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More iTunes Math
markmcb writes "OmniNerd once again digs into the math behind iTunes. The 5-star ratings in iTunes are actually stored in a variable allowing values from 0 to 100, with 20 = 1-star, 40 = 2-star, etc. Known to few, if you set a rating to 30 (manually), it will show up as 1 1/2 stars in the program's GUI. Matt Schinckel provides interesting statistical evidence showing that not only do non-whole, non-half values (e.g., 47) not increase the amount a song will play, but neither do the half-star ratings (with the exception of .5 star)."
That sounds like something Apple would do: write high-quality software that even resists unexpected tampering.
.NET applications, but rather small, fast applications written in Objective-C.
Indeed, the consumer software world would be far better off if it followed Apple's model. It really makes me wonder how good Windows applications today would be if they had put more effort into developing YellowBox. We might not be faced with a future of slow, resource-intensive
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Actually, the Windows equivalents nowhere near compare to what AppleScript offers. The WSH is, to put it kindly, a shitty tool. VBScript, well, we're all aware of how easily it allows applications like Microsoft Word to be exploited.
The open source solutions are far better. A program with Python, Tcl, or Scheme scripting, for instance, is often quite a useful application. Take GIMP, for instance. It's Scheme scripting capabilities are quite superb, and make for a swell application.
Still, AppleScript is by far the most integrated of all such systems. That's understandable, considering Apple's emphasis on providing a solid, coherent desktop system.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yeah, you just made two!
I'm well aware of the DCOP capabilities of KDE. But not every Linux program is a KDE program. There are many users out there who choose to use GNOME, for whatever reason. Other significant applications, like Mozilla and OpenOffice, also do not necessarily have DCOP support.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's quite obvious that it doesn't impact on a normal user's experience. I thought that went without saying, but apparently you completely missed that point.
So in the end it doesn't crash the program, nor does it lead to incorrect output or corrupted data, or anything of that sort. Thus it is not a bug.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
He could have decompiled the application. But doing so would likely have been in violation of the licensing agreement he agreed to before using said software. You may question the legality of such agreements, but he may not have wanted to take the risk of publishing his findings. Litigation is expensive, after all.
Give me a very large break. Even Apple, sue hungry nutjobs that they are, isn't going to sue someone for finding out a trivial part of iTunes. As for the "you don't find this interesting, but us slashdot people do" You can just shove it. Some things are just esoteric minutia, and this is one of them.
AccountKiller
Done right? Pah.
Using iTunes to manage a decent sized music collection is like shooting yourself in the head with a gun that looks like a candy cane. Sure it looks nice, and it's really glossy on the surface, but at the end of the day you're still blowing your brains out.
The slowness of iTunes notwithstanding, the utter lack of any decent playlisting features, the ability to sync to 1 (one) music player, the pisspoor MP3 encoder included, the terrible UI which doesn't fit in with Windows and won't even let you change the UI font to something different, did I mention the slowness?
It's really, really awful. I always find it funny to hear people screaming about Windows Media Player being the devil, because it's a fucking paragon of virtue compared to iTunes (at least WMP's DRM scheme works with more than one audio player).
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --