Certainly you could do a Linux port. However, you'd have to replace the calls to DirectX 7.0 with calls to something more cross platform like OpenGL. This can be done of course, as you can see from the Mac port of Halo.
One of the new features, Class Data Sharing, comes as a contribution from Apple. On the Apple Java Page, Apple describes this feature as:
On other platforms, each Java application consumes some system memory, so you might end up using more memory than you need to when running multiple Java applications. Other languages, such as C or C++, solve this problem using what's called shared libraries. Apple developed an innovative new technology that allows Java code to be shared across multiple applications. This reduces the amount of memory that Java applications normally use. And it fits right into Sun's Hot Spot VM, allowing Mac OS X to remain compatible with standard Java. In addition, Apple has given this implementation to Sun so the company can deploy it on other platforms. It's just one example of how Apple supports standards and shares ideas to benefit all.
Pretty cool stuff, and it shows that Sun does accept changes to Java from the outside that are of clear benefit.
I've been going through resumes this week and all the programmers are billing at $66-$70/hour. The rule of thumb is you have to pay $7/hour or 10% (whichever is more) to your contracting company (MDI, Matrix, etc) for paperwork and such.
So, yes, contract programmers are making that much. Permanent employees are not.
As you can see in this document, iTunes supports quite a lot of different third-party players, including Nomads, Rios, and others.
What these other players do NOT support is AAC-DRM files like those sold by the iTMS. I'm sure Apple would be happy to license their DRM scheme to a third-party mp3 player if they wanted to do so and the price were right. Money talks.
Likes Windows 98? Prefers it over more modern operating systems like Windows 2000, Windows XP, OS X, and various variants of Linux? Sounds like you have other, more pressing problems than online music...
If a W98 system is set up carefully and is not abused by installing programs off the internet, it can be usable and reliable. My wife's Celeron 366 runs Win98 just fine. She uses it for Quicken, IE, and Outlook Express, and that's it. I have filters on the email server, a filtering web proxy, and she has no issues at all.
I could put Linux on there, but then she couldn't use Quicken, and Turbotax would not run. The other more modern OS's like Win2k are too resource hungry for such a lowly machine, so Win98 endures.
Apple is widely rumored to be releasing a "mini-ipod" that (a) is smaller and (b) costs less than the current ones, with prices of $99 to $149 being floated around for a 2GB model and $149 to $199 for a 4GB model.
Just wait and get one of those. You don't want to use a crappy service with WMA audio when in a week you can get the real thing.
What you don't get is the rustic appeal of going into a music store and enjoying the crowd and ambience. It's not the same when you're quoting NIN lyrics to a friend while passing by people who are shopping the contemporary christian aisle. Not the same as being able to watch people in goth clothing walk by. Not the same as being able to say "Chris I-Suck" (Chris Isaak) in public.
Except that these days most people who buy physical media do so at Best Buy, Media Play, Circuit City, Target, Wal-Mart, or other box-box retailers where there is no knowledgeable help, no ambiance, and nobody to whom you can show off your eclectic musical knowledge.
The difference in the physical CD to the digital version is worth at most a couple of bucks to me. If I can buy any album for $9.99 at iTunes Music Store, versus $12.99 - $16.99, Apple is gonna get my cash every time.
Is that for this Christmas or an accounting of birthday, anniversary, etc. gifts for the last two years? If the former, please stop posting as you're making me look really bad! Two watches and a tea kettle? Meanwhile, I still insist on using my rusty old kettle from my bachelor days and throw a tantrum when my wife proposes replacing it.
It's for Christmas. I keep a list on my laptop of things she says she wants throughout the year. When it comes to Christmas, I've got a great list and am never short of ideas.
I had gotten her a Roomba also, but the iRobot company kept calling and leaving messages on the answering machine about the battery charger they were sending me, so she found out about that and got it as an extra anniversary present.
Non-geeks like jewelry, books, kitchen stuff, etc.
I got my wife a pair of Bulova watches (one for every day, one for special occasions), a book on used book stores, a book on Breyer collectable horses (which she collects), the usual assortment of candy, the new Train CD, a new Williams-Sonoma tea kettle, and some other small stuff. Not a geek toy in the bunch, even if I did order quite a bit of it online.
BTW, if you know my wife (not likely if you read slashdot), don't tell her!
And THIS parent post, ladies and gentleman, is EXACTLY why open source is good, and why Apple was VERY SMART to release its Darwin source code under an open-source license.
Windows has a root exploit, and we are dependent on Microsoft to get around to fixing it. Thanks to Darwin, we can fix our own OSX bugs much of the time.
First, let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. THIS VULNERABILITY IS NOT ON BY DEFAULT ON OSX! You have to go into an obscure app (Directory Access) that most users don't know about, and turn on an option that most users don't need, in order to be vulnerable. Also, this vulnerability was never exploited.
How can this idiot compare that to the hundreds of millions of computers ACTUALLY INFECTED by Windows vulnerabilities like Nimda, Code Red, Melissa, Klez, Sobig.f, and thousands of others? Using Windows is like buying random illegal drugs on the street to treat a headache.
The MacOS is not without its flaws, but Windows is the swiss cheese of the secure computing world. It's very telling that the author didn't allow for any feedback or provide his email address.
If you want to ensure that the music you download is not crap, get the m4a files instead of mp3. Without fail these were encoded with iTunes and are of decent quality.
not for nothing, I think having the CD is, to some degree, added value itself. There's the cover art and the insert booklet. Granted, much of this stuff can be found online. But I when I buy merchandise from the band, it's like I'm saying, "Hey, I like your band. Keep making good music." It's somewhat of an investment.
I am the opposite. I bought two CDs this month, and I have never looked at the insert booklet. It's never come out of the case, and likely never will. I bought them for the music. I took them home, ripped them into iTunes at 196Kbps AAC, put the disks in the sleeve in my car, and put the cases in a box in the closet.
I don't want to know what kind of cookies the singer likes, about their mansion in London, or about the car they drive.
I just want music, and I want it cheap, convenient, and sounding good. If I want a single song, I'll buy it from the iTMS, or if it's not there, download it off Gnutella. If I want the whole album, I'll order the CD from Amazon or pick it up when I stop by Sams or Best Buy.
I don't think that either of these examples has significant merit over the other (slight syntactic difference but the same basic concept). I see the big advantage of the EL changes being the need not to use or <%= %> (or any other tag-within-a-tag constructs). The new way is a lot more elegant.
The reason is actually quite simple. The first example, using EL, is syntactically correct HTML. That means you can pass it off to your designer and have them make changes in Dreamweaver or whatever they use. Your example is not valid HTML and will either (a) blow up the tool or (b) overwrite all your JSP tags with valid HTML that breaks your page.
Tomcat 5 implements JSP 2.0
on
Tomcat 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One of the biggest changes seems to be support for the JSP 2.0 specification, which incorporates JSTL (Java Standard Template Library) version 1.1. For more info on what this means, read this article at OnJava.com. The Expression Language (EL in the article) adds a lot of nice features to help keep your JSPs clean without having to use struts.
I downloaded Tomcat 5 from an apache mirror, and I am impressed. It was a drop-in replacement for the Tomcat 4 that was included with OSX Panther 10.3.x.
I work for a certain wireless company with a particularly emphasized logo.
We are pushing off the go-live date of at least one major project until early next year because customer service has been getting a LOT of WLNP calls (WLNP = wireless local number portability), way more than expected, and don't want any releases that will further increase call volume. So I don't know if slashdotters are porting, but a lot of people are. I just hope they are porting TO us and not FROM us:)
Heck, my own mother, who is as non-tech-saavy as they come, is considering porting her home phone number to a wireless phone and just getting rid of the landline. This law is going to shake up the industry. You may even see one or two wireless carriers going under as a result. They've been predicting for years that the 5 major carriers would eventually boil down to 3. This may be the catalyst to make that happen.
1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines? 2. Do Linux app developers follow them?
1) I suspect there are UI guidelines for KDE and Gnome, but not a unifying standard. The KDE/Gnome difference is part of the problem when you're looking for UI consistency. 2) No, but the same can be said of Windows developers. Microsoft has a standard, but people don't seem to follow it with any consistency.
Is this really worth posting to the Slashdot home page? I'm an Apple user, and even to me this seems to be something worthy of posting to the MacNN/ArsTechnica forums, but not to the slashdot home page.
You can already use either Ambrosia WireTap or Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack to record the audio stream as it's sent to the sound card (in digital form), at least on MacOS X.
This is really no different that burning to a CD and re-ripping, which people have been able to do all along.
You can also convert m4p (AAC protected) files to AIFF with Toast Titanium or with Apple's own iMovie, then convert the AIFF to whatever form you choose (Ogg, Mp3, non-DRM AAC) using iTunes.
The results seem to be in line with sales so far. Apple has accounted for over 70% of all legal online music downloads. It's no surprise that they would be the leader.
I've bought/downloaded some songs from iTMS. I've downloaded a lot more than that from Gnutella. But now that I can get songs via iTMS, I go there first because it's so much easier than trying to find the right song by the right band at the right bitrate with the right metadata. With Apple's store, I know what quality to expect -- the only question is whether they have it or not.
Oh, and don't give me the "iTunes limits choice because it doesn't support ogg" bullshit. If you want ogg support in iTunes, go to apple's developer documentation and find the docs for how to write a Quicktime plug-in. There's an entire plug-in architecture for Quicktime that allows you to add support for codecs, such as Ogg, that apple did not
It turns out that enabling OGG support is quite simple. Just go download this and you'll have ogg playback in iTunes.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly you could do a Linux port. However, you'd have to replace the calls to DirectX 7.0 with calls to something more cross platform like OpenGL. This can be done of course, as you can see from the Mac port of Halo.
Pretty cool stuff, and it shows that Sun does accept changes to Java from the outside that are of clear benefit.
I've been going through resumes this week and all the programmers are billing at $66-$70/hour. The rule of thumb is you have to pay $7/hour or 10% (whichever is more) to your contracting company (MDI, Matrix, etc) for paperwork and such.
So, yes, contract programmers are making that much. Permanent employees are not.
As you can see in this document, iTunes supports quite a lot of different third-party players, including Nomads, Rios, and others.
What these other players do NOT support is AAC-DRM files like those sold by the iTMS. I'm sure Apple would be happy to license their DRM scheme to a third-party mp3 player if they wanted to do so and the price were right. Money talks.
Likes Windows 98? Prefers it over more modern operating systems like Windows 2000, Windows XP, OS X, and various variants of Linux? Sounds like you have other, more pressing problems than online music...
If a W98 system is set up carefully and is not abused by installing programs off the internet, it can be usable and reliable. My wife's Celeron 366 runs Win98 just fine. She uses it for Quicken, IE, and Outlook Express, and that's it. I have filters on the email server, a filtering web proxy, and she has no issues at all.
I could put Linux on there, but then she couldn't use Quicken, and Turbotax would not run. The other more modern OS's like Win2k are too resource hungry for such a lowly machine, so Win98 endures.
Apple is widely rumored to be releasing a "mini-ipod" that (a) is smaller and (b) costs less than the current ones, with prices of $99 to $149 being floated around for a 2GB model and $149 to $199 for a 4GB model.
... focus of upcoming Expo keynote
Just wait and get one of those. You don't want to use a crappy service with WMA audio when in a week you can get the real thing.
Mini iPod On Apple's Plate
Mini iPods
Mini iPod Buzz...
MWSF: More Mini iPod Confirmation and Detail?
Mini-iPod Rumors
What you don't get is the rustic appeal of going into a music store and enjoying the crowd and ambience. It's not the same when you're quoting NIN lyrics to a friend while passing by people who are shopping the contemporary christian aisle. Not the same as being able to watch people in goth clothing walk by. Not the same as being able to say "Chris I-Suck" (Chris Isaak) in public.
Except that these days most people who buy physical media do so at Best Buy, Media Play, Circuit City, Target, Wal-Mart, or other box-box retailers where there is no knowledgeable help, no ambiance, and nobody to whom you can show off your eclectic musical knowledge.
The difference in the physical CD to the digital version is worth at most a couple of bucks to me. If I can buy any album for $9.99 at iTunes Music Store, versus $12.99 - $16.99, Apple is gonna get my cash every time.
Is that for this Christmas or an accounting of birthday, anniversary, etc. gifts for the last two years? If the former, please stop posting as you're making me look really bad! Two watches and a tea kettle? Meanwhile, I still insist on using my rusty old kettle from my bachelor days and throw a tantrum when my wife proposes replacing it.
It's for Christmas. I keep a list on my laptop of things she says she wants throughout the year. When it comes to Christmas, I've got a great list and am never short of ideas.
I had gotten her a Roomba also, but the iRobot company kept calling and leaving messages on the answering machine about the battery charger they were sending me, so she found out about that and got it as an extra anniversary present.
Non-geeks like jewelry, books, kitchen stuff, etc.
I got my wife a pair of Bulova watches (one for every day, one for special occasions), a book on used book stores, a book on Breyer collectable horses (which she collects), the usual assortment of candy, the new Train CD, a new Williams-Sonoma tea kettle, and some other small stuff. Not a geek toy in the bunch, even if I did order quite a bit of it online.
BTW, if you know my wife (not likely if you read slashdot), don't tell her!
And THIS parent post, ladies and gentleman, is EXACTLY why open source is good, and why Apple was VERY SMART to release its Darwin source code under an open-source license.
Windows has a root exploit, and we are dependent on Microsoft to get around to fixing it. Thanks to Darwin, we can fix our own OSX bugs much of the time.
First, let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. THIS VULNERABILITY IS NOT ON BY DEFAULT ON OSX! You have to go into an obscure app (Directory Access) that most users don't know about, and turn on an option that most users don't need, in order to be vulnerable. Also, this vulnerability was never exploited.
How can this idiot compare that to the hundreds of millions of computers ACTUALLY INFECTED by Windows vulnerabilities like Nimda, Code Red, Melissa, Klez, Sobig.f, and thousands of others? Using Windows is like buying random illegal drugs on the street to treat a headache.
The MacOS is not without its flaws, but Windows is the swiss cheese of the secure computing world. It's very telling that the author didn't allow for any feedback or provide his email address.
If you want to ensure that the music you download is not crap, get the m4a files instead of mp3. Without fail these were encoded with iTunes and are of decent quality.
not for nothing, I think having the CD is, to some degree, added value itself. There's the cover art and the insert booklet. Granted, much of this stuff can be found online. But I when I buy merchandise from the band, it's like I'm saying, "Hey, I like your band. Keep making good music." It's somewhat of an investment.
I am the opposite. I bought two CDs this month, and I have never looked at the insert booklet. It's never come out of the case, and likely never will. I bought them for the music. I took them home, ripped them into iTunes at 196Kbps AAC, put the disks in the sleeve in my car, and put the cases in a box in the closet.
I don't want to know what kind of cookies the singer likes, about their mansion in London, or about the car they drive.
I just want music, and I want it cheap, convenient, and sounding good. If I want a single song, I'll buy it from the iTMS, or if it's not there, download it off Gnutella. If I want the whole album, I'll order the CD from Amazon or pick it up when I stop by Sams or Best Buy.
I don't think that either of these examples has significant merit over the other (slight syntactic difference but the same basic concept). I see the big advantage of the EL changes being the need not to use or <%= %> (or any other tag-within-a-tag constructs). The new way is a lot more elegant.
<input name="firstName" value="${customer.firstName}">
is preferred over something like:
<input name="firstName" value="<%=customer.firstName%>">
The reason is actually quite simple. The first example, using EL, is syntactically correct HTML. That means you can pass it off to your designer and have them make changes in Dreamweaver or whatever they use. Your example is not valid HTML and will either (a) blow up the tool or (b) overwrite all your JSP tags with valid HTML that breaks your page.
One of the biggest changes seems to be support for the JSP 2.0 specification, which incorporates JSTL (Java Standard Template Library) version 1.1. For more info on what this means, read this article at OnJava.com. The Expression Language (EL in the article) adds a lot of nice features to help keep your JSPs clean without having to use struts.
I downloaded Tomcat 5 from an apache mirror, and I am impressed. It was a drop-in replacement for the Tomcat 4 that was included with OSX Panther 10.3.x.
I work for a certain wireless company with a particularly emphasized logo.
:)
We are pushing off the go-live date of at least one major project until early next year because customer service has been getting a LOT of WLNP calls (WLNP = wireless local number portability), way more than expected, and don't want any releases that will further increase call volume. So I don't know if slashdotters are porting, but a lot of people are. I just hope they are porting TO us and not FROM us
Heck, my own mother, who is as non-tech-saavy as they come, is considering porting her home phone number to a wireless phone and just getting rid of the landline. This law is going to shake up the industry. You may even see one or two wireless carriers going under as a result. They've been predicting for years that the 5 major carriers would eventually boil down to 3. This may be the catalyst to make that happen.
1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines?
2. Do Linux app developers follow them?
1) I suspect there are UI guidelines for KDE and Gnome, but not a unifying standard. The KDE/Gnome difference is part of the problem when you're looking for UI consistency.
2) No, but the same can be said of Windows developers. Microsoft has a standard, but people don't seem to follow it with any consistency.
Is this really worth posting to the Slashdot home page? I'm an Apple user, and even to me this seems to be something worthy of posting to the MacNN/ArsTechnica forums, but not to the slashdot home page.
Slashdot is not tech support.
You can already use either Ambrosia WireTap or Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack to record the audio stream as it's sent to the sound card (in digital form), at least on MacOS X.
This is really no different that burning to a CD and re-ripping, which people have been able to do all along.
You can also convert m4p (AAC protected) files to AIFF with Toast Titanium or with Apple's own iMovie, then convert the AIFF to whatever form you choose (Ogg, Mp3, non-DRM AAC) using iTunes.
Here's a story and photo of a McCafe. I'd never heard of that before.
Actually the exploits only apply to Jaguar -- Panther is apparently immune out of the box.
The results seem to be in line with sales so far. Apple has accounted for over 70% of all legal online music downloads. It's no surprise that they would be the leader.
I've bought/downloaded some songs from iTMS. I've downloaded a lot more than that from Gnutella. But now that I can get songs via iTMS, I go there first because it's so much easier than trying to find the right song by the right band at the right bitrate with the right metadata. With Apple's store, I know what quality to expect -- the only question is whether they have it or not.
Oh, and don't give me the "iTunes limits choice because it doesn't support ogg" bullshit. If you want ogg support in iTunes, go to apple's developer documentation and find the docs for how to write a Quicktime plug-in. There's an entire plug-in architecture for Quicktime that allows you to add support for codecs, such as Ogg, that apple did not
It turns out that enabling OGG support is quite simple. Just go download this and you'll have ogg playback in iTunes.
There are weenies that will say "Psstt.. you know that #2 computer in the Big 500? It only has one button on the mouse!"
Technically, it has 1100 buttons...damn I bet that is one unweieldy mouse.