The MP war will probably, as you say, be a boring and inevitable one, but I can't see that it will be of any benefit to the consumer. There's no accounting for marketing...
I beg to differ. In 60 years, my 2 GHz machine will be long in the landfill (or recycled, or...) In any event, the machine will be gone.
The photos I am taking with my digital camera, though, will still be around. Maybe I will be showing them to my grandchildren.
Digital cameras are one place where hardware and the quality of the data created are linked. Creating a Word document is the same on a 400MHz machine as it is on a 3GHz machine (well, the end result, at least). Sure, the hardware will be long gone in 100 years, but not the data. The data needs to last as long as possible.
I have not idea what technologies will exist in 60 years when it comes to image manipulation and viewing. Sure, blowing up to building size is one thing, but are you sure that in 100 years that is the ultimate test of an image?
I realize that image quality is limited by a great number of things, including CCD size, lens quality, and so on. But if I am looking at two nearly identical digital cameras, and one is 11MP and the other is 13MP, I am going to spend the little extra money on the 13MP camera, even if right here, right now I cannot tell a difference.
information may want to be free, but I also want it to live as long as it can.
Less than 12 hours after I saw the changes to Facebook, I deactivated my account. I admit that I keep a myspace account, and up until yesterday I had a facebook account. I publish almost no personal information on either of these accounts, and the personal information they did require was faked. Myspace thinks I am a 79 year old woman, for example.
I keep these accounts simply so that friends of mine can find me and get in touch with me.
So what did I have to fear from facebook? After all, I almost never did anything "active" on facebook, meaning my name would almost never show up in other people's feeds. What bothered me was the access I had to OTHER people. I really had no desire to know that much about my friends. True, I could probably turn it off somehow, but it really bothered me.
I know human nature all too well. I would like to think I would be above it, but I know that I would log in daily and scan down through the news feed. I did not want to do that, and so I eliminated the temptation.
I do not agree with the people saying "Well, if you do not want everyone to know about it, do not put it online in the first place." My trash might be public once I put it on the street, but that does not mean I want a service to email all my friends with a complete listing of the contents of my trash bag each week.
I never thought I was in the minority, but the more I see how others work, the more I think that I might very well be.
My In box is used exclusively for immediate, pressing emails. They are almost all from the last week, and are generally emails that I have not responded to, but need to. Sometimes I keep an email in there that I have responded to, but that just means that I *need* a response, and that I should email the person again if I do not hear back.
If my In box ever gets more than about 10-12 messages in it, I make a concerted effort to go through and clean it out.
That said, I have well over 60,000 messages (no junk/spam, that gets deleted) saved on my computer. They are saved in about 120 different mailboxes (as Eudora calls them), using about 20 or so different folders and subfolders.
As soon as an email is no longer needed in my In box, it gets filed away in another mailbox.
The idea of keeping everything in one giant mailbox is completely strange to me.
Much of the work done by intelligence agencies is data-mining.
Yeah, but is the NSA sitting on a supercomputer as a "last resort" for encryption problems? I am sure the NSA definitely prefers backdoors and easy mathematical solutions to cryptography problems, but I would not put it past them to have a few supercomputers in case those methods do not work.
Please not the article is talking about "video games", and more specifically console and computer games.
This past weekend I played a very fun game of Uno at a coffeeshop with some friends. I have been known to break out a Scrabble board on occasion. Last month I even played Parthenon with some friends. I would like to get back into D&D at some point.
When I am in a bar, if they have a Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man machine, I am all over it. I wish there was a D&B nearby (or maybe not, since I would probably end up going to often and spending too much money)
That said, I cannot remember the last time I played a game on my computer. On occasion I will play a console game at a friend's house, but I do not own one. I have nothing against them, they tend to just be beyond my budget (I feel like I could afford a console OR the games, but not both). I can have as much fun playing a much less expensive board game.
I am disappointed that a Bose Sounddock was not included as one of the speakers compared. While I despise Bose products, they are a very popular seller to a large part of the iPod buying population.
Between crappy sound, non-portability, and lack of an auxiliary in, it is a terrible product. I would like to have an article I point people to and say "See, it is a crappy product and if you are so hyped up about buying a speaker system specifically for your iPod, there are better ones out there."
Yeah, all of those people out there using iTunes music streaming are constantly complaining about the difficulty in getting it set up.
Simply put, it can be done well enough (using technologies such as ZeroConf) that it really requires almost no effort on the part of the end-user.
It makes a lot of sense to me. I am a Mac user, and I have an iMac with about 500 gigabytes of storage attached in my bedroom. I keep thinking about picking up a cheap Mac mini for my living room. Everyone keeps talking about throwing in bigger hard drives into the mini, or adding more RAM. A minimal HD and RAM is enough to stream off of the iMac.
Now I just need to convince the roommates we need a bigger television...
I month ago I bought a G5 iMac (iSight). A few weeks later I picked up an eyeTV 200 and an external hard drive.
Having once owned a TiVo, I can say that TiVo does not need to worry about any possible competition from el Gato. The software is so much crap as to be ridiculous. The inability to set up a "Season Pass" (where the software will record all episodes of a show on a certain channel) tops the list, but there are many other deficiencies.
Some other problems:
1) The lack of integration with Front Row. 2) The lack of an on-screen display to choose programs via the remote. 3) The inability to edit out commercial breaks automatically. 4) Complete lack of tools to manage hard drive space (ability to say "Just record four of these", and so on)
I have thought about setting up an AppleScript solution that would take the recordings from eyeTV and get them into a form where I can view them with Front Row, but I feel like I should not have to do that.
I have thought about picking up an Intel Mac mini to keep near my television to stream to, but I want to get everything working well before I consider that.
No, Front Row is not ready to replace MythTV or TiVo, but it is a nice solution, nice enough that I miss it when I am working with the eyeTV software.
A Mac mini + Front Row is getting there, but is just not just there yet.
1.8 - Will DNF be available on DVD? This still has not been decided yet, however the chances of this happenning are slim. It is important to note that DVD's are not mainstream yet, at least not in the software industry.
Now, I almost never do any gaming on my computer, but I definitely think that any machine that is going to run DNF is going to have a DVD drive.
Amazing that this product has been in development so long that means of distribution have even changed.
My problem with most all newspaper sites online is that they carry the exact same damn national and international AP/Rueters articles that every other news site on the Internet carries, and they cover their home page with them, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find just the local news.
If I go to a local newspaper website, it is because I am looking primarily for news about that locality. Why would I get my national and international news from the Podunk Journal if getting it from CNN, the BBC, and the NYT was just as easy?
Physical newspapers were limited by the needs of the printing press. Satelite distribution and on-demand printing has somewhat changed that, but newspapers seem to still be stuck on this mentality of "we are the only news source for this certain geographic area, so we have to cover all of the news."
The Internet has changed that, and I am still waiting for newspaper websites to catch up to that. I am fine if your physical paper carries national and international news (indeed, I encourage it), but your website is going to have a different readership entirely.
How come every time I see a comment with these sentiments modded up to a 5, the user number of the poster is a bigger number than I have ever seen on the site?
Take a look at my user number, and then repeat with me: Slashdot has not changed that much over the years. All the "problems" you mention have been around since the beginning. Which is it - do you want Slashdot to fix them, or do you want Slashdot to remain what it is?
The company I work for currently has a home-grown solution/program in place. I use the program, and have found numerous bugs.
I fix show-stopping bugs (since I rely on the program, and major bugs make my job more difficult) as they come up.
I *really* want to do some more work on the program. Clean up the code (it is in PHP), comment it a bit, and fix some of the hacks that allow it to work to more permenant solutions.
I am not a developer for the company, though, and do not get paid to do development work. As such, as tempting as it is, I only touch the code if a new release completely breaks things. [Yes, I think it is possible the sole developer, who I think got a small contract from the company teo develop it, is not a developer either, and probably does not QA on any release].
Some things I could do would make my job easier, but I have no desire to do something "out of the kindness of my heart" for the company without some form of payment.
Sometimes I feel greedy for my position, but I also reaslize that if I write a good enough program to make my job 10% easier or faster, the company would be more than likely to cut my hours 10%.
I suppose that is a comment on company loyalty (going in both directions)
One reason I always dislike Firefox (I keep it around on my Mac, but only use it when a site fails under Safari, something that is happening less and less often now) is the completely un-OS X interface.
Radio buttons, text boxes, you name it, are all done in the Windows-esque way that Mozilla has standardized on.
As a result, I hate the way Firefox looks on my computer. Camino helps with that, but it follows an older code-base.
Add in that AdBlock is more annoying to use than PithHelmet and I will keep using Safari in the near future.
(On a side note, why can no one copy the great blocking abilities built-in to iCab, the old browser for the Mac? Extremely powerful blocking, and an easy to use interface to set it up. Is that too much to ask?)
In my house I happen to have two documents - one is the instruction manual that came with an Apple//gs. The other is the instruction manual that came with Windows 1.0.
Anyone with half a brain can flip through both books, look at screenshots, and realize that they are almost identical. This is not a "KDE copies the Windows UI", this is "Wow, if I had not looked at the cover of the book, I would not be able to identify some of these screenshots correctly."
Based on that evidence alone, I feel that Apple had a right to sue.
I consider myself quite a geek, and more of a power-user type.
That said, I let iTunes do its own thing. I *never* go into the iTunes Library folder (where the actual files are stored). I do all of my organization from within iTunes.
The problem comes from people that want to use two different interfaces (the Finder and iTunes) to manage music. iTunes does this really well. If I want to delete a song, I delete it from within iTunes. iTunes asks if I want to delete the original file.
If I want a copy of a song, I just drag it from iTunes onto the Desktop. Instant copy. Any other organization is done with playlists, smart playlists, and the browser.
I do not see people thinking of iTunes as where music files exist as a bad thing. This gets to the point of the original article - the removal of the old file/folder paradigm. If iTunes can do everything you could possibly need to do with your song files, why would you NEED to go into the folder hierarchy and deal with the actual song files?
I cling to my Sony Clie T665C. I keep thinking about going with one of the current Palms, but they offer so little beyond what my Sony does that there seems to be no reason to pay money for basically the same device.
What do I use my Clie for? 1) Keeping my calendar on me at all times. I do find that I am using it less now that I also have my iPod set up to keep sync'd with iCal. It is nice to be able to add appointments while on the go, though.
2) Keeping the local bus schedules on me at all times. Without a car in a major metropolitan area, the ability to see when the next bus is coming is extremely handy.
3) Being able to read the New York Times and Rueters on the bus on the way to work.
My friends used to laugh at me when I would stick my Sony in my jacket pocket before we would go out for a night on the town. The first few times I pulled it out and said "ok, there is an all-night eatery with good reviews about six blocks from here. Go three blocks in this direction and then turn left", though, they stopped making fun of it.
In addition to everything listed above, I keep a few photos on it, a couple hundred addresses, and a couple thousand datebook entries. Even with this, I am barely breaking 8 megabytes of the 16 megabytes storage on the device.
Sure, my 12" PowerBook could do most of what I have listed above. When I go out for a night, though, I cannot slip my laptop into my jacket pocket.
All this desire for gigabytes of storage, hundreds of megahertz of performance, and wireless make little sense to me.
This entire idea of convergence, with PDA/game device/cell phone/MP3 player/camera seems to be getting ridiculous. Palm seems to have completely ignored innovation on the low end of their devices.
What ever happened to the idea of a simple device that did its job and did it well?
If this were a MS story of Bill Gates doing the same, there would be the usual crazy outbreak of 'MS evil empire' type banter. However, because its Apple , the response is a mild - 'oh its ok, hes the Apple man hes allowed to'.
Funny, you must be reading different posts than I am. Most of the posts I have read have been along the line of "Well, Apple does have a *right* to do this, but it is a sucky thing to do."
In my opinion this is a fairly accurate view of the situation. Nice *non-fanatical* (in either direction) assessment of the situation.
What I want to know is this - how come every single article that gets posted about Apple has several people such as you posting, asking why everyone is going nicely on Apple? It almost seems like you do not even read the posts, and instead just copy and paste the same damn post every time.
Most of the people posting on Slashdot these days are young, easily impressionable males, that have little sense or understanding of two sides of a discussion and generally are very one-eyed about subjects with little or no flexibilty to gauge information as valid or relevant.
It seems to me that at first you are calling upon Slashdot readers to look at both sides of the story, you are now calling upon them to fall into the party line of "Censorship is BAD! Corporations are EVIL!"
I feel like you are calling upon Slashdot readers to make this into a two-sided issue - either Apple is Evil Incarnate, or the company's actions are so uneventful as to not even justify a Slashdot article about it. You seem to be asking why people do not see Apple as evil, and then say you want to promote differing sides of the debate?
A response that gets posted after each of the "Why is Apple immune?" post is one that points out that with several hundred thousand readers, Slashdot is a very diverse place. There are opinions all over the place. There is no single "party line" here.
If you think this discussion was not full of argument and debate, I would definitely accuse you of not even reading the posts before you copied and pasted your "Why is Apple so loved?" comment. You seem to be calling upon people to call for a boycott of Apple because of this. You want to see the extremist anti-Apple view, and hide it under the guise of "I want more discussion and balance."
Basically you want someone to hate Apple for this. I am sorry, we are grown up here and are capable of seeing a corporation's actions as business decisions, not a result of an Evil Overlord guiding commerce in the country (we save that for the actions of the US government).
Oh, and do not dare give me that "Slashdot these days" crap. Take a look at my UID. I have been here a lot longer than you. If anything, Slashdot is a much more diverse place. A long time ago it was just a hang-out for Linux geeks. It was a lot more as you describe - "Linux rocks, everything else sucks!" As it grew and gained popularity, the readership became more diverse, and debate became more and more common.
Please try not to copy and paste your "Why does Slashdot not hate Apple like they do Microsoft?" comment again next time, please.
I am an ardent backer of free journalism, but I see this case pushing a very fine line. Where does "journalism" stop and "somebody just writing something down" start?
Suppose someone writes a trade secret in an anonymous Slashdot story submission? In an anonymous Slashdot comment? In a LiveJournal entry? In a Slashdot journal entry?
Should these all be protected under the guise of journalism?
The Internet blurs the line between professional journalism and amateur writing, which is one of the great things about the new levels of communication that is available to anyone able to get online.
This case can hold the precedence to start the "slippery slope" of protecting anything written online. While this might sound like a wonderful idea to the "Information wants to be free" crowd, I see it as being very dangerous.
This case is a bad test of the "bloggers as journalists" question anyway. Had a paper newspaper done the exact same thing, the law would not protect the paper either. ThinkSecret knowingly asked someone to disclose a trade secret, and then knowingly published this "secret" for no reason other than to publish it (and maybe reap some ad revenue).
I have three browsers on my machine, Safari, Camino, and Firefox. I use them in that order.
I would like to use FireFox more often, but the hideous Windows interface is unbearable. I can deal with it for a couple of sites every now and then than are broken under the other two, but that is about it.
Camino is a great start, but does not offer the full features of the other two browsers. It would be unusable for day to day use, I think (I am sure there are people that use it day in and day out, but for me it is simply too limited).
Safari does most of what a browser should. It is far from complete (PithHelmet goes a far way to improve that, at least in the filtering category), but it looks good and works well 99.9% of the time.
I would like nothing more than to see the day when Camino is feature-complete and a worthy alternative to Safari.
The music industry is apparently unhappy with Apple's increasing share of the market - the firm sells about 65 per cent of songs sold online. The arrival of cheaper iPods is likely to give the firm an even larger share of the market.
I do not understand the music industry's complaint here. Someone (Apple) is selling their music online and they are unhappy about this? Were they complaining when Virgin, Best Buy, and Tower Records were gobbling up the physical CD market?
What complaint could the music industry have against Apple? As long as the music is being sold, what does the music industry care? They agreed to Apple's contract.
Cheaper iPods will also lead to Apple selling MORE songs. That is the reason that Apple will have more of the market. Yeah, the music industry definitely has a right to complain - one of their resellers will be selling a lot more of their product. Gotta hate it when that happens.
Meanwhile it was confirmed on Friday that the European Commission is investigating allegations that British consumers are being ripped off by Apple's iTunes service because it charges more for downloads from the UK site and does not allow punters to buy tracks from other country's iTunes sites.
I always thought that a Brit's inability to buy from another country's iTunes store is because of licensing restrictions. That is, that Apple is not allowed to sell a song to a Brit that Apple only has the French distribution rights to.
I suppose the EU is supposed to rectify a lot of these problems, but I daresay that the contracts between Apple and the music industry follow the older, country-specific licensing agreements.
How much of this could also be chalked up to England still using the Pound, and not going over to the Euro? Will the EC only be happy when it costs EXACTLY the same in England (with the pound) as it does in France, with the Euro? Would Apple have to change prices daily to keep up with the exchange rate?
(Yes, I realize that English iTunes is still way too expensive in comparison and should be brought down. I am just not so quick to blame Apple. Maybe the contract the music industry came up with in England just charges Apple more per song?)
Slashdot Mirror
The MP war will probably, as you say, be a boring and inevitable one, but I can't see that it will be of any benefit to the consumer. There's no accounting for marketing...
I beg to differ. In 60 years, my 2 GHz machine will be long in the landfill (or recycled, or...) In any event, the machine will be gone.
The photos I am taking with my digital camera, though, will still be around. Maybe I will be showing them to my grandchildren.
Digital cameras are one place where hardware and the quality of the data created are linked. Creating a Word document is the same on a 400MHz machine as it is on a 3GHz machine (well, the end result, at least). Sure, the hardware will be long gone in 100 years, but not the data. The data needs to last as long as possible.
I have not idea what technologies will exist in 60 years when it comes to image manipulation and viewing. Sure, blowing up to building size is one thing, but are you sure that in 100 years that is the ultimate test of an image?
I realize that image quality is limited by a great number of things, including CCD size, lens quality, and so on. But if I am looking at two nearly identical digital cameras, and one is 11MP and the other is 13MP, I am going to spend the little extra money on the 13MP camera, even if right here, right now I cannot tell a difference.
information may want to be free, but I also want it to live as long as it can.
Less than 12 hours after I saw the changes to Facebook, I deactivated my account. I admit that I keep a myspace account, and up until yesterday I had a facebook account. I publish almost no personal information on either of these accounts, and the personal information they did require was faked. Myspace thinks I am a 79 year old woman, for example.
I keep these accounts simply so that friends of mine can find me and get in touch with me.
So what did I have to fear from facebook? After all, I almost never did anything "active" on facebook, meaning my name would almost never show up in other people's feeds. What bothered me was the access I had to OTHER people. I really had no desire to know that much about my friends. True, I could probably turn it off somehow, but it really bothered me.
I know human nature all too well. I would like to think I would be above it, but I know that I would log in daily and scan down through the news feed. I did not want to do that, and so I eliminated the temptation.
I do not agree with the people saying "Well, if you do not want everyone to know about it, do not put it online in the first place." My trash might be public once I put it on the street, but that does not mean I want a service to email all my friends with a complete listing of the contents of my trash bag each week.
My big question is "How low is low?"
I never thought I was in the minority, but the more I see how others work, the more I think that I might very well be.
My In box is used exclusively for immediate, pressing emails. They are almost all from the last week, and are generally emails that I have not responded to, but need to. Sometimes I keep an email in there that I have responded to, but that just means that I *need* a response, and that I should email the person again if I do not hear back.
If my In box ever gets more than about 10-12 messages in it, I make a concerted effort to go through and clean it out.
That said, I have well over 60,000 messages (no junk/spam, that gets deleted) saved on my computer. They are saved in about 120 different mailboxes (as Eudora calls them), using about 20 or so different folders and subfolders.
As soon as an email is no longer needed in my In box, it gets filed away in another mailbox.
The idea of keeping everything in one giant mailbox is completely strange to me.
Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia
Much of the work done by intelligence agencies is data-mining.
Yeah, but is the NSA sitting on a supercomputer as a "last resort" for encryption problems? I am sure the NSA definitely prefers backdoors and easy mathematical solutions to cryptography problems, but I would not put it past them to have a few supercomputers in case those methods do not work.
Please not the article is talking about "video games", and more specifically console and computer games.
This past weekend I played a very fun game of Uno at a coffeeshop with some friends. I have been known to break out a Scrabble board on occasion. Last month I even played Parthenon with some friends. I would like to get back into D&D at some point.
When I am in a bar, if they have a Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man machine, I am all over it. I wish there was a D&B nearby (or maybe not, since I would probably end up going to often and spending too much money)
That said, I cannot remember the last time I played a game on my computer. On occasion I will play a console game at a friend's house, but I do not own one. I have nothing against them, they tend to just be beyond my budget (I feel like I could afford a console OR the games, but not both). I can have as much fun playing a much less expensive board game.
I am disappointed that a Bose Sounddock was not included as one of the speakers compared. While I despise Bose products, they are a very popular seller to a large part of the iPod buying population.
Between crappy sound, non-portability, and lack of an auxiliary in, it is a terrible product. I would like to have an article I point people to and say "See, it is a crappy product and if you are so hyped up about buying a speaker system specifically for your iPod, there are better ones out there."
I was stuck at work all day, but managed to sneak some supplies to make my own.
My results
I could not use sand, since I could not find any within walking distance of work, so I ended up cutting up foil tissue paper. I even framed mine.
My boss was proud of me (but told me I had to clean up the mess of glittery paper that was all over the floor once I got done)
Yeah, all of those people out there using iTunes music streaming are constantly complaining about the difficulty in getting it set up.
Simply put, it can be done well enough (using technologies such as ZeroConf) that it really requires almost no effort on the part of the end-user.
It makes a lot of sense to me. I am a Mac user, and I have an iMac with about 500 gigabytes of storage attached in my bedroom. I keep thinking about picking up a cheap Mac mini for my living room. Everyone keeps talking about throwing in bigger hard drives into the mini, or adding more RAM. A minimal HD and RAM is enough to stream off of the iMac.
Now I just need to convince the roommates we need a bigger television...
I month ago I bought a G5 iMac (iSight). A few weeks later I picked up an eyeTV 200 and an external hard drive.
Having once owned a TiVo, I can say that TiVo does not need to worry about any possible competition from el Gato. The software is so much crap as to be ridiculous. The inability to set up a "Season Pass" (where the software will record all episodes of a show on a certain channel) tops the list, but there are many other deficiencies.
Some other problems:
1) The lack of integration with Front Row.
2) The lack of an on-screen display to choose programs via the remote.
3) The inability to edit out commercial breaks automatically.
4) Complete lack of tools to manage hard drive space (ability to say "Just record four of these", and so on)
I have thought about setting up an AppleScript solution that would take the recordings from eyeTV and get them into a form where I can view them with Front Row, but I feel like I should not have to do that.
I have thought about picking up an Intel Mac mini to keep near my television to stream to, but I want to get everything working well before I consider that.
No, Front Row is not ready to replace MythTV or TiVo, but it is a nice solution, nice enough that I miss it when I am working with the eyeTV software.
A Mac mini + Front Row is getting there, but is just not just there yet.
I just noticed this on the DNF FAQ:
1.8 - Will DNF be available on DVD?
This still has not been decided yet, however the chances of this happenning are slim. It is important to note that DVD's are not mainstream yet, at least not in the software industry.
Now, I almost never do any gaming on my computer, but I definitely think that any machine that is going to run DNF is going to have a DVD drive.
Amazing that this product has been in development so long that means of distribution have even changed.
Answers like this are evidence that you should not permanently fake User Agent strings.
"Oh, no one uses FireFox to visit our site!"
"No, 11.7% of our users are using FireFox, and have to fake it to get around our User Agent filtering."
My problem with most all newspaper sites online is that they carry the exact same damn national and international AP/Rueters articles that every other news site on the Internet carries, and they cover their home page with them, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find just the local news.
If I go to a local newspaper website, it is because I am looking primarily for news about that locality. Why would I get my national and international news from the Podunk Journal if getting it from CNN, the BBC, and the NYT was just as easy?
Physical newspapers were limited by the needs of the printing press. Satelite distribution and on-demand printing has somewhat changed that, but newspapers seem to still be stuck on this mentality of "we are the only news source for this certain geographic area, so we have to cover all of the news."
The Internet has changed that, and I am still waiting for newspaper websites to catch up to that. I am fine if your physical paper carries national and international news (indeed, I encourage it), but your website is going to have a different readership entirely.
How come every time I see a comment with these sentiments modded up to a 5, the user number of the poster is a bigger number than I have ever seen on the site?
Take a look at my user number, and then repeat with me: Slashdot has not changed that much over the years. All the "problems" you mention have been around since the beginning. Which is it - do you want Slashdot to fix them, or do you want Slashdot to remain what it is?
I was writing about this over three years ago!
The company I work for currently has a home-grown solution/program in place. I use the program, and have found numerous bugs.
I fix show-stopping bugs (since I rely on the program, and major bugs make my job more difficult) as they come up.
I *really* want to do some more work on the program. Clean up the code (it is in PHP), comment it a bit, and fix some of the hacks that allow it to work to more permenant solutions.
I am not a developer for the company, though, and do not get paid to do development work. As such, as tempting as it is, I only touch the code if a new release completely breaks things. [Yes, I think it is possible the sole developer, who I think got a small contract from the company teo develop it, is not a developer either, and probably does not QA on any release].
Some things I could do would make my job easier, but I have no desire to do something "out of the kindness of my heart" for the company without some form of payment.
Sometimes I feel greedy for my position, but I also reaslize that if I write a good enough program to make my job 10% easier or faster, the company would be more than likely to cut my hours 10%.
I suppose that is a comment on company loyalty (going in both directions)
One reason I always dislike Firefox (I keep it around on my Mac, but only use it when a site fails under Safari, something that is happening less and less often now) is the completely un-OS X interface.
Radio buttons, text boxes, you name it, are all done in the Windows-esque way that Mozilla has standardized on.
As a result, I hate the way Firefox looks on my computer. Camino helps with that, but it follows an older code-base.
Add in that AdBlock is more annoying to use than PithHelmet and I will keep using Safari in the near future.
(On a side note, why can no one copy the great blocking abilities built-in to iCab, the old browser for the Mac? Extremely powerful blocking, and an easy to use interface to set it up. Is that too much to ask?)
Your post does read a lot like a troll.
//gs. The other is the instruction manual that came with Windows 1.0.
In my house I happen to have two documents - one is the instruction manual that came with an Apple
Anyone with half a brain can flip through both books, look at screenshots, and realize that they are almost identical. This is not a "KDE copies the Windows UI", this is "Wow, if I had not looked at the cover of the book, I would not be able to identify some of these screenshots correctly."
Based on that evidence alone, I feel that Apple had a right to sue.
I consider myself quite a geek, and more of a power-user type.
That said, I let iTunes do its own thing. I *never* go into the iTunes Library folder (where the actual files are stored). I do all of my organization from within iTunes.
The problem comes from people that want to use two different interfaces (the Finder and iTunes) to manage music. iTunes does this really well. If I want to delete a song, I delete it from within iTunes. iTunes asks if I want to delete the original file.
If I want a copy of a song, I just drag it from iTunes onto the Desktop. Instant copy. Any other organization is done with playlists, smart playlists, and the browser.
I do not see people thinking of iTunes as where music files exist as a bad thing. This gets to the point of the original article - the removal of the old file/folder paradigm. If iTunes can do everything you could possibly need to do with your song files, why would you NEED to go into the folder hierarchy and deal with the actual song files?
I cling to my Sony Clie T665C. I keep thinking about going with one of the current Palms, but they offer so little beyond what my Sony does that there seems to be no reason to pay money for basically the same device.
What do I use my Clie for?
1) Keeping my calendar on me at all times. I do find that I am using it less now that I also have my iPod set up to keep sync'd with iCal. It is nice to be able to add appointments while on the go, though.
2) Keeping the local bus schedules on me at all times. Without a car in a major metropolitan area, the ability to see when the next bus is coming is extremely handy.
3) Being able to read the New York Times and Rueters on the bus on the way to work.
4) Being able to get maps, walking directions, and local restaurants/bars/shops when I go out.
My friends used to laugh at me when I would stick my Sony in my jacket pocket before we would go out for a night on the town. The first few times I pulled it out and said "ok, there is an all-night eatery with good reviews about six blocks from here. Go three blocks in this direction and then turn left", though, they stopped making fun of it.
In addition to everything listed above, I keep a few photos on it, a couple hundred addresses, and a couple thousand datebook entries. Even with this, I am barely breaking 8 megabytes of the 16 megabytes storage on the device.
Sure, my 12" PowerBook could do most of what I have listed above. When I go out for a night, though, I cannot slip my laptop into my jacket pocket.
All this desire for gigabytes of storage, hundreds of megahertz of performance, and wireless make little sense to me.
This entire idea of convergence, with PDA/game device/cell phone/MP3 player/camera seems to be getting ridiculous. Palm seems to have completely ignored innovation on the low end of their devices.
What ever happened to the idea of a simple device that did its job and did it well?
If this were a MS story of Bill Gates doing the same, there would be the usual crazy outbreak of 'MS evil empire' type banter. However, because its Apple , the response is a mild - 'oh its ok, hes the Apple man hes allowed to'.
Funny, you must be reading different posts than I am. Most of the posts I have read have been along the line of "Well, Apple does have a *right* to do this, but it is a sucky thing to do."
In my opinion this is a fairly accurate view of the situation. Nice *non-fanatical* (in either direction) assessment of the situation.
What I want to know is this - how come every single article that gets posted about Apple has several people such as you posting, asking why everyone is going nicely on Apple? It almost seems like you do not even read the posts, and instead just copy and paste the same damn post every time.
Most of the people posting on Slashdot these days are young, easily impressionable males, that have little sense or understanding of two sides of a discussion and generally are very one-eyed about subjects with little or no flexibilty to gauge information as valid or relevant.
It seems to me that at first you are calling upon Slashdot readers to look at both sides of the story, you are now calling upon them to fall into the party line of "Censorship is BAD! Corporations are EVIL!"
I feel like you are calling upon Slashdot readers to make this into a two-sided issue - either Apple is Evil Incarnate, or the company's actions are so uneventful as to not even justify a Slashdot article about it. You seem to be asking why people do not see Apple as evil, and then say you want to promote differing sides of the debate?
A response that gets posted after each of the "Why is Apple immune?" post is one that points out that with several hundred thousand readers, Slashdot is a very diverse place. There are opinions all over the place. There is no single "party line" here.
If you think this discussion was not full of argument and debate, I would definitely accuse you of not even reading the posts before you copied and pasted your "Why is Apple so loved?" comment. You seem to be calling upon people to call for a boycott of Apple because of this. You want to see the extremist anti-Apple view, and hide it under the guise of "I want more discussion and balance."
Basically you want someone to hate Apple for this. I am sorry, we are grown up here and are capable of seeing a corporation's actions as business decisions, not a result of an Evil Overlord guiding commerce in the country (we save that for the actions of the US government).
Oh, and do not dare give me that "Slashdot these days" crap. Take a look at my UID. I have been here a lot longer than you. If anything, Slashdot is a much more diverse place. A long time ago it was just a hang-out for Linux geeks. It was a lot more as you describe - "Linux rocks, everything else sucks!" As it grew and gained popularity, the readership became more diverse, and debate became more and more common.
Please try not to copy and paste your "Why does Slashdot not hate Apple like they do Microsoft?" comment again next time, please.
I am an ardent backer of free journalism, but I see this case pushing a very fine line. Where does "journalism" stop and "somebody just writing something down" start?
Suppose someone writes a trade secret in an anonymous Slashdot story submission? In an anonymous Slashdot comment? In a LiveJournal entry? In a Slashdot journal entry?
Should these all be protected under the guise of journalism?
The Internet blurs the line between professional journalism and amateur writing, which is one of the great things about the new levels of communication that is available to anyone able to get online.
This case can hold the precedence to start the "slippery slope" of protecting anything written online. While this might sound like a wonderful idea to the "Information wants to be free" crowd, I see it as being very dangerous.
This case is a bad test of the "bloggers as journalists" question anyway. Had a paper newspaper done the exact same thing, the law would not protect the paper either. ThinkSecret knowingly asked someone to disclose a trade secret, and then knowingly published this "secret" for no reason other than to publish it (and maybe reap some ad revenue).
I have three browsers on my machine, Safari, Camino, and Firefox. I use them in that order.
I would like to use FireFox more often, but the hideous Windows interface is unbearable. I can deal with it for a couple of sites every now and then than are broken under the other two, but that is about it.
Camino is a great start, but does not offer the full features of the other two browsers. It would be unusable for day to day use, I think (I am sure there are people that use it day in and day out, but for me it is simply too limited).
Safari does most of what a browser should. It is far from complete (PithHelmet goes a far way to improve that, at least in the filtering category), but it looks good and works well 99.9% of the time.
I would like nothing more than to see the day when Camino is feature-complete and a worthy alternative to Safari.
The music industry is apparently unhappy with Apple's increasing share of the market - the firm sells about 65 per cent of songs sold online. The arrival of cheaper iPods is likely to give the firm an even larger share of the market.
I do not understand the music industry's complaint here. Someone (Apple) is selling their music online and they are unhappy about this? Were they complaining when Virgin, Best Buy, and Tower Records were gobbling up the physical CD market?
What complaint could the music industry have against Apple? As long as the music is being sold, what does the music industry care? They agreed to Apple's contract.
Cheaper iPods will also lead to Apple selling MORE songs. That is the reason that Apple will have more of the market. Yeah, the music industry definitely has a right to complain - one of their resellers will be selling a lot more of their product. Gotta hate it when that happens.
Meanwhile it was confirmed on Friday that the European Commission is investigating allegations that British consumers are being ripped off by Apple's iTunes service because it charges more for downloads from the UK site and does not allow punters to buy tracks from other country's iTunes sites.
I always thought that a Brit's inability to buy from another country's iTunes store is because of licensing restrictions. That is, that Apple is not allowed to sell a song to a Brit that Apple only has the French distribution rights to.
I suppose the EU is supposed to rectify a lot of these problems, but I daresay that the contracts between Apple and the music industry follow the older, country-specific licensing agreements.
How much of this could also be chalked up to England still using the Pound, and not going over to the Euro? Will the EC only be happy when it costs EXACTLY the same in England (with the pound) as it does in France, with the Euro? Would Apple have to change prices daily to keep up with the exchange rate?
(Yes, I realize that English iTunes is still way too expensive in comparison and should be brought down. I am just not so quick to blame Apple. Maybe the contract the music industry came up with in England just charges Apple more per song?)
I think we should have some sort of "SlashDot old-timers" thread somewhere on this site.
Maybe there is one and I have not been invited since I am such a Johnny Come-lately that my UID is four digits long, and not three.
In a lot of ways it is amazing how little has changed on Slashdot over the years.