Far be it from me to be a front-line advocate of MS, but mail merging was a huge advance in word processing. It might not mean much to the home user, but for offices it was a killer app.
Um.... You do know that most of NT was purchaced by MS, not written by them, right?
But all of this history is irrelevant. Neither Mac System 7 nor Windows 95 were nearly as bad as many of their detractors make them out to be, but all that matters is which OS is the most usefull now.
The answer to that question depends on your needs. For me, the answer is OS X, but there are many people I would reccomend XP to. We don't all drive the same car, why do we all need to buy our OS from the same company?
Wrong. You can have the file installed on up to three computers at the same time, and can freely move it from one to the other. This is only an issue if you want more than three "friends" to listen, in different locations, at the same time.
If your friends only want to listen, you can also stream songs to (IIRC) up to 5 friends at a time. They don't even need to be close friends... If you share your iTunes folder to the Internet at large, people can search for songs you have and find you using Spymac's new music search feature. At long last, we can share the music we buy without infringement. Having used the new iTunes features for a few days now, I am amazed. I'm also impressed that AAC works as well as advertised. At 128, files generally sound as good or better than my 192 VBR MP3 files.
He also doesn't seem to realize that he made his thousands by sending messages about penis enlargement to young children's e-mail boxes.
Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that Spam makes the entire infrastructure of the Internet more expensive.
I don't care if he got out of it because he couldn't stand the heat. Assholes like him, each getting into it for a year or two and then getting out, are what keeps the problem going. I would very much like to punch this guy in the throat.
Music, at least prior to Gilbert and Sullivan, has a very different history from literature regarding intellectual property.
The Great Composers learned their craft largely by performing and copying each others' work. The entire history of Western music hinges on the theft of prior ideas. Even the scales (as we know them) were initially formed by trying to make sense of what was written about ancient greek intonations.
Mozart and Beethoven "stole" from Haydn all the time, and Haydn began by stealing ideas from Baroque-era composers. Bach stole many of his church melodies from popular tavern songs. Louis Armstrong "stole" just about every riff and motif King Oliver ever came up with.
Nobody has any fucking clue where that "Nuh-NAH-nuh-na-NUH" stop-time riff in Muddy Waters' "Manish Boy" (and George Thouroghgood's "Bad to the Bone", among dozens of others) originally came from, because it, like most of the best riffs of traditional blues, had been stolen by one artist after another since before audio recording even existed. For that matter, listen to Buddy Guy and Junior Wells sing "Man of Many Words", and then listen to Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"... It's the same damn song, except Otis used horn kicks and Buddy played a guitar solo for the bridge.
"Stealing" a sound, whether by sampling or reading sheet music or replaying it by ear, for your own composition is really no more unethical than an architect putting a feature in his building inspired by something that he liked from a Frank Lloyd Wright structure.
Actually, a better analogy is this: suing somebody for sampling or quoting a previous composition in a new one makes about as much sense as suing Peter Max for painting pictures of the Statue of Liberty.
IMHO, copyright is not a concept that should ever have been applied to music, except perhaps to entire works, with much broader terms of Fair Use to allow other artists to extrapolate.
As for the argument about whether rap is really music... Of course it is, don't be stupid. Almost all of it is really shitty music, but then so is pretty much everything Kenny G plays. Forget about "broad" definitions of music; the most precise definition of music I can give as of 2003 is "the performance art of emotive expression through sound." Does rap fit that criteria? Yes. The fact that some of you don't connect with the expression doesn't invalidate what they are doing. I doubt that most rap fans get much out of listening to Hindemeth or even Stravinsky, and now that they are "last century's music", we are all supposed to finally appreciate it after its time (or so predicted all my pretentious music profs anyway.)
I don't know why I went on such a long tirade on a/. thread that's already 600 comments deep or so. I doubt many people will read it. Something about all this talk about music and copyright kind of triggered a knee-jerk rant, I guess.
It seems to me that a case mod would be a relatively trivial job to anybody that's talking about going to the lengths of building their own box just because they want to use a different monitor.
Really? My iBook came with a free VGA adapter in the box. I'm surprised that isn't the case with other models. Then again, it's a relatively cheap adapter.
However, many other people can't or won't pay more for a flat panel, and would quite happily get by with a $100 Trinitron CRT or a monitor they already have.
Step 1: Put the eMac under your desk or wherever. Step 2: Plug the monitor you have and like into the video out plug (yes, it takes standard VGA connections). Step 3: There's no step three.
You're kidding, right? For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.
No I am not kidding. Maybe *everyone* you hung with had an 8-track, but just about everyone else saw them for what they were: a stupid, stupid fad. I have no numbers in front of me, but I would be shocked to find that the adoption rate of that particular technology was more than about 10%.
Yeah? So, the DVD ends up stored in the library somewhere. Ten years later, the news director calls you up and tells you that he wants to do a promo viz of clips of the anchorman who is about to retire. Of course, you've been a busy guy, you didn't have time to check for bit-rot, besides, because management doesn't really understand the problem it can't be important, right? Wrong.
Rather than "check for bit-rot" every 10 years or so (which is probably far more frequent than needed. I have first-generation CD's from the mid-08s that still play perfectly, and manufacturing processes were piss-poor back then), how about just re-copying the entire archive on a regular basis? It's so trivial to do, you could automate the entire process. Sure, it would cost a little money, but look how much physical storage space your library would save. Honestly, you sound like one of those dinosaur newsmen who insists that he can't write his column on anything other than his old Underwood typewriter because he just cain't cotton ta them new-fangled word proccessing computers.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
Umm... 8-Track never caught on.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
Tapes degrade, just like film does. The coating separates, then the tape oxidizes.
Many digitally stored media also can degrade, but it is far more trivial to back them up before that happens.
This may surprise you, but the RIAA pre-dates the fight over online music sharing by a good 50 years or so. I seriously doubt that the entire recording industry will suddenly decide to disband their main association simply because they no longer f34r the next Napster.
Okay, I guess over a million songs is pretty good for a new service on an obscure platform (apple:-) However, that's still only a million dollars. I thought that the recording industry was something like a 40-50 billion dollar industry.
No, that's one million dollars in a week!
Now, I don't know if they are likely to keep it up at that rate, but if they did, that would translate to $52 Million in a year. Now do you see why people are taking notice of them?
I think the model may work. Let's hope it torpedoes the RIAA completely.
That comment is so amazingly ill-informed, everybody here is a little dumber for having read it.
The RIAA != the record labels. Yes, they have spent a lot of their resources fighingting Napster, Kazaa, etc., on behalf of the labels, but it also represents almost everybody else in the music recording industry, including artists. In addition to enforcing copyrights, they help establish industry standards (such as that little pre-amp that goes into turntables... okay, younger/.ers might need to ask their fathers what a turntable is.) Saying that this will hurt them is like saying that putting a dent in Sony's hardware sales will somehow hurt the IEEE.
Furthermore, all of the music sold on the iTunes Music Store is licensed, and those license fees are managed by... guess who? That's right, the RIAA.
If this takes off, it might kill your local record store (if Best Buy had not done so already) but it will not make the RIAA go away.
Your.sig belongs to Principal Skinner, I believe, not Principal Snyder.
Incorrect!
The parent post was quoting Principal Snyder, the second Sunnydale High principal on the show "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer."
The previous principal prided himself on being very progressive about respecting the students as individuals and creating a "nurturing" environment in the school... until he was eaten by a pack of students who were posessed by the spirits of wild dogs.
(Apple "Pro" speakers my ass, give me a pair of Klipsches any day!)
Not that there's anything wrong with Klipsches, but it should be pointed out that the sound systems on most current Apple models were designed by the good folks of Harmon Kardon.
The first two (much larger) ones [CPU, Motherboard] are an unavoidable effect of having a non-standard hardware platform.
Apples use PowerPC CPU's, which are also used by Motorola in a lot of embedded applications, and by IBM in their servers. If a chip design is being heavilly used by more than three major NASDAQ players, is it really still "proprietary" just because you can't use it in your home-brew budget Windows box?
Also, the motherboards, while not designed to cram into ATX cases, are made up almost entirely of very standard components and design concepts. The only major difference is Apple's boot ROM's. The ATA connections for the drives, the memory bus, the PCI and AGP connections, the USB and Firewire ports... all very similar to the parts you would see on your better Pentium and Athlon motherboards. I find it hard to believe that the motherboards that Apple makes are that much more expensive than the ones that go into Dells.
The real cost of Apples is the markup to finance their R&D, QA, etc. Plus, their higher profit margin per machine allows them to thrive and survive as a niche player.
AFAIC 10.0->10.2 should have been free upgrades since much of what they did was fix functionality that was supposed to have worked right in 10.0.
Well, you are probably right... in that this is as far as you can see.
Having used both 10.0 and 10.2 (and all "points" in between.... ugh... sorry for that one), I can assure you that the 10.x.0 releases were both major overhauls, not just incremental changes. The look was pretty much the same, but in terms of function, the differences in going from 10.0->10.1->10.2 was every bit as great as going from 95->98->ME... except getting better instead of simply more bloated.
And it's not because 10.0 was as "broken" as you claim. When 10.0 came out, it was already my preference over any other UNIX-based GUI on Earth. More consistant, user-friendly, and functional than Gnome, KDE, or any X environment you could name. Yes, it was sluggish... but you should see Gnome running over Linux on my comparable x86 box. Yeesh!
You will dig the battery life. I once watched two DVD movies on a single charge. That's about three hours of the CDRW/DVD Combo drive constantly spinning! I've yet to be shown a PC laptop that can get through a whole movie without being plugged into the wall.
Really? What would women choose as the idealized male and female form? A quick glimpse at media produced by and for women reveals: the same damned thing.
You did know that the ultra-girly characters of Sailor Moon were designed by a Manga house made up entirely of women artists, right?
To say nothing of what you see when you flip through the magazines that most women choose to read.
The author of the article brings up a point which I have heard women mention about MMORPG's before. Specifically, that when she played a female avitar, she did not have nearly an easy of a time "establishing authority" and taking on leadership roles. She found that respect came much easier when she played male characters.
Having played both genders in Everquest, I have not found this to be true in the slightest. One of my main characters was a female cleric, which I role-played as the aloof, matronly high elf that seemed to fit a "priestess of Mother Tunare", and did not reveal my real-life gender to the other players. With that character, I formed many parties and led them into many adventures. Nobody ever questioned that "she" was in charge.
I can't help but think that the easy authority that the woman who wrote the article found when playing male characters had much more to do with how playing the male avitar influenced her attitude and behavior than anything else. She logged in with the expectation "I'm presenting as a male now, so they will respect my opinions more," and the resulting confidence resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Microsoft Office v. X is an excellent program. It's not free of bugs and annoyances, but it's generally very good. Gimp and Vlc, on the other hand, are absolute horse shit.
The Office comment was just me being a smart-ass. I was going for the "Funny" not the "Informative."
Office for X is a big step up from the previous Mac version of Office, not that there was much room for it to get worse. It's still bloated as hell, though. AppleWorks 6 is much nicer for word processing than Word... unless you are sharing files with PC users.
GIMP is not Photoshop, but it's the best free equivalent ever.
vlc is so good that I use it for playing most video files instead of Quicktime Pro. It plays damn near every format, and has a nice full screen mode. It's everything that MacVCD should be, but isn't. Simple, clean, fast, intuitive... everything a Mac program should be, even though it did not begin its life on the Mac.
Now now, let's be fair. There are plenty of incompetent developers in the Mac world, too.
For example, a company in Redmond, Washington released an office application suite for the Mac which is absolute horse shit.
On the bright side, since OS X groks BSD so well, it opens a whole world of Open Source software, good and bad, which are quickly getting ported over (such as GIMP and vlc), as well as others which we can compile ourselves and run via X11.
Careful. If you hype a stock that you own on an Internet forum, that's market manipulation, and the SEC will 0w|\| j00, 5uX0r.
A lot of guys who did just that on MF back in the 90's are now in Tennis Prison.
That said, I own no AAPL stock, and think they are no worse an investment than anything else on the NASDAQ right now... which may be damning them with faint praise, but there you have it.
Slashdot Mirror
Far be it from me to be a front-line advocate of MS, but mail merging was a huge advance in word processing. It might not mean much to the home user, but for offices it was a killer app.
But all of this history is irrelevant. Neither Mac System 7 nor Windows 95 were nearly as bad as many of their detractors make them out to be, but all that matters is which OS is the most usefull now.
The answer to that question depends on your needs. For me, the answer is OS X, but there are many people I would reccomend XP to. We don't all drive the same car, why do we all need to buy our OS from the same company?
If your friends only want to listen, you can also stream songs to (IIRC) up to 5 friends at a time. They don't even need to be close friends... If you share your iTunes folder to the Internet at large, people can search for songs you have and find you using Spymac's new music search feature. At long last, we can share the music we buy without infringement. Having used the new iTunes features for a few days now, I am amazed. I'm also impressed that AAC works as well as advertised. At 128, files generally sound as good or better than my 192 VBR MP3 files.
Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that Spam makes the entire infrastructure of the Internet more expensive.
I don't care if he got out of it because he couldn't stand the heat. Assholes like him, each getting into it for a year or two and then getting out, are what keeps the problem going. I would very much like to punch this guy in the throat.
The Great Composers learned their craft largely by performing and copying each others' work. The entire history of Western music hinges on the theft of prior ideas. Even the scales (as we know them) were initially formed by trying to make sense of what was written about ancient greek intonations.
Mozart and Beethoven "stole" from Haydn all the time, and Haydn began by stealing ideas from Baroque-era composers. Bach stole many of his church melodies from popular tavern songs. Louis Armstrong "stole" just about every riff and motif King Oliver ever came up with.
Nobody has any fucking clue where that "Nuh-NAH-nuh-na-NUH" stop-time riff in Muddy Waters' "Manish Boy" (and George Thouroghgood's "Bad to the Bone", among dozens of others) originally came from, because it, like most of the best riffs of traditional blues, had been stolen by one artist after another since before audio recording even existed. For that matter, listen to Buddy Guy and Junior Wells sing "Man of Many Words", and then listen to Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"... It's the same damn song, except Otis used horn kicks and Buddy played a guitar solo for the bridge.
"Stealing" a sound, whether by sampling or reading sheet music or replaying it by ear, for your own composition is really no more unethical than an architect putting a feature in his building inspired by something that he liked from a Frank Lloyd Wright structure.
Actually, a better analogy is this: suing somebody for sampling or quoting a previous composition in a new one makes about as much sense as suing Peter Max for painting pictures of the Statue of Liberty.
IMHO, copyright is not a concept that should ever have been applied to music, except perhaps to entire works, with much broader terms of Fair Use to allow other artists to extrapolate.
As for the argument about whether rap is really music... Of course it is, don't be stupid. Almost all of it is really shitty music, but then so is pretty much everything Kenny G plays. Forget about "broad" definitions of music; the most precise definition of music I can give as of 2003 is "the performance art of emotive expression through sound." Does rap fit that criteria? Yes. The fact that some of you don't connect with the expression doesn't invalidate what they are doing. I doubt that most rap fans get much out of listening to Hindemeth or even Stravinsky, and now that they are "last century's music", we are all supposed to finally appreciate it after its time (or so predicted all my pretentious music profs anyway.)
I don't know why I went on such a long tirade on a /. thread that's already 600 comments deep or so. I doubt many people will read it. Something about all this talk about music and copyright kind of triggered a knee-jerk rant, I guess.
It seems to me that a case mod would be a relatively trivial job to anybody that's talking about going to the lengths of building their own box just because they want to use a different monitor.
Really? My iBook came with a free VGA adapter in the box. I'm surprised that isn't the case with other models. Then again, it's a relatively cheap adapter.
Step 1: Put the eMac under your desk or wherever.
Step 2: Plug the monitor you have and like into the video out plug (yes, it takes standard VGA connections).
Step 3: There's no step three.
I'm sure you knew what I meant.
No I am not kidding. Maybe *everyone* you hung with had an 8-track, but just about everyone else saw them for what they were: a stupid, stupid fad. I have no numbers in front of me, but I would be shocked to find that the adoption rate of that particular technology was more than about 10%.
Yeah? So, the DVD ends up stored in the library somewhere. Ten years later, the news director calls you up and tells you that he wants to do a promo viz of clips of the anchorman who is about to retire. Of course, you've been a busy guy, you didn't have time to check for bit-rot, besides, because management doesn't really understand the problem it can't be important, right? Wrong.
Rather than "check for bit-rot" every 10 years or so (which is probably far more frequent than needed. I have first-generation CD's from the mid-08s that still play perfectly, and manufacturing processes were piss-poor back then), how about just re-copying the entire archive on a regular basis? It's so trivial to do, you could automate the entire process. Sure, it would cost a little money, but look how much physical storage space your library would save. Honestly, you sound like one of those dinosaur newsmen who insists that he can't write his column on anything other than his old Underwood typewriter because he just cain't cotton ta them new-fangled word proccessing computers.
Umm... 8-Track never caught on.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
Tapes degrade, just like film does. The coating separates, then the tape oxidizes.
Many digitally stored media also can degrade, but it is far more trivial to back them up before that happens.
This may surprise you, but the RIAA pre-dates the fight over online music sharing by a good 50 years or so. I seriously doubt that the entire recording industry will suddenly decide to disband their main association simply because they no longer f34r the next Napster.
No, that's one million dollars in a week!
Now, I don't know if they are likely to keep it up at that rate, but if they did, that would translate to $52 Million in a year. Now do you see why people are taking notice of them?
That comment is so amazingly ill-informed, everybody here is a little dumber for having read it.
The RIAA != the record labels. Yes, they have spent a lot of their resources fighingting Napster, Kazaa, etc., on behalf of the labels, but it also represents almost everybody else in the music recording industry, including artists. In addition to enforcing copyrights, they help establish industry standards (such as that little pre-amp that goes into turntables... okay, younger /.ers might need to ask their fathers what a turntable is.) Saying that this will hurt them is like saying that putting a dent in Sony's hardware sales will somehow hurt the IEEE.
Furthermore, all of the music sold on the iTunes Music Store is licensed, and those license fees are managed by... guess who? That's right, the RIAA.
If this takes off, it might kill your local record store (if Best Buy had not done so already) but it will not make the RIAA go away.
Incorrect!
The parent post was quoting Principal Snyder, the second Sunnydale High principal on the show "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer."
The previous principal prided himself on being very progressive about respecting the students as individuals and creating a "nurturing" environment in the school... until he was eaten by a pack of students who were posessed by the spirits of wild dogs.
Not that there's anything wrong with Klipsches, but it should be pointed out that the sound systems on most current Apple models were designed by the good folks of Harmon Kardon.
The first two (much larger) ones [CPU, Motherboard] are an unavoidable effect of having a non-standard hardware platform.
Apples use PowerPC CPU's, which are also used by Motorola in a lot of embedded applications, and by IBM in their servers. If a chip design is being heavilly used by more than three major NASDAQ players, is it really still "proprietary" just because you can't use it in your home-brew budget Windows box?
Also, the motherboards, while not designed to cram into ATX cases, are made up almost entirely of very standard components and design concepts. The only major difference is Apple's boot ROM's. The ATA connections for the drives, the memory bus, the PCI and AGP connections, the USB and Firewire ports... all very similar to the parts you would see on your better Pentium and Athlon motherboards. I find it hard to believe that the motherboards that Apple makes are that much more expensive than the ones that go into Dells.
The real cost of Apples is the markup to finance their R&D, QA, etc. Plus, their higher profit margin per machine allows them to thrive and survive as a niche player.
Well, you are probably right... in that this is as far as you can see.
Having used both 10.0 and 10.2 (and all "points" in between.... ugh... sorry for that one), I can assure you that the 10.x.0 releases were both major overhauls, not just incremental changes. The look was pretty much the same, but in terms of function, the differences in going from 10.0->10.1->10.2 was every bit as great as going from 95->98->ME... except getting better instead of simply more bloated.
And it's not because 10.0 was as "broken" as you claim. When 10.0 came out, it was already my preference over any other UNIX-based GUI on Earth. More consistant, user-friendly, and functional than Gnome, KDE, or any X environment you could name. Yes, it was sluggish... but you should see Gnome running over Linux on my comparable x86 box. Yeesh!
Dayyyamn! That's the coolest thing I've seen in UI design since the first time I saw the trash can in System 6! I so want that.
You will dig the battery life. I once watched two DVD movies on a single charge. That's about three hours of the CDRW/DVD Combo drive constantly spinning! I've yet to be shown a PC laptop that can get through a whole movie without being plugged into the wall.
Actually, I would sell the Windows laptop, keep the iBook, buy myself an iPod, and pocket the rest of the cash.
My iBook is the 700 MHz model, by the way.
You did know that the ultra-girly characters of Sailor Moon were designed by a Manga house made up entirely of women artists, right?
To say nothing of what you see when you flip through the magazines that most women choose to read.
Having played both genders in Everquest, I have not found this to be true in the slightest. One of my main characters was a female cleric, which I role-played as the aloof, matronly high elf that seemed to fit a "priestess of Mother Tunare", and did not reveal my real-life gender to the other players. With that character, I formed many parties and led them into many adventures. Nobody ever questioned that "she" was in charge.
I can't help but think that the easy authority that the woman who wrote the article found when playing male characters had much more to do with how playing the male avitar influenced her attitude and behavior than anything else. She logged in with the expectation "I'm presenting as a male now, so they will respect my opinions more," and the resulting confidence resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The Office comment was just me being a smart-ass. I was going for the "Funny" not the "Informative."
Office for X is a big step up from the previous Mac version of Office, not that there was much room for it to get worse. It's still bloated as hell, though. AppleWorks 6 is much nicer for word processing than Word... unless you are sharing files with PC users.
GIMP is not Photoshop, but it's the best free equivalent ever.
vlc is so good that I use it for playing most video files instead of Quicktime Pro. It plays damn near every format, and has a nice full screen mode. It's everything that MacVCD should be, but isn't. Simple, clean, fast, intuitive... everything a Mac program should be, even though it did not begin its life on the Mac.
Now now, let's be fair. There are plenty of incompetent developers in the Mac world, too.
For example, a company in Redmond, Washington released an office application suite for the Mac which is absolute horse shit.
On the bright side, since OS X groks BSD so well, it opens a whole world of Open Source software, good and bad, which are quickly getting ported over (such as GIMP and vlc), as well as others which we can compile ourselves and run via X11.
A lot of guys who did just that on MF back in the 90's are now in Tennis Prison.
That said, I own no AAPL stock, and think they are no worse an investment than anything else on the NASDAQ right now... which may be damning them with faint praise, but there you have it.