The fact that Firefox requires a seperate CSS-stylesheet doesn't help matters, but I opted out of Firefox support to Support Gecko variants (safari) as well as Mozilla and IE -- but not Opera.
Last time I checked Firefox and Mozilla were the Gecko variants, Safari was a KHTML variant and IE was a variant of the plague.
Um, that would be because every computer that is capable of running Mac OS X came from a single company, the same one that put out the OS. You could just as easily say the same thing about Sun.
Except of course that Apple uses ATI/NVidia graphics cards and supports nearly the same set of USB/Firewire devices as a PC would.
This is where people care about "plug and play".. when they can plug their scanner/mouse/other device into their Linux box and it just works. No configuration or screwing around with a CLI.
The fact is Apple IS doing it right.. and Linux better catch up quickly because it is clearly a distant third (behing OSX and Windows).
Have you actually talked to some art students lately? Aside from people that are actually doing computer graphics work, their computer skills (in general) are pitiful. Having a Mac does not help this - in fact, it gives them even less incentive to actually learn how their computer works beyond "double-click the cute little icon to open IE/AIM/Photoshop/etc.".
Have you actually talked to some people lately? Aside from people that are actually doing computer work, their computer skills (in general) are pitiful.
Posts like yours aren't informative or interesting. Anyone that thinks people should have to learn how a computer works before they are 'allowed' to use one is deluded. Show me how many people know the internal workings of their car.
I was writing BASIC programs on my dad's C64 when I was 7 or 8.
Right. And a C64 is infinitely easier than trying to install and manage Linux.
And guess what you can program on OSX and still have it be suitable for kids. And heh let's take this to the next logical conclusion:
Why have a GUI at all.. some children don't need a hand at all writing in assembler and doing everything from the command line. Oh wait, that's SOME children (i.e. 0.000000001%).
I have a half-dozen of the more recent blueberry iMacs in my school that have crashed hard drives and fried network cards
WTF ? The blueberry iMacs are hardly 'new' machines. They were made a few years ago, which completely unravels your whole argument.
I have switched to plain-brown-wrapper computers for my school.
Good for you. I wish you all the best with the viruses, spyware, OS troubles, security updates etc etc.
the Apples and Dells of the world offer no advantages in reliability, and I have the machines to prove it.
As always. You != the rest of the world. The problems you are facing are not endemic of a wider quality control issue. It may be. It may be not. But you need a bigger sample size than just your piddly experience.
That said, things like Apple's refusal to provide simple UI enhancements (can we say 2nd mouse button standard, as has been on PCs since around the mid-90s?).
Why I oughta..
The fact is most computer novices don't know what the second mouse button does anyway, and it definitely isn't intuitive under which circumstances it should be used.
Clearly your not a novice, so for fscks sake.. buy yourself a Microsoft or Logitech mouse and plug into your Mac.
Then go down to the corner store and buy yourself a clue.
It should be noted that Weta Digital opted for the more expensive Shake+Linux combination than going the full Mac route, heh
Two points then:
1) Did Weta Digital have any existing Linux infrastructure (including software) that was in use before purchasing Shake. Clearly, this would have increased the cost associated with purchasing the Mac+Shake combination.
2) At the end of the day Apple still made the money to compensate for that so called "loss" of computer. Obviously, they will miss out on future revenue, but it still seems like a good idea to me.
Wait till your boss asks you to "dumb it down" and not to use Generics/Templates/Inner Classes/Overloading/whatever, because others are having trouble understanding/maintaining your code.
IMHO all good programmers should think about what will happen if they leave. That is, if you do use all the exotic features of the language then you have to understand that it will be harder for management to find a replacement for you.
Hence things like templates/overloading whilst great for you and usually for the project.. is pretty bad for the long time survability of the project as generally there will be less chance of finding good C++ programmers than a crappy C programmer.
Exactly right.. a classic example I keep seeing is the attitude towards design and documentation.
In uni, I was taught that design and documentation are equally as important as the code.
In the workplace, I learned that the client and product is the most important. How it is implemented, or how much design, documentation is involved is secondary. Not that it isn't important rather that:
A program delivered months early with secondary attention given to design and documentation is much better than a well designed, documented program that is delivered months late.
Because technology is changing so quickly, having a lot of experience with a particular technology (in this case C++) can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
Good things: Lots of inherent tip & tricks about software design, what works in certain situations and generally a better understanding of what the clients/managers want.
Bad things: Natural inclination to stick to the technology they know best rather than whats the best in that particular situation.
I tend to think people with a lot of development experience should move into becoming technology managers. This is where their experience is most valuable and they will tend to be better at relating to and understanding programmers and the software development lifecycle.
Sure Apple has some good designers..... but so does Sony, Samsung, etc
Sony has great designers, except they have indicated they are going down the ATRAC path i.e. yet another proprietary digital format. Samsung aren't in the same league as Apple or Sony.
At the current price points Apple is working with iPod like devices will never become mainstream
Riigght. Apple is as closer to mainstream than all of the other MP3 players combined. Justin Timerblake, Shaq - when people of this ilk use iPods you know Apple has hit the mainstream market.
And once WMA has conquered the field the recording studios won't even renew Apple's license to run the iTunes Store.
Well given that it is BECAUSE of Apple that these stores exist I would think the RIAA would keep Apple's license for a little while yet.
Their 1% marketshare won't justify pissing off Billy Gates.
Apple has 40% market share. Microsoft has 0%. And Apple hasn't yet started shipping HP iPods or satisfied the huge demand for iPod Mini's. So please get back to me when Apple drops from 40% to 1% rather than increasing their market share.
And for the record it's probably Balmer who is getting pissed off: Developers. Developers. Developers. What a fricking' psycho. I'd take Jobs and his RDF any day.
Consumers aren't stupid enough to buy into this DRM crapola
First sensible point. The point is real consumers (i.e. not you or me or the rest of the Slashdot crowd) don't know what DRM is or why they should care about it. They just care that it is easy for them to get their songs from the store to their iPod. Apple is light years ahead of everybody else.
And does anyone seriously think ordinary consumers care about transcoding their AAC files or the issues of running a Linux MP3 server. I didn't think so.
The Apple crowd was the perfect audience for iPod, they are generally artistic types
By that definition the Linux crowd is a bunch of nerds who never get laid and smell funny (i.e. not true) and the Windows crowd is a bunch of ignorant, lets get a MSCE instead of a degree types. (i.e. not true). Funny how insulting blanket statements are heh !!
I don't see the WinMX crowd lining up to buy crippled tracks.
Course they don't. They know how to steal music for free. Hell if I could rob a bank and know I could get away with it, i'd do it every day.
A lot of people don't know how to download free music off the net. Or they don't want to. Or it's too much effort. Or the quality sucks. Lots of reasons to use a legitimate, high quality store.
Just too complicated and risky for me.
Well your an idiot and frankly I'm disappointed the mods felt your opinion was worth something.
Lastly of course my favorite response is when people say its "O.K," if you go from digital->digital(CD)->digital but not if you go from digital->digital(Playfair)->digital.
One's illegal. One's not.
btw I understand you can do this with Applescript as well. So is Apple going to sue Apple now?
Well you understood wrong. Read some of the many posts before, Applescript just automates the conversion of multiple music files using PlayFair.
i.e. it STILL requires you to have PlayFair installed.
There are a few ongoing costs that will take some chunk out of that so called 'profit'. My definition of profit is money made after you pay off both the initial investment and paid your ongoing expenditure.
For example:
- Salaries for both iTMS support staff, people organising the 30 second preview (remember its not just the first 30 seconds), as well as the developers, system admins, managers.
- The ongoing bandwidth costs, which would seem to be quite significant given they are serving quite large files.
- Ongoing server requirements. WebObjects on which iTMS is based is notorious for liking to eat up memory to cache database info. And WO having a "the process is the instance" mentality, this would require even greater server requirements as the number of downloads increase.
So there would be appear to be quite a few ongoing costs in there - remember this aint no toy setup that anyone can just whip together. Think Amazon.com style costs.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Firefox requires a seperate CSS-stylesheet doesn't help matters, but I opted out of Firefox support to Support Gecko variants (safari) as well as Mozilla and IE -- but not Opera.
Last time I checked Firefox and Mozilla were the Gecko variants, Safari was a KHTML variant and IE was a variant of the plague.
1. Java is not open-sourced and falls out of use like most closed standards eventually do.
.doc, .xls
Except for the two biggest standards:
I.B.M,
U.B.M,
We all B.M.,
For I.B.M.!
Definitely
Um, that would be because every computer that is capable of running Mac OS X came from a single company, the same one that put out the OS. You could just as easily say the same thing about Sun.
.. when they can plug their scanner/mouse/other device into their Linux box and it just works. No configuration or screwing around with a CLI.
.. and Linux better catch up quickly because it is clearly a distant third (behing OSX and Windows).
Except of course that Apple uses ATI/NVidia graphics cards and supports nearly the same set of USB/Firewire devices as a PC would.
This is where people care about "plug and play"
The fact is Apple IS doing it right
Now is finally the time to roll out my speech recognition system, coded in Brainfuck!
.. I didn't know you could do that sort of thing in Perl.
Shit
Either way you look at that .. thats a problem I'm definitely in for solving.
Assuming there is a second version, which there may not be because potential customers found that the performance of v1.0 sucked.
Better a version 1.0 that sucked than none at all.
And funny how Microsoft seems to release so many crappy 1.0 releases yet usually ends up clawing back to become the market leader.
Have you actually talked to some art students lately? Aside from people that are actually doing computer graphics work, their computer skills (in general) are pitiful. Having a Mac does not help this - in fact, it gives them even less incentive to actually learn how their computer works beyond "double-click the cute little icon to open IE/AIM/Photoshop/etc.".
Have you actually talked to some people lately? Aside from people that are actually doing computer work, their computer skills (in general) are pitiful.
Posts like yours aren't informative or interesting. Anyone that thinks people should have to learn how a computer works before they are 'allowed' to use one is deluded. Show me how many people know the internal workings of their car.
Download it here boys and gals:
.. quite a bit 'snappier'.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Looks like a reasonably solid improvement
As much as Microsoft can't be trusted .. i do hope many of the bigger companies/organisations do collaborate on some sort of standard.
Because all I need to be happy in this world is to fulfil my one last dream in life.
I won't go into it, but lets just say it involves a blowtorch, a pair of pliers and a tied up spammer.
I was writing BASIC programs on my dad's C64 when I was 7 or 8.
.. some children don't need a hand at all writing in assembler and doing everything from the command line. Oh wait, that's SOME children (i.e. 0.000000001%).
Right. And a C64 is infinitely easier than trying to install and manage Linux.
And guess what you can program on OSX and still have it be suitable for kids. And heh let's take this to the next logical conclusion:
Why have a GUI at all
I have a half-dozen of the more recent blueberry iMacs in my school that have crashed hard drives and fried network cards
WTF ? The blueberry iMacs are hardly 'new' machines. They were made a few years ago, which completely unravels your whole argument.
I have switched to plain-brown-wrapper computers for my school.
Good for you. I wish you all the best with the viruses, spyware, OS troubles, security updates etc etc.
the Apples and Dells of the world offer no advantages in reliability, and I have the machines to prove it.
As always. You != the rest of the world. The problems you are facing are not endemic of a wider quality control issue. It may be. It may be not. But you need a bigger sample size than just your piddly experience.
That said, things like Apple's refusal to provide simple UI enhancements (can we say 2nd mouse button standard, as has been on PCs since around the mid-90s?).
..
.. buy yourself a Microsoft or Logitech mouse and plug into your Mac.
Why I oughta
The fact is most computer novices don't know what the second mouse button does anyway, and it definitely isn't intuitive under which circumstances it should be used.
Clearly your not a novice, so for fscks sake
Then go down to the corner store and buy yourself a clue.
It should be noted that Weta Digital opted for the more expensive Shake+Linux combination than going the full Mac route, heh
Two points then:
1) Did Weta Digital have any existing Linux infrastructure (including software) that was in use before purchasing Shake. Clearly, this would have increased the cost associated with purchasing the Mac+Shake combination.
2) At the end of the day Apple still made the money to compensate for that so called "loss" of computer. Obviously, they will miss out on future revenue, but it still seems like a good idea to me.
Has to be the XSan .. this combined with the XServe and XServe RAID really does have to worry companies like Sun and SGI a little.
Heh, sounds like this has confirmed to another standard. The standard way to fsck your competitors:
"Embrace and extend"
So you're a retard who can't code C or HTML.
No. More so I'm a retard who keeps pressing Submit instead of Preview. There's a difference.
Because you're a retard who doesn't know how to code C?
.. do you think that could have something to do with it ??
.. it strips out the HTML tags if you set it as Plain Text.
.. heh its a quiet night.
Or how about because I pressed Submit accidentally instead of Preview
#include <stdio.h>
not that I have any idea why im responding to an AC
I just tried the following program:
.. anyone have any idea why ?
#include
main()
{
printf ("Hello World!\n");
}
And I got the output "Hello Suckers"
Wait till your boss asks you to "dumb it down" and not to use Generics/Templates/Inner Classes/Overloading/whatever, because others are having trouble understanding/maintaining your code.
.. is pretty bad for the long time survability of the project as generally there will be less chance of finding good C++ programmers than a crappy C programmer.
IMHO all good programmers should think about what will happen if they leave. That is, if you do use all the exotic features of the language then you have to understand that it will be harder for management to find a replacement for you.
Hence things like templates/overloading whilst great for you and usually for the project
Exactly right .. a classic example I keep seeing is the attitude towards design and documentation.
In uni, I was taught that design and documentation are equally as important as the code.
In the workplace, I learned that the client and product is the most important. How it is implemented, or how much design, documentation is involved is secondary. Not that it isn't important rather that:
A program delivered months early with secondary attention given to design and documentation is much better than a well designed, documented program that is delivered months late.
Because technology is changing so quickly, having a lot of experience with a particular technology (in this case C++) can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
Good things: Lots of inherent tip & tricks about software design, what works in certain situations and generally a better understanding of what the clients/managers want.
Bad things: Natural inclination to stick to the technology they know best rather than whats the best in that particular situation.
I tend to think people with a lot of development experience should move into becoming technology managers. This is where their experience is most valuable and they will tend to be better at relating to and understanding programmers and the software development lifecycle.
Sure Apple has some good designers..... but so does Sony, Samsung, etc
Sony has great designers, except they have indicated they are going down the ATRAC path i.e. yet another proprietary digital format. Samsung aren't in the same league as Apple or Sony.
At the current price points Apple is working with iPod like devices will never become mainstream
Riigght. Apple is as closer to mainstream than all of the other MP3 players combined. Justin Timerblake, Shaq - when people of this ilk use iPods you know Apple has hit the mainstream market.
And once WMA has conquered the field the recording studios won't even renew Apple's license to run the iTunes Store.
Well given that it is BECAUSE of Apple that these stores exist I would think the RIAA would keep Apple's license for a little while yet.
Their 1% marketshare won't justify pissing off Billy Gates.
Apple has 40% market share. Microsoft has 0%. And Apple hasn't yet started shipping HP iPods or satisfied the huge demand for iPod Mini's. So please get back to me when Apple drops from 40% to 1% rather than increasing their market share.
And for the record it's probably Balmer who is getting pissed off: Developers. Developers. Developers. What a fricking' psycho. I'd take Jobs and his RDF any day.
Consumers aren't stupid enough to buy into this DRM crapola
First sensible point. The point is real consumers (i.e. not you or me or the rest of the Slashdot crowd) don't know what DRM is or why they should care about it. They just care that it is easy for them to get their songs from the store to their iPod. Apple is light years ahead of everybody else.
And does anyone seriously think ordinary consumers care about transcoding their AAC files or the issues of running a Linux MP3 server. I didn't think so.
The Apple crowd was the perfect audience for iPod, they are generally artistic types
By that definition the Linux crowd is a bunch of nerds who never get laid and smell funny (i.e. not true) and the Windows crowd is a bunch of ignorant, lets get a MSCE instead of a degree types. (i.e. not true). Funny how insulting blanket statements are heh !!
I don't see the WinMX crowd lining up to buy crippled tracks.
Course they don't. They know how to steal music for free. Hell if I could rob a bank and know I could get away with it, i'd do it every day.
A lot of people don't know how to download free music off the net. Or they don't want to. Or it's too much effort. Or the quality sucks. Lots of reasons to use a legitimate, high quality store.
Just too complicated and risky for me.
Well your an idiot and frankly I'm disappointed the mods felt your opinion was worth something.
Lastly of course my favorite response is when people say its "O.K," if you go from digital->digital(CD)->digital but not if you go from digital->digital(Playfair)->digital.
One's illegal. One's not.
btw I understand you can do this with Applescript as well. So is Apple going to sue Apple now?
Well you understood wrong. Read some of the many posts before, Applescript just automates the conversion of multiple music files using PlayFair.
i.e. it STILL requires you to have PlayFair installed.
Seriously. Take a basic economics class.
Seriously. Grow up.
There are a few ongoing costs that will take some chunk out of that so called 'profit'. My definition of profit is money made after you pay off both the initial investment and paid your ongoing expenditure.
For example:
- Salaries for both iTMS support staff, people organising the 30 second preview (remember its not just the first 30 seconds), as well as the developers, system admins, managers.
- The ongoing bandwidth costs, which would seem to be quite significant given they are serving quite large files.
- Ongoing server requirements. WebObjects on which iTMS is based is notorious for liking to eat up memory to cache database info. And WO having a "the process is the instance" mentality, this would require even greater server requirements as the number of downloads increase.
So there would be appear to be quite a few ongoing costs in there - remember this aint no toy setup that anyone can just whip together. Think Amazon.com style costs.