we care if you want to setup a domain name waiting list. In fact the only thing that bothers anyone is that you're breaking DNS to force us to use them.
If this was really about setting up a search engine and nothing else they could just register vs-sitefinder.com and vs-domain-wait-list.com and be in business. Instead they insist on pissing on their responsibility to maintain a functional DNS system in order to achieve some sort of edge over the competition.
Is there some sort of contest for the most hated corporation going on between Microsoft, SCO, and Verisign?
It takes light a whole lot of years to make it this far. It sounds like this story should have started with:
"A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away..."
According to BetaNews the source code was leaked by a company called "MainSoft" which has been a Microsoft partner for as long as the shared source initiative has been in place.
Mainsoft makes a product called mainwin which is used to create native UNIX versions versions of Windows software. They go on to say the information was found by looking at a.core file found with the code.
See here:
http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=107667411 8
The internet itself is made up of many parts: email, usenet, IRC, world wide web, ftp, telnet the only thing they really have in common is that all of those work on top of IP (internet protocol).
The internet itself works fine on just about every platform. The services provided on top of that may be hit or miss depending on how and who impliments them.
Of course, you knew that, but a surprising number of people think that the web is all there is to the internet. I've met CS majors who still don't quiet get that AIM is part of the internet. They'll send me a message and say "my internet is down". "...how did you send me this message?" really they're just having some site not resolving.
I'm willing to be that one of the first customers for this software is the tabloid newspapers/magazines. They pay small fortunes of photos of celebrities in their most intimate and private moments and without a way to verify digital photographs they could be duped of millions of dollars.
Today IE5 for Mac OS is a crumby browser compared to modern offerings such as Apple's Safari, Camino/Firebird, and OmniWeb but back near the turn of the millennium Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS was praised far and wide as the best browser EVER for Macintosh systems, and arguably the best browser on any platform.
Here is a review at O'Reilly's Mac Developer Center (which has some geek-credit here) where they praise thinks including:
- Blending into the newly released OS X Aqua look
- The "page holder"
- Font controls
- CSS1/2 support
- PNG Support (which is still broken on windows)
- HTML4 support
Here's one over at macworld that decries it as the best thing since jesus as far as os x browsers are concerned. IE was very impressive, unfortunately Microsoft let it stagnate which hurt all mac users - choice is good.
Another article from 2000 that speaks to the quality of the MacIE.
I'm feeding a troll, but whatever.
Re:unfortunately the drives are mounted vertically
on
A Terabyte In A Cigar Box
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
you could just rotate it 90 degrees and be done with the "vertically mounted flaw".
At 11 pounts even the weakest of geeks should be able to move that.
Furthermore, the fact you can toss this thing in a backpack, shove it off your desk, or spill coffee onto it is probably more hazardous to your porno^h^htfolio.
$750cdn is what it'll cost for ($603 with ADC discount) for a 40gb iPod because it's small.
A 60gb nomad zen xtra will cost you half that much - but it's bigger (weight/volume) than the ipod.
You're paying for it being compact. Just like Canon Elf digi-cams cost a lot, and tiny cellphones cost more than brick-sized disocunt pieces - small mp3 players that store a couple thousand songs are going to cost a fair ammount too.
compare with the Nomad MuVo2: 1.5gb - $200 after $30 mail in rebate from crutchfield.com. If apple can get theirs out for $99 then they'll be one of the most cost-effective units in the low-gb MP3 player arena.
Not everyone needs 21 days of music all the time. To carry 40 CDs in say half the size of an ipod would be a wonderful thing for many people. Especially if they could change those in a minute or two by plugging into firewire.
The life of the battery is NOT 18 months in all cases. The majority of iPods (many are >2 years old) are still working flawlessly. The manufacturer of the iPod battery claims that the battery should still function after three years of use (or about 500 cycles). YMMV based on the frequency and type of use but so far most 1G iPods are still working so there isn't a reason to suspect this claim is false.
On occasion you will get a 'dud' something common to all consumer electronics. While it's unfortunate that Apple didn't have a battery replacement/warranty program when those two gentlemen made their movie, that is no longer an issue now. Applecare and battery programs were announces before the ipod's dirty secret domain was even registered.
Furthermore, if you don't want to pay apple to supply and replace your battery, you can do it yourself - see ipodbattery.com
Mod down if you must:I know it gets annoying seeing the same old "ipods aren't disposable" posts every day but I'd be upset if someone didn't buy me an iPod for christmas because they saw the parrent post and asusmed it was accurate.
I don't use my Ti-92+ in school as a calculator any more anyway (not many calculus teachers want you using any electronic devices at all) so this gives me something to do with it.
2mb rom, m68k 10mhz processor, link port: If we could get a graphical tool kit and a C toolchain it might be possible to make something roughly as capable as one of the original Mac or Lisa. Not powerful, but useful for note taking, tetris, and doing some simple calculations on the side - and has even more geek-factor than taking notes on a palm pilot + fold out keyboard or pocketpc running linux.
Being that there is so little java in java desktop anyway (as mentioned above), maybe they should rename it to six-pack-of-bud desktop, or Moonshine-computing environment to appeal to the walmart market.
Java is so upper-class yuppy: Apple users would eat that up! disclaimer: posted from a powerbook at a down-town coffee shop
Except that onemorething.com is a parody site and not actually steve jobs' web-log.
There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
This is from the horse's mouth, a transcript of an interview between Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg at "all things digital". (sorry I couldn't find the article on a "good" source (ie: google news) so go easy on it.
It's good to see that the wal-mart pcs will have plenty of accessories available for them. All they need now is a mouse made out of a stuffed animal head and a keyboard/gun rack combo.
The article is pretty vague. Wal-mart is going to start an online music store to compete with other services which have been successful. Unless they can offer something darn impressive I think they'll have a hard time getting it out the door.
Apple offers you iTunes - excellent music software that people actually want to use (just look at the number of non-US downloads for proof).
Napster 2 offers...well, it's got plenty of name recognition - the music selection/pricing scheme is a little different and the format works on a variety of players.
The other services (buymusic, napster, pressplay...) haven't had near the success of the iTMS. Unless walmart has some sort of killer feature that people are actually asking for they're doomed to be another smalltime player.
what could that feature be?
- Lossless files
- No DRM/Regular MP3
- Extremely cheap pricing ($.10 - $.50)
- EVERY major artist/song represented (and more indie tracks too)
Without one of those it's just more of the same, and there is no reason for consumers to choose walmart's startup over the much more popular ITMS or the much more established napster.
I Agree that the iPod sounds excellent using AIFF encoded files and using the dock's line-out to drive my home theatre speakers - but using ANY compression codec (including wav & aiff) with headphones can sound terrible.
The EQ sounds like it also has an "Auto distort on bass hits" option - especially if I'm listening at >= 70% volume. Even with the EQ off it will start sounding terrible at 80% of max volume (not that I listen that loud often).
These problems exist on both after-market 'quality' headphones and those included, but are absent when using line out. Anyone else notice this or am I just overly picky. (Using a 3rd Gen, 30gb iPod)
The company I work for will be migrating to Windows 2003, currently we are still utilizing NT 4 and have had to do minimal patching until now. I think the people doing most of the complaining have not been applying service packs in a timely manner and therefore have made more work for themselves. I read that Linux has issued 25 patches so far this year, so what is to be gained by switching?
I'm amazed that this guy accepts bi-weekly patching as a part of life. Then he asks what's to gain from switching to Linux (which by his own research has had 25 patches this year) while according to microsoft there have been
a metric buttload of patches since Service Pack 1a. Granted according to Windows Update only 75 'important' patches, but that's still significantly more than linux.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1917 250 tons of explosive gun powder, benzol, and gun cotton loaded on the French ship Mont-Blanc exploded and devastated the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The ship was carrying supplies to help the war effort over seas. A fire resulting from a collision with a Norwegian ship as the Mont-Blanc was leaving the harbor to join up with a convoy was triggered the blast 28 minutes after the minor collision.
The death toll rose to about 1,600 in a city with a population near 50,000. An explosion 5 times as powerful in a town 5 times smaller could conceivably wipe it off the face of the earth. 12,000 homes were damaged or destroyed not only by the blast, but also the fires that followed.
Wikipedia has some more information on the Halifax explosion.
I think you might have had something wrong with you long before you ever had the Big Mac. I mean you force fed yourself the culinary equivalent of raw sewage for God's sake!
FINALLY! They're enforcing the slashdot policy of not reading the articles before spouting off!
I was getting really tired of these holier-than-thou types messing up my daily dose ofAnd yeah, I saw that too.
Based entirely on my own experiences and those of my friends (how's that for sample size?) I'd bet that for every call the manufacturer receives some poor "computer geek" friend gets ten calls.
It'd be interesting to know how the unofficial support channels stack up against the real thing. I'd bet that neighborhood support would put everyone to shame: we do everything from replacing hardware faster than any mail-in service does to trouble-shoot VPN setups for our bosses and we don't (usually) fall back on the old tech support dismissal "That's a software problem: call Microsoft. Good-bye." Or in the case of a hardware issue "That's a hardware problem: Call IBM. Good-bye."
Something I forgot to add: If the iPod Mini makes people say "Hey, the 15 GB iPod only costs $50 more and gets you almost 400% as much space - why get the small one?!" then Apple has just 'upsold' you to another (better) item. Apple doesn't care if you compare the cheapest iPod to a more costly one because in the end it will still be money in the bank. You didn't think to compare to the Creative MuVo 2 or one of the Rio players - just another Apple product: that makes me think that the iPod mini is perfectly priced/marketed. If the only competition for the iPod mini is another iPod then what does Apple have to lose?
Miniaturization costs money: look at the prices we pay to have those tiny cellular phones compared to the communi-bricks from the late 80's. You're saving a half the weight, half the volume, getting a more "durable" (scratch resistant) outer body. If you had no interest in using more than 1gb of storage the iPod mini is a pretty good deal - even compared to the big ipod for a number of reasons, some examples may include:
1. The guys at my gym that want a smaller iPod to run with. The iPod mini is about half the size of the already small iPod.
2. People that have 4gb or less of music digitized or possibly people who will only ever want to listen to 1,000 songs before returning to their computers to change the list. Using iTunes it's only a half-dozen clicks to switch from "sync playlist x" to "sync songs in playlist x, y and z" - wait a few seconds and you're ready to go.
That's prefect for a lot of people who are used to selecting a couple of CDs in the morning for the commute to work. Buying an additional 11gb of space isn't a better deal for these people, it's a waste of $50!
3. People who just like "cute" or "blue". There are some people who see the iPod as a fashion accessory - $250 isn't a lot compared to a designer belt or purse.
4. People who just don't have $299 to spend on the "big boy" ipods but still want to be part of Apple's "digital lifestyle". The fact remains that the only portable player you can (easily) use your iTunes Music Store tunes with is made by Apple. Also, Apple has arguably one of the best interfaces for a portable MP3 player of this kind, and it's digital jukebox software has been well received too - some people are willing to sacrifice a few gigabytes of storage if they thing they will end up with a better overall user experience.
$50 may not seam like a lot to some of us, but for someone like my younger brother working part time at subway in high-school that's a fair size chunk of his monthly income. They may decide to purchase the 'best quality' by whatever measure they use - rather than the highest specifications.
It takes light a whole lot of years to make it this far. It sounds like this story should have started with: "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away..."
They're numbering in binary.
According to BetaNews the source code was leaked by a company called "MainSoft" which has been a Microsoft partner for as long as the shared source initiative has been in place. Mainsoft makes a product called mainwin which is used to create native UNIX versions versions of Windows software. They go on to say the information was found by looking at a .core file found with the code.
See here:
http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=107667411 8
You confusing the web with the internet.
The internet itself is made up of many parts: email, usenet, IRC, world wide web, ftp, telnet the only thing they really have in common is that all of those work on top of IP (internet protocol).
The internet itself works fine on just about every platform. The services provided on top of that may be hit or miss depending on how and who impliments them.
Of course, you knew that, but a surprising number of people think that the web is all there is to the internet. I've met CS majors who still don't quiet get that AIM is part of the internet. They'll send me a message and say "my internet is down".
"...how did you send me this message?"
really they're just having some site not resolving.
I'm willing to be that one of the first customers for this software is the tabloid newspapers/magazines. They pay small fortunes of photos of celebrities in their most intimate and private moments and without a way to verify digital photographs they could be duped of millions of dollars.
Today IE5 for Mac OS is a crumby browser compared to modern offerings such as Apple's Safari, Camino/Firebird, and OmniWeb but back near the turn of the millennium Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS was praised far and wide as the best browser EVER for Macintosh systems, and arguably the best browser on any platform.
Here is a review at O'Reilly's Mac Developer Center (which has some geek-credit here) where they praise thinks including:
- Blending into the newly released OS X Aqua look
- The "page holder"
- Font controls
- CSS1/2 support
- PNG Support (which is still broken on windows)
- HTML4 support
Here's one over at macworld that decries it as the best thing since jesus as far as os x browsers are concerned. IE was very impressive, unfortunately Microsoft let it stagnate which hurt all mac users - choice is good.
Another article from 2000 that speaks to the quality of the MacIE.
I'm feeding a troll, but whatever.you could just rotate it 90 degrees and be done with the "vertically mounted flaw". At 11 pounts even the weakest of geeks should be able to move that. Furthermore, the fact you can toss this thing in a backpack, shove it off your desk, or spill coffee onto it is probably more hazardous to your porno^h^htfolio.
$750cdn is what it'll cost for ($603 with ADC discount) for a 40gb iPod because it's small. A 60gb nomad zen xtra will cost you half that much - but it's bigger (weight/volume) than the ipod. You're paying for it being compact. Just like Canon Elf digi-cams cost a lot, and tiny cellphones cost more than brick-sized disocunt pieces - small mp3 players that store a couple thousand songs are going to cost a fair ammount too. compare with the Nomad MuVo2: 1.5gb - $200 after $30 mail in rebate from crutchfield.com. If apple can get theirs out for $99 then they'll be one of the most cost-effective units in the low-gb MP3 player arena. Not everyone needs 21 days of music all the time. To carry 40 CDs in say half the size of an ipod would be a wonderful thing for many people. Especially if they could change those in a minute or two by plugging into firewire.
The life of the battery is NOT 18 months in all cases. The majority of iPods (many are >2 years old) are still working flawlessly. The manufacturer of the iPod battery claims that the battery should still function after three years of use (or about 500 cycles). YMMV based on the frequency and type of use but so far most 1G iPods are still working so there isn't a reason to suspect this claim is false.
On occasion you will get a 'dud' something common to all consumer electronics. While it's unfortunate that Apple didn't have a battery replacement/warranty program when those two gentlemen made their movie, that is no longer an issue now. Applecare and battery programs were announces before the ipod's dirty secret domain was even registered.
Furthermore, if you don't want to pay apple to supply and replace your battery, you can do it yourself - see ipodbattery.com
Mod down if you must:I know it gets annoying seeing the same old "ipods aren't disposable" posts every day but I'd be upset if someone didn't buy me an iPod for christmas because they saw the parrent post and asusmed it was accurate.
Go easy on her, it's on my ISPs web space. Wait a minute, I'm still upset about not have truely unlimited access so on second thought: bag on it! ;)
I don't use my Ti-92+ in school as a calculator any more anyway (not many calculus teachers want you using any electronic devices at all) so this gives me something to do with it. 2mb rom, m68k 10mhz processor, link port: If we could get a graphical tool kit and a C toolchain it might be possible to make something roughly as capable as one of the original Mac or Lisa. Not powerful, but useful for note taking, tetris, and doing some simple calculations on the side - and has even more geek-factor than taking notes on a palm pilot + fold out keyboard or pocketpc running linux.
Being that there is so little java in java desktop anyway (as mentioned above), maybe they should rename it to six-pack-of-bud desktop, or Moonshine-computing environment to appeal to the walmart market.
Java is so upper-class yuppy: Apple users would eat that up!
disclaimer: posted from a powerbook at a down-town coffee shop
Except that onemorething.com is a parody site and not actually steve jobs' web-log.
This is from the horse's mouth, a transcript of an interview between Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg at "all things digital". (sorry I couldn't find the article on a "good" source (ie: google news) so go easy on it.
It's good to see that the wal-mart pcs will have plenty of accessories available for them. All they need now is a mouse made out of a stuffed animal head and a keyboard/gun rack combo.
The article is pretty vague. Wal-mart is going to start an online music store to compete with other services which have been successful. Unless they can offer something darn impressive I think they'll have a hard time getting it out the door.
Apple offers you iTunes - excellent music software that people actually want to use (just look at the number of non-US downloads for proof).
Napster 2 offers...well, it's got plenty of name recognition - the music selection/pricing scheme is a little different and the format works on a variety of players.
The other services (buymusic, napster, pressplay...) haven't had near the success of the iTMS. Unless walmart has some sort of killer feature that people are actually asking for they're doomed to be another smalltime player.
what could that feature be?
- Lossless files
- No DRM/Regular MP3
- Extremely cheap pricing ($.10 - $.50)
- EVERY major artist/song represented (and more indie tracks too)
Without one of those it's just more of the same, and there is no reason for consumers to choose walmart's startup over the much more popular ITMS or the much more established napster.
I Agree that the iPod sounds excellent using AIFF encoded files and using the dock's line-out to drive my home theatre speakers - but using ANY compression codec (including wav & aiff) with headphones can sound terrible.
The EQ sounds like it also has an "Auto distort on bass hits" option - especially if I'm listening at >= 70% volume. Even with the EQ off it will start sounding terrible at 80% of max volume (not that I listen that loud often).
These problems exist on both after-market 'quality' headphones and those included, but are absent when using line out. Anyone else notice this or am I just overly picky.
(Using a 3rd Gen, 30gb iPod)
I'm amazed that this guy accepts bi-weekly patching as a part of life. Then he asks what's to gain from switching to Linux (which by his own research has had 25 patches this year) while according to microsoft there have been a metric buttload of patches since Service Pack 1a. Granted according to Windows Update only 75 'important' patches, but that's still significantly more than linux.
a 25% increase in muscle mass in 2 weeks
So, I can go from an 80 pound weakling to a 100 pound beefcake in the time it takes me to compile Gentoo on my P2-300?
Those jocks from highschool are going to be sorry they shoved me in my locker...
everyday...
twice.