Advertised version numbers are meaningless, MS numbers doubly so.
I have been using browsers since Mosiac. The situation with Netscape 4 is the same as it is today. The complexity and malfomedness of MS sanctioned and generated HTML tends to break non IE browsers. This coupled with the fact that the ignorant masses confuse a text markup language with a page markup language meant the end of the generic browser. The proffesional sites like Amazon, Yahoo, most banks, most retail stores work with all browsers. Only the hick web sites, in which someone suddenly has the bright idea that we need one of those website thingies, need IE.
[To be clear, i am not talking about companies writing application front ends for internal or established customer use. IE is legitimate, although seldom really needed, in these cases.]
Mozilla and Firefox and most other browsers still have trouble with the IE malformed code and the silly complexity that MS introduces into a medium that is meant provide a guaranteed simple way to reach a userbase, whether those be potential customers or fellow crackpots. What MS has done is contrary to the reason people make websites. Nearly impossible navigation and flashy screens is not going to make people come back. A search box that works in any browser and a simple login is the basic need. And anything that cannot do this is simply useless.
Back to the point, the parent is right. What MS did was limit what OEMs could do with the software. The OEMs needed windows, and in the world of falling PC prices needed it cheap. MS was willing to compy only if the OEMs participated in the marketing program of MS other properties. Whether the properities are applications or formats is an arguable point. However, the upshot is the same. MS used OEM to create a monopoly. Util OEMs are free to pick and choose, the monopoly will remain.
One would imagine that these links are somehow automatically generated to make deployment faster, or just to utilize spare time. It makes sense that anticipated future product lines are included in the mix. I assume that someone just set a flag incorrectly. It is like when papers write obits in advance and publish them by mistake.
The G5 powerbook is hopefully coming. Some indicators point to a release this year. Others point to another interation of the G4, and a G5 next year. For my computing I am not all that impatient. It is like the 68xx to PowerPC switch. I have enough invested in the old technology. My major issue right now is sufficient memory.
To me, the mini is too far on the unexpandable size. I do not like not being able to add bluetooth or airport or memory after the fact. The LC form fact was much more reasonable.
However. as the parent indicates, the issue is much more of internal or external expandability. Expanding with internal parts can be cheaper, but it requires designed, perhaps overdesigned, for that purpose, often at extra initial expense that may never be utilitzed. OTOH, SCSI, firewire, Appletalk, etc, has tended to allow Apple to design a minimilist machine that is still expandable.
I priced the cheapest machine at HP, and it was over $800. It did have a better DVD drive, and might be faster in certain situations.
The problem, as always, it what you want. The PC has always been a good choice when one just needed a cheap GPC or a computer dedicated to MS Office, or some vertical application. One does not need a quality machine for the grunt. However, when we are talking about a versitile GPC, and starting getting into things like speed, quality, support, then the Mac became a competitor.
The issue is as it has always been. What is equal. Is XP home equal to OS X, or must you add $50 to the PC. Does anyone need OS X, or is that just a luxury. Is the fact you won't be interrogated everytime you want to download an unpdate worth nothing. Is the fact that most paid-for-updates are not security critical, but merely performance upgrades.
Apple would be a fool to undercut the WinTel pricing. The WinTel machine has it's place in the world, and those that produce it are happy making a few dollars per machine and liking MS balls for the rest. The thing that so few people on/. don't understand is that there is room for everything. If all you need is WinTel machine, buy it. If you are happy with Linux on x86, that is great.
For many of us, Apple has provided us with quality machines for 20 years. A little more, but perhaps we value a computer more than a more expensive car. We are already distressed at the quality issues that appear as Apple build cheaper machines. If we wanted a cheap PC, we would get a cheap PC.
When i browse the web, I always wish more web monkeys had read the humane interface, as well as his other usability work. So many sites, including those that are not corporate, are hobbled by corporate priorities, rather than delivering a product to the consumer.
One thing that Raskin has gotten right is the idea that the user should not have to know your corporate structure to use the page. Niether should the user have to know his or her status within your structure. The thing that he does not address, and one reason why I found Home Page Usability less than perfect, is how to meld the utopian usability with realistic personal and corporate needs.
The reality is that most large usability problems can be solved by following his basic principles. In one school district web site, a third of the web page is used by navigation and rotating banner ads. And this is the intranet. The place where the employees are supposed to be productive. The IE only code does not resize properly to page width, and uses a lot of distrating widgets. Likewise the Rice University web presence forces the user to choose 'student' 'public' etcetera, and has no default navigation that lets you just find a map. The University of Houston has some of the same problems, but provides a second simple text navigation for those who just want some quick info.
The best way to save enterprise is to nix the time travel arc. Have the crew win the time wars. Destroy all time technolgy. Make sure it never happened. And, like Dallas, be transported back to season one, perhaps even with a nude scene in a shower. Leave everything else behind as the bad dream it has become. I would watch that.
MS Word files are workable back to a certain point, and on certain platforms. Stock MS Word for XP does have certain problems with Mid-90's format, and probably those older as well. Stock MS Word in the early 90's had a great deal of trouble with earlier versions of word.
In order to create a facade of safety, MS is obviously going to make it possible to read it's proprietary formats back to day one. If such ability is default behavior, or if the format has changed so much that all or even most formatted is preserved, has always been a game of chance. In the past 5 years or so the format and MS is getting more mature, and they are making fewer decisions based on forcing vendor lockin, but the history of word goes back 20+ years, not 10-15. My experience is that I begin to have trouble after two releases. Again, it is always possible, but not always easy.
with any luck future devices won't be crippled with silly formats no one uses.
What do I care what sony makes, as long as someone else makes something I want. Sony or whoever can make all the silly useless gadgets they want, as long as Apple and Creative are making player that understand the MP3 format. It is not like the OGG problem, in which few players work with it, and few major market vendors are taking it seriously.
Sony needs to be honest. They took a risk based on greed and fear. The risk turned out not to work. It was not a mistake. It was a calculated risk in an effort to protect thier content based a belief that they should be paid at least for every piece of Sony IP, if not for each access to they Sony IP.
Again, I don't care. As long as there is reasonable choice, it matters not what an individual company does. It won't stop future attempts to destroy choice for consumers. Nothing ever does. And with these huge companies, such decisions, unfortunately, will not lead to bankruptcy.
I simply never understood why the metric for web ads are so different from the metric for all other media ads. I mean in newspapers and television and magazines, the advertisers pays for the potential to reach the viewing or subscriber base. It is possible to guess how good these campaigns are doing, but the continuation of the campaign is often based on demographics, not how many people come in and say, hey, I saw your ad on Survivor and wanted to pick up your product. Advertisers want to create a personal connection to the consumer, and this is done by sponsoring content the target consumer desires.
Now it could be said that web advertising is more like direct mail. A firm pays an ad agency to create copy, the post office to send stuff out, and hopes for enough responses to the campaign to generate the profit. If the campaign fails, maybe the ad agency receives some flack. But the post office is not going to refund money because several hundred of the recipients happened to work for a competitor, or because a third of the envelopes were discarded unopened.
So where did this concept of one click one sale, or one click one payment. What happened to the concept of sponsoring good content in the hopes of generating a connection to potential customers. By all accounts TV and print ads are increasingly worthless. Can web ads be any worse? Could the problem be that the ad agencies or advertisers are not taking time to understand the medium? Are all web advertisers so fly by night that they need a sale today because tomorrow they will have run off to tahiti with the receipts?
The NYT merely states that the new cable deal fell through, that thier current cable partner is affiliated with a competing PVR, and that the current executive will be replaced with someone more able to deal with the cable companies.
The big guys are notorious for setting up deals that spell the end of the little guy. The big guys don't care because they will roll thier own or find someone else to do the work of the now bankrupt firm. It could be that TiVo was not so greedy for immidiate bonuses and saw through to the long term. We really cannot know.
More likely the cable cos probably wanted more strict DRM, and TiVo wants to differentiate it's player by provided cable unfreindly features. The new director may very well cave into the cable interests, and the consumer may lose all fair use rights.
I don't like the optics or style of Oakley (flash over function), but a building a bluetooth headset, if this is in fact what they are talking about, makes much more sense than and MP3 Player. The earphone is done, so all that needs to be designed is the boom. The bluetooth circuitry can easily fit in the space of an mp3 player.
For walking and driving around sunglasses would be much more stable than the average headset.
As long as google has no certifiable cases of self-censorship, keeps the privacy option on tool, does not require registration to use, does not require cookies to use, maintains an API that the average web developer can use, and provides a useful range of tool registration free, I have few complaints.
There were much fewer complaints as MS when the licensing and registration terms were liberal, although we have always complained that they were less than forthcoming with the interupts.
But during this time in the late 90s. IT wasn't thinking of security
Security may not have been a priority, but reasonable IT people were thinking about it. In fact since before the worms started formating HD in DOS, rational IT people did think about security. Hackers have always been present, and competent staff has always defended against them, making sure users logged of terminals, scanning floppies, setting up user level security. The only people that were not thinking security was MS, and they convinced a lot of people that security was not important. Today my OS X machine can automatically log off after a certain time, has a built in firewall since day 1, and does not automagigicaly relinquish control to an arbitrary website.
What happened is that MS always reacts. Java is a threat, make ActiveX. Netscape is a threat, buy a mosaic derivative. Need a real OS, hire a couple guys from DEC then screw it up with bad engineering decisions. It was really like the Ford Pinto. Not a bad car. Not incredibly dangerous. But somewhere a decision was made to allow a known significant risk of death. Fortunately for us the laws were present to force Ford to absorb some of the costs related to Pinto. Unfortunately for us, MS has externalized all costs of it's bad decisions to the consumer.
Krogers in unionized and is still doing quite well against Wall*mart. Those who prefer to pay for an honest days wage, rather than use slavery, know where to shop.
If the airlines can't make money without working people to death, they need smarter managaement.
In the US we developed a hub and spoke system. Huge planes to major spokes, then a second plane to where you want to go. If you are fortunate enough to fly to or from a hub, then you can make it in one flight.
Some smaller airlines will do no frills flight from an arbitrary destination to another. These airlines are hobbled by the fact that they may no get a be able to get landing rights to a particular airport, so travelers sometimes must use ground transporation, over a significant distance, or a puddle jumper to complete thier journey.
The advantage of these larger jets, if the airports can work out the logistics, is than they should increase the number of travelers that can be serviced by a given terminal by increasing the potential travelers per plane. Even if some logistics are not solved, it wil solve the cramped takeoff and landing schedule.
Of course all these are theoretical. Perhaps nothing will change. It is unlikely the big airlines will want the smaller competitors to have access to the unused slots, and airport access is one of the things that keeps the hub and spoke system viable.
The open standard argument against iPod is silly, and saying MS has better DRM assumes that the consumer want DRM. Yes Apple should support Ogg. No Apple should not support WMP. Apple DRM cannot re-download songs because the DRM is meant to be cosmetic.
WMP is problematic. The recent bug in which trojans are downloaded through it proves that it is dangerous. To be fully functional WMP requires many validating connections to the net, allows information to be sent back and forth about the user, and allows an unnecessarily complex number of rules. There is not reason for apple to support this. Apple users don't want to trade their personal information for the right to listen to some song that is already paid for. If the history of Realplayer is any indication, no one does.
Apple has a good DRM. It will work with iTunes and iPod automagically. If you have another player, burn the song to CD, something you should do anyway to make a backup, and reimport it in your favorite format. Yes, there is theoretical quality loss, but if you are worrying about quality, why are you downloading music. Buy the CD or get it the old fashion way. Borrow a CD from a friend and copy it.
The fact that you want you life to be controlled is what humanity has been fighting against. Those that are happy to be slaves, and like sheep give the reign of sovereignty to those that are willing to oppress.
That pretty much sums it up. Consumer portable audio has never worked for me because there wre too many points of failure. Even the old Sony Walkman did not do a good job of securing the headphone hack. All of these had cheaply made subsytems that would render an otherwise working unit useless.
My creative player was no different. A plastic switch broke and made the unit extremely difficult to use. When I was looking at a new player, I did not go to creative. I went to apple with thier mini. It had one switch, and a trackpad with button, something that has proved to be very reliable. Likewise, the ram allows the harddrive to be mostly powered down and safe under normal cicumstances.
I paid good money for the creative palyer, almost as much as the mini. Creative just didn't care enough about the product to make it reliable. Althought the battery life was better than the iPod.
And any reasonable person who takes it seriously get what they deserve. It is reducing the rating of the computers perfomance, or even the cars performanace, to a single number. It is invoking the 'single vendor', either as a good or bad thing, to sell MS products. We do not buy furniture, we buy a lifestyle. We do not buy beer, we buy a dudes night out. We show our love not through the daily attention paid to another person, but through the size of diamond or a security system or, as a base, the amount of money we are able to accumulate.
We know that people buy stuff of spam. I saw a $2 pan being sold as a custom $10 fondue set. MS tells us that employees are incapable of using anything other than MS Windows. Apple tells us that you are a square if you don't use Macs. IBM promises massive profits if you use the complete solution. Sun says that IBM is ripping everyone off. It is game and learning to play it is part of our brand of capitalism.
It is not a complex deal. It is a simple one. It has been known since the introuction of these seeds that cross polination would occur. It was known that Monsato would file suits against those that were infected by the Monsanto product. The hope was that a structure could be set up to sue Monsanto for the infection. This did not happen. So what will happen is that every farmer, even those farmers that chose not to run a farm on manmade chemicals, will have to use Monsanto crops. Now this may be ok in more facists countries, but the U.S., and particularly Canada, still values some level of consumer choice.
So here is the deal. Monsanto could have chosen to sell the seeds under normal terms, and made thier money through the sale of roundup. It would be less profit, but it would probably build more loyalty Instead they choose to maximize profits at all levels, and ignore the risk to farmers that choose not to use their products. this is a classic example of Corporate Domination.
As far as your point about the farmer, the farmer is trying to do they same thing as Monsanto. Maximize profit. If we assume that Monsanto needs to sell the seed to make a reasonable profit, can we assume that the struggling farmer is forced to harvest seeds to do the same. Is Monsanto better of having a farmer that can afford to purchase the Round Up, rather than moving to alternative growing methods that often fetch higher prices for crops? I certainly pay more when I know that the farmer is trying to work with the land instead of against it. (And before someone points out the scarcity issue, the US produces about twice as much food for US consumption than the US needs. This is a much higher buffer than we need)
But, at the end of day, we return to the fact that the Monsanto seeds is a virus that will tend to take over and create a monoculture, not because they are superior, buy becase they are new and immune to the current threats. Future threats will develop, and perhaps we will not be so lucky to have a protected space, like the NASA orange groves, to save us from out short sightedness.
The mini looks great. Built in blue tooth. Built in airport. Included productivity apps. Combo drive. Really better than anything available a the price point.
I am worried about one thing. Years ago when they started shipping cheap laptops, performanced suffered greatly. The cheaper hardware could not match the quality and speed one had come to expect from apple. I probably won't buy one of these until the third gen.
What I do hope for is these to start appearing in schools. I want a lab in which I can have student log into an account with *nix like controls over applications and net access. Our admin cannot seem to do this with XP.
And the new ipod is a good as anything I have seen. Extremely competative price and storage capacity. It might bring me back to the flash based player. Certainly easier to carry for exersise.
Pretty much this is just the rehashed single vendor argument, and was used 20 years ago to build the MS monopoly. Basically, it siad that the PC was better because there were multiple vendors, and Apple was worse because it was a single vendor.
Of course, in terms of hardware and software, the market was much more single vendor. There was IBM, Compaq, and Apple. Whichever machine you bought you were locked into hardware and to some degree software. Today is much different.
Apple and the PC market in general has moved to commodity hardware, so what you are buying is support. The two big OS, Mac and MS Windows, both put you into single vendor status. The difference is that Apple will support it's hardware and software, while MS will often try to push support to other vedors. Given the growth of the *nix marker, the Mac might be a better choice.
No one knows what MS will do, how it will further lock customers into weird standards. No one knows what the Linux vendors will do in term of outsourcing support or modifing the applications. Insecurity is always an isuue
The life cycle this is like fashion. If you wish you can buy a new wardrobe every year, however it will be because the clothes are out of fashion, not because they are old. I have Mac OS X 10.3 running well on a c. 2000 Mac, with only a memory and hard disk upgrade. I wonder if XP will run well on a c. 1999 PC.
Everyone knows the only way to truly worship god is to throw all your valuable and intricately carved tokens into a bog pit. The occasional human sacrifice does not hurt either.
Simply saving up your best token and displaying them is not sufficient worship. I sleep at night knowing that people who keep their tokens are going to be the first against the wall come Armageddon. Fools!
Slashdot Mirror
I have been using browsers since Mosiac. The situation with Netscape 4 is the same as it is today. The complexity and malfomedness of MS sanctioned and generated HTML tends to break non IE browsers. This coupled with the fact that the ignorant masses confuse a text markup language with a page markup language meant the end of the generic browser. The proffesional sites like Amazon, Yahoo, most banks, most retail stores work with all browsers. Only the hick web sites, in which someone suddenly has the bright idea that we need one of those website thingies, need IE.
[To be clear, i am not talking about companies writing application front ends for internal or established customer use. IE is legitimate, although seldom really needed, in these cases.]
Mozilla and Firefox and most other browsers still have trouble with the IE malformed code and the silly complexity that MS introduces into a medium that is meant provide a guaranteed simple way to reach a userbase, whether those be potential customers or fellow crackpots. What MS has done is contrary to the reason people make websites. Nearly impossible navigation and flashy screens is not going to make people come back. A search box that works in any browser and a simple login is the basic need. And anything that cannot do this is simply useless.
Back to the point, the parent is right. What MS did was limit what OEMs could do with the software. The OEMs needed windows, and in the world of falling PC prices needed it cheap. MS was willing to compy only if the OEMs participated in the marketing program of MS other properties. Whether the properities are applications or formats is an arguable point. However, the upshot is the same. MS used OEM to create a monopoly. Util OEMs are free to pick and choose, the monopoly will remain.
The G5 powerbook is hopefully coming. Some indicators point to a release this year. Others point to another interation of the G4, and a G5 next year. For my computing I am not all that impatient. It is like the 68xx to PowerPC switch. I have enough invested in the old technology. My major issue right now is sufficient memory.
However. as the parent indicates, the issue is much more of internal or external expandability. Expanding with internal parts can be cheaper, but it requires designed, perhaps overdesigned, for that purpose, often at extra initial expense that may never be utilitzed. OTOH, SCSI, firewire, Appletalk, etc, has tended to allow Apple to design a minimilist machine that is still expandable.
The problem, as always, it what you want. The PC has always been a good choice when one just needed a cheap GPC or a computer dedicated to MS Office, or some vertical application. One does not need a quality machine for the grunt. However, when we are talking about a versitile GPC, and starting getting into things like speed, quality, support, then the Mac became a competitor.
The issue is as it has always been. What is equal. Is XP home equal to OS X, or must you add $50 to the PC. Does anyone need OS X, or is that just a luxury. Is the fact you won't be interrogated everytime you want to download an unpdate worth nothing. Is the fact that most paid-for-updates are not security critical, but merely performance upgrades.
Apple would be a fool to undercut the WinTel pricing. The WinTel machine has it's place in the world, and those that produce it are happy making a few dollars per machine and liking MS balls for the rest. The thing that so few people on /. don't understand is that there is room for everything. If all you need is WinTel machine, buy it. If you are happy with Linux on x86, that is great.
For many of us, Apple has provided us with quality machines for 20 years. A little more, but perhaps we value a computer more than a more expensive car. We are already distressed at the quality issues that appear as Apple build cheaper machines. If we wanted a cheap PC, we would get a cheap PC.
One thing that Raskin has gotten right is the idea that the user should not have to know your corporate structure to use the page. Niether should the user have to know his or her status within your structure. The thing that he does not address, and one reason why I found Home Page Usability less than perfect, is how to meld the utopian usability with realistic personal and corporate needs.
The reality is that most large usability problems can be solved by following his basic principles. In one school district web site, a third of the web page is used by navigation and rotating banner ads. And this is the intranet. The place where the employees are supposed to be productive. The IE only code does not resize properly to page width, and uses a lot of distrating widgets. Likewise the Rice University web presence forces the user to choose 'student' 'public' etcetera, and has no default navigation that lets you just find a map. The University of Houston has some of the same problems, but provides a second simple text navigation for those who just want some quick info.
The best way to save enterprise is to nix the time travel arc. Have the crew win the time wars. Destroy all time technolgy. Make sure it never happened. And, like Dallas, be transported back to season one, perhaps even with a nude scene in a shower. Leave everything else behind as the bad dream it has become. I would watch that.
In order to create a facade of safety, MS is obviously going to make it possible to read it's proprietary formats back to day one. If such ability is default behavior, or if the format has changed so much that all or even most formatted is preserved, has always been a game of chance. In the past 5 years or so the format and MS is getting more mature, and they are making fewer decisions based on forcing vendor lockin, but the history of word goes back 20+ years, not 10-15. My experience is that I begin to have trouble after two releases. Again, it is always possible, but not always easy.
What do I care what sony makes, as long as someone else makes something I want. Sony or whoever can make all the silly useless gadgets they want, as long as Apple and Creative are making player that understand the MP3 format. It is not like the OGG problem, in which few players work with it, and few major market vendors are taking it seriously.
Sony needs to be honest. They took a risk based on greed and fear. The risk turned out not to work. It was not a mistake. It was a calculated risk in an effort to protect thier content based a belief that they should be paid at least for every piece of Sony IP, if not for each access to they Sony IP.
Again, I don't care. As long as there is reasonable choice, it matters not what an individual company does. It won't stop future attempts to destroy choice for consumers. Nothing ever does. And with these huge companies, such decisions, unfortunately, will not lead to bankruptcy.
Now it could be said that web advertising is more like direct mail. A firm pays an ad agency to create copy, the post office to send stuff out, and hopes for enough responses to the campaign to generate the profit. If the campaign fails, maybe the ad agency receives some flack. But the post office is not going to refund money because several hundred of the recipients happened to work for a competitor, or because a third of the envelopes were discarded unopened.
So where did this concept of one click one sale, or one click one payment. What happened to the concept of sponsoring good content in the hopes of generating a connection to potential customers. By all accounts TV and print ads are increasingly worthless. Can web ads be any worse? Could the problem be that the ad agencies or advertisers are not taking time to understand the medium? Are all web advertisers so fly by night that they need a sale today because tomorrow they will have run off to tahiti with the receipts?
The big guys are notorious for setting up deals that spell the end of the little guy. The big guys don't care because they will roll thier own or find someone else to do the work of the now bankrupt firm. It could be that TiVo was not so greedy for immidiate bonuses and saw through to the long term. We really cannot know.
More likely the cable cos probably wanted more strict DRM, and TiVo wants to differentiate it's player by provided cable unfreindly features. The new director may very well cave into the cable interests, and the consumer may lose all fair use rights.
For walking and driving around sunglasses would be much more stable than the average headset.
I think what you are looking for is peril sensitive sunglasses. They were last available in the HHGTTG video game.
There were much fewer complaints as MS when the licensing and registration terms were liberal, although we have always complained that they were less than forthcoming with the interupts.
Security may not have been a priority, but reasonable IT people were thinking about it. In fact since before the worms started formating HD in DOS, rational IT people did think about security. Hackers have always been present, and competent staff has always defended against them, making sure users logged of terminals, scanning floppies, setting up user level security. The only people that were not thinking security was MS, and they convinced a lot of people that security was not important. Today my OS X machine can automatically log off after a certain time, has a built in firewall since day 1, and does not automagigicaly relinquish control to an arbitrary website.
What happened is that MS always reacts. Java is a threat, make ActiveX. Netscape is a threat, buy a mosaic derivative. Need a real OS, hire a couple guys from DEC then screw it up with bad engineering decisions. It was really like the Ford Pinto. Not a bad car. Not incredibly dangerous. But somewhere a decision was made to allow a known significant risk of death. Fortunately for us the laws were present to force Ford to absorb some of the costs related to Pinto. Unfortunately for us, MS has externalized all costs of it's bad decisions to the consumer.
If the airlines can't make money without working people to death, they need smarter managaement.
Some smaller airlines will do no frills flight from an arbitrary destination to another. These airlines are hobbled by the fact that they may no get a be able to get landing rights to a particular airport, so travelers sometimes must use ground transporation, over a significant distance, or a puddle jumper to complete thier journey.
The advantage of these larger jets, if the airports can work out the logistics, is than they should increase the number of travelers that can be serviced by a given terminal by increasing the potential travelers per plane. Even if some logistics are not solved, it wil solve the cramped takeoff and landing schedule.
Of course all these are theoretical. Perhaps nothing will change. It is unlikely the big airlines will want the smaller competitors to have access to the unused slots, and airport access is one of the things that keeps the hub and spoke system viable.
WMP is problematic. The recent bug in which trojans are downloaded through it proves that it is dangerous. To be fully functional WMP requires many validating connections to the net, allows information to be sent back and forth about the user, and allows an unnecessarily complex number of rules. There is not reason for apple to support this. Apple users don't want to trade their personal information for the right to listen to some song that is already paid for. If the history of Realplayer is any indication, no one does.
Apple has a good DRM. It will work with iTunes and iPod automagically. If you have another player, burn the song to CD, something you should do anyway to make a backup, and reimport it in your favorite format. Yes, there is theoretical quality loss, but if you are worrying about quality, why are you downloading music. Buy the CD or get it the old fashion way. Borrow a CD from a friend and copy it.
The fact that you want you life to be controlled is what humanity has been fighting against. Those that are happy to be slaves, and like sheep give the reign of sovereignty to those that are willing to oppress.
My creative player was no different. A plastic switch broke and made the unit extremely difficult to use. When I was looking at a new player, I did not go to creative. I went to apple with thier mini. It had one switch, and a trackpad with button, something that has proved to be very reliable. Likewise, the ram allows the harddrive to be mostly powered down and safe under normal cicumstances.
I paid good money for the creative palyer, almost as much as the mini. Creative just didn't care enough about the product to make it reliable. Althought the battery life was better than the iPod.
We know that people buy stuff of spam. I saw a $2 pan being sold as a custom $10 fondue set. MS tells us that employees are incapable of using anything other than MS Windows. Apple tells us that you are a square if you don't use Macs. IBM promises massive profits if you use the complete solution. Sun says that IBM is ripping everyone off. It is game and learning to play it is part of our brand of capitalism.
So here is the deal. Monsanto could have chosen to sell the seeds under normal terms, and made thier money through the sale of roundup. It would be less profit, but it would probably build more loyalty Instead they choose to maximize profits at all levels, and ignore the risk to farmers that choose not to use their products. this is a classic example of Corporate Domination.
As far as your point about the farmer, the farmer is trying to do they same thing as Monsanto. Maximize profit. If we assume that Monsanto needs to sell the seed to make a reasonable profit, can we assume that the struggling farmer is forced to harvest seeds to do the same. Is Monsanto better of having a farmer that can afford to purchase the Round Up, rather than moving to alternative growing methods that often fetch higher prices for crops? I certainly pay more when I know that the farmer is trying to work with the land instead of against it. (And before someone points out the scarcity issue, the US produces about twice as much food for US consumption than the US needs. This is a much higher buffer than we need)
But, at the end of day, we return to the fact that the Monsanto seeds is a virus that will tend to take over and create a monoculture, not because they are superior, buy becase they are new and immune to the current threats. Future threats will develop, and perhaps we will not be so lucky to have a protected space, like the NASA orange groves, to save us from out short sightedness.
from the brilliant Mike Judge
I am worried about one thing. Years ago when they started shipping cheap laptops, performanced suffered greatly. The cheaper hardware could not match the quality and speed one had come to expect from apple. I probably won't buy one of these until the third gen.
What I do hope for is these to start appearing in schools. I want a lab in which I can have student log into an account with *nix like controls over applications and net access. Our admin cannot seem to do this with XP.
And the new ipod is a good as anything I have seen. Extremely competative price and storage capacity. It might bring me back to the flash based player. Certainly easier to carry for exersise.
Of course, in terms of hardware and software, the market was much more single vendor. There was IBM, Compaq, and Apple. Whichever machine you bought you were locked into hardware and to some degree software. Today is much different.
Apple and the PC market in general has moved to commodity hardware, so what you are buying is support. The two big OS, Mac and MS Windows, both put you into single vendor status. The difference is that Apple will support it's hardware and software, while MS will often try to push support to other vedors. Given the growth of the *nix marker, the Mac might be a better choice.
No one knows what MS will do, how it will further lock customers into weird standards. No one knows what the Linux vendors will do in term of outsourcing support or modifing the applications. Insecurity is always an isuue
The life cycle this is like fashion. If you wish you can buy a new wardrobe every year, however it will be because the clothes are out of fashion, not because they are old. I have Mac OS X 10.3 running well on a c. 2000 Mac, with only a memory and hard disk upgrade. I wonder if XP will run well on a c. 1999 PC.
Simply saving up your best token and displaying them is not sufficient worship. I sleep at night knowing that people who keep their tokens are going to be the first against the wall come Armageddon. Fools!