The VAIO Pocket Interface (play movie to view in action) does not seem very good to me.
For those who won't watch the above link, there is a grid of 5x5 'buttons' you run your finger up and down, left to right to simulate scrolling and navigating menu levels. The problem is, what if you want to go down more and you run out of buttons because you initially positioned your finger wrong? Maybe you can just pick your finger up, but I would think it easier to use the touchpad a la notebooks (and what Apple derived for the iPod) that we have been used to using for years.
There is also a rather large color screen whcih looks like a nice power drain to me, especailly when the thing is playing in my pocket, displaying a color albumn cover.
So how long with the virus writer get in jail? If it isn't a REALLY long time, this could be quite lucrative. Take this example:
(1) Spend a month or two writing a virus (2) Have accomplice turn you in for $X Million (3) Spend Y years in prison (4) Split the reward money and PROFIT
If you trust your accomplice and as long as $X million divided by Y years split 50/50 or whatever is still several hunded dollars a year, the hacker is making more money this way than some legal means as a talented programmer getting paid $40k including benefits.
If the IT economy doesn't turn around, this is bound to happen one day.
I am terrified to think what will happen if MS actuall gets it right with Longhorn.
We have all, to various extents, been accomplices in MS monopoly 9who has NEVER purchased any MS product?)
We clammor for more scurity and fewer bugs and so forth. What if MS ACTUALLY provided a secure and stable OS? And then people upgraded to it. What then of Linux, OS X, and the like?
Everyone thinks the RIAA is evil and I do agree they are unfair but the be fair to them, I have learned about music I would otherwise not hae known about without the RIAA
The RIAA markets music like Counting Crows and Rush and Nirvana to raido stations. They get the bands to tour the country so I can see bands from around the country and world in a short 1 hours drive.
I can't stand that the RIAA keeps mroe than their fair share of the artists well earned money and I don't wnat tunes to go to $1.25, but as I look at my music collection, I have had the opportunity to hear of 95% of the music I listen to because the RIAA marketed it to me.
You can disagree with the changes, but tough luck. Either you stop using their service, or deal with it.
If you stop using the service, that just means you don't buy more music under that userID from Apple. The previously purchased songs are protected by the agreement you digitally signed before iTMS 4.5.
The guy who wrote the Post article is terribly biased in my biased opinion.
He wrote that:
some of the usage rules - such as how many times users can burn downloads - have been altered.
Thanks for stating this in a way that does not make it obvious there are still unlimited burns of any song...and also a big thanks for not mentioning the loosening of the restriction of # of PCs & Macs music can be shared on.
In addition, Timmy shared that:
For example, a Pepsi marketing campaign announced last year that was supposed to give away 100 million downloads has resulted in only 5 million downloads by Pepsi drinkers, according to a source.
The implication is that iTunes was not something people were interested in.
There are other examples of his FUD statements, such as covering Sony's new service without the mention of their restrictions (if you own a MiniDisc player or MemoryStick music device raise your hand).
And finally, this gem:
A spokesperson for iTunes was not available for comment.
Apple's willingness to allow some singles to be priced higher than 99 cents indicates the company feels empowered by its current success in the download market and sees a chance to boost profits from the sales of digital music.
Got a source for that one Jimmy? Steve Jobs was just quoted refuting such a statment.
SonyConnect is a horrible version of on-line music service.
They have copied Apple in that they use their own compression and it only works on Sony MemoryStick or MiniDisc devices - but Sony does not have the appeal to drive a THIRD DRM standard. Who do you know who loves their MiniDisc Player? Why buy a MiniDisc Player and the discs to hold 1000 songs when an iPod Mini is $250 and the size of ten business cards?
With the service agreement that they have for the iTMS, it seems already they can change the rules for the DRM
Welcome to the crowd of those who spread FUD.
The change in Apple's DRM was something the user must AGREE to. When you installed iTMS 4.5 you had to sign the agreement. If you read it, you would see that is when you agreed to change the terms of your Fairplay music. YOU AGREED TO THE CHANGE!
If you like your license and don't want to change, don't sign it. Oddly, an unreadable version of your own name has great power.
I didn't say they won't bill you, I said they won't refuse service, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. So YES, it is in fact welfare when you cannot pay. Th indigent DO receive lifesaving healthcare in this country.
I am a product manager responsible for a web application. Our office is seriously OUT OF ROOM and rather than rent office space across the street, I volunteered to work from home. I thought this would be great, but in practice, it has not been.
I find it too distracting to be both at home and at work 24 hours a day. It allows me to pop out of bed and be at work which is GREAT and I can recieve a FedEx package or run an errand no problem, but I am also able to just pop in the office after dinner.. and stay for two or three hours. Weekends are just another work day too.
But there are other issues that make me less productive. Though I try to stay focused, small things like unloading the dishwasher yield to larger things like mowing the yard. And when my wife is at home, it is even more distracting because I don't get to spend much time with her.
The question posed has striking similarities to the question of public healthcare. In the US, the EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) requires hospitals and clinics to give life saving and stabilizing care to anyone, regardless of proof of insurance and/or ability to pay.
This is primarily a welfare service for the individual but has corporate benefits as well such as the reduction of communicable disease from those who would otherwise go untreated.
Without getting offtopic into the US healthcare system, I think the article brings up a similar point. If a software update is meant to benefit the end user only, in that it fixes or enables a new feature, that is one thing, but for the health of the public Internet, security patches that prevent malicious and communicable computer virii should be publicly available...by law.
It is more important to keep the Internet available to individuals, businesses, and research institutions as well as governments that rely upon it every day for communication and control of critical systems, than to ensure that a small percentage of the population is not illegally pirating software.
It is surprising how popular this portable is, but how few manufacturers have even added basic integration of an iPod into car stereos.
To my knowledge, no factory stereos come with line in inputs on either the rear of the desk (difficult to use) or on the front of the unit which is much easier. I had a blaupunkt with a front side line in and there are several aftermarket makers that have that ability.
But where are the ones that offer an "iPod Mini Dock", you know, just slide the think into a slot like a tape desk but shaped for the Mini. I dont' see these poping up anywhere.
At least our friends at Alpine are releasing a converter to treat your iPod like a CD Changer. This is the best attempt yet to integrate an iPod but it is, in my opinion, not a very tight integration.
At least it will display the track title on the head unit!
I dont' spend much time talking about my heart condition, so when people ask me about it, I give them odd looks, explain it away and generally dismiss it.
Mind you, I don't have a heart condition, or at least, not one any doctor has identified. I guess I *could* have one and just don't know it. Sure I do some of the things that could lead to a heart condition. Don't smoke but do drink. Don't eat fast food but do enjoy butter on my baked potato, that sort of thing.
I think that this journalist is trying to spread FUD about the Apple dieing of a heart condition it doesn't have.
I agree that bashing a product or post the lifts up a product, simply because it is not made by Apple is bad. However, i would not go as far as to say we shouldn't be allowed to automatically hold the product to the standard Apple has set.
After all, Apple has created a 'reference standard' for the digital media player industry by which all other digital media players are, in my opinion, rightly judged. The same holds true for Windows. Apple Linux and before it Unix were and remain compared to Windows, the reference standard for desktop OS.
Okay, that's just cool looking and I give them huge props on the look and feel. Even the USB-port-slide-out-feature is very cool. Not as certain about the "joystick" feature.
But what is with the 256MB capacity? I am not trying to be an Apple zelot here, but with the iPod Mini, hasn't Apple really drawn a line in the sand where Style and 4GB capacity intersect at a sub $250 price point?
The way I see it, no one who ever uses a high capacity digital music player (remember back when we called them MP3 players?) will ever go BACK to a low capacity sub 100 song player. Just won't happen. You get hooked on the ability BROWSE.
They're not talking about the average computer, they're talking about the average computer that will run Longhorn.
That's like saying that the average person who lives in the "Smith" household is named "Smith".
Seriously, if the above quote is true then these specs are totally meaningless - first of all, it gives no timeframe. I be the "average" Win98 user today is a more powerful system than in 1999 when Win98 was the newest MS OS.
What the artcile didn't say was that this computing power was needed primarily for a new feature of Longhorn - the Microsoft Streaming Patch System or MSPS.
If one graphs Microsoft's patch releases over time, it is clear that the time between patches approaches zero. No one likes to patch a aysstem, just to see the next day a new patch or twelve have been released over night!
So the MSPS will stream patches to all servers in a continuous feed. Of course, to install these patches takes bandwidth (1 GB Either), to download, both CPU power (dual 4GHz) and ram (2 GB) to install and a lot of room (1 TB to be exact) to store them all.
Mod this a -1 STUPID but who finds most of these security flaws?
No matter if it's OS X, Windows, or Linux, there are always these security fixes popping up. I assume there is a QA team that is working on this stuff but unless there is a vulnerability that manifests itself in the form of a virus or hacked system, who finds these things and why were they looking in the first place?
That is a tough story you shared. Thanks for the honesty. I have never known someone to take their own life so I feel for what that must have been like. I don't really have words for it, but I wanted to just say that I feel for you.
I used to work for a bank and they had an interesting solution to safe deposit boxes.
When you lookup a customer's accounts with the bank, you may find a couple checking accounts, a couple savings accounts, perhaps a money market and you may see a "deposit box". Now this account has no balance and was generally in the way of the tasks I was working on but it served its purpose.
When someone dies, the relatives always seem to figure out where they banked at. When the administrator of the estate gets a list of the assets, they see the deposit box "account" and know that there are untold goodies to be claimed.
If these deposit boxes were kept n file in some other way, they may go unclaimed until the branch closed or changed the vault.
Slashdot Mirror
The VAIO Pocket Interface (play movie to view in action) does not seem very good to me.
For those who won't watch the above link, there is a grid of 5x5 'buttons' you run your finger up and down, left to right to simulate scrolling and navigating menu levels. The problem is, what if you want to go down more and you run out of buttons because you initially positioned your finger wrong? Maybe you can just pick your finger up, but I would think it easier to use the touchpad a la notebooks (and what Apple derived for the iPod) that we have been used to using for years.
There is also a rather large color screen whcih looks like a nice power drain to me, especailly when the thing is playing in my pocket, displaying a color albumn cover.
So how long with the virus writer get in jail? If it isn't a REALLY long time, this could be quite lucrative. Take this example:
(1) Spend a month or two writing a virus
(2) Have accomplice turn you in for $X Million
(3) Spend Y years in prison
(4) Split the reward money and PROFIT
If you trust your accomplice and as long as $X million divided by Y years split 50/50 or whatever is still several hunded dollars a year, the hacker is making more money this way than some legal means as a talented programmer getting paid $40k including benefits.
If the IT economy doesn't turn around, this is bound to happen one day.
I am terrified to think what will happen if MS actuall gets it right with Longhorn.
We have all, to various extents, been accomplices in MS monopoly 9who has NEVER purchased any MS product?)
We clammor for more scurity and fewer bugs and so forth. What if MS ACTUALLY provided a secure and stable OS? And then people upgraded to it. What then of Linux, OS X, and the like?
Everyone thinks the RIAA is evil and I do agree they are unfair but the be fair to them, I have learned about music I would otherwise not hae known about without the RIAA
The RIAA markets music like Counting Crows and Rush and Nirvana to raido stations. They get the bands to tour the country so I can see bands from around the country and world in a short 1 hours drive.
I can't stand that the RIAA keeps mroe than their fair share of the artists well earned money and I don't wnat tunes to go to $1.25, but as I look at my music collection, I have had the opportunity to hear of 95% of the music I listen to because the RIAA marketed it to me.
Would this track cost:
(a) 99c
(b) $1.25
(c) $1.98
(d) $2.50
(e) your sanity
FYI: This is a L/R channel overlay of two Nickleback "hit" songs from the NIAA. Support Independent music!
He wrote that:Thanks for stating this in a way that does not make it obvious there are still unlimited burns of any song...and also a big thanks for not mentioning the loosening of the restriction of # of PCs & Macs music can be shared on.
In addition, Timmy shared that:The implication is that iTunes was not something people were interested in.
There are other examples of his FUD statements, such as covering Sony's new service without the mention of their restrictions (if you own a MiniDisc player or MemoryStick music device raise your hand).
And finally, this gem:Got a source for that one Jimmy? Steve Jobs was just quoted refuting such a statment.
SonyConnect is a horrible version of on-line music service.
They have copied Apple in that they use their own compression and it only works on Sony MemoryStick or MiniDisc devices - but Sony does not have the appeal to drive a THIRD DRM standard. Who do you know who loves their MiniDisc Player? Why buy a MiniDisc Player and the discs to hold 1000 songs when an iPod Mini is $250 and the size of ten business cards?
Welcome to the crowd of those who spread FUD.
The change in Apple's DRM was something the user must AGREE to. When you installed iTMS 4.5 you had to sign the agreement. If you read it, you would see that is when you agreed to change the terms of your Fairplay music. YOU AGREED TO THE CHANGE!
If you like your license and don't want to change, don't sign it. Oddly, an unreadable version of your own name has great power.
Where do you stand on the issue of "Ass Rape" in the great state of Nebraska?
I didn't say they won't bill you, I said they won't refuse service, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. So YES, it is in fact welfare when you cannot pay. Th indigent DO receive lifesaving healthcare in this country.
How about a Gumball Rally?
I can see it now: "Now accepting applications for the Gumball Inerplanetary Rally - fewer cops, more space junk"
I am a product manager responsible for a web application. Our office is seriously OUT OF ROOM and rather than rent office space across the street, I volunteered to work from home. I thought this would be great, but in practice, it has not been.
.. and stay for two or three hours. Weekends are just another work day too.
I find it too distracting to be both at home and at work 24 hours a day. It allows me to pop out of bed and be at work which is GREAT and I can recieve a FedEx package or run an errand no problem, but I am also able to just pop in the office after dinner
But there are other issues that make me less productive. Though I try to stay focused, small things like unloading the dishwasher yield to larger things like mowing the yard. And when my wife is at home, it is even more distracting because I don't get to spend much time with her.
Then...there's Slashdot!
The question posed has striking similarities to the question of public healthcare. In the US, the EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) requires hospitals and clinics to give life saving and stabilizing care to anyone, regardless of proof of insurance and/or ability to pay.
This is primarily a welfare service for the individual but has corporate benefits as well such as the reduction of communicable disease from those who would otherwise go untreated.
Without getting offtopic into the US healthcare system, I think the article brings up a similar point. If a software update is meant to benefit the end user only, in that it fixes or enables a new feature, that is one thing, but for the health of the public Internet, security patches that prevent malicious and communicable computer virii should be publicly available...by law.
It is more important to keep the Internet available to individuals, businesses, and research institutions as well as governments that rely upon it every day for communication and control of critical systems, than to ensure that a small percentage of the population is not illegally pirating software.
It is surprising how popular this portable is, but how few manufacturers have even added basic integration of an iPod into car stereos.
To my knowledge, no factory stereos come with line in inputs on either the rear of the desk (difficult to use) or on the front of the unit which is much easier. I had a blaupunkt with a front side line in and there are several aftermarket makers that have that ability.
But where are the ones that offer an "iPod Mini Dock", you know, just slide the think into a slot like a tape desk but shaped for the Mini. I dont' see these poping up anywhere.
At least our friends at Alpine are releasing a converter to treat your iPod like a CD Changer. This is the best attempt yet to integrate an iPod but it is, in my opinion, not a very tight integration.
At least it will display the track title on the head unit!
Did they make you Takeoff Your Pants and Jacket?
I dont' spend much time talking about my heart condition, so when people ask me about it, I give them odd looks, explain it away and generally dismiss it.
Mind you, I don't have a heart condition, or at least, not one any doctor has identified. I guess I *could* have one and just don't know it. Sure I do some of the things that could lead to a heart condition. Don't smoke but do drink. Don't eat fast food but do enjoy butter on my baked potato, that sort of thing.
I think that this journalist is trying to spread FUD about the Apple dieing of a heart condition it doesn't have.
I agree that bashing a product or post the lifts up a product, simply because it is not made by Apple is bad. However, i would not go as far as to say we shouldn't be allowed to automatically hold the product to the standard Apple has set.
After all, Apple has created a 'reference standard' for the digital media player industry by which all other digital media players are, in my opinion, rightly judged. The same holds true for Windows. Apple Linux and before it Unix were and remain compared to Windows, the reference standard for desktop OS.
Okay, that's just cool looking and I give them huge props on the look and feel. Even the USB-port-slide-out-feature is very cool. Not as certain about the "joystick" feature.
But what is with the 256MB capacity? I am not trying to be an Apple zelot here, but with the iPod Mini, hasn't Apple really drawn a line in the sand where Style and 4GB capacity intersect at a sub $250 price point?
The way I see it, no one who ever uses a high capacity digital music player (remember back when we called them MP3 players?) will ever go BACK to a low capacity sub 100 song player. Just won't happen. You get hooked on the ability BROWSE.
But anyway, nice looking toy
They're not talking about the average computer, they're talking about the average computer that will run Longhorn.
That's like saying that the average person who lives in the "Smith" household is named "Smith".
Seriously, if the above quote is true then these specs are totally meaningless - first of all, it gives no timeframe. I be the "average" Win98 user today is a more powerful system than in 1999 when Win98 was the newest MS OS.
What the artcile didn't say was that this computing power was needed primarily for a new feature of Longhorn - the Microsoft Streaming Patch System or MSPS.
If one graphs Microsoft's patch releases over time, it is clear that the time between patches approaches zero. No one likes to patch a aysstem, just to see the next day a new patch or twelve have been released over night!
So the MSPS will stream patches to all servers in a continuous feed. Of course, to install these patches takes bandwidth (1 GB Either), to download, both CPU power (dual 4GHz) and ram (2 GB) to install and a lot of room (1 TB to be exact) to store them all.
+1 Sarcastic
Mod this a -1 STUPID but who finds most of these security flaws?
No matter if it's OS X, Windows, or Linux, there are always these security fixes popping up. I assume there is a QA team that is working on this stuff but unless there is a vulnerability that manifests itself in the form of a virus or hacked system, who finds these things and why were they looking in the first place?
That is a tough story you shared. Thanks for the honesty. I have never known someone to take their own life so I feel for what that must have been like. I don't really have words for it, but I wanted to just say that I feel for you.
I used to work for a bank and they had an interesting solution to safe deposit boxes.
When you lookup a customer's accounts with the bank, you may find a couple checking accounts, a couple savings accounts, perhaps a money market and you may see a "deposit box". Now this account has no balance and was generally in the way of the tasks I was working on but it served its purpose.
When someone dies, the relatives always seem to figure out where they banked at. When the administrator of the estate gets a list of the assets, they see the deposit box "account" and know that there are untold goodies to be claimed.
If these deposit boxes were kept n file in some other way, they may go unclaimed until the branch closed or changed the vault.
Why is this on topic? Thats for you to decern