Read "Diamond Age"? They have something very similar. Actors around the world, brought together by broadband and good VR, acting out mini-parts on a just-in-time schedule. It's a neat concept that is fleshed out a bit more by Neal Stephenson.
Cheers! I ordered a shipment via FedEx overnight for the day after Thanksgiving. UPS wouldn't deliver that day. We spent the whole day at home, except when I chased the FedEx truck down the street. Despite making several calls to FedEx customer support, where they were all smiles, and zero help (and changed their story every ten minutes), I was obliged to drive to the FedEx facility and pick up the package myself with fifteen minutes to spare (needed for gift wrapping). The whole experience was so fustrating I was spitting sparks. With a new baby, we had been getting FedEx packages every couple weeks for several months so why did they say we had an invalid address??
Re:Returned DOA hard drive no problems
on
A Look Inside Newegg
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Since I found NewEgg a year ago (through Slashdot), I've placed over a dozen orders with them, both for work and personal orders. Only had one problem with a shipment, one of five hard drives was DOA. I filled out the online RMA request, shipped it back that day, and got a replacement within three business days (cross-shipped I think). I am *really* happy with NewEgg prices and reliability.
Compare to Fry's, Best Buy, Good Guys.
I will not shop at TigerDirect since the whole Mac OS X "Tiger" "I'm-an-attention-whore" lawsuit.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 1
I use SideTrack to map 'taps' to left-click and the button to right-click. This feels so normal to me that actually claimed (incorrectly) that my PowerBook had two buttons.
I'd rather have a TouchStream keyboard/mouse on my laptop. When Apple finally makes one optional for the laptops, I'll upgrade IMMEDIATELY.
Hear hear!! I firmly believe in diversity as essential for security. Just look at evolution/biology. Or what happens when you rely on a single species of potato or corn for most of your crops.
We use GFI for our email virus scanner at work, which lets us have three AV packages scanning each message. Usually they all catch the viruses, but there will be spurts of only Kapersky catching emails, then a spurt of only McAffee-caught emails another week.
A lot of people don't get dental, vision, or even decent medical insurance with their jobs. Plus, there's the hidden costs of having a job: travel times, bridge tolls and gas, inflexible hours, overtime without pay, stress/poor health.
I'm not saying that an Oracle administrator should quit his job, but someone working at Best Buy may find this "SL career" a lot more rewarding (if they're good at it).
That's completely different, because people expect that to happen. They're using the internet. People don't expect a music playing application to be internet connected (unless they explicitly choose to use the store).
It becomes subversive (and annoying) when something which doesn't have a particular obvious need to connect to the internet does so and doesn't make the user aware of it or doesn't give them the choice to prevent it.
But you are missing the point that the Apple mini-store in iTunes is not secret and is trivially closable. When the mini-store is open, it shows "related" songs and albums to whatever you most recently clicked in your playlist. When closed, it does not send any requests to Apple-- as expected.
You can't really miss the mini-store. And the button to close the mini-store frame looks the same as for closing the album artwork frame.
I'm not defending the mini-store -- I think all ads are crap, and I'm very mistrustful of privacy abuse (think supermarkets), and I worry sometimes about all of the cross-marketing that Apple is doing -- BUT, THIS IS NOT A PRIVACY ISSUE.
Wiretapping, cell phone records, keyloggers, spyware, Real Player, Microsoft Activation, Mozilla "quality" reports, supermarket datamining, census mining, gerrymandering, insurance/political profiling, phone surveys, unencrypted wireless, doubleclick.net... can we have a real story?
They dropped the iPod Mini without a moments notice when it was the best-selling mp3 player. A company that does that... could do anything.:)
RTFA and stop whining about things which aren't
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 4, Informative
For those of you who didn't RTFA or missed what this is all about, the latest update in iTunes added a 1" advertisizing bar in the playlist windows that is easily closed.
THIS IS NOT THE "RECOMMENDED FOR YOU" WINDOW IN THE MUSIC STORE. This is a new bar which appeared prominently in a playlist window by default after the latest update. THIS IS NOT HIDDEN TRACKING. THIS IS A CLOSABLE AD.
The mini-store bar is very obvious. It is annoying that it appears at all, but can be turned off easily (click the close/hide button) just like the album artwork. The mini-store is not subtle. It very clearly is showing songs in iTMS that match whatever song you just selected in iTunes, like other songs by that artist, and such. It does not appear to suggest songs based on my previous purchases. It looks just like the iTMS store (when you get to actual tracks), but at the bottom of *your* playlist instead of going through the usual iTMS clicks.
According to the reports, sniffing the traffic shows that if you close the mini-store window, it does not bother to send any hits/requests/info back to Apple. Presumably because you wouldn't see the results anyway. If Apple is sending my uniqueid along with my selection clicks, this would be somewhat more of a privacy issue.
I am annoyed by the new "feature" since I hate advertising. But I don't see it as a serious breach of privacy, except that a little popup explaining the new feature and what it does would have been greatly appreciated. It's only a little different from clicking on tracks in the iTMS in that it appears in playlists.
Adware? Sure. Spyware? No. Annoying? Yes, for five seconds, until you click the hide button.
(just watched the streaming keynote) Steve said they wanted their name in it.. thus the "Mac". I agree the name sucks -- sounds like a duck -- but it's still better than..
They haven't posted battery life expectancy for the new laptops. Do you think it's because 1) the battery life sucks, 2) they're still trying to improve the battery life, desperately or 3) they haven't got a laptop built yet for long enough to test the battery life?
Turning the screen to the lowest gets a huge boost (up to twice-ish) in battery life. Add that he had few apps running; we were mostly using it for music, with some web browsing. Sorry, my post was misleading, unintentionally. He got that once, but I'm still jealous of his normal battery life compared to my 2 year old PowerBook.
Apple makes a big deal out of the fact that researchers, photographers, journalists who work in less "civilized" areas use PowerBooks. (Think National Geographic journalists, or wildlife tracking researchers.) They don't always have WiFi and Ethernet.. sometimes just a phone cable with a bad connection for checking their email and sending reports.
There's more like that, but yeah, sometimes you need power that'll go into the wilderness with you..
No one else seems to have mentioned the lack of battery specs, which used to be a main boasting point. My brother's 17" PowerBook gets nearly seven hours on a full charge. But I can't find battery life specs on the Apple site anywhere. Are they that bad?
Nice, the built-in camera, though I hope we can still use the external cameras easily. (Handy for showing off the baby to grandma without getting mushy Cheerios in the $2500 keyboard.). And THANK YOU for the new magnetic power cable!
Still, it's fun imagining Steve Jobs going over to Intel and single-handedly motivating them to get the new processors done in time for the keynote.. New use of the reality-distortion field effect. Looks like they cut the timing really close.:)
Two of my brothers and my partner just got Powerbooks in the last six months. I feel bad for them, but they could not have gone without laptops all that time. OTOH, they'll miss out on all the first-generation what-will-break-now excitement, and the oh-yeah-this-isn't-a-universal-binary-either game.
My PowerBook will be three years old in March, and I'm full of anticipation...
Don't forget that: 1. PowerMacs are dual-processor standard 2. Much more expandable (cards, drives) 3. and don't force you to use the dinky 20" screen (if you have the cinema display) 4. Run all Mac software natively, without Rosetta translation
People buying the new MacBooks and iMac will be on the cutting edge for the next six months. (Not that that will stop me..)
I've been waiting/hoping for this to come out since 2000. The first version - Stars! - was a Civ-type game played in space, and is still played by fans 10 years later; the sequel would be more of the same but with awesome graphics, better combat system, spys/diplomacy, less micromanagement, and fully extendable. Also with an end-of-turn newspaper created to help you track events.
I'd check back to the official website and the fans sites every few months, drool over the screenshots, and read the beta testers game reports.. Sadly, sometime last year the websites have gone away. http://www.crisium.com/ and http://www.starbasedelta.com/(fan faq)
I've only been able to find this review left with some great screenshots..
"BMWs are way overpriced! So are Hondas. Really, you can find used cars for just a few hundred dollars that will drive on more roads and take any kind of engine oil."
"BMW and Honda should just fold. Nobody takes them seriously, and their products are way overpriced. Also, hybrids are a waste of your money because at todays prices, you only break even on gas prices after five years. Design, comfort, size, color, leather, safety, and appearance aren't quantifiable and are pointless expenses."
"If you like BMW, you're just a fanboi and have been duped by the vast marketing machine. Sucker."
I sure hope you don't mean to suggest that carefully picking "stock photos for iPhoto" and is comparible to carefully picking "screenshots of a beta product". Because if you are, you need to do yourself a favor and slap yourself silly.
Jeers have been going to software companies for decades for using screenshots that carefully mislead how an application or game really looked, like only picturing the cut scenes for a platform game.
And if you're referring to what I think you are, a few years ago Microsoft submitted a video of web browsing trying to prove that Windows was faster with IE than without IE. That video, submitted as evidence in the trial, was later proved to be edited to appear to be faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Read "Diamond Age"? They have something very similar. Actors around the world, brought together by broadband and good VR, acting out mini-parts on a just-in-time schedule. It's a neat concept that is fleshed out a bit more by Neal Stephenson.
If there's a few people around, put the system somewhere central so whoever's closest can swap to the next cd.
If you want to make a game of it, put a jar of quarters/tokens/dollars near the system and tell people to take one for every cd they swap.
Use iTunes with the auto-CDDB-lookup, auto-rip, auto-eject for the rest. Remember to set your file naming and other options first.
Cheers! I ordered a shipment via FedEx overnight for the day after Thanksgiving. UPS wouldn't deliver that day. We spent the whole day at home, except when I chased the FedEx truck down the street. Despite making several calls to FedEx customer support, where they were all smiles, and zero help (and changed their story every ten minutes), I was obliged to drive to the FedEx facility and pick up the package myself with fifteen minutes to spare (needed for gift wrapping). The whole experience was so fustrating I was spitting sparks. With a new baby, we had been getting FedEx packages every couple weeks for several months so why did they say we had an invalid address??
Since I found NewEgg a year ago (through Slashdot), I've placed over a dozen orders with them, both for work and personal orders. Only had one problem with a shipment, one of five hard drives was DOA. I filled out the online RMA request, shipped it back that day, and got a replacement within three business days (cross-shipped I think). I am *really* happy with NewEgg prices and reliability.
Compare to Fry's, Best Buy, Good Guys.
I will not shop at TigerDirect since the whole Mac OS X "Tiger" "I'm-an-attention-whore" lawsuit.
I use SideTrack to map 'taps' to left-click and the button to right-click. This feels so normal to me that actually claimed (incorrectly) that my PowerBook had two buttons.
I'd rather have a TouchStream keyboard/mouse on my laptop. When Apple finally makes one optional for the laptops, I'll upgrade IMMEDIATELY.
Hear hear!! I firmly believe in diversity as essential for security. Just look at evolution/biology. Or what happens when you rely on a single species of potato or corn for most of your crops.
We use GFI for our email virus scanner at work, which lets us have three AV packages scanning each message. Usually they all catch the viruses, but there will be spurts of only Kapersky catching emails, then a spurt of only McAffee-caught emails another week.
A lot of people don't get dental, vision, or even decent medical insurance with their jobs. Plus, there's the hidden costs of having a job: travel times, bridge tolls and gas, inflexible hours, overtime without pay, stress/poor health.
I'm not saying that an Oracle administrator should quit his job, but someone working at Best Buy may find this "SL career" a lot more rewarding (if they're good at it).
I'd love an iMonkey from Rob and Eliot's comic.
That's completely different, because people expect that to happen. They're using the internet. People don't expect a music playing application to be internet connected (unless they explicitly choose to use the store).
It becomes subversive (and annoying) when something which doesn't have a particular obvious need to connect to the internet does so and doesn't make the user aware of it or doesn't give them the choice to prevent it.
But you are missing the point that the Apple mini-store in iTunes is not secret and is trivially closable. When the mini-store is open, it shows "related" songs and albums to whatever you most recently clicked in your playlist. When closed, it does not send any requests to Apple-- as expected.
You can't really miss the mini-store. And the button to close the mini-store frame looks the same as for closing the album artwork frame.
I'm not defending the mini-store -- I think all ads are crap, and I'm very mistrustful of privacy abuse (think supermarkets), and I worry sometimes about all of the cross-marketing that Apple is doing -- BUT, THIS IS NOT A PRIVACY ISSUE.
Wiretapping, cell phone records, keyloggers, spyware, Real Player, Microsoft Activation, Mozilla "quality" reports, supermarket datamining, census mining, gerrymandering, insurance/political profiling, phone surveys, unencrypted wireless, doubleclick.net... can we have a real story?
I believe that you can also use the calculator, no joke. But you're right about Apple and the upselling-- didja see the demo of iWeb?
They dropped the iPod Mini without a moments notice when it was the best-selling mp3 player. A company that does that... could do anything. :)
For those of you who didn't RTFA or missed what this is all about, the latest update in iTunes added a 1" advertisizing bar in the playlist windows that is easily closed.
THIS IS NOT THE "RECOMMENDED FOR YOU" WINDOW IN THE MUSIC STORE. This is a new bar which appeared prominently in a playlist window by default after the latest update. THIS IS NOT HIDDEN TRACKING. THIS IS A CLOSABLE AD.
The mini-store bar is very obvious. It is annoying that it appears at all, but can be turned off easily (click the close/hide button) just like the album artwork. The mini-store is not subtle. It very clearly is showing songs in iTMS that match whatever song you just selected in iTunes, like other songs by that artist, and such. It does not appear to suggest songs based on my previous purchases. It looks just like the iTMS store (when you get to actual tracks), but at the bottom of *your* playlist instead of going through the usual iTMS clicks.
According to the reports, sniffing the traffic shows that if you close the mini-store window, it does not bother to send any hits/requests/info back to Apple. Presumably because you wouldn't see the results anyway. If Apple is sending my uniqueid along with my selection clicks, this would be somewhat more of a privacy issue.
I am annoyed by the new "feature" since I hate advertising. But I don't see it as a serious breach of privacy, except that a little popup explaining the new feature and what it does would have been greatly appreciated. It's only a little different from clicking on tracks in the iTMS in that it appears in playlists.
Adware? Sure. Spyware? No. Annoying? Yes, for five seconds, until you click the hide button.
(just watched the streaming keynote) Steve said they wanted their name in it.. thus the "Mac". I agree the name sucks -- sounds like a duck -- but it's still better than..
:)
ATTACK OF THE CLONES
That's odd. The accessories for the new laptops includes a link for buying an extra battery. The link goes to:
A ppleStore?productLearnMore=M9756G/A
"Rechargeable Battery - 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook G4"
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
They haven't posted battery life expectancy for the new laptops. Do you think it's because 1) the battery life sucks, 2) they're still trying to improve the battery life, desperately or 3) they haven't got a laptop built yet for long enough to test the battery life?
Turning the screen to the lowest gets a huge boost (up to twice-ish) in battery life. Add that he had few apps running; we were mostly using it for music, with some web browsing. Sorry, my post was misleading, unintentionally. He got that once, but I'm still jealous of his normal battery life compared to my 2 year old PowerBook.
I did say "if you have the Cinema display" (not that I do). 30" of flat-screen goodness would make 20" feel dinky.. ;)
Apple makes a big deal out of the fact that researchers, photographers, journalists who work in less "civilized" areas use PowerBooks. (Think National Geographic journalists, or wildlife tracking researchers.) They don't always have WiFi and Ethernet.. sometimes just a phone cable with a bad connection for checking their email and sending reports.
There's more like that, but yeah, sometimes you need power that'll go into the wilderness with you..
Is this a joke? Isn't NeoOffice/J a Java app? :)
No one else seems to have mentioned the lack of battery specs, which used to be a main boasting point. My brother's 17" PowerBook gets nearly seven hours on a full charge. But I can't find battery life specs on the Apple site anywhere. Are they that bad?
:)
Nice, the built-in camera, though I hope we can still use the external cameras easily. (Handy for showing off the baby to grandma without getting mushy Cheerios in the $2500 keyboard.). And THANK YOU for the new magnetic power cable!
Still, it's fun imagining Steve Jobs going over to Intel and single-handedly motivating them to get the new processors done in time for the keynote.. New use of the reality-distortion field effect. Looks like they cut the timing really close.
Two of my brothers and my partner just got Powerbooks in the last six months. I feel bad for them, but they could not have gone without laptops all that time. OTOH, they'll miss out on all the first-generation what-will-break-now excitement, and the oh-yeah-this-isn't-a-universal-binary-either game.
My PowerBook will be three years old in March, and I'm full of anticipation...
Don't forget that:
1. PowerMacs are dual-processor standard
2. Much more expandable (cards, drives)
3. and don't force you to use the dinky 20" screen (if you have the cinema display)
4. Run all Mac software natively, without Rosetta translation
People buying the new MacBooks and iMac will be on the cutting edge for the next six months. (Not that that will stop me..)
I've been waiting/hoping for this to come out since 2000. The first version - Stars! - was a Civ-type game played in space, and is still played by fans 10 years later; the sequel would be more of the same but with awesome graphics, better combat system, spys/diplomacy, less micromanagement, and fully extendable. Also with an end-of-turn newspaper created to help you track events.
s
I'd check back to the official website and the fans sites every few months, drool over the screenshots, and read the beta testers game reports.. Sadly, sometime last year the websites have gone away. http://www.crisium.com/ and http://www.starbasedelta.com/ (fan faq)
I've only been able to find this review left with some great screenshots..
http://pc.ign.com/objects/015/015220.html#preview
R.I.P.
"BMWs are way overpriced! So are Hondas. Really, you can find used cars for just a few hundred dollars that will drive on more roads and take any kind of engine oil."
"BMW and Honda should just fold. Nobody takes them seriously, and their products are way overpriced. Also, hybrids are a waste of your money because at todays prices, you only break even on gas prices after five years. Design, comfort, size, color, leather, safety, and appearance aren't quantifiable and are pointless expenses."
"If you like BMW, you're just a fanboi and have been duped by the vast marketing machine. Sucker."
I sure hope you don't mean to suggest that carefully picking "stock photos for iPhoto" and is comparible to carefully picking "screenshots of a beta product". Because if you are, you need to do yourself a favor and slap yourself silly.
// don't feed the trolls
Jeers have been going to software companies for decades for using screenshots that carefully mislead how an application or game really looked, like only picturing the cut scenes for a platform game.
And if you're referring to what I think you are, a few years ago Microsoft submitted a video of web browsing trying to prove that Windows was faster with IE than without IE. That video, submitted as evidence in the trial, was later proved to be edited to appear to be faster.
/ way too tired for this
There are ways of removing the bias from a stream of randomized data, including the 95%-are-ones stream you mention. -- RNG#Attempts to clean up non-random bit streams