You're whining because you're inately jealous of what Apple's been able to do with Free code they've used in their products or based their products off of.
Why would I be jealous of such a thing, considering I have an ibook?. I guess my mother's allowance must be pretty good to fund my home/office. I'm glad apple is making use of OSS, thats what it is there for, my original post was simply stating that Apple has not released anything that makes OSX interesting or desirable to non-mac users. I was never even hinting that Apple should or must release anything. I was simply stating that for all the Open Source talk that has been Spewed out by Apple's PR machine, they haven't delivered.
Not everyone can make money selling advertisements on their website, ergo they need to sell software or even hardware.
When the fuck did I ever mention advertisements or business models. Bottom line, Apple should pay up or shut up when it comes to their OSS PR.
I'm not talking about standards, protocols, etc, or re branded open source projects+changes. It would be interesting to see Apple release the full source code to some of its desktop applications. I am perfectly aware of why Apple needs to keep much of its software closed source, but it would be interesting to see Apple make good on its "embracing of open source" instead of releasing tidbits for PR purposes.
This is hardly a whine, I'm simply stating that Apple uses Open source for PR, and does not have commitment to open source software or ideology. Your post is a typical defensive, brainless mac zealot comeback, packed in the "translator fashion" for easy mod points. Instead of replying to my actual post, you decide to resort to stereotypical assertions and personal attacks.
Offerings from most vendors in the PC market are mostly crap. There's very little money spent into engineering things well
In the past 2 years I've had the pleasure of owning a tibook (500mhz), Ibook 2, and an IBM Thinkpad X31. The thinkpad may not be a showstopper as far as looks are concerned, but the engineering is solid, even better than the Mac notebooks I've owned.
Darwin is great and all, but many of us already have a kernel to use. Apple may say they embrace open source but when are they going to release code to some of the various software that makes OSX unique? When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML.. Its not like Safari is innovative or anything, we already have better open source browsers, but releasing the source code would of been a nice gesture.
The researchers studied how easily two groups of users could perform tasks using the different operating systems. One group consisted of 60 users aged 25 to 55 with computer skills but no prior experience with Linux or Windows XP.
Well both KDE and Windows XP were designed to make the UI easy to use for users of previous versions of windows. Windows XP UI is the same has windows95 with a gaudy facade that they restrict to three colors (blue, silver, olive). KDE's UI is designed to make it easy for people migrating from windows, but also allows for a high degree of customization.
I have OSX, WinXP, Gnome, and Fluxbox installed on computers at home, KDE is my PERSONAL favorite. I'm not saying it is the BEST. Every environment has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Celeron 2 GHz Processor
256 MB DDR RAM
SAMSUNG - SP4002H 40G HD
MSI 6533E main board
All SIS chipset
I think the performance benefits are related to compiling for a specific arch say P4 over how standard distros package at i386 for compatability reasons. This test would be much more interesting if it was done with an Athlon XP or P4. I'm not familiar with celeron arch though, would/etc/make.conf setup be the same for a celeron as a p4? Why would anyone buy a celeron with Athlons at 2Ghz rated athlons going for peanuts?
I know thats why i used a key word encourage instead of demand. Perhaps you should read comments a little more carefully before doing a hasty reply. Hypothetically speaking, he could have a republican congressman introduce a bill that would remove federal state funding X if a state did not have electonic voting in testing. This would never happen with a 2004 timeframe, but it is possible so saying the states control voting is a little far fetched, the federal government can just punish any state that does not fit their vision .
First off there are plenty to hard drive based portable players have between 5-15 GB of storage and there are also plenty of bigger devices similar to nomads that offer 30+ GB. There are millions of cheap, less than $100 mp3 portables sold. The ipod while being the by far the best device on the market probably only has a 2-5% share of the portable market. Not many people are willing to spend more than $100 for a device to replace their walkman.
The biggest problem with AAC is that lack of support from the stereo device category. Maybe Apple should whip something up?
For anyone who encodes in AAC. Because AAC is only supported by the iPod as far as portable devices are concerned, its a useless codec to people who own other devices that support MP3 only, which while a 128kpbs AAC file sounds a tad better than an MP3, most people would be better off encoding a higher bitrate MP3 file with a quality mp3 encoder(Lame) so their music will be compatible with just about every little player on the market. Is there a device that doesn't support MP3?
I think OGG as a format sounds the best out of the whole lot but until I can play it on my audiotron, there is no way i can convert, short of sticking a computer in my living room and carrying my laptop around a walkman. He are my two wishes:
A home player like the audiotron or slimp3 that supports OGG, SHN, and FLAC too.
A portable that supports the same file formats listed above or at least OGG since carrying around lossless files would fill up even the 30g ipod very quickly.
Well thats why having files at different bitrates but charging more for higher quality files. If a service also offerred a lossless tracks for $2/track and 256kpbs for $1.50/track they would make more money in the long run with very little in the way of additional fixed costs. As far as WAVS are concerned, FLAC losless compression makes the transmission to broadband bearable by cutting the wav's filesize in half or more in many cases.
You think a newer service would learn from some of Apple's mistakes, instead this service made some worse choices than Apple. Where to start, 128 kpbs WMA files with DRM are not going to get people rushing to your site. What are the problems with such a file?
Its WMA, which is proprietary and certainly not widely used by Choice although MS has managed to get quite a few devices to support it and wm9 encodes to it by default.
128 Kpbs is even worse than what Apple is offering. A 128 kpbs AAC file will sound better than that, which is pretty said because a 128kpbs AAC file sounds like crap on a decent stereo system but still is perfectly capable for ipod and computer speaker listening. If I am going to pay for music in 2003, I expect it to be of the same quality as the CD's I purchased in 1987. I know I will get a bunch of "Apple's itunes files are good enough for me replies" but the fact is that the CD I bought in 1987 will sound better on my stereo system today than the AAC file I downloaded from Apple's service.
DRM? I'm sorry but if the music industry plans on having a successful transition to online distribution, it might as well forget about DRM. DRM is not stopping online distribution, remeber all it takes is one source for a P2P distributed file to spread like wildfire.
I know there are plenty of people complaining about the IE and WM9 requirement but the fact is it is not nearly as limiting as having to buy a computer from Apple and use a service that is only compatible with an Apple portable. The fact is both services are at fault for using DRM, picking a non-standard file format and restricting service to a particular platform. There is simply no reason a music service needs to restrict itself to one particular platform. I know Apple apologists will talk about "tight integration" till the cows go home but the fact is that the itunes music store basically amounts to a web page that is restricted to one browser.
Here is a partial list of requirements for a decent music service:
Huge and diverse catalog with no incomplete albums, etc. Also there is no reason to use masters, CD rips will be fine. The concept of taking a master and converting it to a 128kpbs AAC file is self-defeating. If you want to offer FLAC files then maybe using masters would be worthwhile
Varying bitrates for people who take quality or portability seriously. There are very few barriers to offering multiple levels of file quality (scripting anyone?). Higher bitrate and lossless files should be priced higher, while 128/64kbps OGG and MP3 files could be really cheap.
No DRM period. No matter what you might think, in the longrun DRM based music services are doomed to fail even if it takes the collapse of the recording industry to realize that..
No platform specificity, there is simply no reason for it when DRM is taken out of the equation. Standard file formats so files can play on a variety of devices.
Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
I don't think that's a flaw it just makes good sense for their example, most of the people searching for flowers are looking for emergency flowers to send to their GF or mother. If someone wants to research flowers they should probably search for Botany?
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer--and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page.
Again, I think this more a result of what people tend to be looking for when searching for Apple, I would imagine that most people querying google using the single keyword "Apple" would be looking for the company. The average user wouldn't have a reason to search google for fruit. Using a one keyword query is not good enough if you want to criticize a search engine, search for Apple and Fruit will get you everything you need to known about the non-computer apples. If you want to by fresh Apples perhaps you should search for Fruit Store?
So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books.
Hasn't the web been doing that for years? Is this somehow google's fault? If publishers want to have the full text of their books available on the web for free, I'm sure the folks at Google would be happy to spider them.
However, it's too late. Enough WordPerfect code has been stolen for the OSS project,
I'm sure if there was any validity to this claim Sun would be getting their pants sued off by now. Is this the effect of SCO? Is every loser company going to start BS claims and legal maneuvering against competitive open source projects?
Well good riddens as far as I'm concerned. I started using Corel Draw! at version 3, it was revolutionary program for its time especially since for awhile it was the only decent package that ran on a PC. If you think MS has a lousy upgrade path, Corel use to extort its Draw! customers with unnecessary upgrades and buggy released. Coreldraw 6 was probably the last good draw release, while release 7 was the best for photo paint. Photo paint 7 was given a higher rating that photoshop 4/5 at the time by most magazines, but most photo shop regulars were wise not to switch or ran macs anyway.
Corel has a strategy of buying successful products and turning them in to obscure POS's. Here is just a short list off the top of my head of products they still offer:
Fractal Design Painter (Amazing Program)
Kai's Power Tools
Wordperfect
Bryce
I believe there are also a bunch of excellent products that were acquired and abandoned. If I remember correctly Kai's Goo (easy to use image editor) was extremely popular before digital cameras were common and another product called photo soap was pretty decent too. The "Kai" line of basic image editors and easy effects for the masses could have been insanely successful if Corel didn't touch it.
A technology called Pass Faces has been around for a few years. Microsoft simply substituted the faces for ink blots. Personally, I think it would be a lot easier to remember faces.
I was looking to back up my SHN and FLAC (lossless audio) collection, with a DVD burner I could fit about 2 concerts of SHN files on one DVD. In the end, I decided to just buy a 200 GB hard drive. When considering the cost of DVD burner and DVD media to back up 200 GB, I saved around $200. Not to mention the time it would take burn 50 DVD's.
I guess if your looking burn DVD video, then yes go buy a DVD burner, but if it is for storage, just buy another hard drive. You can pick up an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25 if you're looking to take stuff on the road.
I'm sure Berman and Conyers don't think for a minute that this bill will ever be passed. I think this is just another stage in the RIAA's psychological warfare campaign against P2P. Just like the hollow threats to sue individuals, the introduction of this law is designed to scare the casual P2P file sharing user.
Personally, I love this kind of desperate action by the RIAA/MPAA and their congressional stooges. All of this sabre rattling will only speed up the development of anonymous P2P file sharing networks with encrypted network traffic. I would also love to see this law passed, maybe it would lead to an organized civil disobedience campaign. After the RIAA lawsuit threat against individuals, I've started sharing my personally ripped (from CD's I own) MP3 collection and I encourage people to do the same.
Note to RIAA:
If the RIAA is reading this and would like to file a civil suite against me, please send me an e-mail and I will be happy to disclose my home IP address that is sharing over 40GB of high bitrate lame encoded mp3's.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I be jealous of such a thing, considering I have an ibook?. I guess my mother's allowance must be pretty good to fund my home/office. I'm glad apple is making use of OSS, thats what it is there for, my original post was simply stating that Apple has not released anything that makes OSX interesting or desirable to non-mac users. I was never even hinting that Apple should or must release anything. I was simply stating that for all the Open Source talk that has been Spewed out by Apple's PR machine, they haven't delivered.
Not everyone can make money selling advertisements on their website, ergo they need to sell software or even hardware.
When the fuck did I ever mention advertisements or business models. Bottom line, Apple should pay up or shut up when it comes to their OSS PR.
WebCore (khtml)
I'm not talking about standards, protocols, etc, or re branded open source projects+changes. It would be interesting to see Apple release the full source code to some of its desktop applications. I am perfectly aware of why Apple needs to keep much of its software closed source, but it would be interesting to see Apple make good on its "embracing of open source" instead of releasing tidbits for PR purposes.
This is hardly a whine, I'm simply stating that Apple uses Open source for PR, and does not have commitment to open source software or ideology. Your post is a typical defensive, brainless mac zealot comeback, packed in the "translator fashion" for easy mod points. Instead of replying to my actual post, you decide to resort to stereotypical assertions and personal attacks.
In the past 2 years I've had the pleasure of owning a tibook (500mhz), Ibook 2, and an IBM Thinkpad X31. The thinkpad may not be a showstopper as far as looks are concerned, but the engineering is solid, even better than the Mac notebooks I've owned.
Darwin is great and all, but many of us already have a kernel to use. Apple may say they embrace open source but when are they going to release code to some of the various software that makes OSX unique? When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML.. Its not like Safari is innovative or anything, we already have better open source browsers, but releasing the source code would of been a nice gesture.
Well both KDE and Windows XP were designed to make the UI easy to use for users of previous versions of windows. Windows XP UI is the same has windows95 with a gaudy facade that they restrict to three colors (blue, silver, olive). KDE's UI is designed to make it easy for people migrating from windows, but also allows for a high degree of customization.
I have OSX, WinXP, Gnome, and Fluxbox installed on computers at home, KDE is my PERSONAL favorite. I'm not saying it is the BEST. Every environment has its own advantages and disadvantages.
mmmmm Cowboyneal...
I think the performance benefits are related to compiling for a specific arch say P4 over how standard distros package at i386 for compatability reasons. This test would be much more interesting if it was done with an Athlon XP or P4. I'm not familiar with celeron arch though, would /etc/make.conf setup be the same for a celeron as a p4? Why would anyone buy a celeron with Athlons at 2Ghz rated athlons going for peanuts?
Read the The Road Ahead.
Any decent cartoons on this morning?
I know thats why i used a key word encourage instead of demand. Perhaps you should read comments a little more carefully before doing a hasty reply. Hypothetically speaking, he could have a republican congressman introduce a bill that would remove federal state funding X if a state did not have electonic voting in testing. This would never happen with a 2004 timeframe, but it is possible so saying the states control voting is a little far fetched, the federal government can just punish any state that does not fit their vision .
Will encourage all States to do a trial run of these machines for the 2004 election.
The biggest problem with AAC is that lack of support from the stereo device category. Maybe Apple should whip something up?
I think OGG as a format sounds the best out of the whole lot but until I can play it on my audiotron, there is no way i can convert, short of sticking a computer in my living room and carrying my laptop around a walkman. He are my two wishes:
Well thats why having files at different bitrates but charging more for higher quality files. If a service also offerred a lossless tracks for $2/track and 256kpbs for $1.50/track they would make more money in the long run with very little in the way of additional fixed costs. As far as WAVS are concerned, FLAC losless compression makes the transmission to broadband bearable by cutting the wav's filesize in half or more in many cases.
I know there are plenty of people complaining about the IE and WM9 requirement but the fact is it is not nearly as limiting as having to buy a computer from Apple and use a service that is only compatible with an Apple portable. The fact is both services are at fault for using DRM, picking a non-standard file format and restricting service to a particular platform. There is simply no reason a music service needs to restrict itself to one particular platform. I know Apple apologists will talk about "tight integration" till the cows go home but the fact is that the itunes music store basically amounts to a web page that is restricted to one browser.
Here is a partial list of requirements for a decent music service:
I don't think that's a flaw it just makes good sense for their example, most of the people searching for flowers are looking for emergency flowers to send to their GF or mother. If someone wants to research flowers they should probably search for Botany?
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer--and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page.
Again, I think this more a result of what people tend to be looking for when searching for Apple, I would imagine that most people querying google using the single keyword "Apple" would be looking for the company. The average user wouldn't have a reason to search google for fruit. Using a one keyword query is not good enough if you want to criticize a search engine, search for Apple and Fruit will get you everything you need to known about the non-computer apples. If you want to by fresh Apples perhaps you should search for Fruit Store?
So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books.
Hasn't the web been doing that for years? Is this somehow google's fault? If publishers want to have the full text of their books available on the web for free, I'm sure the folks at Google would be happy to spider them.
I'm sure if there was any validity to this claim Sun would be getting their pants sued off by now. Is this the effect of SCO? Is every loser company going to start BS claims and legal maneuvering against competitive open source projects?
Corel has a strategy of buying successful products and turning them in to obscure POS's. Here is just a short list off the top of my head of products they still offer:
- Fractal Design Painter (Amazing Program)
- Kai's Power Tools
- Wordperfect
- Bryce
I believe there are also a bunch of excellent products that were acquired and abandoned. If I remember correctly Kai's Goo (easy to use image editor) was extremely popular before digital cameras were common and another product called photo soap was pretty decent too. The "Kai" line of basic image editors and easy effects for the masses could have been insanely successful if Corel didn't touch it.A technology called Pass Faces has been around for a few years. Microsoft simply substituted the faces for ink blots. Personally, I think it would be a lot easier to remember faces.
Well since it is a backup drive, I will loose nothing eh?
I guess if your looking burn DVD video, then yes go buy a DVD burner, but if it is for storage, just buy another hard drive. You can pick up an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25 if you're looking to take stuff on the road.
Personally, I love this kind of desperate action by the RIAA/MPAA and their congressional stooges. All of this sabre rattling will only speed up the development of anonymous P2P file sharing networks with encrypted network traffic. I would also love to see this law passed, maybe it would lead to an organized civil disobedience campaign. After the RIAA lawsuit threat against individuals, I've started sharing my personally ripped (from CD's I own) MP3 collection and I encourage people to do the same.
Note to RIAA:
If the RIAA is reading this and would like to file a civil suite against me, please send me an e-mail and I will be happy to disclose my home IP address that is sharing over 40GB of high bitrate lame encoded mp3's.
I prefer the term distributed computing, why did distributed computing turn in to grid computing?