Linux can never really become a Monopoly because it's not explicitly owned by any one corporation. Maybe, but not necessarily, one day it will become a seriously major player in the desktop market, but even then it can't be a monopoly unless someone like Redhat manages to get "ownership" of Linux and manages to get 51% of the desktop market to use Redhat Linux.
Even then, there's nothing inherently illegal or evil about being a monopoly. A monopoly is only deemed an illegal monopoly if it uses it's market dominance to create a barrier to market entry for smaller companies or established competitors. Also, using market domination in one market to create an artificially dominant position in another market is considered illegal.
Hopefully Linux can take some marketshare away from MS and return some semblance of competition and innovation to the industry.
Ok, InDesign is the shit. InDesign is awesome. I honestly think it's a better program than Quark XPress, but Adobe typically doesn't get things right until version 3.0.
That said, XPress 6 is the single most important program out there for mass adoption of OS X. As much as I hate Quark the company, XPress is still the flagship print publishing application out there. InDesign has made some inroads, but Apple NEEDS XPress as much as it needs Photoshop.
I won't trust XPress 6.0 until they've done at least 2 patches to it. They're first whole number releases are always atrocious, bug-ridden nightmares, but they fix them pretty quickly.
Actually, Quark under Classic is a nightmare. Not only is it crash prone in Classic, quite frequently your documents will become corrupted if the application crashes. This doesn't really happen when booted natively into os 9.
even though I dropped it about 18" on it's side! It was a Graphite iMac DV/SE 466, the old clamshell version. I dropped it and it just plain stopped working. Even the molding on the front left was visibly damaged. I brought it into my local retailer. They asked me what was wrong, I said it wasn't working, they shipped it off and a week later it came back good as new and no charge! They had to have known that I damaged the molding. That it wasn't a simple malfunction. They didn't charge me anyway! I call that service!
Quartz Extreme uses today's faster graphics cards to render the desktop and graphics, but that's not what Quartz is. Quartz is essentially a graphic layer which uses PDF as it's base.... essentially it's an extension of Display PostScript.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/graphic s. html
Read up a little bit if you think Quartz is about simply rendering the desktop with a GPU.
It's all quite simple. Check out key caps and make sure you're using a font that has extended character sets. option+e then typing and "e" will result in é. you can extrapolate from there!
Yeah, this is flamebait, but I have karma to spare! What's with the BSD subsystem and the Mach microkernel then? What's with the terminal? Crawl out from under your rock you troglodyte!
I essentially agree with you, but beg to differ on one point. The GIMP is light years away from being a real competitor to Photoshop. I could list the palces where GIMP falls flat on it's face, but I have to get back to doing some actual work in Photoshop. Plus, this war has been waged many many times here.
No, digital avatars will never replace actors. I don't care how advanced technology gets, digitally animated characters will not replace real actors. You still need voice talent and that requires a good actor. Why pay for the voice and then spend a gazillion dollars animating that person when you could way more cheaply put a camera with film in front of the actor and have them act.
I still seriously think the article didn't take into consideration all of the costs that go into producing an album. Building leases, salaries, utilities, insurance, etc. All of these things are built into the price of music.
That said, I'm sure Apple will lower the prices eventually. They usually get a pretty penny from early adopters and then lower prices once demand starts slipping.
$0.18? Why that number? Do you remember any of the justification for it? If not, it sounds just as impotent as the argument that music should be free.
There are royalties to be paid, encoding costs, labor, recording costs, bandwidth, database maintenance, etc. The cost of printed materials and shipping (and all labor costs associated with that) have been removed. So yeah, an entire album should cost less than a store-bought $18.00 album. So you're saying a 10 song album should cost $1.80? I realize the price of store bought albums is ridiculous, but I don't think reducing price to 10% of where it was is quite realistic. I don't think that price takes into account all of the factors that go into pricing music.
Remember, there are A LOT of people involved in the production of an album. Not just the artists, producers and record executives. There are secretaries, janitors, print production people... etc, etc. They have salaries and hourly wages that need to be paid and these songs contribute to that.
Demand determines price. There's a reason Doors songs still cost a certain amount and why Vanilla Ice albums go for $1 in bargain bins. For popular music, the price will remain steadily high... as long as the market bears the price. If you have back inventory and no one's buying it, well, you sell it for ridiculously cheap prices just to get rid of it and clear out your inventory.
I've actually never bought any Doors albums before just because I went to college in Santa Cruz and listened to rock radio, so I never really needed to own the albums. THEY WERE ALWAYS ON! Now if I want a select song, I buy the select song and I'm happy. This service will actually encourage me to purchase single songs from certain artists that I don't want whole albums from.
I wish this service existed in the days of Metallica's Black album so I could have purchased the three good songs on the album and not have been forced to listen to the rest of the grabage on it!
DRM riddled? That's a bit extreme dontcha think? The DRM in these AAC files is so easy to get around it's ridiculous. It's about as difficult as copying a CD to a normal cassette tape. Burn the tunes to a CD and it's totally portable and rippable to any other format you'd like. If you want to copy and play the AAC file on other machines, well, you're limited to three authorized machines. Other than that, it's very very very flexible.
I guess Matador records is already clamoring to get on the service. Now if the could get Kool Arrow, Ipecac, Discipline Global Mobile, Papa Bear and some others it would be extremely cool.
What do you use to measure what is reasonably priced? $.1 is just so freaking arbitrary a number. Must Apple work at a loss to satisfy you? Must the artists not get their royalties in order to satisfy your musical needs?
Think for a second. The music industry isn't going to change just to meet the demands of a very small segment of the market that are total cheapskates.
Hmmmm... my B&W G3 400Mhz runs Jaguar 10.2.5 just dandy. Photoshop 7 is noticeably in OS X than Photoshop 6 was in Classic or booted into OS 9. Yeah, Office X is a bit of a dog, but that's alright. I pretty much just use it for Word and Entourage anyway.
Granted, when I use the DP 1Ghz G4 at the school where I teach Final Cut Pro with a nice new Nvidia GPU, I notice a huge speed difference over OS 9 and OS X on my lowly G3 at home. For everyday web graphics use though, Jaguar running PS 7 and Illustrator 10 is great on my B&W. And I've had absolutely NONE of these 20 second drop down window problems. EVER. I did back in the Public Beta, but I really hope you're not forcing that on your poor users.
Seriously, you're doing something wrong. 10.2 was like giving a new life to my B&W. 10.0 and 10.1 weren't even useable on a G3, but Jaguar, well... basically it rocks.
In the meantime other people keep the fight for their freedom.
Fight for digital freedom. Freedom from DRM? Man, what a minor thing to fight for when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are being systematically dismantled by a government that purports to be fighting to protect our freedom by bombing other countries.
Let's face it, all this talk about fighting for freedom on slashdot is really just about fighting for convenience.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux can never really become a Monopoly because it's not explicitly owned by any one corporation. Maybe, but not necessarily, one day it will become a seriously major player in the desktop market, but even then it can't be a monopoly unless someone like Redhat manages to get "ownership" of Linux and manages to get 51% of the desktop market to use Redhat Linux.
Even then, there's nothing inherently illegal or evil about being a monopoly. A monopoly is only deemed an illegal monopoly if it uses it's market dominance to create a barrier to market entry for smaller companies or established competitors. Also, using market domination in one market to create an artificially dominant position in another market is considered illegal.
Hopefully Linux can take some marketshare away from MS and return some semblance of competition and innovation to the industry.
Ok, InDesign is the shit. InDesign is awesome. I honestly think it's a better program than Quark XPress, but Adobe typically doesn't get things right until version 3.0.
That said, XPress 6 is the single most important program out there for mass adoption of OS X. As much as I hate Quark the company, XPress is still the flagship print publishing application out there. InDesign has made some inroads, but Apple NEEDS XPress as much as it needs Photoshop.
I won't trust XPress 6.0 until they've done at least 2 patches to it. They're first whole number releases are always atrocious, bug-ridden nightmares, but they fix them pretty quickly.
THIS IS A BIG DEAL!
Actually, Quark under Classic is a nightmare. Not only is it crash prone in Classic, quite frequently your documents will become corrupted if the application crashes. This doesn't really happen when booted natively into os 9.
even though I dropped it about 18" on it's side! It was a Graphite iMac DV/SE 466, the old clamshell version. I dropped it and it just plain stopped working. Even the molding on the front left was visibly damaged. I brought it into my local retailer. They asked me what was wrong, I said it wasn't working, they shipped it off and a week later it came back good as new and no charge! They had to have known that I damaged the molding. That it wasn't a simple malfunction. They didn't charge me anyway! I call that service!
Well, they are making a port of iTunes for Windows and are planning on opening up the music store to the rest of the world.
This was definitely not something they slapped together. They know the market for this is really on the Windows side and are taking appropriate steps.
Quartz Extreme uses today's faster graphics cards to render the desktop and graphics, but that's not what Quartz is. Quartz is essentially a graphic layer which uses PDF as it's base.... essentially it's an extension of Display PostScript.
c s. html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/graphi
Read up a little bit if you think Quartz is about simply rendering the desktop with a GPU.
It's all quite simple. Check out key caps and make sure you're using a font that has extended character sets. option+e then typing and "e" will result in é. you can extrapolate from there!
Yeah, this is flamebait, but I have karma to spare! What's with the BSD subsystem and the Mach microkernel then? What's with the terminal? Crawl out from under your rock you troglodyte!
That would be about as useful as the USB floppy drive RAID that one guy made a couple of months ago.
I essentially agree with you, but beg to differ on one point. The GIMP is light years away from being a real competitor to Photoshop. I could list the palces where GIMP falls flat on it's face, but I have to get back to doing some actual work in Photoshop. Plus, this war has been waged many many times here.
No, digital avatars will never replace actors. I don't care how advanced technology gets, digitally animated characters will not replace real actors. You still need voice talent and that requires a good actor. Why pay for the voice and then spend a gazillion dollars animating that person when you could way more cheaply put a camera with film in front of the actor and have them act.
I still seriously think the article didn't take into consideration all of the costs that go into producing an album. Building leases, salaries, utilities, insurance, etc. All of these things are built into the price of music.
That said, I'm sure Apple will lower the prices eventually. They usually get a pretty penny from early adopters and then lower prices once demand starts slipping.
$0.18? Why that number? Do you remember any of the justification for it? If not, it sounds just as impotent as the argument that music should be free.
There are royalties to be paid, encoding costs, labor, recording costs, bandwidth, database maintenance, etc. The cost of printed materials and shipping (and all labor costs associated with that) have been removed. So yeah, an entire album should cost less than a store-bought $18.00 album. So you're saying a 10 song album should cost $1.80? I realize the price of store bought albums is ridiculous, but I don't think reducing price to 10% of where it was is quite realistic. I don't think that price takes into account all of the factors that go into pricing music.
Remember, there are A LOT of people involved in the production of an album. Not just the artists, producers and record executives. There are secretaries, janitors, print production people... etc, etc. They have salaries and hourly wages that need to be paid and these songs contribute to that.
Demand determines price. There's a reason Doors songs still cost a certain amount and why Vanilla Ice albums go for $1 in bargain bins. For popular music, the price will remain steadily high... as long as the market bears the price. If you have back inventory and no one's buying it, well, you sell it for ridiculously cheap prices just to get rid of it and clear out your inventory.
I've actually never bought any Doors albums before just because I went to college in Santa Cruz and listened to rock radio, so I never really needed to own the albums. THEY WERE ALWAYS ON! Now if I want a select song, I buy the select song and I'm happy. This service will actually encourage me to purchase single songs from certain artists that I don't want whole albums from.
I wish this service existed in the days of Metallica's Black album so I could have purchased the three good songs on the album and not have been forced to listen to the rest of the grabage on it!
DRM riddled? That's a bit extreme dontcha think? The DRM in these AAC files is so easy to get around it's ridiculous. It's about as difficult as copying a CD to a normal cassette tape. Burn the tunes to a CD and it's totally portable and rippable to any other format you'd like. If you want to copy and play the AAC file on other machines, well, you're limited to three authorized machines. Other than that, it's very very very flexible.
well, uh, it has 2 Firewire ports.... better than USB 2.0. Plain and simple.
I guess Matador records is already clamoring to get on the service. Now if the could get Kool Arrow, Ipecac, Discipline Global Mobile, Papa Bear and some others it would be extremely cool.
What do you use to measure what is reasonably priced? $.1 is just so freaking arbitrary a number. Must Apple work at a loss to satisfy you? Must the artists not get their royalties in order to satisfy your musical needs?
Think for a second. The music industry isn't going to change just to meet the demands of a very small segment of the market that are total cheapskates.
Yeah, that 6 bucks I spent on the 6 Aerosmith songs I wanted really put a huge freaking dent in my wallet
Apple's Cube was a definite dud. Pretty cool machine but they priced themselves out of any market with it.
They're 128k AAC files... not MP3. I've purchased a dozen or so songs and they sound way better than a comparably encoded MP3.
Hmmmm... my B&W G3 400Mhz runs Jaguar 10.2.5 just dandy. Photoshop 7 is noticeably in OS X than Photoshop 6 was in Classic or booted into OS 9. Yeah, Office X is a bit of a dog, but that's alright. I pretty much just use it for Word and Entourage anyway.
Granted, when I use the DP 1Ghz G4 at the school where I teach Final Cut Pro with a nice new Nvidia GPU, I notice a huge speed difference over OS 9 and OS X on my lowly G3 at home. For everyday web graphics use though, Jaguar running PS 7 and Illustrator 10 is great on my B&W. And I've had absolutely NONE of these 20 second drop down window problems. EVER. I did back in the Public Beta, but I really hope you're not forcing that on your poor users.
Seriously, you're doing something wrong. 10.2 was like giving a new life to my B&W. 10.0 and 10.1 weren't even useable on a G3, but Jaguar, well... basically it rocks.
This is singlehandedly the most insightful, thought provoking and concise statement I've ever heard!
Lars shott his mouth off so much in 2000 that Jobs probably didn't want them on the service!
In the meantime other people keep the fight for their freedom.
Fight for digital freedom. Freedom from DRM? Man, what a minor thing to fight for when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are being systematically dismantled by a government that purports to be fighting to protect our freedom by bombing other countries.
Let's face it, all this talk about fighting for freedom on slashdot is really just about fighting for convenience.