Yes and no. I take their reviews of the taste of coffee and wine and the sound of hi fi with a cowlick of salt. They never seem to agree with my own tastes...;-). But for reliability, features, and other more objective measures, I agree they are well worth the subscription price.
These are examples of an industry which is creatively bankrupt... We need people to continue proving DRM is an unsound technology...
Non sequitor. If you don't like what the music industry is serving you don't buy it. If you don't like the distribution method don't buy it. Not liking what's available, you can vote with your wallet, you don't need to resort to theft. DVD Jon is not a hero, he's just making things worse for the rest of us. I happen to buy classical music so I expect to buy "covers," and frankly the competition is pretty cut-throat, because there's a lot of recorded versions to choose from, and it's hard to compete with some of the great recordings of the past. It's tough to make a living in a profession where those who graduate from the best schools with real talent have about a 1 in 10 chance of making a living professionally.
Once upon a time, folks didn't need to lock their front doors, but a bunch of assholes figured it was so easy to steal, so why not. Now we have an escalating war of trying to keep the theives out while minimizing inconvenience to the legitimate owners. I'd love it if I didn't need to lock my front door, but apparently I can't trust my fellow man (and in cases like you I use the term loosely) to stay the hell out of where they have no right being. If it weren't for people misusing the software in the first place (like Napsterites), we'd all be able to easily network our music in our own homes, but someone has to come along and screw it up for everyone else. Continually.
So take your high and mighty notion of fighting the music industry and go to hell. Withhold your money if you don't like it, the rest of us will vote with our own wallets thank you very much.
In fact, compelled testimony is a defense of freedom. Allow me to quote the relevant portions of the Bill of Rights, since you seem to be somewhat ignorant of it. From the Fifth Amendment:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
note that's "himself" not "himself or others"; from the Sixth Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions,... to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor
So, you can argue you think you have "the right not to testify to incriminate another," but you have an uphill battle getting such a "right" recognized; no such right is recognized in The Bill of Rights, and in fact, you may be compelled to testify on behalf of an accused (and in the process incriminate another, e.g., if you saw someone other than the accused commit a crime).
What, you aren't looking forward to having Lucas make incompatible "improvements" to the original trilogy for simultaneous release under Blue-Ray and HD DVD?
Personally, I'm looking forward to having JarJar's son get blown away in a gun fight in Episode IV's bar scene, (only available in HD DVD) but maybe that's just me. Of course in the Blue Ray version, you can see a special scene between C3PO and Darth Vadar in Episode V. "C3PO - I am your father!"
If it takes you one hour to do some unit of work on OS X, and 45 minutes (due to familiarity, or whatever reason) plus 45 minutes of wasted time due to spyware, etc. I don't see how you can objectively claim you are more productive in Windows; your switch of platform seems to back up the notion that in fact you are more productive on the Mac.
Task One
* GUI - 1 minute thinking, 29 minutes flapping around with a mouse
* COMMAND LINE - 29 minutes thinking, 1 minute typing
Does this say that it took 1 minute to solve the problem, and then under a GUI you got lost in the interface, while with the command line, you got lost figuring out what command to type? That's clearly what happened with Task 2, I'm just not sure of the import of Task 1.
What's grating about this isn't that the feature isn't available, it's that they won't let anybody implement the feature. Why? Because they think they know how you should use your computer better than you do. What arrogance!
Or, possibly "what science!" While full screen mode was reasonably productive on smaller screens back in the 80s (I'm thinking specifically of the lisp machines), they required keyboard support to select between applications, and the select key didn't make it into the modern (well, really a throwback) keyboard. (Symbolic's keyboards were the best I've ever used - they knew to make keys off the home row outsized). Thus, changing between applications in full screen mode would be very awkward, and I would expect in any series of experiments users would be confused how to do so.
The choices made, e.g., case sensititivity, reflect how average folks interact with their appliance. They don't think a camelcased word is different because of how you capitolize it, with some few exceptions, e.g. "the white house" vs. "the White House."
I suspect your issue is that you are unfamiliar with "user centered design." Here the intuitions of the engineer don't count for much - you need to actually sit down and experiment with actual users from your user population and see how they go about their tasks and your job is to enable them to do their task faster and better. Mac OS X was not designed as a software engineering workstation, and users were not selected from that population. If it were it may or may not have the features you crave, but the feature set would certainly be different from those it has now.
At any rate, the important point to make is the idea of tossing a lot of stuff onto a preferences screen usually means you didn't do the science right - if you did, you'd know what your population would want and need. The approach you recommend is what leads to HCI nightmares - when a user can change the behavior of the machine and not realize the implications of that change.
I agree to some extent you can't just look at how you create code in terms of using the editor. This misses the forest for the trees. Productivity as a programmer has more to do with the paradigms for organizing thought, the architecture in which you will attempt to solve your problem, and making sure the platform doesn't get in your way. To a lesser extent, familiarity will be important. Lisp machines didn't take over the world, despite the fact that they were highly productive environments, and would be still today, but most "programmers" couldn't handle the learning curve.
But productivity for a platform is more than just the productivity for some particular user of that platform. And when we want to look at non-programmers, we have to look at a typical mix of non-programming tasks. And here again, we want to see that the tool doesn't get in the way of acheiving goals.
Productivity, as a measure, really is just the amount of work divided by the amount of time to do it, factored by the quality of the work done. As such, the individual will heavily influence the particular numbers you get, and the Mac as a platform may be self-selecting for people who are already highly productive. Instead, a better measure is more something like impedance or waste: the amount of time spent on the vagarities of the tool instead of doing work that contributes to the product, divided by the total time of the task. We can make predictions about waste based on cognitive models of the tool use (how much of the brain is occupied by running the tool vs. thinking about the problem to be solved), but it's probably easier just to measure how much time is spent moving the mouse around and hitting key combos.
TiVo's patents? This is the only thing I can think of that Apple might want. But I'm not sure how crucial they are. They certainly haven't stopped cable companies from handing out competing DVRs, or Elgato from implementing one on the Mac.
Aha! I think you've hit the nail on the head. They want the patents so they can sue all the cable companies!
the confidentiality of sources becomes just as "high and mighty" a concept as property rights or due process.
So, lets say a serial killer admits his past crimes to a journalist, and promises to give him an exclusive on the intimate details of future killings. The journalist, full of his journalistic integrety, refuses to name his source to the police, citing his god given right to keep his sources private, and incidentally insuring a fantastic readership for his column. This is the "free press" you are arguing for? I think you misunderstand the concept.
4) Not dependant on other people's technology. Unlike HP, Gateway, etc.
Well, no. They have lots of dependancies on other people's technology, which is why they sat so long at 500Mhz waiting for Motorola to get off their can. They are as dependent as anyone on suppliers. For instance, on IBM, for CPUs, the various disk drive makers for disk drives (particular of a size appropriate to the iPod), memory makers, etc. No company is an island.
All they have to do is just make it so that if you stop paying the subscription you still keep the songs.
Holy crap! You're right. And I'd consider leasing a car if they'd make a similar change - if I stop paying the lease, I still keep the car. And for folks subscribing to an apartment, stop paying, but keep the apartment. Why there are lots of deals I can think of "a small change" that would make "an attractive deal". I just can't figure out why they don't do so. You aren't a landlord by chance?
(Didn't the original Xerox machines have a mouse with three color-coded buttons?)
I used the Alto and later the Dandylion. Early Suns had 3 button mice, the Dandylion had 2, which you'd chord to get the "middle" button. It's been so long since I used the Alto, I don't want to quote from memory, but at least according to this page it had 3 buttons (all the same color), and was available with a separate set of organ keys (we had one fit out that way at U Rochester, but I beleive we only had 3 keys, not the 5 shown here, again, my memory may be failing me.)
Windows 2000, fully patched, with stable drivers and applications, behind a firewall and not running IE or Outlook - IS STABLE.
Unfortunately, Windows 2000, fully patched, behind a firewall, and running the corporate required copies of IE and Lotus Notes IS UNSTABLE. And I don't have a choice of my desktop OS, because the IT department has their heads firmly wedged between their cheeks (and it outsourced to boot). So don't give me this dreckulant song and dance about some hypothetical non-standard configuration being stable. Corporate desktops aren't, and it's M$'s fault. I wish I could choose Apple... since I'm the one who has to work unpaid overtime when this craphouse can't deal with simple office productivity tasks.
Why stop at two buttons? Why not put an entire keyboard on your "mouse"? Or just wheels under your existing keyboard and slide it around? Or perhaps something you can move around with your foot and some pedals?
There are tradeoffs between buttons and the ability to use them. The mouse was intended as a "pointing device". When you point to somthing in conversation(diectic reference) "that thing there" do you use different fingers and expect other people to understand that when you use your pinky you mean something different than when you use your thumb?
Re:Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino P
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
While you can add Linux for free to the Mac Mini, you still pay for the Mac OS. So to be fair you should at least compare to Windows XP Professional. And then you need to add the moral equivalent of iLife.
I don't know about the other features, but revision tracking is critical in a corporate or other group environment (university papers) where there are multiple authors and reviewers. I hate the lack of support in Word for citations (without 3rd party hacks), but live with it over just using LaTeX primarily because of the review/revision facilities.
The review should have been, not on the way they would prefer to use the device, but how well the device works within the parameters it was designed for.
I disagree. A reviewer always brings their expectations into any rendering of an opinion; a good reviewer makes those expectations plain so a reader can appropriately filter them.
To take your advice literally would be to give every product from M$ or Real rave reviews, because they were designed to be unmitigated steaming piles of crap.
Of course if you have high resistence headphones the iPod might not be the best pick since it's not terribly high powered.
The problem would be having too low an impedance - the lower the impedance the higher the current needed. So high impedance cans would in fact be best. I beleive Senheiser makes some decent 2K cans (vs the usual 4-8 ohm).
I am unaware of any equivalents to iLife in PCland, (particularly taking into account cross-application integration) and certainly not by the computer manufacturers. So asking the question
How lond (sic) do you think it will take PC manufacturers to answer Apple's latest entry into the market?
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time, folks didn't need to lock their front doors, but a bunch of assholes figured it was so easy to steal, so why not. Now we have an escalating war of trying to keep the theives out while minimizing inconvenience to the legitimate owners. I'd love it if I didn't need to lock my front door, but apparently I can't trust my fellow man (and in cases like you I use the term loosely) to stay the hell out of where they have no right being. If it weren't for people misusing the software in the first place (like Napsterites), we'd all be able to easily network our music in our own homes, but someone has to come along and screw it up for everyone else. Continually.
So take your high and mighty notion of fighting the music industry and go to hell. Withhold your money if you don't like it, the rest of us will vote with our own wallets thank you very much.
The precident is Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit and philosopher of science and religion who embraced both God and evolution.
At least, it may be the first bug with an Apple at it's core.
What, you aren't looking forward to having Lucas make incompatible "improvements" to the original trilogy for simultaneous release under Blue-Ray and HD DVD? Personally, I'm looking forward to having JarJar's son get blown away in a gun fight in Episode IV's bar scene, (only available in HD DVD) but maybe that's just me. Of course in the Blue Ray version, you can see a special scene between C3PO and Darth Vadar in Episode V. "C3PO - I am your father!"
If it takes you one hour to do some unit of work on OS X, and 45 minutes (due to familiarity, or whatever reason) plus 45 minutes of wasted time due to spyware, etc. I don't see how you can objectively claim you are more productive in Windows; your switch of platform seems to back up the notion that in fact you are more productive on the Mac.
Or, possibly "what science!" While full screen mode was reasonably productive on smaller screens back in the 80s (I'm thinking specifically of the lisp machines), they required keyboard support to select between applications, and the select key didn't make it into the modern (well, really a throwback) keyboard. (Symbolic's keyboards were the best I've ever used - they knew to make keys off the home row outsized). Thus, changing between applications in full screen mode would be very awkward, and I would expect in any series of experiments users would be confused how to do so.
The choices made, e.g., case sensititivity, reflect how average folks interact with their appliance. They don't think a camelcased word is different because of how you capitolize it, with some few exceptions, e.g. "the white house" vs. "the White House."
I suspect your issue is that you are unfamiliar with "user centered design." Here the intuitions of the engineer don't count for much - you need to actually sit down and experiment with actual users from your user population and see how they go about their tasks and your job is to enable them to do their task faster and better. Mac OS X was not designed as a software engineering workstation, and users were not selected from that population. If it were it may or may not have the features you crave, but the feature set would certainly be different from those it has now.
At any rate, the important point to make is the idea of tossing a lot of stuff onto a preferences screen usually means you didn't do the science right - if you did, you'd know what your population would want and need. The approach you recommend is what leads to HCI nightmares - when a user can change the behavior of the machine and not realize the implications of that change.
I agree to some extent you can't just look at how you create code in terms of using the editor. This misses the forest for the trees. Productivity as a programmer has more to do with the paradigms for organizing thought, the architecture in which you will attempt to solve your problem, and making sure the platform doesn't get in your way. To a lesser extent, familiarity will be important. Lisp machines didn't take over the world, despite the fact that they were highly productive environments, and would be still today, but most "programmers" couldn't handle the learning curve.
But productivity for a platform is more than just the productivity for some particular user of that platform. And when we want to look at non-programmers, we have to look at a typical mix of non-programming tasks. And here again, we want to see that the tool doesn't get in the way of acheiving goals.
Productivity, as a measure, really is just the amount of work divided by the amount of time to do it, factored by the quality of the work done. As such, the individual will heavily influence the particular numbers you get, and the Mac as a platform may be self-selecting for people who are already highly productive. Instead, a better measure is more something like impedance or waste: the amount of time spent on the vagarities of the tool instead of doing work that contributes to the product, divided by the total time of the task. We can make predictions about waste based on cognitive models of the tool use (how much of the brain is occupied by running the tool vs. thinking about the problem to be solved), but it's probably easier just to measure how much time is spent moving the mouse around and hitting key combos.
There are tradeoffs between buttons and the ability to use them. The mouse was intended as a "pointing device". When you point to somthing in conversation(diectic reference) "that thing there" do you use different fingers and expect other people to understand that when you use your pinky you mean something different than when you use your thumb?
Way, way more expensive.
I don't know about the other features, but revision tracking is critical in a corporate or other group environment (university papers) where there are multiple authors and reviewers. I hate the lack of support in Word for citations (without 3rd party hacks), but live with it over just using LaTeX primarily because of the review/revision facilities.
To take your advice literally would be to give every product from M$ or Real rave reviews, because they were designed to be unmitigated steaming piles of crap.