I don't think $1.99 is a rip off price. In fact, I think $1.99 price point will bring TV DVDs cost down in the long run. The issue price for Lost, Season 1 is $59.99, most stores like Target or Borders are selling it for $49.99. The Amazon price, like most of Amazon's pricing is much less expensive than at your normal store.
For example, I downloaded Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2 of Desperate Housewives. I had been considering getting the full season from Target for $45.00. After enjoying the first two episodes at 3am, I wanted to see episode 3. I decide that purchasing the full season from Apple at $34.99, even with getting duplicates of episode 1 & 2. I don't need DVDs of the show. It's not a show that I feel a need to keep forever.
If it was a show I loved, I'd want the DVDs, but I'd also want the DVD to cost between $25-$45 for a full season. So many shows just aren't worth the $50-$60 per season that the studios want for them. Admittedly, if you shop around you can get them cheaper, but the iTunes Music Store provides almost instant gratification and the price point is below the average cost of the DVDs. Which just makes it darn attractive.
What the report failed to note was that the Mac version of iTunes has generally been fairly robust in its unwillingness to cater to copy-protection technologies. When we reviewed Macrovision's then state-of-the-art CDS-300 version 7 copy-protection scheme last year, while it happily imposed restrictions on Windows users, the sample tracks we were challenged to rip where easily converted from CD audio to MP3 on a PowerBook G4 running iTunes. Right now, the solution to copy-protection appears simple: buy a Mac.
My favorite quote from the article, and currently, very true. I remember when I read that the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews new albums wouldn't work in iTunes. I was like, "worked for me". But I had forgotten about the OS factor. Choose wisely!
God read, already! It's not like the planets right next door. It takes a long time for light to travel that far a distance. Why is it that everyone now expects all other sciences to move at the same rate as computer or information science. Even with things that can be physically held, it can take years upon years to perfect things. Decades to introduce a new medicine, centuries to identify all current variants of a plant family, etc.
The world, the solar system, and probably the galaxies beyond deal in time in 100s of years, if not 1000s; not split seconds. Two years is nothing in that time frame. Hell, I have a friend who's a biochemist, who spent over three years testing for the same thing. Different tests, different lengths of time, different chemical reactions, etc., etc., but three years, and when she left the test were still going.
Astronomy is not the field to get into if you like your information fast.
This prevents you from being able to take your knowledge of a product that you were working on at company A to company B. This kind of practice is completely ethical. Taking your knowledge from 1 company to another is very unethical and these type of rules prevent these thigns from happening.
What's so funny is what is consider unethical. Its NOT unethical to take your knowledge and skills that you've gained from work and life from one company and give them to another. It's typical and standard practice. That's why losing longterm employees can be quite damaging to organizations regardless if the are for-profits or nonprofits.
Organizational knowledge and a large portion of what corporations classify as "intellectual property" belongs inherently to individuals NOT organizations. Take a moment to think about the best employee at your job. Not the flashiest or the one who earns the most money; but who's the go to person when you need something accomplished; who knows the various process for champion a new project; hiring new staff; get code out the door on time, instead of six weeks behind. Now think what happens if that persons gone tomorrow.
Despite decades of effort, most organizations don't have adequate systems to retain "organizational knowledge". And the reason why, is that that knowledge never belonged to the organization, but was always tied to specific individuals who made things happen.
Non-competition clauses are just better ways of organizations saying to individuals, your knowledge belongs to me. But in truth, your knowledge always belongs to you, and you can impart it to one organization; multiple organizations; or horde it to yourself. But unless you've made a concerted effort to document your knowledge for your organization; when you go, the knowledge goes with you.
Nothing unethical about that, just the basic truth of how knowledge flows.
Not enough, not comparable. The "real" Microsoft Office Professional has: o Access, o Excel, o Outlook, o PowerPoint, o Publisher, o Word. Even if Apple does a spreadsheet, that's not going to be enough. The major deployment for Office in small to medium businesses is with MS Access and a bunch of Visual BASIC/VBScript glue to turn it into vertical market custom software.
Your comparing the wrong market. iLife and iWork aren't business/professional level user applications (even though some use them for that). They are home user applications. In iLife- iPhoto and iMovie both have professional level alternatives (though for iPhoto, its not made by Apple).
While Pages is far closer to professional level than AppleWorks, it's primary target audience is still home users and people who operate home based businesses, that don't want to spend $200-$800 on a professional level office suite.
I've started intermixing using Pages over InDesign or Quark for things that I want a fair amount of control over but really don't need a full fledge DTP app. And I've started using Pages as a Word replacement, and its been more than satisfactory, in fact just a darn pleasure to use, everytime.
A growing number of home users need to write letters, or create a newsletter, or pamphlet at some point in there life. Also, a growing number of these people are running side businesses in their homes. Things that may require them to print an invoice, but not have a full fledge billing system. That's the market Apple is targeting. iWork is the companion to iLife-information management tools for the components of your life that aren't music, video, and photos.
Not to start a war. But as a former user of both services, Peapod kinda sucked. I used it once and didn't come back. Sure I should have given it another try, but decided against it, then I moved.
I tried WebVan once, not expecting much, and it rocked! I picked a selection of hard to please items, and then staples, thinking if they failed the hard to please, at least I got my water, dish soap, and cat liter for the month, without taking a taxi, so no harm no foul.
But I was pleasantly surprised that my request for one ripe avocado and one that would last a week, actually delivered one ripe and one that would last a week. In all honesty, I was expecting two hard can't use for a week in a half, or two overly ripe avocados, but it didn't happen. Same with tomatoes, beef cuts, seafood, and fruit.
Not only that the drivers were courtesy, helpful, well informed, and timely. They always made my deliver window. Oops, once they were 5 minutes late, but there had been a freeway accident, and they had called fifteen minutes before to warn me they were running late and why, so I forgave them.
If they were out of something (rarely happened, after the fact. Typically the website told you if items were in stock or not), someone would call, and be truly helpful in putting together substitutes. I remember one conversation with some guy (he could have been a driver, a dispatcher, or a specially hired food consultant for all I know), but he actually asked me what I had planned on cooking, and then made recommendations.
Recommendations. I almost passed out, I'd been so use to companies giving you basic specifications and overviews, but not recommending anything for fear of irritating one vendor over another, that I had almost forgotten that business COULD actually put a customers needs first rather than a vendor.
The Peapod service was okay. Actually, I'd rate it as good, but it was missing all the little touches that made me think that they'd take as good as care of my grocery list as I would, and I lived much closer to the market then, so even having to make a couple trips to get everything, seemed better than using the service again.
But WebVan was like Amazon in its early days. Amazon allowed me to move away from my disappointment in small book stores, because they never had a book I needed immediately. It allowed me to enjoy the bookstore as a browsing festival, and use Amazon for immediate needs. WebVan made me believe that someone else could care whether or not a tomato that they would never eat was firm but ripe vs soft and sweet. It often felt like they care just as much about the dish I was preparing as I did. And that's what makes a grocery delivery service great.
But now I make due with services that delivery my bulk goods, canned foods, and frozen foods. And I walk to the co-op or farmer's market to get fresh ingredients for various dishes. It's cool. The service is good. It's just uninspired.
O' for the opportunity to once again lament the loss of WebVan. I loved them. Mourn. Mourn.
But in all seriousness, just because the dot.com boom folded, doesn't mean that the idea was bad. WebVan died because it overextended itself massively, thinking it would have time to make a profit; and was caught rather unaware of the failing dot.com industry. Executive stupidity, sure, but a bad idea NO!! If they would have just kept to two primary markets during there fateful last year, they could have survived the crash, and be raking in the dough today. Many stores not offer delivery, because WebVan showed them that there was a market for it.
Also not to knock Seamless Web, but Waiter's On Wheel (Bay Area) and Waiter.com (Bay Area & Silicon Valley) both managed to survive the dot.com bust, and still deliver food from great restaurants without the super high mark-up. Up to 15% for the business charge just seems excessive; and already seems to be pushing some of their clientele into establishing their own services. The Japanese grill mentioned has a nice clean easy to use web site. Nice enough that if I knew I wanted food from them, I'd order directly from them to save both me and them money.
Of course, I admit sometimes, I used Waiter's On Wheels when I was uncertain what I wanted for dinner. Having access to a large array of menu's that aren't limited to pizza specials has its own value.
Also, one should remember that this teacher was not approved to give the lecture and decided to go without permission and give it in the cafeteria.
Actually that's not true, the lecture was priorly scheduled, it was the room that they kept canceling. In his statement he clearly states that he was invited to give the presentation by a student group, and then the room the event was scheduled for was cancelled. After this had happen twice he then used the cafeteria to give his lecture. The cafeteria typically being public space, not requiring reservation.
Additionally, he seems to indicate that he was never directly contacted with the request to NOT give the scheduled lecture by the university; it would seem the room cancellations were the subtle indicator for "please do not discuss these issues.
Not that this type of behaviour doesn't happen at various universities across the U.S. on a number of issues, but I find it even more distressing that the university didn't even try to take the direct approach of asking, "please do not give this lecture" or "please do not give this lecture on campus". Obviously, censorship still applicable, but at least the guy would have had fair warning that his job maybe in jeopardy if he proceeded.
Apple's already warned users about the "run safe files" function before. The warning indicated that average users should turn the function off, unless you ONLY downloaded files from known, "safe" sites. I had thought that they had released an update that had switch the default in Safari to remove the check from the "open safe files" box, but either Tiger changed that, or I was wrong.
The original story just had Zach Rusin saying that Apple's contributions to KHTML were exaggerated. OK, fine. -Otter
I'm with Otter on this one. I read Zach Rusin's original post and it sounded as if he was much more frustrated with KDE and KHTML users than he was with Apple. His biggest issue was that users kept expecting things FAR more rapidly than they should, because Safari had it. And from the user perspective, if Safari had it, then *ALL* the works been done for you, why can't you just implement this tomorrow.
That's not to deny obvious frustrations with Apple as well, but the fact of the matter is, even if Apple was a great OSS citizen, implementing code changes back to KDE/KHTML would take some time and effort--even if it was just for cleaning, documenting, and streamlining code; and people AREN'T given the KDE developers credit for ALL the work they do have to do, and have done.
I'd say more than a fair share of the frustration could be attributed not to how Apple provides the code, or when, how frequently, and or how well documented; but to random user comments indicating that Apple is doing ALL the work for the KDE team, when obviously that's just not true. And let's face it, even if Apple were the BEST OSS citizen in terms to contributions that STILL WOULD NOT be true. Other people are working on these code bases, and they are working hard. To have their contribution continuously overshadowed by Safari must be massively frustrating.
Turning this into an argument about OSS versus the corporation; Safari vs KHTML, or even David Hyatt vs Zach Rusin is just stupid. But even worse, it obfuscates the real issue that communities like Slashdot (I won't say the KHTML community, because hopefully they know better), offer praise and condemnation without really understanding what they are offering it for.
The praised offered to Safari for passing the ACID test was well deserved, but side by side with that praise was a not so silent condemnation of Konqueror for not passing ACID the next day; and that has to hurt far more than Apple's poorly documented 60MB tarball.
This isn't praise for Apple (though I love them as a company), and this isn't condemnation of Konqueror (I don't know much about them). I don't think Apple is a bad OSS citizen, but I doubt if they're the best OSS citizen. But they are an OSS citizen on a number of projects, and most of those projects are doing well.
Safari is a fork. WebKit/WebCore is really where its at, and that encompasses far more than Safari. So instead of trying to vilify Apple, and or crucify Zach Rusin and team, I recommend giving some much welcome praise and support to the OSS projects that you use.
I think this is where Graham gets it very wrong... However, finding paying customers is time-consuming and expensive. I've worked for a startup, and they went under because they had a product, but no customers. Marketing ought to be 80% of your starting budget....
You think Graham's wrong because you've overlooked or given little value to his statement, "...If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to make something people want.". Marketing can be important, but you have to have a product that people want or need in the first place. And the biggest mistake most people make, is in thinking that they can persuade people to NEED their product by throwing a ton of money into advertising/marketing.
Unfortunately, for those who have failed at start-ups, you'll find a slew who really had created products of little interest to the world. The line between innovators/early adopters and everyday folk can be enormous, and most people don't weather it well. You think you have a product that everyone should want, and the few people from the real world that you can actually get to look at you, are thinking, why would we want that??
It's slightly off-topic, but I was thinking about this today, as I was reading a posting by Jason Kotte http://www.kottke.org/05/04/a-whole-new-internet/ One of his points was that some of the early innovators of the new-internet (blogging, etc.) are now running businesses and aren't as prolific, community driven, and or innovative anymore. And it's not as if I can totally disagree, but I think he, as well as the author of this post are missing, the not so obvious, obvious...
Innovations, new technology, new ideas are adopted by fringe groups first--geeks, nerds, enthusiasts, etc. These people rarely run in "normal" crowds. So if you want your product to hit the masses, you typically have to leave behind or create a bridge between the early adopters, and mainstream public. Most individuals and companies can't do this.
Good marketing might get you there, but you still need a product that people other than your friends would want.
First Netsky DOES NOT effect Mac OS. It can be received via email like numerous other PC viruses, but doesn't execute or cause any damage on a Mac OS X machine.
Second, Opener/Renepo IS NOT a virus or a worm. It doesn't spread and can not self-replicate. Opener/Renepo can cause damage to a Mac OS X system, but only if the user running it has permission to run it, and grants the app permission to run and perform the damage. It can't traverse the network, spread to others machines, or run without explicit permission of the user. In that sense it's pretty much the equivalent of a user deleting their own files or running a trojan application locally.
Obviously, if your going to write this, you could have at least spent 5 minutes getting information from any reputable anti-virus site. Symantec, Sophos, and a host of other sites, will give you the details of what OSs the virus run on,threat level, etc.
They're not always music videos. I purchased Dave Matthew's Band new album and it came with a video and PDF book. The video was not the video for "American Baby" as I had expected, but a five minute video on the making of the album. More like a VH1 Behind the Music style thing, with interviews and clips from studio sessions, etc.
I guess this falls in line with Apple's other initiatives, like the iTunes Special Editiion albums, that include all the songs from the album, plus them 30 second to 2 minutes briefs from the artist on the song or the making of the song, etc. I have a couple of these albums, and they're pretty cool (and of course you can tick the conversation pieces off, so they don't play when your on your morning walk or run).
One thing I did discover is you can't use your Pepsi redeemed points to get a song that has videos attached. I had five or so points left to redeem, and tried to download the Gorillaz song (which was one single and four videos. The song was only.99 cents, so I figured my credits would cover it, but I got a message saying my credits were not enough to cover the song, and that my credit card may be charged for all or part of this purchase.
It was "odd" but I'll assume that Pepsi isn't paying Apple.99 cents per song, but some other agreed upon amount. No biggie. I was just curious to see if I could.
I haven't tested this thoroughly, but for one of our clients we activated WebDAV, mostly for future use--they were discussing adding a calendaring system to the internal use area of their website. What I noticed, is that after WebDAV was activated, each users' Sites folder had a folder called "WebDAV". Based on that, I'd say yes, WebDAV requires a dedicated directory, but that directory can and would be set-up for each users, and would be accessible through the Site's folder in the Users home Directory. Of course access to this folder could be placed in the Finder SideBar next to Documents, Music, Movies, so one wouldn't have to dig into the site's folder to get to it.
They probably used the Microsoft Edit Management functions. There's no better way to see EVERYTHING someone has commets, adjusted or modified in a document. I've seen a number of government and educational institutions send out what they feel is a final version of a document without cleaning out all the hidden document tracking/version tracking details.
Actually, to be fair, their database approach should have been split into tiny flat files years ago. The biggest issue with Entourage, Outlook, and Outlook Express is the fact that ALL your mail is stored as a SINGLE file. This means corruption, accidental deletes, etc. Effect ALL your mail. At the very least, breaking down the storage into mail folders, so that your InBox is separate from your archived mail would do wonders for Entourage.
I've seen people loose 5+ years of email data, in one fell swoop. To do that in Apple Mail, Eudora, and numerous other mailbox you'd have to deliberately (or accidently delete the entire enclosing folder, without having a backup. But a corrupt message is typically a corrupt message in those application. Just get rid of it, and everything else is fine. At worst, if left alone, it may spread across a single mailbox (very sad for those who don't file), but an acceptable loss for those of us who do.
My brain nearly imploded when reading this review. I realized after so many years of being treated to 1-3 page reviews that skimmed over everything except the authors ego, I had almost forgotten what an in-depth review could be (I'm ignoring Amit Singh's http://www.kernelthread.com/ since they're more like white papers).
It was great to read about a lot of backend stuff like metadata handling or core video rather than just here about Spotlight again and again. No mistake, I'm looking forward to spotlight, but I like knowing how things work and or the problems that had to be overcome to get them to work.
I lived in the Netherlands for 6 months on a school exchange program; and loved it so much I considered transferring and staying for a couple years. But your right tensions regarding immigration issues, and way to much US influence have started corrupting all the things I loved the most about the country.
My personal though is levies on "products" are just wrong. Obviously the same could be argued for levies on property for school districts (but I tend to think of those as forced fundraisers). Well, when the levy cost outweighs the product cost somethings just wrong, massively wrong. I can't believe government officials fall for these "it's just fair" arguments from business.
It would be interesting to note if the levy has to be paid, if you purchased the device out of the country. Because, if not, I expect train rides to non-levy countries for purchasing would increase a lot. Especially, if you wanted a 60GB iPod. Hell, I want an 80GB or 100GB iPod, no way would I pay an extra $300+ on top of the base price for it.
I agree, my first real negative experience with them, was when I was attempting to be proactive. I was setting up an email server and wanted to find out what holes came in the base configuration. I feed it an IP plugged the in-progress server to get back a report, and found my IP address automatically blocked. This address belonged to an active server that was already properly configured but the client didn't have any extra IPs for me to use. There server was down the entire weekend, plus three workdays, before I could get them to remove the ban. Yet, they encourage techs to test a machine and receive a report of security holes. After that, I pretty much put out the word to never use their service to test a machine that's being built.
I hate spam, but their methods pretty much demand a new approach to fighting spam, creating blacklist, and even just testing servers. Their support is horrible and while it guarantees it will hurt a spammer here or there, that's pretty much like shooting in a crowd then stating well at least I killed a bad guy.
Okay, but that means you've opened the document and have been tracked. Better to use a reader that doesn't implement the function. I use Mac OS X, and have Apple's Preview set to be my default reader of PDFs. I did this because it opened faster, and was less intrusive then Acrobat Reader. Now it looks like it might be more secure to use as well.
Also, on Mac OS X, I use Little Snitch, which is a great application that monitors the various port connections made by specific applications. Allowing you to block traffic to specific servers, all traffic, all traffic using a specific port or to accept traffic based on the same criteria. I would assume that you could disallow all traffic to a specific server, while still having internet access, which should make the document readable.
Typically, there's a 30 or 60 day (I forget which) period, that if you've purchased new equipment you can get the new OS either for free or the cost of shipping, something like that. I know I got Jaguar for less than $25 when it came out, because I had just purchased a laptop before its release.
Everyone, regardless of how smart; regardless of how vigilant can be fooled. Discussions of self-protection, and who can and should use a certain type of service plays little role in this. My mother would never use VoIP, she barely tolerates a telephone with call waiting on it. And she's smart enough to recognize when she doesn't understand a technology, that the technology can be dangerous to her, but her not using VoIP would not protect her from this type of fraud.
She's been trained for years, as have most of us, that if a bank calls up to verify something on your account, that they will give you the last four digits, and ask you to validate the remaining digits. It was a process developed to instill trust and security of bank and credit customers, so that they felt comfortable discussing certain banking issues over the telephone.
It's a situation that technology created, by allowing us to be further and further removed from the knowledge of who is handling our financial concerns. So after years of convincing our parents that it was safe to do this or that via telephone if they could verify your account, etc. We're now expected to call our parents fools, because the largest percentage of them will not be able to adapt to the fact that this process is no longer safe.
In fact a large percentage of them will never even know its not safe, because I doubt, outstanding children that we are, that we will all call our parents tomorrow--warning them, then take the time to school them on ways to be safe.
Western Union verifies against the ANI number. I use to wire my mom money every month, and the process was annoying, but I always seemed fairly secure. Of course, after awhile, I qualified for their preferred customer status which ironically, did not require the teller to verify the calling telephone number by dialing it. So I'm not certain if they still do that. My thought is that would be one method for preventing this type of fraud. Customer A gives you the phone number, it matches the caller ID or ANI number, then hang-up and call the customer back.
If I spend $0.99 for a song, I want to be able to be able to listen to it from any of the computers I use or in the car (all legal uses) without having to jump through hoops. Now, I have the technical knowledge to work around the DRM, but one shouldn't need to be technically savy just to fairly use a purchase.
Well, in iTunes defense, you don't need to have any technical savvy to end up with DRM free music. Apple even encourages you to use their method for removing DRM, by simply burning a back-up CD. I've seen people complain about all the limitations, etc. But really, I've use iTunes and iTMS almost daily, since they've come out, and I've only run up against the DRM once--and that was the five machine limit, when I was being to lazy to de-authorize a machine before replacing it with a new one.
Other than that, the only real limit I've experienced is that Apple doesn't allow you to massively convert your entire purchased music into mp3 without burning a CD.
Otherwise, I can burn a playlist, up to 7 times, but really, I rarely have the need to burn the same playlist more than once or twice. And if I did, it would be faster to burn the original CD, ad then just copy it, which I can do an unlimited number of times.
I can transfer to my iPod or someone else's iPod an unlimited number of times. I can store on any number of backup media (I use FireWire hard drives), but could use CD or DVD.
I'm not a casual music fan. I spend thousands of dollars a year cultivating my music collection, and encouraging others to "enjoy" and "love" music. And through that, haven't come across an instance that has put me in direct conflict with Apple's DRM, though that has included doing things that I'm certain the RIAA wouldn't like--like giving away digital copies of songs.
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I don't think $1.99 is a rip off price. In fact, I think $1.99 price point will bring TV DVDs cost down in the long run. The issue price for Lost, Season 1 is $59.99, most stores like Target or Borders are selling it for $49.99. The Amazon price, like most of Amazon's pricing is much less expensive than at your normal store.
For example, I downloaded Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2 of Desperate Housewives. I had been considering getting the full season from Target for $45.00. After enjoying the first two episodes at 3am, I wanted to see episode 3. I decide that purchasing the full season from Apple at $34.99, even with getting duplicates of episode 1 & 2. I don't need DVDs of the show. It's not a show that I feel a need to keep forever.
If it was a show I loved, I'd want the DVDs, but I'd also want the DVD to cost between $25-$45 for a full season. So many shows just aren't worth the $50-$60 per season that the studios want for them. Admittedly, if you shop around you can get them cheaper, but the iTunes Music Store provides almost instant gratification and the price point is below the average cost of the DVDs. Which just makes it darn attractive.
My favorite quote from the article, and currently, very true. I remember when I read that the Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews new albums wouldn't work in iTunes. I was like, "worked for me". But I had forgotten about the OS factor. Choose wisely!
God read, already! It's not like the planets right next door. It takes a long time for light to travel that far a distance. Why is it that everyone now expects all other sciences to move at the same rate as computer or information science. Even with things that can be physically held, it can take years upon years to perfect things. Decades to introduce a new medicine, centuries to identify all current variants of a plant family, etc.
The world, the solar system, and probably the galaxies beyond deal in time in 100s of years, if not 1000s; not split seconds. Two years is nothing in that time frame. Hell, I have a friend who's a biochemist, who spent over three years testing for the same thing. Different tests, different lengths of time, different chemical reactions, etc., etc., but three years, and when she left the test were still going.
Astronomy is not the field to get into if you like your information fast.
It's amazing aerial quality, why I can still see the Twin Towers when looking at zooms of New York. That's pretty darn amazing.
a rth_deletes_aple/
I'm certain that detail will get updated soon, but for prosperity sake, here the Register article http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/msn_e
What's so funny is what is consider unethical. Its NOT unethical to take your knowledge and skills that you've gained from work and life from one company and give them to another. It's typical and standard practice. That's why losing longterm employees can be quite damaging to organizations regardless if the are for-profits or nonprofits.
Organizational knowledge and a large portion of what corporations classify as "intellectual property" belongs inherently to individuals NOT organizations. Take a moment to think about the best employee at your job. Not the flashiest or the one who earns the most money; but who's the go to person when you need something accomplished; who knows the various process for champion a new project; hiring new staff; get code out the door on time, instead of six weeks behind. Now think what happens if that persons gone tomorrow.
Despite decades of effort, most organizations don't have adequate systems to retain "organizational knowledge". And the reason why, is that that knowledge never belonged to the organization, but was always tied to specific individuals who made things happen.
Non-competition clauses are just better ways of organizations saying to individuals, your knowledge belongs to me. But in truth, your knowledge always belongs to you, and you can impart it to one organization; multiple organizations; or horde it to yourself. But unless you've made a concerted effort to document your knowledge for your organization; when you go, the knowledge goes with you.
Nothing unethical about that, just the basic truth of how knowledge flows.
Your comparing the wrong market. iLife and iWork aren't business/professional level user applications (even though some use them for that). They are home user applications. In iLife- iPhoto and iMovie both have professional level alternatives (though for iPhoto, its not made by Apple).
While Pages is far closer to professional level than AppleWorks, it's primary target audience is still home users and people who operate home based businesses, that don't want to spend $200-$800 on a professional level office suite.
I've started intermixing using Pages over InDesign or Quark for things that I want a fair amount of control over but really don't need a full fledge DTP app. And I've started using Pages as a Word replacement, and its been more than satisfactory, in fact just a darn pleasure to use, everytime.
A growing number of home users need to write letters, or create a newsletter, or pamphlet at some point in there life. Also, a growing number of these people are running side businesses in their homes. Things that may require them to print an invoice, but not have a full fledge billing system. That's the market Apple is targeting. iWork is the companion to iLife-information management tools for the components of your life that aren't music, video, and photos.
Not to start a war. But as a former user of both services, Peapod kinda sucked. I used it once and didn't come back. Sure I should have given it another try, but decided against it, then I moved.
I tried WebVan once, not expecting much, and it rocked! I picked a selection of hard to please items, and then staples, thinking if they failed the hard to please, at least I got my water, dish soap, and cat liter for the month, without taking a taxi, so no harm no foul.
But I was pleasantly surprised that my request for one ripe avocado and one that would last a week, actually delivered one ripe and one that would last a week. In all honesty, I was expecting two hard can't use for a week in a half, or two overly ripe avocados, but it didn't happen. Same with tomatoes, beef cuts, seafood, and fruit.
Not only that the drivers were courtesy, helpful, well informed, and timely. They always made my deliver window. Oops, once they were 5 minutes late, but there had been a freeway accident, and they had called fifteen minutes before to warn me they were running late and why, so I forgave them.
If they were out of something (rarely happened, after the fact. Typically the website told you if items were in stock or not), someone would call, and be truly helpful in putting together substitutes. I remember one conversation with some guy (he could have been a driver, a dispatcher, or a specially hired food consultant for all I know), but he actually asked me what I had planned on cooking, and then made recommendations.
Recommendations. I almost passed out, I'd been so use to companies giving you basic specifications and overviews, but not recommending anything for fear of irritating one vendor over another, that I had almost forgotten that business COULD actually put a customers needs first rather than a vendor.
The Peapod service was okay. Actually, I'd rate it as good, but it was missing all the little touches that made me think that they'd take as good as care of my grocery list as I would, and I lived much closer to the market then, so even having to make a couple trips to get everything, seemed better than using the service again.
But WebVan was like Amazon in its early days. Amazon allowed me to move away from my disappointment in small book stores, because they never had a book I needed immediately. It allowed me to enjoy the bookstore as a browsing festival, and use Amazon for immediate needs. WebVan made me believe that someone else could care whether or not a tomato that they would never eat was firm but ripe vs soft and sweet. It often felt like they care just as much about the dish I was preparing as I did. And that's what makes a grocery delivery service great.
But now I make due with services that delivery my bulk goods, canned foods, and frozen foods. And I walk to the co-op or farmer's market to get fresh ingredients for various dishes. It's cool. The service is good. It's just uninspired.
O' for the opportunity to once again lament the loss of WebVan. I loved them. Mourn. Mourn.
But in all seriousness, just because the dot.com boom folded, doesn't mean that the idea was bad. WebVan died because it overextended itself massively, thinking it would have time to make a profit; and was caught rather unaware of the failing dot.com industry. Executive stupidity, sure, but a bad idea NO!! If they would have just kept to two primary markets during there fateful last year, they could have survived the crash, and be raking in the dough today. Many stores not offer delivery, because WebVan showed them that there was a market for it.
Also not to knock Seamless Web, but Waiter's On Wheel (Bay Area) and Waiter.com (Bay Area & Silicon Valley) both managed to survive the dot.com bust, and still deliver food from great restaurants without the super high mark-up. Up to 15% for the business charge just seems excessive; and already seems to be pushing some of their clientele into establishing their own services. The Japanese grill mentioned has a nice clean easy to use web site. Nice enough that if I knew I wanted food from them, I'd order directly from them to save both me and them money.
Of course, I admit sometimes, I used Waiter's On Wheels when I was uncertain what I wanted for dinner. Having access to a large array of menu's that aren't limited to pizza specials has its own value.
Actually that's not true, the lecture was priorly scheduled, it was the room that they kept canceling. In his statement he clearly states that he was invited to give the presentation by a student group, and then the room the event was scheduled for was cancelled. After this had happen twice he then used the cafeteria to give his lecture. The cafeteria typically being public space, not requiring reservation.
Additionally, he seems to indicate that he was never directly contacted with the request to NOT give the scheduled lecture by the university; it would seem the room cancellations were the subtle indicator for "please do not discuss these issues.
Not that this type of behaviour doesn't happen at various universities across the U.S. on a number of issues, but I find it even more distressing that the university didn't even try to take the direct approach of asking, "please do not give this lecture" or "please do not give this lecture on campus". Obviously, censorship still applicable, but at least the guy would have had fair warning that his job maybe in jeopardy if he proceeded.
Apple's already warned users about the "run safe files" function before. The warning indicated that average users should turn the function off, unless you ONLY downloaded files from known, "safe" sites. I had thought that they had released an update that had switch the default in Safari to remove the check from the "open safe files" box, but either Tiger changed that, or I was wrong.
The original story just had Zach Rusin saying that Apple's contributions to KHTML were exaggerated. OK, fine. -Otter
I'm with Otter on this one. I read Zach Rusin's original post and it sounded as if he was much more frustrated with KDE and KHTML users than he was with Apple. His biggest issue was that users kept expecting things FAR more rapidly than they should, because Safari had it. And from the user perspective, if Safari had it, then *ALL* the works been done for you, why can't you just implement this tomorrow.
That's not to deny obvious frustrations with Apple as well, but the fact of the matter is, even if Apple was a great OSS citizen, implementing code changes back to KDE/KHTML would take some time and effort--even if it was just for cleaning, documenting, and streamlining code; and people AREN'T given the KDE developers credit for ALL the work they do have to do, and have done.
I'd say more than a fair share of the frustration could be attributed not to how Apple provides the code, or when, how frequently, and or how well documented; but to random user comments indicating that Apple is doing ALL the work for the KDE team, when obviously that's just not true. And let's face it, even if Apple were the BEST OSS citizen in terms to contributions that STILL WOULD NOT be true. Other people are working on these code bases, and they are working hard. To have their contribution continuously overshadowed by Safari must be massively frustrating.
Turning this into an argument about OSS versus the corporation; Safari vs KHTML, or even David Hyatt vs Zach Rusin is just stupid. But even worse, it obfuscates the real issue that communities like Slashdot (I won't say the KHTML community, because hopefully they know better), offer praise and condemnation without really understanding what they are offering it for.
The praised offered to Safari for passing the ACID test was well deserved, but side by side with that praise was a not so silent condemnation of Konqueror for not passing ACID the next day; and that has to hurt far more than Apple's poorly documented 60MB tarball.
This isn't praise for Apple (though I love them as a company), and this isn't condemnation of Konqueror (I don't know much about them). I don't think Apple is a bad OSS citizen, but I doubt if they're the best OSS citizen. But they are an OSS citizen on a number of projects, and most of those projects are doing well.
Safari is a fork. WebKit/WebCore is really where its at, and that encompasses far more than Safari. So instead of trying to vilify Apple, and or crucify Zach Rusin and team, I recommend giving some much welcome praise and support to the OSS projects that you use.
You think Graham's wrong because you've overlooked or given little value to his statement, "...If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to make something people want.". Marketing can be important, but you have to have a product that people want or need in the first place. And the biggest mistake most people make, is in thinking that they can persuade people to NEED their product by throwing a ton of money into advertising/marketing.
Unfortunately, for those who have failed at start-ups, you'll find a slew who really had created products of little interest to the world. The line between innovators/early adopters and everyday folk can be enormous, and most people don't weather it well. You think you have a product that everyone should want, and the few people from the real world that you can actually get to look at you, are thinking, why would we want that??
It's slightly off-topic, but I was thinking about this today, as I was reading a posting by Jason Kotte http://www.kottke.org/05/04/a-whole-new-internet/ One of his points was that some of the early innovators of the new-internet (blogging, etc.) are now running businesses and aren't as prolific, community driven, and or innovative anymore. And it's not as if I can totally disagree, but I think he, as well as the author of this post are missing, the not so obvious, obvious...
Innovations, new technology, new ideas are adopted by fringe groups first--geeks, nerds, enthusiasts, etc. These people rarely run in "normal" crowds. So if you want your product to hit the masses, you typically have to leave behind or create a bridge between the early adopters, and mainstream public. Most individuals and companies can't do this.
Good marketing might get you there, but you still need a product that people other than your friends would want.
First Netsky DOES NOT effect Mac OS. It can be received via email like numerous other PC viruses, but doesn't execute or cause any damage on a Mac OS X machine.
Second, Opener/Renepo IS NOT a virus or a worm. It doesn't spread and can not self-replicate. Opener/Renepo can cause damage to a Mac OS X system, but only if the user running it has permission to run it, and grants the app permission to run and perform the damage. It can't traverse the network, spread to others machines, or run without explicit permission of the user. In that sense it's pretty much the equivalent of a user deleting their own files or running a trojan application locally.
Obviously, if your going to write this, you could have at least spent 5 minutes getting information from any reputable anti-virus site. Symantec, Sophos, and a host of other sites, will give you the details of what OSs the virus run on,threat level, etc.
They're not always music videos. I purchased Dave Matthew's Band new album and it came with a video and PDF book. The video was not the video for "American Baby" as I had expected, but a five minute video on the making of the album. More like a VH1 Behind the Music style thing, with interviews and clips from studio sessions, etc.
.99 cents, so I figured my credits would cover it, but I got a message saying my credits were not enough to cover the song, and that my credit card may be charged for all or part of this purchase.
.99 cents per song, but some other agreed upon amount. No biggie. I was just curious to see if I could.
I guess this falls in line with Apple's other initiatives, like the iTunes Special Editiion albums, that include all the songs from the album, plus them 30 second to 2 minutes briefs from the artist on the song or the making of the song, etc. I have a couple of these albums, and they're pretty cool (and of course you can tick the conversation pieces off, so they don't play when your on your morning walk or run).
One thing I did discover is you can't use your Pepsi redeemed points to get a song that has videos attached. I had five or so points left to redeem, and tried to download the Gorillaz song (which was one single and four videos. The song was only
It was "odd" but I'll assume that Pepsi isn't paying Apple
I haven't tested this thoroughly, but for one of our clients we activated WebDAV, mostly for future use--they were discussing adding a calendaring system to the internal use area of their website. What I noticed, is that after WebDAV was activated, each users' Sites folder had a folder called "WebDAV". Based on that, I'd say yes, WebDAV requires a dedicated directory, but that directory can and would be set-up for each users, and would be accessible through the Site's folder in the Users home Directory. Of course access to this folder could be placed in the Finder SideBar next to Documents, Music, Movies, so one wouldn't have to dig into the site's folder to get to it.
They probably used the Microsoft Edit Management functions. There's no better way to see EVERYTHING someone has commets, adjusted or modified in a document. I've seen a number of government and educational institutions send out what they feel is a final version of a document without cleaning out all the hidden document tracking/version tracking details.
Actually, to be fair, their database approach should have been split into tiny flat files years ago. The biggest issue with Entourage, Outlook, and Outlook Express is the fact that ALL your mail is stored as a SINGLE file. This means corruption, accidental deletes, etc. Effect ALL your mail. At the very least, breaking down the storage into mail folders, so that your InBox is separate from your archived mail would do wonders for Entourage.
I've seen people loose 5+ years of email data, in one fell swoop. To do that in Apple Mail, Eudora, and numerous other mailbox you'd have to deliberately (or accidently delete the entire enclosing folder, without having a backup. But a corrupt message is typically a corrupt message in those application. Just get rid of it, and everything else is fine. At worst, if left alone, it may spread across a single mailbox (very sad for those who don't file), but an acceptable loss for those of us who do.
My brain nearly imploded when reading this review. I realized after so many years of being treated to 1-3 page reviews that skimmed over everything except the authors ego, I had almost forgotten what an in-depth review could be (I'm ignoring Amit Singh's http://www.kernelthread.com/ since they're more like white papers).
It was great to read about a lot of backend stuff like metadata handling or core video rather than just here about Spotlight again and again. No mistake, I'm looking forward to spotlight, but I like knowing how things work and or the problems that had to be overcome to get them to work.
I lived in the Netherlands for 6 months on a school exchange program; and loved it so much I considered transferring and staying for a couple years. But your right tensions regarding immigration issues, and way to much US influence have started corrupting all the things I loved the most about the country.
My personal though is levies on "products" are just wrong. Obviously the same could be argued for levies on property for school districts (but I tend to think of those as forced fundraisers). Well, when the levy cost outweighs the product cost somethings just wrong, massively wrong. I can't believe government officials fall for these "it's just fair" arguments from business.
It would be interesting to note if the levy has to be paid, if you purchased the device out of the country. Because, if not, I expect train rides to non-levy countries for purchasing would increase a lot. Especially, if you wanted a 60GB iPod. Hell, I want an 80GB or 100GB iPod, no way would I pay an extra $300+ on top of the base price for it.
I agree, my first real negative experience with them, was when I was attempting to be proactive. I was setting up an email server and wanted to find out what holes came in the base configuration. I feed it an IP plugged the in-progress server to get back a report, and found my IP address automatically blocked. This address belonged to an active server that was already properly configured but the client didn't have any extra IPs for me to use. There server was down the entire weekend, plus three workdays, before I could get them to remove the ban. Yet, they encourage techs to test a machine and receive a report of security holes. After that, I pretty much put out the word to never use their service to test a machine that's being built.
I hate spam, but their methods pretty much demand a new approach to fighting spam, creating blacklist, and even just testing servers. Their support is horrible and while it guarantees it will hurt a spammer here or there, that's pretty much like shooting in a crowd then stating well at least I killed a bad guy.
Okay, but that means you've opened the document and have been tracked. Better to use a reader that doesn't implement the function. I use Mac OS X, and have Apple's Preview set to be my default reader of PDFs. I did this because it opened faster, and was less intrusive then Acrobat Reader. Now it looks like it might be more secure to use as well.
Also, on Mac OS X, I use Little Snitch, which is a great application that monitors the various port connections made by specific applications. Allowing you to block traffic to specific servers, all traffic, all traffic using a specific port or to accept traffic based on the same criteria. I would assume that you could disallow all traffic to a specific server, while still having internet access, which should make the document readable.
Typically, there's a 30 or 60 day (I forget which) period, that if you've purchased new equipment you can get the new OS either for free or the cost of shipping, something like that. I know I got Jaguar for less than $25 when it came out, because I had just purchased a laptop before its release.
Everyone, regardless of how smart; regardless of how vigilant can be fooled. Discussions of self-protection, and who can and should use a certain type of service plays little role in this. My mother would never use VoIP, she barely tolerates a telephone with call waiting on it. And she's smart enough to recognize when she doesn't understand a technology, that the technology can be dangerous to her, but her not using VoIP would not protect her from this type of fraud.
She's been trained for years, as have most of us, that if a bank calls up to verify something on your account, that they will give you the last four digits, and ask you to validate the remaining digits. It was a process developed to instill trust and security of bank and credit customers, so that they felt comfortable discussing certain banking issues over the telephone.
It's a situation that technology created, by allowing us to be further and further removed from the knowledge of who is handling our financial concerns. So after years of convincing our parents that it was safe to do this or that via telephone if they could verify your account, etc. We're now expected to call our parents fools, because the largest percentage of them will not be able to adapt to the fact that this process is no longer safe.
In fact a large percentage of them will never even know its not safe, because I doubt, outstanding children that we are, that we will all call our parents tomorrow--warning them, then take the time to school them on ways to be safe.
Western Union verifies against the ANI number. I use to wire my mom money every month, and the process was annoying, but I always seemed fairly secure. Of course, after awhile, I qualified for their preferred customer status which ironically, did not require the teller to verify the calling telephone number by dialing it. So I'm not certain if they still do that. My thought is that would be one method for preventing this type of fraud. Customer A gives you the phone number, it matches the caller ID or ANI number, then hang-up and call the customer back.
If I spend $0.99 for a song, I want to be able to be able to listen to it from any of the computers I use or in the car (all legal uses) without having to jump through hoops. Now, I have the technical knowledge to work around the DRM, but one shouldn't need to be technically savy just to fairly use a purchase.
Well, in iTunes defense, you don't need to have any technical savvy to end up with DRM free music. Apple even encourages you to use their method for removing DRM, by simply burning a back-up CD. I've seen people complain about all the limitations, etc. But really, I've use iTunes and iTMS almost daily, since they've come out, and I've only run up against the DRM once--and that was the five machine limit, when I was being to lazy to de-authorize a machine before replacing it with a new one.
Other than that, the only real limit I've experienced is that Apple doesn't allow you to massively convert your entire purchased music into mp3 without burning a CD.
Otherwise, I can burn a playlist, up to 7 times, but really, I rarely have the need to burn the same playlist more than once or twice. And if I did, it would be faster to burn the original CD, ad then just copy it, which I can do an unlimited number of times.
I can transfer to my iPod or someone else's iPod an unlimited number of times. I can store on any number of backup media (I use FireWire hard drives), but could use CD or DVD.
I'm not a casual music fan. I spend thousands of dollars a year cultivating my music collection, and encouraging others to "enjoy" and "love" music. And through that, haven't come across an instance that has put me in direct conflict with Apple's DRM, though that has included doing things that I'm certain the RIAA wouldn't like--like giving away digital copies of songs.