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http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/ne xt-gen-dvd.ars

according to that, mostly manufacturing costs.

This article over at Ars Technica, while somewhat one sided has some more information.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050923-5346 .html

Anybody mentioned the article form ArsTechnica? They did a hell of abuse on the iPod nano, and it withstood them for a good fight.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3

It still played.

They also threw it out a car going 50 miles an hour which led to scratches which were awful but the screen still looked readable. Look at the pictures here:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3

I have yet to see a single picture from a compainer that matches the devastation they are communicating in words. All iPods have always scratched. iPods are pretty. Getting them dirty or scratched is doubly frustrating because they are so pretty. But this story is a lot of kerfluffle about nothing.

Initially I read that the screen scratches easily which leads to it not being usable whatsoever, like a shuffle. That does not seem to be the case.

I'm calling bullshit on that one too. arstechnica threw theirs out a car window at 50mph and it's less scratched than the grandparent poster's image.

Something companies have to put up with. A meme gets out that iPod nanos are getting scratched more than white iPods and everyone wants in on a class action suit by rubbing theirs down with sandpaper.

More scratches on an iPod nano sitting in a pocket than on a nano being thrown from a car window at 50mph? I don't think so.

The tests done at ArsTechnica were pretty extreme and the scratching they did wasn't nearly as bad as some people here are describing their own experiences to be.

How much do some people abuse their things?

Mine got scratched after running it over with a VW. The store manager said the same thing had happened to his. He said that as soon as an iPod Nano is crushed under a 1 ton vehicle they're known to suffer a few nicks and cuts. It'll all be completely fixed in the 2nd generation, which will have a smaller capacity and be the same price as its predecessor.

I got an iPod nano last week, and yes, it has been scratching up like mad. And I'm not doing anything remotely bad to it -- just the kinds of things that "respectful" users do.

I've taken pictures of the damage and written up a log of how I've been using my nano. Here's a picture, and here's the full write-up.

When's the recall?

I got an iPod nano last week, and yes, it has been scratching up like mad. And I'm not doing anything remotely bad to it -- just the kinds of things that "respectful" users do.

I've taken pictures of the damage and written up a log of how I've been using my nano. Here's a picture, and here's the full write-up.

When's the recall?

According to the Washington Post, the new anti-obscenity squad, which will consist of eight agents, a supervisor, and assorted staff,

Interesting that they try to strong arm Apple. Guess they're still rankled by being strong armed by Walmart:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041014-4313 .html

If ITMS sales were on par with Walmart's CD sales, wonder how this would go?

"The main question that I had for the rep was this: what's to keep someone from haX0ring up some sort of rank, rotting flesh smell and mailing it to someone with a name like "spring showers" or something so that they wind up stinking up their workstation? The rep tried to assure me that this was somehow impossible because the machine didn't carry those categories of rank odors like rotting flesh, flatulence, etc. Still, I remained unconvinced. Then he started talking about Digiscents' designs on the gaming market, and I pointed out to him that a developer like iD would definitely want the smell of rotting flesh for their games, so the machine would, in fact, have to support such smells eventually. He agreed, and then tried various other angles on convincing me that there's no way you could prank someone by e-flatulating in their cubicle."

"Exactly why is TiVo adding this functionality? I cannot for the life of me figure it out"

It was a licensing requirement from Macrovision
See here http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050914-5307 .html

ArsTechnica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher has written a rather insightful article about just this issue. Well worth the read.

As "Caesar" stresses in his article, DRM on TiVo is nothing new. There's really no point in getting steamed at TiVo about this...they're victims of DRM just as much as their customers.

If we're going to fix this problem, we need to do it at this level...not at TiVo's level.

ArsTechnica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher has written a rather insightful article about just this issue. Well worth the read.

As "Caesar" stresses in his article, DRM on TiVo is nothing new. There's really no point in getting steamed at TiVo about this...they're victims of DRM just as much as their customers.

If we're going to fix this problem, we need to do it at this level...not at TiVo's level.

ArsTechnica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher has written a rather insightful article about just this issue. Well worth the read.

As "Caesar" stresses in his article, DRM on TiVo is nothing new. There's really no point in getting steamed at TiVo about this...they're victims of DRM just as much as their customers.

If we're going to fix this problem, we need to do it at this level...not at TiVo's level.

ArsTechnica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher has written a rather insightful article about just this issue. Well worth the read.

As "Caesar" stresses in his article, DRM on TiVo is nothing new. There's really no point in getting steamed at TiVo about this...they're victims of DRM just as much as their customers.

If we're going to fix this problem, we need to do it at this level...not at TiVo's level.

In the current paradigm designers create non-functional art. Then programmers recreate that art in code. Being programmers and not designers they often don't really see all the details and subtleties, so this is a very difficult back and forth process. Finally the programmers create the engines behind the interface so the program can do the heavy-duty work.

The new paradigm removes that middle step. Designers develop functional art with graphical tools that are natural and familiar. Then the programmers put the engines directly behind what the designers create.

I encountered this video in an article on ArsTechnica. It is a great explanation from the Sparkle development team, complete with hands on demonstrations. Personally, I'm very excited.

In the current paradigm designers create non-functional art. Then programmers recreate that art in code. Being programmers and not designers they often don't really see all the details and subtleties, so this is a very difficult back and forth process. Finally the programmers create the engines behind the interface so the program can do the heavy-duty work.

The new paradigm removes that middle step. Designers develop functional art with graphical tools that are natural and familiar. Then the programmers put the engines directly behind what the designers create.

I encountered this video in an article on ArsTechnica. It is a great explanation from the Sparkle development team, complete with hands on demonstrations. Personally, I'm very excited.

Seems like they've reached step 5 on the Apple Product Cycle. They've gone from "We won't do it" to "Nobody else has done it right yet":

Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula.

So we can expect a product soon :-)

Of course, the PSP platform has a lot of deficiencies that a video iPod would presumably correct. Primarily:

• The perception that the PSP is a games platform. Of course it's true, but my elderly mother has an iPod, but I can't see her buying a handheld games console.
• Lack of downloadable movies (at fullscreen quality). The "Apple iFlicks Movie Store" or whatever it's called would be pivotal in getting such a device going. Looking at the rumour sites and the opening of iTunes 5 resource files, this might be already happening.

Network associates, the makers of McAfee Viruscan, put a line in their EULA that essentially said you couldn't publish a review of the software without their permission. It didn't hold up in court because it violated the first amendment. Network Associates are not the government, and could not force anyone to give up their first amendment rights through contract. That provision was unenforceable, and many things in contracts are unenforceable. A lot of the crap in employment agreements is legalese nonsense that it would take a team of lawyers to interpret, and then they wouldn't all agree what it means. No one can give informed consent to something they do not understand. All they really understand is that if you don't sign, you don't have a job so enjoy living under a bridge when you lose your house! That is not far from holding a gun to your head, and saying, "sign this". An agreement under duress is no agreement at all.

The new controller can be fitted into a Wavebird like shell, so you will be able to play more traditional style controller (eg Gamecube games) with the new controller in tis shell. So you won't have as many buttons as on other platform controllers still, but the porting process won't be as difficult as it would be without the shell.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/zeta-1.0.ars

Eat me, lameness filter.

Did you read this article on the indestructiblity of the iPod Nano? These solid state devices are pretty damned tough.

As for a light source, how about OLED?, or LED lit, not by a normal backlight, but by a Viewmaster-like arrangement of a transparent window behind the screen, so you could hold it up to ambient light to view. eInk is still under patent, but someday it'll be free -- and then we'll party with some decent screens.

They can improve on perfection; they can fix the f***ing finder! People rag on linux and windows all the time, but the mac has a lot of crappy sh** that gets passed off because the mac is so cool. I like Macintosh computers and use one all the time. Please people quit kissing Apple's ass! I always wonder reading Slashdot if it is not Apple's marketing team posting here!

Examples of finder problems:

I love when you go to open a network drive and you get the spinning candy colored wheel and can't do anything else. Sometimes the finder will get frozen.

Also, any network based application that crashes in osx when accessing network resources results in the finder being unusable, even a bad disk such as a cdrom can cause this sort of thing. Then you have to reboot many times. I had typed up a paper and was going to save it and had the finder give me the nice spinning candy ball. Sitting forever. I had to then give it the ctrl-apple-option-esc after about 20 minutes, loosing all my work. Now some people would say that is not a "crash" or a BSOD. I disagree... It is just as bad.

I also love how cut and paste does not always work from application to application within the finder. I tried to cut and paste from a terminal session to Apple Works and it would not let me. I tried to cut from Internet Explorer to Safari and the same thing happend. Sometimes it works fine to cut and paste and sometimes it won't.

Also, the control or right-click context menus are not always consistant and the dock has a tendancy to get in the way of applications even when it is in hide mode. The UI can be confusing to new users because on the mac many people don't relize that often you need to do a close of the application instead of just click an X. And sometimes clicking an X closes the Applications. This gets confusing when you have a lot of applications open, and even causes me some problems at times. It shows lack of consistancy and some poor design. Classic mode applications can sometimes cause the finder to hang with the spinning ball as well and many carbon lib based applications have poor placement on the screen (don't work well with the doc) and get in the way.

If you think this is only my opinion you should read the internet. Here is a good one:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 18

Of course all these bugs seem to be related to the finder and are directly caused by the UI. I would think after 5 years apple would fix them because they have been there since 10.0 and still seem to be there in 10.4.

With all that said the underlying system is very stable and even with the finder unusable at times shell scripts and unix related stuff seems to never have problems. Which tells me it is all the Finder and they should fix it.

-R

your present monitor will NOT work with Vista.

I haven't been following Vista too closely, but I don't recall anything about monitors not working with Vista. Are you referring to the same thing that this ars technica article (new window) is discussing? In that case it's not that the monitors won't work with Vista at all, it's that they can't display legally obtained HD content in full HD on present displays. However, if I'm understanding this right, it looks like it will only to be crippled over a digital pipeline like DVI. But that's beside the point.

Unless I'm mistaken (and feel free to show me evidence that I am) your present display will work with Vista... but just might not show HD content in full HD.

You should take a look at their compositor architecture. Note how GL sits on top of quartz, not the other way around. That means that instead of quartz rendering to GL (which what glx11 was about), GL is rendering to quartz. This is not a 3d-accelerated compositing, nor is it compositing into GL...it only can be. However, there is no video hardware that can do it perfectly and be accelerated at the same time.

That's exactly what it does. All of the "windows" on the desktop are turned into textures and mapped onto flat rectangles; the final compositing, translucency, etc is all done in GL on the video card.

For example can you alpha blend a full screen video, and a full screen 3d game together? If your Mac can do it at full expected framerate, then I will conceed.

Yeah, you can. There were many reports of multiple DVD's playing, 3D renders running, all with multiple levels of transparent terminal windows on top of the whole mess. Ran without a hitch on Quartz Extreme (obviously, as you add more and more on, you'll need more than the base 16MB of video memory, but I haven't heard of anything stressing on a 32MB or better card). Even on my lowly iBook with a mobility GPU and 32MB of VRAM I can have as many translucent windows and such as I like and toss it on top of rendered 3D or other intense graphical content (movies, etc) - nothing blinks.

I cant find the screen shots at the moment, but here's a huge chunk of technical info on the current generation of Quartz Extreme from Ars Technica.

Oh. You mean like filing suit against their overzealous fans and getting laughed out of court?

I disagree... Nintendo and Apple have little in common beyond the obvious.

... between useless karma points and useless ratings on ZDNet?

The reason I mentioned Jeremy and Jay is because a simple Google search on your name turns up tens of hits regarding people who despise you and wish there was a court order requiring you to never be connected to the internet again.

Hey, what kind of English is this? "You just need to grow up, & learn 1 thing: "Brick not hit back" but, apk do!"

Speaking of English, you're sure one to talk about profanity, aren't you? Nice bit of anti-Semitism on you, too. Don't you just hate it when your past catches up with you?

(Oh, and please don't try to tell me how terrible my past is - I have Excellent karma, thanks very much)

I also find the fact that you consider the word "student" to be a pejorative to be a sad commentary on the history of your life.

Didn't do so well in school, did you? Barely squeaked out passing grades? Became embittered at the fact that your professors didn't think you were anywhere near as brilliant as you thought you were? A sad, but all-too-common story. You're not special, Alex. There's lots of people out there like you (academically, at least - your particular combination of poor academic performance and narcissistic personality disorder is quite unique, I'd say).

You make mention many times of how I'm "paying the price" or "being destroyed" or "reaping what I sow" or etc. etc. yadda yadda ad infinitum et nauseum.

Er... what exactly is HAPPENING to me here? Are you sawing off my legs and somehow I'm not noticing? I have to tell you I really don't feel any different (other than extremely amused).

And finally, something about you that truly, truly bothers me is that you actually think people have "betters." Must tie in with your anti-Semitism problem. Again, I implore you - seek help.

... between useless karma points and useless ratings on ZDNet?

The reason I mentioned Jeremy and Jay is because a simple Google search on your name turns up tens of hits regarding people who despise you and wish there was a court order requiring you to never be connected to the internet again.

Hey, what kind of English is this? "You just need to grow up, & learn 1 thing: "Brick not hit back" but, apk do!"

Speaking of English, you're sure one to talk about profanity, aren't you? Nice bit of anti-Semitism on you, too. Don't you just hate it when your past catches up with you?

(Oh, and please don't try to tell me how terrible my past is - I have Excellent karma, thanks very much)

I also find the fact that you consider the word "student" to be a pejorative to be a sad commentary on the history of your life.

Didn't do so well in school, did you? Barely squeaked out passing grades? Became embittered at the fact that your professors didn't think you were anywhere near as brilliant as you thought you were? A sad, but all-too-common story. You're not special, Alex. There's lots of people out there like you (academically, at least - your particular combination of poor academic performance and narcissistic personality disorder is quite unique, I'd say).

You make mention many times of how I'm "paying the price" or "being destroyed" or "reaping what I sow" or etc. etc. yadda yadda ad infinitum et nauseum.

Er... what exactly is HAPPENING to me here? Are you sawing off my legs and somehow I'm not noticing? I have to tell you I really don't feel any different (other than extremely amused).

And finally, something about you that truly, truly bothers me is that you actually think people have "betters." Must tie in with your anti-Semitism problem. Again, I implore you - seek help.

Because it's likely going to be very tied to MS platforms and won't work on anything else.

It might be a fun toy for those utilising the MS Platform but support for it in Free OSes will probably only come about via reverse engineering in a country other than the US.

None of us particularly look forward to yet another closed standard, especially when it is pushed out on the web, effectively locking non-MS users out of certain sites.

Example: FEMA IE-Only

Cheers
Stor

I find that light wood colors reduce my stress,
and it is good to keep your field of vision as clear as possible. You want to reduce distractions and keep the mood light and serene.

I put in laminate wood flooring (easier to clean) with a light coloured massive L-shaped laminate desk with hutch, and real wooden horizontal blinds (all similarly light woods)

The desk lets me hide a couple of workstations in it (out of sight, out of mind - and less noise too) and lets me hold a massive glass monitor (FP1370) on the desk, with an alternate flat panel monitor on the library return. The Belkin KVM, powerbar and all wiring are all hidden underneath.
The old soapbar style MS mouse (with gel pad and mouse bungee) tucks away with the keyboard under the desk on a sliding shelf/tray.

The Klipsch satellite speakers are hidden away in various spaces and an electric coffee warmer pad, a phone, a webcam and a microphone is on the desk.

The 4x6 whiteboard is on the back wall so I have to swivel my mesh backed ergonomic chair to see it. The floor is protected with a clear mat against the chair's plastic casters.

Visitors seat themselves in a drafting chair (the kibitzing seat) just high enough to have difficulty reaching for the keyboard or my mouse. After all, a computer is more personal than underwear (no touching allowed).

The source control repository, database, NAS (get a big ATA one), firewall/router, LAN switch and web servers are all hidden away downstairs in the basement at a secondary L-shaped desk. I normally leave tbe repository and database servers off, but I can remote boot and VNC into them as needed. Any other funky hardware, old software, or odd parts need to hide in the basement office/server room too.

For software, I use Subversion for a repository, ANT for build scripts (regardless of programming target), and CodeWright for an editor (no longer commercially available - get SlickEdit instead). If I have to use an IDE, I use Eclipse, but usually it is more trouble than its worth. Hopefully it will be good enough someday soon.

For hardware, see the ARS system guide.
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-2 00508.ars/4
Get the God box for your primary workstation.
The secondary workstation should have removable drives so you can boot multiple OSes (screw bootloaders) and swap drives around.

All workstations and servers should be dual CPU.
Web servers should be as low power as possible.
Repository and database servers should have RAID for their storage drives (back them up to the NAS) Database server should have SCSI drives and at least 2GB RAM. All other boxes are OK with ATA or SATA drives and at least 1GB RAM.

Make sure you have one of those DVD/CD multiformat burner thingies (to cut releases), and a jump drive (to carry demo/test software around)

If you are serious about software, you will also have plenty of books and quite a few binders. Either get a separate room for them (a study) or put bookcases in the basement, or both (I had to do both) Disk media need to be stored in binders, towers or whatever, but keep a ready rack in your primary office (it's part of my desk hutch)

Here's the ARS Technica article on the HP Dynamo tech.

It's not breakable, slick. At least not for any practical purposes - Ars Technica Threw it out of a car at 50mph and then ran over it - twice - and the player continued to function normally. The cosmetics were pretty trashed and the screen damaged, but if the most you'll do is drop it on the pavement from 3 1/2 feet, I'd say it's pretty safe.

my bet is that Apple didn't run their prototypes over with cars. Or did they??

They probably did.

...Because it implies an all-new generation of technology, when the truth is that most of its internals are silicon that Apple just hasn't used for its iPods but has been used extensively elsewhere, as Ars Technica noted in their review posted here yesterday. This isn't a bad thing, of course, it's just kind of lazy journalism, IMO.

From the review: "Most of the other components are run of the mill as far as iPods go. The heart of the iPod, the PortalPlayer chip, was upgraded to a slightly newer model (the PP5021C-TDF), the audio codec is the same Wolfson Microprocessor (WM8975G) found in the current generation iPods, a new power management unit by Phillips (CF50607), a batch of 32MB of Samsung SDRAM (534-K9WAG08U1M) replaces the old Hynix chips, and the LCD is of unknown manufacturer but it's a 16-bit color, 176x132 1.5" model."

1) Refer to this article:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars

2) The Apple one is out now. Then theres the whole Itunes/ITMS/Airtunes argument. But you go with your Creative if that works for you.

The nano's already going there - it has a lock feature; to unlock it you spin the click wheel and the screen shows a little combination lock. Absolute fluff, so totally Apple...I seriously wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone did just what you say.

I believe its called register renaming, but I probably know less on the topic than you.

The limitations of this are described in more depth here http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:5mZte35ICdQJ: www.answers.com/topic/register-renaming+limitation s+of+register+renaming&hl=en&client=safari
And here http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-3.ht ml
And here
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?articl e_id=53
One significant problem is that this process is not transparent to the coder; it's done on the fly, by the processor, with hints from the compiler.

You know, it's almost like I've seen this somewhere else.

Not that I'm raising a fuss about a great leap forward in technology being copied. More power to MS if they're able to get it to work. It's just funny that Apple is shipping Tiger with this tech now (mostly working - see the Ars article for more details), while Vista will have it in a year.

Now, from what I've read, it seems that the requirements for Quartz 2D Extreme on a Mac include a fast GPU with 128MB of VRAM. It's entirely possible that those are the minimum specs, and 256MB would be preferred, making that part of the MS system requirements seem not quite so crazy.

Why wasn't parent moded funny?

Which, if you read the Ars Technica article DO NOT RUN WINDOWS!

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=dl&s=5 0009562&f=174096756&x_id=1126067740&x_subject=Disa ster+relief+in+the+post-Internet+age,+and+a+call+f or+hardware&x_link=http://arstechnica.com&x_ddp=Y

Before we go off the high board (ok, maybe while we're in the air before hitting water anyway...)

Link and the below snippet:

This is a case many of us are all to familiar with. One where the 'product' is being used in an environment that it was not intended.

"Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind."

So we have an *INTERNAL* app that was opened to the public, thus adding new browsers for which it was not designed to it's possible clients.

It's also a good lesson for designing things even when you *know* the environment in which it will be used...that can change and it's best to work with standards rather than the easiest, but perhaps proprietary choice.

Ars Technica has a good article. Another one on Macworld

Ok, if you want in-depth perhaps you're in the wrong place, but if you happen to want it.... ;)

Not keeping up with the Joneses or the latest discussion about the latest version of Gnome, I was left in the dark when it came to know what was meant when the poster mentioned, "spacial tree browsing." I found the following two articles useful:

• Inside the GNOME 2.6 Desktop (discusses spatial browsing)
• Perhaps the Origin of the Term

However, I don't have the foggiest as to what spacial tree mode really means. Can anybody enlighten me or point me at some screen shots?

-AP

Not keeping up with the Joneses or the latest discussion about the latest version of Gnome, I was left in the dark when it came to know what was meant when the poster mentioned, "spacial tree browsing." I found the following two articles useful:

• Inside the GNOME 2.6 Desktop (discusses spatial browsing)
• Perhaps the Origin of the Term

However, I don't have the foggiest as to what spacial tree mode really means. Can anybody enlighten me or point me at some screen shots?

-AP

They're soon to release the Game Boy micro, a considerably smaller GBA without the clamshell design of the SP, but with replaceable fascias. It'll sell for $99. (Ars Technica journal article here)

If Microsoft is having zero or negative job growth in the US why did it just move to expand it's corporate campus in Redmond?