I think the quality of and restrictions placed on the files are acceptable. From all the compaining in the last article on this service (1400 posts!), you'd think Apple had announced a listen-once for $1.00 service.
The selection of music, while not great initially, will be expanded. They don't want me to subscribe. It's $1.00 a song - easy impulse buy. I get to choose what to do with my music - I think the copy restrictions are pretty reasonable - of course they fit my usage pattern.
I get the convenience of buying music relatively easily and painlessly, at an acceptable quality level, and without wasteful and largely unnecessary packaging. In the vast majority of cases, I (the consumer, the one who SHOULD be dictating the rules) get to pick and choose within the selection of music offered.
At least Apple is trying to give people what they want. There are some downsides to this service, but even the most stringent fair-use advocates have to admit that the itunes store is the current high water mark for selling music on the internet without Draconian restrictions.
I'm quite frankly surprised at all the negative comments here. A system that makes allowances for fair use and that is priced reasonably seems to be what folks here have been clamoring for since the shut down of Napster.
Apple is stepping out on a very thin limb here, and as with every other product they've released in the past few years, they'll make adjustments to the feature set and pricing as feedback reaches them.
$1.00 a song isn't unreasonable given the convenience, flexibility and feature set they've built in to this product. They've removed the need for me to pay shipping charges opn music, to fight traffic on the way to the music store, and to find space for more jewel cases. I still retain the right to burn the song an unlimited number of times, albeit on different playlists every tenth burn. Sounds like fair use to me. It's an intelligent approach that is the FIRST one to consider the needs, rights, wishes and hopes of the.mp3-savvy consumer.
At least give them credit for doing something no other computer company or music company has done or even shown an interest in: further integrating the computers we use for 8-10 hours a day with the other devices and interests we all have.
United Nations, is it really is as teathless a body as the League Of Nations
Do you brush your teath before you go to bed? Why should I take anything you say seriously if you can't be bothered to use correct tense and spelling?
For what it's worth I agree with you on some points. I believe Bush 43 acted to deflect public mistrust over the economy and his failure to nab Osama, who apparently perpetrated the WTC attacks peronally with a team of dedicated Iraqis. (19 Saudis and Egyptians led the attacks.) Bush looks like a tough guy to the uneducated majority of U.S. voters. Sometimes I wonder if our shitty edumacational system is handicapped by politicians on purpose.
These are the same voters who are looking for an excuse to get mad (and even!)after being laid off by ruthless companies that aren't forced to justify executive bonuses in bankruptcy court as the court obviates any and all severance for 15-year veteran engineers from the same company. I'd be pissed too. That'd make me wanna kick some towelhead ass.
Bush doesn't love the U.S. He loves himself and Ari Fliescher. And big corporations. Perhaps rightly so. If the price of gas went up to $5.00, we'd all be sunk.
So where's our visionary Mahattan project-style crash course, providing alternative energy and power? Ooops. I guess Bush really is beholden to to the oil companies.
When it's all said and done, all 43 has done is piss off the world we depend on for cross-pollination of ideas, trade, and good will. The rest of the world hates us, George. And they think we're using too much oil per capita. And they're right. We're squandering our time and riches on GW Bush's political capitol.
Unfortunately, we have to live with the rest of the world, and fighting them off at the Alamo isn't going to work this time.
It's even better - Apple is reimplementing something like Labels and what sounds like a spatial implementation of the Copland GUI's "Saved Search Folders".
You could save a metadata-based search as a folder on the desktop in Copland. As you created new documents that matched the criteria of the search, they would be added to the folder for easy access. The demo I saw included Tabbed folders as the 'easy access' mechanism.
Piles sound like a way to implement this type of "saved search/associated files" grouping spatially, without the GUI real-estate penalty of tabbed windows. As a bonus, you get the "Labels" functionality of grouping files by common arbitrary values.
...the CDMA carriers (SprintPCS and Verizon) will have 2Mbps 1xEVDO (TRUE 3G networks) up and active. The biggest single limiting factor to creating a wireless infrastructure is that somewhere it has to tie into fibre optics. Wireless carriers, nacent though the technology is today, have this figured out. Some xx,000 wireless radio towers all terminate at a base station connected to real telco networks.
You know, I've been hearing this exact verbiage for four years now, and I don't believe it any more. When I worked at Metricom, Ricochet was the product that was going to be 'killed' by 3G. Luckily for 3G, Metricom's brain-dead, overspendy management and ridiculous pricing model killed the company instead. Curiously, the arrangement Intel seems to be proposing here is strikingly similar to the dual-band microcellular architecture Ricochet used/uses. Microcellular architecture has some unique strengths, as evidenced by the fact that Ricochet was the ONLY way to get data to ground zero in the days immediately following the WTC attacks.
Now the previous poster is saying this uplink and backhaul arrangement will be obviated by 3G. You know what? Show me. Then I'll believe it. Until then, I don't think 3G will ever solve anything for anyone.
3G sounds like great technology. But it isn't shipping, and there are LOTS of caveats. have you ever seen a technology that worked out of the box? 3G is still "months" away, and it probably won't work as advertised when it does ship, if ever. Perhaps 3G should be renamed "Duke Nukem Forever Wireless".
I'm tired of hearing "wait until 3G". Hell, I'm tired of waiting.
One of the major problems with the altered photograph is the fact that the general public (NOT the Slashdot crowd) sees this outright lie and bases every decision about digital photographs on it.
Digital manipulation (as opposed to interpretation, like dodging, burning, tonal adjustments and color correction) only makes what was previously possible with film,basic tools and an enlarger easier. What we're seeing in the Times' photograph was possible long before the widespread use of digital cameras by photojournalists, and even before the advent of digital photographic retouching.
Digital photography only makes this sort of visual slight-of-hand easier - but that doesn't stop the person in the street from mistrusting the method used to capture and deliver the photograph instead of laying blame at the feet of the photojounalist who chose to misuse the tools he was provided with.
There aren't any easy solutions to this problem. Photojournalism is so competitive these days that I'm not surprised some unscrupulous person chose to combine the elements of two photographs for a more dramatic impression.
It's just as wrong to try to sell this image, no matter what the competitive environment, but I wish it weren't seen as being caused by digital photography, instead of what it really is - an artifact of photography itself made easier with digital technology.
(-Diety- knows that Apple sure protects their little widgets and pictures fervently).
Well, the last time they let this particular horse out of the barn, Microsoft ended up creating Windows. We all know how that turned out...can you really blame them for being twice shy?
Sure, Microsoft had permission, but ostensibly for Windows 1.0 only...
They were taught to use Windows, as opposed to being taught to use a computer, and fear and loathe anything different.
I am an assistant at a digital photography/printing business.
We run workshops occasionally (check the schedule on the web site) and we just finished one tonight. Our lab is comprised of 400MHz G4s running Mac OS 9.1 and Photoshop 7.0.1, mostly culled from eBay. I love my job; I haven't been able to say that since I worked at Metricom.
From time to time, Windows users who use our Macs are stymied. These tend to be the people who want to know "the right numbers" for Unsharp Mask (there aren't any "right numbers"), and who want to know if the keyboard commands and files from Photoshop on a Mac will work on a Windows machine.
An example of a "very confusing" situation: the Windows user clicks on the desktop behind the active application's window and can't figure out why the menus have changed. They don't ever try to click on the (still visible) window to regain focus on the application they want to use. With no screen-stealing taskbar to remind them of wht they're doing, they get lost in the contexts of an application-centric OS.
Nothing against these people; many of them are talented and bright in their own right, but they uniformly seem to lack the mental abstraction that the desktop metaphor depands on. They are dependent upon the concept of procedural instruction to perform tasks on a computer. They were, as the previous poster suggests, taught to use Windows, and are not able to acclimate to anything different.
My experience has taught me that the best way to help these people learn to use a Mac for three days at a time is to produce a short but highly procedural document explaining how to perform common tasks in Macintosh OS 9. (I refuse to waste my time explaining the 47 possible places to put ICC profiles in the last six versions of Windows, nor am I especially keen on explaining the vagaries of why Microsoft STILL will not allow users to have different color lookup tables on dual-head or dual monitor card systems!)
I think the fundamental differences are small between Mac and Windows users, but while I find that many Mac users are adaptable to Windows without outside instruction, Windows users depend on the higly organized and enforced GUI of Windows in order to perform tasks.
Hope you enjoyed this data point...
Re:Apple could learn one thing from Sun...
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
The XServe has a nine-pin serial port on the backplane. I'm pretty sure that it is the first Mac to come equipped with a serial port since the PowerBook G3 Series (Lombard) was discontinued.
The Power Mac 9500 and 8500s required users to access Open Firmware from the serial port of another machine in order to set the output device to the display card.
As you can imagine, there is quite a lot of danger involved here. Rather than criticizin NASA for the accident, let's recognize how amazing it is that their safety record is as good as it is, and see what we can do to learn from this catastrophe.
Amazing safety record? Are you kidding?
I have little sympathy for an agency that disdains proven heavy-lift technology like the Saturn V (which was cheaper by far per ton to orbit than the shuttle is in constant dollars) in deference to contractors who helped design and produce the most complex, failure-prone, expensive, and fatal space vehicle we now have.
113 launches. 14 deaths. You call that a good record? Yes, there's a need for a reusable crew and science vehicle. The Space Shuttle does this job well, but it kills someone once every eight launches on average.
I am infuriated that what will likely come of this whole debacle is simply another round of beaurocratic budget increases and "improvements'" in "safety" that will make everyone but the failure-analysis people feel better.
It's nice that Nasa and Lockheed and Rocketdyne and everyone else came up with such a technology showpiece. When it works, it works well - but the approach is flawed. We don't need to send people up for every single mission the Shuttle performs.
It's true. The "New Seven" is turning out to be more of a pricey lemon for many owners. the bulletin boards at Audiworld have more than a few former new seven series owners who got fed up with computer-related problems includeing, but not limited to:
Engine shuts off unexpectedly. After a random interval, it might start again - but who knows?
Security system problems.
The aforementioned light and sound shows - the radios in some cars change volume unexpectedly.
I have seen these cars kaput on the side of Bay Area streets and freeways three times now. For a car that's been on sale for only six months, that's pretty scary. BMW has apparently had a lot of explaining and backpedaling to do when people come back into the dealerships time and time again with cars that act "weird".
This costs Microsoft less than three cents on the dollar of their approximate $40 billlion cash on hand - which they don't bother to pay as dividends to their stockholders either.
Microsoft must be laughing their asses off. They've got a world economy nearly dependent upon them, and they will go on doing exactly as they please, admitting no wrongdoing.
If I were Grey Davis, I'd have told Bill "settle" Lockyer (CA state AG) to help balance the state budget by trying to get a few extra billion outta Microsoft's war chest.
But then again, I'm not Grey Davis - I have ethics and accountability.
Who else but Linux devotees goes to a Linux convention? People don't use operating systems as their job - they usually do something else.
My point is, that by promoting the ideas and benefits of Open Source to Graphic Artists, Travelling Business People, "Creative Types" and the Casual Mac User(tm), Apple is doing more to promote open source among non-technical people than any other company out there - at least any other company my grandmother has heard of, anyway.
Part of the problem crashing the remotely-piloted 707 as I recall was the fact that the aircraft was supposed to "crash" onto a field of steel stakes designed to rip the aluminum skin of the aircraft open in a designed manner. If memory serves me, the fuel valves for the engines were supposed to be shut off, and the engine fire bottles pulled for all four jets (this should stop any ignition in the turbine, although the aft stages could still be VERY hot).
This would have helped release the fuel from the tanks in a manner consistent with a controlled gear-up crash-landing at low speed. Instead, the plane hit the ground at an "unanticipated" angle, releasing the fuel in a matter inconsistent with the model while the jets were still lit. As my grandfather told it, there was another problem; there was no time to pull the fire bottles for the engines, so they were still running at the time the jet hit the earth, although they were at idle power.
Honestly, it's been a while since my granddad told me this story, but that's what I remember.
Do both screens need to have the same resolutions/refresh rates?
No.
What about Quartz acceleration, is it on both displays simultaneously, or just one at the time?
Both displays at once, given sufficient (64MB) VRAM.
Do the popups show up in the middle of one screen or split between the displays like on the Matrox/PC.
Dialog boxes and other messages are typically centered on the display containing the menu bar.
Apple did multiple screens first, and it shows up in the more elegant handling of interface elements across displays and the general flexibility of those multi-monitor options compared to the "divided" dialog boxes and hardware constraints of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the quality of and restrictions placed on the files are acceptable. From all the compaining in the last article on this service (1400 posts!), you'd think Apple had announced a listen-once for $1.00 service.
The selection of music, while not great initially, will be expanded. They don't want me to subscribe. It's $1.00 a song - easy impulse buy. I get to choose what to do with my music - I think the copy restrictions are pretty reasonable - of course they fit my usage pattern.
I get the convenience of buying music relatively easily and painlessly, at an acceptable quality level, and without wasteful and largely unnecessary packaging. In the vast majority of cases, I (the consumer, the one who SHOULD be dictating the rules) get to pick and choose within the selection of music offered.
At least Apple is trying to give people what they want. There are some downsides to this service, but even the most stringent fair-use advocates have to admit that the itunes store is the current high water mark for selling music on the internet without Draconian restrictions.
I'm quite frankly surprised at all the negative comments here. A system that makes allowances for fair use and that is priced reasonably seems to be what folks here have been clamoring for since the shut down of Napster.
.mp3-savvy consumer.
Apple is stepping out on a very thin limb here, and as with every other product they've released in the past few years, they'll make adjustments to the feature set and pricing as feedback reaches them.
$1.00 a song isn't unreasonable given the convenience, flexibility and feature set they've built in to this product. They've removed the need for me to pay shipping charges opn music, to fight traffic on the way to the music store, and to find space for more jewel cases. I still retain the right to burn the song an unlimited number of times, albeit on different playlists every tenth burn. Sounds like fair use to me. It's an intelligent approach that is the FIRST one to consider the needs, rights, wishes and hopes of the
At least give them credit for doing something no other computer company or music company has done or even shown an interest in: further integrating the computers we use for 8-10 hours a day with the other devices and interests we all have.
Do you brush your teath before you go to bed? Why should I take anything you say seriously if you can't be bothered to use correct tense and spelling?
For what it's worth I agree with you on some points. I believe Bush 43 acted to deflect public mistrust over the economy and his failure to nab Osama, who apparently perpetrated the WTC attacks peronally with a team of dedicated Iraqis. (19 Saudis and Egyptians led the attacks.) Bush looks like a tough guy to the uneducated majority of U.S. voters. Sometimes I wonder if our shitty edumacational system is handicapped by politicians on purpose.
These are the same voters who are looking for an excuse to get mad (and even!)after being laid off by ruthless companies that aren't forced to justify executive bonuses in bankruptcy court as the court obviates any and all severance for 15-year veteran engineers from the same company. I'd be pissed too. That'd make me wanna kick some towelhead ass.
Bush doesn't love the U.S. He loves himself and Ari Fliescher. And big corporations. Perhaps rightly so. If the price of gas went up to $5.00, we'd all be sunk.
So where's our visionary Mahattan project-style crash course, providing alternative energy and power? Ooops. I guess Bush really is beholden to to the oil companies.
When it's all said and done, all 43 has done is piss off the world we depend on for cross-pollination of ideas, trade, and good will.
The rest of the world hates us, George. And they think we're using too much oil per capita. And they're right. We're squandering our time and riches on GW Bush's political capitol.
Unfortunately, we have to live with the rest of the world, and fighting them off at the Alamo isn't going to work this time.
Jeez.
It's even better - Apple is reimplementing something like Labels and what sounds like a spatial implementation of the Copland GUI's "Saved Search Folders".
You could save a metadata-based search as a folder on the desktop in Copland. As you created new documents that matched the criteria of the search, they would be added to the folder for easy access. The demo I saw included Tabbed folders as the 'easy access' mechanism.
Piles sound like a way to implement this type of "saved search/associated files" grouping spatially, without the GUI real-estate penalty of tabbed windows. As a bonus, you get the "Labels" functionality of grouping files by common arbitrary values.
Cool, man.
You know, I've been hearing this exact verbiage for four years now, and I don't believe it any more. When I worked at Metricom, Ricochet was the product that was going to be 'killed' by 3G. Luckily for 3G, Metricom's brain-dead, overspendy management and ridiculous pricing model killed the company instead. Curiously, the arrangement Intel seems to be proposing here is strikingly similar to the dual-band microcellular architecture Ricochet used/uses. Microcellular architecture has some unique strengths, as evidenced by the fact that Ricochet was the ONLY way to get data to ground zero in the days immediately following the WTC attacks.
Now the previous poster is saying this uplink and backhaul arrangement will be obviated by 3G. You know what? Show me. Then I'll believe it. Until then, I don't think 3G will ever solve anything for anyone.
3G sounds like great technology. But it isn't shipping, and there are LOTS of caveats. have you ever seen a technology that worked out of the box? 3G is still "months" away, and it probably won't work as advertised when it does ship, if ever. Perhaps 3G should be renamed "Duke Nukem Forever Wireless".
I'm tired of hearing "wait until 3G". Hell, I'm tired of waiting.
Digital manipulation (as opposed to interpretation, like dodging, burning, tonal adjustments and color correction) only makes what was previously possible with film,basic tools and an enlarger easier. What we're seeing in the Times' photograph was possible long before the widespread use of digital cameras by photojournalists, and even before the advent of digital photographic retouching.
Digital photography only makes this sort of visual slight-of-hand easier - but that doesn't stop the person in the street from mistrusting the method used to capture and deliver the photograph instead of laying blame at the feet of the photojounalist who chose to misuse the tools he was provided with.
There aren't any easy solutions to this problem. Photojournalism is so competitive these days that I'm not surprised some unscrupulous person chose to combine the elements of two photographs for a more dramatic impression.
It's just as wrong to try to sell this image, no matter what the competitive environment, but I wish it weren't seen as being caused by digital photography, instead of what it really is - an artifact of photography itself made easier with digital technology.
I wrote some of the documentation for the PP5002C and PP5003 chips used in the iPod when I worked for Portal Player last year.
In fact, the chip IS a dual ARM7 core with supporting I/O logic. So it is you, in fact, who is mistaken.
I think you meant for all intents and purposes, although it is true that CPUs are overclocked for intensive purposes as well.
Well, the last time they let this particular horse out of the barn, Microsoft ended up creating Windows. We all know how that turned out...can you really blame them for being twice shy?
Sure, Microsoft had permission, but ostensibly for Windows 1.0 only...
I am an assistant at a digital photography/printing business.
We run workshops occasionally (check the schedule on the web site) and we just finished one tonight. Our lab is comprised of 400MHz G4s running Mac OS 9.1 and Photoshop 7.0.1, mostly culled from eBay. I love my job; I haven't been able to say that since I worked at Metricom.
From time to time, Windows users who use our Macs are stymied. These tend to be the people who want to know "the right numbers" for Unsharp Mask (there aren't any "right numbers"), and who want to know if the keyboard commands and files from Photoshop on a Mac will work on a Windows machine.
An example of a "very confusing" situation: the Windows user clicks on the desktop behind the active application's window and can't figure out why the menus have changed. They don't ever try to click on the (still visible) window to regain focus on the application they want to use. With no screen-stealing taskbar to remind them of wht they're doing, they get lost in the contexts of an application-centric OS.
Nothing against these people; many of them are talented and bright in their own right, but they uniformly seem to lack the mental abstraction that the desktop metaphor depands on. They are dependent upon the concept of procedural instruction to perform tasks on a computer. They were, as the previous poster suggests, taught to use Windows, and are not able to acclimate to anything different.
My experience has taught me that the best way to help these people learn to use a Mac for three days at a time is to produce a short but highly procedural document explaining how to perform common tasks in Macintosh OS 9. (I refuse to waste my time explaining the 47 possible places to put ICC profiles in the last six versions of Windows, nor am I especially keen on explaining the vagaries of why Microsoft STILL will not allow users to have different color lookup tables on dual-head or dual monitor card systems!)
I think the fundamental differences are small between Mac and Windows users, but while I find that many Mac users are adaptable to Windows without outside instruction, Windows users depend on the higly organized and enforced GUI of Windows in order to perform tasks.
Hope you enjoyed this data point...
The XServe has a nine-pin serial port on the backplane. I'm pretty sure that it is the first Mac to come equipped with a serial port since the PowerBook G3 Series (Lombard) was discontinued.
The Power Mac 9500 and 8500s required users to access Open Firmware from the serial port of another machine in order to set the output device to the display card.
Amazing safety record? Are you kidding?
I have little sympathy for an agency that disdains proven heavy-lift technology like the Saturn V (which was cheaper by far per ton to orbit than the shuttle is in constant dollars) in deference to contractors who helped design and produce the most complex, failure-prone, expensive, and fatal space vehicle we now have.
113 launches. 14 deaths. You call that a good record? Yes, there's a need for a reusable crew and science vehicle. The Space Shuttle does this job well, but it kills someone once every eight launches on average.
I am infuriated that what will likely come of this whole debacle is simply another round of beaurocratic budget increases and "improvements'" in "safety" that will make everyone but the failure-analysis people feel better.
It's nice that Nasa and Lockheed and Rocketdyne and everyone else came up with such a technology showpiece. When it works, it works well - but the approach is flawed. We don't need to send people up for every single mission the Shuttle performs.
Film at 11.
One-two-one-two-eight-six-seven-five-three-oh niyeeeeeiyne!
Elder Jedi: (waves hand) You don't need a Hummer H2 to cross the sands of Tatooine.
Young Jedi: I don't need a Hummer H2 to crosss the sands of Tatooine.
Elder Jedi: Now you're learning!
I have seen these cars kaput on the side of Bay Area streets and freeways three times now. For a car that's been on sale for only six months, that's pretty scary. BMW has apparently had a lot of explaining and backpedaling to do when people come back into the dealerships time and time again with cars that act "weird".
Holy Shit! Another Rambling Jack Eliot Fan! I saw him in Santa Cruz a couple of years ago with Guy Clark...what a great night.
This costs Microsoft less than three cents on the dollar of their approximate $40 billlion cash on hand - which they don't bother to pay as dividends to their stockholders either.
Microsoft must be laughing their asses off. They've got a world economy nearly dependent upon them, and they will go on doing exactly as they please, admitting no wrongdoing.
If I were Grey Davis, I'd have told Bill "settle" Lockyer (CA state AG) to help balance the state budget by trying to get a few extra billion outta Microsoft's war chest.
But then again, I'm not Grey Davis - I have ethics and accountability.
Now I can prnt my own iPod.
My point is, that by promoting the ideas and benefits of Open Source to Graphic Artists, Travelling Business People, "Creative Types" and the Casual Mac User(tm), Apple is doing more to promote open source among non-technical people than any other company out there - at least any other company my grandmother has heard of, anyway.
Here's a screen shot:
Apple Keynote Screen Shot
Considering that FedEx doesn't use 747 cargo aircraft, that shouldn't be a problem.
Oh, no! Another Bakersfield Massacre in the making!
Next thing you know, they'll be calling the Presidential race the "Running Man".
Part of the problem crashing the remotely-piloted 707 as I recall was the fact that the aircraft was supposed to "crash" onto a field of steel stakes designed to rip the aluminum skin of the aircraft open in a designed manner. If memory serves me, the fuel valves for the engines were supposed to be shut off, and the engine fire bottles pulled for all four jets (this should stop any ignition in the turbine, although the aft stages could still be VERY hot).
This would have helped release the fuel from the tanks in a manner consistent with a controlled gear-up crash-landing at low speed. Instead, the plane hit the ground at an "unanticipated" angle, releasing the fuel in a matter inconsistent with the model while the jets were still lit. As my grandfather told it, there was another problem; there was no time to pull the fire bottles for the engines, so they were still running at the time the jet hit the earth, although they were at idle power.
Honestly, it's been a while since my granddad told me this story, but that's what I remember.
Apple Network Attached Storage
Just wait.
No.
What about Quartz acceleration, is it on both displays simultaneously, or just one at the time?
Both displays at once, given sufficient (64MB) VRAM.
Do the popups show up in the middle of one screen or split between the displays like on the Matrox/PC.
Dialog boxes and other messages are typically centered on the display containing the menu bar.
Apple did multiple screens first, and it shows up in the more elegant handling of interface elements across displays and the general flexibility of those multi-monitor options compared to the "divided" dialog boxes and hardware constraints of Windows.