Well, it kinda supports Safari - if you enable Safari's debug menu and use the Debug menu to set your user agent to, say, MSIE 6, you get the slider. I can move in in crude and fairly arbitrary steps by clicking either side of it, but when I try to drag the slider, Safari just starts dragging the slider image - either the position marker or the background bar - just like it drags all other images.
So it's not really usable, but you can see how it works and get a taste of the results.
Ah, interesting. I'm sure he'll make the most of the Cube and mine any interesting depths it might harbour. And of course he'd do the same for the PS2 and Xbox, given the opportunity (maybe with the EyeToy or the Xbox hard drive). On the GC he could tap into the GBA linker for some old school pixel action... a lot of possibilities. One thing at a time, I guess.
Get a Gamecube - his latest psychedelic shooter Unity is soon to be released.
Bound to be a trip, but to be honest, this seems like a wasted opportunity - imagine a Minter title on Xbox or PS2, where it could draw audio from your own CDs and munge the graphics in time. The GC is the one modern console that doesn't offer this possibility, which is a shame. Then again, maybe Jeff'll turn out a separate game with this functionality, and I'm sure Unity will be a blast. One of my strongest gaming memories is playing Revenge of the Mutant Camels and trying so hard to beat each wave just to see what the enemies would be in the next one. Llamasoft games were often (not always) rehashes of existing titles, but they added so many layers of decoration and sheer information that they just couldn't be ignored...
Yes, I'm a fool. That would work like a charm, provided you know someone who's making the trip, or else are saving so much on the laptop that you can afford to pay for two trips. Ah! unless you don't go over at all, but just pay for your friend to buy the laptop and bring it over... see, I'm getting the idea, I'm learning. Becoming sneaky.
"Trivial to defeat. Have a friend deliver the laptop and the note to you. When the checkers check him on his return flight to the U.S. they find neither a laptop nor a note."
Trivial to defeat. Have Customs write your friend's name on the note. Ah, but that's trivial to defeat - find a friend with the same name. A neverending battle of wits! Well, perhaps 'wits' isn't the best word.
Sweet, thanks - I assume the problem I had was that I just assumed Printer Setup had been disallowed because it wasn't explicitly on the 'allowed programs' list. I'll give the permissions a try - I didn't really want to mess with the permissions until I'd checked that there wouldn't be terrible consequences for regular users, but it sounds like this is what I'm after, and I'm now able to check it on a test machine.
I've had problems with this - I tried very much the same approach at work on 10.3, and I found that a normal user could still delete the printer from the print dialog - File, Print and then Edit Printer List from the printer selection box. Then delete the printer. We get students deleting OSX printers quite often, either through mischief or mistakes, and I haven't managed to stop them yet. I'll try your method again step by step in case I goofed it up last time... who knows? Maybe you could check your setup and see if 'Edit Printer List' still allows deletion... if it doesn't, hurrah!
Well, with 2,000 pictures a day, you could easily have an app that ran them as a movie and let you blast through on fast forward or whatever - so you had that wine on Jerry's birthday, in the evening - let's say 100 pictures cover that event over two hours, that's nothng to sift through. Of course, you need to know approximately where to look, and the more info you had the better, but I don't see a problem here - I know the meal was in January around 8pm, so give me 8pm thumbnails from 1st-31st January. Okay, there's the day I'm after, now let's flick through and find that bottle of wine. Bada-bing!
You could also have a variant on the iPod's on-the-go playlist feature; if something interesting happens that you want to refer back to, tap a button on the camera (or use some other kind of trigger) and tag the relevant shots as a special selection that's marked in your browser app. Hell, stick in a pulse monitor and review those moments from 2005 that really got your motor running. Oh, that reminds me: this thiing really needs a lenscap.
Too true - and don't forget that older games like Unreal will most likely FLY on your current PC, which can be quite a revelation... my PC at the time of Unreal managed it fine most of the time, but had occasional slowdown and didn't do very well at higher resolutions. On my current PC - POW! I've also been playing System Shock 2 for the first time in many years, and I'm having the same experience with that. This is a good way to discover which games are truly classics - Unreal, SS2, the Quakes - they stand the test of time... the gameplay holds its own against modern titles, while the lower system requirements make for fewer technical frustrations. And the wealth of additional material is staggering. If you've never played the original Unreal, give it a shot - it could last you a hell of a long time.
I played a fair amount of Rainbow 6 on Xbox, and that has voice recog. in it. It's only a matter of time before you try putting on an Irish brogue (or the closest you can get) and other accents, to see how well they work. I found that R6 was pretty solid in that respect, and there were a few commands that worked more consistently with accents applied. Of couse, we all have an accent, but if a computer game can understand what I'm telling it when I'm talking in a ludicrously exaggerated Birmingham (England, not Alabama) accent, someone's doing something right... I also tried drawling my words as fasr as I could before crossing the recongnition line, and there was a fair amount of slack there, too. Be nice if the game characters answered you with the same affectations...
Duh, when I say "this is no good if you just want to use Lynx" in my entry above, I mean "that is no good": the steps in the bullet points *do* let you get to the article using Lynx alone.
Well, the FAQ for the free pass has this foreboding entry:
Check if your browser accepts animation. In IE go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > check box "Play animations in web pages."
Even worse, the URL for the first ad includes the chilling string "RealMedia". However, the images you are required to click through for this particular day pass (or at least the ones I got, for powells.com) are simply animated gifs with image map links, so Lynx should display them just fine.
However again, I can't seem to get from the Salon article page and the 'get a free day pass' link to the actual ads, as you say, and despie accepting all cookies offered. I did get to the ads by copying the URL for the first ad page from a Safari window and pasting it into Lynx.
This is no good if you just want to use Lynx, but here's something that did work:
Open Lynx and go to http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/02/eugen e_jarvis/index_np.html;
Press 'L' to get a list of links;
Follow the long URL mentioning Powells;
Follow the imagemap links through the ad pages;
Wind up at the Salon homepage and hope you made it.
You'll know you made it if you don't see the 'free day pass' link at the top of the page. I had to go through the process twice to get there, and had to retry a couple of 'server not found links', but it did work. And not having to wait for the animated gifs to reveal their hotspots is a genuine timesaver - the glitchy Lynx process didn't take any longer than the full-on process with the animated gif wait.
Not that I'd recommend it, but there's a workaround to the one-minute limit in Windows' sound recorder: record and save a minute of silence, then use the "insert file" command to add it to your new recording file as often as you like, up to the length you want.
This would be handy if you were caught in the desert with only a laptop with a bare install of Windows 98 and a built-in microphone, and you wanted to capture the sound of the vultures picking at your carcass, and you thought they might take longer than one minute.
Well, he said "no way even close", which suggests he doesn't agree with the "rapidly becoming suitable" part.:)
The danger being, I guess, that someone hears Rosegarden is "rapidly becoming suitable", tries it, decides it's "no way even close" and never comes back.
It's great to have projects like Rosegarden (I havn't tried it for a while but it was shaping up impressively a while back when I did), but it's not going to become a viable alternative to Cubase for pro users. What it hopefully *will* be is an excellent app for 'everyone' to use, without barriers of price, proprietary features, and usability. If it can make an impact on those people who grab warez copies of Cubase for personal music making, or have to make do with scaled-down 'lite' copies of music apps for budgetary reasons, fantastic. Here's something that can do what that 600 music suite does, it won't cost you a penny, and it runs on Linux. That would be a fantastic achievement, and to me it would be closer to my vision of what Linux and OSS are all about than seeing it replace a pro tool in the studio. There for all , free for all, and Free for all.
Doing something fairly similar will get you the 'opposite' result and is often used to obtain 'acapella' tracks for use it mashups and bootlegs.
The ideal method is to find a CD that contains an instrumental version of the main track. This needs to be literally the same tracks with the lyrics removed, not an instrumental remix.
Open both tracks as wav/aiff files or whatever (something uncompressed) and make sure they both start at exactly the same point in the file (easily done with an app like Audacity).
Run a 'select all' on the instrumental version, invert it, and copy it.
Paste-mix it into the vocal version. The inverted instrumental backing will be removed from the mix, leaving only the vocals. Save this et voila (and no viola).
I've tied this once myself and it worked OK so long as it was precisely set up to begin with. Hip hop singles are a good place to find instrumenal tracks. You're going to have your work cut out getting that acapella vocal of Brothers in Arms or Centerfold. But please keep trying.
Of course you can download plenty of pre-made acapellas with a little Googling, and artists are starting to release acapella tracks in line with the "zeitgeist" (or slightly behind, to be accurate). But it's always good to know you can do something yourself, you know. Nice to know I can fend for myself when it comes to acapella tracks if the a-bomb drops.
As you say, we're both winners, and as I have an iPod and a MD, I can't fail;)
Yeah, the large library on shuffle is the real killer for me, I hardly ever set the 'pod to anything else nowadays - there's stuff on there I've never listened to on CD and plenty of web-derived stuff that's yet to be heard. Oftentimes I get to work and have to plug into iTunes first thing to check out the walk in's playlist.
The battery life / disc swapping? Well, I don't dispute your figures, and I never really ran my MD battery down, so who knows? I'd use my MD to and from work (45 min walk each way) and charge it up once a week. Occasionally I'd get a low battery warning toward the end of the week. I knew bupkis about battery care back then, probably a factor. Disk swapping I guess depends on what you put on a disc and how you like to listen; I generally like to hop around, as we've seen... and LP MD quality I was gauging from listening to a friend's, admittedly on the highest compression (around 4x, I think). Didn't like the sound myself, but take that as a personal call, I didn't apply any science.
It's all good, anyhow; I still like to use my MD as a highly portable recorder and it makes a decent digital audio storage device, though I'd use it far more if it had a digital out. Day to day, my iPod wins me over easily. Still, ask me again in 12 months when the battery's gone...
My 2 cents: buy a minidisc player. Better battery life, physically tougher, smaller. What's the point of having 10,000 songs if you can only listen to 7 hours worth in a sitting?
So a MD player will give you 10-12 hrs, or whatever, But in that time, you'd have to change disks ten or so times, unless you were a) listening to the same tracks over and over, or b) using MD compression, which gets pretty poor results IMO.
I switched from MD to iPod, and it works great for me. A lot of the time, my laptop is with me too, so that's extra power for the 'pod. I don't make long trips away from power adapters, so that's a hassle I don't face. If I did, I'd probably buy an iPod battery pack. My MD player uses a rechargable battery, so for long trips I'd face the same choice with that; take the charger, or take backup power.
Advantages to the MD player: it records, and it has optical in. Disadvantages: no way to digitally transfer the contents (mine is a pre-Net MD), and I'm limited to using discs. I enjoy the serendipity and convenience of 8,000 tracks of music on shuffle far too much to go back to having to choose a specific disc to play.
A case of getting the right tool for the job, I guess. Seven iPod hours works fine for me, but might be a dog for someone else, I guess. I'd never pick a MD over an iPod, however; notes, caledar, alarm, firewire hard drive... too many bonuses. My iPod is to MD as my MD was to my Walkman...
I understand what you're saying there, but the last chapter was in fact very interesting to me, because I was born in, and live in, Northampton. Of course, the whole book is interesting in that respect, but the last chapter brings the whole novel home as Moore writes up the streets and sites you see every day (while hinting at those elements you *don't* see every day).
An important point, of course, is that a similar novel could be written for your town, for any town. We're admittedly lucky that we had Moore to write Northampton's. A good book, worth your time.
Well, just because I joke doesn't mean I'm discounting the idea; I work with visually imparied students quite frequently, and I'm always amazed at the speed they can set their screen reading software to - as with your friends, it often sounds like an aural blur to me. I fare a lot better with visual speedreaders myself - but as voice synthesis improves, who knows?
They're all examples of computers / tech being adapted to suit our individual needs, which is what it's all about.
Well, really we ought to subject you to some kind of comprehension test before we let you loose on the stronger stuff....
I haven't come across any other speedreader applets myself, but here's something cool: follow the link off the speedreader page to The Reading Lab and check out how they hooked a video game driving system up to a reader, allowing you to (literally) accelerate up to 2000 words per minute - and steer 'between streams of text', whatever that might mean. There's a PDF paper linked off there I haven't read yet (I might've if I'd had access to their system, though).
Yeah, do this. Speed everything up, chew less and swallow more. When someone is talking, encourage them to talk faster by making a fast winding motion with your hands. Leave cinemas as soon as the first credit appears (and slip the projectionist a sawski to crank the handle faster).
Actually, someone made a nice speed-reading version of Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons-released novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The speedreader applet, with adjustable speed, is here. You could use this to gauge your aptitude for the compressed life - and your limits. It's surprising how fast you can comprehend, although at higher speeds you're a bit like a rocket-powered train that's easily derailed...
Well, we can still froth at the mouth about the fact that MS has been brazen enough to *apply* for the patent. And then if the patent is granted, we can froth twice as much.
Well, the article only mentions Media Player; I don't see any problem with Windows shipping with IE at all. You're right; a new user is going to want to surf the web, and without suffering something along the lines of "let's spend a few mninutes choosing a browser...".
The media player angle could be solved in a number of ways. I guess the simplest would be to include a web page that contains links to the various media players, so people can make a choice. The key lies in making an *informed* choice, so perhaps a third party could be given the task of creating the page.
There's nothing wrong with bundling a media player with a system, per se; people will expect their PC to play MP3s. The problem here is that WMP is more than just an MP3 player. Maybe MS could ship Windows with a no-frills, non-DRM-enabled CD/MP3/WAV player (mplayer2.exe?), to get people up and running. WMP could then be an optional upgrade, similar to Quicktime Pro (in spirit rather than functionality). $25 to enable playback of DRM files. Standard files are supported out of the box. If the $25 came off the cost of the main OS, that would suit me just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it kinda supports Safari - if you enable Safari's debug menu and use the Debug menu to set your user agent to, say, MSIE 6, you get the slider. I can move in in crude and fairly arbitrary steps by clicking either side of it, but when I try to drag the slider, Safari just starts dragging the slider image - either the position marker or the background bar - just like it drags all other images.
So it's not really usable, but you can see how it works and get a taste of the results.
Ah, interesting. I'm sure he'll make the most of the Cube and mine any interesting depths it might harbour. And of course he'd do the same for the PS2 and Xbox, given the opportunity (maybe with the EyeToy or the Xbox hard drive). On the GC he could tap into the GBA linker for some old school pixel action... a lot of possibilities. One thing at a time, I guess.
Get a Gamecube - his latest psychedelic shooter Unity is soon to be released.
Bound to be a trip, but to be honest, this seems like a wasted opportunity - imagine a Minter title on Xbox or PS2, where it could draw audio from your own CDs and munge the graphics in time. The GC is the one modern console that doesn't offer this possibility, which is a shame. Then again, maybe Jeff'll turn out a separate game with this functionality, and I'm sure Unity will be a blast. One of my strongest gaming memories is playing Revenge of the Mutant Camels and trying so hard to beat each wave just to see what the enemies would be in the next one. Llamasoft games were often (not always) rehashes of existing titles, but they added so many layers of decoration and sheer information that they just couldn't be ignored...
Yes, I'm a fool. That would work like a charm, provided you know someone who's making the trip, or else are saving so much on the laptop that you can afford to pay for two trips. Ah! unless you don't go over at all, but just pay for your friend to buy the laptop and bring it over... see, I'm getting the idea, I'm learning. Becoming sneaky.
"Trivial to defeat. Have a friend deliver the laptop and the note to you. When the checkers check him on his return flight to the U.S. they find neither a laptop nor a note."
Trivial to defeat. Have Customs write your friend's name on the note. Ah, but that's trivial to defeat - find a friend with the same name. A neverending battle of wits! Well, perhaps 'wits' isn't the best word.
Sweet, thanks - I assume the problem I had was that I just assumed Printer Setup had been disallowed because it wasn't explicitly on the 'allowed programs' list. I'll give the permissions a try - I didn't really want to mess with the permissions until I'd checked that there wouldn't be terrible consequences for regular users, but it sounds like this is what I'm after, and I'm now able to check it on a test machine.
Thanks again...
I've had problems with this - I tried very much the same approach at work on 10.3, and I found that a normal user could still delete the printer from the print dialog - File, Print and then Edit Printer List from the printer selection box. Then delete the printer. We get students deleting OSX printers quite often, either through mischief or mistakes, and I haven't managed to stop them yet. I'll try your method again step by step in case I goofed it up last time... who knows? Maybe you could check your setup and see if 'Edit Printer List' still allows deletion... if it doesn't, hurrah!
Well, with 2,000 pictures a day, you could easily have an app that ran them as a movie and let you blast through on fast forward or whatever - so you had that wine on Jerry's birthday, in the evening - let's say 100 pictures cover that event over two hours, that's nothng to sift through. Of course, you need to know approximately where to look, and the more info you had the better, but I don't see a problem here - I know the meal was in January around 8pm, so give me 8pm thumbnails from 1st-31st January. Okay, there's the day I'm after, now let's flick through and find that bottle of wine. Bada-bing!
You could also have a variant on the iPod's on-the-go playlist feature; if something interesting happens that you want to refer back to, tap a button on the camera (or use some other kind of trigger) and tag the relevant shots as a special selection that's marked in your browser app. Hell, stick in a pulse monitor and review those moments from 2005 that really got your motor running. Oh, that reminds me: this thiing really needs a lenscap.
Too true - and don't forget that older games like Unreal will most likely FLY on your current PC, which can be quite a revelation... my PC at the time of Unreal managed it fine most of the time, but had occasional slowdown and didn't do very well at higher resolutions. On my current PC - POW! I've also been playing System Shock 2 for the first time in many years, and I'm having the same experience with that. This is a good way to discover which games are truly classics - Unreal, SS2, the Quakes - they stand the test of time... the gameplay holds its own against modern titles, while the lower system requirements make for fewer technical frustrations. And the wealth of additional material is staggering. If you've never played the original Unreal, give it a shot - it could last you a hell of a long time.
I played a fair amount of Rainbow 6 on Xbox, and that has voice recog. in it. It's only a matter of time before you try putting on an Irish brogue (or the closest you can get) and other accents, to see how well they work. I found that R6 was pretty solid in that respect, and there were a few commands that worked more consistently with accents applied. Of couse, we all have an accent, but if a computer game can understand what I'm telling it when I'm talking in a ludicrously exaggerated Birmingham (England, not Alabama) accent, someone's doing something right... I also tried drawling my words as fasr as I could before crossing the recongnition line, and there was a fair amount of slack there, too. Be nice if the game characters answered you with the same affectations...
Duh, when I say "this is no good if you just want to use Lynx" in my entry above, I mean "that is no good": the steps in the bullet points *do* let you get to the article using Lynx alone.
I repeat, Duh.
Well, the FAQ for the free pass has this foreboding entry:
Check if your browser accepts animation. In IE go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Multimedia > check box "Play animations in web pages."
Even worse, the URL for the first ad includes the chilling string "RealMedia". However, the images you are required to click through for this particular day pass (or at least the ones I got, for powells.com) are simply animated gifs with image map links, so Lynx should display them just fine.
However again, I can't seem to get from the Salon article page and the 'get a free day pass' link to the actual ads, as you say, and despie accepting all cookies offered. I did get to the ads by copying the URL for the first ad page from a Safari window and pasting it into Lynx.
This is no good if you just want to use Lynx, but here's something that did work:
You'll know you made it if you don't see the 'free day pass' link at the top of the page. I had to go through the process twice to get there, and had to retry a couple of 'server not found links', but it did work. And not having to wait for the animated gifs to reveal their hotspots is a genuine timesaver - the glitchy Lynx process didn't take any longer than the full-on process with the animated gif wait.
Hope that's useful, and good luck. Lynx on!
In support of this suggestion, you can get the mplayer binaries, and a GUI player, from here.
You could also use Audio Hijack, which is (very nicce) shareware, or Wiretap, which is free(beer)ware.
I find mplayer is very nice to have around and will often chip in and help where Quicktime fails. Same can be said of VLC.
Not that I'd recommend it, but there's a workaround to the one-minute limit in Windows' sound recorder: record and save a minute of silence, then use the "insert file" command to add it to your new recording file as often as you like, up to the length you want.
This would be handy if you were caught in the desert with only a laptop with a bare install of Windows 98 and a built-in microphone, and you wanted to capture the sound of the vultures picking at your carcass, and you thought they might take longer than one minute.
Well, he said "no way even close", which suggests he doesn't agree with the "rapidly becoming suitable" part. :)
The danger being, I guess, that someone hears Rosegarden is "rapidly becoming suitable", tries it, decides it's "no way even close" and never comes back.
It's great to have projects like Rosegarden (I havn't tried it for a while but it was shaping up impressively a while back when I did), but it's not going to become a viable alternative to Cubase for pro users. What it hopefully *will* be is an excellent app for 'everyone' to use, without barriers of price, proprietary features, and usability. If it can make an impact on those people who grab warez copies of Cubase for personal music making, or have to make do with scaled-down 'lite' copies of music apps for budgetary reasons, fantastic. Here's something that can do what that 600 music suite does, it won't cost you a penny, and it runs on Linux. That would be a fantastic achievement, and to me it would be closer to my vision of what Linux and OSS are all about than seeing it replace a pro tool in the studio. There for all , free for all, and Free for all.
Doing something fairly similar will get you the 'opposite' result and is often used to obtain 'acapella' tracks for use it mashups and bootlegs.
The ideal method is to find a CD that contains an instrumental version of the main track. This needs to be literally the same tracks with the lyrics removed, not an instrumental remix.
Open both tracks as wav/aiff files or whatever (something uncompressed) and make sure they both start at exactly the same point in the file (easily done with an app like Audacity).
Run a 'select all' on the instrumental version, invert it, and copy it.
Paste-mix it into the vocal version. The inverted instrumental backing will be removed from the mix, leaving only the vocals. Save this et voila (and no viola).
I've tied this once myself and it worked OK so long as it was precisely set up to begin with. Hip hop singles are a good place to find instrumenal tracks. You're going to have your work cut out getting that acapella vocal of Brothers in Arms or Centerfold. But please keep trying.
Of course you can download plenty of pre-made acapellas with a little Googling, and artists are starting to release acapella tracks in line with the "zeitgeist" (or slightly behind, to be accurate). But it's always good to know you can do something yourself, you know. Nice to know I can fend for myself when it comes to acapella tracks if the a-bomb drops.
As you say, we're both winners, and as I have an iPod and a MD, I can't fail ;)
Yeah, the large library on shuffle is the real killer for me, I hardly ever set the 'pod to anything else nowadays - there's stuff on there I've never listened to on CD and plenty of web-derived stuff that's yet to be heard. Oftentimes I get to work and have to plug into iTunes first thing to check out the walk in's playlist.
The battery life / disc swapping? Well, I don't dispute your figures, and I never really ran my MD battery down, so who knows? I'd use my MD to and from work (45 min walk each way) and charge it up once a week. Occasionally I'd get a low battery warning toward the end of the week. I knew bupkis about battery care back then, probably a factor. Disk swapping I guess depends on what you put on a disc and how you like to listen; I generally like to hop around, as we've seen... and LP MD quality I was gauging from listening to a friend's, admittedly on the highest compression (around 4x, I think). Didn't like the sound myself, but take that as a personal call, I didn't apply any science.
It's all good, anyhow; I still like to use my MD as a highly portable recorder and it makes a decent digital audio storage device, though I'd use it far more if it had a digital out. Day to day, my iPod wins me over easily. Still, ask me again in 12 months when the battery's gone...
My 2 cents: buy a minidisc player. Better battery life, physically tougher, smaller. What's the point of having 10,000 songs if you can only listen to 7 hours worth in a sitting?
So a MD player will give you 10-12 hrs, or whatever, But in that time, you'd have to change disks ten or so times, unless you were a) listening to the same tracks over and over, or b) using MD compression, which gets pretty poor results IMO.
I switched from MD to iPod, and it works great for me. A lot of the time, my laptop is with me too, so that's extra power for the 'pod. I don't make long trips away from power adapters, so that's a hassle I don't face. If I did, I'd probably buy an iPod battery pack. My MD player uses a rechargable battery, so for long trips I'd face the same choice with that; take the charger, or take backup power.
Advantages to the MD player: it records, and it has optical in. Disadvantages: no way to digitally transfer the contents (mine is a pre-Net MD), and I'm limited to using discs. I enjoy the serendipity and convenience of 8,000 tracks of music on shuffle far too much to go back to having to choose a specific disc to play.
A case of getting the right tool for the job, I guess. Seven iPod hours works fine for me, but might be a dog for someone else, I guess. I'd never pick a MD over an iPod, however; notes, caledar, alarm, firewire hard drive... too many bonuses. My iPod is to MD as my MD was to my Walkman...
I understand what you're saying there, but the last chapter was in fact very interesting to me, because I was born in, and live in, Northampton. Of course, the whole book is interesting in that respect, but the last chapter brings the whole novel home as Moore writes up the streets and sites you see every day (while hinting at those elements you *don't* see every day).
An important point, of course, is that a similar novel could be written for your town, for any town. We're admittedly lucky that we had Moore to write Northampton's. A good book, worth your time.
Well, just because I joke doesn't mean I'm discounting the idea; I work with visually imparied students quite frequently, and I'm always amazed at the speed they can set their screen reading software to - as with your friends, it often sounds like an aural blur to me. I fare a lot better with visual speedreaders myself - but as voice synthesis improves, who knows?
They're all examples of computers / tech being adapted to suit our individual needs, which is what it's all about.
Well, really we ought to subject you to some kind of comprehension test before we let you loose on the stronger stuff....
I haven't come across any other speedreader applets myself, but here's something cool: follow the link off the speedreader page to The Reading Lab and check out how they hooked a video game driving system up to a reader, allowing you to (literally) accelerate up to 2000 words per minute - and steer 'between streams of text', whatever that might mean. There's a PDF paper linked off there I haven't read yet (I might've if I'd had access to their system, though).
Yeah, do this. Speed everything up, chew less and swallow more. When someone is talking, encourage them to talk faster by making a fast winding motion with your hands. Leave cinemas as soon as the first credit appears (and slip the projectionist a sawski to crank the handle faster).
Actually, someone made a nice speed-reading version of Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons-released novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The speedreader applet, with adjustable speed, is here. You could use this to gauge your aptitude for the compressed life - and your limits. It's surprising how fast you can comprehend, although at higher speeds you're a bit like a rocket-powered train that's easily derailed...
Well, when I said 'we' I didn't really intend to include myself. In retrospect, I could have chosen a better word.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't put me down for rabies. In fact, put me down for two.
Well, we can still froth at the mouth about the fact that MS has been brazen enough to *apply* for the patent. And then if the patent is granted, we can froth twice as much.
Well, the article only mentions Media Player; I don't see any problem with Windows shipping with IE at all. You're right; a new user is going to want to surf the web, and without suffering something along the lines of "let's spend a few mninutes choosing a browser...".
The media player angle could be solved in a number of ways. I guess the simplest would be to include a web page that contains links to the various media players, so people can make a choice. The key lies in making an *informed* choice, so perhaps a third party could be given the task of creating the page.
There's nothing wrong with bundling a media player with a system, per se; people will expect their PC to play MP3s. The problem here is that WMP is more than just an MP3 player. Maybe MS could ship Windows with a no-frills, non-DRM-enabled CD/MP3/WAV player (mplayer2.exe?), to get people up and running. WMP could then be an optional upgrade, similar to Quicktime Pro (in spirit rather than functionality). $25 to enable playback of DRM files. Standard files are supported out of the box. If the $25 came off the cost of the main OS, that would suit me just fine.