With the right tools at ones fingertips, an efficient teacher can do the work of two or three and still have time to have a life out of the class.
Having more teachers is one option -- if you are willing to pay more in taxes. As one that doesn't have children and knowing the current president of the US gives tax breaks to those that do have children -- to the point where those of us childrenless have to carry a larger load in the tax system, I say there are enough teachers and not enough tools for them.
I've seen what a dedicated educator can do with an 'overloaded' class. Having more not so dedicated educators is not always the answer.
Actually, I've been a part of writing software like this for their competitors and have worked with this software in the past as part of my duties as manager of development at the IUPUI Testing Center (thats Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis). We've worked on this shit for about 10 years now.
One of my tasks in the past was to push this type of software onto the local schools. We've used it for rating in class essays.
The idea is that everyone knows that the only way you get better writing is to write more and get some feedback on it. It doesn't matter if you are an educator throwing the papers back at the student or a computer algorithm. It all forces the student to find the mistakes and not make them the next time.
The problem isn't getting students to write more, its getting educators to grade more. There isn't enough hours in the day. So this is where this type of software comes into play -- you assign 2x the work you can normally handle, and let the computers handle half of it. You don't tell the students which assignments will be computer rated. Thus the students grades got better. Not much better, but they were better than the students not using the system in the same types of classes.
One of our smaller studies actually had us installing this software locally for instant feedback. It was a small percentage, but the students work was even better than before.
Yeah, you 'steal a copy' if you can't seem to get one given to you, and run it through until it likes it. How is this cheating or anyway underhanded. One of the better and far more dedicated educators I know actually allows students to hand in papers and have them marked up as many times as they want until the paper is due. His students final works are generally light years ahead of other educators in his facility that don't have the dedication (and for $26k a year, do you really want to give up your nights and weekends???).
Same thing here.
Shit, even using the grammar checker under work will force you to learn to write better (up to a point). You learn what its looking for and you avoid it. I'm not a good speller and I know the spell checkers help me learn after I hit the same error over and over again.
All these tools work for you in the learning process as long as you are willing to not just put this stuff on autopilot.
As for the title of this thread -- Lawsuit? The only lawsuits will come from idiots. None of the high stakes testing does purely computer rating. They all put humans into the equation. You will most likely get better rating because instead of having three or four humans look at your paper for 30 seconds each before moving on, you will now have one that is able to devote some serious time to it. All these humans will still be working just as many hours as before, but studies have shown that the eyeballs on the paper are there longer with this type of software than without (sorry, but these studies belong to the bigger testing companies or I'd post links...I just get paid to crunch the data).
Secondly, 5 years ago when I was working on this stuff full time, the software had a human agreeance of around 62% with a rater pool of 3 raters. Meaning that if you asked 3 people what they thought, took an average of this, and then asked a fourth, 62% of the time, the human agreed with the others. This was on a 12 point scale. The application, however, actually rated between 70 - 80% of the time depending on the model used.
In both cases, the raters were all trained together with the same things to look for, and the models were designed around this rater pool -- in a sense trying to simply guess at what the others would pick. The computer:human agreeance was higher than the human:human agreeance.
Back to the parent post, beating the system only means you beat learning to write.
BTW -- My post is not indicative of my writing skills outside of a conversational and informal setting, sans spell checker and proof re
Would you really punish someone for doing something as simple as what they have done?
Capital punishment is for someone that breaks into a bank, shoots a few people and rapes a woman before taking off with the cash.
This is a misdemeanor -- break into a candy store that someone left the door open, flip the lights a few times and tell the local kids that it would be funny to run to neighboring towns and repeat this process. It deserves a slap on the wrist.
Trust me, I'm no happier about this worm than you are. I found out of 100 computers, 3 work stations were not set up for automatic updates -- the users always canceled when it wanted to update manually. Those 3 were infected and I got hit on Saturday and called out of a wedding. One of my former employees was in charge of making these all automatic updates earlier in the year (as well as changing the virus protection to daily updates instead of weekly -- noticed half were still updating weeking from this weekends audit).
So I had my life interuupted for a bit because of this crap. Its not a big deal. I blame Microsoft more than I do the virus writters.
The difference is that the BBC wrote and produced those shows. They owned them and lost them.
Mp3.com never owned those files. They weren't theirs to give to anyone else. If anything was lost, it is lost solely because the original author did not think to use a $0.10 CD and put it in a vault (and periodically back up the data).
I was a little miffed when they took down the archives -- I had a few remix pieces I did for others and gave them all the media associated with, in which they put them on MP3.com and to this day don't know where the backups were. It was their stuff, so I can't complain too much (I look at remix work solely as hired hand -- yeah, it might require some creativity and otherwise, but the beginning and end products were someone elses).
In the end, its the author thats the sole person in charge of making certain their content is in tact.
Actually, in the beginning of automotive design, there were MANY interfaces for the design of how a car should be operated.
The first automanufacturer that decided that you didn't need a stick throttle pushing it forward or grab a handbrake to stop, all the while pulling a stick attached to a horizontal wheel SHOULD have been able to patent their idea and retain the protection for a number of years simply for creating a better interface.
Someone comes up with another interface, and the two companies get together and share their technologies, and its not like safety is being thrown out the window. If you aren't smart enough to design something in the first place that addresses these problems and only notice them after the fact, you don't have the skills or the need to be building this stuff just because you can.
This is the problem with society today. The inventors get nothing for their work unless they are complete assholes about it. You design something, and your whole life is around making things easier and more intuative for others and someone is able to use your work and undercut you because they have better manufacturing skills. Its as though the only thing that matters to people is who can get it to them the cheapest.
So yes, whom ever had the idea of putting pedals in a particular spot on a car should have gotten protection for it. Its been 100+ years since the auto was invented, and the patents would have been far removed in the past (even by our current laws) by the time that the auto had reached anywhere near general consumption, so it wasn't even a monopoly that held back the public in anyway. You, sir, have brought up the exact reason patents and other intellectual properties are in existance, yet weren't even smart enough to follow your own logic.
In the article you talk about, he was still using OS8 and had access to a second mouse button when he wanted one.
"I've been using a two-button mouse on my Macs for a couple years now, and no one could pry them away from me. The Kensington two-button mouse allows me to use the second button for System 8's context-sensitive menus, and even lets you set a third code for both buttons pressed simultaneously."
He then goes on to argue --
"In principle, I'm not against adding more buttons, but only if some clear definition exists for each, so the user can predict what might happen were one pressed."
What is interesting is that his opening salvo in explaining the 1 button mouse in the beginning
"We wanted an interface that could be learned in 20 minutes, and you can't do that with a mouse festooned with buttons."
is what Apple is still aimed at out of the box: Learning an interface in 20 minutes.
As the article says, even 6 years back, Apple had the hooks in the system to allow for 2 or more button capibility straight out of the box. All you have to do is spend the $15 to buy one...maybe even ordering one from Apple itself along with your order.
What the folks who continually bitch about the lack of the 2 buttons seems to ignore is that its a choice. And something that gives the clear definitions of what the second mouse button should do. What should it do? If an application is properly designed, one button is good enough to get the job done easily. If properly designed, two buttons might give the power user to get the job done much faster after learning the rest of the interface with only one button -- and then learning the short cuts.
"Like playing your purchased music on a Linux or OS/2 machine. Or suppose you have 5 macs in your house, iTunes only lets you play them on three machines!"
Then burn a fucking CD and play it from that. No loss of quality with that. Not as small, but you don't loose *ANY* quality from converting an AAC to AIF or WAV or CDDA. Still want it smaller, there are several formats that are lossless that you can convert it to and much smaller than any of these.
Theres your f'n fair use.
As for 5 machines -- yeah, I have this problem too. I have my iBook, my work PC, my home PC and my G4. I can only pick between 3 of these. Annoying sometimes. I can live with it though. If I need to have it on another machine, I burn a CD (which I have to for in my car for when I don't feel like taking my iPod with me).
"I think this is a pretty good example of how silly laws like the DMCA only restrict commerce in their own country."
Its pretty silly how laws like pickpocketting only restrict commerce in their own country too. While in Mexico a few years back, a few friends were robbed and had to ask me to western union them money to get back. I've heard that if Mexico started enforcing the pickpocket laws, the pickpocketers will just find another country to pickpocket in.
Its amazing how moronic posts like the parent of this one get modded up.
Whats even more amazing is that I know some fucking moron is going to mod this up too.
It was embarassing. It was during these days, that we'd spend 90% of our waking hours playing some role playing game or programming the Commodore / Amigas. Depending on who's home we were at. Or building Heathkit crap.
When I turned 15, I discovered women...yeah, a late start, but I don't think anyone in my core group did for the next 10 years. And by that time, they were already set in their ways. I was lucky, dad forced me to play sports and mom forced me to be in the scouts -- one year I had to work her Girl Scout Camp as a counsellor, which was all away across the lake from the Boy Scout camp.
I was still a geek at heart, but learned really quickly how to hide this fact...having a CR bag tucked into my belt was a sure way to loose respect from anyone outside of the geek community. I think my friend Ed still carried his through out his time at Purdue...sadly, my girlfriend threw my dice out within 3 weeks of meeting her at my university:-) After that, the geekiest game was Risk or Fortress America in the dorm lounge...
As one of the other posters said, its pretty much a more advanced version that needed a dozen books to understand.
Standard D&D came in a single box with everything ya needed to play. DM Guide and Player Guide. I remember, I spent $16 on this at the local gaming store when I was in my preteen age (cripes more than 2/3rds of my life ago). That was a lot of money back then:-)
Limited player classes. Limited Alignments. It was a LOT more black and white -- Lawful Neutral and Evil. Not to note that this makes no sense from a legitimate scale. Advanced had alignments based on your law following and your general disposition. For instance, someone could be Chaotic Good. More or less ya say fuck the laws, but you do what you feel is right -- Fucking dope smoking hippies... Or Lawful Evil. Think Dick Chenney. Oh wait, he makes the laws...nevermind.
Classes were limited...and levels were limited to a ceiling of around 20. No switching classes. No multiclasses. Advanced allowed you to be both multiclass as well as switching classes where this wasn't possible. For instance, if you became a fighter, you might not be able to be a magicician because the need for physicial training got in the way of the spiritual training -- but you'd still have some of the leftover abilities at the lower level.
That and there were a *LOT* more classes and subclasses. Some classes couldn't be some alignments or races. A hobbit souldn't be a palidin...and a Palidin needed to be Lawful Good -- even if the laws were unjust, you followed them. At least how the game was supposed to be played, I don't think anyone cared about this when actually playing as role playing was always minimized with ?D&D.
AD&D had a lot more subtlties to it...and manuals that wen't along with it. The monsters in the D&D books were limited and didn't have much back story to them. In AD&D, I had I believe the Monster Manual 1 & 2. Monstor Companion. Deities and Demigods (before they were forced to change the name by religious groups). Lots of back stories. A lot more to remember. A lot more abilities and weaknesses.
Fuck, the last time I looked at AD&D, the books had gotten so out of hand that not only did you have the players handbook (which use to be 200 pages of a large with legal sized pages), but now with the same for each character type.
Advanced D&D -- more rules and more money to buy the rules (gawd help you if you were the DM -- ya needed to have ALL of this). Simple enough for ya?
Personally, if I were playing again, I might look at the AD&D books for the back story, but stick with the rules of the D&D side simply because simplicity focuses on the role playing as opposed to charts and having a dozen DM cheat cheats / screens and having to carry 100 dice type (lets see, I had a D100 which just rolled for 10 minutes before stopping, a D50 -- which was as hard to find as the 100 at the time, a few that were designed for cards in case the players decided to gamble -- I think that came with a module and a dozen more -- that all us geekies would carry around in our Crown Royal bags attached to our belts even in nongaming situations as if they were bags of magic).
Yeah -- but most of the pros with G4 / G5s have complex setups and thus would want to keep everything racked:-) Its getting easier with Firewire where you just have 3 or 4 connections to make to the back of the machine, but still...
As for speeds, I think the TiBook is 5200, but the iBook I have is a 4200. Shhhlow. We sucessfully put in an 7500 into a TiBook a few months ago, but it runs hot and the battery gets drained a LOT faster. Almost better just to run an external in this situation (but thats what the client wanted).
Ya know, when I signed up for Audible.com, one of the first things I bought was War and Piece. It comes in 8 files -- the largest of which is 123 Megs...so the simple calculation is that it should take around 1 Gig at the highest quality of recording. It also comes in:
Fair (1 Hour of audio = 2MB): 20MB Medium / Good (1 Hour = 4 MB): 33MB Medium / Better (1 Hour = 7 MB): 61MB and as mentioned Excellent (1 Hour = 14MB): 123MB
The Medium Better is good enough for most speech oriented listenings of this which would weigh in at half (for the math impared) a gig.
Heck, you could listen to War and Peace on a solid state MP3 player and not have a problem at this resolution. 120Gig??? You are outta your gord. My several year old 5Gig iPod carries this easily (and its just as confusing remembering the characters in audio as it is in print -- then again, I'm not on the motorcycle shooting around at 90MPH weaving in around cars with the print version either).
Don't ya hate it when folks ruin 'funny' rated threads with serious info:-P
Its also due to the fact that its been filtered by the years.
When folks talk about how great anything was X years ago, they conviently forget about all the shit that didn't make it. Its like houses, a good friend of mine always claims they don't make them like they use to and point of the great old houses available today -- duh...the bad shit fell down, burned down or was torn down.
If you listen to any popular oldies station, they recycle the same play list over and over and over. Out of 1982, I can count maybe 3 or 4 great songs. The rest were average. Out of 1967, I can do the same. Out of 2004 -- I actually feel like there is far more diversity to choose from, but honestly, there is probably just as few GREAT songs on the radio.
So, a band's music survives 30 years...thats almost like claiming that copyright works perfectly. In the beginning they make crap and survive like anyone else. As they progress, the field weeds out. Its only in their old age when their output is nothing and bandmembers had dies off that this stuff gets any recognition.
Personally, I think copyright should be limited to a smaller time frame than is currently given, but how much smaller? Few can agree on that part:-)
Again, its only '99.9999%' better because the law of averages over the years...
I use my iBook for a lot, but it just doesn't have the buss bandwidth to deal with everything needed. Even the TiBooks with the FW800 really don't have what it needs to do more than a dozen in / outs at a time before you start to slow down.
Past that, unless you upgrade, laptop HDs rarely top 54k RPM. If you are running a pure synthesis rig -- something like Reaktor -- or even a hybrid app that is intended for DJs and not for serious musicians (DJs and Musicians have a good deal of the same skill sets, but it *IS* a different profession...most folks I know have their hands in both sides these days) such as Acid or Soundtrack or even Reason, bandwidth isn't a big thing because you really aren't running that much in the way of resources.
So it really depends on what you are after -- if I just need to do remix stuff, its the iBook. If its DAW work, its the G4. If its DAW + Orchestration, its the G4 + PC (for Gigasampler) + all the other hardware crap.
And if you use the velcro, make certain you get the good 3M Industrial stuff -- I've dumped a rack over and had my mixer still stuck to the top of it hanging over the side of the stage with this stuff:-) Never skimp on the adhesives...
That and the G4 XServ sounds like a stack of vacuum cleaners:-)
There is a decent rack system from Marathon that works for the G4s...the only problem is that the CD is now sideways -- but I'll probably be picking one up soon to get next to my rack'd PC so I don't have to crate everything up when I need to take the stuff on the road (luckily most of the time, its just in town).
BTW -- if you need to have ports up front, there are kits for both Mac and PC to reroute most of this up there...as well as a specialized fack for PCs that had the motherboard 'backwards' so that you see this stuff on the front end -- its a lot more because its targetted at the music audience, but I've tried the standard reroute hardware (its about $20) which uses a 5 1/4 bay up front...makes it easier so that even if the rack is open up front, you don't need to twist the rack during a gig -- or if you keep it at home and push a stationary rack up against the wall, you don't have to drag it out (I keep mine on wheels so its just a quick spin).
Just to backup someone else with sonik in his user info --
Yeah -- it does. I spent an hour getting my older inkjet printer hooked up to my PC hooked into my Macs. To do so, I couldn't use the standard printer sharing -- I had to pull up the CUPs.
The *ONLY* confusing thing was that many of the printer equivelents are not in the menu. I had to do a little research to find out that a lesser known printer from another manufacturer was what I needed to put into the printer name / type. All it would have taken would be for someone that was compiling these equivelencies to make an alias for one printer to the other, this would have been FAR easier...it wasn't impossible nor was it hard -- other than having to realize I need to see if there was anything close on the net. Thats something I don't think most average users would have done.
I think I would have gone mad, however, if I had to deal with the stuff ESR had to go through though...
I wish I could -- this is specific software for synthesisers. It runs on synthesizers. No copyprotection allowed once the stuff is downloaded to the computer for tranfer to the machine.
The installers that have this DO ask for a password, and we've though about watermarking the patches, but thats treating the client like a criminal right then and there. The few pieces of utility software that run on the PC / Mac are pretty generic -- but they are ours. I would HATE to make that registration based. Again, it treats customers like criminals.
As it stands, there is a clear cut and dried case of wrong doing.
I just don't want to do anything that would treat folks in any way I wouldn't want to be treated...the software is for professionals (the synths it runs on start around $5k) and I would expect professionals to act as such. Most do. I shouldn't have to change the way I do business just because a criminal forces me to do so.
Having said that, I completely understand why folks get all up in arms about their content being taken and given away. I can understand why they would want harsh penalties. I can understand why they think the consumer is a competitor and treats them like shit. I try not to do this because I have employement that is outside of this field. If it was my sole line of income, I'd have a different opinion on this -- my business manager for this enterprise *DOES* live off the income of the music industry and his opinion is much harsher than mine. And I can relate to that...
The average mainstream artist makes no where near $1M a year.
Unless you are talking about the less than 100 artists a year that make it in the top 10.
The average artist has to pay for people like me -- musicians, producers, sound engineers, music techs, studio gophers and otherwise. We don't come cheap -- i.e., we aren't paid like the taco bell employee, and honestly, its not that much more than computer technology jobs -- you need a few dozen of these around to get the job done. Making music is a business. The business might make a million dollars, but there are people to get paid, and investors (and generally, thats what the music companies are -- investors, they give you X amount of money in hopes of recouping their investments).
Most guys I know that are in it for the long haul live pretty modestly. The president of the local home town bank probably brings home more $$$. Guys that are in it for their first hit, spend and over spend and they LOOK like that have a lot of money, until the folks that need to get paid start asking for the money. I know one guy that pays me in gear because he never has any cash -- at least he did until I realized the gear was most likely not his, but on someone elses dime. Its like paying one credit card with another. And then these idiots go bankrupt. Honestly, you and I could live this exact same way for a couple of years if we were given two big credit cards and just kept transfering the balance (I did this the first year I was in college -- $5k in credit card purchases ended up costing me $20k because of it -- I know folks that were a LOT worse -- but I was still an idiot).
Next time you watch MTV Cribs, just realize the banks, the taxman, bankruptcy courts and the little people like me own all that -- it isn't the artist.
As for my crap not being worth the money -- the $14 on eBay. It might not be worth it. I have quite a few folks telling me it is. If its not worth it to someone else, then they don't *NEED* them. No one is going to go hungry, no children are going to be put out of their homes if they can't aquire my products cheaply. Past that, we had to pay a lot of money for licensing for our products. One was a replication of another technology, for which we aquired permission and licensing before we even started. Regardless if it isn't worth it for one person, then they are free to contact the same persons and get the appropriate licensing, or to develop an equivelent that doesn't require any someone elses work. If they can do it cheaper, fine -- I welcome fair competition. Hell, on my website, a *LOT* of our competitors use our forums. A lot advertise on our site -- the idea of the site was a community for folks that created content for a specific group of musicians...most of our competitors are also folks we have worked with or licensed our sounds to for specific areas that they would do better in marketting them.
Competition isn't a problem...unfair competition is. Taking something someone else creates and remarketting it as their own -- or just a free alternative -- is unfair competition.
As for buying a CD with 3 decent songs -- quite honestly, if I spend $12 on 3 decent songs, I'm happy to hear the rest in their original context -- even if they aren't radio friendly. $1 a song is WAY too cheap -- yeah, I use those services, but I'm willing to give a musician my cash for their cd if even a few make me happy. Then again, I know what goes into making music, and thus for me, there is more value in it...the average consumer thinks 4 musicians show up for two weeks and a polished cd comes out of it all by themselves.
Quite a few times the inventors / designers at Apple will point at Jobs ideas as the one that got them to the current design.
Case in point, the Lamp Style iMac came from him. Ives had come up with several LCD prototypes -- and they were probably all cool as hell in their own right -- but Jobs wasn't satisfied. While some upper management were touring his wine fields, he took the designers to a plantings of sunflowers and pointed out that the head of the plant was HUGE but didn't seem unwieldy and was natural. He asked the guys to think about that and how the flower's head was supported when redesigning the new iMac (for the 30th time).
The new iMac is directly a result of this and Jobs' idea on how it should work. you can see it in the machine when you look at it and think about it.
There are dozens of these stories out of the net from the designers of the hardware and the software where something that might have been a throw away comment from someone else became the core of what Jobs got out of his engineers (sometimes for good / sometimes for the bad).
So, from past experience, it is only prudent to accept he might have had a good deal of input even if others with the practical experience are listed (that was for the grandparent post as I agree with the parents post:-).
"We USED to be consumers, that is the old model of thinking at least. The current trend is that once a industry has a stranglehold on the consumer, we become the enemy, the opponent, since no natural opponent no longer exists."
We become the enemy when we are no longer consuming, but also competing.
P2P is competition, not consuming.
Face it, the average consumer out there really doesn't understand what goes into making a product -- even folks that SHOULD know what goes in to a product claim that since its all easily reproduced electronic bits, there really isn't any value in it.
When consumers start being competitors with no way of stopping them, something needs to change.
Think about it this way -- if one or two folks go into a store and shoplift, its a problem. BUT if they get caught, they get a light sentence. Now, what if hundreds went into stores and shoplifted as if it were institutional values? Several magnitudes above previous levels. Folks believed that they would never get caught because the law enforcement couldn't deal with this crime. So, what does law enforcement do knowing they can't police everything? They put a few shoplifters to death...err...a good deal bigger punishment than is really appropriate for the level of the damage *THEY* did...it would be a deterent.
The laws are not just there to punish the guilty, but to be a deterent. Sometimes one has to make an example of someone just to stop others.
Then again, I could just be a bit pissed off right now. I just found out last night some dumb motherfucker is selling software I sell to keep my website alive for $14 on eBay. He packaged about $100 worth of my software (as well as others that do sound design that I'm friends with), and claiming that he should be free to do it because he's not really making a profit -- he's only recouping his cost from burning the discs and sending them out. And thats not even the levels of P2P -- so far, according to his profiles, its only 2 dozen people that will never need to buy my stuff because they have it for almost free.
Theft is theft. If thieves were going into each and every one of your neighbors houses day and ripping them off every day, I can guarentee there will be some dead thieves and a lot of people applauding -- well except for the thieves who will be claiming that civil rights are being taken away and everyone else is a bunch of nazis.
If you want to talk about huge conglomerates screwing over the average consumer, you better be sure that the average consumer isn't fucking things up for those few honest consumers out there first...
Its not like its THAT hard. Games aren't movies...and most of the time the audio isn't really that much of the budget -- those of us that work with audio engineers and sound designers always talk about being the first to get the budget pulled out from under them.
My company has licensed some sound to game companies in the past. Its sad, but most of them are happy with static samples.
With a proper gaming synthesis engine, a lot of the repetitive sound fx could go away. The use of envelopes, filters and pitching coulf do most of the work. Granular synthesis could do a lot -- especially with metalic sounds. Reverb is dead simple these days. One doesn't need convolution or IR reverb to show proper soundstage depth. Of course, a good simplified convolution verb WOULD be great...
Lots of ways to get decent sounding audio out of a game -- but most game designers focus on the graphics and would have NO clue as to where to go for the rest.
Actually, YellaDawg should run a little more stable than other linuxes (theoretically) simply because it has less hardware it has to configure for. The exact opposite of what I was arguing against and you kinda make my point.
I know a lot of PC hardware the just won't work relyably on the Mac. I deal with a lot of estroic audio interfaces and some work well on the Mac, while others work well on the PC -- all claim to be xplatform, but they really aren't.
As for using standard PC parts -- a lot do work, some need their internal bios flashed and I've done this to save $100 over the price of the PC Version (my last SCSI card for example). Exact same hardware, different bios.
As for the security -- thats all conjecture. Microsoft wouldn't have all the security problems if they implemented a way to deal with this crap that didn't involve trying to prove they weren't at fault, it was just because they left a hole open so that others didn't have to change their code and users wouldn't have broken apps and blame M$ that this is the case.
M$ *IS* working on the security problems in a more proactive way -- they've already said the next service pack is going to kill a lot of software that didn't take security into account and used shortcuts in their programming. Its something that can be guarenteed to piss off their client base and folks that make software for windows users. They've realized that if they don't take the hard choices now, they will never have decent security -- even if it means a few months of folks blaming them for breaking their applications (instead of the idiots that programmed the stuff in the first place). As I mentioned, Apple already does this and pisses off a lot of people when they do something Apple says not to do and some smart ass wants to prove he can do it anyways, and then Apple fixes it and the stuff stops working -- and who gets the blame.
I can say if Apple were in the same situation, it is clearly uncertain if they would have the same security problems...they seem to fix things as rapidly as the OS guys...mainly because its the same software...there have been a few times where Apple has supplied the fix to the OS guys (and then they reported the fix across the other platforms a few days later).
Its just an asinine statement to say just because something has a monopoly type marketshare that they will abuse it and take their users for granted simply because they know even if they don't take the time, the sheep will buy it either way. M$ treats users like sheep...we don't know how anyone else would react under the same circumstances...
Apple is based on having decent and predictable hardware to run the OS.
OS X is great software -- I'm using it right now, but unless you are using the hardware along side it, its not the same. One of the problems with Windows is that there is WAY too much hardware to support relyably...thats not totally their fault either. The fact that you want to encourage folks to make hardware for your platform means that you have to make the code easy to program against -- which means you have folks vastly unqualified to write driver software writting it.
Apple raises the bar and makes it a bitch to program some drivers for this very reason. That probably means that having a dozen types of motherboards with different integrated parts would not work as relyably...or if Apple kept their standards - not at all. Witness every so often when they patch their systems to remove specific pieces of hardware that is known to be buggy -- I've been told some updates were there to simply KILL some hardware so that it wouldn't make the machine unstable. There was substandard RAM that was sold for a while on the G4s and Apple put out a patch that disabled all of this from being used and they pissed off a LOT of folks -- but Apple needed to do this to keep their standards up (otherwise folks were bitching about stability issues that had nothing to do with the OS or Apple branded hardware).
So would they move over to inexpensive x86s? They might. probably not...at least not from a supported perspective...
Thats strange -- are you feeding it the same data?
I have a few implementations of MD5 that I use for various apps that ALL give the same results. Sometimes you have to make sure that character sets and otherwise are being processed that same way, and it all comes out the same way.
Lets see -- I have the PHP builtin function, a perl implementation (for systems that don't have it built into the OS), a Javascript one and one that was for just plain ASP (not the.NET -- never used it yet. Hell, I use it to pass off authentication between these languages when I can't get away with using the same language through out. All work exactly the same...and I'm not even that great of a programmer...
Apple requires you to buy the Case, the Motherboard and the Harddrives. Past that, it is as open as anything else. You can swap out the case with something else (not easily) and hard drives are dead simple.
Past that, one doesn't need 'more software' -- the software that is there works. No need for 100 solutions that don't do shit, when the free one that came with the box is better than 99% of what you find on the PC -- and by that I mean Windows. Want to run Linux / BSD stuff...go to Darwinports. Want to build device drivers -- Darwin in open source and you can get a better picture of how its going to work with the system than with something like Windows.
Yeah, the initial hardware costs...but past that, its nothing closed like Windows.
There are no monopoly on applications for a Mac user, but there is a culture of getting things done right. I wish Windows was this way -- Linux is getting there, unfortunately, for the end user, they get there from the back end.
I'll happily tweak a linux app until I get it right...my mom won't. My dad is clueless about computers and I've had to set up every one that he's bought -- I bought my G4 a few years for music and video and was off for a gig just before my father stopped by unannounced and said he was going to be in town for a few days. My Mac showed up the same day (which was the only reason I went home before heading to the show).
My dad, curious about the Mac, asked about it and I told him to pull it out of the box and hook it up and check it out.
I got back several hours later to find that he had plugged everything in, was on the network (I had wireless for my laptops) and had pulled his video recorder out of his car because he had heard that it hooked into Macs -- and found the one firewire cable that was included and hooked it up to his video camera and it automatically pulled up iMovie...he was learning how to edit concert footage 7 hours after I left him with the machine in unopened boxes and he knew nothing about computers.
When the grandparent of this post says Get A Mac, You Will Be Happier, he means it. Its a bit snappish and its a bit condescending, but those of us that use computers solely to get our work done and not to be computer geeks want to do something, we use our Macs...it allows for computer illiterates to use them knowledgeable within their given field as much as someone that has used computers for years. It also allows geeks that want to get all unixy like me to do that too...
As for not having a monopoly, if they did have a monopoly, maybe you'd see more crappier half done applications on their platform. As its not a monopoly, everything HAS to work right. Again, Linux / BSD is also in this boat -- as they aren't the standard, things have to work right or we will just switch back to the standard, which at this time is Windows.
This is offtopic and will be modded accordingly, but I'm not going to post this anonymously to fear for my precious karma:-)
Having said that, I have gotten Firewire Video to work on the PC, but it was a long sorted process involving buying 2 different FW cards -- one of which seemed to be incompatible with all my devices, and a few different software packages to edit this stuff and stream it.
Having said that, I've heard that that VLC (Video Lan Client) can do Firewire Streaming, but I haven't looked at it in this capacity yet. I have used it as a way to import DVDs that were nearly dead due to friends misuage so that I at least had backups of the crap:-) VLC is free for Mac, Windows, Linux and probably a few other OSes that I don't know about...check it out and see if this is a possibility.
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No, it can work either way.
With the right tools at ones fingertips, an efficient teacher can do the work of two or three and still have time to have a life out of the class.
Having more teachers is one option -- if you are willing to pay more in taxes. As one that doesn't have children and knowing the current president of the US gives tax breaks to those that do have children -- to the point where those of us childrenless have to carry a larger load in the tax system, I say there are enough teachers and not enough tools for them.
I've seen what a dedicated educator can do with an 'overloaded' class. Having more not so dedicated educators is not always the answer.
Actually, I've been a part of writing software like this for their competitors and have worked with this software in the past as part of my duties as manager of development at the IUPUI Testing Center (thats Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis). We've worked on this shit for about 10 years now.
One of my tasks in the past was to push this type of software onto the local schools. We've used it for rating in class essays.
The idea is that everyone knows that the only way you get better writing is to write more and get some feedback on it. It doesn't matter if you are an educator throwing the papers back at the student or a computer algorithm. It all forces the student to find the mistakes and not make them the next time.
The problem isn't getting students to write more, its getting educators to grade more. There isn't enough hours in the day. So this is where this type of software comes into play -- you assign 2x the work you can normally handle, and let the computers handle half of it. You don't tell the students which assignments will be computer rated. Thus the students grades got better. Not much better, but they were better than the students not using the system in the same types of classes.
One of our smaller studies actually had us installing this software locally for instant feedback. It was a small percentage, but the students work was even better than before.
Yeah, you 'steal a copy' if you can't seem to get one given to you, and run it through until it likes it. How is this cheating or anyway underhanded. One of the better and far more dedicated educators I know actually allows students to hand in papers and have them marked up as many times as they want until the paper is due. His students final works are generally light years ahead of other educators in his facility that don't have the dedication (and for $26k a year, do you really want to give up your nights and weekends???).
Same thing here.
Shit, even using the grammar checker under work will force you to learn to write better (up to a point). You learn what its looking for and you avoid it. I'm not a good speller and I know the spell checkers help me learn after I hit the same error over and over again.
All these tools work for you in the learning process as long as you are willing to not just put this stuff on autopilot.
As for the title of this thread -- Lawsuit? The only lawsuits will come from idiots. None of the high stakes testing does purely computer rating. They all put humans into the equation. You will most likely get better rating because instead of having three or four humans look at your paper for 30 seconds each before moving on, you will now have one that is able to devote some serious time to it. All these humans will still be working just as many hours as before, but studies have shown that the eyeballs on the paper are there longer with this type of software than without (sorry, but these studies belong to the bigger testing companies or I'd post links...I just get paid to crunch the data).
Secondly, 5 years ago when I was working on this stuff full time, the software had a human agreeance of around 62% with a rater pool of 3 raters. Meaning that if you asked 3 people what they thought, took an average of this, and then asked a fourth, 62% of the time, the human agreed with the others. This was on a 12 point scale. The application, however, actually rated between 70 - 80% of the time depending on the model used.
In both cases, the raters were all trained together with the same things to look for, and the models were designed around this rater pool -- in a sense trying to simply guess at what the others would pick. The computer:human agreeance was higher than the human:human agreeance.
Back to the parent post, beating the system only means you beat learning to write.
BTW -- My post is not indicative of my writing skills outside of a conversational and informal setting, sans spell checker and proof re
Would you really punish someone for doing something as simple as what they have done?
Capital punishment is for someone that breaks into a bank, shoots a few people and rapes a woman before taking off with the cash.
This is a misdemeanor -- break into a candy store that someone left the door open, flip the lights a few times and tell the local kids that it would be funny to run to neighboring towns and repeat this process. It deserves a slap on the wrist.
Trust me, I'm no happier about this worm than you are. I found out of 100 computers, 3 work stations were not set up for automatic updates -- the users always canceled when it wanted to update manually. Those 3 were infected and I got hit on Saturday and called out of a wedding. One of my former employees was in charge of making these all automatic updates earlier in the year (as well as changing the virus protection to daily updates instead of weekly -- noticed half were still updating weeking from this weekends audit).
So I had my life interuupted for a bit because of this crap. Its not a big deal. I blame Microsoft more than I do the virus writters.
Wheres my new powerbook?
The difference is that the BBC wrote and produced those shows. They owned them and lost them.
Mp3.com never owned those files. They weren't theirs to give to anyone else. If anything was lost, it is lost solely because the original author did not think to use a $0.10 CD and put it in a vault (and periodically back up the data).
I was a little miffed when they took down the archives -- I had a few remix pieces I did for others and gave them all the media associated with, in which they put them on MP3.com and to this day don't know where the backups were. It was their stuff, so I can't complain too much (I look at remix work solely as hired hand -- yeah, it might require some creativity and otherwise, but the beginning and end products were someone elses).
In the end, its the author thats the sole person in charge of making certain their content is in tact.
Actually, in the beginning of automotive design, there were MANY interfaces for the design of how a car should be operated.
The first automanufacturer that decided that you didn't need a stick throttle pushing it forward or grab a handbrake to stop, all the while pulling a stick attached to a horizontal wheel SHOULD have been able to patent their idea and retain the protection for a number of years simply for creating a better interface.
Someone comes up with another interface, and the two companies get together and share their technologies, and its not like safety is being thrown out the window. If you aren't smart enough to design something in the first place that addresses these problems and only notice them after the fact, you don't have the skills or the need to be building this stuff just because you can.
This is the problem with society today. The inventors get nothing for their work unless they are complete assholes about it. You design something, and your whole life is around making things easier and more intuative for others and someone is able to use your work and undercut you because they have better manufacturing skills. Its as though the only thing that matters to people is who can get it to them the cheapest.
So yes, whom ever had the idea of putting pedals in a particular spot on a car should have gotten protection for it. Its been 100+ years since the auto was invented, and the patents would have been far removed in the past (even by our current laws) by the time that the auto had reached anywhere near general consumption, so it wasn't even a monopoly that held back the public in anyway. You, sir, have brought up the exact reason patents and other intellectual properties are in existance, yet weren't even smart enough to follow your own logic.
You mean 'one of the designers'.
In the article you talk about, he was still using OS8 and had access to a second mouse button when he wanted one.
"I've been using a two-button mouse on my Macs for a couple years now, and no one could pry them away from me. The Kensington two-button mouse allows me to use the second button for System 8's context-sensitive menus, and even lets you set a third code for both buttons pressed simultaneously."
He then goes on to argue --
"In principle, I'm not against adding more buttons, but only if some clear definition exists for each, so the user can predict what might happen were one pressed."
What is interesting is that his opening salvo in explaining the 1 button mouse in the beginning
"We wanted an interface that could be learned in 20 minutes, and you can't do that with a mouse festooned with buttons."
is what Apple is still aimed at out of the box: Learning an interface in 20 minutes.
As the article says, even 6 years back, Apple had the hooks in the system to allow for 2 or more button capibility straight out of the box. All you have to do is spend the $15 to buy one...maybe even ordering one from Apple itself along with your order.
What the folks who continually bitch about the lack of the 2 buttons seems to ignore is that its a choice. And something that gives the clear definitions of what the second mouse button should do. What should it do? If an application is properly designed, one button is good enough to get the job done easily. If properly designed, two buttons might give the power user to get the job done much faster after learning the rest of the interface with only one button -- and then learning the short cuts.
"Like playing your purchased music on a Linux or OS/2 machine. Or suppose you have 5 macs in your house, iTunes only lets you play them on three machines!"
Then burn a fucking CD and play it from that. No loss of quality with that. Not as small, but you don't loose *ANY* quality from converting an AAC to AIF or WAV or CDDA. Still want it smaller, there are several formats that are lossless that you can convert it to and much smaller than any of these.
Theres your f'n fair use.
As for 5 machines -- yeah, I have this problem too. I have my iBook, my work PC, my home PC and my G4. I can only pick between 3 of these. Annoying sometimes. I can live with it though. If I need to have it on another machine, I burn a CD (which I have to for in my car for when I don't feel like taking my iPod with me).
Fair use doesn't mean any and every use.
"I think this is a pretty good example of how silly laws like the DMCA only restrict commerce in their own country."
Its pretty silly how laws like pickpocketting only restrict commerce in their own country too. While in Mexico a few years back, a few friends were robbed and had to ask me to western union them money to get back. I've heard that if Mexico started enforcing the pickpocket laws, the pickpocketers will just find another country to pickpocket in.
Its amazing how moronic posts like the parent of this one get modded up.
Whats even more amazing is that I know some fucking moron is going to mod this up too.
Yeah...
:-) After that, the geekiest game was Risk or Fortress America in the dorm lounge...
It was embarassing. It was during these days, that we'd spend 90% of our waking hours playing some role playing game or programming the Commodore / Amigas. Depending on who's home we were at. Or building Heathkit crap.
When I turned 15, I discovered women...yeah, a late start, but I don't think anyone in my core group did for the next 10 years. And by that time, they were already set in their ways. I was lucky, dad forced me to play sports and mom forced me to be in the scouts -- one year I had to work her Girl Scout Camp as a counsellor, which was all away across the lake from the Boy Scout camp.
I was still a geek at heart, but learned really quickly how to hide this fact...having a CR bag tucked into my belt was a sure way to loose respect from anyone outside of the geek community. I think my friend Ed still carried his through out his time at Purdue...sadly, my girlfriend threw my dice out within 3 weeks of meeting her at my university
Sad...I'm a traitor to geeks everywhere...
As one of the other posters said, its pretty much a more advanced version that needed a dozen books to understand.
:-)
Standard D&D came in a single box with everything ya needed to play. DM Guide and Player Guide. I remember, I spent $16 on this at the local gaming store when I was in my preteen age (cripes more than 2/3rds of my life ago). That was a lot of money back then
Limited player classes. Limited Alignments. It was a LOT more black and white -- Lawful Neutral and Evil. Not to note that this makes no sense from a legitimate scale. Advanced had alignments based on your law following and your general disposition. For instance, someone could be Chaotic Good. More or less ya say fuck the laws, but you do what you feel is right -- Fucking dope smoking hippies... Or Lawful Evil. Think Dick Chenney. Oh wait, he makes the laws...nevermind.
Classes were limited...and levels were limited to a ceiling of around 20. No switching classes. No multiclasses. Advanced allowed you to be both multiclass as well as switching classes where this wasn't possible. For instance, if you became a fighter, you might not be able to be a magicician because the need for physicial training got in the way of the spiritual training -- but you'd still have some of the leftover abilities at the lower level.
That and there were a *LOT* more classes and subclasses. Some classes couldn't be some alignments or races. A hobbit souldn't be a palidin...and a Palidin needed to be Lawful Good -- even if the laws were unjust, you followed them. At least how the game was supposed to be played, I don't think anyone cared about this when actually playing as role playing was always minimized with ?D&D.
AD&D had a lot more subtlties to it...and manuals that wen't along with it. The monsters in the D&D books were limited and didn't have much back story to them. In AD&D, I had I believe the Monster Manual 1 & 2. Monstor Companion. Deities and Demigods (before they were forced to change the name by religious groups). Lots of back stories. A lot more to remember. A lot more abilities and weaknesses.
Fuck, the last time I looked at AD&D, the books had gotten so out of hand that not only did you have the players handbook (which use to be 200 pages of a large with legal sized pages), but now with the same for each character type.
Advanced D&D -- more rules and more money to buy the rules (gawd help you if you were the DM -- ya needed to have ALL of this). Simple enough for ya?
Personally, if I were playing again, I might look at the AD&D books for the back story, but stick with the rules of the D&D side simply because simplicity focuses on the role playing as opposed to charts and having a dozen DM cheat cheats / screens and having to carry 100 dice type (lets see, I had a D100 which just rolled for 10 minutes before stopping, a D50 -- which was as hard to find as the 100 at the time, a few that were designed for cards in case the players decided to gamble -- I think that came with a module and a dozen more -- that all us geekies would carry around in our Crown Royal bags attached to our belts even in nongaming situations as if they were bags of magic).
AD&D -- rules. D&D Roles...
Yeah -- but most of the pros with G4 / G5s have complex setups and thus would want to keep everything racked :-) Its getting easier with Firewire where you just have 3 or 4 connections to make to the back of the machine, but still...
As for speeds, I think the TiBook is 5200, but the iBook I have is a 4200. Shhhlow. We sucessfully put in an 7500 into a TiBook a few months ago, but it runs hot and the battery gets drained a LOT faster. Almost better just to run an external in this situation (but thats what the client wanted).
Ya know, when I signed up for Audible.com, one of the first things I bought was War and Piece. It comes in 8 files -- the largest of which is 123 Megs...so the simple calculation is that it should take around 1 Gig at the highest quality of recording. It also comes in:
:-P
Fair (1 Hour of audio = 2MB): 20MB
Medium / Good (1 Hour = 4 MB): 33MB
Medium / Better (1 Hour = 7 MB): 61MB
and as mentioned
Excellent (1 Hour = 14MB): 123MB
The Medium Better is good enough for most speech oriented listenings of this which would weigh in at half (for the math impared) a gig.
Heck, you could listen to War and Peace on a solid state MP3 player and not have a problem at this resolution. 120Gig??? You are outta your gord. My several year old 5Gig iPod carries this easily (and its just as confusing remembering the characters in audio as it is in print -- then again, I'm not on the motorcycle shooting around at 90MPH weaving in around cars with the print version either).
Don't ya hate it when folks ruin 'funny' rated threads with serious info
Its also due to the fact that its been filtered by the years.
:-)
When folks talk about how great anything was X years ago, they conviently forget about all the shit that didn't make it. Its like houses, a good friend of mine always claims they don't make them like they use to and point of the great old houses available today -- duh...the bad shit fell down, burned down or was torn down.
If you listen to any popular oldies station, they recycle the same play list over and over and over. Out of 1982, I can count maybe 3 or 4 great songs. The rest were average. Out of 1967, I can do the same. Out of 2004 -- I actually feel like there is far more diversity to choose from, but honestly, there is probably just as few GREAT songs on the radio.
So, a band's music survives 30 years...thats almost like claiming that copyright works perfectly. In the beginning they make crap and survive like anyone else. As they progress, the field weeds out. Its only in their old age when their output is nothing and bandmembers had dies off that this stuff gets any recognition.
Personally, I think copyright should be limited to a smaller time frame than is currently given, but how much smaller? Few can agree on that part
Again, its only '99.9999%' better because the law of averages over the years...
I use my iBook for a lot, but it just doesn't have the buss bandwidth to deal with everything needed. Even the TiBooks with the FW800 really don't have what it needs to do more than a dozen in / outs at a time before you start to slow down.
:-) Never skimp on the adhesives...
Past that, unless you upgrade, laptop HDs rarely top 54k RPM. If you are running a pure synthesis rig -- something like Reaktor -- or even a hybrid app that is intended for DJs and not for serious musicians (DJs and Musicians have a good deal of the same skill sets, but it *IS* a different profession...most folks I know have their hands in both sides these days) such as Acid or Soundtrack or even Reason, bandwidth isn't a big thing because you really aren't running that much in the way of resources.
So it really depends on what you are after -- if I just need to do remix stuff, its the iBook. If its DAW work, its the G4. If its DAW + Orchestration, its the G4 + PC (for Gigasampler) + all the other hardware crap.
And if you use the velcro, make certain you get the good 3M Industrial stuff -- I've dumped a rack over and had my mixer still stuck to the top of it hanging over the side of the stage with this stuff
That and the G4 XServ sounds like a stack of vacuum cleaners :-)
There is a decent rack system from Marathon that works for the G4s...the only problem is that the CD is now sideways -- but I'll probably be picking one up soon to get next to my rack'd PC so I don't have to crate everything up when I need to take the stuff on the road (luckily most of the time, its just in town).
BTW -- if you need to have ports up front, there are kits for both Mac and PC to reroute most of this up there...as well as a specialized fack for PCs that had the motherboard 'backwards' so that you see this stuff on the front end -- its a lot more because its targetted at the music audience, but I've tried the standard reroute hardware (its about $20) which uses a 5 1/4 bay up front...makes it easier so that even if the rack is open up front, you don't need to twist the rack during a gig -- or if you keep it at home and push a stationary rack up against the wall, you don't have to drag it out (I keep mine on wheels so its just a quick spin).
Just to backup someone else with sonik in his user info --
Yeah -- it does. I spent an hour getting my older inkjet printer hooked up to my PC hooked into my Macs. To do so, I couldn't use the standard printer sharing -- I had to pull up the CUPs.
The *ONLY* confusing thing was that many of the printer equivelents are not in the menu. I had to do a little research to find out that a lesser known printer from another manufacturer was what I needed to put into the printer name / type. All it would have taken would be for someone that was compiling these equivelencies to make an alias for one printer to the other, this would have been FAR easier...it wasn't impossible nor was it hard -- other than having to realize I need to see if there was anything close on the net. Thats something I don't think most average users would have done.
I think I would have gone mad, however, if I had to deal with the stuff ESR had to go through though...
I wish I could -- this is specific software for synthesisers. It runs on synthesizers. No copyprotection allowed once the stuff is downloaded to the computer for tranfer to the machine.
The installers that have this DO ask for a password, and we've though about watermarking the patches, but thats treating the client like a criminal right then and there. The few pieces of utility software that run on the PC / Mac are pretty generic -- but they are ours. I would HATE to make that registration based. Again, it treats customers like criminals.
As it stands, there is a clear cut and dried case of wrong doing.
I just don't want to do anything that would treat folks in any way I wouldn't want to be treated...the software is for professionals (the synths it runs on start around $5k) and I would expect professionals to act as such. Most do. I shouldn't have to change the way I do business just because a criminal forces me to do so.
Having said that, I completely understand why folks get all up in arms about their content being taken and given away. I can understand why they would want harsh penalties. I can understand why they think the consumer is a competitor and treats them like shit. I try not to do this because I have employement that is outside of this field. If it was my sole line of income, I'd have a different opinion on this -- my business manager for this enterprise *DOES* live off the income of the music industry and his opinion is much harsher than mine. And I can relate to that...
The average mainstream artist makes no where near $1M a year.
Unless you are talking about the less than 100 artists a year that make it in the top 10.
The average artist has to pay for people like me -- musicians, producers, sound engineers, music techs, studio gophers and otherwise. We don't come cheap -- i.e., we aren't paid like the taco bell employee, and honestly, its not that much more than computer technology jobs -- you need a few dozen of these around to get the job done. Making music is a business. The business might make a million dollars, but there are people to get paid, and investors (and generally, thats what the music companies are -- investors, they give you X amount of money in hopes of recouping their investments).
Most guys I know that are in it for the long haul live pretty modestly. The president of the local home town bank probably brings home more $$$. Guys that are in it for their first hit, spend and over spend and they LOOK like that have a lot of money, until the folks that need to get paid start asking for the money. I know one guy that pays me in gear because he never has any cash -- at least he did until I realized the gear was most likely not his, but on someone elses dime. Its like paying one credit card with another. And then these idiots go bankrupt. Honestly, you and I could live this exact same way for a couple of years if we were given two big credit cards and just kept transfering the balance (I did this the first year I was in college -- $5k in credit card purchases ended up costing me $20k because of it -- I know folks that were a LOT worse -- but I was still an idiot).
Next time you watch MTV Cribs, just realize the banks, the taxman, bankruptcy courts and the little people like me own all that -- it isn't the artist.
As for my crap not being worth the money -- the $14 on eBay. It might not be worth it. I have quite a few folks telling me it is. If its not worth it to someone else, then they don't *NEED* them. No one is going to go hungry, no children are going to be put out of their homes if they can't aquire my products cheaply. Past that, we had to pay a lot of money for licensing for our products. One was a replication of another technology, for which we aquired permission and licensing before we even started. Regardless if it isn't worth it for one person, then they are free to contact the same persons and get the appropriate licensing, or to develop an equivelent that doesn't require any someone elses work. If they can do it cheaper, fine -- I welcome fair competition. Hell, on my website, a *LOT* of our competitors use our forums. A lot advertise on our site -- the idea of the site was a community for folks that created content for a specific group of musicians...most of our competitors are also folks we have worked with or licensed our sounds to for specific areas that they would do better in marketting them.
Competition isn't a problem...unfair competition is. Taking something someone else creates and remarketting it as their own -- or just a free alternative -- is unfair competition.
As for buying a CD with 3 decent songs -- quite honestly, if I spend $12 on 3 decent songs, I'm happy to hear the rest in their original context -- even if they aren't radio friendly. $1 a song is WAY too cheap -- yeah, I use those services, but I'm willing to give a musician my cash for their cd if even a few make me happy. Then again, I know what goes into making music, and thus for me, there is more value in it...the average consumer thinks 4 musicians show up for two weeks and a polished cd comes out of it all by themselves.
Quite a few times the inventors / designers at Apple will point at Jobs ideas as the one that got them to the current design.
:-).
Case in point, the Lamp Style iMac came from him. Ives had come up with several LCD prototypes -- and they were probably all cool as hell in their own right -- but Jobs wasn't satisfied. While some upper management were touring his wine fields, he took the designers to a plantings of sunflowers and pointed out that the head of the plant was HUGE but didn't seem unwieldy and was natural. He asked the guys to think about that and how the flower's head was supported when redesigning the new iMac (for the 30th time).
The new iMac is directly a result of this and Jobs' idea on how it should work. you can see it in the machine when you look at it and think about it.
There are dozens of these stories out of the net from the designers of the hardware and the software where something that might have been a throw away comment from someone else became the core of what Jobs got out of his engineers (sometimes for good / sometimes for the bad).
So, from past experience, it is only prudent to accept he might have had a good deal of input even if others with the practical experience are listed (that was for the grandparent post as I agree with the parents post
"We USED to be consumers, that is the old model of thinking at least. The current trend is that once a industry has a stranglehold on the consumer, we become the enemy, the opponent, since no natural opponent no longer exists."
We become the enemy when we are no longer consuming, but also competing.
P2P is competition, not consuming.
Face it, the average consumer out there really doesn't understand what goes into making a product -- even folks that SHOULD know what goes in to a product claim that since its all easily reproduced electronic bits, there really isn't any value in it.
When consumers start being competitors with no way of stopping them, something needs to change.
Think about it this way -- if one or two folks go into a store and shoplift, its a problem. BUT if they get caught, they get a light sentence. Now, what if hundreds went into stores and shoplifted as if it were institutional values? Several magnitudes above previous levels. Folks believed that they would never get caught because the law enforcement couldn't deal with this crime. So, what does law enforcement do knowing they can't police everything? They put a few shoplifters to death...err...a good deal bigger punishment than is really appropriate for the level of the damage *THEY* did...it would be a deterent.
The laws are not just there to punish the guilty, but to be a deterent. Sometimes one has to make an example of someone just to stop others.
Then again, I could just be a bit pissed off right now. I just found out last night some dumb motherfucker is selling software I sell to keep my website alive for $14 on eBay. He packaged about $100 worth of my software (as well as others that do sound design that I'm friends with), and claiming that he should be free to do it because he's not really making a profit -- he's only recouping his cost from burning the discs and sending them out. And thats not even the levels of P2P -- so far, according to his profiles, its only 2 dozen people that will never need to buy my stuff because they have it for almost free.
Theft is theft. If thieves were going into each and every one of your neighbors houses day and ripping them off every day, I can guarentee there will be some dead thieves and a lot of people applauding -- well except for the thieves who will be claiming that civil rights are being taken away and everyone else is a bunch of nazis.
If you want to talk about huge conglomerates screwing over the average consumer, you better be sure that the average consumer isn't fucking things up for those few honest consumers out there first...
Its not like its THAT hard. Games aren't movies...and most of the time the audio isn't really that much of the budget -- those of us that work with audio engineers and sound designers always talk about being the first to get the budget pulled out from under them.
My company has licensed some sound to game companies in the past. Its sad, but most of them are happy with static samples.
With a proper gaming synthesis engine, a lot of the repetitive sound fx could go away. The use of envelopes, filters and pitching coulf do most of the work. Granular synthesis could do a lot -- especially with metalic sounds. Reverb is dead simple these days. One doesn't need convolution or IR reverb to show proper soundstage depth. Of course, a good simplified convolution verb WOULD be great...
Lots of ways to get decent sounding audio out of a game -- but most game designers focus on the graphics and would have NO clue as to where to go for the rest.
Actually, YellaDawg should run a little more stable than other linuxes (theoretically) simply because it has less hardware it has to configure for. The exact opposite of what I was arguing against and you kinda make my point.
I know a lot of PC hardware the just won't work relyably on the Mac. I deal with a lot of estroic audio interfaces and some work well on the Mac, while others work well on the PC -- all claim to be xplatform, but they really aren't.
As for using standard PC parts -- a lot do work, some need their internal bios flashed and I've done this to save $100 over the price of the PC Version (my last SCSI card for example). Exact same hardware, different bios.
As for the security -- thats all conjecture. Microsoft wouldn't have all the security problems if they implemented a way to deal with this crap that didn't involve trying to prove they weren't at fault, it was just because they left a hole open so that others didn't have to change their code and users wouldn't have broken apps and blame M$ that this is the case.
M$ *IS* working on the security problems in a more proactive way -- they've already said the next service pack is going to kill a lot of software that didn't take security into account and used shortcuts in their programming. Its something that can be guarenteed to piss off their client base and folks that make software for windows users. They've realized that if they don't take the hard choices now, they will never have decent security -- even if it means a few months of folks blaming them for breaking their applications (instead of the idiots that programmed the stuff in the first place). As I mentioned, Apple already does this and pisses off a lot of people when they do something Apple says not to do and some smart ass wants to prove he can do it anyways, and then Apple fixes it and the stuff stops working -- and who gets the blame.
I can say if Apple were in the same situation, it is clearly uncertain if they would have the same security problems...they seem to fix things as rapidly as the OS guys...mainly because its the same software...there have been a few times where Apple has supplied the fix to the OS guys (and then they reported the fix across the other platforms a few days later).
Its just an asinine statement to say just because something has a monopoly type marketshare that they will abuse it and take their users for granted simply because they know even if they don't take the time, the sheep will buy it either way. M$ treats users like sheep...we don't know how anyone else would react under the same circumstances...
Why?
Apple is based on having decent and predictable hardware to run the OS.
OS X is great software -- I'm using it right now, but unless you are using the hardware along side it, its not the same. One of the problems with Windows is that there is WAY too much hardware to support relyably...thats not totally their fault either. The fact that you want to encourage folks to make hardware for your platform means that you have to make the code easy to program against -- which means you have folks vastly unqualified to write driver software writting it.
Apple raises the bar and makes it a bitch to program some drivers for this very reason. That probably means that having a dozen types of motherboards with different integrated parts would not work as relyably...or if Apple kept their standards - not at all. Witness every so often when they patch their systems to remove specific pieces of hardware that is known to be buggy -- I've been told some updates were there to simply KILL some hardware so that it wouldn't make the machine unstable. There was substandard RAM that was sold for a while on the G4s and Apple put out a patch that disabled all of this from being used and they pissed off a LOT of folks -- but Apple needed to do this to keep their standards up (otherwise folks were bitching about stability issues that had nothing to do with the OS or Apple branded hardware).
So would they move over to inexpensive x86s? They might. probably not...at least not from a supported perspective...
Thats strange -- are you feeding it the same data?
.NET -- never used it yet. Hell, I use it to pass off authentication between these languages when I can't get away with using the same language through out. All work exactly the same...and I'm not even that great of a programmer...
I have a few implementations of MD5 that I use for various apps that ALL give the same results. Sometimes you have to make sure that character sets and otherwise are being processed that same way, and it all comes out the same way.
Lets see -- I have the PHP builtin function, a perl implementation (for systems that don't have it built into the OS), a Javascript one and one that was for just plain ASP (not the
Monoculture?
:-)
:-) VLC is free for Mac, Windows, Linux and probably a few other OSes that I don't know about...check it out and see if this is a possibility.
And you are comparing this to Wind'rs.
Apple requires you to buy the Case, the Motherboard and the Harddrives. Past that, it is as open as anything else. You can swap out the case with something else (not easily) and hard drives are dead simple.
Past that, one doesn't need 'more software' -- the software that is there works. No need for 100 solutions that don't do shit, when the free one that came with the box is better than 99% of what you find on the PC -- and by that I mean Windows. Want to run Linux / BSD stuff...go to Darwinports. Want to build device drivers -- Darwin in open source and you can get a better picture of how its going to work with the system than with something like Windows.
Yeah, the initial hardware costs...but past that, its nothing closed like Windows.
There are no monopoly on applications for a Mac user, but there is a culture of getting things done right. I wish Windows was this way -- Linux is getting there, unfortunately, for the end user, they get there from the back end.
I'll happily tweak a linux app until I get it right...my mom won't. My dad is clueless about computers and I've had to set up every one that he's bought -- I bought my G4 a few years for music and video and was off for a gig just before my father stopped by unannounced and said he was going to be in town for a few days. My Mac showed up the same day (which was the only reason I went home before heading to the show).
My dad, curious about the Mac, asked about it and I told him to pull it out of the box and hook it up and check it out.
I got back several hours later to find that he had plugged everything in, was on the network (I had wireless for my laptops) and had pulled his video recorder out of his car because he had heard that it hooked into Macs -- and found the one firewire cable that was included and hooked it up to his video camera and it automatically pulled up iMovie...he was learning how to edit concert footage 7 hours after I left him with the machine in unopened boxes and he knew nothing about computers.
When the grandparent of this post says Get A Mac, You Will Be Happier, he means it. Its a bit snappish and its a bit condescending, but those of us that use computers solely to get our work done and not to be computer geeks want to do something, we use our Macs...it allows for computer illiterates to use them knowledgeable within their given field as much as someone that has used computers for years. It also allows geeks that want to get all unixy like me to do that too...
As for not having a monopoly, if they did have a monopoly, maybe you'd see more crappier half done applications on their platform. As its not a monopoly, everything HAS to work right. Again, Linux / BSD is also in this boat -- as they aren't the standard, things have to work right or we will just switch back to the standard, which at this time is Windows.
This is offtopic and will be modded accordingly, but I'm not going to post this anonymously to fear for my precious karma
Having said that, I have gotten Firewire Video to work on the PC, but it was a long sorted process involving buying 2 different FW cards -- one of which seemed to be incompatible with all my devices, and a few different software packages to edit this stuff and stream it.
Having said that, I've heard that that VLC (Video Lan Client) can do Firewire Streaming, but I haven't looked at it in this capacity yet. I have used it as a way to import DVDs that were nearly dead due to friends misuage so that I at least had backups of the crap