Torrentse.cx is down because it was originally supposed to be a semi-private [or at least obscure] site serving a medium-sized community of people. The problem is that it got so popular that the guy who runs it [the enigmatically named hello.jpg] went waaay over his bandwidth cap and shut it down to prevent him from going bankrupt. There is no RIAA/MPAA conspiracy going on.
I don't know how many of you had ever been in a pre-Elite Computerware store but it was an exercise in frustration. It frequently took 5-10 minutes for a person to speak to you, their prices were terrible [frequently higher than MSRP] and their overall service was awful. I walked out in the middle of buying a $3000 computer there once because the clerk was being very rude to me. ECS should have dropped the Computerware brand, it was more of a liability than an asset.
They basically got squeezed from both sides by full service Apple VARs who dealt with businesses and cheaper mail order.
Did you know all the cool logos that change every day at Google are done by one person?
It's pretty obvious. I love Google but their visual branding sucks. Of course Google is a good example of how having a valuable service is a more important part of your brand than having a cool logo.
At least they do the logo in Photoshop instead of the Gimp now, the way too soft drop shadow and fuzzy antialiasing on the older version hurt me.
There's a new group of companies that are doing a lot of the same things as the original dotcoms did, they're just not hiring 100 people to implement online want ads or make an invitation web page. A small amount of individual angel investors are willing to sink a couple hundred grand into starting a small company now that you need something better than a business plan drawn on a napkin. Most are under 10 people and either profitable or have immediate revenue.
It's not like 1998-2001 showed that internet-based companies can't be successful, it just showed that you don't need to be a publicly traded company to sell mail-order dog food.
Well, it's pretty well known that engineering samples of the 970 are floating around out there right now and Apple probably gets a bunch [if not most] of them. I do find these benchmarks to be a little suspect though simply due to the fact that while it's not my preferred platform the P4 3.0 is a very capable chip and I don't see it likely that it got beaten in almost every test by about the same ratio.
The reason they haven't announced 970-based Macs yet is that they'd really like for people to keep buying computers now and not just hold off until new ones are released [although that's what I'm doing].
Uh, you can make backups of your Apple music store files just like every other file in the finder. They're stored in your ~/Music directory just like mp3s are.
This is a good thing but I have a feeling that the numbers in 60 or 90 days will have a lot more to say about how viable this is.
They need to sort out international licensing too, This could be huge in the UK where albums frequently cost as much in pounds as they do in dollars here in the US.
This is a Good Thing[tm] but I'd say its victory is mostly due to the extremely unremarkable American animated features this year. When an anime movie wins best foreign language move wake me up.
p.s. does "Harry Potter" not count for anything because it was a UK production?
Well, they included that shot in particular in the Digital Keying section of the bonus materials. The faults in that scene were both from the weird color correction and the flatness of the glow of Gandalf's staff. The color grading was far, far worse in TTT anyway.
It jsut seems to me like it's a cheap trick now and is becoming more common.
No one is fooled by your "digital keying". Please inform shooting units that we the viewers would really like them to use correct lighting instead of fixing it in post.
For the worst example of this, check out when Gandalf lights his staff when they enter Moria in FOTR. We're not fooled, it looks really fake.
The Apple Extended Keyboard II is quite possibly the most durable piece of computer hardware ever built. It should be of course given that it cost $120.
A friend of mine once saw an Apple rep hammer a nail into a board with one.
AltaVista was a weird alagam of old-school DEC engineers [like in their late 50s old-school], Bay Area tech folks and East Coast MBA frat weenies. It was a deadly combination.
Rod Schrock and his Harvard b-school buds [his old roommate was one of our VPs], fresh from creating the Presario group at Compaq fled the sinking Compaq ship and headed for high ground in the Bay Area with dollar signs in their eyes. Knowing nothing about the Internet and what it meant or the realities of media business they decided to go after Yahoo instead of continuing their dominance of the search arena. They bought two absolute dogs [Zip2.com and shopping.com which was about 10 days from bankruptcy], then lost most of their product development team to another startup [where Louis Monyeaux (misspelled)] had just gone to. Undaunted, Schrock and friends dumped close to 100 million dollars total into the ill-fated "smart is beautiful" version of AV. A lot of that money went to USWEB CKS and Weidman Kennedy, $6 million for the overblown "launch event" in New York and the rest went to unqualified employees.
A few months later [spring 2000], the market really starts tanking. CMGI pulls AV's IPO for the third time and things get really stupid. The smart employees start leaving and the idiots take full command. Several months later, Schrock is finally booted by CMGI but the damage is already done.
I'd like to adknowledge the people who actually did their jobs and did them well during that period, namely the Search Engineering and Search Product Management groups [well, most of them but I won't name names here]. They were the ones who made AV great and fought futiley to keep it good. Fortunately, many of them landed at good places [like Barry at Google] but it was a long, unpleasant journey.
For rentals there are few places better than Le Video [9th & Irving] and Japantown Video [Japantown Center]. As far as purchasing goes there's a lot of good places in chinatown to get HK bootlegs of your favorite series on VCD or DVD. My personal pick is Sun Entertainment [Sacramento btw. Grant & Kearney] and Silver Star [Grant & Jackson].
The reviewer in this case put a lot of emphasis on the bundled software than what I'm used to. It's nice that the Sony includes Photoshop Elements, there's no OS X equivalent for that out right now [yes, I know about Graphic Converter].
And if you're really into expandability, the base-model G4 is cheaper than the iMac. The iMac has never been and probably never will be for people who upgrade anything besides maybe the RAM. Keep in mind that over 90% of all PCs never have a single hardware upgrade in their lifetime.
The PS3 is not going to be out in 18 months, They don't even have first silicon on the "Cell" processor/cluster/whatever it is. The most optimistic estimates on its finish date are mid-2003, with late 2003 or early 2004 much more likely. If the PS3 ships in 2004, that'll be 5 years for the PS2 which is the projected lifespan of that console anyway.
I have worked for 2 companies that were DMA members and they were quite careful about sending mail, etc. already. This will have no effect on spammers whatsoever, they have a tendency to not pay thousands of dollars in dues to trade organizations.
I always love reading Slashdot posts about Apple because a thousand people who haven't even touched a piece of Apple hardware in 5 years come forward and bitch. Yes, the Macintosh is a propietary platform, yes, the hardware is more expensive. The fact of the matter is though that there isn't a better end user experience in the world.
Hey kids, you get what you pay for. Remember that little blurb about Linux only being free if your time is worth nothing? It's true and no computer commercially available today is as fast and easy to get rolling as a Mac. It might not be the king of the benchmarking circuit or the cheapest possible solution but the people giving their money to Apple aren't flushing it down a toilet as some would like to have you believe.
This is just yet another example of the Wintel world copying Apple's lead in technology. They had explosive notebook components all the way back in 1996! This does have an overall impact on sales, that little incident pretty much sank the Powerbook 5300...
I do both, but recently I've just been doing UI. I do all of my brainstorming and scratch work in Illustrator when I move past the #2 and Engineer's pad.
When I am designing an interface, I don't give a toss what it looks like, that, I leave up to the graphic designers.
You should, the look and the functionality are always interedependant.
If you people had any idea what people like me go through to create successful interfaces I don't think you would take this so lightly. Just because we do our work in Illustrator instead of emacs doesn't mean we're sitting there doing a paintjob. I used to code, I once wrote a device driver for Solaris [for a Gretag SPM-50 spectrophotometer if you're interested] but real UI design is the same amount of work.
Developers in general don't have to deal with criticism from VPs or C*Os about the validity of how their stored procedures are set up. You don't have to sit behind a one-way mirror and watch a user rip the result of the last 3 months of your life to shreds.
As far as Apple and Aqua goes, you have to realize what it is that Apple really sells. They provide a whole experience that spans hardware, software and everyhting else. They invested millions upon millions of dollars in developing Aqua so I don't think it's a big suprise when they see someone mucking with their stuff. I think they are less worried about "competition" than they are about their work being "diluted" and offered on a system that doesn't work as elegantly.
What is everyone's great desire to rip off Apple's look anyway? Make something better if you're the expert.
Slashdot Mirror
Torrentse.cx is down because it was originally supposed to be a semi-private [or at least obscure] site serving a medium-sized community of people. The problem is that it got so popular that the guy who runs it [the enigmatically named hello.jpg] went waaay over his bandwidth cap and shut it down to prevent him from going bankrupt. There is no RIAA/MPAA conspiracy going on.
p.s. yo Bram, it's James.
I don't know how many of you had ever been in a pre-Elite Computerware store but it was an exercise in frustration. It frequently took 5-10 minutes for a person to speak to you, their prices were terrible [frequently higher than MSRP] and their overall service was awful. I walked out in the middle of buying a $3000 computer there once because the clerk was being very rude to me. ECS should have dropped the Computerware brand, it was more of a liability than an asset.
They basically got squeezed from both sides by full service Apple VARs who dealt with businesses and cheaper mail order.
It's pretty obvious. I love Google but their visual branding sucks. Of course Google is a good example of how having a valuable service is a more important part of your brand than having a cool logo.
At least they do the logo in Photoshop instead of the Gimp now, the way too soft drop shadow and fuzzy antialiasing on the older version hurt me.
There's a new group of companies that are doing a lot of the same things as the original dotcoms did, they're just not hiring 100 people to implement online want ads or make an invitation web page. A small amount of individual angel investors are willing to sink a couple hundred grand into starting a small company now that you need something better than a business plan drawn on a napkin. Most are under 10 people and either profitable or have immediate revenue.
It's not like 1998-2001 showed that internet-based companies can't be successful, it just showed that you don't need to be a publicly traded company to sell mail-order dog food.
Well, it's pretty well known that engineering samples of the 970 are floating around out there right now and Apple probably gets a bunch [if not most] of them. I do find these benchmarks to be a little suspect though simply due to the fact that while it's not my preferred platform the P4 3.0 is a very capable chip and I don't see it likely that it got beaten in almost every test by about the same ratio.
The reason they haven't announced 970-based Macs yet is that they'd really like for people to keep buying computers now and not just hold off until new ones are released [although that's what I'm doing].
Uh, you can make backups of your Apple music store files just like every other file in the finder. They're stored in your ~/Music directory just like mp3s are.
This is a good thing but I have a feeling that the numbers in 60 or 90 days will have a lot more to say about how viable this is.
They need to sort out international licensing too, This could be huge in the UK where albums frequently cost as much in pounds as they do in dollars here in the US.
Porting to the XBox from Windows hasn't turned out to be quite as easy as originally thought. Any good console game needs to be tweaked a lot anyway.
This is a Good Thing[tm] but I'd say its victory is mostly due to the extremely unremarkable American animated features this year. When an anime movie wins best foreign language move wake me up.
p.s. does "Harry Potter" not count for anything because it was a UK production?
Well, they included that shot in particular in the Digital Keying section of the bonus materials. The faults in that scene were both from the weird color correction and the flatness of the glow of Gandalf's staff. The color grading was far, far worse in TTT anyway.
It jsut seems to me like it's a cheap trick now and is becoming more common.
No one is fooled by your "digital keying". Please inform shooting units that we the viewers would really like them to use correct lighting instead of fixing it in post.
For the worst example of this, check out when Gandalf lights his staff when they enter Moria in FOTR. We're not fooled, it looks really fake.
The Apple Extended Keyboard II is quite possibly the most durable piece of computer hardware ever built. It should be of course given that it cost $120.
A friend of mine once saw an Apple rep hammer a nail into a board with one.
AltaVista was a weird alagam of old-school DEC engineers [like in their late 50s old-school], Bay Area tech folks and East Coast MBA frat weenies. It was a deadly combination.
Rod Schrock and his Harvard b-school buds [his old roommate was one of our VPs], fresh from creating the Presario group at Compaq fled the sinking Compaq ship and headed for high ground in the Bay Area with dollar signs in their eyes. Knowing nothing about the Internet and what it meant or the realities of media business they decided to go after Yahoo instead of continuing their dominance of the search arena. They bought two absolute dogs [Zip2.com and shopping.com which was about 10 days from bankruptcy], then lost most of their product development team to another startup [where Louis Monyeaux (misspelled)] had just gone to. Undaunted, Schrock and friends dumped close to 100 million dollars total into the ill-fated "smart is beautiful" version of AV. A lot of that money went to USWEB CKS and Weidman Kennedy, $6 million for the overblown "launch event" in New York and the rest went to unqualified employees.
A few months later [spring 2000], the market really starts tanking. CMGI pulls AV's IPO for the third time and things get really stupid. The smart employees start leaving and the idiots take full command. Several months later, Schrock is finally booted by CMGI but the damage is already done.
I'd like to adknowledge the people who actually did their jobs and did them well during that period, namely the Search Engineering and Search Product Management groups [well, most of them but I won't name names here]. They were the ones who made AV great and fought futiley to keep it good. Fortunately, many of them landed at good places [like Barry at Google] but it was a long, unpleasant journey.
For rentals there are few places better than Le Video [9th & Irving] and Japantown Video [Japantown Center]. As far as purchasing goes there's a lot of good places in chinatown to get HK bootlegs of your favorite series on VCD or DVD. My personal pick is Sun Entertainment [Sacramento btw. Grant & Kearney] and Silver Star [Grant & Jackson].
The reviewer in this case put a lot of emphasis on the bundled software than what I'm used to. It's nice that the Sony includes Photoshop Elements, there's no OS X equivalent for that out right now [yes, I know about Graphic Converter].
And if you're really into expandability, the base-model G4 is cheaper than the iMac. The iMac has never been and probably never will be for people who upgrade anything besides maybe the RAM. Keep in mind that over 90% of all PCs never have a single hardware upgrade in their lifetime.
The PS3 is not going to be out in 18 months, They don't even have first silicon on the "Cell" processor/cluster/whatever it is. The most optimistic estimates on its finish date are mid-2003, with late 2003 or early 2004 much more likely. If the PS3 ships in 2004, that'll be 5 years for the PS2 which is the projected lifespan of that console anyway.
I was waiting for someone to outdo the 22" Cinema Display, funny it was Apple that ended up doing it themselves.
Am I the only one who read this as "Robotic Mime Smasher?
Wishful thinking I guess.
I have worked for 2 companies that were DMA members and they were quite careful about sending mail, etc. already. This will have no effect on spammers whatsoever, they have a tendency to not pay thousands of dollars in dues to trade organizations.
E for effort though.
This is the best comment in this entire "news" article.
[blockquote]Is this still the case with OSX?[/blockquote]
I reboot my box when I install new software that requires it, probably around once a week.
I always love reading Slashdot posts about Apple because a thousand people who haven't even touched a piece of Apple hardware in 5 years come forward and bitch. Yes, the Macintosh is a propietary platform, yes, the hardware is more expensive. The fact of the matter is though that there isn't a better end user experience in the world.
Hey kids, you get what you pay for. Remember that little blurb about Linux only being free if your time is worth nothing? It's true and no computer commercially available today is as fast and easy to get rolling as a Mac. It might not be the king of the benchmarking circuit or the cheapest possible solution but the people giving their money to Apple aren't flushing it down a toilet as some would like to have you believe.
This is just yet another example of the Wintel world copying Apple's lead in technology. They had explosive notebook components all the way back in 1996! This does have an overall impact on sales, that little incident pretty much sank the Powerbook 5300...
I do both, but recently I've just been doing UI. I do all of my brainstorming and scratch work in Illustrator when I move past the #2 and Engineer's pad.
When I am designing an interface, I don't give a toss what it looks like, that, I leave up to the graphic designers.
You should, the look and the functionality are always interedependant.
If you people had any idea what people like me go through to create successful interfaces I don't think you would take this so lightly. Just because we do our work in Illustrator instead of emacs doesn't mean we're sitting there doing a paintjob. I used to code, I once wrote a device driver for Solaris [for a Gretag SPM-50 spectrophotometer if you're interested] but real UI design is the same amount of work.
Developers in general don't have to deal with criticism from VPs or C*Os about the validity of how their stored procedures are set up. You don't have to sit behind a one-way mirror and watch a user rip the result of the last 3 months of your life to shreds.
As far as Apple and Aqua goes, you have to realize what it is that Apple really sells. They provide a whole experience that spans hardware, software and everyhting else. They invested millions upon millions of dollars in developing Aqua so I don't think it's a big suprise when they see someone mucking with their stuff. I think they are less worried about "competition" than they are about their work being "diluted" and offered on a system that doesn't work as elegantly.
What is everyone's great desire to rip off Apple's look anyway? Make something better if you're the expert.