You really think they'll do the latter? It seems like it would just take a lot less man-hours (read: money) to just make it so that you provide the PIN through the only platform available (read: iTunes) to do so, thus negating the user experience for anybody not on Windows or Mac.
If I jailbreak my iPod touch, my warranty is voided. That's what.
it suits me just fine.
To be honest, I'd be happy with just keeping the home drive as-is - it's never given me issues (except in Amarok where every upgrade or so it would reset my library... that's what I get for using KDE apps... back to rhythmbox for me!). The only issues I ever got was when I just repointed my repositories to the new distro and upgraded that way.
Only reason I go through the hassle of creating the new user is because I want to check out what neat new features have come in by default.
That's what I like about linux - is that I can make it as much of a hassle as I'm comfortable with. If I really want to turn my brain off, then I can reformat my home dir every time. But I configure a lot of shit to work very specifically for me, so I don't want to have to keep reconfiguring everything. Seems a lot easier for me just to keep my home drive kicking around.
Most windows apps wouldn't give me that option. If I wanted to move from XP to Win7 I'd have to completely copy over my Documents & Settings folder, and then start rearranging into the appropriate Win7 folders. Most of my shortcuts would stop working so I'd just have to make new ones. Just seems like a lot more of a headache for power users.
My approach isn't for everybody, but I'm not everybody. I'm the kind of guy who uses shell scripts to clean up his mp3 collection, and likes to install programs at the commandline because synaptic takes too freaking long. Sure, you don't NEED it to run linux effectively, but I'm a stickler for doing things the quick advanced way.
It's just that nobody's programmed it to be user-friendly yet.
Welcome to OSS. Don't like it, rewrite it.
That feature is set on a device-by-device basis. If you set it not to auto-sync on the first time you hook up your device to iTunes, then you can actually pull music from ANYBODY's library, not just your own.
But yeah, I always used that feature, so the Rhythmbox interface works just perfectly for me.
Not being able to talk with Linux is one of the things that has kept me off iPods for years. I finally liked the features of the iPod touch and buckled, and used it in Virtualbox under windows/iTunes (so I didn't have to jailbreak it).
Now, finally, Rhythmbox can seamlessly put music on my iPod. If they take that functionality away, then that oft-publicized letter that Jobs put forth touting open standards as an excuse for not supporting Flash is going to be exposed as pure and utter hogwash.
#1 feature that has me blown away: full iPod Touch/iPhone support in Rhythmbox, without jailbreaking. Seriously, this was the one thing that kept me from buying an iPod touch for so long... I eventually decided to just bite the bullet and find _SOME_ fix that works... ultimately going with just using iTunes within Virtualbox. But then I hooked up my iTouch after upgrading to Lucid and was about to go launch Virtualbox and test that was still working fine... but saw my iTouch, with its designated name, listed in Rhythmbox....
I'm sitting there going, "No.... they didn't...." so I try to drag one of the songs in my library over to my iPod.... and boosh! They did!
Only problem I found though was that when I moved a couple tracks over that had "Unknown" as album title, it actually made everything else with "Unknown" as the album title inaccessible on the iPod. seems though this only has to do with stuff that was added via iTunes... so if I remove the song and then re-add it in rhythmbox, it's perfectly fine.
It's a bit of a weird bug, but easily worked past, and now means that I no longer need to keep going into Windows/iTunes to load stuff onto my iPod. Great jerb!
Also, while I'm not a _huge_ fan of the new default theme (window control buttons on the right pls) I did end up picking one of the new themes that suited my tastes, and I honestly am not looking back at all. I keep saying this every time I upgrade, but best linux yet.
But it's a little bit in-between.
I do a fresh install, but maintain my
Once I've basically got my computer up to where I was before, then I log into my version-specific account which creates a fresh profile, and I start to check out the differences - themes, feature updates, new defaults - for all my apps I regularly use. If I see anything I like, I hop over to my default profile and adjust. If I see anything I don't, then I just don't bother changing my current settings.
Has worked fantastic for my last 3 upgrades (please note that I never go with mid-release upgrades.... while the
Stated like someone who has never understood the frustrations of being hosted on a friend's hobby server.
And it might seem a little ironic, but I find that computer techies, for all their avenues of communication that they have, tend to be the HARDEST people to track down when you need them.
799
... was seducing an enemy agent.
*sigh* This is why we can't have nice things.
I find they usually go up by a half a degree, actually.
... without Bing there is no competition.
The Search Engine market is HUGE. Yahoo's been around forever, and the only way that google ousted them was by having a better product.
Microsoft just plain doesn't deliver to the consumer. Algorithms alone don't make a search engine. I like google because right away on the first page I get straightforward results, usually a wikipedia article, images and videos with thumbnails, news results, a pdf-to-html converter, etc. etc. etc.
First result I seem to always get on bing is ebay. Yeah, google has ads, but they don't hide them amidst the regular results, they keep them off to the side.
Google still just has a better product. Microsoft can complain about proper competition when they have a product that competes.
In secondary school, however, your TA only has about 150 papers to mark,
Damnit. This is supposed to be post-secondary.
The problem though with critical thinking is that it encourages students to challenge their teachers, and when you have standardized curricula and testing then you can't really challenge what is going to be considered "fact" on the testing. This is why critical thinking isn't really encouraged until post-secondary, when challenging your professors is part of what will give you a good grade.
Let me put it this way: let's pretend that I'm writing a Biology paper, and it comes up with a question asking about the function of adrenaline. Let's say that I recently read a peer-reviewed journal article that says it doesn't directly affect your sympathetic nervous system at all and they have studies that prove this, and that stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system is actually caused by something that is almost always secreted simultaneously as adrenaline (this is a huge hypothetical, and probably could be disproven rather easily, but for the case of this example let's pretend it's so).
So final exam, question saying "Explain the function of adrenalin" and you spend a two-page essay theorizing its other uses based on this study and looking towards other evidence gathered in support of the adrenalin-stimulates-sympathetic theory.
In High School, this would get you an 0, because the teachers marking it have to mark papers for ~1000 students and they don't have the time to verify your studying, and their standardized key shows just that it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system.
In secondary school, however, your TA only has about 150 papers to mark, and so they'll do some minor fact-checking, realize that you've now discovered this original and revolutionary theory, and quite probably give you an A.
The thing is, science isn't exact and it never is. However, so that we can actually grade the masses on their understanding of what we're pretty sure we know so far, we pretty much treat it like it is in high school.
High school isn't designed to make you think, it's designed to teach you what we think we know. The value in a post-secondary education is that it shows that you know how to actually understand and challenge a topic as opposed to just regurgitating learned information. Teaching critical thinking in high school would just confuse the majority and devalue a college education.
That being said, if you really think your kids should be learning critical thinking in high school, see if you can get them enrolled in some college-level exams, such as the AP exams. They actually do teach you a lot about critical thinking. I took three AP courses and was insanely thankful I did. Biology was especially interesting, since I got to learn DNA fingerprinting, and got to transform bacteria to become penicillin-resistant. IN HIGH SCHOOL. Also, my provincial exams became a cake-walk because I knew all I had to do for them was just memorize shit, and the _REAL_ tough exams were like a month before my provincials, where I had to critically think about things during the exam. Heck, I even came across a bunch of questions that I didn't even know the answer to before the exam, and I actually had to figure through the question to get the answer. Insanely valuable skills that paid off tenfold in first year.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
