Again, only reacting and attempting to stuff the genie back into the bottle. I don't download illegal music -- but I sure as hell do rip CDs that don't belong to me.
If the labels want to survive, they have to recognize the new reality of music consumption and distribution. Consumers will embrace the most efficient systems that provide what they want, and right now iTMS and its competitors are the best solution.
Oh, and support local artists -- go see them live.
I'm a professional Mac systems consultant, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, but much like Windows and the hotfixes, the rest of your list of 'first 10 installs' should include everything aavailable in Apple's Software Update (Security Updates, etc).
Of course, compared to Windows, OS X is totally secure OOTB once online. No racing required for anything.
Greyhound buses have used forward-looking X-band radar on long-haul routes for many years. If an object in front of the moving bus changes its acceleration too rapidly and begins closing the distance, the system automatically triggers the brakes, reacting faster than a human driver could and potentially avoiding a collision.
If we're going to use the system to check for blind spots, add another transceiver assembly up front, use the same cpu, tie in the brakes, and give the driver a few extra milliseconds to avoid hitting something -- milliseconds will translate to feet in stopping distance.
Anything that can reduce the number of crashes and injuries would be worthwhile; the extra hardware costs could be subsidized over the vehicle's lifetime by lower insurance premiums and fewer repairs / medical bills.
Another vote in favor of the DirecTV/TiVo combo receiver unit. I installed a 4-line dish myself on the roof of my Brooklyn building and connected two lines in, so I can do all of the TiVo tricks on dual tuners.
My wife failed to understand when I tried to explain what a TiVo was and what it could do, and how cool/necessary ownership was, until I handed her the remote. Her parents still don't get it, despite our best efforts..
Apple was actually very early with USB 1.1, although their initial drivers in OS 9 were flaky. The original iMac was noted -- and criticized -- for lacking a serial port and going strictly USB, and that model was introduced May 6th, 1998.
They were late with USB2 support since they already had FireWire, a faster and superior technology, onboard everything anyway...
"Videogame experts fear that with the advent of powerful, accurate voice-recognition systems performing the majority of tasks once reserved for joysticks and thumbboards, American children could lose their global dominance in such thumb-candy categories as first person shooters, sick million-point THPS4 combos and Final Fantasy XXIV...."
What I find interesting is that of every true geek I've ever met, and of nearly every semi-geek, they all have serious side interests such as what are being discussed here: personally I dig cooking at the moment, but I'd be building furniture and whatnot if I had some workspace.
But even though many geeks show serious musical talent and are often proficient with more than one instrument, and usually have an in-depth knowledge of their favorite music genres, very few geeks seem to ever express themselves artisitically other than music.. How many coders paint? How many sysadmins sculpt? For that matter, how many of all these 'enlightened' interesting geeks and technies belong to, or regularly visit, art museums?
Its a disconnect that I still don't understand. Something to do with thinking abstractly and choosing which medium/channel to express the results.
That car toll is being looked at very, very carefully here in New York City. It might be political suicide for Mayor Bloomberg to implement it but it would certainly improve the quality of life for everyone in Manhattan..
The mindset is slowly beginning to change. Already, 'congestion pricing' is being used at the two Hudson River tunnel crossings; drive into the city at offpeak times and pay less. Use the EZ-Pass system and pay less. Broadly speaking, follow the lead of the regional planning authorities, and pay less money per trip. Businesses are already reacting and adapting.
1) Americans like cars more than any other citizen group. The fact that, through various functions of the US Government, Americans pay considerably less for gasoline than the rest of the Western world probably contributes to this.
2) After seeing it in Brazil, the mayor of Los Angeles helped implement a system of express busses using dedicated lanes and timed lights. The result was a high-density, wide-scale system that carried 90% as many riders as light rail at less than one-quarter the cost of any new rail construction, on *existing roadways*.
You can't get rid of the cars -- but you can work within existing infrastructure, offer people a cleaner, cheaper, safer alternative to private cars, and let them come to you.
Depends upon how long you own the car or the apartment.
Cars don't appreciate in value the way that any real estate does.. and when you compare the amount of money spent on either one, then think about the amount of time you and your SO/family/etc spend in it and the quality of that time, where do you really want to focus that investment?
I could drive a Porsche and camp out every night, I suppose.
I'm sorry, but you should either stay in Atlanta -- or any of the other 50 'large' cities in N. America that are "built at the scale of the car" -- or you should accept that life in NYC is always going to be different and not bitch about it.
Subways break down a lot less than cars do per mile. They break down a *LOT* less per passenger-mile. Panic-inducing delays? And what, the threat of being crushed by an SUV on an overcrowded interstate is better than, dear God!, having to maybe be delayed a few minutes? Stations? Well, you moron, if you don't like transferring at the stations that require walking that half mile, don't transfer there if you can avoid it. (Check out the Fulton St station. That is a true labyrinth. The most die-hard New Yorkers avoid that one wherever possible.) I'd rather walk an extra two blocks on the street in harsh weather than walk through some of those transfers. With MetroCards I can transfer back in to the system and not take an extra charge. But more likely I just actually *think* about where I'm going and plan accordingly. Sick passenger on the train = scores of other people looking out for them, notifying the conductor, and having the medics waiting on the platform. Sick passenger as sole occupant of a car = another auto wreck, and hope you're not the person in the other car.
Taxis? Always available? Of course not! Rush hour is always a PITA. The 5pm shift change has been, and probably always will be, a source of endless speculation and bewilderment as to why anyone would pick 5pm to have a shift change. See above: you learn, you think about it, you plan accordingly. I've nearly missed flights out of LGA cause I couldn't find a cab. Try hailing one with its off duty light on.
Tired of lugging a few bags of groceries home? Get one of those big old-fashioned collapsible grandma carts or shop somewhere that delivers. No, we don't have Costcos here. Need to do more shopping than that? Hire a car service for the afternoon.
Atlanta is indeed a new city, one that depends entirely upon a polluting, expensive, unsafe, unreliable set of technologies to sustain the basics of the urban economy. I can *READ* on the subway. I can work. I can talk to new people, or I can tune everything out and listen to music. You really think being stuck in traffic is superior? Rush and Howard are your major waking hour priorities?
NYC during non-rush hours has better transportation than anywhere, and during rush hours I still say its competitive. Maybe we need some better signage. Maybe we shouldn't assume so much of our out-of-town guests. All 34 million of them.
I hear Times Square is nice, clean, and safe lately. Of course, you have all those same things in all your Georgia malls already.
NeXT was Steve Jobs' second company, in the 1980s, well after Apple's introduction of the Macintosh platform in early 1984.
Your memory apparently doesn't serve. Apple purchased the remnants of NeXT -- and rehired several key engineers -- Mac OS X does have a few features which could be described as being inspired by NeXT, but few of those are in the GUI, mostly they are in the Mach-O layer.
The real question is, will the subway platform payphones get wireless?
Re:Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Another excellent example of congressional pork masquerading as a high-level commitment to major scientific research investment.
Why? The SSC would be billions of dollars' worth of construction and logistics, not to mention the jobs created, tourism, and most of all, prestige for the region that landed it.
Never mind that the US already had an advanced functional particle accelerator at Fermilab in "scenic" Batavia, IL, with an existing infrastructure and culture. Never mind that the SSC could have been built faster at less cost had it been constructed at Fermi.
So careful about using the word 'advocacy.' Barton was 'advocating' that the US Govt spend a few billion dollars in his district, not some Illinois (most likely) Democrat's.
They didn't have to get their hands 'on' the testbed / prototype hardware, theyt simply had to convince someone who had access to the machine to run their benchmarks, save them and send them over. Easily done, considering the number of people involved in designing a totally new hardware (970) and software (10.3 aka Panther) platform.
That said, I find these numbers a bit too detailed. But.. but.. I want to believe.
I've been supporting and working with Macs in the publishing and advertising fields for over 8 years now and I can tell you from experience that Macs have a longer useful life than Windows-based PCs.
Mac owners tend to hang on to their machines through more than one product revision cycle; sure, they're expensive, I'd love to upgrade, but my G4/400 here at work does everything I need it to -- and my G4/500 single-cpu at home runs Mac OS X quite well.
An increase of a few hundred Mhz is not a compelling upgrade for most. But jumping a few generations and replacing hardware that has performed flawlessly for three, four, five years? That's where you'll see me.
Now if only my CFO would start returning my calls...
Ben & Jerry's ice cream in Vermont used to subscribe to a version of the same idea: the highest-paid employee could make no more than 7x the salary of the lowest-paid.
Sadly they discontinued this practice a few years ago.
I used to work directly across the street from Bryant Park. You have to understand that an urban park, especially one in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, is not the same type of park, in purpose or experience.
The people heading into Bryant Park are lucky to even get away from their desks for a quick glimpse of sky and some non-HVAC-recirculated air. I was fortunate enough to have a job where I could often take 60 or 90 minutes at lunch, grab a chair and the day's newspapers and sit in the sun, all before returning to my monitor.
The second-to-last thing I would've wanted to do was check my email, or anything else resembling work, but by far the *last* thing I wanted to do was get up out of my seat and return to buzzing indoor fluorescent lights, away from sky and sun and fresh air...
Exercise is what you do at a gym in NYC, not a park. That may be sad to some but its true.
Slashdot Mirror
sweeeeeet! Goooooo! -mj
Again, only reacting and attempting to stuff the genie back into the bottle. I don't download illegal music -- but I sure as hell do rip CDs that don't belong to me.
If the labels want to survive, they have to recognize the new reality of music consumption and distribution. Consumers will embrace the most efficient systems that provide what they want, and right now iTMS and its competitors are the best solution.
Oh, and support local artists -- go see them live.
-p
Check out GLTerm, which in the 10.1-early 10.2 days was a very nice replacement to the stock Terminal.app.
http://www.pollet.net/GLterm/
-mj
I'm a professional Mac systems consultant, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, but much like Windows and the hotfixes, the rest of your list of 'first 10 installs' should include everything aavailable in Apple's Software Update (Security Updates, etc).
Of course, compared to Windows, OS X is totally secure OOTB once online. No racing required for anything.
That said:
ncftp, nmap, BBEdit, Adobe CS, Suitcase, Cocktail, Pacifist, dnetc, Konfabulator. KisMAC / MacStumbler for portables.
Greyhound buses have used forward-looking X-band radar on long-haul routes for many years. If an object in front of the moving bus changes its acceleration too rapidly and begins closing the distance, the system automatically triggers the brakes, reacting faster than a human driver could and potentially avoiding a collision.
If we're going to use the system to check for blind spots, add another transceiver assembly up front, use the same cpu, tie in the brakes, and give the driver a few extra milliseconds to avoid hitting something -- milliseconds will translate to feet in stopping distance.
Anything that can reduce the number of crashes and injuries would be worthwhile; the extra hardware costs could be subsidized over the vehicle's lifetime by lower insurance premiums and fewer repairs / medical bills.
-mj
Another vote in favor of the DirecTV/TiVo combo receiver unit. I installed a 4-line dish myself on the roof of my Brooklyn building and connected two lines in, so I can do all of the TiVo tricks on dual tuners.
My wife failed to understand when I tried to explain what a TiVo was and what it could do, and how cool/necessary ownership was, until I handed her the remote. Her parents still don't get it, despite our best efforts..
hth. -mj
Apple was actually very early with USB 1.1, although their initial drivers in OS 9 were flaky. The original iMac was noted -- and criticized -- for lacking a serial port and going strictly USB, and that model was introduced May 6th, 1998.
They were late with USB2 support since they already had FireWire, a faster and superior technology, onboard everything anyway...
-mj
"Videogame experts fear that with the advent of powerful, accurate voice-recognition systems performing the majority of tasks once reserved for joysticks and thumbboards, American children could lose their global dominance in such thumb-candy categories as first person shooters, sick million-point THPS4 combos and Final Fantasy XXIV...."
-mj
Besides which, how else are you going to doodle? Lug around a Wacom tablet?
-mj
What I find interesting is that of every true geek I've ever met, and of nearly every semi-geek, they all have serious side interests such as what are being discussed here: personally I dig cooking at the moment, but I'd be building furniture and whatnot if I had some workspace.
But even though many geeks show serious musical talent and are often proficient with more than one instrument, and usually have an in-depth knowledge of their favorite music genres, very few geeks seem to ever express themselves artisitically other than music.. How many coders paint? How many sysadmins sculpt? For that matter, how many of all these 'enlightened' interesting geeks and technies belong to, or regularly visit, art museums?
Its a disconnect that I still don't understand. Something to do with thinking abstractly and choosing which medium/channel to express the results.
-mj
That car toll is being looked at very, very carefully here in New York City. It might be political suicide for Mayor Bloomberg to implement it but it would certainly improve the quality of life for everyone in Manhattan..
The mindset is slowly beginning to change. Already, 'congestion pricing' is being used at the two Hudson River tunnel crossings; drive into the city at offpeak times and pay less. Use the EZ-Pass system and pay less. Broadly speaking, follow the lead of the regional planning authorities, and pay less money per trip. Businesses are already reacting and adapting.
The car toll is not that far away in NYC.
-mj
1) Americans like cars more than any other citizen group. The fact that, through various functions of the US Government, Americans pay considerably less for gasoline than the rest of the Western world probably contributes to this.
2) After seeing it in Brazil, the mayor of Los Angeles helped implement a system of express busses using dedicated lanes and timed lights. The result was a high-density, wide-scale system that carried 90% as many riders as light rail at less than one-quarter the cost of any new rail construction, on *existing roadways*.
You can't get rid of the cars -- but you can work within existing infrastructure, offer people a cleaner, cheaper, safer alternative to private cars, and let them come to you.
-mj
Rome had traffic problems.
Two thousand years ago.
Depends upon how long you own the car or the apartment.
Cars don't appreciate in value the way that any real estate does.. and when you compare the amount of money spent on either one, then think about the amount of time you and your SO/family/etc spend in it and the quality of that time, where do you really want to focus that investment?
I could drive a Porsche and camp out every night, I suppose.
-mj
I'm sorry, but you should either stay in Atlanta -- or any of the other 50 'large' cities in N. America that are "built at the scale of the car" -- or you should accept that life in NYC is always going to be different and not bitch about it.
Subways break down a lot less than cars do per mile. They break down a *LOT* less per passenger-mile. Panic-inducing delays? And what, the threat of being crushed by an SUV on an overcrowded interstate is better than, dear God!, having to maybe be delayed a few minutes? Stations? Well, you moron, if you don't like transferring at the stations that require walking that half mile, don't transfer there if you can avoid it. (Check out the Fulton St station. That is a true labyrinth. The most die-hard New Yorkers avoid that one wherever possible.) I'd rather walk an extra two blocks on the street in harsh weather than walk through some of those transfers. With MetroCards I can transfer back in to the system and not take an extra charge. But more likely I just actually *think* about where I'm going and plan accordingly. Sick passenger on the train = scores of other people looking out for them, notifying the conductor, and having the medics waiting on the platform. Sick passenger as sole occupant of a car = another auto wreck, and hope you're not the person in the other car.
Taxis? Always available? Of course not! Rush hour is always a PITA. The 5pm shift change has been, and probably always will be, a source of endless speculation and bewilderment as to why anyone would pick 5pm to have a shift change. See above: you learn, you think about it, you plan accordingly. I've nearly missed flights out of LGA cause I couldn't find a cab. Try hailing one with its off duty light on.
Tired of lugging a few bags of groceries home? Get one of those big old-fashioned collapsible grandma carts or shop somewhere that delivers. No, we don't have Costcos here. Need to do more shopping than that? Hire a car service for the afternoon.
Atlanta is indeed a new city, one that depends entirely upon a polluting, expensive, unsafe, unreliable set of technologies to sustain the basics of the urban economy. I can *READ* on the subway. I can work. I can talk to new people, or I can tune everything out and listen to music. You really think being stuck in traffic is superior? Rush and Howard are your major waking hour priorities?
NYC during non-rush hours has better transportation than anywhere, and during rush hours I still say its competitive. Maybe we need some better signage. Maybe we shouldn't assume so much of our out-of-town guests. All 34 million of them.
I hear Times Square is nice, clean, and safe lately. Of course, you have all those same things in all your Georgia malls already.
-mj, 8.5 years in NYC
NeXT was Steve Jobs' second company, in the 1980s, well after Apple's introduction of the Macintosh platform in early 1984.
Your memory apparently doesn't serve. Apple purchased the remnants of NeXT -- and rehired several key engineers -- Mac OS X does have a few features which could be described as being inspired by NeXT, but few of those are in the GUI, mostly they are in the Mach-O layer.
-mj
The real question is, will the subway platform payphones get wireless?
Another excellent example of congressional pork masquerading as a high-level commitment to major scientific research investment.
Why? The SSC would be billions of dollars' worth of construction and logistics, not to mention the jobs created, tourism, and most of all, prestige for the region that landed it.
Never mind that the US already had an advanced functional particle accelerator at Fermilab in "scenic" Batavia, IL, with an existing infrastructure and culture. Never mind that the SSC could have been built faster at less cost had it been constructed at Fermi.
So careful about using the word 'advocacy.' Barton was 'advocating' that the US Govt spend a few billion dollars in his district, not some Illinois (most likely) Democrat's.
-mj
They didn't have to get their hands 'on' the testbed / prototype hardware, theyt simply had to convince someone who had access to the machine to run their benchmarks, save them and send them over. Easily done, considering the number of people involved in designing a totally new hardware (970) and software (10.3 aka Panther) platform.
That said, I find these numbers a bit too detailed. But.. but.. I want to believe.
-mj
are you crazy? How long till someone writes a virus that hijacks iTunes and makes you purchase thousands of songs?
That's easy - as soon as they release the Windows version.
-mj
I've been supporting and working with Macs in the publishing and advertising fields for over 8 years now and I can tell you from experience that Macs have a longer useful life than Windows-based PCs.
Mac owners tend to hang on to their machines through more than one product revision cycle; sure, they're expensive, I'd love to upgrade, but my G4/400 here at work does everything I need it to -- and my G4/500 single-cpu at home runs Mac OS X quite well.
An increase of a few hundred Mhz is not a compelling upgrade for most. But jumping a few generations and replacing hardware that has performed flawlessly for three, four, five years? That's where you'll see me.
Now if only my CFO would start returning my calls...
Ben & Jerry's ice cream in Vermont used to subscribe to a version of the same idea: the highest-paid employee could make no more than 7x the salary of the lowest-paid.
Sadly they discontinued this practice a few years ago.
I used to work directly across the street from Bryant Park. You have to understand that an urban park, especially one in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, is not the same type of park, in purpose or experience.
The people heading into Bryant Park are lucky to even get away from their desks for a quick glimpse of sky and some non-HVAC-recirculated air. I was fortunate enough to have a job where I could often take 60 or 90 minutes at lunch, grab a chair and the day's newspapers and sit in the sun, all before returning to my monitor.
The second-to-last thing I would've wanted to do was check my email, or anything else resembling work, but by far the *last* thing I wanted to do was get up out of my seat and return to buzzing indoor fluorescent lights, away from sky and sun and fresh air...
Exercise is what you do at a gym in NYC, not a park. That may be sad to some but its true.
-mj
all your feiss are belong to us!
so what's your pointcast?