Or buy the CD and rip it yourself; free of DRM... What's the big deal? If you don't like DRM, don't buy music from iTunes music store. iTunes itself is very useful for ripped music that is DRM free. I've got 400 gig of FLAC files ripped to 60 gig of MP3's that sit in iTunes and on my iPod, zero drm, all legal.
I do find RSS headline feeds useful, based on the implementation. For example, many RSS aggregators are more time consuming to fire up, read headlines, and go to the rest of the story, than going to the web sites directly. These RSS aggregators are not useful IMHO.
I do use a free utility called slashdock (on OS X) that provides a nested list of headlines which lives in the dock. A quick right-click allows many different feeds to be browsed and followed if more info is desired. I keep it running all the time, and in seconds I can check Slashdot, and many other sites for interesting updates. Quick, easy, and out of my way...
After working in DC for nearly two years, I'm off to Indiana to eliminate the three hour daily commutes, and the crowds everywhere I go. Sure, I'll get paid a little less, but if you look at the costs in BFNW, I'll actually have more $$$ in my pocket at the end of the day.
Given the generica that has blanketed the land, the major shopping is more or less the same everywhere. And I do mail order here as well (sure it's only 20 miles across the city, but it would take me 2 hours at lunch to get to it and back), so not much changes in terms of my accessibility to items. It's really frustrating to be near lots of good stuff, but not being able to really enjoy them because of the crowds and gridlock on the highways.
Plus there are little grandma types handing out cookies at the airport, they never do that at LaGuardia. More power to the folks who want to go the cities, that makes more land and quiet for me. Enjoy your bird flu in the city...
Am I the only one who hates anti-aliased fonts? It makes me feel like I need glasses. I want my text crisp and clean. The OSX on the mac has everything anti-aliased, it's a mess. It looks like my monitor is worn out.
As a longtime apple user I am familiar with the strengths and many weakness of the Mac OS, aqua is a big step back in usability of the OS. A lot of human enginering that went into the original MacOS and has been refined for years has been tossed out in favor of a candy looking much less usable GUI.
I'm excited that MacOS will finally have good low level OS functions, and the ability to have shells in addition to the "clicky-clicky" interface will be fantastic. But I want my old GUI back!!!
That particular watermark is audible, wich is a very bad thing in my opinion. At least they should try to do a good job at copy protecting, and do it in a way that doesn't damage product. But why should I be suprised that the music industry doesn't care about sound quality; they gave us the marginal digital standard we have today, and are pushing even lower standards like lossy compression.
It's this sort of crap that makes me sad that I'm an occasional Mac user. This is just another in a series of marketing / PR blunders that apple has done over the past decade or so. No good can come out of this. At this point Apple is selling machines of that nature (the cube and the non-imac models) to the converted. Knowing about the machine a day or so early doesn't do anything to the sales of those machines to people who are already going to buy another macintosh. Personally, I find the Keynote speaches to be longwinded and "pipedreamish". I give two shits about a new style sherlock find application with candy looking buttons, I want a stable OS that has modern memory management and real multitasking, and I want it 8 years ago. There is a phrase that decribes Apple to a tee:
The are very deft at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it does sound like the company knows it's limitations and is using the best platforms for the tasks. That company didn't get to be it's size by making bad business decisions (we all know it didn't get that size by selling the best products).
The marketing droids are probably 95% responsible for the conception that NT 2000 et al are really hardcore OS's and on par with the unix's.
As someone who uses Linux, AIX, and Solaris, as well as Mac OS, and NT and 98 at work, it's pretty obvious that the unix variants are the only OS that can handle high loads, and large jobs gracefully.
That's not to say that the "weaker" OS's like the current Mac OS (I'm not talkin' OS X here), and the microsoft OS's don't have a place. Just don't bitch too hard when they let you down. Save often...
As a user of LinuxPPC as well as Linux on an Intel box, I would love to see StarOffice GPL'ed. Currently there is no port of star office to LinuxPPC, although it should only require a new compile. Fortunate for me, I don't use office applications much in my job, I do all my technical writing in framemaker and LaTeX. Sheldon
The current gas tanks are bombs, but swapping that out for a pressurized, flammible liquid filled tank wouldn't make me feel better.
Fuel cells seem to be the way to go, but until there are filling stations everywhere including the back woods, it's going to be seriously hard to get people to switch.
It seems the easiest way would be to build a transitional generation of cars that had fuel cells that ran on standard gas, but could also run on whatever the high energy brew of the future is. Then as gas stations transitioned to the new fuel, there wouldn't be dead cars sitting around looking for the right fuel.
Whenever prompted for an e-mail address, I always guess at a likely address that is inside the company that is asking for the address.
For example, I downloaded a new scanner driver this weekend from Epson. When they asked for my e-mail, I put: postmaster@epson.com. Turn that spam right around and feed it back to them.
This doesn't work on all sites, NY times has gotten wise to lots of us doing this. They won't let any NYtimes domains in the e-mail field.
The college I attended (clarkson university), is a big hockey school. When they built a new arena, Pepsi "donated" a scoreboard in exchage for an exclusive contract to sell that syruppy crap to the enire school population.
Before the scoreboard, we drank coke and could buy either in the school stores. After the board, it's pepsi as far as the eye can see.
I am an engineer, and as such, I use the computer and program to get a question answered. I've done a lot of research in fluid mechanics and turbulence, which is a nasty non-linear problem, and requires a lot of different analysis techniques to chip away at the problem.
The nice thing about a field like engineering is that computer questions like this are easily answered. I do whatever programming is needed to get the job done so I get paid and can eat.
I work at one of the air force research labs, and it's seriously infected with MS products. However there is a definate push by the techie folks like myself to use Linux (I have NO MS OS on my machines). Actually I do my job mainly with Linux, and do journal articals and such with a Macintosh. I also sysadmin AIX and a touch of SunOS.
The network Nazi's and computer apes will not support anything but NT or 95/98. And after they have worked their magic on a machine it invariably works worse.
Thank you slashdot, these stories make my day. Everybody where I work uses office for everything. I get unformatted text attachments created in word e-mailed to me all the time. I run star-office to read them only to find out that it's just plain text that could have been put right in the body of the message. Hurt those people badly.
They aren't puppets there for our amusement. They have real lives. More big actors should be this intelligent.
To a large extent they ARE. They are payed very well to assume a role and act. They signed a contract to do that. It's not like they didn't know what was expected of them. That's what being under contract is all about. IF he wants out, don't sign another contract when the current one is up.
If somebody doesn't want to be bound to the terms and conditions of a job, pick a different one.
There's a nice utility for the macintosh OS called USB overdrive which will allow USB mouse or joystick inputs to be mapped to a variety of keyclicks, mouse actions or scripts (I don't know that such a simple and elegant utility exists for other platforms). This could be very handy when combined with a bit of engineering. A mouse or joystick could be gutted and used with whatever switches, paddles etc work well for a given disability, and the keys and such can easily be mapped to the OS without a lot of hacking. With cheap USB joysticks, there are typically a half dozen buttons and several axes of movement that could be mapped to a variety of tasks on the computer.
With the wireless networking available today, a laptop could be used anywhere which talks to a base computer which can control apliances via X10 etc. If the IR ports were useful enough (and I don't think they are), they could be trained to control a TV and VCR (many remotes suck to use even for those not disabled).
IF I were running windoze, I'd want to run programs on my stereo too, it's a lot more reliable... BTW, it's pretty obvious how lossy (lssy) mp3's are when heard through a high resolution audio system. It will be a long time before I'm listening to mp3's on my stereo. Sheldon
Actually there is a way to download the app and then move it around to other apple machines. I have it written down at home. The first time you do the apple download, and then you can grab the downloaded files and move them to other machines. The installer looks for them and if found will not contact apple. A least that is the way it worked when QT4 first came out. It may not work that way on wintel boxes though.
Personally, I'm pretty underwhelmed with video via the net on any computer I've seen. To get the bandwidth down, I get stuck watching a postage stamp sized image filled with nasty artifacts. So the lack of QT on any platform doesn't bother me much.
Slashdot Mirror
Or buy the CD and rip it yourself; free of DRM... What's the big deal? If you don't like DRM, don't buy music from iTunes music store. iTunes itself is very useful for ripped music that is DRM free. I've got 400 gig of FLAC files ripped to 60 gig of MP3's that sit in iTunes and on my iPod, zero drm, all legal.
Sheldon
I do find RSS headline feeds useful, based on the implementation. For example, many RSS aggregators are more time consuming to fire up, read headlines, and go to the rest of the story, than going to the web sites directly. These RSS aggregators are not useful IMHO.
I do use a free utility called slashdock (on OS X) that provides a nested list of headlines which lives in the dock. A quick right-click allows many different feeds to be browsed and followed if more info is desired. I keep it running all the time, and in seconds I can check Slashdot, and many other sites for interesting updates. Quick, easy, and out of my way...
Sheldon
I'm a PhD Mechanical Engineer, moving to Fort Wayne. Yes, I've already got a good job and an amazing relo package.
The Ft Wayne airport comes with grandma types handing out cookies.
Sheldon
After working in DC for nearly two years, I'm off to Indiana to eliminate the three hour daily commutes, and the crowds everywhere I go. Sure, I'll get paid a little less, but if you look at the costs in BFNW, I'll actually have more $$$ in my pocket at the end of the day.
Given the generica that has blanketed the land, the major shopping is more or less the same everywhere. And I do mail order here as well (sure it's only 20 miles across the city, but it would take me 2 hours at lunch to get to it and back), so not much changes in terms of my accessibility to items. It's really frustrating to be near lots of good stuff, but not being able to really enjoy them because of the crowds and gridlock on the highways.
Plus there are little grandma types handing out cookies at the airport, they never do that at LaGuardia. More power to the folks who want to go the cities, that makes more land and quiet for me. Enjoy your bird flu in the city...
Sheldon
Am I the only one who hates anti-aliased fonts? It makes me feel like I need glasses. I want my text crisp and clean. The OSX on the mac has everything anti-aliased, it's a mess. It looks like my monitor is worn out.
Just say no,
Sheldon
As a longtime apple user I am familiar with the strengths and many weakness of the Mac OS, aqua is a big step back in usability of the OS. A lot of human enginering that went into the original MacOS and has been refined for years has been tossed out in favor of a candy looking much less usable GUI.
I'm excited that MacOS will finally have good low level OS functions, and the ability to have shells in addition to the "clicky-clicky" interface will be fantastic. But I want my old GUI back!!!
Sheldon
That particular watermark is audible, wich is a very bad thing in my opinion. At least they should try to do a good job at copy protecting, and do it in a way that doesn't damage product. But why should I be suprised that the music industry doesn't care about sound quality; they gave us the marginal digital standard we have today, and are pushing even lower standards like lossy compression.
Sheldon
>What other frontiers or environments are left for computers to work in?
My office...Thanks MS.
Sheldon
It's this sort of crap that makes me sad that I'm an occasional Mac user. This is just another in a series of marketing / PR blunders that apple has done over the past decade or so. No good can come out of this. At this point Apple is selling machines of that nature (the cube and the non-imac models) to the converted. Knowing about the machine a day or so early doesn't do anything to the sales of those machines to people who are already going to buy another macintosh. Personally, I find the Keynote speaches to be longwinded and "pipedreamish". I give two shits about a new style sherlock find application with candy looking buttons, I want a stable OS that has modern memory management and real multitasking, and I want it 8 years ago. There is a phrase that decribes Apple to a tee:
The are very deft at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Sheldon
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but it does sound like the company knows it's limitations and is using the best platforms for the tasks. That company didn't get to be it's size by making bad business decisions (we all know it didn't get that size by selling the best products).
The marketing droids are probably 95% responsible for the conception that NT 2000 et al are really hardcore OS's and on par with the unix's.
As someone who uses Linux, AIX, and Solaris, as well as Mac OS, and NT and 98 at work, it's pretty obvious that the unix variants are the only OS that can handle high loads, and large jobs gracefully.
That's not to say that the "weaker" OS's like the current Mac OS (I'm not talkin' OS X here), and the microsoft OS's don't have a place. Just don't bitch too hard when they let you down. Save often...
Sheldon
As a user of LinuxPPC as well as Linux on an Intel box, I would love to see StarOffice GPL'ed. Currently there is no port of star office to LinuxPPC, although it should only require a new compile. Fortunate for me, I don't use office applications much in my job, I do all my technical writing in framemaker and LaTeX. Sheldon
The current gas tanks are bombs, but swapping that out for a pressurized, flammible liquid filled tank wouldn't make me feel better.
Fuel cells seem to be the way to go, but until there are filling stations everywhere including the back woods, it's going to be seriously hard to get people to switch.
It seems the easiest way would be to build a transitional generation of cars that had fuel cells that ran on standard gas, but could also run on whatever the high energy brew of the future is. Then as gas stations transitioned to the new fuel, there wouldn't be dead cars sitting around looking for the right fuel.
Sheldon
Whenever prompted for an e-mail address, I always guess at a likely address that is inside the company that is asking for the address.
For example, I downloaded a new scanner driver this weekend from Epson. When they asked for my e-mail, I put: postmaster@epson.com. Turn that spam right around and feed it back to them.
This doesn't work on all sites, NY times has gotten wise to lots of us doing this. They won't let any NYtimes domains in the e-mail field.
Sheldon
Just say no to: lssy cmprssin
Sheldon
Anyone know of a place for Windows NT Security?
Betty Ford Clinic.
Sheldon
The college I attended (clarkson university), is a big hockey school. When they built a new arena, Pepsi "donated" a scoreboard in exchage for an exclusive contract to sell that syruppy crap to the enire school population.
Before the scoreboard, we drank coke and could buy either in the school stores. After the board, it's pepsi as far as the eye can see.
Sheldon
I am an engineer, and as such, I use the computer and program to get a question answered. I've done a lot of research in fluid mechanics and turbulence, which is a nasty non-linear problem, and requires a lot of different analysis techniques to chip away at the problem.
The nice thing about a field like engineering is that computer questions like this are easily answered. I do whatever programming is needed to get the job done so I get paid and can eat.
Sheldon
I work at one of the air force research labs, and it's seriously infected with MS products. However there is a definate push by the techie folks like myself to use Linux (I have NO MS OS on my machines). Actually I do my job mainly with Linux, and do journal articals and such with a Macintosh. I also sysadmin AIX and a touch of SunOS.
The network Nazi's and computer apes will not support anything but NT or 95/98. And after they have worked their magic on a machine it invariably works worse.
Sheldon
Thank you slashdot, these stories make my day. Everybody where I work uses office for everything. I get unformatted text attachments created in word e-mailed to me all the time. I run star-office to read them only to find out that it's just plain text that could have been put right in the body of the message. Hurt those people badly.
Sheldon
They aren't puppets there for our amusement. They have real lives. More big actors should be this intelligent.
To a large extent they ARE. They are payed very well to assume a role and act. They signed a contract to do that. It's not like they didn't know what was expected of them. That's what being under contract is all about. IF he wants out, don't sign another contract when the current one is up.
If somebody doesn't want to be bound to the terms and conditions of a job, pick a different one.
Sheldon
There's a nice utility for the macintosh OS called USB overdrive which will allow USB mouse or joystick inputs to be mapped to a variety of keyclicks, mouse actions or scripts (I don't know that such a simple and elegant utility exists for other platforms). This could be very handy when combined with a bit of engineering. A mouse or joystick could be gutted and used with whatever switches, paddles etc work well for a given disability, and the keys and such can easily be mapped to the OS without a lot of hacking.
With cheap USB joysticks, there are typically a half dozen buttons and several axes of movement that could be mapped to a variety of tasks on the computer.
With the wireless networking available today, a laptop could be used anywhere which talks to a base computer which can control apliances via X10 etc. If the IR ports were useful enough (and I don't think they are), they could be trained to control a TV and VCR (many remotes suck to use even for those not disabled).
Sheldon
Those entries were just way too general, they could have jsut said "the industrial revolution" and covered the list.
Take for example: Electronics
Does that mean the transistor is just as important as a furby to society?
Sheldon
The Palms are rumoured to switch to an ARM or Strong/ARM processor in the future.
Sheldon
IF I were running windoze, I'd want to run programs on my stereo too, it's a lot more reliable... BTW, it's pretty obvious how lossy (lssy) mp3's are when heard through a high resolution audio system. It will be a long time before I'm listening to mp3's on my stereo. Sheldon
Actually there is a way to download the app and then move it around to other apple machines. I have it written down at home. The first time you do the apple download, and then you can grab the downloaded files and move them to other machines. The installer looks for them and if found will not contact apple. A least that is the way it worked when QT4 first came out. It may not work that way on wintel boxes though.
Personally, I'm pretty underwhelmed with video via the net on any computer I've seen. To get the bandwidth down, I get stuck watching a postage stamp sized image filled with nasty artifacts. So the lack of QT on any platform doesn't bother me much.
Sheldon