Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.
Who is the poster picking a fight with? No one. Or if he is, he's doing too subtle of a job to blindly label it "flamebait". His stated position is that he worries about zealots because he fears they might do damage to his community for X, Y, and Z reasons. He's not calling a jihad against zealotry, merely pointing out analogs between zealots and terrorists. He's not blindly saying "You zealots are terrorists so NYA!", he backs up his claims with reasoning.
You are all acting like little children. Someone has said Santa Clause does not exists, and instead of sitting down, considering the argument and the evidence, you have all collectively thrown your hands over your ears, shouting "La! La! La! LAAA! I can't hear you!"
If you ever want to advance your ideas, your ideas must be challenged and expanded and filled in by other, contrary ideas. Contrary ideas are, by their nature, the opposite of what you might like to think. If you go and label everything you don't want to think about flamebait, you will never think more than rudimentary thoughts about the world.
Like the zealots he speaks of, he goes to far.
How? All he said was:
I expect [a zealot] -- or perhaps a group of them -- will go too far at some point and do significant damage to the open-source movement... zealots of any movement represent a huge risk to that movement because zealots do not consider the repercussions of their actions.
That's going too far? He's basically quoting from the dictionary!! Webster's defines a "zealot" as a "fanatic". If you look "fanatic" up, it says:
marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion
So, zealots are excessive by definition. Hmm. Sounds to me like Webster is saying they go too far. And zealots are marked by uncritical devotion? I'm going to assume you know the definitions of "uncritical" and "devotion" and put two and two together. Zealots, by definition, are so blinded by their faith that they don't pay close attention to the repercussions of their actions. This is exactly, by the way, what the poster said.
Maybe before quoting someone and claiming they've gone to far, you should not only read what was written, but consider what the words mean. If anyone behaved fanatically here, it was you and your knee-jerk reaction to an honest post.
Don't forget that Apple now owns eMagic and thus Logic, one of the best Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) on the market. For super-high-end mixing and finalizing, ProTools and the like probably still rule the market, but many, many top artists and indi folk are using Logic for at least composition and sound creation/munging, only jumping to ProTools for the mix down.
And whether the artists are using Logic, ProTools, Cubase, or what have you, the large majority are doing it on a mac. So the artist loyalty to the brand is even greater than you suggest.
The protections on purchased songs really just keep you from putting them on P2P networks, web sites, or emailing them to other people. The latter can be gotten around if they also have iTunes AND you trust them with your authorization password.
Not so. You can email someone a protected AAC (.m4p) file, your iTMS user name, and password, and they would be unable to play the song. What they could do is use your user name and password to authorize their computer to play the protected AACs, but you can only have three computers authorized in this manner at any given time.
Thus if you mailed the protected AAC out to 20 people, and they all tried to play it at the same time, only the three that were authed would be able to. Of course, those three would probably not be able to get through the song before one of the other 20 took their auth away in an attempt to auth their own computer to play the song.
Also an interesting tidbit: protected AAC files have the account email address and full name of the purchaser in plain-text towards the top of the file. So be careful who you "share" these files with. If they make it out to the cloud, they'll be easily traceable back to you.
And of course, these same parents are so concerned about the effect of 2.4Ghz waves on their childrens' health that they've all thrown out their microwave ovens, right?
This article is well thought-out as far as its arguments go, but fails to look at the big picture.
The author seems to think micro-payments are doomed to fail because it is not macro-payments that are deflecting customers -- it's the mental action of deciding whether or not to buy something.
I can see his point in the short-term. If a site I read regularly suddenly switches to micro-payments, I have to decide if I think the site is "worth it" anymore. I might very well stop visiting it all together. If you force any significant number of people to make a decision -- any decision -- you'll end up with people on both sides of the fence.
Likewise I agree with the author that, if I was bored and randomly surfing a list of micro-payment-enabled content, I would have to subject each offering to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny that may turn me off from clicking the "Buy" button.
But these two scenarios are not what micro-payments are trying to address. Micro-payments really shine when the decision to buy has already been made.
The large percentage of all things bought are premeditated. It's not often that someone drives by an auto dealer and decides on the spur of the moment that he's going to buy a car. People do not go to a book store and just wander aimlessly and sometimes accidentally buy a book.
If a person goes shopping, it is with the intention to buy.
So now lets look at the more likely scenario of a micro-payments shopper. Say a young boy longs to find some entertaining reading material. He's already decided that he's willing to pay for it. So he goes on line to sort out his options. He finds a comic book store, but it's in the next town, a half-hour drive away. He discovers he can subscribe to his favorite comic, but that's expensive, and it will take the comic book company forever to ship it to him. There are some free comics on the web, but he's read all of those, and some of them are of questionable quality. Then he comes upon a comic that can be purchased with micro-payments. Let's look at the questions this boy is going to ask himself:
Which is the best value?
Which gives me the quickest gratification?
Which is the least amount of hassle?
Which looks the most interesting?
Notice how whether to buy or not was never a question asked? Notice how micro-payments encourage a positive response to three of the above four questions? If you manage to bat.750 with a customer, chances are you will make a sale.
People will only balk at being asked to buy something if they are not shopping to begin with. And it's a fact of business that it's hard to get people who are not shopping to make impulse purchases. But micro-payments should not be misconstrued as being designed to attract the impulse buyer. While their low cost does give them a foot in this door, micro-payments will really only come into their own when used to sell goods that the public is looking to buy.
The new Apple Training Series book is not only a brilliant to learn the basics of Logic, but also comes with a demo. Upon buying the book you can go to Peachpit's website and order a free XSKey that lets you use Logic and all its plugins uncrippled for 30 days.
Not only is Logic now OWNED by Apple (so you can bet it will get the kind of resources Final Cut Pro has been enjoying over the years) but Logic Audio evolved from Notator, hands down the best notation software available (for the Atari).
While Logic itself can have a bit of a steep learning curve, there are now brilliant books and active, friendly mailing lists available to help you out. And the notation part of the program has always been pretty intuitive. Plus, as an organ player, you might appreciate that Logic has what I feel is the best B3 plug in ever made (Logic comes with a 30 day demo of this, and all its virtual instruments for you to mess around with). And if, down the road, you decide you want to take your notating to the next level and produce/mix/record/arrange/whatever, Logic will be able to take you there.
There are three different versions of Logic,
Logic Audio
Logic Gold, and
Logic Platinum
They differ mostly in how many audio tracks you can arrange with, what DSP effects ship with each one, and other minor stuff like being able to draw automation curves. Feature comparison charts are available. For what you describe, you would need nothing more than Logic Audio, but the upgrade path to Gold and Platinum is clear and affordable should you decide you need more later on.
I know a number of people who are interested in graphic story-telling. Unfortunately, not many people are as equally gifted artists as they are writers (or vice-versa). As graphic novels are a medium that require both these skills, what would you advise would-be collaborators do to find each other?
You're missing the way the financial world works. A company is not required to post record-breaking profits each quarter in order to be a fiscally "successful" company (though they will certainly be successful if they can pull this off!). The most important thing is that a company meets its projections. A company that gives low projections but meets them is much better off than a company that gives high projections but misses them even if the latter company still rakes in more profit that the former. Why? Because the former company has a business plan it's sticking to and the latter is just out of control.
Now I ask you to recall Jobs's last keynote when he said Apple expected to be hit hard by the downturn in the economy, but felt they had enough in the bank to weather the storm and they planned to invest in evolving the company's technology so that they could hit the ground running when the market came back.
IIRC, Apple posted three quarters of successively lesser losses mostly due to "internal investment" and "one-time restructuring" costs. And now they've started turning profit in this, the year of the notebook, which was another thing Jobs forecasted as being a major direction he wanted to take the company in. They met that goal too, having shipped more laptops this quarter than in any other quarter of the company's history.
Apple definitely seems to be a company with a plan -- and more importantly a company that sticks to its plan. Unless you honestly believe that plan is "to burn Apple to the ground and salt the earth," any report which shows Apple sticking to the plan is a good report.
Besides, the article is clearly being a link to a test to buck up those who prefer PC's.
Indeed. And I've no problem with giving a hand to my brother PC user. And I totally understand why, from Adobe's point of view, it all comes down to speed. After all, interface- and appearance-wise, there's no difference between Illustrator for OS X or Windows. But I think that, though bringing it all back to speed is an easy simplification for Adobe to make, in the real world users take more into account when choosing a computer platform than just how fast it crunches.
No one claims that speed is the end-all or the be-all.
But that seems to be exactly the argument Adobe is making if they are, in fact, providing some sort of "preferred" endorsement for the Windows platform. The only evidence they've given to back up this decision is time-to-complete-X graphs.
You and I both seem to agree that there is more to a platform than how long it takes to render a lighting effect, but we disagree on what platform is "the best". Well, different strokes for different folks, right? It seems that Adobe, of all people, should share our view.
Besides, although Apple isn't dead, guess what % of people buy Macs compared to Windoze boxes?
I've never seen this as a particularly meaningful reason to switch to Windows (or, for that matter, to do anything). Most of the world uses Windows. Cool.
At any rate, this is clearly not a factor to Adobe who is still making money hand-over-fist on software sales for the Mac.
You mistake my point. I did not say that, were it not for Apple, PC users would still be in DOS. I said that if everyone's only concern was speed PC users would still be in DOS, as programs running in DOS were much faster than their Windows counterparts. But there are things more important to users than speed such as having a multitasking environment, a common user interface, and a shared clipboard, for example.
You stumble all over yourself in your effort to bash Apple. It does not make you look particularly intelligent.
People who use Macs don't use them because they're faster.
Adobe has for a long time now achieved feature and interface parity between their Windows and Mac products. That's no mean task, and they should be applauded for it. But it seems a little short sighted of them to name Windows the "preferred" platform just because it's faster. Photoshop may be the same on Windows and OS X, but Windows and OS X are very different. And no matter how graphically productive you are, you are still going to end up spending a large amount of time outside of Photoshop's isolated interface.
If speed were really the end-all and be-all of graphic design (or computing in general) Apple would have died a long time ago and PC users would still be using DOS.
At just over 4 years old, I think this would be the first big break for SETI@home.
You mean you think that discovering alien radio transmissions would be a big break for SETI? Sheesh. Whatever, man. I guess you're definition of "big break" isn't as demanding as mine.
A 12" laptop with DVI, plugged into a Cinema Display could be a desktop replacement. But note that the 12" Powerbook does not have DVI. Nor does it have an L3 cache or a FireWire 800 port or memory expandable above 640Mb.
The review played the lack of these features off as deficiencies that counted as checks in the "bad" column against the 12" PowerBook because it made it less suitable for a desktop replacement.
My point is that these are not deficiencies but very conscious design decisions that hint to the purpose and philosophy behind the 12" PowerBook and its low price tag (tablet killer? PDA equalizer? Executive presentation junkie's entry drug? Digital photographer's best friend?).
But whatever you might personally argue the 12"s niche is, it's clearly not targeting the desktop computer. Other's here seem to be happy with it as a desktop replacement, but then, that's the/. crowd who appreciate cool, well-made, technology and know, for the most part, exactly what can and cannot be expected of it.
But if you're average Windows (or Apple!) user bought the 12" expecting it to replace her desktop computer, she would be disappointed (as, indeed, the author of the above article was).
I say, "Well, of course you're unhappy with it on your desktop! That wasn't what it was made for, and if you use it for what it was made for you will find it to be a brilliantly designed machine."
As to your situation, you were evidently looking for a 12" desktop machine. That is something many, perhaps, here on/. would like. But I mean no offence when I say to you, you are in the minority. Most people, when they want a "portable desktop machine" want something that is just small enough to move from room to room or take to set up in a hotel during exceptionally long business trips. The 15" or better yet the 17" fit this mold exceptionally well.
On the other hand, when most people go shopping for a small laptop, they want it for constant travel or true portability around the house -- my 12" is never on a desktop. It's always on my lap!
These people, more often than not, have/need a desktop machine, too. If a desktop owner wants a portable laptop to use along side his other computer, the most important "feature" of that laptop is low price (he already owns one computer, after all).
Coincidentally, if a desktop owner wants a portable computer to use along side his other computer, the least important features are DVI, L3 cache, etc. So Apple could kill those things, make the 12" cheaper, and make this class of computer user very happy.
You may claim that Apple should release a version of the 12" that has DVI, L3, >640Mb so that your class of computer user is happy, and I sympathize with you. But the hard facts are they would not sell more than a few thousand such PowerBooks, so it's not likely to happen.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Apple will see complaints like yours in such a number that they'll realize there is a market for tricked-out small PowerBooks out there. You could get your wish. But in the mean time, saying that the 12" is crippled because it doesn't fit your particular needs is like saying a hammer is stupid because it won't tighten the bolt you have in front of you.
Its lack of DVI is not really hard to figure. This is the travel-sized laptop. This thing goes anywhere. It's more rugged than most other laptops on the market. It's small. It's light. It's got a great keyboard and a great LCD (yes, that's right, I love the LCD. I think it's fine). But it's not going to replace your desktop.
That was never its intent. Desktop-replacing laptops start at 15". This is the laptop that you sync up with your dedicated desktop box and then take on the road. It does a great job of that, and honestly, at $1800.00, you can afford to have the 12" and a desktop machine.
Assuming that this is not going to be your desktop machine, then, what's the use of DVI? The only reason it has external video at all is so that you can give presentations with it (another good use of a truly portable machine), and towards that purpose, it has RCA- and S- video out. Even presentations made with the sexy new Keynote are not going to benefit from DVI.
This laptop fills a very specific niche (here's a hint: that niche is not "iBook replacement"). Even a cursory glance at the specs reveals that. If someone got sold on the thing to do something it wasn't meant to, well, sorry. They're going to be as unhappy with it as anyone is who tries to use the wrong tool for the job. For my part, I'm using it for what it was made for. And I'm quite happy with it!
...if you're installing Mozilla in a professional environment, you must not forget to download a (slightly) more professional splash screen than the one Moz ships with (shouldn't be hard. The one Moz ships with is embarrassingly bad). You can find some good ones here.
Then rename that image "mozilla.bmp" and put it in your root mozilla directory (the same one that holds your mozilla executable, mozilla.org by default).
Nothing will kill the reputation of this new browser you're deploying like that ridiculous green dinosaur breathing fire all over.
This shouldn't be a big surprise, as this is exactly what Apple said they were going to do at MWNY last year. Jobs said that the market was crappy and that Apple's sector and therefore Apple itself would be hit hard. But he said that Apple had a lot in the bank and -- unlike other computer manufacturers -- was prepared to invest and innovate through the downturn, taking a loss at first, then floating by on their technology, and then, when things started picking back up again, hitting the ground running to overtake their competitors.
Looks like, with the introduction of the new sexxy powerbooks, some great brand-new lines of software, and that big hit listed as "one time re-organization costs", Apple is right on schedule.
If a Beatle can "mess up" and subconsciously insert parts of a song he heard into a song he was writing, then I'm quite sure I'm capable of doing much, much worse. It's kinda the name of the game in composing. You try to make everything you write original, and it certainly sounds original to you, but just about everything modern is based on the same major scale and certain intervals just sound good next to one another. You hope you come up with a progression that not only sounds good, but also that no composer before you came across and thought sounded good. Clearly there's room for mistakes to be made here.
For example: sometimes I dream music. I'll turn on the radio or play a game in the dream and a dream song will start playing. I've trained myself, when I wake, to pay attention to and zero in on what that song was. Once I've got it down, I'll run over it in my memory and try to think if there are any other songs that sound like that. Sometimes I'll realize that it's just a variation on some song or another I had been listening to that week, but sometimes I just know that it's new, and I have to go with that.
About the best you can do is keep a quick collection of the songs you most often draw inspiration from in a playlist and run over it after you have the structure of a song down. For me, when I'm working on a video game score, that means listening to the collected work of Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Yoko Kanno. It's a big list, but when you have the "shape" of a song you're writing in your head, it only takes listening to the first 5 seconds of another song to diff their comparative shapes internally.
At any rate, the difference between George Harrison's deal and mine is that my songs are open source:-P If they were found to be copyright infringing, you could always just change them. MIDI is an open (and even human readable!) file format. You could rip out or modify offending sequences with perl!
Slashdot Mirror
You are all acting like little children. Someone has said Santa Clause does not exists, and instead of sitting down, considering the argument and the evidence, you have all collectively thrown your hands over your ears, shouting "La! La! La! LAAA! I can't hear you!"
If you ever want to advance your ideas, your ideas must be challenged and expanded and filled in by other, contrary ideas. Contrary ideas are, by their nature, the opposite of what you might like to think. If you go and label everything you don't want to think about flamebait, you will never think more than rudimentary thoughts about the world.
Like the zealots he speaks of, he goes to far.
How? All he said was:
That's going too far? He's basically quoting from the dictionary!! Webster's defines a "zealot" as a "fanatic". If you look "fanatic" up, it says:
So, zealots are excessive by definition. Hmm. Sounds to me like Webster is saying they go too far. And zealots are marked by uncritical devotion? I'm going to assume you know the definitions of "uncritical" and "devotion" and put two and two together. Zealots, by definition, are so blinded by their faith that they don't pay close attention to the repercussions of their actions. This is exactly, by the way, what the poster said.Maybe before quoting someone and claiming they've gone to far, you should not only read what was written, but consider what the words mean. If anyone behaved fanatically here, it was you and your knee-jerk reaction to an honest post.
Don't forget that Apple now owns eMagic and thus Logic, one of the best Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) on the market. For super-high-end mixing and finalizing, ProTools and the like probably still rule the market, but many, many top artists and indi folk are using Logic for at least composition and sound creation/munging, only jumping to ProTools for the mix down.
And whether the artists are using Logic, ProTools, Cubase, or what have you, the large majority are doing it on a mac. So the artist loyalty to the brand is even greater than you suggest.
The protections on purchased songs really just keep you from putting them on P2P networks, web sites, or emailing them to other people. The latter can be gotten around if they also have iTunes AND you trust them with your authorization password.
Not so. You can email someone a protected AAC (.m4p) file, your iTMS user name, and password, and they would be unable to play the song. What they could do is use your user name and password to authorize their computer to play the protected AACs, but you can only have three computers authorized in this manner at any given time.
Thus if you mailed the protected AAC out to 20 people, and they all tried to play it at the same time, only the three that were authed would be able to. Of course, those three would probably not be able to get through the song before one of the other 20 took their auth away in an attempt to auth their own computer to play the song.
Also an interesting tidbit: protected AAC files have the account email address and full name of the purchaser in plain-text towards the top of the file. So be careful who you "share" these files with. If they make it out to the cloud, they'll be easily traceable back to you.
The author seems to think micro-payments are doomed to fail because it is not macro-payments that are deflecting customers -- it's the mental action of deciding whether or not to buy something.
I can see his point in the short-term. If a site I read regularly suddenly switches to micro-payments, I have to decide if I think the site is "worth it" anymore. I might very well stop visiting it all together. If you force any significant number of people to make a decision -- any decision -- you'll end up with people on both sides of the fence.
Likewise I agree with the author that, if I was bored and randomly surfing a list of micro-payment-enabled content, I would have to subject each offering to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny that may turn me off from clicking the "Buy" button.
But these two scenarios are not what micro-payments are trying to address. Micro-payments really shine when the decision to buy has already been made.
The large percentage of all things bought are premeditated. It's not often that someone drives by an auto dealer and decides on the spur of the moment that he's going to buy a car. People do not go to a book store and just wander aimlessly and sometimes accidentally buy a book.
If a person goes shopping, it is with the intention to buy.
So now lets look at the more likely scenario of a micro-payments shopper. Say a young boy longs to find some entertaining reading material. He's already decided that he's willing to pay for it. So he goes on line to sort out his options. He finds a comic book store, but it's in the next town, a half-hour drive away. He discovers he can subscribe to his favorite comic, but that's expensive, and it will take the comic book company forever to ship it to him. There are some free comics on the web, but he's read all of those, and some of them are of questionable quality. Then he comes upon a comic that can be purchased with micro-payments. Let's look at the questions this boy is going to ask himself:
- Which is the best value?
- Which gives me the quickest gratification?
- Which is the least amount of hassle?
- Which looks the most interesting?
Notice how whether to buy or not was never a question asked? Notice how micro-payments encourage a positive response to three of the above four questions? If you manage to batPeople will only balk at being asked to buy something if they are not shopping to begin with. And it's a fact of business that it's hard to get people who are not shopping to make impulse purchases. But micro-payments should not be misconstrued as being designed to attract the impulse buyer. While their low cost does give them a foot in this door, micro-payments will really only come into their own when used to sell goods that the public is looking to buy.
Police are at a loss to explain why the software wasn't effective, since it seemed to work fine in controlled testing, Guidara said.
"Though," Guidara elaborated, "We did think it odd that all of the test subjects had barcodes tattooed across their foreheads."
The new Apple Training Series book is not only a brilliant to learn the basics of Logic, but also comes with a demo. Upon buying the book you can go to Peachpit's website and order a free XSKey that lets you use Logic and all its plugins uncrippled for 30 days.
While Logic itself can have a bit of a steep learning curve, there are now brilliant books and active, friendly mailing lists available to help you out. And the notation part of the program has always been pretty intuitive. Plus, as an organ player, you might appreciate that Logic has what I feel is the best B3 plug in ever made (Logic comes with a 30 day demo of this, and all its virtual instruments for you to mess around with). And if, down the road, you decide you want to take your notating to the next level and produce/mix/record/arrange/whatever, Logic will be able to take you there.
There are three different versions of Logic,
They differ mostly in how many audio tracks you can arrange with, what DSP effects ship with each one, and other minor stuff like being able to draw automation curves. Feature comparison charts are available. For what you describe, you would need nothing more than Logic Audio, but the upgrade path to Gold and Platinum is clear and affordable should you decide you need more later on.
A) Yes.
B) No.
C) CowboyNeal.
Oh. Right. So it's supposed to go like this?
- buy game
- play game
- game locks up
- don't buy game
Hmmmmmmm.One big surprise was that last year's winner...
Umm, I don't think that means what you think it means.
Or you could, you know, just drop it in a volcano or something.
Hmm. I swap my battery out of mine while in sleep all the time. You might want to have that checked out.
I know a number of people who are interested in graphic story-telling. Unfortunately, not many people are as equally gifted artists as they are writers (or vice-versa). As graphic novels are a medium that require both these skills, what would you advise would-be collaborators do to find each other?
...you'll love the manga.
You're missing the way the financial world works. A company is not required to post record-breaking profits each quarter in order to be a fiscally "successful" company (though they will certainly be successful if they can pull this off!). The most important thing is that a company meets its projections. A company that gives low projections but meets them is much better off than a company that gives high projections but misses them even if the latter company still rakes in more profit that the former. Why? Because the former company has a business plan it's sticking to and the latter is just out of control.
Now I ask you to recall Jobs's last keynote when he said Apple expected to be hit hard by the downturn in the economy, but felt they had enough in the bank to weather the storm and they planned to invest in evolving the company's technology so that they could hit the ground running when the market came back.
IIRC, Apple posted three quarters of successively lesser losses mostly due to "internal investment" and "one-time restructuring" costs. And now they've started turning profit in this, the year of the notebook, which was another thing Jobs forecasted as being a major direction he wanted to take the company in. They met that goal too, having shipped more laptops this quarter than in any other quarter of the company's history.
Apple definitely seems to be a company with a plan -- and more importantly a company that sticks to its plan. Unless you honestly believe that plan is "to burn Apple to the ground and salt the earth," any report which shows Apple sticking to the plan is a good report.
Besides, the article is clearly being a link to a test to buck up those who prefer PC's.
Indeed. And I've no problem with giving a hand to my brother PC user. And I totally understand why, from Adobe's point of view, it all comes down to speed. After all, interface- and appearance-wise, there's no difference between Illustrator for OS X or Windows. But I think that, though bringing it all back to speed is an easy simplification for Adobe to make, in the real world users take more into account when choosing a computer platform than just how fast it crunches.
No one claims that speed is the end-all or the be-all.
But that seems to be exactly the argument Adobe is making if they are, in fact, providing some sort of "preferred" endorsement for the Windows platform. The only evidence they've given to back up this decision is time-to-complete-X graphs.
You and I both seem to agree that there is more to a platform than how long it takes to render a lighting effect, but we disagree on what platform is "the best". Well, different strokes for different folks, right? It seems that Adobe, of all people, should share our view.
Besides, although Apple isn't dead, guess what % of people buy Macs compared to Windoze boxes?
I've never seen this as a particularly meaningful reason to switch to Windows (or, for that matter, to do anything). Most of the world uses Windows. Cool.
At any rate, this is clearly not a factor to Adobe who is still making money hand-over-fist on software sales for the Mac.
You mistake my point. I did not say that, were it not for Apple, PC users would still be in DOS. I said that if everyone's only concern was speed PC users would still be in DOS, as programs running in DOS were much faster than their Windows counterparts. But there are things more important to users than speed such as having a multitasking environment, a common user interface, and a shared clipboard, for example.
You stumble all over yourself in your effort to bash Apple. It does not make you look particularly intelligent.
People who use Macs don't use them because they're faster.
Adobe has for a long time now achieved feature and interface parity between their Windows and Mac products. That's no mean task, and they should be applauded for it. But it seems a little short sighted of them to name Windows the "preferred" platform just because it's faster. Photoshop may be the same on Windows and OS X, but Windows and OS X are very different. And no matter how graphically productive you are, you are still going to end up spending a large amount of time outside of Photoshop's isolated interface.
If speed were really the end-all and be-all of graphic design (or computing in general) Apple would have died a long time ago and PC users would still be using DOS.
At just over 4 years old, I think this would be the first big break for SETI@home.
You mean you think that discovering alien radio transmissions would be a big break for SETI? Sheesh. Whatever, man. I guess you're definition of "big break" isn't as demanding as mine.
A 12" laptop with DVI, plugged into a Cinema Display could be a desktop replacement. But note that the 12" Powerbook does not have DVI. Nor does it have an L3 cache or a FireWire 800 port or memory expandable above 640Mb.
/. crowd who appreciate cool, well-made, technology and know, for the most part, exactly what can and cannot be expected of it.
/. would like. But I mean no offence when I say to you, you are in the minority. Most people, when they want a "portable desktop machine" want something that is just small enough to move from room to room or take to set up in a hotel during exceptionally long business trips. The 15" or better yet the 17" fit this mold exceptionally well.
The review played the lack of these features off as deficiencies that counted as checks in the "bad" column against the 12" PowerBook because it made it less suitable for a desktop replacement.
My point is that these are not deficiencies but very conscious design decisions that hint to the purpose and philosophy behind the 12" PowerBook and its low price tag (tablet killer? PDA equalizer? Executive presentation junkie's entry drug? Digital photographer's best friend?).
But whatever you might personally argue the 12"s niche is, it's clearly not targeting the desktop computer. Other's here seem to be happy with it as a desktop replacement, but then, that's the
But if you're average Windows (or Apple!) user bought the 12" expecting it to replace her desktop computer, she would be disappointed (as, indeed, the author of the above article was).
I say, "Well, of course you're unhappy with it on your desktop! That wasn't what it was made for, and if you use it for what it was made for you will find it to be a brilliantly designed machine."
As to your situation, you were evidently looking for a 12" desktop machine. That is something many, perhaps, here on
On the other hand, when most people go shopping for a small laptop, they want it for constant travel or true portability around the house -- my 12" is never on a desktop. It's always on my lap!
These people, more often than not, have/need a desktop machine, too. If a desktop owner wants a portable laptop to use along side his other computer, the most important "feature" of that laptop is low price (he already owns one computer, after all).
Coincidentally, if a desktop owner wants a portable computer to use along side his other computer, the least important features are DVI, L3 cache, etc. So Apple could kill those things, make the 12" cheaper, and make this class of computer user very happy.
You may claim that Apple should release a version of the 12" that has DVI, L3, >640Mb so that your class of computer user is happy, and I sympathize with you. But the hard facts are they would not sell more than a few thousand such PowerBooks, so it's not likely to happen.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Apple will see complaints like yours in such a number that they'll realize there is a market for tricked-out small PowerBooks out there. You could get your wish. But in the mean time, saying that the 12" is crippled because it doesn't fit your particular needs is like saying a hammer is stupid because it won't tighten the bolt you have in front of you.
...And I love it.
Its lack of DVI is not really hard to figure. This is the travel-sized laptop. This thing goes anywhere. It's more rugged than most other laptops on the market. It's small. It's light. It's got a great keyboard and a great LCD (yes, that's right, I love the LCD. I think it's fine). But it's not going to replace your desktop.
That was never its intent. Desktop-replacing laptops start at 15". This is the laptop that you sync up with your dedicated desktop box and then take on the road. It does a great job of that, and honestly, at $1800.00, you can afford to have the 12" and a desktop machine.
Assuming that this is not going to be your desktop machine, then, what's the use of DVI? The only reason it has external video at all is so that you can give presentations with it (another good use of a truly portable machine), and towards that purpose, it has RCA- and S- video out. Even presentations made with the sexy new Keynote are not going to benefit from DVI.
This laptop fills a very specific niche (here's a hint: that niche is not "iBook replacement"). Even a cursory glance at the specs reveals that. If someone got sold on the thing to do something it wasn't meant to, well, sorry. They're going to be as unhappy with it as anyone is who tries to use the wrong tool for the job. For my part, I'm using it for what it was made for. And I'm quite happy with it!
...if you're installing Mozilla in a professional environment, you must not forget to download a (slightly) more professional splash screen than the one Moz ships with (shouldn't be hard. The one Moz ships with is embarrassingly bad). You can find some good ones here.
Then rename that image "mozilla.bmp" and put it in your root mozilla directory (the same one that holds your mozilla executable, mozilla.org by default).
Nothing will kill the reputation of this new browser you're deploying like that ridiculous green dinosaur breathing fire all over.
Looks like, with the introduction of the new sexxy powerbooks, some great brand-new lines of software, and that big hit listed as "one time re-organization costs", Apple is right on schedule.
If a Beatle can "mess up" and subconsciously insert parts of a song he heard into a song he was writing, then I'm quite sure I'm capable of doing much, much worse. It's kinda the name of the game in composing. You try to make everything you write original, and it certainly sounds original to you, but just about everything modern is based on the same major scale and certain intervals just sound good next to one another. You hope you come up with a progression that not only sounds good, but also that no composer before you came across and thought sounded good. Clearly there's room for mistakes to be made here.
:-P If they were found to be copyright infringing, you could always just change them. MIDI is an open (and even human readable!) file format. You could rip out or modify offending sequences with perl!
For example: sometimes I dream music. I'll turn on the radio or play a game in the dream and a dream song will start playing. I've trained myself, when I wake, to pay attention to and zero in on what that song was. Once I've got it down, I'll run over it in my memory and try to think if there are any other songs that sound like that. Sometimes I'll realize that it's just a variation on some song or another I had been listening to that week, but sometimes I just know that it's new, and I have to go with that.
About the best you can do is keep a quick collection of the songs you most often draw inspiration from in a playlist and run over it after you have the structure of a song down. For me, when I'm working on a video game score, that means listening to the collected work of Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Yoko Kanno. It's a big list, but when you have the "shape" of a song you're writing in your head, it only takes listening to the first 5 seconds of another song to diff their comparative shapes internally.
At any rate, the difference between George Harrison's deal and mine is that my songs are open source