So M$ bashing aside, i installed the app. and used it, and i found it quite good. Its too early to say a lot, but have surely made me switch atleast for evaluating it.
Here are the main advantages i found over google desktop search:
1. Its an application, so dosent open browser pages for search. 2. It has search-as-you-type 3. It has an awesome support for shortcuts, i have programmed all my firefox keywords in search desktop 4. It has a very good feature for previewing the documents in search application itself, so you dont have to open it at all (Preview of office docs. is disabled by defualt, u will have to add the extensions). 5. You can change the default web search engine to google, so dosent suck that much. It also dosent pop IE, uses the default browser. 6. You can start applications from it by creating shortcuts.
So basically, this feels more like a decent "application" than just a "web page", and has a few really neat tricks for keyboard users.
I visit India and other contries, and i must say that the phones and technologies people use there is WAAAY superior than what we use in US.
Synchronizing the phones with computer is standard there, and so is "SMSing" ringtones. If one person buys a ringtone from the carrier (which is around 8 cents), that ringtone can be SMSed to all the friends. There is a nominal charge for SMS also, basically its a huge market which people simply love.
What sucks here is iTunes sells whole song for 99c, and the f**** cell phone carrier sells the MIDI file for that song for 3 dollars, that expires in 3 months!!!! No wonder people use sites like 3guploads.com or PitPim to put ringtones on their phones. The carriers are simply killing the technology by locking too much stuff.
I dont mind DRM, and i dont care if it dosent allow me to copy the stuff as far as it allows me to play the songs i have bought on all the devices i own, irrespective of the company making them.
Its just like if u buy a CD, u can listen to it in your bedroom, home theater, carry it to work, listen to it on the car, take it when ur going on vacation and listen to it in the audio system in the hotel, etc.
I can live with not allowing me to distribute it, but i would definitely like to have the media wherever i go.
I had switched to OSX+IPOD in a flash, however, i would say its still "raw" for a lot of "normal" people.
These are the reasons my sister didnt switch, despite of a strong recommendation from me:
1. Yahoo Launch dosent work 2. MSN / Yahoo messenger are not to the mark on Mac (they dont have stuff like avatars, etc). 3. Her existing Webcam wont work with Mac. 4. She already owns fairly new versions of Adobe Photoshop, Primere, MS Office on windows, going to mac will have her buy all these again. 5. She absolutely dosent care about the "Unix" part. 6. All her friends know windows, so windows can generally get better support from people if something goes wrong. 7. A lot of online movie sites, like MovieLink.com don't work on Mac. 8. Safari/Firefox browsers are great, but cant beat IE in terms of the number of sites supporting them.
These are a few i can think of, there may be more..
If you look into slight history, there were a series major bomb blasts occured in Bombay, the financial capital of india in 1993 in places like the Stock Exchange. These resulted into a lot of tension and communal riots between the people.
This one seems to be kindof similar to them, just targetting a little more high-tech organizations. These militants just cant see a country prosper and the people getting happy. If you cant do well, dont let anyone do well.
It totally sucks that we are always crying over the memory requirements, when the way it should be done is to have all the songs stored on **YOUR** owned server in DRMed format, and then we have this tiny mobile devices like cell phones, or car radio, your desktop computer at work, etc. to play the songs directly from there. The sole purpose of these devices will be to play music, so they will be simple and small and cheap. There can be a high quality (or even lossless) format of music being streamed to them.
There should be a unified protocol for all this, so each of the client can play the DRMed songs. We already (probably) have the network to support this bandwidth on cell phones..
This is what i would like to do. Play DRMed content on any of the devices i own, without doing "illegal" stuff like re-ripping them and removing DRM. Till then, all these just dosent make any sense.
Users should be able to activate any DRM enabled device they own and play any DRMed content they have bought. This seems to be a good step in that direction.
what would be the best is they publish it as a web service and then people like you and me make clients to access them from applications running in the system tray.
The only reason people share their bandwidth over P2P networks is because all the content is "free" for everyone (RIAA dont read this). If people are charged to download music from my machine, there is no reason why i should waste my bandwidth by sharing stuff on it. As it is, the internet runs really slow while im running P2P, just donsent make sense to share. So they will have all the licences, but no "Peers" in their "Peer-2-Peer" network !
Even if we leave the style, appeal, looks, etc. aside, itunes is still a far more superior software for music management then anything else available in the market.. other mp3 players either work with windows media player or some of their proprietory(tm) software which Sucks big time. so its about an end-to-end solution.. ipod is simply easier to use then all others.
I used to live in LA, and the public transport SUCKS. If i have to go to irvine to see my aunt, it either takes 4 hours and 30$ to reach there (a 40 mile trip), or i can drive down. So to discourage people from driving, they should have more efficient (and cheap) public transportation. Doing something on the government scale can definitely earn some $$s for the state.
Most of the things are quite expensive for my range, but a good summary (and a even better model) though. I was hoping they also included a "moded xbox" in it;).
From TFA, it seems tha book is quite basic. Would be great if it would actually discuss "how tomcat works, internally", something like a really advanced course. The material in book can be found in tutorials and stuff, but its slightly more difficult to figure out for the first time that you can "precompile" the jsp pages so the site is fast right from the very first hit.
I have a small linux box installed alongwith my TV that acts like a media center. I have a huge desktop with 500 GB storage space which stores my media. i have ripped all the media i have and kept it on the desktop. i dont like to buy any more DVDs, not because they are expensive or anything, they are just inconvenient. downloading movies "legally" dosent help because they come with f@!ing DRM and cant play on the media center, and also, they "expire" after a day ! so the only option is to download for free.
I am really waiting for netflix-like thing to come up, where i simply pay a monthly rent and can download as many movies as possible and view them on a linux box. i dont care if they are DRMed as far as they play on linux.
also, for a LOT of movies that i downloaded from net, i actually bought DVDs lateron as DVDs are anyways of a superior quality. just waited for them to become affordible.
Google still dosent have a single non-windows app.
on
Google-branded Firefox?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Google-Toolbar, Google-Desktop, Picassa, etc. etc. etc...but everything windoze. I would simply love the google-desktop for linux or mac.. may be, so firefox might be *sortof* an answer.
google desktop runs a webserver on the localhost which the browser connects to, so u can always use google desktop of ur windows machine from the linux machine and do stuff like that.
From Apple Tiger's new system-wide Spotlight search helps you find anything on your Mac, instantly. Spotlight can find email messages, calendars and contacts along with documents, movies, images -- any kind of file -- all at once.
Am a Mac+Linux user, but would have been gr8 if they came out with atleast a Linux version (seeing googledesktop.sourceforge.net in near future...??? )
Managing 6000 songs is a pain without iTunes..
on
Rio Karma User Review
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I use iTunes+iPod, and the main reason i am not switching away from the ipod is other players dont work with itunes. I simply love itunes in its simplicity and usability, and its just makes very easy to manage the huge library with its clean interface. There is simply no good reason to switch from ipod yet, not even the price after they released the new 4g ipods.
I am kindof with VOIP and would be very happy to make the switch once it qualifies the basic requirements, like it should work with there is no power.
My local phone works when there is a power outage (how would i report a complaint that my power has been cut off otherwise?). Also, VOIP uses the existing internet connection, which means if the internet is down, the phone is also down (so no more backup dialup access or phone line).
The day it gets over such things and guarantee a 99.9999% availability, I dont think i would give up the regular phone. Might consider the additional line of VOIP someday (but who needs 2 such lines when u have a cellphone)
Well, one interesting application is to have the same phone number at multiple places... very easy to do with VOIP, useful for small businessmen who dont have soo much cellphone minutes.
I use XBOX Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com) since a month now, and it is WAYYY better than whatever MS will be offering, the main advantage being u dont get stuck with M$ software. My XBMC works with the iBook and a Windows XP desktop that is kinfof like my "Media Server" lying somewhere in the bedroom.
Its all connected to the network wirelessly, and works exceptionally well. U can manage the songs using iTunes and play those on ur home theater connected through XBMC. There are also Optical Audio and Component Out kits available for the XBOX and it works really well. It has the mplayer media player which has all the nasty codecs which can play just about anything. Also, xbox dosent make the noise that a regular PC will make. It now also supports 1080i DVD playback with DTS audio which is just what I need.
M$ has a media center extender for their xbox, but it only works with their shitty Media center PCs which is wayyy overpriced and too "closed".
As far as my XBOX can do everything i ever want (of course, except the HD-Tivo functions, which i would like leaving to Tivo), spending 150$ for the XBOX just makes too much sense. I would always prefer to have all the media stored on some PC but remotely accessible from a small non-noisy set-top box connected to the TV (like the XBOX).
"Priced at about $3,200, a single K-yan can tutor a large classroom of nearly 100 students in schools that cannot afford multiple personal computers."
$3200 is insanely high for any indian school to afford. this is probably more than the entire IT spending budget in an year for a small school. u can buy cheap computers in india for around 250$, but computers are still cheaper in USA for similar configuration.
The main problem with india is there is that most of the people in rural areas dont even know what the internet is, forget a computer. they definitely cant afford a computer, and internet connections are waaaayy too expensive, even for the "city" people. do u know any indian who stays online for "24 hours" from Home ?? Its just not affordible.
So i guess the first thing to do there would to reduce the cost of internet/infrastructure (just like they did for cell-phones) and then look for finding innovative devices to use it.
BTW, just in case u dont know, the price of gas in india is around 5$ per gallon (people in rural areas earn around 30$ per month) ! So much for "low costs".
Install a embedded GPS device and let them steal..
on
Securing Pricelessness
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
and then catch those theives. Of course, some basic "preventive" security is must. some RFID also will help.
i wonder how they will be calibrating all these many things to fire the right alarm. a mischievious person might get some kicks by raising false alarms every now and then, as all he has to do is to point a finger near the painting. i also wonder how they will test it, and keep it maintained without a large time overhead.
I initially thought that they can simply use PGP or similar encryption (like pgpdisk as mentioned in a post), but then to decrypt the data, we would need the private key on the machine. I will have the private key on my own machine, but would not like to have it on some other machine where i want to get data off the drive.
Any (insightful) comments ??
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you can change the default search engine to google. Also, it dosent open IE only, but opens the actual "default" browser (firefox).
So M$ bashing aside, i installed the app. and used it, and i found it quite good. Its too early to say a lot, but have surely made me switch atleast for evaluating it.
Here are the main advantages i found over google desktop search:
1. Its an application, so dosent open browser pages for search.
2. It has search-as-you-type
3. It has an awesome support for shortcuts, i have programmed all my firefox keywords in search desktop
4. It has a very good feature for previewing the documents in search application itself, so you dont have to open it at all (Preview of office docs. is disabled by defualt, u will have to add the extensions).
5. You can change the default web search engine to google, so dosent suck that much. It also dosent pop IE, uses the default browser.
6. You can start applications from it by creating shortcuts.
So basically, this feels more like a decent "application" than just a "web page", and has a few really neat tricks for keyboard users.
I visit India and other contries, and i must say that the phones and technologies people use there is WAAAY superior than what we use in US.
Synchronizing the phones with computer is standard there, and so is "SMSing" ringtones. If one person buys a ringtone from the carrier (which is around 8 cents), that ringtone can be SMSed to all the friends. There is a nominal charge for SMS also, basically its a huge market which people simply love.
What sucks here is iTunes sells whole song for 99c, and the f**** cell phone carrier sells the MIDI file for that song for 3 dollars, that expires in 3 months!!!! No wonder people use sites like 3guploads.com or PitPim to put ringtones on their phones. The carriers are simply killing the technology by locking too much stuff.
I dont mind DRM, and i dont care if it dosent allow me to copy the stuff as far as it allows me to play the songs i have bought on all the devices i own, irrespective of the company making them.
Its just like if u buy a CD, u can listen to it in your bedroom, home theater, carry it to work, listen to it on the car, take it when ur going on vacation and listen to it in the audio system in the hotel, etc.
I can live with not allowing me to distribute it, but i would definitely like to have the media wherever i go.
I had switched to OSX+IPOD in a flash, however, i would say its still "raw" for a lot of "normal" people.
These are the reasons my sister didnt switch, despite of a strong recommendation from me:
1. Yahoo Launch dosent work
2. MSN / Yahoo messenger are not to the mark on Mac (they dont have stuff like avatars, etc).
3. Her existing Webcam wont work with Mac.
4. She already owns fairly new versions of Adobe Photoshop, Primere, MS Office on windows, going to mac will have her buy all these again.
5. She absolutely dosent care about the "Unix" part.
6. All her friends know windows, so windows can generally get better support from people if something goes wrong.
7. A lot of online movie sites, like MovieLink.com don't work on Mac.
8. Safari/Firefox browsers are great, but cant beat IE in terms of the number of sites supporting them.
These are a few i can think of, there may be more..
If you look into slight history, there were a series major bomb blasts occured in Bombay, the financial capital of india in 1993 in places like the Stock Exchange. These resulted into a lot of tension and communal riots between the people.
This one seems to be kindof similar to them, just targetting a little more high-tech organizations. These militants just cant see a country prosper and the people getting happy. If you cant do well, dont let anyone do well.
It totally sucks that we are always crying over the memory requirements, when the way it should be done is to have all the songs stored on **YOUR** owned server in DRMed format, and then we have this tiny mobile devices like cell phones, or car radio, your desktop computer at work, etc. to play the songs directly from there. The sole purpose of these devices will be to play music, so they will be simple and small and cheap. There can be a high quality (or even lossless) format of music being streamed to them.
There should be a unified protocol for all this, so each of the client can play the DRMed songs. We already (probably) have the network to support this bandwidth on cell phones..
Just a thought.
This is what i would like to do. Play DRMed content on any of the devices i own, without doing "illegal" stuff like re-ripping them and removing DRM. Till then, all these just dosent make any sense.
Users should be able to activate any DRM enabled device they own and play any DRMed content they have bought. This seems to be a good step in that direction.
what would be the best is they publish it as a web service and then people like you and me make clients to access them from applications running in the system tray.
The only reason people share their bandwidth over P2P networks is because all the content is "free" for everyone (RIAA dont read this). If people are charged to download music from my machine, there is no reason why i should waste my bandwidth by sharing stuff on it. As it is, the internet runs really slow while im running P2P, just donsent make sense to share. So they will have all the licences, but no "Peers" in their "Peer-2-Peer" network !
Even if we leave the style, appeal, looks, etc. aside, itunes is still a far more superior software for music management then anything else available in the market.. other mp3 players either work with windows media player or some of their proprietory(tm) software which Sucks big time. so its about an end-to-end solution.. ipod is simply easier to use then all others.
I used to live in LA, and the public transport SUCKS. If i have to go to irvine to see my aunt, it either takes 4 hours and 30$ to reach there (a 40 mile trip), or i can drive down. So to discourage people from driving, they should have more efficient (and cheap) public transportation. Doing something on the government scale can definitely earn some $$s for the state.
Most of the things are quite expensive for my range, but a good summary (and a even better model) though. I was hoping they also included a "moded xbox" in it ;).
From TFA, it seems tha book is quite basic. Would be great if it would actually discuss "how tomcat works, internally", something like a really advanced course. The material in book can be found in tutorials and stuff, but its slightly more difficult to figure out for the first time that you can "precompile" the jsp pages so the site is fast right from the very first hit.
I have a small linux box installed alongwith my TV that acts like a media center. I have a huge desktop with 500 GB storage space which stores my media. i have ripped all the media i have and kept it on the desktop. i dont like to buy any more DVDs, not because they are expensive or anything, they are just inconvenient. downloading movies "legally" dosent help because they come with f@!ing DRM and cant play on the media center, and also, they "expire" after a day ! so the only option is to download for free.
I am really waiting for netflix-like thing to come up, where i simply pay a monthly rent and can download as many movies as possible and view them on a linux box. i dont care if they are DRMed as far as they play on linux.
also, for a LOT of movies that i downloaded from net, i actually bought DVDs lateron as DVDs are anyways of a superior quality. just waited for them to become affordible.
Google-Toolbar, Google-Desktop, Picassa, etc. etc. etc...but everything windoze. I would simply love the google-desktop for linux or mac.. may be, so firefox might be *sortof* an answer.
google desktop runs a webserver on the localhost which the browser connects to, so u can always use google desktop of ur windows machine from the linux machine and do stuff like that.
Am a Mac+Linux user, but would have been gr8 if they came out with atleast a Linux version (seeing googledesktop.sourceforge.net in near future...??? )
I use iTunes+iPod, and the main reason i am not switching away from the ipod is other players dont work with itunes. I simply love itunes in its simplicity and usability, and its just makes very easy to manage the huge library with its clean interface. There is simply no good reason to switch from ipod yet, not even the price after they released the new 4g ipods.
I am kindof with VOIP and would be very happy to make the switch once it qualifies the basic requirements, like it should work with there is no power.
My local phone works when there is a power outage (how would i report a complaint that my power has been cut off otherwise?). Also, VOIP uses the existing internet connection, which means if the internet is down, the phone is also down (so no more backup dialup access or phone line).
The day it gets over such things and guarantee a 99.9999% availability, I dont think i would give up the regular phone. Might consider the additional line of VOIP someday (but who needs 2 such lines when u have a cellphone)
Well, one interesting application is to have the same phone number at multiple places... very easy to do with VOIP, useful for small businessmen who dont have soo much cellphone minutes.
I use XBOX Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com) since a month now, and it is WAYYY better than whatever MS will be offering, the main advantage being u dont get stuck with M$ software. My XBMC works with the iBook and a Windows XP desktop that is kinfof like my "Media Server" lying somewhere in the bedroom.
Its all connected to the network wirelessly, and works exceptionally well. U can manage the songs using iTunes and play those on ur home theater connected through XBMC. There are also Optical Audio and Component Out kits available for the XBOX and it works really well. It has the mplayer media player which has all the nasty codecs which can play just about anything.
Also, xbox dosent make the noise that a regular PC will make. It now also supports 1080i DVD playback with DTS audio which is just what I need.
M$ has a media center extender for their xbox, but it only works with their shitty Media center PCs which is wayyy overpriced and too "closed".
As far as my XBOX can do everything i ever want (of course, except the HD-Tivo functions, which i would like leaving to Tivo), spending 150$ for the XBOX just makes too much sense. I would always prefer to have all the media stored on some PC but remotely accessible from a small non-noisy set-top box connected to the TV (like the XBOX).
"Priced at about $3,200, a single K-yan can tutor a large classroom of nearly 100 students in schools that cannot afford multiple personal computers."
$3200 is insanely high for any indian school to afford. this is probably more than the entire IT spending budget in an year for a small school. u can buy cheap computers in india for around 250$, but computers are still cheaper in USA for similar configuration.
The main problem with india is there is that most of the people in rural areas dont even know what the internet is, forget a computer. they definitely cant afford a computer, and internet connections are waaaayy too expensive, even for the "city" people. do u know any indian who stays online for "24 hours" from Home ?? Its just not affordible.
So i guess the first thing to do there would to reduce the cost of internet/infrastructure (just like they did for cell-phones) and then look for finding innovative devices to use it.
BTW, just in case u dont know, the price of gas in india is around 5$ per gallon (people in rural areas earn around 30$ per month) ! So much for "low costs".
and then catch those theives. Of course, some basic "preventive" security is must. some RFID also will help.
i wonder how they will be calibrating all these many things to fire the right alarm. a mischievious person might get some kicks by raising false alarms every now and then, as all he has to do is to point a finger near the painting. i also wonder how they will test it, and keep it maintained without a large time overhead.
apple frequently sale refurbished ipods for around 200$.
I initially thought that they can simply use PGP or similar encryption (like pgpdisk as mentioned in a post), but then to decrypt the data, we would need the private key on the machine. I will have the private key on my own machine, but would not like to have it on some other machine where i want to get data off the drive. Any (insightful) comments ??