Re:Desktop Manager is Amazing
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
He better be ready, as will everyone else, to accept the fact that Apple is likely toying with providing this functionality in a future OS release (likely why the prototype/private API exists that he is using) so when they come out with it folks better not bitch about Apple ripping anything off.
I find the same thing with my 99 C5 vette. I can get 29-33 MPG on open highway when in sixth gear (the thing is basically idling at 65-80 speeds, 1.5-2k RPM). The sticker had it at 27 MPG on the open highway if I recall it correctly.
Of course out on the track you can suck fuel with averages under 4 MPG on complex heavy breaking/acceleration courses.
FYI, If you are ADC member (with a seed key) you can download the latest Tiger related documentation. This documentation bundle is later then the Tiger developer preview DVD handed out at WWDC.
CoreImage & CoreVideo are rather nice and parallel CoreAudio in many ways from what I have seen so far. Apple is on a strong push to bring in the compute capabilities of modern GPUs for things other then 3D and games, focusing on it as another system compute resource basically. Apple is of course eating its own dog food as well... let you think about how they may be doing that (since I am under WWDC NDA).
Did you note the following statement on that page?
Mac OS X dynamically adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on temperature.
and
This system provides a continuous flow of thermally conductive fluid that transfers heat from the processors as they work harder. The heated fluid then flows through a radiant grille, where air passing over cooling fins returns the fluid to its original temperature.
So it may have a pumping system or some type of flow control... possibly even a reservoir but likely not needed.
Also don't read to much into an artists rendering of things.
I think you are reading (err... seeing) to much into an artists drawing of the system. I would wait until folks can look at them and/or Apple releases more engineering like schematics.
I personally doubt it is implemented exactly as the artists rendering is.
The idea that the courts determine whether or not someone ACTUALLY IS GUILTY is a stupid and common American fallacy. (I don't know what it's like elsewhere.)
The concept of guilt is a legal one in this context. If a court finds you guilty your are guilty, under the law, of that crime. Only a secondary trial as a result of the granting of an appeal and/or a higher court can over turn such a conviction. This is true in the United State and in most places in the world with any type of modern legal system.
Curious on how you think it should work... seriously really think about what you find stupid and how it could be different.
The simple fact is humans are not all knowing so we have to use evidence in a court trial (all bound by laws on what can and cannot be used) to connivence a group of folks (picked from the populace) of someone's guilt.
No problem. iTunes is fully scriptable via AppleScript on Mac OS X and I believe now via COM on Windows. I bet you can find software to control it as needed, if not, you will shortly.
Also the updated iTunes hasn't been fully release yet so who knows but it may provide such capabilities between iTunes applications directly.
Now you just need a wireless (11b/g) remote that can connect to iTunes, etc.:-)
Just to be clear. iTMS isn't going to be in China this month, at least nothing so far points to that (or if and when it will be). All that is happening is that Apple is getting iTunes, the application, pre-bundled on computers from one major hardware vendor in China. Like it did with HP in the states (which took place before the iPod rebrand deal IIRC).
I guess you don't understand very well how Apple's Interface Builder works or Cocoa (AppKit) in general. Interface Builder (IB) doesn't generate code (like most RAD tools do for other language/frameworks) it constructs real objects, connects those objects with each other and then archives that object graph to a file called a nib. Using IB you can test you interface without having to compile or building the application, simple use the live objects that you are working with (it has a test interface mode).
When your application runs the nib is loaded as needed and that object graph is unarchived.
You can implement rather complex GUIs without writing a single line of code yourself (more so now thanks to the contoller objects supported) and without any other tool generating code for you.
If you haven't really used Interface Builder and AppKit you should consider taking it for a serious spin... often their is no need to code your GUI by hand.
Also note that you can load a nib (with one or more views, etc.) and have its views inserted into the view hierarchy as needed and multiple times.
You can say lots of things with numbers depending how you focus on them.
The 1950-1960 numbers didn't really have any war dividends (in the traditional sense of the phase) but saw a strong growth in the economy during that time which increased tax income (among other tax code changes). In fact spending on military was rather higher during this time period.
The following outlines the percentage of total federal outlays for nations defense... notice the effects of the start of the cold war.
For those interested the following is per capita debt adjusted into 2003 dollars (picked decade boundaries for the hell of it and to make math easier).
Based on population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau (with 2000 and 2003 estimated from 1999 numbers using 0.9 annual growth). Also I used numbers from here to scale dollar values to 2003 levels. I also used the total gross federal debt not the total debit held by the public... Gross Federal debt is composed both of Federal debt held (owned) by the public and Federal debt held by Federal Government accounts, which is mostly held by trust funds. Federal debt held by the public consists of all Federal debt held outside the Federal Government accounts.
For example in 2003 the gross federal debit was 6,760,014 and total owned by the public was 3,913,607 and in 1970 (scaled to 2003 dollars) it was 1,805,565.54 and 1,342,358.52 (all in millions of dollars). Feel free to work with the total public debt instead if you want. In general the ratio of public debt to that in trust funds has been reducing, in other words more and more of the federal debt is in the form of trust funds (social security, medicare, civil service, military retirement, etc.).
Note... I don't have an agenda other then to point out inaccuracies in or the issues behind sufficiently vague statements, I will leave my politics out of it.
----
You do realize that a lot of the surplus came from the taxes generated by the false economy that was the.com bubble, both during the bubble and as it collapsed (massive capital gain tax income at the peak and initial slide of the markets). Additionally large personal and business income tax proceed directly results from the false employment that took place during the.com bubble.
If you look at the federal outlays as a percentage of GDP (which is a good way (but not the only way) to relate numbers from differing years and decades) you see the following and it doesn't support your unqualified quadrupled statement. If fact it points out that the government outlays are still smaller in relationship to GDP then during the Reagan years (or Carter / Bush Sr. and half of the Clinton years).
Carter: 20.7 (1977), 20.7, 20.1, and 21.7 (1980) Reagan: 22.2 (1981), 23.1, 23.5, 22.1, 22.8, 22.5, 21.6, and 21.2 (1988). Bush Sr.: 21.2 (1989), 21.8, 22.3, and 22.1 (1992) Clinton: 21.4 (1993), 21.0, 20.7, 20.3, 19.6, 19.2, 18.6, 18.4 (2001) Bush Jr.: 18.6 (2001), 19.4, 19.9, and 20.2 (est.)
Also generating more debt then previous 200+ years is an interesting but inaccurate statement from what I can see (without some clarification on your part). Looking at the budget numbers I don't see how you came up with that, since for example at the start of Bush Jr's term (2001) the nation debt was 5,769,881 (millions of dollars) and as of 2003 it is 6,760,014 and 6,760,014-5,769,881 = 990,133 and 990,133 is less then 5,769,881 that he start with (which existed before he got into office). As a percentage the debit has grown by 17% or on average 5.7% per year under Bush Jr.
Anyway note that the 5,769,881 was built up in the "200+ years" before him.
As a comparison lets look at Clinton's term which started with 4,351,044 (1993), 5,181,465 (1996) and 5,628,700 (2000). If you take the whole term... 5,628,700-4,351,044=1,277,656 and as a percentage... 29.4% increase or 3.7% per year under Clinton.
Note that Clinton had a stable and then booming economy for a large part of his term (large gains in GDP) and relatively small, generally decreasing spending on national defense and related items. Bush Jr. started with a rapidly sliding economy (reduced tax income) and an attack on the US soil, not seen sense WWII. As a result national defense (in this case FBI, police, fire, health, military, etc.) spending increased as well as a couple of large military actions, wars.
Of course you should likely look at the numbers in the terms of GDP as well but I didn't bother but if curious: 32.5% in 1981, 53.1% in 1989, 66.1% in 1993, 57.5% in 2001, 62.4% in 2004 and 67.5% (estimated) in 2005.
For the fun of it look at around the WWII time period... 52.4% in 1940, 97.6% in 1944, 121.7% in 1946, 98.2% in 1948, etc.
Anyway look at the real numbers in this budget history document (PDF) and draw your own conlusions. Just remember to also factor in what was taking place during the various time periods.
(I hope I didn't copy any wrong numbers out of this document when doing the above... also the term dates I used should likely be move on year later since the next president cannot greatly affect things until the second term of his presidency... also note that the budget/spend is controlled by congress more so then just by the president).
Ah using the end user visible names... working so long below that level of things I forget some of the tools used that naming (used to seeing partition names, etc.).
I was pointing out that the name he was using are not the normally used names (or correct) for those file systems and trying to make sure of what exactly we was talking about.
I guess this just goes to show their is a difference between reading and comprehending.
No amount of nuclear devices or propulsive systems that humans use in long distances space travel will have any noticeable affects given the huge amount of high energy particles given off by the sun. What is given off with be lost in a background noise of radiation/particles from the sun and will be blown/scattered by the solar wind in short order.
I cannot grok your definition of usable in the above. Do you mean usable as in more palatable based on some desire for some ideal of how software was developed?
If you are using usable, as in usability, in the traditional software sense then Mac OS X is extremely usable and in general consistently more usable then many current Linux distributions (and IMHO Windows) if you consider the breadth of individuals that can use it (non-developers, non-IT, etc. - yeah yeah you can not use it if you don't have the needed hardware but that is not my point).
Anyway Mac OS X is a proprietary OS based on BSD but with a large feature set the goes well beyond BSD which Apple developed themselves (aspects gained from NeXT). So if that doesn't turn you away, you should consider giving it a try (or more of a try).
"SCO UnixWare® is the solution for companies who place a high value on the scalability, reliability and security inherent in the UNIX® technology, but don't want the vendor lock-in or high server costs associated with proprietary platforms."...at least that is what this lawyer is trying to tell me.
Oops... connivence picked the wrong one from the spell checker popup on that one, it should have of course been convenience... didn't notice it until after clicking submit.
To bad I have to use a spell checker in the first place, I blame it on my parents, the schools and hell why not Mr. Bush.
At least I learned the definition to connivence in the process.
My point was that buying something doesn't imply that you can do anything you want with it, various legal constructs surround everything we do. It is they way of living in a society of any size.
Anyway if the system is setup that you should only be able to play a DVD on a licensed player then they have a right to attempt to enforce that. The fact that you own the disk doesn't change that and it also doesn't change the fact that you own the disk.
For example I can buy electronic maps from various companies but to view them I need a viewer that was built using the map decoder library and/or a licensed third-party implementation of that library. The company/individual (or group of companies) has a right to setup a licensing scheme for their designs and/or implementation of those designs.
Actually if you have listened to Steve Jobs comments he doesn't believe that DRM can unbreakable in this regard. Instead you provide a compelling service with flexible allowances to win folks over and in doing so you attempt to grow the market for bought music. So in general they have not attempted to make an unbreakable system.
That however doesn't mean you don't attempt to enforce those allowances (legally in general they need to do that to insure proper precedents are set). I believe Apple will try to do that without causing problems for its customers, without punishing folks for the acts of a few, at least based on comments by Steve and company. Apple also has to attempt enforcement to likely placate record companies and artists listing song on the store.
Anyway, it is like the issue of cassette tapes back in the day... folks worried that rampant pirating of music would take place and kill sales. Well pirating did take place but the connivence of the tape form factor allowed things like tape players in cars, smaller/cheaper/easier to use stereos, and portable players like the Walkmans. This grew the market size for music and the large gains in market size easily offset the loss do to piracy.
You make a good way to buy and listen to music, one easier to use, more convenient and reasonably priced to out compete the illegal channels (generally most folks like to do the right thing). This is the thinking that Steve and company has stated a few times.
Personally I see hacking around FairPlay as a waste of time, it yields me nothing that I cannot already do based on my needs. If it pushes the business world to more draconian DRM and/or stronger legal actions that "punishes" everyone then it is doing folks more of a disservice then a service.
They ask for it if you want set up the ability to purchase music at the time you open the account but you do NOT have to provide it to redeem a free song.
Slashdot Mirror
He better be ready, as will everyone else, to accept the fact that Apple is likely toying with providing this functionality in a future OS release (likely why the prototype/private API exists that he is using) so when they come out with it folks better not bitch about Apple ripping anything off.
I find the same thing with my 99 C5 vette. I can get 29-33 MPG on open highway when in sixth gear (the thing is basically idling at 65-80 speeds, 1.5-2k RPM). The sticker had it at 27 MPG on the open highway if I recall it correctly.
Of course out on the track you can suck fuel with averages under 4 MPG on complex heavy breaking/acceleration courses.
FYI, If you are ADC member (with a seed key) you can download the latest Tiger related documentation. This documentation bundle is later then the Tiger developer preview DVD handed out at WWDC.
CoreImage & CoreVideo are rather nice and parallel CoreAudio in many ways from what I have seen so far. Apple is on a strong push to bring in the compute capabilities of modern GPUs for things other then 3D and games, focusing on it as another system compute resource basically. Apple is of course eating its own dog food as well... let you think about how they may be doing that (since I am under WWDC NDA).
Did you note the following statement on that page?
Mac OS X dynamically adjusts the flow of the fluid and the speed of the fans based on temperature.
and
This system provides a continuous flow of thermally conductive fluid that transfers heat from the processors as they work harder. The heated fluid then flows through a radiant grille, where air passing over cooling fins returns the fluid to its original temperature.
So it may have a pumping system or some type of flow control... possibly even a reservoir but likely not needed.
Also don't read to much into an artists rendering of things.
I think you are reading (err... seeing) to much into an artists drawing of the system. I would wait until folks can look at them and/or Apple releases more engineering like schematics.
I personally doubt it is implemented exactly as the artists rendering is.
The idea that the courts determine whether or not someone ACTUALLY IS GUILTY is a stupid and common American fallacy. (I don't know what it's like elsewhere.)
The concept of guilt is a legal one in this context. If a court finds you guilty your are guilty, under the law, of that crime. Only a secondary trial as a result of the granting of an appeal and/or a higher court can over turn such a conviction. This is true in the United State and in most places in the world with any type of modern legal system.
Curious on how you think it should work... seriously really think about what you find stupid and how it could be different.
The simple fact is humans are not all knowing so we have to use evidence in a court trial (all bound by laws on what can and cannot be used) to connivence a group of folks (picked from the populace) of someone's guilt.
No problem. iTunes is fully scriptable via AppleScript on Mac OS X and I believe now via COM on Windows. I bet you can find software to control it as needed, if not, you will shortly.
:-)
Also the updated iTunes hasn't been fully release yet so who knows but it may provide such capabilities between iTunes applications directly.
Now you just need a wireless (11b/g) remote that can connect to iTunes, etc.
...may be because you can legally steal music in Canada :-)
Just to be clear. iTMS isn't going to be in China this month, at least nothing so far points to that (or if and when it will be). All that is happening is that Apple is getting iTunes, the application, pre-bundled on computers from one major hardware vendor in China. Like it did with HP in the states (which took place before the iPod rebrand deal IIRC).
I guess you don't understand very well how Apple's Interface Builder works or Cocoa (AppKit) in general. Interface Builder (IB) doesn't generate code (like most RAD tools do for other language/frameworks) it constructs real objects, connects those objects with each other and then archives that object graph to a file called a nib. Using IB you can test you interface without having to compile or building the application, simple use the live objects that you are working with (it has a test interface mode).
When your application runs the nib is loaded as needed and that object graph is unarchived.
You can implement rather complex GUIs without writing a single line of code yourself (more so now thanks to the contoller objects supported) and without any other tool generating code for you.
If you haven't really used Interface Builder and AppKit you should consider taking it for a serious spin... often their is no need to code your GUI by hand.
Also note that you can load a nib (with one or more views, etc.) and have its views inserted into the view hierarchy as needed and multiple times.
You can say lots of things with numbers depending how you focus on them.
... ... ... ...
The 1950-1960 numbers didn't really have any war dividends (in the traditional sense of the phase) but saw a strong growth in the economy during that time which increased tax income (among other tax code changes). In fact spending on military was rather higher during this time period.
The following outlines the percentage of total federal outlays for nations defense... notice the effects of the start of the cold war.
1950 - 32.2%
1952 - 68.1%
1954 - 62.4%
1956 - 60.2%
1958 - 56.8%
1960 - 52.2%
1962 - 50.8%
1964 - 46.2%
1966 - 43.2%
1968 - 46.0%
1970 - 41.8%
1978 - 23.8%
1980 - 22.7%
1982 - 24.8%
1984 - 26.7%
1986 - 27.6%
1988 - 27.3%
1990 - 23.9%
1993 - 20.7%
2000 - 18.4%
2003 - 18.8%
(got tired of typing hence the "...", look at the history doc for all numbers)
The real numbers are "per capita debt"
For those interested the following is per capita debt adjusted into 2003 dollars (picked decade boundaries for the hell of it and to make math easier).
1940 - $502.65
1950 - $1,288.72 (15.64% annual rate of change)
1960 - $1,000.20 (-2.24%)
1970 - $880.54 (-1.20%)
1980 - $892.14 (0.13%)
1990 - $1,812.23 (10.31%)
2000 - $2,188.92 (2.08%)
2003 - $2,372.25 (2.79%)
Based on population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau (with 2000 and 2003 estimated from 1999 numbers using 0.9 annual growth). Also I used numbers from here to scale dollar values to 2003 levels. I also used the total gross federal debt not the total debit held by the public... Gross Federal debt is composed both of Federal debt held (owned) by the public and Federal debt held by Federal Government accounts, which is mostly held by trust funds. Federal debt held by the public consists of all Federal debt held outside the Federal Government accounts.
For example in 2003 the gross federal debit was 6,760,014 and total owned by the public was 3,913,607 and in 1970 (scaled to 2003 dollars) it was 1,805,565.54 and 1,342,358.52 (all in millions of dollars). Feel free to work with the total public debt instead if you want. In general the ratio of public debt to that in trust funds has been reducing, in other words more and more of the federal debt is in the form of trust funds (social security, medicare, civil service, military retirement, etc.).
Note... I don't have an agenda other then to point out inaccuracies in or the issues behind sufficiently vague statements, I will leave my politics out of it.
.com bubble, both during the bubble and as it collapsed (massive capital gain tax income at the peak and initial slide of the markets). Additionally large personal and business income tax proceed directly results from the false employment that took place during the .com bubble.
----
You do realize that a lot of the surplus came from the taxes generated by the false economy that was the
If you look at the federal outlays as a percentage of GDP (which is a good way (but not the only way) to relate numbers from differing years and decades) you see the following and it doesn't support your unqualified quadrupled statement. If fact it points out that the government outlays are still smaller in relationship to GDP then during the Reagan years (or Carter / Bush Sr. and half of the Clinton years).
Carter: 20.7 (1977), 20.7, 20.1, and 21.7 (1980)
Reagan: 22.2 (1981), 23.1, 23.5, 22.1, 22.8, 22.5, 21.6, and 21.2 (1988).
Bush Sr.: 21.2 (1989), 21.8, 22.3, and 22.1 (1992)
Clinton: 21.4 (1993), 21.0, 20.7, 20.3, 19.6, 19.2, 18.6, 18.4 (2001)
Bush Jr.: 18.6 (2001), 19.4, 19.9, and 20.2 (est.)
Also generating more debt then previous 200+ years is an interesting but inaccurate statement from what I can see (without some clarification on your part). Looking at the budget numbers I don't see how you came up with that, since for example at the start of Bush Jr's term (2001) the nation debt was 5,769,881 (millions of dollars) and as of 2003 it is 6,760,014 and 6,760,014-5,769,881 = 990,133 and 990,133 is less then 5,769,881 that he start with (which existed before he got into office). As a percentage the debit has grown by 17% or on average 5.7% per year under Bush Jr.
Anyway note that the 5,769,881 was built up in the "200+ years" before him.
As a comparison lets look at Clinton's term which started with 4,351,044 (1993), 5,181,465 (1996) and 5,628,700 (2000). If you take the whole term... 5,628,700-4,351,044=1,277,656 and as a percentage... 29.4% increase or 3.7% per year under Clinton.
Note that Clinton had a stable and then booming economy for a large part of his term (large gains in GDP) and relatively small, generally decreasing spending on national defense and related items. Bush Jr. started with a rapidly sliding economy (reduced tax income) and an attack on the US soil, not seen sense WWII. As a result national defense (in this case FBI, police, fire, health, military, etc.) spending increased as well as a couple of large military actions, wars.
Of course you should likely look at the numbers in the terms of GDP as well but I didn't bother but if curious: 32.5% in 1981, 53.1% in 1989, 66.1% in 1993, 57.5% in 2001, 62.4% in 2004 and 67.5% (estimated) in 2005.
For the fun of it look at around the WWII time period... 52.4% in 1940, 97.6% in 1944, 121.7% in 1946, 98.2% in 1948, etc.
Anyway look at the real numbers in this budget history document (PDF) and draw your own conlusions. Just remember to also factor in what was taking place during the various time periods.
(I hope I didn't copy any wrong numbers out of this document when doing the above... also the term dates I used should likely be move on year later since the next president cannot greatly affect things until the second term of his presidency... also note that the budget/spend is controlled by congress more so then just by the president).
Taking my comments the wrong way...
Ah using the end user visible names... working so long below that level of things I forget some of the tools used that naming (used to seeing partition names, etc.).
Yes, I know that (it is HFS+ not HFS Extended).
I was pointing out that the name he was using are not the normally used names (or correct) for those file systems and trying to make sure of what exactly we was talking about.
Mac OS Extended?
You mean HFS+ (HFS Plus)? That is the name of the file system.
I guess this just goes to show their is a difference between reading and comprehending.
No amount of nuclear devices or propulsive systems that humans use in long distances space travel will have any noticeable affects given the huge amount of high energy particles given off by the sun. What is given off with be lost in a background noise of radiation/particles from the sun and will be blown/scattered by the solar wind in short order.
Yeah I did see that it fit in overall context but at last, no my light bulb wasn't on enough at the time for me to be intentionally that... witty.
I cannot grok your definition of usable in the above. Do you mean usable as in more palatable based on some desire for some ideal of how software was developed?
If you are using usable, as in usability, in the traditional software sense then Mac OS X is extremely usable and in general consistently more usable then many current Linux distributions (and IMHO Windows) if you consider the breadth of individuals that can use it (non-developers, non-IT, etc. - yeah yeah you can not use it if you don't have the needed hardware but that is not my point).
Anyway Mac OS X is a proprietary OS based on BSD but with a large feature set the goes well beyond BSD which Apple developed themselves (aspects gained from NeXT). So if that doesn't turn you away, you should consider giving it a try (or more of a try).
You left off SCO UnixWare!
...at least that is what this lawyer is trying to tell me.
Didn't you know...
"SCO UnixWare® is the solution for companies who place a high value on the scalability, reliability and security inherent in the UNIX® technology, but don't want the vendor lock-in or high server costs associated with proprietary platforms."
Oops... connivence picked the wrong one from the spell checker popup on that one, it should have of course been convenience... didn't notice it until after clicking submit.
To bad I have to use a spell checker in the first place, I blame it on my parents, the schools and hell why not Mr. Bush.
At least I learned the definition to connivence in the process.
My point was that buying something doesn't imply that you can do anything you want with it, various legal constructs surround everything we do. It is they way of living in a society of any size.
Anyway if the system is setup that you should only be able to play a DVD on a licensed player then they have a right to attempt to enforce that. The fact that you own the disk doesn't change that and it also doesn't change the fact that you own the disk.
For example I can buy electronic maps from various companies but to view them I need a viewer that was built using the map decoder library and/or a licensed third-party implementation of that library. The company/individual (or group of companies) has a right to setup a licensing scheme for their designs and/or implementation of those designs.
Actually if you have listened to Steve Jobs comments he doesn't believe that DRM can unbreakable in this regard. Instead you provide a compelling service with flexible allowances to win folks over and in doing so you attempt to grow the market for bought music. So in general they have not attempted to make an unbreakable system.
That however doesn't mean you don't attempt to enforce those allowances (legally in general they need to do that to insure proper precedents are set). I believe Apple will try to do that without causing problems for its customers, without punishing folks for the acts of a few, at least based on comments by Steve and company. Apple also has to attempt enforcement to likely placate record companies and artists listing song on the store.
Anyway, it is like the issue of cassette tapes back in the day... folks worried that rampant pirating of music would take place and kill sales. Well pirating did take place but the connivence of the tape form factor allowed things like tape players in cars, smaller/cheaper/easier to use stereos, and portable players like the Walkmans. This grew the market size for music and the large gains in market size easily offset the loss do to piracy.
You make a good way to buy and listen to music, one easier to use, more convenient and reasonably priced to out compete the illegal channels (generally most folks like to do the right thing). This is the thinking that Steve and company has stated a few times.
Personally I see hacking around FairPlay as a waste of time, it yields me nothing that I cannot already do based on my needs. If it pushes the business world to more draconian DRM and/or stronger legal actions that "punishes" everyone then it is doing folks more of a disservice then a service.
You do not need to provide a credit card.
They ask for it if you want set up the ability to purchase music at the time you open the account but you do NOT have to provide it to redeem a free song.