Which is fine, but they say 'you can't sync Contacts, Calendars or Notes automatically' without commenting that you can using OS X.
iSync'll take care of the first two (and very well). You can do notes manually, or there's a lot of OS X apps which'll do it for you - Pod2Go is a good one, which scrapes news, weather etc off the web and slaps it into notes. There are others, but there's also a new Interactive Fiction thing under development, so the opportunities are endless.
I'm quite sure some enterprising PC developer will code up something similar, if they haven't already, but for once it's nice to be ahead of the crowd as a Mac User:)
iTunes is built around Quicktime, so when they released AAC coding in Quicktime, iTunes could immediately do it. The iPod will play anything you can throw at it - I'm sure if you can get Audible tracks or AAC audio into MusicMatch, and then onto the iPod, it'll be happy - but good luck!
It's worth noting that the firewire cable plugs into the dock, and then the iPod sits in the dock.
If you prefer, you can forget the dock, and just plug the cable right into the bottom of the iPod - the connector's the same. The only addition in the dock is a line-out port.
Plus you get a power adaptor which simply turns the local power plug into a firewire socket... so you can power the dock or the iPod while you're away from your Mac, whichever you prefer. I might get a spare dock for work, even though I can't plug it into my PC, just to let my iPod stand on the desk rather than lying there all forlorn...
All in all, it's a very sensible design - I know a lot of companies that'd have the power adaptor built into the dock & require a firewire and power connection to use it, and three different cable connectors:)
Re sound formats, a quick check of Apple's site would have told you that on a Mac it does support AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, and WAV. Windows users (poor saps;) only get MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, and WAV.
Maybe this is the secret of the tie-in with Amazon that's been rumoured.
Imagine you browse the iTMS, and you look at famous bands X, Y and Z... Then you can get a frame/tab/whatever saying 'people who liked them, also liked ABC Band, a new Indie group from Hicksville...' which is what Amazon already do. They have a HUGE database of people's tastes!
THAT would be good... And with a 30sec preview, you'd be willing to risk $0.99 on it. Or maybe the 'smaller' bands get less cash from Apple, so they sell at $0.75 instead?
Of course you could also choose to upload 'statistical information' about your iTunes library itself, and they could check your tastes and then tell you 'XYZ have a new album out, and FGH band are similar in style...'
Sounds like an Apple kind of idea to me - making it easier to find stuff you like.
Mark
PS If anyone from Apple is reading this, contact me for low, low pricing on licensing my ideas:)
This is what happened in the telco system I mentioned. Sure, we need to fix the bug, but when the system spots it and cleans up it also produces a report. This allows a patch to be created and loaded (on the fly, usually) which solves the bug without affecting anyone else. In the meantime, the bug only affects the people who trigger it, not everyone logged in at once!
It's different (in my view) in that you can go even lower than that... Imagine you're running a webserver, and you get 1000 hits a minute (say).
Now say that someone manages to hang a session, because of a software problem. Eventually the same bug will hang another one, and another until you run out of resources.
Just being able to stop the web server & restart to clear it is fine, but it is still total downtime, even if you don't need to reboot the PC.
Imagine you could restart the troublesome session and not affect the other 999 hits that minute... That's what this is about.
Alternatively, making a config change that requires a reboot is daft - why not apply it for all new sessions from now on? If you get to a point where people are still logged in after (say) 5 minutes you could terminate or restart their sessions, perhaps keeping the data that's not changed...
rc.d files are a good start, but this is about going further.
When I left the company in question, they had recently introduced a 'micro-reboot' feature that allowed you to only clear the registers for one call - previously you had to drop all the calls to solve a hung channel or if you hit a software error.
The system could do this for phone calls, commands entered on the command line, even backups could be halted and started without affecting anything else.
Yes, it requires extensive development, but you can do it incrementally - we had thousadnds of software 'blocks' which had this functionality added to them whenever they were opened for other reasons, we never added this feature unless we were already making major changes.
Patches could be introduced to the running system, and falling back was simplicity itself - the same went for configuration changes.
This stuff is not new in the telecomms field, where 'five nines' uptime is the bare minimum. Now the telco's are trying to save money, they're looking at commodity PCs & open standard solutions, and shuddering - you need to reboot everything to fix a minor issue? Ugh!
As for introducing errors to test stability, I did this, and I can vouch for it's effects. I made a few patches that randomly caused 'real world' type errors (call dropped, congestion on routes, no free devices) and let it run for a weekend as an automated caller tried to make calls. When I came in on Monday I'd caused 2,000 failures which boiled down to 38 unique faults. The system had not rebooted once, so only those 2,000 calls had even noticed a problem. Once the software went live, the customer spotted 2 faults in the first month, where previously they'd found 30... So I swear by 'negative testing'.
where are the great streaming music stations? A few recommendations of where to listen might help - the more who hear this sort of music, the more people will bother their local media outlets to carry it!
I sign up for the 'micropayment' system and get a little tag (imagine SecureID or something) which I authenticate myself to BT/France Telecom with...
Then they know it's me - and maybe it can even be used if I'm at work.
Of course if you're going down that route, why not try this.
Some countries (Holland for example) have a ChipCard system, where you replace cash with a sort of pre-pay card. You charge it up at cash points (ATMs for the American crowd) and just swipe it at the tills (cashouts) to pay for small cost items... Add authentication to those, web enable the system and you have a micro-payment system tied to the user!
Of course we'll end up with two or three per country, but Visa/Mastercard/Amex or Bill Gates/Ron Rivest/Richard Branson could do it...
But Telecom companies already charge tiny amounts for services, they have the structure in place to do so... I get charged a minimum of UKP0.05 for every phone call I make.
So all we need is for the seller to charge the telco handling your Internet Connection (dial-up, cable modem, ADSL whatever).
So for example, I log online with BT and surf to mp3.com. I ask for a $0.25 MP3 file and mp3.com checks my IP, spots I'm at BT and asks for the cash FROM THEM, NOT ME. (Insert foolproof authentication here, of course).
When I get my next monthly bill, I have an additional $0.25 charge on it, hopefully with some information regarding what it's for. I pay my bill as usual (relatively large numbers so it's easy).
Assuming BT and mp3.com trust each other, they can agree to settle the bill for all BT's customers when it hits $10, $100 or $10,000 if they like. Or BT can pre-purchase 'tokens' from mp3.com and use them up as and when their customers buy stuff.
Sounds exactly like PayPal, doesn't it? Except I trust my telco not to rip me off, I don't (usually) need to pre-charge my account, and the economies of scale mean it's easier to kick off - there are a huge number of customers for the average ISP, so they can all start trying this out without stuffing $10 in a Papercoin or PayPal account, which might be usable in all of 3 online shops.
Firstly, it greatly improved my vocabulary, since the meaning of many unknown English words can be guessed if you can spot the 'root' of the word.
It also helped with foreign languages (French, Spanish and other 'Romance' languages, obviously) and while I was working in Germany, and I didn't know the German word for something and the guy I was speaking to didn't know the English, we used the latin word!
Here it is, people - the best reason to use OSS software. It follows Open Standards, without the need for things that "enhance" or "differentiate" it from the rest. Stright from the RFC to your OS. It means that "proprietary lock-in" won't be a problem, should you decide to switch vendors.
Err, no. You're confusing open standards with open source.
What makes OSS software automatically follow Open Standards? I can write something that uses a 'proprietary standard' which has never been an RFC, and release the source under an OSS license. Of course, I can't stop you figuring out how the 'proprietary standard' works, but I can probably still patent it... Is that open source? Yes. Is it an open standard? Probably not (although your point that you can't get locked in to a vendor is true, as anyone can modify my code).
And there's no reason why proprietary, closed source software can't use RFCs - or do all those closed source email apps not follow RFC822? (OK, I know a lot of them don't follow it too well, but bear with me here:) Nothing's stopping me replacing Outlook with Eudora to handle my internet email, so I'm not locked in here, because the STANDARD is open, not the SOURCE.
I agree entirely with you about requiring open standards, but don't assume that using OSS applications will automatically give you that. Though as I say above, it's hard to lock up a standard when everyone can use your code to read it:)
Slashdot Mirror
Which is fine, but they say 'you can't sync Contacts, Calendars or Notes automatically' without commenting that you can using OS X.
:)
iSync'll take care of the first two (and very well). You can do notes manually, or there's a lot of OS X apps which'll do it for you - Pod2Go is a good one, which scrapes news, weather etc off the web and slaps it into notes. There are others, but there's also a new Interactive Fiction thing under development, so the opportunities are endless.
I'm quite sure some enterprising PC developer will code up something similar, if they haven't already, but for once it's nice to be ahead of the crowd as a Mac User
Mark
Quicktime. That and iTunes.
iTunes is built around Quicktime, so when they released AAC coding in Quicktime, iTunes could immediately do it. The iPod will play anything you can throw at it - I'm sure if you can get Audible tracks or AAC audio into MusicMatch, and then onto the iPod, it'll be happy - but good luck!
Mark
It's worth noting that the firewire cable plugs into the dock, and then the iPod sits in the dock.
:)
If you prefer, you can forget the dock, and just plug the cable right into the bottom of the iPod - the connector's the same. The only addition in the dock is a line-out port.
Plus you get a power adaptor which simply turns the local power plug into a firewire socket... so you can power the dock or the iPod while you're away from your Mac, whichever you prefer. I might get a spare dock for work, even though I can't plug it into my PC, just to let my iPod stand on the desk rather than lying there all forlorn...
All in all, it's a very sensible design - I know a lot of companies that'd have the power adaptor built into the dock & require a firewire and power connection to use it, and three different cable connectors
Mark
Just got mine, and I'm delighted with it.
;) only get MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, and WAV.
Re sound formats, a quick check of Apple's site would have told you that on a Mac it does support AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF, and WAV. Windows users (poor saps
Mark
Maybe this is the secret of the tie-in with Amazon that's been rumoured.
:)
Imagine you browse the iTMS, and you look at famous bands X, Y and Z... Then you can get a frame/tab/whatever saying 'people who liked them, also liked ABC Band, a new Indie group from Hicksville...' which is what Amazon already do. They have a HUGE database of people's tastes!
THAT would be good... And with a 30sec preview, you'd be willing to risk $0.99 on it.
Or maybe the 'smaller' bands get less cash from Apple, so they sell at $0.75 instead?
Of course you could also choose to upload 'statistical information' about your iTunes library itself, and they could check your tastes and then tell you 'XYZ have a new album out, and FGH band are similar in style...'
Sounds like an Apple kind of idea to me - making it easier to find stuff you like.
Mark
PS If anyone from Apple is reading this, contact me for low, low pricing on licensing my ideas
I typed in all the details (including the 'You Must Enter A Profile!' bit) and then hit 'Register'.
;)
10 seconds later, I get a window saying (in its entirety) 'Failed' with an option to 'Cancel'.
So what was it? Firewall? Network glitch? Did I pick a nickname someone else already had? Is my password too short? Too long? Too secure?
Doesn't look like version 2.0 to me - more like 0.2Beta.
Mark
PS There goes my Karma.... Quick, whore it back up.... Oh, and it's Windows only
Well, in the telco world alarms are monitored 24/7, and each report comes out as a minor alarm.
Trust me, the customer who paid for it won't ignore 'warnings'!
Exactly.
This is what happened in the telco system I mentioned. Sure, we need to fix the bug, but when the system spots it and cleans up it also produces a report. This allows a patch to be created and loaded (on the fly, usually) which solves the bug without affecting anyone else. In the meantime, the bug only affects the people who trigger it, not everyone logged in at once!
It's different (in my view) in that you can go even lower than that... Imagine you're running a webserver, and you get 1000 hits a minute (say).
Now say that someone manages to hang a session, because of a software problem. Eventually the same bug will hang another one, and another until you run out of resources.
Just being able to stop the web server & restart to clear it is fine, but it is still total downtime, even if you don't need to reboot the PC.
Imagine you could restart the troublesome session and not affect the other 999 hits that minute... That's what this is about.
Alternatively, making a config change that requires a reboot is daft - why not apply it for all new sessions from now on? If you get to a point where people are still logged in after (say) 5 minutes you could terminate or restart their sessions, perhaps keeping the data that's not changed...
rc.d files are a good start, but this is about going further.
they were large telecomms phone switches.
:)
When I left the company in question, they had recently introduced a 'micro-reboot' feature that allowed you to only clear the registers for one call - previously you had to drop all the calls to solve a hung channel or if you hit a software error.
The system could do this for phone calls, commands entered on the command line, even backups could be halted and started without affecting anything else.
Yes, it requires extensive development, but you can do it incrementally - we had thousadnds of software 'blocks' which had this functionality added to them whenever they were opened for other reasons, we never added this feature unless we were already making major changes.
Patches could be introduced to the running system, and falling back was simplicity itself - the same went for configuration changes.
This stuff is not new in the telecomms field, where 'five nines' uptime is the bare minimum. Now the telco's are trying to save money, they're looking at commodity PCs & open standard solutions, and shuddering - you need to reboot everything to fix a minor issue? Ugh!
As for introducing errors to test stability, I did this, and I can vouch for it's effects. I made a few patches that randomly caused 'real world' type errors (call dropped, congestion on routes, no free devices) and let it run for a weekend as an automated caller tried to make calls. When I came in on Monday I'd caused 2,000 failures which boiled down to 38 unique faults. The system had not rebooted once, so only those 2,000 calls had even noticed a problem. Once the software went live, the customer spotted 2 faults in the first month, where previously they'd found 30... So I swear by 'negative testing'.
Nice to see the 'PC' world finally catching up
If people want more info, then write to me.
Mark
Cool, I'll go!
:)
Maybe I can find out what happens in series 5
where are the great streaming music stations? A few recommendations of where to listen might help - the more who hear this sort of music, the more people will bother their local media outlets to carry it!
Fair point, so how about this:
:)
I sign up for the 'micropayment' system and get a little tag (imagine SecureID or something) which I authenticate myself to BT/France Telecom with...
Then they know it's me - and maybe it can even be used if I'm at work.
Of course if you're going down that route, why not try this.
Some countries (Holland for example) have a ChipCard system, where you replace cash with a sort of pre-pay card. You charge it up at cash points (ATMs for the American crowd) and just swipe it at the tills (cashouts) to pay for small cost items... Add authentication to those, web enable the system and you have a micro-payment system tied to the user!
Of course we'll end up with two or three per country, but Visa/Mastercard/Amex or Bill Gates/Ron Rivest/Richard Branson could do it...
Problems are there to be solved
(OK, so it's a contentious subject line :)
:)
But Telecom companies already charge tiny amounts for services, they have the structure in place to do so... I get charged a minimum of UKP0.05 for every phone call I make.
So all we need is for the seller to charge the telco handling your Internet Connection (dial-up, cable modem, ADSL whatever).
So for example, I log online with BT and surf to mp3.com. I ask for a $0.25 MP3 file and mp3.com checks my IP, spots I'm at BT and asks for the cash FROM THEM, NOT ME. (Insert foolproof authentication here, of course).
When I get my next monthly bill, I have an additional $0.25 charge on it, hopefully with some information regarding what it's for. I pay my bill as usual (relatively large numbers so it's easy).
Assuming BT and mp3.com trust each other, they can agree to settle the bill for all BT's customers when it hits $10, $100 or $10,000 if they like. Or BT can pre-purchase 'tokens' from mp3.com and use them up as and when their customers buy stuff.
Sounds exactly like PayPal, doesn't it? Except I trust my telco not to rip me off, I don't (usually) need to pre-charge my account, and the economies of scale mean it's easier to kick off - there are a huge number of customers for the average ISP, so they can all start trying this out without stuffing $10 in a Papercoin or PayPal account, which might be usable in all of 3 online shops.
Now let the flaming begin
If you're on a Mac, iTunes does both of these things
And with smart playlists, you can have 'most heard', 'never heard', top or bottom rated....
Easy!
Mark
Deja vu!
I second that.
Virgin.Net has 1p a minute (at home rates, hotels will be higher). No CD required, I use it as an emergency dial-up when my cable modem goes down.
They offer 56k dial up, news, mail and the usual web browsing stuff.
So do what Microsoft (unofficially) did - release a 'TweakUI' app which allows you to do this...
That way, it's not something Joe Average can enable by accident, but those who want it can get it.
Mark
Don't get me wrong, I love S@H but I ditched it when I heard they were running out of
Cash
Bandwidth
New data to process
Firstly, it greatly improved my vocabulary, since the meaning of many unknown English words can be guessed if you can spot the 'root' of the word.
:)
:)
It also helped with foreign languages (French, Spanish and other 'Romance' languages, obviously) and while I was working in Germany, and I didn't know the German word for something and the guy I was speaking to didn't know the English, we used the latin word!
Plus it can make you seem highly educated
I recommend Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus as a humourous primer to the language
Mark
And in the UK, there's a paperback at £7.99.
Errr, Google?
So leave the URLs with 'ad' in them, or pointing to 'doubleclick' as they are...
/. editors? :)
If Webwasher, Omniweb et al can spot an Ad, surely it's not beyond the
Having used Linux since 1.x days, on a variety of nasty, obsolete, and far-too-new hardware, I'm gasping in amazement. :)
I never got sound working
Err, no. You're confusing open standards with open source.
What makes OSS software automatically follow Open Standards? I can write something that uses a 'proprietary standard' which has never been an RFC, and release the source under an OSS license. Of course, I can't stop you figuring out how the 'proprietary standard' works, but I can probably still patent it... Is that open source? Yes. Is it an open standard? Probably not (although your point that you can't get locked in to a vendor is true, as anyone can modify my code).
And there's no reason why proprietary, closed source software can't use RFCs - or do all those closed source email apps not follow RFC822? (OK, I know a lot of them don't follow it too well, but bear with me here :) Nothing's stopping me replacing Outlook with Eudora to handle my internet email, so I'm not locked in here, because the STANDARD is open, not the SOURCE.
I agree entirely with you about requiring open standards, but don't assume that using OSS applications will automatically give you that. Though as I say above, it's hard to lock up a standard when everyone can use your code to read it :)
Mark