So, you would go out of your way to buy a slower machine to avoid the "yuckiness" on Intel?
Okay, good luck with that.
I have an iBook, a mini, an eMac and a dual-G5 tower. I like them because they are Macs, not because of the Apple logos on the cases and certainly not because of the corporation which sold Apple the CPUs inside.
The MacBook is a faster laptop than the old Powerbook. Why would you care how it became faster?
The PS3 is supposedly going to support a variety of standard flash storage devices including SD and MemoryStick.
I hear it also cures cancer and controls the orbit of the moon.
At any given moment, there is no device in the universe more powerful than whatever the next upcoming Sony game platform is.
Re:Extremely easy to disable, and more info
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
I think it's a cool feature. It shows me songs I might like based on what I'm listening to at the moment, and I if I don't want it to do so, I can get rid of it with a couple of mouse-clicks.
A woman browses the accessories section of a department store while wearing a tan pair of shoes. An ambitious sales woman knows of a bag they carry which matches her shoes really well, and suggests said matching purse to her.
iTMS is doing something which is about as sinister as that. You indicated when you installed iTunes that you want the app to connect to the Internet automatically for you (mostly for the sake of pulling CD track names of CDDB), and there you are, listening to The Killers on a networked machine through an app which you said could use your network connection, with the feature that is supposed to offer you reccomendations from the store turned on, and iTMS says, "I see you like crap kiddie rock. Did you know that The Strokes have a new album out?"
If you didn't want crap bands like that suggested to you while listening to your current favorite crap band, then why are you running that feature of the application?
The "Just For You" section is Apple's stab at doing something like the reccomendations section of NetFlix with music sales, and from what I've seen so far, it has a long way to go before it's even useful data to me, let alone to some corporate boogie-man.
Right, because lots of reviewers are going to cheerfully tell their publishers that they didn't bother to review the latest Spielberg movie due to trouble getting the DVD to work.
I don't think "discouraging the spammers" automatically means finding a technical solution. Submissions are selected by human editors. I don't think it's asking too much of the editors to be aware of what's going on here and who is doing it. It could be as easy as saying "look at what users are bombing the site with submissions, and pass them up in favor of other submitters.
Do they really need some tweak to the queue software in order to do that? Can't they just take a few extra seconds to look around a little bit once in a while?
Like I was saying, if various Slashdot members can find all the dupes, link whores, bad links, etc. within minutes (and often within seconds) of the story going up, why can't the editors? And if they simply can't do it, why haven't they been sacked?
Actually, I think you need to settle down. My original remarks were nowhere nearly as hyperbolic as they way you paraphrased them back to me.
My point was that the rumor sites, particularly the ones which were known for touting "inside" info (sometimes in violation of NDA's) and had a record of getting it right a lot in the last couple years, were not going anywhere near the iMac or Powerbook over the last few weeks.
None of the specific predictions from sites who put such pre-announcement material out there had it right. MacRumors runs every bit of gossip that comes along (including reports of what other rumor sites are saying), so they are not exactly what you can call "predictors" of anything.
By saying "nobody", I perhaps should have made it clear that I was speaking within the limited scope I was talking about.
I took what you said and linked a site which reported a rumor that did predict it. Honestly, what's wrong with that?
I don't remember saying anything was wrong with it. I took the liberty of commenting on several remarks at once within the post where I was replying to you, as I didn't want to crapflood the discussion. Of course, your lengthy reply (and my lengthy reply to your lengthy reply) had the exact same effect, so I guess that was a bad instinct.
The solution will not be to discourage spammers, instead it will be to encourage regulars to submit more stories.
One great way you can do that is by... ta-da! Discouraging spammers.
"Regulars" will be probably be encouraged to submit more when they know that their efforts will not be passed over in favor of somebody cranking out 200 submissions a day to elevate their PageRank.
Since Mac Rumors runs just about every whisper of every last thing that might happen, they can claim to have "predicted" it no matter what happens.
Just five days ago, they were claiming Apple was about to announce 42" and 50" plasma screens for use with "Viiv" at the Keynote.
That's about as valid as the half-dozen or so Slashbots who replied to my post by saying "I said it would probably happen." Sure, out of the thousands of people who like to speculate on Apple's next move, somebody's gotta win the lottery.
My question to all of you who are so proudly claiming to have called it correctly is, how much did you wager on that betting site that Slashdot was telling us about last week? You'd be a rich man today if you actually "predicted" it and had the confidence to put a little money down on it.
When I say "nobody" I'm talking in the context of rumors sites.
There's a big difference between the guess-work and speculation of a handful of slashbots (some of whom are bound to be right, in the way a broken clock is right twice a day), and somebody like Think Secret telling us that "inside sources" are informing them of a new iBook and an Intel mini.
What that demonstrates simply and absolutely is that by trying to put ID in the science class they have made their god *indistinguishable* from the FSM.
Only if you get them to concede that ID is all about teaching about God in schools. You can stamp your feet and insist that such is their "real" motivation all you like, but nobody from that camp is saying any such thing.
Consider this, why did we start finding fossils and oil when we did?
We've been finding oil for as far back in human history as you care to look. We've been digging deeper for larger quantities of oil recently, because it burns better than most other liquids that we can gather in high quantities.
We've also been finding fossils all along. We just didn't start looking carefully for them underground until people made a science of trying to make sense of them.
It's not hard to look at the evidence and reach the conclusion that they first started popping up when the negative time reached a point equidistant from the Genesis center from us now.
If that were the case, there would constantly be new distant stars appearing in the sky, as the world gets old enough in each direction for their light to travel to us today.
Your little thought exercise might make a fun work of speculative sci-fi, but there's far too much evidence to the contrary to take it seriously as a model of the world.
For another fun thought exercise which doesn't quite work, read Scott Adams's ramblings at the end of The Dilbert Future, where he suggests that, for all we know, gravity is just a function of everything getting bigger at the same time.
Actually, science has nothing to do with existance.
You observe whether something exists or not. Science is the practice of anticipating the behavior of those things which exist.
The debate ammounts to this:
Non-ID Origin:
The universe exploded into existance. Just because. After the explosion, energy and matter fell into certain patterns which eventually resulted in complex entities capable of observing their own existance and speculating about how it all came about. This might, in fact, be the only one planet in the only one of millions of billions of universes in which this seemingly unlikely result came about, but as none of those other worlds and universes have anybody there to observe it, it seems miraculous to the inhabitants of this world.
ID:
Some intellegent force greater than the universe set all these things in motion deliberately, presumably for the company. The Big Bang, fish hopping out of the sea... all of it was meant to have happened for the purpose of bringing us about. (It's worth noting that the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" parodies which many in the anti-ID crowd have latched on to do not, in any way, contradict or discredit Intelligent Design. ID is completely mute on the nature of the "Intelligent Designer.")
Nothing in Darwins books, nor anything about how bees fly, can possibly settle this debate. What can be settled is that this debate has nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Science is all about predicting behavior. We can only validate (or invalidate) either of these notions by attempting to create more universes. Since that's not happening any time soon, it seems to me that schools ought to just be teaching about the Big Bang (and why we are pretty sure it happened), and Evolution (and why we are pretty sure it's how man came about), and leave the speculation about why all this happened to the philosophy and religion teachers.
So much for the bogus 42" and 50" media center plasmas.
The Rumors sites, such as ThinkSecret and MacOSRumors.com, were almost universally wrong this time around.
No new iBook. No Intel mini. No plasma TV's. No "media center" mini. No movie streaming on demand (that was Cringely's guess). None of it.
As of this keynote, Intel chips are going into the iMac and the replacement for the Powerbook... just about the only systems which NOBODY predicted upgrades for.
Looks like Apple managed to plug up the leaks from last year.
The purpose of positive moderation is to amplify comments which are worthy of attention. Front page stories need no such emphasis. Being able to slap negative mods on stories is a terrific idea.
Advantages: 1. Crap stories can be filtered more easilly. 2. Crap submitters can be identified quickly by editors. 3. Instant feedback of how each editor is doing. (Information which Taco could use as he sees fit.)
Disadvantages: 1. Requires changes to the Slashcode, which nobody seems to want to do.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect
Why re-invent the wheel, when a Google tab is right there in the upper-right corner of your Open Source browser?
I mean, if all the whiners who complain about dupes manage to find the original Slash stories using Google, why can't your staff?
Well said. The fact is that link whores add almost no value whatsoever to slashdot. We don't need them.
A lot of regulars here don't bother to submit stories very often, because the odds of the submission actually being used are not very high.
Why bother to submit a story about some new geek-friendly story when you know that the version of the same story written up by a link whore who is currently popular with one of the editors is going to be the one that gets used?
Plus, if the editors didn't have to sift through hundreds of scattershot submissions from story spammers, maybe they would have a little more time to... I don't know, maybe run a spellcheck once in a while?
Taco's above message pretty much told would-be spammers exactly how to make money off slashdot: Comb Google News and the Drudge Report for stories, and submit every last one which is even marginally geek related. Sooner or later, they'll take some of them, or even start relying on you. Then watch the page hits roll in.
The fact that such submitters are not sent directly to/dev/null looks to me more like apathy about this problem than really, really wanting to run a particular story.
So you have to be a "fanboy" and/or trying to be "hip" to think it would be fun to play X-Box 360 games in HD, huh?
I think there is a fanboy in this conversation, and I don't think it's me.
Can your tiny little mind possibly comprehend the possibility that some people might have different tastes in console games than you, and that doesn't make them lesser people?
Sorry, but the only people I see enjoying this launch are fanboys (MS fanboys? WTF?), braindead games journalists, and rich idiots who think shiny toys make them "hip" or something.
You missed one group:
HDTV owners who like playing console games on a big screen in their living room.
I'm in my mid-thirties, and pretty much everybody from my peer group either already has an HDTV or is planning on buying one within the next year. Most of them like console games, and currently own either the old X-Box or the Playstation 2. (In some cases, both.)
At almost every party, the question that comes up when discussing console gaming is not "will you buy an X-Box 360", it's "how long are you going to put off buying an X-Box 360." Though none of us have yet, the fact that some of us will eventually get one is already established as axiomatic. We like console games; we like our big living room TV sets. The new X-Box offers the chance to take full advantage of our new TV sets when gaming. Case closed.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you would go out of your way to buy a slower machine to avoid the "yuckiness" on Intel?
Okay, good luck with that.
I have an iBook, a mini, an eMac and a dual-G5 tower. I like them because they are Macs, not because of the Apple logos on the cases and certainly not because of the corporation which sold Apple the CPUs inside.
The MacBook is a faster laptop than the old Powerbook. Why would you care how it became faster?
The less said about 2003's Xtreme Beach Volleyball, the better.
You, sir, are clearly not on my side.
DOAX was a triumph of the human spirit.
The PS3 is supposedly going to support a variety of standard flash storage devices including SD and MemoryStick.
I hear it also cures cancer and controls the orbit of the moon.
At any given moment, there is no device in the universe more powerful than whatever the next upcoming Sony game platform is.
I think it's a cool feature. It shows me songs I might like based on what I'm listening to at the moment, and I if I don't want it to do so, I can get rid of it with a couple of mouse-clicks.
A woman browses the accessories section of a department store while wearing a tan pair of shoes. An ambitious sales woman knows of a bag they carry which matches her shoes really well, and suggests said matching purse to her.
iTMS is doing something which is about as sinister as that. You indicated when you installed iTunes that you want the app to connect to the Internet automatically for you (mostly for the sake of pulling CD track names of CDDB), and there you are, listening to The Killers on a networked machine through an app which you said could use your network connection, with the feature that is supposed to offer you reccomendations from the store turned on, and iTMS says, "I see you like crap kiddie rock. Did you know that The Strokes have a new album out?"
If you didn't want crap bands like that suggested to you while listening to your current favorite crap band, then why are you running that feature of the application?
You nailed it. Good work.
The "Just For You" section is Apple's stab at doing something like the reccomendations section of NetFlix with music sales, and from what I've seen so far, it has a long way to go before it's even useful data to me, let alone to some corporate boogie-man.
Right, because lots of reviewers are going to cheerfully tell their publishers that they didn't bother to review the latest Spielberg movie due to trouble getting the DVD to work.
I don't think "discouraging the spammers" automatically means finding a technical solution. Submissions are selected by human editors. I don't think it's asking too much of the editors to be aware of what's going on here and who is doing it. It could be as easy as saying "look at what users are bombing the site with submissions, and pass them up in favor of other submitters.
Do they really need some tweak to the queue software in order to do that? Can't they just take a few extra seconds to look around a little bit once in a while?
Like I was saying, if various Slashdot members can find all the dupes, link whores, bad links, etc. within minutes (and often within seconds) of the story going up, why can't the editors? And if they simply can't do it, why haven't they been sacked?
Actually, I think you need to settle down. My original remarks were nowhere nearly as hyperbolic as they way you paraphrased them back to me.
My point was that the rumor sites, particularly the ones which were known for touting "inside" info (sometimes in violation of NDA's) and had a record of getting it right a lot in the last couple years, were not going anywhere near the iMac or Powerbook over the last few weeks.
None of the specific predictions from sites who put such pre-announcement material out there had it right. MacRumors runs every bit of gossip that comes along (including reports of what other rumor sites are saying), so they are not exactly what you can call "predictors" of anything.
By saying "nobody", I perhaps should have made it clear that I was speaking within the limited scope I was talking about.
I took what you said and linked a site which reported a rumor that did predict it. Honestly, what's wrong with that?
I don't remember saying anything was wrong with it. I took the liberty of commenting on several remarks at once within the post where I was replying to you, as I didn't want to crapflood the discussion. Of course, your lengthy reply (and my lengthy reply to your lengthy reply) had the exact same effect, so I guess that was a bad instinct.
The solution will not be to discourage spammers, instead it will be to encourage regulars to submit more stories.
One great way you can do that is by... ta-da! Discouraging spammers.
"Regulars" will be probably be encouraged to submit more when they know that their efforts will not be passed over in favor of somebody cranking out 200 submissions a day to elevate their PageRank.
Since Mac Rumors runs just about every whisper of every last thing that might happen, they can claim to have "predicted" it no matter what happens.
Just five days ago, they were claiming Apple was about to announce 42" and 50" plasma screens for use with "Viiv" at the Keynote.
That's about as valid as the half-dozen or so Slashbots who replied to my post by saying "I said it would probably happen." Sure, out of the thousands of people who like to speculate on Apple's next move, somebody's gotta win the lottery.
My question to all of you who are so proudly claiming to have called it correctly is, how much did you wager on that betting site that Slashdot was telling us about last week? You'd be a rich man today if you actually "predicted" it and had the confidence to put a little money down on it.
When I say "nobody" I'm talking in the context of rumors sites.
There's a big difference between the guess-work and speculation of a handful of slashbots (some of whom are bound to be right, in the way a broken clock is right twice a day), and somebody like Think Secret telling us that "inside sources" are informing them of a new iBook and an Intel mini.
What that demonstrates simply and absolutely is that by trying to put ID in the science class they have made their god *indistinguishable* from the FSM.
Only if you get them to concede that ID is all about teaching about God in schools. You can stamp your feet and insist that such is their "real" motivation all you like, but nobody from that camp is saying any such thing.
Consider this, why did we start finding fossils and oil when we did?
We've been finding oil for as far back in human history as you care to look. We've been digging deeper for larger quantities of oil recently, because it burns better than most other liquids that we can gather in high quantities.
We've also been finding fossils all along. We just didn't start looking carefully for them underground until people made a science of trying to make sense of them.
It's not hard to look at the evidence and reach the conclusion that they first started popping up when the negative time reached a point equidistant from the Genesis center from us now.
If that were the case, there would constantly be new distant stars appearing in the sky, as the world gets old enough in each direction for their light to travel to us today.
Your little thought exercise might make a fun work of speculative sci-fi, but there's far too much evidence to the contrary to take it seriously as a model of the world.
For another fun thought exercise which doesn't quite work, read Scott Adams's ramblings at the end of The Dilbert Future, where he suggests that, for all we know, gravity is just a function of everything getting bigger at the same time.
Actually, science has nothing to do with existance.
You observe whether something exists or not. Science is the practice of anticipating the behavior of those things which exist.
The debate ammounts to this:
Non-ID Origin:
The universe exploded into existance. Just because. After the explosion, energy and matter fell into certain patterns which eventually resulted in complex entities capable of observing their own existance and speculating about how it all came about. This might, in fact, be the only one planet in the only one of millions of billions of universes in which this seemingly unlikely result came about, but as none of those other worlds and universes have anybody there to observe it, it seems miraculous to the inhabitants of this world.
ID:
Some intellegent force greater than the universe set all these things in motion deliberately, presumably for the company. The Big Bang, fish hopping out of the sea... all of it was meant to have happened for the purpose of bringing us about. (It's worth noting that the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" parodies which many in the anti-ID crowd have latched on to do not, in any way, contradict or discredit Intelligent Design. ID is completely mute on the nature of the "Intelligent Designer.")
Nothing in Darwins books, nor anything about how bees fly, can possibly settle this debate. What can be settled is that this debate has nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Science is all about predicting behavior. We can only validate (or invalidate) either of these notions by attempting to create more universes. Since that's not happening any time soon, it seems to me that schools ought to just be teaching about the Big Bang (and why we are pretty sure it happened), and Evolution (and why we are pretty sure it's how man came about), and leave the speculation about why all this happened to the philosophy and religion teachers.
I must not have visited your rumors site last week. My bad.
A year or two ago I'm sure mac zealots were saying the purpose was the superiority of the PPC hardware platform.
No, that would be the Yellow Dog Linux zealots.
The OS has always been the selling point of the Mac to Mac-heads.
So much for the bogus 42" and 50" media center plasmas.
The Rumors sites, such as ThinkSecret and MacOSRumors.com, were almost universally wrong this time around.
No new iBook. No Intel mini. No plasma TV's. No "media center" mini. No movie streaming on demand (that was Cringely's guess). None of it.
As of this keynote, Intel chips are going into the iMac and the replacement for the Powerbook... just about the only systems which NOBODY predicted upgrades for.
Looks like Apple managed to plug up the leaks from last year.
The purpose of positive moderation is to amplify comments which are worthy of attention. Front page stories need no such emphasis. Being able to slap negative mods on stories is a terrific idea.
Advantages:
1. Crap stories can be filtered more easilly.
2. Crap submitters can be identified quickly by editors.
3. Instant feedback of how each editor is doing. (Information which Taco could use as he sees fit.)
Disadvantages:
1. Requires changes to the Slashcode, which nobody seems to want to do.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect
Why re-invent the wheel, when a Google tab is right there in the upper-right corner of your Open Source browser?
I mean, if all the whiners who complain about dupes manage to find the original Slash stories using Google, why can't your staff?
Just sayin' is all.
Well said. The fact is that link whores add almost no value whatsoever to slashdot. We don't need them.
A lot of regulars here don't bother to submit stories very often, because the odds of the submission actually being used are not very high.
Why bother to submit a story about some new geek-friendly story when you know that the version of the same story written up by a link whore who is currently popular with one of the editors is going to be the one that gets used?
Plus, if the editors didn't have to sift through hundreds of scattershot submissions from story spammers, maybe they would have a little more time to... I don't know, maybe run a spellcheck once in a while?
/dev/null looks to me more like apathy about this problem than really, really wanting to run a particular story.
Taco's above message pretty much told would-be spammers exactly how to make money off slashdot: Comb Google News and the Drudge Report for stories, and submit every last one which is even marginally geek related. Sooner or later, they'll take some of them, or even start relying on you. Then watch the page hits roll in.
The fact that such submitters are not sent directly to
Wait... TWO guys on a Segway?
Well, that'll get this documentary an NC-17 rating if anything will.
My apologies, KDR 11. That bile-filled comment was meant to be directed at the post immediately previous to yours. Have a nice day.
So you have to be a "fanboy" and/or trying to be "hip" to think it would be fun to play X-Box 360 games in HD, huh?
I think there is a fanboy in this conversation, and I don't think it's me.
Can your tiny little mind possibly comprehend the possibility that some people might have different tastes in console games than you, and that doesn't make them lesser people?
Sorry, but the only people I see enjoying this launch are fanboys (MS fanboys? WTF?), braindead games journalists, and rich idiots who think shiny toys make them "hip" or something.
You missed one group:
HDTV owners who like playing console games on a big screen in their living room.
I'm in my mid-thirties, and pretty much everybody from my peer group either already has an HDTV or is planning on buying one within the next year. Most of them like console games, and currently own either the old X-Box or the Playstation 2. (In some cases, both.)
At almost every party, the question that comes up when discussing console gaming is not "will you buy an X-Box 360", it's "how long are you going to put off buying an X-Box 360." Though none of us have yet, the fact that some of us will eventually get one is already established as axiomatic. We like console games; we like our big living room TV sets. The new X-Box offers the chance to take full advantage of our new TV sets when gaming. Case closed.