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Comment Re:Psystar is 100% wrong (Score 1) 865

Well, OK, they are... definitely wrong according to my moral code of "stupid douchebags who want to make a quick buck without doing anything original."

How can you argue they are doing nothing original? They build computers using a set-up they designed all by themselves, in a manner that they believe is more cost-effective and/or powerful than Apple's set up. Under your argument innovators are really just, "stupid douchebags who want to make a quick buck without doing anything original." That's like saying that selling a non-honda car with a Honda engine is morally wrong. In that example the designer still had to make the chassis, the steering assembly, the transmission etc. just as Psystar has to pick the parts for their computers and assemble them.

Comment Re:Apple's activity is criminal here, Palm's is le (Score 1) 656

Why don't you list a couple of non-iPod devices and explain exactly why they are so much better?

Well i'm not too familiar with other devices; i do however own a Cowon S9 and love it. I've owned it for probably 7 or 8 months at this point. The S9 has an OLED screen with a near 180 degree viewing angle, a solid state drive available in 8, 16, and 32 gigabyte version. It supports flac, it can view Dvix files. it can play flash games,it has a touch screen that is unnoticeably smaller(less than a quarter of an inch). in addition to volume, play/pause track skip, and hold controls on the outer edges. It can play 8 hours of video on a single charge, or 55 hours of music. It has user customisable themes. And it is about $100 dollars cheaper than an ipod touch of the same size

The Internet

Submission + - Pigeon vs. S. African 'Net: Pigeon Wins, by a lot (yahoo.com) 2

inject_hotmail.com writes: Hi, I'm a pigeon, and I'm faster than South Africa, at doing the Internet.
The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes.
As discussed yesterday, I just read over on Yahoo news that a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.

Software

Submission + - Simple file transformation tools, where are they? 2

cs668 writes: "There is a part of our business that does one time loads of data. It comes from the customers in varying formats and can be anywhere from 5,000 to 500,000 records. Our import processes use XML. Currently we are using Excel to transform the data from the customers format to our XML. It's the wrong tool for the job.

We are looking for a good data transformation tool that makes it easy to graphically define the transformation, allowing the input format to be easily defined and constraining the output to the XSD for our XML. Here is the problem, every tool we can find is geared at writing code, or the part of some massive ETL architecture intended to be the MOM of your entire enterprise. It seems like 10 years ago you could find nice tools for this, but all of the good ones have turned into massive piles of Enterprise level over complexity.

Can anyone recommend a simple tool that is suited for this type of one time data transformation?"

Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 1) 681

Ummmmm... I happen to be running Ubuntu at the moment, and by opening "Add/Remove.." under applications it opens an interface of free applications that are installed with one-two clicks, "and everything just needs to just work, no compiling code or anything crazy." Hell I can even browse them by category or use a search bar on the top.
IBM

Submission + - My Classic PC, Still Working After All These Years 2

tunersedge writes: Check the specs:

Epson Equity I personal computer (c. 1984)
512K RAM
82-key keyboard
2 (count them!, 2) 5.25" floppy disk drives
13" RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs)
Handy on/off switch
healthy 25-year-old yellowed plastic
absolutely NO software

This PC happens to be one my parents bought brand new in 1984. My mom ran a pre-school, and they used it to keep records and payroll. Lotus 123, baby! I cut my programming teeth on this thing. GW-Basic was my friend. Kings Quest screens took 2 minutes to load when you walked into a new one. I dug this thing out of my parents basement yesterday. I pulled the case of, dusted out a little (surprisingly low on the dust), and plugged it in. It actually fired up! I'm stoked, except the disks we had are missing. Who knows where they ended up. What I'm looking to do is either buy some old-working disks with whatever I can find (MS-DOS 3.22, GW-Basic, whatever), or try and recreate some using a USB based floppy drive and some modern software. Has anyone tried to resurrect a PC this old before? I figured at least a couple Slashdotters might have some good leads.

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"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

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