If you want to record Hi-Def shows, you can buy a Mac mini + EyeTV + extra RAM for a total of about $1000, that will also take the place of the DVD player, and also serve up on-line content (both legitimate and otherwise) AND be a nice jukebox for the living room stereo. Not to mention suck your life and soul away with World of Warcraft (or some Windows games, if you are willing to dual boot and live with Intel's integrated graphics.)
And that's buying Apple hardware which we all know is waaaaaaay overpriced, right?
$800 for a computer which can't do anything but record TV shows? That's just sad.
Lore is a funny guy who I have found entertaining for nearly a decade, but if this particular nugget of wit was written by some random blogger that nobody had ever heard about, would it really have made the front page of Slashdot?
I mean... It's kinda-sorta funny. I guess.
It doesn't really hold a candle to his "I'm Somebody's Fetish" T-shirts, though.
Ringtones and uploading are disabled by default with Verizon's phones. I don't want to flash a new bios into my phone, so I'm apparently SOL. Work for Motorola?
No, but I got my RAZR from T-Mobile. I guess they don't cripple their phones the way it sounds like you are saying Verizon does.
Still... It's not exactly Motorola's fault that you chose a shitty phone provider, is it?
A personalized ring-tone is a fun fashion statement, but a more important reason for a custom ring became very obvious when I was working at a TSA training center a few years ago.
Everybody there was issued their very own mobile phone, and they all had the same generic ringtone. With as many as 30 of us in the staging area sometimes, often with our phones sitting near us on tables or desks, every time one phone rang, every last one of us had to check to see if it was ours.
I now have my phone set to ring with the opening theme from Sailor Moon, which I extracted using iTunes. It has to benefits:
1. It's a ringtone which NOBODY else uses, so I always know when my phone is ringing. 2. It calls me out as an Anime otaku to those who recognize it, which breaks the ice nicely among strangers sometimes.
After buying a Razr, I don't think I'd buy another Motorola phone. It's got a lot of hype, but not as durable as my old Nokia was by a long shot. It keeps overheating while I blow glass, going black after I leave it on for a few days, needing rebooting, and I can't load my own ringtones to it. All in all, I have to give it a bit of a thumbs down.
Let's break this down, shall we?
It keeps overheating while I blow glass
You work in a glass-blowing studio, and you are surprised that electronics overheat when you leave them near the furnace???
going black after I leave it on for a few days
You are surprised that a battery-operated device shuts off after a few days of continuous use???
I can't load my own ringtones to it
Maybe you can't, but that's not the phone's fault. I made my own ringtones using iTunes, and had no problem using my Mac's bluetooth connection to load my custom ringtones, wallpaper, etc., into my RAZR.
The RAZR simply kicks ass over every phone I've ever owned, and is also way smaller.
I have a mac so I don't personally know, but was thinking about it since I have ripped a number of CDs as apple lossless, does Apple Lossles play with other media players, or is it esentially as locked up as FairPlay?
Nothing you rip yourself via iTunes is locked up by DRM. The only files which have any DRM at all are the songs you buy off iTMS.
I rip with Apple Lossless for archival and for use in the living room, and make AAC copies for my iPod.
If I had an MP3 player which couldn't support AAC, I suppose I would make VBR MP3 copies... but I don't, so there's no need.
If you care most about "flexibility" then MP3 is every bit as stupid of an option as AAC.
Neither of the "A"s in "AAC" stand for "Apple." AAC is an industry-standard MPEG audio layer, just like MP3 is, and is every bit as "flexible." It just happens to be one which delivers better sound with fewer bits.
If you are worried about formats becoming obsolete, then there are only two good choices for archiving your music:
1. Uncompressed 2. Lossless compression (such as FLAC or Apple Lossless)
It's still an attempt at market manipulation, and the SEC should come down on anybody who does this like the fist of an angry god. CEOs have gone to prison over this, you would think they could at least bitchslap these spam-and-dump traders with a hefty fine.
That's because cotext menus in MacOS [X] are basically worthless fluff to fill a tickbox, whereas context menus in Windows are actually useful UI tools.
That may be a Windows fan's perspective, but any Mac fan will be quick to point out that what makes right-click pop-up menus so "useful" in Windows is that the shortcomings of the OS itself creates a need for them.
Back in the days when Win95 was new, Apple users had a muscle-memory for "Command-c to copy, command-v for paste, command-x for cut, command-a for select all, command-s for save, shift-command-s for save as, command-o for open, command-w for close, command-q for quit, command-f for find, command-b for bold, command-i for italics, etc." because you could count on pretty much every application to work that way, and furthermore the contextual menus which were already at the top of the screen taught them to you as you used the Mac.
The top-line menu on the Mac makes right-click menus best suited to be used for a fast shortcuts to extremely short lists of actions which are common enough that you will use it once in a while, but not so often that you will have the keyboard shortcut memorized within a couple weeks of using the Mac. For example, "view source" in a browser window. (Shift-command-u... or just look in the... surprise! "View" menu.)
Windows has gotten better about HIG over the years, but I still see Windows users right-clicking and searching through a (sometimes very long) menu for something as simple as copying a line of text. Hell, I do it myself when I'm in Windows. I still have a few apps where I can't count on the "normal" keystrokes to work.
It did in the same sense that MacOS System 7 had it: If you bought a multi-button mouse from certain vendors, context-click menu software was often bundled with it.
Neither company invented the idea, but by the time it was rolled into Apple's OS, it was old hat to the Windows world.
(And it was added to the Mac with little or no fanfare. To this days, there are a lot of Mac users who never use them at all, while it's the very first thing I try when I want to do just about anything on a Windows box.)
Wikipedia to the rescue (although Wiki search was no help, and I only found it by via Google.)
The letter was written by Empress Suiko. It was addressed "The Tenshi in the land where the sun rises addresses the Tenshi in the land where the sun sets."
It was considered an insult to the Chinese Emperor in two ways. First, because of the little dig about the sun rising in her land and setting in his, and second, because she addressed them both as "Tenshi" ("Child of Heaven"), which puts them both on equal footing as rulers when China considered Japan to be a rather insignificant and backwards place.
The message did receive and envoy in response, in spite of the snub, because China needed Japan's military support at the time.
I see no mention of it being the first recorded document in Japanese history, but that could be the case, as I believe that the Chinese writing system was adopted by Japan right around that time.
Right-clicking for contextual menus was around as an additional software feature (sometimes even included with mouse driver software) long before it was part of any OS, but Microsoft added it as a built-in feature of Windows95 long before Apple jumped on the bandwagon.
Granted, if it was also a feature of NeXT, then Apple probably would have carried it over to OS X regardless of what MS was up to, since OS X is really just the newest version of NeXT with a few MacOS features bolted on, but the fact remains that Apple was late to the party on this particular feature.
IIRC, an empress of Japan once famously insulted China by writting a not-so-diplomatic letter "from the land of the rising sun to the land of the setting sun."
Ah, old-world imperialist humor. You can't beat it.
Well known Microsoft supporter has a few bad words to say about Apple.
Ok, so which part of 'News for Nerds' does this come under?
apple.slashdot.com, where all stories are either spiteful media bias by trolls who want to get their hit-count up by groundlessly bashing Apple, or slavish fanboy posts by "Reality Distortion Field" victims who are lining up to drink poisoned Flavorade.
If you try to write a balanced story or comment about Apple, you will be accused of being both.
The facts:
Microsoft has frequently bought, borrowed or stolen all kinds of UI concepts from Apple, but generally doesn't do as good a job at implementing them for some reason. They have some very bright programming minds at Microsoft, but for some reason they are (and pretty much always have been) famously weak on design concepts.
Apple has turned around and taken a few UI tools from Microsoft as well (most notably contextual "right-click" menus, and the schedule integration they are rolling into the next version of Mail.app), mainly for the sake of meeting the expectations of OS "switchers."
My broad generalization of the trend:
When Microsoft takes from Apple, it's because Apple came up with a great idea. When Apple takes from Microsoft, it's because Microsoft has pushed a new industry standard on the market.
That Pac Man and Katamari don't interest you as much as Brian Eno's work...
Holy crap, where did you get that from???
they aren't trying to do the same things, so it's quite natural that the experience, and your preference for the experience, is different.
Actually, they are doing almost exactly the same thing as Eno's proposed project (I don't know if he ever got it completely off the ground) for interactive compositions. That was my whole point.
Gawd. I love it when people take the time to disagree with a rational case for their view. It's so rare to see.
You call the "constructed experience" an art form, I say it's more of an art "framework."
Much like Brian Eno's experiments in listener controlled music, or those cool "loop lab" flash apps that were considered hot stuff on the web about three years ago, we are talking about works which are delivered by the original creator as deliberately incomplete. The only compelling thing about them is the way we interact with them to make them personally compelling. Start up a game of Pac Man and keep your hand off the joystick, and you won't experience anything all that interesting. The same goes for Katamari Darmacy.
I'm not sure if "art" is the term to use for this sort of thing, but as we don't really have a better word for it, I suppose we should consider expanding the definition.
I put it to you that video gaming does have a history. Just as movies draw from the theater tradition, before there was Quake (or even Pac Man or Pong) there was pinball, pachinko, magnet-driven football, air hockey, Stratego, Connect 4, and endless other distractions which one could set up in a parlour room, alone or against an opponent, to pass idle hours. There were even handheld games (cup and ball, for example).
I recall a Star Trek toy I received as a child. It had a "screen" which was really a scrolling screen made of a big hidden wheel which simulated motion. To play, you had to navigate around various obstacles like planets and Klingon ships. Similar race-car games were around in the 70s. These, along with similar childhood amusements, are the true tradition that video games grew out of, and I doubt it will ever be regarded as high art.
Art is essentially a medium of communication, from the artist to the audience. The best art conveys feelings and notions which can not be conveyed with literal descriptive language alone. The interactive nature of gaming, almost by definition, excludes it from being regarded as an art form, beyond the creative trappings of the game's "eye candy" and music soundtrack.
Every college newspaper in America has job openings posted around election season offering to pay you to pretend to be a motivated volunteer cold-calling and canvassing for the Democrats or various 527 groups. How is it news that the Republicans also astroturf?
Meanwhile, it's full speed ahead for mixed metaphors!
Hey now, there's no need to be a wet blanket just because you're not ready to drink the Kool-ade. Some people are really revved up about the curtain being drawn back next week. I, for one, am on pins and needles while I'm holding my breath for the big fireworks.
to Microsoft and I wonder what the comments would be?
Frankly, I don't give a fuck about Apple's past profits, nor their current share price. I hold no AAPL stock, so there's no reason for me to care.
But if the future of the company is in jeopardy, or if it's a possibility that they could lose Steve Jobs, then I do care, because I really like the products they've put out since Jobs came back to the company, and I would really like to see them continue as they have.
Switch the company name to Microsoft, and I'd be dancing in the street. The remote possibility of seeing Steve Balmer and Bill Gates being hauled away in orange jumpsuits would make my whole week.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding.
If you want to record Hi-Def shows, you can buy a Mac mini + EyeTV + extra RAM for a total of about $1000, that will also take the place of the DVD player, and also serve up on-line content (both legitimate and otherwise) AND be a nice jukebox for the living room stereo. Not to mention suck your life and soul away with World of Warcraft (or some Windows games, if you are willing to dual boot and live with Intel's integrated graphics.)
And that's buying Apple hardware which we all know is waaaaaaay overpriced, right?
$800 for a computer which can't do anything but record TV shows? That's just sad.
Lore is a funny guy who I have found entertaining for nearly a decade, but if this particular nugget of wit was written by some random blogger that nobody had ever heard about, would it really have made the front page of Slashdot?
I mean... It's kinda-sorta funny. I guess.
It doesn't really hold a candle to his "I'm Somebody's Fetish" T-shirts, though.
Ringtones and uploading are disabled by default with Verizon's phones. I don't want to flash a new bios into my phone, so I'm apparently SOL. Work for Motorola?
No, but I got my RAZR from T-Mobile. I guess they don't cripple their phones the way it sounds like you are saying Verizon does.
Still... It's not exactly Motorola's fault that you chose a shitty phone provider, is it?
It has to benefits:
:/
Now I just need a feature on my phone which lets me go back and edit my Slashdot posts, so I can correct moronic typographical errors like that one.
A personalized ring-tone is a fun fashion statement, but a more important reason for a custom ring became very obvious when I was working at a TSA training center a few years ago.
Everybody there was issued their very own mobile phone, and they all had the same generic ringtone. With as many as 30 of us in the staging area sometimes, often with our phones sitting near us on tables or desks, every time one phone rang, every last one of us had to check to see if it was ours.
I now have my phone set to ring with the opening theme from Sailor Moon, which I extracted using iTunes. It has to benefits:
1. It's a ringtone which NOBODY else uses, so I always know when my phone is ringing.
2. It calls me out as an Anime otaku to those who recognize it, which breaks the ice nicely among strangers sometimes.
After buying a Razr, I don't think I'd buy another Motorola phone. It's got a lot of hype, but not as durable as my old Nokia was by a long shot. It keeps overheating while I blow glass, going black after I leave it on for a few days, needing rebooting, and I can't load my own ringtones to it. All in all, I have to give it a bit of a thumbs down.
Let's break this down, shall we?
It keeps overheating while I blow glass
You work in a glass-blowing studio, and you are surprised that electronics overheat when you leave them near the furnace???
going black after I leave it on for a few days
You are surprised that a battery-operated device shuts off after a few days of continuous use???
I can't load my own ringtones to it
Maybe you can't, but that's not the phone's fault. I made my own ringtones using iTunes, and had no problem using my Mac's bluetooth connection to load my custom ringtones, wallpaper, etc., into my RAZR.
The RAZR simply kicks ass over every phone I've ever owned, and is also way smaller.
I have a mac so I don't personally know, but was thinking about it since I have ripped a number of CDs as apple lossless, does Apple Lossles play with other media players, or is it esentially as locked up as FairPlay?
Nothing you rip yourself via iTunes is locked up by DRM. The only files which have any DRM at all are the songs you buy off iTMS.
I rip with Apple Lossless for archival and for use in the living room, and make AAC copies for my iPod.
If I had an MP3 player which couldn't support AAC, I suppose I would make VBR MP3 copies... but I don't, so there's no need.
If you care most about "flexibility" then MP3 is every bit as stupid of an option as AAC.
Neither of the "A"s in "AAC" stand for "Apple." AAC is an industry-standard MPEG audio layer, just like MP3 is, and is every bit as "flexible." It just happens to be one which delivers better sound with fewer bits.
If you are worried about formats becoming obsolete, then there are only two good choices for archiving your music:
1. Uncompressed
2. Lossless compression (such as FLAC or Apple Lossless)
It's still an attempt at market manipulation, and the SEC should come down on anybody who does this like the fist of an angry god. CEOs have gone to prison over this, you would think they could at least bitchslap these spam-and-dump traders with a hefty fine.
There will finally be a new game release which Gabe and Tycho won't bitch about.
That's because cotext menus in MacOS [X] are basically worthless fluff to fill a tickbox, whereas context menus in Windows are actually useful UI tools.
That may be a Windows fan's perspective, but any Mac fan will be quick to point out that what makes right-click pop-up menus so "useful" in Windows is that the shortcomings of the OS itself creates a need for them.
Back in the days when Win95 was new, Apple users had a muscle-memory for "Command-c to copy, command-v for paste, command-x for cut, command-a for select all, command-s for save, shift-command-s for save as, command-o for open, command-w for close, command-q for quit, command-f for find, command-b for bold, command-i for italics, etc." because you could count on pretty much every application to work that way, and furthermore the contextual menus which were already at the top of the screen taught them to you as you used the Mac.
The top-line menu on the Mac makes right-click menus best suited to be used for a fast shortcuts to extremely short lists of actions which are common enough that you will use it once in a while, but not so often that you will have the keyboard shortcut memorized within a couple weeks of using the Mac. For example, "view source" in a browser window. (Shift-command-u... or just look in the... surprise! "View" menu.)
Windows has gotten better about HIG over the years, but I still see Windows users right-clicking and searching through a (sometimes very long) menu for something as simple as copying a line of text. Hell, I do it myself when I'm in Windows. I still have a few apps where I can't count on the "normal" keystrokes to work.
OS/2's WorkPlace Shell used context menus heavily almost everywhere ... in 1992.
Which does not contradict my point.
(did NT 3.51 have right-click menus?)
It did in the same sense that MacOS System 7 had it: If you bought a multi-button mouse from certain vendors, context-click menu software was often bundled with it.
Neither company invented the idea, but by the time it was rolled into Apple's OS, it was old hat to the Windows world.
(And it was added to the Mac with little or no fanfare. To this days, there are a lot of Mac users who never use them at all, while it's the very first thing I try when I want to do just about anything on a Windows box.)
You make it sound like Microsoft has never had a good idea in its life
Only if you don't know what the words "broad generalization" mean.
Wikipedia to the rescue (although Wiki search was no help, and I only found it by via Google.)
The letter was written by Empress Suiko. It was addressed "The Tenshi in the land where the sun rises addresses the Tenshi in the land where the sun sets."
It was considered an insult to the Chinese Emperor in two ways. First, because of the little dig about the sun rising in her land and setting in his, and second, because she addressed them both as "Tenshi" ("Child of Heaven"), which puts them both on equal footing as rulers when China considered Japan to be a rather insignificant and backwards place.
The message did receive and envoy in response, in spite of the snub, because China needed Japan's military support at the time.
I see no mention of it being the first recorded document in Japanese history, but that could be the case, as I believe that the Chinese writing system was adopted by Japan right around that time.
Right-clicking for contextual menus was around as an additional software feature (sometimes even included with mouse driver software) long before it was part of any OS, but Microsoft added it as a built-in feature of Windows95 long before Apple jumped on the bandwagon.
Granted, if it was also a feature of NeXT, then Apple probably would have carried it over to OS X regardless of what MS was up to, since OS X is really just the newest version of NeXT with a few MacOS features bolted on, but the fact remains that Apple was late to the party on this particular feature.
IIRC, an empress of Japan once famously insulted China by writting a not-so-diplomatic letter "from the land of the rising sun to the land of the setting sun."
Ah, old-world imperialist humor. You can't beat it.
Well known Microsoft supporter has a few bad words to say about Apple.
Ok, so which part of 'News for Nerds' does this come under?
apple.slashdot.com, where all stories are either spiteful media bias by trolls who want to get their hit-count up by groundlessly bashing Apple, or slavish fanboy posts by "Reality Distortion Field" victims who are lining up to drink poisoned Flavorade.
If you try to write a balanced story or comment about Apple, you will be accused of being both.
The facts:
Microsoft has frequently bought, borrowed or stolen all kinds of UI concepts from Apple, but generally doesn't do as good a job at implementing them for some reason. They have some very bright programming minds at Microsoft, but for some reason they are (and pretty much always have been) famously weak on design concepts.
Apple has turned around and taken a few UI tools from Microsoft as well (most notably contextual "right-click" menus, and the schedule integration they are rolling into the next version of Mail.app), mainly for the sake of meeting the expectations of OS "switchers."
My broad generalization of the trend:
When Microsoft takes from Apple, it's because Apple came up with a great idea. When Apple takes from Microsoft, it's because Microsoft has pushed a new industry standard on the market.
That Pac Man and Katamari don't interest you as much as Brian Eno's work...
Holy crap, where did you get that from???
they aren't trying to do the same things, so it's quite natural that the experience, and your preference for the experience, is different.
Actually, they are doing almost exactly the same thing as Eno's proposed project (I don't know if he ever got it completely off the ground) for interactive compositions. That was my whole point.
Gawd. I love it when people take the time to disagree with a rational case for their view. It's so rare to see.
You call the "constructed experience" an art form, I say it's more of an art "framework."
Much like Brian Eno's experiments in listener controlled music, or those cool "loop lab" flash apps that were considered hot stuff on the web about three years ago, we are talking about works which are delivered by the original creator as deliberately incomplete. The only compelling thing about them is the way we interact with them to make them personally compelling. Start up a game of Pac Man and keep your hand off the joystick, and you won't experience anything all that interesting. The same goes for Katamari Darmacy.
I'm not sure if "art" is the term to use for this sort of thing, but as we don't really have a better word for it, I suppose we should consider expanding the definition.
How does interactivity preclude artistic communication?
What are you communicating if the audience decides what you say? The end result is as much their creation as it is the artist's.
I put it to you that video gaming does have a history. Just as movies draw from the theater tradition, before there was Quake (or even Pac Man or Pong) there was pinball, pachinko, magnet-driven football, air hockey, Stratego, Connect 4, and endless other distractions which one could set up in a parlour room, alone or against an opponent, to pass idle hours. There were even handheld games (cup and ball, for example).
I recall a Star Trek toy I received as a child. It had a "screen" which was really a scrolling screen made of a big hidden wheel which simulated motion. To play, you had to navigate around various obstacles like planets and Klingon ships. Similar race-car games were around in the 70s. These, along with similar childhood amusements, are the true tradition that video games grew out of, and I doubt it will ever be regarded as high art.
Art is essentially a medium of communication, from the artist to the audience. The best art conveys feelings and notions which can not be conveyed with literal descriptive language alone. The interactive nature of gaming, almost by definition, excludes it from being regarded as an art form, beyond the creative trappings of the game's "eye candy" and music soundtrack.
Every college newspaper in America has job openings posted around election season offering to pay you to pretend to be a motivated volunteer cold-calling and canvassing for the Democrats or various 527 groups. How is it news that the Republicans also astroturf?
Unless you've been incredibly naive, that is.
Meanwhile, it's full speed ahead for mixed metaphors!
Hey now, there's no need to be a wet blanket just because you're not ready to drink the Kool-ade. Some people are really revved up about the curtain being drawn back next week. I, for one, am on pins and needles while I'm holding my breath for the big fireworks.
switch the company name
to Microsoft and I wonder what the comments would be?
Frankly, I don't give a fuck about Apple's past profits, nor their current share price. I hold no AAPL stock, so there's no reason for me to care.
But if the future of the company is in jeopardy, or if it's a possibility that they could lose Steve Jobs, then I do care, because I really like the products they've put out since Jobs came back to the company, and I would really like to see them continue as they have.
Switch the company name to Microsoft, and I'd be dancing in the street. The remote possibility of seeing Steve Balmer and Bill Gates being hauled away in orange jumpsuits would make my whole week.