It constanty surprises me how many people are stuck with this "contract" idea.
It's a north american concept.
In europe, most cellphones are pay as you go. Not the limited, low service, expensive pay as you go service like in the US, but universal, GSM, GRPS, voicemail, data, etc. You want a phone? pick one. You want a phone number? Pick your store, go buy a 25e card + number. No fuss, no contract no signatures, no time wasted. Pop it in your phone, you are done. Need more time? Go anywhere and get a recharge card. Going to France? Buddy has an extra card? (not uncommon for people to have two or three). Pop it in your phone. Phone got stomped on? Need to make a call? Borrow someone's phone, pop in your card in stead of theirs, it's your phone.
The whole "contract" idea is just an unnecessary beurocratic waste.
Interesting point.. but let me say, why exactly does the user need to know that the OS just installed and activated a bunch fo meta devices to get the USB mouse to work? Sure, some geek might like to know that a new internal driver was now in use.. but joe average just wants his mouse to work. I do NOT need to konw five facts along the way. As you said, you plug it in, it works.. that's all you should need to know. Whether or not some mysterious thing called a "driver" was involved isn't something you need to know, especially if it was included.
I'm sure apple has a hidden agenda, making windows look bad.. but then, it's not hard.
1 - see the "Hold" button on the top. IT's there for a reason, like most portables.
2 - Yeah.. I thought it was the unit spinning up.. this will probably be fixed in firmware.
3 - It was built to work with itunes, in which case this is a non issue. Apple users use itunes to catalogue and store all their music. Valid complaint, but not gonna happen.
4 - Itunes again... itunes doesn't use directories and filenames either.. you let it import your music and sort it for you. (it does, btw, sort it into folders by artist/song, and you can copy the files directly out if it if you so wish). It also makes it easy to edit id3 tags to keep your stuff clean.
5 - Good point. Most long-life players dont' hold 2000 songs.. so there you go. Also, many ipod useres travel with a laptop, and the laptop works as a power source for the ipod to charge from.
6 - Yeah.. the reset after synchronizing sucks on the mac too.
7 - (digs out clip to look) Mmm. Now you might be on to something...
Ogg is nice.. but all teh ogg heads out there knew damn well before they went and encoded anything out there that ogg was the black sheep of portables. There is not a lot of ogg support out there. Sorry. You knew that when you started.
As for headphones... it's true to a point. Music is very psychological though... and it's not just about good or bad. Poorly encoded mp3 sounds *better* on cheaper headphones than it does on good ones, as the good ones reveal just how bad the recording is.
It brings up a page asking you to register your purchase with them. It doesn't really send you ads.
What gets ME is that companies these days have the audacity to think they can bully us into registering ourselves with them. I'm sorry, you sold something on the public market.. I paid for it, that is all you get. You do not need to know who I am, what kind of computer I have, or anything else.
Stores asking for phone numbers and address info, every software application on earth asking you to register, and now, for fuck sakes, HARDWARE that asks you to register by not doing what it's supposed to do.
What's next.. telephones that redirect all your calls to a customer service center for registration?
If you want a player for jogging, an ipod is not ideal. Heck, technical reasons aside, it's too heavy!
If you are going to jog, you want some light tiny plastic thing strapped to your arm, or something, and you don't care that much about superb sound quality. You are jogging. For that matter, you don't want something expensive, either. What if it breaks? Gets lost? Falls off?
If you need the battery to last for long, long periods of time, listening for 15 hours solid, an ipod is not for you.
Me, I use my ipod for going to work, going home, walking around town, on the bus, on the plane. IT lasts plenty long. For those plane rides where it might be dying a bit.. I do have my ibook with me. I can just plug it into the ibook and recharge it a bit.
It's not the perfect mp3 player for everything, of course...
But for an mp3 player that has 3000 of my favorite tunes on it, that fits in my pocket, looks slick, has good sound quality, and integrates well with my main computer, it can't be beat.
They should not be exploiting bugs in windows in order to display ads on my screen. When I browse the web, I understand that a site may choose to show me an ad. I'm looking for content.
A winpopup is another matter entirely.
Furthermore, using these invasive, exploitive winpopups to advertise a product that BLOCKS winpopups is extortion.
You can make all the excuses you want for why it wasn't that good, including just blaming apple for poorly supporting windows.. but the fact remains..
It is extremely rare for things in windows to integrate as smoothly as they do on the mac.. WHY isn't important.
Take something as simple as a mouse.. even when you plug a usb mouse into windows XP the first time, it says "Detected new USB device " " initializing " "Detected HID mouse" "initializing " " starting mouse" or whateve.r. then it works. So even though it did't ask for any drivers or anything.. it grinded and flashed several popups of technical info the end user doesn't need...
When I plugged a usb mouse into my mac, it just worked,within about 1 second. There were no popups or indicators, other than the mouse now controlled the cursor.
IT's hard to design things to work to the level apple wants in windows, simply because windows is so varied.. you don't know what the user already has, so it's hard to decide what will work smoothly.
Apple is a corporation. Yes. They are out to make money. Yes.
Their way of doing so, however, is to make some rally kick ass stuff.
I *LOVE* OS X. And I"m a control freak. If I didn't have OS X, I would be using a linux desktop, no questions asked.
As it is I get a rock solid desktop that rules. In fact, I'll even go as far as to say that if you haven't sat down and really got to know OS X as a desktop, you only THINK You know what a good desktop is.
It IS that much better, in terms of user experience. Apple knows what "User experience" actually means.. to microsoft it's a buzzword. You don't know what good effortless computing can be if you haven't been using a mac.
What they say about itunes is totally true...
I bought an ipod last summer. I plugged it into my ibook. Then I opened up the manual, and started reading.. and basically every step said "If you have a mac, skip this step". When I got to the end, there was nothing for me to do.. I looked back at the laptop, and it had already done everyting.
THen my co-worker got one, and he uses windows. It took us 5 or 6 weird dialog boxes to install MusicMatch. Then we had to get musicmatch to import his music to it's library (which was REALLY slow, and it doesn't even move files around, just reads them). We had to reboot. We had a few more dialog boxes for a few other components.... Then we could synchronize, which was by overwriting everything already in the ipod. And it was slow. And,,of course, the firewire ports on his laptop are 4 pin, and don't have power in them, so we had to leave the ipod plugged in for an hour or so before being able to use it.
End result:
I plugged in my ipod, and it worked. All the music I had ended up on my ipod in seconds, and it started charging up.
IT took us an hour or so of futzing around to get my co-workers to work.
that the article you reference doesn't KNOW how google makes it's money, they GUESS. Google is a private company, and does not have to disclose where it's profits come from, so it's just speculation based on observation.
It sounds reasonable.. but isn't necessarily true.
I don't see how the information that they attempted to remove should have been allowed to be removed in the first place.. it was vital to the report.
You aren't allowed to just remove whatever you feel like it from an FOIA requested document. the whole point of the FOIA is so you can see documents you have a right to see; like this report.
Exemptions are made for things like national security, fair enough.. and privacy.. but simply crossing out the "bad" parts of a report is absurd.
was more like "Given the ferocity with which the OpenBSD nazis fix things like this in their code wouldn't this sort of thing, in the kernel, be one of the first things they did?"
Indeed, I thought this was done quite a while ago...
Linux is the swiss army chainsaw of operating systems... we can do pretty much anything with it, technically speaking. For the record, I've used linux for ten years, since.95 or so. For a good portion of those ten years, my main workstation at work has been Linux, usually with a Windows box on the side, for administrative purposes.
Along comes OS X. Now... here's the deal. OS X turned out to be my favorite workstation EVER. I have two OS X boxes on my desk.. a G4 tower, and an iBook 800. IT gives me all the unix flexibility I need in my primary workstation (admin scripts, ssh, sniffers, etc), and a user interface and desktop application set that is second to none. After getting my head around how Apple handles the gui, I realize that Windows is a poor, feeble attempt at good user interface.
OSX does not feel like windows + cygwin. It does not feel like some weird unix layer stuck in there.. it feels like a real desktop, running on unix... just the way I want it.
Now.. does that mean OSX is better than linux? Heck no. Linux boxes are all around me, for various tasks.. I would not advocate someone replace one with the other.. except maybe if it's for their primary workstation only. I have linux boxes, when I need to test linux applications.
Stuff like iTunes music sharing, so I don't have to copy music to my desktop (where my nice headphones and amp are hooked up).. is great. Sure, you could rig up streaming fairly easily with linux.. but with the mac, it just worked.
It's like this:
Windows - MS attempts to make a GUI that is easy to use, and does what you want. Unfortunately, they aren't that good at this. Even more unforunately, anything outside the scope of what MS thought you wanted to do becomes very tough to do.
Linux - In general, everything is possible, knowledge required. Light on the GUI stuff. KDE and Gnome don't quite cut it, though if configured perfectly, they can.
OS X - GUI that is easy to use, apps with default behaviors that just make sense. If not, you can still make it do whatever you want, it's unix.
If you are a guy at home, with one computer, and you run linux on it, maybe dual booting windows for games.. I'm not trying to sell you on OS X. It's more expensive, less flexible than what you already have. If you are a professional who has multiple computers, likes unix, and wants a cool new workstation, I recommend you give it a try, you might find you really like it.
Look. Debian is good, Debian is great, it IS my favorite linux distribution. Sticking to free software is GOOD.
However...
having packages for non-free stuff is good, and NECESSARY, as well. Yes, anyone can make them.. but it really helps having a central repository. IN the real business world, you can only take the need for freedom so far. I love Debian servers, but at some point there is non-free stuff I *need* to run.
Further... I'm sure everyone has said it before, but Debian really NEEDS to get it's stable releases more often, or at least more current. Stable is WAY behind the curve.. to the point where the benefit of running a common server on stable is almost gone now... I have to build everything manually.
Perhaps paring down the set of core software required to be well put together to call it stable?
"Just use testing, it's stable" is fine and dandy.. except security fixes don't come out in time.... again defeating the purpose.
So.. debian continue sto be awesome, for sure.. but I really, really wish they would focus a bit more and get more stable releases out more often.
I am very, very close to not being able to use debian any more internally because it creates too much work, compared to something sleazy like redhat.
That's a great idea... using security devices to prevent cart theft.
A better one, though, is to use the $1-deposit-for-a-cart system.. you know, where the carts are all chained together, and you gotta put in a buck to remove it. You get it back when you put the cart back.
IT works great.. lazy yuppies, who feel the time to put the cart back isn't worth a dollar and just leave it in the lot somewhre, or across the street, local kids will happily return it for a free buck. Same with carts left wihtint a few blocks.
Having spent days on end with Dad as a kid, driving around looking for shopping carts people took.. I know what a problem it is. IT costs a fair bit of money. You'd be amazed how many carts go missing without some kind of system.
They gave away some software.. OHH THE PAIN. HOW MUCH IT HURTS.
Keeps their marketshare up, doesn't really cost them any real capital, just a slight market dilution, and so on. Not like, say, 200 million in auto parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup.
So if you are in europe, you are set.
If you are in the US, you are screwed.
It constanty surprises me how many people are stuck with this "contract" idea.
It's a north american concept.
In europe, most cellphones are pay as you go. Not the limited, low service, expensive pay as you go service like in the US, but universal, GSM, GRPS, voicemail, data, etc. You want a phone? pick one. You want a phone number? Pick your store, go buy a 25e card + number. No fuss, no contract no signatures, no time wasted. Pop it in your phone, you are done. Need more time? Go anywhere and get a recharge card.
Going to France? Buddy has an extra card? (not uncommon for people to have two or three). Pop it in your phone.
Phone got stomped on? Need to make a call? Borrow someone's phone, pop in your card in stead of theirs, it's your phone.
The whole "contract" idea is just an unnecessary beurocratic waste.
Interesting point.. but let me say, why exactly does the user need to know that the OS just installed and activated a bunch fo meta devices to get the USB mouse to work? Sure, some geek might like to know that a new internal driver was now in use.. but joe average just wants his mouse to work. I do NOT need to konw five facts along the way.
As you said, you plug it in, it works.. that's all you should need to know. Whether or not some mysterious thing called a "driver" was involved isn't something you need to know, especially if it was included.
I'm sure apple has a hidden agenda, making windows look bad.. but then, it's not hard.
1 - see the "Hold" button on the top. IT's there for a reason, like most portables.
2 - Yeah.. I thought it was the unit spinning up.. this will probably be fixed in firmware.
3 - It was built to work with itunes, in which case this is a non issue. Apple users use itunes to catalogue and store all their music. Valid complaint, but not gonna happen.
4 - Itunes again... itunes doesn't use directories and filenames either.. you let it import your music and sort it for you. (it does, btw, sort it into folders by artist/song, and you can copy the files directly out if it if you so wish). It also makes it easy to edit id3 tags to keep your stuff clean.
5 - Good point. Most long-life players dont' hold 2000 songs.. so there you go. Also, many ipod useres travel with a laptop, and the laptop works as a power source for the ipod to charge from.
6 - Yeah.. the reset after synchronizing sucks on the mac too.
7 - (digs out clip to look) Mmm. Now you might be on to something...
Agree 100%. Furthermore....
Ogg is nice.. but all teh ogg heads out there knew damn well before they went and encoded anything out there that ogg was the black sheep of portables. There is not a lot of ogg support out there. Sorry. You knew that when you started.
As for headphones... it's true to a point. Music is very psychological though... and it's not just about good or bad. Poorly encoded mp3 sounds *better* on cheaper headphones than it does on good ones, as the good ones reveal just how bad the recording is.
It brings up a page asking you to register your purchase with them. It doesn't really send you ads.
What gets ME is that companies these days have the audacity to think they can bully us into registering ourselves with them. I'm sorry, you sold something on the public market.. I paid for it, that is all you get. You do not need to know who I am, what kind of computer I have, or anything else.
Stores asking for phone numbers and address info, every software application on earth asking you to register, and now, for fuck sakes, HARDWARE that asks you to register by not doing what it's supposed to do.
What's next.. telephones that redirect all your calls to a customer service center for registration?
If you want a player for jogging, an ipod is not ideal. Heck, technical reasons aside, it's too heavy!
If you are going to jog, you want some light tiny plastic thing strapped to your arm, or something, and you don't care that much about superb sound quality. You are jogging. For that matter, you don't want something expensive, either. What if it breaks? Gets lost? Falls off?
If you need the battery to last for long, long periods of time, listening for 15 hours solid, an ipod is not for you.
Me, I use my ipod for going to work, going home, walking around town, on the bus, on the plane. IT lasts plenty long.
For those plane rides where it might be dying a bit.. I do have my ibook with me. I can just plug it into the ibook and recharge it a bit.
It's not the perfect mp3 player for everything, of course...
But for an mp3 player that has 3000 of my favorite tunes on it, that fits in my pocket, looks slick, has good sound quality, and integrates well with my main computer, it can't be beat.
The incremental cost to give away the songs is negligible.. it's digital.
IT works for both companies: Think of the extra exposure it would give itunes.... McDonalds is HUGE.
If MCDonalds does it... everyone on earth will hear about Itunes, and inquire as to what it is, etc.
No, the real point is ethics.
They should not be exploiting bugs in windows in order to display ads on my screen.
When I browse the web, I understand that a site may choose to show me an ad. I'm looking for content.
A winpopup is another matter entirely.
Furthermore, using these invasive, exploitive winpopups to advertise a product that BLOCKS winpopups is extortion.
it's "Pay us to stop doing this".
IT's not at all beneficial to society.
You can make all the excuses you want for why it wasn't that good, including just blaming apple for poorly supporting windows.. but the fact remains..
It is extremely rare for things in windows to integrate as smoothly as they do on the mac.. WHY isn't important.
Take something as simple as a mouse.. even when you plug a usb mouse into windows XP the first time, it says "Detected new USB device " " initializing " "Detected HID mouse" "initializing " " starting mouse" or whateve.r. then it works.
So even though it did't ask for any drivers or anything.. it grinded and flashed several popups of technical info the end user doesn't need...
When I plugged a usb mouse into my mac, it just worked,within about 1 second. There were no popups or indicators, other than the mouse now controlled the cursor.
IT's hard to design things to work to the level apple wants in windows, simply because windows is so varied.. you don't know what the user already has, so it's hard to decide what will work smoothly.
Then I got a mac.
,of course, the firewire ports on his laptop are 4 pin, and don't have power in them, so we had to leave the ipod plugged in for an hour or so before being able to use it.
Now I understand.
Apple is a corporation. Yes. They are out to make money. Yes.
Their way of doing so, however, is to make some rally kick ass stuff.
I *LOVE* OS X. And I"m a control freak. If I didn't have OS X, I would be using a linux desktop, no questions asked.
As it is I get a rock solid desktop that rules. In fact, I'll even go as far as to say that if you haven't sat down and really got to know OS X as a desktop, you only THINK You know what a good desktop is.
It IS that much better, in terms of user experience. Apple knows what "User experience" actually means.. to microsoft it's a buzzword. You don't know what good effortless computing can be if you haven't been using a mac.
What they say about itunes is totally true...
I bought an ipod last summer. I plugged it into my ibook. Then I opened up the manual, and started reading.. and basically every step said "If you have a mac, skip this step". When I got to the end, there was nothing for me to do.. I looked back at the laptop, and it had already done everyting.
THen my co-worker got one, and he uses windows.
It took us 5 or 6 weird dialog boxes to install MusicMatch.
Then we had to get musicmatch to import his music to it's library (which was REALLY slow, and it doesn't even move files around, just reads them). We had to reboot.
We had a few more dialog boxes for a few other components....
Then we could synchronize, which was by overwriting everything already in the ipod. And it was slow.
And,
End result:
I plugged in my ipod, and it worked. All the music I had ended up on my ipod in seconds, and it started charging up.
IT took us an hour or so of futzing around to get my co-workers to work.
The mac has the best, open, free develoment stuff out there... not sure where you get extremely proprietary from.
Do you mean, perhaps, all the open source software I"m running?
Or do you mean the supplied applications that actually work.. I'm unclear
And for joe average, Windows doesn'ty come close to MacOS. Not nearly as polished or finished. yet it's everywhere.
Nothing these companiess have done really drives linux.. linux drives itself. Even Redhat, despite their contributions, is just along for the ride.
Linux will succeed regardless of what happens with these companies.
It was a very useful tool before they arrived, and will be equally useful after they are gone.
Speaking of cleartype.
Cleartype on a 1600x1200 15" laptop screen, with the windows DPI setting set arbitrarilty to 120... makes fonts look AMAZGING.
Nothing has touched those for me yet.. no linux tricks, not even the really nice rendering on OS X.
Of course, I still hate windows.. but cleartype is nice.
You have to adjust the DPI setting.
I had no problems on my 15" 1600x1200 laptop, using windows in 120DPI mode. It looked GREAT, easy to read, etc.
The odd web page or crappy app would have some problems, due to improper use of widgets.. but for the vast majority of things, it worked just fine.
And am I the only one who remembers microsoft ALWAYS is going to solve everything in the next version?
That hit the nail on the head, basically. People mis-understand what it is libraries are supposed to do, and be.
They are not supposed to be places where you can babysit your kids.
Why have I not had mod points for 2+ years/ Hmm.
that the article you reference doesn't KNOW how google makes it's money, they GUESS.
Google is a private company, and does not have to disclose where it's profits come from, so it's just speculation based on observation.
It sounds reasonable.. but isn't necessarily true.
I don't see how the information that they attempted to remove should have been allowed to be removed in the first place.. it was vital to the report.
You aren't allowed to just remove whatever you feel like it from an FOIA requested document. the whole point of the FOIA is so you can see documents you have a right to see; like this report.
Exemptions are made for things like national security, fair enough.. and privacy.. but simply crossing out the "bad" parts of a report is absurd.
was more like
"Given the ferocity with which the OpenBSD nazis fix things like this in their code wouldn't this sort of thing, in the kernel, be one of the first things they did?"
Indeed, I thought this was done quite a while ago...
To sum it up, it's not really a contest.
.95 or so. For a good portion of those ten years, my main workstation at work has been Linux, usually with a Windows box on the side, for administrative purposes.
Why?
OSX and Linux are two different beasts.
Linux is the swiss army chainsaw of operating systems... we can do pretty much anything with it, technically speaking. For the record, I've used linux for ten years, since
Along comes OS X. Now... here's the deal. OS X turned out to be my favorite workstation EVER. I have two OS X boxes on my desk.. a G4 tower, and an iBook 800. IT gives me all the unix flexibility I need in my primary workstation (admin scripts, ssh, sniffers, etc), and a user interface and desktop application set that is second to none. After getting my head around how Apple handles the gui, I realize that Windows is a poor, feeble attempt at good user interface.
OSX does not feel like windows + cygwin. It does not feel like some weird unix layer stuck in there.. it feels like a real desktop, running on unix... just the way I want it.
Now.. does that mean OSX is better than linux? Heck no. Linux boxes are all around me, for various tasks.. I would not advocate someone replace one with the other.. except maybe if it's for their primary workstation only. I have linux boxes, when I need to test linux applications.
Stuff like iTunes music sharing, so I don't have to copy music to my desktop (where my nice headphones and amp are hooked up).. is great. Sure, you could rig up streaming fairly easily with linux.. but with the mac, it just worked.
It's like this:
Windows - MS attempts to make a GUI that is easy to use, and does what you want. Unfortunately, they aren't that good at this. Even more unforunately, anything outside the scope of what MS thought you wanted to do becomes very tough to do.
Linux - In general, everything is possible, knowledge required. Light on the GUI stuff. KDE and Gnome don't quite cut it, though if configured perfectly, they can.
OS X - GUI that is easy to use, apps with default behaviors that just make sense. If not, you can still make it do whatever you want, it's unix.
If you are a guy at home, with one computer, and you run linux on it, maybe dual booting windows for games.. I'm not trying to sell you on OS X. It's more expensive, less flexible than what you already have. If you are a professional who has multiple computers, likes unix, and wants a cool new workstation, I recommend you give it a try, you might find you really like it.
It's not the mac of old, by any means.
Let's hope apple doesn't screw it up.
Look. Debian is good, Debian is great, it IS my favorite linux distribution. Sticking to free software is GOOD.
However...
having packages for non-free stuff is good, and NECESSARY, as well. Yes, anyone can make them.. but it really helps having a central repository. IN the real business world, you can only take the need for freedom so far. I love Debian servers, but at some point there is non-free stuff I *need* to run.
Further... I'm sure everyone has said it before, but Debian really NEEDS to get it's stable releases more often, or at least more current. Stable is WAY behind the curve.. to the point where the benefit of running a common server on stable is almost gone now... I have to build everything manually.
Perhaps paring down the set of core software required to be well put together to call it stable?
"Just use testing, it's stable" is fine and dandy.. except security fixes don't come out in time.... again defeating the purpose.
So.. debian continue sto be awesome, for sure.. but I really, really wish they would focus a bit more and get more stable releases out more often.
I am very, very close to not being able to use debian any more internally because it creates too much work, compared to something sleazy like redhat.
That's a great idea... using security devices to prevent cart theft.
A better one, though, is to use the $1-deposit-for-a-cart system.. you know, where the carts are all chained together, and you gotta put in a buck to remove it. You get it back when you put the cart back.
IT works great.. lazy yuppies, who feel the time to put the cart back isn't worth a dollar and just leave it in the lot somewhre, or across the street, local kids will happily return it for a free buck. Same with carts left wihtint a few blocks.
Having spent days on end with Dad as a kid, driving around looking for shopping carts people took.. I know what a problem it is. IT costs a fair bit of money. You'd be amazed how many carts go missing without some kind of system.
There are also many other gliders, of various sizes and complexities, including some really wondeful looking constructs.
This is the simplest, however, and can be discovered very simply by seeding the field with random data and then watching..
As for direction, direction is irrelevant..there is no up/down in a 2 dimensional world.
I mean, it always comes down to vouchers.
They gave away some software.. OHH THE PAIN. HOW MUCH IT HURTS.
Keeps their marketshare up, doesn't really cost them any real capital, just a slight market dilution, and so on. Not like, say, 200 million in auto parts.
It should have been CASH.