If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Historians say this would be the first proof of such an event to have happened prior to September, 2001, and may hinder the US's attempt to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for 'largest bombardment of the Middle East'
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
Moses never crossed the Red Sea.
For those Christians/non-Hebrew-speakers who believe in the stories of the Exodus, read that as 'the Red Sea wasn't the one Moses crossed'.
The sea that is referred to in the book of Exodus is not 'red' - the word actually refers to a plant that grew in shallow waters/marshes/etc, and was extremely common. 'Red Sea' is a translation error.
Besides, the Red Sea isn't between Egypt and what was then Israel anyway.
Since by definition we can not see beyond the Singularity, we may only list here a few dark horse candidates who will appeal to the AI Minds of the expanded readership by virtue of having written about artificial intelligence:
Orson Scott Card -- Speaker for the Dead (1986)
I hate to nitpick (well, I love to nitpick, but I hate getting berated for it), and perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like you're saying Speaker for the Dead was written about artificial intelligence. It wasn't - in fact, as far as I remember, there was no mention at all of artificial intelligence in the entire series.
If you're referring to Jane, I'd suggest you finish Xenocide and Children of the Mind or check out some fan websites - Jane wasn't artificial.
Jordan's Wheel of Time series, now up to 9 novels even though it only has enough content to fill 7, has been, IMHO, far better before book 6 than it will ever be afterwards.
50 years from now, people will still be reading his works, but just like they do now, they'll start shouting 'just finish it already!' when they read #8, and perhaps (as I did) not even bother to finish #9.
I like the idea of a continuing storyline, but when 80% of the book is descriptions of coats, hats, and brooches that ramble on for ten pages before the person wearing them walks past and is never mentioned again, it's just pathetic. Attention to detail is nice, obsession with it is not.
I think he'll be remembered most for starting a great series and gaining a cult following, and then losing all but the most die-hard because he dragged the last few books on too long.
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about user interface design, and we came to a conclusion - nothing revolutionary, but still.
There are three major OS branches I see - MacOS, Windows, and UNIX/Linux/OSS/etc.
In my opinion, UNIX user interfaces are the absolute worst as far as being user interfaces for one reason: they are designed from the code up; they are designed by and for the programmer, and where $user == "programmer", that's fine. The problem arises when non-programmers try to use it - they have to conform to it, which is not nice. Say whatever you want to about choice, but users don't want choice, they want a simple, clean, uniform way things behave. UNIX/Linux don't offer this. Sorry, but they don't.
Windows does offer this, and they DO keep the user in mind. The problem is that, while they have the user in mind from the start, the user interface trains the user how to do things. You learn things in Windows because you have to learn them, because the interface tells you how they should be. Thus it is a good thing done badly.
The Mac OS, from what I've heard, is incredibly easy. It was designed from the user down. It wasn't designed to be 'neat' or anything, it was designed with the philosophy of the user interface is the user's interface with the computer, as opposed to the computer's interface with the user.
I say 'from what I've heard' because I started using macs shortly after my ninth birthday, and I don't remember it at all - I can only assume it wasn't hard, because I was only nine at the time (ten years ago) and had no problem finding games and opening them.
User interfaces now, though need to take into account what people are doing (which is 'more'; more applications with more functions and more complexity), and figure out how to arrange things properly.
Ideally, I don't want a pointing device, I want a touch screen. I want a small, thin area on the side of the screen which I can use to access my programs, which should be ordered by category, similar to the way Palms are set up.
I don't really want to distinguish between applications that are 'open' or 'not open'. Saved state would be nice. If I choose an application, it brings it to the front, and if it was doing anything, then that should be restored, though the option to 'save document and discard state' would be nice, as would 'run in background' ability. I don't want to have to worry about 'open windows' or anything of the sort, I just want to focus on the task at hand.
This is the one thing that Windows doesn't understand very well, and other OSes don't understand at all (Linux/etc) in the user-interface category. For servers, you need multitasking, but except in a few cases (MP3 players, defragmenters, Disk Doctor, etc), I am doing one thing at one time, an I'd like my interface to reflect that. Maybe I have 10 programs running, but I'm only using one of them at a time. My IRC client and word processor are both open, but if I'm only typing my latest report, I don't care about anything else. If I'm running Maya, I don't want other programs popping up, and so on.
Well, that was a longer rant than I intended, but I hope I've said something worth reading. Just the way I see things, is all.
one is the popup dialog box that steals focus from whatever you are doing.
I agree, and windows is absolutely horrible for this.
I was installing Office 2000 on my Windows 98 virtual machine in Virtual PC, after just having installed mIRC. I was chatting on IRC while the installer went on about its merry way. I'm in the middle of a sentence, and a dialog flickers - the default choice was (I assume) selected when I hit 'space' between words, so I never did see what the dialog was about (my 60-70 WPM is faster than VirtualPC-emulated Windows GDI).
Now the installation is screwed up, and every time I try and run an Office app, or even start the box, it says the user '' did not complete an install of Office 2k. Works ok, insofar as it ever works, and it even prints, but running the installer doesn't fix it, and I don't want to go through the install again (VPC's hard-drive accessing is slower than anything I've ever seen on post-1990 hard drives.
*sigh* Even on my mac, windows makes my life hard.
First of all, if people had read the readme, they wouldn't have had this problem. Secondly...
Programming is less difficult than building a bridge or an airplane and yet software companies have hoodwinked the public into making it seem that badly made software is a fact of life.
Engineers are a very carefully controlled group - you need years of university education to call yourself an 'Engineer', and even then, you have to maintain your skills or you're not an 'engineer' anymore. If you're building a bridge, you have trained engineers that have paid money for this sort of thing. They know what they're doing.
Anyone can be a 'programmer', as demonstrated by more than one piece of software on the market today, and more than one company. They are often inexperienced and overworked, especially in cases where you have to get a product out (anyone read about how the iPod interfaces with iTunes 2? anyone notice how iTunes 2 hadn't been released yet?).
Frankly, I'm not surprised companies disclaim this stuff, because they don't have any guarantee that the person knows what they're doing. If they screw up, the worst that can happen is loss of data on the customer's side, and loss of job on the programmer's side. If an engineer screws up building a bridge or building, she can endanger thousands of lives, thousands of jobs, billions in damages, and if it was proven that they were at fault, they'd probably lose their 'engineer' status for good - which means all their experience is useless, and they have to get a new career field.
Anyone ever notice how bridges and buildings are more often late and over-budget? Compare this to software, which is often rushed out. And you wonder why the quality is different? Companies need to understand that waiting a few more days/weeks isn't as bad as wiping someone's hard drive and then saying 'oops, your fault'.
Well-put. It has nothing to do with technology, it has to do with our (poorly-executed) attempt to make good in 1948 for what we stood by and allowed to happen during WW2.
Yes, that's right. A Saudi millionaire hates the United States because Britain gave Palestine to the Jews. Doesn't this seem a little roundabout?
The thing that the US is hated for in the middle east is its support of Israel's heavy-handed, brutal, discriminatory practices against the Palestinian people; every country on the security council (in fact, pretty much every country in the world) has agreed over and over that there needs to be resolution of the conflict, but the US vetos resolutions and Israel ignores them.
Israel will only agree to a Palestinian state on its own terms, and the US support is one of the only things that keeps Israel intact despite this - this is why the US is hated.
Of course, this still ignores the fact that there's nothing inherently wrong with X anyway:)
Well, there may not be anything 'inherently wrong with X', but X is wrong for a lot of things - for what I do, I don't need remote X serving, multiple display support, and a hundred other things that X provides. What is nice is having a uniform API, fast, responsive, and streamlined.
In my opinion, X/XFree/etc should be the exception in the UNIX world, not the rule; I'd guess 99% of people spend 99% of their time not using 99% of the complexity of X. It's a waste of memory for me, and I wish there was an alternative.
TightVNC performs better in this case than ssh-compressed X-Windows, but the really sad thing is that Windows Terminal Server blows them all away.
I can't help but think that this might be because on X, with GTK, QT, and so on, the rendering for all the widgets, menus, etc. is all done client-side, then sent to the X server as pixmaps, whereas I expect Terminal Server can merely send events - 'make a menu with these items', 'make a button called this', and so on, since the remote server knows what the widgets look like.
If only that could be incorporated into X somehow - make it use GTK/QT/whatever, and have GTK apps send events, not pixmaps.
The first will be a tactics game. After your country is attacked, you can either immediately bombard them with cruise missiles until their society reaches the level of prehistory, or you can use diplomacy to try and resolve the situation, and then bombard them anyway.
The second will be an arial combat sim, where you have to correctly identify, target, and destroy hostile emplacements, like hospitals and Red Cross/UN buildings, with the last level being an assault on a refugee camp.
Osama bin-Laden is said to be funding similar games. The first is reportedly also a tactics sim, in which you sit in a cave and send money to the government to keep you safe, and you pay people to blow things up.
The second is a modern combat sim, where you play the part of a Taliban soldier, and must fight Northern Alliance troops and US commandos. You must also dodge air attacks by hiding in such places as fields, mountaintops, and military installations that aren't hospitals.
If you ever visit Vancouver, go to Wreck Beach - it's the only topless beach in North America (so I'm told), and it's even on/near the UBC campus.
Just a little something to remind you of home. =;>
--Dan
Re:The ultimate irony..
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 1
1) Debian isn't German, it's an international, country-indepenant effort.
2) The DCMA will screw Germans, Japanese, Canadians, etc, the instant they set foot inside the US, and most people want freedom to travel. There are very few countries I can't go to as a Canadian, I'd like the US not to be one of those.
3) Do you mean glibc 5.x? 'Cause there ain't no Debian 5.x out there.
4) Slackware is for people who would rather manage their computers than use them (naah, just kidding; I used to use Slackware too... but then I tried Debian)
5) Debian: it's what your mother would use if it were twenty times easier (wildly inaccurate I thought, but amusing)
6) Debian doesn't even have LAME, BladeEnc, etc. in the package lists, because they don't like walking the line. DeCSS would go against every ounce of common sense anyone in the organization has.
Personally, I preferred red on black or white on black. God knows I had enough blue-on-white at 5 AM, after 8 hours with only moon and monitor light. Bright bad. Dark good.
Come to think of it, I've got pine looking very similar.
I can't afford it either, however I would like to see those features for THAT price.
Well if you keep in mind that the hard drive in this thing costs $400, then notice that for the same price, you can get the hard drive plus LCD plus MP3 playing capabilities plus playlist management plus 32 megs of anti-skip memory...
I mean, I'd like to see more for this price too, but that doesn't mean it's not a sweet purchase. =;>
--Dam
Re:Philosophical differences, and the Unix Way
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 1
Uh, there are rip/(encode/decode)/burn scripts for UNIX... you see, when you have flexible tools it's trivial to make them work together.
Anything can be done in UNIX, but in iTunes, it's easy and simple to do, and it's all integrated. I don't have to run one script with five program prerequisites to rip my CDs and encode them, I don't have to run a separate program to manage my playlists and play my MP3s, I don't have to run separate scripts to burn my MP3s to CD.
iTunes provides CD ripping and encoding, MP3 playing and managing, and CD mixing and burning. It's insanely easy to use iTunes, and the interface is consistent. Can you say that UNIX/Linux programmers somewhere provide a simple, easy to use, functional, fast, efficient, and versatile program that could honestly compete with iTunes?
The UNIX way is about flexible tools. Tools that work well together. Tools that are elegant and flexable. Tools that work well regardless of where you are, where you're coming from, or where you're going.
And the Macintosh way is about functional tools. Tools that just plain work. Tools that are easy to use, and easy to learn. Tools that work well regardless of how many dozens of hours you spend learning C, bourne shell scripting, and logical OR statements.
The Macintosh is not about being able to do anything in any way you want for any reason. The Mac philosophy is about making things easy for the user, and iTunes does that better than any other software out there - but it also provides a huge feature set that is easy to use.
This is why I have given up on Linux/UNIX, and just use the household G4: I would rather spend my time using my computer than making sure it works properly.
You do what you need to do, and you use the tools that need to be used for it, but don't knock the MacOS because we can't do the same things you can. Many Linux 'advocates' need to realize something: sometimes, we don't want to do everything you can. Sometimes, we just want to listen to our music.
Anyone else think its funny how they werer toting OS X as great because of how its gui looks and how bland others were (even compairing them to a 6 line LCD) and here they are releasing something that doesnt even have color. Irony.
Dude, don't give them ideas. I can't even afford $400 for this thing, let alone $600.
Besides, it's an MP3 player. Why on earth do you need colour? Just like that new Samsung (?) phone, with the full-colour LCD built-in, what on earth do you need it for?
I remember reviews saying that OSX was sluggish on dual G4s with 1.5G RAM.
I remember friends saying that OSX runs sweet on a G4 with 256 megs of ram (and acceptible on a G3 with 256).
First, the current version (10.1) is hella faster than any previous version; second, any idiot can screw up an install or lag a box (my experience with WinXP is radically different from a friend's).
I'm guessing the article was testing a beta or something.
You have free speech as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's rights. The DCMA claims that your telling people how to circumvent content restrictions is a violation of their rights.
The struggle here is not to assert that you have the rights you claim to have, but that they do not have the rights they claim to have.
I wish you and your country the best in this endeavour.
That's a good idea. Now anyone who knows who you are in real life and has this number can call it from their cellphone while kicking down your door, and if they let it ring, they can be gone before the alarm system can pick up.
Or are there defences against this? Pick-up-and-drop the call or something? Still seems like a risk.
I can pick up a P133 ith 64 megs of ram, 3 gig hard drive, sound card, network, video, etc. for $120-150 Canadian, which is quite a bit less than the $200 US (about $300 Canadian) for the Audiotron. I can certainly put in a decent sound card and IR port for less than $150.
While the Audiotron is quite probably a more elegant solution in a lot of ways, the idea of stringing network cables, setting up smb shares (I would want a dedicated NT server for this if I got it anyway), and waiting for it to scan the whole network seems to suck quite a bit. I'll just spend that $200 on getting a better DVD player, and burn MP3 CDs instead, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.
Historians say this would be the first proof of such an event to have happened prior to September, 2001, and may hinder the US's attempt to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for 'largest bombardment of the Middle East'
--Dan
Could a meteorite hit has sucked water from the Red Sea thus emptying it for Moses to cross?
Moses never crossed the Red Sea.
For those Christians/non-Hebrew-speakers who believe in the stories of the Exodus, read that as 'the Red Sea wasn't the one Moses crossed'.
The sea that is referred to in the book of Exodus is not 'red' - the word actually refers to a plant that grew in shallow waters/marshes/etc, and was extremely common. 'Red Sea' is a translation error.
Besides, the Red Sea isn't between Egypt and what was then Israel anyway.
--Dan
Since by definition we can not see beyond the Singularity, we may only list here a few dark horse candidates who will appeal to the AI Minds of the expanded readership by virtue of having written about artificial intelligence:
Orson Scott Card -- Speaker for the Dead (1986)
I hate to nitpick (well, I love to nitpick, but I hate getting berated for it), and perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like you're saying Speaker for the Dead was written about artificial intelligence. It wasn't - in fact, as far as I remember, there was no mention at all of artificial intelligence in the entire series.
If you're referring to Jane, I'd suggest you finish Xenocide and Children of the Mind or check out some fan websites - Jane wasn't artificial.
--Dan
Jordan's Wheel of Time series, now up to 9 novels even though it only has enough content to fill 7, has been, IMHO, far better before book 6 than it will ever be afterwards.
50 years from now, people will still be reading his works, but just like they do now, they'll start shouting 'just finish it already!' when they read #8, and perhaps (as I did) not even bother to finish #9.
I like the idea of a continuing storyline, but when 80% of the book is descriptions of coats, hats, and brooches that ramble on for ten pages before the person wearing them walks past and is never mentioned again, it's just pathetic. Attention to detail is nice, obsession with it is not.
I think he'll be remembered most for starting a great series and gaining a cult following, and then losing all but the most die-hard because he dragged the last few books on too long.
Too bad, he's a great writer.
--Dan
David Eddings - sure, he only has two series worth reading, and it's really only one series, but it's a good one.
My kids will be reading it, I'm sure (if they want to keep their holovision (or whatever) privliedges).
--Dan
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about user interface design, and we came to a conclusion - nothing revolutionary, but still.
There are three major OS branches I see - MacOS, Windows, and UNIX/Linux/OSS/etc.
In my opinion, UNIX user interfaces are the absolute worst as far as being user interfaces for one reason: they are designed from the code up; they are designed by and for the programmer, and where $user == "programmer", that's fine. The problem arises when non-programmers try to use it - they have to conform to it, which is not nice. Say whatever you want to about choice, but users don't want choice, they want a simple, clean, uniform way things behave. UNIX/Linux don't offer this. Sorry, but they don't.
Windows does offer this, and they DO keep the user in mind. The problem is that, while they have the user in mind from the start, the user interface trains the user how to do things. You learn things in Windows because you have to learn them, because the interface tells you how they should be. Thus it is a good thing done badly.
The Mac OS, from what I've heard, is incredibly easy. It was designed from the user down. It wasn't designed to be 'neat' or anything, it was designed with the philosophy of the user interface is the user's interface with the computer, as opposed to the computer's interface with the user.
I say 'from what I've heard' because I started using macs shortly after my ninth birthday, and I don't remember it at all - I can only assume it wasn't hard, because I was only nine at the time (ten years ago) and had no problem finding games and opening them.
User interfaces now, though need to take into account what people are doing (which is 'more'; more applications with more functions and more complexity), and figure out how to arrange things properly.
Ideally, I don't want a pointing device, I want a touch screen. I want a small, thin area on the side of the screen which I can use to access my programs, which should be ordered by category, similar to the way Palms are set up.
I don't really want to distinguish between applications that are 'open' or 'not open'. Saved state would be nice. If I choose an application, it brings it to the front, and if it was doing anything, then that should be restored, though the option to 'save document and discard state' would be nice, as would 'run in background' ability. I don't want to have to worry about 'open windows' or anything of the sort, I just want to focus on the task at hand.
This is the one thing that Windows doesn't understand very well, and other OSes don't understand at all (Linux/etc) in the user-interface category. For servers, you need multitasking, but except in a few cases (MP3 players, defragmenters, Disk Doctor, etc), I am doing one thing at one time, an I'd like my interface to reflect that. Maybe I have 10 programs running, but I'm only using one of them at a time. My IRC client and word processor are both open, but if I'm only typing my latest report, I don't care about anything else. If I'm running Maya, I don't want other programs popping up, and so on.
Well, that was a longer rant than I intended, but I hope I've said something worth reading. Just the way I see things, is all.
--Dan
one is the popup dialog box that steals focus from whatever you are doing.
I agree, and windows is absolutely horrible for this.
I was installing Office 2000 on my Windows 98 virtual machine in Virtual PC, after just having installed mIRC. I was chatting on IRC while the installer went on about its merry way. I'm in the middle of a sentence, and a dialog flickers - the default choice was (I assume) selected when I hit 'space' between words, so I never did see what the dialog was about (my 60-70 WPM is faster than VirtualPC-emulated Windows GDI).
Now the installation is screwed up, and every time I try and run an Office app, or even start the box, it says the user '' did not complete an install of Office 2k. Works ok, insofar as it ever works, and it even prints, but running the installer doesn't fix it, and I don't want to go through the install again (VPC's hard-drive accessing is slower than anything I've ever seen on post-1990 hard drives.
*sigh* Even on my mac, windows makes my life hard.
--Dan
First of all, if people had read the readme, they wouldn't have had this problem. Secondly...
Programming is less difficult than building a bridge or an airplane and yet software companies have hoodwinked the public into making it seem that badly made software is a fact of life.
Engineers are a very carefully controlled group - you need years of university education to call yourself an 'Engineer', and even then, you have to maintain your skills or you're not an 'engineer' anymore. If you're building a bridge, you have trained engineers that have paid money for this sort of thing. They know what they're doing.
Anyone can be a 'programmer', as demonstrated by more than one piece of software on the market today, and more than one company. They are often inexperienced and overworked, especially in cases where you have to get a product out (anyone read about how the iPod interfaces with iTunes 2? anyone notice how iTunes 2 hadn't been released yet?).
Frankly, I'm not surprised companies disclaim this stuff, because they don't have any guarantee that the person knows what they're doing. If they screw up, the worst that can happen is loss of data on the customer's side, and loss of job on the programmer's side. If an engineer screws up building a bridge or building, she can endanger thousands of lives, thousands of jobs, billions in damages, and if it was proven that they were at fault, they'd probably lose their 'engineer' status for good - which means all their experience is useless, and they have to get a new career field.
Anyone ever notice how bridges and buildings are more often late and over-budget? Compare this to software, which is often rushed out. And you wonder why the quality is different? Companies need to understand that waiting a few more days/weeks isn't as bad as wiping someone's hard drive and then saying 'oops, your fault'.
That said, they did tell you to uninstall first.
--Dan
Well-put. It has nothing to do with technology, it has to do with our (poorly-executed) attempt to make good in 1948 for what we stood by and allowed to happen during WW2.
Yes, that's right. A Saudi millionaire hates the United States because Britain gave Palestine to the Jews. Doesn't this seem a little roundabout?
The thing that the US is hated for in the middle east is its support of Israel's heavy-handed, brutal, discriminatory practices against the Palestinian people; every country on the security council (in fact, pretty much every country in the world) has agreed over and over that there needs to be resolution of the conflict, but the US vetos resolutions and Israel ignores them.
Israel will only agree to a Palestinian state on its own terms, and the US support is one of the only things that keeps Israel intact despite this - this is why the US is hated.
--Dan
Of course, this still ignores the fact that there's nothing inherently wrong with X anyway :)
Well, there may not be anything 'inherently wrong with X', but X is wrong for a lot of things - for what I do, I don't need remote X serving, multiple display support, and a hundred other things that X provides. What is nice is having a uniform API, fast, responsive, and streamlined.
In my opinion, X/XFree/etc should be the exception in the UNIX world, not the rule; I'd guess 99% of people spend 99% of their time not using 99% of the complexity of X. It's a waste of memory for me, and I wish there was an alternative.
Then again, I use MacOS now, so...
--Dan
TightVNC performs better in this case than ssh-compressed X-Windows, but the really sad thing is that Windows Terminal Server blows them all away.
I can't help but think that this might be because on X, with GTK, QT, and so on, the rendering for all the widgets, menus, etc. is all done client-side, then sent to the X server as pixmaps, whereas I expect Terminal Server can merely send events - 'make a menu with these items', 'make a button called this', and so on, since the remote server knows what the widgets look like.
If only that could be incorporated into X somehow - make it use GTK/QT/whatever, and have GTK apps send events, not pixmaps.
Just a thought.
--Dan
Maybe I'll stick with The Sims.
--Dan
The Corel 7 (I think?) for Linux spell checker complains when you put in 'Microsoft' - according to them, the proper spelling is 'Micro$oft'.
--Dan
If you ever visit Vancouver, go to Wreck Beach - it's the only topless beach in North America (so I'm told), and it's even on/near the UBC campus.
Just a little something to remind you of home. =;>
--Dan
1) Debian isn't German, it's an international, country-indepenant effort.
2) The DCMA will screw Germans, Japanese, Canadians, etc, the instant they set foot inside the US, and most people want freedom to travel. There are very few countries I can't go to as a Canadian, I'd like the US not to be one of those.
3) Do you mean glibc 5.x? 'Cause there ain't no Debian 5.x out there.
4) Slackware is for people who would rather manage their computers than use them (naah, just kidding; I used to use Slackware too... but then I tried Debian)
5) Debian: it's what your mother would use if it were twenty times easier (wildly inaccurate I thought, but amusing)
6) Debian doesn't even have LAME, BladeEnc, etc. in the package lists, because they don't like walking the line. DeCSS would go against every ounce of common sense anyone in the organization has.
--Dan
Get a disk drive, an ethernet card, and broadband. Go Debian, and don't look back.
Heck, if you have a DOS partition, you don't even need the disk drive.
It's very nice.
--Dan
I don't know if the CBC is legally obligated to be unbiased, though it is government-owned and seems to do pretty well most of the time.
Their article, Microsoft rolls out the hype again with Windows XP, though, seems to be pretty unbiased. I just like the headline.
--Dan
Acually, they were .ini hacks.
Personally, I preferred red on black or white on black. God knows I had enough blue-on-white at 5 AM, after 8 hours with only moon and monitor light. Bright bad. Dark good.
Come to think of it, I've got pine looking very similar.
--Dan
I can't afford it either, however I would like to see those features for THAT price.
Well if you keep in mind that the hard drive in this thing costs $400, then notice that for the same price, you can get the hard drive plus LCD plus MP3 playing capabilities plus playlist management plus 32 megs of anti-skip memory...
I mean, I'd like to see more for this price too, but that doesn't mean it's not a sweet purchase. =;>
--Dam
Uh, there are rip/(encode/decode)/burn scripts for UNIX... you see, when you have flexible tools it's trivial to make them work together.
Anything can be done in UNIX, but in iTunes, it's easy and simple to do, and it's all integrated. I don't have to run one script with five program prerequisites to rip my CDs and encode them, I don't have to run a separate program to manage my playlists and play my MP3s, I don't have to run separate scripts to burn my MP3s to CD.
iTunes provides CD ripping and encoding, MP3 playing and managing, and CD mixing and burning. It's insanely easy to use iTunes, and the interface is consistent. Can you say that UNIX/Linux programmers somewhere provide a simple, easy to use, functional, fast, efficient, and versatile program that could honestly compete with iTunes?
The UNIX way is about flexible tools. Tools that work well together. Tools that are elegant and flexable. Tools that work well regardless of where you are, where you're coming from, or where you're going.
And the Macintosh way is about functional tools. Tools that just plain work. Tools that are easy to use, and easy to learn. Tools that work well regardless of how many dozens of hours you spend learning C, bourne shell scripting, and logical OR statements.
The Macintosh is not about being able to do anything in any way you want for any reason. The Mac philosophy is about making things easy for the user, and iTunes does that better than any other software out there - but it also provides a huge feature set that is easy to use.
This is why I have given up on Linux/UNIX, and just use the household G4: I would rather spend my time using my computer than making sure it works properly.
You do what you need to do, and you use the tools that need to be used for it, but don't knock the MacOS because we can't do the same things you can. Many Linux 'advocates' need to realize something: sometimes, we don't want to do everything you can. Sometimes, we just want to listen to our music.
--Dan
Anyone else think its funny how they werer toting OS X as great because of how its gui looks and how bland others were (even compairing them to a 6 line LCD) and here they are releasing something that doesnt even have color. Irony.
Dude, don't give them ideas. I can't even afford $400 for this thing, let alone $600.
Besides, it's an MP3 player. Why on earth do you need colour? Just like that new Samsung (?) phone, with the full-colour LCD built-in, what on earth do you need it for?
--Dan
I remember reviews saying that OSX was sluggish on dual G4s with 1.5G RAM.
I remember friends saying that OSX runs sweet on a G4 with 256 megs of ram (and acceptible on a G3 with 256).
First, the current version (10.1) is hella faster than any previous version; second, any idiot can screw up an install or lag a box (my experience with WinXP is radically different from a friend's).
I'm guessing the article was testing a beta or something.
--Dan
You have free speech as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's rights. The DCMA claims that your telling people how to circumvent content restrictions is a violation of their rights.
The struggle here is not to assert that you have the rights you claim to have, but that they do not have the rights they claim to have.
I wish you and your country the best in this endeavour.
--Dan
That's a good idea. Now anyone who knows who you are in real life and has this number can call it from their cellphone while kicking down your door, and if they let it ring, they can be gone before the alarm system can pick up.
Or are there defences against this? Pick-up-and-drop the call or something? Still seems like a risk.
--Dan
I can pick up a P133 ith 64 megs of ram, 3 gig hard drive, sound card, network, video, etc. for $120-150 Canadian, which is quite a bit less than the $200 US (about $300 Canadian) for the Audiotron. I can certainly put in a decent sound card and IR port for less than $150.
While the Audiotron is quite probably a more elegant solution in a lot of ways, the idea of stringing network cables, setting up smb shares (I would want a dedicated NT server for this if I got it anyway), and waiting for it to scan the whole network seems to suck quite a bit. I'll just spend that $200 on getting a better DVD player, and burn MP3 CDs instead, thanks.
--Dan