There's that whole nasty "human interpretation" thing again. It's almost as if people actually aren't machines with binary thought processes.
Okay, let's say that some aspects of Internet access are interstate commerce and some aren't. Now, how would you go about defining it?
In trying to find a "compromise" for what should be a black-or-white issue of definition, you've just opened up Pandora's box of conflicting laws and uncertainity, which is the very thing that hurts an economy and culture. It's hard enough for the mere mortal citizen to maintain legal compliance with all the laws on the book, especially in American jurisprudice where ignorance of the law is rarely accepted as a valid defense. Laws are only worthwhile if they are simple enough for common citizens to understand, and reasonable enough where enforcement is actually possible. But, IANAL...
The power to regulate interstate commerce cannot be enumerated to include the power to regulate internet access.
You guys are all arguing in circles. Some of you #define kInterstateCommerce as == to kInternetAccess and the rest of you #define kInterstateCommerce as != to kInternetAccess. Until you agree which is which, this argument is going nowhere.
Where are all the games like PacMan? I don't mean PacMan itself, but simple games like that which you can play in five or ten minutes here and there?
Mostly to cell phones and PDAs, though you can still play them online at places like PopCap. I'll also double another poster's suggestion about the GameBoy; WarioWare is a good example of simple game play for the new millenium. Simple game design seems to have been shunted to the "puzzle" genre of gaming.
t's because people still associate Mac with MacOS = 9. You know, the non-multitasking OS without dynamic memory allocation which totally froze when an app crashed so you had to reboot the whole computer..
This would explain disparagement, but not vitriol. I actually got into an argument with an Apple-basher at college once, and it was during the System 7/Win95 era, where you concern mattered less.
That, and that it has so few games..
The worst flamage is in the developer and business spheres, not the hobbist/gamer space. This comic says it best for me...
But the most important reason is that their friends also hate it, but they have no idea why, only that their friends' friends also hate it.
This is about the only thing I can figure, except that too few people out there even know that Macs still exist; they think they stopped making them or something. This limits the "friends of friends" effect.
hen when I ask them what they know about Macs they say "well, I haven't used one since school, but..."
What's funny is that the "one" is more likely to have been an Apple ][, not a Mac. And the Apple ]['s were well loved in their day.
If I was more conspiratorially minded, I'd guess most Mac haters were decended from Commodore 64 and Amiga users, bitter that that company tanked, as well as getting too used to having many friends pirate games and software for them. (The social network makes it easier to pirate software on PCs than Macs.)
Yes, this is way late, but I hope you are tracking this via your personal comments page...
Off the top of my head are SuperCard and Runtime Revolution. Also, if you only care about the Mac, AppleScript Studio, while not as elegant as the above, uses a programming language decended from HyperTalk, and it's a free part of Xcode.
Also, don't forget there are many people who don't like Apple either and that is something many still like to ignore.
As a long time Mac user and developer, I have to agree here. It seems like for every Mac zealot, there are ten anti-Mac zealots, especially in the business world. I just wish I could understand the source of this resentment; it's not like Macs are common enough to breed contempt via familiarity that Windows suffers from... And the "boycott" that the FSF once held against Apple has all but been forgotten once Apple migrated to a BSD-variant for it's OS, so it's not some kind of grudge...
blitz to 'regain its rightful place in the audio industry' by trying to dominate the MP3 market
Where did this quote come from? If it was said by somebody at Creative, that shows a remarkable sense of hubris and entitlement that is out of place in a competitive marketplace.
Just because you were first major player in the MP3 player market doesn't mean you are entitled to stay there. Look at Apple, they were first to the mass market with a GUI-based computer, and they didn't maintain any dominance there, did they? Apple's not even your real enemy; their iTunes player supported the Rio series in the early days, and still supports many of them on the Mac platform. Apple chose the high end player space; Creative chose the low end. Apple got lucky this time around. No sense whining about it...
Creative would be far better off developing a hybrid MP3/MP4 system, and push MP4. Apple has far too much tied up in MP3 hardware to switch quickly, which would give Creative a massive head-start.
I can't tell if you are joking or not, but do you mean MPEG-4? If so, that's what AAC is part of. (It's the prefered audio codec of both the short lived "MPEG-2.5" and MPEG-4.) The container file format used by MPEG-4 is similar to QuickTime's movie format. Also, the file iTunes makes either are M4A's for ripped songs, and M4P's for DRM'ed files.
I thought iPods played "AAC" files or whatnots but not MP3s, can anyone confirm?
iPods have been able to play MP3's for longer than they have been able to play M4A's and M4P's... IIRC, the original 5 GB iPod didn't even have support for AAC (much less the DRM.) iTunes originated as a Mac MP3 player called SoundJam.
However, Steve personally didn't like the audio quality of MP3s and defaulted iTunes to burn them at 160 kbps instead of the traditional 128 kbps. This combined with the inital iPod's support only for the Mac platform limited its appeal until Apple integrated MPEG-4 and it's AAC codec into QuickTime. Once this occured, Apple finally had a "ideological" business reason to leverage the iPod onto the Windows platform: as a way to reinforce QT installations on PCs. QuickTime technology drives many of Apple's high scale packages, like Final Cut Pro, as well as making a good PR platform to keep Macs on the radar, so more visibility of QT verses Real or Window Media was in line with Apple's historical biases.
People who get married make more money, and are healthier, on the average as most studies have concluded. That's a good thing about getting married! If you can do that without getting married, great!
Oh, dear... you've confused correlation with causation! If you actually think having a spouse will suddenly and magically cause you to make more money, you are sorely mistaken.
The reason people who are married tend to make more money is because they tend to be more emotionally stable or have some other personality attribute that makes for both successful marriage and successful careers. To turn it around, a person with a successful career (read: money) is more likely to attract a spouse.
I, personally, am still single in my 30's and I still am able to make the median income for family households. Getting married now will only serve to add to my debt overhead and reduce my flexability to move to where jobs are. People don't marry to get rich, but to get CENSORED...
In my mind, the difference between nagware and shareware is simple.
If you had bothered to follow the link to Wikipedia that started the brou-ha-ha and read through to the software types you are griping about, you would have discovered that "nagware," "adware," "demoware," et al, are just sub-categories of shareware, not entirely different concepts.
To say that only software given away with no means of enforcing payment can claim to be shareware shows a decided lack of knowledge of history about how shareware came to be and it's place in computing prior to the Internet. The original releases of Wolfenstein 3-D and Escape Velocity had just as much business calling themselves "shareware" as Maelstrom or PC-File.
It's funny you should bring up Turbo C++ since Borland still has inexpensive development tools that are perfect for a shareware developer.
Just how was Speed Racer's post offtopic? The Audion article is, in part, about the trials and travails of shareware development. This side discussion might be slightly off tangent, but it's still relevant to the discussion at hand.
These guys passed up an opportunity to become iTunes, and why?? Because they thought AOL was going to solve all of their problems, because they couldn't hold a frickin' meeting without them?!?
IANAL, and I don't have the details, but Panic might have opened themselves to legal exposure if they tried to negotiate with Apple without AOL being present. AOL would have treated such a meeting as "going behind their back" and even if they didn't sue over some technicality, their representatives in the industry could have started spreading stories about Panic developers being untrustworthy to deal with.
Yes, it's stupid. I've been the recieving end of this in college, when my chapter of ACM was forced to sign a letter of apology to a couple of reps from Author Anderson since we didn't keep them informed constantly about a presentation we invited them to. Some IT people are so full of themselves and can get away with it...
I wasn't refering to their regular "collection" discs... (I have their #1 of that series somewhere.) Prior to Ferazel's Wand, Ambrosia didn't sell pre-registered CDs in commerical venues. They also made a pre-registered bundle of Mars Rising and an EV game for sale as well. Andrew Welch was a really big believer in the viability of the shareware model, but the malware and security issues involving the modern Internet put a damper on that...
I know what a Spyware developer is, and I know of open source and closed source; but is there really such a thing as a shareware developer anymore?
Your confusion is understandable; in the Windows/x86 world, shareware truly is dead. But the distribution format continues to exist (though barely) in the Mac market. Besides, Panic, there's Ambrosia Software, Freeverse, Littlewing, Spiderweb and others.
Mac users, partly due to reduced malware exposure and partly due to cultural conviction, tend to be more appreciative of shareware developers, and as such are more likely to download strange unknown software and pay their fees. I used to have a link to a developer's anecdote where he got about 3% or so pay-in from Mac downloads, but only got much less than 1% when he ported his product to Windows. The result is that Mac shareware tends to get more income than on Windows, despite (or because of?) the low market share of the platform.
That said, even the old shareware houses are starting to migrate to brick-and-mortar. Freeverse sells some of their games in Apple Stores, and even Ambrosia has made CD pressings of Escape Velocity: Nova (as well as a board game!). It's a shame, shareware was as close as the "little person" could get to a true free market of software sales, sacrificed during the current war between Corporate software and Open Source.
've been looking for one for about a decade, I can never seem to find a "good" one on ebay:/
Seven Towns still makes Rubik's toys, though the current color scheme for the Magic puzzle isn't the same as the cooler original that Matchbox made. However, they now sell do-it-yourself kits that allow you to make your own Magic puzzles.
*giggle* *giggle* *snort*...you bought the Sega CD...
(Insert several minutes of incoherent laughter here)
Hey now, be nice... Yes, half of the Mega CD's catalog (mostly "interactive video") sucked, but the platform got plenty of gems. Working Design's translations of Lunar, Vay, and Popful Mail were works of art. The platform also got decent strategy games like Dark Wizard. This platform was the first to really show to western audiences the true wierdness of Japanese tastes, thanks to games like Keio Flying Squadron and Panic!. Finally, most Sonic fans consider Sonic CD to be the best game of the series...
The gist of what I was saying was that I wanted Windows and Unix to know how to do it too.
A nice wish, and not unprecidented either. The Amiga used ".info" files much in the same way your "manifest" concept would have worked.
A little more time, I think, is needed for this to happen again. We are at a crossroads where it's unclear if the concept of file systems will be abstracted away from the end user interface (iTunes and iPhoto are examples of this design philosophy) or if end users will re-assert their desire to have control over how files are organized and presented on storage media. (Which makes more sense for removable storage than booting media.)
For what it's worth, I've seen some things on OS X that are bundles with a.manifest XML metadata file. I think it would be great if that was the standard:
This is tricky, while the OS X package/bundle format survives storage on flat file systems, other OS's don't know how to hide or abstract away accessory files that are part of what's really a master folder.
The result is a usability problem; users on Windows and Unix systems will e-mail and CD burn what they percieve to be the "main" data file, without taking due diligence by keep extra "garbage" files like the.xml or.plist file with it. This isn't just about naive end users; system admins also have a hostility towards the various "garbage" files that OS X is famous for strewing around a file system.
So long as most end users (and even many professionals!) regard file formats as "magic boxes" that appear to hold structured data, as opposed to the non-standard or unstructured form that most data files take, they will not appreciate the difficulty in exchanging files that aren't properly "contained" in either a universal container file format or a file system enforced organization system. I have had to deal with end users who can't even make the distinction between a native Word document or a plain text file or an RTF...
The really interesting part is that metadata will be playing a big role in Spotlight while just a few years ago people were afraid metadata in Mac OS X was going the way of the dodo.
The kind of metadata that was almost deprecated by Apple isn't quite same thing as the "modern" concept of metadata. The classical HFS metadata covered concepts like file type, file creator, and "Finder bits" that aren't handled at the file system level in other OSes. This, combined, with the Mac OS's historical use of resource forks for storing developer defined data records, made perserving such data difficult or impossible in heterogenous environments like the Internet. It's really a shame; I've always thought this concept was the most elegant attempt to solve the problem of "rich data" associated with data files without requiring the data in the file itself to have some form of universal container format.
The metadata concept used by Spotlight is going to be based in part on a plug-in system that allows the Mac OS to reconstruct metadata information from the data within files themselves, rather than just using the metadata facilities provided by HFS and Mac OS resource forks. That means that each different kind of file, from Word documents to PDFs to Postscript jobs, needs its own special kind of processing to read its own format of storing such data. It's less elegant and more processor intensive that just using the historical HFS system, but it's more likely to to be useful for extracting metadata from files provided by Windows and other Unix variant users.
I've actually got the original Dead Ale Wives skit on one of my Dr. Demento CDs to boot... Supposedly, the Wives did a follow-up skit on the Dr. D Show involving the DM fudging dice rolls...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, let's say that some aspects of Internet access are interstate commerce and some aren't. Now, how would you go about defining it?
In trying to find a "compromise" for what should be a black-or-white issue of definition, you've just opened up Pandora's box of conflicting laws and uncertainity, which is the very thing that hurts an economy and culture. It's hard enough for the mere mortal citizen to maintain legal compliance with all the laws on the book, especially in American jurisprudice where ignorance of the law is rarely accepted as a valid defense. Laws are only worthwhile if they are simple enough for common citizens to understand, and reasonable enough where enforcement is actually possible. But, IANAL...
o_O
Okay, I'll bite. What does The Princess Bride have to do with monorails?
I've looked at apes before, but not like that.
Ew. Off to use some mental floss.
As Seen On TV
You guys are all arguing in circles. Some of you #define kInterstateCommerce as == to kInternetAccess and the rest of you #define kInterstateCommerce as != to kInternetAccess. Until you agree which is which, this argument is going nowhere.
Mostly to cell phones and PDAs, though you can still play them online at places like PopCap. I'll also double another poster's suggestion about the GameBoy; WarioWare is a good example of simple game play for the new millenium. Simple game design seems to have been shunted to the "puzzle" genre of gaming.
This would explain disparagement, but not vitriol. I actually got into an argument with an Apple-basher at college once, and it was during the System 7/Win95 era, where you concern mattered less.
That, and that it has so few games..
The worst flamage is in the developer and business spheres, not the hobbist/gamer space. This comic says it best for me...
But the most important reason is that their friends also hate it, but they have no idea why, only that their friends' friends also hate it.
This is about the only thing I can figure, except that too few people out there even know that Macs still exist; they think they stopped making them or something. This limits the "friends of friends" effect.
hen when I ask them what they know about Macs they say "well, I haven't used one since school, but..."
What's funny is that the "one" is more likely to have been an Apple ][, not a Mac. And the Apple ]['s were well loved in their day.
If I was more conspiratorially minded, I'd guess most Mac haters were decended from Commodore 64 and Amiga users, bitter that that company tanked, as well as getting too used to having many friends pirate games and software for them. (The social network makes it easier to pirate software on PCs than Macs.)
Yes, this is way late, but I hope you are tracking this via your personal comments page...
Off the top of my head are SuperCard and Runtime Revolution. Also, if you only care about the Mac, AppleScript Studio, while not as elegant as the above, uses a programming language decended from HyperTalk, and it's a free part of Xcode.
As a long time Mac user and developer, I have to agree here. It seems like for every Mac zealot, there are ten anti-Mac zealots, especially in the business world. I just wish I could understand the source of this resentment; it's not like Macs are common enough to breed contempt via familiarity that Windows suffers from... And the "boycott" that the FSF once held against Apple has all but been forgotten once Apple migrated to a BSD-variant for it's OS, so it's not some kind of grudge...
Where did this quote come from? If it was said by somebody at Creative, that shows a remarkable sense of hubris and entitlement that is out of place in a competitive marketplace.
Just because you were first major player in the MP3 player market doesn't mean you are entitled to stay there. Look at Apple, they were first to the mass market with a GUI-based computer, and they didn't maintain any dominance there, did they? Apple's not even your real enemy; their iTunes player supported the Rio series in the early days, and still supports many of them on the Mac platform. Apple chose the high end player space; Creative chose the low end. Apple got lucky this time around. No sense whining about it...
I can't tell if you are joking or not, but do you mean MPEG-4? If so, that's what AAC is part of. (It's the prefered audio codec of both the short lived "MPEG-2.5" and MPEG-4.) The container file format used by MPEG-4 is similar to QuickTime's movie format. Also, the file iTunes makes either are M4A's for ripped songs, and M4P's for DRM'ed files.
iPods have been able to play MP3's for longer than they have been able to play M4A's and M4P's... IIRC, the original 5 GB iPod didn't even have support for AAC (much less the DRM.) iTunes originated as a Mac MP3 player called SoundJam.
However, Steve personally didn't like the audio quality of MP3s and defaulted iTunes to burn them at 160 kbps instead of the traditional 128 kbps. This combined with the inital iPod's support only for the Mac platform limited its appeal until Apple integrated MPEG-4 and it's AAC codec into QuickTime. Once this occured, Apple finally had a "ideological" business reason to leverage the iPod onto the Windows platform: as a way to reinforce QT installations on PCs. QuickTime technology drives many of Apple's high scale packages, like Final Cut Pro, as well as making a good PR platform to keep Macs on the radar, so more visibility of QT verses Real or Window Media was in line with Apple's historical biases.
Oh, dear... you've confused correlation with causation! If you actually think having a spouse will suddenly and magically cause you to make more money, you are sorely mistaken.
The reason people who are married tend to make more money is because they tend to be more emotionally stable or have some other personality attribute that makes for both successful marriage and successful careers. To turn it around, a person with a successful career (read: money) is more likely to attract a spouse.
I, personally, am still single in my 30's and I still am able to make the median income for family households. Getting married now will only serve to add to my debt overhead and reduce my flexability to move to where jobs are. People don't marry to get rich, but to get CENSORED...
If you had bothered to follow the link to Wikipedia that started the brou-ha-ha and read through to the software types you are griping about, you would have discovered that "nagware," "adware," "demoware," et al, are just sub-categories of shareware, not entirely different concepts.
To say that only software given away with no means of enforcing payment can claim to be shareware shows a decided lack of knowledge of history about how shareware came to be and it's place in computing prior to the Internet. The original releases of Wolfenstein 3-D and Escape Velocity had just as much business calling themselves "shareware" as Maelstrom or PC-File.
Just how was Speed Racer's post offtopic? The Audion article is, in part, about the trials and travails of shareware development. This side discussion might be slightly off tangent, but it's still relevant to the discussion at hand.
IANAL, and I don't have the details, but Panic might have opened themselves to legal exposure if they tried to negotiate with Apple without AOL being present. AOL would have treated such a meeting as "going behind their back" and even if they didn't sue over some technicality, their representatives in the industry could have started spreading stories about Panic developers being untrustworthy to deal with.
Yes, it's stupid. I've been the recieving end of this in college, when my chapter of ACM was forced to sign a letter of apology to a couple of reps from Author Anderson since we didn't keep them informed constantly about a presentation we invited them to. Some IT people are so full of themselves and can get away with it...
I wasn't refering to their regular "collection" discs... (I have their #1 of that series somewhere.) Prior to Ferazel's Wand, Ambrosia didn't sell pre-registered CDs in commerical venues. They also made a pre-registered bundle of Mars Rising and an EV game for sale as well. Andrew Welch was a really big believer in the viability of the shareware model, but the malware and security issues involving the modern Internet put a damper on that...
Your confusion is understandable; in the Windows/x86 world, shareware truly is dead. But the distribution format continues to exist (though barely) in the Mac market. Besides, Panic, there's Ambrosia Software, Freeverse, Littlewing, Spiderweb and others.
Mac users, partly due to reduced malware exposure and partly due to cultural conviction, tend to be more appreciative of shareware developers, and as such are more likely to download strange unknown software and pay their fees. I used to have a link to a developer's anecdote where he got about 3% or so pay-in from Mac downloads, but only got much less than 1% when he ported his product to Windows. The result is that Mac shareware tends to get more income than on Windows, despite (or because of?) the low market share of the platform.
That said, even the old shareware houses are starting to migrate to brick-and-mortar. Freeverse sells some of their games in Apple Stores, and even Ambrosia has made CD pressings of Escape Velocity: Nova (as well as a board game!). It's a shame, shareware was as close as the "little person" could get to a true free market of software sales, sacrificed during the current war between Corporate software and Open Source.
Seven Towns still makes Rubik's toys, though the current color scheme for the Magic puzzle isn't the same as the cooler original that Matchbox made. However, they now sell do-it-yourself kits that allow you to make your own Magic puzzles.
(Insert several minutes of incoherent laughter here)
Hey now, be nice... Yes, half of the Mega CD's catalog (mostly "interactive video") sucked, but the platform got plenty of gems. Working Design's translations of Lunar, Vay, and Popful Mail were works of art. The platform also got decent strategy games like Dark Wizard. This platform was the first to really show to western audiences the true wierdness of Japanese tastes, thanks to games like Keio Flying Squadron and Panic!. Finally, most Sonic fans consider Sonic CD to be the best game of the series...
A nice wish, and not unprecidented either. The Amiga used ".info" files much in the same way your "manifest" concept would have worked.
A little more time, I think, is needed for this to happen again. We are at a crossroads where it's unclear if the concept of file systems will be abstracted away from the end user interface (iTunes and iPhoto are examples of this design philosophy) or if end users will re-assert their desire to have control over how files are organized and presented on storage media. (Which makes more sense for removable storage than booting media.)
This is tricky, while the OS X package/bundle format survives storage on flat file systems, other OS's don't know how to hide or abstract away accessory files that are part of what's really a master folder.
The result is a usability problem; users on Windows and Unix systems will e-mail and CD burn what they percieve to be the "main" data file, without taking due diligence by keep extra "garbage" files like the .xml or .plist file with it. This isn't just about naive end users; system admins also have a hostility towards the various "garbage" files that OS X is famous for strewing around a file system.
So long as most end users (and even many professionals!) regard file formats as "magic boxes" that appear to hold structured data, as opposed to the non-standard or unstructured form that most data files take, they will not appreciate the difficulty in exchanging files that aren't properly "contained" in either a universal container file format or a file system enforced organization system. I have had to deal with end users who can't even make the distinction between a native Word document or a plain text file or an RTF...
The kind of metadata that was almost deprecated by Apple isn't quite same thing as the "modern" concept of metadata. The classical HFS metadata covered concepts like file type, file creator, and "Finder bits" that aren't handled at the file system level in other OSes. This, combined, with the Mac OS's historical use of resource forks for storing developer defined data records, made perserving such data difficult or impossible in heterogenous environments like the Internet. It's really a shame; I've always thought this concept was the most elegant attempt to solve the problem of "rich data" associated with data files without requiring the data in the file itself to have some form of universal container format.
The metadata concept used by Spotlight is going to be based in part on a plug-in system that allows the Mac OS to reconstruct metadata information from the data within files themselves, rather than just using the metadata facilities provided by HFS and Mac OS resource forks. That means that each different kind of file, from Word documents to PDFs to Postscript jobs, needs its own special kind of processing to read its own format of storing such data. It's less elegant and more processor intensive that just using the historical HFS system, but it's more likely to to be useful for extracting metadata from files provided by Windows and other Unix variant users.
So rather than having a turducken this Thanksgiving, have a nerdorkeek! Be sure to leave out the pencil-necks though...
I've actually got the original Dead Ale Wives skit on one of my Dr. Demento CDs to boot... Supposedly, the Wives did a follow-up skit on the Dr. D Show involving the DM fudging dice rolls...