Blackberry 8700c
 

Thanks, everyone. 8700c it is. I'll let you know how I like it --

CDF

Blackberry 8700c
 

Let me know how the phone works. I can't stand having both a phone and a blackberry (7000 series - can't hear a damn thing when using the phone).

SBC --> AT&T
 

My bad. Of course, I would have spotted and intentionally made the horrid boot pun.

Dual tuner Tivo
 

Missed this one . . .

dual tuner tivo, with built-in ethernet.

Yeah, it's not directv. so sue 'em.

Treo
 

In the process of switching jobs, larger firm to in-house (local office of an NGO). Had a Treo 600 with my old firm, and now have a choice, Treo 650 or 700W (it's my discretion, the employer does not care). Verizon is the carrier, which has high speed networking for the 700W but not the 650.

Advice? Pros/cons?

Thanks in advance.

Treo
 

I'd say it depends on the back-end mail system your employer is running. if it is Exchange, there are great solutions on both the 700w and the 650. The 700w has the mew Exchange Push Email, and the 650 has versamail with Active Sync out of the box, or something like Chatter EX (direct Exchange syncing, which is whay I use).

If you will be using lots of data, the 700w with EVDO high-speed data is clearly the prefered device. Otherwise, it really somes down to a WM5 v. Palm OS preference.

CITIT
 

California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology has as the world's most advanced digital theater.
Each seat has a gigabit Ethernet connection and power jacks, and the big screen displays images from the first "super-high-definition" projector system installed in this country. The projector was provided by Sony, which is trying to sell it to the movie industry.

Super-high-def video is four times the resolution of standard high-def.

Its cameras put out 6 gigabits of content per second, compared with 1.5 gigabits per second with regular high-def.

A demonstration video, scanned from a 65-millimeter Imax film on India, was so crisp, vibrant and deep, it seemed like 3-D.

"This is a new medium," Smarr said during the tour, part of the Future in Review (FiRe) conference organized by Friday Harbor technology commentator and investor Mark Anderson.

Technology investors, entrepreneurs and journalists attending the conference murmured in awe at the theater demonstrations, then crowded into smaller laboratories to peer at ultra-high-resolution screens and experience a wallsize virtual-reality display.

When combined with superfast Internet connections like the ones at the theater, it enables applications such as super-realistic videoconferencing that Smarr calls "telepresence." The building has 100 gigabits of bandwidth and could, in principle, be configured to have as much capacity as every cable-modem equipped home in the U.S.

Other gee-whiz demonstrations included a 24-channel digital surround-sound system and a prototype of a circa 2015 personal computer with a 100 million-pixel display.

The PC was actually a stack of 55 flat-panel displays powered by a cluster of 28 Linux PCs, plus a 29th PC that served as a sort of controller.

On the big screen, Smarr displayed the system's power by casually showing a visual model of the forces and weather that create a tornado.

He also showed plain old high-definition video of hydrothermal vents filmed 2.5 miles below the ocean's surface by a University of Washington oceanography professor, John Delaney.

"With this [broadband network], any schoolchild can see in live time this kind of thing," Smarr said.

Here.

CITIT
 

Does it have a red vines dispenser at each seat? And a Jolt! cola spigot?

Vonage IPO
 

Any of you other Vonage people thinking about participating in the directed share program?

Vonage IPO
 

I can't even get my Vonage router to work with my computer.

What's this program you speak of?

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

Have we found out which one sounds the best?

Klipsch?
Apple?
Bose?
Altec?

I'm looking at the systems that suggest they sound like stereos.

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

The Altec dock sounds tinny to my ear. I liked the Klipsch when I heard them, but I was given a Bose dock for my birthday about a year and a half ago and I haven't listened to my big system since.

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

Klipsch makes a pretty good speaker. I have never trusted Bose.

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

One of my office mates has the Altec. It sounds like crap. The Klipsch seem very nice at the Apple Store.

I have a pair of Harmon/Kardon Soundsticks (which also has a bass unit); they aren't a dock, but they do sound nice.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipo...r-system-ipod/

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

Are they enough for a kitchen/dining room area? I think I'm looking for a small stereo sound.

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

I'd think so. They were plenty loud for a really large bedroom (approx. 200 sq ft, 12 ft ceilings - damn I miss that place).

Here are a bunch of other reviews:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/accessories/

(scroll down about 2/3 of the page to see the speakers - realize that they rate partially on price, so "A"s that are $50 may not sound nearly as good as "B"s that are $200.

The SoundSticks are regularly cheap (<$100) on eBay from H/K's eBay outlet.

ETA: Another alternative, also available cheap on eBay from the source:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipo...speakers-ipod/

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

. . . from a big stereo?

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

Cool. Thanks.

Ipod Speaker Dock
 

Small sound from an even smaller stereo.

I call BS on AOL as number 1. Now? Sure. But until about 2000, dial up was relevant. Until 1996 or 1997, who else made the internet worthwhile?

True. Also Pointcast (which was a victim of its own success, and was pretty damn cool) and the Iomege Zip Drive (which was also a good solution to its problem that was later supplanted by better solutions).

And the CueCat at number 20 is way, way, way too low. Worst.Idea.Ever.

I disagree. AOL is now and always was terrible (when I say "is now", keep in mind I haven't used AOL in forever, so that assertion is mere speculation). And everything that was said about being forced down America's throat and the use of guerilla tactics to make it impossible to cancel the service are totally true. Even when I was forced to use it in the dawn of the internet era, I recognized it for the crap it was. With the smilies, the cheesy graphics and the content created for the least common denominator. You've Got Mail, indeed.

AOL was, and is, much like a sleazy land speculator.

They build a gated community, spend lots of dough to convince people it was the shnizzit, and sold access for fucking millions of dollars. People paid dial up fees to get in, and service providers of every stripe overpaid by a factor of 10 to get access to the millions of Americans who inhabited the place, most of whom had no idea what the Web was and as such were kinda Internet retards.

Eventually, once more credible competitors came on to the scene, accompanied by the arrival of broadband, the inhabitants began to look around and discover that this golden fucking palace gated community actually had a good number of old tires laying around in the common areas, and grass growing through the sidewalks. So they started leaving in droves.

Sure, AOL was relevant during its heyday, but lots of people got fucked doing deals with them, the features blew, and folks didn't walk away feeling the love.

you're saying BEFORE you saw the improved providers you knew AOL was not good, and you knew specific improvements- not just general complaints? I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit right here.

My first providers were institutions of higher learning, which always kicked AOL's ass. I wept for my parents that they had to settle for AOL when the real internet was out there.

Call what you like. I'm sure you probably luuuvved AOL's "user friendly" format and neato graphics. I would have rather had a cursor flashing on black screen than the crap they passed off as content there in the mid 90s. It is the same problem that Yahoo still has, in fact. They cater to a bunch of 15 yo girls, from the best I can tell by looking at the graphics they choose.

Thankfully the cursor flashing on black screen option was still around back then.

My whole family had the college internet access. My mom was using e-mail to communicate with people long before I ever had it. This is the only way that my mom has ever been ahead of the curve, technologically speaking.

In the mid 90s, other than AOL there was only a cursor flashing. You can't judge AOL then against your standards now. It sucks now, to be sure, but it didn't then.

Quick question--who remembers the name of the browser you used before Netscape (which was before IE, which I hope everyone has replaced with something else)?

2.

College internet sucked in the early 90s. there was email, but not much more.

Mosaic.

I am not. You guys are being intentionally dense? AOL sucked then. It did. The way they set it up was for a demographic that I did not belong to or want to belong to. I did not want to chat with housewives in Debuque about recipes or set up friends groups with other Sk8erGirlz. And it was an impediment to getting to actual internet content. And it was poorly designed. And yes, I realized that then. I would have thought that most people posting here would agree.

Controversial stance - emoticons and icons and chat groups does not equal content. Where is Al Gore when I need him?

Um, wouldn't preferring the flashing cursor be saying that AOL sucked even then? Like, it was so annoying, that having basically nothing was better. To put it in terms I might understand -- even if I couldn't have sex toys, even if I couldn't masturbate, I would not fuck AOL -- I'd rather be orgasm-free for the rest of my life.

I remember, early/mid-90s, somehow signing onto listservs that were things where people discussed stuff but it didn't seem like they were through a web browser. About body art. Now, I can do all the internet I want, but don't know how to get to those. Weird.

I don't remember using browsers in college. The listserv stuff was something I did at work (on my lunch hour).



Edited to change "someone" to "AOL" and to add this clarifying note that AOL is that bad at content/sex that I'd give it up altogether, more or less. And that something good at work may have just become a total nightmare. And that apparently this is affecting not just my ability to express myself, but my handwriting.

OTOH, at least I'm not working in actual salt mines. And my life is overall really good, right? I mean, better than like 90% or more of lives on the planet.

Now that I have Tivo, I think VCRs suck. But I thought VCRs were the greatest thing since sliced bread when they were introduced, at least until CD players came along, which made me realize that vinyl albums sucked, and always did.

How was it an impediment to the internet? You could always fire up mosaic (good work, Gatti) and browse using that. my favorite site was blinkingcursor.com.

I just felt you were being a little too "all that." I'm actually a little too young to remember AOL very well.

It only allowed some sites through (I guess out of fear of competition, possibly coupled with technology problems). Did you read the article posted by RT? Every single criticism of AOL that was in there was true. I didn't think the internet was so great, based on my experience with AOL, so I didn't use it. For a few years. See? I thought it sucked then. The alternative was a flashing cursor on a black screen, and I preferred that. As I said 3 posts ago.

Listserves were better than AOL. IN MY OPINION. Ignoring what was available on AOL and merely e-mailing with friends was better than AOL. IN MY OPINION.

I thought VCR's were great at the time, and for the technology we had then, I'm still impressed with them (though TPTB forced Beta, which was a better recording quality format out of the marketplace, I still appreciate the huge advance that was the VCR). I get your concept, but I disagree w/r/t AOL. What is your problem with me having that opinion? Big early AOL stockholder?

No. Your faulty analogy is saying ncs knew there were options and was unhappy with what she had choosen.

What burger and I were saying is that she would not have known of any alternative. Say if your faulty analogy was the first analogy burger or I had ever seen, we might think "analogies are clumsy and relatively unuseful." But we wouldn't know of an alternative, or the full power of the tool until we had read a sucessfully used one- like this. See?

To the extent my analogy implies that she knew of other options, I rescind my analogy.

Your analogy sucks. You suck. Can't we freeze you in the 9th circle?

I'm not defending the marketing, and once I stopped using floppies, the 1000 hours free BS became a drag. And, yeah, they use all kinds of tactics to keep you locked in, like Microsoft.

The problem I've got with the critique the article offers is that the Web sucked in 1993, and the Web sucked in 1994. Sure, listserves and email were great. You could email your buddy in the next dorm room over. Or maybe email your parents across the country, who would pick it up the next day when they dialed in. And listserves had great porn on them, with no graphics.

AOL did two things others weren't really doing in the mid-90s: 1) providing some content (however sucky, which could be said of most media providers then and now) and 2) introducing the Web to mainstream america.

Did they do it best? Of course not. But they spurred the innovation. People got a taste of the web, and wanted more of it and better. And we got it. I'm not sure that without AOL it would have developed so quickly, and in a way that it's not controlled by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Comcast, or someone else. It would have happened eventually, but I think AOL deserves some credit for helping it get there.

(and I've never owned AOL stock, and cancelled my service as soon as a better ISP became available in 1997)

good first step. now will you promise to stop posting on the parents' board?