and they generally tend to lead the others in terms of qualities you like -- thinness, size of screen, pixels on the screen. The whole world of Apple works together.
Thinness? Sony. Size of screen? Apple's just somewhere random in the pack. Pixels on the screen? Apple's been trailing there for ever. It's not until this year that the 17" Powerbook had more pixels than my old 14" Thinkpad, and they're still behind the leaders.
in Permutation City one of the characters has a high level agent, not a full blown conscious AI but more like an expert system, that sits in front of her online telephone/chat/email (they all seem to be the same thing) system to filter out increasingly aggressive software that is itself running high level expert systems pretending to be acquaintances and friends. At one point she gets a call allegedly from someone she knows that turns out to be software... and it takes her a little while watching it interact with HER software before she's sure it's not real. It turns to be a soft-sell from a religious group...
If you think you'll get music for less than $0.99 per song, you're dreaming.
I get music for less than 99c a song every week through 3hive, and some of it is stuff like Mr. Moran from the Bosstones that I'd never in a million years have found any other way.
I can't cost-effectively get cable from three different cable companies, except through reseller pseudo-competition like all the "Fred's DSL" services.
It's hard to have "auction" pricing for an unlimited resource, unless you create an artificial scarcity (for example, virtual currencies like the Linden dollar). Now, calling it an artificial scarcity shouldn't be taken to mean that it's a bad thing... the artificial scarcity in printed banknotes is normally considered a GOOD thing.
The question is, how would you create an artificial scarcity of copies of a song?
i attached it to your comment because this portion of your previous post
OK, I don't get it. I'm not taking anything and running "further and further with it", I started at the same line as everything else.
I looked at the picture, went 'that looks like a fossa, interesting' and because the taxonomical confusion over madagascar's viverrids was fresh in my mind I thought it worth commenting about. I added it to the comment about the fossa because I started out looking for a comment about a fossa to attach it to, because someone reading a message about a fossa might find it interesting, not because I read it and went "oh, yeh, a fossa".
On the other hand, someone who might be in the potential audience for comments about escaped pets would more likely find your message if it was at the top level and labeled "It might be an escaped pet". You might want to repost.
I'm not sure why you attached this to my comment rather than the top level, but I'll make a couple of comments anyway.
1. Borneo is large and sparsely populated, particularly in the high altitude rainforests.
2. When they say "the local people don't know it" you don't know who they talked to. There must be 50 ethnic groups and languages on Borneo, and subsistence farmers don't travel huge distances.
3. "New mammal species" doesn't mean "nobody's ever seen it before". It just means "nobody who publishes in academic journals has seen it before". Columbus didn't discover the New World, the people living there had known about it all their lives... they discovered Columbus!
I'm not surprised that there are people like this there.
The problems at microsoft that lead to things like the IE-hole-of-the-month-club have nothing to do with the competence or otherwise of the people working there. You could put Linus, RMS, and another fifty of the top OSS developers there and (if they didn't quit) they'd end up producing the same quality of product.
The problem is that windows has some fundamentally bad designs baked into it. Design flaws that they won't (and probably by now can't) change. Some deliberately created for short-term advantage, like the IE/ActiveX farce, that would break too many applications for them to properly fix now.
My first thought was that Nick Isaac was smoking something good. It sure looks like a fossa to me, and it's possibly a related viverrid. That could lead to a real breakthrough in our understanding of the Malagasay viverrids. As far as I know there really aren't any close relatives of the fossa anywhere else in the world, and this could help solve the question of whether the fossa (Cryptoprocta Ferox) and the malagasay civet (confusingly categorised as Fossa Fossana) are related or not.
Well, he's got a point, or he might have if the "DRM industry" wasn't undermining it... all you need if you're trying to keep mostly-honest people honest is a token lock. The iTunes nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM has been tremendously successful even though Apple tells you one way to remove it by burning an audio CD, and recommends that you do this to have a backup.
You don't need "secure audio path" and hardware DRM and kernel DRM modules for that.
And if you DO want strong DRM, putting it in the middle of a general purpose OS is stark staring bonkers. There are so many avenues of attack for that the only way to make it secure is to cripple the OS. Make the DRM, the keys, the decoder, and everything else part of the audio hardware and the video card... so the OS doesn't need to be any more secure than the internet connection the media was downloaded over. It just pulls an encrypted audio or video stream from the file and feeds it to the card, and the decryption happens there. MUCH better design than this one.
I seem to recall that they actually have done that in cards with hardware MPEG decoders for DVDs.
I suspect that the reason Microsoft is pushing so hard to put it in the NT kernel, other than their fetish for making Windows the center of the computing world because they're still trying to operate as a start-up, is that open source software would be able to easily support hardware DRM in the end devices, whereas supporting hard DRM in the OS and convincing software vendors and content creators to trust them is a much tougher job.
However I have one question...
At some point, all these files floating around for free on the net are going to start sounding pretty crappy.
If it requires them to have OS- and CPU- specific software anyway, why bother making it browser-based? That actually decreases the potential user base, because now you have to have the right OS and the right CPU, but the right browser as well.
Yes, yes, you can use common GUI code on all three platforms. But you can do that with any number of other technologies, from scripting languages like Tcl/Tk, through Java, to cross-platform libraries. It seems like a bad move to me.
There are roughly forty zillion applications for loading appointments into Palm Desktop, and we use those. Notebooks without network connectivity are pretty much useless for so many other reasons that it doesn't much matter that they need it for appointments.
MSDN and Windows Update are special cases, and you know that... and Windows Update runs the HTML control for its access even if you pick another default browser, so that's a non-issue.
In addition, how does your company get customers outside slashdot if your own web designers are not testing their stuff with IE?
Man, every damn message you've posted is full of all kinds of bad assumptions.
I'm in the real-time control systems business. Bugs in our software can kill people quicker than you can say "high voltage". Our customer's systems, you should be glad to know, don't even have internet access by policy, and are not only behind the corporate firewall they have their own firewall protecting them from the untrusted corporate network, and even then they're careful what protocols they run between systems.
You are doing a horrible job if 95% of users are happy and virus free, but 5% can not get their work done because they are unable to access an IE-only website or don't have access to a distributed calendar, to do lists and other collaboration tools.
I'm sorry, but it's just not true that 5% or 1% or any% of users actually need Outlook more than everyone else, and you can just give Outlook to those and keep everyone else on whatever mail interface they want. To make these things useful you need everyone to be using them. For example, a distributed calendar that only 5% of the people used would be pointless. The calendar that I implemented in scripts works for 100% of the users on any browser, and scales up very nicely thank you. The same is true of the other web-based tools I implemented or purchased. It's only old-school legacy software like Exchange that forces you to use mail as the transport and interface for web services, because they evolved from software designed for primitive networks that pretty much only did email.
Anyway, it sounds like you're arguing that I should force the 95% of the people who don't want Outlook to put up with it instead of the mail software of their choice, for the sake of some tiny subset of that 5% who are somehow magically incapable of using a web browser for calendering. How is THAT more responsive to user's needs?
And there certainly aren't 5% of websites that require IE. And despite actively seeking out users and polling them for sites they have trouble with I've found precisely zero business-related sites outside the New Corporate Intranet that require it. Virtually all the IE-only sites are games or movie traler/video clip sites, and if your users have a business related reason to play Luminous or Diamond Drop or whatever I want to work there.
There is nothing worse than a sysadmin who forgets his place.
I agree, more on that later...
I personally prefer Thunderbird or Opera, but I understand from other people that it's not nearly enough for serious business users.
I'm sorry, but "I understand from other people" doesn't cut it. Also, a system administrator's place is implementing and where appropriate guiding business policy, not simply doing what "I understand from other people" is the best solution.
I had to make a business case for this ban. I had to compare the features of Outlook with the alternatives, the costs, and convince my CEO that this was a good idea. I didn't just sit down and say "we're not going to use Outlook".
I got the ban approved and moved the few people using Outlook and the MANY people using Internet Explorer over to Netscape Mail, Eudora, and other applications. Shortly afterwards the first of the big email worms that exploited the active content hole hit. EVERY OTHER DIVISION OF THE COMPANY came to a standstill while they battled these worms, even the ones with clueful admins and excellent antivirus policies. All we saw was an increase in junk mail from the infected messages, particularly from other parts of the company.
These events were repeated over and over again. I implemented tools on our own webserver to fill in the gaps, and we just crusied along virus-free until the Head System Administrator forcibly integrated the networks and put us in the same mail and security domain... against the wishes of our division's CEO. That week the company got hit with another worm and that was the first time in six years that we had to stop everything and deal with a network meltdown. And that experience has been repeated over and over again.
Oh, and my users begged me to find a way to let them keep using Thunderbird, Mozilla, Eudora, or even "elm" instead of putting up with the centralized virus-checked super-functional "I understand from other people" is the leading corporate mail system. Because they much preferred something that worked to all the bells and whistles.
So don't get on my case about the place of a system administrator, bucko. The place of a system administrator is to make his users effective and the network and computer environment as transparent as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean letting them do whatever they want to, and "I understand from other people" isn't going to convince me... but you're welcome to talk to my boss about it.
I don't even want to break the iTMS DRM. I burn audio CDs as my backup.
I just don't want the REST of the baggage that would have to come along with any kind of effective DRM, which REALLY imply a closed source kernel and legal and technical restrictions on even necessary reverse engineering.
Given Microsoft's security record this should mean that Apple's share of PC market is at least 70%...
If most people were as easily frustrated and as aware of why they should be frustrated and care about security as you and I are, it would be. But it's amazing how much crap people are willing to accept as a normal cost of using computers.
I find myself regularly watching people put up with horribly broken systems and, after I fix the problem (because I can't even stand watching someone suffer), they're shocked. They didn't even realise the problem was a problem that could be fixed, they just EXPECTED it.
And security?
After having a contractor who is technically very good, and has been working in this business longer than me, stand there and argue why he should be an exception to my "No Outlook" policy WHILE I'M CLEANING OUT HIS COMPUTER THAT WAS INFECTED THROUGH AN OUTLOOK HOLE... I reckon that there's some fundamental difference between "average computer users" (no matter how skilled) and people like myself myself that goes far beyond experience and training and into some kind of "Zen" thing... I don't know.
Microsoft: the latest security hole in the HTML control is a buffer overflow in Javascript. They've known about it for months. Nothing happens until a sample exploit is released.
Apple: the latest security hole in Webkit is a buffer overflow in URLs. The first anyone hears of it is a patch through Software Update.
I have no plans to update to XP until I'm actually required to by software that doesn't work on 2000.
A more complex system with boobytraps deliberately hidden in the kernel and dubious anti-virus enhancements that actually make cleaning up malware harder? Yeh, I've gotta get me some of that. Plus, 2000 ships with a version of Windows Media Player old enough that it doesn't have its DRM tentacles coiled around the kernel's balls.
I'm also going to be staying clear of the new Intel-based Macs until I'm reasonably confident they don't have boobytraps or effective "strong DRM" support. Not because I want to pirate software or rip protected CDs, but because that stuff's toxic.
Internet Explorer can't be secured because it would require changing the API. I expected them to do that back in 1997, when it became obvious that backing out the tight integration between the desktop, the browser, and the ActiveX API was the only way to fix the real problem. Obviously I'm naive... having seven (no, eight now) years of spyware and viruses is preferable to abandoning their 'loophole' in the consent decree.
But if they're prepared to stonewall on deep security flaws, why do you expect them to pay attention to compliance with standards that they don't need to comply with because everyone has to support them anyway?
The small size is half the point. It is called Mini, after all.
It could be twice the size and it would still be half the size of any competitive device, so even if your odd devotion to the dubious value of a trademarked name was an issue, it would remain mini.
With my Mini, using external firewire drives and/or network drives is more than sufficient.
Without an external drive disk performance is poor enough to be noticable even in everyday use, and once you add an external drive the resulting accumulation of parts is far less mini and far less convenient than a single slightly larger device would be... and it would still have a video port the runs under spec, and a USB port that's only within spec by treating the mini as an unpowered device, and a GPU that's inadequate to support Quartz Extreme 2d, or even fully support Quartz Extreme on a large monitor. And to keep it quiet I can't even stretch it to its limits... just browsing some web pages is enough to turn the fan to high... it would actually be quieter if it were larger and better cooled. All these restrictions are part of the cost of that small design and the tight power restrictions that go along with it.
It's not inadequate, no, but adding not even twice but just half again the height would have allowed it to be easily twice the computer, so it's a crippled version of what it could have been.
WTF? Have they seen a Mac Mini? A 3.5" drive would require a completely new, much larger, case.
Did yuo read the article? They already brought that point up. The small size of the mini is a crippling bottleneck all round, it really NEEDS to be bigger just from the standpoint of cooling.
Itunes only asked me if I want to be setup as another user and transfer music from a different library.
Your music is associated with your account. It can only be played on a computer activated by that account. The correct answer to that question was "no".
Are you sure it *deleted* the music, rather than simply fail to *copy* it? Or did you just delete the old folder after the partial transfer?
Slashdot Mirror
I remixed culture and ended up with a sushi burrito!
and they generally tend to lead the others in terms of qualities you like -- thinness, size of screen, pixels on the screen. The whole world of Apple works together.
Thinness? Sony. Size of screen? Apple's just somewhere random in the pack. Pixels on the screen? Apple's been trailing there for ever. It's not until this year that the 17" Powerbook had more pixels than my old 14" Thinkpad, and they're still behind the leaders.
in Permutation City one of the characters has a high level agent, not a full blown conscious AI but more like an expert system, that sits in front of her online telephone/chat/email (they all seem to be the same thing) system to filter out increasingly aggressive software that is itself running high level expert systems pretending to be acquaintances and friends. At one point she gets a call allegedly from someone she knows that turns out to be software... and it takes her a little while watching it interact with HER software before she's sure it's not real. It turns to be a soft-sell from a religious group...
If you think you'll get music for less than $0.99 per song, you're dreaming.
I get music for less than 99c a song every week through 3hive, and some of it is stuff like Mr. Moran from the Bosstones that I'd never in a million years have found any other way.
I can't cost-effectively get cable from three different cable companies, except through reseller pseudo-competition like all the "Fred's DSL" services.
It's hard to have "auction" pricing for an unlimited resource, unless you create an artificial scarcity (for example, virtual currencies like the Linden dollar). Now, calling it an artificial scarcity shouldn't be taken to mean that it's a bad thing... the artificial scarcity in printed banknotes is normally considered a GOOD thing.
The question is, how would you create an artificial scarcity of copies of a song?
I'm sorry... Google Desktop is allegedly being groomed into a competitor for Microsoft Office. I'm not sure where OS X comes into the picture.
i attached it to your comment because this portion of your previous post
OK, I don't get it. I'm not taking anything and running "further and further with it", I started at the same line as everything else.
I looked at the picture, went 'that looks like a fossa, interesting' and because the taxonomical confusion over madagascar's viverrids was fresh in my mind I thought it worth commenting about. I added it to the comment about the fossa because I started out looking for a comment about a fossa to attach it to, because someone reading a message about a fossa might find it interesting, not because I read it and went "oh, yeh, a fossa".
On the other hand, someone who might be in the potential audience for comments about escaped pets would more likely find your message if it was at the top level and labeled "It might be an escaped pet". You might want to repost.
I'm not sure why you attached this to my comment rather than the top level, but I'll make a couple of comments anyway.
1. Borneo is large and sparsely populated, particularly in the high altitude rainforests.
2. When they say "the local people don't know it" you don't know who they talked to. There must be 50 ethnic groups and languages on Borneo, and subsistence farmers don't travel huge distances.
3. "New mammal species" doesn't mean "nobody's ever seen it before". It just means "nobody who publishes in academic journals has seen it before". Columbus didn't discover the New World, the people living there had known about it all their lives... they discovered Columbus!
I'm not surprised that there are people like this there.
The problems at microsoft that lead to things like the IE-hole-of-the-month-club have nothing to do with the competence or otherwise of the people working there. You could put Linus, RMS, and another fifty of the top OSS developers there and (if they didn't quit) they'd end up producing the same quality of product.
The problem is that windows has some fundamentally bad designs baked into it. Design flaws that they won't (and probably by now can't) change. Some deliberately created for short-term advantage, like the IE/ActiveX farce, that would break too many applications for them to properly fix now.
My first thought was that Nick Isaac was smoking something good. It sure looks like a fossa to me, and it's possibly a related viverrid. That could lead to a real breakthrough in our understanding of the Malagasay viverrids. As far as I know there really aren't any close relatives of the fossa anywhere else in the world, and this could help solve the question of whether the fossa (Cryptoprocta Ferox) and the malagasay civet (confusingly categorised as Fossa Fossana) are related or not.
All the cars on the earth(which is round) has round wheels!!!!
Yes, but only Katamari Darmacii can build a car big enough to take advantage of that.
Well, he's got a point, or he might have if the "DRM industry" wasn't undermining it... all you need if you're trying to keep mostly-honest people honest is a token lock. The iTunes nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM has been tremendously successful even though Apple tells you one way to remove it by burning an audio CD, and recommends that you do this to have a backup.
You don't need "secure audio path" and hardware DRM and kernel DRM modules for that.
And if you DO want strong DRM, putting it in the middle of a general purpose OS is stark staring bonkers. There are so many avenues of attack for that the only way to make it secure is to cripple the OS. Make the DRM, the keys, the decoder, and everything else part of the audio hardware and the video card... so the OS doesn't need to be any more secure than the internet connection the media was downloaded over. It just pulls an encrypted audio or video stream from the file and feeds it to the card, and the decryption happens there. MUCH better design than this one.
I seem to recall that they actually have done that in cards with hardware MPEG decoders for DVDs.
I suspect that the reason Microsoft is pushing so hard to put it in the NT kernel, other than their fetish for making Windows the center of the computing world because they're still trying to operate as a start-up, is that open source software would be able to easily support hardware DRM in the end devices, whereas supporting hard DRM in the OS and convincing software vendors and content creators to trust them is a much tougher job.
However I have one question...
At some point, all these files floating around for free on the net are going to start sounding pretty crappy.
What makes you say this?
Well, I guess.. like "why would you go with Microsoft who sit on a vulnerability for months, instead of someone who actually fixes security holes?"
If it requires them to have OS- and CPU- specific software anyway, why bother making it browser-based? That actually decreases the potential user base, because now you have to have the right OS and the right CPU, but the right browser as well.
Yes, yes, you can use common GUI code on all three platforms. But you can do that with any number of other technologies, from scripting languages like Tcl/Tk, through Java, to cross-platform libraries. It seems like a bad move to me.
There are roughly forty zillion applications for loading appointments into Palm Desktop, and we use those. Notebooks without network connectivity are pretty much useless for so many other reasons that it doesn't much matter that they need it for appointments.
MSDN and Windows Update are special cases, and you know that... and Windows Update runs the HTML control for its access even if you pick another default browser, so that's a non-issue.
In addition, how does your company get customers outside slashdot if your own web designers are not testing their stuff with IE?
Man, every damn message you've posted is full of all kinds of bad assumptions.
I'm in the real-time control systems business. Bugs in our software can kill people quicker than you can say "high voltage". Our customer's systems, you should be glad to know, don't even have internet access by policy, and are not only behind the corporate firewall they have their own firewall protecting them from the untrusted corporate network, and even then they're careful what protocols they run between systems.
You are doing a horrible job if 95% of users are happy and virus free, but 5% can not get their work done because they are unable to access an IE-only website or don't have access to a distributed calendar, to do lists and other collaboration tools.
I'm sorry, but it's just not true that 5% or 1% or any% of users actually need Outlook more than everyone else, and you can just give Outlook to those and keep everyone else on whatever mail interface they want. To make these things useful you need everyone to be using them. For example, a distributed calendar that only 5% of the people used would be pointless. The calendar that I implemented in scripts works for 100% of the users on any browser, and scales up very nicely thank you. The same is true of the other web-based tools I implemented or purchased. It's only old-school legacy software like Exchange that forces you to use mail as the transport and interface for web services, because they evolved from software designed for primitive networks that pretty much only did email.
Anyway, it sounds like you're arguing that I should force the 95% of the people who don't want Outlook to put up with it instead of the mail software of their choice, for the sake of some tiny subset of that 5% who are somehow magically incapable of using a web browser for calendering. How is THAT more responsive to user's needs?
And there certainly aren't 5% of websites that require IE. And despite actively seeking out users and polling them for sites they have trouble with I've found precisely zero business-related sites outside the New Corporate Intranet that require it. Virtually all the IE-only sites are games or movie traler/video clip sites, and if your users have a business related reason to play Luminous or Diamond Drop or whatever I want to work there.
There is nothing worse than a sysadmin who forgets his place.
I agree, more on that later...
I personally prefer Thunderbird or Opera, but I understand from other people that it's not nearly enough for serious business users.
I'm sorry, but "I understand from other people" doesn't cut it. Also, a system administrator's place is implementing and where appropriate guiding business policy, not simply doing what "I understand from other people" is the best solution.
I had to make a business case for this ban. I had to compare the features of Outlook with the alternatives, the costs, and convince my CEO that this was a good idea. I didn't just sit down and say "we're not going to use Outlook".
I got the ban approved and moved the few people using Outlook and the MANY people using Internet Explorer over to Netscape Mail, Eudora, and other applications. Shortly afterwards the first of the big email worms that exploited the active content hole hit. EVERY OTHER DIVISION OF THE COMPANY came to a standstill while they battled these worms, even the ones with clueful admins and excellent antivirus policies. All we saw was an increase in junk mail from the infected messages, particularly from other parts of the company.
These events were repeated over and over again. I implemented tools on our own webserver to fill in the gaps, and we just crusied along virus-free until the Head System Administrator forcibly integrated the networks and put us in the same mail and security domain... against the wishes of our division's CEO. That week the company got hit with another worm and that was the first time in six years that we had to stop everything and deal with a network meltdown. And that experience has been repeated over and over again.
Oh, and my users begged me to find a way to let them keep using Thunderbird, Mozilla, Eudora, or even "elm" instead of putting up with the centralized virus-checked super-functional "I understand from other people" is the leading corporate mail system. Because they much preferred something that worked to all the bells and whistles.
So don't get on my case about the place of a system administrator, bucko. The place of a system administrator is to make his users effective and the network and computer environment as transparent as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean letting them do whatever they want to, and "I understand from other people" isn't going to convince me... but you're welcome to talk to my boss about it.
I don't even want to break the iTMS DRM. I burn audio CDs as my backup.
I just don't want the REST of the baggage that would have to come along with any kind of effective DRM, which REALLY imply a closed source kernel and legal and technical restrictions on even necessary reverse engineering.
Given Microsoft's security record this should mean that Apple's share of PC market is at least 70%...
If most people were as easily frustrated and as aware of why they should be frustrated and care about security as you and I are, it would be. But it's amazing how much crap people are willing to accept as a normal cost of using computers.
I find myself regularly watching people put up with horribly broken systems and, after I fix the problem (because I can't even stand watching someone suffer), they're shocked. They didn't even realise the problem was a problem that could be fixed, they just EXPECTED it.
And security?
After having a contractor who is technically very good, and has been working in this business longer than me, stand there and argue why he should be an exception to my "No Outlook" policy WHILE I'M CLEANING OUT HIS COMPUTER THAT WAS INFECTED THROUGH AN OUTLOOK HOLE... I reckon that there's some fundamental difference between "average computer users" (no matter how skilled) and people like myself myself that goes far beyond experience and training and into some kind of "Zen" thing... I don't know.
Microsoft: the latest security hole in the HTML control is a buffer overflow in Javascript. They've known about it for months. Nothing happens until a sample exploit is released.
Apple: the latest security hole in Webkit is a buffer overflow in URLs. The first anyone hears of it is a patch through Software Update.
I have no plans to update to XP until I'm actually required to by software that doesn't work on 2000.
A more complex system with boobytraps deliberately hidden in the kernel and dubious anti-virus enhancements that actually make cleaning up malware harder? Yeh, I've gotta get me some of that. Plus, 2000 ships with a version of Windows Media Player old enough that it doesn't have its DRM tentacles coiled around the kernel's balls.
I'm also going to be staying clear of the new Intel-based Macs until I'm reasonably confident they don't have boobytraps or effective "strong DRM" support. Not because I want to pirate software or rip protected CDs, but because that stuff's toxic.
Internet Explorer can't be secured because it would require changing the API. I expected them to do that back in 1997, when it became obvious that backing out the tight integration between the desktop, the browser, and the ActiveX API was the only way to fix the real problem. Obviously I'm naive... having seven (no, eight now) years of spyware and viruses is preferable to abandoning their 'loophole' in the consent decree.
But if they're prepared to stonewall on deep security flaws, why do you expect them to pay attention to compliance with standards that they don't need to comply with because everyone has to support them anyway?
The small size is half the point. It is called Mini, after all.
It could be twice the size and it would still be half the size of any competitive device, so even if your odd devotion to the dubious value of a trademarked name was an issue, it would remain mini.
With my Mini, using external firewire drives and/or network drives is more than sufficient.
Without an external drive disk performance is poor enough to be noticable even in everyday use, and once you add an external drive the resulting accumulation of parts is far less mini and far less convenient than a single slightly larger device would be... and it would still have a video port the runs under spec, and a USB port that's only within spec by treating the mini as an unpowered device, and a GPU that's inadequate to support Quartz Extreme 2d, or even fully support Quartz Extreme on a large monitor. And to keep it quiet I can't even stretch it to its limits... just browsing some web pages is enough to turn the fan to high... it would actually be quieter if it were larger and better cooled. All these restrictions are part of the cost of that small design and the tight power restrictions that go along with it.
It's not inadequate, no, but adding not even twice but just half again the height would have allowed it to be easily twice the computer, so it's a crippled version of what it could have been.
WTF? Have they seen a Mac Mini? A 3.5" drive would require a completely new, much larger, case.
Did yuo read the article? They already brought that point up. The small size of the mini is a crippling bottleneck all round, it really NEEDS to be bigger just from the standpoint of cooling.
Itunes only asked me if I want to be setup as another user and transfer music from a different library.
Your music is associated with your account. It can only be played on a computer activated by that account. The correct answer to that question was "no".
Are you sure it *deleted* the music, rather than simply fail to *copy* it? Or did you just delete the old folder after the partial transfer?