Yeah, you save a ton of dough by picking subscriptions very precisely by what you want to watch rather than lazily accepting you need 600 channels of reality TV so that you "have something to watch".
Just today during my biweekly Hotmail check I realized that Hotmail's Junk folder is the only spam dump I check every time I'm on to ensure that I haven't missed something from someone I know. (Or something from someone I knew back when I regularly used Hotmail.) No spam filter filters more non-spam than Hotmail's junk.
Or something like that. In other news, I'm happy to see Slashdot is still doing well.;^)
Good points all around. Apple's very familiar with DRM, and I'd wager most DRM'd content on most Windows and Macintosh OS running hardware was provided by Apple. Microsoft's approaches, though less practically successful on the popular media front, are certainly more successful on the OS front, as another post slightly earlier has pointed out (quoted after this post).
Here's the rub, taking us back to the OP (and away from the Zune vs. iPod discussion this thread has taken):
None of the reasons given suggest Macintosh or Windows OSes would be less "DRM loving" (OP) than Linux. In fact, all we've determined is that both Macintosh and Windows already support "DRM loving policies" (quote from OP).
I don't use Linux daily. I'm not a Linux fanboy. At the same time, if your top priority is a DRM-free "policy" for your OS, learning Linux and forcing it onto your laptop [1], is going to be the best option.
[1] This in response to the troll-esque phrase in the OP trying to ensure that this would be a MS vs. Apple flamewar, "I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it." [emph mine].
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Microsoft doesn't just want to own your media - they want to oen [own?] your whole system and have the ability to shut your OS down remotely. Hell, Microsoft even tries to put DRM on your pre-existing content - for example, if you rip a CD with Windows Media Player. And their "PlaysforSure" DRM is way more restrictive than Apple's.
Just because Microsoft hasn't been particularly successful with their plans, doesn't mean they aren't trying.
Eventually the forum thread got out of hand, and he set up a website devoted to answering the questions. If you have a question that hasn't already been answered, email him at the address on the site. He is responding daily and sometimes within minutes. This guy is dedicated.
And thanks to slashdot, maybe those Google Ads he's added to his answers will bring him a few bucks he wouldn't have made on the "out of hand" macrumors forum.
Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with cashing in -- macrumors' forum isn't exactly ad-free either -- but I'm not real sure how making your own website to answer questions makes slashdot. If he'd taken it apart, upgraded the processor, or found out that there's something inside we hadn't heard of, well, telling us about that is possibly post worthy. Right now, this story is just hardware.slashdot.org-as-billboard.
One of the incredible bits of insight from the site: Q: What can you tell me about the battery? A: Not a whole lot. Made in China (what isn't), Model # A1175, Li-ion.
This was originally going to be a quick reply to someone talking about CB, but I haven't seen HD addressed nor the advantages of analog decoding/receiving, so here goes...
The problem with CB is that CB isn't installed in everyone's car and walkman. This is like fighting Microsoft by dumping into the ocean every copy of Microsoft Office -- for Macintosh.
Having the FCC reserve a swath of AM bandwidth for citizen broadcasts is a much better idea. Lots of open space during the day, inexpensive and very simple to construct transmitters, and you can listen to the broadcasts using radios that don't require power. And, surprisingly, 95% of drivers can listen with the radios they've already got installed in their cars. That's democracy-building (or whatever kind of society you're trying to construct).
That's also what concerns me with 'High Definition' (HD), aka digital, radio. Will we displace analog broadcast? Will we be able to continue building radios that work for free -- rather, will those radios have a signal they can decode in 70 years, or will we be digitally bound? Don't DRM my AM, please. This is a simple technology found in 95% of cars and I'd daresay 99.99% of homes (and anyone with a dime store and $5) that can pick up broadcasts from hundreds of miles away. For the sake of shoving bucks to radio manufacturers, giving a little extra income for the gov't, and a few new stations, we're willing to throw that network away. Bad news. Let them eat UHF.
How do you stop the currently fatalistic drive to HD, when every group with lobbying power (incl. the gov't) is in on the take? This is a hard sell for your typical voter, as the replies of what's generally an above-averagely tech savvy group like/. to this thread show we're not exactly well-informed about the tech behind radio. Is there really an advantage to not just consumer but citizen in moving to digital setups? I'm not sure there is.
I read that as the sabotage of FreeBSD by their own license, although in hindsight I can see it the other way as well. Original author is welcome to clarify his point.
You (Ryel) have my intent. That said, though I didn't intend it, I do see their point about my seeming to blame Apple for Linux. In an extreme sense, I suppose I'm suggesting as much, though that's hardly my intended point of emphasis. I'm blaming, as you say, BSD for FreeBSD's exploitation and, contrary to my title, blaming Apple for being, well, capitalist. I find it difficult for think the latter demands much of a reprimand, however. Apple's always been pretty clear on that point.
Open source tries to appropriate copyright within the context of consumerist capitalism to create a subversive counterforce -- no, to create a true alternative to capitalism from within a capitalist framework; GNU/Linux is an alternative to capitalism built with capitalism. I *really* dig that. The BSD license simply doesn't do this sort of work. OpenDarwin's troubles show it. GNU/Linux is a better alternative, imo, as its [hypothetical and arguably wholly impractical] possible adoption by something like OS X would include true collaboration from the paradigm it hopes to replace [as the dominant]. I'm not, however, for GPL or against BSD. I believe there is a nice middle ground out there somewhere that's even better, as I try to detail on my blog at that earlier link. I doubt we'll find -- or at least implement -- it.
I do wonder what the background is of the people who assume that I, Mr. "I <3 VB", am a GNU/Linux zealot. Are they Windows users? Mac users? BSD users? Linux users? And what is the purpose of FreeBSD, if its supporters get upset when Apple acts like a conventionally incorporated entity living in the US trying to make a buck, bless its heart, but these same upset FreeBSD folk want to retain the option to release code in what is, let's say, an "extremely" altruistic fashion? If FreeBSD contributors hoped that entities like Apple would, out of common courtesy, seriously enter into an active or even passive partnership with them, I believe we now know that's not so likely to happen. I, too, appreciate idealism and a positive belief in our fellow humans, but things like Apple & FreeBSD have turned me into a much more hardened, well, "realist" is the word, I suppose. I think Apple should have felt an obligation to return the favor to the FreeBSD community. Just like IE and Mosaic, it hasn't happened.
By the way, how can I find the proper attribution that OS X uses BSD code? If I use the terminal daily and don't see it, how many semi-technical users do?
P.S. Also sorry that I didn't properly format part of my other reply wrt the "Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there..." paragraph. That was obviously from the previous post, and wasn't my material. Anyhow... Should have used the Preview button again, I guess.
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
That's why I said that they "essentially". How many IE users know the code is based partially on Mosaic? Yet the "proper attrbution" is right there in the About box. MS took it, and now everyone considers it theirs. I haven't heard many blame the NCSA for winning the browser wars. That's essentially plagiarism. End of story.
>but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.
Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.
Two points:
1.) Sure GPL is altruistic. BSD is overly so, imo, because it allows itself to become exploited, as has happened with OS X. This doesn't happen with the, IMO, "less altruistic" GNU/Linux.
2.) I won't tell you how far your altruism can go, but I will give you my opinion how far it's smart to go to prevent your contribution from becoming what some might call exploited. This thread is, in large part, about Apple not providing enough to make Darwin a viable open source OS. Why could they based their entire OS on Darwin and not passively partner with a viable community of open source hackers? B/c of BSD.
>With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code >has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.
Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.
Absolutely right, to a point. I'd rather see Apple have to pay for new development than steal from open source. No, I'd rather Apple feel the ethical, if not legal, obligation to give more back to the FreeBSD community. Sites like OpenDarwin should not have to struggle to stay afloat. People should not have to complain about unbuildable packages being released by Apple. Apple should take their place in the open source community more seriously. They haven't.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
I hate Linux.;^) There, I said it. As I implied in my first post, I use OS X first, and get this, I use Windows second. I like Visual Basic. No, love VB for some tasks. I think C# is great. I know asp inside and out. I hate using C. I hate Perl. I hate *NIX. [These are slight overstatements.]
This is precisely why I'd prefer Apple's millions in Darwin development had been given back to the community in a fashion that would have made both better. The GPL would have done that, as would a more ethical Apple. If you've got a better way of ensuring BSD doesn't short-circuit into one-way, lossy contributions to multi-national, billion dollar corporations, I'm ready to hear it.
Look, not to get too preachy, but that's the problem with FreeBSD and projects with other, equally open licenses, like MIT, etc. As I said in my not-so-tongue-in-cheek blog to the audienceless ether years ago...
These licenses [X11, BSD, MIT] don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism. It's certainly one's right to make code that's this unregulated, but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.
I'm using OS X right now. I'm happy FreeBSD enabled its creation. I'm posting from Safari. I'm happy Konq's code helped Apple build this very fast, mature browser. Without totally free and open licenses like the ones I wrote about, above, we wouldn't have this OS X.
Yet at the same time, this happiness doesn't change that I wish Apple would have partnered with GNU/Linux. We'd see a very different OS X and a very different collaboration (some would argue a "collaboration" would be a new thing, and I believe I agree) between Apple and the GNU hacker community today. Linux has not yet come close to hitting the tipping point on the desktop for the typical semi-technical user. With Apple's help, it would be much closer. With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.
The MacTech 25 is no popularity contest, nor is it to "pick your favorite CEO." We looked for the most influential in the Mac TECHNICAL market.
This seems simliar to American Idol saying that this year, they've instructed the caller-in voters to pick purely on ability. How else could David Pogue and Mike Breeden -- admittedly both *very* influencial writers and news reporters in the Mac "space" -- out-garner Glenda Adams (of Aspyr.com fame, formerly president of Westlake Interactive), who seems, at times, to single-handedly not only keep Mac gamers with options, but also keep anyone interested in the Mac as a gaming platform?
Even then I'm just picking from my own favorites. What techs have these people championed? What BurgerLibs have they created or OpenGLs have they supported?
Looks like one of those was Photoshopped pretty heavily around the remote, but I honestly can't tell if it was to put the remote in or to take it out. I suppose it could be both! Reminds me of the thinking behind the $899 -- Take something you've already done, hack it as little as possible to make it functional in another niche, and release, assuming those who notice the difference won't really care.
And I really don't think anyone will [notice]. It's not like Macs are for gamers, especially not iMacs which, even if they game relatively well when released, are about as useful with their Radeon X1600 in a year or two as the integrate (overstated, but not by much, and written by a three-time iMac owner). Unless you're a programmer or gamer, this iMac is next to perfect, missing only the Superdrive if you're into iDVD.
Previews are horribly positive. Until today, that didn't upset me. If there's ever the proper space for a lovefest in a gaming mag, it's right there, in the previews. Developers are more likely to spill the good beans if you're being positive, and since the games aren't done, why not continue to give them irrationally large boats full of benefit from your doubts?
This is called journaltisement -- the magazine gets inside access because they provide a service, "free" advertisement. Your journal is giving its readers what they want (the designer's biggest dreams, aka "something colorful to read") and the gaming companies get what they'd like as well (um, advertisements!).
It's all a big happy family right? That's what I used to think before I read this story. Here's an important quote.... the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.
"Press previews are very important to our sales," he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Retailers don't know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those [previews].
I knew I was naive, but I was trying so danged hard to stay positive about the previews in magazines. The problem is the Catch-22 -- without the lovefest, there is no inside access and no review. With the lovefest, retailers may be making horribly misinformed decisions about which games to stock for us to buy.
Ultimately, I don't guess I've changed much. For the common reader, journaltisement-style previews still don't bother me as long as the reviews are legit. I guess the question is how intelligent a set of readers are the people making the decisions of what to stock at retailers, and do they know journaltisement when they see it?
No problem with pdf necessarily, but when someone asks for Word you can be reasonably confident they'll accept an rtf -- it'll be opening in the same app. People can get aggravated when they ask for a Word doc and don't get something close enough to one they can treat it as such. I've seen someone open all resumes at once to print and get annoyed when one slips past Word into, say, IE. And I'd recommend not annoying prospective employers!;^) I've also seen head-hunters and in-house HR depts open a resume and start recutting/editing on the spot to pitch to possible employers. Cutting and pasting from Adobe Reader & friends into Word is often a less than pleasing place to start.
Anyhow, thus the rtf. Safe enough that it's likely not going to annoy Word-addicts, but appeals to my idealism since it's not a M$ format. Yet at the same time, as my first post was trying to show, even then I was give or take counting on my Word-written rtf to be opened in Word in order to dodge the formatting issues I describe. When a Word-written rtf does go outside of Word, well, it appears it's potentially headed for trouble.
HTML, otoh, seems to do much better app-to-app than rtf. Much more mature viewing options, and still with the potential (though it makes me cringe to think about it) to be edited in Word on the spot. Still, prone to the potential annoyance factor.
And the fix is to run them through abiword and save as rtf!
Not so fast. AbiWord and rtf do not a crossplatform format make. Trust me, if MS can't keep the.doc format straight from one version of Word to another, rtf isn't doing any better.
I've always liked saving my resume out in rtf format when companies asked for.docs. I guess I had some idealistic notion that I was resisting MS somehow, but, as I knew even then, I was counting on rtf being mapped to Word if they had it installed on their box. One day to check on the xplat of rtf, I took a look at my rtf resume on some alternative word processors on my Mac. Long story short, an *.rtf file looks quite a bit differently when swapped between Word, AppleWorks, TextEdit, and AbiWord.
I already knew that -- I'd always ignored it knowing/assuming the end user was going to use Word -- but this time I took it as a challenge to make a truly reader independent rtf resume. I couldn't do it. Sometimes underlines would come out, sometimes they wouldn't, depending on what editor had done the latest save. Sometimes margins would work like I liked, sometimes they wouldn't, again, depending on the editor that was doing the saving and which was doing the viewing. I would hack and slash in each editor, one at a time, hoping *this* one would produce the simplest, and most portable, document, and each time I'd eventually find the editor's archnemesis in the four which would, on one occasion, even duplicate a line of text randomly in a way that no other editor did! I even started from plain text in two editors, and still couldn't get a doc that would appear reasonably the same in all four editors.
And mind you, I wasn't putting in colors or fancy margins or the like. I was simply underlining, making some text appear in italics, and occasionally using all-caps (The caps did work well cross-editor, thankfully).
What's the answer? Oh, that's easy. People need to start accepting html resumes. When a job is web-related, it's hard to believe that's not the case already. If you've ever seen all the extra code Word slaps into a doc spit out as html, you know you've got several kilobytes to work your own magic before you're gotten it as bloated as Bill's folk do. Html with nice, gracefully degrading CSS and Javascrirt -- now that'd be a resume.
Even for "normal" jobs, though, I recommend to employers that html seems to be the best way to go. Take a look in Internet Explorer, Safari, and some version of Mozilla and you're good to go. In my experience, the file's format translates much more easily in html than rtf. Opening in too many "editors" can still introduce some issues, but in general not as many as the Fabulous Four word processors did.
But the last thing I'm going to do, though with an rtf I'm awfully close already, is not do as I've been told by the people handing out work. At least I'm pretty sure a user will have rtf's mapped to Word. Sending an html file might be seen as a sign of an inability to follow directions. *sigh*
From Jaffe's blog: I want game journalism- at least 50% of it- to be more like music or film journalism of old. I want it to challenge us and tear our s#!t [mactari's edit] apart and analyze it and- when we do a good job- champion it and bring the message to the masses....
Now sure, some of that has to do with what the public will actually pay for (it's not like NEXT GEN magazine- one of my faves of all time- was a chart topper). But doesn't some of it also have to do with the mentality of the folks who write for these magazines IF indeed they are not respecting their OWN industry enough to claim JOURNALISM as their industry?
Has Jaffe gone completely mad? Does he really think video game journalists are any different from the talking heads (and mouths on radio) of ESPN?
The issue is that both "journalism" outlets are really just thinly veiled, sometimes unofficially sanctioned extensions of the respective entertainment industries. Each is, unfortunately, intertwined commercially with the product they're "reporting" on. Just as ESPN Radio's SportsCenter updates are often 20-30% (by time) commercials for games that are being shown on, you guessed it, ESPN or ABC (both owned by Disney), video gaming sites pimp games that they themselves are selling. Heck, at least one arguably large site pimps their store's (that should have you worried enough as is, that a 'news' site sells games) sales as news alongside their 'true' news stories.
Let the buyer beware -- good reviews mean better relations with major gaming houses means easier copy, more codes, more exclusives, and better sales for both players. It's a fact of life, I'm afraid. Jaffe wonders why there are so many previews; that's easy. They're "reviews" without any conventional requirement for objective judgement. You can play up South Park for the N64 as a game with lots of potential even when it stinks to high heaven -- it's still in development, after all. Previews are excuses for incestuous gaming industry lovefests, and everyone's a winner, developers (Out, out, Ballmer!), gaming rag editors, authors, & owners, and even readers.
Readers, that is, except for those like Jaffe that might truly want to see someone with both the personal and commercial cahones to call out the proverbial spade. Where are the old oldmanmurray.com folk when you need em?
Look folk, there will [for the foreseeable future] always be a clean break point for recording sound, video, whatever -- the human body. As an earlier posted Orwelled, until the listening device is implanted into your ear, you can always stick a microphone-as-ear-proxy in front of whatever audio device the companies create. Voila.
Suicide Girls is the site that's somehow managed to get itself to be considered, at least in some fringe academic[esque] conferences I've been attending that tend to deal with pop culture and [others more specifically on] video games, some strange sort of 'woman's lib porn', where women with 'non-standard' body profiles (which apparently means that it's not "Beautiful young women" but the much more liberating, "Beautiful young women with tattoos and piercings") are in the spreads, apparently without any men. They have blogs where they talk with site members, etc, which I believe is to make it harder to objectify them, and there was apparently some shindig a while back where some of them quit the site for some reason but their pictures and blogs stayed online. But enough about some lame excuse 'explaining' why I'm still a morally just person for looking at women without their clothes on.
In any event, it's a porn site (don't ask me to describe it, but, by virtue of being human, I apparently have the innate ability to know it when I see it) and you can download videos to your iPod and even subscribe to a video podcast. I can only imagine other sites will, at some point, have a giant black monolith fall in their backyard so that they too can figure out how to make.m4v's as well.
Porn ignoring video iPods indeed. Rubbish. If it's a medium, it's been used to transmit porn.
Wasn't real sure what the OP meant about the "Ding dong, the witch is dead" song was edited out (had visions of some ultra-PC schmoe saying the song was too graphic and encouraged violence), so I googled up this from imdb.com. Lots of interesting archeological findings there on how the movie was edited (the bit about removing a scene and flipping the image in the scene following to keep the original character positions seems the wildest claim there).
Anyhow, here's the bit on the Witch's dead. Song's still there; apparently an additional performance isn't:
A scene where the four main characters return to the Emerald City with the witch of the west's broomstick (including a reprise of "Ding Dong, The Witch is dead!") was cut. Only the song survived; the footage no longer exists (except a shot or two that can be found in the theatrical trailer).
Interesting case for how even recorded history can be easily lost. I doubt there's a single movie where this isn't the case -- heck, over on the Stella List (discusses Atari 2600 programming), we're trying to relocate an old Java port of the popular Stella ("no relation to the list") Atari 2600 emulator. There's hardly a medium around that keeps a perfect history, even when it's theorhetically possible, even arguably easy to do so.
I'm also reminded of my studies of Mark Twain's composition of The Mysterious Stranger, where scholars try to piece together versions by, among other things, what color pen the MSs use, or Walt Whitman's [famously] continual edits to Leaves of Grass. I'd argue our concept of 'final cuts' is a concept born solely via legacy conventional mediums of expression. Without books editions, film releases, etc, we'd have an even more difficult time discussing what's authoritative.
I'll try to stop now. I'd only initially wanted to show the Oz info, and now I'm about to launch into a diatribe about Edward Albee's desire to open up the arts from the clutches of big business (particularly in NYC's Broadway and off-Broadway theaters) so that the masses can get what he feels is a 'real' education, but at the same time uses that same power of copyright (back into another poster's deal about this all stemming from ramifications from the way IP works) closes down a local-yokel presentation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because he felt one of the actors wasn't believable in the role, not b/c of acting ability but b/c he was too tall for Albee to believe his stage-parents were his actual parents, and b/c the role as written was for a 16 year-old and this guy was 24. Performative art by definition can never, no matter how sessile the script, achieve anything resembling a final cut, intrusions like this one by a living author nonwithstanding.
But I won't mention that, and will simply say the age-old song has not been cut from Wizard of Oz. Now go watch a real movie like Zardoz.
This is exactly why I'm not real sure why we're so paranoid about getting locked out of copying DVDs or pay-per-view movies. Look, the worst that'll happen is that you have video tape what you're watching. Until companies figure out how to pipe the goods right into electrodes sitting in our brains, we'll continue to have an awfully natural break point from which to grab anything we can experience -- from the contraptions that allow us to preserve "real life". This Sony PSP handheld projector is an awfully smart idea along those lines, as it is simply a specialized camera tied to a projection system that can easily get, I'd imagine, the sort of resolution to which we've become acustomed to seeing on the half-century-plus old medium of the television.
I recently (yesterday? Man, I need a LONG nap) purchased three [vinyl] records, as an example. I know audiophiles will hate me, but instead of buying hundreds of dollars of software and equipment to listen to them through iTunes, I plan to stick my iBook in front of the speaks and tape it through the mike there. What's the big deal? I've listened to shows from Furthurnet that aren't much better, and enjoyed them.
What we've become used to and spoiled by is the ability to have everything in a digital format, and not only that but a digital format that provides what goes for a "definitive" experience; the digital version is now usually 'the best'. The fact that today's generation expects exact copies of the definitive experience even in their blackmarket content shows what's particularly unique about this digital age. We've come a long ways even from the in-theater camcorder bootlegs Seinfeld made famous.
"I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public."
Ha! Have you look at the source of many open sourced projects lately? (Actually I get your point, but sometimes I think the difference between open and closed source programmers is that the former has enough confidence to allow someone else to look at their crappy code, not that one type of code is inherently worse than the other. In my experience, depending on the maintainer's outlook (particularly the, "If it works, use it" attitude), open source code can get quite a bit uglier with all the chefs in the kitchen.)
What I don't understand is why if you can't release as open source and the company's in bankruptcy that it automatically equals the death of the application. If he's in bankruptcy, doesn't he (or, I suppose more precisely, doesn't the fictious entity that is the company) sell off its goods? Seems like someone else buying the beast would be an option.
There's something in this story that's not quite making sense, however. Either the app's so rough that it's losing money now and there's nothing, given the state of the code, that anyone could do to fix it in a cost-effective manner, or the author's too attached to let anyhone else take a look and the company doesn't have any creditors. Or I suppose he may have already sold the rights to the code to his new fictious entity for a song before going belly-up and there's nothing left for this one to sell!
1.25 Mini -- Hidden cheapest Superdrive system
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New iBook and Apple mini
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Note that with the 1.25 G4 you can add the Superdrive as a BTO option for $100. Otherwise you have to jack all the way up to the $699 to get one; though the modem is an option on the 1.42's, the drive you get isn't.
More to the point, the *only* difference between the $599 and $699 is the Superdrive. They've changed a $100 BTO html SELECT box into a new level o' Mac.
Now if I can just get someone to let me upgrade their new Mini to a gig of RAM. I can save them about $100 and keep their Mini's 512 for my Athlon system... Any takers?;^)
Re:EU's Antitrust reasoning, and why it stink-ed
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Windows XP N a Bust
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· Score: 1
Of course, Microsoft doesn't want people to pay just for the parts of Windows they actually use - it's 200 bucks for the whole kit and kaboodle. For that reason, they don't offer XP-N at a discount, even though they might make more money by doing so.
How is it they make more money? From reselling the extra bits on the XP install CDs to pr0n providers?
This isn't like they were selling a horse and buggy. Removing Media Player doesn't mean they're keeping the buggy and selling the horse for the same price. If anything, the price of release-testing Windows in another configuration -- even one simply with a component removed -- means "N"'s release is an additional, nontrivial expense for MS. In other words, "the marginal cost of the Media Player code on an XP CD" is >>> (aka, not) zero if N is a given, or, more to the point, the marginal cost of removing the Media Player code on an XP CD is >>> zero.
Makes me feel like Ross Perot to say it (seems like it always came down to simple fiscal policy for him), but if the EU wanted people to consider N, as many have said, they should have forced its release and added an additional tax to XP with the player. The market would have sorta itself out.
I am interested to hear how the media player download utility works. Is it open-ended? Is it just Apple and Real, or can I, ur, I mean other minor 3rd parties get in on the providing? Does it feature MS Media Player more prominently? If I can use MediaPlayer's of Quicktime's ActiveX lib and build my own offering for users to install, well, now we're on to something.
JS is not going away, so it ought to evolve. As with sharks (and relationships, see Annie Hall), a programming language is either moving forward, or it's dead.
No, when a programming language doesn't chance, it's called a standard. Look at what we've been able to do keeping html, css, and javascript a stable target for so many years! It's like Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 -- nobody who created that console, its hardware designed specifically for playing Combat and Video Olympics, expected someone to be able to slap six sprites in a row, much less have the player shoot then down one at a time. The 'standard' that was the 2600, however, gave a stable platform for programmers to learn tricks that would give the console life well beyond its creators' expectations.
We've got something like that with javascript, and we can see what happens when we compare to something like Visual Basic 6. Developers are still upset about Microsoft's decision to drop official support for VB6 in an attempt to force people to upgrade to VB.NET. Know what? Those upset programmers have found that VB6 hasn't rusted and simply continue using it to create their apps. There are more companies than you'd know (here's one) whose major apps are/were written in VB6, the 'prototyping language'. They're not quite ready to cast the baby out with the bath.
Fix bigs in javascript? Absolutely. The issue is that we've reached a point where nearly every browser anyone uses supports a 'single' flavor of javascript and we're all familiar with how to make our code work with the few quirks that remain crossplatform. There is a standard on nearly every box on the net that coders can assume will be there for them. I wouldn't want to see anyone mess this stable delivery platform up, splitting the user base into something like what we had in the Netscape 4.x/Mozilla/IE 4 & 5 days. Now *that* was an ugly time to code.
The bottom line is that evolution is an overused metaphor. You've got two choices if you'd like to propagate your genes into the future: immortality or reproduction. Immortality was a little too difficult to accomplish for living, unique individuals. Perhaps there were little organisms that could live forever, but something squashed 'em. They're gone. That's not a problem in the digital world, folk. We can make as many exact copies of an individual as we'd like. Javascript modules are not unique. They don't need to evolve. (I mean, come on, he even mentions sharks, a design that hasn't changed in millions on millions of years!)
Javascript should shoot to become an immortal standard, not another field of play and debate.
No no, you're quite right, and that started haunting me as soon as I hit "submit" -- I meant to say, "There's a reason why IBM was able to follow up with PPC on a platform that, up to then, had used Motorola's 68k," or something similar, which is more exact. Ah, the preview button, whereforartthou, preview button?
Though I'm certainly sorry to have saddened you, I think the logic of the original post still stands, luckily. IBM entered the Apple market "in spite of" Motorola's initial dominance (with 68ks) b/c they're both chip makers. Don't be surprised if Intel and Apple do partner and the chip isn't x86 -- or if they do use some fancy-smancy Transmeta-esque adaptive chip to help ease the transition.
So yes, good point, but I hope it didn't kill the op.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you save a ton of dough by picking subscriptions very precisely by what you want to watch rather than lazily accepting you need 600 channels of reality TV so that you "have something to watch".
I did some figurin' about two years ago, and it looks like I still spend about $27 a month for sports and a few shows I particularly enjoy. And I feel like that's extravagant. ;^)
Just depends on where you like to put your money, I suppose.
Just today during my biweekly Hotmail check I realized that Hotmail's Junk folder is the only spam dump I check every time I'm on to ensure that I haven't missed something from someone I know. (Or something from someone I knew back when I regularly used Hotmail.) No spam filter filters more non-spam than Hotmail's junk.
Or something like that. In other news, I'm happy to see Slashdot is still doing well. ;^)
Good points all around. Apple's very familiar with DRM, and I'd wager most DRM'd content on most Windows and Macintosh OS running hardware was provided by Apple. Microsoft's approaches, though less practically successful on the popular media front, are certainly more successful on the OS front, as another post slightly earlier has pointed out (quoted after this post).
Here's the rub, taking us back to the OP (and away from the Zune vs. iPod discussion this thread has taken):
None of the reasons given suggest Macintosh or Windows OSes would be less "DRM loving" (OP) than Linux. In fact, all we've determined is that both Macintosh and Windows already support "DRM loving policies" (quote from OP).
I don't use Linux daily. I'm not a Linux fanboy. At the same time, if your top priority is a DRM-free "policy" for your OS, learning Linux and forcing it onto your laptop [1], is going to be the best option.
[1] This in response to the troll-esque phrase in the OP trying to ensure that this would be a MS vs. Apple flamewar, "I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it." [emph mine].
===
Microsoft doesn't just want to own your media - they want to oen [own?] your whole system and have the ability to shut your OS down remotely. Hell, Microsoft even tries to put DRM on your pre-existing content - for example, if you rip a CD with Windows Media Player. And their "PlaysforSure" DRM is way more restrictive than Apple's.
Just because Microsoft hasn't been particularly successful with their plans, doesn't mean they aren't trying.
Eventually the forum thread got out of hand, and he set up a website devoted to answering the questions. If you have a question that hasn't already been answered, email him at the address on the site. He is responding daily and sometimes within minutes. This guy is dedicated.
And thanks to slashdot, maybe those Google Ads he's added to his answers will bring him a few bucks he wouldn't have made on the "out of hand" macrumors forum.
Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with cashing in -- macrumors' forum isn't exactly ad-free either -- but I'm not real sure how making your own website to answer questions makes slashdot. If he'd taken it apart, upgraded the processor, or found out that there's something inside we hadn't heard of, well, telling us about that is possibly post worthy. Right now, this story is just hardware.slashdot.org-as-billboard.
One of the incredible bits of insight from the site:
Q: What can you tell me about the battery?
A: Not a whole lot. Made in China (what isn't), Model # A1175, Li-ion.
Wow.
Save yourself some time, and skip directly to pictures of Sudan or Christian Wife Pictures. Not joking.
Wal-Mart's not crying; they're competing. Predatory? Perhaps. Legal? I have no idea. Imagine debatably so.
Want more? Frontline has a pretty good episode on how they treat their suppliers. Almost reassuring to know Disney doesn't get special treatment.
Wal-Mart's not crying wolf, they're playing the game like one.
This was originally going to be a quick reply to someone talking about CB, but I haven't seen HD addressed nor the advantages of analog decoding/receiving, so here goes...
/. to this thread show we're not exactly well-informed about the tech behind radio. Is there really an advantage to not just consumer but citizen in moving to digital setups? I'm not sure there is.
The problem with CB is that CB isn't installed in everyone's car and walkman. This is like fighting Microsoft by dumping into the ocean every copy of Microsoft Office -- for Macintosh.
Having the FCC reserve a swath of AM bandwidth for citizen broadcasts is a much better idea. Lots of open space during the day, inexpensive and very simple to construct transmitters, and you can listen to the broadcasts using radios that don't require power. And, surprisingly, 95% of drivers can listen with the radios they've already got installed in their cars. That's democracy-building (or whatever kind of society you're trying to construct).
That's also what concerns me with 'High Definition' (HD), aka digital, radio. Will we displace analog broadcast? Will we be able to continue building radios that work for free -- rather, will those radios have a signal they can decode in 70 years, or will we be digitally bound? Don't DRM my AM, please. This is a simple technology found in 95% of cars and I'd daresay 99.99% of homes (and anyone with a dime store and $5) that can pick up broadcasts from hundreds of miles away. For the sake of shoving bucks to radio manufacturers, giving a little extra income for the gov't, and a few new stations, we're willing to throw that network away. Bad news. Let them eat UHF.
How do you stop the currently fatalistic drive to HD, when every group with lobbying power (incl. the gov't) is in on the take? This is a hard sell for your typical voter, as the replies of what's generally an above-averagely tech savvy group like
Mr. Keenan says it best.
I read that as the sabotage of FreeBSD by their own license, although in hindsight I can see it the other way as well. Original author is welcome to clarify his point.
You (Ryel) have my intent. That said, though I didn't intend it, I do see their point about my seeming to blame Apple for Linux. In an extreme sense, I suppose I'm suggesting as much, though that's hardly my intended point of emphasis. I'm blaming, as you say, BSD for FreeBSD's exploitation and, contrary to my title, blaming Apple for being, well, capitalist. I find it difficult for think the latter demands much of a reprimand, however. Apple's always been pretty clear on that point.
Open source tries to appropriate copyright within the context of consumerist capitalism to create a subversive counterforce -- no, to create a true alternative to capitalism from within a capitalist framework; GNU/Linux is an alternative to capitalism built with capitalism. I *really* dig that. The BSD license simply doesn't do this sort of work. OpenDarwin's troubles show it. GNU/Linux is a better alternative, imo, as its [hypothetical and arguably wholly impractical] possible adoption by something like OS X would include true collaboration from the paradigm it hopes to replace [as the dominant]. I'm not, however, for GPL or against BSD. I believe there is a nice middle ground out there somewhere that's even better, as I try to detail on my blog at that earlier link. I doubt we'll find -- or at least implement -- it.
I do wonder what the background is of the people who assume that I, Mr. "I <3 VB", am a GNU/Linux zealot. Are they Windows users? Mac users? BSD users? Linux users? And what is the purpose of FreeBSD, if its supporters get upset when Apple acts like a conventionally incorporated entity living in the US trying to make a buck, bless its heart, but these same upset FreeBSD folk want to retain the option to release code in what is, let's say, an "extremely" altruistic fashion? If FreeBSD contributors hoped that entities like Apple would, out of common courtesy, seriously enter into an active or even passive partnership with them, I believe we now know that's not so likely to happen. I, too, appreciate idealism and a positive belief in our fellow humans, but things like Apple & FreeBSD have turned me into a much more hardened, well, "realist" is the word, I suppose. I think Apple should have felt an obligation to return the favor to the FreeBSD community. Just like IE and Mosaic, it hasn't happened.
By the way, how can I find the proper attribution that OS X uses BSD code? If I use the terminal daily and don't see it, how many semi-technical users do?
P.S. Also sorry that I didn't properly format part of my other reply wrt the "Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there..." paragraph. That was obviously from the previous post, and wasn't my material. Anyhow... Should have used the Preview button again, I guess.
>they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.
;^) There, I said it. As I implied in my first post, I use OS X first, and get this, I use Windows second. I like Visual Basic. No, love VB for some tasks. I think C# is great. I know asp inside and out. I hate using C. I hate Perl. I hate *NIX. [These are slight overstatements.]
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
That's why I said that they "essentially". How many IE users know the code is based partially on Mosaic? Yet the "proper attrbution" is right there in the About box. MS took it, and now everyone considers it theirs. I haven't heard many blame the NCSA for winning the browser wars. That's essentially plagiarism. End of story.
>but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.
Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.
Two points:
1.) Sure GPL is altruistic. BSD is overly so, imo, because it allows itself to become exploited, as has happened with OS X. This doesn't happen with the, IMO, "less altruistic" GNU/Linux.
2.) I won't tell you how far your altruism can go, but I will give you my opinion how far it's smart to go to prevent your contribution from becoming what some might call exploited. This thread is, in large part, about Apple not providing enough to make Darwin a viable open source OS. Why could they based their entire OS on Darwin and not passively partner with a viable community of open source hackers? B/c of BSD.
>With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code
>has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.
Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.
Absolutely right, to a point. I'd rather see Apple have to pay for new development than steal from open source. No, I'd rather Apple feel the ethical, if not legal, obligation to give more back to the FreeBSD community. Sites like OpenDarwin should not have to struggle to stay afloat. People should not have to complain about unbuildable packages being released by Apple. Apple should take their place in the open source community more seriously. They haven't.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
I hate Linux.
This is precisely why I'd prefer Apple's millions in Darwin development had been given back to the community in a fashion that would have made both better. The GPL would have done that, as would a more ethical Apple. If you've got a better way of ensuring BSD doesn't short-circuit into one-way, lossy contributions to multi-national, billion dollar corporations, I'm ready to hear it.
Look, not to get too preachy, but that's the problem with FreeBSD and projects with other, equally open licenses, like MIT, etc. As I said in my not-so-tongue-in-cheek blog to the audienceless ether years ago...
These licenses [X11, BSD, MIT] don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism. It's certainly one's right to make code that's this unregulated, but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.
I'm using OS X right now. I'm happy FreeBSD enabled its creation. I'm posting from Safari. I'm happy Konq's code helped Apple build this very fast, mature browser. Without totally free and open licenses like the ones I wrote about, above, we wouldn't have this OS X.
Yet at the same time, this happiness doesn't change that I wish Apple would have partnered with GNU/Linux. We'd see a very different OS X and a very different collaboration (some would argue a "collaboration" would be a new thing, and I believe I agree) between Apple and the GNU hacker community today. Linux has not yet come close to hitting the tipping point on the desktop for the typical semi-technical user. With Apple's help, it would be much closer. With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.
The MacTech 25 is no popularity contest, nor
is it to "pick your favorite CEO." We looked for the most influential in
the Mac TECHNICAL market.
This seems simliar to American Idol saying that this year, they've instructed the caller-in voters to pick purely on ability. How else could David Pogue and Mike Breeden -- admittedly both *very* influencial writers and news reporters in the Mac "space" -- out-garner Glenda Adams (of Aspyr.com fame, formerly president of Westlake Interactive), who seems, at times, to single-handedly not only keep Mac gamers with options, but also keep anyone interested in the Mac as a gaming platform?
Even then I'm just picking from my own favorites. What techs have these people championed? What BurgerLibs have they created or OpenGLs have they supported?
Education Store iMac image: http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/imac_ed/i m_ib_isight_ed_060705.jpg
i ght_060110.jpg
Public Apple Store iMac image: http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/im_ib_is
Looks like one of those was Photoshopped pretty heavily around the remote, but I honestly can't tell if it was to put the remote in or to take it out. I suppose it could be both! Reminds me of the thinking behind the $899 -- Take something you've already done, hack it as little as possible to make it functional in another niche, and release, assuming those who notice the difference won't really care.
And I really don't think anyone will [notice]. It's not like Macs are for gamers, especially not iMacs which, even if they game relatively well when released, are about as useful with their Radeon X1600 in a year or two as the integrate (overstated, but not by much, and written by a three-time iMac owner). Unless you're a programmer or gamer, this iMac is next to perfect, missing only the Superdrive if you're into iDVD.
Previews are horribly positive. Until today, that didn't upset me. If there's ever the proper space for a lovefest in a gaming mag, it's right there, in the previews. Developers are more likely to spill the good beans if you're being positive, and since the games aren't done, why not continue to give them irrationally large boats full of benefit from your doubts?
... the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.
This is called journaltisement -- the magazine gets inside access because they provide a service, "free" advertisement. Your journal is giving its readers what they want (the designer's biggest dreams, aka "something colorful to read") and the gaming companies get what they'd like as well (um, advertisements!).
It's all a big happy family right? That's what I used to think before I read this story. Here's an important quote.
"Press previews are very important to our sales," he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Retailers don't know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those [previews].
I knew I was naive, but I was trying so danged hard to stay positive about the previews in magazines. The problem is the Catch-22 -- without the lovefest, there is no inside access and no review. With the lovefest, retailers may be making horribly misinformed decisions about which games to stock for us to buy.
Ultimately, I don't guess I've changed much. For the common reader, journaltisement-style previews still don't bother me as long as the reviews are legit. I guess the question is how intelligent a set of readers are the people making the decisions of what to stock at retailers, and do they know journaltisement when they see it?
No problem with pdf necessarily, but when someone asks for Word you can be reasonably confident they'll accept an rtf -- it'll be opening in the same app. People can get aggravated when they ask for a Word doc and don't get something close enough to one they can treat it as such. I've seen someone open all resumes at once to print and get annoyed when one slips past Word into, say, IE. And I'd recommend not annoying prospective employers! ;^) I've also seen head-hunters and in-house HR depts open a resume and start recutting/editing on the spot to pitch to possible employers. Cutting and pasting from Adobe Reader & friends into Word is often a less than pleasing place to start.
Anyhow, thus the rtf. Safe enough that it's likely not going to annoy Word-addicts, but appeals to my idealism since it's not a M$ format. Yet at the same time, as my first post was trying to show, even then I was give or take counting on my Word-written rtf to be opened in Word in order to dodge the formatting issues I describe. When a Word-written rtf does go outside of Word, well, it appears it's potentially headed for trouble.
HTML, otoh, seems to do much better app-to-app than rtf. Much more mature viewing options, and still with the potential (though it makes me cringe to think about it) to be edited in Word on the spot. Still, prone to the potential annoyance factor.
And the fix is to run them through abiword and save as rtf!
.doc format straight from one version of Word to another, rtf isn't doing any better.
.docs. I guess I had some idealistic notion that I was resisting MS somehow, but, as I knew even then, I was counting on rtf being mapped to Word if they had it installed on their box. One day to check on the xplat of rtf, I took a look at my rtf resume on some alternative word processors on my Mac. Long story short, an *.rtf file looks quite a bit differently when swapped between Word, AppleWorks, TextEdit, and AbiWord.
Not so fast. AbiWord and rtf do not a crossplatform format make. Trust me, if MS can't keep the
I've always liked saving my resume out in rtf format when companies asked for
I already knew that -- I'd always ignored it knowing/assuming the end user was going to use Word -- but this time I took it as a challenge to make a truly reader independent rtf resume. I couldn't do it. Sometimes underlines would come out, sometimes they wouldn't, depending on what editor had done the latest save. Sometimes margins would work like I liked, sometimes they wouldn't, again, depending on the editor that was doing the saving and which was doing the viewing. I would hack and slash in each editor, one at a time, hoping *this* one would produce the simplest, and most portable, document, and each time I'd eventually find the editor's archnemesis in the four which would, on one occasion, even duplicate a line of text randomly in a way that no other editor did! I even started from plain text in two editors, and still couldn't get a doc that would appear reasonably the same in all four editors.
And mind you, I wasn't putting in colors or fancy margins or the like. I was simply underlining, making some text appear in italics, and occasionally using all-caps (The caps did work well cross-editor, thankfully).
What's the answer? Oh, that's easy. People need to start accepting html resumes. When a job is web-related, it's hard to believe that's not the case already. If you've ever seen all the extra code Word slaps into a doc spit out as html, you know you've got several kilobytes to work your own magic before you're gotten it as bloated as Bill's folk do. Html with nice, gracefully degrading CSS and Javascrirt -- now that'd be a resume.
Even for "normal" jobs, though, I recommend to employers that html seems to be the best way to go. Take a look in Internet Explorer, Safari, and some version of Mozilla and you're good to go. In my experience, the file's format translates much more easily in html than rtf. Opening in too many "editors" can still introduce some issues, but in general not as many as the Fabulous Four word processors did.
But the last thing I'm going to do, though with an rtf I'm awfully close already, is not do as I've been told by the people handing out work. At least I'm pretty sure a user will have rtf's mapped to Word. Sending an html file might be seen as a sign of an inability to follow directions. *sigh*
From Jaffe's blog: ...
I want game journalism- at least 50% of it- to be more like music or film journalism of old. I want it to challenge us and tear our s#!t [mactari's edit] apart and analyze it and- when we do a good job- champion it and bring the message to the masses.
Now sure, some of that has to do with what the public will actually pay for (it's not like NEXT GEN magazine- one of my faves of all time- was a chart topper). But doesn't some of it also have to do with the mentality of the folks who write for these magazines IF indeed they are not respecting their OWN industry enough to claim JOURNALISM as their industry?
Has Jaffe gone completely mad? Does he really think video game journalists are any different from the talking heads (and mouths on radio) of ESPN?
The issue is that both "journalism" outlets are really just thinly veiled, sometimes unofficially sanctioned extensions of the respective entertainment industries. Each is, unfortunately, intertwined commercially with the product they're "reporting" on. Just as ESPN Radio's SportsCenter updates are often 20-30% (by time) commercials for games that are being shown on, you guessed it, ESPN or ABC (both owned by Disney), video gaming sites pimp games that they themselves are selling. Heck, at least one arguably large site pimps their store's (that should have you worried enough as is, that a 'news' site sells games) sales as news alongside their 'true' news stories.
Let the buyer beware -- good reviews mean better relations with major gaming houses means easier copy, more codes, more exclusives, and better sales for both players. It's a fact of life, I'm afraid. Jaffe wonders why there are so many previews; that's easy. They're "reviews" without any conventional requirement for objective judgement. You can play up South Park for the N64 as a game with lots of potential even when it stinks to high heaven -- it's still in development, after all. Previews are excuses for incestuous gaming industry lovefests, and everyone's a winner, developers (Out, out, Ballmer!), gaming rag editors, authors, & owners, and even readers.
Readers, that is, except for those like Jaffe that might truly want to see someone with both the personal and commercial cahones to call out the proverbial spade. Where are the old oldmanmurray.com folk when you need em?
Look folk, there will [for the foreseeable future] always be a clean break point for recording sound, video, whatever -- the human body. As an earlier posted Orwelled, until the listening device is implanted into your ear, you can always stick a microphone-as-ear-proxy in front of whatever audio device the companies create. Voila.
http://suicidegirls.com/ipod/
.m4v's as well.
Suicide Girls is the site that's somehow managed to get itself to be considered, at least in some fringe academic[esque] conferences I've been attending that tend to deal with pop culture and [others more specifically on] video games, some strange sort of 'woman's lib porn', where women with 'non-standard' body profiles (which apparently means that it's not "Beautiful young women" but the much more liberating, "Beautiful young women with tattoos and piercings") are in the spreads, apparently without any men. They have blogs where they talk with site members, etc, which I believe is to make it harder to objectify them, and there was apparently some shindig a while back where some of them quit the site for some reason but their pictures and blogs stayed online. But enough about some lame excuse 'explaining' why I'm still a morally just person for looking at women without their clothes on.
In any event, it's a porn site (don't ask me to describe it, but, by virtue of being human, I apparently have the innate ability to know it when I see it) and you can download videos to your iPod and even subscribe to a video podcast. I can only imagine other sites will, at some point, have a giant black monolith fall in their backyard so that they too can figure out how to make
Porn ignoring video iPods indeed. Rubbish. If it's a medium, it's been used to transmit porn.
Wasn't real sure what the OP meant about the "Ding dong, the witch is dead" song was edited out (had visions of some ultra-PC schmoe saying the song was too graphic and encouraged violence), so I googled up this from imdb.com. Lots of interesting archeological findings there on how the movie was edited (the bit about removing a scene and flipping the image in the scene following to keep the original character positions seems the wildest claim there).
Anyhow, here's the bit on the Witch's dead. Song's still there; apparently an additional performance isn't:
A scene where the four main characters return to the Emerald City with the witch of the west's broomstick (including a reprise of "Ding Dong, The Witch is dead!") was cut. Only the song survived; the footage no longer exists (except a shot or two that can be found in the theatrical trailer).
Interesting case for how even recorded history can be easily lost. I doubt there's a single movie where this isn't the case -- heck, over on the Stella List (discusses Atari 2600 programming), we're trying to relocate an old Java port of the popular Stella ("no relation to the list") Atari 2600 emulator. There's hardly a medium around that keeps a perfect history, even when it's theorhetically possible, even arguably easy to do so.
I'm also reminded of my studies of Mark Twain's composition of The Mysterious Stranger, where scholars try to piece together versions by, among other things, what color pen the MSs use, or Walt Whitman's [famously] continual edits to Leaves of Grass . I'd argue our concept of 'final cuts' is a concept born solely via legacy conventional mediums of expression. Without books editions, film releases, etc, we'd have an even more difficult time discussing what's authoritative.
I'll try to stop now. I'd only initially wanted to show the Oz info, and now I'm about to launch into a diatribe about Edward Albee's desire to open up the arts from the clutches of big business (particularly in NYC's Broadway and off-Broadway theaters) so that the masses can get what he feels is a 'real' education, but at the same time uses that same power of copyright (back into another poster's deal about this all stemming from ramifications from the way IP works) closes down a local-yokel presentation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because he felt one of the actors wasn't believable in the role, not b/c of acting ability but b/c he was too tall for Albee to believe his stage-parents were his actual parents, and b/c the role as written was for a 16 year-old and this guy was 24. Performative art by definition can never, no matter how sessile the script, achieve anything resembling a final cut, intrusions like this one by a living author nonwithstanding.
But I won't mention that, and will simply say the age-old song has not been cut from Wizard of Oz. Now go watch a real movie like Zardoz.
This is exactly why I'm not real sure why we're so paranoid about getting locked out of copying DVDs or pay-per-view movies. Look, the worst that'll happen is that you have video tape what you're watching. Until companies figure out how to pipe the goods right into electrodes sitting in our brains, we'll continue to have an awfully natural break point from which to grab anything we can experience -- from the contraptions that allow us to preserve "real life". This Sony PSP handheld projector is an awfully smart idea along those lines, as it is simply a specialized camera tied to a projection system that can easily get, I'd imagine, the sort of resolution to which we've become acustomed to seeing on the half-century-plus old medium of the television.
I recently (yesterday? Man, I need a LONG nap) purchased three [vinyl] records, as an example. I know audiophiles will hate me, but instead of buying hundreds of dollars of software and equipment to listen to them through iTunes, I plan to stick my iBook in front of the speaks and tape it through the mike there. What's the big deal? I've listened to shows from Furthurnet that aren't much better, and enjoyed them.
What we've become used to and spoiled by is the ability to have everything in a digital format, and not only that but a digital format that provides what goes for a "definitive" experience; the digital version is now usually 'the best'. The fact that today's generation expects exact copies of the definitive experience even in their blackmarket content shows what's particularly unique about this digital age. We've come a long ways even from the in-theater camcorder bootlegs Seinfeld made famous.
"I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public."
Ha! Have you look at the source of many open sourced projects lately? (Actually I get your point, but sometimes I think the difference between open and closed source programmers is that the former has enough confidence to allow someone else to look at their crappy code, not that one type of code is inherently worse than the other. In my experience, depending on the maintainer's outlook (particularly the, "If it works, use it" attitude), open source code can get quite a bit uglier with all the chefs in the kitchen.)
What I don't understand is why if you can't release as open source and the company's in bankruptcy that it automatically equals the death of the application. If he's in bankruptcy, doesn't he (or, I suppose more precisely, doesn't the fictious entity that is the company) sell off its goods? Seems like someone else buying the beast would be an option.
There's something in this story that's not quite making sense, however. Either the app's so rough that it's losing money now and there's nothing, given the state of the code, that anyone could do to fix it in a cost-effective manner, or the author's too attached to let anyhone else take a look and the company doesn't have any creditors. Or I suppose he may have already sold the rights to the code to his new fictious entity for a song before going belly-up and there's nothing left for this one to sell!
Note that with the 1.25 G4 you can add the Superdrive as a BTO option for $100. Otherwise you have to jack all the way up to the $699 to get one; though the modem is an option on the 1.42's, the drive you get isn't.
;^)
More to the point, the *only* difference between the $599 and $699 is the Superdrive. They've changed a $100 BTO html SELECT box into a new level o' Mac.
Now if I can just get someone to let me upgrade their new Mini to a gig of RAM. I can save them about $100 and keep their Mini's 512 for my Athlon system... Any takers?
Of course, Microsoft doesn't want people to pay just for the parts of Windows they actually use - it's 200 bucks for the whole kit and kaboodle. For that reason, they don't offer XP-N at a discount, even though they might make more money by doing so.
How is it they make more money? From reselling the extra bits on the XP install CDs to pr0n providers?
This isn't like they were selling a horse and buggy. Removing Media Player doesn't mean they're keeping the buggy and selling the horse for the same price. If anything, the price of release-testing Windows in another configuration -- even one simply with a component removed -- means "N"'s release is an additional, nontrivial expense for MS. In other words, "the marginal cost of the Media Player code on an XP CD" is >>> (aka, not) zero if N is a given, or, more to the point, the marginal cost of removing the Media Player code on an XP CD is >>> zero.
Makes me feel like Ross Perot to say it (seems like it always came down to simple fiscal policy for him), but if the EU wanted people to consider N, as many have said, they should have forced its release and added an additional tax to XP with the player. The market would have sorta itself out.
I am interested to hear how the media player download utility works. Is it open-ended? Is it just Apple and Real, or can I, ur, I mean other minor 3rd parties get in on the providing? Does it feature MS Media Player more prominently? If I can use MediaPlayer's of Quicktime's ActiveX lib and build my own offering for users to install, well, now we're on to something.
I'm sorry, but this comment simply doesn't hold:
JS is not going away, so it ought to evolve. As with sharks (and relationships, see Annie Hall), a programming language is either moving forward, or it's dead.
No, when a programming language doesn't chance, it's called a standard. Look at what we've been able to do keeping html, css, and javascript a stable target for so many years! It's like Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 -- nobody who created that console, its hardware designed specifically for playing Combat and Video Olympics, expected someone to be able to slap six sprites in a row, much less have the player shoot then down one at a time. The 'standard' that was the 2600, however, gave a stable platform for programmers to learn tricks that would give the console life well beyond its creators' expectations.
We've got something like that with javascript, and we can see what happens when we compare to something like Visual Basic 6. Developers are still upset about Microsoft's decision to drop official support for VB6 in an attempt to force people to upgrade to VB.NET. Know what? Those upset programmers have found that VB6 hasn't rusted and simply continue using it to create their apps. There are more companies than you'd know (here's one) whose major apps are/were written in VB6, the 'prototyping language'. They're not quite ready to cast the baby out with the bath.
Fix bigs in javascript? Absolutely. The issue is that we've reached a point where nearly every browser anyone uses supports a 'single' flavor of javascript and we're all familiar with how to make our code work with the few quirks that remain crossplatform. There is a standard on nearly every box on the net that coders can assume will be there for them. I wouldn't want to see anyone mess this stable delivery platform up, splitting the user base into something like what we had in the Netscape 4.x/Mozilla/IE 4 & 5 days. Now *that* was an ugly time to code.
The bottom line is that evolution is an overused metaphor. You've got two choices if you'd like to propagate your genes into the future: immortality or reproduction. Immortality was a little too difficult to accomplish for living, unique individuals. Perhaps there were little organisms that could live forever, but something squashed 'em. They're gone. That's not a problem in the digital world, folk. We can make as many exact copies of an individual as we'd like. Javascript modules are not unique. They don't need to evolve. (I mean, come on, he even mentions sharks, a design that hasn't changed in millions on millions of years!)
Javascript should shoot to become an immortal standard, not another field of play and debate.
No no, you're quite right, and that started haunting me as soon as I hit "submit" -- I meant to say, "There's a reason why IBM was able to follow up with PPC on a platform that, up to then, had used Motorola's 68k," or something similar, which is more exact. Ah, the preview button, whereforartthou, preview button?
Though I'm certainly sorry to have saddened you, I think the logic of the original post still stands, luckily. IBM entered the Apple market "in spite of" Motorola's initial dominance (with 68ks) b/c they're both chip makers. Don't be surprised if Intel and Apple do partner and the chip isn't x86 -- or if they do use some fancy-smancy Transmeta-esque adaptive chip to help ease the transition.
So yes, good point, but I hope it didn't kill the op.