yPlay is a freeware MP3, Ogg*, WMA, WAV, FLAC* and Midi player with multiple playlists and a light, clean interface. But why did I write it when there are other free mp3 and ogg music playing software programs out there already?
First, I find too many music players have tiny, ambiguous controls and overly complicated menu structures. I want computer programs to look like computer programs so I can quickly work out how to use them. If I want something that looks like a piece of hardware, I'll buy the hardware instead.
Even worse, many players are the digital equivalent of having your teenage kids move back home. They take over your computer, leave odd things all over the place, and you never know exactly what they're doing behind your back.
Finally, as computers have become more and more powerful, media players have become more and more power-hungry. I'm only interested in quickly finding and playing a particular track or playlist, not swirly pictures and virtual lava lamps. yPlay has a filter built into the main screen - type in part of the title or artist and the list will only display matching tracks. Double-click the track you want, close the player to the system tray and forget about it. And if you don't feel like listening to the next track, the system tray icon has a right-click menu with skip, pause, play, etc built right into it. (I got a big surprise the other day - I dragged an MPG file onto the yPlay files list and it started to play - as a video. Not officially supported, but the progress bar works on those too.)
I bought Fable for the PC, and my daughters saw it and immediately wanted to play it. However, it carries an M rating and when I checked my character stats I saw why: One of the entries says 'number of times had sex'
The thing is, the game has cutesy graphics and starts out with this innocuous-looking kid like something out of an N64 game. At first glance it DOES look like a childs game, so who are they marketing it to?
We run an SF/Fantasy mag entirely via email. Submissions, slush reading, meetings, discussions, the lot. Proofreaders grab PDFs, and later the layout is emailed to the printer so he can run off the job, and the physical copies are then posted to subscribers. 19 members of the group, and we're about to despatch issue 22. Some users are on mac, some just use hotmail, and it took us many attempts trying to explain IRC before we realised email was the only way. We've been going over 3 years now, and still looking good.
They do, and they ship all those old used cars to Australia for resale. The roads in Western Australia are dotted with models that were never released here, half of them blowing smoke.
I'm still debating whether to go for a car with an internal combustion engine. However, now that they've almost ironed all the bugs out do you think I should wait for electric cars 1.10?
I spend more computer time in my browser than anywhere else, and Firefox is intuitive, easy to use and very stable. At least with an open source project you know they're not going to go crazy adding features to please the marketing droids.
I think they're just reasoning that when there's a market, private enterprise will always get in before government. Instead of demanding the government DO something about internet porn, parents can now spend a few bucks and do something themselves.
On a related topic, I'm still amazed that introducing a.xxx domain for porn is considered a violation of free speech/human rights/whatever. Speaking for a local primary school whose web filters I maintain, just get on with it so we can fence of that part of the web. Please. Right now the filters we're using are so restrictive they block a lot of useful sites. Yes, I whitelist them as required, but it's still a PITA.
I still use Office 97 too. I've seen the 'future' of user interfaces as Virtual CD went from a slick version 5 to a nightmare version 7 with draggable everything, self-hiding menus and other crap. The program works fine, don't get me wrong, but the user interface has is akin to one of those sliding puzzles thanks to.net offering programmers these neato whizzo coolio tools which are actually really, really annoying for the end user. Just give me plain old drop down menus and window panes which stay where they're supposed to be.
Problem is, more and more apps are leaping into the same style of user interface, and they're driving me nuts.
I voted with my wallet a couple of years ago and cancelled Foxtel. Station promos, fair enough (and only between progs) but advertising? What exactly was I paying for? More content, yes, but also many more ads. Worse, they're very generic ads because it's one station for the whole country.
The day I can pick hold of a remote and say 'I'm not interested in a new car, new home, feminine hygiene products, alcoholic beverages, non-alcoholic beverages, fast food, women's clothes, men's clothes, new watches, perfume, chocolate bars, after shave, etc, etc.' and have those ads suppressed, so much the better. In fact, give me opt in so I can pick out the ads which might conceivably be of interest to me - which is none.
Thing is, I like to research products and make up my own mind. The only impulse buys I ever make are things marked down to silly prices which I happen to see when I'm out and about (e.g. a PCI parallel card reduced to $5 or something, or three DVDs I actually wouldn't mind watching for $8.99.) In other words, true bargains and not SPECIAL OFFERS HURRY HURRY BUY NOW! Let someone else pay full retail - I like a clearance bargain and they never advertise those;-)
I was being flippant. They do catch modern stuff, but it's funny to hear my 11 year old happily singing songs by the Beatles, Eagles, 10cc, ELO, Hall & Oats and so on.
A PC, networked but no internet, virtual CD (no scratched disks around here), lots of world-building games (Age of Empires, Sims, etc). An LCD screen instead of CRT. Print-to-PDF instead of direct to printer, so we can cancel 99 full colour pages of Pikachu and just print one.
My kids spend time on their computers, but they spend a lot more time playing in the garden. They make their own dolls furniture (wood, nails, paint), miniature food (clay & paint), etc etc. The eldest taught herself to ride the unicycle. What I'm getting at is that they're not mindless blobs slaved to their PCs 24/7 - yes, they sometimes get heavily involved in a game and will play it in their spare time over 2 or 3 days, but then they'll avoid the computer for a week and do something else.
The youngest is now 8 years old and produces her own digital art and newsletters, the eldest (11 yo) types up stories and homework. Both use an mp3 player on their computers, and because the music available to them is all my own favourites (mostly 70's and 80's), it's very interesting to see their tastes via their playlists. They're not exposed to modern rubbish on the radio, so I'm probably warping their minds and putting them forever out of touch with their friends.
Or break in from the roof, lowering yourself down a ventilation shaft, subduing the guarddogs with sleeping darts and finding the laser beams with cigar smoke.
These things are going to be as popular as copy-protected CDs. Just wait until the first few thousand people get home with a shiny new disc, whack it into their machine and get a crappy picture and/or a blank screen.
The joke is that the AUD$8.95 DVD is here to stay. People can hold off buying new releases until they're in the bargain bin, so what are the media companies going to release on these discs that we just have to have right now? A couple of months after release nobody cares either way.
I'm wearing the same Seiko digital I got 12 years ago for a birthday pressie. I will only wear a watch with a countdown alarm timer alongside the usual alarm, stopwatch and so on. My previous watch was a combo analog/digital - with the countdown timer - and coincidentally I found it yesterday while tidying up a box of stuff. Whack in a battery and I'll have a spare;-)
It's not the plot, it's the way you tell it. Otherwise publishers wouldn't bother with new authors, and would just keep reprinting out-of-copyright works from Project Gutenberg.
Re:Maybe a grain of salt, but it's what I'd predic
on
Wine vs Windows Benchmarks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree with you. When I was a kid we had 8 bit computers and you learned by doing. In those days you of fritzing your hardware by moving it too suddenly, causing a machine lockup with crappy code was the least of your problems.
Gentoo evokes that era for me, and you can't have a go at people for breaking something when they're busy learning. So what if they over-optimise compiler flags and break things? When they fix them up they're learning a valuable lesson, and that lesson isn't 'next time use a binary distro'
Anyway, today's school-age gentoo n00bs are tomorrow's crop of system admins.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the pros and cons of apostrophe use?
yPlay
yPlay is a freeware MP3, Ogg*, WMA, WAV, FLAC* and Midi player with multiple playlists and a light, clean interface. But why did I write it when there are other free mp3 and ogg music playing software programs out there already?
First, I find too many music players have tiny, ambiguous controls and overly complicated menu structures. I want computer programs to look like computer programs so I can quickly work out how to use them. If I want something that looks like a piece of hardware, I'll buy the hardware instead.
Even worse, many players are the digital equivalent of having your teenage kids move back home. They take over your computer, leave odd things all over the place, and you never know exactly what they're doing behind your back.
Finally, as computers have become more and more powerful, media players have become more and more power-hungry. I'm only interested in quickly finding and playing a particular track or playlist, not swirly pictures and virtual lava lamps. yPlay has a filter built into the main screen - type in part of the title or artist and the list will only display matching tracks. Double-click the track you want, close the player to the system tray and forget about it. And if you don't feel like listening to the next track, the system tray icon has a right-click menu with skip, pause, play, etc built right into it. (I got a big surprise the other day - I dragged an MPG file onto the yPlay files list and it started to play - as a video. Not officially supported, but the progress bar works on those too.)
I bought Fable for the PC, and my daughters saw it and immediately wanted to play it. However, it carries an M rating and when I checked my character stats I saw why: One of the entries says 'number of times had sex'
The thing is, the game has cutesy graphics and starts out with this innocuous-looking kid like something out of an N64 game. At first glance it DOES look like a childs game, so who are they marketing it to?
I doubt it too. On the other hand, you'd see this guy coming from miles away - sky lit up with the flames and forty patrol cars on his tail.
allows the user to play with topless versions of female characters
Now there's a candidate for rephrasing if ever I heard one.
I think they're just saying that you can't modify your journal templates to remove the ads. Move along, next story please.
Blue ring round Uranus?
So don't use cyan-coloured toilet paper.
We run an SF/Fantasy mag entirely via email. Submissions, slush reading, meetings, discussions, the lot. Proofreaders grab PDFs, and later the layout is emailed to the printer so he can run off the job, and the physical copies are then posted to subscribers. 19 members of the group, and we're about to despatch issue 22. Some users are on mac, some just use hotmail, and it took us many attempts trying to explain IRC before we realised email was the only way. We've been going over 3 years now, and still looking good.
They do, and they ship all those old used cars to Australia for resale. The roads in Western Australia are dotted with models that were never released here, half of them blowing smoke.
at $100K each and 1200 programmers at $150K each to keep the things running. Okaaay.
I'm still debating whether to go for a car with an internal combustion engine. However, now that they've almost ironed all the bugs out do you think I should wait for electric cars 1.10?
can also distinguish eight different kinds of smells
including ex-dogfood?
I spend more computer time in my browser than anywhere else, and Firefox is intuitive, easy to use and very stable. At least with an open source project you know they're not going to go crazy adding features to please the marketing droids.
I think they're just reasoning that when there's a market, private enterprise will always get in before government. Instead of demanding the government DO something about internet porn, parents can now spend a few bucks and do something themselves. .xxx domain for porn is considered a violation of free speech/human rights/whatever. Speaking for a local primary school whose web filters I maintain, just get on with it so we can fence of that part of the web. Please. Right now the filters we're using are so restrictive they block a lot of useful sites. Yes, I whitelist them as required, but it's still a PITA.
On a related topic, I'm still amazed that introducing a
Anyone got pets2.com yet? Instant millionaire waiting for that one.
Do we want anything that hot on our planet?
If it'll power a laptop for more than 4 hours, probably yes.
I still use Office 97 too. I've seen the 'future' of user interfaces as Virtual CD went from a slick version 5 to a nightmare version 7 with draggable everything, self-hiding menus and other crap. The program works fine, don't get me wrong, but the user interface has is akin to one of those sliding puzzles thanks to .net offering programmers these neato whizzo coolio tools which are actually really, really annoying for the end user. Just give me plain old drop down menus and window panes which stay where they're supposed to be.
Problem is, more and more apps are leaping into the same style of user interface, and they're driving me nuts.
I voted with my wallet a couple of years ago and cancelled Foxtel. Station promos, fair enough (and only between progs) but advertising? What exactly was I paying for? More content, yes, but also many more ads. Worse, they're very generic ads because it's one station for the whole country.
;-)
The day I can pick hold of a remote and say 'I'm not interested in a new car, new home, feminine hygiene products, alcoholic beverages, non-alcoholic beverages, fast food, women's clothes, men's clothes, new watches, perfume, chocolate bars, after shave, etc, etc.' and have those ads suppressed, so much the better. In fact, give me opt in so I can pick out the ads which might conceivably be of interest to me - which is none.
Thing is, I like to research products and make up my own mind. The only impulse buys I ever make are things marked down to silly prices which I happen to see when I'm out and about (e.g. a PCI parallel card reduced to $5 or something, or three DVDs I actually wouldn't mind watching for $8.99.) In other words, true bargains and not SPECIAL OFFERS HURRY HURRY BUY NOW! Let someone else pay full retail - I like a clearance bargain and they never advertise those
I was being flippant. They do catch modern stuff, but it's funny to hear my 11 year old happily singing songs by the Beatles, Eagles, 10cc, ELO, Hall & Oats and so on.
A PC, networked but no internet, virtual CD (no scratched disks around here), lots of world-building games (Age of Empires, Sims, etc). An LCD screen instead of CRT. Print-to-PDF instead of direct to printer, so we can cancel 99 full colour pages of Pikachu and just print one.
My kids spend time on their computers, but they spend a lot more time playing in the garden. They make their own dolls furniture (wood, nails, paint), miniature food (clay & paint), etc etc. The eldest taught herself to ride the unicycle. What I'm getting at is that they're not mindless blobs slaved to their PCs 24/7 - yes, they sometimes get heavily involved in a game and will play it in their spare time over 2 or 3 days, but then they'll avoid the computer for a week and do something else.
The youngest is now 8 years old and produces her own digital art and newsletters, the eldest (11 yo) types up stories and homework. Both use an mp3 player on their computers, and because the music available to them is all my own favourites (mostly 70's and 80's), it's very interesting to see their tastes via their playlists. They're not exposed to modern rubbish on the radio, so I'm probably warping their minds and putting them forever out of touch with their friends.
Or break in from the roof, lowering yourself down a ventilation shaft, subduing the guarddogs with sleeping darts and finding the laser beams with cigar smoke.
I have to do that to access my own computer.
These things are going to be as popular as copy-protected CDs. Just wait until the first few thousand people get home with a shiny new disc, whack it into their machine and get a crappy picture and/or a blank screen.
The joke is that the AUD$8.95 DVD is here to stay. People can hold off buying new releases until they're in the bargain bin, so what are the media companies going to release on these discs that we just have to have right now? A couple of months after release nobody cares either way.
I'm wearing the same Seiko digital I got 12 years ago for a birthday pressie. I will only wear a watch with a countdown alarm timer alongside the usual alarm, stopwatch and so on. My previous watch was a combo analog/digital - with the countdown timer - and coincidentally I found it yesterday while tidying up a box of stuff. Whack in a battery and I'll have a spare ;-)
It's not the plot, it's the way you tell it. Otherwise publishers wouldn't bother with new authors, and would just keep reprinting out-of-copyright works from Project Gutenberg.
I agree with you. When I was a kid we had 8 bit computers and you learned by doing. In those days you of fritzing your hardware by moving it too suddenly, causing a machine lockup with crappy code was the least of your problems.
Gentoo evokes that era for me, and you can't have a go at people for breaking something when they're busy learning. So what if they over-optimise compiler flags and break things? When they fix them up they're learning a valuable lesson, and that lesson isn't 'next time use a binary distro'
Anyway, today's school-age gentoo n00bs are tomorrow's crop of system admins.