They do have a way to access the music, and it doesn't even require a fee or an API. The user's iTunes library is stored in a plain text XML file with an obvious schema. It includes all the information about the user's library and the physical location of the files. iTunes itself doesn't even use this file; it's created and maintained solely for the use of third party applications. This is how RIM and other vendors offer iTunes syncing: their own sync application parses the XML file and then syncs the songs between the device and the computer. Palm simply doesn't want to bother writing their own sync application. They'd rather hack in to iTunes and use it.
As to fair use, songs bought on the iTunes store are plain jane AACs, and are stored in the user's iTunes folder in a rather obvious manner. By default, this will be ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/artist/album. This is also how songs manually imported in to iTunes are stored if you have iTunes set to manage your music library (on by default, although you're explicitly asked if you want to turn this off the first time you run iTunes). Anyone who wants to can open that folder in Windows Explorer or Finder or whatever and do whatever you want with the files.
I very much like the approach my AP computer science classes took in regards to the standardized test: ignore it! Instead, we spent our time *gasp* learning how to program, and learning some of the theory behind it. At least every other class period was spent with the class at the computers working on a handful of programming assignments, with the teacher checking on our progress and giving out help as needed. Sure, towards the end of the year, we had to spend a little time working on the AP case study, but by the time we got to the AP test, all of the materiel was absolutely trivial. We were all well beyond the skill level required by the test.
Incidentally, of the 4 or 5 people in my AP computer science 2 class that I've kept up with over the years, every one has gone on to get some flavor of CS degree and is now using it professionally.
Civilization Revolution came out for iPhone last month. It's not as deep or complex as Civ 4, but it's still got quite a lot of depth for a cell phone game, and games can still last hours. Plus, the UI was rebuilt from scratch for the touch screen. It's not perfect, but I don't feel like adding physical buttons would make up for the shortcomings either.
That would be the 2G plan, which does not allow MMS at all. The 3G plan does not come with any SMS messages, but if you add SMS, MMS messages just count against that pool and are not charged separately.
It depends on what state you're filing in, as federal bankruptcy law explicitly defers that decision to the states. Here in Texas, you can choose between the federally recommended exemptions (which only allows you to keep $20,200 of equity on your home), or Texas's own set of exemptions (which lets you keep any size house, but only up to 10 acres of land in the city or 100 acres of land in the country, and is more restrictive in other categories than the federal expeditions). I'm sure it varies wildly from state to state.
I liked what my stats professor in college did: All tests were open book and open note, and you were allowed to use whatever calculator you wanted with whatever programs you wanted. The problems were tuned so that you wouldn't need a fancy calculator to do well, but if you knew this test was going to have Z-tests on it and you brought a program that could do Z-tests for you, more power to you. However, you darn well better be able to read the presented scenario and know off the top of your head that a Z-test is what you need in the first place. There was a strict 50 minute time limit, and if you were using your resources for anything more than a quick formula lookup or computation, you were doomed.
It doesn't even really need to be bragging. Every few days or so, I'll run in to one of my managers and have a conversation along the lines of:
Me: "Oh hey, I finished $module for $client. Did you want me to do anything else on that project?" Manager: "Nah, just give the exe to $tester so they can test it, and then I'll have $supportPerson install it at the client site. By the way, have you had a chance to work on $otherModule yet?" Me: "It's been on my back burner for a couple weeks. I've toyed with a few ideas on how to implement it, but haven't coded it yet. Why, is it becoming urgent?" Manager: "I was hoping to have it ready to go by the end of next week." Me: "Alright. I need to finish $module3 first as it's due this Friday, and then I'll get on that one. I should be able to have it done by late this week or early next if I hit a snag." Manager: "Great, thank you."
Great, now my manager knows I'm getting projects done and knows what I'm currently working on, and now I know what from my mile long to-do list needs to get done sooner rather than later and can prioritize accordingly. No bragging required. A few weeks after I started this habit, I even had the CEO (who, in my small company, is one of the ones I have these chats with) call me in to his office and thank me for keeping them in the loop.
Your last move was actually around the time they started ramping up fiber installations in my area. I haven't really kept up with it nationwide, but here in the suberbs north of Dallas, Verizon began rolling out their fiber to the premises service (FiOS) a bit over three years ago. I think they're pretty much done now. When I moved in to my house in May of 2006, 15 mbps down / 2 mbps up was available for $45 a month, and 30 / 5 service could be had if I really wanted it. They've now bumped that up to 20 mbps down. I forget what the new premium speed is, but I want to say 50 mbps.
There's really not much to it. There's a fiber line running from the alley where the main line is all the way to my garage, where's it converted to a plain old Cat-5 Ethernet run to my router. They installed it for free with a 1 year contract, and even threw in a cheap wireless router.
Strange, I was under the impression that I've had 15 mbps fiber to the home for the past three years. Verizon even kicked that up to 20 mbps a few months ago.
Not to mention that the new battery in the 17" MBP is supposed to last 8 hours on one charge, and takes several times as many charging cycles as most Li-Ons do before it drops to 80% capacity.
I think that's where the rating system is supposed to come in to play. I've driven from Dallas to Houston and back more times than I care to count. There's one particular town just after the speed limit drops from 70 to 65 headed north that, every single time I drive through there headed north (and only north), someone's getting a ticket. Oftentimes, two people are. That would would probably get reported in many times, and thus would get a nice high rating.
Most of my trips, that's the only place I see any cops between Dallas and Houston. While I probably have seen someone pulled over at each town on the trip at least once, it's pretty rare that I see any at all, much less at a particular town. Those probably wouldn't get reported as traps often, and so would get a low rating.
Agreed. I don't know about you, but the campaigns in SC I felt kinda short to me. It seemed just as soon as I was getting really good with the Terran units, it's all over. Ditto with the Zerg. I'm hoping with 30 missions per race, they'll be able to throw some real curveball missions at you that really make you have to rethink your strategy.
It sounds like it's going to be native Windows and OS X only. However, Blizzard has gone out of there way to ensure WoW runs great in WINE, even though Linux isn't an officially supported platform. I'm not a Linux guy myself, so I can't speak from experience, but every report I've read says that WINE runs WoW pretty much flawlessly. Hopefully, Starcraft II will end up the same way.
Tell me, why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?
Sure you can. In OS 10.4 and earlier, there's a black triangle under every application that's currently running. In 10.5, they changed it to a white dot.
I dunno what version of EverQuest you were playing, but when I played it around the time Luclin came out, the quest system was a royal pain in the rear. There was nothing quick about it. No quest log, no clear indication of what NPCs were offering quests, and on several occasions, I was given a quest that characters ten levels higher than me had no hope to complete.
I'm not sure how they do it, but I understand Exchange Server does pretty much what you suggested the browser should do. It'll grab almost all the available memory to use as a cache so it can speed up user request processing. Then, as other applications request memory from the OS, Exchange Server will free the amount requested.
A big risk that many people don't consider when this topic comes up is the safety of the linemen working on the grid. Consider the following example. My house is well equipped with solar cells. This particular afternoon is bright and sunny, and I'm generating more than enough power for my home. Just up the line, however, an old tree has rotted out, and it's picked this particular afternoon to give up on life. It comes crashing down and lands on the power line, snapping the line as it plummets to the ground. The power company shuts off the next transformer up the line (thus cutting the feed to the snapped power line), and sends out a lineman to repair it. The lineman works swiftly, and the repair is complete a short time later.
What happens when the lineman makes the final connection and closes the gap? Under a normal situation where the power flows only one way, nothing, as the power's been cut off at the transformer upline. Once he's done and has moved to a safe distance, the power company turns the transformer back on and life continues. However, if my excess power is being fed back in to the grid, SURPRISE! The line is live the instant the final connection is made. The lineman gets a nasty (and likely fatal) shock.
For this reason, allowing your customers to feed their excess power in to the grid is actually quite dangerous. With power flowing one one way and equipped with a modern dispatch center software package, it's very easy to tell what parts of your grid have power and what parts are out. Simply start at each of your sources and work down the line, checking each device to see if it's active. Many systems allow you to ping the various devices on your electrical grid just as you'd ping a computer, so you can rapidly check whole sections of grid. It's also quite easy to prevent shocking your linemen: if you issue the command to turn on a transformer, and the dispatch system shows a worker downline, the worker has to give the okay before the command is executed.
When power flows two ways, it becomes FAR more difficult to ensure the safety of your workers, as any endpoint on the grid could be either a source or a sink, and many of them are outside your control. Tracking which parts of your grid have power and which don't requires every single node on your grid to have a wireless connection to dispatch, which is absurdly expensive at this point. While there are ways to work around this, they're not cheap to implement or maintain. This cost would have to be passed on to the customers. Some power companies have decided that it's worth the cost and risk to allow the their customers to feed power back in to the grid. Other's have decided it's not worth it.
And some of us are geeks with only 24 hours in our days! Sure, I'm more than capable of building my own machines from scratch, compiling my OS from source, and hacking together unholy combinations of hardware and software, but you know what? I have precious little free time, and would rather spend it doing something I enjoy (posting on Slashdot) than something I don't (fixing the computer again).
Sure, you can do what Google did: Don't put "turning a profit" into your mission statement. Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information, and when you buy Google stock (assuming you've done your homework), you know that's what you're buying in to. Plus, their official stated motto is "Don't be evil." When you buy in to them, you accept that they may pass on a very lucrative deal if they perceive it as evil. On top of all that, Page and Brin together hold a majority of the stock, so anything they agree on IS the majority will of the stockholders.
Slashdot Mirror
They do have a way to access the music, and it doesn't even require a fee or an API. The user's iTunes library is stored in a plain text XML file with an obvious schema. It includes all the information about the user's library and the physical location of the files. iTunes itself doesn't even use this file; it's created and maintained solely for the use of third party applications. This is how RIM and other vendors offer iTunes syncing: their own sync application parses the XML file and then syncs the songs between the device and the computer. Palm simply doesn't want to bother writing their own sync application. They'd rather hack in to iTunes and use it.
As to fair use, songs bought on the iTunes store are plain jane AACs, and are stored in the user's iTunes folder in a rather obvious manner. By default, this will be ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/artist/album. This is also how songs manually imported in to iTunes are stored if you have iTunes set to manage your music library (on by default, although you're explicitly asked if you want to turn this off the first time you run iTunes). Anyone who wants to can open that folder in Windows Explorer or Finder or whatever and do whatever you want with the files.
I very much like the approach my AP computer science classes took in regards to the standardized test: ignore it! Instead, we spent our time *gasp* learning how to program, and learning some of the theory behind it. At least every other class period was spent with the class at the computers working on a handful of programming assignments, with the teacher checking on our progress and giving out help as needed. Sure, towards the end of the year, we had to spend a little time working on the AP case study, but by the time we got to the AP test, all of the materiel was absolutely trivial. We were all well beyond the skill level required by the test.
Incidentally, of the 4 or 5 people in my AP computer science 2 class that I've kept up with over the years, every one has gone on to get some flavor of CS degree and is now using it professionally.
Civilization Revolution came out for iPhone last month. It's not as deep or complex as Civ 4, but it's still got quite a lot of depth for a cell phone game, and games can still last hours. Plus, the UI was rebuilt from scratch for the touch screen. It's not perfect, but I don't feel like adding physical buttons would make up for the shortcomings either.
That would be the 2G plan, which does not allow MMS at all. The 3G plan does not come with any SMS messages, but if you add SMS, MMS messages just count against that pool and are not charged separately.
It depends on what state you're filing in, as federal bankruptcy law explicitly defers that decision to the states. Here in Texas, you can choose between the federally recommended exemptions (which only allows you to keep $20,200 of equity on your home), or Texas's own set of exemptions (which lets you keep any size house, but only up to 10 acres of land in the city or 100 acres of land in the country, and is more restrictive in other categories than the federal expeditions). I'm sure it varies wildly from state to state.
I liked what my stats professor in college did: All tests were open book and open note, and you were allowed to use whatever calculator you wanted with whatever programs you wanted. The problems were tuned so that you wouldn't need a fancy calculator to do well, but if you knew this test was going to have Z-tests on it and you brought a program that could do Z-tests for you, more power to you. However, you darn well better be able to read the presented scenario and know off the top of your head that a Z-test is what you need in the first place. There was a strict 50 minute time limit, and if you were using your resources for anything more than a quick formula lookup or computation, you were doomed.
It doesn't even really need to be bragging. Every few days or so, I'll run in to one of my managers and have a conversation along the lines of:
Me: "Oh hey, I finished $module for $client. Did you want me to do anything else on that project?"
Manager: "Nah, just give the exe to $tester so they can test it, and then I'll have $supportPerson install it at the client site. By the way, have you had a chance to work on $otherModule yet?"
Me: "It's been on my back burner for a couple weeks. I've toyed with a few ideas on how to implement it, but haven't coded it yet. Why, is it becoming urgent?"
Manager: "I was hoping to have it ready to go by the end of next week."
Me: "Alright. I need to finish $module3 first as it's due this Friday, and then I'll get on that one. I should be able to have it done by late this week or early next if I hit a snag."
Manager: "Great, thank you."
Great, now my manager knows I'm getting projects done and knows what I'm currently working on, and now I know what from my mile long to-do list needs to get done sooner rather than later and can prioritize accordingly. No bragging required. A few weeks after I started this habit, I even had the CEO (who, in my small company, is one of the ones I have these chats with) call me in to his office and thank me for keeping them in the loop.
Or if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can download a software one for free from the App Store.
This story has a lot of comments. Here's another one.
You didn't point out the best part! The domain of the page pointed to by the link is none other than microsoft.com!
Your last move was actually around the time they started ramping up fiber installations in my area. I haven't really kept up with it nationwide, but here in the suberbs north of Dallas, Verizon began rolling out their fiber to the premises service (FiOS) a bit over three years ago. I think they're pretty much done now. When I moved in to my house in May of 2006, 15 mbps down / 2 mbps up was available for $45 a month, and 30 / 5 service could be had if I really wanted it. They've now bumped that up to 20 mbps down. I forget what the new premium speed is, but I want to say 50 mbps.
There's really not much to it. There's a fiber line running from the alley where the main line is all the way to my garage, where's it converted to a plain old Cat-5 Ethernet run to my router. They installed it for free with a 1 year contract, and even threw in a cheap wireless router.
You might find this interesting: http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios. It's a Google map with all the spots Verizon has FiOS installed at pinned. AT&T's equivalent product is called U-Verse. Here's a map for them too: http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/uverse.
Hope that helps!
Strange, I was under the impression that I've had 15 mbps fiber to the home for the past three years. Verizon even kicked that up to 20 mbps a few months ago.
Not to mention that the new battery in the 17" MBP is supposed to last 8 hours on one charge, and takes several times as many charging cycles as most Li-Ons do before it drops to 80% capacity.
And Quirk's Exception says that your attempt to end this thread will fail.
I think that's where the rating system is supposed to come in to play. I've driven from Dallas to Houston and back more times than I care to count. There's one particular town just after the speed limit drops from 70 to 65 headed north that, every single time I drive through there headed north (and only north), someone's getting a ticket. Oftentimes, two people are. That would would probably get reported in many times, and thus would get a nice high rating.
Most of my trips, that's the only place I see any cops between Dallas and Houston. While I probably have seen someone pulled over at each town on the trip at least once, it's pretty rare that I see any at all, much less at a particular town. Those probably wouldn't get reported as traps often, and so would get a low rating.
Agreed. I don't know about you, but the campaigns in SC I felt kinda short to me. It seemed just as soon as I was getting really good with the Terran units, it's all over. Ditto with the Zerg. I'm hoping with 30 missions per race, they'll be able to throw some real curveball missions at you that really make you have to rethink your strategy.
It sounds like it's going to be native Windows and OS X only. However, Blizzard has gone out of there way to ensure WoW runs great in WINE, even though Linux isn't an officially supported platform. I'm not a Linux guy myself, so I can't speak from experience, but every report I've read says that WINE runs WoW pretty much flawlessly. Hopefully, Starcraft II will end up the same way.
Sure you can. In OS 10.4 and earlier, there's a black triangle under every application that's currently running. In 10.5, they changed it to a white dot.
I dunno what version of EverQuest you were playing, but when I played it around the time Luclin came out, the quest system was a royal pain in the rear. There was nothing quick about it. No quest log, no clear indication of what NPCs were offering quests, and on several occasions, I was given a quest that characters ten levels higher than me had no hope to complete.
I'm not sure how they do it, but I understand Exchange Server does pretty much what you suggested the browser should do. It'll grab almost all the available memory to use as a cache so it can speed up user request processing. Then, as other applications request memory from the OS, Exchange Server will free the amount requested.
javascriPt
A big risk that many people don't consider when this topic comes up is the safety of the linemen working on the grid. Consider the following example. My house is well equipped with solar cells. This particular afternoon is bright and sunny, and I'm generating more than enough power for my home. Just up the line, however, an old tree has rotted out, and it's picked this particular afternoon to give up on life. It comes crashing down and lands on the power line, snapping the line as it plummets to the ground. The power company shuts off the next transformer up the line (thus cutting the feed to the snapped power line), and sends out a lineman to repair it. The lineman works swiftly, and the repair is complete a short time later.
What happens when the lineman makes the final connection and closes the gap? Under a normal situation where the power flows only one way, nothing, as the power's been cut off at the transformer upline. Once he's done and has moved to a safe distance, the power company turns the transformer back on and life continues. However, if my excess power is being fed back in to the grid, SURPRISE! The line is live the instant the final connection is made. The lineman gets a nasty (and likely fatal) shock.
For this reason, allowing your customers to feed their excess power in to the grid is actually quite dangerous. With power flowing one one way and equipped with a modern dispatch center software package, it's very easy to tell what parts of your grid have power and what parts are out. Simply start at each of your sources and work down the line, checking each device to see if it's active. Many systems allow you to ping the various devices on your electrical grid just as you'd ping a computer, so you can rapidly check whole sections of grid. It's also quite easy to prevent shocking your linemen: if you issue the command to turn on a transformer, and the dispatch system shows a worker downline, the worker has to give the okay before the command is executed.
When power flows two ways, it becomes FAR more difficult to ensure the safety of your workers, as any endpoint on the grid could be either a source or a sink, and many of them are outside your control. Tracking which parts of your grid have power and which don't requires every single node on your grid to have a wireless connection to dispatch, which is absurdly expensive at this point. While there are ways to work around this, they're not cheap to implement or maintain. This cost would have to be passed on to the customers. Some power companies have decided that it's worth the cost and risk to allow the their customers to feed power back in to the grid. Other's have decided it's not worth it.
And some of us are geeks with only 24 hours in our days! Sure, I'm more than capable of building my own machines from scratch, compiling my OS from source, and hacking together unholy combinations of hardware and software, but you know what? I have precious little free time, and would rather spend it doing something I enjoy (posting on Slashdot) than something I don't (fixing the computer again).
Sure, you can do what Google did: Don't put "turning a profit" into your mission statement. Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information, and when you buy Google stock (assuming you've done your homework), you know that's what you're buying in to. Plus, their official stated motto is "Don't be evil." When you buy in to them, you accept that they may pass on a very lucrative deal if they perceive it as evil. On top of all that, Page and Brin together hold a majority of the stock, so anything they agree on IS the majority will of the stockholders.
Shouldn't they be prioritizing protecting the constitution (which forbids unreasonable search and seizure) to the "highest level of our government"