Here at the University of Connecticut, they've banned Napster, not because they were asked too, but becuause it was sucking up too much bandwidth for recreational perposes.
Maybe as a music major I can convince them I need access. Not that the ban is holding me back. Napigator satisfies all my try-before-I-buy needs.
Why would apple want to make MacOS available on the PC platform? Apple is in the business of making computers. The whole thing: a tight, integrated product. Steve Jobs wants access to every nook and cranny of the product.
And that's what makes a Mac a quality product. It's not just the OS, it's the package.
-Erik
So the Volvo engineers who build backhoes should drive them to work? You have to remember to separate Microsoft's real viable market from who their marketing department *appears* to be marketing to.
This has happened before. The movie people were shitting bricks when VHS reared it's head. After a while they realized that all they had to do was rent movies cheaply enough that it wasn't worth the pain in the ass to copy them.
Whoever "wins" this situation is the party that sells convenient access to music. It will be a little trickier than the video solution, but someone will figure it out.
I'd be happy, for instance, to pay a buck or two per song if I could have them wirelessly (not a word, is it...) transmitted to my portable mp3 player, my car, my stereo, or my computer. Heck, I'm happy to buy CDs now and they're not half that convenient.
Piracy won't go away. There will always be zealots who think they can get something for free. But for the people with the most spending power... if you're pulling in 60,000 in a given year, why waste your time dicking around in napster when you can pay someone to get the music to you easily and at the same time support the creation of more such lovely music.
It's one thing for police to stop a car to see if there's a caucasian male age 20-24 with blonde hair and a lakers jersey. It's another to stop people on the street and frisk them for drugs. Or do a cavity search or something.
Imagine if this technology were used to develop a tattoo friendly ink... get a silicon mesh implanted under your skin and a piesoelectric power supply and have your favorite tattoo artist inject this stuff. You could upload a new tattoo every day.
I might guess that refresh rates are not up to desktop quality. Remember when LCDs were starting to be used on laptops? Much ghosting. I recall reading about other flexible display techs and that was a problem.
... but I guess not. This reminds me of the guy trying to build a paper computer... print the display, chip, input device all on paper as a way of managing absentee ballots.
if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
You seem to be suggesting a way to moderate w/o recieving moderator points. What's to stop me from creating 100 accounts and slapping you on 100 kill lists to get all of your posts moderated down. Leave the moderation alone--don't fix what ain't b0rked.
Gilder, Moore... I remember when you had to discover a pretty clever fold in the universe to get your own law. Heck Pythagorus only got a "theorum." These days all you have to do is a little algebra.
Erik's law: My hair seems to double in length every three weeks. I wonder what would happen if I didn't cut it at that point.
I don't mind paying for software but jeez that crap is so expensive!People are lucky to be able to afford a computer let alone $500 for a drawing program.
Photoshop is *not* marketed towards people, it's marketed towards companies. Working as a web designer, I would say to my boss "I need Photoshop 4. It will let me do X, Y, and Z, and that will improve P, Q, and R on the web site.
A company that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars can afford to spend a thousand bucks on some software for their web designer to make an attractive, functional site. And that's a thousand times more true for a magazine whose image is tied directly to every design decision their graphic designers make. -Erik
Looking only at how far M16 was from it's projected release date, M17 should be packaged, documented, and downloadable around next thursday (7-6-2000).
The operating system that Apple developed is poor at best; a single application crash almost always brings down the machine.
If you're comparing it to a year 2000 release of Windows or Linux, sure. But the MacOS came out in what, 1984? I remember using Mac Classics in grade school, and for what most people were doing with them, they were great. It never crashed while I used AppleWorks or whatever it was...
Yes, if you beat the crap out of it today, it falls down because it's an old man, but when it was in its prime it did it's job extremely well. -Erik
Everything Microsoft is talking about is both "nothing new" and "not as inherantly wonderful as microsoft would like us to believe." But was TCP/IP new when Windows 95 came out? No, but that doesn't mean Microsoft's implementation didn't made my life a hundred times easier. I never want to look at Trumpet Winsock again.
Microsoft is willing to trade up some "ideal" for "useful" and for "marketable." I think that's why GNU hasn't taken off in the consumer marketplace... GNU developers don't seem to be willing to sacrifice "ideal" at any cost.
We have to wait and see how MS implements this. Microsoft didn't get where they are by putting bullshit in the software and the good ideas in the press release. They got where they are by putting prettying up good ideas in the software and leaving the bullshit for the press release.
In Windows2000, Explorer has image previewing software built in. What if MS adds an HTML preview? That's not allowed? What about a PDF preview? What's the difference between a web browser and a file system shell anyway? It's just layers of data.
I'm weary of all this talk about things being "good for consumers". I like the fact that my shell has built in ties to HTML. I like that I can have a weather widget on my desktop. I like that I can call up a web page from Explorer if I'm feeling lazy.
Punish Microsoft if you will, limit their behavior, but I don't want the DOJ telling me what my software vendors can and can't package for me. That sits wrong with me. Are they going to order Adobe to pull ImageReady out of Photoshop 5.5 if Macromedia Fireworks bombs? Is that illegal tying?
That's a strange kind of voodoo statistics you learned there... predicting a trend with one datapoint. Windows was deeper and it beat MacOS, so since Linux is even deeper still it will beat windows?
It's not so hard to write a useful application these days. We have HTML and Java and the web, and with these tools a good developer can create a cross-platform tool that does something useful and marketable.
Why do you think AOL is investing in a hardware platform with no hard drive? Do you really thing the Gateway/TimeWarner/AOL/Transmeta/Linux webpad is going to have a command line? The problem with your argument is that you're assuming that the things that made an operating successful 10 years ago will make an OS successful today. -Erik
Microsoft is...eager to push some sort of pay-per-use revenue model
This sort of thing will never become mainstream in America. We want to own our cars (not ride the bus,) we want to own our DVDs (down with DivX!) and so on... we're a material people, that's all there is to it. This sort of thing won't catch until someone offers it for free.
That's the other thing... we Americans will pay out our asses for the illusion that we're getting something for free. -Erik
Making a fancy table in WP5.1 was a lot faster than using MS Word
Sometimes you need to take a step back to take two steps forward.
You can do things very quickly by memorizing keyboard shortcuts and practicing sequences of keystrokes. But that doesn't mean we should keep using those interface elements. Maybe it's faster to remember that to save a document in my documents folder in Textra I press F2 F8 filename.doc ENTER Y ENTER, but I wouldn't go back to that from the Word 2000 way of doing it for a million dollars.
when senior people are criticising other senior people in public you don't have a team any more. Await implosion.
I guess this is what Graeme Divine was hired for. He's the head of the team, it's his job to keep things going smoothly and making sure communication is going and everyone is clear on what they're doing and working together towards some cohesive design goal.
Besides, Carmack is coding, and Adrian and Kevin are doing art. Once they decide on a project, I don't think that they'll butt into each other much. Carmack just puts his head down and codes, I don't think he meddles with many of the art decisions.
Once the Darwin level is ported to intel, most of the remaining higher level items (the rest of MacOS X) would follow with relative ease.
I always figured that one of the big problems with porting mac-os-anything to the Intel platform would be that Apple tightly controls hardware. The drivers for my Diamond MX300 sound card have to come from somewhere, I don't think you can just magically throw Quartz and everything else on "Darwin for Intel" and play Mac QuakeIII.
> people who say that Napster won't cost the > music industry money are kidding themselves
I recently downloaded Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP through napster. (It's not in stores yet.)
I never would've bought the album had I not listened to the whole thing. The songs on the radio just sound like the MTV bullshit he put on his last album. After listening to the MM LP, I've got a lot more respect for this artist. (Mozart was crazy too, you know... He's worth a look for those who haven't.)
The fact is, I'll probably buy this album when it comes out. Eminem and the RIAA are getting $15 more of my money than they would've had napster never existed.
> Let me guess, you think it's a good thing if > people had to spend 10 minutes poking under the > hood messing with stuff just to start their > cars, right? But what if you could stand in your garage in front of your car with the hood open while a little animated paper-clip ran around in the engine fiddling with stuff and explaining things to you and looking around on the web for hints and freelance mechanics who could offer advice? -Erik
Slashdot Mirror
Here at the University of Connecticut, they've banned Napster, not because they were asked too, but becuause it was sucking up too much bandwidth for recreational perposes.
Maybe as a music major I can convince them I need access. Not that the ban is holding me back. Napigator satisfies all my try-before-I-buy needs.
-Erik
50% of engineers aren't below average. 50% of engineers are below the median.
-Erik
Why would apple want to make MacOS available on the PC platform? Apple is in the business of making computers. The whole thing: a tight, integrated product. Steve Jobs wants access to every nook and cranny of the product. And that's what makes a Mac a quality product. It's not just the OS, it's the package. -Erik
you need to use your own product on a daily basis
So the Volvo engineers who build backhoes should drive them to work? You have to remember to separate Microsoft's real viable market from who their marketing department *appears* to be marketing to.
-Erik
This has happened before. The movie people were shitting bricks when VHS reared it's head. After a while they realized that all they had to do was rent movies cheaply enough that it wasn't worth the pain in the ass to copy them.
Whoever "wins" this situation is the party that sells convenient access to music. It will be a little trickier than the video solution, but someone will figure it out.
I'd be happy, for instance, to pay a buck or two per song if I could have them wirelessly (not a word, is it...) transmitted to my portable mp3 player, my car, my stereo, or my computer. Heck, I'm happy to buy CDs now and they're not half that convenient.
Piracy won't go away. There will always be zealots who think they can get something for free. But for the people with the most spending power... if you're pulling in 60,000 in a given year, why waste your time dicking around in napster when you can pay someone to get the music to you easily and at the same time support the creation of more such lovely music.
-Erik
It's one thing for police to stop a car to see if there's a caucasian male age 20-24 with blonde hair and a lakers jersey. It's another to stop people on the street and frisk them for drugs. Or do a cavity search or something.
-Erik
We've got the source code... all we need is a compiler and an O'Reilly book...
-Erik
Imagine if this technology were used to develop a tattoo friendly ink... get a silicon mesh implanted under your skin and a piesoelectric power supply and have your favorite tattoo artist inject this stuff. You could upload a new tattoo every day.
-Erik
I might guess that refresh rates are not up to desktop quality. Remember when LCDs were starting to be used on laptops? Much ghosting. I recall reading about other flexible display techs and that was a problem.
-Erik
http://www.papercomputer.com/
-Erik
Good suggestion, except...
if a particular user is in the kill profile of more than 90% of the users who use kill profiles, that user loses karma or gets posted at a lower level.
You seem to be suggesting a way to moderate w/o recieving moderator points. What's to stop me from creating 100 accounts and slapping you on 100 kill lists to get all of your posts moderated down. Leave the moderation alone--don't fix what ain't b0rked.
You could also just browse at +2. -Erik
Gilder, Moore... I remember when you had to discover a pretty clever fold in the universe to get your own law. Heck Pythagorus only got a "theorum." These days all you have to do is a little algebra.
Erik's law: My hair seems to double in length every three weeks. I wonder what would happen if I didn't cut it at that point.
-Erik
I don't mind paying for software but jeez that crap is so expensive! People are lucky to be able to afford a computer let alone $500 for a drawing program.
Photoshop is *not* marketed towards people, it's marketed towards companies. Working as a web designer, I would say to my boss "I need Photoshop 4. It will let me do X, Y, and Z, and that will improve P, Q, and R on the web site.
A company that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars can afford to spend a thousand bucks on some software for their web designer to make an attractive, functional site. And that's a thousand times more true for a magazine whose image is tied directly to every design decision their graphic designers make. -Erik
Looking only at how far M16 was from it's projected release date, M17 should be packaged, documented, and downloadable around next thursday (7-6-2000).
-Erik
The operating system that Apple developed is poor at best; a single application crash almost always brings down the machine.
If you're comparing it to a year 2000 release of Windows or Linux, sure. But the MacOS came out in what, 1984? I remember using Mac Classics in grade school, and for what most people were doing with them, they were great. It never crashed while I used AppleWorks or whatever it was...
Yes, if you beat the crap out of it today, it falls down because it's an old man, but when it was in its prime it did it's job extremely well. -Erik
Everything Microsoft is talking about is both "nothing new" and "not as inherantly wonderful as microsoft would like us to believe." But was TCP/IP new when Windows 95 came out? No, but that doesn't mean Microsoft's implementation didn't made my life a hundred times easier. I never want to look at Trumpet Winsock again.
Microsoft is willing to trade up some "ideal" for "useful" and for "marketable." I think that's why GNU hasn't taken off in the consumer marketplace... GNU developers don't seem to be willing to sacrifice "ideal" at any cost.
We have to wait and see how MS implements this. Microsoft didn't get where they are by putting bullshit in the software and the good ideas in the press release. They got where they are by putting prettying up good ideas in the software and leaving the bullshit for the press release.
-Erik
In Windows2000, Explorer has image previewing software built in. What if MS adds an HTML preview? That's not allowed? What about a PDF preview? What's the difference between a web browser and a file system shell anyway? It's just layers of data.
I'm weary of all this talk about things being "good for consumers". I like the fact that my shell has built in ties to HTML. I like that I can have a weather widget on my desktop. I like that I can call up a web page from Explorer if I'm feeling lazy.
Punish Microsoft if you will, limit their behavior, but I don't want the DOJ telling me what my software vendors can and can't package for me. That sits wrong with me. Are they going to order Adobe to pull ImageReady out of Photoshop 5.5 if Macromedia Fireworks bombs? Is that illegal tying?
-Erik
You see the trend here
That's a strange kind of voodoo statistics you learned there... predicting a trend with one datapoint. Windows was deeper and it beat MacOS, so since Linux is even deeper still it will beat windows?
It's not so hard to write a useful application these days. We have HTML and Java and the web, and with these tools a good developer can create a cross-platform tool that does something useful and marketable.
Why do you think AOL is investing in a hardware platform with no hard drive? Do you really thing the Gateway/TimeWarner/AOL/Transmeta/Linux webpad is going to have a command line? The problem with your argument is that you're assuming that the things that made an operating successful 10 years ago will make an OS successful today. -Erik
Microsoft is...eager to push some sort of pay-per-use revenue model
This sort of thing will never become mainstream in America. We want to own our cars (not ride the bus,) we want to own our DVDs (down with DivX!) and so on... we're a material people, that's all there is to it. This sort of thing won't catch until someone offers it for free.
That's the other thing... we Americans will pay out our asses for the illusion that we're getting something for free. -Erik
Making a fancy table in WP5.1 was a lot faster than using MS Word
Sometimes you need to take a step back to take two steps forward.
You can do things very quickly by memorizing keyboard shortcuts and practicing sequences of keystrokes. But that doesn't mean we should keep using those interface elements. Maybe it's faster to remember that to save a document in my documents folder in Textra I press F2 F8 filename.doc ENTER Y ENTER, but I wouldn't go back to that from the Word 2000 way of doing it for a million dollars.
OK, maybe for a million dollars
-Erik
when senior people are criticising other senior people in public you don't have a team any more. Await implosion.
I guess this is what Graeme Divine was hired for. He's the head of the team, it's his job to keep things going smoothly and making sure communication is going and everyone is clear on what they're doing and working together towards some cohesive design goal.
Besides, Carmack is coding, and Adrian and Kevin are doing art. Once they decide on a project, I don't think that they'll butt into each other much. Carmack just puts his head down and codes, I don't think he meddles with many of the art decisions.
-Erik
Once the Darwin level is ported to intel, most of the remaining higher level items (the rest of MacOS X) would follow with relative ease.
I always figured that one of the big problems with porting mac-os-anything to the Intel platform would be that Apple tightly controls hardware. The drivers for my Diamond MX300 sound card have to come from somewhere, I don't think you can just magically throw Quartz and everything else on "Darwin for Intel" and play Mac QuakeIII.
-Erik
-Erik> people who say that Napster won't cost the
> music industry money are kidding themselves
I recently downloaded Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP through napster. (It's not in stores yet.)
I never would've bought the album had I not listened to the whole thing. The songs on the radio just sound like the MTV bullshit he put on his last album. After listening to the MM LP, I've got a lot more respect for this artist. (Mozart was crazy too, you know... He's worth a look for those who haven't.)
The fact is, I'll probably buy this album when it comes out. Eminem and the RIAA are getting $15 more of my money than they would've had napster never existed.
And I don't think this situation is uncommon.
-Erik
> Let me guess, you think it's a good thing if > people had to spend 10 minutes poking under the > hood messing with stuff just to start their > cars, right? But what if you could stand in your garage in front of your car with the hood open while a little animated paper-clip ran around in the engine fiddling with stuff and explaining things to you and looking around on the web for hints and freelance mechanics who could offer advice? -Erik
A pen is pretty damn powerful.
-Erik