Jeez... I guess you'll need some gloves for it then. The "Revolution" is a handheld system.
Dev kits are already out there. Last I'd heard, "Revolution" was going to be released either just before Christmas, or in mid-spring.
Nintendo's next home system won't be out for quite a while, probably not until early 2007. I hope UT2k7 is a launch title for it... what with the PPU and all... I've probably said too much...
I am usually considered an "early-career professional without a degree" because I went to community college instead of "real" college because that's what I could afford. I've forgotten more things than the average beer-swilling, frat-party-attending, cow-tipping college asshat has ever known. I know this because I work with several of them. Sounds like they've done it all, though.
I constantly learn new things and new ways of doing old stuff. I've taught myself (books and Google) several programming languages that I didn't get from high school or college and new techniques in the ones I already knew. Any "HUGE holes in [my] knowledge" that I can identify are things I "close up" as quickly as possible.
So, would you hire me as a developer when all I have is an Associates in programming (which is, admittedly, useless) and 4 years of experience doing wiring diagrams and warehouse keeping? It sounds like you wouldn't just because I don't have a "real" degree.
What if I told you I automated that CAD wiring diagram process and made my own inventory system, and put them both behind a nice web frontend, integrated into the company's website? But, wait, you wouldn't get that far with me. You'd just choose that other guy because he has a Bachelor's in drinking beer from a hose held by a college slut.
I don't mean to be abrasive or personally insulting here, but I'm currently hunting for a job (believe it or not, I don't want to do CAD-and-office-monkey work for the rest of my life) and this attitude is WAY too common amongst HR feebs. (OK, so I read too many BOFH stories and use too many parentheticals as well. Sue me.)
I got my novice license in 1993, barely passing the morse part of the test. So... if I learn all the multiple choice questions and answers... I could go all the way to the top level license without more morse tests? Or am I wrong here?
based purely on faith I see faith in something as a lack of logical conclusion dumb for having blind faith
You don't know what "faith" is, do you? What you're describing is known as "hope". "Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld." (Hebrews 11:1, NWT) Read that again. Assured expectation and evident demonstration are anything but blind. Faith is based on a logical conclusion, not formed despite one.
As someone who has studied the Bible quite a bit, I can assure you that there's nothing in that book that says that the universe isn't 13.8 billion years old. There's nothing in the Bible that says the Earth is flat. There's nothing that says that imperfect reproduction doesn't cause minor variation in a species. In fact, it directly refutes at least two of those things, and quite plainly leaves the other one to the reader to figure out rather than giving facts and figures.
(For your info: Isaiah chap. 43 describes the earth as a circle or ball by using the Hebrew word "chugh". Also, the flood account in Genesis speaks of taking animals along "according to their kind" leaving the color and shape variations for later generations' imperfect reproduction.)
These are things that "true Christians" understand. The Bible isn't a science textbook, but it isn't inaccurate, either.
The dev kits for Revolution have been around since GDC. Find someone online that has access to one, and they'll likely tell you what a buddy of mine in that situation told me.
"Revolution is a handheld. It uses disks like the Gamecube's. It might even be Gamecube compatible."
He wouldn't elaborate any further, since he's under NDA about it (as well as everyone else at the company he works for), and he had only had about 10 minutes with the dev kit at that point (it was the day after GDC). He did say that Nintendo has no plans to release another set-top system until 2006 at the earliest. He wouldn't elaborate on how he knew that one either.
Revolution will supposedly be released in November, just in time for the end-of-year-capitalist-orgy celebration (according to this same guy, so take it with the same salt you've been taking the rest of this).
His first impression of the Revolution included the absolute assurance (in his mind) that the PSP had a snowball's chance in hell of competing against it, and the DS is just a decoy to bump up short term profit numbers.
Better yet... Time travel isn't possible because time doesn't exist.
We speak of "time" because it's convenient. It allows us to measure our lives and our activities against a single background. We keep track of "time" by observing the predictable patterns of celestial objects, as well as by setting mechanical devices to synchronize with those celestial movement cycles.
But what exactly is "time"? Time is a series of events. Nothing more. You can't undo things in real life. A broken vase can't be put back together just by reversing the event that caused it to break. Why? Because events are irreversible. You can cause a negating event for some things (like turning a light on or off), but you can never undo an event once it's done.
So, simply put, time doesn't exist. It's merely perception of a series of events. The fact that it's perception is made clear by the phrase "time flies when you're having fun." Your brain records images of events into your memory, sometimes with a record of celestial body locations or numeric representations thereof.
The more interested you are in what is happening around you, the more things your brain will record. But having limited processing resources, it will skip the "timestamp" on many of those events. The relative difference between each "timestamp" is much farther apart than is expected or normal, so "time flies."
When you're disinterested in events around you, the opposite is true. Your brain records some meaningless drivel and since it has lots of resources available, it slaps a "timestamp" on every one of those mental notes. Boring stuff seems to take much longer because of this.
Let's see the writers for the next Star Trek series (several years from now, I hear) put this tidbit of time-travel logic to work. It'll at least spare us some crappy re-hashes of Nazis in space (spaaaaaaaaaaaace?).
At which point someone will just McVeigh-ify the RIAA's offices. Sure, (mostly) innocent people will be hurt (but even a pencil-pusher in the military is a non-civilian target). Sure, politicians will scream "terrorism!" for the next 10 years. But that already happens anyway, and it might just send a message to the RIAA that we're sick of their shit.
Note that I do not condone such actions. I condone treating people fairly, quite unlike the RIAA.
Your post is mostly correct. The only thing wrong is that USB does not have a global limit of 127 devices. Each bus supports that many devices.
On Apple systems, there are 2 USB ports on the back of the machine, and they're both on the same bus. Hooked into those two ports (via lots and lots of hubs), you can have 127 devices (numbered internally as 1 to 127, the computer would be device 0, so there is technically a total of 128 devices).
On PC's, USB ports are usually more plentiful. They generally come in pairs. I know for a fact that my PC motherboard has 3 USB busses on it. 2 busses (4 ports) on the back, and a separate bus (2 ports) for the front. Each bus can support 127 external devices, for a total of 381 USB devices.
Firewire, on the other hand, is generally given one bus per port on a computer. A PCI card that has 3 Firewire ports will generally have 3 separate bus controllers. An Apple system with 2 Firewire ports has 2 bus controllers (always!). Each controller can handle 63 other devices attached to it. If you install one of those fancy 5-port PCI Firewire cards, you'll get 5 busses, each capable of handling 63 external devices, for a total of 315 Firewire devices.
Neither system truly supports "daisy-chaining", since they both rely on a bus topology. Daisy-chaining requires every device to have two transmitter/receivers, and each port(and its respective transceiver) can only be connected to one other device. Firewire and USB use bus "backbones" to connect multiple devices to each other on a common wire. They use switching and collision detection/avoidance to keep things sane (like Ethernet does).
Firewire can support something that appears to be daisy-chaining. Since Firewire is a point-to-point communication system, any device can have a second (or third, or more) bus connection and can propagate signals from one bus to another. This setup would qualify as daisy-chaining, but it could be abused to make chains of busses instead of chains of devices, so it's close, but not quite the same.
USB, on the other hand, is more of a master/slave setup. It requires a "host controller" (UHCI = Universal Host Controller Interface, OHCI = Open H.C.I.) to keep things running. Any device may not talk to any other device. They can only talk to the host controller. They can, however, request the host controller to pass a message to another device. USB won't support anything that even resembles daisy-chaining.
Firewire has a limit of 63 devices(additional devices... the computer would be a 64th device) per bus. USB has a limit of 127, not including the host controller (the computer, which would make the total 128).
That'll be a good way for the media and broadcast industry to get exactly 0 minutes of my eye-time on their advertisements (read: $$$ for them), as well as exactly $0 from me for pay-per-view stuff.
You mention that Acrobat is a single app, and that if you kill it one place, it dies everywhre. And that reminded me of the coolest thing about the MacOS.
You can copy an app (the 'APPL' in OS 9 or the.app in OS X) and run it concurrently as a separate app from the first.
For example, Toast (Roxio disc burning software)... Let's say you have 5 Firewire (don't try this with USB, kids) disc burners. So you install Toast, and it burns one disc to one drive, and won't do anything else while it's doing that. How can you make use of all your burners? 4 more Macs? Hell no.
It's easy. Copy the Toast.app (assuming OS X) file. Heck, MacOS has a "Duplicate" command (command-D, also found in the Finder's File menu), so you don't even have to keep holding Ctrl while dragging and dropping. Then rename them to Toast 2.app, Toast 3.app, etc. Then highlight the whole mess of them and hit command-O (the Open command, again, found in Finder's File menu). Suddenly, the dock shows 5 bouncing Toast icons, and in a moment, there are 5 instances of burner software ready to go. Set them each up to burn to a specific drive (you'll know which one because it'll open the tray for you when it wants a blank disc). Then hit the Burn button. Watch as 5 discs get Toast-ed simultaneously.
Just for your curiosity, this was possible as far back as Toast 5 for MacOS 9. It tended to get messy after a few burns, but that's because MacOS 9 was crusty. OS X suffers no such decay.
But try doing that on Windows... Can you copy just the.exe? Not likely. It'll try to borrow the same config files as the first.exe. It might even gripe about having a different filename than it expects. It'll probably find something wrong with the way the registry is set up, since it's set for the original installation. So could you just install a second copy? Not a chance. It'll replace any registry entries pointing to the first one. So can you get an app that'll just burn multiple discs at once? I've never seen one, but I won't say it doesn't exist.
Apple's products aren't integrated systems. They're layers of platforms with very capable systems built in between and on top of them, all helping to provide stable, useful, and easy-to-use functions that work well together, yet independently of one another.
In order for a law to be removed from the books, it has to be broken then challenged in court. That means someone has to break it, and someone has to defend their law-breaking posterior in court. That someone will probably get help from the EFF when the time comes. And possibly from consumer watchdog groups as well. The winner is the one with the best marketing and the biggest "underdog" factor in the public opinion. The court won't rule against that, since they know that if they do, the ruling will be irrelevant within days because the elected officials will pass something to replace or repeal the law that might cost them re-election.
Take this bitch head-on. Break the DRM. You can't beat politicians at their own game, so quit dancing around the issue. You have to play rough. Bust some heads. Make a mess. In the end, it sends a much more powerful message than just protesting.
Well, color me uninformed. Oops./me flogs himself with a Google stick.
It seems there is a Firewire flash drive. Available in 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB. FYI, the 128MB one is about $55, the 4GB one is about $650.
Re:New Removable Media Standard Ignores Media
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USB Flash Drive Round-up
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· Score: 4, Informative
And while you're futzing around picking out how to limit what they can get to, they dump the memory of the thing and start parsing.
Remember, USB only works where there's a host controller. That host has to be trusted. If it's not, your data is screwed.
A Firewire (IEEE-1394) keychain drive would be much more secure for what you're describing, since the keychain drive would be in a point-to-point communication mode with that untrusted store machine. It wouldn't rely on an untrusted host that might force it to do what you didn't ask it to do. I'm surprised nobody's made a Firewire keychain drive already. It would be a faster and more secure (though a bit less universal) alternative to USB-based drives.
My first "walkman" was a Sharp model. It sucked batteries dry faster than a hooker can... well... you know. It also broke in about a year.
The replacement was a Panasonic. It's still going strong, though the spring on the tape door went dead after 5 or 6 years.
I did go ahead and buy another one, since I wanted one with an LCD tuner readout. It's a real Sony that doesn't get much use, though comes in handy at times.
More recent purchases in this area are: - a Panasonic SL-162 CD player, built in 1995 (according to the sticker on the bottom), and still working, flawlessly. - a Creative 6GB Jukebox player. Uses crappy 1.2V AA-sized rechargable batteries that die if you aren't careful (after one charge, even!). And do you know how long it takes to transfer 6GB over USB 1.1? Jeez... - an iPod, 4th generation (click wheel), 40GB. This is the one that gets used most.
I'd give Panasonic kudos for the same reason you liked your Sony F5. It's built to last. And those damn kids need to get off my lawn too... and turn down that "music"!
iTunes allows you to tell it how you would like it to organize the files in directories, but it's quite limited. Basically, your choices are: 1 - everything dumped into a single directory 2 - in directories by artist 3 - in directories by album inside directories by artist...and filenames forced to be unique... or: 4 - leave it alone, dammit!
But every file you add to the Library (the main database/playlist) gets all its tag info thrown into an XML database for searching, no matter which file organization option you choose. New playlists are treated as subsets of the main Library playlist. Basically, it's a single table, and playlists are just queries against it.
1) iTunes in "minimal mode" (as you were comparing it to Winamp's "minimal mode") is only a small corner of the screen. Then again, maybe you're at 640x480, so that might indeed be a problem for you.
2) In iTunes, IIRC, there's a setting to fill in the filename if the title is blank. In any event, I don't want that shitty "feature" in iTunes, as I would rather it sort properly and give me an indication when a tag isn't correct (like it being somewhere it shouldn't be... the bottom of the list).
2 again) Also, if you sort a playlist by the field you want to search in, then click any entry in the list (to give the list focus), then type what you're looking for, you'll notice that it "finds" it for you. Additionally, you can make automatically updated playlists that work on arbitrary keywords in the comment tag, which means you never have to search again. Just give your files keywords in the comment field.
3) Use one of those newfangled "media" keyboards. It works with those. And just remember, Apple designs things that require a mouse. I can think of far more annoying things than not being able to change tracks quickly without a mouse that Apple has done. It used to be impossible to install MacOS without a mouse. An ADB mouse, and as recently as 1999. I have horror stories, and the scars to back them up.
4) Winamp... 2? Yeah. I still use Winamp 2.91 too (for certain things). Winamp 3 was a non-functional POS. Winamp 5 was worse. And both 3 and 5 were every bit as huge as iTunes. One thing to mention, to slim iTunes down a bit on Windows, stop the iPod Service unless you use an iPod with that machine. It's a real memory hog.
And for your finishing rant, iTunes doesn't change your file associations. QuickTime does. And it keeps trying. You need to kick QT in the nuts sometimes.
The GBA is going away soon. The DS is a placeholder. The PSP is going to die a swift death. The "Revolution" is a Gamecube-compatible portable, and the true successor to the GBA.
Nintendo is still king of the handheld. They're quite assured of making still more bags of money. And Sony is quite assured of being sent home with their tail between their legs, much in the same way they've been put in their place by Apple in the portable music player market in recent years.
As a side note, since Nintendo has no plans for a home console release for at least 2 years, how do you think Sony and Microsoft are going to fare against a portable, well-established system with a large library and some incremental hardware improvements to an already good design?
The Blue and White (and PCI-only) G3's can boot into target disk mode, as well as the "Pismo" powerbooks (the first ones with Firewire, released in 2000). The PCI G4's were just crap, and were the low-end only in that release cycle. They're the only Mac with Firewire that can't boot into target disk mode.
One of the problems is the fact that almost everyone (if not everyone) breaks traffic laws at some point. But only a percentage are ticketed with negative consequences. This is a recipe for widespread dissatifaction. Of course, if they could ticket everyone, heads would roll (laws, speed limits, and elected officials would quickly change)....
Which is why speed limits need to go away. A logical way of deterring bad drivers from causing harm would be to punish for harming someone. Like this:
1st accident - huge fine 2nd accident - lose license for 1 year 3rd accident - lose license for 5 years 4th accident - lose license. period. Accident resulting in death - manslaughter charge, 5-15 years of prison. 1st DUI/DWI - lose license for 5 years 2nd DUI/DWI - lose license forever DUI/DWI accident resulting in death - 2nd (or 3rd) degree murder. Driving without a license -
Very simple, straightforward, and easy to enforce. When someone screws up, they deal with it. Hopefully it scares them straight. If they screw up bad enough, they aren't a problem in the future.
Of course, this puts more burden on the prison system, so they're going to have pass or revise laws to drastically reduce the amount of legal bullshit for the serious offenders, increase the number of death penalty and slap-on-the-wrist cases, and actually execute people on death row instead of letting them sit there for a decade or two. This is, of course, way too much to ask or expect from our lazy-ass lawmakers.
I had a set with a bad disk. Disk 1 worked fine, Disks 3-5 worked fine, but Disk 2 wouldn't work in any player in my house.
I took it back to Best Buy (yeah, yeah, evil blah blah blah...) and the girl at the customer service counter said, "Go get another one off the shelf." I was out of there with a working set of disks in 5 minutes.
I've heard several stories about bad disks in the SG-1 Season 7 set. There must've been a problem with the first runs at the disk presser.
You know your hearing is good when you can hear a jewelery store's "silent" alarm. It's even higher pitch than a TV. And it's quite loud if it's in your range.
It gives horrible headaches within seconds. Of course, being a typical/. geek, I have no use for jewelery stores, so I stay away.
The N64 controller was and is the only tolerable FPS controller ever. If I can't use a keyboard and mouse, that controller is the only remaining option.
It really hurts Nintendo to make their new systems incompatible with old controllers. I'd probably love Metroid Prime if I could use an N64 controller to play it.
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Jeez... I guess you'll need some gloves for it then. The "Revolution" is a handheld system.
Dev kits are already out there. Last I'd heard, "Revolution" was going to be released either just before Christmas, or in mid-spring.
Nintendo's next home system won't be out for quite a while, probably not until early 2007. I hope UT2k7 is a launch title for it... what with the PPU and all... I've probably said too much...
Bullshit.
I am usually considered an "early-career professional without a degree" because I went to community college instead of "real" college because that's what I could afford. I've forgotten more things than the average beer-swilling, frat-party-attending, cow-tipping college asshat has ever known. I know this because I work with several of them. Sounds like they've done it all, though.
I constantly learn new things and new ways of doing old stuff. I've taught myself (books and Google) several programming languages that I didn't get from high school or college and new techniques in the ones I already knew. Any "HUGE holes in [my] knowledge" that I can identify are things I "close up" as quickly as possible.
So, would you hire me as a developer when all I have is an Associates in programming (which is, admittedly, useless) and 4 years of experience doing wiring diagrams and warehouse keeping? It sounds like you wouldn't just because I don't have a "real" degree.
What if I told you I automated that CAD wiring diagram process and made my own inventory system, and put them both behind a nice web frontend, integrated into the company's website? But, wait, you wouldn't get that far with me. You'd just choose that other guy because he has a Bachelor's in drinking beer from a hose held by a college slut.
I don't mean to be abrasive or personally insulting here, but I'm currently hunting for a job (believe it or not, I don't want to do CAD-and-office-monkey work for the rest of my life) and this attitude is WAY too common amongst HR feebs. (OK, so I read too many BOFH stories and use too many parentheticals as well. Sue me.)
What, exactly, is a "cum-Nazi"?
No, wait... I don't want to know. Nevermind.
I got my novice license in 1993, barely passing the morse part of the test. So... if I learn all the multiple choice questions and answers... I could go all the way to the top level license without more morse tests? Or am I wrong here?
Heh...
based purely on faith
I see faith in something as a lack of logical conclusion
dumb for having blind faith
You don't know what "faith" is, do you? What you're describing is known as "hope". "Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld." (Hebrews 11:1, NWT) Read that again. Assured expectation and evident demonstration are anything but blind. Faith is based on a logical conclusion, not formed despite one.
As someone who has studied the Bible quite a bit, I can assure you that there's nothing in that book that says that the universe isn't 13.8 billion years old. There's nothing in the Bible that says the Earth is flat. There's nothing that says that imperfect reproduction doesn't cause minor variation in a species. In fact, it directly refutes at least two of those things, and quite plainly leaves the other one to the reader to figure out rather than giving facts and figures.
(For your info: Isaiah chap. 43 describes the earth as a circle or ball by using the Hebrew word "chugh". Also, the flood account in Genesis speaks of taking animals along "according to their kind" leaving the color and shape variations for later generations' imperfect reproduction.)
These are things that "true Christians" understand. The Bible isn't a science textbook, but it isn't inaccurate, either.
The dev kits for Revolution have been around since GDC. Find someone online that has access to one, and they'll likely tell you what a buddy of mine in that situation told me.
"Revolution is a handheld. It uses disks like the Gamecube's. It might even be Gamecube compatible."
He wouldn't elaborate any further, since he's under NDA about it (as well as everyone else at the company he works for), and he had only had about 10 minutes with the dev kit at that point (it was the day after GDC). He did say that Nintendo has no plans to release another set-top system until 2006 at the earliest. He wouldn't elaborate on how he knew that one either.
Revolution will supposedly be released in November, just in time for the end-of-year-capitalist-orgy celebration (according to this same guy, so take it with the same salt you've been taking the rest of this).
His first impression of the Revolution included the absolute assurance (in his mind) that the PSP had a snowball's chance in hell of competing against it, and the DS is just a decoy to bump up short term profit numbers.
Better yet... Time travel isn't possible because time doesn't exist.
We speak of "time" because it's convenient. It allows us to measure our lives and our activities against a single background. We keep track of "time" by observing the predictable patterns of celestial objects, as well as by setting mechanical devices to synchronize with those celestial movement cycles.
But what exactly is "time"? Time is a series of events. Nothing more. You can't undo things in real life. A broken vase can't be put back together just by reversing the event that caused it to break. Why? Because events are irreversible. You can cause a negating event for some things (like turning a light on or off), but you can never undo an event once it's done.
So, simply put, time doesn't exist. It's merely perception of a series of events. The fact that it's perception is made clear by the phrase "time flies when you're having fun." Your brain records images of events into your memory, sometimes with a record of celestial body locations or numeric representations thereof.
The more interested you are in what is happening around you, the more things your brain will record. But having limited processing resources, it will skip the "timestamp" on many of those events. The relative difference between each "timestamp" is much farther apart than is expected or normal, so "time flies."
When you're disinterested in events around you, the opposite is true. Your brain records some meaningless drivel and since it has lots of resources available, it slaps a "timestamp" on every one of those mental notes. Boring stuff seems to take much longer because of this.
Let's see the writers for the next Star Trek series (several years from now, I hear) put this tidbit of time-travel logic to work. It'll at least spare us some crappy re-hashes of Nazis in space (spaaaaaaaaaaaace?).
At which point someone will just McVeigh-ify the RIAA's offices. Sure, (mostly) innocent people will be hurt (but even a pencil-pusher in the military is a non-civilian target). Sure, politicians will scream "terrorism!" for the next 10 years. But that already happens anyway, and it might just send a message to the RIAA that we're sick of their shit.
Note that I do not condone such actions. I condone treating people fairly, quite unlike the RIAA.
Your post is mostly correct. The only thing wrong is that USB does not have a global limit of 127 devices. Each bus supports that many devices.
On Apple systems, there are 2 USB ports on the back of the machine, and they're both on the same bus. Hooked into those two ports (via lots and lots of hubs), you can have 127 devices (numbered internally as 1 to 127, the computer would be device 0, so there is technically a total of 128 devices).
On PC's, USB ports are usually more plentiful. They generally come in pairs. I know for a fact that my PC motherboard has 3 USB busses on it. 2 busses (4 ports) on the back, and a separate bus (2 ports) for the front. Each bus can support 127 external devices, for a total of 381 USB devices.
Firewire, on the other hand, is generally given one bus per port on a computer. A PCI card that has 3 Firewire ports will generally have 3 separate bus controllers. An Apple system with 2 Firewire ports has 2 bus controllers (always!). Each controller can handle 63 other devices attached to it. If you install one of those fancy 5-port PCI Firewire cards, you'll get 5 busses, each capable of handling 63 external devices, for a total of 315 Firewire devices.
Neither system truly supports "daisy-chaining", since they both rely on a bus topology. Daisy-chaining requires every device to have two transmitter/receivers, and each port(and its respective transceiver) can only be connected to one other device. Firewire and USB use bus "backbones" to connect multiple devices to each other on a common wire. They use switching and collision detection/avoidance to keep things sane (like Ethernet does).
Firewire can support something that appears to be daisy-chaining. Since Firewire is a point-to-point communication system, any device can have a second (or third, or more) bus connection and can propagate signals from one bus to another. This setup would qualify as daisy-chaining, but it could be abused to make chains of busses instead of chains of devices, so it's close, but not quite the same.
USB, on the other hand, is more of a master/slave setup. It requires a "host controller" (UHCI = Universal Host Controller Interface, OHCI = Open H.C.I.) to keep things running. Any device may not talk to any other device. They can only talk to the host controller. They can, however, request the host controller to pass a message to another device. USB won't support anything that even resembles daisy-chaining.
Firewire has a limit of 63 devices(additional devices... the computer would be a 64th device) per bus. USB has a limit of 127, not including the host controller (the computer, which would make the total 128).
That'll be a good way for the media and broadcast industry to get exactly 0 minutes of my eye-time on their advertisements (read: $$$ for them), as well as exactly $0 from me for pay-per-view stuff.
You mention that Acrobat is a single app, and that if you kill it one place, it dies everywhre. And that reminded me of the coolest thing about the MacOS.
.app in OS X) and run it concurrently as a separate app from the first.
.exe? Not likely. It'll try to borrow the same config files as the first .exe. It might even gripe about having a different filename than it expects. It'll probably find something wrong with the way the registry is set up, since it's set for the original installation. So could you just install a second copy? Not a chance. It'll replace any registry entries pointing to the first one. So can you get an app that'll just burn multiple discs at once? I've never seen one, but I won't say it doesn't exist.
You can copy an app (the 'APPL' in OS 9 or the
For example, Toast (Roxio disc burning software)... Let's say you have 5 Firewire (don't try this with USB, kids) disc burners. So you install Toast, and it burns one disc to one drive, and won't do anything else while it's doing that. How can you make use of all your burners? 4 more Macs? Hell no.
It's easy. Copy the Toast.app (assuming OS X) file. Heck, MacOS has a "Duplicate" command (command-D, also found in the Finder's File menu), so you don't even have to keep holding Ctrl while dragging and dropping. Then rename them to Toast 2.app, Toast 3.app, etc. Then highlight the whole mess of them and hit command-O (the Open command, again, found in Finder's File menu). Suddenly, the dock shows 5 bouncing Toast icons, and in a moment, there are 5 instances of burner software ready to go. Set them each up to burn to a specific drive (you'll know which one because it'll open the tray for you when it wants a blank disc). Then hit the Burn button. Watch as 5 discs get Toast-ed simultaneously.
Just for your curiosity, this was possible as far back as Toast 5 for MacOS 9. It tended to get messy after a few burns, but that's because MacOS 9 was crusty. OS X suffers no such decay.
But try doing that on Windows... Can you copy just the
Apple's products aren't integrated systems. They're layers of platforms with very capable systems built in between and on top of them, all helping to provide stable, useful, and easy-to-use functions that work well together, yet independently of one another.
Why are you tiptoeing around this issue?
In order for a law to be removed from the books, it has to be broken then challenged in court. That means someone has to break it, and someone has to defend their law-breaking posterior in court. That someone will probably get help from the EFF when the time comes. And possibly from consumer watchdog groups as well. The winner is the one with the best marketing and the biggest "underdog" factor in the public opinion. The court won't rule against that, since they know that if they do, the ruling will be irrelevant within days because the elected officials will pass something to replace or repeal the law that might cost them re-election.
Take this bitch head-on. Break the DRM. You can't beat politicians at their own game, so quit dancing around the issue. You have to play rough. Bust some heads. Make a mess. In the end, it sends a much more powerful message than just protesting.
Well, color me uninformed. Oops. /me flogs himself with a Google stick.
It seems there is a Firewire flash drive. Available in 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB. FYI, the 128MB one is about $55, the 4GB one is about $650.
And while you're futzing around picking out how to limit what they can get to, they dump the memory of the thing and start parsing.
Remember, USB only works where there's a host controller. That host has to be trusted. If it's not, your data is screwed.
A Firewire (IEEE-1394) keychain drive would be much more secure for what you're describing, since the keychain drive would be in a point-to-point communication mode with that untrusted store machine. It wouldn't rely on an untrusted host that might force it to do what you didn't ask it to do. I'm surprised nobody's made a Firewire keychain drive already. It would be a faster and more secure (though a bit less universal) alternative to USB-based drives.
My first "walkman" was a Sharp model. It sucked batteries dry faster than a hooker can... well... you know. It also broke in about a year.
The replacement was a Panasonic. It's still going strong, though the spring on the tape door went dead after 5 or 6 years.
I did go ahead and buy another one, since I wanted one with an LCD tuner readout. It's a real Sony that doesn't get much use, though comes in handy at times.
More recent purchases in this area are:
- a Panasonic SL-162 CD player, built in 1995 (according to the sticker on the bottom), and still working, flawlessly.
- a Creative 6GB Jukebox player. Uses crappy 1.2V AA-sized rechargable batteries that die if you aren't careful (after one charge, even!). And do you know how long it takes to transfer 6GB over USB 1.1? Jeez...
- an iPod, 4th generation (click wheel), 40GB. This is the one that gets used most.
I'd give Panasonic kudos for the same reason you liked your Sony F5. It's built to last. And those damn kids need to get off my lawn too... and turn down that "music"!
iTunes allows you to tell it how you would like it to organize the files in directories, but it's quite limited. Basically, your choices are: ...and filenames forced to be unique... or:
1 - everything dumped into a single directory
2 - in directories by artist
3 - in directories by album inside directories by artist
4 - leave it alone, dammit!
But every file you add to the Library (the main database/playlist) gets all its tag info thrown into an XML database for searching, no matter which file organization option you choose. New playlists are treated as subsets of the main Library playlist. Basically, it's a single table, and playlists are just queries against it.
1) iTunes in "minimal mode" (as you were comparing it to Winamp's "minimal mode") is only a small corner of the screen. Then again, maybe you're at 640x480, so that might indeed be a problem for you.
2) In iTunes, IIRC, there's a setting to fill in the filename if the title is blank. In any event, I don't want that shitty "feature" in iTunes, as I would rather it sort properly and give me an indication when a tag isn't correct (like it being somewhere it shouldn't be... the bottom of the list).
2 again) Also, if you sort a playlist by the field you want to search in, then click any entry in the list (to give the list focus), then type what you're looking for, you'll notice that it "finds" it for you. Additionally, you can make automatically updated playlists that work on arbitrary keywords in the comment tag, which means you never have to search again. Just give your files keywords in the comment field.
3) Use one of those newfangled "media" keyboards. It works with those. And just remember, Apple designs things that require a mouse. I can think of far more annoying things than not being able to change tracks quickly without a mouse that Apple has done. It used to be impossible to install MacOS without a mouse. An ADB mouse, and as recently as 1999. I have horror stories, and the scars to back them up.
4) Winamp... 2? Yeah. I still use Winamp 2.91 too (for certain things). Winamp 3 was a non-functional POS. Winamp 5 was worse. And both 3 and 5 were every bit as huge as iTunes. One thing to mention, to slim iTunes down a bit on Windows, stop the iPod Service unless you use an iPod with that machine. It's a real memory hog.
And for your finishing rant, iTunes doesn't change your file associations. QuickTime does. And it keeps trying. You need to kick QT in the nuts sometimes.
The GBA is going away soon.
The DS is a placeholder.
The PSP is going to die a swift death.
The "Revolution" is a Gamecube-compatible portable, and the true successor to the GBA.
Nintendo is still king of the handheld. They're quite assured of making still more bags of money. And Sony is quite assured of being sent home with their tail between their legs, much in the same way they've been put in their place by Apple in the portable music player market in recent years.
As a side note, since Nintendo has no plans for a home console release for at least 2 years, how do you think Sony and Microsoft are going to fare against a portable, well-established system with a large library and some incremental hardware improvements to an already good design?
The Blue and White (and PCI-only) G3's can boot into target disk mode, as well as the "Pismo" powerbooks (the first ones with Firewire, released in 2000). The PCI G4's were just crap, and were the low-end only in that release cycle. They're the only Mac with Firewire that can't boot into target disk mode.
One of the problems is the fact that almost everyone (if not everyone) breaks traffic laws at some point. But only a percentage are ticketed with negative consequences. This is a recipe for widespread dissatifaction. Of course, if they could ticket everyone, heads would roll (laws, speed limits, and elected officials would quickly change)....
Which is why speed limits need to go away. A logical way of deterring bad drivers from causing harm would be to punish for harming someone. Like this:
1st accident - huge fine
2nd accident - lose license for 1 year
3rd accident - lose license for 5 years
4th accident - lose license. period.
Accident resulting in death - manslaughter charge, 5-15 years of prison.
1st DUI/DWI - lose license for 5 years
2nd DUI/DWI - lose license forever
DUI/DWI accident resulting in death - 2nd (or 3rd) degree murder.
Driving without a license -
Very simple, straightforward, and easy to enforce. When someone screws up, they deal with it. Hopefully it scares them straight. If they screw up bad enough, they aren't a problem in the future.
Of course, this puts more burden on the prison system, so they're going to have pass or revise laws to drastically reduce the amount of legal bullshit for the serious offenders, increase the number of death penalty and slap-on-the-wrist cases, and actually execute people on death row instead of letting them sit there for a decade or two. This is, of course, way too much to ask or expect from our lazy-ass lawmakers.
I had a set with a bad disk. Disk 1 worked fine, Disks 3-5 worked fine, but Disk 2 wouldn't work in any player in my house.
I took it back to Best Buy (yeah, yeah, evil blah blah blah...) and the girl at the customer service counter said, "Go get another one off the shelf." I was out of there with a working set of disks in 5 minutes.
I've heard several stories about bad disks in the SG-1 Season 7 set. There must've been a problem with the first runs at the disk presser.
You know your hearing is good when you can hear a jewelery store's "silent" alarm. It's even higher pitch than a TV. And it's quite loud if it's in your range.
/. geek, I have no use for jewelery stores, so I stay away.
It gives horrible headaches within seconds. Of course, being a typical
The N64 controller was and is the only tolerable FPS controller ever. If I can't use a keyboard and mouse, that controller is the only remaining option.
It really hurts Nintendo to make their new systems incompatible with old controllers. I'd probably love Metroid Prime if I could use an N64 controller to play it.
Recent compilers already do.
They also warn about if(foo=bar) goofs in your code.
Or maybe I just got a really good IDE/compiler back in '98 that did that (Symantec C++ for MacOS).