I certainly hope market saturation never stops the company from bringing new tech on the market, and I certainly hope that they keep making your newest PDA "obsolete" (one of the oddest things in technology is when users cry foul over new products coming out: This is seen to the greatest extent in video cards where users yell that nvidia came out with a GeForce 3...no longer is their GeForce 2 Ultra the latest and great, and this offends their sensibilities).
Merlin is PocketPC 2002, hence it's the newest version of CE, hence it almost certainly has all the old apps and then some. The speech recognition is mostly a sham (just as it's a sham in Office XP: People just don't use that, and even 99% accuracy isn't good enough: That 1% is killer).
It's like the post where the guy actually complained that Slashdot has posted two articles which contradicted each other: Apparently Slashdot must a) be the absolute first to ever link to anything, b) must stick to their guns and stand by the original posting regardless-> No contradictory findings can be presented.
Keyboard magazine had a DIY midi-mod kit for the SK1 and it soon found its way into many thousands of SK1s across the land. Historically one could say that the SK1 most certainly ended up with a MIDI port.
I hate @home, because I've had their competition to compare them to.
I use @Home and I consistently download 2x faster (even with the cap) than the best of 3 ADSL friends, and I upload over 2x faster (even with the cap). My outages can be counted on one hand and all except for one time were less than 8 hours. I have found the support abhorrent, however the hope is that you never need support because the same stories are circling about all the high speed providers: Long outages, dropped packets, etc. In other words it's just like a lemon car: You hope you don't get one, but if you do it really sucks.
Like the Amiga, the ST couldn't compete with the big boys, nor with Amiga for gamers, but its sophisticated sound capabilities earned it a niche with audio editors and musicians.
In reality the sound on the Atari ST was somewhat subpar and it was seriously outmatched by the Amiga (note that I was a massive Atari ST fan so I'm not biased when I say that...The ST ran at 8Mhz whereas the lowly Amiga only ran at 7.14!). What they are probably referring to is that the Atari ST, in a very odd piece of design, had a MIDI in and out port on it (no thru though) which single-handedly catapulted it in the upper echelon of PCs for electronic musicians. Pretty silly really as you could inexpensively add MIDI to most other PCs, but in a strange twist of events rather than making musicians buy the ST, it made lots of ST owners musicians (or at least wannabe musicians with their Casio SK1 in tow)...
This is your computer on DSL. This is your computer on cable.
:-) Those numbers are bogus, however I concur: I have had great throughput, very few outages (though admittingly they are very annoying because the internet is such a critical part of my life now), and the value is absolutely amazing. I'm really perplexed at the dislike of @Home/cable on Slashdot and I'm prone to thinking that it's the pick-on-the-big-guys syndrome that is so rampant. Of course there are people who've had bad experiences (come on it costs $40 CDN / month! Are people expecting a huge line of net techs ready to rush to your house?), just as there are people who's Honda makes a knocking noise, etc.
I beg to differ. I had @Home in London in 1998 and this was far in advance of ADSL being rolled out en mass to consumers in that area, and I know that the situation was similar in many other parts of the country: In large scale roll-outs @Home had a huge lead over consumer ADSL. Indeed many of my friends in that area are just getting HSE availability.
Last I heard Rogers was awash in debt (which I believe is one of the reasons they're so big: They're willing to go heavily in debt to get and stay big)
A potential bidder I could envision is Microsoft though...Microsoft has been trying to eak into the high speed cable business for some time, so if they could take over the top level servicing...
@Home killed themselves when they merged with Excite: @Home, which had a solid prospect of a large scale profitable business, decided that they just HAD to dilute their value by merging with a absurdly overvalued search engine that was headed into the great abyss (Excite has been on a major decline while engines like Google conquer the market). While they've tried to make some value out of the Excite merger, as an @Home customer I have never used the Excite pages except to transition to the member services pages. Even the so called "Broadband" version is simplistic and borish.
As another poster mentioned though, @Home really is marketing and some peering agreements: I'm on Cogeco and they will continue if @Home fails, and likewise Rogers and Shaw will be just as strong.
It's ironic that this is occuring right now as I just finished reading the National Post over lunch, and one of the stories detailed the fact that cable modems are being installed twice as fast as DSL. You would think that these would be the good times for @Home.
you can go shove your vehement 'everyone on the net is a pir8' opinions where your head must currently be situated.
This pretty much puts your reply into context. In any case 99.999% of people (such as yourself) yapping about their God given right to back up what they "legally purchased" only REALLY care about the ability to rip shit off of Napster, and grab 3d Studio Max from #Warez950-dcc. The absurdity of seeing you blue in the face protecting your right to pir8 is hilarious. BTW: I haven't "scratched a CD to shit" since they first came out and I was testing the limits of the players error correction, and if I did I _WOULD_ go and buy another: It isn't worth the waste of time and effort to burn a dupe just in case I turn mentally handicapped and start wearing CDs as sandals. The whole "just in case I'm dumb!" argument doesn't fly.
BTW: Almost all software allows you to get new media for a small fee if you destroy the original.
Windows is a very nice software product (and with each iteration it's getting better), and at some point you'll realize that fighting the "good fight" through FUD just doesn't achieve anything other than short-term victories at the expense of long-term saturation. It just tends to be that open-source zealots tolerate a lot more without complaining, while the same faults would incite riots in Windows.
Shhhh! You're making it sound like "freedom fighters" don't want to pay for things, almost like they want the unbridled right to pirate and copy to their hearts content! No no no...the official line is that they want "fair usage" rights to copy "their own" CDs. You see all they want is the right to make MP3 copies of all the CDs they themselves own, and copy games that they legally have copies of, and books that they have purchased. You almost make it sound like they want everything for free...nah that's not the freedom fighter goal...
Volvo advertises that, and it does it by basically making the radiator a big catalytic converter. Neat idea, albeit the metals in catalytic converters (like rhodium and platinum) are very expensive.
<Humor> Now all my favourites (bookmarks for the non-IE crowd) pointing to AC posts I made slamming someone or other [in an ever so clever manner!] are bogus with the reindexing of post #s, etc. Damn. </Humor> Now how will I see whether the private school kid who's got the "high IQ" comes back with a brilliant rejoinder?
It certainly feels very, very speedy now, though perhaps that's because everyone went to bed (of course I'm stereotyping that everyone lives in -05:00) when it was screwing up earlier. While there has been no "update" about how the upgrade went, it was apparent earlier that it neither happened in the one hour period, and when it did come up a multitude of quirks surfaced. I say this not to criticize but rather to poke fun at our profession: If a software developer tells you it'll take an hour, presume 4.:-)
Rather than RDRAM, get excited about the much more scalable multi-channel low-end solutions which are appearing in the pipeline, the first of which will be the nforce. It dual-channels, but one can imagine quad-channeling, octo-channeling, etc. Exciting times.
That depends on the user. Dual-channel PC800 RDRAM is faster than DDR DRAM (is anyone else rather underwhelmed by DDR? Seriously there was such an outpouring of excitement over it, and of course the name itself implies dual performance, yet it's marginally better than SDR SDRAM. Perhaps they need to start multi-channeling it...oh wait they will with the nvidia nForce [a motherboard I am very anxiously awaiting]). Anyways to the kind of people who are looking for the fastest of the fastest for whatever, RDRAM may be quite economical indeed.
Personally I'd get an Athlon, preferably on a nForce motherboard.
Right now users are getting a lot of stuff included for free.
___NOTHING___ Microsoft "gives away" is free (well, unless you're a pirate. Oy matie! [would that be a Jewish pirate?]), and it upsets me to hear that being said or perceived. Every single widget or fancy that Microsoft builds to wipe some company out of business COSTS CONSUMERS. Windows Me, which is a minor facelift of Windows 98SE, which was a minor facelift of Windows 98, which was a minor facelift of Windows 95, costs $180 new or $90 as an upgrade, despite the overwhelming majority of the technology being paid for many times previously (and despite the presumed efficiency of numbers), but Microsoft needs to continue to rake in the dough to put all of those other companies out of business with the "free" IE, the "free" Media Player, the "free" Netmeeting, etc. The problem is that even if the user does opt to buy and install 3rd party software, most of it doesn't exist because Microsoft has abused their monopoly position and pushed companies in many other software fields out of business as they provide their services "for free", and the customer is already paying for the "free" software that Microsoft is providing. Even if you don't buy or use Microsoft software, Microsoft also subsidizes their monopoly with the Office suite, so think about the costs that countless businesses you do deal with are paying to subsidize putting Netscape et. all out of business.
Microsoft is not like any other software company out there: They control the desktop space, they have enormous money, and they have shown a willingness to abuse their monopoly will little regard for perceptions or legalities. Comparing Microsoft with a car company, of which you can choose between Ford, Honda, GM (many brands), Toyota, Hyundai, etc. etc. etc. (and of each of those you have countless models to choose from) is pure folly.
Let me give a better analogy: Say your telephone company, of which there is only one and there is no real competition (sure there's a couple of other companies with a micro portion of the saturation, but if you sign up with them you can only call customers on their network, and because all your friends and neighbours use the monopoly you stick with it...the old chicken/egg, and it's the concept of a monopoly to begin with), decides that they feel threatened by the local newspaper (maybe the newspaper has supported competing phone companies, or they've talked about legislation) so they start providing a "free" newspaper to all of the cities residents versus the outrageous $1 a day of the competitor, and, oh yeah, coincidentally they have to raise rates 20% because of "increased costs". NOTHING that ANY business "gives" away is free, and whether you realize it or not you are paying for it. The outrage comes if you are being forced to pay for it because of an abused monopoly position, and that is why the situation is as it is right now.
I agree with that, however if you subsampled with just users who use their PC for games (rather than either not playing games, or alternately using a PS2 or whatever for gaming), I think you would find a much much higher percentage that dual-boot.
I'm not suggesting that every company should be sueing Microsoft, but rather that vendors should have ZERO restrictions when installing Windows, and if they decide that as a value added they'll replace Solitaire with Megataire, then so be it: Let customers decide among true options rather than letting Microsoft dictate that even if it's beneficial to the customer, vendor Y can't do anything because that might give them a "in" into the software market. For too long Microsoft has dominated through brute force, and their domination has led to lots of software companies that have , and that's just sad.
I have massive respect for the folks in Redmond, and personally I love a lot of their product, but the reality is that they are a monopoly and they have been using that position to stop competition from ever taking root. As a Microsoft apologist for many years they have gone too far too many times, and I no longer find their actions acceptable.
I've often wondered what the economics of a porting company like Loki are like. For instance Vendor X sells game Y for $49.95 and there are 100,000 potential customers, only 10,000 of them happen to be running a variant operating system that you aren't targeting. However, under further analysis you learn that 9,000 of them dual-boot to your target environment, so they're actually potential candidates anyways. So company Y comes along and offers to port your software for those 10,000 users. Now really despite the fact that it has a potential market of 10,000 users, really 9,000 were potential users already, so the porting is purely a convenience for them, and the 1,000 are truly bonafide new customers.
Anyways you can see how economically this can get pretty convoluted, and it must be under tight terms that porting contracts written: I would presume that for the majority of the prospective market the original game was a candidate already. Bleh.
Yup I definitely agree: I use and love FreeBSD and have no issues with it. I just find the paradox of user friendliness an interesting point of discussion.
This should not delay XP and that would be harmful to consumers.
What needs to happen with this is that equilibrium needs to be restored in the computer marketplace through restraints put on Microsoft limiting how they can limit customers: Namely that hardware vendors that integrate the Windows operating system have every right to modify the desktop, add/remove programs, or develop relationships with other companies for cross-promotion. In Dell starts shipping computers with desktops full of third-party tools, and they replaced IE with Mosaic and removed notepad, then so be it: Let reviewers hash them out and sell the benefits versus detriments to the massive number of vendors which we as consumers get to choose from. Personally, while I don't like Java myself, I think it would be great if vendors preinstall the newest Java Runtime Environment for their customers.
It's (BSD) not any harder to install than most linux distributions (save mandrake, redhat, oh, perhaps it is harder to install)...
So in essence what you're saying is that Linux is for the point-and-clicker newbies, and FreeBSD is for the intelligentsia that don't need fancy dancy pointy-clicky wizards and helpers? I get it. So the progression of knowledge should be:
;-) Seriously though user friendliness is one of those hilarious multi-headed hydras: When you don't have it you can disparage it as being for idiots and dullards, but once you have it it's a wonderful feature.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly hope market saturation never stops the company from bringing new tech on the market, and I certainly hope that they keep making your newest PDA "obsolete" (one of the oddest things in technology is when users cry foul over new products coming out: This is seen to the greatest extent in video cards where users yell that nvidia came out with a GeForce 3...no longer is their GeForce 2 Ultra the latest and great, and this offends their sensibilities).
Merlin is PocketPC 2002, hence it's the newest version of CE, hence it almost certainly has all the old apps and then some. The speech recognition is mostly a sham (just as it's a sham in Office XP: People just don't use that, and even 99% accuracy isn't good enough: That 1% is killer).
It's like the post where the guy actually complained that Slashdot has posted two articles which contradicted each other: Apparently Slashdot must a) be the absolute first to ever link to anything, b) must stick to their guns and stand by the original posting regardless-> No contradictory findings can be presented.
Keyboard magazine had a DIY midi-mod kit for the SK1 and it soon found its way into many thousands of SK1s across the land. Historically one could say that the SK1 most certainly ended up with a MIDI port.
I hate @home, because I've had their competition to compare them to.
I use @Home and I consistently download 2x faster (even with the cap) than the best of 3 ADSL friends, and I upload over 2x faster (even with the cap). My outages can be counted on one hand and all except for one time were less than 8 hours. I have found the support abhorrent, however the hope is that you never need support because the same stories are circling about all the high speed providers: Long outages, dropped packets, etc. In other words it's just like a lemon car: You hope you don't get one, but if you do it really sucks.
One line that I found interesting in the article:
Like the Amiga, the ST couldn't compete with the big boys, nor with Amiga for gamers, but its sophisticated sound capabilities earned it a niche with audio editors and musicians.
In reality the sound on the Atari ST was somewhat subpar and it was seriously outmatched by the Amiga (note that I was a massive Atari ST fan so I'm not biased when I say that...The ST ran at 8Mhz whereas the lowly Amiga only ran at 7.14!). What they are probably referring to is that the Atari ST, in a very odd piece of design, had a MIDI in and out port on it (no thru though) which single-handedly catapulted it in the upper echelon of PCs for electronic musicians. Pretty silly really as you could inexpensively add MIDI to most other PCs, but in a strange twist of events rather than making musicians buy the ST, it made lots of ST owners musicians (or at least wannabe musicians with their Casio SK1 in tow)...
This is your computer on DSL. This is your computer on cable.
:-) Those numbers are bogus, however I concur: I have had great throughput, very few outages (though admittingly they are very annoying because the internet is such a critical part of my life now), and the value is absolutely amazing. I'm really perplexed at the dislike of @Home/cable on Slashdot and I'm prone to thinking that it's the pick-on-the-big-guys syndrome that is so rampant. Of course there are people who've had bad experiences (come on it costs $40 CDN / month! Are people expecting a huge line of net techs ready to rush to your house?), just as there are people who's Honda makes a knocking noise, etc.
I beg to differ. I had @Home in London in 1998 and this was far in advance of ADSL being rolled out en mass to consumers in that area, and I know that the situation was similar in many other parts of the country: In large scale roll-outs @Home had a huge lead over consumer ADSL. Indeed many of my friends in that area are just getting HSE availability.
Last I heard Rogers was awash in debt (which I believe is one of the reasons they're so big: They're willing to go heavily in debt to get and stay big)
A potential bidder I could envision is Microsoft though...Microsoft has been trying to eak into the high speed cable business for some time, so if they could take over the top level servicing...
@Home killed themselves when they merged with Excite: @Home, which had a solid prospect of a large scale profitable business, decided that they just HAD to dilute their value by merging with a absurdly overvalued search engine that was headed into the great abyss (Excite has been on a major decline while engines like Google conquer the market). While they've tried to make some value out of the Excite merger, as an @Home customer I have never used the Excite pages except to transition to the member services pages. Even the so called "Broadband" version is simplistic and borish.
As another poster mentioned though, @Home really is marketing and some peering agreements: I'm on Cogeco and they will continue if @Home fails, and likewise Rogers and Shaw will be just as strong.
It's ironic that this is occuring right now as I just finished reading the National Post over lunch, and one of the stories detailed the fact that cable modems are being installed twice as fast as DSL. You would think that these would be the good times for @Home.
you can go shove your vehement 'everyone on the net is a pir8' opinions where your head must currently be situated.
This pretty much puts your reply into context. In any case 99.999% of people (such as yourself) yapping about their God given right to back up what they "legally purchased" only REALLY care about the ability to rip shit off of Napster, and grab 3d Studio Max from #Warez950-dcc. The absurdity of seeing you blue in the face protecting your right to pir8 is hilarious. BTW: I haven't "scratched a CD to shit" since they first came out and I was testing the limits of the players error correction, and if I did I _WOULD_ go and buy another: It isn't worth the waste of time and effort to burn a dupe just in case I turn mentally handicapped and start wearing CDs as sandals. The whole "just in case I'm dumb!" argument doesn't fly.
BTW: Almost all software allows you to get new media for a small fee if you destroy the original.
Windows is a very nice software product (and with each iteration it's getting better), and at some point you'll realize that fighting the "good fight" through FUD just doesn't achieve anything other than short-term victories at the expense of long-term saturation. It just tends to be that open-source zealots tolerate a lot more without complaining, while the same faults would incite riots in Windows.
Shhhh! You're making it sound like "freedom fighters" don't want to pay for things, almost like they want the unbridled right to pirate and copy to their hearts content! No no no...the official line is that they want "fair usage" rights to copy "their own" CDs. You see all they want is the right to make MP3 copies of all the CDs they themselves own, and copy games that they legally have copies of, and books that they have purchased. You almost make it sound like they want everything for free...nah that's not the freedom fighter goal...
Volvo advertises that, and it does it by basically making the radiator a big catalytic converter. Neat idea, albeit the metals in catalytic converters (like rhodium and platinum) are very expensive.
<Humor> Now all my favourites (bookmarks for the non-IE crowd) pointing to AC posts I made slamming someone or other [in an ever so clever manner!] are bogus with the reindexing of post #s, etc. Damn. </Humor> Now how will I see whether the private school kid who's got the "high IQ" comes back with a brilliant rejoinder?
It certainly feels very, very speedy now, though perhaps that's because everyone went to bed (of course I'm stereotyping that everyone lives in -05:00) when it was screwing up earlier. While there has been no "update" about how the upgrade went, it was apparent earlier that it neither happened in the one hour period, and when it did come up a multitude of quirks surfaced. I say this not to criticize but rather to poke fun at our profession: If a software developer tells you it'll take an hour, presume 4. :-)
Rather than RDRAM, get excited about the much more scalable multi-channel low-end solutions which are appearing in the pipeline, the first of which will be the nforce. It dual-channels, but one can imagine quad-channeling, octo-channeling, etc. Exciting times.
That depends on the user. Dual-channel PC800 RDRAM is faster than DDR DRAM (is anyone else rather underwhelmed by DDR? Seriously there was such an outpouring of excitement over it, and of course the name itself implies dual performance, yet it's marginally better than SDR SDRAM. Perhaps they need to start multi-channeling it...oh wait they will with the nvidia nForce [a motherboard I am very anxiously awaiting]). Anyways to the kind of people who are looking for the fastest of the fastest for whatever, RDRAM may be quite economical indeed.
Personally I'd get an Athlon, preferably on a nForce motherboard.
Right now users are getting a lot of stuff included for free.
___NOTHING___ Microsoft "gives away" is free (well, unless you're a pirate. Oy matie! [would that be a Jewish pirate?]), and it upsets me to hear that being said or perceived. Every single widget or fancy that Microsoft builds to wipe some company out of business COSTS CONSUMERS. Windows Me, which is a minor facelift of Windows 98SE, which was a minor facelift of Windows 98, which was a minor facelift of Windows 95, costs $180 new or $90 as an upgrade, despite the overwhelming majority of the technology being paid for many times previously (and despite the presumed efficiency of numbers), but Microsoft needs to continue to rake in the dough to put all of those other companies out of business with the "free" IE, the "free" Media Player, the "free" Netmeeting, etc. The problem is that even if the user does opt to buy and install 3rd party software, most of it doesn't exist because Microsoft has abused their monopoly position and pushed companies in many other software fields out of business as they provide their services "for free", and the customer is already paying for the "free" software that Microsoft is providing. Even if you don't buy or use Microsoft software, Microsoft also subsidizes their monopoly with the Office suite, so think about the costs that countless businesses you do deal with are paying to subsidize putting Netscape et. all out of business.
Microsoft is not like any other software company out there: They control the desktop space, they have enormous money, and they have shown a willingness to abuse their monopoly will little regard for perceptions or legalities. Comparing Microsoft with a car company, of which you can choose between Ford, Honda, GM (many brands), Toyota, Hyundai, etc. etc. etc. (and of each of those you have countless models to choose from) is pure folly.
Let me give a better analogy: Say your telephone company, of which there is only one and there is no real competition (sure there's a couple of other companies with a micro portion of the saturation, but if you sign up with them you can only call customers on their network, and because all your friends and neighbours use the monopoly you stick with it...the old chicken/egg, and it's the concept of a monopoly to begin with), decides that they feel threatened by the local newspaper (maybe the newspaper has supported competing phone companies, or they've talked about legislation) so they start providing a "free" newspaper to all of the cities residents versus the outrageous $1 a day of the competitor, and, oh yeah, coincidentally they have to raise rates 20% because of "increased costs". NOTHING that ANY business "gives" away is free, and whether you realize it or not you are paying for it. The outrage comes if you are being forced to pay for it because of an abused monopoly position, and that is why the situation is as it is right now.
I agree with that, however if you subsampled with just users who use their PC for games (rather than either not playing games, or alternately using a PS2 or whatever for gaming), I think you would find a much much higher percentage that dual-boot.
Grrr...you preview a story and somehow between preview and submit you munge it up. In this case I apparently deleted a >. Bleh.
Anyways that link was to http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$ 351
BTW: Could someone please tell me why Slashdot inserts random spaces, screwing up links and such?
I'm not suggesting that every company should be sueing Microsoft, but rather that vendors should have ZERO restrictions when installing Windows, and if they decide that as a value added they'll replace Solitaire with Megataire, then so be it: Let customers decide among true options rather than letting Microsoft dictate that even if it's beneficial to the customer, vendor Y can't do anything because that might give them a "in" into the software market. For too long Microsoft has dominated through brute force, and their domination has led to lots of software companies that have , and that's just sad.
I have massive respect for the folks in Redmond, and personally I love a lot of their product, but the reality is that they are a monopoly and they have been using that position to stop competition from ever taking root. As a Microsoft apologist for many years they have gone too far too many times, and I no longer find their actions acceptable.
I've often wondered what the economics of a porting company like Loki are like. For instance Vendor X sells game Y for $49.95 and there are 100,000 potential customers, only 10,000 of them happen to be running a variant operating system that you aren't targeting. However, under further analysis you learn that 9,000 of them dual-boot to your target environment, so they're actually potential candidates anyways. So company Y comes along and offers to port your software for those 10,000 users. Now really despite the fact that it has a potential market of 10,000 users, really 9,000 were potential users already, so the porting is purely a convenience for them, and the 1,000 are truly bonafide new customers.
Anyways you can see how economically this can get pretty convoluted, and it must be under tight terms that porting contracts written: I would presume that for the majority of the prospective market the original game was a candidate already. Bleh.
Yup I definitely agree: I use and love FreeBSD and have no issues with it. I just find the paradox of user friendliness an interesting point of discussion.
This should not delay XP and that would be harmful to consumers.
What needs to happen with this is that equilibrium needs to be restored in the computer marketplace through restraints put on Microsoft limiting how they can limit customers: Namely that hardware vendors that integrate the Windows operating system have every right to modify the desktop, add/remove programs, or develop relationships with other companies for cross-promotion. In Dell starts shipping computers with desktops full of third-party tools, and they replaced IE with Mosaic and removed notepad, then so be it: Let reviewers hash them out and sell the benefits versus detriments to the massive number of vendors which we as consumers get to choose from. Personally, while I don't like Java myself, I think it would be great if vendors preinstall the newest Java Runtime Environment for their customers.
It's (BSD) not any harder to install than most linux distributions (save mandrake, redhat, oh, perhaps it is harder to install)...
So in essence what you're saying is that Linux is for the point-and-clicker newbies, and FreeBSD is for the intelligentsia that don't need fancy dancy pointy-clicky wizards and helpers? I get it. So the progression of knowledge should be:
>-PlayStation 2 ->-Windows 98 ->-Linux ->- Windows 2000 ->-GEM (Atari ST) ->-BSD.
;-) Seriously though user friendliness is one of those hilarious multi-headed hydras: When you don't have it you can disparage it as being for idiots and dullards, but once you have it it's a wonderful feature.