Well, the "article" is a bit of disappointment, however I've been in the same situation and here is how I approach the problem (way more music then will fit on my 8GB touch or smartphone): I have a linux server (Dell Studio Hybrid running Gentoo) that I always leave on which has a copy of my music repository. On it I run Music Player Daemon (MPD) with Icecast as one of the outputs. I connect to MPD via a simple web client (there are several: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients) from my touch, build my playlist, then point Safari to my Icecast server's IP/port which opens the media player and I can listen to MPD anywhere I have WiFi. I'm not sure what the minimum bandwidth required is, but even my smartphones (previously Samsung Saga on WM 6.1, now Droid Eris running 2.1) work with this system. For the record I used TCPMP on WM 6.1 (Windows Media Player mobile worked too, but that app is horrible) and now use I use A Online Radio for the Droid (oddly enough, the built in media player on Android doesn't do streams and it's touch to find an Android streaming client that let's you specify any address/port you want).

I'm sorry, but one person typing a short message, is not going to tell us anything significant. Furthermore we don't know his background (e.g. what types of phones/PDA's he's used in the past), or how "fat" his fingers are. At best all we know is what phone he's best at right now. The performance of the same person when they first used the phone compared to that same person after owning that type of phone for a year will differ significantly.

If someone plans to type on their phone enough for the difference of a few seconds to matter, then they really need to compare the phones in person themselves. A significantly larger sample of people ideally who have never used a phone with a full keyboard may give some idea of which styles tend to work better on average, but that's about the most information you'll get. Whether it works best (and is comfortable) for you is something you need to try yourself.

There's actually a RPM in the Linux forums(which I moderate) for Fedora 12, and compiling it yourself isn't too complex. You need a lot of the -devel packages, but if you take a look at the RPM's spec, that should give you a good idea of what you need.

Previously the web site had a great intro video that actually explained it fairly well. I'm not quite sure when that was changed, but since I've been running the alpha for roughly a year now, I can try taking a stab at it.

Boxee's goal is to be a "social media player" where you can watch media from various sources, see what your friends are watching, and let your friends know what you're watching. By "media" it's referring to TV, movies, music, and pictures. The source of most of the content comes from the Internet (although it definitely supports offline and local network content). Boxee provides a framework to create native applications that allow aggregating and viewing of the online media (basically XBMC plugins if you're familiar with that app), for example there's apps for Hulu, Pandora, Flickr, etc. Boxee automatically monitors what you and your friends watch, and allows you to browse the history of it as well. Boxee also offers other cool features like grabbing metadata for local content. E.g. if it detects a ripped copy of Season 1 of The Office, it will grab screen shots and descriptions of each episode from IMDB.

Personally I've found Boxee's primary benefit is for aggregating media. With the new version, I can search a TV show title and it comes up with all the episodes I can stream regardless of the source (e.g. episodes from Hulu, nbc.com, etc.). I'm not a big fan of the social aspect, but it's not a deal breaker (I just ignore it). So far I've been very impressed with both the alpha and beta releases and would definitely recommend giving the software a go.

I'm glad to see they've finally started offering a native 64 bit version for Linux. Previously, I had been providing patches/scripts to allow folks to compile it themselves on their forums (I'm a moderator on their Linux forum). There's currently a RPM on the Linux forum for Fedora 12, but as I don't run Fedora any more, I can't vouch for it. I have personally compiled the latest Beta on Gentoo ~amd64 and it works fine with some minor tweaks (I plan to submit an ebuild to Gentoo Bug 258082). One thing to note if you do compile from source is that their XULRunner included in the flashplayer portion of their source is missing 64 bit shared objects (this causes flash to break). I've submitted a bug to get the XULRunner updated, but haven't heard anything.

I've ran the closed Beta for the last month and so far it's very promising. I just wish Boxee's development process was more open.

The biggest benefit I see of the Ion is for small form factor desktops to support VDPAU (an API for hardware offloading of video decoding). Majority of the recent small form factor systems (e.g. Dell Studio Hybrid) I've looked into use the Intel 4500 which does support XvMC, but at least in Linux VDPAU is much more usable (larger list of supported codecs, etc.). I moderate the Boxee Linux forum, and I'm seeing a lot of posters using Ion based HTPC's.

I agree, and from the article (I know...), it seems like there's already some effects. She's quoted as say, "They were so nice to me," which implies the cops were being decent (nice to hear), and the judge released her on a personal recognizance bond (so she didn't have to pay bail or a bail bondsman, assuming she shows at court). She did get two days of jail, but I definitely hope this gets some good media exposure as I believe most folks are going to side with her even if it's not the letter of the law. I'd be interested to see if anyone more familiar with this law could shed some light on its details. Best case would be if she could get off on a technicality (e.g. the amount filmed was too short to count for the felony), but even then she still has to live with being arrested.

Actually I've found last.fm's recommendation system works extremely well; so well in fact that I constantly have a tab open to it when I'm browsing music stores like eMusic (eventually I want to write a little app for this purpose using last.fm's API, but I digress). For those unaware, last.fm users submit what they're listening to through automated plugins (and the supported apps list is huge and very platform independent, I personally use both Amarok 1.4 and MPD); one of the things last.fm does with this music is identifies your "neighbors" (people with similar lastes, i.e. 8 of our top 10 artists are identical). I've found that one of the best ways to find new music is by browsing what my neighbors are listening to and checking out any of their top bands that I'm not familiar with. They also list related artists by correlating this information (e.g. the majority of users who have Band A as a favorite artist also like Band B). Another useful feature is being able to check what an artists most played songs are (great for when it's an artist you never heard of). With that said, I'm definitely interested in seeing what recommendations come from this UCSD team (and not just because I'm an alumnae) as I'm always interested in finding new artists, especially smaller and local ones.

I agree, and after reading the article (I know...) I doubt Mr. Stross has even seen the show. Some of his issues are the lack of story arcs or lasting impact to the universe, yet the show had both. The series had major story arcs with actions from the first and second season directly impacting what occurs in the final one. You definitely got the feeling that the major points of the series had been planned years in advance. Likewise the fate of several races varied tremendously with major effects to the surrounding galaxy (effectively the universe for the races in the show). Babylon 5 also took an interesting approach in not making humanity some überpowerful utopian society, in fact it was much closer to the opposite (earth wasn't even close to a powerhouse in the galaxy, and its political climate approached dictatorship through the series). I get the feeling that he has a bit too much prejudice against non-hard science fiction to fairly evaluate several of the shows.

Coincidentally, the Ask Slashdot regarding SciFi works for students lead me to Isaac Asimov's cool short story "The Last Question" (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html which has an interesting perspective on this...

Yeah, that through me off as well, but the Yahoo article linked in the summary clarifies, "The Arm processor is a secondary CPU that sits alongside an Intel low-voltage," so it sounds similar to the "Instant-On" provided by SplashTop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SplashTop on some Asus machines (e.g. Eee Box).

I have to agree, although personally I don't think we need to throw 3D all the way out. Something along the lines of what Capcom did with Street Fighter IV would be pretty awesome. I've said it before, and will say it again. I wish these classic series would start sticking to their roots. When will companies realize it's not in their best interest to reinvent the wheel when it comes to classic series? I'm dying for modern remakes of several classic titles (Raiden, Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, etc.), and I'm confident that doing them 2D is not only the cheaper approach, but will lead to the superior product.

Gradual change, my friend.

Not all CDs have copy protection. Not buying CDs at all isn't really better than buying copy protected CDs.

You don't have to go directly to an absolutely-no-DRM-acceptable state. Favour games, developers, publishers and distribution channels that use weaker DRM. I shouldn't have to tell you this, but if you don't do anything, nothing will happen. So do something.

Let's see... Pain Killer, released 2004, available DRM-free from GOG.com. Took less than a minute to find that. There are also recent games which were released straight DRM-free, such as the new Prince of Persia. Many indie games don't have DRM.

If you expect to achieve a DRM-free world without making sacrifices, you're just dumb.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-048.mspx mentioned no updates for Windows 2000 SP4 because it requires a major change in operating system (OS). If no fixes, then what will stop it? Hardware routers and/or software firewalls for those who still use it?

Seriously, "duplicating core functionality" is not the only restriction in the iPhone SDK.

This is quite obviously related to the restriction on exposing an executable shell and other forms of executing arbitrary code, such as external plugins or frameworks. iPhone apps can't run random code downloaded from the Internet or run other files on the system. They are all sandboxed to prevent PC-style chaos.

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

That same restriction is what kills any prospects for implementing Flash, Silverlight or Java on the iPhone.

Apple approves Commodore 64 emulator for iPhone