I owned a first gen G4 Titanium powerbook and it got a lot of use...
Around the 2 year point, the top third of all the scan lines started to become intermittent. As the weeks went on, intermittent turned into off, and now the middle third started going intermittent. With the thing far out of warranty, knowing full well it'd make more sense to get a new one (vs. get it serviced), I decided to roll the dice and assume it was a (fixable) loose connection somewhere in the screen to the main board...
Weeelll... It turns out the back plate of the screen is *glued* and *snapped* to the front side, making disassembly of the screen a one-way process...
Unfortunately, firmly reconnecting everything has no effect, leaving me with the bad screen, and a mass of back-paneling that no longer can attach to the front side. Seeing there was no point in having the screen at this point (after a couple weeks, the middle third of the scanlines was off, and now the bottom third was intermittent), I simply removed the screen completely...
Thus, I now have a "headless" G4 TiBook w/ a monitor attached to serve stuff--it's not so portable anymore!:^)
The fact that someone here modded the parent as a troll is the case and point--it makes the term "slashbot" a little more appropriate. Only a jackass would mod down what someone obviously spent a good hour drafting as a troll--it's unspeakable (not to mention that it emphasizes the parent's comments about the mod system being broken). Is everyone a slashbot? No, of course not--far from it. Do a lot of the stories posted on slashdot perpetuate slashbots and grow new ones? Absolutely.
This is the same compilation of ancient scrollwork that says we should kill homosexuals, that we should mutilate our genitals, that we should burn animal sacrifices, that we should kill rather than understand each other.
Most of what you list there comes from the old covenant (ie. old testament aka the "old law")... Christ's coming and his story is a *new* covenant--a new law--that outlines salvation as seeing Christ as your advocate before God, who is ready to exact justice (hence the notion that Christ "bears our sins"). The new law supercedes the old law, filled with the traditional forms of tribute you speak of. A incredible pastor I once knew put it very well, "God sees us as infinitely perfect only through the lens of Christ". Who is Christ has some great material, meant to speak to intellectuals interested to see Christianity's real answers to tough questions.
Why is this passage even IN the Bible in the first place?
There are many prophetic passages in the bible (that are not known to be prophetic and/or richly accurate) until the right time has come.
I believe it is portrayed in error, ON PURPOSE - as an example of why Inerrancy is a "BAD" thing.
Perhaps. Anything is, of course, possible. My previous post was simply to address the point that we're not knowledgeable and advanced enough to make blanket statements about one of the most pragmatic fundamental mathematical constants of the universe.
When believers start to take too much stock in their Scripture, and refuse to accept that it may not be a 100% perfect roadmap of God's Will - that's when people start blowing stuff up.
I think that statement is unqualified (as much as I agree that there's no shortage of people that believe simply what they choose to believe). I offer that people "blow things up" because they've nothing better to do (and are therefore not learned where they need to be to make the statements that they do). For example, look at the intense outcry from this story from/. users. When I look at the volume of posts that do nothing more than to laugh or tear down an expedition looking to accomplish something, I'm disappointed and ashamed.
I have to say that it more than bugs me when I see the bible refer to pi as 3.0.
You shoudln't be so easily slighted. Do you think the enigma and majesty of pi, found in essentially every aspect of the theoretical and physical universe, would be trivially spelled out? Were you expecting an inifinitely long bible with all the digits? What base would it be in? It would almost be a contradiction or let-down to expect a supposedly holy text to express pi in a domain so clearly unfitting (but completely appropriate for pi). This is to say, pi can be easily arguged to be exactly 3 in a domain we have not discovered. Consider some of the other major lurking aspects of the universe yet to be unraveled (all relating to geometry, time-space, the physical universe) -- dark energy, dark matter, the physical orgins of the universe, unification of all forces, fundamental particles, and so on. We are still a far cry from understanding the fabric of the universe (God created or not).
So, this is to say that before you discount the bible, I'd wait until we have the entire phyiscal and time-space universe figured out for sure. At such a time, we finally may have the authority to make such judegements about findamental contanstants. (Of course, IMHO, I beleive this say won't come for a long long time, if ever).
Finally, if you think I'm spouting hot air, I encourage to drop by my site and see what I do...
Yhe Rio Nitrus was the first player to use a 1" drive.
Fair enough, but what about the other factors critical witht he iPod? Namely, what's the price, size, and weight of the Nitus? Further, USB is pretty ugly next to firwire when you decide to drop 500 megs of new music onto it 5 minutes before you want to leave for your run. Separately, I owned two rios in my life (Rio 400? and a Rio 500). Both models had shoddy Mac OS support and froze up constantly w/ various mp3s.
I run about once a week for about 60-90 min per run at about a 7 minute mile pace, and i often run shirtless. I just assumed that'd I have to buy the mareware sport suit thing for an added $30, but the clip that comes with it (from Apple) is superb! It's a really tight clip-grip and has a very narrow profile, causing minimal bounce (a huge contrast to a normal iPod in a mareware sportsuit clipped onto your shorts). I slide my mini about 1" downward on the clip, protecting the top from any sweat, etc--a simple solution, but effective.
About the only thing more worthless than simple anecdotal evidence would be attempting to extrapolate trends from data gathered on Slashdot.
Of course, unlike the over-cynical and ever-useless comments that serve even less of a purpose.
If a dozen people over the span of the last 6 weeks all posted that they had to wait 5 weeks for their mini, then that defintely says something about Apple and the demand. And that, sir, would make you an asshat.
Thought I'd share a data point for what it's worth...
I ordered my iPod mini about two weeks after the iPods were available (about 6 weeks ago-ish), was told 3-5 weeks delivery, and it arrived at the 5 week point. A friend ordered his last week, and they told him 4-6 weeks.
Perhaps we should put together some more data points and extrapolate if this has been the trend since the iPod mini release.
For all the reasons described in the article, the iPod mini exactly fits my preferences--it's sufficiently small, long-loved, well-designed, and spacious. More specifically, for me, the breakthrough was to have a audio player that a capacity beyond ~500 megs that was also suitable for running/jogging--the mini is the first to break that barrier.
The quality of code is always higher with C than C++, unless VERY well programmed with C++, and for that reason alone, C code is reused more despite being less reusable.
This is an impressively insightful statement--mod parent up. Indeed, this fact reflects reality, not the "reality" touted by the manufacturers (and the software companies tied to them). If you're a dev and you look back at your years, think of how many C snippets you copied and pasted from example or demo code so that you get up-and-running and have something simple to start from. With OO code bases, that's never possible. Parent has made the best point in this entire thread.
Steve Jobs once described low level OO APIs really well years ago when Apple was looking doing an OO for medium level OS calls (I can't recall when ir for what codename)... It went something like, using someone elses OO framework when you have your own is like having two buildings next to eachother and having to climb down one and climb up the other, then go all the back every time you wanted to make a system call. If somone knows the exact quote, please jump in--I don't do it justice.
D drops archaic C++ features like the preprocessor
I'm a veteran C/C++ dev, and when I saw this I went cock-eyed. Macros are essential if you have a performance-critical section that has very redundant portions (that can otherwise be maintained with just a single macro called many times). If D has it's way, I suppose it'd want a dev to write a proc to replace his macro in this a situation--are they kidding? It'd be a turkey shoot for the compiler to it screw up the inlining (without you knowing about it), so you're getting non-optimal execution.
I've wondered why so many Java finatics, Sun, and now D finatics are so anti-macros. It's a real mystery to me--and it's not like they're significant for the compilers to implement and maintain--macro implementation for a preprocessor is nothing next to their C/C++ compiler. If you have piss-poor dev abuse macros, shame on the dev, not on the language.
What are you talking about? Solid state storage is here, today, now [bestbuy.com]. (If that link stops working, search for "removable flash drives" as a category.)
*sigh*... you're missing the point.... the grandparent was referring to *real* solid state storage, not 1-2 gigs. Figure out how much it will cost you (and how many units you'll have to get) in order to get 100 gigs of solid state storage vs. a 100 gig drive. Still ready to go to BestBuy? I didn't think so.
"In the interim, we know the company is going to burn through its cash balance.",
The saddest part is that this money goes to lawyers and only lawyers, who'll just opt for the luxury version of their next car or shop for the more expensive waterfont summer property. Think if that money went anywhere else--charities, disaster funds, education, investment, open source funding--you name it. Dozens of/.ers have said it before and it's worth saying again: the only people that win are the lawyers and the senior execs (who suck up senior exec-caliber salaries while they ride their company into the ground). It kills me that types like this go home at the end of the day to their families convinced that they're adding to the GDP.
If it was Microsoft doing this, we'd have seen a long judgmental rant with a biased link at the end.
A fair point, but I think we all agree here that a patent filer deserves to be flamed if their implementation of the patent is garbage (ie, MS WMP). iTunes/Apple has legitimately pioneered most of this new territory everyone else now has no problem ripping off. There was a post a few days ago by someone noting how Apple just doesn't get innovative software handed to them from a magical gnome cave--they spend a lot of money and hire the top talent.
Jeff Robbin was the primary author of SoundJam, licensed by Cassidy & Greene years ago. I worked w/ Jeff on some SoundJam and iTunes related software before Apple bought SoundJam (or whatever it is they did) from Cassidy & Greene. A landslide of credit goes to him for bringing iTunes to where it is today in a variety of categories (the most obvious being the UI). Although he probably wears additional hats at Apple, he's currently one of the iTunes senior engineers (if not the chief).
Fact: HP is in more retail markets than Apple. Fact: HP has many more business arrangements with Corporate America than Apple does and is more respected in those same halls.
Um, ok, great. What bearing does this have on this rapidly changing landscape and where things will be in 2-3 years?
and thereby create a credible alternative to Dell, their common enemy.
Apple's enemy is only crappy software and crappy ideals. the grandparent is right on--Apple has sacraficed much to polish their jewels, it's only now it's starting to come full circle... iPod is not much of all their total assets--you're way off in thinking a profit margin is somehow related to a company's assets and overall total value.
Once brought back to life, you can go back to your corpse and grab your stuff, assuming someone else hasn't looted it.
I was a "hardcore" mode Diablo II addict (in HC mode, you only get one life to live and when you die, that's it--you lose everytihng and you're level one again). I'd go for days w/ minimal food and rest--it was insane. Anyway, that's beside the point--I never had more fun with a game. It was the first time a modern game went beyond a FPS shooter game (ie, instant action), while combining a persistent character, while causing you to exhibit real survival-like behavior. When I played for those hours--and days straight--I was having *tons* of fun and laughs constantly and consistently...
So many of these games these days have you sit there for hours w/o even raising your heartbeat--I don't understand how people let themselves play them! In Diablo II hardcore, I'd stand up after a few hours of play and feel like I just had a two hour-long workout (and I'm shape, before you jump on that one).
Looking back, there wasn't a *single* hour or loss of a character where I didn't have hoots of fun. What other games (and/or game formats) can boast that? Sure, some of the deaths were painful and sad at the equipment I lost, but that's what real battle and gaming is--it goes beyond fun and enters the realm of glory.
Glory isn't something that you can save to file, accumulate from killing a high xp monster a hundred times using hours of free time, or get from nice equipment. It's when you and a couple others that you've been fighting alongside with rush in a room where the outcome is unknown and is also for keeps--you get one and only one chance. And when you fought off the odds, the glory was yours. And when you didn't, and fought to the end, the glory was still yours. I bowed down--and fell in love--with a game that could let your experience that.
I've had a great set of experiences w/ Norton's 2003 bootable CDROM disk doctor. I dev some low level stuff on my PB 17" causing me to do reset or shutdown... Needless to say, my disk develops issues now and then (lately, 1% of the icons would be wrong or garbled). Anyway, since using the Norton 2003 CD, i've had a perfect recovery.
Separately, the utility suite it installs is bloaty and unnecessary. (have there even been any Mac OS X viruses worth mentioning yet over the years?). Just buy/get the CD and have it handy if you ever need to check and/or repair your disk.
Slashdot Mirror
I owned a first gen G4 Titanium powerbook and it got a lot of use...
:^)
Around the 2 year point, the top third of all the scan lines started to become intermittent. As the weeks went on, intermittent turned into off, and now the middle third started going intermittent. With the thing far out of warranty, knowing full well it'd make more sense to get a new one (vs. get it serviced), I decided to roll the dice and assume it was a (fixable) loose connection somewhere in the screen to the main board...
Weeelll... It turns out the back plate of the screen is *glued* and *snapped* to the front side, making disassembly of the screen a one-way process...
Unfortunately, firmly reconnecting everything has no effect, leaving me with the bad screen, and a mass of back-paneling that no longer can attach to the front side. Seeing there was no point in having the screen at this point (after a couple weeks, the middle third of the scanlines was off, and now the bottom third was intermittent), I simply removed the screen completely...
Thus, I now have a "headless" G4 TiBook w/ a monitor attached to serve stuff--it's not so portable anymore!
The fact that someone here modded the parent as a troll is the case and point--it makes the term "slashbot" a little more appropriate. Only a jackass would mod down what someone obviously spent a good hour drafting as a troll--it's unspeakable (not to mention that it emphasizes the parent's comments about the mod system being broken). Is everyone a slashbot? No, of course not--far from it. Do a lot of the stories posted on slashdot perpetuate slashbots and grow new ones? Absolutely.
Gee, isn't $800,000 kind of steep?
800K should be enough for anyone.
This is the same compilation of ancient scrollwork that says we should kill homosexuals, that we should mutilate our genitals, that we should burn animal sacrifices, that we should kill rather than understand each other.
Most of what you list there comes from the old covenant (ie. old testament aka the "old law")... Christ's coming and his story is a *new* covenant--a new law--that outlines salvation as seeing Christ as your advocate before God, who is ready to exact justice (hence the notion that Christ "bears our sins"). The new law supercedes the old law, filled with the traditional forms of tribute you speak of. A incredible pastor I once knew put it very well, "God sees us as infinitely perfect only through the lens of Christ". Who is Christ has some great material, meant to speak to intellectuals interested to see Christianity's real answers to tough questions.
Why is this passage even IN the Bible in the first place?
/. users. When I look at the volume of posts that do nothing more than to laugh or tear down an expedition looking to accomplish something, I'm disappointed and ashamed.
There are many prophetic passages in the bible (that are not known to be prophetic and/or richly accurate) until the right time has come.
I believe it is portrayed in error, ON PURPOSE - as an example of why Inerrancy is a "BAD" thing.
Perhaps. Anything is, of course, possible. My previous post was simply to address the point that we're not knowledgeable and advanced enough to make blanket statements about one of the most pragmatic fundamental mathematical constants of the universe.
When believers start to take too much stock in their Scripture, and refuse to accept that it may not be a 100% perfect roadmap of God's Will - that's when people start blowing stuff up.
I think that statement is unqualified (as much as I agree that there's no shortage of people that believe simply what they choose to believe). I offer that people "blow things up" because they've nothing better to do (and are therefore not learned where they need to be to make the statements that they do). For example, look at the intense outcry from this story from
I have to say that it more than bugs me when I see the bible refer to pi as 3.0.
You shoudln't be so easily slighted. Do you think the enigma and majesty of pi, found in essentially every aspect of the theoretical and physical universe, would be trivially spelled out? Were you expecting an inifinitely long bible with all the digits? What base would it be in? It would almost be a contradiction or let-down to expect a supposedly holy text to express pi in a domain so clearly unfitting (but completely appropriate for pi). This is to say, pi can be easily arguged to be exactly 3 in a domain we have not discovered. Consider some of the other major lurking aspects of the universe yet to be unraveled (all relating to geometry, time-space, the physical universe) -- dark energy, dark matter, the physical orgins of the universe, unification of all forces, fundamental particles, and so on. We are still a far cry from understanding the fabric of the universe (God created or not).
So, this is to say that before you discount the bible, I'd wait until we have the entire phyiscal and time-space universe figured out for sure. At such a time, we finally may have the authority to make such judegements about findamental contanstants. (Of course, IMHO, I beleive this say won't come for a long long time, if ever).
Finally, if you think I'm spouting hot air, I encourage to drop by my site and see what I do...
Yhe Rio Nitrus was the first player to use a 1" drive.
Fair enough, but what about the other factors critical witht he iPod? Namely, what's the price, size, and weight of the Nitus? Further, USB is pretty ugly next to firwire when you decide to drop 500 megs of new music onto it 5 minutes before you want to leave for your run. Separately, I owned two rios in my life (Rio 400? and a Rio 500). Both models had shoddy Mac OS support and froze up constantly w/ various mp3s.
How much do you run? Is the mini holding up well?
I run about once a week for about 60-90 min per run at about a 7 minute mile pace, and i often run shirtless. I just assumed that'd I have to buy the mareware sport suit thing for an added $30, but the clip that comes with it (from Apple) is superb! It's a really tight clip-grip and has a very narrow profile, causing minimal bounce (a huge contrast to a normal iPod in a mareware sportsuit clipped onto your shorts). I slide my mini about 1" downward on the clip, protecting the top from any sweat, etc--a simple solution, but effective.
About the only thing more worthless than simple anecdotal evidence would be attempting to extrapolate trends from data gathered on Slashdot.
Of course, unlike the over-cynical and ever-useless comments that serve even less of a purpose.
If a dozen people over the span of the last 6 weeks all posted that they had to wait 5 weeks for their mini, then that defintely says something about Apple and the demand. And that, sir, would make you an asshat.
Thought I'd share a data point for what it's worth...
I ordered my iPod mini about two weeks after the iPods were available (about 6 weeks ago-ish), was told 3-5 weeks delivery, and it arrived at the 5 week point. A friend ordered his last week, and they told him 4-6 weeks.
Perhaps we should put together some more data points and extrapolate if this has been the trend since the iPod mini release.
For all the reasons described in the article, the iPod mini exactly fits my preferences--it's sufficiently small, long-loved, well-designed, and spacious. More specifically, for me, the breakthrough was to have a audio player that a capacity beyond ~500 megs that was also suitable for running/jogging--the mini is the first to break that barrier.
Wow--I didn't even know power support was built in to the ethernet spec. Anyone know the power capacity of the spec and any related details?
The quality of code is always higher with C than C++, unless VERY well programmed with C++, and for that reason alone, C code is reused more despite being less reusable.
This is an impressively insightful statement--mod parent up. Indeed, this fact reflects reality, not the "reality" touted by the manufacturers (and the software companies tied to them). If you're a dev and you look back at your years, think of how many C snippets you copied and pasted from example or demo code so that you get up-and-running and have something simple to start from. With OO code bases, that's never possible. Parent has made the best point in this entire thread.
Steve Jobs once described low level OO APIs really well years ago when Apple was looking doing an OO for medium level OS calls (I can't recall when ir for what codename)... It went something like, using someone elses OO framework when you have your own is like having two buildings next to eachother and having to climb down one and climb up the other, then go all the back every time you wanted to make a system call. If somone knows the exact quote, please jump in--I don't do it justice.
D drops archaic C++ features like the preprocessor
I'm a veteran C/C++ dev, and when I saw this I went cock-eyed. Macros are essential if you have a performance-critical section that has very redundant portions (that can otherwise be maintained with just a single macro called many times). If D has it's way, I suppose it'd want a dev to write a proc to replace his macro in this a situation--are they kidding? It'd be a turkey shoot for the compiler to it screw up the inlining (without you knowing about it), so you're getting non-optimal execution.
I've wondered why so many Java finatics, Sun, and now D finatics are so anti-macros. It's a real mystery to me--and it's not like they're significant for the compilers to implement and maintain--macro implementation for a preprocessor is nothing next to their C/C++ compiler. If you have piss-poor dev abuse macros, shame on the dev, not on the language.
What are you talking about? Solid state storage is here, today, now [bestbuy.com]. (If that link stops working, search for "removable flash drives" as a category.)
*sigh*... you're missing the point.... the grandparent was referring to *real* solid state storage, not 1-2 gigs. Figure out how much it will cost you (and how many units you'll have to get) in order to get 100 gigs of solid state storage vs. a 100 gig drive. Still ready to go to BestBuy? I didn't think so.
I think price will always be a hurdle for solid state storage.
I think you're missing his point. The fact that solid state is *still* not low priced is what the grandparent was commenting as suprising.
"In the interim, we know the company is going to burn through its cash balance.",
The saddest part is that this money goes to lawyers and only lawyers, who'll just opt for the luxury version of their next car or shop for the more expensive waterfont summer property. Think if that money went anywhere else--charities, disaster funds, education, investment, open source funding--you name it. Dozens of
Try HyperDict. It's as lightweight as google as well as very impressive and multi-fuctional.
If it was Microsoft doing this, we'd have seen a long judgmental rant with a biased link at the end.
A fair point, but I think we all agree here that a patent filer deserves to be flamed if their implementation of the patent is garbage (ie, MS WMP). iTunes/Apple has legitimately pioneered most of this new territory everyone else now has no problem ripping off. There was a post a few days ago by someone noting how Apple just doesn't get innovative software handed to them from a magical gnome cave--they spend a lot of money and hire the top talent.
Inventors: Robbin, Jeffrey L.; (Los Altos, CA) ; Jobs, Steve; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Wasko, Timothy; (High River, CA)
Jeff Robbin was the primary author of SoundJam, licensed by Cassidy & Greene years ago. I worked w/ Jeff on some SoundJam and iTunes related software before Apple bought SoundJam (or whatever it is they did) from Cassidy & Greene. A landslide of credit goes to him for bringing iTunes to where it is today in a variety of categories (the most obvious being the UI). Although he probably wears additional hats at Apple, he's currently one of the iTunes senior engineers (if not the chief).
Fact: HP is in more retail markets than Apple. Fact: HP has many more business arrangements with Corporate America than Apple does and is more respected in those same halls.
Um, ok, great. What bearing does this have on this rapidly changing landscape and where things will be in 2-3 years?
and thereby create a credible alternative to Dell, their common enemy.
Apple's enemy is only crappy software and crappy ideals. the grandparent is right on--Apple has sacraficed much to polish their jewels, it's only now it's starting to come full circle... iPod is not much of all their total assets--you're way off in thinking a profit margin is somehow related to a company's assets and overall total value.
...but that was under the previous leadership...
When you log on, you hear the cheery voice, "You've got worms!"
Once brought back to life, you can go back to your corpse and grab your stuff, assuming someone else hasn't looted it.
I was a "hardcore" mode Diablo II addict (in HC mode, you only get one life to live and when you die, that's it--you lose everytihng and you're level one again). I'd go for days w/ minimal food and rest--it was insane. Anyway, that's beside the point--I never had more fun with a game. It was the first time a modern game went beyond a FPS shooter game (ie, instant action), while combining a persistent character, while causing you to exhibit real survival-like behavior. When I played for those hours--and days straight--I was having *tons* of fun and laughs constantly and consistently...
So many of these games these days have you sit there for hours w/o even raising your heartbeat--I don't understand how people let themselves play them! In Diablo II hardcore, I'd stand up after a few hours of play and feel like I just had a two hour-long workout (and I'm shape, before you jump on that one).
Looking back, there wasn't a *single* hour or loss of a character where I didn't have hoots of fun. What other games (and/or game formats) can boast that? Sure, some of the deaths were painful and sad at the equipment I lost, but that's what real battle and gaming is--it goes beyond fun and enters the realm of glory.
Glory isn't something that you can save to file, accumulate from killing a high xp monster a hundred times using hours of free time, or get from nice equipment. It's when you and a couple others that you've been fighting alongside with rush in a room where the outcome is unknown and is also for keeps--you get one and only one chance. And when you fought off the odds, the glory was yours. And when you didn't, and fought to the end, the glory was still yours. I bowed down--and fell in love--with a game that could let your experience that.
The grandparent is right on IMHO, to a large degree. Know how much your post added to the GDP or added value to a shared resource? Zero.
I've had a great set of experiences w/ Norton's 2003 bootable CDROM disk doctor. I dev some low level stuff on my PB 17" causing me to do reset or shutdown... Needless to say, my disk develops issues now and then (lately, 1% of the icons would be wrong or garbled). Anyway, since using the Norton 2003 CD, i've had a perfect recovery.
Separately, the utility suite it installs is bloaty and unnecessary. (have there even been any Mac OS X viruses worth mentioning yet over the years?). Just buy/get the CD and have it handy if you ever need to check and/or repair your disk.