Camino has no mechanism to automatically install Dashboard widgets.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
I'll never understand where Thinkpads got a reputation for quality.
Selling the ones that failed QC to employees at a discount, it sounds like.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
There are those of us who simply prefer Apple's hardware.
I'm sure that's true, there's people who are fans of the strangest things, but I firmly believe the majority are simply making a virtue of necessity.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about that. You somehow don't dig that cool G5 tower case?
No, I don't: it's an unnecessarily huge monster that makes very poor use of space... it reminds me of the overblown case engineering on the first generation IBM RISC boxes. And I've used machines that are far easier to work on, like, say, almost any of the slab-style Sparcstations, or the last of the Compaq-branded Deskpros.
It's $129... at most a new version of OS X has ever been is $149. How much do you want it to cost?
Err, that's what I said, the current price for OS X is close to the Windows XP upgrade price, and every copy of OS X currently sold is sold for a machine that already had OS X on it, and so the idea is that if you're buying for a Mac you'd always buy the upgrade... the price for Mac users wouldn't change.
For non-Mac users, buying the generic version would be like buying XP Pro. Now... the only single-CPU Macs out there after the transition are likely to be the new Mac mini and the new iBook. The markup on those over a comparable Wintel box is about $150-$200, so a single-CPU version going for about $300... like XP Pro... would give Apple the same profit per sale. The higher price for the multi-CPU version accounts for the higher markup that Apple gets on the Powerbooks and Powermacs.
They could even sell the 2 CPU version at the XP Pro price, and charge more for the quad. That's what Microsoft's doing.
So... they'll make as much profit per sale, maybe, but the piracy rate is going to look like what ?
The piracy rate is going to be pretty high whether Apple gets any money from the sale or not. And if (as is likely) Apple goes to "strong DRM" to get the iTunes Video Store off the ground they're going to be abusing us Microsoft style whether they require registration for the OS or not.
You didn't state why you don't think Mac hardware is so poor
The hardware is middle-of-the-road, with unexceptional performance, and since the iMac showed up the affordable Macs have been nightmares to work on and with abysmal support for expansion, and all too often crippled for the sake of style.
Look at the Mac mini. That tiny case is really nifty, but...
To make it that small, it has to use a laptop drive, and to keep it cool it's got an anemic GPU, a low speed drive, and underpowered USB ports... you can't even charge an iPod Shuffle from a Mac mini without putting a powered hub in the chain.
The iMac G3, the iMac G4, the eMac, they all sacrificed far too much to style, and they didn't have to.
The one partial exception was the iMac G5, but the latest version as well as the new intel iMac have gone back to "no user servicable parts".
The laptops have traditionally had unacceptably low resolution... they only produced Powerbooks with decent screen resolution for their size and price last year. The 'books are the nastiest laptops to work on that I've seen in 10 years. The G3 iMac and eMac had nasty screens: the contemporary Apple apple-branded CRTs had been Trinitron-style aperture-grille screens, and going back to the fuzziness of shadow-mask was a slap in the face. And to add insult to injury, Jobs declared that this was in aid of "no ugly monitors on nice Macs".
Apple's only now getting a little closer to parity with generic hardware, albeit at a significantly higher cost, but the only thing it's really got going for it is a lack of choice and cool styling. And calling the lack of choice a feature is, well, appalling.
god those beige powermac cases were godawful
A lot of the Beige era boxes were terrible: I've got a Performa 630CD that's a nightmare maze of tight-fitting compartments, and the 8xxx towers were horrible. Put the 7xxx series were exceptionally nice to work on, and even the 6xxx slabs were easy to get into. One of my favorite models was the Performa 475, and the first generation iMac G5 seems to almost be a replay of that... I just wish they'd used the same design in the new h
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
But OK... ask Apple *and* Lenovo for OS X for ThinkPad, but realize that's a different beast than OS X for (any) Intel.
1. Well, yes, of course it is. I don't care how they do it, I mostly want something better than the "one button is enough for anyone" nouse and the damn "typing on a dead alligator" Powerbook keyboard.
2. My original point is that the parent to my post was rattling on about how Mac hardware was better. MY point is that it's not. It hasn't been, historically. Apple is not a killer hardware company, at least not on the desktop. They're a software company that happens to make their money on hardware sales.
It's like Cisco. I mean the classic Cisco 2600 series switches were crap hardware, people bought them because that's how they bought IOS.
Which is (a) why Apple is unlikely to release OS X generic, and (b) I do know that it's not likely to happen, and (c) I already noted that I'm not going to go try and do it myself.
So even if Apple doesn't release OS X for Intel, or for the Thinkpad, the Apple fans who go on about how Apple *hardware* is so great are, well, full of it.
3. If Apple treated the current OS X prices as the "OS X upgrade" price for systems already shipping with OS X support (which is pretty close to what it is, excepting the half dozen or so remaining people still running OS X on Sonnet-upgraded Powermac 7500s), and released a "Generic OS X (single CPU)" for something like the price of Windows XP pro, and a "Dual CPU" version about $100-$200 more, I think they'd make as much profit per sale as they're making per bundled Mac now.
But I don't believe they'll do it.
On the other hand, I predicted that Apple wouldn't release a headless Mac or a Flash MP3 player in December 2004. I hoped I was wrong then. I hope I'm wrong now.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
I don't much care for Apple's laptop keyboards ( in particular ) myself... but if I have to choose between Windows and Apple's keyboard, I'll make do with Apple's keyboard.
Me too. But that doesn't mean I have to STFU about it.
I'm not sure it's right to complain that Apple won't give you OS X for ThinkPad;
Why not? I complained that Microsoft wasn't giving me Graffiti for the Pocket PC, and they listened (well, to me and the other 34 Palm enthusiasts they invited to 'Mobius Zero') and now Pocket PC has better Graffiti than Palm OS. I've found that Pocket PC has enough other problems that I've gone back to Palm, but the squeaky wheel does sometimes get the grease.
Besides, Apple and IBM's Thinkpad division have worked together before, and produced one of the cult classic Powerbooks as a result. They could do it again.
Creating a neat C++ framework when what the world really needs a non-Microsoft browser is nothing but a deriliction of duty: a piece of vanity code. What we Brits call pointless "willy waving".
It's also not all that neat.
I've only delved into the Mozilla code base once, because of a weird DNS problem that ONLY happened with Mozilla... and god DAMN that was a nasty mess of spaghetti inheritance.
Re:Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
I would like TWO buttons on my touchpad;-)
And longer key travel, and angled keys, and BOTH a touchpad and a trackpoint controller, and illumination from the top of the screen rather then under the keys, and a standard drive bay, and easy access to user-replacable parts, and I personally think the F117-style dead black shell of the Thinkpad is ded sexeh...
Don't be so dismissive of generic hardware.
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would pay more for OS X on a Thinkpad.
I don't like Apple's laptops, at all, and I'm not much of a fan of any of Apple's hardware.
Not that I'm gouing to run out and get a Thinkpad and install cracked OS X on it, but sheesh... Apple's hardware choices really suck.
When Microsoft is falsely attacked, I'm a staunch defender. When Microsoft does something good, I'll praise them to the skies.
For example, the basic elements of the Windows user interface operate much better than the ones that Apple uses, the buttons, menus, and other control elements are more intuitive, have better keyboard controls, and are more versatile. I've been bashed by the REAL Apple fanatics for my criticisms of Apple's user interface, on the Mac and on the iPod.
I used iTunes and the iTMS with my non-Apple CD and later MP3 player and it was NOT A PROBLEM. I got an iPod Mini, and I hated it. The clickwheel truly sucks. It's a user interface disaster... the iPod Shuffle is a much better design.
If you want a subscription service, get a different MP3 player. If you bought an iPod and you don't really like it, then stop supporting the monopoly you hate and get a better device. It's not like there's any shortage of music on other online stores, or you can walk the walk and actually try using iTMS music on a non-iPod. Until then, don't tell me you're suffering from a monopoly you don't even TRY and get out from under. Because I have, and it's Not A Problem.
This kind of technology, using an animal to control a vehicle by converting the animal's responses into control inputs for the vehicle, goes back at least to WWII... you can see a picture of one of Skinner's pigeon-guided bombs here and here, and more details here.
It was never deployed, but it worked more than half the time in test runs... how good are today's "precision" munitions?
cross converting a song to mp3 by first burning to a cd is a hassle
Have you ever tried to read a Word document by running "strings" on it and gluing the resulting mess together, which was the state of the art in reading Word documents on UNIX when the Microsoft trial began? Talk to me not of "hassles" unless they're at least as tough as that.
and degrades the music quality
If you care that much about a slight loss of quality, why are you buying a low quality version instead of a CD in the first place?
as well as wastes a cd-r
So use a CD-RW.
We're talking about buying a single song online
The product is "music", not "a single DRM-crippled song". A copy of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on CD, downloaded from the iTMS, downloaded from Rhapsody, or recorded from an FM broadcast is the same song, modulo the quality of reproduction... and the iTMS version is not the best version by that standard... you may even get a better copy from FM radio if you record it without compression.
I'd love to try a subscription service and use it with my iPod, but I can't because Apple doesn't offer one
I'd love to buy an iPod with a jog wheel and thumb pad instead of the stupid click-wheel, because I hate the click wheel, but Apple doesn't make one. Somehow I manage to avoid making the argument that it should be possible to sue Apple to make the product I want.
If you have iTunes music, you cannot listen to it on any portable device except an iPod. And if you have an iPod, you cannot buy any music online except from iTunes.
Crikey, I must have hallucinated doing both!
Let's see, here's a song I've downloaded from iTMS... here's a blank CD. Mix, Burn, stick it in a Sony Discman... that's a portable device you know... and it's just fine. That's what I did for years before getting an iPod Shuffle. Ih, you mean an MP3 player? Well, let's see... an audio CD. Take it out of my Discman, putit in my computer, Rip it, oh look, it's an MP3 file! Theoretically, it's now got lower quality, but listening to it on tiny earbuds in a noisy environment I can't tell the bloody difference...
Now, let's see... I go to Amazon.com, buy a CD, it costs a little more than on iTMS (hold on a second, isn't the monopoly product supposed to be more expensive?) but it's better quality, and the MP3s I rip from it play on anything... even an iPod. I can buy MP3 and MP4 versions of songs and albums from dozens of artists own websites. I can pull the "Mix, Burn, Rip" trick on Windows Media files.
Compared to what you have to do if you want to use an OS other than Windows, it's nothing. The biggest "application barrier to entry" for non-iPod MP3 players has nothing to do with iTunes, it has to do with the fact that you can go anywhere and buy accessories for an iPod. You can get iPod accessories at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, I've seen them at a Chevron gas station!
A lot of that has to do with the fact that they're so common, but it's also due to the fact that Apple doesn't change the iPod form factor and connector every six months.
Handspring Visor iPaq 3600 Jornada 548 iPaq 3800 Jornada 568 T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition Sony Clie SJ22
I finally switched back to Palm. An older device, refurbished, that suits me better than any of the Windows Powered devices or the newer PalmOS handhelds.
Microsoft improved things in each new device, but only at the cost of a reduction in capability in other areas. But the difference between these devices and a Palm, let alone a Blackberry, is incredible. Rather than a device designed for a purpose (personal organization, email) these are pretty much baby laptops, complete with a very desktop-like operating system that requires far far more handholding than the simpler operating systems in the palm or blackberry.
I can't imagine relying on Pocket PC or any variant thereof. I gave it a chance, over three generations of the software, and it let me down.
I wish/. would quit promoting physorg, all they do is grab news and press releases from other sites and post them WITHOUT LINKS TO THE SOURCE as if they originated the story.
FF users are guilty of keeping older versions because x or y doesn't work with new versions.
Err, no, you would be thinking of Internet Explorer there Every time there's a new release of IE we are required to hold off on upgrades until the IT guys at the head office update the intranet sites to work with it. Most large companies have to behave the same way. And have you seen the complaints about pages broken by the IE7 beta?. Newer versions of Firefox work better on more pages, because unlike Microsoft they can't just break stuff and expect every website in the world to change to suit them.
Did any of the 45,000 pages contain FF exploit code?
If there was anything like the same opportunity to exploit FF, they would, even if it is only a minority browser. When the Active Content problems in the HTML control surfaced, it was in the minority, but there was an immediate flood of exploits like I'd never seen before. And while Microsoft has patched the symptoms over and over again the underlying design flaw is still there.
Yes, OK, but the people who are playing MMOGs have already gotten past that issue, so whether they're swinging a virtual sword in Everquest or in a VLARP in VR it's all the same to them.
Have you seen Aero Glass? Obviously you're not going to do these things on a bargain basement graphics board.
Have I? I don't know... I've seen a video of a demo but it's been alleged that the UI in that video was a Director mock-up.
In any case, I've used smooth translucent windows, fully rendered transparency while dragging, on a machine with a 180 MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an unaccelerated frame buffer. Some of the effects will need something beefier, like maybe a Radeon 7000 or GeForce 2MX... at least they would on Mac OS X under Aqua. On Windows X-uh-Vista they may require a bit more beef...
Of course IE is unsafe, because it is the primary target.
IE is the primary target because it is unsafe.
Even back when IE was the minority browser, in 1997, when MS introduced "Active Desktop" it opened up a MASSIVE flood of malware targeting the gaping hole they created. There was no similar attack on netscape or Mosaic.
No, IE is the primary target because it is unsafe, and it (or more properly the HTML control) is unsafe because it is inherently unsafe to give one component that kind of responsibility over rights when it has no mechanism to unambiguusly determine whether a document can be trusted.
The security zones model is unfixable without changing the API. ALL existing applications that use the HTML control will have to be modified to control the execution of active content if Microsoft is to have a hope in hell of solving the problem.
This was true last century, it's true this century. That is is the most common browser makes things worse, but it's an unacceptably insecure one regardless.
Windows NT 3.51 was pretty solid and reliable, but had lousy device support. NT4 had slightly better device support, but it was a lot less reliable, and more of a memory hog. Windows 2000 has been a lot better than NT4, though it's still got a messed up architecture, and it's got good device support. Windows XP is, well, it's Windows 2000 with a few extra bundled tools (like the Citrix stuff from Terminal Server), and nasty copy protection.
I wouldn't use XP on ANYTHING if I wasn't using a corporate load that doesn't have time-bombs in the kernel ready to lock you out of your own machine if you upgrade the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Camino has no mechanism to automatically install Dashboard widgets.
I'll never understand where Thinkpads got a reputation for quality.
Selling the ones that failed QC to employees at a discount, it sounds like.
There are those of us who simply prefer Apple's hardware.
I'm sure that's true, there's people who are fans of the strangest things, but I firmly believe the majority are simply making a virtue of necessity.
I don't know about that. You somehow don't dig that cool G5 tower case?
No, I don't: it's an unnecessarily huge monster that makes very poor use of space... it reminds me of the overblown case engineering on the first generation IBM RISC boxes. And I've used machines that are far easier to work on, like, say, almost any of the slab-style Sparcstations, or the last of the Compaq-branded Deskpros.
It's $129... at most a new version of OS X has ever been is $149. How much do you want it to cost?
Err, that's what I said, the current price for OS X is close to the Windows XP upgrade price, and every copy of OS X currently sold is sold for a machine that already had OS X on it, and so the idea is that if you're buying for a Mac you'd always buy the upgrade... the price for Mac users wouldn't change.
For non-Mac users, buying the generic version would be like buying XP Pro. Now... the only single-CPU Macs out there after the transition are likely to be the new Mac mini and the new iBook. The markup on those over a comparable Wintel box is about $150-$200, so a single-CPU version going for about $300... like XP Pro... would give Apple the same profit per sale. The higher price for the multi-CPU version accounts for the higher markup that Apple gets on the Powerbooks and Powermacs.
They could even sell the 2 CPU version at the XP Pro price, and charge more for the quad. That's what Microsoft's doing.
So... they'll make as much profit per sale, maybe, but the piracy rate is going to look like what ?
The piracy rate is going to be pretty high whether Apple gets any money from the sale or not. And if (as is likely) Apple goes to "strong DRM" to get the iTunes Video Store off the ground they're going to be abusing us Microsoft style whether they require registration for the OS or not.
You didn't state why you don't think Mac hardware is so poor
The hardware is middle-of-the-road, with unexceptional performance, and since the iMac showed up the affordable Macs have been nightmares to work on and with abysmal support for expansion, and all too often crippled for the sake of style.
Look at the Mac mini. That tiny case is really nifty, but...
To make it that small, it has to use a laptop drive, and to keep it cool it's got an anemic GPU, a low speed drive, and underpowered USB ports... you can't even charge an iPod Shuffle from a Mac mini without putting a powered hub in the chain.
The iMac G3, the iMac G4, the eMac, they all sacrificed far too much to style, and they didn't have to.
The one partial exception was the iMac G5, but the latest version as well as the new intel iMac have gone back to "no user servicable parts".
The laptops have traditionally had unacceptably low resolution... they only produced Powerbooks with decent screen resolution for their size and price last year. The 'books are the nastiest laptops to work on that I've seen in 10 years. The G3 iMac and eMac had nasty screens: the contemporary Apple apple-branded CRTs had been Trinitron-style aperture-grille screens, and going back to the fuzziness of shadow-mask was a slap in the face. And to add insult to injury, Jobs declared that this was in aid of "no ugly monitors on nice Macs".
Apple's only now getting a little closer to parity with generic hardware, albeit at a significantly higher cost, but the only thing it's really got going for it is a lack of choice and cool styling. And calling the lack of choice a feature is, well, appalling.
god those beige powermac cases were godawful
A lot of the Beige era boxes were terrible: I've got a Performa 630CD that's a nightmare maze of tight-fitting compartments, and the 8xxx towers were horrible. Put the 7xxx series were exceptionally nice to work on, and even the 6xxx slabs were easy to get into. One of my favorite models was the Performa 475, and the first generation iMac G5 seems to almost be a replay of that... I just wish they'd used the same design in the new h
But OK... ask Apple *and* Lenovo for OS X for ThinkPad, but realize that's a different beast than OS X for (any) Intel.
1. Well, yes, of course it is. I don't care how they do it, I mostly want something better than the "one button is enough for anyone" nouse and the damn "typing on a dead alligator" Powerbook keyboard.
2. My original point is that the parent to my post was rattling on about how Mac hardware was better. MY point is that it's not. It hasn't been, historically. Apple is not a killer hardware company, at least not on the desktop. They're a software company that happens to make their money on hardware sales.
It's like Cisco. I mean the classic Cisco 2600 series switches were crap hardware, people bought them because that's how they bought IOS.
Which is (a) why Apple is unlikely to release OS X generic, and (b) I do know that it's not likely to happen, and (c) I already noted that I'm not going to go try and do it myself.
So even if Apple doesn't release OS X for Intel, or for the Thinkpad, the Apple fans who go on about how Apple *hardware* is so great are, well, full of it.
3. If Apple treated the current OS X prices as the "OS X upgrade" price for systems already shipping with OS X support (which is pretty close to what it is, excepting the half dozen or so remaining people still running OS X on Sonnet-upgraded Powermac 7500s), and released a "Generic OS X (single CPU)" for something like the price of Windows XP pro, and a "Dual CPU" version about $100-$200 more, I think they'd make as much profit per sale as they're making per bundled Mac now.
But I don't believe they'll do it.
On the other hand, I predicted that Apple wouldn't release a headless Mac or a Flash MP3 player in December 2004. I hoped I was wrong then. I hope I'm wrong now.
I don't much care for Apple's laptop keyboards ( in particular ) myself... but if I have to choose between Windows and Apple's keyboard, I'll make do with Apple's keyboard.
Me too. But that doesn't mean I have to STFU about it.
I'm not sure it's right to complain that Apple won't give you OS X for ThinkPad;
Why not? I complained that Microsoft wasn't giving me Graffiti for the Pocket PC, and they listened (well, to me and the other 34 Palm enthusiasts they invited to 'Mobius Zero') and now Pocket PC has better Graffiti than Palm OS. I've found that Pocket PC has enough other problems that I've gone back to Palm, but the squeaky wheel does sometimes get the grease.
Besides, Apple and IBM's Thinkpad division have worked together before, and produced one of the cult classic Powerbooks as a result. They could do it again.
The hardware no where near resembled what will really be in the PS3.
As opposed to Microsoft's demos last year, which used Powermac G5s pretending to be Xbox 360s?
Creating a neat C++ framework when what the world really needs a non-Microsoft browser is nothing but a deriliction of duty: a piece of vanity code. What we Brits call pointless "willy waving".
It's also not all that neat.
I've only delved into the Mozilla code base once, because of a weird DNS problem that ONLY happened with Mozilla... and god DAMN that was a nasty mess of spaghetti inheritance.
I would like TWO buttons on my touchpad ;-)
And longer key travel, and angled keys, and BOTH a touchpad and a trackpoint controller, and illumination from the top of the screen rather then under the keys, and a standard drive bay, and easy access to user-replacable parts, and I personally think the F117-style dead black shell of the Thinkpad is ded sexeh...
I would pay more for OS X on a Thinkpad.
I don't like Apple's laptops, at all, and I'm not much of a fan of any of Apple's hardware.
Not that I'm gouing to run out and get a Thinkpad and install cracked OS X on it, but sheesh... Apple's hardware choices really suck.
When Microsoft is falsely attacked, I'm a staunch defender. When Microsoft does something good, I'll praise them to the skies.
For example, the basic elements of the Windows user interface operate much better than the ones that Apple uses, the buttons, menus, and other control elements are more intuitive, have better keyboard controls, and are more versatile. I've been bashed by the REAL Apple fanatics for my criticisms of Apple's user interface, on the Mac and on the iPod.
I used iTunes and the iTMS with my non-Apple CD and later MP3 player and it was NOT A PROBLEM. I got an iPod Mini, and I hated it. The clickwheel truly sucks. It's a user interface disaster... the iPod Shuffle is a much better design.
If you want a subscription service, get a different MP3 player. If you bought an iPod and you don't really like it, then stop supporting the monopoly you hate and get a better device. It's not like there's any shortage of music on other online stores, or you can walk the walk and actually try using iTMS music on a non-iPod. Until then, don't tell me you're suffering from a monopoly you don't even TRY and get out from under. Because I have, and it's Not A Problem.
This kind of technology, using an animal to control a vehicle by converting the animal's responses into control inputs for the vehicle, goes back at least to WWII... you can see a picture of one of Skinner's pigeon-guided bombs here and here, and more details here.
It was never deployed, but it worked more than half the time in test runs... how good are today's "precision" munitions?
cross converting a song to mp3 by first burning to a cd is a hassle
Have you ever tried to read a Word document by running "strings" on it and gluing the resulting mess together, which was the state of the art in reading Word documents on UNIX when the Microsoft trial began? Talk to me not of "hassles" unless they're at least as tough as that.
and degrades the music quality
If you care that much about a slight loss of quality, why are you buying a low quality version instead of a CD in the first place?
as well as wastes a cd-r
So use a CD-RW.
We're talking about buying a single song online
The product is "music", not "a single DRM-crippled song". A copy of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on CD, downloaded from the iTMS, downloaded from Rhapsody, or recorded from an FM broadcast is the same song, modulo the quality of reproduction... and the iTMS version is not the best version by that standard... you may even get a better copy from FM radio if you record it without compression.
I'd love to try a subscription service and use it with my iPod, but I can't because Apple doesn't offer one
I'd love to buy an iPod with a jog wheel and thumb pad instead of the stupid click-wheel, because I hate the click wheel, but Apple doesn't make one. Somehow I manage to avoid making the argument that it should be possible to sue Apple to make the product I want.
If you have iTunes music, you cannot listen to it on any portable device except an iPod. And if you have an iPod, you cannot buy any music online except from iTunes.
Crikey, I must have hallucinated doing both!
Let's see, here's a song I've downloaded from iTMS... here's a blank CD. Mix, Burn, stick it in a Sony Discman... that's a portable device you know... and it's just fine. That's what I did for years before getting an iPod Shuffle. Ih, you mean an MP3 player? Well, let's see... an audio CD. Take it out of my Discman, putit in my computer, Rip it, oh look, it's an MP3 file! Theoretically, it's now got lower quality, but listening to it on tiny earbuds in a noisy environment I can't tell the bloody difference...
Now, let's see... I go to Amazon.com, buy a CD, it costs a little more than on iTMS (hold on a second, isn't the monopoly product supposed to be more expensive?) but it's better quality, and the MP3s I rip from it play on anything... even an iPod. I can buy MP3 and MP4 versions of songs and albums from dozens of artists own websites. I can pull the "Mix, Burn, Rip" trick on Windows Media files.
Compared to what you have to do if you want to use an OS other than Windows, it's nothing. The biggest "application barrier to entry" for non-iPod MP3 players has nothing to do with iTunes, it has to do with the fact that you can go anywhere and buy accessories for an iPod. You can get iPod accessories at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, I've seen them at a Chevron gas station!
A lot of that has to do with the fact that they're so common, but it's also due to the fact that Apple doesn't change the iPod form factor and connector every six months.
Not the same at all. You don't need an iPod to listen to iTMS music, nor can you not get the same music for other devices.
The PDAs I've used or attempted to use...
Handspring Visor
iPaq 3600
Jornada 548
iPaq 3800
Jornada 568
T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition
Sony Clie SJ22
I finally switched back to Palm. An older device, refurbished, that suits me better than any of the Windows Powered devices or the newer PalmOS handhelds.
Microsoft improved things in each new device, but only at the cost of a reduction in capability in other areas. But the difference between these devices and a Palm, let alone a Blackberry, is incredible. Rather than a device designed for a purpose (personal organization, email) these are pretty much baby laptops, complete with a very desktop-like operating system that requires far far more handholding than the simpler operating systems in the palm or blackberry.
I can't imagine relying on Pocket PC or any variant thereof. I gave it a chance, over three generations of the software, and it let me down.
Especially since the new core is actually just a new variant of the P6 core that's been their standard core since the Pentium Pro.
STAIF 2006.
I wish /. would quit promoting physorg, all they do is grab news and press releases from other sites and post them WITHOUT LINKS TO THE SOURCE as if they originated the story.
Another copy of the press release.
FF users are guilty of keeping older versions because x or y doesn't work with new versions.
Err, no, you would be thinking of Internet Explorer there Every time there's a new release of IE we are required to hold off on upgrades until the IT guys at the head office update the intranet sites to work with it. Most large companies have to behave the same way. And have you seen the complaints about pages broken by the IE7 beta?. Newer versions of Firefox work better on more pages, because unlike Microsoft they can't just break stuff and expect every website in the world to change to suit them.
Did any of the 45,000 pages contain FF exploit code?
If there was anything like the same opportunity to exploit FF, they would, even if it is only a minority browser. When the Active Content problems in the HTML control surfaced, it was in the minority, but there was an immediate flood of exploits like I'd never seen before. And while Microsoft has patched the symptoms over and over again the underlying design flaw is still there.
Yes, OK, but the people who are playing MMOGs have already gotten past that issue, so whether they're swinging a virtual sword in Everquest or in a VLARP in VR it's all the same to them.
Have you seen Aero Glass? Obviously you're not going to do these things on a bargain basement graphics board.
Have I? I don't know... I've seen a video of a demo but it's been alleged that the UI in that video was a Director mock-up.
In any case, I've used smooth translucent windows, fully rendered transparency while dragging, on a machine with a 180 MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an unaccelerated frame buffer. Some of the effects will need something beefier, like maybe a Radeon 7000 or GeForce 2MX... at least they would on Mac OS X under Aqua. On Windows X-uh-Vista they may require a bit more beef...
Of course IE is unsafe, because it is the primary target.
IE is the primary target because it is unsafe.
Even back when IE was the minority browser, in 1997, when MS introduced "Active Desktop" it opened up a MASSIVE flood of malware targeting the gaping hole they created. There was no similar attack on netscape or Mosaic.
No, IE is the primary target because it is unsafe, and it (or more properly the HTML control) is unsafe because it is inherently unsafe to give one component that kind of responsibility over rights when it has no mechanism to unambiguusly determine whether a document can be trusted.
The security zones model is unfixable without changing the API. ALL existing applications that use the HTML control will have to be modified to control the execution of active content if Microsoft is to have a hope in hell of solving the problem.
This was true last century, it's true this century. That is is the most common browser makes things worse, but it's an unacceptably insecure one regardless.
The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.
...
Damn, I though patience and the Times Crossword were older than that. Not to mention knucklebones, hopscotch, tops, pachinko, pinball,
Half right.
Windows NT 3.51 was pretty solid and reliable, but had lousy device support.
NT4 had slightly better device support, but it was a lot less reliable, and more of a memory hog.
Windows 2000 has been a lot better than NT4, though it's still got a messed up architecture, and it's got good device support.
Windows XP is, well, it's Windows 2000 with a few extra bundled tools (like the Citrix stuff from Terminal Server), and nasty copy protection.
I wouldn't use XP on ANYTHING if I wasn't using a corporate load that doesn't have time-bombs in the kernel ready to lock you out of your own machine if you upgrade the hardware.