Apple is reacting to an unauthorized publication about Jobs? It does not make sense: unless it is about today's Apple directly?
Did Wiley want to sell it in Apple stores (even that would have been, at most, a bit weird) ?
With all respect to Apple's hardware and software products, such an action as banning the entire publishing house from stores sound absurdly inappropriate.
Check for yourself the sample chapter at least, to see whether it's such an outrageous book or not.
you can make Finder's hidden Quit menu entry (A.K.A. Command-Q) visible again, by turning it on with TinkerTool for example - note that it does not patch nor modify any executable... it's just a setting in the Finder's preference file (which any Unixy person might like to edit in emacs:-)
yeah, that was my first thought too. However, given the fact that in Prey (the book) the prey was us, humans, I'm not so sure nanorobot swarms are exactly what I'd like to have prepare Mars for the 'our' arrival there. Unless they behave like the swarm in Nemesis or the one in Solaris...?
...it is always a controversial issue. But the 2nd paragraph in the article starts with:
Who invented the telephone? Was it Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray?
In fact, the US Congress acknowledged that it was Antonio Meucci, despite the fact that he was not able to obtain a patent for it, unlike Bell about five years later.
Patents... a topic which I guess slashdotters feel strongly about.
Actually, there are different business models for cellphones and satellite TV: some prevalent in most of the world, some prevalent in the U.S. :
Cell Phones have always required a subscription, and people percieve value in what they pay for (communication whenever, whereever, cheap long distance).
This is only true in the U.S. - for cellphone use in EU, East Asia, African countries etc, pay-per-use is _the_ most popular business model (you pay some c/minute to call, you pay nothing to receive calls, you are not tied to any contract, no penalties for switching carriers etc.)
Cable/Satellite (and you could probably throw DVR subscriptions for Tivo and RePlayTV in there) and XM have always been subscription-based, and while they supplant free TV and radio, enough people percieve them as superior to be an advantage.
Similarly, Sat-TV like for example Astra, HotBird &c. in EU, have always had tons of free commercial (now digital) satellite channels - except that you have to endure lots of ads... There are also subscription-based Sat-TV channels, but their market is tiny by comparison.
What surprises me is that iTunes follows the pay-per-use model, i.e. the one much less common in the U.S. for cellphones, and it is nevertheless so successful.
Samsung i790? I found the Samsung i730 which is a PDA, and the Samsung A790 which is a CDMA 800 / CDMA 1900 / GSM 900 / GSM 1800 phone. With the A790, in North America you can't use any GSM network since they all operate on 850/1900MHz, and you can't use the CDMA2000 operators you list, since the phone is a 2G CDMA device. All in all, this phone is no equivalent to the ubiquitous "swap your SIM and go" quad-band GSM phones... and these come quite cheap nowadays.
The link you provide (CDMA site) while a useful list of CDMA-2000 operators, it is not at all the same as the list of 2G CDMA operators (which is less extensive).
And while you find GSM networks in almost all countries which have CDMA or CDMA2000 (e.g. in the US it is now about 50%-50%), the opposite is by far not true. Both by coverage, by countries and by number of users, GSM is the standard (e.g. over 1000M GSM vs. 226M CDMA)
Even where CDMA operators exist, you can't bring your phone to one of those countries and swap a SIM, because there is no SIM... you need a new phone anyway to use their service at local rates (while any unlocked GSM phone can accept a SIM from any GSM operator in the world).
Finally, GSM is vendor-independent - not tied to a single company like CDMA with Qualcomm...
According to the Japanese Cellular Phones FAQ cellular phone networks in Japan use PDC (TDMA-like, used only in Japan) for 2G networks and both WCDMA (successor to GSM) and CDMA2000 (successor to CDMA) for 3G networks.
By the way, GSM is the only global standard which has coverage in almost every country in the world: with a cheap GSM quad-band phone like the Moto V400, you can roam in 212 countries, and you can keep using the same phone by purchasing pay-per-use SIM cards anywhere. Try that with a CDMA or iDEN phone...
wouldn't that be a perfect case for using 2 separate usernames (both non-admin!) one for work, the other one for fun stuff... fast user switching at work.
Just to set a couple of facts straight, since I've configured & used a couple of these almost portable 9M pixel displays:
the first one from IBM was the T220, which required 4 separate DVI inputs and only worked with slow 2D cards, i.e. the Matrox G200MMS provided with it. Initial price $20.000.- then lowered to $16.000.- (it was indeed very slow....)
IBM renamed it to T221 and improved it to handle 1- and 2-DVI inputs, thereby enabling 3D-accelerated cards to handle it: original FireGL cards finally could drive this at about 25Hz refresh rate
support came for other dual-DVI cards, such as the Quadro 4, and more refresh rates available: 20Hz,24Hz and 25Hz using both DVI ports, and 13Hz using only one
as of last year at Siggraph, IBM did not support Apple systems for these displays, but ViewSonic did, with their own version of the display (IBM's hardware repackaged, I presume) named VP2290b however, only a Radeon 8500 single DVI out was supported, hence the 13Hz refresh rate being the only one available...
And to be precise, the mentioned refresh rates are for data refresh, since the LCD keeps its refresh rate constant. Having opened one of the T221s to try and reduce its bezel (yup, the plan was to build a 2x2 tiled 36M pixel display), it was clear that this was not just a "slightly bigger" LCD panel inside...
More than for X-rays, it's been useful so far for astronomy applications, large dataset visualizations, etc. Being stuck at 13Hz on OS X, I have not put it as my main desktop display in the end.
Finally, although not as bad as on XP, there are still too many hardwired fixed-sized widgets in Mac OS X's interface to make a 200dpi display really usable. I'd go for a 30" 100dpi instead, at least for now, for general desktop use (XCode sure could do with some more real estate...)
MPEG-4 provides an open playing field. As an open, industry standard, anyone can create an MPEG-4 player or encoder that will work with other manufacturer's devices.
while Microsoft continues to support the MPEG-4 standardization process, it is
moving forward with the development of audio and video technologies that deliver superior quality and an end-to-end streaming solution for Microsoft customers
i.e. they're not much interested in working with others on open standards. They want to license but keep it proprietary.
It's quite clear to me which one is the less of the two evils here, i.e. which company works on actively promoting open standards.
More about MPEG licensing at the MPEG Industry Forum's web site.
I can't speak for anyone but myself of course, but in my case "good user interface" would mean easier to use. I'll give you an example: [...] Obviously, this is a pretty specific case, but it's not hard to imagine non-musical examples as well.
You are right, there are many similar cases to what you describe. But I would not consider these "good user interface" examples (no more than a car having a steering wheel): these are simply obvious, normal user interface features - a good 20 years old obvious features...
maybe I have not been clear in my previous post - what I meant to say was that, to consider "ease of use" and "good user interface" as main describing features for MS-Windows OSes and programs, is just like saying that "stability" is Mac OS 9.x's main describing feature - which it isn't, as those aren't.
For "ease of use" and "good user interface", MS-Windows & its features just don't cut it, compared to the real thing... and creativity seems to be killed by MS-Windows features more often than not - having decent programs running on it is not enough to mask the OS's user interface's clumsyness, incoherent and non-ergonomic GUI, etc. That's why I consistently pick something else to run my professional tools (both for coding as well as for creative activities).
Honestly, if there is one thing I'll never be able to understand are Linux "power users" who admire programs running on MS-Windows or, even worse, MS-Windows' "ease of use" and "good user interface" (these are direct quotes from an IT professional I know, who is supposed to be one of the division's best Linux gurus, and who keeps bashing MS-Windows... only to be found running it on about 1/2 of his computers both at work as well as at home...).
I could understand, as a remote possibility, someone who does not care about either of those two qualities, possibly admiring MS-Windows' ubiquity and the huge variety of hardware on which MS-Windows runs. But honestly, "wonderful programs", "ease of use" and "good user interface"...these are terms which as a Linux user I would reserve for Mac OS X systems, not MS-Windows...
As the Beatles sang, "it's gettin' better all the time...". Or at least, it should be. From my first home computer some 25 years ago to the PBG4 I use at work nowadays, the hope, the appeal, the drive, the it which kept computer interesting for me was the idea that they'd keep improving at working for me, not me working for them.
When DOS came out I thought, OK, so what's the big deal compared to an Apple II? It was much bigger (but not much better). GUIs became available (to me) with the Mac in '84 and its copycat Ataris and Amigas in '94 - and that was much better than a castrated CLI-only system such as DOS or CP/M. Yeah, VMS and Unix were another story at that time: those were better because they were powerful, unlike DOS.
Nowadays, MacOSX combines the above two qualities, so I see no reason for using a system where 1) the UI is inconsistent and counterintuitive, 2) the security holes are endless and caused by arcane obscurities, 3) you have to keep working for the damn machine and not vice versa, 4) the kernel is closed-source, and 5) last but definitely not least, its vendor is a proved condemned abusive monopolist (yes, all those are true for MS-Windows).
Bottom line: when I'm offered a job where I have to use MS-Windows, I turn it down. Unless I'd be in a life-or-death starving situation, and thankfully enough, for IT professionals things are not that bad yet:-)
>>Yeah... and there's countries that aren't part of the US, too.
>
>Not for long...
Naah, as from the famous quote:
"But we are not without cunning. We shall not make Britain's mistake. Too wise to try to govern the world, we shall merely own it. Nothing can stop us." -Ludwell Denny, America Conquers Britain, 1930
you saying that premiere is better or worse than avid then?
I was quoting what someone else once told me about these 2 (4?) programs - I've never used Avid so I can't comment on that. What I've used at the time was Premiere, before FCP came out.
But I think that person's analogy was something like:
Premiere ~ Pico ~ easy to learn, limited functionality
Avid ~ emacs ~ steep learning curve, can do pretty much everything
(I didn't want to start an editor flamewar by this!:-)) In my experience however Premiere not only was quite limited (just a tad above what iMovie can do nowadays) but also, and mostly, extremely unstable: it'd crash and freeze the machine not only Mac OS 9 but also (so I've witnessed on somebody else's desktops...) MS-Windows 2000 etc - nothing but cold reboot to resurrect them.
Yes, because we all know Premiere was the only NLE software for the Mac...
Well, AFAIK it was the only one in the $500-$1000 price range.
Media 100 and Avid systems were aiming at quite a different market, in Mac OS 7.x-8.x times. With quite a different set of features & options. Premiere 5.x couldn't even copy-paste sets of multi-track edit sequences (not sure whether later versions can do that now). As someone once told me (in pre-FCP days), Premiere is like the pico of video editing compared to Avid being the emacs of video editing
cryptically referenced, maybe, but -1, flamebait? What about the fact that this movie tries (among other things) to show people's reactions to such a danger?
Ah well, some moderator must have been turned down last night, and needed to vent some anger I guess...
The American consumer pays for research and development enjoyed by the rest of the world's price-controlled regimes.
Uhm, have you ever heard of Zytromax, the Pfizer antibiotic? FYI, it was developed and tested in Croatia, which probably most North Americans hardly consider a "high tech" country. Pfizer licensed it and Pliva now earns royalties on Pfizer's sales worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Wiley want to sell it in Apple stores (even that would have been, at most, a bit weird) ? With all respect to Apple's hardware and software products, such an action as banning the entire publishing house from stores sound absurdly inappropriate.
Check for yourself the sample chapter at least, to see whether it's such an outrageous book or not.
you can make Finder's hidden Quit menu entry (A.K.A. Command-Q) visible again, by turning it on with TinkerTool for example - note that it does not patch nor modify any executable... it's just a setting in the Finder's preference file (which any Unixy person might like to edit in emacs :-)
most important release of the year?
Wow, 9.3! Do you have access to some unpublished version of the Classic Mac OS?
Viola ... OS X Lite.
Viola? I thought music was more related to that other Apple company ...or were you thinking of et voilà?
yeah, that was my first thought too. However, given the fact that in Prey (the book) the prey was us, humans, I'm not so sure nanorobot swarms are exactly what I'd like to have prepare Mars for the 'our' arrival there. Unless they behave like the swarm in Nemesis or the one in Solaris...?
Patents... a topic which I guess slashdotters feel strongly about.
Cell Phones have always required a subscription, and people percieve value in what they pay for (communication whenever, whereever, cheap long distance).
This is only true in the U.S. - for cellphone use in EU, East Asia, African countries etc, pay-per-use is _the_ most popular business model (you pay some c/minute to call, you pay nothing to receive calls, you are not tied to any contract, no penalties for switching carriers etc.)
Cable/Satellite (and you could probably throw DVR subscriptions for Tivo and RePlayTV in there) and XM have always been subscription-based, and while they supplant free TV and radio, enough people percieve them as superior to be an advantage.
Similarly, Sat-TV like for example Astra, HotBird &c. in EU, have always had tons of free commercial (now digital) satellite channels - except that you have to endure lots of ads... There are also subscription-based Sat-TV channels, but their market is tiny by comparison.
What surprises me is that iTunes follows the pay-per-use model, i.e. the one much less common in the U.S. for cellphones, and it is nevertheless so successful.
some parts seem to be copied almost verbatim...
All in all, this phone is no equivalent to the ubiquitous "swap your SIM and go" quad-band GSM phones
The link you provide (CDMA site) while a useful list of CDMA-2000 operators, it is not at all the same as the list of 2G CDMA operators (which is less extensive).
And while you find GSM networks in almost all countries which have CDMA or CDMA2000 (e.g. in the US it is now about 50%-50%), the opposite is by far not true. Both by coverage, by countries and by number of users, GSM is the standard (e.g. over 1000M GSM vs. 226M CDMA)
Even where CDMA operators exist, you can't bring your phone to one of those countries and swap a SIM, because there is no SIM... you need a new phone anyway to use their service at local rates (while any unlocked GSM phone can accept a SIM from any GSM operator in the world).
Finally, GSM is vendor-independent - not tied to a single company like CDMA with Qualcomm...
According to the Japanese Cellular Phones FAQ cellular phone networks in Japan use PDC (TDMA-like, used only in Japan) for 2G networks and both WCDMA (successor to GSM) and CDMA2000 (successor to CDMA) for 3G networks.
By the way, GSM is the only global standard which has coverage in almost every country in the world:
with a cheap GSM quad-band phone like the Moto V400, you can roam in 212 countries, and you can keep using the same phone by purchasing pay-per-use SIM cards anywhere. Try that with a CDMA or iDEN phone...
wouldn't that be a perfect case for using 2 separate usernames (both non-admin!) one for work, the other one for fun stuff... fast user switching at work.
...here's the translation of the verb. This product's name is the substantive of that verb, i.e. a person who commits the act of ... got it?
Well, since there is no coffee in latte (unless the cow is a serious coffee addict), you can safely keep drinking it...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=112692&cid=956 2882
- the first one from IBM was the T220, which required 4 separate DVI inputs and only worked with slow 2D cards, i.e. the Matrox G200MMS provided with it. Initial price $20.000.- then lowered to $16.000.- (it was indeed very slow....)
- IBM renamed it to T221 and improved it to handle 1- and 2-DVI inputs, thereby enabling 3D-accelerated cards to handle it: original FireGL cards finally could drive this at about 25Hz refresh rate
- support came for other dual-DVI cards, such as the Quadro 4, and more refresh rates available: 20Hz,24Hz and 25Hz using both DVI ports, and 13Hz using only one
- as of last year at Siggraph, IBM did not support Apple systems for these displays, but ViewSonic did, with their own version of the display (IBM's hardware repackaged, I presume) named VP2290b however, only a Radeon 8500 single DVI out was supported, hence the 13Hz refresh rate being the only one available...
And to be precise, the mentioned refresh rates are for data refresh, since the LCD keeps its refresh rate constant. Having opened one of the T221s to try and reduce its bezel (yup, the plan was to build a 2x2 tiled 36M pixel display), it was clear that this was not just a "slightly bigger" LCD panel inside...More than for X-rays, it's been useful so far for astronomy applications, large dataset visualizations, etc. Being stuck at 13Hz on OS X, I have not put it as my main desktop display in the end.
Finally, although not as bad as on XP, there are still too many hardwired fixed-sized widgets in Mac OS X's interface to make a 200dpi display really usable. I'd go for a 30" 100dpi instead, at least for now, for general desktop use (XCode sure could do with some more real estate...)
- Support for MPEG-4 in QuickTime (for developers) and (for end users) where they write:
- Microsoft and MPEG-4 where it's clearly stated that: i.e. they're not much interested in working with others on open standards. They want to license but keep it proprietary.
It's quite clear to me which one is the less of the two evils here, i.e. which company works on actively promoting open standards.More about MPEG licensing at the MPEG Industry Forum's web site.
[...]
Obviously, this is a pretty specific case, but it's not hard to imagine non-musical examples as well.
You are right, there are many similar cases to what you describe.
But I would not consider these "good user interface" examples (no more than a car having a steering wheel): these are simply obvious, normal user interface features - a good 20 years old obvious features...
maybe I have not been clear in my previous post - what I meant to say was that, to consider "ease of use" and "good user interface" as main describing features for MS-Windows OSes and programs, is just like saying that "stability" is Mac OS 9.x's main describing feature - which it isn't, as those aren't.
For "ease of use" and "good user interface", MS-Windows & its features just don't cut it, compared to the real thing... and creativity seems to be killed by MS-Windows features more often than not - having decent programs running on it is not enough to mask the OS's user interface's clumsyness, incoherent and non-ergonomic GUI, etc. That's why I consistently pick something else to run my professional tools (both for coding as well as for creative activities).
I could understand, as a remote possibility, someone who does not care about either of those two qualities, possibly admiring MS-Windows' ubiquity and the huge variety of hardware on which MS-Windows runs. But honestly, "wonderful programs", "ease of use" and "good user interface" ...these are terms which as a Linux user I would reserve for Mac OS X systems, not MS-Windows...
When DOS came out I thought, OK, so what's the big deal compared to an Apple II? It was much bigger (but not much better). GUIs became available (to me) with the Mac in '84 and its copycat Ataris and Amigas in '94 - and that was much better than a castrated CLI-only system such as DOS or CP/M. Yeah, VMS and Unix were another story at that time: those were better because they were powerful, unlike DOS.
Nowadays, MacOSX combines the above two qualities, so I see no reason for using a system where 1) the UI is inconsistent and counterintuitive, 2) the security holes are endless and caused by arcane obscurities, 3) you have to keep working for the damn machine and not vice versa, 4) the kernel is closed-source, and 5) last but definitely not least, its vendor is a proved condemned abusive monopolist (yes, all those are true for MS-Windows).
So maybe Jef Raskin is right when he says that a GUI is a double system: it combines slow-to-use menus and hard-to-learn keyboard shortcuts. In other words, a modern GUI is a combination of two bad ideas but it's also seems true what Tufte says: To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning. (Tufte's comment is about Powerpoint, but it similarly applies to any software sold by the same infamous monopolist).
Bottom line: when I'm offered a job where I have to use MS-Windows, I turn it down. Unless I'd be in a life-or-death starving situation, and thankfully enough, for IT professionals things are not that bad yet :-)
One has to strive to gettin' better!
>
>Not for long...
Naah, as from the famous quote:
I was quoting what someone else once told me about these 2 (4?) programs - I've never used Avid so I can't comment on that. What I've used at the time was Premiere, before FCP came out.
But I think that person's analogy was something like:
- Premiere ~ Pico ~ easy to learn, limited functionality
- Avid ~ emacs ~ steep learning curve, can do pretty much everything
(I didn't want to start an editor flamewar by this!In my experience however Premiere not only was quite limited (just a tad above what iMovie can do nowadays) but also, and mostly, extremely unstable: it'd crash and freeze the machine not only Mac OS 9 but also (so I've witnessed on somebody else's desktops...) MS-Windows 2000 etc - nothing but cold reboot to resurrect them.
Well, AFAIK it was the only one in the $500-$1000 price range.
Media 100 and Avid systems were aiming at quite a different market, in Mac OS 7.x-8.x times. With quite a different set of features & options. Premiere 5.x couldn't even copy-paste sets of multi-track edit sequences (not sure whether later versions can do that now). As someone once told me (in pre-FCP days), Premiere is like the pico of video editing compared to Avid being the emacs of video editing
Then I post about a movie where
cryptically referenced, maybe, but -1, flamebait? What about the fact that this movie tries (among other things) to show people's reactions to such a danger?
Ah well, some moderator must have been turned down last night, and needed to vent some anger I guess...
(I meant this Greenspace)
PS: OK, that was only a movie
Uhm, have you ever heard of Zytromax, the Pfizer antibiotic? FYI, it was developed and tested in Croatia, which probably most North Americans hardly consider a "high tech" country. Pfizer licensed it and Pliva now earns royalties on Pfizer's sales worldwide.